ABC/Randy HolmesBilly Corgan isn't optimistic about The Smashing Pumpkins' chances of getting inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Responding to a question on his Instagram Story about who he'd want to induct The Pumpkins if they were to enter the Rock Hall, Corgan writes, "I don't envision it happening, so..." Artists are eligible for induction into the Rock Hall 25 years after releasing their first commercial recording. The Smashing Pumpkins released their first album, Gish, in 1991, so they've been eligible for induction since 2016. However, the band has never even been nominated. In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, comedian John Mulaney suggested that the reason Corgan and company haven't been inducted yet is because the Rock Hall has an "anti-Chicago bias." When another fan brings up Mulaney's comments to Corgan, he responds, "It is anti-a-lot-of-things." "Particularly metal," he adds, though The Pumpkins are more of an alt-rock band than a metal band. The 2019 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductees include Def Leppard, Stevie Nicks, The Zombies, Radiohead, The Cure, Roxy Music and Janet Jackson. The induction ceremony will be held March 29 in Brooklyn, New York. Incidentally, Mulaney's claim of an "anti-Chicago bias" in the Rock Hall doesn't hold water. Among the Chicago-born or Chicago-based musicians who've been inducted: the band Chicago, Paul Butterfield, Bo Diddley, Howlin' Wolf, Willie Dixon and Muddy Waters. Copyright 2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved. Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi speaks at the 4th Mekong-Lancang Cooperation Foreign Ministers' Meeting held in Luang Prabang, Laos, Dec. 17, 2018. Senior officials from China, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam agreed here Monday to deepen cooperation under the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation (LMC) to achieve inclusive and sustainable development in the sub-region. At the "4th Mekong-Lancang Cooperation Foreign Minister's Meeting," the ministers decided to promote greater cooperation in new areas and new initiatives for mutual benefit and shared prosperity, featured with high-quality production capacity cooperation and the building of the LMC Economic Development Belt. Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Lao Foreign Minister Saleumxay Kommasith co-chaired the meeting, which was also attended by Cambodian Deputy Prime Minister Hor Namhong, Union Minister for International Cooperation of Myanmar U Kyaw Tin, Thai Foreign Minister Don Pramudwinai and Vietnamese Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh. (Xinhua/Li Gang) LUANG PRABANG, Laos, Dec. 17 (Xinhua) -- Senior officials from China, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam agreed here Monday to deepen cooperation under the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation (LMC) to achieve inclusive and sustainable development in the sub-region. At the "4th Mekong-Lancang Cooperation Foreign Minister's Meeting," the ministers decided to promote greater cooperation in new areas and new initiatives for mutual benefit and shared prosperity, featured with high-quality production capacity cooperation and the building of the LMC Economic Development Belt. Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Lao Foreign Minister Saleumxay Kommasith co-chaired the meeting, which was also attended by Cambodian Deputy Prime Minister Hor Namhong, Union Minister for International Cooperation of Myanmar U Kyaw Tin, Thai Foreign Minister Don Pramudwinai and Vietnamese Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh. The LMC has seen rapid development and positive outcomes, heading into a fast-growing period. It has added momentum for China-ASEAN cooperation and made the relations between the regional countries even better, said Wang. As international rules are being threatened by unilateralism and protectionism, Wang underlined the need for the six countries to deepen partnership to jointly build the LMC Economic Development Belt, promote high-quality production capacity cooperation and foster new growth areas to promote sustainable development and prosperity in the sub-region. Hailing China as the st friend and partner of Mekong River countries, the ministers expressed appreciation and gratitude to China for its contribution, especially through the LMC framework to enhance economic integration. The ministers agreed to continue to synergize LMC development with the development strategies of each country, strengthen infrastructure construction and sub-regional connectivity, while exploring cooperation opportunities of improving production capacity and promoting inter-regional cooperation. The six countries along the Mekong (known as Lancang in the Chinese stretch), namely China, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam, officially started the LMC process in March 2016. 2 1 [ Editor: Zhang Zhou ] HUNTSVILLE, Texas (AP) The Latest on the execution of Texas inmate (all times local): 7:25 p.m. A Texas inmate has been executed for fatally shooting a newlywed during a robbery more than 25 years ago. Alvin Braziel Jr. received lethal injection Tuesday evening at the state penitentiary in Huntsville. The 43-year-old Braziel was condemned for the 1993 slaying of 27-year-old Douglas White as he and his wife walked along a jogging trail in the Dallas suburb of Mesquite. The couple had been married only 10 days. White's killing remained unsolved for more than seven years until DNA evidence tied Braziel to the case. Braziel is the 24th inmate put to death this year in the U.S. and the 13th executed in Texas, the nation's busiest capital punishment state. He will be the last Texas inmate executed this year. ___ 7 p.m. A Texas appeals court has rejected a last-minute appeal to halt the execution of an inmate condemned for the slaying of a newlywed attacked as he and his wife walked on a jogging trail more than 25 years ago. Attorneys for Alvin Braziel Jr. argued that an emotional outburst at Braziel's 2001 murder trial from the widow of slain 27-year-old Douglas White was unfairly elicited by prosecutors when she was shown on the witness stand a photo of her husband's autopsied body. Braziel's attorneys went to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state's highest criminal court, after the judge in Braziel's trial court in Dallas rejected their plea that his Tuesday evening execution be put off so they can investigate whether prosecutors wrongly provoked the outburst and then misrepresented their intentions to the trial court. Prosecutors at the trial denied any wrongdoing. The ruling came about an hour after the six-hour execution window defined by the execution warrant began. The death warrant is in effect from 6 p.m. CST until midnight. ___ 11 a.m. A Texas death row inmate is set to be executed for the fatal shooting more than 25 years ago of a newlywed who had only been married for 10 days. Story continues Forty-three-year-old Alvin Braziel Jr. would be the 24th inmate put to death this year in the U.S. and the 13th executed in Texas, the nation's busiest capital punishment state. He would be the last Texas inmate executed this year. His lethal injection is scheduled for Tuesday evening at the state penitentiary in Huntsville. He was condemned for the slaying of 27-year-old Douglas White as White and his wife walked along a jogging trail in 1993 in the Dallas suburb of Mesquite. White's killing remained unsolved for more than seven years until DNA evidence tied Braziel to the case. By Ayman al-Warfalli and Ahmed Elumami BENGHAZI, Libya/TUNIS (Reuters) - Libya's biggest oilfield, El Sharara, will reopen, the country's internationally recognized government said on Wednesday after Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj flew there to persuade protesters to end a blockage. Production had not restarted yet as oil workers were waiting for orders from state oil firm NOC. A spokesman for NOC declined to comment when Reuters called. Sarraj's office gave no time frame. A spokesman for a group of tribesmen, who took over the 315,000 barrels a day-field with state guards on Dec 8, said the government had agreed to implement their demands within a week from Dec 22. "El Sharara oilfield will be reopened after reaching an agreement with Fayez al-Sarraj," Mohammed Ahmed said. "Urgent (demands), like liquidity and fuel, will start (being implemented) on Saturday, other demands will be implemented within 45 days", he said. The Tripoli-based government had earlier announced a development fund worth 1 billion Libyan dinars ($717 million) for the long-neglected south in a bid to appease the protesters. The tribesmen had demanded better state services for the south, which produces around 400,000 bpd of day, but lacks basic facilities such as hospitals or electricity. The guards, which NOC said had facilitated the protest, had demanded salary payments they said they were owed. It was not immediately clear when NOC would agree to reopen the field. Its Chairman Mustafa Sanalla had denounced the protesters as "militia" NOC would not negotiate with -- comments which had drawn criticism of the Tripoli-based chief of staff. Sarraj said in a statement he had met the protesters at the field and understood the factors driving their action, describing the demands as "legitimate". El Sharara crude is transported to the Zawiya port, which is also home to a refinery. NOC runs the field with Spain's Repsol, France's Total, Austria's OMV and Norway's Equinor, formerly known as Statoil. Story continues Libya had in recent months boosted output to up to 1.3 million barrels a day, its highest level since 2013 when a wave of protests and blockages against oil facilities began. NOC is widely seen by armed groups and civilian protesters as an easy target to milk in the absence of a weak state and deteriorating public services. ($1 = 1.3939 Libyan dinars) (Reporting by Ahmed Elumami, Ayman al-Warfalli and Ulf Laessing; Additional reporting by Omar Fahmy in Cairo, Writing by Ulf Laessing and Hesham Hajali Editing by Edmund Blair, Louise Heavens and Kirsten Donovan, William Maclean) MEXICO CITY (AP) A climber who went missing two days ago has been found dead on Mexico's Nevado de Toluca, a dormant volcano about 60 miles (100 kilometers) west of Mexico City. Police in the State of Mexico say the body of the climber was found prone on a steep, rocky slope, with a backpack a few yards (meters) away. The position of the Mexican man's body suggested he may have slipped, injured himself and then possibly died of exposure. Mexico has been experiencing a cold snap, and the slope of the 15,269-foot (4,654-meter) peak was partly covered in snow and ice. Washington (AFP) - Jamming and astrophysics go hand-in-hand for Queen lead guitarist Brian May, who announced Wednesday he is releasing a musical tribute to a far-flung NASA spacecraft that is about to make history. The US space agency's New Horizon's spacecraft will soon make the most distant flyby of a cosmic object ever, zipping by an object called Ultima Thule -- a billion miles (1.6 billion kilometers) beyond Pluto, on January 1. A NASA scientist involved with the mission asked the legendary British guitarist behind "Bohemian Rhapsody" -- who also holds a doctorate in astrophysics -- to contribute some music to play as the flyby occurs. And May, 71, agreed. The "New Horizons" track (Ultima Thule mix), which will be released New Year's Day, is his first solo single since 1998. "For me it's been an exciting challenge to bring two sides of my life together -- astronomy and music," said May in a statement. "I was inspired by the idea that this is the furthest that the Hand of Man has ever reached - it will be by far the most distant object we have ever seen at close quarters, through the images which the spacecraft will beam back to Earth," he added. "To me it epitomizes the human spirit's unceasing desire to understand the Universe we inhabit." Portions of the wailing guitar track, overlaid with the voice of the late legendary scientist Stephen Hawking, are already available on www.brianmay.com. A third installment in expected in the next few days. Scientists do not yet have a clear picture of exactly what Ultima Thule is, whether a single object or a cluster, spanning about 19 miles (30 kilometers) in diameter. But when New Horizons passes, it should capture images at a resolution of 98 to 230 feet (30 to 70 meters) per pixel. New Horizons completed a successful flyby of Pluto three years ago, and returned stunning images of the dwarf planet. BUCHAREST, Romania (AP) Romanian stocks slumped at a decade-high rate Wednesday after the government unveiled a surprise package to slash the country's budget deficit by raising 10 billion lei ($2.5 billion) of extra revenue, including through a tax on banks. The stock slide came a day after Finance Minister Eugen Teodorovici presented measures to remedy a fiscal shortfall that risked exceeding the European Union's limit of 3 percent of GDP. The plan includes taxing energy and telecommunications companies, capping natural gas prices until 2022 and a proposal to overhaul the pension system. Bucharest exchange's BET Index closed down 11.2 percent, its biggest retreat since the financial crisis of 2008. Among the worst-hit shares were Romania's Transylvania Bank which ended 19.9 percent down, while the BRD bank, owned by French Groupe Societe Generale ended the day 16.6 percent lower. Austria's OMV Petrom gas company was about 13 percent lower. The Coalition for the Development of Romania, which groups the country's most important business associations, said the government measures would harm important sectors in the economy. And Romanian President Klaus Iohannis, who has been a consistent critic of the Social Democratic government, has urged the government to reconsider. He said the measures "weren't discussed with business leaders.... they'll throw the economy into chaos." MOSCOW (Reuters) - A decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria creates prospects for a political settlement of the crisis there, TASS news agency reported the Russian Foreign Ministry as saying on Wednesday. The United States said it had begun withdrawing U.S. forces from Syria as U.S. officials said Washington was considering pulling out all its troops as it winds up its campaign to retake territory once held by Islamic State. TASS also cited the ministry as saying that an initiative to form a Syrian constitutional committee had a bright future with the U.S. troop withdrawal. (Reporting by Vladimir Soldatkin, Editing by William Maclean) JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - South Africa has issued an arrest warrant for Zimbabwe's former first lady Grace Mugabe over the alleged assault of a model in a luxury Johannesburg hotel in 2017, police said on Wednesday. After the alleged assault with an electric cable came to light, the South African government granted Grace Mugabe diplomatic immunity and she left the country. Her husband, Robert Mugabe, was Zimbabwe's president at the time. The immunity was overturned by a South African court in July this year after the alleged victim, model Gabriella Engels, challenged the decision. "I can confirm that a warrant for the arrest of Grace Mugabe was issued last Thursday," police spokesman Vishnu Naidoo said, adding that police were seeking Interpol's help to enforce the warrant. There was no immediate comment from Grace Mugabe. Zimbabwe has an extradition agreement with South Africa allowing the two nations to exchange persons accused of crimes in either jurisdiction. But Zimababwe's deputy minister for information, Energy Mutodi, told Reuters that Zimbabwe would not extradite her to South Africa as this would be "harassment". "I believe the government of Zimbabwe will not tolerate any harassment or degrading treatment on the former President Mugabe and his immediate family members," Mutodi said, adding that he would still need to consult with President Emmerson Mnangagwa on the final decision. Mrs Mugabe, 53, was seen as a potential successor to her 94-year-old husband Robert, who ruled Zimbabwe from 1980 until he was ousted in a coup in November last year. She was famed for her lavish lifestyle. She has denied assaulting Engels, saying an "intoxicated and unhinged" Engels attacked her with a knife after the model had gone to see the Mugabes' sons at the hotel in Johannesburg's posh Sandton district. Mrs Mugabe has retreated from the limelight in Zimbabwe since her husband was ousted. (Reporting by Alexander Winning in Johannesburg and MacDonald Dzirutwe in Harare, Editing by James Macharia and Angus MacSwan) Retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn (center) arrives for sentencing at federal court in Washington with attorney Robert Kelner (right) on Tuesday, December 18, 2018. (Photo: Diego M. Radzinschi/ ALM) A federal judge agreed Tuesday to postpone Michael Flynns sentencing after a hearing to decide the punishment for President Donald Trumps former national security adviser went awry. The surprise development came after Judge Emmet Sullivan in Washington, D.C., offered to give Flynn, a retired lieutenant general, more time to consider his decision to plead guilty to lying to investigators probing Russias interference in the 2016 election. Sullivan described the offense as serious and said he could not guarantee a sentence without prison time, even after the special counsels office recommended that Flynn not be incarcerated. After a brief recess, Covington & Burling partner Robert Kelner said Flynn was prepared to take your honor up on the suggestion of delaying sentencing. The delay, Kelner said, would allow Flynn to eke out the last modicum of cooperation in his deal to assist in a separate case being prosecuted in Alexandria, Virginia, involving two of Flynns former business associates. Kelner envisioned that Flynn could be called to testify in a case against Bijan Rafiekian and Kamil Ekim Alptekin, who were charged Monday with acting as unregistered agents of the Turkish government and lying to the FBI. Sullivan set a March 13 deadline for a status report. The surprise development came after what began as a routine sentencing hearing devolved into a dramatic discussion on Flynns conduct. Sullivan at one point questioned whether, hypothetically, Flynn could have been charged with treason and told the former lieutenant general that, arguably, you sold out your country. Sullivan later walked back those comments. Still, Sullivan spoke at length Tuesday about the seriousness of Flynns crime, at one point expressing disdain for his actions. He cautioned Flynn that, if they proceeded to sentencing on Tuesday, he could not rule out prison. "I'm going to be frank with you: This crime is very serious, Sullivan said, highlighting more than once how Flynn was a high-ranking official who lied to the FBI on White House grounds. Sullivan described how Flynn worked as an unregistered agent of a foreign power while serving as a Trump adviser, later correcting his statement. But in that exchange, the judge pointed to a flag behind him and said Flynns conduct arguably undermined everything this flag stands for. At the start of Tuesdays hearing, the judge pressed defense attorneys about a court memo that appeared to suggest federal investigators led Flynn to lie during his January 2017 FBI interview. The filing noted Flynn was not warned that lying to the FBI was illegal, and that he did not have counsel present during the interview. Sullivan said the filing raised some concerns with the court, and questioned how it was consistent with Flynns acceptance of responsibility. Kelner explained the filing was meant to distinguish Flynns case from those of former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos and former Skadden associate Alex van der Zwaan, who were sentenced to prison terms of 14 days and 30 days, respectively. The aggravating circumstances in the Papadopoulous and van der Zwaan cases dont apply to Flynn, Kelner said, adding the former national security adviser fully accepts responsibility and stands by his guilty plea. Kelner later emphasized that Flynns attorneys, not Flynn, had written that filing. The judge also squarely asked Flynn in the morning if he wished to challenge the circumstances in which the FBI interviewed him. No, your honor, Flynn replied. Asked if he was continuing to accept responsibility for his false statements, Flynn said: I am, your honor, before he re-entered his guilty plea before the court. Flynn pleaded guilty last December to lying to federal investigators, and misleading investigators about his contact with ex-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the presidential transition. He also admitted to filing false paperwork with DOJ related to his lobbying work for Turkey. Read more: Who Is Emmet Sullivan, the Judge Who Will Sentence Michael Flynn? DOJ Asks 4th Circuit to Halt State AG Emoluments Lawsuit DC Circuit Won't Force IRS to Release Trump's Tax Returns Ex-Skadden Associate Gets 30-Day Jail Sentence for Lying to Mueller's Team Covington's Robert Kelner, Navigating the 'Wild West,' Pushes Flynn Deal First-time travelers to Germany may flock to the livelier hubs that are Berlin, Frankfurt, or Munichbut hidden from the crowds in middle of the country is Thuringia, one of Germanys smaller states. What it lacks in size, it makes up for in a high number of historical landmarks and figures: it is where the composer Johann Sebastian Bach was born, where poets Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller lived and developed their craft, and where the Bauhaus art and design movement was first ignited. It is also home to over 400 different castles and palaces, all of which are anchored by the scenic Thuringian Forest that holds a variety of different hiking trails. Visit Thuringia in December, though, and it really comes alive: it happens to hold some of the best Christmas markets in the world. (Were talking next-level, capital-F festive, seriously postcard-worthy Christmas markets.) Every holiday season, communities across the state set up enchanting booths filled with plenty of local crafts, food, and wine. They are usually erected in the cities main marktplatz, though some of them spread their markets out across town, or even host them inside a nearby mountain-top castle. Below, explore Thuringias must-visit markets and other notable sights: In Erfurt, traditional Christmas markets prevail Touring Erfurts Most Charming Christmas Markets Photo: Courtesy of Barbara Neumann / Erfurt Tourism Photo: Courtesy of Christian Allaire Photo: Courtesy of Martin Krichner / Thuringia Tourism Photo: Courtesy of Guido Werner Bildeigner / Thuringis Tourism Photo: Courtesy of Toma Babovic / Thuringia Tourism Erfurt is Thuringias capital city, as well as its largest city overall, with a population of over 200,000. Its also home to Thuringias largest Christmas market, the Erfurter Weihnachtsmarkt, along with several other mini markets spread out across the city. (There are over 200 different booths overall.) In the main market, find the best of traditional German foodand drink!as well as a wide selection of handmade decor. Strolling the booths, Im instantly drawn to the glass-blown Christmas ornaments, one of Thuringias specialties, that come in all shapes and sizes, from classic red and green baubles to kitschier weihnachtsgurkes, shiny green pickle-shaped ornaments that are all the rage here (tradition goes that whoever finds it on the tree first on Christmas Eve gets to open their presents first). Woodwork is also a specialty of the region. There are wood-carved figurines, from Santa Claus to nutcrackers, that are sold with tiny incense burners hidden in the bottom. German Christmas pyramids are also made of the material; they're decorated with figurines from a nativity scene, and a spinning roter at the top is fueled by the rising heat of burning candles, which are placed along the bottom. (Every house here owns oneits a mainstay piece.) Story continues In between spending all of my euros, I taste the fantastic bratwurst sausages and large, salty pretzels. I try the hot candied nuts, which are sold by the poundthere are almonds, cashews, and walnuts. Heart-shaped gingerbread cookies are a crowd-pleaser: here, they come iced with kitschy slogans, such as vielen, vielen dank (thanks a lot). Im told I must also try the Stollen, a special fruit bread made with nuts, spices, and candied fruits. To sipand de-thaw from the cold, there's a large variety of gluhwein, a concoction made of warmed red or white wine infused with oranges, cinnamon, cloves, and sugar. Despite the treasures to be found here, what makes Efurts main market is especially dazzling due to its surroundings. There is a large multicolor Ferris Wheel that lights up the space come nighttime, and all of the booths are centered around a 27-metre Christmas tree; this year it's named Rupfi. (There is currently a social media hashtag, #WirLiebenRupfi, meaning #WeLoveRupfi, dedicated to him, which began as a reaction to some locals deeming his skimpy branches ugly.) Behind the market, 70 steps lead up to two adjacent cathedrals, St. Marys Cathedral and St. Severus Church, both of which offer a birds-eye view of the entire market and city. During the summer, these same steps are also used for various festival performances. Outside the main market, there are other sights (and more markets!) to take in. Behind the two cathedrals lies Medieval Market, a slightly smaller market selling medieval-era souvenirs and, well, more food and wine. There, I try Met, a sweet honey wine. In Erfurts Old Town, there is also the Merchants Bride, a narrow, cobblestoned street lined with local shops, all built atop a stone bridge dating back to 1325. Its Europes longest bridge with buildings that are inhabited, and the people who live above the shops are all local artists or craftsmen. Nearby, the Alte Synagogue is one of the best-preserved medieval synagogues in Europe, having been built in the Middle Ages, while the St. Augustines Monastery was once home to Martin Luther, Germanys most famous monk. Dont forget the Goldhelm Schokoladen Manufaktur and the Viba Confiserie-Cafe for some local chocolates to take home. In Weimar, Bauhaus students host pop-up markets Touring Weimars Most Charming Christmas Markets Photo: Courtesy of Christian Allaire Photo: Courtesy of Alexander Burzik Photo: Christian Allaire Photo: Courtesy of Christian Allaire Photo: Courtesy of Jens Hauspurg / Thuringia Tourism Photo: Courtesy of Christian Allaire Despite Weimars smaller population of 65,000, it is a city filled with historyin fact, its almost impossible to wander down its cobblestone streets without passing by some sort of important landmark. It is here where the popular German poets Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller lived, as well as the composer Johann Sebastian Bach. The much-visited Nietzsche Archive is also located in Weimar, as well as the Duchess Anna Amalia Library, a historic library founded in 1691, containing extensive works from 17th and 18th century. Downtown, there's the world-class Deutsches Nationaltheater and Staatskapelle Weimar, two of Germanys oldest theatre and orchestra groups. Perhaps most notably of all, serious art and design fans will recognize Weimar as the official birthplace of Bauhaus, the art and design movement that took the 1920s by storm. The Bauhaus school was founded in Weimar in 1919 and gained prominence for its non-traditional approach: students were often left to their own devices, with a focus on hands-on workshops and self-expression. The school ignited a larger revolutionary social and political movement, making the case for streamlining ornate, frivolous design and ramping up mass production. (The schools unconventional experimentation defied the conservative views of that time period so much so that, following pressure from the Nazis, it was forced to move from Weimar to Dessau in 1925, and then later to Berlin in 1932, before shuttering completely a year later.) Today, the Bauhaus University in Weimar is still very much alive, as is the movements enduring legacy. Over 4,000 students a year enroll in programs such as carpentry, ceramics, photography, and more. Inside, the signature Bauhaus aesthetic is present: classrooms-slash-studios are flanked by giant bright windows, a stairwell is painted with a mural by iconic painter and former student Oskar Schlemmer. Once a year, Bauhaus students host a pop-up Christmas market in December where they sell a wide range of objects they've created throughout the school year. The market began in 2008 with just 8 humble booths, but has since grown to over 80. Inside, youll find one-of-a-kind creations at much-too-cheap costs. (All students need a buck.) I score some handmade ceramic espresso cups with hand-etched floral designs on them, as well as some handmade soaps in lavender, cinnamon, and mint. Guests cant help but stop to giggle at one students booth, which is selling bratwurst-shaped Christmas ornaments; another student has crafted 3-D models of famous Bond cars made out of paper. There are Bauhaus-themed socks in its signature school colors of red, blue, and yellow. There are also plenty of items made from signature Bauhaus materials like concrete; Anita Riesch has made flower planters with ceramic nipples along the outside. In one corner, a student live-sketches children; in another, Chinese painter Junli Du is painting a new work. The creative energy is palpable. The success of the Bauhaus Christmas market will only be further spotlighted in 2019: to celebrate the Bauhaus Centenary, the new Bauhaus Museum will open its doors in Weimar come April. Spanning four floors, the new space will be a major expansion from its current one-room location. In addition to highlighting important pieces from iconic Bauhaus figures, the museum will also feature workshops and a performance stage, as well as special exhibitions from current students. Meanwhile, Weimar hosts its main Christmas market in its marktplatz. There, find a busy gluwhein hotspot shaped into a large schwibbogen, a traditional German candle-holder. Of course, theres also a gigantic Christmas treeits rumored that the first public German tree was erected in Weimar. For the month of December, the adjacent Town Hall decorates all of its windows in the style of an advent calendar. Downtown, wander the main shopping streets such as Schillerstrasse, Windischenstrasse, and Wielandstrasse. At Meissen, elegant porcelain has been made since the 1700s. I also meet Claudia Koecher, a milliner who creates whimsical headpieces, and her adorable dog, Bella. For a bite, head to Scharfe Ecke, where the traditional Thuringian dumplings are generous in size and served with your choice of meat. At Weinbar, a stellar list of local wines offers a taste of Germanys vineyards (the wines are dry and unsweet). A younger crowd can be found at C.Keller, a late-night bar where Ive been told there is lots of weed, and, upstairs, the Galerie Markt 21 offers rotating exhibitions. End with a night cap at the recently-renovated Hotel Elephant next door: its art deco interior has a very Wes Anderson vibe; it's an ideal spot to grab a drink post-shopping. Near the Thuringian forest, markets are found inside castles Touring Germanys Most Charming Castle Christmas Markets Photo: Courtesy of Thuringia Tourism Photo: Courtesy of Christian Allaire Photo: Courtesy of Christian Allaire Photo: Courtesy of Andre Nestler / Thuringia Tourism Photo: Courtesy of Christiane Hohne Photo: Courtesy of Thuringia Tourism The Thuringian Forest is the largest uninterrupted forest in Germany. Its also why the state is called the green heart of Germany. Within its densely-packed spruces and rolling mountains, there are over 7,000 kilometers of scenic hiking routes here (including Germanys oldest hiking trail, the Rennsteig, dating back almost 700 years). Some of Thuringias smaller cities have unbeatable access to the states best-preserved castles and palaces. So why not host Christmas markets in them? The Leuchtenburg castle, located in Seitenroda near Kahla, was first documented back in 1221. Perched 400 meters above the Saale valley, its orange-roofed defense towers are surrounded by fortified walls and one seriously cool moat. Over the many years, its main purpose has shifted: it has been used as an administration office, a prison, a mental asylum, and a youth hostel. Today, it serves as a tourist attraction, and a museum showcasing Thuringias porcelain-making history. It is also home to its very own Christmas market. The Leuchtenburg market, held inside the castle and on the grounds outside, only runs for two weekends in December. Unsurprisingly, many of the booths pay homage to its porcelain exhibit, where local artists sell a wide variety of porcelain items, from jewelry to home decor items. I find some custom candle covers that are made out of a thin, birch-like material, allowing the flame to shine through just right. There are elegant wreaths entwined with acorns, lavender, and wild berries, and, of course, lots of gluwhein, as well honey meats and homemade cheeses. Meanwhile, just an hour west in Eisenach, a Christmas market takes place at the Wartburg castle. Built in 1067, its located 400 meters above the Eisenach city center, and serves as an imposing focal point. Here, most notably, is where Martin Luther translated the New Testament into German while in hiding. Again, its market is focused on craftsmanship from the city. And lastbut certainly not leastthere is also the city of Gotha, an hour away from Eisenach. Just down the steps from the Friedenstein Palace, Gothas Christmas market has all the German necessities. Children practice early road rage while playing in the squares bumper cars setup (theres a slight Coney Island feel here, if you will). Nearby, the mimi K. coffee shop has excellent coffee set against water-colored walls. Thats just the thing about all of these cities: within their old world charm and majestic markets, theres always something new and unexpected to discover. By Mohammed Ghobari ADEN (Reuters) - Explosions rocked Yemen's Red Sea city of Hodeidah for a second day on Wednesday despite a U.N.-mediated ceasefire meant to pave the way for peace negotiations to end nearly four-years of war. Residents said six missiles blasts near the 7 July eastern suburb broke the calm, but it was not clear who was responsible. The Iranian-aligned Houthi movement and the Saudi-led government had traded blame for violations on the first day of the truce on Tuesday, when residents reported shelling on the eastern and southern outskirts of the Houthi-held city at night. The United Nations brokered the truce deal as part of confidence-building measures at peace talks last week in Sweden to avert a full-scale assault on the port that is vital for urgent aid supplies for millions facing starvation. A source in the Saudi-led coalition arrayed against the Houthis told Reuters that if international monitors were not deployed in Hodeidah soon, the deal could falter. "If the U.N. takes too long to get into (the) theater, they will lose the opportunity altogether and the Stockholm agreement will be a dead duck," said the coalition source, who declined to be named. A U.N.-chaired committee formed to oversee the truce and troop withdrawal from Hodeidah city and three ports held its first meeting on Wednesday using video link and phone with representatives from both sides. Retired Dutch General Patrick Cammaert, chair of the Redeployment Coordination Committee, will travel to Jordan on Thursday, then on to Sanaa and Hodeidah, with a small initial advance team, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said. The ceasefire deal, which covers only Hodeidah, will see international monitors deployed in the city and port with all armed forces pulling out within 21 days of the truce. The two sides had also agreed a prisoner swap. A Red Cross official said in Geneva on Wednesday they had exchanged lists of a total of 16,000 people believed to be detained. HODEIDAH A LIFELINE Hodeidah, the main port used to feed Yemens 30 million people, has been the focus of fighting this year, raising fears abroad that a full-scale assault could cut off supplies to nearly 16 million people suffering from severe hunger. The truce, the first significant breakthrough in peace efforts in five years, is meant to pave the way for a wider ceasefire in the impoverished country and a second round of talks in January on a framework for political negotiations. A Sunni Muslim Arab alliance led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates entered the war in 2015 against the Houthis to restore the internationally recognized government of Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, which was ousted from the capital Sanaa. Western nations, which supply arms and intelligence to the alliance, are calling for an to the conflict which has killed tens of thousands of people and is widely seen as a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran. The Security Council is considering a resolution to ask the U.N. chief to submit proposals by the end of the month on how to monitor the truce and forces redeployment. The Houthis control most urban centers, including Sanaa, while Hadi's government is based in the southern port of Aden. Yemen descended into war after pro-democracy unrest forced late former president Ali Abdullah Saleh to step down. Hadi was elected to a two-year term to head a transitional government but the Houthis drove him into Saudi exile. The Houthis deny getting any help from Iran and say they are waging a revolution against corruption. (Additional reporting by Ghaida Ghantous in Dubai, Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva and Michelle Nichols in New York; Writing by Ghaida Ghantous; Editing by Mark Heinrich) New Zealand will hold a referendum on legalising recreational marijuana when the South Pacific nation votes in its next general election in 2020, the government announced Tuesday. The ballot was among the demands the Green Party made during talks to join Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern's progressive coalition government after the 2017 election. Justice Minister Andrew Little said the government had agreed to the timetable, and the result of the referendum would be binding. "It will be held at the 2020 general election," he told reporters, adding "there is a bit of detail still to work through." Ardern's government has already moved to legalise medicinal cannabis, with legislation on the issue working its way through parliament. An opinion poll last year found 65 percent of New Zealanders also supported legalising the drug for recreational use. Pro-reform campaign group New Zealand Drug Foundation welcomed the vote, with its chief Ross Bell saying the current approach to regulating marijuana was outdated and it was time for a change. "Cannabis is New Zealand's most common illegal drug, 50 percent of the country have tried it," he said. "We're still trying to address the problem through a law enforcement approach. We're still criminalising people and not providing help to people who have a cannabis dependency." The conservative National Party opposition leader Simon Bridges said he would be voting against legalisation and accused the government of trying to deflect voters' attention from issues such as the economy and the rising cost of living. "I'm pretty cynical that you've got a government here that wants to distract from the core issues of a general election," he said. Ardern strongly supported legalising medical pot but has not revealed her personal views on recreational marijuana, saying only she does not believe cannabis users should be jailed. The debate in New Zealand comes as New York governor Andrew Cuomo called Monday for the drug to be made legal for recreational use in his state, including America's most populous city. Thank you for reading! Please purchase a subscription to read our premium content. If you have a subscription, please log in or sign up for an account on our website to continue. Dozens of settlers have returned to rebuild the site of an unauthorized West Bank outpost evacuated by the state, in what they said was a response to recent deadly Palestinian attacks on Israelis. Three people two soldiers and a newborn have been killed in the past two weeks in attacks in the West Bank. The renewed violence comes just two months after two Israelis were murdered by their Palestinian co-worker at a factory in the West Bank. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook STRONG> and Twitter The settlers returned for ceremonial event at the Amona outpost in the Mateh Binyamin region, which was evacuated less than two years ago. During the event, they placed two units on plots of land they said former Amona residents purchased from Palestinians, with the assistance of private investors and donors. Amona was evacuated in February 2017, following a court ruling that it was built on private Palestinian land. Settlers return to evacuated outpost Amona, December 2018. (Photo: Courtesy of Amona residents' association) (Photo: Amona activists) The event was attended by members of the Mateh Binyamin Regional Council, Shomron Regional Council head Yossi Dagan, MK Bezalel Smotrich of the right-wing Bayit Yehudi party, and Avihai Boaron, a representative of the residents of the outpost. Haaretz daily newspaper quoted defense sources as saying that the settlers had not coordinated the event with the Israel Defense Forces army or the Civil Administration. Furthermore, Haaretz said, the area is classed as a closed military zone. "After two years of this place being uninhabited, we are fortunate to resume Israeli life here," said Yisrael Gantz, head of Binyamin Regional Council. "The plots upon which we erected the structures were legally purchased. Yesterday, I promised to establish a new settlement in Binyamin in response to the deadly attacks and today we are carrying it out." 'We will fight to the end' Avihai Boaron, who led the Amona residents in recent years, said: "The night we were expelled from our homes we swore to do everything to bring back Jewish life here, to raise the Israeli flag high up so that all our enemies will know we will be victorious! This land is our home and we will fight for our home to the end." Settler leaders return to the eavcuated Amona outpost, December 2018 (Photo: Amona activists) "In these dark days, when terrorist attacks are so numerous and the honor of the people of Israel is harmed, we must get fired up and today's ascent to Amona is an appropriate Zionist response," said Yossi Dagan, head of the Shomron Regional Council. After the evacuation of the outpost, the security cabinet approved a new settlement for Amona residents, the first time Israel has created a new settlement in over 20 years. The settlement, named Amichai, received its first residents in March. The left-wing anti-settlement movement Peace Now condemned the return to Amona, accusing the settlers of disregarding the law of the land. "There is no limit to the cynicism of the hilltop criminals who exploit the events of recent days to trample the law and ignite disturbances, all with public funds," the organization said. "These pyromaniacs are backed by Knesset members and local politicians It is difficult to understand how an order has not yet been issued to evacuate them, and we ask whether the IDF and the police would have allowed this if they were Palestinians. This disgrace should be addressed today." Peace Now said it would file a complaint with the police against the settlers, and make an appeal to the attorney general. In an unprecedented turn of events, nine ministers came out in criticism of the government and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last weekend. Four of them were even from Likud: Environmental Protection Minister Ze'ev Elkin; Tourism Minister Yariv Levin; Welfare Minister Haim Katz; and Science, Technology and Space Minister Ofir Akunis. Even Construction and Housing Minister Yoav Galant, who is actually about to jump ship from Kulanu to Likud, also joined the frey. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook STRONG> and Twitter Education Minister Naftali Bennett and Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked of the hard-right Jewish Home party, meanwhile, went so far as to slam the government policy on terrorism, even though both of them are on the security cabinet and participate in the decision-making process. Even the opposition doesn't confront the government like its own ministers are doing. Which begs the question why these nay-sayers choose to remain in the coalition, given their very evident disapproval of its policies. Benjamin Netanyahu (Photo: Alex Kolomoisky) Let's not be naive. How many ministers have we seen so far volunteer to leave their posts, especially ahead of an election? Besides, this is the great paradox of this tail end of the current Netanyahu government. On the one hand, the coalition partners are trying hard to keep it intact, since no one is willing to be the one to bring down a right-wing government. On the other hand, the elections are close, the primaries are around the corner, and the ministers are investing all their efforts in pleasing their own electorates. So the ministers must learn to walk a tightrope, and maneuver between rhetoric that will win over their right-wing electorate and the fear that the said rhetoric will pull the rug out from under the feet of this government and they are held responsible for bringing it down. Bennett and Shaked, who only two weeks ago insisted they would quit the coalition if the former did not get the defense portfolio, appear to be the most frustrated with the government. Thats understandable. Not only did Netanyahu refuse to show a single drop of gratitude for them keeping his coalition alive, he persists in abusing both Bennett and Shaked at every opportunity. Just a few days ago, after legislation to regulate settlement construction was approved by a ministerial committee, Netanyahu gave himself the credit for this achievement despite the fact Shaked has been heavily promoting the bill for several years. Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked (Photo: Yoav Dudkevitch) It isnt the first time the prime minister has taken credit for anothers work, and while such actions are sometimes met with a faint protest, they are mostly swept under the rug. But not this time. If there is anything that drives the justice minister crazy, its the brazen manner in which Netanyahu claims her achievements for his own. This could also explain her and Bennett's decision to abstain during the vote to approve Netanyahu as defense minister. Shaked justified her decision by saying that Israel needs a full-time defense minister, and that Bennett is the most suitable candidate. But the two Jewish Home leaders backed down from their ultimatum, so what are they complaining about? This indecision serves no purpose other than to show their electorate that they are more right-wing than Netanyahu. But what wouldve happened had Bennett actually become defense minister? What could Bennett do that Netanyahu hasn't? It's a shame that Netanyahu isnt as impassioned fighting terrorism as he is fighting us, claimed Bennett at one of the cabinet meetings, prompting Netanyahu to say that the education minister doesnt need to double down because everyone heard his ultimatum. Shaked, meanwhile, attacked Transportation Minister Yisrael Katzwho defended the prime ministerby calling him a suck-up. So what did Bennett and Shaked achieve? Absolutely nothing. All those jockeying for position on party lists will keep expressing dissatisfaction with government policy, while all those waiting for Netanyahu to bestow a ministerial position will keep protecting him. Its an epidemic of all talk, no action. There really is no reason to be jealous of Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri. It is true he has a parliament in Beirut, but he does not have a government. Lebanon's economy is in a very bad shape, and desperately needs outside aid but international institutions have made it clear they will not come to the rescue until a Lebanese government is formed and ministers are appointed. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook STRONG> and Twitter Meanwhile, Hezbollah is stalling the establishment of that government by demanding at least one minister to represent the terror organization. Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri (Photo: AFP) Hariri's response to this demand was "over my dead body." This response triggered a series of terrible emails from former minister Wiam Wahhab, who reminded him what had happened to his father, ex-prime minister Rafik Hariri, assassinated in the heart of Beirut in 2005. Wahhab was sued for libel by Hariri's supporters. Lebanon is finding itself isolated from former allies. Following Israel's discovery of Hezbollah's cross-border tunnels and its subsequent warnings, Russia also had harsh words for Beirut, echoed by the United States and the United Nations. There were also surprising statements of support for Israel from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. This new solidarity with Israel is amazing, while Hariri is left griping to the heads of European international organizations. In the meantime, the UN warns of possible new economic sanctions over terrorist Jawad Nasrallah, the son of Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, and 10 other senior Hezbollah officials. Truth be told, it doesn't really matter for how long Hezbollah has been busy digging tunnels from Lebanon to Israel, what's important is how Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu turns them into political leverage. It's enough to watch Sunday's coverage of the tunnels by CNN to understand the tide is not only turning against Hezbollah, but that the responsibility for keeping Lebanon on track is placed on the regime in Beirut, which also is seen responsible for the tunnels. (Ironically, the Lebanese use the catchphrase "I'm in the tunnel" when they want to say they have a problem, and "I'm out of the tunnel" when that problem is solved.) A Hezbollah member caught on camera by the IDF (: ") X The most surprising thing is that the Lebanese media is also daring to voice its disapproval of the tunnels, calling on Lebanon's army to block them and warning Hezbollah it is entangling the country in a potential conflict. Public servants in Beirut say they have enough problems. Well, here is a new one: Israel initiated a special discussion at the UN Security Council about the four cross-border tunnels the IDF has exposed since it launched Operation Northern Shield at the beginning of December. Lebanon knows, exactly as does Israel, that the tunnels are a minor problem. Israel showed restraint on this issue in the past, and decided to expose them now on purpose, for obvious reasons. The truly worrying fact, for a substantial part of Lebanon's residents, is Iran's efforts to seize their country. If this happens, and Iran moves large forces into Lebanon, Israel will never look the other way. A US envoy is due to visit South Korea on Wednesday, officials said, as Washington and Pyongyang struggle to find a breakthrough in their stalled talks aimed at ending North Korea's nuclear program. Stephen Biegun, the US special representative for North Korea, is due to stay four days, a diplomatic source told Reuters. The Pittsburgh City Council began considering a package of gun-control laws on Tuesday, including a ban on assault-style rifles, nearly two months after a gunman shouting anti-Semitic messages killed 11 people in a synagogue. The measure would also ban certain types of ammunition and allow courts to ban gun ownership by people deemed to pose a significant threat of violence. Seven of nine council members agreed to co-sponsor the legislation at Tuesday's meeting. The European Union is sending a strong warning to Donald Trump that any Israeli-Palestinian peace plan not based on the pre-1967 borders will not succeed. Ambassadors from eight EU members states issued the warning in a joint statement at the UN headquarters in New York. "We, the European Union members of the (UN Security) Council, would like to reiterate once more and emphasize the EUs strong continued commitment to the internationally agreed parameters for a just and lasting peace in the Middle East, based on international law, relevant UN resolutions and previous agreements," the statement said. The European Union and Russia have warned US President Donald Trump that any Israeli-Palestinian peace plan not based on the pre-1967 borders and a two-state solution will not succeed. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook STRONG> and Twitter On the EU side, ambassadors from eight members states issued the warning in a joint statement at the UN headquarters in New York. "We, the European Union members of the (UN Security) Council, would like to reiterate once more and emphasize the EUs strong continued commitment to the internationally agreed parameters for a just and lasting peace in the Middle East, based on international law, relevant UN resolutions and previous agreements," the statement said. "The EU is truly convinced that the achievement of a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders with Jerusalem as the capital of both states, that meets Israeli and Palestinian security needs, and Palestinian aspirations for statehood and sovereignty, ends the occupation and resolves all final status issues ... is the only viable and realistic way to end the conflict and achieve just and lasting peace," the statement said. Russia also expressed concerns that the American peace plan would not succeed unless it implemented a two-state solution, the TASS news agency reported Tuesday. Russia has yet to see the peace plan, and its Permanent Representative to the United Nations Vasily Nebenzya told TASS that Moscow "doubts that it can be viable." "We hear about it for the second year already, they regularly promise this, but these are jam tomorrow promises. We have not seen it so far, and nobody knows when we will see it," Nebenzya told TASS. He added that "no plan will be viable if the internationally recognized basis for the Middle East settlement is not taken into account and it is crucial to rely on a two-state solution." The statements came shortly before comments from Trump's UN ambassador Nikki Haley gave a hint, but no details, of her boss's peace plan for Israel and the Palestinians. The plan is long, she said, takes advantage of new technology, and has a lot both sides will like and things they won't like. Haley said Israelis and Palestinians, as well as countries around the world, have a choice: focus on the parts they dislike, which she said means returning "to the failed status quo of the last 50 years," or focus on parts they like and encourage peace negotiations to move forward. The US ambassador, who said she has read the plan, told the UN Security Council that "both sides would benefit greatly from a peace agreement, but the Palestinians would benefit more, and the Israelis would risk more." Haley, who is stepping down at the end of the month, said moving forward to negotiations and peace "will need leaders with real vision to do it." She declared: "The world will be watching." Haley made no mention of any of these issues in her last speech at the council's monthly Mideast meeting, stressing instead the "unshakeable bond" between the United States and Israel, which she has reflected in her nearly two years as US ambassador. "Given my record, some might mistakenly conclude that I am unsympathetic to the Palestinian people," she said. "Nothing could be further from the truth." Haley said neither Israelis nor Palestinians should make peace at "any price" but she highlighted the differences between the two sides. "Israel wants a peace agreement but it does not need one," she said. On the other hand, Haley said, the Palestinian people "are suffering terribly, while their leadership clings to 50-yar-old demands that have only become less and less realistic," and a peace agreement holds the prospects "of a massive improvement in the quality of their lives and far greater control over their political future." She said "it is with this backdrop in mind that the Trump administration has crafted its plan for peace between Israel and the Palestinians." Israel's UN Ambassador Danny Danon said late last month that US officials have told Israel's government they expects to release the long-awaited Israeli-Palestinian peace plan in the beginning of 2019. US President Donald Trump calls the plan -- drafted by a team headed by his son-in-law Jared Kushner and adviser Jason Greenblatt -- the "Deal of the Century." Nikolay Mladenov, the UN Mideast envoy, told the council he "remains concerned by the weakening of international consensus and the absence of collective efforts to achieve an end to the (Israeli) occupation and the realization of a negotiated two-state resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict." "At the end of 2018, we are nowhere closer to reviving efforts for a negotiated solution," he said. "Without a political horizon, all our collective and individual efforts merely contribute to managing the conflict rather than resolving it." Mladenov also reported to the council on Israel's compliance with a December 2016 resolution that condemned Israeli settlements in lands the Palestinians want to include in their future state and said the settlements have "no legal validity." The resolution demanded a halt to such activities for the sake of "salvaging the two-state solution." The UN Mideast coordinator said Israel has taken "no steps" to comply with the resolution and has continued expanding settlements and constructing new ones. Over the past year, he said that "although Gaza has been the most volatile, the risk of an explosion in the West Bank has also grown." Mladenov warned that "the dangerous escalation of terrorist attacks, clashes and violence in the West Bank" in the past days and weeks have led to deaths of Israeli and Palestinian civilians and Israeli soldiers. Israeli security measures following these incidents, its search operations in the West Bank city of Ramallah, as well as clashes and protests that turned violent "are adding to an already tense atmosphere," he said. Mladenov echoed Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in calling on Israeli and Palestinian security services "to work together to restore calm and avoid escalation." Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Wednesday that Islamic State group (ISIS) terrorists had executed nearly 700 prisoners in nearly two months in eastern Syria. The UK-based war monitoring group said the prisoners were among 1,350 civilians and fighters that Islamic State had been holding in territory near the Iraqi border. The jihadists control a shrinking strip of land east of the Syria's Euphrates River around the town of Hajin, which US-backed forces entered this month. The wage of Israeli parliamentarians, ministers and other senior civil servants is expected to rise by thousands of shekels at the start of 2019, even as the public is protesting about an anticipated jump in the cost of living , as food, electricity, and water prices are set to soar in the coming year. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook STRONG> and Twitter The salary increase is down to the fact that Knesset members and civil servants have their salaries automatically updated according to past year's average wage index. Knesset plenum MKs can reject the pay rise, which some have done in recent years. The Kulanu party, which is headed by Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon, decided on Monday that all of its members would waive their pay raise. A document signed by all party members relinquishing the increase was submitted to the Knesset accountant, Haim Avidror. The exact wage increase has yet to be determined as it is based on a National Insurance Institute index, which will only be issued in January. However, according to the index average wage change index calculated by the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), the average wage has risen during the first nine months of 2018 by 2.5%. Assuming this index continues to rise, it is expected to reach a rate of 3%. If this is the case, all MKs and deputy ministers are expected to receive an additional NIS 1,100 (approx. $300) per month, while ministers would get an extra NIS 1,200. The prime minister's salary would increasedby some NIS 1,360 per month. At the beginning of 2018, outcry erupted over a minister's demand that their salaries be also linked to the average wage index. The minister, whose wage at the time was linked to the consumer price index, argued that a relatively static CPI index meant he and his colleagues were being treated unfairly. The Knesset Finance Committee held several discussions on the matter, ultimately deciding to link the ministers' wages to the average wage index, which meant their salaries rise each year. This addition to their salaries, MKs, deputy ministers and the prime minister receive a monthly wage supplement of NIS 3,400 (approx. $900). Furthermore, each MK is entitled to expenses of NIS 150 for every day the Knesset plenum convenes, as well as a private car and full coverage for gas. The Kremlin said on Wednesday Russia was pressing ahead with a contract to deliver advanced S-400 missile air defence systems to Turkey despite the US State Department approving the possible sale of a rival US missile defence system to Ankara. The Pentagon said on Tuesday that the US State Department had approved a possible $3.5 billion sale of Patriot air and missile defence systems to NATO-ally Turkey, after notifying Congress of the certification. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday that Hezbollah has "at most, a few dozen" precision-guided missiles, having shut down factories for converting such weapons in Lebanon after Israel exposed them in September. "Those sites near the Beirut airport, the underground sites for precision conversion of missiles, which IDF intelligence gave me, to expose, those sites were closed," he told an economic conference. "They are trying to open other sites. But through these measures we are denying them precision arms." Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday urged the UN Security Council to take action against Hezbollah tunnels dug under the Israel border from Lebanon. Speaking ahead of a Security Council session on the issue, Netanyahu said the UN presence in Lebanon, UNIFIL, should have unrestricted access to all areas of southern Lebanon and warned that Israel would defend itself. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday urged the United Nations Security Council to take action against Hezbollah over its tunnels dug from Lebanon under the Israeli border. He said the international body should to condemn the Lebanese militant group's "wanton acts of aggression," designate it a terrorist organization and heighten sanctions on it. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook STRONG> and Twitter Speaking ahead of a Security Council session on the issue, Netanyahu said UNIFIL, the UN presence in Lebanon, should be granted "unrestrained access to any area in southern Lebanon," where the Iranian-backed Hezbollah has traditionally operated unfettered. He said that UNIFIL should not be hampered in its work, or restricted by Hezbollah or the Lebanese army in any way. The tunnels were "an act of war" that was imperiling Lebanon, he said. Benjamin Netanayhu denounces Hezbollah ahead of a Security Council debate, December 19, 2018 "I demand that UNIFIL meet its mandate," Netanyahu said, adding that the organization must report "any violations" of UN Resolution 1701 to both the United Nations and Israel. The resolution ended the 2006 Second Lebanon War, during which Israel and Hezbollah fought a 33-day destructive battle following the abduction of two Israeli soldiers by the Lebanese terror group. "I hope the UNSC stands up for the truth and takes the necessary action," Netanyahu said, and called on the UN Security Council to "stand up for truth and peace and security and take necessary action." He said that Israel "has the right to defend itself against Iranian aggression," and "will continue to take all the necessary action to protect our people and defend our borders." Israel announced the existence of the tunnels at the start of the month, along with the IDF operation to locate and destroy them. So far, Israel has uncovered four tunnels, and says it has been planning the operaration for years. "Very few people knew (about the tunnels), but they know about it now," Netanyahu said at his press conference Wednesday. The prime minister's comments come hours after he said that Hezbollah has "at most, a few dozen" precision-guided missiles, having shut down factories for converting such weapons in Lebanon after Israel exposed them in September. "Those sites near the Beirut airport, the underground sites for precision conversion of missiles, which IDF intelligence gave me, to expose, those sites were closed," he told an economic conference. "They are trying to open other sites. But through these measures we are denying them precision arms." It was cleared for publication that one out of the four Hezbollah cross-border terror tunnels discovered by the IDF, had been dug west of the Shiite village of Ramyeh, reaching Moshav Zar'it in the Upper Galilee. The Trump administration will withdraw all of the approximately 2,000 American troops in Syria, according to a US official, as the White House declared victory Wednesday in the mission to defeat Islamic State militants there. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook STRONG> and Twitter Planning for the pullout has begun and troops will begin leaving as soon as possible, said the official, who was not authorized to publicly discuss military planning and spoke on condition of anonymity. US President Donald Trump said American forces no longer were needed in a country torn apart by long-running civil war. Trump declared victory over the Islamic State in Syria, saying that it was the only reason he had kept troops in the country. "We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency," Trump wrote on Twitter, his preferred means of communication. The pullout upends assumptions about a longer-term US military presence in Syria, which US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and other senior US officials had advocated to help ensure Islamic State cannot reemerge. Even so, Pentagon and other officials have said that US troops were countering Iran-backed militants in Syria, which was an expansion of the US mission. Trump has previously expressed a strong desire to bring troops home from Syria when possible. American troops in Syria (Photo: AP) Reports of an abrupt withdrawal drew quick criticism from Congress. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said a full and rapid removal of troops would be a "grave error with broader implications" beyond the fight against IS. The Pentagon recently said that IS now controls just 1 percent of the territory they originally held. Responding to the reports, Pentagon spokesman Col. Rob Manning said in a statement that "at this time, we continue to work by, with and through our partners in the region." The United States has about 2,000 troops in Syria, many of them special operations forces working closely with an alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF. The partnership with the SDF over the past several years has led to the defeat of Islamic State in Syria but outraged NATO ally Turkey, which views Kurdish YPG forces in the alliance as an extension of a militant group fighting inside Turkey. The announcement of the US troop withdrawal comes as Ankara threatens a new offensive in Syria. To date, US forces in Syria have been seen as a stabilizing factor in the country and have somewhat restrained Turkey's actions against the SDF. The Foreign Ministry of Russia, Assad's closest ally, said that the presence of American forces in Syria was becoming a dangerous obstacle to finding a peace settlement and accused Washington of keeping its forces there illegally. "From being a factor in the fight against terrorism, the illegal American presence in Syria is becoming a dangerous obstacle to the path to a settlement," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told a news briefing. Donald Trump greets Vladimir Putin during the commemorations to mark 100 years since the end of World War II, in Paris in November 2018 A complete withdrawal of US troops from Syria will still leave a sizeable US military presence in the region, including about 5,200 troops across the border in Iraq. Much of the US campaign in Syria has been waged by warplanes flying out of Qatar and other locations in the Middle East. Still, Mattis and US State Department officials have long fretted about leaving Syria before a peace agreement can be reached to end that country's brutal civil war, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced around half of Syria's pre-war population of about 22 million. In April, Mattis said: "We do not want to simply pull out before the diplomats have won the peace. You win the fight and then you win the peace." Islamic State is also widely expected to revert to guerilla tactics once it no longer holds territory. A US withdrawal could open Trump up to criticism if Islamic State reemerged. The Lebanese Foreign Ministry asked the United Nations Security Council on Wednesday to compel Israel to stop the alleged violations of Lebanese sovereignt. The ministry claimed hat "Israeli warplanes circulate at low altitudes, while the Israeli army deploys espionage devices, and breaks into the Lebanese communications network to send messages to the personal cell phones of our residents." Israel rapped the United Nations peacekeeping force in Lebanon on Wednesday, as the UN Security Council gathered in New York to discuss the issue of Hezbollah tunnels dug into Israeli territory. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook STRONG> and Twitter Israeli Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon said information Israel provided to UNIFIL, the UN's peacekeepers in Lebanon, had been passed to the Lebanese Army, which then passed it to Hezbollah, who then attempted to conceal the tunnels on the Lebanese side. He said Hezbollah planned to use the tunnels to carry out a five-point attack on Israeli civilians at five different locations in the Galilee. He also displayed an image of a tunnel that ran directly under the feet of the UNIFIL troops, claiming that there were areas where the peacekeepers could not go. UNIFIL's chief, Jean-Pierre Lacroix, earlier confirmed the organization has asked Lebanon to assist in tracking the tunnels on the Lebanese side of the border. The Lebanese envoy denied that the country had violated UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the 2006 Second Lebanon War fought between Israel and Hezbollah. She said that the world turned a blind eye to Israeli violations of international law, charging that a double standard was in play. Lebanon, the envoy said, has no aggressive ambitions, but carries the memories of four Israeli invasions. The country was determined to uphold security in southern Lebanon and said there would be patrols along the shared border with Israel. The Iranian-backed and heavily armed Hezbollah, meanwhile, found itself in the crosshairs as nation after nation called for Lebanon's army to be the only military force in the country. Britain, France and the US all called the tunnels a violation of Resolution 1701. The US questioned whether any further proof was needed that Hezbollah posed a genuine threat to the stability of the region. France urged both sides to maintain calm on the frontier, and called on the Lebanese army to aid UNIFIL, as it worked to investigate the tunnels. The US also called for UNIFIL to investigate the tunnels, while the UK said Israel has the right to defend itself against Hezbollah. The UK, Sweden, and The Netherlands all urged Israel not to violate Resolution 1701. UNIFIL's French chief, Jean-Pierre Lacroix confirmed the organization has asked Lebanon to assist in tracking the tunnels on the Lebanese side of the border. Kuwait, meanwhile, accused Israel of exaggerating the severity of the tunnels and claimed it was violating Resolution 1701. It said the tunnels were a legitimate form of defense for Hezbollah and said that Israel must end its occupation of Lebanese territory, namely the Sheba Farms. State Prosecutor Shai Nitzan said Wednesday that his office's legal opinion review of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's investigation spread over 800 pages. "After receiving the drafts of the prime minister's questionings, I held meetings in which extensive material and evidence were presented to me and other officials from the State Attorney's office. In the coming days we will begin deliberations with Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit," Nitzan said. US Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a frequent defender of the president, said a decision by President Donald Trump to withdraw troops from Syria would be "a mistake". An American withdrawal at this time would be a big win for ISIS, Iran, Bashar al Assad of Syria, and Russia. I fear it will lead to devastating consequences for our nation, the region, and throughout the world," Graham said in a statement. "It will make it more difficult to recruit future partners willing to confront radical Islam. It will also be seen by Iran and other bad actors as a sign of American weakness in the efforts to contain Iranian expansion." The United States is considering a total withdrawal of US forces from Syria as it winds up its campaign to retake all of the territory once held by Islamic State, US officials said on Wednesday. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Wednesday that Israel would study Washington's decision to withdraw all American troops in Syria. "I spoke with United States President Donald Trump a few days ago and with Secretary of State Michael Pompeo yesterday. I was told that the American administration intends to withdraw its forces from Syria," he said. "They made clear they have other ways to have influence in the area," Netanyahu said. "We will study the timeline, how it will be done and of course the implications for us. In any case, we will make sure to maintain Israel's security and protect ourselves from this arena." Israel will study the US decision to pull its forces from Syria and will ensure its own security, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook STRONG> and Twitter Netanyahu in a statement said he had spoken over the past two days with US President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo about their intention to withdraw troops from Syria. "They made clear they have other ways to have influence in the area," Netanyahu said. "We will study the timeline, how it will be done and of course the implications for us. In any case, we will make sure to maintain Israel's security and protect ourselves from this arena," he said. Russia's Foreign Ministry, meanwhile, said the US decision to withdraw creates prospects for political settlement to the years-long, bloody Syrian civil war, according to the TASS news agency. TASS also cited the ministry as saying that an initiative to form a Syrian constitutional committee had a bright future with the US troop withdrawal. Russia is a key backer of Syrian President Bashar Assad, and Russian President Vladimir Putin's support is believed by many to have turned the tide of the war in Assad's favor. Russian President Vladimir Putin with Syrian counterpart Bashar Assad (Photo: Reuters) Trump tweeted that the troops would be leaving as the US had defeated ISIS, which he said was his sole reason for being in Syria. But in the UK, minister in the Defense Ministry Tobias Ellwood used Trump's favored means of communication to express his disapproval of the decision. "I strongly disagree," Ellwood tweeted in response to Trump's claim that Islamic State had been defeated. He warned that the organization "has morphed into other forms of extremism and the threat is very much alive." In the US, senior members of Trump's own Republican Party denounced the decision as having a far-reaching, negative impact. Withdrawing the troops, said Senator Lindsey Graham, a recent staunch supporter of the president, would be "a big win for ISIS, Iran, Bashar al-Assad of Syria and Russia." Fellow GOP Senator Marco Rubio also condemned the move, saying that a full, rapid withdrawal would be a "grave error" that had implications beyond the battle against Islamic State. An American military base in Syria (Photo: AFP) The Pentagon said Wednesday that the process of withdrawing had already begun, while a US official said that the full redeployment would take between 60-100 days. "The Coalition has liberated the ISIS-held territory, but the campaign against ISIS is not over," Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White said in a statement, using an acronym for Islamic State. "We have started the process of returning US troops home from Syria as we transition to the next phase of the campaign," she said. "For force protection and operational security reasons we will not provide further details. We will continue working with our partners and allies to defeat ISIS wherever it operates." Ten Israeli ambassadors and consuls general in Asia and the Pacific met Monday with their foreign counterparts in Jerusalem. The meeting, held as part of a diplomatic conference organized by the Foreign Ministry, was attended by senior diplomats from China, Japan, India, Vietnam, Nepal, Korea, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Australia and Myanmar. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook STRONG> and Twitter The guests were seated according to their geographical location in order to allow direct dialogue between Foreign Ministry officials, who were also in attendance, and the foreign ambassadors. Ambassador from Asia-Pacific countries in Jerusalem, December 17, 2018 Deputy Director General for Asia and the Pacific, Gilad Cohen, said that he would be happy to host the envoys in Jerusalem, the capital of Israel, and hoped that Asian countries would follow Australia's example and recognize Jerusalem as a capital. "Jerusalem's origin is King David's time, not Camp David," he stated. The Israeli and foreign ambassadors discussed deepening cooperation between their respected countries and the Jewish State. The Indian ambassador to Israel and his Israeli counterpart spoke about their cooperation in education; the Australian ambassador spoke about establishing Australian trade and defense offices in Jerusalem; the Philippines envoy discussed future visits of Philippines' president in Israel; and the Japanese ambassador talked about promoting tourism between the two countries. Australia recognizes West Jerusalem as Israel's capital, December 15, 2018 X 'We look forward to moving our embassy when practical' On Sunday, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced that his country formally recognizes West Jerusalem as Israel's capital. Two months ago Morrison said he was open to moving the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, but did not mention that Australia will only recognize the western part of the city. Despite his announcement, the Australian premier noted that the move will only take place once an agreement has been reached on a two-state solution. "Australia now recognizes West Jerusalem, being the seat of the Knesset and many of the institutions of government, is the capital of Israel. We look forward to moving our embassy to West Jerusalem when practical," he told reporters in Sydney. According to Morrison, after a settlement has been reached between Israel and the Palestinians, the Australian government will also recognize the aspirations for a future state of Palestine with East Jerusalem as its capital. Although the embassy's move to West Jerusalem is unlikely to happen soon, in the meantime, Australian trade and defense offices would be set up while the country examines a future site for its embassy. Former defense minister Avigdor Lieberman was verbally attacked Wednesday night by ultra-Orthodox activists outside the home of Sgt.Yoseph Cohen the soldier who was killed last week in a shooting attack in the West Bank Follow Ynetnews on Facebook STRONG> and Twitter Protesting Lieberman's support of the IDF draft bill , the activists, who were waiting outside the Cohen family home in Jerusalem, called the former defense minister a "murderer" and compared him to the terrorists behind the attack that claimed the young sergeant's life. Former defense minister Avigdor Lieberman attacked by ultra-Orthodox activists, Jerusalem, December 19, 2018 (Photo: Haim Goldberg/ Kikar Hashaba) Former defense minister Avigdor Lieberman attacked by ultra-Orthodox activists, Jerusalem, December 19, 2018 (: , ) X Several local residents, including Cohen's relatives and neighbors, witnessed the attack and tried to calm the protestors. However, within a few seconds, more activists gathered outside Cohen's home. The activists kept shouting at Lieberman while passersby retorted by calling them "disgusting." Islamic State is still present in Syria and Iraq, and yet US President Donald Trump is withdrawing his forces from Syria. He intended to do so long ago, but US Defense Secretary James Mattis deterred him. The stated reason for keeping American troops in Syria was their Kurdish allies, since if American consultants abandon the Kurdsthe betrayal would decimate American standing and credibility. Such a move will also invalidate Israel's insistence that Syria, Iran and Turkey should not be given carte blanche to do as they wish in the strategically located country. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook STRONG> and Twitter But Trump wanted out of Syria, mainly for economic reasons, and therefore he declared victory over IS. The White House was quick to state that the US departure does not signal that the Americans are leaving the coalition against IS, but rather, now that IS lost its strongholds, the White House is "transitioning to the next phase of the campaign." US troops in Syria (: AFP) The White House's announcement means that the US is letting Russia and Iran, and to a certain extent Turkey, shape both their own interests and the new order that will form in Syria at the end of the civil war. As a result, Iran will cement its foothold in Syria more easily and Putin's influence in the Middle East, including Iraq, will grow. The Syrian Kurds, who are losing the support of a protector and adviser, will have to seek shelter in Assad's arms while, once the US forces leave the area, Turkey is free to attack them at will. US pulls all troops from Syria (: ) X Who will trust the US now? The United States had about 2,000 military personnel in Syria. They were stationed there to assist the Syrian Democratic Forces, a prominent opposition group, to fight in rebel enclaves in the desert east of the Euphrates River. Despite what Trump claims, IS has not yet been completely destroyedthe American troops and their Kurdish allies were successfully wiping them out. Until now. The American presence in Syria, therefore, is still necessary, even though they are small in numbers. In fact, this force, together with its Kurdish allies, holds all territory to the east and north of the Euphrates Riverabout a quarter of the entire territory of Syria. When the American military advisers return home, the US will lose an important asset that would grant it influence over whatever surfaces in Syria after the civil war. Another American military asset in Syria is a Special Forces base in Al-Tanf, near to the Syrian-Iraqi-Jordanian border triangle. From this military base, US air and intelligence forces operate against IS enclaves in the Deir ez-Zour area. But more importantly, these troops prevent Iran from transferring militias, missiles and other weapons through the land corridor from Iran through Iraq to Syria, and onto Hezbollah in Lebanon. Therefore, the American departure from Syria does not bode well, both from an Israeli and a Jordanian perspective. It is this American presence that currently blocks the establishment of the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and the Shiite militias it brought into Syria, near its borders with Jordan and Israel. More importantly, this withdrawal erodes the status of the United States as a world power and as an influencer in the Middle East. The Russians want the American military advisers out so that Washington wouldnt be able to demand a share of the spoils once the civil war is over. Worse yet, the US will be perceived as abandoning the interests of its allies in the Middle East, not just Israel and Jordan, but also Saudi Arabia, which is considered the patron of the Sunni Muslims in Syria. In addition, by withdrawing its forces, Washington is losing a negotiating card in their dealing with Russia. When Trump takes his soldiers from Syria, you can be sure Qasem Soleimani , the commander of Iran's Quds Force, will be cheerfully rubbing his hands together and gleefully informing Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that another obstacle has been removed from their path in Syria, and a second front against Israel is now ripe for opening. THE FORMER speculation building in the Ironwood Industrial Park will be used for a Waupaca Foundry expansion business. By RALPH ANSAMI [email protected] IRONWOOD - Waupaca Foundry, Inc., a manufacturer of high-quality cast and machined iron components for the transportation and industrial markets, plans to expand into Ironwood. The Michigan Economic Development Corporation said Tuesday the project is expected to generate total private investment of $4.3 million and create 61 jobs. Michigan was chosen over competing sites in Arkansas and Wisconsin, MEDC said. Ironwood Community Development Director Tom Bergman said the company will locate in the former speculation building on Liberty Street in the I... By RICHARD JENKINS [email protected] HURLEY Iron County is considering implementing a temporary moratorium on importation and raising of cervids in the county, with the Iron County Comprehensive Planning and Zoning Committee deciding Tuesday to schedule a public hearing on the issue. The temporary ban would allow the county to consider how it wants to handle any potential deer farms that may consider locating in the county. Just to remind you, this doesnt mean no deer farms ever. This is a one-year block on deer farms for us to figure out what we want to do, Zoning Ad... Detached house sales rose by 3.6% in November, according to the Housing Industry Associations (HIA) New Home Sales Report. The monthly increase was geographically widespreadsales were up in Victoria (7.3%); Queensland (2.1%); South Australia (7.4%); and Western Australia (2.2%). New South Wales was the only state to buck the trend, with sales declining by 3.3%. After a string of weak months, it is pleasing to see new home sales finishing the year on a slightly more positive note, said Geordan Murray, HIA senior economist. However, Murray also warned that this increase in sales was unlikely to mark the end of the downward trend seen throughout the year, considering the weakening Sydney and Melbourne housing markets, as well as the tight credit environment. Despite the monthly rise, the overall level of sales in November is well below the level 12 months previously and also below what had otherwise been typical for most of the period since 2014, he said. Murray said that the tighter lending environment was a result of the banks adapting to the more restrictive lending regulations from The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) and increased scrutiny from the Hayne Royal Commission. HIA found that the credit squeeze first started to hurt the investor side of the market in 2017. Recently, the impact of the crunch has reached the owner-occupier market. Tighter credit conditions facing owner-occupier borrowers are now weighing on the detached house building market, illustrated clearly by the reduced levels of new home sales and building approvals, Murray said. The Royal Commission is set to release recommendations early next year, and HIA believes that that the credit squeeze may continue in 2019. The industry group said that policymakers will need to proceed cautiously when responding to the commissions recommendations. 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Ireland Uruguay, Eastern Republic of Uzbekistan Vanuatu Venezuela, Bolivarian Republic of Viet Nam, Socialist Republic of Wallis and Futuna Islands Western Sahara Yemen Zambia, Republic of Zimbabwe Latest News Washington, DC - "We must also work together to create a culture in our country that embraces the dignity of life, that creates deep and meaningful human connections, and that turns classmates and colleagues into friends and neighbors." President Donald J. Trump PROVIDING A SAFE ENVIRONMENT: President Donald J. Trumps Commission on School Safety examined ways to make our schools safe for all students and teachers. President Trumps School Safety Commission (Commission) is releasing its report and recommendations on how to address school safety and violence. The President established the Commission following the tragic shooting in Parkland, Florida, and placed it under the leadership of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. The President directed the Commission to make a comprehensive assessment of the issue of school violence and to make policy recommendations to keep our schools safe. The Commission listened to students, parents, teachers, administrators, counselors, law enforcement, mental health professionals, security personnel, and others. The Commission hosted meetings, field visits, and listening sessions across 8 States and the District of Columbia and reviewed more than 1,500 comments from the public. Understanding that each community has a unique set of school safety needs without a one-size-fits-all solution, the Commission offered recommendations, to be adopted as appropriate. PREVENTING SCHOOL VIOLENCE: The Commission offered a number of recommendations to improve school cultures and help prevent acts of school violence. Schools and communities must take a comprehensive approach to making sure school campuses are safe places for learning and growth. The Commissions report emphasizes the importance of improving access to mental health services as a vital means of reducing school violence. This includes identifying youth at risk for mental illness and connecting them with needed treatment, services, and support. The Commission advocates the development of model State legislation on compelling treatment for individuals with serious mental illness. One analysis found that up to 25 percent of mass shooters had been treated for mental illnesses, and more than 75 percent had prior symptoms of mental illness. The Commission endorses Extreme Risk Protection Order laws, which give authorities a temporary way to keep those who threaten society from possessing or purchasing firearms. The Commission encourages media to consider adopting the principles of the No Notoriety campaign, which calls on media coverage to not use names or photos of killers. PROTECTING STUDENTS: The Commission laid out recommendations to improve the physical security of schools and ensure trained personnel are in place to respond to threats. Yuma News Yuma, Arizona - Monday, just before 12:00 pm, smoke was reported coming from a compactor at Bed, Bath, and Beyond, 1212 South Castle Dome Avenue. Arriving Yuma Fire Department personnel found that a fire had started in the large commercial compactor at the business. The heat from the fire activated the Fire Sprinkler System, protecting that area of the building. The fire was contained and extinguished by the sprinklers. Damage was limited to the materials being compacted inside the unit. The store was evacuated due to the initial alarm on site. There was no damage to the store itself and the store was able to soon resume normal operations. The specific cause of the fire is not known at this time. Fire sprinkler systems can keep fires from spreading and can also extinguish them. Fire spreads quickly and can double in size every minute. Even small fires can cause significant damage to property and endanger those nearby. Contrary to many Hollywood portrayals, only sprinkler heads directly exposed to the heat activate, not those in the rest of the room, building, or complex. This is at least the 5th fire sprinkler save in the last year, here in Yuma. Sprinkler systems save lives and protect property. Yuma News Yuma, Arizona - A grand total of 549 pounds of produce grown at the Arizona Western College Land Lab was donated to the Yuma Community Food Bank during 2018. Donations made throughout the year by the Yuma County Collegiate Young Farmers and Ranchers club consisted of green okra, red okra, green beans, snap peas, beets, broccoli, cauliflower, zucchini, and eight ball squash. The produce was grown as part of the Plant Science 100 class as well as by other members of the AWC Agricultural Science Department. It is a part of the mission of the Young Farmers and Ranchers to be a part of their community. Instead of letting this produce go to waste in the field, we were able to do a small part in helping those who are food insecure in the Yuma community. By donating this produce, it allows the members of the Young Farmers and Ranchers to give healthy, nutritious food to those in need, said Leigh Loughead, AWC Agriculture Science Manager. Loughead shared that the AWC Ag Science Department will continue to donate produce to the food bank each semester. AWCs Yuma County Collegiate Young Farmers and Ranchers club is part of the Yuma County Farm Bureau, which exists to support student engagement in agriculture, enhance members education, and develop future leaders for the organization and agriculture industry. Our directory features more than 18 million business listings from across the entire US. However, if we're missing your business, add your business by clicking on Add Your Business. The mother and sister of embattled Menzgold boss Nana Appiah Mensah are alleged to have arrested a loyal customer of Menzgold over a misunderstanding concerning two cars they intended purchasing. In a report cited on Browngh.com by YEN.com.gh, NAM1's mother whose name was given as Eve Brew and sister, Abigail Mensah, reportedly contacted the car dealer to purchase 2018 models of Range Rover and Maserrati respectively. Menzgold dealership. Source: Yen.com.gh Source: UGC The car dealer whose name is not known at the moment is said to be a long time business associate of NAM1 and his family as well as a loyal Menzgold customer who supposedly has his money locked up at Menzgold like other Ghanaians. READ ALSO: Medikal will be a fool to marry Fella Makafui - Counselor Lutterodt Reports from the car dealer purportedly revealed that he (the car dealer) told NAM1's mother and sister that he did not have the 2018 Range Rover and Maserrati models but can order from another car dealer abroad; which they agreed to and paid accordingly. After the payment, the car dealer then ordered and paid for the respective cars from Europe which were supposed to be shipped into Ghana and consequently released to NAM1's mother and sister. According to the car dealer, while they were all waiting for the ordered cars to be shipped, Madam Eve Brew (mother of NAM1) and Abigail Mensah (sister of NAM1) called to say that they were no more interested in purchasing the cars, thus want the money they paid to be returned. READ ALSO: Don't be wicked; share your husbands with other women - Islamic scholar In response, the car dealer said he had already ordered and paid for the cars so it was impossible to abrogate the contract and take back the money, thus the only way was to have the cars imported, sell to other buyers and pay back their monies. This suggestion by the car dealer did not go down well with NAM1's mother and sister. In reaction, Madam Eve Brew and Abigail Mensah reportedly called for the arrest of the car dealer while the three were having a meeting over the issue. The car dealer was allegedly sent to the Greater Accra Regional Police station where NAM1's mother and sister had lodged a complain about the issue. READ ALSO: Young Nigerian man goes mad after withdrawing money from ATM Watch: Ghana News Today: Angry Residents Call on Government to Fix Damaged Bridge in Kumasi | #Yencomgh Click here to get the latest exciting English Premier League news. Get match highlights, reports, photos & videos all in one place. Source: Yen December 17, 2018 " Information Clearing House " - He represents the worst of what US imperial arrogance is all about, its pure evil agenda, waging war on humanity, supporting some of the worlds worst tinpot despots. Notably it includes the Saudi regime, run by bandits, hooligans, and cutthroat killers, the Arabian peninsula they control masquerading as a nation-state. On Wednesday, Pompeo tried defending the indefensible on Fox & Friends. His public remarks always feature a litany of Big Lies. Nothing he says is credible. He lied about the nonexistent threat of radicalized immigrants, posing a risk to American citizens. The only threats ordinary Americans face are state-sponsored, none from abroad or from alien refugees or asylum seekers. Claims otherwise by Trump, Pompeo, and other regime hardliners are fabricated. Pompeo supports a colossal boondoggle, wasting billions of dollars on a southern border wall Trump seeks. If built, itll be breached, tunneled under, or gone around by water or air to reach the USA. Are You Tired Of The Lies And Non-Stop Propaganda? Get Your FREE Daily Newsletter The only conceivable way to keep out unwanted immigrants is by walling-in the entire country and putting an impenetrable roof over it. Even that wouldnt likely work. Trumps scheme is hugely ill-conceived. No sensible person supports it. Jamal Khashoggis murder was discussed. Pompeo continued to pretend Saudi crown prince Mohammad bin Salman (MBS) had nothing to do with what happened. The world community knows otherwise. His responsibility for ordering Khashoggis elimination is indisputable. Pompeo lied claiming the Saudis provide security for America and for Israel. The kingdom partners in their wars of aggression throughout the region unrelated to security concerns. Pompeo lied saying it is absolutely Americas intent to hold everyone accountable who was responsible for Khashoggis murder provided MBS who ordered it is absolved, convenient patsies blamed for the crime. Pompeo lied claiming direct evidence (revealing who ordered Khashoggis murder) isnt yet available. Indisputable evidence exists, he wants suppressed. He tried changing the subject, falsely accusing Iran of running rampant throughout the Middle East a US, Israeli, Saudi speciality. The Islamic Republic is the regions leading peace and stability advocate, one of many reasons why Washington wants its government toppled. Trump, Pompeo, Bolton, Haley, and other regime hardliners never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity to support right over wrong. They consistently blame nations targeted for regime change for US, NATO, Israeli, Saudi, UAE high crimes against them or affecting people in countries they attack. Pompeo blamed Beijing for unacceptable US provocations in the South China Sea. He accused the Xi Jinping government of espionage and (undefined) influence operations here in the United States. Washington notoriously meddles in the internal affairs of virtually all other nations, including scores of elections post-WW II, aiming to install pro-Western puppet regimes. Its waging endless wars of aggression against one nation after another together with NATO, Israel, the Saudis, and other imperial partners. Russia, China, Iran, and other sovereign independent countries support global peace and stability. They seek cooperative relations abroad, opposing belligerence everywhere. Pompeo and other US hardliners (Republicans and Dems) rhetorically express support for world peace, a notion they abhor. Systematically smashing one nation after another threatening no one shows what their agenda is really all about. Americas rage for global dominance risks catastrophic nuclear war. Pompeo is part of the problem supporting endless US wars of aggression, not responsibly opposing them. The same goes for all Trump regime officials and vast majority of congressional members warriors, not peacemakers, hostile to the rights and welfare of ordinary people everywhere. Stephen Lendman: www.stephenlendman.org. Contact at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. My newest book as editor and contributor is titled Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III. www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html- Do you agree or disagree? Post your comment here ==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. December 18, 2018 " Information Clearing House " - John Bolton, the new US National Security Advisor, has relaunched the Pentagons project for the destruction of the State structures in the Caribbean Basin. We remember that in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the Secretary for Defense at that time, Donald Rumsfeld, created the Office of Force Transformation and nominated Admiral Arthur Cebrowski as its Director. Its mission was to train the US army for its new role in the era of financial globalisation. It was designed to change military culture in order to destroy the State structures of the regions which were not connected to the global economy. The first chapter of this plan consisted of dislocating the Greater Middle East . The second stage was intended to perform the same task in the Caribbean Basin . The plan was designed to destroy some twenty coastal and insular States, with the exception of Colombia, Mexico and as far as possible, territories belonging to the United Kingdom, the United States, France and Holland. When he arrived at the White House, President Donald Trump opposed the Cebrowski plan. However, two years later, he has so far only been able to prevent the Pentagon and NATO from handing over States to the terrorist groups they employ (the Caliphate ), but not to stop manipulating terrorism. Concerning the Greater Middle East, he has managed to diminish the tension, but the wars still continue there at lower intensity. Concerning the Caribbean Basin, he restrained the Pentagon, forbidding them to launch direct military operations. Last May, Stella Calloni revealed a note from Admiral Kurt Tidd, Commander in Chief of SouthCom, exposing the operations aimed at Venezuela [1]. A second penetration was simultaneously implemented in Nicaragua, and a third, running for the last half century, against Cuba. Are You Tired Of The Lies And Non-Stop Propaganda? Get Your FREE Daily Newsletter Working from several previous analyses, we concluded that the destabilisation of Venezuela - beginning with the guarimbas movement, continued by the attempted coup detat of February 2015 (Operation Jericho) [2], then by attacks on the national currency and the organisation of emigration - would end with military operations [3] led from Brazil, Colombia and Guyana. Multinational manoeuvres of troop transport were organised by the United States and their allies in August 2017 [4]. This was made possible by the election of pro-Israeli President Jair Bolsonaro, who will come to power in Brasilia on 1 January 2019. The next Vice-President of Brazil will be General Hamilton Mourao, whose father played an important role in the pro-US military coup detat of 1964. He has made himself famous by his declarations against Presidents Lula and Rousseff. In 2017, he declared on behalf of the Grand Orient of Brazil that the time for a new military coup detat had arrived. Finally, he was re-elected with President Bolsonaro. In an interview with the magazine Piaui, he announced an impending overthrow of the Venezuelan President, Nicolas Maduro, and the deployment of a Brazilian peace force (sic). Faced with the gravity of these statements, which constitute a violation of the United Nations Charter, elected President Bolsonaro declared that no-one had any intention of going to war with anyone, and that his Vice-President talked too much. In any case, during a Press conference on 12 December 2018, President Maduro revealed that US National Security Advisor John Bolton was handling the coordination between the teams of Colombian President Ivan Duque and those of the Brazilian Vice-President. A group of 734 mercenaries is currently being trained in Tona (Colombia) in order to perpetrate a false flag attack, allegedly by Venezuela, against Colombia thereby justifying a Colombian war against Venezuela. The war would be under the command of Colonel Oswaldo Valentin Garcia Palomo, who is today in hiding after the attempted assassination by drone of President Maduro during the anniversary of the National Guard on 4 August 2018. These mercenaries are supported by Special Forces stationed on US military bases in Tolemaida (Colombia) and Eglin (Florida). The US plan is to take over, from the beginning of the conflict, the three Venezuelan Libertador military bases of Palo Negro, Puerto Cabello and Barcelona. Wanted notice for Colonel Oswaldo Valentin Garcia Palomo of the Venezuelan National Guard, after he had commanded an attempted assassination of the President of the Bolivarian Republic. December 18, 2018 " Information Clearing House " - Last week something historic happened in the US Senate. For the first time in 45 years, a chamber of the US Congress voted to pull US forces from a military conflict under the 1973 War Powers Act. While there is plenty to criticize in the War Powers Act, in this situation it was an important tool used by a broad Senate coalition to require President Trump to end US participation in the Saudi war against Yemen. And while the resolution was not perfect there were huge loopholes it has finally drawn wider attention to the US Administrations dirty war in Yemen. The four year Saudi war on neighboring Yemen has left some 50,000 dead, including many women and children. Weve all seen the horrible photos of school buses blown up by the Saudis using US-supplied bombs loaded into US-supplied aircraft. Millions more face starvation as the infrastructure is decimated and the ports have been blocked to keep out humanitarian aid. Stopping US participation in this brutal war is by itself a wise and correct move, even if it comes years too late. Are You Tired Of The Lies And Non-Stop Propaganda? Get Your FREE Daily Newsletter The Senate vote is also about much more than just Yemen. It is about the decades of Presidential assaults on the Constitution in matters of war. President Trump is only the latest to ignore Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution, which grants war power exclusively to Congress. Yes, it was President Obama who initially dragged the US illegally into the Yemen war, but President Trump has only escalated it. And to this point Congress has been totally asleep. Fortunately that all changed last week with the Senate vote. Unfortunately, Members of the House will not be allowed to vote on their own version of the Senate resolution. Republican Leadership snuck language into a rule vote on the Farm Bill prohibiting any debate on the Yemen war for the rest of this Congressional session. As Rep. Thomas Massie correctly pointed out, the move was both unconstitutional and illegal. However as is often the case in bipartisan Washington, there is plenty of blame to go around. The Republicans were able to carry the vote on the rule and thus deny any debate on Yemen only because of a group of Democrats crossed over and voted with Republicans. Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer is being blamed by progressives for his apparent lack of interest in holding his party together. Why would Democrats help a Republican president keep his war going? Because, especially when you look at Congressional leadership, both parties are pro-war and pro-Executive branch over-reach. They prefer it to be their president who is doing the over-reaching, but they understand that sooner or later theyll be back in charge. As I have often said, there is too much bipartisanship in Washington, not too much partisanship. Americans should be ashamed and outraged that their government is so beholden to a foreign power in this case Saudi Arabia that it would actively participate in a brutal war of aggression. Participating in this war against one of the worlds poorest countries is far from upholding American values. We should applaud and support the coalition in the Senate that voted to end the war. They should know how much we appreciate their efforts. This article was originally published by "Ron Paul Institute" - Do you agree or disagree? Post your comment here ==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. He made the statement in Hanoi on December 18 while receiving Chairman of the Presidium of the Communist Party of Japan (CPJ) Central Committee Kazuo Shii, who is paying an official visit to Vietnam. At the meeting, the leader of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) proposed the two parties to bolster partnership, theoretical exchanges, and experience sharing, as well as effectively cooperate in regional and international forums, thus contributing to regional and global peace, stability, cooperation, and development. He spoke highly of the significant contributions by the CPJ to the two countries relations, voicing his belief that the CPJ will reap further success in the implementation of the 27th Congress resolution towards its 100th founding anniversary in 2022. Congratulating Trong on his election as the President of Vietnam, Shii highly valued the achievements of the Vietnamese people in national construction under the leadership of the CPV. He also hailed the positive growth of the Japan-Vietnam ties, affirming that the CPJ will spare no efforts in strengthening the countries relations. He noted that various exchanges between the two parties, especially theoretical exchanges, hold important meaning in completing the parties theoretical systems. Earlier, a delegation of the CPV, led by Politburo member and permanent member of the Party Central Committees Secretariat Tran Quoc Vuong, held talks with the visiting CPJ delegation, led by Shii. The delegations agreed to maintain theoretical exchanges, as well as increase information exchange and collaboration at multilateral political party forums. December 18, 2018 " Information Clearing House " - George Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel was right Again: The only thing the human race learns from history is that it learns nothing from history. In 1914,the British Empire, largest in human history and one of the longest-lasting, charged into World War I to defend gallant little Belgium whose King Leopold over the previous 30 years had carried out one of the longest, largest genocides of all time, killing 10 million people in the Congo. Germany, wealthiest, most prosperous nation in Europe, blundered into the same needless war when feckless Kaiser Wilhelm II causally gave sweeping approval to Austria-Hungary to annihilate the tiny nation of Serbia. Millions of brave and idealistic Russians eagerly volunteered to fight in the war to protect gallant little Serbia. Most of them died too. There is no record that any of the Serbian leaders after the war visited any of their mass graves. Now it is the United States turn. Since the end of the Cold War US policymakers, presidents and their congresses have carried out virtually every stupidity and folly imaginable for any major power. The only one they have so far avoided has been the danger of stumbling into a full scale world war. Are You Tired Of The Lies And Non-Stop Propaganda? Get Your FREE Daily Newsletter However, now, with the escalating and increasingly hysterical US support for the shady and risk-taking junta in Kiev, President Donald Trump risks committing that most dire and unforgivable of all horrors. Trump today is no more than putty in the hands of his national security adviser John Bolton, one of the masterminds of the catastrophe that was the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Bolton is just like his hero Winston Churchill a century ago during World War I. He always gets his way, always gets the wars and battles he wants and bungles them embarrassingly every time. And like the young Churchill, Bolton never learns, never mellows and he never changes. It is always everybody elses fault. Churchill finally did grow and learn. His famous activities of the 1930s were not meant to start a new world war with Germany under the far worse leadership of Adolf Hitler: He wanted to avert such a war. The invaluable diaries of Ivan Maisky, the Soviet Unions ambassador to Britain through the 1930s make clear that even then Churchill was eager alone in the British ruling classes - to establish a serious close defensive alliance with Josef Stalin and the Soviet Union. He recognized that would be the only way to box in Hitler and prevent a global catastrophe. But Bolton has not learned from his hero - Quite the reverse. He is now impelling Trump on a reckless course of empowering the dangerous adventurers who with US support have seized Ukraine and have spent the past nearly five years wrecking it. Even worse, the same kind of absurd sentimentalizing of an obscure, tiny or unstable ally that doomed Britain, Russia and Germany to unimaginable suffering and loss in 1914 now permeates US decision-makers, strategists and their pontificating pundits about Ukraine. On March 1, 2016, US General Philip Breedlove, then NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) memorably referred to our Ukrainian brothers and sisters in a Pentagon press briefing There is no way in any sane assessment that the ramshackle Ukrainian forces - and certainly not the neo-Nazi militias recruited in the west of the country to terrorize the east - can be regarded as brothers of the US armed forces. The US and Soviet troops who met on the River Elbe on April 25, 1945 after advancing a combined more than 2,000 miles to liberate Europe from the darkest tyranny in its history could truly be called brothers. However, the US military today and the Ukrainian forces they are being drawn in to protect certainly are not brothers and sisters. No poll has been taken since then across the United States, as far as I am aware as to whether the American people would be willing to risk full-scale nuclear war to defend a government in Ukraine that is demonstrably unpopular among its own people. Trump was elected president in November 2016 precisely because he was the only candidate in that shock election who unambiguously called for the United States to end its 70-year fixation with getting pulled into one endless war and confrontation after another around the world. It would be the darkest of ironies if instead he took America into its last and most catastrophic conflict a nuclear confrontation from which there could be no recovery, no escape and no survival. Britain, Russia and Germany in 1914 were all destroyed by the deliberate plotting and manipulations of vastly smaller or weaker allies run by psychopathic gamblers. The rulers of Kiev today, in their entirely reckless disregard for the dangers of global thermonuclear war clearly fit into that category. Policymakers in Moscow recognize this dire reality. Their counterparts in Washington remain amazingly totally blind to it. Their only idea of strategy is the suicidal stampede of the Gadarene Swine in the Gospels off the end of a cliff. And they are taking the entire human race with them. This article was originally published by " Strategic Culture Foundation " - Do you agree or disagree? Post your comment here ==See Also== US confirms pullout from INF treaty, Moscow will respond if missiles placed in Europe deputy FM : Russia isnt threatening anybody, but have the necessary strength and means to counter any aggressor. INF treaty cannot be suspended, it can only be violated, says senior Russian diplomat Putin says Russia to boost security if U.S. quits INF Treaty Putin: Russias advanced weapons will make those accustomed to militarist rhetoric think: Serial production of Avangard hypersonic missile systems has been launched 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. December 18, 2018 " Information Clearing House " - U.S. media is again making a big fuzz about the alleged 'Russian' attempts to 'influence' the presidential elections in 2016. In March the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee commissioned two reports about the alleged 'Russian influence' via social media. Those reports (1, 2) were released yesterday but not endorsed by the committee. Both reports rely on data that Facebook, Google and Twitter gave to the intelligence committee. The data contained tweets, Facebook posts, videos and how many likes, shares or retweets they received. These are from accounts which for some reason are believed to be related to the Internet Research Agency (IRA) in St. Petersburg. Most of these activities occurred after the 2016 election. Both reports look at the usage data and the content themes the IRA run pages provided. Both claim that the intent of the IRA was to influence the election and to sow discord within the U.S. population. But there is no, none, nada, zero evidence in the data that the IRA had such an intent. Nor is their any testimony or statement on it. In contrast the Muller investigation, which looked into the case, found evidence that the IRA had a commercial intent. Unfortunately this is mentioned neither in the two reports, nor in the current news about them. The only really known motive the IRA had when it created those accounts and filled them with content is simply ignored. Are You Tired Of The Lies And Non-Stop Propaganda? Get Your FREE Daily Newsletter We showed in The "Russian Ads" On Facebook Are Just Another Click-Bait Scheme that the IRA people simply created pages on Facebook and elsewhere to attract as many 'eyeballs' as possible. This so called 'click bait' was used to lead people to webpages on which the IRA sold advertisement space. This was confirmed when the Muller investigation indicted the IRA as described in Mueller Indictment - The "Russian Influence" Is A Commercial Marketing Scheme. Point 95 of the indictment says in relation to wire fraud accusations: Defendants and their co-conspirators also used the accounts to receive money from real U.S. persons in exchange for posting promotions and advertisements on the ORGANIZATION-controlled social media pages. Defendants and their co-conspirators typically charged certain U.S. merchants and U.S. social media sites between 25 and 50 U.S. dollars per post for promotional content on their popular false U.S. persona accounts, including Being Patriotic, Defend the 2nd, and Blacktivist. The IRA wanted to make money. It therefore naturally concentrated on content themes that took the least effort to create while attracting a maximum numbers of 'eyeballs' which could then be sold to advertisers. That is why some of its pages were about cute puppies. Cute puppies always sell. Using the news value of the election the IRA created pages that were pro-Trump and pages that were anti-Trump. Themes that did not attract enough eye-balls were discarded, those which did well were further promoted. This maximized the numbers of potential eyeballs and thus its advertisement income. The reports say that a relatively high share of the IRA pages were about issues that interested African Americans. The New York Times thus headlines: Russian 2016 Influence Operation Targeted African-Americans on Social Media: [One] report gives particular attention to the Russians focus on African-Americans, which is evident to anyone who examines collections of their memes and messages. The most prolific I.R.A. efforts on Facebook and Instagram specifically targeted black American communities and appear to have been focused on developing black audiences and recruiting black Americans as assets, the report says. ... The Internet Research Agency also created a dozen websites disguised as African-American in origin, with names like blackmattersus.com, blacktivist.info, blacktolive.org and blacksoul.us. On YouTube, the largest share of Russian material covered the Black Lives Matter movement and police brutality, with channels called Dont Shoot and BlackToLive. ... The report does not seek to explain the heavy focus on African-Americans. But the Internet Research Agencys tactics echo Soviet propaganda efforts from decades ago that often highlighted racism and racial conflict in the United States, as well as recent Russian influence operations in other countries that sought to stir ethnic strife. "The commies are coming to steal our slaves!" The New York Times could just have reprinted this page 3 story from 1930: There is of course no evidence that the IRA had any special intention in catering to a black audience except for making money. The Muller indictment even highlights the IRA created site 'Blacktivist' as one of its advertisement assets. Attracting people from marginal groups, who are not well served by mainstream media, is obviously easier than to market to a mainstream audience which already gets flooded with news relevant to it. Moreover, creating Youtube channel with publicly available videos of police attacks on black citizens takes little effort while potentially attracting a significant audience. Both reports published yesterday fail to investigate the content and available date with regard to its commercial value. Both fail to look into it under the aspect of the only documented motive the Internet Research Agency had. These reports are thus just extensions of the sorry excuse the Hillary Clinton campaign made up after she lost the election: "Blame the Russians!" Trump Steals Prize For Defeating ISIS U.S. To Pull Troops From Syria Immediately By Moon Of Alabama Updated below December 19, 2018 " Information Clearing House " - The Wall Street Journal just reported that U.S. troops prepare to leave northeast Syria: WASHINGTONIn an abrupt reversal, the U.S. military is preparing to withdraw its forces from northeastern Syria, people familiar with the matter said Wednesday, a move that throws the American strategy in the Middle East into turmoil. U.S. officials began informing partners in northeastern Syria of their plans to begin immediately pulling American forces out of the region where they have been trying to wrap up the campaign against Islamic State, the people said. The move follows a call last week between President Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has threatened to launch an assault on Americas Kurdish partners in Syria. Turkey had threatened over several week to invade and occupy an at least 10 miles deep strip of northeast Syria. The Turkish army brought heavy weapons to its adjacent borders areas. Some 15,000 foreign and Syrian 'rebels', paid by Turkey, are supposed to be on the forefront of the invasion. These were over the last month transferred from Idleb and other Turkish controlled areas of northwest Syria to the Turkish side of the eastern border. bigger The U.S. military and the neoconservatives elements in Trump's administration wanted to hold onto the northeast of Syria for an unlimited time. They planned to establish a Kurdish entity and finance it with the Syrian oil fields they occupied. They had plans to arm and train some 40,000 Kurdish troops. Are You Tired Of The Lies And Non-Stop Propaganda? Get Your FREE Daily Newsletter For over a year the U.S. claimed to fight the Islamic State remands which still holds some grounds on the northern side of the Euphrates near the Iraqi border. But the front lines moved little. Only during the last week did the U.S. supported troops finally take the town of Hajin. For Turkey the perspective of 40,000 armed and U.S. protected YPK Kurds on its border, while the YPG's sister organization PKK is fighting a separatist guerilla war against the Turkish army north of it, was a real and existential threat. It seems that Erdogan made a deal with Trump, which is now turned into practical moves. Yesterday Turkey was suddenly offered to buy advanced Patriot missile defense systems. It had earlier decided to buy the Russian S-400 system. Now we learn the U.S. troops move out. What other surprises are in this deal? What does Trump get out of it? How does this change Turkey's relation with Russia? And what about the U.S. occupied border station al-Tanf between Iraq and Syria. Will those troops leave too? bigger With the U.S. moving out there will be a race to take those parts of Syria that the U.S. leaves. Turkey is likely to stick to its invasion plan. The Syrian government must now race to take back the Raqqa dam, the rich agricultural land north of the Euphrates and, most important, the oil and gas field near the Iraqi border which are needed to finance the country. It must also move parts of its army to the northeast Euphrates area to isolate and finally defeat the rest of ISIS that the U.S. seemingly leaves behind. Update 14:45 utc The New York Times(and Trump) confirm the move: President Trump is considering pulling 2,000 United States ground troops out of Syria in a move that would seek to describe the four-year American-led war against the Islamic State as largely won, officials said Wednesday. We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency, the president said in a Twitter post on Wednesday morning. He offered no details on his plans for the military mission in Syria. A formal withdrawal announcement could come as early as Wednesday, administration officials said. But Pentagon officials were still trying to talk the president out of it, arguing that such a move would betray Kurdish allies who have fought alongside American troops in Syria and who could find themselves under attack in a military offensive now threatened by Turkey. Mattis and the neocons want Trump to stay in Syria but it seems that for once Trump is not falling for their stupid plans. . That the U.S. betrays the Kurds is almost a tradition. The Kurds had been warned about this over and over again. But they did not listen. Like in Afrin canton, which Turkey occupied after the Kurds rejected to come back under Syrian government control, they will now likely have to pay a huge price. This article was originally published by " Moon Of Alabama " - Trump Orders Full Withdrawal From Syria After "Victory Over ISIS" By Tyler Durden Update 2: A troop withdrawal appears already underway after a Pentagon official said it would happen "quickly". White House spokesperson Sarah Sanders has issued a formal statement on troop withdrawal from Syria: "We have started returning United States troops home as we transition to the next phase of this campaign." Moments after President Trump confirmed reports of US pullout via Twitter saying "We have defeated ISIS in Syria," Pentagon officials said the president "ordered full US troop withdrawal from Syria," and that this will be "rapid" apparently already beginning, per a Reuters breaking report: "All U.S. State Department personnel are being evacuated from Syria within 24 hours - official." The full White House statement issued Wednesday late morning: Sarah Sanders: We have started returning United States troops home as we transition to the next phase of this campaign... pic.twitter.com/1V00r4WUyP Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) December 19, 2018 Meanwhile Israel's ambassador to the U.N. has vowed to continue combating Iran in Syria if US forces leave. Russia has alternately said "Syria will stabilize" should the thousands of American troops stationed there exit. *** update: It's official, within an hour after the first headline the president tweeted "We have defeated ISIS in Syria" and in reference to reports of a planned US troop withdrawal from Syria which unnamed officials say is to be initiated "immediately," he added that the terror group's defeat was "my only reason for being there". We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency. Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 19, 2018 Minutes after the WSJ first broke the story, The Washington Post confirmed the following through a defense official: The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a decision that has not yet been announced, said the decision would include the entire force of more than 2,000 U.S. service members. It was made on Tuesday, the official said. President Trump has long promised to conclude the campaign against the Islamic State and has questioned the value of costly and dangerous military missions overseas. *** The WSJ just reported a monumental and historic reversal in White House policy on Syria, revealing Wednesday morning the Pentagon is preparing to withdraw all forces from northeastern Syria "immediately": In an abrupt reversal, the U.S. military is preparing to withdraw its forces from northeastern Syria, people familiar with the matter said Wednesday, a move that throws the American strategy in the Middle East into turmoil. U.S. officials began informing partners in northeastern Syria of their plans to begin immediately pulling American forces out of the region where they have been trying to wrap up the campaign against Islamic State, the people said. The WSJ notes the complete 180 reversal in policy, which just days ago was reiterated by officials as an "indefinite" American presence in Syria in order to "counter Iran" while bolstering Kurdish and Arab SDF forces in the East (the YPG-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces), comes following a phone call last week between President Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. For the past week Erdogan has threatened to launch a full-scale cross border assault on US-backed Kurdish forces in Syria, which Turkey has long considered an terrorist extension of the outlawed PKK. This would potentially bring American troops and advisers under fire, who've found themselves in the awkward position since entering Syria of training Syrian Kurdish militias on the one hand, and coordinating broadly with a NATO ally on the other. Perhaps Trump finally took full stock of the fact that the prior planned "indefinite" presence of some 4000 American troops was recipe for a quagmire sure to be Washington's next Afghan or Iraq style "endless war"? As one recent intelligence study put it: "The prospect of US being militarily involved in Syria, caught in middle of one of most complex conflicts in recent memory, with shifting objectives & ambiguous endgame, has been met with congressional indifference and public apathy." Will America finally exit Syria? Is Trump belatedly making good on his campaign promises? This article was originally published by " ZeroHedge " - Do you agree or disagree? Post your comment here ==See Also== Kurdish forces confirm US and French forces began withdrawal from east Syria Isis not defeated in Syria despite Trump claim, says UK US approves Patriot missile sale worth $3.5bn to Turkey 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. The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House. Washington Finally Acknowledges Defeat In Syria By Nauman Sadiq December 19, 2018 " Information Clearing House " - In a succinct tweet on Wednesday, Donald Trump has announced a momentous policy decision that the Trump administration will soon be pulling out the US troops from Syria and Iraq. Although the current redeployment of American troops will only be limited to northern Syria to appease the US-ally Turkey where it has been a longstanding demand of President Erdogan that Turkey will not tolerate the presence of the US-backed Kurdish forces west of Euphrates River, it can be expected in the coming months that Washington will withdraw American forces from eastern Syria and Iraq as well. President Trump said in the tweet, We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency. Thus, Washington has finally acknowledged its humiliating defeat in a country it never formally invaded, but where it waged a devastating proxy war for the last seven years that gave birth to myriads of militant groups, including the Islamic State. It is an irrefutable fact that the United States sponsors militants, but only for a limited period of time in order to achieve certain policy objectives. For instance: the United States nurtured the Afghan jihadists during the Cold War against the former Soviet Union from 1979 to 1988, but after the signing of the Geneva Accords and consequent withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, the United States withdrew its support from the Afghan jihadists. Similarly, the United States lent its support to the militants during the Libyan and Syrian proxy wars, but after achieving the policy objectives of toppling the Arab nationalist Gaddafi regime in Libya and weakening the anti-Israel Assad regime in Syria, the United States relinquished its blanket support to the militants and eventually declared a war against a faction of Sunni militants battling the Syrian government, the Islamic State, when the latter transgressed its mandate in Syria and dared to occupy Mosul and Anbar in Iraq in June 2014 from where the US had withdrawn its troops only a couple of years ago in December 2011. The only difference between the Soviet-Afghan Jihad back in the 1980s that spawned Islamic jihadists such as the Taliban and Al-Qaeda for the first time in history and the Libyan and Syrian proxy wars 2011-onward is that the Afghan jihad was an overt jihad: back then, the Western political establishments and their mouthpiece, the mainstream media, used to openly brag that the CIA provides all those AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades and stingers to Pakistans intelligence agencies, which then distributes those deadly weapons among the Afghan so-called freedom fighters to combat the Soviet troops in Afghanistan. After the 9/11 tragedy, however, the Western political establishments and corporate media have become a lot more circumspect, therefore this time around they have waged covert jihads against the Arab-nationalist Gaddafi regime in Libya and the anti-Zionist Assad regime in Syria, in which Islamic jihadists (aka terrorists) have been sold as moderate rebels with secular and nationalist ambitions to the Western audience. Are You Tired Of The Lies And Non-Stop Propaganda? Get Your FREE Daily Newsletter Since the regime change objective in those hapless countries went against the mainstream narrative of ostensibly fighting a war against terrorism, therefore the Western political establishments and the mainstream media are now trying to muddle the reality by offering color-coded schemes to identify myriads of militant and terrorist outfits operating in Syria: such as the red militants of the Islamic State and Al-Nusra Front, which the Western powers want to eliminate; the yellow Islamic jihadists, like Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham, with whom the Western powers can collaborate under desperate circumstances; and the green militants of the Free Syria Army (FSA) and a few other inconsequential outfits which together comprise the so-called moderate Syrian opposition. Its worth noting, moreover, that the Syrian militant groups are no ordinary bands of ragtag jihadist outfits. They were trained and armed to the teeth by their patrons in the security agencies of Washington, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Jordan in the training camps located along Syrias border regions with Turkey and Jordan. Along with Saddams and Egypts armies, the Syrian Baathist armed forces are one of the most capable fighting forces in the Arab world. But the onslaught of militant groups during the first three years of the proxy war was such that had it not been for the Russian intervention in September 2015, the Syrian defenses would have collapsed. The only feature that distinguishes the Syrian militants from the rest of regional jihadist groups is not their ideology but their weapons arsenals that were bankrolled by the Gulfs petro-dollars and provided by the CIA in collaboration with regional security agencies of Washingtons traditional allies in the Middle East. While we are on the subject of Islamic States weaponry, it is generally claimed by the mainstream media that Islamic State came into possession of the state-of-the-art weapons when it overran Mosul in June 2014 and seized huge caches of weapons that were provided to Iraqs armed forces by Washington. Is this argument not a bit paradoxical, however, that Islamic State conquered large swathes of territory in Syria and Iraq before it overran Mosul when it supposedly did not have those sophisticated weapons, and after allegedly coming into possession of those weapons, it lost ground? The only conclusion that can be drawn from this fact is that Islamic State had those weapons, or equally deadly weapons, before it overran Mosul and that those weapons were provided to all the militant groups operating in Syria, including the Islamic State, by the intelligence agencies of their regional and global patrons. If we were to draw parallels between the Soviet-Afghan jihad during the 1980s and the Syrian proxy war of today, the Western powers used the training camps located in the Af-Pak border regions to train and arm Afghan jihadists against the Soviet troops in Afghanistan. Similarly, the training camps located in the border regions of Turkey and Jordan were used to provide training and weapons to Sunni Arab militants battling the Shia-led Syrian government with the collaboration of Turkish, Jordanian and Saudi intelligence agencies. During the Afghan jihad, it is a known historical fact that the bulk of the so-called freedom fighters was comprised of Pashtun Islamic jihadists, such as the factions of Jalaluddin Haqqani, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Abdul Rab Rasul Sayyaf and scores of other militant outfits, some of which later coalesced together to form the Taliban movement. Similarly, in Syria the majority of the so-called moderate rebels were comprised of Sunni Arab jihadists, such as Jaysh al-Islam, Ahrar al-Sham, al-Nusra Front, the Islamic State and myriads of other militant groups, including a small portion of defected Syrian soldiers who go by the name of Free Syria Army (FSA). Moreover, apart from Pashtun Islamic jihadists, various factions of the Northern Alliance of Tajiks and Uzbeks constituted the relatively moderate segment of the Afghan rebellion, though those moderate warlords, like Ahmad Shah Massoud and Abul Rashid Dostum, were more ethnic and tribal in character than secular or nationalist, as such. Similarly, the Kurds of the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces can be compared to the Northern Alliance of Afghanistan. Recently, the Islamic States purported terror franchises in Afghanistan and Pakistan have claimed a spate of bombings against the Shia and Barelvi Muslims who are regarded as heretics by Takfiris. But to contend that the Islamic State is responsible for suicide blasts in Pakistan and Afghanistan is to declare that the Taliban are responsible for the sectarian war in Syria and Iraq. Both are localized militant outfits and the Islamic State without its Baathist command structure and superior weaponry is just another ragtag regional militant outfit. The distinction between the Taliban and the Islamic State lies in the fact that the Taliban follow Deobandi sect of Sunni Islam which is an Islamic sect native to South Asia and the jihadists of the Islamic State mostly belong to the Wahhabi-Salafi denomination. Secondly, and more importantly, the insurgency in the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan is a Pashtun uprising which is an ethnic group native to Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan, while the bulk of the Islamic States jihadists is comprised of Arab militants of Syria and Iraq. The so-called Khorasan Province of the Islamic State in the Af-Pak region is nothing more than a coalition of several breakaway factions of the Taliban and a few other inconsequential local militant outfits which have pledged allegiance to the Islamic States chief Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi in order to enhance their prestige, but which dont have any organizational and operational association, whatsoever, with the Islamic State proper in Syria and Iraq. Conflating the Islamic State either with Al-Qaeda, the Taliban or with myriads of ragtag local militant groups is a deliberate deception intended to mislead public opinion in order to exaggerate the threat posed by the Islamic State which serves the scaremongering agenda of Western and regional security establishments. Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused on the politics of Af-Pak and Middle East regions, neocolonialism and petro-imperialism. Do you agree or disagree? Post your comment here ==See Also== US approves Patriot missile sale worth $3.5bn to Turkey 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. Presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Atiku Abubakar has said that the assassination of former Chief of Defence Staff, Air Marshal Alex Badeh, is a stark reminder of the countrys failed security system. The former vice president said this, while reacting to the murder of former Chief of defense staff, along the Abuja-Keffi road on Tuesday. Atiku via a tweet on Wednesday prayed for strength for the his family. The killing of former Chief of Defence Staff, Air Marshal Sabundu Alex Badeh is a stark reminder of the state of insecurity in our land. May God grant strength and comfort to his family to bear this irreparable loss. Mixed reactions have trailed the booing of President Muhammadu Buhari by members of the National Assembly. The President on Wednesday, in a joint session of the National Assembly, presented the 2019 budget, amidst being cheered by his party members and being booed by lawmakers from the opposition party. While making his presentation in a house led by an opposition party member, Bukola Saraki, Buhari was interrupted with chants of lies, propaganda . Taking a break of his address, Buhari urged the booing lawmakers to behave properly, that the world was watching. May I appeal to the honourable members that the world is watching us and were supposed to be above this. Many Nigerians have taken to social media to react to the drama. While some scolded those lawmakers who booed the president, others gave them a pat on the shoulder, saying Buhari deserves what he got. See reactions No point pretending or expecting anything meaningful from the National Assembly deliberations on the 2019 budget proposal. Its a pity though! Emmanuel Nwachukwu (@emma_dele) December 19, 2018 https://twitter.com/Ediong/status/1075375111816052743?s=19 If National Assembly lawmakers behave like this, what do we expect from motor park touts? A.S. Aruwa (@MusadiqZ) December 19, 2018 @MBuhari treated Nigerians & members of the National Assembly with disdain by refusing to sign the amended electoral bill into law. Today, members of the National Assembly representing Nigerians also treated him with disdain while presenting the #2019Budget Tit for tat. Lordbishop (@realDewoye) December 19, 2018 Are these lawmakers selling tomatoes and crayfish in the National Assembly? The joint session of the National Assembly (Senate and House of Reps) for the #Budget2019 Presentation is more noisier than the market place. AJ (@AJTweete) December 19, 2018 https://twitter.com/Deji_OoniAbj/status/1075388127299203072?s=19 https://twitter.com/iam_donbash/status/1075385862492471296?s=19 Couldnt watch the #Budget2019 live but with the tweets, the National Assembly members represented its people truly with the boos and hisses which stood for dissatisfaction. KUDOS 8th Assembly; You made Nigerians proud!!! (@Heir_2D_Throne) December 19, 2018 Whatever Buhari got today at the National Assembly serves him right. This is what you get when you have lying Aides who can't even stand up and tell you the truth. I believe after today he'll see the damages he has done to this country.#Budget2019 Confidence Jonah (@realNCNC) December 19, 2018 Hear from an APC lawmaker President Muhammadu Buhari on Tuesday shared photos of a surprised birthday celebration, he got during his one-day official trip to Zinder, the Republic of Niger. Buhari, who had gone to participate in the programme of activities marking the 60th anniversary of the formal Proclamation of the Republic of Niger, was ambushed with another birthday surprise. However, reacting to photos shared via twitter, by the president, former presidential aide, Reno Omokri, queried why the first family were conspicuously absent from all the birthday photos of Mr President. According to Omokri, while speaking via his Twitter handle, it was rare to find a 76-year-old man, that celebrates his birthday without his children, grandchildren and wife. Dear President Muhammadu Buhari, You shared birthday photos yesterday and today and your wife and children are conspicuously absent. Did they travel to Sudan? Which 76 year old man celebrates his birthday without his wife, children and grandchildren? Former Chief of Defense staff, Air chief Marshall Alex Badeh, was on Tuesday, assassinated by unknown gunmen along the Abuja Keffi road, on his way from his farm. The assassination of the four star general has sparked a serious debate on social media, as many are calling for severe investigation into the tragic incident. Although, there were quite a number of social media users, who argued that Badeh, is a victim of karma, having allegedly embezzled funds met to fight insecurity which he was being prosecuted for, for the unfortunate scenario that led to his death. Senate President Bukola Saraki, Speaker Yakubu Dogara, Senator Shehu Sani, Reno Omokri, Fani- Kayode and other Nigerians have since tweeted about it. See reactions Nigeria has suffered another great loss with the passing of former Chief of Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Alex Badeh. My heartfelt prayers go to his family and our Armed Forces at this tragic time. May the Almighty grant him eternal rest. Amin. pic.twitter.com/Anc0rykZKw Dr. Abubakar Bukola Saraki (@bukolasaraki) December 18, 2018 News of the gruesome murder of the former Chief of Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Alex Badeh, is both saddening and alarming. My thoughts and prayers are with his family and loved ones, and I hope that those responsible are swiftly apprehended and brought to justice. Rt Hon Yakubu Dogara (@YakubDogara) December 18, 2018 Alex Badeh;Its sad and tragic.If it can happen to Alex,it can happen to anyone.May his soul Rest In https://t.co/cPqEPXiRjW condolences to his family. Senator Shehu Sani (@ShehuSani) December 19, 2018 Just look at what they did to Alex Badeh! This assassination is too convenient and must be investigated by a Panel of Inquiry. He was s firmer Chief of Defence Staff entitled to armed guards. Where were those guards? #RenisDarts pic.twitter.com/CGEaG4fDRc Reno Omokri (@renoomokri) December 18, 2018 The brutal murder of the former Chief of Defence Staff and former Chief of Air Staff, Air Vice Marshall Alex Badeh, is a despicable and cowardly act. Those that were behind it shall not escape justice and they will pay a terrible price for their wickedness. God will avenge! Femi Fani-Kayode (@realFFK) December 18, 2018 Alex Badeh fueled insecurity, he was collecting N580M every month from military coffers after paying salaries, insecurity has taken his soul. Im not sure whatll happen to his soul and not even sure if I care Souljah (@jeffphilips1) December 18, 2018 Alex badeh allegedly deprived the Nigerian Military of weapons and kept the money for himselfhe is now dead from the insecurity he helped in establishing! Corruption affects everyone.. including those engaging in it as he allegedly did. Deezer234 #SapereAude (@deezer234) December 18, 2018 Nigeria is on a low. A 4-star General killed like a chicken, just like that. That means the rest of us are just on a queue. May Alex Badeh's soul rest in peace. (@Google_12point7) December 18, 2018 Alex Badeh Too many lessons & questions. A former Chief of Defense staff-entitled to armed security both at home,work,& in transit. Where were they? He was gunned down in cold blood. A victim of the insecurity he helped deepen with mismanagement of military resources. Karma. Ayo Bankole (@AyoBankole) December 19, 2018 https://twitter.com/Rouvafe/status/1075293699108691968?s=19 Alex Badeh, formerly, a chief of defense staff and retired air chief Marshal, has been shot dead. The shocking incident, which was made known via some tweets by the official Twitter handle of the Air force, occurred along the Abuja-Keffi road. It is with a heavy heart that I regretfully announce the unfortunate demise of former Chief of Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Alex Badeh, who died today, 18 Dec 18, from gunshot wounds sustained when his vehicle was attacked while returning from his farm along Abuja-Keffi Road. On behalf officers, airmen and airwomen of the Nigerian Air Force, the Chief of the Air Staff, Air Marshal Abubakar, commiserates with the family of the late former Chief of Defence Staff over this irreparable loss. We pray that the Almighty God grants his soul eternal rest. It will be recalled that the former chief of staff, was facing a N3.9 billion fraud allegations. More to follow. Former Aviation Minister, Mr Femi Fani-Kayode has also reacted to the death of former Chief of Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Alex Badeh, who was murdered by unknown gunmen, on Tuesday. The sad incidence took place along the Keffi-Abuja road, when the former Chief of Defense staff, was returning from his farm. A lot of speculations have arisen from the death, of Badeh, whom some have claimed was a strong critic of the President Muhammadu Buharis government. In his reaction, Fani-Kayode said the country has grown from ethnic and religious cleansing, to political. The former minister made this known via his Twitter handle on Wednesday, and asked if Nigerians still believed Buhari will conduct a free and fair election and hand over power quietly next year? With the murder of Badeh on Buharis birthday,it is clear that ours is a nation of not just ethnic and religious cleansing but also a nation of political cleansing. Does anyone still believe that Buhari will conduct a free and fair election and hand over power quietly next year?. He said the USDP will support the investment and business activities of Vietnamese firms in Myanmar for mutual benefit. He informed the host about the outcomes of the talks between the USDP and the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV). He said he is deeply impressed with the socio-economic achievements that Vietnam has gained during its Doi Moi (reform) process. For his part, the Vietnamese Deputy PM spoke highly of Myanmars socio-economic accomplishments over the years and affirmed to support the countrys efforts in peace building. He noted that the comprehensive cooperative partnership between Vietnam and Myanmar has been expanded and deepened, especially after the visit to Myanmar by Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong in August 2017 and the visit to Vietnam by State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi in April 2018. Bilateral trade between the two nations has recorded an annual growth of 15-18% and is expected to hit US$2 billion in the near future, he said, adding that Vietnam is the seventh biggest foreign investor in Myanmar, with the total investment of US$2 billion. The two countries are coordinating closely in the fields of politics, defence, and security as well as at bilateral and multilateral forums, according to the Deputy PM. Vanguard LAGOSNATIONAL Leader of the All Progressives Congress, APC, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, has lampooned the governorship candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Mr. Jimi Agbaje who is advocating freedom for Lagos State. The Nation Reports reaching us indicate that there is a raging fire at Ebule Egba caused by activities of pipeline vandals.Residential and commercial houses allegedly affected. People scampering to safety.It is alleged that vandals had caused an explosion from the pipelines, which extended to Abule Egba Bus Stop . This Day Tell IRI, NDI to treat Buhari with caution INEC expresses concern over security personnels perceived bias Adedayo Akinwale in Abuja and Segun Awofadeji in Gombe The presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the 2019 general election, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, and the National Chairman of the party, Prince Uche Secondus, have enjoined the Daily Sun They are fighting back. But the average Nigerian is not going to align with those forces. No, we cannot return to Egypt. Romanus Ugwu, Abuja The National Chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Adams Oshiomhole, has said that the ruling party has no reason to entertain fears over the 2019 general elections. Daily Times The Independent National Electoral Commission ( INEC) says it plans to engage the Nigeria Police Force on the parameter to be used for the deployment. Daily Trust The Forum of State Chairmen of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) has expressed support for the decision of the partys national leadership to appeal the Abuja Federal High Court ruling that sacked Donald Duke as presidential candidate. The chairman of the forum and Delta State SDP chairman, Hon. Oke Idawene, who addressed journalists, yesterday, Leadership Residents of Maiduguri, Borno state capital, are irked by the recent uninterrupted electricity supply which has caused astronomical increase in charges. Yola Electricity Distribution Company (YEDC) came under attack by residents who see the 24 hours electricity supply as waste and digging holes in their pockets. Tribune The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Hon. Yakubu Dogara has declared that the 2019 elections would be a referendum on the state of security and hunger in Nigeria. Dogara who was speaking in Gombe, the Gombe State capital at the North East zonal campaign and rally of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) challenged Nigerians Reno Omokri has reacted to the tragic death of former Chief of Air staff, Alex Badeh, who was shot dead, along Abuja-Keffi road on Tuesday, 18th December. According to Omokri, a former aide to ex president, Goodluck Jonathan, the assassinated ex defense staff, chief, was a strong critic of the President Muhammadu Buhari government, and knew a lot about the inner workings of this government, And as such theres more to his death that meets the eye. Omokri, speaking via his twitter handle on Tuesday evening, called for a thorough investigation of the death, which according to him, is too convenient. Ex-chief of Defense Staff, Alex Badeh, strong critic of the @MBuhari government, was just assassinated along Abuja-Keffi Rd. This is a man who knew a lot about the inner workings of this government. His death must be investigated. It is too convenient. You may be next #RenosDarts Ever thought that only N1000 can help you start the journey to long-term wealth and rewrite your story? Do you wish your money could work for you while you hustle, allowing you to spend yet still plan for a future with no financial struggles? If youre preoccupied with these thoughts, youre about to experience a great financial breakthrough. The economic reality might leave many people feeling that it is impossible to have a sustainable income, much less being able to invest. To the average Nigerian, investment is for the big boys and girls of society, who have a lot of money lying around. Thats where you are wrong. Mutual funds such as the Legacy Money Market Fund (LMMF) not only make investing easy, you dont need to have so much money to get starter. With as little as N1000, you can start investing for a great future! 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For example, a Money Market Fund will invest in only Money Market Instruments such as Fixed deposits and Treasury bills, while a Fixed Income Fund will invest primarily in Fixed Income Instruments. In addition, an Equity Fund will invest mainly in stocks. In Nigeria, all mutual funds are regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Dont forget, start your investment journey with the Legacy Money Market Fund today. Its easy and affordable. Click here to begin. This content is from: European Union Heads of tax at multinational companies have welcomed the Dutch governments announcement that it will publish anonymised summaries of all its tax rulings from July 2019. Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. As you may have heard by now, Apple and Qualcomm are in a bit of a legal tussle these days, which has led to some pretty drastic turn of events. None as big as a Chinese court actually siding with Qualcomm and banning imports of certain iPhone models, including the iPhone X and iPhone 8. (For its part, Qualcomm is also trying to get the iPhone XS and XR banned, too.) In an effort to stop that ban on the older models, Apple said it was planning on launching a software update that would address the Qualcomm-owned patents that the court used to enforce the iPhone import ban. Earlier this week, Apple officially launched iOS 12.1.2 into the wild, and only for iPhone models. In the United States and other markets, the changelog for the new software was pretty short, with the company confirming that the new software addressed cellular connectivity issues for iPhone owners in Turkey, while also fixing eSIM activation issues. But in China, the changelog is a bit longer and for good reason. It looks like iOS 12.1.2 is indeed meant to address the Qualcomm patents in China, and, in doing so, Apple created a brand new animation for users that force close an app on their iPhone running iOS 12.1.2. MacRumors was able to get a video of the new animation, which you can see just below, with Apples changelog just below that. iOS 12.1.2 includes iPhone bug fixes. This update: Fixes bugs with eSIM activation for iPhone XR, iPhone XS, and iPhone XS Max Addresses an issue that could affect cellular connectivity in Turkey for iPhone XR, iPhone XS, and iPhone XS Max Introduces a new animation when force closing apps Updates share sheet for setting contact and wallpaper images As you can see in the quick video above, the new animation no longer has apps sliding up and off screen. Now, with iOS 12.1.2 installed, iPhone owners that force close an app will see the app basically condense in on itself before fading out of view completely. Its certainly an interesting approach. Apple doesnt necessarily have to change that animation in the United States, but will they? Or will the company keep different animations for certain regions? Whatever the case, Apple has apparently fixed the issue in China, all in an effort to remove that import ban on older iPhone models. [via MacRumors Apple has had a bit of a rough go of it when it comes to its Maps app, with a legendarily terrible launch many years ago. But while Apple is working to turn things around, it is other companies that really reaped in the rewards right out of the gate following Apples initial stumble. In a recent interview with Business Insider, Waze CEO Noam Bardin weighs in on the effect Apples initial issues had on the Waze app in general, and why, even when compared to the acquisition by Google, its still marked as the most successful moment for Waze as a whole, and why the company owes its success to Apple. If youll recall, Apples efforts with ditching Google Maps as the default maps app didnt go over well. And not just because people werent ready to switch (but that probably had something to do with it). Apple Maps, at launch, just wasnt good enough to warrant a switch, and even when the app could do something, it didnt do it very well. There were plenty of shortcomings with Apple Maps on day one, which prompted the companys CEO, Tim Cook, to write and publish a public apology letter. In that letter, despite the fact Apple was trying to launch its own product, Cook actually suggested folks try to use other, competing apps. One of those apps at the time was Waze. And that moment actually cemented itself as an annual celebration for Waze, called, appropriately (but a bit sarcastically), Tim Cook Day. Here, well let Bardin explain it: We were acquired in 2013, but 2012 was sort of a defining moment for the company. Its a day thats still celebrated today at the company every year: Its called Tim Cook day, and its the day Apple came out with Apple Maps. The day before I was interviewed by a not-to-be-named publication, and it doesnt really matter what I said, but the headline said Apple partner says Maps will be terrible. So you can imagine the response when that happened from Apple they were definitely not very happy but its what I said. The next day, Apple Maps came out, and suddenly I went from being about to get fired, app get pulled from the App Store, to I saw the future and I knew what I was talking about. Tim Cook came out and actually put out a letter apologizing for Apple Maps, and he said until that comes out you can use Microsoft, Google, and Waze. That was our coming-out moment in the US, and from there things start to pick up pace, eventually ending in the acquisition in 2013. Whats funny here is that Bardin actually says that Waze was looking at developing primarily for BlackBerry at the time. But, of course, that idea changed course and the iOS app was brought to the world. The Waze CEO says that if they had gone the other way, down that BlackBerry road, the company might not be here at all (which is a little sad, but mostly for BlackBerry). Bardin talks about a lot of different things in the interview and its certainly worth checking out through the source link below. But, heres one last bit from the CEO, directed to those entrepreneurs out there who might be thinking about selling their company: If youre going to sell your company, sell it to Google. I mean that. [via Business Insider (AUS) Minh made the statement at separate meetings with Lao leaders, including General Secretary of the Lao Peoples Revolutionary Party (LPRP) and President Bounnhang Vorachith, Prime Minister Thongloun Sisoulith, and Chairwoman of the National Assembly Pany Yathotou on December 19, as part of his official visit to the country from December 18-19 to co-chair the fifth foreign ministerial-level consultation with Lao FM Saleumxay Kommasith. The Lao leaders spoke highly of the annual consultation mechanism, saying that it has helped the two foreign ministers discuss strategic issues to give effective and timely recommendations in bolstering bilateral cooperation to Party and State leaders of both nations. LPRP General Secretary and President Bounnhang Vorachith affirmed that the Lao Party and State always attach importance to nurturing the traditional friendship, special solidarity and comprehensive cooperation between Laos and Vietnam. PM Thongloun Sisoulith expressed his pleasure at the positive development of bilateral relations, especially the close coordination between the two governments and the connecting role of the two foreign ministries. Meanwhile, NA Chairwoman Pany Yathotou promised to support necessary changes and supplements in mechanisms, policies and laws in order to further boost trade and investment ties between Laos and Vietnam. Earlier, Minh hold talks with his Lao counterpart Saleumxay Kommasith, during which they discussed measures to foster bilateral relations and exchanged views on several regional and international issues of mutual concern. Both diplomats said they were delighted at the extensive and effective development of the traditional friendship, special solidarity and comprehensive cooperation in all spheres such as politics, foreign affairs, security, defence, economy, trade, investment, and education. They agreed to increase the exchange of high-level visits and meetings, effectively carry out the existing cooperation mechanisms, and work with competent ministries and branches to make meticulous preparations for the 41st meeting of the Vietnam-Laos Intergovernmental Committee scheduled to take place in early 2019 in Vietnam. They held that the two foreign ministries have enjoyed practical and effective cooperation through a wide range of cooperation mechanisms like the foreign ministerial-level consultation, the deputy minister-level political consultation, border meetings and human resources training. The two FMs agreed that in the context of complicated developments in the world, the two ministries need to step up discussions on regional and international issues based on mutual trust and understanding. Sharing their viewpoints on several international issues, including the Asia-Pacific situation, ASEAN Cooperation, Mekong sub-region collaboration and sustainable water use, and the East Sea, they consented to continue close coordination at regional and international forums to elevate the position of each country in the international arena. Right after the talks, on behalf of Party, State and Government leaders, the two FMs presented orders and medals to units and individuals of the two foreign ministries, who have made significant contributions to promoting the Vietnam-Laos special solidarity. Focus on Lisa Netz, co-owner of The Lavish Loft Submitted by Haleh Rabizadeh Resnick, Federation Business and Community Development Director For the Voice What was your path to South Jersey? I grew up in... Focus on Peter Hecht Partner at Magna Legal Services Tell me about your connection to the South Jersey Jewish Community? I actually grew up in East Brunswick, Exit 9 off the Turnpike. But weve... Focus on Abigail Dahan: Owner of the Bake School Tell me a bit about your life in South Jersey. I grew up in Cherry Hill. We moved here from Paris when I was six... The drill updates public technicians on the solutions to prevent and counter advanced persistent threats (APT), while equipping them with the skills and knowledge to prepare for real-life attacks to important national information infrastructure. Addressing the opening ceremony, Deputy Minister of Information and Communications, Nguyen Thanh Hung, expressed his hope that the participating teams would continue joining hands to build a safe and trustful cyberspace. According to Nguyen Khac Lich, deputy head of the Vietnam Computer Emergency Response Team (VNCERT), stimulation drills in recent years have shown limitations concerning dangerous and complex APT attacks. At this years event, VNCERT, for the first time, has launched a new model where participants can practice both defence and attack skills in selected working data. They are not allowed to destroy or shutdown the data, or cause information leaks. Co-organised by the Authority of Information Security and the Vietnam Computer Emergency Response Team (VNCERT), the programme runs until December 21. According to the VNCERT, Vietnam has so far this year recorded nearly 400 million cyber-security-related events. There were 9,344 cyber-attacks, including 2,499 phishing, 5,018 deface and 1,764 malware attacks. Statistics show that more than 27 percent of the attacks targeted government institutions, followed by those hitting banking and financial institutions and telecommunication firms with a large customer database. Pakistan Study Centre Faculty Jobs 2019 in Karachi Latest University of Karachi Education Posts Karachi 2021 Pakistan Study Centre University of Karachi requires the services of highly qualified and well educated candidates for the posts of Associate Professors & Lecturer in Karachi. How to Apply on University of Karachi Job Advertisement Apply as per details in job advertisement. In some cases, you may apply online at vacancies after registering at https://www.jobz.pk online. Note: Beware of Fraudulent Recruiting Activities. If an employer asks to pay money for any purpose, do not pay at all and report us at contact us form. Apply as per instuctions & dates mentioned in official job ad. Govt jobs may not be applied online here. Human typing error is possible. Error & omissions excepted. Retired JCO/NCO Jobs 2019 For Lahore Latest Logistic Company Management Posts Islamabad 2021 Experienced and professional Government retired JCO / NCO for the position of Logistics Officer required urgently for a well known PAF Logistic Branch in Islamabad Pakistan. How to Apply on Logistic Company Job Advertisement Apply as per details in job advertisement. In some cases, you may apply online at vacancies after registering at https://www.jobz.pk online. Note: Beware of Fraudulent Recruiting Activities. If an employer asks to pay money for any purpose, do not pay at all and report us at contact us form. Apply as per instuctions & dates mentioned in official job ad. Govt jobs may not be applied online here. Human typing error is possible. Error & omissions excepted. Ranked seventh out of 28 in the list, Hoang Lien Son is praised by the magazine as much of this northwest mountain region (beyond the busy gateway town Sa Pa) remains rugged, rural, and a world away from hectic Hanoi, which is about 313 kilometres to the southeast. Thanks to a new cable car connection, tourist traffic is on the rise at 10,312-foot high Fansipan, Vietnams highest peak, it said. It suggested visitors go hiking routes in and around Hoang Lien Son National Park and the adjacent Muong Hoa Valley, then resting up at homestays among the Hmong, Red Dao, Tay, Giay, and other ethnic minority groups. It also recommended Sapa Sisters, a sustainable tourism venture owned by local Hmong women, which offers custom trekking adventures; and Topas Ecolodge, a National Geographic Unique Lodge of the World tucked on a hilltop inside Hoang Lien Son National Park, where guests can discover the cultures, languages, and traditions of Sa Pas diverse tribes. The 28 best trips for 2019 were voted by travel editors and explorers of National Geographic. Mexico City (Mexico) topped the list, followed by Peruvian Amazon, Fanjingshan (China) and Dakar (Senegal). A view of Topas Ecolodge, a National Geographic Unique Lodge of the World tucked on a hilltop inside Hoang Lien Son National Park (Photo: Topas Ecolodge) This vacant premise at 1619 Pandosy St. is one of the 31 proposed pot shops in Kelowna, according to a list of possible sites released by the city. We're always interested in hearing about news in our community. Let us know what's going on! Go to form BEIJING, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- As China celebrated the 40th anniversary of its reform and opening-up policy on Tuesday, the achievements it has made over the last four decades were hailed as a miracle. Experts said that China's reform and opening-up not only is a milestone in the country's history but also holds global significance. RIGHT PATH Addressing a grand gathering Tuesday to celebrate the 40th anniversary, Chinese President Xi Jinping said that the past 40 years eloquently prove the correctness of the path, theory, system and culture of socialism with Chinese characteristics. Robert Lawrence Kuhn, a leading American expert on China who was honored with China Reform Friendship Medal on Tuesday, said China's direction is clear, that is, socialism with Chinese characteristics, the leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in all areas, putting people and their well-being and happiness first, and the need to further implement and deepen reforms. Russian Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov said the reform and opening-up policy enacted by the CPC at the third plenary session of the 11th CPC Central Committee in 1978 planned China's development and raised China to heights unimaginable at that time. "All the achievements that China has made is inseparable from the country's adherence to the leadership of the CPC and taking the socialist path," he told Xinhua in a recent interview. Manoranjan Mohanty, former chairperson of the Institute of Chinese Studies in Delhi, said the reform and opening-up was a great revolution. At one time it was called a "New Long March," which has two things in common with the Long March of the Red Army - one is the determination to unite maximum popular forces and the other is to innovate a strategy of revolution, he said. QUANTUM LEAP Describing the reform and opening-up as "a great revolution in the history of the Chinese people and the Chinese nation," Xi said a quantum leap has been made in the cause of socialism with Chinese characteristics. Stephen Perry, chairman of Britain's business networking organization 48 Group Club, said China has undergone incredible transformation since its reform and opening-up in 1978 and the country is sure to achieve its long-term target. Perry, also recipient of the China Reform Friendship Medal, said that he had seen China turning from a backward country where most of the population lived in countryside into a country where nearly 60 percent of the population now dwell in towns and cities. During the period, China's grain output has doubled to over 600 million tons and modern technology is being developed in various industries, Perry noted. William Jones, Washington bureau chief of the U.S. publication Executive Intelligence Review, told Xinhua in an interview that the 40th anniversary of the reform and opening-up is extremely important and is a pivotal moment. China has moved from a relatively impoverished country to one of the most important economic powers in the world today, Jones said. What is done has shown that the policy that was laid out in terms of the reform and opening-up has been a resounding success, he added. China's reform and opening-up over the past 40 years has proven to be the "golden key" to reviving its society, said Jin Jianmin, a senior fellow at the Fujitsu Research Institute in Tokyo, believing that the ongoing process will never stop. Shadrack Gutto, a political analyst at the University of South Africa, recalled that when talking about China 40 years ago, people would think of the "kingdom of bicycle." But now automobiles made by China have been exported to the world market, said Gutto, adding that both in material and spiritual terms, Chinese people's standard of living has been significantly improved. PROPELLING GLOBAL PROSPERITY The 40 years of reform and opening-up has benefited both China and the world, said Jin, emphasizing that the great demand created by China's rapid economic growth has offered opportunities to the international community. Farooq Sobhan, president of Bangladesh Enterprise Institute, said the China International Development Cooperation Agency, along with the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the New Silk Road Fund, represents the country's "firm commitment to promote and support economic growth, both globally and regionally." These institutions will "benefit Bangladesh and other developing countries to meet their growing development and infrastructure requirements," said Sobhan. Appreciating the China-proposed concept of a community with a shared future for mankind, Mohanty believed that "people all over the world wish the people of China even greater successes in pursuing the path of equitable and sustainable development." (Xinhua reporters Hu Xiaoguang, Zhang Jianhua, Zhao Xu, Wang Huihui, Jin Jing, Gui Tao, Zhu Dongyang, Hu Yousong, Liu Chen, Jiang Qiaomei, Yang Ting, Jing Jing, Liu Chuntao, Yang Shilong contributed to the story) Minister of Land, Infrastructure and Transport Kim Hyun-mee announces four new residential sites near Seoul during a press conference at the Government Complex in Gwanghwamun, Wednesday. / Yonhap Sites in Namyangju, Hanam, Incheon, Gwacheon selected By Nam Hyun-woo The government will construct four new commuter towns three in Gyeonggi Province and one in Incheon to provide 122,000 new apartments, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said Wednesday. This is the latest effort by the Moon Jae-in administration to curb soaring housing prices in Seoul and its surrounding satellite cities. In a press conference, Land Minister Kim Hyun-mee said the four envisioned suburban communities will provide new homes starting 2021. The three Gyeonggi Province sites selected were in Namyangju, providing 66,000 apartments; Hanam offering 32,000; Gwacheon with 7,000. In Incheon, Gyeyang Techno Valley was selected to will provide 17,000 dwellings. The ministry explained that those sites are currently underdeveloped or protected from development. Kim said all of the new sites are closer to Seoul than existing satellite cities such as Ilsan, Bundang and Pangyo which were developed under previous governments' real estate projects. Also, they are near to envisioned Great Train Express (GTX) lines, which are under construction to link Seoul and its dormitory towns. "The areas are all located between existing satellite cities and the capital, and the new transport infrastructure will allow residents to commute to central Seoul within 30 minutes," Kim said. She added that the government took self-sufficiency into account in selecting the locations. "The new towns will create jobs," she said. "They will have twice as much space for support facilities than that of existing satellite cities, so they can house venture companies, urban factories and other startups." The distance from Seoul and self-sufficiency has been criticized as a shortcoming in two previous state-led new town projects. In the first in 1989, the then government selected five areas including Bundang and Ilsan, but they lacked space for non-residential facilities and ended up being labeled as dormitory communities. For the second project in 2003, the government selected 12 sites, including Gimpo and Pangyo, but they were too far from Seoul more than 10 kilometers from the metropolitan boundary. The plan also named 37 smaller sites in Seoul and Gyeonggi Province that will provide 33,000 new homes. Of them, Seoul will have 32 and the province, five. In September, the government announced it will supply more than 300,000 homes in Seoul and Gyeonggi Province and disclosed locations for 35,000 homes. At the time, it said 200,000 of these would be in four or five new satellite cities. With the locations of 190,000 homes now disclosed, Kim said the remaining 110,000 will be announced next year. Finance Minister Hong Nam-ki, right, shakes hands with Bank of Korea Governor Lee Ju-yeol ahead of their meeting in Seoul, Wednesday. Courtesy of Ministry of Economy and Finance Gov't seeks policy mix with central bank for revival By Park Hyong-ki The economy is unlikely to be sustained by exports of semiconductors in 2019 as the industry is facing a down-cycle, Bank of Korea Governor Lee Ju-yeol said Wednesday. He expressed this concern, while questioning how long the economy can manage to grow only by relying on chips. "It is worrisome when we look five years ahead," Lee said at a press meeting Tuesday. "I am also worried about how much the downturn will spill over to other industries that are already experiencing difficulties, and affect the economy." This comes as exports of chips have accounted for 20 percent of the country's total outbound shipments. Also, the industry is winding down its investment given it has completed most of its plan to purchase equipment for plant expansion. And this is further weighing on an index measuring corporate investment, according to Statistics Korea. Analysts say it would be "wishful thinking" to say chips will continue to sustain the economy. "We hope this will last. But the reality is it won't, and it will slow overall private investment in 2019," said Song Min-kee, an economist at the Korea Institute of Finance (KIF), in a press event hosted by the Financial Services Commission. As the economy faces growing uncertainties and hardship, Finance Minister Hong Nam-ki stressed the importance of combining its fiscal policy with the central bank's monetary policy. Hong paid a courtesy call to BOK Governor Lee, asking for interagency cooperation through the policy mix in an effort to revive investment and consumption, and create jobs in 2019. "I deeply understand that the central bank is an important partner," Hong said in a meeting with Lee at the central bank in Seoul, Dec. 19. "As you know, the economy is facing both internal and external uncertainties. But there is a limit to revitalizing the economy only with an expansionary fiscal policy." Lee said the central bank will further collaborate with the finance ministry to tackle problems such as falling birthrate, aging population and inequality. He added the BOK will back the government's measures, unveiled Dec. 17, aimed at encouraging investment by the private sector via various "mega projects and deals" involving infrastructure development. But some industries that already posses power need to let go some of their power for new industries to emerge and thrive as the country seeks to relax regulations enabling the growth of open platform businesses. "The public, the government and the private sector will have to work together to let new industries emerge and grow," Lee said, referring to the latest conflict between taxis and Kakao's carpool application. Hong mentioned in a press conference Dec. 17 that it was tough to break social misconceptions toward new business models for sharing economy. It will need further discussion on the matter before moving to relax related regulations, he added. Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, addresses a grand gathering to celebrate the 40th anniversary of China's reform and opening-up at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, on Dec. 18, 2018. (Xinhua/Yao Dawei) BEIJING, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- China held a grand gathering Tuesday to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the country's reform and opening-up, a great revolution that has changed the destiny of the Chinese nation and influenced the world. Addressing the meeting, President Xi Jinping described the reform and opening-up as "a great reawakening" of the Communist Party of China (CPC). "Chinese Communists accomplished the most profound and the greatest social transformation in China's history and created the fundamental political conditions and the institutional foundation for all development and progress in China today," said Xi, also general secretary of the CPC Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission. Premier Li Keqiang presided over the meeting at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. The celebration started with all participants rising to sing the national anthem. Wang Huning, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, read a decision to award personnel for their outstanding contributions to the reform and opening-up. The award recipients were 100 Chinese and 10 foreigners. Chinese leaders presented the medals to those who were present at Tuesday's event. QUANTUM LEAP Describing the reform and opening-up as "a great revolution in the history of the Chinese people and the Chinese nation," Xi said a quantum leap has been made in the cause of socialism with Chinese characteristics. Xi hailed the birth of the CPC, the founding of the People's Republic of China, and the pursuit of reform and opening-up and socialism with Chinese characteristics as "the three milestones" on the way toward national rejuvenation in modern times. "What we have achieved in the past 40 years was not a windfall, nor was it given in charity by others. It comes from the hard work, wisdom and courage of all members of the Party and the people of all ethnic groups in China," Xi said. In 40 years, China lifted 740 million people out of poverty. China has built the world's largest social security system, with the basic old-age pension covering more than 900 million people and medical insurance covering over 1.3 billion people. China's share of global gross domestic product rose from 1.8 percent to 15.2 percent, generating more than 30 percent of global growth for years. "The great spirit of reform and opening-up ... has significantly enriched our national character and become the most prominent hallmark of the Chinese people in the modern day," Xi said. Dawn Nakagawa, executive vice president of the Los Angeles-based Berggruen Institute, said China's reform and opening-up is an amazing course to celebrate and a miracle. "The reform and opening-up has made great contributions to turning China into a powerful country," said Yohei Kono, president of the Japanese Association for the Promotion of International Trade. GREAT PATH Xi said that the past 40 years eloquently prove the correctness of the path, theory, system and culture of socialism with Chinese characteristics, noting the reform and opening-up is a game-changing move not only in making China what it is today, but also for the Chinese people to achieve the country's two centenary goals and its great national rejuvenation. Tu Xinquan, a professor at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing, said the most important reason behind China's economic and social marvels is the strong leadership of the CPC. On the way forward, Xi said the country must see the CPC exercises leadership over all work, as the leadership of the CPC is the most essential attribute of socialism with Chinese characteristics and the greatest strength of this system. Xi also emphasized the need to adhere to the people-oriented approach to keep delivering on the aspirations of the people for a better life. Chinese Communists are duty-bound to develop Marxism in the 21st century and adapt it to the Chinese context, he said. "There is no textbook of golden rules to follow for reform and development in China, a country with over 5,000 years of civilization and more than 1.3 billion people," he said. "No one is in a position to dictate to the Chinese people what should or should not be done." Xi stressed that the decisive role of the market in resource allocation should be put into full play while the role of the government will be better leveraged, and the vitality of various market entities will be stimulated. He said China has stayed committed to the fundamental national policy of opening-up, noting China cannot develop itself in isolation from the world, and the world needs China for global prosperity. "A major country like China cannot afford any disruptive mistake on fundamental issues," Xi said when elaborating on the need to strike a balance between reform, development and stability. "We must show full tenacity and persistence to see all major reform measures through," Xi said. By staying committed to advancing reform and opening-up and seeing that Chinese people realize their aspirations for a better life, Xi said that new and even greater wonders of the Chinese nation would be made in the new era. "We will create new and even greater wonders that will truly impress the world," he said. Unification Minister Cho Myoung-gyon. Yonhap By Kim Bo-eun Denuclearization talks between North Korea and the United States need to be put back on track by early next year, Unification Minister Cho Myoung-gyon said Tuesday. "Whether the denuclearization process gets on track by February or March will determine the direction of events surrounding the Korean Peninsula in 2019 and 2020," he told reporters. The remarks come at a time when the nuclear disarmament negotiations have hit a stalemate, despite North Korean leader Kim Jong-un pledging to work toward complete denuclearization at summits held this year. At the inter-Korean summit in September, Kim said his regime would take steps such as the permanent shutdown of its key Yongbyon nuclear facility if the U.S. took corresponding measures. A high-level meeting was scheduled for November to address these, but has been postponed indefinitely. Special Representative for Korean Peninsula Peace and Security Affairs Lee Do-hoon, right, speaks with U.S. Special Representative for North Korea Stephen Biegun at an office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Seoul, in this Oct. 29 file photo. / Korea Times file By Park Ji-won U.S. Special Representative for North Korea Stephen Biegun arrived in Seoul, Wednesday, for high-level discussions that may be centered on easing sanctions on the North. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Lee Do-hoon and his counterpart Biegun will meet Thursday to discuss possible sanctions relief for inter-Korean projects, including a groundbreaking ceremony for inter-Korean railways and roads scheduled to be held Dec. 26. Biegun will be here until Saturday. According to ministry spokesman Noh Kyu-duk, working group talks between the allies will also be held Friday to discuss how to spur on the denuclearization process. Participants of the working group talks will include Alex Wong, the deputy assistant secretary for North Korea at the bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs from the White House, and officials from Cheong Wa Dae and the unification ministry, he said. The meetings come amid stalled talks between Pyongyang and Washington over denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula. U.S. President Donald Trump has said that he's "in no hurry" regarding the nuclear negotiations, while North Korea's foreign ministry warned against Trump stalling the talks. In a statement released Sunday, a senior policy researcher at the ministry said if the U.S. continues to step up sanctions and pressure, it will "block the path to denuclearization on the Korean Peninsula forever." Expectations are high that Biegun will look for a chance to meet with North Korean officials during the visit following U.S. officials' meeting with their North Korean counterparts in early December. During his last visit to Seoul in October, he didn't have a meeting with the North at Panmunjeom. Meanwhile, emphasizing the relationship with the South is a "linchpin" for peace and security in the region, the U.S. said that the goal of the two countries was the "fully verified denuclearization of North Korea." Regarding the possibility of a meeting between Biegun and North Korean officials, Robert Palladino, deputy spokesman of the U.S. Department of State, didn't divulge any details but stressed the importance of South-U.S. coordination. He also reiterated the U.S. stance that "sanctions relief will follow denuclearization." Moon Jae-in administration has been putting its efforts into maintaining the momentum of dialogue between Pyongyang and Washington as a mediator considering that improved inter-Korean ties will help the denuclearization talks. The two Koreas' ceremony next week to start to modernize and reconnect the cross-border roads and railways at Panmun Station in the North's border town of Gaeseong, is not subject to the sanctions against the North. Still, South Korea needs prior consultations with the U.S. regarding the exchange of some materials crossing the border. Meanwhile, Unification Ministry spokesman Baek Tae-hyun said that "the talks with the U.S. will likely be seeking denuclearization through inter-Korean projects." An image of Air Asia's A320 flight. Courtesy of Air Asia By Kim Hyun-bin Korea does not truly have a low-cost carrier (LCC), only airlines disguised as such, said Tony Fernandes, CEO and founder of Air Asia Group. "Korea needs one really true low-cost airline. Korean Air and Asiana (operating their own LCCs) just block other airlines from entering the market. They are full-service airlines," Fernandes said in an interview with The Korea Times during his visit to Seoul last week. Fernandes came to Korea for the Korean-version publication of his autobiography "Flying High." In Korea, two full-service carriers (FSC) are operating, Korean Air and Asiana Airlines, as well as six budget carriers, Jeju Air, Jin Air, T'way Air, Eastar Jet, Air Busan and Air Seoul. However, half of the LCCs are operated by the two FSCs Jin Air is affiliated with Korean Air, while Air Busan and Air Seoul are with Asiana Airlines. Fernandes believes the most important factor of a budget carrier is low prices, which he claims the local LCCs do not provide. Tony Fernandes, CEO of Air Asia Group The United Nations Refugee Agency's Special Envoy Angelina Jolie, right, with the organization's Goodwill Ambassador in Korea Jung Woo-sung, center, and senior public information associate Shin Heinn at UNHCR Korea's office in Jung-gu, Seoul, Nov. 4, 2018. Shin and Chae Hyun-young, interviewees of this report, asked The Korea Times not to conspicuously expose their photos. Courtesy of UNHCR Korea United Nations Refugee Agency Korea explains its region-specific role and desire to endow its job entirely to the Korean government By Ko Dong-hwan At the United Nations Refugee Agency Korea's office, employees half-jokingly say that someday they will no longer be needed in this country. The statement carries more than a self-deprecating tone. It is the Korean representative of the international organization's ultimate objective. The agency says achieving the goal is for the good of the Korean government. With its limited authority due to the regional office's geopolitical situation and directives from UNHCR's Geneva headquarters, the agency, in a low-key way, mainly advocates and supports the government and civic NGOs to help refugees. "The UN Refugee Agency is most encouraged when each state government protects asylum seekers and does its best in helping them," Shin Heinn, senior public information associate from UNHCR Korea, told The Korea Times. UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador Jung Woo-sung, right, met Yemeni refugees in Djibouti and Malaysia in November 2018. Courtesy of UNHCR Korea Facebook The Korean representative isn't entitled to conduct its own humanitarian aid agenda without the Moon Jae-in administration's approval. It always works with the Korean government, mostly the Ministry of Justice that manages immigration issues, providing guidance and care for foreigners with urgent needs who do not benefit from state aid. "If a massive number of refugees hits Europe in a single year, does UNHCR build camps and start protecting them instead of state governments? No," said UNHCR Korea's associate legal officer Chae Hyun-young. "It can, however, work with the governments. So does its Korean representative, sharing information with the ministry and acting as a watchdog." The local office doesn't burden itself with more roles. Instead, it tries to make the central government do more work without spilling responsibilities to NGOs. "As to what we do, we persuade the government to offer more financial support," Chae said. "Also, if we have an asylum seeker whose evaluation process takes longer than a year or whose visa extension request was rejected, we call immigration offices to check why, because the outcomes could have resulted from miscommunication due to a language barrier. "When there is no vacancy at state-run shelters for the foreigners, we reach out to NGOs to see if there is anything available." Yemeni asylum seekers wait for talks with the National Human Rights Commission of Korea at the Jeju Immigration Center on Jeju Island, June 29, 2018. Yonhap No Direct Assistance Under UNHCR Korea's restrictive job description, the regional office is not allowed to provide any direct help to refugees or asylum seekers, except in emergencies. Its main job is advocating. Many foreigners, however, visit the agency expecting employment opportunities, shelter or financial support. "Because we don't run any aid program, we sometimes hit the wall, like when some foreigners come to us with heaps of luggage seeking a place to reside," Chae said. "In that case, we contact NGOs and beg for any available room." Chae said the Korean office in Jung-gu, Seoul, if it had field offices and established networks, could provide certain direct help. But since the state government controls managing asylum seekers in Korea, the office isn't equipped with those auxiliary arms. "In Jordan, there are some 660,000 Syrians in Zaatari and Azraq refugee camps who had fled from the nearly eight-year-long domestic military conflict," Shin said. "There, UNHCR, with the Jordan government's agreement, provides direct assistance. "If a massive number of asylum seekers landed in countries near Korea, then our office's official role would be adjusted to allow us to engage in helping them more directly." Civic NGO members distribute basic items to Yemeni refugee applicants at a makeshift booth in a parking lot in front of the Jeju Immigration Office, July 18, 2018. Korea Times file Tight government budget The state budget for subsidizing asylum seekers in need of basic necessities has always been tight. UNHCR Korea said "the pie is too small to share." The subsidy is like a sore thumb for lawmakers who often turn sour at calls for an increase. This year, the National Assembly slashed 350 million won ($308,000) from the refugee budget bill proposed by the justice ministry. This year's annual state budget for asylum seekers included 3 billion won for operating the Immigration Reception Center on Yeongjongdo Island in Incheon, where asylum seekers stay while waiting for completion of their application's evaluation, and 800 million won for the subsidy pool. Considering that the number of asylum seekers in Korea was over 43,000 as of July this year, the pool is too little to support them all. "With the shallow subsidy pool, the money is granted to just 10 percent of subsidy applicants, with families with women and children being priority," Chae said. "Young men are the least likely to get funded. That's why none of the Yemeni men who sought asylum on Jeju Island earlier this year received the subsidy." The agency, when it needs an urgent subsidy pool, asks the Korean Red Cross or Save the Children. The latter provides its funds for the nominal purpose of rearing children but in many cases the money is used for basic necessities like paying rent and heating fees. Shin says that in the long term, the justice ministry getting the National Assembly to pass the subsidy expansion bill and increasing the pool isn't helpful for the foreigners. "What is more important is supporting them to find measures to live independently," Shin said. "We shouldn't look at them as poor. They just came here to seek help. Preparing a refugee camp and isolating them there is our last resort." Yemenis who were granted humanitarian stay permits by the Jeju Immigration Office on Sept. 14, 2018, leave the authority's building on Jeju Island. New1 Evaluating asylum seekers UNHCR Korea does not have any control over evaluating asylum seekers. Unless there was a "system" in which the government could issue legal status or permanent residency based on the agency's evaluation reports, the agency's authority is limited. One of the Yemeni asylum seekers on Jeju Island who came from Malaysia was confused to find that his refugee status granted in Malaysia by the UN Refugee Agency was ineffective in Korea. Malaysia is a non-member state of the UN refugee protocols and doesn't officially grant refugee status. The UNHCR refugee status there provided him with immunity to the risk of being incarcerated by the state authority. He challenged why his status was revoked in Korea by the same UNHCR authority. "UNHCR Korea is helpless without the central government's approval," said Shin. "How refugee status was granted in Malaysia cannot be applied to Korea." What the regional agency can do with the government is negotiate. "We could persuade the government to at least not repatriate asylum seekers who are from member states of the U.N. refugee protocols," Chae said. "UNHCR Korea's ultimate objective is to support the Korean government so its capabilities in evaluating asylum seekers will improve and eventually conduct the job on its own. We would never evaluate asylum seekers instead of the government because of the latter's ineptness. The government would then try to keep relinquishing its responsibility to us." By Dec. 14, of the 484 Yemeni asylum seekers on Jeju Island, the justice ministry accepted two journalists as refugees, granted humanitarian stay permits to 412 and rejected 56. The decision drew criticism over why most of the Yemenis ended up with the one-year temporary permit. "The decision could have been worse amid the raging anti-refugee atmosphere that swept nationwide," said Chae, aware that it is also the government's role to listen to the public. "We eventually sent no one back to Yemen. While civic groups tend to stick the government with necessary pointers, we try to maintain a good tie with the government. "UNHCR evaluates asylum seekers in the hope that, although state governments might want to deport them, our assessment could persuade the authorities not to do so. If things went really well and even a single refugee got a chance for resettlement in a third country, that's something we want to see as well." Seoul Mayor Park Won-soon, left, and Justice Minister Park Sang-ki show a memorandum of understanding signed at Seoul City Hall, Monday, aimed at improving conditions for foreign residents. Yonhap Limited job market Korea signed up to the U.N. refugee protocols in 1992 and its refugee act became effective in 2013, the earliest among Asian countries. A recent memorandum of understanding between Seoul City Hall and the justice ministry raised the possibility of more immigration offices and inviting more foreign talent to the city. But there are major hurdles to overcome. One of them is diversifying employment chances for asylum seekers. To embrace those who ask for particular jobs or vocational training, the current structure needs a major shift that involves not just the justice ministry but also the National Assembly, local governments, NGOs and citizens' changed views on refugees. NGOs, which attract many asylum seekers and refugees looking for jobs, only have limited spots for laboring positions in factories and farms. Pnan, one of the local NGOs in Seoul dedicated to refugees and asylum seekers, has a long waiting list of job-seeking foreigners who don't mind hard work. Yemenis on Jeju Island, most of whom had held professional positions like journalists, doctors, engineers and teachers, worked at tangerine farms and on fishing vessels because of the poor job market. "Diversifying the job market for asylum seekers requires revising existing policies," Chae said. "It would be marvelous if a company showed up and asked for a list of 100 asylum seekers to hire. But there is simply no such system. It would be practically ideal for the Ministry of Employment and Labor to introduce a dedicated bureau, prepared with reserved interpreters. Mixing and matching pipelines to do that, however, is tricky as it must involve more than the justice ministry." Anti-refugee protesters raise banners that read "Fake Refugees OUT" at a street demonstration at Bosingak in Jongno-gu, Seoul, Sept. 16, 2018. Korea Times photo by Choi Won-suk One of the 10 students from Daesung High School in Seoul who were found unconscious at a pension in Gangneung, Gangwon Province, Tuesday, is taken to an emergency room of Gangneung Asan Hospital for hyperbaric oxygen treatment. Yonhap Three senior high school students were found dead and seven others unconscious at a pension in the northeastern province of Gangwon, possibly due to carbon monoxide poisoning caused by inadequate ventilation, local police and firefighters said Tuesday. The owner of the pension, located in the city of Gangneung on South Korea's east coast, found the 10 people around 1:12 p.m. Police said the students were vomiting and foaming at the mouth. The living room and other rooms at the pension where they were staying contained high concentrations of carbon monoxide, police said. A warden closes down the main entrance gate of Daesung High School in Eunpyeong-gu District in Seoul, Wednesday morning, as the institution is shutting itself down for three days following the Tuesday's incident. Yonhap According to firefighters, levels of carbon monoxide concentration were detected at 155 parts per million (ppm) at the scene, well above the standard 20 ppm. Police said they found the gas boiler at the pension disconnected from the ventilation pipe, leading them to believe that poor ventilation might have caused the incident. Police also said they didn't see any device in the pension to detect gas leaks. Police said they'll continue to explore all kinds of possibilities. And Lee Jin-ho, head of the Gangneung Fire Station, told reporters, "We are treating this as an accident, not a suicide or a murder." Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Education Yoo Eun-hae, right, attends a debriefing session at the ministry's headquarters in Sejong Government Complex, Wednesday, regarding the Tuesday's incident in Gangneung. Yonhap The students, all of whom are males who attend Daesung High School in Seoul, were on an excursion after finishing the state-administrated scholastic aptitude test for university entrance. Of the seven injured, five are being treated at Gangneung Asan Hospital in Gangneung. The other two, said to be in critical condition, were transferred to Wonju Severance Christian Hospital in Wonju, about 120 kilometers west of Gangneung, for hyperbaric oxygen treatment. Kang Hee-dong, director of Gangneung Asan's Regional Emergency Medical Center, said one of the five students there improved to the point where he said his name. Superintendent of Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education Cho Hee-yeon, center, answers to journalists at Gangneung Asan Hospital, Tuesday, where five of the Daeseong High School students were being treated for possible carbon monoxide poisoning at a pension in Gangneung earlier that day. Yonhap By Park Si-soo Keeping digitized documents with subversive content in an email inbox or sharing them with online communities is punishable, an appellate court ruled. The Seoul Central District Court's department handling appeal cases made the decision on Wednesday, sentencing a member of an ultra-left political party to a year in prison. The man, surnamed Kim, avoided immediate imprisonment because the court suspended the term for two years. Kim was prosecuted in October 2013 for possessing video or audio files extolling North Korea's "Juche" ideology or championing the concept of reunification of the two Koreas promoted by the North, in a violation of the National Security Act. He was also charged with distributing these files on internet communities. According to court documents, the files have content portraying the North's development of long-range missiles and nuclear weapons as a "proud symbol of self-reliance" and the birth of late North Korean leaders Kim Il-sung and Kim Jung-il as "milestone events" in human history. The court said the purpose of Kim possessing and sharing the files was to "damage the foundation of the nation and security, and basic principles of democracy." The court said the seriousness of his crime was "not light." The verdict came amid heated political debate about the National Security Act, which was enacted in 1948 to keep the South away from then spreading communism. But it was abused by dictators in the 1970s-80s to persecute their political foes. While liberal forces have tried to scrap the law, arguing it does more harm than good, conservatives want to keep the status quo, claiming North Korea is still a real security threat to the South. Former chief flight attendant Park Chang-jin speaks to the press at Gangseo Police Station in Seoul prior to former Executive Vice President Heather Cho's indictment in early May. / Korea Times photo by Seo Jae-hoon By Kim Jae-heun The Seoul Western District Court ordered Korean Air, Wednesday, to pay former chief flight attendant Park Chang-jin 20 million won ($17,779) in compensation for his suffering from the so-called "nut rage" incident. However, the court dismissed his claim for compensation from the carrier's former Executive Vice President Heather Cho, the elder daughter of the conglomerate's owner. Park filed the suit after Cho forced him off an Incheon-bound plane as it was taxiing for takeoff at JFK International Airport in New York in 2014 as she was angry with the way a junior flight attendant served her macadamia nuts. He also claimed the company forced him to give a false testimony during the investigation and demoted him after the incident. The court recognized the company's responsibility for the coercion of false testimony, ordering Korean Air to pay compensation. It also acknowledged Cho's liability for compensation for assaulting him on the plane, but said she didn't have to pay the 30 million won Park claimed because she had already paid a 200 million won deposit to personally compensate Park and the junior female flight attendant. Park had refused to take this saying he wanted a sincere apology from Cho. The court also dismissed Park's call to nullify his demotion. Park took about a year-long break after the incident and returned to work in May 2016, but the airliner demoted him from his chief position. While Park argued it was a retaliatory act against him, Korean Air argued Park had scored low in his in-flight announcement test that took place in March 2014 before the incident. In December 2014, Cho kicked Park off the plane which had already left the gate after ordering the pilot to return to it. She became angry after the junior attendant served her macadamia nuts in a bag, not spread on a plate. She held Park accountable for the "poor service," and assaulted him before forcing him off the plane. The prosecution indicted Cho on several charges including acts of violence that threatened flight safety and interfered with business. Cho was sentenced to one year in prison, however, an appeals court freed her by converting this to a suspended term. Investigators of the National Forensic Service check a ventilation pipe at a holiday home in Gangneung, Gangwon Province, Wednesday, one day after three high school students dies and seven was left unconscious, Tuesday. / Yonhap By Kang Seung-woo Police said Wednesday that they had found a ventilation defect in a gas boiler at a holiday home in Gangneung, Gangwon Province, tentatively concluding that carbon monoxide poisoning killed three high school students and left seven unconscious the day before. During an investigation of the two-story property, police tested the gas-powered boiler and found that its ventilation pipe emitted a high level of fumes. The test came after police set up an ad-hoc investigation headquarters and inspected the vacation home. They found that the gas boiler's ventilation pipe was not properly connected and this was the probable cause of the incident. This backed up an earlier finding that the level of carbon monoxide in the students' room was 155 parts per million (ppm), well above the standard 20 ppm. In examining the three dead students, pathologists found that the carbon monoxide levels in their blood were far above the fatal level, adding no other toxic substances were detected. "We conducted combustion tests repeatedly and found that the boiler emitted a large quantity of exhaust fumes from the faulty pipe," said a police officer, adding investigators plan to do more tests on the boiler jointly with the National Forensic Service (NFS) and the Korea Gas Safety Corp. In addition, there was no alarm system for gas leaks at the vacation home although this was not illegal. The victims were seniors at Daesung High School in Seoul who took the college entrance exam last month, and then went to stay at the vacation home with their parents' permission. The Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education (SMOE) confirmed it was not an official trip and the students traveled on their own after getting permission from their school. No teachers or parents accompanied them. The seven surviving students were admitted to two hospitals five at Gangneung Asan Hospital and two at Wonju Severance Christian Hospital. According to police, one survivor recovered early Wednesday and could say his name and answer simple questions, while later in the day another student regained consciousness and is now stable enough to drink water. Both of them were at the Asan hospital. The rest are in intensive care and are undergoing treatment in hyperbaric chambers. In the wake of the deadly incident, Education Minister Yoo Eun-hae held a meeting with education officials Wednesday to discuss countermeasures. "The education ministry plans to check if high school seniors receive proper education programs after taking the college entrance exam," the minister said. "It is also set to monitor their field trips." Although the SMOE is in charge of matters pertaining to the incident, the ministry will oversee the investigation, Yoo added. Residents of Seongdaegol in Dongjak-gu install a solar panel on the roof of a supermarket in this November 2017 photo. Seongdaegol is the birthplace of the Seoul Metropolitan Government's energy-independent village plan. Korea Times file Seoul city seeking to set up 140 such villages by 2020 By Kang Seung-woo The energy-independent community is regarded as the living example of the Seoul Metropolitan Government's energy-saving plan. As part of its six-year-old One Less Nuclear Power Plant initiative, the city government has designated energy self-sufficient neighborhoods that produce energy and participate in energy conservation activities. Under the energy self-reliant village plan, a village is converted from being a power consumer to being a village that creates profit through efficient use and generation of energy, and shares energy in connection with energy welfare. Their activities include installing LED lighting and residential solar systems. To this end, the city government has provided subsidies, education and outreach programs to designated neighborhoods for up to three years. The One Less Nuclear Power Plant initiative was launched in 2012 to reduce energy consumption and produce enough renewable energy to match the output of one nuclear power plant. It is now in its second phase that will be completed by 2022. "For the past six years, Seoul City has given support for citizen-led energy self-reliant villages to expand across the capital. Also, we saw possibilities to expand the villages," said Kim Yeon-ji, an official of the Energy Efficiency Promotion Division at the city government. "We expect the program will lay the ground for local energy communities that are appropriate for Seoul." The energy town plan had a very humble beginning in 2012 as it started with seven neighborhoods, but the accumulated number reached 100 this year. "The Seoul city government is set to increase the number of such villages to 140 by 2020," a city official said. Currently, 73 out of the 100 neighborhoods are receiving the three-year subsidies that range from 5 million won ($4,400) to 30 million won. The budget for this year was 1.1 billion won. Plus, for those who have entered the fourth year or above of the program, they are receiving not only the subsidies but also administrative and informational support from the city. Even among those "graduates" from the three-year subsidy course, some neighborhoods have formed cooperatives to expand the ecosystem of energy economy and some neighborhood representatives are working as instructors helping newly designated energy-independent neighborhoods operate well. The energy-independent community plan is practically paying off. A recent study showed the neighborhoods in the support program cut electricity consumption by 15 percent on average. In 2016 alone, they reduced power consumption by an average of 7.2 percent through their own energy-saving activities such as "Energy Festival" and "Lights-off Campaign." In addition, they generated 2.99 million kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity by installing solar panels on vacant land, generating an amount equivalent to monthly power consumption of 13,114 four-member households. According to the city government, 523 rounds of energy-saving education classes took place at 66 energy self-reliant neighborhoods last year, 1,028 bulbs were replaced with LED lights, and 1,414 residents insulated their homes or improved their doors and windows to save energy. Also 1,069 households joined the city's Eco-Mileage program an energy-saving program that offers incentives to households and organizations that voluntarily cut back on the use of electricity, water, gas and heating. Along with the quantity achievements, the program has gained global recognition thanks to its eco-friendly methods of energy production. C40, a network of the world's megacities committed to addressing climate change, introduced Seongdaegol in Dongjak-gu, the birthplace of energy self-sufficiency, as one of the most notable successful stories. The town was also invited to give an address at the Korea-China-Japan Tripartite Environmental Education Network's workshop and symposium in October and other events in Taiwan and Hong Kong. The village's library for children features solar panels and a bicycle generator. In addition, each household engages in a variety of energy conservation efforts, such as switching to LED lights, taking part in the Lights-Out Movement, in which all lights are turned off for a certain period of time on a specific day, and using multi-tabs to conserve the standby power supply. Sangol in Eunpyeong-gu also received a C40 award for its energy welfare projects. In cooperation with private businesses, Seoul's energy-independent program has enabled the neighborhood previously known for dilapidated housing and low-income households to install mini-solar generators and repair 21 homes. The Ministry of Gender Equality and Family discovered that 131 sex offenders were working at public facilities that are frequented by children. Yonhap The Ministry of Gender Equality and Family said Wednesday it uncovered the fact that 131 sex offenders were working at child-related facilities. The ministry said a thorough review, conducted from July to September on 1.93 million people from 305,078 educational, sports, game and medical entities, found that 131 employees at 132 workplaces were unfit to work there due to child safety concerns. Among the 131 sex criminals, 71 were dismissed from their workplaces, 43 were ordered to close down their facilities and 17 were replaced, the ministry said. Sports-related facilities were found to have hired the biggest number of sex offenders, with 45 people, or 34.4 percent, followed by private education facilities with 26 people, or 19.9 percent, then game-related facilities with 21 people, or 16 percent of the total. A man who sexually assaulted an elementary school student is taken by police to reenact his crime scene at a residential district in Jangan-dong neighborhood in Dongdaemun-gu District, Seoul, July 2010. Korea Times file WASHINGTON, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- A federal judge agreed here Tuesday to postpone the sentencing of Michael Flynn, U.S. President Donald Trump's former national security adviser, until he has finished assisting the ongoing Russia probe. The turn of event came as U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan gave harsh words to Flynn at the hearing. "Arguably, you sold your country out. The court's going to consider all that," he said. Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents about his conversations with former Russian ambassador in Washington during the presidential transition. "I'm going to be frank with you -- this crime is very serious," Sullivan told Flynn. The postponement, asked by Flynn's legal team, will give him opportunity to further cooperate with the ongoing investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election. Flynn, also a senior adviser to Trump's presidential campaign team and a retired lieutenant general, admitted in December 2017 that he lied to the FBI about his discussion, including of U.S. sanctions against Russia, with then Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. "This is a very serious offense - a high-ranking senior official of the government, making false statements to the Federal Bureau of Investigation while on the physical premises of the White House," Sullivan said. Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who has been leading the Russia investigation, suggested that Flynn serve no prison time given his "substantial" cooperation during the legal process "The court will also consider (Flynn's) substantial assistance in several investigations," Sullivan said. The judge didn't give a schedule for the sentencing but asked both the Mueller team and Flynn's attorney to provide update on his case by March 13. On Monday, a business associate of Flynn from Turkey and a Turkish businessman were indicted in a separate case of illegally lobbying for the Turkish government in the United States, violating the U.S. Foreign Agent Registration Act. The two Turks were accused of illegally helping Ankara urge the deportation of cleric Fethullah Gulen, who is now living in exile in the United States, and who the Turkish government said orchestrated the failed coup attempt in 2016 to overthrow President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. "All along you were an unregistered agent of a foreign country while serving as the national security adviser," Sullivan told Flynn. "I cannot assure that if you proceed today you will not receive a sentence of incarceration," he added. Flynn's lawyers had asked leniency for their client, arguing that the FBI had not warned Flynn that it was a crime to lie to the FBI, and that the interview was conducted without White House counsel present. Prosecutors dismissed the above claims and said Flynn -- as high-ranking White House official and the former director of Defense Intelligence Agency, and as someone who has served 33 years of military duty -- was well aware that it is a crime to lie to federal authorities. Lying to the FBI, the criminal nature of which Flynn said at the hearing he was aware of, carries a statutory maximum sentence of five years. However, Flynn's plea agreement stated that he could face between zero to six months in prison. Federal prosecutors have recommended a lenient sentence for Flynn, including the possibility of probation, on the ground that he has provided "substantial help" to multiple criminal inquiries. Flynn is the highest-ranking Trump aide so far to face sentencing in the Russia probe. South Korean President Moon Jae-in, right, congratulates the newly-elected head of Interpol Kim Jong-yang, center, for the appointment on Nov. 21 at Cheong Wa Dae, Wednesday. Korean National Police Agency's Commissioner General Min Gap-ryong attended the meeting as well. Yonhap President Moon Jae-in on Wednesday welcomed the recent election of a South Korean as the new head of Interpol, calling it a victory for the entire nation. "I sincerely congratulate and welcome your election as (Interpol) president," Moon said while meeting Kim Jong-yang, the newly elected head of Interpol, formerly the International Criminal Police Organization. "I understand Interpol is the largest international organization with 194 member countries, bigger than the United Nations in terms of the number of member countries. You are a great source of pride for our nation since you were also elected by a large margin," the president said in the meeting held at his office Cheong Wa Dae. In this photo provided by South Korea National Police Agency, South Korea's Kim Jong Yang speaks during the 87th Interpol General Assembly in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Wednesday, Nov. 21, 2018. Kim was elected as Interpol's president on Wednesday, edging out a longtime veteran of Russia's security services who was strongly opposed by other nations. Yonhap Members of the minor opposition Party for Democracy and Peace participate in a rally calling for electoral reform in Seoul on Dec. 13/ Yonhap By Park Ji-won The major political parties agreed in principle last week to introduce a new proportional representation system to better represent voters' party preferences. However, there is still a bumpy road ahead for them to reach a consensus on the details of the new system because they all have different interests. The question is whether the big parties are really willing to revise the proportional representation system. Civic activists and smaller parties have been calling for the introduction of a system similar to the German-style mixed-member proportional representation system (MMPRS) to prevent "dead votes" in elections. Under the MMPRS system seats are allocated to parties according to the proportion of ballots won by their candidates. Currently, out of the 300 National Assembly seats up for grabs, 253 seats are given to the winners of elections in constituencies. The remaining 47 proportional representation seats are divided among the parties based on the people's preferences. The voter casts two votes: one for an election and the other for a party. The current winner-takes-all election system has been criticized for not reflecting the percentage of people who voted for losing candidates and small parties, as the candidate with the most votes wins. In Korea, the proportional representation system was first introduced in 1948 and revised several times over the decades. The present system was adopted in 2004. NGOs and smaller parties have criticized it for aggravating regionalism, which has been aperennnial problematic in South Korean politics. The present system has also been criticized as it is considered favorable to larger parties, which makes it difficult to establish a multi-party system, giving little chance to small parties to expand their presence in the Assembly. For example, in the last legislative elections in 2016, candidates from the Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) didn't win the most votes in total, but won the most Assembly seats. The DPK won 110 constituencies, while the Saenuri Party, the predecessor of the Liberty Korea Party (LKP), won 105 constituencies. However, the DPK actually won 37 percent of the votes, or 8.88 million, while the LKP won 41.5 percent of the votes, or 9.2 million. The DPK currently has 123 seats while the LKP has 113 seats. The minor People's Party, a predecessor of the minor Bareunmirae Party and Party for Democracy and Peace (PDP), meanwhile, won 38 seats in total, or 12.7 percent of the seats, with 26.7 percent of the total votes in the election. Calls are growing to introduce a new representation system that reduces those "dead votes." In 2015, the National Election Commission proposed to the Assembly the introduction of the German-style electoral system. President Moon Jae-in has been supportive of reform, but the big parties have been reluctant to discuss it. To be specific, political parties are focusing on adjusting the details on largely two matters: the number of Assembly seats and the ratio of seats for constituencies versus proportional representation candidates. Many civic activists and smaller parties called for adjusting the ratio of lawmakers elected in constituencies versus those who get seats via proportional representation to 2-to-1 or 3-to-1 in the 300-member Assembly. Some, such as PDP leader Rep. Chung Dong-young, have demanded an increase in the number of Assembly seats to 360. The DPK remains cautious about increasing the total number of seats while the LKP downplays the meaning of the agreement reached last week, saying "It means we are open to discussions rather than wanting reform." Civic groups assert that the country needs a better electoral system as soon as possible to boost political diversity. "If the German-style system is introduced here, Korea will have a more stable multiple-party system and thus be able to focus more on long-term policies, which are badly needed in Korea now," said Ha Seung-soo, co-chairman of the Green Party and of My Vote, a civil rights group. "Canada is also discussing the introduction of a similar system. If we change the system, other countries like Japan, for example, could be affected, too." By Mahmood Elahi This refers to the most topical article: "US-China trade truce," by Andrew Hammond, published in The Korea Times on Dec. 7. Hammond touches the heart of the issue when he says: "Yet, despite Trump's optimism at the weekend about future relations, it is by no means certain that the trade and wider relationship is now on a less combative path in 2019. Trump himself said Tuesday that if the truce did not work out, "remember I am a Tariff Man. When people or countries come to raid the great wealth of our Nation, I want them to pay for the privilege of doing so." U.S. Donald Trump used his anti-China diatribes to rally mostly white blue-collar working classes who blamed China for stealing American jobs by flooding the market with cheap products. Trump called China "a currency manipulator" and blamed China for running massive trade surpluses with the United States. He promised to impose heavy tariffs on Chinese products and revive domestic manufacturing. He asserted this will bring back jobs lost to China while eliminating the U.S. trade deficits with that country. Since assuming the presidency, Trump has kept up his protectionist trade policies vis-a-vis China and other countries with which the United States runs trade deficits. While expressing warm personal relations with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Trump has unilaterally imposed tariffs on Chinese products. The U.S. tariffs on $34 billion of Chinese goods went into effect on July 6. China retaliated with tariffs of an equal size, largely targeting cars and agricultural products. The U.S. has also threatened another $200 billion of tariffs, which invariably would lead China to more retaliatory measures against U.S. goods. An escalating trade war between the United States and China seems to be on the horizon. If allowed to go unchecked, this might do incalculable damage to the international trading order we know today. With two-way trade totaling about $630 billion, China is America's biggest trading partner. Of this, Chinese exports to the U.S. stand at $500 billion, while U.S. exports to China amount to a relatively modest $130 billion, leading to a massive trade surplus of $370 billion in China's favor. This has prompted Trump to denounce China's trade policies and demand major reform to correct this imbalance. But the punitive tariffs he has imposed are already having the opposite effect. American farmers, who have a great deal of their produce tied up in trade with China, are already facing hard times. The retaliatory tariffs imposed by China on imported American farm products have led the Chinese importers to look for alternate suppliers in Canada and Australia. America's loss is Canada's gain. But the loss of the Chinese market may prove costly to American farmers, leading to eventual farm foreclosures. The U.S. tariffs on Chinese products might hurt American consumers. American consumers, particularly those in low-income brackets, who have been able to afford appliances, flat screen TVs, computers and smart phones at reasonable prices because of Chinese production, will see prices soar due to tariffs. This will hit hard the lower-income blue-collar working classes who put Trump in power. Facing higher prices, many of them will reduce consumption, undermining the consumption-driven economy. Trump's tariffs on "low-cost" Chinese goods may prove to be a tax on low-income American consumers. All the major U.S. industries, which for years have purchased Chinese electronics as part of their supply chain, will have to look elsewhere to avert U.S. tariffs or pay a substantially higher price and some will have to close shops, laying off workers. U.S. retail giants such as Walmart, Target and others, who have depended on Chinese producers of consumer goods for supplies, will have to raise their prices, losing customers. For now, the United States and China have agreed not to impose any new tariffs for three months. U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said on Dec. 9 that U.S.-China trade negotiations need to reach an agreement by March 1, or new tariffs will be imposed. At the G20 summit in Argentina, U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to a truce, postponing the planned Jan. 1 U.S. tariff hikes to 25 percent from 10 percent on $200 billion of Chinese goods. This will allow time to negotiate a trade deal. However, the arrest of a top Chinese executive, Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer at Huawei Technologies Co. by Canada at the behest of the United States for violating U.S. sanctions against Iran, has roiled global markets amid fears that it could further escalate the U.S.-China trade tensions. Lighthizer and trade adviser Peter Navarro insisted the trade talks with China would not be derailed by the arrest, which they deemed solely a law-enforcement matter. Let's hope this will not interfere in their bilateral trade talks which have global implications. Normalization of relations between North and South Korea and denuclearization of North Korea may hinge on de-escalation of the U.S.-China trade row. The sticking point is that the United States is asking for concessions across a number of areas in the coming months if higher tariffs are to be avoided. That includes demands for increased purchases of U.S. goods by China, as well as "structural changes" to a system that, for example, forces U.S. corporations to share technology with Chinese partners as a condition for doing business. It is likely that both the United States and China will come to realize that a trade war will equally hurt their own people. Once President Trump sees the support of his working-class base is dwindling because of higher prices for imported goods, he will change course. As for China, it must further open its market and provide better protection for intellectual properties. Let's hope that it will happen before a planned second tranche of even more sweeping tariffs in August. The world is watching. Mahmood Elahi (omega51@sympatico.ca) is a freelance writer By Tom Plate Are new icicles dangling in the surfacing cold war between China and the United States? Mainland Chinese students at U.S. universities number more than 300,000. That's good for China and the U.S., no? Not, we are told, if many are doing more spying than studying. One senior adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump sees so much "infiltration" on campuses that he'd block any additional Chinese students from entry. And to that draconian proposal, he gets little argument from the FBI, whose latest director, in Senate testimony, said many Chinese students in the U.S. were no more than information "collectors" for Beijing. One has to wonder about FBI officials when they agree with the Trump administration. Are they clear what they are saying? Collecting information is precisely what "scholars" and "researchers" do at universities. Sometimes they even share it and/or publish it! and hope it gets widely circulated. A relatively tiny amount is classified or sensitive and unavailable to the average Chinese sophomore from Xian. Besides, there's not enough good top secret stuff to occupy 300,000 students. Even so, the loyalty temperature-taking on our campuses regarding China and the U.S. does appear to be heating up, and on both sides of the divide. As a university professor, I loathe such displays, especially on campuses, and wish paranoid FBI officials would pop chill pills and maybe even go back to school to learn about true intellectual life, as well as the culture of scholarship and information-sharing. And, for that matter, I would ask China's Ministry of State Security, if it does require some of its student exports to live a double life, to cut it out before the FBI has something to sink its teeth into. An incident occurred on my own campus last week that left me yearning for simpler, happier times. An undergraduate student of Chinese ethnicity, whose family lives in Hong Kong, was on assignment from his calligraphy professor. The young man was to create a poster illustrating the difference between traditional and simplified Chinese characters. Having done so, he then posted it, with the instructor's OK, in a section of the university library designated for the display of student work. Oh no! It turned out that the poster's characters could be read as endorsing independence for Hong Kong but then again, they could also be read (I am told) as reaffirming Hong Kong as integral to China. Imagine! A few dozen Chinese mainland students got riled up and viewed the poster as advocacy of independence and complained to university authorities that they found the work needlessly provocative. The university, reacting with both calm tenderness and unmistakable clarity, reiterated its free speech policy while noting the oft-bumptious nature of university culture. Even so, the student, shaken up by the fuss (and well-aware of how high-strung students can get, especially around final exam time), had the poster taken down. This incident illustrates, in these absurdly fraught times, how even when no one does anything wrong, things seem to go wrong anyway. The calligraphy instructor had given out a perfectly good assignment. The student responded with what he thought was a good product. The library posted it for all to admire. The university administration promptly and correctly defended the faculty member and the student when challenged for an explanation by any and all. So, were the Chinese students from the mainland wrong to launch their objections? No. By so doing, they brought attention to the salience and complexity of the continuing conundrum of Hong Kong under the "one country, two systems" mantra. They also reminded us that students from other lands do not place their cultures and emotional loyalties into some sealed bag at customs when they reach our shores. And they reminded us that, as much as they appreciate America and its zany ways (and most really do), they are not Americans; they are Chinese. Is it imaginable that at least some of the mainland student complainers had the thought that if they did not raise the China-sovereignty-sensitivity flag, authorities back home might make note on their return? Whatever a love of country, even proper nationalism, is not the same thing as spying or believing that the Communist Party is never wrong (the FBI and others need to get this into their heads). But I do wish today's students would be less prone to easy insults and be cool about letting a hundred flowers bloom they are at an American university. China and the U.S., 40 years on: It's complicated, but they're still talking Regarding China-U.S. relations, it is clearer than ever that the roiling bilateral yo-yo diplomacy proceeds apace a looming plague on the world's peace of mind. The yo-yo goes up one moment (Trump seeks to cool tariff temperatures), and down the next (Huawei executive arrested). This is not the way to live, on campus or off. But it seems to be spreading. Even good friends, such as Australia and Singapore, wonder how to further hedge their geopolitical bets. Worse yet is the U.S., where suddenly all is paranoia. Even so, on this or any other campus, I greatly respect our students, whether they be from Hong Kong or mainland China. For that is more or less the same thing no? Why can't bilateral life be simpler? Tom Plate is the author of "In the Middle of China's Future" and "Yo-Yo Diplomacy." He teaches at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, where he is clinical professor in the Asian and Asian-American Studies Department. His commentary was distributed by the South China Morning Post. LG Uplus CEO and Vice Chairman Ha Hyun-hwoi speaks during a press conference at the firm's headquarters in Yongsan, Seoul, Wednesday. / Courtesy of LG Uplus By Baek Byung-yeul LG Uplus aims to take the lead in the use of fifth-generation (5G) networks by building a nationwide infrastructure for the super-fast system ahead of its competitors, the CEO of the country's third largest mobile carrier said Wednesday. "We have invested 4 trillion won ($3.56 billion) to complete a nationwide infrastructure for our 5G network. As of Dec. 18, we have built 5,500 base stations nationwide," Ha Hyun-hwoi, also the vice chairman of LG Uplus, told reporters during a press conference at the firm's headquarters in Yongsan, Seoul. Ha said this was "a pre-emptive move" to prepare for the penetration of 5G smartphones which will be available starting March 2019. "This is a pre-emptive move to take the lead in the technology which will be an industry standard," Ha said. Ha said the next-generation network will have a bigger impact than 4G as it can be applied not only to business-to-consumer (B2C) but also the business-to-business (B2B) sector. "We expect the 5G network will help increase the sales of smartphones. In the B2B sector, the 5G network will also create momentum to enhance the development of technologies such as smart cities and farms, drones and robots," Ha said. Stating that many people are still unaware of the advantages of 5G networks, Ha added the firm will bolster its marketing efforts. To that end, the firm unveiled a slogan for its 5G service "Changing everyday life, Uplus 5G." LG Uplus said the slogan aims to attract consumers by providing 5G services that can help improve their daily life. Speaking of using network equipment from Chinese maker Huawei, Ha said the firm will have a public inspection by an international organization that will evaluate the security of network equipment. "To make sure there are no concerns about security issues over using network equipment from Huawei, we will invite reporters, network experts and government officials to an inspection conducted by an international network security evaluation organization from Spain in the first half of 2019," Ha said. LG Uplus has faced controversy over security concerns surrounding Huawei's network equipment. SK Telecom and KT two other mobile carriers here excluded the Chinese firm from their 5G partners amid security concerns. Choi Joo-sik, executive vice president of the firm, also said LG will inspect all network equipment provided by not only Huawei but also the firm's three other suppliers Samsung Electronics, Nokia and Ericsson. By Nam Hyun-woo Lotte Group Chemical Business unit head Kim Gyo-hyun Lotte Group replaced the heads of its food and chemical units, in what appears to be Chairman Shin Dong-bin's bold move to embrace young leadership after his return to the helm. According to the group, Wednesday, it named Lotte Chemical CEO Kim Gyo-hyun the new head of the group's chemical business unit, replacing Vice Chairman Huh Soo-young. Also, Lotte Foods CEO Lee Yeong-ho was named chief of food business unit, replacing Vice Chairman Lee Jae-hyuk. Lotte Group is using business unit system to better control its multiple affiliates in similar sectors. It has four units chemicals, food, distribution and hotel & service. The new chemical unit head is known as an overseas business specialist, spearheading Lotte Chemical's 2010 acquisition of Titan Chemical, now LC Titan, in Malaysia. Kim headed LC Titan from 2014 to 2017, and oversaw its listing on the Malaysian bourse last year. Industry watchers said Chairman Shin highly appreciated Kim's achievements in overseas businesses and called on him to contribute more to Lotte's multiple movements in overseas markets. In a 50 trillion won investment blueprint announced earlier this year, Lotte Group has earmarked 20 trillion won in its chemical business. Lotte Group Food Business unit head Lee Yeong-ho Inside the Galleria Department Store's Timeworld branch in Daejeon / Courtesy of Hanwha Galleria By Park Jae-hyuk Hanwha Galleria Timeworld, which runs a department store in Daejeon, will open the second Galleria Luxury Hall in 2019, benchmarking the first at the main store in southeastern Seoul, Hamhwa Galleria said Wednesday. The retailer is seeking to attract French and Italian luxury brands and fine-dining restaurants to open stores in the new luxury hall. Galleria Department Store's Timeworld branch in Daejeon / Courtesy of Hanwha Galleria At its Dec. 11 meeting, the La Jolla Development Permit Review (DPR) Committee voted unanimously to recommend that the City approve reconstructing the historic Windansea belvedere shade structure built adjacent to the Kolmar Street stairs around 1912 and, if at all permissible, to expedite the process. The belvedere, one of five original shade structures, was torn down in 1982 during an act of vandalism. (A La Jolla Light article on Oct. 7, 1982 reported police saying that chains attached to a vehicle were used to haul down the public structure.)Its replacement, first promised by lifeguards at the time, never materialized due to lack of funding. However, as applicant Melinda Merryweather explained, Friends of Windansea will pay for the entire project now. (La Jolla Parks & Beaches already endorsed the project and the La Jolla Community Planning Association ratified the request, voting to send a letter to the California Coastal Commission indicating the intention to rebuild the belvedere.) Rastetter Cabana Land-use attorney Matt Peterson and his co-presenter, Paul Vaughan, requested DPRs recommendation for a Coastal Development Permit (CDP) to remove an existing 3,355-square foot one-story and construct a 905-square-foot, one-bedroom dwelling with two onsite parking spaces and a spa at 303 Sea Lane. I never get to stand up here asking for a smaller house, Peterson joked. They also seek a lot-tie agreement, Peterson explained, since their client bought the lot next door and wants to use it just for additional space and guest quarters. If we could get everyone there to do that, I think the property values would probably quadruple, trustee Mike Costello said . Trustee Diane Kane thought the project could be fast-tracked, but was advised by Costello: We have a policy, the first house on the ocean like this, we dont do that. DPR chair Brian Will replied: Weve also never had a situation where the structure fits entirely within the outline of whats already there. The committee told the presenters to return to the next DPR meeting with a cycle-issues report from the City, in addition to cross-sections and a landscape plan. Presenter Claude-Anthony Marengo answers a question from trustee Diane Kane at DPRs Dec. 11 meeting. (COREY LEVITAN) Brodiaea Way Residence Presenter Claude-Anthony Marengo requested a recommendation for a CDP and Site Development Permit to demolish an existing residence and construct a 15,670-square-foot, two-story house with a basement garage and a 738-square-foot detached pool house at 7362 Brodiaea Way.The committee asked to be shown photos and two section diagrams next time. Marengo defends 1590 Coast Walk During the public comment section at the top of the meeting, DPR member Diane Kane addressed a development at 1590 Coast Walk, which is drawing protests from neighbors about its scale especially because it blocks what was once a narrow view of the ocean. (The house, being developed by Marengo Morton Architects and Dodd and Associates Engineering, was originally approved locally more than 10 years ago and has undergone City-approved changes ever since, before getting the green light to proceed with current construction plans.) Can we investigate what happened on that project? Kane asked.Marengo replied that it came through DPR twice and complies with all code, and that it meets all view corridor requirements. Its identical to what this committee approved, Marengo said. The only problem, according to Marengo, is that the scaffolding unintentionally came down. We still have to do stone and spandrel windows on the (street) side, so it looks like a box, he said, but its intended to have windows all on that side just not functional windows. Marengo explained that there wont be real windows so the concrete can block street noise. DPR next meets 4 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 8 at the La Jolla Rec Center, 615 Prospect St. Executive director Jodi Rudick enacted a new format when the La Jolla Village Merchants Association held its annual strategic planning meeting on Dec. 12 at the La Jolla Riford Library. The format inspired by the Main Street America Association broke officers, board members and members of the public into five groups offering opinions on how to improve the La Jolla business improvement district in each of five key areas: 1) organizational excellence; 2) economic vitality and merchant development; 3) design and ambience; 4) promotion (events and experiences); and 5) promotion (marketing and publicity). Each group wrote its best ideas on a board, then rotated around the library meeting room to the four other areas. Here, they prioritized the previous groups ideas. Another rotation and each group assigned each of the previously prioritized ideas a feasibility grade from A to F. Each group eventually rotated back to its starting point and delivered a final presentation of the ideas. A group prioritizes ideas in the Design and Ambience area. COREY LEVITAN Strict time was kept by Rudick, who acted like part drill sergeant and part standup comic. Stay creative! Rudik encouraged the groups. Brainstorm as if there is not an attorney on the planet!The suggestions emerging from this process included: Discount cards for La Jolla locals with the merchants LJVMA associate memberships Applying for a community enhancement grant Reprioritizing the Belvedere pedestrian shopping district at Girard Avenue and Prospect Street A taxi and Uber/Lyft zone* A First Friday art, wine and food event Bringing back Concerts in the Park By far the issue raised the most, however, was parking. Most participants saw a need for a coordinated merchant validation program with the two parking companies operating in The Village, ACE and LAZ. I really think the local would take it nicely if we tried to make some true, concerted effort, said Natalie Aguirre, store manager of J. McLaughlin. There is the perception that theres no parking in La Jolla when its not true. Just LAZ alone has 16 parking structures. Gary Wright, co-owner of Wright On Communications, said he thought La Jolla was hindered the most by not having a strong brand. What is the brand of La Jolla? Wright asked during his presentation for Promotion (Marketing and Publicity). The question is what should La Jolla be known for. And if you try to be everything to everybody, youre going to be nothing to nobody. Our group concluded that were not going to get to the answer, but it needs an exercise to go through. The brand needs to be cleaned up. It needs to be defined and spit-polished. You start with target audiences. A slogan is not a brand. Its just a slogan. The suggestions will be edited and tweaked by the executive board, then presented at LJVMAs Jan. 9 meeting for a vote to adopt as the official 2019 strategic plan. The work that you did here was amazing, Rudick told the group and the ideas mind-boggling. Tourism meetings Rudick and LJVMA president Brett Murphy reported meeting with the San Diego Tourism Authority earlier this month, as Murphy said, just getting some feedback and asking a ton of questions. We are going to be taking a look at what theyre doing in Gaslamp and Little Italy and figure out how to do something like that in La Jolla, Murphy said, referring to the repurposing of some streets as pedestrian walkways with fountains. What we came out of this with is that we need to create better experiences for people in La Jolla. Does this idea bring business into La Jolla? If we can really hone in on some action items that focus on that, we will be successful. Rudick added: Its about heads in beds and feet on the streets. LJVMA president Brett Murphy, executive director Jodi Rudick and board member Laurnie Durisoe pose with Bizx chief growth officer Daniel Kosh at the LJVMA/Bizx holiday party at CAVU. COREY LEVITAN Also at LJVMA... Star-studded walk: The board voted unanimously to write a letter of recommendation supporting the establishment of a Hollywood Walk of Fame-like walk of stars somewhere in La Jolla. The idea was presented at the groups Oct. 10 meeting by Robert Alexander, president of similar programs in both Las Vegas and Palm Springs. Rudick noted that the LJVMA would have zero commitment in terms of resources and finances, since those would all come through sponsorships arranged by Alexanders company The board voted unanimously to write a letter of recommendation supporting the establishment of a Hollywood Walk of Fame-like walk of stars somewhere in La Jolla. The idea was presented at the groups Oct. 10 meeting by Robert Alexander, president of similar programs in both Las Vegas and Palm Springs. Rudick noted that the LJVMA would have zero commitment in terms of resources and finances, since those would all come through sponsorships arranged by Alexanders company Toast to the New Year: Group members adjourned to attend a joint Bizx/LJVMA holiday party at CAVU, the former Absolution by The Sea brewery. Walter Munk speaks at Point Loma Nazarene How do you land the internationally legendary oceanographer Walter Munk as a guest speaker for your administrative communications class at Point Loma Nazarene University (PLNU)? Easy: Be the daughter of one of the founders of the Walter Munk Foundation of the Oceans! Professor Madeline Scarpella, who was raised and lives in La Jolla, called in the favor and it was granted big time. In addition to Munk, guest speakers included Foundation reps Mary Munk, Damien Leloup and Scarpellas mother, Julie. While Walter was speaking, I took a moment to pause and look up at my students, Scarpella recalled. I have never seen them so engaged and focused. I have never seen them look at me that way when I lecture. Walter and the foundation really had a positive effect on them and they were beyond interested in hearing what he had to say. Almost mesmerized. It was the first time Munk ever spoke at PLNU, Scarpella reported. La Jolla prof named worlds leading diabetes expert Dr. Matthias von Herrath founder of the Type 1 Diabetes Center at La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI) has been named the worlds leading expert in the disease by Expertscape, an online base of biomedical expertise. Rankings by Expertscape use an algorithm to assign a weighted score to peer-reviewed scientific publications over the last 10 years to identify the most knowledgeable and experienced physicians, clinicians and researchers across more than 26,000 specific topics. Dr. von Herrath splits his time between his lab at La Jolla Institute and Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, where he was recently named vice president and senior medical officer. Veterinarians day at Childrens School Author Ruth MacPete recently held a book-reading accompanied by her dog, Oski at The Childrens School on Dec. 6. MacPete, the San Diego veterinarian who has appeared on Good Morning America, The Doctors and Good Day LA read her book, Lisette the Vet, to 70 students. Afterwards, she talked about what it takes to become a vet (21 years of school) and offered students to her stethoscope to listen to Oskis heart. The Childrens School reports that the students who have been writing their own books in writing workshops were excited to meet a published author. UCSD campus fire station approved The first fire station on the campus of UC San Diego has passed its first hurdle. The Citys Public Safety and Livable Neighborhoods Committee has unanimously approved its construction. The 10,500-square-foot fire station is earmarked for the northwest corner of the UC San Diego campus, near the intersection of North Torrey Pines Road and Northpoint Driveway. Currently, UCSD hosts 36,000 students, with the nearest fire station 1.5 miles away at 4285 Eastgate Mall. This fire station is long overdue and I am appreciative of UC San Diego for their patience and commitment throughout the process, said City Council member Barbara Bry, a member of the aforementioned committee. The UC San Diego Fire Station is a much-needed infrastructure addition which will greatly benefit the surrounding community. Next, the proposal will go before the entire City Council in January. Salk Institute uses fruit flies to improve computer searches New research from the Salk Institute sheds light on an important neurobiological problem how organisms detect new odors and could also improve algorithms for novelty detection in computer science. The research, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that adding an algorithm for how fly brains identify similar odors developed in 2017 by Saket Navlakha, an assistant professor in Salks Integrative Biology Laboratory greatly improved computer similarity searches, such as those that suggest products that are similar to your previous purchases. When a fly smells an odor, the fly needs to quickly figure out if it has smelled the odor before, to determine if the odor is new and something it should pay attention to, Navlakha said. In computer science, this is an important task called novelty detection. Understanding how novelty detection strategies compare in both domains could give us valuable insights into both brain algorithms and computing. UCSD develops metastasis sensors Researchers at UC San Diego have developed sensors that detect and measure cancers ability to spread. In a paper published online in iScience, senior author and UCSD School of Medicine professor Pradipta Ghosh described identifying a protein and its unique modification, called tyrosine-phosphorylated CCDC88A (GIV/Girdin), only present in solid tumor cells. This modification could represent a point of convergence of multiple signaling pathways commonly hijacked by tumor cells during metastasis. Although there are many ways to detect metastasis once it has occurred, there has been nothing available to see or measure the potential of a tumor cell to metastasize in the future, Gosh said. So at the Center for Network Medicine, we tackled this challenge by engineering biosensors designed to monitor not one, not two, but multiple signaling programs that drive tumor metastasis. Upon sensing those signals, a fluorescent signal would be turned on only when tumor cells acquired high potential to metastasize, and therefore turn deadly. The sensors need further refinement, Gosh wrote, but have the potential to be a transformative advance for cancer cell biology. $2 million in college scholarships available Hundreds of scholarships, worth more than $2 million, are available for San Diego students pursuing higher education during the 2019-2020 school year from the San Diego Foundation. Applications are available online through Feb. 5. Investing in our students is one of the most important ways to build a strong local talent pipeline for our region, said Danielle Valenciano, director of community scholarships for the San Diego Foundation. Todays students will be the leaders of tomorrow. By supporting them with scholarships, we are creating a more inclusive economy and workforce, and building a lifelong connection between San Diego students and the region. The awards generally ranging from $1,000 to $5,000 are granted to attendees of four-year universities, two-year colleges, graduate or trade/vocational schools. To apply, visit sdfoundation.org/scholarshipapplication Airbus has delivered the 400th A320 Family aircraft from its Final Assembly Line Asia (FALA) in northern China's Tianjin Municipality, announced Airbus China Tuesday. An A320 aircraft of Air China [Photo: caacnews.com.cn] The A320neo airplane was delivered to Air China, the country's national flag carrier, representing another milestone of the industrial cooperation and partnership between Airbus and China's aviation industry, said Airbus China. In 2008, a joint venture of the A320 final assembly line was set up in Tianjin to meet surging demand from Chinese customers. It is the third single-aisle aircraft final assembly line location of Airbus and first outside Europe. Airbus has four A320 Family production facilities around the world, including in Toulouse in France, Hamburg in Germany, Tianjin in China, and Mobile in the United States. China is the largest single-country market for Airbus, representing about one-quarter of its global sales. In 2017, Airbus delivered 176 aircraft to China. The same year, the value of industrial cooperation between Airbus and China exceeded 640 million U.S. dollars, and the figure is expected to reach one billion dollars by 2020. La Jolla Shores previews its new map The Friends of La Jolla Shores (FOLJS) and the Walter Munk Foundation for the Oceans invite the public to preview the new Map of the Grand Canyons of La Jolla, on New Years Day at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The 2,400-square-foot mosaic fabricated by Robin Brailsford and Wick Alexander depicts the sea life and underwater topography of the part of the ocean off La Jolla Shores that oceanographers Walter Munk and Mel Traylor first mapped for a 1947 research paper. A previous map designed by Rick Sparhawk and Lynn Reeves was installed in 2008 next to the Kellogg Park playground. Soon afterward, however, the recycled crushed glass it was constructed of began to loosen, crack and create a safety hazard. By 2015, the surface was removed and the City replaced it with decomposed granite. Munk and his wife, FOLJS president Mary Coakley-Munk, contributed $275,000 toward replacing the map. We felt it was right for a community that was so supportive, financially and otherwise, of the initial project to have it replaced and done right, Coakley-Munk said, noting that it was her hope that the public might match their donation, which hasnt quite happened yet. (If youre interested in contributing, e-mail mary@waltermunkfoundation.org) The new map made from a more durable material invented by Brailsford is expected to be installed by March in Kellogg Park. Its going to be 10 times better than the last one, Coakley-Munk said. Theyve doubled the number of species represented. The preview will be held 1--4 p.m. Jan. 1 at 8890 Biological Grade (the old Southwest Fisheries Building). Parking and refreshments are free. Orphan choir wows La Jolla The Matsiko World Orphan Choir made its return to the La Jolla Open Aire Market on Sunday, Dec. 16, where it made its local debut last year. Once again, the groups energetic burst of world music stopped and wowed produce-samplers in their tracks. The choir currently consists of 23 of the worlds poorest orphaned and at-risk children six from Peru, two from India, nine from Liberia and six from Nepal. Participants in the choir are auditioned annually, and they are selected from a pool of hundreds before leaving their home nations to travel for the first time in their lives, said Don Windham, founder of the International Childrens Network (ICN), which takes the children, ages 10 to 18, on an 11-month tour around the United States each year. ICN attempts to procure tax-deductible sponsorships for the children that end up changing not only their lives, but the lives of their families and villages. For more information, visit matsikochoir.com La Jolla PR exec safaris for money, awareness Julie Wright, co-owner of La Jollas Wright on Communications, just returned from a 12-day African safari that included a 40-mile fundraising walk in Kenya, during which she and five friends raised $10,000 each for African elephants through the nonprofit Space for Giants. (Wrights funds were matched by the Roddenberry Foundation, whose president, Heidi Roddenberry daughter-in-law of the late Gene Roddenberry of Star Trek fame was in Wrights group.) A highlight of the safari was a visit to the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, where Wright got to see the last two surviving northern white rhinoceroses on the planet who are protected round-the-clock by armed guards. It was so much to absorb, Wright said. It was exciting to see them so close but at the same time, sad to know this is the end of the line for that species. Childrens Pool resealed The City of San Diego performed its annual closure of Childrens Pool Beach on Dec. 15, to accommodate the start of harbor seal pupping season. Since 2014, the City has closed the La Jolla beach from Dec. 15 through May 15. The rope line, which served as a reminder for the public to keep a safe distance, was removed since the entire beach is now off limits. New coastal info app has bizarre origins The California Coastal Commission (CCC) has released a new iPhone app. Available for free in the App Store, YourCoast provides directions, photos and information for 1,563 beaches, trails and parks along the Golden States coast. (The info includes which locations have restrooms and parking, and which allow dogs.) The app has its origins in a 2013 settlement with billionaire tech entrepreneur Sean Parker, whose $45 million wedding, at a Big Sur hotel campground, resulted in a Coastal Act violation for impacting public access and sensitive habitats. Although the previous property owner was directly responsible for the permit violations, Parker the co-founder of Napster and first president of Facebook covered the penalties and agreed to work with the CCC to help build something beneficial to the state. This is a case of turning lemons into lemonade, said CCC chief of enforcement Lisa Haage. We negotiated a creative agreement with a willing partner of great ability and expertise that will widely benefit the public. We literally ended up working with some of the worlds best tech engineers to create something that everyone can use and enjoy. United Cerebral Palsy celebrates 60th In 1958, the San Diego Cerebral Palsy Foundation serving parents of disabled children looking for a better life since the 1940s joined forces with United Cerebral Palsy to become the United Cerebral Palsy Association of San Diego County. Since then, UCP has grown from a single location in Kearny Mesa to three across San Diego. For those of you who have been involved over the past 60 years, thank you, said UCP board president Greg Wells. To learn more, visit ucpsd.org Red Cross still needs blood The Red Cross says it urgently needs blood and platelet donors to help ensure that blood remains available this holiday season for vital medical treatments and unforeseen emergencies. Upcoming La Jolla donation times include 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Friday, Jan. 4 at the Lawrence Family JCC, 4126 Executive Drive; 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Jan. 8 at UCSD Library Walk, 9500 Gilman Drive; and 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Jan. 14 at Scripps Green Hospital, 10666 N. Torrey Pines Road. Appointments can be scheduled via RedCrossBlood.org or (800) 733-2767. Walk-in appointments are available, but may be associated with a wait. As a special thanks for meeting the urgent need, the Red Cross says that all donors from Dec. 20 to Jan. 6 will receive a long-sleeved Red Cross T-shirt (while supplies last). La Jolla doctor helps brief FDA La Jolla plastic surgeon Robert Singer was part of a multi-specialty task force that briefed the FDA on aesthetic uses of stem cells on Dec. 3. Singer heads up a private practice and is clinical professor of plastic surgery at UC San Diego. Moving to a new city can be full of anxiety and excitement. When you feel scared, you cant enjoy the... Most real estate agents have an obligation to market their business to potential clients. You have to make sure that... Were sure you already know, but lets repeat: Burlington is a city located in the Halton, Ontario area. It is... A personal injury occurs when a person's body, mind, or emotions are injured due to the negligence, carelessness, or wrongful... I Agree This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this website you are giving consent to cookies being used. Visit our Privacy and Cookie Policy Rapid urbanization, country's ability to adapt to changes in markets credited China played a significant role in global wage growth from 2008 to 2017, helping the average wage to rise by 22 percent, compared with just 13 percent if the country is excluded, according to a report by the International Labor Organization. Experts attributed China's influence on wages to the country's steady economic growth and its changing growth drivers. According to the new report, which was based on data from 136 countries, the annual average global real wage in 2017 grew by 1.8 percent year-on-year, the lowest rate since 2008. The growth rate in 2016 was 2.4 percent. The report again suggested China was a significant factor. Without China, the average real global wage increased 1.1 percent last year. "China contributed to the global wage growth," said Su Zhongxing, dean of Human Resources Management at Renmin University of China. "China has a large labor population. What's more, its wages grew rapidly in recent years. These factors obviously will help the world's average wage rise." Xu Ding, an ILO economist for wage and labor relations and one of the report's authors, said changes in China's mode of economic development also contributed. "The economy in China has been growing steadily over the last decade, despite the fact that the main drivers of growth have been shifting to different sectors," he said. "All of them have translated into high levels of employment and an increase in real wages." According to the National Bureau of Statistics, 33 percent of China's employees worked in tertiary industries in 2008, compared with 45 percentor more than 349 million peoplein 2017. During the period, China's average wage increased by 8.2 percent annually in the decade, much higher than the global growth rate, according to the ILO report. Following the same pattern, average real wages nearly doubled in China between 2008 and 2017, even as other G20 countries, including Japan, the United Kingdom and Italy, saw a slower rise and fluctuations. Xu said China's wages likely remained on an upward trend because the country has adapted well to changing international and domestic markets. "When international trade slowed down, China promoted its domestic demand and employment in different ways," he said. "Also, in a number of provinces, minimum wage policies were used to foster local economic activity." He said China's rapid urbanization was another catalyst for wage growth. "People who were farmers in rural areas now receive salaries in cities, increasing the pace of average wage growth," he said. The NBS found that 813 million permanent urban residents accounted for 58 percent of the total population in 2017 compared with 47 percent in 2008. Chelsea Clintons fifth book for young readers will urge children to fight to protect endangered animals, the former first daughter announced this week on Twitter. Dont Let Them Disappear: 12 Endangered Species Across the Globe will be published on April 2 by Penguin imprint Philomel Books. The publisher describes the book, aimed at children ages 4 through 8, as a beautiful book about the animals who share our planet and what we can do to help them survive. The book will provide tips on how to help endangered species, including rhinos, tigers, whales, pandas and more, according to the publisher. Advertisement Author and artist Gianna Marino, whose books include Night Animals and If I Had a Horse, will provide the illustrations for Clintons book. The cover features a menagerie of cute beasts, including a giraffe, elephant, polar bear and sea otter. This cover image released by Philomel Books shows Dont Let Them Disappear: 12 Endangered Species Across the Globe, by Chelsea Clinton with illustrations by Gianna Marino. The book is scheduled for release on April 2. (Associated Press) Clintons interest in protecting endangered animals goes back more than 20 years. In 1997, she and her mother, First Lady Hillary Clinton, visited Tanzania, where they learned about the poaching of elephants for ivory. Since then, the familys Clinton Global Initiative has sponsored a program to fight elephant poaching in Africa. Dont Let Them Disappear will be Clintons fifth childrens book. Her previous ones include Its Your World: Get Informed, Get Inspired & Get Going! Start Now!: You Can Make a Difference, She Persisted: 13 American Children Who Changed the World and She Persisted Around the World: 13 Women Who Changed History. Clintons She Persisted books, which take their name from Sen. Mitch McConnells now-famous rebuke of his colleague Sen. Elizabeth Warren, were both bestsellers and have remained popular in the months since they were released. Shes not the only popular author in her family both of her parents have hit the bestseller lists, with Hillary Clintons 2017 memoir What Happened and Bill Clintons 2018 collaboration with James Patterson, The President Is Missing, both racking up strong sales. The hours would be long, the sun blazing, the food terrible Oscar Ivan Contreras knew what to expect as the bus rumbled toward America. Hed been on this bus before, bound for California and a seasons work picking blueberries. It was partly math that pulled him back now: Six hours pay as a legal, temporary worker for Munger Brothers LLC, North Americas largest blueberry grower, equals a weeks wages back home in the Mexican state of Nayarit. But almost as soon as Contreras and some 600 other Mexican guest workers arrived in Californias Central Valley, he realized something was very different from the year before. It was spring 2017, and America had changed. Mungers managers were surlier, he says, and more demanding. On many days, workers got no lunch until 3 p.m. and when the food came, it was often rotten or there wasnt enough, Contreras says. Munger failed to supply sufficient drinking water or toilets at one of its facilities, resulting in a $6,000 fine from the state. Workers say they were compelled to work even when sick or injured. Ultimately, the company fired dozens of them when they walked off the job for a day after one man collapsed in the fields. Advertisement Throughout, those who complained heard a new refrain from Mungers supervisors, tuned to the era of President Trumps strict immigration policies: Go back to Mexico. This response to every gripe was a way to remind the worker the company has the power to fire them and send them home, according to a court affidavit submitted by Sierra Giovanna, who managed Mungers guest worker program before she was fired in August 2017. The affidavit was filed in a federal lawsuit in which workers accuse Delano, Calif.-based Munger of labor trafficking. Mungers treatment of its guest workers in 2017 has drawn fines from regulators in California and Washington state, and a federal investigation by the Department of Labor that officials say is ongoing. The company declined to answer questions for this article, but said in a statement after the workers filed suit in January that it intends to vigorously fight their claims. All employees are treated well and are paid well, the company said. In court filings, Munger denies wrongdoing and alleges the guest workers production was exceedingly low, possibly because some of the laborers tried to force others to slow down, according to one filing. According to company filings, Munger provided sufficient food for nourishment, but some of the laborers in 2017 were picky eaters who tried to game the system for free or low-cost medical care. Between the blueberry harvests of 2016 and 2017, something did change in America. During Trumps first year as president, arrests of immigrants suspected of being in the country illegally jumped 41%, stoking fear of deportation in immigrant communities. Such arrests accelerated even more in 2018, increasing 55% over 2016. Other administration policies have eroded protections against labor trafficking that is, compelling people to work through force, fraud or coercion according to immigration lawyers. In short, worker advocates say, Trumps immigration crackdown has become the nasty boss best friend. Terrified of la migra, more workers are putting up with unpaid wages, untreated injuries and various forms of mental and physical abuse, says David Weil, who was director of the U.S. Labor Departments Wage and Hour Division under President Obama. Industries dependent on immigrant labor have been emboldened by the Trump administrations anti-immigrant policies, says Victor Narro, a director at the UCLA Labor Center, an academic research institute. Its all about maximizing profitability by not paying minimum wage or not offering workers the labor protections theyre entitled to. Its impossible to quantify how employers behavior is changing, but data from the California Labor Commissioners Office offer a glimpse. Since Trumps January 2017 inauguration, the agency has received at least 172 complaints alleging that employers threatened to retaliate against workers based on their immigration status which is illegal under federal and California law. In 2014 through 2016, that office received just 29 such complaints. The scores of new cases suggest how brazen some employers have become: A tile installers boss threatened to call Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents right in the middle of a hearing at the Labor Commissioners office. You have to stop doing this for illegals, the employer beseeched the commissioners staff members, who fined him $20,000. A vitamin store owner told an employee seeking back pay that shed use President Donald Trump to return the worker to her country, according to the commissioners findings. The owner followed up with a text to the worker: Viva Donald Trump! She was fined $5,000. A drywall hanger won a claim for a weeks back pay against a general contracting company whose owner responded with an angry text to the worker: Guess what, its not over, its my turn now, the vulgarity-studded message said. TRUMP IS COMING TO TOWN. Have [you] ... deported. The labor commissioner imposed a $100,000 fine for the retaliatory threats, half payable to the worker. That drew another response from the owner, this time on Facebook. I think TRUMP is the best president ever, but were still having problems, he wrote. Why is it that illegal Mexicans have more rights than hard-working General Contractors? Its not just California. Audrey Richardson, an employment attorney with Greater Boston Legal Services, says she sees far worse cases workers kept essentially in servitude. I dont think its an exaggeration to call some of the cases were seeing Trump slavery, she said. The White House and the U.S. Department of Labor didnt respond to repeated requests for comment. :: Even as the administrations hard line at the border has led to tear gas and turmoil, the agricultural guest worker program that brings foreign nationals to the United States on temporary visas has grown rapidly. Berry growers such as Munger are the leading source of demand for the workers, government data show, accounting for more than 10% of the 200,049 positions that were certified in 2017 and the 242,762 certified this year. In 2017, Munger paid Oscar Contreras and his fellow guest workers about $13 an hour, a rate set by the federal Department of Labor, state regulations and unions. Employers that use the guest worker program have a number of obligations. They must cover employees costs for travel to the United States once the workers have completed half the contract period and then cover the trip home at the contracts end. They must provide lodging and three meals a day, at minimum cost to the workers. And they must provide some workers compensation insurance to cover illnesses and injuries. For Contreras, as for thousands of other Central Americans, not all the reasons for heading north were economic. A summer in the United States offered at least temporary escape from Nayarit, a pocket of Mexico where Joaquin El Chapo Guzmans arrest had triggered a murderous turf war between rival drug cartels. Contreras wanted a better life. He went to California to support his three young children and to try to earn enough money to pay tuition for a medical imaging degree. Im a college dropout, he says. I wanted to go back to the university and finish my degree. Not long after work began, an apparent allergic reaction caused his face to swell and his throat to constrict, Contreras says. His head pounded in the heat, but he pressed on. He watched another laborer, Jesus Solorzano Leon, try to keep working through an inexplicable and sudden facial paralysis. Leon says he spent the last of his savings on co-pays for injections and doctors bills before giving up. Munger refused to pay for his trip home, so co-workers chipped in for his bus ticket, says Leon, whose droopy right eye earned him the nickname La Pirata. Munger, in its answer to the workers complaint, denies it sent sick workers back to Mexico without paying for their transportation. Workers say their bosses had little sympathy for such ailments. You came here to suffer, not for vacation, a company supervisor named Jessica told the workers, according to sworn affidavits filed in the labor-trafficking lawsuit. One hotel for the workers, near Stockton, was riddled with bedbugs, says Giovanna, the former Munger labor manager. :: After the California harvest, most of the Munger workers were bused 900 miles north to another of the companys blueberry plantations in Sumas, Wash., called Sarbanand Farms. They were housed in a barracks-style camp, enclosed by a cyclone fence with a guard at the gate. Threats and abuse got worse, the workers say. There, Munger supervisor Nidia Perez admonished them that only those on their deathbeds could miss work, according to workers affidavits. The warning was reinforced by the sight of U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents in marked SUVs patrolling outside the camp, which lies a few miles from the Canadian border. In her answer to the workers complaint, Perez, who is named as a defendant in the lawsuit, admits she told workers not to miss work unless youre dying, but she denies she meant they shouldnt take sick days or report medical problems to supervisors. Pressure to pick faster intensified as mid-summer temperatures reached the 90s and smoke from Canadian forest fires enveloped the fields. One boss declared that any worker who failed to pick two boxes of berries an hour would be deported, according to a workers affidavit, which doesnt name the supervisor. In the camps dining hall, proctors marked workers hands when they went through the buffet line to ensure no one got seconds, according to court affidavits. When the food ran out, some workers didnt eat. Munger often served spoiled meat and 3-day-old scrambled eggs, says Maria Gallardo, who worked at Sarbanand as a cook and food server in August 2017. When Gallardo pointed this out to one of the supervisors, the woman told her it doesnt matter, Gallardo says. As the camp population tripled to almost 600 workers, the food budget didnt keep up, she says. She gave workers extra tortillas and seconds when she could, but she thinks most of them left hungry. It was very unjust, says Gallardo, who was fired after 10 days on the job. In recent court filings, Munger has said that its food was nourishing and that workers complained only because some had different tastes. Coastal workers preferred seafood, one filing says. Others preferred carne asada. :: One man at Sarbanand was particularly skinny. Honesto Ibarra would eat only a few beans, no rice or meat, Gallardo recalls. She asked him why. I just dont feel well, he told her. In truth, Ibarra had diabetes, and hed apparently run out of medicine at the camp. In court filings, company officials say he never disclosed his condition to them. On Aug. 1, Ibarra didnt get up for work. He told a Munger office assistant who brought all three meals to his bedside that day that he had a headache and wanted to sleep it off. He called Mexico and told his wife he was going to give his notice and come home, according to Corrie Yackulic, the Ibarra familys Seattle attorney. The next morning Munger manager Javier Sampedro rejected Ibarras request for the companys help to fly home and ordered him back to work, according to co-worker Barbaro Rosas, one of the two named plaintiffs in the labor-trafficking suit. Later that day, Ibarra collapsed in the field. Sampedro asked the office assistant to drive Ibarra to the emergency room, but the assistant refused, noting his lethargy and labored breathing, and called 911, according to Washington state investigative documents obtained by Bloomberg. Ibarras coworkers demanded information about his condition in a meeting with Sampedro the next night. They warned the farm manager that others might collapse without more water and shade. Some asked why Munger provided medical attention only after workers were deathly ill. On Aug. 4, about 60 of the workers didnt show up for work, saying they were striking for better working conditions. A day later, Munger fired them. Company officials cited insubordination and told the workers they had an hour to leave camp before Munger called police and immigration agents to take them away, according to workers court affidavits. Oscar Contreras was among those fired. Meanwhile, Ibarra, 28, lay comatose in a Seattle hospital. He died two days later. The cause of death was complications from diabetes, according to the medical examiner. A subsequent state investigation found that his death was unrelated to work conditions. After his death, Ibarras wife, Brenda, and their three kids were evicted from their home in the rural Mexican state of Zacatecas, and they had to move into a two-room shack with no electricity, according to Yackulic, her lawyer. She recently applied for a widows pension from the state of Washington workers compensation system, Yackulic says. Munger has given nothing, she says. Munger referred questions about Ibarras death to a statement issued by Sarbanand Farms this August, which said the grower fully supported his family during this ordeal. It added: We are committed to the well-being of every worker. :: Most employers who use the H-2A temporary visa program comply with its rules, but a few unscrupulous users tarnish the rest, says Jason Resnick, vice president and general counsel of Western Growers, which represents farmers in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado. We know Americans are not willing to engage in labor-intensive agriculture at any wage, but if were going to feed this country, were going to need to rely on foreign labor, Resnick says. We dont want workers to be exploited or denied benefit. But when someone intentionally violates the rules, it casts a pall on the entire program, he added, referring to the industry as a whole, not Munger specifically. Whether applied to guest workers, permanent residents or native-born citizens, a bedrock principle of U.S. labor law is that every job holder, regardless of immigration status, enjoys equal protection from abusive employers. Yes, its illegal to hire immigrants who arent authorized to be in the country, but its just as illegal to pay them less than minimum wage, skimp on overtime or make them work in unsafe conditions. After Trumps election, Irasema Bravo Lopez says, her job became unbearable. She was accustomed to long shifts stocking shelves at MD Gas & Foods in Guerneville in Sonoma County, but things got worse quickly, she says. Owner Mangal Dhillon made her work longer hours for less money, she says; she was pulling 18-hour shifts seven days a week. After a customer threw a cup of scalding coffee at her in what she called a racially motivated incident, Dhillon told her to pay for an ambulance to the hospital, she says. She couldnt afford it. Instead, she got a ride from a friend. When we hear about deportations and family separations in the news, yes, these things empower employers to mistreat people, Lopez says. Thats what happened to me. Finally, Lopez says, she discovered he had shorted her pay by $28,000 over more than eight months last year. She quit and filed a wage-theft claim with the state. On her last visit to the store to give Dhillon his keys, the owner issued an ultimatum, she says: Drop the wage claim or face immigration agents. She says he told her: If you hurt me, Ill have to hurt you back. Lopez added a retaliation claim to her complaint; it was settled for $5,000. The wage claim is pending. Dhillon didnt respond to repeated requests for comment. :: Traditionally, the United States has been viewed as a sanctuary for victims of labor trafficking. By law, immigrant victims can apply for special T visas that allow them to work in the country for four years and apply for permanent residency. Historically, even if such a trafficking visa was denied, applicants for them were no worse off. But that ended this year. Trumps administration announced in June that anyone rejected for T visas must appear in immigration court for deportation proceedings. Meanwhile, according to immigration and labor lawyers, the government is making it harder to qualify for T visas. Federal law says that any credible evidence will be considered in establishing whether an immigrant worker was a victim of trafficking language that has given applicants wide latitude. But now Trump administration officials are peppering applicants with requests for evidence, effectively revoking any benefit of the doubt, attorneys say. In July, the administration rejected an application from a 24-year-old man who claimed smugglers spirited him and his family across the border when he was 6. The government said immigrants who volunteer to be smuggled put themselves in position to be trafficked and arent entitled to restitution without evidence of extreme abuse. The mans claims that his father was forced to work as a day laborer without pay, while he cleaned bathrooms, handling bleach without gloves werent severe enough, officials said. Such new hurdles have made some workers scared to apply. Maria, a Filipino domestic worker who asked that her last name not be used, was brought to Boston last year from the Middle East to care for a familys four children. Her contract specified shed work 40 hours a week, with two days off, for $2,500 a month. Instead, her employers paid her $550 a month to work 110 hours a week without breaks, she says. The family held her passport, forbade her from leaving the house alone and prevented her from having her own phone, Maria says. Now, having found her way to a Boston legal aid group that could help her, Maria faces an agonizing choice: Should she report the family and apply for a T visa, work illegally in the United States, or go home to the Philippines? Here we have somebody whos been through an incredibly abusive situation that absolutely fits the definition of labor trafficking, says Richardson, the lawyer with Greater Boston Legal Services. Yet its incredibly stressful because we dont know what Trumps [Department of Homeland Security] will do. :: In their trafficking claim against Munger, the Mexican guest workers in Washington state claim that managers forced them to work with a common scheme of threats and a common practice of abusing the law to keep workers in the fields. The threats of repatriation were so institutionalized that workers came to believe they had no choice but to suffer abuse or find their way home, says Joe Morrison, their Seattle attorney. They also knew that by leaving early, they would risk being blacklisted by labor recruiters for other U.S. companies. Oscar Contreras is back in Nayarit, earning about $60 a week as a construction worker and dreaming of the college degree hed hoped to pursue. He didnt hear from Mungers recruiter this year. Hes hoping for the best from the workers suit, filed as a class-action claim in Seattle, but the monetary damages are almost secondary, he says. The families just wanted an apology or some kind of recognition that what they did was wrong. Munger has said it did nothing wrong. It says the work stoppage after Ibarras collapse wasnt a strike at all, but just dozens of laborers who were all late for work on the same morning and were therefore fired for insubordination. Sampedro, the supervisor accused of sending Ibarra back to the field before he collapsed, said in a court affidavit that many workers were already sick when they left Mexico and accepted the position simply to try to obtain free or low-cost medical treatment. He said that all workers medical complaints were taken seriously and that he or his assistant made as many as 15 trips with workers to the doctor that summer. After Ibarras death, investigators with the Washington state Department of Labor and Industries interviewed dozens of the workers. Many said they felt forced to work while sick and injured, according to state investigative documents obtained by Bloomberg. Many workers expressed that they did not report anything due to fear, one investigator wrote in a memo. Workers were told if they caused problems or complained about anything they would never be contracted to come back to work. The state fined Munger almost $146,000 for providing insufficient breaks and meal periods, the largest fine ever levied for those violations in Washington state. A local lawyer, serving as a temporary state judge in Bellingham, Wash., near Sarbanand Farms, cut the companys fine in half. He cited the fact that the company kept good records. Mehrotra, Waldman and Levin write for Bloomberg. Marcela Villa isnt a big name in healthcare but she played a crucial role in the lives of thousands of Medicaid patients in California. Her official title: denial nurse. Each week, dozens of requests for treatment landed on her desk after preliminary rejections. Her job, with the assistance of a part-time medical director, was to conclusively determine whether the care from doctor visits to cancer treatment should be covered under the nations health insurance program for low-income Americans. She was drowning in requests, Villa said, and felt pressed to uphold most of the denials she saw. If it was a high-dollar case, they tried to deny it, Villa said. I told them you cant deny it just because its going to cost $20,000. Villa, 32, did not work for the government. She did not even work for an insurer under contract with the government. She worked for a company now called Agilon Health. Owned by a private equity firm, its among the legion of private subcontractors looking to profit from Medicaid patients. Advertisement Californias Medicaid program, known as Medi-Cal, has determined that the Long Beach company, which was paid to coordinate care for about 400,000 patients, improperly denied or delayed care for at least 1,400 of them, state officials confirmed. The state Department of Managed Health Care is investigating further. The state findings, along with internal company documents and a whistleblower complaint obtained by Kaiser Health News, shine a light on the potential dangers of outsourcing care for poor people. Government oversight, not rigorous to begin with, fades as taxpayer money filters down through layers of companies eager to seize on Medicaids substantial growth under the Affordable Care Act. Medicaid officials say they have authority only over the health plans, not their subcontractors. In an interview, Agilon Chief Executive Ron Kuerbitz acknowledged that some patients experienced modest delays in care. But he disputed that any suffered unjustified denials. He noted that an internal investigation by the company found no evidence of systemic denials and that most of the problems existed before Agilon took over another firm, Primary Provider Management Co., in 2016. We did the right thing when it was identified, Kuerbitz said of the problems. We disclosed it, we investigated it, and we pursued a remedial path. Such concerns are not isolated to one company. Last year, Kaiser Health News reported on similar irregularities at SynerMed, a Medicaid subcontractor that coordinated care for about 650,000 patients in California. In response to a whistleblower complaint, Medi-Cal said it found widespread deficiencies at SynerMed that put patients in imminent danger of not receiving medically necessary healthcare services. The companys staffers had falsified documents for years to cover up improper denials of care, according to state officials. Then SynerMed abruptly shut down, and some of its patients moved to Agilons medical groups. Skimping on services? Nearly three-quarters of the 73 million low-income Americans on Medicaid are now in managed care, in which states pay health insurers fixed monthly amounts for each enrollee to cover the range of services they need. Under this system, keeping patients as healthy as possible is one way to make money. Another is to deny or skimp on services. Increasingly, Medicaid plans outsource the work of managing patients health and medical treatment to subcontractors like Agilon passing along a share of the government money along with the financial risk posed by a fixed budget. These firms can be powerful gatekeepers. They run physician groups, bear responsibility for forming doctor networks and judge whether a request for care is necessary. Agilon is a big player in California doing business with insurers such as Molina Healthcare and Blue Shield of California and its now expanding in other states like Texas and Ohio. Primary Provider Management Co. ran several medical groups, including Vantage Medical Group with more than 5,000 physicians across Southern California. By building off PPMCs base of Medicaid enrollees in California, the New York private equity firm that owns a majority stake in Agilon Clayton, Dubilier & Rice sought to coordinate care in Medicaid and Medicare Advantage plans across the country. (The equity firm did not respond to interview requests.) For several years, the problems at PPMC, and then Agilon, went undetected. Then, in early 2018, Agilon disclosed to the California Department of Managed Health Care its discovery that employees had been altering records prepared for auditors, which it said was not known to top management. According to an internal report completed in May and obtained by Kaiser Health News, staffers had been falsifying documents since at least 2014 to pass audits by health plans. Employees were changing dates, for example, to cover up delays or withholding certain files so they couldnt be reviewed. That same month, an anonymous whistleblower sent a letter to health plans and government officials, urging them to investigate illegal, unethical conduct at the firm. Senior management delays treatments for cancer patients without any regard of patients well-being, to save their dollars, the whistleblower wrote in a two-page letter reviewed by Kaiser Health News. They brag about how profitable we are. In response to the allegations raised by the whistleblower and the state, Agilon opened another internal investigation. That second report, finished in June, found inadequate staffing to handle the volume of work, various shortcuts and practices outside industry norms and improperly denied claims. Both internal reports were released to the state. A top official at Inland Empire Health Plan, one of the largest Medicaid insurers in the country, said the plan also looked into Agilons conduct and found instances in which its patients were harmed. In an interview, Inland Empire CEO Bradley Gilbert said Agilon denied a patients transfusions for anemia, requiring the patient to be hospitalized. It also improperly denied cardiac rehabilitation to a patient recovering from a heart attack, he said. Inland Empire canceled its contract with Agilons Vantage Medical Group in August, he said. A manager told me to do it Agilons June report depicts an operation that was often stretched thin: Nurses were handling 120 to 200 requests for care per day, on average, with no full-time medical director to review the findings. From 2014 until May, the company relied on a family physician who was working 10 to 12 hours a day running his own medical practice, according to the report. Dr. Reuel Gaskins sees patients at the Hampton Medical Clinic in Riverside, where a red neon sign flashes Open in the front window. In an interview, Gaskins said he reviewed cases during breaks throughout the day and after normal work hours. He said he left Agilon in April. Ultimately, Agilons internal investigation found that patient care may have been denied 439 times since 2014 without a physicians review of the medical records a potential violation of state law. Under California law, only a licensed physician or healthcare professional who is competent to evaluate the specific clinical issues involved can determine medical necessity. Gaskins said he was not aware of allegations that medical decisions were made without his review until he was interviewed by Agilons lawyers. Thats inappropriate and unacceptable, he said. It really bothered me when I heard about it. The June report also found that Villa helped alter 20 files at the request of a supervisor in 2014 so her employer could pass an upcoming audit by an insurer. A manager told me to do it, Villa said in an interview. They were so adamant that everything look perfect for the auditors. A few days after the companys lawyers made that discovery, Agilon sent Villa home on paid leave, the nurse said. When she returned to work in August, she found she had been replaced as denial nurse. Shortly after that, she was fired, she said. Chad Terhune is a senior correspondent for Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent publication of the Kaiser Family Foundation. Williams-Sonoma Inc. is suing Amazon.com Inc. in a challenge to the e-commerce giants private-label push that started with batteries, baby wipes and phone chargers and has expanded to include clothing, toys and high-end furniture. Amazons Rivet line includes products that are strikingly similar to Williams-Sonomas West Elm brand, including a $300 orb chair the household goods maker introduced two years ago, according to Williams-Sonomas complaint. It is implausible Amazon could have conceived of a product line with nearly identical product designs which feature product names containing the very same non-descriptive terms WSI uses in connection with these products, other than by intentionally undertaking to copy WSIs West Elm product line, the suit says. Amazon declined to comment on the trademark and patent infringement complaint, which was filed Friday in San Francisco federal court. Advertisement The lawsuit marks a new chapter in the tension between the worlds largest online retailer and major brands that have to decide how to interact with a company that can simultaneously be their partner and their competitor. Apple Inc. and many other companies have previously accused Amazon of not doing enough to fight counterfeit products sold on the site by independent merchants. Extra inventory. More sales. Lower prices. How counterfeits benefit Amazon Williams-Sonomas lawsuit takes direct aim at Amazon, claiming it unfairly and deceptively engaged in a widespread campaign of copying. The lawsuit signals Amazon will face more blowback from major brands as its private-label products move into more expensive categories in which established brands have invested heavily in design and marketing. Williams-Sonoma said three of the chairs its accusing Amazon of copying were designed in house and accounted for $8 million in Williams-Sonoma revenue in the first 10 months of the year. Theres no doubt well see more lawsuits like this, said Spencer Millerberg, a senior vice president at Edge by Ascential, an e-commerce consulting firm. He previously worked at Amazon. The thing is, Amazon just doesnt care. Vendor managers look at how big the legal risk is versus the sales they expect from the product. The complaint underscores Amazons power as a product search engine, which can glean insights about products customers want that it doesnt sell based on the searches of hundreds of millions of consumers. It can offer similar products and promote them on its site and even advertise them on Google using the same keywords shoppers use on Amazon. Amazons private-label products pressure brands to sell and advertise their goods on the web store, lest their customers start buying similar products Amazon is making. Amazon can have manufacturers make something just close enough for a consumer to buy it and sell it for 30% less while making it just different enough to not violate a patent, said James Thomson, a former Amazon executive who now advises merchants how to sell on the marketplace. If someone searched Amazon for a Williams-Sonoma chair and couldnt find one, they will market to them when they make a cheaper chair. Wonderful Co., an agriculture conglomerate that sells popular brands of mandarins, pistachios and other products, will raise the minimum hourly wage for its full-time, year-round workers to $15 next month a move that mirrors wage increases at farms across the state. The new minimum will mean a pay bump for some 2,000 workers in Wonderfuls packing and processing plants and in its nut, citrus, pomegranate and grape orchards. The hike takes effect Jan. 1, the same day the minimum hourly wage for agriculture workers in California will rise to $12. The state minimum wont hit $15 until 2022 for large firms like Wonderful, while smaller firms with 25 or fewer employees will have until 2023. The higher minimum was announced to workers Wednesday in Lost Hills, the Kern County town thats home to Wonderfuls almond and pistachio operations, company spokesman Mark Carmel said. Advertisement This move firmly positions the Wonderful Co. as the employer of choice in Californias Central Valley, and we encourage others in the agriculture industry to follow our lead, said Stewart Resnick, Wonderfuls chairman, in a press release. The pay increase comes as farmers across the state continue to face a tight labor market, one made tighter by stricter immigration enforcement under the Obama and now Trump administrations as well as by a healthier Mexican economy that has led to fewer migrant workers seeking farm jobs. Many farmers have raised wages as they try to attract workers from the now-smaller pool. Last year, for instance, Gilroy garlic producer Christopher Ranch raised its minimum hourly wage to $13, up from $11, and this year it raised the minimum to $15. Ken Christopher, the companys vice president, said the company went from having a shortage of 50 workers to a waiting list of 150. Carmel, the Wonderful Co. spokesman, said the company has not experienced a labor shortage firsthand. This increase is not a reflection on the labor market but rather our desire to become the employer of choice in the Central Valley and California, he said. We want to attract and retain the best employees, and this new minimum wage will help us do so. Wonderful Co. is a privately held company headquartered in West L.A. that is owned by Resnick and his wife, Lynda, a Beverly Hills couple that Forbes estimates has a net worth of $5.6 billion. The company controls a vast agriculture empire, growing, packaging and branding a bevvy of high-value products including Wonderful-brand almonds and pistachios, Pom Wonderful pomegranate juice and Halos mandarins. The company also owns Fiji Water, two wine brands and flower delivery company Teleflora. It has about 9,000 employees around the world, half of them in California. Even if the company has not faced a worker shortage, it may be trying to fend off a future shortage by holding on to current workers, said Guadalupe Sandoval, executive director of the California Farm Labor Contractor Assn., which represents companies that supply labor to farm operators. Sandoval sees Wonderful Co.s wage increase, and Christopher Ranchs earlier move, as two sides of a natural push and pull between Central Valley employers, who tend to pay less but have access to more affordable housing, and coastal agriculture employers, who tend to pay more but are in higher-cost areas. Christopher Ranch, in Gilroy, not far from Silicon Valley, needed to raise its pay enough to persuade potential employees to drive in from the Central Valley. Moving to $13 became really attractive and made it worth it for people to carpool into these jobs, Christopher told The Times last year, before further raising wages this year. Now Wonderful, which has huge operations in Central Valley towns including Lost Hills and Delano, may find itself on the other side of the equation, needing to raise its wages to keep workers from seeking higher wages close to the coast, Sandoval said. There are workers willing to trek across the hills to Santa Maria, Paso Robles, Sandoval said. I would assume theyre feeling the same pressure: that a lot of Valley employees are finding better wage opportunities by driving a couple hours. If theyre jumping to $15, that would indicate their starting pay is not that high. Thats a Central Valley wage, but its not a coastal wage. In Northern California, for instance, Sandoval said workers frequently make the trek from inland areas such as Stockton and Lodi to work higher-wage jobs in the pricier wine country of Napa and Sonoma counties. You can drive two hours to Napa and make $17 an hour, he said. You cant afford to live in Napa, but the wages are better. james.koren@latimes.com Follow me: @jrkoren Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. were under attack Tuesday by an array of critics, including President Trump and civil rights leaders, triggered by revelations from two reports on the long Russian social media campaign to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The segmented messaging and disinformation targeted African Americans in particular, according to the reports for the Senate Intelligence Committee, prompting the NAACP to urge Americans to abandon the social network. Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said the company needs to do more to advance civil rights. Trump asserted, without evidence, that social media giants favor his political opponents by rigging their platforms against him. In a tweet Tuesday, he slammed Facebook and Twitter, as well as Google, alleging that the companies made it much more difficult for people to join his social media accounts. The reports for the Senate stated that Russian interference had clearly sought to benefit the Republican Party and specifically Donald Trump. Advertisement The reports dovetailed with other strains of criticism including privacy breaches, human rights abuses and a deflection of corporate responsibility in what experts said marks a critical point in the public backlash against the global social networks. They capped a tumultuous year for social media companies that appear to lurch from one scandal to the next. Its no longer a drip, drip, drip, said Daniel Kreiss, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hills school of media and journalism. Its no longer these one-off stories. Its a fire hose. Its a river that has really exposed the underlying vulnerabilities of democracies in particular to these disinformation and misinformation campaigns. The reports prepared for the Senate showed that Russian operatives vied to manipulate particular segments of the electorate, including a focus on lowering black voter turnout a finding Sandberg said the company takes incredibly seriously. She said in a Facebook post that the company will work to strengthen and advance civil rights on our service, adding: We know that we need to do more. In the wake of the reports, the NAACP announced it had returned a donation from Facebook and kicked off a weeklong protest Tuesday, called #LogOutFacebook, encouraging people to protest the companys behavior by abandoning the Facebook social network and the companys other platforms, Instagram and WhatsApp. Facebooks engagement with partisan firms, its targeting of political opponents, the spread of misinformation and the utilization of Facebook for propaganda promoting disingenuous portrayals of the African American community is reprehensible, the NAACP wrote on its website. Facebook shares rose 2.5% on Tuesday to $143.66, almost erasing their Monday loss. Twitters drama continued when it revealed Monday that a November security error exposed user data country codes of phone numbers and account status information to internet addresses in China and Saudi Arabia that may have ties to state-sponsored actors who might be trying to access the accounts. No personal information was compromised, the company said in a public apology, and the problem was fixed by Nov. 16. Twitter shares plummeted 6.8% on Monday after the announcement. They rose 0.9% on Tuesday to $33.74. A Tuesday report from Amnesty International, Troll Patrol, painted a stark picture of the abuse that women especially women of color face on the platform. A collaboration with Element AI, a global artificial intelligence software company, the study looked at millions of tweets received by nearly 800 journalists and politicians across the political spectrum in the United States and Britain in 2017. More than a million abusive or problematic tweets were received by women in the study about one hateful tweet every 30 seconds. Black women were subject to the lions share of hate 84% more likely to receive abusive or problematic tweets than white women, the study found. Overall, women of color were 34% more likely to be targeted by abusive tweets. Troll Patrol means we have the data to back up what women have long been telling us that Twitter is a place where racism, misogyny and homophobia are allowed to flourish basically unchecked, Milena Marin, senior advisor for tactical research at Amnesty International, wrote in a blog post about the study. Little question remains about the power social media wields in the current landscape, easily harnessed by both individuals and state actors seeking to expand their influence and the rampant hatred is a reflection of cultural and political tensions that have reached a boiling point. But finding ways to check the power of platforms such as Facebook and Twitter is still a vague and Herculean task, Kreiss said. Congressional inaction has really not held anyone accountable or set clear rules or guidelines on what the public should expect from these companies, Kreiss said. In the absence of that, we will just continue to see the same issues. Shaban and Telford write for the Washington Post. The Los Angeles Unified School District is belatedly learning an important lesson. Artists have moral rights that protect their work. LAUSD stepped back on Monday from its plan to censor a mural at the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools on the Koreatown site of the old Ambassador Hotel. The district stated no specific cause for the reversal, but it took a small step in the right direction. The raging censorship controversy around the painting could not help but bring to mind the federal Visual Artists Rights Act, enacted by Congress in 1990. That law responds to the defacement, mutilation or destruction of works of art. For the first time in U.S. history, federal law recognized an artists moral rights. In a stunning irony, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, brother of the slain presidential candidate for whom the Koreatown school is named, introduced the law to Congress. Advertisement The imperiled mural, painted without incident more than two years ago, depicts actress Ava Gardner with symbols of the Cocoanut Grove, a nightclub once the epicenter of the Ambassador complex. Protesters mischaracterized the 44 blue and red rays in the portraits background as the Japanese imperial battle flag a banner that actually features a red disk with 16 crimson rays against a white ground. A small but voluble Korean American neighborhood group pressured school officials to remove the mural anyhow. LAUSD announced the painting would be whitewashed during the holiday break. Now, faced with rising public criticism of the imminent censorship plan, a final verdict has been postponed until an unspecified future date. Mondays 180-degree about-face was as abrupt as the original judgment to censor the mural. No doubt it was pushed along by two sharp rebukes. The first came from Robert F. Kennedy Jr., following the lead of a complaint offered by his younger brother Max. Kennedy wrote to school board chair Monica Garcia and district administrator Roberto Martinez that citizens who love democracy will flock to the barricade to shield artists from government censors (including LAUSD!). The second scolding came from Paul Schrade, the other person shot in the head on the awful night of Robert Kennedys 1968 assassination at the Ambassador Hotel. (The schools library is named for Schrade.) Now 94, he lamented that the districts actions violate the legacy of freedom and justice embodied by the RFK schools namesake. If whitewashing the mural does proceed, however, dont expect it before March. Those pesky moral rights stand in the way of precipitous action. The 1979 California Art Preservation Act erected steep obstacles to any mutilation or destruction of a work of fine art. The federal law goes even further including a provision that could have made the rash decision to obliterate the mural during winter break a very expensive proposition for LAUSD. The Visual Artists Rights Act stipulates a minimum waiting period of 90 days after an artist has been formally notified of, never mind given consent to, the destruction of his work. The most recent whitewashing case to run afoul of both those state and federal laws Kent Twitchells obliterated six-story portrait of Edward Ruscha on the side of downtown L.A. building cost the offending party almost $1.1 million in settlement payments. The school district had estimated the cost of painting out the Ava Gardner mural at $20,000. That might cover the cost of scaffolding and labor, but I suspect it would barely put a dent in an inevitable lawsuit. Legal wrangling is of course a messy business. (Beau Stanton, the murals artist, has reportedly retained a lawyer.) Art that is made for hire, as commissions often are, can be exempt from VARA protections, but trampling on a 1st Amendment guarantee of free speech is a bad look for a school. A 90-day waiting period is designed to prevent a hecklers veto. It means to defuse exactly the kind of rush to judgment that LAUSD made when faced by noisy opposition. The hope is that cooler, more thoughtful voices will emerge. In recent days those voices have been coming to the foreground. Street artist Shepard Fairey announced that he would seek to remove his own mural a portrait of Robert F. Kennedy that is the schools signature image if Stantons was destroyed. Four other muralists with works at the site Berlin-based American artist James Bullough; Bay Area-based Allison Torneros, known as Hueman; and Cyrcle, the Los Angeles based artist-duo David Leavitt and David Torres told The Times they would do the same. On Monday, a podcast produced by the website Korean American Heritage condemned the censorship in no uncertain terms. Interview guest Dave Young Kim, an Oakland-based Korean American artist familiar with Stantons mural, expressed profound skepticism over the complaints legitimacy. Podcast co-host Philip Ahn Cuddy dismissed the protesters complaint outright, calling it petty baloney. Cuddys maternal grandfather, Dosan Ahn Chang Ho, was a renowned Korean independence activist imprisoned by the Japanese imperial government, while his American-born uncle, character actor Philip Ahn, appeared with Ava Gardner in the 1947 movie Singapore. Cuddy challenged the protesters claims to speak for the larger Korean American community. The dispute is not, as the pious protesters claim, over ignoring atrocities committed by the long-defunct Empire of Japan. On Dec. 8, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor, my husbands family in the Philippines lost almost everything their home, their business when the empire attacked Manila. They fled the city on foot, carrying what they could more than 150 miles into the mountains, seeking shelter and living for the next several years in the side chapel of a church. His uncle, surreptitiously working as a courier for the U.S. Army, was captured and imprisoned by the Imperial Japanese Army, barely surviving the notorious Bataan Death March, among the cruelest war crimes of a century that was no stranger to them. The story is awful but not unique. Thousands of families have them. The dispute in Koreatown is over bowing to an intolerable demand for censorship, a moral offense that cheapens the punishing struggle countless people have endured. LAUSD should not be an instrument for that. christopher.knight@latimes.com Twitter: @KnightLAT Nanjing University students take group photos after their graduation ceremony. [Photo/Xinhua] More young Chinese believe their country is changing for the better and identify with its development path, a recent survey says. The study by China Youth Daily and the Communist Youth League of China Central Committee found that 92.9 percent of young people surveyed think China is heading in the right direction, compared with 89.9 percent in 1998. The Survey on Young Chinese, conducted in mid-November to mark the 40th anniversary of reform and opening-up, says only 0.6 percent think the country is getting worse, down from 1.2 percent 20 years ago. Some 2.4 percent of respondents chose "neither better nor worse", and 4.1 percent said "sometimes better and sometimes worse". The findings were based on a nine-day online survey of 6,081 people. About 52.4 percent of the respondents were male, 83.4 percent had college diplomas and 12.4 percent were from rural areas. The survey indicated that young people feel moderately fulfilled, happy and secure about their lives. Those living in county-level cities were among the most content, responding with an average mark of more than 80 percent for their sense of happiness. Respondents in first-tier cities, including Beijing and Shanghai, are among the least happy young Chinese, with an average score of 77 percent, the report said. Responses from those born in the 1990s indicated a higher degree of happiness, compared with those born in the 1980s, but those born in the '80s tended to be more fulfilled, it said. Most young Chinese are beneficiaries of reform and opening-up, according to Chen Zihan, a graduate student in Beijing. The policy, which was launched in 1978, helped put an end to longtime domestic turmoil and kicked off decades of double-digit economic growth. The 23-year-old geoscience student, who is applying for a doctoral program at a Canadian university, said the past 40 years have given millions of young Chinese opportunities to connect to the world and broaden their horizons. "Only a generation ago, attending college was too much of a luxury to think of," he said. Wang Meili, an English teacher at a private school in Yulin, Shaanxi province, was not surprised by the survey findings. The 26-year-old, who has a bachelor of arts degree, said a college education has allowed her to secure a job that she likes and to lead a relatively well-off life, despite the cost of housing. "I come from a rural family, and I have noticed great advancement in the country's input in rural regions and the welfare of rural residents. My parents now benefit from numerous agricultural subsidies and health insurance for farmers." Li Xin, a government employee in Yongshou county, Shaanxi, said that although money cannot buy happiness, the rapid increase of disposable income over the past decades and online shopping and food delivery services have contributed a lot to people's sense of fulfillment and happiness. Super-nanny meets superhero in Aquaman. You read that right. With the DC Comics standalone film and Disneys Mary Poppins sequel both hitting theaters today, Julie Andrews is back on the big screen. But not for the cameo you might have expected. Opting out of an appearance in the Disney follow-up, unlike her 1964 co-stars Dick Van Dyke and Karen Dotrice, Andrews instead makes a return to theaters as the voice of a Kraken sea creature in the James Wan-directed comic book epic. Advertisement So what exactly is the creature Andrews voices? The answer is murky even to the writers, but at last weeks Los Angeles premiere scribe Will Beall described it as a Lovecraftian, Cthulhu kind of a character that was eons old. Lovecraftian refers to the late American writer H.P. Lovecraft, who gained fame posthumously for his horror fiction. Since his death in 1937, he has inspired generations to continue the vision of his stories about the octopus-like Cthulhu creature. Related: Talking to Victor LaValle about H.P. Lovecraft, The Changeling and the horror of parenthood The Aquaman Kraken was not originally written with Andrews in mind. Beall, co-writer David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick and Wan shaped what the underwater dweller would sound like during post-production. Johnson-McGoldrick recalled a moment when Wan addressed the group in the writers room: You know what? This creature its always a guy. Its always like the big, booming male voice. I want a female voice with gravitas. We dont ever see that coming from this creature. So, lets make this a powerful female. That was [Wans] inspiration, explained Johnson-McGoldrick, who previously collaborated with Wan on the Conjuring franchise. Amber Heard, director James Wan, Jason Momoa and Willem Dafoe on the set of Aquaman (Jasin Boland / Warner Bros.) Related: Aquaman director James Wan didnt want to make a traditional superhero movie The team spent days in conference rooms, sort of cooking up this story. It felt like when I was 12, 13 playing Dungeons and Dragons, said Beall, who also helped shape Aquamans story on early drafts of 2017s Justice League. Wan brought a youthful energy to the creative process. James would get up and hes like, Yeah! And he takes up the trident as if a giant tentacle swats him, and James kind of throws himself against the wall. Later, to actually see those scenes come to fruition thats what its like to work with a visionary director, he added. Without spoiling the plot its safe to say Andrews character plays a pivotal role in Aquamans journey to stop a war from breaking out between the people of Atlantis and those above the surface. Her cameo contributes to the films lighter tone in comparison to previous DC Comics movies. Nicole Kidman, Jason Momoa and Amber Heard attend the premiere of Aquaman at TCL Chinese Theatre on December 12, 2018 (Presley Ann / FilmMagic) Review: Aquaman makes a splash with underwater spectacle galore and Jason Momoas superheroic star turn Andrews vocal turn is one small part of an ensemble cast led by Jason Momoa, reprising his DC Universe role as the half-human and half-Atlantean Arthur Curry. He is joined by an eclectic mix of actors including Nicole Kidman, Amber Heard, Willem Dafoe, Dolph Lundgren, Patrick Wilson and Temuera Morrison. The idea that Im writing for Dolph Lundgren and Julie Andrews in the same movie.... Beall paused with a smile. If my career ended today, I dont think theres many writers that can claim theyre able to do that. The scent of mulled wine and righteous indignation wafted through the air Monday night at a theater in New Yorks Times Square, as Samantha Bee promised a weary audience a night of good cheer amid a stream of relentlessly grim political news. Your hearts are going to swell with goodwill toward your fellow humans if its the last [bleeping] thing I do, said the Full Frontal host as a flock of figure skaters in Bee-esque blond wigs and blazers swirled around a patch of ice lined by heaps of fake snow and towering, tinsel-laden Christmas trees. Bee and her team of correspondents were taping Christmas on I.C.E., a holiday special about immigration that makes liberal use of wordplay. Airing Wednesday, the half-hour show is the latest attempt by Bee and her team of correspondents at Full Frontal to break out of the weekly topical-comedy routine, following Not the White House Correspondents Dinner last year and The Great American Puerto Rico in March. We knew we wanted to center a whole episode on immigration, and it felt like the holiday season was the right time to do it, said Bee in a phone interview Tuesday. And then the pun occurred and you know when someone says they wrote a song in 15 minutes? We were tossing ideas around and it kind of coalesced quickly. Advertisement In addition to copious sequins, skating and a few musical numbers, the special features field-reported pieces about undocumented Christmas-tree-farm workers and an immigrant detention center in rural Georgia. It also raised money for Kids in Need of Defense, a charity that provides legal aid to children in the immigration system. Olympic figure skater Adam Rippon also pays a visit. In South Korea this year, he became the first openly gay American man to compete at the Winter Games. Though he didnt medal, he became a breakout star thanks to his sharp social-media wit and vocal support of LGBTQ rights. When Im on the ice, its my time to feel free, Rippon told The Times in a phone interview. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (the I.C.E. of the specials title) does the opposite of that to a lot of people. I hope this special really shows a different side of a lot of these immigrants who are trying to seek asylum. I started training in all these cities. Everyone else is from Russia, China, Korea, he added. I skate with so many people from around he world. It opened my eyes. For Bee, a Canadian who grew up in multicultural Toronto and became an American citizen a few years ago, immigration is something that has always interested me. Though she describes her naturalization process as quite lovely on the whole, she recalls picking up her green card and seeing needless confusion and lack of compassion extended to immigrants who werent native speakers of English. I was upset by the process. It was hard for me to do and I spoke perfect English and was immigrating because I got a job on a television show. Were all here trying to do this legally. Why are you being so mean to us? she said. To prepare for the special, Bee took skating lessons her lack of skill on the ice despite being Canadian is a running gag. And in the shows opening number she makes an attempt at talk-singing reminiscent of Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady. Full Frontal also hired seven professional figure skaters and installed a temporary rink at New Yorks PlayStation Theater. We put a lot of elements of the show in the hands of other people and didnt pull the threads together until very close to taping. It was fun, but it was an adventure, she said. It was a lot of, I wonder if this will work? I guess well find out on Monday. Skater Adam Rippon, left, and Samantha Bee. (Kevin Mazur / Getty Images for TBS) See the most-read stories in Entertainment this hour One of those loose threads was the purchase and renovation of a house in the small town of Lumpkin, Ga., which is home to the Stewart Detention Center. It will be used by El Refugio, an organization that provides meals and housing to visiting families of detainees, who have few options for lodging in the small town. The sale was closed in late November, and the renovation was completed in two weeks, Bee said. Christmas on I.C.E. arrives amid revived debate over President Trumps plans for a border wall and the death of Jakelin Caal Maquin, a 7-year-old Guatemalan girl, while in border patrol custody this month. You can have lots of different opinions about what it would take to fix the immigration problem. Thats fine, Bee said, but we are meeting it with the most profound level of cruelty. Its unimaginable. Thats something we can solve. She recalls a woman at the detention center in Lumpkin who had driven overnight with three children under the age of 3 in order to visit their father. The detainees dont get to hold their babies, they dont get to touch their children, the meeting is held behind glass, the telephones do not work, Bee continued. It is just literally sorry, Im going to cry dads with their hands pressed up to the glass and babies on the other side going, Why isnt Daddy picking me up? This is what were doing by the tens of thousands. We cannot be OK with this. For Bee, the message is especially resonant at Christmas, a holiday inspired by the story of a family fleeing persecution and seeking shelter. It can either be platitudes or you can put something behind it, she said, so we tried to put something behind it. meredith.blake@latimes.com Follow me @MeredithBlake Breakfast burritos. Right after heres your coffee, these are the most reassuring words any of us can hope to hear in the morning. Its a subject taken quite seriously at Burrito Bomba, where owners Gurgen Martikyan and Eric Yepiskoposyan put their own spin on breakfast burritos, just off a North Hollywood roadside. Tucked into a barbed wire-crowned lot among the stone and tile showrooms, storage depots and auto body shops that line Sherman Way where it meets the 170 Freeway, the duo launched Bomba to support themselves while attending school. While you can order burritos stuffed with beef, bacon and vegetarian options, the specialty at Bomba is the breakfast burrito full of filet mignon and bacon. Advertisement Few things are as controversial in Southern California as the contents of a breakfast burrito. So Martikyan and Yepiskoposyan sampled different offerings throughout L.A. to develop their own recipe. We wanted to do something different from any breakfast burrito spot in L.A., says Martikyan. Before opening, we made around 300-400 samples to get to our final product. Every day were up at 4 in the morning scrambling 400 eggs, cutting the steak, making the pico de gallo. Were running on real sleep deprivation, says Yepiskoposyan. To make Bombas signature burrito, the guys griddle thick-cut, applewood-smoked bacon and cuts of a five-spice-marinated filet mignon. Then they smash a bronzed jumble of fried potatoes sprinkled with their Cajun seasoning before covering it with a blend of four cheeses and dousing everything in egg batter. As the egg begins to set, they hack it all up, the staccato clang of spatulas drowning out all other noise in the lot. Everything comes off the grill and gets rolled into a basil-tomato tortilla with pico de gallo and a pointedly spicy yellow aioli made with a chile the owners import from Brazil. The now complete burrito gets a final kiss from the grill before its handed over. The owners, who both grew up in the San Fernando Valley and have been friends since high school, also have a limited, word-of-mouth burrito based on Armenian pamidorov dzvadzex, the egg-and-tomato dish that they both consider a breakfast favorite, only made with pico de gallo. Bomba itself is an Armenian-Russian colloquialism, the owners explain, that people use to describe things they like such as cars and food, much like people here use bomb. In time, they hope the term comes into more widespread usage. Were going to take this as far as we can, Martikyan says. Hopefully, things go well and we can move from streetside to a restaurant, to a couple of locations across the country to worldwide. Burrito Bomba is open from 7:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. on weekdays and weekends from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. 12547 Sherman Way, North Hollywood, @burritobomba on Instagram food@latimes.com @latimesfood When Dick Van Dyke visited, or rather revisited Cherry Tree Lane for Mary Poppins Returns, the 93-year-old actor toured the set with a smile on his face. It was wonderful, says Oscar-winning production designer John Myhre who tagged along with Van Dyke and director Rob Marshall. He stopped dead in his tracks and said, Oh, my goodness. He noticed all the little details that brought back the original film. Inspired by P.L. Travers books about the magical nanny who brings joy to the lives of Jane and Michael Banks, Myhre wanted to convey the grown-up Michaels loss of his wife and financial hardship by adding a dose of Depression-era London. The film opens in the Slump. Its a gray, cold, scary world for the kids, Myhre says of the musical sequel to the 1964 film, which takes place 25 years later. We wanted to have the feel of Cherry Tree Lane along with the reality of the 30s. How to balance bleak reality with the magic that is Mary Poppins? In this edited Q&A, Myhre shares how he pulled it off. The Cherry Tree Lane set for Disneys Mary Poppins Returns. (Jay Maidment) Advertisement Can you remember the first time you saw Mary Poppins? Its such a vivid memory as it was the first movie I ever saw. I saw it at the Northgate Theatre in Seattle. When we pulled in to the parking lot, we saw that the theater manager had hung a mannequin on the marquee that was dressed like Mary Poppins. My 5-year-old head exploded. I wonder if that was the moment that I became a production designer? How is the new 17 Cherry Tree Lane different from the original? We wanted to make the house feel like their house. In the first movie, the house was so formal. The entryway almost looks like a mausoleum. There isnt even a sofa in the front room. In our film, Michael Banks has grown up to be an incredibly loving father, and the fingerprints of the children are all over the house. We brought in softer colors, woodwork that hadnt been painted white, and Michaels artwork. On the exterior, we scaled the houses down a bit and added brick to make them feel less formal. We were inspired by P.L. Travers house, which was all brick. So you consulted her books? Yes. Id be sitting in airports reading childrens books. There are seven books in the series, and each one is better than the next. It was good to read them all. The interior of 17 Cherry Lane. (Disney) Where did you find the furnishings for the Banks house? Set decorator Gordon Sim scoured England every two weeks. A lot of the better pieces we found at flea markets like the one in Kensington. We pulled a few pieces from prop houses there. Disney likes to keep things, so some of the pieces a lamppost, a bicycle from our movie are all over the world right now. Everything was reupholstered to control the color. Production designers often mention how characters influence sets. True? You have to become the character. The attic, for instance, is Michael Banks. Thats where his art is. Its filled with memories of his wife that are too hard for him to face. Visually speaking, everything in the room tells you something about his life. And the bank? The bank was a villain. Thats why we needed to find that strong, powerful exterior, which ended up being the Royal Exchange in London. We used green as a symbol of money and power. We gilded some of the wood paneling so it had the strength of gold as well. Because Wilkins (Colin Firth) is represented as a wolf in the animated sequence, we decided to put wolves heads on the fireplace of his office. Ben Whishaw as Michael Banks in the artist-fathers attic. (Jay Maidment) Is it different to design sets for a musical? It is the best thing as a designer. Dance leads everything when you work with Rob. Some sets, like the abandoned park, are built specifically for the dancers. For example, we might need a ramp or a tunnel. Some things may have to be slick or sticky. You have to consider the height of a fountain or the lampposts. Every surface allows the dancers to do their best work. Im proud of the giant stone floor that was actually a sprung dance floor. We spent months trying to figure it out. We built the floor so that it moves with 45 dancers. The piece that grounded that set was a dilapidated greenhouse. After a month or two Rob said, Wouldnt it be nice if we rode bicycles on top of that? We had to go back and re-engineer it. London feels like a character in the film. It is. We came up with a term: Londony. Everything had to be Londony. It was used as our mantra in the art department. The opening of the movie is a love letter to London. It was a mix of real locations like St. Pauls Cathedral and the Tower of London and sets. We had to cut from centuries-old locations to something that was built three weeks ago. The costumes have received a lot of praise. Did you collaborate with costume designer Sandy Powell? I was completely in touch with Sandy. Because we built so many of the sets, we wanted to control the color. Rob sat down with me and Sandy and the [director of photography] Dion Beebe and we discussed color. Sandy let me into her world. She made some amazing sweaters. She loves patterns. The film has so many different moods. How did you juggle that as a designer? The goal was to have two different design worlds. There was the real world that was dipped in reality and the magical world of Mary Poppins. The goal was to have them flow together and become one. When the park bursts into cherry blossoms and the family walks to the spring fair at the end of the film, you wonder if it is real or is it Mary Poppins? You realize that she brought magic back to the Banks family. Lin-Manuel Miranda is Jack in Disneys Mary Poppins Returns. (Disney) ALSO: As The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel returns for Season 2, we go behind the scenes of those amazing sets The Crown production designer Martin Childs shares how he creates those lavish sets A Spanish-style hacienda so inviting, it has a starring role in the film Home Again A labor agreement is not the only thing dividing the Los Angeles Unified School District and its teachers. One missing element crucial to coming together on a contract deal and averting a strike is trust. On Wednesday, the union representing Los Angeles teachers announced that its 31,000 members will walk out Jan. 10 and that it has no plans to return to the negotiating table. What would be the point? said Alex Caputo-Pearl, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, during a news conference at the unions Koreatown headquarters. We are not going back into a bargaining process that has failed and that the district has not taken seriously for 20 months, Caputo-Pearl said. In this context, the traditional bargaining process has not worked. Advertisement The union announcement came one day after L.A. schools Supt. Austin Beutner portrayed his side as the reasonable party in the dispute and said he was willing to negotiate around the clock. The two sides appear to agree on very little. Union leaders seem certain that those running L.A. Unified have a secret plan to dismantle traditional public education in Los Angeles. District officials seem just as certain that the union has always been determined to strike, even before negotiations began. The district declares itself in financial straits too dire to meet many union demands. The union says there is money available. In textbook depictions of labor relations, unions and management move from conflict to coexistence if not collaboration, said Charles Kerchner, a labor relations historian and professor emeritus at Claremont Graduate University. That hasnt happened in L.A. A nationally known union leader once commented to me that UTLAs good at one thing: fighting, Kerchner said. But thats not the only the problem, he noted. The district also breeds distrust. Decades of externally pushed reform efforts have produced a siege mentality inside the district that extends through the administrative ranks into the teachers. There has been instability at the top, changing school board majorities and several embattled superintendents. The current dispute between the teachers union and the district has reached a point of peril that has not existed since the early 1990s when a strike was narrowly averted or even 1989, when one was not. United Teachers Los Angeles represents teachers, counselors, librarians and nurses. About half a million students would be affected by a strike in the nations second-largest school system. Four in five students are from low-income families, and many families depend on their children being in school while they work. Union leaders say theyve chosen to take to the streets because the disruption to families is worth it, especially after years of inattention and inadequate funding have harmed generations of students. A few days of turmoil to make 25 years right, Caputo-Pearl said. Were going to do that. District officials see such statements as more evidence that the union planned to strike all along. To buttress this point, lawyers for L.A. Unified filed a complaint with the state Public Employment Relations Board, which oversees labor negotiations. The district cited numerous examples to allege that the union has not bargained in good faith. This week, PERB agreed to issue a complaint. It essentially says the district has submitted enough credible evidence to move forward with a hearing on the allegations. We need a willing party to negotiate, and thats whats weve been saying for months, said school board member Nick Melvoin, an ally of Beutners. The setting of a strike date is disappointing but also unsurprising given that we know theyve been talking about a strike for years. The union also has alleged misconduct in the bargaining process in complaints before the labor board, saying the district has, among other things, failed to provide public records and improperly blocked teachers from talking to parents. In earlier labor conflicts, the fundamental issues were salaries and benefits. Here, the divisions are broader. School district leaders assert that the district will continue to have serious budget problems, risking insolvency in two or three years, even if a reasonable agreement is reached. Union leaders reject the idea of a budget crisis pointing to the districts current large reserve and say the existential danger is from Beutner and his allies. According to this narrative, Beutner, a wealthy businessman with no prior work experience in a school system, wants to increase the number of privately operated, nonunion charter schools and weaken the unions influence. That agenda would damage the long-term interests of most students as well as district employees, union leaders say. The union views everything through this lens, including the superintendents still-confidential plan to reorganize the district. Few details of that plan have been publicly disclosed, but the Los Angeles Times has reported that the district would be divided into 32 networks. It alarms the union that consultants advising the district have worked in cities, such as New Orleans and Newark, N.J., where reform efforts included expanding the number of charter schools, weakening labor or both. Beutner is intentionally starving our schools by hoarding the reserves so that cuts can be justified, opening the pathway for his ultimate goal: to break up the school district into 32 networks, making our neediest schools more vulnerable to takeover attempts by corporate interests, the union said in a statement Tuesday. That conviction may make it challenging to end a strike quickly. Beutner says the goal of his reorganization plan is to improve services to students and families by bringing more resources closer to schools. Like the union, he says he is thinking of students and families in light of a possible strike. Among the points he makes is that children who dont come to school during a strike would miss the meals that would be waiting for them there. A strike will be awful, Beutner said Tuesday. This is not going down on a Saturday or Sunday. This is of consequence. Think of the homeless student who is not going to get a meal. We serve a million meals a day. The superintendent has stated that many of the items on the unions lengthy list of demands are reasonable, but also that the district cannot afford most of them at this time. The unions announcement came one day after district officials released a report by a fact-finding panel. The goal of the panel was to establish a base of information that both sides could agree on and that could propel them toward compromise and a settlement. Ultimately, each side cherry-picked parts of the report to emphasize. For L.A. Unified, the big win was the panels unanimous endorsement of the districts salary offer. The school system is offering a 3% raise retroactive to July 1, 2017, and another 3% taking effect from July 1, 2018. The union wants a 6.5% raise retroactive to July 1, 2016. Caputo-Pearl said it would be misleading to focus on the split over wages. Austin Beutner continues to try to buy us off by focusing almost exclusively on salary, he said Wednesday of the districts salary offer. We will not be bought off. The union pointed to the panels support for class-size reduction and schools fully staffed with nurses, counselors and librarians. The report did not state the cost of this new hiring or how it would be paid for. The fact-finding process was the last step required under California law before the union could call a strike. For its part, the district now has the legal authority to impose a contract. As of Tuesday, Beutner said that school officials had not decided whether they would take this step. Setting a strike date is significant, and not just because it tells union members to prepare for it, said UCLA education professor Tyrone Howard. It elevates the stakes when a date is announced, he said. This is the proverbial line in the sand. howard.blume@latimes.com Twitter: @howardblume Dr. George Tyndall arrived on the USC campus in the summer of 1989. The university had advertised for a full-time gynecologist for the student health center, and Tyndall, then 42, was an enthusiastic candidate. My mission will be to do everything I can to help Trojan women avoid the many preventable catastrophes that I have seen, Tyndall declared during the job interview, according to a written account he provided to The Times. And I will do so for as long as I am mentally and physically able, hopefully well into my 80s. USC offered a salary that was a fraction of what Tyndalls peers elsewhere earned, but he saw rewards beyond money. The job, he would later say, allowed him to shepherd female students safely to womanhood, steering them around sexually transmitted diseases, unplanned pregnancies and other hazards. The way I saw patients at USC I would think to myself, This is my chance. She hasnt made any mistakes yet, Tyndall said in an interview this spring. Advertisement Many who encountered the physician, however, saw him as less a voice of medical authority than as an eccentric who bewildered and, over time, ultimately alarmed those around him. The 71-year-old physicians life is now under intense scrutiny as detectives probe allegations that Tyndall sexually abused hundreds of patients over nearly three decades at USC, part of the largest-ever L.A. Police Department sex crimes investigation with a single suspect. Investigators are grilling his co-workers and poring over his possessions, including hard drives seized from his cluttered home and photos of unclothed patients found in a rented storage unit. Tyndall has denied all wrongdoing. These days a team of lawyers speaks for the doctor, who was removed from the clinic in 2016. But before the allegations became public this spring, Tyndall met with Times reporters several times at a city park in L.A. and shared details about his life and career. I was controversial from Day One, he said of his time at USCs student health clinic. FULL COVERAGE: USC former gynecologist Dr. George Tyndall accused of inappropriate behavior The interviews with him and more than two dozen associates paint a portrait of a man of obvious intelligence who excelled in college, medical school and the U.S. Navy, but struck many as socially awkward and sometimes overbearing. He spoke to co-workers and patients like a lecturing professor. He labeled himself as a germaphobe, though his office was an unsanitary jumble of medical waste and boxes. To find a wife, he went to the Philippines repeatedly, and ultimately married a Filipina 25 years his junior. Perhaps his most long-term and significant bond was with USC, where he worked for 27 years. Although he never attended or taught at the university, Tyndall reveled in its academic reputation and prodded patients to respect their school as the center of the world. He could recite the contributions of university presidents and provosts as if they were figures in a U.S. history textbook. Even after hundreds of alumnae came forward with allegations against Tyndall, USC remained central to his identity. In a May letter to The Times criticizing its coverage, he promised that when the true story came out, most Trojans are going to be very proud of this particular member of the Trojan Family. George Tyndall with his wife, Daisy Patricio, at their wedding in Corona. Patricio was in her late teens or early 20s and he was in his 40s, records show. The couple obtained a confidential marriage license, and the date of the ceremony is not clear. (Handout) A love for the Philippines When he arrived at USC, Tyndall had just finished his residency after a roundabout way to medicine. Born and raised in Plattsburgh, a city in upstate New York near the Canadian border, he was one of five children. He enrolled at the State University of New York Plattsburgh but dropped out in 1967 to enlist in the Navy. Signing up allowed Tyndall to avoid the Vietnam War draft and a possible infantry assignment. The Navy sent him to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey to study Vietnamese, then in high demand for American intelligence efforts. He graduated with honors and was stationed in Manila where he worked as a crypto-linguist. His time in the Philippines sparked a lifelong love for the country and its people. Tyndall said in interviews that he felt as if he had been Filipino in a past life and recalled that learning Tagalog was like rediscovering a language he already knew. Honorably discharged from the Navy in 1971, Tyndall returned to SUNY and graduated summa cum laude. He joined the U.S. Customs Service as an enforcement officer at Los Angeles International Airport but made it clear to colleagues that it was only a stop off before medical school in the Philippines. He talked about working every overtime assignment he could...because he was going to take his money over there and get his doctors certificate, said retired customs officer Terry Kennedy, who often chatted with Tyndall as they waited for delayed planes. In 1980, Tyndall began medical school at the University of the East, Ramon Magsaysay Memorial Medical Center in the Philippines. Classes were conducted in English and other Americans also attended. Fellow medical student Rainier Umali said Tyndall stood out among their classmates for his age and his height. He stands well over 6 feet. Umali, now a psychiatrist in Manila, described Tyndall as exceptionally smart and friendly. He said Tyndall seemed taken with Filipinos emphasis on family. He recalled one conversation in which his classmate marveled at how local families lived together in one room. He said, in case he gets married, hell raise his children like Filipinos do, Umali said. An undated Vietnamese language classroom at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif., where George Tyndall studied when he was in the U.S. Navy. (Handout) After three years, Tyndall transferred to the Medical College of Pennsylvania, now Drexel University College of Medicine. Tyndall said that while his classmates caroused, he was in his room studying. At graduation, he won a prize for excellence in psychiatry and was elected to a national honor medical society, Alpha Omega Alpha. He went on to an obstetrics and gynecology residency at Kaisers Sunset Boulevard hospital, a program he said admitted just five physicians out of more than 500 applicants. At Kaiser, he delivered babies, performed hysterectomies and treated cancer patients. In the end, he found much of the work depressing, he said. Patients were often old and suffering from cancer, sexually transmitted diseases and other illnesses that might have been avoided with better medical care. When he wished aloud for a career where he could focus on preventative care, a colleague responded, Student health, Tyndall recalled in an interview. Soon after, he said he saw a classified ad for the job at USC. At the university clinic, he was given one of the largest offices, complete with a private bathroom, access to a rear stairwell and a beautiful view of the campus. The office assignment rankled colleagues, Tyndall said in the interviews. Tyndall was the first and only full-time gynecologist at the clinic. He made it clear to doctors, nurses and patients that he considered himself an authority on womens health and sometimes referred to his medical school honor society as evidence of his expertise. But some colleagues noted that he was not board certified, a standard step for many gynecologists. A creepy feeling, a sideways glance patients of accused former USC gynecologist share their stories One reason USC hired Tyndall, he said in an interview, was his ability to perform colposcopies, a procedure that looks for disease on the cervix or vagina. Some of these exams were photographed, and his use of cameras led to some of the first complaints against him by colleagues and patients. An undergraduate reported him in 1991 for improperly photographing her, according to a sworn affidavit provided by her attorney. The woman, identified only as Jane Doe, said Tyndall initially took close-up photos of her genitals, but as he walked away from the exam table, she wrote, the doctor began taking full body pictures and of my private area She said she complained to the clinics medical director who forced Tyndall to destroy the images, she wrote. Tyndall has said through his attorney that he only photographed patients with their consent and for legitimate medical reasons. In these early years at USC, Tyndall was a newlywed and his wife occasionally visited the clinic. They had met through a matchmaking service Tyndall had used to find a Filipina bride, said Sharyn Bruno, whose late husband grew up with Tyndall. He traveled to the Philippines often and eventually proposed to Daisy Patricio, a young woman from the southern island of Mindanao. Public records indicate that when they married, she was in her late teens or early 20s. He was in his 40s. The two wed at Brunos Corona home in front of 20 or so guests, who dined on cake and Chinese food, Bruno said. The couple obtained a confidential marriage license, an option in California that prevents anyone other than the spouses from viewing the document, and the date of the ceremony is not clear. No family members attended, Bruno said. Tyndall had a photography hobby and he snapped so many photos that day that neighbors phoned police, fearing the noise from the flash was gunfire, according to Bruno and another wedding guest. Patricio spoke English fluently and seemed to adjust well to married life in the U.S., Bruno said. She and Tyndall lived in an apartment he had purchased near Lafayette Park in Westlake. The couple rode on his motorcycle, took trips to Disneyland and enjoyed eating out with Bruno and her husband, Bruno said. They returned to the Philippines to visit her relatives and, according to property records, purchased a single-family home in Davao City, Mindanaos capital, about a decade ago. In her visits to the clinic, Patricio spoke little, but Tyndall talked about their relationship often to both patients and staff, former co-workers said. After the 1992 riots reached the edge of Westlake, Tyndall told colleagues that Patricio did not feel comfortable venturing out in the neighborhood alone. Many days he left work to bring her lunch, the former colleagues said. Tyndall spoke openly about the apartments cluttered state. He said there were so many boxes, books and papers in his home that he and his wife could not use the living room and had to eat dinner on their bed. When nursing supervisor Cindy Gilbert complained about the cluttered state of his office, she said, Tyndall replied, This is nothing. You should see our house. He told her his storage unit was filled to capacity and the car he parked in the USC lot was also stuffed with papers and boxes. The only open area was the drivers seat, two colleagues recalled. Dr. Howard Mandel, a Westside gynecologist who worked part-time at USC, said Tyndall seemed to admire the art of filmmaking. He sometimes talked about film and TV or screenwriting, Mandel added. Another colleague recalled Tyndall saying that he and Patricio enjoyed filming skits in their bedroom. Tyndall and his wife embarked on a photography business in 1992, according to public records. In ads in the Yellow Pages, Glamourlight Photography offered traditional services, such as acting headshots and family portraits, along with boudoir shots intimate and erotic images of women in lingerie. Patricio worked as Glamourlights makeup artist, according to a later bankruptcy filing. Dr. George Tyndalls photography business regularly advertised in the Yellow Pages and in directories for Hollywood actors. (Los Angeles Times) Tyndall pitched his business to at least one patient, according to a woman who graduated in 1993 and is now suing the doctor and USC. The alumna alleged in a lawsuit that during an appointment in her freshman year, Tyndall pulled out a photo of a scantily clad Asian woman. Would you consider doing something like this? the former patient, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, recounted Tyndall asking. The woman, who is Chinese American, said in an interview, When I caught his drift, I realized it was a proposition and left in a hurry. Dr. Tyndall adamantly denies that any patient of his was asked to pose for boudoir photography, his criminal defense attorney, Leonard Levine, said in a statement. He and Patricio declared bankruptcy in 1997. At the time, Tyndalls annual salary at USC was $110,000. In court records, the couple listed Tyndalls outstanding student loans and credit card bills among their debts. Glamourlight continued listing in the Yellow Pages until 2008. The current state of the business is unclear. When police raided Tyndalls storage unit in June, detectives found a mountain of pornographic videos and photographs, some showing the doctor having sex with women. Alongside them was a smaller set of images showing patients naked during exams. Levine, his attorney, has said the photos were taken with patient consent for medical reasons. The physician moved the photos to the storage unit in 2013 when the student health center relocated to a new building on campus, Levine said in a statement. The photos were never shown to, or viewed by anyone, including Dr. Tyndall, after they were originally taken, decades ago, Levine said. Hundreds of alumnae who visited the USC student clinic, right, have come forward to accuse Dr. George Tyndall of sexual misconduct allegations that he has denied. (Los Angeles Times) A doctor with an eccentric style From the moment patients entered Tyndalls office, they could tell he was different. His wardrobe was a rotation of stretched-out slacks, clogs and long embroidered shirts known in the Philippines as barongs. If a student tried to shake his hand, he offered a business card instead, professing to be a germaphobe. If I get sick, I wont be able to treat Trojan women, he explained. He carried a hand towel to open doors, press elevator buttons and turn off faucets. The state of his office often seemed at odds with his sanitary concerns. Colleagues said it was often foul-smelling and littered with soda cups, take-out containers and an overflowing bin of medical waste. He examined yeast infection specimens at the same desk where he ate lunch and counseled young women, they said. Tyndall took his time with patients -- even when the waiting room was full. An appointment for birth control often turned into a lengthy science lesson with the physician proffering diagrams of the female anatomy and laminated sheets listing various prophylactic options. Some people valued this approach and asked for him again and again. Michelle Ward saw Tyndall regularly from 1998 to 2004, when she was getting her doctorate in clinical neuroscience. She said she was initially disconcerted by what she called his homeless appearance, but he soon won her over with deeply researched explanations and advice. She recommended him to other women. I never felt anything perverted, not for an instant. [It was] the opposite of that. It just felt like I was in there with a professor, a quirky, nerdy, unusual, reclusive, eccentric professor, said Ward, a jury consultant for an L.A. firm. She said, however, that she takes the accusations of abuse seriously and believes the allegations should be thoroughly investigated. By his own account, Tyndall took a particular interest in treating international students, especially those from China. Tyndall said he attempted to empathize with his foreign patients and visualized himself in their shoes. I try to imagine Im from China, Tyndall said in an interview. In falsetto, he imitated a potential patient: Im 5-foot-2. My English is not good. Maybe Im scared by the tall man. Tyndall acknowledged that his colleagues were suspicious of his solicitousness of Asian patients. In their mind, Im a pervert but clients are signing up and begging to be seen by me, he said. It caused jealousy among medical assistants. Tyndall sometimes spoke to clinic colleagues about racial issues and shared his political opinions. In his hours away from the USC student clinic, he tapped out letters to newspaper editors. Publications including The Times printed more than 30 letters in the 1990s and 2000s. Many were critical of illegal immigration. In a 1993 letter to the New York Times, he bemoaned laws that welcomed individuals who because of language problems and lack of skills have almost no chance of achieving the American dream. On a few occasions, he was accused of making racist remarks in the clinic. Undergraduate Shernae Hughes said she complained in 2016 after she saw him for birth control. I shared that I was interested in opening businesses in low-income black communities, Hughes, who graduated in May, testified at a June state Senate hearing. Dr. Tyndall responded, You should open up more clinics so they can stop having so many babies. Attorney Gloria Allred, seated center, with a few women who have accused of Dr. George Tyndall of sexual abuse. (Los Angeles Times) Questions turn to alarm at USC In Tyndalls final years at USC, Daisy Patricio was rarely seen at the clinic, but the physician continued displaying her smiling photo on his desk. He often showed it to patients and talked to many of them about their relationship, sometimes sharing intimate details, according to former co-workers and patients. Selamawit Mulugeta, who saw Tyndall for a pelvic exam in 2014, said he brought up his wife and how she never had a father figure and that he served as a father figure as well as a husband. Patients and colleagues had no inkling that the couple appeared to be separated. Patricio had returned to her hometown in the Philippines and opened a medical billing firm in Davao City with a local businessman, according to an archived website for the company. Since 2012, photos on her social media accounts have shown her embracing the man, who an associate said referred to Patricio as his wife. She did not respond to numerous requests for interviews and the man pictured with her online declined comment. A medical assistant who worked with Tyndall for years, said that she asked him in 2016 why Patricio never visited anymore. She was in an accident and shes scared of driving, she recalled him answering. In interviews, Tyndall referred to Patricio as his wife and shared details about her upbringing and relatives. LAPD Capt. Billy Hayes, who is overseeing the criminal investigation into Tyndall, said detectives want to interview Patricio. Tyndall also told colleagues and at least one patient that he was sponsoring the education of a young Filipina. Former patient Viva Symanski said that during a 2014 appointment, Tyndall showed pictures of Patricio and the younger woman and said he and his wife were underwriting the womans business degree. She recalled him expressing ambivalence about the younger woman, saying at one point that she disappoints me lately. He did not elaborate, she said. Colleagues also noticed Tyndall was spending increasing amounts of time in his office. He was there late at night and on weekends, even though he didnt see patients then. Some said he appeared to be working on his computer. In an interview, he mentioned that he brought an external hard drive to his office each day for personal stuff. He did not elaborate. Tyndall frequently received shipments from Amazon at the clinic, former colleagues said. He reviewed gynecology books as well as electronics and photography equipment on the Amazon website, including hard drives, a hidden camera and drone landing pad. Of a mini-digital camera touted as the smallest video camera in the world, Tyndall commented that the quality of the video is insufficient for my needs. Investigators are aware of the reviews and LAPD computer experts are performing a forensic examination on Tyndalls hard drives, Hayes said. Tyndalls defense attorney said the doctor never sold, traded or shared any images of patients. In 2016, Gilbert, the nursing supervisor, went to USCs rape crisis center and told the executive director that Tyndall was inappropriately touching students. USC put Tyndall on administrative leave while the claims were investigated. About three weeks later, he sent a text to a clinic colleague, Dr. Dennis Kelly, seeking help finding another job. Kelly, a mens healthcare specialist who works part time at Cal State Northridge, said Tyndall asked whether there were any positions open in CSUNs student clinic. I knew I wouldnt recommend him, Kelly said. So I told him there was no availability. USC administrators reached a secret deal with Tyndall last year that allowed him to leave the university with a financial settlement and a clean record with the medical board. He told The Times that he regretted signing the deal and had sent letters to USCs president and provost begging to be reinstated. After The Times revealed Tyndalls troubled history in May, he defended himself in a letter to the papers editor. He suggested that he was victimized by fabricated allegations and an institutional cover-up. Suffice to say, if ever the time comes that my fellow Trojans are aware of the details, many are likely going to be not only angry but also embarrassed, he wrote. So far USC has committed to paying nearly a quarter-billion dollars to settle lawsuits filed by Tyndalls former patients. The total price tag for settlements is expected to rise. Times staff writers Paul Pringle, Richard Winton, Melissa Etehad and Sarah Parvini in Los Angeles and special correspondents Ana Santos and Johnny Urbina in Davao City, Philippines, contributed to this report. matt.hamilton@latimes.com Twitter: @MattHjourno harriet.ryan@latimes.com Twitter: @latimesharriet Pope Francis has accepted the resignation of a Los Angeles auxiliary bishop accused of sexually abusing a minor in the latest case of alleged molestation to rock the Roman Catholic Church, officials said Wednesday. In a one-line statement, the Vatican said Alexander Salazar, 69, an auxiliary bishop in Los Angeles, was resigning, but also released a letter from Archbishop Jose H. Gomez explaining that the accusation dated to the 1990s. Gomez said the L.A. archdiocese was made aware of the allegation in 2005, a year after Salazar was named a bishop. The accusation was never directly reported to the archdiocese, but was investigated by the police in 2002 and did not lead to prosecution at the time, Gomez wrote. Advertisement Since Salazar was a bishop at the time the allegation was received, the archdiocese referred the matter to the Vaticans Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which investigates clergy. The congregation imposed certain precautionary measures on the ministry of Bishop Salazar, Gomez wrote, without providing details. Salazar denied any wrongdoing, according to Gomez. Apparently unsatisfied with the outcome of the Vatican probe, the archbishop sought and received permission from the Vatican to submit the allegation to the L.A. archdioceses independent clergy misconduct oversight board. The board found the allegation to be credible and I submitted its findings and recommendations along with my own votum to the Holy See to make its final determination as to Bishop Salazars status, Gomez wrote. Francis decision to accept Salazars resignation caps a difficult year for the pope, who has seen the churchs long-running abuse scandal flare up in Chile and the U.S. The pope this year was accused of belittling the claims made by victims of predator priests in Chile before he made a dramatic about-face in April, apologizing to the victims and prompting Chiles bishops to all offer their resignations. In July, Francis ousted Francis McCarrick, the retired archbishop of Washington, from the College of Cardinals after he was accused of molesting a minor in the 1970s. Since then, former seminarians have claimed McCarrick tried to share a bed with them. A former Vatican nuncio to the U.S., Carlo Maria Vigano, then accused Francis of turning a blind eye to McCarricks behavior, and called on the pope to resign. In July, a U.S. grand jury reported that 1,000 children had been molested by Catholic clergy in Pennsylvania since the 1940s. In a bid to stamp out the scourge of abuse in the church, Francis has since summoned the heads of more than 100 bishops conferences to the Vatican in February to discuss remedies. This week, the organizers of the conference advised bishops to spend time talking to abuse victims before they fly to Rome, to learn first hand the suffering that they have endured. In a letter to bishops they added, Absent a comprehensive and communal response, not only will we fail to bring healing to victim survivors, but the very credibility of the church to carry on the mission of Christ will be in jeopardy throughout the world. Kington is a special correspondent. Kington is a special correspondent. A man wanted by San Diego police in the October slaying of a good Samaritan on Interstate 15 was captured in Mexico on Tuesday and turned over to U.S. authorities, police said. Investigators believe Edson Acuna, 24, fled to Mexico some time after the Oct. 27 slaying of 21-year-old Navy man Curtis Adams on southbound I-15, San Diego police homicide Lt. Anthony Dupree said. Adams was driving with his girlfriend in the Logan Heights neighborhood when he stopped about 2:20 a.m. to help what he thought was a stranded motorist, Dupree said. Adams was shot immediately as he exited his vehicle. Edson Acunas brother Brandon Javier Acuna, 21 was taken into custody and questioned shortly after the shooting. He was arrested later and charged with murder, robbery, burglary and shooting at an inhabited vehicle. Two other people Harvey Elias Liberato, 24, and Susana Galvan, 38 were arrested and charged in connection with the shooting shortly afterward. Advertisement Detectives subsequently identified Edson Acuna as a suspect, and a warrant was issued for his arrest on suspicion of murder, Dupree said. On Tuesday, Mexican authorities located Acuna and took him into custody before delivering him to U.S. authorities at the border, Dupree said in a statement. Acuna was booked into San Diego Central Jail on Tuesday afternoon and was being held without bail, according to jail records. He was also booked on suspicion of murder, robbery, burglary and shooting at an inhabited vehicle, plus an additional count of being a felon in possession of a firearm. Liberato is facing murder, robbery and burglary charges and was being held without bail Tuesday. Galvan is suspected of being a criminal accessory in the case, according to prosecutors and jail records. She was being held in lieu of $100,000 bail. Brandon Acuna was in court for a routine appearance in the case Tuesday. Adams was a first-generation American whose parents immigrated to New York from the West Indies, according to his cousin, Desmond Abrams Jr. Adams enlisted in the Navy in 2016. He was a steelworker with Amphibious Construction Battalion 1 and was stationed at Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, military officials said. He was very excited about deploying and doing his job with the Navy, Abrams said in October. He loved the uniform. He was really proud of being a sailor. City News Service contributed to this report. Riggins writes for the San Diego Union-Tribune. alex.riggins@sduniontribune.com In the six months since his arrest on sexual assault charges, Harvey Weinstein and his legal team have not hesitated to strike back at those who have accused him of wrongdoing. The women who say they were victims? Unreliable and opportunistic. The cops who investigated him? Corrupt. The prosecutors who obtained the indictment? Not interested in justice merely bowing to the intense pressure brought on by a #MeToo movement that in many ways sees Weinstein as its arch-villain. Advertisement Faced with accusations from nearly 80 women in New York, Los Angeles and London, Weinstein could serve extensive jail time if convicted as a serial sexual predator. But his scorched-earth defense strategy has won him some short-term victories. One of the six criminal charges against him already has been dropped, and one of the detectives who led him into a New York City police precinct in handcuffs has been taken off the case. The head of the NYPD unit that investigated Weinstein was transferred out of his sex crimes assignment, then retired last month. The first true test of Weinsteins hellbent approach, however, may come in a Manhattan courtroom on Thursday, when a judge will rule on a motion to dismiss the remaining five counts of sexual assault Legal experts say attorney Benjamin Brafman has done well to challenge the credibility of the New York Police Department and the Manhattan district attorneys office. But his strategy is not without risk. The repeated attacks on Weinsteins accusers could hurt the movie moguls already tarnished image and make him even less sympathetic in the eyes of a jury. Theres a cruelty, theres a double-blaming of the victim, to his argument. They are victimized when theyre attacked and then theyre humiliated when they have to maintain a modicum of ordinary interaction with a monster, said Eugene ODonnell, a former New York City police officer and prosecutor who teaches at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at City University of New York. Most people will identify with that sense of powerlessness. In October 2017, the first of dozens of women came forward to accuse the Hollywood titan of a wide array of misconduct. Weinstein has been charged in Manhattan with forcing former actress Lucia Evans to perform oral sex on him in 2004; attacking another woman, Mimi Haleyi, in 2006; and sexually assaulting an unidentified woman in a hotel in 2013. The Times typically does not name women who make accusations of sexual assault, but Haleyi and Evans have told their stories in public. The claims against Weinstein helped spark the #MeToo movement, leading to the professional destruction and criminal prosecution of a number of high-profile entertainers and politicians who saw women accuse them of harassment and assault. In hundreds of pages of court documents filed since May, Brafman has sought to subvert the movements central narrative that women accusing powerful men of sexual misconduct should automatically be believed. When prosecutors in October dropped the charge related to Evans accusation a decision that followed the discovery of emails that suggested inconsistencies in her testimony Brafman was quick to argue that her perjured testimony contaminated the grand jury proceedings and called for the remaining five counts on the indictment to be dropped. In other court filings, Brafman has revealed friendly communications between the remaining accusers and Weinstein that took place after the dates of the alleged assaults. The emails and continued conversations, Brafman has said, invalidate the assault claims. In his most recent filing, Brafman said he could produce a friend of the unidentified accuser in the alleged 2013 assault who would testify that the woman had attended a private movie screening with Weinstein mere hours after the incident was said to have taken place. The emails demonstrate that these women who now allege sexual assault by Mr. Weinstein have for years engaged in loving and often intimate conversations with him before and after the date of the alleged assault, Brafman wrote in a November filing. Sonia Ossorio, president of the National Organization for Womens New York City chapter, said Brafman and Weinstein are peddling a narrative that is both antiquated and offensive. It is no way proof that an assault didnt take place, she said of the email traffic. It doesnt translate into every interaction being consensual. ODonnell, the former New York prosecutor, also said Brafman might be overplaying his hand in referring to the emails and communications as exculpatory evidence. The women, several of whom had Hollywood aspirations, might have felt compelled to maintain a relationship with Weinstein because of the influence he commanded at the time, he said. Its a throwback argument that ignores the relationships that can be very complex in these situations, ODonnell said. The fact that somebody stays in contact with somebody with such awesome power, who wields such influence, that in and of itself is, at best, inconclusive. Brafman also repeatedly has set out to discredit the police and prosecutors involved in Weinsteins arrest. NYPD Det. Nicholas DiGaudio became a target after prosecutors admitted that he had advised an accuser to delete personal information from her cellphone if she did not want it to appear in a public court record. Ultimately, no information was deleted from the phone and the accuser has said DiGaudio had no influence on her testimony, according to court filings. But the perception of police misconduct has been a common drumbeat from the Weinstein camp. Over and over again, Brafman has argued that prosecutors failed to turn over exculpatory evidence in the form of emails or statements from friends of the accusers who could provide testimony favorable to the defense. In response to each motion, prosecutors have said they are under no legal obligation to turn over such evidence during a grand jury hearing and have dismissed Brafmans arguments as an attempt to litigate the case in the press. But though prosecutors have dismissed Brafmans all-out assault as bluster, other legal experts see it as necessary. The veteran defense attorney has bested the Manhattan district attorneys office in high-profile cases before, but Brafman also knows what could likely happen if a toxic figure like Harvey Weinstein ends up in front of a jury. His sentiment is: If you can get this jettisoned now, thats not just saving this guy from a trial, ODonnell said. Thats saving this guy a very high likelihood that he will probably be convicted. james.queally@latimes.com richard.winton@latimes.com Follow @JamesQueallyLAT & @LACrimes for crime and police news in California. President Xi Jinping attends a grand gathering celebrating the 40th anniversary of the countrys reform and opening-up at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Tuesday. [Photo/Xinhua] President sums up countrys success over past 40 years, charts major tasks in future at key gathering President Xi Jinping reaffirmed Chinas commitment to opening-up even more to the world at a grand gathering on Tuesday to mark the 40th anniversary of the countrys reform and opening-up. The practice of reform and opening-up over the past 40 years has shown that openness brings progress, while seclusion leads to backwardness, Xi said. The president pledged to support the building of an open, transparent, inclusive and nondiscriminatory multilateral trading system, facilitate trade and investment, and promote more openness amid ongoing economic globalization. The high-profile conference was attended by Xi and the six other members of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, as well as Vice-President Wang Qishan. Premier Li Keqiang presided over the meeting. Over the past 40 years, China has recorded an average annual GDP growth rate of around 9.5 percent. This contributed over 30 percent to global economic growth and lifted more than 740 million people out of poverty, Xi said, calling the four decades a glorious process. The country will focus on jointly building the Belt and Road with other nations and establish a new platform for international cooperation while continuing opening-up measures, Xi said. China will never seek self-development at the cost of other countries interests, nor will it give up its justified interests, Xi said, adding that Chinas development will pose no threat to any other nation, and it will never seek hegemony no matter how developed it becomes. Chinas development provides successful experience and offers bright prospects for other developing countries as they strive for modernization, and it represents Chinas great contribution to the progress of human civilization, Xi said. During the conference, Xi stressed the Partys leadership over all work while calling for constantly enhancing and improving Party leadership. Reform and opening-up show that Party leadership is the most essential attribute of socialism with Chinese characteristics, and the greatest strength of this system, Xi said. Two Honduran teenagers with the migrant caravan were killed and their bodies dumped in a Tijuana alley over the weekend, according to a Baja California prosecutor. The killings highlight the dangers faced by Central American migrants, especially unaccompanied minors, waiting in Mexico to ask for asylum in the United States. The identities of the teenagers have not been released. The boys, approximately 16 and 17 years old, showed signs of being stabbed and strangled, according to a statement from the Baja California prosecutors office. Advertisement A third victim survived the attack, according to the prosecutors. Prosecutor Jorge Alvarez said the bodies were discovered around 7 p.m. Saturday on public roads in the Quintana Roo alley of Zona Centro in Tijuana. Investigators said the minors were leaving a shelter for unaccompanied children on the Boulevard Cuauhtemoc and heading to the downtown area of Tijuana. A statement from the government of Honduras offered condolences to the boys bereaved families and said they were offering assistance in taking the childrens bodies back to Honduras. We reiterate the call to Honduran nationals that they not risk their lives and the lives of their families on the dangers that the migratory route represents, where migrants are exposed to being victims of traffickers, the statement read. Alvarez said the initial investigation showed robbery was a possible motive. Its possible robbing them of their mobile phones was the motive, or they thought these young people were carrying money, he said. Fry writes for the San Diego Union-Tribune. An owner of a downtown Los Angeles Fashion District company was sentenced Tuesday to federal prison for his role in what prosecutors allege was a money laundering scheme to hide hundreds of thousands of dollars that came from drug traffickers. Hersel Neman of Beverly Hills pleaded guilty to conspiring to launder money. His brother, Morad Neman of Westwood, pleaded guilty to conspiring to structure monetary transactions in a domestic financial institution and subscribing to and filing a false 2013 tax return that understated the companys income, among other charges. For the record: The headline of this story and the article previously stated that brothers Morad and Hersel Neman were sentenced in a money laundering scheme. The headline and article were updated to clarify that only one of the brothers, Hersel Neman, was sentenced for conspiring to launder money. The other brother, Morad Neman, was sentenced for other charges, but not money laundering. Parts of the story have been reworked. Morad Neman didnt plead guilty to money laundering charges and denies any involvement in the scheme, his attorney said. Ariel Neuman, an attorney for Morad Neman, said the government made it appear that his client was involved with drug traffickers when there was no proof. Advertisement The governments press releases have suggested over and over that [Morad] Neman pled guilty of money laundering, he said. We think [the sentencing] is still too harsh, but compared to what the government was asking for, its a fair result. Morad Neman was sentenced to two years in federal prison, and his brother, Hersel Neman, was sentenced to 18 months, the U.S. attorneys office said. They also were ordered to undergo six months of home confinement. Morad Neman was ordered to forfeit nearly $3.2 million to the government; his brother owes about $370,000. The two brothers, a company accountant and Hersel Nemans brother-in-law were among several arrested after a 2014 raid in the Fashion District that was part of a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigation. Prosecutors alleged in the sentencing report that between 2012 and 2014, the business owned by the Nemans, Pacific Eurotex Corp., was used to launder proceeds from drug deals. Prosecutors also said in the report that Pacific Eurotex Corp. failed to report the income in their tax returns and that Alma Villalobos, an accountant for the business, kept a separate book to document the illegal cash activity. In 2014, 1,000 law enforcement officials searched 75 Fashion District locations, including Pacific Eurotex Corp. and Q.T. Fashion, as part of a crackdown on an illegal scheme that cartels are increasingly relying on to get their profits from drug sales, kidnappings and other illegal activities back to Mexico, authorities said. Federal officials said they believe that the drug organizations have used businesses throughout Los Angeles to convert their vast earnings into pesos, turning the city into a hub for trade-based money laundering. Authorities collected $90 million total from those raids, of which $70 million was in cash. In the peso exchange scheme, a broker arranges for a drug traffickers cash to be given to U.S. businesses to ship goods to foreign customers, according to the Pacific Eurotex Corp. sentencing report. When the foreign customers sell the goods, the pesos are turned over to the broker, who pays the drug trafficker in the local currency of the foreign country, the report said. According to the sentencing report, Pacific Eurotex received $3.2 million 40% of its income that was deposited in an illegal manner. Sentencing documents said agents from the Department of Homeland Security warned Hersel Neman and Villalobos in May 2013 about the money laundering scheme organized by cartels and instructed them to file a form when they received more than $10,000 for each transaction. While an agent was present, Hersel Neman asked Villalobos to make sure the form was filled out. After that agents visit, they received drug proceeds anyway, according to the documents. Investigators found out after using an undercover agent who acted as though he were delivering narcotics proceeds to the Nemans, according to court documents, which said the cash deliveries were made in large amounts by individuals unknown to the Nemans and involved tens of thousands of dollars bundled by rubber bands. In total, the [undercover agent] delivered $369,935 in narcotics proceeds to Pacific Eurotex, for payment on behalf of goods that Pacific Eurotex sold to customers in Mexico, the court documents said. Times staff writer Alene Tchekmedyian contributed to this report. alejandra.reyesvelarde@latimes.com Twitter: @r_valejandra Nevada is set to become the first state in the nation with an overall female-majority Legislature when its next session opens in the new year. The Clark County Commission on Tuesday appointed Beatrice Duran and Rochelle Nguyen to fill two open state Assembly seats. With the commissions approval, the Legislature will have 32 women out of a total of 63 seats between the state Assembly and Senate. The additions will solidify the female majority in the Assembly, with 23 of 42 seats to be held by women. Men still make up the majority of the 21-member state Senate, with women holding nine seats. A great milestone! Democratic Gov.-elect Steve Sisolak tweeted after the appointment. In his last meeting as Clark County Commission chairman, Sisolak voted to approve both women for the vacant seats. Advertisement Tuesdays appointments continued to propel Nevada forward as a state that has been especially receptive to women running for and being elected to public office. The midterm election in November proved to be a high-water mark for the Silver State. Jacky Rosen defeated incumbent Dean Heller in the U.S. Senate race, becoming the second woman in Nevada to secure a Senate seat. In 2016, Catherine Cortez Masto became the first female senator to be elected to represent Nevada. Half of Nevadas representatives in the U.S. House will be women next year as well; Susie Lee defeated Danny Tarkanian and Dina Titus beat Joyce Bentley. The Nevada Supreme Court also picked up a majority of women in November, with three female judges being elected to join a fourth on the bench. Nevada voters also approved by a wide margin a ballot question that exempted feminine hygiene products from state sales tax. State Sen. Pat Spearman, who led the push for Nevada to become the first state in more than 40 years to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment in 2017, said the new female majority in Nevada should be a beacon to other states. We are on the right side of history and we will continue to make history, Spearman said. For people stuck in the 15th century who still want to promote the idea that a womans place is only in the home, I would say if youre planning on running for office, be afraid. Be very afraid. People are done with that. Its time to get things done. Nevadas female population, according to the latest Census data, is 49.8%. In Clark County, where Las Vegas is, its 50.1%. Kelly Dittmar, an associate professor of political science and scholar for the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, said Nevadas embrace of women in positions of political power may be partially rooted in the Wests more pragmatic view of women pulling weight in all aspects of frontier life. You needed women to step in and step up into public roles, Dittmar said. Whether it was working on the farm or participating in government. The Center for American Women in Politics showed New Hampshire had a female majority in its state Senate in 2009-2010, but no state has had a female majority of both chambers combined. Dittmar said the states with the lowest concentration of women in their state legislatures heading into 2019 were West Virginia and Mississippi both at under 15% female. Nevada has generally had higher representation of women in its state Legislature, with 39.7% being represented by women in 2017, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. The average for state legislatures nationally was 24.4% in 2017. Assembly Speaker Jason Frierson said in a statement he was proud to welcome two members with a diversity of backgrounds and life experiences. Nguyen, a Democrat, said she was inspired to run amid the record-setting number of women who sought political office this year, but she said that wasnt the only factor in her decision to seek the Assembly seat. The criminal defense attorney and mother to two children said issues like education and healthcare were driving forces behind her seeking the seat. We can sit there and talk about how we want things to change or want things to be different or better, but I know it was important for me and my husband to show our children that, in order to make a difference, you have to get involved, Nguyen said. Duran, a fellow Democrat and a staff member at Culinary Workers Union Local 226 in Las Vegas, said she was honored to be part of a history-making legislative class and that this was a chance for women being able to show their power. Nevadas legislative session begins in February. david.montero@latimes.com | Twitter: @davemontero The United States on Tuesday announced it was adding billions of dollars to an ambitious Mexican development project for that countrys southern region and Central America as a way to deter migration. But neither Washington nor Mexico City announced any headway in the Trump administrations goal of keeping Central American asylum seekers in Mexico and out of the United States. In simultaneous announcements in the U.S. and Mexican capitals, the U.S. State Department and Mexican Foreign Secretary Marcelo Ebrard said the United States has committed to $5.8 billion in public and private money for Central America and an additional $2 billion for southern Mexico. Most of the money was already in the pipeline, allotted by the Obama administration and in the early months of the current government, or requested for the upcoming fiscal year 2019. Advertisement About $2 billion is new money potentially available through the Overseas Private Investment Corp., the governments financial development arm. The funds, including loans, are distributed based on the commercial viability of projects, State Department officials said. We are committed to promote strong regional economic growth, better-paying jobs and greater opportunities for all of our citizens, Ebrard said in Mexico City. Last week, the new Mexican government of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador announced plans to spend $30 billion over five years for development in southern Mexico. Mexico is under enormous pressure from the Trump administration to curb illegal migration from Central America, and the U.S.-Mexico projects are aimed at fighting the poverty and joblessness that push thousands of Guatemalans, Salvadorans and Hondurans, as well as Mexicans from countrys impoverished southern states, north to the United States. The U.S. money announced Tuesday is also designed in part to be an incentive to the Mexican government to go along with President Trumps demands that Central American asylum-seekers be kept in Mexico and not allowed to cross the U.S. southern border. In talks with Ebrard and other senior Mexican officials, the Trump administration has pushed for a remain in Mexico program where those headed north would stay in Mexico while their asylum claims were processed, something that can drag on for years. Immigrant advocates in the United States have denounced the plan as illegal, and Mexico has so far refused to go along. Any mention of the idea was conspicuously absent from Tuesdays announcements. State Department spokesman Robert Palladino said in Washington that the money announced Tuesday was part of a holistic, coordinated approach by Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo and the new Mexican government to stem illegal immigration. The financial pledges stood in sharp contrast to Trumps repeated threats to cut off aid, not increase it, to Mexico and Central American countries if they did not prevent their citizens from migrating to the United States. Palladino said the administration still expects the recipients of U.S. aid to hold up their end of the bargain and to show results. Mexico has pushed economic development as an alternative to Washingtons hard-line enforcement approach, and Tuesdays joint announcements appear to indicate U.S. officials are willing to accept some of the Mexican philosophy, at least for now. That contrasts with some of the heated electoral rhetoric from Trump and his supporters on the so-called caravans of migrants that made their way across Mexico in recent months. Honduran migrant Oscar Hernandez, 22, carries his 11-month-old daughter, Daniela, in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas on Oct. 30. (Rodrigo Abd / Associated Press) The idea is that people would not have the need to migrate, Lopez Obrador, who took office on Dec. 1, told reporters in Mexico City last week. Lopez Obrador, a left-wing populist, has maintained a cordial relationship with Trump, despite the two leaders divergent ideological pedigrees. Tuesdays joint announcement was yet another sign of how Mexicos new leadership has sought to accommodate Trump without compromising Lopez Obradors oft-stated commitment to respect the human rights of migrants. This declaration reflects the importance that both countries place on our bilateral relationship, Ebrard said. The spirit of cooperation between our countries is strong as seen in institutional, economic, family and cultural links that unite Mexico and the United States. The topic of international migration is a sensitive one in Mexico, which has long been the major source of immigrants both legal and illegal to the United States. But in recent years the U.S.-bound flow of undocumented Mexicans has dwindled as the numbers of Central Americans detained along the southwestern U.S. border have increased. In their Tuesday announcement, the U.S. and Mexico also agreed to a series of cabinet-level meetings starting in January, a business summit and creation of a task force to address the root causes of migration. Most of U.S. aid for the region is earmarked for projects that promote good governance, institutional reform, human rights and job creation. Experts say those projects have had spotty success in a region still devastated by violence and official corruption. Wilkinson reported from Washington and McDonnell from Mexico City. tracy.wilkinson@latimes.com For more on international affairs, follow @TracyKWilkinson on Twitter patrick.mcdonnell@latimes.com Twitter: @PmcdonnellLAT Jorge Cifuentes and the other drug traffickers turned witnesses in the ongoing trial of Joaquin El Chapo Guzman have much to gain by cooperating with the U.S. government and testifying against the Mexican kingpin. Prosecutors could petition the court to go easier on Cifuentes when he is finally sentenced for his 2015 guilty pleas to charges of drug trafficking and money laundering. And under his cooperation agreement, he can never be charged with other past crimes, including the many slayings he has admitted to ordering as a member of a prominent family in the Colombian drug trade. But the most coveted prize is the elusive S visa, which provides temporary legal status to convicted terrorists and drug lords and their families and sets them on the path to green cards and eventually U.S. citizenship. A powerful tool in the prosecution of some of the worlds most dangerous criminals, it is often the main incentive a foreigner has to wear a wire, participate in a sting operation or step onto the witness stand. Advertisement But the visa also remains shrouded in mystery. Cooperators usually must take prosecutors and other law enforcement authorities at their word, and immigration attorneys say those promises often fail to materialize. I did ask them for the favor of helping bring my family to the U.S., Cifuentes testified last week in New York. I really dont have a lot of hope that they will do it. S visas are so rare that in online forums of immigration attorneys they are routinely referred to as unicorns. Everybody knows about them, everybodys heard of them, but no ones ever seen one, said Ahmed Hassan, a Washington-based immigration attorney who has represented clients in several S visa fights but has never succeeded. The elusive unicorn slipped my grasp. He explained his strategy for breaking that losing streak: I have to cavort with a lot more high-level unsavory fellows. Just 250 S visas are made available annually, and only a handful of those are ever issued. Officials were unable to provide statistics. By comparison, the government issues up to 10,000 U visas each year to crime victims who cooperate with law enforcement. I think of the S visa as the snitch visa, said Georgia immigration lawyer Tracie Klinke. If a clients been asked to cooperate, we always want to have a plan B, because plan A, the S visa, probably wont pan out. Not even the federal agencies that deal with justice and immigration were able to provide clear answers about how the visas work. A Justice Department spokesman said that the responsibility for issuing them rests with Homeland Security specifically its investigations division and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. But an ICE spokesman said the job fell to another division of Homeland Security U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, whose website indeed includes a fact sheet about the S visa suggesting its the ultimate arbiter. Bringing things full circle, however, a spokesman there said the visas were the purview of the Justice Department. In any case, the bar for receiving one remains extraordinarily high. Klinke told the story of a client who wore a wire for ICE in an attempt to bust the man whod helped him get a fraudulent work visa. The S visa he was promised never came through, and the man was deported. The outcome was the same for two of Hassans clients a club bouncer from Mexico who worked undercover to bust high-level cocaine dealers and a Ghanaian drug mule who helped bring down a heroin ring. The federal government will chew them up and spit them out, Hassan said. Ive tried a number of other times. Immigration attorneys whose clients have obtained S visas say that the most hardened criminals have the best chances, because they are most likely to lead investigators and prosecutors to the biggest targets. The first time I mentioned the possibility of an S visa to an ICE agent with whom I had a good rapport, he said, Oh, so your client knows where Bin Laden is? recalled New Hampshire immigration attorney Ron Abramson, who recently won his first S visa case. The whole paradox in only benefiting criminals is that you dont possess valuable information unless youre involved in some pretty serious stuff yourself. As one of the worlds most notorious criminals, Guzman certainly qualifies as a big target. The former head of the Sinaloa cartel, he was extradited to the United States on charges of drug trafficking, conspiracy to commit murder and weapons violations. His trial began in early November and was originally projected to stretch until March, though the judge recently said he believes it could wrap up in mid-February. Guzmans lead defense attorney, Eduardo Balarezo, said he has little doubt the government will make good on its promises of S visas. Its not a unicorn, he said, adding that hed just recently secured one for a client. If youre cooperating, theyll give it to you. Especially on a case like this. The visas have featured prominently in the defense strategy. In his opening statements, defense attorney Jeffrey Lichtman warned jurors that the killers and drug traffickers who testified in court would live among you soon. The lawyers also taunted witness Miguel Angel El Gordo Martinez, once a deputy to Guzman, over the fact that he sat on the stand with his visa just out of reach. Up to this date, have you received your S visa? defense attorney William Purpura asked. No, replied Martinez, who testified that Guzman tried to have him assassinated four separate times while he was in Mexican prison. Purpura suggested that Martinez was lying to improve his chances. Prosecutors have sought to neutralize that argument by eliciting testimony about how much some witnesses are risking. Why is it important for you and your family to stay in the United States? U.S. attorney Gina Parlovecchio asked German Rosero, a former public defender in Colombia who became a drug trafficker and is now waiting for an S visa. Its the only safe place I would have to live, the witness said. Sharp is a special correspondent. Good morning, and welcome to the Essential California newsletter. Its Wednesday, Dec. 19, and heres whats happening across California: TOP STORIES Dr. George Tyndall arrived at the University of Southern California in the summer of 1989 to be the campus gynecologist. Now the 71-year-old physicians life is now under intense scrutiny as detectives probe allegations that Tyndall sexually abused hundreds of patients over nearly three decades at USC, part of the largest ever LAPD sex-crimes investigation with a single suspect. Investigators are grilling his co-workers and poring over his possessions, including hard drives seized from his cluttered home and photos of unclothed patients found in a rented storage unit. Tyndall has denied all wrongdoing. Heres the story of how the former Naval crypto-linguist ended up at the center of a scandal that led to the universitys president stepping down. Los Angeles Times Plus: The Times published its first story about Tyndalls alleged misconduct with young women in May. Within a week, 300 people had contacted the school, and the LAPD opened a sex-crimes investigation. You can read The Times coverage of whats been happening at USC here. Los Angeles Times Advertisement Whats up with Weinstein? In the six months since his arrest on sexual assault charges, Harvey Weinstein and his legal team have not hesitated to strike back at those who have accused him of wrongdoing. The women who say they were victims? Unreliable and opportunistic. The cops who investigated him? Corrupt. The prosecutors who obtained the indictment? Not interested in justice merely bowing to the intense pressure brought on by a #MeToo movement that in many ways sees Weinstein as its arch-villain. Faced with accusations from nearly 80 women in New York, Los Angeles and London, Weinstein is in a tough legal fight, but his tactics have shown some short-term signs of success. Los Angeles Times What will happen with that wall? President Trump appeared to back away on Tuesday from threats to shut down parts of the federal government over his demands for billions for his border wall, though he left Congress unclear about what deal he would accept to avert closure after midnight Friday. Trump, who has been demanding $5 billion in additional wall funding, said last week during a meeting with Democratic House and Senate leaders that he would be proud to shut down the government if his demand wasnt met. In an interview Tuesday morning with Fox News, however, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said, We have other ways that we can get to that $5 billion. She did not offer specifics. Los Angeles Times Plus: The United States on Tuesday announced it was adding millions of dollars to an ambitious Mexican development project for that countrys southern region and Central America as a way to deter migration. Los Angeles Times Get the Essential California newsletter L.A. STORIES RIP: Penny Marshall, who costarred as a Milwaukee brewery worker in the top-rated 1970s and 80s sitcom Laverne & Shirley before becoming a director of hit movies such as Big and A League of Their Own, has died. She was 75. Los Angeles Times Fitting tribute: When Marshall knocked a classic out of the park, inspiring generations to come, in A League of Their Own. Los Angeles Times Its a tunnel, yup: Elon Musk unveiled his companys first tunnel in Hawthorne, and it wasnt a smooth ride. Los Angeles Times Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk arrives in a modified Model X during an unveiling of the Boring Co.'s first tunnel in Hawthorne. (Robyn Beck / Pool Photo) Oy vey: Expect your public transit ride to LAX to take longer in January. The Green Lines airport stop will shut for two weeks. Los Angeles Times Summing it all up: Over the last year, the Los Angeles Times has published a series about a program that pays Los Angeles police and firefighters essentially double at the end of their careers. The latest installment looked at how those extra payments drove some former employees retirement income far over the limit the Internal Revenue Service allows pension funds to pay. The series has sparked calls for reform. Here is a breakdown of the key findings. Los Angeles Times IMMIGRATION AND THE BORDER Good news for this family: It seemed that Shaima Swileh, a Yemeni national, who has been separated from her family for months because of the Travel Ban would not get a chance to see her 2-year-old before he died. But now Swileh has been granted a visa by the State Department. Los Angeles Times An ugly border story: A Los Angeles-area man who was accused of trying to set up sexual encounters with children as young as 8 in Tijuana was sentenced to 17 years in prison. San Diego Union-Tribune POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT Prepare the picket line: Los Angeles schools Supt. Austin Beutner called for the teachers union to settle a long-running contract dispute, citing a just-released fact-finders report as a framework for a deal. The union sees it differently. Los Angeles Times Potentially good news: The number of people living on the streets in Los Angeles and San Diego, two epicenters of the homelessness crisis, fell this year, suggesting those cities efforts to combat the problem could be starting to pay off. That occurred even as the total number nationwide went up. Los Angeles Times Coincidence? A former top executive at Pacific Gas and Electric Co. said his recent retirement from the company was unrelated to regulators allegations that the utility falsified gas pipeline safety records for five years. San Francisco Chronicle His next act? Gov. Jerry Brown is leaving, but he has plenty of political money to take with him. Hes sitting on $15 million in his campaign account. Sacramento Bee CRIME AND COURTS Pill mill accusations: An Irvine doctor suspected of prescribing opioids and other powerful narcotics to people without medical exams including a man accused in a DUI crash that killed an off-duty Costa Mesa fire captain has been arrested, authorities said. Los Angeles Times See you in court: Alfonso Ribeiro of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air fame has sued video game companies over use of the Carlton Dance. Los Angeles Times High in the sky: Border patrol agents seized 129 pounds of narcotics worth $1.4 million and arrested two people after agents spotted a suspicious ultralight aircraft landing just north of Calexico, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Los Angeles Times Settlement reached: Sonoma County has agreed to pay $3 million to settle a lawsuit with the parents of a 13-year-old Santa Rosa boy who was fatally shot in 2013 by a sheriffs deputy who mistook the boys plastic gun for an AK-47. Los Angeles Times THE ENVIRONMENT The warning signs: Officials knew the Carr fire could happen and failed to prevent it. ProPublica CALIFORNIA CULTURE At the Emerald Cup: Stoned on pot, but clear-eyed about legalizations threat to Californias legendary cannabis culture. Los Angeles Times Seven women, seven juicy roles: The Times actress roundtable. Los Angeles Times Yum! Here are the 11 most anticipated L.A. restaurant openings in 2019. Eater Los Angeles In Hollywood: The Anita Hill Commission more formally, the Hollywood Commission on Eliminating Sexual Harassment and Advancing Equality announced Tuesday that it will prioritize protecting Hollywoods thousands of freelance workers, who often have no access to traditional workplace structures or human resources departments. The Hollywood Reporter Heres one Grammy Awards prediction: Adding more nominees in big categories just means more disappointment. Los Angeles Times CALIFORNIA ALMANAC Los Angeles area: sunny, 73, Wednesday; partly cloudy, 74, Thursday. San Diego: sunny, 68, Wednesday; partly cloudy, 71, Thursday. San Francisco area: foggy, 59, Wednesday; cloudy, 56, Thursday. San Jose: partly cloudy, 64, Wednesday; partly cloudy, 62, Thursday. Sacramento: partly cloudy, 62, Wednesday; cloudy, 56, Thursday. More weather is here. AND FINALLY Todays California memory comes from Linda Mann: As a Los Angeles native, I remember playing outside with my neighborhood friends in the 1940s: hopscotch, jacks, bike riding, roller skating and hit-the-bat right in the middle of Military Avenue! We played until our moms called us in for dinner, and after dinner in the summer until the streetlights went on. If you have a memory or story about the Golden State, share it with us. Send us an email to let us know what you love or fondly remember about our state. (Please keep your story to 100 words.) Please let us know what we can do to make this newsletter more useful to you. Send comments, complaints and ideas to Benjamin Oreskes and Shelby Grad. Also follow them on Twitter @boreskes and @shelbygrad. Minneapolis may have just become the most radically pro-housing, anti-climate-change city in the nation. The Midwest metropolis recently voted to eliminate single-family zoning and instead allow duplexes and triplexes to be built on lots now reserved for one house. Such an ambitious, large-scale overhaul of zoning rules is practically unheard of in U.S. cities, where single-family neighborhoods with their rows of houses set behind landscaped front yards have typically been off the table during discussions of citywide Smart Growth and affordable housing. Minneapolis 2040 Comprehensive Plan is radical for other reasons too. The plan would do away with the requirement that new housing developments include parking, and it would allow taller, denser buildings next to transit stops. Single-family neighborhoods can no longer be sacrosanct. Advertisement But city leaders recognized that they cannot meet their goals of creating more units of affordable housing, building communities that are less dependent on cars and reducing racial and economic disparities, without reconsidering single-family zoning, which makes up nearly 60% the city. Continuing to preserve single-family neighborhoods as they were decades ago would have left vast swaths of the city unaffordable to many buyers, hostile to new approaches to transportation and, often, still segregated as a result of racially discriminatory housing practices dating back decades. While rezoning single-family properties for denser development may seem extreme today, some of Minneapolis older neighborhoods as in many cities actually grew up with homes next to duplex, triplex and fourplex apartment buildings. This mix of housing was only later prohibited by strict single-family zoning, which was often adopted in the last century as a way to segregate neighborhoods without explicitly banning any racial or religious group. If there is a silver lining to the affordable housing crisis that has swept cities across the country in recent years, its that political leaders are finally talking about dramatic changes to housing policy that could address these historical wrongs and lay the groundwork for more sustainable ways of growing. Minneapolis certainly gets credit for taking a bold approach. (The regional planning agency still needs to sign off on the citys plan; if it does, the new zoning rules would go into effect next year.) Seattle is considering rezoning 6% of its single-family neighborhoods. Portland has been mulling over a proposal to allow four-unit buildings in most single-family neighborhoods. And one Oregon lawmaker, frustrated with the slow pace of the regulation, is drafting a bill that would allow such buildings on single-family lots in any city in the state with more than 10,000 residents. California has begun to whittle away at single-family zoning as well. Recently passed state laws allow a homeowner to build an accessory dwelling unit if there is enough space on the property essentially allowing two units on lots zoned for one home. State Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) has been pushing for even more dramatic change. Last year he offered a hotly disputed bill to override local zoning and allow taller, denser housing around transit stations even on single-family lots. That proposal didnt make it past the first committee hearing, felled by concerns that it would promote gentrification and undermine local control of land use, along with opposition from single-family neighborhood protectionists. Undaunted, Wiener has introduced a new version this year (Senate Bill 50); it still faces a fight in Sacramento, but the opposition already appears to be softening. Enter the Fray: First takes on the news of the minute from L.A. Times Opinion In Los Angeles, the citys first attempt to rezone land around light rail stations exempted all single-family neighborhoods from having to accept increased density. Only after lobbying by YIMBY Yes in My Backyard activists did the City Council approve a plan that rezoned exactly one single-family neighborhood to allow midsize apartments and town house developments. It was the most modest step forward possible, illustrating how challenging it can be to change the status quo, one neighborhood or one community plan at a time. Thats why Minneapolis decision to eliminate single-family zoning is such a big deal. Its not uncommon for cities governed by progressive Democrats to espouse lofty goals to create affordable housing, fight segregation and slash greenhouse gases. It is not at all common, however, for those elected officials to brave the political heat and enact policies designed to help reach those goals over the objections of established neighborhoods. There may be debates over exactly how radical the changes to the status quo should be, but its clear that single-family neighborhoods can no longer be sacrosanct. Not if cities are serious about increasing the supply and affordability of housing. And not if were serious about building more walkable, bikeable, transit-friendly communities to reduce driving and slow climate change. Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook Sharks are the apex predator of the ocean they are at the top of the food chain, prey to no other animal in the water. Their size, strength and, of course, their teeth make them the quintessential movie monsters. In real life, they regularly get screen time on TV news when they maim or kill a person. But, fearsome or not, their presence in the ocean is essential to its health, helping keep its ecosystems in balance and influencing the behavior and distribution of other species. Without sharks, the fish population would actually be far less diverse, with fewer herbivores, and coral reefs would be more endangered than they are now. For the record: An earlier version of this editorial suggested that up to 73 million sharks are finned on a fishing boat are thrown back into the water to drown. Some sharks are finned and not thrown back into the ocean, and some are not finned until after they are delivered. While sharks prevail in the oceans, they are no match for fishers who catch them to cut off their fins for sale. Up to 73 million sharks are pulled from the water each year, according to the ocean protection organization Oceana, and hauled aboard a fishing vessel. Many have their fins sawed off their live bodies before being thrown back into the water where, without their fins, they cannot get water to flow over their gills to access oxygen. They drown, starve to death, or drift down in the water, where they are eaten alive by other animals. Of the numerous species of sharks, close to a third are considered to be in danger of extinction. Advertisement This barbaric and wasteful practice feeds a market for the expensive Chinese delicacy known as shark-fin soup, and for shark fin curios that are put up for sale. Of the numerous species of sharks, close to a third are considered to be in danger of extinction. Some shark populations have been reduced to 10% of their historical levels. But its impossible to tell which cut-off fins are from which species of shark. The U.S. has long prohibited shark finning in its own waters and the European Union, Canada, Australia and some other countries have similar bans in their waters. But it still occurs in international waters and those of other nations. The state of California did its part to stanch the commercial traffic in fins by passing a law in 2011 that bans the possession or sale of shark fins. Currently, 11 other states have similar bans in place. But that hasnt stopped the international export of fins to the other 38 states, some of which, then, become hubs in the U.S. for commerce in shark fins. Enter the Fray: First takes on the news of the minute from L.A. Times Opinion The ideal way to tackle this issue is with a federal ban. Bills have been introduced in both the House and Senate to forbid the possession, sale or purchase of any shark fin or product containing shark fin (with some limited exceptions). This is a straightforward, common-sense approach that has broad, bipartisan support in Congress. Rep. Ed Royce (R-Fullerton), the original sponsor of the House bill, has 261 co-sponsors on his bill. The Senate bill, introduced by Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), has 39 co-sponsors. Given that kind of support, it should not be difficult for House leaders to pull the bill out of the Natural Resources Committee and get it to the floor so it can be voted on before Congress adjourns for the year. There isnt enough time left to move the measure through the Senate, but passing it in the House would give the proposal some momentum in the new Congress, rather than forcing supporters to start over. The U.S. is hardly the largest market for shark fins. China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan are the top five markets. The U.S. ranks 12th. But that shouldnt stop Congress from closing off the entire country to this trade and becoming a leader in the denunciation of this savage, unnecessary practice. Only sharks need their fins. Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion or Facebook The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said Tuesday that it had finalized a rule reclassifying so-called bump stocks the devices that can make a semiautomatic rifle fire nearly as quickly a fully automatic weapon as machine guns, which makes it illegal to manufacture, sell or possess them. The agency said a year ago it had the authority to reclassify the devices, and President Trump in the wake of the Parkland, Fla., school shooting directed the ATF to speed up the process. Tuesdays announcement a rare bit of welcome news from the Trump administration makes it official; White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters that owners of the conversion devices will have until March 21 to destroy them or turn them in to the ATF. This is a good step. Unfortunately, its all but certain to be challenged in the courts, and its on shaky legal ground because of the way the new rule evolved. The Obama administration determined that because bump stocks have no automatically functioning mechanical parts and [perform] no automated mechanical functions when installed, they did not fit the definition of a machine gun in federal law, which meant the ATF lacked the authority to regulate them. Tuesdays announcement, by contrast, hinges not on the technical specifications, but on the functionality. In essence, if it fires like a machine gun, its a machine gun. Cue the lawyers. The sure-fire way to resolve this would be for Congress to legislate bump stocks and related gadgets out of existence. We hope the administration prevails in whatever challenges emerge, but the sure-fire way to resolve this would be for Congress to legislate bump stocks and related gadgets out of existence. Such devices serve no function other than to evade the strict congressional limit on machine guns by, as the ATF said, harnessing the recoil energy of the semiautomatic firearm in a manner that allows the trigger to reset and continue firing without the shooter having to pull the trigger for each shot. Advertisement A mass shooter in Las Vegas used bump stocks affixed to semiautomatic rifles to fire more than 1,000 rounds in a matter of minutes from a 32nd-floor suite of the Mandalay Bay Hotel into a crowd of some 20,000 people, killing 58 concertgoers and injuring hundreds of others. It was the largest single mass shooting in the modern era, drawing attention to bump stocks and sparking outraged demands by many the Los Angeles Times included that the devices be banned. As welcome as this new rule is, it will do little to corral our national problem with gun violence. The vast majority of gun deaths come in ones and twos, led by suicides. Mass killings grab public attention for the obvious reasons these traumatic events often occur in schools, churches, work sites and on public streets, and despite their regularity, they can still shock the conscience. Getting rid of bump stocks simply trims the outer edges of potential carnage presuming that the people who have the devices in their personal arsenals follow the new rule and get rid of them. The new rule doesnt seem to add any new enforcement mechanisms, and no agency maintains any sort of records on who owns such devices. So we shouldnt be lulled into thinking this small, sane step will make a big difference in our collective safety. Enter the Fray: First takes on the news of the minute from L.A. Times Opinion But it is progress. And the president deserves credit for sticking with his promise to find a way to ban bump stocks. We urge him to go one better and work with Congress on a law banning them outright. That would require more political courage on his part, as it would push him further away from the National Rifle Assn.s position on the issue while furthering the national interest. Then the president ought to reconsider some of his other beliefs on gun laws and find more ways to limit access to firearms. It is ready access to these weapons that makes suicide attempts more successful, and that can give acts of domestic violence a deadlier turn. The president and Congress can do much more to protect public safety without eroding individual rights. Its a shame that they and their predecessors have done so little. Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion or Facebook Oh, the books that will be written about Californias 2018. So much to cover! The blue wave that crashed over Orange County in the midterms. The apocalyptic fires in Paradise and Malibu. Hollywoods #MeToo reckoning. The best of them will join other classics, like Joan Didions Slouching Towards Bethlehem or L.A. Bizarro (look up the latter one), which capture some essential aspect of the Golden State experience. This year saw the release of several great books in that genre, each of which explores a facet of what makes healthy Southern California communities institutions, businesses, even newspapers. The one I just finished was the The Library Book, the new bestseller by New Yorker staff writer Susan Orlean. She tackles one of the most infamous disasters in Los Angeles history: the 1986 fire at Central Library that destroyed 400,000 volumes and damaged 700,000 more. Orleans words spread out smoothly and richly like Kerrygold butter on toast. She describes Santa Fe Springs, for instance, as hemmed in by the dun-colored Santa Rosa Hills and a looming sense of monotony. Its a quick, yet deep read that mentions many facts and figures but never gets bogged down by them. Each of these books explores a facet of what makes healthy Southern California communities institutions, businesses, even newspapers. Advertisement She easily switches among the trauma that befell the library, how the city united to help it recover (complete with a cameo by legendarily cantankerous TV evangelist Gene Scott!), and the vibrant institution the library system is today. Her positioning of libraries as one of the last truly public spaces in the world resonated with this book nerd. I loved how she painted the Los Angeles Public Library as the citys heartbeat, its 72 branches and employees a circulation system that keeps the city humming. Libraries are egalitarian and democratic communities at their best a place where those in charge welcome everyone from the homeless to the rich, and want the twain to meet. Another type of community institution the local bank is the focus of Banking on Beauty: Millard Sheets and Midcentury Commercial Architecture in California, the first book-length study on the productive relationship the titular artist had with businessman and philanthropist Howard F. Ahmanson Sr. Lovers of California art and architecture will swoon at the photos of the murals, statues and mosaics that Sheets designed for about 200 Home Savings and Loan branches between the 1960s and 1980s. (Kids, these are the cooler-looking Chase banks today.) Ahmanson wanted to create temples to capitalism. He commissioned fortress-like buildings that one of his executives boasted were built to last not just a hundred, but a thousand years, according to author Adam Arenson. But he also wanted customers to feel welcome and knew he needed art to pretty up his authoritarian aesthetics. Sheets, already a nationally known artist by the time he signed up to become Ahmansons personal Picasso, responded to the challenge. He delivered soft, bohemian depictions of local historical scenes to make the past as understandable as possible to the public. His creations are beloved fixtures in Southern California. My favorite remains the humongous stained-glass portrait of 1890s Orange County life that looms over the Chase tellers on Harbor Boulevard in Anaheim. Banking on Beauty invites readers to remember a time when our captains of industry cared about public spaces as much as they did the bottom line and it also challenges us to preserve those remaining buildings that possess Sheets originals. Enter the Fray: First takes on the news of the minute My final 2018 reading recommendation highlights David Allen of the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin. He just published On Track, a collection of columns that span 2001 to 2005. More Jack Smith than Herb Caen, Allen is one of Southern Californias most underappreciated chroniclers, someone who finds the wry and ridiculous in a region that few of us who dont live in the Pomona Valley ever think about really, when was the last time you ever bothered to consider Montclair, unless it was to wonder where the heck is Montclair? Through the columns, Allen evolves from, in his own words, a wannabe Dave Barry looking to hone his craft at a regional paper before moving on to the big leagues into someone who grew to love the area he covered and never left. On Track at its best offers small vignettes an Ontario man who built a life-sized replica of the Iwo Jima flag-raising sculpture in his frontyard, a remembrance of Jack Bennys Rancho Cucamonga, a Tupperware exhibit at an Upland museum. (Admission is free. So is burping the merchandise, Allen concluded in one of his trademark nice-guy teases.) Maybe his subjects didnt affect the historic arc of Southern California, but thats OK: Allen highlighted characters and bits of history that deserved their day in the paper. And thats the through line of all these books. Our everyday institutions the bank, the library, the newspaper are so rarely remarked upon and yet are the most essential blocks of society. Lets value them now, because wed be so much the worse if they were gone. mexicanwithglasses@gmail.com Twitter: @GustavoArellano A staff member shows the commemorative stamps marking the 40th anniversary of China's reform and opening up at the post office of Liaoning provincial archives in Shenyang, capital of northeast China's Liaoning Province, Dec. 18, 2018. China Post released a set of commemorative stamps and one souvenir sheet marking the 40th anniversary of China's reform and opening up on Tuesday. (Xinhua/Yang Qing) With the sole exception of Vietnam, the ongoing Afghanistan war represents the greatest failure in U.S. military history. Today, all but a few diehards understand that Vietnam was a debacle of epic proportions. With Afghanistan, its different: In both political and military circles, the urge to dodge the truth remains strong. This may explain, at least in part, why the present commander in chief has yet to visit the war zone. For a president with an aversion to accepting responsibility, traveling to Afghanistan would call attention to a situation he prefers to ignore. After all, Donald Trump campaigned against the war and vowed if elected to end it forthwith. Once in office, however, he caved in to advisors urging him not only to continue the war but even to dispatch a contingent of reinforcements. Steering clear of Afghanistan allows Trump to sustain the pretense that the war is not actually his. If only by default, it becomes incumbent on the military itself to explain whats going on. With the Afghanistan war in its 18th year, Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, characterized the war as a stalemate last month. Other high-ranking officers regularly use the same term. The most significant indicator of a war gone badly awry is this: The U.S. has now quietly opened negotiations with the enemy. Advertisement Coming from seasoned professionals who preside over what is ostensibly the worlds mightiest armed forces, this qualifies as a remarkable, though misleading, admission. The truth is that the United States is losing in its effort to bring order and stability to Afghanistan. The relatively small number of recent U.S. casualties 13 fatalities in all of 2018 should not distract from the pertinent facts. Terrorist attacks in Afghanistan occur on a daily basis, with Afghan security forces suffering losses at a rate that even the incoming commander of U.S. Central Command describes as unsustainable. The Taliban now directly controls or contests more than 60% of the districts across Afghanistan. Coalition efforts to foster political legitimacy and create a functioning economy have flopped. Afghan opium production, a major source of insurgent funding, has reached an all-time high. The most significant indicator of a war gone badly awry is this: The U.S. has now quietly opened negotiations with the enemy. Recall that the immediate military objective of Operation Enduring Freedom when launched back in 2001 was to destroy the Taliban and thereby prevent Afghanistan from ever again becoming a terrorist sanctuary. Yet, now the United States seeks to end the war by coming to terms with the Taliban. That is a de facto admission of failure. On the one hand, of course, it makes sense for the United States to cut its losses in Afghanistan, and the sooner the better. Substantive U.S. interests there have never been other than marginal. In any logical ranking of U.S. strategic priorities, Afghanistan comes nowhere close to justifying the trillion-plus dollars that the United States has spent there since it first intervened. On the other hand, some might argue, the United States has a moral obligation to finish what it began. After all, previous administrations stressed that U.S. involvement in Afghanistan included a moral component. The U.S., it was said, was seeking to spread freedom and democracy and to advance the cause of womens rights. Helped by the United States, Afghanistan would become a beacon of modernity in the Islamic world. Enter the Fray: First takes on the news of the minute from L.A. Times Opinion None of that has come to pass, nor will it. So bending to the dictates of realpolitik, authorities in Washington are now proceeding down a path not unlike the one followed by their predecessors a half-century ago when the United States found itself stuck in another unwinnable war. That path culminated with the U.S. selling out its ally and leaving the South Vietnamese people to their fate. Although no U.S. government official will yet admit to the fact and few Americans care enough to notice, a similar fate now awaits Afghans. If the United States were, in fact, what many Americans imagine their country to be exceptional, indispensable, historys chosen agent of salvation the story of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan might have a different ending. But we are not all that different from other great powers in other ages. The United States war in Afghanistan began with an illusion: that it was incumbent upon the U.S. to liberate and transform that country. The war in Afghanistan will end, as the Vietnam War ended: in shame and abandonment. Andrew Bacevich is the author most recently of Twilight of the American Century. During the 1952 presidential campaign, Republican nominee Dwight D. Eisenhower gave a speech in Richmond, Va., after which the stage hed been standing on collapsed. Im glad the general wasnt hurt, quipped his Democratic opponent, Adlai Stevenson. Ive been telling him for two months that nobody could stand on that platform. This kind of humor has all but disappeared from politics, replaced by ridicule, rabid attacks and blunt insult. President Reagans jest to operating room doctors after being shot in 1981, Please tell me youre Republicans, likely would be taken literally today. This shift is often blamed on a loss of civility or unbridgeable partisanship. But its a symptom of something else just as troubling: a loss of wit. Wit is the quality of being able to hold in your mind two differing ideas about a thing simultaneously. Stevensons pun was witty not only because it riffs on the two meanings of the word platform, but because he also used it to make a pointed critique of Republican policies. To hold competing ideas in mind the essence of wit you dont have to agree with both. Advertisement Wit is about more than a knack for snappy comebacks. True wit is a kind of practical intelligence, an improvisational ingenuity, and it is essential to political thinking. Laughter is an important byproduct, but wit is about making connections, not just making jokes. Last month, for instance, French President Emmanuel Macron was witless when rolling out a tax on diesel fuel. The tax itself makes a lot of sense; some form of carbon pricing is essential if market forces are to be used to combat climate change. At the same time, Frances rural working poor, who could least afford the tax, already struggle with declining living standards. Yellow vest protesters took to the streets and were soon joined by groups with more extreme agendas. Violent protests have racked Paris and other French cities for a month. Whats good for the planet can be bad for the wallets of its human inhabitants. A quicker-thinking Marcon would have introduced some kind of compensating tax credit for people living in rural communities at the same time as the diesel tax. Instead he doled out a minimum-wage increase and some other sweeteners to tamp down the protests, and had to abandon the carbon tax entirely. All political issues are interconnected in this way: The environment is connected to economics is connected to social class is connected to immigration, and so on. Another contentious issue that would benefit from some witty thinking is what to do with the Confederate statuary that has been removed from cities like Memphis. Many see them as monuments to an era of white supremacy, which they are; others see them as historical artifacts, even if from a shameful part of the nations past. They are that too. Cant these two views be recognized and reconciled? There may be lessons from one of the most divisive issues of all: guns. After the mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Fla., last February, state legislatures passed dozens of gun control measures, including in Republican-controlled chambers. The new laws implemented ideas such as improved background checks and red flag laws, which permit confiscating weapons from those deemed to pose an imminent threat. State lawmakers, if not Congress, seem to have come to this 2nd Amendment epiphany: In a democracy, restricting gun ownership preserves gun ownership. Enter the Fray: First takes on the news of the minute from L.A. Times Opinion To hold competing ideas in mind the essence of wit you dont have to agree with both. You do, however, have to hear them, comprehend them, take them seriously, and admit that the people who hold them have their own reasons for doing so. Eisenhower and Stevenson campaigned during the McCarthy era, when demagogic and evidence-free attacks on political opponents were commonplace. Stevenson spoke out against McCarthyism. Eisenhower was more circumspect. Republicans criticized Stevensons wit as inappropriate for such serious times. My opponent has been worrying about my funny bone, Stevenson replied. Im worrying about his backbone. We face complex economic, social and environmental challenges and the rise of an authoritarianism every bit as dangerous as McCarthys Red Scare. These challenges should scare us into our wits, not out of them. James Geary is the author of Wits End: What Wit Is, How It Works, and Why We Need It. Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinionand Facebook It was bad, yes. I was getting perhaps three calls a day from numbers that were UNKNOWN or NOT LISTED or from my own phone number with a few digits switched. The caller invariably told me to give to the Police Foundation or that he was conducting a quick survey or that I needed to turn myself in to the police for four serious allegations. I stopped answering calls from numbers I didnt know, sending them to voicemail and, later, warily reading the transcript on my iPhone. Listening made me too furious; I needed a barrier of technology between myself and the swindlers saccharine voices. Then I went to visit my parents, who have a landline, and realized I was actually getting off easy. Their phones ring all hours of the day and night. They never answer. When I told my mom I was tempted to yank the phone near my bed out of the wall, she answered with a shrug: We dont use it. If youll indulge me in a moment of nostalgia: We used it once. We didnt even have caller ID. We just picked up. My sister and I have identical voices, which led to all sorts of amusing mishaps. She once had a minutes-long conversation with my high school boyfriend; she thought he was a friend with the same name, he thought she was me. Spam calls made up 3.7% of total calls in 2017. In 2018, they were more than 29%. Next year, theyre projected to make up 45% of total calls. Advertisement Now my folks have Caller ID, and scammers announce themselves with varying levels of specificity. Sometimes, theyre a country. MOLDOVA calls before breakfast, while we scream and burrow under the covers. Im still tempted to pick up my cell sometimes. Writer Panama Jackson once sent an UNKNOWN call to voicemail and it was OPRAH. Oprah! For me, its never Oprah. Its someone calling me Mister Melissa or telling me I won a cruise. Oh, also, there is no cruise. According to a recent report, spam calls made up 3.7% of total calls in 2017. In 2018, they were more than 29%. Next year, theyre projected to make up 45% of total calls. Thats absurd and infuriating. In some cases, its dangerous. Spammers dont call just to waste your time sure, theyre happy to do that but by the end, theyll take your money, whether by credit card number or wire transfer. Often, there are fake threats attached: that youre in trouble with the IRS or that you have an outstanding loan or that your loved one is in jail. These calls disproportionately swindle vulnerable people; the undocumented, uneducated or elderly. Spam calls fall under the purview of the Federal Communications Commission. Back in 2016, when spam calls accounted for 60% of the complaints his commission received, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said eliminating them was his top consumer protection priority. Since then, the FCC has undertaken piecemeal steps, like allowing carriers to label certain numbers NUISANCE LIKELY or slapping offenders with fines. (In May, the commission fined a south Florida man a record $120 million for placing fraudulent calls.) But if my cellphone and my parents landline are any indication, the FCC is playing whack-a-mole with Hydras. The police dont know what to do either. After spammers started placing calls using a Florida business phone number, angry customers called the business back to complain, overwhelming its operations. The head of the Clearwater polices economic crimes unit told the Tampa Bay Times: Its just a phone call. It could come from the internet. It could come from a phone. Theres nothing to follow up on. In other words: \_()_/. University of Florida professor Patrick Traynor said: Theres a real risk that if we dont address this problem, the utility of the phone will go away. It already has. He called the situation a technological tragedy. That phrase is provocative. Our phones have been made irrelevant as phones. This isnt a rant on the social choices of millennials Those avocado toast munchers only text! They never call! its a statement of fact. You cant pick the damn thing up, which is precisely half of what its good for. If your bike had one wheel, would you keep riding it? Maybe, but youd feel like you were in the circus. As we do. Enter the Fray: First takes on the news of the minute from L.A. Times Opinion The best solution Ive found is to keep my cell on silent unless Im expecting to hear from someone. As for my folks, they could unplug the landline. Eventually, in a fit of rage, they will. But they live in a rural area; the cell tower goes down a dozen times a year during snowstorms. And what if a long-lost friend were on the line? My mother, bless her, doesnt hang up on the rare occasion she gets fooled into answering. Instead, she says firmly, Please take me off your list. They never do, of course. They call back the next day. Were fortunate to have a roof over our heads and all the socks we need. So for Christmas this year, we want just two things: peace on Earth, and for the Godforsaken spammers to stop calling. Melissa Batchelor Warnke is a contributing writer to Opinion. Follow her on Twitter @velvetmelvis. Newsoms budget proposes $3 million for Alzheimers research, brain task force By Melody Gutierrez Amyloid plaques, shown here in human brains, are a hallmark of Alzheimers disease. (UCLA School of Medicine) Gov. Gavin Newsom will call for the creation of a brain health task force and dedicate $3 million annually from the states general fund to Alzheimers disease research in the budget proposal he will release Thursday, a source close to the administration said. The money for Alzheimers research would target the new grants at understanding why the disease is more prevalent in women and people of color. Former California first lady and Alzheimers activist Maria Shriver pushed for the funding to be included in the state budget. Shriver said in a statement Wednesday that the funding would make California the first state to make understanding our brains a priority. The states former first lady, whose late father Sargent Shriver was diagnosed with Alzheimers, founded the Womens Alzheimers Movement, an advocacy group raising awareness about womens increased risk for developing the disease. In 2011, she wrote a comprehensive assessment on the disease, to which Newsom then mayor of San Francisco contributed a portion called What one city is doing. This is personal to me, just like it is to millions of California families, Shriver said. Alzheimers is one of the largest medical, social and economic crises in our state, and of our time. I am so proud that, once again, California is leading the way. Wiping out Alzheimers is going to require bold thinking, and there is no doubt in my mind that California is home to bold thinkers who can make this happen. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Gov. Gavin Newsom orders reinvention of troubled California DMV By Patrick McGreevy A line of people stretches around the South L.A. location of a California Department of Motor Vehicles Office on Aug. 7. (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times) Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday ordered an overhaul of the California Department of Motor Vehicles, which has been plagued by hours-long wait times at field offices, computer crashes and voter registration errors involving tens of thousands of customers. Just a few days after taking office, Newsom appointed a top advisor to a new DMV Reinvention Strike Team to revamp the beleaguered agency over the next six months. By any metric, California DMV has been chronically mismanaged and failed in its fundamental mission to the state customers it serves and the state workers it employs, Newsom said in a statement, adding Its time for a reinvention. The governor appointed state Government Operations Agency Secretary Marybel Batjer to lead the strike team with a goal of modernizing the agency and enacting changes that improve customer satisfaction, employee performance and transparency. Newsom also ordered an accelerated review of initial findings of an ongoing audit ordered last year by Gov. Jerry Brown. The action was welcomed by lawmakers who have been critical of the DMV, including Assemblyman Vince Fong (R-Bakersfield). The egregious management failures of the DMV have been self-evident, which is why I have been calling for new leadership and a comprehensive independent audit of this troubled state agency over and over again as the problems grew significantly worse, Fong said. Last summer, Californians seeking new driver licenses complained of wait times of four to six hours at DMV offices, which the agency blamed partly on snafus caused by a rush of people trying to get Real IDs, a new identification card design required for airline passengers starting in late 2020. Delays were also blamed on computer crashes at DMV offices as the agency struggled to update its aging automation systems. The DMV also admitted that there were an estimated 23,000 errors as people either were unknowingly registered to vote or mistakes were made in their registration status as part of the states new motor voter program. The agency registered to vote as many as 1,500 people with legal U.S. residency but no citizenship. Last month, DMV Director Jean Shiomoto retired from the agency. Legislators were angered earlier this week when the DMV said it needed an additional $40 million to prevent the return of long lines at its field offices. In addition, the agency has been under fire for issuing driver licenses in the last year that do not comply with the federal Real ID standards requiring two forms of identification by applicants. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print California police unions are preparing to battle new transparency law in the courtroom By Maya Lau Just as a landmark police transparency law is going into effect, some California police agencies are shredding internal affairs documents and law enforcement unions are rushing to block the information from being released. The new law, which begins to unwind Californias strictest-in-the-nation protections over the secrecy of law enforcement records, opens to the public internal investigations of officer shootings and other major uses of force, along with confirmed cases of sexual assault and lying while on duty. But the lawsuits and records destruction, which began even before the law took effect Jan. 1, could tie up the release of information for months or years, and in some instances, prevent it from ever being disclosed. The fact that police unions are challenging this law is on some level not surprising, said Peter Bibring, director of police practices at the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, one of the principal supporters of the new law. They have a long history of fighting tooth and nail against transparency. Read More Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Secretary of State Alex Padilla begins second term with challenge to ensure every Californian is counted By Jazmine Ulloa Secretary of State Alex Padilla takes the oath of office as his family stands by his side on Monday in Sacramento. (Jazmine Ulloa / Los Angeles Times) Secretary of State Alex Padilla was sworn in for a second term on Monday, saying he would continue the battle to protect the right to vote at a time when voter suppression efforts, online disinformation campaigns and interference from foreign adversaries have polarized the public and threatened to undermine trust in U.S. elections. I am doubling down on our fight here in Sacramento and in Washington, D.C., to defend our democracy, he said. Working on the front lines with so many of you, I know that our collective resolve has never been stronger. But the loudest applause came when Padilla promised to fight back against the Trump administrations changes to the U.S. census, saying he will ensure every Californian gets counted. Padilla, a former state senator and Los Angeles City Council member from the San Fernando Valley, led the cause for a new motor voter registration law in 2015, and a new system for online business registrations. But the programs have had experienced problems: More than 23,000 Californians were registered to vote incorrectly by the state DMV, the agency reported last year. On Monday, Padilla said he would continue to push back against false claims of voter fraud in California and pointed to the states voter turnout as proof that his office was involving more people in the democratic process, a promise he made when he was first sworn in four years ago. More than 12.7 million voters cast ballots in the Nov. 6 midterm election, representing roughly 65% of the states registered voters, the highest number of any midterm election since 1982, according to state certified results. I made that promise based on a shared belief that we are a stronger democracy and a better California when we hear all voices from all corners of California, and when those voices are not just heard but counted, Padilla said. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement Ricardo Lara, Californias first statewide officeholder to come out as gay, sworn in as insurance commissioner Ricardo Lara on the floor of the state Senate in 2016. (Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times) Ricardo Lara took the oath of office as California insurance commissioner on Monday, pledging action to boost healthcare coverage and combat climate change. Lara, a Democrat from Bell Gardens, is the first elected statewide officeholder in California who has come out as gay. He began his speech in downtown Sacramento by thanking LGBTQ leaders who came before him and celebrated the occasion. Today, because of you, weve shattered the pink ceiling, Lara said. In his inaugural speech, Lara announced the creation of an executive position in his office to address climate change. There is no other industry that has the necessary expertise to ensure that California is prepared to mitigate and reduce risk to our communities and our environment, Lara said. Our planet cant wait. Im ready, and I hope you are too. Lara served as a state legislator and in 2017 introduced a bill to create a single-payer healthcare system in the state. He promised to work with new Gov. Gavin Newsom to expand coverage across California. Lara was sworn in by retired U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker, who declared unconstitutional Californias Proposition 8 gay marriage ban. State Sen. President Pro Tem Toni Atkins (D-San Diego) was on hand for the ceremony along with multiple other state lawmakers. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print New California Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis says she will help expand access to universities in the state New Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, center, is shown in June talking with attendees at the Power to the Polls rally in Sacramento. (Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press) More Californians should be given access to public universities, Eleni Kounalakis said as she took the oath of office Monday to become the states first woman elected lieutenant governor. Kounalakis was given the oath of office by Gov. Gavin Newsom, her predecessor in the job, who pledged they would work together. As lieutenant governor, Kounalakis serves on the University of California Board of Regents and the California State University Board of Trustees, she noted in a speech at her swearing-in ceremony at the main Sacramento Library. In that role, she said, she will be committed to expanding access to affordable public higher education here in our state. Its wise, its smart and it is the best way to address our rapidly changing digital economy. Kounalakis is former president of a development company founded by her father, Angelo Tsakopoulos, and served during the Obama administration as the U.S. ambassador to Hungary. In November, she won her first run for statewide office. Also attending the ceremony were House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print California meets Dutch Newsom, who steals the show at his fathers inauguration By Taryn Luna Gov. Gavin Newsom gives his inaugural address while holding his youngest son, Dutch. (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times) In the California political world, all eyes were on Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday until his 2-year-old son stole the show. Dutch, the youngest of four children in the Newsom brood, climbed onstage in the middle of his fathers inaugural address in a tent outside the Capitol on Monday. The unplanned moment saw the 51-year-old governors big day interrupted by the toddler, bringing levity to the ceremony. Newsom was recounting Gov. Jerry Browns last inaugural speech and reference to the Sermon on the Mount, a biblical story about two men who built separate homes on sand and rock, when Dutch approached his father, a pacifier in his mouth and blanket in hand. Now more than ever we Californians know how much a house matters and children matter, Newsom said, improvising as he scooped the boy into his arms. The governor kissed Dutch on the cheek and held him for several minutes as he continued with the speech. This is exactly how it was scripted, Newsom joked. Newsom eventually put his child down and Dutch walked to the edge of the stage before retreating behind the podium to hide from his mother, First Lady Jennifer Siebel Newsom. The crowd roared. Siebel Newsom was able to briefly divert her son only for him to return to the stage minutes later. She grabbed him again and this time, the crying toddler did not reemerge. When fires strikes, when kids cry and the earth shakes, well be there for each other, Newsom said. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, who said the moment humanized Newsom, threw cold water on any theories that Dutchs cameo was planned. No, I know it was not, Garcetti said with a laugh after Newsoms speech concluded. I could see that look of absolute abject terror [on Newsoms face]. Weve all been there. Kids always think its about themselves and theyve proved it. California Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon (D-Lakewood) agreed. I worked in early childhood education for 20 years and theres no way you can ever get a child to do anything when you want them to do it, Rendon said. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Fiona Ma takes oath as Californias new treasurer By Liam Dillon State Treasurer Fiona Ma. Fiona Ma took the oath of office in Sacramento on Monday as the states 34th treasurer, promising to boost Californias economy. Ma previously served on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, in the state Assembly and on the California Board of Equalization. I want to thank everyone for entrusting me with this important job. I understand my role here as your state treasurer is to build that financial wall around California so that we will remain the fifth-largest economy, Ma said in brief remarks. That is my promise to you. California Supreme Court Chief Justice Tani G. Cantil-Sakauye administered the oath to Ma. Following the ceremony, Ma held an ice cream social for guests. On Wednesday, she will host a public event in San Francisco to celebrate her swearing-in. State Treasurer Fiona Ma takes the oath of office. (Liam Dillon / Los Angeles Times) Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement Expectations are high for newly sworn-in state schools chief Tony Thurmond Tony Thurmond shakes hands with retired Alameda County Superior Court Judge Gordon Baranco after taking the oath of office. (Melody Gutierrez / Los Angeles Times) Tony Thurmond took the oath of office as Californias state superintendent of public schools on Monday, promising a labor-friendly agenda before the teachers, students and Democratic officials who filled an auditorium at McClatchy High School in Sacramento to watch him being sworn in. We cant close the achievement gap without a great teacher at the head of every class, Thurmond said Monday to applause. We have to make sure we provide quality compensation and support to our teachers and our classified staff and all the educators who support our kids. Thurmond, a Bay Area Democrat who served in the state Assembly, won a hotly contested and expensive race with the help of labor leaders against charter school executive Marshall Tuck. The race took several days to sort out after Tuck held an initial lead in early returns on election night before falling behind thereafter. Thurmond was sworn in Monday by retired Alameda County Superior Court Judge Gordon Baranco. He was joined on stage by labor rights leader Dolores Huerta and Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon (D-Paramount). Thurmonds former colleagues in the state Assembly took turns praising him and promising to be an ally in improving schools. Many said they expected Thurmond would be a strong leader focused on improving student outcomes. We know we are going to work hard to give you the money you need and the budget you need to fully fund education and our schools so we can put our money where our mouth is and make sure our children have everything they need, Assemblywoman Connie Leyva (D-Chino Hills) said. As state superintendent, Thurmond will oversee the education of 6.2 million students at 10,000 schools. Thurmond was a member of the West Contra Costa County School Board and a Richmond city councilman before he was elected to the state Assembly. Tony is the right man at the right time to fight the federal, Donald Trump, Betsy DeVos anti-child, anti-education, anti-civil and -human rights agenda, U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) said. Tony is going to do that for us. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print State Controller Betty Yee takes oath of office with call for more affordable housing and healthcare State Controller Betty Yee California Controller Betty Yee took the oath of office Monday for a second term, saying she still has work to do addressing problems that include a lack of affordability in housing, healthcare and higher education. A San Francisco native, Yee is the chief financial officer of California the fifth-largest economy in the world having first won election to the post in 2014 before winning reelection in November. No region is spared from the widening inequality and increased poverty that plague our state, fueled by the lack of affordable, stable housing, the cost of healthcare and transportation, limited educational opportunities, student loan debt, displacement caused by disasters and more, she said. Yee was administered the oath of office by California Supreme Court Chief Justice Tani G. Cantil-Sakauye at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento before an overflow crowd that included state Senate leader Toni Atkins (D-San Diego), state Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra and San Francisco Mayor London Breed. As a public official it is about governance that delivers results and stays accountable while upholding the underlying value of dignity for all, Yee said. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print California Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra begins new term promising to fight Trump policies California Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra ( (Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press)) California Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra on Monday took the oath of office for a new term, saying he would continue his role as a leading challenger to Trump administration actions that he believes are counter to the states interests. Becerra, a former 12-term congressman, has become a national opposition figure to Trump, having sued the federal government 45 times since he was appointed as the states first Latino attorney general in 2017. Weve been a little busy stopping the dysfunction and insanity in Washington, D.C., from infecting California, Becerra told an audience during a swearing-in ceremony at the California Museum in Sacramento. Whether its the criminals on our streets or the conman in the boardrooms or highest office of the land, Becerra said, the California Department of Justice, well, weve got your back. Becerra won his first statewide election as the states top cop in November, two years after he filled the post vacated when predecessor Kamala Harris was elected to the U.S. Senate. He has peppered the Trump administration with lawsuits challenging federal policies on healthcare, the U.S. census, the environment and immigration. Our state builds dreams, not walls, he said in a direct criticism of Trumps proposal to build a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border. Just last week, Becerra led a coalition of 17 Democratic attorneys general in announcing an appeal of a federal judge in Texas that ruled the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional. The ACA has been the law for nearly a decade and is the backbone of our healthcare system, Becerra said last week. This case impacts nearly every American workers covered by employers, families, women, children, young adults and seniors so we will lead the ACAs defense as long and far as it takes. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement California Democratic Party Vice Chairman Daraka Larimore-Hall announces bid to lead group By Christine Mai-Duc Daraka Larimore-Hall. (Dominic Parisi / Courtesy of Daraka Larimore-Hall) Daraka Larimore-Hall, a top official at the California Democratic Party, said Monday hes running to replace former chairman Eric Bauman, who resigned abruptly in November after being confronted with allegations of sexual misconduct. Larimore-Hall, a longtime state party activist and former chairman of the Democratic Party of Santa Barbara County, was one of the party leaders who urged Bauman to resign following the allegations. In an email to supporters announcing his bid, he urged both structural and cultural change at every level of our Party. He also repeated his call for a top-to-bottom investigation of the allegations, the party and its culture. In a Times investigation, 10 party activists and staff members said Bauman made crude sexual comments and engaged in unwanted touching and physical intimidation in professional settings. In order to be where we need to be for 2020, we have to confront the culture of abuse and fear that allowed someone to behave in such a vile way for so long, Larimore-Hall said in an interview. We cant brush it aside or think that our activists or our candidates or our donors are going to forget about this overnight. Larimore-Hall said his first priority would be to fully investigate the allegations and restore rank-and-file confidence in the partys leadership. The second would be to refocus the party on political priorities as the 2020 presidential election nears. The Bauman episode, Larimore-Hall said, threatens to derail the Democrats plans to help defeat President Trump and keep the seven congressional seats gained in the midterm elections. Its definitely a crisis, Larimore-Hall said. But the component parts the energy, the enthusiasm, the volunteers, the infrastructure its still there. We just need to direct it toward something. Larimore-Hall was elected vice chairman of the state party in February following Baumans razor-thin victory over Bay Area activist Kimberly Ellis. Ellis has announced another bid for the chairmanship and former state Senate leader Kevin de Leon is also mulling a run. The vote will take place at the partys May convention in San Francisco. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Newsom will vow to seize this moment, and swipe at Trump in Monday inaugural address By Melanie Mason Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom and his family attend an Inauguration Family Event at the California Railroad Museum in Sacramento on Jan. 6. (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times) Building on the theme of California exceptionalism that defined his campaign, Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom will depict the state as a guardian of progressive values and a counterweight to President Trump in his inaugural address Monday, according to excerpts of his prepared remarks. What we do today is even more consequential, because of whats happening in our country, read the excerpts obtained by The Times. Peoples lives, freedom, security, the water we drink, the air we breathe they all hang in the balance. The country is watching us. The world is waiting on us. The future depends on us. And we will seize this moment. The speech casts Californias political stakes in a decidedly national scope, promising an agenda that will unify and be an example to the rest of the country. It contrasts the governing goals of Newsom, a Democrat, with that of Trump, the incoming governors perennial foil. We will offer an alternative to the corruption and incompetence in the White House, the excerpts say. Our government will be progressive, principled, and always on the side of the people. Newsom campaigned on an ambitious and wide-ranging platform, promising sweeping solutions on housing, healthcare, education and other issues that rank among Californians top concerns. In the weeks after his election, he struck a more muted tone, taking pains to emphasize his fiscal caution and need for patience in achieving those goals. The inaugural excerpts indicate a return to lofty pledges. While Newsom will vow to prepare for uncertain times ahead by building budgetary reserves and paying down debt, the prepared remarks quickly turn to a vow to be bold. Newsom has already floated several proposals for his first budget that carry significant price tags, including a nearly $2-billion plan to boost early childhood development for low-income families and a dramatic expansion of paid family leave from six weeks to six months. When asked for a preview of his inauguration speech during a news conference Sunday evening, Newsom predicted pundits would criticize his address as short on specifics. Well, of course, Im at an inaugural, Newsom said. But Ill be very detailed in the budget, a few days later. And then we will architect, in much more nuance and detail, in state of the state. I really see this as three opportunities to communicate over the next few weeks our agenda, our vision for the state. Times staff writer Taryn Luna contributed to this report. Read More Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Newsom-hosted benefit concert raises nearly $5 million for wildfire victims By Taryn Luna Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom speaks at a concert to benefit wildfire victims at the Golden 1 Arena in Sacramento on Jan. 6. (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times) On the eve of the gubernatorial inauguration, Californias political class rubbed elbows in Sacramento for a benefit concert hosted by Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom and headlined by the rapper Pitbull. Newsom told the crowd gathered at the Golden 1 Center on Sunday evening that the fundraiser brought in nearly $5 million for the California Wildfire Foundation, a 501(c)(3) that supports the families of fallen firefighters and communities affected by wildfires. You know, a lot of folks feel anxious about not just politics, but government, Newsom said on stage before introducing the rapper and activist Common. But those firefighters, they are the antidote to the fear and cynicism; they are the manifestation of why government matters and why you should care. Top sponsors, including Salesforce, Kaiser Permanente and other interest groups, paid up to $1 million each to support the cause and curry favor with the new administration. Nathan Click, a spokesman for Newsom, said organizers sold more than 7,000 tickets. Several state lawmakers attended the concert alongside Capitol staff, lobbyists and business types, who mingled on the floor of the arena and offstage in private VIP areas. The rock band X Ambassadors and a duo called the Cold Weather Sons from the town of Paradise, which was destroyed by fire in November, were among several performers who entertained the crowd during the four-hour event. The California Rises concert is the final in a series of festivities held Sunday to celebrate the inauguration of Californias 40th governor. Earlier in the day, Newsom attended a private brunch at Sacramentos Crocker Art Museum and his inaugural committee hosted a free party for families at the California State Railroad Museum at the Old Sacramento Waterfront. Newsoms inauguration is set to begin at 11 a.m. Monday on the steps of the Capitol. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Inauguration fever hits Sacramento as Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom prepares to take office By Phil Willon Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom holds his son, Dutch, as he and his family attend an inaugural event at the at the state Railroad Museum Sunday. (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times) Incoming Gov. Gavin Newsom doesnt officially take the oath of office until Monday, but the parties celebrating his inauguration were in full swing all day Sunday. Newsom and his family were mobbed by well-wishers at the California State Railroad Museum at the Old Sacramento Waterfront in the afternoon, where his inaugural committee hosted a free party for families. He just has charisma. Hes able to really connect with people, said Rosielyn Pulmano, an attorney from Elk Grove who came to see Newsom with her husband, two sons and her niece. I think he cares about working Californians and a lot of their issues. Newsom arrived with his wife, documentary filmmaker Jennifer Siebel Newsom, and their four young children, and the governor-elect spent a good deal of his time wading through crowds, taking selfies with supporters and signing autographs as music boomed in the background. As the family toured the inside of the museums locomotives and the bevy of exhibits, Newsoms two-year-old son, Dutch, was wide-eyed, impressed by all the train cars and seemingly a little overwhelmed by the crowd. Newsom said that for his son, all that was missing from the museum was Thomas the Train, popular fictional locomotive in childrens books and cartoons . If theres one thing I can contribute to Sacramento maybe its getting a Thomas the Train exhibit for the two years olds, Newsom joked when talking with reporters afterward. Newsom said he wanted to include such an event in his inaugural festivities to highlight families and children, whose wellbeing will be among the top priorities of his administration. Youll see that not only as a preamble to the inaugural and the budget that well be submitting next week, but I think itll be a big part of the administration, Newsom said. The museum event followed a private, high-dollar brunch at Sacramentos Crocker Art Museum. A steady rain failed to dissuade as many as 200 guests who sipped wine and dined on chicken and salmon while waiting for a photo with Californias new first couple. Seen at the event were representatives of some of the states most powerful political interests, among them organized labor, healthcare companies and tribal gaming interests. A few other high-profile guests attended, too, including Larry Baer, CEO of the San Francisco Giants, and Erika Jayne, a singer and cast member of the reality TV show The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Im excited to see someone like Gavin young, vibrant taking over the state and leading us into the future, Jayne said after attending the brunch with her husband, attorney Tom Girardi. Hes got a lot of great plans. Attendees said the event, which was closed to reporters and held under a tent in the museums outdoor atrium, did not include prepared remarks by Newsom. Among those seen leaving the event were representatives of AT&T, the California Medical Assn., Uber, Kaiser Permanente and the State Building and Construction Trades Council. A fundraising invitation obtained by The Times offered bundled tickets to all of the inauguration events, including those on Sunday and the Monday ceremony, ranging in price from $25,000 to $200,000. The money will be collected by a committee specifically organized to pay for Newsoms inaugural weekend. Sundays festivities are scheduled to end with a benefit concert headlined by Pitbull at the Golden 1 Center, home of the NBAs Sacramento Kings, to raise money for the victims of Californias recent deadly wildfires. Among the attendees at @GavinNewsoms pre-inaugural leadership brunch: Real Housewife of Bev Hills @erikajayne. Im excited to see someone like Gavinyoung, vibranttaking over the state and leading us into the future. Hes got a lot of great plans. pic.twitter.com/561NHiy2XQ Melanie Mason (@melmason) January 6, 2019 Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement As Newsom inaugural events begin, he unveils more state budget promises on education and paid family leave Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom, seen here last April, will propose new state budget efforts on paid family leave and education subsidies. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times) Californias incoming governor, who must send his first state budget plan to the Legislature this week, has already signaled a significant new focus on programs to help families and children from infancy to college. Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom campaigned on a platform that included a number of child-focused efforts specifically aimed at helping lower-income families. The price tag for the initial efforts is expected to approach $2 billion a cost paid out of an unrestricted tax revenue windfall that could be one of the largest in state history. Newsom may also seek help for families through new subsidies paid by California employers. The governor-elect is expected to propose a dramatic expansion of paid parental leave from six weeks to six months according to an internal document provided by a source close to the Newsom transition team, first reported on Sunday by the New York Times. The document doesnt offer a full explanation for how the program will be funded, saying instead that the budget will set a goal of ensuring that all newborns and newly adopted babies can be cared for by a parent or a close family member for the first six months. Employers across the state are currently assessed a payroll tax that helps offer a subsidy to parents who temporarily leave their job to care for a newborn. Newsoms plan, according to the document, would pay for some of the new costs by shrinking the mandated cash reserve of the state fund that administers the program, allowing more of the money to be paid in benefits. The increase in paid leave would not all happen at once but instead be phased in over a multi-year period. A task force to help implement the expanded care plan is also envisioned, according to the document. It would determine whether two parents could split the six months of paid leave and whether an extended family member could be enlisted to help care for the child of a single parent over the six-month period. The incoming administrations focus on young children will also include $1.8 billion in new spending on early childhood education programs, with a particular focus on training childcare workers and pushing for more California schools to offer full-day kindergarten. Those costs, according to an overview memo obtained by the Los Angeles Times, are considered to be a one-time expense while leaving the long-term costs of the effort to be determined later. More community college students would get free tuition under a third initiative expected in the new governors budget plan. Newsom will propose spending $40 million to offer a second year of tuition-free college to California students, according to an outline provided by a transition official, first reported by Politico. Students are already eligible for a single year of paid tuition under a plan agreed to by Gov. Jerry Brown and lawmakers in 2017. The incoming governor embraced the idea of free community college during the 2018 campaign as part of a broader focus on additional investments in higher education. Education is an economic development strategy, Newsom said at a higher education forum last spring. We need to significantly increase the investment from the general fund of this state on higher education. Theres no greater higher return on investment. Whether the proposal would be targeted to students based on a familys financial need is unclear. Many low-income students are already eligible for fee waivers at community colleges. The new governor must submit his full state budget plan to lawmakers no later than Thursday. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Gavin Newsom and his family decide Sacramento is the place to be The Old Governors Mansion State Historic Park in Sacramento. Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom will move his family into the mansion. (Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press) Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom and his family will give up the Marin County life and move to the Victorian-style governors mansion in Sacramento after he takes the oath of office Monday. Newsom and his wife, documentary filmmaker Jennifer Siebel Newsom, had debated whether or when to relocate to the state capital since his election in November. The couple have four young children and expressed reservations about moving in the middle of a school year. To best serve the people of California while also maximizing family time together, the Newsoms have therefore decided to move to Sacramento, said Newsoms spokesman, Nathan Click. On Monday, they will move into the Governors Mansion along with their four children, their two family dogs, and their family bunny rabbit and reside there for the immediate future. The Newsoms currently live in Marin County. Gov. Jerry Brown and his wife, Ann Gust Brown, moved into the grand house in 2015 after it underwent $4.1 million in renovations to update electrical and plumbing systems, as well as to remove lead-based paint and install a fire sprinkler system and other security features. The mansion was built in 1877 and has been home to 14 governors, but before Brown it had not housed a California governor for nearly half a century. The state bought the mansion from a wealthy Sacramento hardware merchant, Albert Gallatin, in 1903 for $32,500. It was one of the few California homes at that time to have indoor plumbing. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Newsom announces top labor, business liaisons as he prepares to take office Julie Su will be secretary of the California Labor and Workforce Development Agency for Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom. (Katie Falkenberg / Los Angeles Times) Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom on Friday named two advisors on issues related to the California economy, each recognized for their expertise on business and labor. The incoming governor will appoint Julie Su as secretary of the California Labor and Workforce Development Agency and Lenny Mendonca as chief economic and business advisor and director of the Governors Office of Business and Economic Development. Su, 49, has served as state labor commissioner under Gov. Jerry Brown since 2011 and has led an office tasked with the enforcement of Californias labor laws. She won a MacArthur Foundation genius grant in 2001 and previously worked as a civil rights attorney representing low-wage workers. In her new position, Su will be tasked with coordinating the work of several workforce departments in state government, including those that administer unemployment benefits and oversee the relationship between agriculture workers and employers. Mendonca, 57, has been a longtime advocate for rethinking government operations as co-chairman of the nonprofit organization California Forward. Previously, he was partner at McKinsey & Co., a global management consulting firm. While he will be a key advisor to Newsom on the states economy, Mendonca will also lead the office often referred to as Go-Biz, designated as a high-level way to encourage job growth and economic development. In his new role, Mendonca will help ensure that California is rolling out the welcome mat to current and future California businesses and growing a sustainable economy for every Californian, said a statement from the Newsom transition team. Newsom will take the oath of office as governor Monday. He has previously selected key advisors on the state budget, legislative affairs and the executive branchs wide array of agencies and departments. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Joshua Groban, aide to Gov. Jerry Brown, sworn in to California Supreme Court By Taryn Luna California Supreme Court Justice Joshua Groban gives remarks after he is sworn into the court by Gov. Jerry Brown on Thursday. (Taryn Luna) California Supreme Court Justice Joshua Groban, a lawyer and longtime aide to Gov. Jerry Brown, was sworn into the states highest court Thursday in Sacramento. The ceremony marked Browns fourth appointment to the state Supreme Court and gave the seven-member bench a Democratic majority. We live in a highly chaotic, ever-changing and ever-confusing world, Groban said in prepared remarks at the Stanley Mosk Library and Courts Building. But Im happy to report that Im joining an institution whose fundamental purpose, at core, is to provide stability and consistency amidst this chaotic place we live. I look forward to doing that with a sense of reflection, respect, fidelity to the law and compassion. None of Browns appointees, Groban included, have judicial experience. Groban served as legal counsel to Browns 2010 gubernatorial campaign and joined the administration as a senior advisor to the governor, overseeing the appointments of some 600 judges over the last eight years. Prior to working with Brown, Groban, 45, practiced law for more than a decade. In perhaps his final public appearance before his successor, Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom, takes office next week, Brown pushed back on notions that he stacked the court. I dont want this to be known as a Brown court, the governor said before administering the judicial oath of office. First of all, the so-called Brown appointments do not agree with themselves and nor should they. They are individuals. They will differ. Its not anybodys court. The governor called the court a high calling and said Groban possesses the values for the job. Probably, next to my wife, Ive talked to no person as much as Ive talked to Josh Groban, Brown said. I think youve talked to him more, Californias First Lady Anne Gust Brown interjected. I cant tell you what the hell hes going to do, Brown later quipped. I warned him, dont screw up, at least not at first. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement California campaign watchdog agency seeks law barring use of campaign funds to fight harassment claims Former state Sen. Tony Mendoza (D-Artesia). ( (Steve Yeater / Associated Press)) Elected officials accused of harassment or discrimination would be barred from using political contributions to cover their legal defense costs under legislation proposed by Californias campaign watchdog agency. The state Fair Political Practices Commission has agreed to pursue a law change to clear up confusion after an attorney for one former state lawmaker argued political funds could be used in such legal defenses. Commission Chairwoman Alice Germond said putting a prohibition into the law would provide some much needed clarity. As chair, I would like to show the public their lawmakers are held to a standard that is above reproach, Germond said in a statement. People dont give money to campaigns for lawmakers to use it to defend their own bad behavior, so lawmakers shouldnt be able to use it in that manner. The issue came up a year ago when an attorney for former Sen. Tony Mendoza (D-Artesia) sought a formal opinion from the FPPC after the Senate launched an investigation that later concluded Mendoza likely engaged in a pattern of harassment against female aides. Mendoza resigned in February under threat of expulsion by the Senate. In a Jan. 10, 2018, letter, Cassandra Ferrannini, an attorney for Mendoza, wrote to the FPPC that she believed Mendoza should be allowed to establish a legal defense fund able to defray his legal expenses in defending himself against the allegations. The use of campaign funds for attorneys fees under these circumstances would fall squarely within the scope of legislative matters, since it involves the alleged conduct of a legislator with regard to legislative staff that he supervised, Ferrannini wrote. The commission staff originally issued an advice letter that said Mendoza may use campaign and legal defense funds to defend himself from claims of sexual harassment that arose directly out of his activities or status as a candidate or elected officer. But the panel later rescinded the letter after some members questioned using campaign funds to fight sexual harassment claims. That left uncertainty about what was allowed, which Germond said could be cleared up by a new law. The FPPC is still looking for a legislator to carry the bill, a spokesman said. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Californias landmark police transparency law takes effect after court denies police union effort to block it California Supreme Court building (Eric Risberg / Associated Press) A new state law allowing the public disclosure of internal police shooting investigations has gone into effect after the California Supreme Court on Wednesday denied a bid by a police union to block it. The law opens to the public for the first time internal investigations of officer shootings and other major uses of force, along with confirmed cases of sexual assault and lying while on duty. The San Bernardino County Sheriffs Employees Benefit Assn. challenged the law last month, asking state Supreme Court justices to decide that the law only apply to incidents that occur in 2019 or later. The court rejected that request Wednesday, allowing members of the public to seek all applicable records held by police departments. Union president Grant Ward said in a statement that his organization was disappointed with the decision and is now seeking other legal options. We feel this is a statewide issue and should be considered accordingly, Ward said. Last month, the city of Inglewood authorized the destruction of more than 100 police shooting investigations and other records in advance of Jan. 1, when the disclosure law was scheduled to take effect. California law requires police departments to keep such records for five years, and Inglewood City Council voted to destroy records older than that. Mayor James T. Butts has said the decision had nothing to do with the new law. In Los Angeles, Police Chief Michel Moore has said that complying with the new disclosure rules could take hundreds of thousands of hours of work. State Sen. Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley), the author of the transparency law, has said she has no immediate plans to propose changes to it. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Few complaints of racial profiling are sustained by police agencies in California, state panel finds CHP Officer J. Nelson stands outside the office of Gov. Jerry Brown as activists in 2015 support requiring the tracking of police stops. (Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press) Law enforcement agencies in California sustain few citizen complaints of racial or identity profiling, according to a report Wednesday by a state panel set up to help reduce bias in policing. The states Racial and Identity Profiling Advisory Board recommended in its annual report that law enforcement agencies improve training and adopt clear guidelines for tracking and reporting data on who is stopped by officers. The panel said that 453 law enforcement agencies in the state received 9,459 civilian complaints in 2017, including 865 complaints alleging racial or identity profiling. Of the racial and identity complaints that reached a disposition that year, 1.5% were sustained, 14.6% resulted in officers being exonerated and 83.9% of complaints were not sustained or were determined to be unfounded, the report said. A clearer picture of the issue is expected from a 2015 law that requires police agencies to report demographic data on all detentions and searches. The first reports by the eight largest agencies, including the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department, are due to be submitted in April. California Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra, whose office oversees the board, said tracking of all detentions and searches will be helpful to understand the scope of the issue. The Boards recommendations will help make our law enforcement agencies more transparent and promote critical steps to enhance, and in some cases, repair the public trust, Becerra said in a statement Wednesday. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print California housing crisis podcast: What Minneapolis decision to end single-family zoning might mean for California A view of downtown Minneapolis in 2014 (Stephen Maturen / Getty Images) Theres a national movement brewing to roll back zoning rules in cities that only allow one house on a plot of land. The epicenter of that movement is Minneapolis, which passed a plan last month to eliminate single-family zoning citywide and let landowners build duplexes and triplexes on residential property. On this episode of Gimme Shelter: The California Housing Crisis Podcast, we talk about the reasons why Minneapolis leaders took this action, including their desire to combat a history of racial exclusion and spur more housing density to fight climate change. We also debate how Minneapolis decision might affect housing politics in California. Our guest is Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender, who helped shepherd the new zoning rules to passage and a former San Francisco city planner. The episode also crowns 2018s Avocado of the Year the most ridiculous story exemplifying Californias housing woes and includes our predictions for the most under-the-radar important themes in housing politics in 2019. Gimme Shelter, a biweekly podcast that looks at why its so expensive to live in California and what the state can do about it, features Liam Dillon, who covers housing affordability issues for the Los Angeles Times Sacramento bureau, and Matt Levin, data and housing reporter for CALmatters. You can subscribe to Gimme Shelter on iTunes, Stitcher, Soundcloud, Google Play and Overcast. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement How young immigrant Dreamers made flipping control of the House a personal quest By Jazmine Ulloa Gabriela Cruz, who was brought to the U.S. illegally when she was 1, couldnt vote, but in the final hours before the Nov. 6 election, she was making one last run to get people to the polls. The sun was setting in Modesto when she found Ronald Silva, 41, smoking a cigarette on a tattered old couch behind a group home. He politely tried to wave her off until she reminded him he had a right that she as an immigrant without citizenship didnt have. It could really make a change for us, said Cruz, 29. Read More Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom will propose almost $2 billion for early childhood programs (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times) Seeking to frame his new administration as one with a firm focus on closing the gap between children from affluent and poor families, Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom will propose spending some $1.8 billion on an array of programs designed to boost Californias enrollment in early education and child-care programs. Newsoms plan, which he hinted at in a Fresno event last month, will be a key element in the state budget proposal he will submit to the Legislature shortly after taking office Monday, a source close to the governor-elects transition team said. The spending would boost programs designed to ensure children enter kindergarten prepared to learn, closing what some researchers have called the readiness gap that exists based on a familys income. It would also phase in an expansion of prekindergarten and offer money to help school districts that dont have facilities for full-day kindergarten. The fact that hes making significant investments with his opening budget is really exciting, Ted Lempert, president of the Bay Area-based nonprofit Children Now, said Tuesday. Whats exciting is the comprehensiveness of it, because its saying were going to focus on prenatal through age 5. A broad overview document reviewed by The Times on Tuesday shows that most of the outlay under the plan $1.5 billion would be a one-time expense in the budget year that begins July 1. Those dollars would be a single infusion of cash, an approach favored by Gov. Jerry Brown in recent years. Most of the money would be spent on efforts to expand child-care services and kindergarten classes. By law, a governor must submit a full budget to the Legislature no later than Jan. 10. Lawmakers will spend the winter and spring reviewing the proposal and must send a final budget plan to Newsom by June 15. Though legislative Democrats have pushed for additional early childhood funding in recent years a key demand of the Legislative Womens Caucus those actions have typically come late in the budget-writing season in Sacramento. Quite frankly, to start out with a January proposal that includes that investment in Californias children reflects a new day, state Sen. Holly J. Mitchell (D-Los Angeles) said. The governor-elect will propose a $750-million boost to kindergarten funding, aimed at expanding facilities to allow full-day programs. A number of school districts offer only partial-day programs, leaving many low-income families to skip enrolling their children because kindergarten classes end in the middle of the workday. Because the money would not count toward meeting Californias three-decades-old education spending guarantee under Proposition 98, which sets a minimum annual funding level for K-12 schools and community colleges, it will not reduce planned spending on other education services. Close behind in total cost is a budget proposal by Newsom to help train child-care workers and expand local facilities already subsidized by the state, as well as those serving parents who attend state colleges and universities. Together, those efforts could cost $747 million, according to the budget overview document. An expansion of prekindergarten programs would be phased in over three years at a cost of $125 million in the first year. The multiyear rollout would, according to the budget overview, ensure the system can plan for the increase in capacity. Lempert said the Newsom proposal is notable for trying to avoid the kinds of battles that in recent years pitted prekindergarten and expanded child care against each other for additional taxpayer dollars. The reality is we need to expand both simultaneously, he said. Another $200 million of the proposal would be earmarked for programs that provide home visits to expectant parents from limited-income families and programs that provide healthcare screenings for young children. Some of the money would come from the states Medi-Cal program, and other money from federal matching dollars. Funding for the home visits program was provided in the budget Brown signed last summer; the Newsom effort would build on that. Emphasizing a policy area with broad appeal in his first state budget could reflect Newsoms political sensibility about the challenges ahead. Democratic lawmakers and interest groups will be especially eager to see how Newsom addresses the demand for an overhaul of healthcare coverage in California especially after a 2017 effort to create a single-payer, universal system fizzled. The path forward on healthcare is complex and costly, making early childhood education a more achievable goal in the governor-elects early tenure. Newsom is likely to face considerable demands for other additional spending. In November, the Legislatures independent analysts projected that continued strength in tax revenues could produce a cash reserve of some $29 billion over the next 18 months. Almost $15 billion of that could be in unrestricted reserves, the kind that can be spent on any number of government programs. Kim Belshe, executive director of the child advocacy organization First 5 LA and a former state health and human services secretary, said the initial Newsom budget proposal suggests the next governor will focus on a comprehensive approach to improving outcomes for children from low-income families. School-ready kids deserve quality early learning, strong and well-supported families, and access to early screening services, Belshe said. Newsom understands the whole child, multifaceted needs of our kids and is clearly ready to lead. Mitchell, the chair of the Senate budget committee, said shes eager to see the details of the governor-elects proposal to determine whether it might signal the beginning of an even broader expansion of early education efforts. Similar efforts have been hindered by a lack of money and ongoing debate over which services to help children 5 and younger need state funding the most. Universal preschool, in particular, has been debated for more than a decade. California voters rejected a ballot measure to fund a full prekindergarten system in 2006. Its clear theres a new movement afoot trying to engage on investment for universal preschool, Mitchell said. How we invest, and how we prioritize that investment, is going to be a great conversation for the coming months. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print California Politics Podcast: A final conversation with Gov. Jerry Brown No Californian has served longer as governor, signed more laws, granted clemency to more felons or waged more high-profile campaigns than Gov. Jerry Brown. Brown will leave behind a unique legacy when he packs his last belongings for the trip from the governors mansion in Sacramento to his Northern California ranch. His final two terms in office could be his most consequential. The governor reviewed some of the more notable moments from the past eight years in a far-reaching interview with The Times on Dec. 22. This weeks podcast episode includes extended portions of that conversation. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement A sagging economy could doom a 2020 ballot measure to raise commercial property taxes, Gov. Jerry Brown says Gov. Jerry Brown, at his Colusa County home on Saturday, said a ballot measure to raise commercial property taxes could struggle in 2020. (Randall Benton/For The Times) An effort to remove commercial property in California from the tax limits imposed by the landmark Proposition 13 could be felled by an economic slowdown, Gov. Jerry Brown said. In a Saturday interview with The Times at his Northern California ranch, Brown said liberal activist groups that have successfully placed the proposal on the November 2020 statewide ballot shouldnt read too much into early poll numbers showing support for the plan. That isnt as easy as you think, Brown said. Because youre going to be in a downturn of the business cycle. And youre talking many kinds of business. And the cost of doing business in California is already high. The ballot measure would allow counties to more frequently assess the market value of commercial property in California than allowed under Proposition 13, a 1978 ballot initiative that amended the state constitution to place strict limits on assessing property values and taxation for both homeowners and businesses. An analysis of the new measure, which qualified in October for the 2020 ballot, estimates it could bring in some $10.5 billion a year in new tax revenue. The business community will fight it, Brown said. And the minimum wage, the family leave, the environmental rules business[es] have left California, thats going to be the big argument. And I think thats something you really have to think a lot about. The governor, who leaves office early next month due to term limits, declined to either endorse or oppose the ballot measure. He said Californias economic health in two years time could be a key factor in how voters weigh the proposal. Well be in a recession by then, Brown said. So its anybodys guess. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Inglewood to destroy more than 100 police shooting records that could otherwise become public under new California law By Jack Dolan Inglewood Mayor James T. Butts (Maria Alejandra Cardona / Los Angeles Times) The city of Inglewood has authorized the shredding of more than 100 police shooting and other internal investigation records weeks before a new state law could allow the public to access them for the first time. The decision, made at a City Council meeting earlier this month, has troubled civil liberties advocates who were behind the state legislation, Senate Bill 1421, which takes effect Jan. 1. The law opens to the public internal investigations of officer shootings and other major uses of force, along with confirmed cases of sexual assault and lying while on duty. The legislature passed SB 1421 because communities demanded an end to the secrecy cloaking police misconduct and use of force, Marcus Benigno, a spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, said in a statement. Inglewood PDs decision to purge records undermines police accountability and transparency against the will of Californians. California law says police departments must retain records of officer shootings and internal misconduct investigations for five years. The city of Inglewood, however, had kept records longer than that, including case files of police shootings dating to 1991. State Sen. Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley), the author of SB 1421, intended for her bill to allow public access to all qualifying records held by a department, no matter the date of the incident. Inglewood City Council approved the destruction of records that have been in the police departments possession more than 100 cases longer than required by law. The city staff report and council resolution describing the action makes no mention of the new police transparency law. Instead it says the affected records are obsolete, occupy valuable space, and are of no further use to the police department. It added the traditional method of destroying such records is to shred them. It is unclear whether the records have since been destroyed. A spokesman for the Inglewood Police Department along with Inglewoods city manager, attorney, clerk, four council members and Mayor James T. Butts, a former Santa Monica police chief, did not respond to requests for comment. Inglewoods City Hall is closed the last two weeks of December. The Inglewood Police Department has a reputation for secrecy and using excessive force. In 2008, the departments officers fatally shot four men in as many months, three of whom turned out to be unarmed. The U.S. Department of Justice launched a civil rights probe and found significant flaws in the way the department oversaw use-of-force cases and investigated complaints against officers. Civil rights advocates still question why Inglewood police opened fire on a couple found sleeping in a car in 2016, killing them both. California police have a long history of shredding records to avoid scrutiny of their actions. In the 1970s, the LAPD famously destroyed more than four tons of personnel records after defense attorneys began requesting them as part of criminal cases against their clients. The move resulted in the dismissal of more than a hundred criminal complaints. In response, the Legislature demanded that records be preserved but then took other measures, supported by police unions, to ensure the public had very little access to them, making California the most secretive state in the nation when it comes to police misconduct. Skinners legislation begins to unwind those laws, which have been on the books since 1978. No video or audio of the Dec. 11 council action is available on the citys website and neither are meeting minutes or any record of the decision. A city spokeswoman, Courtney Torres, confirmed that the council had voted in favor of the police records purge, and said all the relevant reasons for the decision were included in the city staff report. The Jan. 1 implementation for SB 1421 has prompted other police officials to act. A police union in San Bernardino is asking the state Supreme Court to determine that Skinners bill only applies to incidents that occur in 2019 or later. Los Angeles Police Department Chief Michel Moore sent a letter to Skinner earlier this month warning that complying with the law in regard to older records in the departments possession could take hundreds of thousands of work hours. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Federal officials question California DMVs process for issuing Real IDs (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times) The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has notified the California Department of Motor Vehicles that its process for providing residents with federally recognized identification cards is not adequate. DMV spokesman Armando Botello said Friday that 2.3 million residents who received Real IDs under the current process will have to submit additional documentation when their cards are renewed in five years but will be able to use them in the meantime. The DMV is developing a way for residents to submit more documentation online or via email to comply with the stricter federal requirement, he said. But some state legislators are upset about delays in notifying them of the problem and say Homeland Security could eventually require additional documentation provided by current holders. The DMV has known for a month that millions of Real IDs theyve been dolling out are potentially invalid, Assemblyman Jim Patterson (R-Fresno) said. The DMVs only hope is that the Department of Homeland Security takes pity on California and gives the DMV more time to fix this mess. Real IDs are a new kind of driver license and identification card that federal law will require legal residents to present when boarding domestic flights or visiting military bases and other federal facilities starting Oct. 1, 2020. The DMV has only been requiring one form of documentation, including a current lease or utility bill, to verify the residence of a card applicant. But the federal government said in a Nov. 21 letter to the agency that two such documents are needed. On Friday, DMV Director Jean Shiomoto released a letter defending the current process but said her agency will start requiring a second document to prove residency in April. In order to minimize confusion among our customers, the CADMV will work to inform individuals who have been issued a Real ID under the current process that their card will be accepted for official federal purposes, even if their renewal occurs after the October 1, 2020, final enforcement date for Real ID, Shiomoto wrote to the federal agency. Legislative officials worry there is still a possibility that those issued Real IDs in the past might be required to present a second document to have their cards designated as compliant. The more complex process for obtaining Real IDs has led to hours-long waits for customers at DMV field offices this year, although wait times have been reduced recently by an increase in staffing. Shiomoto last month announced that she is retiring amid problems with the motor voter registration system and after the governor ordered an audit of her agency in response to the long wait times. On Friday, Assembly Republican Leader Marie Waldron of Escondido blasted the DMV for waiting a month to tell legislators of the problem. This is unacceptable and flies in the face of security for our citizens, which is what Real ID was created for in the first place, she said in a statement. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom taps Keely Bosler to be his finance director Keely Bosler, the director of the California Department of Finance, will continue in that role under Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom. (California Department of Finance) Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom on Friday appointed Keely Martin Bosler as director of the California Department of Finance, continuing the role she has served under Gov. Jerry Brown since August. Bosler will become Newsoms chief fiscal advisor, and will play a pivotal role in shaping Newsoms spending plan for the state that will lay the foundation for his top policy priorities. Newsom must roll out his first budget plan within days of taking office on Jan. 7. Californias brighter future depends on a strong, stable fiscal foundation, Newsom said in a statement released Friday afternoon. Keely is an accomplished public servant of sound fiscal judgment. She understands that state budgets are more than numbers on a page they are value statements affecting the fate and future of millions of families reaching for the California Dream. We are fortunate to have her on our team. Prior to being appointed finance director, Bosler served as Browns cabinet secretary for two years and, before that, as the chief deputy director for budget in the Finance Department for three years. Earlier this year, Brown picked Bosler to lead an audit of the Department of Motor Vehicles, which had come under fire for long wait times at DMV field offices and numerous computer problems, including errors in the new motor voter program that registered Californians to vote. As we have discussed, long wait times at the Department of Motor Vehicles do not reflect the high standards of service that Californians expect from their state government, Bosler wrote in a letter in September to DMV Director Jean Shiomoto. The audit is still ongoing, but Shiomoto has since announced she will retire at the end of the year. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Californias legislative analyst, after decades of nonpartisan research for lawmakers, calls it a career Legislative Analyst Mac Taylor, who has led the state research unit since 2008, will retire on Dec. 31. (Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press) Only five people have led the independent research office of the California Legislature since its creation in 1941. And each of them has had a pretty simple mantra to live by in reviewing public policy proposals and government programs: Call it like you see it. The job of any analyst, to me, is you maintain that nonpartisanship, Legislative Analyst Mac Taylor said. Taylor, 65, will retire from the post at the end of December after a four-decade career with the research team that began, as he likes to tell it, just after the passage of the landmark property tax rollback, Proposition 13, in 1978. He became the leader of the office, with the title of legislative analyst, in October 2008. Two months later, state government found itself in arguably the worst fiscal crisis in its history a projected shortfall that ultimately grew to $42 billion by the following winter. There were forces beyond our control, Taylor said of that time. But dont underestimate the policy changes that were made afterward. Those changes, most notably a boost in taxes paid by high-income earners and a robust state budget cash reserve fund, have helped lead to successive years of fully funded government services. The state is projected to have some $24 billion in reserves by the end of the current fiscal year. Taylor announced his intention earlier to step down this year. Leaders from both houses of the Legislature select the analyst, who leads a staff of almost five dozen researchers. The office provides in-depth reports on pending legislation, as well as on broader policy topics like education and healthcare, and produces an independent analysis for every proposed ballot measure. A succession of lawmakers and governors alike have praised or panned the work of the Legislative Analysts Office based on their own political worldview. Taylor said his staff is mindful that they work for legislators, but try to ignore the rhetoric that follows the release of a major report. People are going to do what theyre going to do with our information, he said. They dont always like it, but they appreciate that we give them our best advice. Taylor oversaw a transformation in the way the Legislative Analysts Office distributes its information, embracing the release of research reports through social media instead of relying on traditional printed copies and journalist roundtable events. But he said the work of the researchers has remained largely unchanged through the decades. Having an independent take on things, I think, is good for the Legislature, he said. No replacement for Taylor has been announced, which means a short transition for his eventual successor before Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom sends his first budget proposal to lawmakers in early January. Taylor, who lives in the Sacramento suburbs, said he will honor the tradition of his predecessors in stepping away from public policy debates in order to give the new analyst space to lead the team as he or she sees fit. He said he hopes to travel in the coming years and spend time with his children who have moved to the East Coast. Forty years in state government, Taylor said in why he was stepping aside now. Isnt that enough? Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Gov. Jerry Brown sues to save California sentencing laws By Don Thompson, Associated Press (Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press) Outgoing Gov. Jerry Brown sued Thursday to protect one of his signature actions in office, a voter-approved measure that allows most prison inmates to seek earlier release and participate in rehabilitation programs. His administration filed a lawsuit challenging a pending 2020 initiative that seeks to toughen criminal penalties as part of an effort to roll back reforms adopted by voters within the last decade. Browns lawsuit in Sacramento County Superior Court contends the measure lacked enough valid signatures to overturn a previously approved constitutional amendment. County officials and California Secretary of State Alex Padilla certified the signatures in July but said they were submitted too late to qualify for last months election. The lawsuit names Padilla and the ballot measures official proponent, Nina Salarno Besselman, president of the advocacy group Crime Victims United. Padilla said the measure exceeded the required roughly 366,000 valid signatures, equal to 5% of votes cast for governor in 2014. Browns lawsuit says he used the wrong threshold. It says changing the state Constitution requires 8%, or more than 585,400 signatures. That makes the pending initiative more than 150,000 signatures short, the lawsuit says. Hes wrong, said Jeff Flint, a spokesman for the campaign backing the measure. He predicted a judge will be reluctant to reject a measure that already has qualified for the ballot. The secretary of state told us how many signatures are required, and thats how many we collected, Flint said. Padillas office did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The measure would reverse reforms adopted by voters through Proposition 47 in 2014 and Proposition 57 in 2016. Proposition 57 allows most inmates to seek earlier paroles, and Proposition 47 reduced some drug and property crimes from felonies to misdemeanors. The combination has helped keep Californias inmate population below a population cap set by federal judges. Corrections department spokeswoman Vicky Waters said the measure gives corrections and parole officials broad discretion to protect our communities and fashion a rational system of rehabilitation and punishment. This new initiative unlawfully seeks to supplant the departments constitutional authority to implement these critical reforms to our criminal justice system. The pending initiative would shorten the list of crimes that qualify for earlier parole and change some theft crimes from misdemeanors back to felonies. It would also increase the number of crimes for which DNA is collected, a list that was limited when some crimes went from felonies to misdemeanors. Those supporting the tougher penalties say easing criminal penalties has increased the number of dangerous criminals on the streets, but those backing the changes say they have helped reduce mass incarceration and rehabilitate convicted criminals. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print California Supreme Court orders records unsealed in pardon of ex-state Sen. Roderick Wright Former state Sen. Roderick Wright (Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times) The California Supreme Court has granted a request to unseal court records involving Gov. Jerry Browns decision last month to pardon former state Sen. Roderick Wright for felony convictions involving lying about living in his legislative district, officials said Thursday. The court order was in response to a request by the nonpartisan First Amendment Coalition, which argued that the public has a right to know what information went into the governors decision to grant clemency to Wright. This is an important victory for public access to court files involving the exercise of executive clemency, said coalition spokesman Glen A. Smith. We are gratified the court has recognized that these decisions should be subject to the same public access rules that apply to other judicial records under California law. The court gave Browns office until Jan. 2 to redact confidential material before giving the court documents that can be released to the public. The court files submitted by the governors office include letters of support for a pardon and an internal review of Wrights case. The court denied a motion to unseal the records of all clemency cases but left open consideration of requests on other individual cases. Browns office is currently evaluating the courts decision, said spokesman Brian Ferguson. The governor argued against unsealing records in a recent court filing that said confidentiality is consistent with historical practice and is supported by state law. In pardoning Wright on Nov. 22, the governor wrote: He has shown that since his release from custody, he has lived an honest and upright life, exhibited good moral character, and conducted himself as a law abiding citizen. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement California political watchdog agency fines BART, urges prosecution over using public funds for campaign A Bay Area Rapid Transit train leaves the station in Oakland in this 2013 file photo. (Ben Margot / AP) Californias state political watchdog agency on Thursday imposed a $7,500 fine against the Bay Area Rapid Transit District and called for a possible criminal or civil prosecution over allegations the district used public resources to campaign for a 2016 bond measure. The state Fair Political Practices Commission levied an administrative fine against BART for its failure to disclose spending on YouTube videos, social media posts and text messages to promote Measure RR, which authorized $3.5 billion in general obligation bonds. Though the panel lacks authority to seek criminal charges over the misuse of public funds, it also urged county district attorneys in the BART service area and the state attorney general to pursue possible criminal or civil charges over the spending of taxpayer dollars for campaign purposes, Commission Chairwoman Alice Germond said. It is the concept of misusing public funds that I think we all here are very disturbed about, and we want to send a warning and not create a precedent that is a minor, little slap on the wrist, Germond said, adding that the referral to criminal prosecutors would further send a message that this is wrong. Commissioner Brian Hatch also called for the state Legislature to consider granting the FPPC power to go after public agencies that spend taxpayer money on campaigns. Sen. Steve Glazer (D-Orinda) called on the agency to increase the fine to the maximum level of $33,375. The proposed $7,500 fine represents a slap on the wrist for a very serious violation of the law and the publics trust, Glazer said in a letter to the panel. In supporting the fine recommended by the staff, Germond said BART has agreed to pay the penalty. Somebody did something wrong and they have admitted it, she said. A staff report said there were factors in favor of a fine below the maximum. Although the Commission considers BARTs violations to be serious, the absence of any evidence of an intention to conceal, deceive, or mislead; the voluntary filing of the delinquent campaign statement; and the absence of a prior record are mitigating, the report said. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print California police union seeks state Supreme Court review of new law disclosing internal investigation records Los Angeles Police Department officers. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times) A police union is asking the California Supreme Court to block the release of internal officer investigations before a new state law takes effect next year. The San Bernardino County Sheriffs Employees Benefit Assn. filed a petition Tuesday asking justices to rule that only investigations of incidents that occur after Jan. 1 would be available under the law and not those the department has on file from years prior. The litigation comes after this years passage of Senate Bill 1421, which opens to the public for the first time internal investigations of officer shootings and other major uses of force, along with confirmed cases of sexual assault and lying while on duty. The law goes into effect Jan. 1, and the San Bernardino County Sheriffs Department has told the union it intends to make available in response to public records requests all the information it has. The union is very concerned about any plans to retroactively apply Senate Bill 1421, Grant Ward, the unions president, said in a statement. We believe retroactive application violates our members rights and we hope the California Supreme Court will consider the serious issues raised by our legal challenge. The bills author, Sen. Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley), does not agree with the unions interpretation. She has said her legislation should apply to all the records in a police departments possession because the law simply declared that affected records were no longer confidential. If the record exists, its disclosable, Skinner said. A decision on what records will be available under the law is key to how far-reaching it will be. If the court restricts access to incidents that occurred prior to 2019, those cases will not be subject to public scrutiny. The police union in San Bernardino County is not the only one raising concerns about the law. Earlier this month, Los Angeles Police Department Chief Michel Moore sent a letter to Skinner expressing concern that his agency would be overwhelmed if the law required the department to disclose older incidents. Even if the law only applied to the previous five years, Moore wrote, it could take nearly 300,000 hours of work to comply with its provisions. The LAPD operates with a guiding principle of Reverence for the Law; as such, we will diligently comply with SB 1421, Moore wrote. We maintain, however, that a retroactive implementation of SB 1421 will be exceptionally burdensome and would require significant reallocation of front-line investigative personnel. Skinner said if complying with the law becomes untenable for law enforcement agencies that maintain records for a long time, she would consider modifications. But she said agencies did not raise this concern during discussion over the bill. SB 1421 went through multiple committee hearings, multiple floor debates, extensive opportunity for all parties to weigh in on concerns with its structure, she said. That was not an issue that was raised by law enforcement at the time. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Gov. Brown warns of backlash for Republicans in 2020 if Obamacare repeal is upheld Gov. Jerry Brown at the National Press Club in April. (Alex Wong / Getty Images) Gov. Jerry Brown warned Republicans on Tuesday that repeal of the Affordable Care Act would devastate the partys political chances in the 2020 election. Brown, speaking at a Sacramento Press Club event moderated by Los Angeles Times columnist George Skelton and Brown family historian Miriam Pawel, said a federal judges ruling last week to strike down the 2010 law if upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court will build such a backlash that the Democrats will not only take over the Senate, theyll win the presidency and will win with the kind of momentum, particularly on the issue of healthcare, that [the law] will be replaced probably with something even better. The governor, who leaves office in less than three weeks, said he did not believe the ruling by a Texas judge would ultimately prevail. I think the decision will probably be overturned, Brown said. Few states have embraced the law championed by former President Obama more than California, both through its healthcare exchange, Covered California, and by expanding access to government-funded services under Medi-Cal. Some 12 million Californians now receive healthcare through Medi-Cal, and Brown said a final ruling affecting the federal dollars that subsidize that care would be a serious blow. California would not be able to afford it without the subsidy, the governor said. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement Bars in Los Angeles, San Francisco could stay open until 4 a.m. under new bill A bar in Sherman Oaks (acuna-hansen) For the third year in a row, a California lawmaker is trying to keep bars open until 4 a.m. State Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) is reintroducing legislation that would allow Los Angeles, San Francisco and seven other cities to extend the sales of alcohol in bars, clubs and restaurants by an additional two hours. Nightlife brings people together, fosters creativity and innovation, supports small businesses, and creates middle-class jobs, Wiener said in a statement. Its time to embrace our nighttime economy and give our cities the tools they need to foster the best nightlife possible. Last year, Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed a similar bill by Wiener, writing: I believe we have enough mischief from midnight to 2 without adding two more hours of mayhem. Should this years measure, Senate Bill 58, advance through the Legislature, Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom would decide whether to sign it into law. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti has endorsed SB 58, saying the city should have more flexibility than it does now. Every community has its own needs, and cities should be able to make informed decisions about what nightlife hours make sense for residents, visitors, and neighborhoods, Garcetti said in a statement. The bill would create a five-year pilot program where Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Sacramento, West Hollywood, Long Beach, Coachella, Cathedral City and Palm Springs could decide to allow restaurants and bars within their cities to serve alcohol until 4 a.m. with the approval of the state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Bars in Los Angeles and San Francisco could stay open until 4 a.m. under new bill A bar in Sherman Oaks. (Acuna-Hansen) For the third year in a row, a California lawmaker is trying to keep bars open until 4 a.m. State Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) is reintroducing legislation that would allow Los Angeles, San Francisco and seven other cities to extend the sales of alcohol in bars, clubs and restaurants by an additional two hours. Nightlife brings people together, fosters creativity and innovation, supports small businesses and creates middle-class jobs, Wiener said in a statement. Its time to embrace our nighttime economy and give our cities the tools they need to foster the best nightlife possible. Last year, Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed a similar bill by Wiener, writing: I believe we have enough mischief from midnight to 2 without adding two more hours of mayhem. Should this years measure, Senate Bill 58, advance through the Legislature, Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom would decide whether to sign it into law. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti has endorsed SB 58, saying the city should have more flexibility than it does now. Every community has its own needs, and cities should be able to make informed decisions about what nightlife hours make sense for residents, visitors and neighborhoods, Garcetti said in a statement. The bill would create a five-year pilot program where Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Sacramento, West Hollywood, Long Beach, Coachella, Cathedral City and Palm Springs could decide to allow restaurants and bars within their cities to serve alcohol until 4 a.m. with the approval of the state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Californias DMV director announces retirement amid problems with motor voter program (Kent Nishamura/Los Angeles Times) The director of the California Department of Motor Vehicles will retire at years end with a number of questions unanswered about the implementation of a major voter registration system and long wait times experienced by customers for much of the past summer. Jean Shiomoto will not continue in her current role as Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom takes office, and announced to staff several weeks ago her intent to retire at the end of the year after 38 years in state service, spokesman Armando Botello said in an email to The Times on Friday. Newsoms transition team did not immediately respond to a request for comment on who might lead the department in 2019. Shiomoto was appointed DMV director by Gov. Jerry Brown in the fall of 2013, having served in prior leadership roles with the department. DMV officials have been sharply criticized by lawmakers in recent months for delays in serving customers at its field offices across the state. Last week, DMV officials revealed errors in registering California voters for the November election mistakes that followed a series of problems in the rollout of the states new motor voter registration system. Secretary of State Alex Padilla last week said he had lost confidence in Shiomotos leadership as a result of the voting registration problems. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement New law could break the stalemate over housing on the site of a near-vacant Cupertino mall By Liam Dillon For more than a decade, developers have tried to build new housing on the site of an all-but-empty mall in Cupertino, a city in the heart of Silicon Valley and home to Apple headquarters. A well-organized group of neighbors, upset about traffic, building heights and the potential loss of the communitys suburban lifestyle, turned away every plan. Now, for the first time, the stalemate might be broken thanks to a decision made in the state Capitol. In an effort to address Californias housing affordability problem, legislators passed a law last year that requires cities and counties to approve housing projects if they comply with local zoning rules and other standards, forcing some resistant communities to agree to new homebuilding. In September, the city of Cupertino, citing the state law, approved developer Sand Hill Property Co.s proposal to build an office park and more than 2,400 homes where the Vallco Shopping Mall sits. Read More Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Local government was a last bastion for struggling California Republicans. Not anymore By Mark Z. Barabak Theres no shortage of watery metaphors to describe the disaster that befell California Republicans this midterm election. A blue wave. A Democratic tsunami. But the most apt may be a flood, with the casualties steadily rising as the vote count climbed in the days and weeks following Nov. 6. Eventually half the GOP congressional delegation was washed away, along with the entire slate of statewide Republican candidates. In Sacramento, Democrats claimed 29 of 40 state Senate seats and seized three-quarters of the 80-member Assembly the largest number since 1883, when Chester A. Arthur was serving in the White House. Read More Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print For the Republicans left in Californias Legislature, fewer lawmakers will have to do more work By John Myers From January to late summer every year, the California Legislature is a perpetual motion machine. And in the new year, the people most likely to struggle in keeping up will be Republicans, vastly outnumbered but still responsible for representing millions of the states residents. There are 22 standing committees in the state Senate, plus at least a dozen more subcommittees or special committees. And after Novembers election, only 11 Republican senators will be left to divvy up the work. To the victors go the spoils. To the vanquished go the extra assignments. Read More Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement Californias DMV failed to finish registering 329 new voters before November election (Los Angeles Times) Officials at the California Department of Motor Vehicles said Friday that the agency failed to send information for 329 new voters to state elections officers in time for the November election, the latest revelation in a string of mishaps regarding voter registration. Secretary of State Alex Padilla responded with a blistering letter, calling on Gov. Jerry Brown or Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom to replace Jean Shiomoto, the DMV director. The Director of DMV has lost my confidence and trust, Padilla wrote. In all, the agency revealed that 589 mailed voter registration records that should have been processed under election deadlines werent sent to Californias secretary of state until late November, including forms from 260 drivers who had intended to update their address on existing voter registration records. The DMV had been instructed to not send registration forms that came in after Oct. 22, but the voters in question had forms that were postmarked before the deadline. In some cases, when the postmark wasnt legible, the agency said, documents inside indicated the voter had intended to finish their registration in time for the Nov. 6 election. The DMV recognizes the pause in transmittals was an error and affected the timing of the registration of the 589 individuals referenced above relative to the November election, Shiomoto wrote in a letter to Padilla on Friday. The pause was due to a misunderstanding on the part of the department, for which we take responsibility. Those who were trying to update their address for voter registration would not have been blocked from casting ballots. But officials said its unclear whether any of the 329 new voters were able to participate in the election. Shiomoto said in her letter that DMV will work with elections officials. The errors were not related to previous DMV mistakes about registering voters, problems associated with the rollout of the states new motor voter law. In those cases, multiple registration forms were sent to local elections offices for some voters, some people were assigned the wrong political party preference and others who are noncitizens were incorrectly placed on the list of registered voters. DMV officials have yet to respond to questions posed by The Times over the last several weeks about who knew of those mistakes and when. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Newsom appoints a labor advocate and a former staffer as his chief deputy Cabinet secretaries By Taryn Luna A labor advocate and a San Francisco political operative have accepted positions in Gov.-elect Gavin Newsoms new administration. Angie Wei, a Capitol insider with deep ties to organized labor in California, will serve as a chief deputy Cabinet secretary with a focus on policy development. As a legislative director and chief of staff at the California Labor Federation, Wei has represented more than 1,200 unions and 2.1 million workers in Capitol fights over a host of policy issues, including drug-pricing transparency and paid family leave. The governor-elect also tapped Jason Elliott, a policy advisor to Newsom during his time as mayor of San Francisco and a chief of staff to San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee, as another chief deputy Cabinet secretary overseeing executive branch operations. Elliott and Wei will serve under Ana Matosantos, Newsoms previously The Senate late Tuesday approved a bipartisan overhaul of criminal sentencing and the federal prison system, an initiative pushed by President Trumps aide and son-in-law, Jared Kushner. The bill, approved in the Senate 87 to 12, is expected to be passed by the House and signed by the president. The 12 no votes were from Republicans. Called the First Step Act, the legislation would undo some of the sentencing crackdowns of the 1990s and create programs for federal inmates to reduce recidivism. It would allow low- and minimum-risk prisoners to earn credits for early release to reentry centers or home confinement and reduce some mandatory minimum sentences, including those imposed by so-called three-strikes laws that automatically result in life imprisonment. The bill would also allow reviews of sentences that reflect significant disparities between harsh punishments for crack cocaine use, which disproportionately involve minorities, and lesser penalties for powder cocaine. Advertisement The bill would affect only prisoners in the federal system. The vast majority of criminal cases are handled in state courts with prisoners held in state prisons, which would not be affected. Still, the change at the federal level could add momentum to efforts in many states to roll back some of the harsh sentencing laws adopted during the 1980s and 1990s, when crime rates in the U.S. were much higher than they are now. Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, worked on the bill and called it an overwhelmingly bipartisan piece of legislation that is going to be the first major change in criminal justice legislation since the Clinton era. Both Republicans and Democrats who worked on the bill credited Kushner for his efforts. Critics of the bill, including Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), argued that it was a dangerous proposal that would allow violent criminals to be released early from prison. The latest from Washington jennifer.haberkorn@latimes.com @jenhab As autonomous-car companies unveil their test vehicles on city streets, they are also unleashing their lobbyists on Congress with an urgent mission: Keep California regulators at bay. The prospect of California writing the rules of the driverless road does not sit well with auto firms. Californias outsized influence over car companies most notably the states sway over air pollution and fuel economy rules has been a source of consternation for the auto industry for decades. The regulatory muscle the state has used to force manufacturers to adopt new technologies is a long-running point of industry agitation. Now, the state is moving to impose stringent safety and privacy regulations on autonomous vehicles. The companies have responded by championing a measure in Congress to force California and other states to yield rule-making authority to the Trump administration. The fight is playing out in a determined campaign to pass legislation backed by the industry in the final days of this Congress. At stake are the rules that will guide what promises to be a revolution in transportation, as well as the balance of power between an industry-friendly administration in Washington and a more consumer-oriented government in the nations largest state. Advertisement The state is already over-regulating this industry, and it is stifling innovation, said Grayson Brulte, an industry consultant based in Beverly Hills. This would override some of the states regulations and replace them with federal regulations. We have to look at what is best for society, not what is best for a single state. Some influential lawmakers are hoping to slip the legislation into a must-pass spending bill before the current session of Congress comes to a close at the end of this week. While the clock seems likely to run out on the effort in this session, the industry almost certainly will take another run at it in the new year. The latest look at the Trump administration and the rest of Washington California officials warn that the measure under consideration in the Senate threatens to idle pioneering regulations already approved in their state and others. In particular, the Senate bill, which has drawn some bipartisan backing, would jeopardize Californias first-in-the-nation safety rule that forces driverless firms to detail for the public every malfunction that has caused a test vehicle to be taken off the roads. Opponents of the measure say it might also exempt driverless firms from the states new landmark privacy law, leaving passengers unable to opt out of having their movements tracked and data about their riding habits shared commercially. It could also ban state and local governments from adopting laws that California officials say will be crucial to safely adapting to the new technology. This technology is nowhere near where private companies would like us to think it is, said Seleta Reynolds, general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Transportation. These vehicles are years away from being able to operate in cities without a fair number of controls in place to reduce the amount of chaos they could cause. Yet the auto and tech industries are steadfast. We keep pushing back against this plan in Washington to preempt our ability to protect the public good, Reynolds said. But it is the one main thing industry keeps fighting for. The National Assn. of City Transportation Officials, which Reynolds leads, has joined cities, state lawmakers and consumer rights groups in urging senators not to approve the pending bill, known as AV START, warning it would create a national carte blanche for experimentation on public roadways, putting real people in the place of crash dummies. Lawmakers championing the bill say their goal is not to undermine California. They argue the anxiety is unwarranted. Advisors to the lawmaker leading the push, Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee, say the bill does not target Californias existing rules for elimination. The measure would not prevent the state from forcing companies to obey its data privacy rules and report publicly when vehicles malfunction, they say. They frame the proposal as merely bringing sanity to what they describe as a disorderly patchwork of driverless-vehicle regulations, in which the industry faces 36 different sets of rules in states that have adopted their own policies toward autonomous vehicles. The legislation would clarify that the federal government is responsible for vehicle safety standards, and states and local governments will maintain their traditional role over traffic and vehicle operation laws, backers say. That, they add, would give the administration the tools it needs to draft nationwide rules and provide industry the regulatory clarity it says is essential to accelerating innovation. The intention of our self-driving legislation has always been to preserve a dynamic where auto equipment is regulated by the federal government, and state and local officials set the rules of the road for driving and related services like insurance, Thune said in an email. Weve made multiple edits to re-clarify this intention and stand ready to do more. The measures critics are unconvinced. Rules for driverless vehicles are largely uncharted territory, and the legislation remains full of potential pitfalls for states that want to do more than Washington would do to hold companies accountable. Lawmakers opposed to Thunes bill are concerned it would create a vacuum, banning state and local governments from imposing rules on the industry immediately, even with federal regulations unlikely to be drafted and approved for years. Congress needs to be absolutely sure were not interfering with local traffic laws, Sen. Dianne Feinstein said in an email. Feinstein is among a group of senators demanding major changes in the bill. If self-driving cars are going to revolutionize transportation, states and cities shouldnt be deprived of their ability to keep people safe during that transformation, especially since it could be decades before new federal safety standards are written, she wrote. State Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson, a Democrat who chairs the state Senates Judiciary Committee, is skeptical of Thunes assurances that his measure would protect Californias privacy rules. Members of Congress and industry representatives have resisted adding a provision explicitly guaranteeing the privacy rules would apply to autonomous vehicles. These cars have extraordinary information-collecting opportunities, and the industry wants to be able to use that data without restriction, she said. The existence of multiple state rules is a constant complaint of industry officials, who want to build fleets that can glide across state lines. The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, which represents major car companies, is urging lawmakers to immediately pass the Thune measure, arguing it would protect against an unworkable patchwork of state and federal laws and regulations that could stifle innovation, job growth, and the development of safety technologies. Back in California, some analysts compare this pivotal moment for the auto industry to 1970, when Congress gave the smog-choked state special authority under the Clean Air Act to impose tailpipe emissions targets stricter than federal standards. The state used that authority to push automakers to develop ever more efficient fleets. Only now, they say, the push in Congress is to inhibit the state. If California had to deal with these kinds of preemptions in the Clean Air Act, wed all be breathing dirtier air right now, said Steven Shladover, a UC Berkeley research engineer who has advised the state on autonomous vehicle rules. Its a race to the bottom. The industry wants the most minimal, meaningless level of regulation and for it to be imposed everywhere. The fight over what sort of rules to impose inevitably centers on California, Jackson said. Because of the size and number of vehicles sold here, we are ground zero for the auto industry in terms of the requirements it must follow, she said. As goes California, so goes the rest of the country by virtue of our market share. The auto industry does not want to be regulated by us in any way, shape or form. More stories from Evan Halper evan.halper@latimes.com | Twitter: @evanhalper Fever pitch online comments were not matched by an in-person presence when the Burbank Unified facilities-naming committee held its first meeting regarding the possibility of dropping David Starr Jordan as a middle school namesake Thursday evening. The topic sparked hundreds of comments on various social media sites but only drew 10 people to district headquarters for the meeting. The low number prompted committee members to ask for a second meeting, which will be held on either Jan. 23 or Feb. 6 at Jordan Middle School, located on 420 S. Mariposa St. Jordan was a renowned scientist, educator and founding father of Stanford University, who passed away in 1931. He is also notorious for his views on eugenics, a system of controlled breeding and separation of people to increase the chances for desirable heritable characteristics, a practice later favored by the Nazis. During the recent meeting, Burbank Unified board member Charlene Tabet, who is also a member of the naming committee, said she appreciated the residents who attended. Please tell the folks that youve spoken to to please come and, if theyd like, to speak up, one way or another. Its important to hear many viewpoints, she said. In addition to the second meeting request, committee members agreed to several measures. All future meetings will be scheduled to last 90 minutes, though they could stretch to two hours, if needed, while the districts director of secondary education, John Paramo, was asked to provide a preliminary budget as to what a name change would cost. The next meeting will also be informational as it will include the merits and demerits of David Starr Jordans work and life. The gathering will be headed by Tabet, who was elected the committees chairperson. The group is expected to take a straw poll at the next meeting, which will help determine its recommendation to the Burbank Unified school board. At the center of the meeting on Thursday was a discussion on whether community standards have changed since 1948, when David Starr Jordan Middle School was christened. Of the five public speakers, three were in favor of keeping David Starr Jordan as the namesake. I am here to urge you not to take any action on Jordan, resident Carole Kubasak said. If you do, I think you will have to, in all fairness, also examine all the other schools. She added, Im thinking [youll] also have to change the name of Jefferson because he impregnated a slave and Washington because he had slaves. That sentiment gave caution to committee member Elena Hubbell, who appeared to be leaning toward keeping Jordan and said shed fight forever against any change to the Burroughs High School Indian mascot. Resident Paula Morris said the committee should not be swayed by other districts. In March, the Palo Alto School District renamed schools named after Stanford educators Jordan and Lewis Terman because of the duos ties to eugenics. Burbank resident Konstantine Anthony argued for a name change and added that money should not be an issue. A lot of people want to get behind this, Anthony said. I know the school district has some funding issues right now, and I will let you know there are more than enough people who would be willing to donate to offset the cost. One common-ground measure proposed by Tabet was to keep the Jordan name, but rename the school after African American civil rights activist and educator Barbara Jordan. Also, committee member and parent Gayle Kolodny Cole suggested keeping the Jordan name by turning it into an acronym, with the letters standing for virtues such as justice and open-mindedness. andrew.campa@latimes.com Twitter @campadresports Popular East Coast burger chain Shake Shack opened its newest location in Burbank Monday morning and drew a crowd to its doors just minutes after opening. It is the eighth location in L.A. County for the New York-based restaurant and it is located in the heart of downtown Burbank at 200 N. San Fernando Blvd., which was previously a campus for the now-defunct Marinello Schools of Beauty. Ashley Hummel, general manager of the Burbank site, said she was excited to finally let people into the restaurant after having many people ask her when it would be ready. I am super excited to open [a Shake Shack] in my hometown, and its very special to me, she said, adding that most of the hires for the Burbank location are from the local community. Hopefully, were that next staple in Burbank. Just a few minutes down San Fernando on the other side of the Burbank Town Center is one of Shake Shacks direct competitors West Coast chain In-N-Out Burger, which was founded in Baldwin Park and has its headquarters in Irvine. Hummel, a Burbank native who recently moved back to Southern California after living in New York City, said her first job was working at an In-N-Out restaurant, and she is familiar with the chain. She added that the other burger chain is a great company, and she thinks the two restaurants can coexist. We respect the hell out of them, Hummel said. We dont have as many locations as they do, and were not trying to take over anything. Were just trying to share a little piece of the pie. About 100 people lined up outside the restaurant Monday morning to be the first people through its doors. Glendale resident Sean Cooley did not hesitate to start taking photos of his order, which consisted of a cheeseburger, cheese-covered fries, chicken tenders and a shake. He has been to multiple Shake Shacks around L.A. County and even across the country, including locations in Chicago and New York. I think its a peak fast-food burger, in terms of what I want in an upscale but not froofy hamburger, he said. Its at a bit higher price point than In-N-Out, but I think theres a much needed space for it. Mayor Emily Gabel-Luddy attended the Shake Shack grand opening and said she was excited to see how the burger chain performs in the downtown area. I think [this restaurant] indicates that the downtown area is stepping up; that there are more significant kinds of restaurants or retail shops that are coming in, she said. Downtown, in and of itself, through the [Tourism Business Improvement District] and all the merchants that participate, is really beginning to raise the bar on the kinds of facilities that we have. anthonyclark.carpio@latimes.com Twitter: @acocarpio Elf on the loose in Laguna A small, cherry-cheeked figure is running around Laguna Beach, swinging on a rope above Laguna Canyon and driving a firetruck. Elbee (pronounced like the citys initials) made his 2018 holiday season debut in a Laguna Beach government Instagram story and has been hanging art, tinkering in city trucks and riding the trolley around town. The elf, about a foot tall, first visited Laguna in 2016. His name was chosen by a vote on social media, according to Jennifer Chapman, the citys digital communications coordinator. Elbee helps promote the citys various departments and services, Chapman said. People think its funny; they ask where the elf is going to be next, she said. [And] Can you tell the elf that I want this for Christmas? The mischievous elf, based on the popular Elf on the Shelf holiday book and box set, has visited the cultural arts and public works departments, the Suzi Q Center and other places around the city. Of course, Elbee goes back to the North Pole every night to report to Santa Claus, Chapman said. Laguna Beach police to present story time Friday Laguna Beach police will present a story time from 10:30 to 11:30 a.m. Friday at the Laguna Beach Library, 363 Glenneyre St. Cookies and hot cocoa will be available for guests. For more information, visit bit.ly/2SSaOQx. Newport party to feature Santa and boat parade viewing A family fun night with Santa Claus, dinner, crafts and boat parade viewing will be offered from 5:30 to 8 p.m. Friday at the Marina Park Community Center, 1600 W. Balboa Blvd., Newport Beach. Tickets are $25 for adults and $15 for children. For more information, visit bit.ly/2QyQTcG. Tall ship to offer tours and sailings in Newport Beach Guests can visit Lady Washington, the official tall ship of Washington state, from Friday to Dec. 26 in Newport Beach. Daily tours will be offered for $5, except on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Sailings from 2 to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday will feature demonstrations of tall ship handling, sea shanty singing and other maritime amusements. The cost of the Adventure Sails is $42 to $49. Lady Washington also visited Newport Beach early this year. For more information, visit bit.ly/2GjFLvA. Chargers star launches foundation for low-income kids Star running back Melvin Gordon of the Costa Mesa-based Los Angeles Chargers launched his Beyond Flash Foundation supporting low-income youths by teaming with the Boys & Girls Clubs of Central Orange Coast and Second Harvest Food Bank of Orange County to provide food for 1,000 kids at an event Saturday in Santa Ana. The Boys & Girls Clubs of Central Orange Coast has locations in Costa Mesa and Newport Beach. Laguna Beach Unified School District placed on Advanced Placement honor roll The Laguna Beach Unified School District recently earned a spot in the ninth annual Advanced Placement District Honor Roll for increasing its number of students in AP programs. Laguna Beach Unified was one of five districts in Orange County to make the honor roll, which included 373 districts in the United States and Canada. I am always impressed by the ongoing success of our students, said Laguna Beach Unified Supt. Jason Viloria. These are rigorous courses that demand a high level of dedication, and I am proud to see an increase in student participation as a result of the ongoing efforts of our staff to identify and support students who have not traditionally accessed AP courses and through the addition of new AP course offerings. Kool & the Gang to headline New Years Eve party in H.B. Kool & the Gang, known for hits such as Jungle Boogie, Hollywood Swinging, Ladies Night and Celebration, will play a New Years Eve event at the Hyatt Regency Huntington Beach, 21500 Pacific Coast Hwy. DW3 also will perform. The party is scheduled for 7 p.m. Dec. 31 to 1 a.m. Jan. 1. Tickets start at $155. For more information, visit bit.ly/2EuqhCF. Free tax prep to be offered for low- and moderate-income earners Orange County United Way will offer free tax preparation starting Jan. 8 for people with low and moderate incomes. Volunteers will be at various locations throughout the county, including the Melinda Hoag Smith Center for Healthy Living, 307 Placentia Ave., Newport Beach. For more information, visit ocfreetaxprep.com. Kelly Rodriguez, the first female captain in the Huntington Beach Police Department, will make local history again as the departments first assistant chief. Im very excited to keep the community safe and make everybody happy and do the best I can, Rodriguez told the City Council on Monday after it approved her appointment to the position. She will start Jan. 12. Rodriguez was selected after being interviewed by a panel of law enforcement professionals, according to a staff report. She will receive an annual salary of $192,212. Mayor Erik Peterson and Mayor Pro Tem Lyn Semeta congratulated Rodriguez, describing her as an asset to the community and capable of defusing explosive situations. Rodriguez began her career in public safety in 1989 as a custody operations deputy with the Orange County Sheriffs Department. She joined the Huntington Beach Police Department in 1996 as a patrol officer and has held various positions since, including school resource officer, special enforcement bureau lieutenant and uniform division commander. Rodriguez holds a bachelors degree in criminal justice from Cal State Long Beach and a masters in public administration from National University. In 2017, an independent consulting firm recommended creating a second-in-command position to improve departmental operational efficiency and establish a ladder of succession planning. Police Chief Robert Handy has said a jump from captain to chief is too big to make and that having the assistant position would prepare a potential chief. Harbor Commission In other business Monday, the City Council gave final approval to establishing a city Harbor Commission to supervise Huntington Harbours recreational and commercial uses and infrastructure. The seven-member commission will offer input to the council and study and analyze harbor issues. Huntington Harbour, in the northwest corner of the city bordering Seal Beach, includes five islands and a network of channels and connects to Anaheim Bay. Priscella.Vega@latimes.com Twitter: @vegapriscella TOKYO, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- Japan on Tuesday approved new defense guidelines, part of which includes the controversial upgrading and deployment of aircraft carriers in a move unprecedented since the end of World War II. Japan's new National Defense Program Guidelines, which also spans issues of cyberspace, outer space and electronic warfare as part of its plans to create what it describes as a "multidimensional joint defense force," has already drawn criticism from defense experts, the public and constitutional scholars. They have maintained that the bolstering of a multidimensional and integrated defense force is a major step away from Japan's "defense only" posture, which is enshrined in its pacifist constitution. At the heart of recent controversies and now outlined in the defense guidelines, covering a period from fiscal 2019, is the planned upgrading of the Izumo-class helicopter carrier to enable it to transport and launch F-35Bs multirole stealth fighters. "We will refit Maritime Self-Defense Force multipurpose helicopter destroyers so fighter jets capable of short takeoffs and vertical landings can be deployed when necessary," the government said in its mid-term defense program, adopted at a Cabinet meeting Tuesday and endorsed by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. The defense guidelines, to appease a concerned public, maintain that the retrofitting of the Izumo helicopter carrier to be able to carry and launch F-35Bs, among other aircraft, is not so Japan can posses an attack aircraft carry and is not in breach of the constitution. Defense analysts, however, have pointed out that under the current interpretation of the Constitution, Article 9 of which reads "land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained," the upgrading of Izumo into a contemporary "de facto" aircraft carrier, whether it permanently carries next-generation fighter jets or not, is in contradiction of Japan's pacifist charter. Along with Cabinet ministers approving the purchase of 42 F-35Bs and 63 F-35As, the Pentagon's most sophisticated 5th generation multirole stealth fighters and most expensive weapons system, 18 of which will be allocated to the Izumo. Opposition parties have also taken aim at the guidelines for being in excess of Japan's defensive needs. The Medium Term Defense Program comes with a price tag of 27.47 trillion yen (243 billion U.S. dollars) and compounds concerns from the international community about Japan's constantly rising defense costs since Abe took office in 2012. Japan's defense ministry, as the country is mired in the highest public debt in the industrialized world at more than twice the size of its economy, has requested another record-high budget of some 5.3 trillion yen (47 billion U.S. dollars) for the next fiscal year. This includes around 235 billion yen (2 billion U.S. dollars) to cover costs related to the installation of two Aegis Ashore missile systems, another military acquisition that has caused public uproar and major concerns from Japan's neighbors. A man was flown from Aliso Beach in Laguna Beach on Tuesday morning after suffering serious burns in a vehicle fire, police said. The Lake Forest resident was in a Toyota Tacoma pickup that was engulfed in flames when police and firefighters arrived just after 9 a.m. at an Aliso Beach parking lot off South Coast Highway, Laguna Beach police said. The man, who was not identified, was taken by helicopter to a hospital, where he was in grave condition, police spokesman Jim Cota said. The Laguna Beach Police Department will work with the Orange County Fire Authority to investigate the cause of the fire. julia.sclafani@latimes.com Its no mystery in my mind as to why the Orange County Republican Party endured such monumental losses this past election. They can blame it on everyone from President Trump to President Obama, to being outspent by Democrats. But the bottom line is this: their core message didnt resonate with voters. As they say in the TV biz, know your audience. Instead of reading the room and running fresh faces and ideas, party leadership stuck to its antiquated policy of protecting incumbents, no matter how flawed, at all costs. No race exemplified this better than the one in the 48th Congressional District between Democratic candidate Harley Rouda and longtime Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher. The party could have stopped Rouda in the primary if it hadnt spent big bucks trying to knock out Republican challenger Scott Baugh against Rohrabacher. Odds were good Baugh and Rohrabacher would win the primary and face off in November. At least then Republicans wouldve held onto the seat. But Rohrabacher was an incumbent. Baugh, former OC Republican Party chairman, broke the cardinal rule by challenging him. I joked with Rouda after his primary win, asking if hed sent OC Republican Chairman Fred Whitaker a thank you note for ensuring his victory. He just laughed. And of course Rouda took that win all the way home in November to beat Rohrabacher, ending the congressmans 30-year run. On Monday I checked in with the congressman-elect about his impressions of Washington, D.C., and his political to-do list. Its been interesting, Rouda said. The first days after the election, and still exhausted from the long campaign, everything was still a bit surreal for him. At first you dont appreciate the full magnitude of the situation, said Rouda. But that quickly changed. His initial time in Washington consisted of three weeks of congressional training in D.C. and one week at Harvard in preparation for serving in the 116th Congress. It may be surprising to people coming into Congress, he said. Its like setting up a not-so-small business youre given a budget, and the next step is to set up a D.C. office and one in the district. The federal government must approve the leases, and budgets for this arent released until Jan. 3 after the swearing-in. Rouda says on a personal level, existing members have been helpful to incoming members, sharing advice on where to live, schools, etc. The Roudas have already rented an apartment in the Eastern Market area so he can walk the four or five blocks to the Capitol. With 35 weeks in the Congressional calendar, Rouda typically plans to fly into Washington on Mondays and back to the district on Thursdays to work with constituents here. Its a bit more travel than he was used to doing when he ran his own business, but not much, he tells me. Rouda described Rohrabacher and his team as being very gracious during this transition period. Stepping foot in the Capitol for the first time is when the significance of the job we were ready to undertake, and being one of 12,000 people to have ever served the country, really sunk in for him. Rouda is a history buff and its everywhere in Washington. I just want to stop and read every plaque, he said. One of the most touching moments came recently while walking with his wife on a tour of the Capitol. On display in one of the underground areas of the building was the black, fabric-draped wagon that carried President Lincolns body. It was such a poignant moment, Rouda says. With all the preparation underway to take his congressional seat, Roudas eager to get to work. Hell focus on issues for which he feels there there is bipartisan support like climate change, infrastructure, gun violence, reforming drug pricing and health care, as well as addressing homelessness and affordable housing availability, which directly affects Orange County. And he hasnt forgotten issues facing the district we talked about before the election: rehab/sober living homes and John Wayne Airport. Hes also responding to the states recent emergencies. I joined my fellow members-elect from California to request expanded federal support to address the impacts of the devastating November wildfires, he said in a news release. Members-elect hope to improve evacuation routes and emergency protocols, greater education for community members on fire safety; increased defensible space around structures; and funding for science-based hazardous fuel treatment. As we ended our conversation on Monday, Rouda said, Even though I won the election, a lot of people voted for Dana, and I will be working hard to represent all the people. He also wanted to wish everyone a happy and prosperous 2019. So do I. Barbara Venezia is an opinion columnist writing political and social commentary since 2007. She can be reached at bvontv1@gmail.com Artist Devin Thor worked often with a paintbrush in the past, but its the stone sculptures carved with a diamond-blade, powered cutting saw thats been garnering him attention lately. In his La Crescenta backyard, he takes the power tool to a huge slab of flagstone and grinds out figures of animals such as bison, fawn and antelope, species which date back to the Paleolithic era, which ended around 10,000 B.C. NEWSLETTER: Get the latest 818 headlines straight to your inbox >> Thor said hes trying to create abstract representations of cave art he saw in Europe that some say could be as old as 30,000 years. In essence, [people back then] were big-game hunters, he said. What they hunted and what they ate were those animals they painted on their caves. La Crescenta artist Devin Thor sculpts animals inspired by Paleolithic cave paintings in his backyard. (Courtesy of Devin Thor) Ten pieces from his collection will be part of an exhibit called Paleolithic Creatures from April 9 through May 6 at Gallery 825, 825 N. La Cienega Blvd., West Hollywood. Thors been into art his whole life, and its something that ran in his family. His father was a Disney animator in the 1940s and worked on shorts including Casey at the Bat. But for most of his adult life, Thor was a geologist before changing gears and becoming an artist full time. Aside from being inspired by ancient artworks, his sculptures capture the animals relationships with modern-day man and mans stewardship of the Earth, Thor said. It touched my environmental geologist part of me that my art can speak to those emotions, to how much I care about the planet and the life thats on this planet, he said. His animal sculptures started off small with maquettes or miniature-scale works, but that didnt last long. I realized that for them to have impact, Im going to have to scale up. The larger it is, the bolder the impact, Thor said. His works got much bigger. Some of his sculptures weigh as much as 350 pounds. It all starts off with buying flagstone imported from Arizona at local landscaping businesses. Then, with some clever engineering, Thor is able to suspend the stone so he can use the power saw and diamond blade. Fortunately, his home is situated on a plot of land that lets his backyard double as his studio. Im lucky to have a home that abuts against a national forest property, he said. I can take a stone back there and cut without causing much noise. -- Arin Mikailian, arin.mikailian@latimes.com Twitter: @ArinMikailian -- ALSO: Educator puts brakes on area school districts joint resolution opposing 710 extension Glendale to study possibility of building a cap park over Ventura (134) Freeway Hard work pays off for Glendale High School dance team I get the sense from most people I encounter that they consider Christmas one big hassle. Theres the rush to shop for presents, dress the tree, hang the lights and plan for the festivities. The meaning of Christmas is lost to commercialism. According to Christian tradition, its supposed to commemorate the birth of Jesus, but he rarely gets a mention anymore. Understanding moments of euphoria are important. This time of year, Im vulnerable to such musings since Christmas evokes thoughts during an era where meaning is skewed toward triviality. I thought Id share a Christmas story from my personal journal titled: 1970. Its about a child; but more so, it tells of the metamorphic change among a platoon of Marines serving in the Vietnam War and their realization that Christmas magic exists in a wasteland. Its copied directly from my journal. The events of those few days forever clarified for me that the miracle of Christmas is the joining of this world with the next. 23 December 1970 the day began after midnight. We were inserted north of Quang Tri, close to the Laotian border. Our mission: to establish a radio-relay site between the enemy and us. Shortly before dawn, we reached the perimeter of the village. We were expected a battle ensued we prevailed. We entered the village and found it abandoned except for one. She couldnt be more than 3. Id say she was closer to 2. She was hungry, unclothed, and gave us a big smile when we came into view. After 49 years, I still see her smile. Corporal Feldman swaddled her while the men gave her the last of their rations. Oh! Even the hardest of hearts of the hardest of men were softened by caring for this child. The Marines held the little Montagnard girl; the wise men, the shepherds and the drummer boy. Only circumstance made them different. The same star they originally followed centuries before still led the way. Chocolate, canned peaches and pound cake replaced the gold, frankincense and myrrh. As we tended to her needs, we treasured the gifts she gave us. We were given a new birth, a chance to find meaning in the maddening inertia of things; a hope that finding and saving her would save us and somehow make the insanity and inhumanity worth it. We had found a reason to exist and rationalize the havoc we brought. We searched for her family or any signs of life. There were none. Regardless, the mission was scrubbed unsuitable for communications. 24 December 1970 Carrying the little girl, we moved quickly to our extraction point. For her sake, not ours, I hoped that the Captain had read the map correctly. Navigating in a dense jungle is no better than a guess. Miracle of miracles! The choppers came at dawn and returned us and the Montagnard girl to Quang Tri. The whole platoon was present when we delivered her to the orphanage of the Sisters of Mercy. As we said our goodbyes, the Marines showered her with keepsakes and good luck charms. Somehow, we didnt need these anymore. We had found something better! We promised to return, but knew we wouldnt. In Vietnam, the dream was always better than the reality. Christmas Eve brought a 24-hour truce. It was a silent night, and, in most areas, all was calm, and all was bright. For one day, the hate and anguish that filled our hearts were replaced by joy and peace, the gift from the little Montagnard girl. That evening, the men moved in slow motion and hardly made a dent in the beer the chopper brought. Sergeant Lehue and I shared a can of ham and lima beans. We sat in silence, unable to find the words to describe what we felt. Sergeant Lehue said, Lieutenant, if there is a God, hes alive and well and with us tonight. Merry Christmas, sir. Thinking back nearly half a century, I remember it was a very Merry Christmas. Joe Puglia is a practicing counselor, a retired professor of education and a former officer in the Marines. Reach him at doctorjoe@ymail.com. Visit his website at doctorjoe.us. After a slew of failed attempts to woo a starting pitcher, Angels general manager Billy Eppler finally lured one. The Angels on Tuesday agreed to sign right-handed pitcher Matt Harvey to a one-year contract worth $11 million, plus incentives, according to a person familiar with the situation but not authorized to speak publicly. Harveys official welcome into the Angels starting rotation is pending a physical examination. Harveys name isnt as flashy as it once was, but a trade from the New York Mets to the Cincinnati Reds in May sparked something akin to a career rejuvenation. Harvey, who will be 30 on opening day, finished 2018 with a 4.94 ERA in 32 games (28 starts) and an average fastball velocity that more closely resembled its vintage form. It was his first time pitching in 20 or more games since he posted a 2.71 ERA in 29 starts in 2015. Still, Harvey enticed the Angels with his peripheral statistics. Advertisement Finally injury free for a full season in 2018, Harvey threw 155 innings and increased his strikeout rate by one batter, to 7.6 per nine innings. He cut his walks-per-nine innings rate in half to 2.1. He also rediscovered a gear on his fastball when he joined the Reds pitching staff, which welcomed him when the Mets designated him for assignment following a poor start to the season. He gained nearly 2 mph on the pitch in Cincinnati, giving him a final average velocity of 94.6 mph. At its best in 2013, Harveys fastball clocked in at 97 mph. That dormant velocity is what the Angels, under the guidance of new pitching coach Doug White, will try to draw out. The Angels have tried on multiple occasions to land a free-agent starter this offseason. They made an offer to veteran left-hander J.A. Happ, who signed a two-year, $34-million contract with the New York Yankees for about $6 million more than the Angels offered, and also chased after Nathan Eovaldi and Patrick Corbin. Harvey in spring training will join a group of starters currently composed of left-handers Andrew Heaney and Tyler Skaggs, and right-handers Jaime Barria, Felix Pena and Nick Tropeano. Harvey might seem like a consolation prize, but this isnt the first time the Angels have dealt with him. The Angels selected Harvey, a Connecticut native, out of high school in the third round of the 2007 draft. But Harvey spurned a $1-million bonus in favor of attending the University of North Carolina. The move eventually set Harvey on a quick trajectory. He was drafted by the Mets seventh overall in 2010, signed for a $2.5-million bonus and flourished upon making his major league debut two years later. Harvey had a 2.39 ERA and a 0.985 WHIP while striking out 9.9 batters per nine innings through his first 36 big league starts from 2012 to 2013. But elbow ligament replacement surgery after the 2013 season, for which he received enough votes to finish fourth in National League Cy Young Award voting, caused him to miss all of 2014. He performed well in 2015, pitched 189 1/3 regular-season innings and led the Mets to the World Series, where they lost to the Kansas City Royals. Harveys career hit a downward spiral after that season. He became afflicted with thoracic outlet syndrome in 2016 and had to have surgery to relieve the discomfort in his right arm. Seeking to become a productive pitcher the following year, Harvey stumbled in different ways. He was suspended for violating team rules in May 2017, shortly after amassing a 5.14 ERA in his first six starts. Then he missed more than two months as he recovered from a stress fracture in his scapula, for which he underwent a surgical procedure. It wasnt until the Mets gave up on Harvey, once labeled the Dark Knight in New York, that Harvey began to regain his prior form. He still struggled to miss bats opponents batted .271 against him in 2018 but he reduced line-drive contact from 26.7% with the Mets to 18.6% with the Reds. Eppler is known for taking risks on fallen stars and taking fliers on potential. His latest successful reclamation projects include right-hander Pena, who morphed into a starting rotation candidate with his September performance last season; and reliever Hansel Robles, who flashed a high-90s fastball after being claimed off waivers mid-season. Perhaps Harvey, who could earn an additional $3 million based on the number of games started next season, will become the next to land on Epplers list. maria.torres@latimes.com @maria_torres3 The United Nations General Assembly endorsed a sweeping accord to ensure safe and orderly migration Wednesday over opposition from five countries, including the United States and Hungary. The Global Compact for Migration, the first international document dealing with the issue, is not legally binding. But the escalating debate over people leaving their home countries for new ones has sparked increasing opposition and reservations among the U.N.'s 193 member states. The General Assembly resolution endorsing the compact was approved by a vote of 152-5 with Israel, the Czech Republic and Poland also voting no and 12 countries abstaining. The vote in favor of the resolution was lower than the 164 countries that approved the agreement by acclamation at a conference in Marrakech, Morocco, earlier this month. The compact represents a U.N.-led effort to crack down on the often dangerous and illegal movements of people across borders that have turned human smuggling into a worldwide industry, and to give migrants seeking economic opportunity a chance to find it. Advertisement U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres welcomed the resolutions adoption, saying the compact provides a platform for international cooperation that points the way toward humane and sensible action to benefit countries of origin, transit and destination as well as migrants themselves. It calls for greater solidarity with migrants in situations of appalling vulnerability and abuse, the U.N. chief said. And it highlights the imperative of devising more legal pathways for migration, which would also help to crack down on trafficking and exploitation. Guterres told the Marrakech conference that more than 60,000 migrants have died on the move since the year 2000" and called the loss of lives a source of collective shame. The secretary-general and other supporters of the compact contend that migrants contribute to the world economy, including by providing needed workers in aging rich countries and returning cash to poorer home countries through remittances. The United States and other opponents argue that the compact is attempting to globalize how migration is carried out at the expense of the sovereignty of individual countries, and is trying to make new international law. Supporters counter that the compact is non-binding and every country remains sovereign and in charge of its borders and migration policy. Before the vote, General Assembly President Maria Fernanda Espinosa called the compact a historic opportunity to cooperate, exchange good practices and learn from each other so that migration, a phenomenon that has marked the history of humanity, benefits all of us. By contrast, Hungarys Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto, whose countrys right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban is vehemently opposed to migration, warned the assembly that approving the unbalanced, biased and extremely pro-migration compact would be a serious mistake. Migration is a dangerous phenomenon that has destabilized countries of origin and transit and put enormous security risk on countries of destination, he said. WASHINGTON, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Donald Trump issued an order Tuesday directing the establishment of "Space Command." Trump said the new command will be created as a "unified combatant command," according to his memo to Defense Secretary Defense Jim Mattis, which was made public by the White House. The Space Command will oversee all U.S. military activities in space, and the president has asked Mattis to recommend officers for the command's leadership, the memo said. A comprehensive list of authorities and responsibilities for the Space Command will be included in the next update to the Unified Command Plan, it added. The magic of Christmas comes in many shapes and forms. I remember the shiny gloss of a purple-and-white J.C. Higgins bicycle at age 8. The next year was even better a Lionel train whose sleek black engine puffed smoke and raced around the track pulling an orange boxcar, a silver tanker car, and a bright red caboose. I would let out a cry, but secretly thrill, to see it fly off the tracks when I raced it around a curve at too high a speed. We often had a white Christmas where I grew up, the yard carpeted with thick snow, icicles clinging to window frames, and my mother sowing the window sill with seeds for the birds. She would ring a little bell and call out Heeeere Birdie Boy to summon her favorite bright red cardinal from the woods surrounding our house. All magical in a childs mind. I can even glimpse what Christmas was like for my mother when she was a little girl since her own mother wrote a letter on Christmas Day in 1907. She described a Christmas program of songs and recitations at the local school. They asked two boys what they wanted to be when they grew up. One said a splendifferous lawyer while the other boy said he was going to be a preacher and preach as loud as I can. Each of the 85 children in the program received a gift bag of candy, nuts, and fruit. Back at the family farm, the gifts included flannel shirts for the older boys, blocks and a picture book for my mother, and a ladder wagon for her twin brother. But work remained an integral part of farm life in 1907. The day before Christmas, the boys shucked 23 shocks of corn, and my grandmother ended her Christmas Day letter with I must close and get to work. I want to wash windows this afternoon. Less magical but realistic. Christmas can come with deep spiritual meaning for Christians while coexisting with a secular Santa and a gift-oriented holiday as well as with Hanukkah and other celebrations with deep spiritual meaning for those of other faiths. Having both a personalized and a generalized significance is part of Christmas magic. This magical facet of a Christmas that we all can share can be seen by what it is not call it Christmas Opposite. Christmas Opposite exists in a mean-spiritedness that would snuff out a Christmas candle. It is seen in its rawest forms in homeless refugees, the bombing of civilians, and the literal slaughter of innocents, both here and abroad. Christmas Opposite exists in attitudes of taking rather than giving and in crude and uncivil discourse thats unfortunately flourishing nowadays. Christmas Opposite would even steal Santas bag of toys and blacken Rudolphs shiny red nose. The magical generosity that pervades a genuine Christmas spirit was well described by a New York Sun editorial of 1897 in reply to a little girls question about the existence of Santa Claus. Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion existThe most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can seeYou can tear a babys rattle apart and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man..could tear apart. Only faith, poetry, love, romance can push aside the curtain and view..the supernal beauty and glory beyond. You have the Christmas spirit if you see a neighbor in need and help; if you hear the bell ringers call and give; or if the sight of a child in tattered clothes or an aged person in the hospital brings a tear to your eye. And you embody the Christmas spirit when you see people, even strangers, hungry and thirsty, scantily clothed and cold, sick, or in prison and feed them, give them drink, clothe them, and visit them. The Christmas spirit is ageless, timeless, loving, giving, and generous. It can be no other. James F. Burns is a retired professor at the University of Florida. This article first appeared in The Lebanon (Pa.) Daily News on Dec. 21, 2016. The first Guangzhou village gourmet gathering kicked off alongside the launching ceremony of the Zengcheng Cantonese cuisine workshop last Friday, attracting more than 30,000 tourists, people.cn recently reported. With the theme of food tourism, the three-day event was held in Zengcheng district of Guangzhou. It presented tasty treats famous in Guangzhou, including wontons, sweet taro cake, tasty sticky rice noodles, and mouth-watering tortoise jelly. There were nine other exhibitions, with stalls for local business and investment, agricultural and sideline products, folk custom, and farming culture also set up during the event. The event has not only increased peoples understanding of Guangzhou gourmet, but also created a new driving force for local development. An official from Zhengguo town said that hosting the event was a significant step for the local government in realizing rural revitalization. He added that the area will take the opportunity to build its own brand to elevate local tourism. Set up on Dec. 14, 2018, the second Cantonese cuisine workshop in Guangdong focuses on popularizing local gourmet food and teaching cooking skills. Zhengguo town has a profound culinary culture and rich ingredients. I believe that by setting up the second workshop here, they will build it into a new platform to boost rural revitalization of Zengcheng district, said an official from the Tourism Administration of Guangzhou Municipality. While building the platform, Guangzhou also rolled out a new educational food project, called Cantonese Cuisine Chef. The project serves as an innovative approach to rural revitalization and inheritance of our food culture. It will benefit local people and bring new historical opportunities for food tourism in Guangdong, the official said. The official suggested that Guangzhou will now continue to develop food tourism through diversified modes to create more job opportunities, lead local people towards prosperity, and expand domestic and overseas influence of their food culture. A Rs 6.85 crore bill of Apollo Hospitals for the 75-day treatment of late Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa in 2016, submitted recently to a panel probing the circumstances leading to her death, has gone viral in the social media. The one page summary shows Rs six crore and eighty five lakh as the total bill with a detailed break-up and an outstanding amount of Rs 44.56 lakh. The ruling AIADMK is shown as having paid Rs six crore received on June 15, 2017, months after Jayalalithaa's death on December 5, 2016. Though an amount of Rs 41.13 lakh is shown as being received by the hospital on October 13, 2016, no mention is made of who made that payment. When contacted about the leak of the bill, both the Justice A Arumughaswamy Commission of Inquiry and a legal counsel for the hospital in the panel denied dissemination from their respective sides. The bill is, however, genuine and it was submitted in the panel on November 27, 2018, the hospital counsel said. "The bill summary is not a complete factual reflection of all the details because the details were produced in more than 200 pages. We are surprised and shocked that a confidential document, which was submitted to the commission on November 27, is out in the open," hospital counsel Maimoona Badsha told PTI. PTI On Monday, 26 November 2018 Canadas post-war social contract finally died, after a long period of ill health. At her bedside were two who were present at her birth, Oshawa auto workers and striking postal workers. Her passing was due to systematic abuse and abandonment by corporations and government. She is survived by a labour relations regime of naked class war. In lieu of flowers, bring picket signs and burn barrels. The shock announcement of the closure of the Oshawa General Motors plant, on the same day that back-to-work legislation against the Canadian Union of Postal Workers passed the Senate, represents the final nail in the coffin of Canadas post-war labour compromise. It is ironic that it is the auto workers and postal workers who are the target of the present-day attack, as they were also the instigators of the struggles that brought about the attempt to regulate the class war in the post-war period In 1937, workers at GM Oshawa struck for recognition of their union, organised on the industrial model where every worker is automatically part of the union (as opposed to the craft model that only organises select skilled workers). After two weeks of fighting the boss and the governments goons, known as the sons-of-Mitches, the workers were victorious. This was the first victory for industrial unionism in Canada, and it sparked off a wave of strikes and -organising drives that eventually won the right to collectively bargain, the right to automatic dues payment by all workers benefitting from a collective agreement, and a regulated right to strike in the private sector. These rights were not given away freely, and they were not won without a price. Running battles with cops and scabs were a regular occurrence during this period. Workers would down-tools at a moments notice. Many were injured, some even died. Defeated strikers would find themselves fired and blacklisted. But, by the end of WW2, the tide began to turn in the direction of the working class, and the capitalists sought a way to manage the turmoil and radicalisation of the class struggle. In exchange for union recognition and collective bargaining, the workers gave up the right to strike while a contract was in force. Grievances that would have previously led to a spontaneous walkout were now to be sent to a labour board for arbitration. Power was taken out of the hands of workers on the shop floor, and instead a bureaucratic caste of lawyers and negotiators were given control of the movement. This hastened the bureaucratisation of the workers organisations, with the rank and file being relegated to the role of passive onlookers. But in the boom years of the 1950s and 60s the unions were able to negotiate real improvements, while the bosses were able to regulate the class struggle to make it more predictable and manageable. In this period, it helped that the crumbs gained by the workers were still only a small fraction of the total increase in profit, so the owners of capital could afford to buy class peace. The weakness and unwillingness to fight by the labour bureaucracy made the capitalists arrogant. By destroying labour relations compromises, the bosses open up the real prospect of going back to the 1930s struggles / Image: fair use However, while private sector unions had won the right to strike and negotiate, governments refused to extend such rights to the public sector. Throughout the 1960s, especially, government employees became increasingly proletarianised and there was a push for the formation of genuine unions rather than yellow staff associations with no-strike pledges. This came to a head in 1965 when the Canadian Postal Employees Association the forerunner of todays CUPW went on an illegal wildcat strike for union recognition and improved conditions. This forced the government to pass legislation in 1967 giving government employees the right to strike and bargain. Subsequently, CUPW found itself at the forefront of the class struggle in Canada. Strikes in 1970, 1974, 1975, and 1978 regularly pit the postal workers against the state. Notably, in the 1978 strike, CUPW president Jean-Claude Parrot refused to submit to back-to-work legislation and was imprisoned for 3 months. In the following 1981 strike, bosses were afraid of a similar confrontation and the workers gained an historic victory of being the first major union to win parental leave. This paved the way for this to be won by other unions and eventually became a right of all workers to receive parental leave via the unemployment insurance system. As we can see, the post-war social compromise was won by bitter struggles in the private and public sector. But it appears as if all the participants in this conflict have forgotten where the compromise came from. Labour leaders who have grown comfortable with the grievance and arbitration regime have forgotten that the system that provides their often-inflated pay cheques was negotiated on the backs of illegal strikes and street battles. Bosses who see the right to strike and bargain as hindrances forget that this regulated system was how they tamed the class war. The weakness and unwillingness to fight by the labour bureaucracy has made the capitalists arrogant. By destroying 1960s labour relations compromises, the bosses open up the real prospect of going back to the 1930s struggles. GM lessons and lost opportunities General Motors is currently a profitable corporation, having raked in over $6 billion in the first 9 months of 2018. The Oshawa plant has regularly won awards for excellence in productivity, and its workers have made GM directors very wealthy men and women. Management isnt closing the plant because it isnt making money, they are closing it because they think they can make more money elsewhere. The destruction of over 2,500 direct jobs, and 20,000 indirect jobs, is particularly galling given the $10.8 billion bailout doled out to GM after the 2008 crisis. This money was sufficient to buy a majority stake in the company at the time, but instead it was gifted with no strings attached. While there were layoffs and rollbacks for the workers, management got to keep their bonuses. In 2015, the government sold off its remaining GM shares at a loss of billions and, earlier this year, it wrote off a further debt to the corporation of over a billion dollars. This is a classic example of socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor. The bosses demand handouts while holding jobs hostage, but when profitability has returned they throw people on the garbage heap and say that the market determines everything. They cannot be allowed to have it both ways. Since the 2008 crash the Canadian Auto Workers, now Unifor, have repeatedly signed concessionary deals with the supposed aim of maintaining production. The most criminal compromise of the labour bureaucracy was so-called two-tier contracts that stipulated lower pay and conditions for new hires. This cancer within the workers movement undermines the union from within, discriminates against the youth, and is a direct violation of the principle of equal pay for work of equal value. The Oshawa workers showed their correct class instinct by spontaneously walking out the day of the closure announcement. But the Unifor leadership did everything in its power to get the workers back producing cars the next day. This was a missed opportunity to go on the offensive / Image: Save Oshawa GM The rank and file were sold these miserable contracts with the understanding that the union had received a production guarantee from management. Even then, these contracts were only narrowly approved by the membership. But, as seen by the closure of the more than 100-year old Oshawa plant, concessions do not work to save jobs and any production guarantee is not worth the paper it is written on. This was pointed out by the Marxists at the time. Rather than concessions securing production, the weakness of the union emboldened the corporation that now thinks it can walk away without repercussions. The Oshawa workers showed their correct class instinct by spontaneously walking out the day of the closure announcement. But the Unifor leadership did everything in its power to get the workers back producing cars the next day. This was a missed opportunity to go on the offensive. Historically, the best tactic to fight factory closures has been factory occupations combined with the call for nationalisation. Given the fact that all GM plants in Canada are under threat, the movement could have spread quickly to the other Canadian plants, paralyzing production and profits for the corporation. Some may argue that this is illegal, but was it legal for GM to walk away from a signed contract that guarantees production? Some may also argue that expropriation is unrealistic. But why is it realistic to nationalise the Kinder-Morgan oil pipeline at vastly inflated prices and not nationalise GM to save the city of Oshawa? Why is it realistic for the federal finance minister to put through $16 billion of corporate tax cuts, but not a penny to save auto jobs? In fact, expropriating GM need not cost a nickel. GMs owners have received more than enough in years of accumulated handouts, bailouts, loan write-offs, and corporate welfare. Others connected with the union bureaucracy argued that workers couldnt give up wages by striking now when they were going to lose their jobs next year. This defeatist line isnt any different from Doug Ford saying that, the ship has already left the dock, when it comes to saving the jobs. Such pessimism was clearly rejected by the workers who are demanding action now. Unifor president Jerry Dias is starting to feel the pressure from below. After sending his members back to the production line, he said that if he had his way hed shut down every GM manufacturing plant until they got the message. Somebody must have pointed out the obvious fact that, as president of Unifor, he does have the power to do exactly that. At a subsequent union meeting he said, We are going to shut down GM in this country if they they do not reverse their decision. He also added a, fuck you! to Ontario Premier Doug Ford who thinks it is pointless to fight for Oshawas jobs. Unfortunately, while Dias has been pushed to adopt a more militant tone, he has also flirted dangerously with economic nationalism and Trumpite trade barriers against Mexican workers. This is no solution. Economic nationalism ties the worker to their boss and their government, and allows both to set worker against worker. Rather than attacking Trudeau for inaction, Dias praised him for calling the new trade deal CUSMA (Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement) instead of USMCA (U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement)! Autoworkers, on the way to the unemployment line, are sure to be very concerned by the order of letters in the new corporate free trade pact! Protectionism leads to divide and rule, while factory occupations and nationalisation builds a movement that unites workers across borders. The ranks need to keep up the pressure on the Unifor leadership to turn the threat to shut down GM into action. The mood is there not just to occupy GM, but to spread the movement to the entire auto sector. A mass day of action and Oshawa general strike is on the order of the day. Most importantly, the workers need to demand that the union adopt the position of nationalising GM to save the jobs and the union. There is no way to artificially make GM invest, and there is realistically no solution that maintains private ownership of GM. You cannot control what you do not own. Instead of acting all buddy-buddy with Trudeau, Dias needs to demand that the federal government take real action to save Oshawa and all the other cities with GM plants who face a similar fate. Expropriating GM is the only way out. Occupying the plants and spreading the movement is the only way to make the government do this. The need to defy back-to-work legislation Just as the contract guaranteeing production in Oshawa has been torn up, the right to strike also faces a similar fate. As explained above, this right was won through struggle and has since been deemed a constituent part of Canadas Charter of Rights and Freedoms. But none of this matters to the bosses, who are setting fire to all the old contractual arrangements. The use of back to work legislation has increased to the point where it is now seen as routine. It has been used more than 90 times by federal and provincial governments over the last 35 years. Workers have the right to withdraw their labour only as long as it only inconveniences themselves. As soon as a strike begins to have an impact, the right to strike is removed by the capitalist state. The right to bargain, the right to recognition, and the right to strike were only won by breaking the laws that prohibited such actions. The labour movement desperately needs to break the routine cycle of legislation and, short of bringing a workers government to power, defiance is the only way to make the capitalists think twice before they head down this road. Court challenges, even when successful, take years and change nothing. The cost of passing the legislation needs to be made higher than the cost of letting a strike play out normally. The 2018 Canadian Union of Postal Workers strike was probably the best chance in a generation to beat back the routine imposition of back-to-work. The issues of the strike were clear and well understood. Predominantly female rural workers are significantly underpaid, relative to their mostly male urban comrades. One in four workers are injured every year due to forced overtime and overloading with packages. Sympathy for the postal workers is widespread. The union also has a left wing reputation of struggle, and every indication shows that the workers are willing to take defiant action. Instead of defying the legislation, the union leadership appears to be accepting the process of mediation prior to binding arbitration. But the government and corporation are dragging their heels appointing a mediator, who will then work for a further 7 to 14 days. It seems likely that management will do everything in their power to push mediation past Christmas, at which point the postal workers will lose much of their leverage. Submitting to these delay tactics also risks demobilising the membership. As workers start to reluctantly accept the apparent inevitability of an undemocratically imposed contract, the window where defiance is a political possibility amongst the members gets smaller and smaller with every passing day. Some in the union bureaucracy argued that workers couldnt give up wages by striking now when they were going to lose their jobs next year. This defeatist line isnt any different from Doug Ford saying that, the ship has already left the dock, when it comes to saving the jobs. This pessimism was clearly rejected by the workers / Image: Bruce Reeve Since the legislation was passed there has been a heroic movement of community-led blockades popping up sporadically around the country. Fightback has solidly participated in these actions wherever we have been able to. CUPW president Mike Palecek has said There are fifty thousand union members that have been prohibited from picketing at post offices in this country, and three million who havent. We are not the only ones willing to defend the right of free collective bargaining. Activists have even been prepared to defy orders to disperse, leading to 6 arrests in Halifax and 3 in Ottawa. In addition, many unions have pledged interest-free loans of millions of dollars to support CUPWs fight. This shows that CUPW has widespread support for any actions that may be taken to defy the legislation. But as heroic as the community blockades are, in and of themselves they cannot defeat the legislation or force management to seriously bargain. They are a useful secondary action to show that there is no business as usual at Canada Post, and to keep up the morale of the workers. But, without escalation, there is no incentive for the boss and the government to do anything other than wait out mediation and rely upon an imposed contract. CUPE 3903 at York University recently received the results of its imposed contract after back-to-work legislation, and the administration won all the way down the line. Realistically, community pickets can only be sustained for a day in each location, and solidarity is not a bottomless well that can be called upon indefinitely. The problem with solidarity actions by outside activists is that they leave the workers passive. Written interviews, together with conversations with workers during pickets, have shown that there is a widespread readiness to defy, combined with deep-felt gratitude for the solidarity actions, but also a layer of workers who feel defeated and do not know what to do. The lack of tactics that put the mass of the workers in the drivers seat has been a consistent weakness in the strike. Saturday, December 1st was supposed to be a day of action, but the union did nothing to officially organise a mass protest. A Montreal protest was called off for an unspecified logistical reason. The actions that were organised were ad-hoc by small peripheral groups, none bigger than a few hundred. This had the effect of atomising the 50,000 workers in the union and not giving them a sense of their massive collective power. There should have been emergency local meetings called during the five days it took to pass the legislation so that the ranks would have a democratic forum to express their opinion on whether the legislation should be respected or defied. Even the rotational pickets, prior to the legislation, reduced the involvement and control by the ranks. It has been argued that rotational strikes still had a massive impact on the corporation with hundreds of millions in lost revenue, without costing the workers wages or the union picket pay. This may be true, but what this tactic gained in the bank account it lost in workers control. Workers can learn more in a day on a picket line than in a decade on the production line. Striking frees the workers up from the daily grind and gives them the time to control the direction of the struggle. Without tactics that bring the members out, the movement will be top-down and the amazing creativity of the workers will go unrealised. Some on the left have said that you shouldnt give advice to the union but instead concentrate on building solidarity. This is reminiscent of the stay in your lane line found in identity politics. These same leftists do not hesitate to critique unions with a right wing leadership, but appear to be confused by the left tradition of CUPW. We wonder what these people would say about articles putting demands on the CUPW leadership co-written by Mike Palecek (prior to being elected CUPW president) and the author of this piece? Fightback has been literally on the front lines organising solidarity with the postal workers and it is a slander to suggest otherwise. We have supported CUPWs fights year after year. But a good friend does not stay silent when you are making a mistake. There are also thousands of workers who wish to defy back-to-work but have no organised vehicle to achieve this aim. It is vital that we let these workers know that they are not alone and there are positive options. If we believe that an injury to one is an injury to all, then all have a right to contribute their perspective on the best way to achieve victory. Experience of defiance Unlike others, Fightback has earned the right to speak with authority on the question of back-to-work legislation. The author of this article was the leader of a strike that defied the undemocratic imposition of legislation. In 2003, the teaching assistants at the University of British Columbia were legislated back. This was the first time legislation had been used against university workers, but it was part of a union-busting pattern by the BC Liberal government. For the previous two years union leaders submitted to legislation saying there was nothing they could do, but we showed that to be wrong. We blockaded the campus for two days and threatened a public sector general strike. The government blinked, and we gained an 11.5 percent wage increase over three years, overturning the imposed public sector wage freeze. There were no fines or imprisonment of trade unionists. The government was afraid that by enacting such repression they would spread the movement further and turn the leaders of the strike into martyrs. But the most important victory was not the wage increases but the example that we set for the rest of the labour movement. Subsequently, the example of UBC led to defiance by the ferry workers, in November of 2003. In May of the following year the hospital employees defied, and a general strike was only averted by the betrayal of the BC Federation of Labour leadership. In 2005, the teachers went on an illegal strike, which led to a partial general strike and spontaneous cross-picketing. Teachers union leader Jinny Sims, now an NDP MPP, famously said there is a difference between breaking the law and defying a law that was written to break you. After this, the bosses backed off. The economy had stabilised by 2006, and rather than provoke more class conflict, the government bought class peace with $3000 signing bonuses for every worker who voted for a 5 year contract. For a period, back-to-work legislation had been beaten back by defiance. There are rumours that 6 out of 15 of the CUPW executive are in favour of defying back-to-work legislation. However these are just rumours, and from the perspective of the rank and file it appears that there is a united leadership. By functionally ruling out defiance under any circumstance the executive majority is leading the union down a blind alley. From experience, there really is no better situation than this. Occurring on the same day as the Oshawa GM closure there was an electric mood looking for an outlet. The week of 26 November could have been an historic week in the Canadian class struggle. But unfortunately, due to the lack of a lead from Unifor and CUPW, it was a huge lost opportunity. The need for Marxist leadership and a socialist perspective in the unions The workers of CUPW and Unifor have shown their heroism and willingness to fight. The spontaneous wildcat at GM is an example for the entire working class. But unfortunately, the union leadership has not shown the same heroism or been prepared to defy laws that are designed to break the workers. The bosses have thrown away the old social contract and do not play by its rules. It is time for the labour movement to do the same and refuse to respect capitalist legality. The minority of the CUPW executive should be commended for wishing to defy, but without letting this be known, the ranks will not be able to delineate between them and the anti-defiance bureaucracy. Those truly in favour of defiance should be organising in the rank and file to let them know that they are not alone. Emergency meetings should have been, and need to be, called in every local. Resolutions need to be sent demanding that the executive do their duty and not submit to the legislation.There is even the possibility that a wildcat walkout will break out from below. This may be what is needed to break the impasse and force the executive to act. Every ounce of pressure needs to be put to bear on the leadership, and power has to be wielded from the bottom up. The democratic will of the 50,000 members is far more important than any so-called unity with those who do not wish to fight. A Marxist leadership of Unifor and CUPW would have united the two struggles as two aspects of the wider crisis of capitalism. At GM, instead of sending the auto workers back to work, delegations of picketers should have been sent to every GM plant to bring them out too. At CUPW, once the legislation was announced every worker should have been legally brought out on strike to give them the time to come to emergency union meetings to plan the way forward. The slogan must be, the workers decide! The government should have been shown that legislation does not calm things down, but escalates the conflict. GM management must be shown that by closing the Oshawa plant, they risk losing everything to expropriation. If capitalism cannot provide jobs for the most productive auto workers on the planet then it is capitalism that deserves to be fired, not the auto workers / Image: Save Oshawa GM When the CUPW back-to-work legislation came into force at noon on Tuesday, 27 November, the legal pickets should have been brought to mass protests in every major city. The main issues of these protests could have been both the right to strike and the right to good union jobs in cities like Oshawa. The entire labour movement would have been brought into this struggle, pushing the CLC and other unions to do their duty to support the postal and auto workers. If mass protest proved insufficient to put pressure on the corporations and the government, then the next day genuine cross-picketing could resume. Not dozens of radicals secretly planning to blockade mail while postal workers still go to work, but thousands of postal and auto workers going to transit workers, dock workers, rail workers, steel workers, government workers, all sectors of the working class, to picket out their workplaces. In France we are currently seeing the impressive yellow vest movement that is bringing out hundreds of thousands into the streets and forcing the government to backtrack. We cannot guarantee in advance that any movement will succeed, but it is always better to fight and lose than to never fight at all. Jean-Claude Parrot was imprisoned in 1978, but this action prepared the maternity leave victory of 1981. The class war politics of the bosses, the crisis of capitalism, and the logic of the movement leads us to the conclusion that illegal strikes and factory occupations will be on the agenda sooner or later. The 50s and 60s will never come back, and we should stop looking to this period as if it will. It has been ten years since the 2008 crash, and we are supposedly in the midst of a recovery. But this recovery has not improved conditions for the workers and a new global downturn is imminent. The bosses have decided to go back to 1930s methods of struggle. The workers have no alternative but to react in kind. On a fundamental level we need to understand that the struggles of the postal workers and the auto workers are part and parcel of the wider struggle against capitalism. If we restrict ourselves to what is possible in the system then workers will face defeat after defeat, concession after concession. We must not accept the logic of capitalism. We must demand that the unions adopt a socialist perspective of breaking with capitalism. If capitalism cannot provide jobs for the most productive auto workers on the planet then it is capitalism that deserves to be fired, not the auto workers. CUPW has been proposing some innovative green solutions via the postal service, making them a hub for re-charging electric vehicles and environmentally-friendly delivery. But this could be even better if it was united with a socialist environmental plan with a nationalised auto sector that produced buses, trains, and streetcars for a free public transit system. All this is possible, all the wealth and the expertise is there, the only thing that stands in the way is capitalist production for corporate profit. The greatest advances in the labour movement have come about when our movement has adopted a revolutionary perspective. Let us cremate the post-war labour compromise as a dead letter, but also throw the capitalist system on the fire along with it. ZHENGZHOU, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- For villagers in Wenxian County's Jueshitou Village in central China's Henan Province, Wang Yongxin, as their general practitioner, is more like a family member. The 68-year-old doctor has been helping those in his hometown for the past five decades. In 1968, the then 18-year-old Wang became a "barefoot doctor" after two years of training at a medical school in the city of Jiaozuo in Henan, four years after he graduated from high school. "The name 'barefoot doctor' comes from southern farmers who often work barefoot in the rice paddies," said Wang. He was among numerous primary health care providers who received basic medical training and treated hundreds of millions of farmers in rural areas where urban-trained doctors would not settle. By the 1960s, 90 percent of China's rural villages had access to a rural cooperative medical system in which community participation was included in rural health care services, and barefoot doctors played a major role. At that time, a barefoot doctor was a part-time job since they also worked in the fields. "During the harvest season, I always carried my medical box," said Wang. "I would not let my patients wait." "I promoted basic hygiene, preventive health care and treated common illnesses for villagers," Wang said, adding he used to dispense medicine and visit his patients door to door during the years when malaria and endemic diseases were rampant. After China's reform and opening-up in the late 1970s, the cooperative medical system was abolished in the early 1980s, along with the barefoot doctor system. A large number of barefoot doctors received additional medical training and became village doctors. They served as the cornerstone of a nationwide primary health care program. In 1987, the then 38-year-old Wang also became a village doctor after he obtained his medical certificate. He also refurbished two of his rooms to treat his patients. Ever since the barefoot doctors were abolished, the new government-funded cooperatives medical scheme has continued to sustain the village doctor system by providing affordable basic health care to the rural farming population. In 2013, China rolled out an insurance program to increase the medical coverage for the country's growing population, especially coverage for serious diseases. The new program primarily relies on the experiences of the barefoot doctor system. In 2015, the Jueshitou Village's new clinic center was put into operation in response to a national health campaign to encourage the construction of standardized health facilities in rural regions. Wang began to see his patients in one of the new offices in the 70 square meter center. His diagnosis room has a glucometer, a hemodynamometer, chairs for infusion therapy and shelves for the health records and prescriptions of the villagers. With government subsidies, Wang has a stable monthly salary of over 3,000 yuan (about 435 U.S. dollars). Before that, he was paid by his village and was responsible for his own profit and loss. "These days, villagers pay more attention to their physical conditions," said Wang. "They always come to the center to monitor their blood pressure and have other health checks." "I'm a regular at the center because the routine health checks are often free of charge," said 51-year-old villager Ren Xiaoxiang, adding that most of the regular medication costs are covered by the country's basic medical insurance. In 2003, China proposed a government-funded basic medical insurance covering both costs at village-level health centers for minor illnesses, as well as the expenses of treatment for serious illnesses. Wang said he also practices as a family physician, providing continuous health care services for households in the village. Village doctors like Wang were also integrated into the country's hierarchical medical system where they could refer seriously ill patients to township and county hospitals. According to the health sector, China's basic pension has covered more than 900 million people and over 95 percent of the Chinese population now enjoy basic medical insurance. "I've seen the dramatic improvement of rural China's health care over the past decades, and I'm just so grateful to have been a part of it," Wang said. Last weeks pick up in bookings + 16%. This is an excellent indication of weekly growth from a growing base. Cancellations are slowing down. Noting a net cancellation of 7% of bookings, down from 16% last month. Past data enables us to now work out with fair precision an adjusted factor in total forward bookings by taking account and using Statistics Mauritius tourism arrivals data. We have noted that our sources of primary intelligence represents approximately 60% of total tourism arrivals numbers. Worked out over several recent months. We can assume, and therefore factor, a formula 60:40 to generate improved insight forecasts of forward bookings for Mauritius. In doing so the total booking numbers last week was approximately 5,700 pax. This represents about 45% of the 1,786 daily bookings required to reach 650,000 tourists over a 12 months period. The UK had a 30% share of all bookings last week, followed by France with 20%. Bookings are growing out of the RSA market too, whilst German bookings are steady but not significant. Last week saw the total number of forward bookings overtake the Seychelles for the first time in 18 months, whilst a rebound in the Sri Lanka market is noted. Bookings out of the UK and France for Mauritius have taken an important share of the Indian Ocean markets. Mauritius leads bookings out of France with 40% of all bookings, whilst out of the UK Mauritius has a 39% market share of all Indian Ocean bookings. An important market share progress. In October, scheduled flights seat capacity for Mauritius will climb by 113% to 77,000. However this will represent an estimated (168%) less seats available on the market than in 2019. Air fares are still significantly more expensive to Mauritius than our main competitors. Google traffic trends are fading, and perhaps a little focus on this would help the destination. Partager et informez vous aussi...... 0 shares Share Tweet LinkedIn Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Chinese FM said it hasnt heard anything about the detention of a third Canadian File Photo: Hua Chunying, spokesperson for the Chinese foreign ministry China said on Wednesday that it has not heard anything about the detention of a third Canadian in China, which was reported by Canadas National Post newspaper, citing Global Affairs Canada. The report said that the Canadian foreign ministry was aware of a Canadian citizen who has been detained in China, but did not provide further details. The office did not suggest the arrest was linked to the arrest of Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Huawei Technologies, according to the report. A spokesperson for the Chinese foreign ministry said she was not aware of the new case. I havent heard anything about what youre asking about, Hua Chunying said at a regular press conference in response to a question concerning the third Canadian reportedly being detained in China. Two Canadians, businessman Michael Kovrig and former diplomat Michael Spavor, are suspected of engaging in activities that endanger Chinas national security and that their cases are now under investigation and they are being detained according to the law. Meng Wanzhou was arrested while changing flights in Vancouver on December 1 at the request of the United States and has been released on bail. Board of Education honors robotics team, officially ends mask mandate at November meeting Audio Article Morgan Local School District Board of Education held its monthly meeting on Monday, Nov. 15, where they conducted business such as officially ending the mask requirement on campus and other agenda items. All board members were present except for Becky Thompson. After the meeting was called to order and the... Morgan County Sheriffs Office Daily Call Reports Audio Article Editors Note: The following are initial incident reports from callers to a Morgan County Sheriffs Office Dispatcher. Any details, charges or situations may have been distorted by the caller, or perhaps may have been found to be different after the officer further investigated the incident. Friday, July 30, 2021 ... Malta Village Mayor Hill swears in Homer Weekley Audio Article Two resolutions were read at the October 21, Malta Village Council meeting. RESOLUTION 21-27, to appoint Homer Weekley to council was adopted to fill the vacancy left by Tom McCoy until the end of the calendar year. Mayor Greg Hill swore in Homer Weekley after the resolution was passed. RESOLUTION... Chief Copeland discusses installing cameras in the village with council Audio Article At the November 2, 2021, meeting of the McConnelsville Village Council, Chief of Police Troy Copeland reported that he had received a phone call from a company that had installed cameras at one of the local schools. He stated that he was able to view what their system can do,... Morgan County Sheriffs Office Daily Call Reports Audio Article Editors Note: The following are initial incident reports from callers to a Morgan County Sheriffs Office Dispatcher. Any details, charges or situations may have been distorted by the caller, or perhaps may have been found to be different after the officer further investigated the incident. Sunday, August 1, 2021 ... 2022 Morgan County dog tags on sale Audio Article Dog tags are on sale as of Wednesday (today), Dec. 1. The deadline to purchase your 2022 dog tags without penalty is Monday, Jan. 31, 2022, according to Gary D. Woodward, Morgan County Auditor. Applications will be mailed to those who purchased tags in 2021. People are asked to bring... NEW YORK, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping's speech at a grand gathering celebrating the country's 40th anniversary of reform and opening-up "exemplified the accomplishments of the past and set the trajectory for the new era of the future," said Robert Lawrence Kuhn, a leading U.S. expert on China. Kuhn said Xi's speech was "both a milestone and a benchmark, a milestone in reflecting on all that China has accomplished in the past and a benchmark in addressing all that China still needs to accomplish in the new era," Kuhn told Xinhua via email on Tuesday, after he was honored with the China Reform Friendship Medal at the gathering held in Beijing. Kuhn, also chairman of the Kuhn Foundation, was among the 10 foreigners honored Tuesday for helping China to open up. The 74-year-old investment banker and the host of an interview-based program titled "Closer to China with R. L. Kuhn" was lauded for his devotion to "telling the world (the story of) contemporary China." The award itself "evinces how seriously China takes international communication," Kuhn said. Kuhn noted that Xi's speech showed a clear and confident direction for China. "In Xi's telling, China's direction is clear and confident, encapsulated in nine major points, stressing confidence in China's socialism with Chinese characteristics, the primacy of the Party (the Communist Party of China) in all areas, putting people and their well-being and happiness first, and the need to implement further and deepen reforms," he said. "Sitting in the Great Hall of the People listening to Xi's speech, I was struck by the consistency of Xi's thought. When he said 'chanting slogans' was not sufficient, (and) that hard work must be done and reform needs to be furthered, I smiled to myself, because more than 12 years ago, Xi, then secretary of Zhejiang Provincial Committee of the Communist Party of China, told me in a private personal meeting precisely the same thing," Kuhn recalled. "When historians of the future write the chronicles of our times, a highlight is sure to be China's remarkable 40 years of reform and opening-up. What an amazing transformation it has been!" he said. China has transformed from "a backward economy and a closed society" to the world's second-largest economy, engaged openly with all countries, and involved in all matters of global importance, Kuhn said. Washington may see its imminent withdrawal from a key arms control treaty with Russia as shedding loathed restrictions. But consequences of the move may be detrimental to US interests, military experts told RT. The fate of the Cold War-era agreement, which bans the US and Russia from having land-based intermediate-range missiles, seems to be sealed now. The INF is likely to follow the lead of another key arms control treaty, which banned development of anti-ballistic missile technologies by the two countries and was scrapped under the George W Bush administration. The looming dismantlement of the INF comes after years of bickering between Washington and Moscow over which side violates it letter and spirit. US complaints focused on a missile developed for the Iskander M launcher, which it claims was tested with a range longer than allowed by the treaty. Also on rt.com US confirms pullout from INF treaty, Moscow will respond if missiles placed in Europe deputy FM Moscow denies this and has its own set of complaints about the Americans, including the development of AEGIS Ashore, the land-based version of the US Naval ABM system that uses a launcher compatible with intermediate-range Tomahawk cruise missiles. The site already operating in Romania can be converted in less than an hour to fire at Russian territory, pointed out Aleksey Leonkov, a military expert and writer. The Americans are not blameless. Tomahawks fired from land can hit anything in Russia at a distance of up to about 2,500km. That is a direct violation of the treaty. After abandoning the INF, the US may theoretically renew production of relatively cheap land-based nuclear-capable missiles and deploy them in Europe. The threat of an accidental nuclear exchange between European NATO members and the Soviet Union was the main reason why the treaty was signed in the 1980s in the first place. Ivan Konovalov, director of the Center of Strategic Conjuncture, says European nations willing to host US nukes again may face a backlash from the public. Any country hosting such missiles will be targeted by Russian strategic forces, unfortunately for those countries. I believe there will be demonstrations or even panic among voters there, he told RT. When Americans deployed their weapons in Europe, some of them nuclear, in the 1980s, there was massive public outcry. Also on rt.com Russia will easily design new missiles to defend itself if US pulls out of INF Putin He added the situation now is somewhat different from the 1980s, because today Russia has naval and air-launched intermediate-range cruise missiles, unlike the Soviet Union. It gives Moscow the capability to exert pressure on the US directly rather than on its European allies, should an escalation happen. The INF is still salvageable, believes Vladimir Batyuk, a senior fellow with the Moscow-based Institute of the USA and Canada. It could be replaced with a new bilateral agreement or even a multilateral deal, which would include countries that have intermediate-range land-based missiles. Those include not only China to which the US pointed a finger when justifying their pullout from the treaty but also India, Pakistan, Israel and Iran. But convincing them will be difficult. Their intermediate-range missiles were created as deterrence to their regional adversaries. India and Pakistan also became nuclear nations to deter each other. They see it as part of a regional nuclear balance, not the global one, he told RT. Winning these countries support would be hard, but if there was political will to do it, it would be possible. Konovalov said US efforts to scrap the treaty without offering a substitute may backfire, because countries like China will see development of land-based intermediate-range missiles by the US as a threat to their national security. The US will be pushing those nations into the hands of Russia, he believes. If you like this story, share it with a friend! Washingtons anti-Russia policy proves to be ineffective, according to German companies doing business in Russia. But they say they are facing increased difficulties due to the sanctions regime. The new US sanctions are clearly aimed at providing the US with economic advantages, including at the expense of European companies, said the chairman of the German-Russian Chamber of Commerce Matthias Schepp. He has presented the results of the 16th survey on the business climate in Russia. The survey was conducted by the chamber and the German Eastern Business Association (OAOEV). It's time for Russia and Europe to start looking together for a way out of the sanctions regime, said Schepp. Also on rt.com EU lost over 100bn because of its own anti-Russia sanctions Lavrov Two-thirds of German companies doing business in Russia back the idea of setting up a dollar-free alternative payment system, according to Michael Harms, the executive director of the German Committee on Eastern European Economic Relations. If we dont want the US to control EUs foreign trade, we need to think more actively in this direction, he said. Harms stressed that despite all the obstacles, The potential of the Russian economy remains extremely large. If the conflict with the West finally resolves, and small and medium businesses begin to develop, Russia will quickly see a real economic upswing. Also on rt.com Russia says its business as usual, EU sanctions extension changes nothing Schepp added that Despite the difficulties, German companies clearly demonstrate their commitment to the Russian market. They like to work in Russia, and they want to continue investing there. Germanys business lobby has been criticizing EU sanctions against Russia, arguing that German companies will end up the losers since Moscow cant be fully isolated. Sanctions against Moscow were introduced by Brussels in 2014 over Russias alleged involvement in the conflict in eastern Ukraine. The punitive measures targeted Russias financial, energy, and defense sectors; along with some government officials, businessmen, and public figures. Also on rt.com Solid relations in time of sanctions: Germanys investments into Russia exceed 2 billion The Kremlin responded by imposing an embargo on agricultural produce, food, and raw materials from countries that joined the sanctions on Russia. Since then, both sides have been extending the measures. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said earlier that EU sanctions against Russia were imposed by the European nations "on direct orders" from Washington. The restrictions policy does not harm the US, while the EU suffers billions in losses, he said. For more stories on economy & finance visit RT's business section Russia's energy giant Novatek and Italian SACE Export Credit Agency have sealed an agreement on strategic cooperation in the liquefied natural gas (LNG) projects, including Arctic LNG 2, the Russian company said on Wednesday. Novatek and SACE signed a Memorandum on Strategic Cooperation... in relation to the Company's current and future LNG projects. The parties agreed to develop long-term cooperation on the Arctic LNG 2 project and potential new LNG projects involving Italian suppliers and engineering companies, according to a Novateks statement. Also on rt.com Ice fields & polar bears: Icebreaker voyages around Russias Arctic sea route sold out The step creates new opportunities for mutually beneficial cooperation with Italian businesses on our future LNG projects, according to Novatek chief executive Leonid Mikhelson. We are successfully cooperating with SACE in the financing of our Yamal LNG project. We welcome the interest of international export credit agencies to participate in the financing of our Arctic LNG projects, Mikhelson said. The Yamal LNG project, launched last December, operates three production lines with a total capacity of 16.5 million tons of LNG per year. Almost 96 percent of the Yamal LNG plants production has already been contracted. Besides Novatek, Yamal LNGs shareholders also include Frances Total, Chinas CNPC and the Silk Road Fund. Also on rt.com US continues imports of Russian gas which it insists Europe should stop buying Apart from SACE, the Russian company has managed to raise funding from a number of foreign financial institutions, including the Japan Bank for International Cooperation, Italian banking group Intesa and French credit insurer Coface, Mikhelson said. All in all, Novatek has signed supply contracts worth 600 billion rubles (nearly $9 billion) for building the fourth natural-gas-liquefaction line at its Yamal LNG plant, according to Mikhelson, who expects the amount to rise. The CEO added that most of the contracts are focused on supplies by Russias producers. In addition, Novatek, Russia's largest independent natural gas producer is developing the Arctic LNG 2 project on the Gydan Peninsula in Northern Siberia. With a production capacity of approximately 19.8 million tons per year, Arctic LNG 2 is expected to unlock over seven billion barrels of oil equivalent of hydrocarbon resources. For more stories on economy & finance visit RT's business section The best boutiques in Switzerland The best boutiques in... Where is the best place to buy a watch in French-speaking Switzerland? Between the undisputed world leader and independent shops with a... Where is the best place to buy a watch... American consumers will take the brunt of the US-China trade row and the tariff race, that can make the prices on their products become almost equal, a market expert explained to RTs Boom Bust. The paused trade war comes in line with President Donald Trumps promises to help American manufacturers, but in fact leaves no choice for consumers, according to expert Melissa Armo. She told RTs host Bart Chilton what 2019 held in store for different sectors of the US economy. If a person comes to a store to buy something, and sees an American-produced branded item for $2 and the same item for $1, but made in China, he would have a choice of what to buy, Armo points out. But if the prices are the same for both, one is poised to go for familiar brand, meaning that in any case you will pay more. What it [trade war] is doing is that people are being forced to pay more to buy American, Armo said. Chinese people truly believe that America cannot live without Chinese products, because they are so cheap. Thats part of the reason why they are hanging on. For more stories on economy & finance visit RT's business section Saudi-led coalition launches strike at airport in Yemen capital, 'destroys drone' Saudi-led coalition launches strike at airport in Yemen capital, 'destroys drone' The Saudi-led coalition has said it launched an airstrike on Wednesday at the airport in the rebel-held capital Sanaa, destroying a drone. The coalition is fighting on the side of Yemens government. It is the first airstrike that the alliance has confirmed carrying out since a ceasefire with Houthis was agreed at peace talks in Sweden last week for the battleground port city of Hodeida. The coalition said that it targeted an unmanned aerial vehicle and destroyed the aircraft that was in the process of preparing to be launched, AFP reports.Source : RT - Daily news US envoy in Kabul after talks with Taliban on Afghanistan peace US envoy in Kabul after talks with Taliban on Afghanistan peace The US special envoy for Afghan peace talks, Zalmay Khalilzad, arrived in Kabul on Wednesday to meet government officials, following his discussions with Taliban representatives in Abu Dhabi this week. Khalilzad, an Afghan-born former US ambassador to Kabul, has been leading Washingtons efforts to encourage negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan government to end the 17-year-old war. Khalilzad will meet President Ashraf Ghani and Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah, according to a statement from the US embassy in Kabul. US officials have not commented on the meetings in Abu Dhabi, attended by officials from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Pakistan. The Taliban said the two days of talks focused on the withdrawal of foreign troops, a central demand of the movement, as well as the treatment of Taliban prisoners and civilian casualties from airstrikes.Source : RT - Daily news Hookworm, a blood-sucking parasite thought eradicated in the US in the last century, is now seeing a resurgence in Alabama. In the Now explains how wealth inequality and racism put the state on par with countries like Honduras. Lowndes County is part of Alabamas so-called Black Belt, a name reflecting its majority population and dark soil. The soil has clay-like properties and cannot absorb water very well. It means special septic systems need to be installed there to treat sewage. Spending some $10,000 on such a system in a country where a third of people live in poverty is not an option for many households, so they often get a regular system that is twice cheaper. Unfortunately, such septics clog and overflow in rain, resulting in literal cesspools forming in peoples backyards. Hookworm, a parasite that can cause anemia and hamper development in children, spreads through raw sewage. The worm lives in the guts and their eggs are spread through the hosts feces. The larvae live in the ground and get inside a host who happens to walk nearby. So if the sewage is treated properly, the parasites life cycle is broken. The poor residents of places like Lowndes County dont have this sanitation luxury. Few locals suffering from this problem, however, are willing to speak on camera, fearing fines from health officials. Walter McMeans is one of those. He agreed to explain his situation to In the Now journalist Rania Khalek, and to the crew of Vice News, when they came to report on the hookworm threat. The irony of the fact that poorest communities in the US suffer from a treatable infection that is commonly associated with the worlds poorest countries was not missed by the UNs Special Rapporteur on poverty, Philip Alston. His report came just as Washington was withdrawing from the UN Human Rights Council, with Nikki Haley, the American envoy to the UN, denouncing the body as a cesspool of political bias. Also on rt.com Nikki Haley calls Human Rights Council UN's 'greatest failure' in bid to justify US exit I note with regret that United States Ambassador Nikki Haley has characterized this Council as a cesspool and has chosen to withdraw from it just days before my presentation. Speaking of cesspools, my report draws attention to those I witnessed in Alabama, he noted at the time. There is certainly a race dimension to the problems that residents of Lowndes County face, but it mostly is about wealth inequality and poor people not getting the support they need, said local activist Catherine Flowers. I've seen places in West Virginia and Tennessee, and Kentucky, where poor white people are treated the same way, she said. Of course people of color are going to be marginalized simply based on that fact alone. But also people that don't have the means. They are not making it available to poor people, period. Watch Khalek discover more about the dangers facing Americas communities. Think your friends would be interested? Share this story! Yemens govt, Houthis trade blame for breaching Hodeidah port ceasefire Yemens govt, Houthis trade blame for breaching Hodeidah port ceasefire Yemens warring parties have traded accusations of breaching a UN-mediated ceasefire in Hodeidah. The port city is vital for food and aid supplies, and is a lifeline for millions facing starvation. Residents reported shelling late on Tuesday, the first day of the truce, for nearly one hour on the eastern and southern outskirts of the Houthi-held Red Sea city. It was calm early on Wednesday, Reuters reports. Houthi-run al-Masirah TV accused Saudi-led coalition forces of breaching the truce by shelling several sites. A Yemeni source was quoted by the UAEs news agency WAM as saying that the Houthis fired mortar bombs and rockets at a hospital in the eastern suburbs. The UN is due to convene the Houthi group and the Saudi-backed government by video link on Wednesday to discuss a troop withdrawal from Hodeidah city and three ports. The truce deal was agreed at UN-led talks in Sweden last week, the first in more than two years.Source : RT - Daily news We attempted to send a notification to your email address but we were unable to verify that you provided a valid email address. Please click here to update your email address if you wish to receive notifications. Otherwise, you may click here to disable notifications and hide this message. Egypt's Minister of Health Hala Zayed has announced that nearly 19 million citizens have been screened for Hepatitis C and other non-communicable diseases as part of the '100 Million Lives' campaign, the largest-ever nationwide campaign to eradicate hepatitis C launched last October. Zayed affirmed that a total of 6.5 million citizens have been screened for the virus since the launch of the campaign's second phase by the end of November. The initiative aims to examine between 45 and 52 million citizens out of a population of 104 million. The first phase of the three-phase campaign lasted until 30 November and included the governorates of Damietta, South Sinai, Matrouh, Port Said, Alexandria, Beheira, Qalioubiya, Fayoum and Assiut. The second phase included Cairo, Beni Suef, Sohag, Menoufiya and Kafr El-Sheikh governorates. According to 2015 statistics, 22 percent of the population carried hepatitis C. Over the past three years, Egypt has been successful in the intensive use of a variety of new medications to combat the virus. In 2016, the health ministry achieved a 96 percent cure rate of the disease nationwide. The health ministry has vowed to completely eliminate the disease in Egypt by 2021. Search Keywords: Short link: "We're so diverse, and so varied across the district, that I think it's important that this assessment include on-site observation of school safety, at all of our facilities," said Doerr, adding that support and transportation facilities would be included in the study. "The last bucket in the assessment would be a behavioral health piece: what do we have available to... Welcome to Morningstar.co.uk! You have been redirected here from Hemscott.com as we are merging our websites to provide you with a one-stop shop for all your investment research needs.To search for a security, type the name or ticker in the search box at the top of the page and select from the dropdown results.Registered Hemscott users can log in to Morningstar using the same login details. Similarly, if you are a Hemscott Premium user, you now have a Morningstar Premium account which you can access using the same login details. Egypts Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry is bound for Brussels on Wednesday, where he will head the countrys delegation to the eighth Egypt-EU Association Council meeting on Thursday. In an official statement, Egypts foreign ministry spokesman Ahmed Hafez said Shoukry and the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Federica Mogherini will co-chair the meeting. The meeting aims to continue dialogue between Egypt and the EU to boost and explore new means of cooperation in various economic, social, and political fields, as well as presenting progress made as part of the Egyptian-European Association Agreement. Issues of bilateral interest, including the peace process in the Middle East, the situation in Libya, Syria, terrorism, and illegal migration will also be discussed. This comes in light of implementing partnership priorities from 2017-2020 and the development of cooperation between both sides since the convocation of the last session in July 2017. The EU-Egypt Association Agreement, which was signed in 2001, has been in force since 2004. It creates a free-trade area between the EU and Egypt by removing tariffs on industrial products and making agricultural products easier to trade. The agreement has made the EU the top trade partner for Egypt, according to Hafez. EU-Egypt trade has more than doubled from 11.8 billion euros in 2004 to 27.9 billion euros in 2017. The EU is both Egypt's biggest import and export partner, covering 29.7 percent of Egypt's trade volume in 2017. Search Keywords: Short link: Fannie/Freddie "Reform" Discussion Heats Up Again The debate has opened again on the fate of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae (the GSEs). Ten plus years after the two were put in federal conservatorship at the start of the housing crisis the issue of what to do with them and when never seems to come any closer to resolution. With the expiration of Melvin Watt's five-year term as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) approaching and a nominee awaiting confirmation, the various sides are dragging out their arguments and their not insignificant biases. Solutions however are hazy at best. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told Bloomberg News on Tuesday that the Trump administration wants to see the conservatorship end but would like Congress to be involved in the resolution. He added that the executive branch would also be open to making some tweaks on its own, although he did not specify what those might be. Mnuchin noted that securing Senate confirmation of the new FHFA director will be key to administration efforts. "There are changes we will be able to make with a new director at the FHFA," Mnuchin said. The White House has nominated Mark Calabria, Vice President Mike Pence's chief economist, to fill the vacancy. Calabria has indicated positions that are not particularly friendly to government support of housing, including ending the GSE conservatorships by placing the two companies in receivership, a process similar to bankruptcy, and doing away with the mortgage interest deduction. The GSEs were placed in conservatorship in 2008 and shored up with $187.5 billion in loans from the Treasury in return for which the government received senior preferred stock and, through a 2012 modification of their agreement, the right to strip the companies of all quarterly profits except for a steadily diminishing capital buffer which ended late last year. Since then that arrangement was modified slightly to allow the GSEs to keep some capital to protect them in another downturn. They have now paid Treasury $279 billion in dividends without reducing their debt. The eventual fate of the GSEs has sporadically been debated in Congress and several bills, each addressing a portion of the issue, have been introduced in the House and several more comprehensive bills have been presented in the Senate. None have gone far. One problem has been a debate between Republicans and Democrats over the role, even the worth, of the GSEs - a debate which preceded the housing crisis. Republicans have felt the GSEs had an unfair advantage over banks because the nature of their charter appeared to be an implicit guarantee from the government to rescue them in the event of a crisis. This allowed them to borrow at a lower rate. Democrats have pushed the role of the GSEs partially as a mechanism to promote affordable housing. Meanwhile stockholders, largely hedge funds which bought up GSE stock at fire sale prices, have been in court contesting the government's actions stripping GSE profits. They have also urged the Treasury to bypass lawmakers and allow the companies to rebuild their capital buffers and then release them from conservatorship with Treasury selling their shares to private investors. Recently several of the big players in the housing crisis wrote an op-ed published in The Hill. The group consists of Edward J. DeMarco who was acting director of FHFA at the time the GSE/Treasury deal was originally negotiated and later revised; Dave Stevens, former president and CEO of the Mortgage Bankers Association, Jim Parrott, a nonresident fellow at the Urban Institute, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, Lew Ranieri, CEO of Ranieri Strategies, and Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody's Analytics and a former member of the Obama Administration. Their article maintains that Wall Street investors in the GSEs "are pushing a plan to take over the behemoth financial institutions after a decade in government control." This would allow them to reap billions of dollars on their bet that "lawmakers would ultimately fail to fundamentally change the housing finance system, despite universal agreement that it was badly needed." The group calls the proposal audacious and appears to blame the GSEs for what befell them, although most independent studies have found the GSEs to be victims of the housing collapse rather than responsible for it. The rescue and conservatorship were badly needed, they say, but was always intended to be temporary until Congress could replace "a badly flawed model with something that posed less risk to the housing finance system." A decade later, they say, we are still waiting. The authors say the investor groups' proposal simply leads back to the pre-crisis model. They do recommend retaining some of the reforms made during conservatorship, such as limits on what the two companies can invest in and higher capital levels but would leave "the fundamental structural flaw that was the system's ultimate undoing: the dominance of a duopoly that is too big and too important for the nation ever to let fail." This makes sense for the investors, the writers say, as the GSEs' market power will bring in more profits, but it would be up to the taxpayers to bail them out for the very reasons they could not be allowed to fail last time. The structure would give them the incentive to take outside risks. They conclude with the "shame us once" cliche and say, "Let's not be distracted by this call to forget the past but roll up our sleeves and get on with the difficult but important work of real reform." Of course, they offer no suggestions for what that would be. Government to reduce E-levy from 1.75% to 1.5% ... CHESHIRE Pier 1 Imports will close its doors in April. The home decor and furniture store chain also has locations in Hamden and Meriden. The decision to close the Cheshire store, located in a plaza on South Main Street (Route 10), was made after a review of store locations, according to company spokeswoman Melissa Simon. Pier 1 continually reviews new and existing store locations to make sure were operating as efficiently as possible, she said. Where necessary, based on that review, we make the strategic business decision to close certain locations on a case-by-case basis. The company that owns the plaza, Tartaglia Commercial Properties, had no information on a new tenant. Pier 1 occupies one of the largest storefronts in the Cheshire Shopping Center, which is also home to Advance Auto Parts, Bagelicious, and YMCA. Jerry Sitko, the towns economic development coordinator, said the store had a good run in town but does face competition from online shopping and other stores. Im sure that has a hand in it, Sitko said. Sitko has heard speculation on possibile tenants but nothing definite. Simon said Pier 1 does everything it can to support employees leading up to the closing. We care about our shoppers in the Cheshire area and have enjoyed serving them over the years. We look forward to serving them at our other area locations nearby, she said. jbuchanan@record-journal.com 203-317-2230 Twitter: @JBuchananRJ Governor-elect Ned Lamont is still three weeks from taking office, but the head of the Connecticut Business and Industry Association is encouraged by what hes seen so far. Were excited about having someone with a business background being in the governors office, CBIA President Joe Brennan said during an interview last week for the Morning Record, the Record-Journals daily news podcast. Lamont, who takes over Jan. 9, has formed 18 different working groups to help him develop policy. Brennan is part of a group looking at the economy. Brennan said Connecticut needs to adopt a budget that is balanced without harmful tax increases and does not increase the deficit. Lamont and the legislature also need to strengthen Connecticuts workforce, he added. He said Electric Boat, which projects it will need another 1,500 to 2,000 workers by 2030, has had success working with community colleges and other organizations to develop a program to train new employees. How can we replicate that successful pipeline around the rest of the state of Connecticut? he asked. Brennan said businesses believe its crucial for the legislature to address those issues and not get bogged down in other areas. Our concern is more, kind of, the direction of the Democratic caucuses, Brennan said, raising concern about the progressive wing of the party. The Progressive Caucus picked up members in the November election. Democrats as a whole regained control of the Senate, 23-13, and stretched out their majority in the House, 92-59. Members of the caucus said during a press conference earlier this month that they plan to push for paid family medical leave, an increase in the minimum wage to $15, and the legalization of recreational marijuana. Brennan said CBIA, which has opposed past efforts to increase the minimum wage and implement paid FMLA, said the organization hopes to offer suggestions that make the policies more palatable to businesses. I would say that we certainly have an understanding that, given the votes now, that these things are going to pass or are likely to pass, he said. Brennan also responded to criticism from Malloy, who said earlier this month that business owners have painted an inaccurate picture of Connecticuts economy by being overly negative. I constantly talk about that on our website anytime we get any good news, were pumping it out, Brennan said. But if I say one negative thing, all I hear from everybody is oh, youre always so negative. He said the states economy, though, continues to lag behind states in New England and around the country, demonstrating why the legislature needs to make growth its top priority. To hear more from Brennan, listen to the Morning Record at https://bit.ly/2GoypHe msavino@record-journal.com 203-317-2266 Twitter: @reporter_savino Regional Children from Manipur call on DoNER minister Union DoNER Minister Dr Jitendra Singh with students from Manipur. (Twitter) New Delhi, Dec 19 (Agencies) | Publish Date: 12/19/2018 10:32:27 AM IST A group of 20 students from remote villages of Manipur on Wednesday called on Union DoNER Minister Dr Jitendra Singh in the national capital. According to Northeast Now, the students are on a National Integration Tour being organised by 29 Assam Rifles. This is a unique opportunity for the children of remote bordering areas of India said DoNER Minister Dr Singh. The DoNER Minister said that such tours give exposure to the students and give them confidence. The Union Minister also expressed thanks to Assam Rifles for organising such tours and giving exposure to the children from remote areas. This will provide children knowledge about the historical and cultural places of India, he added. The children belong to the age group of 13 to 20 years and are accompanied by two teachers. The purpose of the visit is to give exposure to these students coming from the remote areas of the Northeast. The students from Dingpi region of Chandel district of Manipur have visited Delhi, Agra and Dholpur during their tour. They visited Rashtrapati Bhawan, Red Fort, Humayun Tomb, Qutub Minar, Lotus temple, India Gate, Nehru Planetarium, Museum, Metro, Taj Mahal and Rashtriya Military School, Dholpur, among other places. A Cairo criminal court on Tuesday ordered the release of a rights activist who has been detained for months pending investigations into charges including spreading false news and misusing social media websites, a judicial source said. Amal Fathy, a member of the now-banned 6 April Youth Movement, was arrested in May, days after she posted a video on Facebook in which she accused the government of failing to protect women from sexual harassment, and criticised poor service at a state-owned bank and deterioration in living conditions and public services. She faces charges of sharing a video on Facebook to incite the overthrow of the regime, spreading false new and misusing social media websites. On Tuesday, the court granted her conditional release, requiring her to report to a police station one day a week, the judicial source said The court on Tuesday "accepted Amal Fathy's appeal against her detention and replaced pre-trial detention with precautionary measures," her lawyer Ramadan Mohamed said on Facebook. An appeal by satirist Shady Abu Zeid, who is a co-defendant in the same case, was rejected by court. In September, Fathy, 33, was sentenced to two years in jail and fined EGP 10,000 (approximately $560) over similar charges, including spreading false news that threatened national security, in a separate case related to the anti-harassment video. An appeal hearing in this second case had been scheduled for 30 December. She was given a bail of EGP 20,000 in this case and only remained in pre-trial detention due to charges in the first case, which involves a number of other co-defendants. Also on Tuesday, Fathy's husband Mohamed Lotfy, who chairs the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms, received the Franco-German Prize for Human Rights and the Rule of Law at a ceremony hosted by the French ambassador in Cairo. Search Keywords: Short link: By Katie Ziegler With the appointment of two women, Beatrice Duran and Rochelle Nguyen, to fill vacant seats in the State Assembly, the Nevada Legislature made history Dec. 18 by becoming the first state legislature to have a majority of female members. The new appointments bring the total number of women in the Assembly to 23 of the 42 members. There are nine women in the Senate, for a combined total of 32 out of 63 legislators. Prior to these appointments, the Nevada Assembly was already noteworthy, as it had 50 percent female members following Novembers election. Colorado is the only other state with parity in a chamber, as its state House will be 50 percent women, too. This has happened only once before in any state, when the New Hampshire Senate had a majority of women in 2009-2010. The U.S. territory of Guam broke records this election, too, and its Legislature will be two-thirds women next year. These individual state examples are part of the larger story this election, which is that women joined state legislatures in unprecedented numbers. The nationwide share of women legislators will be 28.3 percent in 2019, an increase of three percentage points over 2018. Most states saw their number of female legislators increase, many by five percentage points or more. At least 14 women will serve as the presiding officer of a chamber next year, an increase from nine female presiding officers in 2018. Keep following NCSL for updated information about women in leadership coming in January. Katie Ziegler is the program manager of NCSL's Women's Legislative Network. Email Katie By Express News Service NEW DELHI: The Central government on Tuesday said that the Enforcement Directorate (ED) has initiated probe against 1,326 companies, which had been under its lens for violating money laundering laws. Around 1,326 companies are under the scanner of Enforcement Directorate for violating money laundering laws, Shiv Pratap Shukla, Minister of State in the Ministry of Finance, told Rajya Sabha. However, no company has been deregistered for money laundering charges so far. While searches and raids have been already conducted at some of these companies, in the coming months, there will be more raids and arrests. We also have (info on) few companies that have made big investments overseas post demonetisation, a senior ED official told TNIE. Last week, the ED had initiated a probe against the managing director of Usha Martin, the countrys largest steel wire rope maker, in connection with alleged violations of the Foreign Exchange Management (FEMA) Act. The ED has also ordered investigation into the true ownership of 68 companies for exceptional deposits and withdrawals made during demonetisation. The government has also ordered investigation into the true ownership of 68 companies under Section 216 read with Section 210(1)(c) of the Companies Act, 2013, which have deposited and withdrawn funds in an exceptional manner from their bank accounts during the demonetisation period, the minister said. According to sources, 17.42 lakh suspected accounts have come under the scanner of both the ED and Income-Tax department. The firms were under the agencys scanner as they had reportedly used third-party bank accounts to stash their unaccounted money. Based on the data and closer investigation, the ED has zeroed in on the 1,326 companies. After investigation, show cause notices are issued and due process is followed for recovery of evaded tax. In the last few weeks, ED had speeded up its investigation and attached assets and bank accounts for over two dozen companies for money laundering during demonetisation. By PTI NEW DELHI: The commerce and industry ministry is working on a new e-commerce policy to boost the fast growing online retail as well as protect the interest of small retailers, sources said. The government has already set up a group of secretaries to look into the issues of the sector. The ministry is committed to preparing the policy to boost the growth of the sector, sources said. The move came after concerns were raised on some proposals of the draft e-commerce policy, which was prepared after consultations with several stakeholders, including industry chambers. The draft e-commerce policy had suggested several steps to promote the growth of the sector. It had stated that online retail firms may have to store user data exclusively in India in view of security and privacy concerns. It had also said that any group company of an online retailer or marketplace may not be allowed to directly or indirectly influence the price or sale of products and services on its platform, a move that could completely restrict e-tailers from giving deep discounts. The draft had suggested to introduce a pre-set timeframe for offering differential pricing or deep discounts by e-commerce players to customers. Meanwhile, Commerce and Industry Minister Suresh Prabhu informed Parliament the formulation of e-commerce policy is under consideration of the government for which no timeline has been fixed. Traders body Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) has time and again raised concerns over heavy discounts being provided by certain online-retailers. CAIT Secretary General Praveen Khandelwal said that they have written to finance and commerce ministers suggesting them to take steps to check these discounts as they are leading to predatory pricing. "We have recently met officials of the ministry, who are making the new e-commerce policy. We have urged to put certain clauses to check e-commerce firms giving huge discounts and freebies as it is damaging the trade fabric of the country," he said. He added that e-tailers are giving discounts for the last four-five years and these were seriously damaging small retailers. Framing of a new policy also assumes significance as rich member nations of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) are pushing to frame global norms for e-commerce trade. By PTI NEW DELHI: The GST Council is likely to slash tax rates on automobile tyres to 18 per cent from 28 per cent currently in its next meeting Saturday, an official said. The move is part of the overall plan to rationalise the highest tax bracket of 28 per cent after Prime Minister Narendra Modi Tuesday said that 99 per cent of over 1,200 goods and services will attract 18 per cent or less Goods and Services Tax (GST). "A 28 per cent tax on automobile tyre impacts common man because ultimately he has to shell out the tax. The overall focus on December 22 Council meet will be to lessen the GST burden on common man," an official told PTI. Currently there are 34 goods left in the highest tax bracket of 28 per cent. The list include commonly used items like 'new pneumatic tyre of rubber' (automobile tyre), digital camera, air conditioners, dish washing machine, set top box for TV, monitors and projectors as well as construction item like cement. The official said, while a GST rate cut on cement to 18 per cent is likely to cost about Rs 20,000 crore annually to the exchequer, the Council is still likely to go ahead. ALSO READ | GST evasion of Rs 12,766 crore detected in April-November "Cement is an area where huge instances of evasion was taking place. If tax rates come down more people will buy it from the formal channel and would also boost housing sector as well," the official added. The other items which are likely to retained in the 28 per cent slab include aerated drinks, cigarette, bidi, tobacco products, pan masala, smoking pipes, automobiles, aircrafts, yachts, revolvers and pistols, gambling lottery. GST has five tax slabs of 0 per cent, 8, 12, 18 and 28 per cent with daily essential items attracting nil tax rates and luxury, sin and some white goods at the highest tax slab. Modi Tuesday indicated that the 28 per cent slab of GST would only be restricted to a few select items, such as luxury and sin goods. "We are of the opinion of making GST as smooth as possible for the enterprises. In earlier days, the GST was framed according to the existing VAT or excise tax structures exercised in those respective states. (With) the discussions held from time to time, the tax system is getting improved," Modi had said. In the first eight months (April-November) of the current fiscal, the government has mopped up over Rs 7.76 lakh crore from GST. The 2018-19 budget had estimated annual GST collection at Rs 13.48 lakh crore, which means a monthly target of Rs 1.12 lakh crore. EY Tax Partner said "the industry as well as consumers have been eagerly looking forward to pruning of the goods in the 28 per cent category which today amongst others include cement, camera, two wheelers, tyres, etc. However, the Government would need to analyse the same from the perspective of impact on GST revenue collections". By PTI NEW DELHI: Satellite communications service provider Hughes India has bagged Rs 100 crore contract from broadband technology firm Sterlite Tech to provide satellite connectivity to Naval Communication Network. Indian Navy had awarded a Rs 3,500-crore contract to Sterlite Tech in February for designing, building and managing its communications network. "With Hughes' globally used satellite systems, we will bring in ease of network management through seamless connectivity even in tough and remote island terrains for the Indian Navy," KS Rao, CEO Telecom Services Business, Sterlite Tech said in a statement. Under the year-long contract of Rs 100 crore with Sterlite, Hughes Communications India (HCIL) will supply the solution for broadband satellite services across the Navy's mainland and island sites, the statement said. "We are proud to have been awarded this critical communications infrastructure project by Sterlite Tech," said Shivaji Chatterjee, senior vice president and head of Enterprise Business, HCIL said. By Express News Service BENGALURU : Scooter-sharing platform Vogo on Tuesday said the company has signed a strategic partnership with cab-hailing company Ola. As part of the partnership, Ola will invest about $100 million, which would primarily be used by Vogo to strengthen the two-wheeler supply on its platform by about 1,00,000 scooters. Ola will also facilitate its 150 million users to book Vogos offerings from the Ola app. This infusion will give Vogo a strategic supply advantage without having to incur significant capital expenditure, said a Vogo statement.Ola was the lead investor in Vogos $7 million Series-A funding round. Other players such as Stellaris Venture Partners and Matrix Partners India too participated. Vogo also received funding from Pawan Munjal, chairman, MD & CEO of Hero MotoCorp. Founded in 2016, Vogo is a point-to-point dockless scooter-sharing company, currently present in Bengaluru and Hyderabad, having served over 20 million km on its platform.Our investment in Vogo will help build a smart multi-modal network for first-last mile connectivity in the country, said Bhavish Aggarwal, co-founder & CEO, Ola. The two-wheeler manufacturers are also bullish about the prospects offered by these last mile connectivity players. Honda and Mahindra, two of the big names in the scooter manufacturing industry, are exploring business opportunities with bike rental players like Drivezy and Bounce. Honda has supplied 3,000 scooters including its largest selling two-wheeler Activa 5G and CLIQ to Drivezy to operate in Bengaluru and Hyderabad. In August, Bengaluru-based Bounce, formerly known as Metro Bikes, had raised $12.2 million in Series-A round of funding from leading investors like Sequoia India and Accel Partners this August. Olas deep understanding of mobility and their investment to power additional supply are extremely valuable to Vogo. As we enter our next phase of growth, we look forward to executing our synergistic vision of the future: smart and sustainable mobility for all, said Anand Ayyadurai, founder and CEO, Vogo. Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi met on Wednesday with a number of heads and representatives of Egyptian and Austrian companies as well as members of the Egyptian-Austrian Business Council at the end of his four-day visit to the Austrian capital, state news agency MENA reported. The talks tackled means of boosting Austrian investments in Egypt in light of the recent measures adopted by the Egyptian government to ensure an investment-friendly environment and give momentum to international trade. According to MENA, trade exchange between Egypt and Austria has hit $400 million, which is equivalent to EGP 7 billion. MENA also reported that 600 Austrian companies currently operate in Egypt. Following the meeting, El-Sisi concluded his four-day visit to Vienna and returned to Cairo. Search Keywords: Short link: By PTI NEW DELHI: Private sector lender Yes Bank said it has sold over 2 per cent stake in Fortis Healthcare Ltd (FHL) in tranches. "We would like to inform that Yes Bank has sold 1,23,37,323 equity shares having nominal value of Rs 10 each, constituting 2.13 per cent of the paid-up share capital of FHL," the lender said in a regulatory filing. The bank said the stake was sold in various tranches, last being on December 18, 2018, which resulted in change in holding of the bank by more than 2 per cent of the total shareholding in FHL. Companies are required to inform the exchanges if the change in shareholding of an entity is over 2 per cent. According to shareholding data on BSE, Yes Bank held 9.33 per cent stake in FHL as on November 21, 2018. On Monday, Malaysia-based IHH Healthcare said it will not be able to proceed with open offer for FHL for the time being, following the Supreme Court order to put on hold sale of controlling stake in the Indian hospital chain. However, the apex court's order does not impact IHH Healthcare's acquisition of 31.1 per cent stake in FHL for Rs 4,000 crore, which was completed on November 13, it said in a regulatory filing. Stock of Yes Bank closed 1.21 per cent down at Rs 178.90 on BSE, while Fortis Healthcare closed 0.84 per cent lower at Rs 136.35. Sinduja Jane By Express News Service CHENNAI: Dr S Jayachandran, popularly known in North Chennai as 'Makkal Maruthuvar' (People's doctor) as he charged only Rs 2 as consultation fee from his patients, passed away after a brief illness on Wednesday. Hundreds of people paid homage to him at his house at Old Washermenpet. K Rajeshwari, one of Jayachandran's patients, said that he used to charge just 25 paise during his initial years of practice. "I knew him for last 40 years. He is our family doctor. At a time medical service has turned into a business for many doctors, he looked at it as a humanitarian service," she said. Jayachandran studied medicine at Madras Medical College, and began practice in 1970s at Old Washermenpet. He later shifted his clinic to Kasimedu and started practicing at his home at Old Washermenpet, according to his friends. After fighting lung problem for some time, the doctor breathed his last at around 5.15 am on Wednesday at a private hospital on Greams Road, said his elder son Dr J Saravana Jagan. "He used to always talk about doing service to people. He would tell that people in North Chennai are from economically weaker sections and they can't afford much, so we should help them. He used to charge only Rs 2," said Jagan. There was a special respect for prescription given by Jayachandran, say his friends, family members and neighbours. "Seeing daddy's service, many trusts came forward to donate, but he never accepted money, instead he would request them to buy medicines and donate to us, which he gives to his patients free of cost," he said. Jayachandran also used to refer patients to scan centres, where they would get concessions. He was also nominated by his well-wishers and friends for Padma Shri award in 2016 on the grounds of humanitarian service, said his friend N Raman, former director of Botany Department, University of Madras. "He deserved the award, but he didn't receive it," said Raman. One of his patients, Om Prakash said, "The doctor who cured others' ailments never bothered about his own health. He never slept or ate on time. Even if you knock on his door at 1 am, he will be awake to treat his patients. He even gave money to patients. Sometimes he even offered them food." "When I was young, I have seen him going around narrow streets of North Chennai on a bicycle to treat patients," added the 63-year-old. Born in 1948 at Kodaipattinam Village in Kancheepuram district, Dr Jayachandran was honoured with many awards including Knighthood Award in 2008 by Grand Magistry of Knights of Charity of St. John Jerusalem, Lifetime achievement award by Dr MGR Medical University in 2012, and Doctors Day Award for the years 2005, 2006 and 2009 from Indian Medical Association. He was also given the Best Social Service Doctor Award by former Governor of Tamil Nadu K Rosaiah in 2013 He is survived by his wife Dr Veni Jayachandran, two sons, and one daughter, all doctors by profession. K Shiva Shanker By Express News Service HYDERABAD: If the fire accident of the kind that recently hit ESIC Hospital in Mumbai had to occur in any government hospital in Telangana it will have a far worse impact due to inadequate safety measures prevalent at these places. Most of the prominent government tertiary care hospitals in Hyderabad, for instance, either lack fire safety measures or even if they have they are inadequate, putting lives of more than 3,500 patients, who utilise their services, at risk. It may be recalled that tragedy at Employees State Insurance Corporation (ESIC) Hospital in Andheri, which shook the whole country, led to eight deaths, including that of a five-month-old baby, while leaving 157 people injured. In the past, Express reported about lack of proper safety measures at Osmania General Hospital and Gandhi Hospital. More than a year after this newspaper brought those lapses to light, there seems to be hardly any improvement at these hospitals. In fact, minor fire accidents continue to occur at OGH. Though, on the other hand, there is a slight improvement at the Government Maternity Hospital in Koti, there is a problem with the source of water to the hose reels. Doctors and hospital staff on condition of anonymity said that patients, attendants and their lives are at risk and people could char to death or die due to asphyxiation in case of fire accident. There is every possibility of such tragedies unfolding if there were to be a fire accident in these hospitals. Though there only 1,012 beds at Gandhi Hospital, more than 2,000 patients are admitted there and around 1,500 patients are admitted to 1,168-bed capacity OGH. A modest estimation of one attendant per patient might lead to head count of 3,500 patients plus equal number of attendants, put together 7,000 people at least. All of them would rush to exit gates at a time and patients in critical condition would struggle to move out of the building if fire starts to spread. Successive superintendents of the hospital have pointed out these lapses and requested Telangana State Medical Services and Infrastructure Development Corporation to address the issue. It is learnt that requests were filed to place spiral stairs on four sides of the main building so that they can be used during the accidents. In case of Osmania General Hospital, the fire safety measures are completely missing. Sources said that there is only one small sump tank is connected to hose reels in all four floors of Government Maternity Hospital, Koti, which is inadequate. When Director of Medical Education Dr K Ramesh Reddy was asked for response on the long delay in addressing the issue, the senior official said that they are constantly pursuing the issue with TSMIDC. Inputs on what needs to be done were given after mock drills were conducted and TSMIDC gave estimates. Two-months ago, I asked the corporation how many extinguishers are needed at government hospitals (Under DMEs purview). I will follow up with them for the response, Reddy said. By PTI MUMBAI: Two days after a massive fire at ESIC Kamgar Hospital at Marol in suburban Andheri killed nine people, another blaze broke out at the same facility late Wednesday evening, a senior civic official said. Nobody was injured in the fire, which was reported at 7.54 pm, the official from Disaster Management Unit of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) said. "The fire erupted at an electric box in ESIC Hospital premises at 7.54 pm. All the agencies, including fire brigade, police, ambulance service were rushed to the spot," he said, adding that the fire brigade team managed to bring the blaze under control. "It was extinguished at 8.34 pm," he said. Following Monday's blaze, the entire hospital had been vacated. Monday's incident had left nine people dead and injured 175 others, including some children, who are currently undergoing treatment at various hospitals across the city. Leader of the Opposition in Maharashtra Legislative Assembly Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil visited the hospital on Wednesday and slammed the government saying it has not learnt any lesson from the Kamala Mill fire in December last year, which had claimed 14 lives. A Twitter handle of 'The Voice of Citizens'said, "#MumbaiHospitalFire #hospital Again fire at ESIC hospital at Andheri , second incident in a row of hospital fire. #Alert #FireSafety standards below par in hospitals,#human life is getting cheaper for hospitals." By Express News Service THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The Attingal police on Tuesday arrested two Bihar natives for allegedly providing fake visas to two youths for travelling to Malaysia. The arrested are Krishnakumar, 23, and Sharvan Kumar, 21, of Bihar. They were arrested from New Delhi and have been brought here and remanded in judicial custody. According to the police, the arrest was based on the complaint of an Attingal native Prasad. The duo cheated Prasad and his friend and swindled money to the tune of `1.7 lakh for the visa charges. The accused advised them to come to Nedumbassery airport from where they would get a connecting flight to the Maldives. From there, the Attingal natives were advised to fly to Malaysia. However, the cheating came to light only after the complainants reached Nedumbassery airport. By PTI BEIJING: Scientists have identified a fossil plant species that suggests flowers bloomed in the Early Jurassic, more than 174 million years ago, according to a study. Before now, angiosperms (flowering plants) were thought to have a history of no more than 130 million years, according to the study published in the journal eLife. ALSO READ | We are forcing peacocks to eat sunflowers! The discovery of the novel flower species, which the researchers named Nanjinganthus dendrostyla, throws widely accepted theories of plant evolution into question, by suggesting that they existed around 50 million years earlier. Nanjinganthus also has a variety of 'unexpected' characteristics according to almost all of these theories. Angiosperms are an important member of the plant kingdom, and their origin has been the topic of long-standing debate among evolutionary biologists. Many previously thought angiosperms could be no more than 130 million years old. However, molecular clocks have indicated that they must be older than this. "Researchers were not certain where and how flowers came into existence because it seems that many flowers just popped up in the Cretaceous from nowhere," said Qiang Fu, Associate Research Professor at the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology, China. "Studying fossil flowers, especially those from earlier geologic periods, is the only reliable way to get an answer to these questions," Fu said. ALSO READ | Mysteries of primrose genes unravelled The team studied 264 specimens of 198 individual flowers preserved on 34 rock slabs from the South Xiangshan Formation -- an outcrop of rocks in the Nanjing region of China renowned for bearing fossils from the Early Jurassic epoch. The abundance of fossil samples allowed the researchers to dissect some of them and study them with sophisticated microscopy, providing high-resolution pictures of the flowers from different angles and magnifications. They then used this detailed information about the shape and structure of the different fossil flowers to reconstruct the features of Nanjinganthus dendrostyla. The key feature of an angiosperm is 'angio-ovuly' -- the presence of fully enclosed ovules, which are precursors of seeds before pollination. In the current study, the reconstructed flower was found to have a cup-form receptacle and ovarian roof that together enclose the ovules/seeds. This was a crucial discovery because the presence of this feature confirmed the flower's status as an angiosperm, researchers said. Although there have been reports of angiosperms from the Middle-Late Jurassic epochs in northeastern China, there are structural features of Nanjinganthus that distinguish it from these other specimens and suggest that it is a new genus of angiosperms. The team now wants to understand whether angiosperms are either monophyletic -- which would mean Nanjinganthus represents a stem group giving rise to all later species -- or polyphyletic, whereby Nanjinganthus represents an evolutionary dead end and has little to do with many later species. By Express News Service NEW DELHI: The Advertising Standards Council of Indias consumer complaints council upheld complaints against 355 advertisements of the more than 450 ads evaluated by it. The complaints were investigated in August and September. Of the complaints upheld, 201 related to the education sector, 62 to the healthcare sector, 24 to the food and beverages category, 24 to personal care, seven violated BARC guidelines, and 37 were from the others category. Once the complaints are upheld, the advertisers are informed of the decision and are encouraged to pull out the advertisements. In cases of non-compliance, the ministries concerned are informed. One of the most common reasons for upholding complaints was unsubstantiated claims in the education sector, such as providing 100 per cent placement, guaranteed immigration, No.1. This was followed by exaggeration of product efficacy and exploitation of consumers lack of knowledge, and violation of Guidelines for Celebrities in Advertising, BARC Guidelines, and Drugs and Magic Remedies regulations. Several claims were misleading and were likely to lead to widespread disappointment to consumers, according to the ASCI. Namita Bajpai By Express News Service Lucknow: The Special Investigation Team (SIT) set up to probe into the killing of Apple executive Vivek Tiwari by two constables of UP police in a posh locality of state capital on September 29, this year, submitted its report to ADG, Lucknow, here on Wednesday. As per the sources, the SIT has found constable Prashant Kumar accused of Tiwaris murder. It has been claimed in the report that constable Prashant Kumar Chaudhary shot Tiwari dead intentionally despite knowing the consequences of firing a bullet. Notably, Tiwari, 38, was shot dead on by UP police constable Prashant Kumar Chaudhary in posh Gomti Nagar extension area when he was going to drop his ex-colleague Sana Khan to her place. Constable Prashant Chaudhary was accompanied by another constable Sandeep Kumar on night patrol duty. The autopsy report of slain Apple executive and the version of lone eye witness Sana Khan had ripped apart the claim of accused constable Prashant Chaudhary that he fired in self-defence when the Apple executive tried to run him over. The Lucknow police filed the chargesheet in the case after SIT, headed by IG, Lucknow Sujit Pandey, submitted the probe report to ADG Lucknow. The report allegedly claims that the erring constable had intentionally opened fire at Vivek Tiwari and not in self-defence as was claimed by him in the statement. The SIT, in its report, has recommended that constable Prashant should be tried under Section 302 and Sandeep under Section 323 of IPC. The report believably claims that the recreation of crime scene and findings of the Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL) showed that the entire incident took place within 38 seconds. It also says that the evidence sufficiently proved that even if Vivek Tiwari tried to escape by driving away, there was no threat to life of accused constables. It has also come to light after the submission of report that both Vivek and his ex-colleague Sana Khan were sitting inside the vehicle (SUV) with seat belts on indicating that the SUV was in motion and not stationary as was claimed by constable Prashant Chaudhary. Consequently, the FSL findings infer that the tangent formed by the bullet showed the accused constable opened fire at the apple executive only after taking a proper aim with the intention to kill him. The report also claims that firing at Vivek was against the service rules and training of the constables on patrol duty. The weapon used to kill Vivek was the revolver allotted in the name of constable Prashant Kumar Chaudhary. The SIT report also claimed that constables changed the position of their bike later to make it look like as if it was hit by the vehicle. Constable Prashant had argued that he had to shoot the Apple executive in self defence as he was trying to run over his bike on the fateful night. Minor tyre mark of SUV on the bike showed a slight touch and not collision as was claimed by the accused cops in their statements. Meanwhile, the damaged bumper of the SUV was because of the collision impact with the pillar of the underpass after the incident when the cops had fled the scene of crime after shooting Vivek. Prasanta Mazumdar By Express News Service GUWAHATI: Congress president Rahul Gandhi has promised to waive of farm loan nationwide if the party is voted to power in the next general elections. In Assam, in a move seen as warming up to the farmers, the states BJP-led coalition government has announced that it will make agricultural loan interest-free from the next financial year. The Sarbananda Sonowal government on Wednesday announced three schemesAssam Farmers Credit Subsidy Scheme (AFCSS), Assam Farmers Interest Relief Scheme (AFIRS) and Assam Farmers Incentive Scheme (AFIS)for the welfare of farmers. Finance minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said the state has 27 lakh agricultural households in 26,000 revenue villages and the AFCSS scheme would benefit 2.62 families of farmers. Under AFCSS, whatever amount of loan the farmers took from banks and whatever amount they repaid, 25 per cent of the money will be reimbursed by the state government. For example, a farmer availed of a loan of Rs.1 lakh and repaid Rs.50,000. If he repays another Rs.25,000, then the remaining Rs.25,000 will be paid by the state government. The upper cap of the governments assistance will be Rs.25,000, he said. The scheme was in commemoration of the 125th anniversary of 1894 farmers uprising of Patharughat in Assam in which 140 peasants were killed by the British. This scheme is for the period from April 1, 2018 to March 31, 2019. This is a one-time scheme but it could be extended depending on its success. The government will have to spend around Rs.500 crore for the scheme, Sarma said. Explaining AFIRS, he said currently three per cent of the seven per cent interest against farm loan is paid by the Central government and the remaining four per cent is required to be paid by farmers. To give relief to the farmers, the state government has decided to pay the four per cent loan which the farmers pay now. And if the Centre decides to withdraw its assistance, then the state government will pay the entire seven per cent interest against farm loan. The scheme, which will come into effect from April 1, 2019, will be a permanent feature. Initially, the state government will have to spend around Rs.200 crore to continue this, Sarma said, adding farm loan in Assam usually does not exceed Rs.2 lakh. Talking about the third scheme, the minister said through AFIC, the government was focused on bringing back the defaulting farmers into the banking system. There are an estimated three lakh farmers in Assam who defaulted on farm loans. Under this scheme, the government will give Rs.10,000 to a farmer to help him repay loan. Supposing he took a loan of Rs.50,000 from a bank but never repaid. The government will give him Rs.10,000 if he is willing to pay Rs.40,000 to repay the loan entirely. This scheme will cost the government around Rs.100 crore, Sarma said. He also said that for all the three schemes, five lakh farmers would be covered in the first phase. By PTI BHOPAL: The Congress stormed topower inn Madhya Pradesh after 15 years, while violent protests over dilution of the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act kept the Hindi heartland state on tenterhooks during 2018. The state witnessed hectic political activity before the Assembly polls which concluded with a nail-biting finish when Congress, after a see-saw battle with the BJP, emerged as the single largest party, with five seats more than the BJP. Nine-time Lok Sabha member Kamal Nath became the chief minister and hours after taking charge, announced a farm loan waiver, a poll promise of Congress president Rahul Gandhi, expected to cost Rs 50,000 crore to the state exchequer. Nath faces the challenge of putting the state economy, having borrowings of around Rs 1.60 lakh crore, back on track. The year saw a setback for the BJP as its longest serving chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan was unseated. In pre-poll surveys, Chouhan emerged more popular than Nath and Congress leader Jyotiraditya Scindia but this did not help the BJP retain power despite it getting 41.02 per cent votes as against Congress' 40.89 per cent in the state polls. Till now, a party securing less vote share than its rival never came to power in the state. In the run-up the the polls, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Congress chief Rahul Gandhi addressed 10 public meetings in MP between November 15 and 25, while BJP president Amit Shah addressed 15 public meetings and held road shows. On November 25, Shah stumbled and fell while alighting from a vehicle during his road show in Ashok Nagar district, but escaped unhurt. The state witnessed violent protests in April after the Supreme Court on March 20 "diluted" provisions of the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, ruling that government servants should not be arrested without prior sanction and private citizens too, can be arrested only after an inquiry under the law. Opposing the verdict, several Dalit bodies called for a nationwide strike in which violent incidents and blockades of roads and rail tracks were reported from several states. Six people were killed in Madhya Pradesh during the bandh which witnessed clashes between police and protesters and incidents of arson. It led to the birth of anewpolitical party called 'SAPAKS'(Samanya Alpsankhyak Pichda Adivasi Varg Kalyan Samaj), which pocketed 0. 4 per cent votes in the state polls, affecting prospects of other parties' candidates. A few months before the polls, Chouhan's move to accord Minister of State (MoS) status to five seers drew sharp criticism from the Congress. Chouhan tried to justify his action, saying it was aimedatroping in all sections of society for public good. The seers had earlier announced that they would take out a 'Narmada scam yatra' to expose corruption in the river cleanliness drive. Later, Swami Namdeo Tyagi, the self-styled godman popularly known as Computer Baba, resigned as MoS, accusing Chouhan of not fulfilling his promises. In January, former Gujarat chief minister Anandiben Patel was appointedthe state governor. February brought good news for the Congress when it retained both Mungaoli and Kolaras Assembly seats in bypolls. In June, farmers came out on streets in some parts of the state seeking remunerative price for their produce. Former Union Minister Arjun Singh's wife Saroj Kumari (83) petitioned a local court in June seeking action against her son and then Leader of the Opposition Ajay Singh, who lost his traditional Churhat seat in the November assembly polls. Vyapam scam, a multi-crore recruitment and admission racket, also kept the state in news. Congress leader Digvijay Singh filed a complaint in a court alleging that prosecuting agencies CBI and others were protecting then chief minister Chouhan, Union minister Uma Bharti and police officers in the scam. Egypt's Coptic Orthodox Church has decided to appoint a team of international lawyers to restore its legitimate ownership of the Deir Sultan Monastery in Jerusalem, said Ibrahim Azmi, the international media officer of the Coptic Orthodox Church, according to Al-Ahram Arabic news website. Azmi said that the church has also filed a complaint with the Ministry of Justice and the prime minister against the practices of Israeli police, and will also file a lawsuit to demand the right to restoration of the monastery. In late October, Israeli security forces assaulted Egyptian Coptic monks and arrested at least one during a protest against the restoration of Deir Sultan Monastery. The arrested monk was later released. Deir Sultan had been returned by Sultan Salah Al-Din to the Coptic Church in the 12th century, but Israeli occupation authorities expelled Coptic monks from the monastery after the 1967 War and handed it over to Ethiopian monks, prompting Pope Cyril VI of the Coptic Orthodox Church to ban the travel of Copts to Jerusalem. In 1971, the Israeli High Court of Justice ruled that the monastery rightfully belongs to the Coptic Orthodox Church, but Israeli authorities have not enforced the ruling. Ownership of the 1,000-year-old monastery has been the source of a decades-long dispute. The monastery, where Ethiopians have lived for decades, had been owned by the Egyptian Coptic Orthodox Church since the 7th century. Copts remained in control of the monastery until 1970 when Israeli authorities handed its control over to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church after police changed the monastery's locks and gave them the keys. Search Keywords: Short link: By PTI NEW DELHI: Taking a dig at BJP chief Amit Shah over his claim of winning at least 23 Lok Sabha seats from Bengal in the 2019 elections, Trinamool Congress Wednesday said the party should rather focus on retaining the two seats it has in the state. Reacting to the Shah's claims, Trinamool's Derek O' Brien said that the BJP chief and Prime Minister Narendra Modi were involved in only "big talk". "Sitting in Mumbai and Delhi and giving these big statements. The BJP has two seats in Bengal and their first priority should be to hold on to these two seats because if they don't watch it they will get zero seats like rosogolla," he said. O'Brien added that while the BJP is talking about winning more seats in Bengal, recent bypolls in the state have shown that their vote share is decreasing. BJP, which won 30 per cent of the votes last time, managed only 20 per cent this time, he said. "Now they are claiming that they will win many seats in Bengal. When it comes to numbers and figures they are the 'jumla jodi' -- Modi and Shah. Jumla Jodi who said they will put Rs 15 lakh in your bank account, who will give two crore jobs every year. Jumla Jodi who said they will double farmers' income in two years and who said they will have a clean sweep in the recent elections. So whenever they give figures the figures are jumlas," said the Trinamool parliamentary party leader in Rajya Sabha. Over the last few elections, the BJP has emerged as the main opposition to Trinamool Congress in West Bengal. At a summit in Mumbai, Amit Shah Wednesday said that people of Bengal are waiting for change and his party will win at least 23 seats from the state in the upcoming polls. Namita Bajpai By Express News Service Lucknow: In a fresh twist to Bulandshahr cow slaughter case which led a huge mob violence claiming two lives on December 3, four persons arrested earlier have come out clean in the probe conducted by Special Investigative Team (SIT). Consequently, the district police moved to court to ensure their release under relevant section of CrPC on Wednesday. ALSO READ | Bulandshahr violence: Relief for man mistakenly named in FIR due to police 'goof up' as real culprit surrenders The four men --- Sarfuddin, Sajid, Banne Khan and Asif -- were apprehended on December 5 after being named in the FIR filed by district Bajrang Dal convenor and an accused in mob violence, Yogesh Raj for alleged cow slaughter. A trolley full of carcasses was recovered in a field in Mahaw village, Syana town of Bulandshahr district on Dcember 3. However, the FIR lodged by Yogesh Raj naming four triggered speculations of deliberate attempt by the Bajrang Dal activist to settle personal score with them. However, as per Bulandshahr City Superintendent of Police Atul Srivastava, police were now proceeding with formalities to release the men "wrongly framed. Sufficient evidence was not there against the four persons who were earlier held for cow slaughter. Formalities are now underway under Section 169 (release of accused when evidence deficient) of the CrPC," said SP Srivastava. Meanwhile, during the investigation, another gang of four involved in the cow slaughter emerged as culprit of December 3 incident. The police have arrested three of them-- Nadim, Rahees and Kala -- who are now being dubbed as the main accused behind the cow slaughter in Mahaw village. While three of the gang behind the cow slaughter have been arrested. Their court aide Haroon is still absconding," said Prabhakar Chaudhary, SSP Bulandshahar said. The SSP claimed that police team had recovered the arms used to slaughter the cows on the fateful intervening night of Decemebr2 and 3. Even scientific evidence also proved the involvement of the three persons held now in the case, he added. Police said that the gang members used to shoot the cows down before slaughtering them. The meat was later distributed among gang members. A DBBL gun, a gypsy and equipments used for cow slaughter was also recovered from them police said. Meanwhile, the man accused in the case, Yogesh Raj is still absconding. On December 3, over 400 people had gone on rampage after a trolley load of cow carcasses were found in a field in Syana town in Bulandshahr. The violence, however, had claimed two lives including inspector Subodh Kumar Singh and a 20-year-old Sumit. Inspector Singh and his team had gone to the area to pacify the mob when they came under attack. By PTI NEW DELHI: The number of complaints received by the National Commission for Minorities (NCM) has gone down over the last three years, the government told the Lok Sabha on Wednesday. Minority Affairs minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, in a written response to a question, said that on receiving complaints, the NCM takes appropriate action as per provisions of the NCM Act, 1992, and the procedure adopted by it. As mandated under Section 9 of the Act, the commission has been taking up cases regarding deprivation of rights and safeguards of the minorities with the authorities in the concerned state governments or the central government, he said. There has been no increase in complaints received by the NCM over the last three years, Naqvi said to a question on whether there as been an increase in the number of complaints to the minority panel. The minister also gave details of the complaints received by the NCM in the last three years. In 2015-16, a total of 1,974 complaints, including 1,437 by Muslims and 144 by Christians, were received, and out of those 1,960 were disposed off. In 2016-17, a total of 1,647 complaints, including 1,231 by Muslims and 102 by Christians, were received, and out of those 1,607 were disposed off. A total of 1,498 complaints, including 1,128 by Muslims and 100 by Christians, were received in 2017-18, and out of those 1,384 were disposed off. In 2018-19 till December 13, a total of 1,342 complaints, including 952 by Muslims and 106 by Christians, were received, and out of those 253 were disposed off. By PTI NEW DELHI: Hamid Nihal Ansari, the software engineer who has returned home after spending six years in a Pakistani jail, met External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj on Wednesday and narrated his ordeal. Officials said 33-year-old Ansari, who came back to India on Tuesday, became emotional while talking about the difficult phase of his life in Pakistan. Ansari, who was accompanied by his mother and other family members, also thanked Swaraj and the Ministry of External Affairs for persisting with the case and taking it up with Islamabad. Welcome home, son! Indian national, Hamid Ansari returns home after six years of incarceration in Pakistan. EAM @SushmaSwaraj warmly welcomed him in Delhi today. pic.twitter.com/vM4HXF2ORc Raveesh Kumar (@MEAIndia) December 19, 2018 The Mumbai resident, who returned to India after crossing the Wagah-Attari border, was imprisoned in the Peshawar Central Jail after being sentenced by a military court on December 15, 2015. According to official sources, India issued 96 notes verbales to Pakistan seeking consular access to Ansari. The decision to release him was on account of relentless pressure from New Delhi, they said. Shortly before his arrival on Tuesday, Ansari's mother Fauzia Ansari told reporters that the prayers of the family and of all those who wished for his safe return had been answered. "I am immensely happy today. I don't have words to describe my feelings," she said. His father, Nihal Ansari, said, "It is a new dawn for us". Ansari was arrested in 2012 for illegally entering Pakistan from Afghanistan, reportedly to meet a girl he had befriended online. His jail term ended on December 15 but he was not able to leave for India as his legal documents were not ready. On Thursday, the Peshawar High Court gave the Pakistan government a month's deadline to complete his repatriation process. In reply to a habeas corpus petition filed by his mother Fauzia Ansari, the high court was informed that he was in custody of the Pakistan Army and was being tried by a military court. Amit Agnihotri By Express News Service NEW DELHI: Former prime minister Manmohan Singh, a well-known economist, walked down the memory lane on Tuesday as he recounted his sweet and sour interactions with politicians during a long innings in public life. I was not an alien to working with politicians, Singh, known as the architect of the 1991 economic reforms as finance minister in the government of Narasimha Rao, said when asked about his long career as a bureaucrat. The former PM, who has been accused of being a silent PM by the BJP, took a dig at PM Narendra Modi, saying he was not afraid of meeting the Press. I wasnt the PM who was afraid of talking to the Press. I met the Press regularly and on every foreign trip that I undertook, I had a Press conference on return in the plane and after the visit, Manmohan said. Singh, speaking at the launch of his six-volume book series called Changing India, recalled how former prime minister Rao backed him but the Cabinet members were opposed to the new industrial licensing policy. Manmohan thanked two of his former Cabinet colleagues, Mani Shankar Aiyar and Nathu Ram Mirdha, for supporting his reform ideas. Singh, who has been described as the accidental prime minister, remarked that he was an accidental finance minister as well. He said Rao wanted him to head the finance ministry and conveyed the message through aide PC Alexander. The next day Singh got a call from PM Rao, who told him to dress up properly and turn up at the Cabinet swearing-in ceremony. By Express News Service NEW DELHI: The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Wednesday questioned former finance minister P Chidambaram in the INX Media case, in which his son Karti is also an accused. According to the sources, this was for the first time when Chidambaram was questioned in the INX Media case. He was asked to depose before the investigating officer (IO) of the case to record his statement under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) in this case. The senior Congress leader came along with his lawyer to the ED office in Jamnagar house at around 11.30 am and recorded his statement. The ED had registered a PMLA case in this deal on the basis of a CBI FIR and had alleged that irregularities took place in the FIPB clearance to INX Media, a venture promoted by former media baron Peter Mukherjea and Indrani Mukerjea, for receiving overseas funds to the tune of Rs 305 crore in 2007 when P Chidambaram was the Union finance minister. It had registered an Enforcement Case Information Report (ECIR), the EDs equivalent of a police FIR, against the accused named in a CBI complaint, including his son Karti, INX Media and its directors Peter and Indrani Mukerjea. Karti Chidambaram was arrested on February 28 by the CBI for allegedly taking money to facilitate the FIPB clearance to INX Media in 2007. He was later granted bail. In October, the Enforcement Directorate attached assets worth Rs 54 crore of Karti Chidambaram in India, the UK and Spain including his property in Kodaikanal and Ooty in Tamil Nadu and a flat in New Delhis Jorbagh. Though Karti had dismissed the action against him as bizarre and outlandish, he was arrested on February 28 by the CBI for allegedly taking money to facilitate the FIPB clearance to INX Media in 2007. He was later granted bail.Last month, the Delhi High Court extended the interim protection from arrest to the veteran politician till January 15 next year. According to the ED, the alleged irregularities took place in 2007 when Chidambaram was the Finance Minister under the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government. By Express News Service NEW DELHI: The Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB) has increased its strength along the India-Bhutan border in Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh, not far from the mountainous terrain of Diban, Dua-Delai and Lohit valleys along the China border in the Tibetan region, following last years Doklam standoff. In the past one year, the countrys youngest paramilitary force created 18 new Border Outposts (BOPs) in Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh, which started functioning this year. Three new BOPs in Sikkim and 15 in Arunachal Pradesh were established and they have started functioning this year to provide better security and patrolling in the areas bordering Bhutan. The three new BOPs are in Western Sikkim, which touches the Bhutan border, SSB Director General Surjeet Singh Deswal said on Tuesday. Deswal, however, clarified that his force had nothing to do with the operations along the India-China border. The 18 new BOPs are among the 72 which began functioning this year, he added. Indian and Chinese soldiers were locked in a 73-day standoff at Doklam in the Sikkim section of the India-China border over the building of a road by the Chinese military in an area claimed by Bhutan. The crisis was resolved on August 28. At present, 53 battalions of the SSB are deployed on the 699-km Indo-Bhutan border and the 1,751-km India-Nepal border as part of its primary task of providing security with the establishment and operationalisation of 708 BOPs along the borders of the two countries. Another senior SSB official said that 176 BOPs were functioning along the India-Bhutan border, which runs along the states of Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh, West Bengal and Assam, while 533 are along the India-Nepal border, which runs across the states of Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal and Sikkim. The SSB is deployed along the borders India shares with Bhutan and Nepal and the force is instrumental in preventing trans-border crimes like smuggling, human trafficking and other illegal activities.The DG stressed that construction of roads to connect the border posts was top priority of all the government organisations involved in this task. He said the force, raised after the 1962 Chinese aggression, was mulling using laser fence technology to plug loopholes along the borders of Nepal and Bhutan. By IANS AGARTALA: History was created when the first straight poll battle between the country's dominant Left party, the CPI-M, and the BJP saw the Marxist stronghold of Tripura crumble in the February 2018 assembly elections, after 25 years in power. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-IPFT (Indigenous People's Front of Tripura) coalition swept the polls, winning 44 seats in the 60-member assembly. The BJP alone secured 36 seats while the IPFT, a tribal-oriented party, won eight seats. The CPI-M won the remaining 16. Before the 2018 polls, neither the BJP nor the IPFT had won a seat in the assembly and their vote share was less than two or three per cent. ALSO READ: Former Tripura CM Manik Sarkar accuses BJP for rising violence in state The 2018 polls were also a major setback for the Congress, which had ruled the state for 23 years (1959-1977 and 1988-1993). For the first time in 40 years, the key opposition party remained unrepresented in the assembly. "The CPI-M's tally (16 seats) would have much less if they had not got the support of the minorities, specially the Muslims," renowned political analyst and writer Sekhar Datta told IANS. Large-scale migration from the Congress to the BJP and numerous other political developments in Tripura in 2016 and 2017 set the stage for the first face-to-face battle between the BJP and the Left. In October, the BJP swept the local bodies' by-polls, winning 3,386 seats in different Panchayati Raj institutions. The CPI-M and Congress alleged that through intimidation, attacks and arson, BJP candidates had won 96 per cent of the unopposed seats and the remaining through large-scale rigging. ALSO READ: No lynching in Tripura in 25 years of Left government, says Manik Sarkar On the welfare front, the BJP-led government, in October, hiked the salaries and allowances of 219,454 government employees and pensioners in line with the 7th Central Pay Commission recommendations, fulfilling the saffron party's pre-poll promise. Hoever, the burning issue of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam is gradually spreading in Tripura as well, with several tribal-based parties, including alliance partner IPFT, agitating for an NRC update, with 1951 as the cut-off year. And, in a major breather, the Supreme Court last month extended the services of 10,323 Tripura government teachers by two more years, as the state government had appealed for. ALSO READ: Tripura government attacking democratic acts, says Manik Sarkar The year 2018 also saw a crusade against the drug menaces in Tripura. Immediately after the BJP-IPFT government headed by Chief Minister Biplab Kumar Deb coming to power, the security agencies comprising state and central para-military forces, along with district administrations, began a war against the cultivation, trade and smuggling of drugs, especially cannabis (ganja). Various security agencies in the last nine months have seized huge quantities of numerous drugs valued at over Rs 40 crore. "Different security agencies in the past nine months have seized 65,000 kg of dry cannabis (ganja), over two crore ganja plants, one lakh bottles of various types of cough syrups (that serve as intoxicans), 1.65 lakh habit-forming tablets, 2,626 grams of brown sugar and heroin in Tripura," officials of Tripura's home and revenue departments said. ALSO READ: Tripura CM Biplab Kumar Deb maintains his stand on Indians inventing internet during Mahabharata era, blasts critics Deb, who pledged to make Tripura a "drug-free state", said : "During the short period of nine months, over 200 people who are involved in the drug menace had to go to jail. As the drug related activities were reduced, 40 per cent atrocities on women and 10 per cent incidents of rape of young girls have been decreased." On the security front, there were no incidents of militancy for the fourth consecutive year in a state once devastated by terrorism. However, various crimes, specially rioting have moderately increased. According to an official document of Tripura police, there were 78 and 124 instances of rioting in 2016 and 2017 respectively but this shot up to 245 in 2018. Former Chief Minister and CPI-M politburo member Manik Sarkar, while evaluating the governance of the coalition government, said that its dictatorial and illegal acts, like bulldozing of hundreds of opposition party offices, houses and assets belonging to Left party members and supporters are creating "total unprecedented anarchy" in the state. "There is a huge crisis of food and jobs in Tripura specially in the hilly and interior areas. The state's economy is entirely shattered. Without dealing with the basic crisis, the BJP government is only bulldozing opposition party offices and continuing with its undemocratic activities," Sarkar told IANS. By PTI NEW DELHI: A Delhi court Wednesday reserved for December 22 its order on bail plea of Christian Michel, alleged middleman charge-sheeted and arrested in the AgustaWestland VVIP chopper case. The 57-year-old British national told Special Judge Arvind Kumar that he was not required for custodial interrogation and no purpose will be served by keeping him in further custody. "My handwriting has already been taken. There were no original documents with the CBI to match it with. I have volunteered to provide all the documents," Michel told the court. He was in CBI custody for 15 days. Michel was arrested in the UAE and extradited to India on December 4. READ| VVIP chopper scam: Christian Michel bore foreign travel expenses of IAF officers, CBI tells court The next day, he was produced in the court, which allowed his five-day custodial interrogation by the CBI which was later extended by five more days. Michel is among the three alleged middlemen being probed in the case by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). The others are Guido Haschke and Carlo Gerosa. Both the agencies notified an Interpol red corner notice (RCN) against him after the court issued a non-bailable warrant against him. The CBI opposed the bail application, saying Michel might flee as he had already tried to escape from Dubai just before his extradition. The probe agency said that Michel was an influential person having links with people from the ministry and other bureaucrats and politicians, many of who are its witnesses in the case. "We brought him with so much difficulty. Some new facts have emerged and we need to have follow-ups on those. He has not been a cooperative witness. A lot more to be unearthed of out own. He has no roots in India here. He has property etc but he may sell them and go away," the probe agency said. The court had earlier extended by four days the CBI custody of Michel on the ground that he needed to be confronted with various documents in the case. The CBI had said that he was required to be taken to the premises of Pawan Hans India Ltd in Mumbai to verify his version of his alleged attempted negotiations to buy back WG-30 helicopters, to identify the shipper and to confront the officials of Pawan Hans India. The agency said that voluminous documents have been received from various countries pursuant to the 'Letter of Requests' and the accused was yet to be confronted with a number of them. The defence counsel had opposed the CBI application for further remand, saying already enough time was granted to the agency and nothing incriminating was found against the accused. The CBI has alleged there was an estimated loss of Euro 398. 21 million (about 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 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. Amna Mirza By Increased interdependence has been dealt a blow by heightened commercial animosity. The US and China seem to be engaged in never-ending trade conflicts. With the trade strategies of most nations in disarray, there is an urgent need to end the current deadlock that is not good for any country. What is also evident is the accompanying clash of ideologies, where the underlying idea of development free trade versus protectionismis being hotly debated. Nations across the globe must deliberate on this crisis of the modern age. While the crisis is in the form of a stealthy conflict, the weapons deployed are in some ways more impactful than the ones used in conventional warfare. Tariffs are being used to stop other nations from emerging as viable competitors.With the establishment of international institutions, global governance norms were altered. These gave primacy to the free flow of goods and services marked by the context of the world where there was space-time compression. But this trade war is having a dramatic effect on the individual commodities industry now. One has to think of how to rebut the idea that trade leads to harm. Yes, in the process of exchange, the terms of benefits might not be the same. But a mere absence of parity does not mean we should end the entire drill. Instead of the short-term policy of harming each other to secure the goals of national interest, one must think comprehensivelyof strategic structural reforms. Today what is global is connected to the local. Therefore nations must accord primacy to trade policy and the parties can make it an electoral issue. There is a need for coordinated thinking and action on corporate tax reforms, for harmoniously gaining through global trade, rather than pulling out of it. One can also not neglect the rising trade deficits and falling imports. It is important to add here that trade balances do not emerge out of ad-hoc measures, just as staunch nationalistic sentiments cannot serve the purpose of national security unless we look at the larger picture of immigration policies and reforms. Similarly, in the case of the trade war, as the heat is being felt by each countryfrom Taiwans semiconductor industry to Indian agricultural sectorone cannot ignore the inappropriate practices and have to address the problems. With the backlash to globalisation, the trade crisis is moving into a new realma technology war. This will fundamentally change global relations and also demand open communication and coordination amongst various shareholders. Information theft and malicious hardware are the reasons cited in the battle where tech and 5G are radically redefining the domain of power, with data as the new currency. From developed to developing nations, all now aspire for a smart-cities model where there is an app for every problem. Cyberespionage has emerged as a non-traditional security dimension where the threat cuts across borders. Huaweis technical expertise enabled it to challenge Apple Inc. and others. Its grandiose vision of expansion finds support from Chinas government and blue-chip firms. The US requesting that Canada arrest Wanzhou Meng, the chief financial officer of Huawei, is seen as an American declaration of war on Chinas business community. It could very well lead the world towards another disaster. No doubt accountability and transparency are needed in the corporate world. But it is clear that the US is going after Huawei due to the Chinese companys success in marketing cutting-edge 5G technologies. Even in the past when Bank of America or Barclays busted the sanctions, the responsibility was fixed at the organisational level rather than the individual level. One cannot duck the issue that such incidents also derail trade talks. With the rise of legal challenges in both the US and China, and tariffs for private-sector businesses and small-scale firms in the respective nations, the harsh truths are at odds with the purported gains sought from trade animosity. The situation has a ripple effect with no timely payment of dues for workers and staff. US President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping are witnessing a sharp downturn in their nations, and sadly efforts for a truce are far from being impactful. Amidst this upheaval due to the ongoing uncertainty, pharmaceutical to engineering corporations are attempting to relocate to areas with better returns and lesser risks. The US-China bonhomie seen in Argentina during the G-20 meet is having little impact on the underlying conflict. With neither side a winner in the trade crisis, a lack of political will to solve it and the drain of economic resources of the nations involvedboth actively and passivelythe global polity, with individual and collective action, has to try to de-escalate the situation. It should use appropriate mechanisms to sort out global problems like poverty, inequality and climate change in the interests of all. We must keep in mind that in these realms, we sail and sink together. Egypt's public prosecution has summoned the parents of an underage couple whose recent engagement has sparked a public debate, the prosecution said in a statement. A video footage of the engagement ceremony of 15-year-old Fares and his relative Nada, 14, in the Nile Delta town of Kafr El-Shiekh went viral online earlier this week, sparking ridicule from social media users and condemnation from officials. The public prosecutor's office said in a statement on Wednesday that it had summoned the parents of the duo and "instructed them to distance their kids from things not commensurate with their age." Prosecutors investigating the matter have taken the necessary legal measures as prescribed by Egypt's child law, the statement said without elaborating. Egypt's National Council for Childhood and Motherhood (NCCM) condemned the incident two days ago as a "flagrant violation" of childrens rights and said it had the parents pledge to halt any marriage procedures until the pair reach the legal age of 18. According to a report by UNICEF and NCCM in June, one out of 20 girls aged 15 to 17 and one out of 10 girls aged 15 to 19 are currently, or at one time have been, married. The report, which features data from Egypt's official statistics agency CAPMAS, says girls in rural areas are three times more vulnerable to child marriage than those living in urban areas. Search Keywords: Short link: K Krishnachand By Express News Service THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: On Tuesday, the state took another major step in ensuring transgender rights when four transwomen visited Sabarimala. At a time when the Left government is facing flak over the womens entry issue, it scored a political point by allowing transwomen to visit the hill shrine. On Sunday, the police had stopped transgeder devotees at Erumely saying they were wearing sarees. This invited severe criticisms from all corners forcing the government to step in. On Monday, the state gave them permission to visit the temple. Last year, the same team had visited the temple this time clad in mens attire without facing any trouble. Transgender activists feel the police action was triggered by the widespread protest against SC verdict allowing women of al ages to enter the hill shrine. Four TG devotees offer prayers Sabarimala: Four transgender devotees Avantika Vishnu, Renjumol Mohan, Trupti Shetty and Ananya Kumari offered prayers at the temple here on at 9 am Tuesday. Noted transgender activist Kalki Subramaniam said: There is nothing new in transgender devotees visiting Sabarimala. But this year, the SC verdict made the law enforcers more cautious about the people entering the temple. So when they came wearing saree, the police stopped. Though Kalki applauded the efforts of the state government in securing transgenders rights, she was quite apprehensive about the empowerment of transgender community. The state has done exceptional things for the protection of transgenders. But they should also make policies for their empowerment, Kalki added. Biju Prabhakar, Special Secretary, Social Justice department, said the governments decision to allow trans devotees to visit the temple in womens dress was praiseworthy. Though the state government has succeeded in initiating many projects for the welfare of transgender community, a lack of leadership in the community failed to achieve the empowerment. The government has been implementing many projects for the community. However, no one in the community came forward. There are many bright trans people and they are capable of becoming leaders. If they come forward, empowerment will happen, said Biju. Akeeramon hails NSS stance Sabarimala:Thantra Vidyapeedom patron and All India Brahmin Association vice-president Akeeramon Kalidasa Bhattathiri on Tuesday welcomed NSS general secretary G Sukumaran Nairs open stance in support of the devotees and for the protection of the temples ongoing practices. Akeeramon said the devotees cannot be blamed for thinking that the decision for organising the statewide womens wall was taken with the intention to influence the revision petition on womens entry which the Supreme Court will consider on January 22. Kollam Thulasi moves HC Kochi: Malayalam actor Kollam Thulasi on Tuesday approached the High Court seeking anticipatory bail in a case related to the controversial remarks he made against women over the Sabarimala Temple issue at an NDA protest meeting. The court has sought the governments view on his plea. The Kollam Principal Sessions Court had earlier dismissed the bail plea. In his petition, Thulasi submitted the Sessions Court failed to consider the fact that he had tendered an unconditional apology for his remarks. Thulasi has been charged under IPC Sections 504 and 295 (A) By Express News Service CHENNAI : Yet another public interest litigation (PIL) petition challenging a Government Order (GO) dated June 25 last, of the State government banning manufacture, sale and use of plastic products from January 1, has been filed in the Madras High Court. A division bench of Justices M M Sundresh and Krishnan Ramaswamy, before which the petition from the Tamil Nadu Plastics Manufacturers Association, came up for hearing on Tuesday, tagged it with the other PILs on the issue and posted for hearing on Friday (December 21). The State is to file its counter by then. The GO issued by the Environment and Forest (EC.2) department, has imposed total ban on manufacture, storage, supply, sale and use of one time use and throwaway plastics such as plastic sheets for food wrapping, dining table spread, plates, tea cups and tumblers, water pouches and packets, straw, carry bags and flags, irrespective of their thickness. According to the petitioner, the GO violated the doctrine of legitimate expectation and promissory estoppel (legal principle that a promise is enforceable by law, even if made without formal consideration). It is liable to be set aside due to non-application of mind. It was contrary to Central legislations like Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, Environment (Protection) Rules, 1986, Solid Waste Management Rules, 2016 and Plastic Waste Management Rules, 2016. Even though the so-called single use items had been in existence for many years, it certainly has not been a menace or an issue either in volume or in quantity. That is why these single use items had never been regarded as threat to the environment or to health, and not considered for Legislation by the Central government. On the other hand, these items are used by common man to ensure hygiene and quality at affordable prices. The total ban is also in violation of the principles of natural justice. The government has not taken any step for implementation of Plastic Waste Management Rules, 2016, as per which the urban/local bodies shall be responsible for the development of infrastructure for segregation and collection, etc. This apart, plastic manufacture is being carried out by the petitioners in conformity with the norms and standards prescribed by the Central legislation and within the parameters of Bureau of Indian Standards. While so, there cannot be any order of total ban. The State has no legislative competence to pass such order, the association said. By Express News Service CHENNAI: In a significant order having far-reaching consequences, a division bench of the Madras High Court has held that no political parties shall erect digital banners in public places all over Tamil Nadu until further orders from the court. The bench of Justices M Sathyanarayanan and P Rajamanickam gave the ruling while passing interim orders on a PIL petition from social activist 'Traffic' K R Ramaswamy on Wednesday. The bench also sought for an undertaking from the state government that it would honour the rules relating to road safety and the judgments of the court relating to the issue. The matter will be taken up for further hearing on January 4. The illegal erection of banners by political parties is one the persistent problems in Tamil Nadu and the banners often obstruct the movement of pedestrians. Earlier this month, the Madras High Court had directed the Corporation of Chennai to furnish all details pertaining to the erection of digital banners and hoardings in connection with former Chief Minister and AIADMK founder M G Ramachandran's centenary celebrations throughout the state. After pulled up by the courts, the Chennai Corporation on Tuesday issued a statement that banners violate the norms and those erected illegally should be removed immediately to avoid a fine of Rs 5000 or a year of imprisonment or both. Any banner should be erected after due permission from the Chennai Corporation, for a period of six days after which it should be removed without causing any damage, the statement said. Every banner shall carry at its bottom, details of the license number, date of issue of license and the specifications of the banner against which the permission has been obtained failing which legal action would be initiated against the concerned violators. Bagalavan Perier B By Express News Service VILLUPURAM: Peace eludes the Dalits of Kazhuperumpakkam village in Villupuram district even after their deaths. For over a century, they have been seeking adequate space to bury their dead but their struggle shows no signs of coming to an end. P Ramalingam, a 70-year-old resident of Kazhuperumpakkam Colony in Vanur taluk, says that the fight for a new cemetery began during his grandfathers time and has continued to this day, with his grandsons now taking it up. Many years ago, our forefathers settled here as farmhands. During that period, the landlords had given us 12 cents of land on the western side of the village to be used as a burial ground. Today, there are 300 families residing here and there is not much space left, says Ramalingam. As this small piece of land has run out of space, the Dalits have been petitioning officials and politicians one after the other to allocate a new burial ground for them. Of course, they cant even imagine asking for the right to bury their dead in the common burial ground of the village it is a well-settled norm in most villages in Tamil Nadu that Dalits needs to be segregated even in their deaths, with separate burial grounds for them and for caste Hindus. Recently, officials have started the process to lay a new road to the old cemetery, despite the Dalits telling them that there is no space left there. The Dalits have instead been seeking the allocation of a small portion of the poramboke land in the village as a burial ground for them. This seems to have put them in conflict with the caste Hindus of the village, some of whom have built buildings on the land. "We are demanding a new cemetery in the poramboke land, which measures more than three acres. We just need some space in that. We have been demanding this for more than a hundred years but a few years ago, some caste Hindu people built a few houses and a shop, and are now opposing the cemetery in that poramboke land," said M Ramani, a resident of Kazhuperumpakkam Colony. She said that government officials had promised a peace meeting last week to settle the issue between them and the caste Hindus. But until Monday, there was no communication from them. When Express contacted a revenue official in charge of the region, he said, We found that one person of the same village, who is a caste Hindu, has constructed his house near the poramboke land, where the villagers are demanding a cemetery. He has got a stay order from the Madras High Court against allocating the land for the cemetery. Due to this, we couldn't allocate the land for this purpose. As an alternative solution, measures are being taken to acquire land to lay a proper path to the old cemetery. He promised that work to pave a path for the old cemetery will be started within a week, as the paperwork was already underway. However, villagers said that laying a road to the old cemetery will be of no use as there is not much space left there and demanded that the district administration take action to solve the issue in court, and get the poramboke land for their cemetery. The Dalits say with 300 families now in the Kazhuperumpakkam Colony, the old cemetery is hardly adequate and it had always been an ordeal whenever one of them dies. The areas surrounding the old cemetery have, over time, been cultivated with casuarina, making it difficult for villagers to carry out the funeral procession. Most of the time, farmland owners, who are caste Hindus, water the land deliberately when a Dalit villager dies, forcing us to walk in the mud, said Muthukannu, another villager. It becomes even worse during rainy days. Muthukannu says there is a government school nearby. The teachers in the school have to send their students home when there is a body to be cremated because the fumes engulf the premises. When a body is cremated (some Dalit families perform cremation as per their beliefs), around five people usually circle the body, ready with bucketfuls of water in case the fire spills over to the casuarina trees of the nearby farm. With the lack of adequate lighting, it is also imperative that the body is buried or cremated before dark. Villagers added that they had submitted a petition to the collector three weeks ago after which revenue department officials and Vanur constituency MLA M Chakrabani visited the spot. Villagers had blockaded them and demanded a new cemetery. By Express News Service HYDERABAD: BJP national president Amit Shah will arrive in the city on December 24 to take stock of the poll debacle in the State. The saffron party top boss will hold meetings with party workers across all parliamentary constituencies and revive the partys fortunes in the forthcoming parliamentary elections. BJP State president, while making the announcement at a press conference here on Saturday said: BJP national president Amit Shah will visit Hyderabad to take stock of the situation. Amit Shah will hold talks with party pramukhs and karyakartas at the booth level. A cluster of three parliamentary constituencies will be reviewed, he said. Considering the fact that the party is on a weak spot, Shahs would also be considering candidates who would be fielded in the 17 parliamentary constituencies. Currently, the party has one parliamentary seat - Secunderabad constituency represented by Bandaru Dattatreya. Besides this, the party will also examine if its 22-point formula to the booth level karyakartas is being implemented. Amit Shah will examine if the 22-points are being followed. And, we have identified 14 critical constituencies on which well have a special focus, Laxman said. Seemingly taking a cue from its rival the Congress, even the BJP held that it has suspicion over EVM machines used in the recently concluded elections. There is suspicion over the way EVMs were put to use and we have doubts that the EVMs were tampered, Laxman alleged. Further, citing an example on how faulty EVM machines led to the poor voter turnout, Laxman said, In my constituency, Musheerabad, for three hours the EVMs did not function. One can know the number of people who would have gone back without casting votes. He went on to slam the Eelection Commission officials for having multiple voters deleted from the voters list and said that a mere sorry would not undo the damage. By PTI LAHORE: Mumbai attacks mastermind Hafiz Saeed has donned the hat of a column writer for a leading Urdu newspaper, stirring a debate among journalists as to how the media house allowed the head of a banned terror group to write on the Kashmir issue and the creation of Bangladesh in 1971. Saeed was declared a global terrorist by the US and the UN after the 2008 Mumbai attack and was put under house arrest in November 2008 but freed by a court some months later. He carries a USD 10 million American bounty on his head for his role in terror activities. 'Illegal aggression of India on East Pakistan. Why Pakistan is avoiding advocating for Kashmiri people' written by "Professor Hafiz Mohammad Saeed" appeared in Daily Dunya (an Urdu publication of Dunya media group of Mian Amer Mahmood) on Sunday. ALSO READ | WATCH | Leaked video shows Pakistan minister vowing to 'protect' Hafiz Saeed and his party The article carries a picture of former prime minister Indira Gandhi and some young men holding guns in Dhaka. Allowing the head of a banned terror group to contribute for a known media house has stirred a debate with journalists questioning whether the company in question allowed Saeed to write due to some "direct links" with the owner or under "someone's pressure". A court has ordered the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority to ensure that the Pakistani media does not display Saeed's pictures. In his article, "Saeed said Indira hatched a conspiracy to dismember Pakistan", lamenting the then Pakistani rulers for their failure. Saeed has extensively explained the role of India in the creation of Bangladesh and expressed his opinion as to why Kashmir is important for Pakistan. He said Pakistan should support the Kashmiri people. India has been demanding Pakistan not only to arrest the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) founder and try him in the Mumbai attack case but also punish all those involved in this carnage. Saeed launched the Milli Muslim League (MML) party in August 2017 with a so-called mission to implement the ideology of Pakistan in accordance with the 1973 Constitution. In April this year, the US placed the MML on its list of foreign terror organisations for its links with the LeT. The government has said that the MML is an off-shoot of Saeed's Jamat-ud Dawah (JuD), which has been declared as a foreign terrorist organisation by the US in June 2014. The JuD is believed to be the front organisation for the LeT which is responsible for carrying out the 2008 Mumbai attack that killed 166 people, including some Americans. By PTI GENEVA: Switzerland and Britain signed an agreement Monday guaranteeing that flights between the two countries can continue uninterrupted even if London opts to leave the European Union without a deal with Brussels. "We have managed to ensure a flawless transition, which is in the interest of both of our countries," Swiss Transportation Minister Doris Leuthard said in a statement after signing the deal in Zurich with her British counterpart Chris Grayling. Switzerland is not a member of the EU, but its relations with Britain are based on a long line of bilateral agreements between Bern and the bloc. If London and Brussels manage to reach a deal for an orderly Brexit, the bilateral agreements between Switzerland and the EU will continue to apply to Britain through the end of 2020, the statement said. But in the case of a "no-deal" Brexit, those agreements will no longer apply to Swiss-British relations. Monday's deal would then kick in on March 30, allowing for a smooth transition and avoiding chaos for travellers between the two countries, it added. There are some 150 flights each day between Switzerland and Britain, mainly through the airports in Zurich, Geneva and Basel, and 25 British airports. Some 6.7 million passengers flew these routes in 2017. In September, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) raised the alarm over the impact on air travel if the Brexit negotiations failed. IATA chief Alexandre de Juniac warned of the "extreme seriousness of what is at stake" and stressed "the huge amount of work that would be required to maintain vital air links". A technical paper published by the British government indicated that without an overarching Brexit deal, airlines will have to seek two different approvals from each of the rest of the 27 EU members to ensure they have the regulatory framework to fly. Airlines themselves have warned that their cross-Channel flights may be grounded for lack of insurance if they cannot be sure their pilots' licenses and safety standards are recognised after Britain leaves the EU on March 29. By AFP BERLIN: Worker-starved Germany decided Wednesday to ease immigration rules to attract foreign job-seekers and replenish its ageing workforce, despite mounting public resistance against new arrivals. Chancellor Angela Merkel's cabinet approved a new immigration law which still has to be formally approved by parliament next year, possibly with some amendments. Economy Minister Peter Altmaier hailed as a "historic day" the cabinet's decision on Germany's first immigration law, which had been eagerly anticipated by business groups. The new law aims to attract foreign skilled vocational workers with German language skills, including those from outside the European Union, and promises them eased visa procedures and reduced red tape. "We need manpower from third countries to safeguard our prosperity and be able to fill the job vacancies," said Interior Minister Horst Seehofer. Job-seekers such as cooks, metallurgy workers or IT technicians would be allowed to come to the EU's biggest economy for six months to try and find employment, provided they can financially support themselves. A separate provision, which sparked much controversy, will allow permanent residency for some of the rejected asylum seekers in Germany who have been granted stays of deportation because their home country is considered unsafe. To qualify, they must have held a full-time job for 18 months, speak at least intermediate-level German, be socially well-integrated with no criminal offences, and be able to prove their identity. "We must not deport the wrong people," said Labour Minister Hubertus Heil, who stressed that many of the recent arrivals now "speak German, work, are industrious and are useful for Germany". - 'Pragmatic solution' - Nonetheless, the provision for asylum seekers had been criticised for potentially sending the wrong signal and encouraging human traffickers to bring illegal migrants to Germany on the promise they will eventually be allowed to stay. Immigration has been a hot-button political issue since Germany has absorbed more than one million mostly Muslim refugees and migrants from 2015. The large influx sparked a xenophobic backlash that saw the far-right, anti-immigration and anti-Islam Alternative for Germany (AfD) enter parliament a year ago as the biggest opposition party. But Germany has also been anxious not to leave thousands of migrants idle and susceptible to taking on jobs on the black labour market while they spend years awaiting a final decision on their asylum claims. The ministers stressed that the new rules aim to find a "pragmatic solution" for rejected asylum seekers who cannot be sent back because, for instance, they face the risk of torture in their country of origin. Sounding an optimistic note, the head of the Confederation of German Employers' Associations, Ingo Kramer, last week said that, of those who arrived since 2015, "more than 400,000 are in employment or training... even I am surprised at how quickly it's progressing". With unemployment at 5.0 percent, a record low since Germany's 1990 reunification, companies in Europe's most populous economy have long complained that a chronic shortage of workers is threatening growth. In the areas of mathematics, computing, natural sciences and technology, a record 338,200 jobs went unfilled in September, according to data from the Cologne-based German Economic Institute. Altmaier said the new rules will especially help Germany's small-and-medium-sized companies "which in the past have suffered as they are in competition with big companies that have poached the well-trained people". To attract qualified professionals from abroad, the German government has opened the information website make-it-in-germany.com. By PTI ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan government plans to file a case before the Election Commission against former President Asif Ali Zardari, seeking his disqualification over concealment of assets in the US, Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry said on Wednesday. Chaudhry accused Zardari of failing to mention an apartment he allegedly owns in the US in a declaration submitted to the Election Commission of Pakistan. He said the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) government will soon file a reference against Zardari for not declaring the property in his nomination papers. "Our government has decide to move the Election Commission of Pakistan to disqualify Zardari for hiding his assets," Chaudhry said. He said Zardari was not "truthful and righteous" under Articles 62 and 63 of the Constitution and is therefore not eligible to become a lawmaker. Zardari's Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) dismissed the allegation as another effort by the Imran Khan government to hide its failure. "We are not afraid of such baseless allegations," said PPP leader Saeed Ghani. The allegation against the 63-year-old PPP leader surfaced when an accountability court reserved judgment in two corruption cases against former premier Nawaz Sharif. The opposition parties have accused the government of targeting its leaders in the name of accountability. Chaudhry said the investigative agencies were given a "free hand" to investigate any politician regardless of the party they belonged to whose activities are found to be suspicious, a media report said. Zardari served as the 11th President of Pakistan from 2008 to 2013. In July, Pakistan's Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) declared 20 suspects, including Zardari and his sister, as absconders in a Rs 35 billion money laundering case. By ANI MUZAFFARABAD: Residents on Wednesday took to the streets of Muzaffarabad against Pakistan's indiscriminate and unabated construction in the illegally occupied region of Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK), demanding the immediate termination of the projects that are underway on the Neelum-Jhelum River. While shouting slogans against Islamabad, the protestors also demanded the authorities to refrain from sanctioning any further projects. Locals blamed Pakistan for recklessly exploiting natural resources in the illegally-occupied region by building mega-dams and hydropower projects on rivers like Neelum and Jhelum. While PoK residents remain deprived of drinking water, construction of hydropower plant projects like one on the River Neelum is further aggravating the water-crisis. The project, which was built in the pretext of bringing prosperity, has deeply affected the lives of the common people, with many of them forced to migrate to other places in the country. PoK residents have been suppressed for seven decades now. They are not just denied basic rights but are forced to lead their lives on terms dictated by Islamabad's political puppets in the region. South Africa has issued an arrest warrant for Zimbabwe's former first lady Grace Mugabe over the alleged assault of a model in a luxury Johannesburg hotel in 2017, police said on Wednesday. After the alleged assault with an electric cable came to light, the South African government granted Grace Mugabe diplomatic immunity and she left the country. Her husband, Robert Mugabe, was Zimbabwe's president at the time. The immunity was overturned by a South African court in July this year after the alleged victim, model Gabriella Engels, challenged the decision. "I can confirm that a warrant for the arrest of Grace Mugabe was issued last Thursday," police spokesman Vishnu Naidoo said, adding that police were seeking Interpol's help to enforce the warrant. There was no immediate comment from Grace Mugabe. Zimbabwe has an extradition agreement with South Africa allowing the two nations to exchange persons accused of crimes in either jurisdiction. But Zimababwe's deputy minister for information, Energy Mutodi, told Reuters that Zimbabwe would not extradite her to South Africa as this would be "harassment". "I believe the government of Zimbabwe will not tolerate any harassment or degrading treatment on the former President Mugabe and his immediate family members," Mutodi said, adding that he would still need to consult with President Emmerson Mnangagwa on the final decision. Mrs Mugabe, 53, was seen as a potential successor to her 94-year-old husband Robert, who ruled Zimbabwe from 1980 until he was ousted in a coup in November last year. She was famed for her lavish lifestyle. She has denied assaulting Engels, saying an "intoxicated and unhinged" Engels attacked her with a knife after the model had gone to see the Mugabes' sons at the hotel in Johannesburg's posh Sandton district. Mrs Mugabe has retreated from the limelight in Zimbabwe since her husband was ousted. Search Keywords: Short link: By PTI WASHINGTON: The US has started to withdraw its troops from Syria, the White House said Wednesday, asserting that it has defeated the Islamic State terror group in the strife-torn country. "We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency," US President Donald Trump tweeted soon after which the White House announced that its troops have started returning from Syria. "Five years ago, ISIS was a very powerful and dangerous force in the Middle East, and now the United States has defeated the territorial caliphate. These victories over ISIS in Syria do not signal the end of the Global Coalition or its campaign," White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said in a statement. She said the United States troops have started returning home. "The US and our allies stand ready to re-engage at all levels to defend American interests whenever necessary, and we will continue to work together to deny radical Islamist terrorists territory, funding, support, and any means of infiltrating our borders," she said. "The Coalition has liberated the ISIS-held territory, but the campaign against ISIS is not over," said Dana W White, Defense Department chief spokesperson. "We have started the process of returning US troops home from Syria as we transition to the next phase of the campaign. For force protection and operational security reasons we will not provide further details. We will continue working with our partners and allies to defeat ISIS wherever it operates," White said. The Pentagon declined to give any comment immediately. "At this time, we continue to work by, with and through our partners in the region," Pentagon spokesman Col Rob Manning said when asked whether the US military is preparing for a full withdrawal of forces in northeast Syria. The Wall Street Journal described it as an abrupt decision by the Trump administration. "US officials began informing partners in northeastern Syria of their plans to begin immediately pulling American forces out of the region, where they have been trying to wrap up the campaign against Islamic State," the daily said, quoting unnamed official. Several US lawmakers warned the Trump administration that this was a grave error. Republican Senator Marco Rubio said that the full and rapid withdrawal from Syria is a grave error with broader implications beyond just the fight against ISIS. "The President's tweet is dangerous, premature and wholly inconsistent with the facts on the ground in Syria and our military's advice. I have travelled to Syria to review our mission, and our military has performed well beyond expectations," said Senator Jeanne Shaheen. Shaheen said he is very concerned that "an ill-informed and hasty withdrawal of troops will "breathe new life into ISIS" and other terrorist groups and cede America's leadership role to Russia, Iran and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Reporter Noelle McGee is a Danville-based reporter at The News-Gazette. Her email is nmcgee@news-gazette.com, and you can follow her on Twitter (@n_mcgee). Success! An email has been sent to with a link to confirm list signup. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Wednesday that Islamic State (IS) militants had executed nearly 700 prisoners in nearly two months in eastern Syria. The UK-based war monitoring group said the prisoners were among 1,350 civilians and fighters that IS had been holding in territory near the Iraqi border. The jihadists control a shrinking strip of land east of the Syrias Euphrates River around the town of Hajin, which U.S.-backed forces entered this month. The Syrian Demoratic Forces (SDF), led by the Kurdish YPG militia, has battled IS there for several months with the help of U.S. air power and special forces. SDF commander-in-chief Mazloum Kobani told Reuters last week that at least 5,000 IS fighters remain holed up in the enclave, including many foreigners who appear ready to fight to the death. ISs self-proclaimed caliphate has crumbled after different offensives across Iraq and Syria, though its fighters still operate in the desert border region and mount attacks. Search Keywords: Short link: Wilkes County Kids toy drive gearing up for holiday season The Wilkes County Kids toy donation drive is gearing up for the holiday season. The program is accepting donations through Friday, December 3. Late submissions may still be considered. Any... BOE approves $16,908 cybersecurity contract renewal The Wilkes County Board of Education met on November 29 at 5:30 p.m. The only item on the public agenda was the renewal of a contract with White Rock Cybersecurity.... Dollar General constructing new store on N. Mercer Street Dollar General is constructing an additional store in Washington. The new store building will be located on North Mercer Street in District One and is rapidly nearing completion. According to... Premier Li Keqiang has commended Chief Executive Carrie Lam and her administration for maintaining steady economic growth. After meeting Premier Li in Beijing this morning, Mrs Lam later told reporters he was pleased that Hong Kongs growth so far this year is real growth of 3.7%, based on the first three quarters of the year. She said Hong Kong will continue to strengthen its fundamentals, including financial services, professional services, and the logistics and tourism industry. But at the same time, we will grow the new sectors, especially innovation and technology. And that was also what Premier Li has commended us for, that in the past year we have been very active in growing this sector. Noting that 2019 will be a year full of uncertainties and perhaps some downside risks, Mrs Lam said the Government will provide support and assistance to industry people. If there is anything they need in order to meet this challenge and to relieve their pressure, my Government is very happy and very committed to providing those assistance. Mrs Lam also briefed President Xi Jinping in the afternoon on Hong Kongs latest economic, social and political situation. She thanked President Xi for affirming her work and that of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government. Looking forward, Mrs Lam said she hopes Hong Kong can actively take part in three major events of the country next year - the Belt & Road Forum for International Cooperation, the China International Import Expo, and the celebration of the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China. Chief Executive Carrie Lam says the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government will do whatever it takes to help Hong Kong people facing difficulties abroad. Speaking to the media in Beijing today, Mrs Lam made the statement when asked by reporters about the jailing of four Hong Kong residents in the Philippines over drug offences. She noted the HKSAR Government has provided assistance to them through the help of the Chinese embassy in Manila. In response to legislator James To's allegation that she would not meet him or the families of the four residents, Mrs Lam said she had received a letter from him earlier this year and referred the case to the Security Bureau to follow up. The HKSAR Government has to respect the laws of foreign countries when providing assistance, she added. She said she and the Secretary for Security will continue to follow up on the case and assist those involved. President Xi Jinping praised Chief Executive Carrie Lam for leading the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government in courageously taking up its responsibilities. Meeting with her in Beijing today, President Xi said Mrs Lam has been leading the HKSAR Government in staunchly safeguarding the one country, two systems principle as well as the Basic Law. He said Mrs Lam has seriously planned for Hong Kongs long-term development and has actively participated in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area development and the Belt & Road Initiative. She has also made efforts to solve livelihood issues faced by residents, especially the development of young people. President Xi said Mrs Lam is not afraid of taking up difficult tasks, adding the Central Government fully recognises the work done by her administration. Noting Hong Kong has both benefitted from and contributed to the country's reform and opening up over the past 40 years, he said looking forward the one country, two systems principle must be upheld and Hong Kong and Macau will be supported in integrating into national development. Mrs Lam thanked President Xi for his care for Hong Kong and his attendance at the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge opening ceremony in October. She also met with Premier Li Keqiang, who also praised Mrs Lam for her leadership, highlighting her promotion of innovation and technology as well as efforts to tackle livelihood issues. He said Hong Kong has maintained stable economic growth as a free-trade port and a separate customs territory under intricate international circumstances. The Government will provide all possible assistance to four Hong Kong men convicted in the Philippines for drug offences, Acting Chief Executive Matthew Cheung said today. Speaking to reporters ahead of the Executive Council meeting, Mr Cheung said the Government is highly concerned about the matter. The Security Bureau is keeping close contact with the Office of the Commissioner of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region on the matter, Mr Cheung said. Mr Cheung also noted Immigration Department officers have met legislator James To and the four residents family members, and said the Government will maintain close contact with them. He added the bureau is assisting those involved through the Chinese embassy in Manila. Hong Kong has the constitutional responsibility to enact local legislation to implement the national anthem law. Acting Chief Executive Matthew Cheung made the statement ahead of the Executive Council meeting today. He said the Government will consult the community on the issue. Mr Cheung also noted drafting of the local legislation is near completion and the Government plans to table the bill to the Legislative Council early next year. Lebanon's Finance Minister Ali Hassan Khalil is due to retain his position in the country's new national unity government, a senior Lebanese official told Reuters on Wednesday. Lebanon is on track to form a new cabinet in the next few days, politicians said, raising hopes for an end to months of wrangling that has hurt the outlook for its struggling economy. Search Keywords: Short link: Farmers in Mashonaland West Province are counting their losses after their early planted crop failed to germinate. As a result, they are being forced to buy more inputs including seed, weed control chemicals and fertilisers before replanting. The most affected farmers are those who planted maize early in areas such as Martin Spur, Chegutu, Sanyati and Mhondoro-Ngezi. Some of them have already started replanting. Sanyati district crop and livestock production officer Mrs Evelyn Ndoro said most farmers from the district who planted with the early rains were badly affected. Our rain season had a false start, affecting the germination process among those who had utilised the early rains, she said. Among the farmers who suffered the heaviest losses are those on Governments Command Agriculture programme. Mrs Ndoro, however, said the current rainfall patterns were now ideal for farmers to start planting. Mr Albert Murove of Martin Spur between Chegutu and Kadoma, who got inputs under Command Agriculture, has started replanting. I had planted maize three weeks ago and it failed to germinate with about one and half hectares having been affected. Considering the high costs of inputs its a major blow for me, as initially I had benefited from Command Agriculture but now I have to fork out inputs using my personal resources, he said. Mr Murove said Government should also consider including small grains under Command Agriculture. A farmer from Sanyati who preferred anonymity said he was not spared from the losses. I am considering replanting six hectares as the seed failed to germinate well but the cost of inputs is prohibitively high, said the source. Chitumba. Meanwhile, farmers are being encouraged to be on the lookout for the fall armyworm from this week when most crops are expected to have germinated as early detection will reduce damage to crops, writes our correspondent LawrenceChitumba. In an interview last week, Mashonaland Central provincial livestock officer Mr Daniel Kampiyao said: So far we have not yet received any cases of the fall armyworm because most people have not yet planted their crops, but from next week when most of the crops would have germinated so we encourage farmers to be always on the lookout. Trainings for fall armyworm identification have already started. This includes capacity building for our staff which is done every year as they believe there may be new chemicals and innovations to control the fall armyworm. The fall armyworm explodes if we experience hot weather conditions two to three days after some rains. Some of the farmers can now identify the fall armyworm, but for those who might not be sure about it they must approach the nearest extension officer for help as there is a tendency to mistaken the fall armyworm for the African armyworm which does less damage and is easy to control. Mr Kampiyao said farmers must adopt contingent measures that correspond with the predicted normal to below normal rainfall for the 20181-19 agricultural season like planting drought-tolerant seed varieties. rippers. He encouraged farmers to stagger their planting, adding that when ploughing farmers must employ deep ploughing methods usingrippers. For areas like Mbire and Rushinga which receives low rainfall, Mr Kampiyao encouraged the growing of small grains as they are drought resistant unlike crops like maize which are known not to do well in these areas in order to improve on food security since they are also recommended by nutritionists. The committee made the recommendation after noting that Zimbabwe does not own any properties in at least 20 countries in which it has foreign missions, a situation that has resulted in treasury running an unsustainable bill accruing from rentals and other services offered to the missions. (Newser) Alton Thacker's toy factory made its millionth toy car this yearand it has given away every single one of those cars. Tiny Tim's Toy Foundation, founded more than a decade ago in Utah, produces and distributes small wooden cars to children in need around the world. Some of those kids are sick in hospitals, others are living in a tough neighborhood, still others are impoverished in a developing country, but they all react similarly when given the wooden toys: "Kids will drop to the floor and start driving them on the concrete, the tile, the dirt," a retired teacher who drives 60 miles round-trip once a week to volunteer at the factory tells the Washington Post. "The response of pure joy is always the same." Thacker and his wife, both 83, came up with the idea for the foundation when he and his wife used to dress up as Santa and Mrs. Claus and distribute toys to kids in Mexico. story continues below The wood is donated and the factory's rent is paid by a benefactor. In addition to volunteersmostly retirees, with an average age of 80Thacker and his wife get help producing the cars from groups like churches, Boy Scout troops, and civic organizations. Most of the cars are painted by inmates at a Utah correctional facility, and the volunteer who spoke to the Post says many of them are moved to the point of tears by the chance to help others. The toys are then distributed by charities, churches, children's hospitals, and even long-haul truckers who stop by the factory to pick up a box, dropping off its contents along their routes. Thacker tells the Post he and his wife "both knew the important role toys played in helping little minds to grow. ... For some kids around the world, one of our little wooden cars is the first and only toy they'll ever get." Read the full story here. (Read more uplifting news stories.) (Newser) Kristen Biel was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2014and when she told her employer she would need time off for surgery and chemotherapy, she was dealt a second blow. St. James Catholic School in Torrance, Calif., declined to renew her contract to teach for the next academic year. She sued for discrimination, but last year, a federal judge dismissed the suit, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. On Monday, a federal appeals court reinstated it. The initial ruling against Biel cited the "ministerial exception" to civil rights laws, Education Week reports, concluding that she actually worked as a minister, not a teacher, and as such the school was allowed to fire her. But the appeals court ruled that the fact Biel taught her fifth-grade students religion curriculum along with the rest of their academic subjects, at a religious school, does not make her a minister, USA Today reports. story continues below Biel was hired by the Roman Catholic parish school within the Archdiocese of Los Angeles in 2013 as a substitute teacher, and was promoted to a full-time teacher a few months later. In November 2013 she received a positive evaluation from the principal, but less than six months later, when she was fired, the principal said her "classroom management" was "not strict." The principal also said "it was not fair ... to have two teachers for the children during the school year." The constitution's religious freedom guarantee gives religious organizations the right to choose their faith leaders, but the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals said in its 2-1 decision that religious organizations do not have carte blanche to disregard the Americans With Disabilities Act when it comes to employees who are not faith leaders. Biel's lawyer says she is still fighting cancer. (This teacher says she was fired for getting married.) (Newser) Two Missouri officers saved the life of a 6-month-old girl whose father walked into their police station and said he had just drowned his daughter, authorities say. Greenwood police Chief Greg Hallgrimson and Cpl. Tom Calhoun rushed to a pond where the man said he had drowned his daughter Monday and pulled her out, performed CPR and warmed her up until she started breathing, said Lt. Aaron Fordham, who called the baby's survival a "miracle." He said the father, 28-year-old Jonathon Stephen Zicarelli, showed no emotion when he stunned officers with his report that he had left his daughter in an icy pond on the west side of Greenwood, which is about 20 miles southeast of Kansas City. While Fordham stayed with Zicarelli, Hallgrimson and Calhoun ran to the pond, the AP reports. story continues below They found the unconscious baby floating face up, lethargic and her skin a lifeless color, the Kansas City Star reported. She had mud in her eye and grass and water in her mouth, and her lungs were full of water. Officers estimate she had been in the pond more than 10 minutes. Calhoun waded into the thigh-deep water and rushed the girl to the bank. He cleared the water from her lungs and began CPR, and the infant began breathing within minutes, Fordham said. Calhoun and Hallgrimson removed the baby's wet clothes and wrapped her in the chief's shirt to warm her. She was stable and in good health at a nearby hospital as of Monday afternoon, where she was being treated for hypothermia. "There was absolutely someone watching over that child today," Fordham said. Prosecutors have charged Zicarelli, who allegedly said he was stressed by the holidays and trying to provide for his family and also said he wanted to make things easier for his wife, with first-degree domestic assault. (Another "miracle" recently made headlines.) (Newser) Nathan and Ellen Rigney were asleep just before midnight Monday when the baby monitor next to their bed started making a beeping noise. Next, the Texas couple started hearing "sexual expletives," which they assumed were coming from inside their 4-month-old son's room. "Then [he] said 'Im going to kidnap your baby, Im in your babys room,'" Ellen Rigney recounts to Click2Houston. Her husband ran upstairs to find the baby safeand alone. Then Ellen remembered reading a story about how WiFi cameras can be hacked. They turned off their WiFi and their two Nest WiFi cameras and filed a police report, and are sharing their story so others know this can happen. story continues below The couple says Nest representatives were "no help" and that the company has not apologized. They've replaced the camera network with a non-WiFi camera in the nursery. A security expert tells the station hackers may have accessed the family's original camera network through the app. "If you can access it remotely, chances are someone else can as well," she says. In a statement, Nest says that customers sometimes reuse passwords that had been previously exposed in breaches and notes that "reusing compromised passwords can expose customers to other people using the credentials to log into their Nest account and potentially other websites and services." (Another creepy story about a Nest device made headlines this week.) (Newser) Mark Rober felt violated when a package was stolen off his doorstep a few months back, so he decided to get revengein a big way. Rober, an engineer who has worked on NASA's Curiosity Rover, joined forces with a friend who makes custom circuit boards to create a high-tech decoy package, USA Today reports. The package, which was designed to look like an Apple HomePod delivered via Amazon, combined a number of amazing features: It was a glitter bomb that shot glitter everywhere when it opened; it also sprayed fart spray every 30 seconds and recorded the whole experience from four different angles to ensure the thief's reaction upon opening the package was captured on video. Rober offered up the resulting videos in a highly entertaining video on his YouTube channel Monday; the whole thing (which includes a Home Alone shout-out) is worth a watch. (Here's how others are fighting back against package thieves.) (Newser) House Republicans grilled James Comey over the FBI's January 2017 interview of Michael Flynn in a closed-door session Monday, according to transcripts released Tuesday. Comey defended the interview to GOP lawmakers from the House Oversight and Judiciary committees who suggested that the FBI treated Trump administration officials differently than their Obama administration counterparts, the Washington Post reports. The transcripts show Oversight committee chairman Trey Gowdy wondering about the purpose of the meeting, which came after Flynn lied to Mike Pence about his Russian contacts. "It is not the FBI's job ... to correct false statements that political figures say to one another. So why did you send two bureau agents to interview Michael Flynn?" Gowdy asked. story continues below "Because one of the FBI's jobs is to understand the efforts of foreign adversaries to influence, coerce, corrupt the government of the United States," Comey replied, per CNN. "So they were sent there as part of that counterintelligence mission to try and understand why it appeared to be the case that the national security adviser was making false statements about his conversations with the Russians to the vice president of the United States." Comey told the lawmakers it was "consistent" with FBI practices not to warn Flynn, then Trump's national security adviser, that he could face consequences for lying to investigators. (On Tuesday, a judge told Flynn he had arguably "sold his country out.") (Newser) The "Sealed v Sealed" case working its way through courts in Washington is shrouded in so much secrecy that reporters were cleared from an entire floor of a DC courthouse before a hearing Fridaybut a Tuesday night ruling provided some clues. CNNwhose reporters spotted attorneys from Robert Mueller's team returning to their offices after the Friday hearing endedreports that the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ordered an unnamed party to comply with a grand jury subpoena. The ruling revealed that the party trying to resist the subpoena is a corporation owned by "Country A," not an individual, ended speculation that the party might have been President Trump. story continues below National security attorney Bradley Moss, who notes that the case has been proceeding with unusual speed over the last few months, believes the corporation could be a foreign bank. "This suggests to me that Mueller is following the moneyTrump is heavily dependent on foreign banks as US lenders gave up on him a long time ago," he tells the Guardian. The Lawfare blog notes that despite speculation, there's not enough information to draw firm conclusions, and it's "not even clear whether the corporation is a familiar character in the story so far or a new player altogether. As with every step of the Russia investigation so far, theres a lot that remains in the shadows." (Read more Robert Mueller stories.) The United States is considering a total withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria as it nears the very end of its campaign to retake all of the territory once held by Islamic State, U.S. officials told Reuters on Wednesday. Such a decision, if confirmed, would upend assumptions about a longer-term U.S. military presence in Syria, which U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and other senior U.S. officials had advocated to help ensure Islamic State cannot reemerge. Still, President Donald Trump has previously expressed a strong desire to bring troops home from Syria when possible. On Wednesday, Trump appeared to declare victory against the group and made clear he saw no further grounds for remaining in Syria. "We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency," he tweeted. The timing of the troop withdrawal was not immediately clear and U.S. officials who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity did not disclose details about the deliberations. But one official told Reuters that partners and allies had been consulted. Two U.S. officials said a decision to withdraw had already been reached but that could not be immediately confirmed. It was unclear how soon a decision detailing any withdrawal plans might be announced. The Pentagon declined to comment, saying only that it continued to work with partners in the region. The United States still has about 2,000 troops in Syria, many of them special operations forces working closely with an alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF. The partnership with the SDF over the past several years has led to the defeat of Islamic State in Syria but outraged NATO ally Turkey, which views Kurdish YPG forces in the alliance as an extension of a militant group fighting inside Turkey. The deliberations on U.S. troops come as Ankara threatens a new offensive in Syria. To date, U.S. forces in Syria have been seen as a stabilizing factor in the country and have somewhat restrained Turkey's actions against the SDF. A complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria would still leave a sizeable U.S. military presence in the region, including about 5,200 troops across the border in Iraq. Much of the U.S. campaign in Syria has been waged by warplanes flying out of Qatar and other locations in the Middle East. Still, Mattis and U.S. State Department officials have long fretted about leaving Syria before a peace agreement can be reached to end that country's brutal civil war, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced around half of Syrias pre-war population of about 22 million. In April, Mattis said: "We do not want to simply pull out before the diplomats have won the peace. You win the fight and then you win the peace." Islamic State is also widely expected to revert to guerilla tactics once it no longer holds territory. A U.S. withdrawal could open Trump up to criticism if Islamic State reemerged. Trump has previously lambasted his predecessor, Barack Obama, for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq that preceded an unraveling of the Iraqi armed forces. Iraqi forces collapsed in the face of Islamic State's advance into the country in 2014. Islamic State declared its so-called "caliphate" in 2014 after seizing large swathes of Syria and Iraq. The hardline Islamist group established its de facto capital in the Syrian city of Raqqa, using it as a base to plot attacks in Europe. According to U.S. estimates, the group oversaw about 100,000 square kilometers (39,000 square miles) of territory, with about 8 million people under Islamic State control. It had estimated revenues of nearly one billion dollars a year. Brett McGurk, the U.S. special envoy for the global coalition to defeat Islamic State, said last week that the group was down to its last 1 percent of the territory it once held in its self-styled "caliphate." The group has no remaining territory in Iraq. Hajin, the group's last major stronghold in Syria, is close to being seized by U.S.-backed SDF forces. After losing Hajin, Islamic State will control a diminishing strip of territory along the eastern bank of the Euphrates River in the area where U.S.-backed operations are focused. The militants also control some desert terrain west of the river in territory otherwise controlled by the Damascus government and its allies. But U.S. officials have warned that taking back the group's territory would not be the same as defeating it. "Even as the end of the physical caliphate is clearly now coming into sight, the end of ISIS will be a much more long-term initiative," McGurk told a State Department briefing on Dec. 11. U.S. Marine General Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, cautioned earlier in December that the United States had trained only about 20 percent of Syrian forces required to stabilize areas captured from Islamic State. Search Keywords: Short link: (Newser) Attorneys for a Colorado baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple on religious groundsa stand partially upheld by the US Supreme Courtargued in federal court Tuesday that the state is punishing him again over his refusal to bake a cake celebrating a gender transition, the AP reports. Lawyers for Jack Phillips, owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop in suburban Denver, are suing to try to stop the state from taking action against him over the new discrimination allegation. They say the state is treating Phillips with hostility because of his Christian faith and pressing a complaint that they call an "obvious setup." "At this point, he's just a guy who is trying to get back to life. The problem is the state of Colorado won't let him," Jim Campbell, an attorney for the Alliance Defending Freedom, said after the hearing. The conservative Christian nonprofit law firm is representing Phillips. story continues below The Colorado Civil Rights Commission says Phillips discriminated against Denver attorney Autumn Scardina because she's transgender. Phillips' shop refused to make a cake last year that was blue on the outside and pink on the inside after Scardina revealed she wanted it to celebrate her transition from male to female. She asked for the cake on the same day the US Supreme Court announced it would consider Phillips' appeal of the previous commission ruling against him. In that 2012 case, he refused to make a wedding cake for same-sex couple Charlie Craig and Dave Mullins. The Supreme Court ruled in June that the Colorado commission showed anti-religious bias when it sanctioned Phillips for refusing to make the cake, voting 7-2 that it violated Phillips' First Amendment rights. But the court did not rule on the larger issue of whether businesses can invoke religious objections to refuse service to gays and lesbians. (Much more on both cases here.) (Newser) A 12-year-old boy was charged Tuesday with killing his sister and seriously wounding his mother in a stabbing at a Connecticut home, the AP reports. West Hartford police said the boy was arraigned at Connecticut Children's Medical Center in Hartford, where he was being treated for minor injuries sustained in Monday's incident. The boy faces one count of murder and one count of first-degree assault and is currently in the custody of the Connecticut Judicial Marshals. The names of the boy and the victims haven't been released by authorities, but the Hartford Courant identifies the mother as Janemarie Murphy, a well-known lobbyist at the state Capitol who has worked in the government affairs group of a Hartford law firm for more than 24 years. She remains hospitalized but in stable condition. story continues below West Hartford Mayor Shari Cantor released a statement from the family, which has asked for privacy. "We are all enduring a very painful and unimaginable loss," the statement says. "Our family will never be the same. Our daughter was a beautiful child and we will remember forever her smile ... laughter ... and remember her for the way she loved and lived." Cantor said community members are also "incredibly brokenhearted." The stabbing shocked the upscale Hartford suburb, where police were continuing their investigation Tuesday. Officers responded to the home at about 3:30pm Monday after the mother called 911 to report that she and her daughter, whom the Courant reports was also 12, had been stabbed by her son. No motive has yet been made public. (Police say a Coast Guardsman killed his wife, then their 7-year-old son.) (Newser) Compassion International allows people to sponsor kids living in poverty around the globeand for 10 years, George HW Bush quietly sponsored a Filipino child through the organization. Bush, using a pseudonym, was connected with Timothy, then 7, in 2002. "I am an old man, 77 years old, but I love kids; and though we have not met I love you already," Bush wrote in his first letter to Timothyone of a number of letters between the two that Compassion International recently provided to CNN. In addition to exchanging letters, of course, Bush also sent money that went toward Timothy's education and other needs. And he sometimes sent the boy physical gifts, like art supplies when he found out Timothy liked to draw, even though doing so is technically not allowed. He also drew his own pictures for the boy. story continues below Bush was attending a Christmas concert in Washington in 2001 when the musicians, during intermission, talked to the audience about Compassion International. Bush "raised his hand and asked for a pamphlet," the former president of Compassion International tells CNN. It was Bush's security team who insisted the former president sign his letters to Timothy simply as "George Walker," mainly out of concern that the boy could become a target if anyone knew he was corresponding with Bush, but the organization's former president tells the Colorado Springs Gazette that Bush was constantly providing little hints as to his true identity, like when he sent a photo of his dog or mentioned that he was visiting his son who "lives in a big, white house." But it wasn't until Timothy graduated from the program at age 17 that he found out who his pen pal had been. (Read more uplifting news stories.) (Newser) A legally blind Michigan woman who wanted to see the world before completely losing her vision has been missing in Peru for a week, and family members are extremely concerned. Carla Valpeoz, a 35-year-old social worker from Detroit, visited the country with a friend for a wedding and was supposed to meet her in Lima after doing some solo traveling in the Cusco area, the Detroit Free Press reports. She texted her friend on the evening of Dec. 11 to tell her about her visit to Machu Picchu, but she missed both her Dec. 13 flight from Cusco to Lima and her Dec. 15 flight back to the US. She was last seen leaving a Cusco hostel early on Dec. 12 and taking a taxi to an area where people catch buses. story continues below It's not clear whether Valpeoz caught a bus, though brother Carlos Valpeoz says she had expressed interest in visiting the village of Pisac, 22 miles north of Cusco. He says his sister, who was diagnosed with optic nerve atrophy when she was 10 years old, is a seasoned traveler who has spent time in countries including Yemen and Papua New Guinea and would not have put herself in danger. "Carla is a very determined person ... a leader devoted to life, to travel and immersing herself," he tells CNN. "Since an early age, our family has prepared her for when she would lose her sight and that's why she wants to see so much." Valpeoz is described as 5-foot-1 with brown hair and brown eyes. She was last seen carrying a green backpack. (Read more Peru stories.) (Newser) Joy Frances Collins didn't want to miss her bus home, so the California mom asked her children to do something they'd done many times before, police sayand now her young daughter is dead. Per Fresno Police Chief Jerry Dyer, Collins, her 9-year-old son, and 8-year-old Joyanna (spelled by some sources as Joy Anna) Harris were headed to a bus stop Monday evening around 6 when a freight train stopped in their path, reports the Fresno Bee. That's when Collins allegedly instructed the kids to crawl underneath the idling train to get to the other sideand even though Joyanna seemed wary about following her brother, who scrambled right underneath, witnesses say Collins yelled at her to "hurry up," and so she did, Dyer says. But as Joyanna was on the tracks, the train suddenly jerked forward and she was dragged a few hundred feet, her mother running behind her, cops say. story continues below By the time Collins managed to pull Joyanna out, she'd suffered severe injuries; it appears she died at the scene. "There was nothing that could prepare me for what I've seen," a local man who lives near the tracks and witnessed the tragic incident tells KFSN. "It's the [worst] thing I've ever seen in my life," another neighbor says, per YourCentralValley.com. Residents say there've been other deaths on those tracks, and that some kind of barrier is needed to keep people away. As for Collins, she'd made her kids go under the train at least seven times before and has had previous interaction with Child Protective Services, Dyer said in a news conference, though he added, "We know that she is hurting." She was arrested Tuesday on felony child endangerment charges, as well as for trespassing, per FOX26. (A 3-year-old boy was killed and his 2-year-old sister injured by a freight train near their home.) (Newser) President Trump says his proposed border wall will do its job and look good doing it. "The Democrats are saying loud and clear that they do not want to build a Concrete Wall," but "we are building artistically designed steel slats, so that you can easily see through it," Trump tweeted Tuesday as Republicans and Democrats looked to find common ground in an effort to avoid a government shutdown. "It will be beautiful and, at the same time, give our Country the security that our citizens deserve," he added. That message clashed with criticism from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on Tuesday, which had nothing to do with the wall's appearance. "The wall isn't about money. The wall is about morality. It's the wrong thing to do. It doesn't work. It's not effective," Pelosi said, per the Hill. story continues below Trump has demanded $5 billion in funding for the wall, which he says would "save us BILLIONS of dollars a month once completed," threatening a shutdown if he doesn't get it. However, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said Tuesday that the administration was looking for wall funding at "every avenue," with the possibility that funds could be "reprogrammed" from other departments, to avoid a shutdown affecting 25% of the federal government before a Friday midnight deadline, per Fox News. With that, a short-term spending bill seems the most likely route forward. Per the Washington Post, the Senate Appropriations Committee has begun drafting a bill that would carry government funding into February, though it's not clear if Trump would sign such deal. (He's apparently still eying Mexico.) (Newser) Zimbabwe's former first lady is facing an arrest warrant in South Africa, where she's accused of beating a model with an extension cord. Grace Mugabewife of Zimbabwe's deposed 37-year leader Robert Mugabe, whom she was expected to succeed as president before a coup last yearallegedly assaulted South African model Gabriella Engels after finding her in the company of Mugabe's two sons at a luxury hotel in Johannesburg last August, per the Telegraph. Per CNN, the model tweeted Mugabe "split my head open in 3 places." "She walked in with an extension cord and just started beating me with it over and over," leaving "blood everywhere," the model added, per the BBC. "I needed to crawl out of the room before I could run away." story continues below Mugabe denied that version of events. In her telling, the former first ladywho was reportedly in South Africa to be treated for an ankle injuryonly acted in self-defense after an "intoxicated and unhinged" Engels came at her with a knife, per the Telegraph. Mugabe was allowed to leave the country after South Africa's foreign minister at the time granted her diplomatic immunity, but a court overturned that decision in July. "I can confirm that a warrant for the arrest of Grace Mugabe was issued last Thursday," a police rep now says, per CNN, adding officers are seeking Interpol's help to enforce it. Per the BBC, the Mugabe family owns property in South Africa, which hasn't indicated if it will push for extradition. (Mugabe has been lately plagued by illegal gold miners.) (Newser) Dennis Michael Simmerman intended to plead guilty in a case involving the sexual abuse of a 13-year-old boy, after previously admitting he'd done so. Instead, his case was dropped, and an allegedly drunk prosecutor is at the crux of why. The Des Moines Register reports the 23-year-old Iowa man was supposed to make his plea in an Oct. 18 hearing. Just before the hearing was to begin, Clarke County Attorney Michelle Rivera, 42, was reportedly observed by a sheriff's deputy to be "slurring her words and stumbling on her feet." She refused to take a breath test, was arrested for public intoxication, and pleaded guilty. Prosecutors were obligated to file for an extension the next day, or otherwise facilitate his right to a speedy trial. They didn't. story continues below As a result, on Monday District Court Judge Martha Mertz ruled the two charges against Simmermanthird-degree sexual abuse and disseminating obscene material (photos, in this case) to a minor by telephoneshould be dropped. "The county attorney's unavailability at the last hearing was the finale following unexplained periods of inactivity," said Mertz. Simmerman had been in jail awaiting trial for 15 months, reports KCCI, and his lawyer noted that because he wasn't tried within a year, "you have the potential to have that case dismissed and that's what happened here." He can't be charged again. As for Rivera, the Register reports she was again arrested on Friday on suspicion of operating while intoxicated; police made contact with her after responding to a report of an erratic driver. She had just dropped her child at day care and was also charged with child endangerment. (Read more strange stuff stories.) (Newser) A West Virginia assistant principal is under fire after allegations that he harassed a transgender student. Sophomore Michael Critchfield, 15, says he was in the boys' bathroom Nov. 27 when Lee Livengood confronted him and demanded he "come out here and use the urinal" to prove that he was male, the Daily Beast reports. Critchfield, who was assigned female at birth but identifies as male, says Livengood also blocked the door as he told him, "You freak me out" and asked him "what would happen if another boy thought Michael was checking him out," referring to the student using female pronouns as he did so. After three or four minutes of being "barricaded" in the bathroom, Critchfield says the mother of a band student came to see what was going on because people could hear Livengood yelling from the band room, ABC News reports. story continues below Critchfield complained to the ACLU after, he says, school administrators failed to take action, and the ACLU got in touch with the school district. The Harrison County Schools superintendent suspended Livengood Tuesday, but only until the end of the semester, which is Friday. "While we are heartened to hear the administration admit to wrongdoing, a four-day paid suspension of an employee is not sufficient," the ACLU says. The superintendent has agreed to meet with ACLU officials after the holiday break, but he tells Metro News that while Livengood acted "inappropriately," "I dont think more needs to be done." An ACLU official, however, tells the Daily Beast Critchfield had already been repeatedly misgendered by teachers at the school and in intercom announcements in which his female birth name is used. "I think that there's a cultural problem at the school," he says. (A 12-year-old transgender girl was threatened after using the girls' bathroom.) (Newser) The lone suspect arrested in the killing of two Scandinavian tourists in Morocco's Atlas Mountains is connected to a terrorist group, and three other suspects are on the run, Moroccan authorities said Wednesday. State television 2M reported on its website that authorities consider the two women's slayings a terrorist act. Local media reported that the suspects had links to the Islamic State group, the AP reports. The women, who were from Denmark and Norway, were discovered stabbed in the neck Monday by other tourists, who alerted police, according to national media. Hiking in the area was temporarily suspended. The killings have shocked Morocco, a popular tourist destination where such attacks on foreigners are extremely rare; the country is generally considered safe for tourists and is a key ally of the United States and Europe in the fight against terrorism. story continues below The Rabat public prosecutor's office said in a statement Wednesday that the only captured suspect has affiliations to a terrorist group, without naming the group. The suspect was arrested in Marrakech on Tuesday. The remote mountainous region where the women were found dead is 6.2 miles from the village of Imliloften the starting point for treks to Mount Toubkal, North Africa's highest peak. Moroccan media outlets reported that investigators have video surveillance footage showing three suspects putting up a tent near the victims' tent and leaving the area after the slaying. The women have been identified as Maren Ueland, 28, and Louisa Vesterager Jespersen, 24, both of whom were students at the University of South-Eastern Norway. "What we know is that they were on a monthlong, private holiday in Morocco," the university said on its home page. (Another young tourist was murdered in New Zealand just after starting what was supposed to be a yearlong trip.) Tunisian authorities on Wednesday dismantled a cell planning attacks on security forces and seized material for making explosives, the Interior Ministry said. Most of the members of the cell, dubbed the Brigade of Jihad and Unity, were arrested and were being held in prison, the ministry said in a statement. It had pledged allegiance to an unidentified militant group abroad and planned attacks targeting security posts and patrols in the central province of Sidi Bouzid, it said. An explosive belt, grenades and bomb-making material were seized during the operation, it added. Tunisia has been on high security alert since 2015 when Islamic State gunmen killed 38 tourists in a museum in the capital and on a beach in the resort city of Sousse. Since then security has improved with only sporadic smaller attacks, allowing the vital tourism industry to recover as foreigners have returned to Tunisia's Mediterranean beaches. Authorities say more than 3,000 Tunisians have left to fight for jihadist groups in Syria, Iraq and Libya. Many of them have been killed in battle while others have been jailed or put under house arrest after returning to Tunisia. Search Keywords: Short link: (Newser) Authorities say a deputy in Florida has killed his wife, his daughter, and his granddaughter before turning the gun on himself, the AP reports. During a Wednesday afternoon news conference, Hillsborough County Sheriff Chad Chronister said that Terry Strawn, a school security officer, shot his wife and 6-year-old granddaughter, then went to his daughter's house and shot her. Chronister says Strawn went on the department's main radio channel to say he'd harmed his family and then fatally shot himself outside a nearby high school. Strawn used his service revolver. Strawn was a deputy from 1991 until his retirement in 2017. He was rehired as a school security officer in 2018. (A Coast Guardsman killed his wife and their 7-year-old son.) An inhuman act by a student at the University of Bahrain (UoB) has sparked online fury. He allegedly beheaded a kitten and kept its bloody remains on display at one of the campus aisles. The display of cruelty went on for nearly two weeks with many posting pictures online. Angered by the act, animal rights activists have announced BD800 reward for leads on the culprit. Speaking to Tribune, an official spokesperson for Bahrain Adoption, an animal rights organisation, said a few days ago he was alerted over a UoB student torturing a cat by burning it with cigarettes. A few individuals contacted me on Instagram and informed me about this cruelty. They knew the person behind the act, but did not want to reveal as it would affect his future. I reported the incident on all social media networks to obtain enough information to pursue legal action against the culprit. Initially, I announced BD50 reward for leads. But many angered animal lovers joined my call taking the reward to BD800. The student is mentally ill. He needs professional help, he can be a danger to society, fellow students and innocent animals. Mahmoud Faraj of Bahrain Society for Prevention of Cruelty on Animals (BSPCA) has taken up the issue with UoB officials, it is learnt. What is disheartening is that UoB did not take any steps until the cruelty was discussed on social media, the spokesperson said. More than cruelty on animals, it is an issue of violence on campus. What if the student had used the same sharp object to attack another student on the campus? The spokesperson said that hurting animals is against the values of Islam as well as that of any civilised society Bahrains Embassy to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) hosted an event marking the Kingdoms National Day yesterday. A number of ministers, ambassadors, senior officials, journalists, diplomats, businesspersons and Bahraini citizens residing in the UAE attended the event. During the event, Ambassador of Bahrain to the UAE, Shaikh Khalid bin Abdullah bin Ali Al Khalifa, extended his congratulations to His Majesty King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, HRH Prince Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa the Prime Minister, and HRH Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, Crown Prince, Deputy Supreme Commander and First Deputy Prime Minister on the Kingdoms achievements in many areas. The Ambassador pointed out in his speech that the Kingdoms national celebrations coincide with the Commemoration Day, in recognition of the sacrifices made by the fallen soldiers of the Kingdom of Bahrain to their homeland and the Arab world. He also reviewed the Kingdoms achievements under the reform approach at all levels, as well as the historic transformation in the Kingdom since His Majestys accession to the throne. The ambassador stressed that the fraternal ties and distinguished relations between the two countries and the two brotherly peoples enhanced the deep-rooted Emirati-Bahraini relations. British Airways will resume flights to Pakistan next summer, the carrier announced yesterday, in a major vote of confidence from a Western airline a decade after suspending operations due to security fears. The British carrier, which halted services in 2008 after the deadly Marriott Hotel bombing in Islamabad, will return in June 2019 with three weekly flights from Londons Heathrow airport to the Pakistani capital, airline officials said. BA had six weekly flights to the Pakistani capital before the Marriott attack, which killed more than 50 people and triggered a major drawdown by embassies and international agencies over safety concerns. The carriers announcement was a reflection of the great improvements in the security situation in Pakistan in the years since, said British High Commissioner to Pakistan Thomas Drew in a statement. We only fly somewhere when we know its safe to do so, Robert Williams, BAs head of sales for Asia, told a press conference in Islamabad. Tickets starting at $630 were due to go on sale from Tuesday. BA said the route -- which will be serviced by the Boeing 787 Dreamliner -- is among four direct long-haul flights being introduced in 2019, along with Pittsburgh and Charleston in the US, and Osaka in Japan. The announcement caused a stir on Twitter, where it was greeted with jubilation by many Pakistanis. Dramatic shift Britain is home to more than a million residents of Pakistani origin, making it the largest Pakistani diaspora community in Europe. The struggling Pakistan International Airlines is currently the only carrier with direct flights between the two countries. Since the Marriott attack the country has been largely dependent on Middle Eastern airlines such as Emirates and Etihad, with most international flights routed through the Gulf, making travel expensive and cumbersome for many passengers. Hong Kong-based Cathay Pacific was one of the last major international carriers to cease operations in Pakistan after dozens were killed during a 2014 siege at Karachi airport by Taliban militants. Many Western countries have travel advisories in place to warn their citizens of the potential for kidnapping and bomb attacks, especially in areas near the Afghan border. The announcement came after Prime Minister Imran Khan vowed to revitalise Pakistans struggling tourism industry in effort to bring in much-needed revenue to its fragile economy. Pakistan has a rich cultural and archaeological heritage, along with serene alpine valleys, pristine beaches and vast deserts peppered with vibrant Islamic shrines. The country is also home to some of the worlds tallest peaks including K-2 -- the second highest summit after Everest, which sits atop a region of 120 other mountains rising above 7,000 metres (23,000 feet). Libya's government of national accord said on Wednesday El Sharara oilfield had reopened following the visit of Libya's internationally recognised Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj to the field. Earlier a source said al-Sarraj flew to the southern El Sharara oilfield to meet protesters who had shut down the facility. "Dialogue is the only way to solve problems," al-Sarraj said. Search Keywords: Short link: A month since his arrest in Japan, former Nissan Motor Chairman Carlos Ghosn continues to deny allegations of understating his compensation as prosecutors grill him on evidence they say shows his pay was set and thus legally required to disclose. Ghosn has told prosecutors at a Tokyo detention center that he did not commit to any compensation, according to sources. He is scheduled for release Thursday but could be held until Dec. 30 if the court approves prosecutors' request for an extension. Prosecutors apparently have obtained a set of documents that they say show Ghosn's decided-on pay. "Agreement on compensation" documents signed by Ghosn and a former chief of Nissan's secretarial office break down the chairman's remuneration into "total," "paid" and "postponed." The phrase "fixed remuneration" is used in certain documents. A table said to outline details of these compensation agreements is believed to include handwritten edits by Ghosn. Greg Kelly, fired as a representative director days after he and Ghosn were arrested, and CEO Hiroto Saikawa had also signed a post-Nissan noncompete agreement for Ghosn listing payments for him in the form of consulting fees. Ghosn said he had signed the documents as a guide to his desired pay, based on similar practices of CEOs at American automakers. He has maintained that his pay after stepping down as chairman would be set by the CEO rather than fixed. He also said Kelly had assured him that the reporting procedures were legal. Japan has approved new defense guidelines, including a plan to upgrade an existing destroyer into a de-facto aircraft carrier. The new National Defense Program Guidelines and the mid-term defense program for the next five years were adopted on Tuesday at a cabinet meeting. They highlight the tough security environment around Japan. This includes China's rapid military buildup on the sea and in the air and its pursuit of dominance in outer space and cyber space. They say the threat posed by North Korea's nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles remains essentially unchanged. Under the defense guidelines, Japan will launch a multi-dimensional and integrated defense force. It will function strategically in outer space and cyber space, in addition to the conventional domains of land, sea and air. The plans call for setting up a new space unit and expanding an existing cyber-defense unit. In order to strengthen defense in the Pacific Ocean, the guidelines call for refurbishing the nation's largest destroyer Izumo over the next five years so it can effectively function as an aircraft carrier. Japan will acquire state-of-the-art F-35B stealth fighter jets that can take off and land on the refurbished Izumo. However, the fighters will only be used on the vessel in emergencies or for training, rather than being deployed on a regular basis. The measure is intended to clarify that the new Izumo will not be an "offensive aircraft carrier," which Japan cannot possess under its war-renouncing Constitution and its "defense-only" national policy. Cabinet ministers also approved a plan to introduce 42 F-35Bs and 63 F-35As in phases to replace about 100 aging fighter jets. Defense spending for the next five years is set to reach a record of about 240 billion dollars. The Defense Ministry hopes to bring down that figure by around 17 billion dollars through cost-cutting. About 140 Nigerians deported from Libya, yesterday, arrived Lagos aboard a chartered Airline 737 at the Cargo Wing of Murtala Muhammad International Airport at about 10.30pm on Tuesday.The Assisted Voluntary Returnees consisted of 39 adult females, 76 adult males, 17 boys and 8 girls arrived Nigeria aboard a Libya Airline.Nigerians who voluntarily returned from Libya disembarking from the aircraft on their arrival at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Ikeja in Lagos on TuesdayThis has brought the total number of the voluntary returnees to Nigeria from January 2018 till date to 4,123And the total brought back since April 2017 till date to 11,833.Yesterdays journey was facilitated by International Organisation for Migration IOM, with funding by EU, African Union and Federal Government of Nigeria.The Acting Zonal Coordinator, Mr Segun Afolayan received the returnees on behalf of the Federal Government at the Cargo Wing of Murtala Muhammad International Airport.Mr Afolayan on behalf of Federal Government thanked the initiative of IOM in assisting the Nigerians back home and assured the UN body that the various Federal Agencies have benefitted in various ways since the MOU with body began since 2011.He said that though the IOM has been partnering with NEMA long before this time and what have been achieved at all levels of contact have a service to humanity, even as dynamic as management of human beings are, we are grateful for the service.The feedback from the Migrants Resource Centres have been very positive and encouraging, the recording of over 3,000 enquiries by prospective migrants and assistance given by the centres are very commendable.It will be recalled that the IOM in collaboration with Federal Ministry of Labour have established a 3 Migrants Resource Centres in Abuja, Benin and Lagos. The Centres are opened for any intending migrants to access for enquiries on information about the prospective country of destination, the various job opportunities in the country, safest route and other important information would be provided to Nigerians who intend travel in regular process. The Vice-President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, and several ministers, special advisers, and assistants to President Muhammadu Buhari have arrived at the National Assembly ahead of the presentation of the 2019 Appropriation Bill.Osinbajo entered the building at about 11:50am, while the President is expected to arrive at 12noon.More details later Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, Wednesday presided over brief Federal Executive Council, FEC, meeting which lasted less than one hour thirty minutes.The brief FEC started about 10am when the Vice-president arrived at the Council Chamber, Presidential Villa, Abuja with Christian and Muslim prayers said by the Minister of Industry, Trade and Investment, Okechukwu Enelemah and the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Mohammed Bello respectively.But in less than one hour thirty minutes, the FEC, meeting was adjourned and the Ministers immediately proceeded to the National Assembly for the presentation of the 2019 Appropriation Bill by President Muhammadu Buhari.However, the Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai, when asked whether there would be any briefing on the outcome of brief FEC, he said there would be none.The budget presentation was coming six weeks late when compared to that of 2018 budget which was presented on November 7,2017.Last years presentation lasted for about two hours with the President standing for 62 minutes to read the budget proposal. The number of journalists killed around the world in reprisal for their work nearly doubled in 2018 to at least 34 people, reflecting an increase in deliberate attacks on journalists in Afghanistan, according to a report released on Wednesday. That was up sharply from 18 murdered for their work in 2017, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. The jump this year reflects 10 reporters killed in Afghanistan, as well as four journalists slain in a June attack at Maryland's Capital Gazette newspaper. Overall, some 53 journalists died on the job worldwide from Jan. 1 through Dec. 14 -- including those killed inadvertently in combat or on other dangerous assignments -- a 13 percent increase from 47 deaths in 2017, said CPJ, a U.S. nonprofit that promotes press freedom. CPJ cited insufficient international standards for journalists' rights as another reason for the uptick in murders. CPJ included the four slain journalists in its total of 34 reporters murdered during the year. The slain sales associate factored into a separate tally of seven media support workers who died on the job in 2018, down from eight in 2017. Sixty-two percent of the journalists killed covered politics, which the report deemed the most dangerous beat. Last week, CPJ reported that a near-record number of journalists around the world are in prison this year because of their work, including two Reuters reporters in Myanmar. *The story was edited by Ahram Online. Search Keywords: Short link: Some members of the House of Representatives are now in a free for all. Several lawmakers in the House chamber are chorusing a protest ... Some members of the House of Representatives are now in a free for all.Several lawmakers in the House chamber are chorusing a protest song, Freedom comes by struggle, by struggle; freedom come.Two members of the House, Mr Bashir Babale and Duoye Diri, had physical combat. Trouble started when some lawmakers brought out placards and others tore them. They were, however, calmed.Shortly after, Senators Samuel Ayanwu, also engaged Godwill Akpabio in a hot argument.The protesters continued with the song as President Muhammadu Buhari stepped into the chamber, while APC lawmakers hailed the President, Sai Baba!The National Anthem stopped both sides temporarily. Chairman, National Peace Committee and former Head of State, General Abdulsalami Abubakar (retd), has expressed worry over the growing insecurity in the country, saying the development had assumed a worrisome dimension.He spoke as Chairman of Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, observed that insecurity would be a major challenge for the commission in the conduct of the 2019 elections.Abubakar charged security agencies and other stakeholders in the nations democracy to show commitment to the successful conduct of the 2019 general election.Speaking at Nigeria Police/Stakeholders Security Summit on Election Security: Collaboration Between The Nigeria Police and Other Stakeholders Towards the Success of the 2019 General Election, Abubakar noted that the ongoing security situation in the country calls for deeper worry by well-meaning Nigerians and tasked stakeholders to work in conjunction with security agencies to maintain security before, during and after the coming general election.He said: Collaboration between Nigeria Police and other stakeholders towards the success of the 2019 general election is key.For security to be guaranteed, it is fundamental that the stakeholders and Nigeria Police must show commitment towards a successful election. The current fragile security situation in the country should be a source of concern to all Nigerians, especially the leaders.In order to achieve peace and security, it is necessary that all stakeholders, most especially the political class, traditional and religious leaders, and all Nigerians collaborate with the Nigeria Police, which is the supervisory institution in maintaining internal security in the country.Speaking also on the occasion, Chairman of INEC, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, disclosed that the electoral umpire will work with the Nigeria Police on the parameter to be used for the deployment of personnel during the 2019 general election.He noted that security would be a major issue during the general election, adding that the rules of engagement of personnel would be clear.He said: INEC will be solely in charge of all elections while the police will be in charge of security.He said the commission will work with security agencies to prosecute those involved in electoral malpractices during the election.He appealed to stakeholders, especially non-governmental organisations, NGOs, traditional rulers to help mobilise the electorate to collect their Permanent Voters Cards, PVCs, before the election.Yakubu reassured of the commissions readiness to conduct free, fair and credible election in 2019.We shall continue to work with the security agencies to prosecute violators during elections, he said.On his part, President Muhammadu Buhari has reiterated this commitment to a free and fair 2018 electiion.The President, who was represented by the Permanent Secretary, Federal Ministry of Interior, said: I attach much important to the stakeholders meeting. It is our firm belief that the election will be successful, free and transparent. Twenty years of democratic experience is enough for us to get our elections right.The election will go down in the memory of Nigeria as the most peaceful and transparent election. To achieve this, the Nigeria Police must earn the confidence of Nigerians. And this can only be done by maintaining a high level of professionalism devoid of partiality and partisanship. It must erase the perception of being seen as an agent of intimidation and coercion. The Presidential candidate of the PDP, Atiku Abubakar, has commended senators from the South East for working hard to realise the Sout... The Presidential candidate of the PDP, Atiku Abubakar, has commended senators from the South East for working hard to realise the South East Development Commission, SEDC, which bill was passed recently. He gave the commendation yesterday in a terse statement by the Abia State coordinator of the Atiku/Obi Presidential Campaign Organisation, Chief Charles Ogbonnaya in Umuahia. Recall that the Bill co-sponsored by Senators Stall Oduah (PDP-Anambra) and Samuel Anyanwu (PDP-Imo) aims at enhancing the infrastructural development of the South East zone, which is grappling with huge ecological challenges. Against that backdrop, Atiku urged the senators not to relent but to fight further to ensure that the commission takes off and was well funded. According to him, the commission if well funded would go a long way in solving some of the infrastructural deficiencies being suffered by the people of the South East. The family members of the immediate past Chief of Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Alex Badeh (retd.), may miss his burial as they remain on the watch list of the Department of State Services and the Nigeria Immigration Service.Badehs widow, Mary Iya Badeh, and his two sons, Alex (jnr) and Kam have been in the United States since 2016 following his prosecution by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission.A family friend of the Badehs told our correspondent that it was unlikely if they would come.He said, I have spoken with them and I dont know for now if they will be coming but it is highly unlikely. Their father has just been killed under controversial circumstances and the government has not removed them from the watch list. If they return and their passports are seized and they are not allowed to return, it would be a double tragedy.Everybody is still in shock so we cannot say for now if they will be coming but since they are Christians, there is no rush. A lot can happen before then.A prosecution witness, Abubakar Madaki, had told a Federal High Court sitting in Maitama that Badehs wife and two of his children were being investigated for offences with which the ex-Chief of Air Staff was charged.Madaki said the three of them, however, escaped to the United States before the investigation was concluded.He said all attempts to get them arrested turned out to be futile.The witness had said, At the initial stage, when we started the investigation, we invited Alex Badeh (Jnr.) who lives in 19 Kumasi Crescent, Abuja, one of the properties, among the properties earlier mentioned.He happened to be a son of the first defendant (Badeh). He claimed to be a tenant in that property and since an investigation was ongoing at the preliminary stage, we allowed him to go and come back when we had enough issues to question him about.He left and never came back. We later got to know that he has left the country for America.We were also looking for Mary Iya Badeh, the wife of the first defendant, who is one of the directors in the second defendant (Iyalikam Nigeria Limited).The second defendant (Iyalikam) had received so much funds from the alleged funds we are investigating.She too, according to the investigation has left the country for America. Kam Badeh (another of Badehs son) is one of the directors in one of the companies.We have gone round the locations that we had information that he does business, but we are unable to get him.Since the information was that they left through the International Airport, we wrote a letter to the Nigerian Immigration Service and the Department of Security Service to watch them. But we have not been able to get them.He said when his team concluded investigation in the case, it discovered that the first defendant (Badeh) and his wife had earlier incorporated a company Iyalikam Nigeria Limited in whose accounts they allegedly diverted the Nigerian Air Forces funds. Residents of Maiduguri, Borno state capital, have complained about the 24-hour electricity supply provided by Yola Electricity Distrib... Residents of Maiduguri, Borno state capital, have complained about the 24-hour electricity supply provided by Yola Electricity Distribution Company (YEDC). Speaking to NAN on Tuesday, they described the 24-hour supply as a waste, saying it has caused outrageous billings. Ibrahim Suleiman, a resident at who lives in Bolori Layout, appealed to the YEDC to reduce the supply of electricity. YEDC should go back to the former supply system where electricity was supplied for 12 hours and not 24 hours recently being enjoyed, he said. I work from 7pm to 4pm. So I do not need any electricity until I get home. But in this case, whether you consume power or not, you will be billed to pay for it. I think this is not fair. Residents told NAN that the incurring high bills were not in the interest of the masses, because it has hindered economic activities and social life of the people. They also alleged that YEDC jacked up their electricity bills by over 100 percent for commercial and residential areas sequel to an appreciable improvement in power supply in the metropolis. Esther Chukwuma, one of the consumers, described the new billing adopted by the power distribution companies as frustrating and lamentable. My bill indicated that I used 605 units in November and they charged N14, 000 as against N6, 500 for September where I used the same units, she said. They are charging me for what I did not consume because, during the day, I spend most of my time in my shop. I only use the electricity at night at home. I have a prepaid meter in the shop and I dont spend more than N2, 000 in a whole month. So how come I am not staying at home and I am being asked to pay N14, 000. I am here in their office, demanding an explanation. Responding, Usman Wakta, the YEDC Maiduguri business manager, said the company does not bill its customers arbitrarily. He said before the commissioning of the new 330kV transmission line, the stations relied on the 132KV controlled from Biu, which can only supply for a period of ten to twelve hours per day. On the average, we now supply electricity in the town for a minimum of 22 hours in a day which simply implies that the consumption of energy by residents in the state have multiplied or even tripled itself, he explained. We took a simple study from our prepaid metres users and we found out that the people that usually came to buy units of N2000 or N3000 in a month now have to spend N15, 000 or N20, 000 because of their energy usage. One thing we notice about the consumers is that they waste energy. People have this habit of leaving their lights on even in the afternoon. Go to some supermarkets or filling stations, you will see more than 200 bulbs on in the afternoon. So the more you load you use the more energy you consume. President Muhammadu Buhari has arrived at the National Assembly complex where he will be presenting the 2019 budget proposal. Th... President Muhammadu Buhari has arrived at the National Assembly complex where he will be presenting the 2019 budget proposal. The President and members of his cabinet arrived amid a rowdy session in which lawmakers could be heard jeering and cheering loudly. President Buhari arrived at about 12:40 pm and is expected to table the budget before a joint session of the Senate and House of Representatives. Ahead of his arrival, men of the Nigeria Police Force (NPF) and operatives of the Department of State Services (DSS) were ensuring all security measures were in place in and around the complex. Also unground to give security support are the Presidential Guards Brigade, Nigerian Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC), Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC), among others. Earlier on, the Clerk to the National Assembly, Mr Mohammed Sani-Omolori conduct a rehearsal for the Special Assistant to the President on National Assembly Matters (Senate), Senator Ita Enang, who will guide Buhari on his movement and presentation in the chamber. Noticeably absent were the workers at the National Assembly, under the auspices of the Parliamentary Staff Association of Nigeria, who had crippled business and legislative activities as part of their four-day warning strike. Former chief of defence staff, Alex Badeh, has been assassinated by unknown gunmen. Ibikunle Daramola, spokesman of the Nigerian air fo... It is with a heavy heart that I regretfully announce the unfortunate demise of former Chief of Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Alex Badeh, who died today, 18 Dec 18, from gunshot wounds sustained when his vehicle was attacked while returning from his farm along Abuja-Keffi Road Air Commodore Ibikunle Daramola (@KunleDaramola3) December 18, 2018 Former chief of defence staff, Alex Badeh, has been assassinated by unknown gunmen.Ibikunle Daramola, spokesman of the Nigerian air force, announced this via his Twitter handle on Tuesday.He said Badeh died from gunshot wounds sustained in an attack while returning from his farm.He said the sad incident happened along Abuja-Keffi road.The late Badeh, who was 61 years, was commissioned into the Nigerian Air Force in 1979.He was born in Vimtim, in the Mubi Local Government Area of Adamawa State.He attended the Vimtim Primary School. Vimtim and went on to obtain his secondary school certificate from the Villanova Secondary School in 1976 before proceeding to the Nigerian Defence Academy.Badeh was admitted into the Nigerian Defence Academy as a member of the 21 Regular Course on January 3, 1977, and was commissioned as Pilot Officer on July 3, 1979.The retired military officer was promoted Air Vice Marshal on January 3, 2008.He was appointed Chief of Air Staff by President Goodluck Jonathan in October 2012 and was appointed Chief of Defence Staff in April 2014.Until his death, he was standing trial for alleged diversion of funds meant for arms purchase. The National Assembly, yesterday, resolved to receive President Muhammadu Buhari at a joint session of the Senate and House of Representatives for the presentation of 2019 Appropriation Bill.At the Senate, yesterday, Senate Leader, Senator Ahmad Lawan (APC, Yobe North), moved that the Senate and the House of Representatives will sit in a joint session to receive an address by Commander-in-Chief, President Muhammadu Buhari, today, on the 2019 Appropriation.Lawans motion was seconded by Senate Deputy Minority Whip, Senator Emmanuel Paulker (PDP, Bayelsa Central).Thereafter, the Senate President, Dr. Bukola Saraki, put it into voice vote, the Ays had it as there was no nay.Meanwhile, the Presidency said, yesterday, that all was set for President Buhari to present 2019 budget before a joint sitting of the National Assembly, today, despite ongoing strike by National Assembly workers under the umbrella of Parliamentary Staff Association of Nigeria, PASAN.Speaking with newsmen, Senior Special Assistant to the President on National Assembly Matters (Senate), Senator Ita Enang, gave assurances that the President will make it a date with the National Assembly and that the current workers strike would not stop the President from carrying out the crucial national assignment of presenting the 2019 Appropriation Bill.Also speaking with newsmen, Leader of the House of Representatives, Femi Gbajabiamila, said the National Assembly was eager to receive President Buhari as No amount of strike can stop the budget presentation.He said: Its not possible to shut down the legislature as the entire country would be shut down as there will be nobody to make the laws. Last night (Monday) both legislative chambers leadership met on the issue of unpaid salaries though we operate separate accounts and we are on top of it.Our intervention is already yielding results and we hope to get results soon.It will be recalled that the workers resumed their strike, yesterday, after shutting down the National Assembly on Monday for the second time in two weeks over arrears of 28 percent increase in their salaries since 2010.The workers had arrived the complex quite early blocking the main entrance into the National Assembly complex already occupied by security operatives. President Muhammadu Buhari has described the killing of former Chief of Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Alex Badeh (rtd) as very sad... President Muhammadu Buhari has described the killing of former Chief of Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Alex Badeh (rtd) as very sad and unfortunate, and ordered security agencies to urgently find the killers. The President, in a statement by his Special Adviser on Media and Publicity, Mr Femi Adesina, in Abuja on Wednesday, commiserated with the family of the late four-star general, his friends and professional colleagues in the military. Buhari also condoled with the people and government of Adamawa over the demise of the former Chief of Defence Staff. Who was killed by unknown gunmen along Abuja Keffi road, on Tuesday. While noting that the late Badeh, who was also a former Chief of Air Staff, attained professional fulfillment in his over three decades military career, President Buhari regretted that he fell victim to the incidence of violent and fatal attacks on the nations highways. He directed security agencies to find the killers of the 15th Chief of Defence Staff and bring them to face the full force of the law, while ensuring greater security and safety for all users of the countrys roads. The President prayed that almighty God would comfort all those who mourn him and grant his soul peaceful rest. Dr Tom Okihere, Coordinator of APC BroomPlatForm, has said that President Muhammadu Buhari shares the same attributes with Nigerias first prime minister, the late Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa.Okihere made this known in Bauchi when members of the platform on tour of Bauchi State visited the tomb of the late prime minister.What we have discovered here now is the similarity in character and leadership virtues of the late Tafawa Balewa and President Muhammadu Buhari.They are alike in description; Buhari is so simple, Buhari is so down to earth, Buhari is a man of the people.And what you have read in the summary of life and time of Tafawa Balewa is all about his character and virtues.So in President Buhari we have found another Tafawa Balewa of blessed memory; we have found the president of the people, he stated.The coordinator, therefore, called on Nigerians to re-elect Buhari in the forthcoming general elections to enable him to consolidate on his achievements and the gains so far made.Our leader, President Buhari, the leaders of the APC, the leaders the Nigerian nation have to come back by 2019 to fully deliver this country from the hands of economic saboteurs.The electorate have no choice but to support the peoples mandate, which is Buhari and his governor, he said.The BroomPlatform is a support group of the APC, made up of more than journalists.The group aims to promote political integrity of the APC, President Muhammadu Buhari and progressive governors. A court in eastern France on Wednesday sentenced a Buddhist monk originally from Bhutan to 12 years in prison over a series of rapes at a communal living compound, including minors. Karma Tshojay, 56, was found guilty after four women, disciples at the "Temple of 1,000 Buddhas" or their children, accused him of multiple rapes and sexual assaults in the 1990s and 2000s. One of the victims was raped from 11- to 13-years-old, while another was just nine when she was sexually molested, the court heard. Tshojay, known as the Tempa Lama at the site in La Boulaye, has denied the claims since his arrest in 2012. He spent two years behind bars before being freed on bond. He continues to live in the region with his wife, but has been excluded from the community, which claims to have the first Himalayan temple built in Europe. But the court acquitted a second monk, also from Bhutan, who was accused of sexually assaulting a minor under 15-years-old. Search Keywords: Short link: President Muhammadu Buhari has written to the Senate, declining assent to National Broadcasting Commission, NBC, Amendment Bill 2018, passed by the National Assembly and forwarded to him for onward signing into law.In a letter to the Senate President, Dr. Bukola Saraki, and read yesterday at plenary, President Buhari said he was refusing assent to the bill because he would require a more appropriate approach for amendment.The letter read: Dear distinguished Senate President. Presidential decision to decline assent to the National Broadcasting Commission amendment Bill 2018.Pursuant to Section 58(4) of the constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria as amended, I hereby convey to the Senate, my decision on November 26, 2018, to decline presidential assent to the National Broadcasting Commission Amendment Bill 2018.I am declining assent to the bill because the amendment to the powers of the commission deletes existing paragraphs 21(u) which contains an important omnibus clause that grants the commission incidental powers which are not specifically provided for in other sections of the Act.We suggest that a more appropriate approach for the amendment for the creation of a new paragraph (U) as contained in the bill and the renumbering in the current paragraph (U), as a new paragraph (Y).Please accept, distinguished Senate President, the assurance of my highest consideration. Yakubu Dogara, speaker of the house of representatives, has pleaded with lawmakers in the lower legislative chamber not to embarrass Pre... Yakubu Dogara, speaker of the house of representatives, has pleaded with lawmakers in the lower legislative chamber not to embarrass President Muhammadu Buhari by staging a protest during thebudget presentation. It was learnt that aggrieved lawmakers of the All Progressives Congress (APC) who did not get tickets to contest the 2019 polls were planning to protest against the president. Some Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) lawmakers also plotted to partake in the protest, a legislative source said. which lasted about 12 minutes not to protest against Buhari as he is presenting the 2019 budget proposal. But the source said during a closed-door session on Thursday, Dogara pleaded with the aggrieved lawmakers in thewhich lasted about 12 minutes not to protest against Buhari as he is presenting the 2019 budget proposal. Another source said after the plea, some of the aggrieved lawmakers submitted their placards to Kawu Sumaila, senior special assistant to the president on national assembly matters (house of representatives). They have started submitting their placards to Kawu, the source said. They are aggrieved, you know most of them did not get their tickets and that is why they want to protest. That is the reason for the delay, the joint session was supposed to start at 12am. A former minister of Aviation, Femi Fani-Kayode, has reacted to the drama which ensued while President Muhammadu Buhari was presenting t... A former minister of Aviation, Femi Fani-Kayode, has reacted to the drama which ensued while President Muhammadu Buhari was presenting the 2019 proposed budget before a joint session of the National Assembly on Wednesday. The opposition lawmakers booed the President as he highlighted some of the successes so far recorded by his administration. The actions of the lawmaker made the President to remind the aggrieved lawmakers that, The world is watching us and we are supposed to be above this. But reacting, Fani-Kayode commended the lawmakers for putting the President in his place. He tweeted, I commend the members of NASS for standing up to the tyrant today and putting him in his place. A commercial tricycle operator Mr. Usman was rewarded with N200 after he returned the sum of N1,150,000 to an unnamed Igbo businessman w... Twitter Fam, lets celebrate this honest Keke Rider Mr. Usman. A Businessman from the East forgot N1,150,000 in his Keke & He went extra miles to track him down & return the money to him in Jalingo, Taraba St. After returning the money, the owner gave him N200 for recharge card. pic.twitter.com/5rD7J89A7L December 18, 2018 This is a clip from the interview with Usman in Hausa Language. pic.twitter.com/gmJAktsuAk December 18, 2018 A commercial tricycle operator Mr. Usman was rewarded with N200 after he returned the sum of N1,150,000 to an unnamed Igbo businessman who forgot the money in his tricycle after a ride in Jalingo, Taraba state yesterday.A Twitter user @Hassanpullo shared the pictures and videos on his Twitter page yesterday...A video with the Keke rider who spoke in Hausa language. The governor's aide says he has not broken any rules in APGA which he belongs and which has its own presidential candidateChido Obidiegwu, a senior special assistant to Governor Willie Obiano of Anambra state on event management, is championing the re-election campaign bid of President Muhammadu Buhari in the southeastern part of Nigeria.Obidiegwu inaugurated a movement, One-on-one Nigeria on Tuesday, December 19, at a briefing at the Nigeria Union of Journalists Press Centre in Awka, Anambra state.The Punch reports that the aide was accompanied by a former All Progressives Grand Alliance presidential aspirant, George Okoye.Obidiegwe reportedly said his campaign for Buhari was in the interest of the Igbo.According to him, the One-on-one Nigeria is an independent network of Ndigbo with a determination to achieve Igbo presidency by returning Buhari for a second term.This we do through a massive awareness to convince Ndigbo that four years of President Buhari is better than eight years of any other person for us to achieve this dream via a project tagged 4 is better than 8, Obidiegwu said while recalling the travails of the Igbo since the end of the Nigerian civil war.He argued that the Igbo are not ready to play the opposition anymore in the countrys polity just as he commended Buhari for infrastructural development in the south eas.Asked if his action will not be seen as anti-party politics since APGA has Gen John Gbor (retd), as a presidential candidate, Obidiegwu said his movement had nothing to do with political parties.Our resolve is driven by President Buharis past, his values, orientation and disposition.Buhari began serious work on the long-abandoned Second Niger Bridge, the long abandoned Enugu-Port Harcourt Expressway, the Zik Mausoleum, Ariaria Aba Independent Power Project.These, among other projects the Igbo yearned for over 16 years, could only be realised under President Muhammadu Buhari.We in One-on-One Nigeria are resolute and unequivocal in our support for this 2nd tenure.Successive military and civilian administrations could not do much to elevate the Igbo spirit as desired and deserved. It only took President Buhari who the Igbo rejected at the polls to address some of their key desires abandoned by previous regimes," he said.Meanwhile, Legit.ng reported that Atiku Abubakar, the presidential candidate for the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) will be visiting Nigeria's commercial city, Aba, Abia state on Wednesday, December 19.The presidential hopeful would be in Aba in the company of his running mate, Peter Obi, a former governor of Anambra state. The duo are expected to hold an interactive session with their various support groups in the commercial city of Aba. National Chairman, All Progressive Congress, Adams Oshiomhole, on Wednesday expressed hopes that the National Assembly wont distort the 2019 budget as presented.He also described President Muhammadu Buharis presentation of the 2019 Budget as a successful outing.Oshiomhole spoke in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria shortly after Buhari presented the budget at the National Assembly in Abuja.I think it was done very well and analytically well presented. It covers all the issues.It gives account of the previous budget, how it was implemented and why we will have to consolidate, going forward. I think it was a successful outing.Im impressed, Im excited and I pray that the National Assembly will not distort it in a way that will distort the tenet, well-thought out outcome, he said.Reacting to the rowdiness amidst the budget presentation, Oshiomhole said: I think the lawmakers generally agreed that the budget was good.All the requirements of the law have been met, namely, to lay the budget. How the senators behaved thereafter is their privilege.On his part, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Geoffrey Onyeama, simply described the budget presentation as excellent. Deputy Senate President, Senator Ike Ekweremadu, yesterday denied media report that he was on the list of Nigerians barred from traveling out of the country on the request of the Special Presidential Investigative Panel on the Recovery of Public Property.According to a statement by Ekweremadus Special Adviser, Media, Uche Anichukwu, Ekweremadu, was not in court with the panel or any other government agency over any corruption case, adding that it was the panel that sued him, with the excuse that he allegedly neglected to declare his assets in the manner prescribed by the Special Presidential Investigation Panel for the Recovery of Public Property.A statement yesterday by Ekweremadus Special Adviser, Media, Uche Anichukwu, read, the attention of the Office of the Deputy President of the Senate has been drawn to a misleading report by a national newspaper that Senator Ike Ekweremadu has been barred from traveling out of the country on the request of the Special Presidential Investigative Panel on the Recovery of Public Property.For purpose of clarification and emphasis, the Office wishes to restate that Ekweremadu is not in court with the panel or any other government agency over any corruption case. He was rather sued by the SPIP on the grounds that he, in the Panels words, allegedly neglected to declare his assets in the manner prescribed by the Special Presidential Investigation Panel for the Recovery of Public Property.Ekweremadus position is that the Constitution demands every public officer to declare his or her assets to the Code of Conduct Bureau every four years, a provision he had since fulfilled, hence his refusal to fill fresh asset declaration forms forwarded to him by the panel contrary to the constitution.It is also his position that the Public Property Special Provisions Act, CAP R4 LFN, 2004, otherwise known as Decree No 3, 1984, which the Panel relied on to charge public officials to court has become obsolete and the power to investigate non-asset declaration is now vested in the Code of Conduct Bureau by the 1999 Constitution (as amended). Therefore, only the Code of Conduct Bureau can receive asset declaration forms from public officers. Former President Dr. Goodluck Jonathan has extended his condolences to the Nigeria military, the entire people of Adamawa State and the family of the immediate past Chief of Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal, Alex Badeh (retd.) who was killed by gunmen along Abuja-Keffi Road on Tuesday.The former President in a statement by Ikechukwu Eze, Media Adviser to Dr. Goodluck Ebele Jonathan recalls that Badeh who successively served his administration as both Chief of Air Staff and Chief of Defence Staff served the nation to the best of his abilities.Ex-President Jonathan regrets the fact that Badeh who rose to the peak of his military career before his retirement was murdered in cold blood, at a time he could still be of service to his fatherland.He therefore urges the security agencies to swiftly unmask those behind this dastardly act and bring them to justice, especially in this election season when every necessary measure should be taken to ensure that Nigerians confidence in the nations democracy remains unshaken.Dr. Jonathan prays to God Almighty to grant his soul eternal repose and strengthen his family members as they mourn. Buruji Kashamu, senator representing Ogun east, has headed to the supreme court, after the judgement at the appellate court sitting in... Buruji Kashamu, senator representing Ogun east, has headed to the supreme court, after the judgement at the appellate court sitting in Ibadan did not end in his favour. Kashamu and Ladi Adebutu have been laying claim to the governorship ticket of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Ogun state. While the leadership of the party is behind Adebutu whom Uche Secondus, national chairman of the party, handed the governorship flag, a faction of the opposition party unveiled Kashamu as its candidate. Kashamu had relied on a ruling of the federal high court in Abeokuta which ordered the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to accept the list of candidates submitted to it by the faction of Kashamu. But Adebutu asked the court of appeal to set aside the ruling of the lower court. At the court on Monday, Emeka Etiaba, counsel to Adebutu, demanded that the case be assigned to another judge at the federal high court. But Alex Izinyon, counsel to Kashamu vehemently opposed the granting of the prayers sought by the appellants. Etiaba said a party in perpetual violation of positive and subsisting orders of court cannot justifiably seek favour from the same court it had treated with contempt. He contended that the appellants had the opportunity to state their case at the federal high court, Abeokuta, after they were served and chose to stay away from the court on October 2. The court had fixed Tuesday for judgement. Ruling on the suit filed by Adebutu, the court upturned the judgement of the Abeokuta high court which favoured Kashamu. Non-service of the originating summons on the applicants at the lower court rendered all the order given at the lower court against the applicants a nullity and this is an indication that the applicants were not given a fair hearing, Haruna Tsammani, the lead judge, held. In the interest of justice, the order of the lower court is set aside, null and void and an academic exercise. Tsammani ordered that the case be returned to the chief judge for reassignment to another judge. Dissatisfied, the senator asked his lawyers to proceed to the apex court. Some members of the national assembly booed President Muhammadu Buhari while he was delivering his speech at the presentation of the 2... Some members of the national assembly booed President Muhammadu Buhari while he was delivering his speech at the presentation of the 2019 budget. The action of the lawmakers made the president pause at different intervals. Some of the legislators even accused Buhari of making false claims. When the president said the economy and security have improved under his administration, some lawmakers shouted Lies! Lies!. While the presidents supporters cheered and clapped in solidarity, the voice of his opponents resonated within the chamber. Senate President Bukola Saraki and Yakubu Dogara, speaker of the house of representatives, watched as the aggrieved lawmakers kept shouting on top of their voices. Earlier when he arrived, supporters of the president welcomed him by chanting Sai Baba! Sai Baba! A Brazilian supreme court judge on Wednesday issued an order that could see former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva imminently released from prison, where he is serving a 12-year term for graft. Justice Marco Aurelio Mello ruled that all prisoners in Lula's situation -- whose conviction has been confirmed by a second court -- should be freed while appeals were under way if their lawyer requested. Search Keywords: Short link: President Muhammadu Buhari is currently presenting the 2019 budget proposal to the National Assembly amid cheers and jeers. Wedn... President Muhammadu Buhari is currently presenting the 2019 budget proposal to the National Assembly amid cheers and jeers. Wednesdays budget presentation is markedly different from previous ones as it started with a rowdy session and the Presidents speech is being repeatedly interrupted by cheers and jears. It all started with his arrival. As the President, who arrived at the National assembly around 12:40 pm, walked into the chamber, he was received with both cheers and jeers. While his supporters praised him, opposition lawmakers booed him and sang freedom songs. After pausing for the National Anthem, the chamber became rowdy again as several lawmakers began booing him. The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has expressed shock over the gruesome murder of former Chief of Defence Staff (CDS), Air Chief Marshal (ACM) Alex Badeh (rtd), on Tuesday, by yet to be identified gunmen, describing it as a national loss.The party said the ambush and killing of a military officer of ACM Badehs status has heightened fears and apprehensions on the level of insecurity in the country, particularly, the safety of average citizens, under the incompetent and insensitive Buhari administration.In a statement by its National Publicity Secretary and Director, Media & Publicity, PDP Presidential Campaign Organization, Mr. Kola Ologbondiyan, the PDP noted that the murder of the former CDS came ahead of his opening of defence, in January next year, in the N3.9 billion military fund case preferred against him by the APC-led Federal Government.The statement further reads thus: The PDP therefore demands a wide-ranging investigation into the killing to unravel those behind the dastardly act as well as the motive behind their action.The party recalls the killing of former Chief of Army Administration, Major General Idris Alkali, in Plateau state as well as the horrific murder of over 100 of our gallant soldiers in Melete, Borno state, by insurgents and stated that President Buhari has failed woefully as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces.PDP insists that our nation is drifting and gradually assuming the status of a failed state and urges President Buhari to spend the few months left of his administration to provide a leadership that will secure respect for our territorial integrity and the lives of our people.Our party notes further that the failure of President Buhari is whittling the confidence of the citizens in our nationhood.The PDP describes ACM Badeh as a fine and patriotic officer, who made various sacrifices towards the security, unity and stability of the nation, particularly as the Chief of Defence Staff, adding that his killing is a monumental loss to the nation.The party condoles the Badeh family, the Government and people of Adamawa state and prays God to grant them the fortitude to bear the loss, while urging our security forces to immediately swing into action and leave no stones unturned until the killers are brought to book. Some residents of Nasarawa state have told Amnesty International (AI) that policemen sent to their communities to stop attacks by susp... Some residents of Nasarawa state have told Amnesty International (AI) that policemen sent to their communities to stop attacks by suspected herdsmen asked them to pay N150,000. The residents made the allegations in a report released by AI on the conflict between farmers and herdsmen in the country. In the report released Monday, the villagers were quoted as saying the policemen who were reportedly deployed from the force criminal intelligence and investigation department asked them to pay the money for logistics. The report read: Some residents of villages from Nasarawa and Kokona LGAs and Agwada, Udege, and Loko Development Area Councils, all within Nasarawa State, on 10 March 2017 wrote a petition to the Chief of Army Staff seeking help against what they described as incessant attacks by Fulani gunmen on their communities. The army wrote a letter to the Inspector General of Police (IGP), attaching the petition, asking the IGP to look into the petition with a view to taking necessary action to remedy the situation. The IGP forwarded the letter to the Deputy Inspector General of Police in charge of Force Criminal Intelligence and Investigation Department for investigation. The villagers told Amnesty International that the policemen sent from the Nigeria Police Force Headquarters asked them to pay N150,000 ($411), for logistics, which they paid in cash, because the policemen did not want to leave any trace of the funds to them. But only three policemen were sent to Nasarawa LGA. The policemen then went to the police station in Agwada town between the 25 and 27 May 2017, where they asked people from the affected villages to come and write statements. According to a resident of one of the villages, the policemen refused to go to the villages, complaining of bad road and that the Fulani gunmen had better weapons than them. Isa Sanusi, AI spokesman, confirmed the villagers claim to TheCable on Tuesday. I can confirm that to you. We have evidences. Everything in that report is a fact so they asked them to pay, he said. When Jimoh Moshood, Nigeria police spokesman, was reached out to, he denied the allegations. Moshood said he reached out to the force criminal intelligence and investigations department and the officer in charge said no one asked for money from the villagers. President Muhammadu Buhari has declined assent to two bills in the transport sector.They are the National Transport Commission Bill 2018 and the Federal Roads Authority (Establishment) Bill 2018.The presidents decision came in a letter to the National Assembly leadership read by the President of the Senate, Sen. Bukola Saraki, at plenary on Wednesday.Buhari said some sections of the National Transport Commission Bill contained safety regulations that would duplicate the functions of existing transport agencies.He said, Safety regulatory provisions enshrined in some sections of the bill which are technical in nature fall within the purview of central legislation implemented by agencies like NIMASA (Nigeria Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA), NPA (Nigeria Ports Authority (NPA) and therefore should be expunged from the bill.Two, the percentage of the amount to be retained by the agency from royalties collected under section 19 (2)(d) should be reduced from 10 to five per cent.Section 12 (9)(2)(d) stipulates that a portion of the proceeds from royalties collected by the authority empowered to collect royalties from transport service providers should not exceed 10 per cent which is collected by service providers and concessionaires.Three, section 19 (2)(f) which stipulates charge of three per cent freight tariff stabilisation fee on all imports and exports out of Nigeria including wet and dry cargoes should be amended and reduced from three per cent to one per cent.This is what is currently contained in the Nigerian Shippers Council legislation, he said.On the Federal Roads Authority (Establishment) Bill 2018, the president said the proposed road sector regulator would usurp the supervisory power of the Federal Ministry of Power, Works and Housing.The president pointed out that the proposed agency would also render the entire technical workforce of the supervisory ministry redundant.The establishment of the road sector regulator as a separate and distinctive body in Part 6 of the bill is capable of rendering the entire technical workforce of the supervisory ministry redundant.The supervisory power of the ministry over the road sector would be taken over by the road sector regulator and will leave the ministry without the power to exercise its supervisory role.I feel the ministry would have little or no desirable role to play in the road sector.This is because ownership and management of roads would be vested in the road sector regulator such that the supervisory powers would be exercised by it, leaving the ministry without any clear statutory function, Buhari argued. The House of Representatives is now holding an executive session.The Speaker, Yakubu Dogara, shortly after saying the opening prayers, met with the Deputy Speaker, Lasun Yusuf; and Majority Leader, Femi Gbajabiamila, after which he urged those who are not lawmakers in the chamber and at the gallery to step out.He said the closed-door meeting would last only five minutes.The meeting is holding less than 25 minutes to the arrival of the President.President Buhari is now to be received at 12 noon. South Africas National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) has issued an arrest warrant for Grace Mugabe, Zimbabwes former first lady. A... South Africas National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) has issued an arrest warrant for Grace Mugabe, Zimbabwes former first lady. AfriForum, a minority rights group announced the development at a press conference that held on Wednesday in Centurion. We can report that the warrant of arrest has been issued for Grace Mugabe, Times Lives quoted Kallie Kriel, AfriForum CEO, to have said. It seems that justice is going to take place and we are looking forward to this matter going forward. Vishnu Naidoo, the national police spokesperson, also confirmed that the arrest warrant was issued on December 13. Three months before the military take over that saw Robert Mugabe resign as president in 2017, the former first lady was accused of assaulting Gabriella Engels, a model, in a Johannesburg hotel. At the time, she said she acted in self-defence after the intoxicated and unhinged model attacked her at the hotel where her son lived. Engels was reported to have sustained injuries including a gash on her forehead. Human rights lawyer, Mr. Femi Falana SAN has asked the Nigerian Army to end attack, harassment and intimidation of Amnesty International and focus instead on addressing the several allegations of serious human rights violations and abuses by the Army.In a statement made in Lagos this morning, Mr. Falana said, The Nigerian military has also been indicted by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Presidential Panel on Procurement of Arms and Ammunition, Judicial Commissions of Enquiry and the International Criminal Court (ICC) on gross human rights abuse and war crimes which are similar to the allegations documented by Amnesty International.The Nigerian Army yesterday said it would make a case for the closure of the Amnesty International offices in Nigeria, alleging the human rights group is working hard to destabilise the country.But Falana said, I am very concerned that rather than telling Nigerians what they would do to address the very damaging allegations made by Amnesty International of grave human rights abuses against the Nigerian Army and other security agencies the Army is targeting Amnesty simply for working to hold the Army to account.Falanas statement read in part: The Army should accept responsibility and allow Amnesty International to carry out its human rights work. Stigmatising and maligning the very organizations that stand for human rights would be inconsistent with Nigerian Constitution of 1999 (as amended) and international law, and portray the Army as attempting to cover up the allegations.Contrary to the false claim of the Army, the Muhammadu Buhari government in 2016 instituted a Judicial Commission of Inquiry to investigate allegations of human rights violations and abuses by the Nigerian Armed Forces in the North-east region and other parts of the country. The panel confirmed grave human rights abuses by the military. Unfortunately, the government has not been able to release the report. Further, the government has not released the White Paper on the panels findings.However, many of the hundreds of people being detained in Giwa Barrack and other detention centres have either been released or charged to court. But the Army previously dismissed the allegations of human rights abuse of the detainees.The Nigerian Army killed 347 Shiites in Zaria in December 2015 under the pretext that there was a plot to assassinate the Chief of Army Staff, General Tukur Buratai. The Judicial Commission of Enquiry instituted by Governor Nasir Elrufai of Kaduna State dismissed the basis of the massacre and recommended the prosecution of the culprits. But as the indicted officers and the troops were not prosecuted for conspiracy and culpable homicide the Army again opened fire on another group of Shiites in Abuja in October 2018. At the end of the attack, 52 Shiites were killed in cold blood. Even though the soldiers who committed the reckless massacre in Abuja have been identified in a video they will not be brought to trial for now!In all of these incidents and several others, Amnesty International and other human rights bodies have conducted investigated and indicted the criminal elements who bear most responsibility for the crimes against humanity and other egregious human rights violations committed against the Nigerian people. It is because of these unresolved allegations that the Army is now mounting pressure on the Federal Government to expel Amnesty International.Last week, the Army did the same thing to UNICEF, an institution that is doing so much to protect the human rights of Nigerian children in difficult circumstances in the North-east region and across the country. We are not unaware that the Nigerian authorities did not like the recent report by UNICEF that 13.2 million Nigerian children are out of school, sadly the highest number in the world.We are also aware that some senior military officers are standing trial for alleged criminal diversion of several billions of Naira earmarked for the purchase of arms and ammunition for counter insurgency operations. This sad development has prolonged the war on terror being prosecuted by the Federal Government.Mr. Falana also recalled that President Buhari had personally assured the leadership of Amnesty International that all allegations of human rights by the military would be investigated and that anyone implicated would be sanctioned. The Senate had also passed a resolution to probe the various allegations of human rights abuse by the members of the armed forces. But due to the failure of the Nigerian Government to ensure compliance of the Armed Forces with Human Rights obligations and rules of engagement and specifically to investigate allegations of human rights abuses levelled against the military by Amnesty International and other foreign and local human rights organisations the International Criminal Court has been inundated with petitions alleging human rights abuse by the Nigerian military and failure of the Government to bring the perpetrators to book.According to the human rights lawyer, the ICC has recently revealed that it received a total of 169 communications from Nigeria and its assessment has shown that security forces in Nigeria have committed war crimes varying from murder, torture, and intentionally attacking the civilian population. Specifically, the Office found a reasonable basis to believe that security forces committed the war crimes of murder, torture, cruel treatment, outrages upon personal dignity and intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population.Mr. Falana urged the Authorities of the Nigerian Army to stop chasing the shadow by mounting pressure on the Buhari administration to close down the offices of Amnesty International and UNICEF in Nigeria. To prevent the arraignment of the indicted military officers before the International Criminal Court, the Federal Government is advised to obtain the report of the Prosecutor with a view to embarking on the immediate prosecution of the suspects. Furthermore, the Federal Government should prosecute the military personal indicted by the two judicial commissions of enquiry as well as the Presidential Panel on Arms Procurement. Gov. Aminu Tambuwal of Sokoto State will on Monday present the states 2019 budget to the House of Assembly for approval, the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports.The presentation of the budget estimates was approved by the House of Assembly at a plenary session in Sokoto on Wednesday.The Deputy Speaker, Alhaji Abubakar Magaji, who presided over the plenary session, called for the suspension of the House rule to allow members sit for the presentation.Magaji said the occasion called for attendance by all notable citizens.NAN recalls that Tambuwal presented the states 2018 budget estimate of N220.5 billion to the House of Assembly on Dec. 21, 2017.In the 2018 budget, N152.8 of the budget was for capital expenditure, while N67.6 billion went for recurrent expenditure. The National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS), on Wednesday condemned the killing of the immediate past Air Chief Marshal, Alex Badeh, retired Chief of Defence Staff.The former Chief of Defence Staff, Badeh, a four-star General of the Nigerian Air Force (NAF), was shot dead on Tuesday along Abuja-Keffi Road.The Director of Public Relations and Information, NAF, Air Commodore Ibikunle Daramola, confirmed Badehs assassination in a statement in Abuja on Tuesday.He said that that the former defence chief died from gunshot injuries sustained when his vehicle was attacked on Abuja-Keffi Road while returning from his farm.NANS National Public Relations Officer, Mr Bestman Okereafor, in a statement in Enugu, urged security agents to ensure that the perpetrators of this evil are brought to book without delay.The attention of the apex students governing body, NANS, has been drawn to the gruesome assassination of Air Chief Marshal Alex Badeh, a retired four-star flag officer of the Nigerian Air Force (NAF).NANS, in all totality, condemns the killing and considers this as very unfortunate, disheartening and one that has no doubt once again portrays our beloved country in a negative way and manner in the comity of nations.If a former Chief of Defence Staff can be assassinated in such a manner in a democratic rule, what then is the fate of common defenceless Nigerians?NANS is calling on security agents across the country to step up security measures as the Yuletide draws nearer, and specifically ahead of the 2019 General Elections, he said.He said the association was not unaware of the Federal Governments efforts to tackle insecurity in the country even though it was being frustrated by some political gladiators.On this sad note, NANS is bidding the former Chief of Defence Staff farewell.May God grant the Badeh family, government of Adamawa and the Nigerian Air Force the fortitude to bear this irreparable loss, we pray that his gentle and rugged soul rest in peace, Amen.NAN recalls that the late retired four-star General and flag officer of the Nigerian Air Force was the 18th Chief of Air Staff from Oct. 4, 2012 to Jan. 16, 2014; and the 15th Chief of Defence Staff from Jan. 16, 2014 to July 13, 2015. President Muhammadu Buhari has cautioned lawmakers in the joint session of the National Assembly to comport themselves as they are on television and being watched across the world.Buhari who is currently at the Assembly presenting the 2019 Budget was being heckled by some lawmakers believed to be members of the opposition.While some lawmakers stood up to give the President a clap, some others heckled him shouting, Lies, propaganda.One of them called Buhari, grass cutter in reference to the scandal which the last Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Babachir Lawal, was enmeshed.When the President was stating the achievements of his administration in the area of fighting corruption, some lawmakers shouted him down, saying, propaganda, which corruption are you fighting? Grass cutterBuhari had also claimed that every state was being touched by the Federal Government in the area of road construction. Soldiers raise China's national flag to half-mast on the National Memorial Day for Nanjing Massacre Victims at the memorial hall for the victims in Nanjing, East China's Jiangsu province, on Dec 13, 2018. [Photo/IC] BEIJING, Dec. 17 -- December 13, 2018 marked China's fifth National Memorial Day for Nanjing Massacre Victims. That day, China organized a national memorial ceremony and relevant activities calling for keeping history in mind and cherishing peace, which drew wide attention from the international community. Stephen Perry, chairman of the UKs 48 Group Club, called the Nanjing Massacre one of the most horrible incidents in human history. He said that setting up the national memorial day for victims of the massacre was a right choice, which can enable people not only to keep in mind the brilliant achievements realized by China today, but also to remember the sufferings endured by Chinese people in the past. Michael Charleston Chua, a history professor at the Philippine De La Salle University, said that it was very important and meaningful for China to set up the National Memorial Day of Nanjing Massacre Victims. The Philippines also suffered during World War II, and also set up a memorial day marking the end of World War II in the country in November. Chua noted that people needed to remember what happened in the past, so as to avoid historical tragedies from repeating themselves in the future. He added that remembering the past is not to prolong hatred, but to learn lessons from history and to better understand what happens in the present and warn ourselves not to repeat mistakes in the future. Luu Bich Ho, former director of the Institute of Development Strategy under the Vietnamese Ministry of Planning and Investment, noted that China held the national memorial day for victims in the Nanjing Massacre not only for remembering history but also demonstrating its pursuit and longing for lasting peace. While keeping the past in mind, China is also looking into the future and making efforts to achieve peace, cooperation and development. According to a research fellow at the Institute of Far Eastern Studies under the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Nanjing Massacre was one of the most terrible crimes committed by Japanese imperialists in China, which is an irrefutable historical fact. He added that one of the greatest lessons we can learn from World War II is that we must do all we could to avoid new wars and prevent the world catastrophe from repeating itself, and it requires efforts of all people to maintain world peace. The vice chairman of the Mandalay Branch of the Myanmar-China Friendship Association, said that learning history aims to prevent future generations from repeating the past mistakes. He noted that as the national memorial day was held in China, overseas Chinese in Myanmar also mourned for their compatriots who fell victim in the Nanjing Massacre 81 years ago. He also called for remembering the past and preventing historical tragedies from repeating themselves in the future. Li Renliang, an expert on international studies at Thailands National Institute of Development Administration, commented that China set up the National Memorial Day for Nanjing Massacre Victims and held a grand national memorial ceremony in Nanjing, evidencing that the Chinese people keep history in mind and cherish peace. This also warned relevant countries not to neglect history, but to draw lessons from the past and jointly create a peaceful international environment, he added. Carice Witte, executive director of the Sino-Israel Global Network & Academic Leadership (SIGNAL), said that both Israeli and Jewish people also suffered a lot in the past, and the past tragedies should be remembered to prevent them from happening again. She added that setting up the national memorial day is vital for China and its people to remember and understand the major tragedy endured by Nanjing in the past. French painter Christian Poirot who once created oil paintings on the Nanjing Massacre and comfort women was invited to participate in a memorial event in Nanjing on December 13. He noted that the spark of seeking justice and respect for victims in the massacre has never died out, and the experience of watching the dance drama Deep Memory based on recollections of the Nanjing Massacre survivors made him think over that episode of history all over the night. Ahmed Sallam, former media adviser at the Egyptian Embassy in China, said that China held memorial activities for victims in the Nanjing Massacre, with an aim to inform people in the country and the rest of the world that wars can only bring damage and hurt, and its hoped that people of all countries can learn from history and cherish and maintain peace. Ronnie Lins de Almeida, director of the Brazilian Center for China Studies, hoped that the Japanese government could admit the atrocities it committed in the past as the German government, and maintain a correct attitude toward history. He added that the Nanjing Massacre would never be forgotten, and this episode of history reminds todays people of cherishing the hard-won peace. A political analyst and honorary professor at the University of South Africa, remarked that it is crucial to remember history, or we will be unable to make right judgement on the present and the future. He added that all humans should join the memorial event, rather than just victims, and Japan should face up to history and admit its crime in the massacre. Tan Sri Datuk Dr. Ng Teck Fong, chairman of the Malaysian Chinese Museum, said that history should not be forgotten, and remembering the past aims to prevent tragedies from repeating themselves. He commented that it is moving for China to set up the National Memorial Day for Nanjing Massacre Victims through legislation and organize national memorial activities. Particularly, these can enable young generations who havent experienced wars to keep history in mind and cherish peace, he added. We have used your information to see if you have a subscription with us, but did not find one. Please use the button below to verify an existing account or to purchase a new subscription. We have well passed the point where saying that the government is corrupt feels like a broken record, it's like pointing out that the sky is blue or the grass is green. While things may seem to have gone from bad to utter catastrophe in recent years, there has been hope, as evidenced by the recent midterm elections, that more people are becoming politically active and getting to know where their local representatives stand on issues relevant to them. But frustratingly, just as many are coming to discover that many constituents don't speak the same language as their representatives: capitalism. Ever since the Supreme Court ruled that "money is speech" protected by the First Amendment in Citizens United, Congress has been flush with a seemingly endless supply of donations from corporate interest groups and unnamed PACs. Undisclosed and unaccountable, it often feels like our elected officials are unable to listen to anything that doesn't come attached with a check and corporate logo but luckily New York-based design studio, Hello Velocity, has devised the perfect solution. Their latest project, the Corporate Constitution, is an updated version of the country's founding document typeset entirely in logos. Using the studio's own typeface, Brand New Roman, the Corporate Constitution looks to use the language of rampant consumerism and late stage capitalism in order to finally break through to members of Congress. Operating on a 'Buy One Give One' business model, those who buy their own copy of the Corporate Constitution will also get the chance to donate a copy to their elected representative in House (or even a representative of your choice). "We know most elected representatives don't get the opportunity to read this important book, so we are donating copies" Hello Velocity says on their website, adding that "we've made sure to put it in the language they understand best." The Corporate Constitution is now available to buy through Hello Velocity. Check out an inside look at the new edition below: Photos Courtesy of Hello Velocity The Bank of Ghana (BoG) has given a no objection to the planned merger talks between First Atlantic Bank and Energy Commercial Bank. Information available to Peacefmonline.com indicates that the Central Banks green light was communicated on Friday, December 14, 2018. This means the discussions can begin having secured all the documents that give more information about the merger between the two banks. This no objection approval granted by the Regulators would help the two banks to quicken up the process in meeting the new mnimum capital requirement before the deadline of December 31, 2018. The two banks are entering into this merger after Energy Commercial Bank failed to raise the targeted amount of 340 million to help meet the new minimum capital requirement of 400 million. This resulted in the two banks signing a MoU to merge their business to help them meet the new capital levels set by the BoG. First Atlantic Bank assured customers in May this year that it is positive of meeting the 400 million cedis capital requirement set by the Bank of Ghana. First Atlantic Bank has signed a deal to acquire The Energy Commercial Bank Limited. The acquisition will increase the two banks capital beyond the stated Ghc 400million set by the BOG and will position the bank in the top 10 league of best performing banks in Ghana. Source: Peacefmonline.com Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video President Akufo-Addo has revealed that a Special Investigations Team has been put in place to undertake criminal investigations into the failures of all seven banks for possible prosecutions by the relevant State agencies. Addressing the media at an end of year press conference on Wednesday, 19th December, 2018, President Akufo-Addo assured that no one found complicit will be spared. Additionally, the Bank of Ghana, he indicated, is conducting its own internal investigations into the conduct of its officials (past and present) that could have facilitated wrong doing at these banks. Throwing light on the banking sector, the President noted that his administration inherited a financial system that was under a considerable state of distress, with banks that were known to be insolvent as far back as 2015, and banks that had been licensed without the requisite capital. Some of these banks, he said, were surviving day to day only by virtue of liquidity support from the Bank of Ghana with the underlying problems that plagued them remaining unresolved. To protect depositors funds as well as to prevent contagion from these failed banks to the rest of the financial system, the new administration of the Bank of Ghana took some courageous measures in the public interest, to clean up the banking system and to put it on a stronger and more resilient path, he said. President Akufo-Addo continued, There is no doubt that the failure of the seven banks came at a cost to the Ghanaian taxpayer and staff of the affected banks. As a result of the decisions taken by the Bank of Ghana and the financial support Government provided through the establishment and funding of Consolidated Bank Ghana Limited, the President noted that this has ensured that deposits of more than 1.5 million customers with deposit values of over GH10 billion and about 70 per cent of the 5,000 jobs in the affected banks were saved. This, he explained, was important to alleviate the severe adverse outcomes that could have occurred. It is important that the costs of these interventions, which were borne by taxpayers, are recovered to the extent possible through recoveries from debtors, shareholders, and related and connected parties who took money from the defunct banks, he said. The President continued, the receivership processes are ongoing, and the receivers are making great strides in their recovery efforts. Amounts in excess of GH400 million have so far been recovered by the Receivers of the 2 banks closed last year. At the same time, the recapitalisation efforts by banks have been very successful so far, with about 22 banks already meeting the new minimum capital of GH400 million well in advance of the 31st December deadline. The 22 banks that have met the new requirement include a good number of indigenous banks, whilst a few others are in the final stages of meeting this requirement. I am confident that at the end of the exercise, we will have a stronger, more resilient banking sector with a strong indigenous presence, well-positioned to finance the next phase of our agenda of economic growth, the President added. Source: Peacefmonline.com/Ghana Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video Ghana and Morocco are to deepen their bilateral relations in the area of education. To this end, the two countries will exchange students and teachers to promote the use of French as the second language in Ghana. The Minister of Education, Dr. Matthew Opoku Prempeh made this known when the Ambassador of the Kingdom of Morocco to Ghana, H.E. Mohammed Farahat, paid a courtesy call on him at his offices today. Dr. Opoku Prempeh noted that since Ghana had joined the International Organization of the Francophonie (OIF), it was imperative that French was widely taught and learnt in the country, hence the need for enhanced partnership with sister countries such as Morocco, where French is an official language alongside Arabic. The Minister stated that education was an asset; hence the need to invest more in education to ensure well educated citizens who will support the economic growth and development of the country. H.E. Mohammed Farahat expressed his countrys willingness to sustain the gains made in the educational sector, especially the round of scholarships offered Ghanaians to study in Morocco. He indicated that the Moroccan system also stood to benefit from Ghana, adding that highly trained and skilled persons were needed to ensure the progress of countries. He used the occasion to officially invite the Hon. Minister to the First African Forum on Vocational Training, under the theme Governance of vocational training systems for employability and competitiveness in Africa, scheduled for the 21st -22nd December, 2018 in Morocco, adding that will be an opportunity to examine the issues and common challenges related to the governance of vocational training in Africa and its impact on the valuation of human capital. Source: Peacefmonline.com Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video Mr Osei Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu, Minister for Parliamentary Affairs has defended the emergency medical drone deal approved by parliament. According to him, the people who are opposed to the arrangement were making their argument from a wrong premise. Mr Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu, who is also the Majority Leader, gave the justification at a dialogue with the media organised by Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs (MOPA) in Accra. The forum which attracted media personnel and people from academia was on the theme: Interrogating Parliaments contribution to the consolidation of Ghanas democracy thus far: The perspectives of media. The Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs as part of its mission to deepen inclusiveness in a participatory democracy recognised the importance of media in the democratization process, especially in providing a vital link between citizens and the state. The Ministry is engaging the media to help interrogate the performance of Ghanas Parliament, since 1993 with the view to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the institution for the consolidation of democracy. Parliament recently approved an agreement between the government and Zipline Ghana Limited for drones to be used to deliver emergency health products. The Ghana Health Service (GHS) introduced the deal to help deliver blood and essential medicines across the country, especially to rural communities. The GHS described the deal as extremely useful and called on all Ghanaians to support the idea. Mr Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu also explained that governments reason for the drone deal was predicated on the huge fire that engulf the Central Medical stores at Tema where the nation lost over $200 million worth of medical supplies. We all know what happened, the nation lost over $200 million worth of medical supplies from the Central Medical Stores He said the strategy of government now is to localised and not store medical supplies at one place where people would pilfer and steal, and later burn down the whole the place so that there would no information to track and prosecute them. Mr Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu also stated that the rationale is to prevent people from stealing medical items meant for the whole country and also a drain on the economy. He explained the current drone arrangement with Zipline is for four years after which the government has the option to either terminate or continue with the contract. He said he was not only convinced by the committees report that there was value for money on the deal but also persuaded. Mr Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu also gave assurance that Parliament would pass the Right to Information (RTI) Bill before the end of the session on Saturday, December 22, 2018. He however stated that if the Bill was not passed before the end of the session, it would definitely be done in the first week of the next session. He explained that a significant amount of work has already been done on the Bill and it is left with few clauses to be amended. Source: GNA Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video MOSCOW, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- Russia's strategic nuclear forces have grown significantly stronger and it is necessary to further strengthen the potential of the country's strategic nuclear forces next year, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday. "The nuclear triad, which plays a key role in maintaining global parity, has been noticeably strengthened with the share of modern weapons in it already reaching 82 percent," Putin told an extended Russian Defense Ministry meeting. A nuclear triad is a three-pronged military force structure that consists of land-launched nuclear missiles, nuclear-missile-armed submarines and strategic aircraft with nuclear bombs and missiles. Putin said that serious, breakthrough steps have been taken in the development of the newest and unparalleled weapons this year, including the start of the serial production of the Avangard scramjet glide vehicle, successful testing of the Sarmat missiles, test-alert duty of the hypersonic Kinzhal (Dagger) air-launched ballistic missile and of the Peresvet combat laser systems. According to Putin, these weapons increase several times the potential of the armed forces and will reliably ensure the security of Russia in the coming decades. A priority next year is to further strengthen the combat potential of the strategic nuclear forces, Putin said. It is necessary to switch quickly to modern weapons, which have enhanced capabilities for overcoming promising missile defense systems, he said. The next step will be continuing the serial production and delivery of the Avangard systems to the troops, he said. Controversial Ghanaian Politician and Member of Parliament for Assin Central, Hon. Kennedy Agyapong is crying over abnormal duty charges at the port on goods imported into the nation. According to him, his goods worth $4m are locked at the port and there is no way he is getting money to pay due to the exorbitant duties which the port officials are demanding from him. The loudmouthed Member of Parliament disclosed this during an interview on the Tuesday 18th December 2018s segment of Adom TV. I have imported goods worth 4 million dollars, the duties on the goods is 800 million dollars. How do you create an enabling environment for businesses with this? I have sent copies of the import duties to the Vice President. He was also shocked. In fact, I will not be able to clear the goods, where will I get the money from? he enquired. As a country, we have to think about the Dubai and Singapore way where we reduce import duties to give room for businessmen to import more and sell more to enable the government rake in more taxes. It is not prudent to pile pressure on the few importers with higher taxes, he said. He, therefore, used the opportunity to send a strong warning to the ruling government, NPP to take the necessary steps should they ever want to remain in power. Source: ghanacelebrities.com Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video NIGERIA: Justice Maureen Onyetenu of the Federal High Court in Osogbo, Osun state has sentenced Professor Richard Akindele, a former lecturer at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile Ife, to 2 years in prison for demanding sex to pass one of his students, Monica Osagie. Akindele changed his plea from not guilty to guilty during the hearing of the case on Monday December 17th. Akindele was first arraigned in court by the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) on November 19th on a three count charge bothering on "using his position as a lecturer in the Department of Management and Accounting to demand for sexual benefit from a student and fraudulently upgrade her result in Research Method course which she supposedly failed in 2017". He initially pleaded not guilty. On Monday morning during the hearing of the case, he made a u-turn, pleading guilty to all the charges. The court has sentenced him to 2-years in prison. Source: LIB Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video The New Patriotic Party (NPP) MP for Nsawam-Adoagyiri in the Eastern Region, Frank Anor Dompreh, has described as 'unfortunate' a confrontation that occurred on Monday involving the Foreign Minister, Shirley Ayorkor Botchwey. According to him, Madam Ayorkor Botchwey should have controlled her emotions even though she was provoked. There were verbal exchanges between Ms Botchwey and North Tongu MP (NDC), Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, in the lobby of parliament. This was after Mr Ablakwa accused the government of allegedly inflating the cost ($12 million) of a six-bedroom residence for Ghanas new mission in Norway. Speaking to the issue in an interview on Okay FM's Ade Akye Abia, Tuesday, Mr Anor Dompreh, said: "It was unfortunate what happenedthe minister got emotionalwe thank God it did not degenerateI am not trying to justify what happened.I think she should have been more tolerant. We are humans and one way or the other we make mistakes. I am sure the next time she will be much more careful" Source: Peacefmonline.com Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video Owners of Car Court, a garage company in Kotobaabi Accra, are in a desperate state seeking the whereabouts of a staff of the Presidency, Hopeson Yaovi Adorye, who they are accusing of absconding with a fresh Toyota Land Cruiser V8 vehicle he purchased from them on credit, but has refused to pay for. Hopeson, who is the Security Coordinator at the Kotoka International Airport (KIA) VIP Section, is said to have used the sickness and subsequent death of his wife, as an excuse to evade his financial obligation. Attempts to locate him, has proven futile as he has refused to pick calls and several visits to his office, have also been fruitless. The airport, especially the VIP section is a security zone, and Hopeson, has been hiding behind this to prevent those he owe from having access to him. The embarrassing situation, has left many asking how a man with integrity issues, will be put in-charge of a crucial security facility as the VIP section of the KIA. There are fears that he could be compromised with money. The Herald, was informed, Hopeson purchased the vehicle at a cost of Ninety Five Thousand United Sates Dollars (US$95, 000) on April 25, 2017, but the politician, who appears to have taste for good things, has refused to make payment and been dodging officials of the car dealership. According to owner of Car Court, Edmund Osei Kofi, the agreement between the two parties was that, Mr Adorye, defrays the US$95, 000 cost within a period of three months, that same year. His first payment of US$32, 000 was expected to be made on May 25, 2017, while the second amount of US$32, 000 was to be settled on June 25, 2017. The two dates, per Edmund Osei Kofis narration, elapsed but Hopeson, who is also a member of the New Patriotic Partys (NPP) National Communication team, didnt pay a dime. The next payment of $31, 000 which was to be made on July 25, 2017, was also not honoured. Aside money for registering the vehicle, nothing else was paid. Hopeson, who reports directly to the Office of the President through the National Security Secretariat, presently drives the vehicle registered, GE-2825-17. We asked him to give us a cheque for the first and second payment, but he didnt. He asked us to give him a little more time because he was tight up as his wife was sick in Germany, and pleaded that we allow him to go and see her so we agreed. But all efforts to get the politician, who is set to marry gospel musician, Gifty Osei any moment from now, to settle his debt have proved futile. He was confronted after we allowed for some time to take care of his domestic matters, but yet still he refused to pay even after the wife died. Not even a pesewa has been paid. He hasnt given me even $1 as we speak neither has he called me. According to the company, numerous visits to the airport with Hopesons friend, one Bismark (Guarantor), who led him to the company to purchase the vehicle, were unsuccessful. He said, Hopeson, has resorted to playing hide and seek with the company as anytime they went to the KIA, they were told he was not present. You go to his office and you are told he is not around. We have been to his office with a mutual friend, Bismark, who brought him here to buy the car and another man from Kumasi, Nana Kwarteng, but he is still being adamant. Mr Osei, who brought out a written document of the agreement showing Mr Adoryes signature, said the politician wants to use his current political position given to him by President Nana Akufo-Addo, to bully his way through by not paying for the vehicle but he vowed to ensure that does not happen. Shocked at his behaviour, Mr Osei, also known as Boakye, wondered why an appointee of the President, will choose to behave in this way, to disgrace Nana Akufo-Addo and his government. He feels because of his position at the VIP section of the airport, he doesnt want to pay. If I go to his office and he is even around they will tell me hes not there. I dont know the whereabouts of the car too. I have no idea if he has sold it or he is still using it. Already, Car Court, has contracted a debt collecting agency, Express Consult, which is working to get the NPP communicator, to settle his debt. This paper was further informed that Express Consult, has proceeded to court, and it has been given a ruling. Meanwhile, when the Herald reached Mr Adorye on phone on Saturday, he confirmed that he bought the said vehicle, but said it was no news, because he has already said it on television and on radio. Mr Adorye, sounded very rude when the issue of the vehicle was mentioned. He got infuriated in the less than two minutes interview, when he was asked, if it was true that he hadnt paid. But this thing, I said it on TV, I have said it on radio, so what is it? Yes, I bought it but that one is Herald the one going to pay? You can go ahead and publish it, he retorted rudely before hanging up in a disrespectful manner. Source: The Herald Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video South Africa's police spokesman has confirmed that an arrest warrant has been issued for Zimbabwe's former first lady Grace Mugabe for alleged assault, Reuters news agency reports. I can confirm that a warrant for the arrest of Grace Mugabe was issued last Thursday." from Police spokesman Vishnu Naidoo Mr Naidoo said the police was seeking Interpol's help to enforce the warrant, Reuters reports. The moves comes after a court annulled Mrs Mugabe's diplomatic immunity in July. South Africa's government caused outrage for letting Mrs Mugabe leave the country after the alleged assault of a model in a hotel room where her two sons lived in Johannesburg. It is unclear whether South Africa will push for Mrs Mugabe's extradition. The alleged assault took place about three months before Robert Mugabe was ousted from power. The former president's family owns properties in South Africa. Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video "The country is not being taken over by China," says President Nana Akufo-Addo. According to him, even though Ghana has some business transactions with China, there is no way the Asian giant will take over various sectors of the economy. The President who was interacting with the media, Wednesday, 19 December 2018 said: Im aware about some anxiety among some people that we might be putting ourselves in a position of too much dependency on China. I am determined that we should use what opportunities that there are to raise ourselves out of poverty but there is no chance that I will ever preside over the loss of Ghanas sovereignty to any foreign country. Meanwhile, President Akufo Addo has assured that Ghanas plan of exiting from the IMF programme will be completed successfully. Background Parliament has already approved a $2 billion bauxite-for-infrastructure barter arrangement between the government of Ghana and Chinas Sinohydro Corporation. This arrangement seeks to leverage a fraction of Ghanas bauxite resources to address the countrys infrastructural challenges and will provide a wide variety of projects including hospitals, bridges, interchanges, roads, affordable housing, rural electrification, and many other projects in line with governments development agenda. Following the visit of Mr Akufo-Addo to the Asian country, Sinotruk International, Chinas first heavy-duty truck manufacturer, has signed an agreement with the government to establish an assembly plant in Ghana. These and other deals with China have raised concerns about overdependence and the possibility of Ghana being shortchanged in the long term. Source: Peacefmonline.com/Ghana Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video Penticton businessman David E. Kampe (middle) receives a ceremonial key to the new David E. Kampe Tower at PRH to signify service commencement on the tower. Also on hand were (from left) Ben Deeley and Don Quon of EllisDon, Petra Veintimilla, chair of the Okanagan Similkameen Regional Hospital District, PRH chief of Staff Brad Raison, PRH acute care health services director Deb Runge, SOS Medical Foundation executive director Carey Bornn, PRH acute health services director Maureen Thomson, Jason Hui of EllisDon, and Carl Meadows PRH health services administrator. Soldiers from a branch of the border defense forces in Yantai, Shandong province, see off a demobilized soldier. (TANG KE/FOR CHINA DAILY) Several local governments have adopted measures to help veterans land jobs, following the central government's promise of an all-out effort to boost their well-being. The Beijing Municipal Bureau of Veterans Affairs organized a job fair on Tuesday for employers and veterans in the capital. More than 270 State-owned enterprises and private companies took part. It was the first of its kind for military retirees after the bureau was founded. Nearly 1,000 job vacancies were made available. Miao Lifeng, who heads the bureau, told China Central Television that more than 400 companies applied for a place in the job fair to support veterans, noting that around 660 retirees received initial offers at the event. In late October, the municipal government arranged a similar fair for former soldiers to connect with State-owned enterprises. More than 100 veterans landed jobs at that gathering, local newspapers reported. In late November, authorities in Zhejiang province published a set of 23 guidelines to help veterans find jobs or start their own businesses. Under those guidelines, ex-military personnel in Zhejiang are eligible for free vocational training. State-owned companies must reserve a certain proportion of their job openings each year for ex-soldiers, while government organizations are encouraged to employ more veterans. Veterans who start a business or who hire at least three other military retirees will receive government subsidies for up to three years. In mid-November, Hunan province held a series of recruitment activities to help ex-soldiers enter the civilian workforce. A total of 210 companies have taken part, offering more than 4,800 positions to veterans. The central government published guidelines in August to help veterans find civilian jobs or start businesses. Under the guidelines, each veteran is eligible for two years of free vocational training and a living allowance during the training period. Employers are urged to give preference to veterans in recruitment, set lower requirements for job applicants who have served in the military and arrange periodic training for any veteran they hire. Enterprises that hire veterans may be eligible for tax benefits if they meet certain criteria. County governments or higher authorities have been asked to organize at least two job fairs for military retirees each year, according to the guidelines. On Sunday, the ministry ordered the protection of veterans' rights at all levels of government and reemphasized proper handling of veterans' petitions. It urged relevant departments to fully implement policies to improve veterans' welfare, including helping them find jobs. According to Sun Shaocheng, minister of veterans affairs, more than 530,000 personnel will retire from the armed forces in 2018. Since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, more than 57 million military personnel have re-entered civilian life, the ministry said. Early morning view of the Philadelphia-bound train platform at commuter rail station, Claymont, Del. Commercial Development Co., which controls the surrounding 400 acre-plus property where the former Claymont Steel Co. (later Evraz Steel) was located, has donated a neighboring site for an expanded station it hopes will attract more commuters, more trains, and new stores, offices, warehouses and residences at the property near the Delaware 92 exists of I-95 and I-495 just south of the Pennsylvania state line, along the Delaware River. Read more A developer hoping to attract offices, homes, and warehouses to the 420-acre former Claymont Steel site on the Pennsylvania-Delaware state line and along the Delaware River has donated 15.5 acres for the construction of a mass-transit station, with 800 parking spaces, for people using SEPTA trains and Delawares DART buses. The land was given by a unit of St. Louis-based Commercial Development Corp. The developer has cleared the century-old former steel-mill complex, transferred its former offices to the Gaudenzia House rehab organization, and hopes the big new replacement station, close to I-95, will attract not only more trains and commuters but projects and tenants for prospective offices, warehouses, homes, and a hotel totaling 3.7 million square feet the size of three big Center City office towers. Commercial Development says the site, convenient to I-95, I-495, and other highways as well as mass transit, will be more attractive with a higher-capacity mass-transit center. People will start using the station, not just to go to Philadelphia or Wilmington, but to come to Claymont and the site his company calls First State Crossing for its yet-to-be-built attractions, said Steve Collins, executive vice president of the company overseeing the project. Collins expects to announce additional projects at the site in the new year. Delaware plans to hire a design-build team in January to develop the station, said John Sisson, executive director of Delaware Transit Corp. The station would replace unheated plastic-roofed shelters that cover only a fraction of peak crowds and lack even a ticket-sales booth for 1,200 commuters who jam the morning and evening express trains and locals running between Wilmington and Newark, Del., and Philadelphia and Delaware County towns along I-95. The current station, with its brick underground tunnel, poorly lit pedestrian bridge spanning I-495, and bottleneck delays out of its main parking lot, isnt a good experience, added Sisson, whose child is among the hundreds using the footbridge, on a daily commute to a nearby prep school. The old station is on a curved section of track, forcing passengers in and out of cars on an angle that keeps some aging SEPTA car doors shut unless they are propped open by hand. The new station will be relocated onto a straight section of the four-track line, which is shared by intercity Amtrak Northeast Corridor trains and freight traffic serving nearby oil and chemical plants. A federal transportation grant will provide $10 million of the cost, with other funding in the works, Sisson said. He said parking will remain free, at least initially," and paths to the nearby village of Claymont will be extended. Collins' company, which redeveloped Bethlehem Steels former Sparrows Point works near Baltimore, is also seeking projects for the former Budd Co. site in far Northeast Philadelphia, the Glidden paint factory in Reading, and the ex-Congoleum works near Trenton, among other locations. The Delaware transit agency is also upgrading the SEPTA-Amtrak station in Newark, near the University of Delaware, the southernmost station served by SEPTA trains. Sisson said the goal is to run more trains along the line not just north toward Philadelphia but also to get Marylands MARC trains to extend service into Delaware so riders can travel by local train among Philadelphia, Wilmington, Baltimore, and Washington suburbs. For now, the local Cecil County Transit agency runs buses from Newark to MARCs station in Perryville, Md. Allison Vulgamore (left), orchestra president and CEO, with co-chairs Gary Frank and Dianne Rotwitt, in happier times. Read more A federal bankruptcy judge on Tuesday approved the sale of Gary Alan Franks Legal Coverage Group to Lebanon, Pa.-based Legal Risk Services (dba Discount Legal Plan) for $20,000, said bankruptcy trustee Leslie Beth Baskin. The sale is a major signpost in the curious saga of Frank, who was charged with loan fraud in March after claiming far larger revenues and profits for his Bala Cynwyd firm than it had. Franks firm received loans from Prudential Insurance Co. of America, now totaling more than $35 million, along with more than $5 million from friends. Records later showed that the company was far smaller than presented and has only a fraction of the revenues it claimed to have to qualify for the loans. Also, Frank allegedly took expensive trips, purchased two Center City condos, bought a $100,000 engagement ring, and gave away about $168,000 in gifts to various nonprofits. Frank is now under house arrest. Franks world started unraveling in 2015, just after Prudential Insurance Co. of America agreed to provide up to $40 million in debt financing to help Legal Coverage Group (LCG) expand. LCG provides legal services as a benefit that employers can offer their workers. The loan agreement called for LCG to provide copies of its audited financial statements. LCGs Jan. 26 bankruptcy filing in Philadelphia was designed to fend off Prudential, which then claimed $34 million in damages. (It has since risen with interest) After LCG failed repeatedly to provide the audited statements, Prudential in August 2017 exercised its right to obtain LCGs bank records. What Prudential found, according to an October lawsuit in the Supreme Court of New York, was that the only substantial funds deposited into the deposit account were the $30 million in proceeds from Prudentials financing. The account records showed revenues from at most two customers. In its internal financial statements provided to Prudential, LCG claimed that it had a total of $546.7 million in revenue in 2015 and 2016. The bank account showed just $109,009 in revenue from customers. Frank, who was charged in March in a massive loan fraud, was also found to have made $168,333 in charitable donations to Philadelphia organizations in the two years before the January bankruptcy of LCG, legal filings show. The biggest beneficiary was the National Liberty Museum, which received $68,833. In addition, the Foreign Policy Research Institute got $55,000, the Philadelphia Orchestra $25,000, and the Philadelphia Youth Orchestra $18,500. Federal agents arrested Frank on March 16 and charged him with wire fraud related to a $40 million line of credit his firm received from Prudential. Federal judge Richard G. Andrews in Wilmington on Wednesday sentenced former Wilmington Trust Corp. Chief Credit Officer William North, 59, to four and a half years imprisonment and a $100,000 fine, and former Wilmington Trust Controller Kevyn Rakowski, age 65 to three years imprisonment. The sentences were for their roles in concealing hundreds of millions of dollars in commercial real estate loan losses from investors buying newly-issued Wilmington Trust securities and from federal regulators. Former President Robert Harra and former chief financial officer David Gibson were each sentenced Monday to six years in prison and $300,000 in cash. The executives are expected to appeal. These sentences represent one of the few criminal cases to emerge from the 2008 financial crisis. Wilmington Trust raised $287 million from investors in 2009 without disclosing that it faced hundreds of millions of dollars in bad-loan losses. The bank also accepted $330 million from the federal Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which also was not informed about the bad development loans. Wilmington Trust and its successor, M&T, agreed to pay the government $60 million in a civil settlement in exchange for a government agreement to drop criminal charges against the bank. Last month, M&T agreed to pay $200 million cash to settle a civil fraud lawsuit filed by shareholders who said the trusts failure to disclose its true condition cost them when it was sold at a price far below its already depreciated market value. The banks auditor, KPMG, also agreed to pay $10 million, the Associated Press reported. A scene from "The Dick Van Dyke Show -- Now in Living Color!," a one-hour special featuring two newly colorized episodes of the 1960s series that CBS aired on Dec. 14. It's available On Demand from Comcast, but as one of our readers discovered, the X1 voice remote has a problem with Van Dyke's name. Read more A funny thing happened when a reader tried to use her Comcast X1 voice remote to search for The Dick Van Dyke Show holiday special On Demand. She got called on her language. Shed missed the two colorized episodes of the classic 1960s sitcom last Friday when CBS aired The Dick Van Dyke Show Now in Living Color! and used her voice remote to search for Dick Van Dyke Christmas Special. Her voice command elicited this response: "Sorry, I cannot handle commands with that type of language. Dick Van d*** Christmas special. " After hearing from the reader, who prefers to be identified only as Pat, I tried it myself at home and got the same response. Comcast, of course, didnt mean to suggest the actors name is a slur and is working on a fix. We want to provide our customers with a best-in-class voice control experience that is also safe and appropriate for every member of the family, the company said in a statement released Wednesday. "Last month alone, our customers issued 700 million voice commands, and when issues like this arise, we work to address them quickly. " In fairness to Comcast, Philadelphia Media Networks own internal spellcheck also flags Dyke as a problem word. The good news is that if youre a Comcast subscriber who missed the episodes Never Bathe on Saturday and Where Did I Come From?, both of which were based on incidents in creator Carl Reiners life you can watch them through On Demand. You just might need to do some clicking, not talking, to find them until the bugs cleared up. As for Van Dyke, whose first name apparently passed muster, having a potentially offensive last name doesnt seem to have hurt his career any. The 93-year-old actor, who 54 years ago was Bert (and Mr. Dawes Sr.) to Julie Andrews' Mary Poppins, can be seen in Mary Poppins Returns, which opened Thursday, as Mr. Dawes Jr. The death of Lesbia Ayala, 48 of North Philadelphia, is being investigated as a homicide, according to the NYPD. Read more The case of a North Philadelphia woman who died from silicone cosmetic injections in New York over the summer is being investigated as a homicide, according to the New York Police Department. Police found Lesbia Ayala, 48, of the 2500 block of North Bouvier Street, in cardiac arrest after responding to a call of an aided female at an address in the Bronx in June. Ayala was taken to Jacobi Hospital, where she was pronounced dead, according to police. The medical examiners office ruled the death a homicide on Dec. 1, with systemic silicone embolism syndrome caused by cosmetic silicone injections of the buttocks and thighs listed as the manner of death, officials said Tuesday. Its not clear when she received the injections, according to the Associated Press. No arrests have been made in the case. The case isnt the only one of its kind, however. In 2015, a Common Pleas judge sentenced Padge-Victoria Windslowe, who injected silicone into peoples' butts and is better known as the Black Madam, to 10 to 20 years in prison and six years of probation after the death of one woman and injuries to another. Windslowe was convicted of third-degree murder in the 2011 death of 20-year-old Claudia Aderotimi, who traveled to Philly from England to receive the injections. Another woman, Sherkeeia King, had to be hospitalized after attending a pumping party in East Germantown in 2012. I never knew the dangers of this, Windslowe said at her sentencing hearing. I did this to myself and to my friends. At a pretrial hearing, Windslowe said that others called her the Michelangelo of buttocks injections. An investigation into Ayalas death is ongoing, according to New York authorities. Spending time in local movie theaters is nothing new for Malvern native and Oscar-winning writer-director Adam McKay. He logged hours at the Eric Twin in Frazier and the Ritz Five in his high school and Temple University days. The circumstances will be somewhat loftier when he enters the Film Center (formerly the Prince) on Thursday evening to receive the Lumiere Award for lifetime achievement from the Philadelphia Film Society, which will also screen his new Dick Cheney biopic, Vice. Speaking of awards, Vice has already been bestowed with six Golden Globe nominations, the most of any movie this year, including fellow local Bradley Coopers A Star Is Born. I love it every time I get back to Philly even for a day or two, because its Philly, and because its where I fell in love with film, said McKay, who just quit smoking, and who attributes his good mood to over-the-counter medicine. God bless nicotine lozenges. Without them, I would be an insufferable maniac. Or Id be more of an insufferable maniac, said McKay, whos been on a health kick since suffering a mild heart attack amid the pressure of finishing Vice, a movie that may have endangered his health but that also saved him. Doing research on Cheneys string of heart attacks allowed him to diagnose his own symptoms and seek treatment, so now hes fine. Somewhere in there is a joke about all of that being as funny as a heart attack, but surely not up to the standards of McKay, who built his movie career on a series of inspired and commercially successful comedies with pal Will Ferrell before edging toward drama with The Big Short, HBOs Succession, and now Vice. Along the way, hes established himself as the kind of director who can summon a cast that includes Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Sam Rockwell, Steve Carell, and Tyler Perry playing Dick Cheney, Lynn Cheney, George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Colin Powell, respectively as easily as Ron Burgundy blowing a conch shell to assemble his news team in Anchorman. McKay said he sought movie theater jobs in part for the free movies. He rattles off the names of favorites he saw gratis while working Stephen Frears' Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, Barry Levinsons Tin Men, John Boormans Hope and Glory, Spike Lees School Daze (not to mention some repertory Kurosawa at the old TLA). That was his film school, but his path to Hollywood went through Chicago and New York, where he learned stand-up and improv and created sketches and short films for Saturday Night Live before branching out with Ferrell on Talladega Nights, The Other Guys, Step Brothers, and Anchorman. Those who knew him when including Carell say his talent was always evident and was suited to more than comedy. I think people are just starting to see the scope of his skill set, said Carell. He has a massive intellect, hes incredibly passionate and opinionated and bold. As a friend and as an employee, I cant think of a more fun or inspiring person to work with. Ive known him for an awfully long time we go back to the early 90s together at Second City, so Ive seen the genesis and I also knew there was more inside of him than people realized. McKay is not one to say drama is more important than comedy, but after the Anchorman sequel, he found himself looking at our crazy, undulating world and sensing that the kind comedy wed been doing didnt really fit what he felt needed to be done. It all goes down to kind of a gut feeling. If Im going to be up at 5:30 and a cars going to pick me up to take me to the set, Im going to have to be excited. If that is not there, at that point youre not using your position the right way If its just a paycheck, you feel like youve blown it, and thats where the change came from. Thats when he collided with the Michael Lewis best seller The Big Short, a readable and excoriating account of the Wall Street malfeasance that led to the Great Recession. It was highly readable but not necessarily highly filmable, so McKay (who won an Oscar for the script) used his knack for inspired comic flourishes (Margot Robbie talking about collateralized debt obligations in a bubble bath) to make the material accessible. The scene is not a throwaway gag. It gets to McKays firm belief that the hopelessly complex investments behind the financial crisis were designed to be inscrutable, so as to lull the public into thinking that complicated was boring and that boring was innocuous. The same way, he says, the intricacies of foreign policy and energy policy (two subjects of Vice) can get buried under impenetrable levels of bureaucracy and diplomacy. When you make people bored, when you make people not care about the government, ultimately other people take control of it, he said. Thats a theme of Vice, which follows the soft footsteps of Cheneys political career congressional aide, White House chief of staff (1975-77), secretary of defense under George H.W. Bush, then vice president to George W. Bush. The Cheney of Vice presents a phlegmatic face to the public but wields incredible and (in McKays view) unprecedented and dangerous power behind the curtain. To me, you have this old man who works quietly and carries no evident charisma, but when you lift the stone, you see somebody who changed history as much as any figure in American history, said McKay, whose movie positions Cheney as the real driving force in what the director sees as catastrophic choices on the Iraq war, the war on terror (torture and drone strikes), and fossil fuels (the movie argues that although Cheney left the oil services giant Halliburton, the companys priorities never left him). At the same time, he tells the human story of the Cheney marriage via Adams Lynn. Early on, Lynn helps her husband get his life on the right track, and his career becomes a form of repayment. He was a tough kid from the Plains states who had a simple ambition to make his wife proud, and how that turned into something much darker. To me, that struck a chord, McKay said. With The Big Short and Vice (hes now awaiting delivery of a script about scandal-plagued Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes), McKay has migrated away from comedy and toward the weighty. His next project is a series of documentaries on global capitalism and the environment, the latter a subject that worries him a great deal. Things are changing so fast in the world. Theyre so berserk, I have a suspicion that in two, three years, global warming will change our world in ways we cant even fathom, he said. I asked McKay, whose commercial success has paid for a solar-powered house in California, whether he has studied the plans of wealthy people who intend to evacuate to New Zealand. New Zealand wont save you. Whats coming is coming for the whole planet. It strikes me as strange, the notion of arriving at the cusp of Fishtown and Port Richmond an area with a rich, if endangered, culture of corner bars conceived in an era when it seemed impossible to imagine a beer fancier than a Heineken and choosing to synthetically re-create just one more of them. But apparently theres demand for manufactured nostalgia. I push through the door to find a sizable Wednesday night crowd at Sergeant Yorks, a brand-new, vintage corner dive bar fashioned with an instant 50-year patina. It has crawled into the shell left behind by Jovans Place, a real old-school Fishtown mainstay noted for its stuffed cabbage, beef goulash, and service so slow it is said some of the final dinner guests still are waiting for their food. The new owners salvaged its remains the glass-brick windows; the Formica-topped, horseshoe bar that never made much sense in that BYOB setting; even some furniture and added sitcom-dive-bar touches like vintage beer signs and photographs harvested from different old guys garages all over Pennsylvania. The bar is named for the street and the war hero and above all for the fact that it just sounded nice, according to Jacob Cohen, 30, a real estate agent and former drummer for Jimmy Buffett who opened the bar with his father, David Cohen, 60, the former owner of Evolutions, a Delaware Avenue nightclub with a checkered history, and Revival in the space thats now National Mechanics. A digitally enhanced image of Alvin York, who was reportedly drawn to moonshine and barroom brawls before finding God and military glory, has been co-opted for the logo. This vision of York would fit right in with the crowd of thirtysomethings, with their creative facial hair and knit caps the type neighborhood old-timers used to call hipsters (as in, Hipster, go home! a phrase once shouted in my direction as I dared walk past an authentic Fishtown dive much like the ones Sergeant York is modeled on). Jacob Cohen likes to think its a Parc or Harp & Crown crowd, sipping $8 beers on their low-key nights. Its got the feel of a dive and its got the hospitality and inventory of some place youd see in Center City, he said. The cocktail list, though, is heavy on flavored vodka. In a moment of optimism I will come to regret, I order the Sauls Sweet Tea ($9) with mint-infused whiskey, sweet tea, and lemon. More enticing is the selection of relatively obscure beers: IPAs from Tonewood Brewing, out of New Jersey, and Astorias SingleCut on draft, plus cans ranging from a right-priced $2.50 Miller Lite up to a $10 New England-style IPA from Foreign Objects out of New Paltz, N.Y. The food menu, which the Cohens initially thought of as a throwaway, has recently been revamped: the most popular items are an enjoyably salty/spicy/scalliony General Tsos Cauliflower ($11) and the fried-chicken sandwich on a biscuit ($11), a structurally unsound but tasty creation heaped with coleslaw and pickles and served with undercooked french fries. Even so, its light-years ahead of your average dive-bar fare. Jacob Cohen insists thats the whole point. Despite the decor (and the press materials) he says, I dont feel like we recreated something. Were making the extra effort to be an elevated dive bar. Sergeant York 2327 E. York St., 215-425-1424 When to go: Happy hour runs 5-7 p.m. with half-price appetizers. Or catch a 76ers game on the sharp TVs. Its open 4 p.m. to 2 a.m. Monday to Saturday, and noon to 2 a.m. Sunday. The kitchen closes at 11 p.m. but stays open until midnight Friday and Saturday. Bring: Beer fans. Nostalgic types. Probably not your children, unless you want them to practice sounding out the F-word from the bars signage and getting an abridged sex-ed lesson (see: bathroom situation). What to order: Try a pint of the Tonewood IPA ($6) and the General Tsos cauliflower, a quality bar snack that can be rationalized as health food. Bathroom situation: Wow, that is a lot of porn. Its decoupaged all over the walls of the single-stall bathrooms that could otherwise be described as clean. Cohen said hes had families with young kids come in for dinner and seem unfazed by it, though. They get that its a gag. Sounds like: A rowdy 94 decibels with a soundtrack that plays it safe: the Postal Service, the Roots, Eric B. & Rakim, Arcade Fire. The khaopoon "King Soup" with shrimp at Vientiane Bistro is one of the signature Lao dishes at this new BYOB in Kensington. The painting of Buddha is from the walls of the restaurant. Read more Theres been a fragrant wave of new Lao restaurants in recent months, with not one but three new BYOBs opening across Philadelphia with variations of warm beef jerky, chili-laced coconut stews, and crunchy green papaya salads that radiate with the tang of funky spice. And it feels like a recent development for a city whose population of Lao chefs has largely been relegated to cooking the more familiar and perhaps less potent flavors of Americanized Thai food. But the origin story of newly opened Vientiane Bistro is, in fact, an old one. It goes back more than two decades, to a home kitchen in West Philly where a mother and her daughters cooked together, at first illegally as an unlicensed catering speakeasy in an effort to gain a foothold in their new country. It eventually was shut down by the city. But Daovy Panthavong, who arrived in Philadelphia in 1980 as a refugee from the civil war in Laos, overcame her early licensing issues and eventually opened a proper restaurant, Vientiane Cafe, on Baltimore Avenue in 2002. And she inevitably told her young American-born daughter, Sunny, weary from the all-day task of frying crispy jasmine rice cones for the popular naam salads, that she had it easy. She was always telling me how she had to swim across the Mekong River with my sister Manorack on her back, dodging bodies in the water in order to escape [to the Nong Khai refugee camp in Thailand], Sunny recalls. She was always reminding me how lucky I have it. And Id always say, OK, Mom, Im sorry! " Call it a parents guilt trip. Call it survival. But those kitchen lessons and pride in Lao culture clearly sank in. Vientiane Bistro is the next-generation chapter in the Panthavong story. Sunny, now 34, has grown up to open a BYOB in Kensington with her partner, Kong Tieu, essentially crafting a North Philly sibling to Vientiane Cafe in West Philly, now run by her sister and mother. The Bistro sits almost hidden in the shadows of the Market-Frankford El on a stretch of Kensington Avenue that is still a bit north of the fast-gentrifying zones of the River Wards. But along with neighboring Cafe Pho Ga Thanh Thanh, a bare-bones destination renowned for its chicken pho, and excellent Thang Long across the street, these three restaurants have made this scruffy stretch of storefronts a legitimate food-lovers hub. Tieus family owns the building, and a grant from the city helped make it possible, along with their life savings. And Vientiane, named for the capital of Laos, Daovys home town, is a charming little space done up in rustic wood-plank wainscoting, purple walls hung with embroidered red Lao tapestries, and dangling wicker baskets used to hold the warm bundles of sticky rice that are such an essential starch in Southeast Asian cuisine. On a recent Friday evening, Vientiane Bistro was bustling and full with both Lao families and a diverse young crowd of beanie-capped millennials full to the point that our reservation (my first on Kenzo Avenue!) was honored 20 minutes late. The service is outgoing and friendly here, if not necessarily organized. And the food arrived in fits and spurts that seemed to mimic the rumbling rhythm of the El above, with a long wait for anything, then a sudden rush of all the plates at once. Once the food did arrive, however, we were delighted. And when one of those wicker cylinders of sticky rice comes to your table, take a steamy pinch of the rice and press it into a flat disk that can be wrapped around chunks of sai gak sausages, the glistening links made in house from pork belly, lemongrass, and kaffir leaves, that hit another level of flavor when dabbed with roasted green chili paste. A pad of sticky rice also is essential to accompany the warm and chewy strips of house-dried beef jerky encrusted in sweet soy and coriander, which comes with its own unique dark chili paste dip, thickened with peanut butter, sweet soy, and galangal that almost has the texture and fruity savor of spicy fig jam. Lao cuisine, with aromatics of lemongrass, coconut milk, and fish sauce, shares obvious similarities with the cuisines of the countries that border it Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia. And most all local Lao restaurants, the Vientianes included, offer wide varieties of Thai classics. Vientiane Bistros chicken satay, for example, is one of my new favorites, the tender thigh meat fully marinated with turmeric and mushroom powder before its charcoal-grilled and paired with spicy peanut sauce. But Lao food has an extra punch, an edgier heat and funky notes amped up by padeak, a fermented fish paste similar to Cambodian prahok, but perhaps a shade milder because landlocked Laos uses only freshwater fish. The most obvious example is the thum mak hoong, the famous green papaya salad thats bruised with a mortar and pestle then soaked in a chili-fired lime juice marinade, padaek, and, for serious Lao eaters, salt-fermented crabs that give it an almost tidal glow. These flavors have been in Philly for decades, usually tucked away on menus at Thai restaurants where Lao chefs were in the kitchen. Vientiane Cafe and Sa-Bai-Dee, an old favorite in Upper Darby, are two Lao-forward pioneer exceptions to the rule. But the sudden emergence of more restaurants showcasing Lao food as their prime mission is a reflection of that first generation of immigrant children now come of age. Thats the story at the new Laos Cafe on West Passyunk in South Philadelphia, where Kha Vorasarns minced duck laap salad and sausages have even bolder chili heat than Vientianes. Its also the case at new Maliwan, which recently replaced Khmer Kitchen at Sixth and Morris, and which has a slightly milder touch that still leans Thai (though the fantastic grilled Lao steak is alone worth the visit). At Vientiane Bistro, which sits somewhere between those two on the pungency spectrum, there is a wide range of classic dishes to explore what Lao cooking is all about. Im always a fan of the laap salads, the minced protein of your choice (try the grilled beef here) tossed with tangy, spicy dressing and a dusting of roasted rice powder. But the crispy naam lettuce-wrap salad is the essential order, a blend of crunchy rice fried into cones, then broken apart in a mortar marinated with grated coconut and red curry tossed with fresh herbs in a citrusy dressing topped with crushed peanuts. Wrapped inside a crunchy rib of lettuce, so many textures and fresh flavors explode in one bite. The garnish of a lettuce wrap, along with the sticky rice, is a common theme. I especially loved it with the deep-fried whole pompano (tod paa), whose silver-skinned flesh was scored into easily plucked diamonds of meat that, once wrapped up with ginger and lemongrass made for an addictive dunk in tangy tamarind dip. Some of most distinctive dishes, though, are the soups and stews that are perfect for winter. The Khao poon King Soup is a coconut broth blushing with spicy red curry, mint, and galangal that gives its hearty brew, laced with rice vermicelli noodles, a gingery swagger. Snappy wood-ear mushrooms and sweet chunks of kabocha squash added a nice textural contrast to the vegetarian gang naw mai stew with fresh bamboo turned a deep forest green with the juice of yanang leaves. The tom saap hot pot was yet another revelation. This soup, which arrived in a doughnut-shape pan that bubbled around a flaming hot pot chimney, is more a reflection of Laos' eastern border with Vietnam. The soup begins not unlike a pot of pho, with beef bones and brisket slow-steeping with aromatic spices like star anise, cinnamon, clove, and lemongrass. But then it takes a tart Lao turn with tamarind powder, lemon juice, and chilies, a sour and spicy twist that amplifies all the other flavors until they ring on my lips. This dish is one of the secret" off-menu items at the original Vientiane Cafe in West Philly. But Sunny, eager to bring her own light touch to her new place, has made it a regular fixture on Vientiane Bistros menu. Its time for Lao people to come out of their shell, Sunny said. And its happening across the country now, not just Philly. My generation is ready to make it happen. And its about time. VIENTIANE BISTRO 2537 Kensington Ave., 267-703-8199; vientianebistro.com Theres been a flavorful boomlet of Lao restaurants in recent months, and this cheerful new Kensington sibling to Vientiane Cafe, Phillys Lao pioneer in West Philadelphia, is one of the best. It features a wide range of vividly seasoned Southeast Asian specialties, from crispy rice salad to garlicky housemade sausages and refreshing green papaya salads that bear the cuisines signature blend of sour, spice and fermented funk. The location sits just north of the River Wards more gentrified zones, but adds yet another bright destination (with Thai specialties, too) to a stretch of storefronts below the El on Kensington Avenue that already hosts two of the citys best pho shops. MENU HIGHLIGHTS House Lao jerky; satay; steamed dumplings; sticky tamarind chicken wings; crispy naam lettuce wraps; green papaya salad (thum mak hoong); tom saap lemongrass hot pot; sai gawk sausages; khaopoon King Soup; laap (beef); tod paa whole pompano with lettuce wrap; pad see eew noodles; mango sticky rice. BYOB Cold Riesling or crisp lager beer is the best match for the spicy sour flavors of Lao food. WEEKEND NOISE The room is small and lively when full, often with families. But its reliably pleasant for easy conversation backed by an unexpected Top 40 soundtrack. IF YOU GO Three-course lunch specials Monday through Saturday, 11 a.m.-2 p.m. Entire menu also available, 11 a.m.-8:30 p.m. Closed Sunday. Dinner entrees, $14-$20. All major cards. Reservations suggested weekends. Not wheelchair accessible. There are three steps at the entrance; bathrooms are not wheelchair accessible. Street parking only. A CH-4 unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), characterized by its long battery life of 40 hours, is displayed at the 10th China International Aviation & Aerospace Exhibition in Zhuhai, south China's Guangdong Province, Nov. 12, 2014. The 10th China International Aviation & Aerospace Exhibition, which takes place in Zhuhai from Nov. 11 to 16, features various UAV drones for both military and civilian use.(Xinhua/Liang Xu) The Chinese CH-4, one of the best-selling armed reconnaissance drones on the international market, will be fitted with a new and stronger engine that would allow it to fly higher than the world's highest peak. The CH-4 will soon see its old piston engine that burns gasoline replaced with a domestically made next-generation heavy-fuel engine that burns kerosene, a spokesperson of the Chinese Academy of Aerospace and Aerodynamics (CAAA) under the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp (CASC), the drone's manufacturer, told the Global Times on Tuesday. The exact date for the upgrade and the new designation for the new version will be announced at a later date, the CAAA spokesperson said. The heavy-fuel engine will allow the drone to reach a height of 9,000 meters, according to a Monday report on the WeChat public account of Ordnance Industry Science Technology, a Xi'an-based periodical on national defense industries and technologies. That is even higher than Mount Qomolangma, known in the West as Mount Everest, which is 8,844 meters high. With the old piston engine, the CH-4 can only reach 7,200 meters high, the report said. Being able to fly higher means the drone is less likely to be detected and hit by a surface-to-air missile and more capable of combat in plateau regions, military experts said. Fu Qianshao, a Chinese air defense expert, told the Global Times on Tuesday that by switching from gasoline to kerosene, the new engine will open the door for the CH-4 to operate on large vessels. Gasoline is volatile and may lead to fire accidents, which is especially dangerous at sea, which explains why gasoline is not allowed on military vessels, Fu said. Heavy-fuel like aviation kerosene is much safer, he said. The new engine can also reduce the fuel consumption by 20 percent compared to the old one, and significantly shorten the takeoff ground run distance, Ordnance Industry Science Technology reported. Heavy-fuel is also less expensive than gasoline, Fu noted. The CH-4's upgrade is similar to the US-made MQ-1 Predator drone. Its updated version, MQ-1C Gray Eagle, uses a heavy-fuel engine, the report said. With CAAA's new armed reconnaissance drone on the market, the new domestic engine will help the CH-4 in terms of combat capability as the drone will also see a further price reduction following mass production, the report said. The CH-4 has become one of the best-selling drones on the international market, the report said. Many countries, including Algeria, Iraq, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE are operating the CH-4, Jane's Defence Weekly reported. At Airshow China 2018 in Zhuhai, South China's Guangdong Province in November, the CAAA revealed the latest additions to the CH drone series: the flying-wing stealth combat drone CH-7 and the tilt-rotor drone CH-10. The folks behind P.J. Whelihans have opened their fourth bar-restaurant in a half-mile stretch of Haddon Avenue in Westmont, and this time theyve themed it to Mexican. Also this week, Im charmed by a Vietnamese spot in Kensington as well as a solid bar-restaurant in Wayne (with a location also in Manayunk). If you need food news, click here and follow me on Twitter and Instagram. Email tips, suggestions, and questions here. If someone forwarded you this newsletter and you like what youre reading, sign up here to get it free every week. Michael Klein Tacos and tequilas in Westmont Beer, beer and wings, steak, pizza. South Jersey-based PJW Restaurant Group (P.J. Whelihan's, The Pour House, ChopHouse, Treno Pizza Bar) stepped outside its comfort zone for its 23rd restaurant, which opened Monday. Central Taco & Tequila, a top-to-bottom redo of Westmont pub The Irish Mile, brings a list of more than 100 agave-based spirits, including 90 or so tequilas, along with a taqueria menu that presents the burrito/taco canon in a rustic setting. By "top-to-bottom redo," note Stokes Architecture's idea to raise the ceiling and install skylights. Exposed wooden beams and rafters are festooned with string lights over the roomy 150-plus seats, including 20 or so at the bar. Its open from 11 a.m.-1 a.m. daily. This Weeks Openings Central Taco & Tequila | Westmont See above. Ground Up | South Philadelphia East Passyunk's newest coffee shop is at 1926 E Passyunk Ave., by Le Virtu and Pistola's Del Sur. Mix | Rittenhouse Renovations are complete at Victor Fellus' Italian spot at 2101 Chestnut St., which has become more of a bar. Poe's Sandwich Joint | Fishtown Marijuana activist N.A. Poe is behind this drop-in at 1429 Marlborough St. This Weeks Closings The Dairy Cafe | Bala Cynwyd With the kosher eatery at 321 Montgomery Ave. closed, owner David Magerman and Zavino's Greg Dodge plan to open Zagafen, a kosher pizzeria in the spirit of Zavino, in April across the street at 370 Montgomery Ave. Rose Petals Cafe | Germantown location Desmin and Jania Daniels, who recently opened a location in Elkins Park, will close their five-year location at 322 W. Chelten Ave. in Germantown on Dec. 24. The last day will be a pay-as-you-wish breakfast buffet from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Theyre scouting for a new location. Where were enjoying happy hour North Italia, 350 Mall Blvd. (King of Prussia Mall), 3-6 p.m. Monday-Thursday You say potato, I say zucca. Im referring to the flash-fried zucchini chips served at this mod, smart-looking Italian restaurant from Arizona-based James Beard nominee Sam Fox, in the newer section of KoP Mall that once was the corridor between Neiman Marcus and Macys. (Follow signs for orange parking.) At $8, the zucca chips are a star starter on the lunch and dinner menus. but at happy hour, when a heaping bowl is four bucks, theyre a must. Id also recommend the prosciutto bruschetta ($11 regularly, $5 at happy hour), which brings a generous pile of prosciutto atop creamy crescenza cheese, grilled asparagus, more than a little truffle flavor. Wine selection (only a red, a white, and a sangria) are limited, but just $5 a glass (or $16 for a bottle or pitcher), while beers are $4. The 3 p.m. happy-hour start, by the way, makes it perfect for a snack when your other options are mainly fast food. Where were eating The Goats Beard, 103 N. Wayne Ave., Wayne, and 4201 Main St., Manayunk First, some trivia: These cozy bar-restaurants (Manayunk opened in 2013, Wayne in 2016) are named not after a barnyard animal but the native Pennsylvania plant (Aruncus dioicus), and managing partner Sean Coyle grew up in the biz, as parents Richard and Irene Coyle owned Binni & Flynns, which had a multidecade run in Waynes Gateway Shopping Center. Particularly in Wayne, where it helps anchor North Wayne Avenues restaurant row, The Goats Beard hits multiple constituencies, such as happy hour, families (kids eat free over the early dinnertime Sunday-Tuesday), whiskey-seekers, locavores, gluten-freers, and the late-night crowd that doesnt mind live music. Joel Romanos menus are built for all, as well burger, steak mac and cheese, vegetable paella, fish and chips, meat loaf, big salads, Two particular shareables: the Carlos fries, which have a sweet chili sauce tamed by a drizzle of sour cream (served late night), and the addictive TGB nuggets, which are lightly battered bites of Lancaster County chicken splashed with lime and sriracha and topped with blue cheese. Manayunk is open for lunch Thursday and Friday, brunch on weekends, and dinner daily. Wayne runs from 11:30 a.m.-1 a.m. daily. Cafe Mi Quang, 3324 Kensington Ave., 215-239-0739 It's wise to be leery of restaurants whose menus weigh in with page after page of "specials." Which is assuredly why I dig Phuong Dang's humble, tile-walled Vietnamese storefront under the El on an otherwise sad block of Kensington Avenue. Here's all she's got: 10 noodle/soups, three rice dishes, four banh mi, and a side of tightly packed pork-and-shrimp spring rolls, plus a few desserts. All homestyle cooking here, and photos will help you decide though the kindly Dang or an assistant will recommend. Banh mi rolls are perfectly crispy, and for $4.50, the charbroiled pork (thit nuong on the menu) is among my favorites in the city. Beef soups predominate, and I'd suggest that the spicy bun bo Hue with vermicelli has medicinal qualities for colds, allergies, and/or hangovers. Get a pennywort drink, too. Plenty of meter parking out front, VietTV on the tube over the front window. Hours are 8:30 a.m.-7 p.m. Wednesday-Monday (as in, closed Tuesday). Dining Notes IPAs on tap and porn in the bathroom: Find manufactured nostalgia at Sergeant Yorks, a brand-new, vintage, corner dive bar fashioned with an instant 50-year patina. Still shopping? Craig LaBan tasted more than two dozen whiskeys and recommends the best to give as gifts. (Or to buy for yourself!) If you're buying for a cook, our staff recommended our favorite cookbooks of the year. Spice Finchs Jennifer Carroll and Billy Riddle both grew up with big family Christmases. They drew inspiration from those memories to create a vibrant holiday feast. The drug delivery device is implanted in a tiny pocket in the eye. Read more Melinda Roth feels fortunate. The vision in her left eye went from a big black blotchy circle to nearly normal thanks to a drug that stopped the growth of abnormal blood vessels. But the medication, Lucentis, has to be injected into the eyeball every month by an ophthalmologist. Lessening that drawback has been a goal of researchers ever since the drug debuted 12 years ago the first treatment to slow age-related macular degeneration (AMD). Earlier this month, Roth, 59, of Cherry Hill, opted for a wave of the future. An experimental drug delivery device, about the size of a grain of rice, was surgically implanted in her eye at Wills Eye Hospital. Twice a year, the tiny port will be refilled with a concentrated version of Lucentis. Its exciting that I dont have to get shots every month, said Roth, an online retailer and grandmother. But its also exciting that theres new medical technology that has had great success. The port, being developed by Lucentis maker, Genentech, will soon begin the final phase of clinical testing at sites across the country. Researchers hope the results will lead to Food and Drug Administration approval in about three years. Other innovations, including longer-acting drugs and even gene therapy, are also in the research pipeline. Making treatment less burdensome is not just a matter of comfort or convenience. Studies show AMD patients, many of them elderly, often miss or delay monthly appointments because of illness, transportation problems, or just the unpredictable nature of life. That means many are being undertreated. If youre a week or two late for a visit from time to time, you may have a decline in vision, and you cant always recover from that, explained Carl D. Regillo, Wills chief of retina service and site leader of the port trial. Its a relentlessly progressive disease. A leading cause of irreversible blindness, AMD affects as many as 10 million people in the U.S., including two million with visual impairment. The disease damages photoreceptors in the macula, located in the middle of the retina at the back of the eye. The macula is vital to central vision, color, and detail. No one knows why the cells start to break down. But the early dry form of the disease is often associated with yellow deposits, or drusen, that form under the retina. In advanced disease, called wet AMD, abnormal blood vessels multiply, leaking fluid and blood into the macula. Two approved AMD drugs, Lucentis (ranibizumab) and Eylea (aflibercept, made by Regeneron), work by inhibiting blood-vessel growth. Another growth inhibitor, Avastin, made by Genentech, is often used at doctors discretion and has been shown to be as effective. The big difference: Avastin is about $50 per injection, compared with about $2,000 for the approved drugs. Genentech said pricing for the device and surgery -- and how costs would compare with current treatment -- have not yet been established. The company also said it is investigating sustained ocular drug delivery for a number of eye diseases that now require injections. Blacked out the middle Five years ago, Roth was diagnosed with dry AMD. She took recommended eye vitamins and (mostly) got annual checkups. But her slowly worsening vision was low priority amid various family crises and a move with her husband from Alabama to Cherry Hill to be closer to relatives. Almost two years ago, she had a rude awakening. Literally. She woke up and, with her right cheek and eye buried in her pillow, gazed at the alarm clock with her left eye. It was like someone took a paintbrush and blacked out the middle, she recalled. A South Jersey eye doctor sent her to Wills, where she was diagnosed with wet AMD and learned about the second phase of the port trial. She enrolled, but was randomly assigned to the comparison group, which got conventional treatment. Each month, Roth steeled herself to get anesthetic, antiseptic, and a shot of Lucentis in her left eye. The injection isnt painful. But when someone comes at your eye, your natural instinct is to bat them away. You just have to relax and let them come at you, said Roth, who also usually had a headache or floaters in her eye for a day or so after treatment. When the trial ended in July, she was thrilled to find out she could switch to the port. Passive diffusion The 45-minute surgery earlier this month unfolded flawlessly, as Roth snoozed under twilight sedation. Regillo, the retinal surgeon, peered through a scope that magnified Roths eye and projected the image on a monitor. Using a blade, he cut and pulled back part of the eyes protective membrane, the conjunctiva, just above the iris. Then he measured, marked, and cut a tiny pocket about a tenth of an inch wide and deep to hold the port device. After sealing blood vessels in the pocket with a laser, Regillo used a special tool to implant the rice-grain-sized port. The conjunctiva was sewn back in place with four stitches that will gradually dissolve. The port holds 20 microliters of Lucentis. While that is less than half the volume of an injection, the formula is 10 times more concentrated. It works by passive diffusion into the eye, Regillo explained. Once it gets into the retina, its slowly metabolized. Eighty percent of trial participants went six months before needing a refill, done in the office with a special needle that removes any remaining drug and replaces it. Some patients went much longer because, Regillo explained, disease severity and metabolism vary. Roths chances of complications are small. The rates of conjunctiva problems, infection, and retinal detachment in the trial were each less than 2 percent. The risk of hemorrhage in the first month was 4 percent. Two days after the procedure, Roth was feeling great. Her eye appeared bloodshot and the stitches tickled when she blinked. But she couldnt feel the port, and the top of it was discreetly tucked under her eyelid. Post-operative 3-D imaging of the inside of her eye reassured her that the itty-bitty implant was in place. Its the coolest thing, Roth marveled. Penn received the highest grade among Ivy League schools on their practice of imposing leaves of absence on students who are experiencing mental illness. It was a D+. Read more A new report from a disability-inclusion foundation has blasted Ivy League schools, including the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University, for discriminating against students with mental illness. It claims the colleges are forcing students to leave campus against their will and without medical justification to protect the schools from legal liability and bad press. The report, released in December by the Ruderman Family Foundation, graded the leave of absence policies at all eight Ivy League universities. None scored higher than a D-plus. Leave-of-absence policies, as they are currently being implemented, are exacerbating the college mental-health crisis, concluded the report from the Boston-based philanthropy. According to the American College Health Association, 40 percent of undergraduates have felt severely depressed in the last year and more than 10 percent have seriously considered suicide. Yet many college counseling centers are understaffed, with often less than one mental-health clinician for every 1,000 students. Against this backdrop, the issue of how long students with mental-health issues should be allowed to stay on campus and when they need to be removed has become increasingly contentious. Many say the lack of resources justifies colleges' sending students home if they are at risk of harming themselves or others. But disability advocates say universities are applying leave policies too broadly, prioritizing school image over students well-being. It became clear universities are not supporting students, said Miriam Heyman, author of the report and a senior program officer at the foundation. Theyre pushing students out. The result can be students refusing to seek care for fear of exclusion, Heyman added. Princeton rebutted the report, saying it is fully committed to supporting the health and well-being of our students, especially when they consider, take, and return from leaves of absence. This report misstates our policies, mischaracterizes how they are applied, and ignores the holistic approach the university takes to assist our students in these situations. About 150 to 180 students of the more than 5,000 undergraduates at Princeton take a leave of absence each year for various reasons, university officials said. In three to five cases a year, the university asks students who arent considering a leave to consider taking one a practice disability rights advocates consider coercion. If the student refuses but the university determines their safety is at risk, the student can be forced to leave. Princeton says this situation has not occurred in the last five years. The University of Pennsylvania declined to comment. On its website, Penn says about 5 percent of students take a leave of absence each year for various reasons. It was not clear whether that includes involuntary leaves. The Ruderman report judged each universitys leave policies on 15 criteria chosen by lawyers and mental-health experts, including whether a student on leave is allowed to visit campus or if there is a mandatory minimum length of time for the leave. For each criterion, the schools received a score of one (problematic), two (room for improvement), or three (best practice), and the scores were then tallied for a total out of 45 points. Each schools total score was divided by 45 to get a percentage, which was then translated into an academic grade. Researchers chose to focus on Ivy League schools because of their elite status and the expectation that their policies can set a standard for others to follow. Penn received a score of 31 out of 45, or a D-plus the highest of the group. Princeton scored 29 out of 45, a D. The rest of the schools were graded as follows: Brown University (D); Columbia University (D); Cornell University (D-minus); Dartmouth College (F); Harvard University (D-minus); and Yale University (F). Making reasonable accommodations Taking leaves of absence can be important for students with mental illness to focus on recovery and return to campus prepared to handle stress, Heyman said. But ambiguous, if not discriminatory policies are allowing universities to impose leaves on students when less drastic alternatives should be tried first. The Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) requires universities to make reasonable accommodations for students with mental illness. But many colleges, including Penn, do not mention that in their policies. That is a big deal, said Shane Owens, a New York-based psychologist who works with college students and young adults. Though he believes colleges should have the right to ask students to leave, they should consider other options first, he said. In 2014, a student sued Princeton, claiming the school violated the ADA by refusing to provide reasonable accommodations after he attempted suicide. Karen Bower, a co-author on the Ruderman report, is one of the students attorneys. According to the lawsuit, the 20-year-old sophomore, referred to as W.P., had swallowed pills and then walked to the student health center to receive medical attention. When he was released from the hospital, the university told him he needed to take a leave. W.P. instead asked to live off campus or take a reduced course load. But he was told those conditions would fundamentally alter the nature of a Princeton education. Princeton disputes that narrative. The lawsuit led the U.S. Department of Justice to review Princetons policies. Though it did not make any findings of noncompliance, the department asked Princeton to update its policy to better explain options for students with disabilities. Considering students a community disruption Another shortcoming of Ivy League university policies noted in the report is the use of community disruption as grounds for an involuntary leave of absence. The practice, which is in Penns policies but not Princetons, can be interpreted very broadly, Heyman said. If a parent requests a wellness check on a student and campus police enter a dorm room to do so, that can be considered a community disruption. Its also a legally dubious practice, as a 2007 court case on workplace discrimination found that conduct resulting from a disability is part of the disability and not a separate basis for termination. Owens, the New York psychologist, said the fact that the policy is vague means what really matters is how its enforced something the Ruderman report did not examine. The researchers "talk about the high-profile cases where policies are enforced and bad things happened, but what about all the times they enforce policies and there were good cases? Owens said. And there are success stories. In 2016, Devin Trotter was placed on leave three months into his freshman year at Penn after attempting suicide. He returned a year later, only to be placed on leave again within days, for risk of suicide. When I was first placed on leave, I thought Penn was making a mistake, said the 20-year-old, currently living with his family in Los Angeles. But now, I know it was something that was necessary for me to go through. Leave gave Trotter time to go to rehab for alcohol-use disorder, learn to deal with setbacks in healthy ways, and prioritize his health. He plans to return to Penn in January. Now, Im even more prepared to come back, he said. In 2018, a museum fan in California sent in an anatomical heart ornament (lower right), and a Philly fan hand-delivered a photo of Chang and Eng in a holiday sweater (upper left). Read more Think your family has odd holiday traditions? Compare them with mini-wreaths made of human hair and an ornament of gingerbread men conjoined at the head. Those are two of Anna Dhodys favorite Christmas decorations. Every ornament you open up is a great time to relive memories, said Dhody, curator of the Mutter Museum, a medical-history collection in Center City. The wreaths remind her of a hair art exhibit the museum featured this year. The gingerbread twins pay homage to a display of Chang and Eng, the original Siamese twins. And an ornament called Santas hand in a jar hearkens back to the perfectly preserved gangrenous hand that belonged to Thomas Mutters original collection. More than 170,000 visitors come to see the museums rare medical collection each year, including the wall of skulls and slices of Albert Einsteins brain. So its only fitting that the museum celebrate the holidays in a similar fashion with a crowd-sourced Christmas tree featuring handmade Mutter-esque ornaments highlighting medical marvels and anatomic anomalies. How many times do you walk into an office around the holidays and see a Christmas tree? Dhody said. You almost never stop and look. This tree gives you a reason to stop. The ornaments are donated by museum staff members, their families, and Mutter fans across the country. The series of conjoined gingerbread twins were among the first added to the tree when it went up in 2007. Dhodys mother made them, along with a patch featuring Skully Claus, the museums Santa reincarnate. Since then, the museum has received a few donations each year, totaling more than 20 unique ornaments on display now. One ornament, which came all the way from Scotland, shows a cross-section of Santas brain. In case you were wondering, there are presents tucked between his neurons. An orthopedic baby brace was sent from upstate New York, and a poinsettia with skeletal fingers was delivered from Chicago. Every time we put the tree out, its a time capsule, reminding us of Mutter holidays past, Dhody said. Atop the tree sits the Angel of Death a tradition for the last 11 years. This year, museum director Robert Hicks named the angel Kritana, which means god of death in Sanskrit. Exhibition manager Michael Keys puts up the tree after Thanksgiving and has it inspected by the Plague Doctor (Hicks in costume), who ensures the tree is Mutter-y enough. Its a nerve-wracking time, Keys joked. The criteria for ornaments to make it onto the tree are fairly loose. A green bauble with eyes and a purple sash qualified because of the mutant aspect of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It hangs across from a two-headed dinosaur and next to a smiling colon, modeled after the museums display of a 40-pound megacolon from the 19th century. So far, the museum hasnt received any ornaments that were inappropriate to display. The hair wreaths are the only ones made of actual human remains, Dhody said. That we know of. The museum received donations from two fans this year, said Gillian Ladley, media and marketing manager. A woman from California shipped an anatomically accurate heart ornament, and a local resident hand-delivered an endoscopy-slide ornament and a photo of Chang and Eng in a holiday sweater. Anyone who wants to donate an ornament can mail it to: Mutter Tree, Mutter Museum, 19 S. 22nd St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19103. Submissions are accepted year-round. If youre in need of some inspiration, Dhody said shed love to see an ornament that lights up on its own. Keys is hoping someone will create an ornament based on the collection of more than 2,000 objects Philadelphia surgeon Chevalier Jackson removed from peoples throats and lungs, ranging from buttons and pins to bones and toys. Creating an ornament is one way for people to interpret the collection and be a part of it, Ladley said. Lets talk. We all have teeth and at some point in our lives each of us may experience dental pain. A recent study in JAMA Internal Medicine, however, highlights the association between teenagers getting opioids for their dental pain following wisdom teeth extractions and opioid addiction. In 2017, more than 70,000 persons died of drug overdoses in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Although the data doesnt break it down, Im concerned that some of these deaths were teenagers who got addicted after being prescribed opioids for their wisdom teeth extractions, and others may be adults who got addicted as teenagers under the same circumstances. Theres no debate that wisdom teeth may need to come out. Five million people mostly teenagers and young adults have their wisdom teeth removed each year. This oral surgery is usually a short procedure and healing should take only a few days. The post-procedure pain, however, can be significant. Many teens get their first opioid prescriptions, like Tylenol # 3, Percocet or Vicodin, for pain at this time. But do they really need all the medication that has been prescribed? In a 2016 study, of patients who had dental surgery and were prescribed opioid pain relievers, most filled their prescriptions, but more than half of the pills remained unused three weeks later, according to an article published in Drug and Alcohol Dependence. The researchers estimated that overprescribing could add an extra 100 million opioid pills to American medicine cabinets each year! These left-over pills may wind up in the wrong mouths. Teenagers may use those leftover pills even if they dont need them. Then they may go looking for more, and they may become addicted. A recent study out of Stanford University School of Medicine addresses this issue. Among nearly 15,000 teenagers and young adults who received initial opioid prescriptions from their dentists in 2015, almost 7 percent had additional opioids prescribed within a year, and almost 6 percent were diagnosed with opioid abuse within that time. By comparison, only a fraction of those who did not receive an opioid prescription from their dentists got another opioid prescription (0.1 percent) or were diagnosed with opioid abuse (0.4 percent) over the same period. The developing teen brain is especially vulnerable to addiction. Research now suggests that the human brain is still maturing during the adolescent and young adult years. Teens brains may be particularly vulnerable to the acute effects of drugs and drug use may significantly increase a young persons risk for developing a substance use disorder. The American Dental Association says enough is enough. Dentists and oral surgeons should limit opioid dosage and duration for acute pain to no more than seven days, according to new recommendations from the ADA. Instead, they should first consider prescribing non-opioid painkillers like ibuprofen or acetaminophen. Some pearls of wisdom for parents: Be the gatekeeper for medications, including those prescribed after wisdom teeth extraction. Dont just hand your teen the bottle of pills after surgery. And be sure to properly dispose of leftover prescription drugs. You can search online for convenient drug drop-off locations in Pennsylvania , New Jersey and Delaware. Talk with your adolescents about your expectations that they will not use drugs and alcohol because (sometimes) they really do listen to you. Research confirms that when parents talk to their children about drugs and alcohol, those children are much less likely to become users. Not sure how to start the talk? The American Academy of Pediatrics has a useful resource. Rima Himelstein, MD, is a Crozer-Keystone Health System pediatrician and adolescent medicine specialist. More than half of American Airlines 15,000 pilots told the company that they had experienced problems with a uniform that gave rise to complaints of breathing difficulties, migraines, rashes, and other problems, according to a lawsuit unsealed by a federal court in Illinois. One American flight attendant described her job as life threatening in December 2016 soon after the new uniforms debuted, and said, I am not able to be around anybody in the new uniforms because the formaldehyde shuts down my respiratory system and I will need an inhaler, oxygen and EpiPen and I am risking death by being around them, according to the suit. The lawsuit, brought by the airlines pilots and flight attendants, says chemicals in the uniforms are causing the symptoms. And the suit, citing internal documents and emails, accuses American of covering up dangers and falsely portraying the uniforms as safe. The company collected thousands of complaints of reactions through a dedicated call center, the suit noted. American Airlines, the dominant airline at Philadelphia International Airport, says that the uniforms, made by Twin Hill, are safe and that the lawsuit has been written in a sensationalized manner that does a disservice to Americans commitment to its team members, and to their continued health and safety." A federal judge dismissed American as a defendant from the suit in September, but allowed the plaintiffs to bring an amended complaint against the airline. A redacted complaint was filed in October, and the judge ordered an un-redacted version to be unsealed this week, after American said it did not object. We continue to believe that the current uniform is completely safe, American spokesperson Leslie Scott said. In fact many team members, including senior executives, have worn the Twin Hill uniform safely and continue to do so today. Regardless, we are well underway with an alternative path to provide uniforms by new suppliers. Twin Hills parent, Tailored Brands, did not respond to a request for comment. The uniform debuted in September 2016, and the following month, the airline allowed employees to purchase and wear off-the-rack alternatives. Flight attendants could opt for a uniform by another manufacturer beginning in March 2017, and pilots could do so starting in June 2017. American is now field-testing new uniforms made by Lands End among 1,000 employees. That uniform -- for flight attendants and other workers -- is expected to roll out in late 2019. Scott said pilots will be in new garb made by M&H Uniforms in the spring. At Philadelphia International, one of Americans hubs, the new uniforms apply to 1,380 pilots, 2,450 flight attendants, and 845 customer-service and premium-service agents. We want to offer people options if they were not comfortable for whatever reason, Scott said. The plaintiffs want American to remove the Twin Hill uniforms altogether, and allege that the company has known that thousands of employees -- including pilots in the cockpit -- react to the uniform if colleagues are wearing it. The suit says one pilot filed a safety report with the FAA and American after he experienced an asthma-like reaction to a flight attendants uniform, and had to delay departure for 20 minutes. American took no action on the safety report, the suit alleges, and subsequently sent the pilot a disciplinary notice and grounded him twice. American maintains that we have seen absolutely no scientific support for the claim that the uniforms cause reactions by simply being around them, Scott said. According to the lawsuit, American heard from 3,828 unique callers to its uniform-reaction call center within five months of the rollout. About three months later, the suit said, 7,000 employees had placed orders for an alternative uniform, according to a draft report that Americans president, Robert Isom, was scheduled to give to the companys board. Among the many allegations that refer to internal documents, the suit says that starting in December 2016, an airline executive in Philadelphia forwarded more than 30 injured on duty reports to upper management, indicating that employees "not only had rashes, but headaches, severe migraines, stomach problems, eye and vision problems. The company has not granted any workers' compensation claims for uniform reactions, according to the suit. The company was concerned about the costs of terminating its contract with the uniforms manufacturer, including having to pay $32 million to buy out the uniform inventory, being sued by Twin Hill, and having to compensate sick employees, says the lawsuit whose plaintiffs include a pilot and a flight attendant from Pennsylvania. American chose to save money versus saving its employees health. A North Jersey man and woman were arrested in Burlington County and charged with targeting a 93-year-old Arkansas woman for $3,500 in a phone scam, police said Tuesday. Edgar Trejo-Tavares, 21, and Kevelin Garcia, 21, both of Paterson, were arrested Monday when they allegedly went to claim a shipping envelope they believed contained money from the target of the scam but was actually a setup arranged by Bordentown Township police and the U.S. Postal Service. Law enforcement were alerted last week by the Arkansas woman that she received a scam phone call from a man claiming to be an attorney representing her grandson in a drunk-driving case involving a pregnant female victim at risk of losing her baby. The Arkansas woman was told to mail $3,500 in bail money to a Bordentown apartment complex. Bordentown Police Chief Brian Pesce said his department arrested the pair at the apartment complex and found in their car an additional $10,130 in cash believed to be proceeds from similar scams. Trejo-Tavarez had a phony New Jersey drivers license at the time of his arrest, Pesce said. Trejo-Tavarez was charged with conspiracy to commit theft by deception and possessing a false government document and was being held in the Burlington County Jail pending a detention hearing, Pesce said. Garcia was charged with conspiracy to commit theft by deception and was released pending a future court date. More than 300 volunteers receive instructions at Rodeph Shalom on North Broad Street in 2016 before fanning out to take an annual census of the homeless. The Census Bureau says people who are homeless are one "hard-to-count" population it will focus on during the 2020 Census. TOM GRALISH / Staff Photographer Read more With so much riding on the outcome of the 2020 Census, state and local officials are joining with the federal government in preparing now for the massive undertaking of attempting to count every woman, man, and child living in the United States. At stake are numbers of seats each state will get in the U.S. House, the boundaries of voting districts, and more than $675 billion per year in federal funds to state and local governments for such necessities as social services, roads, and schools. Just how much money is in play for the region? Pennsylvania pulls in about $2,100 in federal funds per person, and New Jersey receives about $1,960, according to a 2017 report by the George Washington Institute of Public Policy. The important thing is we only have one opportunity every 10 years, said Fernando Armstrong, director of the Census Bureaus Philadelphia Regional Office. So its critical to the country, to the communities to have a good census. New Jersey and Pennsylvania are among the 47 states that have created or are considering creating Complete Count Commissions to oversee the 2020 Census. (South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas have declined.) New Jerseys and Pennsylvanias plan to convene in the new year. Philadelphia and other cities are creating municipal counterparts. These commissions will be working with the Census Bureau, community organizations, nonprofits, and service providers to come up with the best strategies for reaching residents. Philadelphia City Council will schedule informational hearings on the Census in the coming year, as proposed by Councilman Derek Green in April. The statewide counts need to be complete, particularly in Philadelphia, Green said, "to make sure we get the resources we need to improve the lives of residents. In the 2010 Census, the black population was under-counted by 2.1 percent, and the Latino population by 1.8 percent, the Census Bureau said. Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh, chair of the U.S. Conference of Mayors' census task force, sent a 2020 Census action plan to mayors across the country in June. Among her recommendations: start planning early, update residential address databases, and identify where hard-to-reach populations live. The Census Bureau plans to start opening its first local offices next month throughout the nine states the Philadelphia office covers. Philadelphia will get two offices in Center City early next summer. The Census Bureau will hire about 50 Philadelphia-area residents in June and July to staff each office and hundreds of field workers in spring 2020. Thats also around the time residents can expect to receive the first of three or four letters from the Census Bureau explaining the importance of the census and asking them to complete the questionnaire. For the first time, people can fill out census forms online, in addition to by phone or mail. Online is easiest on the Census Bureau. But census data released this month shows that Philadelphias internet access rate last year was 71.6 percent, the second-lowest of the countrys largest 25 cities. And Philadelphia was the only large city in which internet access declined. Shared computers in places such as libraries and schools will be important to bridge the digital divide, Pugh said. As in past census counts, the Census Bureau will focus much of its efforts on hard-to-count populations, such as people who are homeless, nomadic renters, college students, children who split time among several family members, infants who families might not think need to be counted, and immigrants wary of sharing information with the government. A new question the Trump administration wants in the 2020 Census stands to complicate the governments efforts to gain immigrants' trust: Is this person a citizen of the United States? The administration says the question will mean a more accurate count of residents who are eligible to vote. Philadelphia, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania joined an April lawsuit filed in by 18 states, a handful of cities, and the U.S. Conference of Mayors against the Census Bureau and the U.S. Department of Commerce challenging the addition of the citizenship question. California had sued earlier. The governments argue the question will deter immigrants from participating and depress the count. Regardless of your citizenship status, the fact is resources will be used, children will go to schools, said Pugh, Baltimores mayor. The courts have not yet decided whether to allow the question. A federal judge heard testimony this month on the lawsuit Philadelphia and others filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and is expected to rule soon. Local governments have filed six other suits. The issue is expected to reach the U.S. Supreme Court next year. By law, individuals Census questionnaire answers are confidential and the bureau cannot share them with any other federal or local agency, Armstrong said. He said Census workers will work with community leaders whom immigrants trust. "We want to make sure we can be nimble enough to provide for every community and every group within that community whatever they need so they can be part of the Census, Armstrong said. Its a difficult task and thats why we cant do it alone. Protestors demonstrate at the entrance of the Saudi Arabia consulate over the disappearance of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, on Oct. 9, 2018, in Istanbul, Turkey. (Depo Photos/Zuma Press/TNS) Read more At this Christmas season, tolerance is a disappearing value in our politics and at the White House. This was a year in which an America First president continued to ignore human rights violations abroad while failing to counter hate groups at home. It was also a year of increasing governmental hostility towards refugees, with rising levels of public hysteria whipped up by the White House. Even as the United States virtually abandons Americas longtime role as a promoter of human rights, authoritarian governments are promoting their value system as an alternative to democracies that they paint as in decline. Autocrats in Russia, China, the Philippines, Egypt, Turkey, and elsewhere feel freer than ever to crush human rights activists, journalists, ethnic minorities, and political opposition groups. So the role of nongovernmental organizations in promoting human rights, including refugees, and in exposing the rise of domestic hate groups becomes ever more important. Their pressure, along with media coverage and (hopefully) congressional action, is vital to fill the vacuum left by the White House retreat. For this season, here are some nongovernmental organizations that are working to expose hate groups and human rights atrocities here and abroad, and to aid refugees in an era when the West is closing its doors. There are other groups doing great work as well, but these are groups I respect and think worthy of support. The International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) organizes law students and lawyers (working pro bono) to pursue legal and human rights for refugees and displaced persons. I got to know IRAPs work because of their vital legal help to Iraqi and Afghan translators whose lives were endangered because they had worked for the U.S. military or government but werent receiving the visas Congress had authorized. IRAP has broadened its mandate to help resettle the most at-risk refugees, including religious minorities, victims of sexual and gender-based violence, and sick children. When the Trump administration imposed a travel ban on Muslim refugees in early 2017, IRAP volunteers flooded the airports to provide legal defense and then pursued cases in the courts. The International Rescue Committee (IRC) sends medical, food, and other aid into the toughest conflict zones. That includes Yemen, where 12 million people are on the brink of famine because of a Saudi-led air campaign that has destroyed the countrys infrastructure and has been aided by the United States. The IRC is working with 100 Central American migrant families to reunite children who were separated from their parents. It is also providing emergency support in El Salvador to families affected by violence that is driving them to flee north and to families separated from their children at the border. If you are looking for more groups doing work in Yemen, go to PRIs guide to helping people survive the worlds worst humanitarian crisis. Human Rights Watch. This venerable organization exposes violations on every continent from Saudi torture of women activists to repression of Christians and Muslims in China. from barriers to girls education in Pakistan, to the rising numbers of journalists imprisoned in Turkey and elsewhere. And oh yes, to the ripping children away from their parents on the U.S.-Mexican border. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has long been the leading U.S. nonprofit organization monitoring the activities of domestic hate groups and other extremists, most of whom used to be regarded as fringe groups but have now pushed closer to the mainstream, helped by the rising popularity of conspiratorial websites (some favored by the White House) and the huge influence of the far right on the GOP. The SPLC says it now tracks more than 1,600 groups across the country that vilify others because of their race, religion, ethnicity, or gender identity, prejudices that strike at the heart of our democratic values. These groups include the Ku Klux Klan, the neo-Nazi movement, neo-Confederates, racist skinheads, black separatists, and antigovernment militias. While we are worrying about Russia exacerbating the fault line in U.S. society, we need to watch out for American groups, some with dog whistles from Washington, that are actually doing this job. You may also want to check out the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which is the leading U.S. organization in monitoring anti-Semitism, which is on the rise in this country and in Europe. The Committee to Protect Journalists promotes press freedom around the world and tracks murders and arrests of journalists worldwide. Fifty-three journalists were killed in 2018. Many were killed in conflict zones, but what is most shocking about the CPJ list is the reminder that five were shot dead in the Capital-Gazette newsroom in Annapolis, Md. In these times, when a U.S. president constantly attacks American journalists verbally, and autocrats abroad increasingly silence such journalists as Jamal Khashoggi, freedom of the press is an endangered concept. So CPJ deserves support. David Desper (right), was recently sentenced to up to 40 years in prison in the road-rage shooting death of 18-year-old Bianca Roberson last year in suburban Philadelphia. Read more The prison sentence was harsh: Up to 40 years on third-degree murder for pointing a Smith & Wesson out the window of a truck and killing an 18-year-old woman who was behind the wheel of a Chevy Malibu. And yet, even this sledgehammer of justice against David Desper for the murder of Bianca Roberson has left many of us feeling empty. Baffled, still, over a case that gripped the nation in the summer of 2017. We do not know today, any more than we did 18 months ago, the answer to the question that vexed us all after the indelible instant that left a promising young woman dead in her car on southbound Route 100 in West Goshen Township. The question: Why? Why did a man with no criminal record a man whose lawyer and prosecutors both found to be living a nonviolent life fire a loaded weapon at an 18-year-old as the pair of motorists came upon each other on a stretch of high-speed road where two lanes narrow into one? One reason we know so little is that there was no trial. Also, no sworn account from the defendant. Desper refused to give investigators a statement after turning himself in and eventually pleading guilty to third-degree murder. I sought answers this week by calling lawyers on both sides. This was, as I vividly recall from being a reporter on the story in June 2017, a case as chilling as they come. The killing and the days-long manhunt made national news. There was racial discontent in the air across the country a tinderbox of anger and polarization following the inauguration of President Trump months earlier. The shooting happened just weeks before the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va. Roberson was an African American teen whose parents had moved to the suburbs from West Philadelphia. They thought this would keep her safe. And it did until then. She was a highly regarded graduate of Bayard Rustin High School and college bound. She was shot in the head by a bullet from Despers gun. Desper, we learned in trickles after his arrest, was a white graduate of Chichester High School who had recently become a union machinist. He still slept amid plastic stars and Camaro posters in the bedroom of his childhood home in Trainer, a Delaware River borough near impoverished Chester City. Desper turned himself in soon after investigators released photos of his red truck. Because he refused to give a statement, detectives went to work trying to find motive in other ways. They wanted to know if race had played into the decision to fire the gun he had legally purchased in 2015 a weapon he kept on the console of his truck while driving. We tore apart his life, basically, District Attorney Tom Hogan told me this week. I told my guys, I need you to scrub up everything you can on this guy, because if this is racially motivated, we need to know. "They went back and re-created his day. Everyone he was working with that day. They went through his friends, his contacts, all of them, to find out what they knew about him. They go back through his high school history, through his traffic violation history, through absolutely everything they can thats linked to him. What they found: No history of mental health problems. No accounts of a man with a rage-control issue. He also owned a semi-automatic AR-15 rifle, a second handgun, and he stored in his room targets that he brought home from shooting practice, Hogan said. A typical blue-collar guy," Hogan said, "who liked guns and not much else. Detectives talked to his coworkers and his friends, looking for any racial animus. Did not find any, Hogan said. Despers attorney, Dan McGarrigle, has been reluctant to speak publicly about the case. He shook his head in court as Judge Ann Marie Wheatcraft rejected his request for a lighter sentence during a Dec. 13 sentencing hearing that brought just about everyone to tears. The judge also rebuked Desper for claiming he had been frightened when he shot at Roberson. McGarrigle took my call but would only say publicly one thing: That his client had never shown himself to be an angry man prone to such violence. The commonwealth investigated my client thoroughly, McGarrigle said. His friends, family and coworkers. The person that they were told about was the same person in the 80-plus character letters provided to the court at sentencing, who all, almost to a T, described him as a kind and gentle person. All we know for sure: That person took Bianca Robersons life. And perhaps all we need to know is that it was made possible by the gun on his console. Cui Liru Photo: Courtesy of Cui Liru In his book Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?, Harvard Professor Graham Allison compares China-US relations with the historical conflict in ancient Greece, where a rising Athens challenged an established Sparta and created a common pattern between ascendant and consolidated powers that would likely be projected on the future. Allison's intention of writing the book is not to declare that Beijing and Washington will head toward a war, but to suggest bilateral relations are highly likely to be frosty. Since the reform and opening-up, China's development has been accelerating, making it the world's largest developing country and the strongest emerging power. At the same time, the US, the No. 1 power which has been dominating the international order since World War II, showed signs of decline in some respects, thanks to the financial crisis and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The concept of Thucydides' Trap has been dug out amid comparisons of a rising China and a US on decline. I agree with Allison's prediction that ties between Beijing and Washington are going down a slope. Over the past decades, there have been obvious fluctuations in the Sino-US relationship. Whenever there are major historical events, there are ups and downs. But the ongoing deterioration in ties is different. China is emerging rapidly and posing a challenge to the US' status in the global arena. Washington, meanwhile, is not willing to shed its leadership role. In this struggle, Beijing's challenges lie first and foremost in Asia. Americans are worried that China will elbow the US out of Asia, jolting Washington's alliance system in the region by its growing influence or increasing deterrence power over other nations. But the situation is different from the historical reference. There have been no major powers in history which were so interdependent as Beijing and Washington. This implies Sino-US ties could follow the path of Thucydides' Trap, but could also possibly head to another direction. Core interests It is precisely because China wants to avoid the Thucydides' Trap that it raised the new type of major power relationship, which focuses on win-win cooperation. The concept of win-win cooperation is based on the idea of community of shared interests and shared future. Yet one realistic issue is - there is currently no practical way or method to solve the divergences on core interests on both sides. It is frequently said that both sides should respect each other's core interests. What are the criteria for their core interests? What should we do when our core interests clash? Take the South China Sea dispute. China is asking for its historical rights in the waters, which is its sovereign right and in keeping with its territorial integrity. Yet given the issue's complex historical background as well as intricate ties between disputing nations, a clear demarcation is hard for the moment and would make little contribution to resolving the differences. It requires a process during which maintaining regional peace and stability accords with interests of all parties. In recent years, the situation in the South China Sea has developed into a jagged, interlocking pattern in terms of interests of each relevant party and their control over the islands and rocks. It is therefore extremely difficult to figure out the puzzle. Meanwhile, with the growing strength of China, tensions in the waters are deemed by the US as a factor affecting its rights and interests in the region, including military dominance, free navigation and the stability of its alliance there. For Washington, maintaining its leading role after WWII and safeguarding its national and global interests are tied together. Could we come up with a common standard to define our respective core interests? China did not propose such standard because even if it did, a consensus will still be hard to reach. Traditionally, it can be worked out through negotiations. When that doesn't work, differences are either set aside or resolved via military means. The stronger side emerges on top. The US, which adores power politics more than any other country, has been maintaining absolute superiority as the basis of its diplomacy. In this background, the concept of building a new type of major power relationship means well, but how to realize it? As far as I am concerned, the process of building it is also a process of interaction with continuous discussions between the two sides. The US' wrong expectation Some Americans say China duped them. They hoped Beijing would develop in line with US expectations, but China didn't. This is a groundless argument. China has integrated itself into the international economic system through reform and opening-up. The system is dominated by Western developed nations centered around the US. Beijing-Washington ties have also developed during the process. The US has different goals and strategic priorities at different stages. Previously, US and China's goals were not completely compatible with each other, but did not clash. Washington has also benefited greatly from its economic and trade ties with Beijing. US capital has found a new investment market and profited tremendously. American consumers, especially disadvantaged groups, have for a long time enjoyed substantial amount of attractive made-in-China products at a reasonable price, which helped keep US prices down. Americans are used to spending tomorrow's money today and China is contributing to such a lifestyle in the US. It holds over $1 trillion in US debt. That's why the term "Chinamerica" has been created. Nowadays, the interests of China and the US are intertwined. Some Americans say that the development of Beijing-Washington relations helped China's rise and the emerging China is not what they wanted. But China never promised anyone that it will develop according to US wish. How can they say China tricked them if there is no relevant agreement at all? Americans whose expectations from China haven't been met should ask themselves - is there anything wrong with their expectation? When some Americans are stuck with the mind-set that the US has not gained from Beijing-Washington ties, they should be aware that the crux of their problems does not originate in China, but the uneven distribution of benefits they gained from globalization. Some US interest groups made a considerable fortune during globalization, some did not obtain anything and some groups' interests were even infringed. Since the 1990s, serious imbalance in economic development and distribution of interests within the US emerged. The financial crisis of 2008 and the resulting sluggish economy worsened the contradictions caused by the imbalance. This is the reason why US President Donald Trump won the elections in 2016. Americans need to find a scapegoat outside their country and they picked China. The US excuse may sound reasonable - China's trade surplus, US trade deficit and reduced American job opportunities are what hurt America. These conclusions are too simple. The truth is, US trade deficit with China is caused by reallocation of resources. To a large extent, many other countries have been shifting their trade deficit with the US to China, because of the latter's large economy and strong manufacturing capability. This is acknowledged by many economists. The special and differential treatment of developing nations in the WTO was agreed by all and China did enjoy such treatment after joining the organization. But China developed very fast afterward and quite a few Western countries including the US believe those provisions are no longer suitable for China. Washington refuses to accept that China is still a developing country. Beijing acknowledges that trade deficit is indeed a problem, yet it is a structural issue that needs a process to be solved. Nevertheless, Trump wants it to end instantly and some Americans are using the row to reach their political goal, causing growing tensions in the trade war. The nature of Sino-US ties Allison said that the idea of defining China-US ties as "rivalry cooperation" attracted his attention during his recent speech at Renmin University of China. It is understandable. The bilateral relationship is now dominated by competition, and will deteriorate. Nobody knows how much the China-US relationship will sour. China offered to build a new type of major power relationship to get rid of the tendency and will hold on to it even if the US does not respond. It is significant not to interpret today's Beijing-Washington relations with the help of old concepts, and not to treat ties with the notion that they are destined to confront each other - like between rising and established powers. But what kind of new relationship will develop is uncertain. But we should first admit and face the fact that competition is a prominent feature of Sino-US ties in the new era. And the new type of relationship focuses on cooperation. To begin with, the increasing competition between them should be under control. The two countries can synergize their strengths to turn competition into an advantage. The change could take place by either proactive collaboration or pressure arising from needs of the situation. The relationship between China and the US is too big to fail. If such ties keep going toward confrontation, the two nations, the region and the globe would be severely affected, which is obviously not in anyone's interest. To establish the new type of relationship, the mind-sets of both sides need to be changed. Washington should learn to accept sharing its leadership with others. China should be well aware of the reality - US status has come about in history, changing it would hence need a historical process which can only be realized through social evolution. China's mission is to deal with various challenges on the way toward peaceful rise and modernization. Handling its ties with Washington is a test that cannot be dodged. It must keep getting stronger while keeping all the risks of Sino-US competition under control, avoiding a repeat of the cold-war style confrontation between the US and the Soviet Union. The evolution of history is the alteration of substances and concepts. When both countries' power and mind-sets change, and they realize that a changed global order can better accord with their long-term interests, a new order will emerge. The author is a senior researcher of Taihe Institute and former president, senior consultant of China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations. Local high school students attend a screening of the film "On the Basis of Sex" at the Riverview Movie Theatre, hosted by Inquirer & Daily News columnist Jenice Armstrong in Philadelphia on Thursday, Dec. 06, 2018. The movie is based on the life of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. HEATHER KHALIFA / Staff Photographer Read more This holiday season, you can take your children to see Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Or the one about that undersea superhero, Aquaman. But if I had a daughter, she would be going with me to see the new film about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, On the Basis of Sex, which opens on Christmas. The Supreme Court associate justice, famously known as the Notorious RBG, is my kind of superhero, and this fictionalized drama tells of how she found her calling and became a fierce advocate for gender equality. Im not out to knock the other box-office offerings, which Im sure are entertaining, but in the age of #MeToo, On the Basis of Sex is an important movie for youngsters to see. Roughly four in 10 working women in the United States have experienced gender discrimination on the job, according to a Pew Research Center survey. That ranges from sexual harassment to being paid less than a man doing the same work. Ginsburg has been fighting the good fight in this arena for virtually her entire career. I cant think of a better way to introduce youngsters to the backstory of the second woman appointed to the Supreme Court than with this first-run Hollywood production by Participant Media starring Felicity Jones and Armie Hammer. Thats why I organized a free advance screening this month at UA Riverview Plaza Stadium 17 for students from the Philadelphia High School for Girls, St. Basil Academy in Jenkintown, and Camdens Pride Charter School. I confess I was a little nervous when the students filed in that morning. Would they be interested in this story of the early years of an 85-year-old woman, even if she is one of the great legal minds of our time? I shouldnt have worried. The students settled down immediately and seemed engaged, gasping at times, and making comments at various scenes, such as when the dean of Harvard Law School accuses Ginsburg and the other eight women in her class of occupying spots that could have gone to men. As a woman and as an African American, I can identify with her struggle, especially how even after graduating at the top of her law school class, she was unable to land a job at a law firm simply because of her sex. The movie centers around a pivotal case in Ginsburgs early career, Moritz v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, in which she and her late husband, Martin, defend an elderly male caregiver in Colorado who was denied a $600 tax deduction because of his sex. Ginsburg saw it as a test case that could help topple laws that discriminated against women. As Ginsburg argues the case in the film, a judge soberly tells her, The word woman does not even appear once in the U.S. Constitution. Ginsburg, portrayed by Jones, shoots back: Nor does the word freedom, Your Honor. I wont spoil it for you by revealing what happens at the end, but suffice it to say it had us cheering and applauding. Women really have it hard out here," said Turwan Pratt, 17, a senior at Camdens Pride, as he exited the theater. "They cant even get the same jobs as we could get. And if they do, they get paid way less than we do because other men think that women arent equal as men. I think that everybody should be equal. Thats what Martin Luther King fought for. Black, white, women, men, all that. Equality is equality, no matter what. Im sure Spider-Man or Aquaman could impart the same message. The difference is that Ginsburg is real. Sweeping new federal school-discipline guidelines designed to keep children safe could have the opposite effect in Philadelphia and beyond, some experts said Tuesday. A panel led by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on Tuesday called for the cancellation of an Obama administration policy designed to address racial disparities in school discipline and discriminatory treatment of students of color and those with disabilities. That 2014 guidance, called Rethink School Discipline, warned schools that they could be violating civil rights laws if they enforced discriminatory rules or their policies led to disproportionate disciplinary rates for students of a single race. Critics asserted such guidance caused a chilling effect, leaving schools afraid to discipline problem students for fear of federal incursion and administrative pushback. Where well-meaning but flawed policies endanger student safety, they must be changed, said a report issued by the DeVos panel. Others saw the new guidance as a step in the wrong direction. The panels report communicates that the federal government is no longer interested in protecting the civil rights of students, said Reynelle Brown Staley, policy director at the Philadelphia-based Education Law Center-Pennsylvania. Students of color and those with disabilities are punished more severely than white and non-disabled peers for similar offenses, data show. A Government Accountability Office report in April found that black students account for 15.5 percent of all public school students, but 39 percent of students suspended from school. The new recommendations came out of the Federal Commission on School Safety, which was formed in the wake of the February school shooting in Parkland, Fla., that killed 17. President Trump pressed the group to deliver recommendations to improve school safety. In a 177-page report, the panel tackled topics ranging from character development education to violent video games. It recommended bolstering mental-health services, but suggested leaving to schools the decision on whether to arm teachers and other school staff, noting that schools were permitted to use some federal money for weapons training. Our conclusions in this report do not impose one-size-fits-all solutions for everyone everywhere, DeVos said in a news conference. Local problems need local solutions. This report seeks to identify options that policymakers should explore. But the recommendation around the Rethink School Discipline guidance drew swift and fierce criticism. If formally adopted, the new guidelines would not supersede the law, Staley said. Any school that discriminates against students on the basis of race, sex, disability or another protected class would still be acting illegally. But as a parent," she said, "its troubling to know that if you find that your child is being subject to unfair discipline because of their race or disability status, you can no longer go to the U.S. Department of Education. Lily Eskelin Garcia, president of the National Educators Association, the countrys largest teachers' union, called it shameful that the administration was using the risk of gun violence to strip students of their civil rights. Students deserve real solutions that will keep them safe that is what our students have asked of us," she said in a statement. The National PTA sounded similar themes. And the new guidance also worried Julien Terrell, executive director of the Philadelphia Student Union, a student organizing group that has long advocated for schools' moving away from policing and harsh discipline policies, which he said seemed to be endorsed in the report. These mass school shootings are not happening at urban schools, but urban schools are getting the investments in school police" that lead too many youths to early interactions with the criminal justice system, Terrell said. During testimony in Washington this month about the anticipated rollback of the guidelines, Philadelphia student Nayeli Perez urged officials to focus resources on supporting students instead of hiring more officers and beefing up security. Instead of suspensions, give students an avenue where we can improve and develop," said Perez, a student at the Academy at Palumbo, a South Philadelphia magnet school. "Instead of arming teachers with firearms, arm them with the tools they need to help each of their students succeed. This article contains information from the Associated Press. Volunteer firefighters participate in a rowhome fire training exercise at the Chester County Public Safety Training Campus in Coatesville. TIM TAI / Staff Photographer Read more At a time when firefighter associations nationwide are struggling to keep afloat, nearly $245 million sits untouched in a fund designed to help New Jersey firefighters thanks to an antiquated law restricting its use, the state comptroller asserted Wednesday. The money collected through a tax and intended for the New Jersey State Firemens Association, as well as the states 538 local relief associations has barely been touched in decades, and the state nonprofits monitoring of its use has been flawed, according to Comptroller Philip James Degnan. The accumulation of substantial money, combined with a lack of appropriate oversight, has resulted in waste, and could lead to fraud or theft," a report by his office concluded. The state Firemens Association gets its money about $30 million annually from a 2 percent tax on fire insurance policies that out-of-state insurers write for New Jersey properties. About half the money goes to local relief associations to give to firefighters in financial need. Other states, including Pennsylvania and New York, allow fire companies to use the funds they receive this way for training, equipment, and annual physicals. New Jersey only allows fire companies to use the fund to aid individual firefighters for costs including burials and financial assistance even though relief associations' biggest cost is for administrative and operating expenses. Degnan said the money could specifically be used to help volunteer firefighter groups, whose numbers have been dwindling. More than 80 percent of New Jerseys roughly 37,000 firefighters are volunteers, according to the New Jersey Department of Community Affairs. The number of volunteer firefighters nationwide has been dropping for decades, due in part to fire companies asking members to devote more time to raising money as costs rise and community contributions lag. Degnan recommended that state law be significantly revised so some funds can go to education, ongoing training, and equipment to increase personal safety as firefighters perform their mission of protecting the public." New Jerseys Comptrollers Office began its examination of the states firefighter assistance program after receiving a complaint that a local relief association in Bergen County was giving aid to members who were not experiencing financial hardship. Its investigators reviewed records from local relief associations and the New Jersey State Firemens Association between January 2013 and June 2017. The comptrollers report suggested lawmakers bolster the associations internal controls and mandate audits by an independent auditor. The report also recommended the group require training for all new officers in local relief associations. The president of the state association did not respond to requests for comment Wednesday. In 1994, New Jersey lawmakers discussed the surplus relief funds that the state law had created. The total then was about $90 million. In the 25 years since, very little has changed," the comptroller said. Israeli soldiers stand around the opening of a hole that leads to a tunnel that the army says crosses from Lebanon to Israel, near Metula, Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2018. Israel's prime minister Wednesday called on the U.N. Security Council to condemn "wanton acts of aggression" by the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, designate it a terrorist organization and heighten sanctions on it over attack tunnels it has dug into Israel. (AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner) Read more JERUSALEM (AP) Israel's prime minister Wednesday called on the U.N. Security Council to condemn "wanton acts of aggression" by the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, designate it a terrorist organization and heighten sanctions on it over tunnels it has dug into Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu said the council should "stand up for the truth" when it meets to discuss the tunnels Israel recently uncovered on the Lebanon border during "Operation Northern Shield." The Israeli military is engaged in the open-ended operation to identify and destroy the cross-border passageways, of which four have already been uncovered. Israel says they were built by Hezbollah militants to carry out attacks on Israeli civilians and try to conquer its northern tip. "This is not merely an act of aggression. This is an act of war," Netanyahu said. "The people of Lebanon have to understand that Hezbollah is putting them in jeopardy and we expect Lebanon to take action against this." Hezbollah, which has used such tunnels inside Lebanon before, has yet to comment. Israel has long called for a crackdown on the Iranian-backed Hezbollah, a heavily armed mini-army that is believed to possess an arsenal of some 150,000 rockets that can reach nearly all of Israel. The two sides are bitter enemies and fought an inconclusive monthlong war in 2006. In recent years, Hezbollah has been bogged down in fighting on behalf of Bashar Assad's regime in Syria. But with that civil war winding down, Israeli security officials fear it is now refocusing its attention on Israel. Netanyahu said Hezbollah was currently using every third house in villages in southern Lebanon for hiding missiles or other military activity. He called their activity a "double war crime" since it threatened to harm Israeli civilians and put Lebanese civilians in danger as well. On Wednesday, the Israeli military escorted reporters along the Israel-Lebanon border to the site of one of the tunnels found in recent weeks near the town of Metula. Heavy mist and rain nearly obscured the Lebanese villas perched on the mountains overlooking Israeli army bulldozers and tractors trundling through the mud. Hezbollah, Lebanese and Palestinian flags fluttered on the opposite side of the border as Israeli soldiers lowered cameras 26 meters (85 feet) into the mouth of a rock-hewn tunnel they said was the first exposed in "Operation Northern Shield" emanating from the Lebanese village of Kafr Kela just a few hundred meters (yards) away. Netanyahu is demanding the U.N.'s peacekeeping force in Lebanon fulfil its mandate and take action against Hezbollah's violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions banning it from conducting military activity in southern Lebanon. The U.N. force, UNIFIL, said Monday that two of the tunnels allegedly dug by Hezbollah cross the border in violation of the cease-fire agreement that ended Israel's 2006 war with Hezbollah. The council was convening Wednesday at Israel's request. Though it appeared the Lebanese army was unaware of the Hezbollah tunnel network, Netanyahu said they know about it now and were required to neutralize it for their own country's sake. Israel holds the Lebanese government responsible for the actions of Hezbollah, which enjoys significant political power in Lebanon. "The fact that the Lebanese army is doing nothing means that they are either unable or unwilling or both to do anything about this. But it doesn't absolve Lebanon's culpability," he said. "My message is: Hezbollah is putting you in great jeopardy. You should act in your own defense and roll them back. Fight Hezbollah for the future of Lebanon." Lebanon's Foreign Ministry said it was concerned about the U.N. report about the tunnels crossing the border into Israel in violation of the 2006 cease-fire agreement. It said the Lebanese army has been asked to "intensify its activities" along the border. It also said the council should hold Israel accountable for its violations of Lebanon's air, land and sea space. ___ Associated Press writer Sarah El Deeb in Beirut and Isabel Debre in Metula, Israel contributed reporting. In this photo provided by Moroccan news channel 2M and taken on Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018, a security team is seen at the area where the bodies of two Scandinavian women tourists were found dead, near Imlil in the High Atlas mountains, Morocco. The lone suspect arrested in the killing of two female Scandinavian tourists is connected to a terrorist group, and three other suspects are on the run, Moroccan prosecutors said Wednesday. (2M via AP) Read more RABAT, Morocco (AP) The lone suspect arrested in the killing of two Scandinavian tourists in Morocco's Atlas Mountains is connected to a terrorist group, and three other suspects are on the run, Moroccan authorities said Wednesday. State television 2M reported on its website that authorities consider the two women's slayings a terrorist act. Local media reported that the suspects had links to the Islamic State group. The women, who were from Denmark and Norway, were discovered stabbed in the neck Monday by other tourists, who alerted police, according to national media. Hiking in the area was temporarily suspended. The killings have shocked Morocco, a popular tourist destination where such attacks on foreigners are extremely rare. The Rabat public prosecutor's office said in a statement Wednesday that the only captured suspect has affiliations to a terrorist group, without naming the group. The suspect was arrested in Marrakech on Tuesday. Three other suspects have been identified and but are still on the run, a security official told The Associated Press. The official was not authorized to be publicly named. The remote mountainous region where the women were found dead is 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) from the village of Imlil often the starting point for treks to Mount Toubkal, North Africa's highest peak. Broadcaster 2M released photos and videos Wednesday of forensic investigators and others working around the women's brightly colored tent on a rocky hillside. The broadcaster said the tent held food and belongings for three people, including an ID card. Moroccan media outlets reported that investigators have video surveillance footage showing three suspects putting up a tent near the victims' tent and leaving the area after the slaying. Authorities in Denmark and Norway warned their citizens from hiking without local guides in Morocco after the killing. Danish police officials said Wednesday they sent an officer to Morocco to assist in the investigation. Morocco is generally considered safe for tourists and is a key ally of the United States and Europe in the fight against terrorism. Morocco has struggled for years with sporadic Islamic extremism, and more than 1,000 Moroccans are believed to have joined the Islamic State group. Media in Norway identified the Norwegian hiker as Maren Ueland, 28. The mayor of her family's hometown of Time, Reinert Kverneland, told Norwegian broadcaster NRK that he informed relatives of Ueland's slaying. The victim's mother, Irene Ueland, told NRK her daughter had taken safety precautions before making the trip. The Danish victim was identified by media in Denmark as Louisa Vesterager Jespersen, 24. Her mother, Helle Jespersen, told tabloid BT two police officers rang the doorbell Monday evening with the message that her daughter had been killed. She said the family had warned her against undertaking the journey. The University of South-Eastern Norway said on its website that both women were studying to earn bachelor's degrees in outdoor life, culture and ecophilosophy. They attended a campus in Boe, southern Norway and west of Oslo. "What we know is that they were on a monthlong, private holiday in Morocco. Our thoughts go to the families," the university said on its home page, adding flags were flown at half-staff in their memory Tuesday. ___ Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen, Denmark contributed to this report. Muslim women walk in the courtyard of the 7th century Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, Syria, Wednesday, Oct. 3, 2018. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar) Read more WASHINGTON - The Trump administration is planning to pull all U.S. troops out of Syria, a defense official said on Wednesday, as President Donald Trump declared victory against the Islamic State. The president, in a message on Twitter, said the United States had "defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency." His statement came shortly after news organizations reported that the White House had made a decision on Tuesday to abruptly remove the entire U.S. force of more than 2,000 troops from Syria and end the extended American ground campaign against the Islamic State. Trump has long promised to conclude the campaign against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, and has questioned the value of costly and dangerous military missions overseas. But U.S. troops, working alongside Syrian partner forces, have struggled to eradicate remaining pockets of militants in central Syria. An abrupt American withdrawal would raise questions about whether the militants would be more easily able to regain strength. The decision is the latest twist in American leaders' unsuccessful quest to craft a solution for Syria's long civil conflict, which has drawn in U.S. allies and adversaries including Turkey, Russia and Iran. Both the Trump and Obama administrations have resisted becoming more involved in Syria's larger civil war but many senior officials - including at the State Department and Pentagon - have supported an ongoing troop presence in Syria until security conditions improve and a political solution can be reached. Defense officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss a decision that has not yet been announced, said the withdrawal was expected to occur as quickly as possible and would affect the entire force of more than 2,000 U.S. service members. The Wall Street Journal first reported on Wednesday that U.S. troops would be removed from northeast Syria. U.S. forces are mostly in north central and northeast Syria, but they also have a smaller ground presence in the southeast Syria along the border with Jordan. The unexpected White House move comes as tensions increase sharply with NATO ally Turkey, which has promised to launch a military offensive against the U.S. partner forces in Syria, which Ankara considers part of a Kurdish terrorist group. Losing their U.S. ground partner will be a major blow to the Syrian Kurdish forces. The Washington Posts Paul Sonne, Joshua Dawsey and Karen DeYoung contributed to this report. Garfield DeMarco, 80, the son of a successful Atlantic County cranberry farmer and politician, began his own political life as a Democrat, crosed over to the Republican, and ran the GOP organization in Burlington County from 1974 to 1991. He's now an Independent, loathes Donald Trump, but remains fond of his cousin, Kellyanne Conway, who works for the president. Read more Garfield DeMarco greets me from his recliner, his walker within easy reach, his legs beneath a blanket bearing the logo of Dartmouth, his undergraduate alma mater. The onetime Republican boss of Burlington County is 80 now, maintaining his independence with the help of old friends-turned-caretakers, living in an unassuming house in Hammonton, the town where he grew up. DeMarco doesnt so much shake my hand as embrace it with a purpose and a power that are startling, as well as heartening. He laughs easily and often. And in a lively recent conversation, he was agile-minded, quick-witted, and delightfully blunt about his personal and political evolution, as well as the sorry state of our politics. I was always a lefty Republican like a pink elephant and Im now a registered independent, he said. I had no trouble at all voting for Hillary Clinton." DeMarco gets his TV news from CNN. His taste in magazines runs to The Nation and The Economist, thanks to Antoinette Gugliotta, a colorful (she was a hoot) if exacting Hammonton High School teacher who urged her students to read broadly, deeply, and with open minds. He likes Beto ORourke, the telegenic Texan who put up a good fight against incumbent Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, and dismisses other potential Democratic candidates for president, like Joe Biden, as too old. As for Donald Trump? Trump is Trump. Its the support hes achieved that really bothers me, DeMarco said. Theres an undercurrent of racism in it. I really believe that. Theres an awful lot of hate and vitriol, and Trump is exploiting it. DeMarco said he learned values of tolerance for others from his parents, who were cranberry farmers in Atlantic and Burlington Counties. His father, who had been a Republican but switched parties and became an influential Atlantic County Democrat, was always for the underdog. Young Garfield learned a lot listening to conversations among local pols gathered at the DeMarco kitchen table, where helping constituents who needed food, or needed coal was a not-infrequent topic. The death of his father in a car crash led him to take over the family business not long after graduating from Yale Law School, and delayed his own entry into politics. But in the 1970s, DeMarco became a Republican at the urging of the bow-tied, crew-cutted, Quaker conservationist Edwin Forsythe, the congressman from Moorestown. It was a different party then, said DeMarco, who ran the GOP organization in Burlington County from 1974 to 1991 and kept it a few steps away from candidates and others who sought to pull it rightward. DeMarco had known he was gay since childhood and as an adult pursued numerous romances with other men; his private life was whispered about but never became a public issue. That may have been due to what he called my blue-haired ladies lunches" at Le Bec-Fin and his packed, big-ticket fund-raising soirees at the same Philly restaurant during its haute cuisine prime. >> ) READ MORE: NJ pol DeMarco finally feels free to share his whole story "It was hard for people to use my being gay against me, because as county chairman I wasnt running for office, DeMarco said. And I kept producing victories. I never lost an incumbent. Many of the photos on the wall of his den show family, friends, politicians, and celebrities including Pope John Paul II long gone. Theres a fabulous, framed color shot of the man himself at 22, shirtless and buff on the beach in Margate, and another of his longtime boyfriend, now husband, Billy Wilson. The two dont share a home but see each other often and are still very much together, said DeMarco. I didnt notice any photos of his cousin Kellyanne Conway, who also grew up in and around Hammonton and has been a key and often controversial figure since the beginning of the Trump administration. Kellyanne is a very skilled political operative. Very capable, DeMarco said. "But I wonder how she can reconcile Trumps behavior and attitude with her deep religious belief. I have a lot of respect for Kellyanne. I like Kellyanne, shes part of my family. Her great-grandmother was my dads sister. And her mother and her aunts have been very close to me. Although he said he prefers to be just an interested spectator on the political scene, DeMarco clearly relished his days of running the GOP. Im proud of selecting good people and promoting good government, he said. He also likes tossing a comment or two into the frenzy on Facebook. But he prefers to engage with people face-to-face. These days, seeing friends and family is among his chief pleasures. But theres always that touch of sadness when we get together, because at my age, people are always dying, he said. But Im comfortable. Im well taken care of. As I take my leave, DeMarco took my hand in that powerful grip one more time. The Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi was commissioned to design "The Letter" for the Haddon Heights Post Office in 1938. Read more In the dozen years Ive regularly used the Haddon Heights post office, I havent paid much attention to the sleek, sinuous sculpture high on a lobby wall. I hadnt noticed that the stylized, rather voluptuous, recumbent woman it depicts is writing a letter. Nor did I know that the piece is called The Letter let alone that its the work of Isamu Noguchi, one of the greatest American sculptors of the 20th century, in whose honor the U.S. Postal Service once issued a set of stamps. Now I know, thanks to Marshall Hatfield, a local history buff who describes the provenance of this rather fabulous piece of public art in the Haddon Heights Business and Professional Associations 2019 community calendar. This handy publication is being distributed free throughout the borough. When I heard about this sculpture," Hatfield told me, "I thought, 'This is kind of cool. So is the story behind it, which, like the sculpture itself, seems to get rediscovered every so often by historians and journalists. The Letter is one of 1,400 sculptures or murals commissioned for post offices nationwide, thanks to New Deal arts support programs instituted by President Franklin D. Roosevelts administration. The Haddon Heights piece is the only one created for a post office by Noguchi, whose glorious News, a gleaming exterior bas-relief at 40 Rockefeller Center, is my particular favorite. Much later, he designed a controversial sculpture you may have noticed at the plaza on the Philadelphia side of the Ben Franklin Bridge. Its known as Bolt of Lightning or Lightning Bolt or, according to Philadelphia Magazine, the ugliest piece of public art in the city. But Haddon Heights got lucky, said Hatfield. Noguchi wanted to do something in New York, where he was living, or Los Angeles, where he was born, but there werent any projects available in those places. Haddon Heights was available. Noguchi needed the money, Hatfield said. He probably thought, Haddon Heights is not so far away from New York. And he did come here a number of times, Hatfield did research online at the National Archives (my eureka moment), and also obtained information from the Smithsonian Institutions National Postal Museum and the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, Queens. He read 85 pages of handwritten and typewritten correspondence between Noguchi and the U.S. Treasury Department and others. Some of the exchanges involved then-Haddon Heights Postmaster Henry McKay who, to say the least, didnt much care for the finished product. I wish at this time to object to the figure installed, McKay wrote a Treasury official on March 30, 1939, about the new artwork claiming pride of place above the door to his office. "It is too large for the space and the figure itself is objectionable, rather than attractive. We have yet to hear a single favorable comment and there has been a great deal of ridicule and unfavorable mention. I really think it should be removed and something more appropriate installed. Fortunately, the postmasters request was not granted. Inslee A. Hopper, of Treasurys fine arts section, wrote a letter to McKay describing the sculpture as "an outstanding example of Mr. Noguchis work and I believe the interest [in it] will only increase as time goes by. Which has been proved true, more or less. That Thing? Its Famous? was the headline of a 2005 New York Times story about the Noguchi of Haddon Heights by Rowan University professor of art history Fred Adelson. The piece is quite handsome, said Adelson, of Cherry Hill. Its in the spot where it was originally installed, where it was meant to be located, and it sort of flows above the doorway to the postmasters office. Alice Boland, the current postmaster, said patrons often are curious about the sculpture as were several I interviewed during a recent visit. Im excited to show this to my daughter, said Rachel Yi, 40, who manages the office of a medical practice. Shes interested in art, and this artist is Asian American, so it will be a point of conversation with her. Roberta Stevenson, whose husband, John, is the pastor of Haddon Heights Baptist Church, likes the sculpture but can understand why in the 1930s some local folks were not enthusiastic. I agreed, noting that the woman writing the letter is, after all, nude. No, she isnt, Stevenson said. Look." The pastors wife is right. To appreciate the sculpture, she said, smiling, you have to really look at it. Amen. Josephine Mozee, 69, of Camden, was struck by a car in Camden and later died from her injuries. Read more In just two years, Josephine Mozee made an impact at Pennsauken High School as a teachers assistant. Every day, she arrived an hour before school began to greet students and staff with a cheery welcome outside the auditorium. She often stayed late, too, working with troubled students in an after-school alternative program. In her short stint at the Camden County school, Mrs. Mozee never missed a day. Now, the school is mourning her loss and remembering her as a role model in the school and her community who always had a smile, hug or prayer for anyone she met. She didnt need a high position. She was just happy being someone who helped the kids," Superintendent Ronnie Tarchichi said Tuesday. She had a kind heart, a great disposition, and was truly a lovely woman. Mrs. Mozee, 69, of Camden, died Saturday, Dec. 15, at Cooper University Hospital from injuries sustained when she was struck by a car the day before, only blocks from her home, authorities said. Details about the incident, which is under investigation, are few. Authorities said the driver remained at the scene at 11th and Newton Streets and no charges have been filed. Mrs. Mozee was walking home after picking up fruit and vegetables at a produce market, her family said. More than two dozen people, family and friends, rushed to the hospital waiting room to keep vigil Saturday as news spread, said Claudia Wehnau-Guida of Moorestown, a retired nurse at the high school. The two became friends when Mrs. Mozee was hired by the district in 2016. She would have been so thrilled to know how many people loved her, Wehnau-Guida said. She touched everybody. She was the kind of person you want to be your friend. She made you want to be a better person." The school remembered Mrs. Mozee with a moment of silence Monday, the superintendent said. School officials are collecting donations to assist her family with funeral expenses, he said. After a career spanning more than 40 years as a certified nursing assistant, Mrs. Mozee worked for Camden County in a health center at the Lakeland Complex. She later was employed at a day-care center in Camden. She loved the teaching assistant job and especially enjoyed working with teenagers, said former school principal Greg Munford, who now runs the alternative program and hired her for that, too. As an education assistant, she floated in the building, assisting teachers in the classroom with students who needed extra help with lessons. She bought school supplies and treats for staff candy and cupcakes. In order to get to school by 6 a.m., Mrs. Mozee would wake up around 4, walking several blocks to catch the bus to Pennsauken, said English teacher Adrienne Conyer. Mrs. Mozee had never learned to drive and after her husband, Roy, died in 1997, she became an avid walker. For about an hour, Mrs. Mozee stood in the hallway, greeting every student and staff member, Conyer said. Later, she would visit the nurses' office, where she hugged each nurse. Conyer said Mrs. Mozee was her lunch buddy and never failed to offer her an encouraging word or a quote from Scripture. It seems that her personal goal was to leave a friend or even a stranger better than how she met them, Conyer said. From a recent chance encounter with Mrs. Mozee on a bus on her way home from work, Stephon Johnson of Willingboro said, he knew that she was special. After another passenger gave his seat to Mrs. Mozee, she replied, Youre going to be doubly blessed. She got amens all around, recalled Johnson, who shared the exchange on social media. It was an amazing feeling. Born in South Carolina, Mrs. Mozee moved to Camden when she was 16, said her daughter, Tomicaela Butler. She married in 1980 and raised three children. Like her husband, she worked two jobs to send the children to Catholic school, Butler said. Butler said her mother enjoyed walking around Camden because it gave her a chance to minister to people, passing out religious pamphlets. She often walked more than a mile to her church. She also volunteered once a month at the Cathedral Kitchen, which provides meals and services to the needy in Camden. She was an awesome mother, said Butler. She just wanted to help people. Mrs. Mozee was a member of the Higher Ground Temple Church of God in Christ in North Camden, where she was active in several ministries, including the usher board, womens department, street ministry and pastors aide. Her favorite expression was nobody but God, her daughter said. The woman was a true disciple, said Bishop E.M. Barron, the churchs senior pastor. "Once you met her, you never forget her. She was just a blessing. In addition to her daughter, she is survived by son Abdullah Beyson; another daughter, Patricia Brockington; six grandchildren; six great-grandchildren; two sisters; and two brothers. A viewing will be held on Friday, Dec. 28, from 5 to 8 p.m., and Saturday, Dec. 29, from 8 to 10 a.m. , followed by services at 10, at Higher Ground Temple Church of God in Christ, 203 Vine St., Camden. Interment will be at Lakeview Memorial Park, Cinnaminson. Rahanna Gray, owner of Stylish Pooch grooming, poses with Major next to her RV grooming business. Read more Meet Rahanna Gray, a 26-year-old pet groomer whose colorful doggie dye jobs turn heads on Phillys streets and on Instagram. Becky with the good hair: I think the dogs like getting the color because they get more attention and you know dogs love attention. Old habits dye hard: I have color all over the curtains, on the floor, all over me. They move. They shake. The dye goes everywhere. Theres really no way to stop it. Rahanna Gray wants to unleash your dogs inner rock star. She can see through those thick layers of fur, to the mohawk just waiting to be uncovered below, and she can tell that purple not pink hair dye would compliment his tiny ears and paws quite nicely. Grays unusual dog-grooming styles turn heads across the city and on Instagram but the best effect she has on her four-legged clientele cant be seen. It can only be felt, deep in their little doggy souls. I love adding swag to their wag, Gray said. They look at you like, Thank you. I really appreciate what you just did for me." Since she opened her own business, Stylish Pooch Mobile Grooming, two years ago at the age of 24, Grays heard it all about her kaleidoscopic doggie dye jobs, from I didnt know you could do that to a dog (you can) to thats inhumane (it isnt). She uses Opawz permanent hair dye for dogs, which is nontoxic, and gets brushed into the pets hair and then rinsed off. But Grays business isnt so mobile anymore. The used 1996 RV she bought has had so many problems that it no longer runs. She still works out of the vehicle, which remains parked on a Germantown street, but the change has meant a drastic drop in clientele, especially since she can no longer reach elderly clients or those without cars. MORE WE THE PEOPLE: People pay $1 just to take pictures of Anthony Smiths well-dressed dogs What hasnt diminished, however, is Grays determination to succeed and her positive attitude. Theres no Plan B. Theres no just in case. This is it, she said. I dont see myself doing anything other than this. I love what I do and I just feel this is my calling." A graduate of W.B. Saul High School, Gray grew up in a Germantown house where her parents were always bringing stray animals home. They even had a wayward rooster for a few days once, until its rightful owner was found. It was definitely a zoo, she said. MORE WE THE PEOPLE: Sunny Bear, a Philly dog with an army of fans, channels The Art of War on Twitter Though her family had cats, lizards, and rodents, Gray said dogs have always held a special place in her heart. Dogs dont have any other thing on this planet but to love us, so the only thing we can do for them is to love them, take care of them, and show them how much they mean to us," she said. Gray began her career at the PetSmart in Plymouth Meeting, first as a pet bather and then as a dog groomer after the store put her through grooming school. After eight years at the store, Gray started her own business in 2016. A friend was the first person to request that she dye her dogs hair a wild color. After researching the process and method, Gray gave it a try. When a picture of the painted pooch was posted on Instagram, it blew up, she said. Today, Grays Instagram is full of her colorful clientele, whose hairdos range from mohawks to ombre dye jobs. Shes taken calls from people from as far away as California whove seen her work and want her to style their pet. Gray dreams of one day being mobile again and owning her own fleet of grooming vehicles, but until then, shes content doing what she loves out of a rusted trailer. No matter that the first step of the trailer is missing. She knows shes already taken bigger steps to get where she is today. Im the only one in my family who has their own business, and I feel like I have to do it for them, she said. I have to do it for myself, and I have to do it for them. Want more We the People? Bucks County dads Chad Collins and Gabe Young are the force behind Minefaire and Comic Con for Kids. Erik Weiss is Erik the Everyday Viking and also portrays Krampus at Christmastime. Check out the full We the People archive here. The PLA Navy's new destroyer, the Type 055, a 10,000-ton domestically designed and manufactured vessel, was launched at the Jiangnan Shipyard in East China's Shanghai on June 28, 2017. It is equipped with new anti-air, anti-missile, anti-ship and anti-submarine weapons. Photo: 81.cn China's domestically made 10,000-ton class missile destroyer Type 055 recently underwent a high-speed test run, leading Chinese naval experts to believe the vessel has completed most of its trials and will go through weapons system tests before entering service in half a year's time. The Type 055 was recently photographed sailing through the sea at a fast speed at an undisclosed location, cctv.com reported on Tuesday. Wang Yunfei, a naval expert and retired People's Liberation Army (PLA) Navy officer, told the Global Times on Wednesday that the goal of this sea trial was to test the destroyer's high speed sailing capability and the comprehensive coordination of its different systems. "The Type 055 had previously tested its systems at a slower speed, but only in high speed can its overall performance be truly tested," Wang said. The latest sea trial is already at a later stage of all of its sailing tests, Wang noted. After conducting its first sea trial in August, the Type 055 was spotted on the sea several times, the cctv.com report said. The PLA Navy will soon have the first Type 055 in service, it said. Wang said now that the warship has completed sailing-related tests, it still needs to conduct weapons and command system tests. This process will take about half a year, after which the vessel will be delivered to the PLA Navy, Wang said. China has already launched four Type 055stwo of them in Dalian, Northeast China's Liaoning Province and the other two in Shanghai. Wang said that after gaining experience from the first batch of Type 055s, China will develop upgraded versions. Considering China needs to have about six aircraft carriers and multiple amphibious assault ships in the future, China is looking to have at least 10 Type 055s to form battle groups and escort these vessels, Wang said. The 180-meter-long, 20-meter-wide destroyer will be equipped with 112 vertical launch missile cells capable of launching a combination of surface-to-air missiles, anti-ship cruise missiles, land-attack cruise missiles and anti-submarine missiles, media reported. The first of four bodies is removed from the basement of a residence on the 5100 block of Malcolm Street on Nov. 19, 2018. Read more Philadelphia police on Wednesday announced the arrests of three more men in last months execution-style slayings of two sisters and two men, found shot to death in a West Philadelphia home in what authorities have said was a drug deal gone bad. The arrests this month of Robert Long, 30, of the 1600 block of North 60th Street in West Philadelphia; Nasir Moss Robertson, 36, of the 6100 block of Glenmore Avenue in Southwest Philadelphia; and Keith Garner, 34, of the 6100 block of Master Street in Brewerytown, follow last months arrest of Jahlil Porter, 32, of the 200 block of East Ashmead Street in East Germantown. Authorities have said the victims included two men trying to sell a stash of drugs they found in a house they were renovating on the 5100 block of Malcolm Street. Police contend that the suspects went to purchase the drugs at the house Nov. 18 and instead shot the four people in the head. Police found the bodies the next day in the unfinished basement after relatives requested that they check on the well-being of the victims. Police Homicide Capt. John Ryan said Wednesday that two weapons were used, but he declined to elaborate. The victims were Tiyaniah Hopkins, 20; her sister Yaleah Hall, 17; William Maurice Taylor, 31; and Akeen Mattox, 28. Relatives have said the two men recently moved into the home and considered themselves stepbrothers because they were raised together. Ryan previously said the two females were not involved in the botched drug deal that led to the slayings. Taylors great-uncle Greg Brinkley, 60, of East Falls, said Wednesday that his family was extremely pleased to hear of the arrests. He gave Police Commissioner Richard Ross and homicide detectives major kudos for their work. This has really, really been a trying time for us, he said, and the arrests have lessened some of the anger for our family. The four suspects have been charged with murder, robbery, conspiracy, and related offenses. Longs court-appointed lawyer, Benjamin Cooper, and Mandy Nace, a spokesperson for the Defender Association of Philadelphia, which is representing Porter, declined to comment Wednesday. Attorneys were not listed in court records for the other two men. Timothy Barnes, 33, left, is charged with murder in the shooting death of Tyisha Timmons, 23. Read more Timothy B. Barnes killed a woman he hadnt intended to shoot, authorities say. The 33-year-old man from the Ogontz section of the city was ordered Wednesday to stand trial for murder in the death of 23-year-old Tyisha Timmons, who was shot Feb. 21 while driving her fathers 1988 Dodge Ram conversion van with six passengers, including three young children. Prosecutors said Timmons, of Ogontz, was an innocent victim whose van was mistaken for another vehicle that had been involved in an earlier gang-style shooting. According to a transcript of testimony in a Nov. 20 hearing from police and the victims twin sister, Myisha, the van carried seven people, including Tyisha, who was driving, as well as Myisha, two adult female friends, and children ages 4, 2, and 1. Around 8 p.m., Tyisha Timmons and her passengers were driving on 16th Street near Nedro Street when they heard gunshots. Tyisha turned right onto Nedro, and when they reached a gas station at Old York Road, one of the women, saying she was scared, left the van and entered the stations store. Tyisha continued driving, but her sister persuaded her to circle back to the gas station and pick up their friend. When Tyisha pulled onto the 5700 block of North Broad Street, she was flanked by two vehicles, a 2004 Chrysler Sebring and an early-2000s-model Ford Taurus. Barnes, of the 1500 block of West Nedro, was allegedly driving the Sebring, and police testified Wednesday that he was coordinating with the driver of the Taurus. At a stop light, the Taurus pulled up to the vans left side, and when the light changed, the Taurus passenger fired at the vans drivers side, according to testimony. Tyisha was shot multiple times in a hip and once in the head, and the car veered across Broad Street and Old York Road and crashed into a wall. Municipal Court Judge James M. DeLeon scheduled Barnes' arraignment for Jan. 9, 2019. Hazim Hardeman, right, and his mother, Gwendolyn, sit for a portrait outside their West Philadelphia apartment on Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2018. Hazim Hardeman is Temple University's first Rhodes Scholar. Read more Everyone loves a good story, and Hazim Hardeman, the Temple grad who became the schools first Rhodes scholar, has one for the ages. The journey from his North Philadelphia neighborhood to Oxford, England, has twists, turns, and a happy ending. Reporter Susan Snyders two-part deep-dive into his past and present is full of hope and perseverance. For others, getting through college can be a much different story. In Ivy League schools, including Penn and Princeton, students with mental illness are claiming discrimination. Reading this online? Sign up here to get this newsletter delivered to your inbox every morning. Aubrey Nagle (@aubsn, morningnewsletter@philly.com) Last year, Temple University graduate Hazim Hardeman was named the schools first-ever Rhodes scholar, one of just 32 students chosen nationally. Many of his peers come from Ivy League degrees and privileged backgrounds. But Hardemans road to the scholarship from his North Philadelphia neighborhood was much more unlikely, and he wants others to follow his path, Across the Atlantic, hes now settled into Oxford where hes carving his own space at the school and confronting its fraught legacy. A new report from a disability-inclusion foundation claims Ivy League schools, including the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University, are discriminating against students with mental illness. The report alleges the schools are forcing students to leave campus against their will and without medical justification via leave of absence policies that exacerbate the college mental-health crisis. Good news for medical marijuana patients: Pennsylvanias Department of Health awarded 23 new permits to cannabis companies Tuesday, doubling the number of marijuana dispensaries that it will allow to set up shop. Each permit allows a company to operate three retail storefronts. When all the dispensaries are open the state will have 150 shops, including Center Citys first cannabis retailer. But Tuesdays announcement was also good news for Big Marijuana, as many of the permit winners were national outlets seeking to expand their footprints. What you need to know today Through Your Eyes | #OurPhilly Are you talking about the Grinch or SEPTA, @stylephilly? Tag your Instagram posts or tweets with #OurPhilly and well pick our favorite each day to feature in this newsletter and give you a shout out! Thats Interesting Opinions Maybe then well finally move beyond this point. Maybe then we wont be bogged down in reports and recommendations while in the real world, a generation of mostly young black men is gunned down on our streets. Columnist Helen Ubinas on a report on the citys violence prevention programs that may tap your inner Grinch. The U.S. government may not be acting to abate carbon emissions, but state and local governments can take action to tackle the problem, writes former senior vice president at The World Bank Vinod Thomas. Better mental health care is possible in Philadelphia, including innovative treatments, as long as there is proper financial support and the political will, writes writer and editor Alicia B. Grimaldi. What were reading A Daily Dose of | Swag Could your dog pull of a purple mohawk? Pet groomer Rahanna Gray is turning Philly pooches into rock stars. How much criticism does the new Philadelphia School Board deserve for allowing a failing charter school to remain open? This week, the board reversed a 2017 decision by its predecessor, the School Reform Commission, to close Richard Allen Preparatory Charter School for declining academic performance and other problems and gave it two years to improve its academic performance and make other corrections. If the school doesnt meet a list of new standards, it has reportedly agreed to surrender its charter. On the face of it, allowing a troubled school with 500 students and declining performance to continue to exist is an outrage. But the fact is, the outrage should be directed to the 20-year-old state charter-school law that is considered one of the worst in the country, and to state lawmakers who have refused to alter, reform, or improve the original bill so that the promise of charters would have a better chance of changing the lives of students and the failing ones would close before damaging more students. One of the charter reforms needed underlies the boards decision to given Allen another chance: the process of closing a charter school is so protracted that it would likely take more than the two-year reprieve Richard Allen was given to complete the process. Schools whose charters are not renewed can appeal to the state Charter School Appeal Board, where a closure decision can be reversed (and often is). That goes to the heart of a fundamental flaw in our public education: frequent conflict between the state and the local district when it comes to charter standards and expectations. The gulf between the state and local districts plays out in the way that charter schools have evolved rapidly and without a clearly defined set of goals and expectations for their success. Charter schools are supposed to be alternatives that allow innovative and successful ideas to develop that can ultimately improve the performance of all schools. Instead, their academic excellence is spotty at best, and given the way the law is crafted, they drain resources from the traditional districts. They often provide a culture and structure that appeals to parents, but the sad fact is that on the whole, they perform only marginally better than traditional public schools, and often far worse. Its as if the state legislature created the law in 1997 and hadnt much bothered with it since, other than to urge more charter schools to open. That is criminally irresponsible. In Philadelphia, there are now 87 charter schools educating one-third of all public school students. Mild attempts at reform that have included alterations to the law that would make the situation worse have been floated for the past few years, with little traction. Talk of reforms typically arise around budget time. Its hard to understand why this is so hard to pull off. Public Citizens for Children and Youth has crafted a list of commonsense charter reforms that would make a difference in elevating education for all our children, which after all, was supposed to be the point of charters to begin with. Stay the Course The Story of Vanguard and the Index Revolution By John C. Bogle Wiley. 320 pp. $34.95 Reviewed by Joseph N. DiStefano Vanguard Group founder John C. Bogle, who turns 90 in May, has been Americas cheerfully barbed, plainspoken investment adviser for so long its easy to forget hes been retired from the Malvern investment company which now invests $5 trillion in clients' money, behind only BlackRock Inc. for even longer than he ran Vanguard (1975-96). There is a fan base for commonsense investment oracles, and Bogle fills that need (as does his admirer and contemporary Warren Buffett, still chairman and CEO at Berkshire Hathaway Corp., a very different kind of company). Bogles mostly-free-media network includes his live-event business TV and occasional congressional appearances skewering Wall Street competitors; the Bogleheads fan chatrooms; his busy small staff at Vanguard headquarters (his old Wellington Management Co. mentor, Walter Morgan, kept coming in almost to his death at 100 in 1998); and the retail brokers who peddle the hot-money Vanguard exchange-traded funds Bogle once opposed, and who now cheerfully quote Bogles aphorisms and give away his books. And now Bogle has written Stay the Course, his 12th book (if it sells like the others, it will push his lifetime sales over 1 million), in which he retells familiar Vanguard stories and industry questions with new detail. The emphasis is again against Wall Street greed and for low fees, market-index targets, and structural exceptionalism (Vanguard is owned by its funds, not its founders or outside shareholders; Bogle claims this aligns customers with bosses). Whats new includes a Bogle A-Z glossary of life lessons and a compact section evaluating each of his three Vanguard successors who are as Ivy League as Bogle but a lot lower-profile (quick, name them!). The language is diplomatic but easy to parse. Bogle says John J. Brennan got remarkably close to him (they played lots of squash) and showed a singular ability to get what he wanted. As boss, Brennan was competent, tough, and pushed a far more prominent emphasis on marketing and data-driven performance management. Bogle watched Vanguard evolve beyond him: Brennan plunged Vanguard into ETFs (the founder worried they encourage speculation); later, Brennan's successor, F. William McNabb, overrode Brennan's own skepticism to make big foreign bets. McNabb reversed Brennan's bullying, returning Vanguard "to my vision of a more personal, human place for our burgeoning crew" while also pivoting from small investors to employer plans, advisory services for wealthy clients, and cheap "robo advisory" (mostly attracting old Vanguard customers, not new ones, Bogle notes). And now comes Mortimer Tim Buckley, a onetime Bogle assistant he calls poised and prepared. But he then makes clear he sees Buckleys job running a thriving concern as easier than Bogles in building it. Bogle calls on Buckley to eschew hucksterism, improve privacy, apply artificial intelligence and to build on McNabbs incipient shareholder activism in the name of higher profits now that Vanguard owns at least 8 percent of most U.S. companies. Bogle quotes very smart people who have praised his ideas, including Buffett, former Fed chief and relentless Wall Street critic Paul Volcker, and mathy trader turned acerbic professor Nassim Taleb (Black Swan). He admits a few mistakes (he regrets that Vanguard sometimes increases fund fees; he says he should have gotten the SEC to allow only cuts) and engages a few Vanguard critics, accusing Yale law professor John Morley of sneering at Vanguard by arguing that its self-perpetuating management is not meaningfully different from that of its rivals. Bogle ignores another critic, ex-Vanguard lawyer David Danon, who says Vanguard evaded taxes; Texas paid Danon for helping collect. He quotes Thomas Carlyle, Adam Smith, and Lin-Manuel Miranda, but he doesnt point out that a favorite paean to himself by an old assistant is clearly based on World War I Canadian poet John McCraes well-known poem In Flanders Fields. Theres at least one more uncredited borrowing. (I told Bogle I expected his old masters at Blair Academy would want citations. He said hell consider it if theres another edition.) Bogle details the custom Lummi totem pole he had hauled across the country to his Adirondack compound; praises the heart doctors who keep him alive, his wife for how she raised their six kids (there are third and fourth generations), and his late mother for getting him and his brothers into Blair Academy on working scholarships during the Depression (without lingering over his father's absence, or emphasizing that his uncle was meanwhile commodore of the Greenwich Yacht Club; this poverty was mercifully transitory). Bogle has paid charity forward with hundreds of scholarships for Native American students and others at his alma maters. He praises personal forgiveness and admits he applied it grudgingly; busts on his industry lobby, the Investment Company Institute, for putting firms before customers; euologizes old teachers (and some classmates) at Blair and Princeton; and puts a word in for Joe Torsella, who ran Philadelphia's National Constitution Center when Bogle was chairman. That marks what Bogle hopes is his third legacy family, Vanguard, and public duty. Torsella, now Pennsylvanias elected treasurer, is one of the rising politicians who have adopted Bogles relentless call for cheaper, simpler indexed investments of government funds. It is, after all, the peoples money. Sen. Cory Booker (D., N.J.) speaks at a post-midterm election victory celebration in Manchester, N.H., on Dec. 8, a recent visit that fueled speculation that he will run for president in 2020. Read more WASHINGTON For Cory Booker, the Senates approval of a landmark criminal justice reform bill Tuesday night is perhaps his most significant policy achievement in Washington and a well-timed one. The vote comes as Booker nears a decision on whether he will run for president in 2020, and after the New Jersey Democrat has made criminal justice reform one of the central causes of his time in Congress. If he chooses to run, as is expected, Booker could point to momentum on an issue that has become a priority for many liberal voters, and is one with broad appeal. Along with being one of the efforts most visible supporters, Booker pushed to ensure that the final bill included a virtual ban on solitary confinement for juveniles in federal prisons. Our criminal justice system, as it stands right now, is an affront to who we say we are as a nation, Booker said on the Senate floor Tuesday. We profess, we actually swear an oath to the flag, that we are a nation of liberty and justice for all, but our criminal justice system violates those values. The measure, which has received a big push from President Trump, passed the Senate easily, with dozens of Republicans joining every Democrat. It must clear the House, which approved a less ambitious set of reforms earlier this year. That chamber is expected to act this week. The policy victory could help answer a criticism that has shadowed Booker: He is great at the showy sides of politics, but less devoted to the nuts-and-bolts work. When Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) praised individual senators for their work on the bill Tuesday, Booker was the second person he named, after the Senates second-ranking Democrat, Sen. Dick Durbin (D., Ill.). Schumer said Booker knew when to hold, knew when to fold," in accepting an agreement to support the bill. The efforts bipartisan nature could also help a potential presidential candidate. Booker was among the Democrats who worked closely with conservative Republican senators such as Utahs Mike Lee and Iowas Charles Grassley to pull the bill together. The measure would be one of the most significant federal sentencing reforms in years and one of the only major policy measures to pass in this Congress with wide bipartisan support. It drew an unusual coalition. Democrats and civil rights activists focused on reversing consequences of tough-on-crime laws that they say led to too much incarceration, lengthy sentences out of step with the crimes committed, and tougher treatment for minorities and poor people. Conservatives and libertarians, including the political network founded by the mega-donor Koch brothers, saw heavy incarceration rates as a waste of money and lives, arguing that people who had served their time should have a chance to contribute to society. As Booker noted, a Congressional Research Service report found the federal prison population has increased nearly 800 percent since 1980. The plan would reduce some mandatory-minimum sentences for drug crimes, including the three-strikes law requiring life sentences, and offer judges more discretion in sentencing for low-level offenses. It also includes more opportunities for inmates to shorten their sentences by taking part in rehabilitation programs and bars certain practices, including shackling pregnant prisoners. Booker predicted that the bill will affect thousands suffering from injustice. Conservative critics, however, warned that it could lead to the early release of violent criminals. A number of serious felonies, including violent crimes, are still eligible for early release, Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) wrote in the National Review. In short, the First Step Act flunks their basic test to protect public safety. Ironically, Booker reached this long-held goal with an assist from the president he may try to replace. Trump supported the measure and cajoled Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) to allow a vote. It is the first significant bipartisan policy achievement of the Trump presidency. This will keep our communities safer, and provide hope and a second chance, to those who earn it. In addition to everything else, billions of dollars will be saved. I look forward to signing this into law! Trump tweeted Tuesday night. Every senator from Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware supported the bill, including Pennsylvanias Pat Toomey, its lone Republican senator. Booker took up sentencing reform almost as soon as he arrived in the Senate. He teamed up with Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.) to introduce an early proposal, and was later a key figure in a bipartisan deal unveiled in 2016, a precursor to the measure passed Tuesday. Schumer said then that Booker was the conscience of the effort. On the Senate floor, Booker, of Newark, spoke in personal terms, saying he is the only senator living in a mostly minority neighborhood. I still live in a community that is both over-criminalized and under-protected because of federal policies that mistake the severity of a punishment with the actual security of a people, he said. Booker toured all 21 New Jersey counties to promote the issue and made countless television appearances and speeches. On a Utah radio station with Lee, he talked up the messages of forgiveness found in the Bible. In 2017 he hosted Eagles safety Malcolm Jenkins and other current and former NFL players as they visited Capitol Hill to argue for criminal justice reforms and improved relations between police and minority communities. Booker has said he will make a decision on the presidential race over the holidays; he is widely expected to announce his intentions early next year. Recent visits to Iowa and New Hampshire, the first two states with nominating contests, have only accelerated speculation. Booker, in an interview last week, said he plans to keep the criminal justice issue in the spotlight. He called this bill a first step and lamented that some provisions he sought were left out. As soon as the ink is dry on this, Im going to take a holiday vacation and come back to work on criminal justice reform, he said. Some advertisers say they are leaving conservative host Tucker Carlson's show following his remarks on immigration. Read more Fox News host Tucker Carlson continues to lose advertisers following comments he made on air last week that allowing certain immigrants to enter the United States makes our own country poorer and dirtier and more divided. As of Wednesday evening, at least 20 companies had announced they would stop airing ads on Carlsons highly rated Fox News show, Tucker Carlson Tonight. The companies which include Bowflex, IHOP and TD Ameritrade have pulled their advertisements following a segment that aired last Thursday. A video clip of the segment, shared on Twitter by Progressive Activist Jordan Uhl, has been viewed more than one million times. Pacific Life Insurance, which had sponsored the segment but is now pulling its ads, said in a statement, As a company, we strongly disagree with Mr. Carlsons statements. Other companies made similar comments. Western Digital is a global company with employees, customers, and partners from many countries," Western Digital, the parent company of SanDisk, wrote in a statement Wednesday afternoon. "We embrace diversity and inclusion, and work with advertising partners who share our core values. A Fox News spokesperson said some companies, such as Farmers Insurance, Bayer, Mitsubishi, John Deere, AstraZeneca, My Pillow, and Gold Bond parent company Sanofi are keeping their ads on Carlsons program. Our strategic marketing intent is to share our key product news with consumers through a variety of media channels," Mitsubishi said in a statement. "We will monitor the situation and adjust our advertising if necessary. In a statement, Fox News called out left-leaning outlets like MoveOn.org, Media Matters, and Sleeping Giants for pushing what it described as an agenda-driven intimidation effort. The network also drew comparisons between advocates calling for advertisers to boycott the show with self-described Antifa protesters who targeted Carlsons home in Northwest D.C., reportedly damaging his front door. While we do not advocate boycotts, these same groups never target other broadcasters and operate under a grossly hypocritical double standard given their intolerance to all opposing points of view, Fox News said in the statement. Dont let Fox News distract, deflect, or deceive, Media Matters president Angelo Carusone said in a statement. This isnt about Media Matters, Sleeping Giants, or activists. No one forced Tucker Carlsons odious bigotry and fixation on white genocide conspiracy theories. And thats what advertisers are rejecting. Rightfully so, too. Its unclear if Fox News is losing any money from the ad boycott of Carlsons show. A Fox News spokeswoman said no revenue has been lost, and all of the advertisers had moved their commercials and ad dollars to other shows on the network. On Monday night, Carlson defended his controversial comments on immigration, telling viewers the left wants to shut him up, but that he refused to be intimidated by enforcers on Twitter. "It wont work with this show," Carlson said. "Were not intimidated. We plan to try to say whats true until the last day." This isnt the first Fox News show abandoned by advertisers. Back in April, Laura Ingraham shed advertisers after comments she made on Twitter about David Hogg, one of the teenage survivors of a school shooting in Parkland, Fla., and an outspoken supporter of stricter gun control. Advertisers also briefly boycotted Sean Hannitys show in November 2017, after the popular Fox News host defended failed Alabama Republican senate candidate Roy Moore against allegations of sexual misconduct. Hannity eventually apologized to viewers after it appeared he referred to the alleged sexual assault of a 14-year-old as consensual on his radio show. "That one line was absolutely wrong," Hannity said. "I misspoke." Bill OReilly also faced an advertiser boycott in April 2017, after the New York Times revealed that five former Fox News personalities were paid $13 million as part of settlements involving harassment claims against OReilly. He took an abrupt vacation during the boycott, and was subsequently forced out by the network. Carlsons Tucker Carlson Tonight replaced The OReilly Factor in Fox News' evening lineup. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is shown in the Senate on Capitol Hill in Washington on February 13, 2018. Read more WASHINGTON - The Senate prepared Wednesday to pass a short-term spending bill that would keep the government open through the New Year but deny President Trump the money he wanted for his border wall - a stark retreat for Republicans in their final days in control of Congress. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., announced the deal on the Senate floor Wednesday to extend government funding through Feb. 8, when Democrats will be in control of the House. Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said Democrats would support it. The outcome would temporarily break an impasse that threatened to shutter large portions of the government this weekend and send hundreds of thousands of federal workers home without pay just before Christmas. Trump has signaled his support for the plan but "can change his mind if he wants to," said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, the No. 2 Senate Republican. A senior White House aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the administration's position, said the plan is for Trump to sign the legislation McConnell is introducing. That would represent a major defeat for Trump on his signature issue, the U.S.-Mexico border wall he long insisted Mexico would pay for but has demanded $5 billion in taxpayer money to fund. And it's an abandonment of his stance from a week ago, when he claimed he would be "proud" to shut down the government to get his wall money. Trump has oftened changed his mind or threatened to veto bills at the last minute, so a shutdown is still possible. Trump continued to assert over Twitter on Wednesday that the wall would be built, insisting Mexico would pay for it via the renegotiated North America trade deal and that the military would build it. The legality of such an approach is in question, and Schumer insisted Democrats would not let it happen. It's also unclear how the trade deal would mean Mexico is paying for the wall. McConnell blamed the outcome on Democrats after they turned down a GOP offer on Tuesday that would have provided $1.6 billion for border barriers and another $1 billion for Trump to spend on other immigration priorities. "Faced with this intransigence - with Democrats' failure to take our borders seriously - Republicans will continue to fulfill our duty to govern," McConnell said. "That's why we will soon take up a simple measure that will continue government funding into February: So we can continue this vital debate after the new Congress has convened." Schumer spoke on the floor shortly thereafter, saying: "I'm glad the leader thinks the government should not shut down over the president's demands for a wall, and Democrats will support this CR." A CR is a "continuing resolution" extending government funding. The Senate could pass the measure as soon as Wednesday and the House by Thursday, marking a humbling end to the 115th Congress and two years of unified GOP control of Washington. About 25 percent of government funding would run out at the end of Friday absent action by Congress and Trump. "One way or the other, we will win on the Wall!" Trump said in a morning tweet. In another, he sought to make the case that because of "large scale criminal and drug inflow" the military would be justified in building a border wall. Just last week, Trump told Democratic congressional leaders that he'd be "proud" to shut down the government to get his wall money. But in recent days, Democrats have held firm against his demand, and Republicans have appeared increasingly eager to avoid a partial shutdown heading into the Christmas holiday. During a television appearance before McConnell's announcement Wednesday morning, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway insisted Trump had not softened his stance on the wall but said the White House wanted to see what Congress would produce. "The president has said he's willing to do what he has to do to get that border security, including a government shutdown," she said on Fox News's "Fox & Friends." "Now we'll see what the Senate and the House, what they come together and present to the president. We don't know what's going to make it to his desk." She said that while Congress had worked successfully with Trump on other issues, lawmakers seemed to be "walking away" on border security. She also reiterated the White House's view that it could redirect money from other areas, a strategy that has limits given congressional powers over appropriations. "There are other ways for him to get that money," Conway said. "He's not going to back down." Multiple budget experts said it would be illegal for Trump to take money from the Pentagon and redirect it toward the construction of a wall. At a minimum, such a change would require the approval of at least four congressional committees, two of which will be controlled by Democrats in two weeks. "If Congress did not appropriate money to build a wall, you cannot just use other unrelated appropriations to do that," said Todd Harrison, director of defense budget analysis at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Schumer said Democrats would not allow it to happen. "Let me be very clear. The administration cannot reprogram funds appropriated by Congress for the full wall without our assent," Schumer said on the Senate floor. "To do so would violate Congress' Article One powers. They cannot do it on their own and the House and Senate will not approve a wall from reprogrammed funds or anything else. It won't happen." If Trump did order the military to build a wall anyway, Democrats or landowners could file a lawsuit and seek an immediate injunction to halt the construction. Trump has also not disclosed how he plans to deal with all the private property that runs along the border in Texas. If he orders the military to effectively seize that land through eminent domain it would open a host of additional legal issues. Congress passed a spending bill for military programs that runs through September 2019, giving the White House even less flexibility in reappropriating existing funds. But White House officials have been scouring the budget rules for weeks and could try to combine a number of unrelated programs in a way that helps with the construction of a barrier. They haven't specified how they would do that though. Congress has passed several spending bills in the past year that allowed the administration to repair and rebuild existing portions of border walls and even add some new barriers, but these projects have fallen far short of the scope Trump sought during the campaign. A partial government shutdown would be the third this year, after Congress's terminal budget dysfunction forced two brief shutdowns in January and February before lawmakers managed to get their spending bills back on track. But that effort was derailed again in recent fighting over the border, as Trump demanded taxpayer funds for a wall he had long claimed Mexico would pay for. In one of his tweets Wednesday, Trump again asserted that Mexico would be paying for the wall "indirectly" through a pending trade deal with Canada and Mexico - a concept his advisers have struggled to explain. White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Tuesday that funding would come from new revenue to the Treasury Department triggered by economic growth, but this would be very hard to measure with any precision, if at all. House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) said on Fox News Wednesday that Trump could use his State of the Union address late in January to make his case for the wall, as well as to hammer Democrats for blocking funding for it. "If the negotiation is going to go until February, one of the good things about that is the State of the Union will be right before that next funding resolution, which means the president has a real good opportunity to go to the country, make a case at the State of the Union for why Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are on the wrong side of this issue, not wanting to keep our country safe, while the president is fighting to build the wall," Scalise said. The Washington Posts Josh Dawsey and Seung Min Kim contributed to this report. A construction crew works near the intersection of Broad Street and Girard Avenue, with City Hall in the distance. Experts expect more construction to occur on North Broad as a result of the new Opportunity Zones located along the corridor. Read more The stretch of Broad Street from Susquehanna to Allegheny Avenue is just one mile long approximately a dozen blocks of North Philadelphia asphalt punctuated by gas stations, fast-food drive-thrus, and crumbling homes. Its an expanse that Shalimar Thomas, executive director of the nonprofit The North Broad Renaissance, sees as one of the most troubled along Philadelphias major artery. Real estate investors and developers, however, may soon see it as one of the most promising. The corridor and the blocks that surround it is a small piece of the 300 Pennsylvania census tracts that were selected this year to be part of the Opportunity Zones program, a new federal initiative that gives investors lucrative tax breaks for backing real estate projects in low-income communities. Tucked last year into the tax bill that President Trump signed into law, the program while still being worked out has already been billed as a way to curtail inequality across America. In Philadelphia, where the poverty rate hovers around 26 percent, 82 census tracts were designated as part of the program with at least 19 directly abutting North Broad Street. The area, once known for the opulent mansions that lined the 100-foot-wide corridor, is now home to some of the deepest poverty rates and most violent crime in the city. The per-capita income of residents who live in census tracts near North Broad is estimated to be $15,183, with an unemployment rate of 14 percent. Compare that with the area around Society Hill and Old City, two of the citys wealthiest neighborhoods, where income levels top $100,000 and unemployment stands at 3.3 percent. The Opportunity Zone program aims to level the playing field for communities such as those that, like many nationwide, have experienced uneven economic recovery. While investors and developers have flocked to red-hot neighborhoods in Philadelphia and across the nation, other areas Rust Belt communities, rural swaths, and neighborhoods with large minority populations are still waiting for prosperity. By giving wealthy investors the chance to reduce their capital gains taxes by investing in opportunity zones, the idea is that economically depressed census tracts will get the cash infusions they need. Already in Philadelphia, developers, brokers, and officials say, there is unprecedented investment interest in some census tracts. Ryan McManus, a broker for Agent PHL, a Philadelphia company associated with Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Fox & Roach, said his firm is now devoting almost half of [its] time on a daily basis to opportunity zone developments. Keith Burke, a real estate agent at MPN Realty Inc., said he recently has had bidding wars for North Broad Street parcels including one far north of Temple University that previously had minimal interest. Eric Blumenfeld, the developer who in December completed a renovation of the Metropolitan Opera House, recently swapped his plans for a North Broad strip mall with a high-rise tower full of apartments and commercial space. And Anne Fadullon, director of Planning and Development for the city, said Philadelphia officials are sitting down and having conversations with interested developers. I would not say the floodgates are opening, Fadullon said. ... But there is definitely activity. There are a lot of conversations happening around them. Local stakeholders and residents from low-income communities say the prospect of development is exciting and many are already forecasting how their communities could change. Many have envisioned new grocery stores, small businesses, and housing that longtime residents can afford. Everyone wants North Broad to be more of a job creator, Thomas, from the North Broad Renaissance, said. How can we make sure we attract the right jobs to the area? The only problem: There is no guarantee that Opportunity Zone development will directly improve the lives of neighborhood residents. There are no rules that say, You have to hire people from the local community.' There are no rules that say, If you build condos, you have to set aside a certain number of low-income units, " said Adam Looney, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Washington-based Brookings Institution. Its a big experiment, and I dont think we know what the answer is going to be until we see whats happening in these neighborhoods." The optimistic story is the one in which private capital flows in and builds new businesses, rehabilitates residential real estate, and improves the quality of the neighborhood in a way that creates more economic activity and that provides jobs for the local community, improves the safety of the neighborhood, and improves home values for local residents who own their property, Looney said. But there is clearly a potential for displacement. If investors come in and basically flip houses ... or local residents can no longer afford their rents, then its not clear that they would be better off. While the Opportunity Zone program was made law last year, investors, regulators, and local officials are still trying to figure out how the program will work. In October, the U.S. Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service finally released guidelines to better explain the tax-break regulations, but questions still loom. On Wednesday, Trump signed an executive order creating a council with representatives from 13 federal agencies to oversee the program, aimed at streamlining federal programs to benefit the zones, in addition to collecting data to measure the programs results. (The October regulations from the Treasury Department, in short, allow investors to roll capital gains from other investments into Opportunity Funds, which developers can tap to build projects in opportunity zones. The taxes on those initial gains can be reduced depending on the amount of time that an investment is held. Separately, any gains from the opportunity zone investment itself can be avoided entirely if the investment is held for at least 10 years.) The federal government, however, has issued no guidelines thus far regulating the types of development that can occur in zones. Fadullon said the city can help shape some of that. We need to make sure that the investment is good for all of our residents, whether they are new or existing but particularly if they are existing, Fadullon said. So when we are sitting down ... with those developers, we want something in return or something out of this. Practically, Fadullon said, that will likely mean that when a developer seeks the citys or states help in getting a project off the ground whether that means they are buying city-owned land, seeking zoning approval, or asking for some kind of supplemental financing the city would try to negotiate a social impact piece of development in return. For different census tracts, that social impact component will mean different things, Fadullon said, but a developer could be asked to generate job creation, access to early education, or access to fresh food. Even if we are not involved, we would really like investors to take to heart the mission of this, which is to spur investment in these areas and to lift up these entire areas, including the residents, Fadullon said. ... But I think the reality is that a relatively large percentage of projects need something from us, so we can have a very intentional conversation about this. In Harrisburg, a spokesperson for the Department of Community and Economic Development said in an email that the state is exploring the effect that possible incentives and/or state policies" may have in enticing developers to build projects that will support longtime residents, on top of the state programs already in place to help low-income communities. As for North Broad, Thomas said she is scheduling a January meeting with existing and potential developers, during which she plans to pitch them on boosting Broad Street jobs. (The North Broad Renaissance, which Thomas leads, is a special service district" and provides improvement services, including cleaning and job creation.) If you decide to invest on North Broad, and that leads to commercial tenants, how do we work with you to help you get the right tenants [from our community] in place? Thomas said. The hope is that this can be a win-win. Thomas said a strong example of local job creation is Blumenfelds Met Opera House. The developer said this week that the project created roughly 400 jobs about half of which employed neighborhood residents. I think theres a formula out there where everybody thrives, Blumenfeld said. ... Honestly my hot button should be about making money, but its not. Its about creating positive change, and the most exhilarating thing that has happened in the last two years was when we were filling those lines around the corner creating jobs. Screengrab of web page at U.S. Department of State website offering information for international travel. Read more The State Department is sending out a seasonal message of good cheer and safe travel to the millions of Americans who are traveling internationally this holiday season. Last December, according to National Tour and Travel Office data, nearly 8 million Americans traveled out of the country, making it the fourth-busiest month of the year. (The peak summer season swept the top spots.) To assist the traveling masses, the State Department has created a holiday checklist with the tagline Travel Smart. Travel Safe. Travel Well. The tips appear on the agencys travel landing page and social media accounts. Among the suggestions: Familiarize yourself with your destination at travel.state.gov/destination; the country profiles include such essential information as Safety and Security, Health, and Travel and Transportation. For instance, you should notify your bank and credit card company about your trip. If you are carrying medications, consult with the embassy or consulate in your host country on whether they are legal. For example, the U.S. Embassy in Japan warns travelers that it is illegal to transport a number of over-the-counter medicines, such as certain inhalers and allergy and sinus medications. And of particular urgency at this time of the year, stay alert in places with large crowds, such as houses of worship, transportation hubs, and holiday markets (where in Strasbourg, France, an attack killed three people this month). The threats range from terrorism to pickpockets. For answers to other questions or concerns, reach out to the department via Twitter. If you ask, someone will answer. The department also encourages Americans to sign up for its Smart Traveler Enrollment Program, a free service that sends alerts and updates to members. Its Twitter account is also a good source of news, such as this recent tweet: Demonstration Alert: March planned for December 8, and may continue in the coming weeks. The announced route is from Place de la Bastille to the Arc de Triomphe. Expected gathering points and routes include areas in the 1st, 4th, 8th, 16th, and 17th arrondissements. U.S. citizens in France who enrolled in STEP received this message directly on their devices. Source: fijisun.com.fj Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama will be chief guest at the handing over and commissioning of the state-of-art navy vessel Republic of Fiji Navy Ship (RFNS) Kacau on Friday at the Stanley Brown Naval Base, Walu Bay, Suva. This was confirmed to the Fiji Sun by Chief of the RFMF Naval Division Captain (Navy) Humphrey Tawake. A delegation from the Peoples Republic of Chinas Peoples Liberation Army-Navy will be present to witness the handing over ceremony, which will be officiated by the Embassy of the Peoples Republic of China in the Republic of Fiji. The commissioning, he said, would be done by Prime Minister Bainimarama. The RFNS Kacau arrived in October on a cargo vessel and was offloaded at Suvas Kings Wharf. It is a hydrographic vessel that will help the Fijian Navy in the measurement and description of the physical features of the coastal areas. Captain (Navy) Tawake said the vessel would also help with surveillance and maritime issues that the Fijian Navy was involved in. The RFNS Kacau, Captain (Navy) Tawake said, was initiated by the Republic of Fiji Military Forces (RFMF) and the Peoples Republic of Chinas Peoples Liberation Army-Navy, who saw fit to donate a vessel of such magnitude because of the role we have in Fiji. Not only that, but also maritime security in the region. The crew of the new navy vessel, he said, had undergone training at the navy base at Togalevu, about 17 kilometres West of Suva, just to refine their maritime skills before they get posted on board. He said a team from the Republic of Chinas PLA-Navy was in the country to conduct the sea transit and check on technical aspects of the vessel. Roma May Drag Moscow and Brussels Into Major Financial Crisis International experts are trying to evaluate the situation in Italy. Some of them are convinced that the EU is not going to save the Italian populists. For those of you who don't know the details, in October, the European Commission rejected the draft budget devised by the new Italian government. This means that the draft budget needs to be improved in order to approved. With that being said, the experts say that this incident indicates a fundamental conflict inside the European Union, which may well end up with a disaster for Italy and a deep crisis for the Eurozone and the EU. Chances are, the situation around Italy may obscure the Greek bailout and even the worst-case Brexit scenario (according to which, Great Britain quits the EU without signing a major agreement). Which is more interesting, Russia may get involved in a potentially dangerous situation. At this point, Moscow seems to be trying to create close ties with the new Italian government. In October alone, Moscow hosted the new Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Vice Prime Minister and even the Prime Minister. At the same time, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte started talking about the possibility of emitting Italian T-bonds, which seems to be the key point of interest in the entire situation. During the press conference with Vladimir Putin, he assured the media that he hadn't come to Russia to ask the Russian President to buy Italian bonds. But at the same time, the Russian leader hinted that he ws not going to limit the National Prosperity Fund in its search for new investments. In other words, the fund may well start loading up on those bonds. Italian Crisis May Cause Major Consequences In case you don't know, the new Italian government created on June 1, 2018, is considered to be a populistic one. As a rule, populists ignore fundamental and complex problems or just promise the electorate to work out a simple yet fast and efficient solution to them in the future. Some of the key problems for Italy is a really huge public debt, which is over 2,3 trillion euros. This is the consequence of living beyond their means on the national level for many years. As a result, the debt is now equal to 130% of the national GDP. Only Greece can beat this with an even bigger debt - 180% of the national GDP. At the same time, Brussels' requirements to avoid exceeding the threshold of 60% of the national GDP is ignored by many EU and Eurozone states. However, most of those governments are trying to reduce the debt. The European Commission is responsible for supervising those governments in terms of complying with the signed obligations. In particular the EC agreed with the previous Italian government that the Italian budget deficit would not exceed 0,8% of the GDP. The draft budget devised by the new government implies 2.4% of the GDP. So, the government is planning to borrow 25 billion euros more than agreed initially. So, the experts belive this is a clear step indicating that Rome is reluctant to follow the Eu scenario aimed at curing Italy's economy and financial system. Given these facts, there's nothing to be surprised about the EC's decision to reject the draft budget. Still, the Italian government claims they are not going to change their mind. So, we are likely to see another round of confrontations between Brussels and Rome. Italy may end up getting fined for violating the agreements and paying several billion euros for that. As for Russia, the Kremlin is probably interested in the opportunity to participate in something that may distabilize the political and economic situation in the European Union. However, neither Russia no the EU or the ECB have enough spare funds to bail out Italy. Apparently Mario Draghi and his ECB cannot buy junk Italian bonds forever while the new Italian government keeps openly ignoring the EU's requirements. Anyways, there won't be anything like the Greek bailout this time. So, if the Italian government keeps playing dangerous games, Italy may end up defaulting on its debt, which in its turn will result in a major crisis for Italy, Russia and the EU. You are free to discuss this article here: forum for traders and investors Text: If you were looking for the Charlestown Democratic Town Committee website and ended up here, try this Got news tips, gossip, suggestions, complaints?E-mail us: progressivecharlestown@gmail.com We strive to avoid errors in our articles. Our correction policy can be found here Welcome Guest! You Are Here: Hanukkah, The Festival Of Lights Happy early Hanukkah! This year Hanukkah started in November. We believe the last time it did was in 2013, on November 27 when it began... Letters to the Editor Land Of OpportunityStill To The Editor: I rarely take a car service in Queens. Mass transit is usually faster and its become much cheaper... State-run Korea Development Bank has caved in to GM's demands to set up a research and development unit that critics feared was a preliminary to closing down car factories here. KDB, which is the second-largest shareholder in GM Korea with a 17 percent stake, said Tuesday that it has agreed to the U.S. automaker's plan to set up the R&D unit here. In return, KDB won a pledge that the new subsidiary will develop two new global models and be kept open for the next 10 years. GM Korea authorized the plan at both board and shareholders' meetings on Tuesday, and the R&D unit will be launched later this month, absorbing some 3,000 staff from other operations. KDB chief Lee Dong-gull told reporters that the R&D unit will develop a new SUV and a crossover utility vehicle. KDB caved in because the situation was getting desperate. GM Korea has suffered cumulative losses of more than W3 trillion since 2012 (US$1=W1,130). It shut down an assembly plant in Gunsan earlier this year and is expected to have racked up losses of another W1 trillion in 2018. KDB and unionized workers both opposed the R&D unit at first because they thought it was a ruse by GM, which has been shutting down factories worldwide, to sidestep its pledge to the government to keep operations running in return for a massive bailout. But the prolonged standoff with workers made the situation worse for both KDB and GM Korea. A KDB staffer said, "We sensed a crisis when we saw GM shut down five factories in North America citing poor efficiency even though it made more than W40 trillion in profits over the last two years, and prolonged losses at GM Korea were feared to prompt GM to pull out of the country altogether." A lawsuit brought by KDB paved the way for an exit strategy. The Seoul High Court ruled on Nov. 28 that GM Korea broke the law by unilaterally authorizing the R&D unit plan at a shareholders' meeting. GM had no time to appeal the ruling and appears to have extended an olive branch to KDB. GM's head of overseas operations, Barry Engle, said in a statement that it is "critical that all the stakeholders do everything they can to deliver these important programs -- and also to support turning around the financial performance of our operations, to be sustainable and profitable for the long term." But unionized workers are threatening to strike, raising fears that the issue will keep haunting GM Korea. Joint efforts essential for self-driving industry as explosive growth is expected From:ChinaDaily | 2018-12-18 23:52 Collaboration between firms globally is vital for the success of the autonomous-driving industry, and governments should take an active role, say several key Chinese players in the sector. Both traditional vehicle makers, such as Toyota, BMW, Audi and Volvo, and tech giants including Apple, Intel, Uber, and Baidu, have collectively pumped billions of dollars into driverless vehicles in an attempt to advance the technology, test safety, and bring commercial products to the market. Its too early to determine who the winners will be, said Tony Han, CEO of WeRide, a Chinese startup that specializes in AI technology and robotics. Since it was established in 2017, the firm has expanded to include offices in Guangzhou, Beijing, Anqing, and Sunnyvale, California. Currently, we are all partners that work hard to push forward the entire autonomous-driving industry, he said, adding the US possesses the most advanced expertise and technology know-how in this field. We believe a mutually beneficial relationship will be the driving force and eventually help reshape the way people travel. Echoing Han is James Peng, founder and CEO of Pony.ai, another Chinese autonomous-driving startup that has raised $214 million since late 2016. He said a massive global market for fully autonomous driving is not mature yet, adding that an expectation for an overnight shift from traditional driving to fully autonomous driving is not realistic. Based in Fremont, California, Pony also operates in Beijing and Guangzhou, and announced its partnership with Guangzhou Automobile Group in February by launching its fully self-driving fleet on a 2.8-kilometer route. The global self-driving vehicle market will undergo explosive growth in the next 10 years and reach an estimated value of $556.7 billion by 2026, according to Allied Market Research. In China alone, a $14 billion market value is projected for intelligent connected vehicles by 2020, according to Chinas Industry and Information Technology Minister Miao Wei, speaking at the World Intelligent Connected Vehicles Conference in October in Beijing. Baidu, which began autonomous -driving research in 2013, has developed over 100 self-driving minibuses powered by its Apollo platform and will soon deploy them in Beijing, Shenzhen and foreign cities, said its CEO Robin Li in September. WeRide operates a fleet of 30 vehicles, which have logged 60,000 kilometers of testing with zero accidents. WeRide is aiming for large-scale, commercial deployment of autonomous vehicles in Chinas major cities by 2025, said Han. Our vehicles will operate without human intervention by using a combination of LiDAR (light detection and ranging), cameras and radar sensors, along with artificial intelligence to perceive the road conditions and choose the quickest and safest route to the final destination, Han said. No matter how ambitious the entrepreneurs are, nor how rapidly the technology emerges, safety remains the top priority and benchmark of autonomous driving. Over 90 percent of car accidents are caused by human error, such as fatigue, road rage and drunken driving, said Peng, adding that autonomous driving will be much safer and more reliable. Safety is our, or the industrys top priority, he emphasized. In March, one of Ubers autonomous cars killed a pedestrian during a test drive in Arizona, leading to the temporary suspension of similar tests by several US counterparts. The integration of urban governance with algorithms and artificial intelligence, or the practice of smart cities, ultimately will benefit citizens and help solve some of the most severe urbanization challenges, including traffic congestion, climate change and energy overconsumption, said Tang Jie, former vice-mayor of Shenzhen, in a global climate action summit held in San Francisco in September. However, further development of autonomous driving relies on the government, which offers regulatory support and invests in infrastructural upgrade, Li said. Danial Sperling, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Davis, said the government should play a more active role in regulating and shaping the autonomous driving industry. We will definitely have electric vehicles; we will definitely have automation, but we need to learn that the government should bring them all together with pooling and sharing, to avoid vehicle dependency, Sperling said. Editors Pick United Airlines operated Thursday the first ever passenger flight using 100% Sustainable Aviation Fuel or SAF as part of its efforts to combat climate change. The airline flew the green flight from Chicago's O'Hare International Airport or ORD to Washington, D.C.'s Reagan National Airport or DCA with more than 100 passengers. Rancho Cordova, California-based E-filliate Inc. is recalling about 301,800 units of DEWALT wireless earphones citing burn and fire risks, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission said. The recall involves DEWALT Jobsite Pro Wireless Earphones, which have a black and yellow neckband with wired earbuds. According to the agency, the wireless earphones can overheat while charging or in use. The five-day holiday shopping period from Thanksgiving Day through Cyber Monday saw about 180 million Americans making in-store and online purchases, according to the National Retail Federation's Annual Thanksgiving Weekend Consumer Survey, conducted by Prosper Insights & Analytics. The shoppers spent an average of $301.27 on holiday-related purchases such as gifts, decor, apparel and toys. Sun Life Financial Inc. (SLF.TO,SLF) announced that it intends to merge Bentall Kennedy, its North American real estate and property management firm, with GreenOak Real Estate. Sun Life Financial will acquire a majority stake in the combined Bentall Kennedy and GreenOak entity that will be named Bentall GreenOak and be part of Sun Life Investment Management. Sun Life Financial will contribute its interest in Bentall Kennedy and pay GreenOak shareholders $146 million in cash in exchange for a 56% interest in the combined Bentall GreenOak entity, with GreenOak shareholders holding the remaining interest. As part of the transaction, Sun Life will have an option to acquire the remaining interest in Bentall GreenOak approximately seven years from the closing. Sun Life Financial will also be acquiring the right to a portion of the GreenOak shareholders' share of Bentall GreenOak net income in exchange for a fixed amount to be paid in quarterly installments. Sun Life Financial expects the transaction to be accretive to underlying earnings per share and return on equity in 2019 by C$0.04 and 60 bps, respectively. The common shareholders' equity of Sun Life Financial will be reduced by approximately C$730 million when the transaction closes, from the establishment of a liability reflecting the present value of the expected settlement price on the purchase of the remaining interest of Bentall GreenOak. For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com Business News Aflac Inc. (AFL) said Wednesday that Japan Post Holdings Co. plans to purchase about 7 percent of the company's outstanding common shares through a trust. The company noted that the investment will be accomplished on a non-dilutive basis to Aflac's shareholders, as all shares will be purchased through open market or private block purchases in the U.S. In addition, this agreement does not change Alac's outlook to repurchase an expected range of $1.3 billion to $1.7 billion of its common shares in 2019. In conjunction with this announcement, Aflac will host a conference call today. Aflac noted that through this announced strategic alliance, the two parties have renewed their mutual commitment to the cancer insurance marketplace in Japan. Japan Post Co., Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of Japan Post Holdings, will continue to offer Aflac's cancer products through more than 20,000 postal outlets across Japan, as well as through Japan Post Insurance Co., Ltd. and its 76 directly managed sales offices. The parties will also continue to collaborate to promote cancer awareness and education, cancer screening, and philanthropic sponsorship of cancer-related causes in Japan. In addition to distributing cancer insurance policies through Japan Post and Japan Post Insurance, the companies will explore opportunities for further collaboration in product development. As part of its investment, Japan Post Holdings has agreed to enter into a shareholder agreement with Aflac. The agreement will provide for Aflac shares to be acquired by a trust under which Japan Post Holdings will be the economic beneficiary. It will also include a cap on share ownership of 10 percent, a minimum holding period or "lock-up" provision, and a standstill provision as well as voting restrictions in light of the fact that the shares, like all Aflac common shares, will be eligible for 10-for-1 voting rights after being held for 48 consecutive months. Japan Post group consists of Japan Post Holdings and its three operating subsidiaries: Japan Post Co., Ltd.; Japan Post Insurance Co., Ltd.; and Japan Post Bank Co., Ltd. These subsidiaries provide universal postal services as well as a variety of financial products in post offices throughout Japan. For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com Business News Bristol-Myers Squibb Company (BMY) announced that Taisho Pharma, an over-the-counter drug company in Japan, has offered to purchase Bristol-Myers Squibb's UPSA consumer for $1.6 billion. UPSA is a French pharmaceutical company and brand owned by Bristol-Myers Squibb. It develops and delivers important consumer medicines for patients in France, across Europe and additional countries. "Today's announcement marks the culmination of an in-depth strategic review to identify the best option to grow the UPSA business for the long-term. UPSA is a strong business that deserves the best possible opportunities for its employees and its future development. With Taisho we have found an experienced and reliable buyer," said Giovanni Caforio, CEO of Bristol-Myers Squibb. Assuming completion, Bristol-Myers Squibb estimates the potential transaction would be approximately ($0.04) dilutive to 2019 earnings. For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com Business News Telecom giant Huawei to spend $2b on cybersecurity over next 5 years From:ChinaDaily | 2018-12-19 07:54 Huawei Technologies Co Ltd said on Tuesday it would spend $2 billion over the next five years on cybersecurity by recruiting more people and upgrading laboratories, as the Chinese technology major seeks to ease concerns about its telecom gear. The move came after Huawei has already secured more than 25 commercial contracts for 5G, or fifth-generation mobile communication technology. "We have already shipped more than 10,000 base stations for 5G, which demonstrates the trustworthiness of our company," said Hu Houkun, rotating chairman of Huawei. Huawei is the world's largest maker of telecom equipment and the world's second-largest smartphone vendor by shipments. The company said on Tuesday that it expects revenue to exceed $100 billion in 2018, up 8.7 percent from last year. The comments came as Huawei is recently facing concerns from foreign governments which have doubted the safety of its products. "We will open a security transparency center in Brussels in the first quarter of next year to ensure clients that our products are reliable," Hu said at a news conference in Dongguan, Guangdong province, adding that no major cyber security incidents have ever happened at the Shenzhen-based company for the past 30 years. The senior executive also said Japan and France have no formal ban on Huawei's telecom gear, in response to media reports that the two countries have expressed relevant concerns. The move came weeks after Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of Huawei, was arrested in Canada at the request of the United States. Meng was later released on bail. Hu on Tuesday highlighted that the company looks forward to a just conclusion of Meng's case. Huawei gained a 28 percent share of the global telecom equipment market in the third quarter of 2018, up 4 percentage points since 2015, market research company Dell'Oro Group said in its latest report. As countries around the world scramble to deploy large-scale 5G networks, the global telecom equipment market for the superfast technology will hit $11 billion by 2022, research agency IHS Markit forecast, without disclosing the figure for this year. Xiang Ligang, CEO of telecoms industry website Cctime, said the consumer electronics industry chain is so globalized, with companies being highly interdependent. "Any possible harm to one company will have bad effects on others," Xiang said. According to him, it is unreasonable for foreign companies to doubt the safety of Huawei just because it is a Chinese company. Huawei said its products and services are available in more than 170 countries and regions. It also has more than 13,000 suppliers around the world, from Japan, the US and other countries. Gold prices fell slightly on Wednesday after reaching a more than five-month high earlier in the day on expectations of a dovish rate hike by the Federal Reserve later in the day. Spot gold dropped 0.1 percent to $1,248.39 per ounce after hitting its highest level since July 11 at $1,251.06 earlier in the session. U.S. gold futures were also down 0.1 percent at $1,252.25 per ounce. The Fed ends its two-day policy meeting later today, with many expecting a 25 bps rate hike, despite President Donald Trump's criticisms. However, the policy statement accompanying the rate decision is likely to be dovish amid rising risks to growth. The U.S. dollar held slightly weak while equity across Asia and Europe steadied somewhat after recent heavy losses on concerns about global growth. Investors reacted positively to reports suggesting that the U.S. and China will hold a series of trade talks in January aiming for a preliminary resolution of the issues underpinning their trade war. Elsewhere, Italy's populist government has reached an informal agreement with the EU on the country's disputed 2019 budget following discussions with senior officials in Brussels. For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com Market Analysis 3M Co. (MMM) said Wednesday that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire the of M*Modal for a total enterprise value of $1.0 billion. M*Modal is a healthcare technology provider of cloud-based, conversational Artificial Intelligence or AI-powered systems that help physicians efficiently capture and improve the patient narrative so they can spend more time with their patients and provide higher quality of care. About 750 employees supporting the technology business of M*Modal are expected to join 3M upon completion of the transaction, which is expected to close in the first half of 2019. The business is based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. "This acquisition builds on our strategic commitment to invest in our Health Information Systems business and expands the capabilities of our revenue cycle management and population priority growth platform. Together, we will enable doctors to improve the patient experience, while enhancing documentation accuracy and operational efficiency for both providers and payers," said Mike Vale, executive vice president, 3M Health Care Business Group. 3M said it will maintain a strategic business relationship with M*Modal's remaining transcription, scribing and coding services business, which is not part of this transaction, to help ensure continuity and strong customer support. Annual revenue of M*Modal's technology business is estimated to be about $200 million. 3M Health Information Systems or HIS business works with more than 8,000 healthcare organizations worldwide, both providers and payers, to deliver software and services across the continuum of care. 3M HIS offerings, which include the 3M 360 Encompass software platform, combine clinical documentation systems and risk assessment methodologies to help capture, analyze and advance patient information. On a reported basis, 3M estimates the acquisition to be $0.10 dilutive to its earnings in the first 12 months following completion of the transaction. Excluding purchase accounting adjustments and anticipated one-time expenses related to the transaction and integration, 3M estimates the acquisition to be neutral to earnings over the same period. 3M noted that the effective enterprise value multiple is about 10 times estimated annual adjusted EBITDA for the first 12 months following completion of the transaction, including expected run rate synergies. For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com Business News Eurozone construction output dropped in October after rising in the previous month, figures from Eurostat showed on Wednesday. Construction output fell 1.6 percent from September, when it grew 2.1 percent. Building construction fell 1.9 percent and civil engineering declined by 1.3 percent in November. Among member states, France, Italy and Romania logged the biggest declines in construction output, while Bulgaria, Slovenia and Slovakia reported the largest gains. On year-on-year basis, construction output grew 1.8 percent in November after a rise of 4.8 percent in September. For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com Economic News What parts of the world are seeing the best (and worst) economic performances lately? Click here to check out our Econ Scorecard and find out! See up-to-the-moment rankings for the best and worst performers in GDP, unemployment rate, inflation and much more. With a dispute over funding for President Donald Trump's proposed wall on the U.S. border with Mexico potentially leading to a government shutdown, the results of a Quinnipiac University National Poll show an increase in support for building the controversial border wall. Fifty-four percent of voters remain opposed to building a wall along the border with Mexico, although that is down from 58 percent in a poll conducted in August. Support for building the wall has climbed to 43 percent from 38 percent, reaching its highest level since Quinnipiac first asked the question in November of 2016. Vast majorities of Democrats, black and Hispanic voters continue to oppose the wall along with 57 percent of women. Eighty-six percent of Republicans support the wall, while independents, men, and white voters are more divided on the issue. The release of the latest poll results comes ahead of a potential partial government shutdown if Trump and Democratic lawmakers cannot reach an agreement on border security. Trump has repeatedly demanded $5 billion for construction of the wall, while Senate Democrats are reportedly only willing to provide $1.6 billion for border security in a government spending bill. Lawmakers face a December 21st deadline to fund key government agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department and the Interior Department. The Quinnipiac poll found that 62 percent of voters oppose shutting down the government over differences about funding for the border wall compared to just 34 percent that support a shutdown over the wall. Fifty-nine percent of Republicans support shutting down the government over the wall but are the only listed party, gender, education, age or racial group supporting a shutdown. During a meeting with Democratic leaders last week, Trump stated he would be "proud to shut down the government for border security," an issue that helped propel him to the White House. If there is a shutdown, 51 percent of voters would blame Trump and Republicans in Congress more, while 37 percent would blame Democrats in Congress more. Trump insisted throughout his presidential campaign that the border wall would be paid for by Mexico and has recently suggested the cost of the wall will be offset by a new U.S. trade agreement with Mexico and Canada. "Mexico is paying (indirectly) for the Wall through the new USMCA, the replacement for NAFTA! Far more money coming to the U.S." Trump said in a post on Twitter on Wednesday. He added, "Because of the tremendous dangers at the Border, including large scale criminal and drug inflow, the United States Military will build the Wall!" White House officials have had difficulty backing up Trump's claims about the impact of the trade agreement but have suggested the president can go around Democratic lawmakers in order to fund construction of the wall. The Quinnipiac survey of 1,147 voters was conducted December 12th through 17th and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points. For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com Political News The Enforcement Directorate is likely move an application before a city court on Wednesday seeking custody of Christian Michel, the middleman who was extradited to India from the UAE earlier this month in the Rs 3,600-crore AgustaWestland VVIP chopper deal, said sources. The agency's move is expected as the 57-year-old British national's CBI custody ends on Wednesday, the day he is to be produced before special judge Arvind Kumar in Patiala House courts for further hearing. The ED wants Michel's custody as it has been investigating financial irregularities in the procurement deal of 12 AgustaWestland VVIP choppers. Michel's name surfaced in 2012 as one of the three middlemen for swinging the deal in favour of AgustaWestland and making illegal kickbacks to the Indian authorities. The other two middlemen are Ralph Guido Haschke and Carlo Gerosa. The special judge on December 15 allowed the Central Bureau of Investigation to quiz Michel till December 19. The CBI is grilling Michel since December 4 when he was extradited from the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Sources said the CBI needs more examination of Michel who is being confronted with documents the agency has as evidence of the corrupt practice during the deal. The CBI has informed the court that voluminous documents have been received from five countries pursuant to the Letters of Request and a number of documents are yet to be confronted with the accused. According to the CBI, Rs 92.3 lakh was given to some Air Force officers and Michel, through his shell companies, to bear the air expense of two serving/retired Air Force officers during 2009-2013 which needs to be verified. Michel's custody is also required for the CBI as it wanted him to be confronted with witnesses to corroborate different versions. The CBI said that Michel was not cooperating in the probe and was evasive. President's rule is set to be imposed in Jammu and Kashmir from Thursday as the Governor's rule expires in the state on Wednesday, after six months, said government sources. The Centre is learnt to have recommended President's rule after a report by Governor Satya Pal Malik, officials said on Tuesday. A Home Ministry official told IANS that the Union Cabinet has given its go-ahead for President's rule after December 19. A communication from Governor's office was sent to the Central government and subsequently it was moved to the Union Cabinet for its nod. The official said President Ram Nath Kovind will have to issue a proclamation declaring that the powers of the legislature of the state shall be exercisable by or under the authority of Parliament. The state plunged into a political crisis in June this year after the Mehbooba Mufti-led coalition government was reduced to a minority following withdrawal of support by the 25-member BJP in the state. Since the state has a separate Constitution, in such cases, six months of Governor's rule is compulsory under Article 92 of the Jammu and Kashmir Constitution, under which all the legislative powers are vested with the Governor. The Governor has to dissolve the Legislative Assembly after six months. The state then directly comes under President's rule for another six months after which elections have to be held in the state. In case the elections are not declared, President's rule can be extended by another six months. No Presidential proclamation shall in any case remain in force for more than three years except for the intervention of Election Commission of India which has to certify that the continuance in force of the Proclamation is necessary on account of difficulties in holding general elections to the Legislative Assembly. Malik on November 21 dissolved the 87-member state assembly after the PDP, supported by the Congress and their arch rivals National Conference, had staked their claim to form the government. Simultaneously, the two-member People's Conference led by Sajjad Lone had also staked his claim to form a government with 25 members of the BJP and other 18 unknown members. The Governor dissolved the assembly citing horse-trading and lack of stability to form a government as the reasons. In an apparent dig at Prime Minister Narendra Modi who is yet to hold a press conference, his predecessor and Congress veteran Manmohan Singh on Tuesday said as Prime Minister, "he was never afraid of speaking to the press". Speaking at the launch of his book "Changing India", the former Prime Minister also asserted that India was destined to become a major economic global power. "I was not the Prime Minister who was afraid of talking to the press. I met the press regularly, and on every foreign trip that I undertook, I had a press conference on return. "There are large number of those press conferences which have been described in the book," he said at the event. A set of five volumes, "Changing India" details his life as an economist as well as his 10-year period at the helm of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) regime. "People say I was a silent Prime Minister, but these volumes will speak for themselves. I don't want to boast about my achievements as a Prime Minister, but the events that took place are well described in these volumes," he said. Modi has not once faced the press ever since he became the Prime Minister in 2014. Talking about future of the country, Manmohan Singh said despite all the hiccups, India was destined to become a major global powerhouse. "The emergence of India as a major global power is one such idea whose time has come and no power on earth can stop such an idea," said Singh, quoting Victor Hugo, whom he had quoted as the then Finance Minister during his historic 1991 budget speech. Asked if the farm loan waivers by the new Congress governments in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh were not bad economics, Singh said the commitments need to be fulfilled. "Whatever it is, the commitments that have been made have to be honoured," he said speaking with media on the sidelines of the event. Commenting on the ongoing RBI turmoil, the former Prime Minister hoped that the government would find a way to work in "harmony" with the RBI. "We need a strong, independent RBI which has to work in close cooperation with the central government. I hope the RBI and the government would find ways to work in harmony," Singh said. Earlier, he recalled how once on his advice, former Prime Minister Narasimha Rao bypassed the Cabinet decision to devalue the rupee. "He (Rao) signed on a handwritten note which I have preserved to this day," he said, recalling many more anecdotes in his long journey within the Union government. SNc Channels: Search About Salem-News.com Dec-19-2018 14:47 TweetFollow @OregonNews Oregon Restaurant Owner Sentenced to Prison for Immigration-Related Forced Labor Scheme Defendant used debts, fraud, threats of financial and reputational harm, and other means to compel victims to work long hours for minimal pay at restaurants in Oregon and Washington (PORTLAND, Ore.) - 55-year old Paul Jumroon, also known as Veraphon Phatanakitjumroon, formerly of Beaverton and Depoe Bay, Oregon, and a naturalized citizen originally from Thailand, was sentenced today by U.S. District Judge Anna J. Brown to 37 months in prison and ordered to pay more than $131,000 in restitution to four victims and more than $120,000 to the IRS in taxes due. The defendant previously pleaded guilty to forced labor, visa fraud conspiracy, and filing false tax returns. Todays sentence was announced by Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband of Justice Departments Civil Rights Division, U.S. Attorney Billy J. Williams of the District of Oregon, Acting Special Agent in Charge Steve Palmer of the FBIs Portland Field Office, and Acting Special Agent in Charge Troy Burrus of IRS Criminal Investigations Seattle Field Office. According to documents filed in court, between 2011 and 2014, defendant Paul Jumroon and co-defendant Tanya Jumroon fraudulently obtained E-2 investor visas to bring Thai nationals into the United States to provide cheap labor at their restaurants in Lake Oswego, Oregon, and in Ridgefield, Washington. The defendants no longer own either restaurant. Paul Jumroon then lured four Thai chefs to the United States to work at the restaurants through the promise of a visa and false representations about their salaries and job responsibilities. Once the victims arrived, he confiscated their passports and documents and exploited and coerced their labor through debts, verbal abuse, and threats of financial and reputational harm, requiring them to work significant hours for minimal pay. Tanya Jumroon witnessed the mistreatment of the victims, and she benefited financially from their forced labor at the restaurants that she co-owned. Additionally, the defendants filed multiple false tax returns with the IRS by failing to report cash income earned from the restaurants between 2012 and 2015. Paul Jumroons violation of the law by obtaining fraudulent visas and exploiting vulnerable individuals for his own personal profit is disgraceful, said Acting Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband. The Department of Justice will continue to prosecute traffickers vigorously and secure justice for victims who have been mistreated and degraded by criminals. Paul Jumroon has been brought to justice for preying on the hopes of vulnerable workers and using fear to compel work for little pay. He and his wife Tanya profited off of a degrading crime, said U.S. Attorney Billy J. Williams. This case demonstrates our firm commitment to holding traffickers accountable and restoring the rights, freedom and dignity of victims. Life in America is built on the promise of freedom and choice. When these victims came to this country seeking a better life, Paul Jumroon instead cooked up a scheme of false promises, forced labor and abuse, said FBI Acting Special Agent in Charge Steve Palmer. Todays sentence brings justice for them while also sending a strong message to those who think they can profit off others through coercion and intimidation. Mr. and Mrs. Jumroon bullied and intimidated employees that trusted them in order to line their own pockets said Troy Burrus, IRS Criminal Investigation Acting Special Agent in Charge. The defendants thought they were above the law. They abused multiple victims and stole money from the American taxpayers. Todays sentence demonstrates the government's determination to hold them accountable for their actions. 59-year old Tanya Jumroon, also known as Thunyarax Phatanakit Jumroon, of Beaverton, Oregon, will be sentenced tomorrow for conspiring with Paul Jumroon and others to commit visa fraud, for making and subscribing a false tax return, and benefiting financially from forced labor. Tanya Jumroon pleaded guilty to these charges in June 2018. The District of Oregon is one of six districts designated through a competitive, nationwide selection process as a Phase II Anti-Trafficking Coordination Team (ACTeam), through the interagency ACTeam Initiative of the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security and Labor. ACTeams focus on developing high-impact human trafficking investigations and prosecutions involving forced labor, international sex trafficking and sex trafficking by force, fraud or coercion through interagency collaboration among federal prosecutors and federal investigative agencies. This prosecution is the result of the joint investigation by the Oregon Foreign-Born Human Trafficking Taskforce, FBI, Homeland Security Investigations, IRS Criminal Investigation and Department of States Diplomatic Security Service, with assistance from the Department of Labors Wage and Hour Division and Portland Police Bureau. The case is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Hannah Horsley, Scott Bradford and Steven Mygrant of the District of Oregon, and Lindsey Roberson of the Civil Rights Divisions Human Trafficking Prosecution Unit. See also: workpermit.com Source: U.S. Attorney's Office - District of Oregon _________________________________________ Oregon | Justice | Prison | Most Commented on Articles for December 18, 2018 | Articles for December 19, 2018 | Articles for December 20, 2018 Last month, the Chairman of the National Council of Churches, Deacon Kasiano Leaupepe, blamed human rights for the deteriorating state of violence in Samoa. He did not stop there. He also criticised the existence of the co-education school system, saying boys and girls should be educated in separate schools and went on to say that the scourge of domestic violence is Samoas punishment for disobeying God. What has happened to Samoa and her people is because we have violated Gods ordinances. We have destroyed and ignored Gods laws, we place more emphasis on worldly laws, he said. The commandment says that thou shall respect (ava) your parents so you can live longer. This has been violated, it has been destroyed. How? When human right was born, it demolished this ordinance. Now thats an interesting statement. When human right was born and how it demolished Gods ordinances, Deacon Leaupepe did not say. He also did not say which worldly laws he was referring to. But he did point to one particular issue. There is just too much freedom (in Samoa today). Samoa has been affected by too much outside influence. To be sure, this is not the first time someone has blamed human rights for our problems in Samoa. We have heard it over the years in different forums. Every time we talk about the rights of children, gender equality and all sorts of basic human rights, we have often heard this argument that human rights are to be blamed for all our problems. Is it correct? Is that accurate? Well, lets just say that we live in a free world where people are entitled to their opinion. As a very senior official of the Catholic Church, and in this case the National Council of Churches, Deacon Leaupepe has a right to his opinion as anyone else. But its important that such opinions are informed and constructive, especially coming from people whom this country looks up to. It goes without saying that such opinions, if they are not explained and qualified properly, can do more harm than good. In other words, it is such attitudes that are contributing to the slow progress we are making in addressing some of these perennial issues like violence. Which means we have to be very careful that we dont misconstrue these things. We accept that when it comes to the issue of human rights, it is a sensitive one in some corners of Samoa. The term is frowned upon by some people, who argue that it contradicts our values, cultural and religious beliefs. A few years ago during the celebration of National Human Rights Day, there was a discussion on the topic of Faasamoa and Human Right. The reality in Samoa is that most people have some sort of idea about what human rights entail. But how they apply that knowledge when it comes to sensitive issuesespecially within the village, family and church settingis where we often find the problems. And weve seen plenty of problems. In 2015, the Ombudsmans Office launched Samoas first State of Human Rights Report. With the theme For Samoa by Samoa, the Ombudsman Maiava Iulai Toma made some excellent observations worth revisiting today. Human rights are not merely foreign ideals as many wish to see them, but they have roots within Samoan culture also, Maiava said. A take home point from this Report is that the weaving together of Faasamoa and human rights principles will make a stronger and more harmonious society. We said at the time that we couldnt agree more with Maiava. We still feel the same. We believe human rights and the Faasamoa can coexist perfectly to create a harmonious and peaceful society. The Ombudsman couldnt have worded it better when he wrote in his report then that: When drafting the Constitution, Samoas forefathers incorporated fundamental human rights into the supreme law. This is testament to the appreciation Samoas ancestors had for the human rights of all Samoans. He added: Human rights are underpinned by core values of respect, dignity, equality and security for everyone. Similarly, Faasamoa or the Samoan way of life holds core values that guide social interaction such as respect, dignity, love, protection, and service, which mutually reinforce human rights. The following are some examples of these core values: Feavaai (Mutual Respect) is a core value for which Samoan culture is well known. It is demanded of all Samoans, particularly children towards their parents, brothers towards their sisters, serving members towards their chiefs, young towards the old, congregations towards their pastor and so on. Respect is shown not merely in the manner of talking, but also in the body language of the person. Alofa (Love) is expressed not only within the family and community but also towards guests. It includes parents caring and providing for their children, ensuring that they receive the best of everything; children caring and looking after their elderly parents; brothers and sisters looking out for each other; neighbours providing help and assistance wherever they can; the commitment and sacrifice families make towards the church; and welcoming visitors to Samoa with open arms. Fepuipuiai (Mutual Protection) is demonstrated when parents care for and protect their children from harm and danger, and vice versa when roles are reversed later in life, or when the matai of the village ensures that members of the village live peacefully, and villagers uphold and protect the dignity of the matai. So what does this all mean? Its quite simple in our opinion. While the term human rights might sound complex, foreign to some people and complicated, at the end of the day it comes down to some very basic principles. Those principles are love and mutual respect. These principles are the basis of the Faasamoa, it is what we are as a people. Its about loving our neighbour so that no matter what, we dont judge them. Its also about respecting each other, so that even if we dont agree with someone else, we would walk away, respect their space and hope they would reciprocate the favour. If these basic rights were respected, we cannot see how they could be blamed for the problems in Samoa today. But then thats our opinion. What about you? What do you think? Write and share your thoughts with us. Have a wonderful Wednesday Samoa, God bless! Dazhong launches luxurious limo fleet From:Shanghai Daily | 2018-12-19 08:29 A fleet of 50 Mercedes- Benz limos rolled into town yesterday, forming Dazhong Chuxings premier online ride-hailing service. The flag-fall fare for the limos is 108 yuan (US$15.6), and 5.5 yuan per kilometer thereafter. The E200L limos are equipped with free Wi-Fi, drinking water and umbrellas. All the drivers are Shanghai residents with excellent records earned driving guests at the World Expo and the recent China International Import Expo, said Yang Guoping, president of Dazhong Chuxing. Despite fierce competition among online ride-hailing platforms, Dazhong is confident of distinguishing itself with the luxury service. This is not the first time Dazhong has used limos. In 2004, the company introduced a fleet of luxury Mercedes taxis. Passengers can book the limos via the Dazhong Chuxing app or call 96822. Congratulations on your appointment and hope that your taking over the helm of the ship will ensure that USP as an Institution will remain afloat and not sink into the depths of the Pacific Ocean. We salute as well all of the recent graduates from the ceremony two Fridays ago, you have done everyone proud, especially for your loved one, friends and beloved country nations. However, there are some matters which need to be brought to your attention, matters that as an Alumni, needs to be addressed and despite our USP Patriotism, in order for us to advance in the future and to maintain status quo, has to be looked into. USP Alafua: Prolonged recruitment of a Pro Vice Chancellor: There has been too much power play and conflicts in the past between Head of School and Campus Director which results in the lack of progress and direction and it sandwiches the students, that are not receiving the full benefits of the services which they are entitled to NPF, Overtime and leave benefits: Some of the workers employed for more than 2 years do not have their NPF or ACC paid as they are entitled to under the Law of Samoa. Some staff are paid overtime whilst others are given time off, others have their leave balances paid out whilst others have theirs forfeited. Agriculture Courses: It will be of interest that you have a look at the trend of these particular courses AG213 and AG373, the poor performance over the past few years... isnt that a sign there is something wrong with the delivery of these courses? Where are the evaluation forms that students complete at the end of each course? Are they just for formalities? Because I am telling you there will be some very colourful remarks in those evaluation forms. Because of these 2 courses many of the Agri students having to settle for a Diploma in Agriculture. This poses another question, what kind of system allows for graduating in Diploma, when you enrolled in a Bachelor of Agriculture course? It is an interesting loophole. SAS Services: There have been many issues from this particular Section, including misinformation to students, delay in the submission of relevant paperwork which penalises students that are dependent on their endorsement. Cases of students not being able to graduate upon receiving misinformation on what courses has mental toll on students and their families. Centre in Savaii: There have been Open days and Career days held on the big island of Savaii with thousands of tala being spent on these without any real impact. Shouldnt the resources be focused on facilities for the students such as relevant study space, updated computers, wi-fi service and fixing the leakages to the infrastructure when it rains? Receiving no course materials, no local tutors, and no identification cards. How can we continue to promote USP as an Institution when these basic services and utilities (not to mention the poor amenity conditions) are not made available? Maybe its the testimony from current students that results in the decline in registered students over the past few years? (Please note that number of Enrolled students per year does not count, it is the number of registered students....) Student Welfare Officer: Call it what you may, but everyone knows she was not a Yes Sir person, so despite her hard work and efforts, she had to go. For someone that was putting in a lot of time and effort for community outreach and promotion of USP Alafua, she was treated very unfair, and wish her all the best in whatever she pursues. On Campus Residential for 2018: Lowest ever recording of students residing on campus, simply too expensive, what the students have been calling on for so many years and seems to be falling on deaf ears Remove the compulsory Meal Fee this will ensure many students from the region and local can afford to stay on campus. Security: The current security team act like they are guarding a Prison, maybe they should look for jobs as police wardens instead. Awarding of Building and Maintenance Contracts: In the past these used to undergo a proper evaluation process from Tenders by the Management, and yet over the past 2 years they have been single-handedly awarded to 1 contractor only, even very simple tasks like water blasting the roof tops is outsourced to this contractor, really? USP maintenance team do not possess the ability to carry out these tasks? These are just some issues which the writer feels warrants your attention as a new leader that we hope will help to revive USP Alafua to the glory of days past, and hopefully guide USP towards the straight and narrow, and not towards the crooked and broad. Towards Excellence in Learning and Knowledge Creation ... Is it? Sincerely Jack Concerned USP Samoa Alumnus EDITORS NOTE: The University of the South Pacific had been contacted for a comment. Their response has been published over a series of stories starting yesterday with the stories titled University respond to allegations and Dont blame low pass rate on teaching experience. More stories from the Universitys response are being published today. Think a minute A school teacher was complaining about a little boy in her class who was not showing any interest in learning. She said: David will not do his school work. Hes not even motivated to try! But that same boy, David, will jump out of bed early in the morning to go fishing or play with his friends. He just needs the right motivation. Everyone can be motivated. Just watch people leaving work on Friday. Even at the end of a long week of work, they still have plenty of motivation and energy to party that evening and throughout the weekend! Maybe you had a school teacher who made a certain subject interesting and exciting to you. He or she inspired and gave you the desire to learn. They explained things so you could clearly understand, and as a result you did much better in that teachers class than the other ones. But we parents are our kids most important teachers. We are the main ones responsible to motivate our children, so they want to learn to succeed and become their best in life. But to do that we cannot just tell our kids, we also must show them that we believe in them. We must spend time watching and listening to our children, so we can help them know what their natural, unique talents are. Then we need to encourage them in that area so they can fully develop their own special abilitieswhether it is academics in school, business, social skills and relating to people, sports, music, or whatever they naturally enjoy and do well. You and I can motivate our children by always loving and accepting them without conditions, no matter what they do. We must understand the difference between approval and acceptance. Even when we do not approve of everything they do, our kids need to know we still always accept and love them without conditions. Then when our children do something well and right, we need to motivate and help them to become more confident by encouraging them. Maybe you yourself never had someone who motivated you to become your best. But today, if you will ask Jesus to take full charge of your heart with His real love and power, He can start changing your life. He wants to show you the special abilities He gave you, plus, He will help you fully develop them. Then as you become your best, you can share His love by encouraging and motivating others to become their best. Just think a minute SANAA, Yemen (AP) A cease-fire on Tuesday halted months of heavy fighting in Yemen's port city of Hodeida, raising hopes that the latest U.N.-led peace efforts can end the civil war and alleviate the world's worst humanitarian crisis. But the truce in the Red Sea city remains fragile, and it's unclear if the Saudi-backed government and the Iran-aligned Houthi rebels can reach a wider peace agreement despite mounting international pressure to end the war. Yemeni officials said the fighting in Hodeida subsided early Tuesday as the cease-fire took effect, with only sporadic fire from automatic weapons heard across the city. Some 70 percent of Yemen's food imports and humanitarian aid enter through Hodeida, which remained open even as the Saudi-led coalition waged a months-long campaign that failed to dislodge the rebels. Aid groups feared the port's closure could plunge Yemen into famine. The truce agreement, reached last week at U.N.-brokered talks in Sweden, calls on both sides to withdraw from the city and its outskirts. A joint committee led by U.N. officers will oversee the cease-fire and the redeployment of forces. Local authorities and police will run the city and its three port facilities under U.N. supervision. U.N. envoy Martin Griffiths has said the committee will get to work swiftly "to translate the momentum built up in Sweden into achievements on the ground." U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said Maj. Gen. Patrick Cammaert, who has been appointed to head the coordination committee overseeing the cease-fire, will depart New York with a team later this week headed for Yemen. He said the Dutch general will convene a first meeting of the committee, which includes military and security representatives from the government and the rebels, by videoconference on Wednesday. Yemen's four-year conflict pits the internationally recognized government, backed by a coalition led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, against Shiite rebels known as Houthis. Iran supports the rebels, but denies allegations from the coalition, Western countries and U.N. experts that it is arming them. The fighting has killed tens of thousands of people, and has driven millions to the brink of starvation. The U.N. calls it the world's worst humanitarian disaster. British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt welcomed the cease-fire, urging all warring parties "to stick to the terms agreed at peace talks last week in Stockholm so we can achieve a long-term political solution to this horrific crisis and end the suffering of so many." The cease-fire is the first step in a process the U.N. hopes will lead to a province-wide truce in Hodeida and the demilitarization of the Red Sea trade corridor, said Peter Salisbury, a senior analyst at the Brussels-based International Crisis Group. "But it's important to note that the deal itself is quite specific in saying that this is not part of a wider peace process: It's an agreement made for humanitarian rather than political reasons," he said. The United States, which supports the Saudi-led coalition, has stepped up pressure to end the fighting amid the fallout from the killing of Saudi dissident journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents, which brought renewed international attention to Yemen's stalemated war. That provided a boost to Griffiths' efforts to bring the two sides together in Sweden. In addition to agreeing on a cease-fire for Hodeida, they also exchanged lists of prisoners ahead of a planned swap to be carried out with the Red Cross. But a wider agreement could prove elusive. The Houthis, who have seized and held much of northern Yemen, including the capital, Sanaa, at great cost, have consistently rejected the government's demands that they withdraw and give up their heavy weapons. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, meanwhile, view the rebels as an increasingly dangerous Iranian proxy. The rebels have fired ballistic missiles deep into Saudi Arabia and have attacked vessels in the Red Sea. The conflict has caused a humanitarian catastrophe. Emaciated children are being brought to overwhelmed clinics, and in some areas families are surviving off leaves boiled into a sour green paste. The fighting and displacement have also generated a cholera epidemic. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned Sunday that if Yemen's humanitarian situation does not improve, 14 million people will be in need of food aid in 2019, 6 million more than this year. "There is a high level of hunger in Yemen," he said, adding that even though the situation has not technically been declared a famine "does not in any way diminish our huge concern with the very high level of hunger that exists." Last week, an international group tracking Yemen's civil war reported that the conflict has killed more than 60,000 people, both combatants and civilians, since 2016. That is much higher than the U.N. figure of 10,000 civilian deaths, and has added to the urgency to find a political resolution. The report from the U.S.-based Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project said more than 28,000 people were killed in the first 11 months of 2018, an increase of 68 percent from 2017. More than 3,000 were killed in November, the deadliest month since the group started collecting data. It said 37 percent of civilians killed in Yemen in 2018 died in Hodeida. The figures do not include the last few months of 2014, when the Houthi rebels captured the Yemeni capital of Sanaa and much of the country's north, nor the casualties in 2015, when the Saudi-led coalition joined the war on the side of the government. The group said it based its figures on news reports of each incident of violence in the war. Two interesting developments in relation to the use or the abuse of social media have emerged this week. The developments are not only a timely intervention, they are absolutely necessary as a reminder to all of us that freedom of opinion and information has its limitations and must be exercised with great care. In other words, people who enjoy such freedom should remember there are boundaries, which must be respected. Anything less is illegal and must be held to account, in accordance to the laws that exist to ensure peace, stability and the integrity of justice in this country we call home. The first development we are referring to surfaced yesterday on the front page of this newspaper under the headline Families hit with $5000 penalty over Facebook posts. The penalty was issued by the Laulii Village Council in a bid to buckle the alarming trend we are seeing today where certain users abuse Facebook to incite violence and make derogatory and threatening comments. Speaking to the Samoa Observer, Village chief Fuamatu Samoa Asuelu said the matter was raised before the Village Council last week and they have decided that enough is enough. So five families, whose family members were allegedly involved, were penalised. Interestingly enough, Fuamatu pointed out that of the five families affected families; only one family member lives in Samoa. These are issues those people overseas need to consider before they go on social media and disrespect the elders of the village, Fuamatu said. We will not allow that. These are high chiefs of the village and we have zero tolerance for such unwelcoming behavior. These social media or Facebook or whatever, should not be made to be abused and for people to use it as a platform, to make derogatory comments and threatening remarks against chiefs in the village of Laulii or anyone for that matter. We as the village council have a job to do and that is to keep the peace at the same time, the chiefs of this village will not be disrespected by people who are abusing social media. We couldnt agree more with the Laulii Village Council. Its about time something is done to address an issue we believe is getting out of hand. While social media is extremely useful when its used appropriately, we have also witnessed how destructive it can be when it is abused. We are referring to users who deliberately spread misinformation, lies and use fake name pages to abuse innocent and unsuspecting members of the public. This should not be tolerated, at all. Which is why we welcome the decision by the Laulii Village Council. This decision could well be the made in Samoa solution to address our social media problems. You see, everyone belongs to a family and every Samoan family comes from a village. When users know that they and their families will be held accountable for what they say, they will likely be more responsible for their actions. Which is what we want. Social media should be used as a platform to build people and improve the prospects of this country. It should not be abused as a tool to wreak havoc and encourage the pulling down of people and incite violence. In another related development, the Police have also launched an investigation into an incident where illegal footage taken during Court proceedings was posted on social media. They are also looking at an incident where a photo was taken during the proceedings of the first appearance of the Congregational Christian Church of Samoa ministers charged with failing to file tax returns. The Ministry of Justice has apparently asked the Police to track down the culprits. Why is this an important development? Well rules and laws exist for a reason. And if you know anything about Court rules and policies, you cannot do this. Which means that if people who turn up to Courtof all placesand blatantly ignore the rules in place to protect the sanctity and integrity of the judiciary, what hope do we have that they will respect the law anywhere else? Tell us what you think. Have a productive Thursday Samoa, God bless! A total of 381 students from various programmes graduated yesterday under the National University of Samoas Technical and Vocational Training Programme. The ceremony was held at the universitys gymnasium, graduates where parents, families and friends witnessed the occasion, where the students were presented with certificates in various courses. The Preliminary Certificate in Technical Vocational Educational and Training had 17 graduates with the Faculty of Health Science 14. The Faculty of Technical Education had 77 while three graduates were from the Faculty of Arts. The Faculty of Business and Entrepreneurship had 98 graduates, the Faculty of Science 46, and 126 from the School of Maritime Training. The top student in the Certificate in Computer Operating in the Faculty of Science was Lotelina Opelu. The 21-year-old from Tuaefu, Asau, Sapapalii, and Sataoa dedicated her success to all the lecturers who taught her and her school mates at the university. Without the help from my teachers, I would not have been able to possess the skills and knowledge that I have right now." It is with the knowledge acquired that she will pursue being a future Information Technology technician." I am simply overjoyed that my journey for this academic year has come to an end, I admit it was not easy I came across so many obstacles but my main challenge was the financial side, she said. Lotelina added that the support of her parents, Lapaloma and Opelu Opelu and families, helped her to overcame many obstacles. Another top students was Sara Taimane Selu, who topped electro engineering within the Faculty of Technical Education to receive the Office of the Regulator Trophy. The Seumanutafa Dr. Hazelman Trophy for Best All Round NUS Horticulture student went to Dennis Asem while Samoa Observer trainee-journalist, Talaia Mika, was awarded the Journalists Association of Samoa (JAWS) Trophy for top journalism student. The Manukau Institute of Technology Award for top tourism and hospitality student went to Maria Losa Hellesoe. While the Pio Faatiga was awarded the Samoa Water Authority (SWA) Trophy and a six months paid internship with the authority for being the top plumbing student. The Leufisa Asiata Seumanutafa Memorial Trophy was claimed by top diploma in office management student, Gloria Aperaamo Segifili. Anuilagi Samuelu Elia received the Prime Minster Trophy for topping Diploma in tourism. A man charged with the killing of two men last month appeared before the Supreme Court yesterday. Simanu'a Manuela of Falefa is facing first degree murder charges and was represented in Court by lawyer, Sua Hellene Wallwork. The lawyer asked the Court for an adjournment to enable her to get further instructions from her client and go through the case file. The application to adjournwhich went before the Chief Justice, His Honour Patu Tiava'asu'e Falefatu Sapoluwas granted. The proceeding was then adjourned and returns to the Court next Monday. The bodies of two men were discovered in an open outdoor kitchen area at Leulumoega-uta on November 23. The Police identified the two victims as a male 69 years of age of Leulumoega uta/Lufilufi and New Zealand, and his son-in-law, a 42-year-old of Savaia Lefaga and Leulumoega uta. The Ministry of Police is investigating the alleged assault of Suapaina Savaiinaea during a Supreme Court hearing on Monday. The defendant who is jointly facing a manslaughter charge with Herman Westerlund in connection with the death of Malaki Tauiliili was in Court for criminal mention when the incident occurred. According to Police officers who were escorting Savaiinaea, the assault occurred after the defendants appearance before the Chief Justice. After their case was called, the defendant then walked back to his seat, when another inmate punched him on his jaw while his family looked on, said a Police Officer, who is not authorised to talk to the media. Eye witnesses, who were in the Courtroom on the day of the incident, have been asked to make statements with the Police on the alleged assault, the Samoa Observer has been told. Repeated attempts to get comments from the Commissioner of Police, Fuiavailiili Egon Keil, on the alleged assault were unsuccessful. The assault allegedly occurred in the presence of Police officers. The Samoa Observer has also been told that Savaiinaea remains under Police custody, and is not housed at the Tafaigata Prison due to concerns for his safety. During the hearing on Monday, the Supreme Court granted bail to Savaiinaea. But it rescinded its decision after Sulamanaia Tauiliili who is the father of the deceased told the Court that he is concerned for the safety of the defendant. Taimalelagi Mona Tugaga is the first Samoan to become an accredited gender-based violence counselor and joins 25 other specially-trained counsellors from 11 countries in the region. She is the general secretary of the non-government organisation Young Womens Christian Association (YWCA) of Samoa. The regional course, which was conducted in Fiji, is designed to strengthen the quality and culturally appropriate capacity of counselling services that deal with survivors of gender-based violence in the Pacific. It was delivered by Fiji Womens Crisis Centres Regional Training Institute (RTI)/Feminist Learning for Advocacy Research and Empowerment (FLARE), in partnership with the UN Women Fiji Multi-Country Office (MCO), and endorsed by the Pacific Womens Network Against Violence Against Women. Fiji Womens Crisis Centre coordinator, Shamima Ali, said they have provided such trainingbased on international best practicefor 20 years. Now were taking the next step to formalise a Level 1 course to provide a standardised approach to support GBV counsellors, and help Pacific governments comply with GBV legislation, she added. Zooming in on Recommendation 17 of the Family Inquiry Report on Family Violence in Samoa, Taimalelagi said this recommendation highlighted the need for qualified counselors in Samoa. This approach, is strongly committed to human rights, a survivor centered approach, thereby supporting the empowerment of women of all ages and the elimination of all forms of violence against women and girls in Samoa and the world, she said. The YWCA Samoa has had an impact in the communities through their programs, added Taimalelagi, and together with her training will give more credibility to their programs. Since the revival of YWCA in 2016, we have been working tirelessly towards the improvement and development of the status of women in Samoa." As the general secretary of YWCA Samoa, this has been a dream come true especially working with young women where counseling efforts come as a need for every woman going through Gender Based Violence, she added. Tamalelagi dedicated her career achievements to women, whom she said said played major roles in her life, especially her late aunty, Laeimau Oketevi Tanuvasa-Savea. The Electric Power Corporation (E.P.C.) presented a $4 million tala dividend to the Government yesterday. The dividend was presented by the Chairman of E.P.C., Pepe Fiaailetoa Fruean to Prime Minister, Tuilaepa Dr. Sailele Malielegaoi. During the presentation, the Chairman highlighted E.P.Cs commitment, as a state-owned enterprise, to contribute to the development of Samoa with dividends. Prime Minister Tuilaepa congratulated the Corporation for responding to the call for S.O.Es to return profits on their investments. The Chinese Embassy has donated a 1000-liter water tank to a family in Vailoa in partnership with Women in Climate Change (WICC) and TankGuy Samoa. This is the first of 20 water tanks funded by the China AID costing $30,000 which will be handed over to families, under the auspices of the WICC and targets women-led familieswho are in need of reliable water supply. Vailoa resident, Patricia Peniamina, told Samoa Observer she is humbled by the donation as this was exactly what they needed. Firstly, I am very grateful for the donation theyve given my family through this water tank as this will be of great use to our family. Because all my mothers cousins on this one land, together with us use one water line, the water bill ran too high so currently our water supply has been cut because we cant afford to pay, she said. Speaking on behalf of the WICC, Cherelle Jackson expressed her appreciation towards the Chinese government for the donation of 20 water tanks, which have been installed in the past two months. The idea behind the formation of Women in Climate Change in January this year was to build the resilience of women against the impacts of climate change, and we have worked hard to ensure that womens voices and needs are reflected in the work that we do, she said. It is for women like Patricia that we are doing this work, to build the resilience of Samoan women to better take care of their families in times of disasters and in droughts. Chinese ambassador, Wang Xuefang expressed his best wishes and contentment in presenting the donation to the Vailoa family, as one of 20 lucky families benefiting from the project. I am very happy to meet this family and to see that with the help of WICC and Tank Guy, we [have] already finished the project for 20 families in Samoa and I am glad to do something on behalf of the Chinese embassy for families that need the help most, he said. The ambassador commended WICC on their partnership and efficiency in identifying families, who needed assistance and signing up the support of TankGuy, the manufacturers of water tanks, within two weeks. Auga Farrell Craig, owner of Tank Guy said they have already installed 20 water tanks around Upolu from the villages of Apia to Saleimoa, Lefaga, Siumu and Falealili to Aleipata and briefed the families on how to take care of their new tanks. The father of the family should make sure of the clean water supply for their families but watch out for the children playing around the tank faucet, and it would be such a waste if it breaks, he added. The families were selected by through ADRA Samoa surveys in partnership with climate change projects of the Government of Samoa. NEW YORK (AP) The number of journalists killed worldwide in retaliation for their work nearly doubled this year, according to an annual report by the Committee to Protect Journalists. The New York-based organization found that 34 journalists were killed in retaliation for their work as of Dec. 14, while at least 53 were killed overall. That compares to 18 retaliation killings among the 47 deaths documented by the committee in 2017. The report issued Wednesday includes the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, a native of Saudi Arabia fiercely critical of its royal regime. His Oct. 2 death inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul has led to tremors on the global political scene around allegations that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was involved. Khashoggi lived in self-imposed exile in the United States, and had gone to the Saudi consulate to formalize his divorce, but was instead strangled and dismembered allegedly by Saudi agents. Asked whether he believed the crown prince had ordered Khashoggi's murder, President Donald Trump said last month, "Maybe he did and maybe he didn't." While the president condemned the violence against journalists, the committee noted that he has called them "enemies of the people." In addition to retaliation killings, journalists have died in combat or crossfire, or on other dangerous assignments. The deadliest country for journalists this year has been Afghanistan, where 13 journalists were killed, some in back-to-back blasts staged by suicide bombers and claimed by the militant group Islamic State, according to the report. Media freedom group Reporters Without Borders said Tuesday that the U.S. made it into the top five deadliest countries for journalists this year for the first time, with six dying, including four who were among five people killed by a gunman who opened fire in the offices of Maryland newspaper Capital Gazette on June 28. The shooting was the deadliest single attack on the media in recent U.S. history. A sales associate was also killed. The man had threatened the newspaper after losing a defamation lawsuit. Another two died while covering extreme weather. In addition, the committee said the imprisonment of journalists has been on the rise. "The context for the crisis is varied and complex, and closely tied to changes in technology that have allowed more people to practice journalism even as it has made journalists expendable to the political and criminal groups who once needed the news media to spread their message," the committee said in its report. Time magazine last week recognized jailed and killed journalists as its "person of the year," including Khashoggi, Maria Ressa imprisoned in the Philippines, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo imprisoned in Myanmar, and staff at the Capital Gazette. Journalists also have died this year in Slovakia, where 27-year-old investigative reporter Jan Kuciak was fatally shot while probing alleged corruption. Last year in Malta, Daphne Caruana Galizia, on a similar mission, was killed by a bomb placed in her car. At least four journalists were murdered in Mexico, two in Brazil, and two Palestinian journalists were shot and killed by Israeli soldiers during protests in the Gaza Strip, according to the report. In Syria and Yemen, two of the worst civil-war decimated countries, the fewest journalists were killed since 2011. Three died in Yemen, and in Syria, the committee recorded nine deaths compared to a high of 31 in 2012. However, the drop may be due to limited access or extreme risks that discourage media visits, the committee said. When InCahoots opened in 1992 in the heart of Mission Valley, few expected the sprawling country western saloon to stay in business much longer than six months. Nearly three decades later, the beloved bar and dance hall will soon be closing its doors, a casualty of an impending sale that will likely lead to a much different tenant. Operators of InCahoots will be throwing their final New Years Eve bash to close out their long run in Mission Valley, a gathering that is expected to draw devoted out-of-town fans from Phoenix to Nashville. The building on Mission Center Road is currently in escrow, and the brokerage handling the sale would not disclose anything about the prospective buyer. When asked about potential new tenants, broker William Shrader would say only that the new owner would be changing the use. Advertisement The owner of both the building and the business, Suzanne Wales of Texas, was unavailable for comment. News of the closing, say the bars patrons and managers, is devastating. While the venue has long been a haven for country western fans, its appeal extends far beyond classic country tunes and line dancing. Its all very emotional, said general manager Gary Martin. I had a lady call me yesterday and she was in tears. She said it will be a financial struggle to come to the New Years Eve party and I told her Id take care of her. Fans describe it as a second home, a place to reunite with close friends while dancing the night away. Those less confident about their footwork have come for the lessons on how to execute a perfect two-step. InCahoots also proved to be a much-needed refuge for a number of the survivors of last years mass shooting in Las Vegas that claimed the lives of 58 people attending the Route 91 country music festival. Within a week of the shooting, survivors began gathering at InCahoots for group therapy sessions led by Shiva Ghaed, a licensed clinical psychologist who specializes in trauma and is herself a survivor of the Route 91 tragedy. Therapy sessions, which drew 40 to 70 participants at a time, were held weekly for a year. Let me tell you about this bar, said Ghaed, who has been a regular patron for the last seven years. This place is and has always been a place of healing and recovery. This is a community home, and InCahoots was so generous, opening their doors to us for the meetings. They were very much a part of this recovery process for this community. A lot of people hadnt gone to InCahoots until the whole support group started. So passionate are InCahoots fans that theyve started an online petition to keep this San Diego staple alive. While more than 2,600 have signed the online plea, it will take more than crowdsourcing to save the business. When Martin learned that the bars lease would not be renewed, the owner told the operators they would need to find a new location and if it met with her approval, they could consider relocating the business. Martin, who has been scouting locations, including a few in La Mesa, is hopeful hell land a suitable site. Given the rising popularity of Mission Valley, hes not sure hell have success there. He acknowledges sales have slowed a bit in the last couple of years as the bar raised prices slightly in the face of rising expenses. But you can still get a cocktail there for as little as $6, Martin said. He remains hopeful that a relocation will happen. I already have five people in line to help find a location, he said. And if the owner isnt on board with what I find, I have people willing to buy the business. Stephanie Knobel has been a regular at InCahoots since 2013, and even though she moved to Phoenix six months ago, that hasnt stopped her from making regular pilgrimages to the dance hall. Shell be attending the New Years Eve party with her boyfriend who she met at InCahoots. When we heard the news it was closing, we were totally devastated, said Knobel, 31. We ended up on these text message chains, people were saying, can you believe this. I didnt even like country western before I first went, but the dancing is so much fun, and now I actually like the music. And if it were to relocate, what then? Itll definitely be different because theres so much history in that building but its better than losing it, Knobel sighed. This was like our home. Business lori.weisberg@sduniontribune.com (619) 293-2251 Twitter: @loriweisberg Young blood is stepping into San Diegos tech scene with the arrival of a new VC fund. The venture capitalists all in their 30s and younger have launched with $50 million in cash to invest in software startups. The fund, called Blueprint Equity, is led by founders Bobby Ocampo, 33, and Sheldon Lewis, 34. The duo met more than a decade ago while working as investment bankers. Since then, Lewis went on to become a Silicon Valley venture capitalist for MainSail Partners. He moved to San Diego in 2013 to help lead PayLease, one of MainSails portfolio companies. Ocampo also moved into the VC world, most recently working with Revolution Ventures, an East Coast fund launched by AOL founder and longtime CEO Steve Case. Ocampo and Lewis collaborated on a few local investments, including construction software startup eSUB and agtech company SlantRange, over the past few years. After rallying their own investors, the two decided to step out on their own with a software-focused fund. Ocampo moved to San Diego earlier this year to join Lewis, and the two have already hired two associates to get started. Although the duo wouldnt say how much theyve raised, a recent filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission shows they have closed on $54 million, with plans to raise $75 million total. Advertisement Blueprint will be a bit of an island in San Diego, as the city is not home to many technology-focused funds apart from JMI Equity and TVC Capital. San Diegos money is hyper-focused on the life science industry, and several tech funds of yesteryear died out with the dot-com demise. Although groups like Enterprise Partners, Mission Ventures and Forward Ventures used to place big bets in the tech world, those funds disappeared more than a decade ago. But thats the selling point for Blueprint. Escaping the microcosm of Silicon Valley and Boston Ocampo and Lewis said their main goal is to step outside traditional tech hubs like Silicon Valley and Boston and instead search through secondary markets like San Diego, Austin and other up-and-coming tech cities. The ecosystem in Silicon Valley feeds on itself, and not always in a good way, Lewis said. Being in a place like San Diego enables us to make decisions outside the influence of those microcosm bubbles. San Diego has seen recent traction in software, the investors said, illustrated by local software startup Seismics recent $1 billion valuation. Dave Titus, whos been tapped into the local startup scene for the past few decades as a venture capitalist, entrepreneur and civic leader, said Blueprints arrival to San Diego is indicative of recent shifts in the software industry. The trend of consumer-facing apps is over, and now investors are more interested in business-to-business software. Five or even 10 years ago, social media and mobile apps were all the rage, Titus said. Were not a social media and apps kind of town, though. Were an enterprise software kind of town. Now that enterprise software is the popular thing today, money is following where the opportunities are. Ocampo and Lewis said they were strongly influenced to choose San Diego as their home base by Mike Krenn, who leads the San Diego Venture Group, a nonprofit that tries to connect startups with investors. Krenn has been sinking resources into campaigns that help rebrand San Diego as a technology hub, including a memorable effort in 2016 involving a digital billboard on one of Silicon Valleys busiest (and most gridlocked) freeways. The sign displayed eye-catching one-liners to bait technology workers during their commute (For example, Hey engineers: Remember how much fun you used to be? and Todays surf report: San Diego is better). We thought about it and decided San Diego is the best place in the world to live, Lewis said. Mike Krenn talks about that all the time. Why move to the valley and pay twice as much in rent to hire talent that well lose a few months later? Here theres cheaper rent and great talent thats loyal and sticks around. Who do they invest in and how much? Blueprint wants to catch companies before other VCs have arrived, so theyre focusing on early stage deals. The firm wants to see startups that are earning $1 million to $5 million in revenue, primarily those in business-to-business software. Blueprint plans to make investments of $3 million to $10 million per deal, starting with one to three investments per year. Theyre planning on hiring two more associates to help take on the work. Business brittany.meiling@sduniontribune.com 619-293-1286 Twitter: @BrittanyMeiling Caregivers can stay connected to their loved one from anywhere with the Amazon Echo Show, a voice-activated digital assistant. How it helps: With live video calling, the caregiver can do everything from sizing up a persons general health to providing companionship from a distance. Echo Show also enables the person in need of care to do a great deal by themselves, from controlling the household lights and heating in their home, to summoning movies on the video screen. The device: The Echo Show has a 10-inch video screen and built-in speakers. Youll need a Wi-Fi connection to use it. Setup is easy. Advertisement How to use: To place a video call, a user simply says Alexa, which is the name of the devices operating system. The user then asks a question or makes a command. For example, youd say, Alexa, call Mary. Marys device would ring, and a green light would flash on her screen to further notify her of a call. She could use her voice to say answer or ignore. When shes done, shed say, Alexa, end the call. Cost: You can order the Echo Show at Amazon.com, or purchase the device at one of the companys brick-and-mortar stores. The Echo Show retails for $229. Features: Nothing replaces being there in person. But the picture quality and audio on Echo Show are good, enabling the caregiver to closely assess a persons general health. A change in skin color or the tone of a persons voice would be very noticeable. So would a change in a persons gait. The caregiver also could show a person how to do basic things, like take their temperature or blood pressure. And theres great value in face-to-face conversation. The device also could help a person dealing with dementia. For example, its not unusual for a dementia patient to ask the same question over and over. They could pose the question to the device, which uses a human-like voice to provide an answer. Echo Show isnt advanced enough to hold a conversation. But the machines voice could help to alleviate confusion and loneliness. Other versions: Google is introducing a similar display platform, Google Smart Displays, to allow its partners to develop their own Echo Show-like devices. Zack Beck, Oceansides elected, part-time city clerk, has accepted the same job in Escondido, an appointed, full-time position. He will begin his new duties in January. Beck, 31, was elected city clerk in Oceanside in 2012 and re-elected without opposition in 2016. Escondido has been looking for someone to replace longtime City Clerk Diane Halverson, who retired in October. Beck, an Oceanside native, will make $118,844 in his new position, the same as Halverson was making. That is far more than the roughly $23,000 he was making in Oceanside, which made the position part-time and cut the compensation at the height of the recession, the same year he was first elected. Advertisement It will be a change, Beck said Tuesday. Hes bright, energetic and he knows the business inside and out, said Escondido City Manager Jeff Epp, and he comes from a great organization. The city clerks office has a multitude of duties, including overseeing local elections, organizing city council agendas, staff reports and minutes, and responding to public records requests. The clerk also maintains campaign and economic interest statement filings, helps with the recruitment and appointments to boards and commissions, and administers the Citys records management program and off-site imaging system. Beck sent a letter to Oceansides mayor and city council members Tuesday announcing his plans to resign effective Dec. 31. To the amazing team members in the Oceanside City Clerk Department, thank you for your wonderful work and sacrificial service. To the City Council, staff and constituents of Escondido, California, I look forward to serving you to the best of my ability with integrity, accuracy and independence. Beck said Tuesday he was very excited to come to Escondido. He plans to continue living in Oceanside with his wife for the time being but he said that could change. He said he is familiar with Escondido having served there as the youth pastor at Gateway Community Church. Im very familiar with the different high schools out there, he said. My wife and I love North County San Diego and feel very connected and committed to North County, he said. One of the reasons he was attracted to the Escondido job was because it would let him stay in the region, he added. jharry.jones@sduniontribune.com; 760/529-4931; Twitter: @jharryjones Alejandra Sotelo-Solis was in fifth grade at Kimball Elementary School when she made the bold assertion. Asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, she said one day she would be the mayor of National City. I dont know if at 11 years old you know (mayors) work on budgets or sit on regional boards, she said. What she did know, however, is that a mayor is a head figure. Now 39, Sotelo-Solis fulfilled her longtime goal on Tuesday, when she was sworn in as the citys first Latina mayor. The oath of office Sotelo-Solis recited was led by none other than her former fifth grade teacher. Advertisement As soon as she finished the oath, the crowd at the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Center burst into a chant in Spanish that means Yes we can. Si se puede, the crowd roared repeatedly. It was a symbolic and historic moment for National City, where about 60 percent of the citys roughly 60,000 residents are Latino. I feel totally humbled, amazing, and ready to get to work, Sotelo-Solis said in a recent interview, smiling from ear to ear. Having spent the past 10 years on the dais as a councilwoman while raising three girls with husband Arturo Solis, a Sweetwater Union High School District trustee, and running a small grant-writing business named La Pluma Strategies its no surprise Sotelo-Solis feels ready. Being able to do all of that in heels and lipstick has put me and gotten me ready for the job, she said, with an eagerness in her voice. Im ready. Her victory in the mayoral race she drew 46 percent of the vote in a field of four candidates is an accomplishment that was a long time coming for Sotelo-Solis. Sotelo-Solis, a Sweetwater High School graduate who received her bachelors degree in political science from UC San Diego, ran unsuccessfully for mayor twice before, including at age 27 in 2006, when then-Councilman Ron Morrison won. Now its her time. Noting she intends to create a 100-day plan, Sotelo-Solis said her priorities include housing and jobs. Also on her list of priorities is to unite the City Council, which has feuded over the past year on some issues, including term limits for the mayor, a councilmans building code violations and city funds for the National City Chamber of Commerce. With a woman as mayor, Sotelo-Solis said, she anticipates the city will see a different style of leadership than in the past. I feel were more about a team effort, she said, referring to female leaders. To unite the City Council, she plans to take a step that is simple, yet symbolic: to bring together council members for a photo to hang inside City Hall. We havent taken a group photo of the City Council in years, she said. Councilwoman Mona Rios, who won a re-election bid in November, said she was excited about the future of National City under the leadership of Sotelo-Solis, a close ally who she described as a trailblazer. She will inspire us all to dream more, learn more, do more and become more as we work together to move National City forward, Rios said. Also on Sotelo-Solis team are sitting Councilman Jerry Cano and in an unusual scenario former Mayor Ron Morrison, who termed out and ran successfully for a City Council seat. While Sotelo-Solis and Morrison havent always seen eye to eye theyve bickered on the dais in the past both have said they intended to work together. I will do my very best to make this thing work, said Morrison, who already has met with his successor to discuss a range of topics, mostly procedural city matters. If the council fails, if the city fails, we all fail. We dont want this. Morrison said his new seat on the council represents an opportunity for Sotelo-Solis to tap into his institutional knowledge and professional relationships. Im hopeful she will use that as we try to move the city forward, he said. As the city transitions power, Morrison said, it may take him time to adjust. He said its something hes joked with Sotelo-Solis about, telling her to not misconstrue it as a dig if he accidentally pulls into her new parking space at City Hall. He said he anticipates a challenge for Sotelo-Solis will be to balance the desires of residents with the interests of community groups she has aligned herself with over the years. What can happen all too often in politics is when you have a lot of outside interests invested in your political career, sometimes you have to do the thing thats most difficult in politics, and thats to tell them no, he said. Thats always a tricky road. PRIORITIES There are many ideas Sotelo-Solis wants to look into from mentorship and apprenticeship programs to boost the citys workforce to the impacts of marijuana businesses to decide whether National City should follow in the steps of other cities and allow recreational pot shops. Then there is housing. She wants the City Council, as the policy-making entity, to look into possible regulations to address the housing crisis. Its a pressing issue for National City, where voters in November narrowly rejected a ballot measure intended to limit annual rent increases and allow evictions sparingly. Measure W, which was defeated by 155 votes, was placed on the November ballot as a citizens-driven initiative. It speaks volumes as to the desire of our community wanting something now, Sotelo-Solis said of the efforts behind Measure W, which she backed. Im ready to get an advisory group of both like-minded and diverse perspectives, Sotelo-Solis said. I need renters, I need owners I want everyone to tell me: what is it that the city really needs to do to be more attractive not only for development but for what we currently have? One idea Sotelo-Solis has in mind is for the city to consider whether to regulate so-called granny flats, perhaps by requiring an annual building code inspection and a fee to cover the enforcement costs. The fee, she said, could be a source of revenue for the city. Although she supported Measure W, which was fiercely opposed by landlords and property owners, Sotelo-Solis said she feels she can work with all sides, including renters and tenants, to address the issue. She said she wants all groups at the table. After all, she said, a key task for her as an elected official is to balance her values with the values of the larger community. We all make up National City, she said, and my decision-making should incorporate all of that. She added: Ive been able to sleep like a baby the last 10 years because Ive done that. Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, who endorsed Sotelo-Solis when she launched her mayoral campaign in February, said she was delighted with the new leadership. Alejandra is National City, said Gonzalez, whose district includes the South Bay city. No one has ever been more representative of the community she serves. Im so proud to have this Latina in leadership as a public servant to a community that embraces her spirit and her values. With Sotelo-Solis sworn in, the City Council has 60 days to fill the seat she held as a councilwoman. The options are to appoint someone or call for a special election in November that could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. On Tuesday, the City Council decided to make applications for the vacant seat available to the public. Email: david.hernandez@sduniontribune.com Phone: (619) 293-1876 Twitter: @D4VIDHernandez Families could do a lot worse this holiday season than to take out a home equity loan for a bucket of multiplex popcorn and take in Mary Poppins Returns, director Rob Marshalls hectic sequel to the 1964 Disney musical cherished by millions. Those who dont want their memories of the original messed with unduly can take comfort in how the sequels storyline follows the narrative and musical beats of the original, right down to a radically square 2-D animation sequence. And its hard to imagine either slaves to the 64 musical or newcomers of any age having a problem with Emily Blunt. The actresss incarnation of the magical, gently fearsome nanny created by author P.L.Travers (who hated Disneys version) suggests a hint of the paradoxical imperious sparkle Julie Andrews brought to Mary Poppins. Then Blunt adds streaks of witty, sly playfulness that are more her thing. And it all works. The costumes do a lot for Blunts characterization. Mary Poppins Returns takes place 24 years after Mary Poppins, in 1934. The effects of the global economic downturn feed into screenwriter David Magees misery-adjacent storyline concerning the grown-up Banks children. Grieving widower Michael (Ben Whishaw, quite moving) is raising young John (Nathanael Saleh), Annabel (Pixie Davies) and Georgie (Joel Dawson), while the childrens aunt, Jane (Emily Mortimer), pays homage to her late mothers interest in the suffrage movement with her own organized labor efforts. Advertisement The plot deals with a threatened foreclosure on the Banks family home at 17 Cherry Tree Lane, London, and greedy capitalist pigs personified by the steely two-faced banker played by Colin Firth. But then theres Mary, who arrives via kite this time, and swans around in fabulously smart 30s hats and delightful footwear. All hail costume designer Sandy Powell! Her work for all the characters here evokes 34, the 64 Disney film and fantasy realms that know no boundaries. Lin-Manuel Miranda, that Hamilton chap, takes second billing as Jack the lamplighter, who were told was once apprentice to chimney sweep Bert. Youll recall Dick Van Dyke in that role back in 64. In Mary Poppins Returns Van Dyke, now 92, more or less reprises the cameo he played in the first Disney Poppins film. Its a serious treat to see Van Dyke jump up on a table and soft-shoe a few bars, as the son of the ancient banker, Dawes. The other major nostalgia bonus is Angela Lansbury, 93, who pops up in the final scene as the Balloon Lady. Songwriters Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman (Hairspray, one of the sturdiest Broadway scores of the century) reward her with the swell waltz Nowhere to Go But Up, which echoes the originals Lets Go Fly a Kite for a sunny, open-air finale. Alas, thats the only song from Mary Poppins Returns I can recall, several days after seeing it. Thats a significant drawback in a well-cast but rather strenuously jolly holiday of a sequel. The nine songs run the gamut from male-chorus spectaculars (Trip a Little Light Fantastic) to eccentric comic turns (Turning Turtle, an upside-down discombobulator sung by Meryl Streep as Marys Aunt Topsy) to a music hall song-and-dance duet for Blunt and Miranda (The Cover is Not the Book, more frantic than clever, though its fun to hear Miranda bust a few lines Hamilton style). Director Marshall stages things with workmanlike efficiency. The movie piles on, the barrage of effects and diversions largely dictated by the demands of the animation interludes and the surfeit of routine digital effects. The 2-D vignette, in which Mary, Jack and the kids pop into a porcelain bowl illustration for a mad chase sequence, almost works, but it too sweats and strains for the magic. Of his six features to date, four of Marshalls films have been musicals: Chicago (2002), Nine (2009), Into the Woods (2014) and Mary Poppins Returns. Hes devoted to the form, though his two non-musicals, Memoirs of a Geisha (2005) and the eternity that was Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011), point to a clunkiness never entirely absent in this uneven picture. The original Mary Poppins was exuberant, fueled by terrific Sherman brothers songs. Mary Poppins Returns is often just pushy. So Im mixed on it. You can enjoy various bits and pieces of Mary Poppins Returns, and a lot of the performers, even as you roll your eyes at, for example, the anachronistic BMX parkour stunt biker interlude.Im no purist, but really. The first Mary Poppins managed perfectly well without consulting the latest fads and spicing up Step in Time with a bunch of hula hoops. Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic. mjphillips@chicagotribune.com Twitter @phillipstribune.com Mary Poppins Returns 2.5 stars Rating: PG When: Now playing Where: Wide release Running time: 2 hours, 11 minutes MORE COVERAGE: Writing new Poppins songs in the old Poppins style was no snap, according to the Hairspray duo 007s little drinking problem, as studied by an Australian medical journal The dazzling Spider-Verse found the audience it deserved opening weekend, and other box office stories South African police have issued a warrant for the arrest of Zimbabwes controversial former First Lady Grace Mugabe, who is accused of assaulting a young woman in Johannesburg last year. In August 2017, just three months before President Robert Mugabe was forced to step down from decades in power, model Gabriella Engels, then 20, accused the first lady of beating her with an extension cord in an upscale hotel room where Engels was socializing with friends of the Mugabes sons. Days after the incident, the South African government granted Grace Mugabe diplomatic immunity, but a court overturned that decision in July. AfriForum, a South African group that lobbies for the rights of Afrikaners, had sought to have Grace Mugabes immunity overturned; it announced Wednesday that a warrant for the former first ladys arrest had been issued. Advertisement South African police spokesman Vishnu Naidoo confirmed it had been issued on Dec. 13. Grace Mugabe, 53, cultivated a high-profile public persona during her husbands time in power and was even seen as his possible successor, but the couple has laid low since the then-93-year-old president was ousted by Zimbabwes military in a coup in November 2017. A widely unpopular figure, the first lady was sometimes referred to as Gucci Grace for her extravagant shopping habits while millions of Zimbabweans struggled in the countrys sinking economy. Mugabe was also resented by members of the ruling party, ZANU-PF, as she sought to consolidate her own power in the organization. She repeatedly verbally attacked Emmerson Mnangagwa until her husband fired him as vice president in November 2017. The move, seen as a signal that the first lady was positioning herself to succeed her husband as president, triggered the Mugabes ouster and paved the way for Mnangagwa to become the countrys next leader. The Mugabes have been isolated at their home in Harare, Zimbabwes capital, since the coup, with the increasingly frail ex-president traveling to Singapore for medical treatment. At a news conference before Zimbabwes national elections in July, Grace Mugabe sat to the side of her husband, audibly coaching him as he responded to reporters questions. Engels vivid account of an allegedly unhinged Grace Mugabe attacking her in a hotel room in Sandton, a tony Johannesburg suburb, enraged many South Africans, particularly after the former first lady was granted immunity and permitted to leave the country in a hurry without answering to police. We believe that this sends a strong message that no one is above the law, even if your surname is Mugabe, said AfriForum Chief Executive Kallie Kriel, who drew criticism this year after saying on a radio show that he did not think apartheid was a crime against humanity. Its not yet clear whether South Africa will now seek Mugabes extradition. Mahr is a special correspondent. Mahr is a special correspondent. December 19, 1945 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. Wednesday, December 19, 1945 In 1945 a 20-ton truck ammunition truck caught fire and exploded, gouging a huge crater on the east side of Highway 101 near Camp Matthews, and leaving more than 200 families temporarily homeless. Here are the first few paragraphs of the story: 1000 HOMELESS IN S.D. EXPLOSION Score Injured, Public Utility Lines Severed Housing Projects Evacuated as Danger Continues By Conant Moulton An explosion so violent it was felt for 90 miles rocked the La Jolla and San Diego areas after a navy ammunition truck and trailer caught fire yesterday at about 2 p.m. on Highway 101, a block south of La Jolla junction near the crest of Rose canyon grade, and last night it was estimated that 1000 persons dwelling in nearby federal housing units were homeless. Unofficially, it was reported that more than 20 persons were injured by flying glass and fragments of metal. Six Camp Matthews marines were treated at the Naval hospital, five of them for laceration from broken glass. The sixth, struck on the head by debris, suffered a skull fracture. He was Pvt. Alue Dale Crosson, 22, and was on the camp rifle range when struck by a heavy object. At Scripps Memorial hospital in La Jolla, Mrs. Jessie Rimbach, of the city farm, near La Jolla, was being treated for facial and eye lacerations, also received from flying glass. Several military personnel in the area who also reportedly suffered hemorrhage from concussion, but apparently were not hospitalized. It was reliably reported that 18 marines were treated at Camp Matthews dispensary for minor lacerations, but whether this included the six treated at the Naval hospital could not be ascertained. Names of military personnel injured could not be learned. GAS MAIN BROKEN The explosion ruptured the main natural gas line between Huntington Beach and San Diego, and telephone trunk communications between San Diego and Los Angeles were crippled when the blast damaged a repeater station, cutting out many of the main lines. John Arvin, area federal housing administrator, said at 9 p.m. that 85 percent of the more than 250 units in two nearby housing projectsthe Torrey Pines home and Libertad naval housing projectwere seriously damaged. The homes are located about 2 miles northeast of La Jolla. 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. Video: Drawn to America - episode 2 U-T editorial cartoonist Steve Breen is going to Tijuana to get a clearer picture of why thousands of migrants would travel thousands of miles in a caravan to seek asylum in the United States. Read about the series here. Two suspects threw a canister of tear gas into the El Barretal shelter from the street outside, causing temporary discomfort and confusion to some Central American migrants sheltered inside, according to Mexican federal police. Central American migrants at El Barretal in eastern Tijuana were just getting ready to go to bed around 9 p.m. Tuesday night when the non-lethal chemical agent was thrown from outside and detonated near an area for women and children. Video from the scene, taken by one of the migrants and posted to the social media accounts of the nonprofit Pueblo Sin Fronteras, shows federal police guarding the single canister while witnesses described how it caused women nearby to cough. I couldnt breathe, said Jose Rodriguez, shortly after the incident. Minutes later, via WhatsApp, he said the air was improving, but that about four to five women and one young girl were seriously coughing from the effects of the chemical agent. Advertisement Federal police said no one was seriously injured or transported to the hospital. Several police agencies and the Tijuana Fire Department responded. Tijuana municipal police searched for the suspects in the streets surrounding the shelter, but no one has been taken into custody. State police in Tijuana arrested two men and a woman on suspicion of killing two Honduran teenagers who were part of the Central American caravan, according to Baja Californias attorney generals office. Although authorities said the Honduran victims, aged 16 and 17, were not targeted because of their affiliation with the migrant caravan, the incident highlights the dangers faced by young people traveling alone, and stuck in limbo in a dangerous city between the violence they fled in their homeland, and the United States, where they hoped to ask for asylum. A third victim survived the attack and is assisting police with the investigation, a prosecutor said Wednesday. The teenagers were part of a group of unaccompanied minors fleeing gang violence in Honduras, according to those familiar with the investigation. It was not immediately known whether they tried to present themselves at the San Ysidro Port of Entry only to be turned back, as has happened with other youths. Advertisement Prosecutor Jorge Alvarez said the teenagers were on their way Saturday to the Benito Juarez shelter from the Casa YMCA, a facility for unaccompanied minors, where they met some women who lured them to an area frequented by drug users. The topic of conversation came up of Hey, what are you guys doing? and one of the victims told the women: Were on our way to go cash a check, Alvarez said. But that was not true. They did not have a check. Alvarez said the women offered to take the teenagers to a place to have sex with them. Now, these females have it in their minds that these guys either have money or they are going to go get money, Alvarez said. When the group arrived at a location where they planned to have sex, one of the women called two men, who arrived and immediately began asking the youth about the money they mentioned, he said. We think the motive at that point was likely robbery, said Alvarez. The teenagers were beaten, strangled and stabbed and their bodies were dumped in a Tijuana alley in the Zona Central part of the city and discovered by police over the weekend. Those arrested were identified only by their first names Esmeralda, Carlos and Francisco Javier as it is customary in the Mexican judicial system not to release defendants last names until they are convicted of crimes. One of the minors managed to escape by telling the attackers he would go retrieve some money for all three victims. However, the two minors, whose names are being withheld because of their age, were killed before the third victim could return. The three suspects, arrested Monday, are awaiting a court hearing before a judge for arraignment, Alvarez said. Alvarez said the bodies of the victims were identified by their clothing and distinguishing marks on their bodies. He said they were well known among the caravan. We cant confirm if this is part of a systemic or organized activity. It appears to be a random act of robbery. They saw the opportunity that these guys had some money so they brought them over to this location, he said. A statement from the government of Honduras offered condolences to the bereaved families of the children and said they were offering assistance in bringing the childrens bodies back home to Honduras. We reiterate the call to Honduran nationals that they not risk their lives and the lives of their families on the dangers that the migratory route represents, where migrants are exposed to being victims of traffickers, the statement read in Spanish. Alvarez stressed the attack appears to be random and not part of a larger organized criminal group. Theres no indication they were specifically targeted because they were caravaners, he said. Them meeting up with these women on the streets was completely happenstance. The news unnerved many in the caravan. Marvin Antonio Garcia, 26, from Honduras, said when people first saw the news last night on Facebook about the killings, they were worried and sad. We know its very dangerous for children to be out on these streets like this, Garcia said. We think its so much better than in Honduras, but maybe we face some of the same problems here as in Honduras. We are sad because these are our countrymen, our people. Two Honduran teenagers with the migrant caravan were killed and their bodies dumped in a Tijuana alley over the weekend, according to a Baja California prosecutor. The killings highlight the dangers faced by Central American migrants, especially unaccompanied minors, waiting in Mexico to ask for asylum with the United States. The identities of the boys have not yet been released. The teenagers, approximately 16 and 17 years old, showed signs of being stabbed and strangled, according to a statement from the office of the Procuraduria General de Justicia del Estado de Baja California, which is the prosecutors office for Baja California. Advertisement A third victim survived the attack, according to the prosecutors. Prosecutor Jorge Alvarez said the bodies were discovered around 7 p.m. Saturday on public roads in the Quintana Roo alley of Zona Centro in Tijuana. Investigators said the minors were leaving a shelter for unaccompanied children on the Boulevard Cuauhtemoc and heading to the downtown area of Tijuana. A statement from the government of Honduras offered condolences to the bereaved families of the children and said they were offering assistance in bringing the childrens bodies back to Honduras. We reiterate the call to Honduran nationals that they not risk their lives and the lives of their families on the dangers that the migratory route represents, where migrants are exposed to being victims of traffickers, the statement read in Spanish. Alvarez said the initial investigation showed robbery was a possible motive Its possible robbing them of their mobile phones was the motive, or they thought these young people were carrying money, he said The use of chemical spray to subdue juvenile offenders in Los Angeles County detention facilities has risen sharply in recent years, prompting the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday to order an investigation into safety conditions for youths and staff. The supervisors, who have raised concerns about the use of so-called pepper spray in the past, have again been focusing their attention on its deployment inside the nations largest juvenile detention system. Led by Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas, the board asked the countys Office of Inspector General to investigate why the countys Probation Department, which handles youth detention and rehabilitation, deploys the spray so frequently. Use of force is a serious issue and we simply must know more in order to ensure the safety of these young people and the employees, Ridley-Thomas said. Simply stated, no department can police itself, the old axiom. Outside eyes are often essential and, surprisingly enough, can be helpful. Advertisement The heightened interest in the issue arose after the countys Probation Commission recently received a statistical analysis detailing the use of oleoresin capsicum spray, which the department allows as a last resort to control violent youths. The information was recently highlighted in an investigative report by KNBC-TV (Channel 4). The data cited by the station show that chemical spray use increased from 294 incidents in 2015 to 747 last year a jump of 154%. About 400 incidents were reported through July 2018, suggesting they were on pace to match 2017, according to the data. The records show an even more dramatic increase in the number of incidents at juvenile halls, where offenders go before their cases are adjudicated, as opposed to juvenile camps, which serve as longer-term rehabilitation facilities. County probation officials said they noticed the overall trend last year and, since then, have taken steps to reduce detention officers reliance on the spray, including by offering them extra training on de-escalation techniques. Chief Probation Officer Terri McDonald and other probation officials say that as a result, the use of chemical spray has declined in recent months, though the department is not expected to release statistics for 2018 until early next year. McDonald highlighted a combination of factors that she believes is driving the trend, including an effort to keep low-risk offenders out of detention and a decision to stop isolating high-risk detainees who cause problems She said officers have struggled to keep order as violence against youths and staff has increased in recent years. The department has a detailed use-of-force policy, advising officers to try other methods to keep order including reasonable physical force before deploying spray. But some, McDonald said, have relied too heavily on the spray to avoid getting into trouble for physical altercations with juveniles during violent incidents. Theyre struggling through really a changed philosophy of how we expect our staff to engage with youths, she said. Its difficult. The staff have difficult jobs. Hans Liang, president of the AFSCME Local 685 union, which represents detention service officers, acknowledged that the use of spray had increased. He said many officers are overworked and inexperienced and operating, at times, in fear. A lot of the staff are also wary about touching the kids, he said. Its very easy for them to go to pepper spray, and its also an effective tool. The questions over spray use mark the latest flare-up over the agencys ability to manage its population of juvenile offenders. The U.S. Justice Department has previously required county officials to implement reforms to improve conditions and to prevent the abuse of young offenders. Several years ago, a federal monitoring team found that the county had reduced the overuse of pepper spray an issue that apparently persists. I got pepper sprayed so many times that I got immune to it, Kent Mendoza, a former juvenile detainee, told the supervisors on Tuesday. We need to get rid of pepper spray, he added. These are kids, and kids should be treated like kids. Liang and other county officials noted that many of the youths inside detention facilities are high-risk and have gang histories. Some outweigh the officers. Supervisors also expressed concern about the safety and training of officers. Ridley-Thomas said he hoped the investigation, unanimously approved by supervisors on Tuesday, would include recommendations on how to improve conditions inside the facilities. The board asked for a report within 45 days. All of us are concerned about the trauma that these youngsters have endured, and we maintain that these events have retraumatized them, he said. A Los Angeles police commander who was charged with public intoxication after an altercation with Glendale police in April should lose her job, a disciplinary board decided Tuesday. The ruling on the dismissal of Nicole Mehringer, made by a three-person LAPD Board of Rights panel, must be approved by Chief Michel Moore. Mehringers attorney, Brad Gage, said his client is willing to be demoted one rank to captain. But if Moore fires her, he said, she will likely sue, challenging the evidence used in the disciplinary proceeding. Mehringer may also file a separate lawsuit alleging she was treated more harshly than male LAPD officers who committed drinking-related offenses, Gage said. Advertisement A one-day event shouldnt negate 22 years of protecting and serving our community, Gage said. Its just not fair. Mehringer and a subordinate, Sgt. James Kelly, were arrested by Glendale police officers who found them in an unmarked police Dodge Charger that had come to rest against a parked vehicle around 1 a.m. on April 27, according to Glendale police. No one was hurt, but the officers suspected the two had been drinking. According to two law enforcement sources who were not authorized to discuss the incident, the two were passed out inside the police car. Officers determined that Kelly, who was behind the wheel, was under the influence. Mehringer, who also showed signs of intoxication, became belligerent, and it took the officers about 20 minutes to get them out of the car. A video of the incident obtained by KTTV Channel 11 showed Mehringer being pulled from the car with her hands behind her back and her shirt pulled up. The video also showed Kelly struggling to stand and walk a straight line. Gage said Mehringer cursed at the officers because they pulled out shotguns and threatened to pepper spray her. In August, the Los Angeles County district attorneys office charged Mehringer with a single misdemeanor count of public intoxication and Kelly with one count of driving under the influence of an alcoholic beverage and one count of driving with a 0.08% blood-alcohol content. Prosecutors said Kelly had a blood-alcohol level that was 0.20% or more more than twice the legal limit under California law. Both Mehringer and Kelly have pleaded not guilty. Mehringer, 47, who is identified on the LAPD website as Nicole Alberca, ran the departments employee relations group, which handles contract negotiations, grievances and other union-related issues. She was promoted to commander in 2017 by Chief Charlie Beck and was considered a rising star. Kelly, 47, also worked in the employee relations group. He is scheduled for a Board of Rights hearing in March, said his attorney, Michael Williamson. Beck had recommended that Kelly be fired, based on the Glendale case and another DUI from 15 years ago. Williamson said the former chiefs recommendation is wholly inappropriate because several other LAPD officers kept their jobs after incurring DUIs just a few years apart. Both Kelly and Mehringer have been relieved of duty without pay since July 11. On Wednesday, LAPD spokesman Josh Rubenstein said the department could not comment on Mehringers case because this is a personnel matter with the potential for litigation. cindy.chang@latimes.com For more news on the Los Angeles Police Department, follow me on Twitter: @cindychangLA At least two people were arrested following a burglary in Orange County that triggered a police pursuit through Los Angeles early Wednesday, authorities said. Westminster police were called to assist other law enforcement agencies about 2:30 a.m. after a burglary crew pried open the door of Vision Center, an optometrists office, in the 15000 block of Goldenwest Street, said Cpl. Alan Aoki. It is not clear what merchandise was taken from Vision Center, which sells prescription glasses and sunglasses, Aoki said. The suspects were under surveillance at the time by the Los Angeles Interagency Metropolitan Police Apprehension Crime Task Force, known as L.A. Impact. It is not clear what the task force was investigating, though Redondo Beach police officials confirmed they were leading the probe. Advertisement Authorities chased the suspects vehicle through Orange and Los Angeles counties before the pursuit ended shortly after 4 a.m. near 65th Street and San Pedro Street in South Los Angeles. The names of the two people arrested were not immediately available. hannah.fry@latimes.com Twitter: @Hannahnfry At least one person was injured Tuesday afternoon when someone fired a gun at a bus traveling west on the 10 Freeway, near the 405 Freeway interchange, according to the California Highway Patrol. Authorities responded to a report that someone had fired a gun at a green FlixBus, CHP Officer Siara Lund said. At least one passenger was injured by shattered glass and taken to a local hospital by paramedics, she said. Authorities have shut down the connector at the 10 and 405 freeways for about two hours, issuing a SigAlert, as they investigate the shooting. Advertisement FlixBus is a German-based company that provides intercity bus travel. The company began operating in the U.S. in May. ruben.vives@latimes.com For more Southern California news, follow @latvives on Twitter. For the second time in two days, an ultralight aircraft was used in an illegal cross-border operation, this time to smuggle two Chinese nationals into the U.S., according to Customs and Border Protection. The latest incident occurred around 2 a.m. Tuesday when agents were made aware that an ultralight plane had crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Border agents tracked the plane to a remote area near Calipatria, southeast of the Salton Sea, where they spotted a 2004 Dodge Neon and came across two Chinese nationals and a Mexican man they suspect was there to pick up the pair. All three were taken into custody. Officials said the Mexican national was legally in the U.S. but was not a resident. Advertisement The alleged human trafficking operation comes just 48 hours after border agents seized 129 pounds of meth worth $1.4 million and a getaway bicycle that had been dropped off by a similar aircraft near Calexico. The ultralight flyers are not an unusual sight for border patrol agents, but in recent years, theyve been noticing the planes more. In some years more than others, said Border Patrol Agent Jose Enriquez Jr., a spokesman for CBP. It goes to show you the lengths theyll go to smuggle people and narcotics. Oftentimes, the small, one- or two-seat fixed-wing aircrafts are used for drug trafficking, but on occasion, they are used to smuggle people. Enriquez said aside from the lawnmower sound they produce, detecting the planes can be difficult. As low as they fly, theyre hard to spot with the human eye, he said. He said the ultralights can travel as far north as the Salton Sea, where Border Patrol agents have been known to bust drug smuggling operations. ruben.vives@latimes.com For more Southern California news, follow @latvives on Twitter. No sooner had the Nov. 6 election results been certified this month than the next election officially started. Actually, it pretty much began well before people cast their ballots this fall. In a sense, 2019 is the new 2020. Candidates are opening committees and can begin fundraising to run for mayor of San Diego and other city offices on Jan. 1. Expect formal announcements in the coming weeks. And you thought you were going to get a breather. This isnt just political hot stove league speculation and it wont be just about city elections. Nor is it about whether or not the city of San Diego will hold a special election this spring to allow for an early vote on a proposed hotel tax to expand the convention center, fund homeless programs and fix roads. Thats still floating out there. Advertisement No, the 2020 campaigns are about to go full bore. Last year, the California Legislature moved the 2020 primary from June to March in an attempt, once again, to give the state greater influence in the presidential primaries. That also pushed up the whole calendar for candidates at all levels to get their campaigns in gear. The race for mayor of San Diego, in particular, is ramping up fast. San Diego City Council member Barbara Bry has taken the official steps to create a committee to run. Assemblyman Todd Gloria and Rep. Scott Peters may not be far behind. Those three Democrats had been maneuvering and talking to potential supporters for months. The likelihood of a fellow Republican replacing termed-out Mayor Kevin Faulconer is slim. Right now it seems like no well-known GOP candidate is making moves to run, though the names of council members Chris Cate and Mark Kersey are still mentioned in some quarters. San Diegos political demographics continue to move in the direction of Democrats, who hold a double-digit lead over Republicans in the citys voter registration. Further, the anti-Trump effect in the region proved devastating to some GOP candidates even running in officially nonpartisan local races. In the 2020 presidential election year, those dynamics will be amplified. Former San Diego Police Chief Shelley Zimmerman, who is registered with no party preference, is in the mix for mayor. While being an independent can have some advantages, it may not be conducive to raising enough money and organizing the kind of campaign needed for a successful mayoral bid. Nevertheless, Zimmerman is a well-known figure who, in running the police department, was relentless in community outreach and attended numerous neighborhood meetings across the city. Many have reached out, encouraging me to run for mayor, Zimmerman said in a brief interview. Im very honored, and I am considering it. While the Democratic lineup may seem like an embarrassment of riches for the party, it can also cause headaches for politically influential unions. Bry, Gloria and Peters all have good relations with labor, though unions have had issues with them in the past. The three likely candidates have been making the rounds with labor, business and community groups. But some leaders of those organizations are dealing with the emerging campaign cautiously. Picking among friendly candidates is difficult and failing to select the one who ultimately becomes mayor could have consequences. A lot still needs to shake out as to whether they all remain in the race the three seem to be in for the long haul at the moment while one or more surprise entries could change the equation. Besides, organized labor almost seems like it needs to take a break. Though unions had many successes (and some failures) in the recent elections, they did so despite a nasty split in which factions battled each other over rival candidates. But new leadership at the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 135 is expected to close that fissure. The UFCW membership last week voted out President Mickey Kasparian and replaced him with former Vice President Bruce Todd Walters. Kasparian not long ago also led the San Diego and Imperial Counties Labor Council and wielded tremendous political power in the region. He also was at the center of bitter disputes within the Democratic-labor political operation. Further, some women had accused Kasparian of harassment and though he denied the allegations, he settled their lawsuits privately. As that was playing out, he took the UFCW out of the Labor Council and created a breakaway labor coalition. Kasparians new Working Families Council itself soon splintered. How active the UFCW will be going forward remains to be seen. Walters said the union spent too much time and money on campaigns and scandals under Kasparian. But Walters did say the UFCW is rejoining the Labor Council, which has long played a major role in local campaigns. While harmony is in the air, thats not to say unions will agree on which candidate to support for mayor and how much to invest. Then theres the cascade of political dominoes that will fall as vacancies open up on the City Council and in the Legislature and Congress if Bry, Gloria and Peters commit to running for mayor. But maybe well take a little breather, enjoy some holiday cheer and tackle that one later. A Los Angeles-area man accused of trying to set up sexual encounters with children as young as 8 in Tijuana was sentenced Monday to 17 years in prison. In his plea agreement, Kenneth Bigler, 53, of Walnut admitted to having sexual contact with girls 14 to 16 years old, but in numerous communications with a sex broker had asked for children much younger, according to court records. Bigler also filmed some sexual encounters with a girl he believed was under 16 and then brought that footage into the U.S., according to his plea. As part of his guilty plea to one count of attempted sexual exploitation of a child, he agreed to register as a sex offender. U.S. District Judge John Houston on Monday also requested Bigler be housed at a prison with a sex offender treatment program and ordered him to 10 years of supervised release upon completion of his prison sentence. Advertisement Bigler, who was working for a Los Angeles moving company, began communicating with the unnamed broker in 2013, asking to set him up with young children for sex, according to a search warrant affidavit detailing the communications. In one instance, he asked for a smaller and younger girl than hed had sex with the other night, hoping for a 10-year-old but NO MORE than 12, according to the messages retrieved by the FBI. Another time he asked for an 8 or 9. Later, he demanded a boy or girl whod never had sexual contact before, encouraging the broker to steal them if he had to, the records said. Want them both tomorrow night, read a September 2015 message. Border crossing records show Bigler traveled to Tijuana frequently, and that the messages roughly corresponded to cross-border trips, authorities said. Bigler was also accused of bragging in messages to the broker about how easy and cheap it was to buy kids for sex in Thailand, according to the court records. The FBI investigation began in December 2016 after a U.S. citizen reported the sex broker. Bigler was arrested in August 2017 about four months after his last recorded trip to Mexico, according to federal records. Biglers criminal record includes multiple convictions for indecent exposure, including one incident involving a minor, prosecutors have noted. In an earlier request for bail, his defense lawyer said Bigler admitted he was abusing alcohol at the time of the offense and it had affected his judgement. kristina.davis@sduniontribune.com Twitter: @kristinadavis The nearly fatal ambush in a Carlsbad Costco parking lot happened quickly, just as she was putting groceries in her car. The woman turned and saw ex-boyfriend Charles Higgins a man who has been court-ordered to stay away from her standing in front of her face. He pounced on me like a wild animal, she said in a Vista courtroom Tuesday. Before it was over, she had been stabbed and kicked in the head before strangers intervened and Higgins fled, the woman said. Advertisement Higgins, 62, was caught and arrested later that day in Temecula, where he tried to light himself on fire in an attempt to take his own life. The womans testimony came during a preliminary hearing for Higgins, who has pleaded not guilty to premeditated attempted murder and allegations including use of a knife and causing great bodily injury in the March 23 attack. At the end of Tuesdays hearing, Superior Court Judge Sim von Kalinowski ordered Higgins to face trial in connection with the attack. Jailed without bail, he faces a life sentence if convicted of premeditated attempted murder. At the time of the ambush, the victim had a protective order barring Higgins from contacting her. In 2017, he had pleaded guilty to making threats against the victim. The woman testified she does not remember much of the attack, and she never saw the knife that authorities say Higgins plunged four times into her back. But she remembers she was shoved, face first, onto the floor of her backseat. I yelled out God help me. He (Higgins) said God is not going to help you, she said. God did help me, she continued. He helped me get stronger. Somehow I got up. I dont know how. When she was back on her feet, she said, Higgins thrust his thumb into her eye and began grinding it. She does not remember what happened after that, but had what she called an out-of-body experience. I was standing up, looking down at myself, she told Deputy District Attorney Ben Barlow. She was lying on the ground, she said, and a man in a turquoise shirt was holding her. When she was cross-examined by defense attorney Herb Weston, she recalled the out-of-body moment again, saying: I saw myself dying. The attack left her in the intensive care unit for nine days, she said. Witness Brett Swain testified that he saw Higgins on top of the unconscious victim between two parked cars, knee in her back while he stabbed her. Swain said he saw the man punch her in the face, then get up and kick her in the head. Swain intervened. Higgins fled. Higgins was wearing a GPS anklet unit as part of his probation for previous threats to his now-ex-girlfriend. It helped police locate him in Temecula. U.S. Border Patrol agents acting on the police information regarding Higgins whereabouts spotted him driving his 2007 Toyota Highlander. He was in stop-and-go traffic on a Temecula surface street. As soon as the agents hit their lights to pull Higgins over, Border Patrol Agent Wesley Foster testified, he saw Higgins reach down, pull up a gasoline can and pour a good amount of the liquid over his head. Higgins then tried to flick a lighter, Foster said. He and two other agents ran to the Highlander. One yanked open the door and batted the lighter from Higgins hands. teri.figueroa@sduniontribune.com (760) 529-4945 Twitter: @TeriFigueroaUT The former president of La Jolla Parks and Recreation Inc. pleaded guilty Monday to embezzling more than $68,000 from the organization. Cindy Greatrex, a longtime volunteer in a number of civic causes, was ordered to pay full restitution as part of a plea deal that would keep her out of jail. La Jolla Parks and Recreation Inc. promotes and raises funds for local recreational programs. As president from 2015 to 2017, Greatrex used her position to change the organizations policies on reimbursement for expenses and paying vendors, Deputy District Attorney Gina Darvas said Tuesday. Advertisement Darvas said Greatrex embezzled $68,272 by writing checks to herself on May 26, 2016 and Feb. 9, 2017. A charge of grand theft and an allegation of great takings the taking of a large sum were filed against her in July 2017. In November that year, Greatrex testified at her preliminary hearing. She said she wrote the checks to pay herself back after paying some vendors out of her own funds, and to pay for a Chicago grant-writing service, according to the La Jolla Light. Darvas said Greatrexs testimony was not found to be credible and she was bound over for trial. She changed attorneys three times before hiring her current lawyer, Michael Pancer. Greatrex entered her guilty plea Monday before San Diego Superior Court Judge Timothy Walsh. She is set to be sentenced on Jan. 29. Pancer said Tuesday that he didnt want to comment on the charges until after the sentencing, but he said Greatrex spent countless hours on civic causes, fundraising and donating to charitable causes. She has worked tirelessly for many years for different volunteer groups in La Jolla and the city of San Diego, Pancer said. He said he received a number of letters from people supporting Greatrex. The prosecutor said that under the terms of her plea agreement, Greatrex will have to repay La Jolla Parks and Recreation all the money she took. She would also spend up to 180 days of home detention, in lieu of jail, be placed on probation for four years and not be allowed to hold any fiduciary positions. She is currently a trustee on the La Jolla Community Planning Association and was president of Independent La Jolla, a group that wants the beachside community to be its own city rather than a part of the city of San Diego. After the plea was entered, Mary Coakley-Munk, who was chair of La Jolla Park & Recreation board for the last year-and-a-half, told La Jolla Light: The board is very pleased to have the issue resolved. pauline.repard@sduniontribune.com Twitter: @pdrepard State and county officials say they have reason to believe that Sweetwater Union High School District officials committed fraud and are moving forward with a state audit that would examine whether the district covered up financial shortfalls, as state experts have alleged. Meanwhile the district is facing a negative fund balance of $11 million at the end of this school year, after it claimed two months ago that it would end the year with a surplus. The San Diego County Office of Education announced on Monday night that it would have the school district audited over potential fraud and mismanagement of funds after a state fiscal team revealed that the district has been misrepresenting its finances for years. The district has repeatedly under-reported its spending and over-estimated its revenue, according to the fiscal teams report. On more than 300 occasions, the district logged unexplained budget entries that made the district seem as if it were spending less than it actually was, said Michael Fine, CEO of the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, the independent state agency that conducted an analysis of the districts finances in October. Advertisement The district has also been relying too heavily on cash borrowing, even though the state has lately been giving out so much money to schools that the district likely shouldnt have needed to borrow money, according to the report. The report raised concerns about $68 million in debt that will be due by the end of June, with no apparent ability to pay it off. I have not heard of any other district in the state thats been in this position, said Michael Simonson, assistant superintendent of business services for the county education office. Sweetwater spokesman Manny Rubio did not have a comment Tuesday about the state fiscal teams report. School board trustee Paula Hall, who served as the board president until this month, declined to comment. Sweetwater will become the second district in the county and one of fewer than 50 school districts and charter schools statewide to be audited by the state fiscal team in the past 11 years, according to the agencys website. The only other time the county education office has arranged for such a state audit was last November for the San Ysidro School District. The audit was published in June and found that two former district administrators overpaid themselves a total of $300,000. Since Sweetwaters audit will be conducted by the state fiscal team that has already analyzed the districts books, Sweetwaters audit will likely take less time than San Ysidros did, Simonson said. In addition to the state audit, the county office is ordering an audit of the districts financial controls to determine whether the district should be allowed to continue paying commercial entities on its own. In order to survive and make payroll, the district might have a couple of borrowing options. Fine said the district could try selling bonds on Wall Street or asking the county treasurer or county superintendent to borrow money. But the county education office doesnt have enough cash to make the loan that Sweetwater would need, a county office spokeswoman said Tuesday. If the district exhausts all its cash options and becomes unable to make payroll, the district would face a state bailout. In exchange for the bailout, the district would be forced to cede governing control to the county education office, Fine said in an interview Tuesday. The superintendent would lose her job and the school board would become powerless, Fine said. It typically takes about six or so years for a school district to get back on its feet after such a takeover, and roughly 10 or so years before the district gets its local board control back, Fine said. Inglewood is the only school district in the state that currently lacks local control, Fine said. In the 27 years since the state legislature created the state fiscal team, only eight out of what is currently more than 1,000 school districts in California have been taken over, Fine said. The school board had on Monday night just given up one of the few tools it had to cut costs and relieve its debt: the ability to lay off staff. It agreed to do so when it unanimously approved more than $18 million in early retirement incentives for 308 employees. As a condition for that retirement deal with its unions, the district agreed to not lay off any credentialed staff for the next school year. The school board approved that retirement plan based on an assumption that it would net savings of $22 million over the next five years and $3 million immediately. But the retirement plan idea was based off assumptions in the October revised budget, which has now been revealed to be incorrect, Simonson said. The October budget said that the district would end the school year with a slight surplus. But external auditors helped reveal this month that the district will actually end this school year $11 million in the red, with zero dollars set aside for its reserve for economic uncertainties, which is required by state law. The October budget predicted that the district would need to make $10 million in cuts next school year and more than $5 million in additional cuts the year after that. The district revealed last week that it will actually need to make at least $42 million in cuts next year and $25 million more the following year. The district had already been making moves on cutting $20 million this current year. Those corrected numbers only came after the San Diego County Office of Education and an external audit raised red flags about the revised October budget. The county office noted that the district was likely overestimating its state revenue by claiming it would have higher enrollment than would actually materialize. That fact was confirmed by the state fiscal teams presentation on Monday. Sweetwaters revised October budget overestimated its state base revenue by more than $6 million, according to the fiscal teams report. Whats not yet clear is who is responsible for the financial mismanagement, something that will likely be revealed in the upcoming state audit. The state fiscal teams report noted incorrect financial data that dates back to the 2015-2016 school year. From 2015 until this summer, the districts chief financial officer was Karen Michel, who has retired from the district. Last year, she was paid $221,260, according to the open-government website Transparent California. The school board hired Jenny Salkeld, who is respected by the state fiscal team, in August to replace Michel. Calls to a phone number listed for Michel came up as busy. Meanwhile, Superintendent Karen Janney was hired at the beginning of the 2015-2016 school year and has led the district during the time period noted in the state fiscal teams report. Janney was paid $252,179 last year, according to Transparent California. Before the state fiscal team finished giving its presentation on Monday, Janney said the district has been working on plans to address this years deficit. But the district has not provided details of its budget solutions or evidence of a fiscal recovery plan to the county education office. Fine identified two particular problems that he believes need further investigation. The first is the 302 negative budget entries that were found in the districts books. There were 302 times when district staff subtracted a dollar amount from a budget line with no explanation, Fine said. Typically, officials dont put negative entries into a budget, Fine said. We believe that was very intentional. The only reason I would know you would do that is to cover something up, Fine said. Fines other major concern is the districts heavy reliance on borrowing cash from its own Mello-Roos fund, a special tax fund that is supposed to be used only for facilities spending. The district had about $36 million in cash borrowing debt for that fund as of July 1, a number that the state fiscal team expected to rise to $68 million by the end of the school year. That exceeds the level of borrowing allowed by state law. All of that debt would need to be paid off by the end of June, according to the fiscal teams report. Kristen Taketa Email: kristen.taketa@sduniontribune.com Twitter: @Kristen_Taketa The latest affordable housing project for families, veterans and formerly homeless people officially opened its doors Tuesday in Southcrest at Vista del Puente. This really is going to be a successful project because its housing with supportive services, said San Diego County Supervisor Ron Roberts, one of several elected officials and other guests at the opening ceremony. That is so critical when youre going to help people. The still-unoccupied 51-unit project at 1436 South 40th St. overlooks Cesar Chavez Elementary School and includes 13 units for low-income families and 38 units for tenants who have been homeless. Of the units for homeless people, 16 will be for veterans. The project was developed by the nonprofits National Community Renaissance (National CORE) and Townspeople, and the units will remain affordable for 55 years. Advertisement Vista del Puente Spanish for View of the bridge in reference to the Coronado Bridge that can be seen to the west will include on-site supportive services for mental health and substance abuse recovery, as well as job training and job placement for tenants who had experienced homelessness. The $21.1 million project was developed with public and private funds and is one of 17 National CORE properties in San Diego County that house 4,500 residents in 1,500 units. Speakers at the Tuesday ceremony acknowledged that many more units will have to be created to meet the need locally and thoughout the state. We need more of these,said Roberts, who noted during the ceremony that the county has encountered resistance in some communities as it tries to build affordable housing. Steve PonTell, president and CEO of National CORE, said he has experienced some hostility at community meetings when presenting affordable housing projects. One of the challenges we have to overcome is this huge culture of fear that permeates all of the conversations, and the lack of civility, he said. I can you the public hearings Ive been in recently thoughout Southern California where the fear that the residents have is just off the charts. PonTell said inviting neighbors to tour projects such as Vista del Puente is one way to ease community members fears. He also said residents should understand that a lack of affordable housing leads to people crowding into housing and overwhelming area schools, parks, roads and public safety services that were designed for smaller populations. Essentially what were doing is destroying every neighborhood we have, said PonTell, who called the overcrowding of people in homes probably the biggest public health crisis facing the state one he described as unconscionable, irresponsible and unsafe. Vista del Puente in Southcrest has 51 affordable units for low-income families and for veterans and non-veterans who have experienced homelessness. (Rendering courtesy National CORE) Rufus Washington, director of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Developments Office of Community Planning and Development, said he, too, has seen community resistance to affordable housing. From time to time, community leadership will wilt in the face of opposition, so congratulations on doing the right thing, he said at the ceremony. Locally, the citys Regional Housing Need Estimates report from 2010 projected that San Diego has to build 38,680 affordable rental housing units before 2020 to meet the areas need. Statewide, PonTell said there is a projected need for 180,000 annually just to keep up with the population growth, and governor-elect Gavin Newsom has vowed to build 500,000 affordable housing units a year to catch up with existing need. San Diego City Council President Georgette Gomez, whose district includes the Vista del Puente neighborhood, acknowledged that government regulations sometimes can make things difficult for developers. But Ive learned that where theres a political will theres a way, she said, adding that she would work with the council to try to make the approval of affordable housing faster. John Seymour, National CORE vice president of acquisitions and forward planning, said he believes the mix of residents at Vista del Puente would create a true community that the surrounding neighborhood would eventually welcome. Funding for the project included $3.6 million from HUDs HOME Investment Partnerships Program funds, $400,000 from the citys affordable housing fund and $100,000 from Funders Together to End Homelessness. The San Diego Housing Commission also provided a $4.1 million loan, and another $3.3 million came from the Veterans Housing & Homeless Prevention Program administered by the state Department of Housing and Community in collaboration with Californias Department of Veterans Affairs and Housing Financing Agency. People interested in housing at Vista del Puente can learn more by (909) 483-2444 or emailing info@nationalcore.org. Homeless Playlist On Now San Diego hepatitis outbreak continues to grow: 481 cases On Now Homeless entrenched in booming tent city along Santa Ana River On Now San Diego mayor agreed to homeless hub, then delayed, advocates say On Now Homeless outreach in San Diego On Now Video: Street Art: Portraits of San Diego's Homeless #8 On Now In poverty himself, 'Water Man Dave,' is the fearless saint of San Diego's homeless 5:41 On Now Video: Homeless living in cars find safe havens 2:21 On Now Street Art: Portraits of San Diego's Homeless #7 On Now Pitching a tent plan for San Diego's homeless On Now Homeless efforts get $80M boost for various services gary.warth@sduniontribune.com Twitter: @GaryWarthUT 760-529-4939 Customs and Border Protection officers on Tuesday morning took in the final members of a group of asylum seekers who, accompanied by attorneys and two members of Congress, sat on U.S. soil outside the Otay Mesa Port of Entry for hours, some overnight. Reps. Nanette Barragan and Jimmy Gomez, both of the Los Angeles area, walked with the group of about 15 asylum seekers up the path to the port of entry around 2:30 p.m. on Monday. When they passed a placard that indicated they had reached the U.S., all of the migrants sat down on the concrete in front of the ports gate. At some point, an additional family that happened to be trying to request asylum at the port joined the group. Volunteers, mostly attorneys and law students, shielded the migrants to keep them from being forced back into Mexico while the two members of Congress questioned officials about whether they would take the group into the port for processing. Advertisement Recent human-rights reports have critiqued U.S. officials use of metering, or limiting how many asylum seekers can enter each day, and questioned whether asylum law allows for such policies. CBP says it implemented the policy, which has led to a ballooning backlog of asylum seekers and likely increased illegal crossings, because of limited resources. Volunteers with Al Otro Lado planned the action to get the asylum seekers onto U.S. soil before they could be turned away. Since none are from Mexico, by law they could not be returned to that country once theyve reached the U.S. They walked in small groups to the border so they wouldnt be noticed by Mexican immigration officials who might send them away. Barragan said that senior officials have told Congress that asylum seekers can come to any port of entry and begin the process of asking for protection. But officials at the port of entry told her on Monday that all but the unaccompanied children would have to go to the San Ysidro Port of Entry to request asylum. Though officials initially said they could only process the eight unaccompanied children in the group, they didnt take anyone inside the port for about five hours. When pressed by Barragan, officials said they had a capacity issue. Barragan asked to be let in to understand the issue, but officials did not allow her to see inside the holding areas. After 9 p.m., CBP took the unaccompanied children as well as a family of a mother and children who were captured in photos published of them running from tear gas at the border. It shouldnt be this way, Barragan said in a video on Twitter. You shouldnt have to have members of Congress here to observe whats happening at ports of entry for CBP to take in people who are on U.S. soil and have presented themselves for asylum. The members of Congress and volunteers remained with the rest of the group overnight, a second family and a man who had traveled alone. According to attorney Nicole Ramos, volunteers brought a bucket for the remaining children to use as a toilet. They all slept on the concrete with blankets. Around midnight, officials placed metal fencing used for police barricades and crowd control around the group, according to Barragans Twitter feed. Shortly after 8 a.m. Tuesday, Barragan announced on Twitter that the remaining asylum seekers had been allowed into the port of entry for processing. They had successfully bypassed the months-long wait to request asylum at the San Ysidro Port of Entry caused by the metering policy. Immigration Videos On Now New developments in family separation case 9:53 On Now A San Diego woman volunteered as a medic in Texas helping migrant families 2:35 On Now Immigration policy protests in Carlsbad nearly cancelled after permit issue 1:38 On Now When children are separated from their parents at the border, here is where they go next On Now Prospects of a deal for 'Dreamers' may hinge on separating Trump from hard-liners on his staff On Now What is DACA? On Now Border wall prototype contractors selected On Now Video: Ukrainian boxer wins asylum in U.S. On Now 30 apprehended after Border Patrol agents discover tunnel On Now Video: Kurdish diaspora prepare to vote on independence Follow me on Facebook for live updates about immigration news kate.morrissey@sduniontribune.com, @bgirledukate on Twitter Three weeks into his new job, Paul McCowns was ready to cash his first paycheck. There were no issues when he first entered a Huntington Bank branch in Brooklyn, Ohio, on Dec. 1. The bank asked for two forms of ID, which McCowns provided, he told Cleveland 19 News. An employee then asked for a fingerprint, which is standard procedure for non-Huntington customers attempting to cash checks, according to the bank. But soon bank employees began to question the legitimacy of his check, which was worth just over $1,000, said McCowns, who is black. They called his employer, an electric company, numerous times to confirm, but his employer did not answer. The bank turned him away, he said. Moments later, he was handcuffed and put into the back of a police cruiser. Advertisement I get in my truck, and the squad car (pulls) in front of me, and he says, Get out the car, McCowns, 30, told Cleveland 19 News. An employee had called Brooklyn police, who detained McCowns until they verified with his employer that the check was real. McCowns said his employer told police: Yes, he works for me, he just started, and yes, my payroll company does pay him that much. In a 911 call, an employee at the bank is heard telling an operator that McCowns had tried to cash a fraudulent check. Does he know you called 911? the operator asks. No, the employee responds. Brooklyn Police Chief Scott Mielke said Tuesday that since July, there have been at least 10 calls out to the Huntington Bank branch where McCowns was detained - all of which have resulted in arrests for fraudulent checks. A spokesman from Huntington Bank confirmed Mielkes account, adding that recent incidents have put employees and tellers at the branch on high alert. The spokesman said they have attempted to reach McCowns multiple times to apologize but that he hasnt returned their calls. They issued the following statement: We sincerely apologize to Mr. McCowns for this extremely unfortunate event. We accept responsibility for contacting the police as well as our own interactions with Mr. McCowns. Anyone who walks into a Huntington branch should feel welcomed. Regrettably, that did not occur in this instance and we are very sorry. We hold ourselves accountable to the highest ethical standards in how we operate, hire and train colleagues, and interact with the communities we have the privilege of serving. McCowns did not return a call requesting comment Friday afternoon. He told Cleveland 19 News that he had no trouble cashing it at another Huntington branch the next day. The person who made that phone call - that manager, that teller - whoever made that phone call, I feel as though they were judging, McCowns said. He added that the bank should change its policies for people who arent account holders. The Trump administrations surprise decision Wednesday to pull all U.S. troops from Syria as quickly as possible sent ripples far beyond the battlefield. It was a dramatic about-face that will have long-term implications for the country, the region and international relations. Heres a look at who benefits from the move, and who might suffer? Beneficiaries: Bashar al-Assad Once, the Syrian president seemed doomed by grinding civil war and international isolation. Then came help from the Russian military in 2015. Now, nearly eight years after the conflict started, Assad will almost certainly remain in power in his tattered country. Advertisement The United States has made no secret of its distaste for the dictator, who killed and wounded hundreds of thousands of his own people, sometimes with banned chemical weapons. When evidence emerged that Assads forces had used sarin nerve agent on civilians in a rebel-held town, President Donald Trump authorized an airstrike that inflicted limited damage on Assads air force. It wasnt much, but it showed a willingness to push back against the regimes worst abuses. Now the White House has signaled that Syria no longer remains a military priority. To be fair, the U.S. forces in Syria were far from the battles between Assads military and rebel factions, including some that were once backed by Washington. The U.S. intervention was mostly about pushing back the Islamic State from strongholds including the militant groups self-declared capital, Raqqa. Still, the end of a U.S. military presence should give further confidence to Assad and his key allies - Russia and Iran - to team up with Syrian troops to crush the remnants of the rebels and opposition, handing Assad more complete control of Syria. In this photo released by the Syrian state news agency SANA, President Bashar al-Assad, left, greets Sudans President Omar al-Bashir in Damascus, on Dec. 16, 2018. Sudans president became the first Arab League leader to visit Syria since a civil war erupted there nearly eight years ago. Syria was expelled from the 22-member Arab League soon after war broke out in 2011. (SANA photo) Iran Just months ago, the Trump administration said it was keeping U.S. troops in Syria indefinitely to act as a bulwark against Iran. The United States has de facto control of about a third of the country and has worked to disrupt Iranian activities. Without the United States, Iran and its ally Russia will be the most powerful foreign forces in Syria. And because they are allied with Assad, they are likely to have free rein. In the past, Iran has used Syria as a pathway to transport troops and weapons to allies around the Middle East, including Hezbollah in Lebanon. Russia Russia has positioned itself as one of Assads major allies. Its military has been active in Syria since 2015. Without the U.S. troop presence, Moscow will be able to expand its role in Syria and its sphere of influence across the Middle East. The #US decision to pull its troops from #Syria creates good prospects for a political solution in that Arab country - #Zakharova https://t.co/HmwlnBz44y pic.twitter.com/g0f5tqcSPm Russia in USA (@RusEmbUSA) December 19, 2018 Islamic State In his tweet about the withdrawal, Trump bragged that the Islamic State has been defeated. Many experts say the opposite is true. There are about 15,000 Islamic State militants in Syria, according to best estimates. In recent months, the group has been regaining a foothold in the country. Violent attacks have increased. (As Charles Lister of the Middle East Institute pointed out, the Islamic State - just 10 minutes before Trumps tweet - claimed responsibility for an attack on Raqqa.) As The Washington Post reporter Liz Sly wrote, there are signs that the Islamic State is starting to regroup, and rumblings of discontent within the Arab community point to the threat of an insurgency. The only thing slowing that result, she wrote, is the presence of the United States. U.S. troops have to stay, said Ilham Ahmed, a senior official with the Self-Administration of North and East Syria, as the self-styled government of the area is called. If they leave and there isnt a solution for Syria, it will be catastrophic, he told Sly. The U.S. withdrawal could lead to a rejuvenated and emboldened Islamic State, a terrorist threat in Syria and beyond. We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency. Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 19, 2018 Who suffers? The Kurds For months, Turkey has threatened to invade the Kurdish-controlled portion of Syria. Although the Turks have launched a handful of directed offensives, they have so far refrained from doing too much damage. When U.S. troops leave, that will almost certainly change. One of the major roles of U.S. troops in Syria has been to protect the countrys Kurds. They now occupy about a third of Syrian territory, which they run as if it were a semiautonomous region. A U.S. exit will leave the ethnic minority vulnerable to attack from Turkey. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has all but promised just that. Days ago, Ankara threatened to launch a military offensive against Syrias Kurds. For decades, Turkish forces have battled Kurdish separatists in Turkeys southeast. Erdogan and others worry that any strengthening of Kurdish power in the region, including Syria, could pose further threats to Turkey. Erdogan has become increasingly frustrated that the Kurds have managed to take control of such a large swath of Syria, including portions on the Turkish border. An American officer speaking with a fighter from the Kurdish Peoples Protection Units (YPG) at the site of Turkish airstrikes near the northeastern Syrian Kurdish town of Derik, known as al-Malikiyah in Arabic, on April 25, 2017. (Delil Souleiman/AFP/Getty Images) Israel Israels main mission in Syria isnt really about Syria at all: It has been working to weaken Iran. Israeli forces have launched some airstrikes. Without the United States, Israel has few allies left inside Syria. A former biotech firm employee who shot a co-worker in the face at their Carmel Mountain warehouse last year pleaded guilty Wednesday to premeditated attempted murder. Julio Riel Narvaez III, 55, also admitted several firearms allegations and an allegation the shooting caused great bodily injury to the victim, Michael Limbag. A charge of assault with a deadly weapon, a semi-automatic pistol, and related firearms allegations were dropped by the prosecutor. Narvaez faces a sentence of up to life plus 25 years to life in prison. His trial was scheduled to start Wednesday without a jury, with the judge tasked with hearing evidence and rendering a verdict. Advertisement Limbag is a cousin of Narvaez wife. Limbag told the judge Narvaez should spend rest of his life in jail. The question i think about daily is, why me? Limbag read from a statement. I can understand if he was mad at me but why did he try to kill me? He said Narvaez lived with him for many years. I thought we were family, he said. Limbag said he has suffered hearing loss, nightmares, daily headaches and he has bullet fragments near his brain and an artery. It really hard. Today with the guilty plea I felt justice has prevailed, Limbag said. San Diego Superior Court Judge Laura Halgren accepted the guilty plea after making sure Narvaez understood the consequences, including the possible life sentence. She said that because the case is considered a serious, violent felony, it would count on his record as a strike that would keep him on parole for life if he was ever released from prison. You attempted to kill Mr. Limbag by bringing a loaded gun to work and pursuing him and shot him? the judge asked. Narvaez answered that and other questions with a soft, Yes, your honor. Deputy District Attorney Genaro Ramirez said in court previously that Limbag and Narvaez got into an argument on June 20, 2017, at Pharmatechs warehouse on Innovation Drive. The prosecutor said the argument between the two men started when Limbag asked why Narvaez was staring at him and not pulling his weight at their work in shipping. Human resources staff met with each man and appeared to have settled the problem, Ramirez said. But later in the day, he said, Limbag became irritated again and called human resources again. Thats when Narvaez pulled a .22-caliber handgun from his workstation and shot Limbag in the face. He tried to fire the gun two more times, but it jammed, the prosecutor said. Narvaez chased after Limbag and tried to break down a door to get to the wounded man. Other workers tackled Narvaez and bound him with zip ties, the prosecutor said. The co-workers held Narvaez until police arrived. He has remained in jail on $1 million in bail for more than a year. The judge on Wednesday ordered Narvaez to relinquish other guns that he owns in addition to the pistol seized by police after the shooting. pauline.repard@sduniontribune.com Twitter: @pdrepard A man wanted by San Diego police in the October slaying of a good Samaritan on Interstate 15 a killing for which the mans brother already faces a murder charge was captured in Mexico on Tuesday and turned over to U.S. authorities at the border, police said. Investigators believe Edson Acuna, 24, fled to Mexico some time after the Oct. 27 slaying of 21-year-old Navy man Curtis Adams on southbound I-15, San Diego police homicide Lt. Anthony Dupree said. Adams was driving with his girlfriend when he stopped about 2:20 a.m. to help what he thought was a stranded motorist on the freeway near the I-5 on-ramp in Logan Heights, Dupree said. Adams was immediately shot as he exited his vehicle. Brandon Javier Acuna, 21, was taken into custody and questioned shortly after the shooting. He was arrested later and charged with murder, robbery, burglary and shooting at an inhabited vehicle. Two other people were also arrested and charged in connection with the case before Edson Acunas arrest Tuesday. Advertisement At some point in the investigation, detectives also identified Edson Acuna as a suspect, and a warrant was issued for his arrest on suspicion of murder, Dupree said. Investigators believed he might have fled to Mexico. On (Tuesday), Mexican authorities located Edson Acuna in Mexico and took him into custody, Dupree said in a statement. The suspect (was) turned over to U.S. authorities at the border. The elder Acuna was booked into San Diego Central Jail just before 4 p.m. Tuesday and was being held without bail, according to jail records. He was booked on suspicion of the same crimes his brother has been charged with murder, robbery, burglary and shooting at an inhabited vehicle plus an additional count of being a felon in possession of a firearm. In the days after the shooting, detectives also arrested two other people with suspected connections to the freeway slaying, including 24-year-old Harvey Elias Liberato. He was taken into custody on Oct. 29 and was booked on suspicion of the same slate of charges, including first-degree murder, as those facing Brandon and Edson Acuna. He was being held without bail Tuesday. On Oct. 31, 38-year-old Susana Galvan was arrested on suspicion of being a criminal accessory in the case, according to prosecutors and jail records. She was being held Tuesday in lieu of $100,000 bail. Authorities have not released details on Galvans and Liberatos alleged involvement the case. Brandon Acuna was in court Tuesday for a routine appearance in the case. Police believe the suspects in Adams killing were also involved in a non-injury shooting incident in the Mount Hope neighborhood about 10 minutes before Adams was gunned down, Dupree said. In that incident, a man was shot at after he encountered people trying to break into his vehicle on Boundary Street north of Market Street. Adams was a first-generation American whose parents both immigrated to New York from the West Indies, according to his cousin, Desmond Abrams Jr. Adams enlisted in the Navy in 2016. He was a steelworker with Amphibious Construction Battalion 1, and was stationed at Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, military officials said. He was very excited about deploying and doing his job with the Navy, Abrams Jr. said in October. He loved the uniform. He was really proud of being a sailor. City News Service contributed to this report. Twitter: @Alex_Riggins (619) 293-1710 alex.riggins@sduniontribune.com UPDATES: 10:45 p.m.: This article was updated with information about Galvan and Liberato. 5:40 p.m.: This article was updated with booking information for Edson Acuna. This article was originally published at 4:55 p.m. Sex crimes detectives on Tuesday sought information and more potential victims of an 18-year-old man suspected in a string of violent rapes and sexual assaults around San Diego County, police said. Seth Alan Roberts was arrested Dec. 5 on suspicion of committing three sexual assaults between early October and November in Bonita, Pacific Beach and Otay Mesa, according to San Diego police sex crimes Lt. Jason Weeden. Based on the circumstances of the crimes, detectives believe there may be more victims. Roberts remained jailed Wednesday in lieu of $1.25 million, jail records showed. His attorney, a deputy public defender, declined to comment on the case. Advertisement Roberts has already been arraigned on two counts of rape by force and one count of forcible sexual penetration with a foreign object, according to the complaint filed in the case. He has pleaded not guilty. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for Feb. 5, in San Diego Superior Court when a judge will be asked to determine whether enough evidence exists for the case to proceed to trial. According to police, Roberts would befriend young females by telling them he was from out-of-state and then sexually assault them with a weapon, Weeden said in a statement. He allegedly identified himself to his victims by his first name. One of the incidents occurred in early October near Sweetwater Summit Regional Park in Bonita, Weeden said. The criminal complaint showed Roberts is charged with rape for an incident said to have occurred on Oct. 18. The two other charges, rape and sexual penetration by force, are linked to incidents on Nov. 17, according to the complaint. Both charges note additional allegations that there were mulitple victims and that the defendant used a knife in the attacks. Online jail records indicated Tuesday that Roberts was also being held on suspicion of more than a dozen additional crimes, mostly felonies, including forcible sodomy of a victim under 14. However, that information had disappeared from the Sheriffs Department website a day later. Roberts is white, 5 feet 7 inches and 140 pounds, with dirty-blond hair and a clean-shaven face. Police say he frequently traveled by skateboard and often wore black clothing, including a black beanie with white lettering. Anyone with information about the incidents, or who may been victimized by the suspect, was asked to call the Police Departments sex crimes unit at (619) 531-2210, or San Diego County Crime Stoppers anonymous tip line at (888) 580-8477. Twitter: @Alex_Riggins (619) 293-1710 alex.riggins@sduniontribune.com UPDATES: 4:50 p.m.: This article was updated with additional details from the District Attorneys Office, and a clarification about information previously found in online jail records. The article was originally published at 7:20 p.m., Dec. 18, 2018. A 50-year-old man was shot in the left leg early Wednesday in the Mountain View neighborhood by a gunman in a car, police said. The shooting happened shortly before 12:05 a.m. on Southlook Avenue near Imperial Avenue, San Diego police Officer John Buttle said. The man and a friend were in an alley near Southlook Avenue when a man in a gray sedan, possibly a Dodge Charger or a Mercedes-Benz, drove up and asked the man a question, Buttle said. The gunman then fired several shots from the car, striking the victim in the left thigh, and drove off in an unknown direction, Buttle said. The victim was transported to a hospital for treatment of a gunshot wound that was not believed to be life-threatening, Buttle said. Advertisement No suspect descriptions were immediately available. Detectives from the San Diego Police Departments southeastern division were investigating the shooting. Twitter: @karenkucher (619) 293-1350 karen.kucher@sduniontribune.com A man was shot in the head Tuesday night in a possible drive-by shooting in Spring Valley, sheriffs officials said. A 911 caller reported just after 10:25 p.m. that a gunshot victim was lying in the roadway at Jamacha Boulevard and Grand Avenue in the La Presa community, county sheriffs Lt. Dustin Lopez said. Deputies found the victim in the street with a gunshot wound to the head, Lopez said. Paramedics rushed the victim to Scripps Mercy Hospital in Hillcrest, Lopez said. Advertisement Witnesses told deputies shots were fired from a white four-door Honda that was last seen heading south on Grand Avenue, said sheriffs Lt. Karla Menzies. No description of the shooter was available. The victims injuries were not believed to be life threatening and he was expected to survive, she said. Twitter: @Alex_Riggins (619) 293-1710 alex.riggins@sduniontribune.com RIYADH, Saudi Arabia Its awkward to find yourself in a police state interviewing people about their leaders penchant for starving children, torturing women or dismembering critics. The result is nervous smiles. And long pauses in the conversation. Its sad because on this visit, I found Saudi Arabia truly is changing under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. You feel a dynamism on the ground in Riyadh, and young Saudis are thrilled that the country finally has a bold leader trying to modernize the economy. Advertisement One businesswoman, Naha Said Kattan, told me that shes grateful to Prince Mohammed that she could drive herself to our interview. I told her that I was delighted for her, but that it was difficult to celebrate while the prince also imprisons womens rights leaders and reportedly has had four flogged, tortured and sexually harassed, with one attempting suicide as a result. Another awkward silence. Ive been fiercely critical of the mad prince, so I was a bit surprised to receive a Saudi visa apparently because I was traveling with a United Nations delegation returning from Yemen. In a reflection of the mood today, American friends seemed less concerned about my safety in rebel-held Yemen than in Riyadh. In fact, Ive felt reasonably safe in Saudi Arabia. Officials were respectful and courteous even when I was painfully frank. But people also seemed more afraid to speak to a journalist than before, and mingled with the oppressiveness, there was an aggrieved nationalism in the air. Public opinion is difficult to judge in any police state in which journalists are closely watched. But my best guess is that the support here for the prince is real, with people welcoming his youthful leadership as a breath of fresh air; even in Arabic he is sometimes referred to affectionately by his English initials, MBS. But I refer to MBS, following the dismemberment of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, as Mr. Bone Saw. Ah, more awkwardness. Bravo to the U.S. Senate for its historic votes to hold MBS accountable for Khashoggis murder and to end support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen. Saudi officials are paying very close attention. Senior Saudis privately accept that MBS ordered Khashoggis death, but insist that the Saudi-U.S. relationship is more important than one mans life. For the sake of stability in the region, they say, America should stand by Saudi Arabia. To which my answer is: The problem is not only that MBS is a murderer but also that he has destabilized the region, starved Yemeni children, and undermined the interests of Saudi Arabia and the United States alike. Everything he touches, he breaks. President Donald Trump and Jared Kushner have placed their bets on the prince, and in a narrow sense they may be right. King Faisal managed to oust his incompetent predecessor, King Saud, in 1964, but I saw no sign that MBS is in jeopardy of losing power. My most interesting interaction was with a group of young professionals who believe that I am getting it all wrong. I dont know why the media focuses on the bad side, protested Tariq Buhilaigah, a consultant in Riyadh. Sure there have been missteps, he said, but the most important things going on are the modernization of the country and the diversification of the economy away from oil. Felwa AlBazie, who is preparing to get her drivers license, said she doesnt know why the womens rights activists are detained but added, The big picture Im seeing is that every woman in life benefits from driving, and women and men benefit from social progress. But modernity isnt just about cappuccinos and iPhone apps; its also about human dignity and the rule of law. While MBS is bringing social progress, hes also reckless, oppressive and brutal, and I am skeptical of his economic competence. He hasnt even been able to organize an initial public offering for Aramco. Trumps bizarre defense of the prince reflects what has been wrong with the U.S.-Saudi relationship. It has become all transactional. The Saudis have treated us like bodyguards, and we have treated them like gas station attendants. I suspect the real reason Trump and Kushner embrace MBS, aside from the hope that he will back their Middle East peace plan, is business: the belief that Saudis will invest in their personal real estate projects for decades to come. The truth is that as Saudi Arabias significance as an oil producer diminishes, we need Saudi Arabia less. In 25 years, if were freed from the tyranny of imported oil, we may not need it at all. Some Saudis kept trying to suggest to me that if we block weapons sales to Riyadh, the kingdom will turn to Moscow. Thats absurd. It needs our spare parts and, more important, it buys our weapons because they come with an implicit guarantee that we will bail out the Saudis militarily if they get in trouble with Iran. Saudi Arabias armed forces cant even defeat a militia in Yemen, so how could they stand up to Iran? Thats why we have leverage over Saudi Arabia, not the other way around. Lets use that leverage. The next step should be a suspension of arms sales until Saudi Arabia ends its war on Yemen, for that war has made us complicit in mass starvation. Letters and commentary policy The U-T welcomes and encourages community dialogue on important public matters. Please visit this page for more details on our letters and commentaries policy. You can email letters@sduniontribune.com or leave a comment below. Follow @UTLetters on Twitter and UTOpinion on Facebook. Adding extra layers of bureaucracy to a government agency rarely improves its performance. Yet that was the approach most often taken by the Obama administration in dealing with local police. When police departments were accused fairly or unfairly of misconduct, the Department of Justice quickly geared up to intervene and assert control. An accusation that was racial in nature even if it involved only one police officer and even if it could be disproven was especially likely to trigger a federal response. DOJ investigations would ordinarily result in a lawsuit. But the court would never be called upon to decide definitively whether misconduct had in fact occurred. Instead, DOJ would attempt to foist a consent decree on the police department. The court would be called upon simply to rubber-stamp it. Once approved, an agreement would be difficult to rescind or modify. Related: Why federal oversight is needed to prevent police abuses Consider, for example, the 110-page Cleveland Police Department consent decree. It imposes extensive paperwork and training duties throughout the system. Under it, the department is also required to create and maintain a Force Investigation Team, a Mental Health Response Advisory Committee, a Force Review Board, and a Consent Decree Implementation Unit. It is further required to have a DOJ-approved independent monitor to enforce the decree as well as a 13-member community police commission. Commission members are selected by a specially-constituted selection panel and work with the already-existing Community Relations Board and the District Community Relations Committees (renamed the District Policing Committees). Advertisement If you are wondering if all this can get expensive, the answer is yes. In 2012, then-Mayor Mike McGinn told KUOW Radio that the DOJs Seattle consent decree could cost that city as much as $41 million per year. According to McGinn, the independent monitor required under the plan would function as a shadow mayor, who could interfere with the citys ability to respond quickly to events. That monitor, not elected officials answerable to the voters, would be calling many of the shots. He or she becomes the superintendent of law enforcement. Might such an intervention be nonetheless justified? Yes, of course. But it should take a very serious case for the federal government to assert such extensive control over a local government. It should take a case in which the roots of the problem run deep, not one involving misconduct by only a few police officers. The problem was that the Obama administrations interventions had become routine. That is why now-former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, as one of his last acts in office, moved to curtail the routine use of such consent decrees. From now on, senior leadership at DOJ must conclude that the police department has been uncooperative. Sessions should be praised for this. It is very much in keeping with constitutional federalism. Alas, in a report entitled Police Use of Force: An Examination of Modern Policing Practices, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, whose membership is dominated by Obama appointees, has instead issued a rebuke. Among other things, that report calls for more federal supervision over local police departments. Two commissioners Peter Kirsanow and I dissented from those recommendations. The real cost of the suffocating bureaucratization of law enforcement cannot be measured in dollars. Officers who are called upon to justify every move they make will inevitably be more reluctant to act. They may think twice before approaching a suspicious person or making a traffic stop. Why make trouble for oneself? It is not that police officers will entirely refuse to do their jobs. Few are that unprofessional. But only the naive would believe that such matters have no affect on officer behavior. We live in the era of Black Lives Matter and concerns over excessive use of force by police. And these concerns are not insubstantial. Where there is power, there will be abuses of power. That is why citizens must be ever-vigilant, and law enforcement must be willing to adopt sensible reforms like officer cameras, which catch misconduct while protecting officers who play by the rules. But spare a thought for the problem that has dogged African-American and low-income communities for more than a century: Because these communities have higher than average crime rates and hence higher victimization rates, they stand to suffer the most when police departments are hamstrung by over-bureaucratization and discouraged from taking initiative. To protect those communities, the federalization of law enforcement through extensive and expensive consent decrees should be a last resort, not a first resort. Heriot, a professor of law at the University of San Diego, is a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Jeff Sessions parting shot to civil rights, on his way out as attorney general of the United States, was to issue a memo to the Department of Justice and all U.S. attorneys throughout the nation severely limiting consent decrees as a tool for resolving federal civil rights investigations. Police reform is one among many areas that memo affects and our nation is more vulnerable as a result. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which I chair, issued a comprehensive report last month evaluating civil rights implications of police use of excessive force and offering practical recommendations for limiting such use of force and protecting all Americans rights and safety. That report confirms the core truism that effective policing depends on community confidence in the police and that community confidence follows from transparently fair police practices. The report also reviews the effectiveness of federal involvement in police reform over the past quarter century and confirms that rates of police shootings fell dramatically in jurisdictions subject to federal intervention. Related: Why routine federal oversight of local police should be curtailed Separate and apart from that research, I know, from direct experience, the difference federal oversight can make both to communities and to police. Advertisement Close to 20 years ago, I represented community members as intervenors in the consent decree negotiated between the Los Angeles Police Department and the U.S. Department of Justice. That decree addressed unconstitutional policing practices, including unlawful use of force, that had persisted unabated over more than four decades. Through that experience, I had a front-row seat to the value of DOJ involvement, even when that involvement fell short of my and my clients hoped for vigilance. The Department of Justice has a 24-year mandate from Congress, unavailable to any other entity, to address systemic patterns and practices of police abuses. This mandate exists to protect the nations citizens from unconstitutional practices. As the commission report documents, federal involvement combined with federal court oversight can function as an essential backstop against longstanding police harm, repairing community and police relations and allowing for constitutional policing to take hold and become the norm. Its absence, however, communicates too clearly that unauthorized police use of force, among other unconstitutional practices, can proliferate unabated, operating to the distinct detriment of Americans subject to harm. I have lived in a community whose police unlawfully preyed on its members, often on the basis of race and always against our constitutional norms. I have participated in the hard work to transform broken police-community relations. I have monitored and pushed halting progress toward meaningful change. Based on these experiences, I know in my core that, even after having been deeply frayed, effective community and police interactions are possible, attainable, and, indeed, essential to healthily functioning communities. From that work with police agencies other than the LAPD, I also know significant gains can be made without federal intervention, with sheriffs and police departments committing and recommitting themselves to constitutional practices including nondiscrimination in the manner in which they protect and serve. Very often local communities, including their police agencies, can work together to ensure delivery of policing that is effective, safe, and nondiscriminatory. And when, as had been true in Los Angeles for longer than my lifetime to date, they cannot, those communities and our constitutional norms stand to benefit significantly from federal intervention of the type that is dangerously absent in our present moment. In the report we just issued, I joined my commission colleagues in calling for practical reforms to stem the tide of perceived conflict between police officers and their communities, and to recommit this nation to the principles of fairness and equal treatment, including at the hands of police, that are core to democracy. I hope very much that the U.S. Department of Justice immediately reverses its dangerous course of refusal to use the tools available to it to drive critical reform of police practices. And whether or not our Department of Justice will return to this justice work, I hope police communities around the country will take up the charge to recommit themselves to the constitutional practices that best support their work and that keep their communities and their officers safe. Lhamon is the chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and of counsel at National Center for Youth Law. The San Diego Union-Tribune editorial cartoonist Steve Breen's 10 best cartoons of the year, ranked by readers The results are in. We asked readers of The San Diego Union-Tribune to rank 40 of editorial cartoonist Steve Breens best cartoons of 2018. Its time to reveal the winners. Here are Breens best 10 cartoons of the year, as judged by our audience. Missed the vote? Let us know your favorite in the comments below. Steve Breen 10. George H. W. Bush tribute Dec. 3: Bush was World War II hero, a Texas oil entrepreneur, a congressman, a U.N. ambassador, a CIA director, a two-term vice president, a one-term president and an elder statesman. He died at 94. Steve Breen 9. Synagogue shooting Oct. 30: A gunman killed 11 Jews at a morning service of the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Steve Breen 8. Brett Kavanaugh Sept. 21: Twenty-seven years after Clarence Thomas survived sexual misconduct allegations in his Supreme Court confirmation hearings, successful nominee Brett Kavanaugh faced his own. Steve Breen 7. March for our Lives March 18: A nationwide protest led by the Parkland, Florida, students called 'March for our Lives' was scheduled for March 24 as the debate over gun violence involved the First and Second Amendments. Steve Breen 6. Stan Lee tribute Nov. 12: Stan Lee is to thank for characters like Black Panther, Spider-Man, the X-Men, Iron Man and Incredible Hulk. He died at age 95. Steve Breen 5. Blue wave Nov. 7: The so-called blue wave is successful in the House of Representatives during the midterm election after Democrats pick up 40 seats, putting it in direct conflict with the Trump administration. Steve Breen 4. Family separations June 19: Reflecting on the presidents response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, Steve Breen illustrated its handling of family separation at border. Steve Breen 3. Vaccinate your kids Oct. 12: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that the number of children who have not been vaccinated against any diseases is growing. Steve Breen 2. No words Feb. 16: The San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board published a wordless editorial in response to a lack of action on school shootings by Congress, and Breen used white space of his own that day. Steve Breen 1. Climate change Aug. 8: More than one dozen wildfires burned across California at the same time including the massive Mendocino Complex Fire. When going on vacation do you worry that someone might break into your house or something else could happen? Worry no more. A free service is provided by senior volunteers who work with local law enforcement. The Rancho Bernardo Retired Senior Volunteer Patrol (it works with San Diego Police Department) and the Poway/4S Ranch Senior Volunteer Patrol (it works with the San Diego Sheriffs Department) each provides free vacation house checks. Both require vacationers to fill out a form at their respective offices at least a few days before going out of town. The form gives the volunteers permission to go onto the property at random times during daylight hours in order to check doors and windows (they look in windows if curtains are left open) and pick up newspapers and fliers so potential criminals are less likely to realize the house is empty. If anything is discovered such as an open door or window, or something wrong inside that can be seen through a window the volunteers call police officers or sheriffs deputies to investigate, according to the groups administrators. Most security checks are routine, but we have found things like open doors and windows, water leaks (and) floating furniture, missing or unexpected vehicles in the driveway, people using the pool without permission and fallen trees damaging the home or other structures, said Pete Babich, Poway/4S Ranch SVP administrator. These are examples of when deputies are called. Babich said the floating furniture incident occurred when a pipe burst in a split-level home and the subsequent flooding led to furniture on the lower level floating in a room, which volunteers saw through a window. The residents were out of the country, so volunteers shut off the water main near the street and notified the emergency contact so clean up and repairs could occur before the residents returned. Another time, water was seen seeping out from under a garage door because of a water emergency, Babich said. More often, someone has been found on the property not committing a crime, but their presence was not conveyed to volunteers in advance. Sometimes it has been a family member who decided to stay in the house and other times it has been the residents who returned early, but forgot to notify the volunteers by calling and leaving a message at the office. Dave Piccus, RB RSVP administrator, said a couple times the patrol volunteers have walked around a home and discovered residents eating breakfast on their patio. Another time, when they looked in a window to make sure nothing was out of place, they and the residents wearing skimpy attire were each startled. These are the funniest stories, Piccus said. A couple doors have been left open when a relative came to stay. We did not know (of the visitors) who left a door unlocked. In such situations, the volunteers called police to investigate, because volunteers do not go inside. If a package was delivered, volunteers call the local contact to retrieve the package. Most (situations) are pretty benign, Babich said, but mentioned an incident he heard of that occurred in Bonsall. The worst-case scenario involved SVP members discovering a vehicle in the driveway and burglars using the home as a place to store their loot from other burglaries. He said the likelihood of coming upon a burglary in process is slim, but there is a chance volunteers will see evidence of a crime that has occurred. The services each group provides are very similar, but there are a couple differences in how they operate. RB RSVP members check on homes within Rancho Bernardo up to five times a week (on weekdays, excluding holidays) and SDPD requires residents to give their house key to a trusted relative or friend within San Diego County in case of emergency, Piccus said. Poway/4S Ranch SVP members check on homes within both communities up to six times a week (Mondays through Saturdays, excluding holidays). While they would like a local contact with a key, it is not required, Babich said. Each program keeps a log of the checks and if anything was discovered. Babich said in 2017 volunteers conducted 1,938 checks (representing about 300 residences) and the program is on track to conduct 2,500 this year. Piccus said that as of Monday, 204 Rancho Bernardo homes had been registered for the service this year. To register a home for checks in Poway or 4S Ranch, residents must go to their respective station the Poway Sheriffs Station at 13100 Bowron Road or the 4S Ranch Sheriffs Substation at 10282 Rancho Bernardo Road. Hours are 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays. To register for home checks in Rancho Bernardo, go to the RB RSVP office on the second floor of the Rancho Bernardo Library, 17010 Bernardo Center Drive. It is open 7:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. weekdays. The form can be downloaded in advance at tinyurl.com/SDPDvacationhouse. While the service is free, Piccus said sometimes people make a donation to the program to express their appreciation. Some are very generous, at the end of the year, sending $200, but we dont expect that, Piccus said, adding if a donation is received, it goes toward office supplies. email: rbnews@pomeradonews.com Thank you for reading! On your next view you will be asked to log in to your subscriber account or create an account and subscribepurchase a subscription to continue reading. New York, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 12/19/2018 -- The latest report Bluetooth Keyboard Module Market discusses everything a business owner needs to know about the Bluetooth Keyboard Module market for the forecast period, 2018 to 2025. The document offers an insight into what the target customer's needs and wants. Industry experts have extracted data from various sources on size, share, growth rate, production volume, production capacity, import and export status, distribution channels and more and have analysed it thoroughly. By properly assessing the competitors and their offerings the study aims at empowering business owners to step ahead. Request for Sample Copy of Bluetooth Keyboard Module Market Report @ https://www.marketexpertz.com/sample-enquiry-form/26288 Scope of the Report: The research methodologies used for evaluating the Bluetooth Keyboard Module market are inventive and also provides enough evidence on the demand and supply status, production capability, import and export, supply chain management and investment feasibility. The investigative approach applied for the extensive analysis of the sale, gross margin and profit generated by the industry are presented through resources including tables, charts, and graphic images. Importantly, these resources can be easily integrated or used for preparing business or corporate presentations. Estimating the potential size of the Bluetooth Keyboard Module industry: Industry experts conducting the study further estimate the potential of the Bluetooth Keyboard Module industry. Such information is important for firms looking to launch an innovative service or product on the market. Industry experts have measured the total volume of the given market. Researchers have calculated the industry in terms of sales by the competitors and end-user customers. Data on the entire size of the Bluetooth Keyboard Module market for a particular product or a service for the forecast period, 2018 to 2025 covered in the report makes it valuable. This information reveals the upper limit of the Bluetooth Keyboard Module industry for a specific product or service. Major Players in Bluetooth Keyboard Module market are: KORG, Texas Instruments, Microchip Technology Inc, Handheld Scientific, Lierda, DELL, Apple, SparkFun Electronics, Broadcom, Lenovo, Logitech Most important types of Bluetooth Keyboard Module products covered in this report are: - Original - Modified Most widely used downstream fields of Bluetooth Keyboard Module market covered in this report are: - Computer - Telephone - Others Buy Bluetooth Keyboard Module Market Research Report @ https://www.marketexpertz.com/checkout-form/26288 Major Regions play vital role in Bluetooth Keyboard Module market are: - North America - Europe - China - Japan - Middle East & Africa - India - South America - Others Attracting the target audience: First, the comprehensive report finds out why customers need a certain product or service. The study focuses on what problems a certain product and service can solve. Apart from target demographics industry experts weigh up on the factors including audience type, as well as others vital attributes about the target customer segment. The market intelligence study for the Bluetooth Keyboard Module market further provides an inside-out overview of necessary aspects associated with the product classification, important definitions, major orders and other industry-centric parameters. An underlying part of the study also maps the important factors associated with the recent events such as mergers and acquisition, collaboration and new product launches. In addition, the research lays down a robust groundwork for obtaining a vast amount of information that potential customers can use to increase their profits and reduce costs. The inclusion of data on market segmentation by type, application, and geography offers clarity presents an analytical picture of, what manufacturers are aiming for. The research provides answers to the following key questions: - What is the estimated growth rate of the Bluetooth Keyboard Module market for the forecast period 2018 - 2025? What will be the market share and size of the industry during the estimated period? - What are prime factors expected to drive the Bluetooth Keyboard Module industry for the estimated period? - What are the major market leaders and what has been their winning strategy for success so far? - What are the significant trends shaping the growth prospects of the Bluetooth Keyboard Module market? - What are the key challenges expected to restrict the progress of the industry for the forecast period, 2018 - 2025? - What the opportunities product owners can bank on to generate high profits? There are 13 Chapters to deeply display the global Bluetooth Keyboard Module market. - 1 Bluetooth Keyboard Module Market Overview - 2 Global Bluetooth Keyboard Module Market Competition by Manufacturers - 3 Global Bluetooth Keyboard Module Capacity, Production, Revenue (Value) by Region (2013-2018) - 4 Global Bluetooth Keyboard Module Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by Region (2013-2018) - 5 Global Bluetooth Keyboard Module Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by Type - 6 Global Bluetooth Keyboard Module Market Analysis by Application - Continue Read More @ https://www.marketexpertz.com/industry-overview/bluetooth-keyboard-module-market Key Points from TOC 8 Competitive Landscape 8.1 Competitive Profile 8.2 KORG 8.2.1 Company Profiles 8.2.2 Bluetooth Keyboard Module Product Introduction 8.2.3 KORG Production, Value ($), Price, Gross Margin 2013-2018E 8.2.4 KORG Market Share of Bluetooth Keyboard Module Segmented by Region in 2018 8.3 Texas Instruments 8.3.1 Company Profiles 8.3.2 Bluetooth Keyboard Module Product Introduction 8.3.3 Texas Instruments Production, Value ($), Price, Gross Margin 2013-2018E 8.3.4 Texas Instruments Market Share of Bluetooth Keyboard Module Segmented by Region in 2018 8.4 Microchip Technology Inc 8.4.1 Company Profiles 8.4.2 Bluetooth Keyboard Module Product Introduction 8.4.3 Microchip Technology Inc Production, Value ($), Price, Gross Margin 2013-2018E 8.4.4 Microchip Technology Inc Market Share of Bluetooth Keyboard Module Segmented by Region in 2018 Continue About MarketExpertz Planning to invest in market intelligence products or offerings on the web? Then marketexpertz has just the thing for you - reports from over 500 prominent publishers and updates on our collection daily to empower companies and individuals catch-up with the vital insights on industries operating across different geography, trends, share, size and growth rate. There's more to what we offer to our customers. With marketexpertz you have the choice to tap into the specialized services without any additional charges. Contact Us: John Watson Head of Business Development Market Expertz | Web: www.marketexpertz.com Direct Line: +1-800-819-3052 E-mail: sales@marketexpertz.com News: https://www.marketexpertz.com/market-news Tampa, FL -- (SBWIRE) -- 12/19/2018 -- Adoption Miracles Florida adoption agencies has been offering free assistance in matters of unplanned pregnancies including birthmothers trying to give a baby to a loving family as well as assistance for prospective parents. The company works as a bridge between the two sides and has assisted people throughout the state in finding the right match. Birthmothers are able to decide what level of communication and involvement they can have in the process and the adoption agency in Florida will handle the rest including assistance before and after the birth of the baby. "For women dealing with unplanned pregnancies there are hundreds of questions that come up. You were not ready for this, you have no idea what to do and you are not sure how to handle this. The important thing you have to know is that you have options. Private adoption in Florida presents you with several options to improve your situation now and in the future. We offer counseling, transportation assistance and help with getting back to school or job placement as well. Our goal is to not only help ensure the long-term care of the child, but of the birthmother as well." Adoption Miracles Representative For prospective parents looking for options to adopt a baby, working with an adoption agency in Florida is often the best way to get started. Rather than relying on online speculation, prospective parents can contact Florida adoption agencies for a free consultation to learn more about their options, how to become a quality candidate, how the process works, costs and more. Again, rather than basing decisions and your strategy based on information that you found online, these hopeful parents can contact the agencies directly for further assistance. "In some cases, the birthmother may want to be very involved in the process. In other cases, they may not want anything to do with it. The important thing to know is that we will handle everything along the way to make this experience as simple and comfortable as possible for everyone involved. Because the wishes and needs of each birthmother is different, we will work with both parties to make sure that everyone is on the same page and able to benefit from the assistance of a private adoption in Florida." For more information, please call: 813-654-6911 or email adoptionmiracles@yahoo.com About Adoption Miracles Adoption Miracles is licensed and based in Tampa and assists couples throughout the United States with expanding their families. With nearly 20 years of experience, our team has helped birth parents find safe and loving homes for their children while receiving full financial and emotional support. If you are interested in learning about these, or any of the other services that we offer, we invite you to give us a call or visit our site today. Related Links: https://www.facebook.com/pages/category/Adoption-Service/Adoption-Miracles-522913974737213/ New York, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 12/19/2018 -- The lending and payments market comprises all establishments engaged in lending and payments related activities such as lending, payments and transferring service. The lending and payments industry is categorized on the basis of the business model of the firms present in the industry. This growth is driven by a higher level of data security offered by EMV chip and PIN cards as compared to traditional magnetic stripe cards. EMV is a security standard for various payment cards including debit, credit, charge and prepaid cards. Get Sample Copy of this Report @ www.researchnreports.com/request_sample.php?id=201955 Top Key Vendors in Market: Industry And Commercial Bank Of China, Agricultural Bank Of China, Bank Of China, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo According to the research report, the growing Global Lending and Payments Market is likely to boost the global market substantially over the forthcoming years. Apart from this, the increasing number of driving is projected to add to the growth of this market significantly in the near future. The worldwide market is analyzed on the basis of the various segments and the geographical reach of this market. Ask for discount@ www.researchnreports.com/ask_for_discount.php?id=201955 This report provides a detailed analysis of the Lending and Payments market with description of market sizing and growth, segmentation of market by products & services and major markets, top market players etc. The report recapitulates the factors that will be responsible for the growth in the market in the forecasted period. Entities include establishments such as finance companies, personal credit institutions, loan companies and student loans companies. Leading and Payment market covers all types of loans such as mortgage loan, personal loan, working capital loan, vehicle loan, industrial loans and others. The report evaluates the products available in the market on the basis of the production volume, their pricing structure, and the revenue generated by them. Production chain and the dynamics of demand and supply has also been assessed in this report. The research report also analyzes the Lending and Payments Market hierarchy carrying out a SWOT analysis of the key players operating on the Global Market in order to provide an overall picture of the competitive landscape in the industry and assist the participants to come up with market winning strategies to gain an edge over their peers. Table of Content: Global Lending and Payments Market Research Report 2018-2022 Chapter 1: Industry Overview Chapter 2: International and Lending and Payments Market Analysis Chapter 3: Global Lending and Payments and China Market Chapter 4: Analysis of Revenue by Classifications Chapter 5: Analysis of Revenue by Regions Lending and Payments Market Chapter 6: Analysis of Technologies Market Revenue Market Status. Chapter 7: Analysis of Global Lending and Payments Market Chapter 8: Sales Price and Gross Margin Analysis Chapter 9: Distributor Analysis of Telemetry Monitoring System Market Chapter 10: Global Lending and Payments Market Industry 2018-2022 Chapter 11: Telemetry Monitoring System Market with Contact Information Chapter 12: Feasibility Analysis of Global Lending and Payments Market Chapter 13 Global Lending and Payments Industry 2018 Market For more Information@ www.researchnreports.com/enquiry_before_buying.php?id=201955 About Research N Reports Research N Reports is a new age market research firm where we focus on providing information that can be effectively applied. Where counting on a legitimate board company for your selections will become critical. Research N Reports specializes in enterprise evaluation, marketplace forecasts and as a result getting great reports overlaying all verticals, whether be it gaining angle on modern market situations or being in advance inside the cut throat Global opposition. Contact: (Research N Reports) 10916, Gold Point Dr, Houston, TX, Pin - 77064, Sunny Denis (Sales Manager), +1-8886316977, sales@researchnreports.com www.researchnreports.com Albany, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 12/19/2018 -- Electricity plays a crucial role in modern life. Forklift battery possess a broad range of applications. Historically, the term 'battery' was used to refer to a device composed of multiple cells, but the usage of batteries has evolved substantially to include devices composed of a single cell. Demand for electricity is increasing exponentially around the world. Governments in various countries are undertaking modernization and development of their power generation infrastructure. Both developed and developing countries are undertaking efforts to develop new power generation, transmission, distribution infrastructure and revamp existing infrastructure. Read Report Overview @ https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/forklift-battery-market.html The forklift battery market can be segmented based on type, application, and region. Based on type, the forklift battery market can be classified into lead-acid battery, nickel-cadmium battery, and sodium-sulfur battery. Lead-acid batteries power most of the electric forklifts manufactured globally. These batteries are cost-effective and offer benefits such as high resilience in difficult environmental conditions involving dirt, chemicals, and vibrations. The maintenance costs of lead-acid batteries could be monitored and improved with inexpensive technology to reduce the total cost of ownership. Advanced charging technologies can bring up the efficiency to 90%, with power factors approaching 99%. It helps in keeping utility costs economical. In terms of application, the forklift battery market can be categorized into warehouse, manufacturing, construction, and others. Electric forklifts are being replaced by fuel cell forklifts. Technical innovations such as fast and opportunity charging during operator downtime add to the cost efficiency of lead-acid batteries. Rise in demand for green products is a major trend in the forklift battery market. Manufacturers of forklift batteries are increasingly focusing on developing efficient quality batteries with less detrimental impact on the environment. The tensile strength and fatigue strength of the forklift battery joint are low. These are some of the restraints of the forklift battery market. Technological advancements are emerging in order to reduce forklift battery manufacturing cost with an aim to provide environmentally friendly and safe electrical solutions. In terms of region, countries in Asia Pacific such as India, China, and Japan are investing significantly in development of forklift batteries with environmentally friendly and halogen-free insulation. Several end-users are replacing their old equipment such as transmission and distribution transformers, power cables, circuit breakers, and switchgears with technically advanced transmission and distribution equipment to revamp their existing transmission networks. It is widely used to store electricity. North America offers high potential for the forklift battery market. The usage of forklift batteries is expected to increase in North America, as the U.S. government plans to refurbish infrastructure and produce eco-friendly energy distribution and transmission control systems. This is driving demand for forklift batteries. Request to view Sample eport: https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=44174 Countries in Europe such as Germany, France, Sweden, and the U.K. are increasing their focus on infrastructure investments for the development and improvement of renewable energy projects. This is anticipated to create the need to connect renewable energy sources to the grid network, thereby augmenting the usage of forklift batteries due to their properties such as low transmission loss. The forklift battery market in Middle East & Africa is anticipated to expand in the near future. Countries such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar have invested significantly in forklift batteries for development of infrastructure. Key players operating in the forklift battery market include Exide Industries, East Penn Manufacturing, Navitas System, Chloride Batteries, and Johnson Controls. Sapphire Princess arrived earlier, on Nov. 28. Southeast Asia and China Sapphire Princess, sister of Diamond Princess, is homeporting in Singapore for a fifth season and will sail to Southeast Asian destinations on three- to 13-day voyages. The ship will also embark on a 'Grand Asia' voyage return trip from Singapore to Shanghai over the Christmas and New Year period. Sapphire Princess will then continue sailing in the region before redeploying to Europe for the summer. Diamond Princess will operate Christmas and New Year sailings to Southeast Asian destinations. For the Christmas period, Diamond offers a 10-day round-trip sailing from Singapore to Kota Kinabalu, Nha Trang, Ho Chi Minh City, Bangkok and Ko Samui. The New Year itinerary is a 10-day sailing from Singapore to Bali, Port Klang, Penang (late night stay) and Phuket. 'With two ships homeporting in Singapore for the first time, were offering guests an expansive schedule of sailings to experience some of the most incredible destinations in the region, while celebrating in style on the high seas,' said Farriek Tawfik, director Southeast Asia, Princess Cruises. Annular solar eclipse Sapphire Princess will return to Singapore for a sixth homeporting season next year which will include a cruise to see the annular solar eclipse from the Straits of Malacca on Dec. 26. The cruise to experience this natural wonder when the moon covers the sun's centre, leaving the Sun's visible outer edges to form a 'ring of fire,' departs on Dec. 17. Diamond Princess will undergo a drydock in Singapore before returning to Japan in February for a sixth season sailing round-trip from Yokohama and Kobe. The March to November season features 60 departures on 40 unique itineraries, visiting 41 destinations in seven countriesmore ports than ever before. Offerings include access to 11 UNESCO World Heritage sites and nine late night port calls. Officials found about six tonnes of processed cannabis and 3m super-strength "Captagon" amphetamine pills hidden aboard the St Kitts & Nevis-flagged vessel Noka, it said in a statement. The 3,265 dwt freighter, with a crew of 11, was en route from the Syrian port of Latakia to Benghazi when it was intercepted by Greek authorities off the southeastern coast of Crete on 5 December and escorted to Crete's Heraklion on 8 December, where the authorities unloaded its entire cargo. The drugs were found under false floors in eight containers, hidden between layers of coffee, spices and wood shavings. Greek authorities have impounded the vessel and its contents. The crew have been arrested and will appear before a public prosecutor. Syria became a major amphetamines exporter and consumer as the trauma of the country's civil war fuelled demand and the breakdown in order created opportunity for producers. Captagon was said to be a fund-raising tool and stimulant for militants says Reuters. The government now controls most of the country and Islamic State is close to defeat. Scientists say Captagon is a super-boosted amphetamine with unique chemical complexities allowing it to induce potent psychoactive effects far more rapidly than amphetamines alone. The new facility located in KIZAD, Middle Easts largest industrial zone and a subsidiary of Abu Dhabi Ports, will serve sectors including oil and gas, manufacturing, construction, FMCG, household effects, and specialist equipment. Abu Dhabi is increasingly becoming a major global hub for logistics and shipping, and so it is only natural that a player of GACs scale and reputation would be looking to expand its presence in the Emirate, said Samir Chaturvedi, ceo of KIZAD. By joining the thriving KIZAD community, GAC becomes the latest major enterprise to realise the impact that the strategic location and exceptional infrastructure and support offered by our zone can have on their business. GAC Abu Dhabis managing director, Goran Eriksson said: Khalifa Port is an essential gateway to Abu Dhabi. Setting up operations at KIZAD gives us the advantage of being close to the state-of-the-art port, enabling greater operational efficiency for both GAC and our customers. GAC has been in Abu Dhabi since 1967, and today has facilities at Sila, Ruwais, Mussafah, Mina Zayed and Abu Dhabi International Airport. KIZAD has also recently launched KIZAD Logistics City, in response to the needs of distributors, manufacturers, shippers and logistics companies in the region. The new hub is adjacent to Khalifa Port, close to major UAE airports, and connected by highways to Abu Dhabi, Dubai and into Saudi Arabia. Read more: Khalifa Industrial Zone launches new free zone warehouses KIZAD has further expanded its product offerings with the launch of new free zone warehouses and Light Industrial Units (LIUs). The free zone warehouses will cater to trading and export companies, Third Party Logistics, freight forwarders and distributors while the pre-built and flexible LIUs will serve various light manufacturing businesses and workshops. Press Release December 19, 2018 Dispatch from Crame No. 437: Senator Leila M. de Lima's Statement on the Passage of a House Resolution Endorsing the Shift to Federal Government and the Removal of Term Limits 12/19/18 Just before Congress went on recess last week, the House of Representatives approved Resolution of Both Houses No. 15 (RBH15) which proposes revisions in the 1987 Constitution. Led by no other than House Speaker Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and her allies, RBH15 proposes a shift from a unitary form of government to a federal system where, among others, incumbent elected officials may enjoy "unlimited" terms of office. What makes the passage of this RBH15 even more scandalous, outrageous and unprecedented is the fact that it slipped past us while we were all amazed at the spectacle of some Congress leaders and the members of the Executive Department trading barbs upon the discovery of multi-billion "pork insertions" in the proposed national budget. Without public scrutiny, RBH15 passed through plenary debates in only three session days. Obviously, the House leadership's railroading of the passage of RBH15 is a typical trademark of CGMA who, like the proverbial thief in the night, was proclaimed the winner in the 2004 presidential election. Never mind if Congress, with its enormous power, allowed the third extension of martial law in Mindanao. Never mind if Congress once again kowtowed to the President's wishes while remaining oblivious about the economic woes of our people. But, for such a very sensitive task of overhauling the basic law of the land, it is Congress' duty and obligation to the people to at least require a comprehensive and open debate on the proposals. The Filipino people have the right to a full and fair deliberation, given wide-ranging implications of the proposed revisions on all our lives, and those of our children and even our children's children. Unfortunately, the only transparency to be found in Arroyo's Lower House is its members' arrogance and greed to find any way possible to revise the Constitution - no matter what or how much it takes - so that those who are desperately pushing for it can perpetuate themselves in power and enrich their pockets with taxpayers' money. Mrs. Arroyo should realize that she is no longer the president. She or Mr. Duterte should never tinker with our Constitution and the fate of our nation and its people. Even when time comes to change our Constitution, our people cannot bet on those who are currently pushing for it. Their words and actions cannot be trusted anymore to decide what is best for the interest of our nation. Still, we must insist from our "honorable" congressmen to answer the lingering question: How does revising our Constitution get the lives of ordinary Filipinos better? It is a tragedy that even in the past efforts to introduce revisions or amendments to the Constitution, the Filipino people are being made to swallow the misleading proposition that the present Constitution has created the societal ills we have today, and that revising it is the only way to get us out of poverty. That is patently false. RBH 15 is the latest gift from Mrs. Arroyo and her allies to Duterte who has repeatedly displayed his penchant for quick-fixes to the country's problems. Duterte's push for Charter Change is meant to protect his and his minions' political interests and cover up their inability to lead and govern our people. The best Christmas gift that our congressmen can give us is to lay their hands off of Cha-Cha. At least, we're consoled by the idea that Cha-Cha has slim chances of securing the Senate's nod. And even if it does, I have faith that the Filipino people will stand up to defend our Constitution. The cost of printing currency notes has increased by 45.44 billion. This, according to a written reply from Finance Minister Arun Jaitley to the Parliament. Jaitley while answering a question on expenses incurred on printing of bank currencies, replied, "Rs 79.65 billion and Rs 49.12 billion were spent on printing of banknotes in the year 2016-17 and 2017-18, respectively." The expenditure on printing of notes during 2015-16 (the year prior to demonetisation) was Rs 34.21 billion, said Jaitley. The difference between the expenses incurred in FY16 and FY17 is Rs 45.44 billion. A year later, that is in FY18, the printing cost has come down to a substantial Rs 49.12 billion, with the RBI sufficing the shortage of bank notes. He added that "In addition, Rs 1.09 billion, Rs 1.47 billion and Rs 1.15 billion were spent on remittance of currency in the year 2015-16, 2016-17 and 2017-18, respectively." The minister was also asked to give expenditure details for replenishing the currency withdrawn during demonetisation. "Expenditure on printing of new notes after demonetisation has not been shown separately by the Reserve Bank of India in its accounts," Jaitley said. The minister also informed the House that no public sector bank, except for SBI, had reported incidences of casualties during the period of demonetisation. Jaitley said that there were no other PSUs except for SBI, where three staffers and one customer died during the demonetisation drive. A total compensation of Rs 4.407 million (including Rs 300,000 to customer) was paid to their family members, he said. On asked if any study has been conducted on the impact of demonetisation on industry and employment situation in the country, the finance minister said that "no specific study has been done by government". Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced the demonetisation of high-value notes on November 8, 2016, which wiped out nearly 86 per cent of the total currency notes in circulation. In a separate question asked about the durability of new Rs 500 and Rs 2000 bank notes, Minister of State for Finance Pon Radhakrishnan said these notes are expected to have normal life as that of older currencies. Radhakrishnana, however said that some design elements have been changed in the new banknotes. The visible changes in the new banknotes are in form of size, color and inclusion of heritage motifs. He also said that there are no issues related to non-recognition of new Rs 500 and Rs 2,000 notes by the ATMs. Private lender Yes Bank on Tuesday said it had sold a 2.13% share in Fortis Healthcare. The Bank on Tuesday communicated via a BSE filing, that this transaction was made in various tranches. "Yes Bank Limited has sold 12,337,323 equity shares having nominal value of Rs 10 each, constituting 2.1279 per cent of the paid-up share capital of Fortis Healthcare Limited, in various tranches last being on December 18, 2018," said the bank in its filing. The transactions have resulted "into a change in holding of the Bank by more than 2 per cent of the total shareholding of FHL, from the last disclosure made by the bank on March 15, 2018," it added. Speaking at the press meet of Maari 2, Dhanush said: "Playing Anbu in Vada Chennai was actually quite easy. The only thing which was difficult in Vada Chennai was to carry the guilt. But being Maari required a lot of homework because he is neither good nor bad. He doesn't love anyone and nobody loves him. Generally, if someone irks me in real life, would silently move away from them but Maari would hit them. So if there is a scene to hit someone in Maari, I would imagine people who pissed me off ". Dhanush also heaped praise on Sai Pallavi."She is a very talented and smart heroine. Pallavi only accepts films which give her great importance or scripts which revolves around her character. She accepted Maari 2 because her role is pivotal. The most difficult part about her is that she would cry real for emotional scenes and if we take it easy in one scene , Pallavi would own the scene with her performance". Dhanush also said that Maari 2 is not a world class movie and it won't be a case study to film students. "But I can assure that Maari 2 is a pukka mass commercial cinema which you will definitely enjoy watching on big screen. Other than the fun mass element, Maari 2 also has a surprise in the second half". Talking about Yuvan Shankar Raja, Dhanush said: "Yuvan said here that he needed push at this point his career and thanked us. I don't know what push he needed. Yuvan sir is the one who gave life to me in Thulluvatho Illamai. He debuted twenty three years back and only his competitors keep changing but there is only one Yuvan". In his petition, Dileep pleaded that he has been framed in the case by the police relying only on the statement of the prime accused, Pulsar Suni. Kochi: The Kerala High Court here on Wednesday dismissed a plea by the eighth accused in the infamous actress abduction case, actor Dileep, for a CBI probe into the case. Meanwhile, the prosecution put up their defense by stating that an accused in a case has no right to decide on what sort of probe should take place and, moreover, this is nothing but a ploy to delay the trial in the case. The police probe team has already filed the detailed charge sheet in the case and the court on March 14 summoned all the accused. Dileep was arrested after two rounds of questioning on July 10, 2017, for his alleged role in the conspiracy behind the abduction of the young actress. Dileep's former wife Manju Warrier is one of the witnesses in the case. After being in jail for 85 days, Dileep secured bail. The actress was allegedly abducted on February 17 last year while she was on her way to Kochi from Thrissur. Pulsar Suni, the prime accused, drove her around for two hours before she was dropped near the home of director-actor Lal, who later called the police. Page Content PHILIPSBURG On December 14th, the General Audit Chamber of the Netherlands released a focus study on the contribution of the Netherlands to the recovery and reconstruction of Sint Maarten. This report recognizes some of the challenges that the Government of Sint Maarten is experiencing in the recovery process. The past months have taught us that the preparation and implementation of Trust Fund projects takes much more time and capacity than Sint Maarten and the Netherlands originally anticipated. The implementation of the projects is challenging, not because of a lack of will or commitment of the political leaders and civil servants of Sint Maarten, but because of the extreme constraint of capacity on the island and the complex procedures of the World Bank, Prime Minister Leona Romeo-Marlin remarked. Yesterday, the World Bank published its report on the status of the Trust Fund, providing a full overview of all activities that have been executed with the World Bank between April and November of this year. The World Banks report acknowledges the implementation of recovery projects on Sint Maarten is challenging, due to capacity constraints within Government and the limited capacity of the market to respond to the demands for goods, works and services in a flexible and rapid manner. Prime Minister Romeo-Marlin observed that for some people the report of the Audit Chamber may be a reason to question why the Netherlands has chosen the World Bank to assist Sint Maarten in the recovery process or to blame the Government of Sint Maarten for delaying the recovery of the island. As Prime Minister, I do not want to turn our recovery process in a political blame game and I reiterate that the Government of Sint Maarten has and will remain fully committed to the cooperation with the World Bank. While we did not chose the World Bank, we are grateful for their support and ongoing commitment. Prime Minister Romeo-Marlin emphasized that all parties should continue to work together towards solutions, without ignoring the challenges that the Government and our hard-working project teams face on a daily basis. Im counting on the people of Sint Maarten to protect the recovery process and the cooperation with the World Bank from cheap politics, and Im counting on the Netherlands and the World Bank to assist the Government of Sint Maarten as much as possible in providing technical expertise in an expedient manner. In the past six months, this Government has made significant progress in the cooperation with the World Bank, and managed to ensure that more than 250 million dollars is committed to the preparation and implementation of recovery and resilience projects. The Prime Minister of Sint Maarten noted that she is especially proud of the Interim Recovery Committee and the different ministries, who had no previous experience with the World Bank, but managed to prepare World Bank projects at record speed. On this point, the World Bank report notes that all projects currently under implementation were prepared with utmost urgency, in approximately one half to one third of the average time it takes to prepare a World Bank managed project. While everyone on Sint Maarten would like to see things get better right now, Prime Minister Romeo-Marlin reminds all involved that recovery is a process and Sint Maarten is bound to certain procedures, whether we like it or not. Within those procedures, my Government has and will continue to do everything in its power to accelerate the preparation and implementation of the different World Bank projects. Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site. 0108263 License for publishing multimedia online Registration Number: 130349 Registration Number: 130349 System error error: Can't call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25. context: ... 21: 22: 23: % foreach my $c (@categories) { 24: <%perl> 25: my $category_id = $c->get_id(); 26: my @stories = Bric::Biz::Asset::Business::Story->list ( { element_type_id=>1148, category_id=>$category_id , Order=> 'cover_date', publish_status => 't' , OrderDirection=> 'DESC' , Limit=>10 } ); 27: 28: 29: ... code stack: /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html:25 /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm:951 /var/cache/mason/obj/1784076917/main/smetimes/dhandler.html.obj:17 /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/autohandler_template.html:149 Can't call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25. 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"The Motown Phenom" UFC 8 . . , ... Gunmen kill Nigeria's ex-defence chief: official Lagos, Dec 19 (AFP) Dec 19, 2018 Gunmen have shot dead a former defence chief on a main road outside Nigeria's capital Abuja, the air force said, in an attack that underscores worsening security in the vast west African nation. "It is with a heavy heart that I regretfully announce the unfortunate demise of former Chief of Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Alex Sabundu Badeh", air force spokesman Ibikunle Daramola said in a statement late Tuesday. Badeh, 61, died Tuesday "from gunshot wounds sustained when his vehicle was attacked while returning from his farm along Abuja-Keffi road". The air force did not say if any arrests had been or suggest motives behind the killing. Badeh who served as Nigeria's defence chief under former president Goodluck Jonathan, retired in 2015. He has been on trial since his retirement over allegations of corruption while in office. Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, is battling a myriad of security problems, from Boko Haram jihadist insurgency in the northeast to farmer-herder conflict in the centre and kidnappings for ransom ans armed robberies in the south. President Muhammadu Buhari who came to power in 2015 and is seeking a second term in February elections, has come under fire for not doing enough to address the security challenges. US bans Serbian ex-police officer over Albanian-American murders Belgrade, Dec 19 (AFP) Dec 19, 2018 The US has banned a former Serbian police commander for being "credibly implicated" in the 1999 murders of three Albanian-Americans, a case that has long been a source of friction between Belgrade and Washington. The Bytyqi brothers -- Ylli, Mehmet and Agron -- were detained by Serbian police in June 1999 shortly after the end of the war between Serb forces and ethnic Albanian separatists in Kosovo, where the three had roots. Two years later, their bodies were found in a mass grave in a special police base in eastern Serbia. No one has ever been convicted over the crime, though two Serb police officers were acquitted in a 2012 trial, drawing concern from the US that the case would remain unsolved. On Tuesday, the US State Department said that Goran Radosavljevic, a well-known former police commander now in his 60s, was banned from the US because he has been "credibly implicated" in the killing of the Bytyqi brothers. Known by his nickname 'Guri', Radosavljevic was a commander of a unit in Petrovo Selo, a police training camp where the mass grave containing the bodies of the Bytyqi brothers, and 71 others, were later found. He later went on to join the current ruling party in Serbia, the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS). According to local media, he has previously denied any involvement in the murders. Radosavljevic's wife and daughter are also banned from the country, the State Department said. More than 13,000 people -- mostly ethnic Albanians -- were killed in the 1998-99 war that paved the way for Kosovo to declare independence a decade later. After the fall of former Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic in 2000, the bodies of more than 800 Kosovo Albanians were exhumed from mass graves around Serbia. Serbia has never recognised Kosovo's independence and still considers the former province a renegade territory. Coalition says it launched strike at airport in Yemen capital Riyadh, Dec 19 (AFP) Dec 19, 2018 The Saudi-led coalition fighting on the side of Yemen's government said it launched an air strike Wednesday at the airport in the rebel-held capital Sanaa, destroying a drone. It is the first air strike that the alliance has confirmed carrying out at the airport since peace talks last week in Sweden that resulted in a ceasefire accord for the battleground port city of Hodeida. The coalition said in a statement carried by the state-run Al-Ekhbariya news channel that it targeted an unmanned aerial vehicle and "destroyed the aircraft that was in the process of preparing to be launched, thwarting an imminent terrorist attack". The coalition said that the Huthis are using the airport "as a military camp in violation of international humanitarian law". The strike Wednesday comes nearly a week after an agreement between the government and the Iran-aligned Huthi rebels on the withdrawal of fighters from Hodeida and a planned swap of around 15,000 prisoners. A "mutual understanding" was also reached to facilitate aid deliveries to Yemen's third city Taiz -- under the control of loyalists but besieged by rebels. No deal was reached on the future of Sanaa airport, which has been closed to commercial flights for nearly three years. The airport will be discussed at the next round of talks, UN envoy Martin Griffiths said. The two sides have agreed to meet again in late January to define the framework for negotiations on a comprehensive peace settlement. The war between the Huthi Shiite rebels and troops loyal to President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi escalated in 2015, when he fled into Saudi exile and the coalition intervened. Since then, the war has killed some 10,000 people, according to the World Health Organization, although human rights groups say the real death toll could be five times as high. The conflict has also pushed 14 million people to the brink of famine in what the United Nations describes as the world's worst humanitarian crisis. Court to hear India-Italy marine shooting case next year The Hague, Dec 19 (AFP) Dec 19, 2018 An international tribunal will hear in July next year the case of two Italian marines accused of killing two fishermen in India, the court based in The Hague said Wednesday. The case of Salvatore Girone and fellow marine Massimiliano Latorre has poisoned relations between and Rome and New Delhi since it happened in 2012. The Italian pair are accused of shooting the fishermen while protecting an Italian oil tanker as part of an anti-piracy mission off India's southern Kerala coast. The Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague said it will hold a public hearing from July 8 to July 20 next year, on who has jurisdiction in the case. "The forthcoming hearing will address the jurisdiction of the Arbitral Tribunal as well as the merits of Italy's claims and India's counter-claims," the court said in a statement. Italy initiated international proceedings in 2015, referring the row to the Netherlands-based tribunal and asking it to rule on where the men should be tried. Both Italians were initially held in India, but Latorre was allowed to return to Italy in 2014 after suffering a stroke. Girone was permitted to do the same in 2016 after living in Italy's embassy in Delhi for four years. New Delhi insists both Italians should return to India for a final judgment by an Indian court. The detention of the marines, the murder charges and the long wait for the case to be resolved are sore subjects in Italy. Italy insists the oil tanker, the MV Enrica Lexie, was in international waters as part of an anti-piracy mission at the time of the incident. India argues the case is not a maritime dispute but "a double murder at sea", in which one fisherman was shot in the head and the other in the stomach. In December 2014 Rome threatened to withdraw its ambassador from India after a court rejected Latorre's original request for medical leave. Trump plans full withdrawal of US troops from Syria Washington, Dec 19 (AFP) Dec 19, 2018 The United States will withdraw its troops from Syria, a US official told AFP on Wednesday, after President Donald Trump said America has "defeated ISIS" in the war-ravaged country. The stunning move will have extraordinary geopolitical ramifications and throws into question the fate of US-backed Kurdish fighters who have been tackling Islamic State jihadists. "We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency," the Republican president tweeted. The US official said Trump's decision was finalized Tuesday. "Full withdrawal, all means all," the official said when asked if the troops would be pulled from all of Syria. Currently, about 2,000 US forces are in Syria, most of them on a train-and-advise mission to support local forces fighting IS. The official would not provide a timeline for a withdrawal, saying only: "We will ensure force protection is adequately maintained, but as quickly as possible." The Pentagon would not confirm the US troop pull-out. "At this time, we continue to work by, with and through our partners in the region," Pentagon spokesman Colonel Rob Manning said. A large contingent of the main US-backed, anti-IS fighting force in Syria, an alliance known as the Syrian Democratic forces (SDF), is Kurdish and is viewed by Turkey as a "terrorist" group. Ankara has said it plans to launch an operation against the Kurdish militia, known as the YPG (Kurdish People's Protection Units). While the YPG has spearheaded Washington's fight against IS, US support has strained relations between the NATO allies. Ties have grown even more fraught since the US set up observation posts in northern Syria close to the border with Turkey to prevent any altercation between Turkish forces and the YPG. Most US forces are stationed in northern Syria, though a small contingent is based at a garrison in Al-Tanaf, near the Jordanian and Iraqi border. - 'Short-sighted and naive' The decision to withdraw marks a shocking development not just for Kurds in Syria, but for long-established US doctrine in the region. Only last week Brett McGurk, the special envoy to defeat IS, said: "nobody is declaring a mission accomplished." "The military objective is the enduring defeat of ISIS. And if we've learned one thing over the years, enduring defeat of a group like this means you can't just defeat their physical space and then leave." A US presence in Syria is seen as key to pushing against Iranian influence in the country and across the broader region. Tehran militias have supported the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a Trump ally, said the president's decision was shortsighted. "President @realDonaldTrump is right to want to contain Iranian expansion," Graham said on Twitter. "However, withdrawal of our forces in Syria mightily undercuts that effort and put our allies, the Kurds at risk." Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, called the decision "extraordinarily short-sighted and naive." "This move will look like a 'withdrawal,' not a 'victory,' and yet more evidence of the dangerous unpredictability of the US president," Lister said. "This is not just a dream scenario for ISIS, but also for Russia, Iran and the Assad regime, all of whom stand to benefit substantially from a US withdrawal." IS swept across large swaths of Syria and neighboring Iraq in 2014, implementing their brutal interpretation of Islamic law in areas they controlled. But they have since seen their dream of a state crumble, as they have lost most of that territory to various offensives. In Syria, IS fighters are holding out in what remains of the pocket that once included Hajin, including the villages of Al-Shaafa and Sousa. Netanyahu vows Israel will defend itself after US Syria withdrawal Jerusalem, Dec 19 (AFP) Dec 19, 2018 Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Wednesday Israel will defend itself after the US withdraws from Syria, a decision the premier said he has discussed with President Donald Trump. "We will study its timetable, how it will be implemented and -- of course -- its implications for us. In any case we will take care to maintain the security of Israel and to defend ourselves in this area," Netanyahu said in an English language statement released by his office. The Israeli prime minister said he had discussed Washington's plans on Tuesday with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Trump. "We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency," the US leader wrote on Twitter, referring to the Islamic State group. Trump was hinting at plans to pull out of Syria, which were subsequently confirmed by a US official. "Full withdrawal, all means all," the US official told AFP on condition of anonymity. Currently, about 2,000 US forces are in Syria, most of them on a train-and-advise mission to support local forces fighting IS. Their withdrawal will be implemented "as quickly as possible", the official said without providing a timetable. Israel has launched dozens of strikes in Syria since the war started in 2011, targeting Iranian positions and those of Hezbollah as well as weapons convoys to the militant group. Both Iran and Hezbollah support Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and are enemies of Israel. Observers have warned a withdrawal of US troops from Syria would see Assad -- along with his Russian and Iranian allies -- secure his influence over the country and wider region. Trump plans full withdrawal of US troops from Syria Washington, Dec 19 (AFP) Dec 19, 2018 The United States will withdraw all of its troops from Syria, a US official told AFP on Wednesday, after President Donald Trump said America has "defeated ISIS" in the war-ravaged country. The stunning move will have extraordinary geopolitical ramifications -- and plunges into uncertainty the fate of US-backed Kurdish fighters who have been tackling Islamic State jihadists. "We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency," the Republican leader tweeted. The US official told AFP that Trump's decision was finalized Tuesday. "Full withdrawal, all means all," the official said when asked if the troops would be pulled from across all of Syria. Currently, about 2,000 US forces are in Syria, most of them on a train-and-advise mission to support local forces fighting IS. Most US troops are stationed in northern Syria, though a small contingent is based at a garrison in Al-Tanaf, near the Jordanian and Iraqi borders. Trump had previously voiced skepticism about the US presence in Syria, saying in March he wanted to bring troops home "soon." But the president's military advisors and international allies warned him against a precipitous pull-out and the mission continued. The US official would not provide a timeline, saying only: "We will ensure force protection is adequately maintained, but as quickly as possible." Echoing Trump, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said IS has been defeated territorially, but that the US-led coalition that includes dozens of nations would continue fighting the jihadists. "These victories over ISIS in Syria do not signal the end of the Global Coalition or its campaign," Sanders said in a statement. "We have started returning United States troops home as we transition to the next phase of this campaign." A Pentagon spokeswoman said the department had "started the process" of pulling troops out. It was not immediately known what effect the troop withdrawal would have on air operations in Syria. These have been ongoing since late 2014. - Fate of Kurdish fighters? - A large contingent of the main US-backed, anti-IS fighting force in Syria, an alliance known as the Syrian Democratic forces (SDF), is Kurdish and is viewed by Turkey as a "terrorist" group. Ankara has said it plans to launch an operation against the Kurdish militia, known as the YPG (Kurdish People's Protection Units). While the YPG has spearheaded Washington's fight against IS, US support has strained relations between the NATO allies. Ties have grown even more fraught since the US set up observation posts in northern Syria close to the border with Turkey to prevent any altercation between Ankara's forces and the YPG. In a sign of possible rapprochement, however, the State Department said Wednesday it had approved the $3.5 billion sale of Patriot missiles and associated equipment to Turkey. - 'Short-sighted and naive' - The decision to withdraw marks a remarkable development not just for Kurds in Syria, but for long-established US doctrine in the region. Only last week, Brett McGurk, the special envoy to defeat IS, said "nobody is declaring a mission accomplished." "If we've learned one thing over the years, enduring defeat of a group like (IS) means you can't just defeat their physical space and then leave," he said. The US-led coalition on Friday had said the mission was unchanged and any reports to the contrary were "false and designed to sow confusion and chaos." A US presence in Syria is seen as key to pushing against Russian and Iranian influence in the country and across the broader region. Tehran-backed militias have supported the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and Moscow in 2015 intervened in the conflict to prop him up. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a Trump ally, said the president's decision was unwise. "President @realDonaldTrump is right to want to contain Iranian expansion," Graham said on Twitter. "However, withdrawal of our forces in Syria mightily undercuts that effort and put our allies, the Kurds at risk." Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, called the decision "extraordinarily short-sighted and naive." "This move will look like a 'withdrawal,' not a 'victory,' and yet more evidence of the dangerous unpredictability of the US president," Lister said. "This is not just a dream scenario for ISIS, but also for Russia, Iran and the Assad regime, all of whom stand to benefit substantially from a US withdrawal." IS swept across large swaths of Syria and neighboring Iraq in 2014, implementing their brutal interpretation of Islamic law in areas they controlled. But they have since seen their dream of a state crumble, as they have lost most of that territory to various offensives. In Syria, IS fighters are holding out in what remains of the pocket that once included Hajin, including the villages of Al-Shaafa and Sousa. Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger, a former pilot in Iraq and Afghanistan, blasted Trump's decision. "Really? Iran is rejoicing right now. We left Iraq, and had to come back. I would sure hope the president and his advisers are smarter than this," he said on Twitter. Former Blackwater guard convicted for 2007 Baghdad massacre Washington, Dec 19 (AFP) Dec 19, 2018 A former security guard for the US firm Blackwater was found guilty of murder on Wednesday for his role in a notorious massacre of unarmed civilians in downtown Baghdad in 2007. Nicholas Slatten, 35, was convicted of first-degree murder by a federal jury in US District Court in Washington after five days of deliberations. Slatten was convicted of killing Ahmed Haithem Ahmed Al Rubia'y, 19, an aspiring doctor who was one of more than a dozen civilians killed by Blackwater guards in Baghdad's Nisour Square on September 16, 2007. While escorting a diplomatic convoy, Blackwater guards opened fire in the bustling square with sniper rifles, machine guns and grenade launchers -- allegedly without provocation -- leaving at least 14 civilians dead and at least 18 wounded. The Iraqi government says the toll was higher. The shooting deepened the resentment of Americans in Iraq four years after US forces toppled dictator Saddam Hussein and raised questions about the expanded use of armed contract guards by the US government. The US Attorney's Office presented testimony from 34 witnesses during the trial, including four who came to the United States from Iraq to testify. According to the government's evidence, Slatten, of Sparta, Tennessee, was the first to open fire. No date was set for his sentencing. The US Attorney's Office said the murder charge calls for a mandatory sentence of life in prison. It was Slatten's third trial on the charges. His first conviction was thrown out and the jury was unable to reach a unanimous verdict at his second trial. Slatten was one of four Blackwater guards who were found guilty in 2014. He was originally sentenced to life in prison while the three others were given 30-year prison sentences An appeals court has ordered that the three other Blackwater guards be resentenced. They are currently in custody pending resentencing. The content herein, unless otherwise known to be public domain, are Copyright 1995-2018 - Space Media Network. All websites are published in Australia and are solely subject to Australian law and governed by Fair Use principals for news reporting and research purposes. AFP, UPI and IANS news wire stories are copyright Agence France-Presse, United Press International and Indo-Asia News Service. ESA news reports are copyright European Space Agency. All NASA sourced material is public domain. Additional copyrights may apply in whole or part to other bona fide parties. Advertising does not imply endorsement, agreement or approval of any opinions, statements or information provided by Space Media Network on any Web page published or hosted by Space Media Network. Privacy Statement Optimization Are you frustrated with a slow pc or a hard disk not performing as it should? Try SLOW-PCfighter to speed up boot time on a slow PC, or try a free scan of FULL-DISKfighter to recover space on a full disk. The latest offering is DRIVERfighter to update your driver updater. Get complete PC optimization and extend the life of your PC with these must-have software tools. The Relotius Case Answers to the Most Important Questions In recent years, DER SPIEGEL published just under 60 articles by reporter and editor Claas Relotius. He has now admitted that, in several instances, he either invented stories or distorted facts. Aaiun occupied, Dec 19, 2018 (SPS) - The political activist and journalist, Salah Eddine Lebsir, was transferred, on Tuesday, from the Tata prison to the Bouzakarn prison. Salah Lebsir was arrested on June 6, 2015 after participating in peaceful demonstrations in the city of Smara, demanding the right to self-determination of the Saharawi people, he was sentenced to four years ending his sentence in June 2019. During the period of imprisonment, he carried out several hunger strikes, demanding more humane treatment and respect for his basic rights. The journalist was transferred from Tata prison, which is 719 km from El Aaiun (capital of Western Sahara), to Bouzakarn, 479 km away. SPS 125/090/TRA Paris (Algiers) Dec 19, 2018 (SPS) - A Saharawi Youth Union activist has stressed, in Paris, the seriousness of the situation of Saharawi students in Moroccan universities, in violations of the international rules and charters. Hamdi Omar, who is in charge of foreign relations at the Saharawi Youth Union, made the statement in a series of meetings on the sidelines of the International Festival of Solidarity. In a meeting with the head of the French University Centre for Western Sahara, Sebastien Boulay, Omar denounced Morocco's racist policy against Saharawi students in Moroccan universities. Omar underlined the various difficulties underwent by Saharawi students, including arrest and imprisonment campaigns and physical abuses against them because of their activities within the university. The Saharawi official said the Saharawi students have been punished for speaking of Western Sahara people's struggle for independence and liberty. He, besides, informed his host of the latest developments of the Saharawi cause at the regional and international levels. SPS 125/090/TRA Headlines from the survey were as follows. Farming subsidy after we leave the EU should continue Government funding of farming subsidies after we leave the EU should remain the same at around 3 billion per annum was the view expressed by 32% of survey respondents. 20% said farming subsidies should increase after leaving the EU, and 9% said they should decrease. Just 7% said there should be no farming subsidy. Paying farmers subsidy for delivery of public goods is more strongly supported than paying subsidy to farmers to produce food The switch to paying farmers for delivery of public goods rather than producing food was strongly supported. 47% of respondents supported this approach against just 9% who strongly opposed or tended to oppose it. Public goods were described as including creating new habitats for wildlife, improving soil health, reducing emissions, promoting greater biodiversity as well as encouraging public access and improved health and welfare for farmed animals. Of those who supported the proposed new subsidy system more (54%) had voted remain in the EU referendum than those who voted leave (45%). Safeguarding farm businesses is more important than allocating subsidy based on the delivery of public goods Asked whether the new subsidy system might place farm businesses at risk of failure, of those expressing a view more respondents (37%) said that the protection of farm businesses was more important than allocating subsidies for the delivery of public goods. However, 20% of respondents still said that allocating subsidies for the delivery of public goods was more important than protecting farming businesses. If the cost of UK produced food increases post Brexit there are more people prepared to pay for it than not The survey found that post Brexit and with a new subsidy system, more (39%) would be either very willing or somewhat willing to pay more for UK produced food. Conversely 23% said they would be either somewhat reluctant or very reluctant to pay more. 28% were ambivalent and 11% expressed no view. The strongest reluctance geographically to pay more for UK produced food after Brexit was in Scotland followed by London. The Association is warning that the proposed salary thresholds may threaten the status of EU vets carrying out critical but comparatively low-paid roles in public health. The Immigration White Paper, includes plans to scrap the cap for skilled workers, such as doctors and engineers, and a consultation on a minimum salary requirement of 30,000 for skilled migrants seeking five-year visas. BVA is warning that a 30,000 threshold for EU workers could lead to a near-total wipeout of veterinary surgeons in critical public health roles in UK slaughterhouses, with devastating consequences for UK trade. Starting salaries for Official Veterinarians monitoring standards, food safety and animal health and welfare in abattoirs are in the mid-20,000s, meaning that imposing this threshold following consultation could jeopardise the capacity of this vital and specialist section of the workforce. Around 95 per cent of Official Veterinarians working in UK abattoirs are from overseas, predominantly the EU. BVA has repeatedly warned that any new immigration measures must consider the veterinary professions high reliance on the EU for workforce supply and mitigate against shortages and disproportionate impacts in the public health arena. A more recent publication of this set of statistics is available. Latest publication: Financial statement statistics on credit institutions 2021, 2nd quarter Published: 19 December 2018 Net income from financial operations and operating profit of banks operating in Finland decreased in the third quarter of 2018 In the third quarter of 2018, the net income from financial operations of credit institutions engaged in banking in Finland amounted to EUR 609 million and their operating profit was EUR 350 million. Compared to the corresponding quarter of the previous year, net income from financial operations decreased by EUR 21 million and operating profit by EUR 101 million. These data derive from Statistics Finlands financial statement statistics on credit institutions. Net income from financial operations and operating profit of banks operating in Finland, 3rd quarter 2005 to 2018, EUR million Interest income and expenses In the third quarter of 2018, credit institutions engaged in banking in Finland accumulated EUR 1.2 billion in interest income and EUR 616 million in interest expenses. The net income from financial operations calculated as the difference between these was EUR 609 million. Compared to the corresponding quarter of the year before, net income from financial operations decreased by EUR 21 million, that is, around 3.4 per cent. Due to the renewed FINREP reporting practices of credit institutions, the net income from financial operations is not, however, in all respects fully comparable between 2018 and previous years. Administrative expenses Administrative expenses are the single largest expenditure item of banks operating in Finland. In the third quarter, banks had EUR 669 million in administrative expenses, which was EUR 99 million less than in the year before. Wages and salaries represented 44.3 per cent of administrative expenses. Compared to the third quarter of 2017, total wages and salaries decreased by EUR 11 million to EUR 296 million. Operating profit The operating profit, or profit from continuing operations before taxes, was EUR 350 million. Compared to the third quarter of the previous year the operating profit diminished by EUR 101 million. Due to the renewed FINREP reporting practices of credit institutions, the operating profit is not, however, in all respects fully comparable between 2018 and previous years. Balance sheet The aggregate value of the balance sheets was EUR 383 billion. The balance sheet was 2.9 per cent up from one year ago. The share of own equity in the total of the balance sheets was 4.0 per cent or EUR 15 billion. Compared to the corresponding period of the previous quarter, banks own equity declined by EUR two billion. Due to the renewed FINREP reporting practices of credit institutions, the balance sheet items are not, however, in all respects fully comparable between 2018 and previous years. A company restructuring made in the Finnish banking sector in the first quarter of 2018 explains part of the unexceptional changes in the profit and loss account and balance sheets and, in particular, in equity. Source: Credit institutions' annual accounts, Statistics Finland Inquiries: Antti Suutari 029 551 3257, Jarkko Kaunisto 029 551 3551, rahoitusmarkkinat@stat.fi Director in charge: Ville Vertanen Publication in pdf-format (266.6 kB) Updated 19.12.2018 Referencing instructions: Official Statistics of Finland (OSF): Financial statement statistics on credit institutions [e-publication]. ISSN=2342-5180. 3rd quarter 2018. Helsinki: Statistics Finland [referred: 2.12.2021]. Access method: http://www.stat.fi/til/llai/2018/03/llai_2018_03_2018-12-19_tie_001_en.html Would better access to the Mississippi River be advantageous to Ste. Genevieve? Yes! It would boost tourism and be awesome for locals. Not really. Anyone who really wants to see it can drive to the ferry landing. View Results Chronicle of the Week Chronicle of the Week: Isabel dos Santos and the Economic Empowerment of African Women 19-Dec-2018 / 19:30 GMT/BST Isabel dos Santos and the Economic Empowerment of African Women By Haley Thompson At a United Nations debate in New York, Isabel dos Santos, who is currently the richest woman in Africa (https://bit.ly/2Gxf9aw), spoke of the economic empowerment of African women as a key to transforming society. This and many of her other hopeful and encouraging messages have inspired many citizens in African countries, mainly young women, to pursue their ambitions in business. Download Image 1: https://bit.ly/2UZZ2p5 Download Image 2: https://bit.ly/2rKGR9t Dos Santos believes that some of the most promising and successful businesspeople in the world have been African because of the continent's entrepreneurial spirit. This spirit, however, has been weighed down by the stigmatization of women in the workplace. This has robbed the economy of valuable innovators and has barred women from achieving their ambitions. But by ensuring that young women can access the same education, job opportunities, and potential for growth as men, dos Santos believes that she can change this attitude and instill a national confidence in women. This type of thinking falls in line with her more general philosophy of reform: "First the seed, then the future." This dictum seems to urge against immediate change and, instead, encourages slow and steady growth. The seeds that Isabel dos Santos thinks ought to be planted are also tied up in the economic freedom of women - by creating jobs, providing training, and breaking sexist stigmas, she believes that women can experience increased financial stability while giving their home countries more influence in the international economy. Dos Santos' Vision of an Entrepreneurial Africa Isabel Dos Santos (https://bit.ly/2POZHGd) has spent a lot of time planting these seeds in Africa, focusing her efforts in her home country of Angola where she meets with young people and speaks with them about the power of entrepreneurship. Sometimes, she visits them in small, personable rooms at universities and other institutions, other times in much larger ones during her speeches and debates. Most tellingly, she refers to famous African entrepreneurs as a "great family" and invites everyone with the motivation to work hard and come join them. She often encourages young women to leverage the world's increased reliance on technology and artificial intelligence, which she refers to as "digitalization". She believes working toward innovations in technology is key to increasing Africa's presence in the international economy while flooding the continent with unique employment opportunities. With just a computer and internet connection, unemployed or underpaid citizens can find more work, sometimes with the higher wages that are more commonplace in developed countries, to support their families and stimulate their local economies. During a conversation with students at the University of Warwick interested in developing Africa, dos Santos tells a young woman who is eager to accomplish her ambitions "now" that she has to be patient and have not just a goal but a string of subgoals to reach it. She goes on to encourages the student to involve herself as deeply as she can in the decision processes that influence that goal, and also to understand that sometimes it's important to just focus on school, other times on a career or starting a business. This type of advice for strategic hesitance can be found in many of her speeches. Isabel dos Santos is the daughter of Jose Eduardo dos Santos, Angola's long-time former president. Much of her wealth came from her investments and her previous position as the chairwoman of an oil company owned by the state called Sonangol. Dos Santos considers herself an independent businesswoman (https://bit.ly/2rLNGrp) and investor and has become Africa's first females billionaire. Forbes ranks her as the 9thwealthiest billionaire in Africa for 2018. A Beacon of Hope in a Male-Dominated Market For young businesswomen in various African countries, her success story has been a beacon of hope. But dos Santos has told various reporters that her rise to riches was marred by the sexism she had to endure in a male-dominated African business world. She has no shortage of stories concerning prejudice and discrimination based on her gender, such as during business meetings where the people she's negotiating with would look to her male assistant, advisor, or lawyer for validation though she already stated her offer. She is also frequently asked what business her husband is in when her wealth is made clear. Despite her tribulations in the business world (https://on.ft.com/2EvASNr) , Isabel dos Santos has maintained a charitable and hopeful perspective on life and takes on many projects geared toward improving small communities and local economies. One of these projects was in Humpata, in the province of Huila, where dos Santos helped establish a strawberry field, "planting the seed" to empower citizens. This project gave 120 women a place to work and a new income. On her website, dos Santos says: "Creating opportunities and employment for women means betting on the progress of the communities themselves. When they thrive, women invest their income in the family, health, and education. I value this as a sense of duty, commitment, and dedication. The impact that women create around them is powerful and transformative." She calls on other African entrepreneurs to give back to their countries by investing in similar projects. Though they seem small-scale, she believes that with enough support, this type of philanthropic work can create a value chain large enough to impact the national economy. As a result, smaller communities will have more prosperous citizens and influence. Should those new entrepreneurs be African women, then dos Santos hopes that their success will help chip away at the stigma that women are less competent than men. This is all part of one of Isabel dos Santos' larger goals to increase the prosperity of African countries as a whole. She plans to accomplish this by working from the ground up, focusing on the individual, such as the promising young men and woman of various African countries. By empowering them, she is, in turn, empowering their communities. This creates value within towns that have historically not had the chance to prosper, and by strengthening local economies, the national economy itself is bolstered. "This is the true transformation of a country," she says. It starts with a little hope and promise, with planting the "seeds", and then, through the hard work of a community's individuals, a brighter future can be earned." More about Isabel dos Santos at https://twitter.com/isabelaangola?lang=en Shares is the leading weekly publication for retail investors. It is packed with investment ideas, news and educational material to help build and run portfolios and get more from your money. Shares puts on free Investor Events throughout the year across the country. They provide an opportunity for investors to learn more about companies on the stock market and hear from a range of investment experts including fund managers and Shares journalists. Dear Minister Ralph Goodale Minister of Public Safety & Emergency Preparedness Re. Sikh Extremism We are writing to express our concern with respect to the addition of Sikh (Khalistani) Extremism to the Public Safety Canadas 2018 Public Report on the Terrorism Threat to Canada. We note that the 2018 report on Canadas terrorist threat environment included the Sikh extremism component for the first time this year. We, and many in the Sikh community, are disappointed and confused as to what would prompt this addition. While the 2018 Public Safety report does not make any reference to current extremist activities in the Sikh community, it goes on to state, some individuals in Canada continue to support Sikh (Khalistani) extremist ideologies and movements. The report does not point to any current incident of violence or terrorism associated with the Sikh community in Canada and only references the 1985 Air India tragedy. Given the lack of any current incidents associated with extremism in the Sikh community, it appears that the addition of the section on Sikh extremism is linked to the fact that, despite any evidence, India has repeatedly raised this issue with Canada at every bilateral meeting between the two countries. Canadian Sikhs have repeatedly insisted that India smears any political speech and activism it finds offensive, such as exposure of Indias appalling human rights record or attempts at recognizing the 1984 Sikh Genocide as extremism. We also note that during Prime Minister Trudeaus visit to India earlier the year, the Government of Canada signed onto the Framework for Cooperation on Countering Terrorism and Violent Extremism between Canada and India. The Framework, formalizes increased collaboration between the law enforcement and security agencies of both countries and will develop exchanges and facilitate effective cooperation in the fields of security, finance, justice, and law enforcement, including, where appropriate, at the operational level. In September 2017, you released the Ministerial Direction to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service: Avoiding Complicity in Mistreatment by Foreign Entities. The Direction prohibits: the disclosure of information that would result in a substantial risk of mistreatment of an individual by a foreign entity; the making of requests for information that would result in a substantial risk of mistreatment of an individual by a foreign entity; and certain uses of information that was likely obtained through the mistreatment of an individual by a foreign entity. Given Indias appalling human rights record, we expressed our doubts as to how the Framework would be in compliance with this Ministerial Direction. Many in the Sikh community have expressed concerns that increased collaboration between Canadian and Indian counterparts may jeopardize the lives of Canadian Sikhs or their family and friends in India. It appears to many in the Sikh community that these steps have been taken by the Government of Canada to appease Indian concerns around imaginary Sikh extremism in Canada. We wish to be very clear- advocacy for Sikh human rights or Khalistan is not extremism and to suggest that it poses a danger to Canada is absolutely ludicrous. There is nothing to suggest there is anything happening in Canadas Sikh community except peaceful activism. Accepting Indian allegations of Sikh extremism deeply maligns the reputation of the community and has a real impact on the everyday lives of Canadian Sikhs. We are deeply disappointed that our community has been stigmatized due what to appears to be foreign interference and pressure. We are writing to request a meeting with you to discuss this matter and to understand what would have motivated the inclusion of Sikh extremism in the 2018 Public Report on the Terrorism Threat to Canada. Yours truly, Mukhbir Singh President World Sikh Organization of Canada By Victor Ing Special to The Post Immigration levels will continue to rise in Canada over the next three years Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada are expected to welcome as many as 350,000 new permanent residents per year by 2021. Most of these permanent residents will qualify as economic immigrants based on having a combination of valuable skills and work experience, and about 71,300 of them will be admitted under Provincial Nominee programs (PNPs). PNPs now represent one of the fastest growing pathways to immigrate to Canada but many people are not familiar with how they work. In this article we introduce you to immigration streams available under British Columbias PNP program (BCPNP). PNPs allow provinces and territories to select and nominate prospective applicants for permanent residents who intend to settle there and have the job skills and/or experience they value based on regional needs. Each of the provinces and territories that have PNPs have created unique immigration streams to attract candidates that will enhance the local economy and fill labour and skills shortages. Successful applicants to PNPs will be issued Nomination Certificates which allow them to apply for Canadian working permits and permanent residence. Below is a summary of the BC PNP immigration streams and how they are unique compared to other well-known economic immigration streams such as Canadas Canadian Experience Class (CEC) or the Federal Skilled Worker (FSW) Class. International Graduate Stream The International Graduate stream is designed for international students who have graduated in the past three years from public Canadian universities or colleges or private degree-granting universities or colleges. To apply under this stream, the successful candidate must have completed full-time coursework in a program lasting at least eight months. Whats unique: New graduates frequently do not have as much or any work experience performing skilled work compared to other candidates who want to immigrate to Canada. This stream allows new graduates with BC job offers in skilled occupations to qualify for permanent residence even without prior work experience. International Post-Graduate Stream The International Post-Graduate stream is designed to attract international graduate students who have completed graduate studies in a prescribed field of study. Not all graduate students are eligible for this stream. The successful candidate must have graduated in the past three years with a masters or doctorate degree in the natural, applied or health sciences fields from a university in BC. Whats unique: Unlike other PNP streams, applicants under the International Post-Graduate stream do not require a job offer from a BC employer or work experience to qualify for permanent residence. Entry-Level and Semi-Skilled and Northeast Development Region (ELSS Stream) The ELSS stream was designed to create a pathway to permanent residence for candidates working in key BC sectors facing labour shortages. Applicants will qualify under this stream if they work in specified occupations in the tourism/hospitality, long-haul trucking or food processing industries and have worked for their employer for at least nine months, or if they work in entry-level or semi-skilled occupations in the Northeast Development Region of BC. Examples of eligible occupations include hotel clerks and cleaners and restaurant servers and bartenders. Whats unique: Most of Canadas immigration programs for permanent residence require the successful candidate to have skilled work experience from either Canada or overseas. The ELSS stream creates a pathway for permanent residence for entry-level or semi-skilled workers. Skilled Worker Stream The Skilled Worker stream is designed to help workers qualify for Canadian permanent residence if they have a job offer from a BC employer in a skilled occupation and at least two years of directly related work experience in the occupation offered to them. Whats unique: Many of Canadas immigration programs require or favour applicants with skilled work experience obtained in Canada. The BC PNP Skilled Worker stream will consider foreign skilled work experience, including paid co-op work experiences abroad, as meeting the minimum experience requirements for a Nomination Certificate. This makes it easier for candidates who have never worked in Canada or have worked for less than one year to qualify for permanent residence if they have an offer of indefinite employment from a BC employer. Healthcare Professional The Healthcare Professional stream recognizes that health care workers, including doctors, nurses, and allied health professionals such as occupational therapists and physiotherapists are in demand in BC. Health care professionals with at least two years of directly related work experience in the occupation offered will be eligible to apply under this stream. Whats unique: With very few exceptions there is generally no preference shown nor any specific pathway available for prospective immigrants who work in specific occupations. However, due to the well-documented shortage of health care professionals in British Columbia, the BC PNP offers a direct pathway to apply for a Nomination Certificate to obtain permanent residence in BC to perform health services. In summary, the BC PNP offers unique pathways to permanent residence that may be suitable for many prospective immigrants who may not be aware that these streams exist. BCs PNP program welcomes international graduates, healthcare professionals, skilled workers and even entry-level or semi-skilled workers who want to make British Columbia their home. The PNP program continues to be an ever increasing aspect of Canadas economic immigration strategy and prospective immigrants should familiarize themselves with the various streams available in BC. Victor Ing is a lawyer of Sas & Ing Immigration Law Centre. He provides a full range of immigration services. For more information go to canadian-visa-lawyer.com or email [email protected]. #Goodbye TNS - You were there for me at my lowest, I struggle to think where Id be without you , an eco-fashion designer from Bristol, began creating her ocean waste dresses in 2017 after an image surfaced of hundreds of dumped body boards on the coast of South West England. Image Courtesy of Linda Thomas Verdict: a brilliantly moving story of survival Based on the autobiography of the man himself, Papillon follows Papi (Charlie Hunnam), a charming Parisian thief framed for murder who must undergo the terrible trials of prison camp in French Guiana in 1931. Along the way he is befriended by skinny billionaire Louis Dega, Rami Malek in yet another fantastic performance, who promises to fund his escape in return for protection. The entire film has an almost dreamlike quality, hazy lighting and lively music drawing the audience in to Papis lavish Paris lifestyle before it all goes terribly wrong. Harsh prison conditions contrast visually with the lush jungle of their surroundings, and the cinematography throughout is absolutely stunning. Hunnam delivers a taut and sophisticated performance as Papis superhuman determination keeps him going through extreme physical and mental torture. Its particularly impressive to see him balance an intimidating physical presence with tenderness as he grows to care for the man under his protection. The bond between the two of them is incredibly compelling, but after seeing Maleks performance in Bohemian Rhapsody, its hard not to see it as a waste o this talents to be playing second fiddle. He does a great job with the material hes given, managing to poke some laughs out of situations that really should not be funny, but Degas character is a little thin: both damsel in distress and wealthy benefactor, but somewhat lacking in depth. That being said, both Malek and Hunnam are what make this film fantastic. Purists may prefer the classic Steve McQueen/Dustin Hoffman adaptation from the 70s, but the 2017 film is a less highbrow and more grounded interpretation. They both have their merits, and in this age of zero originality in cinema, one might ask why this particular classic needed a remake. Well, it certainly succeeds in bringing the story to a whole new generation, and does so powerfully with somewhat lesser known actors taking on the roles, allowing the characters and story to shine. Hunnam has had some brilliant action-man roles in Pacific Rim and King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, but Papillon really gives him the scope to deliver a brilliant dramatic performance. A sentence to years in silent solitary with minimal sustenance leads to a hypnotic sequence where he has the audience literally holding their breath so as not to disturb the atmosphere. A brief foray into madness is certainly risky business in film, but Hunnam carries it off as well as he does the fight sequences. This film marks the start of a long and interesting career that not many would have predicted. The film is a love letter to the indomitable human spirit, but also a harsh and deliberate condemnation of the prison industrial complex that still unfairly convicts and imprisons countless innocent people. The flip side to wow, how brave he is for enduring all this, is an examination of how brutally unjust the entire institution is, that he should have to endure it at all. Be prepared for an insane rollercoaster of emotions that will have your hanging on the edge of your seat at times, and fighting back tears at others. Papillon flutters into cinemas on December 24th. Montreal, CA (H4T1V6) Today Rain. Some mixed winter precipitation possible. High 5C. Winds S at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 100%. Rainfall near a quarter of an inch.. Tonight Cloudy with showers of rain and wet snow this evening. Low -4C. Winds W at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of snow 50%. remaining of Thank you for reading! On your next view you will be asked to log in to your subscriber account or create an account and subscribepurchase a subscription to continue reading. You have reached a premium content area of TOL. To read this entire article please login if you are already a TOL subscriber. Not a subscriber? Subscribe today for access to: Full access to the website, including premium articles videos, country reports and searchable archives (containing over 25,000 articles). Global technology giant Siemens has announced the completion of two substations - Samanoud and Aboul Matameer - in the Delta region of Egypt. The project marks one of the countrys largest turnkey substations ever supplied. The two substations were built to transmit electricity from the Burullus power plant, the worlds largest gas-fired, combined cycle power station, to the national grid. The two 500/220-kilovolt (kV) substations will enable power delivery to Egyptian homes as well as different industries located in the Delta, Alexandria and Kafr El Sheikh areas. They will also help increase the capacity of the national grid, which is a key requirement to foster economic growth as defined by the goals of Egypts vision 2030. Gaber El Desouki, the chairman of the Egyptian Electricity Holding Company (EEHC), said: "To enable more resilient, efficient and reliable power systems, Egypt needs to enhance the countrys transmission lines to accommodate the increase in power generation capacity." "This is why the EEHC has been redefining the conventional approaches to upgrade the grid infrastructure across the country," he stated. The new substations build on Siemens contributions towards strengthening Egypts power sector. It comes shortly following the companys construction of six substations, in El Minia, El Beheira, Qalubia, Assiut and Kafr El Zayat cities, to transmit energy from Beni Suef and Burullus power plants. The first two substations were energised in a record time of only 10 months; from the contract signing to match the implementation timeframe of the mega-sized power plants, said the statement. Siemens Egypt CEO Emad Ghaly said: "An efficient and robust electricity network is an essential part of Egypts vision to drive long-term economic growth. We are pleased to build on a trusting relationship with EEHC to boost grid infrastructure." Farag El Saadany, the senior executive vice-president of Siemens Transmission solutions, in Egypt, said: "The two news substations will not only deliver more electricity to more homes, located near Alexandria and Kafr El Sheikh Governorates, but also support the focus on industrialization by providing reliable power supply to energy-intensive industries." "They will feed power to cement, oil and gas and petrochemical facilities as well as ongoing infrastructure development projects in the Delta region," he stated. The fast-track project was executed in a consortium with El Sewedy. As part of the agreement, Siemens was responsible for the design, engineering, construction, supply, and installation and commissioning of the two turnkey substations. This includes gas-insulated switchgear (GIS); power transformers; control systems as well as protection and telecommunication equipment.-TradeArabia News Service Bahrain has been ranked sixth overall in the region in the World Economic Forums Global Gender Gap Report 2018, securing an improvement of a whole 32 placements in the educational attainment pillar. However, despite this impressive performance, Bahrain's overall ranking saw a slight drop from 126th to 132th place globally, this is due to weakened performance in the other three pillars measured in the report. Regionally, despite continued progress it will take the Mena economies 153 years to close the gender gap at the current rate of change. The highest-placed economy in our index is Tunisia, which ranks 119. The United Arab Emirates (121st, 64.2 per cent) sees improvements in gender parity in the legislators, senior officials and managers and healthy life expectancy indicators, but a widening and counterbalancing gap in wage equality. Saudi Arabia (141st, 59 per cent) shows modest progress, but marks improvement on wage equality and womens labour force participation, as well as a smaller gender gap in secondary and tertiary education. The Global Gender Gap in 2018 Stagnation in the proportion of women in the workplace and womens declining representation in politics, coupled with greater inequality in access to health and education, offset improvements in wage equality and the number of women in professional positions, leaving the global gender gap only slightly reduced in 2018, according to the Forums Global Gender Gap Report 2018. According to the report, the world has closed 68 per cent of its gender gap, as measured across four key pillars: economic opportunity; political empowerment; educational attainment; and health and survival. While only a marginal improvement on 2017, the move is nonetheless welcome as 2017 was the first year since the report was first published in 2006 that the gap between men and women widened. At the current rate of change, the data suggest that it will take 108 years to close the overall gender gap and 202 years to bring about parity in the workplace. Within the global headline figures, it is possible to perceive a number of trends that are defining the gender gap in 2018. Of the four pillars measured, only one economic opportunity narrowed its gender gap. This is largely due to a narrower income gap between men and women, which stands at nearly 51 per cent in 2018, and the number of women in leadership roles, which stands at 34 per cent globally. However, in the same economic pillar, data suggest that fewer women are participating in the workforce. This a worrisome development for which there are a number of potential reasons. One is that automation is having a disproportionate impact on roles traditionally performed by women. At the same time, women are under-represented in growing areas of employment that require STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) skills and knowledge. Another potential reason is that the infrastructure needed to help women enter or re-enter the workforce such as childcare and eldercare is under-developed and unpaid work remains primarily the responsibility of women. The corollary is that the substantial investments made by many economies to close the education gap are failing to generate optimal returns in the form of growth. The other three pillars education, health and politics saw their gender gaps widen in 2018. In terms of political empowerment, the year-on-year deterioration can be partly attributed to the lower tenure of women in head-of-state roles around the world. However, data also suggest that a regional divergence is taking place, with 22 Western economies witnessing an improvement in political empowerment for women as opposed to a widening in the rest of the world. When it comes to women in parliament, these Western economies which collectively have closed 41 per cent of the gap saw progress reverse in 2018. The economies that will succeed in the Fourth Industrial Revolution will be those that are best able to harness all their available talent. Proactive measures that support gender parity and social inclusion and address historical imbalances are therefore essential for the health of the global economy as well as for the good of society as a whole, said Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum. Given the depth of the talent gender gap in AI, there is a clear need for proactive measures to prevent a deepening of the gender gap in other industries where AI skills are in increasing demand. These include traditionally male-dominated industries such as manufacturing, hardware and networking as well as software and IT services, as well as traditionally female sectors such as non-profits, healthcare and education. Industries must proactively hardwire gender parity in the future of work through effective training, reskilling and upskilling interventions and tangible job transition pathways, which will be key to narrowing these emerging gender gaps and reversing the trends we are seeing today. Its in their long-term interest because diverse businesses perform better, said Saadia Zahidi, head of the Centre for the New Economy and Society and Member of the Managing Board, World Economic Forum. TradeArabia News Service Technology Will Determine Buy-Side Winners Investment management firms executing plans with emerging technologies may separate themselves from the competitive pack next year according to the Deloitte Center for Financial Services. Deloitte said in a new report, 2019 Investment Management Outlook, that the buy side has been under pressure for a number of years and spent a lot of time developing plans and strategies. The study said: 2019 may be the year that some firms innovate and emerge through the execution of bold actions. Paul Kraft, US mutual fund and investment adviser leader at Deloitte & Touche, said in the report: Now is the time for investment managers to develop plans with a two- to five-year horizon to match the changing state of play and win investors of the future. Alternative data The consultancy said investment managers are exploring new alternative data sets to drive organic growth through differentiated alpha generation. Dirk Manelski, chief technology officer at Pimco, told Markets Media this year that asset managers who can quickly integrate and analyse both market data and alternative data will have a competitive advantage. Manelski said his priorities include cloud migration, digital transformation and data, data, data. He added: While these are the big change agenda items, priorities always need to include investing in our portfolio risk and analytics platforms. In another use of alternative data, Citywire reported that BlackRocks systematic active equity team will be using a range of sources, including earning calls, internet traffic and satellite images, for a new fund range. Artificial intelligence has graduated from a buzzword to an enabler that offers differentiated capabilities across the investment value chain, added Deloitte. The study also gave the example of Morgan Stanley combining machine learning algorithms with predictive analytics to help its 16,000 financial advisers generate customized advice for clients. The algorithms are designed to browse through research reports, diverse data sets, and news articles to generate insights for future investments and to understand the potential impact of events on client portfolios. Valentijn van Nieuwenhuijzen, chief investment officer atDutch fund manager NN Investment Partners, attended a Unicom conference on AI and sentiment analysis in finance this year which focused on how new sentiment data can drive stronger investment results and which new tools can extract the relevant information from sentiment and alternative data. He said afterwards in a blog: How it can be applied will vary across asset classes and market segments, and it will always be done in an adaptable and research-driven way. But it will be done, and I am convinced it will become an increasingly important driver of investment returns in what will be a more data-driven future, a future where smart digital augmentation of our human investment skill will prove to be a key differentiator. In its investment processes NN IP already uses Marketpsychs sentiment indices, which utilise AI to constantly score the news and other media and extract meaning. Acquisitions 1 2 next For more information on related topics, visit the following channels: UK drug regulator approves GSK Covid-19 treatment 02 Dec 2021 | 5:05 PM London, Dec 2 (UNI/Sputnik) The UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) gave green light on Thursday to the use of sotrovimab, a Covid-19 monoclonal treatment which its manufacturer, the London-based multinational pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), said retains activity against the Omicron variant of the coronavirus. see more.. Somali forces ambush & slain 12 al-Shabab militants in Mogadishu 02 Dec 2021 | 4:54 PM Mogadishu, Dec 2 (UNI/Xinhua) Somali security forces said Thursday they have killed 12 senior fighters of al-Shabab, a terror group, in a sting operation conducted in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia. see more.. Record low birth rates in China 02 Dec 2021 | 4:48 PM Beijing, Dec 2 (UNI) Chinas birth rate has hit an all-time low in 2020 and there's no indication that things are about to pick up anytime soon, according to the yearbook released by the country's National Bureau of Statistics. see more.. Child among four people injured in Kabul blast 02 Dec 2021 | 4:47 PM Kabul, Dec 2 (UNI) At least four people, including a child, were injured in the explosion that jolted Afghanistan's capital on Thursday. see more.. GPS glitch incident promptly over thanks to dialogue with Finland -Russia Security Council MOSCOW, Dec 19 (Sputnik) The recent incident with GPS glitches during NATO drills was quickly resolved thanks to the willingness of Finland to engage in dialogue, Alexander Venediktov, an aide to the Russian Security Council secretary, told Sputnik. The Trident Juncture exercises held on October 25 November 7 in several northern European countries including Norway and Finland were overshadowed by several instances in which pilots reported losing GPS signals. Helsinki said that Russia could be potentially responsible for the jamming the signal. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko said shortly after that Moscow would respond to possible questions related to the matter via diplomatic channels. "The incident with the failure of the GPS systems can and should be discussed calmly, in a businesslike manner, avoiding political engagement and hysteria. I cannot fail to note the position of our Finnish partners, who preferred to exchange opinions on what had happened in the format of a dialogue. As a result, the incident was over in a matter of days," the official said in an interview. Peacekeeping chief honours Tanzanian troops in Zanzibar United Nations, Dec 15 (UNI) A year on from the brutal killings of 15 United Nations peacekeepers from Tanzania in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the head of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) paid a visit to some of the victims families on Friday, to honour the memory of the soldiers who died in what was the biggest single loss of blue helmets in recent history. Speaking on the island of Zanzibar, home to 13 of the men, Under Secretary-General Jean-Pierre La Croix promised families their loved ones service and sacrifice, would never be forgotten. I know that its difficult to find words to express your pain. But let me assure you, that as you will never forget your brave heroes, we will never forget them as well, he said. UW Holds Naming Ceremony for Nips Nook at Geological Museum Longtime UW geology Professor Brainerd Nip Mears and his wife, Anne, have been honored for their support of UW with the naming of Nips Nook at the UW Geological Museum. Professor Mears died in 2015. (UW Photo) The University of Wyoming held a naming ceremony today (Tuesday) for the Brainerd Nip Mears Nook at the UW Geological Museum. Nips Nook is the display hall to the east of the Geological Museums main hall that has windows into the museum prep room. The space has been named in honor of the Mears family to highlight their deep commitment to and support of the UW Geological Museum and the university. Eminent professor and geologist Brainerd Nip Mears and horsewoman Anne Mears are longtime benefactors of UW. They recently continued their extraordinary support of their UW endowment -- the Brainerd "Nip" and Anne C. Mears Excellence Fund for the UW Geological Museum -- with a large additional gift that continues the endowments mission into the future. Previously, they contributed $570,000 to establish the endowment, which was matched by the state of Wyoming for $1.14 million. The funds purpose is to elevate the museum's national prominence in geological research and education. Dr. Mears and his wife, Anne, are an institution in and of themselves at the University of Wyoming, says UW President Laurie Nichols. They have given so much to the university through their years of service and support. It is an honor to name part of the UW Geological Museum after Dr. Mears, who made significant contributions to our understanding of Wyomings geology and gave generously to the museum itself. I would like to thank the Mears family personally, and on behalf of the university, for their generous support. The Mearses have long been leaders in private support of the university. They contributed funds and raised awareness to construct the Cliff and Martha Hansen Livestock Teaching Arena and Earth Sciences Building, among other things. Nip earned his bachelors degree in geology from Williams College and served in the Marine Corps in World War II in the South Pacific. While a student at Columbia University, he attended UWs Geology Summer Science Camp, where he fell in love with Wyoming and with Anne. He earned his doctorate from Columbia and then came to UW, where he taught for 40 years and also served as head of the Science Camp. Nip passed away in 2015. Anne earned her bachelors degree in art history in 1947 from Vassar College and a masters degree in art in 1956 from UW. The Mearses were active Morgan horse breeders and trainers for more than 40 years, and Anne was inducted into the American Morgan Horse Association Hall of Fame and is past vice president and lifetime director of the Continental Divide Morgan Horse Association. It was my great honor to have met Nip and Anne Mears many times after I arrived at UW in 1995, says Carrick Eggleston, head of the Department of Geology and Geophysics. They have been outstanding supporters of our department and of the museum for decades. Nip Mears had a tremendous impact on a generation of UW students -- I have Nips textbooks, Essentials of Geology and The Changing Earth, in my office. In the last decade, their support allowed us to a renovate and revitalize the museum, which is now visited by folks from all over Wyoming, from all 50 states and from 30 different countries around the world as well -- not to mention thousands of Wyoming school kids. We thank them both for their generosity and their long-term impact on Wyoming through the geosciences and through the museum -- all of which are on a solid footing long into the future. Todays program welcomed back UWs Columbian mammoth, affectionately dubbed Nip. Also called the Rawlins Mammoth or the Union Pacific Mammoth, Nip was a male Columbian mammoth discovered in the early 1960s by a dragline operator who was deepening a muddy spring in southern Wyoming. Paleoindian artifacts had been found at the site, including bone material, suggesting that the animal may have been a kill or was exploited after getting stuck in muddy sediments. The UW Geological Museum is a vital part of the university and recently was voted among the top university museums in the nation. It inspires the public of all ages and educational backgrounds with an appreciation for Wyomings prehistoric past, fossils and mineral resources, as well as highlighting important geology and energy research by UW students and faculty. I couldnt think of a better place in the museum to carry the name of Dr. Nip Mears, says Laura Vietti, manager of the UW Geological Museum. The space is extremely dynamic and is used as an exhibit space, an art gallery, a classroom, a reception area and an area of reprieve. Like its namesake, we hope to keep it an approachable, informative and inspiring space for decades to come. It is an honor and privilege to continue the legacy of the UW Geological Museum, and I cant wait to share our visions for the museum made possible by the continued support of the Mears family. The Geological Museum features displays to illustrate Wyomings past environments, highlighted by a 75-foot Apatosaurus (Brontosaurus) skeleton that dominates the museums exhibit hall. Another highlight is Big Al, a display of the most complete Allosaurus fossil ever found. Hundreds of rock and mineral samples from throughout Wyomings geological history also are displayed, including specimens that illuminate with fluorescent glow under ultraviolet light. There is an interactive terrain mapping program over a sandbox that projects the topographic contours onto the sand in real time as children and adults shift and build hills and valleys. Thanks to the Mearses invaluable endowment, the museum recently was renovated and upgraded. These renovations were absolutely necessary, as much of the museums infrastructure was outdated, and some did not meet code. Not only that, but stale display technology did not age well, though it was new and exciting when first introduced. Upgrades include exhibit changes that brought content in line with current science and updating displays with current technology, which makes them more interactive and more inspiring for visitors of all ages. Less showy, but just as vital to a modern museum, were the more basic upgrades such as up-to-date lighting, renovated staircases and entrances to make them compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act; updated environmental conditions; and the replacement of asbestos flooring tiles with polished concrete. Future renovations may include exhibits focusing on everything from the rise of mammals to Wyoming water to continued three-dimensional digitization of UW fossil collections. The program included remarks by Nichols. The event was sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences, the Department of Geology and Geophysics, and the UW Geological Museum. Peer pressure led Chandra Ram to get an Instant Pot, but she didnt expect it would lead her to explore her relationship with Indian food and to publish a new cookbook. 85% of Chinese Ships Disappear, AIS Base Stations Seized Along Chinas Coast Since early November, the number of vessels sending the Automatic Identification System (AIS) signal from seas around China plunged by 85 percent. On Oct. 28, more than 100,000 ships were broadcasting but, according to global shipping data provider VesselsValue, by Nov. 17, only 15,000 were broadcasting the signal. The steep decline comes after China's Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL)came into effect on Nov. 1. It requires companies that process data to get approval from the Chinese government before letting personal information leave Chinese soil. China security agencies seized and inventoried a large number self-built AIS base stations along the coastline. Gibraltar Prepares for No Deal Brexit Today marks 100 days before the United Kingdom and Gibraltar leave the European Union on 29 March 2019 and the Government of Gibraltar is stepping-up its preparations for a no deal Brexit. This follows the recent announcement that the United Kingdom, and indeed the European Union institutions, are also doing the same. The Chief Minister Fabian Picardo and the Deputy Chief Minister Dr Joseph Garcia returned from London today, where they attended a lengthy meeting together with the Attorney General Michael Llamas. The no deal preparations were high on the agenda in those discussions with senior officials at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Department for Exiting the European Union. The Chief Minister has designated the Deputy Chief Minister to deal with the logistical aspects of no deal planning and the Attorney General to coordinate the intensive legislative programme which will arise in such circumstances. It will be recalled that the United Kingdom and the European Union concluded a Withdrawal Agreement in November. Gibraltar is a part of that Agreement and is also included in its transitional provisions. However, the Agreement requires the approval of the United Kingdom Parliament and of the European Parliament. In the event that the UK Parliament does not approve the Withdrawal Agreement, then the United Kingdom and Gibraltar would leave the EU without a deal. The increased preparations are to implement plans to cover this eventuality. The Deputy Chief Minister chaired a meeting last week with different Heads of Department and related agencies in order to set out the policy priorities of the Government. The meeting included the Chief Secretary, who leads a working group of officials, and Attorney General Michael Llamas. The Civil Service and Public Sector as a whole will play an important part of plans for a no deal exit. The Government prepared an impact study on the consequences of different types of Brexit as early as 2016, within weeks of the referendum decision. This involved consultation across the public and private sectors and led to feedback from different entities. In the autumn of 2017 there was another round of consultation on more specific proposals with a number of public and private sector bodies. The Chamber of Commerce was given a confidential briefing at their request. There have, in addition, been discussions with the Ministry of Defence and The Convent. The Cabinet was briefed on Monday on the main areas where a no deal Brexit would be expected to have an impact. The Brexit Select Committee of the Gibraltar Parliament was itself briefed after the summer. The Government has continued with the publication of Technical Notices in preparation for a no deal Brexit. The first set of guidelines on passports, the second on pet passports and the third on driving licences and motor insurance have already been issued. More will follow. Commenting on the preparations, the Deputy Chief Minister, who is responsible for work relating to our EU exit, said: The preparations for a no deal Brexit does not mean that this is going to happen. It means that we need to plan for it in case it does. There is no need to panic. However, citizens and businesses need to be aware of the implications of leaving the EU without a deal, in order to mitigate the effects of this. The Government will itself take the lead in many areas. Gibraltar voted to remain in the European Union. Our best deal would be the withdrawal of the Article 50 letter and staying in the EU with the UK. However, the UK is leaving and if they go, we must go as well. Our historical, cultural, political, social and economic ties are with the United Kingdom and Brexit will not alter that. The Chief Minister, Fabian Picardo, said: As I told the Lords EU Select Committee, we are now going to step up our implementation programme for a no deal eventuality. In doing so, we will rely on great measure also on the work of our excellent Public Servants, in the Civil Service, the GDC and the wider Public Sector. We will be applying the same principles in our planning as have been applied in Operation Yellowhammer in the United Kingdom. We will also be working more closely now with the Private Sector and Unions to coordinate our positions across the community so that our National Readiness Action Plan is ready to kick in by the time a no deal might become an unfortunate reality which we will continue to work to avoid. Welcome to followthemedia.com The article or material you have chosen... ftm Radio Page ...is available for restricted access. You may access this specific article or material for 4 If you are an ftm Member, please go to the home page HERE and log in ftm Members can access all site material at no additional charge. You can JOIN ftm here The ftm newsletter available at no charge to all with registration To register click here. NEW YORK, Dec. 18, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Wolf Haldenstein Adler Freeman & Herz LLP is investigating potential securities fraud claims on behalf of shareholders of Sogou Inc. (NYSE:SOGO) (Sogou) resulting from allegations that Sogou may have issued materially misleading business information to the investing public. If you purchased and incurred losses in shares of Sogou Inc., please call Gregory Stone at (800) 575-0735 or (212) 545-4774, or email to gstone@whafh.com . Sogou Inc. operates as a Chinese online search engine. The Company develops Internet applications such as map, voice search, and smart phone assistant, as well as web directory and browser. Sogou serves clients in China. On November 8, 2017, Sogou priced its initial public offering (IPO) at $13.00 per share. Subsequently, in June and July of 2018, media sources reported that Chinese authorities were investigating Sogou concerning allegations that Sogou had failed to remove illegal content from its search engine. On July 30, 2018, Sogou reported that it had implemented remedial measures, including a ten-day suspension of part of its advertising business, as a result of the investigation. On this news, Sogous stock fell $0.78 or 7.55% to close at $9.55 on July 30, 2018. It has continued to decline and closed today at $5.49 per share. Wolf Haldenstein Adler Freeman & Herz LLP has extensive experience in the prosecution of securities class actions and derivative litigation in state and federal trial and appellate courts across the country. The firm has attorneys in various practice areas; and offices in New York, Chicago and San Diego. The reputation and expertise of this firm in shareholder and other class litigation has been repeatedly recognized by the courts, which have appointed it to major positions in complex securities multi-district and consolidated litigation. If you wish to discuss this investigation or have any questions regarding your rights and interests in this matter, please immediately contact Wolf Haldenstein by telephone at (800) 575-0735, via e-mail at classmember@whafh.com , or visit our website at www.whafh.com. ## Follow the firm and learn about newly filed cases on Twitter and Facebook . ## Contact: Image Group LA/ABCAfter ducking out of the spotlight in October to focus on her mental health, Selena Gomez has been spotted looking happy and healthy on a winter getaway with friends. In a series of photos shared on her pals Instagram pages this week, Selena is seen smiling with the group of friends on a snow tubing trip to Big Bear Lake, California. Shes wearing a black hoodie from Taylor Swifts Reputation tour merch, paired with a black coat, pants and hat. Selena is definitely in a healthier place than she was a few months ago, a source tells Us Weekly. It took lots of energy, focus and therapy to get over that particular hump in her life. In late September, Selena was reportedly hospitalized a number of times for medical issues related to her Lupus and subsequent kidney transplant. The stress of that led to a so-called "emotional breakdown and a stay at an East Coast psychiatric facility where she received dialectical behavior therapy, or DBT, which treats various mental health disorders. Selena was reportedly released from the facility in November. Copyright 2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved. TORONTO, Dec. 18, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- In a release issued under the same headline earlier today by PIMCO Account Management (TSX: PGI.UN), please note that in the first paragraph of the release the date the distribution will be paid has been updated. The corrected release follows: PIMCO Global Income Opportunities Fund (the Fund) (TSX: PGI.UN) is pleased to announce today that it has declared a monthly distribution on its Class A Units (the Units). The distribution is equal to $0.05688 per Unit and will be paid on January 15, 2019 to the holders of record at the close of business on December 31, 2018. Unitholders are reminded that the Fund offers a distribution reinvestment plan (DRIP) which will provide unitholders with the ability to automatically reinvest their distributions. Eligible unitholders are encouraged to contact the institution through which they hold their Units to confirm enrollment procedures and timelines. A copy of the DRIP is available at https://canada.pimco.com . The Fund invests in an actively managed portfolio comprised primarily of fixed-income securities selected from multiple global fixed-income sectors. The Manager, PIMCO Canada Corp. (PIMCO Canada), retains Pacific Investment Management Company, LLC, (PIMCO), to provide investment management services to the Fund. The Funds investment objectives are to: (a) provide unitholders with monthly cash distributions; (b) maximize total return to unitholders through distributions and capital appreciation; and (c) preserve capital. About PIMCO PIMCO is one of the worlds premier fixed income investment managers. With our launch in 1971 in Newport Beach, California, PIMCO introduced investors to a total return approach to fixed income investing. In the 45+ years since, we have continued to bring innovation and expertise to our partnership with clients seeking the best investment solutions. Today we have offices across the globe and 2,150+ professionals united by a single purpose: creating opportunities for investors in every environment. PIMCO is owned by Allianz S.E., a leading global diversified financial services provider. Forward-Looking Statements Certain statements included in this news release constitute forward-looking statements, including, but not limited to, those identified by the expressions expect, intend, will and similar expressions to the extent they relate to the Fund. The forward-looking statements are not historical facts but reflect the Funds, PIMCO Canada and/or PIMCOs current expectations regarding future results or events. These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results or events to differ materially from current expectations, including, but not limited to, market factors. Although the Fund, PIMCO Canada and/or PIMCO believes that the assumptions inherent in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and, accordingly, readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on such statements due to the inherent uncertainty therein. The Fund, PIMCO Canada and/or PIMCO undertakes no obligation to update publicly or otherwise revise any forward-looking statement or information whether as a result of new information, future events or other factors which affect this information, except as required by law. Contact: Agnes Crane PIMCO Media Relations Phone: +212 597.1054 English Dutch Rotterdam, the Netherlands - December 19, 2018, 07h00. Ease2pay N.V. ("Ease2pay" or the "Company") announces it has successfully raised additional capital of approximately EUR 2.31 million and it will issue a total number of 1,539,999 new ordinary shares (the Rights Offering) at the price of EUR 1.50 per ordinary share (the Offer Price). The proceeds from the Rights Offering will be used for i) the Company's working capital to enable growth of the Companys services and platform, ii) to repay EUR 1,471,000 nominal shareholder loans to strengthen the Company's balance sheet and prevent the related burdensome accounting treatment of these shareholder loans in the future. The Rights Offering was completed with an acceptance rate of 81% of the ordinary shares on offer, representing a total of 1,246,130 ordinary shares (the Offer Shares). The ordinary shares from the unexercised rights (the Rump Shares) were offered via a private placement to selected qualified investors in Europe who subscribed for 293,869 Rump Shares at the Offer Price, together with the Offer Shares raising EUR 2,309,998.50 for Ease2pay. The Company's outstanding share capital after completion of the Rights Offering will amount to 9,239,998 shares. Issuance of, payment for and delivery of the Offer Shares and Rump Shares is expected to take place on or about 21 December 2018. The Company expects that the listing and trading on Euronext Amsterdam of the Offer Shares and Rump Shares will take place on or about 21 December 2018. Mr. Borghuis, director of the Company, commented: "We are very grateful for the support and trust from our existing shareholders and new investors. This rights offering allows us to move forward with further developing our product offering and considerably expanding marketing efforts in the Netherlands." As a result of the repayment of the subordinated shareholder loans, Ease2pay has an additional interest charge of EUR 42,098 with which the shareholder loan is repaid at nominal value. In December 2018 the last part will be recognized as a charge in the income statement for Ease2pay, this will result in a higher debt of EUR 42,098, and a lower equity and result of EUR 42,098 for the full year 2018. NIBC Bank N.V. acted as a subscription, issuing and settlement agent in relation to the Offer Shares and as a sole bookrunner in relation to the Rump Shares. About Ease2pay Ease2pay is a payment and loyalty transaction platform with which you can turn every smartphone into a cash register and a pin terminal. The app allows consumers to order, pay and save in one operation without using cash registers or pin terminals. Ease2pay B.V., a subsidiary of the Company, is registered with the Dutch Central Bank (De Nederlandsche Bank) (DNB) as an exempted electronic money institution (elektronischgeldinstelling) and as an exempted payment service provider (betaaldienstverlener). Due to the applicable exemptions, Ease2pay B.V. is not under the supervision of DNB. Ease2pay B.V. is accredited for Mandate Service Provider and is a certificate holder Collecting Payment Service Provider (CPSP) iDEAL. The information communicated through this press release constitutes inside information (voorwetenschap) within the meaning of Article 7 of Regulation (EU) No 596/2014 (market abuse regulation). For more information, please contact: Jan Borghuis Director T: +31 (0)10 3074619 DISCLAIMER These materials are not for release, distribution or publication, whether directly or indirectly and whether in whole or in part, in or into the United States, Canada, Australia or Japan or any other jurisdiction where to do so would constitute a violation of the relevant laws of such jurisdiction. These materials are for information purposes only and are not intended to constitute, and should not be construed as, an offer to sell or a solicitation of any offer to buy the securities of Ease2pay N.V. (the Company, and such securities, the Securities) in the United States, Canada, Australia or Japan or in any other jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration, exemption from registration or qualification under the securities laws of such jurisdiction. The Securities have not and will not be registered under the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the Securities Act) and may not be offered or sold in the United States absent registration or an exemption from, or in a transaction not subject to, the registration requirements of the Securities Act. The Company has no intention to register any part of the offering in the United States or make a public offering of Securities in the United States. No communication or information relating to any offer or sale of the Securities of the Company may be disseminated to the public in jurisdictions, other than The Netherlands, where prior registration or approval is required for that purpose. No action has been taken that would permit an offer of the Securities of the Company in any jurisdiction where action for that purpose is required, other than in The Netherlands. The Company has not authorised any offer to the public of the Securities in any Member State of the European Economic Area (other than the Netherlands). With respect to any Member State of the European Economic Area (other than the Netherlands), and which has implemented the Prospectus Directive (each a Relevant Member State), no action has been undertaken or will be undertaken to make an offer to the public of Securities requiring publication of a prospectus in any Relevant Member State. As a result, the Securities may only be offered in Relevant Member States to any legal entity which is a qualified investor as defined in the Prospectus Directive. For the purpose of this paragraph, the expression "offer of securities to the public" means the communication in any form and by any means of sufficient information on the terms of the offer and the Securities to be offered so as to enable the investor to decide to exercise, purchase or subscribe for the Securities, as the same may be varied in that Member State by any measure implementing the Prospectus Directive in that Member State and the expression "Prospectus Directive" means Directive 2003/71/EC (and amendments thereto, including Directive 2010/73/EU, to the extent implemented in the Relevant Member State), and includes any relevant implementing measure in the Relevant Member State. No action has been taken by the Company that would permit an offer of Securities or the possession or distribution of these materials or any other offering or publicity material relating to such Securities in any jurisdiction where action for that purpose is required. The release, publication or distribution of these materials in certain jurisdictions may be restricted by law and therefore persons in such jurisdictions into which they are released, published or distributed, should inform themselves about, and observe, such restrictions. This announcement does not constitute a prospectus. Attachment English German Sika has agreed to acquire Arcon Membrane Srl, a leading manufacturer of roofing and waterproofing systems in Romania. By acquiring Arcon, Sika will significantly strengthen its position in the Romanian market and extend its product portfolio to meet the increasing demand for complete solutions in the roofing and waterproofing markets. The acquired business generates annual sales of CHF 23 million. The transaction is subject to approval by the Romanian anti-trust authority. With the acquisition of Arcon Sika will become the clear market leader in the Romanian roofing and waterproofing markets. It is also a further step in Sika's expansion in bituminous membranes, following several acquisitions in recent years such as Index in Italy, KVK in the Czech Republic, and Bitbau Dorr in Austria. Arcon is based in Sfantu-Gheorghe, 200 km north of Bucharest. In its fully automated manufacturing facility it produces technologically advanced bituminous membranes, with the potential to also serve other South East European markets. Furthermore, Arcon's product portfolio also includes thermal insulation systems for facades and roofs, combining EPS (expanded polystyrene) sheets and bituminous membranes. The acquired technologies will perfectly complement Sika's roofing, waterproofing, and building envelope systems. Ivo Schadler, Regional Manager EMEA: "Arcon's market leading position, comprehensive product portfolio, and established distribution network will support our growth strategy by opening up new cross-selling opportunities, as well as increasing our market access and the penetration of key projects. We would like to welcome the Arcon employees to our Sika team and look forward to growing our business together." CONTACT Dominik Slappnig Corporate Communications & Investor Relations +41 58 436 68 21 slappnig.dominik@ch.sika.com SIKA CORPORATE PROFILE Sika is a specialty chemicals company with a leading position in the development and production of systems and products for bonding, sealing, damping, reinforcing and protecting in the building sector and automotive industry. Sika has subsidiaries in 101 countries around the world and manufactures in over 200 factories. In 2017, our more than 18,000 employees generated sales of CHF 6.25 billion. The media release can be downloaded from the following link: L'Oreal Foundation awards Wits students fellowships Wits PhD students, Harshna Jivan and Olaperi Okuboyejo have received fellowships from the L'Oreal Foundation. The fellowships, which are part of the foundations L'Oreal-UNESCO For Women in Science, aim to improve the position of women in science by recognizing outstanding women researchers who have contributed to scientific progress The LOreal-UNESCO For Women in Science Sub-Saharan Africa regional programme has grown significantly since its inception. After eight editions in South Africa, we decided to host our ceremony in Nairobi to reinforce our commitment to giving all Sub-Saharan African women scientists an opportunity, says Alexandra Palt, Executive Vice President of the LOreal Foundation. Jivan and Okuboyejo were amongst 14 fellows from five countries in sub-Saharan Africa who gathered in Nairobi, Kenya earlier this month for a training programme that will help strengthen their careers and break the glass ceiling more easily. A jury of independent experts awarded the fellowships from more than 480 applicants, based on the scientific excellence of their work. The world needs science, and science needs women: nowhere is this more clearly illustrated than in African countries, which face significant challenges including climate change, access to energy or food security. Science and technology are key to addressing these challenges, and this will not be possible without women. Their talents and perspectives enrich relevant research, says Palt. Jivans PhD in Physics is entitled: Study on the Influence of Nuclear Deformation on the Pygmy Dipole Resonance in Samarium Isotopes while Okuboyejos PhD in Computer Science is entitled: Enhanced Automatic Feedback Generation for the Learning of Regular Expressions. They were awarded a research grant at a ceremony with distinguished guests from all over the African continent, including representatives of UNESCO, scientists, academics, intellectuals, thought leaders and organisations promoting gender equality. The fellows will benefit from a major communications campaign in Africa, designed to promote and publicise their research and raise public awareness. This entire initiative serves one goal: highlight scientific excellence of female researchers in sub-Saharan Africa, in order to create role models, encourage other young women to become scientists and empower women to shape the future of the continent. ABOUT THE L'OREAL-UNESCO FOR WOMEN IN SCIENCE PROGRAMME Since its creation in 1998, the L'Oreal-UNESCO For Women in Science programme has supported and raised the profile of 3 100 women scientists. While women represent 28% of researchers today, the glass ceiling remains particularly persistent in the field of research: men hold 89% of senior positions in research, and only 3% of Nobel scientific prizes have been awarded to women since the creation of this award. Each year, the L'Oreal-UNESCO For Women in Science programme honors five international laureates, each representing a region of the world, as well as more than 290 young women researchers who benefit from a research and training grant. In 2010, the L'Oreal-UNESCO For Women in Science partnership started the For Women in Science Regional Fellowships including the L'Oreal-UNESCO For Women in Science Sub-Saharan Africa Fellowship programme. The objective of the Regional Fellowships is to support young women pursuing scientific careers in dozens of countries throughout the world where LOreal does not have a subsidiary. The Sub-Saharan Africa Fellowship programme covers 49 countries. China News on Women Sorry, the page you requested was not found. If you're having trouble locating a destination on Womenofchina.cn, try visiting the Womenofchina Home page SHANGHAI, China, Dec. 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Recently, a two-day Singularity Universitys Abundance 360 summit was held in Shanghai. The $7,000 admission fee didnt stop people from learning. All seats were occupied. People from top international investment banks, founders of unicorn tech companies, founding partners of leading foundations and senior management of Fortune 500 tech companies gathered together to listen to the worlds most cutting-edge technologies and business theories. Derek Haoyang Li, founder of Chinas Squirrel AI Learning by Yixue Group, was a keynote speaker for this summit. He decrypted the logic and method of AI subverting traditional industries and how to make smart decisions with AI in each traditional industry from the perspective of knowledge map construction, user portrait labeling, algorithm modeling, etc., which was well received by the attendees. Squirrel AI intelligent adaptive education system is the first AI intelligent adaptive learning engine with complete proprietary intellectual property rights based on advanced algorithms in China. It can simulate special-grade (the nationally-renowned teacher titles given by the government) teachers, use five core technologies, including genetic algorithms, neural networks and machine learning, to improve or accelerate students learning results. A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/b02b3784-d5d7-44b6-a098-5204d649b237 Singularity University is an university jointly opened by Google and NASA for training future scientists. More than 4,000 people from 120 countries apply to this university each year, but the acceptance rate is only 2%. In Singularity Universitys list of lecturers, there is Brad Templeton, an adviser to Google Driverless Car project, and Neil Jacobstein, who once was a technical adviser to AI projects of institutions such as DARPA, NSF and NASA. Abundance 360 is a popular high-tech summit in the USA, initiated by Dr. Peter Diamandis in 2013 to provide an exchange and mutual learning platform for disruptive technologies that bring solutions to the challenges to the fate of mankind. Covering AI, robotics, infinite computing power, broadband networks, digital manufacturing, nanomaterials, synthetic biology and other exponential growth cutting-edge technologies, it is a wind vane for global future exploration. At this Abundance 360 summit in Shanghai, apart from Singularity Universitys founder Dr. Peter H. Diamandis, who gave lectures in person, Hyperloop Ones CEO Robert W. Lloyd, Celgene Cell Therapys founder Bob Hariri, Wantong Groups founder Lun Feng, BGIs co-founder Jian Wang, Squirrel AI Learnings founder Derek Haoyang Li and other successful entrepreneurs in various fields also made presentations, giving attendees an audio-visual feast about the future of technology. At the summit, Dr. Peter H. Diamandis gave lectures titled Exponential Growth and Anti-Scarcity Thinking and Frontiers of Science and Technology with Exponential Growth in succession. He talked about the exponential growth thinking, anti-scarcity thinking, a new interpretation of the resource crowdsourcing model, 6D+ scarcity-to-abundance tool, computer science, sensor technology, Internet of Things, biotechnology, AI, longevity science, robotics, blockchain and other cutting-edge technologies and discussed how to use technology to increase wealth, manage wealth and influence the world. Wantong Groups founder Lun Feng, BGIs cofounder Jian Wang and Squirrel AI Learnings founder Derek Li respectively shared their corporate research achievements in changing by leaps and bounds, longevity science and AI and other related technologies. In Derek Lis opinion, after nearly sixty years of development, AI technology has made breakthroughs in many areas and has been extensively used in medical care and education scenarios. It has broad application prospects. According to the data released by iResearch, the global AI market will be around 119 billion RMB in 2020; in the next 10 years, AI will be a $200 billion market, with a huge space for development. Squirrel AI intelligent adaptive education system has been used by 1 million students in more than 300 cities of more than 20 provinces in China. Its revenue is expected to exceed $200 million in 2018. In the future, AI will penetrate more deeply into everyone's life and reform every industry. This is the trend. Specifically, AI is able to subvert traditional industries mainly because of four dimensions: it's versatile and know-it-all; it can tell big stories from small things; it has infinite computing power; its self-evolving, as Derek Li says. First, it's versatile and know-it-all. AI has remarkable performance in many industries. For example, IBM Watson is one of the most mature cases at present. In 17 seconds, it can read 3,469 medical monographs, 248,000 papers, 69 treatment regimens, 61,540 trial data, 106,000 clinical reports and finally provide the best treatment regimen for the patient. IFLYTEKs AI simultaneous interpretation has reached a high level and refreshed the records set by the Americans and the Japanese. It predominates in English-Chinese translation and Chinese-English translation. Aided by AI systems and communication tools, autonomous vehicles can solve the problem of traffic congestion and drive freely on high streets and back lanes. Its all because AI is versatile and know-it-all. In Squirrel AI intelligent adaptive learning system, this feature of AI is reflected in the nanoscale breaking down of knowledge. Through the knowledge map, information theory and Bayesian theory, it can identify each student's learning level accurately in the huge knowledge database and know the knowledge points that a student has mastered or has not mastered anytime anywhere. Aided by AI, Squirrel AI can break down knowledge points into more fine-grained level. For example, it can break down the concept of rational numbers into more than 20 knowledge points, which is completely impossible for most human teachers. Second, small things can tell big stories. There is a saying that details determine success or failure. AI can analyze details to give people some advice. For example, Toutiao recommends content based on its users big data and intelligent algorithms, to provide users with personalized news content. The Lettuce Bot made by two engineers from Stanford can drive tractors and take photos of plants on the way. Using multiple computer vision algorithms, it compares the photos with more than 1 million pictures in its database to identify weeds and over-dense plants, and sprays high concentration fertilizer to sweep them away, saving over 90% of herbicide expenditure. Face++ can draw user portraits and identify each individual through details in the eyes, nose and eyebrows. Squirrel AI intelligent adaptive learning system uses AI to change the standard learning model in traditional education. It treats every student differently, carefully analyzes the defects in their knowledge points and then provides a more personalized learning program for each student through AI algorithm matching. On the basis of clear learning objectives, the system helps students improve their learning efficiency and achieve fast increases in score in the end. Third, AI has infinite computing power. On the basis of collecting big data, AI shows its infinite computing power in various industries. It can obtain more comprehensive analysis results in a limited time. For example, it took Watson system only 10 minutes to complete a report of possible clinical treatment options for a tumor patient, but it took the expert group 160 hours to finish manual analysis and get a similar report. Before defeating AlphaGo by a score of 100:0, Alpha Zero played hundreds of millions of games against itself. Its impossible without infinite computing power. A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/0f5f9a9c-0451-4cd7-a2fe-9875b9196369 What about Squirrel AI? Education is a much more complex project. Each student has a different intelligence level and education background. The same student has different concentration and learning efficiency in each class. Human teachers alone cannot accurately figure out each student's mastery of knowledge points. But with infinite computing power, Squirrel AI can absolutely do it. On this basis, it can develop a personalized learning path for each student, so that they can learn more efficiently. At last, AI is self-evolving. The most remarkable achievement of AI is its ability to evolve. AI can even be more creative than humans. Therefore, Musk and others put forward the AI threat theory. Apart from social and ethical concerns, the evolution of AI indeed shames humans. When Microsoft Xiaoice took out her collection of poems Sunshine Misses Windows for publishing, her poems might seem a bit immature to some experts, it indeed subverted humans absolute control in the fields of art and aesthetics. In the education sector, the evolution of Squirrel AI is also amazing. It has various skills that human teachers don't have. It can help students fill up their knowledge gap and stimulate their creativity and imagination automatically. Based on the above four features of AI, AI intelligent adaptive education has swept the world. Squirrel AI Learning has organized four human vs. machine teaching competitions to show the effectiveness and universality of intelligent adaptive education. In the latest human vs. machine competition in 100 cities, in terms of the average score increase, the machine-taught group increased 5.4 points on average, while the human-taught group increased only 0.7 points on average. In the same 8 hours, the machine-taught group students mastered 42 knowledge points on average, while the human-taught group students only mastered 28 knowledge points on average. At present, Squirrel AI represents the highest level of intelligent adaptive education in China. The victories in the human vs. machine competitions are inseparable from Squirrel AI R&D teams efforts. Squirrel AI has gathered scientists from Knewton, ALEKS and RealizeIT, the worlds top three AI-powered education unicorn companies. It has established an AI-powered education lab in New York and a joint lab for AI in Silicon Valley with Stanford Research Institute (SRI). As a result, Yixue Education Group can develop the Squirrel AI intelligent adaptive learning system with full proprietary property rights on the basis of the concept of machine learning and adaptive learning of AI. This wasnt the first time for Squirrel AI Learnings founder Derek Li to share his experience at a Singularity Universitys summit. At the Singularity University Annual Summit held in August of this year in San Francisco, USA, Derek Li already exchanged ideas with many experts, professors and scholars on the topic that AI-powered education will push future education to exponential growth. He thinks: A perfect education system not only needs to help children acquire new knowledge, but also needs to train their learning transfer ability, creating opportunities for them to practice critical thinking, develop their creative problem-solving skills and effective learning habits. AI will play a big role in personalized education, thinking training and other aspects to promote the reform of education in the future. Today, a storm of AI + is coming. Only by grasping the pulse of the times can entrepreneurs build great enterprises that can change the future of mankind. The ultimate goal of Squirrel AI Learning is to let every child have an AI teacher like a combination of Socrates + Da Vinci + Einstein, to make boring education become a very intriguing one. About Squirrel AI Learning At present, Squirrel AI Learning already has more than 1 million users. Next, it will develop an OpenAI platform, so that all institutions and individuals no longer need to develop their own intelligent adaptative systems. In addition, Squirrel AI Learning will offer 1 million learning accounts to children from poor families for free. To learn more about Squirrel AI Learning, please visit http://www.squirrelai.us/. Guangming Yang yangguangming@songshuai.com Politicians praise postal workers for delivering first-class festive service This article is old - Published: Wednesday, Dec 19th, 2018 Local politicians have visited Wrexham Delivery Office to see first-hand the operation of delivering Christmas post and to pass on early seasons greetings to its dedicated, hardworking staff. Wrexhams Assembly Member, Lesley Griffiths and Ian Lucas MP recently toured the facility and met the postmen and women who are pulling out all the stops to sort and deliver mail across the town in the build up to the busy Christmas period. The festive season is the Royal Mails busiest time, as millions of people shop online for gifts as well as sending Christmas cards and parcels. Lesley Griffiths AM said: Theres no doubt this is the busiest time of the year for our postmen and women and the team in Wrexham are all working tirelessly to ensure Christmas cards and parcels are delivered on time. It was good to meet everyone and to thank them for delivering our mail throughout the year, in all weather. Ian Lucas MP added: It was a pleasure to visit Wrexhams delivery office to see first-hand the amazing work of our postmen and women. The festive period presents huge challenges but they provide a first-class service. I was grateful for the invite and enjoyed meeting the team in Wrexham. The last recommend posting dates for Christmas are: First Class Thursday 20 December 2018 Special Delivery Saturday 22 December 2018 BROOKS COUNTY, Ga. (WTXL) - Officials have identified the man who's body was recovered from the Withlacoochee River on Dec. 13. The individual recovered from the Withlacoochee River last Thursday in Brooks County has been identified as 22-year-old IJonn Parrish of Quitman, Georgia. According to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, an investigation revealed that Parrish is the person who ran away from a Georgia State trooper who had tried to pull him over for a traffic offense last weekend. During the incident, officials say Parrish gave a false name to the trooper but the responded trooper quickly determined that he had lied after looking up the vehicle registration and name provided by Parrish. The trooper then tried to arrest Parrish, but he ran away. A search was done by troopers and other local agencies after Parrish had ran away, but they were unable to find him. Later that day, Parrish's body was found in the river. An autopsy was performed at the GBI Crime Lab in Macon, which revealed no injuries to Parrish during the examination. The exact cause of death has not been confirmed due to pending toxicology and other tests being performed to determine the cause of death. Body found in Withlacoochee River, death investigation underway BROOKS COUNTY, Ga. (WTXL) - A death investigation is underway after a body was recovered from the Withlacoochee River on Thursday. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation says that they were called to assist in a death investigation around 12:45 p.m. on Thursday. They say a man's body was recovered from the Withlacoochee River off of Highway 94 / Georgia 133 by Brooks County Sheriff Mike Dewey. Agents and crime scene specialists then traveled to the area where they met with Brooks County deputies, Brooks County Fire Rescue and personnel with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources who were continuing a multi-day search. The search continued in an area where an man ran from a Georgia State Patrol trooper who had conducted a traffic stop in the area on Dec. 8. The body has been transported to the GBI Crime Lab in Macon, Georgia where an autopsy will be conducted. After the autopsy is conducted, the preliminary results will be provided to agents conducting the investigation. Agents have been and will be conducting interviews with all law enforcement involved in the case, any other witnesses and reviewing any available video or other evidence available in the case to determine what took place. Once the investigation is complete, the case will be forwarded to the District Attorney for his review. The case is active and ongoing. If you have information regarding this case, you are asked to contact the Thomasville GBI Office at 229-225-4090 or the Brooks County Sheriffs Office at 229-263-7558. TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (The News Service of Florida) - Florida businesses would have to use a federal database to verify the immigration status of new employees, under proposals filed in the House and Senate for the 2019 legislative session. Sen. Aaron Bean, R-Fernandina Beach, filed the Senate version of the proposal (SB 164) on Tuesday. It would require private and public employers and state contractors to enroll in E-Verify, an electronic federal database within the Social Security Administration and Department of Homeland Security. Rep. Thad Altman, R-Indialantic, filed a similar measure (HB 89) last week. The 60-day legislative session begins March. The E-Verify issue has long created fights within the Republican Party. Gov.-elect Ron DeSantis said during his gubernatorial campaign that he would sign E-Verify into law, while accusing his primary-election opponent, Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam, of working behind the scenes with agriculture interests to scuttle prior efforts to enact such a law. Putnam said on the campaign trail that Florida employers need a stable, legal workforce and that Congress needed to come up with an immigration fix. Earlier this year, the state Constitution Revision Commission rejected a proposal that would have asked voters in November to require businesses to use a similar system. The proposal drew heavy opposition from agriculture, tourism and construction interests, and its defeat was applauded by the Florida Chamber of Commerce. The issue goes back years in Florida. Seeking to crack down on the use of undocumented workers, Gov. Rick Scott had as part of his 2010 campaign platform a requirement for all businesses in Florida to use E-Verify. After pushback from business groups supporting the agriculture industry, Scott eventually signed an executive order shortly after taking office in 2011 that required state agencies under his direction to verify the employment eligibility of all new employees by using E-Verify. TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL) - Funeral services have been announced for former Florida State University President Thomas Kent Wetherell. T.K.'s funeral service will be held on Friday, December 21 at 1 p.m. at Florida State Universitys Ruby Diamond Concert Hall. Doors will open at 12:15 p.m. A reception will follow on the Westcott Plaza. Later on, a private graveside service will follow. In lieu of flowers, the family encourages memorial donations to the Southern Scholarship Foundation Fund at the FSU Foundation. Checks need to be made payable to the FSU Foundation or to Big Bend Hospice. Former FSU President T.K. Wetherell dies at 72 TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL) - Former Florida State University President Thomas Kent Wetherell passed away this weekend. He was the first FSU alumnus to become its president. He held that title from 2003 to 2010. Everyone called him "TK" from college freshmen to some of the most powerful politicians in Florida. After retiring from the presidency he worked to improve higher education in Florida. "He was a great leader he gave opportunity for students all over Florida with passion and humor with a design on improving every day," said Dr. Ed Moore, WTXL Political Contributor. "I don't know if I ever met anyone that was as heart driving as he was to change for the better for the better." He also served as President of Tallahassee Community College from 1995 to 2001. And he served in the Florida House of Representatives from 1980 to 1992. TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL) Former Florida State University President Thomas Kent Wetherell has passed away at the age of 72. Officials say Wetherell passed away on Sunday. From college freshmen to the most powerful politicians in Florida, all called him T.K. From 2003 to 2010, Wetherell, who at his death held the title of FSU president emeritus as a sign of honor, was the first alumnus of Florida State to become its president. He brought a wealth of experience and dedication to the institution that raised its stature on many levels. After retiring from the presidency, Wetherell continued working to improve higher education as a professor in the College of Education and director of the Center for Higher Education Research, Teaching & Innovation. As a veteran lawmaker, tireless supporter of higher education and then as president, T.K. used his energy and intellect to not only lead FSU through a severe budget crisis but to make sure it flourished in so many ways, said President John Thrasher. He was a remarkable person and a great friend. Along with his many accomplishments, Wetherell served in the Florida House of Representatives 1980-1992, including two years as House Speaker. He also served as president of Tallahassee Community College 1995-2001. As a result of Wetherells advocacy and service, Florida State is a better university today, said Jim Smith, who served as chairman of the FSU Board of Trustees during Wetherells tenure. Carole and I have had a wonderful relationship with T.K. and Ginger for many years, Smith said. They are among our closest friends, and it was a special privilege to marry them in 1988. A highlight for me was to serve as chairman of the Board of Trustees during part of his presidency of FSU, where he did many wonderful things for Florida State and the Tallahassee community. His passing leaves a big hole in our lives. TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL) - Governor Rick Scott announced that Floridas high school graduation rate has reached a 15-year high. On Wednesday, the Florida Department of Education released data showing that for the 2017-2018 school year, Floridas statewide graduation rate rose to 86.1 percent. The data also showed an increase of 3.8 percentage points over the last year and 17.1 since the school year before Governor Scott took office. Governor Scott said, I am proud to announce that Floridas high school graduation rate has once again risen and has reached an all-time high. Access to quality public education played a critical role in my life, and as a father and grandfather, it has always been important to me that every Florida student has the opportunity to pursue their goals and achieve the American Dream. This accomplishment would not be possible without the hard work and dedication of Floridas teachers and school administrators. Im also proud of the work weve done to provide record amounts of funding to Florida schools so they can continue to deliver results. I will never stop working to ensure students are prepared to succeed. Commissioner of Education Pam Stewart said, I could not be more proud of Floridas students and their educators who have demonstrated unrivaled dedication to excellence. As commissioner, I vowed to be a voice for the voiceless, and that often meant advocating for minority and low-income students whose performance historically fell below that of their white counterparts. Todays announcement is particularly important because it not only shows across-the-board progress, it highlights success in closing the achievement gap and leveling the playing field for all students. For more information about the 2017-18 graduation rates, click here. TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (The News Service of Florida) - Another bill has been filed for the 2019 legislative session that would allow law-enforcement officers to pull over motorists for texting or talking on hand-held cell phones while driving. Rep. Jackie Toledo, R-Tampa, filed a measure (HB 107) on Monday that would prohibit drivers from talking on cell phones that are not hands-free devices and would make enforcement a primary offense. Currently, texting while driving in Florida is prohibited, but it is enforced as a secondary offense. That means motorists can only be cited if they are stopped for other infractions, such as running stop signs or speeding. Under Toledos bill, police would be able to stop motorists for texting or talking on hand-held cell phones. Distracted driving can have deadly consequences, and its time we finally address this public safety crisis, Toledo said in a news release. Toledo was a co-sponsor of a similar House measure during the 2018 session, but the proposal did not advance in the Senate amid concerns about issues such as minority drivers facing increased racial profiling. A Senate bill (SB 76) similar to Toledos new proposal has been filed by Sen. Wilton Simpson, R-Trilby, for the 2019 session, which starts in March. Under the Toledo and Simpson bills, drivers would be able to communicate on hands-free devices. Also, motorists would be allowed to use hand-held devices for such purposes as reporting emergencies, getting safety-related information or for navigation. Rep. Emily Slosberg, D-Boca Raton, also has filed a similar measure (HB 45) for the 2019 session. TTS Group ASA has been awarded two new contracts for ships equipment with a total value of approximately MNOK 82, including an innovative new "Walk- to-Work" motion compensated gangway. The first contract is signed with Cemre shipyard in Turkey for an equipment package for Louis Dreyfus Armateurs newbuild Service Operations Vessel (SOV). The package consists of a TTS Colibri crane, a motion compensated "Walk-to-Work" ganqway TTS Horizon and a Phoenix remote operator environment. The second contract is signed with a European shipyard for delivery of two gantry cranes. The equipment package are expected to be delivered within March 2020, while the gantry cranes are scheduled for installation in Q1 and Q2 2020. Bergen, 19 December 2018 TTS Group ASA http://www.ttsgroup.com Contact persons: Toril Eidesvik CEO M: +47 900 78 218 Leiv Kallestad CFO M: +47 958 95 661 TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL) - The education community is reacting to news that Richard Corcoran will be Florida's new education commissioner. The State Board of Education unanimously approved Corcoran on Monday, but the decision has some people concerned. Corcoran is a well-known name in Florida politics. Some thought he'd run for governor, but instead, the former House Speaker will lead the state's education department. "Everyone has different modes of learning and different ways of succeeding, and who knows that best is parents -- and we need to empower the parents, empower the students, and give them opportunities to learn," said Corcoran. Corcoran was hand-picked by Governor-Elect Ron DeSantis for the job, but the decision still splits some conservatives we talked to who are paying close attention to Florida's education system. "No one else has done as much for school choice and the children of this state as he has," said Jennings DePriest, School Choice Advocate. "He has no education experience. He says he spent some time in a classroom, but it certainly wasn't recently," said Beth Overholt, Public Education Advocate. The big factor is where the state's focus should be. "Richard Corcoran supports public charter schools. Public charter schools are the best option that we have to bring up these low-income communities where students are stuck in failing schools," said DePriest. Corcoran faces critics from the Florida Education Association and teachers' unions, including in Leon County. The overwhelming question is how he will address what some say is a lack of funding for public education. Corcoran will succeed Pam Stewart, who will step down January 8, the same day Ron DeSantis takes office as governor. WASHINGTON (WTXL) President Trump has granted federal employees the day off on Christmas Eve. A new executive order the president signed on Tuesday states, All executive departments and agencies of the Federal Government shall be closed and their employees excused from duty on Monday, December 24, 2018, the day before Christmas Day. In addition, the order specifies that some employees must still work that day for reasons of national security, defense, or other public need. You can read the full order on the White House website by clicking here. WAKULLA COUNTY, Fla. (WTXL) - Several Wakulla County deputies were honored on Tuesday for their lifesaving actions during Hurricane Michael. Deputy Evelyn Brown, Deputy Mitch Revels, Deputy Kenneth Malphurs, Sgt. Joe Page. Lt. Matt Helms, Lt Jeremy Johnston, Major Ray Johnson and Mike Kemp were recognized for their actions. Those deputies responded to a call for help from residents in the Spring Creek area who were stuck in their homes due to fast rising water. Wakulla County Sheriff Jared Miller stated that the deputies quick actions during Hurricane Michael to rescue those residents were directly responsible for saving the citizens life during the powerful storm. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-18 22:42:41|Editor: yan Video Player Close TEHRAN, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- Iranian intelligence minister said Tuesday that the spy services of some neighbors are involved in hatching hostile plots against Iran. "We are facing conditions that the security services of neighboring countries and even faraway countries have directly taken action against the country's (Iran's) security," Mahmoud Alawi was quoted as saying by Tasnim news agency. Outsiders are financing, supporting and training the anti-Iranian trends and terrorist groups, Alawi said. The terrorist groups employ up-to-date hardware to cross the border and carry out operations in Iran, he said, adding that they are in possession of powerful motorcycles, SUVs, machine guns and even anti-aircraft guns. Besides military training, the terrorists receive training in intelligence tactics and making secret contacts, the minister added. He said that the Iranian security forces detected two or three terrorist teams in lran on average every week. Iran has repeatedly accused the Israeli intelligence service for carrying out espionage projects in the region against the Islamic republic. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 00:58:22|Editor: yan Video Player Close KAMPALA, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- Uganda has strengthened surveillance across the country after 40 districts were reportedly hit by a measles outbreak, a top health official said on Tuesday. Sarah Opendi, minister of state for health, told Parliament that the ministry has provided vaccines and other antigens for routine immunization. Opendi said since October, two death cases of measles have been registered and 141 other cases managed. According to the ministry, the affected districts are in north western, western and central regions. Measles, according to the ministry of health, is one of the killer diseases among children below five years. The others include tetanus, whooping cough, diphtheria, polio and tuberculosis. Measles is a highly infectious viral disease that spreads through coughs and sneezes and can cause serious illness, according to the ministry. The symptoms of the disease include a high fever, cough, runny nose and red watery eyes. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 00:58:23|Editor: Lu Hui Video Player Close WASHINGTON, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Donald Trump issued an order Tuesday directing the establishment of "Space Command." Trump said the new command will be created as a "unified combatant command," according to his memo to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, which was made public by the White House. The Space Command will oversee all U.S. military activities in space, and the president has asked Mattis to recommend officers for the command's leadership, the one-page memo said. It added that a comprehensive list of authorities and responsibilities for the Space Command will be included in the next update to the Unified Command Plan. Analysts say the new command, to be led by a four-star general, is separate from the administration's plan to build an independent "Space Force," but could be a step in that direction. Trump has been pushing to establish Space Force by 2020, an idea that has been questioned by Pentagon officials and military experts worried about adding cost and bureaucracy. U.S. Vice President Mike Pence said Tuesday that the Space Command will integrate space capabilities across all branches of the U.S. military, adding that Trump will sign a new "space policy directive" in coming days. Pence was speaking at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, state of Florida, where he was to watch the launch of a SpaceX rocket with a military cargo. The launch, however, had to be postponed until Wednesday because of a technical problem. The Space Command will be the Pentagon's 11th combatant command, along with others including Central Command and Europe Command. The U.S. military had a Space Command between 1985 and 2002 but was disbanded in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks so that U.S. Northern Command could be established, which focuses on homeland defense. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 01:33:31|Editor: yan Video Player Close KHARTOUM, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- At least 14 people were killed and 37 others injured in a traffic accident on Tuesday in Sudan's North Darfur State, Ashorooq net reported. The accident took place at Um Kadada area in North Darfur State when a bus, en route to the Sudanese capital Khartoum, overturned, the report said. "The injured people were sent to Um Kadada hospital for medical treatment," Mohamed Osman Ibrahim, commissioner of Um Kadada locality, was quoted in the report as saying. Many of them were with serious injuries, according to the medics. Director of North Darfur State's Traffic Police, Ahmed Mohamed Hamid, confirmed the death of 14 passengers, including four women and ten men. He said the front tyre of the bus exploded, leading to the bus swerve off the track and overturn. Sudan is among countries of the highest death rates in traffic accidents, mainly due to careless driving, crumbling roads and poor vehicle scrapping system. Citizens complain about poor road conditions while the Sudanese Ministry of Roads and Bridges attributes the accidents to overloaded trucks and high speed. Sudan's Interior Ministry recently said that it was working out new plans to reduce traffic accidents, including installation of radars to monitor speed on highways. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 02:08:38|Editor: Yang Yi Video Player Close Firefighters of China State Construction Engineering Corporation (CSCEC) participate in a firefighting competition in Farwaniya Governorate, Kuwait, on Dec. 18, 2018. China State Construction Engineering Corporation on Tuesday held the firefighting competition at the construction site of Kuwait University, to raise fire safety awareness and response capabilities among its employees. (Xinhua/Nie Yunpeng) KUWAIT CITY, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- China State Construction Engineering Corporation (CSCEC) on Tuesday held a firefighting competition at the construction site of Kuwait University, to raise fire safety awareness and response capabilities among its employees. The competition was held at the CSCEC in Farwaniya Governorate, Kuwait. This is part of the Chinese company's efforts to adopt a high standard in fire prevention and workplace safety measures at its construction site. Akbar Abulati, production manager of the CSCEC university project, said that the participants of the competition are full-time firefighters for the project. A total of 15 firefighters, divided into five groups, participated in the race, he said, adding that firefighters of each group need to cooperate with each other to complete the prescribed actions such as laying fire hoses, installing hose joints and eliminating potential sources of fire. Since the CSCEC entered Kuwait, it has been attaching great importance to the safety of its workers, Abulati said. "Our project here is being carried out with zero accident and zero fire," he said, citing the company's redoubled efforts to ensure workplace safety "because safety is our basic lifeline." During the past more than two years, the project has successfully undergone various random inspections by the Kuwait Fire Department (KFD), which has won a reputation for the Chinese construction companies working in Kuwait, he stressed. Yu Long, security manager of the the project, said that Kuwait has a long summer with high temperature which lasts for half a year. The temperature at the construction site can reach about 50 degrees Celsius in summer, which creates high risk of fire, he noted. To prevent fire and ensure safety of the project, the CSCEC has adopted a high standard in taking fire safety measures, Yu said. Firstly, the site is protected by more than 30 full-time firefighters carrying out all-weather patrol inspection. Secondly, the company holds fire drills and trainings every month to raise the fire awareness among its employees. Finally, strict fire prevention measures are implemented at high cost. For example, all kinds of flammable construction materials must be placed outdoors and covered with high-cost fire blankets. Many Chinese construction enterprises in Kuwait have adopted the strict management measures in this regard, Yu said. These measures have earned a good reputation for "Chinese Construction," Yu added. The Sabah Al-Salem University City (Kuwait University) is a key national strategic project of Kuwait. Covering an area of 6 million square meters, it will house 40,000 university students after completion. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 02:13:41|Editor: yan Video Player Close ROME, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- High-profile budget negotiations between Italy and the European Commission are entering the home stretch, as some analyst speculate that Rome's willingness to compromise may widen an already significant gap between the parties supporting the government. Italy has been at odds with the executive arm of the European Union over the size of the government's 2019 budget deficit for nearly two months. Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini asserted this week on social media that the government had taken steps needed to avoid sanctions from the European Commission. He did not go into detail about the plan. In the latest move before Salvini's announcement, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte announced a compromise draft budget that would see a deficit of 2.04 percent of the country's gross domestic product, down from 2.4 percent previously. To get to that point, the government cut around 2 billion euros (2.3 billion U.S. dollars) each from the Conte government's two main priorities: pensions and a plan to provide a minimum income for poor Italians. Some Italian media reported Tuesday that commissioners will ask Italy to cut at least 2.5 billion additional euros (2.9 billion U.S. dollars) from the budget, though there has been no official word from Brussels on the topic. For his part, Salvini excluded the possibility of further budget cuts for 2019. "If they want us to cut again, then no, that's enough," Salvini said in a televised interview. Luigi Di Maio, the other deputy prime minister, said further cuts would require the government to break electoral promises aimed at helping rank-and-file Italians. "There will be no agreement if commissioners insist we betray our fellow Italians," Di Maio said. Salvini and Di Maio are the leaders of the nationalist League and the anti-establishment Five-Star Movement, respectively, the two parties supporting the Conte government. Oreste Massari, a political scientist at La Sapienza University in Rome, told Xinhua the budget compromise will likely shed more light on the already large gap between the priorities of the League and the Five-Star Movement by forcing the government to choose. "This negotiation process is taking an already difficult balancing act between the two parties and making it more challenging," Massari said. The professor said that even though the two parties campaigned on standing up to the European Union, they could lose support by being too inflexible in budget talks. "Already a majority of Italians disapprove of the budget plan because they are afraid of the consequences of running afoul of EU rules," he said. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 04:24:11|Editor: yan Video Player Close HELSINKI, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- The Bank of Finland on Tuesday said Finland has passed the peak of economic growth in the current cycle. In its prognosis, the bank described a declining trend in growth. From its 2018 estimate of 2.7 percent, the growth would shrink to 1.9 percent in 2019 and to 1.7 percent in 2020. Olli Rehn, governor of the Bank of Finland, told national broadcaster Yle that now would be the "time to build buffers for meeting the next recession." He reminded that even "small growth is growth." Rehn said he does not want to criticize the government, nor the opposition, but noted that fiscal policies in Finland in recent years has been somewhat "lighter than would have been expected." Rehn also said the upcoming climate change should be taken into account. He described the climate change as a "huge market disturbance." "Future generations of Finns must be able to build their lives without having to combat with the debts and environmental problems of the previous generations," he said. Meri Obstbaum, acting research director of the Bank of Finland, said the declining work age population and the problems of the enterprises to find qualified employees will impact the growth in the future. In a news conference on Tuesday, she singled out supply of labor as "a future bottle neck" if "structural reforms are not carried out." She said Finnish exports will continue to grow, but uncertainty about the world economy and the weaker vistas for the euro zone increase the likelihood that economic development will lag behind that forecast. The declining trend in the prognosis of the Bank of Finland is in line with other recent predictions about the Finnish economy. Dublin, Dec. 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "Hemodynamic Monitoring Systems Market by Product (Disposables and Monitors), Type (Invasive, Minimally Invasive, and Non-invasive), End User (Hospitals, Clinics & Ambulatory Care Center, and Home Care Setting), and Region - Global Forecasts to 2023" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering The global hemodynamic monitoring systems market is expected to reach USD 1,167.4 million by 2023 from USD 857.8 million in 2018, at a CAGR of 6.4% during the forecast period. The growth of this market is primarily driven by factors such as the technological advancements in hemodynamic monitoring systems, increasing research into hemodynamic monitoring systems, influx of VC funding, and the rising prevalence of cardiovascular diseases & diabetes. The hemodynamic monitoring systems market is segmented on the basis of product, type, end user, and region. By product, the market is segmented into two broad categories monitors and disposables. The monitors segment is expected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period. This can be attributed to the increasing prevalence of CVDs, technological advancements in monitoring systems, and increasing funding by government authorities to improve patient-centered care, safety, and efficiency. By type, the global hemodynamic monitoring systems market is segmented into invasive, minimally invasive, and noninvasive hemodynamic monitoring systems. The noninvasive hemodynamic monitoring systems segment is expected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast, The rising incidence of respiratory disorders, increasing geriatric population, fewer complications of noninvasive hemodynamic monitoring as compared to invasive methods, better portability, ease of use, and better precision are the major factors driving the growth of this market segment. On the basis of end user, the global hemodynamic monitoring systems market is segmented into hospitals, clinics and ambulatory care centers (ACCs), and home care settings. In 2018, the hospitals segment is expected to account for the largest share of the global hemodynamic monitoring systems market. The large share of this segment can be attributed to the presence of big cath labs in hospitals, successful applications of hemodynamic monitoring systems in several procedures, increase in the prevalence of cardiovascular and other chronic diseases, and continuous technological advancements coupled with government funding. Geographic segments in this report include North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and RoW. Of these, the North American region is expected to account for the largest share of the market in 2018. In North America, the hemodynamic monitoring systems market is driven by rising geriatric population and the increasing prevalence of diabetes and hypertension. In the US, the availability of technologically advanced hemodynamic monitoring systems, a large base of major device manufacturers, and favorable reimbursement scenario are some of the key factors driving the market for hemodynamic monitoring systems. In Canada, the growth of the market is driven by the growing use of patient monitoring systems and the development of technologically advanced hemodynamic monitoring systems. Key Topics Covered: 1 Introduction 2 Research Methodology 3 Executive Summary 4 Premium Insights 4.1 Hemodynamic Monitoring Systems Market Overview 4.2 Asia Pacific: Hemodynamic Monitoring Systems Market, By Country and End User 4.3 Geographic Snapshot: Global Hemodynamic Monitoring Systems Market 4.4 Global Hemodynamic Monitoring Systems Market, By Type (2018 vs 2023) 5 Market Overview 5.1 Introduction 5.2 Market Dynamics 5.3 Drivers 5.3.1 Technological Advancements in Hemodynamic Monitoring Systems 5.3.1.1 Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS) 5.3.1.2 Hypotension Prediction Index (HPI) Software 5.3.2 Increasing Research Into Hemodynamic Monitoring Systems 5.3.3 Influx of VC Funding 5.3.4 Rising Prevalence of Cardiovascular Diseases and Diabetes 5.3.5 Rising Geriatric Population and Growing Number of Surgeries 5.3.6 Awareness Initiatives By Industry Players 5.3.7 Government Focus on Critical Care Infrastructure and Services 5.4 Restraints 5.4.1 Risks Associated With Invasive Hemodynamic Monitoring 5.5 Opportunities 5.5.1 Emerging Markets 5.5.2 Growing Demand for Patient Monitoring Devices in Non-Hospital Settings 5.6 Challenges 5.6.1 Increasing Pricing Pressure on Market Players 5.6.2 Limited Patient Awareness Related to Disease Diagnosis 5.6.3 Dearth of Skilled Professionals 6 Hemodynamic Monitoring Systems Market, By Product 6.1 Introduction 6.2 Disposables 6.3 Monitors 7 Hemodynamic Monitoring Systems Market, By Type 7.1 Introduction 7.2 Invasive Hemodynamic Monitoring Systems 7.3 Minimally Invasive Hemodynamic Monitoring Systems 7.4 Noninvasive Hemodynamic Monitoring Systems 8 Hemodynamic Monitoring Systems Market, By End User 8.1 Introduction 8.2 Hospitals 8.3 Clinics and Ambulatory Care Centers 8.4 Home Care Settings 9 Hemodynamic Monitoring Systems 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 Japan 9.4.2 China 9.4.3 India 9.4.4 RoAPAC 9.5 RoW 10 Competitive Landscape 10.1 Introduction 10.2 Hemodynamic Monitoring Systems Market Share Analysis 10.2.1 Edwards Lifesciences Corporation 10.2.2 Pulsion Medical Systems Se 10.2.3 Lidco Group PLC 10.3 Hemodynamic Monitoring Systems Market Share Analysis, By Region 10.4 Competitive Scenario 11 Company Profiles 11.1 Edwards Lifesciences Corporation 11.2 Pulsion Medical Systems Se (Part of the Maquet Getinge Group) 11.3 Lidco Group 11.4 Deltex Medical Group PLC 11.5 ICU Medical 11.6 Cnsystems Medizintechnik GmbH 11.7 Caretaker Medical 11.8 Osypka Medical GmbH 11.9 Cheetah Medical 11.10 NI Medical 11.11 Uscom For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/jshxms/hemodynamic?w=12 Research and Markets also offers Custom Research services providing focused, comprehensive and tailored research. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 05:19:25|Editor: Yang Yi Video Player Close Sculptures by Chinese artist Xu Hongfei are seen in an open-air show at the port city of Thessaloniki, Greece, on Dec. 18, 2018. Chinese artist Xu Hongfei, president of the Guangzhou Sculpture Academy, presented 15 of his sculptures of female figures to the port city of Thessaloniki in northern Greece, as part of a global tour of his exhibition. (Xinhua/Dimitris Tosidis) THESSALONIKI, Greece, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- Chinese artist Xu Hongfei, president of the Guangzhou Sculpture Academy, "introduced" 15 of his sculptures of female figures to the port city of Thessaloniki in northern Greece, as part of a global tour of his exhibition. The inauguration of the open-air show on Tuesday was carried out by the Union of Chinese Traders in Greece and the Municipality of Thessaloniki. Five sculptures of his curvy women were placed behind the Royal Theatre which hosts the National Theatre of Northern Greece, and another 10 in Pier A of Thessaloniki Port Authority. They will remain in the Greek city until Dec. 24. The aim of the event, according to the organizers, was to present Thessaloniki and Guangzhou, the capital and most populous city of the province of Guangdong in southern China, to the world, combining Chinese art and the unique charm of Greek civilization in order to enhance communication and cooperation between them. "Thessaloniki is the 30th stop of my word tour. Greece is also the birthplace of western art, a country I always dreamed of visiting. Guangzhou and Thessaloniki have a long distance between them, yet the first is one of the main cultural centers in Greece and the other is the birthplace of the Cantonese culture. Both cities have a long history and a rich culture. I wish this exhibition would be the meeting point of these two cities under this intense artistic atmosphere," Xu said in his greeting during the opening ceremony. The Chinese artist who explores the female figure drawing inspiration from the lives of ordinary women in China, as he has said, has exhibited his works from Australia and the United States to Italy and Colombia. "Those of us who have studied Sculpture Art have always admired the Greek sculpture, the ancient statues and especially Aphrodite of Milos, and I am glad that I could bring my chubby women to the birthplace of Aphrodite," he told Xinhua. "We are very happy to have some samples of Chinese art at the most iconic place of Thessaloniki, next to the White Tower monument. Many people will have the pleasure of visiting and admiring them, and this is the best way to deepen relations between Greece and China in the culture," Deputy Regional Governor for Culture and Tourism, Alexandros Thanos, noted in his speech. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 05:24:28|Editor: yan Video Player Close ALGIERS, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- Security deterioration in Libya and return of terrorists are posing further security challenges to Africa, warned Smail Chergui, African Union (AU) High Commissioner for Peace and Security, on Tuesday in Algiers. "Terrorist and extremist organizations continue to overshadow the resilience and adaptation to measures taken by our member states," Chergui said at the opening of the 12th meeting of the focal points of the African Center for Studies and Research on Terrorism. The AU official warned against the persistence of terrorist threat and security instability in the Sahel region, especially with the return of terrorists to some countries, such as Burkina Faso, despite the presence of UN forces. He further noted that several affected African countries do not enjoy enough logistical or financial military support, as the Brussels Agreement, signed two years ago, recommended granting 414-million-euro aids to the Sahel countries, but only 17 million euros have been earmarked so far. "This situation is likely to cause disillusion and despair among populations, creating a favorable environment for the spread of terrorist message," added Chergui. As for the Libyan crisis, the AU official said that the political instability in the country remains a major concern, urging "further joint role between the African Union and the United Nations in order to bring together the Libyan warring parties for talks ahead of organizing elections." Chergui further called for respect for human rights in any response to security challenges, adding that the respect for the fundamental rights of individuals and communities remains "the determining factor of justice and good governance in the international system." The meeting, which opened on Tuesday in Algiers, will continue behind closed doors in the presence of representatives of the regional economic bodies and counterterrorism mechanisms in Africa. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 05:49:40|Editor: yan Video Player Close ROME, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- Italy's trade surplus is shrinking, as the dramatic rise in Italian exports that started last year continued to slow. According to the latest data from Italy's National Statistics Institute, ISTAT, Italian exports over the first ten months of the year outpaced imports by 32.3 billion euros (36.7 billion U.S. dollars). That is 5.6 billion euros (6.4 billion U.S. dollars) less than over the same period last year, a drop of nearly 15 percent. For October alone, the difference was even more dramatic: the trade surplus was 3.8 billion euros (4.3 billion U.S. dollars), nearly a quarter less than during the same month in 2017. In terms of value, Italy is the European Union's second largest exporter -- after Germany -- which means its economy is particularly dependent on its goods and services selling abroad. Exports did grow in October: they totaled 43.7 billion euros (49.7 billion U.S. dollars), 9.6 percent more than in October 2017. But imports grew even faster, increasing by 14.2 percent to 39.9 billion euros (45.6 billion U.S. dollars). Figures in a new research report from SACE, a Rome-based think tank, were in line with those from ISTAT. But SACE further broke the figures down to show that it is predominantly trade with countries outside the European Union that failed to keep pace with imports. One important factor in the calculations is trade with Russia and Turkey, both of which have trailed off dramatically due to European Union sanctions against those countries. But increases in trade with the United States (up more than 22 percent compared to 2017 figures), along with Germany, China and petroleum-producing countries helped balance that out. In contrast, Italian imports from China (up more than 25 percent year on year), petroleum producing countries (up 34 percent), and the United States (up 16 percent) helped Italian imports close the gap on exports. The smaller trade surplus came despite a relatively weak euro currency -- a weak currency usually makes products sold abroad less expensive in relative terms and those imported more expensive -- as well as gross domestic product growth of less than 1 percent over the last four quarters. According to Stefania Tomasini, chief economist with Prometeia, a consultancy, the narrowing of Italy's trade surplus is part of an international trend. "This trend is having an impact on countries across Europe, even in Germany," Tomasini told Xinhua. She said that the rise in imports was due to higher petroleum use as well as more purchases of foreign-made automobiles. Fiat-Chrysler, Italy's lone domestic carmaker, has steadily lost market share in its home country. Giuseppe De Arcangelis, an economist specializing on international issues at Rome's La Sapienza University, told Xinhua that the trend could be pushed by Italians shifting their allegiances to foreign products. But he added that the narrower spread should not be cause for concern. "These statistics are cyclical and comparing trade today to that of last year means comparing it to a period where there was a boom in exports due to cheap oil and a weakening currency," De Arcangelis said. "Over the long term, the country is just returning to its historical averages." Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 05:49:41|Editor: mmm Video Player Close Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras addresses lawmakers during a parliamentary session in Athens, Greece, on Dec. 18, 2018. Greek lawmakers ratified on Tuesday the 2019 state budget, the first of the country's post-bailout era, which foresees 2.5 percent economic growth in the new year from 2.1 percent in 2018. (Xinhua/Marios Lolos) ATHENS, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- Greek lawmakers ratified on Tuesday the 2019 state budget, the first of the country's post-bailout era, which foresees 2.5 percent economic growth in the new year from 2.1 percent in 2018. With the support of the deputies of the two parties of the Left-led ruling coalition and an MP of a centrist opposition party the budget was approved by 154 lawmakers in the 300-member strong plenary, Greek national news agency AMNA reported. During a heated debate before the vote which was broadcast on public broadcaster ERT, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras criticized past administrations of tough and ineffective fiscal adjustment, arguing that his government took over in 2015 a country in dire straits which had lost a quarter of its national wealth and led her to growth. The 2019 budget is "one of fiscal expansions after eight years of austerity," he said. "Our vision is clear. It relates to the dynamic growth of the Greek economy and the revival of production, the safeguarding of fiscal stability, the increase of wages and the support and upgrading of the social state, health, education and social solidarity," the Greek leader stressed. Greece exited this August the third of the harsh bailout programs implemented since 2010 to keep the debt-ridden country afloat and in the euro zone. Athens can now gradually change the mixture of its fiscal policy to support the weaker social groups which suffered during the crisis, the government has said, pledging relief measures. On their part, opposition parties said that there is still a heavy burden of over taxation on the shoulders of households and businesses and lack of reforms. "The fiscal obligations the government has assumed with lenders comprise an informal fourth loan agreement, with unbearable primary surpluses of 3.5 percent to 2022," Greek conservative main opposition New Democracy party chief Kyriakos Mitsotakis said, during the debate. Greek society remains trapped in austerity, argued labor unions that staged a protest outside the parliament building earlier on Tuesday. Public expenditure on health and education for example are further reduced, while one in two Greeks has debts to banks and the tax office, the umbrella union of public servants ADEDY noted in a press statement. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 05:49:42|Editor: yan Video Player Close KIGALI, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- The Rwanda Defence Forces (RDF) rescued 74 civilians who were abducted during Saturday's armed attack in Nyamagabe district in southern Rwanda, it said on Tuesday. The mission started immediately after the attack and there are no more Rwandans missing, defence and military spokesperson Innocent Munyengango told Xinhua. Unidentified attackers torched three passenger vehicles Saturday evening in Nyamagabe, near the border with Burundi, killing two and injuring eight, the army had said late Saturday. The death toll has risen to four after two died from injuries, the Rwandan army said Monday in a statement, adding that they pursued the assailants and killed three while the rest escaped into Burundi. About 20 to 30 armed attackers waylaid vehicles along Huye-Rusizi road, said the spokesperson, adding that they stopped vehicles and ordered passengers to get off. Rwandan soldiers freed the abductees when pursuing the attackers who fled to the Nyungwe forest and marched the abductees through the forest, he said. The attackers started shooting at the stopped vehicles after they saw passengers were reluctant to come out, a witness on one of the vehicles told Rwandan national television Rwanda Television. The attackers, who were dressed in ragged clothes, set fire on the vehicles when passengers were still aboard, he said. The Rwandan army also said the area is secure now. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 06:09:46|Editor: yan Video Player Close WASHINGTON, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday rolled out a new federal rule prohibiting bump stocks, the devices that enable semiautomatic rifles to fire sustained and faster rounds, thus making assaults more lethal. The add-ons drew public attention in October 2017 when a gunman equipped his weapons with the devices and killed 58 people in a concert in Las Vegas, Nevada. The bump stock slides back and forth while the shooter puts the finger on the trigger of the gun and harnesses the recoil to fire multiple shots in rapid succession. A semiautomatic rifle usually fires 60 rounds in a minute, while with a bump stock it can fire hundreds of rounds per minute, making it no difference to a fully automatic machine gun, of which private ownership is banned by the 1986 Firearm Owners Protection Act. The new regulation, whose announcement was reported by U.S. media as early as late November, will give owners of bump stocks a 90-day time period to turn the devices in to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms (ATF) and Explosives or destroy them. Information on destruction of the bump stocks, according to the regulation, will be available on the ATF's website. A Department of Justice official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, was quoted by The New York Times as telling reporters that it is believed that tens of thousands of bump stocks are in circulation nationwide, although the exact number is hard to count. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 06:49:55|Editor: yan Video Player Close SKOPJE, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- The Prime ministers of Macedonia and Greece, Zoran Zaev and Alexis Tsipras, are nominated for the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize for signing the Prespa Agreement between the two countries, the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize winner and Tunisian economist Ouided Bouchamaoui declared in Skopje on Tuesday. According to Bouchamaoui, the nomination is not only for the two PMs, but also for all the citizens. "This is a model of dialogue and prosperity. I strongly believe that Macedonia and Greece will receive the Nobel Prize and prove to the world that everything can be done through agreement," said Bouchamaoui. Bouchamaoui also added that the agreement can serve as a model for problem-solving across the world. A member of the European Parliament, Stelios Kouloglou, who is supporting the nomination, attended the ceremony as well. According to Kouloglou, the Prespa agreement is the only good and positive thing that is currently produced in Europe, a continent divided and faced with numerous problems. In mid June, Macedonia and Greece came up with a final deal after a long process of negotiations to solve the name dispute. Under the agreement reached, Zaev said the name to be used both internationally and bilaterally would be the Republic of North Macedonia. The solving of the name row that has existed between the two countries is seen as the main obstacle Macedonia has to overcome in order to make progress towards the European Union (EU) and NATO integration. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 06:59:57|Editor: Yang Yi Video Player Close UNITED NATIONS, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese envoy on Tuesday asked for international efforts to promote the resumption of peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians. There is a need for the international community to remain united and renew its efforts to promote peace talks between the two sides, Ma Zhaoxu, China's permanent representative to the United Nations, told the Security Council. The parties should meet each other half-way and avoid any action or rhetoric that will aggravate the situation, refrain from any unilateral action that undermines trust, so as to create necessary conditions for the resumption of dialogue, he said. Curbing violence with violence will not solve any problem. China urges all parties to bear in mind the safety and security of the people in the region and the imperative of peace and stability by exercising restraint to avoid escalation, he said. The issue of Palestine is the root cause of the Middle East problem and concerns the long-term peace, stability and development of the region, he noted. He asked for the cessation of all settlement activities on occupied territory, the lifting of the blockade of Gaza as soon as possible, and measures to prevent violence against civilians. Parties that have influence in the region should play a constructive role, explore new mechanisms of mediation to break the deadlock in talks between Israelis and Palestinians as soon as possible, he said. Ma also saw the need to uphold the two-state solution and address the root cause of the conflict. The international community should adhere to relevant UN resolutions, the principle of "land for peace," and the Arab Peace Initiative, and persevere in resolving the issue in a comprehensive, just and lasting manner through negotiation, he said. The Chinese ambassador asked to properly address the final status of Jerusalem. "This issue is complex and sensitive and concerns the future of the two-state solution and peace and security of the region. All parties should proceed with caution, refrain from imposing a solution that might lead to new confrontation." Relevant UN resolutions and international consensus should serve as the basis for a solution through negotiation, accommodating interests of all parties, he said. China firmly supports and promotes the Middle East peace process, the just cause of Palestinians to restore their legitimate national rights and the establishment of an independent state of Palestine with full sovereignty based on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital, he said. China will work with the rest of the international community to explore innovative mechanisms to facilitate peace in the Middle East and promote the resumption of peace talks between the two sides and make tireless efforts to realize comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the region, he said. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 07:15:00|Editor: Lu Hui Video Player Close WASHINGTON, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said on Tuesday that U.S. President Donald Trump would attend the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland in January. Trump would attend the WEF as he did this year, said Sanders at a press briefing, adding that a delegation led by U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin would travel with the president to Davos. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, and Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen are among the members of the delegation. The WEF Annual Meeting will take place in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland from January 22 to 25 in 2019, according to the official website of the WEF. Trump surprised the global business elite by preaching "America First" doctrine in his speech in the WEF Annual Meeting January this year, arguing that the United States would support free trade under the precondition of "fair and reciprocal." Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 07:15:01|Editor: mmm Video Player Close Chairman of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) Presidency Milorad Dodik (L) and Chinese Ambassador to BiH Chen Bo attend a banquet in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Dec. 18, 2018. There is a great friendship, support and understanding between peoples of Bosnia and Herzegovina and China, Dodik told Xinhua in an exclusive interview here on Tuesday. (Xinhua/Zhang Xiuzhi) SARAJEVO, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- There is a great friendship, support and understanding between peoples of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and China, Chairman of BiH Presidency Milorad Dodik told Xinhua in an exclusive interview here on Tuesday. The president spoke on the current project and agreements signed between BiH and China, highlighting the successful, intensive cooperation that the two states have had, especially in the last four years. Dodik said the "friendship, support and understanding between the two peoples" of BiH and China helped bring to building a thermal power plant in Republika Srpska (RS), one of the entities in BiH, which happened during his mandate as President of RS. "We are glad that one of the already realized, the biggest project of thermal power plant, under the One Belt One Road Initiative-16 plus One, is located in Republika Srpska," Dodik explained. He also talked about the agreement that RS authorities have signed with China, granting the concession for the construction of highway 42 kilometers long that will be connecting cities of Banja Luka and Prijedor with a total value of 297 million euros (337.5 million U.S. dollars). "We already have one agreement signed regarding the highway construction, and the second one is in preparation," Dodik added. "Also, in Doboj, a hospital will be built by the Chinese company which took on the obligation to build the object and to install the most contemporary, modern equipment," Dodik announced. Dodik also said there are several other projects that BiH will be doing with China and that Republika Srpska has shown the ability to accept the partnership with companies from China and to realize them. CARSON CITY, NV, Dec. 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via NEWMEDIAWIRE -- Pharmagreen Biotech, Inc., (OTC PINKS: PHBI) (Company) is pleased to announce that with the passing of the 2018 Farm Bill by Congress legalizing the production of hemp, a form of cannabis with THC levels below .3%, conjunctively increased the U.S. market size for CBD Dana hemp tissue culture plantlets. Cannabidiol, or CBD, is a compound found in cannabis that is popping up all over the U.S. market. Currently, CBD generates $418 million in sales, with expectations to increase to $1.6 billion by 2021, according to Brightfield Group. Pharmagreens Cannabis Biotech Complex, in the construction phase and slated for completion in Q1 of 2020, is focused on the production of cannabis tissue culture starter plantlets. At the forefront of its offerings is CBD Dana, a unique strain designed and optimized to provide the burgeoning CBD hemp farming sector with the highest quality 100% germ free, disease free, all female hemp starter plantlets. CBD Danas unique hemp properties with low THC (less than 0.3%) and significantly higher CBD content of 14% (per plant), compared to Industrial hemp strains, which contain around 1% CBD, makes it an ideal strain for CBD biomass farming and CBD oil extraction. With the higher CBD content per plant, this strain has the potential of increasing the yield of CBD per acre by up to 1,400% times that of 1% strain, leading to significantly higher return per acre farmed. Pharmagreen CEO, Peter Wojcik, stated, We are pleased to report extensive research has been completed with respect to CBD Dana strain by our R & D strategic partner, Botanical Research In Motion Inc. At this point, CBD Dana is very suitable for CBD hemp farming and with the expected passage of the 2018 Farm Bill into law, making CBD hemp farming legal, reaffirms the companys strategy for its focus on hemp strains research and development. Dr. Fawzia Afreen, Head of Research and Development for Botanical Research In Motion Inc., commented on her research, After the successful development of the Initiation and Multiplication protocols of our proprietary in-house variety CBD Dana, recent R&D has successfully resulted in plantlets with healthy roots in less time. This is a major achievement for future mass production of the disease-clean, healthy, all genetically the same, CBD Dana tissue cultured plantlets. About Pharmagreen Biotech, Inc. and WFS Pharmagreen Inc. WFS Pharmagreen Inc. is a wholly owned Canadian based subsidiary of Pharmagreen Biotech, Inc., a publicly traded (OTC Pink: PHBI) company. WFS Pharmagreen Inc. is a cannabis company positioning itself to become the largest producer of cannabis plantlets through a proprietary tissue culture process. Pharmagreen's mission is to advance the technology of tissue culture science and to provide the highest quality 100% germ free, disease free and all genetically the same plantlets of cannabis and other flora while offering full spectrum DNA testing for plant identification, live genetics preservation using low temperature storage for various cannabis and horticulture plants; extraction of botanical oils mainly CBD oil, and to deliver laboratory based services to the North American Cannabis and agriculture sectors. For further information on the company progress on the construction of a 63,000 square foot "Cannabis Biotech Complex" please visit www.pharmagreen.ca . About Botanical Research In Motion Inc. (B.R.I.M. Inc.) B.R.I.M. is a privately held research and development company focused on the cannabis industry. Developer of Chibafreen invitro plant micro propagation proprietary technology for the production of tissue cultured plantlets in the Pharmagreens Cannabis Botany Center. The company has also been developing for the last three years tissue culture protocols for variety of cannabis strains. In particular it has developed a hemp strain with a high CBD, very low THC content, CBD Dana, for the medical cannabis market and industrial scale CBD hemp production. Pharmagreen Biotech Inc. is the exclusive licensed supplier of CBD Dana plantlets. Safe Harbor Statement This press release contains forward-looking statements. Such forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks, assumptions and uncertainties that could cause the Company's actual results to differ materially from those projected in such forward-looking statements. In particular, factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in forward looking statements include: our inability to obtain additional financing on acceptable terms; risk that our products and services will not gain widespread market acceptance; inability to compete with others who provide comparable products; the failure of our technology; the infringement of our technology with proprietary rights of third parties; inability to respond to consumer demands; inability to replace significant customers; seasonal nature of our business. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date made and are not guarantees of future performance. We undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements. When used in this document, the words "believe," "expect," "anticipate," "estimate," "project," "plan," "should," "intend," "may," "will," "would," "potential," and similar expressions may be used to identify forward-looking statements. The OTC Markets or any other securities regulatory authority has not reviewed and does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this press release that has been prepared by management. FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump gestures as he speaks during the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland January 26, 2018. (Xinhua/REUTERS) WASHINGTON, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said on Tuesday that U.S. President Donald Trump would attend the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland in January. Trump would attend the WEF as he did this year, said Sanders at a press briefing, adding that a delegation led by U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin would travel with the president to Davos. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, and Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen are among the members of the delegation. The WEF Annual Meeting will take place in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland from January 22 to 25 in 2019, according to the official website of the WEF. Trump surprised the global business elite by preaching "America First" doctrine in his speech in the WEF Annual Meeting January this year, arguing that the United States would support free trade under the precondition of "fair and reciprocal." Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 07:25:05|Editor: Lu Hui Video Player Close UNITED NATIONS, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- A 1-month-old baby has become the world's first child to be given a vaccine delivered commercially by a drone in a remote island in the South Pacific country of Vanuatu, said the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) on Tuesday. The vaccine delivery covered almost 40 km of rugged mountainous terrain from Dillon's Bay on the west side of the island to the east landing in remote Cook's Bay, where 13 children and five pregnant women were vaccinated by a nurse on Tuesday. Joy Nowai was lucky enough to become the world's first child to be administered a drone-delivered vaccine. Cook's Bay, a small, scattered community that does not have a health center or electricity, is only accessible by foot or small local boats, said UNICEF. "Today's small flight by drone is a big leap for global health," UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore said in a press release. "With the world still struggling to immunize the hardest to reach children, drone technologies can be a game changer for bridging that last mile to reach every child." Vaccines are difficult to transport as they need to be carried at specific temperatures. Warm weather locations like Vanuatu, which is made up of more than 80 remote, mountainous islands stretching across 1,300 km and with limited roads, is a particularly difficult location for vaccine delivery. As a result, almost 20 percent of the country's children miss out on their essential childhood vaccines, according to UNICEF. "It's extremely hard to carry ice boxes to keep the vaccines cool while walking across rivers, mountains, through the rain, across rocky ledges. I've relied on boats, which often get canceled due to bad weather," said Miriam Nampil, the nurse who injected the world's first drone-delivered vaccine. "As the journey is often long and difficult, I can only go there once a month to vaccinate children. But now, with these drones, we can hope to reach many more children in the remotest areas of the island." During the drone flight, the vaccines were carried in Styrofoam boxes with ice-packs with a temperature logger. An electronic indicator is triggered if the temperature of the vaccines swings out of acceptable range, according to UNICEF. In tests last week, the Health Ministry of Vanuatu, with support from UNICEF, conducted drone trials with two drone operators, using test payloads. Swoop Aero, the Australian company responsible for Tuesday's successful drone delivery, passed the first phase of trials by landing the payloads within 2 meters of the target after a 50-km flight over numerous islands and waypoints, said UNICEF. This is also the first time globally that a government is contracting a commercial drone company to transport vaccines to remote areas. The drone operators are selected after a bidding process, and as by the contract, they are held accountable and not paid if they don't deliver, said UNICEF. In the long term, the government of Vanuatu is interested in integrating the drone delivery of vaccines into their national immunization program and using drones more widely to distribute health supplies. The data from the trials will also be used to show how drones can be used commercially in similar settings around the world, said UNICEF. "Today's first-of-a-kind vaccine delivery has enormous potential not only for Vanuatu, but also for the thousands of children who are missing out on vaccines across the world," said Fore. "This is innovation at its best, and shows how we can unlock the potential of the private sector for the greater good of the world's children." Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 09:40:31|Editor: Xiang Bo Video Player Close Photo taken on Dec. 16, 2018 shows the Chinese-built Lower Sesan II hydroelectric power station in Stung Treng Province, Cambodia. (Xinhua) by Xinhua reporters Fei Liena, Zhang Jianhua, Zhuang Beining LUANG PRABANG, Laos, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- Against verdant croplands, the Hadkhae village in northern Laos has quite a modern look: brand new apartment buildings standing alongside broad roads leading to public facilities including a newly-built school, a hospital, a market, and a bridge over the river. A local resident who called himself Kaisone in the village near the landmark Nam Ou River hydropower station project, said he used to be a welder at the project and had earned enough to buy a land, build a house on it and open his own car repair shop. Hadkhae is an immigrant village built by PowerChina Resources Ltd, with a development mode combining "basic agriculture support plus cooperation," i.e. resettled villagers do the farming while the company supplying seeds, fertilizers, tree saplings and farming implements, and helping diversify production so as to enable the locals to make more money. The farm was unaffected by the construction of the hydropower station. Kaisone said. "When they came, they also brought along advanced cultivation techniques. See how well these corn crops have grown!" The local natural landscape has attracted many foreign backpackers to visit, generating more income for villagers, he added. All the changes were triggered by the Nam Ou River hydropower project. It is a major development scheme being carried out as part of the Lao government's ambitious bid to turn the country into "the storage battery in Southeast Asia." It is also a key project within the framework of the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation (LMC) mechanism. The LMC is a sub-regional cooperation mechanism launched in March 2016 by China, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam, all riparian countries of the river called Mekong or Lancang in the upper reach. As of August this year, the first phase of the PowerChina-contracted project put into operation has delivered more than 3 billion kwh of electricity to the north of Laos. The second phase is planned to complete by 2020 and to supply 12 percent of the power need in Laos. ECO-FRIENDLY DEVELOPMENT A similar project in the Lower Sesan II hydropower project in northeast Cambodia has enormously lifted the living standards in the Kbal Romeas village with new, modern homes, jobs, better roads, a drainage system, clean water and cheap electricity. "The most important thing is that there is a public school and a free-of-charge health center near our house," said Krav Many, a 45-year-old father of three, adding that in the past, a sick man would have to travel 70 km before getting to a health center. The 400-megawatt dam, which is Cambodia's largest, was inaugurated on Monday after almost five years of construction. China's Huaneng Hydrolancang International Energy is its major stakeholder. "This is the biggest and the seventh Chinese-built hydropower dam in Cambodia," Prime Minister Samdech Techo Hun Sen said. "It will contribute to ensuring energy security, lowering the price of electricity, and reducing poverty in Cambodia." A Chinese-owned paper mill based in Xepon, Savannakhet Province of Laos, often impresses visitors with its drainage outlets. In the local branch of China's Shandong Sun Paper Group, the waste water discharge port is so clean that many ducks and fish are living there. "All our emission data have met the strictest environmental requirements," said general manager Chen Wenjun. The mill's cutting-edge hardwood pulp production line has an annual output of 300,000 tons. In addition, the plant uses the bark, wood chips and waste liquid to generate electricity. "There is certain profit, but the construction cost of the power station is much higher. Our initial thinking is about environmental protection, waste utilization and emission reduction," Chen said. POVERTY REDUCTION In Myanmar, in Min Pyin village in the Lewe township, Ms Thei Ma is receiving financial and technical assistance from China under a three-year pilot program on rural poverty reduction launched in February. "When I was pregnant, I had to walk a long way to fetch water. Now I'm so happy to see a well being dug here," said Thei Ma, a mother of two, holding her three-month-old baby girl in her arms. Wells and roads are planned as the first-year tasks, to be followed by providing power access and building a public center, a dam and a school. Afterwards, villagers will be able to learn plantation and irrigation techniques at China-funded training programs. "The project is expected to bring about substantial development and improve our standards of living," said Sow Kyaw Myint, head of the Myanmarese team of the local project. Besides Min Pyin, the village of Aye Chan Thar in the Tatkon township is the other beneficiary of the ongoing poverty reduction project. LMC MODEL After attending the 4th Lancang-Mekong Cooperation (LMC) foreign ministers' meeting in the Lao city of Luang Prabang on Monday, Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi said that during the past year, the LMC mechanism has achieved many "firsts". They included the first training program for promoting coordination among the six members, implementation of the first LMC-funded projects, and the first Lancang-Mekong forum on water resources cooperation, among others. The LMC countries have also put in place close to 30 major infrastructure projects such as building railways, roads, hydropower stations, and economic development zones, realizing cooperation on production capacity, Wang said. The LMC priority areas have expanded to cover education, media, medicine and youth exchanges, forming a comprehensive cooperation pattern, he added. On the LMC future development, the Chinese foreign minister stressed the consensus reached toward building a Lancang-Mekong economic development belt, further cooperation within the grouping and with other sub-regional blocs, as well as efficiency promotion. (Xinhua reporters Mao Pengfei, Ming Dajun, Taojun also contributed to the story.) (Video reporters: Fei Liena, Zhuang Beining, Zhang Jianhua, Du Dapeng; video editor: Yin Le) Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 10:00:36|Editor: Liangyu Video Player Close TEGUCIGALPA, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- More than 7,200 Honduran migrants heading for the United States as part of Central American migrant caravans have voluntarily returned to their country, an official source said Tuesday. The government is offering returnees land transportation and other services, said the office of Liza Medrano, head of the Foreign Affairs Ministry's office for the Protection of Honduran Migrants. The first of the caravans departed on Oct. 13 and attracted thousands of other would-be asylum seekers as it made its way north through Mexico. Some 2,500 migrants still stay along the U.S.-Mexico border, hoping to cross it, whether legally or illegally. Mexico on Tuesday announced it was working with the United States to boost investment in Central America and southern Mexico in a bid to bring jobs to the region and curb mass migration. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 10:10:39|Editor: Yang Yi Video Player Close UNITED NATIONS, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese envoy asked the international community to help advance reconciliation in Afghanistan, by encouraging the Taliban to return to the negotiating table. The Afghan government has recently called once again for unconditional talks with the Taliban and reorganized its negotiating team, Ma Zhaoxu, China's permanent representative to the United Nations, told the Security Council on Monday. The international community should support the inclusive political process that is Afghan-led and Afghan-owned, support the government's efforts to promote peace talks, and encourage the Taliban to return to the negotiating table as early as possible, he said. He also asked the international community to help Afghanistan improve its security environment. Violence made parliamentary election day on Oct. 20 the deadliest day of the year. The first three quarters of the year saw a record number of civilian casualties, and drug production in the country remains high, noted the Chinese ambassador. The international community should strengthen coordination and cooperation to effectively implement the Security Council resolutions, and continue to help Afghanistan's national security forces to build capacity, he said. Ma asked the international community to help Afghanistan achieve self-driven development, stressing the need to respect the political system and development path independently chosen by the Afghan people. He asked for efforts to maintain political stability in Afghanistan. The country's electoral authority should draw lessons and learn from this year's parliamentary elections in preparations for next year's presidential race, he said. Stakeholders across the political spectrum in Afghanistan should strengthen unity, regard maintenance of national political stability as a shared responsibility, and resolve differences through dialogue, he said. Ma pledged China's continued support for Afghanistan's political process, reconstruction and development. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 10:20:42|Editor: Liangyu Video Player Close YANGON, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- Myanmar and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have vowed to cooperate in repatriating displaced persons from Bangladesh, Myanmar News Agency reported on Wednesday. Speaking at a coordination meeting in Myanmar's capital Nay Phi Taw on Tuesday between the Office of the ASEAN Secretary-General and the Myanmar government, Minister of Social Welfare, Relief and Resettlement Dr. Win Myat Aye said that the cooperation would support the activities of the trilateral memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed between the Myanmar government, UN Development Program (UNDP) and UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The undertaking would also support the implementation of the agreements between Myanmar and Bangladesh and the collaboration is important for not only countries in the region but also for the international community, the minister said. ASEAN Secretary-General Lim Jock Hoi said needs assessment, based on the ASEAN Emergency Response and Assessment Team (ASEAN-ERAT) Guidelines, would be conducted in accordance with the host country's rules and regulations, prioritized process and protocols. Myanmar announced readiness to receive back the first batch of 2,261 displaced people from Bangladesh on Nov. 15 but there was such people seen returning on the designated day due to various reasons. However, Myanmar pledged to work on repatriation, resettlement and reintegration processes in accordance with the bilateral agreement on physical arrangement between Myanmar and Bangladesh, urging the UNHCR to continue assisting the government's repatriation process for those who really want to return back to Myanmar's western Rakhine state. Myanmar has been inviting cooperation from home and the international community to help the country rebuild and resettle the conflict-torn state. Myanmar and Bangladesh agreed in August for early repatriation of the displaced persons fleeing Rakhine state to Bangladesh. On June 6 this year, Myanmar also signed a MoU with the UNDP and the UNHCR on assisting Myanmar government's repatriation process. Myanmar government has assured the displaced persons of voluntary, safe and dignified repatriation in receiving the returnees. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 10:20:42|Editor: Liangyu Video Player Close SYDNEY, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- The special composition of a large stretch of ancient sand dunes discovered in waters off Australia's east coast helped it remain remarkably well-preserved despite being submerged by rising seas 12,000 years ago, pointing to a better understanding of the major geological features, according to the latest research. "They were originally thought to be part of an ancient reef," University of Sydney researcher Tiago Passos was quoted by local media as saying on Wednesday. The 70-km stretch of dunes spotted on the ocean bed between Queensland state's Fraser and Moreton islands, is made up of grains containing calcium carbonate instead of quartz, which makes up most of the world's sand dunes today, the ABC news channel cited the latest findings as showing. Passos analyzed images and samples of rock-like structures identified via sonar imaging in an expedition to the iconic Great Barrier Reef and found that the curved features were not a reef but dunes made of coarse grains of sand, reported the channel. The carbonate grains were cemented into rock through physical and chemical changes that helped preserve the ancient dunes, according to Passos and his team. Other present-day dunes are not likely to remain intact after being inundated by rising seas, said Passos. "They would be eroded as they don't have enough carbonate content to turn them into rock," he said. The findings are set to be published in the Australian Journal of Earth Sciences. The latest study could help scientists understand how sand dunes form, University of Queensland researcher Kevin Welsh told the channel. "It shows these parabolic sand dunes can form under quite different conditions and with different materials," he said. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 10:25:43|Editor: Lu Hui Video Player Close TOKYO, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- China has achieved remarkable economic development through reform and opening-up, with tremendous development scale and speed in the past 20 years, Satoshi Amako, a celebrated Japanese expert on China, recently told Xinhua in an exclusive interview. Amako, also an honorary professor at Waseda University, speaks highly of the reform's contribution as China marks the 40th anniversary of reform and opening-up this year. After a phase of experimentation in the first 20 years, China entered steady economic development with impressive scale and speed, which is the most notable characteristic of reform and opening-up in the past two decades, Amako told Xinhua. According to the Japanese expert, apart from liberation of productive forces, two major factors contributed to China's rapid economic development. On one hand, China's accession to the World Trade Organization helped the country actively integrate into the free trade system. On the other, cheap labor, such as migrant workers, has attracted foreign investment, boosting the Chinese economy, especially in coastal areas, Amako explained. China's economic development has not only benefited itself, but also contributed to the world, he said. As products made in China are welcomed by people all over the world, trade has promoted a free flow and globalization of goods, materials and human resources around the world, Amako said. The Japanese expert also talked about the high level of popularization of the Internet and its great influence on the Chinese society. "After 2010, it is obvious that the Internet is highly popular in China with electronic payment, taxi applications and so on. Things are changing each passing day," he said. Amako pointed out that the Belt and Road Initiative offers a great opportunity for cooperation between China and Japan in terms of aid to developing countries. Japan has accumulated experience in this area, he said, thus, under the initiative, China can draw on Japan's experience to maximize the benefit of Chinese fund to recipient countries. Cooperation between China and Japan in this field is beneficial to the development of bilateral relations, and also helps them make further contribution to the international community, Amako said. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 11:00:50|Editor: Liangyu Video Player Close WASHINGTON, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- Two former senior executives of the U.S. subsidiary of Panasonic Corp. were charged with knowingly violating accounting and documentation rules, according to a statement released by U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Tuesday. SEC said that Paul A. Margis, former CEO and president of Panasonic Avionics Corp., paid over 1.76 million U.S. dollars to several consultants, including a government official who helped Panasonic Avionics seize and retain business from a state-owned airline in return. However, SEC said that Panasonic Avionics falsely recorded these payments to consultants, and Margis "circumvented company procedures for engaging the consultants." Moreover, SEC criticized that Margis made materially false or misleading statements to the company's auditor. Besides, SEC said that Takeshi "Tyrone" Uonaga, former CFO of Panasonic Avionics, improperly recorded 82 million dollars in revenue "based on a backdated contract" and made "false representations" to the company's auditor. SEC said Margis and Uonaga agreed to pay penalties of 75,000 dollars and 50,000 dollars respectively without admitting or denying SEC's findings. Meanwhile, Uonaga was suspended from working as an accountant for five years. "Holding individuals accountable, particularly senior executives, is critical," said Antonia Chion, associate director of the SEC's Enforcement Division. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 11:20:54|Editor: Liangyu Video Player Close CANBERRA, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- A "revolutionary" cancer drug that supercharges immune cells to hunt and kill cancer cells has been approved for human use in Australia. The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) on Wednesday announced that CAR-T therapy has been approved for use in pediatric and young adult patients with B-cell precursor acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) and adults with diffuse large B cell lymphoma (DLBCL). CAR-T therapy trains immune cells to fight and kill cancer cells by first extracting them from a patient's body to genetically re-engineer them before infusing them back into the body. Prior to the TGA approving the treatment, patients with aggressive blood cancers who had exhausted all other treatments had been traveling overseas to be treated. Daniel Clarke, 45, traveled with his family to the United States so he could receive CAR-T treatment for his DLBCL. Within one month his cancer had vanished. "I felt like someone had just handed my life back to me," he told Fairfax Media on Wednesday. "It has all happened so quickly. Late September we (went to Boston) not knowing what to expect, hoping for the best, fearing the worst. Then come November I was in complete remission." Global pharmaceutical giant Novartis owns the therapy and has already increased production to keep up with global demand. "We are focused on ramping up capacity at our U.S. and Switzerland facilities and we recently announced a collaboration agreement for additional manufacturing capacity with Fraunhofer (Germany) and CellforCure (France)," spokesperson Lauren Carey said. "These additional manufacturing facilities are intended to support production on a global scale." However, CAR-T therapy is not classified as a "drug", so it cannot be subsidized by the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. Patients who undergo the treatment in Australia face an out-of-pocket cost of up to 598,000 Australian dollars. Greg Hunt, Australia's Minister for Health, has flagged his intention to have the treatment subsidized as soon as possible. Denver, Colorado, Dec. 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- DENVER In partnership with Shanahan Development LLC and Elevation Community Land Trust (ECLT), Urban Land Conservancy (ULC) purchased an 18,000 square foot site located at 801 W. 6th Avenue in Denvers Santa Fe Arts District for the development of affordable for-sale homes. The $1.8 million acquisition will support a mixed-use development, with commercial space and 92 for-sale condominiums, with at least 86 permanently affordable units for households earning $40,000 to $72,000 in annual income. The lack of affordable for-sale homes in the Metro Denver region is a significant problem, said Mark Marshall, Director of Real Estate for Urban Land Conservancy and lead on the acquisition. In order to provide working families and individuals with permanently affordable for-sale options we need creative opportunities like Inca Commons. ULC is thrilled to be working with Elevation and Shanahan Development who is leading this effort to create affordable housing options for our citys workforce. Inca Commons will be developed by Shanahan Development, who identified the centrally located site for a mixed-use affordable development. Coming from a family of educators, President Jeff Shanahan has seen first-hand how challenging it is to purchase an affordable home in the Denver region. This new development will serve as an example of how to provide homeownership opportunities for individuals and families who face too many barriers in the current housing market. We recognize the critical need for affordable housing across the Greater Denver region, said Jeff Shanahan, President & CEO of Shanahan Development. It has been our ultimate goal to provide affordable for-sale housing opportunities in a centrally located area, and we are excited to see this development finally come to fruition thanks to our partnership with ULC and Elevation. Inca Commons will provide homes for individuals and families earning up to 80% of the Area Median Income (AMI) and will include studios, two- and three-bedroom units as well as 4,000 square feet of commercial space. Given the shortage of condo development over the past decade, its especially exciting to see a project of this scale, with long-term affordability as a prime focus, anchoring in central Denver, said OED Executive Director Eric Hiraga. Additional affordable home ownership opportunities are critically important, and we look forward to Inca Commons taking shape in Lincoln Park. ECLT provided significant equity into the project to subsidize the price of the 86 affordable condominiums with price points below $200,000. Once the homes are developed and sold, ECLT will take on the ownership and stewardship of the land in a 99 year ground lease. The homes will be part of ECLTs community land trust and remain permanently affordable for future buyers as the homes are sold and purchased. Elevation was created to increase the supply of permanently affordable for-sale housing across the Metro Denver region, said Stefka Fanchi, President & CEO of Elevation Community Land Trust. This is an incredible example of the strength behind partnership. Together with Urban Land Conservancy and Shanahan Development, we are creating a much needed affordable housing option for people looking to enter into homeownership. Inca Commons is ULCs third acquisition using the newly created Metro Denver Impact Facility (MDIF). The revolving source of loan capital was created in 2018 in partnership with FirstBank, the Colorado Health Foundation, The Denver Foundation, The Colorado Trust and Colorado Housing and Finance Authority (CHFA). MDIF will grow to become a $50 million resource to support ULCs real estate acquisitions to create and preserve the affordability of housing, community serving space, schools and nonprofit facilities. Increasing affordable housing options is one of the most impactful things we can do as a society to help all Coloradoans thrive, said Stu Wright, Executive Vice President at FirstBank. As the states largest locally owned bank, we feel its our responsibility to help make the American Dream of owning a house more reachable for residents, regardless of income. Were thrilled to see our investment towards the MDIF start to do just that, and address the growing housing crisis head on. The Inca Commons development represents more than just enabling low-to-moderate income individuals to buy a home; its a path towards financial freedom for dozens of local families. The Colorado Trust believes all Coloradans should have equal opportunities to lead healthy lives, regardless of their income, said Deb DeMuth, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer at The Colorado Trust. Access to stable, affordable housing is closely tied to health outcomes, so we believe Inca Commons can ultimately increase the well-being of many Denver residents. Inca Commons is expected to break ground in the third quarter of 2019, with units expected to be available for purchase in late 2020. ### Established in 2003, Urban Land Conservancy is a nonprofit organization that uses real estate as a tool to benefit urban communities in metro Denver. ULC preserves, develops and invests in place-based real estate including affordable housing, nonprofit commercial space, community centers and schools. www.urbanlandc.org Founded in 2008, Shanahan Development is a subsidiary of JJS Investments. The real estate investment company has entitled nearly $260 million worth of multifamily, hospitality, retail and public transit projects which are either completed or currently under construction. The companys portfolio includes a 319 unit apartment complex, two hotels and Depot Square - 71 units of permanently affordable rental housing adjacent to an RTD bus terminal in Boulder, Colorado. JJS Investments also owns multiple commercial properties in Missouri, Kansas and Colorado. The Denver Office of Economic Development (OED) is dedicated to advancing economic prosperity for the City of Denver, its businesses, neighborhoods and residents. Working with a wide variety of community partners, OED operates to create a local environment that stimulates balanced growth through job creation, business assistance, housing options, neighborhood redevelopment and the development of a skilled workforce. Elevation Community Land Trust was founded with a mission to provide opportunities for Colorado families to remain in their communities for generations using the community land trust model. By making homeownership more accessible for Colorado families, we can create healthy, stable neighborhoods for today and tomorrow. Learn more: www.elevationclt.org FirstBank operates more than 115 locations in Colorado, Arizona and California. Its the largest locally owned banking organization in Colorado, serving more than 750,000 customers. FirstBank offers a variety of checking and savings accounts, mortgages, home equity loans and a full range of commercial loans and business accounts and services. Since 2000, the company has been recognized as a top corporate philanthropist and has contributed more than $60 million and thousands of volunteer hours to charitable organizations. FirstBank is also unique in that a majority of its stock is owned by management and employees. For more information, go to www.efirstbank.com Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 11:30:57|Editor: Liangyu Video Player Close CANBERRA, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- Australian authorities are seeking the power to manage convicted terrorists throughout their entire lives, even when they have been released from prison. News Corp Australia on Wednesday reported that the Australian Federal Police (AFP) has applied for a control order against an unnamed Islamic extremist, who is set to be released from prison in February, 2019. The man will be the first Islamic State-inspired terrorist to be released from prison, leaving authorities with questions over how best to manage his release. Under new laws, police can apply for an extended supervision order, which would result in the offender being locked up for longer but authorities have said a judge is unlikely to grant the order in this case. Instead, Attorney-General Christian Porter has promised to change laws so that the AFP could apply for extended supervision orders, which judges are more likely to grant than extended incarceration. Similar control orders already introduced in New South Wales prohibit the subject from associating with other extremists, limit their use of the Internet and restrict the phones they can use. In more extreme cases, subjects can be prohibited from going near places such as airports or prisons. Extended detention or control orders could be applied to 33 of the 36 individuals currently in Australian prisons for violating national terror laws. Control orders can also be applied for prisoners who police can prove were radicalized while incarcerated and thus pose a threat to the community upon their release. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 11:35:58|Editor: Lu Hui Video Player Close CANBERRA, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) has launched an investigation into Virgin Australia Airline over a "serious" incident at Canberra airport, local media reported on Wednesday. The ATSB announced it would investigate the airline, which is one of Australia's largest, over the incident whereby two engines on an ATR 72 twin-engine aircraft "flamed out" during descent on a flight from Sydney to Canberra on Dec. 13. As a result, the aircraft, which can carry up to 78 passengers, had no engines for five seconds mid-air and was only moments from crashing. According to flight data, the aircraft remained in Canberra for three days following the incident but returned to operations on Monday and has since completed 11 flights. "While the aircraft was descending through 11,000 ft in heavy rain, the right engine's power rolled back (decreased) and the engine flamed out. The engine automatically re-started within five seconds," the ATSB said in a statement on Tuesday night. "The descent continued and, while passing through 10,000 ft, the left engine's power also rolled back and that engine flamed out before automatically relighting. "The crew selected manual engine ignition for the remainder of the flight and the landing." The investigation is expected to continue into late 2019 but the ATSB said it would immediately publish any findings that are a threat to public safety. "Should a critical safety issue be identified during the course of the investigation, the ATSB will immediately notify relevant parties so appropriate action can be taken," it said. Virgin Australia responded to the investigation by saying that "there was no customer impact" from the incident and that "safety is always our number one priority." Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 12:46:08|Editor: mmm Video Player Close SYDNEY, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- An extreme heatwave in Australia's Queensland state has wiped out more than 23,000 spectacled flying foxes, or about one-third of the species in the country, in an unprecedented mass death of the fruit bats amid climate change, local media reported on Wednesday. "These are certainly very serious wildlife die-off events and they occur at almost biblical scales," Western Sydney University ecologist Dr. Justin Welbergen told the ABC news channel. "The population size of the spectacled flying fox in Australia is estimated to be about 75,000 individuals, give or take, so for all intents and purpose that means we have lost close to a third of the entire species in Australia," Welbergen said. The deaths were from bat colonies in the state's Cairns area, where temperatures soared above 42 centigrade two days in a row, breaking the previous record temperature for November by five centigrade, according to the channel. It was the first time the bats died from extreme heat in far northern Australia, where conditions were usually hot and humid but stayed below 40 centigrade, Welbergen said. "Extreme heat events are increasing in frequency, also in terms of intensity and duration, and we can expect more extreme temperatures to occur increasingly frequently further north," he said. "A certain proportion of such an extreme event can certainly be statistically attributed to climate change for sure, " he added. There has been an average of one major die-off of flying foxes in excess of 1,000 deaths every year in the country, Welbergen said, with the environmental impact on the animals obvious since many of them roosted in urban areas. Some residents were forced to leave their homes due to the smell from rotting carcasses of bats that dropped dead from trees in affected areas, according to the channel. "These sorts of events really raise concerns around what is happening to other species, especially wildlife that have more solitary and cryptic lifestyles," Welbergen said. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 12:46:09|Editor: mmm Video Player Close by Mohamed al-Azaki SANAA, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- Mohammed al-Dhabiby has been struggling to find treatment for his five-year-old daughter suffering from stomach cancer. To keep the little girl Khadijah alive, the father has spent every penny he has to bring his daughter to the hospital in the capital Sanaa. "We traveled from Abs district to Sanaa to treat Khadijah. I spent all my money. Many medicines are not available in the hospital due to the blockade," he told Xinhua. Abs is situated in Hajjah province in the far north of the war-torn country, just a few miles south of Midi and Harad districts bordering Saudi Arabia. Midi and Harad have been the main frontlines in the province since the war erupted nearly four years ago. The government troops backed by the Saudi-led military coalition advanced in August to the northern edge of Abs, forcing hundreds of families to flee to the southern part of the district. Like thousands of troubled Yemeni people, al-Dhabiby and his daughter suffer from the war and disease. The war and all-out blockade have caused severe shortage in medicines, as well as in food and fuel. The United Nations(UN) brokered a cease-fire deal between the Shiite Houthi rebels and the internationally-recognized government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi in the peace talks hosted by Sweden last week. The cease-fire entered into force on Tuesday and covered the strategic Red Sea city of Hodeidah and its ports, Salif and Ras Issa as the first phase of confidence-rebuilding measure between the rival forces. Hodeidah port is the key entry to almost 80 percent of Yemen's imports of medicines, food and fuel, as well as aid. Much of the country's north, including Hodeidah, Hajjah and Sanaa are still controlled by the Iranian-backed Houthis since the ousted the government of Hadi in late 2014. "I hope that the UN which sponsors the peace talks can press relevant parties to lift the blockade and reopen Sanaa airport in order to facilitate the imports of medicines and the travel of patients for treatment abroad," al-Dhabiby said. Another five-year-old girl lies on a bed next to Khadijah in the National Oncology Center in downtown Sanaa. Tawakul al-Akhram also traveled from Abs to receive chemotherapy IV for treating a cancer tumor in her stomach. Four-year-old Hani Abdulkhalik had his right hand amputated after the chemotherapy dosages failed to treat the cancer. In fact, all 56 beds at the center are occupied with patients, mostly children and the elderly. Mohamed al-Yadee, head of non-governmental Cancer Patients Charity, told Xinhua that the war and blockade have caused acute shortage in medicines and made it very difficult to help transport those in critical conditions to abroad for treatment. "We called the humanitarian aid agency to provide more medical aid for the patients and the UN to help reopen Sanaa airport as that would facilitate the travel of patients in critical conditions," al-Yadee said. According to Mohammed al-Mahfadi, the information and public relations official of the National Oncology Center, the center is the only one to treat cancer tumors in Yemen. "It's a state-owned center providing free of charge treatment and medicines to the cancer patients," al-Mahfadi said. According to the patients, not all medicines are available in the center, so the patients need to buy many medicines from private pharmacies outside, which are very expensive. Al-Mahfadi said the number of cases have increased since the war erupted in March 2015 and the center receives up to 500 new confirmed cases each month. The UN humanitarian agencies have warned that the Yemeni health centers are facing collapse due to acute shortage of medicine supplies, fuel, as well as salary cut of state medical staff as the civil war and all-out blockade near their four-year mark. Yemen is now on the brink of mass famine, with about half of the children under five chronically malnourished, and the cholera epidemic has already infected over 1 million Yemenis, mostly children. Besides, about 25 million Yemenis have no access to clean drinking water. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 13:01:11|Editor: Liangyu Video Player Close RIO DE JANEIRO, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- Brazilian President-elect Jair Bolsonaro said on Tuesday his government will adopt rigorous criteria on immigration. Through a Facebook live broadcast, the president-elect reaffirmed that the country will leave the UN Global Compact for Migration, which was signed recently by 163 nations, including Brazil. Ernesto Araujo, Bolsonaro's pick for foreign minister, said earlier this month that Brazil would leave the agreement. "Unfortunately, the current Foreign Ministry signed the UN's migration pact. I think everybody knows what is going on in France, it is unbearable to live in some parts of France," said Bolsonaro. "We do not want that for Brazil. We are not against immigrants, but to enter Brazil there must be rigorous criteria," he added. Brazilian Foreign Minister Aloysio Nunes Ferreira believed Bolsonaro's decision to quit the compact is a mistake and a regression. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 13:01:11|Editor: Liangyu Video Player Close MEXICO CITY, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- Mexico's austerity-minded president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, on Tuesday returned a third of his salary to the state treasury. Lopez took office on Dec. 1 and pledged to curb public spending, including by slashing his own wages. He gave back 29 percent of the amount paid to him for the first two weeks. At a press conference, he reiterated his monthly salary should be around 108,000 pesos (5,373 U.S. dollars), in keeping with his austerity plan. The president said he was paid 76,159 pesos and 59 cents according to the existing law and decided to return 22,313 pesos and 29 cents. "I already gave it back to the treasury," Lopez told reporters. He has also called on other top public servants to renounce their exorbitant salaries, including judges in the supreme court, who are against the measure. Mexico's long-existing "gilded bureaucracy" must end, he said. The country's debt ballooned to a record 48.2 percent of the gross domestic product in 2016, but decreased slightly to 45.4 percent last year. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 13:21:16|Editor: Liangyu Video Player Close U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (R) meets with Nepal's Foreign Minister Pradeep Kumar Gyawali at the U.S. Department of State in Washington D.C., the United States, on Dec. 18, 2018. (Xinhua/Ting Shen) WASHINGTON, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met with Nepal's Foreign Minister Pradeep Gyawali here on Tuesday, discussing further development of bilateral ties, said the U.S. State Department. The secretary of state highlighted the people-to-people ties that form the foundation of the relationship, according to a statement issued by the State Department. Pompeo also noted that the meeting with his Nepali counterpart demonstrated the U.S. commitment to its partnership with Nepal, and emphasized the potential for the further development of U.S.-Nepal ties. The two sides also discussed the compact between Nepal and Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), which is MCC's first such compact in South Asia and worth 500 million U.S. dollars. Senior officials at Nepal's Foreign Ministry said earlier that Nepal and the United States are holding official talks at the level of foreign ministers after a gap of 16 years. Created by the U.S. Congress in 2004, MCC is a foreign aid agency that provides time-limited grants and assistance to less developed countries that meet rigorous standards. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 13:26:17|Editor: Yang Yi Video Player Close CHONGQING, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- Hainan Airlines on Wednesday opened a direct flight between southwest China's Chongqing Municipality and Paris. The outbound flight leaves Chongqing at 1:30 a.m. Beijing time and arrives in Paris at 6:20 a.m. local time every Wednesday and Saturday. The return flight departs Paris at 1 p.m. and arrives in Chongqing at 6:30 a.m. The flight duration is between 10 hours and 30 minutes and 12 hours. The new route is the first direct flight linking the two cities. So far, Chongqing has opened 80 international air routes. Last week, two routes linking Chongqing with Boston and Seattle, with a connection in Shanghai were opened. Paris has been one of the top destinations in Europe for Chinese tourists. Last year, Chinese tourists made a total of 1.1 million visits to Paris. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 13:31:18|Editor: Liangyu Video Player Close WASHINGTON, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. government on Tuesday promised billions of U.S. dollars of aid to three Central American countries and Mexico as illegal immigration from the Mexican border remains a serious problem for the United States. The United States is committing 5.8 billion dollars through public and private investment toward the Northern Triangle countries, namely, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, said the U.S. State Department in a statement. The fund will be used "in support of institutional reforms, development, and economic growth" in the countries, according to the statement. Washington also vowed to strengthen its support for development in southern Mexico by allocating 2 billion dollars for projects in this area, said the State Department. Illegal immigrants trying to enter the United States through the Mexican border remain a major concern for the U.S. government. Washington has added pressure on the Mexican government to stop the migrants from arriving at the U.S. border, either making them remain in Mexico or give up and head home. In October, U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to cut off or reduce U.S. aid to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador as the three countries failed to stop people from the exodus. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 13:36:20|Editor: Yang Yi Video Player Close TIANJIN, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- A supercomputer-based simulation platform for the research and development of vehicles has been launched in the National Supercomputer Center in north China's Tianjin. Supported by China's first petaflop supercomputer the Tianhe-1, the platform can help researchers and engineers develop key components of vehicles, said Meng Xiangfei, head of the center's applied research and development department. A car is composed of thousands of parts and fittings. A computer simulation can complete around 80 percent of the work in design and research of automobiles, he said. International automakers like BMW, Volkswagen, and General Motors have founded their own supercomputer-based simulation platforms. Meng said the center has established cooperative relations with automakers and institutions such as China Automotive Technology and Research Center Co. Ltd., Foton Motor Group and Tianjin FAW. The Tianhe-1 supercomputer can complete an average of 1,400 online tasks on a daily basis, such as supercomputing for visual analysis and processing. Meng said Tianjin FAW was the first to try the platform, which has optimized the company's research and development process for two types of its self-designed cars. Using the supercomputer, the company shortened its research time by 80 percent, saving more than 7 million yuan (around 1 million U.S. dollars) in costs. The Tianhe-1, unveiled in 2010, is capable of at least 1 quadrillion calculations per second. It has served in a number of fields including digital mining research and development, animation, online finance, and big data, as well as e-governance of the Binhai New Area in Tianjin. The National Supercomputer Center has completed the development of China's new-generation exascale supercomputer the Tianhe-3. The final version of the Tianhe-3 will be operational by 2020 when it is expected to be 200 times faster and have 100 times more storage capacity than the Tianhe-1. Indianapolis, Dec. 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Viral Launch, a leading provider of software and services that enable private-label and major brands to sell successfully on Amazon, today announced the appointment of Jenny Quinnette as its first chief financial officer (CFO). Quinnette brings more than 15 years of experience in corporate strategy, strategic transitions, accounting, information technology and finance. A results-oriented executive with a strong background in finance and accounting leadership, Quinnette previously served as CFO at Onebridge, Indianapolis and director of finance and accounting at Allegient LLC, Indianapolis. This year, Viral Launch reached the next level in our journey to be the premier platform for selling on Amazon, said Casey Gauss, co-founder and chief executive officer of Viral Launch. We need experienced executives to help manage our rapid growth effectively and Jenny is a tremendous addition to our senior management team. This appointment concludes the companys most successful year and follows the appointment in August of Mitch Black as president and chief operating officer. In January, the company renovated and nearly tripled the size of its offices at 429 Pennsylvania St., Indianapolis. Despite the expansion from 3,500 square-feet to more than 11,000 square-feet, the company is ready to grow its footprint again. Viral Launch has more than doubled its staffing in the past year as it works toward a plan to grow by 250 workers by 2021. Cost-effectively creating demand, visibility and conversions on Amazon is becoming more complex and challenging every day as new sellers enter the hyper-competitive marketplace, said Mitch Black, president and chief operating officer at Viral Launch. Using our new software tools, sellers can improve the relevancy and ranking of their listings on Amazon, and ultimately sales. Amazon is the largest U.S. online retailer. This year, according to eMarketer, Amazon will capture 49.1 percent of the market. In addition, eMarketer predicts Amazon will generate $258.22 billion in U.S. retail ecommerce sales in 2018, up 29.2 percent over last year1. By 2019, it forecasts Amazon Marketplace sales to account for over 70 percent of Amazon's overall U.S. online retail business. About Viral Launch Viral Launch provides Amazon Marketplace sellers with a comprehensive, integrated suite of research, analysis, listing and sales tools. Available by subscription, the companys Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions have helped more than 9,000 brands launch over 41,000 products, achieving $6.5+ billion in fulfilled by Amazon (FBA) sales. For greater success on Amazon, the company also provides a range of creative services including photography, copywriting and listing optimization. Founded in 2014, Viral Launch is privately-held and headquartered in Indianapolis. To learn more, visit viral-launch.com and follow us on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter. 1. https://retail.emarketer.com/article/amazon-now-has-nearly-50-of-us-ecommerce-market/5b48c542ebd4000b24140992 Attachment Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 13:46:21|Editor: Liangyu Video Player Close WASHINGTON, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. Senate on Tuesday night overwhelmingly approved a sweeping overhaul of the country's criminal justice system, showing bipartisan support for changes including reducing the penalty for drug offenders as well as allowing leniency for current federal inmates. Shortly after the First Step Act's passage in the Senate by a margin of 87-12, U.S. President Donald Trump tweeted, "Congratulations to the Senate on the bi-partisan passing of a historic Criminal Justice Reform Bill...This will keep our communities safer, and provide hope and a second chance, to those who earn it." The Washington Post described the bill as "handing a rare bipartisan victory to President Trump," and Politico, a news portal focusing on political news, also said it is a win for the president. The 12 against votes, according to The Hill newspaper, were cast by Republicans. The bill is expected to be endorsed by the House when lawmakers there will likely have a vote later this week. It then goes to Trump's desk, ready to be signed into law. House Speaker Paul Ryan voiced his support for the bill in a tweet he sent after the Senate vote. "Criminal justice reform is about giving more Americans a chance at redemption. House looks forward to sending it to the president to become law," the Republican said. The legislation will reduce the so-called "three strikes" penalty for drug felonies from life in prison to 25 years behind bars. The three strikes rule was introduced when former President Bill Clinton was in office, mandating a life sentence for three or more convictions. In addition, the law also limits the disparity between sentencing for crack and powder cocaine offenses. This change, the Washington Post said, would affect about 2,000 current federal inmates. Meanwhile, the bill provides incentives for inmates to earn time credits and aims to lower recidivism rates. A major criticism of the three strikes penalty is that locking the criminals up indefinitely costs a lot of money. Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn said during Tuesday's debate that apart from saving money, the bill also aims to invest in "human potential." "We're investing in the men and women who want to turn their lives around once they're released from prison," he was quoted by the Washington Post as saying. The Post also said the reform, which does not cover state jails, will trim altogether 53,000 years of the sentences of current inmates over the next decade, citing data from the Congressional Budget Office. The newspaper added, however, that the figure is disputed by advocacy groups. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 14:45:27|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close Chinese Mergansers, an endangered bird species, fly in Longhu Mountain scenic area in Yingtan, east China's Jiangxi Province, on Dec. 18, 2018. About 80 Chinese Mergansers were spotted in the Longhu Mountain scenic area to pass the winter, thanks to a series of measures taken by local authorities to make sure of the safety of the wintering birds. (Xinhua/Song Zhenping) Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 14:46:31|Editor: Liangyu Video Player Close RIO DE JANEIRO, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- A Brazilian state in the country's northern region declared on Tuesday state of public calamity after a fire destroyed an entire shanty town. The city of Manaus in Brazil's Amazonas state, known as Educandos, is mostly comprised of wooden houses which are highly flammable. The fire started in the late hours of Monday and took more than 12 hours to be extinguished. The constant wind helped spread the fire and the cars parked at nearby streets made it hard for the large fire trucks to get to the site. Local authorities considered the Educandos fire the second worst in the history of Amazonas state. There were no reports of deaths, but 17 people were injured. One of them, a 53-year-old woman, is reportedly in serious condition. According to the local authorities, at least 600 houses were destroyed. The families who lost their homes either went to their relatives' or were accommodated in shelters around the city. Brazil's President Michel Temer said on Twitter that he is in contact with the authorities in Amazonas state and offered federal aid. Civil Defense Secretary Fernando Pires Junior said the affected families will receive financial aid for tents and food kits. The police are investigating the cause of the fire. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 15:11:38|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close UNITED NATIONS, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- Permanent Observer of Palestine to the United Nations (UN) Riyad Mansour on Tuesday criticized Nikki Haley, the outgoing U.S. ambassador to the UN, for hostility towards the Palestinian people. "Ambassador Haley, unfortunately, exhibited an excessive amount of hostility to the Palestinian people and to the Palestinian cause," Mansour told reporters after a Security Council meeting on the question of Palestine. Haley was more aggressive and more pro-Israeli than previous U.S. ambassadors, he said. "Different representatives of the United States were always showing massive support to Israel. But yet at the same time, there was a bit more balance in terms of not ignoring the Palestinian side completely," said Mansour, who has seen many U.S. ambassadors to the UN since he started serving in the post in 2005. Haley, who is stepping down at the end of the month, made her last statement on the issue of Palestine at Tuesday's Security Council meeting. She will be replaced by Heather Nauert, the current U.S. State Department spokesperson. In her speech, Haley asked Israelis and Palestinians to engage in a new Middle East peace plan yet to be unveiled by the Trump administration. The plan contains elements that both sides will like and dislike, noted Haley, who said she had read the plan. She asked Israelis and Palestinians to focus on parts they like and encouraged negotiations to move forward. "Both sides would benefit greatly from a peace agreement, but the Palestinians would benefit more, and the Israelis would risk more," said Haley. Mansour said Haley's speech contained the same theme she had started with two years ago. She did not convince any of the 14 members of the Security Council to replace the global consensus regarding the issue of Palestine with other ideas, Mansour said. "Any other ideas that might be contemplated by the current U.S. administration to replace this global consensus ... will not have a chance of succeeding. It's dead on arrival," he said. Mansour commended the position of the current and upcoming EU members in the Security Council. The current and upcoming EU members on Tuesday reaffirmed their commitment to "the internationally agreed parameters for a just and lasting peace in the Middle East based on international law, relevant UN resolutions and previous agreements." Any peace plan that fails to recognize these internationally agreed parameters would risk being condemned to failure, said the EU members in a statement. The statement was read to reporters in Mansour's presence before the Security Council meeting by Karel van Oosterom, the Dutch ambassador to the UN, on behalf of the eight EU countries of Britain, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Poland -- the current EU members in the Security Council -- and Belgium, Germany and Italy. Belgium and Germany will become council members next year, and Italy split a two-year council term with the Netherlands. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 15:46:45|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close UNITED NATIONS, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Nickolay Mladenov on Tuesday regretted receding international consensus and the lack of progress on the Middle East peace process in 2018. "I remain concerned by the weakening of international consensus and the absence of collective efforts to achieve an end to the (Israeli) occupation and the realization of a negotiated two-state resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in line with relevant United Nations resolutions and previous agreements," Mladenov told the Security Council. "I believe that I speak on behalf of all of us today when I say that we all share a concern that at the end of 2018 we are nowhere closer to reviving efforts for a negotiated solution. Without a political horizon, all our collective and individual efforts merely contribute to managing the conflict rather than resolving it." It is only by realizing the vision of two states living side-by-side in peace, security and mutual recognition, with Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and Palestine, and all final-status issues resolved permanently through negotiations, that the legitimate aspirations of both peoples can be achieved, he noted. Mladenov expressed concern over violence in the West Bank in 2018 despite the fact that violence in Hamas-controlled Gaza caught more attention. "In terms of violence over the past year, although Gaza has been the most volatile, the risk of an explosion in the West Bank has also grown. I am concerned by the recent incidents and rising tensions in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem." "During the past three months, we have witnessed stabbings, rammings and three lethal shooting attacks against Israelis, one of which led to the heartbreaking death of a baby. We have also seen the death of a Palestinian woman, killed by a stone. There can be no justification for any brutal acts of terror and I call on all to join the UN in condemning them unequivocally. They feed mistrust and hatred." Israeli responses to recent events in the West Bank have been harsh as some of the perpetrators of recent attacks have been killed, said Mladenov. Settler-related violence has also been on the rise during 2018, with the highest number of incidents recorded since 2014, he said. While Gaza has been quiet since the last escalation in November, it is critical that events in the West Bank not lead to reigniting the Gaza fuse, he warned. "It is imperative that the current calm be preserved at all costs. No one can afford another war in Gaza." Since March 2018, tens of thousands of people in Gaza took part in demonstrations along the border fence with Israel, many of which turned violent, said Mladenov. "From May through November, we witnessed the most serious escalations since the 2014 Gaza conflict, with over 500 rockets and 700 mortars fired toward Israel by Hamas and other militant groups. Some 175 Palestinians were killed by Israeli live fire, including 32 children, two women and three medical workers. One Israeli soldier was killed by sniper fire during a demonstration." The indiscriminate launching of rockets and mortars against Israeli towns and villages violates international law, placing hundreds of thousands of civilians under imminent threat, and causing great fear and mental trauma, particularly for children, he said. Mladenov expressed serious concern over the loss of life, especially of children, in the context of these hostilities and protests. "The killing of children is absolutely unacceptable. Israeli security forces have a responsibility to exercise restraint and should use firearms only when strictly necessary in order to protect life or prevent serious injury from an imminent threat. Hamas also has an obligation to protect children, ensuring that they never be put in harm's way," he said. Ongoing instances of incitement, provocative steps, and inflammatory rhetoric plague the public language of the conflict, he said. "They are highly dangerous and threaten to push an already volatile situation past the boiling point." "Over the past year, statements that encourage violence continued. Such rhetoric, particularly if it denies the right of existence of one of the sides, or their right to statehood, or glorifies terror, is dangerous and plays into the hands of extremists beyond Israel and Palestine," he warned. Mladenov condemned the continued expansion of the Israeli settlement enterprise, which, he said, is illegal under international law, undermines hope among the population, trust between the parties, and the two-state solution itself. Settlement planning and tendering continued during 2018 but at lower rates compared with 2017, he said. Mladenov regretted the fact that this year has seen no affirmative steps by the parties to reverse negative trends nor serious progress on implementing important agreements signed in 2017, including on water, energy and telecommunications. Significant Israeli administrative and legal decisions are facilitating the legalization, under Israeli law, of settlements on private Palestinian land and threaten to undermine the financial stability of the Palestinian Authority. Meanwhile, restrictive Palestinian Authority measures against Gaza compound the long-standing Israeli closures of the strip, further widening the political and administrative gap between Ramallah and Gaza, he said. While there has been no progress on intra-Palestinian reconciliation, it is critical that this important Egyptian-led process continues, he stressed. "The United Nations stands firmly in support of Egypt's efforts in this regard and urges the parties to make serious efforts to ensure the return of the legitimate Palestinian government to Gaza. Gaza is, and must remain, an integral part of a future Palestinian state as part of a two-state solution." Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 16:36:55|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close BAGHDAD, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. forces established a new military base inside Iraq near the border with neighboring Syria in the western province of Anbar, a local newspaper reported on Wednesday. "The U.S. troops built the military base in al-Maliha area near the town of al-Qaim, some 400 km west of the Iraqi capital Baghdad," the independent newspaper of al-Mashriq quoted the town's mayor, Ahmed al-Mahalawi, as saying. According to the mayor, this is the second military base established in Rummanah area near al-Qaim. Another base was set up in earlier December. "The new base is close to the borderline with Syria, apparently aimed at monitoring the border to protect the U.S. forces deployed inside Syria near the Iraqi-Syrian border," al-Mahalawi added. The newspaper also quoted Frahan al-Dulaimi, member of Anbar provincial council, as saying that the U.S. forces "did not inform the provincial authorities about the military bases." Al-Dulaimi added that "the provincial council has no power to prevent the U.S. forces from building bases in the desert of the province." Earlier in the year, the Iraqi government said that there was coordination with the U.S. government to gradually reduce the number of the U.S. troops in Iraq after the defeat of the Islamic State (IS) militant group in the country late in 2017. Over 5,000 U.S. troops have been deployed in Iraq to support the Iraqi forces during the battles against IS militants. The troops were part of the U.S.-led international coalition that has also been conducting air raids against IS targets in both Iraq and Syria. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 16:51:59|Editor: ZX Video Player Close GENEVA, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- China and the European Union (EU), among other members of the World Trade Organization (WTO), have accused the United States of imposing protectionist trade measures and paralyzing the WTO by blocking new appointments to its dispute settlement mechanism, the Appellate Body. During the 14th Trade Policy Review of the United States that started Monday, China's Ambassador to the WTO Zhang Xiangchen said "it is ... unfortunate that we are seeing, since the last trade policy review, especially during the past year, a different America with severely mismatched power and responsibility." Recalling the additional tariff measures applied since the beginning of this year by Washington on steel and aluminum, among others, Zhang said that the measures allow "protectionism to be at large" under the pretext of national security, and "bring back to life the ghost of unilateralism that has been dormant for decades." Zhang also criticized the blockage of the selection of WTO Appellate Body members, warning that the blockage "practically digs out the crown-jewel of the multilateral trading system." The ambassador said that China, along with the EU and some other members, lately tabled a joint proposal for the reform of the Appellate Body and his country also raised three fundamental principles and five proposals concerning reforms of the WTO. China hopes to work with all members of the organization, including the United States, to push for necessary reforms at the WTO through consultations "on equal grounds," to make the organization "up-to-date with the realities, adaptable to the developments of the economic globalization and responsive to the expectations from the global business community," he said. Marc Vanheukelen, EU Ambassador to the WTO, warned that "the multilateral trading system is in a deep crisis, and the United States is at its epicenter." "Today, unfortunately, (U.S. protectionist) rhetoric has turned into reality, and the repercussions of tariffs and other restrictions are being felt at the heart of this organization, and more generally in global growth prospects," he said. Vanheukelen also said the EU deeply regrets the current crisis in the Appellate Body. Harm to the independence of adjudicators will not lead to reform but rather to a collapse of the multilateral trading system that has benefited us all, the EU ambassador said. The Appellate Body functions as the WTO's de facto court of appeals and is composed of seven members. However, only three of the seven members are in office since the United States has refused to initiate the process to fill vacancies. On the same occasion, a Japanese representative said that Japan "deeply regrets" the national security measures on steel and aluminum, as such actions disrupt the global market and have a negative impact on the multilateral trading system. Trade policy reviews, in which WTO members' trade and related policies are examined and evaluated at regular intervals, aim to increase the transparency of the members' trade policies. Significant developments that may have an impact on the global trading system are also monitored. The United States on Monday held the first session of its 14th WTO Trade Policy Review, which will continue on Wednesday. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 17:22:05|Editor: Li Xia Video Player Close SEOUL, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- South Korea's presidential Blue House held a meeting of its special committee on Wednesday to implement summit agreements with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). The meeting was presided over by Im Jong-seok, chief of staff for President Moon Jae-in. Attendees of the meeting included ministers of unification, defense, culture affairs, intelligence agency chief, top presidential security advisor and presidential chief of staff for policy. During the meeting, the committee reviewed recent progresses that have made so far in implementing the joint declarations between Moon and top DPRK leader Kim Jong Un, and overall plans for next year, according to the Blue House. Moon and Kim signed the Panmunjom Declaration after their first summit in April at the truce village of Panmunjom, followed by the Pyongyang Declaration which inked at the Pyongyang summit in September. Under the summit agreements, the two leaders agreed on ways to defuse military tensions on the Korean Peninsula, denuclearize the peninsula, and increase cooperation and exchanges between the two countries. As part of the implementation efforts, South Korea and the DPRK agreed to hold a groundbreaking ceremony on Dec. 26 at the Panmun Station in the DPRK's border town of Kaesong to modernize and connect railways and roads along the western and eastern peninsula. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 17:42:13|Editor: Li Xia Video Player Close BEIJING, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- Scholars from European Union (EU) countries said they see the importance of their bloc in China's future plans for partners in the third policy paper on the EU China issued Tuesday. The paper, following the ones issued on 2003 and 2014, aims at identifying the direction, principles and specific measures to deepen the China-EU Comprehensive Strategic Partnership in the new era and promote greater development of China-EU relations. The paper, unveiled at an opportune moment in the current global context of a wave of protectionism and unilateralism, reflects on the dynamic changes of global affairs and the developments and prospects of China-EU relations, scholars said. IMPORTANT PARTNERS The policy paper noted that the year 2018 marks the 15th anniversary of the China-EU Comprehensive Strategic Partnership and the 20th anniversary of the China-EU Summit. "Developing a sound relationship with the EU has long been a foreign priority for China," the paper read. EU Spokeswoman Esther Osorio said the bloc welcomes the paper and will carefully analyze the content of it. Carl Fey, professor at the Business School of Aalto University in Helsinki, told Xinhua that the third policy paper highlighted the importance of China-Europe interaction on business, technology, and other areas. The new text tries to send a message that the EU has become more important to China due to increased uncertainties in the international system and rising protectionism, Tamas Matura, assistant professor at Corvinus University of Budapest, said. Thus, Matura said, the policy paper offered an attractive list of promises to the EU. SOUND FOUNDATION Since the inception of the China-EU Comprehensive Strategic Partnership in 2003, the two sides have broadened and deepened their relations and fostered all-dimensional, multi-tiered and wide-ranging exchanges and cooperation, the paper read. In his historic visit to the EU headquarters in 2014, Chinese President Xi Jinping reached important consensus with EU leaders on building China-EU partnership for peace, growth, reform and civilization, charting the course for deepening the win-win China-EU Comprehensive Strategic Partnership and setting out the overarching goals of China's policy on the EU in the long run, it noted. Relations between the EU and China are quite good, according to Alessia Amighini, co-head of Asia Center and senior associate research fellow with the Italian Institute of International Political Studies. There are multiple open channels between Europe and China, Amighini said. Viktor Eszterhai, senior researcher with Hungarian research institute PAGEO, took note of the common interests shared by the EU and China, such as the "orderly" implementation of Brexit, the rejection of anti-globalization and the maintenance of the international trading system. "China's recently issued policy paper on the EU puts special emphasis on the matter of these common interests and declares that Beijing is ready to show more understanding toward the European critics and fears, including market access, trade imbalances and intellectual property rights protection," the scholar said. This is in accordance with the concrete gestures given by the Chinese government to European companies, Eszterhai said. BRIGHT PROSPECTS The five-part policy paper detailed Chinese propositions on China-EU cooperation in a wide range of areas including politics, security, defense, trade, investment, connectivity, fiscal and financial fields, scientific research, innovation, emerging industries, sustainable development, social and people-to-people cooperation. The paper pointed out that the two sides need to stand firmly against unilateralism and protectionism, push for a more open, inclusive and balanced economic globalization beneficial to all. China offers the EU constructive cooperation based on mutual interests, which is the only adequate means to fight protectionism, one of the main threats to the multilateral system, said Ivona Ladjevac, senior researcher at the Institute of International Politics and Economics in Belgrade. Jani Riissanen, senior vice president of Metsa Fibre, a giant Finnish pulp producer, said his company is utilizing the China-Europe Railway Express to enlarge its market in China. Asked to comment on the Chinese call for synergy between the Belt and Road Initiative and EU development plans, he said "if we can build this kind of cooperation together and make business easier, that is good for us." Riissanen agreed with the remarks that urges concerned parties to facilitate business cooperation and give security for goods and people, saying it is important for the growing export of pulp and sawn timber from Finland to China. Xulio Rios, director of Spain's Observatory of Chinese Politics, said the document reveals the close cooperation that China and the EU develop in numerous fields, counting on an institutional structure and lines of action in the most diverse areas, a high value capital that has been accumulated over the last decades and that ensures a broad framework to deal constructively with disagreements that may arise between them. "It must not be spoiled," Rios said. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 18:02:23|Editor: Li Xia Video Player Close LHASA, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- The Potala Palace, a World Heritage site in Lhasa, China's Tibet Autonomous Region, announced an unscheduled closure Wednesday after 24-hour snow battered the regional capital city. The steep stone stairs leading to the Potala Palace atop a hill became slippery due to heavy snow, according to a statement released by the palace's administrative office late Tuesday. "The palace is usually only closed on Tibetan New Year's Eve and the second day of the New Year. There was no closure due to weather in the past," said Jorden, deputy director of the palace administrative office. All the palace staff, more than 440, and some 30 firefighters participated in snow removal Wednesday, according to Jorden. The palace is expected to reopen to the public Thursday. This winter's first snow in Lhasa came early Tuesday morning and did not stop until Wednesday morning. The city saw 10 cm of snow, and the temperature dropped to minus 9.4 degrees Celsius at 9 a.m. Wednesday, according to the regional meteorological bureau. At noon, shopkeepers were busy clearing the snow. Excited tourists stood on the heights to shoot video of the surrounding mountains and shared the picturesque scenery on social media platforms. "The snow-capped mountains are like in the city! They appear even more spectacular against the blue sky. I've never seen such beautiful scenery before, with Buddhists turning prayer wheels, and the deep red outer walls of the Potala Palace topped with thick snowflakes," said Yang Xiaoyu, a tourist from southwest China's Chongqing Municipality. As one of China's top tourist destinations, the palace was included on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1994. It received over 1.18 million tourists in the first 10 months this year, nearly one-quarter more than the same period last year, according to Jorden. The first snow arrived about 52 days later than usual, according to Du Jun, director of the regional meteorological center. The regional meteorological bureau issued a yellow alert for a blizzard Tuesday morning and dismissed it Wednesday morning. The Potala Palace was built by Tibetan King Songtsa Gambo in the seventh century and was expanded in the 17th century, covering an area of 41 hectares on top of a craggy hill in the heart of Lhasa. Dublin, Dec. 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "North America Telecoms Market: Trends and Forecasts 2018-2023" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. "Revenue will continue to grow in North America at a CAGR of 0.1% between 2017 and 2023 despite competitive pressure on mobile prices in the USA." The total telecoms revenue in North America will increase from USD474 billion in 2017 to USD477 billion in 2023, driven mostly by an increase in fixed segment revenue in both countries, as well as mobile handset data revenue growth and a rapid increase in revenue in the IoT segment. This report and associated data annex provide: a 5-year forecast of more than 201 mobile and fixed KPIs for North America (NA) and for the two countries in the region an in-depth analysis of the trends, drivers and forecast assumptions for each type of mobile and fixed service, and for the two countries an overview of operator strategies and country-specific topics, which highlights similarities and differences between the two countries a summary of results, key implications and recommendations for mobile and fixed operators. Countries Modelled individually Canada USA Key performance indicators Connections Mobile Handset, mobile broadband, IoT Prepaid, contract 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G Smartphone, non-smartphone Fixed Voice, broadband, IPTV, dial-up Narrowband voice, VoBB DSL, FTTP/B, cable, BFWA, 5G, other Fixed and mobile voice traffic Outgoing minutes, MoU Fixed Voice, broadband, IPTV, dial-up Narrowband voice, VoBB DSL, FTTP/B, cable, BFWA, 5G, other Fixed and mobile voice traffic Outgoing minutes, MoU Revenue Mobile Service, retail Prepaid, contract Handset, mobile broadband, IoT Handset voice, messaging, data Fixed Service, retail Voice, broadband, IPTV, dial-up, business services DSL, FTTP/B, cable, BFWA, other Mobile ARPU SIMs, handset Prepaid, contract Handset voice, data Key Topics Covered: Executive summary and recommendations Total telecoms revenue growth in North America will be limited due to competitive pressure in the US mobile segment The USA accounts for around 90% of the regional total retail revenue Geographical coverage: 4G/5G share of connections will reach 100% in both countries before 2023 Key trends, drivers and assumptions for the mobile and fixed markets Key recommendations for telecoms operators Regional forecasts and cross-country comparison Market context: North America's economy will be stable during the forecast period Key mergers, acquisitions, and market entries Key drivers at a glance for each North America market Market overview: the total telecoms service revenue growth will be driven by a fixed broadband revenue increase supported by limited competition in that segment Mobile: ARPU declines will be driven by mobile competition in the USA Mobile: service demand will increase penetration, while competition in the USA will put further pressure on ARPU in the region Mobile: the market competitiveness will continue to increase and MNOs will look for new opportunities in the FWA segment Fixed: fixed broadband revenue growth and the stable business segment will offset the declines in voice revenue Fixed: limited competition is leading to the growth of broadband prices in the region Fixed: there is still potential for fixed broadband penetration growth in North America Business services: the region's enterprise business revenue growth will be driven by revenue from non-operators that provide other business services IoT: the automotive and smart building segments will account for more than half of the total IoT revenue in North America Pay TV: cord-cutting will continue in North America, and traditional pay-TV service revenue will decline Individual country forecasts Canada: mobile revenue growth will be driven by limited competition and increasing data usage Canada: the mobile user base will be almost entirely 4G/5G by 2023 Canada: the three main MNOs will maintain their strong market position and the mobile segment will drive the total market revenue growth Canada: forecast changes USA: fixed broadband will contribute most to the total telecoms revenue increase, supported by the strong take-up of IoT SIMs USA: the number of FTTP/B connections will increase quickly, but cable modems will remain the key broadband access technology USA: an increasing mobile user base and fixed broadband service upgrades will lead to a revenue increase during the forecast period USA: forecast changes Methodology For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/mmwv8q/north_america?w=12 Research and Markets also offers Custom Research services providing focused, comprehensive and tailored research. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 18:07:24|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close A voter casts his ballot at a polling station in Antananarivo, Madagascar, Dec. 19, 2018. Voters went to the polls in Madagascar's second round presidential election on Wednesday to select a new president from two competing former presidents. (Xinhua/Sitraka) ANTANANARIVO, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- Voters went to the polls in Madagascar's second round presidential election on Wednesday to select a new president from two competing former presidents. More than 9 million registered voters are expected to cast their ballots at 24,852 polling stations across the Indian Ocean island country from 6:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. local time. The second round of election is a contest between former transitional president Andry Rajoelina and former president Marc Ravalomanana. Madagascar kicked off its presidential election on Nov. 7 with 36 candidates running for the presidency. Since no candidate won 50 percent of the votes in the first round, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) declared a runoff between the top two candidates with the highest support. According to the INEC, the result will be released on Dec. 31. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 18:07:24|Editor: Li Xia Video Player Close MAIMANA, Afghanistan, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- At least eight militants were killed in two separate incidents in Afghanistan's northern province of Faryab on Tuesday, local police said Wednesday. In one incident, four Taliban militants were killed and seven others wounded after the Afghan Air Force struck a Taliban hideout in restive Dawlat Abad district, provincial police spokesman Karim Urush told Xinhua. In neighboring Shirin Tagab district, four Taliban militants were killed and two others wounded after an improvised explosive device (IED) they were planting to target security forces detonated prematurely, according to Urush. Fighting has escalated in Afghanistan as the Taliban insurgency spreads from its traditional strongholds in the south and east to the once peaceful region in the north, where Taliban have been recruiting from among the youth. Afghan security forces, backed by the U.S.-led NATO coalition troops, have increased ground and air offensives against militants within the past few months as the Taliban militant group has been attempting to take territory and consolidate its positions ahead of winter in the Central Asian country. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 18:37:30|Editor: ZX Video Player Close COLOMBO, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- China on Wednesday donated 90 water bowser trucks to the Sri Lankan government as part of its aid project to distribute clean water to areas affected by severe drought. The trucks were handed over to Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena by Chinese Ambassador to Sri Lanka Cheng Xueyuan at the Presidential Secretariat in Colombo. The donation was made on the request of the Sri Lankan government after several provinces in the island country suffered a severe drought last year. The vehicles are expected to be put into use very soon and will greatly improve drinking water safety and domestic water supply in drought-affected areas. The Chinese ambassador said that at the request of the Sri Lankan side, the Chinese government is able to timely provide 90 water bowser trucks and relevant supporting technical services to express its concern and sympathy to the Sri Lankan people and help the affected people improve their lives and overcome their difficulties. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 19:42:44|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close MANILA, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- About 80 left-wing rebels raided an army camp in southern Philippines early on Wednesday, abducting two soldiers, 12 militiamen and carted away several high-powered firearms. The Armed Forces of the Philippines said the raid took place around 3 a.m. local time when about 80 New People's Army (NPA) guerrillas swooped on a military camp in the village of New Tubigon in Sibagat town in Agusan del Sur Province. The rebels then kidnapped two soldiers and 12 militiamen and fled with 17 M16 rifles, two M4 rifles, and a Harris handheld radio, the government military said. The military said no firefight ensued, meaning that the rebels managed to enter the camp without resistance from the government troops. In southern Philippines' Northern Samar Province, the military said four soldiers and two civilians were injured in an ambush staged by NPA rebels in Lope De Vega town at around 11:35 a.m. local time also on Wednesday. Army spokesperson Naya Fernandez said the soldiers were aboard a vehicle when they were hit by an improvised landmine planted by the rebels. Fernandez said the explosion was followed by volumes of fire of different caliber, leading to a five-minute firefight with the rebels. On Last Monday and Tuesday, the military also said that NPA rebels attacked six military and police installations in the provinces of Sorsogon, Camarines Sur and Capiz, leaving four soldiers and a civilian wounded. Palestinian couple, Najla Abu Nahla, 26, and Mohammed Abu Lahiya, 29, seen inside their museum in Qarara village in the southern Gaza Strip city of Khan Younis, on Dec. 9, 2018. (Xinhua/Khaled Omar) GAZA, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- A Palestinian couple from the Gaza Strip display more than 3,000 archaeological artifacts they collected in their newly established local museum. The couple, Najla Abu Nahla, 26, and Mohammed Abu Lahiya, 29, from al-Qarara village in Khan Younis city, named the museum after their village. "The purpose of setting up the museum is to preserve the Palestinian identity, making it to be commemorated in every Palestinian home," Abu Lahiya told Xinhua. Palestinian man Mohammed Abu Lahiya, 29, seen inside a museum in Qarara village in the southern Gaza Strip city of Khan Younis, on Dec. 10, 2018. (Xinhua/Khaled Omar) He added that he chose al-Qarara area as the location for his museum because it contains antiquities of all civilizations that have lived in Palestine, such as Byzantine, Roman and Islamic civilizations. Al-Qarara is a border area close to Israel, where has few cultural centers and institutions. Lahiya said that the Gaza Strip is rich in ancient antiquities and boasts of significant archaeological sites. Some of these ancient findings date back to bronze and byzantine eras; others go back to the Stone Age. At least 184 archaeological sites have been discovered in the territory, but archaeologists believe that there were others underneath. However, many of the artifacts found by people are sold outside Gaza. Lahiya bought more than one piece when the persons who found them refused to donate to the museum. Palestinian man Mohammed Abu Lahiya, 29, seen inside a museum in Qarara village in the southern Gaza Strip city of Khan Younis, on Dec. 10, 2018. (Xinhua/Khaled Omar) The couple's journey to search for artifacts began with a small old coin which was obtained from one of their friends. Over time, the couple, who studied fine arts at one of the universities in Gaza, grew to collect and preserve heritage and archeological pieces in their home. Gradually, the pieces were almost everywhere in their small house. They rented an old house that was used 50 years ago to store wheat and grain crops and made it a museum. The museum is divided into three sections. The first includes artifacts, the second is for traditional Palestinian heritage pieces, while the third section is dedicated to cultural events and promoting the importance of archaeological monuments. In the center of the small museum, marble columns dating back to the Byzantine period are placed. Traditional women's dresses and ancient kitchen tools were also displayed on the corners of the museum. There are also antique coins in glass boxes, as well as copper statues of animals, such as elephants, horses and deer. Palestinian man Mohammed Abu Lahiya, 29, seen inside a museum in Qarara village in the southern Gaza Strip city of Khan Younis, on Dec. 10, 2018. (Xinhua/Khaled Omar) The couple obtained a license from the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities in Gaza for the preservation and display of artifacts. "The museum receives students from schools and universities and other visitors," the wife told Xinhua. "Young volunteers guided visitors with some artifacts knowledge, in addition, they also help to hold artistic and cultural workshops," she added. The couple dreams of creating a library within the museum to introduce the ancient eras as well as the significance of preserving the heritage, encouraging people to know more about their country and its heritage. They also hope to expand the museum in the future, wishing that international institutions and government would provide them with financial support to collect and excavate more buried artifacts in the area. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 20:22:58|Editor: ZX Video Player Close SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- U.S. video gaming company Unity Technologies (Unity) said Tuesday it is partnering with China's leading Internet giant Baidu Inc. to develop a virtual reality system that will help Baidu test its self-driving vehicles in a simulated real-time environment. San Francisco-based Unity said it is working on a real-time simulation product that creates virtual environments where developers of Baidu's ambitious Apollo autonomous vehicle program will be able to devise, build and test self-driving systems with level 3, 4 and 5 autonomy. Unity's real-time 3D platform allows manufacturers of self-driving vehicles to reduce errors and risk while increasing efficiency and speed of testing by offering simulations that replicate real-world scenarios, Unity said. Unity Technologies is well-known for its cross-platform game engine, Unity, which was first announced and released in June 2005 as an Apple OS X-exclusive gaming engine. With support for 27 platforms, the engine can now be used to create both 3D and 2D games as well as simulation for other 3D development. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 20:43:02|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close ABUJA, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- A former Nigerian defense chief Alex Badeh was late Tuesday ambushed and shot dead by unknown gunmen, according to military authorities on Wednesday. Badeh, a former Chief of Defense Staff and Air Chief Marshal, was attacked near Nigeria's capital Abuja and died from gunshot wounds, the Air Force spokesman Ibikunle Daramola reveal this in a series of tweets. Daramola said the late defense chief was returning from his farm when the gunmen attacked his vehicle on Abuja-Keffi expressway in central Nigeria. A source said two others were killed in the attack. Daramola became the Chief of Air Staff in October 2012 and was appointed Chief of Defense Staff in January 2014. He held the post till July 13, 2015. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 20:48:03|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close LONDON, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- Three people were found with stab injuries at an east London health center, local police said on Wednesday. Officers, including specialist firearms officers, attended and found three people suffering from stab injuries, and they were taken to hospital later, according a police statement. Their injuries are not being treated as life-threatening. A man was detained nearby and taken to hospital suffering from an injury. The incident is not terror related, police said. Investigations are still ongoing. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 20:58:05|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close MOGADISHU, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- A former Somali government minister was on Wednesday elected president of the South West State after beating four other candidates in a hotly contested race, the committee announced on Wednesday. Abdiaziz Hassan Mohamed, former minister of energy and water resources and popularly known as Laftagareen, emerged as the winner in the election in which a total of 149 legislators participated. The regional state elections committee announced "Abdiaziz Hassan Mohamed got 101 votes while his closest rival got 22 votes. Mohamed is now the president of South West." The election faced several delays amid row between regional leaders and federal government. Former al-Shabab deputy leader Mukhtar Robow who was the main challenger was arrested and barred from contesting in the elections by the Somali government, citing international sanctions. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 20:58:06|Editor: ZX Video Player Close HONG KONG, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- Vibrant fireworks, dazzling lighting effects and popular musical performances will illuminate Victoria Harbor on Dec. 31 during Hong Kong's New Year countdown celebrations, said Hong Kong Tourism Board (HKTB) on Wednesday. Countdown celebrations this year will include rich and varied activities introduced by HKTB. Kick-off performances will start from 11:00 p.m. on Tsim Sha Tsui. At the same time, pyrotechnic "shooting stars" will be emitted every 15 minutes from three buildings on Hong Kong Island. Visitors can make wishes upon the shooting stars in four colors, namely red, green, gold and silver, symbolizing love, happiness, wealth and good health respectively. A 10-minute pyromusical will start above the radiant Victoria Harbor when the clock strikes midnight. Striking fireworks will change in form, color and speed in accordance with soundtrack, giving the spectators a sensational experience. The visual picture consists of five layers created by fireworks: pyrotechnics launched from barges, the numerals "2019" and new year blessings displayed on the facade of the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center, lighting effects from buildings and landmarks, rooftop fireworks, and fireworks high in the sky above Victoria Harbor. To visitors' surprise, award-winning fireworks by an Italian maker will be introduced to create a "Celestial Kaleidoscope" for the first time. Ever-changing and varicolored fireworks patterns will shatter above Victoria Harbor like beautiful patterns in a kaleidoscope. And as a grand finale, 45 different patterns of fireworks including flowers, candies, smiley faces and hearts will be projected within last single minute. New Year countdown celebrations this year is expected to attract 360,000 visitors who will enjoy a spectacular scenery from Tsim Sha Tsui, Central and Wan Chai in Hong Kong. TORONTO, Dec. 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Wayland Group (CSE:WAYL) (FRANKFURT: 75M) (OTCQB:MRRCF) (Wayland or the Company), a global, vertically integrated cultivator and processor of cannabis, today announced that its Board of Directors has initiated a process to explore a broad range of strategic alternatives, including, but not limited to assessing the potential spin-out and/or European listing of its international assets (the International Assets) in an effort to unlock the value of the Companys vast international asset portfolio (a Spinout Transaction), as well as its underlying domestic Canadian assets. Any Spinout Transaction of the International Assets could include the Companys European, Latin American, and Asia-Pacific operations. The Company strongly believes in its current strategy; however, it does not believe its current share price accurately reflects the global portfolio Wayland has, and continues to create. We have demonstrated our capability in predicting future markets and working systematically to put supply chain in place, with some of the lowest transaction costs for international acquisitions in addition to organic growth and partnerships. Our exponential growth model has tremendous potential, as it is built on the solid foundation we have laid from five years of organizational learning as a licensed producer in Canada. This has allowed us to become one of five companies with EU-GMP certification on top of having all the requisite cultivation and processing licenses in Canada. It is time for us to capitalize on the largest future cannabis market in the world and focus our efforts in the wellness and medical markets to accomplish our vision of enhancing life through cannabis, stated Ben Ward, CEO of Wayland. Canaccord Genuity Corp. has been retained to serve as the Companys financial advisor related to the strategic review process. There can be no assurance the strategic review will result in the completion of any transaction or any other alternative. The Company has not set a timetable for completion of the review process, and it does not intend to comment further unless a specific transaction or alternative is approved by the Board of Directors, the review process is concluded, or it is otherwise determined that other disclosure is appropriate. Paul Pathak, Chairman of the Board commented, Our Board is committed to maximizing value for our shareholders. Our management team has done a terrific job of building a state of the art cultivation facility in Langton and securing significant distribution agreements with several of the Provinces, while at the same time assembling an impressive portfolio of international assets. Our end goal, however, is to translate that into value for our shareholders and we are confident that the results of our strategic review and potential spin-out of our international assets will be important steps to accomplish that. European Assets Germany Wayland has several active initiatives in Germany that give the Company a distinct advantage in the German and European markets. The Company is the only organization in the world that has a facility ready for domestic cannabis cultivation. Located in Ebersbach, just outside of Dresden, the proposed facility gives Wayland 820,000 square feet of clean-room cultivation, processing, and extraction capabilities. It is currently being utilized to process industrial hemp from the Companys adjacent 164-hectare hemp operation where the Company recently completed their first harvest yielding over 120,000 kg of dry hemp flowers. Once processed, the CBD distillate will be used for the Companys recently launched nutraceutical business, MariPlant GmbH. Finally, the Company expects to receive their second EU-GMP certification for the Ebersbach facility in a matter of weeks, further strengthening Waylands medical production and distribution capabilities. Switzerland Waylands second European cultivation site is located in Regensdorf, Switzerland, a suburb of Zurich. The 60,000 square foot facilitys current production profile is approximately 2,000 kg of CBD flower per year. Wayland plans to upgrade this facility to bring it in line with the Companys production standards from existing GACP standards and increase capacity to 14,000 kg per year with the goal of developing their own CBD products for sale throughout Switzerland and the rest of the European Union. Wayland will locate its Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (API) manufacturing site for its global operations in Switzerland, taking advantage of existing phyto pharmaceutical talent in country. Italy Wayland has a definitive joint venture agreement with CBD Italian Factory S.S., a company of Group San Martino for the production of high quality cannabis products in Italy. The Company expects that the joint venture will marry the best of both entities with world-leading technology by Rockwell Automation paired with existing infrastructure in Piedmont, Italy, which includes agricultural expertise and biogas electricity. This will allow the sustainable production of quality CBD and THC products from a naturally derived fuel source. CBD Italian Factory S.S. and San Martino Group will bring mass-scale agricultural skills to the joint venture with a focus on local sustainable practices and expertise in Biomass Energy production. The Company holds 50.1 % of the joint venture while 49.9% is held by CBD Italian Factory, with Massimiliano Umberto Signorini assuming the role of CEO for the new company. Malta In July of 2018, Waylands application to Malta Enterprise to set up a business in Malta to manufacture finished dose medical cannabis was approved. Malta will offer the Company a unique advantage as Wayland will have the ability to import, extract, manufacture finished dose products, and distribute cannabis for medical purposes within Malta and the entire European Union. Malta Enterprise allows the Company to develop a wide variety of pharmaceutical products and export them across the European Union, and as Malta is a member of the EU, certain VAT tax are inapplicable to Malta Enterprise. United Kingdom The Company has entered into an agreement to acquire a 51% stake in U.K. based Theros Pharma Ltd. (Theros), an early stage company that has successfully imported cannabis to the U.K. for patients with a prescription for medical cannabis. The company expects to be able to import cannabis to patients in the UK as early as March 2019. Latin American and Asia Pacific Assets Argentina Wayland has entered into an agreement to purchase 819 hectares of existing developed agriculture land in San Juan Province in Argentina, which is the ideal micro climate for cultivation. The properly has existing mass scale irrigation, using runoff from the Andes Mountains, and produces 1,000,000 kg of wine juice, and 400,000 kg of olives per year. Existing on site agronomists and farmers will take their knowledge of horticulture and apply it to Waylands existing world class system of cannabis cultivation. Outdoor cultivation will take place in existing alfalfa fields, to supply Wayland with low cost inputs. Initial extraction will take place in Argentina. Colombia The Company has entered into an agreement to acquire 100% of the outstanding shares of Colma Pharmaceutical SAS (Colma), a licensed producer of THC cannabis in Colombia, holding four licenses for cultivation and processing on a leased premise in Ibaque, Colombia. Wayland plans to cultivate THC cannabis outdoor and year-round with an infrastructure investment including 415,000 square feet of processing and clone and vegetation greenhouse facilities to support outdoor cannabis flower production of 125 hectares. Australia Wayland has entered into an agreement to acquire 50.1% of Tropicann Pty Ltd. (Tropicann), a privately owned Australian company located in Darwin, Northern Territory. It plans to build an outdoor grow facility to take advantage of the ideal cannabis cultivation climate with minimal environmental impact. The Company believes it can leverage a major port in Darwin that will provide access to major APAC markets. Canadian Assets Canadian Operations The Companys flagship facility is located in Langton, Ontario with cultivation, extraction, formulation, and distribution capabilities. The facility is a purpose-built cannabis production facility with an emphasis on automation and energy efficiencies. The Company partnered with Rockwell Automation to develop a fully automated system including the development of AI Data Grow, the Companys artificially intelligent master grower. This allows Wayland to drastically reduce its cultivation labour needs by approximately 90% of the industry average while also mitigating risks associated with infecting crops. The facility will be completed in two phases, the first of which is approximately 225,000 square feet in size with 90,000 square feet of production and office space and approximately 135,000 square feet of grow space which will yield the Company approximately 65,000 kg of dried cannabis flower per year. Phase two will bring an additional 719,000 square feet of grow space online taking production capacity much greater than 100,000 kg per year. Waylands Langton campus has been certified by the European Medicines Agency after receiving the certification of EU-Good Manufacturing Practices (EU-GMP). EU-GMP certification allowed Wayland to sign the largest ever medical cannabis export deal with Cannamedical of Germany, agreeing to provide the medical cannabis distributor with a minimum of 9,000 kg of product over a three-year period. Wayland is one of only five cannabis companies in the world to receive the EU-GMP designation which is another advantage the Company believes it has in the global medical cannabis arena as demonstrated by this large purchase order. Provincial Agreements Manitoba : Supply agreement with the Manitoba Liquor & Lotteries Corporation (MBLL) to make available for purchase by MBLL at least 550kg of various cannabis products during the first twelve months of the agreement. : Supply agreement with the Manitoba Liquor & Lotteries Corporation (MBLL) to make available for purchase by MBLL at least 550kg of various cannabis products during the first twelve months of the agreement. Alberta : Supply Agreement with the Alberta Gaming, Liquor & Cannabis Commission (AGLC) to allocate up to 3,375kg of cannabis product for the Alberta market within the first six months. : Supply Agreement with the Alberta Gaming, Liquor & Cannabis Commission (AGLC) to allocate up to 3,375kg of cannabis product for the Alberta market within the first six months. British Columbia : Through a memorandum of understanding (MOU), Wayland is a preferred licensed producer to the BC Liquor Distribution Branch (BCLDB) to initially supply approximately 3,622kg of non-medical cannabis to BCLDB over the first 12 months following legalization. : Through a memorandum of understanding (MOU), Wayland is a preferred licensed producer to the BC Liquor Distribution Branch (BCLDB) to initially supply approximately 3,622kg of non-medical cannabis to BCLDB over the first 12 months following legalization. Ontario: Selected by The Ontario Cannabis Store (OCS) to supply a variety of safe, high quality cannabis products through its online store since launching October 17, 2018. Brand Portfolio The Company has taken a purposeful and consumer-centric approach to each of its brands/offerings, each validated and optimized with local consumer research. Strains within each portfolio will match brand positioning and satisfy target consumer needs and benefits. Solara C : Designed for the modern, active consumer who is looking to find solutions to help them live healthier/better without using stronger pharmaceutical alternatives. This brand will be CBD-only and create a wide range of products from beverages to topical creams with the expressed purpose of promoting a healthy, balanced lifestyle. : Designed for the modern, active consumer who is looking to find solutions to help them live healthier/better without using stronger pharmaceutical alternatives. This brand will be CBD-only and create a wide range of products from beverages to topical creams with the expressed purpose of promoting a healthy, balanced lifestyle. Kiwi : Designed for light users who are new to the category and looking to better understand Cannabis and its effects. The brand will exist to simplify and make the cannabis experience more welcoming and approachable to the masses. : Designed for light users who are new to the category and looking to better understand Cannabis and its effects. The brand will exist to simplify and make the cannabis experience more welcoming and approachable to the masses. Northern Harvest : Designed for light / medium users who enjoy Cannabis as part of their active and social lives. The brand will exist to promote a more natural and balanced approach to Cannabis with a focus on providing a fun and lighthearted experience. : Designed for light / medium users who enjoy Cannabis as part of their active and social lives. The brand will exist to promote a more natural and balanced approach to Cannabis with a focus on providing a fun and lighthearted experience. High Tide : Designed for medium to heavy users who enjoy the cerebral effects of Cannabis. This brand will produce high quality, high THC cannabis with the expressed purpose of pushing the limits of the THC experience. : Designed for medium to heavy users who enjoy the cerebral effects of Cannabis. This brand will produce high quality, high THC cannabis with the expressed purpose of pushing the limits of the THC experience. Lost at Seed : Designed for medium to heavy users who want only the best Cannabis money can buy. This brand will provide highly desirable and impossible to find strains only available on a limited assortment basis. : Designed for medium to heavy users who want only the best Cannabis money can buy. This brand will provide highly desirable and impossible to find strains only available on a limited assortment basis. Rare Dankness: This partner brand will be for experienced Cannabis users who are knowledgeable about strains, potencies and profiles. It will offer a wide selection of premium award-winning strains that users wont be able to find anywhere else. Maricann Group Inc., through its subsidiaries, is operating under the Wayland Group name. For further details see the press release dated September 24, 2018. About Wayland Group Wayland is a vertically integrated cultivator and processor of cannabis. The Company was founded in 2013 and is based in Burlington, Ontario, Canada and Munich, Germany, with production facilities in Langton, Ontario where it operates a cannabis cultivation, extraction, formulation, and distribution business under federal licenses from the Government of Canada. The Company also has production operations in Dresden, Saxony, Germany, Regensdorf, Switzerland, Allesandria, Piedmont, Italy, Ibague, Colombia, London, UK, Australia, and Argentina. Wayland will continue to pursue new opportunities globally in its effort to enhance lives through cannabis. Forward Looking Information This news release includes forward-looking information and statements, which may include, but are not limited to, information and statements regarding or inferring the future business, operations, financial performance, prospects, and other plans, intentions, expectations, estimates, and beliefs of the Company. Such statements include statements regarding the Company's plans for its operations in all regions, proposed acquisitions, the Companys continued global expansion, its effect on the Companys global platform and the Spinout Transaction. Forward-looking information and statements involve and are subject to assumptions and known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors which may cause actual events, results, performance, or achievements of the Company to be materially different from future events, results, performance, and achievements expressed or implied by forward-looking information and statements herein. Such assumptions, risks, uncertainties and other factors include, but are not limited to, that the proposed transactions will be completed on the terms and timelines anticipated by the Company or at all, the effect that the proposed transactions, and Spinout Transaction if and when completed, will have on the Companys global platform, that all necessary stock exchange, regulatory and other approvals will be received in connection with the proposed transactions and or the Spinout Transaction. Although the Company believes that any forward-looking information and statements herein are reasonable, in light of the use of assumptions and the significant risks and uncertainties inherent in such information and statements, there can be no assurance that any such forward-looking information and statements will prove to be accurate, and accordingly readers are advised to rely on their own evaluation of such risks and uncertainties and should not place undue reliance upon such forward-looking information and statements. Any forward-looking information and statements herein are made as of the date hereof, and except as required by applicable laws, the Company assumes no obligation and disclaims any intention to update or revise any forward-looking information and statements herein or to update the reasons that actual events or results could or do differ from those projected in any forward looking information and statements herein, whether as a result of new information, future events or results, or otherwise, except as required by applicable laws. The Canadian Securities Exchange has not reviewed, approved or disapproved the content of this news release. The Canadian Securities Exchange has not reviewed, approved or disapproved the content of this news release For more information about Wayland, please visit our website at www.waylandgroup.com Contact Information: Investor Relations Graham Farrell VP, Communications Graham.Farrell@waylandgroup.com 647-643-7665 Media Inquiries: media@waylandgroup.com Corporate Headquarters (Canada) Wayland Group Corp. (Toronto) 845 Harrington Court, Unit 3 Burlington Ontario L7N 3P3 Canada 289-288-6274 European Headquarters (Germany) Maricann GmbH Thierschstrasse 3, 80538 Munchen, Deutschland Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 20:58:07|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close JAKARTA, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- A nine-year-old Sumatran tiger, a species on the brink of extinction, has given birth to two cubs in a wildlife park in West Sumatra province of Indonesia, park official said on Wednesday. The male and female cubs of the Sumatran tiger were born on Sunday morning, said Ikbal, head of Kinantan Cultural and Wildlife Park. "The mother and the cubs are in a healthy condition and they are placed in one cage, and are under monitoring of the officials," he said. The cage was placed in an isolated area to prevent disturbance and pressure from visitors, the official said. With the newly-born cubs, the total number of protected Sumatran tigers collected by the park rose to 11, including seven female and four males, he was quoted by state's news wire of Antara as saying. The Sumatran tiger is the smallest of the tiger sub-species, with the length of about 2.7 meters and weighing from 75 kg up to 114 kg. The species was listed as critically endangered in 2008 as its population was estimated at 441 to 679 individuals. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 21:38:16|Editor: ZX Video Player Close TAIPEI, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- A delegation of Shanghai led by Executive Vice Mayor Zhou Bo arrived in Taipei Wednesday for an annual forum between the two cities, which is scheduled to open Thursday. Upon his arrival at the airport, Zhou told the media that the forum serves as an important platform for exchanges and cooperation between the two cities and plays an exemplary role in cross-Strait city-to-city exchanges and cooperation. Stating that Shanghai is building itself into a global hub in the financial, shipping, trading and sci-tech innovation sectors, Zhou said he hoped the two cities could create new friendships, gain new knowledge and share new fruit of development during the forum. Themed "sustainable city, sustainable development," this year's forum focuses on circular economy and exchanges in fields such as health care, culture, public housing and city renovation, and environmental protection in a bid to deepen exchanges and cooperation in various aspects between the two cities. The Shanghai-Taipei forum has been held by the two cities in a rotation since 2010, and 30 agreements so far have been inked between the two cities. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 21:58:19|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close ADDIS ABABA, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- The Ethiopia Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA) announced on Wednesday it has repatriated 65 nationals detained in Tanzania over allegations of illegal entry. In a press statement, MoFA said the 65 Ethiopians were released after discussions between the Ethiopian and Tanzanian governments to return all Ethiopians detained in Tanzania for alleged illegal entry. Negotiations are still underway to secure the release of another 166 Ethiopians detained in Tanzania. MoFA said The 65 Ethiopians were repatriated back to home through the joint efforts of the ministry, Ethiopia's flag carrier Ethiopian Airlines and the International Organization for Migration. Every year hundreds of Ethiopians are detained in Tanzania while trying to use Tanzania as a transit point on their final destination, South Africa. Human traffickers reportedly use various countries as transit points to smuggle Ethiopians to South Africa. According to the Ethiopia Ministry of Foreign Affairs, human traffickers charge an average of 3,500 to 4,000 U.S. dollars to smuggle a single individual from Ethiopia to South Africa. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 22:03:21|Editor: ZX Video Player Close GUANGZHOU, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- A comprehensive counter-terrorism emergency drill was held at an airport in Guangzhou in southern China's Guangdong Province Wednesday. The "Yun'an-2018" drill, participated by the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC), public security department and armed police in Guangdong, China Southern Airlines, and Guangdong Airport Authority, is the largest in China in six years. The drill included the handling of hijacking and terrorist attacks, aiming to test the actual combat capacity and effectiveness of the civil aviation system. Real aircraft, scenarios and weapons were used during the drill, which took place at the Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport, assembling forces from civil aviation, police, customs, immigration inspection, firefighting and medical institutions, according to the CAAC. Latest applications of scientific and technological informatization and intelligent policing were showcased in the process, it said. Nearly 1,000 representatives from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Public Security, the Central Military Commission, the CAAC, the provincial government of Guangdong as well as airline companies watched the drill. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 22:08:23|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close ISTANBUL, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- The Turkish police on Wednesday detained at least 19 foreigners in Istanbul for their suspected links to the Islamic State (IS) militant group, local media reported. Counter-terrorism units launched simultaneous operations in 11 districts across the city to capture the suspects, who were allegedly going to conflict zones and plotting terror attacks in Turkey, the private Demiroren news agency said. Illegal documents, books and digital materials were seized during the raids, according to press reports. Over the past years in Turkey, more than 300 people were killed in deadly attacks blamed on the IS. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 22:08:23|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close JOHANNESBURG, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- South African National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) said on Wednesday that it has issued a warrant of arrest for Zimbabwe's former First Lady for allegedly attacking a model in Johannesburg last year. National police spokesman Vishnu Naidoo told Xinhua that the warrant for Grace Mugabe was granted last Thursday. "We will be working with Interpol to have her extradited here." This comes after the South Gauteng High Court in Johannesburg set aside the decision to grant Mugabe diplomatic immunity for assaulting the model. It is alleged that Mugabe assaulted model Gabriella Engels and two other women in an upmarket Sandton hotel in August last year. Engels sustained severe facial injuries due to the assault. It is reported that Mugabe assaulted them after she had found them in the company of her young sons who are university students. Engels also laid a criminal charge of assault against Mugabe with intent to cause grievous bodily harm. Mugabe was granted immunity and allowed to leave the country after the incident. However, opposition party Democratic Alliance and NGO Afriforum took the matter to court to invoke the immunity. South Gauteng High Court ruled that the decision to grant Mugabe diplomatic immunity was inconsistency with the Constitution. It means that Mugabe is likely to be arrested if she visits South Africa. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 22:18:25|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close WASHINGTON, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- The United States is planning to withdraw troops from Syria rapidly, according to U.S. media reports citing Trump administration officials. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 22:23:29|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close ISTANBUL, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- The Turkish coast guard on Wednesday rescued 14 crew members of a freighter which ran aground off Istanbul in the Black Sea. The cargo ship carrying the flag of Comoros went aground with 16 crew members aboard near the district of Sile, the Istanbul governor's office said in a written statement. The coast guard was trying to rescue the pair who remained trapped on the ship, said the statement. The vessel named Natalia started to float toward the shore for an unknown reason before it grounded, the private NTV broadcaster said, noting it had difficulty in dropping anchor in time and ran aground because of worsening weather conditions. File Photo: A Honduran migrant gets help climbing over the border fence into the United States from Tijuana, Mexico Dec. 12, 2018. (Xinhua/REUTERS) WASHINGTON, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. government on Tuesday promised billions of U.S. dollars of aid to three Central American countries and Mexico as illegal immigration from the Mexican border remains a serious problem for the United States. The United States is committing 5.8 billion dollars through public and private investment toward the Northern Triangle countries, namely, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, said the U.S. State Department in a statement. The fund will be used "in support of institutional reforms, development, and economic growth" in the countries, according to the statement. Washington also vowed to strengthen its support for development in southern Mexico by allocating 2 billion dollars for projects in this area, said the State Department. Illegal immigrants trying to enter the United States through the Mexican border remain a major concern for the U.S. government. Washington has added pressure on the Mexican government to stop the migrants from arriving at the U.S. border, either making them remain in Mexico or give up and head home. In October, U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to cut off or reduce U.S. aid to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador as the three countries failed to stop people from the exodus. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 22:28:30|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close MOSCOW, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) said Wednesday that it has killed a group of Islamic State (IS) terrorists in the city of Stavropol in North Caucasus. The armed militants put up a resistance to FSB officers during detention and were shot dead, an FSB statement said, adding that no FSB officers were hurt. It said criminal proceedings were opened over possible preparations for a terrorist attack and illegal possession of firearms. A separate statement from Governor of the Stavropol Region Vladimir Vladimirov said the group consisted of two people who were not residents of the region. CORAL GABLES, Fla., Dec. 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via OTC PR WIRE -- The landscape for healthcare as we know it will most likely look very different a year from now. New advancements in healthcare technology and the advent of legalized medical marijuana have raised the stakes for companies aiming to capture market share. And everyone from Big Pharma to beverage and tobacco companies are vying for a seat at the table. In a recent update from Aurora Cannabis, the company cited its growing patient base. Aurora logged an increase in its active registered patients for medical cannabis, resulting in a jump of 250% to 67,484. During these early stages of market growth its important for investors to note that the healthcare market will no longer be dominated by Big Pharma alone and the pool of new cannabis patients will likely grow as the industry expands. The global medical marijuana market will touch $55.0 billion by 2024; according to a new research study published by Global Market Insights, Inc*. The report explains that growing demand for marijuana application in the treatment of chronic pain caused by neurological disorders, cancer, HIV/AIDS, and arthritis will help drive the global market growth. This trend has echoed across borders as well. In Canada, the pharmacy industry is jockeying for position as well. Shoppers, Lovell Drugs and PharmaChoice have signed supply deals with major cannabis producers yet few are taking full advantage of the play on medical marijuana. Other than Aurora, Canopy Growth has also focused on growing its patient base. The company recorded its registered medical patients at 84,400, which increased by 34% year-over-year. Building from the ground up can be difficult in todays climate and knowing this, other companies are making a play at mergers and acquisitions to up the ante on patient exposure for medical cannabis. Premier Health Group for instance, has taken this approach. Earlier this year the company acquired HealthVue. With this acquisition, Premier was able to instantly enter the primary care clinic and potentially lucrative healthcare technology business. HealthVue is a group of four Greater Vancouver based fully integrated, paperless and electronic medical record based medical clinics with a 10-year history, 22 healthcare professionals and over 100,000 active patients. Further to this, Premier Health Group has gone steps further. First, Premier signed a binding Letter of Intent to acquire a Vancouver, British Columbia based pharmacy. The Company expects the acquisition to close in or about Q1-19. To add to this, Premier signed a binding LOI to acquire all of the outstanding securities of Cloud Practice Inc. The significance of this second LOI involves the products that a successful acquisition would bring into the company. Clouds Juno EMR system is currently used by 287 clinics, over 3,000 licensed practitioners, 1,500 staff and 2,870,000 registered patients. Its ClinicAid processes upwards of $30,000,000 in payments to over 3000 health providers on a monthly basis. Though they are still in the letters of intent phase, if completed both of these would essentially add to immediate revenue opportunities and an expanded patient base of nearly 3 million to dwarf that of its industry competition. There were 269,500 registered cannabis patients through December 2017, according to data released by Health Canada. Considering that 2018 marks the first year that cannabis is fully legal in Canada, awareness of the drug has surely increased and could end up sparking even more patient growth in years to come. In other news, cannabis company Tilray opened up a new opportunity for Big Pharma to get its feet wet in the cannabis industry. On December 18, Tilray signed a global partnership with a division of Swiss drug giant Novartis to develop and distribute its medical marijuana in legal jurisdictions around the world. Tilray Chief Executive Officer Brendan Kennedy said in a phone interview, If a product comes into a pharmacy with the Sandoz logo co-branded on it, or if a pharmaceutical sales rep is talking to a physician about a product thats branded as Tilray and Sandoz, it lends credibility to that product. With new initiatives beginning in places like Canada and proposed market expansion happening with things like the US Farm Bill, the legal cannabis industry will certainly be a focus for investors heading into 2019. As the excitement surrounding recreational marijuana has caught attention, it may be the medical side of the industry that secures a larger market share. About marijuanastocks.com MarijuanaStocks.com is the leading web destination for all things cannabis. Investors can find marijuana-related financial, medical, legal, and social news anytime day or night. Writers are invited to submit cannabis related articles for publication. Legal Disclaimer Except for the historical information presented herein, matters discussed in this article contain forward-looking statements that are subject to certain risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such statements. MAPH Enterprises LLC which owns www.MarijuanaStocks.com is not registered with any financial or securities regulatory authority and does not provide nor claims to provide investment advice or recommendations to readers of this release. MAPH Enterprises LLC, which owns www.MarijuanaStocks.com, may from time to time have a position in the securities mentioned herein and may increase or decrease such positions without notice. For making specific investment decisions, readers should seek their own advice. MAPH Enterprises LLC, which owns www.MarijuanaStocks.com, may be compensated for its services in the form of cash-based compensation or equity securities in the companies it writes about, or a combination of the two. Pursuant to an agreement between an affiliate of MAPH Enterprises, LLC (owners of MarijuanaStocks.com), MIDAM VENTURES, LLC and Premier Health Group Inc., Midam was hired for a period from 10/1/2018 4/1/2019 to publicly disseminate information about Premier Health Group Inc. including on the Website and other media including Facebook and Twitter. Midam was paid $100,000 (CASH) for & were paid 500,000 shares of restricted common shares. We own zero shares of Premier Health Group Inc., which we purchased in the open market. Once the (6) Six-month restriction is complete on 4/1/2019 Midam plans to sell the 500,000 shares of Premier Health Group Inc. that Midam holds currently in restricted form during the time the Website and/or Facebook and Twitter Information recommends that investors or visitors to the website purchase without further notice to you. We may buy or sell additional shares of Premier Health Group Inc. in the open market at any time, including before, during or after the Website and Information, provide public dissemination of favorable Information. As of December 11, 2018 a member of MAPH holds 550 Aurora Call Options and 35,000 shares of Aurora purchased in the open market and may be sold at any time. Our full disclaimer will update at such time. Click here for our full disclaimer. Commentary Contact Information: pr@marijuanastocks.com Media Contact: FN Media Group editor@financialnewsmedia.com www.financialnewsmedia.com *Global Market Insights Report: https://www.gminsights.com/industry-analysis/medical-marijuana-market SOURCE: MarijuanaStocks.com Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 22:33:32|Editor: yan Video Player Close MOSCOW, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- Russia will have to "respond adequately" to excessive U.S. military presence in Ukraine, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin said in an interview with RIA Novosti news agency published Wednesday. According to Karasin, since 2014 U.S. instructors have been deployed at various Ukrainian test sites to train Ukrainian servicemen all year round, while U.S. Navy ships often enter Ukrainian ports in the Black Sea and participate in joint exercises. In the summer of 2017, the U.S. military began to build a fleet operations control center for the Ukrainian Navy in Ukraine's Black Sea port city of Ochakiv near Crimea, he said. "The prospect of the emergence of a U.S. military base in the country will inevitably lead to a further deterioration of the security situation and have an extremely negative impact on the prospect for resolving the conflict in Donbass," Karasin said. Relations between former allies Russia and Ukraine deteriorated after Russia incorporated Crimea in 2014 following a local referendum. In 2017, the United States decided to sell lethal weapons to Ukraine, which Russia vehemently condemned. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 22:48:36|Editor: yan Video Player Close JERUSALEM, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday urged the UN Security Council to denounce Hezbollah's cross-border "attack tunnels." His remarks came ahead of a UN Security Council meeting over these tunnels, which Israel says were dug by the Iran-backed Shiite militant group in Lebanon. "I call on all members of the Security Council to condemn Hezbollah's wanton acts of aggression," Netanyahu said at the Knesset (parliament), according to a statement released by his office. The Security Council should also demand Lebanon "stop allowing its territory to be used as an act of aggression," he added. "Their goal has been to penetrate our territory, to kidnap our people," Netanyahu noted. The Israeli prime minister also accused the Lebanese government of "conspiring with Hezbollah." "The Lebanese government, which should be the first to challenge and protest this, is doing nothing at best but colluding at worst," he said. On Dec. 4, the Israeli army launched Northern Shield operation to "locate and thwart" these tunnels, saying four of such tunnels have so far been uncovered. The UN Interim Forces in Lebanon has also confirmed the existence of the four tunnels, and described it as "a clear violation of UN Resolution 1701." Israel and Lebanon's Hezbollah fought a month-long war in 2006 which ended in a cease-fire. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 22:58:39|Editor: yan Video Player Close JUBA, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- South Sudan's ceasefire monitoring agency on Wednesday accused government forces of attacking its personnel in Luri in southern South Sudan. The Ceasefire and Transitional Security Arrangements Monitoring and Verification Mechanism (CTSAMVM) said the government should adhere to the necessity of the revitalized agreement to end five years of conflict. "CTSAMVM condemns in the strongest terms the appalling attack that took place on Dec. 18, 2018 on its monitoring and verification team in the Luri area," the monitoring agency said in a statement. It revealed that it had launched a full investigation into the events in which coalition government security forces assaulted and illegally detained senior ranking male and female officers, including support staff from the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), an eight-member regional bloc. "Attack on monitoring personnel and interference with the performance of their duties are strictly prohibited and must be prevented from recurring," said the monitoring body. It appealed to the South Sudan government to immediately conduct an investigation, hold perpetrators accountable for these despicable acts and their chain of command responsible for its leadership failure. "CTSAMVM has a legal right to be present in South Sudan, and all the parties to the agreement have an obligation to facilitate the work of the monitoring mechanism," said the monitoring body. It reiterated its obligation to freely monitor the implementation of the revitalized agreement on the resolution of the conflict in South Sudan. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 23:08:41|Editor: yan Video Player Close Aerial photo taken on Nov. 8, 2018 shows the container terminal of Port of Qingdao, east China's Shandong Province. (Xinhua/Yu Fangping) BEIJING, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- Charlie Barker earns more than 250,000 U.S. dollars a year and holds stocks worth 300,000 U.S. dollars in a Chinese company, a big sum even for his peers back home in the United States. It is Barker's 10th year in the city of Suzhou, east China's Jiangsu Province. The 52-year-old former U.S. soldier works as a senior researcher supervising medicine safety assessments in Wuxi AppTec Co. Ltd, a private integrated R&D service company. Barker's former army fellows once doubted why he chose to work in China. China is full of hopes and opportunities and Chinese people are optimistic and kind, said Barker, adding that China was no threat to the West and the world. Barker has persuaded his son, who is studying computer engineering in Nevada, to work in China after graduation. Barker's life experiences coincided with key events of China's reform and opening-up. He joined the army in 1984 when former U.S. president Ronald Reagan visited China, retired from army in 1997 when the Asian financial crisis broke out and began his China endeavor in 2008 when the international financial crisis erupted. China's reform and opening-up that began in 1978 has not only changed China but also deeply affected the world and reshaped its relations with the world. INTEGRATION China was to a large extent isolated with the world until the late 1970s and early 1980s when it changed the war-inevitable mentality and established peace and development as the two major themes of the present times. Barker still remembered the scenes when the Reagans visited the Great Wall in 1984. "Everything seemed to be that peaceful and beautiful," Barker said. Since the reform and opening-up, China has been integrating with the world and is walking to the center of global stage. China is already the world's second biggest economy and the world's largest trading nation. It is also the world's biggest source of international students and the world's largest group of outbound tourists. Facing mounting protectionism and a stagnant world economy, China has proposed a new type of international relations featuring win-win cooperation and following the principle of achieving shared growth through discussion and collaboration in engaging in global governance. A median of 70 percent of respondents across 25 countries say China plays a more important global role than it did a decade ago, according to a new Pew Research Center survey of 25 nations that was released in October. CONTRIBUTOR The second year after the 2008 global financial crisis broke out, Barker moved to Suzhou and realized the great contribution China had made. The country has helped stabilize the global economy during the 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis and the 2008 global financial crisis. He said that without China's contribution, the global economy would have struggled in the abyss for a longer time. China has driven global growth over the past 40 years. Its GDP has averaged an annual growth of around 9.5 percent. The country's foreign trade has also registered an annual growth of 14.5 percent in U.S. dollar terms. It has become a major trading partner with over 130 countries. So far, more than 140 countries and international organizations have signed agreements with China to jointly build the Belt and Road, an initiative aiming to promote shared prosperity of humanity by cooperation on trade and infrastructure. According to current UN standards, China has lifted over 700 million people out of poverty and contributed more than 70 percent to global poverty reduction. "China has played as a responsible contributor to world's peace and development," said Zhao Lei, professor with the Party School of the CPC Central Committee. Since 2018, the HoDo Group, one of China's largest apparel manufacturers has worked with Cambodia to build a special economic zone in Sihanoukville, a coastal city in Cambodia. Over 100 companies from countries including China, the United States and Japan have started overseas businesses in the zone. Upon completion, the special economic zone will be home to 300 enterprises and provide 100,000 job opportunities, which will greatly benefit Cambodia and promote the security and development of the country. The Sihanoukville Special Economic Zone was set up in response to China's new security concept that highlights common interests, cooperation and sustainable development. China believes that development and security should be attached equal importance so as to maintain long-term peace. China is the second largest investor in UN peacekeeping operations, and has sent the most peace-keeping forces among the permanent members of the UN Security Council. It has been actively involved in the world's peace-keeping campaigns including efforts in the most dangerous countries and regions. China has also announced that it would be part of the UN capability readiness system, a global peace-keeping mechanism that will provide quick responses to activities in breach of world and regional peace, with a permanent peacekeeping force of 8,000 troops. GUARDIAN OF GLOBAL ORDER Lin Huiping, 37, could be categorized as one of China's "post reform and opening-up generation." A professor at Soochow University, she acts as an advisor to the university's mock UN activities. In the latest session she oversaw, the students of the university played the roles of country representatives at the UN General Assembly and debated peacekeeping missions in Africa. "In the simulation of the UN session, the students had a taste of democracy and multinationalism in international relations, and had a better understanding of what the 'community with a shared future for mankind' means," Liu said. Mock UN activities, now common in Chinese universities and even high schools, demonstrate the younger Chinese's growing wish of participating in global affairs against the backdrop of an ever opening China. This is in line with China's new role as a guardian of multinationalism. China has pledged support for "building a new type of international relations, an open global economy and a community with a shared future for mankind." The first China International Import Expo, held in Shanghai last month, was among the latest testimonies to China's spontaneous opening up and its opposition against unilateralism and protectionism. China is now actively participating in the world's governance and reforms. It has joined over 100 inter-governmental organizations and signed more than 300 international treaties. Its positive and constructive roles are indispensable in today's global cooperation from anti-terrorism to the battle against global warming. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 23:08:41|Editor: Chengcheng Video Player Close BEIJING, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- A total of 36 Chinese Internet businesses including Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu joined an initiative Wednesday to fulfill their corporate social responsibility. The initiative was launched at a forum on the corporate social responsibility of Chinese Internet businesses hosted by the Internet Society of China. The businesses are expected to make contributions to poverty alleviation, set up an information disclosure mechanism, actively accept supervision from the public and take on other responsibilities, according to the initiative. An annual report on Chinese Internet businesses' performance on fulfilling their social responsibility was also released at the forum, which has been held every year since 2014. Huang Chengqing, vice president of the Internet Society of China, suggested that Internet businesses "integrate social responsibility into their operation and development strategy." Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 23:18:42|Editor: yan Video Player Close BEIRUT, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- The Lebanese foreign ministry on Wednesday reiterated its commitment to UN Resolution 1701, two days after the UN Interim Forces in Lebanon (UNIFIL) confirmed the existence of two tunnels crossing the UN-demarcated Blue Line separating Lebanon and Israel, a local newspaper reported. The Lebanese government has called for the army to take all necessary measures to implement Resolution 1701 in coordination with the UNIFIL, Elnashra, an online independent newspaper, quoted the ministry as saying. The ministry also called on the UN Security Council to commit Israel to stopping all its violations of Lebanon's sovereignty, which exceeds 1,800 annually. The UNIFIL on Monday described the existence of two tunnels crossing the Blue Line as "a clear violation of UN Resolution 1701." Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 23:18:42|Editor: Chengcheng Video Player Close JAKARTA, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- The anti-terror squad of Indonesian police arrested 21 terrorist suspects in various provinces in the past month ahead of the Christmas and New Year holiday season, Indonesian Police Chief General Tito Karnavian said on Wednesday. The police chief said some of the suspects were members of the banned homegrown terrorist group Jamaah Ansharut Daulah. "We will continue the (security) monitoring measures. Legal process against the arrested ones was underway at present," Tito said. After extracting information from the arrested suspects, Tito said so far there has been no credible threat of terrorist attacks in the upcoming holiday season. To ensure security of the holiday season, Indonesian police would deploy 94,946 personnel at worship places and public tourism spots in the annual "Operation Candle" from Dec. 22 to Jan. 2 next year. Extra security monitoring would be applied in 13 provinces identified as being prone to terror attacks. Surveillance would also be in place against terrorists' "sleeping cells" possibly planning for the attacks. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 23:23:43|Editor: Chengcheng Video Player Close KUALA LUMPUR, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- The best is yet to come for the economic cooperation between Malaysia and China as bilateral trade and investment continues to grow, Malaysian Finance Minister Lim Guan Eng said Wednesday. Malaysia's approved foreign direct investment (FDI) in the manufacturing sector surged 250 percent year-on-year in the first nine months of 2018, with China as the largest source, said Lim at the annual dinner of the Chinese Enterprises Association in Malaysia. Meanwhile, data showed that Malaysia's bilateral trade with China, its largest trading partner since 2009, continues to expand with growth in export outpacing import, said Lim, adding that he believes China will buy more from Malaysia, especially palm oil. The minister spoke positively on the healthy development and the spirit of taking root in Malaysia by the Chinese companies, as they brought in investment and created jobs for the local economy over the years. "The Malaysian government reaffirms our commitment to building on the existing close ties with China and will work to maintain friendly relations," Lim said, adding that his country will continue to support and actively participate in the Belt and Road Initiative. Highlighting the recent cooperation between the two sides, including the launch of the first car jointly developed by Malaysian national car manufacturer Proton and China's Geely, Lim said "we believe that the best is yet to come." For her part, Shi Ziming, economic and commercial counsellor of Chinese embassy in Malaysia, said both countries enjoy solid foundation of cooperation and common concept of development. "More and more Chinese enterprises have regarded Malaysia as a hot destination of overseas investment and have achieved mutually beneficial and fruitful results," she said. Founded in 2002, the Chinese Enterprises Association in Malaysia now has some 120 member companies operating in finance, engineering, telecommunications, logistics, tourism, education among others. Wang Hongwei, president of the association and chief executive of Bank of China Malaysia, said not only has the association witnessed the great development of China-Malaysia relations, but also played pivotal role in the partnership over the years. The association will continue to serve as a bridge for entrepreneurs in both countries and to promote bilateral cooperation, he said. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 23:23:43|Editor: mmm Video Player Close HOHHOT, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- Northern China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region is working to collect and preserve the ancient texts of three small ethnic minorities, local authorities said Wednesday. The ethnic affairs committee of the city of Hulun Buir said they were translating and compiling the historical texts and files of Ewenki, Daur and Oroqen, including many collected from the public for better conservation. The committee said they had so far collected 1,794 pages of texts dated between 1636 and 1949. The files written in the Manchu language include government files, folk legends, and records of local religious beliefs and practices. The three ethnic groups do not have their own written languages, and many of their records were in Manchu and Mongolian. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 23:33:44|Editor: yan Video Player Close WASHINGTON, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- The United States is planning a rapid and full withdrawal of troops from Syria, according to U.S. media reports on Wednesday citing Trump administration officials. Currently more than 2,000 U.S. soldiers are deployed in Syria. U.S. President Donald Trump has long urged the military to end the campaign, which he criticized as too costly. VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Dec. 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Canada Carbon Inc. (the Company) (TSX-V:CCB) (FF:U7N1) announces that on December 18th, 2018, Mr. Justice Martin Vauclair of the Quebec Court of Appeal gave permission to the Municipality of Grenville-sur-la-Rouge (the Municipality) to appeal the decision rendered by Madam Justice Danielle Turcotte who rejected the Municipality's motion to dismiss the Companys damage claim as abusive. In granting this permission, Judge Vauclair indicated that he was not commenting on the chances of success of this appeal. It should be noted that the Turcotte judgment concluded in particular that the damage claim filed by the Company 1) did not appear abusive, 2) nor did it present the characteristics of a SLAPP lawsuit, but rather that 3) the action of the Company is an action in damages of a conservatory nature. The Municipality will therefore have the burden of demonstrating to a bench of 3 judges of the Court of Appeal that the Turcotte judgment is unfounded in fact and in law. Executive Chairman and CEO R. Bruce Duncan said: "The filing of our action for damages and its subsequent suspension would both safeguard the rights of the Company and also prevent the Municipality from having to defend itself against this action pending the results of other legal proceedings. This approach was considered reasonable in the decision handed down by Madam Justice Turcotte. The Company will vigorously contest the Municipalitys position. CANADA CARBON INC. R. Bruce Duncan CEO and Director Contact Information E-mail inquiries: info@canadacarbon.com P: (604) 685-6375 F: (604) 909-1163 Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 23:48:48|Editor: yan Video Player Close SHANGHAI, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has launched a new project in Shanghai to promote youth leadership and communication under the Belt and Road Initiative. In partnership with Beifang International Education Group (BIEG), UNFPA launched the project Tuesday to support the exchange of knowledge, facilitate mutual learning among young people, and promote dialogue between youth and decision makers. The two-year-long project will provide young people in China with training sessions on leadership, communication skills and decision making, and offer them intern opportunities in UNFPA or other institutes. There will also be international or regional conferences and workshops to promote communication among youth from countries along the Belt and Road. "We believe that when empowered, young people become effective drivers of change. UNFPA works across the world in more than 150 countries, including China, to ensure that all young people have the information and services to guarantee their healthy development," said Babatunde Ahonsi, UNFPA Representative in China. A youth-friendly club will be established in Shanghai Lida University, a member university with BIEG, to support the project. The project will carry out activities in other cities of China and along the Belt and Road. BIEG is a platform for sharing resources, improving operations and promoting internationalization in higher education, with over 10 university or college members in the cities of Beijing, Shanghai and Chongqing, as well as Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Hunan and Guangdong provinces. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 23:58:49|Editor: yan Video Player Close WARSAW, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- Two people were killed and one seriously injured after a train collided with a vehicle in the southeast of Poland on Wednesday, local authorities said. The accident took place at an unguarded railway crossing in the city of Rzeszow when a car came across the railway without noticing the coming train. According to Podkarpacie firefighters, there were 3 people in the car, one of whom died at the spot and another died on the way to the hospital. The injured was taken to the hospital. Local media reported that the impact was so strong that the car was pushed by the train to a distance of about 150 meters. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 23:58:50|Editor: yan Video Player Close HANGZHOU, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- An empty passenger ship about 30 meters long was spotted some 500 km east of the city of Zhoushan in eastern China Tuesday morning. Wang Weiping, captain of a local fishing boat, said the crew saw the ship at about 3 a.m. and tried to contact passengers using a loudspeaker as it was too dark for them to see the ship clearly. However, they received no response. The crew members noticed some damage marks on the ship's body, but after boarding the ship, they found there were no signs of foul play. The boat later pulled the ship with a rope to the port of Zhoushan. The maritime search and rescue center of Zhejiang Province confirmed on Wednesday that the ship belongs to a Malaysian company that purchased the small second-hand high-speed passenger ship from the Republic of Korea. While it was en route from the ROK to Malaysia, the tugboat pulling the passenger ship broke down and its towrope broke during a storm. The passenger ship then went missing until it was spotted by the Chinese fishing boat crew on Tuesday. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-19 23:58:50|Editor: yan Video Player Close BELGRADE, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- Serbia signed a commercial contract with a Turkish company on Wednesday to design and construct the first section of the highway between Belgrade and Sarajevo, capitals of Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), hoping to boost regional economic cooperation between the two countries and wider. The contract was signed by the Deputy Prime Minister Zorana Mihajlovic who is also the minister of construction, transport and infrastructure of Serbia, acting director of the public company "Roads of Serbia" Zoran Drobnjak and the president of the company "Tashjapi" Emrulah Turanli. According to a press release of the Serbian government, around 30-kilometre section of the highway between villages of Sremska Raca and Kuzmin is worth 250 million euros. The contract includes the development of a detailed regulation plan, projects and construction works with a new bridge across the Sava River, as well as the development of project and technical documentation for the second -- around 70-kilometre long route of the Belgrade-Sarajevo highway, from Pozega to Kotroman. After the signing, Mihajlovic emphasized the importance of infrastructural connections in the region, estimating that the better connection between Serbia and BiH will enable faster development of the region "We hope that next year we will sign a financial contract, and that in 2020 we will begin to work. We expect the contractors to perform the works in accordance with the contract and on time," Mihajlovic said. The realization of this project, she pointed out, is important for good relations between Turkey and Serbia. Minister of Transport and Infrastructure of Turkey Mehmet Cahit Turhan, who also attended the signing, said that Turkey considers Serbia an important factor in stability in the region and that the agreement signed today is only the beginning when it comes to further improvement of relations between the two countries. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-20 00:13:55|Editor: yan Video Player Close NAIROBI, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- The Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) states plan to tap diaspora funding to push their industrialization agenda, an official said on Wednesday. Kipyego Cheluget, COMESA assistant secretary general, told journalists in Nairobi that diaspora resources have been identified as one of the enablers for the COMESA Industrialization Policy 2015-2030. "To promote diaspora involvement in the COMESA industrialization drive, there is need to harness the knowledge, finance and entrepreneurial capacity of the diaspora to enhance investment in industrial sector or related supporting sectors," Cheluget said. Cheluget made the remarks during the fifth Kenyan Diaspora Alliance annual homecoming event. He noted that at the continental level, the African Union Commission has established a department to cater for people of African descent wherever they are for their engagement in the development of the continent. "At the regional level, COMESA has also realized the contribution that its citizens in the diaspora can make to the devolution of knowledge and experience for development of the region," he said. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-20 00:13:56|Editor: yan Video Player Close WASHINGTON, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- The Trump administration has started returning U.S. troops home from Syria, the White House said on Wednesday. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-20 01:19:14|Editor: yan Video Player Close DAR ES SALAAM, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- Tanzanian President John Magufuli said on Wednesday the government has allocated an amount equivalent to 300 million U.S. dollars for the construction of road networks in the commercial capital Dar es Salaam to end traffic jams. Speaking shortly before he laid the foundation stone for the construction of a 19.2 kilometer eight-lane highway project, he said the new highway signaled a new era for the country's commercial capital which has been experiencing traffic jams for a long time. The new highway stretches from Kimara in the commercial capital to Kibaha Maili Moja in coast region. "This has never happened in our history for the government to set aside such a huge amount of money just for Dar es Salaam. We want to make Tanzania the best country and this is the beginning," said Magufuli. President Magufuli said the government was determined to end traffic jams in Dar es Salaam, adding that many other projects were in the pipeline. Patrick Mfugale, Tanzania Roads Agency (TANROADS) Chief Executive Officer, said the project is expected to end by January 2020. Mfugale said the project is being undertaken by a local construction firm under the supervision of TANROADS. File Photo: Rebels of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement-in-Opposition (SPLM-IO), a South Sudanese anti-government force, take part in a military exercise on Sept. 22, 2018, at their base in Panyume, South Sudan, near the border with Uganda. (Xinhua/AFP) UNITED NATIONS, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- Sexual violence has been used as a weapon of war by all the parties of the South Sudan conflict, a United Nations (UN) envoy told the Security Council Tuesday, noting a significant increase of perpetrations this year. Pramila Patten, the UN secretary-general's special representative on sexual violence in conflict, said the UN has witnessed systematic patterns of sexual violence since 2013 when the conflict started in South Sudan, but the phenomenon "escalated dramatically" this year. "In 2018, there has been a clear and alarming increase in the number of cases and victims of conflict-related sexual violence documented," she said, adding that the number of victims has already reached 1,157, the highest recorded in the last three years. First-hand testimony Patten heard indicated that rape was used by the attackers "to exercise power over their victims, impose extreme humiliation, destroy their dignity, and fracture families and the community." Most notably, Patten pointed to the reports of mass rapes in Bentiu in November, where some 125 women and girls were reportedly raped, whipped and clubbed over 10 days while heading to a food distribution site. The UN team on the ground and the local authorities have both launched investigations into this matter, according to Patten. In a separate incident in October, 43 cases of rape or gang rape and the abduction of 505 women and 63 girls for the purpose of sexual slavery in Western Equatoria region were documented, she said. Patten added that sexual abuse would reportedly cease only when abducted women become fighters. Among the incidents Patten cited to the Security Council, the alleged perpetrators are from both the government troops and the opposition forces. Patten said that, although the South Sudanese officials she met with reiterated that the violations are unacceptable, "the fact is that it is still largely 'cost-free' to rape in South Sudan." Jean-Pierre Lacroix, the UN peacekeeping chief who spoke to the Security Council before Patten, condemned "in the strongest terms" the continued prevalence of sexual violence and called on the South Sudanese parties to bring all those responsible to justice. Lacroix appealed to the international community to "pronounce itself and remind the parties that with such prevalent impunity, South Sudan would not be able to find a respectable place among the community of nations." Moreover, Patten urged the Security Council to apply sanctions for sexual violence crimes as a critical aspect of deterrence and prevention. Patten said her office, together with the Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights, submitted on Monday the names of three alleged perpetrators of a July incident in southern Unity state to the South Sudan sanctions committee of the council for its consideration. Patten further called for comprehensive services to be provided for the survivors of sexual violence, particularly medical and psychosocial care, and for conflict-related sexual violence to be addressed as a central aspect of the revitalized peace agreement signed between the government and the opposition in September. Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-20 05:45:07|Editor: yan Video Player Close HELSINKI, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- Losses in Finland's state-owned icebreaking company Arctia have led to the resignation of its CEO Tero Vauraste. Arctia has been losing money for several years in the efforts to find offshore business opportunities for its combo-icebreakers in Arctic waters. The company's chairman Pertti Saarela told local media on Wednesday the board had concluded that a new CEO was needed. Mika Lintila, Finnish Minister for Economic Development, said last month that the state cannot continue "pumping money into Arctia". The company launched legally mandated talks with the staff about downsizing in November. Besides his CEO role, Vauraste is the chairman of the Arctic Economic Council, an auxiliary group assisting the intergovernmental Arctic Council. Finland is currently the chairman of the Arctic Council until next spring. In the 1990s, Arctia added to its fleet of traditional icebreakers two specialized ships that could, besides icebreaking, assist in offshore drilling operations through ploughing the sea bed and towing away masses of ice. However, the ships have been making losses, except when working for Shell International in 2012-2014 in the Arctic Sea north of Alaska. The original idea had been that income from off shore work during the summer would ease the cost of winter ice breaking in Finnish waters. Vauraste said this November that the high Finnish cost structure undermines the competitive edge of operations. He said foreign competition uses "flags of convenience" that allow lower costs. Finland's national broadcaster Yle said the cost level of Arctic combo ships is 30-40 percent higher than what competitors tender. Shell had chosen Arctia in 2012 as no others were available. In 2017 one of the icebreakers made a promotional tour in northern Pacific down to South Korea, but no new customers were obtained. The main duty of Arctia is to keep Finnish sea lanes open during the winter season. Those services are purchased from Arctia by Finnish transport authorities which in turn charge shipping lines. The company said the downsizing plans are to secure the core operation off Finland. PROIECT Regulile de prim ajutor se vor invata la scoala de soferi Cei ce vor sa devina soferi, dar nu numai ei, vor trebui sa invete conducerea defensiva si regulile de prim ajutor. Este vorba despre un proiect de lege care a fost recent inregistrat la Senat si prin care se doreste identificarea unor solutii normative [citeste mai departe] NEW YORK, Dec. 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- LifeSci Public Relations LLC (LSPR) today announced the expansion of its Public Relations team with the hiring of industry leader, Andrew Mielach, Cherilyn Cecchini, M.D., and two academic scientists, Madeline Corrigan, Ph.D. and Amy Jobe, Ph.D. These additions bolster the agencys high science capabilities, delivering comprehensive and strategic communications programs for clients in healthcare and the life sciences. Since its founding, LifeSci Public Relations has been committed to building a team with unmatched communications and public relations capabilities, particularly in the high sciences, said Matt Middleman, M.D., president and founding partner of LSPR. Andrews vast experience with both emerging companies and large pharma commercial campaigns further expands our deep domain expertise. In addition, expanding our team of physicians and scientists with three highly gifted scientists, further strengthens our ability to provide unparalleled strategic services to our clients. Andrew Mielach joins LSPR from JFK Communications, where he served as managing supervisor and an account co-lead for multiple large pharma commercial campaigns. Prior to JFK, Mr. Mielach served as vice president at Ruder Finn tasked with guiding several high-profile large pharma clients. Before Ruder, he was vice president and media relations team lead at Tiberend Strategic Advisors, providing strategic communications counsel to many emerging life sciences companies. Mr. Mielach earned his bachelors degree in communications from Seton Hall University. Cherilyn Cecchini, M.D., is a board-certified pediatrician and joins LSPR after serving as house staff in general pediatrics at Childrens National Medical Center in Washington, D.C. Her research focus throughout her medical career centered on end-of-life care communications. Prior to residency training, Dr. Cecchini received her medical degree from Sidney Kimmel Medical College in Philadelphia. She earned her bachelors degree in biology from The Pennsylvania State University. Madeline Corrigan, Ph.D., joins LSPR from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, where she was an assistant research professor in the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center on Wearable Robotics. Dr. Corrigan has extensive experience in medical device development, robotics and biomechanical research. She received her Ph.D. and M.S. in biomedical engineering from New Jersey Institute of Technology and her B.S. in biomedical engineering from the University of Minnesota. Amy Jobe, Ph.D., joins LSPR after having completed her postdoctoral studies and Ph.D. at Columbia University in a Nobel Prize winning laboratory. Her work employed electron microscopy to study the detailed three-dimensional structure of the cellular machine that makes proteins in all forms of life. Dr. Jobe earned her bachelors degree in biological sciences from Cornell University. About LifeSci Public Relations LifeSci Public Relations LLC (LSPR) ( lifescipublicrelations.com ) is a corporate communications and public relations firm helping clients engage their corporate audiences and achieve their business objectives via a broad array of traditional, social and digital media tools. LSPR has built a truly unique team, with more than half of those handling its client communications programs having M.D.s and Ph.D.s. This team forms the foundation of LSPRs High Science Communications Consultancy, the only one of its kind in healthcare PR. LSPR's proactive approach to public relations is equally distinct. LSPR is further unique in its ability to collaborate across LifeSci Partners ecosystem, including with its IR firm, investment bank, venture fund, executive search team and its analytics and partnering advisory firm. The agency's highly-experienced team has a track record of successfully planning and implementing strategic public relations programs for small-, medium- and large-sized public and private healthcare companies across many clinical and technological fields. LSPR is headquartered in New York City and operates globally in the U.S., Canada, Europe, U.K., Australia and Asia. For further information, please contact: Matt Middleman, M.D. LifeSci Public Relations, LLC matt@lifescipublicrelations.com 646-627-8384 Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-18 15:05:35|Editor: Shi Yinglun Video Player Close NEW YORK, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- The percentage of U.S. high school senior students using e-cigarettes nearly doubled from 2017, according to a new survey released Monday by the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse. Reported use of e-cigarettes specifically in the last 30 days nearly doubled among 10th and 12th graders, from 11 percent in 2017 to 20.9 percent in 2018, the survey said. This was the largest single-year increase in the survey's 44-year history, the survey said. The result was part of the 2018 Monitoring the Future survey, which studied around 45,000 students in the eighth, 10th and 12th grades throughout the United States to track trends in substance use by American teens. The survey found that the percentage of all high school students who used e-cigarettes has risen by a third over the past year. A total of 37.3 percent of 12th graders reported "any vaping" in the past 12 months, compared to 27.8 percent in 2017, the survey said. More than 10.9 percent of 10th graders said they used e-cigarettes in the past year, the survey said. The survey also found a significant jump in the perceived availability of e-cigarettes. Around 45.7 percent of eighth graders and 66.6 percent of 10th graders said the vaping devices are "fairly easy" or "very easy" to get, the survey said. Experts attributed the increase to newer versions of e-cigarettes which look like computer flash drives and can be used discreetly, according to the Associated Press (AP). "They can put it in their sleeve or their pocket. They can do it wherever, whenever. They can do it in class if they're sneaky about it," Trina Hale, a junior student at South Charleston High School in West Virginia, told the AP. File photo shows workers go about their work at a construction site in Hawassa, Ethiopia, Feb. 3, 2016. (Xinhua /Michael Tewelde) ADDIS ABABA, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- Ethiopia welcomes more Chinese investment in its industrial parks, a senior Foreign Ministry official said here on Monday. Dewano Kedir, permanent secretary at the Ethiopian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, expressed admiration for China's fast economic transformation over three decades and called on Chinese firms to boost their involvement in Ethiopia's manufacturing sector. "Ethiopia has registered double digit economic growth for the last decade and is striving to become the manufacturing hub in Africa, with involvement of extensive Chinese capital," Kedir told a Chinese delegation led by Yao Fukang, deputy director of Standing Committee of Luzhou Municipal People's Congress. File photo taken on Dec. 8, 2018 shows Jimma Industrial park in Jima, Ethiopia.(Xinhua/Michael Tewelde) Luzhou city is located in the southeast part of China's Sichuan province. It is renowned for its machine construction, chemicals, tourism, and agriculture industries. Ethiopia has so far commissioned five industrial parks and plans to commission six more during the current Ethiopian fiscal year, which started on July 8. Yao, for his part, said Ethiopia is a favored investment destination for Chinese companies and pledged to play his part in further strengthening trade and investment ties with Ethiopia. He praised Ethiopia for its "well engineered investment policies and bright economic future." New Delhi: Aadhaar-issuing authority UIDAI is proposed to assume a regulatory role with enhanced power to take enforcement actions on misuse of the national biometric ID and impose stiff penalties for violations such as failure to obtain consent for authentication and in case of data breaches, a top source said. In the backdrop of the landmark Supreme Court verdict that imposed restrictions on use of Aadhaar by private companies, the Cabinet Monday evening approved amending the Aadhaar Act to enhance powers of Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), and ensure stringent safeguards against any violation of norms. The amendments proposed are in compliance of the recent order of the apex court, the source pointed out. Also, the Telegraph Act and Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) rules will be amended to provide for voluntary use of Aadhaar for obtaining SIMs and opening bank accounts. The amendments will go to Parliament for approval. The proposed amendments in Aadhaar Act are also in sync with the Srikrishna panel recommendations that had asserted that UIDAI should not only be autonomous in its decision-making, but also be vested with powers akin to traditional regulators for enforcement actions. The suggested amendments, which will be placed before Parliament, will give UIDAI more powers to crackdown on violation, the source said adding that the Section 57 of Aadhaar Act -- that previously allowed sharing of data with private entities and was subsequently struck down by the apex court -- is proposed to be removed altogether as part of the proposed changes. "Against the UIDAI orders, there will be provision to file appeal before TDSAT (Telecom Disputes Settlement and Appellate Tribunal), and against the orders of TDSAT an appeal can be made in the SC," the source said citing the planned changes. The amendments talk about enhanced powers to UIDAI to issue directions, and also impose penalty if the directions are not followed. Entities that can request for authentication will primarily belong to two categories, those mandated by law made by Parliament, and those entities "working in the interest of the State", for which the rules will be framed by the Centre in consultation with the UIDAI. Such authentication will be on a voluntary basis. Other proposed amendments include specific provision for allowing use of Virtual IDs, QR (Quick response) code, and offline verification modes, as well as giving option for opt out of Aadhaar database after a person attains the age of 18 years. The Aadhaar Act amendments suggested by the Srikrishna panel included penalty for failure to obtain consent for authentication or offline verification (up to three year imprisonment or fine of upto Rs 10,000); penalty for unauthorised use of core biometric information (imprisonment between 3-10 years and fine of up to Rs 10,000) amongst others. VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Dec. 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Westhaven Ventures Inc. (TSX-V:WHN) is pleased to provide an update on its recently completed drill program at its 15,542 hectare Shovelnose gold property, located within the prospective Spences Bridge Gold Belt (SBGB), which borders the Coquihalla Highway, 30 kilometres south of Merritt, British Columbia. Fall Drill Program Westhaven has completed another 2,183 metres (m) of diamond drilling in 5 holes. Due to a scheduled holiday break, pending assays will be released in early 2019 when received. Drilling Highlights Include: Epithermal vein mineralization has been intersected in all drill holes. Multiple occurrences of visible gold have been encountered in holes SN18-18 and SN18-21. Ginguro banding has been encountered in holes SN18-18, SN18-20, SN18-21 and SN18-22. A separate vein zone has been intersected in holes SN18-18, SN18-20, SN18-21 and SN18-22, that is situated approximately 150m-200m down section from the vein zone encountered in holes SN18-14 and SN18-15. Hole SN18-18 intersected the projected up-dip extension by 97m of the mineralization encountered in hole SN18-14 (Zone 1 Main Zone). SN18-18 is collared 102m northeast from SN18-14 which returned 17.77m of 24.50 g/t gold (Au) and 107.92 g/t silver (Ag). Hole SN18-18 also first identified a second zone of colloform-crustiform banded quartz veins with visible gold (Zone 2 Footwall Zone), occurring 150m down-section from Zone 1. SN18-19 collared 100m southeast of SN18-15 did encounter veining despite significant cross-faulting and displacement of the main vein zone. Follow-up work is underway, including interpretation of the ground and airborne magnetic surveys to help understand this fault system. SN18-20 intersected the projected down-dip extension by 140m of Zone 1 mineralization encountered in hole SN18-15. SN18-20 is collared 100m southwest from SN18-15 which returned 46.20m of 8.95 g/t Au and 65.47 g/t Ag. A second zone of banded quartz veining was encountered in SN18-20, 100m down-section of Zone 1, and likely represents Zone 2. SN18-21 intersected the projected down-dip extension by 50m of the Zone 1 mineralization encountered in hole SN18-14 and is located 38m to the southwest. Hole SN18-21 also encountered the projected down-dip extension by 170m of Zone 2 veining intersected in SN18-18. SN18-22 is collared 100m to the northwest of SN18-14 and it encountered the northwestward continuation of vein zones 1 and 2. Please see a plan map of the drilling program below. Gareth Thomas, President & CEO of Westhaven stated, This newly discovered second vein zone has the potential to significantly increase the size and scale of the South Zone gold discovery. We are planning to initiate a fully financed drill program in early 2019, not only to follow-up on recent drilling success in the South Zone but to drill test targets generated from recently completed magnetic surveys (geophysics initiatives). The Spences Bridge Gold Belt (SBGB) Westhaven owns a 100%-interest in 4 properties covering over 35,000 hectares within the prospective SBGB, which is situated within a geological setting like those which host other significant epithermal gold-silver systems. It is close to major transportation routes and infrastructure allowing for cost-effective exploration. The SBGB is a 110-kilometre northwest-trending belt of intermediate to felsic volcanic rocks dominated by the Cretaceous Spences Bridge Group. Sable Resources and Westhaven have a combined control of 86% of the SBGB (225,000ha). Any ground staked by Sable within 5 kilometres of Westhaven's existing projects is subject to a 2.5% NSR. In addition, Westhaven has a 30-day Right of First Refusal (ROFR) on any properties outside this 5-kilometre radius. On behalf of the Board of Directors WESTHAVEN VENTURES INC. "Gareth Thomas" Gareth Thomas, President, CEO & Director Westhaven Ventures Inc. is a Canadian based exploration company focused on the acquisition and exploration of prospective resource properties. Westhaven is focused on advancing its Shovelnose, Prospect Valley, Skoonka and Skoonka North gold projects in British Columbia. Westhaven trades on the TSX Venture Exchange under the ticker symbol WHN. For further information, please call 604-681-5558 or visit Westhavens website at www.westhavenventures.com Qualified Person Statement Peter Fischl, P.Geo., who is a Qualified Person within the context of National Instrument 43-101, has read and takes responsibility for this 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. A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/908f8634-8b42-4468-948d-201195de3bfe New Delhi: The government's note ban decision shaved off economic growth by at least 2 percentage points for the October-December quarter of 2016 in which the demonetisation move was effected, according to a research paper co-authored by eminent economist Gita Gopinath. India-born Harvard professor Gopinath, 46, is set to take charge as the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) next month. The paper further said that districts experiencing more severe demonetisation had relative reductions in economic activity, faster adoption of alternative payment technologies and lower bank credit growth. "Our results imply demonetisation lowered the growth rate of economic activity by at least 2 percentage points in the quarter of demonetisation," said the research paper titled 'Cash And The Economy: Evidence From India's Demonetisation'. The paper is published by US-based National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and its co-authors include economist Prachi Mishra, who had headed the strategic research unit at the RBI, Abhinav Narayanan, manager-research at RBI, and Harvard professor Gabriel Chodorow-Reich is the lead author. According to the paper, note ban also led to a decline in nightlights-based economic activity and a 3 percentage points or more drop in employment generation in November and December of 2016 relative to the counterfactual path. "The cross-sectional responses cumulate to a contraction in employment and nightlights-based output due to demonetisation of 2 percentage points and of bank credit of 2 percentage points in 2016 Q4 (calendar year) relative to their counterfactual paths, effects which dissipate over the next few months," the paper said. Night lights satellite imagery has been seen as an alternative means for measuring economic activity. Night lights-based data rely on a scientific model for reaching at an estimated total economic activities, including formal and informal, for countries and states of the world. The Indian economy grew at 7 percent in the third quarter (when demonetisation was implemented) of 2016-17 and at 6.1 percent in the subsequent quarter. In 2017-18, the Indian economy grew by 6.7 percent. In the six quarters before demonetisation, growth averaged 8 percent and in the seven quarters after, it averaged about 6.8 percent (with a four-quarter window, the relevant numbers are 8.1 percent before and 6.2 percent after). The paper also noted that cash continues to serve an essential role in facilitating economic activities in modern India. It also pointed out that there may be longer term advantages from demonetisation that arise from improvements in tax collections and in a shift to savings in financial instruments and non-cash payment mechanisms. "Evaluating these long-term consequences requires waiting for more data and an empirical strategy suited to the study of longer term effects," it said. Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a televised address on November 8, 2016 had announced to ban the Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 currency notes from the system aimed at curbing black money, fake currency and terror funding, among others. This policy made 86 percent of cash in circulation illegal tender overnight, with new notes gradually introduced over the next several months. The authors used a new household survey of employment and satellite data on human-generated nightlight activity to measure demonetisation's effects at the district level Gopinath is the second Indian to be appointed to the role of chief economist after Raghuram Rajan. Chandigarh: The ruling BJP on Wednesday swept the mayoral elections in five cities of Haryana, with Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar terming it as an endorsement of the policies and development agenda of the government. The BJP's mayoral candidates from Hisar, Karnal, Panipat, Rohtak and Yamunanagar registered victories in the elections held on Sunday, state election commission officials said. Though opposition Congress did not contest these polls, some of its leaders extended support to independents. The INLD-BSP combine, which was contesting some of the mayoral seats on their party symbols, faced a severe beating and was even behind the independents. The BJP also bagged majority in Karnal, Panipat and Yamunanagar municipal corporations. It was the first time that mayors of the five municipal corporations were elected directly. Earlier, the councillors used to elect the mayors. Also, the Haryana Election Commission had decided to treat 'none-of-the-above' or NOTA option as a "fictional candidate", making it must for winning candidates to secure more votes than those cast for NOTA. In case, NOTA would have got more votes, the election would have been held afresh. NOTA polled over 7,500 votes across the five cities. The election was considered a battle of prestige for the chief minister who had campaigned extensively. After BJP candidates registered victory in all the five urban areas defeating their nearest rivals, all independents, the chief minister said it was stamp of approval from the people on the government's policies. Asked if there was a possibility that Assembly polls, which are due in October next year, could be held together with the 2019 Lok Sabha election, Khattar told reporters, "If there is any proposal from the Centre's side, we are ready (for the assembly polls). But on our part, we have said that these polls will be held as per schedule." From Panipat, Avneet Kaur registered a massive victory over her nearest rival Anshu Kaur, who was backed by a local Congress leader. The BJP candidate had polled 1,26,321 votes and won by a margin of 74,940 votes. Immediately after her win, Avneet said among her immediate priority will be to come up with a plan to decongest traffic in Panipat city. From Khattar's home constituency Karnal, Renu Bala Gupta overcame a combined opposition challenge. She defeated Asha Wadhwa, who was supported by Indian National Lok Dal (INLD), Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and Congress, by a margin of 9,348 votes. Gautam Sardana defeated Rekha Aren by a margin of 28,091 votes to register win from Hisar, where the rival candidate was supported by two senior Congress leaders from there. Manmohan Goyal defeated Congress-supported Sita Ram from Rohtak by a margin of 14,776 votes while in Yamunanagar, Madan Singh defeated Rakesh Kumar. There are 10 municipal corporations in the state and polls were earlier held in Gurugram and Faridabad. Due to delimitation exercise and related litigation, municipal polls are yet to be held in Sonipat, Panchkula and Ambala. Expressing happiness over the election results, Khattar told reporters, "I congratulate the people of Haryana. Our candidates have registered wins at five places while majority of our councillors too have won. This is victory of people of Haryana, victory of our workers." "People have endorsed our government's policies, our development agenda and various initiatives which we have taken to take the state forward during the past four years. It is a stamp of approval from the public' ? This is victory of our government's achievements. To serve people has been our priority and will remain so in future also," he said. Opposition parties had targeted the chief minister for allegedly playing 'Punjabi' card to woo the urban voters in these polls. Khattar was asked about a controversial advertisement for which Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal had targeted him during his Sonipat visit a few days ago. Khattar said he had nothing to do with that particular advertisement and that people issue advertisements on their own. He also added: "We are committed to development of entire state, from day one we have said 'Haryana Ek, Haryanvi Ek', this is the mantra we believe in. People belong to different castes, but we do not discriminate on basis of caste, we treat all as one." Replying to a question on civic polls, he said the opposition had to bite the dust."Opposition had shown great unity in Karnal, but there too they were defeated," he said. He congratulated Avneet Kaur from Panipat and said she deserved special appreciation for her "landslide win". Replying to a question, Khattar said "civic, assembly and Lok Sabha polls are all different in nature" and he does not treat any election as 'semi-final'. He, however, said that the win will give a boost to the ruling party to work even harder to take the state on the path of progress. Asked about demands by opposition for voting through ballot paper, Khattar said: "When they win, the same EVM is good for them. When they lose, they raise doubts over EVM, this has become their habit. The EVM system is good, it is transparent and results are out in shortest period of time". To another question, Khattar said it is up to the Election Commission to see when it wantz to hold bypolls to Jind assembly segment, which has fallen vacant after the death of INLD MLA Hari Chand Middha in August. Polls had also been held for two municipal committees of Jakhal Mandi in Fatehabad and Pundri in Kaithal district. NEW DELHI: Soon after Congress came to power in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, Chief Ministers of both states Kamal Nath and Bhupesh Baghel made the announcement to waive off farmer loans. In Rajasthan too, Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot is holding a meeting on Wednesday to waive off the loans. But as Congress tries to ramp up pressure on the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led Centre to waive off loans by acting in states that it came to power, the saffron party has hit back saying tweets and press statements don't mean anything. Reminding Congress of their promises in the manifesto in Karnataka, the BJP said that even after six months of coming to power, the loans have not been waived off yet. 6 months on & loan waiver is not a reality in Karnataka Eventually farmers of MP, Rajasthan & Chhattisgarh will know about your lying skills Press statements & tweets dont really mean loans are waived off Btw @RahulGandhi waiving off loan isnt like getting gold from potatos https://t.co/fbs51HqNWa BJP Karnataka (@BJP4Karnataka) December 18, 2018 "6 months on & loan waiver is not a reality in Karnataka. Eventually, farmers of MP, Rajasthan & Chhattisgarh will know about your lying skills. Press statements & tweets dont really mean loans are waived off. Btw @RahulGandhi waiving off loan isnt like getting gold from potatos," the Karnataka BJP tweeted. Had your family not slept on country's development for 60 years our farmers would have been self sustainable today. BTW what is stopping you from waking up CM @hd_kumaraswamy to waive off farmers loan as promised. In fact you should learn from CM's of Assam & Gujarat. https://t.co/xsFbs4dbxX BJP Karnataka (@BJP4Karnataka) December 19, 2018 Union Minister Piyush Goyal also attacked Rahul on Twitter claiming that the promises are limited to poll speeches. "Rahul Gandhi ji, your promises are limited to electoral speeches. A waiver of Rs 44,000 crore was promised in Karnataka but even after many months, loans of only 800 farmers have been waived off. Even in the MP, you have given a deadline of March 31 and betrayed farmers. You have been exposed before the public," he tweeted. _____ _____ __ ____ ______ ____ _____ ______ ______ __ __ _____ ___ I _______ ___ 44000 _____ __ ________ __ ____ ____ __ ______ ___ _____ 800 _______ __ __ ____ ____ __ ___ I MP ___ __ ____ 31Mar __ ____ _____ _______ __ ____ ____ ___ ____ ___ __ ____ __ _____ ___ ___ ___ Piyush Goyal (@PiyushGoyal) December 18, 2018 Congress President Rahul Gandhi had on Tuesday said that his party and other opposition parties will force Prime Minister Narendra Modi to waive the loans of farmers by not letting him sleep till then. He said PM Modi in his over four years in office has not waived a single rupee of farmers' loans but had written off Rs 3.5 lakh crore loans of 15-20 big industrialists using people's money. "I want to tell that Congress and other opposition parties will together force Modi to waive farmers` debt. We will stand, fight, not budge an inch. We will not let him sleep at night till the time he waives the loan of farmers. I wanted to give you this message, tell this to the farmers," he said. "I want to tell the poor farmers that this is your country. It is not of 15-20 industrialists. Injustice is being meted out to you. You (farmers) work day and night and provide food to the country and your voice is never heard. We are ensuring that your voice is heard. We have done it in three states and you remember we will pressurise Narendra Modi ji to do it," he added. He said Modi had the choice in the last four years to execute farm loan waiver or go for demonetisation and "give money to his friends." "And he decided that he does not want to waive farmer loans. Now we will put such pressure on Narendra Modi. Not only Congress but every farmer of the country, we will take you all and get loans waived. Congress will stand with you. All opposition parties will stand with you. Do not be afraid, not be scared. Your work is going to be done," he said. Gandhi said the party had promised that it will start the work of loan waiver in 10 days. "In two states it did not take six hours and it is going to be done in the third state." Mumbai: Following Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) loss in recent Assembly elections, party chief Amit Shah is trying to pursue ally Shiv Sena to contest in the upcoming Lok Sabha polls together. According to sources, the Shah will meet Sena leaders on Wednesday and try to pacify them. "I am sure the Shiv Sena will be with us in 2019 Lok Sabha elections; talks are on," said Shah while addressing media in Mumbai. Shah arrived in Mumbai late Tuesday evening and held closed-door meetings with select leaders from Maharashtra. Speaking on recent Assembly poll results, he said, "The results in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh definitely not favourable for BJP, but it is not right to link them with the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. State polls can't be linked to Lok Sabha poll results; Both elections fought on separate issues." "It is imperative not only for the BJP but also for the country that the BJP wins the next elections in the Hindi heartland and other areas," he said while announcing that the party is introspecting the poll results. Speaking on the grand alliance talks, Shah added, "The reality of opposition 'mahagathbandhan' (grand alliance) is different. It doesn't exist and is a 'bhranti' (illusion)." Maharashtra has 48 Lok Sabha seats. In the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, the BJP had won 23 seats, while the Shiv Sena had bagged 18 constituencies. Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray has already announced that his party would contest the elections solo, which has left the BJP all the more anxious as it does not want division of votes. "It is not the Shiv Sena alone that has indicated to stay away from the BJP, but other alliance partners such as Raju Shetti, an influential farmer leader from Maharashtra, has already snapped the ties," a BJP leader told PTI. Last week, BJP was removed from power in Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh, Congress winning all the three states. With agency inputs New Delhi: A Delhi court will hear a second case registered against former Congress leader Sajjan Kumar, who has recently been convicted by the Delhi High Court in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots case and sentenced to life. The case will be heard by Delhi's Patiala High Court on Thursday. Notably, it is the second case registered by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on recommendations of Nanavati Commission. Kumar is facing trial on charges of murder and rioting in 1984 anti-Sikh riots case pertaining to killing in Delhi's Sultanpuri. While holding Kumar guilty in the first case, the Delhi HC reversed the earlier trial court's judgement in which he had been acquitted in the case. Kumar has been asked to surrender by 31 December 2018. He was held guilty under various counts of Indian Penal Code (IPC) including murder, criminal conspiracy, delivering provocative speeches instigating violence against Sikhs, mischief by fire or explosive substance with intent to destroy house and injuring or defiling place of worship with intent to insult the religion of any class. A day after his conviction, the Congress leader resigned from the primary membership of the party. He wrote to party president Rahul Gandhi submitting his resignation. NEW DELHI: Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Wednesday took a jibe at his successor Narendra Modi claiming that he was never afraid of speaking to the press. "People say I was a silent Prime Minister. I think these volumes (his book 'Changing India') speak for themselves. I wasn't the PM who was afraid of talking to the press. I met press regularly and on every foreign trip I undertook, I had a press conference on return," Dr Singh said. The former PM was speaking at the launch of his book "Changing India" which details his life as an economist as well as talks about his 10-year period at the helm of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) regime. He narrated an incidence of 2005 when he was advised by officials not to address a press conference organised by National Press Club in Washington and said officials were nervous but it turned out to be successful and the verbatim record is published in these volumes. He also said that he was not only an "accidental prime minister" but also an "accidental finance minister" of the country as the post was denied by I G Patel, the former RBI Governor and his immediate predecessor in the RBI. The former prime minister said that no government could change the course of the economy and broadly followed the path set by him as a finance minister in the Narasimha Rao-led government. Dr Singh also spoke about the relationship between the government and the RBI saying they are like "husband and wife". In light of the alleged differences between the government and the Central bank, he said that the difference of opinions must be resolved in a manner that the two institutions work in harmony. The comments came against the backdrop of Urjit Patel resigning as RBI Governor earlier this month amid a tussle between the central bank and the finance ministry on matters ranging from the appropriate size of reserves the central bank must hold to the easing of lending norms for sectors such as small and medium enterprises. "At the same time, I would say the relationship between government and RBI is like husband-wife relationship. There will be hiccups, there will be a difference of opinion, but ultimately these must be harmonised in a manner that these two great institutions can work in harmony," Singh said. Kolkata: Three days after DMK President MK Stalin proposed the name of Congress president Rahul Gandhi as the prime ministerial candidate of the 'mahagathbandhan' in the run upto the 2019 general elections, TMC supremo Mamata Banerjee remained non-committal on the 'choice'. The West Bengal CM said that it was not the right time to talk about the prime ministerial candidate. "This is not the right time to decide who will be the Prime Minister. Let us first all work together for a better day. Prime Ministerial candidate will be decided after the elections," said Banerjee while leaving the state secretariat - Nabanna on Wednesday. While the Telegu Desam Party (TDP), CPI(M) and many others did not endorse Stalin's views, TMC has so far chosen to not endorse or put down Rahul's name for PM. Banerjee has also remained non-committal on all questions raised on the face of the mahagathbandhan. Commenting on the reported seat sharing of Samajwadi Party (SP), Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) in Uttar Pradesh, she said, "This is very good. All leaders have come together. So what if Congress is not a part of the seat-sharing? It is a local compulsion. There are places where Congress will have to fight alone." However, she added some of the key issues that will be focused on in the run-up to the general elections would be farmers, development of youth and several others. "Our top priority will be the farmers and then we will focus on the youth. Most importantly, secularism will also be our top priority ahead of the Lok Sabha elections scheduled to be held next year." Union Minority Affairs Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi on Wednesday lashed out at former prime minister Manmohan Singh over the latters statement that he wasnt a PM who was afraid of talking to press. Speaking to mediapersons, Naqvi said that while the veteran Congress leader talked on someone elses script, Prime Minister Narendra Modi doesnt need a prompter or a director. He is a senior leader and a former Prime Minister. When he was the Prime Minister he used to talk on someones order and script, even now he is doing the same. He should realise that Prime Minister Modi doesn't need prompter, script or a director, said the Minority Affairs minister. Speaking at the launch of his book Changing India on Tuesday, former prime minister Manmohan Singh had taken a dig at Prime Minister Modi, saying that he was not a PM who was afraid to talk to the press. People say I was a silent Prime Minister. I think these volumes (his book 'Changing India') speak for themselves. I wasn't the PM who was afraid of talking to the press. I met press regularly and on every foreign trip I undertook, I had a press conference on return, Singh had said. Referring to an event of 2005, the veteran Congress leader said that during a visit to Washington, he was advised by officials to not address a press conference organised by National Press Club. According to Singh, though the officials were "nervous" about the press meet, it turned out to be successful. The record of the event has been detailed in the former prime minister's book. Manmohan Singh has often been critical of the function of Prime Minister Modi and his various measures like demonetisation and GST implementation. At an event in November, Singh had said that Modi should exercise restraint when he visits states not ruled by his party and set an example with his conduct which should be consistent with his obligations as the PM. "My advice to the prime minister is that he should exercise due restraint becoming of the office of the prime minister," the former prime minister had said. With the Lok Sabha elections 2019 just months away, political parties have begun the process of arrangements like seat sharing. If sources are to be believed, the seat-sharing arrangement has been finalised by opposition parties in Uttar Pradesh, and the Congress party has been left out of the arrangement. Sources told Zee News that the arrangement has been reached by the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). The Rashtriya Lok Dal is also a part of the seat sharing deal. While the Samajwadi Party and the BSP are expected to contest the elections on equal number of seats, the RLD is likely to get three seats to field its candidates. According to sources, an official announcement is likely to be made in this regard on January 15, 2019, when BSP supremo Mayawati celebrates her birthday. The coming together of the BSP and the SP is being considered a tough opposition for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). During the Gorakhpur and the Phulpur Lok Sabha bypolls, the BSP-SP combine had defeated BJP candidates comfortably. Ahead of the recently-concluded Madhya Pradesh Assembly elections, where the Congress emerged victorious, BSP supremo Mayawati had declared that she would not form any pre-poll alliance with the grand old party. Following the snub the BSP chief, the Congress had also reportedly approached the Samajwadi Party, but nothing fruitful could emerge. However, after the Congress party won 114 seats, which was two short of majority in Madhya Pradesh Assembly, the BSP extended its support enabling the formation of the Congress-led government in the state. Samajwadi Party chief and former Uttar Pradesh chief minister Akhilesh Yadav had joined hands with Congress chief Rahul Gandhi for the 2017 Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh, but the alliance saw a bitter result with the BJP winning the state with a massive majority. Uttar Pradesh plays a significant role in government formation at the Centre, as the state sends 80 Lok Sabha MPs to Parliament. Bengaluru: Days, after 11 people were killed consuming 'prasad' at a temple in Karnataka, police on Thursday, said that poison was mixed with the prasad to get control over the temple. So far, four people have been arrested in connection with the incident, police added. "This was done to get control over the temple. So far four persons have been arrested. It is suspected that poison was mixed with the prasad," Sharath Chandra, IGP South Zone said at a press conference. Last Friday, at least 11 people were killed and 72 others hospitalised after they consumed 'prasad' at a temple at Sulavadi village in Chamarajanagar district of Karnataka. The state government announced an ex-gratia of Rs 5 lakh to the next of the kin of the deceased. The medical treatment of those hospitalised would be taken care of by the state government. Following the tragedy, police said that the foundation laying ceremony of Maramma temple was organised on Friday morning and 'prasad' was distributed after the function. Most of those who attended the event followed the 'Om Shakti' tradition. After consuming the prasad, people started vomiting and began writing with stomach pain, police had added. According to the affected people said they got the smell of kerosene oil in the prasad but ignored it. A day after the incident, the Karnataka Congress too had announced Rs 1 lakh compensation to the kin of the victims in Chamarajanagar temple tragedy. The announcement was made by Karnataka Pradesh Congress Committee president Dinesh Gundu Rao. WEST CALDWELL, N.J. and TORONTO, Dec. 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via OTC PR WIRE-- EastGate Biotech Corp. (OTC PINK: ETBI), a pharmaceutical company that focuses on innovative technological developments specifically in insulin drug delivery for the treatment of type 2 diabetes, appointed key consultants Saul A. Mashaal, PhmB, MBA and Munaf Ali, PhD to assist in regulatory matters and manufacturing of the company's liquid insulin mouth rinse solution for Type 2 diabetes and pre-diabetes patients. Saul Mashaal has over 40 years of biotech experience. He has a degree in pharmacy and an MBA. His subject matter expertise is in the area of biotech manufacturing, pharmaceutical distribution, clinical trial development, and insulin manufacturing which are of great interest to EastGate. Saul was instrumental in the building of major biotechnology insulin manufacturing facilities in Israel, China, India and the UAE, the size and scope of the projects exceeded $500 million. Saul was the founder and Chairman of Acertus Pharma LLC and the founder and Chairman of the SciTech Group. Acertus is a privately held company that focuses on the distribution of biopharmaceuticals and consumer products. SciTech Group morphed into a showcase company in Singapore to implement research and development and manufacturing in Singapore. During his tenure, the company developed a breakthrough vaccine for immunization against Hepatitis B and spun off the Bioton division which was one of the first 4 companies in the world to produce recombinant human insulin. He is no stranger to the public markets. Bioton was a Polish company listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange and his predecessor company, SciTech was listed on the Australian Stock Exchange. Early in his career at 3M he was head of business development and the clinical research group and managed 27 clinical trials in the United States and Europe. Sauls depth of experience in key areas that EastGate is starting to address, make him an ideal consultant. EastGate has a paradigm changing drug for type 2 diabetes, said Saul Mashaal. Injections are not the way to address the compliance problem worldwide. An inexpensive easy to use drug that has demonstrated efficacy is a great first step. Having worked at big pharma, I have seen the strategies they have employed to introduce new diabetes drugs, and after the price fixing scandal there was a huge loss of confidence. Therein lies the opportunity for EastGate. Given my background in manufacturing, I anticipate the EastGate team will utilize my contacts in Singapore to negotiate long term supply contracts of insulin. Having reviewed EastGates clinical trial plan, I believe they are on the right trajectory and will eventually need my assistance in developing distribution following drug approval. Dr. Munaf Ali has over 25 years of experience in regulatory affairs and CNS (specifically in Parkinson disease, Alzheimers disease, depression, schizophrenia, and neuropathic pain). He is very familiar with the role insulin plays in these diseases. He is also no stranger to providing scientific and regulatory strategic advice for the conduct of clinical trials across many therapeutic areas. He has been involved on a strategic level with 46 different countries providing guidance with various global regulatory agencies, most notably the FDA and EMA on behalf of sponsors involved in developing the clinical trials necessary for registration. He worked as the head of regulatory strategies for expediting the development of CNS drugs at Ingenix which was eventually acquired by the United Healthcare Group. He now works as an independent consultant providing Pharmaceutical and Biotech companies, CROs, Universities and Financial Institutions guidance on the regulatory pathway for clinical trial development. To his credit, he has been involved in over 10 INDs, 8 NDAs and MAAs, and 5 Orphan Drug Applications. He has presented at FDA Advisory Committee Meetings, CPMP hearings, and at regulatory meetings in Europe, Asia, Central and South America. EastGate has a monumental task ahead of it when we look at the size and scope of the global epidemic in diabetes said Dr. Ali. Each country has a different regulatory body and different approval requirements. This is a virtual minefield, and the only way to navigate it is through experience. I couldnt be more pleased to be part of the EastGate team single handedly tackling this global epidemic. I hope to quickly and efficiently establish a global regulatory strategy that charts a course toward the quickest approvals so that we can bring a much-needed drug into the fight against this epidemic. Our team at EastGate is growing, said Anna Gluskin, CEO of EastGate Biotech. We have been able to attract the worlds best and brightest to this team because each of them realizes that something needs to be done to solve this global epidemic or the burden on our healthcare systems is going to collapse under its own weight. It also helps that we have such a simple and elegant solution. An oral insulin mouth rinse designed to supplement the pancreas and stave off the side effects of diabetes that burden the healthcare system. I am confident that this team will help us realize our goal of our first approval in 2019. About EastGate Biotech EastGate Biotech focuses on innovative technological developments and produces and distributes innovative drug compounds and healthy nutraceuticals that are based on natural therapies absorbed by the body. We utilize advanced nanotechnologies and alternative delivery systems that take difficult to deliver compounds and deliver them using our nanotechnology platform which ultimately increase the bioavailability to the body. Using our methods of delivery provides healthy alternatives to conventional pharmaceuticals that all-too-often create dangerous side-effects and unexpected consequences for those trying to attain and maintain a healthy lifestyle. EastGate's wholly owned subsidiary Omni Surgery and Anti-Aging Centre is the first of many surgery centers to come under the Omni umbrella as we plan to roll up existing business under the Omni brand and expand our footprint globally. Cautionary statement on forward-looking information All statements, other than statements of historical fact, contained or incorporated by reference in this news release constitute "forward-looking information" or "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of certain securities laws, including the provisions for "safe harbor" under the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and are based on expectations, estimates and projections as of the date of this news release. The words "anticipates", "plans", "expects", "indicate", "intend", "scheduled", "estimates", "forecasts", "focus", "guidance", "initiative", "model", "methodology", "outlook", "potential", "projected", "pursue", "strategy", "study", "targets", or "believes", or variations of or similar such words and phrases or statements that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", or "should", "might", or "way forward", "will be taken", "will occur" or "will be achieved" and similar expressions identify forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are necessarily based upon a number of estimates and assumptions that are inherently subject to significant business, economic and competitive risks, uncertainties and contingencies. The risks, estimates, models and assumptions contained or incorporated by reference in this release, include those identified from time to time in the reports filed by EastGate with the SEC, which should be considered together with any forward-looking statement. EastGate undertakes no obligation to update publicly any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. CONTACT: Rose Perri 1-647-692-0652 Email: information@eastgatepharmaceuticals.com Website: www.EastGateBiotech.com SOURCE: EastGate Biotech Corp. MUMBAI: The Bharatiya Janata Party which lost the Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh Assembly elections just a few days ago is now under pressure from ally Shiv Sena for Maharashtra polls. The Uddhav Thakarey-led Shiv Sena has started to flex its muscles and demanded 155 seats in the 288-member Assembly, say sources. The BJP, though, is reluctant with the number and is ready to give 138 seats to them and contest on 150 seats itself. However, sources add that the saffron party is ready to hold discussions with the estranged ally to arrive at a mutually agreeable number. In the current Assembly, the BJP has 121 MLAs while the Sena has 63, making a total of 184 legislators. For a majority in the 288-member Assembly, the government must have 145 MLAs. Of the remaining 104 seats which neither of the parties won in the 2014 elections, Sena is seeking 85 seats to contest which would take its tally up to 155. Sena has also demanded that the Assembly polls be held with Lok Sabha election in 2019. The tenure of the Maharashtra Assembly is due to expire in November 2019, nearly six months after the end of Lok Sabha term. BJP chief Amit Shah met Shiv Sena leaders on Wednesday and tried to pacify and pursue them to contest the general elections together. "I am sure the Shiv Sena will be with us in 2019 Lok Sabha elections, talks are on with them," Shah said on Wednesday in Mumbai. Maharashtra has 48 Lok Sabha seats. In the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, the BJP had won 23 seats, while the Shiv Sena had bagged 18 constituencies. Sena chief Thackeray had recently announced that his party would contest the elections solo, which has left the BJP all the more anxious as it does not want division of votes. Mumbai: A fire broke out on Wednesday in a slum in Mumbai's Matunga. Six fire tenders have been pressed to combat the fire-fighting operations. There have been no reports of injury or casualty so far. This comes two days after a massive fire swept through state-run Employees State Insurance Corporation (ESIC) Kamgar Hospital at Marol in Andheri East. It took more than three hours to extinguish the flames. Nine persons died and more than 145 people were injured in the mishap. Mumbai: Two people were arrested on Wednesday in connection with the Andheri hospital fire that claimed lives of nine people. The two people arrested are - Supreme Construction Company's site engineer and the supervisor. "Supreme Construction Company's site engineer and supervisor have been arrested in connection with the fire incident at ESIC Kamgar Hospital. Further Investigation is underway," Navinchandra Reddy, DCP, Zone-10 (Mumbai) said. Navinchandra Reddy,DCP, Zone-10 (Mumbai): Supreme Construction Company's site engineer and supervisor have been arrested in connection with the fire incident at ESIC Kamgar Hospital. Further Investigation is underway. #Maharashtra pic.twitter.com/ahwHFK1E8v ANI (@ANI) December 19, 2018 A massive fire swept through state-run Employees State Insurance Corporation (ESIC) Kamgar Hospital at Marol in Andheri East on Monday. It took more than three hours to extinguish the flames. Nine persons died and more than 145 people were injured in the mishap. Following the incident, Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis ordered an enquiry into it. Expressing grief over the loss of lives, Fadnavis assured required assistance. A compensation of Rs 10 lakh each to families of the victims who lost their lives in the mishap was also announced by Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Labour and Employment, Santosh Kumar Gangwar. Two days after the incident, another fire broke out on Wednesday evening at the same hospital. The blaze was, however, doused and nobody was injured in the fire. New Delhi: Actress Ankita Lokhande is all set to make her Bollywood debut with 'Manikarnika: The Queen of Jhansi' early next year. She is essaying the role of Jhalkari Bai in the film, who was Rani Laxmibai's closest friend and part of her army. National-award winner Kangana Ranaut is playing the role of the main protagonist Rani Laxmi Bai in the film. Apart from her debut film and her sizzling Instagram photos, Ankita is making headlines for her marriage rumours. The buzz is Ankita, who has been in a relationship with Vicky Jain, will reportedly tie the knot with him in 2019. Bombay Times quoted a source saying, "After her breakup with Sushant, Ankita found her soulmate in Vicky. The couple is seen at many parties together and has also travelled to various holiday destinations. All of their friends know about the relationship. Ankita is also very close to Vicky's family and is often spotted with his sister. Currently, she is occupied with her film promotions, but she is planning to get married in 2019." Ankita, who was once in a steady relationship with her 'Pavitra Rishta' co-star Sushant Singh Rajput for almost six years, had a bitter breakup with him. After they parted ways, Ankita began seeing a Mumbai based businessman Vicky Jain. The duo has been spotted together many times. In fact, Vicky was present at Ankita's birthday along with Kangana, Mouni Roy, Arjun Bijlani and others. The source also said that both Ankita and Vicky have decided to take their relationship to next level and their families have also agreed to it. However, an official confirmation on the same is awaited. Interestingly, Vicky Jain's Instagram account is filled with Ankita's look from her upcoming film 'Manikarnika'. Kolkata: Two teachers were shot at in West Bengal's Cooch Behar while they were taking classes on Wednesday. The incident took place at a private primary school in Gitaldaha. The teachers, who are said to be TMC workers, were shot at by some bike-borne miscreants. West Bengal: Two teachers were injured after a firing inside a private school in Cooch Behar, earlier today. Investigation has started. pic.twitter.com/61dRj132K1 ANI (@ANI) December 19, 2018 They forcefully entered the school premises and entered the classroom The injured are reportedly identified as Majnu Hussain and Manowara Hussain. Both the teachers have been admitted to a local hospital. The police have registered a case and initiated an investigation. Professional holiday of all children is coming up. Find out more about it St. Nicholas Day Open source It is practically a professional holiday of all children. It is marked on December 19. It could as well be a symbol of childhood. The day is devoted to Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker. This saint during his life became a symbol of mercy and sacrificial love. And yes, it's about the historical figure. Fact 1: St. Nicholas was born in 270 CE Nicholas was born in the 270 CE in Pttara. His parents were believers and raised their son in the Christian spirit. Nicholas lost his parents, barely reaching the age of majority. He used his heritage to help those in need. For example, sometimes he would bring warm clothes, toys and food to poor homes. Fact 2: St. Nicholas started to be compared with an angel Nicholas started to be equated with an angel even though it was an ordinary man who did good things. He used gold from his heritage to help a girl from a poor family. She fell in love with a boy from wealthy family and they did not want to accept her. He helped everyone he could. All his life, Nicholas dedicated to the God and helping those in need. Later, he became a bishop. Fact 3: Saint Nicholas not only helps children He also helps students, traders, sailors and drivers. It is also believed that St. Nicholas saves people from the natural disasters. Married women can also pray to him asking for a peaceful family life. Fact 4: Presents depend on your behavior We see this day as the one connected to children who patiently (or not too patiently) wait to find the gifts under their pillow. True, if the child was behaving badly all year, then Nicholas can hint at the need to change the line of behavior :). By putting there a whip, for example. In reality, not many parents would decide to spoil the holiday for a child. Fact 5: There are many various traditions On this day in Czech Republic and Slovakia, person dressed up as Mikulas with long white beard accompanied by an angel and devil. This group visits houses at night on December 5. Angel and Mikulas are giving presents and the devil punishes bad children According to an old Ukrainian tradition, the elder owners of the village gathered for a holiday to brew wheat beer. After the dinner, everyone rode on a sleigh around the village merrily singing songs. The children were given special cookies on this day - Mykolaychyky (Svyaty Mykolay is St. Nicholas in Ukrainian, - 112.international). Throughout the territory of Ukraine, people also organized dinners in honor of Mykolay with ritual beer and honey. In Kharkiv region, it was customary to celebrate the three-days of Mykolay holiday, on which people cooked kutia and uzvar, so that next year they would bring a harvest for rye and fruit. Open source The Directors Board of the IMF has approved the stand-by program of financial assistance for Ukraine. It is accounted for 14 months-long period. The general amount of money makes 3.9 billion U.S. dollars. Petro Poroshenko, the Ukrainian leader posted that on Facebook. The head of the Ukrainian state admitted that the IMF also made the decision to assign part of the sum, 1.4 billion dollars, for the first tranche within this program. The tranche is expected to take place in the near future. 'This decision of the Fund is another important signal in recognition of our non-conditional progress in the macroeconomic stabilization and the proof of success in the reforming efforts. Such decisions of the leading financial institutes provide the stability of our confident movement and increase Ukraine's fortitude in the view of tough domestic and international challenges', Poroshenko wrote. In October, the Ukrainian government decided to increase the gas prices by 23.5 percent, starting from November 1. Over an hour after the respective decision of the Cabinet, a message appeared on the IMF website saying that Ukraine and the Fund reached the agreement on the new stand-by program for 3.9 billion-dollar program. It is to extend the EFF program expiring in March 2019. David Kramer, the President of Freedom House and former assistant secretary of state for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor sat with 112 Ukraine TV channel to speak about the international group aimed at countering interference into Ukraines relations, about the election process in Ukraine, about the situation in the Sea of Azov 112 Agency You are a team leader of the Ukrainian election task force. Can you tell more about this initiative? How will you help to fight with a possible interference in the Ukrainian elections? This is a project of the Atlantic Council, the Pinchuk foundation, the Transatlantic Commission on the electoral integrity. And 3 organizations together believe that this is important to try to expose any outside interference in Ukraines upcoming elections. The election is an important one as every election is. And given the history, recent history, both this country has had, other countries had, including my country - the United States have had with outside interference, we feel its important to do what we can to expose this interference - to possible try to disrupt the elections, create an unstable environment, support some candidates, oppose other candidates. The goal should be for Ukrainians to be able to choose their president freely, without outside interference. And what we want to do is to bring attention to this problem. Because what happens here also is important for the United States, and for the rest of Europe. Why is it important for the rest of the world? We have, ourselves, experienced in 2016 and a little less so last month with our congressional elections. Unprecedented for us, interference by Russia, in our 2016 presidential election. Americans should be able to choose their own leader without any influence and interference from outside. Ukrainians should be able to choose their leaders, Germans. There has been a number of examples where we have seen in particularly the Kremlin, though its agencies, trying to interfere and influence the electoral process, as well as the outcome of the elections. And a key element, a central element of democratic development is the ability to choose leaders freely, without outside influence. The goal of our project is to expose any influence from outside. And while we are looking at any interference as it might come, we anticipate the extended core that will come unfortunately from Russia If we are talking about the outside interference, do we talk about Russia or some other countries? If other countries try to interfere with election, we will certainly look at that and expose it. There is, unfortunately, a proven track record that Russia has of interfering another countries elections. As I have mentioned, including in my country the United States, we have seen it in Germany we even see it outside of the electoral processes where the Kremlin is weighing on the yellow vests protests in France. They weigh in on issues that are divisive in countries. For example, there were the protests in August 2017 in Charlottesville Virginia, that drew ultra-nationalists and neo-nacists and the Kremlin weighed in the social media trying to influence the debate to steer up controversy and this is something that shouldnt be allowed. So what we want to do is to expose it when it happens, and we will have a dashboard that will provide the information about this efforts, there will be a website devoted to it, (ukraineelections.org) This is not only the American effort this is an American and European and Ukrainian effort. We have European partners, we have Ukrainian partners in this. This is really a multinational effort to keep an eye on the elections. If we are talking about the practical side, what will it be will you tell about possible cases of interference in the elections, about propaganda, about fake news? The idea will be to bring attention to expose cases of the outside interference. We are not going to get involved in domestic squabbles, disagreements between candidates, thats for the Ukrainians to figure out. What we want to do is to source any efforts that go from outside of the country. The dashboard will be updated on the regular basis, we will issue very regular newsletters that will be sent by email. People of course can go on website and get the information as well, the idea is not to wait until after the elections is over and then produce a report. Thats too late. What we want to do is to try to expose any efforts to interfere from outside more or less when it happens. It wont be immediate. But we want to be as quick as possible. We want to verify the information that we find out. We want to make sure we are accurate in what we report, so that the proper authorities and individuals can take the necessary measures to try to distill the information. What can be the system of punishments if these cases are revealed? Maybe new sanctions against Russia? Well, it goes a little beyond of what the project is designed. Obviously, we are not in the position to punish anyone. We dont have an ability to sanction anyone, we are not the part of the government effort, we are a private independent entity, the Atlantic Council is a very respected think tank in Washington. We want to educate not only Ukrainians about cases of interference; we also want to educate people in the rest of Europe. We want to educate people in the United States. if it happens interference in Ukraine, and then the governments and parliaments can take whatever measures if they feel it warns some sort of actions. Why do you think these elections are important for Ukraine? What is the overall perception of the election campaign and candidates in the United States? Do the US have any favorites? I dont think we pick favorites. In the United States, we support the democratic process the free and fair electoral environment, where candidates have equal opportunities to reach out to voters. We want to make sure there no abusive administrative resources, we want to make sure candidates are able to get on air, equal basis, and we want to make sure this is done domestically, not based from influence from outside. So the united states is not interested in picking favorites one or another, but we are interested in focusing on the process to make sure that Ukraine once again Ukraine does have a good history of elections where they are conducted fairly. One of the nice things about Ukraine is that we dont know who is going to win. We dont know either. And there are some countries including Russia, where the outcome of elections is known before people go and vote. In this country, the beauty is we actually dont know who is going to win and vote. So voting matters and that why Ukrainians have to vote on March 31. And then next fall for the parliamentary elections, because their votes do actually matters and could decide the outcome of the elections. The U.S. Senate condemned Russias actions in Kerch Strait there was the following resolution. The European parliament adopted the same resolution. Will there be any sanctions against Russia for what its done in the Azov Sea? I think, if the situation would have escalated, then we would likely see some sanction activity from Europe, the EU, and United States. The United States has a warship its going to the black sea, I dont know whether it had been a plan before or is it a reaction to what happened in late November. But its an important signal, that NATO in the US will insist on free navigation that is on agreement dating back to 2003 between Russia and Ukraine, dealing with the Sea of Azov, and what happened was the violation of that and international law, and freedom of navigation in this open seas, And Russia needs to understand that if it would do something like that again, it would trigger serious reaction in the West. I would say, that a West could have acted a little more forcefully in this occasion, but I think the West has put Russia on the notice that if another incident like this happen things may get worse. If the Ukrainian sailors, who had been detained, 24, and would be not returned soon, its possible that it could trigger more sanctions. The US has been insisting on release of these prisoners, and they were detained for no reason, and we want to make sure that they will be returned to their families, and aloud to return to their positions. What is the deadline for these actions? If the sailors are not returned to Ukraine, the ships. Should there be more harsh actions from West? I dont know whether there is a specific deadline that western governments have put for it., but I will say that the new congress of U.S. with the democratic house, the senate will stay republican will start in early January, and I could imagine that this new congress will push the trump administration to take more forceful actions, and imposing additional sanctions because of this situation. What do you think about the possibility to close access to the EU ports for Russian ships coming from the Azov Sea until Russia resumes free navigation through the Kerch Strait and in the Azov Sea? Will it be affective? I think, its a proper step to take. There should be consequences for what happened. I mean this is very fortunate that no one was killed in this incident, there were several sailors who were injured. And there are 24 who had been deprived of their freedom, who are facing an unfortunate situation in Russia so I do think that there should be some consequences what happened we shouldn't just put this aside and pretend it never happened the same let's get back to businesses this is an example of an ongoing aggression by Russia against Ukraine starting in Crimea with illegal annexation by Russia of Crimea, continuing into the Donbass. And it is not a frozen conflict, this is a hot conflict, with Ukrainians being injured, tragically on a number of occasions, being killed as a result of Russian aggression. This is not a civil war, this is not a separatist conflict, this is Russian aggression against Ukraine and that needs to be clear to people around the world. If the western world doesnt reply to these actions of the Russian Federation, what can be the consequences and what countries are at the risk? We have seen the reports of a military built up of Russian forces along the border of Ukraine, while I'm not gotten the sense during the week that Ive been here, that Russian forces are about to cross the line and invade further. If we on the west dont show the strong position, show result, and push back against Russian violation of international norms, we can expect that there will be more violence. And no one should wanna see it. Unfortunately, Mr. Putin is not interested in seeing successful Ukraine and seeing the democratic Ukraine, Ukraine that moves closer towards integration with Euro-Atlantic community. He is interested in destabilizing the situation here, and that is something that is not on our interest, but of course, not in Ukraines interest. And we should do everything we can to try to support and help Ukraine on its democratic trajectory. There was an interview of Kurt Volker to Voice of America, and when asked about cutting Russian banks from SWIFT he replied "People refer to it as a nuclear option. It would have costs for everybody involved. Big costs for Russia, but big costs for allies as well. Ultimately, we have to keep it on the table as a possibility because we just can't continue to see Russia launch further steps of aggression in its neighborhood like this." Will it be ever done? Expelling Russia from swift Is not something the US alone can do. We would also take EU to support that step. I strongly believe we should not rule out anything that is telegraphing to Putin what our limits are in terms of our response to Russian aggression. So, I think, we should keep every option on the table. No one wants wider conflict with Russia in the military sense of course. But if Russian aggression continuing and escalated, then we should consider the possibility of Swift. There is no question whether the Russian government has referred to that as a nuclear option, but my view is that it wouldnt been on consideration if Russia got out of Ukraine. This is not a complicated conflict in my view. I realize the solution is not easy. But it Russias violation of Ukraines sovereignty and territorial integrity. Russian forces have to get out of Ukraine and if they do there is a possibility that sanctions could be lifted. And things could more or less return to normal. 16.02 There is also the possibility that Nord Stream 2 could be canceled. There is growing opposition to Nord Stream 2 in Europe as well as in the United States. And there is more and more pressure coming from both the Congress and the trump administration. To urge Germany to cancel this project. And this will be the consequence of what this country is doing to Ukraine. Nord stream 2 is not commercially viable. There is no real reason for this. And of course, it would hurt Ukraine because it will reduce the transit fee Ukraine depends on. There are number of things that we can do to impose costs on the Kremlin. There were 2 resolutions of the European Parliament and the Senate, about the cancellation of this construction. And according to this resolution of the European Parliament, it is seen as "a political project that poses a threat to European energy security". But other than very important statements, will we see any actions? There has been talks about the sanctioning of the entities that would be involved in the construction of the pipeline, or those who are involved in the actual flow of the energy. I hope, it doesnt come to that. I think it underscores that there is a growing opposition to that pipeline and now with a German political situation, perhaps a little bit stabilizing, it had been, I hope, we will see the German leadership deciding that this pipeline is not in the interest of anyone. Except of Kremlin frankly. It seems to me that we need to remind everyone, that the construction of the pipeline will damage Ukraine, it would increase Europes dependence on Russia for energy, and would only feed on the corruption that Putin depends on for exporting to the outside world. But sanctions for this? I dont rule it out. I hope there is no need for that, but it if pipeline continues and there is no sign that it would be suspended and then terminated, I think sanctions are a possibility in this case. Speaking about NATO, we heard important statements this week. President Poroshenko met with Stoltenberg, NATO will be keeping an eye on the situation in the Azov Sea, and Ukraine supports the idea of opening a mission of the alliance in the Azov Sea. How could it be possible? It would be tricky because of the 2003 agreement that would require neutral consent to this case, but Russia already violated that 2003 agreement, I think its important for it to reinform its support for Ukraine. In 2008 as you know Ukraine in the declaration on the Bucharest summit declared that Ukraine and Georgia will become the NATO members. It didnt say when, but what is particularly ironic is that popular support for Ukraine in joining NATO back in 2008 and up until early 2014, was very law, after Putin invasion of Ukraine, support for NATO membership has gone considerably, and some polls Ive seen as 70%. Putin in a way has united Ukraine on this issue more than any Ukrainian leader, and Ukrainians I think understand, that NATO membership would provide security guarantees under the article 5 of the NATO charter, and they feel that they would be safer, thats why Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania wanted to join and the new members wanted to join, article 5 securities guarantees give them the sense of reassurances against the resumption of the possible threat coming from Moscow. And my view is Ukraine should be treated no differently, simply because it borders Russia should now mean that Russia has a de facto veto of Ukraines NATO aspirations. There was no immediacy to Ukraine joining NATO in 2008, or 2014-2015. The issue is as you know in 2013, was about Ukraine signing the agreement with the European Union, it wasnt about NATO, I think we have to keep in mind that a result of what happened in 2013-2014, was actually increase, in Ukrainian support for joining NATO, as well as libertize with European Union. Speaking of Ukraine and chances to become a NATO member, you know that we have all these aspirations marked in the constitution, what will help this or continuing Russian aggression? Its a combination of things. Its continuation of reforms, that Ukraine needs to undertake. Its the fight against corruption which remains the critical things. It is reduction of dependency on energy which Ukraine makes progress on, it includes control of the military by civilians. Ukraine already well exceeds the 2 percent of threshold spending of GDP on defense. Which is because of the situation with Russia. Ukraine has made a significant progress. You think about the situation the current government, the current leadership inherited from the previous administration which made a mess situation in this country. It reversed its intention to sign the agreement with EU, massive corruption on the Yanukovych regime. Corruption remains a problem I dont want to suggest that it is gone away, not at all, but this is an issue that needs to be addressed. The prospect of the membership in both the European Union and NATO has been a very important incentive, for other countries to undertake difficult reforms. Ukraine in this case is no different. So, for Poland, Chezh Republic, Hungary, the prospect of returning to Europe, belonging in Europe, its not a different thing for Ukraine. In December, Ukraine called on the signatory states of the Budapest Memorandum to hold urgent consultations, according to a statement released by the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry. Why is Budapest memorandum just a paper and when Ukraine had Russian aggression, the countries that signed didnt help? My own personal view is that Budapest memorandum is a very important document, it is not a treaty, it hasnt been ratified, by Europe, parliament, my Congress, but in exchange of the guarantees that were provided other than Budapest memorandum, by the UK, Russia, US, Ukraine agreed to relinquish its nuclear weapons, that it had inherited from the Soviet period. And that was an enormously important development. Because it meant the reduction of the nuclear weapons. Kazakhstan and Belarus turned out the nuclear weapons but they didnt have the similar kind of memorandum. Russia of course violated the Budapest memorandum, but because we were signatories, I feel that the United States, along with the United Kingdom, have an extra responsibility to try to press for restoration of the Ukraines sovereignty and territorial integrity. Again, its not a treaty, it didnt go with an article 5 of security like you would find in NATO membership, but it had enormous consequences, because you no longer have the nuclear weapon, as a result of it, and it made for a safer world, in 1994 until 2014 when your world has become much more complicated and less safe, because of the Russia invasion. So, I think for us, we have an extra obligation to apply pressure on Moscow to get out of Ukraine. And as I say, it is not a complicated story Russia needs to leave Ukraine alone. And let Ukraine to choose its own orientation. As provided under the charter in Paris. Which provides for countries to choose their own orientation. If we are talking about the practical side, if there will be any type of urgent consultation of the signatory states of the Budapest memorandum, what will it give to Ukraine? Well, weve already seen support for Ukraine, coming through specific actions of the current administration and the previous administration. The current administration I think has done a right thing, what the president Obama refused to do when I noted him for this. He refused to provide leaf of military assistance to Ukraine, the Trump administration has agreed to do so. Our providing missiles, antitank weapons, are important militarily as well as symbolically. Because they show that the United States is not stepping in, to fight Ukraines battle for it, but it is providing support and the recognition that Ukraine has a right to defend itself and it needs means by which to do so. There is a talk about the possibility to provide antiship missiles as a result of the incident in the Azov Sea, anti-aircraft missiles if needed, None of this would be talked about. None of this would be on consideration if Russia left Ukraine alone. It is only being discussed and considered because of Russias invasion. I do think we have an obligation to help Ukraine defend itself. Ukraine is on the frontline, it is in the heart of Europe, it is facing the major threat from its East and helping Ukraine means we are also helping ourselves. You were the President of Freedom House from October 2010 to November 2014. Speaking about freedom of speech and media in Ukraine, maybe youve heard of it in October - Ukraines Verkhovna Rada recommended the National Security and Defense Council to impose sanctions against companies included in the holdings of the 112 Ukraine and NewsOne TV channels, to cut a long story short it leads to closing of the channels. After it, the channel turned for help to international organizations and European parliamentarians, and there was an official statement from Federika Mogherini that EU will be monitoring the situation of freedom of expression and media in Ukraine. What is a balance of media pluralism? We provide a place where different politicians gather and their thought may not be agreed by other people Diversity is important when it comes to the role of the media. The media in any democratic societies play a critical role and act as a checking balance against the government. The media has a responsibility to report the truth, to report information that citizens need to know. They also can provide analysis and opinion. if you look at other countries including my own country you would see the wide spectrum of media outlets - some that lean to the right, some that lean to the left, someone that support the current administration, that are critical of current administration, the key is I think to let viewers/readers decided what they want to watch, I would distinguish between local domestic media outlets and things like RT, Sputnik. Its a different thing Absolutely Those are not media organizationsthey are not journalists who work there. These are propaganda machines. Precisely. They are propaganda machines. And people who work for them are propaganda, they are not journalists. I actually dont have a problem banning people who work for RT, Sputnik or things like this. Or channel 1 in Moscow. They are with Russia, not by your choice, by theirs. And number 2 they are not coming here to try to report the news on the objective basis. They are here to try to make additional problems for you. I think, its important to distinguish between the role the outside players play and the role of domestic entities and there are maybe a wide spectrum of they use it wrong as a result. You are an expert on Ukraine/Russia, youve been here many times do you see the changes what are the top 3 victories of Ukraine during the last 3-5 years? It was very critical of the Yanukovych regime when I was in the freedom house as you indicated. We produced 2 special reports on the situation in Ukraine. Beyond the annual reports that we do about assessing freedom around the world. And the titles of them were called signing the alarm we were alarmed by the direction Ukraine was taking under Yanukovych, and I think that changing government has provided Ukraine with more orientation with the West, you have signed the agreements with the EU as the result of his departure, deep and comprehensive free trade agreement, association agreement, there is much more interaction between Ukraine and the European Union, there is much stronger agreement in place with the IMF, you have deeper tights with NATO, as a result, youve reduced energy subsidies as a result, there have been a number of reforms in banking, health care situation, well, still needs more reform. But it is much better now than its been before. But one of the challenges that you face is you have the territory that occupied from Crimea into the Donbas. So, thats the challenge that remains. Ukraine has put a brave fight to push back against Russian aggression in the east and that I think have to continue until Putin decides to respect your country sovereignty and territorial integrity. Here is indicated that nothing will happen until the elections are over. Plural. I think he means not just the presidential elections in March, but Rada elections next fall. I hope, we dont have to wait that long. Because every day people are suffering as a result of this conflict. As I said before, there were good elections in 2004, the second round was not a good election. Local elections in 2010 were not very good either. But you have had peaceful transfers of power and transitions, no one knows who is going to win the elections next March. Thats a good thing. You have come to Ukraine when it has martial law in action in some of the regions. How was it perceived in the US as a necessity or as a political step? There are two important issues, one is what triggered the preceded of martial law and that was Russian aggression in the Azov Sea. And this is very important to understand what Russia did and not get distracted by what happened with a martial law here. But the martial law was also important because it had not been declared previously, from 2014 until the present. Initially, you know that it has started as a 60-day martial law that got reduced to 30 days. It was going for the whole country then it was in 10 regions along with the border with Russia. And it took from what Ive heard this week 2 days to sign it. I only have been in Kyiv this time, I havent traveled outside. I dont see a major change as a result of martial law, that was announced. Its due to expire in about another 15-16 days, I think it has been a good test for the country, the fact that the Rada made clear that it will not lead to a postponing of the election campaign, that was I think a very important thing. To me, the best way for Ukraine to show the Russian interference whether its from hybrid attacks, from disinformation, from military activity, or other kinds of efforts, will not distract Ukraine from conducting election. Ukraine will stay on the democratic path, there will be the election that will take place that will term in the next president. And I think its the best answer of Ukraine to Putins efforts to interfere with this country. Because you will then be able to show no matter what you do we are determined to stay on the democratic path to integrate with Europe. And hopefully soon get Russian troops out of your country. Thank you for the interview. The son of Ukrainian Border Guard officer was detained in Russia in August 2017; as of now, his detention period expires in April 2019 The European Court for Human Rights urged Russia to provide information about the health conditions of Pavlo Gryb, the Ukrainian political prisoner. Yevheniya Zakrevska, the lawyer posted that on Facebook. She admitted that previously, Ukraine filed the appeal to provide urgent measures for the necessary medical assistance to Pavlo Gryb. 'The Court demanded that Russia provide the medical documents regarding the actual health conditions of the appellant regarding the treatment that the doctors assigned during his stay in detention', she said. The court extended the detention period until April 24, 2019. As is known, the son of Ukrainian Border Guard officer was detained in Russia in August 2017. The 19-year-old came to Gomel (Belarus) to meet his girlfriend and ended up in the Russian captivity, detained by the Russian special agents. He was taken to Russia and charged with preparing terrorist acts in Sochi. The Ukrainian pleads innocent. The fact that the Ukrainian and Russian presidents do not have dialogue is nothing good primarily for Ukraine which has to release the Ukrainian sailors taken captive during the conflict near Kerch Strait, as a political expert Vasyl Vakarov said on air of 112 Ukraine. There might be sanctions, and probably, they will be imposed. Their master Volker announced and many other experts talk about a possible tightening of anti-Russian sanctions. I think this is what will happen. But what do we have from that? As a Ukrainian, I ask myself how anti-Russian sanctions benefit Ukraine? And moreover, this is a conflict, obviously, Russias actions should be condemned. Yet, this led to the fact that Ukraines President Poroshenko stopped talking to the Russian President Vladimir Putin. The fact that they do not talk too much is nothing good for the countries, and for Ukraine primarily, Vakarev said. Besides, he offers the President of Ukraine to meet with Putin in Moscow and solve all the issues including the one concerning the release of our sailors. On November 25, the coast guard ships of the Russian Navy acted aggressively against the ships of the Ukrainian Navy, which have been carrying out a scheduled transition from Odesa port to Mariupol port in the Sea of Azov. Related: Medvedchuk - only channel of information delivery to Putin, - Ukraine's President 21 Ukrainian sailors have been delivered to Lefortovo remand center in Moscow, three others are in the hospital of Matrosskaya Tishina prison. On December 3, the Russian prosecutors officially accused Ukrainian sailors with the 'illegal crossing of the state border'during the Kerch Strait incident. Related video: TORONTO, Dec. 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Black Iron Inc. (Black Iron or the Company) (TSX: BKI; OTC: BKIRF; FRANKFURT: BIN) continues to advance the Shymanivske Iron Ore Project (Shymanivske or the Project) towards construction. In the second half of this year, the Company hosted a few multibillion-dollar companies at site as part of their due diligence to fund a portion of Project construction in exchange for purchase of the ultra high grade 68% iron content pellet feed iron concentrate expected to be produced. Additionally, several meetings with Ukraine government officials have been held since receiving a proposal from Ukraines Ministry of Defence to secure the surface rights for a plot of land adjacent to Black Irons Shymanivske Project for location of the processing plant, tailings and waste rock. CONSTRUCTION FUNDING AND OFF-TAKE AGREEMENTS ADVANCING During the summer and fall, interested steel mills and global commodity trading houses visited the Shymanivske Project site as part of their due diligence for investment in Project construction in exchange for long term purchase of Black Irons pellet feed. Discussion with these groups remains ongoing and Black Iron management anticipates being able to announce its first commercial arrangement early in the new year. Interest from these groups is largely driven by the close proximity of the Project to rail, power, ports and people leading to a scalable project with the second lowest capital intensity and lowest normalized operating costs in the world for an undeveloped pellet feed project according to the CRU Group as press released by the Company on May 2, 2018. Debt finance discussions with international finance institutions and European based banks, several of which are actively lending to producing iron ore companies in Ukraine, are ongoing. Debt lenders are mainly focused on a companys ability to repay their loan in a downside pricing environment. Since Black Iron is expected to generate substantial free cash flow in a range of downside price scenarios coupled with relatively low amount of debt expected to be required to produce 4MTpa initially, it is an attractive project for lenders. LAND ACQUISITION ADVANCING As reported by the Company on September 4, 2018, Black Iron received a proposal from Ukraines Ministry of Defence (MOD) to transfer a parcel of land required by the Company for location of its processing plant, waste rock and tailings. Several meetings with high ranking Ukraine government officials including the MOD remain ongoing to finalize the specific parcel of land that is mutually agreeable for transfer. An offer to lease a portion of the surface rights over which the Shymanivske ore body is located has also been made by the Kryviy Rih City Council who own this land. The signing of a lease is pending Black Iron (i) finalizing discussions with Ukraines central government on the MOD parcel of land, and (ii) Black Iron finalizing an agreement with a neighbouring mine, Central Ore Processing (YuGOK), on the previously agreed relocation of their mine service garage. SENIOR MANAGEMENT CHANGES Black Iron has recently engaged Ivan Markovich in the capacity of Vice President, Government and Community relations given his extensive network of relationships with very senior Ukraine government officials. As part of bringing on Ivan, Black Irons President Michael Spektor has agreed to resign his position given the overlap in the mandate for this role. Black Irons management and board of directors thank Mr. Spektor for his contributions and wish him well in his future endeavours. IRON ORE PRICES CONTINUE TO STRENGHTEN ALREADY IMPRESSIVE PROJECT ECONOMICS Since publishing the re-scoped Preliminary Economic Assessment (PEA), the benchmark 62% iron content fines price remains above the US$62 per tonne (/T) used in the PEA and is currently at US$69/T. Similarly, iron grade content premiums remain high with several credible sources reinforcing the structural shift in the market towards higher grade iron ores given they reduce the amount of emissions generated per tonne of steel produced. As can be seen in the picture below taken only a few weeks ago in Beijing, China by Black Irons CEO Matt Simpson, it is very clear that the Chinese government needs to continue with its regulation changes to curb emissions from steel mills particularly during the winter when there is thick smog in the air mainly due to building heat being primarily produced through the burning of thermal coal. Very recently, Vale changed its price basis for pellets from the 62% iron content benchmark to a newer 65% iron content index that the Singapore Exchange (SGX) is now offering futures contracts on. This is good news for Black Iron as it further supports the shift globally to higher grade iron feed products and value of its expected ultra-premium 68% iron content product. About Black Iron Black Iron is an iron ore exploration and development company, advancing its 100% owned Shymanivske project located in Kryviy Rih, Ukraine. The Shymanivske project contains a NI 43-101 compliant resource estimated to be 646 Mt Measured and Indicated mineral resources, consisting of 355 Mt Measured mineral resources grading 31.6% total iron and 18.8% magnetic iron, and Indicated mineral resources of 290 Mt grading 31.1% total iron and 17.9% magnetic iron, using a cut-off grade of 10% magnetic iron. Additionally, the Shymanivske project contains 188 Mt of Inferred mineral resources grading 30.1% total iron and 18.4% magnetic iron. Full mineral resource details can be found in the NI 43-101 compliant technical report entitled Preliminary Economic Assessment of the Re-scoped Shymanivske Iron Ore Deposit effective November 21, 2017 under the Company's profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. The Shymanivske project is surrounded by five other operating mines, including ArcelorMittal's iron ore complex. Please visit the Company's website at www.blackiron.com for more information. The technical and scientific contents of this press release have been prepared under the supervision of and have been reviewed and approved by Matt Simpson, P.Eng., CEO of Black Iron, who is a Qualified Person as defined by NI 43-101. For more information, please contact: Matt Simpson Chief Executive Officer Tel: +1 (416) 309-2138 info@blackiron.com Forward-Looking Information This press release contains forward-looking information. Forward-looking information is based on what management believes to be reasonable assumptions, opinions and estimates of the date such statements are made based on information available to them at that time, including those factors discussed in the section entitled Risk Factors in the Companys annual information form for the year ended December 31, 2017 or as may be identified in the Companys public disclosure from time to time, as filed under the Companys profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. Forward-looking information may include, but is not limited to, statements with respect to the Project, the mineralization of the Project, the results of the PEA, the realization of the PEA, the expectations of future cash flows, the expected economics forecast, the geo-political climate in Ukraine, the impact of changes to the Companys management team, the Companys ability to raise the requisite financing, the Companys ability to obtain the requisite land rights for the Project and other requisite permits or approvals, and future plans for the Companys development. Generally, forward looking information can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "plans", "expects" or "does not expect", "is expected", "budget", "scheduled", "estimates", "forecasts", "intends", "anticipates" or "does not anticipate", or "believes", or variations of such words and phrases or state that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will be taken", "occur" or "be achieved". Forward-looking information is 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 information, including but not limited to: general business, economic, competitive, geopolitical and social uncertainties; the actual results of current exploration activities; other risks of the mining industry and the risks described in the annual information form of the Company. Although the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in forward-looking information, there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. There can be no assurance that such information will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward looking information. The Company does not undertake to update any forward-looking information, except in accordance with applicable securities laws. A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/9586e98c-1ef6-4e13-8c5f-21ca06cf8d7d Open source Law #2449-VII on the diplomatic service has come into force in Ukraine as it was published in the official parliamentary newspaper Holos Ukrainy six months ago. The law introduces categories of diplomatic posts. A category is a Foreign Minister, Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Ambassador, Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Ambassador of Ukraine with a residence in Kyiv, a Permanent Representative of Ukraine to an international organization, Ukraines Representative to an international organization, Chief of Ukraines Mission at an international organization. B category is wider Consul-General, Deputy Permanent Representative, Deputy Representative to an international organization, Deputy Head of Ukraines Mission at an international organization, Foreign Ministry Representative on the territory of Ukraine, the Heads of Foreign Ministry departments and their deputies. All other diplomatic posts are comprised in a C category. The president appoints extraordinary and authorized ambassador of Ukraine, authorized ambassador of Ukraine with the residence in Kyiv, permanent representative of Ukraine, representative of Ukraine at the international organization, head of Ukraines mission to the international organization. The leader of the state also possesses a right to dismiss from these posts. Earlier the Foreign Ministry had to consult with the parliamentary committee on foreign affairs to appoint people on these posts; however, the parliament adopted the law as amended without such norm. The Speaker of parliament Andry Paruby promised that the president will sign the law and oblige the ministry to consult with the committee again. The president ordered by the law #168/2018 dated June 15, 2018, that the candidates for the mentioned posts should be provided to the committee. The order of such submission should be confirmed by the ministry and committee. This law has also come into force today. One of the reasons for the early recall of the workers of the diplomatic service is the actions of the worker or his/her family, which can lead to the negative consequences, including for the image of Ukraine abroad. The term of the work of the citizens of Ukraine at the secretariats and bodies of the international organization, where Ukraine has the membership, and at the jurisdictional bodies is count as the experience in the diplomatic service. The Cabinet of Minister will define the salaries of the diplomatic workers considering the special demands to the professional competency. The state should pay only the moving, first aid, visit to Ukraine for vacation once a year, provision of the medical service, insurance, which will provide emergency, initial and specialized medical service for the diplomatic workers in the case of the long-term travel status. Besides, the state bears the costs for the education of the children of the diplomatic worker at the kindergarten and school. Ukraine plans to provide the workers with the payment for accommodation and public services. President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko signed a law on diplomatic service on June 15, 2018. Earlier the president vetoed the law. The political prisoner will be provided with a medical aid if necessary Open source Chairman of Council of Russian President on Development of Civilian Society and Human Rights Mikhail Fedotov addressed the competent authorities with a request to check the information on the deterioration of the health condition of Ukrainian political prisoner Stanislav Klykh, according to the message of Ukrainian ombudsman Lyudmyla Denisova on Facebook. According to the ombudsman, Fedotov shared this information with her in response to the relevant request regarding the political prisoner's state of health. The Council of Russian President on Development of Civilian Society and Human Rights sent an appeal to the competent authorities of the Russian Federation with a request to verify the information you provided and, if necessary, to take measures to ensure the rights of the Ukrainian citizen, reads the message sent to Denisova. Stanislav Klykh was detained in Russia in September 2014, when he came to Russia to visit his pregnant girlfriend. The Russian jury said Klykh and another Ukrainian political activist, Mykola Karpyuk both allegedly joined the Viking unit, which fought on the side of Chechen nationalists as they sought independence from Russia in the 1990s. The jury accused Karpyuk and Klykh of killing and wounding dozens of Russian servicemen. Klykh was sentenced to 20 years in prison. A Skype conference of the safety subgroup to be held on December 27 to discuss the situation Ukraine and OSCE offer to introduce a silence regime for the period of holidays in Donbas after the martial law ends. Representative of Ukraine at Trilateral Contact Group Iryna Gerashchenko claimed this on Facebook. OSCE and Ukraine proposed to establish a permanent regime of silence in Donbas after the end of the martial law and the beginning of the New Year and Christmas holidays if there is no provocations and acts of aggression from the Russian side, Gerashchenko claimed. According to her, on December 17, there will be a Skype conference of the safety subgroup, where they to discuss the situation. It will be the 18th attempt to establish a ceasefire in Donbas if we succeeded to reach agreements after the negotiations. As we reported earlier, the coast guard ships of the Russian Navy acted aggressively against the ships of the Ukrainian Navy, which have been carrying out a scheduled transition from Odesa port to Mariupol port in the Sea of Azov. Given the tough situation in the area of Kerch Strait in the Sea of Azov, President Petro Poroshenko supported the offer of Ukraine's national security and defense council; it stipulates that the Ukrainian Parliament should consider the option to impose the martial law in Ukraine. On November 28, the Uriadovy Kurier, the official outlet of the Ukrainian Cabinet, published the presidential decree No.392, which activates the decision of the National Security and Defense Council in Ukraine about the 30-days-long martial law in Ukraine. The Representative of Ukraine at the Trilateral Contact Group allows for the possibility of moving the negotiations venue to Astana Premier Vice-Speaker of the Ukrainian Parliament, Representative of Ukraine at Humanitarian Subgroup of Trilateral Contact Group Iryna Gerashchenko deems it appropriate to move the talks venue from Minsk to Astana. Gerashchenko claimed this on her Facebook page after the last session of the Trilateral Contact Group in Minsk. Regular voting of Belarus at the UN General Assembly in unison with the Russian Federation on resolutions relating to the issues of Crimea, Donbas, human rights in the occupied territories, is contrary to the stated position of Minsk neutrality. It is more like a pro-Russian position. This is exceptionally my opinion but, probably, peace talks should be moved to a truly neutral country, Gerashchenko claimed. She noted that in this context, Kazakhstans vote for the resolution on the demilitarization of the Azov and Black Seas is significant and important for her. For the first time, Kazakhstan refrained, and this is a real neutral position. Maybe we should really move the negotiations venue to Astana? the Representative of Ukraine at the Trilateral Contact Group claimed. In addition, she noted that the last meeting of the Trilateral Contact Group this year was unsuccessful due to the destructive position of the Russian Federation and the militants. Over 300 local Hungarians signed in over the first 48 hours after the respective announce was made Open source The Hungarian government will open the free Ukrainian language courses for the ethnic Hungarians living in Zakarpattya. The classes are supposed to begin in early 2019, Yevropeiska Pravda reported. Istvan Greza, the Ministerial Envoy for Transborder Regional Cooperation reported that the initiative aims to reduce the Ukrainian-Hungarian tensions. Over 300 local Hungarians signed in over the first 48 hours after the respective announce was made. 'The sign-in for the courses began last week. The classes are to begin in January. The number of vacant places for the Ukrainian language courses is unlimited. We will teach everyone who wishes to learn', the government envoy said. The classes will be held on the facility of the Transcarpathian Hungarian Institute of Ferenc Rakocsi II that is funded by the Hungarian side; the Institute offers teaching methods and study materials. According to Summa 2017 center's research, over 130,000 Hungarians reside in Zakarpattya region, western Ukraine. When the Ukrainian Parliament passed the Law on Education in autumn 2017, the Hungarian government heavily protested, as the law stipulates that after the primary school, the children will be only taught in the Ukrainian language - without the opportunity to be taught in the language of any national minority. Budapest considered the law an assault on the rights of the national minorities in Ukraine. However, the Venice Commission supported Ukraine in this regard, finding that the law allowed no violations in this area. After long-lasting negotiations, Hungarian foreign minister Peter Szijarto said there was tangible progress and said his government would not turn its back on the actual edition of the law. Kremlin accuses Ukraine of the preparation of the provocation in the last decade of December Open source The Russian mass media has begun to spread the fake information that Ukraine allegedly prepares the chemical attack at the occupied territories of Donbas as Deputy Information Policy Minister Dmytro Zolotukhin reported on Telegram. Already yesterday and today, with the reference to Denis Pushilin, the fake is spread that the foreign intelligence services, along with the Armed Forces of Ukraine, prepare the operations similar to Syrian case of "White Helmets". It means that the attack with the use of the chemical substances will be supposedly committed and the video of the affected by poison gases will be fabricated to accuse pro-Russian terrorists in it, he reported. According to him, recently the Russian side has deployed another disinformation operation, which can result in the large-scale provocation of Kremlin appointed by Russias Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov for the last decade of December. To figure out new series of Kremlinwood, we need to remind the content of the previous episodes. When the Syrian government supported by Putin was accused of the use of the chemical weapons against the civilians in East Ghouta city; Kremlin invented the alibi for itself and hid behind it from the demands of the international society to prosecute the responsible, Zolotukhin reminded. Then the Russian mass media began to spread fake that the volunteers of White Helmets organization, who provided the aid to the civilians were used by the western special service for the holding of the provocation; they committed the chemical attack and made the video for the accusation of Russia. On December 7, 2018, the side of the so-called Donetsk Peoples Republic spread fake that the Armed Forces of Ukraine prepare for the offensive in the area of Mariupol and carry out some manipulation with the chemical substances. Later the Russian online mass media of marginal nature (Russian spring, News Front) started to post the publications about the case of White Helmets without regard of Ukraine. The aim was to refresh memories about fake for their readers, Zolotukhin said. He appealed to the soldiers, journalists and community with a request to treat the spread information carefully and not to relax due to the possible stop of martial law. As we reported around 150 people were gas poisoned and died. The gas was spread in Douma, the last city in the East Ghouta, which is under the rebels control on April 7, 2018. The White Helmets, a voluntary rescue service, punished the pictures of the dead. The representatives of the service stated that more than 1000 people were injured as a result of the chemical attack and 150 deaths are confirmed. The fight for freedom of speech in Ukraine is underway. This is what 112 Ukraine TV channel General Producer Artem Marchevsky said on air of Pulse political talk show. According to him, the petition in support of 112 Ukraine and NewsOne posted on the Presidents website have received 27,000 votes. Yet, the authorities did not react to this The General Producer of 112 Ukraine TV channel stressed that the struggle for the freedom of speech in Ukraine is being conducted on two fronts in the European Parliament and in the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine. The style and the ways of this struggle are quite different. The number of the deputies in the EP who support the draft resolution on freedom of speech in Ukraine is constantly increasing. Three weeks passed since the petition in support of 112 Ukraine and NewsOne got over 27,000 votes, while the counter on the Presidents Administration website shows 24,000. Now the leadership of the TV channels sent an official request on this question. Simultaneously, the European Parliament is considering the draft resolution on prevention of suppression of freedom of speech in Ukraine. 43 European parliamentarians signed this document, soon, the draft will be presented for discussion in the EP, Artem Marchevsky said. At the same time, Ukraines peoples deputies from ruling political parties do not stop trying to shut down leading informational TV channels of Ukraine. For instance, recently, the representatives of Peoples Front in the Verkhovna Rada reacted to the accusatory material about their leader Maksym Burbaka. I would like to thank the peoples deputies from Peoples Front, who stated that the TV channel should be closed. They said it after a journalist investigation conducted by 112 Ukraine against the leader of the mentioned party Maksym Burbaka. In this regard I would like to say that the program of the journalist investigation has already been translated into English and soon, the European parliamentarians will watch it. Such actions of the political party help us in the voting for the future resolution. Besides, Burbak made several statements concerning our TV channels from the Verkhovna Rada rostrum. We have heard these statement and we are preparing a lawsuit, the General Producer of 112 Ukraine said. 112 Ukraine is an informational and analytical TV channel which broadcasts 18,5 hours per day on air and uses modern technologies to be the first channel to provide the unbiased information on important and interesting events going on in Ukraine and in the world. This is mentioned in the respective statement by Artem Marchevskyi, the Chief Producer, and Yehor Benkendorf, Director General of 112 Ukraine. Before the meeting, it was reported that Ukraine was going to propose a formula - "23 for 23" and "66 for 19" No progress has been made in the question of the release of the hostages and political prisoners at the Trilateral Contact Group meeting in Minsk, as Iryna Gerashchenko, Ukraines representative to the humanitarian subgroup of the Trilateral Contact Group, wrote on Facebook. Unfortunately, no progress has been made regarding the release of the hostages and political prisoners, as all of our compromise offers were rejected. During the talks, it was clear that Russia was not ready to any positive steps and compromise. The search of the missing is also blocked, Gerashchenko wrote. Earlier, Yevgen Marchuk, Ukraines representative to the Trilateral Contact Group, stated that Ukraine intended to propose an exchange formula "23 for 23" and "66 for 19". As it was reported, earlier, Russia rejected Ukraines initiative to carry out prisoners exchange on the eve of winter holidays. Related video: The regulator accuses oligarch of evading from the fulfillment of the commitments of the guarantor in the number of the credits of the refinancing of the bank The National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) has filed the lawsuit against ex-shareholder of PrivatBank Ihor Kolomoyskyi to the Court of Republic and Canton Geneva. The total sum of the lawsuit is $239.8 million as the NBU press service reported. The lawsuit is filed at the place of residence of the ex-shareholder of the bank to recover the debt from Ihor Kolomoyskyi as financial guarantor in from the National Bank on personal guarantees provided in 2016, according to five agreements on the provision of the credits on the refinancing of the bank. In accordance with the demands of the Swiss legislation, the filing of the lawsuit is another stage of the judicial proceedings started in June at the First Instance of the Court of Republic and Canton Geneva, the message said. Head of the Complaint and Limitation Department of Judicial Department of the National Bank Viktor Grygorchuk explained that according to the Swiss system, it is necessary to file the judicial claim before the filing of the lawsuit. The NBU has begun with it in the beginning of June. As all attempts of the National Bank to regulate the issue of the debt servicing by Ihor Kolomoyskyi on the credits of the refinancing in the prejudicial procedure were not successful, the regulator, unfortunately, is forced to file the lawsuit in the term established by the Swiss legislation system to protect its rights and interests, Grygorchuk said. For the provision of the existing commitments fulfillment by Ihor Kolomoyskyi, the NBU has also filed 147 lawsuits against him and 32 companies, which stood as the property guarantors to the Ukrainian court. As for December 18, the court made 20 decisions in the benefit of the NBU in the total sum of $43.3 million. 17 of them have already come into force, the enforcement documents on 14 cases were passed to the bodies of the State Executive Service for the forcible implementation. The National Bank is ready to protect its legal rights and interests, particularly, in the prejudicial procedures against Ihor Kolomoyskyi both in Ukraine and other jurisdictions to hold him responsible for commitmens taken by him on the agreements of the guarantee. These lawsuits are one more important step on the way of the defense of the Ukrainian interests and provision of the fulfillment of the taken commitments by ex-shareholders of PrivatBank, Grygorchuk emphasized. The United States Congress will hear information in January 2019 about the allocation of $125 million, the first half of military assistance to Ukraine for the next year. U.S. Special Representative for Ukraine Kurt Volker said that at a meeting with Verkhovna Rada Chairman Andriy Parubiy in Kyiv on December 19, Interfax Ukraine reports. "The U.S. Special Representative for Ukraine Kurt Volker said that in January 2019 the United States Congress will hear information about allocating the next $125 million in military assistance to Ukraine, one half of its military assistance for the next year," reads the statement published on the website of the Ukrainian parliament following the meeting . Volker said the United States wish to support Ukraine in its intention to strengthen its air defense as well as the defenses of the seashore area and waters of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. "[The U.S. Special Representative for Ukraine] said the adoption of the law on sale of military equipment will give a signal not only for tax payers in the United States but also for European countries," the statement reads. As we reported earlier, Kurt Volker, the U.S. Department of the State's Special Envoy for Ukraine's Affairs met with Ukraine's Defense Minister Stepan Poltorak. The Ukrainian minister told Volker that as of December 18, most of the necessary measures were taken as foreseen by the martial law. Poltorak also thanked the U.S. for the 'solid stance' in terms of support of Ukraine. Volker stressed that the Russian aggression in Ukraine was unacceptable, as the Twitter of the U.S. Embassy quoted him. TORONTO, Dec. 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Effective immediately Bougainville Ventures Inc. will be reinstated for trading. The Company has rectified the default situation that gave rise to the suspension. __________________________ En vigueur immediatement, Bougainville Ventures Inc. sera retabli pour le commerce. La Societe a rectifie la situation par defaut qui a donne lieu a la suspension. Effective Date/Date Effective: le 18 decembre/December 2018 Symbol/symbole: BOG If you have any questions or require further information please contact Listings at (416) 367-7340 or E-mail: Listings@thecse.com LOS ANGELES, Dec. 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Levine Leichtman Capital Partners (LLCP), a Los Angeles-based private equity firm, announced that it has partnered with management to acquire Legal Education Holdings, Inc. (West Academic or the Company). West Academic is the leading provider of legal education content in the United States, offering a wide variety of digital and printed casebooks, supplements, study aids and discretionary products used in law schools, undergraduate law classes and commercial settings. With roots dating back nearly 150 years, the Companys library now consists of over 1,600 titles authored by 1,900 of the most influential voices in the legal world. West Academic is headquartered in St. Paul, MN. The investment in West Academic will be the fifth from LLCP Lower Middle Market Fund, L.P. According to Mike Weinberg, Partner at LLCP, We are excited to partner with Chris Parton and the rest of the management team, who have successfully led West Academic over many years. We look forward to working with Chris and his team as they continue to develop their esteemed author base to deliver best-in-class content to the next generation of legal professionals. Parton, who leads the Companys management team, commented, My team and I are delighted to partner with LLCP as West Academic seeks to enhance its market-leading position. LLCPs resources and its global network will be critical to our continued development and I look forward to leveraging this experience. LLCP was advised by Honigman Miller Schwartz and Cohn LLP. Stifel, Nicolaus & Company, Inc. served as financial advisor to West Academic. For more information, visit http://www.llcp.com . About Levine Leichtman Capital Partners LLCP is a Los Angeles, California based private investment firm that has managed approximately $10.0 billion of institutional capital since its inception. LLCP invests in middle market companies located in the United States and Europe. LLCP is currently making new investments through Levine Leichtman Capital Partners VI, L.P., LLCP Lower Middle Market Fund, L.P., Levine Leichtman Capital Partners Europe, L.P. and Levine Leichtman Strategic Capital, LLC. LLCP has offices in Los Angeles, New York, Dallas, Chicago, Charlotte, London, Stockholm and The Hague. Contact: David Wolmer 310-275-5335 SAN RAMON, Calif., Dec. 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Armanino LLP, one of the top 25 largest accounting and business consulting firms in the U.S., today announced Dallas-based Fred J. Bastie & Associates will join with the firm. The deal is effective Jan. 1, 2019. Fred and his team are well respected in the Dallas community, and we are very excited for them to be joining with Armanino, said Perry Kaufman, Partner-in-Charge, Texas for Armanino LLP. Their expertise in individual, estate and gift, and real estate taxation are a great addition. The deal will provide Fred J. Bastie & Associates individual clients with broader and deeper expertise in tax consulting, international tax, wealth transfer strategies, business management and family office services. And for business owners or corporate clients, it provides a set of solutions such as outsourced finance and accounting, expertise in M&A advisory, audit capabilities, technology consulting and business strategy. By joining together we can continue to provide our clients with a high level of personalized service while adding all the resources Armanino has to offer, said Fred J. Bastie, founder of Fred J. Bastie & Associates. Armanino is a great fit for us, and I look forward to continuing to provide exceptional tax planning and consulting to all our clients. Armaninos aggressive growth is anchored in its pursuit of expanded service lines, technology solutions and specialized expertise. The firm has been listed on Inside Public Accountings Best of the Best Managed Firms list for 15 out of the last 16 years. It is regularly featured in best places to work lists and was named Best of Accounting in Client Satisfaction in 2018 with a Net Promoter Score that is nearly double the average for the accounting industry. Bastie will join Armanino as a partner in the Tax practice. This transaction is scheduled to close on January 1, 2019, subject to customary closing conditions. About Armanino LLP Armanino LLP ( https://www.armaninollp.com/ ) is one of the top 25 largest independent accounting and business consulting firms in the nation. Armanino provides an integrated set of audit, tax, business management, consulting and technology solutions to companies in the U.S. and globally. The firm helps clients adapt and change in every stage of business, from startup through rapid growth to the sale of a company. Armanino emphasizes smart technology, leading a cloud revolution of financial, operational, sales and compliance tools that are transforming the way companies do business. The firm extends its global services to more than 100 countries through its membership in Moore Stephens International Limited, one of the world's major accounting and consulting membership organizations. In addition to its core consulting and accounting practices, Armanino operates its division, AMF Media Group ( www.amfmediagroup.com ), a media and communications services agency. Its affiliate, Intersect Capital ( www.intersectcapitalllc.com ), is an independent financial planning, wealth and lifestyle management firm. Kyle McGuire, AMF Media Group 925.790.2788 kyle@amfmediagroup.com Dublin, Dec. 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "Global Fruit-flavored Soft Drinks Market 2019-2023" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. The fruit-flavored soft drinks market will register a CAGR of close to 5% by 2023. The increasing prominence of private label brands is likely to push growth in the market. Private label brand product manufactured and sold by retailers. Major retailers such as Walmart and Aldi are offering fruit-flavored soft drinks under their private label brands. Continuously increasing innovations in the products The increasing need for cheap flights and the growing air traffic will result in a rise in demand for low-cost carriers. Moreover, the growing international tourism and domestic travel will also drive the demand for low-cost carriers in the coming years. Major low-cost carriers such as Indigo and SpiceJet have already announced plans to expand their aircraft fleet. Availability of counterfeit products The soft drink industry is under constant threat from booming counterfeit products. Counterfeit or fake products are harmful to consumer, leading to huge monetary losses to major players. They also hamper the image of the brands. Key Players Keurig Dr Pepper Monster Energy Company PepsiCo Red Bull The Coca-Cola Company Topics Covered PART 01: EXECUTIVE SUMMARY PART 02: SCOPE OF THE REPORT PART 03: MARKET LANDSCAPE PART 04: MARKET SIZING PART 05: FIVE FORCES ANALYSIS PART 06: MARKET SEGMENTATION BY PRODUCT Market segmentation by product Comparison by product Fruit-flavored carbonated soft drinks - Market size and forecast 2018-2023 Fruit-flavored non-carbonated soft drinks - Market size and forecast 2018-2023 Market opportunity by product PART 07: CUSTOMER LANDSCAPE PART 08: GEOGRAPHIC LANDSCAPE Geographic segmentation Geographic comparison Americas - Market size and forecast 2018-2023 EMEA - Market size and forecast 2018-2023 APAC - Market size and forecast 2018-2023 Key leading countries Market opportunity PART 09: DRIVERS AND CHALLENGES PART 10: VENDOR LANDSCAPE Overview Landscape disruption PART 11: VENDOR ANALYSIS Vendors covered Vendor classification Market positioning of vendors Keurig Dr Pepper Monster Energy Company PepsiCo Red Bull The Coca-Cola Company For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/5n6g62/fruitflavored?w=12 Research and Markets also offers Custom Research services providing focused, comprehensive and tailored research. guest column Addis Ababa As we celebrate the lowest levels of extreme poverty in history, Africa must make sure that our people are not left behind. Latest estimates by World Data Lab show that the world will enter the new year with an extreme poverty level of eight per cent. But single-digit numbers around the world hide underlying differences, especially for African countries. Six hundred million people globally will start 2019 living in extreme poverty, and only 20 million will escape that situation by the end of the year. Africa still has much of its population living in poverty or vulnerable. Projections from the Africa Poverty Clock unveiled by the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) estimate that, in 2019, 70 per cent of the world's poor will live in Africa, up from 50 per cent in 2015. The African Poverty Clockwill be a tool to track and to communicate progress on a range of indicators that reflect how well the continent is doing and where more intense efforts are most needed. By 2023, the share of Africa's poor will increase to over 80 per cent of global share. In other words, Africa will be adding more poor people to the world. The African Poverty Clock provides real-time poverty estimates for every country on the continent, with forecasts until 2030. Current projections indicate that almost all of Africa is off track for ending extreme poverty by 2030. Thirteen countries are projected to see an increase in absolute numbers. Seven out of the top ten countries in the world with the most poor people are in Africa. This is expected to rise to nine out of ten by 2030. Why is Africa Lagging? Four main factors drive Africa's diverging progress with the rest of the world. The poor in Africa start further below the poverty line than those in other global regions. So even if incomes rise, it is rarely enough to push a significant proportion out of poverty. Africa's poverty gap index, which is a measure of the intensity or depth of poverty, is nearly double the global average at 15.2 per cent in 2013. The global average is 8.8 per cent. The average consumption of the poor across the east, southern, west and central regions of Africa is $1.16 a day, which is $0.74 below the international poverty line, thus posing a challenge to achieving the SDGs target of eliminating poverty by 2030. To achieve development goals and escape extreme poverty, Africa has to climb further, faster. Poverty reduction is further affected by inequality within countries. Africa's inequality landscape is characterised by high average inequality, extreme inequality as in South Africa, Namibia and Botswana - and substantial variations in 'within-country' trends. Across many countries in Africa, the richest 20 per cent controls up to 60 per cent of the wealth. When inequality levels are high, economic growth delivers less impact for poverty. As a consequence, economic growth has not been inclusive. Jobs and skills should match growth sectors The mismatch between sectors of economic growth and employment opportunities remains a challenge. Africa's working poor are predominantly found in the informal sector, characterised by low productivity and low incomes. Agriculture continues to be an important contributor to economic growth and the transition to industry remains slow. In Burundi, Burkina Faso, and Madagascar, more than 80 percent of the labour force works in agriculture. Africa's manufacturing sector employed only nine per cent of women and 16 per cent of men on average over the decade. And despite the increase in employment within the services sector, the reality is that people are moving from low productivity agriculture to similar low productivity urban informal activities. Thus, there is little overall growth in incomes. One reason the economic growth of the last 20 years has meant limited poverty reduction is rapid population growth. When a 2.6 per cent population growth rate, on average, is accounted for, annual per capita growth in the last quarter century comes in at just 1.1 per cent, which is insufficient to reduce poverty quickly. A declining population growth rate presents unique opportunities However, it is important to note that the rate of population growth witnessed over the last two decades is unlikely to repeat itself in the coming decades, thus presenting unique opportunities for countries to make significant impact on poverty reduction. Close Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox Top Headlines Africa Business By submitting above, you agree to our privacy policy. Success! Almost finished... We need to confirm your email address. To complete the process, please follow the instructions in the email we just sent you. Error! Error! There was a problem processing your submission. Please try again later. A better future demands action Nonetheless, 2019 may prove a significant turning point in Africa's progress towards the elimination of extreme poverty by 2030. For the first time, in 2019, the absolute number of people living in extreme poverty in Africa will be reduced. But there is no guarantee that this pace will continue in the absence of the right public policies and actions. Sustained economic growth of the magnitude of at least 8-10 per cent is necessary for the quantum leap required for faster poverty reduction and to achieve the SDGs. Africa's focus on the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), digital economy and the scaled up push for gender inclusion bode well for inclusive growth over the next decade if governments adopt adequate fiscal and structural policies to encourage private-sector growth and improve infrastructure. Vera Songwe (@SongweVera) is Executive Secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. TORONTO, Dec. 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Route1 Inc . (OTCQB: ROIUF and TSXV: ROI) (the Company or Route1), North America's most advanced provider of industrial-grade data intelligence, user authentication and ultra-secure mobile workforce solutions, today announced that the Company filed a complaint, Court File No. T-2149-18, against VMware, Inc. (VMware) and its wholly owned subsidiary AirWatch LLC (AirWatch) in the Federal Court of Canada for infringement of Route1s Canadian Patent No. 2,578,053, seeking financial compensation for infringement, legal fees, and an injunction. The compensation the Company will be seeking are material when compared to Route1's market capitalization. Patent Litigation A patent lawsuit in Canada typically takes at least three years to resolve. Route1 anticipates that its current cash resources and future cash generated from operating performance will be sufficient to fund Route1s estimated cash costs of the litigation through trial. Compensation for infringing activity may be awarded from six years prior to the filing of the lawsuit, and may be calculated on the basis of a royalty on infringing revenues, or profits wrongfully gained from infringing revenues. VMWare/AirWatch LLC VMware, by itself and through its wholly owned subsidiary AirWatch, is a provider of Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) software and standalone management systems for content, applications and email. AirWatchs EMM solutions emphasize secure communications with its employees' mobile devices and enterprise resources. AirWatch is a wholly-owned subsidiary company of VMware, Inc., whose majority shareholder is EMC Dell. It is likely that AirWatch benefits from access to VMware's large client base and extensive distribution channels. Canadian Patent No. 2,578,053 Route1s Canadian Patent No. 2,578,053 (the 053 Patent), System And Method For Accessing Host Computer Via Remote Computer, was issued by the Canadian Intellectual Property Office on March 20, 2012, and will expire on September 6, 2025. Canadian Patent No. 2,578,053 is generally directed to using a controller to enable secure communication between a remote device, such as a smartphone or a portable computer, and a host computer. Route1 is the owner of the entire right, title and interest in the 053 Patent, including the sole and undivided right to sue for infringement. Route1s Infringement Complaint against AirWatch In the Companys Statement of Claim, Route1 contends that AirWatch, VMware, and its subsidiary VMware Canada Inc. infringe on Canadian Patent No. 2,578,053 through their sales and provision of services relating to the AirWatch EMM System, which is both offered individually and as a part of VMwares digital workspace platform, VMware Workspace ONE. About Route1 Inc. Route1, operating under the trade name GroupMobile, is North America's most advanced provider of industrial-grade data intelligence, user authentication, and ultra-secure mobile workforce solutions. The Company helps all manner of organizations, from government and military to private sector, to make intelligent use of devices and data for immediate process improvements while maintaining the highest level of cyber security. Route1 is listed on the OTCQB in the United States under the symbol ROIUF and in Canada on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol ROI. For more information, visit: www.route1.com . For More Information, Contact: Peter Chodos CEO, Route1 Inc. +1 416 814-2619 peter.chodos@groupmobile.com This news release, required by applicable Canadian laws, does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any of the securities in the United States. The securities have not been and will not be registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "U.S. Securities Act") or any state securities laws and may not be offered or sold within the United States or to U.S. Persons unless registered under the U.S. Securities Act and applicable state securities laws or an exemption from such registration is available. Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Climate change presents a US$3 trillion investment opportunity in Africa by 2030 - and the private sector will be key to green investment and development, Barbara Buchner, one of the top 20 influential women in climate change, has said. , Buchner, who is also the Executive Director for Climate Finance Program at Climate Policy Initiative (CPI) lent her voice to those of other experts at the Finance Day organized by the African Development Bank at COP24 in Katowice, Poland. A range of high-profile speakers set out the challenges and opportunities for financing adaptation and mitigation efforts across Africa over four fascinating sessions, including Innovative Financing Solutions, Drive Billions to a Sustainable Economy in Africa, Inclusive Policies, and Finance for Sustainable Energy Access. Buchner set the scene by reminding the audience that 14% of the world's' population lives in sub-Saharan Africa, yet only 3% of global climate finance flows into the continent. She shared useful insights from her work on the Global Innovation Lab for Climate Finance initiative, emphasizing that a public-private approach is key to its effectiveness. "Since launching in 2014, the Global Innovation Lab for Climate Finance has launched 35 transformative solutions, collectively mobilizing US$1 billion in mitigation and adaptation efforts around the world," she said. "But financial solutions are not enough. We need the right enabling environment to attract investment at scale. We've developed a programme with McKinsey to provide governments with legal, technical and financial support to allow this to happen." Panel speakers called for innovative approaches to attract and steer financial ows consistent towards low-carbon and climate-resilient development to achieve the NDCs that Africa has set out. Statistics have it that Africa offers the highest returns compared to most emerging market economies. For the last two decades, the continent has seen steady economic growth underpinned by commodity exports, growing market demand, and strengthened structural elements. Between 2011 and 2015, and as part of its previous Climate Change Action Plan (CCAP), the African Development Bank mobilized approximately US$12 billion of climate finance to support climate-resilient and low-carbon development in Africa. Nonetheless, Africa has not succeeded as much as other regions of the world in mobilizing the funding needed to implement climate-smart initiatives. With new Green Climate Fund (GCF) finance now available to be channeled through the Bank, African countries will have additional resources to access. David Jackson, Director of Local Development Finance at UN Capital Development Fund (UNCDF), said: "Adaptation is going to be a very expensive process; it's also a localized process. It can only be done by those responsible for land-use planning, agriculture, water management, transport etc." Jackson emphasized the need to encourage access at a local level and to set up national platforms for adaptation, which bring together national and local governments." Experts emphasized how programming adaptation efforts presents a unique challenge given the evolving nature of climate risks, associated uncertainties, and existing implementation issues. Gareth Phillips, Chief Climate Change and Green Officer at the African Development Bank, said: "Strengthening the capacities of national and subnational bodies to access, manage, and channel finance and collectively work together is critical to making adaptation happen at the speed and scale we need. At the same time, we have to do better at engaging national and sub-national stakeholders in the decision-making process. Unlocking finance is critical to achieving the African NDCs." The African Development Bank is working closely with international climate funds as well as other partners to scale up climate finance on the African continent and to strengthen institutions to directly access climate funds. In the words of Akinwumi Adesina, President of the African Development Bank: "Africa's financial actors need to work together creatively to mobilize global financial resources at a scale that can support local innovation, and that drives climate-resilient and low-carbon development on the continent. Having been short-changed by climate change, Africa must not be short-changed by climate finance." The Bank's climate spending will increase to 40% of its total new investments by 2020 compared to 26% on average from 2011 to 2014. Find here the best of the day in photos. English French TORONTO, Dec. 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The first Sunwing flight from Montreal to Mazatlan departed from Pierre Elliott Trudeau International yesterday. This flight marks the first of this seasons new weekly flight service to this popular Pacific Mexican destination, departing every Tuesday until April 16, 2019, inclusive. With the introduction of this new route, travellers in the Montreal area can now enjoy convenient flight services to 29 of the most popular sunshine destinations across the Caribbean, Mexico, Central America and Florida this winter. Sam Char, Executive Vice President for Sunwing Travel Group in Quebec, commented on the news, We are excited to be offering travellers in Montreal with even more ways to Vacation Better this winter. Known as the Pearl of the Pacific with top-rated resorts in the lively Golden Zone, neoclassical architecture in Old Mazatlan and top-rated beaches along the sparkling coast, were sure the addition of Mazatlan to our roster of destinations will be well received. During this cold weather, travellers will appreciate having a new sun destination available to them from Montreal, said Philippe Rainville, President and Chief Executive Officer of Aeroports de Montreal. Wed like to thank Sunwing for offering this new destination, which will allow Montreal travellers to enjoy the sun and beach and give them a chance to experience the rich Mexican culture and history of Mazatlan. Sunwing offers a range of resorts in Mazatlan for travellers of all ages, interests and budgets. Vacationers may choose to stay at Riu Emerald Bay , a popular resort overlooking Brujas Beach thats a short taxi ride from the shopping and nightlife of the famous Golden Zone. Another popular option in Mazatlan is El Cid Castilla Beach , offering the best of both beach relaxation and city exploration. Guests can explore downtowns famous attractions and then take in a beautiful Pacific Coast sunset from the resort beach. All Sunwing vacation packages include return flights on Sunwing Airlines where passengers can sit back and relax while on board, with award-winning inflight service, complimentary non-alcoholic beverage service and buy on board selection of light meals and snacks with choices inspired by Food Network Canada Celebrity Chef, Lynn Crawford, including the brand-new Tex Mex Grilled Chicken Wrap and famous Mac & Cheese. Passengers also benefit from a generous complimentary 23kg checked luggage allowance. For more information or to book, visit www.sunwing.ca or contact your travel agent. About Sunwing The largest integrated travel company in North America, Sunwing has more flights to the south than any other leisure carrier with convenient direct service from over 33 airports across Canada to over 45 popular sun destinations. This scale enables Sunwing to negotiate the best deals and exclusive offers at all of the top-rated resorts across the Caribbean, Mexico and Central America. Renowned for its award-winning service, Sunwing is consistently voted the top leisure airline by travel agents and is the perennial winner of the Consumer Choice Award. Customers can look forward to starting their vacation off in style with award-winning inflight service, which features a complimentary glass of sparkling wine*, tea and coffee and non-alcoholic beverage service; together with a buy on board menu of light meals and snacks (including kids choices) inspired by Food Network Canada Celebrity Chef, Lynn Crawford. Sunwing customers also benefit from the assistance of the companys own knowledgeable destination representatives, who greet them upon arrival and support them throughout their vacation journey. *Service may be unavailable on select flights For all media enquiries, please contact: Rachel Goldrick Senior Corporate Communications Manager Sunwing Vacations 1-800-387-5602 | media@sunwing.ca https://www.facebook.com/SunwingVacations https://twitter.com/SunwingVacay https://www.instagram.com/sunwingvacations https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzjZ-lcuaqBQH7Sq0u3ru7A A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/da9403f4-4ef2-4b83-ab7c-0bc15a393029 MONTREAL, Dec. 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via OTC PR WIRE -- Wuhan General Group (China), Inc. (OTC PINK: WUHN) (the "Company" and "Wuhan"), announces today that the Company is successfully gaining a strong foothold in Canada, Europe, US and Australia through Cannabis regulatory compliance, either by obtaining or having access to the needed permits to cultivate, transform and sell cannabis products in the permitted location. This will secure the proper supply chain to provide high quality cannabis products from all around the world that can be purchased at a retail store nearby as well as online. This alliance will also position Wuhan as a leader in curating the knowledge and clinical research to educate our consumers on the products provided and assist them in their purchases. "With Canada having recently legalized cannabis, and being the second country in the world and the first G7 nation to fully implement legislation to permit a nationwide marijuana market, the barriers to achieving a global market are made clearer to those who wish to build a long-term business in the Cannabis industry," observes Wuhan CEO Ramy Kamaneh. "In order to build a cannabis business in the Canadian market, a company must obtain a permit to grow and cultivate, a permit to process/transform and a permit to sell -- all of which are administered discretionarily by the city and the province in which the company wishes to operate. While Canada is not alone in doing so, this legislative barrier can only be penetrated by forming an alliance between different parties in the supply chain to maintain a profitable business in the long-term." In essence, Wuhan is pursuing the same business model that airlines utilise to provide their travelers a wider reach globally without undertaking enormous operational costs. In a world and time of decentralized partnership, the strategic move is to create profitable and sustainable relationships that will provide us, and in consequence consumers with access to valuable clinical research and quality medicinal cannabis products formulated to address health problems such as cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, melanoma, depression and so much more. Building these partnerships and establishing a worldwide alliance is the smartest path to securing a lasting profitable position in a hot market that is new at the moment. The most strategic move for us to expand globally and sustain our long-term growth would be to build partnerships through this alliance in order to break barriers to international entry. For this reason, we are currently in negotiation with multiple parties involved in the cannabis space around the globe with different licences and products that we aim to import in 2019 to Canada's market first, and extend it to other adjacent country and so forth. This is a very exciting time as we are on the verge of partnering with cultivators, processing facilities, and clinical research centers which will enable us to offer a variety of CBD products in 2019 that aren't yet available in retail or online stores. "Meanwhile, our team is making progress on the channels where customers can purchase our products. Our online store is designed and developed, ready to launch in early 2019 along with a rewards program that will drive customer loyalty and encourage sales through iOS and Android apps," says Ramy Kamaneh, CEO of Wuhan. About Wuhan General Group (China), Inc. Wuhan General Group is an alternative medicinal and botanicals company focused on the application of emerging technologies as well as the clinical research and health application of cannabidiol (CBD)-based medicine to the human and pet care industry for cancer, cardiovascular, mental disorders, chronic pain, and others in Canada, the United States, Europe, and Australia. We are committed to supplying medical grade CBD products, superior patient care while increasing shareholders ROI. We're on track to achieve a positive cash flow in the first quarter of 2019. According to a new estimate from cannabis industry analysts the Brightfield Group, the CBD market alone could hit $22 billion by 2022. For further information, contact: Public Relations E-mail: info@wuhn.org Publicly traded company (OTC Pink: WUHN) Website: www.wuhn.org Forward-Looking Statements: Safe Harbour Statement - In addition to historical information, this press release may contain statements that constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements contained in this press release include the intent, belief, or expectations of the Company and members of its management team with respect to the Company's future business operations and the assumptions upon which such statements are based. Prospective investors are cautioned that any such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance, and involve risks and uncertainties and that actual results may differ materially from those contemplated by such forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause these differences include, but are not limited to, failure to complete anticipated sales under negotiations, lack of revenue growth, client discontinuances, failure to realize improvements in performance, efficiency and profitability, and adverse developments with respect to litigation or increased litigation costs, the operation or performance of the Company's business units or the market price of its common stock. Additional factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contemplated within this press release can also be found on the Company's website. The Company disclaims any responsibility to update any forward-looking statements. Source: Wuhan General Group (China), Inc. PONTE VEDRA, Florida, Dec. 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- North Avenue Capital (NAC), specialized commercial lender, has announced the closing of a $3.1 million loan to MonDak Portables, LLC of Epping, North Dakota. The debt facility was funded in partnership with the USDA Rural Development Business & Industry loan program and the proceeds used to refinance existing debt and provide working capital for this long-standing rural business that serves over 135 clients across North Dakota, Wyoming, Nebraska, Indiana, and Colorado. MonDak is a certified women-owned business operating in four locations across the country. Since its founding in 2008, owners Barbara Rogers and Katherine Zent have worked diligently to manufacture, deliver, and service portable toilets for a broad range of customers, with a focus on the oil & gas exploration industry and federal government entities. Not only did the $3.1 million USDA loan provide more affordable debt, but it armed MonDak with the working capital needed to expand, particularly with their climate-controlled comfort stations. According to Jason Hoerr, Commercial Lender at NAC, With a focus on quality service, MonDak has emerged from the recession with a strong reputation and loyal customers. Now that they have longer-term financing in place, they can focus on strategies for growth. NACs Chief Executive, Ben Chatraw, added, Barb and Kathy know the market, their customers, and the opportunities that lie ahead. Like many rural companies, they simply needed a financial partner that was willing to provide a capital structure that gave them room to execute. Chatraw reiterated that MonDak is a prime example of how the USDA program is having meaningful impact on job growth and economic development in rural communities. About MonDak Portables, LLC MonDak Portables manufactures, delivers, and services portable toilets. MonDak rents and sells portable toilets and trailers to over 135 clients throughout North Dakota, Wyoming, Nebraska, Indiana, and Colorado. Headquartered in Epping, North Dakota, and is a certified women-owned business. For more information on MonDak Portables, please visit their website at www.mondakportables.com . New research from Bain & Company finds that cybersecurity remains the top hurdle to IoT adoption for companies in both regions NEW YORK, Dec. 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Europes stronger engagement in proofs of concept (POCs) and higher investment levels in 2016 have established the continents early lead in the industrial Internet of Things (IoT), helping them to scale faster with three times more extensive implementations than in the U.S. Yet, cybersecurity remains a hurdle to greater adoption in both regions. These are results of Bain & Companys latest survey of more than 600 industrial customers of IoT offerings, detailed in a new report, Europeans Extend Their Lead in the Industrial Internet of Things . Bain & Company first surveyed executives in Europe and the U.S. two years ago about their plans for deploying industrial use cases for the IoT. The research found that 27 percent of European executives said they planned to deploy IoT solutions compared with just 18 percent of their colleagues in the U.S. Additionally, companies in some European industries said they were devoting more of their IT budgets to the Internet of Things, particularly in automotive, buildings and industrial. In the latest survey, nearly half of executives in these industries in the U.S. said they were planning IoT deployments, on par with their European counterparts. The long-term ambitions of industrial executives in Europe and the U.S. appear closely matched, said Christopher Schorling, a partner in Bain & Companys European Technology practice. The difference is that many of Europes industrial companies invested early and often in the Internet of Things, giving them an edge over their U.S. counterparts. Europeans also appear further along in cracking the code to unlock value from IoT solutions. Meanwhile, companies in the U.S. continue to struggle with implementation issues that the Europeans have mostly addressed. Bain & Companys most recent research found that U.S. companies plan to ramp up their investments in POC through 2022. Today, about half of all IoT projects in the U.S. are at this stage, but thats likely to increase to about 70 percent in the next four years. Bain & Company revealed that cybersecurity is a top concern for both European and U.S. companies. According to the research, 49 percent of European CEOs said cybersecurity was the biggest barrier to IoT adoption. Industrial customers in the U.S. share this concern, but say issues that would bring IoT solutions into the mainstream of their businessesnamely, integration with other operating technology, interoperability, technical expertise and transition risk are more pressing. U.S. executives were much more likely to cite these concerns in the 2018 survey than in 2016. These challenges limit the degree to which companies scale their POCs into daily, operational implementations of IoT technology Moving forward, the greatest challenge for Europes IoT providers is to become leaders in cybersecurity, to meet the needs of their commercial and industrial customers that remain wary due to their security concerns, said Ann Bosche, a partner in Bain & Companys Technology practice. European companies must also continue to address the complex privacy and regulatory environment of the EU. Mastering these challenges could position Europeans as global leaders with a competitive advantage over their peers from other regions. According to Bain & Company, Europes lead in IoT implementation is a direct result of commercial and industrial customers allotting a higher percentage of their technology spending to IoT deployments compared with their U.S. counterparts. Funding levels have remained roughly constant in Europe over the past two years, reflecting the reality that it can take longer than originally expected to overcome implementation barriers , especially security. Discrete manufacturing represents the greatest percentage of allocation in Europe and the U.S., with process industries following closely behind. Looking ahead at the investment plans of industrial customers, Europeans are poised to hold a narrowing lead, with more than twice as many extensive implementations in 2020 as their U.S. counterparts. Looking almost 10 years aheadan imprecise endeavor, but one that can shed light on aspirations the investment plans of executives in both regions could result in a more competitive position, with the U.S. expecting to see similar levels of POCs and implementations as the Europeans. IoT providers in both regions could also speed their progress in reducing barriers by focusing their investments on fewer industries, which would allow them to develop greater expertise and deliver more comprehensive end-to-end solutions to their customers. Partnerships with industrial vendors are especially important, as they provide specific domain knowledge, including software development, analytics and system integration. Without these partnerships, IoT vendors may continue to struggle to sell solutions that integrate smoothly with customers businesses and processes. Over the next two to three years, clear IoT winners will emerge, as the benefits of early investment kick in and their POCs scale up to operational levels, said Oliver Straehle, who leads Bain & Companys Advanced Manufacturing & Services practice in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Companies that have put off investment will lose ground to competitors that are learning how to derive value from IoT and are becoming more data-driven every dayskills that will form the basis of competition in a world of extreme automation and artificial intelligence. Editor's Note: To arrange an interview, contact Dan Pinkney at dan.pinkney@bain.com or +1 646 562 8102 About Bain & Company Bain & Company is the management consulting firm that the world's business leaders come to when they want results. Bain advises clients on strategy, operations, information technology, organization, private equity, digital transformation and strategy, and mergers and acquisition, developing practical insights that clients act on and transferring skills that make change stick. The firm aligns its incentives with clients by linking its fees to their results. Bain clients have outperformed the stock market 4 to 1. Founded in 1973, Bain has 57 offices in 36 countries, and its deep expertise and client roster cross every industry and economic sector. For more information visit: www.bain.com . Follow us on Twitter @BainAlerts. Media Contact: Dan Pinkney Bain & Company Tel: +1 646 562 8102 dan.pinkney@bain.com OAKVILLE, Ontario, Dec. 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Marigold Marketing & PR, a Canadian firm specializing in the cannabis industry, has been retained to support Neptune Wellness Solutions (Neptune) in its move into the dynamic cannabis market. Marigold is a team of branding, social & PR experts heavily engaged and connected in the cannabis industry. It is known for its awareness building campaigns, industry focus, and excellent service. Neptune is well known globally for providing turnkey nutritional supplement solutions, its OCEANO3 consumer brand, and quality, specialty ingredients, particularly premium marine and seed oils. With a Health Canada license at the late stage for cannabis extraction, Neptune recently refigured its state-of-the-art, Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP)-certified facility to produce cannabis oils. We have seen what Marigold has been able to do for other organizations and we are confident that they will be instrumental in helping us achieve recognition and success in todays cannabis market," says Sabrina Di Blasio, Marketing Director for Neptune. Neptunes proven expertise, technology, and impressive capacity was something we felt deserved greater visibility and awareness, said Bridget Hoffer, co-founder of Marigold. Neptune intends to become a global centre of excellence for the extraction, purification, and formulation of cannabis products, and that was something we knew we could elevate with our marketing and PR services. Marigold will work with Neptunes leadership to help translate their expertise in developing innovative products, navigating global regulatory frameworks and commercialization to the cannabis market. Through targeted communications, public relations, social media, and blogging support, Marigold will help Neptune reach target audiences through tested and effective strategies to create demand for their specialty products. About Marigold Marketing & PR Marigold Marketing & PR is an industry-leading firm that specializes in driving awareness for national brands. Marigold has launched a division specifically focused for cannabis clients called, Cannabis Communications. Cannabis Communications focuses on serving the legal, medical and recreational markets. For more information, please visit http://marigoldpr.com/ or https://cannabiscoms.com/ About Neptune Wellness Solutions Neptune is a health and wellness products company, with more than 50 years of combined experience in extraction, purification and formulation of value-added differentiated science-based products. Currently, the company develops turnkey nutrition product solutions available in various unique delivery forms, offers specialty ingredients such as MaxSimil, a patented ingredient that enhances the absorption of lipid-based nutraceuticals, and a variety of other marine and seed oils. Leveraging its scientific, technological and innovative expertise, Neptune is preparing to commence production of products for legal cannabis markets. The Companys head office is located in Laval, Quebec. For more information, please visit: http://neptunecorp.com/en/ Marigold Marketing & PR Garrett Respski 1-647-972-2466 garrett@marigoldpr.com NYANKUNDE, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Dec. 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- On December 18, 2018, an MAF flight delivered 550kg of vaccines to Beni, the epicentre of the current Ebola virus disease outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to support the frontline treatment and containment efforts of the World Health Organization and Ministry of Health. The current outbreak of the Ebola virus disease (EVD) continues in the north-eastern region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Yesterday, MAF delivered 550kg of vaccines, transported on dry ice, from Goma to Beni for distribution by the World Health Organization (WHO), with the Ministry of Health (MoH), and their partners. Additional medical supplies and 30 motorcycle tires for their on-the-ground vaccine administration teams were also among the cargo delivered to Beni, the epicentre of the current outbreak, to support the efforts to treat and contain the deadly disease. MAF Pilots David Petersen and Chad Dimon flew to the city of Goma where they loaded MAFs Cessna Caravan with the urgently needed, time-sensitive cargo. After a 1.2 hour flight, they arrived in Beni and unloaded the vaccines and supplies into WHO vehicles waiting at the airport. David shares, It was an honour to do our small part in helping stop the spread of this terrible outbreak. Since August, MAF teams have flown 17 flights in support of efforts to combat the outbreaks of the Ebola virus disease in both the western and eastern regions of the DRC, and remains ready to respond to any requests for flights from frontline organizations working to treat and contain this ongoing outbreak. In their December 15 report, the WHO states that a possible 531 EVD cases, including 313 deaths, have been reported in North Kivu and Ituri Provinces in the north-east part of the country, sharing borders with South Sudan, Uganda and Rwanda, and numbers continue to grow. With the displacement of Congolese refugees to other countries, and also internally within the country itself, the risk of transmission is considered very high within the region. Sources: https://www.who.int/ebola/situation-reports/drc-2018/en/ https://www.who.int/csr/don/22-november-2018-ebola-drc/en/ Mission Aviation Fellowship ( www.mafc.org ) operates a fleet of some 130 airplanes worldwide. Since 1945, MAF has enabled the work of churches, relief organizations, missionaries, medical teams, development agencies, and others working to make life better for those who live in the most isolated parts of the world. In recent years, MAF has responded to disasters such as Hurricane Matthew in Haiti, following two deadly earthquakes in Nepal in 2015, and most recently in the Philippines after Super Typhoon Mangkhut. MAFs Canadian headquarters is in Guelph, Ontario. Notes to the Editor MAF has operated in the DRC since 1961 Currently, a fleet of 10 MAF aircraft operate from bases in Nyankunde and Kinshasa, DRC with an additional office located in Bunia Secured tokens using distributed ledger technology to enhance the efficiency, transparency, speed and regulatory compliance of capital investment in Oxygen Hospitality hotel portfolio Phoenix, AZ, Dec. 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Oxygen Hospitality Group, Inc. , a hotel management and real estate investment company, today announced it will launch a Securitized Token Offering (STO) and begin offering these tokens to Registered Investment Advisors (RIAs) and accredited investors diversifying wealth into its hotel real estate portfolio. The Company is partnering with securities compliant platform, Token IQ, Inc . to transform investor experience by elevating transparency and regulatory compliance, tokenizing a security backed by real estate and simplifying the investment/reinvestment process by transforming the historically time consuming and cumbersome paper investment process with a streamlined electronic process. We strive to be the beacon on the hill, providing trust and guiding a new wave of investors interested in the commercial real estate marketplace, said Peter Anadranistakis, president of Oxygen Hospitality Group. Investors in our hotels will now receive shares, represented by tokens, with asset backed security and an unprecedented level of transparency thats extremely important for investing in real estate. He added, Infusing technology into all aspects of our business from raising capital for acquisitions to the front and back of our hotel operations is a key focus in our growth. Tokenization is the process of converting the investment process and confirming ownership rights through electronic, non-editable blockchain transactions. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has stated that most digital assets are security tokens. STOs using distributed ledger technology trailblaze a new, online way to access global capital, add greater transparency, remove middlemen to lower fees and speed the investment process. Accredited investors of Oxygen Hospitality will simply click the invest button within the investment portal, proceed through anti-money laundering (AML)/Know Your Customer (KYC) protocols, set up the custodian account and receive all their signed electronic documents along with tokens. Oxygen Hospitality is the first to utilize the Token IQ platform. According to Mark Vange, CEO of Token IQ, Token IQs patent pending technology allows Oxygen Hospitality to democratize access to their offerings, reduce the cost and complexity of compliance and do that in a way that fully comports with relevant regulation while empowering RIAs to be a fully participating partner in the effort. He added, The unique token recovery capability allows investors, RIAs and Oxygen Hospitality to effectively deal with any exigencies thus removing the risks and complexity associated with conventional crypto tokens. Anadranistakis and Vange recently discussed STOs and Oxygen Hospitalitys initiative at Blockchain48 and Asian Blockchain podcast. Oxygen Hospitality acquires hotels with capital appreciation and income producing opportunities for high net worth investors through asset repositioning, restructuring, re-development and intensive post-acquisition management. About Token IQ Founded in 2017, Token IQ is a leading SaaS blockchain technology company focusing on delivering a turnkey solution for the tokenization of securities and asset backed investment contracts. The companys technology enables issuers to convert rights to an asset into smart and fully compliant digital tokens on a blockchain with the goal of eliminating middlemen, reducing fees, and creating a frictionless environment. Token IQs solution makes capital formation more efficient while unlocking liquidity for traditionally non-liquid asset classes. Companies of any size and industry can now launch a digitized offering and seek investments with confidence. For more information, visit www.tokeniq.io . About Oxygen Hospitality Group Oxygen Hospitality Group, Inc., is a hotel management and real estate investment company that acquires, redevelops and manages a portfolio of tech-infused branded and independent hotel assets in the Sun Belt and other advantageous U.S. destinations. The Company works with registered investment advisors (RIAs), accredited investors and family offices seeking direct investment opportunities in hotels requiring active asset management or operational repositioning for a return to profitability and guest experience excellence. Founded in 2017, Oxygen Hospitality is headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona. For more information, please visit: http://www.oxygenhospitality.com and follow us on Facebook , Twitter and LinkedIn . Note to Investors This press release is for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy securities. Offers to sell or the solicitations of offers to buy securities may only be made through official offering documents that contain important information about risks, fees and expenses. Certain statements in this press release constitute "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the federal securities laws. Words such as "may," "might," "will," "should," "believe," "expect," "anticipate," "estimate," "continue," "predict," "forecast," "project," "plan," "intend" or similar expressions, or statements regarding intent, belief, or current expectations, are forward-looking statements. While the Company believes these forward-looking statements are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on any such forward-looking statements, which are based on information available to us on the date of this release. These forward-looking statements are based upon current estimates and assumptions and are subject to various risks and uncertainties. Thus, actual results could be materially different. The Company expressly disclaims any obligation to update or alter statements whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law. # # # "We must commend the Foreign Affairs Ministry's work on the defense of the democratic system , the rule of law , and institutionalism ," the Head of State expressed. YEREVAN, DECEMBER 19, ARMENPRESS. Four opposition parties in the United Kingdom have introduced a vote of no confidence motion in the government. The move comes after Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn demanded a Commons vote on PM Theresa Mays future after she confirmed a vote on her Brexit deal would not take place until after Christmas, The Independent reported. The four parties that tabled the vote of no confidence are the SNP, Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru and the Greens. The motion was filed after the opposition party leaders held a meeting. SNP Westminster Leader Ian Blackford MP met with Liberal Democrat Leader Vince Cable, Plaid Cymru MP Liz Saville Roberts and Green MP Caroline Lucas on Tuesday and they took a joint decision to put forward a vote of no confidence in the names of the opposition leaders. SNP Westminster Leader Ian Blackford was quoted by the Independent as saying: Opposition leaders have taken the decision to table a vote of no-confidence in the UK government under the Fixed Term Parliaments Act something Jeremy Corbyn has failed to do. Labour has failed to hold the UK government to account over their shambolic Brexit negotiations. Their motion of no-confidence in the prime minister on Monday was a gimmick we attempted to strengthen it with our own amendment and its regrettable it was not offered time for debate in parliament. Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan YEREVAN, DECEMBER 19, ARMENPRESS. The Economist has named Armenia Country of the year 2018, at the same time noting that it was a tricky choice. The magazine stressed that the annual award celebrates progress. Which country improved the most in the past year? the article says. The article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline "Ovation nation" A stellar performance in one year is no guarantee of future success. Last years pick, France, is now racked by riots. Myanmar, our winner in 2015, has regressed bloodily, The Economist says, adding that they have considered a few countries for this years annual choice Britain, Ireland, Ecuador, Peru, South Africa. Eventually, The Economist narrowed down the list to three countries Malaysia, Ethiopia and Armenia. Noting the developments in Ethiopia, The Economist concluded that Autocracies, alas, seldom die quietly, and went on to describe the Armenian events. Yet in Armenia that is exactly what seems to have happened. The president, Serzh Sargsyan, tried to dodge term limits by making himself into an executive prime minister. The streets erupted in protest. Nikol Pashinyan, a charismatic and bearded former journalist and MP, was swept into power, legally and properly, on a wave of revulsion against corruption and incompetence. His new party alliance won 70% of the vote in a subsequent election. A Putinesque potentate was ejected, and no one was killed. Russia was given no excuse to interfere. A note of caution: Armenias nasty territorial dispute with Azerbaijan has not been resolved and could ignite again. However, an ancient and often misruled nation in a turbulent region has a chance of democracy and renewal. For that reason, Armenia is our country of the year. Shnorhavorum yem! The Economist said, congratulating Armenia in a transliterated congratulation. Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan YEREVAN, DECEMBER 19, ARMENPRESS. The Armenian and Greek foreign ministries have held political consultations on December 17th in Athens, the Armenian foreign ministry said. The Armenian delegation was led by Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Garen Nazarian, while the Greek side was led by Alternate Minister of Foreign Affairs of Greece Georgios Katrougalos. The bilateral political agenda was discussed, and ideas were exchanged over further deepening of cooperation in the commercial, scientific-academic, cultural and other areas. Addressing the current phase and development prospects of the Armenia-EU cooperation, Nazarian introduced the application process of CEPA by Armenia and attached importance to Greeces ratification of the document. The sides also exchanged ideas over commencing dialogue about liberalization of EU entry visas, and support from EU countries in this process. Regional and international matters of mutual interest were also discussed. At the request of the Greek officials, Nazarian briefed on the latest developments in the peaceful settlement process of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict. In turn, Katrougalos presented the Greek stance over the Cyprus issue. Issues concerning cooperation and mutual support in multilateral and international arenas were also addressed. Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan YEREVAN, DECEMBER 19, ARMENPRESS. The team of the Business Armenia Foundation sent a congratulatory letter to ARMENPRESS news agency on the 100th anniversary of establishment. The Business Armenia team warmly congratulates staff members of ARMENPRESS on the 100th anniversary of the news agencys activity. The activity of the news agency sums up a century-old history of Armenia and records the present with the professional work together with our people. We wish the team of ARMENPRESS to always maintain the reputation of a leader, the letter reads. Edited and translated by Aneta Harutyunyan YEREVAN, DECEMBER 19, ARMENPRESS. Consul General of Armenia in Los Angeles Armen Baibourtian had a meeting December 17 with California State Senators Anthony Portantino and Henry Stern, as well as Glendale Mayor Zareh Sinanian and Glendale City Council Secretary Artashes Kasakhian. The meeting was held at Senator Portantinos office, the foreign ministry said. Baibourtian presented the Armenian general election results and prospects of political and economic development of the country. Practical projects aimed at promoting economic, commercial and educational-cultural ties between Armenia and the State of California were discussed, as well as steps for conveying a coordinated nature to bilateral ties. An agreement was reached to follow up the realization of Armenia-California partnership agenda with regular meetings and raising the mentioned issues within the framework of the California Senate. Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan Gaslamp Quarter, San Diego, CA, Dec. 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Celebrating 25 years of Irish revelry, McFarlane Promotions, Inc. is bringing San Diego shamROCK back and better than ever to paint the Gaslamp Quarter green with San Diegos largest Saint Patricks Day block party. Drawing more than 20,000 attendees from across the U.S., this annual celebration is known for taking this legendary holiday and turning it into an outrageous experience for the green at heart to enjoy. We even added two extra hours so every leprechaun can come party like the Irish with us on Saturday, March 16th from 2PM to Midnight! Frolic through a clover field with your green Bud Light beer or Tullamore Dew whiskey libation as 6 blocks of the Gaslamp Quarter get covered with over 50,000 square feet of luscious emerald green astroturf! Bust out your best jig with performances by traditional Irish steppers, or shake your clovers across 3 stages of non-stop live music including nationally recognized Irish rock and Celtic bands, top DJs and more! Feeling lucky? Make way to the ALL NEW shamROCK Shenanigans Street for a variety of Saint Patricks Day-themed games! Grab your friends, don your green attire, and head to the Gaslamp Quarter to experience firsthand the Saint Patricks Day block party of a lifetime! Tickets to this event start at just $35 for General Admission and $70 for Lucky Leprechaun VIP. Add on to your ticket and join the Clover Crew with a range of custom packages including 2 complimentary 16oz beers, a commemorative stein and credential, fast pass entry and more for $7 to $30. San Diego shamROCK is produced by and benefits the Gaslamp Quarter Historical Foundation, which focuses on the development and preservation of Downtown San Diego. For additional information or to purchase tickets, please visit sandiegoshamrock.com. YEREVAN, DECEMBER 19, ARMENPRESS. Artsakh Republic President Bako Sahakyan today received the delegation of the "Lusavor Hayastan" (Bright Armenia) party led by leader Edmon Marukyan, the Presidential Office told Armenpress. The President congratulated the party on the results of the recent snap parliamentary elections of Armenia and entering the parliament, wishing them effective work. The meeting addressed various issues on state-building, as well as domestic and foreign policies. Edited and translated by Aneta Harutyunyan YEREVAN, DECEMBER 19, ARMENPRESS. An actor of the Sos Sargsyan Hamazgayin (Pan-National) Theater has been appointed interim director. Actor Arman Navasardyan told ARMENPRESS that he has been appointed interim director of the theater by caretaker minister of culture Lilit Makunts today. He said he will hold a news conference tomorrow to present the future of the theater. But Navasardyan says the appointment was no surprise for him. The entire staff of the theater has been voicing months ago that they want the actor to be their director. Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan YEREVAN, DECEMBER 19, ARMENPRESS. Members of the US Congressional Armenian Caucus have written a letter to US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urging to develop bilateral relations with Armenia and cooperation in various sectors. Below is the full text of the letter, as reported by ANCA. Dear Secretary Pompeo: We write to express our interest in transforming the United States-Armenia Joint Economic Task Force (USATF) into a platform for sustained strategic dialogue on the direction of our nation's increasingly impactful bilateral partnership with Armenia, based upon our shared interests, common values, and the enduring friendship between the American and Armenian peoples. In the wake of Armenia's recent political transition, capped by this past week's free and fair Parliamentary elections, Armenia has emerged as a model of democratic development, far outperforming many other states in the post-Soviet space and setting an international standard for the peaceful, civil society-driven, constitutional transfer of power. We were, of course, encouraged by the welcome of these remarkable developments by the White House and Department of State. While the credit for this progress belongs to the Armenian people, we can be proud of our role as Americans, over the past two decades, in appropriating and administering aid to help provide the tools and create the conditions for engaged citizens to take ownership of their future. Now is the time to build off Armenia's democratic progress, taking our bilateral relations to the next level - in the political, economic, military, and cultural arenas. As a complement to the Trade and Investment Framework Agreement Council administered by the U.S. Trade Representative, the Task Force managed by our Department of State provides the perfect platform for setting the broad aims and policy objectives for our renewed and re-energized partnership - with a sharp focus on concrete bilateral initiatives that will drive short and midterm progress on key deliverables and shared goals. We respectfully encourage you to upgrade the next Task Force meeting to a strategic dialogue that supports the sustained escalation and regularization of high-level bilateral exchanges. In terms of democracy, we invite you to continue to expand U.S. support for anti-corruption, a strong civil society, and the independence of the media by creating working groups or mechanisms to advance reforms. This will leverage Armenia's real progress in these areas and the commitment made by the Administration to two years of additional democracy funding. Support for a comprehensive democratic transition will secure needed progress in the economic realm, where we encourage you to prioritize a long overdue Tax Treaty, Social Security Agreement, expanding duty-free products, Debt-for-Forestation swaps, non-stop LAX to EVN flights, trade missions, and other related initiatives. We also hope you will take into account that Armenia suffers from a double blockade that deeply affects its economy. On the humanitarian front, we ask you to empower Armenia to continue serving as a safe haven for regional refugees, particularly at-risk ethnic and religious minorities. Finally, building upon Armenia's participation in NATO's Partnership for Peace and U.S.-lead global peacekeeping operations, we ask that you put in place policies and programs to broaden and deepen U.S.Armenia military cooperation. As you prepare for the next annual convening of the USATF in Washington, we request details on your priorities for engagement and your thoughts on exploring the expansion of existing bilateral cooperation frameworks with Armenia. We appreciate your attention to our recommendations detailed here, look forward to your response, and stand ready to help further the growth of the U.S.-Armenia relationship. Sincerely, Jackie Speier (D-CA) Dave Trott (R-MI) Frank Pallone (D-NJ) David Valadao (R-CA) Adam Schiff (D-CA) Gus Bilirakis (R-FL). In turn, the ANCA commended the Congressional Armenian Caucus letter calling for strategic upgrade of U.S.-Armenia Relations. Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan YEREVAN, DECEMBER 19, ARMENPRESS. The Washington Post has included Armenia in its Three countries where democracy actually staged a comeback in 2018 article by contributing columnist Frida Ghitis. The two other countries are Ethiopia and Peru, where drastic domestic changes have also taken place. Referring to Armenia, the Washington Post notes that the country has experiences a dramatic turnaround. When President Serzh Sargsyan, already in office for a decade, staged a power grab by changing the constitution and becoming prime minister, the journalist-turned-activist Nikol Pashinyan leveraged the peoples anger to drastically change the countrys direction. Pashinyan led a massive march followed by crippling demonstrations, paralyzing the country until the parliament which had named Sargsyan prime minister finally relented. The nonviolent people power of Armenians forced Sargsyan to resign and persuaded legislators to name Pashinyan prime minister. But the biggest shift was still to come. A week ago, Armenians elected a new parliament, handing Pashinyans bloc an astonishing 70 percent of the vote. The previous ruling party, Sargsyans Republicans, didnt even manage the 5 percent minimum required to enter parliament. Bolstered by the vote of confidence, Pashinyan has now launched a comprehensive anti-corruption campaign aimed at cleaning up the system of government. These countries and their leaders still face dangerous obstacles ahead along the path to a durable liberal democracy. Their experiments could still fail. But the very fact that they have managed to make meaningful democratic strides against such steep odds should give encouragement to those battling the forces of damaging corruption and creeping authoritarianism in other places, the columnist writes. Caretaker Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyans My Step Alliance has won a landslide victory in the December 9 general election with more than 70% of votes. Earlier The Economist named Armenia the Country of the Year. Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan YEREVAN, DECEMBER 19, ARMENPRESS. Turkey continues its crackdown on Gulenists with arrests of officials. According to local media, a court has issued arrest warrants for 12 police commissioners and another 37 high ranking police officials. Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan YEREVAN, DECEMBER 19, ARMENPRESS. Caretaker Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has reacted to concerns that the replacement of Artsakhs army commander might affect the militarys combat-readiness. Lt. General Levon Mnatsakanyan, Artsakhs Defense Minister Commander of the Defense Army, was dismissed and replaced with Major General Karen Abrahamyan on December 14. A new chief of the general staff was also appointed. Speaking to reporters in Dilijan today, Pashinyan noted that these types of rumors are bad commentaries addressed to the Artsakh army because the new army leaders are professional veterans. People who have served in the military their entire lives and stand in the origins of the Artsakh Liberation War have been appointed to these positions, Pashinyan said. But Nikol Pashinyan declined to comment on Mnatsakanyans dismissal. I cannot comment on the dismissal of Mr. Mnatsakanyan due to circumstances known to you, he told reporters. Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan YEREVAN, DECEMBER 19, ARMENPRESS. Acting Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan today participated in the session of the inter-agency commission coordinating the actions for the implementation of the Armenia-EU Comprehensive and Enhanced Partnership Agreement (CEPA) and the Armenia-EU Partnership Priorities document, the government told Armenpress. Pashinyan delivered remarks at the session which runs as follows: Dear members of the Commission, The signing of the Comprehensive and Enhanced Partnership Agreement with the European Union was an important step for further deepening the Armenia-EU ties and supporting the continuation of reforms in Armenia. The implementation of the agreement itself is a platform for making reforms which are in accordance with the governments program and the agenda of reforms being implemented by the government. I know that currently the main problem of the Commission is the coordination of the development process of the road map, and for this purpose the Commission has discussed actions in different fields in recent months, including the fields of trade, transport, energy and nature protection. I know that the road map of the implementation of the CEPAs provisions which entered into force temporarily have been provided to the European side. I ask you to continue the works to agree with the European side upon the actions included in this road map. The Commission Chairman, acting deputy Prime Minister Mher Grigoryan regularly reports me on the activities of the Commission and its results. I urge you to work more actively towards the CEPA implementation processes as we are entering into a development and implementation stage of more intensive and enlarged programs. I wish you good luck in the discussions of todays agenda issues, and I will regularly attend the Commissions works and will follow the process by highlighting the ongoing activities with the EU. Before the discussion of the agenda issues, acting deputy PM Mher Grigoryan stated: Dear colleagues, I assure you that the CEPA agenda is the agenda of Armenias acting PM, and no matter with what staff and intensity we are working on this path, please take into account that we regularly report him on the process of works, and in fact Mr. Pashinyans perception is that this is first of all the agenda of our reforms. Armenia and the European Union signed the Comprehensive and Enhanced Partnership Agreement (CEPA) in Brussels on November 24, 2017. The Agreement has partially come into force from June 1, 2018. At the moment nearly 80% of its provisions are operating. The remaining provisions will enter into force after the ratification process of the Agreement by the Parliaments of the EU states is completed. As of now 8 out of 28 EU member states have ratified the Agreement: Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Luxembourg and Denmark. Edited and translated by Aneta Harutyunyan YEREVAN, DECEMBER 19, ARMENPRESS. My Step alliance will hold meeting today at 19:30 in Yerevans Armenia Marriott hotel, Yelk faction MP Alen Simonyan told Armenpres. The lawmaker didnt provide any detail about the issue which will be discussed. Its just a meeting with the representatives of the alliance who were elected to the parliament, with quite a major staff, he said. Snap parliamentary elections of Armenia were held on December 9. Based on the election results, three political forces have been elected to the parliament: My Step alliance 70.44% of votes, Prosperous Armenia party 8.27% and Bright Armenia party 6.37%. Edited and translated by Aneta Harutyunyan YEREVAN, DECEMBER 19, ARMENPRESS. There is nothing new in the Nagorno Karabakh conflict settlement issue, caretaker Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan told reporters today, addressing the statement of Azerbaijans FM Elmar Mammadyarov who said that a mutual-agreement has been reached during a meeting with Armenias FM in Milan, Italy. In Milan, the Armenian and Azerbaijani foreign ministers, with the co-chairs, have agreed upon a joint statement, and it has been said that for a long time such a statement was not succeeded to be agreed upon. There is nothing new in the Karabakh issue. And the activeness is to the extent which you see, Pashinyan said. Speaking about his meeting with OSCE Personal Representative of the Chairperson in Office Andrzej Kasprzyk, the premier stressed that the ambassador is regularly visiting the region and that his visits are strictly of a working nature. There were cases when his visits werent published at all, but I have tasked my staff to cover all contacts, because the process must be transparent, Pashinyan said. Pashinyan also noted that whenever a comment is voiced from Azerbaijan that contains a certain element of optimism, he is concerned over the interpretations of a number of Armenian commentators, whose first presumption is that there is some kind of a conspiracy. And why is there such a presumption? Why isnt there a presumption on the Armenian government having succeeded in bringing decisive arguments? Pashinyan said. To an observation that perhaps similar interpretations happen because it is Azerbaijan that first announces it, Pashinyan said: I remember one thing, when I came to Gyumri at night from St. Petersburg and when I was participating in the 30th anniversary of the earthquake events the next day, the Azerbaijani presidential press service published information that a conversation has taken place between myself and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev in St. Petersburg, while we had agreed that we would give a brief information about this. Very big conclusions are being made from the fact that they were the ones to first give this information. I say again, and anyone can study what I say, no government has been so transparent than ours in the Nagorno Karabakh issue. Asked if the St. Petersburg and Vienna agreements remain a priority for Armenia, Pashinyan said that the problem is that from the very beginning Azerbaijan has insisted that such agreements dont exist at all. As far as these agenda, these are the agenda of the official negotiations process, that have taken place in participation of the co-chairs. I personally have not participated in an official negotiations process, Ive had a conversation twice with Ilham Aliyev, and in Dushanbe it so happened that we reached an agreement. I want to once again speak about this contradiction, whenever there is an agreement, whenever something is stabilizing, the commentators are saying what conspiracy is this, whenever there is nothing like this, commentators say it is war and that the government is unable to prevent it, Pashinyan said. Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan YEREVAN, DECEMBER 19, ARMENPRESS. Executive Director of Armenias Public Radio Mark Grigoryan has resigned, the Public Radio told ARMENPRESS. A group of staff members of the Public Radio were demanding his resignation. They had later declared a strike. Grigoryan was appointed to the position in 2017 June by the Public TV, Radio Council. Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan Downing FOUR VCT plc LEI: 21380035MV1VRYEXPR95 Half-Yearly Report for the six months ended 30 September 2018 19 December 2018 FINANCIAL HIGHLIGHTS 18 Dec 2018 30 Sept 2018 31 Mar 2018 30 Sept 2017 Pence Pence Pence Pence DSO D Share pool Net Asset Value per DSO D Share 30.3 54.4 78.5 Cumulative dividends per DSO D Share 76.5 52.5 27.5 Estimated Performance Incentive * (4.4) (4.4) (4.2) Total Return per DSO D Share 102.4 102.5 101.8 DP67 Share pool Net Asset Value per DP67 Share 50.5 50.0 68.7 Cumulative dividends per DP67 Share 49.8 49.8 29.8 Total Return per DP67 Share 100.3 99.8 98.5 DP2011 General Share pool Net Asset Value per DP2011 Gen Ord Share - - 15.0 Net Asset Value per DP2011 Gen A Share 13.0 20.3 34.4 Cumulative dividends per DP2011 Gen Ord Share and Gen A Share 92.0 85.0 55.0 Total Return per DP2011 Gen Ord Share and Gen A Share 105.0* 105.3* 104.4* Estimated remaining Performance Incentive (already included above) * 2.3 3.6 5.2 DP2011 Structured Share pool Net Asset Value per DP2011 Struc Ord Share - - 5.0 Net Asset Value per DP2011 Struc A Share 9.8 15.0 34.5 Cumulative dividends per DP2011 Struc Share and Struc A Share 95.0 90.0 65.0 Total Return per DP2011 Struc Ord Share and Struc A Share 104.8* 105.0* 104.5* Estimated remaining Performance Incentive (already included above) * 1.7 2.7 5.2 Generalist Share pool Net Asset Value and Total Return per Generalist Share 87.0 92.7 95.5 98.7 Healthcare Share pool Net Asset Value and Total Return per Healthcare Share 84.0 88.7 94.6 98.6 *A full explanation of the Performance Incentive arrangements for each Share pool will be shown in the Half-Yearly Report. CHAIRMAN'S STATEMENT Introduction I am pleased to present the Company's Half-Yearly Report for the six months ended 30 September 2018. Share pools The Company now has six active share pools, four of which are winding down. This report includes sections covering the individual share pools and I will give a brief overview of each. Planned exit Share pools DSO D Share Pool The DSO D Share NAV stood at 30.3p at 30 September 2018, a decrease of 0.1p per share or 0.2% over the period, after adjusting for the dividends paid in the period. Total Return now stands at 102.4p per share, compared to the cost for Shareholders who invested in the D Share offer, net of income tax relief, of 70.0p. Based on the current performance it is estimated that a performance fee equivalent to 4.4p per D Share may become payable to the Manager. This has been reflected in the Total Return figure shown above. Following a number of disposals from the D Share Pool, the second major distribution of 24.0p per DSO D Share was paid on 13 August 2018. Realisation plans are progressing in respect of the remaining investments and we expect to be in a position to make a final distribution to Shareholders during 2019. DP67 Share Pool As at 30 September 2018, the NAV of the DP67 Shares stood at 50.5p per share. This represents an increase of 0.5p (1.0%) over the period. Total Return for DP67 shareholders now stands at 100.3p per share, compared to the cost for Shareholders who invested in the original offers, net of income tax relief, of 70.0p. There are plans in place to exit from all of the remaining investments in the DP67 portfolio and, following the dividend of 20.0p per DP67 Share paid on 16 March 2018, we anticipate that the remaining value will be distributed to Shareholders through the payment of one final dividend, which we anticipate should be paid in the coming months. DP2011 General Share Pool The DP2011 General Share Pool is in the process of returning funds to Shareholders. After providing for an estimated Performance Incentive of 2.3p per DP2011 General Ordinary Share, as at 30 September 2018, the NAV of a combined holding of one DP2011 General Ordinary Share and one DP2011 General A Share stood at 13.0p per share. This represents a decrease of 0.3p or 1.5% after adjusting for dividends paid during the period, as well as the Performance Incentive estimate. Further details of the Performance Incentive arrangements are set out in the notes to the accounts. Total Return for DP2011 General Shareholders now stands at 105.0p, compared to the cost for Shareholders who invested in the original offer, net of income tax relief, of 70.0p. On 13 August 2018 a dividend of 7.0p per DP2011 General A Share was paid, bringing total dividends paid to Shareholders to 92.0p for a combined holding. As the portfolio now consists of a small number of investments, all with plans to exit, it is expected that the remaining proceeds will be distributed to Shareholders by way of one closing dividend in the first half of 2019. DP2011 Structured Share Pool The DP2011 Structured Share Pool is at a similar stage to the DP2011 General Share Pool. After providing for an estimated Performance Incentive of 1.7p per DP2011 Structured Ordinary Share, as at 30 September 2018, the NAV of a combined holding of one DP2011 Structured Ordinary Share and one DP2011 Structured A Share stood at 9.8p per share. This represents a decrease of 0.2p or 1.3% after adjusting for dividends paid during the period, as well as the Performance Incentive estimate. Further details of the Performance Incentive arrangements are set out in the notes to the accounts. Total Return for DP2011 Structured Shareholders now stands at 104.8p, compared to the cost for Shareholders who invested in the original offer, net of income tax relief, of 70.0p. On 13 August 2018 a dividend of 5.0p per DP2011 Structured A Share was paid, bringing total dividends paid to Shareholders to 95.0p for a combined holding. As the portfolio now consists of a small number of investments, all with plans to exit, it is expected that the remaining proceeds will be distributed to Shareholders by way of one closing dividend in the first half of 2019. Evergreen Share pools Generalist Share pool As at 30 September 2018, the Generalist Share NAV and Total Return stood at 92.7p, a decrease of 2.8p per share or 2.9% over the period. This fall is attributable to a combination of the unrealised holding losses on the Venture Capital portfolio and the 'cash-drag' of holding uninvested funds. Since the period end, there has been a significant decline in global stock markets. This has impacted the valuation of Public Equity investments. At 18 December 2018, the Generalist NAV stood at 87.0p per share. As detailed in the Investment Manager's Report, the process of building the Generalist portfolio is progressing well, with 5.2m having been invested in VCT Qualifying Investments during the six months to 30 September 2018. More than 40% of the funds are now invested in VCT Qualifying investments. The Manager has a good pipeline of investment opportunities from which the portfolio will continue to be built over the coming years. Healthcare Share pool As at 30 September 2018, the Healthcare Share NAV and Total Return stood at 88.7p, a decrease of 5.9p per share or 6.2% over the period. This fall is the result of unrealised holding losses in respect of the Venture Capital portfolio, coupled with the 'cash-drag' of holding uninvested funds. As with the Generalist Share pool, the falls in global stock markets have impacted the Public Equity investments and other quoted investments. At 18 December 2018, the Healthcare NAV stood at 84.0p per share. As outlined in the Investment Manager's Report, the process of building the Healthcare portfolio is ongoing, with 2.7m invested in VCT Qualifying Investments during the six months to 30 September 2018. As this is a specialist sector, the process of investing Healthcare funds presents more challenges than that of the Generalist Share pool. However, the Manager has a good pipeline of investment opportunities from which the portfolio will continue to be built over the coming years. Dividends Dividends in respect of the planned exit Share pools will be announced as and when sufficient realisations have taken place. No dividends have been declared with respect to Generalist and Healthcare Share pools, due to the effective restriction on paying dividends in the first three years following a share issue. Share buybacks The Company has a policy of buying in any Generalist and Healthcare Shares that become available in the market and will usually expect to do so at a price approximately equal to the latest NAV of the shares, subject to regulatory restrictions and other factors such as availability of liquid funds. In respect of the planned exit pools, the Board does not intend to buy in any of those shares as exits for these Shareholders will be facilitated by way of distributions. During the period the Company repurchased 14,400 Generalist Shares at an average price of 95.7p per Share. The Shares were subsequently cancelled. Fundraising The Company has launched further fundraisings in respect of the Generalist and Healthcare Share pools. The Company plans to raise approximately 20m of Generalist funds and 10m of Healthcare funds, with an over-allotment facility which could increase these totals to approximately 40m and 30m respectively. Downing LLP, the Manager and Promoter, considers there to be a strong pipeline of investment opportunities available to the Company, and the decision to raise additional funds was recommended to Shareholders and the Board as a result. I look forward to reporting on developments in my statement with the Annual Report to 31 March 2019, to be published in July 2019, by which time we expect that the planned exit processes will be substantially complete. Board composition The Directors review the composition and effectiveness of the Board at regular intervals to ensure that it continues to comply with the applicable regulations, is consistent with best practice and remains effective for Shareholders. The new Corporate Governance Code will become effective for the Company at the start of the next financial year and introduces some changes. In order to ensure continued compliance, I will step down as chairman of the Company on 31 December 2018 but will continue on the Board as a non-executive director. I am pleased to announce that Sir Aubrey Brocklebank has agreed to chair the Company from 1 January 2019 onwards. Sir Aubrey joined the Board at the time of the merger with two other VCTs in 2015 and has extensive experience in the VCT sector. I am confident that that he will be an excellent chairman for the Company. We believe that the three-person Board has operated effectively and efficiently since it was established in 2015 and continues to do so. With the changing landscape of the VCT regulation and the new focus of the investment activity, the Board will continue to regularly review the structure and, of course, consider adjustments if it concludes that they would be beneficial. Outlook For the remainder of this financial year, there will be a dual focus for the Board and Manager, of working to return funds to investors in the four remaining planned exit share pools, whilst also continuing to develop the Generalist and Healthcare portfolios. Generally, the Board remains satisfied with the performance of the portfolio companies, which the Manager will continue to closely monitor. Lord Flight Chairman INVESTMENT MANAGER'S REPORT DSO D SHARE POOL Portfolio valuation As at 30 September 2018, the DSO D Share Pool had a portfolio of seven investments with a value of 1.5m. The most significant valuation adjustment during the period was in respect of Apex Energy Limited, which has been written down by 200,000. Technical issues have impacted on operations of the business and the valuation has been adjusted to reflect the additional work required. Other valuation movements amount to a net uplift of 24,000. Portfolio activity Three full realisations took place during the period, generating proceeds of 2.2m. Goonhilly Earth Station Limited, the owner and operator of the afore-named Satellite Earth Station in Cornwall, was sold during the period, generating proceeds of 878,000 and a gain over cost of 163,000. Loan note interest of 49,000 was also recovered on exit. Merlin Renewables Limited, the owner and operator of an Anaerobic Digestion plant in Norfolk, was also sold during the period, generating proceeds of 770,000 and realising a gain over cost of 270,000. The final of the three realisations was in respect of Nightjar Sustainable Power Limited, the owner and operator of a run-of-river hydroelectric scheme in Scotland. The DSO D interest in the company was refinanced by existing investors for 600,000, resulting in a gain over cost of 115,000. Results and Net Asset Value The Net Asset Value ('NAV') per DSO D Share at 30 September 2018 stood at 30.3p, a decrease of 0.1p or 0.2% over the period after adjusting for dividends paid. Total Return stands at 102.4p per share compared to initial cost to Shareholders, net of income tax relief, of 70.0p per share. The loss on ordinary activities after taxation for the period was 7,000, comprising a revenue loss of 29,000 and a capital gain of 22,000. Dividends In light of the realisations from the DSO D Share Pool during the period, the second significant distribution, being 24.0p per DSO D Share, was paid on 13 August 2018. We expect that the remaining NAV will be distributed to Shareholders by way of one closing dividend, and we anticipate that this will be paid during the summer of 2019. Outlook Although the portfolio is now reasonably small in value, as it is made up of investments in seven different companies we expect that it will take some months to execute the realisation plans in place. A further update on the progress of the realisation plans will be provided in the Annual Report to 31 March 2019. Downing LLP SUMMARY OF INVESTMENT PORTFOLIO DSO D SHARE POOL as at 30 September 2018 Cost Valuation Unrealised gain in period % of portfolio by value 000 000 000 Venture Capital investments Lambridge Solar Limited 500 605 (21) 25.1% Pearce and Saunders Limited* 300 354 54 14.7% Fresh Green Power Limited 189 231 - 9.6% Apex Energy Limited 400 200 (200) 8.3% Green Energy Production UK Limited 100 74 (6) 3.1% Pearce and Saunders DevCo Limited** 126 20 - 0.8% Fubar Stirling Limited 20 5 (3) 0.2% 1,635 1,489 (176) 61.8% Cash at bank and in hand 921 38.2% Total investments 2,410 100.0% *partially qualifying **non-qualifying investment SUMMARY OF INVESTMENT MOVEMENTS DSO D SHARE POOL for the period ended 30 September 2018 Disposals Cost Valuation at 31/03/2018 Disposal proceeds Total gain/ (loss) against cost Realised gain in period 000 000 000 000 000 Venture Capital investments Goonhilly Earth Station Limited 715 715 878 163 163 Merlin Renewables Limited 500 719 770 270 51 Nightjar Sustainable Power Limited 485 600 600 115 - 1,700 2,034 2,248 548 214 DIVIDEND HISTORY DSO D SHARE POOL Period end Date paid Pence per share 2012 Final 28 September 2012 2.5 2013 Interim 25 January 2013 2.5 2013 Final 13 September 2013 2.5 2014 Interim 24 January 2014 2.5 2014 Final 30 September 2014 2.5 2015 Interim 30 January 2015 2.5 2015 Second interim 30 September 2015 2.5 2016 Interim 23 December 2015 2.5 2016 Final 30 September 2016 2.5 2017 Interim 6 January 2017 2.5 2017 Final 29 September 2017 2.5 2018 Special 2 November 2017 25.0 2018 Interim 13 August 2018 24.0 76.5 INVESTMENT MANAGER'S REPORT DP67 SHARE POOL Portfolio valuation As at 30 September 2018, the DP67 Share Pool had a portfolio of seven investments with a value of 4.6m. The only valuation adjustment during the period was in respect of Fenkle Street LLP. The DP67 Share pool received profit distributions of 75,000, which have been recorded as income for the Share pool. In light of the receipt of this income, the valuation of the investment has been reduced by the same amount. Results and Net Asset Value The Net Asset Value ('NAV') per DP67 Share at 30 September 2018 stood at 100.3p, an increase of 0.5p (1.0%) over the period. Total Return stands at 100.3p per share compared to initial cost to Shareholders, net of income tax relief, of 70.0p per share. The profit on ordinary activities after taxation for the period was 58,000, comprising a revenue gain of 77,000 and a capital loss of 19,000. Dividends The first significant distribution of 20.0p per DP67 Share was paid on 16 March 2018. We expect that the remaining value will be distributed to Shareholders by way of one final dividend which we are optimistic can be paid in the coming months. Outlook Our focus for this Share pool is on delivering the exit plans currently in place for each of its investments and making a final distribution to Shareholders. Downing LLP SUMMARY OF INVESTMENT PORTFOLIO DP67 SHARE POOL as at 30 September 2018 Cost Valuation Unrealised gain in period % of portfolio by value 000 000 000 Venture Capital investments Cadbury House Holdings Limited 1,409 1,613 - 31.8% Snow Hill Developments LLP* 584 830 - 16.4% Fenkle Street LLP* 405 603 (75) 11.9% Gatewales Limited* 343 527 - 10.4% Oak Grove Renewables Limited 820 492 - 9.7% Yamuna Energy Limited 400 400 - 7.9% London City Shopping Centre Limited* 99 99 - 2.0% 4,060 4,564 (75) 90.1% Cash at bank and in hand 501 9.9% Total investments 5,065 100.0% * non-qualifying investment DIVIDEND HISTORY DP67 SHARE POOL Period end Date paid Pence per share Pre-merger dividends 21.8 2016 Interim 23 December 2015 2.0 2016 final 30 September 2016 2.0 2017 Interim 6 January 2017 2.0 2017 Final 29 September 2017 2.0 2018 Special 16 March 2018 20.0 49.8 INVESTMENT MANAGER'S REPORT DP2011 GENERAL SHARE POOL Portfolio valuation As at 30 September 2018, the DP2011 General Share Pool had a portfolio of seven investments with a value of 2.2m. The value of the portfolio is materially unchanged from 31 March 2018, with a small overall reduction in value of 19,000 during the period. Net Asset Value and results The combined Net Asset Value ('NAV') of one DP2011 General Ordinary Share and one DP2011 General A Share at 30 September 2018 stood at 13.0p, a decrease of 0.3p or 1.5% over the period after adjusting for dividends paid. Total Return stands at 105.0p per share compared to an initial cost to Shareholders, net of income tax relief, of 70.0p per share. The loss on ordinary activities after taxation for the period was 58,000, comprising a revenue loss of 22,000 and a capital loss of 36,000. Dividends The DP2011 General Share pool commenced the process of returning funds to Shareholders in late 2016. Following the dividend of 7.0p per DP2011 General A Share, paid on 13 August 2018, the Share pool is awaiting its final exits before announcing a closing dividend. We believe this can be achieved in the first half of 2019. Outlook Our focus for this Share pool is on completing the final investment realisations to allow the payment of a final distribution. Downing LLP SUMMARY OF INVESTMENT PORTFOLIO DP2011 GENERAL SHARE POOL as at 30 September 2018 Cost Valuation Unrealised gain/(loss) in period % of portfolio by value 000 000 000 Venture Capital investments Snow Hill Developments LLP* 750 1,178 - 48.4% Wickham Solar Limited 550 635 (15) 26.1% Oak Grove Renewables Limited 400 254 - 10.1% London City Shopping Centre Limited** 88 88 - 3.6% Mosaic Spa and Health Clubs Limited* 96 64 - 2.6% Fubar Stirling Limited 133 5 (4) 0.2% Odysian (Holdings) Limited 233 - - 0.0% 2,250 2,224 (19) 91.0% Cash at bank and in hand 208 9.0% Total investments 2,432 100.0% * non-qualifying investment DIVIDEND HISTORY DP2011 GENERAL SHARE POOL Period end Date paid Pence per share Pre-merger dividends 20.0 2016 Interim 23 December 2015 2.5 2016 Special 2 September 2016 22.5 2017 Special 14 February 2017 10.0 2018 Special 2 November 2017 30.0 2018 Interim 13 August 2018 7.0 92.0 INVESTMENT MANAGER'S REPORT DP2011 STRUCTURED SHARE POOL Portfolio valuation As at 30 September 2018, the DP2011 Structured Share Pool had a portfolio of seven investments with a value of 1.0m. The value of the portfolio is materially unchanged from 31 March 2018, with a small overall reduction in value of 17,000 during the period. Net Asset Value and results The combined Net Asset Value ('NAV') of one DP2011 Structured Ordinary Share and one DP2011 Structured A Share at 30 September 2018 stood at 9.8p, a decrease of 0.2p or 1.3% over the period after adjusting for dividends paid. Total Return stands at 104.8p per share compared to an initial cost to Shareholders, net of income tax relief, of 70.0p per share. The loss on ordinary activities after taxation for the period was 33,000 comprising a revenue loss of 7,000 and a capital loss of 26,000. Dividends The DP2011 Structured Share pool commenced the process of returning funds to Shareholders in late 2016. Following the dividend of 5.0p per DP2011 Structured A Share, paid on 13 August 2018, the Share pool is awaiting its final exits before announcing a closing dividend. We believe this can be achieved in the first half of 2019. Outlook Our focus now is on completing the final investment realisations to allow the payment of a final distribution to Shareholders. Downing LLP SUMMARY OF INVESTMENT PORTFOLIO DP2011 STRUCTURED SHARE POOL as at 30 September 2018 Cost Valuation Unrealised loss in period % of portfolio by value 000 000 000 Venture Capital investments Wickham Solar Limited 550 635 (15) 51.1% Oak Grove Renewables Limited 545 347 - 27.9% Mosaic Spa and Health Clubs Limited 64 42 - 3.4% Fubar Stirling Limited 90 4 (2) 0.3% Odysian (Holdings) Limited 155 - - 0.0% 1,404 1,028 (17) 82.7% Cash at bank and in hand 215 17.3% Total investments 1,243 100.0% DIVIDEND HISTORY DP2011 STRUCTURED SHARE POOL Period end Date paid Pence per share Pre-merger dividends 20.0 2016 Interim 23 December 2015 2.5 2016 Special 2 September 2016 32.5 2017 Special 14 February 2017 10.0 2018 Special 2 November 2017 25.0 2018 Interim 13 August 2018 5.0 95.0 INVESTMENT MANAGER'S REPORT GENERALIST SHARE POOL Portfolio activity The ongoing process of building the Generalist portfolio has progressed well during the period, with six new and four follow-on investments totalling 5.2m made during since 31 March 2018. VCT Qualifying Investments 1.1m was invested in Lignia Wood Company Limited (formerly Fibre 7 UK Limited), a producer of modified sustainable wood based in Barry, Wales. A further 991,000 was invested in Live Better With Limited, the developer of a healthcare platform aiming to help people with long-term medical conditions, focusing on non-medical products that make day-to-day life better for patients. 741,000 was invested in Glownet Limited, the developer of a technology solution for organisers of mass-attendance live events, which allows attendees to make cashless payments at the event. A further 639,000 was invested in E Fundamentals (Group) Limited, via two fundraising tranches. The company provides a data analytics service that helps brand owners improve their online revenues. 525,000 was invested in Virtual Class Limited, trading as Third Space Learning. The Company has developed an online educational platform that provides mathematics tuition to pupils studying for their Key Stage 2 exams. A further 417,000 was invested in BridgeU Corporation, the developer of a platform providing intelligent university and course matching which is tailored to the individual student. 250,000 was invested in ADC Biotechnology Limited, a company creating innovative new technology which aims to speed up, simplify and lower the costs of the processes involved in the production of new Antibody Drug Conjugates (ADCs). This investment was made alongside 892,000 from the Healthcare Share pool. 240,000 was invested in Arecor Limited, the developer of biopharmaceuticals and proprietary diabetes-related products, including ultra-fast acting insulin to treat type 1 and 2 diabetes. This investment was made alongside 880,000 from the Healthcare Share pool. 167,000 was invested in Masters of Pie Limited, an early-stage technology firm specialising in virtual and augmented reality software for manufacturing and wider enterprise solutions. A further 150,000 was invested in Xupes Limited, an online retailer of pre-owned luxury goods including designer watches, handbags, jewellery and antiques. Portfolio valuation The carrying values of the Public Equity investments have been adjusted to reflect their quoted prices as at 30 September 2018, resulting in a net reduction of 5,000. Ormsborough Limited has been reduced in value by 279,000 as a result of the delays and cost overruns on the company's pub developments. We have now put in place a plan for the completion of these developments. Both ADC Biotechnology Limited and Virtual Class Limited are currently behind on their respective plans and the carrying values of these investments have been reduced by 243,000 and 146,000 respectively. However, both investments are still in an early stage and we continue to work closely with the management teams. Destiny Pharma plc has been revalued to reflect the quoted share price as at 30 September 2018, resulting in a downward revaluation of 89,000 during the period. The business is progressing well, with the reduction in the share price being attributable to limited trading volumes during the period. Live Better With Limited has been increased in value by 73,000 to reflect the share price at which the Generalist Share pool most recently invested, alongside third parties. Net Asset Value and results At 30 September 2018, the NAV of a Generalist share stood at 92.7p, a decrease of 2.8p (2.9%) for the period. This fall is attributable to a combination of the unrealised holding losses on the Venture Capital portfolio and the 'cash-drag' of holding uninvested funds. The loss on ordinary activities after taxation for the period was 896,000 comprising a revenue loss of 130,000 and a capital loss of 766,000. Outlook The process of building the Generalist portfolio is progressing well and the Share pool is on target to meet the 80% VCT Qualifying threshold by the required date of 1 April 2020. There is a strong pipeline of investment opportunities available to the Share pool, so Shareholders should expect further investment activity over the remainder of the financial year. In addition, as the new Generalist Offer is now open, Shareholders should expect the average deal size to increase proportionately with the size of the Generalist Share pool. Shareholders will be provided with a further update on the progress made in investing the Generalist funds in the Annual Report to 31 March 2019, to be published in July 2019. Downing LLP SUMMARY OF INVESTMENT ADDITIONS GENERALIST SHARE POOL for the period ended 30 September 2018 Cost Venture Capital investments 000 Fibre 7 UK Limited 1,111 Live Better With Limited 991 Glownet Limited 741 E Fundamentals (Group) Limited 639 Virtual Class Limited 525 BridgeU Corporation 417 ADC Biotechnology Limited 250 Arecor Limited 240 Masters of Pie Limited 167 Xupes Limited 150 Total 5,231 All VCT Qualifying Investments are incorporated in England and Wales. SUMMARY OF INVESTMENT PORTFOLIO GENERALIST SHARE POOL as at 30 September 2018 Cost Valuation Unrealised gain/(loss) in period % of portfolio 000 000 000 Venture Capital investments Live Better With Limited 1,211 1,284 73 4.4% Lignia Wood Company Limited 1,111 1,111 - 3.8% Maverick Pubs (Holdings) Limited 1,000 1,000 - 3.5% E-Fundamentals (Group) Limited 917 917 - 3.2% BridgeU Corporation 811 811 - 2.8% Empiribox Limited 750 750 - 2.6% Xupes Limited 750 750 - 2.6% Glownet Limited 741 741 - 2.6% Ormsborough Limited 900 621 (279) 2.1% Volo Commerce Limited 567 567 - 2.0% Fenkle Street LLP* 321 321 - 1.1% Virtual Class Limited 525 282 (243) 1.0% Destiny Pharma plc^^ 500 274 (89) 0.9% Arecor Limited 240 240 - 0.8% Limitless Technology Limited 173 173 - 0.6% Masters of Pie Limited 167 167 - 0.6% ADC Biotechnology Limited 250 104 (146) 0.4% Snow Hill Developments LLP* 86 92 - 0.3% Mosaic Spa and Health Clubs Limited* 37 37 - 0.1% London City Shopping Centre Limited* 30 30 - 0.1% 11,087 10,272 (684) 35.5% Public Equity investments MI Downing Monthly Income Fund* 3,950 3,995 172 13.8% MI Downing UK Micro-Cap Growth Fund* 4,025 3,832 (28) 13.2% Downing Strategic Micro-Cap Investment Trust plc*^ 4,100 3,608 (164) 12.5% MI Downing Diversified Global Managers Fund* 1,800 1,848 15 6.4% 13,875 13,283 (5) 45.9% Total 24,392 23,555 (689) 81.4% Cash at bank and in hand 5,396 18.6% Total investments 28,951 100.0% * non-qualifying investment ^ listed and traded on the Main Market of the London Stock Exchange ^^ listed and trade on AIM INVESTMENT MANAGER'S REPORT HEALTHCARE SHARE POOL Portfolio activity The building of the Healthcare portfolio has progressed further during the six months to 30 September 2018, with one follow-on investment and two new investments totalling 2.7m made during the period. We has also added further resource to our Healthcare team during the period, with the recruitment of Dr Will Brooks. Will has 12 years of experience in medical research and development, academia and business in the UK and Germany. He led Healthcare investments for 15 years at Quest Management, a large European fund, where he was responsible for direct investments in Europe and the US, as well as investments in quoted companies. Will strengthens our Healthcare team significantly and, we believe, will be an invaluable asset as we continue to invest the Share pool's funds. VCT Qualifying Investments 892,000 was invested in ADC Biotechnology Limited, a company creating innovative new technology which aims to speed up, simplify and lower the costs of the processes involved in the production of new Antibody Drug Conjugates (ADCs). The company has also been provided with an investment of 250,000 from the Generalist Share pool. A further 886,000 was invested in Live Better With Limited, the developer of a healthcare platform aiming to help people with long-term medical conditions, focusing on non-medical products that make day-to-day life better for patients. To date, the Generalist Share pool has also invested 1.2m in the company, alongside the Healthcare Share pool. 880,000 was invested in Arecor Limited, the developer of biopharmaceuticals and proprietary diabetes-related products, including ultra-fast acting insulin to treat type 1 and 2 diabetes. This investment was made alongside 240,000 from the Generalist Share pool. Portfolio valuation The carrying values of the Public Equity investments have been adjusted to reflect their quoted prices as at 30 September 2018, resulting in a net uplift of 20,000. ADC Biotechnology Limited is currently behind on its plans and the carrying value of this investment has been reduced by 520,000 as a result. However, this investment is still in an early stage and we continue to work closely with the management team. Destiny Pharma plc has been revalued to reflect the quoted share price as at 30 September 2018, resulting in a downward revaluation of 89,000 during the period. The business is progressing well, with the reduction in the share price being attributable to limited trading volumes during the period. We remain confident that the business can deliver its potential. Live Better With Limited has been increased in value by 73,000 to reflect the share price at which the Healthcare Share pool most recently invested. Net Asset Value and results At 30 September 2018, the NAV of a Healthcare share stood at 88.7p, a decrease of 5.9p (6.2%) for the period. This fall is attributable to a combination of the unrealised holding losses on the Venture Capital portfolio and the 'cash-drag' of holding uninvested funds. The loss on ordinary activities after taxation for the period was 719,000 comprising a revenue loss of 93,000 and a capital loss of 626,000. Outlook The task of building the Healthcare Share portfolio is underway, with a total of 3.6m invested into VCT Qualifying investments to date. Shareholders should expect to see further investment activity over the remainder of the financial year, as the growing pipeline of investment opportunities continues to result in completed deals. In addition, as the new Healthcare Offer is now open, Shareholders should expect the average deal size to increase proportionately with the size of the Healthcare Share pool. Shareholders will be provided with a further update on the progress made in investing the Healthcare funds in the Annual Report to 31 March 2019, to be published in July 2019. Downing LLP SUMMARY OF INVESTMENT ADDITIONS HEALTHCARE SHARE POOL for the period ended 30 September 2018 Cost Venture Capital investments 000 ADC Biotechnology Limited 892 Live Better With Limited 886 Arecor Limited 880 Total 2,658 All VCT Qualifying Investments are incorporated in England and Wales. SUMMARY OF INVESTMENT PORTFOLIO HEALTHCARE SHARE POOL as at 30 September 2018 Cost Valuation Unrealised (loss)/ gain in period % of portfolio 000 000 000 Venture Capital investments Live Better With Limited 1,106 1,179 73 10.8% Arecor Limited 880 880 - 8.1% Destiny Pharma plc^^ 750 411 (134) 3.7% ADC Biotechnology Limited 892 372 (520) 3.4% 3,628 2,842 (581) 26.0% Public Equity investments MI Downing UK Micro-Cap Growth Fund* 1,125 1,067 (8) 10.2% Downing Strategic Micro-Cap Investment Trust plc*^ 700 616 (28) 9.8% MI Downing Diversified Global Managers Fund* 950 970 8 8.9% MI Downing Monthly Income Fund* 1,100 1,115 48 5.6% 3,875 3,768 20 34.5% Total 7,503 6,610 (561) 60.5% Cash at bank and in hand 4,313 39.5% Total investments 10,923 100.0% * non-qualifying investment ^ listed and traded on the Main Market of the London Stock Exchange ^^ listed and trade on AIM All VCT Qualifying Investments are incorporated in England and Wales. UNAUDITED INCOME STATEMENT for the six months ended 30 September 2018 Six months ended 30 Sep 2018 Six months ended 30 Sep 2017 Year ended 31 Mar 2018 Revenue Capital Total Revenue Capital Total Total Company Total 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 Income 215 115 330 545 - 545 765 Net gains on investments - (1,363) (1,363) - 1,440 1,440 1,425 215 (1,248) (1,033) 545 1,440 1,985 2,190 Investment management fees (203) (203) (406) (317) (317) (634) (1,192) Other expenses (197) - (197) (248) - (248) (1,214) Return/(loss) on ordinary activities before tax (185) (1,451) (1,636) (20) 1,123 1,103 (216) Tax on total comprehensive income and ordinary activities (19) - (19) (14) - (14) (160) Return/(loss) attributable to equity shareholders, being total comprehensive income for the year (204) (1,451) (1,655) (34) 1,123 1,089 (376) Return per DSO B Share - - - (0.4p) 0.5p 0.1p - Return per DSO C Share - - - - - - - Return per DSO D Share (0.4p) 0.3p (0.1p) 0.6p 4.3p 4.9p 5.8p Return per DP67 Share 0.7p (0.2p) 0.5p 0.5p 4.1p 4.6p 5.9p Return per DP2011 Gen Ordinary Share - - - 0.4p 3.4p 3.8p - Return per DP2011 Gen A Share (0.1p) (0.2p) (0.3p) - - - 4.1p Return per DP2011 Struc Ordinary Share - - - 0.4p 2.7p 3.1p - Return per DP2011 Struc A Share - (0.2p) (0.2p) - - - 3.4p Return per DP2011 Low Carbon Share - - - 1.1p (5.0p) (3.9p) (9.7p) Return per Generalist Share (0.5p) (2.9p) (3.4p) (0.9p) (0.7p) (1.6p) (6.2p) Return per Healthcare Share (1.2p) (8.5p) (9.7p) (1.3p) (1.4p) (2.7p) (9.4p) A Statement of Total Recognised Gains and Losses has not been prepared as all gains and losses are recognised in the Income Statement as noted above. UNAUDITED INCOME STATEMENT (ANALYSED BY SHARE POOL) for the six months ended 30 September 2018 Six months ended 30 Sep 2018 Six months ended 30 Sep 2017 Year ended 31 Mar 2018 Revenue Capital Total Revenue Capital Total Total B Share pool 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 Income - - - 15 - 15 30 Gains on investments - - - - 121 121 120 - - - 15 121 136 150 Investment management fees - - - (26) (26) (52) (52) Other expenses - - - (61) - (61) (55) (Loss)/return on ordinary activities before taxation - - - (72) 95 23 43 Taxation - - - (14) - (14) (34) (Loss)/return attributable to equity shareholders - - - (86) 95 9 9 Revenue Capital Total Revenue Capital Total Total D Share pool 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 Income 2 - 2 96 - 96 166 Gains on investments - 38 38 - 361 361 442 2 38 40 96 361 457 608 Investment management fees (16) (16) (32) (22) (22) (44) (92) Other expenses (15) - (15) (29) - (29) (53) Return on ordinary activities before taxation (29) 22 (7) 45 339 384 463 Taxation - - - - - - (10) Return attributable to equity shareholders (29) 22 (7) 45 339 384 453 Six months ended 30 Sep 2018 Six months ended 30 Sep 2017 Year ended 31 Mar 2018 Revenue Capital Total Revenue Capital Total Total DP67 Share pool 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 Income 117 75 192 119 - 119 247 Gains on investments - (75) (75) - 482 482 683 117 - 117 119 482 601 930 Investment management fees (19) (19) (38) (25) (25) (50) (102) Other expenses (2) - (2) (37) - (37) (62) Return on ordinary activities before taxation 96 (19) 77 57 457 514 766 Taxation (19) - (19) - - - (114) Return attributable to equity shareholders 77 (19) 58 57 457 514 652 Revenue Capital Total Revenue Capital Total Total DP2011 General Share pool 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 Income 9 - 9 132 - 132 160 Gains on investments - (19) (19) - 573 573 947 9 (19) (10) 132 573 705 1,107 Investment management fees (17) (17) (34) (36) (36) (72) (150) Other expenses (14) - (14) (40) - (40) (196) Return on ordinary activities before taxation (22) (36) (58) 56 537 593 761 Taxation - - - - - - (1) Return on ordinary activities before taxation (22) (36) (58) 56 537 593 760 Six months ended 30 Sep 2018 Six months ended 30 Sep 2017 Year ended 31 Mar 2018 Revenue Capital Total Revenue Capital Total Total DP2011 Structured Share pool 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 Income 9 - 9 86 - 86 75 Gains on investments - (17) (17) - 309 309 535 9 - (8) 86 309 395 610 Investment management fees (9) (9) (18) (20) (20) (40) (78) Other expenses (7) - (7) (23) - (23) (126) Return/(losses) on ordinary activities before taxation (7) (26) (33) 43 289 332 406 Taxation - - - - - - (1) Return/(losses) attributable to equity shareholders (7) (26) (33) 43 289 332 405 Revenue Capital Total Revenue Capital Total Total DP2011 Low Carbon Share pool 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 Income - - - 112 - 112 16 Losses on investments - - - - (370) (370) (252) - - - 112 (370) (258) (236) Investment management fees - - - (15) (15) (30) (54) Other expenses - - - (15) - (15) (442) Return/(losses) on ordinary activities before taxation - - - 82 (385) (303) (732) Taxation - - - - - - - Return/(losses) attributable to equity shareholders - - - 82 (385) (303) (732) Six months ended 30 Sep 2018 Six months ended 30 Sep 2017 Year ended 31 Mar 2018 Revenue Capital Total Revenue Capital Total Total Generalist Share pool 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 Income 61 40 101 10 - 10 62 Losses on investments - (729) (729) - (24) (24) (718) 61 (689) (628) 10 (24) (14) (656) Investment management fees (77) (77) (154) (135) (135) (270) (470) Other expenses (114) - (114) (56) - (56) (208) Losses on ordinary activities before taxation (130) (766) (896) (181) (159) (340) (1,334) Taxation - - - - - - - Losses attributable to equity shareholders (130) (766) (896) (181) (159) (340) (1,334) Revenue Capital Total Revenue Capital Total Total Healthcare Share pool 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 Income 17 - 17 1 - 1 9 Losses on investments - (561) (561) - (13) (13) (332) 17 (561) (544) 1 (13) (12) (323) Investment management fees (65) (65) (130) (38) (38) (76) (194) Other expenses (45) - (45) (12) - (12) (72) Losses on ordinary activities before taxation (93) (626) (719) (49) (51) (100) (589) Taxation - - - - - - - Losses attributable to equity shareholders (93) (626) (719) (49) (51) (100) (589) UNAUDITED BALANCE SHEET as at 30 September 2018 As at 30 September 2018 As at 30 September 2017 As at 31 March 2018 000 000 000 Fixed assets Investments 39,470 31,939 35,192 Current assets Debtors 572 1,180 695 Cash at bank and in hand 11,554 40,931 21,063 12,126 42,111 21,758 Creditors: amounts falling due within one year (211) (340) (615) Net current assets 11,915 41,771 21,143 Net assets 51,385 73,710 56,335 Capital and reserves Called up Share capital 130 180 188 Capital redemption reserve 31 31 31 Special reserve 4,463 29,203 8,021 Share premium account 44,621 39,846 43,904 Funds held in respect of shares not yet allotted 234 1,127 420 Revaluation reserve (1,637) (1,198) 234 Capital reserve - realised 4,855 4,668 4,641 Revenue reserve (1,312) (147) (1,104) Total equity shareholders' funds 51,385 73,710 56,335 Basic and diluted Net Asset Value per Share: DSO B Share - 4.444p - DSO C Share - 10.939p - DSO D Share 30.3p 78.5p 54.4p DP67 Share 50.5p 68.7p 50.0p DP2011 General Ordinary Share - 15.0p - DP2011 General A Share 13.0p 34.4p 20.3p DP2011 Structured Ordinary Share - 5.0p - DP2011 Structured A Share 9.8p 34.5p 15.0p DP2011 Low Carbon Share - 39.1p - Generalist Share 92.7p 98.7p 95.5p Healthcare Share 88.7p 98.6p 94.6p The comparative balance sheet as at 30 September 2017 includes only the Share Pools in existence at that date. UNAUDITED BALANCE SHEET (ANALYSED BY SHARE POOL) as at 30 September 2018 DSO D Shares As at 30 September 2018 As at 30 September 2017 As at 31 March 2018 000 000 000 Fixed assets Investments 1,489 3,636 3,699 Current assets Debtors 4 113 66 Cash at bank and in hand 921 2,479 582 925 2,592 648 Creditors: amounts falling due within one year (31) (51) (67) Net current assets 894 2,541 581 Net assets 2,383 6,177 4,280 Capital and reserves Called up share capital 8 8 8 Special reserve 2,629 6,205 4,201 Revaluation reserve (39) 281 471 Capital reserve - realised (148) (266) (362) Revenue reserve (67) (51) (38) Total equity shareholders' funds 2,383 6,177 4,280 DP67 Shares As at 30 September 2018 As at 30 September 2017 As at 31 March 2018 000 000 000 Fixed assets Investments 4,564 4,890 4,639 Current assets Debtors 627 621 552 Cash at bank and in hand 501 2,264 519 1,128 2,885 1,071 Creditors: amounts falling due within one year (40) (55) (116) Net current assets 1,088 2,830 955 Net assets 5,652 7,720 5,594 Capital and reserves Called up share capital 11 11 11 Capital redemption reserve 31 - 31 Special reserve 861 5,623 805 Revaluation reserve 504 603 579 Capital reserve - realised 3,581 1,308 3,581 Revenue reserve 664 175 587 Total equity shareholders' funds 5,652 7,720 5,594 DP2011 General Shares As at 30 September 2018 As at 30 September 2017 As at 31 March 2018 000 000 000 Fixed assets Investments 2,224 2,884 2,243 Current assets Debtors 1 205 - Cash at bank and in hand 208 5,675 1,569 209 5,880 1,569 Creditors: amounts falling due within one year (36) (76) (68) Net current assets 173 5,804 1,501 Net assets 2,397 8,688 3,744 Capital and reserves Called up share capital 16 16 16 Called up share capital - A Shares 18 18 18 Special reserve 903 7,489 2,209 Revaluation reserve 334 (278) 353 Capital reserve - realised 831 956 831 Revenue reserve 295 487 317 Total equity shareholders' funds 2,397 8,688 3,744 DP2011 Structured Shares As at 30 September 2018 As at 30 September 2017 As at 31 March 2018 000 000 000 Fixed assets Investments 1,028 1,398 1,045 Current assets Debtors 3 120 3 Cash at bank and in hand 215 3,390 877 218 3,510 880 Creditors: amounts falling due within one year (20) (44) (37) Net current assets 198 3,466 843 Net assets 1,226 4,864 1,888 Capital and reserves Called up share capital - Ordinary Shares 11 11 11 Called up share capital - A Shares 13 13 13 Special reserve 566 4,348 1,204 Revaluation reserve (136) (514) (119) Capital reserve - realised 591 685 591 Revenue reserve 181 321 188 Total equity shareholders' funds 1,226 4,864 1,888 Generalist Shares As at 30 September 2018 As at 30 September 2017 As at 31 March 2018 000 000 000 Fixed assets Investments 23,555 12,562 19,053 Current assets Debtors 94 77 73 Cash at bank and in hand 5,396 17,732 10,563 5,490 17,809 10,636 Creditors: amounts falling due within one year (129) (164) (215) Net current assets 5,361 17,645 10,421 Net assets 28,916 30,207 29,474 Capital and reserves Called up share capital 38 38 38 Special reserve (331) (140) (240) Share premium reserve 32,058 31,063 31,058 Revaluation reserve (1,407) (24) (718) Funds held in respect of shares not yet allotted 199 566 398 Revenue reserve (1,641) (1,296) (1,512) Total equity shareholders' funds 28,916 30,207 29,474 Healthcare Shares As at 30 September 2018 As at 30 September 2017 As at 31 March 2018 000 000 000 Fixed assets Investments 6,610 3,361 4,513 Current assets Debtors 3 - 1 Cash at bank and in hand 4,313 5,629 6,953 4,316 5,629 6,954 Creditors: amounts falling due within one year (115) (46) (112) Net current assets 4,201 5,583 6,842 Net assets 10,811 8,944 11,355 Capital and reserves Called up share capital 15 9 15 Special reserve (165) (41) (100) Share premium reserve 12,563 8,782 12,396 Revaluation reserve (893) (13) (332) Funds held in respect of shares not yet allotted 35 561 22 Revenue reserve (744) (354) (646) Total equity shareholders' funds 10,811 8,944 11,355 STATEMENT OF CHANGES IN EQUITY for the six months ended 30 September 2018 Called up Share capital Capital Redempt -ion reserve Special reserve Share premium account Funds held in respect of shares not yet allotted Revaluati -on Reserve Capital reserve -realised Revenue reserve Total 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 At 31 March 2017 144 31 30,620 10,074 16,137 (1,980) 3,331 1,055 59,412 Total comprehensive income - - - - - (225) 645 (796) (376) Transfer between reserves* - - (22,576) - - 2,439 19,548 589 - Unallotted shares - - - - 420 - - - 420 Transactions with owners Dividend paid - - - - - - (18,883) (589) (19,472) Cancellation of shares - - - - - - - - - Purchase of own shares - - (23) - - - - - (23) Issue of shares 44 - - 33,830 (16,137) - - - 17,737 Share issue costs - - - - - - - (1,363) (1,363) At 31 March 2018 188 31 8,021 43,904 420 234 4,641 (1,104) 56,335 Total comprehensive income - - - - - (1,537) 86 (204) (1,655) Transfer between reserves* - - (3,602) - - (334) 3,934 - (2) Unallotted shares - - - - (186) - - - (186) Transactions with owners Dividend paid - - - - - - (3,806) - (3,806) Cancellation of shares (58) - 58 - - - - - - Purchase of own shares - - (14) - - - - - (14) Issue of shares - - - 717 - - - - 717 Share issue costs - - - - - - - (4) (4) At 30 September 2018 130 31 4,463 44,621 234 (1,637) 4,855 (1,312) 51,385 *A transfer of 334,000 (31 March 2018: 2.4 million) representing previously recognised realised gains and losses on disposal of investments during the period has been made from the Revaluation Reserve to the Capital reserve-realised. A transfer of 3.9 million (31 March 2018: 19.5 million) representing realised gains on disposal of investments, less capital expenses and capital dividends in the period was made from Capital Reserve - realised to Special reserve. UNAUDITED STATEMENT OF CASH FLOWS Six months ended 30 September 2018 DSO D Share pool DP67 Share pool DP2011 General Share pool DP2011 Structured Share pool Generalist Share Pool Healthcare Share Pool Total 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 Cash flows from operating activities Return on ordinary activities before taxation (7) 77 (58) (33) (896) (719) (1,636) (Gains)/losses on investments (38) 75 19 17 689 561 1,323 Decrease/(increase) in debtors 62 (94) (1) - (21) (2) (56) Increase/(decrease) in creditors (38) (76) (32) (17) (87) 4 (246) Net cash (outflow)/inflow from operating activities (21) (18) (72) (33) (315) (156) (615) Corporation tax paid - - - - - - - New cash generated from operating activities (21) (18) (72) (33) (315) (156) (615) Cash flow from investing activities Purchase of investments - - - - (5,191) (2,658) (7,849) Proceeds from disposal of investments 2,248 - - - - - 2,248 Net cash inflow/(outflow) from investing activities 2,248 - - - (5,191) (2,658) (5,601) Net cash inflow/(outflow) before financing 2,227 (18) (72) (33) (5,506) (2,814) (6,216) Cash flows from financing activities Repurchase of shares - - - - (14) - (14) Issue of share capital - - - - 551 162 713 Unallotted shares - - - - (198) 12 (186) Equity dividends paid (1,888) - (1,289) (629) - - (3,806) Net cash (outflow)/inflow from financing activities (1,888) - (1,289) (629) 339 174 (3,293) Net movement in cash 339 (18) (1,361) (662) (5,167) (2,640) 9,509 Cash and cash equivalents at start of period 582 519 1,569 877 10,563 6,953 21,063 Cash and cash equivalents at end of period 921 501 208 215 5,396 4,313 11,554 Cash and cash equivalents comprise Cash at bank and in hand 921 501 208 215 5,396 4,313 11,554 Total cash and cash equivalents 921 501 208 215 5,396 4,313 11,554 UNAUDITED STATEMENT OF CASH FLOWS Six months ended 30 September 2017 DSO B Share pool DSO D Share pool DP67 Share pool DP2011 Gen Share pool DP2011 Struc Share pool DP2011 LC Share pool Generalist Share Pool Healthcare Share Pool Total Year ended 31 March 2018 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 Cash flows from operating activities Return on ordinary activities before taxation 23 384 514 593 332 (303) (340) (100) 1,103 (216) (Gains)/losses on investments (121) (361) (482) (573) (309) 370 24 13 (1,440) (1,425) Decrease/(increase) in debtors 35 141 (24) 380 244 (108) (77) - 591 1,244 Increase/(decrease) in creditors 5 (24) (50) (48) (41) (24) 155 41 14 28 Net cash (outflow)/ inflow from operating activities (58) 140 (42) 352 226 (65) (238) (46) 268 (369) Corporation tax paid (58) 10 (505) (16) (7) (6) - - (582) (637) New cash generated from operating activities (116) 150 (547) 336 219 (71) (238) (46) (314) (1,006) Cash flow from investing activities Purchase of investments - - - - - - (12,361) (3,350) (15,711) (24,366) Proceeds from disposal of investments 1,358 2,091 640 5,073 3,143 - - - 12,305 17,696 Net cash inflow/(outflow) from investing activities 1,358 2,091 640 5,073 3,143 - (12,361) (3,350) (3,406) (6,670) Net cash inflow/(outflow) before financing 1,242 2,241 93 5,409 3,362 (71) (12,599) (3,396) (3,720) (7,676) Cash flows from financing activities Repurchase of shares - - - - - - - - - (23) Issue of share capital - - - - - - 22,552 6,089 28,641 16,793 Unallotted shares - - - - - - (13,446) (1,564) (15,010) - Equity dividends paid - (197) (225) - - - - - (422) (19,472) Net cash (outflow)/inflow from financing activities - (197) (225) - - - 9,106 4,525 13,209 (2,702) Net movement in cash 1,242 2,044 (132) 5,409 3,362 (71) (3,493) 1,129 9,490 (10,378) Cash and cash equivalents at start of year 2,475 435 2,396 266 28 116 21,225 4,500 31,441 31,441 Cash and cash equivalents at end of year 3,717 2,479 2,264 5,675 3,390 45 17,732 5,629 40,931 21,063 Cash and cash equivalents comprise Cash at bank and in hand 3,717 2,479 2,264 5,675 3,390 45 17,732 5,629 40,931 21,063 Total cash and cash equivalents 3,717 2,479 2,264 5,675 3,390 45 17,732 5,629 40,931 21,063 Comparative cash flows include the Share Pools in existence at those dates. NOTES TO THE UNAUDITED FINANCIAL STATEMENTS General Information Downing FOUR VCT plc ('the Company') is a Venture Capital Trust established under the legislation introduced in the Finance Act 1995 and is domiciled in the United Kingdom and incorporated in England and Wales. Basis of accounting The unaudited half-yearly financial results cover the six months to 30 September 2018 and have been prepared in accordance with the accounting policies set out in the statutory accounts for the year ended 31 March 2018, which were prepared in accordance with the Financial Reporting Standard 102 ('FRS 102') and the Statement of Recommended Practice 'Financial Statements of Investment Trust Companies' issued in November 2014 (revised in February 2018) ('SORP'). The Company has only one class of business and derives its income from investments made in shares, securities and bank deposits. The comparative figures are in respect of the six months ended 30 September 2017 and the year ended 31 March 2018 respectively. Net Asset Value per share at the period end has been calculated on the number of shares in issue at the period end as follows: DSO D Shares 7,867,247 DP2011 Structured Shares 10,678,725 DP67 Shares 11,192,136 DP2011 Structured A Shares 12,572,817 DP2011 General Shares 15,644,066 Generalist Shares 38,477,754 DP2011 General A Shares 18,418,614 Healthcare Shares 15,138,059 Return per share for the period has been calculated on the average number of shares in issue in the period as follows: DSO D Shares 7,867,247 DP2011 Structured Shares 10,678,725 DP67 Shares 11,229,211 DP2011 Structured A Shares 12,572,817 DP2011 General Shares 15,644,066 Generalist Shares 26,206,561 DP2011 General A Shares 18,418,614 Healthcare Shares 7,372,573 Dividends Six months ended 30 September 2018 Revenue Capital Total 000 000 000 Paid in period DSO D Shares - 1,888 1,888 DP2011 General A Shares - 1,289 1,289 DP2011 Structured A Shares - 629 629 Reserves 30 Sep 2018 30 Sep 2017 31 Mar 2018 000 000 000 Capital redemption reserve 31 31 31 Special reserve 4,463 29,203 8,021 Share premium account 44,621 39,846 43,904 Funds held in respect of shares not yet allotted 234 1,127 420 Capital reserve - realised 4,855 (1,198) 4,641 Revaluation reserve (1,637) 4,668 234 Revenue reserve (1,312) (147) (1,104) Total reserves 51,255 73,530 56,147 The Revenue reserve, Special reserve and Capital reserve - realised are distributable reserves and are reduced by revaluation losses of 3.5 million. Distributable reserves at 30 September 2018 were 4.5 million. In October 2018, the balances on the Share Premium account and the capital redemption reserve were cancelled and added to the special reserve, contributing an additional 44.7 million to distributable reserves. Whilst the distributable reserves of the Company have increased significantly, the VCT regulations prevent the Company from paying dividends in respect of the Generalist and Healthcare Share classes during the first three years of their lives. Investments The fair value of investments is determined using the detailed accounting policy as shown in the audited financial statements for the year ended 31 March 2018. The Company has categorised its financial instruments using the fair value hierarchy as follows: Level 1 Reflects financial instruments quoted in an active market (quoted companies, investment funds and fixed interest bonds); Level 2 Reflects financial instruments that have prices that are observable either directly or indirectly; and Level 3 Reflects financial instruments that use valuation techniques that are not based on observable market data (investments in unquoted shares and loan note investments). Level 1 Level 2 Level 3 30 Sep 2018 Level 1 Level 2 Level 3 31 Mar 2018 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 Quoted equity 685 - - 685 908 - - 908 Public Equity investments 17,051 - - 17,051 17,036 - - 17,036 Unquoted loan notes - - 3,135 3,135 - - 3,323 3,323 Unquoted equity - - 18,599 18,599 - - 13,925 13,925 17,736 - 21,734 39,470 17,944 - 17,248 35,192 The unaudited financial statements set out herein do not constitute statutory accounts within the meaning of Section 434 of the Companies Act 2006 and have not been delivered to the Registrar of Companies. Risk and uncertainties Under the Disclosure and Transparency Directive, the Board is required in the Company's half-year results to report on the principal risks and uncertainties facing the Company over the remainder of the financial year. The Board has concluded that the key risks facing the Company over the remainder of the financial period are as follows: -compliance risk of failure to maintain approval as a VCT; -market, liquidity and counterparty risk associated with Public Equity investments; and -investment risk associated with investing in small and immature businesses. The Company's compliance with the VCT regulations is continually monitored by the Manager, who reports regularly to the Board on the current position. The Company also retains Phillip Hare & Associates LLP ('Phillip Hare') to provide regular reviews and advice in this area. Philip Hare have confirmed that all relevant tests have been complied with for the period under review. The Board considers that this approach reduces the risk of a breach of the VCT regulations. With this approach, the Board believes that these risks are reduced. In order to make VCT qualifying investments, the Company has to invest in small businesses which are often immature. It also has a limited period in which it must invest the majority of its funds into VCT qualifying investments. The Adviser follows a rigorous process in vetting and careful structuring of new investments, including taking a charge over the assets of the business wherever possible and, after an investment is made, closely monitoring the business. Going concern The Directors have reviewed the Company's financial resources at the period end and conclude that the Company is well placed to manage its business risks. The Board confirms that it is satisfied that the Company has adequate resources to continue in business for the foreseeable future. For this reason, the Board believes that the Company continues to be a going concern and that it is appropriate to apply the going concern basis in preparing the financial statements. Statutory accounts The Directors confirm that, to the best of their knowledge, the Half-Yearly Report has been prepared in accordance with the 'Statement: Half-Yearly Financial Reports' issued by the UK Accounting Standards Board, as well as in accordance with FRS 104 Interim Financial Reporting, and the half-yearly financial report includes a fair review of the information required by: - DTR 4.2.7R of the Disclosure and Transparency Rules, being an indication of important events that have occurred during the first six months of the financial year and their impact on the condensed set of financial statements, and a description of the principal risks and uncertainties for the remaining six months of the year; and - DTR 4.2.8R of the Disclosure and Transparency Rules, being related party transactions that have taken place in the first six months of the current financial year and that have materially affected the financial position or performance of the entity during that period, and any changes in the related party transactions described in the last annual report that could do so. PERFORMANCE INCENTIVE ARRANGEMENTS Performance Incentive arrangements are in place for each share pool except the DP67 pool. The various schemes are summarised as follows: DSO D Shares The Performance Incentive in respect of the DSO D Shares is structured as a simple fee when the hurdle is met. A fee is payable when: Shareholders receive total proceeds of at least 100.0p per DSO D Share (excluding income tax relief); and Shareholders achieve a tax-free compound return of at least 7% per annum (after allowing for income tax relief on investment). If the hurdle is met, the fee will be 3p per DSO D Share plus 20% of shareholder proceeds above 100.0p per D Share. The Performance Incentive is restricted to a maximum of 7.0p per DSO D Share. As at 30 September 2018, the estimated performance fee is 4.4p per DSO D Share. DP2011 General Shares/ DP2011 Structured Shares The Performance Incentive arrangements in respect of the DP2011 General and DP2011 Structured pools enable payments, by way of distributions of income, to members of the management team who subscribed for 15% of the DP2011 General A Shares and DP2011 Structured A Shares at 6.5p per share. As the proceeds paid to Shareholders have now exceeded 70.0p per DP2011 General Ordinary/A Share and DP2011 Structured Ordinary/A Share, a Performance Incentive equal to 15% of the dividends paid in respect of the A Shares becomes due to members of the management team. No further incentive is paid to management once Shareholder proceeds exceed 120.0p per DP2011 General Ordinary/A Share and DP2011 Structured Ordinary/A Share. By virtue of the dividends paid in respect of the DP2011 General A Shares and DP2011 Structured A Shares to date, of 22.0p and 25.0p respectively, members of the management team have received Performance Incentive payments, to date, of 3.1p per DP2011 General Ordinary Share and 3.6p per DP2011 Structured Ordinary Share. As at 30 September 2018, the estimated remaining Performance Incentive due to management in respect of the DP2011 General and DP2011 Structured Share pools is equivalent to approximately 2.3p per DP2011 General Ordinary Share and 1.7p per DP2011 Structured Ordinary Share. This brings the total Performance Incentive to approximately 5.4p per DP2011 General Ordinary Share and 5.3p per DP2011 Structured Ordinary Share. Generalist and Healthcare Share pools A Performance Incentive scheme is in place in respect of the Generalist and Healthcare Management Shares, which will represent 20% of the total number of Generalist and Healthcare Shares in issue. As part of the arrangement, in order to prevent dilution to the shareholders of the Generalist and Healthcare Shares, the management team will waive their voting rights granted by these Management Shares at any general meeting of the Company and income or capital distributions otherwise payable on these Management Shares will be waived unless the share class has achieved a Total Return (based on audited year end results) in excess of 1 per share for the years ended 31 March 2018, 31 March 2019 and 31 March 2020. For subsequent years, the Total Return hurdle increases by 3p per annum such that for the year ended 31 March 2021 the hurdle is 1.03, and for the year ended 31 March 2022 the hurdle is 1.06. The existing Performance Incentive scheme in respect of the Generalist and Healthcare Share pools, will also apply to the Shares issued under the new Offers. YEREVAN, 19 DECEMBER, ARMENPRESS. The Central Bank of Armenia informs Armenpress that today, 19 December, USD exchange rate down by 0.17 drams to 484.55 drams. EUR exchange rate up by 0.19 drams to 551.61 drams. Russian Ruble exchange rate down by 0.06 drams to 7.21 drams. GBP exchange rate down by 0.46 drams to 612.81 drams. The Central Bank has set the following prices for precious metals. Gold price up by 65.65 drams to 19415.66 drams. Silver price up by 0.78 drams to 228.31 drams. Platinum price up by 42.46 drams to 12229.23 drams. YEREVAN, DECEMBER 19, ARMENPRESS. Acting Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan assures that he has given reasonable answers to all the questions of the President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko , ARMENPRESS reports Pashinyan said in Dilijan, commenting on the announcement of Lukashenko that Pashinyan has no courage to criticize Russian President Putin, who is the leader in selling arms to Azerbaijan. My spokesperson has clarified that during my interactions with the President of the Russian President that issue has been periodically raised and all the questions of Lukashenko received reasonable and concrete answers. Frankly speaking, I had the impression that Mr. Lukashenko was satisfied with the answers and in my opinion everyone who was present there had the same impression. I cannot say what happened later, Pashinyan said. Edited and translated by Tigran Sirekanyan YEREVAN, DECEMBER 19, ARMENPRESS. Acting Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan promises to try to get some information from his Russian partners about based on what they announce that the USA exerts pressure on Armenia, ARMENPRESS reports Pashinyan said in Dilijan, commenting on the recent announcement of Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin. The Republic of Armenia pursues its own policy and I think if not everyone, at least many see that. And Armenia will continue that policy, the acting PM said. Referring to the announcement of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov that Moscow and Yerevan will sign a document over the bio-labs, Pashinyan announced, A similar agreement has been discussed with the Armenian authorities in the past. We have never discussed that issue with our Russian partners during the period of our Government in office. Its necessary that Mr. Lavrov clarifies what he means. To the question if Armenia observes the opportunities of obtaining weapons from the USA, Pashinyan said, We see no concrete opportunity or assistance at the moment. Edited and translated by Tigran Sirekanyan Russian Defense Minister General of the Army Sergei Shoigu summarized the results of the Ministry of Defense`s (MoD`s) 2018 activities at a meeting at the National Defense Control Center in Moscow. In 2018, the Airborne Troops (Vozdushno-Desantniye Voyska, VDV) took delivery of more than 300 weapon systems and more than 11,000 parachute kits (Picture source: Army Recognition) "The program aimed at the increase of the proportion of professional [contract] servicemen is being implemented in compliance with schedule. The number of contract soldiers will have reached 475,600 by 2025. Meanwhile, the requirement for conscript soldiers will be reduced to 220,000. All the commanders of the military districts, combined-arms armies, air defense and air force armies and divisions have combat experience. The proportion of the brigade- and regiment-level commanders who have seen combat actions has reached 96%," said Shoigu. The Strategic Nuclear Forces (SNF) are being maintained at a level that allows providing of sufficient nuclear deterrence. According to the minister, the proportion of modern hardware in service with the SNF has reached 82%. In 2018, a missile regiment armed with the Yars [NATO reporting name: SS-27 Mod.2] mobile intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) launchers became operational, while the air component of the SNF received five upgraded strategic aircraft, including one Tupolev Tu-160 (Blackjack) and four Tupolev Tu-95MS (Bear-H). According to Shoigu, the salvo capabilities of the Russian strategic nuclear submarines armed with ballistic missiles (SSBNs) were confirmed. In May, the Project 955 (Dolgorukiy-class) SSBN Yury Dologrukiy successfully launched a salvo of four Bulava submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) against a simulated target at the Kura Missile Test Range (Kamchatka Krai). It was the first the first launch of four SLBMs by a Dolgorukiy-class submarine. In November, a modernized Tu-160 strategic aircraft launched 12 Kh-101 air-launched cruise missiles [ALCMs] against a simulated target at the Pemboy Test Range (the Komi Republic). The Russian Armed Forces are shoring up their strike capabilities in order to counterbalance a global missile defense system that is being deployed by the United States of America, the minister said. The Kinzhal air-launched missile system was passing through operational evaluation and tests (OE&T). The Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-31K combat aircraft that carry the Kinzhal missile made 89 patrol flights over the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. On December 1, the Peresvet combat laser weapon system entered service. The Sarmat ICBM successfully passed through its pop-up tests. In 2019, a missile regiment armed with ICBMs with the Avangard gliding reentry vehicle will become operational. "All those assets will ensure penetration of the most sophisticated missile defense systems," Shoigu emphasized. According to him, the upgraded Project 955A type SSBN, Knyaz Vladimir, entered its trials. Compared to foreign analogues, the modernized submarines feature better stealth capabilities and reliability, the minister added. The proportion of modern hardware in service with the Land Forces (Sukhoputniye Voyska, SV) reached 48.3%, the minister said. In 2018, the service received 2,200 brand new and upgraded weapon systems, and 10 units and formations were activated. In 2018, the Aerospace Forces (Vozdushno-Kosmicheskiye Voyska, VKS) took the delivery of 126 modern fixed-wing and rotary-wing aircraft, nine space vehicles and 120 air defense systems. The shares of modern hardware in service with the Air Force (a part of the VKS) and the whole VKS reached 64% and 74%, respectively. The deliveries of new weapon systems to the Navy (Voyenno-Morskoy Flot, VMF) exceeded the plan. It resulted in the proportion of modern armaments in service with the VMF reaching 62.3%. The Navy commissioned 14 naval ships and boats, four logistics support vessels and four Bal (SSC-6 Sennight) and Bastion (SSC-5 Stooge) mobile coastal defense missile systems. In 2018, the Airborne Troops (Vozdushno-Desantniye Voyska, VDV) took the delivery of more than 300 weapon systems and more than 11,000 parachute kits. The proportion of modern hardware in service with the VDV reached 63.7%. The development of medium-range reconnaissance unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is nearing its completion. In 2019, the troops will start receiving these systems. The military takes the delivery of more than 300 tactical and short-range drones on a yearly basis. At present, the Russian Armed Forces operate some 2,100 UAVs. The minister paid specific attention to an automated command and control (C2) system that is being modernized on a priority basis. All the components of this C2 system are made only of Russian-originated items of hardware. In 2018, the Armed Forces took the delivery of 31,000 signal systems, increasing the proportion of C2 subsystems in service to 66%. The defense industry accomplished the State Defense Order (Gosoboronzakaz, GOZ) for 2018, with deliveries of some items of hardware, including fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft, reaching planned indicators. According to Shoigu, a new joint information GOZ payment system heavily contributed to this success. The system will allow the MoD to monitor prices for defense hardware in an intensive manner. In 2018, the troops` combat capabilities were checked during six large inspections, including the Vostok 2018 (East 2018) exercise that involved units from the People`s Republic of China and Mongolia. The Navy conducted a large exercise in the eastern part of the Mediterranean Sea, which involved 28 naval ships and support vessels and 36 aircraft of the Naval Aviation (Morskaya Aviatsiya, MA). "The Armed Forces have held more than 18,000 exercises and training sessions. The intensiveness of combined-arms training has increased by 16%, while the number of two-side exercises has grown by 20%," said Shoigu. In December 2017, the VKS finished the counter-terror operation in Syria. At present, almost all territory of the country (96%) has been liberated from terrorist groups. The Russian MoD now operates a small task force in Syria. The VKS forces are stationed at the Humaymim airbase, while a task force of the Navy is stationed in Tartus. The size of these groups does not exceed that of Russia`s bases in Tajikistan, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan, and the number of combat sorties has been reduced to two to four in a week. The combat experience gathered during the operation in Syria has been integrated with the Russian military`s training program. According to Shoigu, more than 12,000 young officers graduated from military schools and were dispatched to the Armed Forces. The representatives of 81 countries were being trained in Russia. This figure exceeded that of the Soviet age, Shoigu added. In 2018, the repair workshops that had been restored at the arms depots refurbished 550,000 rockets, missiles and artillery rounds, saving RUB63 billion (USD0.94 billion). These depots also received more than 590,000 modern crates for munitions. This delivery resulted in the saving of some RUB1.4 billion (USD20.8 million). In 2018, 3,573 buildings and constructions totaling 3,600,000 square meters were erected, repaired and refurbished. "The works to restore the airfield network are nearing their completion," said Shoigu. In 2013-2018, 458 buildings and constructions for 10 missile brigades armed with the Iskander-M (SS-26 Stone) tactical missile systems were erected. The MoD has built 366 arms depots of 580 planned to be constructed. These arsenals allowed the military to store 218,000 t of munitions. The minister said the remaining depots would be built in 2019. The pieces of infrastructure for strategic units armed with the Yars ICBM systems are being intensively constructed. The missile launch pads in six missile regiments have been outfitted to the full extent, while the pieces of infrastructure in seven more missile regiments became operational. In 2018, the initial production and logistics complex, Nara, started functioning. At present, it stores some 2,000 weapons systems and 18,000 t of materiel, allowing to the MoD to deactivate four of 27 outdated arms depots. The building of two such complexes, in Sebastopol and Arkhangelsk, will be started next year with the involvement of private investments within the framework of concession agreements. In 2018, twelve refueling complexes at airfields were activated and the construction of three more such systems nears its completion. Rosneft and Lukoil joined the project, investing RUB17 billion (USD253 million) in it. In 2019, the companies will start building of 12 more refueling complexes. The Severomorsk-1 airfield has been restored, and 59 buildings and constructions were erected on Alexandra Land, an island of Franz-Joseph Land. "The restoration of the Temp airfield on Kotelny Island is underway. The erection of infrastructure for the Northern Fleet`s 3rd Air Defense Division that will be activated in 2019 has started in the town of Tiksi," said the minister. According to Shoigu, a modern network of military medicine has been formed in Russia. It does not come short of the best foreign analogues, he added. In 2018, the combat potential of the Russian Armed forces increased by 11% and the proportion of modern items of hardware in service with the military reached 61.5%. Shoigu also outlined some plans for 2019. According to the minister, 31 launchers of the Yars ICBMs with the Avangard gliding reentry vehicles will become operational. The Long-Range Aviation (Dalnyaya Aviatsiya, DA) will receive four upgraded Tu-95MS strategic aircraft, while the Navy will be reinforced by the Project 955A SSBN Knyaz Vladimir. Eleven land units and formations will be activated. The Land Forces, the Navy`s Coastal Defense Troops, and the VDV will receive 719 modern armored combat vehicles, a brigade of the Iskander-M tactical missile systems, and two brigade sets of the S-300V4 air defense systems and Buk-M3 medium-range surface-to-air missile (SAM) systems. These deliveries will allow the Land Forces to increase the proportion of modern hardware to 50.8%. In 2019, the VKS, the Navy`s Naval Aviation, and the Navy`s Air Defense Troops will receive 143 brand new and upgraded aircraft, two regiments of the S-400 Triumf (SA-21 Growler) air defense systems, one S-350 Vityaz SAM system, and seven divisions of the Pantsir-S (SA-22 Greyhound) self-propelled anti-aircraft gun-missile (SPAAGM) systems. These deliveries will increase the proportions of modern hardware in service with the Air Force and the whole VKS to 65% and 81.8%, respectively. The Joint Space System is suggested to enter its operational evaluation and trials next year. In 2019, some pieces of infrastructure of air defense radars and forwards controlling posts will be built on Sredny Island, Wrangle Island and Cape Schmidt. The Navy will receive 12 ships and boats, two submarines, 12 logistics vessels, and four Bal and Bastion systems. The proportion of the modern hardware in service with the VMF will increase to 64%. By the end of 2019, the Russian Armed Forces will have been 67%-armed with modern weapon systems. The troops will also conduct 18,500 training sessions, including the Center 2019 (Centr 2019) strategic command and control exercise and the Thunder (Grom) exercise of the Strategic Missile Forces (Raketniye Voyska Strategisheskogo Naznacheniya, RVSN). Some 3,751 buildings and constructions will become operational. The flight tests of the Sarmat ICBM will be conducted at the Plesetsk spaceport and then in the Uzhurskaya Missile Division, Commander of RVSN Colonel General Sergei Karakayev said during the meeting. According to him, the missile has successfully passed through its drop tests. At present, the prototypes of the ICBM are being manufactured and some test beds are being prepared for the test launches. The tests of the Avangard gliding reentry vehicle are nearing their completion. "In 2019, a missile regiment armed with a modified C2 post and two silo-based launchers is to become operational in the Dombarovskaya Missile Division," said Karakayev. The Yoshkar-Ola Missile Division has activated a missile regiment of the Yars mobile ICBM systems. Two more Yars silo-based launcher have become operational in another silo-based missile regiment. The proportion of modern hardware in service with the Strategic Missile Troops has reached 70%. According to Karakayev, this figure will be increased to 76% in 2019. The VDV is continuing its modernization, Commander of the service Colonel General Andrey Serdyukov said during the meeting. "Several new units, including a command and control brigade, the third air assault regiment in the 76th Air Assault Division, tank battalions in three units, and companies operating electronic warfare systems and unmanned aerial vehicles, have been activated," said Serdyukov. According to him, the proportion of contract soldiers in service with the VDV has reached 70%. "More than 2,300 training sessions have been conducted," said the general. The share of the VDV`s modern hardware will reach 63% by the end of 2018. In 2018, five missile regiments, including four of the VKS and of the Northern Fleet, were armed with the S-400 air defense systems, said Commander-in-Chief of the VKS Colonel General Sergei Surovikin. "In 2018, four aviation regiments and two squadrons of the VKS were refitted with Sukhoi Su-34 [Fullback] frontline bombers, Su-35S [Flanker-E+] multirole combat aircraft, Su-30SM [Flanker-H] fighter jets, and Kamov Ka-52 [Hokum-B] combat-reconnaissance helicopters," he added. The aviation units received 126 modern aircraft and more than 100 air defense complexes. Some 60 aircraft were upgraded and 125 systems were overhauled. The proportion of the modern weapons in service with the VKS reached 74%. The service conducted more than 460 training sessions within the prescribed period. The commanders of the MoD`s military districts detailed the developments of their units in 2018. The Eastern Military District (VVO) received 937 new items of defense hardware, including the TOS-1A rocket launchers, the S-400 air defense systems, Mil Mi-8AMTSh transport-assault helicopters, and UAVs, the Commander of the district Lieutenant General Gennady Zhidko said. According to him, some 118 pieces of infrastructure will become operational in VVO in 2019. In early December, the district activated a new motor rifle division. The development of the naval component of the Strategic Nuclear Forces is a top priority for the Navy for 2019. The service will continue the construction of both green- and blue-water ships, primarily, frigates and large landing ships. The Navy will develop the Naval Infantry (Morskaya Pekhota, MP) and pay specific attention to the development of a combat vehicle for the marines. In 2018, the Northern Fleet conducted more than 30 long-range cruises, said Commander of the formation Admiral Nikolay Yevmenov. In 2019, the Northern Fleet will send its ships to the Arctic Region, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Mediterranean Sea. An Arctic expeditionary force was established on the base of the Kola Flotilla, the Commander of the formation Vice Admiral Oleg Golubev said. The Commander of the Pacific Fleet Admiral Sergey Avakiants said the Project 2038 corvette Gromkiy [Gremyashchiy-class] would be delivered to the formation by end-2018. According to him, ship will be the second surface carrier of the Kalibr [SS-N-27 Sizzler] cruises missiles in service with the Pacific Fleet. The Commander of the Southern Military District (YuVO) Colonel General Alexander Dvornikov said the YuVO had received 300 armored vehicles, more than 200 artillery and rocket/missile artillery systems, more than 150 automotive vehicles, five surface combatants, and 30 fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft in 2018. The air defense units stationed in Crimea were rearmed with the S-400 air defense systems. The YuVO`s 8th Guards Combined Arms Army received more than 200 weapon systems, including the T-72B3 and T-90A main battle tanks (MBTs), the BTR-82A armored personnel carriers (APCs), the BMP-3 infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs), and the Shturm-S self-propelled anti-tank guided missile systems. In 2018, the Western Military District (ZVO) received more than 1,600 weapon systems, said the Commander of ZVO Colonel General Alexander Zhuravlyov. The proportion of modern hardware in service with the district has reached 58%. The ZVO`s troops operate the T-72B3M MBTs, the BTR-82A APCs, the upgraded BMP-2 IFVs, the Iskander-M tactical missile systems, the S-400 air defense systems, the Su-35S multirole combat aircraft, and the Orlan-10 UAVs. In 2019, the troops of the district will be involved in the Union`s Shield 2019 (Shchit Soyuza 2019) Russian-Belarusian exercise and the Interaction 2019 (Vzaimodeystviye 2019) exercise with the state members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). Of course, for council members and their friends, exceptions are made, but they can travel only to Australia. It is unclear why this is so, but Ms Kekedo also seems to feel she does not need to explain her decisions. She believes no member of the university staff should travel abroad and that meetings and agreements can be done remotely through video-conferencing. The current chancellor Jean Kekedo apparently has a great nostalgia for the 1970s and has remarked several times that she wants to go back to those simpler times. It is a sad tale of regression which forces me to speak out in an effort to reverse this trend. The current management and university council, however, seem to be making an effort to bring the university back to its roots in the 1970s, whether intentionally or through sheer ignorance, incompetence or carelessness. VERONA, Italy - When I was vice chancellor of the Papua New Guinea University of Technology (known as Unitech) from 2012 to 2018, we worked hard to bring it into the 21st century. Kondom Agaundo's grave - the words above the tombstone read, 'Tomorrow my sons & daughters will come'. Even in the 1960s Kondom knew a good education was essential for a good future The University Act makes the chancellor the ceremonial head of the university, but Ms Kekedo acts as an executive, accountable only to the government. As a result, the council has lost its independence and become a rubber stamp controlled by Waigani. The chancellor has also said frequently that the university should not waste money on the dining hall and in providing meals for students, suggesting that it may remain closed next year. Just like when she went to school in colonial times. Jean Kekedo The current university management has failed to understand simple commercial realities and continues to accuse the catering contractor of overcharging although there has been no breach of contract conditions. This same contractor has acted with goodwill and in good faith. For example, at its own expense it rebuilt a temporary mess facility after the old mess burned down in the riots of June 2016. The management this year frittered away funds to rebuild the dining hall so there will be no new mess building any time soon. Currently, the university owes the contractor for several months service amounting to almost K4 million, making it the largest private creditor. The university management has stubbornly refused to find a solution and is now on a long vacation. In these post-colonial days, it has become acceptable to insult foreigners and expel them from the country for no reason other than dislike. The recent debacle of my hasty separation from my job and subsequent arrest on false charges by corrupt police in Port Moresby, destroyed the international reputation and credibility of the university which I had worked hard to restore. As a result, it is now virtually impossible for Unitech to hire qualified academics with a PhD who have had experience working at world class universities. The university is now bottom feeding and only foreign academics with few options are coming to work at the Unitech. The university model the council seems to have in mind is of an autarchic (self-sufficient) village, not caring about the rest of the world, closed off from it, brandishing a unique knowledge uninformed by recent scientific advance or the ideas of outsiders. Leaving aside these absurdities, lets focus on the basic conditions for research, teaching and learning which represent the core mission of any university. Unitech is becoming an example of a unique experiment - not in education but in the replication of ignorance. The late Chimbu chief Kondom Agaundo's vision of the 1960s is not being realised: he had wanted a well-educated PNG but the current generation of Papua New Guineans are mostly not getting a better education. As with many developing country universities, when I became Unitech vice chancellor in 2012, students had no access to learning materials, since the library did not contain current or useful books or other literature. A survey found that over 35,000 books had probably been stolen and never replaced. These were, of course, the most useful books. In 2012, there was no reliable internet and students did not have access to or possess internet enabled devices such as smartphones, tablets or laptops. In just the few years after 2014, we improved the power supply, established a good internet service and provided students with laptops. This was done without any extra funding or help from the government. O3B satellite earth station At first, internet access seemed an unsolvable conundrum. PNG had (and still has) no reliable fibre network. In 2014, the president of Divine Word University made me aware of the O3B satellite system. During leave, I visited O3B headquarters in The Hague and convinced them to take on their first and only university client. We then built an earth station with two tracking satellite dishes, which was opened by then higher education minister Malakai Tabar and went operational on 1 June 2015. The need to upgrade the internal campus network was immediately evident but, regrettably, this is where things went bad. The newly recruited IT director seemed to have other priorities and his eyes left the ball. A large investment in upgrading the wifi network turned sour and coverage got worse. New investment was needed to address the situation. Another spoiler attempt came from Huawei, which wanted to provide the routers. The offer however was not transparent. The company made a promise to set up a service centre in Lae, which never materialised. As a consequence, the university wisely stuck with Cisco, which offered good support. Sharing and exchanging knowledge is multiplying knowledge. Since no country in the world has a monopoly on knowledge or talent, universities from their inception in Italy in the 11th century have always had an open, international outlook. In fact, this is a condition for assuring a vibrant academic learning environment. During my tenure as Unitech vice chancellor, I was proud to have hosted the first visiting professors in 2016 from India and in 2017 also from Australia and Europe at minimal cost to the university. Many of these visitors stayed for a whole semester and taught both undergraduate and graduate courses. The failure of management to follow through on arrangements with foreign universities, which in 2018 and 2019 would have sent dozens of visiting scientists a year, means that this type of knowledge exchange has stopped. The current generation of students do not have post-colonial hang-ups. They just demand better services and qualified and experienced lecturers. The recent actions of the current council and management do little to create an acceptable learning environment or improve the education of students. The PNG governments and Unitech councils hostile actions this year towards me and my colleague vice chancellor John Warren (of the University of Natural Resources and Environment), also forced to flee the country, have now made it virtually impossible to recruit qualified and experienced foreign academics. Without knowledge exchange and the appointment of strong academic leaders, the external professional accreditation of engineering programs will not occur. Industry support will diminish. This year the annual graduate survey did not take place, showing there is no interest in finding out whether students are employable. A university has a different mission and requires a different kind of leadership than a village, whose purpose is to provide security and conditions for basic subsistence to its inhabitants. It is painful to watch how the university council and management are discovering at the expense of students that it is much easier to throw rocks than to use them to build bridges. Let's hope better leadership will soon be restored. WARNING DISTRESSING CONTENT: Two young Scandinavian women trekking in the High Atlas mountains in Morocco have been found brutally murdered. The bodies of Louisa Vesterager Jespersen and Maren Ueland were discovered on Monday at a campsite above the tourist village of Imlil, a well-known departure point for mountain hikes, where they had pitched their tent for the night. The women were found with their throats cut, Moroccan authorities said on Tuesday as they announced the arrest of a suspect in the nearby city of Marrakesh. Ms Vesterager Jespersen, a 24-year-old Danish student, and her Norwegian friend Maren Ueland, 28, were on a month-long trip to Morocco. Danish hiker Louisa Vesterager Jespersen, left, and her Norwegian travel companion Maren Uelan were found dead at a campsite above the tourist village of Imlil. Images: Facebook / Louisa Jespersen & Maren Uelan An Imlil hotelier mentioned three homeless people from a poor area of Marrakesh whom, he said, had pitched their tent near the two women. One of the victims was found inside the tent, the other outside, decapitated, according to the hotelier who said he arrived at the crime scene before the gendarmerie. Another local restaurant owner said the backpackers were cheerful and energetic when they passed through. They told me that they intended to scale Toubkal, he said, referring to the highest peak in North Africa which stands at 4,167 metres. The bodies were discovered on Monday at a campsite above the tourist village of Imlil. Image: AP The restaurateur, who requested anonymity, said he had suggested putting them in contact with a guide but they declined the offer. According to her Facebook page, Jespersen had studied in Norway to be a guide. Ms Uelands mother, Irene Ueland, meanwhile told Norwegian broadcaster NRK that the pair were well prepared. Her priority was safety. The girls took every precaution before going on this trip, she said. Slayings labelled as an act of terror Moroccan prosecutors say the suspect arrested in the murders is allegedly connected to a terrorist group. Map locating the zone in the High Atlas mountains where the backpackers were murdered. Image: AFP Moroccos state television reported on Wednesday that authorities consider the slayings of the young women from Denmark and Norway to be a terrorist act. Local media reported that the suspect allegedly had links to the Islamic State group. Story continues The killing has shocked Morocco, where attacks on foreigners are extremely rare. The Rabat public prosecutors office said in a statement Wednesday that the one suspect arrested so far has affiliations to a terrorist group, without naming the group. Three other suspects have been identified and but are still on the run, a security official told The Associated Press. The Greek Supreme Court on Wednesday ordered the extradition to France of Russian Alexander Vinnik, who headed the Bitcoin exchange BTC-e, on suspicion of money laundering, judicial sources said. The ruling appears to resolve a legal tug-of-war in which the court also has had to consider rival extradition requests from Russia and the United States. Vinnik has been held in custody since his arrest in July 2017 at the northern Greek tourist resort of Halkidiki. In an October 2017 ruling the court accepted his extradition to the United States but then also agreed to the request from Moscow. On Wednesday it decided he should instead be sent to France since Paris had submitted a European Arrest Warrant against him that offered a more direct procedure, one of the sources said. The French warrant says Vinnik defrauded more than 100 people in six French cities between 2016 and 2018. Vinnik had told the court that he preferred to be extradited to Russia, where he is wanted on fraud charges totalling 9,500 euros ($10,800). BTC-e, founded in 2011, became one of the world's largest and most widely used digital currency exchanges. A judicial source said BTC-e was also suspected of having played a role in online extorsion and other cyber-crimes. Vinnik is also being investigated in connection with the hacking of an earlier earlier digital currency exchange Mt. Gox, one of the pioneers in the field before collapsing in 2014. A US court indicted Vinnik last year on 21 charges ranging from identity theft and facilitating drug trafficking to money laundering. The US Treasury Department has already slapped BTC-e with a $110 million fine for "wilfully violating" US anti-money laundering laws. Vinnik himself has been ordered to pay $12 million. In a separate ruling, the Supreme Court also ordered the extradition to France of convicted crime boss Lasha Shushanashvili, a Georgian national. France suspects Shushanashvili of being part of a Georgian criminal network known as Vory v Zakone -- Thieves in Law -- along with his brother Kakhaber. He was first arrested in Greece in 2012, where he got a 14-year sentence for leading an international mafia network. In France he is accused of having carried out several thefts but may yet be returned to Greece for trial on other crimes there. Russian Alexander Vinnik, centre, has been held in custody since his arrest last year on suspicion of money laundering San Jose, California, Dec. 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- SAN JOSE, Calif. Dec. 19, 2018 Dtex Systems, the leader in user behavior intelligence and insider threat detection, today published the Dtex 2018 Privacy & Cybersecurity Index. The index reveals that a majority of Americans believe it is acceptable for organizations spanning multiple industries to conduct user digital activity and behavior monitoring when it is done to provide defense against threats and breaches. It also shows that a vast majority of Americans would lose trust in organizations that conceal monitoring programs. To compile the index, Dtex commissioned The Harris Poll to conduct an online survey that polled more than 2,000 Americans.* Scandals are consuming Facebook and other companies that collect massive data volumes. These are causing a surge in privacy demands and regulations that security and risk professionals need to contend with, said Rajan Koo, SVP of Customer Engineering, Dtex Systems. They are now looking for new and innovative ways to monitor human behaviors and activities without violating privacy or trust. This report will help them to do both. The survey revealed many key findings, including: Social Media: When asked if it is ever acceptable for social media companies to conduct digital activity monitoring over users to provide defense against threats and data breaches, 51 percent of Americans indicate it is. Banks: When asked if it is ever acceptable for banks to conduct digital activity monitoring over customers to provide defense against threats and data breaches, 65 percent of Americans indicate it is. Government: When asked if it is ever acceptable for government organizations to conduct digital activity monitoring over citizens to provide defense against threats and data breaches, 61 percent of Americans indicate it is. Retail: When asked if it is ever acceptable for retail companies to conduct digital activity monitoring over shoppers to provide defense against threats and data breaches, 60 percent of Americans indicate it is. Deception: 79 percent of Americans would trust a company less if they discovered that it was monitoring consumers digital activities without their knowledge. Access the full report: Dtex 2018 Privacy & Cybersecurity Index (https://www2.dtexsystems.com/2018-dtex-harris-privacy-security-index) Earlier this year, Dtex released findings from the same poll. It revealed how American employees feel about employer digital activity monitoring programs. Those results are summarized at the end of the index. *Survey Methodology This survey was conducted online within the United States by The Harris Poll on behalf of Dtex Systems from June 14 to 18, 2018 among 2,024 U.S. adults ages 18 and older, among whom 833 are employed full-time. This online survey is not based on a probability sample and therefore no estimate of theoretical sampling error can be calculated. For complete survey methodology, including weighting variables and subgroup sample sizes, please contact Joe Franscella. Visit the new website: www.dtexsystems.com Follow Dtex on Twitter: https://twitter.com/DtexSystems Join Dtex on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/dtex-systems Like Dtex on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Dtex-Systems-297181017056254 About Dtex Systems Dtex turns employees, executives, contractors and partners into trusted insiders. The award-winning Dtex Advanced User Behavior Intelligence Platform reduces insider threat risk by providing intelligence about behaviors and activities across massive numbers of distributed users. Dtex combines the largest library of known malicious and negligent behaviors, machine learningand advanced analytics. This gives the platform the power to detect insider threats in near real time, reduce false positives, and free security and risk professionals from having to spend time analyzing overwhelming volumes of data and logs. Dtex is scalable and deploys quickly. It only collects light-weight data needed to identify risky behaviors, which never slows network, endpoint or user performance. Patented anonymization capabilities protect privacy and ensure compliance. Investors include Wing Venture Capital and Norwest Venture partners. Customers include the worlds leading banks, manufacturers, healthcare organizations, government agencies, and law firms. The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and Williams Formula 1 Racing are among customers using Dtex to reduce insider threat risk. https://www.dtexsystems.com/ From the countries who share the Democratic Republic of Congo's vast border -- some of which stirred its devastating conflicts -- to international powers invested in peace efforts, the impact of upcoming elections looks set to reverberate far and wide. Here are some of the implications of the DR Congo's crucial December 23 vote to replace President Joseph Kabila, for nations in the intertwined region and the international community working in the resource-rich country. - Ashes from a regional fire - It has been over a decade since Kinshasa's neighbours fought Africa's "Great War" on its soil, but from across its borders they still jealously guard their interests in the troubled nation. The current regime in the DRC is the direct result of its neighbours' interventions in two conflicts between 1996 and 2003 that drew in troops from up to seven African countries and left millions dead. The regional fire was lit by the 1994 Rwandan genocide, as some two million mostly Hutu refugees including those who led the massacres, flooded into eastern Congo. Rebels used their camps as a new base from which to stage attacks in Rwanda, prompting Kigali to invade the DRC. Rwanda also, with the help of Uganda, backed a Congolese rebellion which led to the overthrow of strongman Mobutu Sese Seko and saw Laurent-Desire Kabila become president in 1997. Barely a year later a second conflict began. Kabila turned his back on his Rwandan and Ugandan allies who then invaded the country again and fought Congolese troops backed by troops from Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe and Chad. Burundi also carried out limited operations, while Libya and Sudan offered support to Kinshasa. Kabila was assassinated in 2001 and his son Joseph Kabila became president. In the years since, the DRC has maintained complex ties with its neighbours, marked by mistrust and the plundering of its considerable natural resources. "The development of mineral riches, controlled by powerful Congolese, Rwandan and Ugandan interests, is growing and thriving" in the restive east of the country, said Andre Guichaoua, a professor at the Paris-Sorbonne university. - 'Co-managed destabilisation' - While the resource extraction continues, those involved have increasingly begun to work side by side. "Over the course of time, in the eastern Congo, the different networks plundering resources who were rivals, realised that they could all get along without fighting to the death," said Thierry Vircoulon, a researcher at the French Institute of International Relations (IFRI). He said the disappearance of clearly "Rwanda-backed" rebel groups believed to have been deployed to protect these mineral interests -- such as CNDP in the 2000s or M23 in the early 2010s -- is evidence of this cohabitation. Guichaoua described the situation in the east as a "co-managed destabilisation". - Gold, diamonds and oil - In its June 2018 report, the UN Security Council's group of experts on the DRC said that "a large part of the gold sold by Uganda and Rwanda was illegally extracted from neighbouring countries, including the DRC". In Angola, the government of President Joao Lourenco has pushed for the holding of elections, and for Kabila not to be a candidate. Luanda is keen protect its offshore oil interests -- which Kinshasa argues are in its waters -- and resume control of diamond mining in the north. Some 400,000 Congolese miners were recently expelled or fled Angola after a massive operation against diamond smuggling. - Firming friendships - Further to the south, Burundi and Tanzania have better relations with Kinshasa, based on similar ideological views and other common interests. Kinshasa and Bujumbura signed a cooperation deal to fight the Burundian opposition which sought refuge in South-Kivu after a political crisis broke out in the country in 2015. And in Tanzania, where the Kabila clan lived in exile before taking power and still has financial interests, President John Magufuli's African nationalist views echo those of his counterpart in Kinshasa. - International community snubbed - The United Nations has been present in DRC for 20 years, and its MONUSCO peacekeeping force is one of the biggest in the world. However in the name of "national sovereignty" Kinshasa has refused any logistical or financial assistance from the international community, as well as the presence of any western observers. Kinshasa has even refused the assistance of MONUSCO aviation in transporting electoral material across the country of 2.3 million square kilometres (890,000 square miles), which has only 3,400 kilometres of paved roads. "We are not a country of beggars," said President Joseph Kabila. Only 200 African observers are being allowed to observe voting in 80,000 polling stations available to the 40 million registered voters. The DR Congo will hold a crucial vote on December 23 to replace President Joseph Kabila In the years since the conflict ended and Rwanda pulled troops out of the country, the DRC has maintained complex ties with its neighbours The United Nations Stabilisation Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO) is one of the world's biggest peacekeeping missions Mining is the source of most of the country's exports The country will vote this month to replace President Joseph Kabila, after 17 years in power Parts of France have become "unlivable" because of migrants, Brazil's president-elect Jair Bolsonaro has said, using rhetoric similar to Donald Trump's before he became the US president. Bolsonaro, who takes office on January 1, made the controversial remarks late Tuesday in a live video feed on his Facebook page. The extreme right-wing politician was elected in October on a hardline anti-crime and anti-corruption platform and has been dubbed the "Tropical Trump." "Everybody knows what is happening in France. Some parts of France are simply unlivable," Bolsonaro said on Facebook. He said that, despite a good welcome by the French, migrants were not integrating. "You know how those people are, right? They have something in them, they don't give up their roots and they want to make their culture, their acquired rights and their privileges prevail," he said. "France is suffering because of that. Part of the population, part of the military, some of the institutions are starting to complain about that. We don't want that for Brazil." It was not clear what recent events prompted Bolsonaro's outburst. Nor did he explicitly say whether he was referring to Muslim migrants, though those with North African heritage form the biggest group of migrants in France after Europeans. France is currently in the grip of "yellow vest" anti-government protests unrelated to migration. It has been rocked by a number of recent deadly attacks, notably in November 2015 in which 130 people were murdered in Paris by radicalized French- and Belgian-born gunmen, and last week in the city of Strasbourg where a French-born ex-convict killed five people in a rampage claimed by the Islamic State group. France's embassy in Brazil declined to comment on Bolsonaro's declarations. - Aligning with Trump - The rhetoric by Bolsonaro recalled that employed by Donald Trump in December 2015 as he was campaigning to become US president. Speaking to US network MSNBC, Trump claimed "they have sections in Paris that are radicalized, where the police refuse to go there. They're petrified. The police refuse to go in there." Trump also said parts of London were similarly dangerous, and used those assertions to justify a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States." After becoming president, Trump issued an order that largely bars citizens from five Muslim-majority countries getting US visas. Bolsonaro did not say whether he would impose tighter immigration controls, but did repeat that he will pull Brazil out of a nonbinding global migration pact ratified by the UN General Assembly on Wednesday. "Unfortunately, Brazil... signed the pact. We are not against migrants, but we must be have very rigorous criteria for those entering Brazil. We are going to denounce and revoke this pact on migration," he said. - Venezuela, Cuba - In the same Facebook video, Bolsonaro said he would do everything possible to counter the governments of Venezuela and Cuba, calling their leaders "dictators" and saying neither was invited to his inauguration. Before and after his October election Bolsonaro has signalled he wants closer ties with the United States and with Trump. Bolsonaro said in November his intention was to move his country's embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, joining the US mission there, although added "it hasn't been decided yet." Almost all other countries believe the status of Jerusalem first needs to be resolved through negotiations. Israel claims all the city as its capital, while Palestinians claim the eastern part as the capital of their future state. Brazil's president-elect has also followed Trump in taking a harder stance against China, his country's biggest trading partner, although members of his incoming government warn any actions against the Asian powerhouse could crimp the economy. Last month, Trump's national security advisor, John Bolton, visited Bolsonaro and said the US anticipated a "dynamic partnership" with the Brazilian leader. Brazilian president-elect Jair Bolsonaro (R) has often been compared to US President Donald Trump, to the point that he has been nicknamed the "Tropical Trump" For three years, Mosul's women were covered in black from head to toe and its men had to keep their beards long. Salons were shut, and plastic surgery considered a crime. But more than a year after the Islamic State group's ouster, the Iraqi city is flaunting its more fabulous side. Need to zap away a scar or a burn? Cover up a bald spot with implants? Whiten teeth for a dazzling smile? Mosul's plastic surgeons and beauticians are at your service. Raji Najib, a Syrian living in Mosul, recently made use of the city's aesthetic offerings. The 40-year-old had long been self-conscious of his bald spots, until his Iraqi friends told him what had worked for them -- hair implants at a new clinic in their hometown. "They told me the equipment was modern, the nurses competent and the prices good," Najib said. In Mosul, the average hair implant procedure costs around $800, including the follow-up after the operation. Nearly 90 kilometres (50 miles) to the east in Iraq's Arbil, or even further north in Turkey, the same operation costs at least $1,200. Plasma injections to prevent hair loss cost around $63 in Mosul, but at least $20 more in Arbil. In addition to the difference in price, Najib would have had to put up money and time for travel. "Going to a clinic in Mosul is much easier, as I don't have time to travel outside Mosul," he told AFP. - Makeovers in Mosul - Decades ago, only one department in Mosul's hospitals offered plastic surgery, and only to those who had a severe accident or were trying to eliminate a physical handicap from birth. Mosul, and Iraq more broadly, have been shaken by waves of conflict since the 2003 US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein and paved the way for a sectarian war. Religious hardliners forced women to cover up or stay at home, and extremists in particular targeted hairdressers, many of whom closed their shops in fear. Another shock came in 2014 when the Islamic State group swept across much of Iraq's north, with the jihadists making Mosul their de facto capital. The religious police of IS enforced ultra-strict rules on dress for all residents, making sure women showed no skin and men wore ankle-length capris and long beards, with no moustache. The city has since gotten a makeover. Five beauty clinics have opened since Mosul was recaptured last summer by Iraqi security forces, and they can hardly keep up with the flow of customers, most of them men. Muhannad Kazem told AFP he was the first to relaunch his city's beauty business with his clinic, Razan, which offers teeth whitening services and other dental care. His secret? "The employees came from Lebanon, and the treatments and machines were imported," said Kazem, 40. - Scars, inside and out - The city's medical services were hit hard by IS's three-year reign and the months-long battle to oust it. The available hospital beds in Mosul dropped from 3,657 before 2014 to just 1,622 last year, according to the local human rights commission. But the city is rebuilding, and one new commercial centre houses the Diamond Dental Clinic in the bottom floor, with the Shahrazad beauty centre upstairs. A poster at the entrance advertises what's on offer: injections of botox and other fillers, slimming surgeries, dermatological operations, and more. Inside the glossy interior are men and women alike, an unthinkable sight under the iron-fisted rule of IS. A female employee carefully injected serums to prevent hair loss into the scalp of a woman gritting her teeth, one of the dozen customers streaming in per day. Beautician Alia Adnan said the physical and mental impact of the jihadists on people in Mosul has been long-lasting. "They have hair or skin problems because of the stress and the pollution that Mosul's residents were exposed to, both under IS and during the clashes," she told AFP. Beauty clinics are now doing a bustling trade in Mosul Most customers at the new clinics are men Members of the Iraqi security forces recently celebrated in the city to mark the first anniversary of the victory over the Islamic State (IS) group The religious police of IS enforced ultra-strict rules on dress for all residents, making sure women showed no skin and men wore ankle-length capris and long beards, with no moustache A safety panel set up by US President Donald Trump in the wake of numerous school shootings recommended Tuesday that schools consider arming staff, using veterans as guards and reversing Obama-era guidelines. The Federal Commission on School Safety panel, led by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, was set up after the February massacre in Parkland, Florida, when a former student shot dead 17 people, sparking mass gun control protests. The commission rejected calls to increase the minimum age required for gun purchases, arguing in its 180-page report that most school shooters obtain their weapons from family members or friends. Instead it suggested arming staff -- even teachers in some circumstances -- "for the sake of effectively and immediately responding to violence." School districts where police responses could be slower, such as rural districts, may benefit in particular, the commission said. It also recommended education authorities hiring military veterans and former police officers who "can also serve as highly effective educators." The report pushes for a review of disciplinary guidelines introduced in 2014 under former president Barack Obama, which suggested alternatives to suspension and explusion to tackle discrimination against black and Latino students. The commission's report said the measure has had "a strong negative impact on school discipline and safety." The American Civil Liberties Union condemned that proposition. "The Trump administration is exploiting tragedies to justify rolling back school children's civil rights protections, despite the lack of any evidence linking school discipline reform to school shootings," it said in a statement. Over 219,000 US students have been involved in a school shooting since the April 1999 Columbine High School massacre, according to figures collated by the Washington Post. More than 219,000 US students have been involved in a school shooting since the April 1999 Columbine High School shooting, the aftermath of which is seen in Littleton, Colorado US President Donald Trump, speaking during a roundtable discussion about school safety at the White House, is seen next to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos who led a federal commission on the topic A UN investigation showed Wednesday that two tunnels allegedly dug by the Lebanese militia group Hezbollah snaked under the Israel side of the tense border -- but the probe did not find any exits located there. It called the findings a "serious violation" of a UN resolution that ended the brutal 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon, which was triggered by a Hezbollah raid on the same border. "A thorough investigation to establish the trajectories and points of origin of the identified tunnels is a complex task," said Jean-Pierre Lacroix, the deputy head of UN peacekeeping operations. "The tunnels are between 29 and 46 meters below ground, difficult to detect and in close proximity to areas sensitive to both parties," he told the Security Council Wednesday. Calling the tunnels "a serious violation of Resolution 1701" -- which ended the 2006 war -- Lacroix said they "do not appear thus far to have exit points on the Israeli side." He said two of the four tunnels that had been detected stretched south of the so-called Blue Line, the demarcation line between Lebanon and Israeli drawn up by the UN to verify Israel's withdraw from Lebanon in 2000. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had earlier urged the Security Council to condemn Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran, for digging cross-border "attack tunnels" and to demand Lebanon prevent such activity from its territory. Israel's UN ambassador Danny Danon presented the Security Council with aerial photos that he said proved Hezbollah's presence below the Blue Line. "With a terror base of operations on the Israeli border, if Hezbollah dares to attack Israel, it will bring the ruin of Lebanon," he said. Israeli soldiers stand bye the concrete barrier erected along the border with Lebanon near the northern Israeli town of Metula: a Un investigation said two tunnels dug by Hezbollah stretched beneath the border line and into Israeli territory The UN Security Council Tuesday urged all parties to reject violence five days before the presidential election in the Democratic Republic of Congo. At least six people have been killed in violence in the run-up to the December 23 election, which will see the conflict-ridden central African country emerge from President Joseph Kabila's 17-year rule. Kinshasa denies any link between the bloodshed and campaigning. The Security Council asked all sides "to continue to reject violence of any kind, exercise maximum restraint in their actions and ... refrain from provocations such as violence and violent speeches and to address their differences peacefully," a UN statement said. The members also underscored the importance of ensuring the safety and security of candidates and voters during the campaign period. Meanwhile, they reiterated their call on all parties to engage peacefully and constructively in the electoral process, to ensure transparent, peaceful and credible elections. "While welcoming the progress in the technical preparation of the polls, the members of the Security Council are worried about" incidents of violence marring the final days the electoral campaign, the statement added. As such, the council "calls on the DRC government to quickly investigate these events," it said. The upcoming election will decide the successor to current President of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Joseph Kabila AUBURN Jeff Delbel evaluated the work of others for decades as a full-time Cayuga Community College professor, but he received some praise himself last month. Delbel, who served as both a teacher and administrator at CCC and still teaches online classes while being semi-retired, received the People's Choice Award at the CNY Book Awards held by the YMCA of Greater Syracuse's Downtown Writers Center. The winning book, Delbel's 2017 novel "Salvatore," is a continuation of his 2016 work, "The Flight of Jimmy Eagleson," which won the same award in 2017. "Salvatore" was selected for the honor by authors and other members of the central New York literary community, according to a CCC press release. The book's title character, Salvatore, is a man who buys and sells real estate in 2008, during the Great Recession. Haunted by dreams, Salvatore learns more about an incident from his past and winds up traveling the globe. He was a character in "The Flight," which focuses on a lawyer named Jimmy Eagleson in 2003. Delbel said the Salvatore character "takes over a room whenever he walks in," so he stuck out as the right character to focus on in his follow-up to "The Flight." While "Salvatore" is more of "an odyssey" than "The Flight," Delbel said, both books are character-driven. Delbel had drafted "The Flight," and then on the advice of an author friend, he put that book in a drawer and wrote the bulk of "Salvatore" so he would already know where the second installment was heading. He then finished "The Flight." Some of Delbel's experiences helped shape his writing, sometimes in indirect ways. He was a professor and dean in CCC's telecommunications program before working as dean of enrollment and student development from 1986 to 1996. He said that time was endlessly stressful, as there was always a crisis to contend with. The work he wanted to focus his attention on constantly seemed further and further away as he dealt with various issues that would pop up, he said. He compared his attitude toward that position to the attitude the Jimmy Eagleson character has toward his job as a lawyer, in that he doesn't like it, but does it anyway. Delbel said that period was still productive, though: Lattimore Hall was built and CCC's Fulton campus was opened during that time. Although Delbel found his decade in administration to be exhausting, he said it was still valuable, as it helped him realize his love of teaching. He said teaching provided closure, and he was able to get through each semester and see the progress students made from the beginning of the class to the end. In conversation, Delbel was visibly excited about teaching, his eyes wide with an ear-to-ear grin on his face. He currently teaches online courses in philosophy and though it's been a few years since he was last in a classroom, he said CCC taught him the importance of teaching. He said he believes the college gives those who work hard an opportunity to succeed, and is a good environment for those in the arts. "It was an encouraging, stimulating atmosphere," he said. "I think that affected me quite a bit." Some of his other teaching experiences include being a part of CCC's international studies program. He taught in places such as London and Amsterdam, which are both locations Salvatore travels to in the book. Delbel also fondly recalled his time in CCC's telecommunications department, saying that it was constantly bustling with engaged students. Delbel said his retirement from teaching full-time in 2008 freed up time for him to write. He isn't showing any signs of slowing down, either, as he hopes to have a third book, "Kate's Gift" starring a woman named Kate who was featured in the previous two novels out by fall 2019. He has a fourth book, an adventure story set in in Panama, "sketched in my mind." Delbel said he has been thrilled to commit his ideas to paper. He came up with the idea for "The Flight" in the '90s, and told himself at one point that unless he stopped himself from teaching so much he was never going to complete the book. "If I hadn't written these books, it would have been a nagging thing to me because it would have been something that I felt I needed to do, so I feel the satisfaction of having done what I felt I needed to do," he said. Staff writer Kelly Rocheleau can be reached at (315) 282-2243 or kelly.rocheleau@lee.net. Follow him on Twitter @KellyRocheleau. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Be the first to know Get local news delivered to your inbox! Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. AUBURN An Auburn man charged with multiple felonies for illegally selling narcotics pleaded guilty in Cayuga County Criminal Court Tuesday morning. Police: Auburn man illegally sold narcotics, possessed weapons An Auburn man was arrested Thursday and charged with multiple felonies and misdemeanors for In court, Sease, 58, pleaded guilty to three charges to satisfy his 18-charge indictment. He pleaded guilty to third-degree criminal sale of a controlled substance, a class B felony, third-degree criminal possession of a narcotic drug, a class B felony and third-degree criminal possession of a weapon, a class D felony. Sease admitted to both possessing about 15 grams of crack cocaine and selling cocaine to another individual even though he knew it was illegal to possess and sell. He also admitted to possessing a Taurus Judge revolver while committing the drug trafficking felonies. His total indictment, satisfied by his plea to the three charges, additionally included these felony charges: two counts of third-degree criminal sale of a controlled substance, seven third-degree counts of criminal possession of narcotic drugs, three counts of third-degree criminal possession of a weapon and two counts of criminal possession of a firearm. He also had one misdemeanor charge of second-degree criminal use of drug paraphernalia. While Sease could face up to 15 years in prison, Judge Mark Fandrich said he is likely to sentence him to six years in prison with three years of post release supervision. At the time of his sentencing, he will also have to submit a second-felony offender statement and there will be potential forfeiture of his car which had heroin and cocaine in it weapons and cash. Also in court: An Auburn man facing drug charges asked Fandrich for one more chance to get his life together. "Your honor I have learned my lesson this time," Duane Smith, 56, read from a letter. He continued to read, sharing that his 3-year-old grandson told him "papa, you're taking too long," and he promised himself, God, and now the court, that he will never use drugs again. Smith, of 290 Genesee St., asked for another chance to change, in light of his substance abuse issues and his former service in the military. After a conference between Norman Chirco, Smith's defense attorney, District Attorney Jon Budelmann and the judge, Smith ended up pleading guilty to six charges to satisfy his 11-charge indictment. Smith pleaded to five separate counts of third-degree criminal sale of a controlled substance, class B felonies, and one count of fourth-degree conspiracy, a class E felony. Other charges on his indictment included five additional counts of third-degree criminal possession of narcotic drugs. He will likely be sentenced to three years in prison and two years post release supervision for the drug charges and 1.5 to three years for the conspiracy, with all sentences running concurrent with a shock camp order. He will also likely pay $380 in restitution and will admit to a second-felony offender statement at his Feb. 26 sentencing. A Liverpool man was designated as a level-one sex offender after posting an ad online searching for a "young playmate." Jason Holcomb, 38, was sentenced to six months in the local jail, followed by 10 years of post-release supervision in September for second-degree attempted rape, a class E felony. Holcomb's crime involved talking with who he thought was a 12-year-old girl and sending her sexually explicit images and messages. In May, when he arranged to meet the girl at the Fingerlakes Mall in Aurelius for sex, he instead was met by a state trooper and was arrested. During his risk-level assessment Tuesday afternoon, Assistant District Attorney Heather De Stefano asked that Holcomb be assigned 20 points for the victim being between the ages of 11 and 16, and 20 points for being a stranger and establishing the relationship for the purpose of victimizing. With a total of 40 points, Fandrich designated Holcomb as a level-one sex offender, the lowest designation. Holcomb said his release date is in three weeks. Joshua Laclair, 32, pleaded guilty to his involvement in a November burglary on Pulaski Street in Auburn. Laclair, of 19 Frazee St., admitted to forcibly entering a home, and getting into an altercation with a man, with the intent of stealing soboxone. he also admitted to having a weapon during the incident. Three charged with robbery, using stolen vehicle in Auburn The Auburn Police Department arrested three people in connection with a robbery at a Pulaski In exchange for his guilty plea to third-degree robbery, a class D felony, Laclair will likely be sentenced to two to four years in prison with a permanent order of protection put in place for the victim and any restitution charges for damages and stolen items. The maximum sentence is up to seven years in prison. Laclair, who was previously convicted of third-degree grand larceny, third-degree welfare fraud and misuse of food stamps greater than $3,000 in 2010, is due back in court for sentencing Feb. 26. An Auburn man was sentenced for stealing a wallet from a stranger's truck in Aurelius. Joshua Henry, 34, of 103 Van Anden St., previously plead guilty to fourth-degree larceny for stealing and using the credit card. In court Tuesday, he was sentenced to one to three years in prison with a shock camp order. Budelmann said he thought time in prison would help Henry get back on track, since "community supervision just hasn't worked." Staff writer Megan Ehrhart can be reached at (315) 282-2244 or megan.ehrhart@lee.net. Follow her on Twitter @MeganEhrhart. Love 0 Funny 5 Wow 0 Sad 1 Angry 0 Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. AUBURN A revised list of downtown project proposals was reviewed Tuesday by officials and the public as a part of a lengthy Downtown Revitalization Initiative process. At its fourth meeting, the Local Planning Committee took another look at 29 project proposals submitted to revamp the downtown area. The projects were reviewed at the committee's previous meeting, however many of the project scopes and requested funds were adjusted since then. Although four projects were removed from the list, the total DRI funding being requested from proposals amounts to $19.8 million. The city has $10 million to work with. Led by consulting firm Bergmann Associates, the LPC chose which projects they felt deserve DRI funding. LPC members were given a stack of $10 million "DRI bucks" that represented the program's actual funds. Members then dropped respective funds into jars that represented each of the project proposals. Later at a public workshop, Auburn residents had an opportunity to do the same exercise. Tallied results will be announced in the future. Addressing a room packed with members of the public, Kimberly Baptiste of Bergmann Associates said the goal of the public workshop was to incorporate community feedback in the initiative's decision-making. A bulk of the proposals call for redevelopment and rehabilitation of buildings in downtown Auburn. Many projects plan to create or renovate city housing options. Increasing housing availability was one of the LPC's original strategies in reinventing downtown. But most of the residential proposals would provide market-rate units. A proposal that would renovate apartment units at 55 Market St. would be the only proposal to offer affordable housing. The Rev. Patrick Heery, of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Auburn and member of the LPC, said he has no objection to market-rate housing, but in a working class community like Auburn, affordable housing could be more beneficial. "We have a significant amount of people who live below the poverty line, and one of our overarching goals (as the LPC) is to serve our entire community," Heery said. Heery said that without more affordable housing options presented, a large amount of Auburn residents would be "left out." Heery acknowledged that property managers are business people and that providing affordable housing isn't always financial feasible. The next LPC meeting will be held at 3:30 p.m. Jan. 22 at Auburn city hall. The third and final public workshop will be at 6:30 p.m. Jan. 8 at the Booker T. Washington Community Center at 23 Chapman Ave. in Auburn. Staff writer Dan Orzechowski can be reached at (315) 282-2239 or dan.orzechowski@lee.net. Follow him on Twitter @OrzechowskiDan. Love 1 Funny 3 Wow 2 Sad 2 Angry 3 Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. ARDMORE, Pa. and AUSTIN, Texas, Dec. 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Rewire Holdings LLC (Rewire) and Vida Capital Inc. (Vida Capital) announce the formation of Merion Square Capital LLC (Merion Square), a joint venture, which combines the expertise and core competencies of the two companies. The asset manager has established an open-ended fund structure, which will primarily invest in insurance-linked securities with an emphasis on Property and Casualty insurance, annuities and mortality-related products. The newly created investment manager leverages Rewires reinsurance and insurance-linked securities experience with Vidas track record and expertise as a dedicated institutional asset manager of insurance related assets. Merion Square will be led and managed by the Rewire managing principals, Stefano Sola, Richard Pennay and Markus Schmutz (the Investment Team). Merion Square will initially launch with $150 million of capital through an open-ended hedge fund structure and will continue to raise new capital throughout 2019. Vida Capitals team will be responsible for the fundraising, investor relations, finance, compliance and other operational-related functions of Merion Square. Stefano Sola, CEO of Merion Square, commented, The Rewire Securities team looks forward to partnering with Vida Capital in establishing a new asset management company. The ILS market is currently at a critical point in its maturation, and Merion Square will utilize our collective experience to best serve our investors and industry stakeholders as principal investors. Rewire established Rewire Securities LLC in 2015, an independent U.S. broker-dealer exclusively focused on the origination and distribution of insurance-linked securities. Rewire has successfully originated, structured and placed over $2 billion of insurance-linked securities. The Investment Team has collectively worked on over $25 billion of ILS issuances since the late 1990s. Rewire Securities LLC will cease to originate and distribute transactions on an agency basis and will be a dedicated vehicle to Merion Square for fundraising and structuring investment opportunities, as required. Founded in 2009, Vida Capital is a $3.6 billion-dollar alternative asset management firm specializing in non-correlated investment strategies. Historically, Vida has specialized in insurance-linked strategies with a predominant focus on longevity-contingent risk. As Vida continued to grow assets under management in the longevity-contingent space, it saw a unique opportunity to partner with Rewire and build a diversifying non-correlated platform. William Tice, Senior Managing Director of Vida Capital, stated, We look forward to partnering with the Rewire team and combining our expertise into a best-in-class asset manager. Since Vidas inception, weve been committed to generating compelling returns for our investors in the longevity space. We look forward to our new partnership to not only broaden but complement our existing product offerings. For Press & Investor Queries: Timothy Leung (512) 961 8265 timothy.leung@vidacapitalinc.com NEW YORK In under five years, a New York social-services organization called Cayuga Centers has gone from newcomer to one of the biggest names in the $1.5 billion-a-year business of housing immigrant children under government detention. Now one of the nation's five largest providers, Cayuga was caring for nearly 900 migrant children as of Monday, 78 percent more than a year ago, according to confidential government data obtained by The Associated Press . The nonprofit has helped make New York second only to Texas in the number of such youngsters, with 1,653 spread around the Empire State, the data show. The number of detained migrant children nationwide swelled during President Donald Trump's administration, and many youngsters stay in big shelters or detention centers. Cayuga's young charges, though, go to foster homes around New York City. Kids spend their days in classes, counseling and activities at a Cayuga facility while staffers work to connect them with relatives or other sponsors, the nonprofit says. "Cayuga Centers believes these vulnerable children should be in homes with real families not behind fences," CEO Edward Myers Hayes told lawmakers and others at an October meeting. The text of his remarks was obtained by AP. Some migrant children's attorneys see Cayuga's foster care as better than a sprawling shelter. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, visited the center in June and said it appeared the children were "being treated very well." Still, accommodations may be tight: As of October, Cayuga had 187 foster homes for up to 900 immigrant children, according to Hayes' remarks. Attorneys say some kids mentioned sharing foster homes with a half-dozen or more young migrants. One mother complained about conditions, saying Cayuga didn't have special education for her learning-disabled 15-year-old son, and a case worker was dismissive when her 11-year-old son said another boy touched him inappropriately at his foster home. "My sons have suffered while in custody" for over three months, the mother said in a November filing in a lawsuit challenging federal policies that lengthened the time children spend in the system. Cayuga isn't a defendant in the suit, filed by the New York Civil Liberties Union and others, and hasn't responded to the allegations. The Associated Press is withholding the mother's name so as not to indirectly identify the son who said he was touched in appropriately. Auburn, New York-based Cayuga which became a focal point for protests this summer after accepting immigrant children separated from their families under a since-canceled Trump administration policy referred AP inquiries about its operation to the federal Health and Human Services Department. HHS spokesman Mark Weber said the migrant youth program nationwide has "incredibly dedicated people" tending to a lot of children in a difficult situation. "We are just working hard to make sure they are taken care of and placed responsibly," he said. Cayuga Centers, originally founded as an orphanage in 1852, started taking "unaccompanied" migrant children during a surge of arrivals in 2014. Soon, the program was Cayuga's biggest. Some 400 children passed through in its first full year, and 1,700 in its third, according to the nonprofit's tax returns. Migrant kids brought a torrent of federal money $121 million so far, government figures show into an organization that reported a less than $17-million-a-year budget before the program began. More than 6,000 youngsters have gone on to live with sponsors and await immigration proceedings, according to Cayuga. As of October, the average child stayed at Cayuga for about 60 days, more than twice as long as last year, according to Hayes' remarks. Many children may be on track for faster release after the administration on Tuesday backed off a five-month-old requirement that all people in a potential sponsor household be fingerprinted. Days at Cayuga's facility include academic and "life skills" classes, sports, therapy and outings to zoos and museums, and the kids head home to Spanish-speaking foster families, according to the organization. Lawyer Jose Xavier Orochena recalls one child he represented describing a particularly resonant trip this summer: to the Statue of Liberty. Other New York programs housing migrant children are considerably smaller than Cayuga's. The next-biggest, Lincoln Hall Boys Haven in suburban Lincolndale, was caring for 183 unaccompanied adolescent boys as of Monday, according to the data obtained by AP. Abbott House, which specializes in children with medical or psychological needs, had 51 unaccompanied immigrant boys and girls in its shelter in suburban Irvington and 15 in foster care, the data showed. Its young clients, who range in age from 3 to 17 , sleep one or two to a room and spend days doing educational programs, art, yoga, and taking trips to church and a gym, medical director Dr. Luis Rodriguez said. "All of them have suffered a lot of trauma," Rodriguez said, but "they're always motivated to learn something new." Another organization, JCCA, is looking after 19 immigrant children, the data show. All are in Bronx foster homes, attending local schools and afterschool programs, spokeswoman Anna Gold said. They face some restrictions: No hanging out at friends' houses, for instance. But the children are taken to Broadway shows, movies and the circus "so they can have a life as a kid," Gold said. "They're kids with a lot of hope and a lot of determination," she said. "None exhibit anything but a strong desire to find a safe place in the United States and build a future here." Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 4 Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. A New York State Trooper and a motorist were injured Wednesday when a vehicle ran into the back of a police car on Interstate 81 outside of Syracuse. Police said that at 8:36 a.m., a marked state police patrol vehicle with emergency lights activated was providing traffic control for a disabled vehicle on the shoulder of the highway in the town of Onondaga when a 2018 Hyundai, operated by Diane Lopez-Edouard, 40, of Endicott, hit the patrol car. Troopers said in a news release that Lopez-Edouard was northbound on I-81 when she observed traffic slowing ahead of her. She was unable to stop in time and swerved to the right, striking the drivers side rear of the state police vehicle. Lopez-Edouard was transported to Upstate University Hospital with fractures to both arms that required surgery. Trooper Andrew Broderick was transported to Upstate University Hospital with neck and back injuries where he was treated and released. Lopez-Edouard was ticketed for violation of New York's Move Over Law. State police said that motorists should be reminded of the importance of moving over for first responders and others who assist with motor vehicle crashes and other roadside incidents. The state's Move Over Law requires cars to move over, if they can safely do so, for police, firefighters, ambulance workers, tow-truck drivers, and other personnel as they work at crash scenes. Motorists are similarly required to move when construction and maintenance vehicles are stopped alongside roads. Motorists unable to change lanes are required to slow down to a reasonable speed. Police said that since the law was enacted in 2011, almost 107,000 people have been ticketed for failing to move over. So far in 2018, 12,775 tickets have been issued. The penalty for violating the Move Over law is a fine of up to $150, or jail time of up to 15 days, or both. It also counts for 2 points on a driver license. Love 0 Funny 1 Wow 3 Sad 0 Angry 2 CAPE CORAL, Fla. Marguerite Peggy Fanning passed away on Dec. 14, 2018 in Cape Coral, Fla., surrounded by her loving husband and family. Peggy was born in Dunmore, Pa. on March 14, 1930. She graduated from St. Paul High School in 1948. An expert typist, she soon joined the administrative staff of the Tobyhanna Army Depot. In 1955 she married the love of her life, Martin Fanning. Together they raised seven children, Marguerite (Tom) Ringwood, Martin III, Mary Kathleen (Geoff) Baer, Mark (Victoria) Fanning, Mitch (Tracey) Fanning, Marlyn Fanning, and Murray (Alexis) Fanning. In addition, they have 18 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. During the early years of their marriage, Martys career carried the family across four states with Peggy making every move look easy. In 1967 she and Marty settled in their beloved Auburn where Peggy was somehow able to volunteer at Sacred Heart and St. Anns parishes while raising her seven children. For years Peggy ran the used book sale at St. Anns Annual Chicken Barbecue. After her children were grown, Peggy worked for Boni State Farm Insurance Agency in Auburn where she loved her co-workers and customers. In retirement she and Marty traveled the world and divided their time between Owasco Lake and Cape Coral, Fla., allowing her to enjoy two of her favorite things, the sun and the water, year-round. The world simply wont be the same without Peggy. She brought light, laughter, and love to every life she touched. Her husband adored her, her family cherished her, and her friends delighted in her company. Peggy loved life and loved people. She was an amazing listener who enjoyed nothing more than learning someones life story. She was also perpetually in motion. She loved to walk and swim and did one or both nearly every day. She loved music and theater and had the voice of an angel. For years she performed a glorious solo of O Holy Night at Sacred Hearts Christmas Mass. The matriarch of a large family who preferred her grandchildren to simply call her Peggy, she made every child and grandchild feel special and loved. She was a constant source of encouragement, wisdom and support who always seemed to have the right words at the right time. A voracious reader and wonderful writer, particularly of poetry, Peggy had a number of her poems appear in major publications. Peggy and Marty suffered devastating tragedies with the loss of their son Marty in a motorcycle accident in 1980, and daughter Marlyn in a motor vehicle accident in 1988. When asked how she persevered through such shattering heartbreak Peggy would respond, My children have lost two siblings, I cant let them lose their mother too. She was truly an extraordinary woman. A devout Catholic, Peggy was a living example of Christs teachings. She put others before herself, treated everyone with love and kindness, and bore hardship with faith and grace. Peggy will live on in the hearts of everyone who knew her, for to know her was to love her. In addition to Martin III and Marlyn, Peggy was predeceased by her parents, Walter and Marguerite Barrett Regan; her brother, Walter Regan; and sister, Ann Demaio. Friends are invited to join the family for a Mass of Christian burial which will be celebrated at 10 a.m. Saturday, Dec. 22, in Sacred Heart Church, 90 Melrose Road, Auburn. Burial will be in St. Josephs Cemetery. Calling hours will be from 4 to 7 p.m. on Friday, Dec. 21, in Sacred Heart Church, Auburn. In lieu of flowers, the family suggests donations in Peggys name to Tyburn Academy, 17 Clymer St., Auburn, NY 13021, Hope Hospice, 9470 Health Park Circle, Fort Myers, FL 33908, or the Alzheimers Association. Former Playboy model Marisa Papen has made a career out of getting arrested for posing nude or semi-nude for photographs taken in various locations of religious significance, and the 27-year-old Belgian added to her resume this week when she revealed that she had recently been busted and jailed for a series of nude and religiously irreverent photos snapped inside the world headquarters of the Catholic religion: the Vatican, Britains Sun newspaper reported. In one image, which may be viewed at this link, a nude Papen sits on a stack of Bibles. In another image, at this link, the fully nude Papen is seen crossing a street inside Vatican City while dragging a large, wooden crucifixa send-up of the classic Christ's final journey imagery. As might have been expected, Vatican police were less than amused by the photo shoot, in which Australian photographer Jesse Walker, of ENKI Eyewear, photographedand had previously been arrested withPapen in her previous nude public photo shoots. "I was right in the middle of putting on my underwear when two police cars suddenly arrived and another four cops approached us on foot, brandishing their batons and saying 'passports, please, Papen recounted, quoted by The Sun. The Vatican arrest resulted in about 10 hours in an Italian jail cell for Papen and Walker. There we were again, behind bars in a tiny little cell with dirt and ash on the floor, the nude model said. Jesse and I looked at each other and we burst out laughing." Among the sites where Papen had earlier posed for photos taken by Walker was the famed Hagia Sophia mosque in Istanbul, Turkey, where Papen posed wearing a burka, but lifting the front of the garment to reveal herself nude from the waist down, as seen in the image at this link. But the Turkish hoot, while causing a controversy, did not result in Papens arrest. She did, however, spend a night in an Egyptian jail after posing topless at the Karnak Temple complex in Luxor, Egypt. We are willing to put it all on the line for these photoshoots even if it means jail time. It is something we thrive on and are very used to now so it is nothing new, said Walker, quoted by The Sun. "I like to think ENKI and Marisa are the two most controversial artists and brand on the planet right now, and that's something I am very proud of." Earlier this year, Papen posed fully nude across from the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, Israel, in an image that can be seen at this link. The Wailing Wall, as the last standing remnant of the Second Temple, which was destroyed the the Roman army in 70 A.D. is the considered the holiest prayer site in the Jewish religion. But despite her repeated nude photo shoots at religious sites honoring Christianity, Judaism and Islam, Papel says that she has no issues with religion, only with established religious institutions. For me, the biggest problem is with the institutions built around religion, she said. They are driven by money and are soulless. Photo by Marisa Papen Facebook Business will face a shortage of low-skilled staff under immigration proposals announced today, industry groups have warned. A 30,000-a-year minimum salary threshold the Government plans to set for all migrant workers is far too high, trade chiefs said in response to todays white paper on immigration. The paper proposes replacing the current system of admitting only highly-skilled workers from outside the EU, and workers of all skill levels from the EU, with a single route. Under the plans, workers would have to earn at least 30,000, although the paper says government will discuss with businesses and employers what salary threshold should be set. Also proposed, as a transitional measure, is allowing short-term workers to come for a maximum of 12 months, followed by a 12-month cooling off period to prevent people working in the UK permanently. The bakery industry and associated trades rely heavily on low-skilled workers, and concerns have already been raised about the plans. The 30,000 minimum income requirement for workers coming to the UK is far too high, said British Sandwich Association (BSA) director Jim Winship. It needs to be around 20,000 in London and between 15-18,000 outside London, depending on the location. He added that only allowing low-skilled workers to come to the UK for a year is too little. At the very least it should be two years to allow for training and for businesses to see a return on their investment. The British Retail Consortium (BRC) voiced similar concerns, saying the proposals would see retailers face rising hiring costs for new workers, putting pressure on the price of goods and services for consumers. Setting the main cut-off for hiring workers from outside the UK at 30,000 would leave retailers and their supply chains recruiting from a very small pool of domestic labour, the vast majority of whom are already in work, said BRC chief executive Helen Dickinson, adding it should be reduced. Further proposals for a temporary 12-month visa for those earning under 30,000 would embed unnecessary cost and churn into the recruitment process and undermine the work currently being done by retailers to attract and retain colleagues. The government also plans to remove a cap on the number of skilled workers being admitted, which the BRC said was a positive. THe BSA said it welcomed a review of the UK immigration rules which it described as not working for the sandwich industry in the current Brexit climate. "Businesses in the food industry are already struggling to fill vacancies because of the uncertainties over Brexit and this will get worse unless the rules are relaxed. We know of restaurants that are unable to open due to staff shortage," added Winship. Depositing equipment supplier Unifiller Systems has been acquired by Linxis Group, owner of brands including VMI, Diosna and Shick Esteve. Unifiller, which supplies portioning and depositing equipment for small and midsized bakeries, is based in Vancouver, Canada, but has offices across the world, including a UK site in Wellingborough, Northamptonshire. We are very pleased to join the Linxis team, we share the same passion for innovative solutions and the same focus on operations, said Unifiller CEO Mark Soares. Our strategic view is fully aligned and we are convinced Linxis can help us in the next phase of our expansion. Linixis Group supplies specialised equipment for the bakery, pharmaceutical and cosmetics industries, and is the parent company of mixing technologies businesses VMI and Diosna, and ingredient dosing systems supplier Shick Esteve. The business, which employs 800 people in locations including France, Germany and the US, is owned by IK Investment Partners, which recently acquired Mademoiselle Desserts. With its portfolio of marketleading equipment, strong reputation and robust track record of success, Unifiller is a perfect fit for Linxis, said Linxis Group CEO Didier Soumet. We share the same values and continuous focus on delivering the highest quality standards to our customers. We are very pleased to welcome Mark and his team: they will bring their deep industry expertise. SAN DIEGO, Dec. 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Judicate West, one of Californias leading providers of private dispute resolution services, welcomes retired United States Magistrate Judge Jan M. Adler to its roster of neutrals. Judge Adler knows what it takes to resolve even the most complex disputes. His practical approach and calm demeanor quickly earn the parties trust. From there, his deep knowledge of the law and how it is applied help him break through the noise to focus on resolution-critical issues a skillset that will be an asset for our clients throughout the state, said Mark Kaufman, Executive Vice President of Market Development for Judicate West. We are excited to add such a talented and well-respected judge to our line-up in the region. Judge Adler has 40+ years of legal experience, including serving as a Magistrate Judge for the Southern District of California for over 15 years and as Presiding Magistrate Judge the last two years. During his time on the bench, he handled a wide variety of civil litigation matters, including employment, intellectual property, class action, insurance bad faith, consumer fraud and personal injury cases. Prior to his bench appointment, Judge Adler spent 25 years as a trial lawyer litigating complex civil matters, including securities class action, derivative, antitrust and consumer fraud cases. Judge Adler is a frequent speaker on ADR topics in the United States and abroad, most recently delivering the opening address at the Sorbonne Winter Conference on ADR, Mediation and Negotiation Management in Paris, France in November. He served as a Ninth Circuit Director for the Federal Magistrate Judges Association from 2014 to 2018 and as Vice Chair of the Ninth Circuit Magistrate Judges Executive Board from 2014 to 2016. He was a member of the Board of Governors for the Association of Business Trial Lawyers (ABTL) of San Diego for several years, and served as President of the San Diego chapter in 2007 and Vice President in 2006. Judge Adler earned his J.D. from Duke University School of Law (1978) and his A.B. from Cornell University (1975). About Judicate West Celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, Judicate West is one of Californias leading providers of private dispute resolution services with a distinguished roster of proven neutrals, including retired state and federal court judges plus attorney mediators and arbitrators from a wide variety of practice areas. Founded in 1993, the firm prides itself on maintaining the utmost integrity in delivering innovative solutions to all types of civil cases. The firms successful formula involves top-tier neutrals and an experienced staff who is dedicated to being the gold standard in alternative dispute resolution (ADR). Judicate West has offices in Santa Ana, Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Diego and San Francisco. Contact: Traci Stuart / Michael Panelli Blattel Communications 415.413.4522 / 415.413.4527 traci@blattel.com / mpanelli@blattel.com Should Beaufort County elected officials demand that every alleged incident of Child Rape be investigated in Beaufort County? Yes, without fail, irrespective of the parties involved; this heinous crime must be investigated, and the truth be known, and responsible parties prosecuted. Washington, DC, Dec. 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The holiday season has not slowed the funding of developments by the District of Columbia Housing Finance Agency (DCHFA). On December 14th, DCHFA issued $12 million in bond financing for the construction of 555 E Street Senior Apartments and underwrote $7.21 million in four percent low income housing tax credits (LIHTC) for 555 E Street Senior Apartments (Ward 6). DCHFA is delivering funds so that developers may deliver housing to residents. The Agency is excited about the construction of this unique community, stated Todd A. Lee, Executive Director and CEO, DCHFA. On December 17th, Mayor Muriel Bowser kicked off the second phase of construction at 555 E Street SW. Additional funding sources include $10.9 million from the DC Department of Housing and Community Developments Housing Production Trust Fund (HPTF) for the construction of 555 E Street Apartments. The new mixed-use development (10,000 square feet of ground floor retail) will be intergenerational with 58 senior and 136 market rate apartments without age restriction, additionally making it a mixed-income development, all located in a primarily commercial section of Ward 6. Forty-three of the studio and one bedroom apartments will be available for seniors 62 years and older, earning up to 50 percent of the area median income (AMI). Fifteen of the units are for tenants with incomes at 30 percent AMI and seven of the 15 units will be Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH) and receive Local Rent Supplement Program housing vouchers. Onsite support services will be available for the residents living in the PSH reserved units. The $24.9 million project is being developed by Potomac Investment Properties, DC Strategy Group, Paramount Development, and Adams Investment. E Street Senior Apartments is located a half mile from Federal Center SW, LEnfant Plaza and Waterfront-SEU Metrorail stations. Property amenities will include a swimming pool, fitness center and concierge. Through its Multifamily Lending and Neighborhood Investment and Capital Markets divisions, DCHFA issues tax-exempt mortgage revenue bonds to lower the developers costs of acquiring, constructing and rehabilitating rental housing. The Agency offers private for-profit and non-profit developers low cost predevelopment, construction and permanent financing that supports the new construction, acquisition, and rehabilitation of affordable rental housing in the District. The District of Columbia Housing Finance Agency was established in 1979. The Agencys mission is to advance the District of Columbias housing priorities, the Agency invests in affordable housing and neighborhood development, which provides pathways for DC residents to transform their lives. We accomplish our mission by delivering the most efficient and effective sources of capital available in the market to finance rental housing and to create homeownership opportunities. Attachment This resource is no longer available This resource is no longer available. Return to previous page. How Akamai Augments Your Security Practice to Mitigate the OWASP Top 10 Risks Access this paper to learn how to make the most of the OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities often seen in web applications. Akamai Shields Leading Retailer from Ddos Attacks During Critical Holiday Shopping Period - and Protects $10 Million in Revenues In this case study, learn how one online retailer was able to maintain online operations and protect $10 million in revenue by implementing Akamais DDoS Defender Security Solution and utilizing Akamai Intelligent Platform to deflect and reflect malicious attacks. Highly Distributed Computing Is Key to Quality on the HD Web This paper outlines the basic requirements for delivering high-definition (HD) video via broadband and describes how Akamai, through highly distributed computing, is uniquely able to extend the Internet's capacity. Retail Website Performance- Consumer Reaction to a Poor Online Shopping Experience Retailers must understand that the online shopper segment is continually maturing and be mindful of how this evolution influences consumers' expectations. Transform the Internet into a Business- Ready Application Delivery Platform for Enterprise SOA Based SAP Deployments For today's enterprises, enterprise SOA based on SAP and the Internet provide a complementary and highly agile platform for rapidly extending the enterprise to reach customers, partners and employees in markets globally. English French TORONTO, Dec. 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Yesterday, Colleges Ontario released their free speech policy mandating its implementation at all 21 Ontario colleges in the new year. In August 2018, the government announced that all colleges and universities in Ontario must have a free speech policy in place by January 2019. Since then various universities have scrambled to finalize their institution-specific policy. In a majority of these cases, administrations have used existing bodies or have formed committees with student and faculty seats to create said policy. Colleges however, have opted to quietly and secretly create one policy for all 21 colleges without any faculty or student consultations. The irony of Colleges Ontario developing a free speech policy without consultation from any on-campus stakeholders, speaks to the lack of credibility students and faculty give to this policy, said Nour Alideeb, Chairperson of the Canadian Federation of Students-Ontario. Alideeb further added, The Progressive Conservative governments directive to have free speech policies in place that are tied to public funding is problematic and should be challenged. This directive threatens to cut increasingly underfunded institutions and will endanger research, teaching and the overall quality of post-secondary education in our province. As part of the process of approval for the college free speech policy, the 21-college board of governors are asked to vote and ratify this policy. Most of these board members are not campus stakeholders or have any experience or knowledge with free speech policy creation, making this a rubber-stamping process for Colleges Ontario. Colleges Ontario is working backwards in getting this policy approved by the board of governors. There are existing committees and on-campus student and faculty groups that would have willingly contributed to this work, said Alideeb. The approach taken by Colleges Ontario signals to students that the quickest way to get policy approved is by avoiding consultation, which in turn will create problematic and unsound policy. Colleges Ontarios lack of consultation on a policy this crucial to students and faculty, implies their complicit in the approach Fords government is using free speech to shut down student and faculty activism. For more information contact: Ian McRae, Government Relations and Policy Coordinator: 416-925-3825 or 306-852-0128 (cell) Nour Alideeb, Chairperson: 416-925-3825 In September, a U.S. district court rejected the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services decision to remove Endangered Species Act protection for grizzly bears in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Photo by Bob Koons 806 shares For more than a decade, our Animal Protection Litigation team, a talented group of attorneys who use the law to advance the cause of animal protection, has been one of our most effective divisions. Each year, they file lawsuits and legal petitions to support our advocacy campaigns, draft numerous state and federal animal protection bills and ballot measures, and defend animal protection laws once they are enacted. In 2018, our lawyers, with the assistance of outstanding pro bono partners, celebrated a number of major wins. These included the exposure and elimination of partisan government support for factory farming interests, the protection of threatened and endangered species like grizzly bears and elephants, and judicious legal counsel to government authorities seeking to bring to justice and hold accountable the perpetrators of cruelty to animals. Our legal team also played a crucial rule in two major ballot victories for animals in November: Proposition 12 in California, which prohibits products derived from cruelly confined farm animals from being produced or sold in the state, and Amendment 13 in Florida, which bans greyhound racing in that state. Here are some of our top legal victories of 2018: Factory farming: Court halts more than $20 million in illegal payments to pork industry lobbying group: In February, the U.S. district court for the District of Columbia issued a monumental ruling in favor of the HSUS in our efforts against federal checkoff program abuses. The USDA oversees checkoff programs, which mandate that producers collectively fund industry promotions beneficial to the entire industry. In this case, the USDA approved the transfer of more than $20 million in checkoff funds to the National Pork Producers Council, to fuel that lobbying groups opposition efforts against our work. The sham deal was approved under the guise of being a purchase of the trademark for the Pork: The Other White Meat advertising slogan, even though federal checkoff program funds were used to develop the trademark in the first instance. The court enjoined these payments in early 2018, and then expanded its injunction in June after the USDA attempted to evade the courts original ruling. This ruling will help us in future challenges to other improperly run federal checkoff programs. State regulators revoke operating permit from Oregon mega-dairy: An Oregon state mega-dairy operated in violation of environmental laws, prompting the Oregon Department of Agriculture to issue the largest fine against any confined animal operation in the states history. Along with other organizations and individuals, the HSUS persuaded the state to fully revoke the dairys operating permits, noting that the facility which was built to house 30,000 heifers and cows failed to complete building necessary waste lagoons and storage facilities and inappropriately managed wastewater. Wildlife: Endangered Species Act protections restored to Yellowstone grizzly bears: In September, the U.S. district court for the District of Montana rejected the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services decision to remove Endangered Species Act protection for grizzly bears in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. The HSUS sued to prevent premature removal of federal protections for the species, and to prevent the states of Wyoming and Idaho from opening hunting seasons on grizzly bears for the first time since the early 1970s. The court agreed with the HSUS that the Fish and Wildlife Service violated federal law by engaging in a piecemeal approach to grizzly bear conservation. California ivory ban upheld: In November, the California Court of Appeals upheld a landmark law that makes it illegal to sell elephant ivory in California, with significant penalties of up to $50,000 or twice the value of the ivory sold, whichever is greater. Ivory dealers challenged the law, and the HSUS intervened in the litigation to defend the law. State restrictions on the sale of ivory are important tools in the effort to protect wild elephant populationsin fact, the California law has already resulted in the April 2018 conviction of an ivory seller, who was sentenced to 10 days in prison and a $5,000 fine. Humane wild horse management option preserved: A judge in the U.S. district court for the Eastern District of Oregon ruled in favor of the HSUS in a challenge to the Environmental Protection Agencys registration of Zonastat-H, an important wild horse and burro fertility control drug. The HSUS is the official registrant of Zonastat-H under federal law, and we rely on its availability in our work advocating for humane approaches to managing wild horse and burro populations. Companion animals: Felony convictions in Alabama dog starvation case: In March, an Alabama court found a defendant guilty on six counts of felony animal cruelty and one misdemeanor. More than three years ago, the HSUS and local authorities rescued approximately 65 dogs in need of urgent care from his property. Once forfeited by the courts, the dogs were placed with our emergency placement partners as we continued to assist in the investigation and prosecution of this animal cruelty case. New Hampshire conviction for neglect of more than 80 Great Danes: In March 2018, a jury found a New Hampshire breeder guilty on 17 counts of animal cruelty based on the deplorable conditions in which she kept 84 Great Danes. At her sentencing hearing three months later, the court ruled all dogs currently in the HSUSs custody should be permanently forfeited to the state, and we were ordered to oversee the process of finding them suitable placement with shelter and rescue partners. In September, we completed the placement process and closed the temporary shelter, and since then all of the Great Danes have found loving foster or adoptive homes. Forfeiture of cruelly treated French bulldog puppies: In July, HSUS lawyers assisted the City of Texarkana, Texas, with a civil forfeiture hearing for 27 French Bulldog puppies who were discovered when Texas state troopers pulled over a moving van for a traffic violation. More than two dozen puppies were found in various stages of heat exhaustion and dehydration in filthy, cramped cargo containers in the back of a moving van, which was not climate controlled. The temperature inside measured 121 degrees. The owner was found to have cruelly treated the animals at the forfeiture hearing and the surviving animals were forfeited and sent to one of our rescue partners. The work our legal team does is integral to our many campaigns to protect animals, and were lucky to have them as colleagues. They are the best possible watchdogs in the field, always at the ready to defend animals and fight cruelty. Someone over at Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen's marketing department has a sick sense of humor. For Philly fliers, the fast food chain is offering "Emotional Support Chicken" which are specially-marked, chicken-shaped carrier boxes filled with, yep, fried chicken. The box reads: This chicken provides comfort and nourishment during stressful air travel. Unlike other chicken, it is marinated in real Louisiana spices for 12 hours and must be permitted to fly without restriction. Do not leave unattended, as Popeyes' is not responsible for lost or stolen chicken. From its press release: Emotional support animals provide comfort and companionship, especially during a highly stressful time like air travel. However, according to recent headlines, some travelers are pushing the envelope with the types of animals they try to bring on flights and classify as "emotional support animals," including the likes of peacocks, squirrels and tarantulas. Knowing this, Popeyes decided to launch its new "Emotional Support Chicken" to bring holiday travelers some humor to what is one of the most stressful places to be during the holidays the airport. "Emotional Support Chicken" is ONLY available at the Gate C31 Popeyes in the Philadelphia airport. image via Popeyes (Cosmo) Instagrammers are posting things crafted to look like ads and sponsored posts, giving the impression they are paid-up influencers when they are not. A decade ago, shilling products to your fans may have been seen as selling out. Now it's a sign of success. "People know how much influencers charge now, and that payday is nothing to shake a stick at," said Alyssa Vingan Klein, the editor in chief of Fashionista, a fashion-news website. "If someone who is 20 years old watching YouTube or Instagram sees these people traveling with brands, promoting brands, I don't see why they wouldn't do everything they could to get in on that." Of course, getting caught means instahumiliation. But even that has its own weird cred, these days. Not all just copy-and-paste from real campaigns. It's mesmerizing, the grasp some of them have on the precise visual and textual vocabulary of the "sponsored post", uncannily bridging authenticity and advertising in a way that fools no-one but would satisfy the client. A client who does not exist, in this caseand may even be cease-and-desisting the instagrammer to cut it out. Cha is the Japanese word for tea, and kombu is a type of seaweed. Real kombucha is seaweed tea and this video takes you to Japan's Rishiri Island, source of high quality kombu. From Great Big Story: Sorry to shatter the illusion, but that expensive, bottled kombucha iced tea you've been drinking isn't anything close to the authentic stuffand, believe us, you're missing out. Come along as we travel to Japan's Rishiri Island and meet Chiharu Hirakawa, a shop owner and master of creating the real-deal drink. Located off the coast of Hokkaido, the remote island is famous for its locally-harvested kombu seaweed. Hirakawa uses the kombu, after it has been dried and powdered, to create traditional kombucha tea. Tampa, Fla., Dec. 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- In the month of December, Ashley HomeStores Hope to Dream program is celebrating its 8th anniversary. Since its inception in 2010, the program has recently reached a milestone of 80,000 beds donated to children in need across the U.S. and Canada. Hope to Dream hosted its anniversary event in partnership with the Boys & Girls Club of the Suncoast and Glazer Childrens Museum. Saturday, December 15, 100 children and their families attended the event at the childrens museum where each child received a new twin mattress, bed sheets, pillow, comforter and bed frame. The children enjoyed free admission to the museums exhibits and exciting interactive games. Each child also received a special gift from Hope to Dream and Ashley HomeStore. We are excited to celebrate the children during our anniversary event. For the past eight years, we have been committed to our mission of providing a good nights sleep to every child in need with a bed donation from Ashley HomeStore and Hope to Dream, said Ruthie Bautista, Hope to Dream Ambassador. We also thank the amazing partnership with Boys & Girls Club of the Suncoast and the Glazer Childrens Museum for providing this special venue for this event. A portion of the proceeds for every mattress purchased at a participating Ashley HomeStore helps pay for a mattress to provide children in the community a good nights sleep who do not have a bed to call their own. "We are grateful for this opportunity to partner with Ashley Furniture HomeStore to provide 100 Club members with a great night sleep, stated Cassie Kackley, Boys & Girls Clubs of the Suncoast, Chief Development Officer. We thank them for their dedication and commitment to our local Pinellas County kids. --- Ashley HomeStore is committed to being your trusted partner and style leader for the home. This commitment has made Ashley HomeStore the No. 1 furniture retailer in the U.S. and one of the worlds best-selling furniture store brands with more than 900 locations in 54 countries. Start designing your dream home today. Visit Ashley HomeStore online at www.ashleyhomestore.com. Like Ashley HomeStore on Facebook, follow us on Twitter and Instagram , or see our design-focused boards on Pinterest. Hope to Dream - Ashley HomeStore believes that every child deserves a good nights sleep. Founded in 2010 on that guiding principle, Ashley HomeStores Hope to Dream program provides beds to less fortunate children across the U.S. and Canada. A portion of the proceeds for every mattress purchased at a participating Ashley HomeStore helps pay for a bed for a child in need. Since its inception, more than 80,000 children have received a brand-new bed. Those wishing to nominate a child can visit https://www.ashleyfurniturehomestore.com/a-hope-to-dream/ or request an electronic application by emailing HopetoDream@ashleyhomestore.com. In-store applications are also available at participating locations. ### Attachments News / National by Mandla Ndlovu United Family International Church Leader Prophet Emmanuel Makandiwa is reportedly mulling a move to set up his church headquarters in Zambia a church source has said.This comes amidst revelations that Zambian President Edgar Lungu has offered Makandiwa land to build his church in Zambia."The Prophet is contemplating setting up a strong base in the neighbouring country after being offered land by His Excellency Edgar Lungu," the source said. "But that does not necessarily mean he may want to abandon Zimbabwe if he is to agree on the offer, but it means he may want to expand the church by stabling another solid base in that country."Makandiwa will not be the first one to leave the country. Few years ago, his counterpart Prophet Uebert Angel of Spirit Embassy the Good News church returned back to the United Kingdom after staying a few years ministering in the country.Makandiwa was not present at church this past Sunday.Prophet Makandiwa, recently waded into the monetary policy debate and advised monetary authorities to urgently address the currency distortions that have become an albatross for both business and consumers. News / National by Mandla Ndlovu President Emmerson Mnangagwa has urged the nation to unite and engage in a process of reforming, restructuring and rebuilding.He was speaking on Tuesday after delivering the Motlanthe Commission of inquiry report into the August 1 political killings."Today (Tuesday) as promised, the report into the August 1 incident was released. The Commission of Inquiry was independent ,transparent and produced a thorough and fair report. We have studied it at length, and expect all parties to do the same, so we can take the necessary insights" Mnangagwa said."I now urge the country to come together and unite. We have a long road of recovery ahead, a process of reforming, restructuring and rebuilding. This requires above all peace, love and unity. We must now look forward, and work as one nation for a better, prosperous future."Presenting his report Mnangagwa told the nation that the commission had established that the opposition MDC was responsible for the violence that took place on August 1."Having considered all the evidence, the Commission found on a balance of probability, that speeches made by political leaders mostly the MDC Alliance before and after the elections heightened tensions and played a part in inciting some members of the public to protest tensions," Mnangagwa said."The influence of these speeches is evidenced by demonstrators reproducing, in many cases, word for word the language used in the rallies in their songs and speeches during the demonstrations."During the pre-election rallies, the MDC Alliance had taken a position that if their presidential candidate Nelson Chamisa did not win the elections, they would protest, a threat that they implemented."The commission urged the police to move with speed in implementing the prosecution of actors involved in the violent protests that left six people dead. News / National by Mandla Ndlovu It's notable that the Motlanthe Commission Report does not extricate the Commission from the antecedent toxicity, arising from its flawed composition and terms of reference, that exposed it upfront as a compromised Zanu PF Public Relations scheme. In fact, the report confirms these flaws. The fact that the Commission did nothing to liberate itself from its founding prejudices, especially with regards to its flawed composition and terms of reference, means its report cannot be expected to meet legitimate public expectations. Something never comes from nothing. There's something instructive from the old-age Shona adage that "rine manyanga hariputirwi". This is particularly true where atrocities are involved. It is impossible to use a Commission or anything else for that matter, to hide or escape from gross crimes against humanity. The smoke and mirrors in Motlanthe Commission's Report cannot obfuscate the fact that everyone knows why the Commission was setup in the first place. On 1 August, civilians were gunned down by soldiers and some were killed in cold blood and others brutally injured in broad daylight! What happened was self-evident to the eye. What was not obvious and needed to be established for purposes of accountability was the identity, names, of the soldiers on rampage and crucially, the authority that deployed them with lethal ammunition in a civilian situation! Mnangagwa publicly told the nation and the world that he did not know who deployed the soldiers; meaning that it was not him. That he did not know was the only reason why Zimbabweans and the international community demanded an independent international commission to investigate! Notwithstanding the antics by Motlanthe's Commission to dance in the dark with smoke and mirrors; and not withstanding its convulted terms of reference, only two key questions needed factual answers: (a) who are the soldiers that killed civilians and(b) who deployed them? Who deployed the soldiers? The Commission had no stomach to bluntly say it was Mnangagwa. It confirms the fact by claiming the deployment "was lawful", a matter of law for a court, and by attaching on page 100 Obert Mpofu's and Chiwenga's letters which say it was Mnangagwa. The finding that Mnangagwa deployed the soldiers is significant in two respects: (a) Clearly Mnangagwa lied in August that he did not know who had deployed the soldiers. This is egregious. (b) Responsibility andaccountability for what the soldiers did is with Mnangagwa! Who killed and injured civilians? "The Commission's finding on a balance of probabilities from all the evidence is that the deaths of six (6) people and the injuries sustained by thirty five (35) others arose from the actions of the Military and Police". Regarding the causes of death and injury of civilians on 1 Aug, the Report says on page 40: "The Commission has NOT RECEIVED ANY CONCRETE EVIDENCE THAT ANY PERSON other than the Army and Police used guns during the protests on 1 August 2018". This puts paid to Vanguard crap! Whereas the Report clearly says the six civilians who died were killed by the Army or Police and the 35 civilians were injured by the Army, the Commission fails to name the soldiers and police officers who committed specific atrocities. This renders the Report a big cover up! The Commission's failure to name the culpable soldiers and police officers is a dereliction of duty against its mandate. Even worse is its recommendation that the Police should investigate the 1 August crimes and the Army should identify and sanction its culpable soldiers. The Report says the Army or Police killed the six dead and the Army injured the 35 injured, and that no one else but the Army and Police used guns; and that Mnangagwa deployed the soldiers yet the Commission assigns no accountability to him, his VP, ministers, Army and Police bosses. The Commission's position that only soldiers and police officers should be held accountable after further investigations and that no political and legal accountability should attach to Mnangagwa, his VP, ministers, Army and Police bosses is contrary to domestic and international law. The Commission belabours the point that it was a fact-finding process, and not a court of law. Yet its Report makes findings of law, notably that the military deployment was lawful. The Commission had no basis or competence whatsoever to draw such a scandalous conclusion. The Commission alleges that the 1 August demonstrations, which it acknowledges kicked off peacefully, "had been incited, pre-planned and well organized by the MDC-Alliance". But the Report does not have any evidence that shows or proves any PRE-PLANNING by the MDC-Alliance. "Pre-planning" means "organising in advance". It is revealing that the only pre-planning about 1 Aug that is proved in the Report was done by the Army and the Police on 29 July BEFORE even voting started on 30 July. The Report's Appendix 7 has police letters that prove this! Nothing in the Report explains why the Police and Army were planning about 1 August protests on 29 July. All of their 1 August letters refer to 29 July. Is this not the smoking gun that points to who planned and orchestrated the 1 August protests? Why was this not investigated? The Army and Police pre-planning on 29 July is damaging given the Report's finding that the Army deployment "COULD HAVE BEEN AVOIDED IF THE POLICE WERE ADEQUATELY EXPERIENCED, better equipped and more suitably organized". This is damming. Why blame the MDC-Alliance for this! The Report of the Motlanthe Commission is poorly written, badly reasoned and self-contradictory. It's the worst published Report by a Commission of Inquiry since 1980. Its saving grace is that it puts paid to the lie that Mnangagwa did not know who deployed the Army on 1 Aug. "The Report of the Kgalema Motlanthe Commission is poorly written, badly reasoned and self-contradictory. It's the worst published Report by a Commission of Inquiry since 1980," Exiled Former G40 Kingpin Professor Jonathan Moyo has said.Responding to the report that was released yesterday, Moyo said the Motlanthe Commision had produced a Public Relations report that sought to save the face of President Emmerson Mnangagwa and ZANU PF.We publish Moyo's full statement below: Opinion / Columnist Government failure and inaction has become an increasingly common aspect of our political system, whether it is due to political polarization as in the government's shutdown in 2008 or through poor planning, which characterised the slow implementation of government policies. But how does the nation apportion blame for these sorts of failures? It is true that people apportions blame to a particular political party in office. You will find that even when experts say otherwise, people still blame the party that rivals their own political views for the failure. This goes against the idea that a better informed electorate would be less partisan in actuality, people simply ignore the extra information they are given if it challenges their beliefs.Government failures are a reality in any political system, and have received a lot of attention in ZIMBABWE in recent years. In the past decade, failures have included the government's woeful response to corruption and in more recent years the inability to make policy and tackle societal problems. The question is, who do people blame when these failures occur? Prices have gone wild a plate of T bone steak is now 40 US dollars in A Zimbabwean hotel. By far Zimbabwe is the most expensive country in the world and investments are stalling.people overwhelmingly blame the party for the failure. The opposition will blame the ruling party and the buck stops with the party in power. This is not entirely surprising and is consistent with the normal reaction of the general populace. What is most interesting is how people blame the ruling party for the rain. People are very selective about who to blame But, when the blame is on one's own party, the information is ignored and people just continue to blame the other party for the failure.Put simply, when we blame the other party, people listen and use that information. But when there is a problem people tune it out, seemingly unwilling to listen and blame their own party.For one, representative democracy requires that the people are able to hold elected officials accountable for performance in office. When politicians fail to produce desired outcomes, citizens need to be able to accurately place blame and potentially vote them out of office. We have shown that rather than consider relevant facts, people are more interested in pointing the finger at the other party.When the information confirms our beliefs, we use it, and when it challenges us we ignore it. Partisanship colors much of our political experience, and expecting people to take off the partisan glasses when considering information about who is to blame does not appear to happen.So it is clear that the failures of the government reflect badly on the party. Defending the party blindly destroys the party more.If the party takes no decision to deal with the failing government then the party is losing the plot.It is thus important that the party be in charge of the government so that they are able to control the damage exerted on them by the government in action.Party will have a bad name if government fails.As we enter in the first bleak Christmas with no fuel not cooking oils swimming in price hikes and poverty being a luxury the party must rise above all this.The blame game must not be the pointer to the effects of the party. UVazet2000@yahoo.co.uk The European headquarters of Google, one of the many huge multinational companies with a presence in Ireland. Photo: PA A small percentage of highly productive, mostly foreign-owned companies are concealing how most Irish businesses have stagnant or falling productivity growth, a government advisory body has warned. Irelands National Competitiveness Council said in a new report that the productivity gap was a serious concern in the context of international economic uncertainty, more protectionist trade policies across the world, and changes to US and international tax policies that affect the country. The vulnerabilities in the fabric of the Irish economy, coupled with the challenging global environment, endanger the medium-term sustainability of our economy, said Professor Peter Clinch, the councils chair. The report also warns that Brexit has implications in all areas of economic activity for Ireland and pointed to several areas, including a lack of adequate port capacity and the security of the countrys energy supply, as issues that require urgent action. READ MORE: No-deal Brexit would almost halve Irish economic growth in 2019 It notes that, as a small open economy, Ireland has heavily encouraged foreign direct investment for more than 60 years. This consistent commitment has allowed multinational companies to become an integral part of our economy, the report says. But this means that narrowing the productivity gap that exists between these highly productive multinational companies and other firms is vital for sustainable economic growth and critical to addressing the vulnerabilities in Irelands economic model. READ MORE: Budget watchdog criticises Irish government for repeating past mistakes Ireland is going through a period of bumper economic growth it is set to be the fastest-growing economy in the euro zone in 2018 but watchdogs in the country have criticised the government for what they view as a return to the kinds of economic policies that got the country into trouble a decade ago. High growth figures must not lead us to be complacent. The international climate has become more challenging for small open economies, and Ireland has lost ground in the international competitiveness rankings, said Clinch. To avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, it is critical that competitiveness and productivity are positioned as a central pillar of Irelands economic policy. By Brad Brooks and Lisandra Paraguassu SAO PAULO/BRASILIA (Reuters) - The chief justice of Brazil's Supreme Court late on Wednesday knocked down a colleague's ruling that would have freed from jail former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, but said the full court will take up the contentious case in April. Chief Justice Dias Toffoli wrote in his ruling that it would be up to all 11 justices to make a decision. The case considers whether a defendant convicted of a non-violent crime can be jailed after a first appeals court confirms a guilty verdict, which is the situation with Lula, convicted on corruption and facing six more graft trials. A leftist icon, Lula is one of Brazil's most popular politicians, but is also reviled by the right, who blame him for years of corruption, botched economic policies and rising crime. Dias Toffoli said the case would be heard on April 10, a debate that will delve into a deeper constitutional discussion that could have wide-reaching implications for Brazil's corruption investigations and criminal justice system. If Lula is released in April, it would galvanize Brazil's demoralized left, still reeling after October's election of far-right President-elect Jair Bolsonaro, who has vowed to reverse policies instilled during Lula's two terms. Lula, 73, was jailed in April after being sentenced to more than 12 years in prison, and faces six other trials over corruption allegations. He maintains his innocence, insisting he is a political prisoner, jailed in a bid to block him from running for the presidency. His argument gained traction when the crusading anti-corruption judge Sergio Moro, who led the sweeping probe that helped put Lula behind bars, accepted an offer from Bolsonaro to be Brazil's next justice minister. The president-elect takes office on Jan. 1. Earlier Wednesday, Justice Marco Aurelio Mello issued a shock ruling that suspended a Supreme Court decision from 2016 that allowed for convicts to be jailed after their sentence was upheld on first appeal. "My conscience led me to this decision," Mello, who voted against the court's 2016 ruling, told Reuters. "I had to act." IMPUNITY RETURNS? Critics have said reversing the 2016 ruling would result in the return of de facto impunity for the rich and powerful, who have been hobbled in recent years by several corruption investigations that revealed stunning levels of graft in the upper echelons of Brazilian society. But several supreme court justices have been clamoring to revisit their 2016 ruling, arguing that lower courts have in practice made it mandatory to send non-violent convicts to prison after a failed first appeal. Won by a narrow 6-5 margin, the decision has been in justice's cross-hairs and the subject of much constitutional deliberation that could see it revisited. Nonetheless, leaders of Brazil's anti-corruption drive, including Moro, told Reuters that overturning the decision would seriously damage the country's battle against graft. A reversal of the 2016 ruling would not only free Lula, but also release many other leading politicians and businessmen serving time for corruption. Additionally, other powerful figures, like President Michel Temer, who is under investigation, could also benefit if eventually found guilty. "It's impossible to read the Brazilian Constitution ... in the sense that it aims to guarantee impunity for the powerful, even when their crimes are proven," Moro told Reuters earlier this year when asked about the chance the top court could reverse its 2016 ruling. "We are a republic, after all, not a society of castes." Rodrigo Janot, Brazil's former prosecutor general who remains an influential prosecutor, told Reuters allowing convicts to remain free until they exhaust appeals deprive investigators of their best weapon in combating corruption - the ability to reach plea bargain agreements, which Brazilian law only began to allow in 2013. "Nobody will want to turn state's witness if they know they will not face punishment," Janot said. (Reporting by Brad Brooks in Sao Paulo and Lisandra Paraguassu in Brasilia; additional reporting by Jake Spring in Brasilia and Gabriel Stargardter in Rio de Janeiro; editing by James Dalgleish and Grant McCool) Health Canada is taking steps to reduce the amount of alcohol allowed in the potent, sugary, premixed drinks that the agency says are becoming a growing risk to public health, especially for young people. "These drinks can contain up to four times the standard amount of alcohol per container, yet do not taste like alcohol, because the alcohol base is purified, flavoured, and often very sweet," the government agency said in a news release. The proposed amendments to the country's Food and Drug Regulations would help protect youth from over-consumption that could lead to alcohol poisoning and death, Health Canada said. The changes would mean that the number of servings of alcohol permitted in one container would be reduced. Any container under a litre could not contain more than 1.5 servings of alcohol under the new amendments. That means they must contain 25.6 millilitres or less of alcohol. Right now, a can of 568 millilitres of flavoured, purified alcohol could contain up to 11.9 per cent alcohol, the equivalent of four alcoholic drinks. Under the new regulation, a drink of the same size could not contain more than 4.5 per cent alcohol by volume, Health Canada said. But the amendments would not apply to alcohol sold in glass bottles of 750 millilitres or more, since those drinks are considered to contain several portions. The reason for this is that glass bottles that are this size are a common format for traditional alcoholic beverages, such as wine and spirits, Health Canada said. "As a result, consumers are likely to identify these formats as containing multiple servings of alcohol," the agency said. In March, Quebec moved to ban the sale of premixed malt-based beverages containing more than seven per cent alcohol from anywhere other than the provincial liquor stores. That decision came two weeks after Montreal-area teenager Athena Gervais died after she reportedly consumed an 11.9 per cent alcohol malt-liquor drink called FCKED UP on her school lunch break. Story continues The company that produces FCKD UP has since halted production, but other similar beverages are still on the market in the province. Athena's father, Alain Gervais, said he and his family are happy with how quickly the federal government moved on the issue, and how the proposed amendments address the amount of alcohol and the format in which it is sold. "The main goal is to protect our young people from these products which are, frankly, dangerous. I can't say more than we are really happy," Gervais said. Sugary, high-alcohol beverages also played a role in the death of 30-year-old Drummondville, Que., resident Pierre Parent last Christmas Day. He died after combining two Four Loko drinks, which had an alcohol content of 11.9 per cent, with caffeine and cold medicine, according to a coroner's report released in August. Proposal significant, but not perfect: substance abuse specialist For the Quebec Association for Public Health (ASPQ), the proposed amendments are a step forward, but don't address the problem completely. Instead of 1.5 standard drink portions, ASPQ substance abuse specialist Emilie Dansereau-Trahan says it should only be one portion. "When someone will open a container of alcohol, they will think they are taking only one portion," Dansereau-Trahan said. "And when they take the second one, it will actually be the third one." Still, the proposal is "really significant," she said. Dansereau-Trahan also suggested ensuring that drinks with more than one portion of alcohol should have a container that is re-sealable, as well as including a logo that tells the drinker exactly how many portions are in the beverage. Health Canada expects the new regulations to come into effect by spring of 2019, after a consultation period. Good morning, Europe. Today we're watching: Belgian PM Charles Michel offers to resign Charles Michel, Belgium's prime minister, has told parliament that he will resign. The biggest party in Michel's coalition, the Flemish N-VA, quit a week ago in a dispute over signing the UN migration pact. "I have decided to resign and will immediately go to see the king," Michel told parliament. Belgium's King Philippe has suspended his decision. | Read more Hungary's government downplays the scale of protests in Euronews interview About 10,000 people demonstrated in Budapest on Sunday. Opposition parties, students groups, trade unions and civilians joined a demonstration against legislation dubbed "slave law" by critics, which will enable employers to ask staff to work up to 400 hours of overtime annually. In an interview with Euronews, Hungary's government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs disputed the number of people demonstrating and attacked coverage in the western media. For Kovacs, the protests in Hungary amounted to a political action organised by a fragmented and weak political opposition, which is unsuccessful in parliament because of the very few seats they were able to earn". | Read more "Gilets bleus" protests in France First, it was the gilets jaunes (yellow vests), now it's time for the gilets bleus (blue vests): after five weeks of violent demonstrations, French police hits the streets in protest today. They say they're exhausted, overworked and underpaid, and demand better compensation and working conditions. On Wednesday, police across France will hit the streets, calling themselves "les gilets bleus." Follow our updates here: Fort Lauderdale, Dec. 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Amazon may have Alexa, but Nova Southeastern University (NSU) has Julie! NSUs Office of Innovation and Technology has developed and debuted Julie to its students, faculty and staff. Julie is an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot that was designed to help the NSU community navigate and optimize their university experience. At NSU, we consistently seek out ways to provide an edge for our students and Julie is another element that allows them to have access to innovation, said Dr. George Hanbury, president of NSU. Technology is embedded in NSUs DNA, having pioneered many firsts that today are taken for granted. This latest feature is yet another advancement designed to provide the best possible educational experience for our students. Online chatbots are typically a computer program or AI that holds a conversation with a user via text or voice, responding in ways that a human would. Beyond automating simple requests, they are able to provide assistance or access information quickly and efficiently. Julie is an animated and personalized chat bot that has been programmed with many abilities, such as providing support to NSU users by finding their class schedule, searching for dining options on campus and entering technology support tickets, just to name a few. Students are able to ask the chatbot questions such as: Who is my advisor?, What is my account balance? or How do I connect to WiFi? The beauty of Julie is that it is an integrated bot that has the ability to connect with several systems throughout NSU to provide the correct answers. Using deep machine learning together with sentiment analysis and natural language processing, the AI is able to educate itself based on user interactions, profile information and outcomes from assessments. In other words, it will learn each users preferences, likes and tendencies all to better assist in their NSU experience. The chatbot leverages the latest frameworks and cognitive services from Microsoft, specifically its Azure Services, Machine Language and Bot Services. Using this technology, NSUs OITT developed a hybrid process to create and implement a training workflow that will help to consistently build new capabilities into Julie. NSU plans to add several other chatbots focused on recruitment and enrollment, health and clinic services, research, alumni and into the residential halls in the near future. The departments vision for the bots is to evolve into personal AI assistants who can provide information to users who ask questions in a natural way and have the ability to provide accurate answers. Our goal in creating the chatbot is to provide a richer and more personalized experience to students, faculty, staff, researchers and eventually patients throughout their time here with us at NSU, stated Christopher Harrison, NSUs chief technology officer. The AI bot acts as a 24/7 support, allowing users to find answers to information they are searching for when staff may not be available. # # # Be sure to sign up for NSUs RSS feed so you dont miss any of our news releases, guest editorials and other announcements. Please sign up HERE . About Nova Southeastern University (NSU): Located in beautiful Fort Lauderdale, Florida, NSU is ranked among U.S. News & World Reports Top 200 National Research Universities and is a dynamic, private research university providing high-quality educational and research programs at the undergraduate, graduate, and first-professional degree levels. Established in 1964, NSU now includes 16 colleges, the 215,000-square-foot Center for Collaborative Research, a private JK-12 grade school, the Mailman Segal Center for Human Development with specialists in Autism, the world-class NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, and the Alvin Sherman Library, Research and Information Technology Center, which is Floridas largest public library. NSU has campuses in Fort Lauderdale, Fort Myers, Jacksonville, Miami, Miramar, Orlando, Palm Beach, and Tampa, Florida, as well as San Juan, Puerto Rico, while maintaining a presence online globally. Classified as a research university with high research activity by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, NSU is one of only 50 universities nationwide to also be awarded Carnegies Community Engagement Classification, and is also the largest private institution in the United States that meets the U.S. Department of Educations criteria as a Hispanic-serving Institution. For more information, please visit www.nova.edu. Attachments An Island man is frustrated after he says he and his girlfriend had to miss out on a Christmas holiday, after their trip with WestJet Vacations went wrong. Mike Bradley said he and his girlfriend had been looking forward to their trip to Cuba for months, but they never made it out of Canada. He said they spent nearly 24 hours at the Moncton and Toronto airports trying to find a way to their destination, before they finally decided to cancel the trip and head home. "I'm frustrated, I'm tired. At this point I'm starting to get sick to my stomach at everything," Bradley said. "We were just both tired and ragged at this point." Brittany Spencer/CBC Bradley said he booked the trip with WestJet Vacations through a travel agent in New Brunswick. He said their WestJet flight from Moncton to Toronto was delayed eight hours due to mechanical issues, causing them to miss their connecting flight to Cuba. He said WestJet staff at the Moncton airport tried to help them throughout the delay, but there was little they could do. They advised them to fly to Toronto anyway and call WestJet Vacations from there, Bradley said. He said they did that, but that call didn't go well. "I felt like they were trying to put the problem on me," he said. "Especially the first representative I was speaking with. She just was like, 'Well you missed your flight,' and I said, well I didn't miss my flight you guys had a problem with your plane that's why we missed it." WestJet gave them options Bradley said after spending three hours on the phone with customer service, WestJet Vacations gave them some options. One was to go to a different resort two days later, which he said would cut time off their trip. Bradley said it would also require them to spend two nights in a hotel and WestJet Vacations only offered to cover the cost of one of those nights. Another option was to keep a seven-day booking, but that would cost an extra $1,000, and Bradley said they didn't have that money. Story continues "The third option, which was the one we ultimately had to take ... was to just go home," Bradley said. WestJet refunded most of vacation package In a statement to CBC, WestJet said it apologizes to the guests for this situation and understands their disappointment. "We have reached out directly to this guest to offer an apology and to help bring satisfactory closure to this unfortunate situation," said the statement. "When a missed connection occurs due to a mechanical issue at point of departure, we work directly with our WestJet Vacation guests, making every effort to accommodate them with alternative options including continuing with travel, refund, change of dates, or change of destination. "We understand that guests have different flexibility and personal situations that although not ideal, cancellation is sometimes the best option. In this situation a full refund is provided." Bradley said WestJet has given him a refund for most of the travel package, but not the amount he paid for with Air Miles, which he said is worth about $900. While he's happy to have some of his money back, Bradley said, he'd still like to see WestJet do more. "I don't know if I'll be able to get it but I would like to see some compensation for all the bills that I had to pay leading up to the event, including hotels, bridge fare, gas and other expenses ... the time spent and vacation lost, really," Bradley said. Brittany Spencer/CBC Bradley said WestJet hasn't offered him any compensation for the inconvenience or for the hours he and his girlfriend spent at the airports. He said in the mean time, he's working with his travel agent to try to recoup the cost of his Air Miles through insurance. "I just feel really wronged in this situation and a company like that should be able to compensate their passengers when they are at fault." More P.E.I. news Chinese tourism in the Northwest Territories has seen a boom in the past few years, but with the current political chill between Canada and China, some of Canada's main tourism organizations are stepping back from advertising for a while. On Dec. 1, one of China's top telecommunications executives, Meng Wanzhou, was arrested in Vancouver and held pending a possible extradition to the U.S. on suspicion of fraud involving U.S. sanctions in Iran. She was released on bail Dec. 11. Her arrest and detention led to increased tensions between Canada and China, with two Canadians detained in China last week on suspicion of "endangering national security." In response, the national body that markets Canada as a tourist destination has decided to halt its advertisements in China for the time being. "Destination Canada, along with our co-invested partners, have decided to temporarily pause or postpone our current marketing efforts in China," said Emma Slieker, a representative for the organization, in an email. We really don't want to be fueling the fire during a time when there's other stressful conversations going on. - Cathie Bolstad, NWT Tourism The organization, which is wholly owned by the federal government and markets the country as a tourism destination internationally, says the marketing it paused primarily promoted winter activities across Canada on Chinese social media. "China continues to be our third largest inbound market and of significant strategic importance in the future," Slieker wrote. GNWT She noted that this isn't a first for the organization. It also halted advertising in France after a series of attacks in that country in 2015. NWT Tourism, which is a partner of Destination Canada, markets the territory as a tourist hotspot. "We really don't want to be fueling the fire during a time when there's other stressful conversations going on," explained Cathie Bolstad, chief executive officer of NWT Tourism. Story continues Destination Canada/Weibo According to a spokesperson for the N.W.T's. Department of Infrastructure, Tourism and Investment, more tourists come to the territory from China than anywhere else in the world. In 2017/2018, nearly 20,000 Chinese tourists visited the N.W.T., spending almost $2,400 per person per visit, according to the territorial government. 'Quiet the conversation' Bolstad said its marketing was on WeChat and Weibo, two top social media platforms in China. The halt in marketing doesn't mean all advertisements are being pulled. Rather, Bolstad likens it to a Facebook page becoming inactive. "[We're] just trying to quiet the conversation right now in terms of tourism." Bolstad said she can't speculate on what effect this will have on Chinese tourists coming to the Northwest Territories, but said she hasn't heard any concerns from tourism operators in the territory. "These trips are often booked and sold well in advance," she said. Tweet Heres a letter to a very angry Cafe Hayek reader (one who asks that I tell Cafe Hayek readers just how angry and disappointed he is with me for my criticisms of our President): Mr. Mo Stansbury Mr. Stansbury: In response to this blog post you insist that Im crazy to doubt Chinas chance [of] dominating all the industries they want. If by dominating you mean have a comparative advantage, understand this: when a country (or a person, or a collection of persons) gets a comparative advantage in the production of some output, it necessarily gets a comparative disadvantage in the production of some other output or outputs. And it matters not how the comparative advantage that is gotten is gotten. So Beijings successful effort to get for Chinese producers a comparative advantage in the production of, say, microchips, will thereby also be Beijings successful effort to get for Chinese producers a comparative disadvantage in the production of some other good or service. And if, as is quite possible, this other good or service is one that Beijing wants Chinese producers also to have a comparative advantage at producing, too bad. No matter how powerful or even miraculous are Beijings modern mandarins, they cannot possibly arrange for Chinese producers to have comparative advantages in whatever industries these mandarins want. One reason for this conclusion is that resources are scarce. Resources used to produce microchips are resources no longer available to be used to produce steel, petroleum, or any other good or service. Another, related reason is that comparative advantage implies specialization and specialization declines the greater the number of tasks any economic entity undertakes. Suppose that you announce to the world that you plan by 2025 to be the worlds greatest cardiologist, dermatologist, novelist, guitarist, architect, and plumber. You would, of course, be laughed at. No one would take you seriously. And if you were nevertheless to make this effort, youd succeed only at failing at each of these jobs. The task at which that youd wind up having a comparative advantage would almost certainly be manual, unskilled labor a task not requiring specialized skills. The same logic holds true for any group of people, including the Chinese: if they were to attempt to specialize in the production of everything theyd succeed at achieving comparative excellence only in the performance of the mundane, low-skilled, and low-value-added tasks. Sincerely, Donald J. Boudreaux Professor of Economics and Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center George Mason University Fairfax, VA 22030 CAMEROUN :: Cameroon: Ivory trafficking to Nigeria, Three Arrested Three people have been arrested in connection to ivory trafficking during an operation carried out by the Douala Port Maritime Brigade. The three were arrested during attempts by a wildlife crime syndicate to smuggle 125 tusks and dozens of ivory pieces to Nigeria. A 31-year old man who was about transporting bales of clothing at the Port des Peches in Douala was stopped by gendarme officers and questioned on the contents of the cargo following prior investigations that revealed that ivory was hidden inside second hand dresses and smuggled to Nigeria. His reaction raised further questions and the gendarmerie officers decided to check the seven bales of clothing. The contraband was found carefully concealed inside the illicit cargo. He was arrested and taken to the gendarmerie office where two of his accomplices were later arrested as they came attempting to bribe the brigade commander for his release. One of the traffickers who is connected to this ring is still at large. The case was forwarded to the state counsel who returned the file to wildlife officials of the Littoral Regional Delegation of Forestry and Wildlife with the competence to handling such matters. The legal proceedings in prosecuting wildlife traffickers was carried out with the technical support of a conservation group called LAGA and the traffickers returned to the state prosecutor who indicted them on charges ranging from corruption attempts, illegal possession of parts of protected wildlife species to the killing of protected wildlife species. Priori investigations provided insights on how the ring operates with connections found in the South Region and Gabon. They were equally connected to traffickers arrested in previous operations including big pangolin scales operations carried out in the past, in Douala. One of the three, is a Nigerian national and several illicit wildlife products heading to Nigeria have in the past been intercepted during crackdown operations Traffickers use the several small ports littered along the Cameroon Nigeria coastline to smuggle ivory, pangolin scales and several other products to Nigeria where they are exported to Asia. In December last year, three were arrested by the police with over 158 ivory tusks and thousands of other wildlife products as they were loading the illegal consignment on board a truck for smuggling to Nigeria. The case is currently being tried at the Bonanjo court of first instance. In 2014, a man was arrested in Edea with 30 ivory tusks hidden in bales of clothing he was transporting to Douala in a consignement that was believed to be heading to Nigeria. Over one ton of ivory was seized in 2009 by wildlife officials as they illicit cargo was heading to Nigeria. The relative ease with which traffickers operate in Nigeria has made the country a preferred destination for big time traffickers seeking to export contraband to Asia. According to sections 101 and 158 of the 1994 law that governs the forestry and wildlife sector anyone found in possession of parts of protected wildlife species is presumed to have captured or killed the animal and is liable to a prison term of 1 to 3 years and or a fine of 3 to 10 million francs. We are in significant times in Australia right now. God is pouring out His Spirit in fresh and unprecedented ways. There are moments when the fervent prayers of the saints, the need of the hour and the divine move of God come into alignment and awakening occurs. The reality of the Kingdom of God breaks through with fresh power and spreads like wildfire. When this happens mighty things happen. Christians are renewed in their faith, many come to Jesus, signs and wonders are released, reformation occurs and new movements are birthed. Many people are becoming increasingly aware that this is what is starting to happen in Australia right now and a powerful recent manifestation of this was the event in Melbourne called Awakening Australia. Awakening Australia Awakening Australia was a massive three day gathering at Marvel Stadium where thousands of Christians from all around Australia came together to be involved in a huge evangelistic outreach in Melbourne and unite together to seek God for a mighty move of His Spirit across Australia. Many well known speakers spoke at the event including Bill Johnson, Heidi Baker, Todd White and Nick Vujicic. Right from the first morning of the event there was such a strong sense of God moving in the stadium as the crowd spontaneously broke out in songs of praise and worship. Australia for Jesus A large focus of the first two days of Awakening was evangelism. Each day thousands of us went out on the streets to give out free tickets to the stadium, talk to people about Jesus and pray for the sick. On the Saturday afternoon as we left the stadium to go out on the streets there was such an energy and fervency in the air. Nothing captures the amazing spirit of the moment better than the video footage on social media of hundreds of people singing Amazing Grace and shouting the name of Jesus next to Southern Cross station on Spencer Street. In fact a few days earlier before I had even left Adelaide God indicated to me that something iconic would happen on Spencer Street. On the way to the airport in Adelaide the bus went past a small side street called Spencer Street. The street sign seemed to jump out at me and take on significance for no reason. When I arrived at Southern Cross station on Spencer Street in Melbourne I realized I wasn't just imagining it, God was informing me that the power of God was descending upon this part of Melbourne near Marvel Stadium. The cross of Christ over Australia Something else that amazed me was discovering that Marvel Stadium was right near Southern Cross Station. This is because earlier this year God started to repeatedly draw my attention to the Southern Cross. First I continually noticed the Eureka Southern Cross flag on cars and trucks. Soon I started to notice businesses everywhere with the Southern Cross in their logo. And then I would look up at night and my eyes would automatically lock with the Southern Cross. I asked God what this meant and I felt Him say 'the cross of Christ over Australia'. This instilled in me an encouragement that God was doing something significant in Australia and wanted to bring many people to Him. Many people came to Christ over the weekend and there were some amazing testimonies, including people being saved from suicide and even some of the police and security staff working at the event becoming Christians! Calling out for a move of God By the last day of Awakening the longing for a move of God was palpable. One of the most powerful sessions was the Sunday morning national unity service where a number of Christian leaders from around Australia and from different denominations shared and prayed. One of these speakers, Katherine Ruonala from Glory City Church in Brisbane, prophetically declared that the times are now ripe for harvest. She drew attention to two important things: Firstly, outpouring will happen through a demonstration of the Spirit's power like never before in Australia. There is a greater openness to signs and wonders and the prophetic and the supernatural are increasingly becoming a normal part of the Christian life across the body of Christ. Another Jesus People Movement Secondly, she mentioned that there had been prophetic words about what God was doing at the moment having parallels with the Jesus People movement that happened in the 1970s. She prophesied that there is coming a greater harvest than happened in the '70s. This particularly stirred me because God has been drawing my attention to the Jesus People movement this year too. And one of these powerful parallels was the beach baptisms that happened at St Kilda beach the night after Awakening finished. Over a hundred people, many of them brand new believers, sealed their decision to follow Jesus in the waters of baptism. Only a few months ago I was watching YouTube videos about the Jesus People movement and watching mass baptisms in the ocean and now here I was watching it happen in real life! It was such a sacred and beautiful time and a foretaste of what is to come. Since Awakening there have been many stories of fresh evangelistic activity across Australia. It is clear that something has shifted spiritually in Australia and I am excited to see what God will do in the days ahead. Conor is from Adelaide South Australia. He is a gardener and is involved in ministry. He loves God, music, reading and thinking deeply about philosophy and current events in the world. Conor Ryans previous articles may be viewed at www.pressserviceinternational.org/conor-ryan.html LOS ANGELES, Dec. 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- AEP Ohio is the first utility in the world to deploy the Enervee Checkout application which enables customers shopping on the AEP Ohio Marketplace to take advantage of instant and dynamic discounts for energy-saving products, in partnership with online retailer lightbulbs.com. Customers can now take advantage of instant discounts while shopping online, reducing the up-front cost to purchase the product and speeding up the process of traditional, after-purchase rebates. For AEP Ohio, Checkout enables real-time verification of users, increased flexibility in terms of customer verification method (e.g. by zip-code, API call or flat file), as well as the ability to set and change underlying rules for incentive eligibility (e.g. by product, quantity or timing). Checkout also enables AEP Ohio to create and deliver targeted incentives based either on user responses during the Checkout process (via fully customizable qualifying questions), or via data provided by the utility. For example, special incentives on the most efficient products could be offered to income-qualified customers, addressing the up-front purchase price barrier. The AEP Ohio Marketplace launched in 2018, offering the companys 1.2 million residential customers the most energy efficient products to meet their needs. The AEP Ohio Marketplace offers features not available through other channels, including an Enervee Score showing how energy efficient a model is compared to other products in the same category. The Enervee Score is based on a 0-100 scale; estimated energy bill savings over the life of the product, compared to typical, similar products; and product price comparisons pulled from e-commerce sites around the country. In contrast to other instant online incentive solutions, Checkout allows AEP Ohio to partner with retailers, rather than compete. Tech-savvy lightbulbs.com proved to be an ideal partner for Enervee to bring Checkout to the utility sector. We are thrilled to be deepening our partnership with AEP Ohio so soon after our relationship began. Checkout is just one step in a detailed and far-reaching product roadmap that we develop with our partners, said Matthias Kurwig, CEO of Enervee. We know the IDEAL Marketplace can deliver significant savings and increased customer satisfaction at scale, and with AEP Ohio being the first to bring Enervee Checkout to the market, were excited to see how energy-smart buying decisions become even simpler and more personalized, and how AEP Ohio continues to demonstrate its commitment to be its customers trusted energy advisor. About Enervee Enervee provides a suite of software applications and services designed to drive more energy-smart buying decisions from consumers. These applications and services blend data science, behavioral science and digital marketing to make the energy-smart choice easy. Learn more at https://enervee.com/about/ . About AEP Ohio AEP Ohio delivers electricity to nearly 1.5 million customers of AEPs subsidiary Ohio Power Co. in Ohio. AEP Ohio is based in Gahanna, Ohio, and is a unit of American Electric Power. News and information about AEP Ohio can be found at AEPOhio.com . American Electric Power based in Columbus, Ohio, is focused on building a smarter energy infrastructure and delivering new technologies and custom energy solutions to our customers. AEPs more than 17,000 employees operate and maintain the nations largest electricity transmission system and more than 219,000 miles of distribution lines to efficiently deliver safe, reliable power to nearly 5.4 million regulated customers in 11 states. AEP also is one of the nations largest electricity producers with approximately 32,000 megawatts of diverse generating capacity, including 4,300 megawatts of renewable energy. AEPs family of companies includes utilities AEP Ohio, AEP Texas, Appalachian Power (in Virginia and West Virginia), AEP Appalachian Power (in Tennessee), Indiana Michigan Power, Kentucky Power, Public Service Company of Oklahoma, and Southwestern Electric Power Company (in Arkansas, Louisiana and east Texas). AEP also owns AEP Energy, AEP Energy Partners, AEP OnSite Partners and AEP Renewables, which provide innovative competitive energy solutions nationwide. Contact: Tory Carver tory@themcdonnellgroup.com 404-583-0003 X 103 Share this: Twitter Facebook WhatsApp LinkedIn Email Telegram His Excellency Paul Biya President of the Republic of Cameroon P.O. Box 100 Yaounde, Cameroon December 19, 2018 Facsimile: +237-222-203306 Email: cabcivil@prc.cm Sent via facsimile & email Dear President Biya, The Committee to Protect Journalists, an independent press freedom advocacy organization, writes to request that you release imprisoned journalist Thomas Awah Junior, the Northwest correspondent for privately owned Afrik 2 Radio in Yaounde and publisher of the monthly Aghem Messenger magazine, on humanitarian grounds. A military court on May 25, 2018, sentenced Awah to 11 years in prison, after he was convicted on several charges including terrorism and the spreading of false news, according to media reports and a copy of the judgment seen by CPJ. Awah was arrested in Bamenda on January 2, 2017, while interviewing protesters for Afrik 2 Radio, according to CPJ research. Awah suffered from poor physical health before his arrest, but his health has deteriorated badly since his incarceration in Kondengui Central Prison in Yaounde. On September 17, 2018, an increasingly frail and emaciated Awah was admitted to a private ward at the Yaounde Central Hospital after a social media campaign went viral. The campaign included shocking photographs of a critically ill Awah, according to local journalists, a BBC Pidgin report, and a CPJ review of the social media posts. A local nongovernmental organization, the Unity Foundation, stepped in to ensure he received treatment for chronic tuberculosis and pneumonia, according to a person familiar with the details of Awahs hospitalization. Despite his continuing poor health, Awah was discharged from hospital on October 16 due to mounting hospital bills, according to a person with knowledge of his hospitalization who asked not to be named for fear of reprisal, as well as local media reports and a tweet by the Unity Foundation. Awah was sent back to Kondengui Prison, where he remains critically ill. According to CPJs 2018 prison census, Awah was one of seven journalists imprisoned in Cameroon as of December 1, 2018, a fact that impacts international perceptions of your country and its commitment to human rights. While we welcome the release of Michel Biem Tong and Akumbom Elvis McCarthy on December 14, 2018, journalists should never be imprisoned for their work. We are particularly concerned that Awah remains jailed despite his deteriorating health. We therefore urge you to use the powers bestowed on you under the constitution of Cameroon to ensure that Awah is unconditionally released on humanitarian grounds. Such a gesture would be viewed both as a compassionate act and as a demonstration of your governments commitment to complying with international human rights treaties to which Cameroon is a state party. Sincerely, Joel Simon Executive Director Committee to Protect Journalists Share this: Twitter Facebook WhatsApp LinkedIn Email Telegram It was 3 p.m. on January 13 when Carlos Dominguez Rodriguez stopped at a traffic light in Nuevo Laredo, in the northern Mexican state of Tamaulipas. Two men approached the car of the well-known newspaper columnist, opened the drivers door, and stabbed him more than 20 times in front of his family. Dominguez, 77, was the first journalist killed in Mexico in 2018. CPJ has determined that at least four journalistsincluding Dominguezwere murdered in direct reprisal for their work there this year, and are investigating the murders of another six to determine the motive. Although it can be difficult to determine the motive in these killings, CPJ often finds indications that organized crime and state actors may have been either directly or indirectly involved. Observers like Juan Velediaz, a veteran crime reporter for the national newspaper El Sol de Mexico, call this narcopolitica, the phenomenon of public officials, local politics, and organized crime becoming so intertwined they are no longer distinguishable. Narcopolitics means that the interests of public officials and organized crime overlap, he told CPJ. As such, it becomes an enormous risk for journalists in this country who report on crime and corruption. The violent effect of this overlap was clear in the July elections, when over 150 candidates were killed in what analysts such as Alejandro Hope said they believed was a mix of political conflict and organized crime attempting to insert itself into the political process. Separately, Red #RompeElMiedo, a social media campaign run by local press freedom groups, reported 52 attacks on the media during the election period. Mexican authorities have long denied or ignored the role of state actors in violence against the press, instead placing the blame squarely on organized crime. In May last year, then president Enrique Pena Nieto hastily organized a summit to address the issue in the wake of the 2017 murder of Sinaloan reporter Javier Valdez Cardenas. Joined by all 32 Mexican governors and the federal Security Cabinet, Pena Nieto said it [was] the obligation of the Mexican state in its entirety to guarantee journalists can carry out their profession, especially when faced with the threat from organized crime. However, data compiled by press freedom organizations contradicts the official narrative that organized crime is almost exclusively to blame. Since 1992, CPJ has found that in at least 10 cases government or military officials were the suspected culprits in the murders of Mexican journalists. Moreover, in its annual report published in March, the Mexican chapter of press freedom group Article 19 found that 48 percent of the attacks against reporters that it documented last year were committed either by or with the involvement of government officials. Those statistics dont tell the whole story. In Mexico, the line between public officials and organized crime is often blurry. In places where local public officials and organized crime have fused, their interests become intertwined and they are often both responsible for attacks against journalists who threaten their interests, said Sara Mendiola, director of Propuesta Civica, a Mexico City nonprofit organization that provides legal assistance to journalists and human rights defenders. Mendiola and her organization represent the family of Miroslava Breach Velducea, a reporter killed in the northern state of Chihuahua on March 23, 2017. Breach, a correspondent for the Mexico City newspaper La Jornada, had received threats after reporting on a criminal gangs attempting to postulate electoral candidates for mayor in small municipalities in the states Sierra Tarahumara region. It was one of several murders CPJ has documented where narcopolitics may have been the motive. Other cases include Leobardo Vazquez Atzin, 42, who was killed on March 21 in Gutierrez Zamora, Veracruzthe deadliest state in Mexico for journalists. Before he was killed, Vazquez had criticized the mayor of a nearby town on Enlace Informativo Regional, a news page he had started recently on Facebook. On September 20, four suspects were arrested for their alleged involvement in a series of crimes, including the murder of Vazquez, according to reports. But, as of mid-December, authorities had not released further information on the identity of the suspects or a possible motive. And in Acapulco, 36-year old Leslie Ann Pamela Montenegro del Real, was shot dead on February 9. Known for her eccentric persona La Nana Pelucas, (the Grandma in Wigs) and what colleagues described to CPJ as her sharp tongue, Montenegro was often critical of local politics on El Sillon, a satirical news show she broadcast on YouTube. One day after the murder, then Guerrero Attorney General Javier Olea said that Montenegro had provoked the anger of an unnamed government official and a criminal group, and added that the journalist had been threatened by a police officer with links to the gang. A suspect was arrested in August, according to reports. As of mid-December, Guerrero state authorities had not responded to several requests from CPJ for updates in the case. In Dominguezs case, police arrested a former political operative named Rodolfo Cantu on accusations of orchestrating the murder. Cantus nephew is former Nuevo Laredo mayor Carlos Canturosas Villareal, whom Dominguez had accused of controlling a network of shell companies to launder money. In a March interview with El Universal, the reporters son accused Canturosas of being involved in the murder. The latters whereabouts are currently unknown and CPJ was unable to find contact details for him. CPJ asked Tamaulipas state attorney general Irving Barrios Mojica via text message whether Canturosas was a suspect in the case, but as of December 17 had not received a reply. Beyond attacks over their reporting, journalists working for small, local outlets are also often at risk because of their close ties to local politics. The majority of journalists in remote areas or small municipalities make the equivalent of only a few hundred dollars per month, with little to no benefits, according to dozens of conversations CPJ has had in recent months with reporters across the country. To add to their income, reporters often work as spokespeople or communication officials for local governments, which can make it hard at times for CPJ to determine whether an attack was in relation to a victims journalism or political ties. CPJ continues to closely monitor the progress of investigations into these cases. And, while the exact motive often remains unclear, narcopolitica cannot be ruled out. [Reporting from Mexico City, Tuxtla Gutierrez and Ciudad Victoria.] Editors Note: The second paragraph has been corrected to reflect the number of cases in 2018 that CPJ is investigating to determine if the journalist was killed for their work. Share this: Twitter Facebook WhatsApp LinkedIn Email Telegram Journalists from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan to the U.S. were targeted for murder in 2018 in reprisal for their work, bringing the total of journalists killed on duty to its highest in three years. The number of journalists killed in conflict fell to its lowest level since 2011. A CPJ special report by Elana Beiser Video: Murders of Journalists Rise in 2018 Published December 19, 2018 NEW YORK The number of journalists targeted for murder in reprisal for their reporting nearly doubled in 2018 from a year earlier, driving up the overall count of journalists killed on the job. Afghanistan, where extremists have stepped up deliberate attacks on journalists, was the deadliest country and accounted for much of the increase. At least 53 journalists were killed around the world between January 1 and December 14, 2018, of which at least 34 were singled out for murder. CPJ tracks three types of journalists deaths on the job: reprisal murders; deaths in combat or crossfire (11 this year, the lowest since 2011); and deaths on other dangerous assignments, such as covering protests that turn violent (eight this year). The total is up from 47 killed in all of last year, of which 18 were pinpointed for murder. A total of 50 were killed in 2016. The recent uptick in killings follows two years of decline, but comes as the jailing of journalists hits a sustained highadding up to a profound global crisis of press freedom. The context for the crisis is varied and complex, and closely tied to changes in technology that have allowed more people to practice journalism even as it has made journalists expendable to the political and criminal groups who once needed the news media to spread their message. Another significant factor is a lack of international leadership on journalists rights and safety. The most illustrative case is the brazen murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul in October by Saudi agents. Khashoggi, who lived in self-imposed exile in the U.S., had been strongly critical of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The most vocal head of state in Khashoggis case has been Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose government has effectively shut down the independent media and is jailing more journalists than any other around the world for the third consecutive year. The White House, traditionally a strong defender of global press freedom, has equivocated on the blame for Khashoggis murder despite, according to the Post, CIA conclusions that only the crown prince could have ordered such an operation. In what was billed as his definitive statement on the case, President Donald Trump on November 20 saidreferring to the crown princes alleged rolemaybe he did and maybe he didnt! and that in any case, the U.S. intends to remain a steadfast partner of Saudi Arabia, citing Saudi purchases of military equipment and joint opposition to Iran. Essentially, Trump signaled that countries that do enough business with the United States are free to murder journalists without consequence. A Capital Gazette newspaper rack displays the days front page on June 29, 2018, the day after a man killed five people in the papers newsroom. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky) Khashoggi lived in Virginia, one of two U.S. states that border Washington, D.C. The other state, Maryland, was on June 28 the site of the deadliest single attack on the media in recent U.S. history. A gunman entered the newsroom of the Capital Gazette in the city of Annapolis and shot dead four journalists and a sales associate. The alleged killer, Jarrod Ramos, had issued repeated threats to the paper after a defamation lawsuit he filed against it in 2012 failed. Ramos faces five counts of first-degree murder and other charges, and is scheduled to go on trial June 3, 2019, according to the Capital Gazette. The day after the massacre, Trump told reporters, Journalists, like all Americans, should be free from the fear of being violently attacked while doing their job. But within days, he had resumed his characteristic attacks on the press, calling the media fake news and journalists enemies of the people on social media and at rallies. Trumps broadsides came as the European Union grapples with its own crisis of journalist safety. Jan Kuciak, a 27-year-old investigative reporter looking into corruption in Slovakia who was shot dead alongside his fiancee in February, was the second journalist murdered for his work in the bloc after Maltas Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed by a bomb placed on her car in October 2017. (Another EU journalist, Viktoria Marinova, was raped, beaten, and strangled to death in her native Bulgaria on October 6 this year. The government has declared the crime unrelated to her work, but CPJ is still investigating the motive.) Caruana Galizias murder, and Kuciaks, remain unsolveda state of impunity that, according to CPJ research, inevitably perpetuates further violence. This cycle is also illustrated by at least four murders of journalists in Mexico this year and two in Brazil. In fact, the deadliest country for journalists in 2018, Afghanistan, is a mainstay on CPJs annual global Impunity Index, which spotlights places where journalists are regularly murdered and their killers go free. The 13 journalists killed in Afghanistan in 2018 were the most in any year since CPJ began keeping trackincluding 2001, when the U.S attacked the country and nine journalists were killed. A vigil for 10 Afghan journalists who were killed in a targeted suicide bombing on April 30, 2018. (AFP/Diptendu Dutta) In recent years, extremists have launched major bombings in Afghanistan, then detonated a second blast with the apparent express aim of killing journalists and other first responders. On April 30, 2018, one such double suicide attack claimed by the militant group Islamic State killed nine journalists. In an especially cynical ploy, the attacker disguised himself as a media worker and detonated his explosives amid a group of reporters rushing to the scene of the first explosion. Among the victims: Abadullah Hananzai, 26, a reporter for U.S.-funded Radio Azadi, the Afghan service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), who had recently covered drug addiction and the Interior Ministrys attempts to crack down on narcotics trafficking out of Afghanistan, and who was about to celebrate his first wedding anniversary, according to RFE/RL. Hananzais last public Facebook post was a tribute to a former colleague who had been shot dead by unknown gunmen the previous week. Journalists continue to die working in other war-torn countries, such as Syria and Yemen, but the number of journalists killed in combat or crossfire fell to its lowest since 2011, as journalists access is diminished or the risks become too grave to bear, leading to self-censorship, exile, or abandoning the work. In Syria, at least nine journalists were killed in each 2017 and 2018, compared with a high of 31 in 2012. In Yemen, three journalists were killed in 2018, and in Iraq, CPJ has not confirmed that any journalists were killed because of their work for the first time since 2012. Elsewhere in the Middle East, two Palestinian journalists were shot and killed by Israeli soldiers while covering protests in the Gaza strip. CPJ is investigating the killing of another 23 journalists in 2018, but so far has not been able to confirm that the motive was journalism in those cases. These include another U.S. case, Zachary Stoner, an independent music video blogger gunned down in Chicago in June. Other findings from CPJs research: Seven media workers were killed in 2018, including two each in Afghanistan and Yemen. Three women were killed, compared with eight last year. Historically, about 7 percent of journalists killed are women. Five foreign journalists were killed during the year: two Ecuadorans were murdered in Colombia (along with their driver) and three Russians were killed in mysterious circumstances in the Central African Republic. Political groups, which includes extremists like Islamic State, were the most frequent suspected perpetrators, in 53 percent of cases. Politics was the most dangerous beat, covered by 62 percent of journalists killed. Broadcast reporter was most dangerous job. CPJ began compiling detailed records on all journalist deaths in 1992. CPJ staff members independently investigate and verify the circumstances behind each death. CPJ considers a case work-related only when its staff is reasonably certain that a journalist was killed in direct reprisal for his or her work; in combat-related crossfire; or while carrying out a dangerous assignment such as covering a protest that turns violent. If the motives in a killing are unclear, but it is possible that a journalist died in relation to his or her work, CPJ classifies the case as unconfirmed and continues to investigate. CPJs list does not include journalists who died of illness or were killed in car or plane accidents unless the crash was caused by hostile action. Other press organizations using different criteria cite different numbers of deaths. CPJs database of journalists killed in 2018 includes capsule reports on each victim and filters for examining trends in the data. CPJ maintains a database of all journalists killed since 1992 and those who have gone missing or are imprisoned for their work. Elana Beiser is editorial director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. She previously worked as an editor for Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal in New York, London, Brussels, Singapore, and Hong Kong. SAN RAMON, Calif. and LAS VEGAS, Dec. 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- CES is the world's gathering place for all those who thrive on the business of consumer technologies. From January 8-11, the EnOcean Alliance formed by leading companies worldwide from the building sector will present innovative wireless Internet of Things (IoT) solutions for automation in sustainable building projects. Due to strong partnerships with innovative organizations of the IT industry such as IBM, BSC Computer and Digital Concepts EnOcean Alliance opens the world of energy harvesting wireless communication to develop interoperable self-powered wireless solutions as an IoT standard. Leading wireless building automation standard EnOcean wireless networks have been installed in more than 1,000,000 buildings worldwide, making it the most widespread and most field-tested wireless building automation standard in the world. The interoperable ecosystem of more than 400 member companies and over 5000 products provides seamless interfaces to common solutions such as Apple HomeKit from Digital Concepts, IBM Watson IoT and the open source software framework IoTivity (sponsored by the Open Connectivity Foundation, OCF with solutions from BSC Computer). The international EnOcean wireless standard (ISO/IEC 14543-3-1X) is also an essential element of the Ready2Services initiative launched by the French Smart Building Alliance (SBA) in June 2018 to support the development of intelligent buildings for smart cities. The Ready2Services concept aims to evaluate the ability of buildings for multiple services, awarding buildings with a certain certification level. Self-powered wireless sensor solutions are a key component of this initiative. Perfect fit with energy-saving building automation systems The key advantages of wireless control are the ease of upgrading existing buildings and expanding a system at any time. Wireless control systems can even provide greater installation flexibility if units within the system do not require dedicated cabling or batteries for power. Energy harvesting wireless sensors, switches and controls therefore perfectly fit in with the sustainable characteristics of energy-saving building automation systems. This makes EnOcean the most important wireless standard for maintenance-free applications for building automation and the IoT, says Graham Martin, CEO and Chairman of the EnOcean Alliance. The EnOcean standard in practice Visitors to CES can learn more about the EnOcean Alliances maintenance free wireless standard for smart buildings as well as examples of self-powered IoT solutions at its partner booth (Sands #40955). At this booth, the partners Smart Building Alliance, Ubiant, Decelect and Avidsen will be demonstrating their IoT solutions currently being installed in thousands of new housing in France (e.g. by the French construction company Bouygues) and being offered in DIY stores across Europe by Leroy Merlin, member of the Mulliez Group. Part of this solution includes the advanced installation tool quickmove enabling easy commissioning and management of EnOcean based networks. At this booth the EnOcean Alliance will be showing a self-powered smart home solution certified to work with Apple HomeKit. This includes the IoT Gateway from EnOcean Alliance promoter Digital Concepts communicating with multiple batteryless wireless sensors and switches which are part of smart phone or tablet based Apple HomeKit smart home solutions. EnOcean Alliance Promoter BSC Computer will be demonstrating their smart building IoT Gateway with IoTivity connectivity from the Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF). Additional members of the EnOcean Alliance exhibiting at CES 2019 include: NodOn (Sands #40444), Zipato (Sands #41452), Engie (Sands #51902), Somfy (Sands #41531), EnOcean (Sands #40464), Rohm (Venetian Titian #2205) and IBM (LVCC Central Hall #14028). About EnOcean Alliance Leading companies worldwide from the building sector formed the EnOcean Alliance to establish innovative maintenance-free wireless solutions for the Internet of Things, which are used for automation solutions for sustainable building projects making buildings more energy-efficient, more flexible and more cost effective. The core technology of the Alliance is energy harvesting wireless technology for flexibly positioned and service-free sensor solutions. The EnOcean Alliance aims to internationalize the energy harvesting wireless technology, and is dedicated to creating interoperability between the products of OEM partners. Basis for this is the international standard ISO/IEC 14543-3-1X, which is optimized for wireless solutions with ultra-low power consumption and energy harvesting. More than 400 companies currently belong to the EnOcean Alliance. The headquarters of the non-profit organization is located in San Ramon, California. www.enocean-alliance.org Press Contact Evelyn Gilde-Back EnOcean Alliance M +49 (0)176 636 13 964 press@enocean-alliance.org FastGo now operates in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City and Da Nang with more than 30,000 drivers. Photo by VnExpress Vietnamese ride-hailing firm FastGo, at odds with authorities over its legal status, asserts it is going by the book. According to the Ministry of Transport and the Ministry of Industry and Trade, FastGo is not yet eligible to be approved for a pilot phase, nor is it registered as a tech platform. In a written reply to the Da Nang Department of Transports proposal to permit FastGo to operate, the Ministry of Transport has said that the application falls under the category of "electronic contract service based - management support platform." But, the ministry adds, it is yet to receive a proposal to launch the app directly from FastGo Vietnam JSC, which means the application is not yet ready to be approved for a pilot phase. The ministry has also requested the Da Nang Department of Transport to inform cab companies not to use FastGo if the app is offered to them. Furthermore, FastGo is not allowed to provide its services directly to taxi drivers, it says. However, Nguyen Huu Tuat, FastGo CEO, is adamant that the app is not violating any law. He told VnExpress that he has not received a written response the ministry or from the Da Nang Department of Transportation. Tuat clarified that FastGo does not provide transport support management services to individual drivers in Da Nang. It only services drivers of local transport cooperatives. "FastGo has filed the information and sent a request for approval for a pilot phase, but has not received a response from the Ministry of Transport," said Tuat. He said Fastgo is neither defined as a transport service provider nor is it a transport cooperative. It is merely an application connecting drivers with customers. Tuat said that he was waiting for new transport regulations on this issue, following which the company will determine the specific business category for registering its app. FastGo has been functioning in Vietnams major cities since June. It is only after six months that regulators have backtracked and declared that its registration is incomplete. A representative of the Department of E-Commerce and Digital Economy under the Ministry of Industry and Trade said: "FastGo has not registered its tech platform with the Ministry of Industry and Trade. Therefore, it is unlawful for FastGo to engage with drivers or operate a transport management platform." In response to this comment, Tuat asserted that he has submitted this proposal, but is yet to receive a reply. Launched in June 2018, FastGo now operates in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City and Da Nang with more than 30,000 drivers. At the end of August, the local company received funding from VinaCapital, and is planning to mobilize up to $50 million for a second expansion phase that will target Indonesia and Myanmar. FastGo Vietnam Joint Stock Company was established in April 2018 with its headquarters in Hanoi. The company belongs to a wide network of services provided by Nextech, a leading tech firm in Vietnam. A Nikkei Asian Review report quoted the company as saying it hopes to make its service available in 20 cities in Vietnam and five other Southeast Asian markets, including the Philippines, Cambodia and Thailand, by the end of next year. VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Dec. 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- SHARC International Systems Inc. (CSE: SHRC) (FSE: IWIA) (OTCQB: INTWF) ("SHARC" or the Company) is pleased to announce that following up on the press release dated November 27, 2018 , the Company has repaid $1,300,000 CDN in loans (the Loan) prior to the agreed maturity date of December 23, 2018. The repayment prior to maturity validates managements commitment to building trust with capital markets as it looks to realize its strategic objectives for 2019. The Company has utilized the loan proceeds for the purposes of paying eligible construction costs related to the Clyde Gateway Project, located in Glasgow, Scotland, which is one of several projects the Company is undertaking in the United Kingdom. The Company utilizes government subsidies, low interest debt financing and strategic funding partners to build out Heat Supply infrastructure for the purposes of supplying heat generated by our SHARC units. Once completed, the projects will generate reoccurring heat supply revenues to support the operating costs of the Energy Centres. The Company made full claim and received 1.684M ($2.86M CDN) in grant support, pursuant to the Heat Incentive Scheme described in detail above, relating to the Clyde Gateway Project. "SHARC is extremely pleased to have retired the loan agreement before the year end," said Lynn Mueller, CEO of SHARC. "As we go into 2019, paying the loan cleans up the balance sheet and helps SHARC with our plans for continued growth particularly with our UK business. About Clyde Gateway The Clyde Gateway is estimated to complete and begin generating cash flow in 2019. Clyde Gateway was established in 2008 to carry out the regeneration of 840 hectares across the east end of Glasgow and South Lanarkshire. Working in partnership with Glasgow City Council, South Lanarkshire Council, Scottish Enterprise and the Scottish Government, Clyde Gateway is driving forward 1.5 billion of private sector investment to establish this area as a hub of business activity. The success to date has been remarkable of the 800,000 square feet of Grade A office and industrial space that Clyde Gateway has already developed, more than 85 per cent has been let or sold. The Company would like to announce the issuance of 800,000 stock options with an exercise price of $0.28 expiring December 18, 2019 to Officers and Directors of the Company. Also, pursuant to a debt settlement agreement for services rendered, the Company issued 23,173 common shares of the Company. About SHARC International Systems SHARC International Systems Inc. is a world leader in thermal heat recovery. SHARC systems recycle thermal energy from wastewater, generating one of the most energy efficient and economical systems for heating, cooling & hot water preheating for commercial, residential and industrial buildings. SHARC is publicly traded in Canada (CSE: SHRC), the United States (OTCQB: INTWF) and Germany (Frankfurt: IWIA). Further information about the Company is available on our website at www.sharcenergy.com or under our profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com . ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD Lynn Mueller Chairman and Chief Executive Officer For further information, please contact: Investor Relations Jeff Walker The Howard Group Phone: (888) 221-0915 or (403) 221-0915 Email: jeff@howardgroupinc.com Jamie Hyland SHARC International Systems Inc. Telephone: (604) 442-2425 Email: jamie.hyland@sharcenergy.com Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in policies of the Canadian Securities Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Forward-Looking Statements Certain statements contained in this news release may constitute forward-looking information. Forward-looking information is often, but not always, identified by the use of words such as "anticipate", "plan", "estimate", "expect", "may", "will", "intend", "should", and similar expressions. Forward-looking information involves 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 information. SHARC's actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in this forward-looking information as a result of regulatory decisions, competitive factors in the industries in which the Company operates, prevailing economic conditions, and other factors, many of which are beyond the control of the Company. SHARC believes that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking information are reasonable, but no assurance can be given that these expectations will prove to be correct and such forward-looking information should not be unduly relied upon. Any forward-looking information contained in this news release represents the Company's expectations as of the date hereof, and is subject to change after such date. The Company disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking information whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by applicable securities legislation. An employee works at a company which produces car and motorcycle parts in Vinh Yen, outside Hanoi. Photo by Reuters/Kham Vietnam needs to make its supporting industry a production base for the global manufacturing chain, PM Nguyen Xuan Phuc says. "Vietnam should become a production base for multinational companies. This is what the Ministry of Industry and Trade and other government bodies should think about in their development strategy," Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc said Wednesday. He was speaking at the conference on "Solutions for Promoting the Development of Supporting Industry in Vietnam," held in Hanoi. He said that Vietnam should strive to compete in regional and global markets, manufacturing parts for cars, motorbikes and even airplanes. The government has always been prioritizing land access for the supporting industry, and has never said no to any such request, Phuc said. Supporting businesses should speed up and start operations earlier, Phuc said, adding that there were firms in the industry that could finish clearance and lay their foundations in just three months, while some have left things hanging for as long as three years. The supporting industry in Vietnam remains weak, having to import nearly 90 percent of raw materials, spare parts and components needed for production, according to the Ministry of Industry and Trade. This means a low localization rate, even in industries with great supporting industry potential, like automobiles and textiles and garments, it said. Minister of Industry and Trade Tran Tuan Anh said at the conference that only 300 supporting firms were currently part of the supply chain for multinational companies. As of last year, Vietnam had 75,000 manufacturing firms. The number of new businesses in this sector has barely increased in recent years, even though this is a key foundation for industrialization, Anh said. Therefore, those making finished products in the country are having to import accessories and parts from other countries or produce them on their own, he added. He cited Japan as a good example of a strong supporting industry. Even though the majority of Japanese supporting businesses are medium, small and micro sized, they are integrated deeply in the global manufacturing chain with high added value. They provide accessories and parts to the aviation industry, he noted. The trade minister added that Vietnams policy for attracting foreign direct investment (FDI) does not create favorable opportunities for local supporting businesses to develop and join the global manufacturing chain. There are over 3,000 supporting industry businesses in Vietnam, accounting for 4.5 percent of the manufacturing and processing sector, creating jobs for over 550,000 employees, according to the Ministry of Industry and Trade. From January to November this year, Vietnam imported $30.66 billion worth of machines, accessories and parts, and exported $15.13 billion worth of products, according to Vietnam Customs, marking a trade deficit of $15.53 billion. Six injured as drunk Hanoi woman crashes car into several vehicles Six people were injured in an accident in Hanoi Tuesday night when this Lexus car hit several motorbikes. Photo by VnExpress/Gia Chinh At least six people were seriously injured in Hanoi Tuesday when a woman driver slammed her Lexus into pedestrians, motorbikes and cars. At around 5:30 p.m. Nguyen Thu Trang, 29, was driving her car on Trich Xai Street in Tay Ho District when she seemed to lose control and mounted the sidewalk, mowing down three pedestrians. Eyewitnesses said she did not slow down and continued on, knocking down four motorbikes and ramming a police car. She then reversed and hit three more motorbikes and only came to a halt after slamming into a taxi. Six people were injured and were rushed to a local hospital. An eyewitness said: "There was a lot of screaming at the time of the accident. A high school student suffered severe injuries after being swept under the car." Several of the motorbikes were badly damaged. Trang is being held at the police station for questioning. Her alcohol test result was 0.7 miligrams per liter of breath. The alcohol level allowed for car drivers in Vietnam is zero, and for motorbike drivers up to 0.25 miligrams per liter. An officer said, "The driver had consumed a lot of alcohol and lost control." Last October a woman in Saigon ran her BMW car into several motorbikes waiting at a traffic light at the Hang Xanh intersection. At least one person died and five people were injured in the accident. Nguyen Thi Nga, 46, a restaurant owner, was driving under the influence, the police said. The accident sparked widespread outrage on social media. Nga was arrested and faces a jail sentence of up to 10 years. Road crashes are a common cause of death in Vietnam, killing almost one person every hour, according to official figures. Flouting road safety norms and causing deaths is punishable by up to 15 years in jail. Police in Can Tho city have arrested two men for allegedly repeatedly raping their 14-year-old niece over a period of two years. Ho Tuan Hung, 38 and Ho Van Dil, 27, were apprehended Tuesday. Preliminary investigation showed that the two men, the girl's uncles on her father's side, raped her on a number of occasions since 2016 until September this year. Hung said he committed the act after seeing Dil did it several times. He reportedly admitted to giving the girl VND50,000 ($2) each time he raped her. The girl was so scared of the two men that she ran away from home in November before returning at the end of the month. She narrated her ordeal to her family who then complained to the police. A report submitted to the National Assembly last month revealed that in the first 11 months of this year 457 cases of child sexual abuse were reported, 2.47 percent up from last year. Over 20 percent involved family members, it said. In Vietnam, rape of a child aged between 13 and 16 faces up to death penalty. Former CEO of PetroVietnam Exploration Production Corp (PVEP) Do Van Khanh. Photo courtesy of PVEP The former CEO of PetroVietnam Exploration Production Corporation was arrested Tuesday for abusing power to appropriate property. Do Van Khanh is accused of receiving interest paid out by domestic lender OceanBank that went beyond the regulated rates, from 2012 to 2014. PetroVietnam Exploration Production Corporation, or PVEP, is a leading exploration and production arm of state oil firm PetroVietnam, formally known as Vietnam Oil and Gas Group. The arrest is part of an ongoing investigation into a multi-million dollar graft case at OceanBank, with scores of officials having been either arrested or sentenced for their involvement in the case, including OceanBanks former chairman Ha Van Tham, former deputy general director Le Thi Thu Thuy and former accounting director Vu Thi Thuy Duong. Between 2010 and 2014, OceanBank paid excessive interest to customers on Thams orders, causing losses of over VND1.58 trillion ($67.4 million), authorities said. Tham was sentenced to life imprisonment, while Thuy and Duong got four and 3.5 years in jail, respectively, for violating accounting laws with serious consequences. Khanhs arrest is part of a widening crackdown on corruption in Vietnam, with the government launching investigations into and arresting hundreds of public officials and several executives at state-owned enterprises. Vietnam's index bucked the trend to edge slightly lower on Wednesday. Photo by Reuters Most Southeast Asian stock markets rose on Wednesday with Indonesia leading the pack on reports of China-U.S. trade meetings in January. The trading sentiment in Asia bolstered after U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told Bloomberg in an interview on Tuesday that United States and China are planning to hold meetings in January to "document an agreement" on trade. "Positive signals on the trade war front are stabilising risk in Asia," Stephen Innes, head of trading for Asia-Pacific at OANDA, said in a note. "...while trade remains a work in progress, investors are at least taking some comfort that a resolution roadmap could be in place as soon as March 2019," he added. The sentiment appeared to slightly improve, with MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan up 0.4 percent in early trade. But investors remained cautious amid speculation that the U.S. Federal Reserve may end its tightening cycle in its policy meeting scheduled to conclude later on Wednesday, after a sharp fall in oil prices and U.S. President Donald Trump's call to not to "make yet another mistake". Indonesia's benchmark index rose 0.5 percent to snap three sessions of losses, with material and consumer stocks benefitting most. Indonesia, which imports a majority of its oil, will likely benefit after oil prices plummeted overnight, slipping more than 5 percent on Tuesday due to fears of a supply glut and falling demand. Shares of telecom products retailer Global Teleshop Tbk rose 25 percent and those of lender Bank Agris Tbk rose about 24 percent, and were was among top percentage gainers. Malaysia's index bounced after closing at its lowest level in nearly two years in the previous session, rising 0.8 percent in early trade. Shares in airport operator Malaysia Airports Holdings Berhad gained 0.5 percent, as did those of tourist resort operator Genting Malaysia Berhad, which rose 6.4 percent. Meanwhile, Malaysia's consumer price index (CPI), which is due later in the day, is expected to rise 0.5 percent in November from a year earlier, a Reuters poll showed, marginally slower than the previous month amid lower transport prices. Singapore's index edged up after being the region's worst performer in the previous session, with shares of passenger transport service provider ComfortDelGro Corp Ltd adding 1.4 percent. Thailand's benchmark edged lower with heavyweight energy stocks coming under pressure and accounting for a majority of losses after oil prices plummeted overnight. Shares of oil and gas company PTT PCL and PTT Exploration and Production PCL, top losers in the sector, lost 1.1 percent and 0.4 percent, respectively. Vietnam's index bucked the trend to edge slightly lower. It is on track for its fifth straight day of loss with its real-estate and consumer stocks coming under pressure. Vietam's Doan Thi Huong (in red), followed by Indonesia's Siti Aisyah, is escorted by police in Malaysia as the two women were accused of murdering Kim Jong Nam by smearing nerve agent VX on his face. Photo by AFP/File The trial of an Indonesian woman accused of assassinating the North Korean leader's half-brother was put on hold Tuesday due to a row over witness statements. Siti Aisyah from Indonesia and Doan Thi Huong from Vietnam have been on trial for over a year, accused of murdering Kim Jong Nam by smearing nerve agent VX on his face at Kuala Lumpur airport. The brazen assassination in February last year shocked the world but the women have denied murder, saying they believed they were taking part in a prank and were tricked by North Korean agents. The women, in their 20s, went on trial together in October 2017 but proceedings have moved slowly due to the large numbers of witnesses and the fact hearings are held infrequently. The defence stage of Aisyah's trial had originally been due to begin in November but was delayed to January after her main lawyer fell ill. And on Tuesday proceedings in Aisyah's case were temporarily halted when the High Court refused to grant her lawyers access to some witness statements, and they decided to appeal. Huong's trial is due to resume in March and the court will rule Friday whether it will go ahead, or be put on hold with Aisyah's. The prosecution stage of the trial, during which the women appeared for hearings together, wrapped up in August. The defence parts of their trials will be held separately. Aisyah's lawyer Gooi Soon Seng said the witness statements were "essential" for the defence and he would appeal the ruling -- a process that could take months. "Without (the statements) there would be a real miscarriage of justice. It would compromise our case," he told reporters at the court in Shah Alam, outside Kuala Lumpur. The seven statements are from witnesses including people who drove Kim Jong Nam around in Malaysia and acquaintances of Aisyah. Prosecutors have refused to hand them over, arguing they should not be made public. Under current laws, the women will be sentenced to death by hanging if convicted of murdering the estranged relative of the North's leader, Kim Jong Un. Malaysia's new government, which took power in May, has vowed to abolish capital punishment for all crimes, although parliament still needs to vote on the change. Polish national appointed chairman of Ukrainian Energy Efficiency Fund's Supervisory Board The decision was made at the first meeting of the Fund's Supervisory Board on December 17. If you see a spelling error on our site, select it and press Ctrl+Enter Ukraine's Cabinet extends ban on Russian goods imports for another year The move is aimed at countering trade restrictions imposed by Russia on imports and transit shipments of Ukrainian products. If you see a spelling error on our site, select it and press Ctrl+Enter Ukraine, Belarus to relaunch river navigation The project is aimed at the development of logistics and transportation of goods between the two countries using river transport. If you see a spelling error on our site, select it and press Ctrl+Enter English French MONTREAL, Dec. 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Osisko Gold Royalties Ltd (TSX & NYSE:OR) ("Osisko") announces that it has subscribed for and received from Barkerville Gold Mines Ltd. (TSXV:BGM) (BGM) 20,554,941 common shares (the Common Shares) at a price of $0.34 per Common Share, for an aggregate subscription price of $6,988,679.94 pursuant to a previously announced bought deal private placement (the Private Placement). The Private Placement was originally announced on November 26, 2018 and upsized on December 6, 2018. Immediately prior to the closing of the Private Placement, Osisko held 142,309,310 Common Shares, representing approximately 32.36% of the issued and outstanding Common Shares. Immediately following the closing of the Private Placement, Osisko owns, beneficial ownership of, or control and direction over (i) 162,864,251 Common Shares, representing approximately 32.30% of the issued and outstanding Common Shares; and (ii) 15,666,527 Warrants. Assuming the exercise of the Warrants, Osisko would own 178,530,778 Common Shares, representing approximately 34.34% of the Common Shares that would then be issued and outstanding. Osisko acquired the Common Shares described in this press release for investment purposes and in accordance with applicable securities laws, Osisko may, from time to time and at any time, acquire additional Common Shares and/or other equity, debt or other securities or instruments (collectively, Securities) of BGM in the open market or otherwise, and reserves the right to dispose of any or all of its Securities in the open market or otherwise at any time and from time to time, and to engage in similar transactions with respect to the Securities, the whole depending on market conditions, the business and prospects of BGM and other relevant factors. A copy of the early warning report to be filed by Osisko in connection with the Private Placement described above will be available on SEDAR under BGMs profile. This news release is issued under the early warning provisions of the Canadian securities legislation. About Osisko Gold Royalties Ltd Osisko Gold Royalties Ltd is an intermediate precious metal royalty company that holds a North American focused portfolio of over 130 royalties, streams and precious metal offtakes. Osiskos portfolio is anchored by its 5% NSR royalty on the Canadian Malartic Mine, which is the largest gold mine in Canada. Osisko also owns a portfolio of publicly held resource companies, including a 16.7% interest in Osisko Mining Inc., a 15.5% interest in Victoria Gold Corp., a 17.8% interest in Falco Resources Ltd and an 10.6% interest in Osisko Metals Incorporated. Osiskos head office is located at 1100 Avenue des Canadiens-de Montreal, Suite 300, Montreal, Quebec, H3B 2S2. 17th General assembly of ECPM reconfirmed that the party is steadily growing and ready for European Parliament elections 2019. Semi-annual general assembly of ECPM was held last week on 5 December in the European Parliament. Participants had an opportunity to listen to the speeches of our present members of the European Parliament and candidates for the European elections too. Peter van Dalen (NL), Branislav Skripek (SK), Marek Jurek (PL) and Arne Gericke (DE) reviewed their parliamentary work and expressed their wish to continue with their mission in the EP in the next term. The campaign manifesto was introduced by vice-president George Rukhadze, now available at our website. Campaign kick-off with list of candidates, visuals and principal topics was scheduled for February. More details will follow. The General Assembly welcomed and approved new political parties from around Europe: No sirds Latvijai (For Latvia from the Heart); Human Dignity Alliance, Ireland; PPM, Portugal; IDEA, Italy; Uniunea Democratica a Slovacilor si Cehilor din Romania (Union of Slovaks and Czechs in Romania); Christiliche Partei Osterreichs (Christian Party of Austria) We are more than happy to enlarge our political family, standing on Christian values with an euro-realistic view. A new report from Spains Interior Ministry has produced an in-depth analysis of murder rates in Spain. The 85-page study is the result of three years of investigation into 632 police reports of homicides that were gathering dust on bookshelves, says psychologist Jose Luis Gonzalez. By analyzing more than half of all murders some of them multiple committed between 2010 and 2012, the team of 50 researchers were able to create the first national report on homicide in Spain, says Gonzalez, who coordinated the report. According to the report, only 7% of male victims are killed by women. The majority of murders are men who are killed by men The reports findings contradict popular notions on murder and its link to immigration and race. This is science, not politics, explains Gonzalez. Secretary general of far-right political party Vox, Javier Ortega Smith, has claimed that there are no figures on men who are killed by women. The figures are hidden because its not of interest to recognize that men are also killed by women. But this data does indeed exist. According to the report, only 7% of male victims are killed by women. The majority of murders (62%) are men who are killed by men, 28% are women killed by men and 3% are women killed by women. From 871 cases of domestic violence, 131 were men who killed their female partner or former partner and just 17 were women who killed their male partner or former partner. The figures however can be misleading because they include young future mothers who hide their pregnancies then dispose of the child for family or religious reasons. The police reports included the murders of 24 babies, 12 committed by women and nine by men. What we mainly have are fetuses that appear in trash cans. Cases like the child Gabriel from Almeria are very exceptional, says Gonzalez, in reference to Gabriel Cruz, an eight-year-old boy who was murdered by his fathers girlfriend earlier this year. Psychologist Jose Luis Gonzalez. Victor Sainz Another surprise was the rate of sexual assault in murder cases. According to the report only three of the 661 murder victims (0.45%) were sexually abused before being killed. Fortunately in Spain, its not at all common to sexually abuse a girl and kill her, says Gonzalez. The study found that men committed 89% of murders and accounted for 61% of murder victims. In 69% of cases, the male murderers had a criminal record and in 31% the homicide was related to drugs. The report found that 35% of murders were committed by foreigners. This figure reached 47% in the case of murders related to criminal activity such as gang violence (59%) and organized crime (95%). But criminologist Jorge Santos explains that this is because a larger percentage of foreigners are young people, who commit the most murders. Its nothing to do with foreigners being more violent. Murder rate falling "There are few homicides and the number is dropping. There are increasingly fewer murders," says criminologist Jorge Santos. His report, which is now published on the Interior Ministry's website, shows murders have fallen from 587 in 2003 to 302 in 2015. In Spain, the annual homicide rate is 0.6 for every 100,000 people, much lower when compared to the 1.3 in France, 1.4 in Finland, five in the United States, 19 in Mexico and 30 in Brazil. "We have to share a message of great tranquility. Spain is a very safe country," says psychologist Jose Luis Gonzalez. The president of Vox, Santiago Abascal, suggested two months ago that migrants were to blame for most female homicide cases. Who is responsible for the murders of women this year? Where do they come from? What nationality are they? Because more than a mans DNA, cultural problems, immigrants who think that women are objects who can be assaulted, also play a role, he said in an interview with the Spanish television network Intereconomia. The new report from the Interior Ministry has the answers to Abascals questions: Spanish men committed 68% of murders relating to gender violence and 80% of family or domestic homicides. Cross-checking the nationality of the victims with the culprits, its apparent that Spanish women die significantly more at the hands of Spaniards (85%) and vice versa. Its much more probable for a foreign woman (77%) to die at the hands of another foreigner, the report states. Whats more, murders associated with criminal activity are the minority only 18% of the total. Most homicides occur during fights or brawls (22%), as a result of gender violence (21%) or domestic and family abuse (20%). Researchers noticed a certain seasonality in murder rates, with figures peaking in September (9.8%) and dropping in November (5.85%). Most murders took place on a Sunday (16.3%) and the fewest on Monday (11.5%). Around 60% of murders happened at night or in the early morning. English version by Melissa Kitson. Civil guards outside the house of Bernardo Montoya (inset). Julian Perez (EFE) More information Autopsy reveals Spanish schoolteacher was sexually abused before her murder The prime suspect in the investigation into the death of Spanish schoolteacher Laura Luelmo has confessed to her killing. Bernardo Montoya began by lying to Civil Guard officers, according to sources from the investigation. But after hours of interrogation, during which his lawyer was present, and after offering several unlikely versions of events, he eventually admitted that he was responsible for the murder. Luelmo died at the age of 26 as the result of a blow to the head at some point between Friday and Saturday, according to the results of the preliminary autopsy that was carried out yesterday. But she went missing on the evening of Wednesday, December 12, leaving unanswered questions about her whereabouts over the space of those two or three days. The autopsy results suggest that there were two or three days when the young woman was missing but still alive In a case that has shocked Spain, the Civil Guard on Tuesday arrested Montoya, 50, who was living in the house opposite Luelmos rented property in El Campillo. Luelmo had only recently moved to the town, located in the southern Spanish province of Huelva, to take up a teaching position. Since Montoyas confession, investigators have ruled out that Luelmo was held captive by the self-confessed killer, believing instead that he attacked her and stuck her in the trunk of his car shortly after seeing her leave her house on December 12, the day she disappeared. The preliminary results of the autopsy revealed that she did not die until December 14 or 15, suggesting that she was left seriously injured at the location where Montoya abandoned her. Victim Laura Luelmo. Sources from the investigation revealed today that during his statement, Montoya admitted that he tried to rape the young woman. She asked me if there was a supermarket near and I sent her to a blind alleyway, he reportedly said. I grabbed her and I smashed her head into the trunk. I tied her hands behind her back and wrapped her up in a blanket. I took her clothes off from the waist down and tried to rape her, but I didnt manage it even though she was unconscious. After a massive search operation by the authorities and volunteers, Luelmos body was discovered on Monday with visible signs of violence. She was found face down in bushes and half-naked. The fact that her clothing was found scattered around the crime scene her pants on one side, her underwear on the other, according to sources from the investigation and just meters from the corpse suggests that she was killed in the same place, and that her assailant used extreme violence to subdue the victim after a struggle. The same sources explained that there were marks on her neck, leading them to conclude that she resisted a great deal. Montoya had previously served 17 years and seven months in prison for the 1995 killing of an octogenarian in nearby Cortegana The autopsy will determine whether there is DNA evidence from the attacker present on the body. Investigators said that they were confident that such genetic evidence will be sufficient to prove the suspects guilt, since the body was discovered relatively quickly and there had been no rain, which will facilitate the collection of evidence. Montoya has a long criminal record, having been released from prison in October after serving a two-year, 10-month sentence for robbery. He had previously served 17 years and seven month for the 1995 killing of an octogenarian in nearby Cortegana, in a bid to prevent the woman from giving evidence against him in a robbery case. When he was out on parole in 2008, he assaulted a hairdresser from El Campillo with a knife, which put him in jail for another 18 months. The crime has shocked Spain, which has seen several high-profile murders of women in recent years, including that of Diana Quer Montoya was on top of the list of the Civil Guards suspects in the Laura Luelmo murder case, and sources from the investigation said that they were following him and waiting to arrest him once the body was found. He was held on Tuesday near Cortegana after he abandoned his vehicle, having spotted Civil Guard officers, and tried to escape on foot. Montoya had aroused the suspicions of residents of El Campillo after the attack on the hairdresser, and Luelmo herself had told her boyfriend that she didnt like the way that he looked at her, according to sources from the investigation. He reportedly would spend a lot of time sitting in the doorway of his house directly opposite the victims rented property monitoring the movements of the teacher, who had lived there just four days. The crime has shocked Spain, which has seen several high-profile murders of women in recent years, including that of Diana Quer, an 18-year-old from Madrid who went missing in August 2016 while vacationing with her family in Galicia. In January of this year, the Civil Guard found the body of the 18-year-old inside a well at the site of an abandoned warehouse in Rianxo and arrested her suspected killer, a local man named Jose Enrique Abuin. The twin brother of the suspect in the Laura Luelmo case, Luciano Montoya, killed a 35-year-old woman in the year 2000. The modus operandi of Bernardos brother did not differ much from his own: he was sentenced to 15 years in jail for lying in wait for the woman, who he also killed as a reprisal for having reported him over the theft of a purse. Several media outlets in Spain had pointed to Luciano as the main suspect in the killing of Luelmo. But this would have been impossible, given that he was in jail at the time of the disappearance, and was not released until the day the body was discovered. Luelmos family calls for privacy The family of Laura Luelmo on Wednesday called for respect and understanding in these painful moments, Spanish news agency EFE reported. Relatives asked to be spared additional pain through hoaxes or rumors. In a statement, the family of the young woman explained that the only important thing right now is to clear up the facts, so that justice can be done, and maintain the privacy of Laura and her family. Her relatives added that they have not, and will not, make any statements nor will they take responsibility for those published by media outlets made by people outside of their family circle. From our silence we beg that you do not cause us more pain by voicing or spreading hoaxes or rumors that would force us to take the appropriate legal measures, they concluded. English version by Simon Hunter. Protesters block a street in Barcelona during the strike on October 3. Albert Garcia More information Jailed pro-Catalan independence leaders call for peaceful protests on Friday Business owners, schools and retailers in Barcelona are on high alert ahead of the Spanish governments planned Cabinet meeting in Casa Llotja de Mar in the city on Friday, which is expected to attract mass protests and cause havoc in the Catalan capital. The pro-independence protest group Committee for the Defense of the Republic (CDR) has promised to bring the city to a standstill with large-scale protests and road blockades. Last years pro-independence protests caused sales to fall between 5% and 30% Spains train service Renfe and postal workers have also called a strike on Friday, while the pro-independence union Intersindical-CSC has asked all workers to down tools for two hours. University students are expected to join the protests with both Together for the Republic (Unis x la Republica) and Catalan Student Union (Sindicat dEstudiants del Paisos Catalans) calling on students not to attend classes. The Catalan regional police force, the Mossos dEsquadra, decided on Tuesday to postpone their planned strike until after the Spanish Cabinet meeting out of a sense of responsibility. More than 9,000 law enforcement officers will be on duty in Catalonia to safeguard public security on the day. Given the expected disruptions, many are taking preventive measures to minimize the impact of the strikes and blockades. Education authorities in the Catalan districts Valles and Maresme have asked the Department of Education to move forward some activities to Thursday in case students have trouble making it to class. In Barcelona, some centers have decided to hand back student grades on Thursday for this same reason. According to the Department of Education, schools must remain open on Friday, the last school day of the quarter, but they do have the freedom to reorganize set activities. The Cabinet meeting will be held in Casa Llotja de Mar. Barcelona University and the Autonomous University of Barcelona maintain that Friday will be a normal day but Pompeu Fabra University, which is mid-exams, has asked to rescheduled tests planned for Friday. Meanwhile, businesses from all sectors are taking measures to reduce the effect of potential traffic problems as a result of the protests on work, such as allowing people to work from home, cancelling or postponing scheduled meetings and moving forward business activities. Even shared motorbike applications, which allow users to rent electric motorbikes across the city, have limited their parking area to ensure they are not left in areas where there will be protests. Concern over disruptions is already having an impact on hotels near the airport. After the CDR announced it would block access to the Barcelona-El Prat airport, many rooms have remained vacant on Friday, even though they are at full occupancy on Thursday. Shopkeepers were the first to raise their concerns over the protests. In a press release, published last week, retailer associations pointed out that last years pro-independence demonstrations caused sales to fall between 5% and 30%. Some schools are handing back results a day earlier in case students cannot make it to class on Friday We recommend opening as normal, but we are worried because it is one of the most profitable weekends of the year. We understand that theres no reason why it will be anything more than road blockades, but with these things you know how they are going start but you dont know how they are going to end, explained Salva Vendrell, president of the retailer foundation Barcelona Comerc. The transport sector is also worried about the effect of the disruptions. Sources from Mercabarna, a food wholesale market in Barcelona, say that the business outlook for Friday is worse than other days. Mercabarna is not going to close, but it is true that, given what our main wholesalers have told us, there will be less work, said sources. Adolfo Martinez, secretary general of the Catalan Transport Association, says that transportation companies have not been given any specific instructions on what to do on Friday. The idea is to avoid, if they can, working on that day, or moving forward or pushing back work, given what could happen, he explained. What are the protests about? The decision of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez of the governing Socialist Party (PSOE) to hold a Cabinet meeting in Barcelona has angered many pro-independence groups, who see the move as a provocation. The date coincides with the first anniversary of the December 21 regional elections, which were called by the central government of then-Popular Party (PP) Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy after the regions powers were suspended under Article 155 of the Constitution. Protesters are also calling for Catalan independence leaders to be released from prison, where they are in pre-trial detention for their involvement in last years unauthorized referendum and subsequent unilateral declaration of independence. Four of the nine independence leaders awaiting trial in the Supreme Court are on a hunger strike to protest the Constitutional Court for blocking their appeals in order to prevent them from getting their cases to the European justice system. English version by Melissa Kitson. Popular Party leader Pablo Casado. Jaime Villanueva The Catalan crisis was at the center of the debate at the last session of the year devoted to question time inside Spanish Congress. The leader of the Popular Party (PP), Pablo Casado, criticized Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez for imploring Catalan premier Quim Torra to meet with him on Thursday. PM Sanchez said Casado has a style that is authoritarian in shape and content Torra is attacking the heart of the Spanish state and seeking bloodshed and a civil war, said the conservative leader. Sanchez in turn lamented Casados authoritarian tone and said that security and public order will be guaranteed in Catalonia. The remarks come as Barcelona gears up for citywide disruption on Friday, when Sanchez is planning to hold a Cabinet meeting in the heart of the Catalan capital instead of at its usual Madrid location. Pro-independence groups are promising to bring the city to a standstill with mass protests against what they view as a provocation, and several unions are calling for strikes that day. Central and regional leaders are scheduled to meet in Barcelona on Thursday, the eve of the Cabinet meeting, but on Wednesday afternoon it was still unclear how many officials would be attending the gathering. Deputy PM Carmen Calvo said there will be two get-togethers, one between Sanchez and Torra, and another one between their deputies. But Catalan government sources said there will be one single meeting bringing together all of the above plus ministers and department chiefs. Weak versus authoritarian Inside Congress on Wednesday, Casado portrayed the Socialist leader as dependent on the Catalan separatists who helped him win a no-confidence vote against Mariano Rajoy of the PP in late May. Sanchez now heads a minority government with just 84 lawmakers inside the 350-seat chamber, and has been unable to secure support for key projects such as the 2019 budget blueprint. Casado said that Torra wants to see tanks in the streets of Catalonia The PSOE also sustained a major setback in early December when it lost its traditional hold on the southern region of Andalusia at an election that showed unprecedented support for a far-right group called Vox, which supports recentralizing Spain and getting tough on Catalan secessionists. Voters response to the Catalan issue takes on added meaning as Spain gears up for local, regional and European elections next year. Analysts are not ruling out the possibility of a snap national election as well, if Sanchez fails to get the budget passed. Casado, who became the new PP president in July, has himself supported hardening the criminal codes response to secessionist attempts, and reforming election laws to stop depending on nationalists and minority parties. On Wednesday, Casado described the Catalan premier as a man who wants bloodshed, a civil war in Catalonia, who wants to see tanks in the streets, alluding to Torras recent defense of the Slovenian way as a model for Catalonia to follow. Slovenia went through a 10-day war that produced dozens of casualties as it split from Yugoslavia in 1991. Meanwhile, Sanchez reasserted his belief in dialogue within the bounds of the law and the Spanish Constitution, and accused Casado of engaging in attack politics with a style that is authoritarian in shape and content. He also said the conservative leader is trying to appropriate the Constitution, which belongs to everybody. English version by Susana Urra. CALGARY, Alberta, Dec. 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- (TSX-V: BBI) Blackbird Energy Inc. (Blackbird or the Company) is pleased to announce that its shareholders (the Blackbird Shareholders) have approved the previously announced strategic combination of Blackbird and Pipestone Oil Corp. (the Transaction) at a special meeting held today, by a majority of over 99% of votes cast. The Blackbird Shareholders also approved the continuance of Blackbird from British Columbia into Alberta (the Continuance), which is necessary for the Transaction to proceed as proposed. The Transaction will result in the strategic combination of two adjacent and contiguous Pipestone Montney land bases under a single well-capitalized, high growth company that will operate under the name Pipestone Energy Corp. (Pipestone Energy). We are very pleased to report the significantly positive outcome from todays special meeting. Thanks to the continued support of our shareholders we are positioned to complete a transformative transaction that is expected to deliver significant growth and value creation in a highly challenged time for our domestic energy industry. As a pro-forma company, Pipestone Energy will have significant scale, diversified access to processing and a combined potential value that we believe is far greater than the sum of the parts, said Garth Braun, President, CEO and Chairman of Blackbird. The Transaction is structured as a plan of arrangement (the Arrangement") under section 193 of the Business Corporations Act (Alberta) and as such also requires final approval of the Court of Queen's Bench of Alberta, which will be sought at a hearing scheduled for tomorrow. The Arrangement will result in the Blackbird Shareholders and Canadian Non-Operated Resources L.P. (CNOR LP), as sole shareholder of Pipestone Oil Corp. (Pipestone Oil), becoming shareholders of Pipestone Energy. More particularly, the common shares of Blackbird (Blackbird Shares) will be converted to common shares of Pipestone Energy (New Shares) and effectively consolidated on a 10:1 basis (the Consolidation), with the Blackbird Shareholders (including with respect to Blackbird Shares issuable pursuant to the related subscription receipt financing described below) to receive approximately 45.3% of the approximately 189.6 million New Shares that will be outstanding on closing, on the basis of one New Share for every ten Blackbird Shares. CNOR LP will receive 103.75 million New Shares (equivalent to 1.0375 billion pre-Consolidation Blackbird Shares) under the Arrangement. In connection with the Transaction, Blackbird and Pipestone Oil also entered into agreements with certain of their existing shareholders who have committed to common equity financings totaling approximately $111.0 million and Pipestone Oil arranged approximately $198.5 million of debt financing (collectively, the Financings). The common equity financings include commitments of approximately $26 million from GMT Exploration Company LLC and certain funds and accounts managed by the Company's principal shareholder, GMT Capital Corp., to purchase additional Blackbird Shares on a subscription receipt basis at a pre-Consolidation price of $0.34 per subscription receipt, and $85 million from CNOR LP in common shares of Pipestone Oil on or prior to closing of the Transaction. The number of New Shares issuable to CNOR LP pursuant to the Arrangement (including with respect to its $85 million equity commitment) was determined with reference to $0.34 per Blackbird Share. Subject to requisite approvals by the Court of Queen's Bench of Alberta and the TSX Venture Exchange, and to satisfaction or waiver of all other conditions to closing as provided in the amended and restated arrangement agreement dated effective October 29, 2018 between Blackbird and Pipestone Oil, the Transaction and Financings are expected to close on or about January 4, 2019. At the special meeting held on December 19, 2018, Blackbird Shareholders approved the Arrangement and Continuance as follows: Resolution Outcome of Vote Percentage of Votes For Percentage of Votes Against Continuance into Alberta Passed > 99% < 1% Plan of Arrangement Passed > 99% < 1% Plan of Arrangement (excluding certain insiders)(1) Passed > 99% < 1% (1) Shareholders of Blackbird who voted on the Arrangement after excluding the vote cast by such persons whose votes were required to be excluded in determining minority approval of a business combination under Multilateral Instrument 61-101 Protection of Minority Security Holders in Special Transactions. About Blackbird Blackbird Energy Inc. is a highly innovative oil and gas exploration and development company focused on the condensate and liquids-rich Montney fairway at Pipestone/Elmworth, near Grande Prairie, Alberta. For more information, please view our Corporate Presentation at www.blackbirdenergyinc.com or contact: Blackbird Energy Inc. Garth Braun Chairman, CEO, and President (403) 500-5550 gbraun@blackbirdenergyinc.com Allan Dixon Manager, Business Development (403) 699-9929 Ext. 103 adixon@blackbirdenergyinc.com Advisories Forward-Looking Statements This news release contains certain statements ("forward-looking statements") that constitute forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities laws. Forward-looking statements relate to future results or events, are based upon internal plans, intentions, expectations and beliefs, and are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results or events to differ materially from those indicated or suggested therein. All statements other than statements of current or historical fact constitute forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are typically, but not always, identified by words such as "anticipate", "continue", "estimate", "expect", "intend", "may", "will", "should", "believe", "plan", "objective", "potential" and similar or other expressions indicating or suggesting future results or events. Forward-looking statements are not promises of future outcomes. There can be no assurance that the results or events indicated or suggested by the forward-looking statements, or the plans, intentions, expectations or beliefs contained therein or upon which they are based, are correct or will in fact occur or be realized (or if they do, what benefits the Company may derive therefrom). In particular, but without limiting the foregoing, this news release contains forward-looking statements pertaining to completion of the Transaction and the Financings. With respect to the forward-looking statements contained in this news release, Blackbird has assessed material factors and made assumptions regarding, among other things: the prospects of Pipestone Energy for future growth and value creation; the combined potential value Blackbird and Pipestone Oil; the satisfaction by CNOR LP, GMT Exploration Company LLC and certain funds and accounts managed by GMT Capital Corp. of their respective obligations in respect of the Financings, as applicable; closing of the debt portion of the Financings in accordance with the terms and conditions proposed by the new credit provider and accepted by the parties; the receipt of all necessary court and regulatory approvals (including necessary approvals from the TSX Venture Exchange); the likelihood of satisfying all conditions to completion of the Arrangement and the Financings; and Pipestone Energy's proposed capital expenditure program and the use of the proceeds of the Financings in respect thereof. The forward-looking statements contained herein reflect management's current views, but the assessments and assumptions upon which they are based may prove to be incorrect. Although Blackbird believes that its underlying assessments and assumptions are reasonable based on currently available information, undue reliance should not be placed on forward-looking statements, which are inherently uncertain, depend upon the accuracy of such assessments and assumptions, and are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, both general and specific, many of which are beyond the Company's control, that that may cause actual results or events to differ materially from those indicated or suggested in the forward-looking statements. The forward-looking statements contained in this news release are made as of the date hereof and Blackbird assumes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, unless required by applicable securities laws. All forward-looking statements herein are expressly qualified by this advisory. THE TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE INC. 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 press release. Generation A: Edition 14. Exclusive Chance to Begin Your Professional Career with Ameriabank Katna Armenian cheeses enter the market: the new project of Galaxy Group of Companies US$30m OPEC Fund loan to Ameriabank to promote sustainable energy and support small businesses in Armenia Black Friday at ucom: up to 70% discount for smart home devices, gadgets and smartphones Google Ad 116 million AMD assistance to minors with disabilities in Shirak Province from Mikayel Vardanyan Discussion on the topic IT infrastructure as the basis of the digital economy with the participation of the heads of telecommunication companies in Armenia Statement nn the ongoing Aggression by Azerbaijan against the Republic of Armenia "We condemn any attempts at borderisation, as observed since the incursion of Azerbaijani troops into Armenian territory on 12 May" Joint statement The United States is deeply concerned about reports of intensive fighting today between Armenia and Azerbaijan.ANTONY J. BLINKEN Statement of the MFA of Armenia Ookla has awarded Ucom with The fastest fixedline network in Armenia award UCOM keeps on supporting the 42 YEREVAN programming school 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 Global Finance Names Ameriabank the Safest Bank in Armenia The National Bank of Ukraine on December 18 made a decision to terminate the banking license of Kyiv's VTB Bank, a subsidiary of the eponymous Russian lender, the press service of the Individuals' Deposit Guarantee Fund has told Interfax-Ukraine. "The Deposit Guarantee Fund made the corresponding decision based on the National Bank decision yesterday [on December 18] on revoking the license, and today we are entering VTB Bank as a liquidator," the press service said. U.S. Special Representative for Ukraine Kurt Volker said at a meeting with members of the Ukrainian parliament that he had canceled his meeting with the Russian president's aid Vladislav Surkov because there had been no signals from Moscow to confirm its readiness to release the Ukrainian naval seamen who were taken prisoners of war near the Kerch Strait on November 25, MP Anna Gopko, head of the Verkhovna Rada's committee on foreign affairs, has said. "Volker said he had canceled his meeting with Surkov and hopes that next year Russia will be able to demonstrate a more progressive approach instead of the lack of any steps by the Kremlin towards a peacekeeping mission and the release of the Ukrainian hostages," Hopko told reports on December 19 following a meeting with Volker in Kyiv. "He said [U.S.] President [Donald] Trump had canceled his meeting [with Russian President Vladimir Putin] at the G20 summit because no progress could be seen on the Russian side in terms of releasing the seamen who are considered prisoners of war. Therefore, there was no need to meet," the MP said. Hopko said the U.S. Special Representative for Ukraine also assured her that if the Russian party demonstrates readiness for reaching some progress in releasing the Ukrainian seamen, starting from January next year, they will be able to start discussing the arrangements for a meeting with Surkov. A lawsuit has been filed against the brother of Irans former president Mohammad Khatami, Tehran's "Revolution and Public Prosecutor-General, Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi disclosed on Tuesday, December 18. Mohammad Reza Khatami is charged with questioning the credibility of the controversial election in 2009 that officially led to the reelection of the conservative incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Jafari Dolatabadi reiterated. In a video released in November, the younger brother of pro-reform former president Khatami (1997-2005) challenged the credibility of the highly controversial 2009 presidential election and once again insisted that the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner in a fraudulent procedure. Dismissing the official statistics that 39 million participated in the 2009 election, Khatami cited "informed individuals" as saying that eight million fake votes were added at the national election headquarters in favor of Ahmadinejad. Former twice speaker of Majils, Mehdi Karroubi, as well as former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi who challenged Ahmadinejad in 2009 election, protested the official result that led to months of anti-Islamic establishment demonstrations across Iran. Later, the two, along with Mousavi's wife, Zahra Rahnavard, were detained and since 2011 are placed under house arrest. Mohammadreza Khatami who is married to Zahra Eshraqi, the granddaughter of the founder the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, was given a one-year jail term and banned from all political and media activity for two years. Six other reformists were also sentenced in October 2017 charged with "propaganda against the ruling Islamic establishment". Iran's Intelligence Minister has denied the claim that the United States granted green cards to 2,500 Iranian officials during nuclear talks, saying such a claim is unfounded, invalid, and a lie spread by anti-revolutionary TV channels. He was answering question from MPs in the Iranian parliament on Tuesday, December 18. Last July, a mid-ranking Shi'ite cleric and the chairman of the Nuclear Subcommittee of the National Security and Foreign Policy Committee in parliament, Mojtaba Zonnour, had claimed that on the sidelines of JCPOA U.S. President Barack Obama ordered 2,500 green cards issued for Iranians to curry favor with Tehran's negotiating team. Later, Jeff Prescott, former senior director of Obama's National Security Council, described the allegation as "absurd and entirely false." Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, for his part, also said on July 7, "Such issues have never been raised in (the nuclear) talks or on their sidelines or in any other way, not even a legitimate request like the abolition of restrictions on Iranian diplomats working at the United Nations." Nevertheless, in a tweet directly addressed to U.S. President Donald Trump, former President Mahmud Ahmadinejad wrote on August 1, Mr. Donald Trump; release the list of relatives of Iranian Government officials that (sic) have Green Cards and bank accounts in the United States; if you have such a list. In early December, NBC News reported that families of American being held in Iran have asked the Trump administration to revoke visas for relatives of prominent Iranian officials. Then on December 11, Brian Hook U.S. Special Representative for Iran in a video message on the State Department Persian language website said that the administration is looking into the issue and added that it is the hypocrisy of Iranian officials that they chant Death to America and they send their families to the so called Great Satan to live and study here, using the resources of the Iranian people. Tehran, Dec 19, 2018 (AFP) - An Iranian member of parliament denounced the arrest of several striking workers following weeks of protests at a steel plant in southwestern Iran, the semi-official ISNA news agency reported Wednesday. "A number of workers of the National Steel Group who had work-related complaints were arrested two days ago," Alireza Mahjoub, head of parliament's labour faction, said in a speech to lawmakers. "This is a violation of the constitution," he added, calling on parliament to intervene to free the arrested workers. Staff at the National Steel Industrial Group in Ahvaz in Khuzestan province have been on strike since November 9 over unpaid wages and benefits, said labor-focused news agency ILNA. The Ahvaz protests started shortly after a strike by workers at the Haft Tapeh sugar factory in nearby Shush over wage arrears and alleged criminal activity by new private owners. The strike at Haft Tapeh, which has around 4,000 workers, ended after the workers received their wages. Iran has been hit by strikes over working conditions in several key sectors this year, including education, mines, transport and the steel industry, mainly outside Tehran. In November the head of Iran's judiciary warned restive workers against creating "disorder". "Workers should not allow their demands to become an excuse and an instrument for the enemy," Ayatollah Sadegh Larijani said, quoted by the judiciary's news agency Mizan Online. Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec. 19 Trend: Baku Higher Oil School (BHOS) hosted a graduation ceremony for the participants of Business education for engineers program implemented jointly by BHOS and BP company in Azerbaijan. It was attended by the Higher School Rector Elmar Gasimov, BP communications, external affairs, strategy and Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey region (AGT) Vice president Bakhtiyar Aslanbayli, representatives of BP management and other guests. Opening the gathering, BHOS Rector Elmar Gasimov said that the innovative Business education for engineers project is developed to equip young Azerbaijani specialists with the knowledge of, and skills in, leadership and management, thus facilitating their more efficient integration into business environment. The Rector expressed his gratitude to the management of BP company for the support of the project. In his words, it represents a bright example of professional knowledge exchange and sharing. BP Vice president for AGT region Bakhtiyar Aslanbayli emphasized that, as long-term partner of Azerbaijan, BP always paid a special attention to educational projects among all social initiatives supported by the company in the country. In his words, this program contributes to building the necessary management and business skills at the university stage to add to the high level of engineering education and industrial experience of the prospective graduates. Speaking at the ceremony, the program participants noted that the project played an important role in gaining new knowledge and experience and expressed their gratitude to the project initiators. Then 56 students of national universities including, among others, Baku Higher Oil School, Azerbaijan State Oil and Industry University, UFAZ University and Baku Engineering University received certificates on the course successful completion. Certificates were also presented to three best instructors of the program. The Business Education for Engineers course curriculum is comprised of eight core modules: presentation and communication skills; project management; time management and efficiency; leadership; risk management; introduction to finance, budget and cost control; HR management fundamentals; and negotiation skills. Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec. 19 Trend: Over the past 24 hours, Armenian armed forces have 24 times violated the ceasefire along the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian troops, the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry said Dec. 19. The 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. Boston, Dec. 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- With 2019 fast approaching and New Years fitness resolutions at hand, the International Health, Racquet & Sportsclub Association ( IHRSA ) is reminding people of the many resources and year-round support that health clubs offer. Professional know-how, dependable guidance, and supportive community environments make health clubs welcoming spaces that empower people of diverse backgrounds, abilities, needs and life circumstances so they can more easily maintain healthier lifestyle habits throughout the year. Health clubs are inherently community-focused, says Helen Durkin, IHRSAs executive vice president of public policy. These are local businesses established by people with a passion for wellness and built on their desire to be supportive of every member who walks through their doors. Local community health clubs are all about helping people of all needs and abilities find the professional guidance, inviting space and community support they need for living more physically active lives. IHRSA research shows that many people succeed at sustaining good exercise habits throughout the year. In fact, the average length of a health club membership is well over 5 years, with most members visiting their club almost 100 times each year. According to IHRSA, the key to making New Years resolutions stick is three-fold. It requires setting realistic goals, maintaining a positive attitude toward exercise, and building a support network to keep it going. Health clubs can help with all three. The support and knowledge of trained professionals make building a well-balanced, enjoyable exercise routine easier. The camaraderie of fellow club members offers positive encouragement and makes time spent exercising more rewarding. Access to state-of-the-art equipment, a variety of classes, personal trainers and professional instructors keeps routines varied and interesting, while helping members set the right level of challenge for their individual needs. Health clubs also provide safe, comfortable spaces for exercising year-round, regardless of the weather. Above all, supportive health club environments and programs, structured for people of all ages, abilities and fitness levels, can be extremely motivational. Community health clubs work hard to ensure welcoming, supportive environments for people of diverse backgrounds and abilities. As part of its commitment to inclusivity, IHRSA joined forces with the UNESCO Chair in Inclusive Physical Education, Sport, Recreation & Fitness, along with other partners, to create UFIT. UFIT stands for Universal Fitness Innovation & Transformation and is a global social change initiative that provides fitness industry professionals with the resources and training they need so they can offer more programming for people of all abilities. With support from the IHRSA Foundation, ACCESS Health: Inclusive Fitness pilot programs, using the UFIT model, are being implemented in a growing number of U.S. and Irish clubs. These programs include special advanced training for personal trainers, as well as education for club staff and management, all designed to inspire structural and cultural changes so clubs can be more inclusive of all populations. So far, UFIT has 16 champion clubs running the ACCESS Health: Inclusive Fitness program in the United States and Ireland. More are starting in Peru and elsewhere as it expands around the globe. UFIT has recognized nearly 60 additional clubs for their commitment to offering inclusive programming. About IHRSA IHRSA is the not-for-profit trade association representing the global health and fitness industry. IHRSA and its members are committed to promoting physical activity worldwidea critical component for advancing human health and the battle against obesity and noncommunicable diseases, which have steadily increased across the globe in the wake of more sedentary lifestyles. Through its membership, partners and allied federations, IHRSA reaches more than 33,000 fitness facilities, 1 million fitness industry professionals, and 150 million consumers worldwide. Find an IHRSA member club at www.healthclubs.com. Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec. 19 By Leman Zeynalova Trend: Experts are developing creative ideas for resolving the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Trend reports referring to Spokeswoman of the Russian Foreign Ministry Maria Zakharova. Zakharova made the remarks during a press conference answering a question of a correspondent of Vestnik Kavkaza about Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrovs recent statement during a visit to Baku that they will strive to find creative ideas to help form a basis for resolving the conflict. Such creative ideas will be supported. Experts are dealing with that, she added. The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @Lyaman_Zeyn Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec. 19 Trend: Consul General of Azerbaijan in Los Angeles Nasimi Aghayev gave an interview to the Los Angeles-based ECONEWS television series, Trend reports referring to Azerbaijans Consulate General in Los Angeles. The interview was conducted by the series award-winning producer and host Nancy Pearlman. The three-time EMMY-nominated ECONEWS television series has aired nationwide on cable channels throughout the US since 1984. Specials have aired on the PBS (Public Broadcasting Systems stations) and Discovery Channel. Currently, stations airing shows regularly reach about 18 million homes in 21 US states, and selected shows air internationally. Each show receives multiple plays and may rerun for up to four years. Its radio show (Environmental Directions) is the longest-running environmental program in the US. In the interview, Consul General Nasimi Aghayev gave detailed information about Azerbaijan's geographical location, its history of independence, rich culture, cuisine, beautiful nature, tourism potential and rapid economic development and modernization. Speaking about Azerbaijan's traditions of tolerance and multiculturalism, Nasimi Aghayev noted that today, people of different ethnic and religious backgrounds live together in mutual understanding, respect and peace in Azerbaijan. The consul general emphasized that under the visionary leadership of President Ilham Aliyev Azerbaijan has built a free, independent and strong nation that is proud of its heritage and that is embracing modernity and progress. The consul general also spoke about the illegal military occupation and ethnic cleansing of Azerbaijans Karabakh region by Armenia. In this regard, Aghayev stated that Armenia continues to commit ecological terror in the occupied territories of Azerbaijan. He further mentioned that Armenia is carrying out an environmental genocide against Azerbaijan and its people by polluting and contaminating the Araz River, which is passing through both countries, with untreated domestic waste, industrial sewage as well as radioactive and chemical substances, and by continuing to exploit the outdated Metsamor nuclear power plant, which does not meet any international security requirements. The consul general stressed the importance for the international community to put pressure on Armenia to stop this environmental genocide. The interview is being aired by over 35 television stations located in 21 US states, including California, as well as radio stations, reaching 18 million homes. Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec. 19 Trend: The extended session of the Defense Ministry Board on the results of preparation of troops in 2018 and upcoming tasks for 2019 was held under the leadership of Azerbaijani Minister of Defense, Colonel General Zakir Hasanov with the participation of the members of the Board, Trend reports referring to the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry. The reports on the work done in the field of Military Capability Development and tasks carried out in the main areas of activity during the reporting period were heard, as well as the recent reforms, the state of combat readiness of troops, and some other issues were discussed at the session of the Board. The minister delivered a report on the results of combat training in 2018, as well as tasks to be performed in 2019. The minister, highlighting the assessment, attention, and care rendered by Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev to the Azerbaijan army, spoke about the progress achieved under the leadership of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief in recent years. Hasanov, having analyzed the work done this year, brought to attention the issues of combat training, the moral-psychological state of military personnel and the comprehensive provision of the defense system. The minister gave relevant instructions to the command staff in connection with the fulfilment of the main tasks facing the Army in 2019 with the purpose to increase the fighting capability of the troops. By order of the minister, various awards and valuable gifts were presented to the servicemen for their distinguished service following the results of combat readiness in 2018. A group of officers was awarded another rank of "colonel". In the end, the draft decision of the Board session was discussed and adopted. Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec. 19 By Rufiz Hafizoglu - Trend: The process of dismantling and removal of equipment from Istanbul's Ataturk Airport to the new airport in Istanbul has been postponed due to technical reasons until March 2019, Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure of Turkey told Trend Dec. 19. Earlier, Minister of Transport and Infrastructure of Turkey Mehmet Cahit Turhan said that this process will begin Dec. 30, 2018. The Ataturk Airport in Istanbul had to end operating flights at 00:00 (GMT +3) on Dec. 31. Beginning from 00:00 (GMT +3) on Dec. 31, all passenger and cargo flights had to be operated from the third airport of Istanbul. The third airport was built near the Lake Terkos in northern Istanbul. The first airport in Turkey was built in 1912 and was used for military purposes. In 1953, Istanbul airport was opened for international flights for the first time, and in 1985 it was renamed in honor of the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @rhafizoglu Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec. 19 By Azad Hasanli - Trend: Measures to combat the shadow economy in Azerbaijan will expand the possibilities for financing the development of human capital, Advisor to Azerbaijans Minister for Taxes Khagani Abdullayev said in Baku at the Human Capital Forum Dec. 19, Trend reports. He reminded that the proposals that the Ministry of Taxes submitted to the government include various measures to combat the shadow economy. The implementation of these measures will at least allow minimizing the huge negative impact of the shadow economy on the state budget, he said. The global experience shows that tax policy primarily supports the mechanism for encouraging investments in human capital, he added. In this direction, there are relevant articles in the countrys Tax Code, he said. As an example, he mentioned the exemption from income tax of educational institutions for people with disabilities. In 2019, such benefits and exemptions will be expanded, he said. Abdullayev noted that over the past period, Azerbaijan has very wisely used its natural resources and has taken important steps to turn oil capital into human capital. Azerbaijan also pays attention to areas that require unique knowledge, which also include the space industry, he added. On Dec. 19, a three-day Human Capital Forum started in Baku. The event, organized by the World Bank, is attended by representatives of the public and private sectors, including ministers, heads of companies, foreign experts, and others. Forum participants discuss the current situation in labor markets, challenges facing countries in this area, as well as measures needed to be taken for the development of employment. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @AzadHasanli Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec. 19 By Azad Hasanli - Trend: Azerbaijans State Customs Committee fired over 100 employees due to corruption in 2018, Chairman of the Committee Safar Mehdiyev told reporters in Baku Dec. 19, Trend reports. He said that in total, over 30 facts of corruption in the customs system were revealed this year. Mehdiyev stressed that the committee will continue the fight against corruption in the customs authorities. He also touched upon the fight against smuggling of goods, noting that over 500 criminal cases were initiated on these facts during the year. As a result of the measures taken, 1.2 tons of drugs were seized, he said. As for the future activities of the committee, he noted that trade facilitation, as well as minimization of contacts between customs officers and business representatives will be the main objectives of the committee. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @AzadHasanli Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec. 19 By Rashid Shirinov Trend: The MPs of the lower house of the Parliament of Kazakhstan have approved the bill providing for the introduction of labeling of goods within the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), Trend reports with reference to the Kazakh media. The corresponding agreement was signed on February 2, 2018 in Almaty by the Prime Ministers of the EEU countries at the meeting of the Eurasian Intergovernmental Council. The main objectives of the agreement are to ensure the legality of the turnover of goods, consumer protection, reduction of the shadow economy, increase of the tax revenues to the budget, and alignment of competitive business conditions within the EEU. At the lower house meeting, the Finance Minister of Kazakhstan Alikhan Smailov said that goods imported into the territory of the Eurasian Customs Union and those produced on the territory of the EEU are subject to labeling. However, the agreement provides for cases in which the goods are not subject to labeling, for example, when the goods are produced for export outside the Eurasian Customs Union or if the goods are imported by individuals for their own needs. "The labeling institute is successfully used in many developed countries, such as the US, EU states, Brazil, China, etc. I believe that labeling each product and ensuring its traceability from the manufacturer and importer to the end user is one of the effective tools for digitizing the economy," Smailov noted. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @ShirinovRashid Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec. 19 By Taleh Mursagulov - Trend: Starting from next year, the salaries of unemployed persons who found a job, will be subsidized in Azerbaijan, Minister of Labor and Social Protection of the Population Sahil Babayev said in Baku at the 5th congress of the Azerbaijan National Confederation of Entrepreneurs` (Employers) Organizations, Trend reports. This, in turn, along with ensuring active employment, will allow reducing employers salary-related costs, he said. Speaking about the benefits of salary subsidies, Babayev noted that this will allow entrepreneurs to expand and develop their companies. He also added that there is an active struggle against informal employment in Azerbaijan. As a result of the work carried out in this direction, the number of people working on the basis of labor contracts has increased by 100,000, Babayev said. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @TalehMursagulov Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec. 19 By Taleh Mursagulov - Trend: As much as 35 million manats were allocated under the self-employment program in Azerbaijan in 2018, Minister of Labor and Social Protection of the Population Sahil Babayev said in Baku at the 5th Congress of the Azerbaijan National Confederation of Entrepreneurs (Employers) Organizations, Trend reports. In the reported period, the self-employment program covered 7,737 people, he said. "Of them, 1,029 are representatives of youth, 1,255 are forced migrants, 816 are the people receiving targeted social assistance and 298 are war veterans, he noted. Also, the self-employment program covers 1,309 women and 913 people with disabilities. The minister noted that as a result of the implementation of projects under the program for 2018, about 7,000 small companies are expected to be created in Azerbaijan, adding that this is a great contribution to the development of small business in the country. "The scope of this program will be expanded, and in particular, serious support will be provided to vulnerable strata of the population in creating small family farms," Babayev said. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @TalehMursagulov Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec. 19 By Sara Israfilbayova Trend: The investment value of the projects that have already been implemented and are being implemented on the territory of industrial parks and sites in Azerbaijan is estimated at five billion manats, Trend reports referring to Azerbaijani Economy Minister Shahin Mustafayev. Mustafayev made the remarks at the 5th congress of the National Confederation of Entrepreneurs (Employers) Organizations in Baku on Dec. 19. Five industrial parks (Sumgait Chemical Industrial Park, Garadagh Industrial Park, Balakhani Industrial Park, Mingachevir Industrial Park and Pirallahi Industrial Park) and four industrial sites (Neftchala, Hajigabul, Masalli and Sabirabad) have been created in Azerbaijan. Presently, the number of residents of industrial parks and sites reaches 70, the minister said, stressing the importance of creating industrial parks and sites for the development of entrepreneurship in the country. Mustafayev added that one of the main directions of the presidents policy is to develop the economy by creating favorable conditions for the activity of entrepreneurship. "Azerbaijan supports the development of entrepreneurship, he said. The moratorium on inspections of entrepreneurial activity in Azerbaijan testifies to that. The share of the private sector in Azerbaijans GDP is 84 percent, while in the sphere of employment - more than 76 percent thanks to the taken measures." Stressing the importance of creating the Azerbaijani Agency for Development of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises, Mustafayev said that this would give impetus to the development of entrepreneurship in the country. The minister stressed that during two years, entrepreneurs in Azerbaijan received 330 documents encouraging investments worth 2.8 billion manats. Forty-five agricultural parks are planned to be created in 30 regions of the country, he said. "Eighteen of them are already operating, the rest will begin to operate in 2019-2020. The total investments made in the creation of agricultural parks are estimated at 1.5 billion manats, Mustafayev said. The Entrepreneurship Development Fund provided 35,600 entrepreneurs with soft loans worth 2.2 billion manats for the entire period of its activity [on August 1, 2018 the National Fund for Entrepreneurship Support was abolished and the Entrepreneurship Development Fund was established upon the presidents decree], he said. Speaking about the importance of export delegations, the minister said that within two years 24 delegations were organized. One of the main goals of export delegations is to diversify traditional export markets and important steps are being taken in this direction, Mustafayev added. Mustafayev also stressed the importance of creating Azerbaijans trade houses. "Today, Azerbaijans trade houses operate in Belarus, Ukraine, Latvia, Russia, Poland, China, he said. Azerbaijans trade houses are planned to be created in the UAE and in two cities of Kazakhstan - Astana and Aktau in 2019," the minister said, adding that Azerbaijans wine houses, which are already operating in China, are also being created in other countries. He stressed that the economic reforms being carried out in the country to diversify the economy and support the non-oil sector are already yielding results. "The export of non-oil products during 11 months of 2018 reached more than 10 percent and this trend will continue," Mustafayev added. ----- Follow the author on Twitter: @IsrafilbekovaS In March of this year, a New York firefighter was killed and two others were injured after a five-alarm fire broke out in the basement of a former Jazz club in Harlem. Edward Norton had been using the location to film his adaptation of the novel Motherless Brooklyn, and in the aftermath of the tragedy, he faced accusations of "recklessness" and a potentially expensive lawsuit. A month later, the FDNY determined that the fire was ultimately caused by a busted boiler igniting nearby flammable objects in the cellar, and thus the responsibility of the building owner, not Norton. But the lead investigator in the blaze, Fire Marshal Scott Specht, is now alleging that the investigation was a sham, and that FDNY leadership knowingly protected Norton's production company. Last week, he filed a notice of claim accusing Chief Fire Marshal Thomas Kane, his deputy J.D. Lynn and FDNY Assistant Commissioner Carlos Velez of retaliating against him for reporting the cover-up to the Department of Investigation. According to the notice, Specht found clear evidence that Norton's crew had illegally tampered with the building's electrical system, in some cases piercing wiring with wood screws. He noted that the boiler and a two-by-four piece of wood at the boiler's base were undamaged by the fire. If the fire had really started as the FDNY claimed, the wood and other objects found in the vicinity of the boiler would have been badly charred, Specht alleges. Norton's film company is also accused of lying about the amount of combustable, petroleum-based movie set materials inside the building at the time of the fire. "There is no doubt in the professional opinion of [Specht] that Edward Norton's movie production company was the precipitating cause of the conflagration that caused the death of Firefighter [Michael] Davidson," the complaint states. After Specht refused to sign off on the final determination, he says he was harassed by his bosses. He is not seeking damages for the retaliation, but rather calling on the FDNY to transfer the investigation to the federal government. "As to Norton, his production, 'Motherless Brooklyn,"' will forever be known as creating fatherless children," the complaint states. It goes on to cite the FDNY's "well documented racist history" as an explanation for why it would let the Hollywood production company off the hook, while placing the blame on an African-American building owner from Harlem. "The legacy of a fallen hero, Michael Davidson, deserves a full and fair investigation," Specht's lawyer, Peter Gleason, told Gothamist. "Unfortunately, the FDNY in the recent past has a history of covering up the culpability of the rich and powerful." A spokesperson for Norton's production company, Class 5 Inc., could not be reached for comment. The FDNY disputed the allegations, saying in a statement that "a team of nine veteran fire marshals with decades of experience determined unanimously that heat from the boiler ventilation flue pipe ignited nearby combustible materials and caused the fire that took the life of Firefighter Davidson. Any additional investigations will come to the same conclusion." The newly sworn-in commissioner of the city's Department of Investigation, Margaret Garnett, has been widely encouraged to investigate the claims. The office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. You can read the full notice of claim below: Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec. 19 By Sara Israfilbayova - Trend: Indian oil companies are looking forward to expand their business with partners in Azerbaijans oil and gas sector, Sanjay Rana, the Indian Ambassador to Azerbaijan, told Trend. He reminded that an Indian multinational oil and gas company Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) has share in Azerbaijans Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli (ACG) oil and gas project (2.31 percent). India has a very good potential in this sector. Our companies are looking forward to participate in development of other oil and gas fields of Azerbaijan, the ambassador said. Rana stressed that there is a great potential for cooperation in pharmaceutics, tourism and other areas as well. The ambassador underlined that economic relations between the countries are getting stronger every year. Our economic relations are very good. We have a good trade and it is growing every year. We hope that our economic cooperation will increase in years to come, Rana concluded. According to the State Customs Committee of Azerbaijan, trade turnover with India in January-November 2018 amounted to $836.7 million. As compared to the indicator for the same period of the last year, the trade turnover between the countries increased by 45.9 percent, while the exports of Azerbaijani products increased almost two times. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @IsrafilbekovaS Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec. 19 By Sara Israfilbayova - Trend: Economic cooperation between Azerbaijan and Indonesia is great, Husnan Bey Fanani, Indonesian ambassador to Azerbaijan, told Trend. The ambassador said that the countries have potential in cooperation in such fields as energy, tourism, business education, agriculture and so on. He stressed that Indonesia mainly exports to Azerbaijan coffee, wood, furniture etc., adding that it would be great to enlarge the list of exported products. Fanani noted that Azerbaijan is the second largest trading partner of Indonesia. According to the State Customs Committee of Azerbaijan, trade turnover with India in January-November 2018 amounted to $581.3 million. As compared to the indicator for the same period of the last year, the trade turnover between the countries increased by 22.6 percent, while the exports of Azerbaijani products increased 1.3 times. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @IsrafilbekovaS Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec. 19 By Elnur Baghishov - Trend: Creation of Iranian oil refineries and putting up oil for the stock exchange are the two solutions to evade the sanctions, former head of National Iranian Oil Company Mohammad Ali Khatibi said in an interview with the Young Journalists Club (YJC), Trend reports. He said that Russia and Saudi Arabia cannot be an alternative to Iranian oil. Khatibi also said that Russian refineries were using Iranian oil for domestic consumption. For example, Iran previously signed a contract with Russia for the sale of 500,000 barrels of oil, he said. The US pursues two goals in oil sanctions against Iran, first of all, to reduce the Iranian oil sales and bring them to zero, and, secondly, to avoid the rise in oil prices in the world market, he noted. According to the statistics available regarding these two issues, the US didnt succeed in its goals, he said. The US government has kept the issue of reducing oil prices in the world market in the agenda by excluding major Iranian oil consumers from sanctions, he added. However, with this exception, the US couldnt bring the sales of the Iranian oil to zero. Also, global media outlets reported that after the US tightened sanctions against Iran, the rise in prices for oil products in the US caused protests among the citizens. He said that eight countries were excluded from the US sanctions for six months. Comparing current and past periods of sanctions considering the US government officials statements, Khatibi said that according to the US experts, the government of this country had the support of international organizations and the EU in the previous period of sanctions, but not now. These sanctions wont have any particular effect on Iran, because the US has no trade, oil or major commodity exchanges with Iran, he added. It is necessary to create local refineries and cooperate with foreign refineries to sell oil products, he said. The sale of oil at the stock exchange can be considered as a short-term and a medium-term solution, he added. Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec. 19 By Elnur Baghishov - Trend: Exports of Irans petrochemical products, excluding gas condensate, increased by 23 percent during the first eight months of this Iranian year (started March 21, 2018) compared to the same period last year, said Masoud Kamali Ardakani, director general of the exports development office of Irans Trade Promotion Organization (TPO), Trend reports via IRIB. The export value exceeded $22 billion in the eight months, he noted. He said that compared to the same period last year, export of petrochemical products increased by $10.3 billion (32 percent), export of bitumen and industrial oils grew by $1.8 billion (14 percent), while the export of polymer and chemical products increased by about $1.4 billion (40 percent). He added that compared to the same period last year, export of mining materials, including metal ores, steel, non-ferrous metals, pipes and profiles increased by $4.4 billion (more than 9 percent). Non-industrial exports, including cement, tiles, ornamental stones and other products, also increased by $1.4 billion (16 percent), he said. Ardakani stressed that exports of household appliances increased, adding that exports of electric and non-electric household appliances grew by $360 million, or 22 percent. They were mainly exported to Azerbaijan, Turkey, Iraq, Afghanistan and Turkmenistan, he said. Iran nuclear deal has created new channels for engagement, High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Federica Mogherini said, Trend reports referring to IRNA. Mogherini made the remarks Tuesday addressing a meeting with members of EU Non-proliferation Consortium. 'Thanks to the nuclear deal, we now have new channels to engage in a constructive manner as some recent developments in Yemen have shown with Iran to discuss regional issues and to discuss also the security matters.' 'With no nuclear deal any negotiations with Iran would be much more difficult not easier,' she noted. 'As the European Union we want to definitely address Iran ballistic missiles and we want to address the arms proliferation in the region but to do so we need the nuclear deal to be preserved,' she added. US President Trump announced on May 8 the withdrawal from JCPOA, what was followed by other parties condemnation as well as emphasis to stay in the agreement. Brussels, in response, updated EU's Blocking Statute to let the Europe-based enterprises to continue to work with Iran. The Blocking Statute prohibits EU companies compliance with US foreign sanctions and allows corporations to compensate for the loss inflicted on them. In a message sent to a conference in the northeastern city of Mashad on Wednesday, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif highlighted the importance of Iran's foreign policy towards its neighbors, Trend reports referring to IRNA. In the message to the confernce dubbed 'Elaboration on Iran's Foreign Policy towards Neighbors Focusing Supreme Leader's Guidelines', Zarif highlighted the leader's remarks saying that his excellency has attached special attention to the importance of neighboring countries in Iran's forign policy. Zarif referred to a speech delivered by the leader early this year in which Ayatollah Khamenei ealaborated on the issue. In parts of his speech, the leader said,'Territorial vastitude of our country and adjacency to international open waters are among its potentials. We do not use them completely. One of the two coasts of the Persian Gulf belongs to us. Major part of the Oman Sea is ours. We have 15 neighbors whcih is a great potential for our country. Iran is located in a geographically sensitive place. Iran is the juncture of the east and west, north and south, which is important geographically.' Elsewhere in his message, Zarif said the precision and importance of the leader's remarks on the issue of neighbors in foreign policy has opened a new chapter both in practical policy and the field of research. The Mashad conference is the second of its kind. The first was held in Tehran in April 2018, hosted by Allameh Tabatabaee University. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani stated on Wednesday that the era of US political dictate in the Middle East had come to an end, Trend reported citing Sputnik. "The majority of our neighbors, including Turkey, clearly stated to the United States that the days of US political dictatorship were over. The United States is no longer able to impose its dictates on the region and relations between countries and great nations from a distance of several thousand kilometers," Rouhani said before departure for an official visit to Turkey. Rouhani also said that he would hold a bilateral meeting with his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan to discuss regional and international issues, as well as issues of bilateral economic cooperation. According to Rouhani, Iran-Turkey trade currently stands at $10 billion a year, which, he believes, is a very low figure. He added that Tehran and Ankara agreed to increase annual trade to $30 billion. Rouhani started his two-day visit to Turkey on Wednesday to participate in the fifth meeting of the Iranian-Turkish High Level Cooperation Council (HLCC). A 10 million project will be launched in Georgias Black Sea region of Adjara to promote rural development and small and medium-sized businesses in the region, Trend reports referring to Agenda.ge. This is the EU-funded project ENPARD-3: Improving Rural Development in Georgia which will be implemented with the financial contribution of the government of Adjara. The agreement was signed today between the parties which implies that the government of Adjara will contribute 230,000 to enhance the implementation of regional components of a 10 million EU-funded project. Under the agreement, in the period of 2018-2022, the EU, in cooperation with UNDP, will assist in developing economic alternatives outside agriculture for families in Adjaras rural areas and support the regions government to develop and implement effective rural development policies. This new initiative gives us a chance to help Ajara families build sustainable livelihoods where farming is no longer profitable, said Head of UNDP Georgia Louisa Vinton. The assistance to Adjara comes as a component of the third phase of the EUs European Neighbourhood Programme for Agriculture and Rural Development (ENPARD), which has been implemented in Georgia since 2013 with a total budget of 179.5 million. The first phase focused on developing the countrys agricultural potential, while the second and third phases aim to create economic opportunities for the rural population that go beyond agricultural activities. The Arab Coalition bombed a Houthi air base in Yemens capital on Wednesday as a local cease-fire held around the Red Sea port city of Hodeidah, Trend reported citing Al Arabiya. The coalition said it struck the Houthi air base next to Sanaas international airport, destroying a rocket launcher and a drone that was preparing to carry out an attack. The coalition said that the targeting was consistent with international humanitarian law and its customary rules, especially that all preventive measures had been taken. The coalition also pointed out that the Houthi militias were using Sanaa Airport as a military base, which is in blatant violation of international humanitarian law. This violation is accompanied by 21 Houthi violations since Monday night to the cease-fire agreement in Hodeidah. The militias have broken the agreement on 21 occasions since its entry into force on Monday night, a coalition source told AFP. There are indications on the ground showing that they chose to ignore the agreement. We will continue to exercise restraint at this stage, but initial indications are not reassuring, the source said, speaking on condition of anonymity. A fragile cease-fire this week halted months of heavy fighting in Yemens port city of Hodeidah, through which the country imports 70 percent of its food and humanitarian aid. The coalition urged the UN to quickly deploy officers to oversee the withdrawal of the opposing forces from the city and its outskirts, warning that the truce could break down. A UN team led by a Dutch general is expected to travel to Hodeidah later this week. China and the United States held a vice-ministerial dialogue on trade and economic issues as part of efforts to de-escalate their trade war, Trend reports referring to The South China Morning Post. On Wednesday, the Ministry of Commerce said officials from both sides exchanged views on matters of mutual concern. The ministrys announcement came after US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said negotiators charged with hammering out a broader truce in the China-US trade war will meet in January. Both sides were now focused on trying to document an agreement by March 1, when the 90-day truce in the trade war ends, he said. Mnuchin said neither he nor US President Donald Trump were aware of the arrest of Huawei Technologies chief financial officer Sabrina Meng Wanzhou in Canada when they met Chinese President Xi Jinping on December 1. Mnuchin poured cold water on Trumps declaration last week that he would be willing to intervene on Huaweis behalf if it was required to help reach a trade deal between China and the US. Weve been very clear and China understands that these are separate tracks, he said. Reducing the trade deficit with China remained a priority for Trump, but the administration understood it would take time and was also focused on securing structural changes in the Chinese economy that would help balance trade, Mnuchin said. The USs monthly trade deficit in goods with China hit a record high in October and is on track to have expanded through the first two years of the Trump presidency. I dont think that wed expect that overnight, Mnuchin said of the prospect of eliminating the trade deficit with China. But the US and China had agreed on the need for more balanced trade and that would set the stage for meaningful change, he said. Washington and Beijing have been locked in a trade war since July 6, when they each applied tariffs to imports of the others goods. But on December 1, the day after the presidents met at the G20 summit in Argentina, they agreed to a 90-day truce in their dispute. The US Soybean Export Council said Chinese importers returned to the US soy market on Tuesday for their second round of purchases since the two nations agreed to the truce. The deals struck were evidence that Beijing is trying to make good on its pledge to buy more US agricultural goods. China last year imported 31.7 million tonnes of soybeans from the US, nearly 60 per cent of the countrys export shipments, in deals valued at US$12.25 billion. Talks between officials from the two sides are necessary to resolve issues such as forced technology transfers and cyber intrusion. If they fail to reach agreement by March, the US could extend its tariffs to all goods it buys from China. Observers said earlier that 90 days was not enough time to tackle all of the issues involved in the trade dispute, but sufficient to create a framework for future talks. New York's nunchuck ban is lifted, right in the middle of the holiday gifting season. Isn't that convenient? According to the Associated Press, a Brooklyn federal judge ruled the state's decades-old anti-nunchuck law (did you know this existed? I did not.) unconstitutional because it violates the Second Amendment. As a result, you not only have the right to bear nunchucks in your home, but also to manufacture, transport, and dispose of them at your leisure. The original ban on this weapontwo rods tied or chained togetherdates back to the Nunchuck Panic of 1974, when overanxious adults worried that the popularity of Bruce Lee's martial arts movies would mean children mercilessly thwacking one another in the streets. Lawmakers reportedly believed the lure of nunchucks to be so strong that a private citizen could not be trusted to keep them safely locked away at home. No nunchucks for anyone, they said; nunchuck privileges revoked, you bloodthirsty monsters. Plaintiff James Maloney has been chagrined over the ban since 2000, when authorities charged him possession of a weapon for the nunchaku he kept in his home and which were apparently critical to the martial arts form he developed, Shafan Ha Lavan. Chafed that he could not pass on this self-styled skill to his two sons, Maloney challenged the law: His appeals brought the case all the way to the Supreme Court, which returned it to the lower courts for reconsideration. On Friday, Judge Pamela Chen ruled that it is not only unconstitutional to bar people from using chuka sticks, as they are sometimes called, in their own homes, but also to keep them from making them, transporting them, and throwing them away. "The ban on nunchaku arose out of a concern that, as a result of the rising popularity of Kung Fu movies and shows, 'various circles of the state's youth'including 'muggers and street gangs'were 'widely' using nunchaku to cause 'many serious injuries," the rulingprovided to Gothamist by the Nassau County District Attorneyreads. In reality, Chen said, nunchucks often serve as instruments "used recreationally in martial arts training, practice, and performance," but in any case, "'the Second Amendment extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms,' not just to a small subset." And so Maloney, who had mostly been asking for the latitude to legally use nunchucks in his home, gained a broader right than he originally anticipated. Hold your applause, though, because as the Washington Post reports, the ruling might have broader implications for the gun rights lobby. Maloney's appeal has been tangled up with other Second Amendment cases, and his victory only came after the Supreme Court ruled in 2010 that the right to bear arms applied to state laws. Because it would seem to shore up the Second Amendment defense beloved of NRA types, this win feels bittersweet. But now at least you can console yourself with nunchucks, which Maloney described in an email to the AP as "recreational" and "therapeutic." The French president has signed an agreement ratified by the countrys legislative body which will allow a certain category of Georgian citizens to receive temporary residency permits and work legally in the country, Trend reports referring to Agenda.ge. The agreement covers both the employment of Georgians in France and French citizens in Georgia. Young Georgian specialists, as well as graduates of French educational institutions and their branches will be able to stay in the country for working experience and then return to Georgia. France will allocate 150 permits for young specialists annually, and an additional 500 permits for others. The Georgian Foreign Ministry says that the agreement regulates terms for residency permits and quotas for jobs. Georgian Foreign Minister David Zalkaliani said that the Georgian government is holding active talks with other foreign states to achieve similar agreements. The Georgian Foreign Ministry says that with the help of the International Organization for Migration a pilot project is ongoing in Poland with 30 Georgian citizens legally employed. We are negotiating with the Polish Government to sign an agreement regarding the legal employment of Georgian citizens, Zalkaliani said. He stated that talks are in progress with Germany regarding the same issue. In August 2018, during her visit to Georgia, German Chancellor Angela Merkel stated that Germany will create working quotas for Georgia, the Foreign Ministry stated. The ministry says that Georgia is also holding talks with Israel, Portugal, Greece and Bulgaria regarding the labour agreement. The Georgian Foreign Ministry says that such agreements decrease the level of unemployment, illegal migration and promotes the development of qualified staff. Brussels and Rome have found a solution on Italy's 2019 draft budget, initially rejected by the EU authorities over concerns about Italy's debt, European Commission's Vice-President Valdis Dombrovskis said Wednesday, Trend reported citin Sputnik. "Intensive negotiations over the last two weeks have resulted in a solution for 2019. This allows us to avoid excessive deficit procedure at the given stage. This is, of course, provided that all agreed measures are implemented," Dombrovskis said. Earlier, Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said that government would not change the 2019 budget plan despite mounting EU pressure over increased spending. In October, the commission rejected Italy's draft 2019 budget, saying that it was not in line with EU rules on public spending. In November, Italian government submitted a new draft with only a few changes that was also rejected. While Italy's budget deficit falls within EU limits set by the Stability and Growth Pact, which states that the deficit for EU members must not exceed 3 percent of their GDP, the country must also have a public debt that is below 60 percent of its GDP Italy's debt exceeded 130 percent of its GDP in 2017. El Al Israel Airlines Ltd. has signed a codesharing agreement with LOT Polish Airlines, the Polish national carrier, Trend reports referring to Globes. A codesharing agreement enables airlines to sell seats on each other's flights on shared routes. El Al will now be able to sell tickets on a LOT flight to Warsaw, for example. Each company sets its own ticket prices, with the passenger being informed in advance when a codeshare ticket is involved, among other things through the four digits making up the flight number. El Al will also operate its code for LOT flights from Warsaw on five international routes, including Lviv (Ukraine), Vilna and Kaunas (Lithuania), Riga (Latvia), and Tallinn (Estonia). Flights will be marketed on El Al's LY code and operated by LOT and marketed on LOT's LO code and operated by El Al. El Al recently signed an agreement with Vietnam Airlines, and also has agreements with various airlines, such as American Airlines, Qantas, Swiss International Airlines, Iberia, TAP Air Portugal, Thai Airways, and others. These agreements are especially important for El Al, which is not a member of any aviation alliance, such as Star Alliance (Lufthansa/United Airlines) or One World (British Airways/American Airlines). El Al CEO Gonen Usishkin said, "This agreement enables El Al to expand the timetable we offer our loyal customers for Poland and the entire region." LOT CEO Rafal Milczarski added that the agreement would enable the companies "to join forces and utilize all of the existing synergy between our routes. In this way, we will offer our passengers broader service that will make a significant contribution to the development of relations between our countries." LOT Airlines, whose hub is Warsaw, flies nine million passengers a year to 105 destinations, including destinations in the US and the Far East. El Al also took action recently to increase the number of seats on its flights to Bangkok, Thailand. The company, which is the only carrier operating direct flights from Tel Aviv to Bangkok, announced that it was replacing the Boeing 777-200 airliners it uses on the route, which have 279 seats, with Boeing 747-400 airliners capable of carrying 403 passengers. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday that the Lebanese group Hezbollah had shut down plants to develop precision-guided missiles after Israel exposed them, and currently had at most just a few dozen of the weapons, Trend reports referring to Reuters. There was no immediate comment from the armed, Iran-backed political organization which fought a war with Israel in 2006. Netanyahu has accused Hezbollah of developing and stockpiling weapons capable of targeting his countrys key infrastructure. In a Sept. 7 speech to the United Nations, he named three locations near Beirut airport where he said the group was turning inaccurate projectiles into precision-guided missiles. At the time, Lebanons foreign minister Gebran Bassil, a political ally of Hezbollah, dismissed Israels accusations and accused Netanyahu of trying to justify another aggression against Lebanon. Netanyahu told an economic conference on Wednesday: Those sites near the Beirut airport, the underground sites for precision conversion of missiles, which (Israeli) military intelligence gave me, to expose, those sites were closed. They are trying to open other sites, he said, without elaborating on where they might be located. But through these measures we are denying them precision arms, Netanyahu added. Hezbollah had hoped to obtain thousands of precision-guided missile (but) they have, at most, a few dozen, he said. On Sept 20, Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said his group had obtained precision and non-precision rockets and weapons capabilities despite Israels air strikes in Syria. Israel has attacked suspected arms transfers to the Shiite Muslim group through neighboring Syria. The Japanese government is determined to hold persistent talks with Moscow on a peace treaty, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told reporters in Tokyo commenting on Japans protest over Moscows construction of military facilities on the southern Kuril Islands, Trend reports referring to TASS. "In order to finally solve this problem the issue of the Northern Territories [the Southern Kuril Islands] needs to be solved and a peace treaty should be signed with Russia. We will hold persistent talks with Russia on the basis of this fundamental position," Suga said. Earlier the Kyodo news agency reported that the Japanese government voiced protest over Russias construction of military dormitories on the Southern Kuril Islands. The statement was made via diplomatic channels in Moscow, the news agency reported citing the Foreign Ministry. The statement says that the construction of these facilities boosts the presence of Russian forces on the four islands, which runs counter to Japans position on these territories. On Tuesday, Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono announced plans to voice protest against Russia over this issue. Colonel Alexander Gordeyev, a spokesman for the Eastern Military District, said earlier this week that military servicemen would settle into the dormitories on Iturup and Kunashir by the end of 2018. He added that military servicemen had moved to two similar dormitories in 2017, while three more - two in Iturup and one in Kunashir - would be built and commissioned in 2019. Russia and Japan have been in talks to sign a peace treaty since the mid-20th century. The main stumbling block to achieving this is the ownership of the Southern Kuril Islands. After the end of World War II, the Kuril Islands were incorporated into the Soviet Union. However, the ownership of Iturup, Kunashir, Shikotan Islands and the Habomai Islands is being challenged by Japan. Russias Foreign Ministry has stated many times that Russias sovereignty over the islands is beyond doubt. In 1956, the Soviet Union and Japan signed a joint declaration on ceasing the state of war and restoring diplomatic and consular relations, but no peace treaty has been signed so far. South Koreas new finance minister said on Wednesday the governments fiscal policy and the central banks monetary policy need to be in harmony to deal with heightened uncertainties, Trend reports referring to Reuters. Finance Minister Hong Nam-ki made the remarks just before he began a meeting with Bank of Korea Governor Lee Ju-yeol, arranged on the occasion of his inauguration last week. The sale of US Patriot missile systems to Turkey wont affect in any way the Moscow-Ankara deal on S-400 deliveries, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday, Trend reports referring to TASS. "These are unrelated processes and in this case we are implementing the accords we have with the Turkish colleagues. The project and the contract on S-400s is at the stage of its implementation and it will be continued," Peskov said, responding to a question about whether the decision to supply US Patriot surface-to-air missile systems would affect Russias accords with Ankara. Russia sees no grounds to mistrust Turkey, which undertook commitments not to disclose data about Russias S-400 missile system to third parties, he said. Peskov commented on media reports citing sources that Turkey has allegedly promised to provide access for US technical personnel to Russias S-400 system, which will be delivered under the Russian-Turkish contract. As a rule, Russias military and technical cooperation with other partners is fulfilled under legal commitments on not disclosing sensitive information related to this cooperation, Peskov explained. "The Turkish side has these commitments. We dont see any grounds to mistrust our Turkish partners," Peskov said. Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec. 19 By Rufiz Hafizoglu - Trend: The work is underway in Istanbul to rescue the crew of a stranded freighter, Trend reports via the Organization for the Management of Maritime Transport of Turkey Dec. 19. As part of the rescue work, seven of 16 crew members were evacuated from the freighter that ran aground on the shore of Istanbuls Sile district due to a heavy storm. The heavy storm led to the flooding of a number of offices in Istanbul's Beylikduzu district. Due to the heavy storm, a canal was flooded in the city's Arnavutkoy district and as a result, six people were evacuated. Earlier, sea voyages were cancelled due to strong winds in Istanbul. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @rhafizoglu Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec. 19 By Rufiz Hafizoglu - Trend: In Turkey, 2,754 people have been arrested for terrorism propaganda on social networks, Trend reports referring to the Turkish media. Reports noted that such arrests have been carried out since 2016, when a military coup attempt took place in Turkey. Among the arrested, there are supporters of the PKK, FETO and the "Islamic State". It was recently reported that 1,934 people have been sentenced for life imprisonment for attempting a military coup in Turkey. Reports noted that after the attempted military coup in 2016, 289 criminal cases were started, 239 of which have ended. In general, 3,057 people were convicted of attempting a military coup, according to media reports. Turkish Minister of National Defense Hulusi Akar has earlier said that 15,153 people were dismissed from the Turkish Armed Forces as part of the fight against the FETO terrorist movement. Fethullah Gulen and his supporters are accused of a military coup attempt in Turkey. A group of rebels attempted a military coup in Turkey on the night of July 16, 2016. The main confrontation broke out in Ankara and Istanbul. More than 250 Turkish citizens were killed, over 2,000 people were injured, the mutiny was suppressed. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @rhafizoglu Transport infrastructure in Karabakh to turn Azerbaijan into logistics hub between Central Asia and Europe CAERC On November 6th, voters across the country showed up to hand a rebuke to Donald Trumps presidency, seizing the House of Representatives, governorships, and statehouses. In New York City, they did something else: give a startling mandate to three obscure ballot propositions that will change, in subtle but arguably significant ways, how our local democracy functions. Eighty percent of voters, or 1.1 million New Yorkers, voted to bolster the citys system of public finance for local campaigns. Under this proposition, contribution limits to all city officescity council, borough president, comptroller, public advocate, and mayorwere lowered further and small contributions were matched at a rate of 8:1 to instead of 6:1. The idea behind it was simple: incentivize candidates to further chase small donors and try to limit the influence of big money in politics. All city candidates participating in the matching funds system would have to accept these rules in 2022, though they are optional for candidates seeking office in 2021. Since many candidates mulling citywide or city council campaigns for the 2021 cycle have already been fundraising under the current rules (6:1 match), the option was inserted into the proposition language to ensure not all candidates would be retroactively penalized for accepting donations that would be over the new limits. Now, the City Council is seeking to pass a bill on December 20th that would give public advocate candidates running in an unprecedented special election the option of fundraising under the rules passed in the first ballot proposal. Voters approved this overwhelmingly in November and its a policy that encourages greater participation in our democracy, Corey Johnson, the current council speaker, said in a statement to Gothamist. Why shouldnt it apply to this election? If the City Council legislation passes on Thursday, the 20-odd public advocate candidates would be able to choose between a system that allows a maximum contribution of $2,550 and matches the first $175 of contributions from individual New York City residents at a rate of $6-to-$1, or a system that limits individual contributions to $1,000 and matches the first $250 at an $8-to-$1 rate. Under the $8-to-$1 rules, the amount of money a candidate must raise to qualify for public matching funds would be cut in half: from $125,000 to $62,500. For a vast majority of the public advocate candidates, the $8-to-$1 match is preferable because they havent raised a significant amount of money. For candidates who have already accumulated campaign war chests under one set of rules, the calculus is far trickier. Melissa Mark-Viverito, who was speaker of the City Council from 2014 through 2017, is one of the 23 people running for Public Advocate. According to her most recently available filing, she has over $300,000 in her bank account, much of it raised when she was speaker. No candidate for public advocate, as of the most recent filings, has even $100,000 socked away. Sources say that Mark-Viverito has been calling her old colleagues to rally opposition to the bill, and that those close to her campaign are fuming that the council is pushing forward a piece of legislation that could render a significant number of her contributions ineligible if she chooses the $8-to-$1 match, or handicaps her if she remains under the $6-to-$1 system. Meanwhile, potent rivals like Councilman Jumaane Williams and Councilman Rafael Espinal are opting for rules that will multiply their campaign cash at greater rates. Espinal called the legislation a great move. To expect a candidate without political connections to raise $125,000 in donations of $175 or less is unrealistic, he said. (Williams did not return a request for comment.) Look, these men are clearly scared of a woman with fundraising prowessits not the first time the old boys club has tried to stop Melissa and it wont be the last, said Monica Klein, a spokesperson for Mark-Viverito. The old boys club harkens back to Mark-Viveritos election to the speakership in 2014, when she defied two male-dominated Democratic machines to win a backroom contest that marked a new progressive era for city politics. Mark-Viverito, unlike her predecessors, openly identified as a leftist and became the Councils first Latina speaker. The irony, however, is that some of her old allies in that speakership fight are now aligned with Williams, a Brooklyn Democrat. Councilman Ben Kallos, a Manhattan Democrat who was an early supporter of Mark-Viveritos, endorsed Williams last month and introduced the legislation creating an $8-to-$1 option for the public advocates race around the same time. Councilman Brad Lander, a co-sponsor of Kallos legislation, also endorsed WilliamsLander was once Mark-Viveritos top deputy in the Council, imbued with enough influence to be routinely called a shadow speaker, a label he publicly rejected. While Mark-Viveritos four years brought a series of high profile progressive victories, including the citys first paid sick days law and a public campaign to successfully convince power brokers to begin the process of closing Rikers Island, she endured criticism for initially working too closely with Mayor Bill de Blasio, who helped elect her speaker. Council members craved more independence and argue theyve gotten more of it under Johnson. Kallos was one of them. For all four years of Mark-Viveritos speakership, he said he tried to pass legislation creating an $8-to-$1 public match and only found progress when he advocated for a citywide referendum. Now, emboldened by the results of the election, he is ready to let the public advocate contenders play by the new rules. I saw this as a mandate. The ballot showed me everyone cares about reform, Kallos said in an interview. Responding to direct criticisms from Mark-Viveritos camp, he said he doesnt believe campaign war chests are good for democracy, arguing money accumulated over several years for an unspecified purpose shouldnt be permitted. I dont believe in zombie committees, he said. I want to be the elected official known for killing zombies and zombie committees I think they should be illegal. The Campaign Finance Board, which will oversee all campaigns participating in the matching funds program, has expressed reservations about Kallos bill, citing the short time frame they would have to prepare for candidates running under two sets of rules. Our staff has already begun the extensive work that is needed, and we have been keeping to an aggressive timeline in order to complete it in time for the 2021 elections, said Amy Loprest, the CFBs executive director, during a recent hearing. Providing the choice for candidates in the special election compresses our implementation timeline considerably. Lander expressed sympathy for the challenge the CFB would face, but thinks implementation would be possible. Widely expected to run for city comptroller in 2021, Lander said he would be fundraising under the $8-to-$1 rules, refunding contributions that exceeded the new limitations. I do respect the CFB and I talked to them a little bit about their concerns. Its always hard to start something new very quickly, he said. To offer people the new rules as a choice, I dont understand the argument against it. Airfares in the fast-growing Indian market are 10 to 15 percent lower than breakeven levels for airlines, a Boeing Co executive said, as the planemaker raised its long-term jet order forecast for the nation to a record despite market challenges, Trend reports referring to Reuters. Major Indian carriers Jet Airways, IndiGo and SpiceJet were all in the red in the September quarter as high oil prices, a weak rupee and intense price competition eroded their margins. It is important for the sustainability of the sector that airlines show more discipline in pricing fares, Dinesh Keskar, senior vice president, Asia Pacific and India sales at Boeing Commercial Airplanes, said on Wednesday. Double-digit growth coupled with losses is what I am concerned about, he said. I will forego 2 to 3 percent growth for making money rather than filling up my airplane at rock-bottom prices and never making money. To date, however, the lack of profitability has not affected deliveries to Boeing clients, which include cash-strapped Jet Airways and budget carrier SpiceJet, Keskar said. Indias passenger traffic has risen at around 20 percent in recent years, making it one of the worlds fastest-growing aviation markets. Boeing expects the country to become the third-largest commercial aviation market by the early 2020s. Boeing sees Indian carriers ordering a record of up to 2,300 new planes worth $320 billion from global planemakers over the next 20 years to 2037, about 9.5 percent more than its previous prediction of 2,100 jets until 2036 made last year. It said single-aisle planes, such as its 737 MAX, would account for 84 percent of global planemakers new jet deliveries to India over the period, higher than the world average. The forecast comes amid signs that pressure on the Indian airline sector, dominated by low-cost carriers, is starting to ease as oil prices fall and the rupee firms. Kotak Institutional Equities last week said in a note to clients that there were signs the worst was over, with data showing flat fares in the third quarter ending Dec. 31, versus a 9-10 percent drop in the previous two quarters. Carriers like Vistara, a joint venture between Singapore Airlines and Indias Tata Sons, IndiGo and budget airline GoAir are also turning to the international market in search of better returns. India has retained a Category 1 rating from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration that means its airlines remain eligible to add new flights to the United States and codeshare with U.S. carriers, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation said on Tuesday evening. Last year, India received a poor rating in an audit by the U.N.s aviation body, sparking industry concerns that it could be downgraded to Category 2 alongside countries like Bangladesh and Thailand. President Donald Trump did not discuss in advance his decision to pull U.S. troops out of Syria with Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, a senior U.S. official said on Wednesday, Trend reported citing Reuters. The president made his own decision. It was not something he discussed with President Erdogan. He has informed President Erdogan of his decision, said the official, who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity. The official also said the United States believes the remaining pockets under Islamic State control in Syria can be eliminated by U.S. and remaining partner forces. Two male passengers from South Africa, aged 66 and 46, have been confirmed with the latest variant of the coronavirus. I know next to nothing about Elon Musk and work hard to keep it that way. So if someone were to say to me, "Have you heard that the eccentric billionaire has set up shop on Rivington Street, built himself a tiny little tech hub from which he will preside over the digging of a tunnel to connect the city's trendier spots?" then I would eye them suspiciously and shrink slowly away. I would not blame you for doing the same now, but should you find yourself in the aforementioned social scenario, know that the "Hypeloop" is a hoax. At least as it pertains to NYC in this moment of time. From now until the end of January, local artist Adrian Wilson's latest installation will occupy 106 Rivington Street. On the top floor, Wilson created an office space that looks generic except for the plastic curtain cordoning off a gaping construction zone. Otherwise, the decorative scheme is pretty straightforward: A messy desk stationed opposite an informal living room area. Above the desk hangs a golden shovel and a sign that reads, "The Boring New York Company." If you, like me, endeavor to live life as unburdened by Musk News as possible, then you may be unaware of the tech titan's plan to bore tunnels under Los Angeles. He seems to have conceived the endeavor somewhat flippantlyas a solution to shoddy infrastructurebut is now treating it as a real thing. The tunnels would house Musk's "ultra high-speed underground public transportation system," a.k.a. the Hyperloop, and have the benefit of being "weatherproof, out of sight," and not falling out of the sky like his option B, flying cars, could. All of that sounds like nonsense to meobviously, my dude has never ridden the L trainbut Musk being Musk, he had a website and a project leader for his Boring Company ("Boring, it's what we do") lined up a few days after his lightbulb moment struck. This is precisely the kind of unchecked "we can so we should" tech industry thinking that galls Wilson. "I am sick to death of listening to people talk about digital start ups which add little to our lives, but which seem to raise millions of dollars and result in the gentrification of neighborhoods," he tells Gothamist, nodding to the Lower East Side as an example. "Long-term residents, community stores and struggling artists are pushed out, replaced by private members' clubs and people who are so self important and unaware of the real world." In Wilson's eyes, that camp includes Musk, but also people like Jeff Bezos, who will receive a cool $3 billion in tax breaks for choosing Long Island City as the spot for one half of his hugely disruptive satellite office. Critics of the deal anticipate that the influx of highly paid workers would drive up the cost of Queens housing at rates untenable for current residents, and that our dilapidated public transit system simply can't handle the strain. "Why not team up two billionaires and create a unicorn company that is, as Musk calls it, 'Boring'?" Wilson explains. Then, throw in a little L train shutdown action ("to draw the Brooklyn millennials into the ultimate fake new start up"), and you've got yourself a really hot piece of social commentary: "A 'Hypeloop' that runs from the Lower East Side, right by Soho House, to Williamsburg, to Long Island City, and back to the LES." "What a dream concept Cuomo would salivate over and millions would be pumped into," Wilson says of his project: "The ultimate unicorn." There's even a mass grave out back, "which symbolically marks the death of the local creative community due to the epidemic of gentrification," he notes. Wilson's friend loaned him the space, and he plans to occupy it through January. The installation isn't open to the public, and if you want to visit it, you'll have to sign a waiver and an NDA, he says. Wilson wants the work to start a public conversation about the palpable value art contributes to the cityalong with the Boring deck, there's a free gallery space showcasing local artists, a performance art space, and a cellphone-free zone. Artists "do something real and beneficial. We add to the city we love, adding color and variety and humanity to this big concrete ATM we call New York," he says. "Change is good, but there should also be room for people who make things. Real things. With their hands, not using an app." Aside from making that point, though, Wilson is also hoping for a moment of viral fame, and best case scenario, "A Twitter spat with Elon." A nationwide effort to install technology intended to prevent deadly high-speed train crashes is crawling right along. The end of 2018 brings with it another expected round of extensions for the regions commuter rails to install the life-saving, crash-preventing, federally-mandated technology Positive Train Control (PTC). Across the country, 26 out of about 41 railroads have requested an extension to December 2020 for full installation of PTC. That includes NJ Transit and the Long Island Railroad. Metro-North is expected to finalize its extension request Friday. "I want to be clear I'm disappointed, MTA board member Neal Zuckerman said at the December board meeting during his presentation on PTC. I'm disappointed as a board member, I'm disappointed as a rider. I'm disappointed in myself frankly and in our organization for not meeting that deadline." The Federal Railroad Administration, which oversees the implementation, acknowledges the challenges. There is a limited number of PTC system vendors and suppliers, all of which are significantly resource-constrained and serving all 41 railroads and their tenant railroads, the agency wrote in a report last July. Part of the holdup is that PTC is not an off-the-shelf technology; it requires customization. And its not one technology but several working together: A transponder on the tracks communicates with a computer on the train, which communicates with an office, as well as other railroads that may share the same track. All of this requires specialized equipment, lots of software, and wireless spectrum to transmit data. In order for a railroad to receive an extension for full implementation, it mustve already completed six aspects of PTC installation including installing the hardware, training employees and acquiring the wireless spectrum that the system needs to function. And a promise that it will be fully installed and operable by 2020. Throughout the course of 2019 and 2020, NJ TRANSIT will continue to install PTC equipment as it continues to restore the ranks of locomotive engineers, NJ Transit wrote in a statement. PTC equipment will be installed on the remaining 158 locomotives and cab cars bringing the total number of vehicle installations to 440 by December 31, 2020. NJ TRANSIT will complete training of the remaining 985 employees bringing its total number of PTC trained employees to 2,730. At the December board meeting, Zuckerman said if the MTA even hopes to meet the 2020 deadline it will have to burn the candle at both ends, and with a looming $1 billion budget shortfall, it will remain a challenge. We have a paucity of revenue and we have a surfeit of expenses, and thats very difficult when youre trying to add goals on. He helpfully adds that Metro-North already has speed enforcement technology on trains that would prevent a crash like 2013 Spuyten Duyvil crash attributed to a drowsy engineer. There are two local bright spotsthe Port Authority has finished installing PTC on the PATH system. And Amtrak has completed the work on all but three miles of track near terminals in Chicago and Philadelphiathose are expected to be done by the spring. Stephen Nessen is the transportation reporter for WNYC. You can follow him on Twitter @s_nessen. Charter Communications (a.k.a. Spectrum) will be forced to provide a whopping $174.2 million in cash and services for lying about the quality and consistency of its often terrible internet service, following a landmark settlement reached Tuesday with the New York Attorney General. As a result, state residents who were defrauded by the company will be eligible for restitution between $75 and $150, which may not seem like enough to make up for the endless suffering & buffering inflicted by Spectrum, but is still quite significant: The $62.5 million direct refund is likely the largest-ever payout issued by an internet service provider in the United States. "This settlement should serve as a wakeup call to any company serving New York consumers: fulfill your promises, or pay the price," Attorney General Barbara Underwood said in a statement. The agreement wraps up a major investigation into the state's largest internet service provider, which began under Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. The 16-month probe of internet speeds determined that customers were "getting dramatically short-changed on both speed and reliability." Despite promises of "blazing fast" internet, the telecom giant was found to have "bottlenecks in its network [that] would result in many subscribers routinely experiencing the very hallmarks of a poor Internet connection." As part of the settlement, Spectrum will be prevented from describing its internet speeds as "consistent," and will instead be forced to refer to its product as "wired." In addition to a bit of cash, victims of Spectrum's lousy coverage will soon have access to not-yet-specified new streaming services and premium channelsretail value of over $100 million, per Underwood. The payout is unrelated to an ongoing fight between Spectrum and the New York State Public Service Commission, which accused the company of a pattern of "purposeful obfuscation" in its merger with Time Warner Cable. Over the summer, the state regulator revoked approval for the merger, meaning that Spectrum could soon be forced to spin off its Time Warner Cable division in New York. "Charters non-compliance and brazenly disrespectful behavior toward New York State and its customers necessitates the actions taken today seeking court-ordered penalties for its failures, and revoking the Charter merger approval," Commission Chair John B. Rhodes said at the time. The company increased its profit in 2017 by more than 180 percent and reported $10 billion in gross profit last year. UPDATE: A spokesperson for Charter provided Gothamist with the following statement: "We are pleased to have reached a settlement with the Attorney General on the issue of certain Time Warner Cable advertising practices in New York prior to our merger, and to have put this litigation behind us. Charter has made, and continues to make, substantial investments enhancing internet service across the state of New York since our 2016 merger, as acknowledged by the Attorney General in this settlement. We look forward to continue providing the best TV, Internet, Voice and Mobile products to our customers, and to bringing broadband to more homes and businesses across the state. News Challenges never deterred us from pursuing our path: Mohammed In his statement to Nation Shield, the UAE Armed Forces' magazine, on the occasion of the UAE's 50th National Day, Sheikh Mohammed says that no matter how great the challenges and obstacles were, nothing was able to discourage us, break our will, or defeat our dreams. SINGAPORE (AP) Singapore regulators placed a lifetime ban Wednesday on a former Goldman Sachs banker who faces criminal charges in the United States and Malaysia for ransacking the 1MDB state investment fund. The Monetary Authority of Singapore, or MAS, said it decided to lengthen its 10-year ban against Tim Leissner after he pleaded guilty to charges levied by the Justice Department in November. Leissner admitted to money laundering conspiracy and conspiring to violate foreign bribery laws in connection with 1Malaysia Development Berhad. "The U.S. DOJ's charges and Mr. Leissner's guilty plea have provided further evidence of Mr. Leissner's involvement in fund flows related to 1MDB, which were previously not available to MAS," the authority said. "The latest actions against Mr. Leissner arose from the close cooperation and continuing investigations by law enforcement and regulatory authorities in the U.S., Singapore and other countries," it added. The ban covers banking and business functions and the managing of capital markets services firms. It also prevents Leissner from being a director, substantial shareholder, capital markets services licensee or exempt person for Singapore businesses dealing with securities, futures and funds management. Leissner, who led Goldman Sachs' Singapore branch, managed three 1MDB bond issuances from 2012 to 2013. MAS said he issued an unauthorized reference letter to a financial institution in Luxembourg, and falsely claimed the bank had conducted due diligence on fugitive Malaysian financier Low Taek Jho, also known as Jho Low. Low, the named mastermind of a scheme that pilfered billions of dollars from the state-owned fund, remains at large. He allegedly used the money for bribes and kickbacks to foreign officials, to pay for luxury real estate, art and jewelry and to help finance Hollywood movies including "The Wolf of Wall Street." U.S. and Malaysian authorities have charged Low in absentia, Leissner and another former Goldman Sachs executive, Roger Ng Chong Hwa. Story continues Singapore, which commenced 1MDB investigations in 2015, has shuttered two Swiss banks and fined others, including DBS Bank, UBS and Standard Chartered Bank for 1MDB-related lapses. It has jailed, fined and imposed bans on several executives. In October, a Singapore court ordered the return of 15.3 million Singapore dollars ($11.1 million) linked to the indebted fund. "I think that the fines so far from Singapore have been relatively minimal, focused on a few facilitators rather than instigators, and have yet to go to the real serious issues of money laundering and kleptocracy," said Bridget Welsh, an associate political science professor at the John Cabot University in Rome. "We will only get a better sense of the facets of 1MDB when the trials start. Exposure of the problem opens Singapore to greater scrutiny," she said. Hotels are often a very large expense on any trip and can take a big bite out of your vacation budget. But if you know how to find the best hotel deals, you can save some serious money on everything from luxury accommodations to discount hotels. I spoke to hotel insiders and travel experts to get their best tips, so you can save money on your next hotel stay. Book Weeks in Advance Knowing the best time to book your hotel room can help minimize travel costs. You can usually get great prices by making hotel reservations 14 to 21 days before your stay, according to Expedia. Dont make the mistake of not planning ahead, said Rachel Cruze, a No. 1 New York Times best-selling author and host of The Rachel Cruze Show. Lots of people think theyll get a last-minute deal on a hotel, but often times prices go up, and you run the risk of rooms selling out. Youll probably wind up spending more out of pure desperation. Book your room ahead of time. You can always cancel it if you find a better rate. Just be sure to check the hotels cancellation policy when you book. Tips: We Crunched the Numbers and Found the Cheapest Time to Book Any Trip Or, Wait Until the Last Minute to Book a Room If you can handle really waiting on this, you can often score a last-minute hotel deal. Book last minute, said Geena Marcelia from Hotwire. Although its common practice to book in advance, if its possible to wait, you can usually find the best rates one week before your travel dates. Get a Refund for a Price Drop If you dont want to end up without a place to stay, you can reserve a room in advance and still take advantage of price drops by booking hotels through Tingo.com. Tingo will automatically rebook your room at a lower rate, if the price drops, and refund you the difference. Stay on a Sunday Timing a hotel stay right can save you money. And Sundays are almost always the cheapest day of the week for hotels, said Marcelia. Story continues Hit Tourist Locales Midweek Cities that are major tourist destinations often see more traffic on weekends when people arent working and have time to travel. Since prices tend to rise with demand, youll save on the cost of lodging if you go against the tide. When it comes to booking a hotel, youll save the most by staying during the week, said Cruze. If you can take the time off work, youll be able to snag a much cheaper price for your lodging. Visit Business Hot Spots on Weekends You can save money on hotel rates by staying in a citys business district on weekends when business travelers have checked out and headed home, said Bob Tupper, author of Drinking in the Culture: Tuppers Guide to Exploring Great Beers in Europe. For example, he found a room in an upscale business district of Zurich, on a weekend at half the price of a weekday stay. Take Advantage of the Shoulder Season Shoulder season is the period of time between the off-peak season when the weather is not ideal for travel and the peak season when ideal weather conditions make prices high and crowds abundant. Because demand is lower, you might be able to find cheap hotel rooms. Hotels often run promotions during [the] low season, especially directly before peak season kicks off when they know they need to incentivize people to travel, said Liana Corwin, travel and lifestyle expert with booking app Hopper. Look for spring specials, especially before the last week in May, when many will still be running these promotions. Did You Know? The Financial Perks of Off-Season Travel Get Deep Discounts During the Off-Season Just because a destination has a reputation for extreme heat, cold or storms at certain times of the year doesnt mean youre destined to experience bad weather if you visit them, said Elizabeth Avery, founder of Solo Trekker 4 U, a site dedicated to those traveling alone. What you will get, though, are deep discounts on lodging because demand is lower in the off-season. For example, locales known for having a rainy season can be a good value because the rains are often brief rather than continuous, she said. You can still do plenty of sightseeing at a lower cost. Stay in the Suburbs If you stay on the outskirts of midsize and larger cities, youll find more upscale hotels at lower prices than you might pay for a budget hotel within the city. Most major cities have plenty of hotel options outside of the city center, said Devon Nagle, head of communications at Priceline. For example, when planning a trip to the Big Apple, consider staying in an outer borough versus Manhattan. Plenty of options exist at rates below those in the most popular areas; this allows travelers to spend the savings on experiences, versus lodging. Watch Out for Event-Related Price Hikes Before you book a trip, make sure there are no major events happening in the city when you want to visit it, said Eric Grayson, founder of Discover 7 Travel. Otherwise, you could wind up paying astronomical rates due to increased demand for rooms in the area, he said. Check the citys tourism or chamber of commerce site for a calendar of events to ensure youre not planning a trip at a time when rooms will be scarce and prices will be high. Be Flexible With Travel Dates The more flexible you are with your travel dates, the more you can save on a hotel room. Choose a destination, and then price the cost of a hotel over a few different weeks or months to spot the best rates. Take advantage of the Trivago Hotel Price Index to see the average monthly prices for 35 of North Americas most popular cities to determine the cheapest time to book a stay. Be Flexible With Destinations You can save even more on the cost of a hotel room if youre willing to be flexible with your destination. If youre comparing beach destinations, its the same water, sand and sun but the rate might be different. You can find more cheap hotels in some places than in others. Use Mobile Apps to Book Hotel Rooms Travelers can often get special hotel deals by booking hotels through travel apps. For example, the Priceline app has Tonight Only hotel deals that offer savings of up to 60% on last-minute hotel rooms, and the Last Minute Travel app offers discounts of up to 60% as well. You also can get $25 off your first hotel booking through the app. Get Discounts on Unused Hotel Reservations HotelTonight partners with top hotel chains to book their unsold rooms, so you can find deep discounts on last-minute hotel bookings. When it comes to booking the best stay, HotelTonight is my favorite app for finding hidden deals in each city, said Jennifer Hawkins, a frequent traveler, and founder and president of Hawkins International Public Relations. Im honestly shocked every time I open the app and see a new, ridiculously awesome deal. Dont Be Afraid to Book Blindly You can find cheap hotel rooms and get discounts of up to 60% if you take advantage of the option to book a room and pay online without knowing the exact hotel where youll be staying at using sites such as Hotwire and Priceline. With Hotwires Hot Rate hotels, youll see a rate and how much of a discount it is below published prices along with the general location, hotel details and reviews. And with Pricelines Express Deals, you can pick the exact amenities you want such as the number of beds in addition to star rating and location. Hotels even some luxury will often offer steep discounts sometimes more than half off to travelers who will book the hotel based on its star rating and neighborhood, rather than its specific name, said Nagle. Such deals often exist for last-minute travelers in particular, but can also be found weeks in advance. Use Online Coupons There are plenty of coupon websites that offer codes to save money on purchases with online retailers, but coupon codes arent just for products. By using online coupons for travel, people can expect to save up to 20%, said Scott Kluth, founder of CouponCabin, a site that offers both coupon codes and cash back on purchases at certain retailers. The benefit of using coupons is that you can stack them with other discounts and cash-back offers to maximize your savings, Kluth said. Save With Package Deals You can save hundreds of dollars by taking advantage of deals offered by travel sites that bundle airfare and hotel accommodations into one price. These package deals allow hotels to offer lower rates because the room price isnt disclosed separately from the airfare, so it gives a hotel cover for selling at a lower rate. Join Hotel Loyalty Programs Loyalty goes a long way with hotels, said Cruze. Lots of hotels reward people who join their loyalty programs with perks. Most of them offer things like early check-in, room upgrades and even special discounts on rooms. Signing up is free, so you have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Join Travel Site Rewards Programs Some travel booking sites have their own rewards programs that members can join for free and earn points for free stays at a variety of hotels, from upscale to cheap hotels. For example, Orbitzs Orbitz Rewards program lets you earn 1 Orbuck for every $1 spent on eligible hotel bookings. Hotels.com also offers a rewards program thats free to join and allows members to get a free hotel night after booking 10 hotel nights through the site. Get Free Stays at Independent Hotels Major hotel chains arent the only ones that reward their guests for being loyal. You can get free stays at independent hotels through Stash Hotel Rewards. This free program lets you earn points by booking through StashRewards.com and then you redeem the points for rooms at more than 160 hotels across the U.S., Canada, and the Caribbean. International travelers can join Voila Hotel Rewards at VHR.com to earn points for free stays at independent hotels and resorts around the world. Members also get other benefits, including early check-in, late check-out and room upgrades. Get a Travel Rewards Credit Card You can rack up points for free hotel stays even faster if you get a hotel-branded credit card. Choosing the right hotel credit card can help you get free night stays, and potentially save you hundreds of dollars per year, said Nathan Grant, a credit industry analyst at Credit Card Insider. Hotel cards can also get you an upgraded hotel status, which often comes with bonus points, room upgrades, early check-in, and late check-out. With the Hilton Honors Card from American Express, for example, you can earn seven points for every $1 you spend on Hilton properties, five points for every $1 spent on gas, grocery and restaurant purchases, and three points per $1 for all other purchases. Theres no annual fee, and you can get 75,000 bonus points if you spend $1,000 in the first three months after getting your card. Get More Savings With Your Credit Card Even if you dont have a hotel-branded credit card, your credit card might offer savings and perks at hotels. For example, American Express Platinum cardholders can book through Amex Travels Fine Hotels & Resorts service for benefits such as room upgrades, free internet, food and beverage credits, and more. Check your card to see what travel benefits and hotel hacks it offers, and find out how to maximize those benefits. Get Airline Miles for Booking Hotel Rooms You can get a lot more value for your hotel dollar by using a travel booking site that gives you airline miles when you book through them, said Jared Blank, past chief marketing officer of deal and coupon site DealNews. Rocketmiles, PointsHound and Kaligo are three sites that offer up thousands of miles per night for your favorite airline frequent flyer program when you book through them. And room rates are generally the same as those found on other travel sites, he said. Get Free Food With Your Stay Several hotels offer guests free food, so you can eliminate the cost of some meals if you stay at these chains. Comfort Inn & Suites and Hampton Hotels, for example, offer guests free hot breakfast. Embassy Suites offers guests complimentary breakfasts and free drinks in the evening. And kids younger than 12 can eat free at Holiday Inn on-site restaurants. Be Nice to the Staff -- and Don't Be Afraid to Ask For Upgrades When you check into a hotel, treat the staff well to get better treatment. Being nice to hotel employees might get you a room upgrade or other perk at no extra charge. Many hotels will often upgrade their guests simply so their customers will have a good experience, said Sara Skirboll, shopping and trends expert at RetailMeNot. The hotel business is big business and hotels, big and small, are aggressively competing for customers every day of the week. All you need is a bit of courage and a smile and more often than not, the front desk staff will do what they can to give you a little something special. Whether that means upgrading your room or simply offering free breakfast, a small and polite ask may go a long way. Bonus points if youre celebrating a special occasion and operate discreetly. Avoid Resort Fees and Other Hidden Fees Resort fees are extra charges hotels levy for amenities such as the use of gym facilities or pool towels, and there might be other hidden fees that come with your stay, so try to do your research ahead of time to avoid them. Watch out for hidden fees when youre booking your room, said Cruze. Some hotels might advertise that they have the cheapest rate, but then they charge for amenities like Wi-Fi, breakfast and other things that hotels usually offer for free. Those costs add up and might wind up making your stay more expensive than the hotel across the street that includes those fees in the price for their room. Do your homework and shop around. If these charges show up on your bill and you werent aware that you were going to be hit with them or if youre charged for amenities you didnt use ask to have the fees removed. Just remember to be polite about it. Get Free Wi-Fi If your hotel doesnt offer free Wi-Fi, you might be able to get free access if you join the hotels loyalty program which should be free. Or, if you have an ample data plan for your smartphone, you can use your phone as a mobile hot spot to connect to the internet. Check your phones settings for the personal hot spot option. Pay Less for Parking Some hotels in metropolitan areas charge outrageous parking fees. You might be able to find cheaper parking at a nearby parking garage or lot and there might be coupons that let you save more. Dont Check In Early Find out what time you can check in at the hotel youve booked before you arrive by calling or looking online. Otherwise, if you show up before the designated check-in time, you could be charged a fee. Dont Overtip Housekeeping Before you leave money in an envelope for the person who cleans your room, ask whether a housekeeping gratuity is automatically included in your bill so you dont spend more on tipping than necessary. Resorts, in particular, are prone to adding this charge. Your Tipping Guide: Insider Secrets of Tipping Etiquette Order Food Delivery Instead of Room Service You pay a high price for the convenience of room service. Not only will you be charged a room service fee and a gratuity, but youll also be expected to tip the person who brings the food to your room. If youre too tired to venture out to a restaurant, ask the hotel staff which restaurants in the area deliver to the hotel for free and whether they have menus for them. Or, check local restaurant sites to find out which ones offer the best prices. You can also go the BYO route and stock the minibar with your own snacks before you arrive. Typically I will order items off of Amazon and have them shipped to my hotel, said Ian McClarty, a frequent traveler, and president and CEO of PhoenixNAP Global IT Services. On Amazon, I have created a repeatable order. With a few clicks, I can have my favorite healthy snacks and drinks waiting for me when I check into the hotel. I have used this on almost every trip over the last few years and saved not only money but also my waistline. Dont Leave Your Bags in Hotel Storage If you ask the hotel staff to hold your bags in storage to avoid checking out late, you might get hit with a fee. To be safe, ask about any fees before handing over your luggage. Watch Out For Extra Person Fees Most hotel rates are based on double occupancy. If you have more than two people in a room even if theyre kids you might have to pay more. Always check a hotels policy before you book, and avoid properties that charge extra if there are more than two people in your party. AAA offers significant discounts for a variety of hotel chains, too. Use Membership Discounts Take advantage of your profession or membership in various groups to score hotel discounts. For example, hotel chains such as Choice Hotels, Hilton and Marriott all offer discounted rates for military members and government employees. AARP, the organization for adults 50 and older, offers its members discounts that typically range from 5% to 15% at several hotel chains. Use a Travel Agent Its easy to compare prices and book hotel stays online. But you might get a room with more perks at no extra cost if you use a travel agent to book your stay. Thats because travel agents can leverage their relationships with hotels to get more for guests. A lot of people think using a travel agent isnt within their budget, said Cruze. But most agents dont even charge for their services. If youre overwhelmed trying to book a hotel, its worth looking into a travel agent. They often are able to get deals that you cant find elsewhere, and you have the convenience of getting expert advice. Not to mention, everything is booked for you so theres less work on your end. Just be sure to ask upfront if they have fees, but for the most part, they do not. Dont Pay Extra for a View You Wont Enjoy Getting a room with a view of the beach or a city skyline can cost you more. If youre only going to be in your room after dark, dont pay extra for a view you wont be able to enjoy, said Avery. Avoid Deals That Are Too Good To Be True If you find a hotel deal that seems too good to be true, it probably is, Avery said. A hotel with an unbelievably low rate might have lots of hidden costs that could wipe out any savings you think youre getting. Moreover, quality issues might be the reason a hotels price is below the going rate and a good reason to stay away, she said. Be Persistent If you check for hotel rates and cant find any that fit your budget, dont give up. Hotels frequently adjust their rates. If you dont see something you like today, keep checking. Set Price Alerts To keep track of hotel rates, you can sign up for price alerts at the travel aggregator site Kayak. Youll be notified via text message or email when rates at hotels you select change. Setting price alerts can help you nab hotel deals without having to check back at hotel or travel sites daily. Book Your Hotel in Person (in Some Destinations) When traveling through Southeast Asia, you can save up to 50% on hotels just by booking your room in person and paying with cash, said frequent travelers Max Chambers and Loren Rispoli. Sites like Agoda, Booking.com, and Hostelworld are great for the U.S. or Europe, but dont provide competitive rates in a number of Southeast Asian countries. Recently, in Cebu in the Philippines, we found the price of one hotel on Agoda quoted at $35, but when turning up at the hotel, they were charging $25 for the exact same room, Chambers said. Bargain With the Hotel Owner If talking to the front desk or hotel staff doesnt get you hotel perks, talk to the big boss. Another tip to get cheap hotels in [Southeast Asia] is to bargain with the hotel owners, said Chambers. Not only can you get a reduced price on your room, [but you can also] get things like breakfast or meal vouchers included in your stay. Book Through the Mobile App The best way to find last-minute deals is through mobile websites, mobile apps and by calling in, said Mahesh Chaddah, co-founder of hotel booking site Reservations.com. Many hotels will offer limited discount rates to mobile users only, so keep those apps handy. Look for Hidden Rates We have all heard of the old saying, What you see is what you get, but sometimes you want what you dont see, said Chaddah. Almost all hotels publish the same room rates on all public websites. However, most also offer discount hidden rates up to 30% cheaper through unpublished channels, like the call center. Become a Registered User and Log In If you havent signed up to be a registered user on your favorite travel booking site, you should do so before you plan your next trip. Most websites offer limited special rates, flash rates and extra room availability on sold-out hotels to their registered and logged-in users, said Chaddah. So, make sure you sign up and sign in before searching. Take Advantage of Tuesdays Dont wait until the weekend to book your hotel do it on a Tuesday. Based on historical data, hotel booking rates are the lowest on this day of the week, said Chaddah. So be sure to compare prices and take advantage of the lower rates being offered on this day. Dont Ignore State Resident Discounts If youre planning a vacation in your state, you might be eligible to score a discount on your hotel stay. Many hotels for instance those in Florida and Hawaii offer state resident discounts, said Chaddah. All you need is a state-issued ID at check-in, and you can save an extra 10% to 20%. So next time you take a staycation or local getaway, make sure you show off that drivers license. Ask the Front Desk About Partnership Deals Most hotels create business partnerships with local businesses, restaurants, and activities, said Jennie Jacobs, director of sales and marketing at Hotel Santa Barbara in California. These relationships equate to great experiences, savings, and deals for guests. For instance, a local restaurant partner might provide the front desk or hotel concierge with some discount coupons or maybe a free dessert with dinner if the staff calls and books the reservation. Tell the Hotel About Other Travel Deals If you go to a booking site that has deals listed, call the hotel or inn directly, and tell them you have seen the rates offered on the site and were wondering if they could better it, said Pekka Paavonpera, innkeeper at the Snapdragon Inn. Chances are they can, by between 10% and 15%, because thats the commission they have to pay the booking site anyway. Sign Up for Hotels Virtual Guest Books If youre planning a trip to Las Vegas, travel journalist David Yeskel offers this tip on how to score the best rate on your hotel. Travelers should register on the individual hotels virtual guest books, he said. Theyll receive promotional emails that often pair low room rates with free daily buffet passes and other resort credits that can bring the effective daily room rate down to ridiculously low levels. Start a Bidding War Next time youre planning to travel, book a hotel reservation that doesnt come with cancellation fees. Then, call other nearby hotels and ask if they can offer you a better deal. If youre talking to a hotel chain, make sure to talk to the front desk directly, as theyre the ones who can make on-the-spot deals. Click through to read about other travel tips like the airport secrets only insiders know. More on Hotels Sydney Champion, Cameron Huddleston, and Gabrielle Olya contributed to the reporting for this article. This article originally appeared on GOBankingRates.com: 50 Hotel Secrets Only Insiders Know ALLETE, Inc.'s ALE wholly-owned subsidiary, ALLETE Clean Energy, recently announced that it is refurbishing its 50 megawatt (MW) of Condon Wind facility in Oregon and the project is expected to be completed in 2019. Details of the Project The investment in revamping the Oregon wind facility includes equipment and system upgrades, which are required for high availability and clean energy production performance. The renovation will extend the operating life of the wind facility and also requalify the site for federal production tax credits. Also, the project will position the hub for re-contracting once the existing power sales agreement with Bonneville Power Administration expires in late 2022. In addition to the Condon project, the company is restoring its 385 turbines at the Lake Benton and Storm Lake sites in order to improve the turbine performance and reliability, generate federal production tax credits at each site and support the renewal of power sales agreements at Storm Lake. Renewable Outlook Renewable Energy source has been gaining momentum in the United States. Wind and solar power have been two of the fastest growing sources of electricity generation over the past decade. Per a latest release from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), wind, solar and other non-hydropower renewables provided slightly less than 10% of electricity generation in 2017. EIA expects the same to provide more than 10% in 2018 and nearly 11% in 2019. Despite efforts of the new administration to revive usage of coal in different industries, we could notice that large utilities like Ameren Crop AEE and CMS Energy CMS are increasingly investing in renewable energy sources to lower toxic emission. Price Performance In the past 12 months, shares of ALLETE have gained 3.1% versus the industrys decline of 1.2%. Zacks Rank & Key Pick ALLETE currently has a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here. Duke Energy Corporation DUK carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). It pulled off average earnings surprise of 3.18% in the last four reported quarters. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for 2018 earnings has been inched up 0.9% to $4.74 in the last 60 days. Wall Streets Next Amazon Zacks EVP Kevin Matras believes this familiar stock has only just begun its climb to become one of the greatest investments of all time. Its a once-in-a-generation opportunity to invest in pure genius. Click for details >> Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report CMS Energy Corporation (CMS) : Free Stock Analysis Report Allete, Inc. (ALE) : Free Stock Analysis Report Duke Energy Corporation (DUK) : Free Stock Analysis Report Ameren Corporation (AEE) : Free Stock Analysis Report To read this article on Zacks.com click here. Zacks Investment Research TORONTO, Dec 19 (Reuters) - Canada said on Wednesday it will exclude some imported steel and aluminum from its newest import tariffs and quotas following a request from the construction industry in British Columbia, which depends on imported metal. The government also said it would give additional relief to some companies that have contractual obligations. In Canada, automakers frequently buy U.S. steel under contract, import and distribute it to their Canadian suppliers as well as their own plants, but it was not immediately clear which companies would be affected. In November, British Columbia construction industry leaders asked the government to exempt rebar, steel bars used to reinforce concrete, from new steel quotas and tariffs announced in October. Canada also said on Wednesday it would give relief for steel product imports that were in transit before Oct. 25, as requested by the construction industry. In October, the government announced quotas and tariffs on seven categories of steel imported from most countries outside the United States. The measures were meant to reassure U.S. officials that cheap metal would not leak across the border if U.S. tariffs were lifted, and ensure that steel shut out of the U.S. market did not harm Canadian steel mills owned by Stelco Holdings , ArcelorMittal Dofasco and others. They followed Canadian tariffs on U.S. imports of steel and aluminum imposed on July 1, 2018, in retaliation for U.S. President Donald Trump's tariffs. (Reporting by Susan Taylor; Editing by Sandra Maler) By Stephanie Nebehay GENEVA (Reuters) - The United States came under fire from China and the European Union on Monday, accused by both major trading partners of taking protectionist measures and bringing the World Trade Organization (WTO) to its knees. Japan, Switzerland and Canada also criticised Washington, but U.S. trade ambassador Dennis Shea charged that China's "unfair competitive practices" were harming foreign companies and workers in violation of WTO rules, and he vowed to lead reform efforts at the watchdog. President Donald Trump's administration says the WTO is dysfunctional because it has failed to hold China to account for not opening up its economy as envisaged when Beijing joined in 2001. Shea drew a rebuke from Chinese envoy Zhang Xiangchen who said U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminium products had allowed protectionism under the guise of dubious national security concerns. "The multilateral trading system is in a deep crisis and the United States is at its epicentre," said EU ambassador Mark Vanheukelen The heated words were exchanged at a review of U.S. trade policies, held every two years. To force reform at the WTO, Trump's team has refused to allow new appointments to the Appellate Body, the world's top trade court, a process which requires consensus among member states. As a result, the court is running out of judges, and will be unable to issue binding rulings in disputes. Shea expressed concern about a wayward WTO dispute settlement system and said the Appellate Body had overreached in some legal interpretations. Zhang countered that by blocking the selection of judges, Washington was putting the system into paralysis. The EU's Vanheukelen urged Washington to engage in talks on reform proposals which it presented last month with 11 other members. Vanheukelen and Canada's envoy Stephan de Boer decried limitations on the U.S. procurement market, in particular through "Buy American" legislation. Japan and Switzerland also expressed concern at the U.S. use of a national security exemption to justify its steel and aluminium tariffs, a trade official said. U.S. TAKES AIM AT CHINA Shea described the United States as "one of the most open and competitive economies in the world", with among the lowest tariffs globally, denying the U.S. approach was "unilateralist and protectionist". China has pursued "non-market industrial policies and other unfair competitive practices" aimed at supporting its domestic industries while restricting or discriminating against foreign companies and their goods and services, he said. "The WTO is not well equipped to handle the fundamental challenge posed by China, which continues to embrace a state-led, mercantilist approach to the economy and trade," Shea said. He did not refer to the dispute on steel which brought the two powers to the brink of a major trade war but defended the U.S. "Section 301" investigation that found in March that Chinese practices related to technology transfer, intellectual property and innovation were discriminatory. On Section 301, Zhang said the U.S. measures vastly increased tariffs, "bringing back to life the ghost of unilateralism that has been dormant for decades". Shea said the United States was committed to addressing concerns on WTO's functioning, adding: "Reforms are necessary for the continued viability of the institution." (Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; editing by David Stamp) A major infrastructure project in the Americas show how differently China and the U.S. view the world. My belief is that the U.S. is looking at the world through a short term lens of tariffs and elections, while China is looking at a 25 year plan of becoming the dominant global power. And Chinese officials are already hard at work to make that happen. China has agreed to buy some soybeans from our farmers, that have already had a $12 billion bailout. The only problem is the size of the buy is a disappointment, at least initially. China is only buying 1.5 million tons-which will barely move stock when China is the market for 60 percent of U.S. soybean exports and Chinese buying is down 90 percent year-over-year. To give you some perspective on scale, China buys between 30-35 million tons a year from the U.S. The problem comes not with what the Chinese are doing short term, it is what they are doing in Brazil despite President Trumps staunch defending of U.S. farmers. Americas biggest competitor for U.S. soybean production is Brazil, which has upped its soybean production 340 percent from 1977 to 2017 in the three Midwest regions of Mato Grasso, Matto Grasso do Sul and Goias. The 2017-2018 crop in Brazil is believed to be bigger than the U.S. by a small margin of 117 million tons to 116.5 million tons. China has helped Brazil spend billions of dollars to build out the Northern Ports and to get these soybeans to market in a much more cost efficient manner. The landlocked three regions are now being opened for the direct purpose of competing with the U.S. for the soybean market and China is helping fund it. This is a game changer for Brazil. Brazil soybeans have two distinct advantages and one huge disadvantage. The biggest advantage is a 3 percent bigger amount of protein (an average of 37 percent protein), which is important for cattle feed and it costs $1 less to produce. The disadvantage is the 1,300 miles to the southern ports for export, which has 30 percent higher transport costs compared to the U.S. because of Brazils poor infrastructure. Soybeans are mainly trucked the entire route. Story continues The key point is China is planning to have a future where they wont be buying soybeans from the U.S. unless they want to or they will no longer need to. The contracts we are losing for our farmers wont be a one or two year blip, we could be losing them forever. We must deal with Chinese theft of intellectual property, though no one is sure that tariffs are the solution. But while we are dealing with tariffs and trade wars, China is working quietly behind the scenes, building out critical infrastructure for our rivals to benefit themselves. The One Belt, One Road initiative has been dismissed by some as not working. But America could be becoming weaker by ignoring what is going on right under our noses. I believe China is merely killing the clock on this tariff war because they see this as a long game and their strategy is flying under the radar-to the detriment of long term economics in the U.S., unless we realize what is going on and choose to counter China's push. John Layfield is FOX Business contributor and is the longest reigning WWE Champ in Smackdown TV history. Follow him @JCLayfield. Related Articles E. Barrett Prettyman Courthouse in Washington, D.C. Photo: Diego M. Radzinschi/ALM. A federal appeals court has upheld the denial of a bid to quash a grand jury subpoena, revealing on Tuesday that an unidentified corporation is the mysterious party seeking to suppress the subpoena believed to be tied to special counsel Robert Mueller IIIs probe. A three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit affirmed a lower court ruling by Chief Judge Beryl Howell that denied the state-owned corporations bid to quash the subpoena. The appeal led up to a sealed oral argument on Friday that closed an entire floor in the courthouse in an effort to keep the proceedings under wraps. According to Tuesdays order, the corporation attempted to quash the subpoena by arguing it was immune under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, and by contending the subpoena would have required the corporation to violate its countrys domestic law. But the panelcomprised of Judges David Tatel, Thomas Griffith, and Stephen Williamwas not persuaded, instead taking up the lower courts finding that the corporation was not immunized from the subpoena. The judges also wrote that they were unconvinced the foreign countrys law truly prohibits the corporation from complying. The judges also agreed with the district courts decision to impose a penalty on the corporation. The lower court had held the corporation in contempt and imposed a fixed monetary penalty to increase each day the Corporation fails to comply, according to the order. Whether and how that sanction can be executed on remand is a separate question for a later day, the panel said. Read the decision: falcon-embed src="embed_2" Read more: DC Circuit Secrecy Keeps Apparent Mueller Grand Jury Fight Under Wraps DC Circuit Won't Force IRS to Release Trump's Tax Returns DOJ Asks 4th Circuit to Halt State AG Emoluments Lawsuit (Bloomberg) -- The European Union is investigating "a potential leak of sensitive information" following a report that hackers breached the blocs diplomatic communications network. Using techniques similar to those used by an elite unit of Chinas Peoples Liberation Army, hackers downloaded cables over a period of three years, according to the report by the New York Times published late Tuesday. In response, a spokeswoman for the European Council said Wednesday they were "aware of the allegations" and "actively investigating the issue." The alleged attack was discovered by U.S.-based cybersecurity firm Area 1 Security, and included thousands of cables that reveal concerns about Donald Trumps administration, struggles dealing with Russia and China and Irans nuclear risks. In one cable, European diplomats described a July meeting between U.S. President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin as successful (at least for Putin), the New York Times reported. In another, a detailed report quoted Chinas President Xi Jinping in a meeting with European officials the same month as accusing Trump of "bullying" Beijing. The news comes as relations between Washington and Brussels remain tense over trade, but are aligning over concerns over possible espionage by China, enabled by telecoms equipment companies like Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. The hackers discovered by Area 1 allegedly breached the EUs system through a phishing campaign directed at diplomats in Cyprus, after which they obtained access to passwords for the EUs database of exchanges, the NYT said. A spokeswoman for Cyprus in Brussels didnt immediately respond to a request for comment. "The Council Secretariat does not comment on allegations nor on matters relating to operational security," a European Council spokeswoman said in her statement. To contact the reporter on this story: Natalia Drozdiak in Brussels at ndrozdiak1@bloomberg.net Story continues To contact the editors responsible for this story: Giles Turner at gturner35@bloomberg.net, Nikos Chrysoloras For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com 2018 Bloomberg L.P. (Bloomberg) -- Facebook Inc. came under renewed pressure from lawmakers following a New York Times report that the social media giant allowed more than 150 companies access to more users personal data than it had disclosed. According to the report, the social network had allowed Microsoft Corp.s Bing search engine to see names of virtually all Facebook users friends without consent, and gave Spotify and Netflix the ability to read Facebook users private messages. Revelations about Facebooks response to manipulation of the social network before and after the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and shifting accounts about breaches of users privacy, have battered the companys reputation and fueled frustration on Capitol Hill. Lawmakers have been threatening for some time to impose new regulations to rein in Facebook, and the news report only seemed to further the case. It is beyond obvious at this point that social media platforms are simply not up to the task of voluntarily ensuring the privacy and security of their users, Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, tweeted on Wednesday. Congress must step in. Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee that heard testimony from Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg in September, has previously put forth several potential measures for regulating tech companies. He said the Timess report is yet another data point demonstrating that Facebook offers users far too little in the way of transparency about how their data is being used, and by whom. Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who has proposed legislation that would jail chief executives if they lie about privacy, slammed the companys "chutzpah" on Wednesday and suggested recent revelations cast doubt on Facebook executives public statements. When companies repeatedly lie to Congress and the American people about what they do with our messages, location, likes and everything else, Congress has a duty to do something about it," Wyden said in a statement. "Clearly these people need some skin in the game before they will take Americans privacy seriously. Story continues Steve Satterfield, Facebooks director of privacy and public policy, told the Times none of the partnerships violated users privacy, or a 2011 agreement with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to require explicit permission from members before sharing their data. In a statement published on its website on Wednesday, Facebook said its partnerships or features did not give companies access to information without peoples permission. Menlo Park, California-based Facebook has been under fire since it learned earlier this year that personal information was transferred by an app developer to Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm that worked for Donald Trumps 2016 presidential campaign. The company has spent the year trying to update its security and answer questions about the scandal from U.S. lawmakers and overseas policy makers. In addition to Sandbergs testimony this fall, Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg testified at House and Senate hearings earlier this year. Facebook shares fell less than 2 percent in New York 11:32 a.m. Wednesday to $140.68 even as other major tech stocks generally traded higher. Facebook has been battered in the markets this year as the data privacy scandal unfolded. The stock is down 20 percent for the year and is the worst performer among the FAANG companies. To contact the reporters on this story: Nate Lanxon in London at nlanxon@bloomberg.net;Ben Brody in Washington at btenerellabr@bloomberg.net To contact the editors responsible for this story: Giles Turner at gturner35@bloomberg.net, Molly Schuetz, Robin Ajello For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com 2018 Bloomberg L.P. iAnthus Capital Holdings Inc (OTC: ITHUF) is executing on its plan to expand its presence across the United States and plans to open its first dispensary in Florida on Dec. 19. What Happened iAnthus, which is one of the largest U.S. cannabis companies, said its first dispensary in Florida will be under its GrowHealthy brand and will represent the company's flagship location in the state. The dispensary will be located in Palm Beach Country. GrowHealthy was acquired by iAnthus in January 2018, offering the latter access to one of 13 marijuana licenses in Florida. Aside from dispensaries, GrowthHealthy also has a 200,000 square-foot cultivation and processing facility in Lake Wales. Don't miss the Cannabis Capital Conference, the No. 1 networking event for institutional capital and leading cannabis companies. The event takes place next month in Miami, Florida -- secure your tickets here before they run out! Why It's Important The acquisition of GrowHealty's assets was a major step for iAnthus, which is betting on M&A to expand its footprint across the U.S. In November, iAnthus CEO Hadley Ford told Benzinga the main competition in the cannabis space in the U.S. will be conducted on the M&A front Our strategy is to expand and have a national footprint. There is no way any company can apply in every state and win in every state, Ford said. In addition to its flagship location, iAnthus and GrowHealthy plan to open two other dispensaries in Florida by the end of 2018. Moreover, in 2019, the company aims to have 16 additional GrowHealthy dispensaries in Florida next year and to reach a total of 30 locations by the end of 2020. Related Links: Tilray Shares Jump On The Back Of Novartis Partnership Newly Public Cannabis Manufacturer Dixie Brands Aims For National Footprint See more from Benzinga 2018 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved. (Bloomberg) -- Hackers downloaded Social Security numbers and other personal information from an unknown number of current and former NASA employees, the agency told workers. NASA began investigating the intrusion of its servers on Oct. 23, according to a memo sent Tuesday by Assistant Administrator Bob Gibbs. Employees who were hired, transferred or left the agency from July 2006 to October 2018 may have been affected by the hack, he said. The agency has about 17,400 civil service employees. Gibbss memo was first published online by Spaceref.com and NASA confirmed its authenticity. The agency said it doesnt believe that any of its missions were affected. NASA doesnt yet know how many employees are affected by the breach, spokeswoman Karen Northon told Bloomberg. Once discovered, NASA took immediate action to secure the impacted servers and has been working to perform a forensic analysis since thenthis process will take time, she wrote in an email. The ongoing investigation is a top NASA priority. The agency said it would offer identity-protection services to those who were affected. To contact the author of this story: Justin Bachman in Dallas at jbachman2@bloomberg.net To contact the editor responsible for this story: Joshua Petri at jpetri4@bloomberg.net For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com 2018 Bloomberg L.P. German Economy Minister Peter Altmaier pauses during an interview in his office in Berlin, Germany December 14, 2018. REUTERS/Annegret Hilse By Gernot Heller and Paul Carrel BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany's economy minister said he believed the Russian-backed Nord Stream 2 pipeline can go ahead while preserving Ukraine's vital interests, but that Berlin is also in talks to diversify its energy supply with liquefied natural gas. U.S. President Donald Trump in July accused Germany of being a "captive" of Russia due to its energy reliance and urged it to halt work on the $11 billion, Russian-led Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline that is to be built in the Baltic Sea. Berlin and Moscow have been at odds since Russia annexed Crimea four years ago, but they have a common interest in the Nord Stream 2 project, which will double the capacity of the existing Nord Stream 1 route from next year. Washington is concerned the pipeline, which will bypass Ukraine by running under the Baltic Sea, will strip Ukraine of important transit revenues and says Moscow is using the project to divide Europe. "Personally, I believe that this project can be justified if Ukraine's vital interests are preserved at the same time," German Economy Minister Peter Altmaier told Reuters in an interview conducted on Friday for publication on Sunday. "And one of these vital interests is that even after 2019, substantial gas transit through Ukraine will take place from Russia. There are discussions about this at the moment," he said, adding that the detail of the talks was "very difficult". Ukraine derives up to 3 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) from transit charges. "We will not reduce dependence on Russia by torpedoing a pipeline such as Nord Stream 2 and then sourcing gas from Russia from other pipelines," Altmaier said. "Greater independence is only conceivable if, in addition to the long-term supply of gas, we also create an LNG infrastructure in Germany." Washington has touted liquefied natural gas (LNG), delivered by U.S. companies, as an alternative to Russian gas. Story continues Altmaier said German government members were agreed they wanted to build the infrastructure to import LNG soon, and "we are currently in the process of clarifying the location issue with private investors." Turning to Britain's departure from the European Union, Altmaier said an EU summit last week showed a deal on Britain's withdrawal from the bloc could not be renegotiated but "on the other hand, that the European Union is ready to provide clarification". "Between these two poles ... there is a certain amount of tension that can only be overcome by Britain putting proposals on the table that, as far as I can see, are not yet available," he added. On German domestic politics, he said Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) was not divided following a robust leadership contest this month. "It is now clear that we have a stable government with a chancellor for the next few years," he added. (Writing by Paul Carrel; Editing by Elaine Hardcastle) (Bloomberg) -- Qualcomm Inc. General Counsel Don Rosenberg said Apple Inc. needs to take seriously a Chinese courts ban on the sale of some iPhone models. The court order, granted last week after Qualcomm argued that Apple is infringing on its patents, is in force and cannot be circumvented automatically by a software or operating system update as the iPhone maker has claimed, according to Rosenberg. Qualcomm is seeking an extension of the ban to cover the latest models of the phone, he said in an interview on Bloomberg Television to be aired later Tuesday. Its something that needs to be taken very seriously, Rosenberg said. The order should be taking a bite out of Apples sales right now. The two U.S. companies are locked in a worldwide dispute over licensing fees that Qualcomm charges for use of technology that the chipmaker says underpins all modern phone systems. Apple has argued its former supplier unfairly leverages its position as the biggest provider of chips for smartphones to force payment. Qualcomm has countered that Apple is using its intellectual property without paying for it, and legal cases are aimed at forcing it to lower licensing charges. The Fuzhou Intermediate Peoples Court ruled that Apple is infringing two Qualcomm patents and issued injunctions against the sale of the iPhone 6S, iPhone 6S Plus, iPhone 7, iPhone 7 Plus, iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus and iPhone X, the San Diego, California-based chipmaker said last week. The order doesnt cover the newer iPhone XS, XR and XS Max, which were released after Qualcomm appealed to the court. The chipmaker is asking to extend the ban to those newer models, Rosenberg said Tuesday. Apple said in a court filing that in 2017 it sold an estimated 50 million iPhone units in China. The device is the companys most important product, generating more than 60 percent of Apples annual revenue. The Qualcomm executive said the burden is on Apple to comply with the order or return to the court to prove that its no longer in infringement. The ban will remain in place until the court reverses it, he said. Story continues Rosenberg declined to comment on whether the two sides are in settlement talks, but said that his company is open to negotiation. Qualcomm rose 1.2 percent to $57.66 at 12:30 p.m. in New York trading. The dispute with the iPhone maker has halted the flow of billions of dollars in licensing payments - its chief source of profit - and hurt its stock price, which was down 11 percent this year before Tuesday. Apple shares gained 1.5 percent to $166.46. (Updates with executive comment in the third paragraph.) --With assistance from Candy Cheng. To contact the reporters on this story: Emily Chang in San Francisco at echang68@bloomberg.net;Ian King in San Francisco at ianking@bloomberg.net To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jillian Ward at jward56@bloomberg.net, Andrew Pollack, Dan Reichl For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com 2018 Bloomberg L.P. (Bloomberg) -- Samsung Electronics Co. is making a new push in the market for wireless network infrastructure. This time, the South Korean electronics giants timing may be just right. Mounting concerns in Europe and elsewhere about letting Chinas ZTE Corp. and Huawei Technologies Co. provide vital components for fifth-generation cellular networks have coincided with Samsungs ambition to capture 20 percent of the global market by 2020. In the U.S., where Chinese vendors are already banned, Samsung has won deals for 5G gear from three of four major carriers. There are certainly concerns that are spreading beyond the U.S. markets into areas where those vendors may have greater share or more customer wins with large operators, Alok Shah, a vice president of networks strategy at Samsung, said of the companys Chinese rivals in a phone interview. 5G is one of several emerging technologies that the conglomerate singled out in August as a target for 25 trillion won ($22 billion) in investments. It represents a new avenue to growth as Samsungs smartphone sales continue to sag, the lucrative semiconductor business shows signs of a downturn and Chinese competition in the display market stiffens. Chips, Smartphones The Korean company, which leads the world in memory chips as well as smartphones, believes a key selling point is a more integrated and tightly policed production chain, which both lessens its reliance on external suppliers and enhances the overall security of its offering. Like Huawei, Samsung is vying for a seat at the table as 5G rolls out across the world, a technology that will shape the mobile internet and power up a plethora of gadgets from home appliances to cars. After a decade of consolidation reduced the number of major wireless equipment vendors to a handful, carriers in countries that shut the door on Chinese providers could be facing a similar situation as in the U.S., with only two large suppliers -- Swedens Ericsson AB and Finlands Nokia Oyj -- and one challenger -- Samsung -- left to turn to. Story continues There really are very few options when it comes to large scale radio-access network vendors in the U.S. market, so certainly the operators are looking for options, Shah said. Theyre looking for competitiveness and companies that are bringing innovation to them. Samsungs immediate goal is to secure initial deals in countries like the U.S., Japan, and South Korea where 5G service is imminent, according to an outline of its strategy released in June. The company boasts that it leads in Europe for the most patents registered with the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, expressing confidence in being a major part of the global 5G spread. Samsung also has a strong position in technology that several U.S. operators are using to bring wireless broadband connections to remote areas using 5G and sees potential for those products in western Europe too, Shah said. Its not the first time Samsung has unveiled ambitions to grab a significant slab of the mobile network business. An earlier push to challenge Ericsson and Nokia stalled after the South Korean company backed CDMA and WiMax wireless technologies that didnt catch on globally. Bengt Nordstrom, head of telecom consultancy Northstream, believes Samsung will struggle to gain the global position needed to support the hefty costs to research and develop the tech that drives 5G networks -- despite its technological prowess and financial firepower. Nordstrom argues that Samsung is chasing a mature market with little growth, where global scale and presence is the only way to reap acceptable returns. Even in a high tech industry that promises all kinds of automation and artificial intelligence, human beings are still key. 100,000 Employees The reason why Ericsson and Nokia each have about 100,000 employees, and Huawei even more, is that thats what it takes to be present in every market, Nordstrom said. To scale up from Samsungs presence in only a few countries, you need to hire tens of thousands of people. I dont think thats doable. Shah is less concerned, saying that Samsungs networks business is gearing up aggressively and rapidly hiring competent staff, including from competitors. Having been tapped to supply 5G gear for AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and Sprint Corp., the executive says that ramping up as markets grow and opportunities arise is a familiar exercise for Samsungs Electronics, whose 100,000 employees work on everything from chip manufacturing to designing smartphones. Next year is really about execution for us, Shah said. We have to prove that our customers made the right decision in making commitments to us. Well see how it all plays out but we do feel that a number of trends are lining up in our favor right now. To contact the reporters on this story: Niclas Rolander in Stockholm at nrolander@bloomberg.net;Sam Kim in Seoul at skim609@bloomberg.net To contact the editors responsible for this story: Rebecca Penty at rpenty@bloomberg.net, ;Robert Fenner at rfenner@bloomberg.net, Kim Robert McLaughlin, Edwin Chan For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com 2018 Bloomberg L.P. Despite falling oil prices, Saudi Arabia will continue paying its citizens cost-of-living allowances, the country's King Salman announced during the unveiling of its 2019 budget on Tuesday. The budget will boost spending to stimulate growth even as Saudi Arabia endeavors to close its deficit. State spending will increase by more than 7 percent next year to 1.106 trillion riyals ($295 billion) from 1.030 trillion riyals, in line with a September pre-budget statement, according to the country's finance ministry. Despite falling oil prices, Saudi Arabia will continue paying its citizens cost-of-living allowances, the country's King Salman announced during the unveiling of its 2019 budget on Tuesday. The budget will boost spending even as Saudi Arabia endeavors to close its budget deficit, indicating Riyadh's priority to spur growth in an economy hurt by lower oil prices. State spending will increase by more than 7 percent next year to 1.106 trillion riyals ($295 billion) from 1.030 trillion riyals, in line with a September pre-budget statement, according to the country's finance ministry. Analysts believe the continued cost-of-living allowances, first established in January 2018 and estimated by officials to cost more than $13 billion, are intended to stimulate sluggish growth and shore up support for the royal family and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman after a controversy-ridden few months. The royal allowances of 1,000 riyals a month ($266) are paid to civil servants and military personnel, and other allowances will continue for pensioners and those living on social security. Riyadh will also increase student benefits by 10 percent for the next fiscal year, the king announced. The International Monetary Fund previously forecast the country's budget deficit to shrink to less than 2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) next year in the event that the allowances were scrapped. The budget deficit for 2019 will now be 4.2 percent of GDP, according to the government's statement Tuesday. Story continues Headwinds for Saudi businesses Saudi Arabia's economy shrank for the first time in nearly a decade last year as headwinds batter its private sector. Businesses have struggled to deal with higher electricity and fuel prices and a 5 percent value-added tax (VAT) introduced at the start of the year. Unemployment, hovering just over 12 percent as of last summer, is at its highest level in a decade. And new quotas and fees on foreign workers have triggered an exodus of more than 900,000 expatriates from the country in the last two years. This caused the labor market to contract, leaving gaps that the local population, lacking vital skills and training, cannot yet fill, analysts and executives say. Saudi officials have said they are now reconsidering the fees on foreign labor, which charge private businesses between $80 and $107 monthly for each foreign worker they hire. A pre-budget statement in September committed to both increasing domestic energy prices and boosting spending by more than 7 percent in 2019 to help stem unemployment and support growth. But that was during a time of bullish forecasts for oil prices, which have now fallen 30 percent in the last three months. And despite an OPEC production cut decision of 1.2 million barrels by January, prices are set to remain under pressure, thanks to slowing global demand and booming shale production in the U.S. As long as oil prices remain at their current lows, stimulating growth will be the immediate priority, said Jean-Paul Pigat, Dubai-based head of research at consultancy Lighthouse Research and a former economist at Emirates NBD. "Weak growth and high unemployment are the priorities today," Pigat told CNBC. "Sure it will increase the budget deficit, but that is a concern that can be addressed many years from now." More From CNBC SINGAPORE, Dec 19 (Reuters) - Singapore's central bank on Wednesday said it had issued a lifetime prohibition order against former Goldman Sachs' banker Tim Leissner after he admitted to charges related to an investigation into scandal-plagued Malaysian state fund 1MDB. The ban is an upgrade of the Monetary Authority of Singapore's 10-year prohibition order against Leissner issued last year. The order, among other things, prevents him from performing any regulated activity under the Securities and Futures Act (SFA). Goldman Sachs has been under scrutiny for its role in helping raise funds through bond offerings for 1Malaysia Development Bhd, which is the subject of investigations in at least six countries. "After careful consideration of Mr Leissner's admission to participation in the conspiracy, as well as US DOJ's criminal actions against him, MAS has decided to vary the PO against him," the MAS said in a statement. Goldman Sachs has consistently denied wrongdoing. (Reporting by Aradhana Aravindan Editing by John Geddie) Japan's SoftBank Corp began trading Wednesday in Tokyo in Japan's biggest-ever IPO and one of the largest the world has seen. Shares open down 6.40 percent at 1,404.00 yen on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, but extended declines to close 14.53 percent lower. The company is the telecoms unit of billionaire CEO Masayoshi Son's SoftBank Group. Son is one of the world's wealthiest people and a major player in technology with his $100 billion Vision Fund. Shares of SoftBank Corp Japan's biggest-ever IPO and one of the world's largest fell more than 14 percent on its market debut Wednesday, after opening 6.40 percent lower. The company is the mobile unit of billionaire Masayoshi Son's SoftBank Group 9984.T-JP holding company, which includes U.S. telecoms company Sprint S . The group also holds significant stakes in Yahoo Japan and Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group BABA . SoftBank Corp raised 2.65 trillion yen ($23.5 billion) after pricing the offering at 1,500 yen a share and increased the amount of stock sold by 160 million shares in a response to strong demand, Reuters reported. That makes it Japan's biggest IPO and just below Alibaba's record $25 billion listing on Wall Street in 2014, according to Reuters. SoftBank shares closed at 1,282.00 yen, down 14.53 percent. Shares in SoftBank Group, meanwhile, finished the day down 0.91 percent at 8,184.00 SoftBank is Japan's third-largest mobile phone company after leaders NTT Docomo and KDDI, but concerns are rising over saturation in the market as online retailer Rakuten 4755.T-JP has also obtained a mobile license and is set to begin offering services in October of next year. Japan's mobile telecoms market is the world's third largest and the government has been pressuring companies to lower prices for their services. In addition to concerns about competition in the Japanese market, SoftBank has faced headwinds in the run-up to the IPO on other worries, such as the group's 18 trillion yen ($160 billion) in debt as of the end of September and a nationwide network service outage of more than four hours on Dec. 6 for which the company publicly apologized . Story continues "There's a lot of company-specific issues unique to SoftBank in this listing," Romaine Jackson, capital markets specialist at Dealogic, said on CNBC's "Street Signs" in explaining the opening day drop. "I do think it's bucking the trend because if you look at returns to investors in the Japanese IPO space this year it's actually been quite positive," Jackson said, adding that the overall economic and political environment in Japan has also been supportive. Another issue is SoftBank's exposre to hardware supplied by Chinese tech giant Huawei, which is under pressure from the United States and other countries suspicious that its telecommunications equipment represents a potential security threat , something that Huawei denies. 'More expensive' SoftBank will be replacing its Huawei hardware in its 4G network infrastructure over the next few years and using equipment from Ericsson and Nokia instead, according to Japan's Nikkei Asian Review . It is also expected to place orders with the two European companies for its 5G networks, the Nikkei reported. Sprint's prospective $26 billion merger with Deutsche Telekom-owned T-Mobile U.S., meanwhile, was approved by the U.S. government on Monday after SoftBank and the German company said they would stop using Huawei's equipment, Reuters reported. Mark Einstein, chief analyst for telecommunications and digital services at ITR Corporation in Tokyo, said he was not surprised by SoftBank's share price drop given the challenges faced by both the company and the Japanese telecommunications market more broadly. He listed those as government pressure to cut costs, expenses related to next year's 5G roll out in the country, Rakuten's entry to the market and higher capital expenditures resulting from Chinese equipment being shut out. "So I think for SoftBank's bottom line it means that they're going to be forced to use European and American equipment, which is going to be more expensive," he said on CNBC's "Capital Connection." The listing on the Tokyo Stock Exchange also comes as Son, one of the tech world's most powerful people , makes waves with his $100 billion Vision Fund , and marks the transformation of the group from a mobile carrier to a global investment fund. "He's trying to court a new type of investor that actually shares his vision in the outlook for (Internet of Things technology), for robotics and most importantly artificial intelligence," Chris Lane, senior researcher at Sanford C. Bermstein, said Wednesday on CNBC's "Squawk Box" before trading began. "So this is part of that transformation," Lane said. "I think it's a fairly major step in that transformation." The fund was established in October 2016 and is aimed at boosting promising businesses in the technology sector. "IPO proceeds will supplement the holding company's liquidity, although a large part of proceeds to SoftBank may eventually be used to fund its remaining capital commitments to the SoftBank Vision Fund (SVF), which continues to invest in internet and emerging technology businesses," Moody's Investors Service said in a report last month. The fund, which describes itself as "designed to be a catalyst for technology progress," has invested in in companies such as Nauto and Brain Corp, which is building self-driving "brains" for robots, and ride-hailing giant Uber. Aside from SoftBank Group, other major investors in the fund include Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund and the United Arab Emirates' Mubadala Investment Company. The Saudi contribution has turned controversial after the international outcry over the disappearance and death of Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey in October amid accusations of official Saudi involvement. The kingdom, for its part, has maintained that powerful Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman did not order Khashoggi's execution. Son said last month that he had met with the crown price to raise concerns about the incident. Son declined to attend a major business conference in Saudi Arabia in October, which was also boycotted by numerous global investment leaders, but visited the kingdom to meet officials and express concerns about the death. CNBC's Akiko Fujita contributed to this report. More From CNBC Anti-Brexit demonstrators wave EU flags opposite the Houses of Parliament, in London FILE PHOTO - Anti-Brexit demonstrators wave EU flags opposite the Houses of Parliament, in London, Britain, June 19, 2018. REUTERS/Henry Nicholls LONDON (Reuters) - Britain will leave the European Union at 2300 GMT on March 29, 2019. Wednesday marks 100 days to departure day. Below is a timeline: WAS BRITAIN A FOUNDER MEMBER OF THE BLOC? No. Britain declined to join the European Union's forerunner, the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), when it was founded in 1952. Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee told parliament in 1950 his party was "not prepared to accept the principle that the most vital economic forces of this country should be handed over to an authority that is utterly undemocratic and is responsible to nobody." There was also concern it might make close ties with the Commonwealth and the United States more difficult. Britain also stayed out of the European Economic Community when it was formed from the ECSC in 1957. Conservative Prime Minister Harold MacMillan reversed this position in 1961 and sought membership of the EEC. With Europe divided in the Cold War, he said the promotion of European unity and stability through the bloc was "so essential a factor in the struggle for freedom and progress throughout the world." But France led resistance to Britain's membership in the 1960s, with Charles De Gaulle blocking Britain's accession in 1961 and 1967, accusing the British of "deep-seated hostility" to the European project. WHEN DID BRITAIN FINALLY JOIN? Britain joined the EEC in 1973 after France dropped its objection's following De Gaulle's resignation in 1969. As he signed the treaty taking Britain into the common market, Conservative Prime Minister Ted Heath said "imagination will be required" to develop its institutions while respecting the individuality of states. 1975 - BRITAIN'S FIRST EUROPEAN REFERENDUM In 1975, new Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson, faced with splits among his ministers on Europe, decided to hold an "in-out" referendum on membership. He backed staying in after saying a renegotiation on terms of membership had "substantially though not completely" achieved his objectives. Story continues Britons voted 67 percent to 33 percent to stay in the European Union in 1975. WAS THE QUESTION OF EUROPE SETTLED AFTER THE 1975 VOTE? No. Although new Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher backed the campaign to stay in the bloc in 1975, her premiership saw her party become increasingly divided by the issue and her own relationship with EU leaders was tense at times. She attacked the idea of a single currency and too much power being centralised in EU institutions, telling the then-Commission President Jacques Delors "no, no, no" over his plans for more European integration in 1990. However, days later she was challenged for the leadership of the party by pro-European Michael Heseltine, and was forced from office when she failed to beat him outright in November 1990. Her successor, John Major, was forced to pull sterling out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) on so called Black Wednesday, Sept. 16, 1992. The ERM had been intended to reduce exchange rate fluctuations ahead of monetary union. Major was also beset by divisions over Europe, describing three eurosceptic cabinet ministers as "bastards" in 1993 after narrowly surviving a confidence vote over the EU Maastricht Treaty. After Labour's Tony Blair won the 1997 election, his finance minister, Gordon Brown, effectively ruled out euro entry by setting out five economic tests that had been worked out with his top aide, Ed Balls, in a New York taxi. CAMERON'S GAMBLE BACKFIRES The tenure of the next Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron, was also, ultimately, defined by Europe. The Conservatives returned to office in 2010 after 13 years of Labour government. In a bid to shore up support for the Conservatives in the face of a split party and the small but staunchly eurosceptic UK Independence Party (UKIP), Cameron promised an "in-out" referendum on a renegotiated deal on membership in the party's 2015 election manifesto. Cameron said he was satisfied that negotiations with the EU gave Britain enough for him to back a "remain" vote. But though Britain's biggest parties backed the campaign to stay in, the people voted to leave by 52 to 48 percent on June 23, 2016. Cameron resigned the morning after the vote and was replaced by Theresa May. MAY DAYS May triggered Article 50, the formal EU divorce notice, in March 2017, setting the exit date of March 29th, 2019 for Britain to leave - with or without a deal. In a bid to gain backing for her Brexit plan, she called a snap election for June 2017. The gamble backfired. She lost her parliamentary majority and formed a minority government, supported by the eurosceptic Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). On Nov. 13, she reached agreement on the terms of Britain's departure from the bloc with EU leaders. But her plan to accept EU customs rules on goods while ending free movement of people has drawn criticism from both pro-EU and eurosceptic lawmakers from her own party, the DUP, and the opposition. Last week May pulled a vote on her deal from parliament, prompting a vote of no confidence in her leadership of the Conservative party. She survived that, but with the 100 day countdown to Brexit about to begin, Britain still doesn't know on what terms it will leave the bloc, whether May will be in office to see it through or whether it will be forced to delay or revoke the Article 50 process. (Reporting by Alistair Smout; Editing by Guy Faulconbridge and Janet Lawrence) By Devika Krishna Kumar NEW YORK (Reuters) - Oil prices fell more than 2 percent on Monday, with U.S. crude tumbling below $50 a barrel, on signs of oversupply in the United States and as investor concern over global economic growth and fuel demand grows. Brent crude oil fell 67 cents, or 1.11 percent, to settle at $59.61 a barrel after dropping to a session low of $58.83 a barrel. U.S. crude dropped $1.32, or 2.58 percent, to end the session at $49.88 a barrel and tumbled to a low of $49.09 a barrel. Benchmark U.S. crude futures settled below $50 for the first time since October 2017. U.S. crude futures fell after inventories at the storage hub of Cushing, Oklahoma, rose by more than 1 million barrels from Dec. 11 to 14, traders said, citing data from market intelligence firm Genscape. Traders and market participants closely watch supplies at the hub because it is the delivery point for the futures contract and underpins nearly all other regional crude grades. "The Cushing number came in higher than anticipated. ... It's definitely pointing to the concern that there's more supply and demand is weakening," said Phil Flynn, analyst at Price Futures Group in Chicago. "A lot of the shale producers can't make money where prices are right now, let alone below $50, so we're going to see a cutback in some of the production estimates, but it takes time for that to happen .... right now we're definitely following the continued weakness in momentum." Increasing concerns about weakening growth in major markets such as China and Europe have also dampened the mood in oil and other asset classes. Broad stock market declines in Europe and the United States on Monday dragged equity markets lower around the world, adding to a sell-off that has sent global shares near 17-month lows. Both U.S. crude and Brent crude benchmarks fell more than 30 percent from early October through the end of November as the supply glut inflated global inventories. But they have stabilized over the last three weeks, trading within fairly narrow ranges as oil producers promised to cut production. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and its allies have agreed to reduce output by 1.2 million barrels per day (bpd) from January, in a move to be reviewed at a meeting in April. United Arab Emirates energy minister Suhail al-Mazrouei told reporters in Dubai on Monday that the oil market was correcting and he expected everyone to stick to the plan. Some investors doubt the planned cuts would be enough to rebalance markets, however. U.S. shale output is growing steadily, taking market share from the big Middle East oil producers in OPEC and making it harder for them to balance their budgets. Oil production from seven major U.S. shale basins is expected to surpass 8 million barrels per day (bpd) by the end of the year, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said in a monthly report on Monday. As inventories at Cushing rise, front-month U.S. crude futures traded as much as 33 cents below the second month , the widest level since October 2017. Russian oil output has been at a record high of 11.42 million barrels per day (bpd) in December so far, an industry source familiar with the data told Reuters. Chinese oil refinery throughput in November fell from October, suggesting an easing in oil demand, while the country's industrial output rose the least in nearly three years as the economy continued to lose momentum. (Reporting by Devika Krishna Kumar in New York, Christopher Johnson in London and Koustav Samanta in Singapore; Editing by Richard Chang and Sonya Hepinstall) WASHINGTON, Dec 18 (Reuters) - The United States and China are planning to hold meetings in January to "document an agreement" on trade, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told Bloomberg in an interview on Tuesday. Mnuchin was quoted as saying the two sides had held several phone conversations in recent weeks, and were planning further formal talks. Trump administration officials had not disclosed plans for face-to-face meetings since a Dec. 1 trade truce reached between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping led to a delay in planned U.S. tariff increase until March 2. "Were in the process of confirming the logistics of several meetings and were determined to make sure that we use the time wisely, to try to resolve this," Mnuchin told Bloomberg. Both sides are now focused on trying "to document an agreement by the deadline. We expect there will be meetings in January, Mnuchin added. A person familiar with the talks had told Reuters over the weekend that formal U.S.-China meetings were likely early in January. Mnuchin said neither he nor Trump were aware of the arrest of a senior Huawei Technologies executive when they met with Xi in Buenos Aires, and said China understands that the trade talks and Huawei issues "are separate tracks," Mnuchin said. The Treasury chief said reducing the U.S. trade deficit with China was still a major priority for Trump but added that this would take time and that the United States was also focused on securing structural changes in China's economy to help rebalance trade. Mnuchin also told Bloomberg that he plans to remain Treasury secretary through the 2020 presidential election and perhaps longer if asked. The Wall Street Journal reported in November that Mnuchin might become a casualty of Trump's cabinet shake-ups. "I foresee myself here at least through the first term and if the president wants me here for a second term when hes re-elected, I would seriously entertain that," Mnuchin said. (Reporting by David Lawder Editing by Phil Berlowitz) Craig Wiggins, one-third of an independent analysis team called TheCannalysts, is dubbing 2019 the year of the vape. (The Canadian Press) With a breathtaking year for cannabis nearly in the rearview mirror, investors are turning their attention to how the notoriously raucous sector will behave in 2019. More reliable sales and revenue figures, new rules allowing edible and beverage sales in Canada, and growing support for legal adult-use markets in the United States are among the top trends to watch, according to experts who spoke to Yahoo Finance Canada. Since the earliest public offerings, pot stocks at large have been cast as over-hyped and overvalued, not unlike the infamous dotcom bubble that saw todays blue chip technology titans separated from the likes of Pets.com. Greg Taylor, manager of the Purpose Marijuana Opportunities Fund, sees clearer distinctions between winners and losers snapping into focus in 2019. I think the next six months or longer are going to be a little dodgy. For every one winner, you might have two losers. You are going to see some companies that just cant deliver. Theyre just going to fail, he told Yahoo Finance Canada. At the same time, the space is going to go from companies that have massive market caps with no sales, to some companies with massive sales and EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization) numbers. Bruce Linton of Canopy Growth Corp. (WEED.TO), a company with a market capitalization of about $14 billion that sold 2,197 kilograms and kilogram equivalents in its second quarter, warns his newer, smaller competition will face increasingly long odds in 2019. Everybody whos just raising money right now, and beginning their build out so they can sell their first cannabis in 2019, is on a very challenging path, Canopys founder and co-chief executive officer told Yahoo Finance Canada. Asked if a Canadian cannabis company launched in 2019 could replicate Canopys trajectory, he said, Regrettably, that opportunity is gone for Canada. Linton expects the most promising opportunities in the Canadian market will be around leveraging research from the countrys vast federally-controlled medical program, and development of advanced intellectual property. The U.S. market You just cant ignore it Story continues Stateside, efforts to end national cannabis prohibition are picking up steam, and the 2018 midterm elections saw more states pass medical and recreational legislation. This is the second year in a row where more than 50 per cent of Republicans now support adult-use legalization, with continued support for medical, Cowen analyst Vivien Azer told Yahoo Finance Canada, referring to a Gallup poll released in late October. Taylor expects a more liberal U.S. regulatory climate will open the door to mutual funds, pension funds and other big institutional investors, which will in turn smooth out some of the stock volatility. Given the potential size of a fully-legalized U.S. market, he also anticipates big U.S.-listed producers will be anxious to gain a first-mover advantage south of the border next year. Cannabis companies on U.S. exchanges are banned from having American operations because the drug remains illegal at the federal level in that country. You have to wonder when companies are going to say, Thats all well and good, but the U.S. market is going to be the biggest in the world by far in a few years. You just cant ignore it, he said. Im wondering when one of these companies is going to say, At risk of losing our U.S. listing, or some banking relationships, we are going to run a big U.S. company and get in position for when that market opens up. The year of the vape One of the biggest events on the horizon in 2019 is the release of Ottawas regulations for selling edibles, beverages, and other alternative forms of cannabis. The rules are expected to be unveiled sometime before Oct. 17, 2019. Azer said the absence of edibles and other novel form factors played into her conservative view of the Canadian recreational market post-legalization. She points to the popularity of such products in well-developed markets like California, where items like vape pens and cannabis-infused sweets account for up to 30 per cent of sales. Craig Wiggins, one-third of an independent analysis team called TheCannalysts, is dubbing 2019 the year of the vape. Grinding it up. Getting out a cone and stuffing it, or rolling it, is a ritual. But many people would prefer not to have crumbs of weed all over their coffee tables. They will go for the vape pen. It fits in your purse. It can slide into your pocket. Its quick. Its easy. It heats up immediately, he told Yahoo Finance Canada. Sucking combustion into your lungs isnt a good thing. Vape pens are going to be everywhere. Canopy inked a $15 billion deal with beer and wine giant Constellation Brands Inc.s (STZ) in August. Linton expects thirsty cannabis consumers will drive drink-based domination of recreational sales once a tasty beverage with a reliable buzz onset similar to booze gets developed. If we were able to figure out why we invented pottery, its probably because they need somewhere to store wine, he said. Drinks are the most social format. Grams for grandma? Perhaps the most profound change pertains to how a formally illicit substance, and those who consume it, are judged by society. For decades, cannabis has been tied to counterculture and crime. The stoner, hippie, pot head, and burnout stereotypes are still alive and well, even as pot continues to gain legal acceptance and attract billions of dollars from legitimate investors. Linton sees beverages, vapor devices and other non-smoking forms changing the way people think about cannabis in 2019. The joint, he said, will always elicit images of characters like Cheech and Chong. He expects the number of smokers to shrink to as little as 10 per cent of the market in the next year or two. Wiggins sees attitudes beginning to change as well, at least in Canada. When I say something like, Id rather have my three 20-year-old children responsibly using cannabis versus responsibly using alcohol, you dont get the looks in Canada like you do in the states, he said. In the states, you look like you have three heads. As families gather for the holidays, he expects the cannabis crowd will get a slightly warmer-than-usual reception thanks to the developments of the past year. There are going to be discussions about cannabis happening over turkey dinners, Wiggins said. I can talk to my 96-year-old grandmother about cannabis. Im trying to get her to take some for her migraines. Download the Yahoo Finance app, available for Apple and Android. President Trump and the White House are claiming that the newly renegotiated North American trade deal means that Mexico is going to pay for the southern border wall Trump promised on the campaign trail. The argument is part of the White House's position on border security as Trump urges Congress to pony up $5 billion for the wall while lawmakers seek a deal to avoid a shutdown. Yet the administration has struggled to explain how the pact ensures that Mexico will actually foot the bill for the barrier. President Donald Trump and the White House are claiming that the newly renegotiated North American trade deal will mean that Mexico is going to pay for the southern border wall promised by Trump on the campaign trail. The argument is part of the White House's position on border security as Trump urges Congress to pony up $5 billion for the wall while lawmakers seek a spending deal to avoid a shutdown on Saturday. Yet the administration has struggled to explain how the pact an updated version of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which was signed 25 years ago ensures that Mexico will actually foot the bill for the barrier. "The president has been clear, that the USMCA deal would provide additional revenue through the deal that would show that Mexico is paying for the wall," press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters Tuesday, referring to the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. Trump tweeted last week that the money would come from savings, not necessarily revenue: "Our new deal with Mexico (and Canada), the USMCA, is so much better than the old, very costly & anti-USA NAFTA deal, that just by the money we save, MEXICO IS PAYING FOR THE WALL!" TRUMP TWEET Asked directly at a recent forum on trade in what sense Mexico could pay for the wall, one of Trump's key economic advisors deflected. "I'm not an immigration expert, so I'm not going to weigh in on that issue," said Clete Willems, deputy director of the president's National Economic Council and a former chief counsel at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. Story continues Sanders offered a vague response when reporters pressed her for an explanation Tuesday. "He's saying revenue provided and money that would be saved through the USMCA deal, we could pay for the wall four times over and by doing that new trade deal, we have the opportunity to pay for the wall," she said Experts question whether the renegotiated agreement would generate much new revenue, as USMCA is very similar to NAFTA. "I expect essentially zero change in revenue collected from tariffs arising through the USMCA. Under both the existing NAFTA and President Trump's proposed new deal, the United States charges zero tariffs on trade with Canada and Mexico," said Chad Bown, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Mexico, for its part, has been adamant all along that it will not pay for a wall. "The issue of the 'wall' has not been part of any conversation with President Trump or his government, tweeted Mexico's foreign minister, Marcelo Ebrard. "Now our talks are about investment and development and we hope so continue." More From CNBC Will the Denver Broncos, currently 6-5 after Sunday's win over the Chargers, qualify for the playoffs? You voted: Of all the things that millennials have killed bar soap, Breastaurants, fabric softener, doorbells their newest victim is a perplexingly unsolved murder. A Wall Street Journal article about the tuna industry alleges that millennials are killing it not because they dont like eating fish, but because they dont own can openers. In a country focused on convenience, canned tuna isnt cutting it with consumers. Many cant be bothered to open and drain the cans, or fetch utensils and dishes to eat the tuna, Jesse Newman and Annie Gasparro wrote. A lot of millennials dont even own can openers, Andy Mecs, vice president of marketing and innovation for Pittsburgh-based StarKist, a subsidiary of South Koreas Dongwon Group, told the Journal. The story acknowledged that sales of fresh and frozen tuna were on the rise: Just 32 percent of consumers aged 18 to 34 recently bought canned fish or shellfish, compared with 45 percent of those 55 years old and older, according to market-research firm Mintel. This raised a couple of questions for millennials. If theyre too lazy to use can openers, why are sales of fresh fish which is much more labor-intensive to prepare on the rise in that age group? Does the can-free generation also eschew garbanzo beans and San Marzano tomatoes? Maybe its not about cans at all? Ah yes, Millennials are abandoning canned tuna because were lazy and not because uh, its gross as hell, Jamelle Bouie, Slates chief political correspondent tweeted. And BuzzFeeds Tom Gara tweeted: Theres only one way to get millennials eating tuna again: it needs to be in a bright white unmarked can with a single blue stripe running across the middle, sold only via online subscription for $5 a month. Its true that a can opener is not as much of a kitchen necessity as it used to be. Soups and other canned goods often have a pull tab, so you can open them with your hands. And some foods that were often canned now come in other packaging tubes of tomato paste and Tetra Paks of condensed milk. A new eco-friendly alternative, the cardboard Cartocan, has an easy-to-open lid. Studies have shown that millennials are less likely to cook at home, and decluttering and living a minimalist lifestyle have been major trends among young people in recent years. But that doesnt explain why millennials arent eating too much tuna. StarKist tuna has come in a pouch hailed as the biggest wave of innovation in tuna since StarKist pioneered canned tuna in the 1920s since 2000, when many millennials were barely in middle school. Consumers dont even have to drain the pouch, which contains virtually no liquid. Its also easy to find pull-tab tuna cans from large-scale brands such as Chicken of the Sea and specialty producers such as Genova. And has can opener ownership actually gone down? According to market researchers at the NPD Group, Spice products, mixing/prep bowls and nonelectric can openers were the kitchen gadgets that contributed the most dollar sales gains during the 12 months ending September 2015. Even though those stats are a few years old and not segmented by age, they show that the can opener is not the dusty historical relic people presume. Heres an alternate theory: Maybe millennials arent eating as much tuna because they grew up learning about how dolphins the magical creatures of their Lisa Frank Trapper Keepers were often killed when they became trapped in tuna nets. Or maybe its because theyre a health-conscious generation that worries about mercury poisoning. Or maybe its because its a generation that cares about the environment and struggles with the level of tuna overfishing. (OK, its still the generation that made Ahi poke bowls mega-popular, so maybe not that one.) Perhaps its just the unglamorous packaging and stodgy connotations of a can. After all, several food trend prognosticators including The Washington Post, twice have written about how chefs and tastemakers have sparked an interest in high-quality imported preserved seafood. But when they talk about it, they dont call those sardines canned. Theyre tinned. Outgoing Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams is considering running next spring for an at-large seat on the Colorado Springs City Council. Williams, a Republican who was defeated in November and will be leaving office next month, served one term as El Paso County clerk and recorder and two terms as a county commissioner before being elected secretary of state in 2014. He lost his re-election bid Nov. 6 to Democrat Jena Griswold. Now, Williams said, hes hunting for a job and possibly one that could mesh with a council position. Ive got to find out first if theyd be OK with five days a month out of the office, he said. Thats about how often the council meets: two work sessions, two regular meetings and a meeting as the Colorado Springs Utilities Board of Directors. All three at-large seats, plus Mayor John Suthers seat, are up for grabs in the municipal election April 2. Williams, his wife and two sons remained in Colorado Springs after he was elected to the state position. Some candidates including two at-large incumbents already have announced their intent to run, but Williams said he still has time to decide. He said his county and state experience give him high name recognition, an advantage over others. Council members are paid $6,250 a year. He said when he knocked on doors during his first commissioner campaign, people overwhelmingly expressed a desire for the county and city to work better together. If he runs and is elected, Williams would be in a unique position to bolster that partnership because his wife, Holly Williams, was elected to the county commission the same day Williams lost to Griswold. During their 32 years together, Williams said, they have been mostly aligned politically, but, when they disagree, neither is bashful about voicing their opinin. I literally sued my own wife as a county commissioner, Williams said with a laugh. The county filed that lawsuit over an eminent-domain issue with then-Gov. Bill Owens. Holly Williams, then the countys public trustee, was named in the suit. Williams said he doesnt foresee any potential conflicts of interest if he were elected to the council. He would represent all of Colorado Springs, and shell represent a northern swath of the county that includes Black Forest and part of Monument. If an issue came up that involved his wife, he said, he would recuse himself. At-large Councilmen Tom Strand and Bill Murray plan to run for re-election. Also running will be former at-large Councilman Val Snider, who served from 2011-15, and Tony Gioia, an Army veteran and former county planning commissioner. Terry Martinez, former Will Rogers Elementary School principle, said he is getting a team together for a possible bid. At-large Councilman Merv Bennett is completing his second term, so he cant seek re-election because of term limits. Candidates cant officially file until early January. Each must submit valid signatures of at least 100 Colorado Springs voters. Dublin, Dec. 17, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "Malaysian Biodiesel Mandate" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. This study offers a detailed overview of the biodiesel mandate in Malaysia and the steps taken by the Malaysian government to protect the Malaysian palm oil industry. Palm oil is a key ingredient in the biodiesel produced in Malaysia. Biodiesel is the main kind of biofuel used in the country. This research service gives an understanding of the factors leading to the B10 mandate in Malaysia. It analyses the strategically important factors, market trends, regulatory trends, and the impact of the same on the automotive sector. Factors such as strong government support, excellent R&D facilities, a large number of plantation estates, low crude palm oil market price and a global commitment to use renewable and sustainable sources of energy are the key market drivers for the growth of the biofuel market. However, for sustained growth, the industry must overcome certain challenges and restraints such as the EU Renewable Energy Directive (RED) that restricts the import of palm oil from Malaysia from 2021, biodiesel chemical incompatibility with diesel engine, labor shortage at plantation estates, and inconsistencies in weather. In 2006 the Malaysian government launched the National Biofuel Policy (NBP) as an initiative to further spur the biofuel market. Research Scope This study includes an executive summary, introduction, strategically important factors, national biofuel policy, market overview, regulatory and legislative trends, impacts on the automotive sectors, industry scenario, timeline, current status and next steps, challenges, and the drivers and restraints that affect the biofuel market. The base year for the study is 2017, with the forecast period being 2018 to 2020. Key Features To offer an elaborate and detailed overview of the biofuel mandate in Malaysia. To build a comprehensive picture of the biodiesel mandate in Malaysia, including how it was proposed, why it was proposed, and what is the ultimate objective of the policy. To highlight the main issues at hand including what is the industry feedback on the B10 mandate and how the government is handling the issue. Key Issues Addressed What is the Malaysia Government stance in introducing alternative fuel from renewable sources? What is the reaction from the industry with regard to the Malaysia Biofuel Mandate? What is the impact (negative and positive) and the implication of introducing Biofuel Mandate to the market? Who are the beneficiaries of this policy and vice versa? What is the latest status of the policy and what is the interim solution for this mandate? Topics Covered 1. Executive Summary Key Findings Reasons for Implementation of Biodiesel Mandate 2. Research Scope, Objectives, Background and Methodology Research Scope Research Aims and Objectives Key Questions this Study will Answer Research Background Research Methodology Key Participants Discussed in this Study 3. Introduction Key Definitions Usage-Buildings, Industrial, and Automotive Applications Global Biodiesel Mandates 4. National Biofuel Policy National Biofuel Policy - Objectives National Biofuel Policy - Strategic Thrusts National Biofuel Policy - Implementation Plan Summary of Biofuel Legal Activities in Malaysia Biodiesel Mandate on Automotive Industry Biodiesel Mandate - Stakeholders' Positions 5. Strategic Importance Crucial Need for the Implementation of the Biodiesel Mandate in Malaysia Strategic Importance - Cleaner Environment Strategic Importance - Economic Factors Strategic Importance - Market Demand Creation Strategic Importance - Enhancing Plant Capacity 6. Market Overview Palm Oil Plantation Area in Malaysia Malaysia Context - Biodiesel Production Malaysia Context - Biodiesel Export Trend Malaysia Context - Export Destinations Malaysia Context - Malaysia Biodiesel Refineries Malaysia Context - List of Biodiesel Companies ASEAN Context 7. Regulatory and Legislative Trends Regulatory Breakthrough Legislation Regulating the Malaysian Palm Oil Industry Legislative Process 8. Impact on the Automotive Sector Technical Impact - Engine Components Technical Impact - Fuel Injection Equipment (FIE) Tests Conducted by Government Agencies Results of Tests Conducted by Government Agencies and JAMA JAMA Position on B10 Biodiesel in Malaysia OEMs' Stance on B10 Mandate 9. Industry Scenario Key Participants and Stakeholders 10 Timeline, Current Status and Next Steps Chronology, Current Situation and Future Scenario 11. Drivers and Restraints Market Drivers Drivers Explained Market Restraints Restraints Explained 12. Growth Opportunities and Companies to Action Growth Opportunity - Opportunities for OEMs/Government Agencies Strategic Imperatives for Success and Growth 13. Key Conclusion and Future Outlook For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/b7twlh/the_malaysian?w=12 Research and Markets also offers Custom Research services providing focused, comprehensive and tailored research. New York, New York, Dec. 17, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Have you ever dreamed of visiting the wondrous pyramids of Egypt, the exquisite Old City of Jerusalem, or the legendary Treasury, carved entirely from a sandstone rock face in Petra, Jordan? On Beyond Cruises by Group IST's new small ship itinerary, Gods, Kings, and Pharaohs , you have the perfect opportunity to visit all three of these bucket list UNESCO World Heritage sites on one mega yacht cruise! In Israel, starting from January 19, 2019, Beyond Cruises' passengers will depart from Israel's Herzliya Marina, the first time ever a commercial vessel has been allowed to use this posh private marina for a port of call. Passengers will continue their Bucket List experience when they board this modern, elegant 50 passenger Mega Yacht, Harmony V, as they embark on this intimate journey through three countries, Israel, Egypt and Jordan, steeped in history, archaeology and the story of human civilization. Start checking off your bucket list in the ancient yet modern city of Jerusalem for a three-day pre-cruise excursion exploring the historic pilgrimage sites holy for Jews, Christians and Muslims alike. Visit the Old City, Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the Via Dolorosa, the Kotel (Western Wall) and its tunnels, the Tower of David, and wander through the old city market (Souq). In the evenings, allow time to dine at one of the trendy new restaurants in the new city market, Machane Yehuda, and then hit the hot new Jerusalem bar scene at night. Then on to Tel Aviv, the city that never sleeps, and the Herzliya Marina just north of the city. Set sail on the Mediterranean Sea and down through the historic Suez Canal to Egypt, site of enduring monuments, colorful pharaohs, and legendary gods. Visit Cairo, Egypts timeless capital, and take an excursion to discover the world-famous Pyramids of Giza and the awe-inspiring Egyptian Museum. Before departing Egypt, guests will take a two-day land excursion to Luxor, known as the greatest open-air museum in the world. Once the southern section of the ancient capital of Thebes, the Karnak and Luxor Temples, the Valley of the Kings and Queens, and the Temple of Hatshepsut are only a few of the breath-taking sites to visit in Luxor. The cruise finishes in Jordan, a country with spectacular beauty, glorious monuments, sun scorched dunes and man-made oases. Discover the marvels that await in the world-famous city of Petra and see the Ancient City, the Royal Tombs, and the fabled Treasury, built as a tomb for the Nabataean King Aretas IV. Travel from Petra to Amman and stop in city of Madaba, known for its Byzantine-era mosaics, including the oldest surviving map of the Holy Lands on the floor of St. George's Church. Your once in a lifetime bucket list experience culminates with a night in the Jordanian capital of Amman, itself home to historic ruins like the Citadel, the Roman Temple of Hercules, and the 8th-Century Umayyad Palace Complex. 8-Day/ 7-Night Gods, Kings, and Pharaohs Sailing Dates Aboard the 25 Cabin M/Y Harmony V- (from Herzliya/Tel Aviv, Israel to Aquaba, Jordan) January 19, 2019 February 2 & 16, 2019 March 2, 2019 This new itinerary will serve to compliment Beyond Cruises already enticing roster of iconic and exotic destinations including Cuba, Iceland, the Adriatic Sea, Greece, Dubai, Thailand, Vietnam, the Mekong River, the Rhone River, the Marne-Rhine Canal, Bali, Costa Rica and Panama, India, Spain & Portugal, the Seychelles and Kenya. For more information and reservations contact your local travel agent or call 1 800 833 2111 and refer to booking code: MELMED18 -Ends- About Beyond Cruises Beyond Cruises passion remains unchanged since its inception: an alchemy that blends enriching oneself educationally and exploring the true identity of a destination, while enjoying the comforts and unique benefits of a small ship-sailing the seas. About the M/Y Harmony V The 50 passenger Harmony V is a modern elegant yacht with a sleek high-tech look very similar to the private yachts found in the famous ports of the world. The ship features a spacious lounge with classy seating, and an American Bar which leads into a dining area decorated with warm colors. The 2,150 ft.2 sundeck offers a shaded outdoor area (also convertible into indoor dining area) for all day dining and a bar as well as sun chairs and loungers. The swimming platform on Harmony V stern also allows for easy access to the ship and for a wide range of sea related activities. Beyond Cruises New 2018/2019 Brochure- https://www.beyondcruises.com/images/Brochures/Beyond%20Cruises%20Brochure%20Web%209-27-18.pdf Follow Beyond Cruises on Social Media: @BeyondCruises @BeyondCruises @BeyondCruisesUS Beyond Cruises US Editorial Contact: The Bradford Group Bianca Pappas/ Daniel Kastanis Tel: (212) 447-0027 Fax: (212) 725 8253 E-mail: info@bradfordglobalmarketing.com Attachments CAMPBELL, CALIF. & WARSAW, POLAND, Dec. 18, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Today, Mojio the leading technology platform and SaaS provider for connected cars announced that it has partnered with T-Mobile Polska, to power Smart Car, the brands comprehensive connected car service. As part of the agreement, Mojio will deliver a suite of telco-grade connected car solutions including the companys leading cloud platform service and mobile apps for iOS and Android to T-Mobile Polska. The operator will offer its nearly 11 million subscribers an affordable upgrade, regardless of their cars make or model, through the combination of the Smart Car OBD-II device and the T-Mobile Tracker app for iOS and Android devices. This is Mojios fourth deployment within the Deutsche Telekom family in Europe, with T-Mobile Polska joining Telekom Deutschland, T-Mobile Austria and T-Mobile Czech Republic. On a global scale, Mojio has now deployed nine operator-branded IoT services, representing more than 800,000 connected cars in six countries across North America and Europe. Like Mojio, T-Mobile Poland is an avid supporter of innovation and understands that enabling the next generation of connected experiences not only means delivering great technology, but also leveraging strong partnerships to accelerate time to market, said Kenny Hawk, CEO at Mojio. Were honored to be expanding our relationship with Deutsche Telekom and look forward to supporting this first-of-its-kind connected car service to drivers in Poland. As the go-to connected car platform for mobile network operators, Mojios experienced team has developed scalable solutions that unlock immediate subscription revenue, facilitate valuable net-adds to the network and help reduce customer churn. As part of its value-added offerings, Mojio partners with operators to define, design and deploy go-to-market strategies that enhance all aspects of the customer journey, while also delivering specialized services across product management, marketing, merchandising, sales training and customer care. Smart Car is available as of today at all T-Mobile retail locations across Poland. More information can be found at http://www.t-mobile.pl/pl/oferta_specjalna/smart-car. For more information on Mojio, the leading platform for connected cars, please visit www.moj.io and follow the company on LinkedIn and Twitter. ### About Mojio Scalable, secure and hardware-agnostic, Mojio is the cloud platform and SaaS provider of choice for automakers and mobile network operators looking to build profitable connected car services. Mojios platform solutions and mobile apps deliver a smarter, safer and more convenient car ownership experience for the global driving community. With real-world data gathered from more than 7 billion miles of driving, Mojio provides a big data analytics framework that uses machine learning to generate actionable insights, unlocking the next generation of revenue streams for companies throughout the automotive value chain. Founded in 2012, Mojio is growing in Silicon Valley and Vancouver, and serves some of the worlds biggest brands as customers, investors and partners, including Amazon, Bosch, Deutsche Telekom, Microsoft, SAP and T-Mobile. Mojio is a career-accelerator for driven tech professionals looking to shape the future of mobility. To learn more about Mojio visit https://www.moj.io/. Mojio Media Contact: Meghan Brown for Mojio 925-271-8234 mojio@10fold.com About T-Mobile Polska TMobile Polska is one of the largest mobile operators in Poland, serving nearly 11 million customers. It provides a full range of telecommunications services for private and business customers. Thanks to its integration with GTS Poland in 2015 and TSystems Polska in 2017, TMobile Polska became an integrated operator. In addition to mobile services, its portfolio includes landline services and a complete range of ICT products. TMobile customers are also able to benefit from the full range of financial services offered by TMobile Usugi Bankowe [TMobile Banking Services], the most advanced and innovative example of synergy between banking and telecommunications. T-Mobile Polska Media Contact: Piotr Zaczko Chief Corporate Comms Specialist 0048-602-207-518 Piotr.zaczko@t-mobile.pl Attachment Winnipeg, Manitoba, Dec. 18, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Richardson International Limited (Richardson) is pleased to announce an agreement with Conagra Brands, Inc. for the purchase of Wesson, a leading U.S. retail brand of canola and vegetable cooking oils. Wesson has been a preferred choice in American homes for cooking and baking applications for more than a century. Creative marketing campaigns firmly established the brand as a common household name for the health-conscious and discerning consumer. Richardson will reinvigorate the brand to engage customers while continuing to live up to their promise of Bringing Quality Ingredients to the Table. Already recognized as a vertically integrated leader in canola processing, this acquisition reinforces Richardsons growth strategy for its food business. Across generations, Richardson has built deep-rooted and trusted relationships with its customers and suppliers to bring premium food products to homes around the world. The rich history of both our company and the Wesson brand makes this an exciting acquisition for us, says Curt Vossen, Richardson, President and CEO. We believe that consumers will continue to seek out high quality foods and aligning with the Wesson brand expands our ability to meet that consumer desire. Richardson is also set to acquire the Wesson production facility located in Memphis, Tennessee. This 280,000-square foot manufacturing plant will complement Richardsons food and ingredients division. We are excited about expanding into this geography and look forward to investing in the future of this plant, the employees, and the community, adds Vossen. Richardson is committed to product innovation. Our recent $30M investment to build an innovation centre focused on product development will provide a modern platform for testing solutions and exploring new ideas, creating the perfect match to develop truly innovative products to meet and exceed consumer expectations, stated Vossen. Richardson has an established precedent for strategic acquisitions and thoughtful investment. With plans to invest in the Memphis facility, Richardson is committed to a continued U.S. presence for marketing, manufacturing and distribution of Wesson products. The agreement is subject to the usual closing conditions, including regulatory approval. We anticipate the transaction to be finalized in the first quarter of 2019. For more information visit news.richardsonfoodandingredients.com. ABOUT RICHARDSON INTERNATIONAL Richardson International is a subsidiary of family-owned James Richardson & Sons, Limited which was established in 1857 from modest beginnings. Headquartered in Winnipeg, today, Richardson is Canadas largest agribusiness and is recognized as a global leader in agriculture and food processing. The company is a worldwide handler and merchandiser of grains and oilseeds and is a vertically integrated processor and manufacturer of oats and canola based products. Over the past two decades, Richardson has become a significant player in the global food business, producing a wide variety of food products and ingredients for the retail, food service and industrial markets. One of Canadas Best Managed Companies, Richardson continues to grow thanks to the dedication and innovative spirit of over 2,600 employees worldwide. ABOUT CONAGRA BRANDS Conagra Brands, Inc., headquartered in Chicago, Ill., is one of North Americas leading branded food companies. Visit conagrabrands.com to learn more. MCI Canada, a wholly owned subsidiary of Mass Markets, will reopen the recently closed ServiCom contact center in Sydney and operate as The Sydney Call Centre Inc. The company will provide new and ongoing employment for the local Sydney area and operate The Sydney Call Centre Inc. as a subsidiary of MCIs North American tech-enabled contact center business. SYDNEY, Nova Scotia, Dec. 18, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- When MCI founder and CEO Anthony Marlowe heard 500+ people lost their jobs when ServiCom closed its door just weeks before Christmas, he saw an opportunity to do something meaningful on behalf of the people of Sydney. It feels great to align our desire to help the workers impacted with our desire to grow MCI. We are in a unique position to be able to quickly bring jobs back to Sydney, provide a valuable service to customers, and add talented employees and capacity to the MCI Portfolio, said Marlowe. The news broke just days ago during his annual leadership meeting where MCIs top 20 executives were planning 2019. Emotionally moved by the news, Marlowe was clear on his message to the executive team: "Let's get their jobs back by January 2, 2019. MCI had been working hard to acquire ServiCom while the company was still operating and believed strongly that the Sydney operation was a great fit for MCIs business. Expanding into a new country in less than 30 days is a big undertaking, but we have a great team and technology in place to get it done. That coupled with the talent, quality, tenure and commitment of the team on the ground, and we have the ingredients for a high degree of short- and long-term success, Marlowe said. Over the past three years, MCI has organically grown their Mass Markets division, acquired two other companies, GravisApps and OnBrand24, to further expand their tech-enabled business process outsourcing (BPO) offerings. Marlowe, an entrepreneur at heart, believes that the communities it relies on for talented employees should be at the forefront of business decisions. The communities and employees have always driven MCI's success in the local markets where we operate, and we are excited by the talent and subject matter expertise that exists in Sydney. We have every confidence that the team in Sydney will further fuel our organizations success, states Marlowe. Sydney is a tight-knit community, as evidenced by the outpouring of support for those who lost their jobs. MCI knows it cannot change the emotional impact the ServiCom closure has had on the employees and community over the past month but hopes that quickly bringing jobs back to Sydney will help everyone look forward to 2019. MCI wants the employees impacted and the entire community to have confidence that there will be new, exciting opportunities in 2019. MCI Canada, a wholly owned subsidiary of Mass Markets, will reopen the recently closed ServiCom contact center in Sydney and operate as The Sydney Call Centre Inc. The company will provide new and ongoing employment for the local Sydney area and operate The Sydney Call Centre Inc. as a subsidiary of MCIs North American tech-enabled contact center business. MCI Canada will not be acquiring any assets from ServiCom Canada but will enter a nine-year lease for the shuttered facility. The hope is that by January 2nd, 2019, or as soon as possible after that, The Sydney Call Centre Inc. will start production with tech-enabled inbound and outbound customer service, technical support, and inside telesales programs. The prior operator, ServiCom, will be responsible for past wages and other liabilities. "We are aware of the debt structure and asset-light nature of JNET, ServiCom, and ServiCom Canada businesses and are disappointed that no reasonable level of consideration to the bankruptcy estate will ever make its way to the displaced ServiCom workers, states Marlowe. We will do as much as possible to assist the workers impacted and have decided to provide an employment offer to ServiCom workers that will include sign-on and retention bonuses. We hope that this will help lessen some of the financial impacts of the closing. MCI is a motivated new employer, unaffiliated with ServiCom, but the MCI leadership team has been inspired by how the people of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia and government have come together in support of neighbors, friends and family, and looks forward to being part of the community. "We are launching MCI Canada, The Sydney Call Centre, because of the amazing community, high aptitude workers, outstanding regional officials and committed clientele, he added. "The Sydney Call Centre will be an amazing augmentation of Mass Markets and MCIs tech-enabled business services and information and communications technology." About MCI: A 10-time Fastest Growing Company on INCs Magazine's List of Fastest Growing Companies, Mass Markets currently operates four contact center facilities out of Iowa and South Dakota in the Midwestern United States. Marlowe Companies Inc. (MCI) is headquartered in Iowa City, IA and has operations in Iowa, Georgia, Florida, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Nova Scotia, and South Dakota. Driving modernization through digitalization, MCI ensures clients do more for less. MCI is the holding company for a diverse lineup of tech-enabled business services operating companies. MCI organically grows, acquires and operates companies that have a synergistic products and services portfolios, including but not limited to business process outsourcing (BPO), business process management (BPM), Customer Experience (CX) services, application software, and technology services to mid-market & enterprise partners. MCI now employs 2,000+ talented individuals with 100+ diverse North American client partners across the following MCI brands: Gravis Apps, Mass Markets, The Sydney Call Centre, and OnBrand24. For more information, please visit https://www.thesydneycentre.com/ or https://www.mci.world/ Latvian English Announcement AS "Brivais Vilnis" Mandatory Share Buy-back Offer Sabiedriba ar ierobezotu atbildibu "Musu Investiciju Fonds", registered in the Commercial Register of the Republic of Latvia with the registration number 40003536860, legal address: Rigas gatve 8, Adazi, Adazu novads, LV-2164 as the Offeror, expresses the Mandatory Share Buy-back Offer of the shares of the target company akciju sabiedriba "Brivais Vilnis". The target company is akciju sabiedriba "Brivais Vilnis", with registration number 40003056186, legal address: Ostas street 1, Salacgriva, Salacgrivas novads, LV-4033, Latvia. Telephone number +371 64000210; Fax number +371 64071331. E-mail address: maris@brivaisvilnis.lv, home page www.brivaisvilnis.lv. The price of one bearer share in public circulation is EUR 00.87 (zero euro, eighty seven cents). The buy-back price of one share is determined in accordance with the requirements of Section 74, Paragraph one, Clause 2 of the Financial Instruments Market Law. Annex: Prospectus for the mandatory share buy-back offer Offer starts on - 20th December 2018 Offer ends on - 18th January 2019 Results will be announced on 23rd January 2019 VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Dec. 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- On Thursday, Dec. 20, the Fraser Institute will release a new study on the generosity of Canadians and Americans. The 2018 Generosity Index spotlights charitable giving in Canada and the United States, and also compares generosity levels over the past 10 years in each province. A news release with additional information will be issued via GlobeNewswire on Thursday, Dec. 20 at 5:00 a.m. (Eastern). MEDIA CONTACT: Jason Clemens, Executive Vice-President (in Vancouver) Fraser Institute To arrange media interview or for more information, please contact: Bryn Weese, Senior Media Relations Specialist, Fraser Institute (604) 688-0221 ext. 589 bryn.weese@fraserinstitute.org Follow the Fraser Institute on Twitter | Becom e a fan on Facebook BEIJING, Dec. 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Mechel PAO (MOEX: MTLR; NYSE: MTL), one of the leading Russian mining and metals companies, reports prolonging the contract for coal supply with Chinas Jidong Cement, one of the worlds top cement producers, until the end of 2019. According to the agreement, during this year Mechel will supply its Chinese partners up to two million tonnes of thermal coal mined at the companys South Yakutia facilities, Elgaugol OOO and Yakutugol Holding Company AO. Monthly supplies will vary from 100,000 to 150,000 tonnes of coal products. Prices will be adjusted on a monthly basis following negotiations and on the basis of index rates. This is a third major contract signed by Mechel and Jidong Cement. I am sure that our ties will continue to develop in a constructive manner in the future. It is also important to note that Jidong Cement is a key customer of Elgas thermal coal in Asia in 2017 we supplied our Chinese partners with 1.9 million tonnes and another 1.4 million in 2018. In 2019 we plan to export thermal coal from Elga in comparable volumes, Mechel Mining Management OOOs Chief Executive Officer Pavel Shtark commented. Mechel PAO Ekaterina Videman Tel: + 7 495 221 88 88 ekaterina.videman@mechel.com Mechel is an international mining and steel company. Its products are marketed in Europe, Asia, North and South America, Africa. Mechel unites producers of coal, iron ore concentrate, steel, rolled products, ferroalloys, heat and electric power. All of its enterprises work in a single production chain, from raw materials to high value-added products. Some of the information in this press release may contain projections or other forward-looking statements regarding future events or the future financial performance of Mechel, as defined in the safe harbor provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. We wish to caution you that these statements are only predictions and that actual events or results may differ materially. We do not intend to update these statements. We refer you to the documents Mechel files from time to time with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, including our Form 20-F. These documents contain and identify important factors, including those contained in the section captioned Risk Factors and Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements in our Form 20-F, that could cause the actual results to differ materially from those contained in our projections or forward-looking statements, including, among others, the achievement of anticipated levels of profitability, growth, cost and synergy of our recent acquisitions, the impact of competitive pricing, the ability to obtain necessary regulatory approvals and licenses, the impact of developments in the Russian economic, political and legal environment, volatility in stock markets or in the price of our shares or ADRs, financial risk management and the impact of general business and global economic conditions. TORONTO, Dec. 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Forbes & Manhattan Inc. (F&M), a leading private merchant bank headquartered in Toronto, Canada, with a global focus on the resource-based and technology sectors, today announced the addition of Kuan Capital Founder, Mr. Michael Kuan to its Advisory Board. Michael joins several other noteworthy and highly regarded individuals on the advisory board which is chaired by former CNN talk show host Larry King. Born in China and educated in the United States, Michaels investment career spans over thirty years starting in 1986 as a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. He returned to China in 1992 to become one of the pioneering investors in telecommunications, the internet, education, energy and biotech industries. Michael has invested and played key roles in some of Chinas most successful ventures, which include Quantech Electronics, China.com, Sina.com, Liming Networks, China Cable Networks, Grandhope Biotech, Hippo Animation, CyberCity Investment, SIG Capital and GGV Capital. Michael co-authored InvestAmerica (1989), an investment guide for foreign investors seeking United States investment opportunities and was the 2006 commencement speaker at Pepperdine University. Michael serves as a founding council member of TEDx Global. As a member of XPRIZEs Innovation Board he is helping to launch Chinas first XPRIZE for Clean Air to deal with the issue of worldwide air pollution. Kuan Capital is currently an investor in Anchor Pacific Capital, RedBird Capital, Bold Capital and Singularity University in the United States. On joining the advisory board, Forbes & Manhattans Chairman Stan Bharti stated, I am very excited to welcome Michael to the advisory board. I look forward to working with him to further build upon and strengthen our presence in China given his extensive relationship across multiple sectors of mutual interest and for his guidance to drive the broader Forbes & Manhattan organizations performance. ABOUT Forbes & Manhattan Forbes & Manhattan is a leading private merchant bank with a global focus on the resource-based sector, Agriculture, Technology and Telecommunications. F&M is headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Canada with offices, operations and assets across the globe. ABOUT Kuan Capital Kuan Capital is a China-based investment and merchant banking firm that provides funding and resources to cross-border joint ventures between China and the rest of the world. Forbes & Manhattan Inc. 416-861-2267 TORONTO, Dec. 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The first-ever Sunwing flight from Thunder Bay, Ontario to Punta Cana, Dominican Republic departed from Thunder Bay International Airport today. This flight marks the start of the new weekly direct flight service to this popular sun destination, departing from Thunder Bay every Wednesday until March 27, 2019, inclusive. With the introduction of this new route, residents of Thunder Bay can Vacation Better with convenient access to three popular destinations this winter including Cancun and Varadero right from their doorstep when they choose to travel with Sunwing. President of Tour Operations for Sunwing, Andrew Dawson, commented on the news, We are excited to be offering residents of Thunder Bay and northern Ontario even more ways to Vacation Better this winter. Our seasonal flight service from Thunder Bay has been well-received and we are delighted to be returning for our ninth season and adding a third option with the introduction of our new weekly flight service to Punta Cana. We are very excited about the additional route this season, said Ed Schmidtke, President & CEO of Thunder Bay International Airports Authority. We are delighted by Sunwings confidence in our market and we look forward to another successful winter charter season. Sunwing offers a wide range of top-rated resorts for all ages, interests and budgets in Punta Cana . Vacationers seeking a family-friendly resort can choose to stay at the newly-opened Grand Memories Splash . This modern resort offers stylish rooms and sophisticated amenities in addition to unlimited access to the sprawling resort water park that kids and the kids at heart will love. Those seeking an adults only getaway can choose to stay at the beachfront Riu Republica , home to the only adults only water park in the Caribbean and eight sparkling swimming pools, some with swim-up bars. Guests can also take advantage of exclusive RIU-topia features including welcome cocktails, in-room liquor dispensers, unlimited reservation-free dining and more. All Sunwing packages include return flights on Sunwing Airlines where passengers can sit back and relax while on board, with award-winning inflight service, complimentary non-alcoholic beverage service and buy on board selection of light meals and snacks with choices inspired by Food Network Canada Celebrity Chef, Lynn Crawford. Passengers also benefit from a generous complimentary 23kg checked luggage allowance. Ten adults travelling together can receive special prices, added values and reduced deposits. For more information on group vacations click here . For more information or to book, visit www.sunwing.ca or contact your travel agent. About Sunwing The largest integrated travel company in North America, Sunwing has more flights to the south than any other leisure carrier with convenient direct service from over 33 airports across Canada to over 45 popular sun destinations. This scale enables Sunwing to negotiate the best deals and exclusive offers at all of the top-rated resorts across the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central America. Renowned for its award-winning service, Sunwing is consistently voted the top leisure airline by travel agents and is the perennial winner of the Consumer Choice Award. Customers can look forward to starting their vacation off in style with award-winning inflight service, which features a complimentary glass of sparkling wine*, tea and coffee and non-alcoholic beverage service; together with a buy on board menu of light meals and snacks (including kids choices) inspired by Food Network Canada Celebrity Chef, Lynn Crawford. Sunwing customers also benefit from the assistance of the companys own knowledgeable destination representatives, who greet them upon arrival and support them throughout their vacation journey. *Service may be unavailable on select flights For all media enquires, please contact: Rachel Goldrick Senior Corporate Communications Manager Sunwing Vacations 1-800-387-5602 | media@sunwing.ca https://www.facebook.com/SunwingVacations https://twitter.com/SunwingVacay https://www.instagram.com/sunwingvacations https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzjZ-lcuaqBQH7Sq0u3ru7A Helpful Posts from Previous UCLA Admit Threads Housing dLo wrote: University housing is good. I used to live in weyburn terrace for grad school and it was about $1k for a room in a 2BR/2BA. i'm sure its around 1200+ now though. Around westwood, depending what you want, rents can range from 1000-1500 for sharing an apt, or 1400+ for a studio. there are a ton of options if you look around enough. last time i lived in westwood was 2013, though, so it may be wholly different now. Also, consider Culver City. you'd have to drive to campus but it's about 10 minutes, cheaper than westwood, and I personally love the area. I've lived in LA for the past 8 years and I would say 18k is a fair assessment. You probably won't have the most luxurious apartment, but you will definitely be able to get a decent apartment with that budget. Apartments that are walking distance to campus may be a little more, but it's just a matter of what amenities you're willing to trade off. There will be a spectrum of options for different budgets and needs. qthelou wrote: I am a dual degree student starting in the MBA this fall. I live in university family housing now and it's a really good deal - 2 bedroom for $1532. It's an easy 20-30 min bus ride to campus. You don't have to have kids or be married to qualify for family housing, but you do need to have proof of relationship - a previous lease agreement works. If you're interested in family housing, the waitlist is long so I'd recommend getting on it as soon as possible. Student Visa justindeniese wrote: Placements justindeniese wrote: fedp wrote: Thanks for offering to help! I first thought I would PM you but I figure this is a question that a lot of internationals may have. Is there any information on what industries and companies are happy to hire internationals? I have a good feel for this already, and I know my dream job is open to internationals, but it would be great to get a comprehensive list/data. If this is something you can't provide to us out here on a forum, is such data at least available to you as a student? With 84% of internationals getting an offer 3 months after graduation, you really don't want to end up as part of that 16%, and to that end I would like to cast a wide net in parallel to targeting my dream job to make sure I have a contingency or two. If anyone is interested in this topic, one piece of really handy information I found (though completely off-topic in the sense that it is not UCLA) was from UNC. They have put up an excel file with a line for each student (anonymous obviously, without names) showing where they did their internship / got their job and you can filter by work authorization status to get a feel for what companies are happy to have us. Hey fedp, So there is no "official" list because some companies that do not traditionally hire internationals will still hire you if they think that you're a really good fit for them. Yes, fit still matters even here! With regard to industries, 99% of the industries do hire internationals - As far as I know, Aerospace and Defense is the only industry that is completely off limits for us. The energy and wine industry are also somewhat difficult for internationals to enter - Unless you're French, then the wine people want you!Lastly, don't worry too much about the 16%. A lot of the internationals are sponsored by their companies and so do not look for jobs and the 16% comprises mostly of them. The 16% also comprises internationals that have not responded back to the survey about where they are working. I'm not trying to paint a false picture that everyone gets recruited, but rest assured you will be hired and the Parker CMC will do everything they can to help you out.On a side note - I encourage everyone, not just internationals, targeting Management Consulting and iBanking to have a backup because of how competitive these two fields are. basic cause (effect 2 : inferred) (effect 1: observed) [ cause is known by observed effect 1...author claims that it is illogical to infer effect 2... hence effect 2 cannot happen ] (means negate above underlined statement..... effect 2 can happen ) (effect 2 : inferred) (characteristic 2) ( basic cause) ( effect 1: observed ) So in short it is not only effect 1 but effect 2 is also possible from cause, because characteristic 2 exists. inferred effect 2 : individual also volunteers at the childrens hospital ( refer I would guess..hence inferred effect)....but no mention of characteristic.. observed effect 1 : anonymous donor gave a thousand dollars to our historical societyinferred effect 2 : individual also volunteers at the childrens hospital ( refer I would guess..hence inferred effect)....but no mention of characteristic.. inferred effect 2 (refer therefore) : birth defect because of >> characteristic 1 : The radioactive material leading genetic mutation this is circular reasoning...our reasoning is not circular hence dropped observed effect 1 : birth defect because of >> characteristic 1 : The radioactive material leading genetic mutationinferred effect 2 (refer therefore) : birth defect because of >> characteristic 1 : The radioactive material leading genetic mutationthis is circular reasoning...our reasoning is not circular hence dropped observed effect 1: immense power because of characteristic 1 : tiny atom inferred effect 2 ( refer...It must be) : complex structure that produces this power observed effect 1: The city orchestra received more funds inferred effect 2 (refer ...Clearly) : this administration is more civic-minded observed effect 1 : [heat liquid water > it evaporates] & [heat other 100 liquids like water > they also evaporate] inferred effect 2 (refer...Therefore): I heat any liquid like water, it will evaporate S_O_SSome one plz help & take it forward ( i have given my understanding but no ansbasic cause >> characteristic 1 >> ( effect 1: observed )>> characteristic 2 >> ( effect 2 : inferred )It is illogical to infer a second and different effectfrom a cause which is known only by one particular effectThis is incorrectbecause the inferred effectmust necessarily be produced by some different characteristicof the causethan is the observed effect, which already serves entirely to describe the cause ( means...observed effect 1 already serves entirely to describe the basic cause)(A) An anonymous donor gave a thousand dollars to our historical society. I would guess that that individual also volunteers at the childrens hospital.(B) The radioactive material caused a genetic mutation, which, in turn, caused the birth defect. Therefore, the radioactive material caused the birth defect.(C) The tiny, unseen atom is the source of immense power. It must be its highly complex structure that produces this power.(D) The city orchestra received more funds from the local government this year than ever before. Clearly this administration is more civic-minded than previous ones.(E) If I heat water, which is a liquid, it evaporates. If I heat hundreds of other liquids like water, they evaporate. Therefore, if I heat any liquid like water, it will evaporate.AM i right ? heavy weights plz jump in to help.... At the beginning of the month, USDA officially said welcome back to chocolate milk in school lunch programs. Technically, it didnt leave in most areas, but under the Obama administration, flavored milk was curtailed to a skim-only option. Under the new announcement from USDA, 99,000 schools and institutions that feed 30 million children annually through USDAs school meal programs can now offer flavored milks in a 1 percent fat option. This has been on the docket since Sonny Perdue became Secretary of Agriculture last year. USDA is committed to serving meals to kids that are both nutritious and satisfying, said Perdue of the broadened USDA recommendations. These commonsense flexibilities provide excellent customer service to our local school nutrition professionals, while giving children the world-class food service they deserve. In addition to bringing low-fat flavored options back to the dairy cases in cafeterias, USDA officials eased restrictions on grains and sodium levels. Schools now only have to meet a requirement of half of the weekly grains in school lunches as whole grains, and the time line for reducing sodium levels was extended. Research by the National Milk Producers Federation, as well as in the Los Angeles Unified School District by the Dairy Council of California, showed that the removal of flavored milks from cafeteria milk cases resulted in consumption losses and waste. To comment, email your remarks to intel@hoards.com. (c) Hoard's Dairyman Intel 2018 December 17, 2018 The information below has been supplied by dairy marketers and other industry organizations. It has not been edited, verified or endorsed by Hoards Dairyman. Richardson International Limited (Richardson) is pleased to announce an agreement with Conagra Brands, Inc. for the purchase of Wesson, a leading U.S. retail brand of canola and vegetable cooking oils. Wesson has been a preferred choice in American homes for cooking and baking applications for more than a century. Creative marketing campaigns firmly established the brand as a common household name for the health-conscious and discerning consumer. Richardson will reinvigorate the brand to engage customers while continuing to live up to their promise of Bringing Quality Ingredients to the Table. Already recognized as a vertically integrated leader in canola processing, this acquisition reinforces Richardsons growth strategy for its food business. Across generations, Richardson has built deep-rooted and trusted relationships with its customers and suppliers to bring premium food products to homes around the world. The rich history of both our company and the Wesson brand makes this an exciting acquisition for us, says Curt Vossen, Richardson, President and CEO. We believe that consumers will continue to seek out high quality foods and aligning with the Wesson brand expands our ability to meet that consumer desire. Richardson is also set to acquire the Wesson production facility located in Memphis, Tennessee. This 280,000-square foot manufacturing plant will complement Richardsons food and ingredients division. We are excited about expanding into this geography and look forward to investing in the future of this plant, the employees, and the community, adds Vossen. Richardson is committed to product innovation. Our recent $30M investment to build an innovation centre focused on product development will provide a modern platform for testing solutions and exploring new ideas, creating the perfect match to develop truly innovative products to meet and exceed consumer expectations, stated Vossen. Richardson has an established precedent for strategic acquisitions and thoughtful investment. With plans to invest in the Memphis facility, Richardson is committed to a continued U.S. presence for marketing, manufacturing and distribution of Wesson products. The agreement is subject to the usual closing conditions, including regulatory approval. We anticipate the transaction to be finalized in the first quarter of 2019. For more information visit news.richardsonfoodandingredients.com. ABOUT RICHARDSON INTERNATIONAL Richardson International is a subsidiary of family-owned James Richardson & Sons, Limited which was established in 1857 from modest beginnings. Headquartered in Winnipeg, today, Richardson is Canadas largest agribusiness and is recognized as a global leader in agriculture and food processing. The company is a worldwide handler and merchandiser of grains and oilseeds and is a vertically integrated processor and manufacturer of oats and canola- based products. Over the past two decades, Richardson has become a significant player in the global food business, producing a wide variety of food products and ingredients for the retail, food service and industrial markets. One of Canadas Best Managed Companies, Richardson continues to grow thanks to the dedication and innovative spirit of over 2,600 employees worldwide. ABOUT CONAGRA BRANDS Conagra Brands, Inc., headquartered in Chicago, Ill., is one of North Americas leading branded food companies. Visit conagrabrands.com to learn more. 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. As of August 26th, 2021 Yahoo India will no longer be publishing content. Your Yahoo Account Mail and Search experiences will not be affected in any way and will operate as usual. We thank you for your support and readership. For more information on Yahoo India, please visit the FAQ New Braunfels, TX (78130) Today Cloudy skies this morning will become partly cloudy this afternoon. Areas of dense fog. High 79F. Winds SW at 5 to 10 mph.. Tonight Partly cloudy early followed by cloudy skies overnight. Low 61F. Winds light and variable. According to the Human Rights Activists News Agency, at least 32 individuals were arrested at their homes or in the streets for participation in labor rights organizing. IranWire adds that at least two individuals were arrested for taking part in protests wherein they demanded the release of those who have already been detained. This reflected an overall increase in the number of arrests being carried out in the streets as the Iranian regime struggles to gain control over the Ahvaz strike and other worker protests. At least one representative of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps confronted protesters on Monday to deliver a threat of further arrests and security action. Yet there was no immediate indication that these threats or the preceding rates had had a dampening impact on the protests. Quite to the contrary, IranWire reported that the latest arrests triggered a wave of support from workers, students and teachers across Iran, while HRANA noted that workers from at least five government-owned corporations had begun their own protests. These demonstrations stem from the same familiar issue of unpaid wages stretching back over a period of months a situation that puts ever-greater strain on a working class population for which poverty has long-since reached epidemic levels. Iran Human Rights Monitor has published three distinct reports on this topic over the course of about a week. One such report indicated that roughly 80 percent of the countrys entire population has been consigned to poverty as a result of the previous 40 years of government mismanagement and corruption. Another indicated that this situation now contributes to the deaths of 10,000 infants per year, on average, or 8.27 infant deaths per 1,000 births. The IHRM reports also indicate that the overall problem is steadily worse, with the recent relief from international sanctions under the 2015 Iran nuclear deal having no recognizable impact for ordinary Iranians. According to one report, there has been a 22 percent increase in the number of people living under the poverty line in the capital city of Tehran alone. Another simply makes the general observation that recent price increases have made people, including members of the middle class, poorer. The non-payment of wages, combined with currency devaluation and price hikes, continues to amplify the trend of labor strikes and economic protests, even in spite of concerted efforts by Iranian security forces to suppress those activities. One IHRM report indicates that in the one-week period between October 26 and November 2, at least 127 strikes and protests were recorded as taking place in various Iranian cities. Some of these, such as a truck drivers strike spanning 75 different localities, are still ongoing in one form or another. Many Iranian dissident voices, such as those associated with the National Council of Resistance of Iran, also connect these protests actions to the nationwide uprising that began with the expression of economic grievances in the final days of 2017. Maryam Rajavi, the President of the NCRI, issued a statement last March calling attention to that uprising and insisting that it should be the starting point of a year full of uprisings leading to the ouster of the theocratic regime. This broader political context encourages some observers to connect solidarity in the economic sphere to solidarity with all manner of Iranian activism that is taking place against the backdrop of workers strikes. And of course the latest crackdown on labor rights activism is made more alarming by its proximity to other instances of government repression, some of which have proven fatal. On or just before December 12, for instance, the Iranian political prisoner Vahid Sayadi Nasiri was pronounced dead due to the effects of a two-month hunger strike that had been effectively ignored by regime authorities. On Monday, Iran Human Rights issued a statement calling renewed attention to that death and calling upon the international community to regard it as grounds for urgent action to demand improvement in the conditions of Iranian prisons and to safeguard all Iranian prisoners of conscience, whose numbers have swelled in the wake of crackdowns such as those on the Ahvaz steelworkers. However, some in the West are misinterpreting this as a struggle between so-called hardliners, represented by Khamenei, and moderates, by President Hassan Rouhani. This is a huge mistake because this is no fight for policy or principle, as you might expect from a democracy. It is a struggle for ultimate power. The mullahs are selected for political office, rather than elected, and Iranian democracy is more for show than for use. Saeed Ghasseminejad, a senior adviser on Iran at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said: The Islamist regime in Tehran is a theocratic mafiocracy. Members of the mafia fight each other. They may have a very different point of views on many important issues, and they may violently eliminate each other to have a larger share of the pie, but in the end, they are all members of a crime family. In fact, MP Karimi Ghoddousi, a former commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), accused half the parliament of seeking to overthrow the regime and defend the leaders of the Resistance; something that no mullah is doing. While other so-called hardliners are trying to impeach Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, following their removal of the countrys labour, economic and education ministers earlier this year, claiming that the Rouhani Cabinet has been influenced by the US, which is not true in the slightest. Ghasseminejad notes, however, that despite these high-profile firings, Iranian policy only ever lies in the Khameneis hands, so it will not change unless he wants it to. Elsewhere Iran has stepped up its aggressive behaviour towards the rest of the world with increased missile tests, support for terrorists, and interference in the affairs of other Middle East states. Iran expert Ronen A. Cohen believes that this is merely an effort to divert public attention from bad economic conditions and prevent further protests against the Regime. As we can see from the factional infighting, growing domestic unrest, poor economic situation, attempts to cause chaos in the Middle East and elsewhere, as well as the numerous other crises in Iran, the Regime is incredibly weak on all fronts right now. There is no way for the Regime to come back from this and simply the mullahs have no future. The only acceptable solution is regime change, which is the true wish of the Iranian people. It is the only way to bring peace to Iran and to the world. - An Australian tabloid was criticized by Filipino netizens due to its way of celebrating Catriona Grays victory - It crossed out the name of the Philippines and put Queensland - Catriona is a half-Filipina and half-Australian beauty queen PAY ATTENTION: Click "See First" under the "Following" tab to see KAMI news on your News Feed A lot of netizens got furious once again after a tabloid in Australia crossed out the name of the Philippines as the hometown of Miss Universe 2018 Catriona Gray. KAMI learned that the newly-crowned queen is a half-Filipina and half-Australian that is why the aforementioned country is also celebrating her trending victory. However, some social media users, especially those who are Filipino by blood, did not like how an Australian newspaper celebrated the triumph of Catriona. In the front page of The Courier Mail, the word Philippines has an x mark and under it was the hometown of Catriona in Australia which is Queensland. Inside the printed copy was an article about the Bicolana model, explaining how she becomes an Australian pride. Ms.Gray was discovered at 14 by North Queensland talent scout Henry Peterson, who also helped launch three former Miss Universe Australia winners Kimberley Busteed, Rachael Finch, and Jesinta Campbell, the story wrote. "Miss Gray has lived in Manila since graduating from Trinity Anglican School in Cairns in 2011. She is the only child of Australian-Scottish father Ian Gray and Filipino-born mother Mita Gray, who still live in Australia, but were watching on in Thailand, the writer added. Because of this, netizens threw their ferocious words against the said newspaper, saying that its action offended the nation who cherished and trained Catriona to be Miss Universe. PAY ATTENTION: Using free basics app to access internet for free? Now you can read KAMI news there too. Use the search option to find us. Read KAMI news while saving your data! Although a lot of them supported the fact that Australia should have a fair share of the recent achievement, they said that the tabloids action was inappropriate and foul. Here are the reactions from netizens: Yes, they can share the victory but to cross out the name of the country that clearly supported her, with the Filipino team that trained her, and the Filipino fans that prayed, cheered and rooted for her since her Miss World days and her unfortunate loss, I think its rude to cross it out and claim sole victory. Australian nga sya pero Philippines pinaglalaban nya and walang tondo sa Australia. You've sent your own Miss Australia. Catriona carried "Philippines" on her chest. She talked about 104 million Filipinos behind her. She told everyone that she brought half of "her" country in the Miss U stage -- I bet we all know what country she's pertaining to. Where is Australia when she didnt win Miss World? Lol. She may have grown in Australia but she found her purpose and cause in the Philippines. She found her passion, dedication and advocacy in the streets of the Philippines and that I believe, should be respected. In a previous article by , the mind-staggering cost of Catrionas gowns during the prestigious pageant was revealed by her designer Mak Tumang. Catriona Gray was born on January 6, 1994 to a Filipino mother and Scotish-born Australian father. She is the fourth Miss Universe from the Philippines. POPULAR: Read more news about Catriona Gray! Enjoyed reading our story? Download KAMI's news app on Google Play now and stay up-to-date with major Filipino news! Chambe Hit Song - Our Low-Budget Version. Alex Gonzaga, what an amazing song you have come up with! We can only try to reach the stars with our low-budget versions. But we are doing our best! - on HumanMeter! Source: Kami.com.ph -People might not be over the death of the former US Pres. George H.W Bush -Some have confessed how good the late President was -Just recently, an organization revealed that Bush secretly sponsored a Filipino child for 10 years and even sent him letters PAY ATTENTION: Click "See First" under the "Following" tab to see KAMI news on your News Feed The news that George H.W Bush, 41st President of the United States passed away broke millions of hearts. Many might not be over his death and some confessed how good he was as a man and as a friend. Just recently, a nonprofit organization revealed that the late former president secretly sponsored a Filipino child for ten years. Photo source: CNN Source: Facebook According to Compassion International, an organization that help children in poor communities through local churches, Bush sponsored a child named Timothy. It all started when Bush attended a Christmas concert in Washington in 2001. "Because the musicians were mostly Christian, they believed in our mission," according to Wess Stafford, the former president of Compassion International in an interview with CNN. "During intermission, they would tell the audience about us, and ask them if they would like to sponsor a child," "All of the sudden, Mr. Bush, who was sitting only a few rows back and surrounded by security, raised his hand and asked for a pamphlet." Photo source: CNN Source: Facebook He said the security was alarmed about that. "His top security called me and said 'this doesn't surprise me coming from him, but if he's going to sponsor this kid, we need to make sure the boy doesn't know who his sponsor is.' So, he signed all his letters to Timothy as 'George Walker,'" he recalls. But according to him, the security team was mainly concerned about Timothy's safety. As soon as the sponsorship began Bush wrote a letter. "Dear Timothy, I want to be your new pen pal. I am an old man, 77 years old, but I love kids; and though we have not met I love you already. I live in Texas - I will write you from time to time - Good Luck. G. Walker" Photo source: CNN Source: Facebook Due to security concerns, Stafford needs to screen each letter and he said it was no easy for him because the late former president began to provide informations. PAY ATTENTION: Using free basics app to access internet for free? Now you can read KAMI news there too. Use the search option to find us. Read KAMI news while saving your data! "His letters were the most sweet, spirited letters I have read from any sponsor, but he kept giving hints as to who he could be," Stafford said. "He was really pushing the envelope." The first information that wasn't supposed to be provided was about his dog, Sadie. "Here is a picture of our dog," he wrote. "Her name is Sadie. She has met a lot of famous people." Photo source: CNN Source: Facebook He also mentioned that he was famous to get invited to White House for Christmas. Photo source: CNN Source: Facebook Sending presents wasn't allowed but that didn't stop Bush especially when he knew thaw Timothy likes arts. "Timothy would send him hand drawings and told the President how much he liked art, so he sent over color pencils, sketch pads, and paint," Stafford said. "I waited for my staff to go to the Philippines and send it with them. They would then bring it to the church Timothy was a part of, so he could collect his gifts." Photo source: CNN Source: Facebook In one of his letters, Timothy thanked the "Mr. and Mrs. Walker" for not forgetting him. "Dear Mr. & Mrs. Walker, How are you? I hope you're in good condition. I would like to thank you for not forgetting me. You're so nice and good. God is so good to us. He gives us the body & will to get to where we want to go. Thank you so much for the book, I like it very much." Photo source: CNN Source: Facebook Though there are some informations that can reveal who the sponsor was, Timothy only knew who his real hero when he graduated from the program. "After a while, my executive assistant, Angie Lathrop, took over the sponsorship, and after Timothy graduated at 17, she flew to the Philippines to meet him," Stafford said. "That's when she told him who his sponsor really was." According to Stafford, Timothy couldn't believe that his sponsor was once a president of a nation and was very stunned! That was the last time they heard from Timothy. "We may not know where Timothy is, but we know he's now living a successful life," Stafford said. We are very grateful to the late George H.W Bush for having a good heart. He became so close to Filipinos' hearts. KAMIwho served the Bush family and recalled her experiences with the late George H.W Bush. Source: CNN Enjoyed reading our story? Download KAMI's news app on Google Play now and stay up-to-date with major Filipino news! Social Experiment: Do Manila Men Still Catcall? Anti-catcalling bill in the Philippines: should we support it and will it protect catcalling victims? on KAMI HumanMeter YouTube channel! Source: Kami.com.ph - Miss Universe 2018 Catriona Gray started accomplishing her duties as the reigning queen right after being crowned - Just after leaving the stage, she shared that she headed straight to the dressing room to retouch her hair and makeup - She then had her first official photo shoot as Miss Universe PAY ATTENTION: Click "See First" under the "Following" tab to see KAMI news on your News Feed! Catriona Gray who was crowned as the Miss Universe 2018 started accomplishing her duties as the reigning queen right after her coronation. In an interview with Dyan Castillejo, Catriona shared that she went straight to the dressing room to retouch her hair and makeup after leaving the stage. She then had her pictures taken as her first official photo shoot as Miss Universe. This was followed by an interview with Kalani Hilliker and analysts Carson Kressley and Lu Sierra. After the interview, she got the chance to finally hug her parents Mita and Ian Gray and was followed by series of picture taking sessions. PAY ATTENTION: Using free basics app to access internet for free? Now you can read KAMI news there too. Use the search option to find us. Read KAMI news while saving your data! During a short break, Catriona ate her lunch. Filipino fans watched her in the evening where she had a live interview with Dyan Castillejo which was aired in ABS-CBN's TV Patrol. An after-party of Miss Universe 2018 at Dusit Thani Bangkok was also held where she got to celebrate with her fellow candidates. She even found time to update her Instagram account where she thanked everyone who helped her achieve her biggest dream. Born on January 6, 1994, Catriona Gray is a Filipino-Australian actress and beauty queen who already joined and became a finalist in Miss World 2016. She is currently dubbed as the strongest contender from the Philippines in Miss Universe so far. POPULAR: Read more about Catriona Gray here Enjoyed reading our story? Download KAMI's news app on Google Play now and stay up-to-date with major Filipino news! I Am In Love With A Married Man Having 3 Kids | HumanMeter Kami received a message from a netizen seeking advice. She is in love with a married man twice her age, with 3 kids. He is ready to leave his wife for her. She doesn't know what to do in this situation. Click Play and find out the what these people have to say regarding the sender's situation. Source: Kami.com.ph - Senate President Tito Sotto said that there is no need to legalize medical marijuana in the country - He argued that it is already allowed in the country for compassionate use - Sotto cited RA 9165 or the Comprehensive Dangerous Drugs Act of 2002 PAY ATTENTION: Click "See First" under the "Following" tab to see KAMI news on your News Feed According to Senate President Vicente Tito Sotto III, there is no need for the government to legalize medical marijuana for it is already allowed in the country. KAMI learned from Inquirer that Sotto argued that it was under RA 9165 or the Comprehensive Dangerous Drugs Act of 2002. Thats whats in the law already. Its allowed already, may proseso lang, Sotto said in an interview. Sotto was the principal author of RA 9165 and he said that medical marijuana is allowed for compassionate use as stated in the law. As mentioned in RA 9165 Sec. 2, the government shall aim to achieve balance in the national control program so that people with legitimate medical needs are not prevented from being treated adequate amounts of appropriate medications, which include the use of dangerous drugs. Sotto also said that it is the physicians duty to apply for the substance permit from Food and Drugs Authority (FDA). In other words, in the Dangerous Drugs Act, combined with the FDA circular, we have a compassionate use provision. Its allowed already, Sotto stated. PAY ATTENTION: Using free basics app to access internet for free? Now you can read KAMI news there too. Use the search option to find us. Read KAMI news while saving your data! For the Senate President, those people who needed drug for medical purposes are already aware about this provision and not those who wanted it for recreational use. Yung mga mahilig sa recreational marijuana ang hindi nakakaalam. Kasi ang daming nag-aapply, eh. So yung mga may medical problem, alam nila at binibigyan sila ng permit ng doctor nila, Sotto said. As previously reported by KAMI, according to Presidential Spokesperson Salvador Panelo, President Rodrigo Duterte supports the legalization of medical marijuana in the Philippines. He is most likely to sign any bill that will legalize it. POPULAR: Read more news about Tito Sotto! Enjoyed reading our story? Download KAMI's news app on Google Play now and stay up-to-date with major Filipino news! Chambe Hit Song - Our Low-Budget Version. Alex Gonzaga, what an amazing song you have come up with! We can only try to reach the stars with our low-budget versions. But we are doing our best! - on KAMI HumanMeter Youtube channel! Source: Kami.com.ph - Filipino fans were so excited to welcome Catriona Gray as she returned in the country with the Miss Universe 2018 title - A red carpet was laid out for the Philippines pride who took home the fourth Miss Universe crown for the country - The crowd cheered as Gray waved to the crowd in a white suit PAY ATTENTION: Click "See First" under the "Following" tab to see KAMI news on your News Feed! Miss Universe 2018 Catriona Gray comes home with the very warm welcome from her Filipino fans. Catriona arrived via private jet at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport and was swarmed by the media and press people. Gray waved to her Filipino fans who cheered upon seeing her in a white suit. Former Ilocos Sur governor Chavit Singson, and his daughter Richelle were seen with her together with some Miss Universe staff. Catriona will be staying in Manila for only a short visit and will include private engagements. Just like in a traditional homecoming she will be honored in a motorcade, and TV appearances though these has yet to be arranged. PAY ATTENTION: Using free basics app to access internet for free? Now you can read KAMI news there too. Use the search option to find us. Read KAMI news while saving your data! She is set to go back to New York to fulfill her duties as Miss Universe just like the other Miss Universe queens along with some other perks as KAMI previously reported. Born on January 6, 1994, Catriona Gray is a Filipino-Australian actress and beauty queen who already joined and became a finalist in Miss World 2016. She is currently dubbed as the strongest contender from the Philippines in Miss Universe so far. POPULAR: Read more about Catriona Gray here Enjoyed reading our story? Download KAMI's news app on Google Play now and stay up-to-date with major Filipino news! I Am In Love With A Married Man Having 3 Kids | HumanMeter Kami received a message from a netizen seeking advice. She is in love with a married man twice her age, with 3 kids. He is ready to leave his wife for her. She doesn't know what to do in this situation. Click Play and find out the what these people have to say regarding the sender's situation. Source: Kami.com.ph - Miss Vietnam H'Hen Nie became a crowd favorite in Miss Universe with her charm - Aside from that, her fans got stunned with her inspiring and simple life - The pride of Vietnam has proven that she's more than just a beautiful lady but she has a big heart for those in need PAY ATTENTION: Click "See First" under the "Following" tab to see KAMI news on your News Feed Miss Vietnam H'Hen Nie has once again made her countrymen proud for donating her entire winnings which has a total of 1-billion-VND or 43,000 in US dollars to charity. That amount came from some sponsors and her managing company. This was confirmed by Miss Universe Vietnam and according to them, the money will go to unfortunate children and they will be given scholarships. "She's decided to donate 100% of her prize for social activities. She wants to complete her promise with her village to provide scholarships for poor students and complete her social project Room to Read (build more libraries in rural areas, support schoolgirls around the world). Such an amazing act of her." This generous act of her made the netizens love her more. "You are amazing! Beautiful in and out!" "Admire you for your big heart to help poor but deserving young students. Good luck Miss Vietnam for your endeavors" "You have a big heart and beautiful miss Vietnam.... I love you,..I am Filipino.." "Congratulations miss vietnam you have a big heart Godbless you more,and more blessings i'm so proud of you" PAY ATTENTION: Using free basics app to access internet for free? Now you can read KAMI news there too. Use the search option to find us. Read KAMI news while saving your data! In a previous report by KAMI, Miss South Africa, Miss Venezuela at Miss Vietnam congratulated Catriona Gray. HHen Nie is the representative of Vietnam in the newly concluded Miss Universe 2018 where the Philippines' bet Catriona Gray won the most coveted crown. Miss Vietnam landed a spot in top 5. Despite not making it to the top 3, she remained loved and admired by a lot of people. Enjoyed reading our story? Download KAMI's news app on Google Play now and stay up-to-date with major Filipino news! In this animation video by KAMI, we show the story of a woman who adopted a baby boy. As he grew up, he became more rebellious and wanted to meet his biological mother. In the end, he learned an important lesson on who his real mother is on KAMI HumanMeter YouTube channel! Source: Kami.com.ph Your tax-deductible gift today powers our reporters and keeps us independent. We rely on you, our reader, not paywalls to stay funded because we believe important news and information should be freely accessible to all. Start your day with LAist Sign up for the Morning Brief, delivered weekdays. Subscribe By Sue Carpenter and Jessica Ogilvie Whether or not underground tunnels will be the solution to L.A.'s horrendous, and worsening, traffic problem, the idea took a big step forward Tuesday night. Elon Musk's Boring Company gave test rides inside his much-hyped tunnel in Hawthorne to select members of the public and press (including us). Calling his so-called Loop system the only solution to soul-crushing traffic, Musk has spent much of the past year building a proof of concept, the entrance for which is in the parking lot of another one of his companies - Space X, also in Hawthorne. Measuring 1.14-miles in length and 12 feet in diameter, the system is designed for use with autonomous and electric vehicles like the ones he makes at his other company, Tesla. Our test ride began inside a Tesla X parked off a nondescript alley off 120th Street. The car was positioned in the center of a metal disc, the middle of which was lowered via elevator about 30 feet to the tunnel's opening. The Model X then rolled forward. When the red entrance lighting switched to green, the driver floored it, and we were off, sashaying through the white tube at 40 miles per hour without another car in sight -- the only sounds being the SUV's horizontal accessory wheels riding the tunnel walls and the car radio. And did we mention, there's Wi-Fi and cell service in the tunnel? Here's a look at what a ride (not ours) looks like: Elon Musk invited us in for a peek at his Hawthorne Tunnel tonight. Here's what a ride looks like: pic.twitter.com/olJ0pXjsnn LAist (@LAist) December 19, 2018 And another view of a ride in Elon Musk's Hawthorne Tunnel: pic.twitter.com/4ICr6u1bVy LAist (@LAist) December 19, 2018 Designed to be an underground freeway system with multiple small vehicles traveling directly to their destinations at speeds of about 150 miles per hour, the Loop is designed to be used with both publicly and privately owned vehicles, which Musk said will be lowered into the tunnels with a network of elevators and spiral entrances. Musk said the advantage to moving traffic underground is that tunnels are weatherproof, quiet to construct and to operate. The Los Angeles Times reported this week that the tunnel has been built largely in secret, and that while residents know about its existence, they don't know much else about what's going on underground. At least one business has been displaced by Musk's Hawthorne invasion. Two boring machines were used to complete the work. And the dirt dug out of the tunnel was used to make concrete onsite for the tunnel itself. Excess dirt was used to make construction bricks that are expected to later be sold at one of the entrances. On Tuesday night, Musk admitted to the tunnel's limitations. The average tunnel costs $1 billion and three to six months per mile to build. The 1.14-mile section of Hawthorne tunnel cost about $10 million, he added. Musk being Musk, though, said he has a plan that would make the process 15 times faster and less expensive. Few details on that were shared. The tunnels are part of Musk's vision of improved transportation in and around Los Angeles, which appears to have its roots in a tweet he sent in December 2016. The tweet echoed what literally every other Angeleno also experiences on a near-daily basis: frustration with traffic. Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging... Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 17, 2016 RELATED: Nothing Can Fix LA Traffic, So Deal With It Following the tweet, Musk established The Boring Company and began his explorations. The Hawthorne tunnel, however, isn't the only tunnel Musk has proposed. Below is a couple of other digging projects he's pitched: SEPULVEDA BOULEVARD The tunnel under Sepulveda Boulevard was the first such endeavor following his frustrated tweet. It would have traveled 2.7 miles, and Musk called it a proof of concept. The city initially planned to allow Musk to begin building without first doing an Environmental Impact Study. That plan was nixed when activists sued. It hasn't stopped Musk from pursuing his dreams elsewhere though (read: in Hawthorne). DUGOUT LOOP Musk has also proposed a tunnel that would carry passengers to Dodger Stadium from Los Feliz, East Hollywood and Rampart Village. The proposed transit system would transport eight to 16 passengers per vehicle, with a cap of 1,400 people per ballgame or event. According to The Boring Company's website, Dugout Loop -- like the Sepulveda Boulevard tunnel and the Hawthorne Test Tunnel, interestingly enough -- is still just an "operational proof of concept." READ MORE: Elon Musk Smokes Weed With Joe Rogan -- And It's All On Camera UPDATES: 8:14 p.m.: This article was updated with details from our ride inside the underground tunnel. This article was originally published at 1:53 p.m. Hey, thanks. You read the entire story. And we love you for that. Here at LAist, our goal is to cover the stories that matter to you, not advertisers. We don't have paywalls, but we do have payments (aka bills). So if you love independent, local journalism, join us. Let's make the world a better place, together. Donate now. Your tax-deductible gift today powers our reporters and keeps us independent. We rely on you, our reader, not paywalls to stay funded because we believe important news and information should be freely accessible to all. Start your day with LAist Sign up for the Morning Brief, delivered weekdays. Subscribe Six weeks ago, Los Angeles Unified School District administrators made a new contract offer to members of the district's teachers union, hoping to prevent its first teachers strike in nearly 30 years. Back then, leaders of United Teachers Los Angeles rejected the offer as "a trojan horse." But this week, a neutral, state-appointed third party, known as a fact-finder, essentially said that the district's earlier offer -- while far from perfect -- could be a starting point for a possible deal with UTLA. NEW: LAUSD Teachers Have Set A Date To Go On Strike On Tuesday, LAUSD officials released the report from the fact-finder, who was charged with offering suggestions for resolving the nearly two-year-old contract dispute. The fact finder's suggestions are just that -- suggestions. Either side can simply ignore the recommendations -- and now that they've been released, UTLA leaders are under no legal obligation to return to negotiations. The union's president, Alex Caputo-Pearl, has said that UTLA's 30,000 teachers, counselors, school nurses and librarians will walk off the job in January if the district doesn't meet their demands. FULL REPORT: Read the entire list of recommendations Here's what fact-finder and professional mediator David A. Weinberg recommended: ADOPT LAUSD'S OFFER ON SALARIES: The fact-finder endorsed LAUSD's most recent offer of a 6 percent raise for UTLA members -- 3 percent in back pay and another 3 percent for the current school year (as opposed to a total of 6.5 percent, retroactive to 2017). He asked the district to drop its demand for teachers to complete an extra 12 hours of training to receive the raise. SALARY Recommendation: adopt @LASchools offer of 6 percent (3% retro, 3% ongoing) minus the district's proposal for additional work hours. pic.twitter.com/OZJo4pwQPX Kyle Stokes (@kystokes) December 18, 2018 ADOPT LAUSD'S PROPOSAL ON RETIREE BENEFITS: LAUSD wants to require teachers to be older or have logged more years of service with the district in order to qualify for retiree benefits -- a proposal known as the "Rule of 87." Weinberg said he agreed with the union's call for salaries that were more competitive with other Southern California districts, but that "making some adjustment for future teachers ... may help in the future to free up more money for salaries." ACCEPT KEY UTLA DEMAND ON CLASS SIZE: Union officials cheered the fact-finder's recommendation to scrap a portion of the contract that currently give LAUSD powers to raise class sizes unilaterally. LAUSD is willing to get rid of that contract language; the sticking point has been what new language takes its place. On Oct. 31, district negotiators proposed a replacement. Union officials found it to be even worse than the original, but offered no alternative at the time. In his report, the fact-finder essentially urged the two sides to go back to the table and hash out the details. CLASS SIZES Recommendation: - adopt @UTLAnow proposal to eliminate contract provision that gives district flexibility to raise class sizes - adopt new class size regulations - @LASchools should spend more to hire more teachers, librarians, nurses and counselors pic.twitter.com/oH1KSgycP3 Kyle Stokes (@kystokes) December 18, 2018 WRITE SMALLER BASELINE CLASS SIZE LIMITS INTO CONTRACT: Class sizes in LAUSD are regulated differently by grade and by school, but the limits on class sizes are written into the contract. Union officials weren't only concerned that the Oct. 31 offer would grant LAUSD too much freedom to raise class sizes, but also that it would lock in baseline class sizes that were themselves too large. In his report, Weinberg urged the two sides to negotiate a class size grid -- with new average and maximum class size levels that are lower than current levels. ACCEPT LAUSD'S OFFER TO SPEND (A LITTLE) MORE ON CLASS SIZE: The fact-finder recommended the district increase spending by "1 to 3 percent in order to recruit additional teachers and staff to reduce class size" and hire more nurses, counselors or librarians. LAUSD officials said this amount lines up with an offer it made on Sept. 25 -- a targeted effort to reduce class sizes in 90 of the district's highest need schools. For example, the fact-finder asks @UTLAnow to drop its demand to among other things require a 60% vote of union members at any school site to convert it into a magnet or other school of choice. (See my highlights) pic.twitter.com/3QLfA6P1tl Kyle Stokes (@kystokes) December 18, 2018 STOP ARGUING ABOUT ALMOST EVERYTHING ELSE: The fact-finder said the two sides were negotiating over too many proposals -- many of which were union ideas that, while well-intentioned, rely on "a level of trust between labor and management which is not present at this time." So Weinberg essentially argued the two sides should drop most of their other proposals (like UTLA's demand that teachers get to vote on every campus conversion into a magnet school) or turn them into small-scale pilot programs (like LAUSD's proposal to shake up its teacher evaluation system.) Among the items on which Weinberg asks the union to punt: caseloads for special education teachers. "The changes to caseloads requested by the union," the fact-finder wrote, "are quite expensive." HOW DID PEOPLE REACT? Both sides found victories to claim in the fact-finder's report. "I think the report is fair," said LAUSD school board vice president Nick Melvoin. "I wouldn't say it's a home run for either party." In a statement, UTLA's Caputo-Pearl said the fact-finder confirmed several "essential UTLA positions," including on the size of the district's $1.8 billion reserve -- money he's previously accused LAUSD of refusing to spend on items the union wants. But LAUSD superintendent Austin Beutner said the report also confirms the district's counter-argument to the union's claims: as the fact-finder puts it, LAUSD's "reserves in the coming years will be decreasing due to ... anticipated deficit spending." Beutner called for district and union negotiators to return to the bargaining table to close a deal. "The neutral fact-finder has told us the path forward is clear," Beutner said at a Tuesday morning press conference. [PRESS RELEASE] UTLA calls on @LASchools @austinbeutner to immediately retract his statement. Contrary to what he told reporters this morning, no agreement salary or otherwise has been reached between UTLA and LAUSD. READ MORE: https://t.co/QDs0c5qZvU pic.twitter.com/yxWu1pEBI5 United Teachers Los Angeles (@UTLAnow) December 19, 2018 In response, union leaders accused Beutner of mischaracterizing their position. UTLA's Caputo-Pearl said in a statement that Beutner seemed "more interested in perpetuating falsehoods than finding a real path to an agreement that respects teachers, parents our students and communities." Two school board members Tuesday welcomed the fact-finding report as an opening for resolving the long-running dispute. Teachers have been working without a contract for more than a year. Last July, UTLA declared an impasse and walked away from un-mediated contract talks. "We do not want to see a strike in Los Angeles that hurts our children and families," said board president Monica Garcia, who appeared alongside Beutner at Tuesday's press event. Melvoin -- who once voted against a labor contract because he felt it didn't do enough to curb rapidly-rising spending on pensions and benefits -- said he believes the fact-finder's report offers a reasonable framework for a deal. "I don't see a willingness to completely capitulate" to all UTLA demands, Melvoin said, "because I think everyone knows the price that we would be paying as a district" if accepting the union's costly proposals now only led to layoffs and cuts in the future. However, Melvoin said, "within the parameters of this report, there's enough there to get us to a deal." UTLA leaders said they plan to hold a press conference on Wednesday to "make an announcement." UPDATED, Dec. 18, 6 p.m.: This post was updated to reflect statements from Beutner, Garcia, Melvoin and Caputo-Pearl. Hey, thanks. You read the entire story. And we love you for that. Here at LAist, our goal is to cover the stories that matter to you, not advertisers. We don't have paywalls, but we do have payments (aka bills). So if you love independent, local journalism, join us. Let's make the world a better place, together. Donate now. Your tax-deductible gift today powers our reporters and keeps us independent. We rely on you, our reader, not paywalls to stay funded because we believe important news and information should be freely accessible to all. Start your day with LAist Sign up for the Morning Brief, delivered weekdays. Subscribe The Vatican announced Wednesday that it has accepted the resignation of Los Angeles Auxiliary Bishop Monsignor Alexander Salazar. Salazar was accused of misconduct with a minor while he served as a priest at the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary Church in Pasadena in the 1990s. Salazar has repeatedly denied the allegation, but stepped down nonetheless. The charges against Salazar were first reported to the Pasadena Police Department in 2002. Pasadena police say the department investigated an accusation of "lewd acts upon a child" that allegedly occurred at a private home, but determined the accusation to be unfounded. Still, it submitted a report to the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office, which in August 2002, declined to file charges. The Los Angeles Archdiocese says it became aware of the allegations against Salazar in 2005. Because Salazar was then a bishop, local officials reported the incident to the Vatican, as required by Catholic Church canon law. The Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, the office that handles abuse claims, investigated Salazar and determined he could remain a bishop, but with certain precautionary conditions imposed on his ministry. Church officials have not yet provided details about those conditions. Salazar was ordained as a priest in 1984 and served as a regional bishop for San Pedro. Patrick Wall, a legal advocate for survivors of clergy sexual abuse said it is clear Salazar would have continued to have access to children as a regional bishop. "As far as we can tell, he was never penalized in any way, shape or form," Wall said. "He fully functioned as a bishop. And that's the scary part. How is the public supposed to protect their children if they're not properly warned?" Earlier this year, Archbishop Jose Gomez requested a full review of sexual misconduct allegations in an attempt to update the church's list of credibly accused priests. The archdiocese added the names of 54 priests accused of abuse since 2008 in the update, the first in 10 years. As part of that process, the archbishop asked the Holy See for permission to allow a local clergy misconduct oversight board to review the decades-old case against Salazar. That review board found the allegation to be credible and recommended that the bishop be removed from ministry. Archbishop Gomez accepted that recommendation and passed it along to Pope Francis, who accepted Salazar's resignation Wednesday. "These decisions have been made out of deep concern for the healing and reconciliation of abuse victims and for the good of the Church's mission," Gomez said in a letter to L.A. church faithful. Aaron Schrank reported this story as part of his coverage of religion, international affairs and the Southern California diaspora made possible by a grant from the Luce Foundation. UPDATES: Dec. 19, 8:30 p.m.: This article was updated with more details from Pasadena police, Los Angeles district attorney's office and the L.A. Archdiocese. This article was originally published on Dec. 19, 9:55 a.m. Jessica Ogilvie contributed to this story. Hey, thanks. You read the entire story. And we love you for that. Here at LAist, our goal is to cover the stories that matter to you, not advertisers. We don't have paywalls, but we do have payments (aka bills). So if you love independent, local journalism, join us. Let's make the world a better place, together. Donate now. Your tax-deductible gift today powers our reporters and keeps us independent. We rely on you, our reader, not paywalls to stay funded because we believe important news and information should be freely accessible to all. Start your day with LAist Sign up for the Morning Brief, delivered weekdays. Subscribe UPDATED, Dec. 19, 12 p.m. -- For more than a year, parents of the 480,000 students in the Los Angeles Unified School District have anxiously watched a low-simmering contract dispute with the district's teachers union, wondering when the feud might boil over. On Wednesday, parents got their answer. Teachers union leaders announced they will call a strike on Jan. 10 if they haven't reached a contract agreement with LAUSD by then. It would be the first work stoppage called by United Teachers Los Angeles since the union's nine-day strike in 1989. At a press conference, UTLA president Alex Caputo-Pearl said union negotiators would not return to the bargaining table until the district takes "a different approach to having discussions." "We're not going to go through another 20 months of unfair bargaining practices on the part of the district," Caputo-Pearl said. "We have several core issues they've literally never responded to -- around early education, regulation of charter [schools], limiting standardized tests." "The district knows where we are," Caputo-Pearl added. "We're right down the street from each other." The announcement comes one day after a neutral third party -- known as a fact-finder -- unveiled recommendations for settling the dispute. But neither UTLA nor LAUSD is bound to accept the fact-finder's suggestions. With the release of the fact-finder's report, there's nothing to legally stop UTLA from striking. READ MORE: A comprehensive guide to the UTLA-LAUSD dispute, including a breakdown of the issues at stake. On Tuesday, the fact-finder validated some of the arguments that both sides had been making at the bargaining table. He urged to UTLA settle at the district's salary offer and concluded that both the union and LAUSD had valid points about regulating class sizes. The fact-finder pushed the two sides to return to the table to resolve the outstanding class size points and punt on almost all other outstanding items as too complicated, too ambitious or too costly. LAUSD superintendent Austin Beutner may have inflamed tensions further with his comments about the fact-finding report. Materials displayed next to Beutner at a press conference Tuesday claimed UTLA had "agreed" to the district's salary offer -- a 6 percent raise. "The report says LAUSD's offer of 6 percent is appropriate," he said, "and UTLA has agreed that it's appropriate." Afterward, UTLA leaders accused Beutner of stretching the facts. The union has not agreed to a 6 percent raise as a matter of contract negotiations; the union's appointee to the fact-finding panel had merely concurred with the fact-finder's recommendation of accepting the district's salary offer. "Implying that an agreement has been reached," Caputo-Pearl said in a statement, "tells us he is more interested in perpetuating falsehoods than finding a real path to an agreement." Teachers have been working without a contract for more than a year, and negotiations have been ongoing since as early as January 2017. In July of this year, teachers declared an impasse and walked away from unmediated contract talks. Mediation followed in the fall, but proved unsuccesful. UPDATED, Dec. 19, 12 p.m.: This story was updated to include new comments from Caputo-Pearl. Hey, thanks. You read the entire story. And we love you for that. Here at LAist, our goal is to cover the stories that matter to you, not advertisers. We don't have paywalls, but we do have payments (aka bills). So if you love independent, local journalism, join us. Let's make the world a better place, together. Donate now. Your tax-deductible gift today powers our reporters and keeps us independent. We rely on you, our reader, not paywalls to stay funded because we believe important news and information should be freely accessible to all. Start your day with LAist Sign up for the Morning Brief, delivered weekdays. Subscribe In recent weeks, thousands of migrants have gathered in Tijuana, hoping for asylum in the United States. Some will be deported before ever stepping foot in California. Others will be detained by U.S. immigration authorities as they wait for their hearings. But some will be allowed to live in California while their cases wind through the system. Legal experts say they'll be lucky to be here. The state has a cadre of pro bono attorneys eager to help them navigate the complicated asylum process. But California's high cost of living could push families out of the very places offering the most help. "A lot of our immigrant community are finding themselves having to move outside of Los Angeles so that they can afford to live," said Patricia Ortiz, a lawyer with the Esperanza Immigrant Rights Project. "But once they're there, there is not quite the same amount of resources or support that they would have here," she said. One of Ortiz's clients, Rosa, has been in Los Angeles for about two months. She fled gang violence in El Salvador with her two children. Before Rosa arrived, she pictured Los Angeles as a place full of luxury and natural beauty. Some areas are like that, Rosa said. But her corner of the city looks and feels familiar. "I sometimes feel as if I were in the capital of El Salvador," said Rosa, who requested that her last name be withheld because her asylum case is ongoing. She was surprised by how much housing costs here. During their first month in Los Angeles, Rosa and her family lived in cramped quarters with another family sleeping right next to the bathroom. "We chose to move because we could not access the bathroom," she said. "We did not feel comfortable entering it." Since then, Rosa has found a studio apartment near downtown L.A. that rents for $800 per month. But even coming up with that amount will be a struggle. Asylum seekers are not eligible for a work permit until at least six months into their cases. Many work under the table to get by. Despite these hurdles, Rosa said California provides what she didn't have in El Salvador: Safety, and the chance of a better life for her kids. "There is opportunity here," she said. "Here, you can realize any dream you want." Ortiz said as expensive as Los Angeles is, asylum seekers here have access to people who want to help. For instance, she said, "Getting our clients connected to mental health resources outside of the L.A. region is very difficult. It's something that we are always struggling with." Jenna Gilbert, a pro bono asylum attorney at Human Rights First, said it's heartbreaking to get calls from clients who plan to leave California months into their case, because they can't afford to stay. She tells them they're not just losing their lawyer. They're leaving behind California's Ninth Circuit for courts that may be more likely to deny asylum claims. "If you move to a small town in Texas, housing is going to be much cheaper," Gilbert said. "But you probably won't have the legal resources. And you also will be in a circuit that is much less favorable to asylum seekers." In 2017, California lawmakers approved a state budget that included $45 million in funding for immigrant legal services. With that increased funding, the state's Department of Social Services has contracted dozens of nonprofits -- including Esperanza and Human Rights First -- to offer legal help to thousands of immigrants every year. The state money is spread to organizations throughout California. But regional breakdowns show that nonprofits in Los Angeles and the Bay Area have received the largest chunks of money. These areas may be expensive for migrants, but the data shows that having access to legal aid makes a huge difference in asylum cases. "Finding a lawyer is powerfully associated with positive outcomes," said UCLA law professor Ingrid Eagly. In a study that tracked outcomes for families after being released from detention, Eagly and her colleagues found that between 2001 and 2016, released families that did not have a lawyer were only allowed to stay in the country 7 percent of the time. Those who had a lawyer increased their odds to 49 percent. "They're more likely to be able to gather evidence, to work collaboratively with their lawyer and to otherwise prepare and find witnesses who can testify in their case," said Eagly. The data from Eagly's study does not include cases since President Trump took office. Under his administration, asylum denial rates have been increasing. Lizeth looks out the window of her apartment in Los Angeles, Dec. 6, 2018. (David Wagner/KPCC) (David Wagner/KPCC) THE LONG ROAD TO ASYLUM Even on a day off from her job at an El Pollo Loco, Lizeth finds herself cooking. While her kids are at school, she stirs a big pot of caldo de res, or beef soup. "I've always cooked," she said. "I like it." Lizeth, who only wants to use her middle name, had a small business selling food out of her home in Honduras. But she said gangs threatened her for refusing to pay a "war tax," a local form of extortion. She fled with her husband and two of her children, now aged 6 and 14. They've been living in Los Angeles for more than two years, and they're still awaiting a decision in their asylum case. By now, they've settled into a routine. "At six o'clock, we get up and get ready," Lizeth said. They need to be out the door by 7:20 a.m. so Lizeth can get to work by 8:30 a.m. It took Lizeth a year and a half to get her work permit. Her husband just received his. Like other asylum seekers, they started off renting rooms in houses crammed with other occupants. But now, they can afford the $1,000 rent for their own studio apartment in the San Fernando Valley. It doesn't offer much privacy, Lizeth said. A simple room divider separates the living room from the bedroom. But their home is decked out with festive Christmas decorations. "It's one thousand percent better" than anything she expected to have, Lizeth said. "I have dreams. I have goals. And I know I can achieve them. In my country, you have goals. You have hope. But everything remains a dream," she said. Two years may sound like a long time to wait for an asylum decision. But Lizeth's attorney, Jenna Gilbert, said these days, "Two years is on the shorter end." As years go by, Gilbert worries that judges may start to think her clients no longer have a credible fear of gang members in their home country. She says a claim that may have been strong a few years ago, "maybe today isn't so strong." "Things are changing so rapidly, there's really no way to provide your clients with any kind of comfort, any kind of understanding of what the road ahead might look like," Gilbert said. UC Hastings law professor Karen Musalo attributed that uncertainty to recent actions by the Trump administration. In a decision earlier this year, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions wrote, "Generally, claims by aliens pertaining to domestic violence or gang violence perpetrated by non-governmental actors will not qualify for asylum." Musalo said Sessions was ignoring the strong legal basis many migrants have for these sorts of asylum claims. But immigration judges are getting a different message. "Certainly the administration is sending a message that people fleeing gangs or people fleeing domestic violence should not be recognized as refugees," Musalo said. On Wednesday, a federal judge struck down parts of the Trump administration's policy of turning away asylum seekers based on domestic violence and gang violence claims. "Many of these policies are inconsistent with the intent of Congress," wrote Judge Emmet Sullivan of the U.S. District Court in Washington. "And because it is the will of Congress--not the whims of the executive--that determines the standard for expedited removal, the court finds that those policies are unlawful." At this point, Gilbert has been hoping that a decision in Lizeth's case is delayed until 2020 or later, when there could be a new president in the White House with more favorable asylum policies. "Now that we're kind of at the halfway point, I'm hoping that cases slow down as much as possible until we can see the end of this administration," Gilbert said. "Hopefully." In the meantime, Lizeth and her family grow more comfortable in California every day. They've put a down payment on a car. Their kids are picking up English in school. Lizeth worries what would happen if they were deported back to Honduras. "They think those of us coming from the United States are carrying a lot of money," she said. "There are many cases of people who went back to Honduras and didn't live more than a month." But for now, Lizeth said, the future is bright. In Honduras, holidays were hard. She could afford to give her kids gifts or a nice meal, but never both. "Now, I'm going to make a big dinner. And my children will have clothes, shoes and a nice Christmas," she said. "Like I haven't had in a long time." UPDATES: 11:15 a.m.: This article was updated with information about a Wednesday federal court ruling pertaining to the Trump administration's asylum policies. The California Dream series is a statewide media collaboration of CALmatters, KPBS, KPCC, KQED and Capital Public Radio with support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the James Irvine Foundation. Sen. Cory Booker Cautiously Praises Passing of Criminal Justice Reform Bill WASHINGTON (AP) The Senate passed a sweeping criminal justice bill Tuesday that addresses concerns that the nations war on drugs had led to the imprisonment of too many Americans for non-violent crimes without adequately preparing them for their return to society. Senate passage of the bill by a vote of 87-12 culminates years of negotiations and gives President Donald Trump a signature policy victory, with the outcome hailed by scores of conservative and liberal advocacy groups. The House is expected to pass the bill this week, sending it to the presidents desk for his signature. The bill gives judges more discretion when sentencing some drug offenders and boosts prisoner rehabilitation efforts. It also reduces the life sentence for some drug offenders with three convictions, or three strikes, to 25 years. Another provision would allow about 2,600 federal prisoners sentenced for crack cocaine offenses before August 2010 the opportunity to petition for a reduced penalty. ADVERTISEMENT This will keep our communities safer, and provide hope and a second chance, to those who earn it. In addition to everything else, billions of dollars will be saved. I look forward to signing this into law! Trump added. The vote also thrilled Democrats. Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., said the nations prisons are full of Americans who are struggling with mental illness and addiction, and who are overwhelmingly poor. He said the nations criminal justice system feeds on certain communities and not on others, and said the bill represents a step toward healing for those communities. Lets make no mistake, this legislation, which is one small step, will affect thousands and thousands of lives, Booker said. When the bill appeared to have stalled in recent weeks, Sen. Charles Grassley, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, pleaded with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to bring it up for a vote. With Trumps urging, McConnell eventually agreed, and voted for the bill as well. The First Step Act takes lessons from history and from states our laboratories of democracy to reduce crime, save taxpayer dollars and strengthen faith and fairness in our criminal justice system, Grassley said. The Senate turned back three amendments Tuesday from Republican senators Tom Cotton of Arkansas and John Kennedy of Louisiana, who said the bill endangered public safety. Supporters voiced concerns that passing any of the amendments would have sunk the bill. One amendment would have excluded more prisoners from participating in educational and training programs that allow them to earn credits. Those credits can then be used to gain an earlier release to a halfway house or home confinement to finish out their sentence. Another amendment would have required that victims be notified before a prisoner gets that earlier release. The third would have required the Federal Bureau of Prisons to track and report the re-arrest rate for each prisoner who gets early release. While the bill has marginally improved from earlier versions, Im disappointed my amendments to exclude child molesters from early release and to protect victims rights were not adopted, Cotton said. I also remain concerned that reducing sentences for drug traffickers and violent felons is a threat to public safety. ADVERTISEMENT Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said the bill already carves out some 60 different crimes that make prisoners ineligible for early release to a halfway house or home confinement. He said Cottons amendment was too expansive and would prevent at least 30,000 prisoners from participation. Durbin said the Federal Bureau of Prisons also gives victims the opportunity to be notified upon a change in the prisoners status, but its a choice. He said about 10 percent of victims choose not to be notified because of the trauma involved in revisiting the crime. Meanwhile, the amendment from Cotton and Kennedy would make it a requirement. Supporting the Cotton amendment is basically saying to these crime victims, Were going to force this information on you whether its in the best interest of your family, whether you want it or not, Durbin said. That is not respectful of crime victims. The bill would affect only federal prisoners, who make up less than 10 percent of the countrys prison population. An array of liberal and conservative advocacy groups rallied in support of the bill. For example, the Koch brothers-backed group, Americans for Prosperity, applauded senators for putting policy ahead of politics. The American Civil Liberties Union said the bill was by no means perfect. But we are in the midst of a mass incarceration crisis, and the time to act is now. Law enforcement groups were more split. It was backed by the Fraternal Order of Police and the International Association of Chiefs of Police but opposed by the National Sheriffs Association. The union representing federal prison guards also joined in supporting the measure. The bill now heads to the House of Representatives for a vote. If the House passes the bill it then heads to the desk of Donald Trump. Statue of Liberty Climber Therese Okoumou Convicted of July 4 Protest, Says She has No Regrets NEW YORK (AP) A woman who climbed the base of the Statue of Liberty on July 4 to protest the separation of families at the Mexican border was convicted Monday of misdemeanor charges by a judge who said a persons viewpoint cant be a factor in whether laws are enforced. The verdict by U.S. Magistrate Judge Gabriel W. Gorenstein came two hours after Therese Okoumou got choked up as she testified, saying images from the U.S.-Mexican border of children being torn from their parents gave her nightmares. She faces up to 18 months in prison at a March 5 sentencing on charges of trespassing, interference with an agencys function and disorderly conduct. ADVERTISEMENT Ron Kuby, one of Okoumous lawyers, told the judge that his client wanted a trial even though it was clear the likelihood of her conviction today was close to 100 percent. In a courtroom packed with emotional Okoumou supporters, Gorenstein explained that his decision needed to be consistent whether it was Okoumou who climbed the statue or somebody with the exact opposite opinions. He noted that Okoumou repeatedly ignored orders to descend from a perch at the feet of the statue that was high enough that a prosecutor said it could have seriously injured or killed her or tourists below. New York Police Department rescuers were forced to climb a rickety ladder and gird themselves like mountain climbers to safely bring her down. The nearly four-hour demonstration forced an evacuation of 4,330 people from the statue grounds on one of its busiest days of the year. Okoumou had testified that she couldnt live with the sight of children in cages and thought climbing the statue was the only way to bring attention to the issue. I have had nightmares. I just couldnt live with it, she said. ADVERTISEMENT Outside court afterward, she stood alongside Kuby, defense attorney Rhidaya Trivedi and California attorney Michael Avenatti, who served as an adviser in the case, as supporters held signs behind her. We stand on the right side of history, Okoumou said. I am not a bit discouraged today. She said she didnt regret her Statue of Liberty protest. In a statement, U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman praised Gorensteins verdict. The act of climbing the base of the Statue of Liberty went well beyond peaceable protest, a right we certainly respect. It was a crime that put people at grave risk, he said, citing the work by NYPD and U.S. Park Police officers who rescued her. Gorenstein allowed Okoumou to remain free without addition bail conditions requested by Assistant U.S. Attorney Brett Kalikow, who said Okoumou had twice tried to climb the Eiffel Tower in Paris and was arrested at an August 2017 Department of Labor protest. The Senate passed a sweeping criminal justice bill Tuesday that addresses concerns that the nations war on drugs had led to the imprisonment of too many Americans for non-violent crimes without adequately preparing them for their return to society. Senate passage of the bill by a vote of 87-12 culminates years of negotiations and gives President Donald Trump a signature policy victory, with the outcome hailed by scores of conservative and liberal advocacy groups. The House is expected to pass the bill this week, sending it to the presidents desk for his signature. Wednesday, December 19, 2018 Dan Trevas does his usual excellent job summarizing two unauthorized practice decisions of the Ohio Supreme Court The Ohio Supreme Court today found two men had engaged in the unauthorized practice of law and ordered them to cease. In separate per curiam opinions, the Court found: Henry J. Ward Jr. of Akron provided legal representation and filed lawsuits while describing himself as Running Wolf, Native American Indian; a historically Independent Paralegal, Attorney-in-Fact, Next Friend, and Tort Litigator. Matthew Cohen of Pickerington filed eviction notices and sought money damages in 32 cases regarding properties he owned and managed through limited liability companies. Ward Case: Actions Filed in State, Federal Courts In 2016, the Office of the Disciplinary Counsel filed a complaint with the Courts Board on the Unauthorized Practice of Law against Ward for his legal representation of Patricia Marie Petroff-Kline. Ward, who has never been licensed to practice law in Ohio, attempted to represent Petroff-Kline in the administration of her mothers estate in Medina County Probate Court. He filed an Emergency Motion for Continuance to File Report document with the court. A probate court magistrate assigned to the case noted that Ward was attempting to represent the mothers fiduciary without being a licensed attorney. He recommended the motion be denied, and the probate judge agreed. Ward also filed two documents with the U.S. District Court of Appeals for the Northern District of Ohio, including a complaint for medical malpractice and wrongful death. The judge dismissed the case and noted that Ward could not represent Petroff-Kline because he was not a licensed attorney. Ward Snubs Investigation Ward did not answer the complaint the disciplinary counsel filed with the board in September 2016. However, in December 2016, he faxed a document to the disciplinary counsel that was labeled a motion to dismiss, set aside, and vacate the complaint. He did not submit the document to the board, but the disciplinary counsel provided it. The board noted that Ward did not answer the complaint or participate in a prehearing conference. The opinion stated the Court has found the drafting and preparation of pleadings filed in Ohio courts to be part of the practice of law and that Ward engaged in the unauthorized practice of law by filing the documents. The Court described his conduct as flagrant, and issued two $2,500 civil penalties. Along with the $5,000 penalty, the Court also barred Ward from preparing, signing, and filing legal documents and instruments on behalf of others in Ohio courts or engaging in other unauthorized legal practices. The Court unanimously agreed to the decision, but Justice Judith L. French noted she would impose a $2,000 total fine. 2018-0699. Disciplinary Counsel v. Ward, Slip Opinion No. 2018-Ohio-5083. Cohen Case: Landlord Mistakes Law The Ohio State Bar Association (OSBA) filed a complaint against Cohen for his attempts to evict tenants from properties he owned and for seeking money damages. The OSBA identified 32 cases, beginning in January 2013, where Cohen sought judgments. Once the OSBA learned of Cohens actions, the association sent him a letter notifying him of the allegation. Cohen stopped the practice once notified. The parties agreed that Cohens action were unknowing or unwitting, and that he did not know that because the properties were owned by limited liabilities companies, he could not as non-attorney represent the companies in court. Cohen owns and manages all of the companies. The decision noted that almost all the tenants were evicted in the cases he filed, but that in 28 of them, he pursued the tenants for money damages. In the four cases in which he was granted damages by the court, he has not attempted to collect them. The Court chose not to impose any financial penalty on Cohen, but ordered him to not take further actions in the tenant cases or commit any other unauthorized practices of law. While agreeing to the sanction, Chief Justice Maureen OConnor and Justices Patrick F. Fischer and Mary DeGenaro recommended the Court remand the case to the board and for the board to consider whether Cohen should hire an attorney to vacate any monetary judgments he obtained. 2018-0703. Ohio State Bar Assn. v. Cohen, Slip Opinion No. 2018-Ohio-5084. (Mike Frisch) https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/legal_profession/2018/12/dan-trevas-does-his-usual-excellent-job-summarizing-a-bar-discipline-decision-of-the-ohio-supreme-court-the-ohio-supreme-cou.html Tuesday, December 18, 2018 The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit affirmed a decision to deny access to the tax records of a person in the news The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) collects more than money. It acquires and maintains a reservoir of sensitive information about taxpayers. And time was, the President couldfor any reason or no reason at allorder the IRS to make that sensitive information public. The arrangement worked out fine for decades. Then the Nixon administration compiled a list of political enemies and ordered the IRS to harass them. The resulting scandal prompted the Congress to enact sweeping legislation to protect taxpayer privacy. The Internal Revenue Code (IRC) now mandates that tax [r]eturns and return information shall be confidential unless they fall within one of the statutes narrowly drawn exceptions. I.R.C. 6103(a). At first blush, the IRC stands in tension with the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which vests the public with a broad right to access government records. 5 U.S.C. 552(a)(3)(A). One statute demands openness; the other privacy. But as we explain infra, the statutes work well together. Not all records are subject to FOIA requests. An agency need not disclose records specifically exempted from disclosure by statute. Id. 552(b)(3). Because the IRC is such a statute, records that fall within its confidentiality mandate are exempt from FOIA. This case presents the question whether a member of the publichere, a nonprofit organizationcan use a FOIA request to obtain an unrelated individuals tax records without his consent. With certain limited exceptionsall inapplicable herethe answer is no. No one can demand to inspect anothers tax records. And the IRCs confidentiality protections extend to the ordinary taxpayer and the President alike. Accordingly, we affirm the dismissal of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC)s lawsuit seeking President Donald J. Trumps income tax records. The case was brought by the Electronic Privacy Information Center EPIC is a nonprofit organization dedicated to focusing public attention on emerging privacy and civil liberties issues. A few months after the 2016 election, EPIC sent the IRS a FOIA request seeking President Donald J. Trumps individual income tax returns for tax years 2010 forward, and any other indications of financial relations with the Russian government or Russian businesses. The panel HENDERSON and MILLETT, Circuit Judges, and EDWARDS, Senior Circuit Judge. Opinion for the Court filed by Circuit Judge HENDERSON. (Mike Frisch) https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/legal_profession/2018/12/the-united-states-court-of-appeals-for-the-district-of-columbia-circuit-this-case-presents-the-question-whether-a-member-of.html A year of unrest in Afghanistan is ending with new hope that a reconciliation process with the Taliban may be possible. The war Afghanistan began with the American invasion in 2001. It is the longest conflict in American history. In September, long-time American diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad was appointed to negotiate an end to the war. He formerly served as the United States ambassador to both Afghanistan and Iraq. Since his appointment, Khalilzad has made three trips to the area. He has spoken with representatives of the Taliban and Afghanistans neighbors. Several developments led to these contacts. The most important of them was the United States agreeing to communicate directly with the Taliban. U.S. State Department official Alice Wells met with Taliban representatives in Qatars capital, Doha, earlier this year. Afghan President Ashraf Ghani had proposed peace talks to the Taliban several times in 2018. The first offer came in February, when he offered them a political office in Kabul. He also offered to cancel restrictions against Taliban leaders. Taliban forces ignored the offers, which they said did not meet their most important demand: a withdrawal of all foreign forces from the country. The group also accused the Afghan government of taking orders from the U.S. The biggest news of the year from Afghanistan was the cease-fire during the Eid al-Fitr religious holiday in June. After 17 years of war, the two sides decided to halt fighting for three days to celebrate Eid. Images of militants and Afghan civilians spending time together flooded both traditional and social media. Taliban fighters were seen taking selfies, shaking hands and smiling at government security forces. Our leaders have ordered a three-day cease-fire, one Taliban fighter told the French news agency AFP. We want a permanent cease-fire to resolve all our issues, he said. We are all brothers, another one told VOA. While all this was happening, the level of violence remained high throughout the year. The Taliban continued to launch thousands of attacks, severely testing the ability of Afghan forces. An attack on the city of Ghazni lasted for days and caused hundreds of deaths. The United Nations says Afghan civilians continued to die in record numbers in 2018. U.S. generals were reported as saying that the losses suffered by Afghan security force were unsustainable. Twelve Americans died in action in Afghanistan in 2018. A U.S. military report showed that the Afghan governments control over territory dropped to the lowest level -- 55.5 percent. During the same period, the United States increased its troop numbers -- to 14,000 from fewer than 10,000 last year -- and airstrikes in support of Afghan troops. U.S. military reports say that the U.S. Air Force dropped a record number of bombs this year, at almost 6,000 by October. Afghanistan held parliamentary elections in October. However, the results were damaged by political disputes between two groups: the countrys Independent Election Commission and the Electoral Complaints Commission. In addition, another group, Islamic State, continued attacking targets in Nangarhar province and Kabul city throughout the year. 2018 in Afghanistan is ending with a hope that the increased push by the United States and the willingness by the Taliban to negotiate may produce results next year. The negotiations are in still development right now, and a road map to some form of reconciliation has yet to take shape. I'm Caty Weaver. Ayesha Tanzaam reported this story for VOANews.com. George Grow adapted his report for Learning English. Caty Weaver was the editor. We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments Section. _______________________________________________________________ Words in This Story reconciliation n. the act of causing two or more people (or groups) to become friendly again unsustainable adj. something that is easily damaged Japan is planning a large increase in defense spending and new weapons, including refitting a helicopter carrier for new high-technology fighters. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe approved the defense spending increase Tuesday. Defense officials say Japan needs to be prepared for North Koreas missile and nuclear threats, Chinas increased military activity and natural disasters. The new defense plan is part of Abes push to expand Japans military power. He has long wanted to revise Japans constitution to permit Japanese soldiers to fight in support of allied forces including American troops. The constitution, written by the U.S. after Japans defeat in World War II, permits the use of force only for defense. The defense plan calls for refitting an existing helicopter carrier into a ship that can deploy U.S.-made F-35B stealth fighters. Officials say the improved helicopter carrier Izumo would be especially useful to defend disputed islands against China in the western Pacific. A cost estimate for the refitted carrier was not given. The work will be done over five years. The ship will carry 10 stealth fighters. The plan also calls for refitting a second helicopter carrier. The move signals a major change in Japans naval defense. The country has not built aircraft carriers out of concerns that they may remind Japans Asian neighbors of aggression by Japans wartime Navy. Officials say possession of an aircraft carrier would give Japan the ability to attack in violation of its constitution. Japan also plans to have cruise missiles designed to hit enemy targets. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said Japan was making groundless and irresponsible accusations against Chinas normal defense construction and military activities. She added, Neighboring countries in Asia and the international community have long been highly concerned about Japans moves in military and security fields. Japanese officials said that the Izumo will be used as an aircraft carrier only when necessary for national defense. Japans cabinet secretary added the plan falls within the minimum necessity allowed under the constitution. Japans defense spending has increased for the last six years since Abe took office in 2012. Japan plans to buy 147 fighter planes, including 42 F-35Bs, over the next few years. The American-made F-35 fighter jets cost $90 million each. The country also plans to add the U.S. Aegis Ashore missile defense system at a cost of $2 billion. The Cabinet approved $240 billion in total defense spending over five years beginning in 2019: a record amount for Japan. Im Mario Ritter, Jr. Hai Do adapted this AP story for VOA Learning English. Mario Ritter Jr. was the editor. Write to us in the Comments Section or on our Facebook page. _____________________________________________________________ Words in This Story refit v. to make something ready for use again, especially with new parts revise v. to make changes especially to correct or improve something renounce v. to formally give something up stealth adj. (technical) describing military aircraft or ships that are designed so that they cannot be easily seen by radar construction n. the act or process of building something allow v. to permit Reducing class size has traditionally been seen as an important way to improve a students educational experience. Many public opinion studies have shown that both teachers and parents favor smaller class sizes. Teachers who go on strike are often seeking lower classroom numbers, among other better working conditions. Many often believe that smaller classes would permit teachers to give more personal attention to their students. This can theoretically lead to improved academic results for students. But one recent study suggests there is not much research-based evidence to support this idea. The research was collected by a team from Denmarks Danish Center for Social Science Research. Results were published by not-for-profit Campbell Collaboration, based in Oslo, Norway. The researchers say the idea of smaller class sizes has been studied and debated for many years. However, they noted a lack of clear research to support class-size reductions. The study notes that one of the main problems with reducing class size is that it can have very high costs. Increasing class size is one of the most common ways school systems control education spending. Financial limitations make it very difficult for many schools to reduce the number of students in the classroom. The new study began by examining 127 studies on classroom size in grades kindergarten through 12 in schools in 41 countries. The researchers goal was to examine the major research studies already completed on the subject. They especially centered on studies that tried to measure whether smaller class size resulted in greater academic success for students. The researchers did not include many of the studies they found on the subject. That is because the researchers found issues with possible sampling problems or bias. In the end, the research centered on 10 main studies. The researchers concluded that there is some evidence to suggest that reducing class size may lead to some improvement in a students reading achievement. But they said the effect is very small. They found just a 53-percent chance that a randomly selected test score from a student from a small class would be higher than the selected score of a student from a larger class. For mathematics achievement, the result was 49 percent. This led the researchers to conclude that there would be no benefit at all to math students in a smaller class size. The National Education Association, or NEA, is an American labor union that represents 3 million educators working at public schools and colleges in the United States. The organization is in favor of smaller class sizes in U.S. schools. For example, the NEA has called for a class size of 15 students in early grades of usual school programs. The NEA says it believes small class size does result in greater student achievement. It has pointed to research that supports this idea. One such study was completed in 2014 by Northwestern University professor Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach. The National Education Policy Center published the study. In that study, Schanzenbach said she also carried out a major examination of available research on the subject. She said her research showed that class size is an important determinant of student outcomes. In addition, she added: All else being equal, increasing class sizes will harm student outcomes. Schanzenbach said her research found evidence that increasing class size was found to directly hurt student test scores. She noted that the effects of larger class size can stay with the students long after they complete their education. Money saved today by increasing class sizes will result in more substantial social and educational costs in the future, she wrote. Im Bryan Lynn. Bryan Lynn wrote this story for VOA Learning English. Ashley Thompson was the editor. Do you think smaller or larger class sizes are better for learning? Write to us in the Comments section, and visit our Facebook page. Quiz - Study: Class Size Has Only Minor Effect on Student Results Start the Quiz to find out Start Quiz _____________________________________________________________ Words in This Story kindergarten n. a school or class for very young children bias n. a strong and often unfair influence on someone or something conclude v. make an ending statement about something achievement n. something good that is achieved randomly adv. done or chosen without any play or system score n. the number of points received in a game or test benefit n. something that helps or provides an advantage outcome n. final result of a process or activity substantial adj. large in amount Two times as many American high school students used nicotine-added electronic cigarettes in 2018 compared to the number of high school users last year. That information comes from a new study about teenage smoking, drinking and drug use in the United States. It was the largest single-year increase in the history of the study, which has been done in each of the past 44 years. It also was much greater than an increase in marijuana smoking during the 1970s. The findings were released on Monday. They confirm the findings of a U.S. government survey completed earlier this year. That survey also found a sharp rise in vaping among children. It led federal officials to request measures that make it harder for children to get vaping products. Experts blame the increase on newer e-cigarettes that look like computer flash drives and can be hard for adults to recognize. Trina Hale goes to South Charleston High School in West Virginia. She told The Associated Press that vaping increased a lot at her school this year. She said that students seem to like the vaping products made by Juul Labs. They can do it wherever, whenever, she said. Olivia Turman attends Cabell Midland High School in Ona, West Virginia. She said she has seen other students hit their vape in class. The government supported survey was a project of researchers at the University of Michigan. The latest findings are based on answers provided by about 45,000 students in grades 8, 10 and 12 in U.S. schools. It found that 1 in 5 high school seniors reported having vaped nicotine in the past month. After vaping and alcohol, the most common drug teenagers use is marijuana, the survey found. About 1 in 4 students said they had used marijuana at least once in the past year. Marijuana use was more common in older children. Nearly 1 in 17 high school seniors said they use marijuana every day. Marijuana smoking is about the same level as it was the past few years. Vaping of marijuana rose, however. More teens are saying no to lots of other substances. The report noted a drop in usage of alcoholic drinks, cigarettes, opioid pills and the drugs cocaine, LSD, ecstasy and heroin. Experts say it is not clear why so many young people are saying no at this time. The nation, as a whole, is in the middle of a deadly drug epidemic, mainly from opioids. What is it that were doing right with teenagers that were not doing with adults? said Doctor Nora Volkow. She is the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. One theory is that young people today are staying home and communicating on cell phones or other electronic devices. In earlier times, they would have socialized together in groups to smoke, drink and try drugs. Drug experimentation is a group activity, Volkow said. What about vaping? Vaping mostly is an individual activity, said David Jernigan, a Boston University researcher who studies alcohol use. The vaping increase is a big worry, however. Health officials say nicotine can harm developing brains. Some researchers also believe vaping will make young people more likely to use cigarettes, and perhaps later try other drugs. But that has yet to happen, surveys show. But vaping products are new, noted Richard Miech, who directed the Michigan survey. If vaping does lead to cigarette use among young people, that may start to show up in the survey as early as next year, he added. Im Susan Shand. The Associated Press reported this story. Susan Shand adapted it for Learning English. The editor was George Grow. Write to us in the Comments Section or on our Facebook page. _______________________________________________________________ Words in This Story cigarette n. a rolled paper product that has the drug nicotine marijuana n. a drug that creates a feeling of being high vaping v. to breathe the gas produced by an electronic cigarette flash drive n. a small device used to store electronic data grade n. a class organized for the work in a given year or a study program senior n. a student in the final year of a study program epidemic n. a product of sudden growth or spread; a disease or condition that affects many people at the same time The memory of a beloved pet inspires one couple's fight against injustice. The Galapagos Islands are among the world's ecosystems most endangered by global warming. A sobering photo spread and in-depth article in Wednesday's New York Times detailed the threat to the fragile islands and their multitude of species. Charles Darwin's voyage to the remote islands off the coast of Ecuador in the late 19th century led to his earth-shaking theory of evolution. Darwin was a pioneering visitor to the islands. Now, along with rising seas and the acidification of the oceans, the once pristine islands are besieged by waves of eco-tourists. I cringe when "Jeopardy" host Alex Trebek pushes Galapagos cruises for his game-show viewers. Places like the Galapagos, the Antarctic and the Arctic should be declared off-limits to humans. Alas, people keep choking them to death as carbon emissions rise beyond the crisis point. The detailed articles regarding the banning of casino employees from entering casinos while off-duty were passed at the Legislative Assembly (AL) yesterday. In total, more than 14,000 employees of casinos will be regulated by this law once it comes into effect. Previously, lawmakers were worried about creating a negative image of the gaming sectors employees. The same concerns were expressed by lawmakers yesterday. I believe that, for a certain period, the law can have an effect at preventing employees from being trapped as gamblers. However, many people worry about the actual practice of the law, said Angela Leong, adding this bill has some practical difficulties in terms of its implementation. As she expressed, casino employees are only able to implement the law using simple observation when identifying whether or not a patron is a casino employee. Are there other effective measures? Will the government build a smart city, and enhance law enforcement through new technologies? Leong asked. I have reiterated in the past that, when the entry regulation is implemented, the supervising party and the gaming operators [both] need to bear great responsibilities, said Leong. The lawmaker stressed that workers banned from entering will likely face emergency situations requiring them to enter a casino while off-duty. Jose Pereira Coutinho also criticized the law for going against principles of equality. He further expressed concern for officers from the Gaming Inspection and Coordination Bureau (DICJ) and other supervising parties, related to heavy workloads as a result of pressure from the large number of people banned from entering the casinos. If there are not enough people to conduct the supervision, how can the authorities implement the law? asked Coutinho. In response to lawmakers, Secretary for Economy and Finance Lionel Leong claimed that the law would not tarnish the image of casino employees. I have never wanted the law to create any discrimination against workers, defended the Secretary. According to Leong, the DICJ, together with gaming operators, will conduct an extensive promotional campaign in order to help workers learn about the implementation of the law. In addition, Leong noted that the entry ban will not affect the careers of any party concerned. I want to reiterate that this law was never intended to affect the careers of people who enter casinos, said Leong, adding we will not consider such things. Regarding whether new technologies might be applied to support law enforcement, Leong noted that the government will consider this when they become available. Meanwhile, DICJ Director Paulo Martins Chan argued that the law will not influence the employment of the affected workers. [Many people] worry they might lose their job once they violate the law. This law simply sets up a penalty. Besides this [penalty], [the law] will not lead to workers losing their jobs, said Chan. The DICJ director also highlighted that the law will come into effect one year after its publication in the government official gazette, which means that a transition period of one year will be given to residents before the laws official implementation. The one-year grace period is meant to allow the parties concerned to get familiar with the law, and for the government authority to conduct seminars explaining the law to the public. In addition, the DICJ director remarked that it is easier for a gaming employee to become addicted to gambling if they watch other people gamble. After the law comes into effect, the government will establish a 24-hour hotline in the hope of implementing the law more effectively. Chan also admitted that there is a shortage of human resources responsible for casino supervision. The law is absolutely established with the aim of responsible gaming. The law [is expected] to prevent people from becoming addicted to gambling, said Chan. I believe that the majority of gaming employees will obey the law. In this bill, it is written that, under some special occasions, [gaming employees] can inform the stationing supervisor in order to enter the casino with a proper reason. However, such special occasions will be few. We still hoped that there could be some flexibility, hence why we made this arrangement. Four bills given green light Four bills related to the government budget and civil servants were passed at the Legislative Assembly yesterday. The four bills are the law for the 2019 budget, the bill for the exercise of offshore activity, the updating of retirement pensions, and the amendment of the civil servants statute. In the 2019 budget, the government expects a consolidated income of MOP122.385 billion, an increase of MOP14.35 billion or 13.3 percent compared to 2018. The general consolidated budget expenditure for 2019 is MOP103.34 billion, representing an increase of MOP2.23 billion compared to 2018. The amendment of the civil servants statute will give civil servants more annual leave flexibility once the law comes into effect. The amendment also increases the maximum number of leave days that can be accumulated and enjoyed in a year. The new law also means that civil servants will need their supervisors approval in order to take an annual leave. Lawmaker Jose Pereira Coutinho is worried that such a change may give higher officials more power and harm civil servants rights. On the Lawmakers Agenda THE EXAMPLE OF LUXEMBOURG Jose Pereira Coutinho listed a series of advances in Luxembourg to illustrate the fact that, in comparison, Macau is lagging behind. He pointed out Luxembourgs free public transportation for people under 30 years old, the minimum wage of approximately MOP18,000, the language skills of the residents, and its democracy. I have said so much already. We need to stop a bit and think, because the Macau SAR has been established for nearly 20 years, but we [Macau] are becoming more and more different from Luxembourg, which also has 600,000 people. Whats been the biggest failure in the past 20 years? And what can be done to make up for it and improve Macau residents life quality? Coutinho asked. HEARINGS Au Kam San believes that the Macau government is not willing to be subjected to residents criticism, as the local government does not even dare to use a little powerful supervision tool [hearings]. Au said that hearing[s] and having the right to call government officials and witnesses [] in order to investigate malpractices of both the government and government officials is the most important mechanism of the AL in supervising the government. However, in Macau, how come [a hearing] has never been successful launched? Aus previous motion for a hearing concerning the LRT was rejected at the AL. ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION Angela Leong and Mak Soi Kun have called on the government to better protect the environment. Leong proposed that Macau promote the use of electric vehicles. Mak suggested that Macau should work with Hengqin to build a better ecological environment for birds. Ecological security is an important part of national security. Protecting the ecological environment cant wait a single second. Has the government always been pursuing ecological protection? Or has the government done nothing? Mak asked. A domestic helper has been accused of raping a three-year-old boy, the Judiciary Police (PJ) reported on Monday. The suspect is a 46-year-old woman from the Philippines who was hired by a family living in the Macau Peninsula in August last year. The familys 3 years and 8 months old son was the victim. Beginning in October this year, the boys parents became unable to spend time with their son between 3 p.m. and 9 p.m. as they were looking after their own parents. During these times, the boy was cared for by the domestic helper, who picked him up from school and bathed him. On Dec. 15 while the mother was changing her sons shirt, he told her that the domestic helper had performed oral sex on him. The suspect admitted to the crime but refused to reveal the details, nor explain why she committed the offence. The PJ believes that the suspect raped the victim more than once. The suspect has been transferred to the prosecution authority under the charge of rape. Earlier this week, the General Association of Chinese Students of Macao urged the government to classify the sexual assault of children less than 16 years old as a public crime. The association believes that the recent frequency of reports of sexual assault against children indicates the need for increased punishment and prevention of such crime. The current law requires the parents of the victims to report sexual assault cases on behalf of their children. However, the association believes that the traditional Chinese mindset that family shames should not be spread abroad means parents are likely to choose to solve matters privately. Following amendments suggested by the 1st Standing Committee of the Legislative Assembly, the governments new flag, emblem and anthem bill will drop proposed penalties for mild forms of disrespect toward the national anthem, including for those who fail to stand or lose their composure during its rendition. The Standing Committee was yesterday discussing an amendment to the law on the national flag, emblem and anthem, which would build on provisions already in place in Macau, including those under Annex III of Macaus Basic Law, National Laws to Be Applied in the Macao Special Administrative Region. The latest bill is in response to Chinas National Anthem Law, approved by the Central Government late last year, which requires an update to laws of the Special Administrative Regions of Macau and Hong Kong. After discussing what type of behavior should warrant a fine from Macau authorities, the group of lawmakers in the 1st Standing Committee led by Ho Ion Sang has settled on only severe and deliberate acts of disrespect. Intentionally changing the lyrics or music of the anthem in a public place will constitute an offence, as will other forms of obvious disrespect. Fines may also be applied when national symbols are used for commercial purposes or for undue ends, such as private funerals, or when the national flag is deliberately altered, damaged, stepped on or set alight. The penalties, still under discussion, may include a maximum three-year prison sentence or a 360-day fine. Previously, the bill had proposed harsher penalties for a wider range of behaviors. It had also required those present to stand in respect while the national anthem was played, but this raised objections from lawmakers who considered it unfair to apply to people with physical disabilities. This bill will be submitted to the Legislative Assembly next year for further consideration. DB Japan plans its first aircraft carrier and big increases in defense spending and weapons capability in the coming years, according to new defense guidelines approved yesterday that cite its need to counter potential threats from North Korea and China and other vulnerabilities. The guidelines approved at a meeting of Prime Minister Shinzo Abes Cabinet call for refitting an existing helicopter carrier into a ship that can deploy expensive, U.S.-made F-35B stealth fighters capable of short takeoffs and vertical landings. Japan plans to buy 147 F-35s, including 42 F-35Bs, over the next decade. The guidelines would replace the current defense plan halfway through and underscore Abes push to expand Japans military role and capability to make it a normal country in Abes words. He has long wanted to revise Japans U.S.-drafted constitution that renounces war and has already broadened the concept of self-defense to allow Japanese personnel to defend allied military forces as Japan increasingly works alongside American troops. Defense officials say Japan needs higher deterrence and increased missile defense and fighter capability as Norths missile and nuclear threat remains unchanged in the absence of concrete steps to dismantle them, and Chinas maritime activity has grown increasingly assertive. The new guidelines say Japan needs to be well-prepared and to show it can withstand threats, noting the archipelago is prone to natural disasters and its coastline is dotted with vulnerable nuclear power plants. Officials say the Maritime Self-Defense Forces helicopter carrier Izumo, a 250-meter (820-foot) -long, flat-top destroyer that can carry 14 helicopters, is set to be refitted as an aircraft carrier. Japan has relatively little land on which to build runways long enough for conventional F-35s, and an aircraft carrier would be particularly useful in the western Pacific, where Japan tries to defend remote islands, including those disputed with China, and to play a greater role as part of the U.S.-Japan alliance. A cost estimate for the refitted carrier wasnt given. The work would be done over five years and the ship would carry 10 stealth fighters. The refitting of a second helicopter carrier would follow. The step is a major shift to Japans postwar naval defense, which has lacked aircraft carriers in part out of concerns that they may remind Japans Asian neighbors of aggression by Japans wartime navy. Critics say possession of an aircraft carrier would give Japan a strike capability in violation of its pacifist constitution that limits use of force to self-defense only. Japan, under the new defense guidelines, also plans to possess cruise missiles designed to hit enemy targets, which opponents say could go beyond Japans pacifist principle. Defense officials brushed off the criticism, saying Izumo will be a multifunctional warship used as aircraft carrier only when necessary for national defense. Chief Cabinet secretary Yoshihide Suga said the plan is mainly for fighter pilots in case of an emergency at sea and that it falls within the minimum necessity allowed under the constitution. He said the revised guidelines presented what Japan truly needs to protect the people and portrayed what Japans future defense should be. The guidelines say Japan needs to beef up its air defense capability in the Pacific, while expanding surveillance in the area. The Defense Ministry says Japan plans to purchase 105 conventional F-35s and 42 F-35Bs to replace some of its fleet of F-15s. The big price tag for the jets a F-35B costs about 10 billion yen (USD90 million) will drive up Japans defense spending, which has already climbed steadily for six straight years since Abe took office at the end of 2012. Japan plans to spend 235 billion yen (USD2 billion) to buy a pair of land-fixed U.S. missile defense system, Aegis Ashore, as well as other American missile interceptors. The Cabinet, under the guidelines, also approved a new Medium Term Defense Program requiring a record five-year defense spending of 27 trillion yen ($240 billion) beginning 2019, up more than 2 trillion yen ($17.6 billion) from an earlier five-year defense budget. As Japan comes under pressure from President Donald Trump to allow more exports from the U.S., purchases of costly American weapons would be a way to reduce the U.S. trade deficit, while enhancing military cooperation between the allies. Japans U.S. arms purchases have surged, and the Defense Ministry came under criticism for agreeing too easily to Washingtons hefty asking price. The guidelines said Japan will seek more cost-efficient purchase of advance-capability U.S. equipment, while pushing for more joint research and development. Buying more American weapons, however, would be a setback for Japans defense industry and its hopes to develop its own replacement of F-2 fighter jets are uncertain. The guideline did not mention whether the F-2 successor would be made made-in-Japan or jointly developed. The guidelines also called for setting up a unit specializing in space, cyberattacks and electronic warfare, while integrating the ground maritime and air forces to better coordinate operations. Japan should aim for a unified, simultaneous multi-dimensional and unified defense capability that breaks away from the conventional concept of ground, maritime and air defense, the guidelines said. As the fast-aging country faces declining population and workforce, Japan will accept more women to join the self-defense force, postpone retirement age and promote research and development of robotics and unmanned equipment. Mari Yamaguchi, Tokyo, AP Jimmy Fallons Tonight Show will air an episode next year from Puerto Rico including an exclusive performance with Lin- Manuel Miranda reprising his role in Hamilton. NBC announced that Miranda and the new touring cast will appear in the episode Jan. 15. The telecast will focus on Puerto Ricos recovery efforts to rebuild and raise awareness after Hurricane Maria massively struck the island in 2017. The episode will delve into how the deadly hurricane devastated Puerto Rico through widespread damage, but also celebrate the great spirit and culture of the people. Miranda will reprise his lead role in Hamilton at the University of Puerto Rico from Jan. 8 to 27. The performances look to raise money for the Flamboyan Arts Fund to benefit the art, artists and arts institutions. South Korean fire department officials said yesterday that three teenage boys were presumed dead and seven other boys were being treated for injuries after they were found unconscious at a motel in the seaside town of Gangneung. An official from Gangwon Fire Headquarters said the cause of the injuries was unclear although gas leakage was a possibility. He said there were no immediate signs indicating suicide attempts or foul play. The official didnt want to be named, citing office rules. The official said rescue workers at the scene presumed three teenagers had died based on vital signs. He said seven other boys who shared a room were being treated at hospitals. Kim Jin-bok, a police official from Gangneung, said the boys were high school seniors from the capital Seoul who were apparently traveling after taking the national college entrance exam last month. Kim said police officers are investigating the motels owner, who called police after finding the boys unconscious yesterday afternoon. AP European officials and companies are meeting in Vienna with African leaders for talks on increasing investment in the continent. Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, whose country currently holds the rotating EU presidency, told ORF broadcaster yesterday that more than 1,000 business people were attending the EU-Africa forum. Kurz says he hopes this is a good start signal for more European investment in Africa so that the African continent, when it comes to investment, isnt just conceded to the Chinese. African Union Chairman Paul Kagame, Rwandas president, and Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi were among the leaders on hand for the forum. The British colony of Hong Kong is to be returned to China in 1997 after an historic agreement was signed in Peking today. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher signed the Joint Sino-British Declaration with her Chinese counterpart Zhao Ziyang. It formally seals the future of Hong Kong, transferring it from a British colony of six million people to communist China in 13 years. The agreement, which will end 155 years of British rule in the colony, also launches a new era in trade and diplomacy between the two countries. Chinese president Deng Xiaoping, who pursued the recovery of Hong Kong, greeted Mrs Thatcher. The champagne ceremony took place at the Great Hall of the People before delegates who helped draw up the agreement, including 101 guests from Hong Kong. Mrs Thatcher said: The circumstances are unique. The agreement is unique. It is right that we should feel a sense of history, of pride and of confidence in the future. The declaration outlines Hong Kong will be restored to the Peoples Republic of China with effect from July 1 1997 and will apply for fifty years. It will be known as the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR). Rocky negotiations Britain has agreed to return Hong Kong after guarantees it will enjoy a high degree of autonomy, except in foreign and defence affairs. And Chinas principle of one country, two systems allows Hong Kong to have a capitalist economy and enjoy existing rights and freedoms. The Prime Minister later revealed the negotiation process had been rocky. When Mrs Thatcher last visited Peking in 1982 the atmosphere was hostile as an agreement could not be reached. Talks restarted in July 1983 and todays agreement, which was finalised only ten days before the 30 September deadline, is being hailed as a diplomatic coup. Mrs Thatcher will visit Hong Kong tomorrow during her whistle-stop world tour. Courtesy BBC News In context A bloody crackdown by troops on protests in the Chinese capital, Beijing, in June 1989, known as the Tiananmen Square massacre soured relations between Britain and China. The British Government, fearing for the colonys future, responded by granting British passports to 50,000 Hong Kong heads of families, building a new international airport, and introducing a Bill of Rights. Chris Patten, the last Governor of Hong Kong introduced democratic reforms in 1992 which the Chinese Government opposed. A series of diplomatic meetings between the two governments in 1995 and 1996 improved relations. On 1 July 1997 a spectacular ceremony in Hong Kong celebrated a new era in its political life as it transferred to Chinese control. The University of Macau (UM) Institute for the Study of Commercial Gaming (ISCG) yesterday held the Responsible Gambling Symposium 2018, marking the start of the 10th anniversary of the citys push for responsible gaming. The symposium was divided into two parts. The various keynote topics included a summary of and an outlook for local responsible gambling policies, as well as an exploration of new trends in gambling activities. In addition, a number of discussion sessions were held for experts and scholars from Macau and neighboring Asian countries and regions to exchange ideas on the planning, practice, and future development of responsible gambling. The event attracted experts and scholars from the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau. During the event, participants reviewed current policies and put forward new strategies for preventing gambling disorder in Macau and other parts of Asia. Lawmaker and ISCG director Davis Fong said at the event that when the government decided to end the monopoly in the gaming industry in 2002, the general public thought that the city was immune to gambling addiction. As part of the academic circle, Fong felt obliged to figure out whether it was true and conducted a survey in 2003. According to Fong, it was found in the survey that approximately 1.78 percent of the local population became pathological gamblers because of gambling activities. Based on this result, the Macau SAR government launched various measures to combat the prevalence of the addiction. According to UM Rector Yonghua Song, surveys on the gambling tendencies and behavior of Macau residents show that the prevalence of gambling disorders has gradually declined from its peak at 6 percent in 2007 to 2.5 percent in 2016. The proportion of Macau residents who are concerned with responsible gambling has also increased from 16.2 percent in 2009 to 63.7 percent in 2017. The first series of activities comprising the Responsible Gambling Awareness Week in Macau was co-organized in 2009 by the Social Welfare Bureau, the Gaming Inspection and Coordination Bureau, and the ISCG. This marks the 10th year in the push for responsible gaming. Surely no one would approach him again asking for bus information. Where do I catch the bus to the near-by hospital? This Kat has never been known for his sartorial distinction. But every (or at least most) rules has its exception and Kat readers may remember the exception to this rule, being the time that this Kat was mistaken for an employee of the local bus company (Why is this Kat laughing (hint: it's all about his blue shirt)?, here ). No, it wasnt about the elegance of his blue shirt, but rather the association that was made between it and the color of the typical shirt worn by the bus employees, never to happen again.And so, by chance, once again this Kat found himself this week walking along the same outer perimeter of the same large outdoor bus terminal in Tel-Aviv. , he reckoned; this time he was wearing a shirt of blue and white stripes, and the hue (or is tint, tone or shade?) of the color blue was demonstrably different from the blue shirt that he had worn on his previous eventful walk.Strolling down the walkway, thinking (only) feline IP thoughts, he noticed in the distance a woman, who herself passed one, two and then three people walking in the opposite direction. This Kat nearly reached her, without giving any more thought, when she approached him and asked:, it had happened again. This time the information sought was not merely the location of the stop of a particular bus number (so the digital time schedule near-by would not be of any help). No, this was the kind of information that only someone intimately connected with the bus company would (should) know. The woman seemed to assume that the grandfather type wearing the blue and white- striped shirt approaching her (and carrying a black bag, actually two black bags, ?) would certainly know the information. For her, blue meant bus company employee meant source of travel information.This was so, even, at least to this Kats discerning eye, there is no confusing similarity between the color blue of the two shirts. Both may fall within the blue color spectrum, but they could clearly be distinguished. And yet, the kindly woman who approached me seemed to be of a different opinion.All of this led this Kat to ruminate how this blue sartorial lightning had struck him twice. In the previous blog, this Kat suggested that the connection between the blue shirt and being an employee of the bus company could be explained by the virtual identity between the color blue of the two shirts and the specific location where the encounter took place, being a large outdoor bus terminal. But in this more recent occurrence, the respective color blue of the two shirts was discernibly distinguishable. And yet the connection was still being made with the bus company and its employees.All of this suggests that the actual color as perceived was less important than the notion that bus company employees are identified in concept by the color blue. Anyone located in the outdoor bus terminal area, wearing a blue shirt, and otherwise appearing as a likely employee with the bus company, was identified as such.Which led this Kat to recall that on a small number of occasions he has received an official action in a trademark matter, stating there was confusing similarity based on the identity of concept of the two marks. This Kat has long been skeptical about such a claim (and under his breath he was known to scoff; how could there be identity based on concept, such as the concept of the Republic of France, here and here ) , much less based on the concept of a color?).But the events of this week have led him to reconsider. Whether one blue shirt was actually similar to another may be less important than the concept that bus employees wear blue shirts of some kind (and they are likely to be found at a bus station).All that is left for this Kat is to select another blue shirt from his wardrobe and contemplate taking yet a third stroll along the perimeter of that outdoor bus station.By Neil WilkofTop two photos courtesy of Mrs. Kat.Bottom photo from www.egged.co.il. On Dec. 13 last week, the Indonesian Constitutional Court (Mahkamah Konstitusi) made a decision that may open the door to the eradication of child marriage in Indonesia. The Court ruled that the 16 years old minimum age requirement for women to marry, as stipulated in the 1974 Marriage Law, was unconstitutional and lawmakers are given up to three years to revise the minimum age requirement. According to a collaborative report on child marriage from the Indonesian government and UNICEF called "Progress on Pause, an estimated 17 percent of Indonesian girls are married before the age of 18, placing Indonesia among the top ten countries with the highest absolute number of child brides, ranking seventh globally. The ruling to revise the minimum marriage age stems from the Courts decision to grant a judicial review petition filed by three child bride survivors from the Indonesian Coalition to End Child Marriage (Koalisi 18+.) The judicial review challenges Article 7 of the law, which sets the minimum age requirement for women to marry at 16, while on the other hand sets the minimum age requirement for men at 19. The difference in age requirement is found to be unfair and to resemble legally-endorsed gender inequality, as it puts women in a much more disadvantaged position than men. The minimum age requirement of 16 itself is found to be legally contradictory to the 2002 Child Protection Law, which considers a person below 18 years of age as a child. In addition to this, the 2002 Law specifically stipulated on Article 26 (1c) that parents are obliged and subject to the responsibility to prevent child marriage. Following this flow of argument, the laws are contradictory and allowing female children to marry at the age of 16 is unconstitutional. Apart from the legal argument, child marriage itself is notorious for its negative impacts to childrens mental, physical, social, and economic wellbeing; it is even regarded as human rights violation against children by the UNICEF. This claim is not unfounded, as a handful research have shown the real life effect of marriage on minors, and the majority of them are harmful not only to the child brides but also their offspring. Physically, the anatomy of a 16-year-old girl is often not developed enough to survive pregnancy, leading to complication during pregnancy and at birth. According to the United Nations Children Fund, complication during pregnancy and at birth is the second largest cause for the death of girls aged 15-19 years. Additionally, infants whose mothers are below 20 years old have a higher chance of dying before the age of 28 days, compared to those whose mothers are aged 20 years and above. On top of that, data have shown that women involved in child marriage are more prone to becoming victims of domestic violence. When lucky, child brides who can advocate for themselves will end up separating from their partners, which only leads to a higher divorce rate and often social shaming for being a widow at such a young age. The rest are doomed to stay in an abusive marriage their whole lives, with a higher chance of living in an economically unstable household.The skyrocketing rate of domestic violence on child brides is explained by the psychological aspect of child marriage itself. Many of the child brides are still too immature to even understand what a marriage entails and the burden of being a wife and a mother at such a young age. Living far away from home, often without any financial capability or sufficient education, child brides are most likely dependent on their husband or their husbands family and are therefore more prone to abuse due to their lack of bargaining power in the relationship.Like a vicious cycle, oftentimes not only that the lack of bargaining power is caused by insufficient education, but child marriage itself leads to high rate of school dropouts. In Indonesia, data shows that child marriage causes young female to have four times the chance of not completing their secondary education. Without education, these young wives and mothers would be impeded from making informed decisions about countless aspects in their lives, ranging from their childrens wellbeing to even their own safety.Economically, the lack of sufficient education among child brides also exacerbates the financial instability within their household which leads to poverty and the lack of proper nourishments for all family members including children. At the macroeconomic level, child marriage also hampers the overall economic development since it lowers the female labor participation rate. Child marriage in Indonesia is estimated to have caused 1.7 percent economic losses from the GDP.The case of child marriage can be prevented through various means that often require collaborative effort between informal and formal institutions; the family, the community, religious institutions, schools, health institution, and, most importantly, the government must work together to protect children.In this fight to eradicate child marriage, the government that holds judicative, legislative, and executive power is easily the most powerful stakeholder and the Constitutional Courts order to revise the minimum age requirement for marriage is a critical opportunity for the government to use its power to spearhead the battle against child marriage.Lets hope next year our lawmakers will make the right decision to set the minimum marriage age to at least 18 years old, and will therefore put an end to the legal immunity for child marriage in Indonesia. Its time.is a Public Policy Researcher in the United Arab Emirates. She is passionate about gender, counterterrorism, and public policy. Technology Marketing Corp. next month debuts The New Intelligence, the umbrella brand for a collection of events and exhibits focused on how artifical intelligence and machine learning are impacting business, communications, and networking. Sameer Padhye, FixStreams founder and CEO, will be giving The New Intelligence keynote. During that presentation he will discuss how AIOps can enable self-healing hybrid IT infrastructures. (And FixStreams CTO will speak at AIOps Expo, part of The New Intelligence) TMC (News - Alert) recently interviewed Padhye to learn more about FixStream, the new product category known as AIOps, and why its important. FixStream is an AIOps solution provider. What is AIOps, and why are we hearing about it now? Padhye: AIOps, artificial intelligence for IT operations, is a strategic segment defined by analysts such as Gartner (News - Alert), Forrester, EMA, etc. Gartner, for instance, says AIOps platforms are software systems that combine big data and AI or machine learning functionality to enhance and partially replace a broad range of IT operations processes and tasks, including availability and performance monitoring, event correlation and analysis, IT service management, and automation. In simple terms, AIOps is whats required to correlate the millions of data points that multiple monitoring tools generate across IT, allowing IT operations to predict when the next outage will occur. Could you provide an example of how one of FixStreams actual customers is benefitting from your AIOps solution? Padhye: Many customers have successfully deployed FixStream AIOps solution in production environments. For instance, Broadcom has deployed it to increase the uptime of their mission critical production line. Maxim Integrated leveraged the autodiscovery capabilities of AIOps to accelerate data center migration, while City of Las Vegas deployed it to predict outages in their Oracle ERP-based processes to increase cash flow. Whos the typical buyer of FixStreams AIOps solution? Padhye: The typical buyer is a VP/director of IT operations in an enterprise that is struggling with one or more of the following pain points: Unplanned downtime of mission-critical applications; High MTTR/MTTD costing [a] significant amount of resources and potential revenue/CSAT loss; Complex/risky migration to cloud and/or data center migration/consolidation; Inefficient IT assets utilization; and Costly/inefficient audit/compliance. How does your AIOps solution work with a companys existing network elements? Padhye: FixStream AIOps platform interfaces directly to the existing infrastructure through both north- and southbound interfaces. It accesses each of the domain (compute, network, storage, etc.) via service accounts (through technologies like SNMP, SSH, vendor-specific APIs, cloud subscription information, etc.) as well as via connectors to third-party tools (like APM, ITSM, etc.). The FixStream platform also provides a rich set of APIs to facilitate the bi-directional integration with existing applications like a CMDB, orchestration/remediation solutions, etc. This open approach enables seamless integration while preserving the IT investment already made into existing solutions. Does a company have to use a particular suppliers firewalls, routers, switches, or other gear if they want to use FixStream for AIOps? Padhye: The FixStream platform supports over 250 technologies, vendors, products across ITs data centers, including all the major vendors (Cisco, Juniper, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft (News - Alert), AWS, Azure, etc.). A detailed list of supported technologies is represented in the datasheet. FixStream also supports custom applications (for instance built on Java). Your company recently announced that AIOps is taking Oracles ERP platform to a whole new level. What does that mean? Padhye: Oracle ERP is one of the most critical applications that a company requires, in that it supports mission-critical business processes like order-to-cash, procure-to-pay, supply chain management, etc. Should any of these processes fail, the company could suffer major setbacks. They could miss their earnings, they could lose millions of dollars in revenue, and it could severely impact their brand and customer reputation. The owners of such applications, though, dont have the end-to-end visibility necessary to detect or predict what could make these app fail. What happens if a network link goes down? Does that impact the O2C process? Can that slow down my orders at the end of the quarter? How long will it take to find out? Traditional domain-centric tools provide a silo view of the customer IT environment and cannot correlate in real time the millions of data points across the entire stack. FixStream AIOps platform is the industry-first solution that can not only detect issues across business transactions, application services, and infrastructure, but it can actually predict when the next outage of an Oracle ERP process will occur. By the way, this can be done for a broad range of Oracle applications (including Oracle EBS, Oracle Siebel CRM, Oracle JD Edwards, etc.), SAP (News - Alert), and custom apps. The AI part of AIOps stands for artificial intelligence. How does AI come into play in the FixStream solution? Padhye: AI comes into play in multiple forms. Dynamic thresholding and multivariate anomaly detection detect[s] anomalies off a normal or expected behavior. It reduces noise, and accelerates root cause analysis across any variable (CPU, memory, etc.) supporting a specific application. Sequential pattern analysis and incident prediction detects a pattern of events across the entire stack from infrastructure to apps to business transactions so that it can predict when the next outage will occur. [AIOps also enables] disk capacity predictive analytics to proactively plan to add more capacity before it negatively impacts the business. Using the weighted slope one algorithm it analyzes the historic trend of utilization of an infrastructure resource and predicts when the infrastructure entity will run out of capacity across business transactions and underlying application and infrastructure entities. Representation of time-series metrics of the impacted vectors in context with a business application or device group allow[s] a user to visually go back and forth in time and examine the behavior of multiple metrics in time series which are a part of group of anomaly events. [It can] identify a sequence or group of anomaly events for transaction, application, and infrastructure entities that may impact a business application. For example, unplanned events such as DDOS attack[s] and planned business events such as Black Friday (News - Alert) or promotional events trigger [a] group of anomaly events across business transactions and underlying application and infrastructure entities. Some people say artificial intelligence isnt ready for prime time and that what some suppliers are calling AI isnt really AI at all. What are your thoughts on that? Padhye: There is a lot of truth to it. AI, for instance, will not help out if it is based off very inaccurate data sources. If the IT inventory, for instance, is not refreshed in near-real time, or is not 100 percent accurate, the ML models will generate incorrect predictions. That is why we recommend all accounts to first start with an agentless autodiscovery process that can be synchronized with their CMDB. This will create an accurate single source of truth that will increase the efficacy of any subsequent service management operation. Likewise, AI cannot help out much if you cannot start with a correlated set of data points. What we recommend is to develop a contextual, applications-centric view of the environment upon which to correlate events. Without it, you will simply reduce noise but not actually solve the issue. Edited by Maurice Nagle A biomarker for multiple sclerosis has been identified in humans by researchers at Purdue University and the Indiana University School of Medicine. Although just in preliminary testing, initial tests in humans have found that the substance acrolein a waste product normally excreted by the body ( shown here in green) can accumulate in some people and cause neurological problems by damaging the myelin (damaged myelin shown in red), which surrounds the nerve cell like insulation on a copper wire. Credit: Purdue University photo/Michel J Schweinsberg A biomarker for multiple sclerosis that could be an early warning for the disease has shown promise in both human and animal testing. Researchers at Purdue University and the Indiana University School of Medicine found that acrolein, a molecule previously suspected as a metabolic waste product that accumulates in people with certain neurological disorders such as multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's disease, could possibly be used to help diagnose MS. Multiple sclerosis affects an estimated 2.3 million people worldwide, according to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, and an estimated 1 million people in the United States have MS. The disease usually is diagnosed between the ages of 20 and 50, and affects twice as many women as men. Although there is no cure for MS, recent years have seen a flurry of activity around possible biomarkers and possible treatments. Dr. David Mattson, professor of neurology and the director of the Indiana University Multiple Sclerosis Center, says that if the results are validated, acrolein could also allow medical professionals to monitor the effectiveness of treatments. "We are in the process of trying to correlate acrolein levels with MS disease activity, which potentially would help us monitor disease activity with a blood test," he says. "If this is validated, it would help us decide how aggressive to be with immunotherapy, or whether a therapy is working or there is a need to switch to a different therapy." Acrolein is a byproduct of fat metabolism. Dr. Riyi Shi, a professor of neuroscience and biomedical engineering in Purdue University's Department of Basic Medical Sciences, College of Veterinary Medicine and Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, has found that an accumulation of the molecule is present in animal models of neurological diseases such as MS, Parkinson's disease, or even spinal cord and brain injuries. Acrolein is thought to damage cells by disrupting the lipids, or fats, that protect nerve tissue, in a process called lipid peroxidation. Shi said that both blood and urine tests, or assays, have been able to measure acrolein levels in humans and in animal models. "The levels of this compound in urine and blood is correlatedthe MS patients that had the highest level of acrolein in the blood also had the highest level in the urine," he said. According to Shi, it is, therefore, possible that a high level of acrolein is indicative of more active MS, though low levels of acrolein do not rule out the possibility of having MS. Further study is needed to vailidate these initital observations. Shi says the study also suggests that acrolein is not just a potential biomarker of MS disease activity but could also be a target for therapies. "There are drugs already on the market that are known to be acrolein scavengers, and it is possible that one of these drugs could be repurposed as a possible therapy for MS," Shi says. "But these drugs also have strong effects on other targets, so more study would need to be done to see if they have a therapeutic effect to eliminate acrolein at a safe level." The two drugs in this category are hydralazine, used to treat high blood pressure and heart failure, and phenelzine, which is used to treat major depression. "Before attempting to repurpose these drugs to lower acrolein in MS patients, we plan to first confirm if acrolein, indeed, correlates with disease activity in MS through a larger clinical study with more participants," Mattson says. "Then we need to show that these drugs can, indeed, reduce acrolein levels in human MS patients, and if lowering acrolein levels is therapeutic in MS. "If it turns out these agents can reduce acrolein levels in MS and offer benefit for the disease process in MS, then patients on these agents for the blood pressure or psychiatric indications would get two benefits for one." Explore further Toxin from tobacco smoke could increase pain in spinal cord injury More information: Melissa Tully et al. Systemic Acrolein Elevations in Mice With Experimental Autoimmune Encephalomyelitis and Patients With Multiple Sclerosis, Frontiers in Neurology (2018). Journal information: Frontiers in Neurology Melissa Tully et al. Systemic Acrolein Elevations in Mice With Experimental Autoimmune Encephalomyelitis and Patients With Multiple Sclerosis,(2018). DOI: 10.3389/fneur.2018.00420 Credit: CC0 Public Domain To be prepared for epidemics, we need certain things in place. We need widespread surveillance systems to detect outbreaks before they can spread, and robust health systems that can give people the care and treatment they need. And we need well-resourced, responsive research research that builds on established relationships and work carried out before an outbreak, that evaluates past responses, and which teaches us how to respond and with what measures. The 201416 West African Ebola outbreak showed us how if we give the right resources to research, it can quickly give us back new knowledge and tools for containing disease that we'll use for years to come. Professor Ian Goodfellow, a Wellcome Senior Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge, arrived in Makeni, Sierra Leone, in December 2014. Within two weeks, his 10-person team had built one of the first diagnostic laboratories in the country, diagnosing up to 100 samples every day. But to stop an epidemic like this, he says, diagnosis alone was not enough. "You need to monitor viral transmission and evolution as fast as possible. And to track the evolution of the virus, you first need its genetic sequence." It's only recently become realistic to sequence whole genomes in a day and that's in a lab. In a tent during an epidemic, it was unprecedented. But Goodfellow's team were undeterred, and with funding, they brought a gene sequencer to Makeni to monitor viral evolution on the ground, uncovering information that had never been available before. "It meant we could produce whole viral genome sequences within 24 hours, and trace where new cases of Ebola may have come from," Goodfellow says. This was key in containing the virus and just one example of what's possible when we bring research approaches into the response plan. Another example is rVSV-ZEBOV, the vaccine against the Ebola virus, which was assessed for its effectiveness during the West African epidemic. If we hadn't taken the experimental vaccine into the epidemic running clinical trials in the middle of the outbreak to test for safety and efficacy we'd be without a key tool in our fight to contain the disease in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The research paid for itself in West Africa; now it pays dividends every time the vaccine gets used. This, ultimately, is the role of research in an epidemic to give us better ways of fighting disease in the future. To fulfil this role, research needs to be responsive. And that means there needs to be access to flexible funding that can be mobilised quickly when outbreaks occur for several reasons. Dr Luke Meredith, who works in Ian Goodfellow's team, explains why creating a mobile lab to fit into a suitcase can provide great benefits during outbreaks. Credit: Wellcome Trust Firstly, putting research into the response is often the only chance of giving those already infected the possibility of receiving treatment, because for many epidemic diseases, there's nothing currently available. "One thing we all have to remember is an outbreak is basically a bunch of people who are sick with a disease," says Professor Peter Horby at the Centre for Tropical Medicine and Global Health, University of Oxford. "Patients are at the heart of outbreaks." Moving quickly gives us the best chance of helping them. But a rapid response is also important because an epidemic itself is short at least by research standards. "Clinical trials usually take years to set up and fund," says Horby, "whereas many outbreaks last six to eight weeks." For rare diseases, this means there's only a fleeting chance to test possible treatments. So research in an epidemic response needs to be atypical, kicking into gear without delay. A great example of this is currently underway in the DRC. In response to the current Ebola outbreak, now the second most deadly the world has known, health officials are setting up a randomised controlled trial of four therapeutic treatments (opens in a new tab) to find out how effective they are. Not only has the trial sprung into action much quicker than usual, the officials have also designed it so that three treatments are compared against a fourth, rather than to no treatment, which is the usual method. In the DRC, this fourth treatment the 'control' will be ZMapp, a monoclonal antibody treatment; if the trial extends to other countries, one of the other three treatments could be the control. It's an excellent example of tailoring the traditional research set-up to fit the situation at hand. They've made sure that knowledge can be built while everyone in need receives treatment. The final way we can use research to prepare for epidemics is to study people, to see how human behaviour contributes to the spread of germs. Dr. Juliet Bedford, founder and director of Anthrologica (opens in a new tab), is studying burial practices in the DRC to look at how to make them medically safe. "Viral load is known to be highest at point of death," says Bedford. "There are certain customary practices about burials and funerals in the DRC washing the body, dressing the body, braiding the hair of the women where there's a high degree of physical contact that really elevates the risk of transmission." So, Bedford and her team have been negotiating slightly different practices with communities, to make sure future burials and funerals are medically safe but still acceptable to the community. And it's worked in the DRC. Now, says Bedford, we need ongoing funding to build up the same strengths and capacities in other high-priority countries. Explore further Research is saving lives in the Ebola outbreaks in DRC Researchers at the University of New Hampshire have found that young adults who experienced repetitive mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI), or concussions, can experience persistent cognitive changes as well as altered brain activity. "Multiple concussions, even after general symptoms have subsided, decrease an individual's ability to flexibly shift their mode of thinking," said Robert Ross, assistant professor of psychology. "We found that these decreases in performance are associated with changes in how the brain communicates information." In their study, recently published in the European Journal of Neuroscience, researchers looked at young adults ranging in age from 18 to 24 who had sustained at least two concussions with the most recent one being at least a month before the testing. The participants were asked to switch between two tasks which included telling the difference between colors and shapes, like red and green and circle or square. Cognitive changes, like working memory and processing speed, were noted and oscillatory activity, or brainwaves, were monitored with an electroencephalogram (EEG), which tests for changes in the brainwaves. In both the concussion group and the control group, researchers looked for differences in three different types of brainwaves and their effects on executive function, which is the ability to control cognitive functions like attention, inhibition, performance, flexibility, stability, working memory, and planning. They found an overall lower performance rate from those in the concussion group during the task-switching exercise. They were less accurate and processing performance was low. "This is important because in the United States more than one and a half million people suffer traumatic brain injuries each year," said Daniel Seichepine, assistant professor of psychology and neuropsychology and a co-author on the study. "Most concussion-related studies focus on older adults or professional athletes, but these findings offer insight into the cognitive changes many young adults may suffer even years after their injury." The researchers hope these findings may help develop better targeted treatment strategies for this population as they age. Explore further Effects of multiple concussions in retired rugby players later in life More information: Stephanie E. Barlow et al, Investigation of the changes in oscillatory power during task switching after mild traumatic brain injury, European Journal of Neuroscience (2018). Journal information: European Journal of Neuroscience Stephanie E. Barlow et al, Investigation of the changes in oscillatory power during task switching after mild traumatic brain injury,(2018). DOI: 10.1111/ejn.14231 Credit: CC0 Public Domain Non-contrast computed tomography (NCCT) is a low-cost medical imaging technology that is used widely in investigating damage to a patient's brain caused by ischaemic stroke. However, writing in the International Journal of Image Mining, researchers from Algeria explain that it is not without limitations. As such, they are developing an algorithm that can automatically detect ischaemic areas of the brain from CT images within hours of the onset of symptoms using a comparison of the two brain hemispheres. Yahiaoui Amina Fatima Zahra and Bessaid Abdelhafid of the Department of Biomedical Engineering, at the University of Tlemcen, explain how subtle changes in ischaemia are difficult to visualise and to extract and although there are techniques that allow radiologists to "score" the damage and to make diagnostic decisions regarding thrombolytic treatment there is always room for improvement. Moreover, commonly only patients with a high baseline score benefit from endovascular revascularisation therapy. This could change if there were a better way to assess the CT images quickly. The team reports that their algorithm has five steps: pre-processing, segmentation of regions of interest, elimination of old infarcts and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) space, feature extraction and ASPECTS scoring. They have tested it on 25 patients and found it to be effective in comparison with methods previously reported in the scientific literature and it shows high sensitivity at almost 91 percent. Explore further Four out of ten patients with atrial fibrillation have unknown brain damage More information: Yahiaoui Amina Fatima Zahra et al. A promising method for early detection of ischemic stroke area on brain CT images, International Journal of Image Mining (2018). Yahiaoui Amina Fatima Zahra et al. A promising method for early detection of ischemic stroke area on brain CT images,(2018). DOI: 10.1504/IJIM.2018.096298 Credit: CC0 Public Domain Research completed at Johns Hopkins and the Greater Baltimore Medical Center has demonstrated that vaginal childbirth substantially increases the probability a woman will develop a pelvic floor disorder later in life. Pelvic floor disorders, including urinary incontinence and uterine prolapse, afflict millions of women in the United States. However, until now little was known about who will develop these conditions and how they progress over time. In this week's Journal of the American Medical Association, Johns Hopkins and Greater Baltimore Medical Center researchers report results of a 10-year study showing that some delivery modes, including spontaneous vaginal delivery, are associated with higher risk of some types of pelvic floor disorders. "We knew that these disorders are more common after childbirth, but now after following these women for 10 years, we have a good sense of how delivery mode impacts a woman's risk of developing a pelvic floor disorder," says Victoria Handa, M.D., M.H.S., professor of gynecology and obstetrics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and director of gynecology and obstetrics at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center. This study considered a woman's risk of developing one of four pelvic floor disorders: stress urinary incontinence (urine leakage during with activities that increase abdominal pressure), overactive bladder (frequent and urgent urination), anal incontinence (involuntary loss of solid stool, liquid stool or gas) and pelvic organ prolapse (when the uterus and vaginal walls fall downward into the vagina, protruding beyond the vaginal opening when bearing down). The research team enrolled 1,528 women within five to 10 years of their first birth. These women were followed annually for up to nine years. Of the women, 778 delivered all of their children via cesarean birth, 565 had at least one spontaneous vaginal delivery and 185 had at least one delivery involving forceps or vacuum-assistance, also called operative vaginal delivery. The median age at enrollment was 38.3the youngest study participant at enrollment was 22.7 years old and the oldest participant at the end of the study was age 61.7. The team collected information from the women at the time of enrollment, including date of first birth, age at first birth, body mass index, whether they had developed any pelvic floor disorder already, birth delivery mode, and genital hiatus size the distance between the urethra and the posterior hymen. The team then collected information at follow-up visitsthe cesarean birth group made 4,039 visits, the spontaneous vaginal delivery group made 2,817 visits and the operative vaginal delivery group made 948 visits. Some women already had developed pelvic floor disorders at the time of study enrollment while others developed the conditions over the course of the study. In all, the researchers found that cesarean delivery substantially reduced the risk of pelvic floor disorders, most notably pelvic organ prolapse, while operative delivery increased the risk. And for pelvic organ prolapse, the magnitude of these differences grew over time. For example, by 15 years after a first delivery, prolapse of the uterus or vaginal wall beyond the vaginal opening was seen in 9 percent (7-12 percent) of women who had delivered by cesarean, 30 percent (25-35 percent) who had at least one vaginal delivery and 45 percent (37-53 percent) of those who had at least one operative delivery. The researchers also found that a large percentage of new cases of urinary and bowel incontinence developed in the first five years after delivery, while pelvic organ prolapse tended to develop many more years after childbirth. A third discovery was that the genital hiatus size is significantly associated with all pelvic floor disorders but most significantly with pelvic organ prolapse. This suggests that the genital hiatus size is a marker that might identify women at high risk of developing pelvic floor disorders with aging. "While this study was limited to one community hospital and might not accurately reflect populations nation- or world-wide, it is the first time we have been able to gather data over a significant period of time," says Handa. "These data help us understand which women might be at highest risk to develop these conditions. Ultimately this research will help us identify which women should be targeted for prevention strategies, and will hopefully improve our ability to deliver the right type of care to the right person." Explore further Vaginal birth tied to later lack of pelvic organ support More information: Joan L. Blomquist et al. Association of Delivery Mode With Pelvic Floor Disorders After Childbirth, JAMA (2018). Journal information: Journal of the American Medical Association Joan L. Blomquist et al. Association of Delivery Mode With Pelvic Floor Disorders After Childbirth,(2018). DOI: 10.1001/jama.2018.18315 Dr. Carol Feghali-Bostwick (left) and Xinh Xinh Nguyen (right) of the Medical University of South Carolina. Dr. Feghali-Bostwick is the senior author on the Frontiers in Endocrinology article, and Ms. Nguyen is the first author. Credit: Sarah Pack, Medical University of South Carolina In an article published online by Frontiers in Endocrinology, researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) report that they have identified a potential therapeutic target for lung fibrosis or scarring. They showed in a preclinical model that the protein promotes fibrosis by turning on profibrotic genes and increasing levels of profibrotic factors, including itself. It is particularly attractive as a target because it exerts its influence early, before most other profibrotic factors emerge. "IGFBP-5 is upstream of several molecules that are considered key molecules in fibrosis, such as TGF-beta," says Carol Feghali-Bostwick, Ph.D., Kitty Trask Holt Endowed Chair for Scleroderma Research at MUSC, and senior author on the article. "So targeting it would allow us to possibly reduce the effect of all of the others that are downstream of it." In lung fibrosis, lung tissue thickens, stiffens and scars. It can no longer function normally. That's why people with lung fibrosis have difficulty breathing. Around 100,000 Americans have lung fibrosis without a known cause, known as idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. Another 50,000 have scleroderma, an autoimmune disease that often leads to lung fibrosis as well as thickening and tightening of the skin. "There are currently no FDA-approved drugs that can either stop disease progression or reverse it in these patients," says Feghali-Bostwick. "Mortality is high, in some cases higher than cancer, so finding therapies is critical." For these patients, transplant is often the only option. However, not all patients are eligible for lung transplant, and it is not without its complications. New therapies that can stop or reverse lung fibrosis are needed. Feghali-Bostwick and her team showed that insulin-like growth factor-binding protein 5 (IGFBP-5) plays an important and early role in promoting fibrosis. It increases profibrotic gene expression, resulting in excessive collagen being deposited to the extracellular matrix (ECM). The ECM is the network that surrounds cells and serves as the scaffold on which they can build tissue. This excess collagen causes the tissue to stiffen and become fibrotic. These profibrotic genes also help ensure that levels of IGFBP-5 and other profibrotic factors such as matrix crosslinking enzyme lysyl oxidase (LOX) stay high. LOX enables collagen fibrils to cross-link, making tissue stiffer. "IGFBP-5 induces its own gene expression and feedback loop," says Xinh Xinh Nguyen, a graduate student who is working with Feghali-Bostwick and first author on the article. "This suggests that IGFBP5 acts together with profibrotic genes to promote fibrosis and tissue remodeling." The MUSC used collagen-producing cells harvested from patients with IPF or scleroderma to explore the profibrotic effects of IGFBP-5. But they also went a step further, showing similar increases in human lung tissue cores. These cores more realistically mimic the physiologic conditions of living human tissue. "It's important to understand the effects of IGFBP5 in human tissue if you are developing therapies," explains Feghali-Bostwick. "Many therapies work in mice but fail in humans when you get to the human trials. So we have this system where we take lung tissues and put them in an environment that's a human-based tissue." Next steps are to use collagen-producing cells and human lung tissue cores to better understand how the increased levels of LOX caused by IGFBP-5 further promote fibrosis. The MUSC team will also study LOX in a transgenic mouse model that is engineered to overexpress IGFBP-5. This important translational discovery was made possible by the South Carolina Clinical and Translational Research (SCTR) Institute's TL1 predoctoral training program, which instills in graduate students the skills they will need to translate their basic science research to the clinic. Nguyen is a TL1 trainee, and Feghali-Bostwick is her mentor as well as the associate TL1 program director. "The TL1 program is critical in training the next generation of scientists and physician-scientists who can move discoveries from the bench to the clinic," explains Feghali-Bostwick. "Graduate students are our pipeline for the future, and this program teaches them about how to have the right mindset and think about translational research and clinically relevant research." "Participation in the TL1 program has provided me additional learning opportunities to gain expertise in translational research," says Nguyen. "It has enhanced my knowledge about clinically relevant aspects of my project." Nguyen was able to shadow Deanna Baker Frost, M.D., Ph.D., an assistant professor in the MUSC College of Medicine, as she saw patients with scleroderma. Baker Frost is participating in SCTR's Institutional Career Development KL2 program, which focuses on preparing early-career scientists and physician-scientists for translational research. "Xinh Xinh (Nguyen) is doing research on scleroderma, but now she understands better what scleroderma is and understands what patients go through and what their complications are and what they come in for," explains Feghali-Bostwick. "That puts it all in perspective and helps her better understand why she is doing the research she is doing." Feghali-Bostwick believes that there is a natural mentoring relationship between the KL2 and TL1 scholars. "There is less of a gap between them than between senior scientists like myself and TL1s," she says. "It's a good fit; it's a natural fit." Explore further Scientists identify agent that can block fibrosis of skin, lungs More information: Xinh-Xinh Nguyen et al, IGFBP-5 Promotes Fibrosis via Increasing Its Own Expression and That of Other Pro-fibrotic Mediators, Frontiers in Endocrinology (2018). Xinh-Xinh Nguyen et al, IGFBP-5 Promotes Fibrosis via Increasing Its Own Expression and That of Other Pro-fibrotic Mediators,(2018). DOI: 10.3389/fendo.2018.00601 In Uganda, one surgery can not only save the life of an infant or child, it also can extend it, providing a better quality of life. This can have a dramatic impact not only on the patient, but on the patients friends and family as well. Credit: Yale University Nasser Kakembo, MD, is a pediatric surgeonone of just four among the 200 surgeons who serve more than 40 million people in Uganda. He gets up at 5 a.m. every weekday and drives 40 minutes to the hospital in Kampala, the capital city. He recently treated a young orphan who had been born with a vestibular fistula (an abnormal connection between the female genitalia and rectum). In the U.S., doctors would have repaired this in infancy. But this girl was 12 years old and had never seen a surgeon. Dr. Kakembo performed a temporary colostomy, a procedure to temporarily divert the large intestine so that she could pass stool into a bag outside of her abdomen, then later performed a more complex surgery to correct the vestibular fistula. "This is a child who had never gone to school," Dr. Kakembo says. He didn't know her parents' story, but he says Ugandans have such a negative perception of colostomies that families may split up when a child has one. Fortunately, the mother of another hospitalized child took an interest in the girl and taught her to sew. "So, now this girl is a tailor. She has a livelihood. She came to the hospital with a medical problem that we were able to fix, and now she is living her life," Dr. Kakembo says. But the problem is that "there are so many stories like this," he says. "And many patients are never treated or even diagnosed." Helping surgeons help themselves This is a situation Yale Medicine pediatric surgeon Doruk Ozgediz, MD, MSc, wants to fix. An assistant professor at Yale School of Medicine, Dr. Ozgediz has a master's degree in public health in developing countries and has been regularly visiting Uganda for 15 years. Uganda is a country known for its lush forests and misty mountains. It was once described by Winston Churchill as the "pearl of Africa." But many of its people don't get proper medical care. When Dr. Ozgediz first traveled there in 2003, most visiting doctors were helping to manage such problems as HIV and malaria. "Little had been done to tackle surgical diseases," he says. "There were major challenges as far as infrastructure, poverty, and just human resources, not enough workforcenot enough of just about everything. The question was, what could we do?" Dr. Ozgediz was especially drawn to caring for the children, partly because 50 percent of the population in Uganda is 14 and younger, and 85 percent of children in low-income countries are likely to need surgery by age 15, he says. Although there is no fee for surgery in Uganda, patients must pay for the hospital stay, the imaging tests, even the bed linens. Some sell off cattleand sometimes their houseto pay for needed care, Dr. Kakembo says. The shortage of doctors in Uganda means that many patients who do get surgery aren't getting it from specialists trained to treat their particular type of problem. It's not uncommon for a woman with a gynecologic problem to seek help from the only doctor available to her, even if that doctor is a pediatrician, Dr. Kakembo says. In response to this, many Yale Medicine doctors travel on medical missions to provide care for people who wouldn't be treated otherwise. But Dr. Ozgediz envisioned Uganda as a place that, with some help, could provide its own sustainable surgical care. (This perspective mirrors a recent mandate from the World Health Organization to make essential surgical care available in all countries.) So, while he has helped perform thousands of surgeries there, he prefers teaching skills to Ugandan surgeons and advocating to increase local capacity. With that in mind, in 2006 Dr. Ozgediz co-founded the nonprofit Global Partners in Anesthesia and Surgery (GPAS). It is a multidisciplinary collaboration focused on increasing surgical care capacity in resource-poor settings with projects to strengthen workforce and infrastructure to address the surgical disease locally. More recently, GPAS partnered with a Scottish charity called the Archie Foundation (now KIDS OR), which provided the country with two fully equipped operating rooms (Dr. Ozgediz led research to evaluate the impact of those operating rooms). He also lived in Uganda in 2007 and 2008, working full-time as a visiting surgeon in Mulago Hospital in Kampala. Now, he visits the country as often as four times a year, for two- to four-week stretches, to instruct the new pediatric surgery fellows, in addition to general surgery trainees, in both classroom and clinical settings. "Once they are trained, each new surgeon will do 700 to 1,000 operations a year, many of them life-saving operations, and more children will have access to surgical care," Dr. Ozgediz says. Dr. Ozgediz says he has built long-term relationships with Ugandan surgeons and like-minded colleagues globally, and worked with local medical teams both in Kampala and in rural areas that are often hours outside the city. The results are promising: One GPAS project helped triple the number of surgical trainees in the country from 15 to 45 (all remained in the country after training). And instead of one pediatric surgeon in the country, there are now four. Adding an endocrine specialty Three years ago, Tobias Carling, MD, Ph.D., through connections with Dr. Ozgediz, started to regularly travel to Uganda, having heard there was a need to increase capacity for endocrine surgical care. Dr. Carling is chief of Yale Medicine Endocrine Surgery and director of endocrine cancer care at Smilow Cancer Hospital. "Growing up in Sweden, and practicing in the United States, I had so many opportunities," Dr. Carling says. "I wanted to get involved in some way. And then this presented itself." In addition to performing surgeries himself, Dr. Carling trains surgical residents and fellows in Uganda in endocrine surgery, and tracks surgical outcomes. "Once I teach the residents how the operation can be done the safe way, they'll have a career for 40 years and be able to train the next generation," he says. He has traveled six hours from Kampala to small hospital "camps" in rural areas, sometimes treating patients who have walked two days to get there. Dr. Carling sees many people with goiter, a disease caused by an enlarged thyroid compressing the trachea, affecting breathing and swallowing, that he treats with a subtotal thyroidectomy. One of his most impactful experiences has been watching doctors do successful surgeries with limited tools and supplies. "It's night and day as far as resources. That blows your mind a little bithow much we throw away in the U.S. because things are made to be used only once, and they use them repeatedly because it's all they have," he says. He once had to use a World War II-era anesthesia machine to help a patient he was treating. Even so, he says, "The patients are similar, the anatomy and the difficulty of the operation are the same, and, what's more, we have proven that we can have excellent outcomes." Making the most of limited resources Dr. Kakembo would agree, with at least one difference: There are many more patients in Uganda and limited supplies and equipment. He told his story while sitting in an office toward the end of a weeklong visit to Yale in October. It was the second visit Dr. Ozgediz had arranged for Dr. Kakembo so that he could speak at Yale, learn from Yale's pediatric surgeons, and attend conferences in this country. (Yale also has hosted medical students and trainees from Uganda, recently including an obstetrician who plans to start a maternal-fetal pediatric program in Uganda.) He says he performed well enough in his early school years to be accepted to medical school, where he found a mentor who got him interested in surgery. "He gave me the passion to love the discipline. I loved the art of fixing tissue," Dr. Kakembo says. He was a surgical resident when he first met Dr. Ozgediz in 2012. Like many of his young peers, he had considered leaving the country to practice surgery in a place where he could make more money and live an easier life. "But I didn't have the means to leave then, so I stayed," he says. "I don't think I'll consider leaving my country now. The need is too great. We make a difference every day." Dr. Kakembo starts each day by checking on patients who came in during the night, often after they've been in a car crashroads are dangerous and accidents are frequent. Later, if it's a surgery day, he goes to the operating room, where he performs surgeryincluding many highly complicated procedureswell into the evening. In his most challenging weeks, if he is working in a hospital camp, he might perform more than 100 surgeries. Recently, a mother traveled three hours by bus so that he could help her baby, who had a large tumor growing out of his back. Another baby's intestines were growing outside of its bodya condition called gastroschisis that is fatal if left untreated. "For the surgeon, it's a very demanding job, especially when it comes to emergencies. There are so many emergencies," Dr. Kakembo says. "That means we end up having a backlog of elective cases that are not tended to." But his greatest concern is for the patients he doesn't see, including children who never see a doctor for devastating anomalies that should be corrected in the first year of life, or who see a doctor when it is almost too late. "I think we are desensitized," Dr. Kakembo says. "But it's the circumstances. There are so many patients. To advocate for them, we need to do an even better job of quantifying our unmet needs through clinical research." The rewards flow both ways The help provided by Yale Medicine doctors can seem a mere drop in the bucket in the context of so much need. But Dr. Ozgediz and Dr. Carling know that every little bit helps and say that when our doctors work in Uganda, their view of what's possible expands. Their perspective changes. They see that surgeons there, who have found ways to do more with limited resources, can do an operation in Uganda for $15. A medical student might learn how to fix an oxygen tank for a patient if he or she is the only one available to do it. "American trainees appreciate the resources in the U.S. better when they can see what it is like on the other side," Dr. Ozgediz says. "Many come back forever changedas clinicians and as human beings." "It has made me a bit more patient," Dr. Carling says. "If I'm in the U.S., and something is not functioning perfectly or there is a delay, I think, well, at least we have lights in the operating room, at least we have functioning electricity. We are so fortunate when it comes to the resources we have here." Both doctors say their experience in Uganda has made them better listeners when they are consulting with patients at Yale. Meanwhile, as Dr. Kakembo learns more surgical skills and the capacity to provide surgery in Uganda grows, he wants to educate its citizens about what health care can do for them. "I want patients to come to us early, so we can provide the best treatment for them," he says. He is grateful to his American colleagues for helping him advance as a pediatric surgeon, and is hopeful for the future. "Their presence is being felt here," says Dr. Kakembo. "This has really made a difference." Explore further Distance to nearest pediatric surgeon a potential barrier for millions of US children Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis and David Altmaier, commissioner for the state's Office of Insurance Regulation, warned insurers not to slow-walk claims made in the wake of Hurricane Michael. A written notice, sent to insurers Wednesday afternoon, reminded companies that they must pay undisputed benefits owed under property insurance policies within 90 days after a claim is made. The hurricane, which slammed into Florida's Panhandle in early October, caused about $4.5 billion in insured losses and generated more than 133,000 claims. According to the state, more than 42,000 of those claims remain open. I expect insurers will keep their promise and obligation to Floridians and pay undisputed claims quickly," said Patronis, who is from Panama City. "Insurance companies must do everything possible to ensure those impacted by Hurricane Michael are made whole. If they dont fulfill these expectations, Florida insurance consumers will be more vulnerable to fraud. In the notice, the two offices remind insurers that in order to make claim or customer service resources available, they may need to set up mobile offices in the Panhandle and go on calls to policyholders. The goal is not only to follow Florida statue, the offices wrote, but to "restore a sense of normalcy and facilitate restoration and recovery." Hurricane Michael caused catastrophic damage, rendered thousands of our citizens homeless, and destroyed critical infrastructure," said Altmaier. "Countless first responders, crews, officials and volunteers continue to work around the clock to support and rebuild communities that have been forever changed we expect nothing less from insurance companies. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., speaks with reporters on Capitol Hill in January. He called President Donald Trump's absence from the Summit of the Americas on Friday understandable but a nonetheless disappointing example of how Latin America often takes a backseat to more pressing national security challenges. [Associated Press] Florida Sen. Marco Rubio took to the Senate floor on Tuesday to urge Florida's new governor and Cabinet to pardon the Groveland Four, calling their plight "a horrifying injustice." "This is what I come here to the Senate today, to urge the new Florida Cabinet to do as soon as possible after they take office next month," Rubio said. "Because after 70 years, it is time for Florida to do the right thing for the Groveland Four." Rubio chose to give his speech just before a Tuesday night vote in the Senate overhauling the criminal justice system. Rubio was one of just 12 senators who voted against the reforms. "While there is nothing we can do to give Mr. Thomas or Mr. Shepherd back their lives, there's nothing we can do to give Mr. Irvin or Mr. Greenlee back the years they spent in jail for a crime they did not commit, we can give these men back their good name," Rubio said. The speech was also an uncomfortable welcome for Gov. Rick Scott, who will become Rubio's counterpart in the Senate next month. Scott has chosen not to speed up the pardon process for the Groveland Four, despite an extraordinary request by the Legislature last year asking him to do just that. None of the other three Cabinet members Attorney General Pam Bondi, Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam and Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis have tried to speed up the pardon process, either. With Scott, Bondi and Putnam set to leave office next month, calls have grown for the Cabinet members to make good on the pardons. Incoming Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried, the first Democrat to win a seat on the Cabinet in 12 years, has already vowed to speed up the process at the first Cabinet meeting. Rubio used the roughly five-minute speech to summarize why the case of the Groveland Four was so horrifying. Wrongly accused of raping a white woman, the four were either murdered, tortured or wrongly imprisoned at the hands of a Lake County Sheriff Willis McCall. "What we can do now, as a state in Florida, is seek the forgiveness of their families and of them for the grave injustice that was committed against them," Rubio said. You can watch Rubio's remarks here: 1. Comments must not be racist, misogynistic, homophobic, or otherwise bigoted. 2. Comments must not involve little more than name-calling and insulting remarks. 3. Comments must not be made by "anonymous" or "unknown". 4. Comments must not try to sneak in some free advertising for themselves (like spam). I invite anyone who wishes to comment on this blog to do so. I enjoy the comments, whether you agree with what I have said or not. But some people want to abuse the right to comment, and since this is my blog, I have decided to lay down the following rules. If your comment violates these rules, it will not be published. Third Circuit: Second Amendment called a Second Rate Right By Dean Weingarten. December 12th, 2018 Original Source In a split decision, a three judge panel at the Third Circuit Court of Appeals effectively ruled the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights is a second-rate right, not entitled to the full protections of other enumerated rights. The opinion was filed on 5 December, 2018. The case is Association of New Jersey Rifle and Pistol Clubs, Inc. v. Attorney General New Jersey, No. 18-3170 (3rd Cir. 2018). The two majority judges followed the trend of other Circuits where the Second Amendment is being degraded and reduced to second-rate status. Only a month ago, the First Circuit ruled the Second Amendment does not apply outside of the home. The rogue Circuits are able to do this because the Supreme Court has been refusing to hear Second Amendment cases for nearly a decade. The Supreme Court only hears a limited number of cases. They are not required to hear all cases. Some Circuit courts are gutting the Second Amendment by claiming it is not really a right. Rather, they say, it is a privilege the government may regulate if the government thinks it might do some good to regulate it. These Jurists seem embarrassed by the Second Amendment. They seem to believe their job is to limit it as much as possible, rather than to protect it as a fundamental right. Judge Stephano Bibas wrote the dissenting opinion in the Third Circuit ruling. He is an outstanding jurist who was appointed by President Trump. At only 49 years old, he is already the 15th most cited jurist by the Supreme Court. His resume is impressive. It is easy to see why President Trump chose to appoint him. His dissent runs to 19 pages. The first four paragraphs eviscerates the majority decision. From uscourts.gov: The Second Amendment is an equal part of the Bill of Rights. We must treat the right to keep and bear arms like other enumerated rights, as the Supreme Court insisted in Heller. We may not water it down and balance it away based on our own sense of wise policy. 554 U.S. at 634-35. Yet the majority treats the Second Amendment differently in two ways. First, it weighs the merits of the case to pick a tier of scrutiny. That puts the cart before the horse. For all other rights, we pick a tier of scrutiny based only on whether the law impairs the core right. The Second Amendment's core is the right to keep weapons for defending oneself and one's family in one's home. The majority agrees that this is the core. So whenever a law impairs that core right, we should apply strict scrutiny, period. That is the case here. Second, though the majority purports to use intermediate scrutiny, it actually recreates the rational-basis test forbidden by Heller. It suggests that this record favors the government, but make no mistake--that is not what the District Court found. The majority repeatedly relies on evidence that the District Court did not rely on and expert testimony that the District Court said was "of little help." 2018 WL 4688345, at *8. It effectively flips the burden of proof onto the challengers, treating both contested evidence and the lack of evidence as conclusively favoring the government. Whether strict or intermediate scrutiny applies, we should require real evidence that the law furthers the government's aim and is tailored to that aim. But at key points, the majority substitutes anecdotes and armchair reasoning for the concrete proof that we demand for heightened scrutiny anywhere else. New Jersey has introduced no expert study of how similar magazine restrictions have worked elsewhere. Nor did the District Court identify any other evidence, as opposed to armchair reasoning, that illuminated how this law will reduce the harm from mass shootings. Id. at *12-13. So New Jersey cannot win unless the burden of proof lies with the challengers. It does not. If the Supreme Court grants a writ of certiorari (the legal term for agreeing to hear a case before the Supreme Court), Judge Bibas' reasoning is rock solid. For those who do not follow these cases closely, here is a short explanation of the different levels of scrutiny. Strict Scrutiny - The highest level of protection, reserved for fundamental Constitutional rights. To pass this level of legal examination, a law, regulation, or other restriction of a Constitutional right must be required by a compelling state interest, and the restriction must be narrowly tailored to achieve that result. The burden of proof is on the government. For example: There is a general prohibition on shouting "Fire" in a crowded theater, when there is no fire. This is a restriction on the First Amendment right of freedom of speech. The prohibition serves a compelling state interest of public safety. The restriction is narrowly tailored to ban shouting false information that causes severe, direct, physical, harm to others. A corollary for the Second Amendment would be a general prohibition on firing a gun in a crowded theater when there is no reasonable, deadly threat. Intermediate Scrutiny- The middle level of protection of less than fundamental rights. The law or regulation must serve an important government objective, and be substantially related to achieving that objective. The burden of proof rests with the government. This level is fairly new, only existing since 1976. Rational Basis - The lowest level of protection. Generally not applied to rights. It essentially is no protection at all. The party challenging the law or rule has the burden of proof. They have to show the government has *no* legitimate interest in the law, rule, or policy. They have to show there is *no* conceivable rational basis for the law, even if the government never stated one. Laws, rules, or policies are almost never struck down on this basis. Judge Bibas shows the two majority judges collapsed the level of scrutiny from strict scrutiny to rational basis, while calling it "intermediate scrutiny". Second Amendment supporters know the Third Circuit ignored the rule of law and applied their own, cherished, leftist, Progressive, biases to gut Second Amendment protections in this case. Judge Bibas, in his masterful dissent, shows how they did it. 2018 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice and link are included. Gun Watch Back to Top Netflix has revealed its ISP Speed Index for November 2018, with Cool Ideas retaining the top spot. South Africas ISPs achieved an average speed of 2.53Mbps during the month, a slight increase over last months average. The countrys overall rank on the charts also increased to 52 out of 59, up from 53 last month. However, South Africas rank still remains lower than its previous best of 50th place, which it last achieved in August. The index is a measure of prime-time Netflix performance on particular ISPs, and not a measure of overall performance on the networks. Netflix said it calculates the average bitrate of Netflix content, in Mbps, streamed by its members per ISP. We measure the speed via all available end-user devices. For a small number of devices, we cannot calculate the exact bit rates, and streaming via cellular networks is exempted from our measurements, said Netflix. Netflix recommends a 5Mbps connection for full HD streaming, which may explain why the average speeds are all below the 5Mbps mark. Fastest ISPs for Netflix The fastest 10 ISPs for prime-time Netflix streaming in South Africa are listed below. November 2018 Rank ISP Speed Previous Speed Change 1 Cool Ideas 3.82 Mbps 3.75 Mbps 2 Vox 3.37 Mbps 3.31 Mbps 3 MTN 3.24 Mbps 3.09 Mbps +1 4 Vodacom 3.23 Mbps 3.12 Mbps -1 5 Cell C 3.18 Mbps 3.08 Mbps 6 Afrihost 2.81 Mbps 2.69 Mbps 7 Cybersmart 2.53 Mbps 2.48 Mbps 8 MWEB 2.44 Mbps 2.37 Mbps 9 Telkom 2.05 Mbps 2.04 Mbps 10 Neotel 1.85 Mbps 1.81 Mbps Now read: Netflix unveils first South African original series SARS Chief Officer for Digital Information Services and Technology, Mmamathe Makhekhe-Mokhuane made headlines in October after an embarrassing interview on SABC. In the interview, Makhekhe-Mokhuane displayed no real knowledge about SARS IT systems and tried to divert the conversation to other topics. When the interviewer tried to get the discussion back on track, Makhekhe-Mokhuane now famously replied: Mam, can you give me protection from yourself. Her testimony before the Nugent Commission was equally disastrous and was described as rather disturbing by Judge Robert Nugent. In the fifteen months of her tenure only one strategy meeting has been held. Of the eleven meetings with her subordinates she attended only four, Nugent highlighted. He added that there has been no material development of the information technology systems since the departure of her predecessor. We think it is manifest that she does not have the capacity to take control of SARS information technology, Nugent said. He added that the aggressive, indecorous, and unusual manner in which Makhekhe-Mokhuane gave evidence was not appropriate for a person in her position at SARS. How Makhekhe-Mokhuane was employed Considering Makhekhe-Mokhuanes lack of experience and knowledge about SARSs IT systems, it raises questions as to how she passed a high-level IT interview process. The Nugent Commissions final report sheds light on the process which led to Makhekhe-Mokhuanes appointment. On 21 July 2016 former Sars commissioner Tom Moyane sought approval to appoint Makhekhe-Mokhuane from then Minister of Finance, Pravin Gordhan. It appears the documents went astray, because the application was replied to, with apologies, on 15 December 2016. The Minister pointed out that while the Commissioner decides on who to appoint to a post, the Minister must approve the terms and conditions of employment. He asked for a copy of her proposed contract, and added the following note: In addition to the above the panel of interviewers did not have anyone with IT experience. Nugent said the panel for the appointment of Makhekhe-Mokhuane appears to be remarkable for a candidate whose function would be to take charge of SARS multi-billion rand information technology systems. Information technology at SARS is not confined to servicing the core-business. It is the very heart of SARS core-business, he said. Only one person on the panel had qualifications in information technology, but there was none with exposure to the SARS technology. Moreover, Makhekhe-Mokhuanes qualifications and experience bear little relationship to the complex information technology she would be required to manage, Nugent added. I have difficulty seeing how these panels could be said to have been a reasonable cross functional team, representative of the functional department, with sufficient diversity of experience and skills to appoint top management of a large and complex organisation. Strange claims about the appointment When faced with questions as to why commission should not find the appointments to have been unlawful, Teboho Mokoena, SARSs Chief Officer: Human Capital and Development responded with an affidavit. Nugent described this affidavit as disappointing, because the responses are all an exculpatory afterthought. Mokoena, for example, said the Minister had noted and approved the appointments, including that of Makhekhe-Mokhuane. That is not correct. The memorandum did not ask for ministerial approval for the appointments, as Mokoena well knows. It asked only that the appointments be noted, Nugent said. Makhekhe-Mokhuane had already been appointed at the time the memorandum was placed before the Minister. Mokoena sought also to justify the lawfulness of the appointments on the grounds that the Minister had raised no queries in relation to what was placed before him. It is unfortunate that a senior employee of SARS should justify misleading information being placed before the Minister on the basis that it was not queried, Nugent said. Huge salary increase What is even more surprising than the absence of SARS IT executives in the interview process is the huge salary increase which followed soon after Makhekhe-Mokhuanes appointment. Shortly after her appointment it was recommended that the remuneration at which she was appointed, R2,207,078, should, at her request, be increased by 42.23% to R3,139,126. That big salary increase was approved by Moyane the following day. Nugent said it is concerning that salaries could be increased so significantly just for the asking. Now read: The head of IT for Sars has failed epically in a live TV interview To: Claus, Santa Subject: Impossible wish list Esteemed Mr. Claus, This is not another plea to put me back on the nice list. I realize those three ships have sailed. Instead, Im asking for your help answering these workers who need more than my traditional salted-sugar-plum quips: -- I broke my leg at home and needed surgery. Two weeks into recovery, I was laid off. I had been with my employer for 10 months, but the Family and Medical Leave Act only offers job protection for employees who have been working a year. It was another few months before I was able to drive or do in-person interviews without a leg cast. -- My daughter was laid off from her warehouse job. She received a small severance package and several months of medical coverage, which will be expiring soon. She has had several interviews in the industry, but no success, possibly because shes a woman and nearing 50. She applied for unemployment, but they stopped sending her money when she enrolled in a school course to improve her skills. She has mild multiple sclerosis and needs expensive medication to control it, although she can still do physical work. Im concerned about how she will be able to afford her medication. I am on a fixed income and unable to help. -- Im a seasonal employee. I work nine to 10 months a year for the state, get laid off in December, and find temporary work or collect unemployment until spring. This year, I need hernia surgery that will take place while Im laid off. Unfortunately, I will not be able to collect unemployment while recovering because, in my state, you have to be physically able to work to be eligible. Also, only permanent full-time employees qualify for short-term disability in my state. This leaves me in a stressful financial situation. -- For these workers and many others, health care and employability are so entangled that one frequently comes at the expense of the other, and our public safety nets have sizable gaps in them. Now, somenot you, of course, Mr. Clausmight argue that these individuals should plan smarter, save more, find a better employer. (Are there no prisons, no workhouses? Is unemployment not historically low?) But when 62 percent of existing U.S. jobs barely pay enough to make ends meetif thatits no wonder many cant save enough to cover even a $400 emergency, let alone two or three months without pay. And even among the youthful, healthy and highly trained, how many are still just an accident, an illness or a layoff away from similar straits? I realize its your peak busy season, but I was hoping you could pass along some gift-giving ideas to the delegation of diverse travelers arriving in Washington from afar in January. Perhaps they have among them the wisdom to find some answers. Karla A. Miller, of South Riding, Virginia, offers advice on surviving the ups and downs of the modern workplace. Local philanthropist Beverly Wendel has donated $40,000 to Jameson Animal Rescue Ranch (JARR) for cat and dog spay/neuter surgeries in a matching gift campaign. The donation will match dollar-for-dollar all donations from supporters, doubling the impact of their contributions. The money raised will be used for two free community spay/neuter voucher, vaccination and microchip clinics in early 2019. The clinics will be named in the memory of Wendels late husband Barry, who was an ardent animal lover. My late husband Barry and I have been donating to animal rescues for years, and when he passed away I wanted to do something in his memory, Wendel said. Since so many people dont spay/neuter their pets, JARRs spay/neuter program is a good place to start so there are fewer homeless pets, she said. The more people contribute the more animals we can help, and I am more than happy to play a part. Its what keeps me going. Animals have held a special place in Wendels heart since she and her late husband rescued two stray kittens they spotted by the side of the road in Yountville. When Barry Wendel died from a long illness at the age of 72, his wife turned to philanthropic work to honor him, donating $2.1 million to the Land Trust of Napa County and supporting other animal rescues. This is the best holiday gift for the animals we could hope to have, said Monica Stevens, co-founder of JARR. Countless cats and dogs will now be spared from a life of suffering and early death. We are deeply grateful to Beverly for this generous gift. The average cost of a clinic for 150 dogs and cats is $15,000, which includes spay/neuter, vaccinations and supplies. With Wendels matching gift and the communitys help, JARR hopes to raise $80,000 to host at least five clinics in 2019 throughout the Bay Area including Napa and Lake counties. For the past four years, JARR has run free pet vaccination and spay/neuter voucher clinics in the Bay Area. In 2018, JARR was able to vaccinate 758 dogs and cats and financed over 1,200 spay/neuter surgeries for low-income families, seniors and people in need as part of its mission to help end the overpopulation of cats and dogs. Maybe its taking in the aromas of soaps and lotions, or fingering the softness of textiles, or perhaps the interaction with a human who can answer a question or share personal knowledge of a stores merchandise, but holiday shopping locally is fun and offers an experience one cant get online. Buying holiday gifts locally not only supports the local economy, it is a great way to get to know neighbors who might be the shop owners or fellow customers. The following is a sampling of what can be found in town. Style and Soul has a 12 Days of Christmas special running where spending money earns free gifts. For example, spend $100 and get a free pack of Twisted Wares cocktail napkins. Spend $200 and get a free scarf, value from $20 to $36. Spend $300 and take home one of the stores most popular items; a cork wrapped bracelet with either gold or silver accent, a $48 value. The store has a loyalty program for frequent shoppers, one shopper in particular, a woman who was back from the East Bay because she said she loved the styles carried and the salespeople. Shopping at Napa Soap Company is a way to support a local company that operates and produces eco-friendly products that, pardon the pun, bathe one in fresh and sustainable body care. There are enough soaps, lotions and other merchandise to create a small gesture gift, or a full-blown thoughtful package that might include aromatherapy concepts for stress relief or energy inspiration. Stop by Farmstead for the delicious menu and take some time in the general store where blankets made by Amana Shop in Iowa are offered along with bags. Amana, Iowa, was formed by a community of Germans seeking religious freedom. They lived their lives simply and, in an Amish-manner shared everything and produced all they needed themselves. Helene Chaisson, a chef visiting from Chicago, was excited to see the Amana Colonies items in the store she and her girlfriends happened upon during their weekend visit. Chaisson lived in Iowa for four years and said she got goosebumps when she found the Amana blankets, a connection to a place she enjoyed, she said. While Chaisson was drawn to Farmsteads farm to table concept, down the street at Steves Hardware, where there is a little bit of everything, including innovative technology, the Twinkly LED string light set was catching looks from shoppers. It is a new generation of customizable lights controlled through an app that can be designed in any shape, used any time of the year, synched to music, and grouped with more than one string. And if a custom-designed gift is appealing, stop by New West Knives and marvel at the beauty of the knives that is evident in the visual appeal as well as the construction. Leather sheathes, blown glass and other unique items are available, too. At Olivier one can find fresh olive oils, vinegars, and other food treats such as tri-colored pastas that maintain their color after being cooked. They come in farfalle, noodle and ravioli shapes. The raviolis come with a hat-like top and a base that are to be filled and connected. For the foodies in your life, the shop also has some food-related decorations, such as a cheese wheel, potato or olive oil bottle. There are a lot of great finds at Findings, including a must-have for the wine drinker who likes to sit on a deck or patio with a glass of wine. The Vinolid is a wine glass with a lid that keeps aromas in and annoying little wine-guzzling gnats out. Woodhouse Chocolates is one of those go-to places that offers nothing anybody needs, but something everybody wants. Its kind of a no-brainer type of gift place where no matter what you buy there, it will be appreciated and devoured. For that difficult-to-shop-for-person who has everything, consider browsing the feather bow tie selection at Pennyweight. The bow ties are from Charleston, South Carolina, and are made of feathers from a variety of birds such as peacock, pheasant, quail and others. The bows are affixed to adjustable satin ribbons and are fitting for any gender or style. Cynthia Carey opened up Wish, a pop-up shop/gallery about a week ago where she is displaying and selling her art that includes decoupaged trays and other art along with glassware and one-of-a-kind pieces. Michael Martin took over as the manager of St. Helenas Market restaurant at the end of November, his latest job in an extensive career in Napa Valley restaurants. He started at Silverado Country Club and then moved to The Restaurant at Domaine Chandon, where he rose through the ranks from seasonal front waiter to assistant restaurant manager under the mentorship of then-manager Daniel Shanks. He mentored me on food and beverage and why we do things the way we do, Martin said. After that Martin was employed as a wine buyer at the Napa Valley Grille, where he worked with future Market co-owner Ernesto Martinez, who started out as a line cook and eventually became special event sous chef. During Martins tenure, the Napa Valley Grille won the Wine Spectators Best of Award of Excellence three years in a row. Martin went on to work at Auberge du Soleil, then back to Napa Valley Grille as general manager. He left restaurants to work in the wine and spirits distribution business for Youngs Market Company and later Classic Wines of California. In 2015 he became general manager of ZuZu in Napa. Martin lives in St. Helena, and hed been eating at Market for years. When Martinez told him he was looking for some help, Martin saw an opportunity to work with his old colleague from the Napa Valley Grille and finally have a job where he could walk to work. Its kind of funny how everythings come full circle for us, Martin said. Having Martin in charge of day-to-day operations frees up Martinez and his business partner Roman Flores to do what owners should do, like market and focus on the banqueting and catering aspect of the business, Martin said. Martin said to expect a few changes at Market. Hes looking at offering more high-end wines by the glass, taking advantage of Markets Coravin wine preservation system. Hes also going to unveil a reserve list with some older wines. Effective Jan. 1, Markets unlimited free corkage policy will be changed to free corkage for the first two bottles and $20 for each additional bottle. You have to continually adapt in the restaurant world, Martin said. You cant stay stagnant. Like many others, Fred and Andy Schweiger were stunned at the devastation wrought by the recent Camp Fire in Paradise. The Spring Mountain vintners, though, decided to do something about it: Re-release 400 cases of their Schweiger Vineyards 2014 Chardonnay and donate 100 percent of the sales to help fire victims. When you think about it, weve had fires here, Fred Schweiger, father of Andy, said. We did help out for the Tubbs Fire and Nuns Fire victims last year. But think about a whole town, a community of a butcher, baker and candlestick maker, and maybe a newspaper, churches, stores gone. People dont have anyplace to go to work. Its going to take a huge amount of funding to help rebuild the community, Fred said. Winemaker Andy Schweiger said he saw a photo that was very chilling. Theres a Lutheran church up in Paradise and its completely down to rubble, except for a cross and cross stand in the parking lot. The Schweigers hope to raise $100,000 for fire relief and will donate proceeds from the sale of the wine to Golden Valley Bank of Chico, which is handling fire relief funds. Thats the most efficient way to send money, because the bank is going to see who has the most need and it is going to be donating to charities that have little or no overhead costs, Andy said. The 2014 Chardonnay is selling for $35 a bottle and $420 a case and is available on the winerys website, schweigervineyards.com or by phone, 707-963-4882. We all know friends who have lost their homes from last year, Fred said as he and his son were finishing details to sell the fire relief Chardonnay. And it hasnt gotten any easier for them. Even though they might have had OK insurance, the family is scared to death, they dont want to move back. The whole town might rally and say, We can do this. The idea of how to donate to Camp Fire Relief first came when Andy was in Atlanta visiting his son, Jerry. He heard that Sierra Nevada was creating a beer called Resilience Butte County Proud IPA, and donated the wort to hundreds of breweries across the United States. Suppliers donated the rest of what was needed to brew the beer, which will be available in cans and by draught at participating breweries. Fred said he wanted to use the name Resilience for Schweigers Camp Fire Relief wine, but the name is copyrighted by Schilling Beer Co. in New Hampshire, which has allowed breweries, but not wineries, to use the name for this special project. He added that the winerys staff brainstormed in the kitchen for a couple of hours and came up with the name Camp Fire Relief. Lets try that, Fred said, And before you know it we sold a couple dozen cases right away. Andy said the winery wanted labels for their Chardonnay, but added that when he orders labels from his supplier, its usually two or three months in advance. We probably looking at $1,200 in printing costs and Dad and I want to sell this wine this week, Andy said. He had a conversation with his sales rep, who went to the companys general manager, who put a rush on the job and turned the labels around in a week. Id really appreciate it if you could mention Tapp Label in Napa, Andy said, who said that when he got the receipt, it was marked paid. Andy came in with the invoice and I said thats swell, weve got to spend money to give money away, Fred said, before he knew about the donation. It really makes you feel good when someone is willing to join in and be a partner with us. The Schweigers bought the property in 1961, Fred said, cleared the land in 1979 and planted it in vines from 1980-81. The first 10-12 years of our vineyard life, we sold all of the fruit, but little by little I built an area down in the shop with an eight-foot ceiling and put in a residential air conditioner to make wine. Thats where we started in 1994, Fred said. Then he pulled out an article from the St. Helena Star from November 1965. A small story told about the beginning of a volunteer fire department on Spring Mountain and a photo showed two men, Fred and his father, Anton, with a 1952 Dodge pumper they had bought. That was a year after the Hanley Fire, which swept from Calistoga to Santa Rosa, much like the Tubbs Fire did in 2017. Fred served with the statewide fire agency in the 1960s and with Kenwood Fire in the late 1970s. They have had a fire engine on the property for some 20 years and respond to fires in the area, with Fred driving and Andy manning the hose. Needless to say, weve always been fire-conscious, especially with the Hanley Fire that blew through here and then last year with the Tubbs and Nuns Fires, Fred said. We were surrounded on three sides. Be the first to know Get local news delivered to your inbox! Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Q: What do brain surgery, fine dining and local elections have in common? A: Its better to have them all done right than done quickly. We had only one question for our most recent guest, Registrar of Voters John Tuteur: Why did it take so long to count Napa Countys votes following the Nov. 6 election? It took him more than an hour to answer, and although we dont have space here to delve into the level of detail that he did, we came away more confident and satisfied than ever with Tuteurs management of our elections. There were a few reasons that it took Tuteur 27 days to certify the election, but the main reason is accuracy. Every step in his laborious process is aimed at ensuring that each voters intent is reflected in the final tally. There are a few things the county could do to speed up the count. In our opinion, none of them are advisable. First, we could go back to using polling places, where poll workers confirm your identity on the spot. Thats much quicker than the current system of comparing the signature on each ballot envelope to the signature the election division has on file. The downside? Polling place elections have substantially lower turnout than vote-by-mail elections. Tuteur reported a 73 percent turnout in Napa County for the November election, the highest local rate for a California midterm in over a century. The higher the turnout, the more the results truly reflect the communitys wishes. Getting a quicker count isnt worth jeopardizing democratic participation. Second, Tuteurs department could invest taxpayer dollars in a $250,000 scanner that would compare the signatures. The downside? Thats an awful lot of money, Tuteur doesnt have room for the machine in the office, and he estimates it would only shorten the process by a day or two. Again, not worth it. Third, we voters could voluntarily send in our ballots as early as possible. Sixty percent of the ballots in the last election were turned in on Election Day, which translates into a lot of post-election counting by Tuteurs staff of five employees and six temps. The downside? A lot of us cherish the ritual of voting on Election Day, even if were just dropping an envelope in a box or marking up our ballots alongside family and friends. Election Day voting also allows us to change our minds in response to late-breaking campaign developments, and to thoroughly research the propositions. Late voting and a commitment to accuracy werent the only factors behind the long wait. Tuteur also had to deal with Californias two-year-old provisional voting system that allows voters to register as late as Election Day. Those provisional ballots 700 in this election go into a separate pile and may only be counted once Tuteurs staff ensures that those voters didnt already cast ballots in the district where they were previously registered. That means waiting for those other agencies to report who has and hasnt voted. Tuteurs staff worked more quickly than you might think. Eight days after the election, 97 percent of the votes had been counted. The only suspense came in close races for St. Helena mayor, Calistoga City Council, American Canyon City Council, and the American Canyon hotel tax, which ultimately failed by only 13 votes. Tuteur released his final uncertified count on Nov. 29. Then his staff had to conduct a legally mandated 1 percent manual tally to ensure that the optical scanners that read the ballots did so accurately. Tuteurs exhaustive answer to our question revealed a watertight, triple-checked system thats resistant to hacking or manipulation and clearly out of step with our frenzied culture of instant gratification, social media and 24-hour news cycles. Tuteurs meticulous process minimizes sloppiness and errors just look to Florida to see the chaos that can result from a poorly run election. Local elections are not an American Idol contest. Theyre the cornerstone of our democracy. And theyre worth the wait. The Star editorial board consists of editors David Stoneberg and Sean Scully and community volunteers Norma Ferriz, Christopher Hill, Shannon Kuleto, Bonnie Long, Peter McCrea, Gail Showley and Dave Yewell. Children and adults wrote letters of appreciation to veterans on Dec. 6 in the lobby of the Lincoln Theater when the Transcendence Theater Company brought its Holiday Spectacular to Yountville. The letter writing to veterans also took place there on Dec. 7, on the 77th anniversary of the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, which led the United States to enter World War II. Jim and Von Hurson, owners of Valiance Wines and sponsors of the holiday show, supervised the letter-writing table prior to the show and during intermission. As some elementary school girls used the available crayons to decorate their letters with Christmas trees during intermission, Von Hurson smiled and said, The veterans are going to love getting these letters. After Kim Marshall wrote his letter, he talked near the letter-writing table. I am retired from the army. My wife and I came here to the holiday show tonight on a bus with 62 people, mostly retired military, Marshall said. Were all residents of the Paradise Valley Estates. Paradise Valley Estates is a 76-acre, nonprofit community that was founded by military officers in 1997. It is open to people age 60 and older from all walks of life. We saw the hand of God during the Camp Fire it came right up to our property line and then the wind changed direction and it went the other way, Marshall said. About 60 percent of our Paradise Valley Estates community are retired military. Some of the other estate residents came on their own tonight, not on the bus. Were all heavily involved with the Transcendence people. Valiance Wines, established in 2017, is known for its tribute and dedication wine labels. Each bottle of Valiance Wines features a photo or graphic design with a special tribute or dedication related to a veteran or military group. The couple said they are committed to donating 100 percent of their wine sales profits, after taxes, to programs that support and benefit veterans and their families. The vets have done far more for us than we can ever do for them, Jim Hurson said. Hurson is an Air Force veteran who flew Airvac missions during the Vietnam War. Von worked for Pan Am and traveled frequently to the Vietnam War zone, flying young servicemen on the R&Rs. The couple said they enjoyed visiting with the letter writers who wanted to talk but they didnt read the letters. Its a privacy thing, Hurson said. We just put them in the mailbox. According to Stephan Stubbins, the Transcendence Theater Companys co-executive director, the letters will arrive at the Veterans Home in Yountville before Christmas. During the show, Stubbins let the audience know how the cast feels about veterans. Veterans are our heroes, Stubbins said. They are people who have put their lives on the line so that our lives can be better and so that our dreams can be possible. After the uplifting show, Stubbins said that he has fond memories of veterans. Both of his grandfathers were veterans of World War II. He said he will never forget the connection he felt with residents at the Veterans Home in Yountville or their enthusiasm when he did a solo performance for about 100 veterans there a few years ago. Stubbins played piano and guitar as he performed selections from the 1920s, 30s, 40s and 50s for them. One of his favorite moments from that performance was getting the veterans to sing along with him full voice to Oh What a Beautiful Morning from Oklahoma. You should have heard the energy in that room, Stubbins said. After I finished singing, I remember a group of them staying afterward to talk with me, Stubbins said. It really touched me that they were so impacted by the music and the experience of connecting with it together. The letter writing to veterans with our shows wasnt intentionally connected with the Pearl Harbor anniversary. But once we discovered that serendipitous coincidence, it was even more meaningful to us, he added. We love the idea of bringing great groups of people to make a difference together, Stubbins said. It was so special to get to partner with Lincoln Theater for the show and Valiance Wines for the letter writing, especially knowing there would be veterans from the home in the audience. Many veterans from the nearby Veterans Home as well as other veterans from Northern California attended the show. Knowing that Transcendence would be doing our first show at Lincoln Theater and performing on the campus of the Veterans Home was significant to us, Stubbins said. In addition to the letter writing at the Lincoln Theater, Transcendence also had their audience write letters to veterans at Luther Burbank Center for the Arts at their Dec. 2 performance. Our community partner that day was the North Bay Veterans Resource Center, and they took with them the letters that our audience wrote to distribute them to the Veterans they serve, Stubbins said. Transcendence has a deep commitment to serving the communities it touches, Stubbins said. Whether that is helping to save Jack London State Historic Park from closure in 2012, giving away tickets to nonprofits or working with boys and girls clubs throughout the North Bay. We knew that this letter-writing project would be an impactful way to make a difference in the Yountville community and bring awareness and thoughtfulness to the veterans during this meaningful time of year. Students at Robert Louis Stevenson Middle School in St. Helena are giving visitors to V. Sattui Winery an artful reminder that far away from this land of plenty, families are fleeing their homes in search of safety and a glass of water. The migration of refugees is the topic of an eighth-grade project at RLS. Student teams each researched a different group of refugees. Some made oral presentations, some designed posters and flyers, others made short films, and the South Sudan group created a mosaic, using colored water bottles and depicting a woman carrying a water jug on her head. The use of cut-up water bottles reflects the lack of clean water thats one of the factors driving the South Sudanese from their homes. Established in 2011, South Sudan is the worlds youngest country. In addition to a severe drought, it suffers from a weak central government, widespread poverty, a lack of schools, pollution, and vicious ethnic violence thats resulted in the death and rape of thousands of civilians. RLS has an annual Immigration Challenge for eighth-graders, but this year teachers focused on refugees to align with Napa County Reads selection of Alan Gratzs Refugee as its book of the year. The novel familiarized students with the push-pull factors that cause people to leave their homes in search of better lives, said eighth-grade English teacher Jennifer Marinace, who collaborated with English teacher Terry Messmer. After finishing the book, students split into groups, chose their topics, and started doing research not all of it online. With the help of adult mentors, These kids had to get on the phone and call City Hall or Mike Thompsons office or some other source, behave maturely, communicate, and get the information they needed, Marinace said. The South Sudan group consisted of Arleth Bautista, Brandon Diaz, Aribella Farrell, Talia Ricci and Mia Wagner. They got in touch with a friend of Farrells mom who works with refugees, and they tracked down information on a few credible websites. They were deeply affected by their research of a place where everything that can go wrong has gone wrong, Ricci said. Women and children are leaving because the military is abusive and they rape women whenever they want, Ricci said. Men are leaving because there are no job opportunities and very little food and water. Seventy percent of South Sudanese schools are shut down, Diaz added. Many civilians travel to United Nations-run refugee camps in neighboring countries like Uganda, where 2 million South Sudanese refugees have fled. The Robert Louis Stevenson mural outside the RLS Museum inspired them to do something big that would reach a lot of people and raise awareness of the South Sudanese refugee crisis, Farrell said. Someone in our group decided a winery would be the best place for it because a lot of people from outside of town would see it and then go back to wherever they were from and tell people about it, Farrell said. It took 17 days for the team of five students to design, sketch and build the mosaic. Our group was just thrown together, and to be able to make something this special was really cool, Wagner said. The sign next to the art briefly describes the dire situation in South Sudan and invites visitors to donate to groups like the UNHCR, the Heartland Alliance, and Peace Winds Japan, which is building water infrastructure in South Sudan. Were hoping that if the UN doesnt have to spend so much time trying to get funded, then ultimately a more permanent solution can rise up, Ricci said. Our main goal is to affect the refugee groups and help them in any way we can, Farrell said. Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Eyewitnesses tell horrific account of pulwama massacre Srinagar, December 18: It took Indian troops and police personnel just 15 minutes to finish the violent cordon and search operation in apple orchards in Pulwama district, which followed the bloodbath in Kharpora-Sirnoo area of the district on Saturday. One after another teenagers and men fell like helpless birds shot by a hunter. The first to fell was a 14-year-old student, Aaqib Bashir, witnesses said quoting reports of the Srinagar-based daily, the Kashmir Press. He was followed by six more including Suhail Ahmad, Liyaqat, Abid Ahmad, Amir Ahmad, Touseef Ahmad Mir and Shahbaz Najar, the report said. Shahbaz Najar was killed just opposite to the lane of his house. The bullets fired by Indian troops and police personnel went whizzing in all directions, witnesses said. The bullets hit the gates, shining corrugated tin sheet barriers, wooden doors, walls, leaving the indelible mark- the large bullet holes. The locals said it was a multi-layered cordon laid to knock down one of the most popular liberation leaders, Zahoor Ahmad Thoker. When it began to dawn, Firdous Ahmad Najar, a school teacher, his brother and two more persons of the Kharpura village, allegedly got a knock at their door. They whisked away me and my brother. Before leaving they told us to switch off our mobile phones. We left it back at our home, Najar said. On the way, the Indian troops beat both of us. And they also hurled invective on us for no reason. Najar said a contingent of Indian army and police took them to the lone rickety structure which happened to be the poultry farm. It was located in the middle of dense apple orchards. The army scanned the building, but they detected nothing, he said. Afterwards, Najar said that the contingent took them along the high rise banks, covered with trees, of a rivulet bisecting the apple orchards. We saw piles of pruned branches and shrubs. When I walked through the woods, we were asked to shove aside the boughs aside. When we did, the Indian troops saw two gum boots under them. They were behind us. They got alerted and opened fire from a distance of 20 feet or so, he said. Few shots were fired from deep inside the earth. The Indian troops ran away from the spot and took position on the higher elevations. Adnan Hamid Butt and Bilal Ahmad were killed just close to the den. The third one, Zahoor Thoker, was killed near the Chinar (Kashmiri version of Maple) tree. The operation ended within 15 minutes, he said. After the operation was over, we left the spot. We bowed before Allah that we were left unharmed, the eyewitness said. According to the eyewitnesses, the Indian troops lifted the bodies of three youth and dumped them into their truck. Just before they were doing so, scores of boys from the nearby villages tried to reach there and raised slogans in favor of freedom. There was no stone pelting as such going on there due to unavailability of stones, witnesses said. There was nothing like a stone available there which could have been hurled on the Indian troops and police personnel, the report said. As the protests were going on, the Indian troops and police personnel opened direct fire on the protesters leaving four including 14-year-old Aaqib dead on the spot, the witnesses said. The obstacles to gaining citizenship in this country grow higher by the day. Some of these new hurdles are dramatic: The administration has placed severe restrictions on asylum seekers, and the military has been deployed to string concertina wire at the U.S.-Mexico border. Other changes are dry and bureaucratic, but no less potentially devastating. One especially consequential policy shift is the Trump administrations proposal to modify the public charge rulewhich it can do without consulting Congress. The rule was designed to bar people from permanent residency who would be dependent on public support for most of their income. Gaining legal permanent residency (a green card) is a critical step before most immigrants can apply for citizenship, and the public-charge rule, whose origins as a federal policy date to 1882, has long been a tool to screen out undesirable immigrants from eventually becoming citizens. Currently, to evaluate whether someone is likely to become a public charge, the government looks at whether an applicant for a green card has used cash-based benefits such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) to support themselves, and at what level, and the Department of Homeland Security can deny a green card application based on the answers. The Trump administration wants to add many more factors to the public-charge determination, including whether the applicants get SNAP (food stamps), Medicaid and Section 8 housing vouchers. Very few noncitizens without green cards qualify for public benefits, but the new public-charge proposal adds additional socioeconomic factors that can contribute to a ruling against permanent residency, including low income, large family size and old age. Applicants with certain preexisting health conditions also could be rejected. Under the new rules, people whom the government suspects of being at risk of becoming a public charge may be granted legal permanent residency but could be asked to post a $10,000 bond, which they would lose if they went on government aid. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that nearly 94 percent of noncitizens currently in the country have at least one factor that could weigh against them if they were to apply for public residency under these rules, and over 40 percent have a heavily weighted factor that could hurt their chances. This proposed rule change buttresses the false narrative that immigrants are a negative burden on the country, unfairly draining taxpayer resources, despite countless studies that show immigration as a positive contributor to the countrys economy. But advocates for immigrants are also worried about a predictable side effect of this rule: Noncitizen parents will not seek health insurance for their citizen children, even though they are entitled to do so and coverage rates for those children will drop, possibly dramatically. Since the Affordable Care Act was passed, the United States has made tremendous strides in insuring children who are citizens but have noncitizen parents. (Its a very large group: Roughly one in four children in the country falls into that category.) In 2008, 84 percent had health insurance. By 2016, that figure had risen to 94 percent. All those gains could easily be erased. This month, Urban Institute researchers estimated that nearly 6.8 million U.S. children who have at least one noncitizen parent are enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP, and they said that group is at high risk of losing their coverage. Additionally, the Kaiser Family Foundation report concluded that the proposed change could lead to Medicaid and CHIP enrollment among citizen children with noncitizen parents dropping by between 15 percent and 35 percent. The low end of that range would mean 875,000 kids losing coverage under those programs; the higher estimate would mean 2 million losing coverage. To be clear, the government would not be directly repealing coverage from these children. Instead, the loss would stem from the chilling effect of causing parents to fear that they will be judged as asking for too much from the government, endangering their own citizenship chances. In truth, the new public-charge rule does not actually count the childrens use of Medicaid or CHIP as a negative factor for their parents green card applications, but that nuance gets missed in immigrant communities. Widespread fear is already causing families to take their children off the rolls of vital programs Weve seen that fear firsthand. At our health center, La Clinica del Pueblo, we have served a primarily immigrant patient population in the Washington, D.C. metro area for 35 years, regardless of ability to pay. We have already seen our patients react to this proposed rule by making unfortunate and harmful choices. One young mother dropped out of the WIC program, deciding to forgo support for the nutritious foods that would ensure her toddlers healthy growth and development. Another patient, the possessor of a green card for 10 years, gave up food stampsand is going hungrybecause she heard a rumor that any immigrants who get benefits could get deported. Our insurance enrollment specialists, hard at work to sign up folks for insurance through the Affordable Care Act exchanges, must routinely reassure patients that obtaining ACA coverage will not be used against them in immigration proceedings. (Many immigrants, such as those with temporary protected status, work permits or other special visas are excluded from Medicaid but eligible for Obamacare; the ACA has been a boon for them.) Since the proposed change in the public-charge rule was leaked to the media last year, our family practitioners have been double-checking with their patients to ensure they are maintaining their childrens health coverage. Any policy that results in people losing insurance has costs that ripple through whole communities, and we see those effects in our clinic. Pharmaceuticals, specialty care and hospitalizations become hard to obtain and expensive. Uninsured patients often forgo routine and essential preventive servicesor vaccines for their children. Prenatal patients skip critical visits. The public health challenge increases for our whole community. Advocates for immigrants were effective in raising the alarm: About 200,000 comments poured into Washingtonthe deadline for commenting was Dec. 10and the administration must show that it has responded to the concerns raised in those comments, a process that itself may slow the rule change. Lets be clear. The proposed change to the public-charge rule is not an effort to punish undocumented immigrants. Its an attempt to prevent legal immigrants from becoming citizens. Whats more, whether by accident or, as we suspect, intent, it punishes children of immigrants who are American citizens. This unfortunate proposal also serves as a reminder that harsh, punitive public policies can arrive without fanfare, in the form of seemingly subtle rule changes that can affect millions of people. Alicia Wilson is a former executive director, and Catalina Sol is executive director, of La Clinica del Pueblo, a nonprofit whose mission is to build a healthy Latino community in the Washington, D.C., area, focusing on those most in need. They wrote this for The Washington Post. Theres a hoary, but self-evident, saying in retail, You cant sell cat food if cats dont like it. The California Republican Party on life-support should take that maxim to heart, but it probably wont. In 2013, when former state Sen. Jim Brulte took over the chairmanship of the state Republican Party, he asked me to speak to the partys board of directors in Ontario and give my unvarnished Democratic view of why the GOP was on such a downward spiral. Brulte is a trusted friend and so I accepted this Daniel-in-the-lions-den assignment. My first line: Im not here to give you a prescription about how to get well. Im here to give you an autopsy about how you died. After the groans died down, I pointed out that in 1922, Republicans constituted 63 percent of the California electorate. Before the 2012 presidential election, GOP registration had fallen to 29 percent. Now, its less than 24 percent. My point was that if any business had lost market share that drastically, it would likely be out of business. Blockbuster video-rental stores used to be ubiquitous, but the company ceased operation altogether that same year, in 2013. Why? It failed to adapt as consumers moved en masse to streaming video services, and pay-per-view. Marketing a political party is not exactly the same as selling cat food or hawking DVDs. But for a party to remain viable, it has to reflect and propound a philosophy and policies that resonate with at least a reasonable share of voters in that partys playing field. If the California Republican Party were operating in Wyoming or Mississippi, Im sure it would be doing just fine. But in California, where it is woefully out of sync with a majority of voters on critical issues, the death rattle is becoming deafening. Why are California Republicans so misaligned with voter sentiment? I have a theory: They delude themselves into believing there is a silent conservative majority out there somewhere, if only they can put up the right candidates. This fantasy was brought home to me 20 years ago when I was managing Gray Daviss gubernatorial campaign against Republican Attorney General Dan Lungren, an unreconstructed right-winger. National political reporters came out to cover the race in the biggest state. One of them reported to me a conversation he had with Lungren that went something like this: Lets see, youre anti-abortion, in a state that is strongly pro-choice. Youre anti-gun control in the state with the strongest gun laws in the country. Youre pro-offshore drilling in a state where even the current Republican governor opposes drilling off the coast. And you refused to sue the tobacco companies as the attorney general of the state with the second-lowest smoking rates in the country. How do you think youre a good fit for California? To which Lungren replied, Oh, you dont get it, Californians are more conservative than they even know! This response fairly sums the Republicans view toward the electorate, and why they keep chasing the imaginary conservative coalition. I grew up in and cut my political teeth in Montana, where hunting and fishing are considered an unalienable right, and where even the last Democratic governor kept guns in a gun rack in the governors office in the Capitol. In the Big Sky state, gun control is anathema to a majority of voters, even most Democrats. I have known every Democratic senator from Montana in my lifetime, from Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield to Sen. Jon Tester. I dont know exactly what was in their hearts, but as mainstream Democrats with a progressive bent, I suspect if they were senators from New Jersey or California, they would have been strong proponents of gun-control measures. But to succeed in Montana, they had to give up that issue in order to gain the consent of the governed. If the California Republican Party is not willing or able to give ground on at least some issues where its position is afoul of a majority of voters in the state, it will continue its decline into irrelevance. And if Republicans think a state party cant actually disappear as a viable force, look at the Democratic Party in some of the formerly solid Democratic Southern states. There is not a single statewide elected Democrat in the state of Texas, and now only three Democratic U.S. Senators in the whole of the old Confederacy. The choice is yours, California Republicans. And I told you that six years ago, before your latest electoral debacle. In politics, as in retail and the natural world, its either adapt or die. Garry South is a Democratic political strategist who managed Gray Daviss successful campaigns for governor in 1998 and 2002. He wrote this commentary for CALmatters, a public interest journalism venture committed to explaining how Californias Capitol works and why it matters. 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And politicians have failed, their speeches are bogus, its time for civil society and academics step in and help lessen the violence and its aftermath (By Humra Quraishi) Is there a Kashmir policy, a sound framework to contain the crisis erupting in the Valley? What is this governments Kashmir policy? Does this government realise the extent of anger triggered off by the ongoing killings of the hapless civilians of the Kashmir Valley? Why are the civilians getting killed in such a targeted way, bullet injuries in the neck, head, mouth and chest? Why are all the youngsters being killed in the ongoing Army operations labelled and branded militants, are they all actually militants; after all, where is the much-needed transparency and accountability? Why are the civilians in the Valley crying out the inevitable, why does it get so easy for the security forces to kill and hound them? Why are the rulers of the day sitting like mute spectators, witnessing these horrifying realities? Is it adequate to just come out with routinely worded condemnations and hollow assurances about setting up an enquiry or two? Isnt it time that the real killers were booked for their crimes, for killing their fellow citizens? Whatever happened to all those political promises of zero tolerance towards civilian killings? Where on earth is the slightest trace of insaniyat and jamhuriyat that Prime Minister Narendra Modi harps on, whilst giving speech after speech on the Kashmir situation? Im writing this column in the backdrop of last weekends killings in Pulwamas Sirnoo village, where 7 civilians were killed and 36 were injured in a firing by security forces. The Medical Superintendent of the Pulwama district hospital, Abdul Rashid Parra, said most of the civilians died of bullet injuries to the head, neck and chest. And most of these civilians were young. One of them, Abid Hussain, 26, a resident of Karimabad, is survived by his Indonesian wife, Wiwiak, and a three-month-old child. The others killed were 14-year-old Aaquib Ahmad Bhat, 29-year-old Tauseef Ahmed Mir, 17-year-old Liyaqat Ahmed Dar. The list of the dead and injured is long, with entire families ruined and the atmosphere surcharged with anger and sorrow. Can peace ever be expected to hold out and prevail in this atmosphere, where violence holds out, where civilians are getting targeted and killed like never before! Though the separatist leaders have given a call for a three-day strike and a protest march to the Armys 15 Corps headquarters at Badami Bagh, Srinagar, over the killing of civilians after the latest encounter in Pulwama, but wherein lies the actual and permanent solution? Not to be overlooked is the vital fact that there is military might holding sway in the Valley. An atmosphere of siege prevails in the Valley. Politicians in New Delhi have failed. Their speeches and promises sound fake and hollow. The political lot will have to rethink their strategy of using the military and paramilitary to crush the rebellious voices within the Valley. Political dialogue has to begin immediately because only a political solution will settle the mess that has been compounded over the years. The war crimes on the civilian population are quite obviously increasing because of the impunity provided to the forces under AFSPA. If the government in New Delhi was serious about settling the crisis in the Valley, it should have started off with an immediate dialogue with the Kashmiris and their Hurriyat leaders. It could have also started by implementing several measures that were suggested by Yashwant Sinha. He along with four other members of his team had visited the Valley, soon after the pellet gun injuries and killings had compounded the situation in the Valley in the autumn of 2016. This occured after the security forces fired on the funeral procession of militant Burhan Wani and the aftermath of which that had continued for months. Across the cross section of people we met, there was anguish about India not recognising that Kashmir was a dispute. The refusal to see Kashmir as a political issue, people claimed, had resulted in the present situation because a political issue cannot be solved through law and order measures Yashwant Sinha and his team members had met with a cross section of leaders, including Hurriyats Syed Ali Geelani, Yasin Malik, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq. This team had submitted its detailed report and some of their suggestions could have helped in the healing process; that is, if they were implemented by the government of the day. After all, the team had suggested the release of first-time offenders and minors arrested under the PSA, re-starting dialogue with the Separatists and a judicial probe on police excesses. It had also suggested compensation to kin of the civilians killed and those wounded, rehabilitation packages for those permanently blinded by pellet guns and the setting up of a blind school in Srinagar for children blinded by the pellet guns. It called for a judicial commission to look into the excesses of the police, especially their use of pellet guns. The team had also focused on the fact that the search operations were resulting in a destruction of property in Kashmiri homes, Apparently electrical and electronic gadgets are destroyed in the name of search operations. This continues even when the search operation yields nothing Most significantly it had stressed on this basic factor Across the cross section of people we met, there was anguish about India not recognizing that Kashmir was a dispute. The refusal to see Kashmir as a political issue, people claimed, had resulted in the present situation because a political issue cannot be solved through law and order measures. It seems quite obvious that the government is no mood to solve the crisis in the Kashmir Valley! What is the point of giving speech after speech when the killings are ongoing, when civilians are getting killed by security forces, day after day! An apology wouldnt do. Ask the devastated and ruptured families of those killed by the unending violence! Death and destruction continue to hold out in the Valley. And as politicians have failed and their speeches are turning out to be bogus, its time for civil society and academics step in and help lessen the violence and the aftermath of this violence. National Herald YEREVAN. Armenia should review its relations with its allies, political scientist Ruben Mehrabyan said at a press conference on Wednesday. In his words, Armenias views on security and the real situation regarding security are in different dimensions. Our [Armenias] perceptions of the evil and the good and as to how our allies look at those matters dont coincide in any way, the analyst said. If we [Armenia] consider the sale of weapons to our enemy [Azerbaijan] by the partner [Russia] member of the international military organization [the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO)] as a negative phenomenon, the so-called allies [of Armenia] regard all that as business. Mehrabyan stressed that the situation regarding Armenia after the arrest of CSTO ex-Secretary General Yuri Khachaturov, as well as the talks on the Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) issue are due to the whole CSTO crisis. The attacks on Armenia, though substantial, but they are solely the manifestations of a crisis in relations of the CSTO and EAEU [Eurasian Economic Union] countries, Ruben Mehrabyan concluded. 34 Indian students of Janaki Medical College denied MBBS exam Thirty-four Indian students at Janaki Medical College in Janakpur have been deprived of MBBS exams as the institution was found to be enrolling them without conducting entrance test. by Sumon Corraya Thousands came from India in search of work in the 1950s. The first generations worked as street cleaners or tea pickers. Today their youth are studying and looking for better jobs. Landless, the community lives in slums. Dhaka (AsiaNews) Bangladeshs Telugu community numbers around 40,000, including some 7,000 Christians, concentred in the capital Dhaka, the city of Pabna and Moulovibazar District. For years most were employed as cleaners, in the streets and hospitals, or picking tea leaves, but recently they have had to increasingly compete with Bengalis. Since their arrival in the 1950s from the Indian State of Andhra Pradesh (where they are known as Telegu), they have preserved their linguistic and religious traditions and are now asking the government to protect their culture. From their ancestral home, they kept their Hindu and Christian faiths, and at home they speak Telugu whilst using Bengali (Bangla) at work. Today the community is struggling to keep its culture alive as its young people move to the big cities to study or in search for work. Michael Piregu, 22, is one of them. Originally from Moulovibazar, he currently lives in Dhaka. "My father was as a tea worker, he said. But now young people dont want to clean the streets anymore, we want to study. Some young Hindus have returned to their villages of origin because they feel neglected in Bangladesh." Michael attends the Nazareth Telugu Baptist Church and is the leader of the Bangladesh Telugu Council. "The government should protect our Telugu culture, he said. This is why we ask for support in the creation of the Telugu Cultural Academy." Poverty is one of the issues that afflict the community, whose members are largely landless, living in slums or on government land. S P Appora, 60 (picture 2), lives in Dhakas Sara Bangla slum. "I have worked in a hospital for many years, he explained. Now I am retired and ill. Our ancestors came to this land and started working as garbage collectors. We were born here and we have citizenship, but we do not own land to live on. In my life I have lived in three shanty towns. For us, it is very painful." The slum where Appora lives has no sewer, electricity or gas. For cooking, he uses a gas cylinder or burns wood. Sanitary conditions are a great concern because his family of ten use the same lavatory. His ancestors were Hindus who accepted the message of Christ brought by Protestant missionaries. "Today we are better than when we were Hindus because by worshiping Christ, we have peace in our hearts." In the capital, Telugu live in five slums. At present, Telugu Christians are getting ready for Christmas, by praying the Gospel and decorating their humble, metal-sheet shacks as best they can. 7 office bearers, 161 CWC members in NC Top leaders of Nepali Congress have agreed to increase the number of party office bearers and size of Central Working Committee (CWC) in a new provision, ending the long-running dispute over the amended party statute. YEREVAN.- Armenian acting Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said he does not see any necessity to continue commenting on the statements voiced by president of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko. I convince you that concrete and final answers were given to the questions of Mr Lukashenko on place. I had an impression that he was satisfied with my answers and I cannot say what happened afterwards, Pashinyan said. He stressed that after his return from the CIS summit a number of questions were addressed to him while he did not find it correct to publicize the conversation that took place behind closed doors. I have said that I am satisfied with the conversation. I confirm now too that I am satisfied with the conversation and see no necessity of continuing it, Pashinyan said. Referring to Lukashenkos statement why Pashinyan does not demand answers from Russia about supply of weaponry to Azerbaijan, Pashinyan said, During our contacts with the Russian president we have voiced the issue. Earlier it was reported that new details have appeared of the statement which Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has made during his press conference with Russian media in the Belarusian capital city of Minsk, and with respect to Belarus selling weapons to Azerbaijan. In particular, Lukashenko spoke about the conversation he had had with Armenias Acting Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan at the CIS summit, and he commented on Yerevans criticism of Minsk for selling weapons to Azerbaijan. In the presence of [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, I told him [Pashinyan]. It was at the CIS summit; [Azerbaijan President] Ilham [Aliyev] was there, too, the Belarusian president said. I told him, Nikol, lets put all the endpoints. Who is in first place in sale of arms to Azerbaijan? Who? Russia. And I [asked] him, Why did you swallow your tongue? Tell him [Putin], criticize Vladimir Vladimirovich. So, are you afraid? And who is in second place [in selling arms to Azerbaijan]? Israel. And the thirdTurkey, and Belarus is only in fourth or fifth placeand that, considering the Polonez [rocket system made by Belarus]. If it hadnt been for the Polonez, we [Belarus] would have been the tenth. Well, why do you attack Belarus? Do you attack your own so that the foreigners realize? Well, you say, and I will keep silent. There was such a conversation. Why am I wrong? Why am I an anti-Armenian man? Armenians live at us [Belarus] better than in Armenia. The U.S. State Department notified Congress of a proposal to sell the Patriot air and missile defense system to Turkey, a move that may signal a breakthrough with a NATO ally that had been moving closer to Russia and roiling administration plans for the F-35 fighter jet, Bloomberg reported. The potential $3.5 billion deal for the Patriot system, which is manufactured by Raytheon Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp., marks an opening gambit by the Trump administration to get Turkey to halt its purchase of Russias S-400 missile system, which the administration and Congress had vehemently opposed, according to four people familiar with internal discussions before the announcement. Its a big deal, because only a few months ago, analysts were predicting all doom and the end of a nearly seven-decades-old U.S.-Turkey relationship, said Soner Cagaptay, the director of the Turkish research program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. This suggests a new phase in U.S.-Turkish ties, one driven by a new rapport between Presidents Erdogan and Trump, and aided by bureaucracies in both countries determined not to let the U.S.-Turkish relationship collapse. Trump administration officials seeking better relations were stymied by a disagreement that threatened to turn into a crisis: Turkeys intention to purchase an advanced Russian anti-aircraft missile system, the S-400 Triumph. Turkey is a crucial partner in the U.S.-led program to build the F-35 stealth fighter jet, with 10 Turkish companies set to produce about $12 billion in parts, including key components such as the center fuselage and some landing gear. The Russian S-400 was designed to shoot down U.S. and coalition aircraft at greater ranges and altitudes than older systems. U.S. officials are concerned that sensitive F-35 technology designed to evade such a system could be compromised and used to improve the Russian air defense system if Turkey takes possession of both systems. The White House and several members of Congress were against the idea of Turkey having both F-35s and the S-400, whose computer systems could gain -- and possibly feed back to Russia -- crucial data about the warplane. At the same time, lawmakers had successfully blocked the possibility of a Patriot deal over fear of rewarding Turkey for what was seen as its bad behavior. The State Department said the Patriot sale would strengthen Turkey as it confronts instability in the region, according to a statement by the Defense Security Cooperation Agency posted on Tuesday. This proposed sale will contribute to the foreign policy and national security of the United States by improving the security of a key NATO Ally on the front lines of the fight against terrorism, according to the statement. The proposed deal, which must be approved by Congress, includes up to 140 Patriot missiles, radar and ground control stations. Lawmakers have 15 days to review the proposed sale under streamlined procedures the State Department has in place for NATO allies. 77 pickpockets arrested from Kathmandu The Metropolitan Police Range, Kathmandu, has arrested a large number of pickpockets from various parts of Kathmandu. Over the last week, Mount St. Marys University has donated 30 refurbished and retrofitted laptop computers to three area schools with which it has relationships: Rosemont Elementary/Middle School and St. Frances Academy, both in Baltimore, and Mother Seton School in Emmitsburg. The pilot program, guided by the Mounts Chief Transformation Officer Simon Blackwell, is expected to expand. Working with Professor Athar Rafiq, students majoring in computer science, cybersecurity and math completed a service learning project to retrofit electronically and physically clean and test the laptop computers, which had been replaced after being in use at the Mount for three years. I would venture to say that the Mount is perhaps the only higher education institution on the East Coast that has such a service learning model, Rafiq said. Our goal in the first year was to prototype and test how the department can provide additional opportunities for a three-way win situation while enhancing the students learning experience that is unique to the Mount. Not only do Mount students receive valuable technical, and more importantly, service-oriented learning experience, but the K-12 schools students and teachers benefit in their teaching and learning initiatives from these laptops, which the Mount students converted to operate like Chromebooks. The sustainability initiative also avoids the cost of piling these laptops in landfills. The students who devoted the most effort to this initiative are Chandler Bankos, Vu Do, Eric Fierro, Christian Hill, Danny Stanley, JDan Vaughn and Sergio Villafane. Rosemont Principal Dwayne T. Wheeler thanked the Mount administrators, faculty and students for the laptops, which will be used by both teachers and students. During the visit to Rosemont, the Mount team caught up with the middle school- students who came to the university last summer for the Mount College Experience Camp, sponsored by Under Armour and run by Professors Corinne Farneti, Tim Wolfe and Bill Prudden. The students reported, and Principal Wheeler affirmed, that they are focused on their pathway to college and are earning higher grades this year. At St. Frances, Principal Curtis Turner, Ed.D., also expressed gratitude for the donation to the independent Catholic high school and discussed the schools work several years ago on a strategic plan with the Center for Catholic School Excellence, housed in the Mounts Division of Education. The plan has helped the school transform its leadership structure as well as invest in science and technology resources as evidenced by the new science lab. The pillars of the planfaith, scholarship, opportunity, characterappear on banners throughout the school. Dean of the Division of Education Barbara Marinak, Ph.D., and Center for Catholic School Excellence Director Elizabeth Monahan were impressed with the schools success in implementing the plan. In thanking the Mount for the laptops, Mother Seton School Principal Sister Brenda Monahan, D.C., conveyed her delight that the laptops had been converted to the Chrome operating system. Several Mount education students are completing their internships at Mother Seton, and Mount students occasionally volunteer at the nearby school for students in preschool through eighth grade. The Mount plans to enlarge this prototype program by working with a national organization, other colleges and corporations to help even more students learn voraciously. Theres no reason that every student in the United States shouldn't have access to a refurbished laptop, Blackwell said. Pictured at Rosemont from left to right are MSMU Center for Catholic School Excellence Director Elizabeth Monahan; MSMU Vice President for Advancement Bob Brennan; Rosemont Principal Dwayne T. Wheeler; Rosemont Technology Officer and Athletic Director Samuel Coffey; MSMU Dean of the Division of Education Barbara Marinak, Ph.D.; and MSMU Chief Transformation Officer Simon Blackwell. Pictured at St. Frances from left to right are Simon Blackwell, Elizabeth Monahan, St. Frances Technology Coordinator Karae Mosley, St. Frances Principal Curtis Turner, Ed.D., and Barbara Marinak. Pictured at Mother Seton from left to right are Mother Seton Principal Sister Brenda Monahan, D.C., Simon Blackwell, Donna Schisler, technology teacher at Mother Seton, Barbara Marinak and Mother Seton Vice Principal Sister Joan Corcoran, D.C. SIU offering new scholarships to hundreds of freshmen and transfer students by Christi Mathis CARBONDALE, Ill. Southern Illinois University Carbondale and the state of Illinois are offering millions of reasons why students should pursue their college degrees at SIU. Illinois has launched a new initiative, the AIM HIGH program, which has allotted up to $1.9 million in state funding to SIU to provide scholarships for freshman students. The university is matching the scholarships to assist even more Illinois freshman and transfer students. We are very appreciative of the opportunity AIM HIGH presents for Illinois students to attend SIU Carbondale. Jennifer DeHaemers, associate chancellor for enrollment management, said. This really makes an education even more affordable for many more students. Students can get funding beginning fall 2019 The General Assembly allocated $25 million, to be distributed by the Illinois Student Assistance Commission, to students attending Illinois public universities beginning in fall 2019. The goal of the academic-based award is to encourage students to stay in Illinois as they continue their academic careers. All who qualify will receive SIU AIM HIGH scholarships Students who have received an SIU Deans Scholarship and who meet the AIM HIGH qualification requirements will receive $2,000 in scholarship funding. There is no additional application required to receive the funds. The SIU AIM HIGH Award will be given to any Illinois high school graduate who is attending college for the first time if they meet these eligibility criteria: Have an ACT score of 24 or higher or an SAT score of 1160 or higher and a GPA of at least 3.5. Meet household income guidelines, which allow income of up to six times the poverty level. For instance, the maximum family income for a one-person household is $72,360 while the maximum income for a four-person family is $147,600. Is a U.S. citizen or permanent resident. The scholarship can be renewed for up to three more years for a total of $8,000 as long as the recipient maintains a 3.0 or higher GPA while earning a minimum of 30 credits per year. Saluki Scholars Awards also offered A new Saluki Scholars Award will give additional new freshmen and new transfer students the chance to receive a $1,500 annual scholarship. The Freshman Saluki Scholars Award academic requirements are slightly less stringent than those for SIU AIM HIGH, and as with the state award, students will not need an additional application to receive the award. To receive this award, an Illinois high school graduate must: Have an ACT score between 21 and 23 or an SAT score of 1060-1150 along with a high school GPA of 3.0 or above. Meet the same income and citizenship requirements that are in place for the SIU AIM HIGH Award. The Freshmen Saluki Scholars Award can also be renewed for an additional three years, for a total of $6,000, if the recipient maintains a GPA of 3.0 or above at SIU while completing a minimum of 24 credits per year. The Transfer Saluki Scholars Award is available to those who transfer a minimum of 30 college credit hours while holding a 3.25-3.49 transfer GPA, if they meet the AIM HIGH criteria. They can renew the award for up to two subsequent years, for a total of $4,500. Scholarships are stackable The scholarships make SIU even more attractive and affordable when combined with other existing awards, including some automatic awards, DeHaemers said. For instance, beginning in fall 2018, SIU began providing a one-time $4,000 First-Year Housing Scholarship to all new Illinois high school/transfer students who live in campus housing. The SIU AIM HIGH scholarship can also be combined with a Deans Scholarship ($4,000 annually for those with a 24-27 ACT and 3.5 or higher high school GPA or $6,000 annually for those with an ACT of 28 or above plus a 3.5 GPA). Complete details online Find all of the details about the new AIM HIGH undergraduate academic scholarships online. Or, call 618/453-4628 or email scholarships@siu.edu. Eat This, Not That! The New York Times reports more than 775,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 and more than 48 million have had the virus. However, many others have likely had COVID but weren't tested or were asymptomatic and didn't realize they had it. While it's impossible to know if you've been infected without seeing a physician or getting tested, there are signs you've had it. COVID affects everyone differently, but according to virus and medical experts Eat This, Not That! Health spoke with, here are the Photo credit: Michael Simari From Car and Driver Photo credit: Michael Simari WHAT WE LIKE: The truck's versatility. We've used the Honda Ridgeline to camp, tow (as covered in our previous update), haul stuff, and commute, enjoying it equally no matter the task. Praise continues to roll in for the Ridgeline's un-pickup-truck-like smooth and secure ride and handling as well as for its numerous interior storage cubbies, flexible rear-seat folding options, and the handy weatherproof trunk hidden beneath the pickup bed's floor. Mileage accumulation has continued to be strong, barring a few stints on the disabled list related to a repair-more on that below. WHAT WE DONT LIKE: Since our last report on the Ridgeline, we have affixed a bed cap to its tail. This probably should have been put to a wider vote before happening, because the non-factory cap has garnered largely negative reviews. On one hand, the cap keeps anything placed in the bed dry and sheltered; on the other hand, it severely limits what can fit back there, and many dissenters have complained that they weren't able to move tall furniture or bulky items. Visibility to the rear also is greatly compromised. We're leaving the cap on for now for two reasons: It's difficult to remove, having been sealed against the top of the bed sides, and winter is upon us, so the additional dry storage is welcome. Photo credit: Michael Simari As for issues attributable to the Ridgeline itself, there are few. The lower-spec radio head unit that came with our RTL trim was initially viewed as preferable to the uplevel touchscreen on fancier models but has since lost advocates. In spite of its easy-to-use volume and tuning knobs-and preset buttons!-the non-touch unit looks old, and performing tasks such as pairing a Bluetooth device are harder than they should be. Some drivers have complained that low-speed shift quality from the six-speed automatic transmission can be balky. WHAT WENT WRONG: The Ridgeline was hit from behind while returning south from Michigan's Upper Peninsula. An inattentive driver slammed into the Ridgeline as traffic ahead on Michigan's I-75 freeway slowed to gawk at a pair of military helicopters strafing the highway (why the choppers were doing this, we'll never know). The other car, driver hunched over his steering wheel and peering up through his windshield at the Blackhawk helicopters above, hit the Honda-which was slowing through 60 mph-at about 80 mph. Story continues Photo credit: Chandler Horning The responding Michigan State patrolman was impressed by the Ridgeline's lack of damage compared to the Pontiac G6 that hit us-the sedan's engine was wearing its pummeled radiator like a form-fitting cocktail dress. Having barfed its coolant, the Pontiac let out a death rattle and joined GM's excitement division in that great automotive graveyard in the sky. Thankfully, nobody was seriously hurt, and the Ridgeline was able to continue on its journey to Ann Arbor. Back home, the body shop assuaged our initial fears that the unibody had been tweaked (since the other car went partly underneath the Ridgeline's tail). Repairs were confined to the rear bumper and some trim; the shop also melted shut a crack in the plastic lining of the trunk beneath the Ridgeline's bed floor. The right-side doors and fenders also required a light repaint because we clipped a metal roadside reflector when dodging another car after the initial impact. Final damage bill: $3541. Photo credit: Michael Simari Our only other financial outlay beyond gas has been $349 for the "B16" service at 17,146 miles, a hefty sum that included an oil change, tire rotation, cabin and engine air-filter replacement, rear differential service, and an inspection. New wiper blades set us back a further $15. WHERE WE WENT: Beyond its everyday life here in Michigan, the Ridgeline has traveled deep into Ohio and gone to Tennessee and across the border into Canada. Months in Fleet: 8 months Current Mileage: 22,669 miles Average Fuel Economy: 20 mpg Fuel Tank Size: 19.5 gal Observed Fuel Range: 390 miles Service: $424 Normal Wear: $15 Repair: $0 Damage and Destruction: $3540 ('You Might Also Like',) This has been a year to remember for the cannabis industry. In October, Canada became the first industrialized country in the world to legalize recreational marijuana, paving the way for billions of dollars in added annual sales once the industry is fully up to speed. This legalization brings legitimacy to the table and should, over the long run, attract big investment dollars and partnerships. We also witnessed plenty of success in the United States, with residents in two additional states voting to legalize medical pot in November. In total, 32 states have given the green light to medical marijuana in the U.S., along with 10 that allow adult-use weed. And yet despite this success, marijuana stocks themselves have had a miserable year. The very first publicly traded pot ETF, the Horizons Marijuana Life Sciences ETF, has lost around a third of its value since the year began. Worse yet, things may not improve much in 2019. Here are five reasons pot stocks could deliver another subpar performance in 2019. A cannabis bud lying atop a messy pile of hundred-dollar bills. Image source: Getty Images. 1. Earnings matter now, which is bad news For starters, operating results actually matter now that cannabis is legal in Canada, and that's not necessarily a good thing for an industry that's thrived on promises to expand capacity, grow product portfolios, and forge partnerships. With the need to actually deliver on the bottom line, many pot stocks will likely disappoint Wall Street and investors. For example, Canopy Growth (NYSE: CGC) is widely viewed as the premier cannabis name on Wall Street. It'll likely slot in as the second-largest grower by peak annual yield at 500,000 kilograms, boasts a major investment partner in Constellation Brands (NYSE: STZ), has what's arguably the most recognized brand throughout all of Canada (Tweed), and has a bounty of sales channels at its disposal. And yet it's probably going to lose money hand over fist in fiscal 2019. That's because Canopy Growth is in the process of completing its capacity expansion, marketing its brands, extending its reach to new markets, and making acquisitions. Even with rapid sales growth, Canopy is liable to lose a lot of money on an operating basis in the near term. Story continues In Canopy Growth's most recent quarter, it recorded a whopping operating loss of 214.6 million Canadian dollars, which ballooned even further to more than CA$330 million once one-time benefits and costs were included. Fiscal year-to-date losses are now up to CA$421.6 million. While investors were previously able to turn a blind eye to such poor operating performances, that's not going to be an option in 2019. A Canadian flag with a cannabis leaf and a "sold out" stamp covering the flag and leaf. Image source: Getty Images. 2. Supply shortages will constrain potential Sure, marijuana stocks are increasing their production capacity at a very rapid pace, but there's no guarantee that they'll be able to plant their crops or sell their harvest anytime soon. That's because of the red tape surrounding the cultivation license and sales permit process with Health Canada. According to an analysis from Marijuana Business Daily back in May, Health Canada had received well over 500 cultivation license applications that it had to review and either approve or deny. These take months or even years to review. Then, assuming a grower receives the green light to plant cannabis, they may have to wait a while for the sales permit. On average, it was taking 341 days for sales permits to be approved back in May, with the fastest on record still taking about four months from permit filing to approval. Following the official legalization date of Oct. 17, it took just hours in some provinces for product to run out. At the moment, more than half of all provinces and territories in Canada are contending with some degree of cannabis shortage, and it looks unlikely to abate anytime soon. That means sale and profit estimates for pot stocks are probably too high, which'll lead to disappointment next year. A suspicious young man in a blue hoodie holding a potted cannabis plant. Image source: Getty Images. 3. The black market is here to stay You may not want to talk about it, but the black market is going to make its presence known in 2019. If cannabis shortages do persist, as is the expectation at this point, it wouldn't be a surprise to see consumers turning to the black market to fill the void, so to speak. Not only does Health Canada's red tape create an opening for a black market that was otherwise on its heels leading up to legalization in October, but it further emphasizes the cost advantages that illicit pot growers can bring to the table. Namely, black-market operators don't have to pay the 10% excise tax, they won't owe any federal income tax to the Canadian government, and they don't have to wait for approval from Health Canada to grow or sell their cannabis. The black market can consistently undercut legal sales channels on price, which means it's not going anywhere. And if illicit growers are here to stay, it means, once again, that sale and profit estimates for marijuana stocks are probably too high. Two friends clanking their Coca-Cola bottles together while sitting outside and talking. Image source: Coca-Cola. 4. Not all brand-name companies are sold on legal weed Fourth, even though we've witnessed a handful of brand-name equity investments and deals in 2018, don't count on there being a rush to partner with cannabis companies in 2019. The deal you're probably most familiar with is Corona and Modelo beer maker Constellation taking a 37% equity stake in Canopy Growth for $4 billion. More than just angling to develop infused beverages, Constellation's massive equity stake in Canopy signals its expectation that legal weed will be a long-term, high-growth industry. But not all brand-name beverage, tobacco, and pharmaceutical companies are sold on the weed industry. In September, multiple news outlets reported that Coca-Cola (NYSE: KO) was in discussion with Aurora Cannabis (NYSE: ACB) to either make an equity investment in the company or create a partnership that would seek to develop new products, presumably including cannabis-infused beverages. There were plenty of reasons a tie-up between Coca-Cola and Aurora Cannabis would have made sense, such as Aurora's market-leading peak production potential and Coca-Cola's deep pockets and marketing expertise. Ultimately, however, Coca-Cola chose not to invest or partner with Aurora, or with anyone for that matter. Instead, its management team is simply watching from the sidelines. This is a view that many brand-name companies could take as the pot industry attempts to find its footing in the early going. An accountant reviewing figures with the aid of a calculator. Image source: Getty Images. 5. Share-based dilution Last but certainly not least is our old nemesis: share-based dilution. As a refresher, access to nondilutive forms of financing has been very limited for pot stocks, even in the postlegalization environment. Banks have simply not wanted to take on the risks of facing financial and/or criminal penalties by offering loans or lines of credit to marijuana companies. This has resulted in pot stocks turning to bought-deal offerings for capital. A bought-deal offering involves the sale of common stock, convertible debentures, stock options, and/or warrants in order to raise capital. The sale of common stock, or using common stock to finance an acquisition, leads to an immediate uptick in a company's outstanding share count. Meanwhile, convertible notes, options, and warrants can lead to a steady increase over many years. This has the effect of diluting the value of existing shareholders as well as weighing on earnings per share, since there are more shares to divide net income into. Aurora Cannabis, arguably the biggest diluter of all, could see its share count eclipse 1 billion when it next reports its quarterly results. For context, it had just 16 million shares outstanding less than five years ago. In sum, things aren't as green as you might expect for the marijuana industry heading into the new year. More From The Motley Fool Sean Williams has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool recommends Constellation Brands. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Apex court quashes governments decision to transfer Dr Chaudhary The Supreme Court has quashed the governments decision to transfer Dr Pushpa Chaudhary from the Ministry of Health and Population to the Office of Prime Minister and Council of Ministers (OPMCM). ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) Back-to-back earthquakes measuring 7.0 and 5.7 shattered highways and rocked buildings Friday in Anchorage and the surrounding area, sending people running into the streets and briefly triggering a tsunami warning for islands and coastal areas south of the city. No tsunami arrived and there were no immediate reports of deaths or serious injuries. The U.S. Geological Survey said the first and more powerful quake was centered about 7 miles (12 kilometers) north of Anchorage, Alaska's largest city, with a population of about 300,000. People ran from their offices or took cover under desks. The 5.7 aftershock arrived within minutes, followed by a series of smaller quakes. "We just hung onto each other. You couldn't even stand," said Sheila Bailey, who was working at a high school cafeteria in Palmer when the quake struck. "It sounded and felt like the school was breaking apart." A large section of an off-ramp near the Anchorage airport collapsed, marooning a car on a narrow island of pavement surrounded by deep chasms in the concrete. Several cars crashed at a major intersection in Wasilla, north of Anchorage, during the shaking. Anchorage Police Chief Justin Doll said he had been told that parts of Glenn Highway, a scenic route that runs northeast out of the city past farms, mountains and glaciers, had "completely disappeared." Traffic in the three lanes heading out of the city was bumper-to-bumper and all but stopped Friday afternoon as emergency vehicles passed on the shoulder. The quake broke store windows, knocked items off shelves, opened cracks in a two-story, downtown building, disrupted electrical service and disabled traffic lights, snarling traffic. It also threw a full-grown man out of his bathtub. Flights at the airport were suspended for hours after the quake knocked out telephones and forced the evacuation of the control tower. And the 800-mile Alaska oil pipeline was shut down while crews were sent to inspect it for damage. Story continues Anchorage's school system canceled classes and asked parents to pick up their children while it examined buildings for gas leaks or other damage. Fifteen-year-old Sadie Blake and other members of the Homer High School wrestling team were at an Anchorage school gymnasium for a tournament when the bleachers started rocking and the lights went out. People started running down the bleachers in the dark, trying to get out. "It was a gym full of screams," said team chaperone Ginny Grimes. When it was over, Sadie said, there was only one thing she could do: "I started crying." Jonathan Lettow was waiting with his 5-year-old daughter and other children for a school bus near their home in Wasilla when the quake struck. The children got on the ground while Lettow tried to keep them calm. "It's one of those things where in your head, you think, 'OK, it's going to stop,' and you say that to yourself so many times in your head that finally you think, 'OK, maybe this isn't going to stop,'" he said. Soon after the shaking ended, the school bus pulled up and the children boarded, but the driver stopped at a bridge and refused to go across because of deep cracks in the road, Lettow said. At Chugiak High School, acting principal Allison Susel said ceiling tiles came down, books and other items fell from shelves, and water line breaks caused damage. Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin tweeted that her home was damaged: "Our family is intact house is not. I imagine that's the case for many, many others." She posted a video of the inside of her parents' home, with broken dishes littering the kitchen floor. A large set of antlers appeared to have fallen off a wall of the living room. Gov. Bill Walker issued a disaster declaration. He was in an elevator in a high-rise Anchorage office building and said it was a "rough ride" coming down. He described the quake as a 7.2, though it was unclear why his figure differed from that of the USGS. Walker says it will take more than a week or two to repair roads damaged by the earthquake. "This is much more significant than that," he told reporters at a news conference. Walker leaves office on Monday, and he said members of Gov.-elect Mike Dunleavy's staff had been involved with the earthquake response to ensure a smooth transition. "This isn't a time to do anything other than take care of Alaskans, and that's what we're doing," he said. In Kenai, southwest of Anchorage, Brandon Slaton was home alone and soaking in his bathtub when the earthquake struck. Slaton, who weighs 209 pounds, said it created a powerful back-and-forth sloshing that threw him out of the tub. His 120-pound mastiff panicked and tried to run down the stairs, but the house was swaying so much that the dog was thrown into a wall and tumbled down the stairs, Slaton said. Slaton ran into his son's room after the shaking stopped. The boy's fish was on the floor, gasping, its tank shattered. Slaton put the fish in a bowl. "It was anarchy," he said. "There's no pictures left on the walls, there's no power, there's no fish tank left. Everything that's not tied down is broke." Alaska was the site of the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in the U.S. The 9.2-magnitude quake on March 27, 1964, was centered about 75 miles (120 kilometers) east of Anchorage. It and the tsunami it triggered claimed about 130 lives. The state averages 40,000 earthquakes a year, with more large quakes than the 49 other states combined. Southern Alaska has a high risk of earthquakes because the Earth's plates slide past each other under the region. Alaska has been hit by a number of powerful quakes over 7.0 in recent decades, including a 7.9 last January southeast of Kodiak Island. But it is rare for a quake this big to strike so close to such a heavily populated area. David Harper was getting coffee at a store when the low rumble began and intensified into something that sounded "like the building was just going to fall apart." He ran for the exit with other patrons. "People who were outside were actively hugging each other," he said. "You could tell that it was a bad one." ___ Associated Press writers Becky Bohrer in Juneau, Alaska; Mark Thiessen in Anchorage; Jennifer Kelleher in Honolulu; Gene Johnson in Seattle; Gillian Flaccus in Portland, Oregon; Rachel La Corte in Olympia, Washington; and John Antczak in Los Angeles contributed to this report. While many advertisers are cutting ties with Fox News Tucker Carlson, others are continuing with business as usual. The host of Tucker Carlson Tonight has been embroiled in controversy after claiming that immigrants were making the United States dirtier on his show last week. We have a moral obligation to admit the worlds poor, they tell us, even if it makes our own country poorer, and dirtier and more divided, he said. He doubled down on that sentiment on his show Monday night. Thus far, at least 12 advertisers have announced theyve broken ties with or are in the process of breaking ties with Carlson. You can find a running list of them here. In response to the controversy, Fox issued an emailed statement on Tuesday. We cannot and will not allow voices like Tucker Carlson to be censored by agenda-driven intimidation efforts from the likes of Moveon.org, Media Matters and Sleeping Giants. Attempts were made last month to bully and terrorize Tucker and his family at their home. He is now once again being threatened via Twitter by far left activist groups with deeply political motives, the statement read. While we do not advocate boycotts, these same groups never target other broadcasters and operate under a grossly hypocritical double standard given their intolerance to all opposing points of view. Below, weve gathered a list of companies that are still doing business with Carlson: 1) Mitsubishi A spokesperson for Mitsubishi told HuffPost in a statement on Monday that the companys advertising media spend is determined based on demographics and psychographics, not politics. Our strategic marketing intent is to share our key product news with consumers through a variety of media channels. We will monitor the situation and adjust our advertising if necessary. 2) AstraZeneca A spokesperson for AstraZeneca told HuffPost that decisions regarding our advertising purchases are primarily made based on customer viewership and demographic relevance in order to educate patients. Story continues The company also said that while the content and opinions of the outlets, networks or websites for which we advertise are not reflective of our views or values as a company, AstraZeneca would regularly monitor our media programming to ensure its aligned to our corporate values and will continue to assess our advertising purchases regarding the heightened attention surrounding this matter. 3) John Deere A spokesperson for John Deere told The Hollywood Reporter that it is an advertiser on the Fox Network and our ads appear on various shows on the network. 4) Alka-Seltzer Plus A spokesperson for Bayer, which produces Alka-Seltzer Plus, also told THR: Opinions or views expressed by the networks news programs or their hosts are solely those of the network, and do not necessarily reflect those of Bayer. Given the wide diversity of media today and wide range of public opinion on any given issue, it would be an impossible task to find a major television or radio network whose entire programming schedule appeals to all audiences. While our programming environment choices may not always be supported by all individuals, we have very specific guidelines to ensure our commercials air in acceptable content. That being said, we regularly evaluate our advertising placements and make sound decisions to continue or discontinue based upon our beliefs, values and ethical considerations. Bayer supports a culture that ensures respect, dignity and opportunity for every individual. We also value the opinions of our consumers, and take them into consideration when making advertising placement decisions. 5) Farmers Insurance A spokesperson for Farmers Insurance said in a statement to The Daily Beast that the companys ad buying decisions arent political. Farmers invests in advertising across a broad range of networks and programs that reflect the diversity of opinions and viewpoints found across the nation. Advertising decisions made by Farmers should not be construed to be an endorsement of any kind as to a shows content or the individuals appearing on the show. 6) MyPillow Michael J. Lindell, the inventor and CEO of MyPillow Carlsons biggest advertiser in terms of dollars spent, per Kantar Media told The Associated Press that the brand has no plans to cut ties with the show and that Lindell makes all of my advertising decisions based on what is best for MyPillow, my customers and my employees. 7) Gold Bond A spokesperson for Sanofi, which produces Gold Bond, told The Hollywood Reporter: As you may be aware, Sanofi purchases advertising time and space in contracts negotiated far in advance and our advertising is never an endorsement of a show and/or the content of a show. Previous advertisers with the show, many of which aired commercials this week, have not replied to HuffPost about whether they will continue to advertise with Carlson. They include: Enterprise Holdings, Pfizer, Cigna, Boehringer Ingelheim, Sleep Number, Weather Tech, 23andMe, Tommy John, Visionworks, Progressive, Ford, Honda, Cascade, Sandals Resorts, Lexus, Cadillac, Jenny Craig, Ebates, Sheex, EPIX, Peloton, Coravin, Career Builder, Allstate, Subaru, and Energizer. An Infiniti spokesperson declined to comment to HuffPost. Related... Donald Trump Jr. Applauds Tucker Carlson's Refusal To Apologize For Misogyny Tucker Carlson Was Open To A Racist President 10 Years Before Trump Love HuffPost? Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today. This article originally appeared on HuffPost. By Jibran Ahmad and Abdul Qadir Sediqi KABUL/PESHAWAR, Pakistan (Reuters) - U.S. and Taliban officials have discussed proposals for a six-month ceasefire in Afghanistan and a future withdrawal of foreign troops as talks aimed at setting up peace negotiations went into a second day, Taliban sources said. The meeting in Abu Dhabi is at least the third time that U.S. special peace envoy Zalmay Khalilzad has met Taliban representatives as diplomatic efforts to end the 17-year war have intensified this year. Taliban officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the U.S. delegation was pressing for a six-month truce as well as an agreement to name Taliban representatives to a future caretaker government. However the Taliban negotiators were resisting the ceasefire proposal as they felt it would damage their cause and help U.S. and Afghan forces. There was no comment from the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. In a statement issued late on Tuesday, the Taliban said the talks had mainly concentrated on the "U.S. occupation", adding: "Nothing about interim government, ceasefire, election or other internal issues has been discussed". "Talks revolved around withdrawal of occupation forces from Afghanistan, ending the oppression being carried out by the United States and her allies," the movement's main spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said in a separate statement. An Afghan government delegation traveled to the city and met Khalilzad as well as officials from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Pakistan. However, despite U.S. insistence that any peace settlement must be agreed between Afghans, the Taliban have refused to talk directly with officials from the Kabul government, which they consider an illegitimate, foreign-appointed regime. The Taliban, seeking to reimpose strict Islamic law after their 2001 overthrow, say the presence of international forces in Afghanistan is the main obstacle to peace. Even as the peace process gathers momentum, fighting has continued with heavy casualties on both sides. SENIOR OFFICIALS The latest round of diplomacy comes about a year after the United States sent thousands of extra troops to Afghanistan and stepped up air strikes to record levels, with the aim of pushing the Taliban into accepting negotiations. The Taliban delegation was led by Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai, head of the movement's political office in Qatar, and included members of the leadership group based in Quetta, Pakistan and the chief of staff of Taliban leader Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada. The presence in the delegation of senior officials close to the Taliban leader underscored the importance of the talks, which are shaping up as the most serious attempt to open negotiations since at least 2015. "It's a well coordinated meeting where members from the political commissions and Quetta shura are both participating for the first time," said one peace activist in close contact with the Taliban side at the meeting. An Afghan government team traveled to Abu Dhabi "to begin proximity dialogue with the Taliban delegation and to prepare for a face-to-face meeting between the two sides", government spokesman Haroon Chakansuri said in a statement. But there was no sign from the Taliban they were ready to accept talks with the government, and the Kabul delegation were based in an Abu Dhabi hotel away from the location of the talks. The United States says the aim of the talks is to facilitate an Afghan-led process and the inclusion of Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Pakistan in the talks reflects a U.S. desire to bring in countries with an interest in Afghanistan. Previous meetings were held in Qatar, where the Taliban maintains a political office, but a push to include Saudi Arabia, which is hostile to the gas-rich Gulf state, prompted a change of venue to Abu Dhabi. (Reporting by Jibran Ahmad in PESHAWAR, Abdul Qadir Sediqi, James Mackenzie; Editing by Robert Birsel and Mark Heinrich) Alan Carr appears to have confirmed that hell appear on Strictly Come Dancing next year. The comedian appeared on the show last week during the series final, as the celebrity reading out the voting terms and conditions. But hes revealed that producers later cornered him while he was there, and told him they wanted him for the shows 2019 series. Appearing on Loose Women, he said: Oh my listen. Listen, I will do it but next year Ive got a busy year. Alan Carr on Strictly (Credit: BBC) They cornered me and asked me to do it. But I hate those VTs. They go to Chester Zoo. I want to be in the studio now doing an Argentine Tango. Yesterday, The Sun reported that he was set to take on the celebrity dance contest, a source telling the paper: Alan has met with the bosses and they all hit it off straight away. Hes a perfect celebrity for Strictly because hes popular, funny and throws himself into everything but has never had a days dance training in his life. Whats certain is he wont hold back. The shows host Tess Daly added: People have been approached. Ive heard theres a few who have already confirmed. The 2018 show found documentary maker Stacey Dooley winning the Glitterball Trophy, with five-time finalist Kevin Clifton. Read more Holly Willoughby wont be returning to the jungle Queer As Folk to get US reboot Noel Fielding and Sandi Toksvig reunite on QI Analog Devices, Inc. ADI appoints Anantha Chandrakasan as the new independent director to its board. Chandrakasan will commence his operations from Jan 1, 2019. Previously, he was the dean of MITs School of Engineering, and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. This latest move is expected to be beneficial for the company, courtesy of Chandrakasans solid technical background. Prior to joining Analog Devices, he also co-chaired the MITIBM Watson AI Lab and chairs the MIT-SenseTime Alliance on Artificial Intelligence and J-Clinic, the Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health at MIT. A glimpse of the companys price trend shows that Analog Devices has outperformed the industry on a year-to-date basis. The stock has lost 1.1% compared with the industrys 16.5% decline. Factors at Play Analog Devices increased focus on innovation and operational execution is expected to bode well in the near term. Also, the company continues to benefit from rising demand for semiconductor content in the Automotive, Communications and Industrial markets. Per Statista, the semiconductor industry is expected to grow by 12.4% in 2018, with total sales reaching $463.41 billion worldwide. During the last reported fourth-quarter 2018, the company witnessed 10%, 2% and 29% increase in revenues year over year in the Industrial, Automotive and Communications markets, respectively. Analog Devices boasts of a well-functioning communications business as well. The buildout of TD-LTE in China, 4G network densification activities in the United States, and expected deployments in Europe and emerging regions should benefit the communications segment in the near term, increasing the chances of market share gains. However, declining usage of the companys products in portable consumer applications is a major headwind. In the last reported quarter, the company witnessed a 33% decline in consumer revenues year over year. Macro uncertainty and geopolitical fears are added concerns, which might hurt the companys top line. Story continues Analog Devices, Inc. Price and Consensus Analog Devices, Inc. Price and Consensus | Analog Devices, Inc. Quote Zacks Rank & Stocks to Consider Currently, Analog Devices has a Zacks Rank #4 (Sell). Some better-ranked stocks in the broader computer and technology sector include Generac Holdings Inc. GNRC, SS&C Technologies Holdings, Inc. SSNC and Symantec Corporation SYMC. All the three stocks sport a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks Rank #1 stocks here. Generac, SS&C and Symantecs long-term earnings growth rate is projected at 6.5%, 13.5% and 7.9%, respectively. Wall Streets Next Amazon Zacks EVP Kevin Matras believes this familiar stock has only just begun its climb to become one of the greatest investments of all time. Its a once-in-a-generation opportunity to invest in pure genius. Click for details >> Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report Symantec Corporation (SYMC) : Free Stock Analysis Report SS&C Technologies Holdings, Inc. (SSNC) : Free Stock Analysis Report Analog Devices, Inc. (ADI) : Free Stock Analysis Report Generac Holdlings Inc. (GNRC) : Free Stock Analysis Report To read this article on Zacks.com click here. Zacks Investment Research A student has lost her pet fish after it was banned from the Southwest Airlines flight she booked on. According to USA Today, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs student Lanice Powless was traveling from the Denver airport to her home in California when she said a Southwest employee told her she could not bring her pink pet Betta fish, Cassie, on the flight. Powless had researched TSA policy about bringing fish on flights ahead of getting Cassie and was pleased to note that live fish are allowed on flights if theyre in a carry-on bag. However, what she hadnt anticipated was that some airlines have separate rules for animals and pets from TSA; Southwest is one of them travelers are only allowed to bring small dogs and cats in crates that can be stored under a customers seat and never in the cargo bins. Powless said that shes flown with her fish on Southwest in the past, but in the confusion of the moment, gave her fish to the woman behind her. I ended up turning around and giving it to a lady behind me, she said. I crossed through and then TSA stops her, and said, were not allowing this fish to go through. Powless was unable to get the womans contact information after the security stop. I dont know where my fish is at. I dont know if they allowed her to take it. Southwest gave a statement on the incident on Monday. A Customer attempted to bring a pet fish onboard their flight from Denver to San Diego. Our Customer Service Agents informed the Customer about Southwests pets policy which does not allow for live fish to travel in the passenger cabin. Our Team offered to re-book the Customer for a later flight to allow them to make arrangements for their pet but the Customer refused that option. The Customer eventually traveled on their originally scheduled flight. Powless disputed the statement, saying that she was not offered the option to re-book the flight. Southwest maintains that the offer was made but the customer declined. Someone with Tony Starks intelligence and perseverance might make a good engineer. Photo: Marvel Studios/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock The governments Year of Engineering campaign is launching a partnership with popular comic brand Marvel to encourage more young people from different backgrounds to pursue the profession. Children aged seven to 16 are being encouraged to take the More Heroes Needed aptitude test online. It lets them find out what qualities they share with iconic Marvel characters like Iron Man and the Hulk, before offering advice on how those strengths could translate into a career in engineering. The test aims to show children that they possess many talents that would allow them to thrive in the world of engineering, as well as demonstrate that engineering is about curiosity, creativity and collaboration as much as it is about academic ability. READ MORE: Ricardo explains Brexits impact on engineering The UK engineering industry is facing a skills shortage of unprecedented levels. Last year, not-for-profit organisation EngineeringUK, which aims to promote the vital contribution of engineers, engineering and technology to our society, reported that 1.8 million new engineers are needed by 2025. Launching the partnership on Wednesday, Year of Engineering minister Nusrat Chani was joined by pupils from Berger Primary School in Hackney, at the highly-anticipated S.T.A.T.I.O.N. Marvel exhibiton in London. A team of real-life superheroes, including a comic book science expert and a former female army engineer, were also present. Ghani said: The characters who inhabit the Marvel universe are famed for achieving amazing things against all odds something engineers do on a daily basis. Whether its tackling the problems of climate change, helping to provide clean water and energy in developing nations or using technology to help us live healthier, more independent lives, the engineering profession is full of its very own superheroes. Im certain this partnership will encourage many young people to look again at their own amazing abilities and realise that while they may never possess the strength of the Hulk, they could one day move mountains as an engineer. Story continues READ MORE: Three pieces of priceless advice from Marvel Comics legend Stan Lee Marvel is the latest in a long line of big names to join the campaign. Since the start of 2018, the government has worked with over 1,400 partners to transform the perception of engineering among children and tackle the engineering skills gap. Research carried out during the first half of the year indicates that these efforts are starting to bear fruit, with the number of 7-11 year-olds who say they would consider an engineering career up by 36%. The Year of Engineering is encouraging parents to take the aptitude test with their children over the Christmas holidays, and take a look at the wide range of curriculum-based resources now available on the website that will keep kids busy and entertained over the festive season. We at Insider Monkey have gone over 700 13F filings that hedge funds and prominent investors are required to file by the SEC The 13F filings show the funds' and investors' portfolio positions as of September 30th. In this article, we look at what those funds think of Tri Pointe Group Inc (NYSE:TPH) based on that data. Tri Pointe Group Inc (NYSE:TPH) shareholders have witnessed a decrease in hedge fund interest of late. TPH was in 17 hedge funds' portfolios at the end of September. There were 22 hedge funds in our database with TPH holdings at the end of the previous quarter. Our calculations also showed that TPH isn't among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds. Hedge funds' reputation as shrewd investors has been tarnished in the last decade as their hedged returns couldn't keep up with the unhedged returns of the market indices. Our research has shown that hedge funds' large-cap stock picks indeed failed to beat the market between 1999 and 2016. However, we were able to identify in advance a select group of hedge fund holdings that outperformed the market by 18 percentage points since May 2014 through December 3, 2018 (see the details here). We were also able to identify in advance a select group of hedge fund holdings that'll significantly underperform the market. We have been tracking and sharing the list of these stocks since February 2017 and they lost 24% through December 3, 2018. That's why we believe hedge fund sentiment is an extremely useful indicator that investors should pay attention to. Clint Carlson, Carlson Capital Let's take a peek at the recent hedge fund action encompassing Tri Pointe Group Inc (NYSE:TPH). What have hedge funds been doing with Tri Pointe Group Inc (NYSE:TPH)? At Q3's end, a total of 17 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, a change of -23% from the second quarter of 2018. By comparison, 22 hedge funds held shares or bullish call options in TPH heading into this year. So, let's check out which hedge funds were among the top holders of the stock and which hedge funds were making big moves. Story continues TPH_dec2018 Among these funds, Greenhaven Associates held the most valuable stake in Tri Pointe Group Inc (NYSE:TPH), which was worth $62.6 million at the end of the third quarter. On the second spot was Carlson Capital which amassed $12.4 million worth of shares. Moreover, Fisher Asset Management, Third Avenue Management, and Royce & Associates were also bullish on Tri Pointe Group Inc (NYSE:TPH), allocating a large percentage of their portfolios to this stock. Seeing as Tri Pointe Group Inc (NYSE:TPH) has faced bearish sentiment from the aggregate hedge fund industry, it's safe to say that there lies a certain "tier" of hedge funds who sold off their positions entirely last quarter. Interestingly, Israel Englander's Millennium Management dropped the biggest position of the 700 funds monitored by Insider Monkey, worth close to $6 million in stock, and Principal Global Investors's Columbus Circle Investors was right behind this move, as the fund said goodbye to about $5.8 million worth. These bearish behaviors are intriguing to say the least, as aggregate hedge fund interest dropped by 5 funds last quarter. Let's go over hedge fund activity in other stocks - not necessarily in the same industry as Tri Pointe Group Inc (NYSE:TPH) but similarly valued. We will take a look at Belmond Ltd (NYSE:BEL), Kronos Worldwide, Inc. (NYSE:KRO), Ladder Capital Corp (NYSE:LADR), and Nuveen California Quality Municipal Income Fund (NYSE:NAC). This group of stocks' market valuations are similar to TPH's market valuation. [table] Ticker, No of HFs with positions, Total Value of HF Positions (x1000), Change in HF Position BEL,16,252781,2 KRO,17,51942,-1 LADR,17,114418,-3 NAC,2,678,-3 Average,13,104955,-1.25 [/table] View table here if you experience formatting issues. As you can see these stocks had an average of 13 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $105 million. That figure was $117 million in TPH's case. Kronos Worldwide, Inc. (NYSE:KRO) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Nuveen California Quality Municipal Income Fund (NYSE:NAC) is the least popular one with only 2 bullish hedge fund positions. Tri Pointe Group Inc (NYSE:TPH) is not the most popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still above average. This is a slightly positive signal but we'd rather spend our time researching stocks that hedge funds are piling on. In this regard KRO might be a better candidate to consider a long position. Disclosure: None. This article was originally published at Insider Monkey. Related Content Robinhood launched its 3% interest checking and savings accounts last week. With 3% well over the average rate offered by conventional banks and some key differentials in the insurance that protects investors in Robinhoods new products, U.S banking organizations are speaking out. The new accounts from the trading platform, at first glance, appear to be like conventional savings accounts, with higher returns. However, savings accounts are normally protected by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). Robinhoods accounts are instead protected by the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC). Chris Cole, the senior regulatory counsel for the Independent Community Bankers of America (ICBA), told American Banker yesterday that Robinhoods use of the terms banking, checking, and saving could be deceptive. Cole added: This is supposed to be a brokerage account, but theyre running around making it look like a banking account. Unlike FDIC coverage, SIPC coverage only guarantees an account holders balance to the value of their funds on the day of any insolvency. Cole said Robinhood: Does not sufficiently explain the difference between SIPC protection and FDIC insurance. Concerns Raised with Regulators Stephen Harbeck, CEO of the SIPC, has already raised his concerns, telling news outlets he simply had not been consulted, and that he has already filed a complaint with the U.S Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) over the matter. Harbeck told CNBC: We want to make sure that investors know theres some risk there. Robinhood has yet to respond to the concerns raised. Its website FAQs for the new products outlined: Your cash and securities in Robinhood are protected up to a total of $500,000 by the SIPC, $250,000 of which can be in cash, the rest in securitiesSimilar to FDIC insurance, SIPC protects cash in your account if the financial firm fails. Sarah Grano, a spokesperson for the American Bankers Association, appears to also be taking note of this and told American Banker in an email that: Story continues We appreciate any effort by regulators to clarify when deposits are fully insured and when they are not, and the need to respond quickly to misrepresentations. An attorney, Brian Hester, said Robinhood is at risk of being classed as an unlicensed banking business if the new savings products are not viewed as incidental to its securities trading business by regulators. Hester explained: Many state laws will have an exception for a registered broker-dealer to engage in banking activities, but only if its incidental to their brokerage business. Robinhood is a broker-dealer and not a registered conventional bank. As such it hasnt had to demonstrate the liquidity and risk management processes that regulated banks have to. It also does not have access to FDIC protection for its customers. This combined with offering a rate far exceeding the average of 0.08% for checking accounts and 0.1% for U.S savings accounts is likely to continue to cause uproar amongst banks, associations, and likely regulators. Any resulting action by the U.S SEC or the SIPC could impact both the new products and Robinhoods existing trading business. Featured image from Shutterstock. Sarah Grano headshot from LinkedIn. The post Bankers Raise Concerns Over Robinhoods New Saving Accounts appeared first on CCN. Belgiums Financial Services and Markets Authority (FSMA) has added 14 new websites to its growing list of websites flagged as cryptocurrency investment scam platforms. The number of websites on the list now stands at 113 with the new additions as the regulator continues its ongoing effort to protect Belgian investors from the relatively new and fast growing threat of crypto scams. To underscore the seriousness of the threat, since 2016 the FSMA has taken the unusual step of issuing a series of written warnings to local investors specifically warning them to keep their money away from any schemes advertised on the 113 websites that are named and shamed on its blacklist. In July 2016, CCN reported that the FSMA issued one such statement advising investors against putting their money into OneCoin, a cryptocurrency ponzi scheme that was once popular across parts of Europe and Asia. FSMA Takes Gloves Off According to the latest FSMA statement, the newly added 14 websites are named as: www.ajassetmanagement.com www.cabinet-finsbury.com www.capital-coventry.com www.capital-secure.com www.capitalmarketing-internationalltd.com www.cashlesspaygroup.com www.cobber-finance.com www.conseil-premium.com www.cryptomonaies.com www.direct-ep.com www.epargnecapital.com www.gbe-capital.com www.moneo-invest.com www.phoenix-gm.com This statement becomes the third investment advisory notice against cryptocurrency scams to be issued by the FSMA in 2018 alone following prior statements in February and October, with the continued adoption of cryptocurrencies making them a favoured vehicle for cybercriminals in Belgium and across Europe and Asia. The regulator points out in the statement that despite the vastly varying claims and sales tacticsemployed by such scams, the basics remain constant efforts to inspire investor confidence using purported experts followed by inevitable disappointment and loss. Explaining this in detail the statement says: The principle remains the same: they offer you an investment they claim is secure, easy and very lucrative. They try to inspire confidence by assuring you that you dont need to be an expert in cryptocurrencies in order to invest in them. They claim to have specialists who will manage your investments for you. You are told that your funds can be withdrawn at any time or that they are guaranteed. In the end, the result is always the same: the victims find themselves unable to recover their money! Story continues In addition to public investment warnings against such schemes, the FSMA has also updated the blacklist five times previously in 2018 as cybercriminals exploit the perceived lack of regulatory uniformity across the EU to push ponzi schemes and bogus investment programs that accept cryptocurrency deposits from investors. Recent events however indicate that the era of regulatory disparity within the EU may be close to an end, as the worlds largest free trade area contemplates setting up a common regulatory regime which could give rise to a North American-style unified anti-fraud task force in the cryptocurrency space. The post Belgian Authorities Add 14 Websites to Cryptocurrency Scam Blacklist appeared first on CCN. Apiculture brings cheer to rural bee farmers With the increasing demand of organic honey made from Chiuri, the locals of Chepang village in Makwanpur have started generating good income from bee farming. Bitcoins Tech Trends of 2018: What This Year Brought Us (Part 2) This is the second part of our December cover story. Click here for part 1. Where 2017s dizzying price highs embedded hodl into the public consciousness, 2018 was the year that buidl" became a trend in the crypto-industry and Bitcoin was no exception. Anticipated in Bitcoin Magazines first cover story of the year, Bitcoins technological progress only accelerated in 2018. Improving Bitcoin from around the world, developers and entrepreneurs furthered Segregated Witness adoption, rolled out the Lightning Network, released privacy solutions, realized sidechains and made progress on a Schnorr signature solution all of which were still around the corner only a year ago. Following up on Januarys cover story, 2018s closing two-parter cover story explores how these five technologies progressed. In part two: privacy, sidechains and Schnorr signatures. Privacy Solutions Two of the most promising privacy solutions that were proposed over the past few years TumbleBit and ZeroLink were both on the verge of release at the start of this year. TumbleBit is a coin-mixing protocol first proposed in 2016 by an academic research team led by Boston Universitys Ethan Heilman. TumbleBit uses a (centralized) mixer to create off-chain payment channels between several participants in a mixing session. Everyone ends up with each others coins, breaking the transaction trail for all. Importantly, clever cryptographic tricks ensure that even the mixer cant establish a link between the users and their transactions. Excited by this potential, NBitcoin developer Nicolas Dorier and privacy-focused Bitcoin developer Adam Ficsor (as well as several others) went a long way toward implementing the solution in the two years after it was first proposed. In early 2017, Stratis, the company behind the Stratis platform and token, even hired Ficsor to implement the technology in its Breeze wallet, which also supports bitcoin. However, back in July 2017, Ficsor had come to doubt the real-world potential of TumbleBit. The solution needs a relatively large number of on-chain transactions for each mixing session, potentially making it cumbersome and expensive to use. Story continues I did not and I do not think anyone else ever thought through TumbleBits Classic Tumblers economics as I did now, in a high Bitcoin fee environment where we are inevitably going towards, Ficsor wrote in a Medium blog post at the time. To be completely honest, after I wrote all these down I became pretty disillusioned. Ficsor and Stratis did complete the project. After years of high anticipation, TumbleBit was finally released in the Breeze Wallet in August of this year. But by then most of the enthusiasm around the project seemed to have waned. Breezes TumbleBit stayed off the radar of many, and because of that, usage statistics are presumably low. Instead, much of the effort to realize a more private Bitcoin shifted to the other major privacy solution: ZeroLink. Based on Chaumian CoinJoin, first proposed by Bitcoin Core contributor Gregory Maxwell in 2013, ZeroLink is a privacy framework first announced in August 2017 by the same Adam Ficsor. ZeroLink allows several users to mix their coins in a big transactions that sends coins from all participants in a mixing session to all other participants. It has similar requirements (a central server) and benefits (breaks the trail of transaction) as TumbleBit, but Ficsor believes the trade-offs are preferable, most notably because ZeroLink requires fewer on-chain transactions. To realize ZeroLink, Ficsor set up his own Bitcoin privacy-focused company this year, zkSNACKs, which he first publicly revealed at the Building on Bitcoin conference in Lisbon in July. A rebrand of his initial Hidden Wallet project, zkSNACKs flagship product is the Wasabi Wallet, a desktop wallet with additional privacy features based on the ZeroLink framework. Besides Chaumian CoinJoin, this, for example, includes compact-client side block filtering: a privacy enhancing solution for light clients that dont download the entire Bitcoin blockchain. The Wasabi Wallet was officially released on October 31 of this year, on the Bitcoin white papers 10th birthday. While still far from mainstream, Wasabi Wallet has already become the go-to privacy option for many of those that care about privacy the most. According to GitHub statistics, the wallet was downloaded thousands of times in the first few months since its release. And, according to the Wasabi Wallets website, it has mixed almost two thousand coins already. Honestly, I've been astonished by the user growth and social media activity. If this keeps up we will finally be able to think about liquidity dependent privacy solutions, for example to allow direct sends through mixing, Ficsor told Bitcoin Magazine. Exciting times. The ZeroLink framework is being adopted as a standard by other wallets as well. The new (and so far relatively unknown) Bob Wallet announced in March that it is developing a ZeroLink implementation. In August, privacy-focused Samourai Wallet announced a mobile ZeroLink implementation called Whirlpool. And Stratis Breeze Wallet initially showed interest as well. On top of TumbleBit and ZeroLink, more privacy solutions were rolled out this year, and even more are in development. For a full overview of privacy technologies that were released in 2018 or currently in development, see Bitcoin Magazines September cover story: Bitcoin as a Privacycoin: This Tech is Making Bitcoin More Private. Stratis (the company behind the Breeze wallet) did not respond to a request for comment on this story. Sidechains A highly anticipated technology for several years now, sidechains are alternative blockchains with coins pegged to bitcoins. This allows users to effectively move bitcoins across blockchains, allowing them to operate under different protocol rules, for example to enable faster confirmation times or to provide more privacy. In essence, sidechains would offer all the technical benefits of altcoins while maintaining Bitcoins 21 million coin limit. Liquid While the blockchain development company has since expanded its mission, Blockstream was originally founded in 2014 around the concept of sidechains. Since 2016, it has maintained Elements, an open-source sidechain project that showcases whats possible with the technology. But Blockstreams first, commercial sidechain project is Liquid, which was announced in 2015. Liquid is designed to offer a payment rail between exchanges and other service providers, to let traders quickly and privately move funds around and take advantage of arbitrage opportunities. This minimizes spreads across exchanges and increases liquidity across the industry. Called a federated sidechain, coins and transactions on the sidechain are secured by a selection of the exchanges and service providers: They are the gatekeepers that move funds from Bitcoins blockchain to the sidechain and back. In October of this year, Blockstream launched Liquid, with its bitcoin-pegged token L-BTC. One month later, it introduced nodes, wallets and a block explorer to the public. Liquid is secured by some of the best-known companies in the industry, including Bitfinex, BitMEX, Xapo, Unocoin, Bitso and dozens others. Italian bitcoin exchange The Rock Trading offered Liquid on- and off-ramps almost immediately after the sidechain launched, and in late November, Bitfinex CSO Paolo Ardoino also indicated Liquid support will be rolled out soon. Judging by publicly available statistics, Liquid usage is still modest: Some 25 bitcoin are locked up at the time of writing this article, which required 75 transactions to do so. The sidechain processed about 3,400 transactions in total, which amounts to less than a dozen transactions per hour. But the long-awaited technology is live and growing. Its a good start, said Blockstream CSO Samson Mow. We only recently released the client, so its about what I would expect. As we have more exchanges exposing integration to their end users, we should see a lot more traffic. RSK Another federated Bitcoin sidechain is RSK, with the bitcoin-pegged token R-BTC. RSK is specifically designed to support Ethereum-style, Turing-complete smart contracts. Like Liquid, coins on RSK are secured by a group of established Bitcoin companies. But unlike Liquid, RSK is also merged-mined with Bitcoin, which means that bitcoin miners use their hash power to create blocks and confirm transactions. This two chambers idea results in strong security because no single group has too much power and each group has specific responsibility, said Sergio Lerner, co-founder and chief scientist of RSK Labs, the company building and supporting RSKs reference implementation. And like in Bitcoin itself, users of the platform ultimately control the destiny of the protocol. In January, the Genesis block was mined and RSK was officially launched. An early announcement suggests that companies in the federation include Bitstamp, Bitfinex, Bitpay, Xapo and BitGo though RSK has not yet revealed which companies are part of todays federation, exactly. (A joint public announcement will follow soon.) RSK has also attracted several of Bitcoins biggest mining pools: BTC.com, AntPool, Slush Pool and F2pool are merge-mining the sidechain already, accounting for over 50 percent of Bitcoins hash power. The R-BTC token is available on exchanges including Bitfinex and Huobi, and the RSK platform itself has been improved a lot as well, said Lerner: RSK performed nine releases throughout 2018 from version 0.4.0 to the current version 0.5.3. Perhaps even more importantly, according to RSK Labs some 50 projects are by now working on the RSK sidechain that RSK Labs is keeping track of though most of the projects are, of course, still in very early stages or still in development. Some of the more notable RSK projects are developed by RSK Labs itself, as well as by RIF Labs, the company that acquired RSK Labs in November. These include a Lightning-like payment channel network called Lumino (which, while incompatible in design, could be bridged to Bitcoins main Lightning Network). RIF Labs recently launched the RIF OS project, which is a range of open-source protocols and libraries that will initially run over RSK, which includes a payment network, peer-to-peer storage, name resolution and more. The RSK community is expanding, mostly in Latin America and Asia, Lerner told Bitcoin Magazine, and weve seen an acceleration in the past few months of companies launching solutions built on top of RSK. Further, in 2018 there were over a 100 RSK meetups and conferences around the world. RSK Labs also has an ambassador program to track the ecosystem growth: There are currently 200+ certified ambassadors and over a 1,000 in certification process. Drivechains Finally, a test-version of a drivechain a product by Tierion researcher Paul Sztorc (previously Bloq) was released in September. The drivechain sidechain model is not federated but is entirely secured by Bitcoin miners. Leveraging their existing hash power (and combined with technical safeguards to limit risks), miners both act as gatekeepers of the sidechain and confirm transactions on it. More of a concept than a specific sidechain design, Sztorc hopes that Bitcoins future holds a diverse range of drivechains in order to copy many of the features now deployed on altcoins. A potential first drivechain would be a big block sidechain for fast and cheap transactions, while Sztorcs personal interest has always been to deploy a prediction market sidechain. Development-wise, the drivechain project made steady progress this year, Sztorc said. We are on release 12, and 13 is almost finished and has many improvements. Many bugs are being fixed. We are working on making the software perfect for now. However, drivechains do require a soft-fork upgrade to Bitcoins base protocol in order to be compatible. Such an upgrade was discussed on the Bitcoin development mailing list about a year ago, and an official Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP301) was submitted by Sztorc in early 2018. Sztorc, however, is doubtful that such a soft fork will be deployed by Bitcoin Core, historically the Bitcoin software application through which most soft forks have been activated. "I'm pessimistic that I can persuade Core maintainers to merge it in, he said, and I am doubtful even that miners would activate it if it were merged, as miner-activated soft forks havent happened in a few years, and not at all since SegWit it used to happen every few months." While Sztorc would still prefer that the drivechain BIP be implemented by Bitcoin Core, he is keeping all options open for now. This includes soft-fork activation without help from Bitcoin Core or deployment of drivechains on Bitcoin Cash instead. Ultimately, Sztorc may even launch a whole new forkcoin with drivechain functionality enabled. It would then have the same general feel as a Monero or Bitcoin Cash, he said. Some different project. Schnorr Signature Proposal The Schnorr signature scheme is considered by many cryptographers to be the best in the field. Its mathematical properties offer a strong level of correctness, it doesnt suffer from malleability, it is relatively fast to verify and, in the context of Bitcoin, it would enable nifty new features. Schnorr signatures have, therefore, been high on the wishlist of many within Bitcoins technical community for some time now. While Segregated Witness made Schnorr integration in Bitcoin easier, its still a major undertaking at the start of 2018, this was not realistically expected to be completed by the end of this year. But good progress has been made. In July, Blockstream and Bitcoin Core developer Pieter Wuille proposed an initial BIP on the Bitcoin Development mailing list, with input from other Bitcoin Core contributors including Johnson Lau, Gregory Maxwell, Jonas Nick, Andrew Poelstra, Tim Ruffing, Rusty Russell and Anthony Towns. But the Schnorr signature proposal itself was only the start, Wuille told Bitcoin Magazine. There will be several more BIPs to come as part of the Schnorr project. The Schnorr BIP defines the signature algorithm itself, Wuille explained. There will be another BIP for integrating it into Bitcoin. The next step is to work out all of the details; more BIPs arent far off. Bitcoin Core developer for Xapo and contributor to Wuilles Schnorr proposal Anthony Towns sent an email to the Bitcoin-development mailing list last week, detailing several of the additional changes that will be required to realize Schnorr on Bitcoin. These include new sighash flags, discussion of which had been ongoing on the same mailing list since November. Of particular interest is that Wuille and the other Bitcoin Core contributors are now working on a proposal to implement Schnorr in combination with another big technical upgrade: Taproot. Taproot was first proposed in January of this year by Bitcoin Core developer Gregory Maxwell (who also contributed to Wuille's Schnorr proposal). Leveraging several Schnorr-based tricks, Taproot can realize a solution much like MAST: it would let users create a sort of data-efficient smart contract. But interestingly, under normal circumstances, these smart contracts would be indistinguishable from regular payments. Practically speaking, Taproot would, for example, allow users to open and close Lightning Network channels, or make payments that require cooperation between multiple users, or make certain types of protocol-enforced bets without anyone besides the parties involved being able to notice that is whats happening a boon for privacy. Still, the initial Schnorr implementation will probably be straightforward relative to what the signature algorithm could ultimately enable, Wuille said. Many of these more complex features will only be added later. Signatures interact with many other parts of the protocol that need to be worked out, so it seems more reasonable to first integrate Schnorr and Taproot. That will offer a number of benefits already, like verifying most spends with a single signature, and without needing to disclose a script, Wuille explained. Once weve implemented Schnorr in Bitcoin there is a good number of things wallets can do, including multisignatures and threshold signatures. The nice thing is that these features dont require their own consensus rules. Edit note: Pieter Wuilles comments were translated from Dutch. This article was updated for accuracy. This article originally appeared on Bitcoin Magazine. London (AFP) - British MPs head off for Christmas with just 100 days to go until Brexit, leaving a country in limbo with no divorce deal in place and total confusion over what happens next. Prime Minister Theresa May, who is holding her last question session of the year in parliament on Wednesday, has delayed a crucial vote on her Brexit deal to next month. Jeremy Corbyn, head of the opposition Labour Party, has accused May of trying to "run down the clock" so MPs will have to choose between her deal and crashing out of the EU. While the politicking continues in Westminster, many Britons are putting their lives on hold and delaying major financial decisions until the future becomes clearer. Retailers are complaining of a slump in sales in a normally busy period as Britons contemplate a post-Brexit future in which government forecasts say they will end up poorer. - 'Overall mood of pessimism' - More than two years after a deeply divisive referendum and after months of negotiations with Brussels, the indecision of the country's leadership is also frustrating for many. "There's an overall mood of pessimism in the country at the moment," said Tom Clarkson, research director at BritainThinks, which conducts surveys on public feeling. "Brexit is the worst kind of politics. It's very Punch and Judy. It's the kind of Westminster politics people hate." In ordinary conversations this Christmas, the word Brexit is being replaced by the euphemistic "The B-word" to avoid groans of despair or a revival of long-running family feuds. Experts agree that May is likely to lose the vote on her deal, but are divided over what might happen next as there is no majority in parliament for any alternative option. Without a deal before March 29, Britain will still leave the European Union in a chaotic end to its 46-year membership that could trigger a financial crisis. A cabinet meeting on Tuesday stepped up planning for a no-deal scenario, after which Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson informed parliament that 3,500 troops would be on standby to help with "any contingencies". Story continues Despite the apparent economic risks, some hardline Brexit supporters back a so-called "managed no-deal Brexit" -- leaving without an overall agreement with the EU but with individual ad-hoc deals to minimise disruption. - Bishops pray for unity - Many MPs are instead calling for a second referendum to end the impasse and give Britons the chance to think again. May has ruled this out as deeply undemocratic since 52 percent voted to leave the EU in the 2016 referendum. Another possibility that has been raised by cabinet ministers in recent days would be for parliament to hold a series of non-binding votes on different Brexit options, giving MPs greater influence on Brexit strategy. With no clear plan, a sense of desperation is setting in. British rock star Damon Albarn recently joined with other prominent public figures to call for a citizens' assembly to decide what to do next if the British parliament cannot. As Christmas nears, even the Church of England has remarked on the "turbulent events" surrounding Brexit. "The bishops of the Church of England pray for national unity -- and courage, integrity and clarity for our politicians," they said in a statement. "There is now an urgent need for the United Kingdom to recover a shared vision and identity to help us find a way through the immediate challenges." Officers, including specialist firearms officers, attended a call and found three victims suffering from stab injuries. Three people were hospitalised today after stabbings at two health centres in East London. A 40-year-old man was arrested nearby and taken to hospital for treatment. Video posted on social media showed a man with long hair wearing only underwear being led to a police van in handcuffs. Jeremy Corbyn denies calling Theresa May a stupid woman Jeremy Corbyn has denied calling Theresa May a stupid woman during Prime Ministers Questions. The Labour leader was accused of misogyny after Tory MPs said he muttered the insult under his breath following a heated exchange with the PM. Returning to the Commons to make a statement, Mr Corbyn said he used the phrase stupid people rather than stupid woman. The Government has released its plans for UK immigration after Brexit, bringing an end to freedom of movement. The proposal outlines that new immigrants should have an annual salary above 30,000 before they can come to work in Britain, and removes preferential treatment for EU citizens. Critics consider the 30,000 salary level, which the Government says is not set in stone, to be an arbitrary threshold that could lead to shortages of lower paid workers. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has unveiled his latest project a subterranean tunnel under Los Angeles designed to beat traffic. Mr Musk says the tunnel, which is currently two miles long, will allow autonomous electric vehicles to travel at 150mph below the city. Currently vehicles can travel at 40mph in the tunnel. By Philip Pullella VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - The Roman Catholic Church's leading experts on sexual abuse told bishops on Tuesday finally to take responsibility for a global clerical abuse scandal and go and speak personally to victims, or risk seeing the Church lose its credibility worldwide. Pope Francis has summoned the heads of some 110 national Catholic bishops' conferences and dozens of experts and leaders of religious orders to the Vatican on Feb. 21-24 for an extraordinary gathering dedicated to the sexual abuse crisis. Victims of clergy sexual abuse are hoping that the meeting will finally come up with a clear policy to make bishops themselves accountable for the mishandling of abuse cases. "Absent a comprehensive and communal response, not only will we fail to bring healing to victim survivors, but the very credibility of the Church to carry on the mission of Christ will be in jeopardy throughout the world," the conference's steering committee said in a letter to all participants. "But each of us needs to own this challenge, coming together in solidarity, humility, and penitence to repair the damage done, sharing a common commitment to transparency, and holding everyone in the Church accountable," said the letter, which was released by the Vatican. The committee is made up of Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago, Cardinal Oswald Gracias of Mumbai, Archbishop Charles Scicluna of Malta, the Vatican's leading sex abuse investigator, and Father Hans Zollner, an abuse expert based in Rome. "The first step must be acknowledging the truth of what has happened," they said. Each bishop was asked to visit survivors of clergy sex abuse in their area to learn first-hand the suffering that they have endured. "PUTTING VICTIMS FIRST" "This is a concrete way of putting victims first, and acknowledging the horror of what happened," said Vatican spokesman Greg Burke, adding that the February gathering would focus on responsibility, accountability and transparency. Last month, when U.S. bishops held their annual assembly in Baltimore, the Vatican asked them to wait until the February meeting before voting on a series of corrective measures. The proposals included a telephone hotline to report accusations of mishandling of cases of abuse by bishops, a review board made up of non-clerics to handle accusations against bishops, and a bishops' code of conduct. Victims' groups and some bishops saw the Vatican intervention as a setback. But the Vatican said it wanted to see if some of the U.S. proposals could be applied worldwide, not just in the United States. The Church is also facing sexual abuse scandals in Chile, Australia and Germany. In September, a study commissioned by the German Bishops' Conference showed that 1,670 clerics and priests had sexually abused 3,677 minors, mostly males, in Germany over a 70-year period. A U.S. Grand Jury report in August found that 301 priests in the state of Pennsylvania had sexually abused minors over a similar period. (Reporting By Philip Pullella; Editing by Gareth Jones) An Internet Court launched in Eastern Chinese City Hangzhou will now use blockchain to fight plagiarism for online writers, local Chinese news outlet China.org.cn reported. China launched its first internet court in the city of Hangzhou to deal with internet related cases, save time and reduce overhead costs of getting justice out of the system. At the time of the launch, the court was expected to accept court filings and cases electronically and given the mandate to rule online cases via live stream. Plaintiffs may verify their identity with a government-issued ID or through their Alipay account. The Hangzhou Internet Court operates as an incubator for the governance of the internet space in China to settle diversified Internet disputes, and a first mover for the transformation of Internet trials. Hangzhou has a large percentage of online writers in China. The Binjiang District of the city has a writers village, which is home to over a hundred popular online writers. These writers have had issues with piracy over the years, and it has become increasingly challenging for them to prove their ownership of any piece of work. The report stated that while these writers used to resort to downloaded content and screenshots as proof of ownership, these pieces of proof can easily be forged, making them ineffective as evidence. Court To Use Blockchain Evidence in Copyright Infringement Cases The expense of legal services and notary fees also make it difficult for writers to pursue justice against those who infringe on their copyright, the report argued. However, the Hangzhou Internet Court believes that it is nearly impossible to tamper with evidence that is logged on a distributed ledger or blockchain, due to its decentralized and open distributed ledger technology. Wang Jiangqiao, who works as a judge at the court, was of the opinion that blockchain is beneficial to writers due to its tamper-proof nature, which gives it the ability to track authorship, time of creation, content, and evidence of infringement. Story continues A few weeks ago, the Hangzhou Internet Court became the first court in China to recognize blockchain technology as a means of storing evidence. The decision stemmed from a case in which the plaintiff, a company based in Hangzhou, sued the defendant, a Shenzhen-based tech firm, or making publications of the plaintiffs copyrighted material on its official website. The plaintiff captured the webpage of the defendant as well as the source code, and uploaded them to the Bitcoin blockchain. After investigations were concluded, the Hangzhou Internet Court maintained that this form of electronic data would henceforth serve as a form of evidence in copyright infringement cases. China has used the blockchain in other areas of law enforcement in recent times. The post Chinese Internet Court Uses Blockchain To Combat Online Plagiarism appeared first on CCN. In the story of St. Boniface, a Thunder Oak decorated with lit candles and gilded apples was glowing in the dark forest one Christmas day in 8th century Germany. The pagan god Thor was to be appeased with a human sacrifice. But Wynfred, an English Christian missionary later to be known as St. Boniface, split the giant oak into four parts with one stroke of an ax, revealing a small fir tree nearby ... the first Christmas tree, perhaps. SOME ARBOREAL HISTORY The exact origin of the Christmas tree isn't known, but for centuries, people have had the urge to decorate trees at this time of year. In ancient Rome, decorated trees were part of the festival of Saturn, celebrated beginning Dec. 17. The Paradise Tree of the Middle Ages was a fir tree hung with red apples, a prop used in the Biblical play telling the story of Adam and Eve. That tradition was moved into homes after the "miracle plays" were banned in the 15th century. In Germany, a written record from 1604 describes trees decorated with paper roses, apples, and figures of Adam and Eve and a serpent. The custom of decorating trees at Christmas gained popularity in the British Empire in 1841 when Queen Victoria and Prince Albert celebrated the birth of their first son with a decorated tree at Windsor Castle. AND NOW FOR SOME LIGHTS In the late 19th century, gas jets and then electric lights were tried as replacements for candles. According to the National Electrical Contractors Association, the first electric Christmas lights were lit in 1882, three years after the incandescent bulb was invented. Edward Johnson, a friend and partner of Thomas Edison, hand-wired 80 "patriotic" red, white and blue bulbs and wound them around a rotating evergreen tree in his home. In subsequent years, publicity (such as Grover Cleveland lighting the White House tree with electric lights) and electrification in rural areas made electric Christmas tree lights more popular. Story continues THE TREE The "technology" of the tree itself has also advanced over the years, mostly to adapt to warmer and drier homes. Firs, spruces and some pines were found to be the best evergreens at holding onto their leaves under these conditions, both for looks and to reduce the fire hazard from dry leaves indoors. Another way to offset the effects of today's drier homes is to put the tree in the coolest spot, or at least not right where an air duct spills hot air out into the room. Spraying the tree with an anti-transpirant such as Wilt-Pruf also helps. Keeping the base of the tree in water after making a clean cut allows water to enter the base to replace moisture lost through the needles. A couple of tablespoons of bleach in the water inhibits bacterial growth which clogs the stems. Still, Christmas trees and Christmas don't last forever. You may be heartened to know that the residents of Christmas, Florida, live up to their name by maintaining a year-round Christmas tree. ___ http://www.leereich.com/blog http://leereich.com Havana (AFP) - Cuba will leave out of its new constitution changes that would have paved the way for legal same-sex marriage, despite majority support in local assemblies, a government official said Tuesday. It was a surprising twist given public popular support shown nationwide -- and earlier remarks from lawmakers in the Americas' only one-party Communist regime. The measure would have changed the definition of parties in a marriage from man and wife to "between two people." But "the draft constitution will not define which parties enter into a marriage... So that is now out of constitutional reform discussions overall," Council of State secretary and drafting coordinator Homero Acosta was quoted as saying by state media. The full draft constitution was put before neighborhood and workplace assemblies for debate between August and November. The marriage issue was the one that drew the greatest attention. "Article 68 was the one most discussed by the people in the popular consultation, in 66 percent of the meetings (of citizen debate). Of the 192,408 opinions, 158,376 propose replacing the measure now in force with the one proposed," Cuba's National Assembly said on Twitter. In light of that, "the (text-drafting) Committee proposes deferring the definition of marriage to the draft constitution, as a way to respect all opinions." Edward McNally Courts hate disputes over pretrial discovery. Not only do those disputes often involve detailed factual arguments, but they are usually boring. It is no fun to review multiple document requests or interrogatories that have been responded to with vague, repetitive objections that take hours to sort out. While there are special discovery masters that might be appointed to take a first shot at resolving those disputes, too often that just postpones, but does not avoid the need for court involvement. The Delaware Court of Chancery has now decided that its past guidance on how to conduct discovery has not cured this problem. It is time, instead, to impose increased sanctions for the most often repeated discovery abuses. Thus, in Terramar Rental Centers v. Marion #2-Seaport Trust U/A/D June 21, 2002, Del. Ch. C.A. No. 12875-VCL (December 4, 2018), issued an evidence-preclusion order to cure discovery misconduct. As Terramar points out, it is not the first time these discovery abuses have occurred. There are four types of discovery abuse that seem to occur most frequently. That they are continuing to take place may mean that counsel, particularly non-Delaware counsel, simply do not understand what is improper. While Terramar dealt with only two of those abuses, its rationale will apply to require sanctions for all of them. Each of these abuses is described as follows: General Objections to Discovery Are Improper. Too often, a party responding to a request to produce documents will reply with a general objection that the request is too burdensome, overbroad, seeks irrelevant documents and is not followed with any actual document production. That objection is not only improper, but it is a waiver of any actually valid objection. As Terramar points out: For an objection party to carry its burden, the objection must be specific, the party making it must explain why it applies on the facts of the case to the request being made, and if the party is providing information subject to the objection, the party must articulate how it is applying the objection to limit the information it is providing. This means that if the objection seeks documents outside of the time the dispute arose, it must say so. If the request seeks too many documents, the objection must say how many documents may be involved and the cost to review and produce those documents. If some documents will be produced, the response must describe the criteria used to select those documents. Story continues Late Responses Are Improper. Terramar also dealt with another too-common problemlate document production. In Delaware, scheduling orders are to be taken seriously. Missing a discovery deadline is sanctionable. For example, as in Terramar, producing documents after depositions have been taken deprives the party taking the depositions of the opportunity to use those documents in the depositions. Ordering additional depositions, at the expense of the tardy party, is one sanction but still permits delay. Under Terramar points out, that sanction may not be enough. Self-Collection Is Bad. Too often, a party will try to avoid legal fees by having its own employees collect the responsive documents and other electronically stored information. That is not proper. In Delaware, a lawyer has the duty to at least supervise the collection of documents responsive to a document request and to determine the basis for an answer to an interrogatory. Clients too often cut corners if only based on the mistaken notion they can determine what is relevant and exclude anything else. That legal determination is not for the client to make. Of course, the parties can and often do agree that the amount at stake is too small to warrant the usual fulsome document collection. But that is their agreement, not what Delaware law otherwise would require. Privilege Logs Must Be Accurate. When the attorney-client or other privilege is asserted as a basis to withhold a document, a privilege log must be produced to explain the basis for the claim of privilege. Some detail is required and, at least in Delaware, senior Delaware counsel must be involved, if only to spot check the log produced by others. Admittedly, deciding when a privilege exists is not always simple. A document may be only partially privileged because it contains both legal advice and business discussions. Joint communications based on the common interest of the parties are also possibly privileged. There are ways to simplify those problems. It is common to agree, for example, that once litigation counsel is retained, all subsequent communications with that counsel may be presumed privileged and not listed on a privilege log. Almost always parties agree that communications after litigation is filed need not be listed on the log. The Appropriate Sanction. Prithvi Man Shrestha is a political reporter for The Kathmandu Post, covering the governance-related issues including corruption and irregularities in the government machinery. Before joining The Kathmandu Post in 2009, he worked at nepalnews.com and Rising Nepal primarily covering the issues of political and economic affairs for three years. WASHINGTON Lawmakers edged closer Wednesday toward a temporary measure that would fund the government a few more weeks but would put off key spending decisions until next year. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said he would file a bill on Wednesday that would fund the government through Feb. 8. We dont want to end this year the way we began it, with another government shutdown, he said. Nine federal departments and several smaller agencies a quarter of the government will run out of money and shut down at midnight Friday unless Congress and the White House strike a deal to extend their funding. But with the deadline just two days away, Democrats and Republicans have been at an impasse, despite signals from the White House that it may be backing away from Trumps demand for $5 billion to build a wall along the nations southern border. The Capitol Dome is pictured on Feb. 7, 2017. At the White House, a top aide said Trump might sign a short-term spending bill that would delay a shutdown and kick the dispute over wall funding into the new year, when the new Democratic-run House takes over. "He'll take a look at that certainly," presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway told reporters. Trump himself, meanwhile, tweeted that "one way or the other, we will win on the Wall!" White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Tuesday that Trump has asked his cabinet secretaries to see if they can find other sources of funding to help protect the border. But she also suggested that the administration is looking to Congress for clues about how to avoid a shutdown. We've laid out clearly what our parameters are with members of Congress, Sanders said. We want to know what they can pass. We want to know what they think they can actually get done. We've laid out what we'd like to see. In the meantime, we're looking at other areas where we can draw money from to make sure that the president can actually protect our border and protect American citizens. Story continues Presumptive speaker, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., listens while Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and President Donald Trump argue before a meeting at the White House Dec. 11, 2018, in Washington, D.C. Sanders comments reflect a retreat from just a week ago, when Trump boasted during an Oval Office meeting with Democratic leaders that he would be proud to shut down the government over border security and that hed be willing to take the blame for any fallout. On Capitol Hill, McConnell expressed confidence Tuesday that a shutdown would be avoided even though Democrats have rejected the GOPs latest proposal to end the impasse. I think theres certainly bipartisan support for avoiding a government shutdown, he said. Were now trying to figure out the way forward. In an 11th-hour attempt at compromise, McConnell had proposed approving a spending bill that includes $1.6 billion for border fencing along with an additional $1 billion for immigration. But Democrats described the additional funding as a "slush fund" and said they had rejected the offer. House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi of California said the GOP proposal would allow Trump to continue his very wrong immigration policies. That wont happen, she told reporters. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York said the GOP offer would not have been able to pass either the House or the Senate. On the Senate floor on Wednesday, McConnell accused Democrats of rejecting the offer out of "knee-jerk, partisan opposition" to Trump. It seems like political spite for the president may be winning out over sensible policy," he said. Nine federal departments still are awaiting for Congress to approve their budgets. Those departments are Agriculture, Commerce, Justice, Homeland Security, Interior, State, Transportation, Treasury and Housing and Urban Development, as well as several smaller agencies. Both of the previous government shutdowns that have taken place under Trumps presidency have ended with short-term funding bills. Last January, parts of the government shut down for three days after an impasse in the Senate over federal funding. The shutdown finally ended when the Senate passed a short-term spending measure. Less than three weeks later, the government shut down for a second time after Congress failed to pass a spending bill to keep the agencies running. That shutdown ended after only six hours when lawmakers passed a six-week spending bill. Contributing: John Fritze, Nicole Gaudiano and David Jackson More: Americans' message to Washington on the looming shutdown: Don't More: Will NORAD's Santa Tracker still monitor St. Nick's journey even if there's a government shutdown? More: The Ghost of Shutdowns Past haunts latest talks to keep the federal government open This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to offer bill to avoid federal government shutdown A look at the shareholders of WABCO India Limited (NSE:WABCOINDIA) can tell us which group is most powerful. Institutions often own shares in more established companies, while its not unusual to see insiders own a fair bit of smaller companies. We also tend to see lower insider ownership in companies that were previously publicly owned. WABCO India has a market capitalization of 132b, so we would expect some institutional investors to have noticed the stock. Our analysis of the ownership of the company, below, shows that institutional investors have bought into the company. We can zoom in on the different ownership groups, to learn more about WABCOINDIA. View our latest analysis for WABCO India NSEI:WABCOINDIA Ownership Summary December 18th 18 What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About WABCO India? Many institutions measure their performance against an index that approximates the local market. So they usually pay more attention to companies that are included in major indices. We can see that WABCO India does have institutional investors; and they hold 13% of the stock. This implies the analysts working for those institutions have looked at the stock and they like it. But just like anyone else, they could be wrong. If multiple institutions change their view on a stock at the same time, you could see the share price drop fast. Its therefore worth looking at WABCO Indias earnings history, below. Of course, the future is what really matters. NSEI:WABCOINDIA Income Statement Export December 18th 18 WABCO India is not owned by hedge funds. There are plenty of analysts covering the stock, so it might be worth seeing what they are forecasting, too. Insider Ownership Of WABCO India The definition of company insiders can be subjective, and does vary between jurisdictions. Our data reflects individual insiders, capturing board members at the very least. Management ultimately answers to the board. However, it is not uncommon for managers to be executive board members, especially if they are a founder or the CEO. Story continues I generally consider insider ownership to be a good thing. However, on some occasions it makes it more difficult for other shareholders to hold the board accountable for decisions. Our data suggests that insiders own under 1% of WABCO India Limited in their own names. It is a pretty big company, so it would be possible for board members to own a meaningful interest in the company, without owning much of a proportional interest. In this case, they own around 453m worth of shares (at current prices). Arguably, recent buying and selling is just as important to consider. You can click here to see if insiders have been buying or selling. General Public Ownership With a 12% ownership, the general public have some degree of sway over WABCOINDIA. While this size of ownership may not be enough to sway a policy decision in their favour, they can still make a collective impact on company policies. Public Company Ownership Public companies currently own 75% of WABCOINDIA stock. This may be a strategic interest and the two companies may have related business interests. It could be that they have de-merged. This holding is probably worth investigating further. Next Steps: I find it very interesting to look at who exactly owns a company. But to truly gain insight, we need to consider other information, too. I like to dive deeper into how a company has performed in the past. You can access this interactive graph of past earnings, revenue and cash flow, for free . If you would prefer discover what analysts are predicting in terms of future growth, do not miss this free report on analyst forecasts. NB: Figures in this article are calculated using data from the last twelve months, which refer to the 12-month period ending on the last date of the month the financial statement is dated. This may not be consistent with full year annual report figures. 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. Elon Musk has unveiled an underground tunnel system that he claims will put an end to traffic in cities. The subterranean tube system is designed to transport electric cars through cities at high speed. Reporters and guests took some of the first journeys in the tunnel system, which is currently only a mile long, beneath the surface of Los Angeles. Mr Musk hopes that vehicles in the tunnels will eventually hit speeds of 150mph when the network has been developed further. During the test ride cars travelled at 40mph. The top speed of the London underground is 60mph. Cars enter the tunnels through a wall-less lift which slowly takes cars down a wide shaft, roughly 30ft below the surface. The cars, which need to be autonomous, then speed up when they enter the system. Elon Musk has unveiled a tunnel that he hopes will provide an answer to soul-destroying traffic (Getty) Guests who tested the tunnels said the vehicle jostled significantly during the journey, which was bumpy enough to give one reporter motion sickness. Tech entrepreneur Mr Musk described his first journey as epic. He told reporters: For me, it was a eureka moment. I was like: This thing is going to damn well work. He said the journey is bumpy at the moment because we kind of ran out of time, and there were some problems with the speed of his paving machine. MORE: Headless bodies of six baby seals discovered on popular New Zealand tourist spot MORE: Brexit: Opposition parties table vote of no confidence in the Government in push for second referendum Of future systems, he said: Itll be smooth as glass. This is just a prototype. Thats why its a little rough around the edges. Later, Mr Musk emerged from the tunnel himself inside one of his cars before giving a speech about the technology. He said: Traffic is soul-destroying. Its like acid on the soul. The entrepreneur explained for the first time in detail how the system, which he simply calls loop, could work on a larger scale beneath cities across the globe. The tech entrepreneur said the system would operate more like an underground motorway than a subway (Getty) Autonomous, electric vehicles could be lowered into the tunnels on the special lifts. Story continues The cars would have to be fitted with specially designed side wheels, fitted to run along the tunnels track. The cost for such wheels would be about 158-237 per car, Mr Musk said. A number of autonomous cars would remain inside the tunnel system just for pedestrians and cyclists. Once they are within the main arteries of the system, every car could run at top speed except when entering and exiting. The station consists of a wall-less lift which slowly took the car down a wide shaft, roughly 30ft below the surface (PA) For the privately-funded test tunnel, Mr Musk acquired a tunnel-boring machine which had been used in a San Francisco Bay Area building project and put it down a shaft in a car park at the SpaceX headquarters. Mr Musk said he is hoping that an extensive network will be open in Los Angeles before the city hosts the 2028 Olympics. He said: Wouldnt it be incredible if you could travel around LA, New York, Washington DC, Chicago, Paris, London anywhere at 150mph? Thatd be phenomenal. Brett Ingerman, DLA Piper One of the more unusual compliance pressure tactics of 2018 is likely to affect companies increasingly in the New Year in what attorney Brett Ingerman calls a collective consumer regulatory risk. You wont see it in any survey, but Ive had a number of conversations with chief compliance officers recently who are accounting for this new consumer regulatory risk, said Ingerman, managing partner of the Baltimore office of DLA Piper. They explain that consumers have become yet another regulator that businesses have to deal with, he said. As an example, Ingerman cited the group of New York consumers who joined on social media in the #deleteUber campaign, an effort to convince riders everywhere to drop their Uber accounts. The campaign was sparked by labor and political issues but quickly spread to include other factors. And it's not just strictly consumers. A related example is the #MeToo movement that has forced companies and law firms to deal with gender wage disparity, discrimination and sexual harassment and abuse. Another example from Ingerman was the group of Harvard Law School students who launched a boycott of Kirkland & Ellis during the summer associate recruiting cycle over the law firms then-forced arbitration policy. Kirkland & Ellis eventually did away with the pacts for all associates and non-attorney employees. Ingerman, who also serves as co-chair of DLA Pipers global governance and compliance practice, said the group compliance pressure tactic is a trend he expects to continue through 2019, especially by consumers, creating a new risk in an attempt to drive corporate behavior. Another growing trend to watch, he said, is the return of the compliance function to the in-house legal department. For years, he explained, the pendulum was swinging the other way, with compliance moving out of legal. The recently released 2018 DLA Piper Compliance & Risk Survey shows that more than 50 percent of the participating chief compliance officers were reporting to the companys general counsel or chief legal officer. In contrast, less than 35 percent reported to legal in 2017, the survey said. The pendulum is swinging back, and I do think it will continue in 2019, Ingerman said. That may not be true in certain heavily regulated industries, such as health care or financial services, where there are requirements by the government that certain compliance functions be outside the legal department. Ingerman explained that regulators see a possible conflict because they believe the purpose of the legal function is to defend the company, while the compliance unit must be independent to assess and mitigate risks. He disagrees with the governments view. Both the CCO and the general counsel are paid by the same company, he noted. And there is a blurred line sometimes between what is a compliance risk and what is a legal risk, he added. Personally I think that the compliance function is better managed in legal, or closely linked to legal. Other notable 2018 compliance trends that Ingerman expects to continue into 2019: A growing number of chief compliance officers who worry about personal liability. He links the concern with the increased amount of international merger and acquisition activity in recent years, especially in high-risk countries like China. In that context, he explained, the CCO is charged with major obligations of identifying significant risks upfront, and then integrating the two compliance programs to make sure there are no gaps. I think as long as the M&A activity continues next year, you will see their concern for personal liability continue as well. In May 2017, for instance the federal government reached a settlement with Thomas Haider, the former chief compliance officer of MoneyGram International Inc., on civil charges that he failed to stop money laundering activities. He was fined $250,000 and barred from working in compliance at a money transmitter for three years. An increased use of technology in the compliance function. Ingerman was surprised that the survey found some 74 percent of companies still were not using compliance technology. But the number is growing, and theres no doubt there will be a growing use of technology in 2019, he said. An increase in the frequency of compliance reports to the board of directors. Ingerman said three years ago or so, a CCOs report to the board was done annually at most companies, but now we see that quarterly reporting to the board has become standard. A growing number of boards that add a director with compliance expertise. He said this director is charged with educating the board generally and drilling down with senior management on compliance issues, making directors more comfortable that compliance is being met. In this third annual survey, DLA Piper said it found that companies continue to value compliance and to up their investment in resources for CCOs and their teams. Read more: If the Compliance Software Can't Catch a Sanctioned Client, That Means a Fine Most Legal Departments Unprepared to Support Digitization: Report US Bank GC James Chosy: Where Tech Leads, So Do In-House Lawyers A UK flag flies alongside an EU flag in the City of London. Photo: Getty The European Commission has told British banks and insurances firms they should relocate to the continent if they want to avoid what its president, Jean-Claude Juncker, called a no-deal catastrophe. The commission published emergency legislation on Wednesday designed to limit the impact of an increasingly likely no-deal scenario. Juncker said: The risks of a disorderly exit of Great Britain from the EU are obvious. It will be an absolute catastrophe. Therefore the Commission as well as the member states are trying to prevent this disorderly exit from the union, but it takes two to tango decently. The plan includes a 12-month extension to existing arrangements for London-based clearing houses a move which was welcomed as vital clarity for the City of London. The area we identified as problematic from a financial stability point of view has to do with derivatives and this is why we are today recognising as equivalent the central clearing party in the UK, which means EU operators will be able to continue to use clearing services in the UK for a period of 12 months, a senior EU official said. However, the reprieve was designed only go give businesses time to move from London. READ MORE: A million Brits living on the continent would become illegal under EU no-deal plans Services will have to migrate to the continent and we need time for that, the source said. Our assessment is it will take around 12 moths to happen. The commission has also changed regulations on derivatives trading to allow for a smoother transition of contracts from the UK to the EU, said its vice-president Valdis Dombrovskis. An official commission document added: Financial institutions that wish to provide banking or insurance services in the European Union should take all necessary steps to be properly authorised on withdrawal date, including by establishing presence in the EU27. It also warned the contingency measures put in place cannot offset some of the costs created by the application of two separate regulatory and supervisory frameworks. Story continues It is the latest in a long line of efforts to use Brexit to lure lucrative financial services from London to EU hubs in Paris, Frankfurt and Amsterdam. The Bank of England estimates that 5,000 financial services jobs will go to the continent after Brexit, a figure backed by financial services minister John Glen. The losses could be even worse in a no-deal situation. READ MORE: Germans mocked over video designed to lure bankers from London after Brexit Antananarivo (AFP) - Madagascar's second-round election on Wednesday pits two former presidents against each other in a long-awaited and bitter battle for power in which their strong personalities dominate over policies. - Ravalomanana: milkman-turned-millionaire - Marc Ravalomanana, 69, was ousted in 2009 and is now looking for revenge at the ballot box. Born into a peasant family, he once worked as a milkman before going on to form an agriculture and food empire after creating Tiko yoghurt. He first emerged on the political stage when he became mayor of Antananarivo in 1999. Despite having no party machine behind him, the self-made business tycoon ran for president two years later, defeating the incumbent Didier Ratsiraka and taking over in 2002 following a wave of violent street protests. He was reelected in 2006 in the first round of voting and secured the cancellation of Madagascar's debt. While supporters lauded his indefatigable energy, critics accused him of acting like a dictator, with criticism building from the end of 2008. On February 7, 2009, his presidential guard opened fire on supporters of Andry Rajoelina, Antananarivo's mayor at the time, as they marched on the presidential palace. Ravalomanana was forced to hand power to the army who subsequently passed the presidential reins to his rival Rajoelina. He then went into exile, not returning to the Indian Ocean island nation until the election of Hery Rajaonarimampianina in 2014. Back at the head of his party Tiako I Madagasikara (TIM) -- or "I Love Madagascar" -- Ravalomanana has plotted a careful strategy to regain power and has studiously courted the international donor nations on which the island depends. Faced with a younger opponent, he has embraced his nickname "Daddy" and styled himself as the experienced "father of the Nation" who knows how to "build a prosperous Madagascar". "Daddy is back," he told thousands of enthusiastic supporters in the capital. Story continues Asked during the campaign how he would react to a Rajoelina win, Ravalomanana told AFP: "I would accept the results, within limits". - Rajoelina: return of 'the disc jockey'? - Andry Rajoelina, 44, had a slight lead over Ravalomanana in the first round and has attracted impressive numbers to his rallies, which have featured performance artists and fireworks. His policies have drawn ridicule from his rivals, such as a proposal to fit zebu cows with trackers to battle rustling, and a scheme to convert Tamatave port into a "Malagasy Miami". Rajoelina burst onto the political scene in 2007. He was previously known for promoting parties in the capital, earning him the nickname "the disc jockey", but he caused an upset when he won the city's mayoral race. Helped by his own Viva broadcasting channel and strong communications skills, he quickly established himself as the leading voice of opposition to then-president Ravalomanana. His supporters openly defied the regime with the tacit support of the military, who helped oust Ravalomanana in 2009. Rajoelina defended his elevation to the presidential palace on the back of a coup d'etat, telling AFP: "It was a popular uprising." At the time, Rajoelina, who was in his mid-30s, struggled to lead the country out of crisis as its unelected leader. His rivals also accused him of rampant corruption, greed, and turning a blind eye to the pillage of the country's natural resources, including its precious rosewood forests. His failings won him the nickname "crayfish" -- a crustacean that walks backwards. Under international pressure, Rajoelina did not contest the 2013 election and backed his victorious former finance minister Hery Rajaonarimampianina. The two quickly fell out, and two years ago Rajoelina vowed to win back office at the ballot box. Rajoelina has been energetic on the campaign trail, bringing a sense of excitement and change to his spectacular rallies. But his policies have been criticised as unrealistic and foes have questioned how he funds his lavish campaigning. But Rajoelina has dismissed his critics and vowed to transform his country. "The situation is catastrophic in Madagascar, I would like to give people hope and pride," he said. "I will be a president of the poor people who protects the poor." The best Netflix Originals coming in 2019 (Netflix) Netflix is changing the way we watch films and television shows forever, and its almost impossible to keep up with the vast array of new content published on the service every day. Alfonso Cuarons Roma, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, and the Coen Brothers The Ballad of Buster Scruggs were just some of Netflixs original productions that blew us away in 2018, and there are plenty more where they came from. 2019 is set to be the biggest year yet for Netflix Originals. To help you navigate through the colossal content splurge coming to Netflix next year, here are the upcoming Netflix projects were most excited to see. Show: Stranger Things S3 The beloved 80s sci-fi series returns in 2019 with what promises to be the biggest series yet. Episode titles for Stranger Things S3 were recently released, and to say were hyped would be an understatement. With Hawkins Lab now shut down and the gateway to the Upside Down seemingly shut, everything seems rosy but the Mind Flayer still lurks and it set to unleash all hell onto Hawkins this time around. Launching: TBC Movie: Triple Frontier The latest from acclaimed filmmaker J.C. Chandor (A Most Violent Year, All is Lost) and writer Mark Boal (Zero Dark Thirty), Triple Frontier has had something of a chequered production history but is finally getting a release in 2019. Ben Affleck, Oscar Isaac, Charlie Hunnam, Garrett Hedlund, and Pedro Pascal lead the cast as a group of ex-soldiers who rob an infamous drug lord after struggling to make ends meet since their end of service. Launching: March Show: Star Trek: Discovery S2 Spock as played by Ethan Peck in Star Trek: Discovery Season 2 A second season of Star Trek: Discovery was commissioned by CBS and Netflix almost immediately after the debut season landed. Showrunner Alex Kurtzman has up-the-ante with the addition of the USS Enterprise, Captain Pike, and a young Spock (Ethan Peck) to proceedings. Launching: January 18 Movie: The Irishman The Irishman stars Robert De Niro, Action Bronson and is directed by Martin Scorsese Scorsese. De Niro. Pacino. Pesci. Four names together to get the blood pumping, and next year the foursome come together for The Irishman. Story continues A passion project from Scorsese, and reportedly one of Netflixs most expensive films ever with a budget of around $175million, it tells the story of labour union official Frank Sheehan (De Niro) and his involvement in bringing down Jimmy Hoffa (Pacino). Launching: TBC Show: Nightflyers The space exploration series draws on all manner of influences without bringing anything new to the table. With the phenomenally successful Game of Thrones coming to an end next year, attention is turning to creator George R.R. Martins other works. First up is Nightflyers, which Martin calls Psycho In Space, and is a co-production between SyFy and Netflix, based on the novel and short stories collection first released in 1980. Launching: TBC Movie: Six Underground After passing the Transformers torch, director Michael Bay returns with another action thriller, this time from Rhett Rheese and Paul Wernick, the writers of Deadpool and Zombieland. Ryan Reynolds leads a cast that includes Dave Franco, Melanie Laurent, and Corey Hawkins. If the set videos are anything to go by, Bay may have out Bay-ed himself with this one. Show: The Umbrella Academy The Umbrella Academy on Netflix The Umbrella Academy is based on the popular, Eisner award-winning comics and graphic novels created and written by Gerard Way, of My Chemical Romance fame. It tells the story of a family of strange superheroes called the Hargreeves, who must save the world from the apocalypse. Naturally. Developed by Steve Blackman (Fargo, Legion), the show stars Ellen Page, Tom Sheehan, Colm Feore, and Mary J. Blige as a super-villain. Launching: February 15 Movie: Velvet Buzzsaw Velvet Buzzsaw stara Rene Russo and Jake Gyllenhaal Set to make its debut at Sundance in January, the buzz for the new film by Nightcrawlers Dan Gilroy is already picking up steam. The writer-director re-teams with his Nightcrawler stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Rene Russo for a film set in the world of contemporary art in Los Angeles. John Malkovich and Toni Collette will also star. Launching: February 1 Show: Central Park Five One of the original Central Park Five members falsely accused of raping a jogger in the New York park Ava DuVernay, the Oscar-nominated director of Selma and 13th, is tackling another shocking true life story for Netflix, this time as a limited series. In 1989 a jogger is brutally raped, and five teenagers are wrongly convicted of carrying it out. Jovan Adepo (Fences) and Chris Chalk (12 Years A Slave) lead the cast with Vera Farmiga, Michael K. Williams and John Leguizamo co-starring. Launching: TBC Movie: The King Actor Timothee Chalamet takes the lead in The King Written by Joel Edgerton and David Michod (who also directs), The King is an adaptation of William Shakespeares Henry IV: Parts 1 & 2 and Henry V. Oscar Nominee Timothee Chalamet stars as King Henry V with a stellar supporting cast that includes Edgerton, Robert Pattinson, Ben Mendelsohn, Lily-Rose Depp, Thomasin McKenzie, and Sean Harris, with Brad Pitt as one of the films producers. Launching: TBC Show: Our Planet David Attenborough has a new nature show on Netflix Sir David Attenborough brings his trademark knowledge to Netflix next year with Our Planet, a new series that is an eclectic celebration of the globe as well as a look at the damages and issues facing it thanks to mankind. Launching: April 5 Movie: The Laundromat The Laundromat stars Meryl Streep After his brief retirement, director Steven Soderbergh continues his renaissance with his latest based around the story of the infamous Panama Papers, teaming again with screenwriter Scott Z. Burns (Contagion, Side Effects). Meryl Streep, Gary Oldman, Antonio Banderas, Jeffrey Wright, and Matthias Schoenaerts lead the cast. Launching: TBC Show: The Crown S3 Olivia Colman and Helen Boham-Carter play the Queen and Princess Margaret Olivia Colman takes over from Claire Foy as the Queen, with the new season taking place from 1964 until 1976 during Harold Wilsons reign as PM. Tobias Menzies and Helena Bonham-Carter take over from Matt Smith and Vanessa Kirby respectively, with Josh OConnor playing a 20-year-old Prince Charles. Launching: TBC Show: Jessica Jones and The Punisher The Punisher returns with Season 2 Hanging on as the last of the two remaining Netflix Marvel shows, after Iron Fist, Daredevil and Luke Cage were cancelled, Jessica Jones and Frank Castle (AKA The Punisher) return for their sophomore and, potentially, final seasons. Launching: The Punisher January, Jessica Jones TBC Movie: The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind Netflix has snagged the The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind The directorial debut of Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years A Slave, Doctor Strange), this is based on the true story of William Kamkwamba, a young boy in Malawi who created a wind turbine that helped his village get power. Launching: TBC Movie: Polar Actor Mads Mikkelsen takes the lead in Polar Mads Mikkelsen stars in an adaptation of the distinctive noir comic-books series of the same name about an international hitman who is forced out of his retirement after an attempt is made on his life. Jonas Ackerlund (Lords of Chaos) directs the film with Katheryn Winnick (Vikings) and Vanessa Hudgens (Spring Breakers) also part of the cast. Launching: TBC Movie: Dolemite Is My Name Dolemite is a blaxploitation classic from 1975 Rejoice, Eddie Murphy is back! Taking the lead role in this biopic, Murphy plays comedian Rudy Ray Moore who appeared in many blaxploitation films in the 1970s. Wesley Snipes, Craig Robinson, Keegan-Michael Key, and Chris Rock co-star in the film from director Craig Brewer (Hustle & Flow). Launching: TBC Murder Mystery Murder Mystery reunites Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston reunite for this comedy about a vacation gone awry after a meeting with a mysterious stranger. Gemma Arterton, Luke Evans, David Walliams, and Terence Stamp are all along for the ride. Launching: TBC READ MORE Best Netflix Original films of 2018 Worst movie plot holes of 2018 The stars we lost in 2018 Foreign Minister Gyawali meets US Secretary of State Pompeo Foreign Minister Pradeep Gyawali met US Secretary of State Michael Richard Pompeo at the US Department of State in Washington on Tuesday. Photo credit: Jack Taylor/Getty Images - Getty Images From Popular Mechanics Another day, another scandalous report on Facebook abusing user trust. This one comes from the New York Times, which alleges that Facebook provided partner companies like Spotify and Netflix broad abilities to inspect user data. Even if users had disabled all sharing on Facebook through security preferences, some of these partner companies had the ability to scan through profiles anyway. "Facebook allowed Microsofts Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users friends without consent," the Times declares, "and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users private messages." The partnerships started in 2010, amidst growing competition from Twitter and a desire to stay relevant for users. They included over 150 companies, ranging from the Royal Bank of Canada to the Times itself. While Facebook never sold its data, the California-based tech giant allowed partners access to data relevant to their own interests. On one level, this was a continuation of the company's business model-free to use while receiving ads. But these partnerships attempted to hide themselves from users at every turn. Facebook's partnership with Apple, for example, included the power for the company Apple to hide indicators that the company was data tracking. Apples devices, from the Apple Watches to MacBook Pros, had "the contact numbers and calendar entries of people who had changed their account settings to disable all sharing," according to the Times report. Apple claims that they were "not aware" Facebook had granted their devices special access to data. Netflix and Spotify have issued similar responses. These partnerships were not subject to privacy program reviews, according to the report. Even when Facebook announced major privacy reforms in 2014, many of these partnerships continued unabated. As recently as last year, Yahoo had access to the data of nearly 100,000 people a month. A Russian social media company with ties to the Kremlin, Yandex, had access Facebooks unique user IDs for years, even after Facebook had restricted access to other pieces of data due to security reasons. Story continues It would be hard to think of a company whose public image has taken a stronger battering in 2018 than Facebook. Once the must-have account for college students on the cutting edge, the company has been accused of everything from influencing the 2016 presidential election to precipitating genocidal massacre in Myanmar. Along the way, the company has repeatedly announced massive privacy breaches, most recently when 6.8 million users had photos given to third-party apps without their consent. But as the Times report shows, these users most likely had their privacy violated several times over even before their photos were shared. Wherever Facebook goes in 2019, the company has a mountain to climb in re-earning consumer trust. Source: NYT ('You Might Also Like',) (Reuters) - A special counsel investigation into possible collusion between Russia and the 2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trump has already secured more than 30 indictments and guilty pleas and has spawned at least four federal probes. But that is not all that Trump needs to worry about. With less than three weeks to go before they take control of the U.S. House of Representatives, Democrats are jockeying to lead overlapping investigations into the president. Trump denies any collusion and has long denounced the investigation being led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller as a "witch hunt." Moscow has denied it interfered in the election. Here are the various agencies or groups whose investigations pose a risk for Trump or are offshoots of Mueller's probe. SPECIAL COUNSEL ROBERT MUELLER Mueller was given a mandate to investigate any links or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the Trump campaign and "any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation." Since his start in May 2017, Mueller has secured indictments against or guilty pleas from 32 people and three Russian companies, including former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and a troll farm in St. Petersburg, Russia that spread disinformation on social media ahead of the 2016 election. While Trump is unlikely to be charged by Mueller due to Justice Department policy against indicting a sitting president, a report from Mueller expected sometime in 2019 could prove damaging politically. The report is expected to focus on any collusion with Russia and obstruction of justice. SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK On a referral from Mueller, prosecutors in the Southern District of New York (SDNY) secured search warrants to raid the office and residence of Trump's attorney, Michael Cohen, in April. Cohen pleaded guilty in August to crimes including campaign finance violations, which he said he carried out at the direction of Trump to silence two women about alleged sexual affairs. Cohen separately pleaded guilty in November to lying to Congress about a planned Trump skyscraper in Moscow in a case handled by Mueller. He has been cooperating with Mueller and in a more limited capacity with the SDNY. He says he is willing to cooperate more, which could lead SDNY prosecutors into the finances of the Trump Organization, legal experts say. Prosecutors have already granted immunity to Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization's longtime CFO. The SDNY is also in the early stages of an investigation into whether Trump's inaugural committee misspent some of the $107 million it raised, according to the Wall Street Journal. NEW YORK ATTORNEY GENERAL The New York Attorney General filed a lawsuit against the Trump's personal charity alleging he unlawfully used it to help his campaign and benefit his business. The suit, which is ongoing, seeks to recover $2.8 million in funds. Incoming attorney general Letitia James told NBC News in an interview this month that she planned to launch sweeping investigations into Trump and "anyone" in his inner circle who may have broken the law. James could get help from Cohen, who met voluntarily with the Attorney General's office concerning the lawsuit and also provided the office "documents concerning a separate open inquiry," according to a sentencing memo in his case. EASTERN DISTRICT OF VIRGINIA Federal prosecutors in Alexandria, Virginia are handling two cases spawned out of the Mueller probe: the indictment of an accountant for a Russian troll farm who allegedly meddled in the 2018 U.S. midterm elections and the indictment of Flynn's former business partner and a Turkish businessman for unregistered lobbying aimed at extraditing a Muslim cleric to Turkey. Mueller and Eastern District of Virginia (EDVA) prosecutors are jointly prosecuting a case involving Russian oligarch Evgeny Prigozhin and two of his companies, which stand accused of spreading misinformation ahead of the 2016 election. [L1N1TH140] EDVA is also the jurisdiction where an indictment against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was mistakenly unsealed last month. It was unclear what any possible charges against Assange could be, though in 2016 Wikileaks published Democratic emails that U.S. intelligence agencies say were hacked by Russia. DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA Sam Patten pleaded guilty in August to unregistered lobbying for a pro-Kremlin political party in Ukraine and admitted to arranging for a U.S. citizen to act as a straw purchaser to buy tickets to Trump's inauguration for a Ukrainian oligarch. The case against Patten was brought by the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia and the Justice Department's National Security Division, which started investigating him after a referral from Mueller. Patten, the business partner of a Russian national indicted by Mueller for conspiring to obstruct justice in the Manafort case, is cooperating with Mueller and could be providing information related to the inaugural committee probe. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES The House of Representatives is expected to engage in a wide range of investigations into Trump's businesses and conduct. The probes will cut across six committees with some under the jurisdiction of two or more, sources told Reuters. The main areas of investigation include Trump's tax returns and business properties; any collusion with Russia; any violations of a constitutional clause that forbids the accepting of gifts from foreign governments; and allegations that he broke campaign finance laws as detailed in the Cohen case. The Intelligence Committee's incoming chairman, Adam Schiff, has pointed to the need to look into accusations Russians may have laundered funds through the Trump Organization. SENATE The Senate Intelligence Committee, contrary to its House counterpart, has maintained a bipartisan stance to its probe into Russia's interference into the 2016 election, including any connection to the Trump campaign. That probe is ongoing. EMOLUMENTS LAWSUIT This month the attorneys general of Maryland and the District of Columbia formally demanded financial records from Trump's businesses, marking progress in their lawsuit alleging that Trump's dealings with governments violate the Constitution's so-called emoluments clauses. (Reporting by Nathan Layne in New York; editing by Darren Schuettler) It's so far out, they're calling it "Farout." Astronomers have discovered the most distant object in the solar system. It's about 11 billion miles from the sun and has the rather dull official name of 2018 VG18, thus the more catchy nickname of Farout. That extreme distance places it about 8 billion miles beyond the orbit of Pluto. The object, which will likely be classified as a dwarf planet, is about 300 miles in diameter and has "a pinkish hue," according to Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science, one of the scientists who made the discovery. Farout "orbits very slowly, likely taking more than 1,000 years to take one trip around the sun," the University of Hawaiis David Tholen said in a statement. Sheppard added that 2018 VG18 is much more distant and slower moving than any other observed solar system object, so it will take a few years to fully determine its orbit." More: Searching for 'Planet X,' scientists discover distant 'Goblin' object billions of miles beyond Pluto The object was first spotted by astronomers using a Japanese telescope that's on top of Hawaii's Mauna Kea volcano. The discovery was later confirmed using a telescope in Chile. Farout was discovered by the same team that's searching for the mythical Planet 9, a yet-to-be-discovered world somewhere out there that could have a mass about 10 times that of Earth. In October, the team found another far-away object they nicknamed the Goblin since it was discovered near Halloween. Farout is much "farther out" than the Goblin. The announcement about Farout was released Monday by the International Astronomical Unions Minor Planet Center. This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Farout: Scientists discover most distant object in solar system By Saumya Joseph and Manas Mishra (Reuters) - An advisory panel to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday narrowly recommended prescribing the opioid overdose reversal drug, naloxone, along with addictive painkillers. The panel voted 12-11 in favor of labeling changes for opioids that recommend co-prescribing the overdose antidote, concluding a two-day discussion on ways to make the potentially life-saving drug readily available. The recommendation underscores concerns about the growing opioid overdose epidemic that claimed more than 49,000 American lives last year. When administered quickly, naloxone helps reverse the effects of an overdose and saves lives. The prescription of naloxone could facilitate a healthy dialogue between patients and the healthcare provider, Maryann Amirshahi, a panel member who voted in favor, said. But co-prescribing naloxone to all patients who are prescribed painkillers could increase annual healthcare costs by $63.9 billion to $580.8 billion, according to FDA studies. "I think co-prescribing is an expensive way to saturate the population with naloxone. The at-risk population is not necessarily the ones that are being prescribed new narcotics," said Mary Ellen McCann, associate professor of anesthesia at Harvard Medical School, a panelist who voted against the decision. "I'm concerned about a person going in with a broken arm and ending up with $30 of a codeine product and a (naloxone) autoinjector at $4,000 plus." Branded versions for treating opioid overdose include Adapt Pharma's Narcan nasal spray and Kaleo Inc's Evzio autoinjector. Robert Kramer, chief operating officer of Emergent BioSolutions Inc , which bought Adapt Pharma this year, said the FDA's cost estimates were "inflated", adding the number includes the price of Narcan and Kaleo's Evzio, which has a list price of over $4,000. The list price is not necessarily what patients actually pay and "out-of-pocket" costs vary depending on the duration of the treatment and individual healthcare plans. A pack of Narcan containing two doses lists at a price of $125, while generic naloxone retails at around $40 per dose. "A fully implemented co-prescription program targeting opioid prescription associated with the highest risk of opioid overdose would cost an estimated $115 million per year as opposed to the $64 billion number," Kramer said. Kaleo announced last week an authorized generic of Evzio, which will be available at a list price of $178 for a pack of two doses. Naloxone is currently made available through distribution and prescription programs in pain clinics and opioid treatment centers, as well as "take-home" programs among high-risk patients. (Reporting by Saumya Sibi Joseph and Manas Mishra in Bengaluru; Editing by James Emmanuel and Sriraj Kalluvila) By Lisa Baertlein (Reuters) - FedEx Corp on Tuesday slashed its 2019 forecast after Europe's economy weakened and the U.S. trade row exacerbated a slowdown in China, sending shares in the package delivery company tumbling more than 6 percent after the closing bell. "Global trade has slowed in recent months and leading indicators point to ongoing deceleration," said FedEx Chief Financial Officer Alan Graf. FedEx, which is in the throes of a record-setting winter holiday shipping season, launched a new cost-cutting campaign after its Express revenues took a hit. On Dec. 7, FedEx announced that the CEO of its Express unit was retiring at year-end. Executives noted a sharp UK slowdown due to Brexit uncertainty, Germany's recent gross domestic product contraction, protests in France that threaten to spread to nearby countries and a cooling down in Asia. FedEx is seen as a bellwether for the global economy and its results sparked concern that the United States may catch the "cold" affecting other regions, said Trip Miller, managing partner at Memphis-based Gullane Capital. "This confirms a lot of market fears ... and is probably why the (stock) market has been off so much," said Miller. Memphis, Tennessee-based FedEx cut its fiscal 2019 earnings forecast to $15.50 to $16.60 per share from $17.20 to $17.80 per share - before year-end mark-to-market retirement plan accounting adjustments and excluding TNT Express integration expenses. FedEx Chief Executive Fred Smith said politics fueled much of the world's economic turmoil and that policy changes can turn it around. The tempered outlook landed as FedEx grapples with ongoing margin pressure at its Express and Ground units and speculation that Amazon.com Inc will attack its own mounting transportation costs with a competing delivery network - a concept CEO Smith described as "fantastical." Its new forecast assumes moderate U.S. domestic economic growth and no further weakening in international economic conditions, FedEx said. Story continues The company moved quickly to reduce expenses and improve efficiency, even though executives said the U.S. economy "remained solid." FedEx is offering voluntary buyouts to certain employees, reducing international capacity at FedEx Express, limiting hiring and cutting discretionary spending. It is also reevaluating its capital spending plans and share buybacks. Profit jumped almost 21 percent to $935 million, or $3.51 per share, for the second quarter ended Nov. 30. Revenue rose to $17.8 billion from $16.3 billion. FedEx shares dropped 6.2 percent to $173.51 in extended trading while rival United Parcel Service Inc fell 3.5 percent to $93.85. (Reporting by Lisa Baertlein in Los Angeles and Uday Sampath in Bengaluru; editing by Dan Grebler, Tom Brown and G Crosse) A fire at Chester Zoo was caused by an electrical fault, an investigation has found. Visitors had to be evacuated from the zoo on Saturday after the blaze broke out in the Monsoon Forest habitat building. Keepers were able to move all the zoos mammal species to safety including a group of critically-endangered Sumatran orangutans but a number of insects, birds and reptiles died in the fire. On Wednesday, a Cheshire Fire and Rescue Service spokesman said the fire had started accidentally and was caused by an electrical fault. Firefighters at Chester Zoo after a fire broke out in the Monsoon Forest habitat area. The fire was caused by an electrical fault, an investigation has found. PA. Fire service area manager Lee Shears said: This was a large and complex operation involving more than 80 firefighters from Cheshire, Merseyside and North Wales fire and rescue services. Firefighters and zoo staff worked closely together in an incredibly challenging situation to evacuate the building and rescue as many animals as possible. The professionalism and expertise of the staff at the zoo meant that many precious species were saved. Jamie Christon, Chester Zoos chief operating officer, added: Were grateful that the fire and rescue service has been able to conclude its investigation into the cause of the fire so swiftly and would again like to thank them for their valiant efforts on the day, which helped us to rescue so many animals and minimise the extent of the damage. Firefighters at Chester Zoo after a fire broke out in the Monsoon Forest habitat area. Our efforts now will focus on rebuilding Monsoon Forest so we can return some very special species back to their home and continue our mission to prevent extinction. More than 140,000 has been raised in donations from the public following the fire. Bosses at the attraction say insurance will pay for fire damage and the cash, donated by more than 7,700 people, will be spent on conservation work. The zoo described it as one of the toughest days in our long history. Eyewitnesses said high winds fanned the flames in the roof of the building when the fire broke out just before 11.30am on Saturday and one person was treated for smoke inhalation, according to North West Ambulance Service. Watch the latest videos from Yahoo UK You'll soon be able to take a Carnival cruise out of San Francisco. Carnival on Tuesday announced it would offer a series of sailings out of the city in 2020 something it has never done in its 46-year history. Kicking off March 19, 2020, the voyages will include four-night trips to Ensenada, Mexico, and five- and six-night trips to Ensenada, Catalina Island and San Diego. The voyages also will include 10- and 11-night Alaska cruises that feature calls at Juneau, Skagway, Icy Strait Point, Sitka and Tracy Arm Fjord. In addition, the line will offer a single 15-night Hawaii cruise out of San Francisco that features stops at four islands including Maui and Kauai. RELATED: Giant ships, new destinations: The biggest cruise stories of 2018 The Mexico sailings will take place during the spring and summer of 2020. The Alaska cruises are scheduled for the summer of 2020. The Hawaii cruise will depart on April 16, 2020. The sailings will take place on the 2,124-passenger Carnival Miracle. Catering heavily to the drive-in market, Carnival is known for offering voyages from more "home ports" around the USA than any other line. On the West Coast, it already offers voyages from San Diego; Long Beach, California; Seattle; and Vancouver, B.C. With the addition of San Francisco, Carnival will operate from 19 ports in North America. This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: For the first time in its 46-year history, Carnival to offer cruises from San Francisco Forwarding equal footing All British Gurkhas must be treated on an equal basis to their British counterparts On Tuesdays Tucker Carlson Tonight, Fox News host Tucker Carlson said that the war on Christmas is real and called it a global struggle. He brought on political commentator and radio host Tammy Bruce to break down a story about a Scottish Parliament coffee shop that changed the name of its gingerbread men to gingerbread persons. They dont want to give them a gender without their consent, Carlson quipped. You dont even want to know how many bathrooms there are in gingerbread houses now. A lot. After Carlson expressed his suspicion that people who do things like this are right-wing plants, there to discredit the progressives they live among, Bruce had a theory of her own. The left has worked now for a couple of generations to condition us to, ahead of time, worry about what we are going to say challenging people and threatening them and letting them know theres danger in those thoughts, Bruce said. And after reporting that the baker in the story was shocked by the negative outcry over the gingerbread name change, Bruce added, I contend that living your entire life being kind of bullied into what you can and cannot say, and presumptions that youre bad people, that it can be the smallest thing that tips you over the edge, that can be your tipping point. And in this case its, you know, calling a gingerbread man a gingerbread person when, obviously, theyre men. Some viewers on Twitter seemed perplexed by the conversation. Many sarcastically thanked Fox News for covering the important issues. And then there were the gingerbread jokes. In todays news, Tucker Carlson and Tammy Bruce think cookies are people. https://t.co/nJi52crE6i Free Dominguez (@freedominguez) December 19, 2018 Good to see #Fox is covering the important issues, gingerbread cookies gender. LZinWisconsin (@lz000) December 19, 2018 This is the ideal male body. You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like. pic.twitter.com/gm7Pa6KNgO Mannheim Steamroller Season (@soundkitties) December 19, 2018 Bruce responded to critics on Twitter, implying that she was just joking about the whole thing. Story continues Bro, do you have a sense of humor? #KnowWhenYoureBeingMocked https://t.co/d3LXQdZd7I Tammy Bruce (@HeyTammyBruce) December 19, 2018 And, of course, Carlson drew his own conclusion from the story. So maybe the lesson is that the rest of us shouldnt participate in our own spiritual neutering, he said. Tucker Carlson Tonight airs weeknights at 8 p.m. on Fox News. Watch Tucker Carlson double down on controversial comments he made that caused advertisers to pull ads: Read more from Yahoo Entertainment: Tell us what you think! Hit us up on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, or leave your comments below. Paris (AFP) - A prosecutor on Wednesday urged judges to impose a 25-year prison term on a British man accused of importing 1.3 tonnes of cocaine into France hidden in suitcases on an Air France flight from Venezuela. Robert Dawes, 46, has denied organising the shipment since his arrest in Spain in 2015, despite a Spanish police video which shows him claiming ownership of the drugs. "This is an unprecedented case... Far from a small-time fall guy, today we are judging men in the highest ranks of organised crime who supplied European networks," attorney general Isabelle Raynaud said. Under questioning on Tuesday, Dawes surprised the court by saying his claims in the video were "just a made-up story" intended to provoke the police into arresting him so that he could prove his innocence. But Raynaud said she was "dumbfounded" by an explanation she called "completely surrealistic." She also rebuked an attempt by Dawes's defence team to submit a forged document intended to show that the incriminating Spanish video was inadmissable on legal grounds. Investigators believe Dawes was at the head of a network which became one of the largest drug traffickers in Europe, with alleged links to South American cartels and the Italian mafia. Shortly after the cocaine was found in 30 suitcases at Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport in 2013, investigators arrested Nathan Wheat and Kane Price, suspected of working for Dawes. They are also on trial. The prosecutor also sought a 15-year term for Wheat, but did not seek prison for Price, saying his association with the operation was not fully established. Sentences of eight to 13 years were sought for three Italians also arrested and standing trial. Raynaud also called on the judges to impose a combined fine of 40 million euros ($45.7 million). The six men will have a chance to make final statements before the judges at the specially composed non-jury trial give their verdict, expected on Friday. Paris (AFP) - A French appeals court on Wednesday cancelled an unfair dismissal payout to former Societe Generale trader Jerome Kerviel, whose deals cost the bank 4.9 billion euros after they turned sour. Kerviel has waged a legal battle on several fronts against his former employer, claiming his supervisors were aware of his risky bets which initially brought in hundreds of millions of euros. In September, he lost his bid for a retrial after a court sentenced him to a five-year prison term in 2010, with two years suspended, for breach of trust, forgery and entering false data to hide massive trading losses. But in June 2016 a Paris labour tribunal ordered Societe Generale to pay him 450,000 euros in damages, saying he had been fired "without genuine or serious cause." In particular the tribunal said Kerviel, now 41, was owed a 300,000 euro bonus for 2007, saying the bank knew he was exceeding trading limits for several months before his dismissal. But the appeals court ruled Wednesday that Societe Generale's move to fire Kerviel for cause was justified after he brought the bank to the brink of insolvency. Kerviel, the son of a blacksmith from rural Brittany who has since become a trenchant critic of "casino capitalism," remains a divisive figure in France since his case made global headlines in 2008. Many believe he is a scapegoat for reckless activities by banks which provoked the financial crisis, while others think he should pay the price for his actions. Kerviel was initially ordered to reimburse the entire 4.9 billion euros -- $5.6 billion at current exchange rates. However an appeals court later reduced the fine to just one million euros, citing "woefully inadequate" internal checks at Societe Generale. France crypto taxes The National Assembly in France has recently shot down proposals to ease up the pressure on tax regulations in the crypto space. As reported by Bitcoin.fr, there recently existed a series of proposals to present a friendlier environment to cryptocurrency firms in France, none of which were able to pass the lower house of the nations legislature. The report listed several proposed amendments to the French tax code, many of which hardly seem like radical ideas. For example, Amendment 399 was apparently intended to clarify distinctions between occasional usage of crypto assets with routine transactions, without any reference to trying to take advantage of either classification. A similar amendment to defer payment of capital gains taxes until crypto assets were converted into fiat also failed. In addition to these, however, were more substantial measures specifically intended to make cryptocurrencies more attractive. One proposed amendment listed figures of 5,000, 3,000 and 305 Euros as annual tax exemptions for usage of cryptocurrency. None passed. Another amendment aimed at allowing cryptocurrency taxation laws to more closely resemble traditional capital gains tax laws was shuttered unceremoniously as well. Frances tax policies as of late have captured the imaginations of the worlds presses. French president Emmanuel Macron has attempted to enact policies of austerity and cuts to social safety nets while continuing to raise taxes on gasoline that millions of French citizens consider a basic necessity to travel and hold a job. The resultant Yellow Vest riots are far from able to overwhelm the government entirely at present, but they serve as a grim reminder to the legislature that the French Republic has collapsed entirely multiple times within the last century and had close calls as recently as 1968. In light of these current events, it may simply be that the French government is feeling skittish about showing any more favoritism with its tax policies. Story continues In other words, this rejection could have very little to do with the overall viability of cryptocurrencies in France. This is an extremely hot time in the French political scene, and the crypto bear market may not be doing proposed amendments such as these any favors. This article originally appeared on Bitcoin Magazine. (L-R) Awards judge Siobhan Moriarty, LegalTalent winners Charlotte Towerton, Josh Page and Charlotte Colthurst of Howard Kennedy, and judge Jeremy Barton Three ideas to improve diversity and inclusion in the legal profession were chosen as the winning entries at Legal Week's second LegalTalent contest last month. The Dragons Den-style competition - which aims to tap into new thinking on how law firms can embrace and retain young, talented employees - this year welcomed pitches from both students and associates. The competition took place at the LegalWeek CONNECT event on 29 November at County Hall London, with pitches judged by a senior panel comprising KPMG UK GC Jeremy Barton, ITV group legal director Andrew Garard, Diageo GC Siobhan Moriarty and Legal Week publishing director John Malpas. The winners, who received prizes including 2,000, one years subscription to all ALM brands and an invitation to pitch their idea at a roundtable of managing partners and GCs, were: Law and business undergraduates Christelle Kazumba and Ahamefula Chigazu Kamalu's 'Reaching Out' project, which aims to make vacation schemes, placements and training contracts more accessible to students from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds. Christelle and Ahamefula commented: We are very grateful for this wonderful opportunity to present our pitch to the judges and we also feel proud of ourselves for going all the way to London to pitch an idea that were very passionate about - which was ensuring that law students are given the university experience that they rightfully deserve and nothing less. A new app - 'Aspire Legal' - targeted at 15-18-year-olds from underprivileged backgrounds to engage their interest in law and highlight the skills required to pursue a legal career. The app is the brainchild of a team of trainees from Howard Kennedy - Charlotte Colthurst, Charlotte Towerton, Josh Page, Owen Griffiths and Jessica Rush. The Howard Kennedy team said: "We thoroughly enjoyed coming up with an idea to foster greater diversity and inclusion in the legal sector hopefully the industry will listen and adopt practices that will engage a wider demographic of teenagers and encourage those who believe a legal career is out of their reach, that it is in fact an achievable goal." Story continues An industry-wide outreach programme devised by Coventry University law students Joy Charles-Nwufoh and Rheanne Williams, which aims to prepare and educate students from low socioeconomic and ethnic minority backgrounds on the realities of the legal profession. Joy and Rheanne commented: "As black and ethnic minority women, it was inspiring to see first-hand the effort being made to improve diversity and inclusivity in the legal profession. It has offered a sense of relief that the profession is trying to adopt a more modern culture." LegalWeek CONNECT, now in its second year, gathers in-house counsel and law firm partners to discuss issues such as collaboration, diversity and talent. This year's event was chaired by Crown Estate GC Rob Booth and Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner co-chair Lisa Mayhew, and featured a series of set-piece debates on issues such as whether law firms which fail to improve diversity will lose out on work from clients. Last year's first-ever LegalTalent competition saw Nottingham University law student Queenie Djan and Leigh Day events manager Yolanda Kibuukamusoke take the honours for their Lawyer Like Me scheme, which proposed linking law firms with secondary schools for moots focused on minority students. Here are the companies the Yahoo Finance team is watching for you today. General Mills reported its earnings on Wednesday, and they were a mixed bag. The food-maker came in stronger than expected on earnings for the last quarter but fell short on revenue by about 2%. The CEO says its still on track to deliver on full-year targets. Were also seeing growing fears of a global slowdown from FedEx, which is slashing its 2019 forecast. The CFO says all indicators show an ongoing deceleration in global trade into next year. Also, the company says politics and trade policy are to blame. FedEx says the U.S. economy remains solid, though. A deal is in the works for pharma giant Bristol-Myers Squibb. The company says Japanese drug maker Taisho Pharmaceuticals received a $1.6 billion offer to sell its French over-the-counter drug business. It's structured as a "put," and Bristol-Myers Squibb hasn't said yet whether it plans to move forward. GE is reportedly looking to take its health care unit public. Bloomberg says the company has now confidentially filed an IPO of the division, which makes MRI machines and other equipment. GE Healthcare had more than $19 billion of sales last year. Its one of the bright spots for GE, which was just crowned Yahoo Finance's worst company of 2018. There's a new manager at publicly traded Manchester United. Former player Ole Gunnar Solskjaer will replace ousted manager Jose Mourinho on an interim basis. Solskjaer he's thrilled to be coming back to the team. Fowl play Urgent action must be taken to stop encroachment at Jagdishpur Lake Berlin (AFP) - Worker-starved Germany plans to ease immigration rules to attract foreign jobseekers and replenish its fast ageing workforce, despite mounting public resistance against new arrivals. Germany's first ever immigration law, to be agreed by Chancellor Angela Merkel's cabinet on Wednesday, is eagerly anticipated by industries. But the law, which will have to be put to parliament, risks opening new fault lines in a country already deeply split over a record influx of more than a million mostly Muslim refugees and migrants since 2015. The German Trade Union Confederation has also warned that the eased access could lead to salary dumping and exploitation of foreign workers. Under the planned relaxed rules, jobseekers from outside the EU -- including, for example, cooks, metallurgy workers or IT technicians -- would be allowed to come to Germany for six months to try and find employment, provided they speak German and can financially support themselves. More controversial has been a plan to allow migrants already in Germany who are awaiting decisions on their asylum applications to stay if they are gainfully employed and can show they have joined the fabric of German society. Following an outcry from the more conservative wing of Merkel's CDU party, it was unclear whether ministers would water down elements of the draft proposal, especially on the issue of employment for rejected asylum seekers. Julia Kloeckner, a heavyweight in the CDU party, has warned amid a heated debate that this part of the package could create "a wrong incentive" for more people to try to get to Germany. - 'Pragmatic solution' - German industry and employment leaders however wrote in a letter to Interior Minister Horst Seehofer that "attempts to essentially water down the planned rules in the draft law endanger the aim of a targeted and necessary migration of workers". Some 60 percent of companies see a worker shortage as a risk for the development of their businesses, according to the letter, which added that the number of unfilled apprenticeship posts surpasses the 33,000 applications that are still being processed. Story continues Immigration has become a hot potato issue in recent years over the record influx of migrants, many fleeing war in Iraq or Syria. Railing against the newcomers, the far-right AfD has become Germany's biggest opposition party. But Germany is also anxious to not leave thousands of migrants -- who may spend years waiting on a final decision on their asylum claims or deportation -- idle and susceptible to taking on jobs in the black market. The government ministers had stressed that the new immigration rules are not designed to allow failed asylum applicants to win residency in Germany by switching over to become employment migrants. Rather the new rules are aimed at providing a "pragmatic solution" for migrants who, for instance, have been in Germany for a protracted period because they cannot be deported if they face the risk of torture in their country of origin. With unemployment at a record low since Germany's 1990 reunification, companies in Europe's biggest economy have been complaining that a chronic shortage in workers is threatening growth. In the areas of mathematics, computing, natural sciences and technology, a record 338,200 jobs went unfilled in September, according to data from the Cologne-based German Economic Institute. Economy Minister Peter Altmaier had said the new rules will especially help Germany's small-and-medium sized companies, "which in the past have suffered as they are in competition with big companies that have poached the well-trained people". Berlin (AFP) - After more than 150 years, Germany's last black coal mine will close in the Ruhr region, posing a gigantic geological and environmental challenge to the former industrial heartland. - How to close a mine - The Prosper-Haniel mine's galleries were painstakingly excavated over decades by workers with pickaxes and later pneumatic drills. Now they have been sealed off by enormous stretches of concrete. Mining company RAG, in charge of clean-up at the site, has nearly finished removing tonnes of steel, equipment and cables from the tunnels. The final concrete blocks remain to be placed for Prosper-Haniel to fall silent once and for all. Within around 10 years, the galleries more than 600 metres below the earth will fill up at least partially with groundwater. RAG will drain and pump this water as part of its "eternal task" as the owner. "If this system of 'eternal tasks' did not exist, 80 to 100 years from now the water would rise and two-thirds of the Ruhr region would be flooded," the professor and hydraulic engineer in charge of the project, Andre Niemann, told AFP. - Environmental risks - The water found in mines is particularly acidic after trickling through a kilometre of underground sediment, and contains more salt than seawater. If it reaches the water table just below the surface, it could contaminate drinking water resources in the region. Hence the requirement for RAG to constantly pump it away -- as well as treating it before it can be diverted into a river like the Rhine. Meanwhile, the tunnel floors in the mine contain so-called polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), chemicals used for mining production. "There is a study to determine the concentration (of PCBs) and how dangerous it is," Niemann said. "A plant for treating it has already been set up," he added. - A new chapter? - "As long as the water is regularly pumped out, there's no risk of subsidence or flooding" in areas above the pit, Niemann said. Story continues And so-called "firedamp" methane explosions are unlikely as long as the galleries are sealed away from the open air. "The gigantic concrete blocks we poured to close the tunnels are designed for this, so even if there is an explosion they won't budge," the engineer said. Some coal still squirreled away will be burned to heat the homes of people in the region, while the naturally warm mine water will flow through the underfloor heating of houses in the area. Part of the Prosper-Haniel site will be covered with grass and plants, turning it into a park alongside tourist landmarks and museums aimed at keeping the memory of mining culture alive. A loyal service dog named Griffin has received an honorary diploma for the steadfast commitment he gave his owner while she earned her masters degree. Clarkson University in upstate New York honored the 4-year-old golden retriever on Saturday after his owner, Brittany Hawley, graduated with a degree in occupational therapy. Hawley said she pushed for Griffin to graduate "from Day One." (Photo: ASSOCIATED PRESS) The pair joined forces in 2016 after Hawley, who uses a wheelchair and has chronic pain, applied for a service dog through paws4prisons, a program where inmates train animals. Griffin accompanied her to lectures and internships and was always there to render assistance. I pushed for him to graduate from Day One, Hawley said. He did everything I did. The universitys board of trustees lauded Griffin for his extraordinary effort ... and diligent dedication to the well-being and student success of Hawley, The Associated Press reported. Hawley said she can't wait to see what adventures lie ahead. (Photo: ASSOCIATED PRESS) In a Facebook post, Hawley expressed her gratitude to Griffin, adding that she was excited for their future adventures: Also on HuffPost Love HuffPost? Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today. The Edmonton International airport has brought in dogs to help calm the nerves of anxious fliers. This article originally appeared on HuffPost. President Donald Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act a year ago this week. It includes an incentive for workers to take contractor jobs. (Photo: Chip Somodevilla via Getty Images) The GOP tax law passed last year could hasten a workplace trend away from direct employment and toward the use of independent contractors, an arrangement that may save businesses money but would shortchange everyday workers in unseen ways. Thats the takeaway from a new paper by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive think tank thats been critical of the Republican tax overhaul. Researchers there say the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which President Donald Trump signed a year ago this week, gives workers an incentive to take contractor jobs that forgo basic labor protections and drive down wages in blue-collar fields like trucking and janitorial services. The White House has argued that by cutting corporate taxes and making it easier for firms to write off expenses, the law encourages companies to make capital investments that will eventually boost wages. White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett has said it will take three to five years for workers to see the full benefit, which he controversially claimed could amount to a $4,000-per-worker raise. But some workers might ultimately be hurt by the laws tax break on whats known as pass-through income income that tax filers report on their individual returns after they earn it through a partnership, S-corp or sole proprietorship. Such money used to be taxed at the same rate as normal wages earned through a traditional job. But now independent contractors who are technically business owners can deduct 20 percent of qualifying pass-through income, thereby cutting their effective tax rate. Those savings could make it easier for companies to sell workers on independent contractor arrangements, a possibility that concerns labor and tax experts. As far as we can tell, lawmakers didnt even consider this outcome, said Chye-Ching Huang, director of federal fiscal policy at the CBPP, noting that no public hearings were held on the tax bill before it was passed. Its hard to get a tangible grip on it. But the fact that weve seen this trend [of using independent contractors] already emerging ... it does make us think its a reasonable concern that this will add fuel to a long-burning fire. Story continues How much the contract workforce has grown in recent years is a matter of hot debate. Some experts have found that it has spread dramatically, while others believe the growth has been negligible. What most experts agree on, however, is that contract work comes with plenty of drawbacks that workers may not recognize. HUFFPOST READERS: Did you wind up as a contractor after having been an employee for most of your career? Tell us about it. According to the CBPP, more companies may be tempted to use the contractor model going forward and more workers may be willing to accept the arrangement since the tax break would allow companies to pay workers less while assuring them the same after-tax income. The paper did not estimate how many workers might move from being employees to contractors, since the tax law is still young and any projection would be speculation. So if a workers after-tax income is the same, then whats the big deal if their employee status changes? Independent contractors, such as Uber drivers, technically work for themselves, not the companies that benefit from their labor. That means they dont receive a lot of the basic workplace protections other workers take for granted, like a minimum wage, time-and-a-half for overtime or the clear right to join a union. They are less likely to receive standard benefits like health care coverage or a 401(k) plan. And unlike traditional employees, contractors are responsible for paying both sides of the payroll tax for Social Security and Medicare the employers end as well as the workers. They often bear other costs as well, as in the case of Uber drivers, who have to supply their own car and pay for their own gas. Many workers dont understand all the downsides when they agree to work under contract. But there are plenty of benefits to the arrangement for employers. By keeping formal employees off their books, they not only avoid payroll taxes but can reduce costs related to unemployment insurance and workers compensation. Contractor agreements can also help companies looking to avoid union organizing drives, since federal collective bargaining law doesnt cover independent contractors. Those advantages for corporations explain why many have chosen to use contractors instead of traditional workers. The author and academic David Weil, a labor official in the Barack Obama administration, coined a term for the phenomenon: the fissured workplace. Weil and other researchers have documented how the use of contractors to save costs has blurred the lines of corporate accountability, often leading to lower wages and higher injury rates for rank-and-file workers. Modern home delivery offers a perfect example of the trend. As a 2014 HuffPost story detailed, many of the drivers delivering Amazon packages work as independent contractors tied to little-known courier companies like Lasership. Many of the workers have to buy their own vans in order to do their deliveries, and they can lose their routes or see their take-home pay cut at the whims of the company. Its like they want us to be employees, but they dont want to pay for it, one driver explained. Dean Baker, an economist at the left-leaning Center for Economic and Policy Research, said he agrees with the CBPP hypothesis that the enticements baked into the tax law will probably lead to more contracting. Absolutely, you give incentives for people to be independent contractors rather than employees, you will see more people be independent contractors, Baker said via email. I dont have a good sense of how many will go this route, but it is classic bad tax policy. You dont want to encourage people to change their employment relationship just to save on their taxes. The benefits of the tax law probably arent great enough to urge workers to become independent contractors, but it might make them more willing to tolerate its drawbacks, said Francoise Carre, research director at the Center for Social Policy at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Carre has studied the use of independent contractors and believes employers already have plenty of reasons to use the model. The new pass-through provision would only be one of the factors, Carre said, and perhaps a limited one. The new tax law includes a number of guardrails aimed at preventing workers from becoming independent contractors just to nab the new savings on pass-through income. The IRS proposed regulations in August designed to stop companies from classifying former employees as contractors, for example. Nicole Hager, a spokeswoman for the Senate Finance Committee, which drafted much of the law, said lawmakers did anticipate the potential for abuse. Tax reform included safeguards to prevent people from gaming the system by re-characterizing personal income as business income in order to use the pass-through deduction, Hager said. Brendan Duke, a tax analyst at the CBPP, said the guardrails probably wont be enough to prevent former employees from becoming contractors when workers move to different jobs over time. Another rule forbids people in certain industries from claiming the deduction if they make over $157,500. But most workers earn well below that so wouldnt be affected by the regulation. Duke said in most cases all the old incentives to using contractors still apply. Now its just an easier case for employers to make to workers. They can say, Heres this independent contractor job. It comes without health care, sure. But look, theres this tax deduction. Related... Republicans Are Seeing Weak Returns On The Tax Law How Republicans Failed To Sell Their Tax Law Love HuffPost? Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today. This article originally appeared on HuffPost. Billionaire hedge fund managers such as Steve Cohen and Stan Druckenmiller can generate millions or even billions of dollars every year by pinning down high-potential small-cap stocks and pouring cash into these candidates. Small-cap stocks are overlooked by most investors, brokerage houses, and financial services hubs, while the unlimited research abilities of the big players within the hedge fund industry can easily identify the undervalued and high-potential stocks that reside the ignored corners of equity markets. There are numerous small-cap stocks that have turned out to be great winners, which is one of the main reasons the Insider Monkey team pays close attention to the hedge fund activity in relation to these stocks. Is Novo Nordisk A/S (NYSE:NVO) a buy right now? Hedge funds are taking a bearish view. The number of long hedge fund bets were cut by 1 lately. Our calculations also showed that nvo isn't among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds. So, why do we pay attention to hedge fund sentiment before making any investment decisions? Our research has shown that hedge funds' small-cap stock picks managed to beat the market by double digits annually between 1999 and 2016, but the margin of outperformance has been declining in recent years. Nevertheless, we were still able to identify in advance a select group of hedge fund holdings that outperformed the market by 18 percentage points since May 2014 through December 3, 2018 (see the details here). We were also able to identify in advance a select group of hedge fund holdings that underperformed the market by 10 percentage points annually between 2006 and 2017. Interestingly the margin of underperformance of these stocks has been increasing in recent years. Investors who are long the market and short these stocks would have returned more than 27% annually between 2015 and 2017. We have been tracking and sharing the list of these stocks since February 2017 in our quarterly newsletter. Even if you aren't comfortable with shorting stocks, you should at least avoid initiating long positions in our short portfolio. Story continues Tom Gayner We're going to view the key hedge fund action surrounding Novo Nordisk A/S (NYSE:NVO). How are hedge funds trading Novo Nordisk A/S (NYSE:NVO)? At Q3's end, a total of 17 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock, a change of -6% from one quarter earlier. By comparison, 18 hedge funds held shares or bullish call options in NVO heading into this year. So, let's review which hedge funds were among the top holders of the stock and which hedge funds were making big moves. No of Hedge Funds with NVO Positions Among these funds, Renaissance Technologies held the most valuable stake in Novo Nordisk A/S (NYSE:NVO), which was worth $927.1 million at the end of the third quarter. On the second spot was Fisher Asset Management which amassed $650.4 million worth of shares. Moreover, Arrowstreet Capital, Markel Gayner Asset Management, and Millennium Management were also bullish on Novo Nordisk A/S (NYSE:NVO), allocating a large percentage of their portfolios to this stock. Since Novo Nordisk A/S (NYSE:NVO) has faced a decline in interest from the smart money, it's safe to say that there exists a select few money managers that elected to cut their entire stakes last quarter. At the top of the heap, Hal Mintz's Sabby Capital dropped the largest position of the 700 funds followed by Insider Monkey, worth an estimated $19.8 million in call options. Hal Mintz's fund, Sabby Capital, also dumped its call options, about $18.3 million worth. These moves are important to note, as aggregate hedge fund interest fell by 1 funds last quarter. Let's now review hedge fund activity in other stocks - not necessarily in the same industry as Novo Nordisk A/S (NYSE:NVO) but similarly valued. These stocks are United Technologies Corporation (NYSE:UTX), Sanofi (NYSE:SNY), The Toronto-Dominion Bank (NYSE:TD), and Accenture Plc (NYSE:ACN). This group of stocks' market values are closest to NVO's market value. [table] Ticker, No of HFs with positions, Total Value of HF Positions (x1000), Change in HF Position UTX,59,7281525,7 SNY,24,821542,1 TD,20,1423010,3 ACN,34,1002113,11 Average,34.25,2632048,5.5 [/table] View table here if you experience formatting issues. As you can see these stocks had an average of 34.25 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $2.63 billion. That figure was $1.85 billion in NVO's case. United Technologies Corporation (NYSE:UTX) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand The Toronto-Dominion Bank (NYSE:TD) is the least popular one with only 20 bullish hedge fund positions. Compared to these stocks Novo Nordisk A/S (NYSE:NVO) is even less popular than TD. Considering that hedge funds aren't fond of this stock in relation to other companies analyzed in this article, it may be a good idea to analyze it in detail and understand why the smart money isn't behind this stock. This isn't necessarily bad news. Although it is possible that hedge funds may think the stock is overpriced and view the stock as a short candidate, they may not be very familiar with the bullish thesis. In either case more research is warranted. Disclosure: None. This article was originally published at Insider Monkey. Related Content (This version of the December 18th story corrects chairman's last name to Hu in 11th, 14th and last paragraphs) By Sijia Jiang HONG KONG (Reuters) - Huawei Technologies [HWT.UL] on Tuesday said it would spend $2 billion over the next 5 years to focus on cybersecurity by adding more people and upgrading lab facilities, as it battles global concerns about risks associated with its network gear. The typically secretive Chinese technology giant made the comments at one of its most indepth press conferences at its Dongguan offices, after welcoming about two dozen international journalists into its new campus in the southern Chinese city. Huawei has been in the news these past weeks for the arrest of its chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou - also the daughter of its billionaire founder Ren Zhengfei - in Canada at the request of the United States. This has exacerbated the woes of the Chinese firm, which has already been virtually locked out of the U.S. market and has been prohibited by Australia and New Zealand from building 5G networks amid concerns its gear could facilitate Chinese spying. "Locking out competitors from a playing field cannot make yourself better. We think any concerns or allegations on security at Huawei should be based on factual evidence," its rotating chairman Ken Hu said. "Without factual evidence we don't accept and we oppose those allegations." Huawei has been communicating with governments worldwide regarding the independence of its operation, he said. He added that Japan and France had not formally banned its telecom equipment. Recent media reports have indicated moves by these governments to shun the company's equipment. Sources have told Reuters that Japan planned to ban government purchases of equipment. Other media reported that the country's three top operators planned not to use current equipment and upcoming 5G gear from Huawei, and that France was considering adding items to its "high-alert" list that tacitly targets Huawei. Huawei has repeatedly said Beijing has no influence over it. At the tour of Huawei's Shenzhen headquarters on Tuesday, journalists glimpsed some of Huawei's most advanced R&D labs housed in a three-storey building with a white facade and four columns, referred to by insiders as the "White House". Hu said Huawei had secured more than 25 commercial contracts for 5G, slightly above the 22 the Chinese technology giant had announced in November. The company has shipped more than 10,000 base stations for the fifth generation of mobile communications, he said, adding that Huawei expects revenue to exceed $100 billion this year - up 8.7 percent from last year. Huawei is the world's largest supplier of telecommunications network equipment and second-biggest maker of smartphones and unlike other big Chinese technology firms, derives half its revenue from overseas. "A JUST CONCLUSION" Hu said on Tuesday Huawei was looking forward to "a just conclusion" in the case of Meng, who was arrested in Vancouver on Dec. 1 after U.S. officials alleged Huawei was trying to use banks to evade sanctions against Iran and move money out. She is awaiting possible extradition to the United States in a case that has roiled global markets amid concerns it would exacerbate tensions between the United States and China, which are already strained over trade matters. Meng, the 46-year-old daughter of Ren, has said in a sworn affidavit she is innocent and will contest the allegations against her at trial if she is surrendered to the United States. Hu said Meng's arrest has had no impact on the travel of the company's senior executives. (Reporting by Sijia Jiang and Anne Marie Roantree, writing by Sayantani Ghosh; Editing by Himani Sarkar) By Gergely Szakacs and Krisztina Than BUDAPEST (Reuters) - Week-long protests in Budapest have forged fragmented opposition parties into a rare coalition against Viktor Orban, drawing young Hungarians into the streets to demonstrate against what they see as his increasingly authoritarian rule. Passage of two laws last week backed by the prime minister's Fidesz party angered a variety of domestic voter groups, galvanizing the weak and divided opposition to act with a unity rarely seen in his eight years in power. The protests in Budapest raised the question of whether such fledgling cooperation can last long enough to put down roots and offer viable opposition to a charismatic politician normally adept at side-lining dissent. While no substantial shift in Hungary's domestic balance of power appears on the cards for now, there is a sense among some Hungarians that Orban overplayed his hand by pushing through the two laws that drew such a concerted opposition response. One law, dubbed the "slave law", allows employers to ask staff to work up to 400 hours per year of overtime. Another would set up new courts controlled by the justice minister, which critics say could lead to political meddling. Denes Hubicsak, an engineer, 24, joined almost all the protests since Dec. 12 and came to the state television building on Monday night, ignoring freezing cold, to demand independent public media and courts. "I'm here because I want to live here in 10 years' time as well," he said. "Many people here are protesting because of the slave law now, but they sometimes forget the other one: the law about administrative courts." Hubicsak said he did not have high hopes of the EU reining in what critics see as the increasingly authoritarian policies of Orban, as this has not happened in the past eight years. "I cannot see the pressure from the EU or from the European People's party that could influence them a little, or make Orban or Fidesz just think twice," he said. The demonstrations, which peaked at around 10,000 on Sunday, pose no immediate threat to Orban as Fidesz enjoys strong voter support, ever since his third straight election win in April. But if the protests persist and leftist parties and the nationalist Jobbik party can turn the latest cooperation into a lasting campaign, such concerted activism might erode Fidesz' widely expected win at European Parliament and municipal elections next year, some analysts said. There were many students among the protesters on Sunday, and some also joined on Monday night. This is the so-called Generation Y -- Hungarians in their 20s and 30s -- for whom Orban and his policies are not an appealing choice. They are very unhappy about the government's education policies which they say fail to prepare them for life in the 21st century by too rigidly focusing on rote-learning. "What they do in higher education is really bad," said Dora, 16, who did not want to give her full name. "I am worried I won't have a good college to go to in Hungary and I don't want to go abroad ...I also oppose the labor law." RARE UNITY Orban has clashed with Brussels over his policies to curb the media and courts, has tweaked the election system to favor Fidesz and put loyalists at the head of several institutions. Orban has projected himself as defending Hungary's Christian culture against Muslim migration into Europe, an image which resonates with millions of voters, especially in rural areas. Fidesz had 38 percent support in a November poll by pro-government think-tank Nezopont, while all the opposition parties had about 25 percent combined. Csaba Toth, director of liberal think tank Republikon, said the opposition was now working in rare unity and could build on this next year when Hungary holds European and municipal polls. "But if they are not able to come up with something forward-looking in the next few days before Christmas, the whole (protest sentiment) could collapse," he said. A government spokesman dismissed the protests as a desperate attempt by a weak opposition and foreign-paid activists. "Citizens have the right to protest as long as they don't break the law. But beware when a small minority of foreign-trained activists, representatives of losing political parties and, yes, Soros network putschists emerge hell-bent on toppling a popular, democratically elected government," Zoltan Kovacs wrote in a blog on Monday. A spokesperson for George Soros' Open Society Foundations said on Monday that Soros had not stoked the protests. (Writing by Krisztina Than, Editing by William Maclean) Google's annual list of the most popular searches in 2018 show many people were trying to stay up-to-date and learn about the major weather disasters of the year. The 2018 Atlantic hurricane season featured two of the most destructive storms in United States history, Hurricane Florence and Hurricane Michael, which were also two of the most searched weather events in 2018. "Looking back on the 2018 hurricane season, there were 15 named tropical storms, eight of which became hurricanes. Of those eight hurricanes, two were major hurricanes. 2018 will go down as a year more active than normal," AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist and Hurricane Expert Dan Kottlowski said. Google released a video accompanying the list saying, "In a year of ups and downs, the world searched for "good" more than ever before" with clips of some of the most-searched content. The two hurricanes that produced the most damage and loss of life this year did so with different characteristics. Florence caused its death and destruction from flooding rainfall over a large area of southeastern South Carolina and southern North Carolina. Michael's damage will primarily be attributed to its powerful winds carving a 20-mile-wide area path. Michael still produced damaging hurricane-force winds over 150 miles inland from where it made landfall. Hurricane Florence Florence batters Carolinas with heavy rain, storm surge and strong wind AP Photo/Garret Fischer First, at vero eos et accusamus et iusto odio dignissimos ducimus qui blanditiis praesentium et accusamus et iusto odio dignissimos ducimus qui voluptatum. 1/12 (AP Photo/Steve Helber) A sailboat is shoved up against a house and a collapsed garage Saturday, Sept. 15, 2018, after heavy wind and rain from Florence blew through New Bern, North Carolina. (Twitter photo/@astro_ricky) Astronaut Ricky Arnold captured the view from space as Florence made landfall on Friday, Sept. 14, 2018. (AccuWeather Photo/Jonathan Petramala) Story continues AccuWeather Weather News Reporter Jonathan Petramala captures the lower level of a parking structure in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. "Despite this, the city has fared #Florence well," he tweeted on Saturday, Sept. 15, 2018. (Twitter Photo/@HSVUtilities) As of Saturday morning, Sept. 15, 2018, 1 million people in the Carolinas were without power. Florence made repair efforts tricky on Friday. (Twitter Photo/@HSVUtilities) As of Saturday morning, Sept. 15, 2018, 1 million people in the Carolinas were without power. Florence made repair efforts tricky on Friday. (AP Photo/Allen G. Breed) The mast of a sunken boat sits at a dock at the Grand View Marina in New Bern, North Carolina, on Friday, Sept. 14, 2018. Winds and rains from Hurricane Florence caused the Neuse River to swell, swamping the coastal city. (AP Photo/Chuck Burton) A man crosses a flooded street in downtown Wilmington, North Carolina, after Hurricane Florence made landfall Friday, Sept. 14, 2018. (AP Photo/Chris Seward) People survey the damage caused by Hurricane Florence on Front Street in downtown New Bern, North Carolina, on Friday, Sept. 14, 2018. (AP Photo/Chuck Burton) Ethan Hall, right, Michael Jenkins, center, and Nash Fralick, left, examine damage to Tidewater Brewing Co. in Wilmington, North Carolina, after Hurricane Florence made landfall Friday, Sept. 14, 2018. (AP Photo/Chuck Burton) A fallen tree is shown after it crashed through the home where a woman and her baby were killed in Wilmington, North Carolina, after Hurricane Florence made landfall Friday, Sept. 14, 2018. (AP Photo/Chuck Burton) People drive an ATV through floodwaters on the riverwalk in Wilmington, North Carolina, after Hurricane Florence made landfall Friday, Sept. 14, 2018. (Image/Rebecca Wells Hooper) Extreme storm surge in Outer Banks, North Carolina, during Hurricane Florence. (AP Photo/Chuck Burton) A tree uprooted by strong winds lies across a street in Wilmington, North Carolina, after Hurricane Florence made landfall Friday, Sept. 14, 2018. (AP Photo/Chris Seward) Debris from Hurricane Florence covers a street in downtown New Bern, North Carolina, on Friday, Sept. 14, 2018. (Image via Christa Gabrielle) A tree twisted and avoided causing more damage to a house in Wilmington, North Carolina. (Image via Shane Cannon) Extreme flooding in Chocowinity, North Carolina, at 8:30 a.m. EDT on Sept. 14, 2018. (Image via Shane Cannon) Flooding in Chocowinity, North Carolina, at 8:30 a.m. EDT on Sept. 14, 2018. (Image via Shane Cannon) Flooding at Extreme Action Park on Whichards Beach Rd. in Chocowinity, North Carolina, at 8:30 a.m. EDT on Sept. 14, 2018. (AP Photo/Allen G. Breed) Kevin Knox loads his cat, Sasha, into a boat that came to rescue his family from its flooded neighborhood as a result of Florence, now a tropical storm, in New Bern, North Carolina, on Saturday, Sept. 15, 2018. (Twitter photo/@DukeEnergy) Duke Energy said on Saturday, Sept.15, that it could take weeks before power is restored to some of the hardest-hit areas in the Carolinas. (Twitter photo/@CityofNewBern) New Bern, North Carolina, a coastal town, has been completely overtaken by flooding from Florence, as seen in this Sept. 15 photo. (Twitter photo/@CityofNewBern) Flooding inundated the coastal town of New Bern, North Carolina, after Florence moved through the region, as seen in this Sept. 15 photo. (Twitter photo/@CityofNewBern) Known for whimsical statues throughout the town, New Bern, North Carolina, was hit hard by Florence, uprooting some of them and carrying them through floodwaters. (AP Photo/Chris Seward) Members of a swift water rescue team check a submerged vehicle stranded by floodwaters caused by Tropical Storm Florence in New Bern, North Carolina, on Saturday, Sept. 15, 2018. (AP Photo/Steve Helber) A tour boat is stacked up next to a railroad bridge as a result from Florence in New Bern, North Carolina, Saturday, Sept. 15, 2018. (Twitter photo/@Sheriff_EWright) Cumberland County, North Carolina, Sheriff Ennis Wright captured this image of the Cape Fear River on Sept. 15 as it continues to rise. It is expected to crest early next week. (Image via Ea Ruth) Flooding in Carolina Beach, North Carolina, during Hurricane Florence. (Image via Ea Ruth) Streets turned into rivers in Carolina Beach, North Carolina. (Image via Ea Ruth) A beach neighborhood flooded in Carolina Beach, North Carolina. (Image via Ea Ruth) Water almost reaching houses in Carolina Beach, North Carolina. (AP Photo/David Goldman) Members of the Nebraska Task Force 1 urban search and rescue team helps load an elderly resident onto a bus as they evacuate an assisted living facility to a church as a precaution against potential flooding the city could see from Florence in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Saturday, Sept. 15, 2018. (AP Photo/David Goldman) Members of the North Carolina National Guard load up after stacking sand bags under a highway overpass near the Lumber River, which is expected to flood from Hurricane Florence's rain in Lumberton, North Carolina, Friday, Sept. 14, 2018. (AP Photo/Tom Copeland) A member of the U.S. Coast Guard walks down Mill Creek Road checking houses after Florence hit Newport, North Carolina, Saturday, Sept. 15, 2018. (AP Photo/Steve Helber) Chicken farm buildings are inundated with floodwater from Hurricane Florence near Trenton, N.C., Sunday, Sept. 16, 2018. (AP Photo/Steve Helber) (AP Photo/Steve Helber) Hog farm buildings are inundated with floodwater from Hurricane Florence near Trenton, N.C., Sunday, Sept. 16, 2018. Hurricane Florence made the number two spot on Google's most popular news search of 2018. "Florence made landfall as a Category 1 hurricane near Wrightsville Beach on the morning of Sept. 14 with maximum sustained winds of 90 mph," Kottlowski said. Florence's slow-moving nature caused it to dump a historic amount of water on the Carolinas, flooding much of the region for weeks. "The very slow movement of Florence brought phenomenal rainfall over South Carolina and North Carolina, breaking statewide rainfall records from a tropical cyclone for both North and South Carolina," Kottlowski said. Hurricane Michael Hurricane Michael devastation and aftermath AP Photo/Garret Fischer Other Galleries you might like... Astronauts emergency landing Central US severe storms and flooding Haiti earthquake First, at vero eos et accusamus et iusto odio dignissimos ducimus qui blanditiis praesentium et accusamus et iusto odio dignissimos ducimus qui voluptatum. 1/12 (REUTERS/Carlo Allegri) A bedroom of a destroyed house is pictured following Hurricane Michael in Mexico Beach, Florida, U.S., October 11, 2018. (REUTERS/Jonathan Bachman) People inspect a Waffle House damaged by Hurricane Michael in Callaway, Florida, U.S. October 11, 2018. Jonathan Bachman A McDonald's sign damaged by Hurricane Michael is pictured in Panama City Beach, Florida, U.S. October 10, 2018. REUTERS/Jonathan Bachman (Photo/ Brandon Clement) A fighter jet is seen upside down after Hurricane Michael. (REUTERS/Jonathan Bachman) An American flag flies amongst rubble left in the aftermath of Hurricane Michael in Mexico Beach, Florida, U.S. October 11, 2018. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert) People walk amidst destruction on the main street of Mexico Beach, Fla., in the aftermath of Hurricane Michael on Thursday, Oct. 11, 2018. (Photo/ Brandon Clement) Hurricane Michael caused extensive damage to homes and boats in Florida. (Photo/ Brandon Clement) (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert) A storm chaser climbs into his vehicle during the eye of Hurricane Michael to retrieve equipment after a hotel canopy collapsed in Panama City Beach, Fla., Wednesday, Oct. 10, 2018. (Photo/ Brandon Clement) Extensive damage of an RV lot can be seen from above after Hurricane Michael struck Florida. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert) Kaylee O'Brian weeps inside her home after several trees fell on it during Hurricane Michael in Panama City, Fla., Wednesday, Oct. 10, 2018. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert) A woman checks on her vehicle as Hurricane Michael passes through, after the hotel canopy had just collapsed, in Panama City Beach, Fla., Wednesday, Oct. 10, 2018. (Photo/ Brandon Clement) Hurricane Michael caused extensive damage to buildings and property. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert) Hotel employees look at a canopy that just collapsed, as Hurricane Michael passes through in Panama City Beach, Fla., Wednesday, Oct. 10, 2018. (Photo/ Brandon Clement) Catastophic destruction of homes can be seen from above after Hurricane Michael. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert) People cut away a tree that'll on a vehicle in the aftermath of Hurricane Michael in Panama City, Fla., Thursday, Oct. 11, 2018. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert) Hurricane Michael caused widespread damage across Florida, including these rail cars in Panama City Beach. (Photo/ Brandon Clement) Catastrophic damage can be seen above Mexico Beach, Florida, after Hurricane Michael. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert) Shredded trees, derailed train cars and a sunken trailer are seen in the aftermath of Hurricane Michael in Panama City, Fla., Wednesday, Oct. 10, 2018. (Photo/Tallahassee Police) A large tree brought down power lines in Tallahassee, Florida, on Wednesday. (Photo/ Brandon Clement) A bulldozer begins the massive cleanup effort after Hurricane Michael. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert) Firefighter Austin Schlarb performs a door to door search in the aftermath of Hurricane Michael in Mexico Beach, Fla., Thursday, Oct. 11, 2018. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert) Rescue personnel perform a search in the aftermath of Hurricane Michael in Mexico Beach, Fla., Thursday, Oct. 11, 2018. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert) A boat sits amidst debris in the aftermath of Hurricane Michael in Mexico Beach, Fla., Thursday, Oct. 11, 2018. Destruction is seen in the aftermath of Hurricane Michael in Mexico Beach, Fla., Thursday, Oct. 11, 2018. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert) Colin Hunt/Handout via REUTERS Damaged and destroyed buildings are seen in an aerial photograph, taken during a post-Hurricane Michael flight by a U.S. Coast Guard MH-65 helicopter over Mexico Beach, Florida. (AP Photo/Chris O'Meara) Homes destroyed by Hurricane Michael are shown in this aerial photo Thursday, Oct. 11, 2018, in Mexico Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert) Rescue personnel search amidst debris in the aftermath of Hurricane Michael in Mexico Beach, Fla., Thursday, Oct. 11, 2018. (Photo/ International Space Station) The International Space Station captured this image of Hurricane Michael as it passed by overhead. (Photo/ International Space Station) Hurricane Michael was one of the most intense storms on record. (Photo/ International Space Station) Michael also had some of the highest winds on record. The ISS captured the eye as it orbited overhead. (Photo/ Walton County Sheriff Department) A sailboat is pummeled by Hurricane Michael at Pilcher Park. (AP Photo/Russ Bynum) Rex Buzzett, far left, his son Josh Buzzett and neighbor Hilda Duren stand outside the Buzzett's home, Thursday, Oct. 11, 2018, that was gutted by a storm surge in Port St. Joe, Fla. (Photo/AccuWeather) (Photo/AccuWeather) (Photo/AccuWeather) (Photo/AccuWeather) (Photo/AccuWeather) Other Galleries you might like... Astronauts emergency landing Central US severe storms and flooding Haiti earthquake Hurricane Michael made the number six spot on Google's most popular news search of 2018. Michael became the strongest hurricane to ever strike the Florida Panhandle and the third-most intense hurricane to ever make landfall in the U.S. with a minimum central pressure of 27.13 inches of mercury. It was also the strongest land-falling hurricane to hit the U.S. in October since 1954. "Hurricane Michael made landfall as a major and very strong Category 4 hurricane over Mexico Beach, Florida, near Panama City on the early afternoon of Oct. 10 with maximum sustained winds of 155 mph," Kottlowski said. Kottlowski said Michael was the strongest hurricane to hit the U.S. since Andrew in 1992. Mariusz Sz (centre) locked up his wife and abused her for years (CEN) A Polish husband has been jailed for 25 years after he imprisoned his wife in a dark cellar and sexually abused her. The victim was raped by her husband, known only as Mariusz Sz, over a period of four years. Police say the husbands brothers and friends also took part in the abuse. Mariusz Sz abused his wife in the small village of Parszczyce in Pomeranian Voivodeship, northern Poland, between 2006 and 2010 two years of which she was kept locked in their cellar. The victim was imprisoned in a cold, dark cellar (CEN) The victim, who has not been named, was beaten, starved and repeatedly raped by her husband and allegedly by his two brothers and a friend. In the initial sentencing in June 2017, judge Marta Urbanska emphasised that the victim was imprisoned in a cold, dark cellar, in which she was deprived the possibility of taking care of her personal hygiene and the possibility of dealing with her physiological needs under dignified conditions. Judge Urbanska added: She was starved, forced to eat meals with her bound hands in a kneeling position. Meals were prepared in a manner that denied her dignity. MORE: Brexit: Opposition parties table vote of no confidence in the Government in push for second referendum MORE: You are not invincible: Police officer writes heartfelt Facebook letter to young speeding driver Mariusz Szs two brothers Andrzej and Marian Sz. and their friend Tadeusz B have now been charged with raping the victim whilst she was imprisoned and face a possible 15-year prison sentence if convicted. All three have pleaded not guilty. Reports suggest Mariusz Sz had rented his wife out for 4.20, putting a bag over her head and letting paying men rape her. Mariusz Szs two brothers and their friend have now been charged with raping the victim whilst she was imprisoned (CEN) It is not known how many men raped the victim and police are still investigating. The victim eventually managed to escape the cellar and call her mother as she was fearful for the safety of her two daughters. Mariusz Sz has been dubbed the Polish Fritzl in local media (CEN) The victim eventually managed to escape the cellar and call her mother (CEN) One of the children, who is four years old, had reportedly been sexually abused. Local media state she reported the case to the police but she was dismissed three times before an investigation was eventually opened. Heres a look at todays top stories Here is a compilation of some of the top stories from the Post that you might have missed on Wednesday. An Indian journalist has been jailed for a year after he criticised Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Facebook, in the latest example of what critics claim is a clampdown on free speech. Kishorechandra Wangkhem was arrested last month in the remote northeastern state of Manipur under a draconian law that allows authorities to detain anyone for up to a year without trial. The 39-year-old television journalist is accused of posting an "inflammatory" social media video in November, in which he accused Modi and state chief minister Biren Singh's government of promoting rightwing Hindu ideology in the region. Local media said he called Singh a "puppet" of Modi and of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a hardline Hindu group and ideological mentor of Modi's ruling party. Authorities said the arrest was made to "prevent him from acting in any matter prejudicial to the security of the state". Police had initially detained him on charges of sedition but he secured bail from a local court, which castigated him for using indecent language. He was re-arrested days later under the stringent National Security Act before a government panel approved his year-long detention on Thursday. Wangkhem's family is expected to challenge the detention. Several Indian journalist unions have condemned his arrest and demanded his release. At least a dozen people have been arrested across the country this year over similar social media posts against Modi. Last month a teacher was arrested in the neighbouring state of Assam after he compared Modi to a "dog". Divya Spandana, social media chief for the main Congress opposition party, was charged with sedition in September. She had tweeted a meme that showed an altered image of Modi's wax statue with a placard emblazoned with "thief". In July, Reporters Without Borders warned of deteriorating press freedom in the world's largest democracy and the targeting of critics of Modi's Hindu nationalist government. India ranked 138th in the World Press Freedom Index run by RSF, trailing countries like Zimbabwe and Afghanistan. Many journalists have faced increased harassment or even violence since Modi came to power in 2014. Weve lost count of how many times insiders have accumulated shares in a company that goes on to improve markedly. The flip side of that is that there are more than a few examples of insiders dumping stock prior to a period of weak performance. So before you buy or sell Love Group Global Ltd (ASX:LVE), you may well want to know whether insiders have been buying or selling. Do Insider Transactions Matter? Its quite normal to see company insiders, such as board members, trading in company stock, from time to time. However, such insiders must disclose their trading activities, and not trade on inside information. We dont think shareholders should simply follow insider transactions. But it is perfectly logical to keep tabs on what insiders are doing. For example, a Colombia University study found that insiders are more likely to engage in open market purchases of their own companys stock when the firm is about to reveal new agreements with customers and suppliers. See our latest analysis for Love Group Global Love Group Global Insider Transactions Over The Last Year While there werent any large insider transactions in the last twelve months, its still worth looking at the trading. Michael Ye purchased 2.00m shares over the year. The average price per share was AU$0.095. You can see a visual depiction of insider transactions over the last 12 months, below. If you click on the chart, you can see all the individual transactions, including the share price, individual, and the date! ASX:LVE Insider Trading December 18th 18 Love Group Global is not the only stock that insiders are buying. For those who like to find winning investments this free list of growing companies with recent insider purchasing, could be just the ticket. Insider Ownership Many investors like to check how much of a company is owned by insiders. We usually like to see fairly high levels of insider ownership. Love Group Global insiders own about AU$2.1m worth of shares (which is 51% of the company). I like to see this level of insider ownership, because it increases the chances that management are thinking about the best interests of shareholders. Story continues What Might The Insider Transactions At Love Group Global Tell Us? It is good to see recent insider purchase. And the longer term insider transactions also give us confidence. But on the other hand, the company made a loss last year, which makes us a little cautious. Along with the high insider ownership, this analysis suggests that insiders are quite bullish about Love Group Global. Nice! I like to dive deeper into how a company has performed in the past. You can find historic revenue and earnings in this detailed graph. If you would prefer to check out another company one with potentially superior financials then do not miss this free list of interesting companies, that have HIGH return on equity and low debt. 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. By Simon Jessop LONDON (Reuters) - Global investors managing $32 trillion in assets have called on governments to accelerate steps to combat climate change, as policymakers meet for talks at a United Nations conference in Poland. A total of 415 investors from across the world including UBS Asset Management and Aberdeen Standard Investments signed the 2018 Global Investor Statement to Governments on Climate Change demanding urgent action. "The global shift to clean energy is underway, but much more needs to be done by governments to accelerate the low carbon transition and to improve the resilience of our economy, society and the financial system to climate risks," the statement said. The intervention is the single largest on the topic to date, the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change said, as talks continue in the Polish city of Katowice to agree how to slow global warming to below 2 degrees Celsius. That goal was agreed at a 2015 meeting in Paris, but investors said national governments were being too slow in enacting the policies needed to help the world transition to a low-carbon economy. Failure to act could lead to permanent economic damage three or four times the scale of the impact of the financial crisis, British asset manager Schroders said. As well as ramping up the involvement of the private sector, governments needed to commit to improving climate-related financial reporting, a move that would help investors better assess the risk and allocate capital to the right companies. "The reality is that the long-term nature of the challenge has, in our view, met a zombie-like response by many," said Chris Newton, Executive Director Responsible Investment, IFM Investors. "This is a recipe for disaster as the impacts of climate change can be sudden, severe and catastrophic." Among specific policy requests, the group called for governments to phase out thermal coal, put a "meaningful" price on carbon emissions and gradually get rid of subsidies for fossil fuels. Under the presidency of Donald Trump, the U.S. government will pull out of the Paris deal and has looked to talk up the country's coal industry, policies Thomas DiNapoli of the New York State Common Retirement Fund called "misguided". "Global efforts to address the very real threat climate risk presents to the economy, financial markets and investment returns are ongoing... (we) remain committed to supporting the Paris Agreement's climate goals. "The transition to a low carbon economy presents numerous opportunities to create value and investors who ignore the changing world do so at their own peril," said DiNapoli, whose fund manages $207 billion in assets. (Reporting by Simon Jessop; Editing by Janet Lawrence) Marrakesh (Morocco) (AFP) - Islamists are suspected to have carried out the murder of two young Scandinavian women trekking in southern Morocco, one of whom was beheaded, a source close to the probe said Wednesday. "Radical Islam is not ruled out due to the profile of the suspect arrested and of the three men wanted" after the women's bodies were found Monday in the High Atlas Mountains, the source said, asking not to be named. The source told AFP that one of the women -- 24-year-old Louisa Vesterager Jespersen from Denmark and 28-year-old Maren Ueland from Norway -- had been beheaded. Police spokesman Boubker Sabik also said terrorism was suspected and that the three suspects on the run had been "identified and a search for them is under way by all the security services". One of the three had "a court record linked to terrorist acts", he said, while the prosecutor general's office said the man in custody belonged to an extremist group. The prosecutor general's office, in a statement, said it was determining the authenticity of a video on social media allegedly showing the murder of one of the women. The interior ministry said initially that the Danish and Norwegian hikers were found with cuts to their necks in an isolated mountainous area 10 kilometres (six miles) from the tourist village of Imlil. The arrest was made in Marrakesh, about 60 kilometres north of Imlil, the ministry said. The Danish victim, Jespersen, "had her throat cut," her mother Helle Petersen was quoted by the Danish newspaper B.T. as saying. Her family had warned her against going to Morocco "because of the chaotic situation," she added. - 'Every precaution' - A local guide who works in the area told AFP the body of one woman was found inside a tent and the other outside of it. The guide, who declined to be identified, said the area where they were found was also frequented by three men from Marrakesh, including the one who was arrested. Story continues The two women studied at a university in southern Norway and had planned to travel together for a month, Ueland's mother told Norwegian broadcaster NRK. The investigation is being conducted by Morocco's central bureau of judicial investigation in cooperation with the royal gendarmerie and authorities from national security. Security was stepped up in the region and hiking suspended following the discovery of the bodies, Moroccan media said. "It's very bad for the region. There will undoubtedly be cancellations," a local guide, Hossein, told AFP from Imlil. The most recent jihadist attack hit Morocco in 2011, when 17 people were killed in Marrakesh. An attack in the financial capital Casablanca left 33 dead in 2003. Tourism is a cornerstone of Morocco's economy and the kingdom's second-largest employer, after agriculture. The sector accounts for 10 percent of national income and is one of the country's main sources of foreign currency. After several years of near-stagnation, Morocco welcomed a record 11.35 million visitors in 2017, exceeding the 11-million mark for the first time. Damascus (AFP) - Israeli jets bombed several areas in southern Syria and near Damascus on Thursday drawing retaliatory fire from the ground, a monitoring group said. The Israeli military made no comment on the reported strikes, during which Syrian air defences opened fire for the first time since the deadly downing of a Russian transport plane in September, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. "Israeli forces bombarded for an hour positions in the southern and southwestern suburbs of Damascus as well as in the south of Syria at the border of Quneitra province," Observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman said. Syrian state media said air defences downed a number of "hostile targets" close to the capital. "Our air defences fired on hostile targets over the Kisweh area and downed them," the official SANA news agency reported, citing a military source. The Israeli military denied that any of its aircraft were hit, while not commenting on the reported strikes. "Reports regarding an IDF (Israeli military) aircraft or an airborne IDF target having been hit are false," it said in an English-language statement. It said a Syrian surface-to-air missile was fired in the direction of an open area of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights but it was unclear if it had hit Israeli-held territory. Israel has carried out hundreds of air strikes in neighbouring Syria against what it says are Iranian targets, many of them in the area south of Damascus. Abdel Rahman said there are "weapons depots belonging to the Lebanese Hezbollah (group) as well as Iranian forces" in Kisweh. Iran and Russia are the government's key allies in the civil war that has raved Syria since 2011, and Moscow's intervention in 2015 dramatically turned the tables against the rebels. The accidental downing of the Russian transport aircraft by Syrian ground batteries during an Israel air strike on September 17 killed 15 service personnel and prompted Moscow to significantly upgrade Syrian air defences. Story continues Moscow pinned responsibility for the downing on Israel, saying its fighter jet used the larger Russian one for cover, an allegation Israel disputed. The move raised fears in Israel that its ability to rein in its arch foe Iran's military presence in its northeastern neighbour would be sharply reduced. Abdel Rahman said Thursday was the first time Syria's air defences had been called into action since the September downing and the delivery of advanced new Russian missiles. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had told Moscow his government would continue to hit hostile targets in Syria to prevent Iran from establishing a military presence across the border. He added that Israel would "continue security coordination" with Russia. burs/scw/kir Jerusalem (AFP) - Israel's prosecution will recommend Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu be charged with corruption in at least one of the investigations against him, media reports said Wednesday. State attorney, Shay Nitzan, was said to have forwarded the recommendation to the public prosecution, according to the media reports, which did not give specifics about the case. Netanyahu has been under investigation for alleged corruption that threatens his long-running hold on power. According to the media reports, there was sufficient evidence to charge him with corruption in the Bezeq case, named after a telecommunications company. Netanyahu has faced questioning by police over suspicions that he sought positive coverage on the Walla! news website in exchange for regulatory breaks by the government. Police have recommended he be charged with corruption, fraud and breach of trust in two other cases, one relating to gifts he and his family had allegedly received. In the other case, investigators suspect the prime minister of trying to reach an agreement with the owner of Yediot Aharonot newspaper for more favourable coverage. The decision to charge him is up to Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit, a former Netanyahu aide who has on occasion opposed the government. Netanyahu has denied all charges and rejected any talk of stepping down. He is not legally required to resign if he is charged. Jerusalem (AFP) - Members of the Israeli parliament gave preliminary approval Wednesday to controversial legislation enabling the forced displacement within the West Bank of Palestinian attackers' family members. The bill comes after a wave of deadly Palestinian attacks against Israeli civilians and soldiers in the occupied West Bank, with its sponsors saying it would deter future attackers. A statement from parliament noted the bill passed the Wednesday vote 69-38 in a stormy session, during which Arab lawmakers were expelled from the chamber for disrupting procedures. The bill would enable the expulsion of family members from one West Bank location to another within seven days of an attack, or attempted attack, by their relative. It will now be debated and voted upon in the parliament's foreign and defence committee, before returning to the chamber for final readings by lawmakers. Education Minister Naftali Bennett, whose far-Right Jewish Home penned the bill, called Wednesday's vote "a huge step in the right direction" aimed at "ensuring the security of Israel". "Every terrorist should know that his family will pay a price for his despicable deeds," he said in a statement. The justice ministry, however, said such legislation would violate both Israeli and international law. "There is legal prevention from advancing this proposed legislation," the ministry said in a statement on Monday. "In addition, this proposal creates significant difficulties in the international arena." Even if passed, the legislation could subsequently be blocked if a legal challenge is launched successfully at Israel's high court. On December 9, Palestinians opened fire at a bus stop near a West Bank settlement, wounding seven and leading to the death of a baby prematurely delivered after his mother was shot. On Thursday, a Palestinian shot dead two Israeli soldiers at a bus stop and wounded others. Story continues Another disputed bill, also tabled by the Jewish Home party, was on Wednesday approved in a preliminary reading by 61 votes to 47. The bill is aimed at legalising unauthorised housing within settlements recognised as lawful by Israel. All settlements are considered illegal under international law, but Israel draws a distinction between those it sanctions and those constructed without permission. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced last week that he would seek to "legalise" thousands of settler homes without Israeli permits in the occupied West Bank. Brussels (AFP) - The EU and Italy on Wednesday called a truce in their bitter row over Rome's disputed 2019 budget, as the populist government agreed to put off signature reforms. In a historic first, in October the European Commission rejected Italy's big-spending budget, which promised a universal basic income and scrapped pension reform. In Wednesday's deal, Italy agreed to back down on both of its landmark measures, and is now committed to not adding to its colossal two-trillion euro debt load next year. "Intensive negotiations over the last two weeks have resulted in a solution for 2019," EU Commission Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis told reporters in Brussels. "Let's be clear: the solution is not ideal. But it avoids opening the excessive deficit procedure at this stage," he added, referring to a process that could result in major fines for a member country. To find a compromise, Brussels offered to show flexibility in appraising the budget in light of "exceptional circumstances", including the modernisation of infrastructure after a tragic bridge collapse in Genoa last August. Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte told senators in Rome that the deal in no way reneged on his government's promises but instead offered a solution "that is good for Italians and also satisfactory for Europe". Deputy Prime Minister Luigi Di Maio, the head of the populist Five Star Movement, hailed a success "without ever betraying the Italian people". The EU and Italy negotiated intensely in recent days with both sides worried that a protracted feud would alarm the markets and ignite a debt crisis in the eurozone's third biggest economy. The situation grew politically thornier for Brussels after France last week announced a new wave of spending for 2019 that will also break EU rules on public spending. This came in response to "yellow vest" protests that forced French President Emmanuel Macron to turn away from EU-backed belt-tightening ahead of European elections next year. Story continues - 'A bluff' - Italy and others complain that powerful France receives special treatment on its budget plans by the EU Commission. Without the compromise, Italy would have ultimately faced a fine of up to 0.2 percent of the nation's GDP after a long and rancorous process with its eurozone partners. The talks centred on the so-called structural deficit, which includes all public spending minus debt payments. Italy's first budget was set to blow through commitments made by the previous government, with a deterioration to a 0.8 of GDP structural deficit, which would require Rome raising even more debt. The deal on Wednesday anticipates that this would now be balanced, with the overall deficit target lowered to 2.04 percent of GDP. In a television broadcast recorded Wednesday evening, Economy Minister Giovanni Tria said the revised pension and welfare measures would now start rolling out from April. Italy's public debt is a big problem and now sits at a huge 2.3 trillion euros ($2.6 trillion), or 131 percent of Italy's GDP -- way above the 60 percent EU ceiling. European sources believe that the cost of servicing Italy's debt quickly turned Rome away from confrontation with Brussels that many predicted would drag on until next summer. The "spread" -- the difference between yields on 10-year Italian government debt compared with those in Germany -- has retreated significantly since Rome adopted a more conciliatory position. The spread stood at 255 basis points Wednesday, far from the highs of around 330 points when Italy submitted its first proposal in October. German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz described the deal as a "good sign". It will now be debated by eurozone ministers in the coming weeks, with fiscal hardliners already critical of the compromise. "We regret that the European Commission is failing its budgetary tasks just when we are engaging in reforms for the eurozone that require consistency and trust," an EU diplomat told AFP. Philippe Waechter, chief economist at Ostrum Asset Management, described the agreement as "a bluff". He said the deal would provide short term relief for investors and eased the spread. "But the main question is not solved. Growth in Italy is too low," he said in a blog post. Chicago (AFP) - Jesuit authorities for 20 US states on Monday released the names of 89 priests with credible allegations of child sexual abuse dating as far back as 1950. The disclosures by the Jesuit provinces of Maryland and USA Midwest are the latest chapter in the ongoing sexual abuse scandal roiling the Catholic Church and come after 153 Jesuits were publicly identified by two other provinces earlier this month. Maryland released 24 names with allegations dating back to 1950 and USA Midwest released 65 names dating back to 1955. Many of the individuals are deceased, and some were previously publicly known to be accused of sexual assault. "On behalf of the Midwest Jesuits, I apologize to victim-survivors and their families for the harm and suffering you have endured. Many of you have suffered in silence for decades," Brian Paulson, head of the USA Midwest province, said in an open letter. Jesuits are the largest male religious order in the Catholic Church, with some 16,000 members worldwide. They operate 30 colleges and 81 schools in the United States and Canada. The names made public Monday included dozens of priests with multiple allegations of abuse who served in educational institutions. - Decades of abuse, errors dating to 1930s - The priest with the most recent allegations was Donald McGuire, who died in federal prison in 2017 while serving a 25-year sentence. His was among the names that had been previously publicized. Numerous men have accused McGuire of molesting them when they were boys. The first allegations dated to the 1950s, when he worked at a Jesuit private high school in Chicago, and went as late as 2005. "Most of the Jesuits on our list entered religious life from the 1930's through the early 1960's. In retrospect, our evaluation of candidates, as well as the training, formation, and supervision of Jesuits, was not adequate," Paulson said. He added that the organization had learned from its mistakes, and has improved training for Jesuits and was holding them accountable if abuse allegations are made. Story continues The latest revelations came as religious orders are starting to face similar scrutiny to the rest of the Catholic Church and are embarking on efforts at transparency. - Lists 'incomplete' - Earlier this month, provinces overseeing Jesuits in more than 20 western, southern and central US states released lists of 153 members accused of child sexual abuse. The Maryland province's leader, who is known as the provincial, said Monday's release was meant to provide transparency and accountability, and that an external audit of the organization's files would be conducted "to ensure that our previous reviews were both accurate and complete." "We are deeply sorry for the harm we have caused to victims and their families," the provincial, Robert Hussey, said in an open letter published on the organization's website. "We view the disclosure today of our shameful history as part of our commitment now to preventing abuse." A victim's advocacy group welcomed the disclosures, but noted that they came only after sustained public pressure, including from prosecutors. The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) criticized the Jesuit order for keeping accused priests' names secret for decades and called for an independent investigation by law enforcement. "Too often, lists are released that are incomplete or carefully curated by church officials, and so by inviting an independent investigation, Jesuit officials can demonstrate to parishioners and the public their commitment to transparency and healing," SNAP said in a statement. "Such an investigation would be the only way to determine who knew what, when they knew it, and what they chose to do with that information." The Catholic Church has been hit by a series of child abuse scandals in recent years, with widespread allegations of cover-ups. In August, a devastating US report on child sex abuse claimed more than 300 "predator" priests abused more than 1,000 minors over seven decades in the state of Pennsylvania. House committee directs government, Election Commission to hold run-off election by mid-May The State Affairs Committee of the Federal Parliament has directed the government and Election Commission to hold elections for all the vacant posts of local and province level within mid-May. WASHINGTON, Dec 18 (Reuters) - A U.S. judge fiercely criticized President Donald Trump's former national security adviser Michael Flynn on Tuesday for lying to FBI agents, and delayed sentencing to ensure Flynncooperates fully with an investigation into possible collusion between Trump's 2016 campaign and Russia. During the sentencing hearing, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan told the retired lieutenant general that he "arguably" had sold out his country. Flynn pleaded guilty in December 2017 to lying to FBI agents about his conversations with Sergei Kislyak, Russia ambassador in Washington at the time. Special Counsel Robert Mueller, leading the investigation, had asked the judge not to sentence Flynn to prison because Flynn already had provided "substantial" cooperation to prosecutors over the course of many interviews. See more related to this story: But Sullivan told Flynn his behavior was abhorrent, noting that Flynn had also lied to White House officials, who in turn lied to the public. "Arguably, you sold your country out," Sullivan said. "I'm not hiding my disgust, my disdain for this criminal offense." The judge also noted that Flynn was operating as an undeclared lobbyist for Turkey even as he worked on Trump's election team and prepared to be his national security adviser. He appeared ready to sentenceFlynn to prison but then gave him the option of a delay in his sentencing so that he could fully cooperate with any pending investigations. Flynn accepted that offer. Prosecutors said Flynn had already provided most of the cooperation that he could, but it was possible he might be able to help investigators further. The judge did not set a new date for sentencing but asked Mueller's team and Flynn's attorney to give him a status report by March 13. Flynn served as a high-profile adviser to Trump's election campaign team, and at the Republican Party's national convention in 2016 he led Trump's supporters in cries of "Lock her up!" directed against Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. He became national security adviser when Trump took office in January 2017 but lasted only 24 days before being ousted. Story continues He told FBI investigators on Jan. 24, 2017, that he had not discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia with Kislyak, when in fact he had, according to his plea agreement. Trump has said he fired Flynn because he also lied to Vice President Mike Pence about the contacts with Kislyak. But Trump has said Flynn did not break the law and has voiced support for him, raising speculation the Republican president might pardon him if he was sentenced. "Good luck today in court to General Michael Flynn. Will be interesting to see what he has to say, despite tremendous pressure being put on him, about Russian Collusion in our great and, obviously, highly successful political campaign. There was no Collusion!" Trump wrote on Twitter on Tuesday morning. Mueller's investigation into Russia's role in the 2016 election and whether Trump has unlawfully sought to obstruct the probe has cast a shadow over his presidency. A series of former Trump aides have pleaded guilty in Mueller's probe, but Flynn was the first former official of Trump's White House to plead guilty. Trump has called the investigation a "witch hunt" and has denied collusion with Moscow. Russia has denied meddling in the election, contrary to the conclusion of U.S. intelligence agencies that have said Moscow used hacking and propaganda to try to sow discord in the United States and boost Trump's chances against Clinton. Several protesters were at the courthouse on Tuesday as Flynn arrived, along with a large inflatable rat. Lying to the FBI carries a statutory maximum sentence of five years in prison. Flynn's plea agreement stated that he was eligible for a sentence of between zero and six months. (Reporting by Jan Wolfe; Additional reporting by Susan Heavey and Ginger Gibson; Editing by Sonya Hepinstall and Will Dunham) Kate Middleton The Duchess of Cambridge wore a pastel pink outfit for the queens Christmas lunch at Buckingham Palace. (Photo: Rex) The festive season has begun for the royals, as family members including Prince William, Kate Middleton, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle arrived for Queen Elizabeth IIs annual Christmas lunch at Buckingham Palace on Wednesday afternoon. Each year, the 92-year-old monarch hosts a big luncheon for extended members of her family, before she departs for Sandringham for Christmas. The Norfolk estate isnt thought to be large enough to accommodate everyone, so this is their annual get-together. William and Kate arrived with two of their children, George, 5, and Charlotte, 3, in the back of their car. The duchess wore a pastel pink ensemble with pussy-bow detailing and diamond drop earrings for the occasion. Meanwhile, sister-in-law Meghan Markle was photographed in the passenger seat as husband Prince Harry drove through the palace gates. Meghan appeared to be wearing a high-neck ruffled outfit and statement diamond earrings. Prince Philip, 97, was also seen being driven to the lunch, joined by two of his children, Princess Anne and Prince Andrew. Annes son, Peter Phillips, arrived with his wife, Autumn, and daughters Savannah and Isla, while Sophie, Countess of Wessex, beamed in a burgundy coat and gray scarf as she drove herself and 15-year-old daughter Louise to the lunch. Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle: Follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day. Follow us on Instagram and Facebook for non-stop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day. For Twitter updates, follow @YahooStyleUK. Read more from Yahoo Style UK: The Royal Familys Christmas 2018 plans: Meals, presents and traditions Kate and Meghans Christmas Day outfits through the years in pictures Everything you need to know about the Queens speech By Timothy Gardner WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Two Democratic lawmakers urged the Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday to better protect U.S. oil and gas pipelines from cyberattacks, after a report they requested detailed a lack of federal oversight of the critical conduits. The report released on Wednesday said Homeland Security's Transportation Security Administration, or TSA, does not have a process to update its pipeline security guidelines to reflect revisions to standards considered by experts and regulators to be the industry bible on cybersecurity. The standards on avoiding hacker attacks are the Cybersecurity Framework from the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The report by the General Accountability Office, or GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, was requested by Senator Maria Cantwell and Representative Frank Pallone. "Protecting our pipelines, and the people who live and work near them, must be a top priority for our government and I hope this report will prompt the Trump administration to start treating this challenge with the urgency it deserves," Cantwell said in a release. A DHS official said TSA is "extremely proud" of its work on pipeline cybersecurity, which has included the publication of security guidelines, information sharing, and analysis of pipeline security reviews. The GAO issued 10 recommendations for the TSA including implementing a process for reviewing, and if necessary revising, security guidelines at regular intervals. DHS agreed with all the recommendations in the report. Energy infrastructure has long been a target of hackers. Last week, hackers using a variant of the notorious Shamoon virus crippled more than 300 computers owned by Italian oil services company Saipem and brought down servers in the Middle East and India. The company did not know who conducted the strike, but an official at cybersecurity company CrowdStrike said he believed Iran was responsible. The report on Wednesday found TSA relied on self-evaluations by the pipeline industry to determine whether operators have critical facilities in their systems that could be the target of hackers. That is a classification the agency uses to determine calculations about the vulnerability of pipelines to cyberattacks. As a result, operators for one third of the top U.S. 100 pipeline systems, based on volume, told the TSA they did not have critical facilities, and the TSA did not verify the self-evaluations, it said. The report also said TSA had not tracked the status of security review recommendations to pipeline operators for the past five years. The vulnerability of gas pipelines to cyberattacks has been one argument that U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry, a Republican, has used to justify asking the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to bail out aging nuclear and coal power plants, which do not depend on pipelines. Cyber experts said Perry's plan would not shield the grid from hackers because they have a wide array of options for hitting electricity infrastructure. FERC, an independent agency of the Department of Energy, rejected the Perry directive, but the issue could come up again. (Reporting by Timothy Gardner; editing by Peter Cooney and Leslie Adler) BEIRUT (Reuters) - Lebanon's finance and foreign ministers will keep their posts in the new national unity government, sources said on Wednesday, with the country close to forming the cabinet after seven months of political wrangling. Efforts to form the government, led by Prime Minister-designate Saad al-Hariri, have been obstructed by conflicting demands for cabinet seats that must be parceled out in line with a finely balanced, sectarian political system. Heavily indebted and suffering from a stagnant economy, Lebanon is in dire need of an administration that can set about long-stalled reforms to put public debt on a sustainable footing. Lebanese dollar-denominated bonds rose on progress toward the government formation, jumping to a five-week high. The May 6 national election, Lebanon's first in nine years, produced a parliament tilted in favor of the heavily armed, Iran-backed Shi'ite Muslim group Hezbollah, which together with its political allies won more than 70 of the 128 seats. Hariri, who enjoys Western backing, lost more than one third of his lawmakers, though he remained Lebanon's biggest Sunni Muslim leader and was nominated again as prime minister. "We are on the brink of forming the government," Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, a political ally of Hezbollah, was quoted as saying by one of his MPs. Caretaker Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil said the remaining details should not need more than "two days ... and we will have a government". Ali Hassan Khalil, a top aide to Berri, will remain finance minister, a senior official and a senior political source told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity because the government had yet to be finalised and announced. $11 BILLION PLEDGED International institutions and donor states want to see the next government take long-delayed steps to put public debt on a sustainable path to unlock more than $11 billion of support, mostly loans, pledged in April to help revive the economy. Lebanon has the world's third highest debt as a proportion of GDP. The sources said Bassil, the son-in-law of President Michel Aoun and head of the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) he founded, would keep his job as foreign minister. Aoun has been a political ally of Hezbollah since 2006 and, despite some differences, supports the group's arsenal which he has said is needed to defend Lebanon from Israel. Hezbollah is expected to name three ministers in the new government, one more than in the outgoing administration. One of these will be the health ministry, the most significant ministry the group would have controlled in any government. Elias Bou Saab, also part of Aoun's political bloc, would be the next defense minister, the senior political source said. Lebanon's army is a major recipient of U.S. aid, receiving more than $1.6 billion since 2006. The defense ministry in the outgoing cabinet was also held by an Aoun ally. The interior ministry is expected to remain with Hariri's Future Movement. A U.S. State Department official said on Tuesday the United States hoped that next government would be willing to work with it "on areas of mutual interest" and expressed concern over Hezbollah's rising political clout in the country. (Reporting by Laila Bassam, Ellen Francis and Tom Perry in Beirut, and Karin Strohecker in London; Editing by Jon Boyle, William Maclean) Many now consider e-discovery to be a mature market, but that doesnt mean the pace of innovation is necessarily slowing down. On the contrary, 2018 saw the adoption of new technologies like beginning-of-EDRM analytics at a wider scale, a focus on expanding e-discovery technology into adjacent spaces like information governance, and the acceptance of e-discovery lexicon into the wider legal community. Looking ahead to 2019, Legaltech News asked a number of e-discovery attorneys and experts what they see as coming next. The expectations vary widely, from an increased use of data analytics, to a focus on privacy and security, to active learning and proportionality being engaged earlier as part of the process. Below is their full thoughts, organized by last names in alphabetical order. For 2019 predictions on cybersecurity, click here. Tomorrow, LTN will publish the final set of predictions, on innovative technologies. E-Discovery Predictions Bobbi Basile, HBR Consulting: Heretofore, the discovery industry has focused on reducing the volume of documents after collection and processing (data minimization) the data. In 2019, the focus will shift to the gap between legal hold issuance and data collection. Earlier engagement with custodiansin a transparent, documented and substantiated wayto determine actual relevance will reduce custodians hold, phasing and/or targeted collection efforts and may allow earlier release of some holds. David Carns, Casepoint: In 2019, firms and legal departments will look for new ways to exploit the power of analytics across the entire e-discovery workflow and across multiple matters to proactively control costs, budget more accurately, litigate more efficiently and generate better legal outcomes. This will put a premium on flexible platforms that can integrate diverse applications and technologies like machine learning, predictive modeling and data visualization to quickly sort through large bodies of complex information. Lawyers will use these tools to make better strategic decisions earlier in litigation, and legal executives will use them to make dramatic improvements to workflows and operations. Chris Chalstrom, Shepherd Data Services: The reason businesses are going SaaS is simple: They can move into a perfect home and not worry about leaks or cracks in the foundation. Instead, they can walk into their environment, fire up their custom programs, and have nice toasty solutions for their clients. And, they can spend more time making better solutions for clients, instead of obsessing about details clients never see. Kirk Chocholek, QDiscovery: Active learning will be used as a supplemental tool to support traditional linear reviews. Case managers will run it in the background and use it to prioritize documents for batching or to QC the results of a linear review. This will be the first step in the adoption of active learning. As people become more familiar with it and its value is proven, it will eventually become the default. Brad Harris, Zapproved: Proportionality will reign supreme in meet-and-confer discussions, driven by a never-ending escalation of costs associated with traditional approaches to discovery. Successful litigation teams will rely on solid legal hold practices and refined early case assessment to confidently limit scope for both preservation and discovery, with new tools emerging for corporate legal teams to manage control cost and mitigate risk. Janice Hollman, Relativity: As law firms and corporations meet the need to create high-caliber, cross-functional teams, the opportunity for job growth and promotion for tech-savvy legal professional will only grow. In 2019, well continue to see more paralegals and litigation support professionals getting certifiedalong with increased demand for tech-trained paralegals and lawyers. Maureen ONeill, Consilio: 2019 will be a tipping point for the protection of personal data privacy in legal discovery. Were already seeing some impact from Europes GDPR, as litigants realize that discovery in their U.S. matters may include EU personal data. But now every state has a data breach regulation, California has passed sweeping privacy legislation, and were seeing a groundswell of support for a comprehensive federal privacy lawamong industry leaders as well as regulators. Going forward, lawyers and their clients will be forced to adjust their e-discovery strategies and workflows to incorporate personal data privacy protection. Anthony Petruzzi, Adrienne Kirshner and Stephanie Rzepka, Tucker Ellis: We expect to see the threat of ESI platform data breaches move to the forefront in 2019. ESI platforms offer sophisticated hackers means, motive, and opportunity because the platforms store concentrated sensitive information that must be accessible from multiple points and devices. Furthermore, the risk of a breach heightens during transfers, but the discovery process necessitates that ESI be transferred from the proprietor to an ESI vendor and then legal counsel. We predict that law firms and vendors will turn their attention to ensuring that they are not the weak link in this chain. Bill Piwonka, Exterro: E-Discovery technology vendors are going to embrace Microsoft Office 365s capabilities. Microsoft has had great success driving the adoption of Office 365, and while they continue to add e-discovery features into their offering, traditional e-discovery vendors will embrace Office 365 to deliver new, compelling solutions that complement Microsoft Offices functionality and help legal professionals get to the facts of a matter more quickly, less expensively, and defensibly. Michael Swarz, Veritone: 2019 will be the year demand for translation of any ESI filetext, audio and videowill balloon to meet increasingly globalized e-discovery & compliance requirements. Firms will look for robust translation options, whether machine or human, to translate international files into the language of their choiceby location, accent and datasetto win their case. Lon Troyer, H5: The legal realm isnt exactly known for its speedy embrace of technology-driven solutions in e-discovery, but the growing cultural acceptance of AI and data analytics in everyday life is bound to push the needle forward. The variety and proliferation of analytics tools and expertise available to find critical information in large datasets more quickly and efficiently will drive forward-thinking lawyers and their clients to pursue e-discovery as a targeted fact-finding exercise, rather than a massive manual review effort. Look for more collaboration among lawyers and search experts, especially in high stakes practice areas such as white collar and antitrust, cybersecurity, and investigations. James Whittington, GravityStack: The introduction of a mandatory two-year disclosure pilot scheme in the UK Business and Property Courts from January 2019 will produce significant change that will require parties to conduct e-discovery at a much earlier stage. Parties must complete a Disclosure Review Document that includes agreement on the use of analytics and TAR. The disclosure reform aims to reduce the cost, scope and complexity of e-discovery. Photo: Shutterstock Technology use in e-discovery isnt a new topic. Thats the problemsometimes experience can make us resistant to new ways of doing things because we already know how to get from start to finish with search terms and linear document review. As technology continues to evolve and collective knowledge about its application in e-discovery expands, this could mean missing out on cost- and time-saving uses available in technology we already know. Consider cultivating a beginners mindset to challenge assumptions about technology and its use. Then, apply this mindset to how you select and use technology in e-discovery. Employing a beginners mindset doesnt mean casting aside existing knowledge and experience, but it does mean questioning assumptions developed over time about what technology can do and getting curious about what else technology can offer in your matters. That could lead to using analytics to get to existing key content quickly, rather than hoping your search terms locate the key documents fast enough. In a recent webinar, Janelle Belling, Rike Connelly, Jamie Viviano and Chad Jones offered impactful suggestions on leveraging technology for a successful e-discovery strategy. With ideas on cultivating a beginners mindset threaded throughout, consider whether the following suggestions could create new possibilities for your matters in the new year: Communicate early and often about the intent and manner of technology use: Include the court and opposing parties in these discussions as cooperation and agreement promote a more efficient process. Incorporate practical considerations, such as timing and cost, and legal considerations, such as risk and strategy, into technology selection. How do you apply a beginners mindset to this? Consider these issues: Are there areas in which your technology use and communications about that technology seem consistently challenging? What contributes to those challenges? What could be done differently next time? Are different skills or people needed in these conversations? Story continues How is technology typically selected? Are there parts of the selection process that could be better or different? Who could help improve that process? Employ technology in pre-review analysis to help identify key issues: Technology has the potential to impact everything from litigation holds to discovery plan negotiation. Before review begins, consider how attorneys and technology professionals can work together to employ the right technology to target potentially relevant documents for review and use analytics to identify data trends and key issues, facts, and people. Applying beginners curiosity about pre-review analysis could include these questions: How are key issues and documents identified in the pre-review phase? Are there additional tools that may help unearth key issues faster? What additional knowledge is needed to employ these tools? How are colleagues across the industry identifying key issues and documents? What must be learned to grow the knowledge and experience to use those workflows as well? Do not be afraid to use technology: When used to its full potential as part of a discovery plan, technology often renders better and more consistent results than manual review in a more cost-effective manner. Ask whether there are technologies avoided in the past because they were less known and, therefore, more daunting. Could those be worth delving into now? Query these additional items: Are there areas in past matters where technology could have done more than it did? What were those areas? Are there features in the technology available that do this? Does technology not used before offer these? What is preventing use of new technology? How could resource or knowledge gaps be bridged? Remember that credibility and defensibility are key to technology use: To gain credibility, partner with experienced technology professionals and use vetted technology. Defensibility includes explaining how technology works and why results are trustworthy, as well as using technology appropriately. Bringing attorneys and technology professionals together throughout the discovery process to discuss technology use and implications contributes directly to efficient discovery. Ask the following: Are there types of technology, or applications of it, where further knowledge would help build credibility? What knowledge must be represented on the team? Are there areas of strength we must add to the team, either through knowledge acquisition or adding new team members? Happy new year, beginners! Helen Stocklin-Enright is the development manager for Perkins Coies E-Discovery Services & Strategy practice. She manages implementation of technology and operational initiatives within ESS, focusing on the strategic application of technology to conserve costs and enhance efficiencies. Thank you to Janelle Belling and Jamie Viviano for their contributions to this article. Antananarivo (AFP) - Both candidates in Madagascar's presidential election have claimed victory in the fierce battle for power in the Indian Ocean island. Andry Rajoelina and Marc Ravalomanana -- who have each held the top job in the impoverished country before -- declared themselves winners in the run-off which analysts warned was likely to draw claims of fraud. "Change is coming tomorrow, and today you can say that 'Papa' is elected," Ravalomanana told supporters on Wednesday night at his headquarters, using his nickname. "Whatever happens, only one thing counts, we will win." However, his rival Rajoelina said: "I am sure I'm going to win but we'll wait for the official results." The contenders, who came a close first and second in November's first-round election, were both banned from running in the 2013 ballot as part of an agreement to end recurring crises that have rocked Madagascar since independence from France in 1960. In the first round, Rajoelina won 39 percent compared with 35 percent for Ravalomanana. Both camps alleged they were victims of fraud and cheating. The polls closed on Wednesday evening. The election count could be tense with the first significant results due only by next week. The EU observer mission, which said turnout was around 50 percent, called for candidates and their supporters to wait patiently for the official results. "It is not by mobilising in the street that they will win, so I ask them resolutely that they refrain from any gesture that could taint the smooth running of the election," mission chief Cristian Preda said Wednesday. - Bitter history - Ravalomanana, 69, was first elected president in 2002 but was forced to resign seven years later by violent demonstrations supported by Rajoelina, the then mayor of the capital Antananarivo. Rajoelina, 44, was installed by the army and ruled until 2014. The two contenders criss-crossed the country via helicopter to secure votes. Story continues Both candidates have spent lavishly, with promises and handouts distributed liberally to voters, who are among the poorest in Africa. With the personalities of the two men dominating the election, issues such as poverty, corruption and lack of basic services and infrastructure have been largely pushed to the side. Some analysts warn a fractious election fallout could damage the chances of future development. "The results could be very tight and, in this context, even small irregularities could lead one or the other candidate to contest them," said Marcus Schneider, an analyst at the Bonn-based Friedrich Ebert Foundation. - High stakes - Former education minister Paul Rabary, a fringe candidate who was eliminated in the first round, said the stakes were high: "For Marc Ravalomanana, his business network cannot survive if he does not take power. For Rajoelina, his personal history is sullied by the (2009) coup, so he must win to rescue his honour." Ravalomanana is a former milkman from a peasant family who went on to build a business empire, while Rajoelina is a former party planner and successful entrepreneur with slick communication skills. Outgoing president Hery Rajaonarimampianina was eliminated in the first round after collecting less than nine percent of the vote. His attempts to change the electoral laws this year backfired, sparking nearly three months of sometimes violent protests in Antananarivo. The demonstrators forced Rajaonarimampianina to accept a "consensus" government tasked with organising the election. Madagascar is well known for its vanilla and precious redwood, yet is one of the world's poorest nations, according to World Bank data, with 76 percent of people living in extreme poverty. The island, which is also famed for its unique wildlife, is dependent on foreign aid and burdened by a long history of coups and unrest. "My choice is already made, but I keep it to myself," 45-year-old housewife Monique Norosoa told AFP as she voted in the capital. A man blinded by unexplainable rage who killed his friend when he drove his car at a crowd outside a club has been jailed for life. On Tuesday, a jury at Manchester Minshull Street Crown Court found Jonathan Snape, 31, guilty of the murder of Nathan Marshall, 30, in Stockport on May 27. Snape, of Yew Tree Lane, Manchester, was also convicted of attempted murder over the incident and had earlier pleaded guilty to dangerous driving and two counts of assault. He must serve a minimum of 24 years in custody before he can be considered for release. Jonathan Snape has been jailed after he crashed his car into a crowd in a blind rage killing his friend Nathan Marshall (pictured). (GMP). Mr Marshall, 30, from Reddish, Stockport, died after Snapes vehicle collided with a number of people outside the Salisbury Club in Truro Avenue, Brinnington. Earlier in the day, Snape had visited pubs in Brinnington with a group of friends including Mr Marshall, said Greater Manchester Police (GMP). Snape became involved in a heated row with another man at the Salisbury Club which led to the defendant punching his victim in the face and then punching a woman who tried to intervene. Outside the club, Snape got behind the wheel of a black Audi A4 car with Mr Marshall and another friend riding as passengers before he started driving dangerously in the direction of a woman. Floral tributes left at the scene outside the Salisbury Club, in Brinnington, Stockport, where Nathan Marshall died after a car was driven into a group of people on May 27. PA. Snape later chased the woman on foot who managed to lock herself inside the club before the defendant continued to fight with people outside. The defendant then returned to the Audi and drove towards the gathered crowd, which by then included Mr Marshall. Snape eventually drove off and abandoned the vehicle on the M60 motorway after he crashed into the central reservation, said GMP. Snape handed himself in the following day. Following sentencing, Detective Inspector Andy Butterworth said: Blinded by unexplainable rage, Jonathan Snape tried to cause as much damage as he possibly could, starting inside the club. Once outside he used a car to drive at a crowd of people, causing serious injuries to one man and catastrophic injuries to Nathan, which sadly resulted in his death. Story continues Although he may not have intentionally targeted Nathan, he clearly didnt give a second thought about the potential consequences of his actions. I dont know what he expected would happen when he decided to use a car as a weapon and drive at speed towards another person. Watch the latest videos from Yahoo UK Mary Poppins Returns arrives in cinemas on 21 December, 54 years after the original film, making it the longest time elapsed for a sequel to a live action film. But why the long wait? It all boils down to PL Travers, the author of the Mary Poppins books and the subject of Disneys Saving Mr Banks, explains Mary Poppins Returns director Rob Marshall. The PL Travers estate had been very famously protective of the material, Marshall tells Yahoo Movies UK in our interview above. Even though there had been 8 [Mary Poppins] books that were written, and there was all this wonderful material, there wasnt really a chance to do it. Travers, famously, disliked the 1964 adaptation disagreeing with Walt Disney over the use of animation and music in the film, and ruled out any further adaptations of her books. Travers died in 1996, aged 96, and its only been in recent years that her estate has loosened its grip on the property paving the way for a movie sequel. This image released by Disney shows Emily Blunt as Mary Poppins in Mary Poppins Returns. (Disney via AP) PL Travers blocked the idea of a sequel, adds Ben Whishaw, who plays an older Michael Banks in the film. She didnt like the first one in the first place and then they had to wait for her to die, and she did die, and then her estate were suddenly much more up for it. The sequel is set 30 years after the events of the first film, with Britain in the midst of the Great Depression. The recently bereaved Michael Banks has fallen on hard times and is at risk of losing the family home on Cherry Tree Lane to the ruthless money men at the Fiduciary Bank. These themes of a Britain in turmoil and the escapist fantasy of Mary Poppins floating in to save the day, couldnt be more timely says Emily Blunt, who plays the title role. I feel how Rob Marshall has set it during the Great Depression, a time of great fragility, a time that feels disconcerting, I feel very much has some relevance today, Blunt explains. A lot of people feel the need for [Mary] to come back, they wish she could come and bring order to chaos, and fix it all. Story continues Quite what Mary Poppins would make of the chaos in Whitehall right now, remains to be seen. Maybe well find out in the inevitable sequel? Mary Poppins Returns is in cinemas from 21 December. Read more Mary Poppins Returns breakout shares journey to blockbusters Dick Van Dyke blowing minds in Poppins return 2018s comic book movies ranked "Dreams are a privileged place to look for the truth because in them we do not defend ourselves from the truth. They come, and ... and God also speaks in dreams; not always, because it is usually our unconscious that comes, but God so often chooses to speak in dreams. Vatican City (AsiaNews) In his homily during the Mass he celebrated today at Casa Santa Marta, Pope Francis said that "Joseph is the man who knows how to accompany in silence", a "man of dreams". The pontiff also prayed for the disabled children of Slovakia, who made Christmas decorations for the tree near the altar. In the Holy Scriptures, we know Joseph as "a righteous man, who observed the law, worked hard, was humble, and loved Mary. When first faced with something he did not understand, he preferred to step back but God revealed to him his mission. Thus, Joseph embraced his task, his role wholeheartedly, and helped raise the Son of God in silence, without judging, without speaking poorly of others, and without gossiping. He helped him [Jesus] grow and develop. So, he looked for a place for the child to be born. He looked after him, helped him grow, and taught him to work: many things in silence. He never took possession of the child for himself. He silently let him grow. He let him grow: This idea could help us immensely, we who by nature always want to stick our noses in everything, especially in the lives of others And we start gossiping, talking But he let him grow, silently watching over him and helping him. For the pope, such a wise attitude can be seen in many parents: the ability to wait without immediately scolding, even in the face of a mistake. It is essential to know how to wait, before saying something that can help children grow. Waiting in silence, as God does with his children, for whom he has so much patience. Commenting on the Gospel passage (Mt 1: 18-24) in which the angel appeared to Saint Joseph in a dream, Francis said that the latter was a practical man with an open heart, a "man of dreams", not "a dreamer". "Dreams are a privileged place to look for the truth because in them we do not defend ourselves from the truth. They come, and ... and God also speaks in dreams; not always, because it is usually our unconscious that comes, but God so often chooses to speak in dreams. He did so many times. We can see this in the Bible, right? In dreams. Joseph was a man of dreams but not a dreamer, right? He was not fanciful. A dreamer is something else. He is what he believes ... he stands ... on the air, and has no feet on the ground. Joseph had his feet on the ground and was open-minded." In concluding, Francis urged people not to lose the ability to dream, the ability to open up to tomorrow with confidence, despite the difficulties that can arise. "Do not lose the ability to dream about the future: each of us. Let each of us dream about our family, our children, our parents. Looking at how I would like their lives to go. Priests too can dream about our believers, what we want for them. We can dream the way young people dream, who are brazen in their dreams and in them can find a way. We should not lose the ability to dream because dreaming is opening the doors to the future, [and] be fruitful in the future. Anup Ojha is a reporter for The Kathmandu Post primarily covering social issues and human interest stories. Before moving to the social beat, Ojha covered arts and culture for the Post for four years. By Sarah N. Lynch BALTIMORE (Reuters) - A U.S. judge signaled skepticism on Wednesday toward a bid by President Donald Trump's administration to block a lawsuit by the state of Maryland seeking to preserve the Obamacare law in a case that also challenges Trump's appointment of Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general. At a hearing before U.S. District Judge Ellen Hollander in Baltimore, Justice Department attorney Hashim Mooppan declined to disclose whether Whitaker is involved in deciding the future of the 2010 healthcare law, formally called the Affordable Care Act, after a judge in Texas last week found it unconstitutional. Whitaker, a Trump political loyalist named after the Republican president ousted Jeff Sessions as attorney general last month, is facing a series of legal challenges to the legality of his appointment. The lawsuit by Democratic Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh asks Hollander to declare Obamacare constitutional and to find that Whitaker was unlawfully appointed. Trump's administration has worked to undermine Obamacare after Congress failed in a Republican effort to repeal the law. The administration asked Hollander to throw out Maryland's case and argued the state lacked legal standing to sue because it cannot prove it has been harmed merely by a decision by Sessions while he was attorney general not to defend Obamacare in the Texas case. On Friday, U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor in Fort Worth ruled that the Affordable Care Act, championed by Trump's Democratic predecessor Barack Obama, was unconstitutional following revisions to the tax code made last year by Congress, which removed a penalty for failing to obtain health insurance. The law was challenged by a group of states including Texas. Mooppan told Hollander if Maryland wanted to defend the constitutionality of Obamacare, it could have joined other states that intervened in the Texas case to protect the law. Mooppan said Maryland also had not sustained any injury because the U.S. Health and Human Services Department pledged to continue enforcing Obamacare pending the conclusion of the litigation despite O'Connor's ruling in Texas. Story continues "What injures Maryland is what happens in the real world. What we write in legal briefs cannot injure Maryland," Mooppan said. Hollander appeared skeptical, noting that Trump's prior Twitter posts supporting the dismantling of Obamacare, coupled with O'Connor's order, injected uncertainty about the health insurance marketplace's future and could lead one to reasonably believe the law may not be enforced. "Doesn't Maryland have to take steps now to protect itself?" the judge asked. "Can it do nothing to protect itself while all of this is playing out? What are you supposed to do? Sit back?" Tom Goldstein, one of two attorneys arguing for Maryland, said the state was injured by the fact that an official illegitimately appointed is presumably presiding over Obamacare's future. Maryland sought an injunction barring Whitaker from serving as acting attorney general, saying his appointment violated the Constitution and a federal law governing the Justice Department's line of succession. If Hollander finds Obamacare constitutional, that would create a conflict with the Texas ruling and could lead the U.S. Supreme Court to weigh in. The high court previously has upheld Obamacare. Hollander asked fewer questions regarding Whitaker's appointment and indicated the issue could become moot. Trump on Dec. 7 said he would nominate William Barr to become attorney general on a permanent basis. He would replace Whitaker, pending a Senate confirmation process likely in early 2019. The number of Americans who signed up for 2019 Obamacare insurance plans fell by about 4 percent compared to the prior year, government data released on Wednesday showed. (Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; Editing by Will Dunham) Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on Wednesday introduced a short-term spending bill that would avert a partial government shutdown at midnight on Friday. The bill which would keep the government open until February 8 at which time the shutdown showdown could come roaring back. But at least everyone could go home for the holidays. While the bill seems to have broad support in Congress and President Trump is expected to sign it, theres still room for failure. Roll Calls Niels Lesniewski and Jennifer Shutt reported that the legislation was hung up in the Senate Wednesday afternoon over a dispute involving the Land and Water Conservation Fund. And Trump spent the day sending mixed signals, including a tweet claiming that Mexico is paying (indirectly) for the Wall and that the U.S. military would build it. Assuming the dispute in the Senate can be resolved, the bill is expected to receive a vote in both chambers on Thursday, sending it to the presidents desk with a day to spare. Like what you're reading? Sign up for our free newsletter. Migrants from Central America yell through a border wall at a U.S. Border Patrol agent after he pulled down a banner on Nov. 25, 2018, in San Diego. On several occasions, President Donald Trump has vowed to shut down parts of the federal government at the end of this week if he doesnt get funding for his U.S.-Mexico border wall. You know, the one Mexico was supposed to pay for. In a meeting with Democratic leaders last week, Trump even said he'd be "proud" to shut down the government in the name of border security, though the White House appeared to soften that stance on Tuesday. A government shutdown, if it happens, would be a big price to pay for a political symbol. There is nothing wrong with physical barriers along certain segments of the 2,000-mile border; in fact, about 650 miles already have some kind of vehicle or pedestrian barriers. But adding another 330 miles, as Trump is proposing, has at least two problems. One is that it is hard to justify spending another $5 billion on Trump's vision, at a time when the budget deficit is soaring and other critical needs make a more compelling case for tax dollars. Despite a boomlet of refugees from Central America, illegal immigration is down significantly from its peak more than a decade ago. OPPOSING VIEW: Rep. Debbie Lesko: We need the wall, and the wall will work The other problem is that, of all of the ways to spend more money on immigration enforcement, wall building will arguably yield the smallest bang for the buck. A wall would do nothing, for example, to thwart the nearly half of all illegal immigrants who arrived in America legally and then overstayed their visas. Nor would it be of much assistance in deterring the families and unaccompanied minors from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras who have been showing up at the border recently, sometimes in caravans. Their aim is not to pass into the United States undetected, but rather to turn themselves in and apply for asylum or refugee status. The best approach for dealing with them is to work with the Mexican government to weed out those with no chance of being approved for such status, preferably long before they reach the U.S. border. Story continues It's hard to fathom how anyone could justify a partial government shutdown over wasteful spending unless, of course, one sees the federal budget as little more than a vehicle for making political statements. Trump made a 2,000-mile wall from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico a key part of his campaign. The fact that few others thought that such a wall was useful or practical only made it more appealing to his backers. Trump has since retreated on the Mexico pay-for part, tweeting nonsense about the wall being financed by the son-of-NAFTA deal he negotiated with Mexico and Canada. In reality, he needs Congress to appropriate wall-building funds, although White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Tuesday that the administration has "other ways that we can get to that $5 billion." Democrats have offered $1.3 billion for border fencing. Nor is Trump still talking about walling off the entire border. Much of Texas, in particular, presents enormous legal, political and topographical problems. But the president has apparently decided he needs something that he can call a wall victory. For someone who considers himself the consummate deal-maker, this one isn't very complicated. Senate Democrats have previously offered additional border-security funding in return for legal protection for the roughly 700,000 DREAMers, undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as minors. So let the DREAMers celebrate Christmas without fear of deportation. Let Trump tout any new or refurbished security barriers as pieces of a "wall system." Let the Democrats call it better fencing. And let the government stay open. USA TODAY's editorial opinions are decided by its Editorial Board, separate from the news staff. Most editorials are coupled with an opposing view a unique USA TODAY feature. To read more editorials, go to the Opinion front page or sign up for the daily Opinion email newsletter. To respond to this editorial, submit a comment to letters@usatoday.com. This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: If Mexico will pay for the wall, then why the big budget fight? Just days after Donald Trumps inauguration, the deputy director of the FBI called Michael Flynn, the new national security advisor, on a secure line. After chatting about a recent training, Flynn suggested the FBI send over some agents to talk with him about his conversations with the Russians during the presidential transition. What happened next is still reverberating nearly two years later. In a court filing last week, Flynns lawyers noted pointedly that the two FBI agents who later visited Flynn did not remind him, prior to talking, that its a crime to lie to federal investigators. On Tuesday morning, White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders went on Fox News to argue that the agents ambushed Flynn. Some conservative pundits even suggested that the interview might lead a federal judge on Flynns case to issue a rare rebuke of Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the FBI for overstepping. Instead, the judge rebuked Flynn both for the conduct that got him into legal trouble in the first place and for his lawyers attempts to soften his guilty plea by complaining about the nature of the FBI interview. Noting that he could not hide my disgust, my disdain for Flynns conduct, District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan who was appointed to various judicial posts by Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton harshly criticized the former national security advisor, hinting that he might ignore Muellers recommendation of a light sentence because of the aggravating circumstances. Sullivan seemed particularly offended that Flynn had lied to FBI agents while on the grounds of the White House. Flynns conduct, Sullivan said, had undermined everything that the flag in the courtroom stands for. The judge also criticized Flynn for working for the Turkish government without registering, and at one point asked Muellers staffers if they had considered bringing treason charges. (They had not, a prosecutor answered.) Arguably, you sold your country out, Sullivan told Flynn. Story continues After a break, Sullivan walked back his remarks somewhat, apologizing for his tone and correcting himself on when Flynn worked for Turkey. But the message was received, and Flynns lawyers, having read the room, asked for the sentencing to be postponed until March. Greg Brower, a former U.S. attorney and senior FBI official, told TIME that the hearing illustrated the disconnect between the frenzied political arguments about the Mueller investigation, often playing out on cable TV, and the routine workings of the law. A lot of the nonsense that we see in the news every day the right-wing talking points about Bob Mueller and the FBI and the DOJ none of that makes any sense to the average federal judge, he said. With hearings like this, we see an example of an apolitical judge just applying the law. And sometimes people are a little taken aback by that, but thats the way its supposed to work. Still, some experts said that the nature of the FBI interview with Flynn was not above reproach, particularly the involvement of two players who later came under fire for different reasons: the deputy director who called Flynn, Andrew McCabe; and one of the agents who stopped by to chat with him, Peter Strzok. McCabe was later fired after the Justice Department determined that he lacked candor during an investigation into a leak, while Strzok was removed from the Mueller investigation and later fired after it was found that he had disparaged Trump in text messages to another FBI agent with whom he was having an affair. Trump has repeatedly criticized both officials by name, arguing that they are part of a witch hunt against him. Thomas J. Baker, a former FBI special agent, said the officials were too closely involved in the investigation. The fundamental problem in this investigation from the FBI end was the way it was managed, he told TIME. Contrary to traditional FBI operations, you had a situation where the decision makers Peter Strzok, McCabe and two or three others were the only ones involved in it. They were making all the decisions in the investigation and actually going out and conducting the investigation. And thats bad because you dont have any independent review. But within the D.C. courtroom, none of that seemed to matter. In a series of biting questions, Judge Sullivan undermined Flynns lawyers line of argument, pressing Flynn on whether he knew that lying to the FBI was a crime and pushing his attorneys to make the case that their client had indeed been entrapped. To each question, the lawyers answered that Flynn knew what he did was wrong, that he had not been tricked by the agents and that he still wanted to plead guilty. Bradley Moss, a Washington-based lawyer who specializes in national security law, said Flynns lawyers argument was thin to begin with. He noted that Flynn was informed ahead of time that investigators would be asking him about his contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and that he was asked if he wanted to have White House lawyers present for the meeting with agents. It was Flynns mistake not to have lawyers there, Moss said. My seven-year-old knows to ask for legal counsel, only because her father keeps Law and Order on the background all the time, he said. With Abby Vesoulis in Washington WASHINGTON It all appeared to be a done deal. Russia special counsel Robert Mueller urged that Michael Flynn, President Donald Trump's former national security adviser, serve no prison time for his communication with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Flynn stepped to the lectern in federal court Tuesday to declare he was ready to accept responsibility for his crimes and proceed to sentencing. Nobody in the packed courtroom especially Flynn expected the blistering rebuke unleashed by U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan, who went as far as to question the patriotism of the retired three-star Army general, wheeling to face the courtrooms American flag to suggest that Flynns conduct undermined all the banner stood for. Arguably, you sold your country out, Sullivan said. More: Judge delays sentencing for Michael Flynn, Trump's ex-national security adviser More: President Trump says 'good luck' to Michael Flynn on day of sentencing At the end of the extraordinary hearing, Flynns attorneys acceded to Sullivans warning that they postpone sentencing at least until March. The move allows Flynn to formally complete his cooperation with Muellers team in the Russia investigation and at least one other inquiry in which two of Flynns former business associates were charged this week with illegal lobbying on behalf of the government of Turkey. Rarely are cooperating witnesses sentenced before their assistance is completed, Sullivan told Flynn, expressing "disgust" over Flynn's conduct. Last week, attorneys raised the notion that Flynn might have been entrapped during an FBI interview Jan. 24, 2017, when the national security adviser falsely denied discussing newly imposed Russian sanctions with Kislyak. Almost immediately after Tuesday's hearing opened, Sullivan seized on the claims made by Flynn's lawyers, who suggested that agents had not properly warned their client of the criminal consequences for lying to the FBI. Story continues Sullivan asked whether Flynn asserted the claims in an effort to cast doubt on his guilty plea. Defense attorney Robert Kelner disavowed any such attempt, asserting that "Gen. Flynn fully accepts responsibility." The tenor of the hearing and the judge suddenly turned against the decorated military officer and vocal Trump surrogate. Asked whether he needed more time to consider the claims related to the FBI interview, Flynn told the judge, "I appreciate that. No. I would like to proceed, your honor." More: Flynn's lawyers request no prison time, defend cooperation with Mueller team More: Mueller: No 'coercion' in Flynn interview; urges court to reject attempt to downplay crime The expectation that Tuesday's hearing would allow Flynn and his family to finally turn the page on an exacting yearlong slog through the most high-profile criminal investigation in the country all but drained away as Sullivan recounted Flynn's false statements as a ranking official in Trump's White House. "I'm going to be frank with you," Sullivan said. "This is a very serious offense. It involves making false statements to the FBI on the premises of the White House in the West Wing!" The interview with FBI agents occurred in Flynn's White House office, four days after he assumed his post as national security adviser. Though Sullivan referenced Flynn's career military service and lack of a prior criminal record, he suggested that Flynn's conduct marked a serious betrayal he could not ignore. "I cannot hide my disgust or my disdain for the crimes you committed," Sullivan said. The judge drew a head-snapping response from the defense table when he asked prosecutors whether Flynn's behavior amounted to "treason." Prosecutors said there was no basis for such a charge, and the judge walked back the reference, saying he did not mean to imply Flynn committed treason. "Don't read too much into my questions," Sullivan told the courtroom gallery after returning from a short break. The judge's admonition could not erase the sting inflicted on the combat veteran and career military officer. "I cannot assure you that, if you proceed today, you will not be sentenced to a period of incarceration," Sullivan told Flynn, suggesting that he seek a delay until his cooperation was complete so it could count in his favor. After a short recess to confer, Kelner said Flynn would seek the postponement, asserting that his client "held nothing back from prosecutors. Kelner said Flynn would probably be called to testify at any trials of two former business associates accused of illegal lobbying on behalf of the Turkish government. The charges were unveiled Monday, and prosecutors acknowledged that Flynn could have faced charges in that case had he not agreed to cooperate with Mueller's team. As part of his plea, Flynn admitted lying about his Turkish lobbying efforts. He belatedly registered with the Justice Department as a foreign agent for Turkey. "Im not promising anything, Sullivan told Kelner about sentencing. The court was just being upfront with you. Sullivan set a status conference in the case for March, but before adjourning the session, he offered one last parting shot: "Happy holidays," he said. Flynn, accompanied by his wife, left the courthouse, rushing through a gantlet of protesters and supporters to a waiting car without comment. "Lock him up!" some called out, echoing Flynn's similar refrain at the podium of the 2016 Republican Convention, when he referred to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and the email investigation that shadowed her campaign. Other placard-waving demonstrators shouted encouragement to Flynn, chanting, "USA! USA!" Supporters of former national security adviser Michael Flynn sing "God Bless America" as they rally for him before Flynn is sentenced in U.S. District Court for lying to the FBI about his communication with former Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, Dec. 18, 2018, in Washington. This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Michael Flynn's sentencing collapses amid a judge's 'disgust' over former national security adviser's conduct The sentencing of Donald Trumps former national security advisor Michael Flynn has been abruptly delayed to allow him to finish his cooperation with Robert Muellers Russia probe, a move recommended to him if he wanted to avoid going to jail. Judge Emmet Sullivan offered the lawyers for the 60-year-old former army general the opportunity both to reconsider his guilty plea and to postpone his sentencing as he continues to work with the special counsels team. Mr Sullivan, who was concerned by the fact that prosecutors had recommended he receive no jail time, warned the man who briefly served in the Trump administration that he may have gone to prison if sentencing went ahead on Tuesday, as had been scheduled The courts going to consider that. I cannot assure you, if you proceed today, you will not receive a sentence of incarceration, Mr Sullivan had said. Im not hiding my disgust, my disdain for this criminal offence. Arguably you sold your country out. Flynn replied: Yes your honour. Support free-thinking journalism and subscribe to Independent Minds Asked later whether the White House was concerned that Flynn had admitted lying, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said: There is certainly concern, but well let the courts determine that. Reports said the hearing in Washington DC had started quietly as the judge asked Flynn, who once served as Director of the Defence Intelligence Agency under Barack Obama, whether he wished to change his plea. The former officer pleaded guilty last December to one count of lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian officials, among them Russias former US ambassador Sergey Kislyak. I do not, replied Flynn. But the mood began to darken as the judge then began expressing his views about Flynns offences. At one point he asked prosecutors if Flynn might have been indicted for treason. That was not something we were considering at the time, charging the defendant, said prosecutor Brandon Van Grack. Story continues After a brief delay, Mr Sullivan returned to the courtroom to play down the project of a treason conviction. Im not suggesting [Flynn committed treason]. I was just trying to determine the benefit and the generosity of the government, he said. Dont read too much into the questions I ask. Reuters said the judge also noted that Flynn was operating as an undeclared lobbyist for Turkey even as he worked on Trumps election team and prepared to be his national security adviser. The hearing came a day after two of Flynns business associates were charged with illegally lobbying for Turkey as part of a campaign to pressure the nation to expel a Turkish cleric. Bijan Kian and Ekim Alptekin were accused in an indictment of conspiring to covertly and unlawfully influence US public opinion and politicians, all while concealing the Turkish government was controlling their work. The campaign took place during the final months of the 2016 presidential campaign while Flynn was a top surrogate for Mr Trumps campaign. Mr Sullivan appeared ready to sentence Flynn to prison but then gave him the option of a delay in his sentencing so that he could further cooperate with any pending investigations, Reuters said. Flynn accepted that offer. Good luck today in court to General Michael Flynn. Will be interesting to see what he has to say, despite tremendous pressure being put on him, about Russian Collusion in our great and, obviously, highly successful political campaign. There was no Collusion! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 18, 2018 Quite what further cooperation he can provide is unclear. Earlier this month, in a sentencing memo filed with the court, Mr Mueller said Flynn had cooperated so much with investigators, they recommended he should not receive jail time. His early cooperation was particularly valuable because he was one of the few people with long-term and firsthand insight, prosecutors wrote. The defendant deserves credit for accepting responsibility in a timely fashion and substantially assisting the government. They added: Given the defendants substantial assistance and other considerations set forth below, a sentence at the low end of the guideline range including a sentence that does not impose a term of incarceration is appropriate and warranted. Tuesday had started with Mr Trump wishing good luck to Flynn, who served as national security adviser from 20 January to 13 February 2017, until he was told to quit after admitting lying to vice president Mike Pence and others about the nature of his conversations with Russian officials. Will be interesting to see what he has to say, despite tremendous pressure being put on him, about Russian Collusion in our great and, obviously, highly successful political campaign. There was no Collusion, he wrote. Mr Mueller is leading the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, possible collusion between Moscow and Trump campaign officials and whether the president has unlawfully sought to obstruct the probe. By Sonam Rai and Stephen Nellis (Reuters) - U.S. chipmaker Micron Technology Inc gave on Tuesday quarterly sales and profit forecasts well below Wall Street estimates, citing a market glut of memory chips as consumer and business demand for phones and computers is weakening. Micron said it expected industry output, including from South Korean rivals Samsung Electronics Co Ltd <005930.KS> and SK Hynix <000660.KS>, to outstrip demand from the makers of phones, PCs and servers, pushing down Micron chip prices. Samsung had already warned of a slowdown in demand and drop in chip prices, flagging an end to a two-year boom in memory chips as global demand for mobile and other electronics devices wanes and fresh supplies from Hynix and Toshiba Corp <6502.T> hit the market. Hynix has also offered a downbeat outlook. Micron Chief Executive Sanjay Mehrotra told investors on a conference call on Tuesday that the company was taking "decisive actions in terms of reducing our production output" to hold the line on prices. "We are always reviewing how to best align our output with market demand to focus on delivering healthy profitability," Mehrotra said in an interview. But the glut will hammer Micron in the short term, with the company estimating revenue of $5.7 billion to $6.3 billion for its fiscal second quarter and gross margins of 50 to 53 percent, compared to analysts' estimates of $7.3 billion and 55 percent, according to I/B/E/S data from Refinitiv. Shares of the Boise, Idaho-based company fell as much as 8.5 percent in extended trading after the forecast, before paring losses to 2.8 percent. Asked about Micron's comments, Hynix told Reuters that in the short term, the memory chip sector would struggle through a period of relatively low growth due to weak demand in the smartphone and PC markets, but the outlook would brighten in the long term. Hynix shares were down 1.6 percent in late morning trading in South Korea. Samsung shares were up slightly. "The worse may not be over yet if the end-market demand weakens further," said analyst Kinngai Chan of Summit Insights Group. Micron is responding to the oversupply of DRAM and NAND memory chips by investing more in its next generation of chips. Major suppliers to smartphone makers such as Apple Inc have lowered their sales forecasts, citing weak demand from device makers. Data centers, which have been a boon for Micron as cloud computing providers like Amazon.com's Amazon Web Services have become massive businesses, were a weak spot in Micron's earnings. On the post-earnings call, Mehrotra cited "inventory adjustments" at data centers for the pressure on revenue. Several chipmakers have cited strong demand in the months before U.S. tariffs were imposed on some Chinese goods, leaving analysts wondering if data center owners had tried to get in orders ahead of the levies. "We expect this headwind will persist for a couple of quarters. We are seeing some cloud customers go through a digestion period following very strong growth over the last two years," Mehrotra said. Stifel analyst Kevin Cassidy said Micron was making the right move by slashing output instead of cutting prices to gain market share as it had in the past. "We see today's announcements as prioritizing profitability over market share gains," he said. Micron's gross margin was 59 percent for the fiscal first quarter, and executives said U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods cut its gross margins by about half a percentage point, at the lower end of the negative impact it told investors in September. Micron is ahead of schedule in addressing the expected impact of U.S. tariffs on its products, Manish Bhatia, Micron's executive vice president of global operations, said in an interview. "We made very good progress across multiple sites in our (factory) network taking the products that were being made in China and destined for the United States and quickly transferring them to other sites outside of China," he said. Net sales rose 16 percent to $7.91 billion, short of analysts' expectations of $8.02 billion. Excluding items, Micron earned $2.97 per share, narrowly beating the analyst average estimate of $2.96, according to I/B/E/S data from Refinitiv. (Reporting by Sonam Rai in Bengaluru and Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; additional reporting by Heekyong Yang in SEOUL; Editing by Richard Chang and Muralikumar Anantharaman) Rio de Janeiro (AFP) - Parts of France have become "unlivable" because of migrants, Brazil's president-elect Jair Bolsonaro has said, using rhetoric similar to Donald Trump's before he became the US president. Bolsonaro, who takes office on January 1, made the controversial remarks late Tuesday in a live video feed on his Facebook page. The extreme right-wing politician was elected in October on a hardline anti-crime and anti-corruption platform and has been dubbed the "Tropical Trump." "Everybody knows what is happening in France. Some parts of France are simply unlivable," Bolsonaro said on Facebook. He said that, despite a good welcome by the French, migrants were not integrating. "You know how those people are, right? They have something in them, they don't give up their roots and they want to make their culture, their acquired rights and their privileges prevail," he said. "France is suffering because of that. Part of the population, part of the military, some of the institutions are starting to complain about that. We don't want that for Brazil." It was not clear what recent events prompted Bolsonaro's outburst. Nor did he explicitly say whether he was referring to Muslim migrants, though those with North African heritage form the biggest group of migrants in France after Europeans. France is currently in the grip of "yellow vest" anti-government protests unrelated to migration. It has been rocked by a number of recent deadly attacks, notably in November 2015 in which 130 people were murdered in Paris by radicalized French- and Belgian-born gunmen, and last week in the city of Strasbourg where a French-born ex-convict killed five people in a rampage claimed by the Islamic State group. France's embassy in Brazil declined to comment on Bolsonaro's declarations. - Aligning with Trump - The rhetoric by Bolsonaro recalled that employed by Donald Trump in December 2015 as he was campaigning to become US president. Story continues Speaking to US network MSNBC, Trump claimed "they have sections in Paris that are radicalized, where the police refuse to go there. They're petrified. The police refuse to go in there." Trump also said parts of London were similarly dangerous, and used those assertions to justify a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States." After becoming president, Trump issued an order that largely bars citizens from five Muslim-majority countries getting US visas. Bolsonaro did not say whether he would impose tighter immigration controls, but did repeat that he will pull Brazil out of a nonbinding global migration pact ratified by the UN General Assembly on Wednesday. "Unfortunately, Brazil... signed the pact. We are not against migrants, but we must be have very rigorous criteria for those entering Brazil. We are going to denounce and revoke this pact on migration," he said. - Venezuela, Cuba - In the same Facebook video, Bolsonaro said he would do everything possible to counter the governments of Venezuela and Cuba, calling their leaders "dictators" and saying neither was invited to his inauguration. Before and after his October election Bolsonaro has signalled he wants closer ties with the United States and with Trump. Bolsonaro said in November his intention was to move his country's embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, joining the US mission there, although added "it hasn't been decided yet." Almost all other countries believe the status of Jerusalem first needs to be resolved through negotiations. Israel claims all the city as its capital, while Palestinians claim the eastern part as the capital of their future state. Brazil's president-elect has also followed Trump in taking a harder stance against China, his country's biggest trading partner, although members of his incoming government warn any actions against the Asian powerhouse could crimp the economy. Last month, Trump's national security advisor, John Bolton, visited Bolsonaro and said the US anticipated a "dynamic partnership" with the Brazilian leader. UK citizens living in Europe taking part in an anti-Brexit demonstration in London (Getty) UK citizens will lose their automatic legal rights to live on the continent under a no-deal Brexit, the European commission has confirmed. It had been reported earlier this week that UK citizens could benefit from a six-to-nine-month transition period during which they would continue be treated like EU citizens even under a no-deal. However, the contingency action plan published by the commission on Wednesday contains no such arrangement. Instead it spells out how the 1.2 million UK citizens living on the continent will be treated like citizens of any other non-EU country immediately after a no-deal Brexit. READ MORE: EUs Verhofstadt blasts Hunt for glorifying no-deal Brexit If the withdrawal agreement is not ratified, EU citizens residing in the United Kingdom would no longer be protected by the EU rules on free movement, it says. UK nationals in the European Union would be subject, as of the withdrawal date, to the general rules that apply to third country nationals in the EU. This would have an impact on their right to stay and work where they currently live as well as on the social security protection they benefit from. The right of residence of UK citizens would be left in the hands of individual member states. Anyone wanting to reside in the EU for longer than 90 days would have to apply for a residence permit or a long-stay visa. UK citizens will have to apply for a visa or residency permit to live in the EU under a no-deal Brexit (Getty) The British in Europe group said its members were having palpitations at the prospect of becoming illegal in 100 days. The group also said it is appalled that transition arrangements have been made for financial services and transport but not for people. This means that there will be no soft landing for over 1.2mn British nationals living on the continent who will have to adjust to life as third-country nationals overnight once all their EU rights have been stripped from them, said British in Europe co-chair Jane Golding. The commission said though it would invite member states to take a generous approach to the rights of UK citizens in the EU, provided that this approach is reciprocated by the UK. Story continues In particular, member states should take measures to ensure that UK citizens legally residing in the EU on the date of withdrawal will continue to be considered legal residents, their statement added. Member states should adopt a pragmatic approach to granting temporary residence status. READ MORE: EU ramps up no-deal plans amid deep freeze in Brexit talks As well as citizens rights, the commission has also published its contingency plans for transport, financial services, customs and climate policy. Vice-president Valdis Dombrovskis said they help turn an abrupt exit into a soft landing in these areas. He also failed to spell out how the commissions plan was different to the so-called managed no-deal being advocated by pro-Brexit cabinet ministers in the UK. But Dombrovskis warned: It cannot replicate the benefits of the withdrawal agreement and certainly cannot replicate the benefits of EU membership. It comes as the UK government sets out its own immigration plans for the post-Brexit era today, designed to remove preferential access for citizens from the EU. UK home secretary Sajid Javid said it would be the biggest shake-up in 40 years to the countrys immigration system, during a Wednesday morning radio interview with BBC Radio 4s Today programme. He is under pressure to bring down immigration into the country. The proposed rules are expected to outline that new immigrants must have a job offer and an annual salary above 30,000 ($38,000) before they can come into Britain on a five-year visa. Money works better Cash transfers are assuming importance in social welfare and anti-poverty policies MobileIrons MOBL cloud-based unified endpoint management (UEM) offering which comprises MobileIron Threat Defense and MobileIron Access was recently selected by Montagu Evans. Montagu Evans is a partnership firm of property consultants and chartered surveyors engaged primarily in real estate in the U.K. With MobileIron Access, users can seamlessly access and download the required applications, in turn enhancing productivity. Meanwhile, MobileIron Threat Defense ensures data security on the go. Notably, MobileIron stock has returned 11.8% year to date, outperforming industry's decline of 0.5%. Cyber Security & Easy Access to Mobile Data Hold Key The growing focus on client satisfaction is increasing mobility among employees of an organization. The job requires employees to switch between client site and office which in turn leads to increased use of devices including smartphones, enabling employees to access client data on the go. The aforementioned factors increase the risk of losing or compromising valuable client data to unsecured networks, for instance. This calls for a secure platform ensuring seamless access to client data irrespective of employee location and time, which is where MobileIrons UEM solutions come handy. In the words of the head of IT at Montagu Evans, Mark Sedgwick, MobileIron is the perfect solution to meet the demands of our ongoing progressive IT strategy, significantly improving our cyber security posture. Rapid Adoption to Benefit Top-Line MobileIron appears to be benefiting from growing clout of its UEM solution, which was recently recognized as a leading solution in the market by Gartner and Forrester, among other research firms. The companys products, particularly MobileIron Cloud and MobileIron Access enjoy steady demand particularly from federal governments worldwide. Previous contract wins from Slovenian railways and the Public Health Agency of Sweden bode well for the companys growth prospects. Story continues Robust adoption of UEM suite of solutions is expected to favor top-line growth, going ahead. Moreover, MobileIron continues to gain from its product selections by wireless carriers like Verizon Communications and T-Mobile. Notably, MobileIron revenues of $49.25 million for the third quarter 2018 improved 15.3% from the year-ago quarter. Additionally, the companys strength in UEM solution is enabling it to rapidly penetrate into high growth Enterprise Mobile Management (EMM) and Cloud Security markets. Per a Stratistics MRC report as revealed by Reuters, worldwide enterprise mobility market is envisioned to witness a CAGR of 21.9% to reach approximately $1225.8 billion in 2026 from $206.13 billion in 2017. Furthermore, per ReportsnReports estimates, the cloud security market will witness a CAGR of 25.5% to reach around $12.73 billion by 2022 from approximately $4.1 billion in 2017. Apart from the aforementioned reports, increasing IT management spending indicate strong growth prospects for MobileIron. Zacks Rank & Other Key Picks MobileIron carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). Twitter, Inc. TWTR, Upland Software UPLD and Intel INTC are some other stocks worth considering in the broader technology sector. All the three stocks flaunt a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank stocks here. Long-term earnings growth rate for Twitter, Upland Software and Intel is currently pegged at 22.1%, 20% and 8.4%, respectively. 3 Medical Stocks to Buy Now The greatest discovery in this century of biology is now at the flashpoint between theory and realization. Billions of dollars in research have poured into it. Companies are already generating revenue, and cures for a variety of deadly diseases are in the pipeline. So are big potential profits for early investors. Zacks has released an updated Special Report that explains this breakthrough and names the best 3 stocks to ride it. See them today for free >> Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report Twitter, Inc. (TWTR) : Free Stock Analysis Report Upland Software, Inc. (UPLD) : Free Stock Analysis Report MobileIron, Inc. (MOBL) : Free Stock Analysis Report Intel Corporation (INTC) : Free Stock Analysis Report To read this article on Zacks.com click here. Zacks Investment Research Helmer Conley Adds Two Former Prosecutors Helmer, Conley & Kasselman in Haddon Heights added two attorneys as of counsel. Helmer, Conley Adds Two Of Counsel Diane M. Ruberton Photo Credit: christinefoster.Diane M. Ruberton previously was first assistant prosecutor and acting prosecutor for the Atlantic County Prosecutors Office, where she spent 19 years. At Helmer Conley, Ruberton will concentrate in criminal law and work in the firms Vineland office, the firm said. Helmer, Conley Adds Two Of Counsel Joel H. Aronow Photo Credit: christinefoster. Joel H. Aronow joined from a civil litigation law firm. He previously served in the Camden County Prosecutor Offices Special Prosecution Unit. At Helmer Conley, he will focus on litigation and criminal matters in the firms Trenton office, the firm said. Flaster Greenberg Opens in Florida Flaster Greenberg Opens Florida Office in Boca Raton David S. Neufeld Flaster Greenberg earlier this year announced the opening of a satellite office in Boca Raton, Florida, to be headed by David S. Neufeld, a a partner in the corporate, tax, and trusts and estates group. For many reasons, exacerbated by the recent changes in the tax laws, there has been a consistent migration of high net worth individuals to Florida from New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York, both seasonal and permanent, and we have as a result developed a large client base in Palm Beach County, Naples and Orlando over the years, Neufeld, who will reside part-time in the Boca office, said in a statement. Our existing clients include those with substantial estates, burgeoning entrepreneurial ventures, successful businesses contemplating sale or succession, and individuals with multiple residences." Neufeld has been practicing for 34 years in tax law and estate planning, and has built a sizeable client base in the Northeast and Florida, the firm said. He joined Flaster Greenberg in June 2018. Pashman Stein Adds Trusts & Estates Associates Pashman Stein Adds Trusts & Estates Associates Victoria Friedrich Victoria Torie Friedrich and Monica Babula joined Pashman Stein Walder Hayden in Hackensackas associates in the trusts and estates and elder law group. Friedrich handles estate administration, including probate and administration practice, asset marshaling, debt negotiation, asset valuation, preparation of federal and state estate tax returns, and informal settlement of estates. She earned her J.D., cum laude, from Pace University School of Law, and her B.S. from Rutgers University in Newark. During law school, Friedrich interned at the Bergen County Surrogates Court and the Law Offices of Bart A. Chase, and clerked at the Law Offices of Edward M. Eustace. She previously was an associate with Joseph H. Gruner, P.C. Babula, previously an attorney with the Hudson County Surrogates Office, earned her J.D. from Seton Hall University School of Law and her B.A. from The College of New Jersey. During law school, she interned for U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Rosemary Gambardella and for the Hudson County Surrogates Office. She also clerked for Superior Court Judges Marybeth Rogers and Barry P. Story continues Pashman Stein Adds Trusts & Estates Associates Monica Babula Sarkisian in the Chancery Division. Joseph L. Goldman, head of the firm's trusts and estates group, said in a statement that the firm is "excited for them to assist with our trust & estate planning and administration, and business succession planning matters. Firm managing partner Michael S. Stein said they will provide valuable support to our leading trusts & estates and elder law practice." North Carolina Republican Party officials accused state officials of being secretive and said they must swiftly certify a GOP congressional candidate the winner of an election unless they can present evidence the outcome of the contest was changed by illegal activity. The call comes as state election officials continue to probe irregularities in the race between Republican Mark Harris and Democrat Dan McCready in the states 9th Congressional District. The state board announced Friday it was pushing back the date for a public evidentiary hearing in the probe as it continues to gather evidence and now plans to hold the hearing on Jan. 11, eight days after the new Congress is seated. The resolution from the GOP executive committee in the 9th District came Monday after Harris, who leads McCready by 905 votes, suggested Republicans werent supporting him the way Democrats were backing his opponent. The GOP-controlled legislature passed a law last week that would require a new primary if the state board orders a do-over, leading to speculation that Republicans were trying to distance themselves from Harris. Much of the evidence that has emerged during the investigation so far suggests that McCrae Dowless, an operative working on Harris behalf, improperly collected absentee ballots from voters in Bladen and Robeson counties in the district. In those two counties, there was an unusually high number of absentee ballots that went unreturned to state officials. Absent clear and convincing evidence presented in public by the State Board of Elections that any alleged voting irregularities changed the outcome of the race or there is a substantial likelihood it could have been changed, the law requires Dr. Harris to be certified as the winner, the resolution says. The state board does not have to show irregularities could have changed the outcome of an election to order a new one. According to state law, the board can order a new election if irregularities or improprieties occurred to such an extent that they taint the results of the entire election and cast doubt on its fairness. Story continues Election officials have posted online evidence they are collecting as part of the investigation. That evidence, accessible to anyone, includes photocopied logs from election offices, as well as absentee ballot envelopes from ballots voters sent in. Last week Dallas Woodhouse, the executive director of the North Carolina GOP, said the party would also support a new election if state officials determined early vote numbers were leaked in Bladen County, something he said was fairly certain had happened. The resolution from Monday says that Republicans support a new election if the numbers were leaked and the information was used in a way that resulted in a substantial likelihood of changing the outcome of the race. Wayne Goodwin, the chairman of the North Carolina Democratic Party, accused Republicans of changing their position. Only days after stating that theyd support a new election, Republicans resorted back to attacking a bipartisan investigation into serious and clear allegations of fraud to benefit Mark Harris, he said in a statement. This is an attempt to steal an election after being caught red-handed. Its shameful, harmful to our democracy and North Carolina voters, and undermines the integrity of our elections. In an email, Woodhouse said the partys position on holding a new election has been consistent. We have always maintained that any irregularities must have changed the outcome of the race or there be a substantial likelihood the race could have been changed, he wrote. Those two positions are not in conflict. Some in the media missed the nuance in our position. Related Coverage Amid North Carolina Election Probe, Voters Are Scared, Confused And Angry GOP Candidate's Consultant Linked To 2nd County In North Carolina Election Probe More Evidence Of Illegal Activity Emerges In North Carolina Congressional Race Love HuffPost? Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today. This article originally appeared on HuffPost. Tafarwa Beckford has been jailed for life with a minimum of 32 years after he was convicted of the 2015 killing of Derek Junior Myers. (PA). A notorious gang member has been jailed for life with a minimum term of 32 years for shooting dead a father-of-two during an explosion of violence outside a nightclub. Tafarwa Beckford was found guilty of murder last week after standing trial under a false identity to avoid jurors learning of his links to previous gang-related killings in 2000 and 2003. The 36-year-old, of Duchess Road, Ladywood, Birmingham, was unanimously convicted of the 2015 killing of Derek Junior Myers, who was gunned down in the Hockley area of the city. Jailing Beckford for life at the citys Crown Court on Wednesday, Judge Patrick Thomas QC said the only sensible conclusion was that the killing had been a gang murder after a confrontation ended in a shoot-out. Derek Junior Myers, a father-of-two, shot dead by Tafarwa Beckford in Birmingham in 2015(PA). Jurors were not told that Beckford was acquitted of murder in both 2000 and 2005 after gang-related deaths, including the machine gun killings of two teenagers at a New Years Day party in Aston, Birmingham. Mr Myers died after being hit in the chest and jaw when Beckford opened fire at close range outside a pool hall, during a mass brawl which left another victim with life-changing injuries. Describing the killing as callous revenge after the shooting of Beckfords friend, the judge said: It is obvious that this should properly be described as a gang shooting two armed groups confronting each other, shots fired from both sides, death and extremely serious injuries, and a blanket of silence to conceal the truth from the authorities. Condemning the killing as a terrible event, the judge told Beckford: You and half a dozen others went to the club looking for trouble. Birmingham Crown Court, where Beckford was sentenced to life in prison with a minimum of 32 years. PA. You and at least one other wore face masks, or scarves pulled up over your lower face. Why you perceived the need for a confrontation I do not know and will not guess. You and your associates swaggered into the club, keeping your coats on and hoods up. I have no doubt that you believed Derek Myers, whom you knew to have a gun, was responsible for the shooting of your close friend. In fact he was not. Story continues That your friend was, as I am sure you believed, killed in the first stage of that confrontation does not afford you any excuse for what you went on to do. Any sentence the court passes must demonstrate that the people of this country, the people of this city, will not tolerate armed gang warfare on their streets. Beckford has 20 previous convictions for largely minor offences and has only once previously been jailed for violent disorder in 2001. His latest court trial was told that trouble flared outside the Big Bang pool hall at about 4am on October 30 2015. Police believe the disorder involved factions of Birminghams Burger Bar gang following a fall-out between members. During the violence Marvin Duffus was stabbed and shot five times at close range, leaving him with brain damage. Almost exactly 60 seconds later, Beckford was caught on CCTV as he shot 25-year-old Mr Myers. Despite around 150 people being in the club, and many onlookers witnessing the shootings, only a handful of people came forward. Defence barrister Ali Bajwa QC, offering mitigation during the sentencing hearing, said the killing was not premeditated and had been provoked by the shooting of Mr Duffus. Commenting after the sentencing, Detective Chief Superintendent Mark Payne, head of CID for West Midlands Police, said: Tafarwa Beckford is an iconic criminal. I think he saw himself as above the law. I think this is one of the most significant convictions in Birmingham over the last 20 years. He has been linked to a number of murders and shootings over very many years. Watch the latest videos from Yahoo UK It was a week where both oil and natural gas finished lower. On the news front, French oil and gas major TOTAL S.A. TOT announced it was paring its stake in the Ichthys liquefied natural gas project, while energy biggies Suncor SU and Phillips 66 PSX set their investment budgets for 2019. Overall, it was a dismal week for the sector. While West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures lost 2.7% to close at $51.20 per barrel, natural gas prices plunged some 14.7% to $3.827 per million Btu (MMBtu). (See the last Oil & Gas Stock Roundup here: Chevron's Capex Boost, Schlumberger's Revenue Warning & More) The U.S. crude benchmark fell last week, signaling that industry observers are skeptical about the effectiveness of OPEC+ coalitions production cuts in tightening the market. EIA's inventory release showing a weekly draw in crude stockpiles that was well below expectations also contributed to the losses. Meanwhile, natural gas prices recorded their biggest weekly fall in almost three years after forecasts of bearish weather outlook raised some red flags regarding heating demand. Recap of the Weeks Most Important Stories 1. TOTAL announced that it has decided to sell 4% interest in the Ichthys liquefied natural gas (LNG) project to its operating partner INPEX for $1.6 billion. This decision is subject to Australian regulatory approvals and will lower the companys stake in the Ichthys project to 26%. The primary reason behind the decision to sell interest in Ichthys is to mitigate the impact of cost overruns. The final capital expenditure of the project is estimated to be $45 billion, up 12.5% from the estimates provided in 2017. The decision to sell 4% interest is to control its capital employed in Ichthys. Notwithstanding the Ichthys stake sale, TOTAL has been working to expand its presence in the LNG market through acquisitions and partnerships, given the fact that demand for the clean burning fuel is rising across the globe. TOTALs decision to acquire Engies LNG portfolio for $1.5 billion, coupled with the 26% interest it still holds in Ichthys, will continue to support the companys LNG business. (Read more TOTAL to Sell 4% Interest in Ichthys to Offset Cost Overruns) Story continues 2. Suncor Energy recently announced its corporate guidance and estimated capital budget in the range of C$4,900-C$5,600 million for 2019, higher than C$4,500-C$5,000 million guided for 2018. The integrated energy player used C$4,131 million for capital and exploration in the first nine months of 2018. Notably, 63% of the companys total capital budget for 2019 will be directed toward planned sustaining and maintenance activities, while the rest can be invested in value creating projects with low capital intensity. Suncors capital expenditure program incorporates its initiatives to expand the infrastructure of midstream logistics, improve margins and reduce cost over the 2020-2023 time period. These are expected to positively impact the companys operations, enabling it to increase dividends, buy back shares and further strengthen its balance sheet, which currently has a debt-to-capitalization of 22.6%. Suncor intends to allot C$3,050-C$3,400 million for upstream oil sands expenditures, and C$1,000-C$1,200 million for upstream exploration and production. This leads to a total upstream capital budget of C$4,050-C$4,600 million compared with 2018 guided range of C$3,650-C$4,050 million. The company spent C$3,544 million in the first nine months of 2018. (Read more What Does Suncor's 2019 Capital Expenditure Plan Reveal?) 3. Phillips 66 has released 2019 capital budget of an estimated $2.3 billion, unchanged from the estimated capex for 2018. Of the total, $1.4 billion will be allocated to growth capital and the remaining $900 million will be allocated to sustaining capital. Phillips 66 has apportioned $1 billion toward the Midstream segment, of which $847 million is for growth capital and the rest is for sustaining capital. The company plans to invest $923 million in the Refining segment, with $512 million allocated toward consistency, security and environmental projects. Phillips 66 has allocated $161 million of the total capital spending to Marketing and Specialties. The Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) company also intends to fund $177 million in the Corporate and Other projects, related to information technology and facilities. You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here. Taking into consideration the total capex allocation for Phillips 66 Partners L.P. the total capex for 2019 would be $2.9 billion. Phillips 66 Partners total capital allocation of $601 million will be completely directed towards the Midstream segment. (Read more Phillips 66 Sets 2019 Capital Expenditure at $2.3 Billion) 4. Bringing in pleasant news for investors, TechnipFMC plc FTI recently boosted its stock-buyback program by an additional $300 million, over and above its existing authorization of $500 million. In addition to boosting the repurchase program, it also outlined its financial guidance and capex budget for 2019. TechnipFMC projected its 2019 capex at $400 million, up from this years estimated level of $300 million. Importantly, TechnipFMC forecasts its subsea revenues within $5.4-$5.7 billion, reflecting an increase from this years guided range of $5-$5.3 billion. Moreover, the Surface Technologies segment is expected to generate revenues within $1.7-$1.8 billion in 2019, up from this years forecast of $1.5-$1.6 billion. While the 2019 revenue forecast for these two segments is higher than this years estimated levels, the company expects offshore/onshore revenues for the next year in the band of $5.7-$6 billion, which is a tad lower than $5.8-$6.1 billion projected for 2018. (Read more TechnipFMC Boosts Buyback: What Else Should You Know?) 5. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (or the FERC) recently approved Williams Companies Inc.s WMB Gateway project, which is an expansion of the firms Transco pipeline. Notably, the Transco pipeline delivers almost half of the natural gas consumed in New York and New Jersey. With the existing Transco pipeline capacity being fully utilized, the expansion will allow additional gas volumes to be delivered to the northeastern markets. Notably, the company had applied for the Gateway expansion projects FERC permit in late 2017. In July 2018, FERC released its Environmental Assessment for the Gateway project, citing that it meets the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act and the approval of the project is not likely to prove detrimental to the environment. Very recently, the FERC completed its review process and gave the final go-ahead to the project. Upon the receipt of the required regulatory approvals, the company is scheduled to commence the construction of the project in spring 2019. The Gateway expansion project is expected to come online by November 2020. With the Gateway expansion project, Williams will be able to fulfill its commitment to supply an incremental 65,000 dekatherms per day of firm transportation capacity and the mounting natural gas needs of customers in the Northeast during the winters of 2020 to 2021. (Read more Petrobras Ups Investment, Divestment Goals in New 5-Year Plan) Price Performance The following table shows the price movement of some the major oil and gas players over the past week and during the last 6 months. Company Last Week Last 6 Months XOM -2.7% -9% CVX -1.4% -10.1% COP -2.1% -4.7% OXY -2.2% -23.1% SLB -9.2% -41.4% RIG -8.9% -42.4% VLO -3.5% -35.3% MPC -2.7% -21.3% The Energy Select Sector SPDR a popular way to track energy companies generated a -3.1% return last week. The worst performer was oilfield services major Schlumberger SLB whose stock slumped 9.2%. Longer-term, over six months, the sector tracker is down 18.9%. Offshore driller Transocean Ltd. RIG was the major loser during this period, experiencing a 42.4% price decline. Whats Next in the Energy World? In this week, market participants will be closely tracking the regular releases i.e. the U.S. government statistics on oil and natural gas - one of the few solid indicators that comes out regularly. Energy traders will also be focusing on the Baker Hughes data on rig count. 3 Medical Stocks to Buy Now The greatest discovery in this century of biology is now at the flashpoint between theory and realization. Billions of dollars in research have poured into it. Companies are already generating revenue, and cures for a variety of deadly diseases are in the pipeline. So are big potential profits for early investors. Zacks has released an updated Special Report that explains this breakthrough and names the best 3 stocks to ride it. See them today for free >> Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report TechnipFMC plc (FTI) : Free Stock Analysis Report Phillips 66 (PSX) : Free Stock Analysis Report Suncor Energy Inc. (SU) : Free Stock Analysis Report Schlumberger Limited (SLB) : Free Stock Analysis Report TOTAL S.A. (TOT) : Free Stock Analysis Report Transocean Ltd. (RIG) : Free Stock Analysis Report Williams Companies, Inc. (The) (WMB) : Free Stock Analysis Report To read this article on Zacks.com click here. Zacks Investment Research Paul Weiss LinkedIn post announcing new partners. (Via LinkedIn) They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison has got an earful over one showing its latest partner promotions. The firms now-deleted post on Linkedin this month announcing its new partner class of 12 lawyers - an image dominated by white men and showing only one (white) woman in the lower right corner - generated a burst of criticism on social media, including by some general counsel. The comments highlight how promotion announcements of law firms are increasingly a hot topic of discussion by some general counsel, who may be assessing new partner classes to help make hiring decisions - and offering their own sometimes critical feedback. For Paul Weiss' new partner announcement, the comments on LinkedIn came swiftly. One lawyer posted that he was inspired to require a check of diversity records of all service providers as a condition of continued relationships, while other in-house counsel said they were dismayed by the homogeneity of this set of new partners and called the announcement very disappointing. The firm appeared to have deleted the post on Tuesday. Michelle Fang, chief legal officer at car-sharing company Turo, also spoke up, writing GCs like me that hire law firms for bet-the-company litigation and other commercial or corporate matters want to see announcements showing diverse new partners. She noted Cravath Swaine & Moores all-female new partner class of three lawyers. Several other elite firms promoted few, if any, women this year. Davis Polk & Wardwells new partner class, announced in July, includes seven men and one woman, while Proskauer Rose promoted 11 new partners, including only two women. Some corporate counsel point to even lower levels of ethnic and racial diversity in law firm promotions. In a statement to ALM, Paul Weiss chairman Brad Karp said: We certainly can - and will - do better. I regret the gender and racial imbalance in our newly elected partnership class (one woman, one Latino, one LGBTQ partner, only 25% diverse), which resulted from an idiosyncratic demographic pool and which I can assure you will not be repeated. We intend to continue to play a leadership role in diversity in terms of race, gender and sexual orientation. We look forward to being judged not by our words, but by our results, in the years to come, Karp said. There is no more important issue to me (and the firm's leadership) than diversity and it is critical to me that Paul Weiss maintain its historic leadership role as a firm that champions diversity in terms of race, gender and sexual orientation. Karp pointed out the firms history in hiring and promoting diverse lawyers, noting Paul Weiss was the first major New York law firm to hire an African-American male associate and female associate, in the 1940s; the first major New York law firm to elect a female partner, in the 1940s; and the first major New York firm to have a diversity of religious beliefs among its partners. Karp also noted that about one-third of the firms partnership are diverse, including women, people of color and LGBTQ partners, and the firms current first-year class is 55% women and 47%racially diverse and LGBTQ. Paul Weiss has also been ranked number one by the American Lawyer Diversity Scorecard, he noted. A woman, Valerie Radwaner, serves as the firms deputy chair, and women lead more than 30% of its practice groups and departments, he said. Our percentage of female, African-American and LGBTQ partners and associates greatly exceeds the average for New York and US law firms, Karp said. It would be unfortunate and disappointing if an idiosyncratic demographic pool in one particular year would erase the firm's diversity achievements over the past 75 years." Karp intends to address the firms diversity values further during the firms next town hall meeting with associates, scheduled in January. For his part, Davis Polk managing partner Tom Reid said in a statement that, Diversity is a constant, generational challenge that we address seriously and sincerely. One of the reasons we adhere to a lockstep compensation structure is that it eliminates any gender- and diversity-based pay inequities. A Proskauer spokeswoman said the firm's chairman, Joseph Leccese, was not immediately available to comment. 'Vote with our pocketbooks' Some corporate counsel say they are paying more attention to law firms' promotion announcements. We want to see announcements that show diversity in the new partner class, Fang said in an interview. She said corporate counsel can make an impact on diversity when they choose law firms. "I really am trying to be thoughtful about our resources and how I deploy them. Its extremely important that we vote with our pocketbooks and reward firms that are championing diversity and inclusion in how they promote and hire people," Fang said. "Its not a token gesture. To be clear, Fang said, lawyers shouldnt get ahead only because theyre women or people of colour. It is diversity and inclusion and quality. It is the best people. You are going to find the best people of every race and every gender. White males dont have a monopoly on talent. Fang also spoke on a common complaint among some firms - that it's difficult to build a diverse new partner class due to a pipeline challenge. What is going on at that firm that people are opting out of the partnership track?" she asked. "There are best practices to help people in the pipeline. Jennifer Chaloemtiarana, general counsel and chief compliance officer of health care navigation company Castlight, said she doesnt necessarily look at partner announcements alone, but they are a sign of how the firm is handling diversity in the more junior ranks. The partner announcement is merely the outcome of the work they have done leading up to that: were they diverse in their hiring? In their promotions? In the choice work they were giving to associates? By the time they get to partner promotions, it is basically too late, she said. Another in-house lawyer, Sangeetha Raghunathan, general counsel of crowd-funding platform Indiegogo, said she recently checked the promotion announcements of the firms her company works with - with some disappointing results. The companys outside counsel guidelines encourage firms to staff cases with a diverse range of lawyers, she added. Raghunathan said she plans to contact the firms she works with to encourage them to promote diversity in their firms, as part of an ongoing discussion of outside counsel guidelines. Law firm promotion announcements are now another factor to consider when hiring firms, she added. I know theyre coming from a good place. Its a good reminder that their clients actually read these things and pay attention, she said. Officials and Italian contractor have differing stories on Melamchi dispute and travel ban A day after the government said it had barred eight members of the Italian contractor for the Melamchi project from leaving the country, the relationship between Nepali authorities and Cooperativa Muratori e Cementisti di Ravenna appeared to have strained further on Tuesday when officials prevented two other Italians from flying out of Kathmandu. Conrad O'Brien contributors during the wrapping party, with all of the gifts going to a PathWays family. Events Conrad OBrien attorneys and staff participated in the PathWays PA Adopt-A-Family program, which pairs sponsors with a PathWays PA client family to contribute gifts and necessities for the holiday season. Conrad OBrien participates in this program annually to buy gifts for a family and then gather to wrap gifts for the donation. Conrad OBrien shareholder, Patricia Hamill, is a former board member of PathWays PA. PathWays PA is a social service agency that provides service and advocacy for women, children and families while helping them achieve self-sufficiency and family well-being. Additions Andrew C. Warren was named associate to The Chartwell Law Offices Philadelphia office. Prior to passing the bar, Warren worked as a law clerk with the firm assisting with workers compensation and general liability. Warren focuses his practice on workers compensation representing large employers and insurance carriers. He also practices general liability. ***** Kang Haggerty & Fetbroyt, a business litigation boutique with offices in Philadelphia and Marlton, New Jersey, added associate Beth A. Hurley and law clerk Mika Kapnoutzi. Hurley concentrates her practice in business litigation, class action and commercial litigation. Prior to joining Kang Haggerty, Hurley gained litigation experience serving as an assistant district attorney in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and Brooklyn, New York. In addition, she worked as an investigative attorney for the Brooklyn District Attorneys Office and prosecuted cases involving economic crimes, enterprise corruption, organized crime and environmental crimes. Hurley is admitted to the practice of law in Pennsylvania and New York. Kapnoutzi is a licensed attorney in Greece, permitting her to practice law in Europe. She will serve as a law clerk at Kang Haggerty until fulfilling requirements to sit for the bar in the United States. Story continues Honored On Nov. 9, the Montgomery Bar Association women in the law committees Margaret Richardson Award was presented to Montgomery County Common Pleas Judge Risa Vetri Ferman. The award was presented at the Sheraton Valley Forge Hotel by Pennsylvania Superior Court President Judge Susan Peikes Gantman and last years Margaret Richardson Award winner, state Rep. Kate Harper. Announcements The Legal is seeking contributing authors for its weekly In-House Counsel column. Articles can cover a broad range of subjects but should be of particular interest to in-house counsel. Contact Kristie Rearick at krearick@alm.com for more information or to submit a proposal. (Reuters) - Home furnishing retailer Pier 1 Imports Inc said on Wednesday its Chief Executive Officer Alasdair James has stepped down and the company is looking at various options as it struggles with falling sales. On Wednesday, the seller of wicker chairs and scented candles said it has retained Credit Suisse to help evaluate a full range of strategic alternatives, but it may not result in a sale. Pier 1, which is struggling to keep up with competing home furnishing companies, including Williams-Sonoma , said Cheryl Bachelder has been appointed interim CEO, effective immediately. In April, former CEO James detailed a three-year turnaround plan called "A New Day", aimed at reducing store clutter and inventory to drive revenue growth at the struggling retailer, which has not posted a profit for the last three consecutive quarters. "Clearly the 'New Day' strategic plan did not deliver the desired results fast enough," Bachelder said in a statement. "We will need to promptly narrow our strategic focus and hone our execution in a way that reinvigorates our top-line sales." Separately, Pier 1 reported a 12 percent fall in third-quarter net sales at $413.2 million, missing analysts' estimates of $452 million, according to IBES data from Refinitiv. "... the third quarter declines reflect continuing challenges in executing its turnaround strategy - particularly in a strong consumer spending cycle," Raya Sokolyanska, senior analyst at Moody's, said. The company's shares plunged 14.4 percent to 95 cents in extended trading. (Reporting by Uday Sampath in Bengaluru; Editing by James Emmanuel) Pierre Rochard: Lightning Adoption Will Basically Mirror Bitcoin Adoption Lightning is a second-layer solution for the Bitcoin blockchain that addresses the scaling issues surrounding it today. Similar to Bitcoin, Lightning is an open-source protocol in which anyone can contribute to. Whether it is through programming and developing applications or setting up a node, participation in Lightning is not just accessible. Its welcomed. The Lightning community is already vibrant and growing every day. Pierre Rochard is one person who has already cemented his place in the Bitcoin community as a strong advocate for the digital currency, founding the Bitcoin Advisory in 2013. More recently, his work with Lightning has garnered plenty of attention through his suite of Lightning applications. Specifically, Rochards Lightning plug-in integration for Microsoft Excel showed the world that Lightning has a place in commonly used applications. The Lightning plug-in uses neutrino, a sidechain solution whose purpose is to allow for interaction with Bitcoins global transaction history without downloading the entire blockchain. Specifically, neutrino was designed to facilitate this on devices with low-power processors, limited storage or bandwidth, and intermittent power essentially, a good fit for an Excel spreadsheet. As for the use-case of this application, Rochard has mentioned in the past that it is for power users who are highly familiar with the technologies being used and not for the everyday user. Nonetheless, its general purpose is to send Lightning payments from an Excel spreadsheet. Rochards suite of Lightning applications is a testament to the progress being made in developing Bitcoins second-layer solution in the first year of its existence. In the following interview with Bitcoin Magazine, Rochard discusses his Lightning plugin as well as the bigger picture of Lightning as it relates to the global adoption of Bitcoin. In the months since he announced that this plugin can run a full node within the spreadsheet. Rochard has created a node launcher GUI to help people set up a Lightning and Bitcoin node locally for the plugin to connect. Story continues My initial experimentation with the Excel plugin was that it would have a Lightning node bundled with it and running inside of it, using Neutrino instead of a full node, said Rochard. But there was a problem with that set-up. Neutrino is not implemented on mainnet, so it cant be used with real bitcoins yet, meaning that no one would be able to use the Excel plugin with real bitcoins. Neutrino versus Full Node Satoshis white paper describes a process called simple payment verification (SPV). But SPVs have never actually been implemented. Instead, Rochard explains, the Bitcoin community has settled for compromises that are SPV-ish. Right now, using this compromise process, a wallet will send a list of transaction IDs to a node and query all information relating to those transaction IDs. The trick is that not all of those transaction IDs that the SPV wallet is sending to the node are actually from the SPV wallet. Instead, the list includes a bunch of random information in addition to the actual queries it's actually interested in. This action is meant to preserve some privacy since the node doesnt know which piece of information is the specific piece it is looking for. It just knows its somewhere in there, hidden in a crowd of other bits of information. Still, however, Rochard pointed out that few mobile wallets actually implemented this process. Instead, most of them are basically contacting a trusted server that is just the specific addresses that its interested in and then it receives information back on this. So that provides zero privacy. With Neutrino, the full node sends whats called a block filter, which is essentially a short summary of a bitcoin block, to the light client and checks if specific transactions or addresses of interest have a match in this filter. If they do, said Rochard, then were going to request the full block and download that and then extract the data from it. So that, essentially, means you have way more privacy because now the full node doesnt know what specific transactions in that block got your interest because theres thousands of transactions in a block. Of course, Neutrino isnt as secure as the Bitcoin blockchain itself. Specifically, it doesnt validate all protocol rules, it just checks the transactions in a specific block. In other words, it doesnt verify the 21 million bitcoin limit, which opens up doors to compromises on security. I would strongly emphasize that there is simply no substitute for running your own full node, said Rochard. Really, the Neutrino functionality is kind of a convenience/UX improvement, but it it does compromise on the properties of Bitcoin. That was the other motivation for this node launcher that Rochard created. He wants the people with the bandwidth capabilities to run a full node to be able to do so. I think that we should have the UI for every platform and in every programming language and we should really have as many UIs as possible. As it relates to which ones are going to be most used, that's an area where I want maximum amount of competition and where really I embrace pluralism and would be against tribalism, which is unusual for me because I'm usually very tribalistic with my Bitcoin maximalism. When it comes to the Lightning UI, however, Rochard is far less tribalistic. I'm an alt-UI, Multi UI proponent, and the reason is that we're going to want to onboard the full spectrum of users. From people who are using Lightning on their mobile wallet, to the people that are using Lightning in a Chrome extension with Joule to people who are using Lightning in an Excel spreadsheet with my plugin. Wherever the user is most comfortable and wherever it is most practical and simple for them, I want there to be a wallet for them. The Future of Lightning: Overcoming Bottlenecks to Adoption I think that Lightning's adoption is going to basically mirror bitcoins adoption; and bitcoins adoption comes from a very grassroots source. It's not like a top-down thing, said Rochard. We've even seen Bitcoin businesses emerge from grassroots users for the most part. Someone becomes a Bitcoin enthusiast [gets] into the ecosystem and then starts a Bitcoin-related service where they see a gap. That's kind of been the general path. Rochard projects that the growth of Lightning will follow a similar path, but first, users will need tools that allow them to work with the protocol. You have people who are Bitcoin enthusiasts who are like, Oh, what's this neat, layer-two, offchain network that people are buzzing about on Twitter? I'm gonna go check that out. Now, I use Windows I have no technical capabilities and I don't know how to use a command line, so I can't get on Lightning today. Oh, Pierre came out with a node launcher. Okay, now I can get on Lightning. And that's that's how the process is going to happen. At first it's going to be ten people, then a hundred people and then a thousand people. Adoption Through Infrastructure Participating in a recent Lightning residency at Chaincode Labs was a pivotal moment for Rochard and turned him from being cautiously bullish to a cult-member, indoctrinated-fanatic of Lightning. There, he met a software developer at Bitmex who gave the impression that, while Lightning was on Bitmexs radar, it wasnt a priority from a development perspective. Now within the next couple of years, they're going to have a Lightning feature, Rochard suggested. That much is clear. So, I think that, you know, it's not within the next six months but within the next few years, exchanges are going to have Lightning features. Now the question is: How useful are these? Because if it's to deposit $20 worth of bitcoins, that's not useful for anyone. On top of figuring out how useful this is for exchanges, it's just too early right now. If we want thousands of dollars being transacted on Lightning in payments, we need to have atomic multipaths worked out among other things. Looking ahead, Rochard said that, when it comes to exchanges, Lightning adoption will continue to evolve; users will find themselves using bitcoin on-chain in the meantime. In the future, however, as the capacity of the Lightning Network increases, using Lightning for everyday transactions on exchanges will become automatic. In five years, its going to the the case that youre no longer going to be able to use bitcoin at an exchange without using Lightning, but thats much longer term. This article originally appeared on Bitcoin Magazine. Vatican City (AFP) - Pope Francis has accepted the resignation of Los Angeles auxiliary bishop Alexander Salazar over his "misconduct" with a minor, the Vatican said Wednesday. The case is the latest in a litany of child sexual abuse scandals to have rocked the Roman Catholic Church and its 1.3 billion followers around the world. Pope Francis has struggled to resolve the problem as the steady drip of scandal corrodes the church's authority but fresh cases surface regularly against a background of sharp divisions in Rome over the issue. The Vatican said an investigation by the Archbishop of Los Angeles had found suspicions about Salazar's behaviour to be "credible". A letter from the archbishop, Jose H. Gomez, said that in 2005 he had been "made aware of an allegation against Bishop Salazar of misconduct with a minor" during the 1990s when he was serving as a parish priest. The allegations were investigated by the police but not prosecuted, Gomez said. - Allegations not prosecuted - Gomez said that since Salazar was a bishop when the allegations were made, he had passed the issue to the Vatican "which conducted an investigation and imposed certain precautionary measures". Salazar, 69, "consistently denied any wrongdoing," Gomez said, and after obtaining permission from Rome, he had put the matter in the hands of the archdiocese's "independent Clergy Misconduct Oversight Board". "The Board found the allegation to be credible and I submitted its findings and recommendations along with my own votum to the Holy See to make its final determination as to Bishop Salazar's status," he said. "These decisions have been made out of deep concern for the healing and reconciliation of abuse victims and for the good of the Church's mission. "Let us continue to stay close to the victim-survivors of abuse, through our prayer and our actions." Story continues Earlier this year a US grand jury report found credible allegations against more than 300 predator priests and identified over 1,000 victims in decades of child sex abuse covered up by the Catholic Church in Pennsylvania. As a result of the church cover-up, almost every instance of abuse was too old to be prosecuted, the report said. The victims "were brushed aside, in every part of the state, by church leaders who preferred to protect the abusers and their institution above all," it said. During a visit to Ireland in August, Pope Francis met eight Irish abuse victims after expressing "pain and shame" over the "failure" of the Catholic Church authorities to deal with the abuses. The problem was clearly a major one -- 14,500 people applied for compensation through an Irish government scheme for those abused at juvenile facilities run by religious groups between 1936 and 1970. Observers said the trip was also notable for revealing how far the church's standing had been damaged by the scandal and how Ireland, traditionally a bastion of the faith, now appeared much less willing to give the Vatican the benefit of the doubt. Pope Francis has organised a conference in February in the Vatican, with bishops urged as part of preparations to "reach out and visit with victims of sexual abuse... to learn first hand the suffering that they have endured". WASHINGTON President Donald Trump called Wednesday for a U.S. withdrawal from Syria over the apparent objections of military advisers and a bipartisan group of lawmakers. The withdrawal of the more than 2,000 troops is based on Trumps decision that the mission against ISIS is complete, a U.S. official told USA TODAY. Military leaders, including Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, in recent weeks and months have spoken of the need for U.S. troops to remain in the eastern part of the country to help stabilize it and allow for peace negotiations to proceed. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., derided Trumps decision to withdraw, likening it to those made by former President Barack Obama to announce ahead of time plans to reduce forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Withdrawal of this small American force in Syria would be a huge Obama-like mistake, Graham tweeted. Withdrawal of this small American force in Syria would be a huge Obama-like mistake. https://t.co/atsjHUyJlB Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) December 19, 2018 In a statement, Graham added Trumps action would represent a big win for ISIS, Iran, Bashar al Assad of Syria, and Russia. I fear it will lead to devastating consequences for our nation, the region, and throughout the world, Graham said. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., tweeted that the move was a "major blunder" made against the Pentagon's advice. The decision to pull out of Syria was made despite overwhelming military advice against it. It is a major blunder. It it isnt reversed it will haunt this administration & America for years to come. Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) December 19, 2018 Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations panel, called it a dangerous decision that would destabilize the region, endanger Kurdish allies and embolden Americas enemies. Story continues Were leaving the Kurds at risk, were creating a vacuum, and were doing it in a way that puts Israel at risk because of Irans presence in Syria, Menendez said. In statements issued later Wednesday, White House and Pentagon spokeswomen equivocated on the defeat of ISIS that Trump referred to. White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Wednesday that the U.S. has "defeated the territorial caliphate." "These victories over ISIS in Syria do not signal the end of the Global Coalition or its campaign," Sanders said in a statement. "We have started returning United States troops home as we transition to the next phase of this campaign. She did not offer details on the next phase of the campaign against ISIS in her statement. Dana White, the chief Pentagon spokeswoman, went even further, saying the fight against ISIS continues. "The Coalition has liberated the ISIS-held territory, but the campaign against ISIS is not over," White said in a statement. "We have started the process of returning U.S. troops home from Syria as we transition to the next phase of the campaign. Yet in a tweet earlier on Wednesday morning, Trump declared victory. We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency, he wrote. Despite Trumps claims that the war against the Islamic State has been won, fighting by U.S.-led forces continues there. We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency. Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 19, 2018 On Saturday, there were 47 airstrikes conducted by war planes against ISIS targets, U.S. Central Command announced early Wednesday. The bombs struck 20 ISIS fighting units, destroyed petroleum tanks, a tunnel, vehicle and a mortar-firing position. Further, according to a recent report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, ISIS is far from obliterated. The Washington-based think tank estimates ISIS may still possess between 20,000 to 30,000 militants in Iraq and Syria. As recently as last week, officials said U.S. troops may need a longer stay to ensure that the military's accomplishments are "enduring." "I think it's fair to say Americans will remain on the ground after the physical defeat of the caliphate, until we have the pieces in place to ensure that that defeat is enduring," said Brett McGurk, Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS. Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declined earlier in December to put a timeline on withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria, suggesting they would be needed for some time to establish conditions for a long-term peace agreement. "We still have a long way to go and so I'd be reluctant to give a fixed time," Dunford said during a forum held by the Washington Post. The U.S.-led coalition has been fighting ISIS in the countries since 2014. More: Syria conflict explained: How did we end up here? U.S. troops, mostly special operations units, have been training local security forces in eastern Syria. In September, Mattis told reporters that declaring victory and leaving Syria would be a mistake. "I think that getting rid of the caliphate doesn't mean you then blindly say okay, we got rid of it, march out, and then wonder why the caliphate comes back and how many times have we seen look at even Iraq where they're still on the hunt for them. And they're still trying to come back." Contributing: Deirdre Shesgreen, Kim Hjelmgaard and The Associated Press. This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump orders US troops out of Syria, declares victory over ISIS; senators slam action as mistake Its no secret the crypto industry is not particularly at its most profitable moment. However, despite the dire state in which the crypto market has found itself, there are certain people who believe things will turn around in a big way a new all-time high, even. Among these is Mike Kayamori, CEO of Quinone, a Japan-based cryptocurrency exchange platform. Speaking in an interview with Bloomberg TV, Kayamori stated that by the end of 2019, Bitcoin would have reached a new all-time high position. While 2019 holds much promise, 2018 has been anything but promising, as the crypto market has been bearish all year long, with some bullish runs here and there. Bitcoin, which held an all-time high position of $20,000 the week before Christmas in 2017, has been on a steady downward spiral since then. Kayamori blamed the current state in the crypto market to a lack of newness, saying theres nothing new, no catalyst to propel the market forward. He, however, predicted that things would begin to pick up from next year, particularly in Japan, where Japanese exchanges have adapted to new regulations and the countrys crypto landscape prepares for the entrance of industry players. Japan has been making quiet but positive moves to increase adoption of cryptocurrencies while churning out regulation to protect investors. Earlier this month, local Japanese news outlet reported that the Japanese Financial Services Agency (JFSA) has plans to regulate Initial Coin Offerings. In the interview, Kayamori added that Bitcoin has performed even worse than many people expected stating that the general belief was that the $4,000 mark would serve as the technical bottom of the currency. When asked about what he believed to be the technical bottom, he said: I dont know. No one does. However, when you look at historical patterns and where things are going, I think the bottom is near. Kayamori argued that while he expected Bitcoin to rebound in the latter stages of this year, that might not happen anytime soon. However, he went on to say that with the arrival of Fidelity Digital Asset Services, Bakkt, as well as a host of other investor-focused products in early 2019, new momentum and sentiment would be able to drive a drastic rebound of Bitcoin. Story continues Featured image from Shutterstock. Mike Kayamori picture from LinkedIn. The post Quinone CEO Backs Bitcoin to Reach New All-Time High by 2019 appeared first on CCN. Shares (LIFT.V) have fallen over 60 per cent since their debut on the TSX Venture exchange in mid-September. A Toronto-based cannabis data firm and online review platform could be an early opportunity for investors to gain exposure to surging ad spending by Canadian licensed producers, according to analysts at GMP Securities. Lift & Co. Corp provides market information, offers specialized retail training, helps consumers discover the right pot products, and even hosts events like the Canadian Cannabis Awards. Shares (LIFT.V) have fallen over 60 per cent since their debut on the TSX Venture exchange in mid-September. Lift reported revenue of $3.7 million for the 12 months ended on Sept 30, a 232 per cent increase year-over-year. The five-year-old company, with a nearly $18 million market capitalization, has yet to realize a profit from operations. GMP analyst Martin Landry said in a stocks to watch report on Wednesday that ads on Lifts website are frequently purchased by licensed cannabis producers. He notes they command a higher-than-average price-per-impression, thanks to the targeted nature of the site. According to the Cannabis Act, producers cannot take out print advertisements, broadcast commercials or use celebrity endorsements, contests or sponsorships to promote their products. That narrow scope bodes well for Lift, Landry said. The companys partners include Canopy Growth Corp. (WEED.TO) brands Tweed and Spectrum Cannabis, as well as Aphria Inc. (APHA.TO) and CannTrust Holdings Inc. (TRST.TO), according to its website. Lift is a young company which provides investors an early opportunity to gain exposure to the rapidly increasing marketing spend, Landry wrote. Licensed producers will devote considerable efforts to build their brands within strict regulations. GMP has not initiated formal research coverage on Lift, and maintains no ratings, earnings forecasts or price targets on the stock. Dealing dope data Current regulations restrict the amount of consumer data licensed producers can collect, and most provinces do not allow their participation at the retail level. Story continues Landry sees Lifts growing data set becoming an increasingly valuable resource to help producers predict consumer behaviour and demographics. The company sells data through a monthly subscription service, or on a per report basis. Landry also predicts Lift could see a bump in retail training revenue thanks to Ontario regulations mandating managers and employees at private retail stores complete a training course approved by the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario. The province said it will issue up to 25 licenses for the first phase of private stores set to open on April 1, 2019. So far, Lift has signed multi-year contracts to train retail workers with the Nova Scotia Liquor Corporation, the Prince Edward Island Cannabis Management Corporation, and the Yukon Liquor Corporation. The company also offers a tablet-based cannabis concierge service that leverages its review data to assist sales clerks recommendations to customers. Landry calls Lift an early entry in a cannabis marketing machine, while warning the company could face competition if retailers choose to develop comparable in-house services. He said while Lift has a first-mover advantage in the space, We have limited visibility on the path to profitability. Download the Yahoo Finance app, available for Apple and Android. Senior executives at Renault-Nissan worked on a plan as far back as 2010 to pay Chairman Carlos Ghosn part of his salary without having to publicly disclose the amount, according to an email seen by CNBC. In the text, Ghosn's alleged accomplice and former Nissan Director Greg Kelly asked Renault's then general secretary, Mouna Sepehri, to weigh up the legal risks of such an action. Sepehri is now executive vice president at Renault and a permanent member of the Renault-Nissan Alliance Board. The email, dated April 2010, outlines a scenario where Ghosn could receive payment through the Dutch holding firm, RNBV, which was jointly owned by the French and Japanese carmakers. Within the text, Kelly stated that he had warned Ghosn of "some legal risk" to this approach but wanted further legal opinion from other executives, including Sepehri. Kelly wrote: "I greatly appreciate the work you have done to analyze whether part of the CEO's compensation can be paid without disclosing it publicly." In a Reuters report Wednesday, that CNBC can confirm, that 2010 plan was never put into action. Renault was not immediately available for comment when contacted by CNBC, but told Reuters that Kelly had "consulted several people at Renault and Nissan to establish whether it was legally possible that part of the CEO's compensation be paid by RNBV to reflect the time he spent working on alliance synergies." Ghosn and Kelly are currently in a Tokyo jail following allegations from Japanese prosecutors that the pair failed to declare around $43 million in deferred compensation between the years of 2010 and 2015. The exclusive report by Reuters on Wednesday also says bankers at Renault-Nissan developed plans to funnel millions of euros in bonus payments to Ghosn and other senior managers through a Dutch company. Ghosn, via his Japanese lawyer, has denied any wrongdoing. Kelly also denies any wrongdoing and the pair have had little opportunity to respond to the allegations. In a statement to CNBC, Nissan said: "We cannot comment regarding the specifics of this investigation and other reports." Self-employed individuals have the autonomy to choose when and how they work. But they also have to take the initiative to prepare for their own retirement. Entrepreneurs have several options to save for retirement, some of which qualify for tax benefits. Consider these retirement plan options for your small business. Traditional or Roth IRA. Individual retirement accounts have low contribution limits, but deposits qualify you for tax perks. You can defer paying income tax on up to $6,000 that you contribute to a traditional IRA in 2019, and the contribution limit climbs to $7,000 if you are age 50 or older. You could deposit up to the same amount in an after-tax Roth IRA and set yourself up for tax-free investment returns and tax-free withdrawals in retirement. You can save in a traditional and Roth IRA in the same year as long as your total deposits in both types of accounts don't exceed the annual contribution limit. IRAs aren't associated with an employer, so you can continue to use the same IRA regardless of where you work. "The IRA can be most appropriate for those just starting out or only able to save less than $6,000 per year, or $7,000 if over 50," says Rick Vazza, a certified financial planner and president of Driven Wealth Management in San Diego. IRA contributions aren't due until your tax filing deadline in April, so you can plug in a contribution while preparing your taxes to see exactly how much your tax bill will decline. [Read: How to Use Retirement Accounts to Reduce Your Tax Bill.] Solo 401(k). A solo 401(k) is a single participant 401(k) plan that covers a business owner with no employees and his or her spouse. Contributions to a solo 401(k) can be made as both an employer and a participant. You can defer paying income tax on up to $19,000 in 2019, or $25,000 if you are age 50 or older, that you deposit in a solo 401(k). "For those over 50, you can make a $6,000 catch-up contribution to a solo 401(k) plan," says David Rae, a certified financial planner and president of DRM Wealth Management in Los Angeles. Story continues As an employer, you can additionally contribute up to 25 percent of compensation to the solo 401(k), after subtracting your personal contributions and half of your self-employment tax. The maximum possible contribution is $56,000 in 2019, or $62,000 for those age 50 and older. "The primary advantage of the solo 401(k) over the SEP IRA is that you have the benefit of funding the plan both as the employer and employee," says Stephanie Sammons, a certified financial planner and founder of Sammons Wealth Management in Dallas. "That means, in most cases, you're going to be able to sock away much more of your earnings for retirement with a solo 401(k) and grab a bigger tax deduction as well." [Read: Defeating Retirement Challenges When Self-Employed.] SEP IRA. Small business owners with a few employees can establish a simplified employee pension plan. "If you have any additional employees who work more than 1,000 hours per year, the SEP IRA would likely be a better option," Sammons says. Only employers can contribute to SEP IRAs and must contribute an equal percentage of salary for all eligible employees. So, if you contribute 10 percent of your pay to a SEP IRA, you must also contribute 10 percent of salary for each employee. Business owners can defer income tax on as much as 25 percent of compensation up to $280,000 using a SEP IRA, for a maximum possible contribution of $56,000. "Catch-up contributions are not allowed on SEP IRAs," Rae says. [See: How to Pay Less Taxes on Retirement Account Withdrawals.] SIMPLE IRA. A savings incentive match plan for employees has a lower contribution limit than many other types of retirement accounts. However, these accounts for businesses with 100 or fewer employees are generally easy to set up and manage. The employer must contribute to a SIMPLE IRA, and individual employees can choose to save more in the plan. Employers are generally required to contribute 2 percent of an employee's pay up to $280,000 in 2019 or provide a dollar-for-dollar match up to 3 percent of each employee's salary. An employee can elect to defer paying taxes on up to $13,000 that is deposited in a SIMPLE IRA in 2019, and workers age 50 and older can make catch-up contributions of an additional $3,000. The ideal retirement account for self-employed workers depends on how much you will be able to save, whether you have employees and the amount of administrative complexity you are willing to take on. "While administrative requirements should not be the sole reason of deciding on an account, it is a factor that needs to be considered," Vazza says. "Contribution limits, age, taxation and ongoing administration will be important factors in determining the right account option." Premature tender for airport expansion project cancelled The invitation to bid for expansion works at Tribhuvan International Airport (TIA) has been cancelled for being premature, as it was issued without arranging the money to implement the project, sources at the Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal said. Pitfall concept as a vulnerable businessman facing risky business peril deep holes as an uncertainty stress idea. An attorney in a litigation is sometimes looked to by the client as something of a soothsayer. Whats likely to happen? Whats the verdict going to be? How is the judge going to rule? How much is this case worth? It is very routine for attorneys to offer such opinions or valuations, which may be crucial elements in determining how to try or resolve a case. However, as many attorneys appreciate, the result in a case is rarely (if ever) assured. Instead, the assessment of the client's potential liability can involve a multitude of factors, ranging from an analysis of the applicable legal principles to a consideration of the likely composition of the jury. In the end, the attorneys assessment often relies on subjective factors in weighing the potential outcomes and the strength of each sides claims and defenses. Inevitably, no matter how carefully the attorney considers the issues, there are times when the outcome or verdict may dramatically differ from the attorney's valuation. In such cases, the clients (or their insurers) may blame the attorneys for not seeing it coming, especially where the client relied on the attorneys valuation or advice in deciding not to settle the case prior to trial. While having an unhappy client is challenge enough, the client could conceivably assert a claim for malpractice based on the attorneys allegedly inaccurate valuation of the claim. In some instances, it may be that the attorney overlooked a critical legal element or other detail that might have impacted the valuation; in others, the attorney can do everything right, and there can still be an unforeseen outcome. Below are some of the issues relevant to a determination of whether an attorneys inaccurate valuation could create potential malpractice liability. What is the Standard? Although bar rules are not by themselves determinative of the applicable standard of care for attorneys in Texas, they can help shape that standard. The question of whether an attorney might be liable for errors in valuing a claim implicates Rule 1.01 of the Texas Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct, which provides that a lawyer generally should not accept representations that the lawyer knows or should know are beyond their competence. Comment 1 to Rule 1.01 states that competent representation contemplates appropriate application by the lawyer of that legal knowledge, skill and training, reasonable thoroughness in the study and analysis of the law and facts, and reasonable attentiveness to the responsibilities owed to the client. However, what constitutes legal knowledge of competent practitioners could vary based on the customs of the attorneys in the jurisdiction. For example, if jury verdict reports are widely relied upon by attorneys in a particular area, then an attorney may want to consult such reports when assessing a defendants potential liability in a personal injury case. At the same time, courts in some jurisdictions have noted that jury verdict reports can be of little value because it is nearly impossible to find apples to apples comparisons between prior cases and the case at issue. Instead, it may be sufficient for an experienced attorney to thoroughly review the facts and, relying on her or his experience with similar cases, make an educated conclusion regarding the client's likelihood of success. The Benefits of the Professional Judgment Rule Attorneys facing a claim arising out of an inaccurate valuation can consider another line of defense: the professional judgment rule. The professional judgment rule provides that an attorney is generally not liable for those acts or omissions in the conduct of litigation that are based on an honest exercise of professional judgment. The professional judgment rule arises from the premise that, after consideration of the facts and law, an attorneys best judgment and recommendation is due some deference, especially where there are multiple options for the legal strategy. However, the rule generally will not excuse the attorneys failure to thoroughly consider the relevant facts. In other words, even if the attorneys conclusion regarding the value of the case is defensible under the circumstances, it will not preclude courts from considering how the attorney reached that conclusion and reviewing whether the attorneys judgment was truly informed. Accordingly, when providing a valuation, it is helpful for attorneys to articulate the key reasons for the attorneys opinion and the variables that may affect the case. Having this information in writing can act as a shield in the event that the client later questions whether the attorney took adequate steps in considering the client's potential liability. Insurance Issues An attorneys potential liability for an error in a valuation can be complicated where a clients insurer is involved. Insurance policies typically require that the insured obtain the insurers consent prior to settling a claim and to keep the insurer informed as to developments in the case and risks. When the insurer reviews a potential settlement of a claim against its insured, the insurer is generally called to consider whether trying the case instead of settling would place an unreasonable risk of a judgment in excess of the policy limits against the insured. In such a situation, the insurer may ask defense counsel to prepare a valuation for the insurers use in determining whether to consent to a settlement. Although this could suggest some direct relationship between the insurer and the defense counsel, the fact remains that in many states, even when the insurer relies on defense counsels valuation, the insurers duties are non-delegable. This usually means that the insurer will engage in its own analysis of the merits of the claim against the insured in order to determine an appropriate settlement value, relying on the information provided by defense counsel. Thus, the failure of defense counsel to properly or thoroughly assess the risks and liabilities facing the client could create an issue between the client and the insurer. Luckily, most courts do not require that attorneys accurately predict the future when it comes to valuing claims. However, attorneys who fail to give a valuation its due consideration could create unnecessary risk in the event that the case goes south. Shari L. Klevens is a partner at Dentons and serves on the firm's US Board of Directors. She represents and advises lawyers and insurers on complex claims and is co-chair of Dentons' global insurance sector team. Alanna Clair is a partner at Dentons and focuses on professional liability defense. Shari and Alanna are co-authors of "The Lawyers Handbook: Ethics Compliance and Claim Avoidance." Moscow (AFP) - Russia will build up its military presence in the Arctic over the next year, the defence minister said Tuesday, as Moscow seeks to assert its influence in the strategic region. The announcement comes after years of increased activity in the Arctic, which Moscow has declared a top priority due to its mineral riches and military importance. "We'll finish building infrastructure in 2019 to accommodate air defence radar units and aviation guidance points on the Sredny and Wrangel Islands, and on Cape Schmidt" in the Russian Arctic, Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said. He said accommodation for military personnel and further aviation infrastructure had been completed elsewhere in the Arctic, at a defence ministry meeting also attended by President Vladimir Putin. Russia has opened a string of military and scientific bases in the Arctic in recent years, with interest in the region growing as rising temperatures open up shipping routes and make hitherto inaccessible mineral resources easier to exploit. Putin has made several trips to the Arctic and last year said further exploration and extraction of raw materials from the area was "extremely important". NATO this year held its biggest military exercises since the end of the Cold War near Russia's Arctic border with Norway. Finland accused Moscow of jamming GPS signals in the region during the manoeuvres. At a Victory Day military parade this year, Moscow displayed a new snowmobile used by Arctic units. Dozens of state and federal law enforcement officers descended on a rural Colorado property belonging to the fiance of missing mom Kelsey Berreth as police pleaded with him to cooperate. We are asking Patrick [Frazee] to sit down with investigators since he is the last person to speak to Kelsey face to face, Woodland Park Police Chief Miles De Young said Friday. Berreth, a 29-year-old flight instructor, has been missing since Thanksgiving Day. Frazee, 32, told investigators he last saw her when he picked up their 1-year-old daughter that afternoon. Frazee did not report Berreth missing and has been noticeably absent from press conferences, although his lawyer last week insisted the fiance is cooperating with investigators. Police on Friday executed a search warrant at Frazees 35-acre ranch in Florissant, where hes living with the couples daughter. Nearly 100 searchers from several law enforcement agencies participated in the two-day search, which included the use of a backhoe and ended on Saturday. Authorities didnt disclose whether they discovered anything useful. De Young declined to say what prompted the weekend search, but said detectives had enough information to obtain a search warrant. The affidavit in support of the warrant has been sealed by a judge. There are a number of other things that we have done up to this point that has led to us to be able to search the residence, De Young said. Frazees attorney, Jeremy Loew, said police never sought permission to search the property before getting the warrant. Frazee was never asked to voluntarily participate in this search, Loew, of Colorado Springs, said in a Friday statement. We encourage law enforcement to take whatever steps it deems necessary to find Kelsey Berreth and to be able to exclude Patrick Frazee as a possible suspect. While police say Frazee has been uncooperative, Loew claimed just the opposite. Mr. Frazees cooperation includes interviews with law enforcement, voluntarily releasing his phone to be searched by law enforcement, swabs for DNA comparisons and photographs, Loew told HuffPost on Wednesday. Story continues Berreths mother, Cheryl Berreth, who lives in Idaho, reported her daughters disappearance on Dec. 2. Cheryl Berreth has appeared at police press conferences, but the family has released few details about Kelsey Berreth or her relationship with Frazee. Frazee told investigators he received a text message from his fiancee on Nov. 25, the Sunday after Thanksgiving, police said. The last confirmed sighting of 29-year-old Kelsey Berreth was on Nov. 22, 2018, police said. (Photo: Facebook.com/helpfindkelseyberreth) Someone at Kelsey Berreths employer, Doss Aviation in Pueblo, also received a text message from her on Nov. 25, investigators said. The message, according to De Young, was that Berreth would not be coming to work the following week. Police later received data indicating Berreths cellphone was near Gooding, Idaho, nearly 800 miles from her Woodland Park home, but authorities said they were uncertain about the accuracy of the data. Police last week released surveillance footage taken on Nov. 22 that shows Berreth shopping with her daughter at a Safeway in Woodland Park, some 20 miles northwest of Colorado Springs the last confirmed sighting before she handed off her child to Frazee, police said. Frazee has not been charged in Berreths disappearance. Asked by a reporter Friday if Frazee is a suspect, De Young said hes not willing to jump to conclusions or label people. Love HuffPost? Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today. Police are offering a $25,000 reward for information leading to the whereabouts of Berreth. An anonymous donor provided the reward money on Saturday, according to De Young. Kelsey Berreth is described as a white female with brown hair, approximately 5 foot 3 and 110 pounds. Anyone with information is asked to contact the Woodland Park Police Department at 719-687-9262, or the Colorado Bureau of Investigation at 719-647-5999. Send David Lohr an email or follow him on Facebook and Twitter. Related... Mystery Surrounds Female Pilot Who Vanished Thanksgiving Day Fiance Of Missing Colorado Mom Is Cooperating With Police, Lawyer Says Also on HuffPost El Dorado Jane Doe We know who killed her. But we still dont know her name. That is the enduring mystery that has left investigators stumped for more than two decades. Despite the passge in time, authorities beleive someone, somewhere, can still help solve the identity of the woman known as El Dorado Jane Doe. READ: We Know Who Killed Her. But 24 Years Later, We Still Dont Know Her Name Storyville Slayer Three decades ago, the melting pot of culture and tradition that makes up New Orleans was overshadowed by a cloud of evil. The historic metropolis that Louis Armstrong once dubbed the Land of Dreams had become a nightmare for the families of more than two dozen people who turned up dead in outlying swamps and bayous. READ: Detective Tries To Solve 25-Year-Old Serial Killer Cold Case. One Suspect Is A Cop. Eugene Hicks A womans quest to learn about her fathers 1983 murder uncovered mistakes that may have cost a retired Dallas Cowboys player his life. READ: How Police Failures May Have Allowed A Cocaine Cowboys Suspected Killer To Strike Again Deborah Lee Shelton And Victoria Lee Specials For 65 days in 1969, Marcia Shelton watched, waited and hoped against all odds that her missing 12-year-old daughter, Deborah Lee Shelton, would turn up safe and sound. Then, in December 2001, there was another tragedy as equally disturbing as the first -- the disappearance of her second daughter, 44-year-old Victoria Lee Specials. Marcia Shelton found herself left with the memories of two daughters, taken under mysterious circumstances three decades apart. Read More: Sisters Deborah Lee Shelton And Victoria Lee Specials Vanish 32 Years Apart Tamala Wells Tamala Wells, of Detroit, disappeared on Aug. 6, 2012. Her mother, Donna Wells-Davis, learned of her daughter's disappearance on Aug. 7, 2012, when she received a phone call from her granddaughter, who was then 6 years old. The little girl said that her mom, then 33, had gone out the previous night and never returned. The mystery deepened when the Pontiac that Wells had supposedly been driving was found abandoned just a few blocks from her home. In an interview with HuffPost, the father of Wells' daughter denied any involvement in Wells' disappearance, but he didn't deny how he feels about the mother of his child -- or about the child herself. "She gives me a headache," Rickey Tennant said. "[Wells] used to give me a headache, but I dealt with it, and I'm looking at it right now as 'one headache is better than two headaches.'" READ: Ex-Boyfriend Calls Missing Woman One Less 'Headache' Joy Hibbs On April 19, 1991, the body of 36-year-old Joy Hibbs was found inside her burned-out home in Bristol Township, Pennsylvania. According to retired Bristol Township Detective Lt. Richard Bilson, the scene inside the bedroom where Hibbs was found was horrific. "She was lying face-up on a mattress that was nothing but springs," Bilson told HuffPost. "Her body was black -- completely burnt beyond recognition. She looked like a mummy and the entire room was charred." Bilson said fire investigators initially thought Joy Hibbs was the tragic victim of a house fire. The following day, a coroner confirmed part of that theory -- her death was tragic, albeit no accident. "The coroner advised us she died before the fire started," Bilson said. "He located five stab wounds, to her neck and chest, and there was a computer cord wrapped around her neck. At that point, it became a homicide investigation." Read More: Pennsylvania Mom's Brutal Murder An Enduring Mystery Terry And Darleen Anderson In October 2005, an unknown intruder brutally murdered Terry and Darleen Anderson. The crime -- LaGrange County, Indiana's first double homicide -- shocked their rural community and left many deep emotional scars. Inside the couple's home, Darleen was found still dressed in her nightclothes, slumped over on the couch. A book was in her lap and a bowl of popcorn was sitting next to her. Someone had viciously attacked the 57-year-old woman while she sat relaxing inside her home. Outside, in a nearby pole barn, lay Darleen's husband of 25 years. Like his wife, the 59-year-old had been brutally bludgeoned to death. With few clues to follow, the case quickly went cold. Many questions still remain. READ: Who Killed Terry And Darleen Anderson? Neal King Neal Forrest King came to California to make his fortune in the burgeoning illegal marijuana trade. In 2013, the 24-year-old former Texan disappeared like a puff of smoke. March 26 was the last time Jeanette Tully, King's girlfriend of six years, saw him. "It's so painful, and I don't think the pain will ever go away," Tully told HuffPost at the time. "I'm 25, and I was ready to spend rest of my life with him. Our love was true, honest and pure." King's mother, Gayle King, described her son's disappearance as inexplicable. "Neal was a kind person and an amazing son," she said. "That's just how he was. He had strong family values. Family for him was everything." Read More: Marijuana Farmer Neal King Disappears Amid Strange Circumstances Brian Barton Punk rock musician Brian Barton was well on his way to success in 2005. The 25-year-old was in love, was a member of As Fate Would Have It -- a band quickly growing in popularity -- and was gearing up for his first music tour. To outsiders looking in, all the stars in Barton's universe appeared to be in alignment. However, appearances can be deceiving. When Barton disappeared prior to the start of the band's breakout music tour, the bizarre circumstances surrounding his disappearance pitted friends and bandmates against each other. Read More: Did Seattle Punk Rocker Brian Barton Stage His Own Disappearance? Judith Geurin Relatives of Judith Geurin last spoke with the 45-year-old mom in January 1991. Geurin's disappearance is rooted in events that transpired in July 1988, when her husband of 18 years, 57-year-old Joseph Geurin, died of a heart attack. According to family members, Joseph's death devastated her and shattered the family. The grief, they said, was so severe that her mom turned to alcohol for solace. By January 1989, Judith Geurin had collected more than $250,000 in life insurance and pension funds granted to her following her husband's death. She sold the family's four-bedroom, colonial-style house and took out a mortgage on a two-family duplex in nearby Troy. Geurin's children, then ages 21, 16, 13 and 11 -- moved into the duplex. However, unbeknownst to them until moving day, their mother had other plans. Instead of following her children, Geurin moved in with 27-year-old Curtis Pucci. In 1990, Geurin and Pucci moved some 200 miles southwest of Albany to Sodus Point. Even though she had all but abandoned her children, Geurin kept in regular contact with her eldest daughter until January 1991, when Geurin vanished without a trace. Read More: Daughter's Search For Mom Goes On, 23 Years After She Disappeared Anita Knutson In 2007, Anita Knutson was an 18-year-old Minot State University student majoring in elementary education. Knutson was, according to her family, exceptionally responsible for her age and juggled three part-time jobs while attending college. Despite a busy life, she kept in regular contact with her family. So, when she went two days without returning phone calls, her father went to her off-campus apartment on June 4, 2007. When repeated knocks to the door of her 4th Street apartment went unanswered, her father had the building manager open the door. When the concerned father stepped inside, his worst fears became a reality when he found his daughter's lifeless body on the floor of her bedroom. Authorities determined the young woman had been stabbed multiple times, more than a day before her body was found. The murder weapon, a bloody knife, was found discarded in a sink. Detectives also determined someone had cut the screen to Knutson's bedroom window, presumable to gain entry into her apartment. Despite an intensive investigation, authorities were unable to identify a suspect or person of interest in her murder and the case went cold. READ: Family Of Murdered MSU Student Demands Answers JonBenet Ramsey On Dec. 26, 1996, 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey was found bludgeoned and strangled to death in the basement of her family's Boulder, Colorado, home. A ransom note from an anonymous group of individuals "that represent a foreign faction" asking for $118,000 in exchange for the safe return of JonBenet was found just hours before, but no call ever came from a kidnapper and it was never linked to a murderer. The entire Ramsey family was cleared of any involvement in the murder of JonBenet back in 2008, thanks to then newly discovered DNA evidence, according to 9News. Beginning in 2010, investigators reopened the case and launched a fresh round of interviews with witnesses that could provide more insight into the murder, according to ABC News, but nothing fruitful came of those interviews. The DNA evidence still points to an "unexplained third party" that serves as a vague lead for authorities still pursuing the case, Time magazine reported. Boulder police have tested more than 150 DNA samples and investigated nearly the same amount of potential suspects in their ongoing investigation, but none have ever been linked to the crime. Read More: JonBenet Ramsey's Killer 'May Be Lost Forever' Kathleen Kolodziej Kathleen Kolodziej was reported missing to police in Duanesburg, New York, on Nov. 2, 1974. The 17-year-old college student was last seen early that morning at a local bar. Kolodziej's whereabouts remained a mystery until Nov. 28, 1974, Thanksgiving morning, when investigators located her partially clothed body. Read More: Kathleen Kolodziej's Murder A 38-Year Mystery John Spira John Spira, a 45-year-old blues-rock musician from Chicago known as "Chicago Johnny," has been missing since Feb. 23, 2007. He was last seen at about 7 p.m. at Universal Cable Construction Inc. in DuPage County. Spira co-owned the company with David Stubben, his business partner of 17 years. Spira had plans to meet a friend for dinner in nearby Oak Brook at 8:30 p.m., but he never arrived. The following evening, John's band, The Rabble Rousers, was scheduled to play in Montgomery. However, "Chicago Johnny," well-respected and normally reliable, was a no-show. Read More: John Spira Still Missing 5 Years Later Bobbi Ann Campbell It has been many years since anyone has seen Utah mom Bobbi Ann Campbell. She was last seen in Salt Lake City in December 1994, when she dropped her 5-year-old daughter off at a friend's house. The young mother said she would return after she picked up her paycheck from work and purchased groceries. She never came back. Campbell, then 24, was there one minute and gone the next. She left no immediate trace and no trail to follow. Read More: Bobbi Ann Campbell Missing: Daughter Seeks Closure In 19-Year-Old Case Colonial Parkway Murders The victims, eight in all, came in pairs. Many were young lovers who apparently met their fates mid-assignation. Each of the homicides occurred along the scenic 23-mile route between Jamestown and Yorktown in Virginia, giving them a ready name: the Colonial Parkway murders. Due to the shared location and other similarities among the deaths, law enforcement officials viewed them as the work of a possible serial killer. Read More: Unsolved Murders Of Young Lovers In Va. Sarah Kinslow Sarah Kinslow was last seen by her parents on May 1, 2001, when her dad dropped her off at Greenville Middle School in her hometown of Greenville, Texas, at approximately 7:20 a.m. It was not until after the school day ended that the Kinslows were notified their daughter had not attended any of her classes. When Louise Kinslow spoke to her daughter's friends, they said her daughter was supposed to skip school with them that day and meet up at nearby East Mount Cemetery. Concerned, Kinslow contacted police and reported the teen missing. Authorities took an article of Sarah Kinslow's clothing from the family home and brought a tracking dog to the school. Investigators were able to pick up her scent where she had exited her father's car. The dog followed the scent around the school and to a location two blocks away, where... Read More: Sarah Kinslow Missing: 11 Years, No Answers Robert Levinson Robert Levinson is a former FBI special agent who retired from the FBI in 1998 after 22 years of service. In March 2007, Levinson traveled to Kish Island, Iran, as a private investigator to reportedly look into a cigarette smuggling investigation. He disappeared on March 9 of that year. In 2010, a video purportedly showing Levinson in captivity was sent to his family by his alleged captors. Read More: Retired FBI Agent Missing Since 2007 This article originally appeared on HuffPost. A second bishop from China's underground Catholic church is stepping aside and is being replaced by a government-backed clergyman, state-run media reported, amid a thaw in relations between Beijing and the Holy See. There are an estimated 10 million Catholics in China, divided between a government-run association whose clergy are chosen by the Communist Party, and the unofficial church loyal to the Vatican. An agreement struck in September on the appointment of bishops has paved the way for a rapprochement between China and the Vatican, who cut off diplomatic ties in 1951. Zhuang Jianjian, bishop of the Shantou diocese in southern China will retire and be replaced by Huang Bingzhang, deputy chairman of the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, the Global Times reported. The Vatican-issued mandate was given to Huang last week by a delegation from the Holy See that met several Chinese bishops, the state-linked paper reported. "The mission now is to unite Catholics in the diocese and reduce divergence so as to achieve the common goal of better serving church members," Huang told the Global Times. "This doesn't come as a surprise because Zhuang Jianjian is already 88, so he would have wanted to retire more than a decade ago," said Anthony Lam, a Chinese Catholic church expert at Hong Kong's Holy Spirit Study Centre. According to canon laws that govern the Catholic church, bishops "are requested" to summit their resignation at the age of 75. The pope can either approve the resignation or request that they wait for a suitable successor to emerge, Lam said. "The agreement between China and the Vatican has solved this problem because the seven bishops previously excommunicated have been restored to the church, so Huang Bingzhang will be able to take up the position." Huang had been excommunicated in 2011 for being ordained as a bishop without papal approval. This is a slightly different situation from that of fellow underground bishop Guo Xijin, who was last week asked to step aside in the eastern Fujian province to make way for government-approved clergy, Lam noted. Story continues Guo instead will serve as "auxiliary bishop" -- someone who assists and works alongside the diocesan bishop -- while both the underground and official churches of the diocese will merge. He was at the centre of last week's negotiations between China and the Vatican, which have been asking him to leave his post since 2017 to allow for talks aimed at ending their decades-old spat. Separately, the official church said it is facing a lack of bishops and called for "politically reliable" clergymen with "good ethnics", the Global Times reported Wednesday. Nearly half the 98 Chinese dioceses have no leaders, chairman of the China's Bishops Conference Ma Yinglin told a seminar, according to the paper. WASHINGTON (AP) Legislation that would ease federal sentencing laws for some offenders cleared its first major test vote Monday, garnering overwhelming support in both parties even as some conservatives portrayed the bill as soft on crime. The Senate voted 82-12 to advance the bill. A vote on final passage would come later in the week, but not until the chamber has debated and voted on a series of amendments from opponents that will be brought up Tuesday. The bill would give judges more discretion when sentencing drug offenders and allow about 2,600 federal prisoners sentenced for crack cocaine offenses before August 2010 the opportunity to petition for a reduced penalty. The bill also encourages prisoners to participate in programs designed to reduce the risk of recidivism, with the reward being the accumulation of credits that can be used to gain an earlier release to a halfway house or home confinement to finish out their sentence. To win over wary senators, sponsors tweaked the bill to prevent those convicted of violent firearm offenses, sexual exploitation of children and high-level fentanyl and heroin dealing from participating in the supervised release program but Senator Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and others want to expand that list. Their amendment would add carjacking, bank robbery by force, felony sex crimes and other "felony crimes of violence" to the list of offenses that make a prisoner ineligible. "Some of those crimes should not be eligible for that program," said Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D. "At this point, I'm probably a no unless they get that done." Cotton has been among the most vocal opponents of the legislation, saying: "If other senators want to vote for a bill that's going to let sex offenders and child pornographers and wife-beaters out of prison, that's their prerogative. That's between them and the voters in their state." The bill has created a unique split in the GOP camp, while Democrats are overwhelmingly supportive. Story continues Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, a former federal prosecutor, is among the bill's champions. He said he has been haunted by the words of a federal judge who sentenced a low-level drug offender carrying a gun to 55 years in prison, noting that murderers, rapists and terrorists could get less time for their offense. He said only Congress could fix the problem. "Those comments have stayed with me ever since," Lee said. The bill follows the lead of states such as Texas that have experienced a decrease in crime in recent years while keeping fewer people in prison. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said his home state has been able to close eight prisons since undertaking various prison reforms, such as investing in probation staffing and getting prisoners into drug treatment more quickly. "This is not about being tough on crime, or soft on crime," Cornyn said. "This is about being smart on crime and getting the best results." Supporters of the bill warn that amendments from Cotton and Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., could cause the compromise to unravel if the Senate approves any of them as early as Tuesday. A unique cross-section of liberal and conservative advocacy groups have rallied in support of the bill. David Safavian, general counsel for the American Conservative Union, said the bill's critics ignore that offenders would be subject to strict oversight while completing their sentence at halfway houses or in home custody. The prisoners also have to show through objective criteria that they are a low risk to society before obtaining supervised release. Under the current process, nearly half of released federal prisoners are arrested again. "And every case of recidivism is another victim, is another crime, is another prosecution, is another trial, is another prison cell, all funded with taxpayer dollars," Safavian said. "I'm sorry, but there is nothing conservative about protecting a non-functioning prison bureaucracy." If the legislation passes the Senate, the House is expected to approve it quickly. The House had earlier passed legislation that focused on boosting prisoner rehabilitation programs, but did not include changes to sentencing laws that critics say had led to overly harsh sentences for many nonviolent offenders, particularly African-Americans. The bill looked to have stalled a couple weeks ago, but supporters led by President Donald Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner persuaded Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., to allow for the Senate vote before Congress adjourns. ____ Associated Press writer Lisa Mascaro contributed to this report. __ Follow Kevin Freking at https://twitter.com/APKFreking 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. Paris (AFP) - The blue glowing jets of science fiction spacecraft came a step closer to reality on Wednesday as US physicists unveiled the world's first solid-state aeroplane powered in flight by supercharged air molecules. More than a century on from the Wright brothers' first artificial flight, scientists hailed the "historic" test of the new technology, which could eventually slash greenhouse-gas emissions from aviation. Ever since Orville and Wilbur Wright's momentous glide in the winter of 1903, aircraft have been driven by propellers or jets that must burn fuel to create the thrust and lift needed for sustained flight. A team of experts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology managed to unlock a process known as electroaerodynamics, previously never seen as a plausible way to power an aircraft. They were able to fly the new plane, with a wingspan of five metres (16 feet), a distance of 55 metres at a speed of 4.8 metres-per-second. That's hardly supersonic, but the implications of this unprecedented mode of flight could be stratospheric. "The future of flight shouldn't be things like propellers and turbines," said Steven Barrett, who designed the prototype. "It should be more like what you see in Star Trek with a kind of blue glow and something that silently glides through the air." At first glance, the plane itself doesn't look lightyears away from other renewable aircraft, such as the Solar Impact II craft that in 2015-16 used energy from the Sun to fly around the world. Unlike Solar Impact, Barrett's plane doesn't have any propellers or solar panels -- or any moveable parts whatsoever. Instead of engines, it is powered by a system comprising two main sections. At the front of the plane sit a series of parallel electrodes made up of lightweight wires that produce an enormous voltage -- +20,000v -- supercharging the air around it and splitting away negatively charged nitrogen molecules known as ions. Story continues At the plane's rear are rows of aerofoils set to -20,000v. The ions automatically move from a positive to negative charge, dragging with them air particles that create the so-called "ionic wind" to provide the aircraft with lift. - 'Something we never knew possible' - The technology to create ionic wind has been around since the 1960s, but it was previously thought nowhere near efficient enough to prove useful to aeronautics. The team not only showed that it was possible for ion-driven craft to fly but also -- due to the relative lack of drag created by the electrodes -- predicted that efficiency would increase in lockstep with speed, potentially opening the way for bigger, faster planes in future. "It's clearly very early days: but the team at MIT have done something we never previously knew was possible, in using accelerated ionised gas to propel an aircraft," said Guy Gratton, aerospace engineer and visiting professor at Cranfield University, who was not involved in the study. Barrett said he believed the current prototype could be scaled up "a significant amount" but cautioned that their may be a limit to how much propulsion the technique can produce. "We don't yet know if there is such a limit and we will certainly try to scale up as much as possible," he said. "I don't yet know if you'll see our vehicle carrying people any time soon but obviously I'd be very excited if that was the case." - Commercial applications - He told AFP that the technology could be used on the skin of commercial aircraft, reducing drag and therefore the energy needed to power modern passenger jets. "This would be much more efficient than the current situation where you have concentrated engines that generate thrust, which have to fight against a large passive airframe that generates drag," he said. In an editorial, the journal Nature, which published the study, said its success would encourage other sectors to re-visit technology that was long thought to be confined to sci-fi films. It listed possible military applications including the development of silent drones and aircraft, and engines with no infrared signal and thus impossible to detect. The prototype flight "will stimulate both awe and anxiety," it said. A hundred and fifteen years ago, Nature published a short news item on the Wright brothers' "first successful achievement of artificial flight." Barrett and the team noted a pleasing parallel with their revolutionary test and the one that sparked the aerial age: both flights lasted all of 12 seconds. TOKYO (Reuters) - Japanese startup Groove X, founded by an alumni of SoftBank Group Corp's robotics unit, unveiled its first creation on Tuesday - a companion robot designed to make users happy. The Lovot, an amalgam of "love" and "robot", cannot help with the housework but it will "draw out your ability to love," Groove X founder and CEO Kaname Hayashi told reporters at the launch in Tokyo. Using artificial intelligence (AI) to interact with its surroundings, the wheeled machine resembles a penguin with cartoonish human eyes, has interchangeable outfits and communicates in squeaks. It is designed to mimic affection for users who show it kindness by becoming warm to the touch, going to "sleep" when it's cuddled or following users when called. Its practical uses are limited to simple tasks like baby monitoring or watching over the house via a camera that users can access through a mobile app while they are out. While Japan is already a leading manufacturer of industrial robots, Groove X is trying to expand the fledgling market for household robots. It has raised 8 billion yen ($71.1 million) from investors including a Toyota Motor Corp-backed fund, chat app operator Line Corp and the Japanese government. The Lovot will compete with Sony Corp's AI-powered robot dog Aibo, revived last year more than a decade after it ceased production. Hayashi worked on SoftBank's humanoid Pepper robot, which can be found greeting customers in shops and restaurants across Japan but has been a flop with households three years after its launch. SoftBank has recently increased its focus on more practical robots, last month launching the Whiz autonomous cleaning machine which uses technology from portfolio company U.S.-based Brain Corp. As with Pepper, Lovot's uptake is likely to be hampered by its hefty price tag of 349,000 yen ($3,100) before tax with ongoing subscription fees. Units will start shipping in late 2019. Story continues Japan ranks lowest among the G7 highly industrialised nations in the United Nations annual happiness ranking. ($1 = 112.5600 yen) (Reporting by Sam Nussey; Editing by Stephen Coates) By Josh Smith and Haejin Choi DAEGU, South Korea (Reuters) - When 17-year-old Lee Yong-soo returned home to South Korea in 1945 after being forced to serve in a brothel for Japanese troops, her family, having given her up for dead, thought she was a ghost. "When I returned, I had a deep wound," Lee told Reuters, holding a black and white photo of herself in a traditional Korean dress, taken in her first year back home. She still remembers the blue and purple fabric of that dress, but other memories from those years are more traumatic. "I thought I was going to die," Lee said of the abuse and torture she endured in a brothel at an airfield in Taiwan used by Japanese kamikaze pilots in the final years of World War Two. Now 90 years old, Lee says she feels like a sincere apology from Japanese authorities for the wartime exploitation of so-called comfort women is no nearer now than when she returned home more than 70 years ago. Japan says the claims have been settled by past agreements and apologies, and that the continued controversy threatens relations between the two countries. Some historians estimate 30,000 to 200,000 Korean women were forced into prostitution during Japan's occupation from 1910 to 1945, in some cases under the pretext of employment or to pay off a relative's debt. The term comfort women is a wartime euphemism translated from Japanese for the women, many from Korea, who were forced into prostitution and sexually abused at Japanese military brothels before and during World War Two. A 1996 UN human rights report concluded that the women had been military sexual slaves. Japan contests that finding, and a 2015 compensation agreement between Japan and South Korea did not address the issue of whether coercion of the women was a policy of imperial Japan. Now with only 25 registered South Korean survivors still alive, there is a sense of urgency behind efforts by the women to receive a formal apology as well as legal compensation from Japan while their voices can still be heard. Just days before Reuters interviewed Lee at her one-room apartment in the southern city of Daegu, a fellow victim had died, one of eight so far in 2018. Another survivor, Kim Bok-dong, said she wanted to share her story, but suffering from cancer and expected to live only a few more months, she was unable to find time to speak. "SINCERE APOLOGY" Under the 1965 treaty, Japan reached a deal with South Korea to provide an $800 million aid-and-loan package in exchange for Seoul considering all wartime compensation issues settled. A South Korean panel late last year concluded the 2015 deal between South Korea and Japan had failed to meet the needs of former "comfort women". Acting on that conclusion, the South Korean government this week shut down a fund created under the 2015 deal and vowed to pursue a more "victim-oriented" approach, a move Japan said threatened the two countries' relations. A sense of shame and secrecy meant most tales of abuse and coercion at the brothels for Japanese troops were never discussed publicly, until Kim Hak-sun, one of the South Korean victims, came forward in 1991. She and two other former comfort women joined a class action lawsuit against Japan, which prompted the Japanese government to acknowledge its role for the first time in 1993. The case was eventually dismissed by Japan's highest courts in 2004. Lee was one of the survivors emboldened by Kim's move, and has since worked to raise awareness, including meeting the Pope and traveling to North Korea to meet other victims. "Since 1992, I had been asking Japan to make sincere apology, that is what I want," Lee said. "I have been doing this for 27 years, it doesnt matter whether it was raining or snowing, or the weather was cold or hot." UNRESOLVED DISPUTE From 1995 to 2007, Japan created a fund from donations to make payments to women throughout Asia, budgeted money for their welfare support and sent letters of apology from successive premiers. While a number of survivors have accepted compensation over the years, many South Koreans see the issue as unresolved because of what they consider a lack of sincerity from the Japanese government. Despite apologies from Japan, for example, the first comfort women fund was criticized in South Korea for not being direct compensation from the state, and the 2015 deal was faulted for failing to include a clear statement of the Japanese governments legal responsibility. Japan says South Korea had waived all claims in the 1965 pact, and that under the 2015 deal, Japan agreed to provide the funds to help the women heal "psychological wounds". Critics of South Korea have also accused it of ignoring the complicity of some Koreans in the sex trade at the time. Shutting the Japan-funded foundation is one of the most significant steps President Moon Jae-in's administration has taken as it revisits the comfort women controversy. In the past year, South Korea has also opened a new research center aimed at consolidating academic study of comfort women, named the first Comfort Women Day and unveiled a new memorial in Cheonan, a city south of Seoul. "We cannot ignore the truth just because it hurts," Moon said this week. "For the sake of sustainable and solid Korea-Japan relations, we must face up to the truth. Lee said she thinks Moon is "trying his best," and in a statement released from her hospital bed this week, Kim said the move to close the foundation restored her trust in the South Korean president. Moon's efforts, however, have faced pushback from Japanese officials, including Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Earlier this year, Japan formally complained after South Koreas foreign minister raised the issue in a speech at the United Nations. Japanese officials have expressed frustration at what they see as the South Korean government's changing positions and efforts to revisit settled agreements. For survivors like Lee, Japan's protests ring hollow. Lee said she was 16 when she was forcibly taken to Taiwan by a Japanese man in a sort of military uniform. When she first balked at entering the brothel, she said she was beaten and tortured with electric shocks. She was released in 1945, after about two years as a captive. "The survivors of the heinous crimes the Japanese committed are dying day by day, and I bet Abe is dancing for joy," Lee said, becoming animated as she described her frustration. "They should apologize, tell the truth, and pay the legal compensation." (Reporting by Josh Smith and Haejin Choi.; Additional reporting by Linda Sieg in Tokyo.; Editing by Lincoln Feast.) A storm packing mostly rain but also flooding, gusty winds, severe thunderstorms and some snow will hit travel hard at a time when millions are beginning their Christmas journey to end this week. The storm will gain strength as it travels northeastward from the upper Gulf coast to eastern Quebec. Since the storm will take a path well inland, snow and ice with the storm will be limited to the northern tier of the Northeast and on its back side over part of the Midwest. However, the combination of drenching rain, gusty winds and poor visibility from fog and low clouds is likely to cause substantial airline delays, especially from Orlando, Florida, and Charlotte, North Carolina, to Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City, Boston and Newark, New Jersey. AAA holiday travel stats 2018 Motorists will face difficulties, especially on the highways as rain, wind and urban flooding impede their travels. Download the free AccuWeather app to see what weather may affect your holiday travels. Enough rain to fall to trigger, renew flooding "The most widespread problem from this storm will be related to drenching rain," according to AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Brett Anderson. "Enough rain may fall to not only cause urban and poor drainage area flooding, but also lead to small stream flooding and new rises on some of the major rivers from Florida to New England as an atmospheric river sets up for a time," Anderson said. Static atmospheric river setup A swath of intense rain will shift to eastern Virginia, eastern Maryland, southeastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, southeastern New York and New England into Friday. There is the potential for rainfall at the rate of 1-2 inches per hour in this zone for a brief time, which is more than enough to cause water to build up on the traveling lanes and beneath the underpasses. Coastal flooding is anticipated with this storm The combination of stiff, onshore winds from the storm and high astronomical tides are likely to cause coastal flooding. The full moon is on Saturday, but the days leading up to the full moon result in progressively higher astronomical tides. Story continues ThurNightWet "The flooding will be greatest at times of high tide," Anderson said. "Minor beach erosion is likely, even though the storm will be of short duration." The coastal flooding risk will extend along the Carolina coast into Thursday night. During Thursday night and Friday, this risk will extend northward to the mid-Atlantic and southern New England coasts. On Friday, coastal flooding may occur along the Florida Panhandle's west coast. Gusty winds may trigger power outages The strengthening storm will cause winds to kick up. The strong winds and heavy rain on the front and back sides of the storm will not only make walking and driving difficult but may also be potent enough to knock over trees and cause tree limbs to break. The soil is saturated. Trees with a poor root system may topple over in these conditions. winds.jpg When limbs or whole trees come down, power lines may be taken with them. At the very least, expect sporadic power outages with this storm. Winds may be the strongest and power outages the most concentrated in parts of New England, Florida and on the back side of the storm over the central and southern Appalachians. A wintry mix and even a narrow swath of wet snow is anticipated to accompany the gusty winds on the back side of the storm on Friday and Friday night. The snow will streak from parts of the Ohio Valley and Lower Michigan to the western slopes of the Appalachians from West Virginia to western New York. StormyFriNE In addition, locally severe thunderstorms and isolated tornadoes are also a concern from the storm. The greatest risk of thunderstorms with strong wind gusts will be over the Florida Peninsula into Thursday night. Blustery conditions are expected to subside from south to north during Saturday and Saturday night in the East, and dry conditions should return by Saturday night and Sunday. Forecaster Challenge News Story Banner Test your weather prediction skills by clicking the image above and playing Forecaster Challenge. Tijuana (Mexico) (AFP) - Still stinging from the tear gas that beat back their attempt to breach the US-Mexican border, members of the Central American migrant caravan are starting to lose hope, and in some cases are turning back. The migrants have played all their cards in recent days, after more than a month's trek across Central America and Mexico -- but with little success. Their surprise bid to rush the border en masse on Sunday ended as abruptly as it began, when US Border Patrol agents fired tear gas and rubber bullets to force them back. And attempts to sneak across the border alone or in small groups appear to be largely failing. That leaves the roughly 5,000 migrants in the caravan with a handful of options, equally unappealing to most: wait the months or years it could take to request asylum in the United States; settle in Mexico; or give up and go home. Their desperation is palpable at the improvised shelter where they are staying in Tijuana, across the border from San Diego. Living in crowded conditions, with limited toilets, disease outbreaks and two rations of food a day, many are still shell-shocked from the failed attempt by about 500 migrants to get over the chain-link border fence topped with barbed wire on Sunday. "We thought they were going to kill us. It's going to be hard to get to the other side," said Brayan Casas, a 28-year-old from Honduras, showing the bruises he got when he, his wife and his son joined Sunday's stampede. - Long wait - "They learned their lesson," an employee of Mexico's National Migration Institute told AFP at the shelter, speaking on condition of anonymity. "They've seen they won't be able to cross easily. They're a lot less rebellious today." The migrants are mostly fleeing poverty and violence in Central America's "Northern Triangle" -- El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. US President Donald Trump has however warned of an "invasion" by a group full of "hardened criminals." Story continues Some migrants have tried to sneak into the United States alone, without much success. "I've tried five times already," said Danilo Mejia, 26, a skinny Honduran man in an oversized leather jacket, who says the US Border Patrol sent him back to Mexico each time. "I thought if it was dark they wouldn't see me, but they're real watchdogs." He says he does not have the $10,000 or so he would have to pay a human trafficker, or "coyote," to bring him into the United States. But sneaking in through the desert alone is a perilous strategy. Hundreds of migrants die trying every year, of dehydration, hypothermia or snake bites. Seeking asylum in the United States is not much easier. In Tijuana, the waiting list to enter the US at an official border crossing and apply for asylum currently has more than 5,000 names on it, including caravan members and other migrants who were already in line. And the US is backlogged with asylum cases: requests increased by 2,000 percent in the past five years, and there are currently 700,000 pending. - 'Like animals' - Arlin Gutierrez, 40, traveled here from Honduras with her three young children, and is unsure what to do next. "We'd have to wait more than three months to be called (from the asylum wait-list), and who knows how much longer for our case to be resolved," she said, shaking out her baby's disposable diaper to use it again. "We can't wait for so long, living here like animals." Trump issued an executive order earlier this month barring migrants who sneak across the border from filing asylum claims. That policy has been temporarily blocked by a federal judge. Undaunted, Trump tweeted Saturday that migrants seeking asylum will have to remain in Mexico while their claims are processed -- though Mexico has not publicly agreed to such a plan. Facing a hostile welcome and little hope, a growing number of migrants have decided to turn back. "We're going home defeated, but alive," said Yaison Roca, 29, a Honduran man traveling with his wife and three children who took part in Sunday's border stampede and says the crackdown left his family traumatized. On Monday, a line formed outside a tent set up by the International Organization for Migration where migrants could ask to be sent home voluntarily. More than 80 requested help from the United Nations body that day, up from just a handful in previous days, officials said. In all, 1,700 caravan migrants have asked to be sent home since the caravan set out from San Pedro Sula, Honduras, on October 13, according to officials. Tehran (AFP) - Frequently a target of attack by hardliners, Iran's President Hassan Rouhani is benefiting from a sudden surge in support from his former critics, a week after he called for national unity. The apparent sea-change in conservative rhetoric follows hawkish comments by the president himself following Washington's unilateral May withdrawal from a landmark 2015 nuclear deal. Visiting Europe to seek economic guarantees, Rouhani lashed out at Israel in the Swiss capital Bern on Tuesday, saying Iran "sees the Zionist regime as an illegitimate regime". And he has questioned the American government's ability to make good on threats to prevent other countries buying Tehran's oil. The latest evidence of the domestic shift came on Wednesday, in a letter by prominent General Qassem Soleimani to the moderately conservative president. Soleimani -- head of the elite Revolutionary Guards' foreign operations -- thanks the president for his "wise and appropriate" words on Israel and the US, in the letter published by Fars news agency. Rouhani's remarks were "a source of pride", wrote the general. - 'Meeting in the Strait' - Rouhani is the main Iranian architect of the July 2015 nuclear accord with world powers, under which his country agreed to rein in its nuclear programme in exchange for easing multilateral sanctions which had strangled the economy. Some Iranians have interpreted Rouhani's recent hawkish comments as meaning he could be open to blocking the Strait of Hormuz -- a threat Tehran has brandished during past bouts of regional tension. Some 30 percent of all the world's sea-borne oil exports pass through the strait, which runs from the Gulf into the Indian Ocean. Conservative Iranian media outlets have thrown their weight behind Rouhani. "Meeting in the Strait" read a headline in Javan -- a daily close to the Revolutionary Guards -- along with a picture of the president and General Soleimani shaking hands in front of a map of the Strait of Hormuz. Story continues A photo of Soleimani was splashed across the front page of Sazandegi newspaper with the headline "Unity Sepah-Government" (Sepah is the Farsi acronym for the Revolutionary Guards). Rouhani, who has sought to open up various economic sectors to private enterprise, has repeatedly criticised the Revolutionary Guards for exerting too tight a grip on Iran's economy. Since he first took office in 2013, Rouhani has regularly been attacked by ultra-conservatives. He was elected for a second four-year term in May 2017, with the support of reformers. After protests around the New Year in many Iranian cities against economic hardship, they accused Rouhani of abandoning the country's weakest citizens. Some have held up America's withdrawal from the nuclear agreement as proof of the president's naivety in trusting the West. - 'Survival of the nation' - As Iran's rial plunged in value and protests re-ignited, some legislators called in late June for Rouhani to be impeached. But things changed abruptly after June 27 when he appealed to his opponents for help. Kayhan is another ultra-conservative newspaper now backing the president. "We must put to one side our differences because, at present, the national interest and the survival of the nation are at stake," said an editorial. But Javan signalled the truce may only be temporary. "Resisting the enemy and preserving the nation's independence require us to be together and put our differences to one side until a later date", wrote editor-in-chief Abdollah Ganji. Washington (AFP) - President Donald Trump's decision announced Wednesday to withdraw US troops from Syria marks his latest abrupt twist on the war, over which he has been inconsistent even by his standards. Trump, taking to his favorite medium of Twitter, declared the defeat of the Islamic State extremist movement, which he said was the sole reason for the presence of 2,000 troops in Syria. His stance paradoxically puts him in line with his predecessor Barack Obama, whom Trump has strongly criticized. Obama, questioning the wisdom of US intervention, ordered a force for the narrow goal of fighting the group also known as ISIS. Here are some of the positions taken by Trump on Syria: - Strongly opposes air strikes - Before his election, the real estate tycoon was firmly in the anti-war camp and opposed any US military action against President Bashar al-Assad. In late 2013, when Obama was pondering whether to enforce his own "red line" by launching strikes to punish Assad's use of chemical weapons, Trump warned to "stay out of Syria." "AGAIN, TO OUR VERY FOOLISH LEADER, DO NOT ATTACK SYRIA - IF YOU DO MANY VERY BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN & FROM THAT FIGHT THE U.S. GETS NOTHING!" he declared in an all upper-case salvo on Twitter. - Assails refugees - As his once improbable candidacy gathered steam, Trump found a major political issue on Syria -- assailing refugees and demanding a sweeping ban on Muslims entering the United States. Again on Twitter, Trump alleged that Syrian refugees "pouring into our great country" could belong to the IS group and warned of the "destruction of civilization as we know it." He at the same time took a stance on Syria that was not too different from Obama, saying that the Islamic State group rather than Assad posed the bigger threat. - Orders air strikes - When a sarin gas attack in April 2017 in the town of Khan Sheikhun killed 83 people, Trump shed his pre-presidential opposition to punishing Assad. Story continues Casting himself as showing more resolve than Obama, Trump ordered 59 cruise missiles to strike a Syrian air base. The attack was a one-off but the tone also hardened. Then secretary of state Rex Tillerson suggested that the US forces provided leverage to pressure Assad into peace talks with the armed opposition. - Withdrawing 'soon' - Trump shifted course sharply again in March this year when, in an aside during a speech that took US generals by surprise, he declared, "We'll be coming out of Syria, like, very soon. Let the other people take care of it now." Returning to his pre-election stance, Trump said the United States had wasted $7 trillion on US wars in the Middle East. But within weeks Trump was incensed and talked of punishing Assad and its ally Russia after a fresh alleged chemical weapons attack in the town of Douma. - Focus on Iran - Trump's team at the same time stepped up another goal in the region -- curbing the influence of Iran, a major foe of US allies Saudi Arabia and Israel. National security adviser John Bolton warned in September that the United States would stay in Syria until the departure of Iran -- a key backer of Assad. James Jeffrey, the US special representative on Syria, later clarified that the continued US role would not necessarily be military. - Islamic State 'defeated' - With Syria largely at an uneasy truce by the end of 2018, the United States said it was looking at a longer-term effort. Brett McGurk, the US special envoy on defeating ISIS, told reporters on December 11 that "nobody is declaring a mission accomplished" and "you can't just defeat their physical space and then leave." But a US official told AFP on Wednesday that the United States was planning a full withdrawal, after Trump tweeted: "We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency." Nayak Paudel is a crime reporter for The Kathmandu Post. Since joining the Post in 2018, he has also written on health issues. Washington (AFP) - The US lawmaker who led a delegation to New Mexico Tuesday to look into the death of a seven-year-old Guatemalan girl in US Border Patrol custody blamed the tragedy on glaring systematic failures. Jakelin Caal died last week in hospital in El Paso, Texas, after being arrested with her father and others crossing from Mexico December 6. Together they had traveled more than 3,000 kilometers from their hometown of Raxruha, Guatemala. "We learned today that (there was) some very disturbing systematic failure in how the young girl's condition was handled," Joaquin Castro, a Texas congressman and incoming chair of the Hispanic Caucus, told reporters on the border Tuesday in Lordsburg, New Mexico. Lawmakers visited a Border Patrol facility after Caal died last week of "dehydration and shock," local media reported, citing US Customs and Border Protection (CBP). "The issue started when (CBP) violated the law and did not notify Congress within 24 hours that Jakelin had died in their custody," Castro said. "During the 94 miles by bus where she started to present serious symptoms of medical and body failure, there was nobody onboard that could offer any kind of medical help to her," he added. Caal had reportedly had not eaten or consumed water for several days, the CBP told The Washington Post, which reported she began having seizures more than eight hours after being detained. Emergency responders had measured the girl's body temperature at 105.7 degrees Fahrenheit (41 degrees Celsius), the Post said. She died after being flown to hospital. President Donald Trump has made hardline immigration policies a central plank of his presidency, drawing fire from critics who accuse him of demonizing migrants for political gain. Much attention has been focused on caravans of thousands of Central Americans who have made their way to Tijuana, Mexico, just south from San Diego, California in a challenge to Trump, who criticized them as posing an "invasion." But migrants fleeing poverty and gang violence also continue to cross over in New Mexico, Texas and Arizona after enduring dangerous treks through Mexico. ISLAMABAD (AP) The Taliban held another round of talks with U.S. officials on Monday, this time in the United Arab Emirates and also involving Saudi, Pakistani and Emirati representatives, part of the latest attempt to bring a negotiated end to Afghanistan's 17-year war. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid offered few details of the daylong meeting except to say "discussions were held with the American side over the end to the invasion of Afghanistan." He dismissed Afghan media reports that Afghan government representatives, who are in the United Arab Emirates, had met with the Taliban. "There is no plan to meet the Kabul administration," Mujahid said. "There is no possibility of the presence of the Kabul administration in the meeting, which the Islamic Emirate will attend." The Taliban refer to their movement as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, and dismiss the Kabul government as a U.S. puppet. Mujahid said the meetings were continuing. Khalil Minawi, director of Afghanistan's state-run Bakhtar news agency, earlier tweeted that officials from the United States, Afghanistan, Pakistan and the UAE held meetings Sunday ahead of "the Pakistani-sponsored U.S.-Taliban meeting." While Afghan officials did not attend Monday's meeting with the Taliban, their presence in the UAE is a significant step in efforts to get the two sides talking. The Taliban have consistently refused to hold direct talks with the Afghan government, insisting they will only negotiate with the U.S. Afghanistan's National Security Adviser Hamdullah Mohib was among the Afghan government representatives in the UAE, a senior Afghan government official told The Associated Press. The presence of such a high-ranking individual was seen as a sign of progress. Also significant is the presence of the Saudis and Emiratis, both of whom have significant influence over the Taliban, and who might be able to help secure concessions from the group eventually leading to face-to-face talks with Kabul. Story continues Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Pakistan were the only three countries to recognize the Taliban government during its five-year rule, which ended with the 2001 U.S.-led invasion. Washington has considerable sway over the Afghan government, which it heavily bankrolls. The U.S. has spent $1 trillion in Afghanistan since ousting the Taliban and the war there has become America's longest. While the U.S. State Department has neither denied nor confirmed previous meetings with the Taliban, Washington's peace envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, says he has met with all sides in the conflict. The Taliban control nearly half of Afghanistan and carry out daily attacks, mainly targeting security forces and government officials. The group said last month that it held three days of talks with Khalilzad in Qatar, where the Taliban maintain a political office. Khalilzad then went to Kabul, where he urged Afghan President Ashraf Ghani to cobble together a team that could hold talks with the Taliban. Khalilzad said he would like to see a "roadmap" agreement reached before Afghan presidential elections, scheduled for next April. Since his appointment in September, Khalilzad has made several tours of the region. Earlier this month, he held meetings in Islamabad. Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan later said Khalilzad asked Pakistan to assist in getting the Taliban to the negotiating table. Khan said Pakistan would sponsor the UAE talks and insisted that a military solution is not the answer. ___ Associated Press writer Amir Shah in Kabul, Afghanistan contributed. Tenerife It comes as no surprise to see Tenerife steal the top spot as this years most searched-for holiday destination. With a plethora of palm-fringed beaches, all year round sun and family-friendly hotels whats not to love? Oh, and its just a four-hour plane ride away. See you there? [Photo: Getty] As the year draws to a close, were desperately trying to squeeze a last-minute getaway in before the inevitable Christmas crush. But with festive flight deals invading our inbox, it can prove impossible to know where to kick-start our holiday planning. Thankfully, weve tracked down the 20 most searched-for holiday destinations of 2018 so you can finally cross off one of the hot spots you didnt get a chance to see (or gram) this year. Family favourites Cyprus, Malta and Benidorm proved popular in 2018 with Tenerife unsurprisingly stealing the top spot. When it comes to chic city breaks, Amsterdam played host to countless Brits alongside Dublin, Barcelona and Rome. Those itching for adventure were scouring the Internet for all things Aussie (were pretty sure Harry and Meghan have something to do with our newfound wanderlust). So if youre itching to escape the manic run-up to Christmas, look no further for inspiration as we count down this years most searched-for holiday destinations from New York to Thailand. How many have you visited? Follow us on Instagram and Facebook for non-stop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day. For Twitter updates, follow @YahooStyleUK. Read more from Yahoo Style UK: The most ridiculously expensive hotels in the UK are they worth it? 15 of the best campsites in Europe The best British destinations for a weekend away The American Automobile Association (AAA) has released their top five year-end travel destinations for 2018, and the list shows that most people are seeking to escape the cold. No matter where you are going, AAA Traffic Safety and Advocacy spokesperson Tamra Johnson recommends drivers hitting the road not only check the weather at your final destination but also all along your route. "It's going to be a record-breaker. We are anticipating that 112 million Americans will be traveling more than 50 miles away from home, and that is more than one-third of Americans and that's a four percent increase and the actual highest year in travel volume since AAA started tracking," Johnson said. AAA holiday travel stats 2018 Johnson said not only will the roads be busy, but so will air traffic and other modes of travel like buses, trains and cruise ships. "Typically, the strength of the economy is a strong indicator for where we will find travel throughout 2018. The economy has been strengthening. Consumer confidence is up; it hit an 18-year high around Thanksgiving. Also consumer spending and the strength of the labor market are all helping to contribute to this increase," Johnson said. top-5-destinations.jpg "If we just look at a lot of the top travel destinations for 2018, we see a lot of people are trying to escape to those warm weather destinations," Johnson said. She added that this tends to be the trend especially at the end of the year, so destinations like Dominican Republic and Jamaica are all in the top five as Americans look to escape cold weather. Johnson said Orlando, Florida, typically tops the list. Orlando as well as Anaheim, California, tend to be popular destinations for families looking to get to amusement parks. "But then also for end of year, we typically see that New York City tends to be a very popular destination for people that want to head to Times Square and see the ball drop, so that is also on the top 10 list," Johnson said. Story continues According to AAA, most people tend to drive to their destination, and 2018 is proving that to be accurate. "We are anticipating that 102 million Americans will be taking road trips; that's up about four percent from 2017. And then 6.7 million are going to be flying and about 3.7 are taking other modes of transportation," Johnson said. Disney No Measles Impact A woman with a Mickey Mouse hat walks toward Sleeping Beauty's Castle at Disneyland, in Anaheim, Calif. Disney. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File) AAA has seen cruise travel rise in 2018. Additionally, many Americans are excited to travel to the Caribbean, whether that be by cruise or by air, particularly since the Atlantic hurricane season wrapped up on Nov. 30. Police arrested a man and have taken him into custody (Onuoha Olere) Three people have been taken to hospital after stabbings at two health centres in east London, police said. A man was detained nearby and taken to hospital for treatment. It is understood two people were stabbed in the Tredegar Practice on St Stephens Road, Tower Hamlets and a further person was stabbed in St Stephens Health Centre off nearby William Place. None of the injuries are thought to be life-threatening. One eyewitness, Onuoha Olere, posted on Twitter: Terrible scene at Roman Road, E3 as done with machete went on a stabbing spree in a local surgery. The health centre in Tower Hamlets Scotland Yard said in a statement: Police were called at 11.06am on Wednesday, 19 December to reports of a stabbing at a health centre on St Stephens Road, Tower Hamlets. Officers, including specialist firearms officers, attended and found three people suffering from stab injuries. They were taken to hospital; their injuries are not being treated as life-threatening. #TowerHamlets BREAKING TRIPLE STABBING: Three people have been brutally stabbed at St Stephens Health Care Centre on St Stephens Road in #Bow, #E3. Police including armed officers were called at 11.06am. A man was detained nearby and taken to hospital. Video: @OOlere pic.twitter.com/OF4pGCfqJy London 999 Feed (@999London) December 19, 2018 Farhad Alom, 25, who witnessed the attacks, said a bystander at St Stephens could not get to safety as he was in a wheelchair. One person was stabbed in the neck and another in the stomach, he added, in what appeared to be targeted assaults. Story continues One woman, who did not want to be named, said she saw the knife attack at Tredegar Practice and a man stepped in to stop the attacker. A man who was in the area at the time of the attack said: A man has come out [of the surgery] quite quick so Ive asked him whats wrong and he said theres a man in there thats walked into the surgery and apparently stabbed an older lady. Then an ambulance and couple of CID cars and armed police was here quite quick. WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Senate on Monday prepared to vote this week on bipartisan criminal justice legislation supported by President Donald Trump, although critics were forcing debate on a series of changes before allowing a decision on passage. The "First Step Act" would ease the way for certain prison inmates to win early release to halfway houses or home confinement. It also would create programs to reduce recidivism and protect first-time non-violent offenders from harsh mandatory minimum sentences. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell noted that a "number" of senators still had problems with the bill. But in a procedural move on Monday evening, the Senate overwhelmingly voted to advance the measure, clearing the way for debate on amendments before a possible vote on passage later in the week. Even with Senate passage, the House of Representatives would still have to act in the waning days of this Congress before it could be sent to Trump for signing into law. Conservative senators already have won some changes to the bill, paring back the discretion judges would have to sentence felons with criminal histories beneath mandatory minimums. At the end of 2016, according to U.S. Justice Department figures, nearly 2.2 million people were incarcerated in prisons or local jails. That makes the United States the world leader in prison population, according to private estimates. Republican senators Tom Cotton and John Kennedy were pushing for approval of three amendments that would further tighten requirements. They address excluding child molesters and other violent felons from early release, notifying victims before offenders are let out early and a measure to track the effectiveness of anti-recidivism programs, according to Senate aides. (Reporting by Richard Cowan; Editing by Dan Grebler) Washington (AFP) - Donald Trump rails on an almost daily basis against the federal probe into whether his campaign colluded with Russia to get him elected to the White House. But the investigation by former FBI director Robert Mueller into the 2016 election is just one of many ongoing inquiries into Trump, his businesses and his associates. Trump's ex-national security advisor, retired lieutenant general Michael Flynn, appeared in court on Tuesday for sentencing after pleading guilty to lying to the FBI. And New York's attorney general announced that Trump's personal charity, the Trump Foundation, had agreed to shut down amid a lawsuit accusing it of engaging in illegal activity. Exactly how many investigations target Trump is subject to interpretation because many of the probes overlap with others or have spun off in different directions. But the scrutiny is extensive. And that's before a Democratic-controlled House of Representatives convenes in January with wide-ranging powers to dig into Trump's affairs. Whether Trump could personally face charges while in the White House is a matter of debate -- legal experts are divided on whether a sitting president can be indicted. The following are the main investigations facing Trump as he approaches two years in office: - Russia investigation - The core focus of the Special Counsel's probe is whether there were "any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals" associated with the Trump campaign. While Mueller has yet to file any charges alleging outright collusion between the campaign and Moscow, the probe has led to a host of indictments and guilty pleas. One focus of the probe is a June 9, 2016 meeting at the Trump Tower in New York in which a Russian lawyer was to offer dirt on Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. The meeting was attended by Trump's campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, his son Donald Jr., and son-in-law Jared Kushner. Story continues Mueller is also looking into whether WikiLeaks' Julian Assange coordinated his leaks of stolen Democratic Party emails with Trump campaign advisor Roger Stone. Twenty-five Russians and three Russian companies have been indicted for interfering in the 2016 election. Manafort was convicted of tax evasion and other charges related to his consulting work for pro-Moscow politicians in Ukraine between 2004 and 2014. Flynn and George Papadopoulos, an advisor to the campaign, pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents about their contacts with Russians and have been cooperating with Mueller. Papadopoulos was given 14 days in prison, while Flynn's sentencing was delayed until March. Michael Cohen, Trump's personal lawyer, was ordered to spend three years in prison after pleading guilty to tax evasion, providing false statements to a bank, campaign finance violations and lying to Congress. Cohen admitted lying to Congress about talks to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, acknowledging the negotiations continued well into the 2016 election campaign. - Campaign finance violations - Trump is facing potential legal jeopardy over hush money payments made to two women who were threatening to go public during the election campaign with claims they had affairs with the Republican candidate. Cohen said $130,000 was paid to porn actress Stormy Daniels and $150,000 to former Playboy model Karen McDougal. Prosecutors have described the payments as illegal campaign contributions intended to influence the election and Cohen said they were made "in coordination and at the direction" of Trump. The president has said he did not instruct Cohen to break the law and has sought to pin the blame for the payments solely on his long-time "fixer." - Obstruction of justice - One avenue of the Mueller probe is whether Trump obstructed justice by abruptly firing then FBI director James Comey and asking him to shut down an investigation into General Flynn. Trump dismissed Comey in May 2017 while he was investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 election, a probe that was eventually taken up by Mueller. - Inauguration spending - According to The Wall Street Journal, federal prosecutors in New York are investigating whether Trump's inaguration commitee misspent some of the record $107 million it received in donations. The newspaper said prosecutors were looking into whether some donors gave money in exchange for access to Trump administration officials. - Profiting off his businesses - One of the cases facing the president is linked to his Trump International Hotel in Washington and an obscure provision in the US Constitution known as the Emoluments Clause, which forbids office holders from accepting money from foreign entities. The attorney generals of Maryland and Washington have sued Trump arguing he is in violation of the clause because his hotel does business with foreign governments. Trump has turned over operations of his real estate empire to his sons and has pledged while in office to donate revenue from foreign governments to the US Treasury. - Trump Foundation - Trump agreed to shut down his personal charity, the Trump Foundation, after it was targeted in a lawsuit by the New York attorney general. State attorney general Barbara Underwood filed a lawsuit against the foundation in June, accusing it of "persistently illegal conduct" to advance Trump's business and political interests. The suit named Trump, sons Don Jr and Eric and daughter Ivanka, who were on the foundation board. The suit, which will move forward despite the agreement dissolving the charity, seeks $2.8 million in restitution and to bar Trump, Don Jr, Eric and Ivanka from serving on the boards of other New York non-profits. - Taxes - In the wake of a New York Times expose about alleged tax evasion by the Trump family, New York state tax authorities said they were looking into the matter. According to the Times, the Trump family managed in the 1990s to avoid paying taxes on hundreds of millions of dollars through "outright fraud" in some cases. Faced with congressional unwillingness to fund his promised wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, President Donald Trump has directed his Cabinet agencies to see if they have funds that can be put toward the project. (Photo: ASSOCIATED PRESS) WASHINGTON Frustrated that neither Mexico nor Congress will pay for his border wall, President Donald Trump has directed his Cabinet to scrounge through the executive branch couch cushions to see what they can come up with. The president has asked every agency to look and see if they have money that they can use for that purpose, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Tuesday. Its unclear how much money that could produce, and whether Trump could legally order it transferred between agencies without permission from Congress. Stan Collender, a longtime former budget staffer on Capitol Hill, said agencies had very limited ability to transfer money to each other. Usually requires at least tacit congressional approval, he added. Finding $5 billion will be very hard and have long-term negative implications for Trump with appropriators. About a fourth of the federal government will run out of operating money Friday at midnight. Trump has threatened to allow a shutdown of those agencies which include the departments of Homeland Security, Justice, State and Interior if Congress fails to include $5 billion to start a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. But with Congress appearing unlikely to approve anything beyond the existing $1.6 billion for border security improvements but not a border wall Trumps White House has started to signal that it might be able to get the money in other ways. Well see what happens. Its too early to say, Trump said during a Tuesday photo opportunity when he was asked about a possible shutdown. We need border security. He promised many hundreds of times during his campaign that American taxpayers would not have to pay anything for his 30-foot-tall, concrete great wall because he would force Mexico to pay for it. But nearly two years into his presidency, he has yet to broach the subject even a single time with that countrys leaders. Asked about that promise during a rare White House press briefing Tuesday, Sanders first claimed falsely that money transferred from other agencies did not constitute American taxpayer money. Then she claimed also falsely that the North American Free Trade Agreement that Trump has rebranded as the United StatesMexicoCanada Agreement will effectively make Mexico pay for the wall. Story continues Were not asking Americans taxpayers for that. We are looking at existing funding through other agencies right now that we can draw on to do that immediately, Sanders said. She added, referring to increased tax revenue from the modified trade deal, We could pay for the wall four times over. ... Were talking about additional revenue that wouldnt have existed without the president getting a new deal. But trade economists say that only one provision of the revised deal would directly increase collections by the U.S. Treasury: a 2.5 percent tariff that would be imposed on cars made in Mexico that did not have at least 75 percent content made in North America. The current threshold is 62.5 percent. That provision would bring in only about $600 million a year nowhere near enough to pay for a $25 billion wall, even after two decades. More important, that tariff would be paid by those who purchase cars in the United States, not the government of Mexico. Ultimately, whos affected by the tariffs is the American consumer, who will pay more for cars, said Monica de Bolle of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Love HuffPost? Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today. This article originally appeared on HuffPost. Washington (AFP) - US allies were stunned Thursday after President Donald Trump declared victory over the Islamic State group in Syria and abruptly ordered the withdrawal of US ground troops from the country. The decision runs counter to long-established US policy for Syria and the region. It blindsided lawmakers, the Pentagon and international allies alike. Britain and France warned on Thursday that the fight against jihadists in Syria was not finished. Trump earlier said: "We've won against ISIS," in a short video posted on Twitter. "We've beaten them and we've beaten them badly. We've taken back the land. And now it's time for our troops to come back home." A withdrawal could have major geopolitical ramifications, and plunges into uncertainty the fate of US-backed Kurdish fighters who have been tackling Islamic State jihadists, thousands of whom are thought to remain in Syria. A US official told AFP that Trump's decision was finalized Tuesday. "Full withdrawal, all means all," the official said when asked if the troops would be pulled from across Syria. Currently, about 2,000 US forces are in the country, most of them on a train-and-advise mission to support local forces fighting IS. Pentagon officials scrambled for a reaction. A spokeswoman eventually said the Defense Department had "started the process" of bringing troops home. Lawmakers assailed Trump's decision, saying it could embolden Ankara to attack US-backed Kurdish fighters. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a Trump ally, said the president's decision was unwise and put the Kurds "at risk." Democratic Senator Jack Reed said it amounted to a "betrayal" of the Kurds that "provides further evidence of President Trump's inability to lead on the world stage." Blasting the move as a "huge Obama-like mistake," Graham said "I fear it will lead to devastating consequences for our nation, the region and throughout the world." Story continues Most US troops are stationed in northern Syria, though a small contingent is based at a garrison in Al-Tanaf, near the Jordanian and Iraqi borders. Trump has previously voiced skepticism about the US presence in Syria, saying in March he wanted to bring troops home "soon." But military advisors and international allies warned Trump against a precipitous pullout, and he later acquiesced to an indefinite Syria mission. The US official would not provide a withdrawal timeline, saying only it would come "as quickly as possible." White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said the US-led coalition that includes dozens of nations would continue fighting the jihadists. "These victories over ISIS in Syria do not signal the end of the Global Coalition or its campaign," Sanders said in a statement. The Pentagon refused to say what effect the troop withdrawal would have on air operations in Syria that have been ongoing since late 2014. A senior administration official said Trump's decision was consistent with comments he has made for years. "The notion that anyone within the administration was caught unaware, I would challenge that," the official said. - Fate of Kurdish fighters? - A large contingent of the main US-backed, anti-IS fighting force in Syria, an alliance known as the Syrian Democratic forces (SDF), is Kurdish. Turkey terms it a "terrorist" group. Ankara has said it plans to launch an operation against the Kurdish militia known as the YPG (Kurdish People's Protection Units). While the YPG has spearheaded Washington's fight against IS, US support has strained relations between the NATO allies. The US decision to withdraw from Syria marks a remarkable development not just for the Kurds, but for years-old US doctrine in the region. Only last week, Brett McGurk, the special envoy to defeat IS, said "nobody is declaring a mission accomplished." "If we've learned one thing over the years, enduring defeat of a group like (IS) means you can't just defeat their physical space and then leave," he said. - 'Short-sighted and naive' - A statement issued by the British government, which has long supported the anti-IS campaign in Syria, said "much remains to be done" against the jihadists. "We must not lose sight of the threat they pose. Even without territory, (IS) will remain a threat," the statement read. Junior defence minister Tobias Ellwood was more blunt, retweeting a message from Trump that the jihadists had been defeated in Syria with the words: "I strongly disagree. "It has morphed into other forms of extremism and the threat is very much alive." The Times newspaper on Thursday reported that Britain had not been informed of the decision before Trump announced it. France said Thursday it will maintain its participation in the coalition fighting IS forces in Syria. European Affairs Minister Nathalie Loiseau said "the fight against terrorism is not over." A US presence in Syria is seen as key to pushing against Russian and Iranian influence. Pro-Iran militias have supported Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and Moscow in 2015 intervened in the conflict to prop him up. Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, called the decision "extraordinarily short-sighted and naive." "This is not just a dream scenario for ISIS, but also for Russia, Iran and the Assad regime, all of whom stand to benefit substantially from a US withdrawal," Lister said. Smugglers attack injures three cops Three police officers were injured when a group of fuel smugglers attacked a security team at Jagarnathpur Rural Municipaliy-1 in Parsa on Tuesday morning. Fox News host Tucker Carlson said that the war on Christmas is real, and called it a global struggle. So on Tuesdays Tucker Carlson Tonight, he brought on political commentator and radio host, Tammy Bruce, to break down a story about a Scottish parliament coffee shop that changed the name of its gingerbread men, to gingerbread people. You don't want to give them a gender without their consent, Carlson quipped. You dont even want to know how many bathrooms there are in gingerbread houses now. A lot. After Carlson expressed his suspicion that people who do things like this are right-wing plants, there to discredit the progressives they live among, Bruce had a theory of her own. The left has worked now for a couple of generations to condition us to, ahead of time, worry about what we are going to say challenging people and threatening them and letting them know theres danger in those thoughts, Bruce said. And after reporting that the baker in the story was shocked by the onslaught of negative outcry over the gingerbread change, Bruce added: I contend that living your entire life being kind of bullied into what you can and cannot say, and presumptions that youre bad people, that it can be smallest thing that tips you over the edge, that can be your tipping point. And in this case its, you know, calling a gingerbread man a gingerbread person when, obviously, theyre men. Some viewers on Twitter seemed perplexed by the conversation. Many sarcastically thanked Fox News for covering the important issues. And then there were the gingerbread jokes. In todays news, Tucker Carlson and Tammy Bruce think cookies are people. https://t.co/nJi52crE6i Free Dominguez (@freedominguez) December 19, 2018 Good to see #Fox is covering the important issues, gingerbread cookies gender. LZinWisconsin (@lz000) December 19, 2018 This is the ideal male body. You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like. pic.twitter.com/gm7Pa6KNgO Mannheim Steamroller Season (@soundkitties) December 19, 2018 Bruce responded to critics on Twitter, implying that she was just joking about the whole thing. Story continues Bro, do you have a sense of humor? #KnowWhenYoureBeingMocked https://t.co/d3LXQdZd7I Tammy Bruce (@HeyTammyBruce) December 19, 2018 And, of course, Carlson drew his own conclusion from the story. So maybe the lesson is that the rest of us shouldn't participate in our own spiritual neutering, he said. Tucker Carlson Tonight airs weeknights at 8 p.m. on Fox News. Watch Tucker Carlson double down on controversial comments he made that caused advertisers to pull ads: Read more from Yahoo Entertainment: Tell us what you think! Hit us up on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, or leave your comments below. By Hyonhee Shin SEOUL (Reuters) - U.S. officials will try to expedite humanitarian aid to North Korea, a U.S. envoy said on Wednesday, as Washington and Pyongyang struggle to find a breakthrough in stalled talks aimed at ending the North's nuclear program. Stephen Biegun, the U.S. special representative for North Korea, made the announcement as he arrived in Seoul for four days of talks with South Korean officials. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un vowed to work toward denuclearization at his landmark summit with U.S. President Donald Trump in Singapore in June but the two sides have since made little progress. With Washington doubling down on sanctions enforcement, humanitarian aid for North Korea has nearly ground to a halt this year, despite warnings of a potential food crisis and improving relations with Pyongyang, aid groups say. International sanctions imposed over North Korea's nuclear weapons and missile programs technically do not cover humanitarian activities, and over the summer the United Nations adopted a U.S. proposal designed to streamline approval for aid shipments. But strict interpretations of U.N. sanctions curtailing banking and shipping transactions with Pyongyang, as well as a travel ban for U.S. citizens, have effectively shut down the North Korea operations of most relief groups, according to a dozen officials at U.N. agencies and civilian organizations. "I'll be sitting down with American aid groups early in the new year to discuss how we can better ensure the delivery of appropriate assistance, particularly through the course of the coming winter," Biegun told reporters in Seoul, noting that the United States would work with the United Nations in reviewing how it grants sanctions exemptions for aid. He acknowledged that the travel ban - which requires American aid workers to obtain special permission from the U.S. State Department before traveling to North Korea - "may have impacted the delivery of humanitarian assistance". Early next year, U.S. officials will review how they grant that permission for the "purposes of facilitating the delivery of aid", Biegun said. Part of the catalyst for the review was the expulsion of an American citizen who had illegally entered North Korea in October, he said. North Korea handled the man's case "expeditiously and with great discretion", giving American officials "greater confidence about the safety and security of Americans traveling" to North Korea, Biegun said. STALLED TALKS Biegun's visit to Seoul comes as negotiations between the United States and North Korea appear stalled, with the two sides yet to reschedule talks between U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and senior North Korean official Kim Yong Chol after abruptly cancelling a meeting in November. Trump has said a second summit with Kim is likely to take place in January or February, though he wrote on Twitter last week that he is "in no hurry". North Korea has for years pursued nuclear and missile programs in defiance of U.N. Security Council resolutions but the bellicose rhetoric from both Pyongyang and Trump that raised fears of war has eased this year. The stalled negotiations have also had an impact on inter-Korean ties, with the North aloof toward the South's plan to host Kim Jong Un in Seoul this month as agreed at his summit with President Moon Jae-in in Pyongyang in September. Kim's trip was unlikely to take place this year, Moon's press secretary said last week. South Korean Unification Minister Cho Myoung-gyon, who is due to meet Biegun on Friday, said the nuclear talks would face a critical moment between February and March. "I think it is fair to say that the denuclearization process is not yet on track in earnest," Cho was quoted by the Yonhap news agency as telling reporters. "Next year, we can see whether they will have a chance to get closer to the objectives." North Korean state media has credited Trump for his "willingness" to continue dialogue but has also slammed Washington for stepping up sanctions, accusing the State Department of being "bent on bringing the DPRK-U.S. relations back to the status of last year which was marked by exchanges of fire". The report referred to the North by its official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). The State Department said communication between both sides was "ongoing" but sanctions relief would come after they achieved the goal of a "final, fully verified denuclearization". "The sooner North Korea denuclearizes, the sooner sanctions can be lifted," deputy spokesman Robert Palladino told a news briefing on Tuesday in Washington. Biegun was scheduled to hold talks on Thursday with his South Korean counterpart, Lee Do-hoon, ahead of their session on Friday of a working group launched last month to boost coordination on North Korean policy. Biegun is expected to discuss inter-Korean issues with Cho amid U.S. concerns that Seoul may be moving too quickly with Pyongyang relative to the lackluster progress on denuclearization. The two Koreas plan to hold a ground-breaking ceremony on Wednesday for their project to reconnect rail and road links, which would need U.S. sanctions exemptions. (Reporting by Hyonhee Shin; Editing by Nick Macfie) By Anthony Esposito MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - The United States is committing billions of dollars toward development in Central America and Mexico as part of a plan to strengthen economies in the region and curb illegal immigration, the U.S. and Mexican governments said on Tuesday. Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has been seeking to persuade U.S. counterpart Donald Trump to work with Mexico to develop Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, as well as Mexico's impoverished south, to stem the flow of people. Trump's threats to slash aid to the region if illegal immigration is not contained raised doubts about how much the United States would provide, however. Much of the new aid pledged on Tuesday is private investment that will depend on the viability of the projects and some of it was a reaffirmation of existing pledges. But Tuesday's announcement defied expectations among some skeptics who thought Trump, a Republican, and Lopez Obrador, a leftist, would clash. "Finally, we see that Mexico and the U.S. are on the same page in understanding and tackling migration from Central America as a regional issue, not something that one country can handle on its own," said Christopher Wilson, deputy director of the Mexico Institute at the Wilson Center in Washington. Since much of the money will come through the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) and will not cost U.S. taxpayers, it is "the creative solution that was found that makes this much more palatable to the Trump administration," Wilson said. Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard said Washington is committing $5.8 billion to development in Central America and increasing public and private investment in Mexico via OPIC by $4.8 billion. Of the OPIC amount, $2 billion would go to southern Mexico, he said. Ebrard's government has pledged to find $25 billion to develop the south over the next five years. "The agreements established here mean more than doubling the foreign investment in the south of Mexico from 2019," the minister told a news conference in Mexico City. Mexico and the United States have been in talks over what to do about Central American migrants moving through Mexico. Washington has pushed for Mexico to keep the migrants while their asylum claims are processed, but no deal has been struck. The Mexican government has pledged to offer migrants work visas if they qualify to stay in the country and Lopez Obrador wants the United States to do the same. Roberto Velasco, a spokesman for Ebrard, said in the coming days Mexico aimed to announce a change in immigration policy incorporating the existing plans for work visas for migrants. The State Department said in a statement it wanted to recognize "Mexico's willingness to develop a framework to ensure migration occurs in a legal, orderly, and safe manner." It said the two countries would organize a business conference early in 2019 to discuss investment opportunities. The U.S. pledges include $1.8 billion Washington has spent or allocated between 2015 and 2018, as well as the budget requested for next year, the State Department said. The sums also incorporate OPIC's current projects and potential pipeline worth $2.8 billion, and the U.S. government's current Millennium Challenge commitments. "We announced today that OPIC could make another $2 billion available for southern Mexico if commercially viable projects are presented," a State Department official said. (Reporting by Anthony Esposito, Writing by Daina Beth Solomon; Additional reporting by Lesley Wroughton in Washington; Editing by Dave Graham and Sonya Hepinstall) WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. State Department has approved a possible $3.5 billion sale of Patriot air and missile defense systems to Turkey, the Pentagon said on Tuesday after notifying Congress of the certification. The Defense Security Cooperation Agency said the State Department had approved the sale of 80 Patriot guidance-enhanced missiles and 60 other missiles to Ankara along with related equipment, including radar sets, engagement control stations and launching stations. The State Department said earlier this year it was working with NATO ally Turkey on the possible sale of a Raytheon Co Patriot missile defense system to keep it from buying a Russian-made S-400 system. But twice in Turkey's selection process, Ankara passed over the Patriot system, first choosing a Chinese system before turning to the Russian S-400 system in 2017. U.S. and NATO officials have repeatedly warned Ankara that the Russian system cannot be integrated into the NATO air and missile defense system and that purchasing the S-400 system would jeopardize Turkey's purchase of Lockheed Martin Corp F-35 fighter jets and possibly result in Washington imposing sanctions. The notification process alerts Congress that a sale to a foreign country has been approved, but it does not indicate that a contract has been signed or negotiations have concluded. (Reporting by Mike Stone; Writing by Makini Brice; Editing by David Alexander and Peter Cooney) By Idrees Ali and Phil Stewart WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump has begun what will be a total withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria, declaring on Wednesday they have succeeded in their mission to defeat Islamic State and were no longer needed in the country. A decision to pull out completely, confirmed by U.S. officials, coincides with the roughly 2,000 U.S. troops finishing up a campaign to retake territory once held by Islamic State militants. But it could leave the United States with few options to prevent a resurgence of Islamic State. It could also undercut U.S. leverage in the region and undermine diplomatic efforts to end the Syrian civil war, which is now in its eighth year. News of a of a full withdrawal drew immediate criticism from some of Trump's fellow Republicans, who said that leaving strengthened the hand of Russia and Iran, which both support Syrian President Bashar al Assad. It may also leave exposed an alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, which has been among the most effective against Islamic State but is under threat as Turkey weighs a new offensive in Syria. U.S. commanders on the ground, who have developed strong ties to SDF leaders, had voiced concerns about what a fast withdrawal would mean for the U.S-backed forces and were surprised by the decision, U.S. officials told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity. "We have started returning United States troops home as we transition to the next phase of this campaign," White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said in a statement issued after Trump tweeted that "We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there." Trump's predecessor, Barack Obama, was slow to get involved in Syria's civil war, fearing being dragged into another open-ended foreign conflict like the one in Afghanistan. Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed and displaced in Syria, around half its pre-war 22 million population. Story continues But in a campaign to defeat Islamic State in Syria, Obama ordered air strikes from September 2014 and then troops into the country the following year. The White House declined to offer a timeline for withdrawal and did not confirm explicitly that Trump had ordered a total withdrawal. U.S. officials confirmed that decision to Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity. One U.S. official said Washington aimed to withdraw troops within 60 to 100 days and said the U.S. State Department was evacuating all its personnel in Syria within 24 hours. A second official said they could leave even sooner. TRUMP'S WARINESS Trump is wary of open-ended foreign conflicts and his decision on Syria raises questions about whether he may also reconsider the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan, where American forces have been fighting since 2001. Trump reluctantly agreed to a troop increase last year but U.S. officials have privately acknowledged a sense of urgency and are increasingly focused on securing a peace deal with a resurgent Taliban. Some of Trump's Republican allies in Congress railed against the pullout decision. U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham, often a Trump ally but generally a foreign policy hawk, said a withdrawal would have "devastating consequences" for the United States in the region and throughout the world. "An American withdrawal at this time would be a big win for ISIS, Iran, Bashar al Assad of Syria, and Russia," Graham said in a statement, using the acronym ISIS for Islamic State. The surprise decision also raised eyebrows abroad. A British defence minister said he strongly disagreed with Trump that Islamic State had been defeated in Syria. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel would study the decision and would ensure its own security. In Russia, TASS news agency quoted the Foreign Ministry as saying withdrawing U.S. troops from Syria created prospects for a political settlement. SPECIAL FORCES Many of the remaining U.S. troops in Syria are special operations forces working closely with the SDF. The partnership with the SDF has helped defeat of Islamic State in Syria but has outraged NATO ally Turkey, which views Kurdish YPG forces in the alliance as an extension of a separatist militant group fighting inside Turkey. Ankara is threatening a new offensive in Syria. To date, U.S. forces in Syria have been seen as a stabilizing factor and have somewhat restrained Turkey's actions against the SDF. A complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria would leave a sizeable U.S. military presence in the region, including about 5,200 troops across the border in Iraq. Much of the U.S. campaign in Syria has been waged by warplanes flying out of Qatar and other locations in the Middle East. Still, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and State Department officials have long fretted about leaving Syria before a peace agreement can be reached. Islamic State is also widely expected to revert to guerilla tactics once it no longer holds territory. The United States has not ruled out that Islamic State's leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi could still be alive. A U.S. withdrawal could open Trump up to criticism if Islamic State reemerged. Trump had lambasted Obama for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq that preceded an unravelling of the Iraqi armed forces. Iraqi forces collapsed in the face of Islamic State's advance into Iraq in 2014. A senior administration official rejected the comparison to Iraq, where the United States had many more troops and would have stayed if Baghdad had provided legal protections for the American forces. "That's an apples and oranges comparison given the scope and scale of our engagement in Iraq," the official said. LAST 1 PERCENT Islamic State declared its so-called "caliphate" in 2014 after seizing large swathes of Syria and Iraq. The hardline group established its de facto capital in the Syrian city of Raqqa, using it as a base to plot attacks in Europe. According to U.S. estimates, the group oversaw about 100,000 square kilometres (39,000 square miles) of territory, with about 8 million people under Islamic State control. It had estimated revenues of nearly one billion dollars a year. A senior U.S. official last week said the group was down to its last 1 percent of the territory it once held. It has no remaining territory in Iraq. Hajin, the group's last major stronghold in Syria, is close to being seized by U.S.-backed SDF forces. After losing Hajin, Islamic State will control a diminishing strip of territory along the eastern bank of the Euphrates River in the area where U.S.-backed operations are focused. Militants also control some desert terrain west of the river in territory otherwise controlled by the Damascus government and its allies. U.S. officials have warned that taking back the group's territory would not be the same as defeating it. "The Coalition has liberated the ISIS-held territory, but the campaign against ISIS is not over," Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White said in a statement. (Reporting by Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali; Additional reporting by Doina Chiacu, Steve Holland and Roberta Rampton in Washington and Sarah Dadouch in Istanbul; Writing by Phil Stewart and Arshad Mohammed; Editing by Frances Kerry and Grant McCool) London (AFP) - Britain is putting forward a UN Security Council on the conflict in Yemen to be voted on later this week, Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt told parliament on Wednesday. Hunt said a ceasefire around the Red Sea port of Hodeida agreed by warring parties during talks in Sweden last week was "highly fragile" but holding for now. "I have instructed our mission in New York to resume working on a draft resolution with the Security Council partners with a view to adopting it later this week. "We will ask the Security Council to vote on the draft in the next 48 hours," he said, adding that he had "urged all parties to stick to the terms agreed last week". The resolution would endorse the terms of the agreement, authorise the UN "to monitor their implementation" and set out "urgent steps to alleviate the humanitarian crisis". The war between the Huthi Shiite rebels and troops loyal to President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi escalated in 2015, when he fled into exile in Saudi Arabia and a Saudi-led military coalition intervened. Since then, the war has killed some 10,000 people, according to the World Health Organization, although human rights groups say the real death toll could be five times as high. The conflict has also pushed 14 million people to the brink of famine in what the United Nations describes as the world's worst humanitarian crisis. The warring sides have both welcomed the truce. London (AFP) - Britain published proposals Wednesday for EU immigration curbs after Brexit as business groups warned the UK economy was not ready for the country to crash out of the bloc with no divorce deal in place. The proposals include a temporary work visa system similar to "guest worker" systems in other countries as well as a consultation on a salary threshold for workers who would be allowed to settle in Britain. The European Union also on Wednesday said it was adopting backup plans in case of a no-deal Brexit, while Prime Minister Theresa May faced another barrage of criticism in parliament for delaying a critical vote on her withdrawal deal. Labour opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn accused May of "recklessly running down the clock" by seeking to ensure that MPs only have a choice between her deal and no-deal when parliament will be allowed to vote next month. "She is holding parliament and the country to ransom," he said, accusing her of a "criminal waste of money" with stepped-up no deal contingency planning. Corbyn was later upbraided by Conservative MPs who said he had muttered "stupid woman" at May when she mocked him over his indecision and was asked to apologise to parliament. But a Labour spokesman said Corbyn had said "stupid people". - Need for 'sustainable' immigration - May has vowed to end free movement of people from Europe, saying that this was one of the main reasons that Britons voted to leave the European Union in a 2016 referendum. Immigration levels have already fallen since the referendum. Net migration to Britain was around 280,000 last year, a decrease from levels of more than 300,000 in 2014 and 2015. Home Secretary Sajid Javid said visas would be introduced for EU nationals arriving to live in Britain after Brexit. The new system will be based on skills, not nationality, putting EU and non-EU citizens on the same footing. "In the future, everyone other than British and Irish citizens will need to get UK permission before they can come here," he told lawmakers. Story continues The proposals include one-year visas for workers of any skill level that are aimed at protecting sectors of the economy that are reliant on lower skilled labour. While in Britain, these temporary workers would not be entitled to access public funds or bring in dependant family members or seek permanent settlement. There would also be a "cooling-off period" prohibiting them from renewing their visa for a year. "The future system is about making sure immigration works in the best interests of the UK," Javid added, noting it would "bring annual net migration down to more sustainable levels". During prime minister's questions, May said her government remained committed to a long-held goal of bringing it down to tens of thousands annually. Javid said the proposals "will give protection to British workers" and "help drive up wages and productivity across our economy". - 'Misguided' approach - The interior minister did not detail the level of the annual salary threshold -- a highly contested proposal -- but said it could be "A30,000 (33,000 euros, $38,000) or thereabouts". He said the threshold could be lowered to encourage foreign students to stay and work in the UK and for certain parts of the economy in which a labour shortage could be proven. The immigration proposals are aimed at winning over Brexit hardliners who have resisted voting in favour of the deal that May has struck with EU leaders. But they will cause anger in parts of Britain, such as London, that have benefited from EU immigration. Mayor of London Sadiq Khan said the government's approach was "misguided" and "risks doing profound damage to growth, jobs and communities across London and the UK". Meanwhile, the political deadlock in Westminster has raised the prospects of either a second referendum or of a no-deal Brexit when the negotiating time runs out on March 29 next year. After the British government outlined Tuesday its no-deal contingency planning, the European Commission said Wednesday it was acting "to ensure that the necessary measures can enter into application on 30 March 2019". Its package would "limit the most significant damage" caused by such a scenario, and covers 14 areas where a "no-deal" Brexit "would create major disruption for citizens and businesses." They include financial services, air transport, customs and climate policy. United Nations (United States) (AFP) - The UN General Assembly on Wednesday formally ratified a UN deal on migration by a large majority -- but without the support of the United States and a string of other countries. A total of 152 countries voted in favor of the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, which was agreed upon earlier this month by 165 UN members at a meeting in Morocco. Twelve countries abstained while five nations voted against it -- the United States, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland and Israel. Billed as the first international document on managing migration, it lays out 23 objectives to open up legal migration and discourage illegal border crossings, as the number of people on the move globally has surged to more than almost 260 million, or 3.4 percent of the world' population. More than 80 percent of those moving between countries do so legally, but more 60,000 people have died trying to cross border illicitly since 2000, according to UN figures. Rows over the accord have erupted in several European Union nations, sparking the collapse of Belgium's coalition government and pushing Slovakia's foreign minister to tender his resignation. From the United States to Europe and beyond, right-wing and populist leaders have taken increasingly draconian measures to shut out migrants in recent years. According to diplomats, the United States had sought up to the last minute to convince other countries not to support the pact. The agreement is not legally binding, which has raised concerns among NGOs and human rights advocates that its provisions may not be fully implemented. In Europe -- where a wave of migration from the Middle East and North Africa in 2015 bolstered far-right politicians -- a dozen states either opposed the pact or abstained. Hungary once again denounced the pact as a "serious mistake" and raised the specter of a fresh influx of migrants, while Brazil's far-right president-elect Jair Bolsonaro said migrants had made parts of France "unlivable" and announced he would withdraw from the pact. Story continues - Support 'safe' migration - But UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned at the summit last week in Morocco for world leaders to sign off on the text that "we must not succumb to fear and false narratives." German Chancellor Angela Merkel also sought to quell fears at the meeting, saying the aim of the agreement was to prevent, rather than encourage, illegal migration. "This is about safe, orderly and regular migration -- it says (this) clearly in the title," she said. Despite the nationalist furor that forced Belgium's prime minister to tender his resignation Tuesday, Brussels voted for the pact at the General Assembly. The pact includes a series of principles -- including the defense of human rights, recognition of the sovereignty of nations -- as well as a list of collaborative tools, such as sharing information and expertise and integrating migrants. It stipulates that the detention of migrants should only be a last resort in tackling the global problem. Amnesty International, a human rights group that supported the pact, said the countries that refused to endorse it -- including the United States, Australia, Hungary, Italy, Poland and Austria -- had been responsible for the "worst abuses against migrants in recent years." United Nations (United States) (AFP) - A UN investigation showed Wednesday that two tunnels allegedly dug by the Lebanese militia group Hezbollah snaked under the Israel side of the tense border -- but the probe did not find any exits located there. It called the findings a "serious violation" of a UN resolution that ended the brutal 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon, which was triggered by a Hezbollah raid on the same border. "A thorough investigation to establish the trajectories and points of origin of the identified tunnels is a complex task," said Jean-Pierre Lacroix, the deputy head of UN peacekeeping operations. "The tunnels are between 29 and 46 meters below ground, difficult to detect and in close proximity to areas sensitive to both parties," he told the Security Council Wednesday. Calling the tunnels "a serious violation of Resolution 1701" -- which ended the 2006 war -- Lacroix said they "do not appear thus far to have exit points on the Israeli side." He said two of the four tunnels that had been detected stretched south of the so-called Blue Line, the demarcation line between Lebanon and Israeli drawn up by the UN to verify Israel's withdraw from Lebanon in 2000. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had earlier urged the Security Council to condemn Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran, for digging cross-border "attack tunnels" and to demand Lebanon prevent such activity from its territory. Israel's UN ambassador Danny Danon presented the Security Council with aerial photos that he said proved Hezbollah's presence below the Blue Line. "With a terror base of operations on the Israeli border, if Hezbollah dares to attack Israel, it will bring the ruin of Lebanon," he said. Tulsi Giri, who defended monarchy and betrayed Congress, dies at 93 Tulsi Giri, the hard-line politician who favoured the autocratic Panchayat regime and later became the youngest prime minister in Nepals history, died at his home on Tuesday after a long bout with liver cancer. Giri was 93. The US and China renewed hostilities at the World Trade Organization on Wednesday, with Washington accusing Beijing of expecting impunity despite countless violations. The world's top two economies exchanged harsh words at the US Trade Policy Review, where the WTO's 164-members are given the chance to scrutinise the practices of the member under the microscope. China on Monday said the US had renounced its leadership role of the world economy by imposing tariffs and other restrictions designed to harm others for the narrow benefit of Americans. US WTO ambassador Dennis Shea, a relentless China critic, mocked the notion that Washington should remain passive in the face of Chinese threats. "Strip away the jargon, and here is China's argument: China will force technology transfer, and outright steal it when it sees fit... China will dump its products on our markets, claiming that all is okay because our consumers pay a little less," Shea said. "If the United States musters a response, we are abusing our power and acting irresponsibly. Rather, we should resign ourselves to nursing the wounds inflicted on our citizens. This is not acceptable." A Chinese envoy to the WTO, Hu Yingzhi, insisted China would not be made the "scapegoat" for US trade concerns, according to a Geneva trade official familiar with his remarks. The director of the WTO's trade policy division, Willy Alfaro, described the debate during the two-day US review as "lively". President Donald Trump's administration has attacked the WTO on multiple fronts, including its alleged failure to respond to the Beijing's manipulation of free enterprise. Lagos (AFP) - A joint US observer team on Wednesday called on Nigeria to ensure that the forthcoming elections are peaceful, credible and transparent. Nigerians will go to the polls in February to elect a president and federal parliament. Governor and state houses of assembly votes will take place two weeks later. A delegation of the International Republican Institute (IRI) and National Democratic Institute (NDI), led by former US assistant secretary for African affairs Linda Thomas-Greenfield, have been visiting Nigeria this week. "The 2019 general elections could be another important step in consolidating Nigerias democratic development," said Thomas-Greenfield. The delegation said positive efforts were being made to conduct more transparent, and inclusive elections, but confidence in the process and the outcome of the elections could still be undermined. The IRI and NDI said they would send foreign observers for the crucial votes. President Muhammadu Buhari, of the All Progressives Congress (APC), who came to power in 2015 and is seeking a second term in office, has promised a credible election. Buhari, 76, faces a formidable challenge from an array of opposition candidates, including former vice president Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party(PDP). Security on polling day is a recurrent concern in Nigeria, which has a history of violence stoked by politics, ethnicity and religion. In 2011, some 1,000 people were killed after clashes between supporters of Buhari after his defeat to Goodluck Jonathan. He won the 2015 poll against Jonathan who immediately conceded defeat. Last week, Buhari and other candidates signed a peace deal ahead of the February 16 vote. Washington (AFP) - The withdrawal of US troops in Syria will have an impact on the battlefield and well beyond, with wide-ranging geopolitical ramifications. Here is a look at some of the likely effects of President Donald Trump's decision to pull out the 2,000 US troops as he declared the defeat of the Islamic State group: - Kurdish fighters and Turkey - Among the most alarmed at a US pullout will be Kurdish fighters who form the backbone of the Syrian Democratic Forces, an opposition force that has seized about a quarter of the country with Washington's backing. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed this week to "remove" the Kurdish People's Protection Units, which he sees as linked to the Kurdish Workers' Party, or PKK, the force that has waged an insurgency inside Turkey since 1984. Turkey had earlier been forced to tread cautiously in Syria, with any injury to US troops certain to trigger a crisis. Hours after Trump's announcement, the United States said it had approved a $3.5 billion missile package for Turkey, a NATO ally that had earlier angered the United States by signing an arms deal with Russia. - Can ISIS return? - Kurdish fighters who were on the frontlines of fighting the Islamic State movement, often known as ISIS, will certainly shift focus if they come under attack from Turkey. The United States has not announced an end to its air war in Syria, but it would be relying on significantly less intelligence without troops on the ground. Critics of Trump's decision noted that ISIS sprouted in Iraq after former president Barack Obama, also eager to end a foreign intervention started under his predecessor, withdrew. Ilan Goldenberg, a former US diplomat now at the Center for a New American Security, said that a successor to ISIS could similarly re-emerge, prompting a fresh US intervention. "We're about to make the exact same mistake in the Middle East that we've been making again and again for the past 20 years," he wrote on Twitter. Story continues - Reinforces Russia and Iran - As the United States withdraws, Assad's allies Russia and Iran have shown no sign of leaving. Russia sees longtime ally Syria as a strategic asset in its quest to restore a global role, while Iran's Shiite clerical state sees a religious imperative in fighting Sunni hardliners and protecting President Bashar al-Assad, a member of the heterodox Alawite sect. Jonas Parello-Plesner, a Danish diplomat at the Washington-based Hudson Institute, said that Trump's move "would make Russia decisively the outside power-broker in Syria." Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu quickly pledged to "defend ourselves" in Syria, an allusion to Israeli strikes on targets of Iran and its Lebanese-based ally Hezbollah. - Risks for Europe - While the Islamic State group has lost virtually all of its territory in Syria, it is believed to have thousands of supporters who may carry out attacks overseas, often blending into local populations in Europe. The US withdrawal leaves France, which still has a small contingent of special operations troops in Syria, and Britain, which according to media reports has quietly deployed a number of soldiers. Former Belgian prime minister Guy Verhofstadt said a US withdrawal would be a victory for Russia, Iran, Turkey, Turkish proxies and the Syrian regime. "Unsurprisingly, it leaves Europeans more vulnerable -- and shows how wrong it is that we do not have a defense force able to help stabilize our immediate neighborhood," he wrote on Twitter, amid French-led calls for a European-wide army separate from NATO. - Effect on US politics - Trump -- much like Obama, despite his distaste for his predecessor -- has called for an end to long-term foreign military interventions, which are costly and have limited support in the general public. Trump's decision nonetheless was condemned both by the rival Democrats, who said he had not thought through his decision, and Republicans, who feared the geopolitical effects. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, usually a loyal supporter of Trump, charged that ISIS was not defeated and that a withdrawal would embolden Iran and abandon Kurdish allies. Veteran tech columnist Walt Mossberg rocked the tech world Monday by announcing that he was quitting Facebook and company-owned Instagram, saying he's "no longer comfortable" with the policies and actions of the company. Facebook has come under fire all year from tech pundits, politicians and concerned citizens over multiple data breaches, collecting personal information that can be in turn marketed to advertisers and how easy it's been for outside forces like Russia and other countries to manipulate media for political gain. "I am hardly the first person to quit Facebook and I am not urging anyone else to do so, or trying to spark some dump-Facebook movement," wrote Mossberg, who retired in 2016 after cover tech for years for the Wall Street Journal, ReCode and the Verge. He is currently writing a book about his years in tech. "This is a decision I am making just for myself. If the company or the service change significantly for the better, in my view, or become effectively regulated, I may resume regular use." Mossberg declined further comment, saying he preferred to have his posts on Facebook and Twitter speak for themselves. Facebook also declined to comment. On Twitter, many congratulated Mossberg for taking the stand, while others criticized him for sticking with Twitter, or the Internet, for that matter. "If that's your standard, you might as well quit using the Internet entirely," wrote Douglas Chia on Twitter. I quit a couple months ago. Made me realize iMessage/FaceTime is the only social network I need. Steve Kovach (@stevekovach) December 17, 2018 Not judging your FB exodus one way or another, but curious what makes you comfortable staying on Twitter. Josh Belzman (@JoshEdits) December 17, 2018 Different strokes. I think Facebook is fantastic. I have learned to moderate the time I spend on it. Getting in touch with old friends, acquiring new friends in my interests or hobbies, learning about events .... just wow. A. Michael Altman (@artmaltman) December 17, 2018 If that's your standard, then you might as well quit using the Internet entirely. Douglas K. Chia (@dougchia) December 17, 2018 The latest Facebook controversy erupted in November, when the New York Times revealed that Facebook had hired a political consulting firm to dig up dirt on George Soros, the billionaire financier who had criticized Facebook policies. Story continues Initially, Facebook execs said they were unaware that the firm, Definers, a Republican linked lobbying firm, had worked for the social network, but then admitted to the hiring, saying that chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg was aware of the hire. Just last week Facebook apologized for its latest security breach, a bug that affected up to 6.8 million people who used a Facebook login and gave permission to third-party apps to access their photos. Facebook says the bug has been fixed but indicated some third-party apps may have had access to a broader set of photos than usual spanning the 12-day period between Sept. 13 and Sept. 25. More: Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg pledges to release update on civil rights audit More: Facebook emails suggest company explored selling people's data despite pledges not to Facebook apologizes for bug affecting photos In the wake of the many controversies this year, there have been many calls for the resignation of co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, but he has vowed to remain on the job. Follow USA TODAY's Jefferson Graham on Twitter, @jeffersongraham This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Veteran tech columnist Mossberg quits Facebook The Doug Ford governments announcement of a new Ontario Provincial Police commissioner has been met with harsh criticism. The provincial government stated that Toronto police Supt. Ron Taverner, who is a family friend of Ford, would move in to the role. But an inquiry by the integrity watchdog has stalled the process. Heres a timeline of the events that have occurred since the 72-year-old was publicly named the new OPP commissioner: The facts: When Taverner was selected as the new OPP commissioner controversy began to erupt, suggesting that he was given the position because of his relationship with Ford, not his credentials. There was no better choice, a transparent choice by the way that I wasnt involved in whatsoever, Ford said in the Ontario legislature. Former acting OPP commissioner Brad Blair requested the Ontario ombudsman, Paul Dube, investigate Taverners hiring with a impartial review, due to questions of political interference. Blair, who was in the running for the position, discovered a change in the job posting that made Taverner, previously ineligible for the position, now qualified for the role. It was to ensure that more people applied, Community Safety Minister Sylvia Jones said as an explanation to the change in the job requirements. Once the provincial ombudsman confirmed the investigation is taking place, Taverner then decided to rescind his resignation with the Toronto Police while he waits for the results of the probe. Official opposition leader, the NDPs Andrea Horwath, is now calling for a public investigation into Taverners appointment. She has also called for the creation of a committee to over the hiring of the OPP commissioner. What do you think of the OPP commissioner scandal? Vote in the poll above and leave your comments below! Ruksana Ashraf has been jailed for fraudulent insurance frauds relating to the Grenfell Tower fire, Manchester bombing and Borough Market terror attack. PA. A woman who made dozens of fraudulent insurance claims totalling nearly 180,000, including ones relating to the Grenfell Tower fire, Manchester bombing and Borough Market terrorist attack, has been jailed for three years. Ruksana Ashraf admitted three counts of fraud relating to false insurance claims made to RSA, Aviva, and Legal and General between 2012 and 2017. The court heard the 44-year-old from Edinburgh had used multiple mobile phone SIM cards and fake names and addresses to take out dozens of insurance policies and then make bogus claims. Ashraf also admitted one count of possessing criminal property in relation to receiving vouchers from insurers instead of compensation. File photo dated 23/05/17 of emergency services at Manchester Arena after Salman Abedi launched a suicide attack during an Ariana Grande gig. Ruksana Ashraf has been jailed for fraudulent insurance frauds relating to the Grenfell Tower fire, Manchester bombing and Borough Market terror attack. PA. Ben Holt, prosecuting, said the successful claims totalled 50,116, but Ashraf had also tried to scam a further 129,030, claims which were not successful. He told Inner London Crown Court on Wednesday that Ashraf made claims relating to Grenfell Tower and two major terrorist attacks. Mr Holt added: Some of those claims related to terrorist attacks or natural disasters that had recently happened. Three claims were said to arise from the Grenfell Tower, two from the bombing on the Arena in Manchester and one from the terrorist attack on Borough Market in London. I do accept that the idea behind the fraud is slightly different in so far as the defendant was not making false representation to the council that they were a resident and liable for payment. But it does need to be borne in mind that this defendant was claiming to be present at natural disasters when clearly she wasnt. Daniel King, defending, appealed for a suspended sentence and said his client had not used the cash to live an exotic lifestyle. The court heard Ashraf, of Saughton Mains Terrace, Edinburgh, had turned to drink and gambling following two abusive relationships and was carer to her elderly mother. Story continues Mr King added: She also accepts that those claims relating to the tragedies of Grenfell Tower, at Borough Market and then the Manchester Arena demonstrate a callous and heartless underlying feature of this fraudulent activity. But Judge Wood QC said he could not impose a suspended jail sentence because of the length of offending and sophistication of the scam. He added: Sometimes in these class of cases one is told that the defendant was in desperate need of money and in her plight succumbed to temptation. Here the mitigation is substantially to the effect she is in a position her mother needs her care and depends on her and she herself is not in the best of health. Jailing her for three years, the judge said it was disgraceful to have used terrorist attacks and disasters to make false claims. He added: The defendant has quite disgracefully made reference to the tragedy at Grenfell and terrorist attacks causing loss of life at Borough and Manchester and that has caused distress to others. Watch the latest videos from Yahoo UK A man-free music festival has been found guilty of discrimination [Photo: Getty] A woman-only music festival in Sweden has been found guilty of discrimination. Though men were allowed to buy tickets to the event, it was made clear they werent welcome and many, including male members of the bands crew, were restricted to a man pen in a backstage area. The man-free event, named Statement Festival and held in Gothenburg in August, was organised by Swedish comedian Emma Knyckare after the countrys largest music event was cancelled the previous year following a string of sexual assault and rape complaints. It was billed as the worlds first major music festival for women, non-binary and transgender only. But Swedens Discrimination Ombudsman (DO) ruled that describing an event as male-free violated anti-discrimination laws and it was therefore illegal. It is important to point out what an infringement is. These are the statements made before the festival, what they wrote on their website, Spokesperson Class Lundstedt said in a statement. Still, we havent been able to prove that someone would have been discriminated against in connection with the implementation or that someone would have been rejected. The DO found that nobody suffered damage from the festivals restriction, and no penalties will be imposed on organisers. Responding to the ruling organisers, Statement Festival penned a Facebook post: Hi, Ombudsman! We are aware of your decision and we think its sad that 5,000 women, non-binary [someone who identifies as neither male nor female] and transgender witnessed at a life-changing festival experience, a few cis men [someone whose gender identity matches their anatomical birth gender] get caught up. The success of the Statement festival shows that is exactly what we need, and the DOs verdict doesnt change this fact. Otherwise, we have no comments. We are busy changing the world. The festival took place in Sweden last August [Photo: Getty] The Statement festival was originally organised in response to a worrying number of sexual assault offences the previous year at Swedens biggest festival, Bravalla. Story continues Organisers of Bravalla announced they were cancelling the 2018 event after police received four rape and 23 sexual assault reports at the festival in July last year. In 2016, local media also reported that five women were allegedly raped at the four-day camping festival, which is attended by thousands of people each year. Together we are making a statement against sexual assaults by creating a safe space for women, non-binary and trans people that want to attend festivals and feel secure at the same time, organisers of the Statement festival wrote at the time. We dont think this is too much to ask for! The DO claim they will try to address the problem of sexual assault at festivals but that man-free festivals isnt the way forward. Clearly, we believe that sexual abuse, especially at festivals, is a serious problem. So we are looking forward to trying to correct this, Lundstedt added. However, it shouldnt happen in a way that violates the law, which their statements in the media and their website do. It isnt the first time a male-free space has been explored at a festival. In 2016, a group called The Sisterhood held a women-only venue at Glastonbury. In a world that is still run by and designed to benefit mainly men, the group explain, oppression against women continues in various manifestations. And they believe the way to fight against this sexism is to keep festivals a women-only zone. Follow us on Instagram and Facebook for non-stop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day. For Twitter updates, follow @YahooStyleUK. Read more from Yahoo Style UK: Female-only train carriages: A way to protect women or a way to excuse violence? If girls is sexist, we need a new term to describe women in the workplace Women are sharing selfies with their tea to mark Mums Equal Pay Day A newly discovered blind amphibian has been named after President Trump in recognition of the presidents denial of climate change. The worm-like creature's name, Dermophis donaldtrumpi, was chosen by sustainable building materials company EnviroBuild, which paid $25,000 to name the legless amphibian as part of a fundraiser for the Rainforest Trust, a nonprofit conservation group. In a blog post, the groups co-founder Aidan Bell explained the reasoning behind the name, by likening characteristics of the president and the squiggly caecilian that is native to Panama. Bell compared the amphibians habit of burrowing its head in the sand to the presidents behaviour in regards to climate change. The amphibians live almost entirely underground, believed to have lost their limbs at least 60 million years ago, as an adaptation to burrowing. Burrowing its head underground helps Donald Trump when avoiding scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change and also appointed several energy lobbyists to the Environment Agency, where their job is to regulate the energy industry, the post reads. Read more More than 1000 institutions pledge to withdraw fossil fuel investments According to Bell, the name is fitting because, as an amphibian, Dermophis donaldtrumpi is particularly susceptible to the impacts of climate change and is therefore in danger of becoming extinct as a direct result of its namesakes climate policies. In the blog, the organisation also insists that the name is not because it is an overtly political organisation, but rather because we do feel very strongly that everyone should do everything they can to leave the world in a better way than they found it. Donald Trump has been outspoken regarding his climate change denial - in November, he dismissed a study compiled by 13 federal agencies and more than 300 scientists on the subject because, as CNN reports, he told reporters: I dont believe it. A newly discovered blind worm that buries its head in the ground is being named for Donald Trump to highlight his refusal to confront climate change. https://t.co/MV2q8bTJZv Behold Dermophis donaldtrumpi: pic.twitter.com/7LAh9gzoVE Helen Kennedy (@HelenKennedy) December 19, 2018 Although the name of the blind worm will still have to undergo peer review before it is officially approved, this is not the first time an animal has been named after President Trump. Story continues Support free-thinking journalism and subscribe to Independent Minds In 2017, a yellow-crowned moth was called Neopalpa donaldtrumpi due to its uncanny resemblance to the presidents hair. New Zealand warned Google to "take responsibility" for its news content Wednesday, after the internet giant broke a court order suppressing the name of a man charged with murdering a British backpacker. An Auckland court granted the man interim name suppression this month but Google revealed his identity in an email to subscribers of its "what's trending in New Zealand?" service. Justice Minister Andrew Little said the breach was unacceptable and he had made his views known to Google executives at a meeting in parliament on Tuesday night. While Google has argued the breach was inadvertent and it was unaware of the court order when the automatically generated email went out, Little said that was not good enough. "I put the ball back in their court," he told commercial radio on Wednesday. "If they choose to set up their algorithms and distribute news, they've got to take responsibility for that." The case concerns the murder of British tourist Grace Millane, 22, whose body was found earlier this month just outside Auckland, resulting in a 26-year-old man being arrested and charged. The case generated intense interest in New Zealand and Britain, where some media outlets have also named the accused, arguing the court order does not apply to them. Little said he met two local Google executives, and a senior legal counsel from the company's California headquarters joined them by video. He said they appeared genuinely concerned about the breach and assured him they were working to ensure it did not happen again, with another meeting scheduled for early 2019 to assess their progress. Little conceded that controlling information on the internet and social media was challenging but said court orders were made for a reason and must be respected. "We can't just stand back and say this is all too hard," he said. "The price of that (would be) we have to capitulate and concede what are very important rights that anyone going through the courts has." Story continues He said the case highlighted the potential need for an international agreement if Google "won't do anything (or) can't do anything" to resolve the issue. "They can expect us to talk to partner countries around the world who have a similar interest... about reaching an agreement to enforce each others' orders in each others' countries," he said. "That may well happen inevitably anyway because it's not just Google, there are others as well and we have to protect the integrity of our court system." Angelo Mathews has celebrated a century against New Zealand with an overt swipe at his own teams selectors. Mathews and Kusal Mendis both compiled centuries and batted throughout the fourth day in an unbeaten 246-run partnership as Sri Lanka reduced the deficit against New Zealand in the first Test on Tuesday. Mendis finished the day 116 not out, Mathews was 117 not out, and Sri Lanka was 259-3, having erased all but 37 runs of a 296-run deficit. Sri Lankas first-innings total was 282, and New Zealand made 578 in reply. Angelo Mathews celebrates his century with a set of push-ups while Kusal Mendis looks on. (Photo by Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images) The twin centuries contributed to Sri Lankas highest-ever fourth-wicket partnership against New Zealand, beating the previous best of 192, and were a coming of age for one player, and a redemption for the other. Mathews innings was a redemption of sorts. Only two months ago he was dropped from the Sri Lanka one-day side by the now dismissed national selectors who labeled him unfit. When he reached his century, Mathews dropped to the pitch and knocked out a few crisp push-ups as a clear riposte to those who questioned his fitness. He then finished off the swipe by flexing his biceps. Angelo Mathews celebrates reaching his century. (Photo by MARTY MELVILLE/AFP/Getty Images) Mendis batted 287 minutes and faced 215 balls for his sixth test century which included 12 fours; Mathews took 342 minutes and needed 248 balls to reach his ninth with 11 fours. By stumps, the pair had shunted back the threat of defeat which seemed imminent at the start of play when Sri Lanka was 20-3. While the tourists still face a final day on which a minimum of 90 overs have to be bowled, giving New Zealand some hope yet of taking a 1-0 lead in the two-test series, the achievements of Mendis and Mathews on the fourth day have left the match more closely in the balance. The strong possibility of rain on Wednesday may further play into Sri Lankas hands and frustrate the home side. with AFP The future of the nuclear power industry lies in China. The Chinese are presently building more nuclear electric power generating stations than any other country. This year, the Chinese will add three more nuclear power stations to their fleet bringing their total up to 40, while eighteen nuclear plants are also under construction. According to MIT estimates, the Chinese can erect a nuclear plant for half the cost of a plant here in the U.S. If so, whats the problem? First, lets put the numbers into perspective. Nuclear power accounts for about 4 percent of Chinese electric power production. (Nuclear accounts for about 20 percent of electric power generation the U.S.) Solar and wind generation accounts for 7 percent of production in China and the renewable component has been growing far faster than nuclear. Chinese industries spent $127 billion in 2017 on developing renewables. Returning to nuclear plant costs in China, MIT estimates show a two-to-one Chinese cost advantage over the U.S., based on overnight costs. This is an engineering concept. that gives short shrift to potentially major construction expenses such cost of capital, duration of project or risk of error and subsequent redress (either actual or compensatory). Appropriately valuing the true cost of capital alone could raise these so called overnight nuclear new build costs by at least 25 percent. Adding insult to injury, perhaps half the Chinese nuclear fleet presently under construction is behind schedule and there are reports of (typical for this industry) cost overruns and construction problems. Now, lets get to the disturbing item in the MIT analysis as far as the nuclear power industry is concerned. The money quote? Officially China still sees nuclear power as a must have. But unofficially, the technology is on a death watch. The Chinese appear committed to completing all of the eighteen or so nuclear projects presently under construction, but they have not announced a new commercial project since 2016. This would give China 58 GWs of installed nuclear capacity by 2020 with another 30 GWs presently under construction. Not that much smaller than the U.S. Related: Saudi Oil Minister: Crude Stocks Should Drop Very Soon The real change here regards discussions of the future. Pre-Fukushima, Chinas power planners were considering adding 400 GWs of nuclear power by the year 2050. It appears plans of this magnitude are no longer under consideration. Perhaps the traumatic events at Japans Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility dampened Chinese enthusiasm for all things nuclear. Also, a major industrial accident of this type could potentially undermine the governments legitimacy by stirring up political protest. We cant know the thinking of Chinas economic planners. But it appears that rising nuclear costs coupled with a lack of public enthusiasm for nuclear power have influenced the lack of new orders. But we would argue that there are other factors for this waning interest in nuclear power. First is that renewables may be cheaper. Also, projections for power demand show a substantial falling off. The rate of Chinese electric power demand growth was 11 percent per year in 2000-2015 but is projected to fall to 2 percent per year in 2015-2030. These shifts show the Chinese economy coming to resemble those of the U.S. and Europe with less growth in the most energy intensive industries. An 11 percent growth rate in demand means a situation of almost chronic undersupply and shortage. A 2 percent growth rate in power demand permits a far more leisurely approach to long term energy planning. Related: Libya Declares Force Majeure On Largest Oil Field We can add to the lower power usage projections uncertainty about the domestic economy in light of a looming trade war. If the Chinese government is serious about reducing carbon emissions, it might restart the expansive nuclear effort. But with such a low penetration of renewables, they could add considerable renewable generation before resuming nuclear construction. Overall, we dont know whether Chinas nuclear construction costs are lower than say the US. Labor costs are cheaper and environmental rules less stringent. And the Chinese have a different concept of cost of capital (very low versus risk adjusted expectations). Whatever the underlying cause, China has de-emphasized its massive nuclear new build strategy. We suspect the reason is a combination of slowing demand for electricity and deteriorating cost competitiveness of the nuclear plants compared to the alternatives. It is not a good sign when the country that that boasts one of the better construction cost records in the business steps back and says, in effect, Maybe we have something better to do with our money. Chinese nuclear operators will, no doubt, continue to sell their wares abroad. China s CNNC is building two indigenous designed Hualong One reactors in Pakistan and CGNs strategy appears to be invest only with generous subsidies from host governments like the U.K. But ultimately why would people want to buy a product that the producer can no longer reliably sell in its home market? By Leonard S. Hyman and William I. Tilles More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: Libyas National Oil Company NOC has once again shocked the oil market by officially declaring force majeure on its operations at the El Sharara oilfield, the largest oilfield in the country. After months of continued optimism in the media and political statements coming out of Paris and Rome about a possible peace deal between the two competing governments, led by Libyan general Haftar and his counterpart El Serraj, the situation on the ground is looking even worse than before. The eagerly awaited oil production increase from Libya, which could supposedly mitigate the effects of falling production from Iran and Venezuela, now seems unlikely to happen. NOC officials stated that the production of the 315,000 bpd field, which is located in the south of Libya, has been blocked by protestors and militias in the area. A group of tribes, armed protestors and guards took over the field on December 8, asking for salary payments and additional financing. Until now, Libyan government officials have been unable to quell the protests. NOC officials have reiterated that the financial demands will not be met, as this could set a precedent for other oil and gas operations in the country. It is still unclear who the real culprits behind the current blockade and seizure of the field are as sources are blaming different groups or militias. NOC claims that the field has been taken over by a militia that is reportedly trying to get on the payroll of the field guards. No indication at present can be given as to when the field will come back onstream. NOCs chairman Mustafa Sanallah has called for the force majeure in a move to provide security to the workers at the field. In recent weeks, several other fields have also been occupied, blocked or taken over but production has not been significantly impacted at those fields. Tribal representatives and several militias have indicated to the press that the current blockade is a protest against marginalization and shortages of electricity, fuel and money. It is the UN-EU backed Libyan government GNA that is feeling the brunt of the pain from these protests. The militias and tribal groups are currently targeting GNA operations as the Tripoli-based government has been accused of marginalizing the southerners. Related: Big Oil Stocks Crash As Crude Prices Tumble Libyas oil and gas fields and infrastructure, including the export ports, such as Zawya, have been the main targets in the ongoing civil war between the two competing governments after the removal of Libyan leader Muammar Ghadaffi. At the same time, several major extremist fundamentalist groups, such as Daesh/ISIS and AL Qaeda are also very active in parts of the country. For months, the power struggle between the GNA and the forces of General Haftar has been concentrated around Libyas main economic artery, its oil and gas fields. Haftar, supported by Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Russia, appears to be winning this struggle, slowly but steadily taking over more of the country. Haftar has been able to tighten his hold also over the so-called Petroleum Facilities Guard, a para-military security force tasked with securing oil and gas operations. At the El Sharara field, the main occupying force at present seems to be the same Petroleum Facilities Guards. In addition to the force majeure at the oilfield, security forces in Libyas Tobruk Port said to the press that the port was closed indefinitely for security concerns, a statement that was followed by gunmen storming the port on Sunday. In October 2017 the port was closed for a long period due to pressure from General Haftars so-called Dignity Operation. Overall, Libyas political and oil future is a shambles. Even after high-level meetings in Paris and Rome, where the French and Italian government tried to set up their own security and governmental arrangements between the fighting factions, the is no end in sight to the fighting on the ground. Currently, another round of violence is brewing in and around Tripoli, where several militias are looking to expand their control over parts of the city, weakening the power of the Western-backed Government of National Accord (GNA). Since a brokered ceasefire in September, most militias have been pulling back, but the tensions at present point to a willingness for a new round of conflict. The UN-GNA approach to either include the militias in security forces or demobilize them is under pressure. Still, some hope remains, as analysts indicate that militia leaders are willing to cooperate, largely in a move to protect their (illegal) income. Stability - in the end - will depend on the willingness of the GNA forces to put their foot down if needed Related: Libya Declares Force Majeure On Largest Oil Field Even if the Tripoli situation can be resolved, the future depends largely on General Haftar. Haftar is looking for any opportunity to expand his powers to the western parts of Libya, having already secured most of the east. Haftar still openly pushes his pledge to liberate Tripoli by forging alliances in the west. Arab countries, such as the UAE and Egypt, are supporting Haftar to make a deal with western Libyan militias to stabilize the whole country. NATO-member Italy has also shown a preference for the Haftar option, especially after Moscow openly stated its support of the Libyan general. Even French president Macron pushed the position of Haftar during the Paris meeting of the GNA and Haftar militias. In Paris Haftar and his counterpart Al Serraj agreed to a ceasefire and Spring elections, but the general declared hours later that he has no intention of sticking to that agreement. Past attempts to negotiate peace in Libya have been undone by splits within each faction, which are often made up of loose alliances of convenience among brigades of former rebels more loyal to cities, regions or tribes than to the idea of a Libyan nation. Haftar now seems to have the upper-hand, after partially defeating IS led militias and other extremists. None of this bodes well for Libyas oil operations. Haftars next moves towards Tripoli will almost certainly be a military operation to win all oil and gas fields that are currently under GNA influence. More actions and possible disruptions can be expected very soon. By Cyril Widdershoven for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: Qatar is continuing to make energy headline news. The tiny kingdom is forging its own path even at the expense of recently pulling out of OPEC to focus on its liquefied natural gas (LNG) ambitions. However, its decision to pull the plug on its involvement with OPEC was also likely a geopolitical move against Saudi Arabia and other Arab neighbors that put in place a blockade and economic measures against Doha over what they allege is state sponsorship of terror groups, an allegation that the country vehemently denies. Over the weekend, news broke that Qatar is now aiming to invest billions in the North American energy patch, including a new deal with Italian energy company Eni for three oil fields in Mexico, as well as making an investment decision by the end of the year or January on the Goldan Pass LNG project proposal in Texas. State-run Qatar Petroleum is the majority owner of the Golden Pass LNG terminal, while U.S. oil major Exxon Mobil and U.S.-based independent oil company ConocoPhillips hold smaller stakes. Investing $20 billion in the U.S. Saad Sherida al-Kaabi, the current Minister of Energy in Qatar and head of state-run Qatar Petroleum, said on Sunday that the company will also announce foreign partners for new LNG trains needed for an ambitious domestic scale-up by the middle of next year. He added that as part of its more than $20 billion investment push in the U.S., the company is looking at gas and oil, conventional and non-conventional. Self-financing options Currently, Qatar Petroleum is still in talks with international oil firms about the LNG expansion push at home, including Eni, Kaabi said. Other partners already operating in Qatar include Exxon Mobil, French oil major Total, Royal Dutch Shell and Eni. He also said the company could self-finance the LNG expansion rather than borrow, marking a major shift from previous deals where it used lenders to fund up to 70 percent or more of project costs. Kaabi said it could carry out the expansion alone if no good offers from foreign firms were made. Operations in Mexico In Mexico, Qatar Petroleum and Eni will produce about 90,000 barrels of oil a day from the Amoca, Mizton and Tecoalli fields in the Gulf of Mexico by the end of 2021, Kaabi said at a press conference with Eni Chief Executive Officer Claudio Descalzi in Doha over the weekend. The fields hold 2 billion barrels of oil equivalent, according to Kaabi. Related: Saudi Oil Minister: Crude Stocks Should Drop Very Soon The companies are already working together on a separate offshore block in Mexico, according to press releases from both companies. Eni gained approval for the developments earlier this year and needs the Mexican authorities to sign off on Sundays deal. For its part, Qatar Petroleum now has operations in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Oman, Congo, South Africa, Cyprus and Mozambique. Flexing its muscles The timing of Qatars proactive moves comes just a few weeks after it shocked energy markets by announcing it would withdraw its decades-long membership from OPEC starting in January. Perhaps more importantly, Qatars energy push in both the U.S., Mexico as well as other countries shows that it can flex its muscles and its wealth despite being ostracized by most of its middle eastern neighbors. Mexico, for its part, is keen to attract foreign direct investment to jump-start its struggling oil sector. Last week, the countrys new government gave plans to build an $8 billion oil refinery in the home state of new President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, in addition to renovating six other plants as the nation attempts to lower its dependence on imported fuel. Qatars interest in the U.S. LNG sector is also a stroke of both geopolitical and energy markets savvy since the U.S. could by the mid part of the next decade compete with Qatar as the top LNG producer in terms of liquefaction capacity as the so-called second wave of U.S. LNG project development becomes operational. Jockeying for top global LNG slot However, Qatar is also developing a fourth LNG production train to increase its liquefaction capacity from a current 77 million tons per annum (mtpa) to 110 mtpa by around 2023. The new additional volumes be secured by doubling the size of the new gas project in the southern sector of the North Field, which Qatar Petroleum had announced earlier. Yet, going forward, Australia, which has briefly overtaken Qatar as the top LNG exporter, and even Russia, will all vie for top global LNG exporter status even after Qatar ramps up its production. Related: Iran Claims It Holds The Most Oil, Gas Reserves In The World All of this LNG project development will come just a few years before LNG buyers in North Asia, which accounts for nearly three-quarters of global LNG demand, will see uncontracted demand in the region increase even more amid increase Chinese procurement of the super-cooled fuel, rising four-fold by 2030, according to a new report by energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie. The major LNG buyers - CNOOC, CPC, JERA, KOGAS, PetroChina, Sinopec and Tokyo Gas - together account for more than 5 percent of the global LNG market, Wood Mackenzie added. Revamped relations with Riyadh Finally, Qatar said on Friday that negotiations to end the feud with its Arab neighbors can only begin after the Saudi-led group ends the embargo on the gas-rich country. Our position on the solution hasnt changed, Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani said at a conference in Doha on Saturday. The blockade should be lifted, and the dispute resolved with dialogue based on mutual respect and non-intervention in the internal affairs of states. Last week, according to a Bloomberg report, Sheikh Tamim turned down an invitation from Saudi Arabias King Salman to attend a gathering of Gulf monarchies. This initial gesture was seen as a sign of thawing relations after 18 months of Qatars boycott by the kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt. By Tim Daiss for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: BY JOSEPH KATO. jkato@ug.nationmedia.com Inspector General of Police, Martin Okoth Ochola, says 2018 has been a challenging year to the Uganda Police Force because of numerous policing encounters. Mr Ochola in his statement read out to the media by police spokesperson, Emilian Kayima, highlighted the policing dilemmas to the police institution among others murders, kidnaps, fire outbreaks, thefts water and road accidents. The police chief reminded Ugandans to be security conscious in this festive season since such challenges could worsen. Drivers and motorists have been cautioned and urged to be disciplined and follow the traffic laws. Mr Kayima was flanked by Kampala Metropolitan police commander, CP Moses Kafeero, Col Ham Kaija commandant police air wing, CP Bazir Mugisha, deputy director traffic police and ACP Moses Walwanga, deputy commandant police marine unit. Some of the murders that outstood in this year include the killing of former Buyende DPC ASP Muhammad Kirumira, Arua Municipality MP Col Ibrahim Abiriga, kidnap and murder of Susan Magara. Road accidents that claimed many lives include Gaaga Bus in Kiryandongo that killed 22 passengers while the November 24 boat cruise carnage on Lake Victoria killed 32 revelers. Mr Ochola called upon District, Division and OC station commanders to keep track of renowned criminals in their areas of jurisdiction and conduct operations to whip out suspected thugs. Meanwhile, Mr Kayima has called upon people claiming to have been brutalized, tortured or wrongfully detained by army to report to police so that an investigation can be conducted. He was responding to a question on why soldiers have increasingly been accused to extorting money from residents after illegally arresting them. On music shows being banned, Mr Kayima insisted that they will only clear those that have met the stipulated requirements. North Korea is still receiving crude oil shipments despite the military presence of a U.S.-led coalition deployed to ensure UN sanctions against Pyongyang are being enforced. This was revealed in a top secret report, NBC News reports, citing U.S. government officials familiar with the document. Under the latest United Nations Security Council sanctions regarding oil sales to North Korea from December 2017, North Korea is allowed to import a maximum aggregate amount of 500,000 barrels of all refined oil products for 12 months beginning on January 1, 2018. The sanctions also introduced a limit of 4 million barrelsor 525,000 tonsper a twelve-month period as of 22 December 2017 for the supply, sale, or transfer of crude oil to North Korea. However, according to the report, more oil is going into the country after ship-to-ship transfers at sea. After the deployment of the military vessels in the area, however, the North Koreans have changed tactics, conducting the transfers further out at sea, sometimes in foreign territorial waters. Warships and surveillance aircraft were deployed near the Korean Peninsula in September, but since the aircraft has a certain range it cant exceed, moving the tankers further into the sea has worked to avoid detection. Another tactic employed by the North Koreans is using small boats to transfer oil from vessel to vessel. Smaller boats, NBC News notes, are harder to detect by the surveillance gear. In other words, despite the military efforts of the United States and its partners in the coalition, it seems that the Pyongyang regime is still getting more oil than the limit agreed under the UN sanctions. Earlier this year, in a report to the UN, Washington said North Korea received at least 759,793 barrels of oil products between January 1 and May 30, well above the 500,000-barrel annual quota. The supplies were being made via ship-to-ship transfers with North Korean tankers that have called in port at least 89 times, the United States said in July. The United States also accused China and Russia of continuing to sell oil to North Korea. At the time, Moscow and Beijing both rebuffed the U.S. claim they were helping Pyongyang to skirt UN sanctions, effectively blocking the United States effort to cut all supplies of oil and oil products to North Korea. Related: Why Irans Positive OPEC Spin Wont Last One Russian company is now facing bankruptcy because the U.S. sanctioned it on allegations of shipping crude to North Korea. The U.S. Treasury blacklisted six vessels from Gudzon Shippings fleet, accusing it of participating in ship-to-ship transfers of oil for North Korea. These vessels have been stranded in South Korea for a month now because the sanctions apparently cover bunkering fuel and the port authorities have refused to fuel all vessels but one, which has left for home. So, it seems that despite Washingtons best efforts, North Korea is getting enough oil to keep going. Things may begin to change but slowly, the NBC sources said. Already the presence of the coalition in the East China Sea has prevented 30 ship-to-ship transfers since October last year. "We've increased pressure and have been collecting information on these illicit transfers and then feeding them back to our interagency partners for financial, law enforcement and diplomatic action," one of the sources said. Its evident the U.S. will not release its stranglehold on North Korea even though President Trump said in a tweet following the release of the NBC report that work is being done on the diplomatic front as well in the spirit of mutual benefit. By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: Iraq has struck an agreement with the worlds largest oilfield service provider Schumberger to drill 40 wells at the Majnoon oil field as it looks to boost production at the giant field, the Iraqi oil ministry said on Wednesday. Schlumberger is also working on a 42-month integrated drilling services (IDS) contract for 30 wells in the West Qurna oil field in Iraq, under a recent deal with ExxonMobil Iraq. Separately, the Iraqi state-run Basra Oil Company, which now manages the Majnoon field, signed a deal on Wednesday with another state-run entity, Oil Exploration Company, to conduct 3D seismic surveys of the field. Carrying out a three-dimensional seismic survey by the Oil Exploration Company in Majnoon will help to obtain accurate data and boost production at the field, Reuters quoted Iraqs Oil Minister Thamir Ghadhban as saying in a statement. Currently, the Majnoon oil field pumps around 240,000 bpd, according to the Iraqi oil ministry. Iraq has had plans to increase production at the giant oil field since Shell said in 2017 that it wanted out of the oil field. In June this year, Shell handed over the operations of the Majnoon oilfield to Basra Oil Company, exiting the field as it said last year it would do. Last year, Shell said that it would sell its interest in the Majnoon oilfield after the oil major and Iraq failed to agree on future production plans and investment budgets. After months of negotiations, Shell agreed at the end of 2017 to exit the venture and hand over its operation to Basra Oil Company (BOC) by the end of June 2018. Shell was the operator and holder of 45 percent at Majnoon, with Malaysias Petronas owning 30 percent, and Iraqs Missan Oil Company holding the remaining 25 percent. At the end of December 2017, Iraq said that it had formed a management team to take over operations from Shell after the oil major exits the field by the end of June. Iraq wants to raise production at Majnoon from the current 235,000 bpd to around 400,000 bpd in the coming years. By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: Alibaba uses AI to speed up detection of pregnant pigs seven times, boosting efficiency of Chinas hog farms Chinese pig breeders have accumulated years of experience to determine if a sow is pregnant, based on careful observation of the animals behavioural changes over a 21 day period a task made more challenging because each farmer has to keep tabs on up to 80 pigs at a time. Now theres a way to do it in just three days, thanks to artificial intelligence. Using facial-recognition cameras, Alibaba Group Holding's cloud unit said it has developed an algorithm that can accurately diagnose pregnancy in pigs by observing changes in their behaviour, physical appearance and eating patterns after mating. The solution, which can also detect a failed pregnancy as early as the third day after mating compared to 21 days the conventional way, is designed to increase the number of newborns on pig farms, according to Alibaba Cloud. The solution is expected to be put to use in some of Alibaba Clouds partner farms in southwest Chinas Sichuan province early next year. China has 700 million pigs, representing about half of the worlds total. In recent months a number of internet companies have launched ventures to revolutionise the countrys pig farming industry. JD.com goes the whole hog with facial recognition for agriculture In November, JD Digits, a unit of Chinas second largest e-commerce giant JD.com, announced its foray into the agricultural industry with a package of digital tools including machine vision, AI-enabled analytics, robots and internet of things technologies, to help the countrys farmers raise better animals at lower cost. The so called pregnancy test algorithm is the latest development of the cloud units ET Agricultural Brain, a digital tool aimed at boosting agricultural efficiency, crop yields and income for Chinese farmers by enabling them to make better use of big data. In some of the farms in Sichuan the system is already being used to track the growth of individual pigs and monitor their health condition. A commonly used method to determine if a pig is pregnant is to observe the females behaviour when a boar is present about 21 days after mating. Sows that sleep with all four legs in the air, and those that prefer to stand still rather than move around, are also more likely to be pregnant signs that can be detected by the AI tool. Story continues Apart from the observation of the behavioural changes, a more thorough check is quite time and energy consuming, requiring help from two to three people, said Deng Qiang, who works at a pig farm under Alibabas smart agricultural project in Sichuan. He said one person usually monitors the growth of 80 pigs simultaneously, so there was a lot of room for new technologies to increase efficiency. Even if the solution can only tell which pig is more likely to be pregnant, that is a big help for us, Deng said, New York-listed Alibaba is the parent company of the South China Morning Post. This article Alibaba uses AI to speed up detection of pregnant pigs seven times, boosting efficiency of Chinas hog farms first appeared on South China Morning Post For the latest news from the South China Morning Post download our mobile app. Copyright 2018. More from South China Morning Post: Beijing and Hong Kong have renewed their calls for the Philippines to ensure the rights are respected of four Hongkongers jailed for life in the country on drug charges. The Hong Kong government said security minister John Lee Ka-chiu had written to the Philippine consulate on Tuesday to reiterate requests for proper treatment in prison and due legal process. Lo Wing-fai, Chan Kwok-tung, Kwok Kam-wah and Leung Shu-fook were sentenced last Friday to life in jail for possession of 467.8 grams of methamphetamine. The families of the four men say they are innocent and have vowed to fight for justice. On Monday they launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise HK$3 million (US$380,000) for legal expenses. The families said they had expected the court to free the men before Christmas, after evidence was presented showing that police officers who arrested them found no drugs in their bags during an initial search, and only did so after briefly removing several bags from sight. They have raised only about HK$50,000 so far. The Chinese foreign ministry on Wednesday issued a statement saying it would continue to follow up on the case. The Chinese government attaches great importance to protecting the safety and legal rights of Chinese nationals abroad, the ministry said. The Chinese embassy in the Philippines has been offering the necessary assistance to the people concerned. A spokesman for Hong Kongs Security Bureau said: The secretary for security has written to the Philippine consul general in Hong Kong reiterating the importance of safeguarding the legal rights of the four Hong Kong residents, and ensuring their proper treatment in prison. The consulate confirmed it had received Lees letter and said it had forwarded it to the relevant Philippine authorities through the Department of Foreign Affairs. Story continues The consulate continues to monitor the reactions from the local government as well as developments on the case, it said. At the same time, similar to Hong Kong, the consulate would like to stress the importance of the rule of law and the independence of the judiciary. The decision on the case is not yet final as it may still be appealed by the defendants. Lee said he had also raised the matter directly with Beijing officials on Monday during a meeting with Chinas Office of the Commissioner of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Hong Kong. Beijing had pledged to do everything in its power to protect the rights of the four, he said earlier this week. Two years ago middlemen in Hong Kong offered the four men a job sailing a fishing boat from the Philippines to mainland China. They were told the vessel had been impounded for fishing violations, but was ready to be released. The men flew from Hong Kong to the Philippines in July 2016, and boarded the boat in Subic Bay. To their surprise, then Philippine police chief Ronald dela Rosa boarded shortly afterwards with journalists and a team of police officers who arrested the four. Lo Shu-ho, sister of Lo Wing-fai, said she appreciated the steps the central and Hong Kong governments had taken but hoped authorities could do more. They cannot depend on the Philippine judicial system. Theyll be dead if they do, she said. We have presented so much evidence to the court but they were still convicted. She said she believed her brother was innocent and that he had never touched drugs. Veteran China watcher Johnny Lau Yui-siu said Beijing had all the bargaining chips necessary to negotiate with the Philippine government, as the Southeast Asian country depended on China economically. President Rodrigo Duterte is so close to Chinese President Xi Jinping, Lau said. It would be much easier to negotiate over the four men now than when the Philippines was run by former president Benigno Aquino. But Lau added that if the Philippines were to release the men the country could face pressure to hand over another prisoner, Tang Lung-wai. Tang is serving a 40-year jail term on drug charges. He too has maintained his innocence. Additional reporting by Karen Zhang This article Beijing and Hong Kong renew pressure on Philippines over four men jailed for life on drug charges first appeared on South China Morning Post For the latest news from the South China Morning Post download our mobile app. Copyright 2018. China reveals that high-level trade war dialogue with US goes on as negotiators schedule January meeting China and the United States held a vice-ministerial dialogue on trade and economic issues as part of efforts to de-escalate their trade war. On Wednesday, the Ministry of Commerce said officials from both sides exchanged views on matters of mutual concern. The ministrys announcement came after US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said negotiators charged with hammering out a broader truce in the China-US trade war will meet in January. Both sides were now focused on trying to document an agreement by March 1, when the 90-day truce in the trade war ends, he said. Mnuchin said neither he nor US President Donald Trump were aware of the arrest of Huawei Technologies chief financial officer Sabrina Meng Wanzhou in Canada when they met Chinese President Xi Jinping on December 1. Mnuchin poured cold water on Trumps declaration last week that he would be willing to intervene on Huaweis behalf if it was required to help reach a trade deal between China and the US. Weve been very clear and China understands that these are separate tracks, he said. Reducing the trade deficit with China remained a priority for Trump, but the administration understood it would take time and was also focused on securing structural changes in the Chinese economy that would help balance trade, Mnuchin said. The USs monthly trade deficit in goods with China hit a record high in October and is on track to have expanded through the first two years of the Trump presidency. I dont think that wed expect that overnight, Mnuchin said of the prospect of eliminating the trade deficit with China. But the US and China had agreed on the need for more balanced trade and that would set the stage for meaningful change, he said. Washington and Beijing have been locked in a trade war since July 6, when they each applied tariffs to imports of the others goods. But on December 1, the day after the presidents met at the G20 summit in Argentina, they agreed to a 90-day truce in their dispute. Story continues The US Soybean Export Council said Chinese importers returned to the US soy market on Tuesday for their second round of purchases since the two nations agreed to the truce. The deals struck were evidence that Beijing is trying to make good on its pledge to buy more US agricultural goods. China last year imported 31.7 million tonnes of soybeans from the US, nearly 60 per cent of the countrys export shipments, in deals valued at US$12.25 billion. Talks between officials from the two sides are necessary to resolve issues such as forced technology transfers and cyber intrusion. If they fail to reach agreement by March, the US could extend its tariffs to all goods it buys from China. Observers said earlier that 90 days was not enough time to tackle all of the issues involved in the trade dispute, but sufficient to create a framework for future talks. Additional reporting by Bloomberg and Reuters This article China reveals that high-level trade war dialogue with US goes on as negotiators schedule January meeting first appeared on South China Morning Post For the latest news from the South China Morning Post download our mobile app. Copyright 2018. China said Wednesday it opposed the "weaponisation" of space as it criticised US President Donald Trump's orders to create a new command centre for controlling military space operations. "China has consistently proposed the peaceful usage of space, and opposes the weaponisation of space and a space arms race," said Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying at a press briefing. "We oppose even further turning space into the new battleground," she added. On Tuesday, Trump ordered the creation of "Space Command", a new organisational structure within the Pentagon that will have overall control of military space operations. SpaceCom, as it will inevitably come to be known, will be on equal footing with other US military commands, such as Central Command in the Middle East or Indo-Pacific Command in Asia, and will require a new headquarters as well as a commander and deputy commander who will need Senate approval. It is not the first military space entity proposed by the US president this year. In June, Trump said he wanted to create "Space Force", an entirely new branch of the military, alongside the Navy, Marine Corps, Army, Air Force and Coast Guard. He insists such a move is necessary to tackle vulnerabilities in space and assert US dominance in orbit. But its creation is not a done deal, as it needs to be approved by Congress, and the concept has met with some scepticism from lawmakers and defence officials wary of the cost and added bureaucracy. China has also bolstered its space capabilities in recent years. Earlier this month, the country launched a rover heading to the far side of the moon, a global first that could boost Beijing's ambitions to become a space superpower. In 2013, China landed its first probe on the moon, Yutu or "Jade Rabbit". DAYS after Manila Archbishop Luis Antonio Cardinal Tagle alluded to the supposed abuse of power to intimidate people, President Rodrigo Duterte on Tuesday, December 18, denied that he was a bully and turned DAYS after Manila Archbishop Luis Antonio Cardinal Tagle alluded to the supposed abuse of power to intimidate people, President Rodrigo Duterte on Tuesday, December 18, denied that he was a bully and turned the tables on the Catholic clergy who are using the pulpit to criticize others. Speaking before village executives in Davao City, Duterte admitted that his administration and the Church "will never come to terms" because of differing views. He made the remark amid his tough rhetoric against the Catholic Church because of its strong opposition to the government's brutal crackdown on illegal drugs. "Kani pung obispo si Tagle, dili daw nako hadlukon. Kanus-a ba ko nanghadlok? (They say I shouldn't threaten Bishop Tagle. When have I ever done that?") the President said. "Unya demonyo daw ko. Mao nay kadaot og gamiton nimong relihiyon para plataporma naa kay atakehong tawo. Because of the separation of church and state, 'di gyud ta magkasinabot. We will never come to terms. Lisod gyud and gobyerno. Ang gobyerno man gud walay Ginoo," he added. (They also said I'm a devil. Using your religion as a platform to attack a person is wrong. Because of the separation of church and state, we will never reach an understanding. We will never come to terms. The government is difficult to navigate. Government has no God.) The Catholic Church has been vocal against the Duterte administration's drug war that killed nearly 5,000 individuals linked to the illicit narcotics trade. The Church leaders' stance on the anti-narcotics crackdown has prompted Duterte to repeatedly lambast them in his often expletive-laden extemporaneous speeches. On December 5, Duterte said bishops are better off dead because they are "useless" and "stupid." READ: Duterte: Kill 'useless' bishops In an indirect reference to Duterte's anti-Catholic slurs, Tagle said in his December 16 homily at Manila Cathedral that those who are in power should not "bully" and "disrespect" others. "Just because you are in power, you already have the right to trample upon others. In truth, the bully, he who uses power to belittle others, he is the one who is most afraid and insecure," Tagle said. (SunStar Philippines) Its an uneasy time for Asian nations as the rivalry between China and the United States intensifies and it remains uncertain whether they can resolve their trade war when the 90-day truce expires. In this special series the South China Morning Post explores how the China-US rivalry is affecting four countries in Asia. In part three, Laura Villadiego looks at Thailand. If the trade war between the United States and China escalates, Thailand is poised to enjoy some short-term benefits as companies look to relocate within Asia, but observers have warned that it may also bring economic risks. The Thai authorities have yet to come to grips with the trade war, said Thitinan Pongsudhirak, director of the Institute of Security and International Studies at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. When they start paying attention to it in earnest, they will find Thailand in good stead because it is very close to China while being a US treaty ally. Thailand has historically been one of Americas main allies in Asia, especially after the second world war. This good relationship translated into thriving economic exchanges and today the US is the second largest destination for Thai exports. At the start of the 21st century, though, Bangkok reoriented its foreign policy towards China, which became the main destination for Thai exports in 2010. The military junta that took power in a coup detat in May 2014 strengthened the countrys ties to China, even though this relationship has not always been smooth. Initially Thailand went head over heels for Chinas superpower support after the coup in 2014, but became more hedged with Japan after the Chinese offered tough loan terms on the rail project, Thitinan said. Both Japan and China have been courting Thailand to cooperate in several infrastructure projects, mainly high-speed train lines, that the Thai government has been pushing recently. Story continues After months of negotiations, China and Thailand reached an agreement in August 2017 for the construction of Thailands first high-speed rail line; it will link the capital, Bangkok, and the northeastern city of Nakhon Ratchasima, and should eventually reach Nong Khai on the border with Laos. The line has been seen as a key element of the Belt and Road Initiative, Beijings plan to connect China with more than 60 countries in Asia, Africa and the Middle East through infrastructure projects. However, Japan is also negotiating with Thailand over the construction of another high-speed train line this one would connect Bangkok and Chiang Mai, the largest city in north Thailand and a popular tourist spot. Beijing and Tokyo have agreed to work together on infrastructure projects in third countries as part of their efforts to counter US President Donald Trumps aggressive trade policies, with the two sides reported to have reached a deal to develop an energy-efficient smart city in Thailand. While Japanese investments in Thailand include several large car factories, Chinese investments are mainly in small or medium-sized companies mostly because of [Thailands] investment restriction and environment-related regulations, said Xu Liping, a Southeast Asian studies expert at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). Thitinan said that Donald Trumps election as president in 2016 helped improve Thai-US relations, which had eroded after the coup, because Trump focused more on interests over values. The escalation of the US-China trade war may have been halted for 90 days at least following Trump and Xi Jinpings meeting in Argentina at the start of the month but the tariffs already imposed on Chinese goods remain in place and may bring new opportunities for countries like Thailand. The trade war will benefit Southeast Asia because some industries will relocate there, said Enze Han, an associate professor of politics and public administration at the University of Hong Kong. In this competition to attract industries, Thailand may benefit from its geographic location in the middle of Southeast Asia and with easy access to the sea and also from positive historical ties with China that neighbouring countries, like Malaysia or Vietnam, lack. Thai-Sino communities are much more powerful [in the country] and there is no particular sensitivity in dealing with China, Han said, referring to the disputes several Southeast Asian countries have with China in the South China Sea and the ethnic flare-ups that have confronted Chinese communities in Vietnam and Malaysia. However, Thailand could be negatively affected as well, as many goods that Thailand exports to the US and China are raw materials used in those nations own supply chains. The tricky part is that if China, Japan or the US are not doing well, everybody may suffer, Han said. Thailands commerce ministry said exports had been hit by the trade war and contracted by 5.2 per cent year on year in September. Even though exports rebounded in October from the previous months decline, some exports, like rubber, have been seriously damaged by the new tariffs. According to Siam Commercial Bank, the trade war could also hit Thai companies in the domestic market. The dispute could cause products of both trade giants to be dumped into Thailand, resulting in stiffer competition with Thai domestic products, it said. However, the bank also saw opportunities in the increase in the demand for Thai products that are substitutable in these two markets notably cassava, soybeans and plastic resins. The Thai government remains optimistic and has set an export growth target of 8 per cent for 2019. The World Bank has also adjusted its projections for Thailands economic growth this year, to 4.5 per cent, from 4.1 per cent, based on domestic demand recovery and a boost in public investment activities. Yet Thailand is ill-prepared to replace China as a high-end manufacturing hub, said Pavida Pananond, an associate professor of international business at Thammasat University in Bangkok. That is because the nation needs to improve its competition policies and intellectual property rights protection; ameliorate the costs of doing business in the country; and enrich the level of skills of Thai workers. To become a true centre for [the global] supply chain to replace China is not going to be easy, because China has a lot of advantages, Pavida said. In 2016, the government introduced its Thailand 4.0 policy that intends to modernise the economy through innovation and to turn Thailand into an economic hub for high-technology industries, like robotics or aeronautics. To attract more sophisticated industries, [ ] Thailand needs to prepare itself for a better investment infrastructure for more advanced activities, Pavida said. The Thai government is also pushing an expansion of the Eastern Economic Corridor, one of the main industrial areas in the country, and has announced a similar corridor for its southern region. The political instability that Thailand has seen over the past decade could also hamper the country and boost Vietnam, which shares a border with China and can offer lower labour costs and more political stability. However, the Thai government last week lifted a ban on political activities in the run-up to a long-awaited general election in February. Speaking ahead of the announcement, Pavida said the elections would probably be viewed positively by investors. The economy is still growing despite our political difficulties, and the elections that are going to take place next year show that at least something is moving forward, he said. But the election campaign may also increase the scrutiny on Chinese-funded infrastructure projects, which faced increased criticism in other countries over the lack of transparency. Such fears have become sharpened recently when three high-profile projects in Malaysia, including a high-speed railway, were cancelled after the new government led by Mahathir Mohamad defeated the pro-Beijing prime minister Najib Razak. Xu, from the CASS, said that Beijing-backed infrastructure projects faced an uncertain future if current Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, a former general, is defeated in the February 24 election. But he said that unlike in Malaysia there was a consensus among Thai politicians about the importance of cooperating with China, so the impact of a change of government would be limited. This article Thailand can cash in on US-China trade war, but theres no gain without pain first appeared on South China Morning Post For the latest news from the South China Morning Post download our mobile app. Copyright 2018. Bangkok, 19 December 2018 Following the stunning Venice Biennale last year, Bangkok has been transformed into a citywide art gallery for the Bangkok Arts Biennale 2018; an international contemporary art showcase for both Thai and international artists across the citys multiple landmarks including temples, shopping malls and heritage sites. To best enjoy the highlights of Bangkok Arts Biennale 2018, ONYX Hospitality Group offers two ideal arts tour base hotels with its city properties: Amari Watergate Bangkok and Shama Sukhumvit Bangkok. Amari Watergate Bangkok Located in the heart of the citys top shopping district, Amari Watergate Bangkok offers arts enthusiasts easy access to enjoy the best of Bangkok Arts Biennale 2018. To avoid traffic nightmares, guests can take a charming boat ride from Pratunam pier, located just across the road from the hotel, travelling along the Khlong Saen Saep to the Phanfa Leelard pier in the old town which is within easy reach to the riverside heritage buildings where many art pieces are installed. Following a short old town stroll, guests can hop on a long-tailed boat along the Chao Phraya River to visit the art landmarks from Dragon Boat by the Bank of Thailand Learning Centre, Giant Twins at Wat Arun to Zero at the East Asiatic Building. Back at the Amari, guests can relax and reenergize with an Energy Boost Package, a 150-minute ritual which combines a body scrub, ancient Thai and Ayurvedic massage techniques and a crystal facial, available exclusively at the hotels Breeze Spa. Nightly rates start at 3,150THB ++. Shama Sukhumvit Bangkok With its prime location in the heart of the business district and shopping malls, close to BTS Nana and Phloen Chit stations, Shama Sukhumvit is an ideal spot for art lovers to explore the amazing BAB exhibits along the BTS skytrain network. From the hotel, guests can take a train ride to start the journey from the Bangkok Arts & Culture Centre (BACC) where many highlights of the event are located. Guests can take a nice photo with the colourful Basket Tower by Choi Jeong Hwa and, from there, take a stroll through interconnected malls and the skywalk to see the iconic 14 Pumpkins by world-famous Yayoi Kusama at Siam Paragon and Central World. From there, we recommend another short train ride to Phloen Chit and Phrom Phong BTS stations to see more striking Choi Jeong Hwas artwork including Fruit Tree, Gun shots etc. at the Central Embassy and EmQuartier. After the arts journey via skytrain, guests can go on a shopping spree or refuel with a savoury dinner at one of the many nearby restaurants. Back at the hotel, guests can sit back and relax in their cosy home-like apartment, or take in the amazing city view from the rooftop infinity pool. Nightly rates start from 3,150 THB ++. For more information and reservations please contact: Amari Watergate Bangkok Tel. +66 2653 9000 or visit https://www.amari.com/watergate/ Shama Sukhumvit Bangkok Tel. +66 2105 6000 or visit https://www.shama.com/sukhumvit/ Greenwood Police(KANSAS CITY, Mo.) -- A 6-month-old girl who was allegedly left to drown in an icy pond by her father is "greatly improving," police announced Tuesday. On Monday morning just after 10 a.m., a man entered the Greenwood Police Department, telling authorities that he had just drowned his child, police said in a press release. The investigators who spoke to the man hurried to the location where he said he left his daughter and pulled the baby out of the frigid pond off Doc Henry Road, police said. They performed CPR and were able to get her to breathe normally, then removed her wet clothes and wrapped her in one of the officer's uniform shirts to warm her, police said. The baby was then taken to the hospital, where she is recovering but in good health, police said. Greenwood Police Lt. Aaron Fordham said Tuesday that the child is "greatly improving" and "continuing to make progress," ABC Kansas City station KMBC-TV reported. She had a body temperature 87.9 degrees when she was taken to the hospital, indicating hypothermia, according to KMBC-TV. The father was taken into custody and transported to jail, police said. He is identified in charging documents as 28-year-old Jonathon Zicarelli of Greenwood, KMBC-TV reported. Zicarelli appeared "emotionally removed" when he informed police of what he had done, according to the local station. Once the responding deputies arrived to the scene, they found the girl floating face up, appearing lifeless, KMBC-TV reported. When they pulled her out of the pond, she had mud in her eyes and grass and water in her mouth, according to the station. Police believe she was in the water for up to 10 minutes, KMBC reported. Zicarelli allegedly told police he had planned to kill the child for more than 24 hours to make things easier on his wife, who was stressed out about the holidays and trying to provide for the family, KMBC-TV reported. Copyright 2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved. Miss Uganda Quiin Abenakyo who was recently crowned Miss World Africa, this evening paid a courtesy call on me at State House, Entebbe. I congratulate our muzukulu on these accolades and also salute her for recently completing her university degree course. She is a true definition of beauty coupled with brains. She also told me she is an advocate of responsible living among young people. She is specifically focusing on helping young girls lead responsible, healthy lifestyles. I must commend Abenakyos parents for raising her with values. Many young people today rush into promiscuity and ruin their lives, yet a little patience and completing school would give them a foundation on which to enjoy the rest of their lives with their spouses. Abenakyo is indeed a tall, beautiful Musoga girl. My only concern is that she was wearing Indian hair. I have encouraged her to keep her natural, African hair. We must show African beauty in its natural form. Again, I congratulate Muzukulu Abenakyo on this feat. Going forward, the government will support the Miss Uganda Foundation. Once upon a time, people thought that electrons and ions always stuck together, living happily ever after. However, under low density of matter or high temperatures, the components of matter are no longer bound together. Instead, they form plasma, a state of matter naturally occurring in our universe, which has since been harnessed for everyday applications such as TV screens, chip etching and torches, but also propulsion and even sustained energy production via controlled fusion. In a fascinating editorial for a special plasma issue of EPJ H, called "Plasma physics in the 20th century as told by players", three physicists share their perspectives on key events in the early history of plasma physics, in the first half of the 20th century. First, Patrick Diamond, from the University of California San Diego, USA, shares his recollections of the early days of wireless transmission and the description of the 'Heavyside Layer' (the electrically conducting layer of the upper atmosphere, which transmits radio waves). In turn, Yves Pomeau from the Ecole Polytechnique in Palaiseau, France, talks about the role of Irving Langmuir in the development of plasma physics theory, namely his calculation of the frequency of oscillation of electrons in a plasma environment with much heavier ions. Lastly, Uriel Frisch from the University Cote D'Azur in Nice, France, describes the birth of nuclear fusion theory. For those interested in reading further about plasma, this EPJ H special issue covers both the fundamentals and the applications related to magnetic-confinement-based controlled fusion between 1950 and 2000. The story ranges from the Soviet era and Russian efforts to the standpoints of French, Japanese, Chinese and American physicists involved in building tokamaks around the worldand more recently ITER- to experiment with controlled fusion, which is governed by plasma physics. Explore further Team wins major supercomputer time to study the edge of fusion plasmas More information: Patrick H. Diamond et al, Editorial introduction to the special issue "Plasma physics in the 20th century as told by players", The European Physical Journal H (2018). Patrick H. Diamond et al, Editorial introduction to the special issue "Plasma physics in the 20th century as told by players",(2018). DOI: 10.1140/epjh/e2018-90061-5 (Left) A living maize weevil. (Right) Image of a maize weevil impression from the surface of a pottery fragment. Credit: Prof. Hiroki Obata Researchers have discovered an ancient Japanese pottery vessel from the late Jomon period (4500-3300 BP) with an estimated 500 maize weevils incorporated into its design. The vessel was discovered in February 2016 from ruins in Hokkaido, Japan. This extremely rare discovery provides clues on the cultivation and distribution of chestnuts, food in the Jomon era, and the spirituality of ancient Japanese people. Maize weevils are beetles of the Dryophthorinae subfamily, and are destructive pests of stored rice and grains. By 2003, Jomon-period pottery and pottery fragments containing foreign-body impressions had been collected by various researchers from multiple archeological sites around Japan. Surveys of these impressions exposed hundreds of seed and insect traces on and in the pottery. Over the years, researchers found that maize weevils constituted over 90 percent of all recorded insect impressions. In 2010, Professor Obata's research group from Kumamoto University (KU) in Japan found maize weevil impressions in 10,000 year-old pottery that had been recovered from the southern Japanese island of Tanegashima. They showed that maize weevils, which were thought to have come from the Korean Peninsula, had damaged stored food, such as acorns and chestnuts, long before rice cultivation began in the area. In 2012, the KU research group found maize weevils impressions in pottery fragments from the Sannai-Maruyama site in the northern Japanese prefecture of Aomori. The fact that weevils inhabited an area with a cold winter is an indicator for the distribution food by humans and a warm indoor environment that persisted throughout winter. It is presumed that weevil infestation of stored food was well underway in the Jomon period. (Top) A pottery vessel excavated from the Tatesaki archaeological site in Fukushima Town, Hokkaido with maize weevils impressions. (Bottom) Yellow dots represent maize weevil locations. Credit: Prof. Hiroki Obata Continuing their study of pottery from northern Japan, Professor Obata's team discovered the first maize weevil impressions from Hokkaido, and in February of 2016 discovered a pottery vessel that contained a large number of maize weevils. X-ray CT scans were taken to count insect cavities and revealed that 417 adult maize weevils were contained in the remaining parts of the pottery. In addition, if all of the missing pieces were accounted for, it is estimated that up to 501 weevils were mixed into the clay and appeared in the vessel when it was whole. Interestingly, when comparing the body size of 337 maize weevil impressions found nationwide, the team discovered that the body length of maize weevils from eastern Japan was about 20 percent longer than that of western Japan. It is presumed that this body-length discrepancy is due to the different nutritional values between the types of foods they infestedthe sweet chestnuts of eastern Japan vs the acorns of western Japan. Chestnuts are not native to Hokkaido and previous studies surmised that people carried them to the northern Japanese island. The discovery of weevils at the Tatesaki archaeological site in Hokkaido is evidence that the Jomon people of Tohoku (south of Hokkaido) carried supplies, including chestnuts infested by weevils, over the Tsugaru Strait by ship. "The meaning of a large amount of adult maize weevils in pottery was not touched upon in detail in my paper," said Professor Obata. "However, I believe that the Jomon people mixed the weevils into the pottery clay with the hope of having a good harvest." To import chestnuts not native to Hokkaido (Tatesaki archaeological site), it would have been necessary to cross the sea (Sannai-Maruyama site in Aomori prefecture). Credit: Prof. Hiroki Obata Explore further Japanese earthenware time capsules contain 4,300-year-old cockroach egg case impressions More information: Hiroki Obata et al, Discovery of the Jomon era maize weevils in Hokkaido, Japan and its mean, Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports (2018). Hiroki Obata et al, Discovery of the Jomon era maize weevils in Hokkaido, Japan and its mean,(2018). DOI: 10.1016/j.jasrep.2018.10.037 The scientific team has studied a total of 20,539 samples of different Iberian spider species. Credit: Marc Domenech (University of Barcelona) The biodiversity catalogue of Iberian Peninsula spiders now includes a dozen new species from seven newly discovered families mainly found in soil, according to an article led by Professor Miquel Angel Arnedo from the Faculty of Biology and the Biodiversity Research Institute (IRBio) of the University of Barcelona. The new study, covering the largest study area on this animal group in peninsular territory, is now published in the journal Biodiversity Data Journal. The scientific team studied a total of 20,539 samples of Iberian spider species, with 8,521 adult specimens corresponding to 190 genera, 39 families and 376 species in the oak woodlands of national parks in Aiguestortes i Estany de Sant Maurici, Ordesa i Mont Perdut, the Peaks of Europe, Monfrague, Cabaneros and Sierra Nevada. These forests with temperate climates, where arboreal species and deciduous trees are abundant, represent the most appropriate natural habitat to study the biogeographic patterns of spiders at a peninsular scale, according to Professor Miquel Angel Arnedo. "In a broader sense, oak woodlands are a few of the forest communities that are represented in all National Parks building up our study. These are natural habitats of interest regarding conservation, and show a high level of endemism and their evolutionary history is quite well known," he says. The geographic distribution of Iberian spiders is still poorly understood compared to other Mediterranean countries. "The lack of tradition in natural history studies in the country and the fewer admirers of arachnology could explain these differences," says Arnedo, member of the Department of Evolutionary Biology, Ecology and Environmental Sciences of the Faculty of Biology and IRBio. The research team found 11 new spider species apart from other 20 species whose taxonomic identification is still pending. So far, more than 1,300 species were known in the peninsula and the Balearic Islands. According to the experts, some of the new species could be especially vulnerable to environmental factors (in most cases, only one or a few individuals have been discovered in one geographical place or even one parcel). Moreover, the experts added seven new spider species to the peninsular biological inventory, and three more in the Spain inventory, with the identification of species such as Dictyna pusilla, Philodromus buchari, Pseudeuophrys nebrodensis, Euryopis flavomaculata, Titanoeca schineri, Dipoena torva and Sardinion blackwalli, some of them described in the scientific bibliography since the late 19th century. "None of these species can be considered rare, since they had been identified in other places such as France, Portugal and Central Europe," says Arnedo "There are still many spider species to be found," adds Arnedo. "These results show there is a lack of systematic samplings in the arachnological biodiversity in Spain and are a good example of the few things we know about our own fauna." Reconstructing the evolutionary history of peninsular spiders The sampling technique for spider specimens in the natural environment has followed the standardized protocol COBRA. This methodology, applied in studies of terrestrial arthropod communities worldwide, enables researchers to create an inventory of the species in a specific area and brings data to extrapolate the amount and abundance of species that can live in a geographical area. Moreover, the methodology based on content such as DNA barcodingthe use of a short and standardized DNA fragment as the identifier of a speciesspeeds up the identification of species and improves the resolution of the analysis of biodiversity in this animal group. "This methodology enables developing high-resolution bioinformatic tools to help automatizing the classification and identification of species, even in populations of the same species in different places," says Arnedo. "For instance, young individuals cannot be classified as species through morphological criteria, as in many cases, they only reach the family taxon. With DNA barcoding, we can categorize them under specific species. This technique also helps to identify different vital stages in the same specieseven remains such as exuvia or overlayers, excrements or environmental DNA that would be impossible to distinguish otherwise. Loss of natural habitat, invasive species, environmental pollution and global warming are threats that put the conservation of peninsular arachnological fauna in danger. Some spider species tolerate environmental perturbations better than others, but other groups are more sensitive to environmental factors. In the future, samplings will need standardized protocols and wider taxonomical data with nuclear molecular markers. Morphological studies and ecological information are required to know about the evolutionary and biogeographic history of peninsular spiders and to guarantee their conservation. "Like other organisms, spiders are exposed to variations in their environmental and biological environments. We are all in the same boat, and with the same destination. Te difference is that we are the in charge of this destiny," concludes Professor Miquel Angel Arnedo. Explore further Intense fires threaten conservation-significant trapdoor spider More information: Luis Crespo et al, A DNA barcode-assisted annotated checklist of the spider (Arachnida, Araneae) communities associated to white oak woodlands in Spanish National Parks, Biodiversity Data Journal (2018). Luis Crespo et al, A DNA barcode-assisted annotated checklist of the spider (Arachnida, Araneae) communities associated to white oak woodlands in Spanish National Parks,(2018). DOI: 10.3897/BDJ.6.e29443 Aurora and stars over Ny-Alesund. Credit: Chris Pirner Scientists have known for some time that Earth's atmosphere loses several hundred tons of oxygen each day. They understand how this oxygen loss happens on Earth's night side, but they're not sure how it happens on the day side. They do know one thing though; they happen during auroras. According to a press release from NASA's Earth Observatory, no two oxygen outflow events are exactly the same, which makes understanding them a challenge. They call the events 'fountains of gas' that escape the Earth during auroral activity, and the Earth Observatory has a mission dedicated to understanding them. The mission is part of the NASA's Earth Observatory program called VISIONS-2 (Visualizing Ion Outflow via Neutral Atom Sensing-2), and it requires certain conditions. It's set in Ny Alesund, Svalbard, Norway for good reason. It's the northernmost year-round civilian settlement in the world. It has an ice-free harbour year round, and a modern rocket launch facility. There's also no sun in the winter night here to interfere with studying the auroras. But there's something else that makes this the perfect setting for the VISIONS-2 mission. Every morning, Ny Alesund passes under a weak point in Earth's magnetic bubble. The weak point is like a funnel that channels the fierce solar wind into our upper atmosphere. That causes auroral displays, and boils the gases of our atmosphere off into the vacuum of space in an auroral fountain. At 78.9 N, Ny Alesund is only 1237 km from the North Pole, and over 5700 km from Washington, DC. Recently, researchers with VISIONS-2 launched two sounding rockets to investigate oxygen loss during auroras. Sounding rockets are small, targeted rockets that can be launched quickly. In this case, the two rockets were loaded with cameras and other instruments, and prepared for launch. The launch team has to be very patient. But of course, they have technology on their side. They don't have to wait until they see the aurora, they have advanced notice of an aurora thanks to the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite. DSCOVR is the NOAA's solar wind observatory. It sits out at the LaGrange point between the Earth and the Sun and tells the VISIONS-2 team when the solar wind is powerful enough and oriented the right way to cause auroras. At best, the team gets about an hour warning. One of the sounding rockets prior to launch. Even though theyre small, theyre still sophisiticated pieces of equipment that require detailed preparation for their mission. Credit: NASA Even with advanced warning, the team is cautious. If the solar wind turns out to be too weak, then they will have wasted the launch. If terrestrial wind conditions in Earth's atmosphere are too strong, that's also a problem. The rockets are unguided, so they have to be oriented before launch to account for winds. Luckily, the team has another tool at their disposal, weather balloons launched every 30 minutes, as needed, to test the wind. The rockets were staged in Ny-Alesund, Svalbard (Norway), and the researchers waited for an aurora before launching the pair. On December 7th, 2018, the researchers launched the two rockets during an aurora. The photo below is a long exposure of the rockets, which captures both launches even though they occurred a couple minutes apart. The mission used a pair of rockets so they could use a mix of different instruments in each. Some instruments required a spinning platform and some didn't. A pair of rockets launched with a couple minutes between them also allowed similar instruments to take readings over time. The above image shows the first stage ignitions and burnouts of the two rockets, as they were sent on their mission to study oxygen loss in Earth's atmosphere. A pair of sounding rockets took aim at the aurora over Svalbard, Norway, to help scientists understand how Earths atmosphere loses oxygen into space. Even though its Earths day side in the image, the launch location is so far north theres no daylight. Credit: Allison Stancil-Ervin of NASAs Wallops Flight Facility "We had such an amazing experience building these very complex and capable payloads, integrating and testing them at Wallops, then bringing them to the field," said Doug Rowland, principal investigator for the mission and a space physicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "The launch was a very emotional moment, even more so when we saw that all the instruments had performed well and the science conditions were good." After launch, there's ten minutes for the rocket to do its work in the atmospheric fountain. Neutral atom imaging cameras build a picture of the fountain from within and without. The auroral camera documents the aurora itself, its temperature, intensity, and height. If all goes well, the research team is rewarded with a 'wall of science.' The December 7 launch appears to have been successful. An early look at the data shows that the instruments functioned properly and returned the intended data. "I believe we did see the 'atmospheric fountain,'" said Rowland. The data still need to be analyzed and scaled, "but we may have evidence of it from multiple perspectives." Who wouldnt want a flashy wall of science like this? VISIONS-2 co-investigator Jim Hecht studies the wall of science used to display data that shows auroral conditions and forecasts. Credit: Doug Rowland Earth, obviously, is a dynamic, living, active planet. There's a lot going on here. The VISIONS-2 project is designed not only to help us understand our own planet better, but other planets as well. Which planets are habitable? Why are some so desolate? How did a planet like Mars, which once had an atmosphere, lose it? Earth's atmosphere won't be gone anytime soon. Not until the sun goes red giant in about 5 billion years, anyway. At that distant point in time, the expanding Sun will boil our atmosphere away like nothing. Then we're done. The amount of oxygen (and hydrogen) lost from Earth's atmosphere during these auroras is miniscule. Several hundred tons each day might sound like a lot, but it isn't. In any case, photosynthesis helps restore oxygen. It's still an important piece of the puzzle for understanding how things work, though, and what the details are in the relationship between Earth and its star. A photograph of an aurora at Ny-Alesund, Norway, November 2018. Credit: Ahmed Ghalib, VISIONS-2 payload team Explore further To image leaky atmosphere, NASA rocket team heads north Credit: CC0 Public Domain A new Simon Fraser University report calls for governments to combine emission reduction and climate adaptation strategies and outlines best practices to reduce the severity of extreme climate impacts. The report, Low Carbon Resilience: Best Practices for Professionals, authored by SFU's Adaptation to Climate Change Team (ACT), is the first to integrate climate mitigation, such as reducing carbon emissions, with climate adaptationaddressing ongoing climate changesinto Canadian best practices. The low carbon resilience (LCR) approaches would facilitate resource efficiencies and provide transformative solutions throughout a variety of sectors ranging from transportation, urban planning and agricultural operations. "Typically, emissions reduction and climate adaptation have been addressed separately," says Deborah Harford, executive director of SFU's Adaptation to Climate Change Team and the report's co-author. "By integrating these two streams of action, governments can save time and resources, increase returns on investment, and generate economic, environmental, social and health co-benefits." The report's findings have been endorsed by several leading national Canadian professional associations: the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects, the Canadian Institute of Planners, the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, the Canadian Water and Wastewater Association and ICLEI Canada. Adopting the findings from the report, the associations have developed a statement of agreement. "Canada's professionals are essential contributors to climate action," Harford says. "Practitioners across the professions have a key role as change agents in advancing LCR practices in all aspects of society." Climate change is already being experienced in Canada with instances of extreme heat, drought, wildfires and flooding. The recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report assessing climate risk makes it clear that climate extremes are projected to increase, and we must rapidly reduce emissions to prevent runaway climate change. Climate impacts, and some of the potential adaptation responses to them, can significantly reduce the effectiveness of emissions reduction planning if this is not considered. Likewise, clean energy, renewables infrastructure, and land and water use planning designed to reduce emissions all have potential to contribute to or hinder the success of adaptation actions. Joint Statement: (from The Canadian Society of Landscape Architects, the Canadian Institute of Planners, the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, the Canadian Water and Wastewater Association and ICLEI Canada): "Canadian professionals have both the opportunity and responsibility to respond to this challenge and address both emissions reduction and adaptation. Our national professional associations have a crucial role to play in advancing ethics, awareness, practices and policies that support this integrated LCR approach to action on climate change, due to their prominent roles in many aspects of the development and management of resources, ecosystems and communities." Read the full statement here. Explore further Cities fight climate change through ecosystem restoration A USC scientist has documented the prehistoric occurrence of a shark species battling a pterosaur, a flying reptile. Credit: Illustration/Mark Witton It was a prehistoric clash of the ages that didn't end pretty when a monster in the sky clashed with a beast of the deep. The sorry outcome for one particular flying reptile is brutally recorded on a fossil where a shark chomped its neck, leaving a telltale tooth wedged against a vertebra. USC researchers who studied the bones kept at the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum say it's a rare glimpse of wildlife interactions in the age of dinosaurs. A window to a lost world, the findings help fill gaps about how a group of extinct flying creatures pterosaurs lived and behaved. The study appears in the Dec. 14 issue of Peer J. "Understanding the ecology of these animals is important to understanding life on Earth through time," said the study's senior author, Michael Habib, an assistant professor of integrative anatomical sciences at the Keck School of Medicine of USC and a research associate at the Natural History Museum. "Are there sharks today that hunt seabirds? Yes, there are. Is that unique or have big sharks been hunting flying creatures for millions of years? The answer is yes, they have. We now know sharks were hunting flying animals as long ago as 80 million years." Fossil findings In the late Cretaceous period, North America was divided by a giant waterway called the Western Interior Seaway. It was a biologically prolific region from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada. Some of the world's best fossils from this time are found here, including the Smoky Hill Chalk region of Kansas, where this specimen was found. The fossil was excavated in the 1960s and kept in storage at the museum before scientists plucked it from a display for further study. They were intrigued by the embedded shark tooth because of more than 1,100 specimens of Pteranodon, a species of pterosaur, only seven, or less than 1 percent, show evidence of predator-prey interaction, according to the study. Pteranodon were masters of the sky. The gigantic flying reptiles abounded when dinosaurs walked the earth. Pteranodon sported a conspicuous crested skull, had a wingspan of 18 feet and weighed about 100 pounds. They could travel long distances, land and take off in water and had a fancy for fish. But ancient oceans were a dangerous place to linger. Under the waves lurked big, flesh-eating reptiles and sharks. And as fierce as the Pteranodon was, it was no match. But which sea monster killed it? How did it happen? And why was the neck bone intact? First, the scientists had to rule out that the shark tooth, about 1 inch long, wasn't randomly stuck to the Pteranodon vertebra; perhaps had both been deposited in a prehistoric boneyard at the same time. They found that the tooth was stuck between ridges in the neck vertebrae, which was clear evidence of a bite. The tooth belonged to Cretoxyrhina mantelli, a shark common at the time. This particular predator was large, fast and powerful, about 8 feet long and roughly comparable in appearance and behavior to today's great white shark, though it's not closely related. Second, scientists wondered why the evidence of attack was preserved at all. Typically, heavy shark bites utterly shattered pterosaur bones, leaving little trace. In this instance, the tooth just happened to get stuck on a particularly bony part of the neck, which led to the fortuitous fossil. Such a fossil discovery is so rare that this is the first documented occurrence of this shark species interacting with a pterosaur, the study finds. Third, while investigators may never know exactly what happened, Habib said it's possible the attack occurred when the Pteranodon was most vulnerable, sprawled atop the water. While Pteranodon could land and take off on water, they were ungainly at sea and took considerable time to take off. "We know big sharks ate pterosaurs, so we could say a big fast predatory species could very well have eaten this Pteranodon when it entered the water, but we'll probably never know exactly," Habib said. Explore further Rare teeth from ancient mega-shark found on Australia beach More information: David W.E. Hone et al. Evidence for the Cretaceous shark Cretoxyrhina mantelli feeding on the pterosaur Pteranodon from the Niobrara Formation, PeerJ (2018). Journal information: PeerJ David W.E. Hone et al. Evidence for the Cretaceous shark Cretoxyrhina mantelli feeding on the pterosaur Pteranodon from the Niobrara Formation,(2018). DOI: 10.7717/peerj.6031 In this Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2018, signs close a damaged landslide road in the village of Anargyri near the town of Amynatio, northern Greece. One after another, tiny villages in northern Greece's lignite belt have been destroyed by mining, where there was once a thriving village community there are now fewer that 50 people hanging on to their homes, with the ground becoming too unsteady to hold homes upright. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis) If earthquakes struck in slow motion, the results might be visible in a place like the Greek village of Anargyri, a hardscrabble enclave in a black landscape gutted by coal mining. The village in northern Greece once had more than 400 people. Now it has fewer than 50, after being torn apart over decades. Its roads are slowly buckling, its door frames have shifted, its walls and home foundations have cracked beyond repair. Residents are leaving not in panic but out of desperation. One after another, the tiny villages in Greece's lignite belt have been destroyed by mining as the ground becomes too unsteady to hold homes upright. Bells at one church in the area are not rung regularly for fear of causing more cracks in the walls. Cattle farmer Michalis Bitas first noticed the damage to homes in Anargyri in 1986. "That's when mining started locally. It slowly began to eat up the houses before it went on to eat us up too," he said. Bitas is from one of the few dozen households in the village who have refused a power company's offer to move them to a rented apartment in a nearby town. These villagers are demanding full compensation for their homesa right only granted by law if mining occurs directly below a settlement. In this Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2018 a landslide damaged road and house are seen in the village of Anargyri near Amynatio town, northern Greece. One after another, tiny villages in northern Greece's lignite belt have been destroyed by mining, where there was once thriving village communities there are now very few people hanging on to their homes, with the ground becoming too unsteady to hold homes upright. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis) "I have sheep and machinery. What am I supposed to do? Move them into an apartment?" Bitas said. Heavy-duty coal excavators and vehicles on the horizon near the village look like toy trucks, dwarfed by the scale of the blackened mining fields. Greek is still hooked on coal, despite warnings about the dire consequences of global warming issued both by a new scientific report and experts at the recent U.N. climate talks in Poland and despite ambitious European Union-wide targets to replace coal use with renewable energy. Greece is currently the world's 12th largest producer of ligniteknown as brown coalmining 36 million tons annually, according to U.S. federal government energy data. Lignite is a low-grade coal that throws off higher carbon dioxide emissions than black coal. It is often burned near where it is mined since its low energy density makes it too expensive to transport very far. In this Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2018 a crack is seen over religious icons inside the Greek Orthodox church of Agios Nikolaos in the village of Rodonas near Amynatio town, northern Greece. One after another, tiny villages in northern Greece's lignite belt have been destroyed by mining, where there was once thriving village communities there are now very few people hanging on to their homes, with the ground becoming too unsteady to hold homes upright. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis) Nearly a third of Greece's electricity is produced by coal-fired plants and the country has no phase-out plan to stop using domestically produced coal, unlike most parts of Western Europe. Despite abundant wind and sun, only around 15 percent of Greece's energy is produced by renewable sources. Most of its reduction in coal use in recent years has been offset by an increased use of imported natural gas. Under measures hammered out with Greece's bailout creditors, the state-controlled power company, PPC, will privatize three coal-fired electricity plants, prolonging their life. Also, contrary to many of its EU neighbors, Greece is on course to expand its dependence on oil and gas as the nation tries to attract overseas investment to counter a financial crisis that lasted nearly a decade. The Greek government has embarked on a major exploration drive for oil and gas off its western and southern coasts. The oil and gas ventures have alarmed environmental groups, which have issued an urgent plea to the Greek government to reverse its course and switch investments to the renewable sources like solar and wind power. In this Tuesday, Dec. 11, 2018, a worker of Public Power Company, PPC, operates a heavy excavator in the South Field lignite mine near Kozani town, northern Greece. Despite warnings expressed at the current U.N. climate talks in Poland, backed by ambitious European Union renewable targets, Greece is planning to remain hooked on coal and is on course to expand its dependence on oil and gas, anxious to attract overseas investment as it emerges from a financial crisis that lasted nearly a decade. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis) "We must act directly to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but our country is moving in the opposite direction," a letter addressed to Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said. It was signed by 34 environmental and human rights groups, including Greenpeace, the World Wide Fund for Nature, Amnesty International and Doctors Without Borders. Greece is planning to invest "in fossil fuels for decades, along with worrying delivery of hundreds of thousands of square kilometers, on and offshore, for hydrocarbon extraction," the letter said. "This would surrender the country to the nightmare consequences of climate change." In Anargyri, despite the destruction of their homes, residents have mixed feelings about coal, since PPC is a key employer that provides 5,000 local jobs. The other attraction is that lignite, mined domestically, is not vulnerable to financial market swings or geopolitical shocks, unlike imported oil and gas, which in Greece mostly comes from Russia. "Clearly, lignite activity will be reduced and will be replaced by other sources of energy, renewable sources of energy," PPC executive Konstantinos Theodoridis told The Associated Press. "But lignite will continue to be a strategic fuel that, in any geopolitical instability, is the only energy-producing fuel that is absolutely controlled by our country," he said. In this Tuesday, Dec. 11, 2018, a heavy excavator operates in the South Field lignite mine near Kozani town, northern Greece. Despite warnings expressed at the current U.N. climate talks in Poland, backed by ambitious European Union renewable targets, Greece is planning to remain hooked on coal and is on course to expand its dependence on oil and gas, anxious to attract overseas investment as it emerges from a financial crisis that lasted nearly a decade. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis) In this Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2018, a worker of Public Power Company, PPC, walks under the chimneys of Agios Dimitrios Power Plant near Kozani town, northern Greece. Despite warnings expressed at the current U.N. climate talks in Poland, backed by ambitious European Union renewable targets, Greece is planning to remain hooked on coal and is on course to expand its dependence on oil and gas, anxious to attract overseas investment as it emerges from a financial crisis that lasted nearly a decade. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis) In this Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2018, smoke is emitted from the chimneys of Agios Dimitrios Public Power Plant near Kozani town, northern Greece. Despite warnings expressed at the current U.N. climate talks in Poland, backed by ambitious European Union renewable targets, Greece is planning to remain hooked on coal and is on course to expand its dependence on oil and gas, anxious to attract overseas investment as it emerges from a financial crisis that lasted nearly a decade. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis) In this Tuesday, Dec. 11, 2018 shows a general view of the South Field lignite mine near Kozani town, northern Greece. Despite warnings expressed at the current U.N. climate talks in Poland, backed by ambitious European Union renewable targets, Greece is planning to remain hooked on coal and is on course to expand its dependence on oil and gas, anxious to attract overseas investment as it emerges from a financial crisis that lasted nearly a decade. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis) In this Tuesday, Dec. 11, 2018, heavy excavators and vehicles of the Public Power Company, PPC, operate in the South Field lignite mine near Kozani town, northern Greece. Despite warnings expressed at the current U.N. climate talks in Poland, backed by ambitious European Union renewable targets, Greece is planning to remain hooked on coal and is on course to expand its dependence on oil and gas, anxious to attract overseas investment as it emerges from a financial crisis that lasted nearly a decade. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis) In this Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2018 a landslide damaged road is seen as trucks and bulldozers operate at the lignite mine of Amynatio, northern Greece. One after another, tiny villages in northern Greece's lignite belt have been destroyed by mining, where there was once thriving village communities there are now very few people hanging on to their homes, with the ground becoming too unsteady to hold homes upright. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis) In this Tuesday, Dec. 11, 2018 a worker of the Public Power Company, PPC, operates in the South Field lignite mine near Kozani town, northern Greece. Despite warnings expressed at the current U.N. climate talks in Poland, backed by ambitious European Union renewable targets, Greece is planning to remain hooked on coal and is on course to expand its dependence on oil and gas, anxious to attract overseas investment as it emerges from a financial crisis that lasted nearly a decade. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis) In this Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2018 a damaged house is seen after a landslide in the village of Anargyri near Amynatio town, northern Greece. One after another, tiny villages in northern Greece's lignite belt have been destroyed by mining, where there was once thriving village communities there are now very few people hanging on to their homes, with the ground becoming too unsteady to hold homes upright. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis) In this Tuesday, Dec. 11, 2018 workers of the Public Power Company, PPC, operate a blast in the South Field lignite mine near Kozani town, northern Greece. Despite warnings expressed at the current U.N. climate talks in Poland, backed by ambitious European Union renewable targets, Greece is planning to remain hooked on coal and is on course to expand its dependence on oil and gas, anxious to attract overseas investment as it emerges from a financial crisis that lasted nearly a decade. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis) In this Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2018, some belongings of the home owner are seen inside his damaged building in Anargyri village near the town of Amynatio, northern Greece. One after another, tiny villages in northern Greece's lignite belt have been destroyed by mining, where there was once thriving village communities there are now very few people hanging on to their homes, with the ground becoming too unsteady to hold homes upright. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis) In this Tuesday, Dec. 11, 2018, heavy excavators and vehicles operate in the South Field lignite mine near Kozani town, northern Greece. Despite warnings expressed at the current U.N. climate talks in Poland, backed by ambitious European Union renewable targets, Greece is planning to remain hooked on coal and is on course to expand its dependence on oil and gas, anxious to attract overseas investment as it emerges from a financial crisis that lasted nearly a decade. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis) In this Tuesday, Dec. 11, 2018, a worker of Public Power Company, PPC, walks atop of a heavy excavator in the South Field lignite mine near Kozani town, northern Greece. Despite warnings expressed at the current U.N. climate talks in Poland, backed by ambitious European Union renewable targets, Greece is planning to remain hooked on coal and is on course to expand its dependence on oil and gas, anxious to attract overseas investment as it emerges from a financial crisis that lasted nearly a decade. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis) In this Tuesday, Dec. 11, 2018, trucks operate in the South Field lignite mine near Kozani town, northern Greece. Despite warnings expressed at the current U.N. climate talks in Poland, backed by ambitious European Union renewable targets, Greece is planning to remain hooked on coal and is on course to expand its dependence on oil and gas, anxious to attract overseas investment as it emerges from a financial crisis that lasted nearly a decade. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis) Explore further Hundreds march in Berlin to demand an end to using coal 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. ANYmal on its first tour of inspection in Zurich's sewerage system. Credit: ETH Zurich / Daniel Winkler ANYmal, a robot developed at ETH, can see and hear, and even open doors. An international research team is now working to ensure the robot can function in extreme conditions a mission that takes them to the labyrinth of drains and tunnels below Zurich. Two men lift the 30-kilogram high-tech machine and lower it into the dark shaft using a rope. We put on reflective overalls, trade our shoes for thigh-high rubber boots and attach them firmly to our outfits. Then comes a helmet, a flashlight and disposable gloves for each of us. Fully kitted out, we begin our descent, following the steps down the wall of the shaft one by one until we reach Zurich's sewerage system, four metres below the surface. On this warm autumn day a team of researchers is performing tests underground. Their aim is to determine whether ANYmal a robot jointly developed by Robotic Systems Lab and ANYbotics, an ETH spin-off could one day be deployed in sewerage systems. It might be used, for instance, to help the City of Zurich employees who regularly have to walk or crawl through the some 100 kilometres of accessible shafts and drains underneath the city and whose job it is to check the walls and floors for damage. This work not only poses a health risk, but is also potentially lethal, given that the drains can fill up with water very quickly without warning. Another advantage of robots in such an environment is that they could operate in narrow sewers that cannot be accessed with the technology in use today. Initial test run The researchers place the robot upright at the bottom of the shaft. It is about 50 cm tall and has four articulated legs as well as something resembling a head that consists of a camera and various sensors. Peter Fankhauser, co-founder of the ETH spin-off that is commercialising ANYmal, radios his colleagues on the surface, who are responsible for coordinating the test and sending commands to the robot. Fankhauser then twiddles with a joystick and the robot plods forward. As this is the first test in unknown terrain, he takes partial control of the robot even though it is capable of moving autonomously. "It's a precautionary measure," says Fankhauser, "Just because something works in the lab doesn't always mean it will in the real world." After all, the conditions underground are not what the robot is used to: the chamber is wet and slippery, with lower temperatures and higher humidity than in the lab. What's more, it's very, very dark. "It's hard to distinguish much down here," says Fankhauser, almost with a hint of resignation in his voice, as the robot moves at a slow pace through the roughly three-metre-high and five-metre-wide tunnel. The robot emits a uniform electromechanical sound a kind of rhythmic whirring that blends with the sound of rushing water emanating from the main sewer nearby. We are in quite a large overflow sewer with only a trickle of water in it. Given that the robot is on its maiden test run four metres below ground level, the researchers have taken the precaution of avoiding large volumes of water. The workers carefully manoeuvre the high-tech robot into the narrow shaft. Credit: ETH Zurich Finding its way in the dark The goal of the three-year research project entitled THING (sub-Terranean Haptic InvestiGator) is to design robots that can move about on their own and are better able to identify their surroundings. Robots generally use 3-D cameras and laser sensors for orientation. But such devices can malfunction in adverse conditions such as when the ground surface is wet or the air full of dust. That's why the researchers consider enhanced haptic perception orientation by touch to be a possible solution. The project has brought together ETH researchers with colleagues from universities in Edinburgh, Pisa, Oxford and Poznan. All these institutions are experimenting with ANYmal robots, and the project participants from the various locations meet up on a regular basis. In addition to the tests in the sewerage system, next year the researchers will deploy the robot in a Polish copper mine. That will determine whether it can function in an entirely different microclimate, one characterised by hot, dusty air and gravel surfaces. ETH is represented in the project by the Laboratory for Robotic Systems led by Professor Marco Hutter, who has been conducting research into legged robots for many years. He received support from ETH soon after embarking on this research in the form of an ESOP scholarship and a Pioneer fellowship. One of the key questions on this first day of testing is whether the robot can find its way around at all in the darkness of the sewerage system. Initially, two helpers with big LED lamps illuminate the surroundings so that we can clearly see what's going on. Then, Fankhauser asks the helpers to turn off the lamps and radios his colleagues on the surface to tell the robot to use its own lights. The robot's sense of touch isn't the only thing that helps it find its way in the dark, as Hutter explains: "The robot uses laser sensors and cameras to scan its surroundings. By identifying irregularities in the surface of the concrete, it can determine where it is at any given moment." All that can be seen in the darkness now are the small round LEDs in the robot's "head". The atmosphere is other-worldly: the darkness, the sound of rushing water, the electromechanical whirring, the robot's LED eyes. Then someone breaks the eerie silence momentarily with a droll comment: "Its eyes are a bit like a Rottweiler." Underground and offshore Researchers at ETH have been working on quadrupedal robots since 2009. The first ANYmal prototype was completed in 2015 and, one year later, ETH established the spin-off ANYbotics. The fledgling company's mission is to make robots deployable in all types of terrain so that they can be used in a wide range of practical applications. The company's slogan is "Let Robots Go Anywhere". On-site tests are carried out two or three times a month. For instance, Fankhauser and some members of his team recently headed to an offshore platform in the middle of the North Sea. The hope is that robots could one day perform inspections on such platforms. On its pilot run at least, ANYmal autonomously completed several inspection routes with flying colours. ANYmal can enter spaces too small for humans. Credit: ETH Zurich After almost ten years of research, there's a lot ANYmal can do. It can not only walk autonomously, but also boasts the sensory capabilities of sight, hearing and touch. These enable it, for instance, to read the air pressure display on a machine, identify sounds and recognise objects for example to determine whether or not a fire extinguisher is in the right place. The robot can even perform certain manual tasks on its own. Equipped with an additional gripping arm, it can open doors, dispose of refuse or press a lift button. It also delivers data that is more precise than our own eyes, ears and noses can perceive. It can identify the ambient temperature and detect the presence of gases in the air. Its latest trick is recognising the composition of the ground beneath it. "Some of its powers are superhuman," says Fankhauser. Despite the lack of light in the sewer, the robot seems to be finding its way quite well, plodding through the shallow channel at a leisurely pace. When the high-tech machine reaches a 20-centimetre-high ledge in a dry side arm of the sewer, Fankhauser brings it to a halt with a flick of the joystick. Initially, he is reluctant to give the robot the command to climb over the ledge. Although it has easily mastered this manoeuvre in laboratory conditions, down here it is a risky undertaking. "It's an expensive machine," says Fankhauser. But he gives it a try anyway. ANYmal doesn't manage it at its first attempt. It stops at the ledge like a horse balking at a jump. "Default, start again," radios Fankhauser. Now the robot elegantly places one leg after another over the ledge. Huge data volumes While Fankhauser and Hutter watch the robot continue on its patrol for a while, I return to the surface via the entry shaft. Sitting on a bench under a white canopy, their eyes firmly fixed on a laptop, are two assistants from ETH. A generator is buzzing and a router is blinking and many a cyclist passing by along the main road looks on in bemusement at the hubbub around the open manhole at the side of the road. Looking over the researchers' shoulders, I can see an almost constant stream of data flickering across the screen. And thanks to state-of-the-art 3-D and laser technologies, live images constantly transmitted by the robot from underground are visible on a separate monitor. When Fankhauser radios from below that he wants the robot to touch the wall of the sewer with one of its legs, the two assistants have their work cut out for them. The software they are using has not been programmed for this. They respond quickly, however, taking an algorithm originally programmed to teach ANYmal to shake hands. But to make sure the robot doesn't hit the wall with force, the researchers have to adapt the parameters. In this case, the problem is the angle at which the robot is to raise its leg. One of the assistants types in 100 and then gradually ratchets up the number. At 180 the perfect level is reached and the robot's manoeuvre is successful. Fankhauser and Hutter emerge from the cool, humid environment of the sewerage system into the warm autumn sunshine. They slowly begin to relax as they take off their reflective overalls. "The robot was in non-stop operation and collected a lot of data," says Fankhauser as he undoes his high rubber boots and removes his protective clothing. Professor Hutter is satisfied, too: "All the teams will be taking home a huge volume of data to incorporate in their research." They are now one step closer to their goal of delivering a robot that can function properly in challenging conditions underground. But their work is far from finished. The robot recorded 500,000 measurements per second over the course of the day. "That's enough data to keep us busy for six months," says Fankhauser with a laugh. Elaine Howard Ecklund. Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University The late Stephen Hawking famously didn't believe in God. Neither does the renowned Richard Dawkins. But is that typical for U.K. scientists? In a new study, researchers from Rice University, Baruch College and West Virginia University find that scientists are indeed significantly less religious than the general population there. In addition, U.K. scientists at elite universities are more likely to never attend religious services than those at less prestigious schools. The study also indicates biologists are more likely to never attend religious services than physicists. "The Religiosity of Academic Scientists in the United Kingdom: Assessing the Role of Discipline and Department Status" utilizes data collected in a survey of biologists and physicists employed at elite and nonelite departments, as past research has suggested the distinction could be relevant in understanding differences in religiosity. The researchers were interested in how U.K. scientists, particularly elite scientists, compared to the general population with regard to religious beliefs. The researchers found that while only 18 percent of people in the U.K. said they do not believe in God, 45 percent of U.K. scientists responded the same way. In addition, the researchers discovered that scientists in elite departments (a categorization based on the number of publications per department, published department rankings and insider knowledge) are about twice as likely to never attend religious services than scientists in nonelite departments. Elaine Howard Ecklund, the Herbert S. Autrey Chair in Social Sciences, professor of sociology, director of Rice's Religion and Public Life Program and the study's lead author, observes that that elite scientists represent the leading edge of the secularizing effects of science. "Individuals who are at the most elite institutions may disproportionately feel the cultural pressure to secularize," Ecklund said. "So, if those methods and mindset are inherently in conflict with religion, then these successful scientists would experience the greatest erosion of religious faith." Ecklund noted that such findings could also be a product of social forces rather than intellectual ones. "This distinction could have an impact on how the public views scientists, in a national context where some minority groups are bringing challenges to teaching evolutionary theory, for example," she said. "Elite scientists might express less religiosity because they assume that, as elite scientists, they are supposed to be or need to be less religious to fit a professional ideal," she added. "Because they might already be on the fringes of that professional ideal in the first place, nonelite scientists may feel less social and cultural pressure to further conform to it." Study co-author Christopher P. Scheitle of West Virginia University's Department of Sociology and Anthropology said this might also help explain why U.K. biologists are more than 2 times more likely to never attend religious services than British physicists. "It is possible that U.K. biologists might be concerned that being seen as a more active participant in religion would violate some professional norm," said Jared Peifer, an assistant professor in the Department of Management at Baruch College's Zicklin School of Business. Ecklund added: "This norm might result from the history of public conflict surrounding issues like evolution and stem cell research, which are most clearly connected to the biological sciences." The researchers hope their work will help foster a better understanding of the social dynamics between religion and science beyond the traditional focus on the U.S. Explore further Muslim and Protestant scientists most likely to experience, perceive religious discrimination More information: Elaine Howard Ecklund et al, The Religiosity of Academic Scientists in the United Kingdom: Assessing the Role of Discipline and Department Status, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (2018). Journal information: Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion Elaine Howard Ecklund et al, The Religiosity of Academic Scientists in the United Kingdom: Assessing the Role of Discipline and Department Status,(2018). DOI: 10.1111/jssr.12552 Astronauts James (Jim) Lovell, Frank Borman, and William (Bill) Anders pose for a portrait in their space suits on November 22, 1968, just less than a month before they would orbit the moon. Credit: NASA Apollo 8 was supposed to be a test flight, meant to simulate atmospheric re-entry from the moon but never meant to go there. Hurtling toward Earth at 2,407.5 miles per hour is hairy business and NASA, having never done so before, needed practice. But then the USSR successfully launched two of its own moonshots (unmanned Zond 5 and 6) on the heels of President Kennedy's call for men on the moon by the end of the '60s. It felt to most like a matter of time before America lost its space race for good. NASA's plan for Apollo 8 had to change. Following a spark of ambitious vision, NASA reorganized, galvanizing a wild rush of fervor and late nights. In mid-August of 1968, astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders received a call telling them to cancel their holiday plansthey were going to the moon. By December, the three men were suddenly farther away than any human had ever been from our home planet, traveling faster and seeing more than could be seen in the entire history of life on Earth. From prehistoric cephalopods to T-Rex to our ape-like ancestors to Alexander the Great, no single pair of eyeballs had ever been so far from Earth's gravitational influence until Dec. 21, 1968. We were shooting for the moon and we got there, sure enough, but the real triumph of Apollo 8 was beyond nationalism, beyond the tumultuousness of an age that catapulted these three men into the dark unknown. Apollo 8 was the fruition of ancient Chinese stargazers, renaissance dreamers and mid-century physicists. It was, above all, our first good look at ourselves, with the best possible perspective. Today, leading up to the anniversary of one of humankind's most audacious missions, we begin to celebrate 50 years of learning, inspiration, altitude and ingenuity not only about our nearest neighbor but also about Earth and where modern lunar exploration will take us next. Explore further Lunar craters named in honor of Apollo 8 By Ritah Kemigisa. The ministry of Finance has today received a 12.5M Dollar grant from the Norwegian government to strengthen the management of the Oil and Gas sector through the Oil for Development Programme which is in the third phase. Signing the financing agreement, the Norwegian Ambassador to Uganda Susan Eckey said as Uganda transitions from exploration to development and production institutional strengthening is important if they are to overcome many challenges. He however said the support given today will help in building capacities of authorities in the petroleum sector so that they can be transparent for the the public to hold them accountable. The finance minister Matia Kasaija said the grant comes at a critical time as activities in the oil sector are to gain momentum. He said the support will be used to put in place necessary legal and institution frameworks to manage the sector before first oil. The Agreement signed today marks a continuation of the cooperation between Uganda and Norway for 5 years, until the end of 2022. Common noctule (Nyctalus noctula). Credit: Uwe Hoffmeister Every year, trillions of animals migrate for thousands of kilometres between their summer and winter habitats. Among them are several species of bats whose journeys in the dark of the night unfold largely unnoticed by humans and have only partially been investigated by science. A reconstruction of individual migration patterns of the common noctule (Nyctalus noctula) in Central Europe has now revealed that traveling distances vary greatly among individuals, yet overall, females cover longer distances than males. Local bat populations, which remain separate when females rear their offspring in summer, strongly mix in their hibernacula, the roost where they hibernate in winter. Additionally, the study showed that individuals rarely change their migration habitsa behaviour that could prove problematic when bats are forced to adjust to rapidly changing ecosystems. The study was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. An international team of scientists led by the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW) in Berlin used stable hydrogen isotope ratios in minute fur samples to estimate the region of origin of more than 1,000 individuals from seven wintering areas across Central Europe. This data informed researchers about the migration routes of noctule bats within, into and out of Central Europe. The data reveals that the animals from a hibernacula show a great variety of migratory behaviour: The majority of the bats populate the same region in summer and winter, but in each hibernacula, a significant share of animals traveled for longer distances to reach it. "We showed that individuals from a hibernacula can show divergent migratory behaviours with some individuals staying local and others being long-distance migrants," says Christian Voigt from the Leibniz-IZW. "This pattern is called partial migration, and it causes strong genetic mixing of populations when bats mate during migration and hibernation. During rearing of the offspring in the summer months, bats remain separate in distinct regions such as Poland, Russia, the Baltic States, Scandinavia or Germany." Furthermore, data analyses indicate that female bats cover especially long distances in their migration. More often than males, female common noctules came from northern regions to their hibernacula. Correlating these findings with morphologic measurements, the researchers show that the females benefit from long journeys. "We derived a coefficient from body mass and forearm length, a body mass index, and were able to show that males are in best shape when they stay in the same region locally, while among females, the ones who travel long distances are in better shape," explains Linn Lehnert from Leibniz-IZW, first author of the study. "We assume that a superior food supply for the insectivorous bats in northern regions is the main reason for this pattern. Females have higher energy demands during pregnancy and nursing, which makes it worthwhile for them to shoulder the epic journeys." Males, on the contrary, migrate predominantly during their early life and tend to adopt a regional lifestyle for much of their adult life. Last but not least, the scientists analysed isotopic data from 79 individuals that were caught more than once in different years in the same hibernacula. They found that the vast majority of common noctules are creatures of habit. Eighty-six percent showed the exact same migratory behaviour as in a previous year. These firm habits could constrain adjusting to changing environmental conditions, a scenario that becomes more and more probable thinking of global warming, insect decline and other human-induced ecosystem changes. Individuals with a greater flexibility may have better chances to cope successfully with these challenges. In order to assess the resilience of different bat species in connection with migratory behaviour, more research is needed, says Lehnert. "What we do know for sure, however, is how important local hibernacula are for the population of the common noctule bat in Central Europe. A combination of locally embedded and internationally coordinated conservation efforts is needed urgently to protect hibernacula." Explore further Bats anticipate optimal weather conditions More information: Variability and repeatability of noctule bat migration in Central Europe: evidence for partial and differential migration, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, rspb.royalsocietypublishing.or .1098/rspb.2018.2174 Journal information: Proceedings of the Royal Society B Variability and repeatability of noctule bat migration in Central Europe: evidence for partial and differential migration, Artificial light at night isn't just a health problem for those of us sitting in bed scrolling through Instagram instead of hitting the sackit hurts entire outdoor ecosystems. When the critters that live in and around streams and wetlands are settling into their nighttime routines, streetlights and other sources of illumination filter down through the trees and into their habitat, monkeying with the normal state of affairs, according to new research from The Ohio State University. "This is among the first studies to show that light at night has detrimental effects not just on individual organisms in the environment, but also on communities and ecosystems," said Mazeika Sullivan, lead author of the study, which appears today (Dec. 19, 2018) in the journal Ecological Applications. "Nighttime light is having profound impacts that extend to the entire ecosystem," said Sullivan, director of Ohio State's Schiermeier Olentangy River Wetland Research Park and associate professor of environment and natural resources. Though many people might not consider it, artificial light is a pollutant, changing the natural course of life for people, animals and plants, he said, adding that urbanization is rapidly increasing both in the United States and around the globe. "We are experiencing this pollution that we don't think about, but it's all around us and it's chronic and it's happening everywherefrom newly lit villages in rural Africa to streams alongside the highway in Columbus, Ohio," he said. "It's also unprecedented in Earth's history." The new study explored the role of light on streams and wetlands in and around Columbus. Moonlight under a clear sky can give an illuminance of 0.1 to 0.3 lux, Sullivan said. The streams in the study were headwater streams draining into the Scioto and Olentangy rivers, with light ranging from 0.01 to 4.0 lux. Wetlands of the Olentangy River Wetland Research Park had lighting from 0 to 20 lux. The research team examined the effect of existing artificial light in streams, and they manipulated the light in wetlands. In all cases, there was a canopy of trees and other vegetation overhead, buffering the light. From those areas, they collected a variety of ubiquitous water-dwelling and land-dwelling invertebrate species, including mayflies, water bugs, ants and spiders. They found that species composition changed with increases in light intensity. They also discovered that the food chain length of the invertebrate communitiesa measure that tells researchers about the complexity of a food webshortened with more light. "Decreases in food chain length are a pretty big deal, as it reflects not just changes in the architecture of an ecosystemthe numbers of various speciesbut also shifts in ecosystem stability and nutrient flows," Sullivan said. "Artificial light decreased food chain length in this study, which means the ecosystem is less complex." The researchers also saw detrimental changes in energy flowhow nutrients are cycled between aquatic and nearby ecosystems. In particular, invertebrates became less reliant on food sources that originate in the water when they were exposed to moderate light levels. The reasons for the changes are complex, and could include such factors as an increase in predators attracted to a lit area at night, which decreases the population of their prey, or even shifts in plant growth, Sullivan said. Previous studies have clearly shown that individual species are impacted by artificial light. "The classic example is hatchling sea turtles that became disoriented and instead of going toward the moonlit ocean at night, they were headed inland, toward coastal lighting," Sullivan said. "In that case, light-management tactics have helped address the problem." But until now, scientists haven't fully detailed the broader implicationshow light might affect species interactions, communities and important ecosystem functions. "One of the neatest parts about this research is that we scaled up and said, 'What does it mean for the entire community and ecosystem?'" Sullivan said. Going forward, Sullivan would like to explore larger ecosystem-level questions, such as how light's effects contribute to fish and bird populations and to water quality. "I think we're going to start to find that that light has cascading consequences that are linked to other environmental problems we're seeing, possibly including harmful algal blooms." Work in this area will continue with a new $600,000 grant from the Ohio Department of Transportation, which is looking for ways to better understand how roadway lighting interacts with the environment, Sullivan said. A particular focus will be the role of LED lights, which are replacing many halogen lights in the interest of energy conservation. Interventions such as carefully directing light, using motion sensors to activate lights only when they're needed and dimming lighting during times when human activity is minimal could all have the potential to buffer the effects of lighting near wildlife, Sullivan said. Thinking about what types of lights are being used could also be important, he said. Explore further Night-time lighting changes how species interact Credit: CC0 Public Domain A sonic boom and a thunderclap may seem like different phenomena, but their behavior is the same, according to SDState Physics Instructor W. Robert Matson. This is one of the ways he explains shock waves in "Sonic Thunder," his latest book. "I want to explain things in a way that everyone can understand," said Matson, who has been teaching college physics for nearly 15 years. He earned his doctorate from Oklahoma State University in 2004 and came to South Dakota State in spring 2017. "I try to bring seemingly unrelated things together under the umbrella of shock waves," Matson said. "The only difference between a jet's sonic boom and a thunderclap is the way the shock wave is created." This is the second book Matson has written for Morgan and Claypool Publishers. "The first one about earthquakes, geared toward a general audience, was very well received, so Joel Claypool asked me to write another one for a college audience," Matson said. "Sonic Thunder" is tailored to a sophomore or junior level and addresses topics suitable for aerospace engineering, fluid mechanics and dynamics, as well as meteorology. Matson looks at supersonic fight and aircraft design, including consequences of shock wave dynamics and shock waves related to weather systems, earthquakes and dry lightning. "I address wing design and the struggle to reach supersonic speeds," said Matson, who studied aerospace engineering in Oklahoma and gained expertise in fluid flow and erosion. Excerpts are available at iopscience.iop.org/book/978-1-68174-966-2, where the book can be purchased and downloaded. "When I'm writing a book, I like to tell a story," explained Matson. "That's why the first chapter talks about the mythological stories that ancient people invented, such as Zeus on Mount Olympus, to explain lightning and thunder, which then segues into the modern understanding of shock waves." His narrative moves from explaining basic functions to the equations necessary to understand the science. "Math is a language, but not everyone speaks that language. When I present math, I try to translate it into a form people can understand, and if they understand math, they can even apply it," he said. "My hope is by taking these 'wow things,' like earthquakes, lightning and thunder, that nature provides free with no explanation, and use language that you can understand to say 'this is what we know and here is some of the science behind how it works,'" Matson said. In the opening section of the book, Matson uses the image of an inquisitive child sitting on his father's knee and then comes full circle in the final chapter telling his readers, "the next time you're at the fireplace with the family, instead of telling ghost stories, you can talk from a knowledgeable point of view and impress everyone." Explore further The difficulties of taking humans out of transportation More information: Sonic Thunder: A discussion of natural and artificial shock waves. Sonic Thunder: A discussion of natural and artificial shock waves. iopscience.iop.org/book/978-1-68174-966-2 Credit: CC0 Public Domain A regular pattern of unusual meteorological events at Jupiter's equator has been identified by planetary scientists at the University of Leicester. Jupiter's striped appearance of light zones and dark brown belts provides breathtaking views through amateur and professional telescopes alike. But Jupiter's stripes can change and shift over poorly-understood timescales, sometimes expanding and contracting, sometimes fading away entirely. Using a large database of observations of Jupiter spanning more than four decades, scientists have been working to understand the forces shaping these gargantuan weather changes on the Solar System's largest planet. In research recently published in Geophysical Research Letters, the team used data telescopic infrared observations to show evidence of unique events at Jupiter's equator when the usual thick, white clouds appeared to be completely missing. Lead author Dr. Arrate Antunano from the University of Leicester's Department of Physics and Astronomy said: "Jupiter's equator is normally completely clouded over, appearing dark in the infrared because those clouds appear in silhouette against Jupiter's warm internal glow. Those thick clouds make the equator look white through a visible telescope." Co-author Dr. Leigh Fletcher also from the University of Leicester's Department of Physics and Astronomy said: "Professional astronomers have been tracking Jupiter's infrared emission for decades, particularly using NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility on top of Maunakea, Hawai'i. "Only by putting all of these observations together, from a wide variety of instruments over more than three Jupiter years a year on Jupiter lasts 12 Earth years did we begin to spot a pattern." Dr. Antunano said: "Every six or seven years, we found examples of observations when the equatorial clouds had vanished completely, allowing us to see deeper into Jupiter's churning atmosphere. These cloud-clearing disturbances left the equator looking very bright in the infrared, and dark brownish in visible light. These disturbances lasted for 12-18 months, and we saw spectacular examples in 1973, 1979, 1992, 1999 and 2006." With this pattern, the researchers expected to see events in 1985 and 2013, but although the brownish equatorial colours were apparent, the clouds didn't clear completely. Dr. Glenn Orton, a Senior Research Scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, and one of the people responsible for the enormous database of ground-based Jupiter observations used in this study, explained: "As usual, Jupiter is reluctant to give up all its secrets at once. It seems that this six-seven-year pattern isn't perfect, and sometimes we don't see a complete cloud-clearing disturbance." None of these previous equatorial disturbances have been properly analysed by a visiting spacecraft. Dr. Antunano said: "If we follow the pattern over the last 45 years, the really exciting result of this work is that we expect to see a new event very soon, perhaps as early as next year." Jupiter is currently close to solar conjunction, meaning that it's hiding away behind the Sun, and won't become visible to Earth-based observers for the next few months. There are already tantalising hints that things are changing, with small breaks in Jupiter's equatorial clouds apparent in the latest images. The new study, funded by the European Research Council and NASA, could have some surprising implications for Juno's exploration of Jupiter. Juno has been orbiting Jupiter since July 2016, returning spectacular new insights into its deep atmosphere and magnetosphere. Dr. Orton said: "Peering beneath the clouds, Juno's microwave instrument revealed a deep column of ammonia gas rising at the equator and condensing to form those white clouds at the equator. We're excited to see whether that deep ammonia plume is about to change during the new equatorial disturbance event." Indeed, the scientists suspect that the accumulation of ammonia at the equator might help to explain the bizarre six-seven year pattern of the events. Dr. Antunano added: "These long-term observations are the key to unlocking the secrets of these slow weather patterns and climate variations on Jupiter, and allow us to place the findings of NASA's Juno mission into the proper historical context." More information: Arrate Antunano et al. Infrared Characterization of Jupiter's Equatorial Disturbance Cycle, Geophysical Research Letters (2018). Journal information: Geophysical Research Letters Arrate Antunano et al. Infrared Characterization of Jupiter's Equatorial Disturbance Cycle,(2018). DOI: 10.1029/2018GL080382 Credit: CC0 Public Domain It's the political scientist's often-asked chicken and egg: does a person's political party or policy attitudes come first? With party and ideology so closely intertwined, the question has in the past been nearly impossible to pin down, but BYU political science professors Michael Barber and Jeremy C. Pope found a way. The duo published a study in top-ranked American Political Science Review showing that people's policy positions are quite malleable when told that leaders of their political party support a different position. The key to answering their question? The election of a president who has made statements both opposing and supporting a range of controversial issues. "With President Trump as a bit of a weathervane on certain issues, it makes it easier to discern party loyalists from policy loyalists," Pope said. In their research, Pope and Barber studied two different groups: party loyalists and policy loyalists. Party loyalists are those who, when informed of the party leaders' position, willingly and quickly change their policy position to align with the party leader. Policy loyalists are those who hold to their original policy preference, despite opinions or stances of party leaders that might contradict their beliefs. "It's odd to think about partisanship and ideology as being disconnected," said Barber. "Why else does a political party exist rather than to advance a particular set of policies?" Using a representative survey of 1,300 Americans, the researchers randomly assigned respondents into control, liberal and conservative groups and asked participants about their political positions on a variety of contemporary issues. The issues they explored were ones on which Donald Trump took different positions during his presidential campaign, including abortion, immigration, guns, health care, climate change and minimum wage. Control-group participants were asked about their opinions on issues, with no mention of Trump's position. But Barber and Pope presented participants in the liberal group with questions such as, "Donald Trump has said that he supports increasing the minimum wage over $10. How about you? Do you support or oppose increasing the minimum wage to over $10 an hour?" In this way, the researchers could uncover the effect of a party leader's endorsement of a policy in both a liberal and conservative direction. President Trump is unique in that most party leaders don't endorse policies that run counter to the dominant ideology of the party, let alone advocate for both ideological sides of an issue. Pope and Barber found that many people in each treatment group moved to support the policy when informed that President Trump likewise supported the policy. This was true of both liberal and conservative policies. "When informed of the president's issue position, many people willingly followed that position in either a liberal or a conservative direction," Pope said. Respondents who knew less about politics, those who approved of President Trump, strong Republicans and self-identified conservatives were the groups most likely to be moved by seeing an endorsement of a policy by President Trump. Surprisingly, this was true of both a liberal and conservative endorsement. In other words, despite identifying as conservative Republicans, these individuals were more likely to endorse a liberal policy when told that President Trump supported that policy. This kind of loyal partisanship should worry political observers, said Pope and Barber. They both maintain that politics are better when they revolve around more than just the party label. "It should be about ideas and not about winning or beating the other side," Barber said. "Politics should be about pushing ideas and policies that you think will better the country." More information: Michael Barber et al. Does Party Trump Ideology? Disentangling Party and Ideology in America, American Political Science Review (2018). Journal information: American Political Science Review Michael Barber et al. Does Party Trump Ideology? Disentangling Party and Ideology in America,(2018). DOI: 10.1017/S0003055418000795 Figure 1: Schematic representation of the experimental method used to observe strongly-correlated neutron and proton pairs in oxygen-16 nuclei. The top figure shows an approaching skater with a matching velocity (Skater A, left), smoothly grabbing Skater B (center) from a spinning pair of skaters, which is an analogy for the pick-up of a neutron from a strongly-correlated proton-neutron pair by an incident protonshown in the bottom figure. The outgoing deuteron was analyzed by the high-resolution Grand Raiden spectrometer at Osaka University, while the recoiling proton was detected by an array opposite the spectrometer. Credit: Osaka University The nuclear force that holds protons and neutrons together in the center of atoms has a non-central componentthe tensor force, which depends on the spin and relative position of the interacting particles. The importance of the tensor force has been observed in the binding energies of light particles, but as of yet their effect on nuclear structure has not been studied in a more direct manner. Previous experiments in the field have demonstrated either the ability to detect the necessary particles, or the resolution required to probe this nuclear force component. However, none have shown both the resolution and the ability to link the observed large momentum transfer of the proton-neutron pairs (or nucleon pair) to nuclear structure. Now, an international research collaboration including Osaka University has reported the first evidence on the relation between strongly correlated proton-neutron pairs in an atomic nucleus induced by the tensor interactions and the nuclear structure. The researchers used a proton scattering experiment to capture the strong interaction of proton-neutron pairs with moderate energy resolution of the final states. By measuring the simultaneous occurrences of deuterons (particles consisting of one proton and one neutron) and protons traveling in opposite directions, they have been able to show the dominance of particular nuclear structures. Their findings were published in Physical Review Letters. Figure 2: The top figure shows how the nature of the electromagnetic force acting between two bar magnets changes depending on their orientations, which is an exact analogy for the case of tensor force acting between a proton and a neutron in an atomic nucleusshown in the bottom figure. Credit: Osaka University "The behavior we have detected can be likened to a pair of skaters executing a spinone of them represents a proton and the other represents a neutron," study author Hooi Jin Ong explains. "If a third skater (another proton) approaches at the correct velocity and picks up the neutron, they travel off together in one direction and the effect of them moving off causes the original proton to travel in the opposite direction. Detecting and analyzing such an event leads to information on the nuclear structure." "Our data, acquired on the GRAF beam line at the Osaka cyclotron facility, are the first to demonstrate this behavior at large momentum transfer," study first author Satoru Terashima says. "We hope that our findings will be useful not only to nuclear physicists, but also to researchers working in a variety of fields, particularly astrophysics." It is expected that improving our understanding of how the neutron and proton pairing affects nuclear structure, namely the energy levels and the magic number (the number of protons and neutrons that provides nuclei with considerably greater stability than other combinations) will lead to a better understanding of the internal structures of neutron stars and other celestial bodies. Explore further Scientists studying nuclear spin make a surprising discovery More information: S. Terashima et al. Dominance of Tensor Correlations in High-Momentum Nucleon Pairs Studied by (p,pd) Reaction, Physical Review Letters (2018). Journal information: Physical Review Letters S. Terashima et al. Dominance of Tensor Correlations in High-Momentum Nucleon Pairs Studied by (p,pd) Reaction,(2018). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.242501 A nanoscale rotor (black rod) is levitated by two counter-propagating laser beams. When the beams are switched off, the quantum state of the rotor disperses into a superposition of all possible orientations, except at certain intervals of time at which quantum revivals occur and the rotor assumes its initial orientation. The rotor can then be recaptured by the lasers and the process repeated. Credit: Stickler et al. 2018 IOP Publishing Physicists have proposed an entirely new way to test the quantum superposition principlethe idea that a quantum object can exist in multiple states at the same time. The new test is based on examining the quantum rotation of a macroscopic objectspecifically, a nanoscale rotor, which is considered macroscopic despite its tiny size. Until now, most tests of quantum superposition have been based on linear, rather than rotational, motion. By examining rotational motion, the new test may lead to applications such as quantum-enhanced torque sensing, and could provide insight into a variety of open questions, such as what causes the quantum wave function to collapse. The physicists, led by Klaus Hornberger at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany, have published a paper on the proposed test in a recent issue of the New Journal of Physics. Quantum superposition arises because, at the quantum scale, particles behave like waves. Similar to the way in which multiple waves can overlap each other to form a single new wave, quantum particles can exist in multiple overlapping states at the same time. If quantum superposition occurred in everyday life, we might observe phenomena like Schrodinger's cat, which is dead and alive at the same time until it is measured, forcing it to assume a single state. In the new paper, the researchers propose levitating a nanoscale rotor using optical tweezers, which are formed by two counter-propagating polarized laser beams that cause the rotor to tightly align with the field polarization. When the beams are switched off, however, the tightly oriented rotor is predicted to quickly disperse into a superposition of all possible rotation states as it falls toward the ground due to gravity. Animation showing how a nanorotor can disperse into a quantum superposition of rotation states, and then, due to quantum interference, undergo a revival, proving that a quantum state has existed. Credit: James Millen, Kings College London Interestingly, the rotor is predicted to experience "quantum revivals" in which, at regular intervals in time, the collective interference of all of the rotation states leads to the re-emergence of the initial state that it occupied when it was aligned by the laser beams. The orientation can potentially be measured by illuminating the rotor with a weak probe laser, and the trapping laser could be switched back on to catch the rotor in this state before it reaches the ground. So far, orientational quantum revivals have been observed only in gases of diatomic molecules. As the nanorods consist of at least 10,000 atoms, they are much larger than the diatomic molecules, allowing for quantum mechanics to be tested in an uncharted regime. The physicists expect that it will be possible to observe quantum revivals of the nanorods using existing technology, such as by using a carbon nanotube as the rotor. If so, the observation would represent a new macroscopic test of quantum superposition. "By observing the quantum revivals, we hope to confirm quantum mechanics at an unprecedented mass and complexity scale, thereby exploring the quantum-to-classical borderline," Hornberger told Phys.org. In the future, coauthor James Millen, now at King's College London, plans to perform the proposed experiment to detect macroscopic quantum revivals. "Testing whether quantum physics breaks down at a high mass is an exciting, yet daunting, challenge," Millen said. "We may have to develop entirely new technologies to isolate nanoscale particles, or even perform experiments in space. However, this experiment which we propose opens up an entirely new route to probing enigmatic quantum effects, in a way which I firmly believe is feasible with today's technology. Furthermore, we will be able to harness this physics to develop useful devices of unprecedented sensitivity." Explore further How Einstein's equivalence principle extends to the quantum world More information: Benjamin A. Stickler et al. "Probing macroscopic quantum superpositions with nanorotors." New Journal of Physics. DOI: Journal information: New Journal of Physics Benjamin A. Stickler et al. "Probing macroscopic quantum superpositions with nanorotors.". DOI: 10.1088/1367-2630/aaece4 2018 Science X Network Guitarist Brian May of Queen also holds a doctorate in astrophysics, and is paying musical tribute to a NASA spacecraft that will conduct a far-flung flyby Jamming and astrophysics go hand-in-hand for Queen lead guitarist Brian May, who announced Wednesday he is releasing a musical tribute to a far-flung NASA spacecraft that is about to make history. The US space agency's New Horizon's spacecraft will soon make the most distant flyby of a cosmic object ever, zipping by an object called Ultima Thulea billion miles (1.6 billion kilometers) beyond Pluto, on January 1. A NASA scientist involved with the mission asked the legendary British guitarist behind "Bohemian Rhapsody"who also holds a doctorate in astrophysicsto contribute some music to play as the flyby occurs. And May, 71, agreed. The "New Horizons" track (Ultima Thule mix), which will be released New Year's Day, is his first solo single since 1998. "For me it's been an exciting challenge to bring two sides of my life togetherastronomy and music," said May in a statement. "I was inspired by the idea that this is the furthest that the Hand of Man has ever reached - it will be by far the most distant object we have ever seen at close quarters, through the images which the spacecraft will beam back to Earth," he added. "To me it epitomizes the human spirit's unceasing desire to understand the Universe we inhabit." Haze layers above Pluto's limb, taken by the Ralph/Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC) on NASA's New Horizons spacecraft during its mission three years ago Portions of the wailing guitar track, overlaid with the voice of the late legendary scientist Stephen Hawking, are already available on www.brianmay.com. A third installment in expected in the next few days. Scientists do not yet have a clear picture of exactly what Ultima Thule is, whether a single object or a cluster, spanning about 19 miles (30 kilometers) in diameter. But when New Horizons passes, it should capture images at a resolution of 98 to 230 feet (30 to 70 meters) per pixel. New Horizons completed a successful flyby of Pluto three years ago, and returned stunning images of the dwarf planet. Explore further New Horizons spacecraft takes the inside course to Ultima Thule 2018 AFP A swan is searching for food in the water plants, while the people in the boat are avoiding the plants. Credit: Therese Fosholt Moe, NIVA Mass development of water plants in river and lakes causes headache for researchers and water managers all over the world. New research aims to reveal the causes of the explosive development and identify ecosystem effects of removing the water plants. The Norwegian Institute for Water Research (NIVA) and the Norwegian University for Life Sciences (NMBU) are now coordinating an international project aiming to solve the water plant mystery. "Mass development of water plants in rivers and lakes is a worldwide problem, and considerable amounts of money are spent every year trying to remove the plants. However, removal is no permanent solution, as the plants always come back," says researcher Susanne Schneider at the Norwegian Institute for Water Research (NIVA). Collaborating with NMBU and researchers from Brazil, South Africa, France and Germany, the NIVA researcher aims to reveal the causes of the explosive mass development and identify the ecosystem effects of removing the water plants. Unbalanced perception of water plants The river Otra, which runs from the Setesdal valley to Kristiansand in Southern Norway, has during the last decades faced great problems concerning mass development of the water plant bulbous rush (Juncus bulbosus). Some places the dense reeds have made boating and fishing impossible and bathing is not particularly tempting when the plant masses lie like a carpet on the river surface. Furthermore, bulbous rush might clog water intakes to hydropower plants, and it has been claimed that the reeds displace native species and destroy salmon spawning ground. Therefore, considerable resources have been spent attempting to remove the reeds by disking and milling. Despite all the negative effects caused by bulbous rush, Schneider argues that water managers and the public should obtain a more balanced view on water plants: The presence of such plants also has several positive effects on the river ecosystem, and the price for removal could be higher than a harrow rental. "The water plants provide clean water through nutrient removal and -retention. Furthermore, they provide habitats for a diverse flora and fauna, and are food and habitat for waterfowl and fish. Not to mention their prevention of toxic cyanobacteria blooms," Schneider says. By the end of a three-year period with coordinated research, the international project called MadMacs ("Mass development of aquatic macrophytes") will provide science based and balanced knowledge on the function of water plants in river and lakes all over the world. "We will compare the direct and indirect costs and benefits of water plant removal. The results will potentially save the society considerable amounts of money, by preventing actions that cost more than they achieve," says the NIVA researcher. Want to reveal causes, not cure symptoms Previously, it was assumed that high nutrient concentration in rivers and lakes caused the mass development of water plants, however, the picture is probably a lot more complex. MadMacs will be the first project to large scale investigate which combinations of natural conditions and pressures are likely to lead to the mass development of water plants. "This will enable handling the underlying causes of macrophyte mass development, instead of unsustainably trying to "cure the symptoms", which generally is current practice," Schneider says. A "cookbook" for managers The Norwegian part of the field work will be conducted in Otra river through investigations and removal experiments. The researchers will make use of identical methods for the planned water plant experiments across five countries (Norway, France, Germany, South-Africa and Brazil), enabling comparison between the results. This will facilitate differentiation between site-specific and general consequences of water plant removal. Thereafter, they will develop a risk assessment model to assess and balance benefits and costs of water plant removal. Lastly, a cookbook for the water management will be developed to assist decision making. "Revealing the general consequences of water plant removal is only possible by comparing several cases in which the same methods have been applied. We hope that other researchers will follow up on our initiative and use our methods, so that their work will be a contribution to increase the knowledge on dense vegetation in rivers and lakes," Schneider concludes. The project officially starts with a kick-off meeting in Paris in February 2019 and is planned to be finished in 2022. Provided by Norwegian Institute for Water Research (NIVA) From boat enthusiasts to anglers, researchers at the University of New Hampshire have found surprisingly widespread support for offshore wind energy development (OWD) among outdoor recreationists. Also unanticipated was the strong support across the entire political spectrum, from liberals to moderates and conservatives, with respondents seeing OWD as a positive impact upon their recreation experience. "These findings are unique because most previous studies show that recreationists tend to oppose energy development on or near public lands and protected areas," said Michael Ferguson, assistant professor of recreation management and policy. "But most of the respondents in our research embraced the idea of offshore wind development. Besides the benefits of renewable energy, they saw it as a benefit to the entire community and region, creating tourism opportunities, and enhancing their own recreation experiences." In the study, recently published in the Journal of Great Lakes Research, the researchers from UNH and Pennsylvania State University examined more closely factors influencing water-based recreationists' perceptions towards OWD in general on Lake Erie. As part of the study, respondents were asked questions about recreation frequency, OWD support and opposition, political orientation, and perceptions towards climate change. Of the 242 respondents, nearly one-half identified as boaters, with the remaining evenly split between beach users and anglers and all were largely repeat day trip visitors. The results of this study suggested significantly high levels of support for OWD among the water-based outdoor recreationists at Lake Erie across the political spectrum. "Offshore wind energy development has been slow to develop in the United States for various social, ecological, and political reasons," said Ferguson. "But our findings suggest that recreationists may be open to it and supportive of it." Some examples cited for support include unique recreation and tourism attractions like boat tours to OWD sites, better fishing opportunities especially in areas that lack natural structures that would attract more fish (like rocks and reefs), and more job opportunities for everything from construction to tourism related businesses like rentals and restaurants. Explore further Research shows climate change affects recreational behavior More information: Michael D. Ferguson et al, Winds of change Predicting water-based recreationists' support and opposition for offshore wind energy development in the Great Lakes, Journal of Great Lakes Research (2018). Michael D. Ferguson et al, Winds of change Predicting water-based recreationists' support and opposition for offshore wind energy development in the Great Lakes,(2018). DOI: 10.1016/j.jglr.2018.10.006 Credit: CC0 Public Domain Food banks have become the subject of heated debate in the UK. For some they are an indictment of 'austerity Britain' and reflect an increase in the numbers living in extreme poverty, while others see them as little more than a 'free lunch for scroungers', but findings from a new study suggest that the reasons for people's use of them is often more nuanced than is presented by politicians and commentators. The study, published in the journal Voluntary Sector Review, which involved in-depth interviews with 25 food bank users in Bristol found that benefit penalties and precarious employment were both important factors in food bank uptake, but that use was very often more complicated than being an 'unmediated response to hunger'. All interviewees for the study reported significant financial hardship. Some were in low-paid employment but were facing short-term financial difficulties due to changing jobs, moving home, servicing debt or other unusual costs. More frequently, participants were benefit claimants whose income had been reduced by delays in processing new or revised claims. Sudden loss of income The researchers heard many reports of benefit penalties causing financial hardship, such as the under-occupancy penalty or 'bedroom tax', or cuts in Jobseeker's Allowance. Typically, a sudden loss of income, caused by benefit penalties or delays, job losses, or equally sudden unanticipated costs, often relating to housing or heating, created a short-term budgetary crisis, which had caused hardship. Although, all of the people interviewed faced financial hardship, their use of the food bank was not always caused by hunger or lack of food. Some people used the food bank to free up income that they would otherwise have needed to spend on food. Extracts from interviews on why some of the people interviewed used the food bank in Bristol suggested: I missed an interview by five minutes with the Jobseeker's Allowance people and they sanctioned me so I lost two weeks' money. This is why I'm here today. I was just five minutes late, and I phoned them up beforehand and told them as well, but they still didn't accept it. I wouldn't have any, [food] yeah. No, because I haven't got the money, you see. I've only just claimed it. It's not just filling up the holes in the cupboard. I really haven't got the food there. I know I couldn't really afford to get a car, but it's a catch-22 thing really. I need a car to get a job, because I can't really do a lot of work without a car, but then I can't really afford the car. ... Basically if I didn't have to do the car then I would have been all right. The head gasket. I would have been all right. Supportive volunteers Another reason for using the food banks was the supportive and non judgemental approach adopted by the volunteers who staff them. This contrasted with the way that many of the users said they had been treated by staff in the state benefits system. Welfare professionals must follow strict rules about who is entitled to receive what, and they also have to impose penalties on people. The research suggests the food banks have a more flexible set of rules, which means they can respond to people's needs promptly, with less bureaucracy or conditions: I was slightly nervous and a little bit embarrassed, but once I came down it disappeared. It was so nice when you walked in and wasn't what I was expecting. People didn't judge me. I felt like I was begging, and I shouldn't be begging, but when you come down here they're so friendly and they put you at ease. You understand that there are a lot more people out there, like myself, who struggle as well.' You get treated like a human being here. At the benefit place, they just look at you as though you're a name and number, and they look at you and think: "Well, you should work. You shouldn't be on benefits." This is better, voluntary style. It's a lot better, a lot more human, where before it's like more pen and paper, everything's got to be done by the book. You don't get nothing for nothing from them, but these places are a lot better. Lead author, Dr. David Wainwright from the University of Bath's Department for Health explained: "The public debate about food banks has become highly polarised and politicised. For some commentators, food banks serve no other purpose than an alarm signalling the hardship caused by austerity measures and benefit penaltiesan emblem of 'Broken Britain' - for others, they signify the Big Society in action. Our findings suggest a more nuanced reality. "Certainly, participants involved in our study faced genuine hardship that was often exacerbated by an inflexible and unresponsive benefits regime. They benefited from and appreciated the greater flexibility and deprofessionalised support that food banks can offer. "Many of these benefits are only possible because food banks sit outside formal welfare structures. A key implication of our study is that food banks should maintain their independence from the state, in order to preserve the benefits of flexibility and informal relationships with users. Food banks can never replace statutory welfare benefits and services, but they provide a way of responding to the tension and their expansion perhaps should not be entirely viewed in negative terms." Having documented the experiences of food bank users, the researchers plan to return to the food banks to interview the volunteers who work at them. The aim is to explore why people volunteer, what they gain from their involvement and how they relate to the people who use the food banks. Explore further Rise of UK food banks linked to local spending and central welfare cuts More information: David Wainwright et al. Why do people use food banks? A qualitative study of food bank users in an English city, Voluntary Sector Review (2018). David Wainwright et al. Why do people use food banks? A qualitative study of food bank users in an English city,(2018). DOI: 10.1332/204080518X15428930047072 Cozmo robots and their corresponding tablets are being distributed to participants to take home so that they can interact with them for a week for an experiment being carried out by social robotics professor Emily Cross. Credit: Ruud Hortensius and Emily Cross People's interactions with machines, from robots that throw tantrums when they lose a colour-matching game against a human opponent to the bionic limbs that could give us extra abilities, are not just revealing more about how our brains are wired they are also altering them. Emily Cross is a professor of social robotics at the University of Glasgow in Scotland who is examining the nature of human-robot relationships and what they can tell us about human cognition. She defines social robots as machines designed to engage with humans on a social level from online chatbots to machines with a physical presence, for example, those that check people into hotel rooms. According to Prof. Cross, as robots can be programmed to perform and replicate specific behaviours, they make excellent tools for shedding light on how our brains work, unlike humans, whose behaviour varies. "The central tenets to my questions are, can we use human-robot interaction to better understand the flexibility and fundamental mechanisms of social cognition and the human brain," she said. Brain imaging shows that a sad, happy or neutral robotic expression will engage the same parts of the brain as a human face with similar expressions. Through their project called Social Robots, Prof. Cross and her team are using neural decoding techniques to probe the extent to which human feelings towards a robot change depending on how it behaves. Tantrums When the robots used in the project lose a game, they alternate between throwing tantrums or appearing dejected. "So far, people actually find it really funny when the robot gets angry," she said. "But people do respond to them quite strongly and that's really interesting to see." Having robots as colleagues has been shown to affect humans in complex ways. Researchers at the University of Washington found that when soldiers used robots in bomb disposal, they developed emotional attachments towards them and felt frustration, anger or sadness if their robot was destroyed. Prof. Cross says that from an evolutionary perspective, this doesn't make sense. "We care about people and perhaps animals that might help us or hurt us," she said. "But with machines it's a bit more of a mystery and understanding how far we can push that (to develop social relationships with machines) is a really, really fascinating question." It's important to understand these dynamics since, as she points out, robots are already working as companions in nursing homes or even as tutors in early childhood education. Home care and education are prime areas of social robotics research, with R&D efforts focusing on adults suffering from dementia and young children. Ten-hour rule Typically, studies on such groups observe interactions over a relatively short time-span. They rarely exceed what Prof. Cross describes as a ten-hour rule, beyond which study participants tend to get bored of their robotic toys. But her team is looking at how feelings towards robots evolve over time. As part of the project, the researchers send a palm-sized Cozmo robot home with study participants and instruct them to interact with it every day for a week by playing games or introducing it to their friends and pets. The participants' brains are imaged at the start and end of that period to track changes. "If we're going to have robots in our home environment, if they're going to be in our schools teaching our kids across weeks, if not years, if they're going to be peoples' social companions, we want to know a lot more than just what happens after ten hours' (of exposure)," she said. "We want to know how people's social bonds and relationships to robots change across many, many more hours." With such technologies set to become a bigger part of our future, other studies are investigating how the brain reacts to a different kind of robot wearable robotic limbs that augment the body, providing extra abilities. Wearables could have social and healthcare benefits. For instance, a third arm could assist surgeons to carry out procedures more safely rather than relying on human assistants, enable people to complete their household chores much faster or help construction workers. But even as the technology capabilities develop apace, Dr. Tamar Makin, a neuroscientist at University College London, UK, is exploring what it would take for the brain to accept and operate a robotic appendage as part of the body, through a five-year project called Embodied Tech. Additional thumb In order to understand how the brain deals with an extra body part, Dr. Makin's team asks participants to wear an additional opposable thumb for a week. Created by a designer named Dani Clode, the thumb is controlled by pressure sensors worn on the big toes. With the additional thumb, the augmented hand almost has the capabilities of two hands, giving people extra capacity to carry out actions. The question is what effect that has on the brain. The study is still underway but preliminary results indicate that the presence of an extra thumb alters the brain's internal map of what the biological hand looks like. Scans show that the brain represents the fingers as collapsing onto each other, away from the thumb and index finger. This mirrors what happens in diseases like dystonia, when the representation of fingers begins to mergefor instance, when musicians use their fingers excessivelyand causes cramp-like pain. The same effect could theoretically cause pain in the wearer of an extra thumb. "One important interim message we have is that there are potential costs, not just benefits, to using augmentation technology," said Dr. Makin. She believes that the newness of human augmentation means there are lots of unanswered questions but it's vital to explore the challenges of wearable robotics in order to fully realise the promises, such as multitasking or safer working conditions. "I feel like we have a responsibility to gain a much better understanding of how having good control of an additional body part is going to change the representation of the body parts you already have." Explore further Robot carers could help lonely seniorsthey're cheering humans up already West Antarcticas Thwaites Glacier. Scientists can now measure ice flow in Antarctica in far more detail, thanks to the help of a new satellite technology. Credit: NASA/James Yungel Scientists can now measure ice flow in Antarctica in far more detail, thanks to the help of a new satellite technology. Using a novel satellite technique called interferometric synthetic aperture radar, or InSAR, scientists can measure the direction of slow ice movement with extreme levels of precision. Slow ice movement is defined as a shift of 1 to 30 meters (3 to 98 feet) per year. InSAR also allows scientists to map Antarctica far deeper inland, providing them with a better understanding of the continent's topography, according to researchers. Glaciologists want to use this new tool to track changes in ice as often as weekly or monthly. This could help them better understand how the glaciers are responding to climate change, according to Bernd Scheuchl, an associate project scientist at University of California, Irvine who presented new maps of Antarctica made with InSAR at the 2018 American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting last week in Washington, D.C. "We want to better represent the evolution of Antarctica in a rapidly warming world," said Eric Rignot, a professor of Earth system science at UC Irvine and co-author of a new study of the new images. "Accurate [ice] velocity is at the cornerstone of these predictions because it is the dominant way by which Antarctica contributes to sea level rise." The lowest segments of glaciers that are exposed to warming sea water are slowly melting away, causing shifts across the ice and a rise in sea levels. By tracking the velocity of these ice movements at a more frequent rate, scientists may be able to anticipate when and where sea levels will change. The new maps are a big improvement from previous maps made in 2011 by scientists from the University of California, Irvine, who used billions of data points captured by European, Japanese and Canadian satellites and meticulously pieced together a map of Antarctica's glacial shapes and movements. This included a bulk of previously uncharted East Antarctica that makes up 77 percent of the continent. By tracking the velocity of ice movements in Antarctica at a more frequent rate, scientists may be able to anticipate when and where sea levels will change. Credit: NASA "Our first goal was achieved in 2011," Scheuchl said. "But in areas of slow movement, this was not really good enough for creating accurate models. We didn't have a good sense of the direction of where the ice was moving." By using multiple radar images, InSAR can measure the difference between the satellite and its target on a glacier. The goal is to generate detailed maps that measure small-scale changes in glacial structure and ice flow over time. Better yet, this technique can help uncover which direction the ice is moving. The new maps have colors that represent different ice velocities in meters per year, with brown being the slowest (less than 10 meters or 33 feet per year) and red being the fastest (more than 3,000 meters or 10,000 feet per year). Antarctic glacial mapping will even get better in 2021, when NASA and the Indian Space Research Organization will be launching a new InSAR mission called NISAR. Satellites normally leave gaps in their mapping, but with NISAR, scientists will now be able to map almost all of Antarctica every 12 days, Scheuchl said. With more extensive data, scientists' models of Antarctica could become far more accurate a true replica of the natural world. "For modeling and understanding, it is important to characterize the whole system," Rignot said. Explore further More glaciers in East Antarctica are waking up This story is republished courtesy of AGU Blogs (http://blogs.agu.org), a community of Earth and space science blogs, hosted by the American Geophysical Union. Read the original story here. Sea level rise above the city's existing sea walls regularly floods the City Dock in Annapolis, Maryland. Credit: Amy McGovern Sea levels are rising globally from ocean warming and melting of land ice, but the seas aren't rising at the same rate everywhere. Sea levels have risen significantly faster in some U.S. East Coast regions compared to others. A new study led by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) reveals why. Over the 20th century, sea level has risen about a foot and a half in coastal communities near Cape Hatteras in North Carolina and along the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia. In contrast, New York City and Miami have experienced about a 1-foot rise over the same period, while sea levels farther north in Portland, Maine, rose only about half a foot. The reason is a phenomenon called "post-glacial rebound," explains Chris Piecuch, lead author of a study published on Dec. 20, 2018, in the journal Nature. Essentially, land areas in the Northern Hemisphere that once were covered by mammoth ice sheets during the last Ice Agesuch as Canada and parts of the Northeast U.S.were weighed down like a trampoline with a boulder on it. At the same time, land around the periphery of the ice sheetsalong the U.S. mid-Atlantic coast, for examplerose up. As the ice sheets melted from their peak at the Last Glacial Maximum 26,500 years ago, the weighed-down areas gradually rebounded, while the peripheral lands started sinking, creating sort of a see-saw effect. Even though the ice sheets had disappeared by 7,000 years ago, the see-sawing of post-glacial rebound continues to this day. To explore why sea levels rose faster during the last century in areas such as Norfolk Naval Station in Virginia and the Outer Banks in North Carolina, Piecuch and colleagues gathered tidal gauge measurements of sea levels, GPS satellite data that show how much the land has moved up and down over time, and fossils in sediment from salt marshes, which record past coastal sea levels. They combined all of this observational data with complex geophysical modelssomething that has not been done beforeto give a more complete view of sea level changes since 1900. The research team found that post-glacial rebound accounted for most of the variation in sea level rise along the East Coast. But, importantly, when that factor was stripped away, the researchers found that "sea level trends increased steadily from Maine all the way down to Florida," Piecuch said. "The cause for that could involve more recent melting of glaciers and ice sheets, groundwater extraction and damming over the last century", Piecuch says. "Those effects move ice and water mass around at Earth's surface, and can impact the planet's crust, gravity field and sea level." "Post-glacial rebound is definitely the most important process causing spatial differences in sea level rise on the U.S. East Coast over the last century. And since that process plays out over millennia, we're confident projecting its influence centuries into the future," Piecuch explains. "But regarding the mass redistribution piece of the puzzle, we're less certain how that's going to evolve into the future, which makes it much more difficult to predict sea level rise and its impact on coastal communities." Explore further Study finds link between river outflow and coastal sea level More information: Christopher G. Piecuch et al. Origin of spatial variation in US East Coast sea-level trends during 19002017, Nature (2018). Journal information: Nature Christopher G. Piecuch et al. Origin of spatial variation in US East Coast sea-level trends during 19002017,(2018). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-018-0787-6 Dr Michael Jack of Otagos Department of Physics. Credit: University of Otago A University of Otago study has examined the potential for New Zealand residential electricity consumption to be shifted to reduce costs for consumers, demand on infrastructure and avoid future carbon emissions. The study focused on shifting demand for three home appliances; heat pumps, electric hot-water cylinders, and refrigeration, because they are high use appliances and their energy demand can in principle be shifted out of peak demand periods (6-10am and 5-9pm). At these times generation, transmission and distribution infrastructures run close to or even at full capacity, especially in winter. Co-author, Dr Michael Jack of Otago's Department of Physics, says the challenge of implementing a 100 percent renewable electricity system in the face of a projected 150-200 percent increase in demand is a significant one for New Zealand, and needs innovative approaches. This is especially true for dry years when hydro power will not be sufficient to meet demand creating a risk that New Zealand would have to invest in new fossil fuel-based generation. "Power generators, Transpower and electricity network companies build infrastructure to cope with peak demand. If we can reduce peak consumption by shifting use out of peaks we will be taking a big step towards achieving our future targets without burdening households and the country with extra costs, and without increasing carbon emissions," Dr Jack says. Hot-water cylinders, heat pumps, and refrigerators constitute 50 percent of the total residential electricity consumption in New Zealand. Co-author of the study, Dr Ben Anderson, a visiting Marie-Curie Research Fellow from the University of Southampton, says there are strong potential gains if the operating times of these appliances could be shifted. "If well managed, the energy services these appliances provide would remain the same; water will stay hot in the cylinder for people's morning showers, living spaces could be pre-warmed before 6am via smart thermostats, and fridges could remain cold despite being switched off for a short time during peak. The combined result of these interventions across millions of New Zealand households could be substantial," Dr Anderson suggests. The results of analysis of peak-load shifting suggest that New Zealand's total electricity demand could be reduced by up to 20 percent during winter. This could equate to a reduction of national power demand during peak periods of up to 700 megawatts (MW) for hot-water cylinders, 400MW for heat pumps, and 200 MW for refrigerators, providing a total of 1.3 gigawatts(GW), or 0.9 kilowatts(KW) per household. Report co-author, Associate Professor Janet Stephenson, Director of Otago's Centre for Sustainability, says these projections are the first stage in determining what would be achievable in reality. "Future work will need to consider the market systems, technologies and consumer behavioural change necessary to achieve residential demand response in practice, and how consumers would respond to the opportunity to shift their demand," says Associate Professor Stephenson. The report, Estimating the Technical Potential of Residential Demand Response in New Zealand: A Summary of Results, has been prepared by researchers at the University of Otago as part of the GREEN Grid Project funded by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment. Explore further Taking charge in electricity research More information: Estimating the Technical Potential of Residential Demand Response in New Zealand: A Summary of Results. Estimating the Technical Potential of Residential Demand Response in New Zealand: A Summary of Results. hdl.handle.net/10523/8616 Osteoporosis, a bone disease that can result in painful fracturestypically in the back, hip or wristis often thought of as a woman's disease. But men get it too, just usually later in life than women. Segment the population even more and researchers find that Puerto Rican men who live on the U.S. mainland are at much greater risk of thinning bones than previously thought. Researchers at UMass Lowell will assess bone strength and nutrition among men and women in this population in a study that could lead to improvements in treatments for all people who suffer from osteoporosis. The National Institutes of Health has awarded $2.6 million to UMass Lowell researchers to evaluate bone health risks among this population. The research team is led by UMass Lowell Prof. Katherine Tucker and includes assistant professors Kelsey Mangano and Sabrina Noel of the Biomedical and Nutritional Sciences Department. This study is among the first of its kind to examine whether differences in bone strength between adults with and without Type 2 diabetes are due in part to compounds called advanced glycation end products (AGEs). Found in many foods and formed when meats are grilled, roasted, seared, fried or baked, AGEs contribute to increased oxidant stress and inflammation, which are linked to the recent epidemics of diabetes and cardiovascular disease. "Studying the relation of AGEs to bone health is novel among humans," said Tucker, who also leads UMass Lowell's Center for Population Health. "We expect that the research results will provide insight for developing interventions to prevent bone loss and fracture risk in adults." The UMass Lowell team will study about 800 people living in the Boston area who are also participants in the Boston Puerto Rican Health Study Projects, which is a series of in-depth studies conducted over the past 12 years that has allowed researchers to follow the nutrition and health risk factors of 1,500 members of this population. Participants in the UMass Lowell study will complete a questionnaire, provide blood samples and get bone scans. In addition to the bone mineral density test that measures bone loss, the research team will use a new approach that assesses bone strength. "We know now that the bone density scans that we use today do not capture the full extent of fracture risk," said Tucker. "In our study, we'll be using microindentation, a new test that measures bone material strength. Using this new method in combination with the bone mineral density test will give us a better picture of bone health as it relates to nutrition and other health factors." Early this year, Tucker received a $3.9 million grant from the NIH to study the effect of highly processed foods on dementia in this same population. Provided by University of Massachusetts Lowell Sign up for MarketBeat All Access to gain access to MarketBeat's full suite of research tools: Best-in-Class Portfolio Monitoring View the latest news, buy/sell ratings, SEC filings and insider transactions for your stocks. Compare your portfolio performance to leading indices and get personalized stock ideas based on your portfolio. Stock Ideas and Recommendations Get daily stock ideas top-performing Wall Street analysts. Get short term trading ideas from the MarketBeat Idea Engine. View which stocks are hot on social media with MarketBeat's trending stocks report. Particularly during my sojourns in South Africa, it may not be possible for me to perform the moderation function speedily. I regret the necessity of moderation but it has been rendered inevitable by the behaviour of a particular commentator whose contributions will always and without exception be rejected. No correspondence will be entered into regarding moderation decisions. Readers are invited to comment on blog posts. All comments require to be pre-moderated by me, and I shall reject all (a) that are not related to the Lockerbie disaster or (b) that fail to meet my -- perhaps idiosyncratic -- standards of courtesy towards other contributors. Comments will not be rejected simply because I disagree with them or because I, or other contributors, find them irritating. But comments will be rejected if they distort or misrepresent the evidence; are defamatory; or if they risk embroiling me, as publisher, in defamation proceedings. I am perfectly relaxed about being sued in respect of material which I personally have posted -- but not in respect of material that others wish to post as comments and which, in any case, I often strongly disagree with. Thank you for reading! Please log in, or sign up for a new account and purchase a subscription to continue reading. Many SCOTUS Justices seems disinclined to find vagueness problems with sentencing guidelines given backdrop of unguided sentencing discretion | Main | Guest posting from Prof Carissa Hessick on SCOTUS argument: "Beckles and the Continued Complexity of Post-Booker Federal Sentencing" This article from The Hill, headlined "Trump marks change for criminal justice reform," effectively details the uncertain terrain for federal sentencing reform in the wake of this month's historic election. Here are excerpts: President-elect Donald Trump wont close the door on criminal justice reform, but the path forward may be complicated by his campaign rhetoric and pick to lead the Department of Justice, advocates say.... Trumps calls for law and order, his vow to jail immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally and his pick of Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) as attorney general have also left some criminal justice reform advocates concerned. Id be lying if I told you I wasnt concerned about Sessions as attorney general, said Danyelle Solomon, who serves as the director of Progress 2050, a Center for American Progress project focused on diversity. There are a lot of concerns ... that he will be a barrier to data-driven, policy-driven reforms in this space," she said. "I think he creates a challenge." Sessions voted against the Senate bill to reduce certain mandatory minimum prisons sentences when it came before the Senate Judiciary Committee over a year ago, leaving some worried that he'd be a barrier for reform moving forward. But conservative criminal justice reforms advocates remain optimistic about Sessions, noting he authored the Drug Sentencing Reform Act in 2001 to decrease the amount of powder cocaine and increase the amount of crack cocaine necessary to trigger mandatory minimum sentences. Sessions isnt monolithically opposed to reform, but he does demand a high standard for legislation thats put in front of him, said Derek Cohen, deputy director of Right on Crime. With Sessions as attorney general, Cohen said lawmakers might hammer out better legislation that may actually reduce costs and recidivism rates. Jessica Jackson Sloan, national director and co-founder of #Cut50, argued "there's a really strong conservative pull on this administration" to continue pushing for criminal justice reform. Sloan is expecting reforms to focus more on re-entry, over-criminalization and initiatives in the private sector to get formerly incarcerated people back into the workforce. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) said in a statement to The Hill that hes spoken to ranking member John Conyers (D-Mich.) about getting an early start on reform measures in the new Congress. I look forward to talking with President-elect Trump and his administration about the problems facing the criminal justice system and our ideas for reform, he said. "There is bipartisan agreement that many aspects of our criminal justice system need reform." Goodlatte pointed to successes GOP governors have had in making reforms at the state level. It is my hope that this will be an issue we can all work on together in 2017, he said.... Opponents of criminal justice reform, however, argue the door for criminal justice reform was never open to begin with. Bill Otis, an adjunct professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center, claims reform never really had a chance of passing Congress when President Obama was in office and has even less of a chance under Trump. The former federal prosecutor said advocates had a leg up with the support of the Obama administration and with that came a forum and resources. Now all that will disappear, he said. Trump ran explicitly as a law-and-order candidate. If he had a good word to say about reducing prison sentences, I didnt hear it. Advocates are refusing to throw in the towel. Last week, the partners of the U.S. Justice Action Network sent a letter to Trump encouraging him to make criminal justice reform a top priority in his first 100 days. We share your goal of enhancing public safety and encourage you to consider that, just as with energy policy, it requires an all-of-the-above strategy, they wrote. That is, just as we recognize those who pose a danger to society must be behind bars, for many others such as addicts and those with mental illness public safety can best be advanced through treatment-based approaches. "Facing the Firing Squad" | Main | Seventh Circuit panel affirms above-guideline drug sentence ... with Judge Posner suggesting USSC involvement would be better than a sentencing "hunch" January 6, 2017 An optimistic accounting of many areas for bipartisan federal criminal justice reform ... and good lines of inquiry for AG nominee Jeff Sessions The week brought this extended commentary by Mark Holden at The Hill under the headline "Criminal justice reform is ripe for bipartisan achievement." I recommend the piece in full, and here are highlights of the reforms urged (with Holden's accounting of "reason it could pass" left out so readers will be encouraged to click through): Criminal justice reform has been one of the few policy areas where Republicans and Democrats have forged bipartisan consensus. They have come close to passing reform the past two years, and now its up to GOP lawmakers to pick up where they left off. Leaders as diverse as Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) agree that the current system is broken.... Thats why its critical that leaders in Congress take up criminal justice reform. If they focus on six key areas of reform, theres a real possibility that legislation could pass in both the House and Senate, even with the Senates 60-vote threshold, a bar not easily achieved on other issues. Here are the six areas of reform and the reasons they have a viable path to becoming law. First, we need to reform the grand jury process and rein in prosecutorial overreach. As Judge Kozinski has advocated, lawmakers should require open file discovery, so prosecutors hand over all evidence favorable to an accused person, and also establish truly independent prosecutorial review units to investigate abuses.... Second, we must protect every citizens Sixth Amendment rights. When it comes to federal cases, Congress should ensure that all individuals regardless of income level have an adequate chance to retain counsel before they appear in court. It should also explore the model that some states have moved to, which allows defendants to choose a private lawyer from a list of options, rather than being appointed a lawyer who may not offer a competent defense.... Third, the punishment must fit the crime. Congress should reform mandatory minimums that dont make sense and increase the use of safety valves, which allow judges to use their discretion for non-violent offenses if the offender meets certain requirements. These reforms are particularly important for low-level and non-violent offenders (mostly involving drug crimes), who too often languish in prison for years or even decades at a time at great cost to their families and our society at large..... Fourth, prisons should leave individuals better off than when they came in. Prison rehabilitation programs have proven to reduce the chance of re-offense and save taxpayer dollars.... Fifth, Congress should give worthy individuals a chance to rejoin society and find fulfillment in their lives. Lawmakers could start by banning the box from federal employment applications so that individuals with a record can be considered for government jobs. Congress, however, should not mandate that companies ban the box, but should allow them to voluntarily do so. Congress should also clear the record of qualifying youth and non-violent federal offenders; limit solitary confinement for juveniles; and establish effective rehab, educational, and vocational programs so that every individual leaves prison a better person than when they came.... Finally, Congress needs to dramatically scale back the federal criminal code and ensure that all criminal laws have adequate criminal intent, also known as mens rea. The criminal code is a stunning 27,000 pages and comprises an estimated 4,500-6,000 criminal laws and that doesnt even include the thousands of additional federal regulations that impose criminal punishments. Many penalize people who had no idea they were committing a crime missing a basic historical requirement that once existed in the criminal law to protect people from being unfairly prosecuted.... Any one of these reforms would improve our federal justice system and have a profound effect on our society. Taken together, they will make communities safer, support our brave law enforcement officers, save taxpayer dollars, and empower individuals in need of a second chance. Thats precisely why Republicans and Democrats alike will have a difficult time answering to their constituents if they resist such reforms. Doing so would be a clear political move that overlooks the millions of Americans who would be better off as a result of this bipartisan achievement. If President-elect Trump and the GOP Congress take up criminal justice reform, it will be a sure sign that they are willing to look beyond party lines in order to improve peoples lives. That would be good start to putting individuals safety and wellbeing ahead of partisan politics. As the title of this post suggests, I think this piece's accounting of six areas in need of reform would provide a fantastic guide for questions for Senator Jeff Sessions during his hearings to serve as Attorney General. These questions can be softball (e.g., do you believe prison rehabilitation programs can be valuable?) or tough (e.g., do you think there should be more means for federal inmates to earn sentence reduction for participating in prison rehabilitation programs). And I welcome readers to use the comment to make more suggestions for additional soft or tough questions on these or other fronts. Critically, and as I hope to outline more fully in a post over the weekend, I feel very strongly that those Senators who support federal criminal justice reforms ought to use the Sessions' confirmation hearing to do much more that just simply attack the Senator for long-ago acts or statements claimed to be evidence of racism or insensitivity. Instead, by crafting astute questions concerning specific area of the federal criminal justice system in need of reform, members of the Judiciary Committee could and should be able to get Sessions to express support for or at least a lack of opposition to many of the bipartisan reforms discussed above and widely embraced inside the Beltway in recent years. January 6, 2017 at 10:46 AM | Permalink Comments How is a system broken if it produces continual drops in crime rates? Reform of the criminal justice system is the same as stopping the insulin in a diabetic who has done well on it for two decades. Diabetes is chronic. Crime is chronic. Posted by: David Behar | Jan 6, 2017 2:35:12 PM I strongly question suggestion #2. Most everyone familiar with federal criminal practice will tell you that Federal Public Defender Organizations offer superior representation than appointed attorneys. Posted by: Anon | Jan 7, 2017 7:46:58 AM Post a comment "Texas sues feds over confiscated execution drugs" | Main | "Why Dylann Roof Has a Right to the Death Penalty" ... OR "Why Dylann Roof Representing Himself Is A Constitutional Tragedy" This lengthy new Politico article, headlined in full "Senators plan to revive sentencing reform push: Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley says he's not done yet pressing a cause with broad bipartisan support," brings some welcome new year good news for advocates of federal sentencing reform. Here are the details, with a couple of lines emphasized for subsequent commentary: Criminal justice reform the great bipartisan hope of 2016 that ended in disappointment may not be dead just yet. Senate Judiciary Committee Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) plans to take up a bill to revamp U.S. sentencing laws and reform prisons soon after his panel clears the high-profile nominations from Donald Trump. A similar measure passed his committee overwhelmingly last year before stalling out in the face of opposition from law-and-order conservatives. But Grassley told POLITICO he will soon try again. "The committee will begin the year working through the attorney general and Supreme Court nominees, but criminal justice reform will be one of the legislative bills I plan to bring up early on, he said in a statement. It cleared the committee with a broad bipartisan majority in the last Congress, and I don't expect that to change. The chief authors of the criminal justice overhaul, led by Grassley and Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), will continue to try to drum up more support among senators, while educating the Trump administration about their bills merits, Grassley said. The legislation isnt expected to be substantially different than last years version. Criminal justice reform couldve been one of the bright, bipartisan spots in an otherwise contentious election year. But despite support from President Barack Obama, powerful congressional Republicans, and a sprawling network of groups from the left and right, the legislation never made it to the floor. That was partly due to the determined efforts of law-and-order conservatives to steamroll it and there's little to suggest that if the legislation heads to the Senate floor, that dynamic would change. Nevertheless, Durbin approached Grassley after the election and pressed the chairman about whether the duo should make another run at it this year, Durbin recalled in a recent phone interview. Grassley was in. And once the chairman tees up the bill this year in his committee, its supporters expect a bipartisan vote similar to the 15-5 tally it received in October 2015. Durbin and Grassleys aides have been discussing a strategy to advance the bill in 2017. Aiding their cause is the fact that three opponents GOP Sens. David Vitter of Louisiana, Jeff Sessions of Alabama and David Perdue of Georgia are leaving the committee this year, stirring hope that the vote count in favor of the measure could be higher. Vitter no longer serves in the Senate, Sessions is expected to be confirmed as attorney general and Perdue is shifting committees. Replacing them on the influential panel are Sens. Ben Sasse of Nebraska, Mike Crapo of Idaho and John Kennedy of Louisiana. I think the committee will be just as strong. It may be stronger, Durbin said. When you have people like Grassley and Durbin and [Senate Majority Whip John] Cornyn and [Sen. Patrick] Leahy for goodness sakes it ought to be enough for us.... Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is rarely eager to take up policy fights that divide his conference and Democrats point a finger at him as a prime reason why criminal justice reform stalled last year. The problem we ran into is Sen. McConnell, who didnt want to call the bill to the floor. He was concerned about the impact on the election and also that the House wasnt going to take it up, Durbin said. The question remains going forward, he added, "whether McConnell will give us a chance. McConnell aide Don Stewart responded that the majority leader spoke several times about the issue in 2016 and doesnt need Sen. Durbin to be his spokesman. The president-elect ran on a law-and-order platform, but Trump doesn't appear to have weighed in on the Senate measure during his campaign. Another wildcard factor is Sessions, Trumps pick to become the attorney general. As a senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he was a fervent opponent of the sentencing overhaul and one of the five votes against it. But Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), another supporter of the criminal justice reform effort, speculated that once Sessions becomes the attorney general, his chief objective will be on enforcing what Congress sends him even if he disagrees with it rather than slipping into the role of legislator and try to change the laws. Hes going to be focused on being the nations top law enforcement official, Tillis said. I dont necessarily see him weighing in heavily on public policy choices that President Trump makes. Durbin said he intends to press Sessions on his views of criminal justice reform and how hell handle the issue at the Justice Department when the two meet privately to discuss about his bid to become attorney general on Wednesday. Though Sessions had wanted to meet earlier, Durbin said Senate Democrats decided as a caucus to not meet with any Cabinet selections until the new year. I want to know after all of the speeches he gave on the floor against criminal justice reform, what we can expect of him as attorney general, Durbin said. I dont know what hell say. Still, others speculate that after Washington endures partisan wars over repealing Obamacare and confirming polarizing presidential nominees, Trump will be looking for a bipartisan win. Criminal justice reform could deliver one. I know we have enough votes to send this to the presidents desk, Tillis said. Stressing his desire to avoid legislative gridlock, Tillis added: The election was not a Republican mandate. The election was a results mandate. Louisiana public defenders lacking resources needed to adequately prepare for Miller resentencings in old juve LWOP cases | Main | Lamenting big criminal justice problems in the little state of Delaware January 5, 2017 Prez Obama produces lengthy Harvard Law Review article titled "The Presidents Role in Advancing Criminal Justice Reform" I am intrigued and surprised (and concerned that I will soon be very aggravated) by this lengthy new Harvard Law Review article authored by Barack Obama. In style (because the article runs 50+ pages with 300+ footnotes), the article hints that Prez Obama is interested in going back to being a law professor after he finishes his current gig. In substance, the article's introduction provides this overview: Part I details the current criminal justice landscape and emphasizes the urgent need for reform. It would be a tragic mistake to treat criminal justice reform as an agenda limited to certain communities. All Americans have an interest in living in safe and vibrant neighborhoods, in raising their children in a country of equal treatment and second chances, and in entrusting their liberty to a justice system that remains true to our highest ideals. We simply cannot afford to spend $80 billion annually on incarceration, to write off the seventy million Americans thats almost one in three adults with some form of criminal record, to release 600,000 inmates each year without a better program to reintegrate them into society, or to ignore the humanity of 2.2 million men and women currently in U.S. jails and prisons and over 11 million men and women moving in and out of U.S. jails every year. In addition, we cannot deny the legacy of racism that continues to drive inequality in how the justice system is experienced by so many Americans. Part II shows how the President can drive significant reform at the federal level. Working with Congress, my Administration helped secure bipartisan sentencing reform legislation reducing the crack-topowder-cocaine disparity. As an executive branch, weve been able to make important changes to federal charging policies and practices, the administration of federal prisons, and federal policies relating to reentry. And through the presidential pardon power, I have commuted the sentences of more than 1000 prisoners. Even though there are important structural and prudential constraints on how the President can directly influence criminal enforcement, these changes illustrate that presidential administrations can and do shape the direction of the federal criminal justice system in lasting and profound ways. Part III details the approaches that Presidents can take to promote change at the state and local level, recognizing that the state and local justice systems tend to have a far broader and more pervasive impact on the lives of most Americans than does the federal justice system. While the President and the executive branch play a less direct role in these systems, there are still opportunities as my Administrations work demonstrates to advance reform through a combination of federal-local partnerships, the promulgation of best practices, enforcement, federal grant programs, and assembling reform-minded jurisdictions struggling with similar challenges. Part IV highlights some of the work that remains, focusing on reforms that are supported by broad consensus and could be completed in the near term. These include passing bipartisan criminal justice reform legislation in Congress, adopting commonsense measures to keep firearms out of the hands of those who are a threat to others or themselves, finding better ways to address the tragic opioid epidemic in this country, implementing critical reforms to forensic science, improving criminal justice data, and using technology to enhance trust in and the effectiveness of law enforcement. I fear I will be aggravated by this article because it will confirm that Prez Obama (or his staff who helped author this article) truly understands the need to major criminal justice reforms and yet so relatively little got achieved on this front during Prez Obama's eight yesr in office. Also, I know I am already going to be troubled by what is not said in this article because a quick word search reveals that the word "marijuana" is not mentioned once even though state-level marijuana reform is by far the biggest criminal justice reform story of the Obama era (which, to the Obama Administration's credit, was in part fueled by his Justice Department's express hands off policy). January 5, 2017 at 10:07 AM | Permalink Comments "Prez Obama is interested in going back to being a law professor after he finishes his current gig." Oh have no fear of THAT. He intends to "raise the next generation of liberal leaders" as if he were a mother hen. I can't imagine why if one where a liberal interested in leadership one would pay any attention to what that man says given--as Doug correctly notes--how little leadership he demonstrated while in office. Posted by: Daniel | Jan 5, 2017 12:11:02 PM Yes, it didn't require "leadership" to for example advance the rights of gay people in various ways. Unlike some people here, Obama is very popular, besides you know being elected twice including by some of the people necessary to elect Trump. He would logically be an important voice in the Democratic Party. This is a sentencing blog, so it is far from surprising (if a tad myopic) if the person who runs it focuses on how Obama (who has so few things on his plate, so I realize it is shocking he did so little here, aside from what he did do including helping the health needs of the people in question) didn't do as much as desired on that subject. PRESIDENT Obama focused more on the various other things involved. It is a lot easier to write law review articles than actually carry out policy, especially when Republicans block even things they support because Obama supports it. Posted by: Joe | Jan 5, 2017 1:03:20 PM A glance at the article points out various things he did as well suggests the barriers (e.g., he did certain things involving guns while other efforts were blocked in Congress). Criticism is fine if done in a fair way. Plus, it is appreciated he and his administration took the time to write the document, only a portion of which covers his own actions. Posted by: Joe | Jan 5, 2017 1:11:44 PM was he a professor or a lecturer? Posted by: federalist | Jan 5, 2017 3:11:54 PM @Joe "Yes, it didn't require "leadership" to for example advance the rights of gay people in various ways." Obvious troll is obvious. But you do try, bless your little heart. Posted by: Daniel | Jan 5, 2017 3:30:13 PM Reform? Second chances? Reintegration? Fine words coming from the man who signed International Megan's Law. What a hypocrite. Posted by: Former Dem | Jan 5, 2017 3:51:17 PM "These include passing bipartisan criminal justice reform legislation in Congress, adopting commonsense measures to keep firearms out of the hands of those who are a threat to others or themselves, finding better ways to address the tragic opioid epidemic in this country, implementing critical reforms to forensic science, improving criminal justice data, and using technology to enhance trust in and the effectiveness of law enforcement." keeping firearms out of the hands of criminals? Hmmm, here's a thought, prosecute criminals who have guns--but he's dropped criminal prosecutions of felons with guns. And as for addressing opioid addiction--perhaps he could have, you know, done his job, and done more to secure the border. Obama is a bad joke and a rotten person. We are truly blessed to be rid of this pseudo-intellectual urbane effete twit. Posted by: federalist | Jan 5, 2017 5:14:07 PM From the U. Chicago website The Law School has received many media requests about Barack Obama, especially about his status as "Senior Lecturer." From 1992 until his election to the U.S. Senate in 2004, Barack Obama served as a professor in the Law School. He was a Lecturer from 1992 to 1996. He was a Senior Lecturer from 1996 to 2004, during which time he taught three courses per year. Senior Lecturers are considered to be members of the Law School faculty and are regarded as professors, although not full-time or tenure-track. The title of Senior Lecturer is distinct from the title of Lecturer, which signifies adjunct status. Like Obama, each of the Law School's Senior Lecturers has high-demand careers in politics or public service, which prevent full-time teaching. Several times during his 12 years as a professor in the Law School, Obama was invited to join the faculty in a full-time tenure-track position, but he declined. Posted by: Andrew | Jan 5, 2017 5:21:30 PM Joe, Do you not find it interesting (and telling) that Obama opted not to write a law review article about "advance[ing] the rights of gay people in various ways" or about health insurance reform or about so many other things he obviously had "on his plate" over eight years? I do not disagree that Obama properly can and likely will be remembered as a successful and popular president, but in the arena of criminal justice reform he was largely content mostly to "lurk" for his entire first term and thereafter he used precious little of his political capital or popularity to see to do anything truly ground-breaking or game-changing in this space. You can make a fine case that it was politically wise and practically effective for Obama to use his political capital and popularity to focus on other concerns. But this article reads a bit like a "victory lap" when the Obama era barely go out of the blocks when it came to significant sentencing/criminal justice reform. Posted by: Doug B. | Jan 5, 2017 5:44:08 PM A fellow member of the Harvard Law Review described President Obama as shiftless. He did no actual work himself as President of the Law Review. One has to wonder if he wrote this article. It looks like it took some real work to complete. And, it does not reflect his actions as President. One has to ask if he even read it before submission. His Presidency achieved some Draconian consent decrees with police departments. These have deterred, not just the signing departments, but all police departments across the country. These decrees, and the over-regulation of the police, have resulted in their leaning back, and relaxing more. Just answer the 911 calls. Wait for the retirement date. If you do any more than that, you get crushed by Obama's Department of Justice. This anti-police jihad by Obama is a major factor in the murders of an excess of hundreds of young black males over the expected number. So he achieved something significant. He killed hundreds of young black males by the policies not described in the article. Harvard Law Review articles are reviewed by law students. Imagine surgical journal articles reviewed by second year medical students. Imagine bridge engineering articles reviewed by second year civil engineering students. The law review students, Harvard's very best, were too stupid to demand a revision, to include real world consequences of the crime reform policies of this President. I do believe there are mitigating factors in the stupidity of the Harvard Law review editors. They underwent a course of Harvard Law 1L. Their culpability is mitigated by its mentally crippling effects. Posted by: David Behar | Jan 6, 2017 3:27:35 AM "Obvious troll is obvious. But you do try, bless your little heart." Sometimes, others set themselves up that it is a bit too easy to resist to "troll" in the fashion of making a sarcastic comment to underline the claim made is wrong. Bless your little heart. :) Obama as I recall did write an article on health issues. His specific training was in law and he was someone who executed the law so it is not surprising to me he wrote an article on legal matters specifically. The "victory lap" label is to me supposition. The article shows he did do things, even if an expert in sentencing law and policy doesn't think he did enough. When he ran for President, I don't recall this being a major focus (among many things) though clearly an expert in the field would particularly notice his remarks on this issue specifically. Posted by: Joe | Feb 24, 2018 1:27:43 PM Post a comment Brennan Center releases its latest (encouraging) accounting of crime in 2018 | Main | On cusp of enactment of FIRST STEP Act, a brief trip to the archives via the (not-so-)way back machine December 18, 2018 After rejection of contentious proposed amendments, FIRST STEP Act passed by Senate by vote of 87 to 12!!!! In this post back in August I wondered "Could enhanced FIRST STEP Act get more than 90 votes in the Senate if even brought up for a vote?". Well, it seems I was off by three votes, as tonight the the US Senate voted 87 to 12 to enact the FIRST STEP Act. With a vote in the House scheduled for later this week, this bill should be on Prez Trump's desk before the end of this week and law before Prez Trump heads down to Mar-a-Lago for the holidays. This USA Today article, headlined "Senate passes First Step Act with push from criminal justice groups; bill goes to House," provides this account of today's historic developments: Alex Gudich and the team from #cut50 werent taking any votes for granted. They spent Tuesday knocking on the doors of senators and urging them to support a criminal justice reform bill up for a vote, something they didn't know would happen that night. "We knew that it would be a tough vote for many members on both sides," said Gudich, deputy director for the national advocacy group pushing to overhaul the nations criminal justice system. "Were here at a very, very pivotal moment." In a major step in that effort, the Senate voted 87 to 12 late Tuesday to approve the bipartisan "First Step Act" pushed by Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, Dick Durbin, D-Ill., Mike Lee, R-Utah and Cory Booker, D-N.J. The bill must now go over to the House for a vote. President Donald Trump has supported the measure.... The Senate defeated amendments proposed by Republican Sens. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and John Kennedy of Louisiana that would have required the Bureau of Prisons to notify victims before a prisoner is released and tracked former offenders after they're released. Several advocacy groups, including #cut50, and national civil rights groups, including the National Urban League, have been a part of a massive push to get the legislation passed. Its been a long time in raising the awareness of how the system of mass incarceration is so destructive and needs to be fixed and reformed, said Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League. Theres been a lot of groundwork that has been laid over the years. The groups have been working on criminal justice reforms for years, including under then-President Barack Obama, but supporters said the effort got a boost earlier this year with the help of Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser. We were excited to see a breakthrough this year and a shift," Gudich said. Gudich called the First Step Act a compromise bill, but importantly it does not add any new mandatory minimum. There are no sentencing enhancements. Some advocates, however, have complained the measure doesnt go far enough. Morial said he would have wanted more provisions to deal with bail reforms and more support for reentry programs, but welcomes the effort. If we could get a perfect comprehensive bill, wed do it," he said. This bill is also the product of some difficult political trade-offs. But its better to move this bill with all the things it does than to sit back and wait. We could end waiting another three to four years." Lawmakers particularly praised the work and input of advocates and civil rights groups. Formerly incarcerated individuals were incredibly important voices in urging the House to get something done meaningful on prison reform, said New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, incoming House Democratic Caucus Chair, a key negotiator. Nobody is more authoritative on the issue of the victimization that has taken place as a result of over criminalization as a result of the mass incarceration epidemic then those Americans who were directly impacted. Indeed, formerly incarcerated people from a host of groups, including #cut50, Prison Fellowship, the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, have lobbied Congress to support reforms. Civil and voting rights groups, including the NAACP and the ACLU, have also been key players along with a host of conservative groups. We as conservatives share common goals, Kevin Roberts, executive director of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, said during a press conference last week. We want strong communities and institutions. We want those who have done wrong to be punished and then to seize their own redemption without state interference. Most of all we want safe neighborhoods. Morial applauded the passage of the First Step Act, but said more needs to be done. This is something that we have to work on over time. This bill is a good bill, but this not going to be the last effort at criminal justice reform, he said. Theres already a lot of movement at the state level This is a growing movement in America the idea that we have to fix the system of mass incarceration. Some of the most recent of many prior related posts: UPDATE : I just say that Prez Trump has already tweeted here about this significant legislative development, saying "This will keep our communities safer, and provide hope and a second chance, to those who earn it. In addition to everything else, billions of dollars will be saved. I look forward to signing this into law!" December 18, 2018 at 09:13 PM | Permalink Comments I hate this version of the bill so much but it just shows what a dufus McConnell is and how the GOP is held hostage by social conservatives. Posted by: Fat Bastard | Dec 18, 2018 9:33:38 PM "...We want those who have done wrong to be punished and then to seize their own redemption without state interference. Most of all we want safe neighborhoods. I love the idea that someone can "seize their own redemption without state interference"! Perhaps we can do without the court-ordered therapy so many must endure. As for the safe neighborhoods...yeah, safety is fine and dandy but it is far, FAR away from what we want "most of all." Liberty, most of all. Congrats to those who worked so hard to pass this bill. Now let's see how it all shakes out and who the winners and losers will be. That was a lot of carve-outs, after all. People incarcerated for crimes designated as "violent" (HR 6691, anyone?), people incarcerated for sex crimes...and their families. Reformers give us up far too easily. I am totally willing to accept that we all win something, if that proves true. Posted by: marie | Dec 19, 2018 1:11:19 PM It's a good sign for compromise legislation when some on both sides are dissatisfied. The pendulum swung hard towards determinate sentcencing in the '80s and '90s. It's good to see a much more moderate swing in the other direction. So often, politics in this country overreacts, setting things up for the next swing back. This bill seems to have avoided that. Additionally, I think it's good from a truth-in-advertising point of view that a 15% redution now actually means a 15% reduction. It's a step that will help some prisoners feel that the system, while tough, is fair. Posted by: William Jockusch | Dec 19, 2018 11:00:14 PM Professor Berman, In future posts I would like to see your analysis the practical effect of this bill, like who is eligible for what benefits. Perhaps it might take some time because I think the BOP needs to adopt the law into their procedures which could take some time. Posted by: Chris W | Dec 20, 2018 11:38:01 AM Post a comment Just one month after going IPO, 500 Startups Vietnam shares its plan to bring 500 Startups Silicon Valley accelerator curriculum to the country 500 Startups flagship accelerator 500 Startups Vietnam announces its accelerator program for 2019 called The Saola Accelerator, brought to the country in partnership with Korean multimedia retailer GS Shop that also operates an internationally active corporate venture capital team. This announcement is made just one month after the accelerator had a final closes oversubscription. The Saola Accelerator is named after rare species of Vietnamese deer, commonly known as the Asian unicorn. It seeks to support three batches of Vietnam-connected startups with US$100,000 investment and a Silicon Valley accelerator curriculum. Also Read: MealPal is great, but it uses A LOT of plastic The participating companies will receive access to more than US$500,000 worth of free perks and discounts from twenty 500 Startups partners including Amazon Web Services, Google, and Microsoft. In addition to capital, the Saola Accelerator will offer enhanced programming including 500s signature Growth Hell Week plus hands-on support for growth. The program will conclude with a Demo Day, where the companies will share about their products and progress to an invite-only audience of regional venture investors. Weve learned a lot from working with 1,000 companies in more than 40 growth program batches around the world. Were excited to bring that experience to Vietnam, said Marvin Liao, Partner at 500 Startups and head of its flagship accelerator program in San Francisco. There are three criteria to enter the accelerator: Tech or tech-enabled Vietnam-connected: serving the Vietnam market, having a Vietnamese co-founder, and/or having a meaningful portion of the team in Vietnam Have meaningful traction The registration opens now and interested startups can apply to the program here. The Early Bird application deadline is January 2, 2019, and regular deadline is January 20, 2019. Story continues Also Read: (Exclusive) Thai fintech startup Masii.com acquires events ticketing platform One Place Our program is aimed at companies ready to break out and become Asian unicorns saolas, closed Eddie Thai, a lead partner of 500 Startups Vietnam. Image Credit: 500 Startups The post 500 Startups Vietnam to launch The Saola Accelerator, known locally as Asian Unicorn appeared first on e27. A cartoon series about the life and times of Karl Marx is set to be shown on a Chinese video streaming website with the full backing of Beijing, according to the host company. The Leader, which recounts the story of the German philosopher and socialist revolutionary, will be broadcast by Bilibili.com soon, the company said on Tuesday. The production was commissioned by the central governments Marxism office, in cooperation with authorities in Inner Mongolia; Weiming Culture Media, which is based in the region; and animation company Dongmantang, Bilibili said on Weibo, Chinas Twitter-like service. The social media post did not say how many episodes the series would comprise or when it would air, but said it had been created to mark the 200th anniversary of Marxs birth. The joint author of the Communist Manifesto was born in May 1818 and the political theories he developed continue to be the driving force for Chinas ruling party to this day. His image has been a common feature on official propaganda throughout the year. As well as covering the political and economic theories Marx devised, the cartoon series will cover his relationship with Jenny von Westphalen with whom he married in 1843 and had seven children and his friendship with Friedrich Engels, Bilibili said. Marx was a great man standing upright between heaven and earth, whose ideological system established through his entire life awakened all sleeping proletariat across the world and deeply influenced the historical development of the world, it said. He was also an ordinary man of flesh and blood. His love for Jenny, which met with much obstruction, and friendship with Engels, which they almost missed, finally became legendary, it said. As well as its assorted producers, the series has Chinas central propaganda department and the website of party mouthpiece Peoples Daily as its strategic partners. Story continues A trailer for the series on Bilibili had been viewed almost 10,000 times as of Wednesday afternoon, and 14,000 people were following it. Despite the gushing preview from the broadcaster, internet users were less impressed, with several of them describing the three main characters as too good looking to be true. Another made the very precise observation that Marxs handwriting appeared much neater in the animation than it had been in reality. This is very interesting, but I have some questions in mind, wrote another. Will young people be allowed to cosplay Marx? Can he participate in cartoon character competitions? Since coming to power in 2012, President Xi Jinping has repeatedly urged Communist Party members not to forget Chinas socialist roots while pursuing the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. At an event in May held to commemorate the 200th anniversary, he said that for Communist cadres reading Marxist works and understanding Marxist theories should be a way of life and a spiritual pursuit, adding that the philosophers theories were still totally correct. This article China produces Karl Marx cartoon series to mark 200th anniversary of his birth first appeared on South China Morning Post For the latest news from the South China Morning Post download our mobile app. Copyright 2018. More from South China Morning Post: AFPTV Buddhists monks in Seoul joined with about 150 other people to get their gloved hands into massive containers of chili and salted cabbage and make kimchi - a fiery national dish. Eight thousand kilos of cabbage were used, with half given to needy households and the other half to Buddhist organisations, including the Jogyesa temple that organised the event. Post: #3 RE: Jordan Peterson calmly dismantles feminism in front of two feminists respect existence fuckhead Quote: Quote: The problem with both American-born story lines is that authoritarian nationalism is rising in a diverse set of countries. Some are mired in recession; others are booming. Some are consumed by fears of immigration; others are not. But besides their hostility to liberal democracy, the right-wing autocrats taking power across the world share one big thing, which often goes unrecognized in the U.S.: They all want to subordinate women. To understand global Trumpism, argues Valerie M. Hudson, a political scientist at Texas A&M, its vital to remember that for most of human history, leaders and their male subjects forged a social contract: Men agreed to be ruled by other men in return for all men ruling over women. This political hierarchy appeared naturalas natural as adults ruling childrenbecause it mirrored the hierarchy of the home. Thus, for millennia, men, and many women, have associated male dominance with political legitimacy. Womens empowerment ruptures this order. Youths oppress My people, and women rule over them, laments Isaiah in the Hebrew Bible. My people, your leaders mislead you. Because male dominance is deeply linked to political legitimacy, many revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries have used the specter of womens power to discredit the regime they sought to overthrow. Then, once in power themselves, they have validated their authority by reducing womens rights. In a 1995 paper, Arthur Gilbert and James Cole of the University of Denver observed that French revolutionaries made Marie Antoinette a symbol of the immorality of the ancien regime and that Iranian revolutionaries did the same to Princess Ashraf, the unveiled and powerful sister of the shah. After toppling the monarchy, the French revolutionaries banned women from holding senior teaching positions and inheriting property. Ayatollah Khamenei made it a crime for women to speak on the radio or appear unveiled in public. Some of the revolutions of the Arab Spring followed a similar course. In their book, The Hillary Doctrine, Valerie Hudson and Patricia Leidl note that when the Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi replaced the longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Morsi quickly announced that he would abolish the quota guaranteeing womens seats in parliament, overturn a ban on female circumcision, and make it harder for women to divorce an abusive husband. After Muammar Qaddafis ouster, the first law that Libyas new government repealed was the one banning polygamy. more: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...te/576382/ spo snouou Wrote: (11-29-2018 08:35 AM) Jordan Peterson argues Hitler and the Nazis were doing what was only normal and logical "given the circumstances", thus exculpating them that's textbook Nazi apologia... notice also that Jordan Peterson places Nazis, who were responsible for WW2 and the Holocaust, on the side of "order", and communists and socialists on the side of "chaos". That's Nazi propaganda, presenting themselves as stability against the threat of "cultural Marxist" chaos Jordan Peterson's main political inspiration is Solzhenitsyn. He was a rabid anti-Semite who believed in the literal Nazi created myth of "Judeo-Bolshevism" the modern version of that is "cultural Marxism", a term Peterson loves to use against anyone who disagrees with him ...for those unaware, there were actually some far right German "historians" (Nolte/Hillgruber) who argued the same thing re Hitler and the rise of the Nazis: they were a logical response to the threat posed by communists/Soviet Union, ergo the latter was to blame, not the former they wrote things like essays and books from the perspective of the German Nazi soldier on the Eastern front, looking at events "through their eyes", thereby "explaining" how their behavior was perfectly rational and understandable given the circumstances of course attached to this was an explicit political project: getting rid of any notion of guilt on the part of Germans for the Holocaust and WW2, and relativizing both, thereby allowing a revival of nationalism. Habermas exposed these Nazi apologetics more https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/10675...26848.html respect existence fuckheadmore: e27 had a conversation with the co-founder of GoWabi, Samir Cherro, about how beauty and health industry can be hailed and adjusted to market needs When it comes to concept, GoWabi certainly does not offer a new approach to online beauty and health service. But when it comes to expertise, GoWabi has got it covered. Its about value that we offer to both the merchants and the customers. Our platform lets customers get the best deals from spa, salon, and even dental clinics around Thailand, and we give our merchants assistance to determine the deals that customers actually want, said Samir Cherro, the companys co-founder. GoWabi brands itself as a one-stop destination for beauty needs, that will discover and book beauty and wellness services around the user. GoWabi works by letting customers easily search for service by location and category, compare prices depending on the booking hour, read reviews and ratings by other customers, and receive cashbacks after each booking made on the platform Personal pain Cherro admitted that hes sort of stumbled into the whole thing with GoWabi. I was looking for barbers around me when I lived in Singapore, Jakarta, Manila, but with no big luck. It was so difficult finding quality hairdressers at reasonable pricesg, Cherro recalled. From a mere idea, Cherro and other co-founders then launched the first platform that made salon, specifically barber service, available for people to book and make reservation. From there, we saw a bigger problem and decided to expand. Two years ago we launched, and we moved more into beauty and spa service, and we were no longer niched only for barber service, said Cherro. Also Read: (Exclusive) Thai fintech startup Masii.com acquires events ticketing platform One Place The co-founders later realized that right after Groupon and Ensogo shut down in Southeast Asia, theres an opportunity to fulfill the need of merchants who want to get more customers, and customers who would like discounts, we combined the two aspects and found the balance of providing smarter discounts where we introduced offpeak pricing. That way customers can still enjoy discounts and merchants would get more customers filling their empty capacity, while receiving full prices on peak hours. Story continues With the co-founders background in previous startups even stints in Ensogo and Lazada combined, the approach would be a sensible one to make. Thailand is the beauty hub Not only an attraction because of its white sandy beaches and culinary, Cherro reminded us why Thailand is an irresistible destination for tourists. Its where all the beauty and health sources are based in Southeast Asia, especially with spa and massage, said Cherro. Its also one of the reasons why GoWabi is based in Thailand, because tourists actually came to Thailand for its spa treatment. We have tourists from around the world coming to our platform and using our application to get deals on spa. Our inbound customers are the overseas tourists flocking to the country, said Cherro. Controls on customers GoWabis customers are able to select date and time based on the real-time availability at the venue and pay online or cash using credit card, Alipay, and installment option. with the platforms simplified booking and payment process under one app. Not only using both GoWabis platform and app, GoWabis customers also can buy deals from e-commerces in Thailand such as Lazada or Shopee. After that, once the booking and payment process is done, the customers can go to the shop and simply show their reservation email. The service provider will already have the booking information in their system. By giving customers controls on when, where, and what treatment they can choose, GoWabi is able to curate a variety of promotion to offer its customers. It depends on certain hours when customers may get, for example, 30 per cent discount during lunch hours, and at peak hours, they must pay full price. It really plays on the various offers that customers can look into and choose from, said Cherro. So in this sense, their merchants also get to reap the benefits of giving only valuable things that customers are going to want to redeem. We try to find balance between discounts and capacity management said Cherro, From day one, we focused on providing value for our merchants, understanding their pain points and how we can help their business grow, to later be able to provide value to our users. In that way we have managed to keep our merchants on our platform (and keep them happy) rather than them seeing us as a quick customer acquisition channel for short time. We offer a way for merchants to market their service in affordable way and to ensure the message is delivered to the users. In the end everyone wants customers, and everyone is able to give discounts, we only need to be smarter in giving out discounts, Cherro added. Every booking made using GoWabi also will be rewarded with cashback to keep the customers engaged and coming back on using its service. Cashbacks that the customers collect can be redeemed for cash discount on any other 1,000 partners on our platform, said Cherro. On bringing expertises on board When asked what differentiates GoWabi from other platforms offering similar services, Cherro began sharing about his and his co-founders collective background in the industry, especially inonline marketplaces and ecommerce. Our team has strong background from various ecommerce and marketplace verticals in SEA, my co-founders previously worked at Ensogo Singapore and Zalora Thailand, I started early on in Lazada Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand. I strongly believe our background and expertise in this industry has helped us bring GoWabi to where it is today, said Cherro. GoWabi announced their recent round of investment, which they in total have managed to raised seven digits in USD. Their investors include Kasper Kragelund, 500 Tuktuks, and dtac, as claimed by Cherro. We believe this has made us the highest invested startup in beauty and salon booking space origined from SEA, Cherro added, while highlighting their monthly growth. In the upcoming quarters, just after securing the funding GoWabi has shared with us, the company plans to add more categories and to replicate the business model in new markets. We want to improve our products for our merchants, basically providing a them more values and benefits by using our platform, said Cherro. Also Read: The state of European tech startup industry and what Asia can learn from it To date, GoWabi has expanded its footprint to nine major cities in Thailand and is now working with more than 1,000 beauty and wellness salons and boutiques, including internationally known brands and hotels such as: Benefit Cosmetics, Yves Rocher, Anastasia Beverly Hills, and Shangri-la. Image Credit: GoWabi The post How this startup makes health and beauty service booking thrives in Thailand appeared first on e27. Also, A JV partnership to result in Thailands first data centre, and Indias ride-hailing service Ola to invest in scooter sharing startup Vogo Indonesian culinary supplier marketplace Stoqo raises Series A round from Monks Hill Partners and Accel Partners India [Deal Street Asia] Stoqo, an Indonesia-based culinary supplier marketplace aimed at small restaurants and hotel owners reportedly just closed a Series A round co-led by Monks Hill Partners and Accel Partners India. Deal Street Asia was the first to share the news upon the story shared by two people familiar with the investment. Stoqo was founded by Aswin Andrison and Angky William just a shy one year ago under PT Stoqo Teknologi Indonesia. According to Andrison, Stoqo focuses on Business-to-Business (B2B) culinary supplier and seeks to become a pioneer in this sector. We gave an easy access to buyers, especially those in culinary business, in getting the basic, daily needs like rice, eggs, oil, flour, vegetable, fresh meat, and other produces. Stoqo aims to fulfill this need to be more accessible and efficient in the best price, said Andrison in a statement shared by SWA. Also Read: Indian edtech startups Toppr, DataTrained raise funding Right now, Stoqo has more than 2,000 produces available on its platform and has gained over 5,000 downloads from Google Playstore. Next, Stoqo is looking to expand to other cities in Indonesia. Singapores STT GDC partners with TICON to bring Thailands first data centre to the country [Press Release] ST Telemedia Global Data Centres (STT GDC), Singapore-based data centre service provider announced that they are now in the final step of completing the joint venture partnership with TICON, the smart industrial platform provider in Thailand. The joint venture will allow their first data centre to be built on a 75,000 square metre (15-rai) site in Ramkhamhaeng district, situated in central Bangkok, that would be finished by 2020. This first data centre is in line with the Thailand 4.0 initiative that seeks to develop the digital economy in the country, as well as the Thai governments National Digital Economy Masterplan, in which the digital economy is expected to see robust growth and contribute up to 25% of Thailands GDP by 2027. Story continues We believe in the market potential of expanding our focus into developing Thailands digital economy and transforming urban living with Smart Cities. Developing digital infrastructure in the form of state-of-the-art data centres is one of the key investment areas we are embarking on in this new economy. This partnership will allow us to best serve the digital growth plans of our customers, said Panote Sirivadhanabhakdi, Chairman of the Executive Committee of TICON Industrial Connection Pcl. (TICON), Furthermore, TICONs representative added that they are confident that the data centres operation will match the global standards in key markets such as Singapore, China, India and the UK, as well as maximising the local expertise of TICON in understanding the needs of the Thai market and navigating its regulatory environment. Myanmars largest private bank KBZ Bank works with treasury management solution Finastra to eliminate manual operation [Press Release] Kanbawza (KBZ) Bank, Myanmars largest privately owned bank has selected treasury management solution Finastra to automate the tedious operational work by enabling straight-through-processing (STP) using the companys product called Fusion. By moving away from manual treasury processing operation, the bank believes that it will result in a faster, more efficient services that can help the bank grow both transaction volumes and revenue and reduce operational risk. The bank also seeks to scale more effectively without sacrificing current levels of manpower across all its treasury business operations. Market dynamics are changing rapidly due to increased modernization and digitalization within Myanmars banking sector. Finastras capability is helping us to overcome high operational overheads associated with manual processes, reduce time-to-market for new products and bring our operations and systems in line with the standards of sophisticated developed markets both regionally and globally, said Win Lwin, Managing Director of KBZ Bank. Fusion Treasury by Finastra is a single, integrated, front-to-back solution, built to cover all aspects of a banks operations in treasury, capital markets, derivatives, and risk and compliance. The solution enables financial institutions to integrate and automate systems and streamline treasury operations. Prior to this partnership, Finastra has supported other financial institutions in Myanmar like Yoma Bank, AYA Bank and First Private Bank. Microsofts Azure manages to cover almost all Southeast Asia regions with its cloud capability [SG Channel Asia] Microsoft Azure Availability Zones are now generally available across Southeast Asia, as the tech giants cloud system arm continues to expand cloud capabilities regionally. The Azure Availability Zones are designed to be a solution for mission-critical applications. As a high-availability offering that protects your applications and data from data centre failures, Availability Zones are unique physical locations within an Azure region with each one of them made up of one or more data centres equipped with independent power, cooling, and networking. To ensure resiliency, there is a minimum of three separate zones in all enabled regions, explained Patrik Bihammar, cloud and enterprise lead at Microsoft Singapore. Furthermore, with the introduction of Availability Zones, the vendor can now offer a service-level agreement (SLA) of 99.99 per cent for uptime of virtual machines. The company believes that it will build upon their extensive cloud portfolio to enable customers to design resilient applications for comprehensive business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategy. Through the addition of these regional zones, customers will now be able to synchronously replicate applications and data using Availability Zones within an Azure region for high-availability within Singapore, and asynchronously replicate across Azure regions for geographic disaster recovery protection. Indias ride-hailing service Ola seeks to invest US$100 million in Indian scooter sharing startup Vogo [Channel News Asia] Indian ride-hailing service Ola is reportedly to invest US$100 million in Vogo, a domestic scooter sharing startup. When the investment comes through, the two-wheelers fleet will be added to Ola app to broaden the range of vehicles it offers. Vogo provides services in the southern Indian cities of Bengaluru and Hyderabad. The company will use the money to expand its fleet by 100,000 scooters. Also Read: (Exclusive) Thai fintech startup Masii.com acquires events ticketing platform One Place Meanwhile, Olas co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Bhavish Aggarwal said, Our investment in Vogo will help build a smart multi-modal network for first-last mile connectivity in the country. Image Credit: STT GDC The post Todays top tech news, December 19, 2018: Indonesias culinary supplier marketplace Stoqo raises Series A funding from Monks Hill Partners appeared first on e27. Why Lion Rock spirit is a fading memory for Taiwan-born novelist Lolita Hu and what gloomy Hong Kong needs to do to get it back Lolita Hu Ching-fang now calls Hong Kong home but the Taipei-born novelist, who is quitting her role as Taiwans top cultural promoter in the city after two years service, believes the energy and confidence she noticed when she first arrived 20 years ago has faded. Hong Kong amazed me when I first came here in 1998, said the outgoing director of the Kwang Hwa Information and Culture Centre in Hong Kong. Then in her 20s, Hu enjoyed the freedom of expression that was not available in Taiwan, where young women were traditionally expected to hold their tongue. The Lion Rock spirit Hong Kongs pride in resilience and diligence, named after a symbolic landmark and a popular 1970s TV series also moved her deeply as Hu saw people striving to fulfil their dreams, believing success could be had through hard work. But today, the social atmosphere is so gloomy because of the extraordinary life pressures and the shortage of smooth political conversations, she said. Hu, who has lived and worked in a number of world cities including Paris, Tokyo and New York, called on Hong Kongs leaders to lend an ear to the public and refrain from labelling and suppressing public conversations as political defiance. The city needed to talk to solve problems and work out its future, she said. The ethos of cities lies in the diversity of voices, Hu said. There cant be development without conversations. And all the great cities around the world have been moving forward by resolving conflicts and problems through public engagement. The cosmopolitan award-winning novelist, who was born in 1969 and studied English literature and drama in Taiwan and the United States, has worked for a variety of publications ranging from lads magazines to the South China Morning Post. With no political affiliation, Hu accepted an invitation from Taiwans ruling and independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and became director of Kwang Hwa in September 2016, succeeding art critic Lu Chien-ying. Story continues Taiwan is my country, Hong Kong is my home, Hu said. I thought, Why not? [to the invitation] because I would be able to serve both places from this position. But, she described the overall political situation between Taiwan and mainland China over the past two years as cold. Some people gave me the cold shoulder when I first began my work at Kwang Hwa, she said. Relations between the mainland and Taiwan have deteriorated since DPP chairwoman Tsai Ing-wen won the presidential election in 2016. But the cultural exchanges between Hong Kong and Taiwan, according to Hu, remained vibrant. The intimacy between Hong Kong and Taiwan built through cultural exchanges can help people feel less lonely when we have to remain cautious in politics, she said. Globalisation has reached a stage where it is backfiring, leaving the whole world searching for the right way to settle chaos and restore harmony Lolita Hu Despite her passion and pleasure in the role, Hu told Taiwans Ministry of Culture in October that she had decided not to renew her contract. It was not a political decision, she said. I am a professional author with a writing plan. Hu has no intention of leaving Hong Kong, although she said the economic and political imbalances left her deeply concerned. Hong Kong is a city of workaholics. But the economic structure has been distorted to such an extent that more and more hardworking people cant afford even a very basic living space, Hu said. Such life pressure must be vented and resolved through public conversations but unfortunately, such public actions are often quickly labelled as some serious political challenges against authority by those in power. But Hong Kong is not alone in struggling to talk and listen, according to Hu. Globalisation has reached a stage where it is backfiring, leaving the whole world searching for the right way to settle chaos and restore harmony, she said. People should learn to listen and adjust themselves. In particular, the powerful should listen to the powerless. This article Why Lion Rock spirit is a fading memory for Taiwan-born novelist Lolita Hu and what gloomy Hong Kong needs to do to get it back first appeared on South China Morning Post For the latest news from the South China Morning Post download our mobile app. Copyright 2018. Scores of workers at China Shipbuilding Industry Corp (CSIC), whose former general manager has been accused of selling state secrets a crime punishable by death have been schooled in how to protect classified information. According to a statement released on social media, the company said that more than 200 of its employees, including security directors and those responsible for handling information, had taken part in a training workshop organised by the National Secrecy Science and Technology Evaluation Centre. The participants listened to lectures on how to identify and handle military secrets, and exchanged views on how to safeguard confidential material, the statement said. The aim of the session was to improve peoples awareness and understanding of the need for secrecy, it said. CSIC was responsible for creating Chinas first aircraft carrier the Liaoning after refitting an unfinished vessel once intended for the Soviet navy that it bought from Ukraine in 1998. It is currently working on the countrys first domestically developed aircraft carrier, the Type 001A which is based on the Liaoning at its shipyard in Dalian, Liaoning province. On Monday, Chinas top anti-corruption agency, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, said that Sun Bo, the former general manager of CSIC, had been found guilty of taking bribes. Sources said he was also being investigated for allegedly passing secrets about the Liaoning to foreign intelligence agents. While the shipbuilder has long played a leading role in the development of Chinese naval vessels, including nuclear and conventional submarines, its apparent mismanagement of classified information has been a cause for concern. CSIC is well known for its poor management of confidential information, a source close to the PLA Navy said in an interview. Story continues At a time of growing geopolitical tensions between China and the United States, Hong Kong-based military expert Song Zhongping said that Beijing was becoming increasingly aware of the need to keep its secrets under wraps. Protecting classified information about weapons technology has become a priority, he said. And for workers at companies like CSIC it was not only important but an obligation to safeguard secrets, and anyone found guilty of violating security protocols would not get a second chance, he said. A worker at a state-owned company involved in Chinas space programme, who asked not to be identified, said that employers and employees both could face serious consequences if they failed to respect confidentiality agreements. Keeping confidential information secure applies for their [workers] entire lives, the person said. And the same principle applies to private companies that work with the Peoples Liberation Army. In a sign of the US growing interest in Chinas military capabilities, a replica of a Chinese J-20 stealth fighter was spotted earlier this month at a military facility in the southern US state of Georgia. The facilitys commander said it had been commissioned by the US Marine Corps and was being used as a training aid. Military observers, however, said that building such a precise replica would have been impossible without a blueprint. Additional reporting by Minnie Chan and Kristin Huang This article Workers at scandal-hit Chinese shipbuilder CSIC given lessons in keeping state secrets first appeared on South China Morning Post For the latest news from the South China Morning Post download our mobile app. Copyright 2018. More from South China Morning Post: Username: Password: or Register Back to Forum Reply to This post Post New Thread Thread Rating: 4 Vote(s) - 3 Average 1 2 3 4 5 Page: 1 2 3 4 BREAKING TRUMP: " THE UNITED STATES MILITARY WILL BUILD THE WALL!" Build The Wall lop guest User ID: 461817 12-19-2018 06:58 PM Post: #1 BREAKING TRUMP: " THE UNITED STATES MILITARY WILL BUILD THE WALL!" Advertisement Donald J. Trump Verified account @realDonaldTrump Following Following @realDonaldTrump More Mexico is paying (indirectly) for the Wall through the new USMCA, the replacement for NAFTA! Far more money coming to the U.S. Because of the tremendous dangers at the Border, including large scale criminal and drug inflow, the United States Military will build the Wall! 5:43 AM - 19 Dec 2018 https://mobile.twitter.com/realDonaldTru...8282545152 BREAKING TRUMP: " THE UNITED STATES MILITARY WILL BUILD THE WALL!"Donald J. TrumpVerified account@realDonaldTrumpFollowing Following @realDonaldTrumpMoreMexico is paying (indirectly) for the Wall through the new USMCA, the replacement for NAFTA! Far more money coming to the U.S. Because of the tremendous dangers at the Border, including large scale criminal and drug inflow, the United States Military will build the Wall!5:43 AM - 19 Dec 2018 LoP Guest lop guest User ID: 459078 12-19-2018 06:59 PM Post: #2 RE: BREAKING TRUMP: " THE UNITED STATES MILITARY WILL BUILD THE WALL!" Were getting private funding, no worries. SkeptiSchism Registered User User ID: 450243 12-19-2018 07:01 PM Posts: 36,330 Post: #3 RE: BREAKING TRUMP: " THE UNITED STATES MILITARY WILL BUILD THE WALL!" Oh boy can't wait to watch this one. I don't think the corps has actually built anything in decades. They just manage, they don't do. Then again, what they would probably do is use private contractors on IDIQ. LoP Guest lop guest User ID: 479111 12-19-2018 07:01 PM Post: #4 RE: BREAKING TRUMP: " THE UNITED STATES MILITARY WILL BUILD THE WALL!" Build The Wall Wrote: (12-19-2018 06:58 PM) BREAKING TRUMP: " THE UNITED STATES MILITARY WILL BUILD THE WALL!" Donald J. Trump Verified account @realDonaldTrump Following Following @realDonaldTrump More Mexico is paying (indirectly) for the Wall through the new USMCA, the replacement for NAFTA! Far more money coming to the U.S. Because of the tremendous dangers at the Border, including large scale criminal and drug inflow, the United States Military will build the Wall! 5:43 AM - 19 Dec 2018 https://mobile.twitter.com/realDonaldTru...8282545152 Cue Sarah Sanders walking back tweet at 3pm today Cue Sarah Sanders walking back tweet at 3pm today American1973 lop guest User ID: 341236 12-19-2018 07:11 PM Post: #5 RE: BREAKING TRUMP: " THE UNITED STATES MILITARY WILL BUILD THE WALL!" Mmm hmm just as my stratagem suggested when I released my epic memes to the world covertly through a destryoyed shitchan. Step by step ddid I explain the hot spots and bugaboos that will arise as we MAGA with this great wall of no beaners. Spanich is a wrecked language. You could give spanich speaking people ten billion dollars a weekm and they still would fu*k it up, and create the life they want, as it stand s right now. I recall the day I saw that horrific mexican head chopping viceo on TOP, three ladies heads hacked off by masked mexican gangster shits, maybe it was some other shitty spanich speaking state, idk, it was just, so horrific, a part of me died that day I realized Mexico does need to be f&*king ruled like a vassal, and if they fight back I would f*ckin aztec their asses they have had enough rope. fu*k spanish. Do you think Jesus spoke spanish? No it's a baby language, only recently made up. Stupid, and produces, stupidity. f*ckin wake up and start teaching your kids Engish you tards. Why do these low class race groups always allow their shittiest gangster type members to rule the scene? LAME. The wall, is to keep me, caged in. I am as mean as Jehovah. And I am sicxk and tired of Americans enduring shitys like the Clitntons and other International Shtigamesters. When I come on the scene, everything related to bullshit will be sunk like a f*ckin muslim rowboat off the north african coast in the days of Thomas Jefferson. ENGINEER AND CADRE: I say to you, building this wall, is the greatest thin Americans are doing at this time, and if Specialist Sanchez wants to rattle on about his family in f*ckin San Deigo, you f*ckin remind him what built America. We have a integrated military but George Washington was no f*ckin Cuban refugee swimming to Florida. Him and his pals were actually smugglers and outlaws and criminals, and they were the best. If we need some Boston Tea Parties to defeat Obummer, HillBill, Kate the Hate, Nasty Grasty, all the evil shits, then believe me, Americans can do that too. The wall, is us being gentle. However my advice has always been to get the USNavy into the mix because they need to have an infection removed inside their body and Adm. Rogers is all set to point out the cancers I bet. The USN can easily fly from Mission Bay to the Gulf of Texas as easily as those little USAF trainers or CHP/CalFire trainers can buzz along the border. I would put 1000 of those dinky little planes, and yes US navy drones above them, just treolling the entire border. Ahhhhh but the drug floews would stop. Why, we'd have to grow our own coca plants at home, if cocaine was our drug, personally. Think how that would affect the law practice? Ha ha ha. Yes, the entire system has a blade to its throat. Ha ha ha Merry Christmas. LoP Guest lop guest User ID: 453934 12-19-2018 07:14 PM Post: #6 RE: BREAKING TRUMP: " THE UNITED STATES MILITARY WILL BUILD THE WALL!" "the United States Military will build the Wall" Trump Dec 18 HOW? He says we are building "artistically designed steel slats" WHO is going to manufacture those pre-made FENCE panels? WHO is going to do the welding? WHO is going to do the digging (6ft deep) for the footings? WHO is going to pour the concrete footings? WHO is going to paint these "artistically designed steel slats" ? WHO is going to place and attach the 'SLATS' to the Footings? WHO is going to weld panel 1 to panel 2? If he thinks the Military is going to do any of that he is out of his mind. Also, who is going to FIX the slats after they have been CUT through with a $50 portable (battery powered) mini grinder with a $7 cutting disk. I could cut through 8 inches of 1/4" plate in just a couple minutes. Anyone could make a DOORWAY through his "artistically designed steel slats" in 10 minutes LoP Guest lop guest User ID: 479139 12-19-2018 07:15 PM Post: #7 RE: BREAKING TRUMP: " THE UNITED STATES MILITARY WILL BUILD THE WALL!" GOOD! LoP Guest lop guest User ID: 467575 12-19-2018 07:16 PM Post: #8 RE: BREAKING TRUMP: " THE UNITED STATES MILITARY WILL BUILD THE WALL!" LoP Guest Wrote: (12-19-2018 07:14 PM) "the United States Military will build the Wall" Trump Dec 18 HOW? He says we are building "artistically designed steel slats" WHO is going to manufacture those pre-made FENCE panels? WHO is going to do the welding? WHO is going to do the digging (6ft deep) for the footings? WHO is going to pour the concrete footings? WHO is going to paint these "artistically designed steel slats" ? WHO is going to place and attach the 'SLATS' to the Footings? WHO is going to weld panel 1 to panel 2? If he thinks the Military is going to do any of that he is out of his mind. Also, who is going to FIX the slats after they have been CUT through with a $50 portable (battery powered) mini grinder with a $7 cutting disk. I could cut through 8 inches of 1/4" plate in just a couple minutes. Anyone could make a DOORWAY through his "artistically designed steel slats" in 10 minutes How would you build it? How would you build it? LoP Guest lop guest User ID: 341236 12-19-2018 07:17 PM Post: #9 RE: BREAKING TRUMP: " THE UNITED STATES MILITARY WILL BUILD THE WALL!" LoP Guest Wrote: (12-19-2018 07:14 PM) [...] I could cut through 8 inches of 1/4" plate in just a couple minutes. Anyone could make a DOORWAY through his "artistically designed steel slats" in 10 minutes Cupcake: This is exactly why we need air superiority. ONLY DRUG FLOWS PREVENT TOP BRASS FROM EVER SAYING THE WORDS "Border Air Superiority" Fuckn get Snoopy and his dog house to fly because f*ckin sopwith camels would get this sh*t done! Drop napalm on your stupid ass. GO HOME AND MAKE YOUR COUNTRY SOMETHING OTHER THAN A PLACE TO FLEE Cupcake: This is exactly why we need air superiority. ONLY DRUG FLOWS PREVENT TOP BRASS FROM EVER SAYING THE WORDS "Border Air Superiority"Fuckn get Snoopy and his dog house to fly because f*ckin sopwith camels would get this sh*t done! Drop napalm on your stupid ass.GO HOME AND MAKE YOUR COUNTRY SOMETHING OTHER THAN A PLACE TO FLEE LoP Guest lop guest User ID: 459261 12-19-2018 07:17 PM Post: #10 RE: BREAKING TRUMP: " THE UNITED STATES MILITARY WILL BUILD THE WALL!" Land mines, invisible wall Just like in Korea, buffer zone Fu King Registered User User ID: 430765 12-19-2018 07:18 PM Posts: 3,346 Post: #11 RE: BREAKING TRUMP: " THE UNITED STATES MILITARY WILL BUILD THE WALL!" Texas Senator Ted Cruz stated: "USE THE 14 BILLION $ CONFISCATED FROM DRUG CZAR 'EL CHAPO' TO BUILD THE WALL" LoP Guest lop guest User ID: 341236 12-19-2018 07:20 PM Post: #12 RE: BREAKING TRUMP: " THE UNITED STATES MILITARY WILL BUILD THE WALL!" As I explained above, airplanes, an amazing invention from Americans, ARE NOT f*ckin UTILIZED? ARE OUR COMMANDERS STUPID f**kers? I would say not. Probably they are kettled by Clinton era black markets and drug flows. ALSO the JAG is making life essentially miserable for the officers, imo. THE JAG OFFENDS THE COTUS THEY ARE CRUEL AND UNUSUAL PUNISHMENT and I am not even in the service just a lifelong student of it. There is no way these men can tow this line, and to see the military sliced by thoudands of chinese Obummer slices to it, it's disgusting. It's time we get back to some good old asskicking of loathesome communists. AND DID YOU KNOW the entire communist takeover, was done by COPS AND COP SYSTEMS not military. So yeah, give me one good riflemen and I can take down a platoon of cops level podunks who feel they can hustle RAMBO, JOHN through their town. I see truth hopefully you do to, because all the bullshit's gonna get set to burn like a Paradise Apple Tree. LoP Guest lop guest User ID: 341236 12-19-2018 07:21 PM Post: #13 RE: BREAKING TRUMP: " THE UNITED STATES MILITARY WILL BUILD THE WALL!" Fu King Wrote: (12-19-2018 07:18 PM) Texas Senator Ted Cruz stated: "USE THE 14 BILLION $ CONFISCATED FROM DRUG CZAR 'EL CHAPO' TO BUILD THE WALL" This is why they are so upset it's happening when you put the drug connection with the wall connections. Lawyers without coke, do more filings to obtain coke. Don't forget judge rolll, versus Saturn Car full of drugs, famous US court case. This is why they are so upset it's happening when you put the drug connection with the wall connections.Lawyers without coke, do more filings to obtain coke. Don't forget judge rolll, versus Saturn Car full of drugs, famous US court case. LoP Guest lop guest User ID: 447778 12-19-2018 07:24 PM Post: #14 RE: BREAKING TRUMP: " THE UNITED STATES MILITARY WILL BUILD THE WALL!" Have a video! https://youtu.be/oZaF-ABKCwE I'm going to start my gofundme for a bulldozer to patrol the border with. I'm done with these retards.Have a video!I'm going to start my gofundme for a bulldozer to patrol the border with. LoP Guest lop guest User ID: 453934 12-19-2018 07:26 PM Post: #15 RE: BREAKING TRUMP: " THE UNITED STATES MILITARY WILL BUILD THE WALL!" LoP Guest Wrote: (12-19-2018 07:16 PM) LoP Guest Wrote: (12-19-2018 07:14 PM) "the United States Military will build the Wall" Trump Dec 18 ..... Also, who is going to FIX the slats after they have been CUT through with a $50 portable (battery powered) mini grinder with a $7 cutting disk. I could cut through 8 inches of 1/4" plate in just a couple minutes. Anyone could make a DOORWAY through his "artistically designed steel slats" in 10 minutes How would you build it? The easiest most effective way. Have you ever seen a Concrete Tiltup Building? I would pour 10,000 pre-cast concrete wall panels (apx 20' x 8' x 8") - then dig a deep ditch, add rock, compact the soil, level, flat - and then stand the panels up on the ditch base. They don't need to be BEAUTIFULL or ARTISTIC. Concrete Tiltup Buildings (aka warehouses) are plain square boxes but very cheap to build compared to other methods. The easiest most effective way.Have you ever seen a Concrete Tiltup Building?I would pour 10,000 pre-cast concrete wall panels (apx 20' x 8' x 8")- then dig a deep ditch, add rock, compact the soil, level, flat- and then stand the panels up on the ditch base.Concrete Tiltup Buildings (aka warehouses) are plain square boxesbut very cheap to build compared to other methods. 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The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.In accordance with industry accepted best practices we ask that users limit their copy / paste of copyrighted material to the relevant portions of the article you wish to discuss (no more than 50% of the source material) provide a link back to the original articleIf you are a legal copyright holder or a designated agent for such and you believe a post on this website falls outside the boundaries of "Fair Use" and legitimately infringes on yours or your clients copyright please contact [email protected] This website is owned by :Marco ZwaneveldDrijfriemstraat 522516 XR The HagueNetherlands.I will not rent, sell, share or otherwise disclose your personal information to any third party.We might contact you from time to time regarding your purchases or the services (like forums and announcement lists) you have subscribed to.Some of the 3rd party advertisers on lunaticoutpost.com may use cookiesto track peformance and/or to serve relevant ads.If you wish to read more and/or opt out of such cookies, please visit: http://www.networkadvertising.org/choices/ Local governments require certain things of new apartments. A minimum square foot size. A window in each bedroom. A way to keep occupants safe when the building catches fire. And, curiously, a parking space. Since the mid-20th century, U.S. cities have insisted that new homes, offices, restaurants, stores, theaters, and practically anything else you could imagine building be built with new parking spaces. To be sure, parking is an amenity, like a hot tub or a walk-in closet. But a legal requirement? There were two reasons planners thought this made sense. First, cities were afraid that their lack of parking, and generally poor accommodation of automobile traffic, had put them at a disadvantage compared to the then-booming suburbs. Second, residents were reluctant to permit new development if they thought new neighbors would compete for precious street parking spaces. (David Baker and Brad Leibin recall a San Francisco Planning commissioner denying a permit for a two-unit building with a restaurant downstairs, saying, I moved from Manhattan to San Francisco so I could park.) And so virtually every large city in the country made parking spaces as fundamental a component of new buildings as staircases. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Thats starting to change. Hartford, Connecticut eliminated parking minimums last year. Other cities, like Buffalo, New York, New York City, and Cincinnati, have selectively relaxed the requirements in certain areas or for certain types of buildings. This month, Minneapolis approved a plan to get rid of parking minimums. And last week, San Francisco became the largest U.S. city to shed the requirement, the culmination of a series of reforms. Developers will still be able to build parking spaces, of course. But they will no longer be bound by the citys ancient formulas to provide them. Which means they can again build the mix of early 20th-century buildings for which San Francisco is famous, most of which were illegal to reproduce under the mid-century code. (Though there were workarounds, like building bicycle parking.) In short, as the transit planner Jarrett Walker put it, San Francisco legalized itself. Advertisement Advertisement Why is this happening now? A few reasons: First, cities realized that residents and business owners had higher priorities than Can I park here?and in fact, some of the countrys least-car-friendly cities have become its most desirable. (See: Francisco, San.) Second, all that required parking functioned, as UCLA parking studies doyen Donald Shoup put it, like a fertility drug for cars, as lifestyles, budgets, streetscapes, and architecture were warped around the parking space subsidy. With an eye on stemming greenhouse-gas emissions, cities like San Francisco now want to reduce vehicle dependency. Third, providing parking proved to be a very onerous stipulation for developers, adding tens of thousands of dollars to the cost of every new unit. In a city with a never-ending housing crisis, scrapping the required parking space is an easy way to lower construction costs. Advertisement Advertisement Rider Levett Bucknall, a consulting firm that estimates real estate costs, pegged the 2012 costs of building parking spots in San Francisco at $29,000 above ground and $38,000 below ground. (That figure doesnt include land costs.) In 2006, the Bay Area think tank SPUR estimated a parking space added $25,000 to $50,000 to the construction cost of each new unit in the city. Advertisement Advertisement As Shoup has written, parking requirements reduce the supply of units in new buildings (because building more units can trigger escalating quantities of parking, dramatically hiking construction costs), increase the price of rentals and condominiums, and diminish the total number of lots that get developed at all (because projects with parking just dont pencil out). In 2016, two researchers found that parking minimums added $1,700 a year in rent for the average tenant, and the national deadweight loss for carless renters was nearly half a billion dollars. Requires parking also changes the way cities look and feel, making it harder to get around without a car. Consider Houston, which famously has no zoning, but maintains a car-centric, sprawly feel through setbacks and parking requirements. As pressure mounts for cities to tackle greenhouse-gas emissions and reduce housing prices, expect to see more cities following San Franciscos lead. Looking to park downtown? Ride a bike. Earlier this year, when I learned that a book called Milkman had been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and that its author was from Northern Ireland, and that her name was Anna Burns, I performed a kind of psychopolitical triangulation that might be peculiar to the small and violently bisected island of which both she and I are natives (she: north; I: south). I found myself more or less reflexively calculating the extent to which this novelistwith whom Ill confess I, like most people from the Republic, was previously unfamiliarcould be claimed as an Irish writer, and I found myself doing so based on nothing more than her name. Burns, by my reckoning, had a distinctly Protestant ring to it; I myself had attended a Protestant secondary school and had known there a fair number of Burnses, and so in all likelihood, claims of this authors Irishness would be complicated, and maybe even outright scuppered, by the matter of her religious heritage. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement The foregoing is as irreducibly Irish as it is absurd, but I begin with it for the reason that this politicized business of names turns out to be central to Milkman itself. From the opening sentenceThe day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman diedBurns narrator, herself unnamed, signals her obstinate refusal of proper nouns. Nobody in these pages gets a name: Her siblings are first sister, second sister, third brother; her love interest is maybe-boyfriend, while he refers to her as maybe-girlfriend; her best friend is longest friend from primary school, and so on. And although the books setting is clearly Northern Ireland in the 1970s, in a city that is probably but by no means unambiguously Belfast, the names of places (neighborhoods, streets, landmarks) are similarly withheld. Neither are there any references to the Republic of Ireland or the occupying power of Britain; there are only the countries over the border and over the water. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement This might sound like a perverse strategy of willful obscurantism, but in fact Milkmans formal strangeness proceeds naturally from the strangeness of the story it tells and the place in which it is set. In Northern Ireland during the worst years of the Troubles, proper nouns were like suspect devices: charged with violent potential, and to be treated with extreme caution. Everything you needed to know about a person could be extrapolated from their name, the school they went to, and the street they lived on. And what you needed to know, always, was whether the person was one of us or one of them. You might have been wrongas I was about Anna Burns, who grew up in the Ardoyne area of Belfast, a nationalist stronghold surrounded by unionist neighborhoodsbut the question nonetheless demanded an answer. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement But in telling her story without names, Burns narrator heightens, rather than defuses, this violent political charge, and deepens the oppressive interiority of her narrative. Milkman deals in industrial-strength estrangement and depersonalization. And depersonalization is central to its plotthough really its less a plot than a setup whose foundations are obsessively deepened over the course of about 370 pageswhich concerns a particularly insidious and creepy campaign of sexual harassment and its disastrous ramifications. The 18-year-old narrator is marked out in her community as an eccentric for her habit of walking everywhere with her face hidden in the pages of 19th-century novels. (I did not like twentieth-century books, because I did not like the twentieth century, she explains, not unreasonably.) Out of nowhere, like a human malediction, appears a paramilitary potentate known only as the milkman, who, though he is married and twice her age, takes a sexual interest in her that is both strangely indirecthe neither touches her nor looks directly at her while addressing herand oppressively all-consuming. At eighteen, she says, I had no proper understanding of the ways that constituted encroachment. I had a feeling for them, an intuition, a sense of repugnance for some situations and some people, but I did not know intuition and repugnance counted, did not know I had a right not to like, not to have to put up with, anybody and everybody coming near. But despite her resistance to his advances, the community becomes convinced that they are lovers, and she is subject to a strange kind of ostracismboth reviled as an adulterer and treated with a kind of arms-length obsequiousness as the lover of a leading paramilitary figure. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement For all the simplicity of its setup, Milkman is a richly complex portrayal of a besieged community and its traumatized citizens, of lives lived within many concentric circles of oppression. There is, firstly, the outer circle of political oppression: the occupation of Northern Ireland by the the country over the water. Then there are the Republican paramilitariesonly ever referred to in the novel as renouncers of the state, as opposed to the defenders of the state, their Loyalist opposite numberswhose righteous resistance to that occupation, and defense of the nationalist population against it, has degraded into a kind of protection racket, a tighter circle of oppression. Then there is the community, which acts as an informal surveillance apparatus, in which everyone is in a state of constant vigilance to the possible transgressions of everyone else. But at the very center of the novels diagram of concentric oppressions is the relentless force with which each of Burns characters police their own inner and outer lives. Language itself, specifically the English language, becomes an agent of collusion in this complex arrangement of oppression. Advertisement Advertisement Among Burns singular strengths as a writer is her ability to address the topics of trauma and tyranny with a playfulness that somehow never diminishes the sense of her absolute seriousness. One of the funniest and most pointedly satirical passages in the book concerns a couple who are charged with maintaining a list of proscribed namesnames far too redolent of the country over the water. It doesnt matter in the least, the narrator tells us, that many of these names didnt actually originate in the despised land that is never named: Advertisement The banned names were understood to have become infused with the energy, the power of history, the age-old conflict, enjoinments and resisted impositions as laid down long ago in this country by that country, with the original nationality of the name now not in the running at all. The banned names were: Nigel, Jason, Jasper, Lance, Percival, Wilbur, Wilfred, Peregrine, Norman, Alf, Reginald, Cedric, Ernest, George, Harvey, Arnold, Wilberine, Tristram, Clive, Eustace, Auberon, Felix, Peverill, Winston, Godfrey, Hector, with Hubert, a cousin of Hector, also not allowed. Nor was Lambert or Lawrence or Howard or the other Laurence or Lionel or Randolph Advertisement and so on. The longer the list goes onand it goes on a whole lot longer than Im in a position to block-quote here, sorely tempted though I amthe more intense the mood of hysterical exhaustiveness becomes. Like Flann OBrien and Samuel Beckett, two writers with whom she has more than Irishness in common, Burns understands the rich comic potential of trying the readers patience, and of lists and enumerations as a means of illuminating the absurdity of logical rigor, of language itself. In grappling with the singularity of Burns style, I also found myself thinking of Angela Carter, and most of all of the Hungarian novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkaithe relentless interiority of narration in Satantango and The Melancholy of Resistance, tragicomic portraits of communities in the latter stages of physical and moral disintegration. Burns portrayal of the insidious psychologies of political and sexual oppressionof what her narrator calls the ways that constituted encroachmentis reminiscent, too, of Krasznahorkais blackly comic treatment of life under totalitarianism. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Im aware that such comparisons might make Milkman sound like a punishing reading experience. Certainly much of the discussion around its Booker victory centered on its supposed difficulty. A number of reviews, including Dwight Garners in the New York Times, have referred to it as a stream-of-consciousness novel. (Just to clear up a basic technical question, the narrative is voice-driven, but it no more employs the device of stream of consciousness than American Psycho or Pale Fireor for that matter Dwight Garners review in the Times.) Garner also declared the book willfully demanding and opaque, claiming that literary modernism had given us eyes for the poetry in a novel like Milkman, but an attentive reader will spend days between stations while searching for it. This conclusion echoed certain dismayed responses to Burns Booker victory in the U.K. press, such as a review in the London Times which concluded, of a representative passage, that this could all have been said much more snappily. When I read this particular complaint, I have to admit I laughed out loud, so perfectly did it seem to me to encapsulate a certain understanding of the critic as inconvenienced customer of literature. It bears noting that some of the most memorable passages in all of fiction Borges exhilaratingly comprehensive attempt to describe his glimpsing of the universe in miniature in The Aleph, say, or Becketts description of Molloys insanely logical methodology for sucking 16 pebbles in impeccable successionare also remarkably deficient in snap. Advertisement Advertisement The books long sentences, its penchant for the exhaustive, can at times be challenging, and there were stretches where I found its uncanny energies stagnated for too long. But it also seems clear to me that these insistent strategies are in service of the books mood of total claustrophobia, and that they contribute to, rather than diminish, its overall effectiveness. As with so much of the national tradition from which she emergesSynge, Joyce, Beckett, OBrien, the whole collectible beer-mat set of the overwhelmingly male canon, few of whom get hassled for being insufficiently snappyBurns seems to convey through her style a deep ambivalence about the English language itself. Because it would be strange, would it not, to write a book about a community for whom every conceivable aspect of the country over the water was an object of obsessive and justified suspicion, and to write it in the language violently imposed on ones people by that colonizing nation, and yet to do so in a manner that did not convey that there was something uncanny, something essentially off, about that language as the communitys primary means of self-expression? Advertisement Advertisement There is a pulsating menace at the heart of the book, of which the title character is an uncannily indeterminate avatar, but also a deep sadness at the human cost of conflict. There is no shortage of physical violence, certainlybombings, decapitations, shootings, stabbings, blindings, beatings, so forthbut what remains, after the final page, are the ways in which the nameless citizens of Burns nameless city prevent themselves from ever really living life, out of a certainty that what is loved will be ripped away and must therefore never be embraced. I lost count of the number of characters who have knowingly wound up with the wrong romantic partner as a means of forestalling this kind of loss. For similar reasons, there is an unofficial proscription against the appreciation of art, or the taking of pleasure in food, or in the worlds beauty. Sunsets are a central motif in the book, not for reasons of romance or aestheticism, but for something like their opposite: because the conspicuous enjoyment, or even acknowledgement, of such things opens one up to the world in a way that feels dangerous. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Here is Burns narrator, for instance, channeling the Greek chorus of the community, in its conviction that to live fully is to court the possibility of loss: What if we accept these points of light, their translucence, their brightness; what if we let ourselves enjoy this, stop fearing it, get used to it; what if we come to believe in it, to expect it, to be impressed upon by it; what if we take hope and forgo our ancient heritage and instead, and infused, begin to entrain with it, with ourselves then to radiate it; what if we do that, get educated up to that, and then, just like that, the light goes off or is snatched away? As with much of the rest of the book, Im sure Burns could have put this more snappily, but I am grateful that she did not. Advertisement Advertisement One of Milkmans most affecting scenes involves the students of a night class in French turning their backs to the sunset, in a manner that is instinctive and protective, as their teacher insists that they turn to look at it. The teacher sees a sky ablaze with a lurid explosion of color, where the students see only blue, which they know for a fact to be one of only two possible colors of the sky (the other being black). It is, in its strange and oblique way, as powerful an illustration of the effect of violence and oppression on the life of a community as I have read. For all the darkness of the world it illuminates, Milkman is as strange and variegated and brilliant as a northern sunset. You just have to turn your face toward it, and give it your full attention. Slate has relationships with various online retailers. If you buy something through our links, Slate may earn an affiliate commission. We update links when possible, but note that deals can expire and all prices are subject to change. All prices were up to date at the time of publication. Has there ever been an art form more dedicated to celebrating itself than the American movie? There are songs about songs, and novels about the power of the written word, but they dont arrive with anything like the regularity of Hollywood productions devoted to celebrating, whether directly or by proxy, the magic of the movies. Robert Zemeckis Welcome to Marwen is one such movie. The movies protagonist, Mark Hogancamp (Steve Carell), isnt a movie buff per se. The elaborate World War II tableaux he stages in his upstate New York yard seem more influenced by comic books and pulp novels than their cinematic equivalents. (Theres a good deal more sex and violence in them than the production code of that era allowed.) But where the real Hogancamp, as seen in the documentary Marwencol, told his stories through still photographs, Zemeckis, working from a script he wrote with Caroline Thompson, sweeps the audience fully inside them. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement In fact, we meet Hogie, Marks scale-model alter ego, well before we meet Carells flesh-and-blood version.* In Marks fantasies, hes a bomber pilot shot down over Belgium who takes refuge in Marwen, a rustic town populated by a bevy of buxom, statuesque women, each of whom is modeled after a person he knows in real life: his co-worker at the local bar (Eiza Gonzalez), the owner of the hobby shop downtown (Merritt Wever), and eventually his neighbor Nicol (Leslie Mann), who moves in across the street after leaving her belligerent boyfriend (Neil Jackson). Theres an obvious wish-fulfillment component to Marks stories, in which a more forthright and cocksure version of himself gets fawned over by an endless succession of perfect, plastic females. But his fantasies can turn dark, too. The town is menaced by a witch named Deja Thoris (Diane Kruger), a capricious figure with a severe acid-green bob who can make any of Marwens residents disappear at will with a wave of her gloved hands. The town is also, less fancifully, plagued by roving patrols of Nazi soldiers, who beat and torture Hogie until hes rescued. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Marwens Nazis are proxies for the men who savagely beat Mark in real life, kicking him nearly to death and inflicting permanent brain damage that wiped out all of his memories from before the attack. Photographs are all he has left to remind him that he was once married, that he served in the Navy, that he had a life before his was nearly taken. So he makes himself a world in which hes strong and capable, incorporating his rehab instructor (Janelle Monae) and his home health aide (Gwendoline Christie), a world in which evil men wear their bad intentions on their sleeves and we all know who wins in the end. Advertisement Advertisement Marwen is the work of a filmmaker whos never been more sure of his craft, and never less connected to anything resembling actual human experience. The real Mark Hogancamps town was made of reclaimed plywood and cast-off junk, a form of ad hoc therapy he started after Medicaid stopped paying for his treatment. Those economic details fall away in the film (as they so often do), and his miniatures gain some production value. But thats nothing compared with what happens when we enter Marwen itself. Zemeckis, who flushed away the better part of a decade on the ghastly motion-capture cul-de-sacs of The Polar Express, Beowulf, and A Christmas Carol, deploys the same technology in Marks fantasy world, so instead of seeing dolls come to life, were seeing humans reduced to doll form. Rather than being repurposed Barbies, Welcome to Marwens figures have the voices and plasticized faces of the people theyre based on, which gives the arrangement just the faintest whiff of a serial killers lair. Perhaps thats why the movies Mark has been so thoroughly desexed, with Carell playing him as a soft-voiced naif whos barely more than an emotional child. Like the real Hogancamp, Carells Mark takes solace in cross-dressing, believing that wearing womens shoes connects him to their feminine essence. (It seems to be one of the few aspects of his personality to survive the attack: When he came home from the hospital, he found a closet full of hundreds of pairs of heels.) But despite watching enough porn to base a doll on his favorite adult actress, the movies Mark might as well have a crotch of smooth, featureless plastic. (Movie Mark is apparently also a big fan of past Zemeckis movies: Deja Thoris time machine, which in real life is made from a dismantled VCR, is, in this movie, patterned on Doc Browns flying DeLorean.) Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement For decades, Robert Zemeckis was a master of expressive visual effects: The knitted timelines of the Back to the Future series, Roger Rabbits fusion of live action and animation, and Contacts cosmos-spanning visions were stunning not just as technical achievements but for the way they told a story. (He was arguably the first filmmaker to use digital imagery to say more than Look what I can do!) But somewhere along the way, he disappeared inside his own computer-generated worlds, and hes never re-emerged. Welcome to Marwen is a tragedy, not because of how Marks story ends, but because its the work of a filmmaker whos never been more sure of his craft, and never less connected to anything resembling actual human experience. The movies underlying theme is that fantasy is an escape from the real world that can help people return to it, but it doesnt seem like Zemeckis is ever coming back. The Philippines successfully placed on the international market its parametric insurance policy with a maximum cover of P20.49 billion to provide quick liquidity to national and local governments, the Bureau of the Treasury said Wednesday. The agency said in a statement the program includes coverage for national and local government assets against natural calamities including public elementary and high schools in 25 disaster-prone provinces in the countrys eastern seaboard. National Treasurer Rosalia de Leon said in a report to Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III the Parametric Insurance Policy would enable these 25 catastrophe-vulnerable provinces and the national government to act faster and respond better against natural calamities. The policy would be effective on the midnight of Dec. 19, 2018. De Leon said in addition to the reinsurers in 2017, which include Nephila, Munich Re, Swiss Re, AXA and Hannover Re, a new set of reinsurers also provided support for the cover. They are Hiscox Re, Allianz Re Switzerland, AP3 (Tredje AP-fonden) and Scor. With the increased market participation, we were able to achieve a tighter multiple this year compared to last years transaction, De Leon said. De Leon said the positive development augurs well for our forthcoming indemnity and catastrophe bond issue. With assistance from the World Bank, the insurance program covers 25 provinces along the eastern seaboard, including Albay, Aurora, Batanes, Cagayan, Camarines Norte, Camarines Sur, Catanduanes, Cebu, Davao del Sur, Davao Oriental, Dinagat Islands, Eastern Samar, Ilocos Norte, Ilocos Sur, Isabela, Laguna, Leyte, Northern Samar, Pampanga, Quezon, Rizal, Sorsogon, Surigao del Norte, Surigao del Sur and Zambales.The premium for the program was allocated under the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Fund of the 2018 General Appropriations Act in the amount of P2 billion. Under the program, the Government Service Insurance System provides catastrophe risk-insurance coverage particularly for the Department of Education along with the 25 selected provinces. The World Bank, through its International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, acts as the intermediary to transfer or cede GSIS risks to the global reinsurance market, thus minimizing risks for the government. Its Disaster Risk Financing and Insurance Program provided preparation work with financial support from the UK-DFID. The Bureau of Treasury is the designated policyholder, representing the 25 provinces and the national government. Finance assistant secretary Paola Alvarez said earlier that unlike the traditional indemnity insurance that takes a long time to assess and process, this program would have quick-disbursing payouts whose amounts would depend on the estimated loss triggers determined through the Philippines Catastrophic Risk Model developed by the DOF in 2014 as well as damage reports from the ground. Since the Bureau of Treasury is the policyholder, the funds will be mobilized faster to the first responders, namely, the national government and the LGUs, Alvarez said. Ladies, gentlemen, friends beyond the binary: It. Is. On. Please gird all applicable body parts for the Ivory Tower Tussle Twixt the Twin Towering Titans of contemporary intellect: Hegelian-Marxist critical theorist Slavoj Zizek and psychology professor/be-vested mens rights worship-object Jordan Peterson. According to a report in RT (formerly Russia Today) about a philosopher fighta misnomer, since that presupposes the presence of at least one philosopherapparently Zizek threw down on both Peterson and evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker in a recent talk at Cambridge, calling them out as members of what is surely a long and storied enemies list and getting in a few dunks on Petersons preference for the term cultural Marxismwhich, of course, is a neo-Nazi-friendly coinage meaning Jews. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Not one to let polite English tittering ring out unanswered, Peterson linked to the RT report and offered the following rejoinder: Any time, any place, Mr. Zizek. Advertisement Advertisement The Twitterverse seems to think that Peterson has challenged Zizek to something as pedestrian as a debate, a battle of word wills, a cucks blathering contest, to see whose incessant use of alienating jargon first makes the audience beg in unison for a gas leak. But look closer, friends. Not only has Peterson used the classic any spatiotemporal designation best suited for fisticuffsone cannot, after all, hold a boring-ass debate in any place but a well-lit auditorium with decent acoustics and maybe also a sound system, because my PowerPoint has embedded video in it, does yours too?but he has also deliberately referred to the multicredentialed Slovene as Mr., which everyone with an earned doctorate knows is the intellectuals equivalent of a glove-slap. Advertisement Advertisement Jordan Peterson doesnt want to debate. Jordan Peterson eats literally nothing but beef. He wants to throw. The eff. Down. Which, of course, brings us to the Backpfeifengesicht Paradox. Backpfeifengesicht, pronounced BOCK-pfie-fen-guh-ZIKT, is one of those there-must-be-a-German-word-for-it German words: Literally translating to jowl-whistling face, it refers to a person whose visage begs to be punched so hard it whistles.* And therein lies the rub: Is the satisfaction of watching one Backpfeifengesicht get it in the punim outweighed by the fact that another Backpfeifengesicht is the one doing the backpfeife-ing? Advertisement Advertisement For whom does one cheer in this melee of the self-satisfied Ph.D.s of the far ends of the political spectrum? The guy who vociferously defended the indefensible New York University professor Avital Ronell, or the guy who threatened to sue a feminist philosopher for hurting his feelings? The guy who ironically endorsed Trump because he thought a Trump presidency would be hilarious, or the guy who thinks Trumps smart? The guy who calls his own students boring idiots, or the guy who gleefully refuses to call his students by their own pronouns? The guy who chooses to use his considerable intellect entirely in the service of left-wing trolling, or the guy who chooses to use his considerable intellect entirely in the service of right-wing trolling? Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement With which questionable cheering section does one seat oneselfthe rabid incels who declare all their naysayers unbangable hags, or the sebum-saturated grad students who call anyone who doesnt quote The Phenomenology of Spirit on their Tinder profile a fascist? I wont choose, I wont, you cant make me. Because a Peterson/Zizek throwdown would demonstrate precisely one Rule for Life, and it is this: If two individuals crawl out far enough onto a limb of sociopolitical identity, either the left or the right one, those limbs will bend and bend until they meet, in the exact precise location of the continuumthe time and place, as it werewhere no reasonable human should ever want to be. And yet, my fellow face-whistlers, here we are. Listen to Outward by clicking the arrow on the audio player below: Get More of the Outward Podcast Slate Plus members get extended, ad-free versions of our podcastsand much more. Sign up today. Join Slate Plus Subscribe to the Outward Podcast Copy this link and add it in your podcast app. copy link copied! For detailed instructions, see our Slate Plus podcasts page. Listen to Outward via Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Stitcher, or Google Play. This month on Outward, hosts Christina Cauterucci, Bryan Lowder, and New Americas Brandon Tensley look for queer spirituality. Where do we find it if not in a church? First, theyre joined by producer Daniel Schroeder to talk about astrology and Enneagrams, and the ways they embrace queer magic. Then they interview artist Leo Herrera about his new series The Fathers Project, a video series that seeks to answer the question: What if AIDS never existed? Then they get a call from Laura Root of Affirmation, in which she shares her experience reconciling her Latter Day Saints faith with her life as a gay woman. Then they tackle an advice question about sexual attraction and, as always, recommend pieces for the gay agenda. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Items discussed on the show: Christmas Tree, by Lady Gaga Mariah and her children singing All I Want for Christmas Is You George H.W. Bushs Presidency Erased People With AIDS. So Did the Tributes to Him, by Masha Gessen in the New Yorker These Teenage Trolls Are Pretending to Be LGBT, and Screwing Up Scientific Studies, by Samantha Allen in the Daily Beast CoStar Meet the Queer Skeptics Who Hate Astrology, by Sascha Cohen in Them. The Fathers Project The Farewell Symphony, by Edmund White Gay Agenda items: Brandon: The Immaculate Collection, by Madonna Christina: The Great Believers, by Rebecca Makkai Bryan: The new podcast Dreamboy This podcast was produced by Daniel Schroeder. Please send feedback, topic ideas, and advice questions to outwardpodcast@slate.com. The Senate, on Tuesday, voted in favor of sweeping criminal justice reform aimed at lowering the number of people in Americas prisons and reducing recidivism. The 87-to-12 bipartisan vote to advance the First Step Act included every Democrat and all but 12 Republicans, offering a comprehensive legislative advancement for an unlikely coalition of supporters from across the political spectrum, ranging from the American Civil Liberties Union to the Koch brothers and the American Conservative Union. The bill, which aims to reduce the human and financial cost of mass incarceration, now needs to be approved by the House, which voted for a different version of the legislation earlier this year. House leaders have pledged to get this bill passed this week and President Trump has committed to signing it. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement America is the greatest Country in the world and my job is to fight for ALL citizens, even those who have made mistakes. Congratulations to the Senate on the bi-partisan passing of a historic Criminal Justice Reform Bill.... Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 19, 2018 ....This will keep our communities safer, and provide hope and a second chance, to those who earn it. In addition to everything else, billions of dollars will be saved. I look forward to signing this into law! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 19, 2018 Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Once signed into law, thousands of inmates will be eligible for immediate sentencing reductions and expanded early-release programs, the New York Times reports. Going forward, the effect will grow as thousands of new offenders receive reduced sentences and enter a changed prison system. More from the Times: In all, it includes four changes to federal sentencing laws. One would shorten mandatory minimum sentences for some nonviolent drug offenses, including lowering the mandatory three strikes penalty from life in prison to 25 years. Another would provide judges greater liberty to use so-called safety valves to go around mandatory minimums in some cases. The bill would also clarify that the so-called stacking mechanism making it a federal crime to possess a firearm while committing another crime, like a drug offense, should apply only to individuals who have previously been convicted. Finally, the bill would allow offenders sentenced before a 2010 reduction in the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine to petition for their cases to be re-evaluated. The provision could alter the sentences of several thousand drug offenders serving lengthy sentences for crack-cocaine offenses. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement The vote is the latest twist in the five-year effort to enact reform the nations prisons that began during the Obama administration with the support of Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley and Speaker Paul Ryan. Sen. Mitch McConnell, as the majority leader, however, refused to allow a vote on the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act leading up to the 2016 election. Over the past year, Senate Republicans joined White House adviser Jared Kushner in reviving the effort with President Trumps endorsement. The product of years of negotiations, the legislation represents a major pivot for the GOP, which decades ago embraced a law-and-order rallying cry and war on drugs campaign as crucial to winning votes, the Washington Post notes. But as crime rates have dropped and states have pursued cost-effective ways to cut the prison population, Congress has favored changes to the system, with GOP lawmakers arguing for rehabilitating some offenders rather than long-time incarceration. It was only a matter of time before the tragic exodus from Central Americas Northern Triangle found a specific face to mourn. Seven-year-old Jakelin Caal grew up in the minuscule indigenous community of San Antonio Secortez, in central Guatemala. Her family spoke mostly Qeqchi, a Mayan language.* Jakelin dreamed of owning her first toy and learning to read and write. A few weeks ago, the girl packed a few things and joined her father, Nery, on the trudge toward the United States, a common one for an increasing number of people leaving in extreme poverty in Guatemala. Advertisement Nery and Jakelin crossed the border as part of a larger group on Dec. 6 and soon surrendered to the authorities. After waiting seven hours at New Mexicos Camp Bounds, a small Border Patrol substation that seems to be inadequately staffed, they boarded a bus that would take them to a larger facility in Lordsburg. Jakelin hadnt been feeling well, having apparently vomited shortly before the bus ride. Then, tragedy struck: At some point during the drive, the girl stopped breathing. She passed away a day later, likely of of sepsis shock in an El Paso, Texas, hospital, where she had been airlifted. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement It is still unclear why exactly Jakelin Caal died. CBP officials blame Nery, who they insist failed to notify agents of his daughters deterioration until they were about to board the bus to Lordsburg. DHS, which is conducting an investigation, insists both father and child were offered food and water during their long stay at Camp Bounds. Meanwhile, the American Academy of Pediatrics, which has been critical of the Trump administrations child-separation policy and its treatment of infant migrants, has called Jakelins death preventable. In any case, her passing, along with the picture of her still in San Antonio Secortez, wearing a blue dress, her dark hair sleeked back while she stares into the camera with a slight melancholy, should shake numb consciences: Central America faces an unprecedented humanitarian crisis that requires far more than a stubborn punitive approach. Advertisement Advertisement Trumps evident reluctance to join the Mexican governments ambitious nation-building project in Central America is both a tragedy and a sign of profound hypocrisy. Mexicos government, at least, seems to have a plan. (And no, it doesnt involve paying for Trumps wall, directly or indirectly.) Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the countrys just-inaugurated president, has put forth an ambitious project to foster development in Jakelins home country, Guatemala, along with El Salvador and Honduras, where the recent migrant caravan originated. (Thousands of Honduran immigrants are still waiting in Tijuana, in slightly better but nevertheless dire conditions.) Lopez Obrador has long maintained that the solution to the crisis lies not in more border enforcement but in a historic partnership akin to a Marshall Plan for the region. He told me as much when I interviewed him last year, a few weeks after Donald Trumps inauguration. Now, Lopez Obrador seems eager to put his money where his mouth is when it comes to Central America. His foreign minister, Marcelo Ebrard, recently announced the Mexican governments intention to pour over $30 billion over the next five years to foster development in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. We will show this is far more efficient than all the containment measures that have been implemented before, Ebrard said recently. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Over the past few days, Lopez Obrador and Ebrard have been trying to convince Donald Trump to join the effort. The relationship between the two leaders, both populists, though of a very different sort, began auspiciously enough. Trump praised Lopez Obrador after his election and the new Mexican president warmly welcomed Vice President Pence; his wife, Karen; and Ivanka Trump at his Dec. 1 inauguration. Sadly, though, the Central American deal has apparently proven to be a tougher sell. On Tuesday, Foreign Minister Ebrard touted what he called a new era of international support for development and announced what seemed to amount to an unprecedented agreement between Mexico and the United States that included, according to Ebrard, Americas commitment to grant $5.8 billion dollars for institutional reform and economic development in the Northern Trianglereferring to Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Advertisement Advertisement Perhaps eager to earn a quick win in the early days of Mexicos new government, Ebrard has mischaracterized the nature and size of the supposed U.S. commitment. As Adam Isaacson, an expert on human rights in Central America, quickly pointed out, Ebrards supposedly historic deal barely includes new aid money at all. (The Trump administration requested only $180 million dollars more in aid for the region in 2019.) Most of Americas pledge would come through OPIC, the government agency in charge of helping American businesses invest in emerging markets. OPICs investment depends on finding commercially viable projects, a far cry from a Marshall Plan that would tackle corruption, crime, poverty, and the myriad problems currently facing Central America. A historic aid package it is not, no matter how badly Mexicos foreign minister wishes otherwise. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Its a pity. Trumps evident reluctance to join the Mexican governments ambitious nation-building project in Central America is both a tragedy and a sign of profound hypocrisy. If Trump were really interested in gradually stemming the flow of Central American immigrants to the United States, he should forget about erecting walls and instead concentrate on helping potential immigrants remain in their countries of origin by ameliorating their daily woes. Although poverty, unemployment, and inequality are certainly not the only causes of the current exodusthe regions brutal violence is probably an even more important factorthe gradual strengthening of the Northern Triangles economy and its social fabric seems to be the only way to stem the flow of immigrants who keep fleeing an impossible situation by the thousands. To search for a better life is a natural human aspiration; to find a way to simply stay alive is part of human nature. If the United States doesnt want to help people like Jakelin Caal survive, tragedies like her death will keep happening. The tragedy continues: Jakelin Caal, a 7-year-old Guatemalan, sought asylum in the U.S. with her father and died during the journey. To prevent such deaths, the Mexican government has put forth an ambitious plan for the development of Central Americas Northern Triangle, a sort of Marshall Plan for the region, and has tried to get the U.S. to sign on. President Trumps reluctance to do so shows the hypocrisy and callousness of his immigration policy, Leon Krauze writes. Advertisement Last words: Many thought that a Michigan priests funeral homily for Maison Hullibarger, a teen who died by suicide, was cruel and needlessly critical. But, Ruth Graham explains, the backlash to the priests remarks ignores key elements of Catholic tradition and pedagogy, illustrating the larger tension between pulpit and pew. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement A history of violence: Anna Burns Milkman has been called one of the oddest, most impenetrable novels ever to win the Man Booker Prize. Set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, it unfolds in long, exhaustive sentences and eschews proper nouns (characters are maybe-boyfriend, Somebody McSomebody; places over the border, over the water). But dont be deterred by its supposed difficulty, Mark OConnell writes; the novels opacity beautifully illustrates the complexity of the communitys oppression. Are you on CoStar? On this months edition of the Outward podcast, Christina Cauterucci, Bryan Lowder, and Brandon Tensley discuss the way LGBTQ folx find religion, spirituality, and queer magic. They also talk about astrology and Enneagrams with producer Daniel Schroeder, who is such a Virgo sun on the Leo cusp. For fun: The Ivory Tower Tussle Twixt the Twin Towering Titans! Willfully demanding and opaque, Vicky In last months election, Democrats swept every one of Michigans elected state executive offices, and voters passed progressive ballot measures by wide margins. In typical fashion, Gretchen Whitmer won her race in a nearly 10-point landslide, and she is set to enter the governors mansion when the new year begins. All in all, Nov. 6 was a pretty good day for Michigan Democrats, who will enter office with a mandate for change after receiving the strong backing of the states voters. Michigans Republicans have other plans, though. Advertisement Just weeks after voters resoundingly rejected the GOP agenda in Michigan, the party is brazenly attempting to steal power from incoming Democrats and pass a stunning wave of right-wing legislation during the states lame-duck legislative sessions. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Among other moves, Republicans approved unpopular plans for an oil pipeline through the Great Lakes, voted to gut environmental protections in the face of a new water crisis, passed a bill that limits abortion access, and acted to protect their dark money donors identities. If the extent of the villainy seems downright cartoonish, its worth noting that the state GOP also took the Montgomery Burnslevel step of loosening puppy mill regulations. Even Michigans puppies arent safe from the Michigan GOP . Perhaps most notably, the party isnt just trying to snatch power from incoming Demsits trying to strip it from every registered voter in the state with a bill that would effectively kill citizen-initiated ballot proposals. Republicans are doing so because voters in November approved by wide margins progressive initiatives to expand voting access, decriminalize marijuana, and set up an independent redistricting commission to address the states gerrymandered legislative map, which is the reason Republicans in the state legislature have been empowered to act with such impunity to begin with. Two other citizen-initiated proposals to increase the minimum wage and to mandate paid sick time likely would have passed, but Republicans killed the initiative by passing and then gutting those laws instead of letting voters have a say. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Here, then, is a further litany of the state partys efforts. A GOP attempt to tamper with citizen-initiated legislation that decriminalizes marijuana has likely failed after it became clear that a supermajority of lawmakers wouldnt support it, but significant changes to the citizen-initiated voting access and independent redistricting commission proposals are still bouncing through the legislature. Republicans have also devised a constitutionally questionable way to maintain control over the states schools. Democrats in November won a 62 majority on the Michigan State Board of Education that sits next session after claiming the two seats that were up for election, but bills that passed in the House and are moving through the legislative process would create a shadow education commission. After a separate proposal for a shadow commission failed, many in the state thought the idea was dead, but state Rep. Yousef Rabhi confirmed to Slate that the legislation is still alive in the Senate. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Though the Flint water crisiswith its roots in the GOPs austerity and deregulation policiesstill haunts the state, the most intense lame-duck assault focused on Michigans already weak environmental regulations. Last week, Republicans rammed through and Gov. Rick Snyder signed a new law that will allow Canadian oil giant Enbridge to build a controversial oil and gas pipeline through the Great Lakes bed. The $500 million line replaces a current pipe that was installed in 1953 and over the years has leaked 1.1 million gallons of oil into the lakes. Advertisement Advertisement It comes with the risk of a devastating spill into the nations largest source of freshwater, and critics say theres no need to replace the line because the infrastructure exists elsewhere to transport the oil. The plan is unpopular, and Gov.-elect Whitmer and Attorney Generalelect Dana Nessel had promised to decommission the current line and scrap plans for a new one. Advertisement Advertisement Still, Snyder signed the billand did so even though he very recently criticized Enbridges management of the pipeline. The company is also responsible for a 2010 oil spill in Michigans Kalamazoo River thats the costliest inland U.S. spill on record, partly because it took Enbridge 17 hours to realize oil was leaking from its line. Since then, the federal government has fined the company for regularly missing line inspections. Michigans smaller bodies of water are perhaps facing even more danger. A Senate-approved bill would strip protected status from about 70,000 of the states protected wetlands, which is viewed as a big win for developers. As the nonprofit Michigan Environmental Councils Tom Zimnicki told the Detroit Free Press: Think you have lakefront property? If this bill becomes law, your house could be facing a parking lot instead of a beautiful lake. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Further, Michigan is facing a dangerous new public health threat from per- and polyfluoroalkyl substancestoxic industrial compounds that have been called the most insidious pollutant since PCBsin its water supply, and the Senate just approved a new law that would require the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality to use outdated science in its cleanups. The law would likely double the allowable level of PFAS in the states waters and nullify recently enacted anti-PFAS rules. A separate bill would prohibit state agencies from developing environmental regulations stricter than whats in the federal guidelines (except in emergency situations) and is awaiting Snyders signature. Beyond environmental issues, Michigans campaign finance laws are among the nations loosest, and some incoming Democrats campaigned on increasing transparency. However, the GOP is moving to ensure that its dark money donors identities are protected by a new law that would prohibit the state from requiring nonprofits to reveal donors identities. Advertisement During eight years of Republican rule in Michigan, meanwhile, the legislature and conservative governor regularly imposed new restrictions on abortion access. Theyre attempting to do so one last time with a law that would make it illegal for doctors to OK abortion-inducing pills via webcam. Advertisement Advertisement Finally, even Michigans puppies arent safe from the Michigan GOP. New legislation approved by both chambers prohibits local municipalities from enacting ordinances that bar pet shops from buying from puppy mills. The GOP claims its keeping puppies safe by requiring that stores purchase from USDA-approved breeders, but local Humane Society officials point out that USDA oversight is nearly nonexistent, and many USDA-approved breeders actually operate puppy mills. I hate those bills, Rep. Adam Zemke, DAnn Arbor, told the local nonpartisan publication Bridge. Who wants to make it easier to sell puppy mill puppies in a pet shop, without a local community being able to have a say in that? Its ridiculous. For this group of outgoing GOP leaders, its just par for the course. President Donald Trump and his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, claim that the men around the president have betrayed him. First these rats turned on Trump. Then they lied about him. Then they did the dirtiest thing of all: They produced evidence. One after another, people who worked for Trump, with Trump, or in his governmentformer FBI Director James Comey, attorney Michael Cohen, media executive David Pecker, FBI agents, and federal prosecutorshave come under attack for proving that Trump is lying. Advertisement Heres how the cycle goes. First, Trump does something corrupt: He buys a womans silence, covers up contacts with Russians, or fires investigators who try to find out what happened. Then, when subordinates disclose his corrupt acts, he says theyre lying. Then, when the subordinates present evidence to support their allegationsmemos, phone calls, witnesses, financial recordsTrump and Giuliani accuse them of treachery for collecting or releasing the evidence. In the upside-down logic of Trump and Giuliani, anyone who proves Trump is lying cant be trusted. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Cohen, Trumps longtime fixer and lawyer, seemed loyal. For months, he backed up Trumps story that the president hadnt known about pre-election payments to women who claimed to have had affairs with him. Michael is a good person, the president told Fox News in April. Advertisement Advertisement Then Cohen turned on Trump. In August, he told a judge that Trump had directed the payments. Not true, said Trump and Giuliani. Those charges were just agreed to by [Cohen] in order to embarrass the president and get a much reduced prison sentence, Trump tweeted on Thursday. On Sunday, Giuliani called Cohen a complete pathological liar. Its Trumps word against Cohens, said Giuliani, and Cohen isnt credible, since he has changed his story. Theres no way to believe Cohen over Trump, Giuliani told ABCs George Stephanopoulos, other than taking Cohens word for it. But it turns out there is a way. Cohen, that snitch, recorded a phone call with Trump in September 2016. In the audio, posted by CNN in July, Trump can be heard discussing with Cohen the amount that would be paid to one woman, the intermediary who would handle it, and the Trump Organization executive who had signed off on the plan. Advertisement Advertisement How have Trump and Giuliani responded to this evidence? By attacking Cohen for recording the call. What kind of a lawyer would tape a client? Trump raged on Twitter after the audio was posted. On Sunday, the president called Cohen a rat. Giuliani, in Sunday interviews on ABC and Fox News, called Cohens behavior outrageous, not just because Cohen recorded Trump, but because Cohen revealed the tape. In Trumps eyes, Cohen isnt alone in his treachery. The recording came to light because the FBI raided Cohens office in April, pursuant to a warrant issued by a federal judge. Now they do the Unthinkable, and RAID a lawyers office for information! Trump fumed when he learned of the evidence-collecting operation. On Sunday, Trump tweeted, Michael Cohen only became a Rat after the FBI did something which was absolutely unthinkable & unheard of until the Witch Hunt was illegally started. They BROKE INTO AN ATTORNEYS OFFICE! Trumps accusation was false, but it faithfully reflected his gangster mentality. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Trump and Giuliani said the recorded call didnt prove that the payments to silence women had violated campaign finance laws. But that defense is falling apart, too, thanks to Pecker, the tabloid executive who collaborated with Trump in the payment plan. On Nov. 9, the Wall Street Journal, citing a draft indictment and other documents, said prosecutors had evidence that Trump was involved in or briefed on nearly every step of the agreements. He directed deals in phone calls and meetings, including an August 2015 sit-down with Pecker and Cohen at Trump Tower.* The evidence included a request, sent from Pecker to Cohen, to abort the payment deal because it might count as an in-kind campaign contribution. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Documents released in the past two weeks indicate that Pecker, a longtime friend of Trumps, has provided additional evidence to nail down the campaign finance charge. A sentencing memo filed against Cohen on Dec. 7 by Robert Khuzami, a Republican U.S. attorney, refers to an August 2014 meeting between Trump, Cohen, and Pecker. On Dec. 12, Khuzami announced that Peckers company, American Media Inc., had struck an agreement with prosecutors. Under the agreement, AMI admitted to making a $150,000 paymentmentioned by Trump in his recorded call with Cohenin concert with a candidates presidential campaign. Giuliani says Pecker is just another rat. Thats why David Pecker got immunity, the former mayor told Stephanopoulos: because Pecker is saying what [prosecutors] want him to say. Giuliani dismissed Cohen and Pecker as a serial liar and a guy whos been given complete immunity. Advertisement Comeys memos. Cohens audio recording. The FBI s intercepts of Flynn. Everywhere you look, the evidence corroborates the presidents accusers. Trump and Giuliani are also attacking the FBI for exposing the deceit of Michael Flynn, the presidents former national security adviser. Last year, Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russians. Initially, Trump conceded that Flynn had lied. Now, however, Trump and Giuliani are disputing it. Advertisement Advertisement The FBI has proof that Flynn lied: Intelligence intercepts of his phone calls contradict his denials. But Giuliani says the FBIs use of that evidence was a dirty trick. They put Flynn through questioning, and he says something wrong, Giuliani recounted to Stephanopoulos. And they got a document there that contradicts it. If they were searching for the truth, theyd show him the document, and theyd say, General, does this refresh your recollection? Instead, said Giuliani, They hid it so they could jam him for perjury. Advertisement Giuliani blames Comey for this unethical use of evidence. Its the latest in a long line of attacks on the former FBI director by Trump and Giuliani. In particular, they claim that Comey concocted a story about Flynn. Comey says that on Feb. 14, 2017, Trump ended an Oval Office meeting by telling everyone but Comey to leave the room. Then, according to Comey, the president asked him to let go of the FBIs investigation of Flynn. Trump says thats a lie. On May 18, 2017, nine days after he fired Comey, Trump denied that he had ever urged Comey in any way, shape, or form to close or to back down the investigation into Michael Flynn. In December 2017, Trump called it another Comey lie and repeated, I never asked Comey to stop investigating Flynn. Trump also says Comey lied about a January 2017 dinner at which, according to Comey, Trump asked the thenFBI director for personal allegiance. I never asked Comey for Personal Loyalty, the president tweeted earlier this year. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Giuliani calls Comeys story about the February 2017 meeting a complete fabrication. There was no conversation about Michael Flynn, Giuliani told CNNs Jake Tapper in August. The conversation never took place. Its Trumps word against Comeys, says the former mayor, and Comeys version is less credible, because not until May 2017, after he was fired, did Comey claim that Trump had pressured him. All of a sudden, in May, he says he felt obstructed, he felt pressured, Giuliani told Tapper. Advertisement Advertisement Thats not true. Comey felt pressured from the beginning, and his story has remained consistent. We know this because after each meeting with Trump, Comey recorded the presidents words and deeds in a memo. Each memo included details that could be independently verifiedfor example, the names of the officials Trump had ordered out of the Oval Office before the Flynn conversation. Each memo also matched what Trump had told other witnesses. And by distributing his memos contemporaneously to colleagues at the FBI, Comey showed good faith: If the memos were false, and if the meetings with Trump had been tapedas Trump at one point suggestedthe memos would be exposed as lies. Comey couldnt go back and revise them. Advertisement Advertisement For recording and disclosing the truth, Comey now stands accused of treachery. James Comey is a proven LEAKER & LIAR, Trump tweeted in April. He leaked CLASSIFIED information, for which he should be prosecuted. That charge was falsethe memos werent classifiedbut Trump, furious that they exposed his corruption, portrayed them as state secrets. James Comeys Memos are Classified, I did not Declassify them, the president declared. They belong to our Government! Therefore, he broke the law! Giuliani, too, misrepresented the memos. Comey should be prosecuted for leaking confidential FBI information, he told Sean Hannity in May. Comeys memos. Cohens audio recording. The FBIs intercepts of Flynn. AMIs and the Trump Organizations financial records. Everywhere you look, the evidence corroborates the presidents accusers. Thats why Trump and Giuliani are calling these people rats and leakers. Its not because Trumps accusers are lying. Its because theyre telling the truth, and they have the goods to prove it. Twenty years ago, a sharply divided House of Representatives voted to impeach President Clinton, against the wishes of a majority of the American people. Now that President Trump has been publicly implicated in serious criminal conduct, the question of whether the president will be impeached and removed from office is once again front and center. Trump has already begun to fan the flames of outrage at the prospect, declaring that people would revolt in the face of impeachment proceedings. The presidents open threat of mob violence is outrageous, but it is also a stark reminder that, if pursued unwisely and without sufficient bipartisan support, efforts to impeach a president can further divide the nation. Advertisement This risk places a heavy burden on Congress in deciding whether, and when, to invoke its constitutional authority to impeach. A nascent debate has commenced among Trump opponents, reflecting starkly different views on the subject: whether to move swiftly to impeach in light of the scandals currently surrounding the president, or to take a longer-term approach, building a broad coalition of lawmakers from both parties who feel the president must be removed. The two sides of this debate are reflected in the views of two prominent individuals. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement The first is incoming House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerrold Nadler, who first came to national prominence as a vocal opponent of President Bill Clintons impeachment. If President Trump is to face potential impeachment, the first hearings will be held by Nadler and his committee. The second is George Conway, the husband of Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, and a lawyer who played a critical behind-the-scenes role in the unsuccessful effort to take down Clinton in the 1990s. Advertisement Advertisement Conway, who not so long ago was planning to become a senior member of the Trump Justice Department, is articulating the most aggressive standard for removal of the president, just as he did 20 years ago. Nadler, by contrast, has adopted a far more restrained standard. Removing a president cannot be accomplished solely with the support of his most ardent opponents, however justified their opposition may be. As Conway recently explained in an interview with Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman, during the Clinton proceedings, he viewed the test for impeachment in stark and unambiguous terms: If the president committed perjury by lying under oath about a material fact, he should be impeached and removed from office, regardless of the context of the subject matter. Conway has also emphasized his belief in the importance of consistency, which he believes mandates that the same standard of conduct he wished to see applied to Clinton should likewise apply to Trump. Advertisement Advertisement It should therefore come as no surprise that, in the wake of former FBI Director James Comeys statement that citizens should use every breath we have to make sure that the lies stop on January 20, 2021, Conway replied by tweeting, I am increasingly optimistic that we can do better than this, plainly suggesting the president may soon be ripe for removal from office. Like Conway, Nadlers views on the subject of impeachment were forged in the Clinton impeachment battle. Nadler was a junior member of Congress in 1998 and was among Clintons most ardent supporters. Indeed, he drew widespread attention for stating before the thenGOP controlled Judiciary Committee that the effort to impeach the president for lying about his sexual activities had all the hallmarks of a partisan coup detat. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Unlike Conway, Nadler believes that the circumstances of a presidents misconduct do matter, and Clintons supposed offense, Nadler argued, simply did not merit the extraordinary relief of removal from office. An impeachable offense is an abuse of Presidential power designed to or with the effect of undermining the structure or function of government, or undermining constitutional liberties, and even if Clinton lied under oath, his conduct did not meet that bar, Nadler argued. Advertisement Advertisement Nadler is a harsh critic of Trump, whom he described as the greatest threat to constitutional liberty and the functioning of our government in living memory. Yet when he has been recently asked whether Trump should face impeachment in the event he engaged in criminal conduct, Nadler has demonstrated remarkable consistency with his position on the matter 20 years ago. Advertisement Nadler has warned against what he has described as a partisan impeachment, explaining that lawmakers have to be reluctant to do an impeachment. Accordingly, Nadler has laid out a three-part test that he will insist upon meeting before his committee considers potential articles of impeachment against Trump. First, Congress must determine if the president committed an offense that could merit impeachment. But even if that initial bar is met, Nadler argues that Congress must then consider whether the gravity of the offense is sufficiently grave to justify putting the country through the trauma of an impeachment proceeding. Finally, Nadler argues that even if the president has committed an offense that is sufficiently grievous to merit impeachment, Congress should proceed only if a good fraction of the membership of the presidents own party agrees. Advertisement It is on this final point that the cleavage between Nadlers and Conways views is most stark. While Conway believes that a president should be removed from office simply if he engages in misconduct that meets the standard of potential impeachability, Nadler argues impeachment is inappropriate unless there is something approaching a consensus in the nation that the president should be removed from office. The histories of both the Clinton impeachment and the end of the Nixon presidency may well support Nadlers caution. Advertisement Advertisement Two decades ago, the GOP-controlled House barreled through Clintons impeachment with full notice that most citizens agreed with Nadler that their proceedings amounted to a partisan show trial, which ended in a party-line vote, based on Conways view that perjury categorically merits the end of a presidency. By the time the articles of impeachment came before the Senate, it was clear that the removal effort was doomed to failure. Following the House impeachment vote, Clintons popularity soared to as high as 73 percent. During the impeachment process, the House GOP conference had suffered election losses and descended into a leadership chaos that resulted in the resignation of both House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his designated successor. Advertisement In contrast, by the time the House Judiciary Committee began to move forward with impeachment proceedings against Nixon, the evidence that the president had obstructed justice and engaged in other grave acts of misconduct was becoming overwhelming. Nixon later resigned in the face of virtual certainty that he would have been both impeached and removed from the presidency had he attempted to remain in office. This was because the smoking gun tape had captured Nixon directly participating in the Watergate cover-up, and as a consequence, Nixons support from Republicans began to collapse. Advertisement Advertisement Given this background, one can reasonably ask if Conway failed to learn the lessons of history, including that of his compatriots past ignominious failure in their efforts to take down Clinton: Removing a president cannot be accomplished solely with the support of his most ardent opponents, however justified their opposition may be. Advertisement Nadler, in contrast, argues that the House should proceed with impeachment only if a good fraction of the other party agrees. Furthermore, in January 2019, the partisan makeup of the Senate, which will be comprised of more Republican senators (and more of them ardent Trump supporters), rendering the challenge of obtaining the two-thirds majority required for removal particularly difficult. Advertisement Advertisement Yet it may be salutary that the road to impeachment is so steep. As Nadler has observed, the tragedy of the Trump presidency could well be compounded if Trump is forced out of office without a clear national consensus. Just as he did 20 years ago, Nadler recently warned that an impeachment that goes forward without bipartisan support could, once again, appear as a coup to the presidents supporters: You dont want half the country to say to the other half for the next 30 years, We won the election. You stole it from us. Advertisement Advertisement It may well prove to be necessary and appropriate for the president to be forced to leave office before his term is up, but if that is to occur, it should be based on a national consensus that the time has come. That consensus, at the end of the day, will only be reached ifas during the waning days of the Nixon presidencythe nation is confronted with unambiguous evidence of serious and pervasive presidential criminality. For that reason, the most important determinant of whether the Trump presidency survives may not be whether early impeachment proceedings commence, but rather whether the Mueller investigation is allowed to proceed to its conclusion wholly unimpeded. Want more Trump analysis? Join us in Los Angeles for a live discussion. Tickets here. As a professional Trump blogger whos also occasionally forced by circumstance to interact with normal people, Ive found that one thing that many otherwise well-informed Americans dont grasp about our current national situation is just how tacky and demented the corrupt individuals surrounding the current president are. This isnt your fathers white-collar shell-company/kickback graft, or at least its not only that; its something much more novel, low-budget, and darkly comic. (N.b.your father is Spiro Agnew.) To wit: Jerome Corsi, the bestselling right-wing conspiracist who the president is currently fond of because hes making noises about refusing to cooperate with Robert Muellers special counsel investigation. Advertisement Lets set aside the part of this Sunday presidential tweet involving formerly incarcerated Illinois governor and Celebrity Apprentice contestant Rod Blagojevich and focus on the part about Corsi: Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Required television watching is last weeks @marthamaccallum interview with the wonderful wife of Rod Blagojevich and the @trish_regan interview with a Jerome Corsi. If that doesnt tell you something about what has been going on in our Country, nothing will. Very sad! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 16, 2018 Advertisement Advertisement Mueller is interested in the roles Corsi and longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone may have played as intermediaries between Wikileaks, which distributed the emails that Russian hackers stole from Democrats in 2016, and the Trump presidential campaign. Corsi is claiming in media appearances, like those hes conducted with Regan of the Fox Business Network, that Muellers thugs are harassing his family and trying to blackmail him into a guilty plea simply because he is a participant in the worldwide struggle against the Deep State. Hes filed an amateurish lawsuit arguing that Mueller should pay him $350 million in damages (LOL), an assertion thats of a piece with the many other outlandish claims hes made throughout his lucrative career. (Corsis books and articles have suggested, among other things, that Barack Obama is gay, that the U.S. is going to merge with Canada and Mexico, and that a series of equations developed by Nazi scientists show that oil is a naturally self-replenishing resource that will never run out. Big if true!) Advertisement Advertisement A particularly evocative look into Corsis part of the media/political ecosystem (i.e. the part of it where fungus is growing on the bottom of a dumpster) happens to have been published last Thursday in the Daily Caller (a conservative site thats been consistently skeptical of Muellers investigation) by writer Chuck Ross. Ross looked into a series of claims that Corsi has made in recent months on YouTube and on his website about a purportedly brilliant Israeli cancer researcher named Dr. Eliad Mendelsohn: Advertisement Advertisement While Dr. Mendelsohn cannot promise his treatments can cure cancer, I can attest from first-hand experience with a member of my family that Dr. Mendelsohn has achieved remarkable results with a Stage 4 lung cancer that had survived both chemotherapy and radiation treatments, Corsi wrote on his website. In an Aug. 2 episode of his YouTube show, Corsi said Mendelsohn had cured his wifes cousins cancer. She was treated in Israel by Dr. Mendelsohn, and I think she looks better than she has in maybe two years, said Corsi, adding that were eternally grateful for Dr. Mendelson for doing what we consider a medical miracle. Advertisement Advertisement Corsi urged his fans to donate to a GoFundMe for an individual named Thomas Sickler, who supposedly needed the money so he could be treated for bladder cancer at a Mendelsohn-run clinic. Ross, however, found that 1) Mendelsohn almost certainly does not exist and 2) his clinic is a paper company registered in Florida (where else!) to Thomas Sickler. From the Caller (tDCNF = the Daily Caller News Foundation): Advertisement Advertisement The Israeli medical center where Corsi claimed Mendelsohn practices says it has no records of the physician working there. A spokesman for the Sourasky Medical Center in Tel Aviv told TheDCNF nobody named Dr. Eliad Mendelsohn practices at the facility. An open source search did not find any recent affiliations between a Dr. Mendelsohn and Sourasky. Floridas physician licensing database also does not list an Eliat Mendelsohn, even though Corsi claimed the doctor set up a practice in Boca Raton. Advertisement (The Daily Caller article spells Mendelsohns first name as both Eliat and Eliad; I asked Ross about the discrepancy and he responded that both spellings have been used in association with Corsi/Sicklers fundraisingfor example, its Eliat in this tweet and Eliad in the comments of this live streamand said he couldnt find evidence that either name corresponded to a real person.) Advertisement There is at present no evidence that Corsi personally benefitted from Sicklers GoFundMe, and the author suggested to Ross that he may have been misled or bamboozled. Of course, Corsi had previously said that Mendelsohn treated one of his relatives, and the day after Rosss story was published, Corsi claimed to Regan in another Fox appearance that Mendelsohn in fact developed special medicine that cured Corsis spinal problems after a 2008 surgery. (I havent looked into any of this, Regan said. I just know that Ive talked to you and you tell me its not true [that Mendelsohn isnt real.] Journalism!) On Monday, Regan had Ross on her show and gave another update: Corsi now asserts, she says, that Mendelsohn is actually just an alias that [the doctor] goes by. Continued Regan: I think [Corsi] was trying to protect this gentlemans identity. He says the doctors real, he goes by a different name, he didnt want his identity shared so publicly and on Twitter, etcetera. The only condition this very real Israeli oncologist/orthopedist cant treat is his own humility. Of course, praising Corsi publicly is the least Trump can do given that he helped start the birther movement that Trump rode to the presidency. The real test will be whether POTUS forces the Pentagon to come clean about whether Corsi is right that Hitler survived World War II by escaping Germany on a submarine. Big if true! Rep. Elijah Cummings, who will soon chair the House Oversight Committee, said Democrats plan to ask the Trump Organization for records related to the companys talks with developers in the Dominican Republic because of concerns one of the presidents sons attempted to discuss a deal after his fathers inauguration , he told ABC News. The conversation could hint to a potential violation of the ethics rules that deal with the presidents business dealings. The comment followed a report Monday by ABC that Eric Trump made a visit to the island 16 days after Trumps inauguration to meet with developers. Ten years ago, the Trump Organization abandoned a plan there to develop dozens of luxury properties, blaming the developers, who they sued for fraud. In 2017, after Eric Trumps visit, the same developers announced they were working with the Trump Organization in the future phases of the project. There were no formal announcements about the organizations return to the Dominican Republic. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Concerns that the Trump Organization was quietly negotiating with the local developers were bolstered when a non-profit group dispatched an undercover investigator to pose as a potential buyer and ask about the deal at the Cap Cana resort on the island. A sales agent there was recorded telling the investigator that the Trump Organization was developing a condominium at a new beachfront locationa new phase of the original deal. The Trump Organization has called the report false and said it is not pursuing any new development deals. In 2007, the company entered into a license agreement with a local developer for a multi-component real estate development project to be built over several years, the company said in a statement. Though there have been some discussions about starting the next phase of the development, there are no plans in place at this time. Advertisement Advertisement As a president-elect, Trump vowed that his company would make no new foreign deals while he was president. Critics of the president have complained that he has not followed precedent or followed through on promises to avoid potential conflicts of interest, as he did not fully divest from his business interests. (He placed his sons in charge of running the business but left it under his ownership). The ethical questions around Trumps potential financial stake in international dealings have surfaced again and again. The emoluments clause, which bars the president from receiving gifts from foreign governments, and which some critics have interpreted to mean a ban on receiving any payment from a foreign government, has been cited to contend Trumps payments from an organization that receives cash from foreign, state-owned corporations are unethical. The American people have the right to know if the President is working in his own personal best interest to support his pocket book, or whether he is working in theirs, Cummings told ABC. When his party takes control of the House in January, according to Cummings, it will request the related records within the first few weeks. BSP Deputy Governor Diwa Guinigundo Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas Deputy Governor Diwa Guinigundo said the Philippine economy is poised to sustain its strong growth in the coming years, as it is far from overheating. Reforms have helped propelled the economy to an impressive streak of 79 consecutive quarters of uninterrupted growth. That means 19 years and 3 quarters since the 1st quarter of 1999. Moreover, the structural reforms have been translated into higher potential output for the economy, Guinigundo said during the the Pilipinas Conference organized by independent think tank Stratbase ADR Institute in Makati City.Our estimates show that potential output growth has been rising, averaging 6 percent for the period 2010 to 2017. So the talk about the large output gap is without basis. Our output gap is either a small positive or a small negative. So, the issues about overheating is quite misplaced, Guinigundo said. Thought leaders from government, the academe and industry examined the Philippine economic outlook for 2019 during the conference. A balance between strategic engagement and strategic retreat is imperative for managing the economy and steering the countrys development. In short, state-market synergy is key to address the primordial concern of a developing nation like the Philippines, said Stratbase ADRi president Dindo Manhit. Poverty reduction and labor expansion should be prioritized to demonstrate the presence of inclusive growth. The volatile growth of the manufacturing sector in relation with the service sector reveals an indeterminate improvement for labor. In turn, poverty reduction cannot simply be addressed through dole-outs. Reducing poverty undeniably necessitates both political and economic reforms, he said. Calixto Chikiamco, president of Foundation for Economic Freedom, said the country failed to achieve its target of reducing poverty incidence to 17.2 percent by 2015 and instead hit 21.5 percent.The slowdown in overseas Filipino workers remittance growth, innovations to business process outsourcing sector, import growth far outpacing export growth, and declining government international reserves are among the challenges of rising current account and trade deficit, Chikiamco said. Dr. Raul Fabella, professor emeritus of University of the Philippines School of Economics compared economic growth as the new normal versus old normal. Fabella said that in the second year of Dutertes administration, growth in manufacturing slowed down and expressed hope that this wont persist as manufacturing is linked to poverty reduction. Inclusion as poverty reduction fares better when manufacturing growth exceeds services growth in low-income countries, Fabella said. George Barcelon, chairman of the Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry said the government should act consistent with the law to entice conglomerates. What the country needs is to uplift the SMEs. Ease of doing business, power facilities can help SMEs to propel the growth of countries. Government should focus on both education and skills training, which is crucial for economic growth and what causes us for being uncompetitive, Barcelon said. The Wall began as just a slogan. By the end of the 2016 presidential campaign, it was Donald Trumps signature promise, a metaphor for his entire domestic agenda as well as an actionable item in its own right. Which makes it remarkable that, nearly two years into his administration, The Wall is on life support. Democrats, invigorated by their midterms victory and confident of their political position, refuse to authorize funding for Trumps priority. And Republicans, demoralized by their defeat, are indifferent, doing little to advance his agenda. A stronger president might have leverage to wield over his allies or his opponents, but a floundering Trump has only one option availablethe self-destructive threat of a government shutdown. Advertisement The spectacle of Trump holding himself hostage to achieve one of his goals is a darkly comic example of a vital but still underappreciated fact of American politics: The president and his administration are exceptionally weak. This assessment isnt just based on the results of the midterms; Donald Trump has diminishing status and influence within the Republican Party itself. This may feel counterintuitive given Trumps continued high standing with Republican voters: According to the latest Gallup weekly average, 86 percent of self-identified Republicans approve of his job performance. Likewise, in a recent poll from NBC News and the Wall Street Journal, 57 percent of GOP voters say they identify as Trump supporters more than members of the Republican Party. At the same time, presidential strength is as much about the executives ability to work his willto move people, personnel, and policyas it is about performance in public opinion. Trump is popular with Republican voters, yes, but thats just one element among many. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement His presidency is stalling outif it hasnt stalled alreadywith even more scandal and chaos on the horizon as a Democratic House majority flexes its oversight powers. Consider just the past two months: Not only did Trump lead his party to a historic midterms defeat, but his already chaotic White House devolved further with the firing of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the impending departure of White House chief of staff John Kelly, and the resignation of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, wholike several of his peers in the administrationis plagued by scandal and allegations of corruption. Kellys departure is especially significant. The chief of staff role is one of the most powerful (and coveted) in government, and yet, Trump has not been able to find a suitably high-profile replacement for Kelly. His first choice, Vice President Mike Pences chief of staff, Nick Ayers, publicly rejected the job, as did possible candidates like former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. You can chalk this up to reluctance to dive into the chaos of the Trump White House, but it also reflects real distance between Trump and the GOP establishment. A stronger, more capable president could rely on party ties and networks to find the right candidate if the need to refill the position arose. Trump, by contrast, has been rejected by nearly everyone with ties to the institutional Republican Party. The relationship is strained. Advertisement Advertisement That strained relationship also helps explain why at least one Republican hasnt dismissed the idea of a 2020 primary against Trump. I see nothing wrong with challengersthat is part of our democratic system, said Sen. Susan Collins of Maine on CNNs State of the Union on Sunday. Its healthy for our democracy. Its not that a primary is likely, or that it would succeed. But Its unusual for a co-partisan to entertain the idea. Collins may back the presidents judges and dismiss accusations of his criminality, but she seems aware that he is vulnerable. South Carolina Republicans have even mulled canceling the states 2020 presidential primary, a move that seems designed to protect Trump from any primary challengers. State GOP Chairman Drew McKissick insists that the entire party supports the presidentbut canceling a primary is the move you take if youre not so sure he would withstand a challenge. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Trumps position is only getting weaker. On Tuesday, former national security adviser Michael Flynn appeared before a federal judge to receive a sentence for lying to the FBI during its investigation into the presidents campaign. Trump is shutting down his foundation, following allegations of persistently illegal conduct from the New York attorney generals office. As the initial lawsuit said, the Foundation was little more than a checkbook for payments to not-for-profits from Mr. Trump or the Trump Organization. Trump has also ended up surrendering in negotiations for government funding, retreating from his demand for wall funding. His signature policy is dead, if it ever was alive in the first place. Advertisement Advertisement Having said that, GOP lawmakers are still covering for the president. Confronted with court filings directly implicating Trump in plans to silence women who might level public accusations against him, in violation of campaign finance law, Senate Republicans shrugged. I mean, until we know all the detailsits a sentencing filing, said John Thune of South Dakota. Im sure theres going to be a lot more [to] come out from the Southern District (of New York) and, at some point, from the Mueller investigation as well. So, its hard to read too much into it. Likewise, said Roy Blunt of Missouri, I dont know that it changes things much. I think you would have to have more than this happen before anything changes much. But this lack of interest may actually underscore the presidents weakness: To acknowledge federal allegations against the president would only serve to further destabilize his administration, a move that would damage Senate Republicans along with Trump. Better to avoid the question than to pile on, especially with the presidents poor standing with independent voters, who broke for Democrats in the midterm elections. Advertisement Advertisement Donald Trump is still full of bluster. He can still count on the support of Republican voters, and he will likely still receive support from many Republican lawmakers. But his presidency is stalling outif it hasnt stalled alreadywith even more scandal and chaos on the horizon as a Democratic House majority flexes its oversight powers. And while its too much and too soon to predict a complete break between Trump and the GOP, the extent to which Republicans are distancing themselves from the White House is a poor sign for a future where even more of the administration is under investigation. The party, or at least a faction of it, is taking a wait and see attitude to Trump. And you dont need a cascade of defectors to deal a major blow. The signs of a collapse are here. The question is what pushes everything over the brink. The most predictable thing about President Trumps semi-official decision Wednesday morning to order the removal of U.S. troops from Syria is the way it blindsided everyone from his own agency heads to Americas Kurdish allies in Syria. In whats becoming something of a tradition, Trump declared his intention to head for the exits right after one of his senior officialsin this case Ambassador James Jeffrey, special representative for Syria engagementgave a major speech in Washington declaring Americas ongoing commitment to the country. Although weve come to expect Trump to contradict his own foreign policy advisers, one aspect of his Twitter statement did stand out, the notion that defeating ISIS was the only reason for the U.S. presence in Syria: Advertisement We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency. Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 19, 2018 Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement In his speech at the Atlantic Council this week, Jeffrey listed the defeat of ISIS (which has not yet been completed, for what its worth) as one of three goals for the U.S. in Syria. The others were a changed regime in Damascus and forcing Iran to get out of there, meaning withdraw its troops and sponsored militias. National security adviser John Bolton put the last goal even more starkly in September, saying, Were not going to leave [Syria] as long as Iranian troops are outside Iranian borders and that includes Iranian proxies and militias. Advertisement Advertisement This goal is a recipe for a quagmire. Iranian forces are going to remain in Syria for the foreseeable future, which means U.S. forces would, as well. Its also illegal. Congress arguably never authorized sending U.S. troops to Syria to fight ISIS, and it definitely didnt authorize them to fight Iran. That being said, a full U.S. withdrawal from Syria probably would be a boon for Tehran. As the Guardian notes, A large US base at Tanf near the Iraqi border has been used as a buffer against Iranian proxies who covet the area as a land corridor linking Iran to Damascus. An evacuation of that base would signal a decision that maintaining that buffer was no longer a national security priority. And while its been clear since before Trump took office that the U.S. has no intention of dislodging Bashar al-Assads regime, Iranian leaders will no doubt welcome the news that the U.S. isnt even interested in pressuring Assad to make concessions. Advertisement Advertisement Extreme hawkishness on Iran is one of the defining characteristics of the Trump administrations foreign policy. In laying out the White Houses Iran strategy earlier this year, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stopped just short of calling for regime change. But Trump often seems to be more a hawk of convenience, calling for confrontation with the Islamic Republic when it aligns with his other priorities. Advertisement Advertisement Trumps marquee foreign policy decision so far has been canceling the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. This was probably less because of what the deal actually accomplishedEven die-hard Iran hawks like Secretary of Defense James Mattis and former national security adviser H.R. McMaster, who opposed the original deal, argued for keeping it place. Advertisement Advertisement Rather, Trump seemed intent on killing it because Barack Obama had negotiated it; because shredding it was a centerpiece of his campaign; because, in his blinkered understanding, it involved sending Iran barrels of American cash for nothing; and because it made his friends in Israel and Saudi Arabia happy. On his first foreign trip in 2017, Trump was more than happy to stand before a crowd of enthusiastic Sunni autocrats and declare that nations of conscience must work together to isolate Iran, deny it funding for terrorism, and pray for the day when the Iranian people have the just and righteous government they deserve. Advertisement Advertisement Just and righteous government for people in the Middle East has never been a core Trump prioritylook at where he was giving the speechand the presidents enthusiasm for the Saudi worldview probably had a lot more to do with the supposed billions in weapons deals he came home with. Advertisement Its true that Trump cited the threat of Irans regional ambitions in his recent statement on why the U.S. was maintaining ties with Saudi Arabia and continuing to back the controversial war in Yemen, but the statement quickly pivoted to a boast about how Saudi investment would create hundreds of thousands of jobs, tremendous economic development, and much additional wealth for the United States. On the other hand, Trump has long been skeptical about the need for a continuing U.S. troop presence in Syria, and its his advisers and senior officials who have framed that presence in terms of Iran. During negotiations about the nuclear deal with French President Emmanuel Macron last spring, Trump brought up the need to maintain a strong blockage between Iran and the Mediterranean. The idea is that Iran, with its sizable deployments and allied militias, as well as pliant government in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, has open access to the sea. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement The idea clearly appealed to Trump, who has mentioned it several times, but now, seemingly on a whim, hes willing to abandon the closest thing he has to an actual blockage, the presence of U.S. troops in Syria. In the wake of Trumps decision, whether it is confirmed or not, U.S.-backed Kurdish forces in northeastern Syria will no doubt rush to cement their nascent relationship with Assad, further extending the Iranian-backed leaders control over the country. Already, there have been indications of Kurdish troops fighting alongside Iranian-backed militias. For many hawks in Washington, including on Trumps own team, confronting Iran is an obsession, an organizing principle requiring massive resources and years of struggle. For Trump, it may just be a way to justify things he wants to do anyway. President Trump has apparently decided to declare victory in Syria and bring the troops home. We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency, he tweeted Wednesday morning. This was shortly after several news agencies had quoted officials as saying that Trump was considering (Reuters), preparing (Wall Street Journal) or planning (CNN) to withdraw the 2,000 U.S. troops from the war-torn country, perhaps immediately (Washington Post). It is worth noting, first of all, that ISIS is not defeated. True, the Islamic State has lost almost all of its once-large swath of territory, which it declared a caliphate, in Syria and Iraq. Its also true that Trump can take some credit for this. President Obama began military operations against ISIS in 2014 with bombing, strafing, and support of local ground troops, mainly Kurds, to great effect. But Trump loosened the rules of engagement, Secretary of Defense James Mattis stepped up the bombing, and though more civilians were killed in the process, the caliphate was destroyed probably six months sooner than it would have been otherwise, according to senior U.S. officers. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement However, contrary to Trumps tweet, ISIS, as a terrorist organization and a military force, is very much alive. The Pentagons inspector general and the United Nations have recently estimated that ISIS still has 20,000 to 30,000 fighters in Syria and Iraq, who regularly launch attacks on their foes. The groups strength is also growing in Libya, Afghanistan, and the Horn of Africa. One complicating factor is that the United States government has never figured out what its interests in Syria are. Trump seems to have taken a page from the late Sen. George Aiken, who was widely (but somewhat misleadingly) quoted as saying in 1966, as the Vietnam War was heating up, that we should declare victory and go home, when in fact we hadnt won at all. President Lyndon Johnson would have been wise to take Aikens advice. He could have avoided another nine years of a futile war, saved the lives of tens of thousands of additional U.S. troops (and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese), and prevented the splintering of the nation back home. Advertisement Advertisement Would Trump be wise to follow up on his tweet? On the one hand, his sentiments are completely understandable. Syria has become a bloody jumble of overlapping warssectarian, civil, regional, big-power proxyover which the United States has little influence. Tensions are tightly wound; rival troops, armored vehicles, and fighter jets maneuver in very close proximity to one another; U.S. personnel have found themselves suddenly surrounded by danger and, on more than one occasion, wrapped in combat. Maybe its best to get out before things get out of hand. Advertisement On the other hand, a withdrawal would probably make things worse. At least for now, the presence of U.S. troops, advisers, pilots, and so forth exerts a somewhat stabilizing forcehelping to repel ISIS, check Iran, contain Russia, support the Kurds, and shore up the regime in Iraq. It would be better if Trump had the slightest interest in coupling this presence with diplomatic initiatives, but at least its something. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement And unlike the war in Vietnam, this is hardly an unsustainable, or even politically unpopular, commitment. In 1966 alone, the year when Aiken made his pronouncement, more than 6,000 U.S. troops were killed in Vietnam, and the toll would soon rise. By contrast, four Americans have died throughout the four years of the U.S. intervention in Syria.* Why is Trump tweeting about getting out now? One possibility lies in a phone conversation that Trump had on Monday with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has been threatening to launch a massive attack against U.S.-backed Kurdish fighters in northeastern Syria, along the Turkish border. Erdogan said after their talk that Trump had given him positive answers on that situation. Could one of the positive answers have been that Trump would soon pull out of the country, leaving the Kurdswho have long been the most effective fighters against ISISopen to Turkish slaughter? Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Trump may not actually follow through on this. The State Department, totally blindsided by Trumps tweet, canceled its press conference on Wednesday, in order to avoid comment. Mattis will certainly press him to reconsider. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton may do so as well. During his first months in power, Trump was set to withdraw troops from Afghanistanuntil Mattis and Boltons predecessor, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, talked him out of it. Then again, Mattis doesnt wield the clout that he once did, Pompeo seems inclined to parrot whatever the boss says, and Bolton has leaned in or laid back on a variety of issues, depending on which bureaucratic game hes playing at the moment. Advertisement One complicating factor is that the United States government has never figured out what its interests in Syria are. The Obama administration pursued a few interests, some of them contradictory: Defeat ISIS, contain Iran, bolster Iraq, maintain the alliance with Turkey, protect the Kurds, and help negotiate a political settlement that involves the ouster of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Accomplishing one of two of those goals was extremely difficult; tackling them all, probably impossible. Advertisement Advertisement Trump wrote in his tweet that defeating ISIS in Syria was his only reason for staying there. Hes pretending that hes defeated ISIS, thus presaging an exit. But ISIS and other jihadis will interpretand widely heraldthis move as their defeat of the American giant. The rest of the worldfriends, foes, and otherswill agree. Then where will Trump be? His word, already dubious currency, will mean nothing to anybody. And, by the way, if he doesnt withdraw, if he lets his tweet drift into the ether as just another early-morning hiccup, his status as an unserious man will chalk up another notch. Advertisement He threatens to shut down the government if Congress doesnt fund the wallthen backs off. He threatens to sue NBC for the satirical savagings of his presidency on Saturday Night Livewhich, like most of his threatened lawsuits, is taken as a joke from the get-go. He threatens North Korea with more sanctions, or even an attack, if it doesnt dismantle its nuclear weapons at oncethen says his new best friend, Kim Jong-un, can take all the time in the world. Either way this eruption over Syria plays out, the United States will emerge as a weaker nation. To listen to this episode of Trumpcast, use the player below: Get More Trumpcast Slate Plus members get extended, ad-free versions of our podcastsand much more. Sign up today. Join Slate Plus Subscribe to Trumpcast Copy this link and add it in your podcast app. copy link copied! For detailed instructions, see our Slate Plus podcasts page. Listen to Trumpcast via Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Stitcher, or Google Play. In Part 2 of Virginia Heffernans talk with Proof of Collusion author Seth Abramson, the pair puts Donald Trumps trip to the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow in 2013 under a microscopic lens. Plus, Trumps ambition to build enormous Russian towers, his relationship with evangelicals, and a sketch exploring how Trumpian logic could fix journalism. Further reading: Trump-Russia Is Too complex to Report. We Need a New Kind of Journalism. Seth Abramson, the Guardian Politicos ultimate Trump-Russia chart Follow Trumpcast on Twitter: @realtrumpcast Podcast production by Melissa Kaplan with help from Merritt Jacob. Theres a certain well-rehearsed theater to publicly accusing a country, or group, or person of perpetrating a cyberattack. First, a government official or industry source will leak anonymously to a few reporters that, say, North Korea was behind the 2014 breach of Sony Pictures, or the Russian government meddled in the 2016 elections, or the Chinese government is responsible for the theft of data belonging to 500 million guests of the Marriott hotel chain. Those initial, vague rumblings of blame quickly crystallize into generally accepted wisdom about who is responsible for the attacks, sometimes with the government going so far as to issue public press briefings and indictments, but sometimes just because no other explanation is offered. Advertisement All of these accusationswhether anonymous or issued from a press briefing podium, whether backed up by persuasive, corroborating details in an indictment or merely supported by vague allusions to known IP addresses and familiar code snippetsare political acts. And while Im generally inclined to believe that most of them are based on solid, supporting evidence, even when that evidence is never made public, its also important to remember how easy it is to simply invent these accusations out of thin air. That seems to have happened as recently as November, during the run-up to the Georgia governors election, when thenGeorgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp (who has since been elected the states governor) accused the Democratic Party of Georgia of trying to breach a voter database based on absolutely zero evidence, according to a recent report from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Soon before the governors election in November, a Georgia man named Richard Wright identified security vulnerabilities in the secretary of states website, and media site WhoWhatWhy contacted the secretary of states office for comment. On Sunday, Nov. 4, Kemps office posted a statement on its website under the headline AFTER FAILED HACKING ATTEMPT, SOS LAUNCHES INVESTIGATION INTO GEORGIA DEMOCRATIC PARTY. The two-paragraph statement read: ATLANTAAfter a failed attempt to hack the states voter registration system, the Secretary of States office opened an investigation into the Democratic Party of Georgia on the evening of Saturday, November 3, 2018. Federal partners, including the Department of Homeland Security and Federal Bureau of Investigation, were immediately alerted. Advertisement While we cannot comment on the specifics of an ongoing investigation, I can confirm that the Democratic Party of Georgia is under investigation for possible cyber crimes, said Candice Broce, Press Secretary. We can also confirm that no personal data was breached and our system remains secure. In its way, its a masterwork of terrible, strategic cyberattack attributionno evidence, no details, but a clearly identified perpetrator. Moreover, there wasnt enough time before the election for any conclusive investigationbut there was plenty of opportunity for voters in Georgia to hear the unfounded, inflammatory allegations. A spokesman for Kemps gubernatorial campaign also told the AJC at the time, Thanks to the systems and protocols established by Secretary of State Brian Kemp, no personal information was breached. These power-hungry radicals should be held accountable for their criminal behavior. Theres a lot going on in there, but perhaps most outrageous is the idea that the campaign would have any idea who the power-hungry radicals were. Serious attribution of any kind of online intrusion takes time and relies on circumstantial digital evidence that has to be pieced together and assessed carefully. Since Kemps initial accusation was made in November, the AJC has conducted an investigation involving interviews, court filings, and public records, only to conclude that no evidence supported the allegations against the Democrats at the time, and none has emerged in the six weeks since. It appears unlikely that any crime occurred. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Accusing people, groups, or even entire governments of cybersecurity breaches requires no real evidence. Theres a whole column to be written just about Kemp and the ways in which he is quite possibly the single greatest threat to U.S. elections integrity (see: ignoring repeated warnings of voting systems vulnerabilities, denying the existence of those vulnerabilities, refusing assistance from the federal government to secure those systems, and destroying election data to prevent audits). Its easy to look at his history with voting technology and ascribe those mistakes to profound incompetence and technological ignorance. But Kemps decision to deflect attention from his states insecure elections infrastructure by blaming an attempted attack on his political rivals was not an act of ignorance or incompetence. It was malicious and manipulative, no question, but it was also, in its way, profoundly savvy. Advertisement Kemp understood that accusing people, groups, or even entire governments of cybersecurity breaches requires no real evidence. For years, political leaders have been setting a precedent of making big, public accusations that rest on little more than their repeated reassurances that they know what theyre talking about. Those accusations often allude to extensive, classified investigations that cant be discussed with the public, or vaguely explain that the malware or IP addresses used by the attackers are similar to those used in other, previous attacks. Advertisement Advertisement In fairness, we do occasionally get to see behind the curtain, especially when the government ends up filing detailed indictmentsas it has now done in incidents involving the Chinese, Russian, Iranian, and North Korean governments. But those indictments actually laying out the evidence the government has collected are still relatively few and far between. When the New York Times first reported that the Marriott breach had been linked to the Chinese government, for instance, the only evidence provided for the accusation was that a range of firms brought in to assess the damage quickly saw computer code and patterns familiar to operations by Chinese actors. Advertisement Advertisement Those patterns may indeed be very compelling evidence, but without any further detail its difficult to know just how damning they really are. The Times (anonymous) sources explicitly said that American intelligence agencies have not reached a final assessment of who performed the hacking. But the idea that the Chinese government is responsible for this breach has already taken hold in the minds of everyone who read one of the many, many articles about how China was responsible. Even if the accusation was made on the basis of a stockpile of secret evidence, it was also made deliberately as part of a larger political agenda in the ongoing struggle between the United States and China around trade and technology. That doesnt mean its not true, of course, but, like Kemps story, it is a reminder that government officials can have lots of different reasons to publicly accuse someone of an online breach. Those accusations can serve as a way to turn popular opinion against the perpetrator, a way to deflect blame from the party responsible for securing the data, a way to signal that the investigators are very on top of the situation and know exactly what is going on and who is responsible, or a way to warn would-be perpetrators that any future attempts will be detected and punished accordingly. Its difficult and time consuming to do the kind of forensic work thats required for thoughtful, compelling attribution. But as Kemp figured out from years of watching the U.S. government make those accusations without releasing any significant supporting evidence, its not at all difficult or time consuming to make an accusation and count on everyone else to trust you as the expert. Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. Robert Gilpin, R.I.P. - The Washington Post : His greatest book was written in 1981, but the main theory in it is perhaps more trenchant now... The country continues to reject the UNs migration compact, however. News: Receive favorite authors articles by email. Try the new feature and turn on the subscription. Font size: A - | A + Comments disabled Slovakia joined 180 other countries and supported the UNs Global Compact on Refugees on December 17. The non-binding document is designed to support countries that have taken in 25 million refugees, the TASR newswire reported. The USA and Hungary voted against the pact, while Eritrea, Libya, and the Dominican Republic abstained from voting. Precitajte si tiez: Precitajte si tiez: Slovakia won't send anyone to Marrakesh Read more The UNs refugee compact is not the same document as the Global Compact for Migration, which the UN will vote on later this week. Slovakia continues to oppose this document. Yes to the refugee compact In the UN General Assembly, a permanent representative of the Slovak Republic to the UN supported the aforementioned document alongside the representatives of 180 other countries, said Boris Gandel, spokesperson for Slovakias Foreign Affairs Ministry, as quoted by TASR. Apart from Slovakia, 26 other EU member states supported the document. The approved refugee compact focuses on increasing governments and private sector investments into infrastructure, or health and education, in countries where refugees had to flee from their homes. It is the biggest effort to broadly share refugee responsibilities that I have witnessed in 34 years of work with refugees, tweeted Filippo Grandi, UN High Commissioner for Refugees, adding nine of 10 refugees are now living in developing countries where basic services aren't adequately met. Currently, nearly 70 million people have had to flee from their homelands, out of which more than 25 million crossed the border and became refugees. What does the pact mean for Slovakia? The measures contained in the refugee compact are voluntary, which means that nothing will change for Slovakia. The country has no relocation programme. It took 149 Assyrian Christians from Iraq back in 2016, but human rights organisations say that it has capacities to help more people, the Sme daily wrote. We will certainly be capable to offer new hope to several hundreds of people a year, families with children, single women and students from the ranks of refugees, Zuzana Stevulova from the Human Rights League told Sme. If every country took care of several refugees every year, the situation in countries that struggle with them the most would be much better, she added. The parliament did not vote on the compact Since the Global Compact on Refugees is not an international treaty, it is not necessary for the Slovak parliament to endorse it. The approval of the Slovak parliament and government are necessary for the countrys representative to the UN to support legally binding documents, Sme pointed out. No to migration pact Precitajte si tiez: Precitajte si tiez: Pellegrini: Slovakia will not support Migration Compact Read more The Global Compact for Migration, which is to secure safe, controlled and legal migration, has been discussed in Marrakesh, where 85 percent of 193 countries voted for it on December 10. It has been rejected by Australia, the US, and central European countries, including Slovakia. However, the UN is expected to adopt the pact on December 19 in New York City, as reported by TASR. The Transport Ministry expects that the rental will improve the condition of the airport and its competitiveness. News: Receive favorite authors articles by email. Try the new feature and turn on the subscription. Font size: A - | A + Comments disabled The state wants to solve the problems of Bratislava airport, the biggest in Slovakia, by renting it out to a private investor. The concessionaire agreement, valid for 30 years, should concern its operation, maintenance and further development. This stems from the document authored by the Transport Ministry, which the government approved at its December 19 session. Read also: Read also: Slovak airports have unused potential Read more Based on the results of the feasibility study, the concessionaire variant proved to be the best alternative for Bratislava airport if the international tender, attended by experienced investors, is prepared well, reads the submission report, as quoted by the TASR newswire. Transport Minister, Arpad Ersek, is now expected to start preparing the tender. What will the contract be about? A consulting company recommends signing the concessionaire agreement with a strategic investor for 30 years, since the strategy involves future investments in the reconstruction of the airports infrastructure, the transfer of the current debt services and the duty of the investor to pay concessionaire fees. The Transport Ministry expects an entrance fee for the concessionaire at 5 million in 2020, and then 1.306 million a year as a fee for using the airport. The specific calculation of the projects contribution to the general government budget will be known only after the public tender is over and the complete version of the concessionaire agreement is prepared, the ministry said, as quoted by TASR. Read also: Read also: How to save regional airports? Read more The runways and related infrastructure will remain in the airports hands. In Implementing the public-private partnership project by granting a concession, the long-term sustainable development of the Bratislava airport will be secured, reads the submission report. It is expected that the strategic partner will improve the competitiveness of the Bratislava airport in the region, and increase the offer and quality of its services. The secondary benefit for the state should be the minimalisation of risks related to the ownership and operation of the airport, while the state will still have a certain control over its strategic assets. The Securities and Exchange Commission approved the sale of up to P10 billion worth of commercial papers by Phoenix Petroleum Philippines to help it fund projects and refinance debts. The board of Phoenix approved the issuance of up to P10 billion in commercial papers in October. It tapped PNB Capital and Investment Corp. as sole issue manager, lead underwriter and sole book runner The board of Phoenix also approved early this month the capital infusion of P507.925 million in three wholly-owned units. The capital call involves PFL Petroleum Management Inc. for P429.625 million, Subic Petroleum Trading and Transport Inc. for P55.8 million and Phoenix Global Mercantile Inc. for P22.5 million. The capital infusion shall correct capital deficiencies in the subsidiaries as well as for the use of expansion of their respective operations, it said. Phoenix is one of the countrys most aggressive oil companies today. The company posted a 59-percent increase in net income to 969.8 million in the first six months from P610 million year-on-year. Revenues grew 113 percent to 40.25 billion in the first half from 18.89 billion on year, primarily driven by the 63-percent increase in total volume sold.As we grow our core business, we are also realizing the value of our new businesses, as we maximize synergies across our portfolio of fuels, lubricants, LPG, trading and supply, convenience store retailing and asphalt. We are committed to delivering greater value to our stakeholders and being their indispensable partner, said Phoenix chief operating officer Henry Albert Fadullon earlier. Sales volume from the core fuel business rose 18 percent in the first half from the same period in 2017. Retail volume increased 8 percent as Phoenix continues to expand its network, having opened 545 stations nationwide. Phoenixs new businesses in liquefied petroleum gas, trading and supply, and convenience store retailing are also delivering value. Phoenix LPG Philippines increased volume by 18 percent on year when it was operating as Petronas Energy Philippines. The brand, Phoenix Super LPG, is expanding in Luzon and strengthening its presence in Visayas and Mindanao. The formation of the Consitutional Committee has long been a sticking point between the US and Russia writes Asharq al-Awsat. The UN Special Envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura, met in Geneva with assistant Russian, Turkish and Iranian foreign ministers to receive the list from the three guarantor countries for the Syrian Constitutional Committee, while Russias Sergei Lavrov, Turkeys Mevlut Cavusoglu, and Irans Mohammad Javad Zarif held a meeting on Tuesday morning to announce the formation of the Constitutional Committee. The US Envoy to Syria, James Jeffrey, is also holding a meeting with his counterparts in the Small Group to decide how to deal with the tripartite Russia-led political attack. The main aim of the tripartite attack is to hinder American attempts to end the Sochi-Astana process, and resist Washingtons advice to the new UN Special Envoy to Syria, Gair Pedersen, to find new ways into the political process apart from the constitutional committee, whose process was begun at the Syrian National Dialogue Conference in Sochi at the start of the year, according to Western diplomatic sources. Mistura had supported the Sochi conference and formed a list of 50 names of civil society, independents and women, and delivered the lists to the Syrian government and the opposition, who each have their own list of 50 names. However Damascus, Moscow, Tehran and Ankara rejected Misturas list or any role for the United Nations in forming the Constitutional Committee, as it was a sovereign issuealthough they did accept that there was a role as facilitator for Mistura, which will allow him to participate in consultations between the three guarantors and the Syrian government to form the Committee. Damascus also insisted on a two-thirds majority and the chairmanship of amendments to the 2012 Constitution in accordance with mechanisms of the current constitutionthat is, with President Bashar al-Assads signature, and through the Constitutional Committee in the current parliament. Here, Washington took a path of escalation accompanied by the international envoy, represented in six points. First, an agenda was developed to form the committee under the supervision of the United Nations; second, Moscow was accused of backing down from the understandings between Lavrov and Guterres that had resulted in Misturas participation in the Sochi conference; third, Damascus was blamed for the non-formation of the Constitutional Committee; fourth, it was suggested that international legitimacy would not be given to any committee that was not composed in accordance with Geneva and its mechanisms; fifth, the reference to ending the Sochi-Astana process; sixth, the advice to the new Special Envoy to look for new entries into the political process in Geneva to implement Resolution 2254. Within this context, Moscow gave an indication to Washington that after the Small Group meeting in the American capital, they should wait and give the three guarantors a chance. after Washington and Mistura had announced disappointment at the failure of the latest Astana meeting and spoke about the process reaching a dead end. Coinciding with the extension of the Russian-Turkish understandings around Idleb, Ankaras influence in northern Syria, and the Turkish army hinting at an operation against Washingtons allies east of the Euphrates rivers, and Cavusoglus statement about accepting to work with Assad if he won in elections, the Russian diplomatic wheel began to turn with the visit of the Russian Presidential Envoy, Alexander Lavrentiev, to Ankara and Damascus to reach an agreement on the list for the committee. According to Al-Sharq Al-Awsats information, all names and figures who had participated in the second process around constitutional options were removed and a list was developed with figures who are loyal to Damascus and who are working in government institutions. It was reported that the guarantors had agreed to a formula of 18 for the government, 12 for the opposition, and 10 independents to balance the weights of official decision-making in forming the new constitution. By delivering the list to Mistura, Moscow and its allies hope to throw the ball into the court of the UN and Washington by entering into the details of the committees working mechanism, its references, voting system and presidency, while leaving these issues to the new envoy so that he does not leave the Sochi-Astana track and so Washington does not search for new entries and Mistura does not accuse Damascus of impeding the process in his briefing to the Security Council on Dec. 20, 2018and also does not accuse President Vladimir Putin of not abiding by his commitments made in the statement following the Russian-Turkish-French-German summit in Istanbul at the end of October. The tripartite attack give Guterres two options: Either accept the proposal while developing reasonable conditions to improve them or angering Moscow by siding with Washington. Washington must either reluctantly accept or escalate and look for political alternatives concerning Moscow and Ankara. It also give the opposition Syrian Negotiations Committee the choices of accepting the new political roof or splitting between supporters of Ankara and the opposition. This article was translated and edited by The Syrian Observer. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author. The visit of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, marks the first time that an Arab leader has visited Syria since the war began in 2011 writes Anadolu News Agency. A recent visit to Damascus by Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir has prompted questions over its motives and timing. On Sunday, al-Bashir became the first Arab head of state to visit Damascus since the eruption of the Syria conflict in early 2011. During his single-day visit, al-Bashir held talks with Syrian regime leader Bashar al-Assad. Although details of the visit remain vague, Khartoum has described it as a purely Sudanese move aimed at achieving inter-Arab rapprochement after years of rift. According to some reports, the two leaders agreed that inter-Arab relations must be based on respect for national sovereignty and non-interference in other countries internal affairs. Gulf ties According to some analysts, al-Bashirs visit suggests that Khartoum is distancing itself from a Saudi-UAE axis that has long been the leading proponent of regime change in Syria. Notably, Sudan is a member of a Saudi-led coalition cobbled together in 2015 to fight Yemens Shia Houthi rebel group. While Khartoum has never stated the number of Sudanese troops taking part in the coalitions operations in Yemen, it has indicated its readiness to send as many as 6,000 soldiers to the war-torn country. Meanwhile, analysts say, the recent expansion of Saudi and Emirati influence in East Africa may have raised Sudanese concerns regarding its allies intentions on the continent. This, some observers believe, may have dampened relations between Sudan and its Arab Gulf allies, despite Khartoums continued membership in the Saudi-led coalition. Whats more, Sudan has maintained close ties with Qatar despite an ongoing crisis in relations between Doha on one hand and Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the UAE on the other. Analysts are also quick to note al-Bashirs ongoing support for certain Islamic groups in his country despite continued Saudi-Emirati pressure not to do so. Al-Bashir, for his part, has pointed out more than once that he himself hails from an Islamic movement, the principles of which he refuses to abandon. Eyeing Russia? Other analysts have attributed al-Bashirs Syria visit to Khartoums mounting impatience following its recent efforts to placate the U.S. efforts, it feels, which have so far failed to bear fruit and which might better be spent cultivating relations with Moscow. At a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in November of last year, the Sudanese president said: Our stances on Syria are identical; we both believe peace isnt possible without Assad. Whats happening in Syria is the result of American intervention there, al-Bashir said at the time. Instability in the region is a direct result of U.S. intervention. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author. The Syrian National Coalition highlighted the important work of the FSA and the need for strong relations with Turkey. President of the Syrian Coalition Abdurrahman Mustafa, received a telephone call from Joel Rayburn, Near Eastern Affairs Deputy Assistant Secretary and Special Envoy to Syria in the US State Department. Both sides discussed the latest field and political developments in Syria. President Mustafa stressed the integrity of Syrian territory, saying that, for us, Syria means all Syrian provinces without exception. He expressed his hope for increased coordination between the US administration and the Syrian Coalition. President Mustafa also underscored the need to continue the fight against all kinds of terrorism throughout Syria. He pointed out that the Free Syrian Army (FSA) was the first force to confront the Assad regime, the Islamic State and all other terrorist organizations. Since the day it was formed, the FSA has also sought to avidly protect civilians, President Mustafa added. Moreover, President Mustafa stressed the importance of US-Turkish coordination in Syria, saying that stepping up such coordination is a priority for us as it is in the interest of the Syrian revolution and will help meet its demands for freedom and dignity, through an inclusive and enduring political solution, which brings the totalitarian regime to an end and lays the foundation for a democratic and pluralistic Syria. For his part, Rayburn asserted that the US and Turkey are actively coordinating on all issues affecting Turkish security, including the situation in northeastern Syria. He pointed out that the US understands the security concerns of Turkey and the Syrian opposition. He stressed that the US administration does not wish for Syria to be a safe haven for terrorism. The US diplomat said that they believe Syrian local councils and local security forces must be representative of local populations. He added that his country also understands the Syrian Coalitions concerns about possible changes to the demographic landscape in Syria, and said that such attempts to forcibly displace Syrian communities are unacceptable. Furthermore, the two sides exchanged views on the latest developments of the Constitutional Committee, and underscored that the Committee must meet the UNs standards and be credible, inclusive and balanced. They also expressed their hope that the Committee will pave the way for a political process that fulfils the aspirations of the Syrian people. The two sides also stressed the need for constant communication, especially at this delicate, sensitive stage and that there is no room for misunderstanding or misinterpretation. Rayburn invited President Mustafa to visit Washington in order to strengthen relations between the two sides. This article was edited by The Syrian Observer. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author. Thierry Mariani congratulated the Syrian people on their victory against terrorism and stressed the need for sanctions to be lifted reports SANA. On Tuesday, Assistant Foreign and Expatriates Minister, Dr. Ayman Sousan, received former French Minister Thierry Mariani and the accompanying delegation. During the meeting, talks focused on the latest developments in Syria and on the regional and European arenas. Sousan affirmed that the Wests bets against Syria have been undermined thanks to the steadfastness of the Syrian people and their brave armed forces. He added that the interferences by states, which are conspiring against Syria, have always aimed at complicating the situation and prolonging the crisis to serve the interests of terrorist groups. Sousan reaffirmed that the great sacrifices by Syrians came in their adherence to Syrias sovereignty and territorial integrity, and today they are more determined in their adherence to the independence of the national decision and to confront all the attempts to interfere in their affairs and that they consider Syrias future their exclusive right. Dr. Sousan noted that the EU lost its independence due to its subordination to US policies and that it has become marginalised in the international arena, and the illegitimate unilateral measures it imposed on Syria have made it a partner in the shedding of Syrian blood and the increase in the peoples suffering. For his part, Mariani was happy with his trip to Syria, following the victories that have been achieved against terrorist groups, and he expressed confidence and hope that Syria will get out of this ordeal and that security and stability will be restored, and will once again be an example of co-existence that can be followed. He criticized the policies adopted by the West, which have led to social and economic crises in Syria and to the retreat of the Wests role and effectiveness in the international arena. Mariani underlined the necessity of the EU adopting a new rapprochement towards the situation in Syria, in light of the current developments, while asserting the necessity of lifting the sanctions imposed on Syria. This article was edited by The Syrian Observer. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author. It is unclear why the journalist was arrested, or why his colleague was later released reports Hashtag Syria. A number of social media websites have circulated information indicating that the director of the pro-government Damascus Now network, Wissam al-Teer and his colleague at al-Madina radio, Sonil Ali, were arrested two days ago. Sources told Hashtag Syria that Ali had been released, while Teer was still in detention. Hashtag Syria contacted the head of the Journalists Syndicate, Moussa Abdel Nour, to get the truth of what happened, or any additional information about the arrest of the two men, but Abdel Nour said that he was not informed of the issue. Hashtag Syria also contacted the director of the Electronic Media Department at the Journalists Syndicate, Hussein al-Ibrahim, who said that Wissam al-Teer would be released soon, adding that he did not know the precise details of the issue. Teer is a member of the Electronic Media Committee, which was recently established under the supervision of the Journalists Union, the naming of whose members created controversy in its ranks at the time. This article was translated and edited by The Syrian Observer. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author. The Turkish assault east of the Euphrates is expected to start imminently and will be led by the commander of the Turkish Second Army, Ismail Metin Temel writes Alsouria Net. On Tuesday, the Turkish Yeni Safak newspaper, which is close to the government, said that the Turkish army was fully prepared for the operation east of the Euphrates, saying that it was just around the corner and giving some details about the expected operation. According to the newspaper, the commander of the Turkish Second Army, Ismail Metin Temel, will lead the operation and will be the decision maker. He previously oversaw Operation Olive Branch in Afrin in the Aleppo countryside at the start of the year. Yeni Safak quoted unnamed military sources as saying that the operation east of the Euphrates would proceed according to a well-laid plan, starting with strikes against the most important targets, which are the observation towers near the Turkish border, which American forces have started to leave and hand over to Kurdish forces. During the early stages, the operation would, also strike the tunnels which the organization has dug recently, and where Erdogan said we would bury them. The newspaper added that, according to the plans announced so far, Turkish forces will strike these targets from the air and then land forces will clean out the area. Turkish anti-mine and anti-explosive armored vehicles will create a safe passage for Turkish forces, out of fear of the presence of explosives within the tunnels, according to Yeni Safak. The newspaper said that when the operation begins, 24,000 fighters from both the Turkish forces and the Free Syrian Army (FSA) will cross the borders to enter the areas controlled by the Kurdish Peoples Protection Units (YPG). The newspaper quoted an unnamed commander in the Syrian opposition forces as saying that the role of FSA units deployed in Idleb would be in bringing forces to the areas east of the Euphrates during the operation. In December, Yeni Safak said in a report translated by Alsouria Net, that it should begin the military operation from the city of Tel Abyad on the Turkish-Syrian border, adding that once it is under their control, they will begin expelling the YPG fighters and cut off its communication with the city of Manbij. On Wednesday, Youssef Hamoud, spokesman for the National Army, which is composed of FSA factions, said that up to 15,000 opposition fighters were ready to take part in the attack. This article was translated and edited by The Syrian Observer. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author. The United States on Wednesday said China and not the US should be blamed for the militarization of the West Philippine Sea. In an interview over ANC new channel, US Ambassador to the Philippines Sung Kim stressed that it was not fair to point the blame at the United States when it was China taking aggressive unilateral action in the disputed areas in the South China Sea. The US ambassador was reacting to the comments made by President Rodrigo Duterte this year that it was the US who should be blamed for the reclamation activities done by China in the West Philippine Sea because Washington did not do anything to stop it. Im not sure if its really fair to point a finger at the United States because were not doing anything. Its China thats taking aggressive unilateral actions in the disputed area, Kim said. China has obviously taken unilateral measures. They had indicated that they will refrain from militarization, but it appears that they have not, the US official added. Reports indicated that China had installed anti-ship cruise missiles and surface-to-air missile systems, which can reach as far as 295 nautical miles of the reefs and 160 nautical miles, respectively, in the Fiery Cross Reef, Subi Reef and Mischief Reef in the Spratly Islands which are all within the Philippines exclusive economic zone.The Philippines filed a case before the United Nations Permanent Court of Arbitration in 2013 due to Chinas aggression and incursions in the WPS, which is within the Philippines 200 nautical mile-exclusive economic zone. The Philippines won the case against China in July 2016 when the UN court junked Chinas nine-dash line claim on the entire South China Sea. The court also declared that the Spratly Islands, which include Mischief Reef, Ayungin Shoal and Recto (Reed) Bank are all within the exclusive economic zone of the Philippines. However, Duterte has since shelved the victory in favor of warming up relations with China. Kim stressed he was not surprised that the Philippines and the rest of the developing nations were working on improving their relationships with China since the latter is a rising power. Drug coddlers who continue to resist arrest have to face the consequences of their actions, Malacanang said Wednesday. Presidential Spokesman Salvador Panelo made the comment after government data from July 1, 2016 to Nov. 30 this year showed that 5,050 people had been killed in drug operations after allegedly resisting arrest. Panelo said this figure is way behind the figures reported in false news agencies. At the same time, data from the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency showed more than 160,000 drug personalities have been arrested since the start of President Rodrigo Dutertes campaign against illegal drugs. The total count of drug personalities arrested since the start of Dutertes term up to Nov. 30, 2018 is at 164,265. Official records also showed that only 51 drug personalities died in the anti-illegal drug operations in November while 2,681 were arrested. In the Real Numbers press briefing Tuesday, PDEA Spokesman Derrick Carreon addressed criticisms from groups questioning the accuracy of the numbers they had presented and said their data had undergone a rigid process of data collation before being released. We stand by these numbers. These were closely studied. These are the real figures. Were used to those groups releasing different figures left and right, we do not know where these numbers come from, Carreon said.Panelo refused to say whether it was a small or big number but noted that the number of deaths occurring in drug-related cases will depend on the circumstances surrounding the arrest. It depends on how those involved in drugs will respond to operations against them. If they become violent just as early, the result will be violent too. What you sow, you reap, Panelo said. It means that the people involved there are resisting arrest or using violence; thats why in the process, they are given the consequent violence coming from the police officers, he added. Carreon said 159 of the arrested drug personalities were foreign nationals48 were part of Chinese drug syndicates while 12 were Americans, 25 were Taiwanese, and 74 belonged to other nationalities. PDEA records said some P128.96 million worth of illegal drugs and equipment were seized in November alone. However, the figure was P25.19 billion for illegal drugs and equipment seized since July 2016 or the start of Dutertes term. Philippine carrier Cebu Pacific is currently operating seven brand new Airbus which the airline firm acquired this year at a total cost of US$812 million. The latest delivery completes the carriers order with Airbus for an additional seven A321CEO aircraft, which were delivered beginning in March 2018. The seven A321CEO (Current Engine Option) and is on top of an existing order for 32 Airbus A321NEO (New Engine Option) aircraft. Cebu Pacific expects delivery of the first of its A321NEO aircraft from Airbus by the first quarter of 2019. With a capacity of 230 seats, the A321CEOs of Cebu Pacific boasts of ergonomically designed seats by world-renowned manufacturer Recaro that allow for more distance and legroom between rows. Each seat is also equipped with a USB port which allows passengers to charge their mobile devices inflight, the CEB said in a statement.It said that Cebu Pacific also ordered five Airbus A320NEO (new engine option) aircraft through an Operating Lease Agreement signed with Avolon Aerospace Leasing Limited, one of the largest aircraft leasing companies in the world. Deliveries of these aircraft will start in the first half of 2019 and will be completed within the same year. The joint panel of the House committee on public accounts chaired by Minority Leader Danilo Suarez and the committee on games and amusements chaired by Paranaque City Rep. Gus Tambunting tackled a proposal to expand the small town lottery operations to generate 600,000 jobs nationwide. The joint panel has directed Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office officials to brief the House of Representatives on its operations. Suarez said there were two pending bills in Congress seeking gaming operations that were transparent and fair, and could generate employment of 600,000 workers. He said that in his province alone, there were about 35,000 to 38,000 marginal workers who lack the necessary criteria or diploma. Some of them maybe did not finish high school. What is important is that they can write numbers [and do] subtraction, addition. Those are the primary jobs of a collector or a . We still have many other places that do not have STLs, said Suarez. He said the intention of the two committees was to assist the PCSO in getting a franchise. Weve checked from the records of Congress and there was no franchise given to PCSO, he said. Bear in mind, what we are going to do is to help the PCSO to legalize what they are doing because right now they are not allowed to do so. Technically they are doing an illegal act because there is no congressional franchise to operate the STL. [What they have] is a franchise to operate the sweepstakes under an executive order. big lotto he said. Tambunting, meanwhile, said the meeting was being conducted to apprise the committee how the PCSO was coping as the principal agency tasked to raise and provide funds for health programs, medical assistance and services and charities of national character without funding from the national government.He questioned the PCSOs move to hire a consultancy firm for P46 million and to assist in the procurement of the P10.9-billion online lottery project. Assistant General Manager for Management Services and current bids and awards committee chairman Lauro Patiag said the procurement for the information technology gaming consultancy services is ongoing. Part of the agenda for approval of the board was the shortlisted bidder to do consultancy services. Patiag said a consultancy firm was needed to ensure that the terms of reference, the conduct of procurement, and its validation would be accurate as advised by our Commission on Audit. San Jose del Monte, Bulacan Rep. Florida Robes, however, lamented how the charity agency intended to pay consultancy firm Isla Lipana & Co. for P46 million for its validation and assessment of the procurement process for PCSOs nationwide online lottery system. What is painful is we can pay a consultant for P46 million and yet we are only giving our indigent patients an amount up to P10,000 only. That pains us. That is the truth, he said. But assistant general manager for gaming, product development, and marketing Arnel Casas justified the need for a consultancy firm to validate the cost per component and specification per component of the system for the NOLS and to satisfy CoA's advice on the project. Car registration rates have once again decreased in the EU. In November, the number of first-time vehicle registrations took another hit - for the third time in a row. The Luxembourg garage owners association blames the new European emission regulations for this drop-off. The downslope has been particularly steep in the Grand Duchy: a mere 3,529 new cars were registered last year, which represents a 19.5% drop compared to the previous year. Only Austria and Sweden have experienced an even steeper decrease. Luxembourg's pharmacies are trying to get their hands on some remaining stock abroad, but resources are tight in other countries as well. The Luxemburger Wort first reported the news that there was a shortage of flu vaccines. Sante director Claude Schmit later confirmed the reports. Luxembourg's reserves have been empty for about two weeks now. The first shortages began towards the beginning of November, but the 73,000 doses strong stock has since been completely depleted. Re-ordering vaccines is easier said than done. The pharma industry is struggling to keep up with the production of flu jabs. According to Claude Schmit, the pharma industry also appears to have an aversion to selling to the Grand Duchy because the profit margin is not as large as in other countries. For the past two years, only two pharma companies have sold their flu vaccines to Luxembourg. Next year, for the winter 2019/2020, Glaxo-Smith-Kline will be the only remaining pharma company to sell to Luxembourg. Delegates at the World Climate Summit discussed climate change and how to tackle it for over ten days in Katowice. Finally, delegates managed to agree on an accord. The aims agreed upon at Katowice came up in Luxembourg's parliament on Tuesday, especially as CSV MPs requested an hour to discuss the aims in more depth. As it transpired, all parties making up Luxembourg's parliament were in agreement that the aims at Katowice would not suffice to try and halt the disastrous effects of global warming. The party did laud the creation of a transparency framework, but highlighted the flaws of the agreement. The CSV's Marco Schank praised the fact that the accord would facilitate seeing how high each country's carbon emissions are. Schank then went on to deplore that the agreement does not include sanctions for countries whose carbon emissions are way above the threshold. Schank especially expressed his concern that more nationalist leaders would join Trump and Bolsonaro in being completely indifferent to the dangers of man-made climate change. At the very least, according to Schank, there would be regular monitoring of the global community with the newly introduced five-year rhythm. The Left's David Wagner stressed that climate change is a question of survival. The Democratic Party's Max Hahn likened the Katowice framework to countries showing themselves to be good students and avoid being put on climate change blacklist. The number of religiously-unaffiliated people across Europe is on the rise. Behind each number in the statistic, there is a personal story just waiting to be told. Here is mine. First off, for those of you hoping for an in-depth analysis of the classic 90s track by the American rock band R.E.M.: I applaud your taste in music, but I'm afraid you've got the wrong article. Still, I hate to disappoint, so I might have a little something for you music lovers at the end of this piece. Now that we've got that out of the way, let's get to the meat of the matter. Like most people in these latitudes, I was born a Christian. I was baptised and later received my first holy communion, making me a fully fledged member of the Catholic churchat least in name. My family and I used to attend church services on a semi-regular basis, but religion was never really talked about outside the holy confines of the church. When I was about 10 or 11, I had a brief come-to-Jesus period during which I used to talk to God each night before going to bed. Looking back, it wasn't really about religion but rather about self-assurance. Growing up is hard after all and it was a handy way for me to keep a journal without actually having to write everything down. Today's generation would probably opt for a daily vlog instead. Over time, my semi-religious habits virtually dwindled into non-existence. There was no particular reason for this, nor did I develop a particular dislike towards religiosityI just simply dropped off the spiritual radar as I developed my own personal philosophy of life. It seems that I am not alone in this. According to a Eurobarometer report from 2010, 46% of people living in Luxembourg believe that there is a God, which is below the EU average of 51%. Those who "do not believe that there is any sort of spirit, God or life force" (aka atheists) make up the second largest group at 24%, which is above the EU average of 20%. Those who believe in some sort of spirit or life force, but not necessarily God, make up 22% of Luxembourg's population. "I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians" Today, I consider myself an agnostic atheist. This means that I can't completely exclude the possibility that there might be some sort of higher power, but I don't necessarily believe in it either. As it stands, I believe in being a good person just for the the sake of it, rather than for the promise of being able to broker a good deal with some sort of deity should I ever get to stand in front of the pearly gates or peek behind the curtain of mortality. I also think that we humans tend to give ourselves too much credit. If there really were a God, I doubt he'd be that interested in what each of us gets up to on a daily basis. To me personally, that sounds more like Santa for grown-ups. Also, why not focus on a more benevolent species such as dogs or the infinitely gentle and arguably more Christ-like capybara? Or even some completely different life-form on some far away planet? Despite being neither here nor there on the small issue of whether God exists or not, I decided to leave the Catholic Church. The reasons for this are manifold, but Mahatma Gandhi summed it up the best when he said "I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." In light of a large sexual abuse scandal within the Catholic church, 14 priests were suspended Chile in May of this year. To be clear: My beef is not with God or his followers, but rather with the man-made institution of the church. As a woman and former child, I find it hard to subscribe myself to an organisation that regularly undermines women's rights and has been racked by more child abuse scandals than I could ever stomach thinking about. As the church's influence is slowly waning and people are becoming bolder in coming forward to share their stories, more and more church cover-ups are finally beginning to see the light of day. I also deeply distrust the idea of accepting a belief as a fact. In my opinion, blind faith in a set belief system takes away your ability to see nuance and to learn from other people's experiences. Be it in politics or religion, defending your own convictions to the hilt keeps you from broadening your horizon and being empathic towards others. It takes a lot of trust in yourself to challenge your own opinions, but you'll be happier and wiser for it. A family affair In the spirit of challenging my own beliefs, I decided to talk to my mother, my father and my grandmother before actually taking the step of leaving the church. While the final decision would always only be up to me, I valued the my family's opinion and would not want to be the one to break with a centuries-long family tradition without consulting those closest to me. I have to say, I was quite amazed at their reactions and I can only recommend having "the talk" with your family. I always considered my mother to be "the religious one", but during our lengthy conversation over lunch I discovered that she actually agreed with me in most aspects. The exchange left me with only one burning question on my mind: Why did I have to sit through so many services and spend so many afternoons in Sunday school as a child? Next up was my dad. Again, I was surprised. I never considered him to be very religious, partially because we never went to church together and partially because the subject was just never really broached in any of our previous discussions. Boy, was I wrong! He gave me his point of view and talked to me about what God means to him on a personal level while making clear that he would accept my decision whatever it may be. Still, I could see a shadow of disappointment on his face as I mentioned that I was considering leaving the church. My conversation with my grandmother was the one I dreaded the most. We have a great relationship and talk about just about anything under the sun on a regular basis, but again I had no idea where she stood on the issue of faith. She told me that while she generally believes in God, Jesus and the Catholic teachings, she refuses to mumble along to the parts of the Lord's Prayer that she doesn't believe in. Like my dad, she talked about feeling deeply connected, on a personal level, to the Virgin Mary, Consoler of the Sad. We had a great discussion on the absurdity of the church's stance towards the use of contraceptives before the conversation turned to lighter topics. It ended in her bringing me up to speed with the talk of the town about the priest that had once almost refused to baptise me because my parents were not married at the time. Godly is as godly does, I guess. While these discussions didn't make me change my personal opinion, they opened my eyes in many ways and I got to know a whole new side of the people I have known all my life. To me, that is what it is all about: Living well and enjoying the company of those closest to us. After all, without God in the picture, we only really have each other. Thanks for sticking around! As promised and without further ado, I give you R.E.M.'s "Losing my Religion". Sarah Cames is a twenty-something freelance journalist with a keen interest in anything to do with politics, history and pop culture. Senate President Vicente Tito Sotto III on Wednesday rejected the claims of former Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile that senators had resorted to coffee table legislation instead of engaging in fiery debates. On Tuesday, Enrile vowed to bring back the glorious days of fiery debates in the Philippine Senate as he noted an increasing practice of doing coffee table discussions of legislative measures instead of bringing it out for argumentation in the Senate floor. But Sotto said Enrile might have been given the wrong information on the ongoing debates of proposed measures on the plenary. Sotto said that the bills are being debated and some even languished in plenary before their passage, especially the controversial ones. They smoothly passed if beneficial or non-controversial and/or if bill of local application. The Senate leader specifically cited the difficult and lengthy debates on coco levy, rice tariffication, Bangsamoro, Philippine ID system, the revised corporation code, amendments to the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas charter, tax amnesty, end-of-contract, universal health care and anti-discrimination bill, among others. We had very long debates. In fact, some are still in plenary as we speak, Sotto added. Senator Panfilo Lacson, meanwhile, said he does not know what coffee table legislation Enrile was talking about. He may have been out too long or he has forgotten how legislation works, Lacson said, referring to the 94-year-old Enrile, who is seeking a senatorial seat in the coming midterm elections in May.Exactly why there is controversy involving the already outlawed pork barrel being talked about nowit was a product of plenary interpellations on the national budget, Lacson said. He said that other measures are being thoroughly debated on the floor before being approved on second and third reading. Vowing to rid the Senate of the so-called coffee legislation, Enrile said that during his 24 years in the Senate, nothing was passed without any debate. Unlike today, they go into a coffee table and they discuss it among themselves and thats it. Thats not a Senate. Thats not a deliberative assembly of the peoples representatives. A democracy must be open where issues are subject to intellectual dissection, he said. Enrile recalled that he made sure that issues of national interest were transparent to the general populace. According to the former senator, who was known for his show-stopping debates with colleagues to include the late Senators Miriam Defensor Santiago and Raul Roco, the desire to bring back open debates on issues that affect the nation was one of the reasons why he decided to run at the last minute. Im not after power. Ive had it, said Enrile who, aside from his stint as Senate president, also served as Minister of National Defense, Secretary of Justice, and Customs commissioner in various administrations. Parts of France have become "unlivable" because of migrants, Brazil's president-elect Jair Bolsonaro has said, using rhetoric similar to Donald Trump's before he became the US president. Bolsonaro, who takes office on January 1, made the controversial remarks late Tuesday in a live video feed on his Facebook page. The extreme right-wing politician was elected in October on a hardline anti-crime and anti-corruption platform and has been dubbed the "Tropical Trump." "Everybody knows what is happening in France. Some parts of France are simply unlivable," Bolsonaro said on Facebook. He said that, despite a good welcome by the French, migrants were not integrating. "You know how those people are, right? They have something in them, they don't give up their roots and they want to make their culture, their acquired rights and their privileges prevail," he said. "France is suffering because of that. Part of the population, part of the military, some of the institutions are starting to complain about that. We don't want that for Brazil." It was not clear what recent events prompted Bolsonaro's outburst. Nor did he explicitly say whether he was referring to Muslim migrants, though those with North African heritage form the biggest group of migrants in France after Europeans. France is currently in the grip of "yellow vest" anti-government protests unrelated to migration. It has been rocked by a number of recent deadly attacks, notably in November 2015 in which 130 people were murdered in Paris by radicalized French- and Belgian-born gunmen, and last week in the city of Strasbourg where a French-born ex-convict killed five people in a rampage claimed by the Islamic State group. France's embassy in Brazil declined to comment on Bolsonaro's declarations. - Aligning with Trump - The rhetoric by Bolsonaro recalled that employed by Donald Trump in December 2015 as he was campaigning to become US president. Speaking to US network MSNBC, Trump claimed "they have sections in Paris that are radicalized, where the police refuse to go there. They're petrified. The police refuse to go in there." Trump also said parts of London were similarly dangerous, and used those assertions to justify a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States." After becoming president, Trump issued an order that largely bars citizens from five Muslim-majority countries getting US visas. Bolsonaro did not say whether he would impose tighter immigration controls, but did repeat that he will pull Brazil out of a nonbinding global migration pact ratified by the UN General Assembly on Wednesday. "Unfortunately, Brazil... signed the pact. We are not against migrants, but we must be have very rigorous criteria for those entering Brazil. We are going to denounce and revoke this pact on migration," he said. - Venezuela, Cuba - In the same Facebook video, Bolsonaro said he would do everything possible to counter the governments of Venezuela and Cuba, calling their leaders "dictators" and saying neither was invited to his inauguration. Before and after his October election Bolsonaro has signalled he wants closer ties with the United States and with Trump. Bolsonaro said in November his intention was to move his country's embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, joining the US mission there, although added "it hasn't been decided yet." Almost all other countries believe the status of Jerusalem first needs to be resolved through negotiations. Israel claims all the city as its capital, while Palestinians claim the eastern part as the capital of their future state. Brazil's president-elect has also followed Trump in taking a harder stance against China, his country's biggest trading partner, although members of his incoming government warn any actions against the Asian powerhouse could crimp the economy. Last month, Trump's national security advisor, John Bolton, visited Bolsonaro and said the US anticipated a "dynamic partnership" with the Brazilian leader. Wonder Caves: Ideal Spot for Hikers and Cave Explorers More Filipinos were employed this year which is 2.0 percent higher compared to 2017, the Department of Labor and Employment said. Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello III said that more workers are now enjoying stable employment for 2018, after President Rodrigo Duterte signed an executive order stopping illegal contractualization. Based on the October 2018 Labor Force Survey conducted by the Philippine Statistics Authority, 826,000 jobs were generated for 2018, making a total of 41.160-million employed workers, which is 2.0 percent higher than the 40.334-million employed workers recorded last year. The employment situation in the Philippines continues to improve as more Filipinos are getting employed through increased job opportunities in various sectors, such as the Build Build Build infrastructure program of the administration. This mainly helped us sustain the rise in employment. Also, more workers are now enjoying security of tenure, Bello said. Also, unemployed Filipinos decreased by 140,000, a 5.3 percent or 0.4-percent decrease from the 5.7-percent unemployment rate recorded last year. The October 2018 LFS also noted improvements in the quality of employment as the number of remunerative and stable wage employment reached 26.6 million, which is 2.9 percent or 743,000 wage employment compared to the same period in 2017.Full-time employment also grew by 4.7 percent, reaching 29.3 million in October 2018, from 28.0 million last year. As of October 2018, DOLEs campaign against illegal forms of contractualization has so far resulted in 411,449 regularized workers, 70 percent of whom have been voluntarily regularized while the 30 percent were regularized through inspection. This can be attributed to DOLEs strict enforcement of campaign against illegal contractualization, as well as to the departments strengthened employment facilitation services and enhanced social protection programs for our workers, Bello said. However, underemployment remains a challenge with 6.735-million underemployed workers in 2018, a 3.5 percent or 229,000 higher from the 6.506-million underemployed workers reported last year. READ: Palace downplays Rodys rape joke President Rodrigo Duterte was only joking when he linked former Interior Secretary Manuel Roxas II to the failed assassination attempt on former police general and now Daanbantayan, Cebu, Mayor Vicente Loot, Malacanang said Wednesday. Roxas spokesman said Wednesday Roxas was letting slide Dutertes remark that he ordered the killing of Loot. Caloocan Rep. Edgar Erice, Roxas party mate in the Liberal Party, said the senatorial hopeful was not a violent man. In the spirit of Christmas, Secretary Mars attitude is to just let go. Secretary Panelo had already clarified that its just a joke, Erice told GMA News Online. In his speech in Davao City on Tuesday night, Duterte first denied any involvement from the ambush of Loot, accusing Roxas of ordering the attack on Loot at a wharf in Daanbantayan on May 13, taking away the life of Loots driver-bodyguard in the ambush.I wasnt the one who ordered his ambush. It was Roxas. Roxas ordered his ambush, not me, Duterte said. Because he was told, Your Garbo, your senior police aide is involved in drugs. That was why Roxas was irked. He said, Kill him instead in order for us not to be in shame. So it reached my term. Thats it. Psst, Roxas ordered this someone to be ambushed. Who else would try to ambush a police general? Sought to explain Dutertes pronouncement, Presidential Spokesman Salvador Panelo dismissed Dutertes remark as yet another joke. It appears to me to [have been] said in jest, given the fact that General Loot is a pet peeve of the President because he is involved in drugs and Mr. Loot is a known protege of Secretary Roxas. I think it was more of an expression of displeasure said in jest, Panelo told reporters. If its a joke, then its not an accusation. And as the President says, you cant stop me from making jokes. Whether its necessary or not, that is his style.Panelo also defended Dutertes remarks by saying Dutertes statements were not a form of bullying, even if it involved someones reputation. I do not think so. People make jokes. It doesnt mean youre bullying someone. If it is a joke, it doesnt involve a reputation because you are joking about it, Panelo said. In the 2016 presidential Elections, Roxas lost to Duterte. The President had accused Loot and other former police generals of shielding drug lords and syndicates. The mayor had previously denied the Presidents accusation, stressing he would not have the power to protect any criminal as he was busy with purely administrative works during the last seven years of his police service. Aside from Loot, Duterte also linked former Deputy Director General Marcelo Garbo Jr., former National Capital Region Police Office director Chief Superintendent Joel Pagdilao, former Quezon City Police District Office director Chief Superintendent Edgardo Tinio and former Western Visayas police Chief Superintendent Bernardo Diaz to illegal drugs. Loot was believed to have been an associate of Roxas, an allegation which the former Cabinet official strongly denied. READ: Rody smoked marijuana? It was a joke Several schools in Ho Chi Minh City have come up with an old-school solution to stop students from using smartphones in the classroom. Students glued to their smartphone screens is a headache for schools, but the education institutions find it hard to impose a complete ban on the hi-tech devices in class. Students always say that they need the devices to keep contact with their parents, said Nguyen Anh Tuan, headmaster of Le Van Tam Middle School in Binh Thanh District. The reality is they only use their smartphones to play games, surf the web and play on Facebook. To solve the problem, Le Van Tam has adopted a low-tech solution - installing some landline telephones in the school. Should students need to contact their parents, they just make a phone call the old-school way, Tuan said. Students, most of whom do not have a landline phone at home, seem intrigued by the idea. Whenever my afternoon class is over, I can telephone my grandfather to pick me up, one of the students, Nguyen Thanh Trung, said. Everyone else does the same. This is very convenient. The school uses its own budget to cover the landline phone bill, which is only around VND700,000 (US$30) a month. Tran Van On Middle School in District 1 also adopted the same solution in response to abusive use of smartphones among its students. The landline phone installation was carried out with general approval from parents and students, said headmaster Le Thi Thanh Giang. "Few students have been caught using smartphones in the classroom since we have the landline phones in the school." Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! Your browser does not support the audio element. A number of male students at a middle school in the northern Vietnamese province of Phu Tho have broken silence to publicly call out their headmaster for sickening sexual abuse that went unreported for a long time. Dinh Bang My, principal of Thanh Son Middle School in Phu Tho, was arrested on Saturday after his actions were uncovered in an investigative report published in a local newspaper earlier this month. My, 57, is being investigated for his alleged molestation of people under 16 years old, pursuant to Article 146 of Vietnams Penal Code. His victims said they had been summoned to the principals office on multiple occasions, where they were coerced into performing several sexual acts on the predator and into remaining silent about what happened. I was summoned to Mr. Mys office twice, L.V.T., one of the headmasters victims, recalled the haunting experience in a conversation with Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper. He asked me which class I was in, then led me into a private room and told me to remove my pants. Then he asked me to remove his pants, too. He said if I told anyone about this I would be dead." A student recalls being sexually abused by the headmaster of Thanh Son Middle School in Phu Tho Province, located in northern Vietnam. Photo: Tuoi Tre T. said it lasted nearly one hour each time he was summoned to the principals office. As it is a boarding school, T. said he received several other invitations to the principals office at night, which he always came up with reasons to refuse. There was one time when he phoned my homeroom teacher and asked her to tell me to come to his office, but I didnt comply, T. said. A student recalls being sexually abused by the headmaster of Thanh Son Middle School in Phu Tho Province, located in northern Vietnam. Photo: Tuoi Tre Another one of Mys victims, T.V.H., said he was asked to perform oral sex and hand stimulation on the headmaster every time he was summoned. He would threaten me with punishments and a beating if I refused, H. said. Many of my friends have already been made to stand in the schoolyard as a punishment. In total, H. said he had been forced into performing the sexual acts on the headmaster five times, which exhausted him both physically and mentally. A student recalls being sexually abused by the headmaster of Thanh Son Middle School in Phu Tho Province, located in northern Vietnam. Photo: Tuoi Tre T.V.P., another victim, said he had had to drop out of school after the haunting experiences in Mys office. Thanh Son is mostly attended by children of underprivileged backgrounds in the rural districts of Phu Tho whose parents work labor jobs and do not have time to attend to their kids in the evening, according to Tuoi Tres understanding. Students spend most of their time at school, only returning home once every few weeks. Whenever we talked over the phone, he would tell me to transfer him to a new school, but he never told me why when I asked, said T.T.H., mother of one of Mys victims. As our family is poor, this boarding school is our kids only chance at receiving education. My husband and I kept telling our son to try to make it work. If only we knew what he has been going through. Parents of a student share their child's experience being sexually abused by the headmaster of Thanh Son Middle School in Phu Tho Province, located in northern Vietnam. Photo: Tuoi Tre According to Nguyen Thi Thu Huyen, deputy director of the provincial Department of Education and Training, My has been headmaster of Thanh Son for quite a long time. School teachers said they were not aware of Mys actions before reading the December 12 report on the Phu Tho online newspaper. Its pretty normal for a principal to summon students to their office for discussion about their behavior, said Ha Van Thang, vice-headmaster at Thanh Son Middle School. In photos posted on the schools official website, My could be seen speaking at a May 2018 event aimed at equipping students with the skills to defend themselves against sexual abuse and harassment. The photos have sparked online mockery following Mys arrest on Saturday. Dinh Bang My, headmaster of Thanh Son Middle School in Phu Tho Province, located in northern Vietnam, speaks at a sexual harassment training program in May 2018. According to police officers, My is currently only investigated for alleged molestation of minors under 16 years of age. The crime carries a sentence of up to seven years behind bars according to Vietnams Penal Code. However, if more evidence becomes available during the investigation, the headmaster can be charged with more severe crimes including rape and sexual assault, officers said. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc and the Holy Sees Under-Secretary for Relations with States Antoine Camilleri discussed the relationship between the two sides during their meeting in Hanoi on Tuesday. Antoine Camilleri led a delegation from the Holy See to attend the seventh meeting of the Vietnam-Vatican Joint Working Group on Wednesday, according to the Vietnam News Agency. During the conversation, the Vietnamese premier praised the positive exchanges between Vietnam and the Holy See over the past years. He believed that the seventh meeting of the Vietnam-Vatican Joint Working Group would mark important progress in the relations between Vietnam and the Holy See, satisfying the common interests of both sides as well as those of the Vietnamese Catholic community. The Vietnamese government will continue promoting national solidarity, respecting and ensuring the rights to freedom of belief and religion of all people, PM Phuc said, adding he appreciated the active and effective contributions of the Vietnamese Catholic community to national development. The governments policy encourages and facilitates the operation of all religions, including Catholicism, in line with legal regulations, he added. He urged the Holy See to continue its work on guiding the Vietnamese Catholic community to engage in national development, contributing to promoting the image of the Vietnam Catholic Church and fostering Vietnam-Holy See relations. Replying to his host, Under-Secretary Camilleri asserted that Pope Francis and the Holy See are looking to further develop bilateral relations and encourage Catholic followers in Vietnam to actively contribute to the countrys development. The Pope always pays special attention to Vietnam and wishes that the Vietnam Catholic Church will make more contributions to national prosperity. He thanked the Vietnamese government for creating favorable conditions for the non-resident Vatican representatives to work in the country, expressing his belief that the two sides will witness new developments in their relations. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! Your browser does not support the audio element. Around four percent of the Vietnamese population has had exposure to the potentially carcinogenic hepatitis C virus, many of whom then developed chronic infection, head of an HIV/AIDS control center said at a workshop in Ho Chi Minh City on Tuesday. Tieu Thi Thu Van, head of the Ho Chi Minh City Center for HIV/AIDS Control, did not mention the time the figure was valid. The four percent ratio corresponds to 3.8 million and 3.9 million people if one chooses the populations in 2017 and 2018, respectively. Van also provided results of a survey conducted as far as eight years ago which said people with high-risk exposure to the hepatitis C virus were often those likely to contract HIV. Citing findings from a separate study, Van said most people at risk of getting hepatitis C did not know its consequences and how to prevent and treat it. People are unwilling to have hepatitis C testing as the disease often has mild or no symptoms, Van said. She underlined making HIV diagnosis more available at home was an excellent way to raise the awareness of hepatitis C prevention amongst people at risk of acquiring HIV as this demographic tended to get the hepatitis C virus, which spreads chiefly by blood-to-blood contact and may lead to liver failure and liver cancer. The general public had had little knowledge of hepatitis C although Vietnam introduced guidelines on the diseases prevention and treatment in 2016, Van added. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! Politics -- Vietnam has for the first time become a member of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL), singing up for a six-year term, after winning 157 out of 193 votes at an election during the 73rd session of the UN General Assembly in New York on Tuesday. -- Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc on Tuesday received a delegation from the Holy See, led by Under-Secretary for Relations with States Antoine Camilleri, who is in Vietnam to attend the seventh meeting of the Vietnam-Vatican Joint Working Group. Society -- Four Vietnamese carriers Vietnam Airlines, Vietjet Air, Jetstar Pacific and VASCO have announced plans to operate more than 28,400 flights, capable of transporting nearly 5.5 million passengers, during the upcoming 2019 Lunar New Year travel season from January 20 to February 19. -- The administration of Ho Chi Minh City has revoked a decision on taking back control of a prime plot of land at number 8-12 Le Duan Street in downtown District 1, Ho Chi Minh City, which was wrongly handed to a third party for estate development, in order to allow investigators more time to look into wrongdoings by the land plots developers. -- The Ministry of Public Security on Tuesday announced they had prosecuted and arrested Do Van Khanh, former director general of the PetroVietnam Exploration Production Corporation (PVEP) for abusing his position to receive extra interest payments from local lender OceanBank and to appropriate assets between 2012 and 2014. -- Six people were injured when an allegedly intoxicated female car driver rammed into traffic on a street in Hanoi on Tuesday afternoon, hitting a total of eight vehicles, before leaving the scene. Business -- The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development on Tuesday unveiled the official logo for Vietnam Rice, recognized by the National Office of Intellectual Property, in a move to help improve the branding of Vietnamese-grown rice and increase its market value. -- Nearly 582,000 household businesses in Vietnam are still not subject to tax regulation despite having an established business location, the General Department of Taxation said on Tuesday. -- Vietnam has started constructing its third 500-kilovolt power line connecting a power plant in Ha Tinh Province in north-central Vietnam with Gia Lai Province in the Central Highlands region, which is expected to improve electricity supply capabilities for southern Vietnam. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! Six people were rushed to hospital after a female driver crashed her Lexus into seven motorbikes, a car and a taxicab on a street in Hanoi on Tuesday. The accident occurred at around 5:30 pm along Trich Sai Street in Tay Ho District, according to preliminary information. The Lexus first hit four motorbikes and an automobile traveling in the same direction, sending the female driver into a panic. Following the crash, the woman started to back her vehicle, only to ram three other motorbikes and a taxi. Six injured people, not including the Lexus driver, were hospitalized. Among the victims was a schoolboy who suffered serious injuries as he was stuck under the Lexus. The luxury vehicle had its front deformed, while the other motorbikes and automobiles were damaged following the crashes. Law enforcement arrived at the scene to probe the case and escorted the driver to the police station to assist the investigation. Officers probe the scene of the accident. Photo: Tuoi Tre She was identified as Nguyen Thu Trang, 29, who resides in Hoan Kiem District. Officers also found out that Trangs breath alcohol content was 0.7 milligrams per liter. Under the current laws, drivers having a breath alcohol content from 0.4 milligrams per liter and higher are subject to fines of VND16 million (US$683) to VND18 million ($768). They will also have their drivers licenses revoked for four to six months. The Lexus car following the crash. Photo: Tuoi Tre In late October, Nguyen Thi Nga, a 46-year-old Ho Chi Minh City resident, crashed her BMW into five motorbikes stopping at a red light in Binh Thanh District, killing one person and injuring five others. A test showed that Ngas breath alcohol content was 0.94 milligrams per liter. She also admitted to drinking prior to the incident. Nga was detained as police launched legal proceedings against her for serious traffic violation. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! A Vietnamese fisherman has discovered an unidentified object shaped like a torpedo adrift off the coast of the south-central province of Phu Yen. The cigar-shaped object measures 6.8 meters long and 54 centimeters in diameter, with propellers installed at its tail and Chinese characters inscribed on its body. We havent been able to confirm what this object is, said Bui Van Thanh, chairman of Tuy An District in Phu Yen, where the object was found. I have been informed that the navy is on their way here to inspect and handle this object. Authorities are already at the site to protect the object from curious onlookers, Thanh said. Local fisherman Tran Minh Thanh, 40, said he found the black-and-orange oblong object adrift around four nautical miles off Phu Yen while fishing on Tuesday. He brought the object to a small islet off Phu Yen and reported the finding to local authorities, who brought it ashore on Wednesday morning for closer examinations. This is the first time an object of this nature has been found in Phu Yen, authorities say. A torpedo-shaped object is brought to a beach in Phu Yen Province after being found adrift off the south-central Vietnamese province of Phu Yen on December 18, 2018. Photo: Tuoi Tre A torpedo-shaped object is brought to a beach in Phu Yen Province after being found adrift off the south-central Vietnamese province of Phu Yen on December 18, 2018. Photo: Tuoi Tre A torpedo-shaped object is brought to a beach in Phu Yen Province after being found adrift off the south-central Vietnamese province of Phu Yen on December 18, 2018. Photo: Tuoi Tre Chinese characters are inscribed on the body of a torpedo-shaped object found adrift off the south-central Vietnamese province of Phu Yen on December 18, 2018. Photo: Tuoi Tre Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! Vietnam has arrested a former senior executive of a state-owned oil company for abusing power to appropriate property, state media reported on Tuesday. Do Van Khanh, former chief executive officer of PetroVietnam Exploration Production Corp, or PVEP, was arrested for alleged involvement in siphoning four billion dong ($171,541)of interest earned from PVEPs account with domestic lender Ocean Bank, Tuoi Tre newspaper reported. PVEP is a leading exploration and production arm of state oil firm PetroVietnam, formally known as Vietnam Oil and Gas Group. Reuters couldnt immediately reach Khanhs lawyer for comment. The arrest comes amid a widening crackdown on corruption in Vietnam, which has seen the Communist-ruled government launch investigations into hundreds of public officials and several executives at state-owned enterprises jailed. "Edsa is not as bad as ever. It is worse." "Edsa is not as bad as ever. It is worse." In mid-2016, shortly after the election of President Rodrigo Duterte, I wrote a column titledto the best of my recollectionThe EDSA Problem Needs a Drastic Solution. As its title suggested, I stated in that column that the usual patchwork-type measures would not bring about the solution of Metro Manilas No. 1 problem and that only a drastic, out-of-the-ordinary solution would cause the 26-kilometer roadway to stop being the biggest parking lot in this countrys premier metropolis. Shortly after moving into Malacanang Mr. Duterte declared that he would put an end to the dawn-to-dusk EDSA gridlock, with as much confidence as he said he would put an end to corruption, crime and the illegal drugs trade. There was talk of the new Chief Executives seeking emergency powers from Congress, and Mr. Duterte brought in brought in as Secretary of Transportation an individual who up until then had a reputation for getting things done, namely, Arthur Tugade. With total focus on, and sufficient resources for, the problem, Mr. Duterte and his crew would make EDSA move cars and goods the way it did when it was called Hig1hway 54. In writing that 2016 column, I did not mean to be a party pooper, as the Americans say. It was not my desire to stop people from talking about, and proposing solutions to, the EDSA issue. All that I wanted to do was to bring back down to Earth everyone who thought that the usual, tired old prescriptions would do the trick for Metro Manilas No. 1 transportation problems. Almost everything but the kitchen sink has been thrown at the EDSA quagmireincluding enlistment of the Philippine National Polices HPG (Highway Patrol Group), truck bans codingbut, as 2018 draws to an end and the Duterte administration nears the halfway mark, EDSA is not as bad as ever; it is worse. I have spoken of a drastic solution. Every leading dictionary has the same meaning or the word drastic. Drastic is placed in the etymological class as severe, extraordinary, extreme. Drastic is the kind of solution that the EDSA problem needs if it is to be ameliorated or ended altogether.Any drastic solution to EDSA will of necessity have to take into account the following facts: (1) EDSA connects six of the National Capital Regions most important cities; (2) because of its central location; major feeder routes to the other Metro Manila cities go into and out of it, (3) EDSAs acceptable carrying capacity has long been exceeded many times over and (4) EDSA is used by both private vehicles, public transport facilities and commercial vehicles. The solutions that have been applied thus farincluding those, like the color coding scheme and the truck banclearly have not done the job. Already there have been grumblings about the constitutionality of the measures; any measures more stringent than these will almost certainly invite legal challenge. The drastic solutions that are possible will have to address two concepts that guide government policy toward EDSA. One concept is that the use of EDSA is open to all vehicular trafficprivate cars, commercial vehicles and public transport facilities. The other guiding concept is public transport should enjoy as much priority in the use of Metro Manilas principal thoroughfare. I can think of at least one drastic solution to the EDSA problem. The complaint is always being heard that the thousands of busesmore specifically, the constant weaving in and out of those vehiclesare the principal cause of the EDSA quagmire. So, why not divide EDSA use into two, one side strictly for private vehicles and the other side for buses? Private vehicles would no longer have to contend with pesky buses, and buses would have one side of EDSA all to themselves. This proposal, and any other equally drastic proposal, is bound to encounter stiff opposition. Any ideas that are out of the ordinary are bound to meet that fate. No proposal to end the hell that EDSAs users face every day, to be even more remotely successful, will have to be drastic in character. Otherwise, we should all just give up tryingas the Duterte administration appears to have done. The first new Australian drama for 2019 is a treat. Bloom takes its time to wash over you, but it does so with quiet awe, a nod to the past, and moodily arouses your senses. While the opening scenes of a small-town flood result in the deaths of 5 locals, they are arresting enough to put the viewer on notice: this show means business. Jacki Weaver stars as Gwendolyn Reed, a faded actress now suffering Alzehimers Disease. Dotted around her crumbling home are memorabilia, photos, even an old Logie trophy. Husband Ray (Bryan Brown) has done his best to care for his wife, but a year after the flood she now resides in a nursing home. Meanwhile the town of Mullan is also the public stage for wild boy Sam (Ryan Corr) to impulsively strip off and run nekkid down the main street, before anonymous sex with the local baker, Tina (Nikki Shiels). Later he encounters a very determined 12 year old Isaac (Thomas Fisher) whose mother went missing in the flood. But the biggest dramatic hook from writer Glen Dolman is left in the form of a small berry which has sprung to life, an elixir which miraculously restores youth. Suddenly lives are transformed, consequences are negated and the impossible becomes real There are no consequences good or bad, doesnt matter what you do, says Sam. Theres no karma, no giant lightning bolt. Zip. You can do anything you want. This life force will ripple through the town in ways more seismic than flood waters, including for farmer Max (John Stanton) who is facing eviction from the banks, but who is inextricably linked to Gwen and Ray. The relationships crafted by Dolman in his high-concept tale are matched at every step: casting, direction, performances, photography and music. Jacki Weaver, Bryan Brown and John Stanton bring gravitas to a landscape too-often distracted by pretty young faces. And it doesnt stop there. There are supporting roles and cameos from Rod Mullinar, Terry Norris, Anne Charleston and Maria Mercedes. While Dolman toys with mystery and hypothetical questions, director John Curran pierces the screen with a bold fusion of evocative shots, CGI and use of music. Never has the Mexican national anthem been so creatively juxtaposed in an Australian drama, or wild sex been waged over custard pies. Its this kind of individuality that makes Bloom blossom There are also dark comedic moments, notably aligned with the energetic Yeah, nah performance of Ryan Corr. Phoebe Tonkin adopts a kind of muse-like role to great effect, although a totes-awks sex scene in episode 2 is risky in this age of #metoo. Nevertheless this brash, colloquial drama has me hooked and it will for you too. Bloom begins Tuesday January 1 on Stan. "Counting On" fans long hoped that Jana Duggar would find love. Rumour said she was dating or courting Caleb Williams. However, it seems to have died away. Probably that's a good thing, as the Duggar Family faced the scandal of Josh over his sexual abuse of his siblings. In fact, that took down the TLC show "19 Kids and Counting." Caleb Williams pleaded not guilty to sexual assault of a minor, Radar Online discovered. Their report hit the headlines of Reality TV news on December 18th. Jana Duggar's not saying anything about Caleb Despite the news coming out [VIDEO], or in fact, possibly because it came out, Jana Duggar remains silent. One can hardly blame her, as sexual abuse charges are serious. It turns out that the records show Caleb allegedly had abused "a minor who was between the ages of 13 to 17." It apparently happened twice, between "May 29, 2015, through August 1, 2016, and on or between August 1, 2016, through May 31, 2018. Radar says he spent one night in jail before his mom put pen to paper on a bond to help him get released. However, he has been warned to have zero contact with anyone under the age of 18. This is likely to be a blow to the Duggar family, as his association with them means more sexual scandal associated with their family. 'Counting On' family could be touched by abuse scandal again The Hollywood Gossip (THG) noted that poor Jana, the most unassuming person in the "Counting On" family, might have inadvertently brought more abuse scandal into the family. They noted that "Caleb and Jana reportedly dated last year, but neither party ever publicly confirmed the relationship." In fact, many fans of the TLC show hoped that Jana may, at last, have found a life mate. If it was not to be then that might be a very good thing. According to a source who emailed THG, Caleb's brother Joshua M. Williams was arrested for alleged abuse. They allege that both of them were trying to avoid police in Arkansas. Allegedly, both of them also had a lot of contact with Josh Duggar who was accused of five counts of the same offence. The 26-year-old, who was once romantically linked to Jana, is facing two Class 2 felony charges.https://t.co/f6YQcQ4hNS In Touch Weekly (@intouchweekly) December 18, 2018 Rumoured ex could inflame fans of the show Many people turned against the Duggar family when news of Josh broke out. There will, no doubt, be many more critics of the family just waiting to chew on this new story. However, those close to the family suggest that Jana never was dating Caleb and it was all wishful thinking by fans. In fact, since then, rumours arose that she is actually a secret [VIDEO]lesbian who can't come out the closet. What do you think about the alleged sexual offences by Jana Duggar's rumoured ex? Do you think they were dating? Follow Blasting Pop for more news about "Counting On." By Brad Brooks and Lisandra Paraguassu SAO PAULO/BRASILIA (Reuters) - The chief justice of Brazil's Supreme Court late on Wednesday knocked down a colleague's ruling that would have freed from jail former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, but said the full court will take up the contentious case in April. Chief Justice Dias Toffoli wrote in his ruling that it would be up to all 11 justices to make a decision. The case considers whether a defendant convicted of a non-violent crime can be jailed after a first appeals court confirms a guilty verdict, which is the situation with Lula, convicted on corruption and facing six more graft trials. A leftist icon, Lula is one of Brazil's most popular politicians, but is also reviled by the right, who blame him for years of corruption, botched economic policies and rising crime. Dias Toffoli said the case would be heard on April 10, a debate that will delve into a deeper constitutional discussion that could have wide-reaching implications for Brazil's corruption investigations and criminal justice system. If Lula is released in April, it would galvanise Brazil's demoralized left, still reeling after October's election of far-right President-elect Jair Bolsonaro, who has vowed to reverse policies instilled during Lula's two terms. Lula, 73, was jailed in April after being sentenced to more than 12 years in prison, and faces six other trials over corruption allegations. He maintains his innocence, insisting he is a political prisoner, jailed in a bid to block him from running for the presidency. His argument gained traction when the crusading anti-corruption judge Sergio Moro, who led the sweeping probe that helped put Lula behind bars, accepted an offer from Bolsonaro to be Brazil's next justice minister. The president-elect takes office on Jan. 1. Earlier Wednesday, Justice Marco Aurelio Mello issued a shock ruling that suspended a Supreme Court decision from 2016 that allowed for convicts to be jailed after their sentence was upheld on first appeal. Story continues "My conscience led me to this decision," Mello, who voted against the court's 2016 ruling, told Reuters. "I had to act." IMPUNITY RETURNS? Critics have said reversing the 2016 ruling would result in the return of de facto impunity for the rich and powerful, who have been hobbled in recent years by several corruption investigations that revealed stunning levels of graft in the upper echelons of Brazilian society. But several supreme court justices have been clamouring to revisit their 2016 ruling, arguing that lower courts have in practice made it mandatory to send non-violent convicts to prison after a failed first appeal. Won by a narrow 6-5 margin, the decision has been in justice's cross-hairs and the subject of much constitutional deliberation that could see it revisited. Nonetheless, leaders of Brazil's anti-corruption drive, including Moro, told Reuters that overturning the decision would seriously damage the country's battle against graft. A reversal of the 2016 ruling would not only free Lula, but also release many other leading politicians and businessmen serving time for corruption. Additionally, other powerful figures, like President Michel Temer, who is under investigation, could also benefit if eventually found guilty. "It's impossible to read the Brazilian Constitution ... in the sense that it aims to guarantee impunity for the powerful, even when their crimes are proven," Moro told Reuters earlier this year when asked about the chance the top court could reverse its 2016 ruling. "We are a republic, after all, not a society of castes." Rodrigo Janot, Brazil's former prosecutor general who remains an influential prosecutor, told Reuters allowing convicts to remain free until they exhaust appeals deprive investigators of their best weapon in combating corruption - the ability to reach plea bargain agreements, which Brazilian law only began to allow in 2013. "Nobody will want to turn state's witness if they know they will not face punishment," Janot said. (Reporting by Brad Brooks in Sao Paulo and Lisandra Paraguassu in Brasilia; additional reporting by Jake Spring in Brasilia and Gabriel Stargardter in Rio de Janeiro; editing by James Dalgleish and Grant McCool) By Zarir Hussain GUWAHATI, India (Reuters) - An Indian television journalist has been detained for criticizing the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government on social media under laws intended to ensure national security, leading to protests in the capital, New Delhi. Kishorechandra Wangkhem was working for a television channel in the northeastern state of Manipur when he uploaded several video clips last month calling the state's BJP chief minister, N Biren Singh, a puppet of the central government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. "It is nothing but a blatant abuse of the law and powers of the government," Wangkhem's lawyer, N. Victor, told Reuters by telephone. Victor said he planned to appeal against his client's detention, with a hearing likely on Thursday. India has one of the world's largest and most diverse media industries, but its journalists often face harassment and violence. The country is ranked 138th in the World Press Freedom Index run by Reporters Sans Frontieres - lower than Zimbabwe, Afghanistan and Myanmar - as a result of censorship laws and the murder of several journalists. Wangkhem was initially arrested on separate charges of sedition on November 21, before being released on November 25, his wife, Ranjita Elangbam, told Reuters. He was then detained on November 27 under India's National Security Act, which allows for detention of up to a year without trial, and has since been held at a jail in the state capital Imphal. A board of judges set up under the Act approved his detention on Thursday. In the posts, Wangkham criticized the state government for commemorating a north Indian freedom fighter, the Rani of Jhansi, a symbol of resistance against British colonial rule in the mid-1800s, who he said had nothing to do Manipur's own struggle against the British. "Dont betray, dont insult the freedom fighters of Manipur," he said in one of the posts. Manipur's deputy home minister Dr Th Charanjeet Singh said in a statement the state had considered the evidence and stood by its decision to detain Wangkhem. Story continues (Reporting by Zarir Hussain; Writing by Alasdair Pal; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani and Nick Macfie) See Also: VILNIUS (Reuters) - A number of Lithuanians linked to minor political parties have been arrested and charged with spying for Russia this year, the Lithuanian prosecutor general said on Wednesday. Since 2014, Lithuania has jailed several of its citizens for spying for Russia, once the Baltic country's Soviet overlord. In 2017 it handed down a 10-year jail sentence on a Russian it said had tried to set up a spy ring in Lithuania for Moscow's FSB security service. "All of these people, who executed tasks for an intelligence organisation of the Russian Federation, are connected to political parties in some way," prosecutor general Evaldas Pasilis said of the arrests this year. The prosecutor declined to say how many arrests had been made in 2018 but said none of those held were connected to parties represented in parliament. The charges could bring sentences of up to 15 years in prison. The Russian Embassy in Vilnius could not be reached for direct comment on Wednesday. But it said on its website: "There is no doubt: this new espionage fuss is one more serious anti-Russian action by the Lithuanian authorities." Pasilis said one of the accused was a former vice-mayor of the capital Vilnius, Algirdas Paleckis. He led the small political party Frontas during the years 2008-2014, and was vocal in protesting against Lithuania's membership of the NATO alliance. Russian intelligence was interested in "the most sensitive topics for the society", said Pasilis, such as the ongoing trial of former Soviet officers, mostly in absentia, charged with the killings of 14 civilians in January 1991 during an attempted takeover of a Lithuanian government which was seeking independence from the Soviet Union. From 2014 to 2017, 12 people were accused of spying for Russia or its ally Belarus, Lithuanian authorities say. Five have been sentenced and one case is currently in court. The remaining six are still under investigation. (Reporting by Andrius Sytas; Editing by Johan Ahlander and Andrew Roche) Counting is underway in Madagascar following the second round of presidential elections on Wednesday featuring two ex-presidents Marc Ravalomanana and Andry Rajoelina. Theres between four and five per cent less in terms of participation compared to the first round, the EU's chief observer Cristian Preda told RFI at midday. The EU election monitoring mission noted some minor problems with polling stations opening late due to organisational issues. The election pits two ex-presidents who have a rather acrimonious relationship. Former president Ravalomanana was forced out of office in 2009 in protests led by Rajoelina, a former DJ. Rajoelina went to on to take the presidency, having been installed by the army, and led the country until 2013 when he stepped aside, paving the way for elections won by Hery Rajaonarimampianina. Both candidates said during campaigning that they had put the past behind them and would accept the results. The two contenders came a close first and second in Novembers first round, well ahead of their nearest competitors. Outgoing president Rajaonarimampianina took less than nine per cent. I hope that everybody comes to vote, said Nour, a voter in the capital Antananarivo. Compared to last month during the first round when there was nearly nobody there, she said on Wednesday morning after casting her ballot. Turnout in the first round was 54 per cent and no candidate secured the 50 per cent of votes needed to avoid a second round. The country has more than 10 million registered voters. The election campaigning period was calm despite the animosity between the two contenders. During the final televised debate both Ravalomanana and Rajoelina accused one another of corruption, incompetence and authoritarianism. Gary Maclean is teaming up with Zero Waste Scotland who say the equivalent of 100,000 turkeys will be thrown away in Scotland this Christmas. Masterchef star Gary Maclean is calling on Scots to turn down the temperature on their turkey to avoid food waste this Christmas. The Glasgow chef said too much meat gets dumped after over-cooking leaves it dry and inedible. Its one of three top tips the 2016 champion of Masterchef: The Professionals is offering after teaming up with Zero Waste Scotland in the fight against festive food waste. The group said the equivalent of 100,000 turkeys will be thrown away in Scotland this Christmas. Buy a turkey thats smaller than the size you think you need. Turn down your oven and cook your turkey upside down to ensure the juices stay in the breast meat. Invest in a temperature probe to help you cook with confidence. Get clever with carving to make sure you get the most out of the whole bird. When serving allow guests to request their preferred portion size. Gary said: Turkey is most likely to end up in the bin due to buying a bird thats far too big or serving up a roast thats dry and inedible from overcooking at high temperatures. My top turkey tips are threefold buy a turkey thats smaller than you think you need, turn down your oven to cook your turkey for longer on a lower temperature and get confident with carving. The latter means you can serve your turkey buffet-style at the table with guests able to request a portion size thats right for them. Ylva Haglund, from Zero Waste Scotland, added: We all have a tendency to overbuy at this time of year but just a few small changes can go a long way in reducing the amount of food waste generated over the festive season. "Digital campaigns are the norm these days." "Digital campaigns are the norm these days." If the results of The Centers latest survey are to be believed, the 2019 senatorial race just got a bit more exciting. Even administration candidates are now scrambling for a place in the Magic 12. This was after former Senator Bong Revillas name was catapulted into the winning circle following his acquittal by the Sandiganbayan. The anti-graft court cleared Revilla of plunder after he was allegedly involved in the controversial pork barrel scam. In the non-commissioned survey conducted by The Center from Dec. 3 to 9 among 1,200 respondents, only four of the seven incumbents seeking re-election are likely to make it in May 13, 2019. Of the seven who are seeking a second term, namely: Senators Grace Poe, Cynthia Villar, Nancy Binay, Koko Pimentel, Sonny Angara, Bam Aquino, And JV Ejercito, only Poe, Villar, Binay and Pimentel are sure of winning if the elections were held today, according to The Center. In The Centers survey which its Executive Director, Ed Malay says has a margin of error of plus/ minus 3.5 percent and a confidence level in excess of 98 percent, Villar is seen taking the lead in 2019 senatorial polls as Poe slides down to second. Former Senator Pia Cayeteno and Binay hold on to third and fourth spots, respectively, while another former Senator, Lito Lapid moves up to fifth with Revilla, long given up for lost given his plunder case, gets into the Magic 12 at the expense of Angara. Former Special Assistant to the President, Bong Go, starts moving up, overtaking Ilocos Norte Gov. Imee Marcos who remains saddled with issues and the recent conviction of her mother former First Lady Imelda Romualdez Marcos. Ejercito and Aquino are seen struggling to keep their Senate posts. Former Presidential Adviser Francis Tol Tolentino remains strong, undaunted by Revillas sudden surge to the winning circle.The Centers latest survey bared the following results: 1. Villar (62 percent); 2. Poe (59.7 percent); 3. Cayetano (56.3 percent); 4. Binay (50 percent): 5. Lapid (47 percent); 6. Pimentel (44.8 percent); 7. Former Senator Jinggor Estrada (44.2 percent); 8. Former Senator Serge Osmena (40.3 percent), 9. Tolentino (32 percent); 10. Retired Gen. Bato dela Rosa (29.6 percent), 11. Former Senator Mar Roxas (27 percent); and 12. Revilla (25 percent). Close on the tails of those in the Magic 12 are: 13. Angara (24.3 percent); 14. Go (23.8 percent); 15, Marcos (21.8 percent); 16. Ejercito (19 percent); 17. Aquino (16.5 percent); and 18. Former Senator Juan Ponce Enrile (15 percent). However, some political pundits say Revillas acquittal might actually do him more harm than good in the forthcoming elections. Basing on the reactions on social media, which Malay said will play a crucial role in the next elections, as it did in the 2018 polls, even staunch critics of the Yellows are critical of Revilla. This is primarily due to the confusing decision handed down by the Anti-Graft Court. In its decision, which was later clarified by the ponente herself, the court said it had to acquit Revilla, not because he is not guilty, but because the prosecution failed to prove his guilt beyond reasonable doubt. Thus, the order for the former senator to return P124 million, which even administration supporters claim, was a clear sign of guilt on the part of Revilla. And while Estrada is praying for a same decision on his similar case, they both could be placed under continuous bombardment of criticism once the campaign proper commences. And that would spice up the already interesting senatorial race. We will be in for tighter race to the finish. Nonetheless, Malay said the 2019 senatorial and local polls will also show if the Filipino voters have already matured in the way they elect their political leaders. He said the strong bias towards popularity is evident in the pre-poll survey results as the preference for popularity and name recall remain strong over the credentials or qualifications of candidates. Malay said the senatorial race will be interesting when the official campaign period starts on Feb. 11, 2019. There seems to be a growing trend in the way that the campaigns of those running next year are being planned and strategized with social media and digital campaigns becoming the norm over the traditional campaign processes. Putin Missile REUTERS/ITAR-TASS/PRESIDENTIAL PRESS SERVICE Russia said on Wednesday it would not let the United States inspect a new nuclear-capable cruise missile at the heart of a dispute between Washington and Moscow that risks unraveling a landmark arms control treaty. The United States issued Russia a 60-day ultimatum earlier this month to come clean about the alleged missile violation and return to "full and verifiable compliance." The treaty previously cleared Europe of the wide majority of nuclear weapons, but leaving the treaty could see those missiles returned. MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia said on Wednesday it would not let the United States inspect a new nuclear-capable cruise missile at the heart of a dispute between Washington and Moscow that risks unraveling a landmark arms control treaty. Washington has threatened to pull out of the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), alleging that the new Russian missile, the Novator 9M729 (called SSC-8 by NATO), violates the pact, which bans either side from stationing short and intermediate-range, land-based missiles in Europe. Russia says the missile's range puts it outside the treaty altogether and is not as long as Washington alleges, meaning that it is fully compliant with the INF. It has accused the United States of inventing a false pretext to exit a treaty it wants to leave anyway so as to develop new missiles. The United States issued Russia a 60-day ultimatum earlier this month to come clean about the alleged missile violation and return to "full and verifiable compliance." That means Moscow is under pressure to scrap the new missile and its launchers. However, Russia said on Wednesday it had no intention of letting U.S. inspectors look at the missile, which it said had not been tested at the longer range that Washington alleges. "We don't feel right now that such a step would be justified from either a political or a technical point of view," Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said in an interview with the Kommersant daily newspaper published on Wednesday. Story continues Ryabkov accused Washington of "extremely intrusive" attempts to shine a light on Russian rocket manufacturing and said that Washington had in the past rebuffed Russian requests to look inside U.S. submarines under another arms control treaty. Any such inspections - if they were to happen - should not be unilateral but should take place in both countries, he added. U.S. Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats said on Nov. 30 that Russia has already deployed multiple battalions of 9M729 missiles and that they posed a direct threat to most of Europe and parts of Asia. Russian military experts asked their U.S. counterparts several days ago to hold consultations on the missile dispute, but had not yet received any response, Ryabkov said. NOW WATCH: How Ocean Spray harvests 220 billion cranberries a year See Also: A South African court ruled that the decision to grant diplomatic immunity to Grace Mugabe was illegal. Authorities in South Africa have issued an arrest warrant for the wife of former Zimbabwe leader Robert Mugabe over an alleged assault. The warrant follows a long legal process during which a South African court this year ruled that the government acted illegally in granting diplomatic immunity to Grace Mugabe when the alleged attack was first reported. It also marked another setback for Grace and Robert Mugabe, who have kept a mostly low profile since the former president was forced from office in November 2017. Robert Mugabe, whose command over Zimbabwe once seemed impregnable, is now 94 years old and ailing. I can confirm that a warrant for the arrest of Grace Mugabe was issued last Thursday. We are following the Interpol processes, said South African police Brig Vishnu Naidoo. Whether Zimbabwe would assist South African authorities with any extradition request is in doubt, though the arrest warrant means Grace Mugabe would be vulnerable if she visits her sons, who stay in South Africa. She also owns a house there. Grace Mugabe allegedly attacked model Gabriella Engels in a hotel on August 13, 2017, whipping her with an extension cable that cut her forehead. However, Mrs Mugabe was allowed to return to Zimbabwe despite calls for her prosecution. She travelled with her husband, who was then president of Zimbabwe and attending a regional summit in Pretoria. Robert Mugabe was ousted only a few months later after a military takeover, impeachment proceedings led by the ruling party that once backed him and large demonstrations for his removal. Representatives of Grace Mugabe have said that Ms Engels was the actual aggressor in the altercation between the two. AfriForum, a South African group that represented Ms Engels, said the court ruling that Grace Mugabe had no right to diplomatic immunity had allowed police to proceed with an investigation. Were now at a point where an arrest is possible, said Kallie Kriel, the groups CEO. We believe that this sends out a strong message that nobody is above the law, not even if your surname is Mugabe. After decades of entrepreneurial success, Brazilian investor Jorge Paulo Lemann asked himself: How can I pay it forward and give back to the country that has provided me with the opportunity to succeed? In 2002, he found his answer and founded the Lemann Foundationa nonprofit organization that has invested heavily in improving education in Brazil and developing the countrys future social leaders. It does this in part through strategic partnerships with some of the most prestigious universities and organizations in the world. Each year, the foundation hosts a Lemann Dialoguea multiday convening of U.S. educators, influencers and partners to discuss and consider the economic, political and social challenges Brazil is facing. This years event was held at the Lemann Center for Entrepreneurship and Educational Innovation in Brazil at Stanford University. The Lemann Foundations CEO Denis Mizne recently sat down for an exclusive interview with us where he discussed the organization and the important role its partners play in the development of new initiatives that will move Brazil forward. Missions, education and networks Meagan Meehan (MM): How did you get involved with the Lemann Foundation, and what about its mission appealed most to you? Denis Mizne (DM): In 1997, I founded the Sou da Paz (I Am for Peace) campaign to reduce gun violence in Brazil. We saw great results: Sou da Pazs violence-prevention projects were instrumental to the 80 percent reduction in homicides that took place in Sao Paulo over the next decade, as well as to the introduction of crime-prevention initiatives at the national level. But my partners and I always said that, at the 10-year mark, we would reflect on whether to continue as leaders of the campaign. Discuss this news on Eunomia When that time came, it became clear to me that there was a critical need to reform and reshape the public education landscape in Brazil. As I looked for a professional opportunity that would meet that need, I found the Lemann Foundation and realized we had something in common: We believe deeply that it is only by advancing Brazils talent and investing in whatever it takes to help people reach their full potential that we will advance as a country. MM: Where did your interest in education stem from, and what sorts of challenges are facing Brazils education system? DM: Though the problems in Brazil are becoming more complex, we believe there is a way to improve things by empowering our most valuable resource: people. Millions of young people are being let down by our public education system every year, and thats why we are so committed to investing in our countrys talentfirst by improving public education and then by identifying and supporting the current generation of leaders, those who already want to dedicate their lives to solving our biggest social issues. MM: How did the Lemann Foundation come to partner with so many esteemed U.S. schools, and why is America so important to the growth of Brazil? DM: Change requires networking, partnership, collaboration. Thats why we work side by side with a network of partners that share our commitment to investing in Brazils talent. In addition to our focus on public education, we are also committed to leadership development, and thats where our university partnersHarvard, Columbia, Stanford, Yale, MIT, University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign, USCplay a critical role. Through programs like our Lemann Fellowship, where we cover the cost for Brazilians to continue their graduate education at one of our partner universities, we give emerging leaders and aspiring social entrepreneurs access to world-class education, prestigious networks and resources for research, so they have the best possible foundation to build upon when they return to Brazil to tackle our social challenges. The Brazilian and U.S. education systems have many similarities. Most of the countries students are in public education85 percent in Braziltheyre both decentralized systems, and they both have big racial and economic inequality. What these similarities mean for us is that we have a lot we can share and learn from each other. MM: Do other international professionals play a role in any of your work, or do you stick strictly with the United States? DM: We partner with prestigious universities in the U.S. and the U.K., working with them to produce quality research on Brazil and collaborating with them to give high-potential Brazilians access to the research, network and education they need to tackle Brazils social challenges. This kind of partnership gives us the opportunity to learn with global benchmarks but to focus on Brazils education and social issues. Each year myself, our education policy director Camila Pereira, our founder Jorge Paulo and our board take trips to countries like the U.S., Singapore, Japan, the U.K., China and more to learn from the expertseducators, public sector leaders and community leaders across the worldand bring those learnings back to what were doing in Brazil. This effort helped in developing the Brazil National Learning Standards document. We find opportunities to work with the best and the brightest across the world because we know that it is through collaboration and partnership that well shape the best future for Brazil. Stanford, events and programs MM: What role does the Lemann Dialogue play in helping achieve your overall mission and why was Stanford chosen as this years location? DM: Over the past eight years, weve hosted the Lemann Dialogue in partnership with the universities that house our four Lemann Centers: Harvard University, Columbia University, Stanford University, and the University of Illinois. The event is an opportunity to bring together some of our most committed partners, native Brazilians and experts to discuss the social, economic and political challenges in Brazil. This annual touch-point serves as a chance for us to learn from others successes to network with like-minded thought leaders and to have candid conversations about Brazils future. We think dialogue is incredibly important when youre trying to create change. This year, the event was held at Stanford University, which is home to the Lemann Center for Entrepreneurship and Educational Innovation in Brazil. MM: What topics were discussed at this years event? DM: This years program was themed Social Innovation and Brazils Future and included two days of discussions around topics like the similarities between the inequalities in the U.S. and Brazil, teacher training, innovations in the public sector, the Brazilian economy, and an analysis of the most recent presidential election. MM: What kind of feedback have you gotten from people who have attended Lemann Foundation events? DM: Our team is very proud of the education and leadership events we organize in Brazil, in the U.S. and, more recently, in the U.K. In all of them, we seek to have a diverse group of speakers and panelists to bring new and different perspectives and also to inspire change and action. While we understand that there may be differences in opinions, we try to create a favorable space for conversation that looks at the root of the problem and offers the best solutions. The feedback weve gotten shows were already doing this well. Weve heard that our events generate great debates about the important challenges Brazil still faces, but always with optimism and the intent of finding new and effective solutions. Another point weve heard is about our ability to gather people from all over the country and around the world and creating spaces for them to network, share experiences, connect, support one another in their initiatives or come up with new projects. One way weve measured success is by the overwhelming response we get to attend the event the following year. Attendees often say they leave our events with renewed energy to keep working for a better, more equal and more advanced country. MM: What specific programs and/or changes has the Lemann Foundation implemented in Brazil, and how do you hope the organization will evolve over the next ten years? DM: Since setting our strategic five-year plan into motion in 2014, 40 million people have used the education technology solutions we support, and our programs have trained 26,000 teachers and educational managers. We supported the creation of the National Learning Standards Movement, which has supported the development of the countrys first-ever national learning standards document, delivered by the Ministry of Education to the National Education Council in 2017. We also offered technical support on the implementation of this new policy so the new curriculum can reach our students in 2022. We have also supported a network of more than 500 social leaders who are dedicating their lives to positively impacting our country. About 400 of these leaders graduated from top-tier universities through our Lemann Fellowship program. Many serve as key leaders or decision-makers at NGOs and other foundations looking at how to tackle some of Brazils most critical issues. In addition, some of them also ran in the recent election and garnered more than 2 million votes. Seven were elected, and 40 have joined our first program focused on developing leaders in Brazils public sector. As we look to the future, our goal is that we as a country continue the work weve started in tackling social issues and supporting the national public education system. We want to guarantee that students are learning and given an adequate level of support, ultimately building a network of the most talented people who want to advance Brazil. Broly, the Legendary Saiyan, returns to the big screen in Japan with a new film. The new film from the "Dragon Ball Super" franchise, "Broly" has brought back one of the most important characters in the Z Warriors saga, and definitely one of the most missed by fans of Dragon Ball. Now, Akira Toriyama will participate directly in his inclusion to the original plot. Goku and his friends must face a completely different Broly from the past. The trailers published by Toei Animation confirmed that this character is not evil, but only has an uncontrollable temperament and an equally destructive power that gets out of control in the film. Now that its premiere is so close in Latin America and the US, after its arrival in Japan, many are looking for some way to see this film to find out all the history behind the leaks and trailers of Toei Animation. The release date of the movie in the United States is January 15, 2019 Can you watch 'Dragon Ball Super: Broly' online? For now, the only legal way to see "Dragon Ball Super: Broly" online is with patience. Finding some video of the first special function that was given in Japan and its subsequent release is very unlikely, and if found, the quality is terrible because it is an illegal upload. Therefore, if you want to see the full movie "Dragon Ball Super: Broly online," even with Spanish subtitles or dubbed into Latin Spanish, all you have to do is wait for some streaming page like Netflix or Crunchyroll get the rights to broadcast, which could take a few months after its release. On the other hand, there is the possibility that some people recorded the film in question from the cinema, but that, besides being illegal, it would reduce the quality of the image and ruin all the graphic efforts that the animation team of Toei Animation invested in this new movie. YouTube may be an option On the other hand, there is a possibility, very remote, that the same company chooses to upload this film on its official YouTube platform, in the same style of "Dragon Ball Heroes." Unfortunately, it is not such a likely possibility, because even if they did, YouTube's copyright would automatically identify it, eliminating the file immediately. Discuss this news on Eunomia For the moment, it only remains to wait for Toei Animation or Akira Toriyama to decide to publish the "Dragon Ball Super movie: Broly" on some online streaming platform in order to enjoy the epic battle of the Saiyajins from the comfort of our homes. "What does it mean to be Filipinx?" "What does it mean to be Filipinx?" Not only a matter for national pride, Catriona Grays Miss Universe victory also compels people to take a closer look at issues related to national identity and how they construct and express their ideas of what it is to be Filipinx. The 24-year-old half-Australian and half-Albayana grew up in Australia and went to college in the United States. She did not move to the Philippines until she was a teenager. But despite her limited time in-country, Gray has shown a remarkable interest in Philippine culture and an intense desire to share and promote it. At the pageant, Gray showed how seriously she took her role as an ambassadress of our country to the world. Her clothes were designed and sewn by Filipinx designers and craftspersons, and each gown and piece of jewelry referenced something related to the Philippines. Grays dress designer Mak Tumang said on Facebook posts that she was working with him on concepts for her Miss U finals gown as early as March this year. I know its super early, Gray told him, just wanted to research. Tumang wrote that the orange feather-patterned evening gown Gray wore for the preliminary was inspired by the Adarna Bird, Phoenix, [Miss U] Mikimoto Crown. For the finals, Gray wore a red, orange, and yellow gown inspired by the Mayon Volcano in Albay. Tumang likened her to the mythical heroine Daragang Magayon (beautiful maiden) who legend says the gods turned into a volcano after her death. Most overt with its use of symbols was Grays national costume, a collaboration of designers Jearson Dimavivas, Jojo Bragais, and Eric Quiwa, that has elements referencing the islands of Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao. Gray wore a pantsuit and boots covered with patterns taken from 16th century sketches of tattooed Visayans in the Boxer Codex. Her backdrop was a parol that bore words in baybayin and illustrations from Philippine culture. Gray also wore a tnalak dress for a Miss U activity in Thailand. Her jewelry by Tessera, an ear cuff dubbed Three Stars and a Sun and earrings with similar motifs, evoked the flag.But Grays choice to showcase Philippine symbols and culture has an impact well beyond fashion and tourism. In an interview by Regine Cabato for Washington Post, Ateneo de Manila assistant professor of literature and gender studies J. Pilapil Bocobo said, I do feel that of all our contestants, Catriona is the most intellectualthe most post-colonial. As a people we are struggling in the aftermath of colonialism, seeking to construct a national identity; ours still seems to be indeterminate, in flux, despite our assertions of having assimilated many elements of Spanish and American colonial culture and made it our own. We are still to some extent confused and conflicted, our past and present at odds as we look to the future. Grays manifest and prolific use of Philippine symbols could be seen as her efforts to make sense of her own identity as half-foreign and half-Filipinx, and to craft and express the Philippine side of her persona. She might also have sought to decolonize her self-expression in the pageant and to bring a more authentic character to her representation. In doing so she paves the way for others to rethink and reconstruct their own ideas on national identity. Is being Filipinx as easy as wearing Philippine textiles and materials, and integrating Philippine symbols and references in what we wear and use? It is not that easy, and it is a simplistic approach; but as a start it is good enough, because it makes us think and remember, and perhaps love. With her track record so far, we can expect Gray to continue to a certain extent the same promotion of Philippine design and materials throughout her year-long reign as Miss Universe. We can also expect people to take a greater interest in our country, its culture, and heritage, as we seek to construct and redefine what it means for us to be Filipinx. * * * Dr. Ortuoste thinks Catriona did our country proud. FB and Twitter: @DrJennyO As some Pagans and Heathens reconstruct or revive ancient religions they often rely on the work of historians, primary texts, anthropologists and archaeologists. For this reason, when something new pops up that challenges long held academic ideas on cultural or religious practice, we pay attention. Here are some recaps of finds making waves in archaeological circles. Paved roads in Latium may have facilitated pilgrimages Le FERRIERE, Italy Young Rome had to compete for power with other cities in central Italy (Latium). Archaeologists have been excavating one such city, Satricum. Excavations at Satricum revealed the earliest known inscription in Latin, the Lapis Satricanus. Like other cities in Latium, Satricum lay on the trade routes between the Greek colonies of southern Italy and the Etruscan complex of northern Italy. Both Etruscan and Greek cultures influenced the cities of Latium. Satricum was best known for its sanctuary of Mater Matuta, a goddess of birth. The sanctuary of Mater Matuta at Satricum began as a hut, but was rebuilt on several occasions. Underneath this temple complex, archaeologists have found a large votive deposit. The Romans equated Mater Matuta with Aurora as well as goddess Eos from the Greek pantheon. This goddess also became associated with sea harbors and ports. The Romans built a temple to Mater Matuta in Rome with her festival on June 11. The City of Satricum, began to pave its roads sometime between 650 to 600 B.C.E. Archaeological evidence suggests that its motivation was to make travel to the Mater Matuta Temple easier. The earliest paved roads found in Roman territory date to 174 B.C.E. Satricum may have taught Rome how to pave its roads. Unlike Roman roads, however, Satricums roads facilitated pilgrimages to the shrine of a goddess. Evidence of Wide Trade Network in the Levant as early as 1600 B.C.E. MEGIDDO, Israel Tombs discovered in the Canaanite city of Megiddo show evidence of long distance trace in spices and other luxury goods as early as 1600 B.C.E. Megiddo dominates the route from Egypt to Mesopotamia, the Via Maris. One tomb contained three bodies, a middle aged man, a woman in her thirties, and a child between 8 and 10. The male skeleton had a gold necklace and diadem. The tomb is located next to the ruins of the Royal Palace of Megiddo. The grave goods included jars from Egypt and ceramic vessels from Cyprus. The grave goods and location indicate the high status and wealth of its occupants. Chemical tests of the jars found residues of vanilla. While vanilla grows throughout Afro-Eurasia, no prior evidence had existed for vanilla use in Afro-Eurasia before contact with the Americas. The chemical signatures of these residues match those of Kenyan and Indian vanilla. Presence of this vanilla residue would require long distance trade. Other evidence for early long distance trade includes the following. In 1213 B.C.E, the mummifiers of Ramasses II stuffed Sri Lankan peppercorns into his nose. Around 1000 B.C.E, Sri Lankan cinnamon is also found in the Levant and Mesopotamia. If goods were traded, myths, rituals, and gods could also have been exchanged. A wide network of trade and cultural exchange challenges notions of cultures of the ancient world as relatively isolated until large empires emerged. Evidence for large settlement at Tintagel, an Arthurian site TINTAGEL, Cornwall, UK Excavations at Tintagel challenge the notion of post-Roman, pre-Saxon Britain as the Dark Ages. After the Roman Legions left in 410 C.E., large Roman urban centers disappeared. Small rival kingdoms replaced central authority. One such kingdom, Dumnonia, ruled over southwest Britain, including Cornwall (Kernow in the Cornish language). Tintagel may have been an occasional royal residence for the Kings of Dumnonia. Archaeologists have uncovered evidence in Tintagel of international trade and a relatively dense population. In Arthurian lore, Arthur Pendragon (King Arthur) was conceived in Tintagel. Archaeologists have excavated only about 10 percent of Tintagel Island. They currently estimate that the site has 100 post-Roman, pre-Saxon buildings. If these estimates are correct, Tintagel may have had the highest population density on the island of Britain. Excavations reveal a five foot deep layer of cultural artifacts. Archaeologists have found more post-Roman pottery in Tintagel than in all the rest of the island of Britain. They have found luxury goods such as olive oil from Iberia, North Africa, and Anatolia. Excavators have also found shards of glass from Iberia and Gaul. Tintagel may have been one node in a viable trade network with the remains of the Roman world. By the eighth or ninth century, Tintagel had begun to decline. The world was no longer post-Roman. This evidence challenges how people think about the Dark Ages in the island of Britain. It, however, is consistent with the quasi-Pagan and Romanized Celtic world of Arthurian lore. Headhunters of Gaul Le CAILAR, France In the Second Branch of the Mabinogi, Celtic warriors spoke on several occasions with the severed head of Bran the Blessed. Greek and Roman texts of the 299 to 200 B.C.E. report that warriors of Gaul severed the heads of only their most powerful and important enemies. These warriors then embalmed the heads for display. One ancient sculpture shows a Gaulish warriors horse, with a severed head hanging from the horses neck. Recent archaeological evidence from southern Gaul (France) confirms these reports. In Le Cailar, France, archaeologists found decapitated skulls, dating from 299 to 200 B.C.E. These skulls had conifer resin on them. This resin could have prevented decay and decomposition. The World Food Program (WFP) announced on Wednesday cuts in food to Gaza and the West Bank, because of a severe funding shortfall, saying the move will affect about 190,000 impoverished Palestinians. The UN agency said it would, as of Jan. 1, suspend food assistance to 27,000 people in the West Bank. In addition, food aid to 165,000 people in the Israeli-occupied territory and in the Gaza Strip would be reduced by 20 percent. WFP has been forced, unfortunately, to make drastic cuts to the number of people that we support across Palestine, both in Gaza and the West Bank, Stephen Kearney, WFP country director in the Palestinian Territories, told Reuters. He said the agency was making the cutbacks mainly because the amount of funding that we are receiving is dropping drastically. According to Reuters, the WFP official imputed the shortfall to cuts by the United States, WFPs biggest contributor, and other countries in aid to Palestinians. The United Nations and the Palestinian Authority appealed on Monday for $350 million in aid for Palestinians next year, saying much more was needed but they had to be realistic after a year of funding cuts, especially by the Trump administration. Other organizations and UN bodies, including UNRWA, have been affected by Washingtons funding cuts. Fraud charge brings 10-year sentence, $7.78M in restitution for farmer Former Watertown farmer who admitted to bank fraud was sentenced to 10 years in prison, $7.78 million in restitution. Editor: This holiday season, oil and natural gas development in our state is giving New Mexico two gifts: lower heating costs for our homes and economic opportunity. The price to heat a home with natural gas has decreased 68 percent since 2008, helped by the production happening right here in our very own state. This cost savings is especially impactful for the many New Mexicans who are living at or below the poverty line. Its not just keeping energy prices low: Oil and gas production is driving revenues for our state to new highs. For the next fiscal year, it is estimated we will have a $1.1 billion surplus, a far cry from the $300 million deficit we faced just a few years ago. This means legislators will have 17 percent additional funding for priorities like schools, roads and public safety. A strong education system in New Mexico will be critical to long-term prosperity, and oil and gas development particularly on state lands is helping to strengthen it. In fiscal year 2017, oil and natural gas generated $934 million for K-12 schools, colleges and universities across the state. That meant more than $47.7 million for K-12 schools in Sandoval County, and it will likely be even higher in the next budget year. As New Mexicans, we have much for which to be thankful in our great state. When you pay your heating bill or send your child off to school, add our abundant natural resources to the list. Kyler Nerison Executive Director New Mexicans for Economic Prosperity Nickolay Mladenov, Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, briefs the Security Council on the situation in the Middle East. Recent violence and rising tensions in the West Bank are fueling a climate of hatred and fear, driving both Israelis and Palestinians further away from a resolution to the conflict, the United Nations envoy for the Middle East Peace Process has said. Briefing the Security Council on Tuesday, UN Special Coordinator Nikolay Mladenov, underscored that there can be no justification for brutal acts, such as the heart-breaking death of an Israeli baby last week, reportedly killed following a drive-by attack; or the killing of a Palestinian woman in October, who was reportedly stoned to death, while driving. They feed mistrust and hatred, he added, calling on all stakeholders to join the UN in condemning them unequivocally. Mr. Mladenov also cautioned against continuing instances of inflammatory rhetoric and provocation, noting that such highly dangerous incitements threatened to push an already volatile situation past the boiling point. Such rhetoric, particularly if it denies the right of existence of one of the sides, or their right to statehood, or glorifies terror, is dangerous and plays into the hands of extremists beyond Israel and Palestine, he warned. On the humanitarian side, efforts to provide essential support to vulnerable Palestinians are severely hampered by rising needs, severe funding cuts, restrictions in operating space and attempts to delegitimize reputable relief organizations, Mr. Mladenov said, urging the international community to support the Humanitarian Response Plan for the region into 2019. Turning to Gaza where the situation deteriorated significantly this year the senior UN official reiterated that the only way to ensure long-term peace in the enclave was through the reunification of Hamas-controlled Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, under a single, legitimate and democratic Authority, as well as through the end of Israeli occupation. It is critical, he added, that the Egyptian-led intra-Palestinian reconciliation process continue, even though there has been no progress of late. The UN stands firmly in support of Egypts efforts in this regard and urges the parties to make serious efforts to ensure the return of the legitimate Palestinian Government to Gaza, Mr. Mladenov said, underscoring that Gaza is, and must remain, an integral part of a future Palestinian state as part of a two-State solution. Concluding his briefing, the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process voiced concern over an absence of collective efforts to achieve an end to the occupation and the realization, of a negotiated two-State resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in line with relevant United Nations resolutions and previous agreements. I believe that I speak on behalf of all of us today when I say that we all share a concern that at the end of 2018 we are nowhere closer to reviving efforts for a negotiated solution, he said. It is only by realizing the vision of two States living side-by-side in peace, security and mutual recognition, with Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and Palestine, and all final status issues resolved permanently through negotiations, that the legitimate aspirations of both peoples will be achieved. Becoming Nicole is a non-fiction book by Pulitzer-prize-winning author Amy Ellis Nutt. The story details the first 18 years of Nicole Maines life. Nicole (born Wyatt) and her identical twin brother, Jonas, were adopted by Kelly and Wayne Maines. From the time Wyatt could walk, he displayed feminine characteristics preferring dresses and dolls. And as soon as he could communicate, he argued that he was supposed to be a girl, not a boy. The book focuses not just on Nicole, but also on her family. Kelly, who had grown up in less-traditional surroundings than her husband, was the first to accept that Wyatt was different. She combed through information until she found the word to define Wyatt: transgender. Although Wayne had a harder time accepting the situation, he, too, supported Nicole in the long run. As a teenager, Jonas said hed known all along he had a sister and was surprised it took others as long as it did to recognize Nicole as a girl. In the small town in Maine where Jonas and Wyatt grew up, most of the community appeared to support Nicoles transformation. Certainly the twins childhood friends were accepting. But it only took one fanatic pushing his grandson into bullying Nicole, along with a school principal who didnt fully support her, to drive the family away. In their new location, however, they found the help they needed. Nicole and her parents won a court case against Nicoles original school district; the court ruled that denying a transgender student access to the bathroom consistent with their gender identity is unlawful. This case opened the way for public discourse around transgender rights across the country. Becoming Nicole sparked a lively discussion in the Alegria Words to Devour Book Club meeting. Everyone agreed they learned a lot about the way the brain controls gender identification, and better understood the meaning of transgender after reading the book. Most said they thought the definition of sexuality has changed for the better over the past few decades. Many members mostly women over 55 discussed the expectations of gender in their respective communities when they were young, and shared personal stories of their own struggles. One member talked about the special bond between her twin children, and said she really appreciated the interaction between Jonas and Nicole. The average rating the group gave the book was 4.6 out of five stars. All agreed Nicoles family was phenomenally supportive; the group enjoyed that positive aspect of the story. As an author, I appreciate the way Nutt let the story unfold with just enough emotion to outrage us at the right times, and not so much as to become sentimental. This skilled author presented the facts in a way that pulled us into Nicoles emotional journey, and opened a window to understanding. I rarely enjoy non-fiction as much as fiction, but I give the book five stars and highly recommend it for other book clubs and individuals. (Sarah Hanberry Baker has written 20 published novels in three genres and is a member of two book clubs. She lives in Bernalillo. Her book reviews appear on the third Sunday of the month.) LORDSBURG Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, called for the head of Customs and Border Protection to step downafter a congressional delegation visited the New Mexico stretch of border where a 7-year old girl died after crossing the border illegally and being taken into custody. There was nobody on board who could offer any kind of medical help to her and no medically trained personnel, Castro said about the bus used by Border Patrol to transport the child among a large group of migrants from Antelope Wells to Lordsburg. On Tuesday an 11-member delegation of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus re-traced Jakelin Caal Maquins final steps, starting in the remote area where she and her father crossed the border with a 163 other migrants near the Antelope Wells port of entry in New Mexicos bootheel. Rep. Ben Ray Lujan of New Mexico led the delegation during the tour of Antelope Wells and the Border Patrols Bounds Forward Operating Base. The Democrat said there is a water contamination issue, no running water and two portable toilets for Border Patrol agents and the migrants they take into custody. The delegation then took the same hour-and-half drive to the Lordsburg Border Patrol Substation for a tour of what I would describe as inhumane holding cells, where we saw children with adults in overcrowded facilities with a shared toilet, completely open, Lujan told a news conference. A young girl and her mother wanted water in one of the holding facilities but there were no cups, Lujan said. Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, said, The (Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) would not allow animals to be treated the way human beings are treated in this facility. There are two sets of victims in this facility. The women and children who are here being processed and the officers that are having to process them, Green said. Green and other members of the delegation said agents need more training, resources and equipment to deal with the humanitarian crisis on the border. He wants a Marshall Plan to provide aid to help Central American countries stem the flow of migrants. The delegation called for an independent investigation of the circumstances surrounding the Guatemalan girls death less than 24 hours after she was taken into custody. Rep. Raul Ruiz, D-Calif., an emergency room doctor with training in humanitarian disaster aid, said the investigation should include health care experts. He said vulnerable migrants like children should have their vital signs checked when they are taken into custody. Ruiz noted the delay it took in getting emergency care for the child who stopped breathing and had to be revived in Lordsburg. The congressional delegation was not allowed to talk to the agents who took the child and her father into custody Dec. 6. But CBP Commissioner Kevin McAleenan accompanied lawmakers on the border tour in New Mexico and answered their questions. Based on my conversations with him, based on his conduct, I believe he should step down, Castro said. We have also asked the question, When was Secretary (Kirsten) Nielsen, his direct boss, made aware of Jakelins death? and If she was made aware of the death before Congress was, why she didnt report to Congress that this had occurred?' Congress requires CPB to report a death in CBP custody within 24 hours. Hidalgo County Commissioner Darr Shannon watched the news conference and angrily interrupted Castro, who she said is blaming Homeland Security for everything. Rep.-elect Xochitl Torres Small, who will represent New Mexicos 2nd congressional district, was part of the delegation that toured the border but she left before the news conference. In the wake of this tragedy it is essential that we work together to keep this from happening again, Torres Small said in a statement released by her office. It was clear that we need increased medical personnel, equipment, and screening to responsibly take custody of those who present at the border, especially children. Robert Real, 56, a federally licensed firearms dealer in Espanola, was sentenced Monday to 24 months in prison followed by three years of supervised release, along with a $10,000 fine, and 50 hours of community service, for illegally selling firearms, falsifying records, and making false statements to law enforcement agents. On June 7, Real, who sold guns as owner of Shooters Outpost, pleaded guilty to conspiracy, sale of a firearm to a felon, sale of a firearm other than a rifle or shotgun to a person under 21 years old, falsification of firearm transfer records, and making materially false statements to federal law enforcement agents. In pleading guilty, Real admitted that from March 12, 2016, to February 24, 2017, he ignored and avoided several legal and administrative restrictions on federally licensed firearms dealers. Francis Tapie, 86, beloved husband and father, was called to his eternal resting place on Nov. 16, 2018. He entered this world on Jan. 20, 1932, in Los Angeles, Calif., born to Francis and Dorothy Tapie. He was preceded in death, this past March, by his daughter Sharon, and is survived by his daughter, Deborah Gallagher; sons, Jack Tapie and Kenneth Tapie; Joan Tapie, wife of 65 years; son-in-law, Michael Gallagher; four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. Francis proudly served his country in the Air Force for 22 years. In November of 1973, Francis accepted a position at then-Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, working for WX-3 repairing electronics. He would work at WX for 17 years till retiring in December 1990. In his life, he loved many things: scouting, where he helped his two sons become Eagle Scouts; camping; hunting and fishing; his children; but most of all, he loved his wife. Visit the online guest book for Francis at FrenchFunerals.com. FRENCH University 1111 University Blvd. NE 843-6333 frenchfunerals.com SANTA FE The wife of a Santa Fe man who died in the Santa Fe County jail two years ago is suing the jail, Santa Fe County and several unnamed jail workers for not properly screening her husband before he died of suspected alcohol withdrawal less than 24 hours after he was booked. John DeLaura was arrested for on Dec. 17, 2016 for assault on a household member and battery on a household member. He had allegedly pushed his wife, Lois Bealle DeLaura. Lois DeLaura, whose wrongful death suit was filed in state District Court on Monday, told Santa Fe police that John Delaura had been on a three-day drinking binge. The lawsuit was filed for her by attorney Cammie Nichols, who has filed other wrongful death lawsuits against the jail. Jail video shows DeLaura weaving and swaying, leaning on the wall, and looking like he was trying to maintain his balance the morning he was booked, the suit says. On information and belief, Mr. DeLauras withdrawal symptoms steadily worsened throughout his confinement in (the jail), and his medical situation continued to be neglected by employees, the suit states. Other prisoners said DeLaura appeared to not be well while he was in his cell, according to the lawsuit. He was found on the floor in the cell and shaking the morning of Dec. 18, 2016, and emergency medical staff pronounced him dead after performing life-saving measures. The Office of the Medical Investigator determined the cause of death to be chronic ethanol abuse, with contributing factors of hypertensive cardiovascular disease, the suit says. The lawsuit says an unnamed nurse who didnt properly handle DeLauras jail intake, by only partially completing intake forms and not making any note of DeLauras intoxication level. In fact, several sections of the required form(s) were left blank and multiple critical assessments went unperformed, the suit says. In March 2015, prisoner Thomas Pederson, 55, also died in the jail of suspected alcohol withdrawal. A wrongful death lawsuit was filed in March 2017, but attorneys from both sides agreed to drop the case last month. A lawsuit was also filed on behalf of Stacy Gambler, who was found dead in her Rio Arriba County jail cell in May 2015, shortly after she was transferred from the Santa Fe County jail. Her autopsy said she died of a gastrointestinal hemorrhage due to cirrhosis of the liver from chronic alcohol abuse. Both cases were recently settled. The night Anthony Juarez was shot in the shoulder during a shootout with police at his Northwest Albuquerque home started with a family outing to a wedding and a drunken disagreement, his wife told the Journal. Juarez was booked into the county jail Monday evening after spending the past month in the hospital. According to a criminal complaint filed Nov. 18 in Metropolitan Court, at least five officers were called to the couples home in the 3900 block of 67th NW, near St. Josephs and Ladera NW, because Juarez was acting drunk and aggressive. As the officers began to walk up to the home, they said, Juarez took a rifle out of his truck and said, I have you in my sights; I will kill you. The officers retreated and hid behind their marked Chevrolet Tahoe. Thats when, police say, Juarez started firing at the officers, hitting the Tahoe several times. One APD officer returned fire, striking the male subject in the right upper shoulder, the officer wrote in the complaint. APD K-9 officers arrived on scene, at which time the offender surrendered. The male was given medical first aid and transported to the hospital. Albuquerque police have not released the name of the officer who shot Juarez, and in the complaint the officers are listed as Police Officer 1, Police Officer 2, Police Officer 3, Police Officer 4 and Police Officer 5. Anthonys wife, Brianna Juarez, said he had never been violent with her before and she is not sure what set him off. The couple had been married for five years, and Anthony who is in the National Guard had recently returned home after spending six months stationed in southern New Mexico. Brianna said she and Anthony had taken their four children, ages 1 to 12, to get family photos taken that morning and gone to a wedding that night. She said that on the ride home he was playing with his gun and got defensive when she told him to put it away because it was making the kids nervous. She said that when they got home, Anthony started to scream at her. She said she took the gun away. He just started breaking everything in the room, Brianna said. He told me that he was going to shoot me tonights the last night of your life, he told me. Thats when I remembered he had a rifle. Brianna said she was able to get herself and all four children, including their baby, out of the home through a bedroom window and they ran to a neighbors house. From there, she said, she watched as police arrived. She said she heard Anthony count down and begin firing. I got back up to see what happened, Brianna said. I was expecting to see him on the floor. I was looking for the puddle of blood, because I figured he was dead after all of that. She said she believes the officers had been trying to negotiate with her husband and calm him down, but he continued to act aggressively. Was he a monster that night? Brianna asked. Yes, he was. But thats not the person that I know him to be or really anyone that knows him or knew him to be. Thats what the cops saw that night. He was not that person before that night. Copyright 2018 Albuquerque Journal Almost 2 months after Albuquerque Police Department officers shot a man who they said was taking about 80 people hostage in a Chinese restaurant, they have not released any information about the shooting, citing a federal investigation. Police have not identified the suspect, said what condition he is in, said what charges he is facing or identified the officers who shot him. In fact, the department has released next to no information about any of the shootings officers were most recently involved in four over the past 2 months. In response to several questions about delays, Gilbert Gallegos, an APD spokesman, said the department has been slower than we aim to be to keep up with the public release of information related to recent officer-involved shootings. He said recent personnel changes in APDs criminal division contributed to the delay as well as the need to protect the investigations by the multiagency task force. We understand the public interest in officer-involved shootings, which is why we strive to produce details sooner, Gallegos wrote. That is difficult when other law enforcement agencies are involved, or when we sometimes have 50 to 100 witnesses to interview and hundreds of hours of video to review. In one instance, the offender who survived the shooting was hospitalized until recently, and was not able to be interviewed by investigators. He said APD will hold a media briefing and answer questions about the Nov. 4, Nov. 18 and Dec. 13 shootings on Friday. ACLU: Wrong message Although APD has been irregular on how they release details, New Mexico State Police which investigates shootings involving law enforcement at many of the agencies throughout the state has a more formalized process for disseminating information. State Police Chief Pete Kassetas said his investigators typically release the names of officers as soon they have been interviewed or after they decline to be interviewed. He said that usually takes three or four days or up to a week or two. We essentially have an accused but not charged situation someone has done something but they havent been charged, Kassetas said. But we know also that theyre a public employee so we treat it a bit differently then someone else who is involved in a shooting. Peter Simonson, the executive director for the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico, said that given APDs history of excessive force and with the Department of Justice reforms underway, withholding information about officers and the people they have shot raises questions about what they are trying to control in the narrative. Its important to remember that APD was shooting and killing someone about every month and actively resisting the publics efforts (to see what was going on), Simonson said. We dont want to return to those days. It threatens to erode the trust that APD has built with the community over the past year and it sends a message that not much has changed inside the department. The previous administration, under Mayor Richard Berry and Police Chief Gorden Eden, was also sporadic about releasing information but they typically released a suspects name in the days following the shooting and released videos and held briefings in the weeks or months after that. After the first police shooting of the year Mayor Tim Keller and Police Chief Michael Geier said they would be more transparent and release information as soon as possible. Police Chief Geier held a news conference and a comprehensive briefing and released videos nine days after Daniel Saavedra-Arreola was shot and killed on Jan. 7. A couple of days after the next shooting in which officers fatally shot robbery suspect Richard Rivera on June 16 federal authorities filed a criminal complaint against Riveras girlfriend which identified him. APD held a media briefing on the incident the following week. After that shooting, the practice changed. When Arthur Lujan was shot during a SWAT situation on July 18 his name was released the next morning since officers had already been looking for him as a suspect in a homicide. Then, it was a more than a month before APD held an official briefing. And when Lambert Joe was shot and injured on Aug. 19, it was three and a half weeks before APD held a briefing and released his name and the name of the officers involved. This year, APD officers have shot and killed five people and wounded three. Gallegos said APD cannot yet release any information about the police shooting at Lins Grand Buffet on Oct. 7 because federal authorities are leading the investigation into part of the incident. Once charges are made public, the name of the offender can be released, Gallegos said. It is unclear what charges the man faces. A spokesman for the U.S. Attorneys Office would not comment on the ongoing investigation. Gallegos said APD was working toward returning to the practice of providing information in a timely manner. Chief Geier has directed all APD staff involved with these investigations to get back on track to meet his goal of providing media briefings in a more reasonable time period so the public can be assured we will be transparent with our investigations, Gallegos said. Still waiting for info: Oct. 7, 2018: APD officers shot an armed robbery suspect after they say he took diners and employees hostage in Lins Grand Buffet on San Mateo near Montgomery NE. Police have not identified the man who was shot, said what condition he is in now, identified the officers who shot him or said how many officers opened fire. An APD spokesman said investigators are working with federal law enforcement on the case. Nov. 4, 2018: APD officers fatally shot 18-year-old Anthony Chavez, who they say was armed, after a confrontation in the parking lot of an apartment complex on the 900 block of Louisiana SE. They had been called to the scene for reports that shots had been fired. Police have not identified the three officers who shot him. Nov. 18, 2018: APD officers shot and injured Anthony Juarez, 30, during a domestic violence call at his house on the 3900 block of 67th Street NW. Police say Juarez fired multiple times at officers and one returned fire. He was booked into jail after spending a month in the hospital. Police have not identified the officer who shot him. Dec. 12, 2018: APD officers fatally shot a man they say robbed a woman at gunpoint near San Mateo and Comanche NE and killed a dog in a backyard in a nearby neighborhood. Police have not released his name or identified the officer who shot him. Police say two men have not been seen since Sunday and a video showing them being beaten in the mesa has surfaced on social media. Albuquerque police spokesman Simon Drobik said Collin Romero, 15, was reported missing by Romeros mother after she learned of a Snapchat video showing Romero and another young man, Ahmed Lateef, being beaten in the mesas west of Albuquerque. The video showed Collin and Ahmed bleeding with what appeared to be broken bones, he said. Drobik said police believe the pair may have been involved in a drug deal that may have gone bad near Juan Tabo and Comanche NE. Both subjects have not been heard from since and their whereabouts are unknown, he said. Drobik did not give Lateefs age or any description, but described Romero as 5 feet 10 inches with brown hair and brown eyes. Tips: Anyone with information is asked to call the missing persons unit at (505) 242-2677. The news media are now covering the Central American caravan that is at the Mexico-U.S. border. This crisis cuts to the heart of Christian and Jewish scriptures. Sad it is that the response by (President Donald) Trump and the military is tear-gassing innocent children, mothers and other refugees. The U.S. response is woven with fear and fueled in politicized rhetoric. It is not grounded in biblical, moral or humanitarian speech. Faith leaders around the U.S. are calling for compassion, morality and common sense in the face of this human crisis that has involved several thousand human beings. The Bible calls us to welcome the stranger, the orphan and the poor. The Old Testament book of Leviticus reminds us of when the people of God were unwanted immigrants in Egypt. We are called to remember the abusive treatment of the Hebrew people and need to not return inhumane acts upon other human beings. Jesus emphasized the law of love and welcoming of the stranger. In the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 25, we people of faith are reminded to care for the least of these. In the New Testament book of James, we are called to respond to those in distress. Giving hospitality to the stranger is not easy for many of us, since we are wired to fear that which we do not understand. Some in religious groups look to legal status that is raised in the book of Romans, chapter 13, wherein Saint Paul calls for reasonable submission to laws and governing authority. When we presume that an immigrant is guilty of violating the law, we people of faith must hold up the criminal code of our country. One is innocent until proven guilty; this is our justice system, based on biblical messages in times past. Scripture lifts up the demand for love as the fulfillment of the law, and not punishment. Jesus called for compassion and not legalism during his ministry. The story of a loving God vis-a-vis our neighbors is held up in a parable of three men. Two followed the law as they avoided a stranger in need. The third man broke the law and went against cultural, moral and religious codes as he met the needs of a stranger; this man is called the Good Samaritan. Translating this biblical story to our present times means that love, not punishment, is what we are called to emulate. A body of international law is in part based on this story of compassion. Today, we hear from the White House much emotionally charged anger over refugees fleeing violence. Yet, our federal and international laws are the basis for a humanitarian response to those in need. Expressing hatred and fear of women, children and parents is not helpful as we attempt to resolve differences of opinion. Engendering mistrust and a destructive spirit is not in line with our biblical mandates. Using our military on the border with our taxes is projected to cost many millions money that will not be more correctly and justly used for human needs. We might now ask: What Would Jesus Do? The prayer and hope of religious people now is that reasonable and just immigration reform begins in seriousness. People of faith must unite and push for compassion for the refugees on our border. The prophet Zechariah said: God does not honor religious rituals when people of God oppress the vulnerable ones. The Creators command is before us to not respond to fear. We are called to be people of Good News who stand with love. The words of prophet Micah are on our hearts and minds. Love Kindness. Seek Justice. Walk humbly with God. After making the ridiculous pronouncement he would be proud to shut down the government in a fight with Democrats over funding for a border wall, President Trump retreated Tuesday in the face of reality. His new position, delivered by press secretary Sarah Sanders, is to find other funding sources with a goal to shut down the border, not shut down the government. Thats a wise decision though New Mexicans know it should be to shut down the border to illegal immigration and drug trafficking, not commerce and legal crossings. Although the looming government shutdown would be partial, there is no need to penalize hundreds of thousands of government employees, some of whom would still be working, but not getting paychecks until the impasse is resolved. Ironically, included in that group would be Border Patrol agents. But now, with Trump backing off and the imminent shutdown threat in limbo, it would be good for the country if Democrats, who had said they also were willing to shut down government rather than provide $5 billion for Trumps border security plan would also look for a place of sanity. Trumps retreat was forced in part by disarray among congressional Republicans, who despite having House and Senate majorities for two years have been unable to do anything meaningful on immigration. The same was true for President Obama and Democrats. But the tragic death of a 7-year-old Guatemalan girl last week only reinforces the need for more physical and technological barriers along the southern border, coupled with some rational fixes to our immigration laws. Thats especially true in light of a court ruling that if you get caught by the Border Patrol, you can simply say Kings X and apply for asylum, no matter your original intent. Presumed incoming speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., pronounced herself in favor of border security this week, saying we have a responsibility, all of us, to secure our borders. Then she denounced the wall as immoral. It would seem Pelosis view of border security is a Customs and Border Protection concierge that facilitates the flow of illegal immigration. So its worth noting many Democrats including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Hillary Clinton and then-Sen. Barack Obama voted in 2006 to approve billions for 700 miles of border barrier. It was called the Secure Fence Act. And a number of Senate Democrats voted for wall funding earlier this year as part of a broader immigration package that failed largely because of Republican defections. Trump desperately wants a wall. It was a central campaign promise. And physical barriers in certain areas do make sense. If Democrats are actually serious about border security, there are deals to be had. Case in point, on Tuesday, Republicans follow-up funding offer would have directed $1.6 billion to border security and $1 billion to immigration matters. Democrats rejected it. But there are still compromises available, presumably in the new Congress. For example, give Trump something for a real DACA fix. Or for legal status for many others now living in the country illegally. Trump has said repeatedly he supports both so why is this so hard? Trump claims hes open to deals. Heck, he wrote a book about it. Given congressional Democrats voting record and alleged support for a secure border, approval of some sort of barrier doesnt require any great moral compromise. While the threat of a partial government shutdown Friday has decreased, trying to find compromise on securing the border is as urgent as ever. Without making it harder to cross the rugged and dangerous country along the New Mexico-Mexico border, people are going to keep on trying and keep on dying. This editorial first appeared in the Albuquerque Journal. It was written by members of the editorial board and is unsigned as it represents the opinion of the newspaper rather than the writers. Jusoor, an Omani consortium based in Brazil, has signed a deal with Italian construction group, Tecnimont, for the funding of Package Two of a major industrial project at Liwa. Jusoor, a joint venture operating mainly in the mining sector, includes Orpic, Sohar Aluminium and Vale. The agreement signed with the Italian giant is related to the funding of the construction of a parking area, lighting poles and landscaping in Liwa Cultural Centre project, being implemented by Jusoor. Tecnimont, according to the Memorandum of Understanding, will provide funding for the construction of 111 parking spaces, 32 lighting poles as well as landscaping with a modern irrigation system at a total cost of $259,193. The project will reportedly commence in February and will be completed in April. The Italian group is also operating the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) works of Package Two of Liwa Plastics Industries Complex (LPIC) Project. RIO RANCHO The City of Rio Rancho has received notification that, in the coming months, it will receive almost $2.5 million owed to it by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and federal government. This payment stems from a 2007 reimbursable grant agreement with the USACE for the design and construction of an arsenic treatment facility needed to meet federal mandates. Per this agreement, approximately $6.5 million was owed to the city, based on available funding. Rio Ranchos water has always been very good the arsenic content is something thats been from volcanic activity, Mayor Gregg Hull said, knowing the proximity of several extinct volcanoes. Cleaning it out was an EPA mandate; we cleaned it out. He said getting the money had been one of his priorities since he took office. I am very happy that, after many years of fighting for this money, we will now cross the finish line once this payment is received, Hull said. The city received $350,000 in 2009, $2.135 million in 2016, $500,000 in 2017 and a little more than $1 million in 2018 for partial reimbursements. Rio Rancho would not have received the total amount owed without the focused efforts of the citys governing body members, city staff and city lobbyist, Hull said. I also want to acknowledge and thank our Congressional members and their staff, as well as USACE staff for their support. Hull said he was initially told pursuing remuneration for an unfunded mandate was a fools errand, and that he was throwing good money after bad. He said he was just green enough as he took office in 2014, hired a federal lobbyist to keep an eye on all the legislation for $210,000 and made two trips to the nations capital to get the ball rolling. In the first year, there was a lot of legwork, (requiring) changing the law that would allow us to get reimbursed literally an act of Congress, Hull explained. Its been slow progress, (but) in four years weve been able to recoup the $6.5 million. Its a big win for the city and it puts this money back in place into the city coffers, where it belongs, he said. He answered a question hes sure will come up: Why not use this money for police officers salaries? This is utility money and can only be used in the utility fund, he said. Its been a bad debt, sitting on the city books. U.S. Sens. Tom Udall and Martin Heinrich, along with U.S. Rep. Ben Ray Lujan and Gov.-Elect Michelle Lujan Grisham, announced last week that the Corps of Engineers had allocated about $10.5 million for water resources projects across New Mexico, including the money for Rio Rancho. As a member of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development, Udall worked to secure the highest level of funding ever for the Army Corps of Engineers. We welcome suggestions for the daily Bright Spot. Send to newsroom@abqjournal.com. Copyright 2018 Albuquerque Journal LORDSBURG Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, called for the head of Customs and Border Protection to step down after a congressional delegation visited the New Mexico stretch of border where a 7-year-old girl died after crossing the border illegally and being taken into custody. There was nobody on board who could offer any kind of medical help to her and no medically trained personnel, Castro said about the bus used by the Border Patrol to transport the child among a large group of migrants from Antelope Wells to Lordsburg. On Tuesday, an 11-member delegation of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus retraced Jakelin Caal Maquins final steps, starting in the remote area where she and her father crossed the border with 163 other migrants near the Antelope Wells port of entry in New Mexicos Bootheel. Rep. Ben Ray Lujan of New Mexico led the delegation during the tour of Antelope Wells and the Border Patrols Bounds Forward Operating Base. The Democrat said there is a water contamination issue, no running water, and two portable toilets for Border Patrol agents and the migrants they take into custody. The delegation then took the same 1-hour drive to the Lordsburg Border Patrol Substation for a tour of what I would describe as inhumane holding cells, where we saw children with adults in overcrowded facilities with a shared toilet, completely open, Lujan told a news conference. A young girl and her mother wanted water in one of the holding facilities, but there were no cups, Lujan said. Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, said, The SPCA (Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) would not allow animals to be treated the way human beings are treated in this facility. There are two sets of victims in this facility: the women and children who are here being processed and the officers that are having to process them, Green said. Green and other members of the delegation said agents need more training, resources and equipment to deal with the humanitarian crisis on the border. He wants a Marshall Plan to provide aid to help Central American countries stem the flow of migrants. The delegation called for an independent investigation of the circumstances surrounding the Guatemalan girls death less than 24 hours after she was taken into custody. Rep. Raul Ruiz, D-Calif., an emergency room doctor with training in humanitarian disaster aid, said the investigation should include health care experts. He said vulnerable migrants, like children, should have their vital signs checked when they are taken into custody. Ruiz noted the delay it took in getting emergency care for the child who stopped breathing and had to be revived in Lordsburg. The congressional delegation was not allowed to talk to the agents who took the child and her father into custody Dec. 6. But CBP Commissioner Kevin McAleenan accompanied lawmakers on the border tour in New Mexico and answered their questions. Based on my conversations with him, based on his conduct, I believe he should step down, Castro said. We have also asked the question, When was Secretary (Kirsten) Nielsen, his direct boss, made aware of Jakelins death? and If she was made aware of the death before Congress was, why she didnt report to Congress that this had occurred? Congress requires CPB to report a death in CBP custody within 24 hours. Hidalgo County Commissioner Darr Shannon watched the news conference and angrily interrupted Castro, who she said is blaming Homeland Security for everything. Rep.-elect Xochitl Torres Small, who will represent New Mexicos 2nd Congressional District, was part of the delegation that toured the border, but she left before the news conference. In the wake of this tragedy, it is essential that we work together to keep this from happening again, Torres Small said in a statement released by her office. It was clear that we need increased medical personnel, equipment and screening to responsibly take custody of those who present at the border, especially children. LAS CRUCES A Las Cruces woman is suspected of drinking and driving and then crashing a vehicle while her 5-month-old child was in the backseat. Brandy Irene Smith, 23, of Las Cruces, is charged with three felony counts of child abuse and variety of other misdemeanors. Dona Ana County sheriffs deputies were dispatched to a crash site on the 2300 block of Sheep Springs Road and Dripping Springs about 11:10 p.m. on Dec. 15. By that time, the occupants of the vehicle Smith, her boyfriend and their baby had left the scene and walked to the boyfriends mothers house. A deputy interviewed Smith and her boyfriend at the mothers house. Smiths boyfriend told the deputy he was in the passenger seat when Smith, who was driving, struck him twice and crashed the vehicle. The couples baby daughter was in the backseat. Smith told the deputy that she took her child out of the vehicle and walked a quarter-mile to the boyfriends mothers house, It was about 35 degrees outside, the deputy observed. The boyfriends mother told another deputy that her grandchild needed to be on oxygen 24/7 and the deputy had to return to the crashed vehicle to retrieve an oxygen tank left behind, according to the report. The deputy who interviewed Smith and her boyfriend wrote in the report that he believed each was intoxicated. Since Smith was driving the vehicle, she was given a field sobriety test, which she failed, registering blood-alcohol levels of 0.18 and 0.17. The legal limit in New Mexico is 0.08. Smith is charged with three third-degree felony counts of child abuse, two misdemeanor counts of battery against a household member and leaving the scene of an accident, four misdemeanor counts of aggravated driving while under the influence of liquor or drugs, careless driving, expired registration of a motor vehicle and no proof of insurance. Smith was booked into the Dona Ana County Detention Center where she was released on a $5,000 unsecured bond. Smith has a court hearing at 1:30 p.m. Jan. 31 in Third Judicial District Court. 2018 the Las Cruces Sun-News (Las Cruces, N.M.) Visit the Las Cruces Sun-News (Las Cruces, N.M.) at www.lcsun-news.com Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. LAS CRUCES, N.M. Las Cruces has become the latest New Mexico city to endorse the idea of allowing terminally ill patients to end their lives with help from doctors. The Las Cruces City Council voted Monday in favor of a bipartisan resolution to support legislation that will be introduced during the upcoming session. Albuquerque has voiced its support along with a majority of Santa Fe councilors. In 2016, the New Mexico Supreme Court declined to overturn the states existing assisted suicide law, meaning that aiding such deaths remained a fourth-degree felony. A legislative effort to overturn the law in 2017 was unsuccessful. Rep.-elect Micaela Lara Cadena of Mesilla will be co-sponsoring the 2019 bill. The District of Columbia and several other states California, Oregon, Colorado, Montana, Vermont, Washington, and Hawaii allow assisted suicide. GENEVA China and the United States traded barbs again Wednesday at the World Trade Organization, with the U.S. ambassador accusing China of technology theft while Beijings envoy retorted that the U.S. was finger-pointing. The standoff comes as many countries lined up to criticize and question Trump administration policies in a WTO trade policy review of the United States, a regular process that WTO member states undergo. Wednesday marked the second and final closed-door session on the U.S. after a first one on Monday. U.S. Ambassador Dennis Shea sought to re-direct attention on China, saying it would subsidize its industries to squeeze foreign producers and dump products at cheap prices abroad, a transcript of his remarks showed. This is not acceptable, Shea said. Hu Yingzhi, a deputy director-general of the Chinese Commerce Ministrys department of WTO affairs, said China had high expectations on the largest economy in the world to behave in the common interests of the entire membership of the WTO. But Hu appeared to bristle against U.S. allegations. China absolutely refuses to be the scapegoat and excuse for unilateralism and protectionism, Hu said. This is the review of the United States, not China. LONDON The European Union marked 100 days until Brexit on Wednesday by triggering an action plan to ensure planes can still fly and money can still flow between Britain and the bloc in the increasingly likely event that the U.K. leaves the EU without a divorce deal. The British government, struggling to break a political logjam over Brexit, released immigration plans that it said will take back control of the countrys borders but which opponents warn will batter the economy by shutting out everyone but highly paid professionals. The EU measures, announced a day after Britain ramped up its own no-deal planning, are intended to alleviate major disruption to people and businesses in case squabbling U.K. politicians fail to ratify a withdrawal agreement between Britain and the bloc. European Commission Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis called the contingency plan an exercise in limiting damage. Britain is due to leave the EU on March 29, but its unclear whether lawmakers will approve the divorce agreement Prime Minister Theresa Mays government has negotiated with the bloc. May postponed a vote in Parliament last week because the deal faced heavy defeat. It has been rescheduled for mid-January, but opposition remains strong across the political spectrum. Leaving without a deal risks plunging the British economy into recession and sparking chaos at the borders, as four decades of economic alignment and open markets evaporate. The EU plan includes temporary one- to two-year measures to allow some U.K.-EU financial services to continue and a 12-month provision to keep planes flying between Britain and the bloc. But Dombrovskis stressed that the measures cannot replicate the benefits of the withdrawal agreement, and certainly it cannot replicate the benefits of EU membership. Britains no-deal preparations include putting 3,500 soldiers on standby, chartering boats to bring in goods and stockpiling medicines. The government called them sensible precautions, but opposition politicians accused May of trying to scare lawmakers into supporting her Brexit deal. No-deal would be a disaster for our country and no responsible government would ever allow it, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn said. Most members of Parliament dislike both Mays Brexit deal and the prospect of leaving the EU without an agreement, but they are deeply divided about what to do instead, and the countrys political debate has grown increasingly bad-tempered as Brexit day approaches. Corbyn was forced to deny calling May a stupid woman in the House of Commons on Wednesday, after he was caught appearing to mutter the insult during a fiery debate. I did not use the words stupid woman about the prime minister or anyone else, and am completely opposed to the use of sexist or misogynist language in absolutely any form at all, Corbyn said. In a bid to regain some of its vanished political momentum, the British government published long-awaited plans for a post-Brexit immigration system that will end the automatic right of EU citizens to live in the U.K. Were going to bring an end to free movement, May said. We will do that in a way that enables us to reduce net migration but enables us to ensure that the brightest and best can be attracted to the United Kingdom. She said that in the future coming here will be based on your contribution, not on the country you come from. The government proposal places no limit on the number of well-paid, skilled immigrants who can settle in Britain, but puts curbs on low-skilled workers, who would only be able to get one-year working visas. The government plan suggests setting a salary threshold that immigrants will have to meet in order to be given the right to settle in Britain. An independent body advising the government has suggested 30,000 pounds ($38,000) a year above the median U.K. wage and more than the starting salary for nurses, paramedics, junior doctors and many other professions. Saffron Cordery, deputy chief executive of NHS Providers an umbrella group for Britains state-funded health care system said the health sector was deeply concerned about the proposal. High skills does not equal high pay, she told the BBC. The government said the exact salary threshold would be decided after public consultation. The rules will not apply to more than 3 million EU citizens currently living in Britain. The government has said they can stay, even if the U.K. leaves the bloc without an agreement on future relations. The EU, in its no-deal plans, urged member states to extend the same right to more than 1 million resident British nationals. Immigration was a major factor behind Britains 2016 vote to leave the EU, and May has made ending free movement and cutting net immigration by more than half to below 100,000 people a year her key Brexit goals. But that has put her at odds with many business leaders. Big chunks of Britains economy, from agriculture to health care, have come to depend on European workers, more than 1 million of whom have moved to Britain in the last 15 years. Businesses fear that choking off the flow of lower-skilled workers could lead to acute employee shortages. Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, a fierce opponent of Brexit, said the immigration proposals would devastate the Scottish economy, Its beyond me that any U.K. prime minister would want to have as her legacy turning the U.K. inwards and making it less open and welcoming to people from the rest of the world, Sturgeon said. The longer the political impasse drags on, the more worried British businesses get. The countrys five leading business groups said in a rare joint statement that businesses have been watching in horror as the prospect of a disorderly Brexit grew more likely. Organizations including the British Chambers of Commerce and the Confederation of British Industry urged lawmakers to return to their constituencies over Christmas and talk to their local business communities. We hope that they will listen and remember that when they return to Parliament, the future course of our economy will be in their hands, the groups said. ___ Cook reported from Brussels. Associated Press writer Danica Kirka in London contributed to this report. ___ Follow APs full coverage of Brexit at: https://www.apnews.com/Brexit The World Food Program is deeply saddened by the killing on Monday of a staff member in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Richard Kasimba, a driver, was shot dead during an ambush by unknown assailants about 70 kilometres northwest of Goma, North Kivu province, while travelling by road with three colleagues to monitor a food distribution, the WFP said in a statement released on Tuesday. His WFP companions were unhurt in the attack, which occurred in the Loashi area of Masisi territory. Their vehicle was heading to Nyabiondo to distribute assistance to 13,000 people recently displaced by violence, the statement said. Armed groups, many of them criminal gangs who prey on local communities and travelers, are active in North Kivu, particularly Masisi territory. They are also known to disrupt the work of humanitarian organizations. As we mourn our dear friend Richard, we condemn this senseless killing and urge all parties to ensure safe passage for humanitarian staff engaged in life-saving work, said WFP DRC Country Director Claude Jibidar, who had known the deceased for almost 20 years. Richard leaves behind a wife and nine children, aged between three and 23. He joined WFP in 1995 and was admired and respected by colleagues for his professionalism, decency and calm. DRC is one of the worlds most complex, challenging and dangerous humanitarian environments. As is the case in such places, humanitarian and other workers operating there often put their lives on the line, travelling long distances through areas where insecurity is rife. They do so with little thought for their own safety, in the service of those less fortunate than themselves. Richard was one such person, who chose to serve his fellow countrymen with selflessness and dedication., the WFP said. BUTTE COUNTY, Calif. - Many who have been displaced by the Camp Fire are experiencing the hardships associated with the housing crisis, especially those displaced out of the area. Some of their housing vouchers are timing out while others still may not have been able to access aid because they can't get to disaster recovery centers closer to Paradise. David and Elissa Crane have been staying in a Sacramento hotel since losing everything in the Camp Fire on Nov. 8. "We were able to get out with our cats and the clothes on our backs," David said. Their renter's insurance paid for a hotel stay until but Monday morning they were notified time was up and they would have to start paying out it on our own. "I hate asking for help but we need it at this point in our lives," David said. They are trying to figure out what happens next. and that's why they stopped by the new Mobile Disaster Recovery Center in Citrus Heights, similar to the ones that opened right after the fire in the Chico area. "We wanted to make it convenient for the survivors as far as being able to talk to as many agents with FEMA or SBA as possible, and also partner with Cal OES," said Michael Hart, a representative with FEMA. FEMA has already registered 20,000 households and given out more than $30 million in funding. The small business administration has given out $185 million statewide. "We have a program that's not only for businesses, but non-profits and homeowners and renters, these are for anyone impacted by the wildfires," said Yolanda Stokes. This is really important info for those who couldn't get back home but are staying here in this area. "I'm looking for work, looking for a home and looking to start over," David said. CHICO, Calif. - The Chico Police Department has issued a warning about package thieves this holiday season. The department has already received reports of thieves following delivery drivers around waiting for them to drop off packages. Here are some tips to avoid getting packages stolen: Track your packages The US Postal Service, FedEX and UPS all have systems to track your packages from the retailer to your doorstep. All three use tracking numbers that can be used to figure out where the item is and when it should be delivered to your home. With the postal service's Informed Delivery app, you can have email or text alerts about packages sent to you automatically, and you can post delivery instructions for the mail carrier if you won't be home when the package gets there. UPS' My Choice program and FedEx's Delivery Manager offer similar options. Amazon helps you keep track of your packages, too, with tracking information that can be found in your order details. Deliver to your office or neighbor Another surefire way to thwart porch pirates is to not have packages delivered to your home at all. Many people have holiday packages delivered to their workplace or to a trusted neighbor nearby who'll be at home when the item arrives. FedEx will hold your package for pickup at one of its FedEx Office locations or at Walgreens. Packages sent via UPS can be picked up at a UPS facility, diverted to a UPS Store or even delivered on another day that's more convenient for you. Invite the delivery person in Maybe you can't stay home during the day when those precious packages arrive -- hey, you gotta work to pay for those things, right? Sending stuff to your workplace isn't allowed, and you're not tight enough with your neighbors for deliveries to be left with them. But there are a few other options if you have an Amazon Prime membership. Amazon's Key Smart Lock Kit allows you to remotely unlock your door so a package can be dropped off inside your home. Or use Amazon's Key In-Car Delivery, which allows a delivery person to put a package in your back seat or trunk when it's parked on the street. What to do if your package doesn't show up So you got an alert saying your package was delivered but it's nowhere to be found. You can file a police report -- and then also do this: If it was delivered by the US Postal Service, you can fill out a Missing Mail Search Request. The main drawback with this, though, is you have to wait seven business days after the package was supposed to arrive before you can take advantage of this option. If it was delivered by UPS, the company encourages you to contact the sender to start a claim, because UPS says package senders have the most essential claim documents, like invoices, receipts, etc. If it was delivered by FedEx, there's an online form to fill out a claim for a missing package. Amazon's "Where's My Stuff?" page offers lots of helpful tips on what to do if your package ends up missing. CNN contributed to this article. CHICO, Calif. - Some young fire survivors from Paradise are getting a chance to learn at the college level. Sixth graders from Paradise Intermediate School sat in on a math class taught by Chico State faculty. Paradise Intermediate teachers reached out to Chico State faculty shortly after the fire, and the students attended this workshop to learn how to build 3-D models of different shapes. "All sorts of teachers have stepped up and offered their classrooms, offered to teach kids, and to share things with them," said Linda Cassady, a sixth-grade teacher at Paradise Intermediate School. "It's been easy for us to get here and they've been very welcoming." Chico State faculty also helped organize field trips and lesson plans to help Paradise students continue their learning. Indias only unified platform for all kinds of packaging solutions, Bizongo announces the launch of its new brand identity reinforcing the companys leadership as Indias largest one-stop packaging platform. In addition to launching a new logo, the company has undergone a complete brand revamp for its solutions Procure Live, Design Square and Partner Hub. The identity is in line with the companys mission to become synonymous with its brand tagline Everything Packaging. Backed with robust technology solutions and a strong foothold in the current Indian market, Bizongo now plans to enter international markets of USA, Middle East, and Southeast Asia. Launched in 2015, Bizongo continues to aid, empower and create value for the $50 bn packaging ecosystem in India. Bizongos new identity represents the companys value proposition that encompasses everything from design and development to procurement thus unifying the complete packaging experience on a single digital platform. Bizongo has solved packaging procurement and quality issues faced by Food & Beverage, FMCG, Consumer Durables, Automobile, and Engineering companies amongst others by delivering reliable, sustainable and high-quality packaging solutions. Simultaneously, Bizongo has been responsible for improved productivity and increased revenues for packaging manufacturers in India by providing robust technology-driven solutions to SMEs. Since inception, Bizongo has experienced a consolidated growth of 5000% and 350% in the last financial year. On launching the new brand identity, Aniket Deb, CEO, Bizongo said, Bizongo was founded on the firm belief that creativity and technology combined, have the potential to set into motion transformation across industries. Today, we have evolved to become a brand that has been responsible for bringing in experience, efficiency, and innovation to the packaging ecosystem. We have also advanced rapidly to become the go-to choice for Indias leading companies for all their packaging needs. The evolution into a single platform that caters to all needs of packaging required us to give this company an identity that resonated with the same idea. A massive growth rate called for a massively appreciated and understood identity. The new identity was crafted with one simple, crucial idea in mind. Bizongo is everything packaging. The challenge was to show that we as a company provide packaging for everything that visibly exists around us - be it consumables, cosmetics, gadgets, tools, automotive parts, or even chemicals. It was a beautiful journey discovering with our creative partners, how to translate this idea into an identity. The complete process has culminated into a hollow logo, which signified that we could encompass everything that came to us. We are everything packaging. We believe we can create tremendous value by enabling businesses to design, develop and source - reliable, responsible, sustainable and smart packaging everywhere. The new identity for the company hence plays a significant role in driving our vision and steering us to newer heights. Bizongos identity will visually echo the companys forte, and its promise, to be a one-stop platform for everything packaging in India. This identity has been designed and developed by Mumbai based design and digital company, The Minimalist. INDIA, December 18, 2018: Over the years, Bournvita Biscuits has become a favorite in the cookie category, successfully establishing itself as the Subah ka biscuit and a healthy partner to milk. Packed with ProHealth Vitamins and rich in the signature chocolaty taste, the brand is now taking this journey one step further by fostering progressive parenting, which has always been at the core of Bournvitas communication. Their latest campaign No More Excuses stems from real life insights when children resort to creative excuses to avoid eating anything that could be healthy. Sudhanshu Nagpal, Head Biscuits Category, Mondelez India said, Since its launch in 2016, Bournvita Biscuits has provided an effective choice of delicious snacking enriched with the wholesome goodness of Bournvita, the drink Indian consumers have trusted for decades. The latest campaign on Bournvita Biscuits appeals to all progressive mothers, who believe in collaborative parenting.Since mornings are always hustled, leaving barely any time for kids to consume the right foods, Bournvita Biscuits will help moms provide the right start to their day giving them no more excuse to skip the morning snack. The TVC conceptualized by Ogilvy India begins with a mother bringing in a glass of milk to her son just before he leaves for school. To avoid this, the boy instantly comes up with a creative excuse. His mother, clearly familiar with her sons antics, quickly reveals a plate with his favourite Bournvita Biscuits. Upon seeing this, the boy realizes what he has bartered away and immediately fixes the situation with another inventive excuse. As he grabs and relishes the yummy Bournvita Biscuits with a glass of milk, the mother is pleased that her son has started off his day with a healthy and delicious snack. The campaign plays on the insight that kids are most innovative when they want to get out of something. One of the things all kids want to escape is a boring breakfast. The film is simple, relevant, charming and brings this insight to life. said Harshad Rajadhyaksha & Kainaz Karmakar, Chief Creative Officers, Ogilvy India Essence, a global data and measurement-driven media agency and part of GroupM, today announced that it will take on integrated media agency of record duties for Airtel, a leading telecommunications services provider in India, effective 1 January 2019. The agencys scope of work will include both offline and digital media strategy, planning and buying. Airtel's media mandate is currently managed by Team Airtel, a bespoke client solution created by GroupM three years ago. The 30-member team will transition to Essence and continue to service the account. The Airtel business will be led by Yoginder Jain, Vice President, Client Servicing, India at Essence, supported by key practice leads across communications strategy, data strategy, client analytics, integrated media planning and media activation. The move will leverage the agencys data, digital and integrated media capabilities as well as full-service offering to deliver the next level of evolution for Airtels media strategy. Sam Singh, CEO, South Asia at GroupM, said, We are happy to further consolidate our relationship with an inspiring brand like Airtel. As Airtel moves forward in this ever-evolving industry, Essence is an excellent match to lead the relationship and help the brand find even more success. I am confident that Essence, with its strength of data, measurement and technology at the core of its integrated media offering, will deliver creative and innovative business, marketing and communications solutions to take Airtel to the next level. Anand Chakravarthy, Managing Director, India at Essence, said, We are delighted to partner with Airtel. Airtel is one of Indias most valuable brands and the opportunity to help shape its future success is truly exciting. The addition of talent into Essence is also a huge win for us, as we continue to strengthen our team, product and full-service offerings in the market. Airtel is a force to be reckoned with in the telecommunications sector, and we look forward to further support it in earning even more meaningful, effective and relevant connections with its customers. Airtel joins Essences portfolio of clients in India which includes Flipkart, Google, Honda two-wheelers and Zee Entertainment. This development marks an important milestone for Essence in India as well as in Asia Pacific, as the agency continues its rapid growth across the region. It further demonstrates the success of Essences approach to working with clients who want to drive transformational change in marketing and support the agencys mission to make advertising more valuable to the world. The United Nations Humanitarian Air Service (UNHAS) that enables aid workers to deploy to reach tens of thousands of people in need in the Central African Republic (CAR) is at risk of shutting down due to a shortage of funds, the World Food Program (WFP) that manages the service warned this week. UNHAS, which depends entirely on the support of international donors to finance its operating costs, is in urgent need of $3 million to maintain its service for the next three months and will be grounded after January if there is no immediate injection of funds. The need for UNHAS is as great as it has ever been, and it would be a real tragedy for aid operations if it were to close down, said Giancarlo Cirri, the Representative and Country Director of WFP in the Central African Republic. We are appealing to our donor partners to save this essential piece of humanitarian relief operations in the Central African Republic. CAR has been mired in conflict for years with regular spikes. Roads become impassable and whole parts of the country are often completely cut off from the capital Bangui leaving UNHAS as the main means of transport to access hard-to-reach locations. In the month of November alone, following clashes in the central, north-west, east and south-east regions of the country, UNHAS provided transport for over 2,000 aid workers a record for a single month since it started operations in CAR in 2006. Between January and December UNHAS also carried out 26 medical evacuations and relocated 193 workers from 5 localities. Over half of the countrys population (2.9 million people) remain in need of humanitarian assistance. One in four citizens is displaced either within or outside the country and insecurity continues to destroy livelihoods. From January to November 2018, WFP provided food assistance to more than 800.000 people including children between 6-23 months supported by a malnutrition prevention program. Love sets you free and at the same time traps you in a time that makes it unbelievable to move on. No one can really forget their first love; every story has its glorious moments, its unspoken promises and eventually broken hearts. &PriveHD, the premium destination for nuanced cinema, presents a poignant love story, Call Me By Your Name, on Saturday, December 22 at 1 PM and 9 PM. Directed by Luca Guadagnino, the movie is based on a novel written by Andre Aciman which takes the audience through a summer rendezvous between a 17-year-old and 24-year-old young adult. Timothee Chalamet plays the lead character of Elio Perlman along with Armie Hammer who plays the role of Elios fathers research assistant Oliver and the film also stars Michael Stuhlbarg, Amira Casar, Esther Garrel and Victoire Du Bois. Watch this story and you will realise there is an Elio in all of us; who goes through an intense life changing encounter and comes out of it filled with love and pain. The young Elio meets his fathers research assistant Oliver in Italy in the summer of 1983. Annoyance, elusiveness and eventually acceptance and maybe just a hint of jealousy Elio feels all this when he first meets the ever so charming Oliver. However, as love and attraction would have it, Elio starts gravitating towards Oliver. As Elio decides to show Oliver around his fathers town little by little, a timid relationship grows between Elio and Oliver and there blossoms a flower of unexpected bond and fresh emotions start to grow. Elios first love in its purest form grows stronger and the unknown exhilaration takes flight. However, reality catches up too soon and it is time for Elio to let Oliver return to his world where there is no place for all-year summer or complex emotions. Passionate desire or a bittersweet journey - Feel the other side of Call Me By Your Name as the film premieres on Saturday, December 22 at 1 PM and 9 PM only on &PriveHD. Mindshare, the global media agency network, today announced two major leadership appointments to its leadership structure in Asia Pacific. The first is the elevation of Prashant Modi to become their Asia Pacific Chief Operating Officer. Modi, who was previously Chief Commercial Officer for Mindshare in Asia Pacific, will take on the broader responsibility of managing the Singapore hub and working with Mindshare Asia Pacific CEO Amrita Randhawa on future proofing the overall company structure and offering. Modi has been with the agency and GroupM for over 16 years working across both GroupM and Mindshare in its India and regional office in Singapore. Prashant is widely credited within the agency as a key reason for the companys consistent delivery across the region. Commenting on the appointment Randhawa said, There are few people who care about our people and our company as much as Prashant. He is the beating heart of Mindshare and one of our absolutely finest minds. I am delighted that this role is going to give him the canvas he deserves to make an even bigger impact on our organization and on our people. Speaking on his elevation Modi said 16 years with Mindshare and it still is a dream place to work with great colleagues and clients. Mindshare has always provided a very open atmosphere to fuel personal growth and I am looking forward to continuing to contribute to our achievements and growing our business further The second appointment is that of Rohan Lightfoot as Chief Growth Officer of Mindshare Asia Pacific. His role is focused on developing high growth opportunities for new and existing clients with an emphasis on new products, innovation and digitization. Rohan has over 20 years experience, across the region based out of Singapore and in China, US and UK. Most recently he was with Isobar working on clients such as Pernod Ricard, Adidas, Yum!, Unilever and Coca Cola. Speaking on Lightfoots appointment Randhawa said Rohans been on my must-hire list for years! He is uniquely placed having spent solid time in China, having a blend of creative, media and digital craft experience as well as working on some of the regions biggest accounts. He understands the changes that the agency needs to deliver in order to continue to be a valued partner for our clients. Speaking on the move to Mindshare Lightfoot said I am so excited to be taking on this new role. Its a perfect fit for my experiences and passions in my career. The breadth and depth of capability at Mindshare is staggering. The challenge of keeping the worlds leading media agency always ahead was impossible to turn down. Im already loving being part of the team that Amrita is building. Both roles are based in the agencys Regional Singapore Office and effective immediately. Pratha, a Future Consumer Limited lifestyle home fragrance and spiritual products brand has taken an initiative to spread education in rural India. Pratha has tied up with Goonjs School to School initiative to provide better quality education and school supplies to the underprivileged children in remote areas in the country. More than 1200 Future Group stores which includes Big Bazaar, Easy Day, Heritage, HyperCity, Food Bazaar and Nilgiris across India will support this noble cause. For every Pratha product sold at these stores, Rs.1 will be donated to School to School initiative. Pratha will support Goonjs School to School initiative which is a step towards creating better access to education for the rural children and bridge the gap between urban and rural population by providing them with equal opportunities. Goonj creates school kits for the rural children which encourages children and motivates them to attend school and understand the importance of education. Speaking about the initiative Keshav Biyani, Head - Home and Personal Care, Future Consumer Limited says, Education has the power to solve many problems and can contribute in a big way for a brighter future. We are happy to support Goonjs initiative to make education accessible to as many children as possible. We would like our customers to participate in this initiative and reach out to everyone who can support this cause. Pratha will be running this initiative till 15th January 2019 and invites all its customers to support this cause and help create a change in our society. So, come visit the nearest Big Bazaar, Easy Day, Heritage, HyperCity, Food Bazaar and Nilgiris store and help educate a child. Would you like to receive breaking news notifications from The Post and Courier? Sign up to receive news and updates from this site directly to your desktop. Breaking News Columbia Breaking News Greenville Breaking News Myrtle Beach Breaking News Aiken Breaking News N Augusta Breaking News Click on the bell icon to manage your notifications at any time. Success! Please click the 'Allow' button in the 'Show Notifcations' alert in your browser if one is available. Thank you for signing up! Please enable notifications in your browser and reload the page. Main Christmas Tree of Tbilisi Placed at Republic Square By Tea Mariamidze The main Christmas Tree of Tbilisi will be assembled at the Republic Square instead of the traditional place in front of the parliament building.The information was released by the City Hall, whose employees have already started assembling the tree and decorating the square.The reason of changing the location of the tree is the protest rallies of Zaza Saralidze, father of the murdered teen Davit, and Malkhaz Machalikashvili, whose son was killed in the anti-terrorist operation in December at the parliament building.The protesters have placed tents and refused to change the location of their rally earlier this month when the Mayors Office sent them the letter.Either the authorities have to attack us or they should hold responsible for all the people who are guilty in forging the case of my sons murder. They have only these two options, Saralidze told media in early December.Malkhaz Machalikashvili says the rallies in front of the parliament building will continue. He called for a fair and transparent investigation into his sons case.The rallies will continue. We will not leave this territory. We call on people to join us, he stressed.Moreover, an online petition was also launched in support of Machalikashvili and Saralidze. I refuse a Christmas tree; I choose a human! is the slogan of the petition which has already been signed by hundreds of people.The petition authors point out that if the authorities and the government of Tbilisi force the public to make a choice between the crushed human right and a Christmas tree, they choose a human.Tbilisi City Hall released a statement regarding the recent development. The statement reads that the process at Rustaveli Avenue was differently evaluated by politicians and media.On December 15, the City Hall announced that the main area for Christmas and New Year celebrations will be the Republic Square in central Tbilisi, known before as the Rose Revolution Square.Tbilisi Mayor, Kakha Kaladze visited the decoration works and took part in the assembling process of the tree.According to him, a New Year village will be arranged around the Christmas tree, where various activities and shows will take place."The main Christmas tree will light up on December 22 and it will be quite impressive. I would like to call on everyone to come with their children and enjoy this beautiful event, Kaladze said. Egypt has been looking at the Asian markets to expand its agricultural exports and open up new opportunities for economic investments there, with the aim of improving its own economy. Deputy Agricultural Minister Mona Mehrez signed Nov. 26 a cooperation protocol with Vice Minister of China Customs Hu Wei to open the Chinese market for seven Egyptian agricultural products dates, grapes, strawberries, onions, potatoes, pomegranates and mangoes in January 2019. Egypt is also set to export some fruits and vegetables to Japan after quarantine officials from both countries agreed in November on the quality and safety standards of Egypt's agricultural produce, Egyptian Minister of Agriculture Ezz Eddin Abu Steit stated Nov. 8. Sherif Fayyad, a professor of agricultural economy at the Desert Research Center, told Al-Monitor, Egypt seeks to increase the volume of its foreign trade and boost its economy through creating new markets for its agricultural exports, especially in East Asia, while maintaining the existing markets. Most of Egypt's agricultural exports are directed to European and Gulf countries. Fayyad believes that Egypt's expansion of exports to Asian markets, such as China and Japan, is of great advantage since it boosts its economic and investment ties with countries that Egypt enjoys steady political relations with. Sometimes political factors interfere in the economic relations between countries, he said, referring to the case of Sudan that imposed in May 2017 a ban on the import of animal and agricultural products from Egypt amid a range of disputes between the two countries. At that time, Sudan accused Egypt of supporting the rebels in Darfur, in western Sudan, which it believes want to topple the government in Khartoum. But on Oct. 25, Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir lifted the ban on Egypt's agricultural exports during an official visit by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to Khartoum. The Egyptian government represented by the Foreign Ministry and the Ministry of Trade and Industry needs to conduct a detailed study on the Asian markets and their food safety requirements. That way Egypt can compete with other countries such as Tunisia, Morocco and Israel that spend a lot on scientific research and have conducted in-depth studies about the needs of these markets, Fayyad added. In 2017, a series of bans were imposed by Gulf countries on Egypt's agricultural exports over concerns of pesticide residues. In May 2017, Kuwait banned the import of onions, guavas and lettuce from Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) stopped importing all types of peppers grown in Egypt. In June, Bahrain banned the import of strawberries from Egypt. Bahrain, Kuwait and the UAE agreed to lift these import bans after a series of meetings and negotiations held between an Egyptian delegation and the three Gulf countries, the Egyptian Ministry of Agriculture said in a statement on Oct. 22, 2017. In an attempt to reverse the series of bans imposed on its agricultural exports, Egypt has been enforcing new regulations and measures to ensure the quality of its agricultural exports. In November 2017, the Egyptian Ministry of Trade and Industry issued decision No. 670, whereby experts from the ministry and the Ministry of Agriculture would conduct inspections of the harvested crops and prepare them for export once approved. Supervisors from the two ministries would oversee the new system. According to a report issued in September by the Agriculture Export Council, a governmental agency, the value of Egypt's agricultural exports reached $2.114 billion between September 2017 and July 2018, from $2.111 during the same period the previous year an increase of 0.14%. In addition, Egypt's agricultural exports volume increased by 7% to 3.973 million tons, up from 3.711 million tons the previous year. During the same period, exports to the European Union (EU) and the United Kingdom hit $630 billion, while exports to European countries outside of the EU zone reached $409 million. Exports to North and South America recorded $29 billion, while exports to African countries reached $27 million and to Arab countries $771 million. Khalil el-Malki, professor of pesticides at the Agricultural Research Center, told Al-Monitor, If Egypt wants to expand its agricultural exports through opening new markets in Asia, there should be a clear-cut plan for the exportation process. It has to market and publicize for the agricultural crops it seeks to export before it starts cultivating them, so that there would be a map of the total size of crops targeted for exportation and the total areas of land needed for cultivating them. Malki called on the Ministry of Agriculture to create an awareness campaign for Egypt's exporters. Through this campaign, exporters must be made conscious of the types of pesticides that are allowed for use internationally, and the criteria of pesticide spraying, which must be done at least 15-20 days before the harvest. The government should also enact a law imposing fines on exporters who break the rules and determine specifications of exportation so that they would not harm Egypt's export reputation, Malki said. An Iraqi administrative court has annulled former Prime Minister Haider al-Abadis decision to remove Faleh al-Fayadh from his posts as head of the National Security Council and leader of the Shiite-dominated Popular Mobilization Units (PMU). Abadi had dismissed Fayadh from his positions on Aug. 30 due to his involvement with political parties in violation of the Iraqi Constitution. Why it matters: Abadi sacked Fayadh after he joined a coalition of parties close to Iran following the May parliamentary elections. Fayadhs move was a crucial step in costing the US-backed Abadi a shot at a second term. The establishment of the PMU during the fight against the Islamic State was a big victory for Tehran, with the pro-Iranian militias now officially a federal security force. The PMU, however, also includes several factions that are close to Iraqs Ayatollah Ali Sistani rather than Iran. As such, Tehran has been keen to maintain control by installing one of its allies to head the umbrella organization. Returning Fayadh to his perch as head of the PMU and the National Security Council will help Iran preserve its interests in Iraq and prevent its rival, Saudi Arabia, from empowering its own political networks in Iraq. Iran will also be able to keep a close eye on US troops in next-door Iraq. Whats next: Iran is also supporting Fayadhs bid to become interior minister of the new Iraqi government. However, Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadrs Sairoon Alliance, which came in first in the May elections, has so far blocked a vote of confidence in parliament. Know more: Read Omar Sattars piece from October, when an Iraqi court first put a hold on Fayadhs removal. - Ali Mamouri A blaze on Dec. 18 at a girls' school in the southeastern Iranian border town of Zahedan the capital of Sistan and Baluchistan province that killed at least four 6-year-old girls has thrown the nation into deep mourning. According to official reports, the fire erupted after one of the students accidentally tripped an old oil heater while playing with others during a break. Neighbors and school staff managed to rescue most of the 59 students before firefighters arrived at the scene to extinguish the blaze. A few hours later, Iranian Education Minister Mohammad Bathaei reacted with a promise to launch an investigation into the tragedy, which he blamed on the school staff's negligence. A local official also quickly resigned afterward. "I have no explanation to offer. I feel like I have lost my children or grandchildren," he said in a statement meant to alleviate the suffering of the families of the deceased. Meanwhile, a local prosecutor general announced that the school headmaster and a teacher have been placed under arrest to face charges over the deaths. But neither of those reactions seemed to console or be of any help with the grief that gripped the nation. "Detentions or resignations can do no good to the pain of the families. How much longer will people have to suffer the loss of their young loved ones [at schools]?" wrote Reformist daily Aftab, as it criticized authorities for reducing such tragedies to blame games with no practical measures. Hard-line Javan, a paper highly critical of President Hassan Rouhani and affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, broadened the story into a partisan debate with pointed criticism against the administration. "While the government boasts about free education and while the lawmakers are busy lobbying for their favorite ministers, parents have to pay high prices on a daily basis for their children's education, and those children continue to fall victim to substandard heating systems in worn-out school buildings." The paper also hit out at the Rouhani government for suspending a comprehensive nationwide school heating renovation plan, which it said was supposed to take effect six years ago. "Parents who see off their kids off to school every morning with wishes and smiles cannot afford to get their bodies back in the afternoon," Javan's editorial read. Even Iran daily, which officially represents the Rouhani government, acknowledged the inadequacies, citing an official who put the proportion of Iranian schools with substandard heating systems at 42%. To many Iranians, the deadly blaze was reminiscent of a similar tragedy in the Kurdish village of Shinabad in the country's west back in 2012. That incident killed two schoolgirls and left 30 others injured. Six years on, however, the physical burns coupled with the trauma are far from over. The injured children, now young adults, went through repeated surgeries, but some are left with permanent scars to grapple with for the rest of their lives. "Iranians were still reeling from the Shinabad tragedy, and now they have to wake up to another school fire that left our kids to the mercy of death," wrote pro-reform Ebtekar on the revisited disaster. On social media, the blaze also once more brought to the fore the commonly perceived notion that the Iranian government has been purposefully keeping Sistan and Baluchistan province, which borders Afghanistan and Pakistan, an underdeveloped region. "Mr. Prosecutor, you better arrest the oil minister," tweeted one user, as he criticized the government's failure to provide the area with basic living standards including mains gas, a source of affordable energy accessible in most other Iranian provinces. "Let's write this down and repeat it: A country that exports [natural] gas has its schoolgirls burn to death in blazes caused by oil heaters," tweeted another infuriated user. Shaima was 17 years old and entering her junior year in school in Erbil. Her mother, who was worried about family "honor," often challenged her daughter in heated discussions. Eventually, Shaima's family barred her from going to school. Around 4 p.m. on Oct. 30, the neighbors heard gunshots coming from Shaimas house. This is not your business, Shaimas mother, who was outside the house, told concerned neighbors. The family claimed that Shaima had committed suicide, but it soon became evident that her younger brother had murdered her with an AK-47, allegedly over possession of a mobile phone. When her body was examined, there were gunshots to her hands, head and chest, and it appeared to Erbil police spokesman Maj. Hoger Aziz that, out of her innocence, Shaima had covered her face with her hands thinking that she could protect herself against the bullets from the barrel of her brothers weapon. Shaima is but one of many girls and women who often die in "mysterious circumstances": They are burned alive in an "accidental fire," savagely stabbed with a knife, killed by a bullet or simply thrown off of a cliff. The faces of the murdered women are often disfigured so that the police cannot track the murderers down. But even those killers who are caught by police sometimes go free if they are influential or know people who are influential. The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and international organizations such as the United Nations have poured millions of dollars into raising awareness about the plight of women in Kurdistan. But the data shows the situation is only getting worse. Outgoing UN special representative to Iraq Jan Kubis acknowledged the KRGs efforts to end so-called honor killings and other forms of violence against women, including amending national laws regarding honor killings, setting up more women's shelters, restricting the practice of polygamy and bringing KRG law on combating violence up to international standards. Despite increased awareness of sexual and gender-based violence and important efforts to combat it, there is still an alarming number of women and girls who continue to face this horrific violation of their rights, Kubis said Nov. 25. The KRG set up the High Council of Womens Affairs in 2009 to address entrenched concerns that exist in Kurdish society. The council spearheaded a 16-day campaign that began Nov. 25 to end violence against women. Head of the General Directorate of Combating Violence Against Women Kurda Omar told NRT channel on Nov. 6 that in the first 10 months of 2018, violence against women has increased both at home and at work, particularly sexual violence. In the first nine months of this year, 91 women were killed or "committed suicide" in the Kurdistan region, 203 women either "burned themselves" or were burned, 87 sexual assault cases were recorded, and 7,191 women complained about being subjected to violent acts, according to official statistics quoted by NRT. The data shows that the violence is increasing every year, Shokhan Hama Rashid, a lawyer who specializes in cases of violence against women, told Al-Monitor. Hama Rashid, who has worked in this field for the last 14 years, believes there has been progress in raising awareness, and the increase in statistics could partly be explained by the fact that more and more women are coming forward to be heard but he says there are fundamental reasons why the violence is so entrenched. We encourage people to go to court, but there is huge bureaucracy sometimes the cases are politicized or political parties interfere, Hama Rashid said, adding, Some people prefer to resolve their issues through tribal councils. Tribal councils often refer to the social offices of the two ruling parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), where disputes between families and tribes are resolved outside the boundaries of the court system with the participation of tribal chiefs. Historically, the Kurdish parties have justified violence against women perceived to be "immoral" as a way of preventing the corruption of youths and thus weakening the Kurdish liberation movement. There are many tales of how women were gunned down in the streets of Sulaimaniyah, Erbil and in the countryside throughout the second half of the 20th century because the armed men in the mountains believed these women were immoral. Others, like Kurdish intellectual Mariwan Kanie who teaches at Amsterdam University, believe that following the establishment of the Kurdistan government in 1992 under the protection of the international community, the new rulers who were former selfless peshmerga commanders became too greedy and corrupt and turned the whole Kurdish society upside down. The transformation of the ex-peshmerga into corrupt tycoons has changed the class structure of society and resulted in a social, political and cultural crisis, Kanie wrote in April 2015. Coercion and force have become crucial in protecting the dominant power relations in Kurdistan. Violence against women is part of this newly emerged context and is related to this crucial transformation in the governing practices since the 1990s. Nyaz Abdullah, an independent journalist with a particular focus on women issues, also believes that post-1991 violence against women has increased under the Kurdish rule. The statistics show that since 1991, thousands of women have been killed. I personally believe that the number of women killed in the name of 'honor' is no less in number than the victims of Halabja, Abdullah told Al-Monitor in reference to the 5,000 people who were murdered during the gassing of the city of Halabja in March 1988 by Saddam Hussein's Baath Regime. On Nov. 28, three days after the recent campaign to combat violence against women started, the main office of the KRG directorate dealing with violence against women in Sulaimaniyah came under attack those responsible were not identified. Meanwhile, as the debate about violence against women continues in the Kurdish media, the number of victims continues to rise. Raja Zaatry, deputy mayor of the northern Israeli city of Haifa, resigned from this post Dec. 12 under Israeli pressure and a media campaign against him by the Israeli right wing. This came as a result of Zaatrys positions seen by senior Israeli officials as against Israel. Zaatry was also accused of supporting Hamas and Hezbollah. Commenting on Zaatrys resignation, Haifa Mayor Einat Kalisch Rotem said in a statement, The Arab community in Israel was and will remain part of the leadership of the city of Haifa. She noted that the personal war against Zaatry has ended. On Oct. 30, Israel held local elections in 251 municipalities and local councils, including the municipality of Haifa, a key city for Israel. Haifa, a mixed Arab-Jewish city, is home to around 280,000 residents. Based on the understandings among the city's winning electoral lists, winning Mayor Kalisch Rotem announced Dec. 3 the appointment of Zaatry, a member of the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality (Hadash), as deputy mayor. Zaatrys appointment sparked a wave of criticism in the Israeli political arena, which reached a climax Dec. 9-10, when main opposing figures called for annulling Zaatrys appointment because of his anti-Israel and pro-Hamas and Hezbollah positions. Among these figures were Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Interior Minister Aryeh Deri and Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon. Al-Monitor tried repeatedly to contact Zaatry, but to no avail. He refused to give any comments to the press given the sensitivity of his situation. On Dec. 9, Zaatry told Israeli Channel 10 that he represents Israel's Arab and Jewish residents together. He denied being a member of Hamas or Hezbollah, affirming his affiliation to the Israeli Communist Party (Maki) and Hadash, and calling for peace and equality among Arabs and Jews. Zaatry, 40, is the former head of the Palestinian Students Union in Israel. He worked as an editor at the Maki-affiliated Ittihad newspaper and is one of the founders of the Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions Committee of Palestinian Citizens of Israel (BDS48). Zaatry is also one of the leaders of the struggle against the recruitment of Palestinians in the Israeli army, and he is the secretary of Maki and a member of the Hadash political bureau. Al-Monitor talked to journalist Barhoum Jaraisey, a Hadash leader and close friend of Zaatry. Israel wanted to punish Zaatry for his patriotic positions, his participation in the popular demonstrations against the Israeli policy, his statements against it and his support for Hamas and Hezbollah, he said. Zaatry decided to give up his new post to keep Israel from punishing the municipality and depriving it of government budgets if he were to remain in his post as deputy mayor of the municipality. Zaatry believes he won the battle of principles despite the loss of his post. Zaatrys withdrawal was seen as a victory for the right-wing positions that demanded his dismissal. On March 13, 2015, Zaatry said during a lecture at Bar-Ilan University that the Islamic State (IS) was inspired by the Zionist actions of 1948 against the Palestinians, mainly in terms of massacres and rape. He continued, Hamas is not a terrorist group, it is a legitimate part of the Palestinian people. Commenting on the Israeli war on Lebanon in July 2006, he told Al Mayadeen channel in 2016 that Hezbollah was not a terrorist organization and was capable of deterring the Israeli aggression. Mahmoud Muhareb, a Palestinian academic and associate researcher at the Doha-based Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, told Al-Monitor, The right-wing parties attempts to keep the Arabs away from the municipalities and to incite criticism against Zaatry fall in the context of Israel's strategic behavior to narrow the democratic margin available to the Arabs in Israel. He added, We are facing a frantic provocation with no legal basis. Zaatry is a member of Maki that opposes any armed action against Israel and calls for a peaceful solution to the Palestinian cause. Zaatry has had several controversial positions opposed by the Palestinian Arabs inside Israel as well. In December 2016, Hadash denied him any official post within its ranks or within Maki, after his repeated insults during political debates and his verbal abuse of Arab political activist Nidal Muhannad Haddad. The two had disagreed on the attacks by the Syrian regime against Syrian nationals since the start of the revolution in 2011. Haddad had lashed out at Bashar al-Assads regime and Zaatry stepped up to its defense. In October 2016, Yaffa48 news website, which is close to the Islamic Movement in Israel, lashed out at Zaatry for comparing its leaders in an article published on the Hadash website on Oct. 10, 2016, to IS members who spread their sectarian poison among the Arabs. A Palestinian journalist from Haifa told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity, Zaatry does not represent the Arabs and Palestinians in Haifa. He calls for Arab-Jewish coexistence, disregarding the fact that we are the owners of the land or part of the Palestinian Arab people. His discourse focuses only on daily life-related demands rather than on identity-related and political demands. Whats more, he became part of the municipal coalition alongside Zionist parties. He added, The issue of Zaatry is not related to a patriotic matter or political principles. The campaign against him is a protest by the Likud Party for not being represented in the municipality of Haifa. The Likud Party and Mayor Einat Kalisch Rotem disagree on administrative issues in the municipality. The Likud remained outside the municipal coalition. The party thus sought to exploit Zaatrys past statements to force him to resign. The controversy over Zaatry spilled from Haifa municipality to the Israeli Knesset. Knesset member Yousef Jabarin from the Joint List of predominately Arab parties described to the Israeli Broadcasting Corporation (Makan) on Dec. 9 Netanyahu's intervention in the appointment of Zaatry as part of a violent racist campaign by the extreme right. He said that Haifas Arab residents deserve representation in the municipality in line with the Arab-Jewish coexistence principle instead of Netanyahu's hatred policy. Awad Abdel Fattah, former head of the National Democratic Assembly party (NDA), said that Zaatrys issue proves that the idea of coexistence between the Arabs and Jews that Israel is trying to promote is not fake and false. Zaatry is not the first one to face this pressure policy. Arab Knesset members enjoying parliamentary immunity such as Haneen Zoabi, Azmi Bishara and others also faced a demonization campaign by the highest Israeli levels, he said. Zaatrys case has put Israels allegations of seeking equality among Jews and Arabs to the test. His withdrawal was a clear statement that the Israeli right wing has imposed its will on the municipality of Haifa, through pressure and threats to deprive it of government privileges. This shows that Israel took its discriminatory policy against Arabs to the next level. The case at hand is new evidence that the Israeli right wing is now showing more stringency in expressing its anti-Arab stance in Israel. It no longer distinguishes between a moderate Arab and an extremist, according to the Israeli standards. This heralds an ongoing campaign against Palestinian Arabs inside Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is trying with all his strength to prevent or at least postpone the presentation of US President Donald Trumps peace plan, also nicknamed the Deal of the Century. A very high-placed political source in Jerusalem told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity that Netanyahu reached the conclusion that if the deal will be unwrapped in the coming months, before Israels elections, it will make it very difficult for him to win with a significant majority and it would harm his survival plan vis-a-vis the anticipated investigations and indictments against him. The information that recently reached Jerusalem regarding the main points of the American proposal arouses great worry in Netanyahus circle. A senior diplomatic source told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity last week that the program includes a clear partition of Jerusalem into three sections, and it is not about a Palestinian capital in Abu-Dis (a Palestinian village in the Jerusalem governance area) but in significant sections of East Jerusalem. According to the source, there will be two capitals in Jerusalem: the Israeli capital in West Jerusalem including control over the Western Wall and Jewish neighborhoods in the citys eastern sections, and the capital of Palestine in the eastern section. In addition will be a third region, within the Holy Basin, to be under international control. Needless to say, the Israeli right-wing will raise tremendous protests over such a plan and cause a public uproar. Netanyahu will have to respond to the plan. According to another diplomatic source also speaking on condition of anonymity, Even if President Mahmoud Abbas hurries to say no, Netanyahu will still have to express his opinion. And so he will find himself caught between a rock and hard place, to say the least. Should Netanyahu say yes to Trump, he will find himself in great trouble with the right. Even if he doesn't answer Trump immediately and postpones his response, he will receive harsh criticism from his right-wing electoral base. That is the same base that abandoned HaBayit HaYehudi leader Naftali Bennett in the last elections in 2015 and instead voted for Netanyahu and offered him victory. If Netanyahu says no to Trump, he may lose the American president as a strategic ally and as Netanyahus most important diplomatic asset. This is a difficult choice one that Netanyahu does not want to face before elections. If he does not announce that he opposes the American program, it is almost certain that he wont be able to gain control of a significant number of Bennetts mandates. That is the ultimate dream of the HaBayit HaYehudis leader: Presentation of the American plan before elections would be Bennetts golden opportunity to differentiate his party from the Likud. It would constitute a powerful impetus for Bennett to show his voters that the time is ripe to vote for him and not for Netanyahu. Netanyahu is aware of the dangers of the American program on the political level. He is using all of his influence to delay it, but doing so cautiously and without leaving too many fingerprints. His head operator in this effort is the influential Israeli ambassador to Washington, Ron Dermer, who enjoys much prestige and is very close to the presidents Middle East team and especially to senior White House adviser Jared Kushner. Dermer is trying to recruit the support of Trumps evangelistic base in order to show the president that his most faithful adherents do not want Netanyahu to be placed in a difficult situation and that it is preferable to postpone the presentation of the program until after the Israeli elections. As of now, the elections are expected to be held at the appointed time in November 2019. The problem is that a postponement would be a significant move, while the situation on the Israeli-Palestinian front continues to deteriorate quickly. No one knows [how long] Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will remain here with us, a senior Israeli security source told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity hinting at Abbas advanced age. The Israeli support of Hamas and the difficulties with Abbas may bring the situation to a boil and then to an explosion. Washington knows that continued delay in presenting the program is likely to complicate the situation and raise the odds of loss of control. Another danger hovering above the plan is that if and when it is delayed until after the Israeli elections, that may be the very same time in which Trump himself faces elections in November 2020. Then he would be open to additional heavy pressures to delay the program presentation to his second term of office. This is exactly how Netanyahu wore down former US President [Barack] Obama with everything connected to the peace process, a Western diplomat told Al-Monitor recently on condition of anonymity. The diplomat added, With Trump, he [Netanyahu] will be much more soft-spoken and friendlier. But the result will be similar: stagnation. According to Western diplomats, the American peace team is split along the following lines: The right is occupied by the influential ambassador to Israel, David Friedman. He supports the settlements, is very wary of the Palestinians and is doing everything possible to defer the presentation of the program. Friedman is on Netanyahus side with everything connected to this explosive issue. On Friedmans left stands US envoy Jason Greenblatt, described by the Israelis as a professional attorney who tries to compromise and bring the sides closer together while simultaneously placating his boss, Trump. Greenblatt, who is investing much energy into formulating the plan, wants to present it but has no deadline. To Greenblatts left is Kushner. He is viewed as the left-leaning person in the group; he really wants to bring the Israelis and Palestinians to the negotiation table and believes that it is indeed possible to present the Deal of the Century. It is the stance of the president himself that contains the element of surprise. According to information from European sources, Trump is the one pushing for completion of the plan and its unfurling. Nonetheless, we must not forget that we are talking about an impulsive president: Trumps behavior is not based on organized teamwork but on moods and gut feelings. He believes that his legendary talents as a businessman will enable him to do the unbelievable regarding this issue, an Israeli source told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity. The problem is that his [gut] feelings can be swayed relatively easily, mainly if he will understand that presentation of the program will harm his chances of re-election. At this stage, however, it seems that the odds are high that the American program will be unveiled in the coming months. The European Union is also gearing up for the plan, and eight key countries (France, Britain, Holland, Poland, Sweden, Belgium, Germany and Italy) came out with a clear statement on Dec. 19 to the US administration in which they bluntly said that any peace plan must include the partition of Jerusalem and be based on the 1967 cease-fire lines. Otherwise, it would simply not be viable. Another interesting development is the weakening of the alliance between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which was reported this week in American media. The reason behind it: the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Netanyahu relied on [Saudi Prince] Mohammed bin Salman as a powerful ally who would help him with regard to the American plan, a high-ranking Israeli political source said this week on condition of anonymity. Now Salman has his own problems and is lowering his profile regarding Israel. This is not good news for Netanyahu. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Dec. 17 ratcheted up his oft-repeated threat to launch a new military operation in Syria by adding the words at any moment. Erdogan also claims US President Donald Trump gave a positive response to starting the operation, though US special envoy for Syria James Jeffrey said the United States is united in its opposition and the Pentagon warned Ankara against any military move. So, even as Turkey, Russia and Iran agreed Dec. 18 on a committee to craft a Syrian constitution, it's quite likely that Ankara is indeed planning a military campaign east of the Euphrates aimed at weakening Kurdish militants. Counterintuitively, it could benefit both Russia and the United States. Turkeys leadership has long been eyeing the possibility of a military campaign in the area where US-led international forces are deployed, though Erdogan has specifically said he will not target US troops. Erdogan reaffirmed his intentions to fight Kurdish terrorists to appeal to his domestic audience and demonstrate the continuity of his foreign policy. For instance, he mentioned the potential operation in eastern Syria during the final press conference Oct. 27 of an Istanbul summit with Russia, France and Germany. Three days later, he promised members of Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) that he would rid the area in the trans-Euphrates region of militant Kurdish groups. Some Kurdish groups there are backed by the United States in the continuing fight against the remnants of the Islamic State (IS). Erdogan's Dec. 12 claim that he would start the anti-terrorist campaign in the area within a few days upped the ante. On one hand, Ankara and Washington remain committed to the road map of stabilizing Manbij, a city on the western bank of the Euphrates. During the latest consultations, the American-Turkish action group also arranged to continue cooperating on their plans for other areas. Jeffrey said Washington's support for the Kurdish fighters is tactical and temporary, and he met in Gaziantep, Turkey, with representatives of the Kurdish National Council, which rejects the Kurdish nationalist, US-supported Democratic Union Party (PYD). Turkey considers the PYD an affiliate of a terrorist group. On the other hand, on Dec. 12, Erdogan once again accused the United States of breaking the Manbij agreement and basically decided it should be handled according to his interpretation of the terms. The Pentagon replied that one-sided military actions carried out by any side of the conflict in northeastern Syria are unacceptable. However, the United States has demonstrated its willingness to compromise, as was when the agreements on Manbij were reached. This time, Erdogans statements were not just a means to measure the situation and take a step toward solving the problem of Manbij in Turkeys favor. He also created conditions where the Americans must respond, either seeking constructive discussion in the lengthy negotiations with Turkey which Erdogan may view as a pretext to delay the proposed operation without any significant political damage or ultimately agreeing to surrender some parts of the trans-Euphrates region. The Turkish side has been making its intentions known for well over a month. In late October, it conducted airstrikes on the Kurdish-held region of Syria's Kobani (Ain al-Arab). Subsequently, Turkish media spread drone footage of Kurdish fortifications in Tell Abyad, Syria, and afterward, military vehicles started to flow into the area of Akchakale, Turkey, which is historically connected to Tell Abyad. Turkey is now reportedly dismantling concrete border walls in the area and consulting with Syrian rebel leaders, as any operation should include locals who know the area well enough to navigate it flawlessly. There is speculation that 14,000 soldiers of the dissident Syrian National Army, supported by Turkish troops, will take part in the assault. The possible objective of the campaign is to divide the Kobani area from the Jazira region (in Hasakah province), which the Kurds united in 2015 shortly after the Islamic State (IS) was ousted from Tell Abyad. Here, a parallel with Turkey's Euphrates Shield campaign is clear. Russia, Turkey and Iran which would later become the "Astana trio" involved in Syria talks in the Kazakh capital of Astana ultimately managed to prevent the Kurdish-held Kobani and Afrin areas from merging into a unified front along the border between Syria and Turkey. However, the United States recently established five observation posts in the Tell Abyad and Ain Al-Arab areas to control the border, despite Ankaras protests. Considering the ethnic diversity of Tell Abyads population Arabs, Kurds, Armenians and Turkmens the Kurds might surrender the city. But if not, any attempts to bypass the American posts could establish a precedent and lead to severe consequences for the opposition in other areas: Nothing would stop the pro-regime forces, using the pretext of fighting against the terrorism threat," from getting around similar posts Turkey erected in an Idlib de-escalation zone. Russia has repeatedly emphasized that Turkey failed to fulfill its obligations to remove the extremist militia Hayat Tahrir al-Sham from the de-escalation zone. Yet the possibility of another exchange between Russia and Turkey, resulting in the withdrawal of the Syrian opposition groups from Idlib to the trans-Euphrates area, also should not be excluded. This scenario would be difficult to carry out but not at all impossible, considering the current conditions in Syria. In theory, it's possible the United States would agree to the moving of opposition forces into Tell Abyad. However, this measure could be seen as a decision in line with the Astana process policy, which is contrary to US efforts to focus solely on the Syria negotiations held in Geneva. Following the 11th round of Astana talks in late November, Russian special envoy for Syria Alexander Lavrentiev for the first time focused on the situation in northeastern Syria. It's widely known that Moscow not only expressed concern about the US presence in the area, but has also undertaken practical steps to decrease US influence and bolster its own efforts to end the Syrian civil war. For instance, Russia invited representatives of the Arab Council in Euphrates and Jazira to the congress in Sochi, Russia, in January. Moreover, those representatives cooperate with Ahmad al-Jarba, leader of Al-Ghad Al-Souri (the Syria Tomorrow movement), and the military division of an all-Arab tribal group, the Syrian Elite Forces. On Dec. 13, Maria Zakharova, spokesperson for the Russian Foreign Ministry, said Moscow believes the United States intends to create pseudo-state structures in the trans-Euphrates area as a factor of destabilization hindering the process of political resolution. The statement followed Erdogans remarks from the day before that the new operation would contribute to the resolution in Syria. An operation would provide Turkey with a foothold toward further weakening the Kurds, which might make them more cooperative with the Syrian regime. Such an action may also encourage them to develop an economic partnership with Damascus, which in the long run could mean the United States would lose leverage with the Syrian government. Turkeys active involvement coincides with rumors about the deployment of S-300 missile systems supplied to Syria after Russia's Ilyushin Il-20 was shot down Sept. 17 in Homs and Deir ez-Zor, and redeployment of pro-Iranian militias closer to the line of contact with the regimes troops and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a US-supported Kurd-Arab alliance. Also, Damascus reportedly is moving its weapons to the airport in Qamishli basically at the rear of the Kurdish forces. The PYD has already asked the international community and the Damascus government to unite and resist Erdogans plans. A Turkish invasion, however, is not the best prospect for the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, even though Assad would appreciate the decrease in American military influence. In that case, the regime might have to deal with potentially gray zones outside its control that it won't be able to reclaim. And a Turkish campaign wouldn't necessarily mean the United States would leave Syria. The Americans might focus on the issue of Syrian-Iraqi border control, considering that Assad is unlikely to provide the Kurds with guarantees, and they will need the United States to preserve any remnants of their statehood. Moreover, if the Turkish troops do appear east of the Euphrates, Washington will probably use that move to press for the political division of the Syrian Democratic Council, the political wing of the SDF, and to integrate Arab tribes, which are growing more discontented with the Kurdish monopoly. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which have already sent troops to the SDF-controlled territories, are also likely to support these actions, being interested in preventing Turkish influence from increasing in the area. At the same time, the UAE has been invited to join the Astana talks: Will the Turkish action against the Kurds move Abu Dhabi to take a more pro-active stance in the political dialogue, or stop in its tracks its emerging diplomacy with the Syrian regime and the emirates support for the return of refugees? CAIRO Naama al-Farmawi and her friend May Abdel-Moneim head to the Korba area in Cairos Misr al-Jadida district every morning, carrying sandwiches wrapped in bags with stickers that read "Naharak sa3eed" (Have a nice day) and sell them to passersby and workers. For years, Farmawi has dreamed of running her own street kiosk, instead of selling her products on the corner of the street. All I need is a permit from the district to run and expand my business and preserve my rights and fulfill my [legal] duties to the state, Farmawi told Al-Monitor. According to a five-year study by the Federation of Egyptian Industries Tax and Customs Committee that was published in December, informal financial transactions in Egypt amount to roughly $400 billion per year. The study was sent to the Ministry of Finance. Head of the Tax and Customs Committee, Mohammed al-Bahi, said in a Dec. 4 press statement that the study aims at finding ways to integrate the shadow economy in the countrys official economy, in a bid to achieve unprecedented financial returns and to preserve society. Bahi said that the study addresses the disadvantages of the underground economy and ways to solve them. The study also suggests solutions that include the establishment of a higher tax council, turning the Egyptian Tax Authority into a public authority, amending the value-added tax laws, unifying the tax rate, adopting a law for small and microenterprises, as well as encouraging e-payments instead of cash transactions. Last month, the Ministry of Finance completed the preparation of the draft tax law for small and medium enterprises and will submit it to parliament for discussion and approval. The informal or shadow economy refers to economic activities and transactions that occur below the governments radar without any declared taxes that should be paid. This type of economy is not part of the gross national product, economic researcher Hussein Abdel Latif wrote in his study on the repercussions of the informal sector on the Egyptian economy. The shadow economy makes up about 60% of the total Egyptian official economy. The informal sector is one of the most burdensome phenomena to the state and the business community within the formal economy, not to mention that it includes all poorly manufactured, not eco-friendly and nonconforming to safety public health products. This is in addition to fake and counterfeit products that harm the national industry, economist Khaled Rafaat Saleh, head of the Tiba Center for Political Studies, told Al-Monitor. One of the disadvantages of the shadow economy is the lack of insurance rights and pensions for workers, he said. We should not only think about the financial return that comes from issuing permits for the activities in the informal sector and the taxes that this might generate. Before integrating the shadow economy, we ought to offer incentives for workers to work under the umbrella of the state, starting with tax exemptions for a period not exceeding three years and bank loan facilities, among other procedures, Saleh said. He added, Organizing exhibitions for informal sector workers will also be an incentive for them to become part of the countrys official economy, which will help them market their products and give them a chance to develop. Saber Ahmed, a street vendor selling jeans, told Al-Monitor. I wish I can stop running with my mattress and goods every time I see a security officer. I only hope that one day I can have a permit to sell my goods and have a pension for when I can no longer work. A plastic bottle vendor nearby overheard the conversation and joined in, saying, I am nearing 60. I only aspire to have my own kiosk to sell my goods with dignity but this requires money that I dont have. Asked about whether these bottles are suitable for human consumption, he said, I buy them from a factory in al-Basateen neighborhood in Cairo. I have no clue. There are plenty of goods and products of unknown origin that are sold in the flea and street markets in Cairo. The undersecretary of the parliamentary Economic Affairs Committee, Ashraf al-Arabi, told Al-Monitor, The integration of the shadow economy depends on the legislation of laws that allow informal businesses to join and exit the state economy easily and to give them incentives to work under the official economy and remain there so that the state can also benefit and monitor all activities. The incentives include reduced taxes and bank loan facilities, he noted. On Dec. 10, the Cabinet announced the government's plan to integrate the shadow economy into the formal one in three steps: the completion of a draft law on the taxation system for small and micro enterprises; the finalization of the draft law on the unified tax procedures; and presenting the draft law to the business sector and informal economy experts. All field studies about the informal sector in Egypt suggest that informal workers are ready to be part of the official economy, especially the ready-made clothing sector, Yaman al-Hamaki, an economics professor at Ain Shams University, told Al-Monitor. The only problem facing the integration of the shadow economy is the large costs these workers could endure. But with incentive laws guaranteeing that they will have returns on the money they paid including financing their businesses and offer them the chance to export their goods as well as reduced taxes these workers would feel more secure to work under the states official economy, she said. Hamaki concluded, We must consider the integration of all economic activities within the informal sector separately. The ready-made clothing sector is different from that of the street food or furniture industry. We must pinpoint the needs and problems of every sector in the most appropriate way. Integrating the shadow economy will have a positive impact on the state budget and citizens as well." The Donald Trump administrations snap decision to withdraw 2,200 US troops from the battlefield in Syria today came from a familiar source: the president himself. We have defeated [the Islamic State] in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency, Trump wrote in a morning tweet just hours after the Wall Street Journal first reported the news. The move once again scrambles US policy toward the Middle East, coming as the Trump administration had begun to coalesce around a three-tiered policy for the war in Syria that seeks the lasting defeat of the Islamic State (IS, also known as ISIS), Irans withdrawal and an irreversible political settlement backed by the United Nations at talks in Geneva. That process seeks changes to Syrias constitution and government and possibly President Bashar al-Assads ouster. As recently as this month, US officials were telling Al-Monitor they believed they had unique leverage to bring Russia and Iran, which would soon seek to stop paying Assads mounting military bills, to the bargaining table. On Tuesday, UN-brokered talks to convene a new constitutional committee broke down, though the sides promised to resume talks in January. Former US officials said that while the State and Defense Departments are still likely to try to get Trump to walk back the decision, the damage may have already been done. Even if this does get overturned or significantly revised, it does undermine the already limited leverage the US has in Syria, Frances Brown, a former National Security Council director under both President Barack Obama and Trump, told Al-Monitor. Today shows that once again, even though the US has the most effective armed forces in the world, the backing of US military force is not all that credible: Our military can be redeployed by a tweet. This will have a chilling effect on other potential US partners who already fear that the US is a fair-weather friend. Todays announcement would also appear to change the administrations calculus about leverage in the negotiations. Asked how the decision would impact Trumps hand in UN-led talks, a source close to the US administration told Al-Monitor it would seem to weaken it. The source, speaking on condition of anonymity, indicated that a warning order had gone out to US troops in Syria about the withdrawal, suggesting that the decision still could be reversed. Yet even if the Pentagon and State Department are able to change the presidents mind, experts said the move could irreparably harm the US position in Syria. Assad will not give one concession on anything, especially the constitutional committee, said Randa Slim, a fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington. Turkey will gain the upper hand in northern Syria. The question: Will [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan go forward with his attack [east of the] Euphrates? If so, what will Damascus reaction be? Irans? The decision and Trumps assertion that the Islamic State had been defeated also drew immediate criticism from close allies of the president in Congress, where lawmakers of both parties were blindsided by todays news. Withdrawal of this small American force in Syria would be a huge Obama-like mistake, said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. With all due respect, ISIS is not defeated in Syria, Iraq and after just returning from visiting there certainly not Afghanistan. Over the summer, the Defense Departments inspector general estimated that IS had 30,000 fighters left in Iraq and Syria, and a Pentagon spokesman said the militant group would emerge from the US-led fighting stronger than al-Qaeda in Iraq at its height. The campaign against ISIS is not over, Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White clarified today. We have started the process of returning US troops home from Syria as we transition to the next phase of the campaign. For force protection and operational security reasons we will not provide further details, she added. We will continue working with our partners and allies to defeat ISIS wherever it operates." The decision also leaves an uncertain future for the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, which have clashed with NATO ally Turkey over ties with Kurdish groups. Testifying to Congress earlier this month, Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Kenneth McKenzie indicated that the Pentagon would hope to integrate the SDF into local security and police forces after the defeat of IS. But those plans have been threatened by Erdogan, who has promised renewed attacks against the Kurdish forces aligned with the SDF. Trump made his decision to pull out after speaking to Erdogan on Friday, according to Reuters. In addition to catching lawmakers off guard, the move also appeared to scramble the US administrations messaging on Syria. At the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Vice President Mike Pence ignored shouted questions from reporters. And State Department spokesman Robert Palladinos briefing, scheduled for 2:30 p.m., was abruptly canceled with just three hours to spare. Ankara recently hosted an eager crowd at the first Turkish Defense Industry Summit, but all the accompanying fanfare wasnt enough to hide the most significant flaw in Turkey's own defense program foreign dependence. All of Turkeys state-controlled defense industries were represented at the Dec. 12 summit, held at the Presidential Complex and organized by the Defense Industries Undersecretariat (SSM), which is tasked with developing the country's industry and modernization of the Turkish Armed Forces. The SSM has been under the direct authority of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan since 2017. The Turkish Armed Forces Foundation (TSKGV), the state-controlled giant that owns majority shares in Turkeys top defense companies, was also moved from the Defense Ministry to Erdogan's desk in 2017. TSKGV companies and their products include Aselsan (electronics), Tusas Engine Industries (engine design and development), Havelsan (software), TAI (Anka drones, Atak helicopters and Hurkus planes), Roketsan (missiles), Aspilsan (aircraft batteries) and Isbir (alternators and generators). The combined revenue for these companies in 2017 was around $3.5 billion. According to 2017 research, TSKGV is an empire responsible for 43% of Turkey's military sales and 41% of its exports. It employs 40% of its personnel and consumes 60% of its research and development funds. Erdogan, speaking at the summit, said Turkey has reached 65% self-sufficiency in defense industry production. He also remarked, [We are] currently working on 650 projects whose costs total $60 billion. Turkey introduced the TAI T625, or the Gokbey, at the defense event, its first general-purpose helicopter. Produced as a prototype at TAI facilities, the aircraft's first flight was Sept. 6, and mass production is scheduled for the end of 2019. SSM head Ismail Demir told those gathered that officials will be visiting a Southeast Asian nation this month to finalize the export of T129 Atak attack helicopters. Although Demir did not disclose the buyers, previous reports have suggested it might be the Philippines. Ankara signed a deal with Pakistan in 2017 for the sale of 30 Ataks, making it Turkey's largest single defense export order to date. Turkey offered the Pakistanis a $1.5 billion line of credit in 2017, but the deals payment terms are unknown. The Pakistani deal, while good news for Ankara, also exposes the biggest flaw in Turkey's defense industry. TAI will manufacture the T129 under license from the Italian-British company AgustaWestland, and to fulfill the Pakistani contract, it has to acquire US export licenses for the US-made power pack for the aircraft. The Atak is powered by two CTS800-4A turboshaft engines, made by the Light Helicopter Turbine Engine Co., a successful 50/50 partnership between Honeywell International and Rolls-Royce dating to 1984. The agreement with Pakistan has been postponed for six months because of the US license applications. Given the strains in US-Turkish relations, the delay could drag on considerably. Ankara has now begun searching for helicopter engines for Ataks in Europe and China. Turkey began a turboshaft engine program in 2017 in the move toward overall independence, but it will apparently take at least eight years before mass production can begin. Another example of Turkeys foreign dependency dilemma is the ambitious Altay main battle tank project. BMC, the Turkish-Qatari armored vehicle manufacturer, has been contracted to produce the Turkish-designed Altay MBT. According to Ankara's plans, production of the first batch of 250 Altay tanks will begin in 2019, the first 15 tanks will be put into service in 2020, and 20 more tanks will be delivered in 2021. Turkey will procure about 1,000 tanks, which will replace most of the old tanks in its inventory. The project will be spread over 20 years and cost around $25-30 billion. As previously reported by Al-Monitor, despite tense relations with Turkey, it looks like Germany will be involved in producing the Altay's engine. BMC has entered into a partnership with the Dusseldorf-based Rheinmetall Group and will build a joint engine factory in Adapazari, in northwest Turkey. Rheinmetall, which manufactures Leopard tanks, will support BMCs production of the first 250 Altay tanks by providing MTU Friedrichshafen 1,500-horsepower engines. It will also provide technology for BMC to develop an 1,800-horsepower engine to be used in subsequent production. The Altay project has gotten to the mass production phase without problems in procuring its systems, but engines remain an issue for Turkey. BMC produced 600-horsepower diesel engines for all the armored vehicles for the Turkish Army in 2017 and is currently testing a 1,000-horsepower engine that is supposed to be the basis for the 1,500-horsepower Altay diesel engine. Delivery is set for 2021, meaning the Altay will have to wait at least three years for a Turkish-made power pack. In related news, on Dec. 13 Ankara announced the creation of the Turkey Space Agency, which has been in the works for several years. The agency is to prepare and carry out the National Space Program in line with the policies determined by the president of Turkey. How Turkey will overcome its foreign dependency in aerospace is a mystery. Ankara, which is excited about exporting Atak helicopters and Altay tanks, knows it must minimize its foreign dependency, especially in regard to power packs, transmissions, sensitive optic lenses, software and aerospace technologies. Its goal is to cut dependency to about 10% by the republics 100th anniversary, in 2023. To accomplish that, it must increase defense funds allotted for research and development (which currently amount to about 1%), increase defense industry personnel from the current 3,000 to 30,000, and achieve robust integration of the sector with academia. The presidential palace, in taking over the defense industry's strategic decision-making, has been touting effectiveness, efficiency and speed. It will need to make good on that potential if it is to reach its 2023 goals. TI Georgia: Change of Legal Status of the Presidential Administration is Unjustified On December 10, a draft law by MPs Guram Macharashvili and Rati Ionatamishvili was registered at the Parliamentary Bureau, which envisages the change of the status of the Presidents Administration staff from qualified public officers to persons recruited on the basis of an employment agreement. With these amendments, the staff of the Presidents Administration will be dismissed upon the expiration of the Presidents term, while the recruiting of new staff will be possible without a contest and their contract duration will be tied to the Presidents term of office. These amendments violate the rights of the Administrations staff, as well as threatens the fulfillment of the public service reforms.Since 2013, the main aim of the public service reforms was the establishment of a legal basis for the formation and functioning of a stable, unified public service in Georgia based on career promotion, merit, integrity, political neutrality, impartiality, and accountability. The aforementioned principles were reflected in the new Law on Public Service.Notably, the EU-Georgia Association Agreement also envisages the pursuit of public administration reform and on building an accountable, efficient, effective, transparent and professional civil service.According to the Law on Public Service, work in the Administration of the President is considered a civil servant position, which is appointed for an unspecified term. According to the initiated draft law, the status of persons recruited on the basis of an employment agreement will be given to over 100 civil servants working in the Administration of the President. This change radically changes their legal status and undermines the provisions of the law that state that staff in the Administration of the President are civil servants.According to the explanatory note of the draft law, the necessity for the amendments is that the staff of the Administration of the President represents the support staff of the President in his/her execution of duties as a state-political official, therefore they should be recruited on the basis of an employment agreement.Notably, the Administration of the President can recruit staff on the basis of an employment agreement under the current law (mainly advisors and assistants). However, the entire staff of the Administration of the President cannot be considered as support staff to the President, since they are committed to upholding the effective functioning of the institution and their duties remain the same with every President. Institutional memory and professionalism are the precursors to ensure the successful execution of their duties.The initiated draft law also goes against the essence of the N626 Constitutional Court Decision of October 17, 2017, on the Oleg Latsabidze Against the Parliament of Georgia, where the Court deemed unconstitutional a provision that envisaged the dismissal without basis of the head of the structural unit upon the election of a new Gamgebeli.We call upon the Parliament to vote against the initiated draft law that establishes a precedent for the politicization of the public service, damages the ongoing reforms and violates the labor rights of public servants. Turkish news outlets reported on Dec. 6 that Hakan Fidan, the director of the National Intelligence Organization (MIT), was in Washington DC to brief Congress on the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Although initial media reports used prudent language, emphasizing closed door meetings, Fidans Washington engagements became an urgent matter of interest in Turkeys fast-paced news cycle. Indeed, government sources in Ankara classified this as a routine trip for the intelligence community. After traveling with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to the G-20 summit in Argentina, Fidan first landed in Canada. Then he arrived in Washington a routine visit, according to sources in Ankara and Washington and met with senators of the NATO Observer Group. Sources in the United States confirmed official Turkish statements that the Khashoggi case was only one among several other intelligence and security issues discussed. Before his departure, Fidan and his team visited CIA headquarters on Dec. 7. Again, this was reported as a routine visit. Yet Ankara and Washington sources both denied that Fidan briefed the US Congress. Meanwhile, in Turkey, the latest Fidan crisis was unfolding. On Dec. 7, when asked by the media about allegations that Fidan had briefed the US Congress, Erdogan simply brushed it off. I do not have knowledge of this," he said. "After [Fidans] Canada trip, something like this might have happened. This statement that Fidan might have possibly acted without the knowledge of the president was sufficient to generate a crisis in Ankara. The Turkish opposition, particularly members of the Republican Peoples Party (CHP) and the Good Party (IP), criticized Fidan. CHP lawmaker Engin Ozkoc was particularly outspoken. In his press statement, he provided multiple examples in which Fidan had ignored invitations to brief the Turkish parliament. Ozkoc reminded the public that over 2015 and 2016, 33 bomb attacks had killed 363 people in Turkey. During that period, Ozkoc was the spokesman for the Security and Intelligence Commission, which had invited Fidan to brief parliament, but Fidan refused. Ozkoc accused Fidan of completely ignoring Turkey's parliament which was not briefed on the Khashoggi murder while greeting the US Senate. His interlocutor is not the lawmakers elected by this nation, but US senators elected by Americans," he said. "That is why he [appeared and] reported information to them, and was held accountable to them. Ozkoc called on Fidan to resign. Lutfu Turkkan, an Good Party deputy chairman, criticized the Justice and Development Party's "native and national" slogan and declared it to be disingenuous. He is responsible to the Turkish parliament," said Turkkan. "He must have confused the address [and] ended up at the US Senate. Fidans actions harm the Turkish nation, said Turkkan. Aytun Ciray, another deputy chairman of the IP, questioned what Erdogan would say about Fidan briefing the US Senate without his knowledge. Ciray, just like other opposition members, elaborated on the governments relentless efforts to prevent Fidan from briefing the Turkish parliament as a way to undermine the legislative body. A sober yet belated response came from Temel Karamollaoglu, the chairman of Islamist Felicity Party, who said the sky would be falling if Fidan had traveled to the United States and briefed the US Senate without Erdogans knowledge and approval. As the oppositions criticism grew, Justice and Development Party (AKP) spokesman Omer Celik told the press on Dec. 11 that Fidan did not formally brief the US Congress. He also said that Erdogan was informed about Fidans engagements in the United States. The oppositions uproar finally quieted down. There are at least three crucial follow-up points about this incident. First, Erdogan controls not only the oppositions agenda but also his own bureaucrats fate. Erdogan allowed harsh words to be spoken against one of this long-time confidants in public, only to discredit those allegations within a few days. It is yet another example of how savvy Erdogan has become in using incomplete if not fake news. This gives double rewards to Erdogan. It allows him to signal to his top echelon that your image and your reputation can be tarnished by one statement from me. It also permits for a temporary release of tension in the pressure cooker of Turkish politics. Although the leaks from Washington were initially credible, they were ambiguous. In Turkey, it was promptly overblown, with Fidan briefing the US Congress, being questioned by the Americans and bowing to them. Erdogans vague answer about Fidans activities fueled the discussions as well. Within a few days, the opposition appeared to be blowing it out of proportion, creating problems over a routine bureaucratic matter. The oppositions efforts to play into the anti-Americanism of the Turkish public hurt their two solid arguments: First, how can a bureaucrat travel to a foreign country without Erdogans knowledge? Next, why didn't Fidan brief any multiparty group (or commission) or the Turkish parliament? Second, the loud criticism and the sudden collapse of the oppositions arguments once more demonstrated to the public that the legislative body has little to no power left to influence Turkish politics. Erdogans alliance with the ultra-nationalist National Movement Party (MHP) seems to be working to control the majority of votes and voices in the parliament. Even on such a sensitive matter, MHP members were silent. An Istanbul-based political science professor with close ties to the AKP spoke to Al-Monitor on the condition of anonymity. The official logic behind Fidans reluctance to brief the Turkish parliament is usually blamed on the presence of pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) deputies. Yet this claim is false," he said. "Before the HDP made it to parliament, the AKP and other parties had prominent Kurdish members who could easily be [accused of having] links with the PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party). Plus, if Fidans statements are so precious and confidential, how can he easily communicate with bipartisan senate groups? If the US is behind the July 15 coup attempt, harboring the main figure, Fethullah Gulen, and if the US is arming the PKK, how is briefing the US more in the Turkish national interest than briefing the nations lawmakers? None of it has logic, but at this point it does not matter. Erdogan speaks and all critics are silenced, Islamists and others alike. Last, parliaments oversight role is no longer possible, since it is unable to obtain information from state institutions and senior bureaucrats. Fidans refusal to brief parliament is not a personal choice. The real grievance in Turkish politics is that accountability is no longer questioned. Hence, bashing Fidan is an easy yet useless engagement for the opposition. While the Turkish opposition was discussing Fidan and Khashoggi, Erdogan altered the agenda by introducing another imminent military incursion, this time east of the Euphrates. ISTANBUL The White House ordered the immediate withdrawal of American soldiers from Syria after President Donald Trump declared victory over the Islamic State on Twitter Wednesday, ceding major diplomatic ground after Turkeys president promised an offensive against a US-allied Syrian Kurdish militia. We have defeated [IS] in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency, the American president wrote. Administration officials said US forces based in Syrias northeast would leave straight away, and his spokeswoman, Sarah Sanders, confirmed their departure was already happening. The decision, which was derided by members of Trumps Republican Party, comes just two days after Turkeys leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said Trump had responded positively to his threat to invade Syrian territory controlled by the Peoples Protection Units (YPG), which fought alongside the United States against the Islamic State. Turkey considers the militia a terror organization for its links to Kurdish insurgents who have waged a three-decade armed campaign for autonomy within Turkey. Trump had informed Erdogan he would pull out troops during a phone call on Friday, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said earlier this week. The withdrawal of US personnel from Syria will take 60 to 100 days, Reuters reported. The departure would avert the risk of a confrontation between NATOs two biggest armies, but it leaves the YPG, which is estimated to have between 30,000 and 40,000 fighters in the area, to face the prospect of a Turkish military offensive on its own. The estimated 2,000 American special forces operating in the area have built dozens of bases and observation points, serving as a kind of shield for the Kurds. It also signals a diminished role for the United States in determining Syrias future. Its rivals Russia and Iran, which back Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, are the main actors along with Turkey in negotiations to end the seven-year war. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani is due in Turkey for talks with Erdogan on Thursday. Trump has long expressed a desire to leave Syria, but senior administration officials had insisted the United States remain in the war-torn country to thwart Iranian influence and stave off a resurgent Islamic State. The Kurdish-dominated militia said it took the last big town under Islamic State control last week, but warned that a Turkish incursion could undo the gains made against the jihadist group. Trumps decision followed a major breakthrough in another long-running dispute with Turkey when the State Department approved the sale of the Patriot missile defense system, a deal worth $3.5 billion that includes Turkey buying 80 guidance-enhanced missiles, 60 additional missiles and related equipment, according to the Defense Security Cooperation Agency. This proposed sale will contribute to the foreign policy and national security of the United States by improving the security of a key NATO ally on the front lines of the fight against terrorism, it said on Tuesday. A slew of other disputes has damaged relations between the once stalwart allies, including Washingtons refusal to extradite cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Erdogan blames for a 2016 attempted coup; the jailing of Americans in Turkey on coup-related charges; the US imprisonment of an executive at a state-run Turkish bank for busting sanctions against Iran and Turkeys desire for punitive action against Saudi Arabia for the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. But worry that Turkey could acquire the Russian-made S-400 missile-defense system is the biggest short-term flashpoint in terms of its ability to create a crisis, more so than any other issue. If they can navigate this gently, all other issues can be tackled with less passion, said Soner Cagaptay, the director of the Turkish research program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Washington frets that Moscow would be able to obtain sensitive NATO technology if Turkey takes possession of both the S-400 and fighter jets the United States is developing with Turkey and other allies. So far, Turkey says it wont give up the S-400 and will buy both the Russian and US systems, Bloomberg News quoted Turkish officials as saying on Wednesday. It agreed in 2017 to buy the S-400 , which is less expensive than the Patriots and considered by many superior to the American-made system, for $2.5 billion. Russia said on Wednesday it still planned to deliver the S-400 to Turkey. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that Russia trusted Turkey to keep its secrets about the system from the rest of NATO. NATO has strenuously warned that the S-400 is incompatible with the alliances defenses and that acquiring it would imperil Turkeys acquisition of the F-35 fighter jet, a $1 trillion program for which Turkish companies are manufacturing the center fuselage and landing gear components, worth $12 billion. Turkey cannot buy both. I think the US will pull both the Patriot sale and F-35 deal if Turkey goes along with the S-400, Timothy Ash, a strategist at Bluebay Asset Management, said in a note to investors. Congress had blocked the sale of Patriots to Turkey over fears that Erdogan was realigning the countrys Western orientation. The Trump administration convinced skeptical US lawmakers to ease their opposition by arguing that Ankara would face sanctions if it also acquired the S-400, Bloomberg reported. The sale of Patriot missiles still requires congressional approval, but the Trump administration is unlikely to have made the announcement without a nod from lawmakers, Cagaptay said. It really points to the depth of the relationship, even when many characterize Turkey as a frenemy of the United States. Even on Capitol Hill, where opposition to Turkey is very strong, strategic decisions are still made favorable to Turkey, he told Al-Monitor. Turkey may be trying to link a settlement of all of its disputes with the United States, including Syria, Gulens extradition and the return of a senior Turkish bank executive who is in a federal penitentiary for helping Iran bypass sanctions for its nuclear program, Ash said. The news that the US government had lifted its opposition to sell Patriots was a major concession to Turkey from the Trump administration, he wrote. It shows the US and Turkey are talking and moving back closer together. That said, the Turks might be trying to drive too hard a bargain and might end up with nothing as a result. Trump told Erdogan he would look into extraditing Gulen, the White Houses Sanders said on Tuesday, confirming Cavusoglus comments the two leaders had discussed the matter at the G-20 meeting in Argentina earlier this month. Trump said he would take a look at it but nothing committal at all in that process, Sanders said. Yet Trump could face reproach from critics in the United States if his government attempted to swap a US resident to win points with Erdogan, especially after prosecutors in Virginia this week indicted business associates of Trumps former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, for illegally lobbying the US government to eject Gulen. The United States has also demanded that Turkey free a NASA scientist, a half-dozen or so other American citizens and two Turkish employees at US consulates jailed on coup-related charges. Iran hawks in Congress are vehemently pushing back against President Donald Trumps directive to begin pulling US troops out of Syria. CNN and the Wall Street Journal reported this morning that the administration has ordered the Pentagon to begin removing US service members as quickly as possible. And Reuters reports that the State Department is evacuating all its personnel within 24 hours. The news sparked an immediate uproar among some of Trumps usual allies on Capitol Hill, who were all caught off guard. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., issued a statement likening the pending removal of the 2,000 US troops stationed in Syria to President Barack Obamas 2011 withdrawal from Iraq and the subsequent rise of the Islamic State (IS, also known as ISIS), calling it a huge Obama-like mistake. Today, we have a small American footprint and limited presence in northeastern Syria in support of our Kurdish allies who were indispensable in the fight against ISIS, Graham said. Staying there is an insurance policy against the reemergence of ISIS and destruction of our Kurdish allies who fought so bravely against them. Graham told reporters that he was blindsided by the announcement and demanded a briefing, noting that he had a meeting lined up with Defense Secretary James Mattis today. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman James Inhofe, R-Okla., also expressed disappointment that the Trump administration did not notify Congress in advance. Although the militant groups would-be caliphate has collapsed, the group still maintains small slivers of territory in eastern Syria. Yet shortly after the initial media reports, Trump declared mission accomplished, tweeting, We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., immediately rebuked Trumps claim, tweeting This is simply not true. Iran is rejoicing right now, tweeted Kinzinger, an Iraq war veteran. We left Iraq, and had to come back. I would sure hope the President and his advisers are smarter than this. As lawmakers clamored for clarity on logistics and details of the withdrawal, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker, R-Tenn., noted that Republican leaders were giving Vice President Mike Pence an earful over the decision during a lunch on Capitol Hill. A White House call with reporters did little to shed light on the decision or provide details on how the Trump administration intends to eliminate the remnants of IS and ensure the group doesnt return. The Pentagon referred basic questions on timing, logistics and extent of the withdrawal to the National Security Council, which referred reporters back to the Pentagon as it did not have the information immediately available. However, a senior administration official did note that the exact timeline for withdrawal was still being designed. The looming withdrawal comes as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has threatened to launch an offensive against US-backed Kurdish forces in eastern Syria. Trump and Erdogan discussed Turkeys threats on the phone on Friday. And on Tuesday the Trump administration announced a $3.5 billion arms sale to Turkey, including 80 Patriot missiles. But the White House was unclear as to how extensively the two leaders discussed the Syria withdrawal. It was not something he had discussed with President Erdogan, said the senior administration official, before adding that Trump had informed President Erdogan as a neighbor of Syria obviously. In addition to troops supporting Kurdish fighters in northeastern Syria, the United States maintains a garrison of soldiers at al-Tanf in an effort to thwart Tehrans endeavors to establish a land bridge from Iran to Lebanon. A US withdrawal, Graham wrote, will also be seen by Iran and other bad actors as a sign of American weakness in the efforts to contain Iranian expansion. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., also weighed in, tweeting that a full and rapid withdrawal from Syria is a grave error with broader implications beyond the campaign against IS. This turns Syria over to Iran entirely, Rubio told Al-Monitor. Theyll now use that opportunity to help Hezbollah even more, particularly in southern Syria. Democrats also unanimously criticized Trumps handling of the situation, even as they remain divided on the merits of keeping US ground troops in Syria. Incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., called the withdrawal premature and asked why it was not done in the context of advancing peace negotiations. The precipitous withdrawal leaves scores of unanswered questions, most pressingly about how the administration plans to ensure the defeat of ISIS, incoming House Foreign Affairs Chairman Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., said in a statement, noting that it cedes influence to Russia and Iran. However, Engel also raised questions about the legality of US military activity in Syria, calling on Trump to consult with Congress on the use of military force. Rep. Ted Deutch, D-Fla., the incoming chairman of the Houses Middle East panel, also noted that the Trump administration is yielding American leadership to powers like Russia, Iran and Turkey to decide the future of Syria. Deutch pointed to comments to that effect from Trumps Syria envoy, James Jeffrey, before his panel last month. But less hawkish Democrats endorsed the withdrawal if not Trumps broader Syria policy. I support withdrawing troops, but we must rejoin a diplomatic process that the Trump administration has left to other powers, and we need a surge in humanitarian relief, Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said in a statement. Meanwhile, Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., responded to Grahams attacks on the withdrawal by tweeting We finally found the one thing that Lindsey loves more than [Donald Trump] .. more war. If ISIS is destroyed and unable to operate as a quasi-state entity, then our mission is done and we should bring our troops home, said Gallego, an Iraq war veteran. The authorization for use of force that we operate under in Syria has no mention of Iran or Russia. Updated: 5 p.m. Dec. 19, 2018. WASHINGTON After US Syria envoys said for months that the United States would stay in Syria indefinitely to prevent the return of the so-called Islamic State (IS, also known as ISIS) and counter Irans influence, the State Department went virtually dark today after President Donald Trump said the US mission in Syria was done with the defeat of IS. We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency, Trump tweeted. The president has been very clear in his declarations over the last two years, that the US is not going into Syria to resolve the Syria civil war, a senior administration official, speaking not for attribution, told journalists on a White House call this afternoon. What we were going in to do is destroy the territorial caliphate of the Islamic State in Syria. We are under no illusions that ISIS writ large or the scourge of Sunni radical terrorism has in some way gone away, the official said. It was the presidents decision to make and he made it, the official added, responding to a question about objections from Hill Republicans to the abrupt decision to withdraw. The president believes very sincerely and has for a number of years that we do not have a military role in ending the civil war in Syria. He has been very clear about that. The State Department canceled a scheduled press briefing this afternoon. In response to queries for Syria guidance, it sent around a statement from White House press secretary Sarah Sanders. Five years ago, ISIS was a very powerful and dangerous force in the Middle East, and now the United States has defeated the territorial caliphate, Sanders said in a written statement. We have started returning United States troops home as we transition to the next phase of this campaign. But US officials, speaking not for attribution, and Syria experts who consult with the US administration said that this time they believe Trumps decision is real, and will not be reversed by a bureaucracy that has urged him to keep US forces in Syria longer. This time its real and truly catastrophic, a US official, speaking not for attribution, told Al-Monitor. The president is just done and said "leave." Trumps decision to withdraw US forces from Syria came in the wake of a phone call between him and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday in which Erdogan said Turkish forces could finish off IS remnants and other terrorist groups, Syria experts said. Secretary of Defense James Mattis, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton met Monday, when Trump was said to formally decide on a US withdrawal from Syria. Multiple US officials argued against an abrupt US withdrawal, but were said to have given up trying to get Trump to change his mind by Tuesday night. US officials began to notify allies of the decision Tuesday. The push back from DOD, State and NSC stopped [Tuesday] night, said one regional expert who consults with the US administration, referring to the Department of Defense, the State Department and the National Security Council. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking at a conference this morning, said he had spoken with Trump on Monday and with Pompeo on Tuesday. Netanyahu said Trump and Pompeo reassured him the US will still have other way[s] to influence the situation in Syria even without forces on the ground, Israel Channel 10 diplomatic correspondent Barak Ravid wrote on Twitter. "This is a US decision and we will study its timetable, its implementation and its repercussions for us, Netanyahu said in a statement. In any case we will make sure Israel's security is preserved and we will defend ourselves from this arena." European officials, whose countries have troops serving as part of the US-led anti-IS coalition in Syria, suggested they were blindsided by the abrupt decision, even if notified. No, do you? Does anyone? one European official, speaking with evident frustration, responded when asked if he had any guidance to offer on the US decision. While Trump has repeatedly made clear his desire to bring US troops home from Syria, he has been persuaded in the past by advisers to give the mission more time. Its not clear that such a reversal will be forthcoming now, however. We know Trumps instincts from the get-go were to get these guys out of Syria, Tamara Wittes, a former State Department Middle East official now with the Brookings Institution, told Al-Monitor. And yet, he has clearly been persuaded at several points 'not yet, ISIS is not quite defeated, but we can use [the troop presence] as leverage against Iran.' He becomes persuaded, and then at a certain point, he decides enough is enough. He just changes his mind. Some current and former US officials faulted what they saw as overreach by administration Iran hawks, in particular US Syria envoy Jim Jeffrey and his lieutenant, Joel Rayburn, the deputy assistant secretary of state for the Levant, who have argued publicly that US forces would not leave Syria until all Iranian forces had left. The people who work for [Trump] Bolton, Rayburn, now Jeffrey make it worse by adding impossible objectives on Syria [involving Iran] that suggest an indefinite stay, said the US official who called Trump's decision catastrophic. The official said these arguments have no connection to realistic objectives for our military and go way beyond the goal of defeating IS and preventing its re-emergence. Amb. Jim Jeffrey has long been advancing a Syria policy divorced from the presidents own views, Wittes wrote on Twitter. I dont fault Jeffrey at all for trying to create some coherence and leverage to achieve desirable outcomes. But it was futile without Trump fully on board. The other big US policy loser here, of course, is Pompeo/Bolton/Hooks Iran policy of 'maximum pressure,' Wittes added, referring to US envoy on Iran Brian Hook. The US military presence in Syria, while it has one mission, which is the defeat of ISIS, indirectly supports, through secondary effects, other goals, Jeffrey told journalists at the State Department on Nov. 14. It, in its work with our partners, indirectly helps affect Irans malign activities, and by our presence and by our commitment to security in Syria and in the region, we demonstrate an interest in achieving a political solution. We also think that you cannot have an enduring defeat of ISIS until you have fundamental change in the Syrian regime and fundamental change in Irans role in Syria, he said. Whether or not one supports the decision for a withdrawal of US troops from Syria, the abruptness of the decision is likely to be highly problematic, some analysts said. Staff with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that have been working on stabilization projects in territory liberated from IS were totally blindsided by the decision, said Nicholas Heras, a Levant military expert with the Center for New American Security. Everyone was totally surprised, Heras told Al-Monitor. It seems there has not been a lot of planning done. Heras said NGO contacts working on stabilization efforts in Raqqa had received text messages today telling them to prepare to withdraw. Should the US leave Syria in a matter of weeks, as is now rumored, the Assad regime will rapidly step in to buy the loyalty of our Arab allies in the northeast, breaking them away from the Kurdish PYD, who will in all likelihood be left vulnerable to an imminent Turkish military intervention east of the Euphrates river, Charles Lister, a Syria expert with the Middle East Institute, said. Trump may well have given this de facto green light to Turkish President Erdogan when they spoke on the phone on Friday. The PYD is the Syrian Democratic Union Party. The Iran hawk wing of the US governments foreign policy establishment ought to feel betrayed by this decision too, Lister added. Demanding Iranian forces leave Syria as part of a negotiated settlement was a boldly unrealistic demand in the first place, but to stick to that position now would look absurd. "It was clear from the outset that President Trump was uncomfortable with a long-term US presence in Syria, said Rob Malley, who served as NSC Middle East adviser for President Barack Obama and now is CEO of the International Crisis Group. The challenge in carrying out this old-new policy, assuming this time it sticks, is to do so in a manner that does not precipitate a military free-for-all in the northeast for which the Kurds will pay the price." The biggest single part of NASAs new Space Launch System is on its way upriver from New Orleans to the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., and SLS engineer Samuel Stephens is ready and waiting. This week, Stephens was found 221 feet above the ground at the top of a test stand specifically built at Marshall to test the part when it arrives. Whats coming is a test version of the new rockets liquid hydrogen fuel tank. It was loaded on a barge last Friday at space agencys Michoud Assembly Facility outside New Orleans. How big is it? Its 149 feet long, and Stephens compares it to the big orange fuel tank of the space shuttle, which is the same diameter and almost the same length. But this new tank is only for hydrogen. The shuttles core held both a hydrogen and an oxygen tank, and there is a separate oxygen tank for SLS. When the tank arrives at Marshall, its future is already decided. Dozens of cylindrical lifts capable of 200,000 pounds of pressure each will be placed under the tank to push and twist it against an overhead brace to simulate the forces of liftoff. When SLS lifts off, the real hydrogen fuel tank will be pushed from below by its four RS-25 rocket engines and the solid rocket boosters strapped to each side. It will also face the air pressure above and any winds in the upper atmosphere. Since its full of 537,000 pounds of liquid hydrogen cooled to minus 423 degrees Fahrenheit, the tank needs to hold up. Right now, that first liftoff is scheduled for 2020, but it could be delayed. The first launch will lift an Orion space capsule toward an orbit of the moon, and the second flight will lift an Orion to the moon with astronauts on board. We have the mathematical models, Stephens said, explaining NASAs confidence in the tanks design, but we have to verify those models. NASA had no test stand this big, so one was constructed at Marshall, NASAs lead propulsion center. It will take test engineers four or five months to get ready for a couple of months of testing, Stephens said. The goal is to simulate the stresses of launch not only on the first version of SLS, called Block 1, but also the larger second version called Block 2. There are no official plans to test the tank until it fails, but Stephens eyes lit up at the prospect. Its not on the books, he said, but we all want to do it. Two dogs were rescued Tuesday after spending more than 12 hours stuck in a storm drain in Birminghams Sand Ridge community, according to the Birmingham Fire Rescue Service. Birmingham Fire spokesperson Sabastain Carrillo said the dogs, Belle and Kate, went missing about 10 p.m. Monday night. The owner was able to locate them through GPS collars the dogs were wearing. The owner contacted the fire department at 12:28 p.m. Tuesday, he said. The dogs were stuck in a 12-inch storm drain pipe underground near Oslo Circle. The dogs were about 157 feet from the nearest opening. Carrillo said the fire department had to dig into the ground then cut the drain pipe open to retrieve the dogs. They worked for about four hours to save the dogs. They were freed just before 4:30 p.m. Tuesday. They were happy to see everybody, Carrillo said. Theyre doing fine and have no injuries. Crews from Quint 4, Truck 1, and 1's Heavy Rescue have been working since 1230 to rescue 2 dogs trapped in a 12" pipe on Oslo Cir. The dogs are 157' from the nearest opening. pic.twitter.com/v3og7znwyL Birmingham Fire (@bham_fire) December 18, 2018 He credits the GPS collars with saving the dogs' lives. The message in there is to think about having your animals chipped and use GPS on them. Thats what saved the lives of those dogs. It really came in handy having those collars, Carrillo said. The dogs have been reunited with their owner. The man accused of killing a teenager girl after shooting into a crowd of underage people outside at rap concert in Mobile earlier this year has asked a judge to reduce his bond. Jamarkus Holifield, 19, whose bond is currently $150,000 with a $15,000 cash component, is accused of killing 15-year-old Anesa Baker and injuring others after he allegedly shot at crowds of people at the Grand Hall event space during an Easter weekend show. Holifield, who has been in Mobile County Jail since May of this year, sent the letter to District Judge Bob Sherling Dec. 7 asking him to reduce his bond as per the Alabama Constitution and in accordance with similar actions taken in other cases. Holifields basic point in the letter, which is available in court filings, is that the bond figure inhibits his ability to make bail and therefore he is doing jail time for a crime he has not yet been convicted or even tried for. The letter was sent from Mobile County Jail. In response to the letter, Judge Sherling noted that Holifield has the right to represent himself or be represented by an attorney, not both. Holifield has an attorney. The court has not read the Defendants letter in this case, wrote Judge Sherling. The letter is to be forwarded to his or her attorney, for the further action as the attorney, in consultation with the client, deems appropriate. If the attorney needs to be re-appointed to this case to be paid for services, this Order re-appoints the attorney to the case. Holifield is currently being represented by Diane McGowin, according to court records. AL.com attempted to reach McGowin for comment but she was unavailable. During the shooting Apr. 1, five people were struck by bullets, and at least two more were hurt during the stampede of people trying to flee the shooting and get inside the building, according to officers a the scene. Of the five shooting victims, one person's injury was self-inflicted and Baker was killed, according to Mobile Police Chief Lawrence Baptiste, who spoke at a press conference the day after. He said the self-inflicted wound was likely an accident and that at least one of the two people that was trampled suffered broken bones. Police arrived at the scene at around 11 p.m., where they describe seeing approximately 300 teenagers between the ages of 15 to 18 year-old. Its believed that most of the victims took themselves to hospital, but Chief Baptiste said some ambulances were at the scene. Chief Baptiste acknowledged that the spring break timing may have been a factor since children in Mobile would have been off Monday. "This is a plea to the parents, said Baptiste at the time. "To be more vigilant where their children are hanging out at, to be sure they are going into a safe environment, that those establishments have safety protocols in place, to make sure of their children's safety." "Most of all hold children accountable for their actions, because the life that they save might just be their own children." The parking lot was strewn with mostly garbage, but evidence of the rush to escape the hall was clear. Clothing, footwear, cell phone cases, and chargers could be seen on the ground outside the venue. At the rear of the parking lot next to a bar, a small bag of marijuana was on the ground, while a bullet casing lay next to the road. Chief Baptiste confirmed the security cameras were not operational. A clean up manager that arrived at the location in the morning told AL.com that it was the first time he could remember any trouble at the venue. When you mix guns and kids with attitudes, these things happen, said Reynolds Parker, 57, who had worked at Grand Hall for seven years. Nothing surprises me anymore. Ana Franklin, the embattled Morgan County sheriff, today agreed to plead guilty to a federal misdemeanor tax charge. Franklin, 54, was charged with willful failure to file a tax return in federal court for the Northern District of Alabama, court records show. Franklin is expected to formally enter a guilty plea at arraignment on Jan. 10, 2019, according to the Department of Justice. Today she signed a plea agreement with federal prosecutors. The sheriff failed to file a 2015 tax return with the Internal Revenue Service, according to the plea agreement. Defense attorney William Gray said Franklin filed the tax return by the end of 2016. But it was due by April 15, 2016. It was late, Gray said. She paid all the interest, penalties, taxes and everything that was due. Franklin faces up to a year in prison and a fine up to $100,000. Prosecutors will recommend that the defendant be awarded an appropriate reduction in offense level for acceptance of responsibility, court records state. Prosecutors said they are leaving it up to the judge whether Franklin should serve prison time or be allowed to serve her sentence on house arrest or probation. We expect all of our citizens, to include and especially our public officials, to promptly and accurately file their tax returns, U.S. Attorney Jay Town said in a statement. The Department of Justice will continue to federally charge those who fail to do so. We appreciate the investigative work of IRS-CID and the FBI Birmingham Division. In a text message to AL.com, Franklin declined comment. Gray said Franklin is expected to complete her term as sheriff. Franklins successor, Hartselle police Chief Ron Puckett, will take office Jan. 15. Franklin did not seek a third term during this years election. My statement on today's late breaking news regarding the Morgan County Sheriff: "I, like most in Morgan County, am... Posted by Ron Puckett, Sheriff-Elect on Tuesday, December 18, 2018 During her two terms, Franklin has been the subject of numerous investigations and lawsuits. A federal judge last year found Franklin in contempt of court for loaning $150,000 of the local jails inmate feeding funds to a crooked used car lot. The food money loan was first exposed by the sheriffs nemesis, blogger Glenda Lockhart, on the Morgan County Whistleblower website. For years, Lockhart has used her blog to accuse the sheriff and her office of wrongdoing and illegal activity. Lockhart has also filed multiple lawsuits against the sheriff. Earlier this year, Morgan County Circuit Judge Glenn Thompson ruled that Franklin, along with deputies Blake Robinson, Robert Bones Wilson and Justin JP Powell, acted criminally during an investigation into fired jail warden Leon Bradley and Lockhart. The judge in April dismissed a misdemeanor case against Bradley, who had been arrested by the sheriffs office and accused of leaking information to Lockhart. After hearing testimony from 11 witnesses during a two-day hearing, Thompson wrote in a scathing order that the sheriffs office provided a keylogger to a confidential informant Lockharts grandson Daniel who "unlawfully" installed it on Lockharts computer. A keylogger is a spy software that records keystrokes and allows for the capture of a persons computer activity and passwords. The sheriff and deputies have forcefully denied any wrongdoing or illegal activity. Lockhart is suing Franklin and the deputies, alleging they bribed her grandson to illegally gather information for search warrants. Bradley also filed a lawsuit against the sheriff and deputies. Franklin argued she was immune from Lockharts civil claims under state law. U.S. District Judge Madeline Haikala disagreed in a ruling last week. The judge said Lockharts lawsuit can proceed because Franklins legal immunity doesnt protect her from claims of bribery, intimidation and other misconduct meant to silence a private citizen, according to the Associated Press. Franklin has filed a counterclaim against Lockhart, alleging defamation, invasion of privacy, trespassing, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and fraud and deceit. The counterclaim accuses Lockhart of intentionally and knowingly publishing false information about the sheriff and deputies. Lockhart has denied the charges. Lockhart began blogging about Franklin after being arrested by the sheriff's office in 2011 on a charge of obstructing government operations. Also arrested was Lockhart's husband, Hal. The charges ultimately were dismissed, but the Lockharts sued the sheriff for unlawful arrest. The lawsuit was settled privately, and Lockhart has told AL.com she can't discuss details of the settlement. The sheriff's office was called to help when the Lockharts' son, who was mentally ill, gained possession of a gun, according to testimony given in a deposition. The call was made from the son's home on the family property in Falkville, but deputies responded to the Lockhart home, which is located at a different address on the property. Lockhart said deputies spent hours at her home, searching the house, property and a garage instead of assisting with the call at her sons home. The couple was arrested because they asked deputies not to continue searching the home without a warrant, Lockhart said. In the federal tax crime case, Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert O. Posey is prosecuting. In January, Franklin is to appear for arraignment at the Hugo L. Black U.S. Courthouse, in Birmingham. Updated at 8:06 p.m. to include a statement from sheriff-elect Ron Puckett, who will replace Franklin next month. This is an opinion column. On the way home from seeing Santa, my three-year-old son had an epiphany followed by a terrible realization. Here was this mystical being who could deliver anything you wished for for free and hed stopped short of asking for everything. Hed told Santa he wanted a Buzz Lightyear for Christmas and nothing else. I need to tell Santa I want a train, Daddy! Im suspect I can get word to him, I said. I need to tell Santa I want a truck. Careful, you dont want to push your I need to tell Santa I want two trains! Christmas for the kid hasnt been co-opted completely by avarice, though. Over breakfast the next morning, he asked what I wanted for Christmas. I want a healthy, happy family, I told him, and a safe delivery for his mom and soon-to-be baby sister next ... You should tell Santa you want a train, he said. Obviously, I didnt get how this system works. Christmas is the time of year when you can wish for anything and it will just happen. All you have to do, my son explained to me as if I were a three-year-old, is ask Santa. My Christmas wish list Non-partisan blanket primaries At some point, we settled on something so preposterous that no one even noticed how strange it was. If you are a Republican in Alabama, you pay for the Democratic primary. If you are a Democrat in Alabama, you pay for the Republican primary, too. If you arent a member of either party, you still have to pay for both through your tax dollars. Third parties and independents are out of luck. In contrast, non-partisan blanket primaries are open to candidates from all parties. Depending on how you want to slice it the top two, three or four vote-getters move on to the general election, no matter what party they belong to. Ranked-choice voting Sometimes called an instant run-off, in this system, voters rank candidates by preference, rather than just picking one and then being done. When counting the votes, officials tally the first-choices first. If no candidate wins an outright majority, the last candidate is cut from the running, and the second-choice of that candidates voters are counted next. This process is repeated until a candidate has greater than 50 percent. Where it has been tried, ranked-choice has had an interesting effect: Candidates are a lot nicer to each other and look for common ground during campaigns. In a Minneapolis mayoral election, candidates in that race literally linked arms after a debate and sang Kumbaya. Democracy vouchers Money is a problem in politics, everyone knows, but its such a big problem most folks seem to have given up on a solution. Leave it to the home of Amazon and Microsoft to find one. Seattle, Wash., has reinvented public financing of campaigns by giving discretion to voters. With a modest tax increase, the city provides each voter four $25 democracy vouchers, which they can donate to candidates they choose. After an early rough start (some voters thought the vouchers were junk mail and threw them in the trash), the democracy voucher program has seen some success, making it possible for candidates to appeal to voters instead of sucking up to big-money donors and giving control of the political system back to citizens. Nonpartisan redistricting In one of its more boneheaded decisions, the United States Supreme Court ruled that its perfectly legal for winners of elections to draw district lines for their own political benefit. Since then, the court seems to have realized just how dumb a decision that was, but because its now an established precedent, theres not much the court can do about it. Which leaves that hard work to Congress and local legislatures whose lawmakers benefit from the system as it is lawmakers choosing their voters rather than voters choosing lawmakers Ah, hell. Santa, just give me a train. Kyle Whitmire is the state political columnist for the Alabama Media Group. Want access to the best analysis and in-depth reporting about Alabama each week? Sign up for the weekly Reckon Report newsletter and follow Reckon on Facebook and Twitter. A grand jury will hear the case of a Huntsville man accused of being on alcohol and drugs when he crashed a truck into a sleeping womans house and killed her. Manslaughter suspect Antony Wu was in Madison County District Court for a preliminary hearing Wednesday afternoon. Judge Don Rizzardi ruled prosecutors have probable cause for the case against Wu. Wu, 53, is accused of being under the influence of alcohol and pills during a fatal crash that killed 48-year-old Joy Vaughn on Nov. 24, according to court testimony and police records. The crash happened late that Saturday night. Wu was traveling south on Chaney Thompson Road when his 1996 Dodge Ram left the road and went through a yard, according to a crash report obtained by AL.com. Wus vehicle crossed into the yard at 1003 Riverchase Road and hit Vaughns home, police records show. Joseph Abernathy, a Huntsville police traffic homicide investigator, testified that Wus truck went through the wall of Vaughns home and into her bedroom. Police said Vaughn was sleeping in bed when the crash happened. Abernathy testified Vaughn was trapped under the truck. The woman died at the scene. This diagram, included in a Huntsville police crash report, shows the path of Antony Wu's vehicle the night of a fatal crash. Police said officers got a warrant for Wus blood sample after the crash. The Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences is analyzing the sample. Wus speech was badly slurred and he smelled like alcohol, Abernathy testified. The investigator also testified Wu appeared to be confused or unable to remember what happened before the crash. In my opinion he was too impaired by alcohol and controlled substances to safely drive a vehicle, Abernathy testified. When officers arrived at the crash scene, Wu was still inside the truck, Abernathy testified. Wu was combative throwing glass at a paramedics face and trying to hide an ice pick from officers, Abernathy told the judge. Because the ice pick could be considered a deadly weapon", Abernathy testified, officers deployed a Taser on Wu. At the hospital Wu was treated for injuries that werent considered life-threatening. He was combative with hospital staff, prompting a doctor to order he be restrained, according to testimony. A grand jury will determine whether prosecutors have enough evidence to indict Wu and send the case to trial. If convicted of manslaughter, he faces up to 20 years in prison. The man who disappeared from an Alabama-based cruise ship has not been found and likely went overboard. Luke Renner, 22, was with a group of nine people traveling with three chaperones, according to Carnival Cruise Line. He went missing Sunday night, a day after the Carnival Fantasy left its home port of Mobile. According to a statement from Carnival, Renner was last seen in his stateroom. He ran without warning out of the stateroom, and after his chaperone was unsuccessful in locating him, the chaperone notified the ships crew, the statement said. Once notified that the guest was missing, the ships crew followed all protocols, including onboard announcements and a ship-wide search. Mexican authorities searched the ship once it arrived in Progreso on Monday. Videos taken on the ship show law enforcement and police dogs walking the decks searching for the man. Other photos show portions of the ship blocked off to passengers. Miami-based Carnival Cruise Line provided a statement from Luke Renner's family, sent by a public relations firm. The Renners say they're devastated by Luke's death but don't blame Wishes4Me, the special needs group which organized the cruise. The family from Johns Creek, Georgia, says they're thankful he was with people they loved and trusted when he died. According to Carnivals email, Renners family believes he may have thought he was going swimming. The Associated Press contributed to this report. The security team reviewed closed circuit television footage of the ships perimeter multiple times. While in port in Progreso on Monday, the Mexican Navy provided a search-and-rescue canine to assist in the search, but there was not any conclusive result as to his whereabouts. All relevant authorities have been notified, Carnival said in a statement. The Fantasy left Progreso as scheduled and went to its next stop in Cozumel. It is scheduled to arrive back in Alabama Thursday. Three Alabama correctional employees are under arrest for ethics law violations, accused of wrongdoing at two state prisons. All of the suspects are female. Two were officers at the Ventress Correctional Facility in Clayton. The third was a correctional officer trainee at the William E. Donaldson Correctional Facility in Bessemer. On Monday, agents with the ADOC Investigations and Intelligence Division arrested the two Ventress officers. Authorities identified them as Tiffany Grey, 25, of Clayton, and Tawanda Rhymes, 35, of Eufaula. Both are charged with use of office for personal gain and failure of duty after an internal investigation found that they had been soliciting contraband to inmates for money. In a separate arrest on Tuesday, 35-year-old Tomisha Hyman of Center Point was charged with use of office for personal again. Officials said Hyman had received multiple payments from inmates in exchange for contraband. Grey and Hyman resigned from their job following their arrests. Rhymes was placed on mandatory leave pending dismissal procedures. Rhymes had been with the ADOC since 2010. Grey joined the department in 2015, and Hyman had been a correctional officer trainee since 2017. ADOC Commissioner Jeff Dunn said the department has taken significant steps to eliminate corruption. In the past four years, we have fully staffed the departments investigations and intelligence division in a deliberate approach to eliminate corruption and to mitigate criminal activity inside our correctional facilities, Dunn said. The small percentage of those who choose to use their position for personal gain does not accurately represent the majority of our professional workforce that is committed to upholding the publics trust by adhering to the highest standards that is expected of a law enforcement agency. The public should contact the ADOC Investigations and Intelligence Division at 1-866-293-7799 with information that may lead to the arrest of anyone attempting to introduce illegal contraband into state prisons. The public may also report suspicious activity to law enforcement by going to the ADOC website at http://www.doc.alabama.gov/investigationrequest. A meeting between Hoover city officials and organizers of ongoing protests over the Thanksgiving night shooting death of Emantic Fitzgerald EJ Bradford Jr. has led to a stay of public demonstrations at least temporarily. Members of the Justice League on Tuesday issued a press release saying they met with Hoover Mayor Frank Brocato and City Manager Allan Rice and discussed the groups concern with the city and the police department. We have come to common ground on enough of those concerns that we are willing to call off tonight's planned protests throughout the City of Hoover and most specifically at Mayor Brocato's home, the statement read. The release said they will schedule a press conference Wednesday to discuss our dialogue and lay out a framework for a better working relationship between citizens and law enforcement. Carlos Chaverst Jr., president of the Justice League, said he will release more details about the meeting at that press conference. Rice released this comment on behalf of city officials: The city was contacted by an intermediary about meeting with protester organizers and we did have that meeting yesterday. Were always open to constructive conversations about how to make the city better. Multiple protests have been held since the Nov. 22 officer-involved shooting that killed Bradford. Over the past nine days, six protesters have been arrested. The release said the Justice League joins the Bradford family in calling for Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall to return authority of the investigation, and the determination of any possible prosecution(s), to Jefferson County by allowing Bessemer Cut-off District Attorney Lynneice Washington to be in charge of the EJ Bradford case. It is hypocritical, and disrespectful, for the Attorney General not to take the word of a sworn officer of the court (that Mr. Carr has no relationship with the protest leader) then claim himself to also be the decision maker when challenged by the exact same evidence (that being pictures with protest leaders, Carlos Chaverst and Le'Darrius Hilliard), according to the groups press release. Marshall last week said his office was assuming jurisdiction over the case, citing the potential for conflict of interest in Jefferson County District Attorney Danny Carr handling the case because of possible prior relationships with some of the protesters. Ben Crump, the Bradford family attorney on Monday, held a press conference saying Marshalls takeover of the case, saying This action could undermine any trust the black community has in this process. Marshall responded to Crumps press conference with a statement that read, As the written correspondence reflects, Jefferson County District Attorney Danny Carr directly conveyed to Attorney General Marshall the presence of Carrs perceived conflicts in this matter. Attorney General Marshall acted on standard procedure to assume prosecution. The Attorney Generals Office will ensure that the Hoover mall shooting cases are handled with the highest degree of fairness and professionalism as we pursue justice for all parties. The Justice League said Gov. Kay Ivey having shown no interest whatsoever in the handling of this case, we are asking for United States Attorney from the Northern District, Jay E. Town, to take this case if it is not returned to its proper jurisdiction. In closing we resume our pleas that the video be released to the public as we fear that at this point, the tapes may have been compromised or worse. The U.S. Attorneys Office would have jurisdiction over any possible civil rights violation case, but that would not be determined until the criminal investigation by the state is complete. The FBI is monitoring the case. The U.S. Attorneys Office would not have any jurisdiction in the shootings that wounded 18-year-old Brian Wilson and 12-year-old Molly Davis, an innocent bystander. Having a baby in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit isnt easy anytime, but it is even more stressful during the holidays. Thats why the smiles were especially big when Santa himself came this week to spread a little seasonal joy and see the tiniest tots at Huntsville Hospitals Neonatal Intensive Care Unit in Huntsville, Ala. Santa Claus visits the NICU at Huntsville Hospital for Women & Children. We are grateful for the opportunity to bring holiday hope to families during their most difficult days. Posted by Project Sweet Peas-North Alabama on Sunday, December 16, 2018 The visit came courtesy of Project Sweet Peas-North Alabama. PSP is a national 501(c)3 nonprofit run by volunteers who say personal experience has made them passionate about supporting families in Neonatal ICUs. Throughout the year, they bring care packages, holiday gifts, sibling support, bereavement support, and financial assistance to families experiencing a Neonatal ICU stay at eight Alabama hospitals in the Huntsville, Birmingham and Tuscaloosa areas, according to volunteer Carrie Tyler. Project Sweet Peas brought Santa to the NICU at Huntsville Hospital for Women and Children this past Sunday. With the help of hospital staff, the organization was also able to bring Dawn Smith Photography to provide each family with a professional print of Santa and their baby. It was a very good time. A Tuscaloosa County man created videos of himself engaged in sex acts with two young girls under the age of 6, according to court records. George Major Edward Battles Jr., 38, was arrested Tuesday on multiple felony warrants. The cases against him were investigated by the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency and the Vance Police Department. Charging documents chronicle three different times they say Battles made videos of a young victim. One video was 49 seconds long, another 57 seconds long and the third was one minute and 10 seconds long. The victim in each of those videos was identified, interviewed and told investigators Battles had photographed her nude. Investigators carried out a search warrant at Battles home on White Lane on Aug. 29. Authorities said he was found to be in possession of pornography of a minor, videos which he apparent did not make himself. Those images depicted adult males having sexually intercourse and deviate sexual intercourse with children as young as age 3. One of the videos included a dog, and another included an infant. Tuscaloosa County Assistant District Attorney Mark Caraway in court records stated that Battles, when learning of his imminent arrest on previous, but related, charges, fled to Kentucky. He was found there in possession of a stolen gun. Battles is charged with three counts of possession of production of child pornography and five counts of possession of child pornography. Caraway said in records that some of the charges carry a minimum sentence of life in prison without parole. He remains behind bars with bonds totaling $525,000. Some Afghans make a living attempting to provide security, but critics say barriers ruin the capitals appearance. Kabul, Afghanistan Almost everywhere you look in the Afghan capital, Kabul, there are thick and tall blast barriers made of concrete. They are a sign of the precarious security situation in the city of more than four million people. With every blast that shatters the calm of the city, more barriers go up changing the face of Kabul further. In the citys industrial area not far from Hamid Karzai International Airport, Muhammad Naseer is hard at work pouring concrete from a wheelbarrow into a T-shaped bowl made of steel. He is making a three-metre tall blast barrier, commonly known in Afghanistan as a T-wall. They are the most popular version because they are the first line of defence against suicide bombers and demand is steady. I am trying to make as many T-walls as I can, the father-of-seven told Al Jazeera. Im paid 700 Afghanis ($9) for making each T-wall. I am the only breadwinner and I am satisfied, the 49-year-old added as he rushed to refill the wheelbarrow with concrete. Demand is usually high. On a quiet day a group of workers make 20 barriers. Each month, they sell more than 600. On a dusty patch of land next to the highway and not more than one-kilometre long, there more than six companies rushing against time to make barriers. Until two years ago, Nazeer Aria worked for the government as an engineer building roads. But seeing how the security of the country was not improving and sensing an opportunity, he resigned to start a business that solely made explosion barriers. Because of insecurity, explosions and attacks I started to make T-walls, bomb barriers, bunkers and guard towers to prevent major destructions that explosions cause, the father-of-four told Al Jazeera as his employees worked in the distance. There are different kinds of barriers, different quality and sizes. They have different prices depending on what the customer wants. The cheapest is $180 and it can go up to more than $1,000. he said. Aria says he is providing an essential service and without his business, security would suffer. These barriers are saving lives. Were trying to save lives and these barriers are efficient in maintaining security. We are doing our best to save human lives, he added. But business was better before NATO ended its combat mission in the country in 2014. The price of the barriers has gone down recently because many foreigners have started leaving Afghanistan, Jafar Danesh, who also makes barriers near the airport, told Al Jazeera. Before, the cheapest barrier was $300. Now it is only $150. Foreigners paid more for barriers. Now most of our customers are Afghans. he added. Since NATO ended its combat mission in the country in 2014 the price of the barriers has gone down slightly [Hamza Mohamed/Al Jazeera] The grey barriers hug the walls of every business and institution in the city from hospitals, to schools to the homes of prominent people who say without them, they would be targeted by armed groups. We are in a complicated war. Our country is facing a lot of problems when it comes to security. The barriers are for my security and not for anything else, Nazeer Ahmadzai, a lawmaker, told Al Jazeera. But others think the blast barriers are ruining the citys appearance, making the capital look like a frontline and a warzone. Now everyone is putting up barriers next to their houses and offices. Anyone visiting the city will say what are these barriers for? They make the city look ugly and cause traffic problems too, Muhammad Yonus Nawandish, former Kabul mayor, told Al Jazeera. But the blast barrier manufacturers say their contribution is as essential as an ambulance. And they are not in a rush to give up their trade. Insecurity harms everyone, even us. We get sad whenever an explosion happens. Everyone wants peace and security. If we have security, we will give up this business and will start to build roads, bridges and whatever that is in [the] interest of our people. Danesh said. Deforestation and degradation will see the Bangladesh land that hosts refugees suffer further from temperature rise. Coxs Bazar, Bangladesh At first when they came, Dilfaraz, a stout 41-year-old Bangladeshi woman, could not find it in her heart to turn them away. She gave the Rohingyas utensils, mattresses, water, whatever they needed to survive. We are not [Buddhists] and we are not Hindu, we are Muslim and as Muslims we should help other Muslims, said the mother of five, who has lived in Kutupalong village since 1999. Along with neighbouring Balukhali in Coxs Bazar district, it now hosts the largest refugee camp in the world. But the goodwill towards refugees has soured over the last year. Like Dilfaraz, Bangladesh is struggling to accommodate over 1 million Rohingya. The exodus began in August last year as the predominantly Muslim minority fled an army-backed massacre in Buddhist-majority Myanmar. Most Rohingya are terrified of returning to Myanmar, which has persecuted them for decades, so it remains unclear for how long Coxs Bazar will play host to their suffering. And while the humanitarian crises at the camp have been documented, a different kind of disaster is brewing. About one million Rohingya have sought refuge in Bangladesh after the army violently cracked down on them [Malavika Vyawahare/Al Jazeera] The hilly tracts of Coxs Bazar could foster an environmental crisis brought on by indiscriminate deforestation and vanishing groundwater reservoirs. In the long run, this would make the region more prone to the effects of climate change. If greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated, by 2050, Coxs Bazar will be the worst-hit district in South Asia as average temperatures rise and rainfall patterns become disruptive, a June 2018 World Bank report found. Living standards, measured in household expenditure, could fall by 20 percent by mid-century. Coxs Bazar, a strip of land wedged between Myanmar to the east and the Bay of Bengal to the west, has sheltered Rohingya refugees over the decades during ethnic clashes in Myanmar. Some stayed while others returned as tensions subsided. But this time it is different; entire villages have migrated en masse with little to return to. Nur, left and Dilfaraz share a moment, sitting infront of Dilfarazs house in Kutupalong village [Malavika Vyawahare/Al Jazeera] Nur, 25, who works for Dilfarazs brother, and says she is grateful to have support in the form of comfortable shelter. I am not being paid, but they helped us out in our time of need, Nur said. Her family of eight hails from Buthidaung in Myanmars Rakhine state. When we came, it (Coxs Bazar) looked like a jungle, people just choose their own place to build a shelter, and the whole jungle was destroyed, Nur recounted. The settlement is now spread across 5,800 acres, and much of it cleared forest land. Fuel and firewood requirements of the refugees has led to a dramatic rise in demand for wood [Malavika Vyawahare/Al Jazeera] Over 95 percent of the refugees collect fuelwood directly from the forests or buy it in the market. A tiny fraction use LPG cylinders (liquefied petroleum gas) provided by NGOs. The loss of forests and land degradation is dangerous for the precariously placed camps. In Bangladesh these are not rocky hills, they are soft soil hills. The stability comes from the roots of the trees, if you cut the trees you have destabilised the terrain and there is a risk of hill collapse, A Atiq Rahman, executive director, Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies (BCAS), said. Vigorous monsoons make the area prone to landslides and there is always the lurking threat of cyclones. Disappearing forests are also a sore spot for locals who have watched a vital resource become scarce. In the initial months, shallow tube wells that pump water from about 150 feet were constructed quickly with little oversight. Many shallow tube wells could run dry as demand peaks in summer. In the cramped camps, toilets pits were constructed close to water withdrawal points. Water samples from over 70 percent of wells were contaminated by E. coli, according to WHO. New tube wells are plumbing deeper into the poorly mapped aquifer. A view of the camp [Malavika Vyawahare/Al Jazeera] Nearby in the camp, a new 650-feet deep hand pump has brought much-needed relief to the refugees. The initial response in the face of political uncertainty is not translating well into a long-term strategy. They are still working in emergency mode, said Saleemul Huq, director of Bangladesh-based International Centre for Climate Change and Development, highlighting the need for environmental monitoring. The long-term impacts are very uncertain. The World Bank report does not take into account the impacts of the current refugee influx, but notes that deforestation has led to major landslides and harmed property and water resources in the area. Since Coxs Bazar lags behind the national average in key development indicators such as education, access to electricity, water availability, market access and has a greater share of agricultural households, it may therefore become more vulnerable to the effects of temperature rise, said Muthukumara Mani, lead author of the World Bank report. The report recommends investment in socio-economic development to overcome climate change impacts. But Coxs Bazar will struggle to do that if the refugee situation remains unresolved. A view of the Kutupalong Balukhali camp [Malavika Vyawahare/Al Jazeera] Poverty may increase due to depletion of assets, labour competition, and the impact of the cyclone and monsoon seasons, a Joint Response Plan 2018 prepared by UN agencies in conjunction with the Bangladeshi government, said, warning that the current situation risks slowing and even reversing efforts towards socio-economic development of the district. Resentment is brewing among locals as the camps become a fixture of the landscape. Dilfaraz believes that people living next to the camp have paid the heaviest price, while businesses that support the vast machinery of aid have prospered. The Bangladeshi government has to find a solution, she said. Mamtaj shows injuries sustained by her daughter Rajia, seven, during the crackdown. At the Kutupalong-Balukhali camp [Ayesha Akter/Al Jazeera] A plan to repatriate the refugees formulated by the Bangladeshi and Myanmar government, has failed to take off. International agencies have criticised the two governments for ignoring the wishes of the Rohingyas. Terrors of their homeland continue to haunt refugees. Mamtaj, 30, is the mother of two boys and one girl, but only her seven-year-old daughter survived. Soldiers shot her husband, she said. Her five-year-old son was snatched from her arms and thrown into a fire. The 11-year old was shot dead. There were two men, one held me down by my head and arms and the other raped me, Mamtaj recounted. I will never go back to Burma. Reporting for this story was supported by a grant from Internews Earth Journalism Network. When on October 27, 2018, anti-Semite Robert Bowers opened fire on the Tree of Life synagogue in the US city of Pittsburgh, killing 11 people, CNN and BBC called it a mass shooting, while the Huffington Post described it as slaughter. When Islamophobe Darren Osborne drove a van into a crowd near the Finsbury Park Mosque in London on June 19, 2017, re-enacting a terrorist modus operandi seen earlier in London, Berlin and Nice, the same news outlets also refrained from using the term terrorism for several hours, initially depicting the attack as a collision. The same semantic tip-toeing was at play when, later that summer, white supremacist James Alex Fields Jr drove a car into a crowd peacefully protesting a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. In a familiar pattern cemented over the past few years, Western mainstream media have conspicuously shied away from using the term terrorist in attacks when the perpetrator was not a Muslim. Yet, in similar cases, the same media and media commentators in general did not hesitate in resorting to the t-word when attackers were Muslims, in fact, they did so automatically. It is hardly a surprise that what we can by now call a double standard on calling a criminal act terrorism has materialised. The international system is rife with such power asymmetries and one would be naive to expect discrimination not to find its way even in security issues that affect us all. The new racism does travel that way. Today, it is able to reinvent itself as per the security zeitgeist. Ensconced in the very phraseology that moves forward the securitisation narrative, racism has successfully coloured what terrorism is widely (mis)understood to be today. Above and beyond the division it sows, this representation has now become conceptually and practically untenable. The notion of terrorism is in a state of conceptual deformation whereby the elasticity it has been given since the 9/11 attacks allows it to serve almost exclusively the purpose of identifying threats against Western states and societies coming primarily from faceless Muslim attackers. To be certain, terrorism suffered by other regions is reported regularly and portrayed equally as an ill of our times to be dealt with urgently. For, in effect, according to the Global Terrorism Index released annually by the Institute of Economics and Peace (IEP), the first casualties of terrorism this year, last year and the year before were Iraqis, Afghans, Nigerians, Syrians, Pakistanis, Somalis, Indians and Yemenis. Yet the core representation of terrorism in the Western media and policy spheres is centrally and invariably the menace it represents to the West. In such a context, where ethos stealthily becomes pathos, variations on the terrorism terminology were introduced in the early 2010s, when initiatives started proliferating on combating violent extremism (CVE) and preventing violent extremism (PVE). On their face, these approaches, notably the preventing one, seek to de-militarise counterterrorism and humanise the fight against terrorism by tackling upstream its so-called root causes. In practice, however, such perspectives have hardly strayed from the fundamental tenets of the post-9/11 discourse and in practice are overwhelmingly concerned not with extremism or radicalisation generically say, of the far-right type in the US or the anti-immigration one in Germany but principally with its Islamist, if not Islamic, incarnations. In inviting law enforcement officers, social service workers, school teachers and indeed an ever-expanding circle of authorities to report individuals who might be susceptible to radicalisation or extremism however problematically defined such official programmes have more often than not resulted in the stigmatisation and alienation of specific communities, such as African-Americans and Arab-Americans in the United States and Muslims in the United Kingdom and France. Evidently, ethnocentric and a sleight of hand, such disciplining of the radicalised/violent extremists travels paradigmatically as these actors are seen as being held by their cultural or religious predicaments; trapped, they have to reconcile so as to exit their near-natural violence and backwardness, or so goes the de-radicalisation narrative. If such weaponisation of social work, martialisation of education and nurturing of a Big Brother mentality have been dangerously eating away at the fabric of social ties in the North and at democracy itself, things are not much better in the South. Bandwagoning on the fighting-terrorism mantra, many a neo-authoritarian southern leader, such as Egypts Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Syrias Bashar al-Assad or Saudi Arabias Mohammed bin Salman have been able to repackage their repressive and dispossessive policies as part of the struggle against extremism. Power cloaks itself in the irresistible, urgent and unquestionable language of terrorism, radicalisation and extremism. Elusive and ever imprecise scientifically, a fluid terminology underwritten by a deterministic focus on religion has come to dominate the discourse about the use of political violence, whether in conflicts around the world or in rising discontent at the heart of the Western metropolis. The problematic larger setting of this call-and-response is, however, the absence of a culturally-consistent and politically-dispassionate intelligent framework to understand the question of contemporary extremism in its fullness and its postmodern permutations. The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial stance. More than two years after talks between the internationally recognised Yemeni government and the armed Houthi movement collapsed in Kuwait, the two warring sides finally sat down for another round of negotiations. UN Special Envoy for Yemen Martin Griffiths managed to bring the two sides together for a week of talks in Rimbo, Sweden, which resulted in the announcement of a break-through agreement. The document includes three provisions: a ceasefire along the Hodeidah front and the redeployment of armed forces out of the city and its port; an agreement on prisoner exchange; and a statement of understanding on the Yemeni city of Taiz. For the 12 million Yemenis on the cusp of famine and for the country as a whole, this was a much-needed positive step towards peace. But it must be recognised that the agreement has some major limitations and much effort has to be made to secure its implementation. The good and the bad in the Stockholm agreement The ceasefire is a highly significant development given that Hodeidahs port is the entry point for most of Yemens food imports, commercial goods and humanitarian aid; currently the country relies on imports for some 90 percent of its food and basic commodity needs. This also marks the first time that Houthi forces have agreed to withdraw from one of the conflicts most significant front lines. This makes the agreement seem too-good-to-be-true, and indeed, this may turn out to be the case. Various points in the agreement are vaguely worded and open to different interpretations by the warring parties. For example, it talks of the mutual redeployment of forces from the city of Hodeidah and the ports of Hodeidah, Salif and Ras Issa; the Houthis interpret this as removing military presence but not withdrawing, while the other side think that the Houthis should withdraw fully. This will be a key point of contention in the coming months. Furthermore, the timeline of implementation is unreasonably tight. It was agreed that the ports shall be handed over within 14 days of the agreement (December 31) to local police and authorities and city within three weeks (January 7, 2019). This time might not be enough for the Houthis to withdraw and it is also unclear to what authority they are supposed to handover the city. Another challenge is the fact that Houthi forces and their affiliates have become highly entrenched in Hodeidah. Even if and when Houthi military forces make their exit, the handover of power would not be achieved immediately as local security forces such as the police are full of Houthi partisans and sympathisers. Dismantling these unofficial networks to re-balance civilian power will be difficult and will need to be approached carefully. Under the Stockholm Agreement, the Redeployment Coordination Committee (RCC) will be tasked with addressing such issues, with the committee comprised of representatives from both warring parties and headed by UN officials. The international community should closely monitor the work of the RCC to limit the influence of spoilers and bolster the UNs authority and capacity to push for the tangible steps necessary to implement the agreement. The agreement on prisoner exchange and the statement of understanding on Taiz are also important. Agreeing on an executive mechanism for a prisoner swap is crucial to building confidence between the two parties. The release of prisoners will make a difference for thousands of Yemeni families, given that most people held by the Houthis are civilians imprisoned with no clear justification. Making progress on Taiz is crucial, but the provision in the agreement, which calls for the formation of a joint committee from both sides of the conflict and the Yemeni civil society to determine the working mechanisms for upcoming consultations has not really resulted in any real action on the ground. Another major downside of the Stockholm consultations is that they failed to reach an agreement on two other key issues: the reopening of Sanaa International Airport and the reunification of Central Bank of Yemen, which was split along conflict divide in September 2016. These issues along with the prisoner exchange were central to the initial agenda of the Sweden peace talks, and reaching an accord on them would have had direct implications for both the economic and humanitarian crises in Yemen. By contrast, the most significant outcomes of the negotiation those related to Hodeidah were on the original agenda. Agreement on them was reached on the very last day of the talks. How did the agreement come about? It is worth pointing out that the success of the negotiations partial as they maybe would not have happened had the international community not pushed for it. This came at the tail of years of inaction and apparent lack of political will on the international level to push for a solution in Yemen. The war has been raging on for more than three years and for almost two it has been declared the worlds largest humanitarian crisis by the UN. In September, when UN envoy Griffiths attempted to bring the belligerents together in Geneva he failed. So why and how did he succeed in December? One of the main reasons seems to be that the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in early October finally pushed many Western governments to shift their position on Riyadh and its intervention in Yemen. Previously, the calculation in Western capitals seemed to be that business contracts with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates Riyadhs largest partner in the coalition campaign in Yemen outweighed any humanitarian concerns. With the global media frenzy following the Khashoggi killing, and in turn the attention this brought to the Saudi-led military campaign in Yemen, continued Western support for Riyadh and Abu Dhabi became domestically less palatable for many politicians. Most importantly, the coalitions largest backers, the United States and the United Kingdom, began calling for a ceasefire in the Yemen war. Following this the US also ended its in-flight refuelling of Saudi-led coalition aircraft operating over Yemen, and US legislators have been forcefully pushing for the withdrawal of all military support to the Saudi-led campaign. The US, and more so the UK, who previously hindered prospects for any new Yemen resolution at the United Nations Security Council, have shifted their positions dramatically. London in particular has begun to play a positive role in ending the conflict. The British mission to the UNSC has been crafting a new UN resolution calling for a ceasefire in Hodeidah and guarantees of safe passage for delivery of food and medicine and British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt attended the peace talks in Sweden. Moving forward, the international community needs to capitalise on the current momentum. This means both continuing to pressure the Saudi regime to end the conflict, while avoiding implicitly legitimising the armed Houthi movements control of areas in northern Yemen. Houthi oppression of the population and their syphoning off of state revenues to fund their war effort must be raised during future negotiations and addressed. Too often, the international discourse on the war in Yemen has been characterised by oversimplification, and consistent failures to capture the inherent complexities of the conflict on the ground. To ensure and sustain peace in Yemen, peace agreements must serve the interests of the Yemenis and reflect their local dynamics and structures. In this sense, the Stockholm Agreement should be seen as a good start, but the hard work of securing peace in Yemen is only beginning. The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial stance. US activist leads fight for asylum seekers rights Ravi Ragbir, who is facing deportation from US, is organising an army of volunteers to help migrants that Trump is trying to stop from entering the country. The relationship between Moscow and Ankara remains close despite a number of harmful incidents. Istanbul, Turkey Standing in Istanbuls Taksim Square, the Republic Monument commemorates the creation of Turkey by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. In the group of people depicted behind Ataturk is a figure little known to most passers-by, that of the first Soviet ambassador to the new republic. The statue of Seymon Ivanovich Aralov on the monument demonstrates the deep ties between Moscow and Ankara ties that came under strain during the Cold War as Turkey joined NATO and later sought membership in the European Union. Since the collapse of Soviet communism, however, Turkey has moved closer to Moscow while retaining its NATO membership and European aspirations. These links forged through cooperation in areas such as energy policy, trade and security cooperation were threatened exactly two years ago, on December 19, 2016, when Russian ambassador Andrey Karlov was shot dead by an off-duty Turkish police officer in Ankara. Before opening fire, the gunman screamed Dont forget Aleppo, a besieged city in Syria, prompting speculation that the ambassadors killing was connected to Russias military intervention in the country in support of President Bashar al Assad, whose removal Turkey has called for. However, Russian President Vladimir Putin brushed aside such claims, describing it as a provocation aimed at spoiling the normalization of Russo-Turkish relations and spoiling the Syrian peace process. His Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan agreed, saying the two countries will not let the assassination affect their ties. Instead, Turkey and Russia will deepen solidarity and strengthen cooperation, he said. Later, Turkey blamed the Karlovs death on a movement led by US-based Muslim preacher, Fethullah Gulen, who Ankara also holds responsible for a failed coup attempt earlier in 2016. Karlovs killing came nearly a year after the Turkish military shot down a Russian warplane on the Syrian border another incident that threatened ties but was smoothed over by a Turkish apology. Theyve shot at each others soldiers and planes, an ambassador was killed and theyre on different sides in a civil war, said Selim Koru, an analyst at the Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey. These are things that would have harmed long-term relations if they were to happen between Turkey and another country, he said. But despite all the real differences they could have, theyre very close right now. PKK, Gulen This detente, many analysts agreed, was partly because of Turkeys various disputes with its Western allies. Key among them, Koru, said was the US support for a Syrian Kurdish group affiliated to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK, which has fought a decades-long conflict with Turkey. That is a long-standing insult to Turkish policy, the Turkish state and Turkish interests. Sener Akturk, an associate professor in international relations at Istanbuls Koc University, said that Moscow and Ankara had found common cause in Syria, despite backing opposing sides in the war. Russia and Turkey are experiencing a pragmatic rapprochement over Syria, he said. Both feel threatened by different local formations that were significantly emboldened and empowered by the United States in the last couple of years. The US support for the PKK-tied Peoples Protection Units (YPG) as well as its failure to extradite Gulen, who has lived in self-imposed exile in the US for nearly two decades, have been long-standing complaints for Turkey. A perceived lack of support from the West after the July 2016 coup attempt has also irritated Turks. By comparison, Putin was the first foreign leader to visit Turkey after the failed putsch and last year suggested the US may have had prior warning of the attempt. The critical turning points have been PKKs declaration of an all-out offensive against Turkey in July 2015 and the failed coup attempt of the Gulenists in July 2016, Akturk said. The PKKs affiliate in Syria is armed and protected by the United States and the top Gulenists, including their leader, are sheltered by the United States. Trade, security ties The close ties between Russia and Turkey is reflected in the growing number of Russian tourists choosing to sun themselves on the beaches of Antalya every summer. Last year, 4.7 million Russians visited Turkey, the largest contingent of foreign visitors. This year, the number is expected to leap to 5.5 million, according to current ambassador Aleksey Yerhov. This follows a sharp drop below a million in 2016 following the shooting down of a Russian jet by a Turkish F-16 over the Syrian border. That incident led to Putin accusing Turkey of delivering a stab in the back. The Kremlin responded by scrapping visa-free travel, calling for a tourism boycott, embargoing Turkish products and restricted Turkish companies working in Russia. These measures have gradually been removed and Erdogan and Putin have since worked closely on several fronts, most notably the war in Syria. The two leaders have met face-to-face more than a dozen times in the last two years as, along with Iran, they put together the Astana peace process that created de-escalation zones in Syria. Ankara has softened its call for Assad, Russias ally, to be removed from power. Meanwhile, Russia has allowed Turkish warplanes to operate in northern Syria, where Turkey has carved out a belt of land controlled by its proxy militias. S-400 air defence system Turkey has also turned to Russia to provide other security solutions in the form of the S-400 air defence system, which is due to be deployed next year. NATO has voiced concern about the move, with the US threatening to block Turkeys acquisition of F-35 fighter jets in response. In the energy sector, Turkey remains heavily dependent on Russian natural gas flowing through Gazproms Blue Stream pipeline under the Black Sea. With sparse domestic energy resources, Turkey relies on Russia for 55 percent of its gas. A second pipeline from Russia TurkStream is due to come online by the end of 2019. Russia has also been diversifying its hold on the Turkish energy market through the construction and operation of a nuclear power plant in Mersin, set to be operational in 2023. Russian-Turkish trade soared by more than 40 percent to $22.1bn between 2016 and 2017. In the first eight months of this year, it surged another 30 percent year-on-year, the state-owned TASS news agency reported last month. At the same time, Putin announced the ambitious goal of seeing the trade with Turkey reach $100bn, although he did not give a timeframe. In October, Turkey exported $1.9bn worth of goods to Russia, sending agricultural products, textiles and cars to its largest export market, according to the Turkish Statistical Institute. Less dependent However, the EU and the US still remain important markets for Turkish companies and the country as it seeks to replicate the growth figures of Erdogans earlier years in power. Keeping up the growth figures is a very important thing for this government so Turkey can catch up with other economies and become a winner not just economically, but also militarily and in terms of prestige, Koru said. Burning bridges puts that goal back quite a bit because you need economic growth to be less dependent on the West. There are also areas where Moscow and Ankara are on opposing sides, most notably in Syria, where Russia supports Assad while Erdogan backs rebel forces seeking to remove him, and Crimea, whose Tatar Muslim population has complained of oppression following Russias 2014 annexation. Turkey has also voiced alarm over recent tension between Russia and Ukraine in the Black Sea, urging restraint. For Mitat Celikpala, an international relations professor at Kadir Has University in Istanbul, Turkey remains strongly tied to the West. Turkey is a Western actor. Its foreign policy and security needs mean it will stay in the Western camp. But we need to work and survive with Russia because it is everywhere around us. State Department says it had informed US Congress of plans to sell a Patriot missile package to Turkey. The United States has said it approved a sale of $3.5bn in missiles to Turkey amid tensions between the NATO allies over Ankaras plans to buy them from Russia. The State Department on Wednesday said it had informed the US Congress of plans to sell Turkey a Patriot package that includes 80 Patriot missiles, 60 PAC-3 missile interceptors and related equipment. 181219143708576 The proposed sale will increase the defensive capabilities of the Turkey military to guard against hostile aggression and shield NATO allies who might train and operate within Turkeys borders, a statement said. Ankara a year ago announced a deal to buy S-400 missiles from Russia, drawing rebuke from its allies in NATO, a bloc originally formed as a bulwark against the former Soviet Union. A State Department official, talking to the AFP news agency, said Turkey was jeopardising participation in another US military programme the coveted F-35 fighter jets if the country still went ahead with the S-400 sale. Turkey could also face sanctions on defence purchases under the US law if it goes ahead, the official reportedly said, on condition of anonymity. S erious ramifications A purchase from Russia would have serious ramifications for US ability to do business with Turkey across the defence trade spectrum, the official said. It is important that NATO countries procure military equipment that is interoperable with NATO systems. A Russian system would not meet that standard, he added. The announcement came hours after President Donald Trump said the US had defeated the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) group in Syria, leading to the withdrawal of US troops, which are located in the Kurdish-controlled north of the country. 181212123525008 There was no immediate indication that the two announcements were linked, although Trump has made it clear that arms sales are a top priority for him. The US is supporting Kurdish forces east of the Euphrates, where Peoples Protection Units, or YPG, troops have been fighting against the ISIL. But Ankara has voiced frustration about what it says are delays in the implementation of a deal with the US to clear the YPG from the town of Manbij, located west of the Euphrates in YPG-controlled areas. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday vowed to remove the Kurdish fighters in northern Syria, if necessary. He said he had spoken by telephone with Trump and agreed on cooperation in Syria. With five months to go until elections, its not immediately clear whether king will accept Charles Michels departure. Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel has submitted his resignation amid pressure on his government after the largest coalition party quit due to differences over migration. With only five months to go until planned legislative elections in May, it was not immediately clear whether the countrys king would accept Michels departure on Tuesday. The right-wing New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) left Michel leading a minority government on December 9 after the prime minister sought parliamentary approval to support a United Nations pact promoting a global approach to refugee and migrant flows against its wishes. The N-VA launched a widely criticised social media campaign against the compact cause celebre for European anti-immigration parties. It featured pictures of Muslim women with their faces covered and claiming that the accord focussed on allowing migrants to retain the cultural practices of their homelands. But it quickly withdrew the materials after the campaign came under fire. Before the prime minister gave his notice, left-wing and green opposition parties had been demanding he submit his new minority government to a confidence vote. But Michel refused, and a confrontation this week seemed likely. Michel, a liberal who took office in 2014, tried to convince the Chamber of Representatives of the reshaped government plans and said he would be ready to work with the opposition, but his overtures were rejected. His 2019 budget was among the sensitive topics up for debate. Some in the assembly pushed for an election to be held before the regularly scheduled one on May 26. Michel again refused, saying it would only lead to stagnation for the whole of 2019. After a short break for reflection, he announced he was resigning instead. I am taking the decision to offer my resignation. I am now going to see the king to inform him, Michel told parliament on Tuesday. All eyes on the king As legislators applauded, he picked up his briefcase, shook the hands of a number of government ministers and left. Michel made no comment to reporters upon entering and leaving Belgian King Philippes residence, the Palace of Laeken in Brussels. The king holds a largely symbolic role in Belgium but becomes a pivotal figure after inconclusive elections or disputes like the current one require the formation of new governments. In a post on Twitter, the Royal Palace said Philippe had received Michel and was withholding his decision about what steps to take next. Belgian media said the king would meet party leaders on Wednesday before deciding whether to accept the resignation Michel tendered on behalf of himself and his government. Michel could be invited to lead a caretaker government until an election can be held. Its the first time the king has faced such a crisis. He ascended to the throne in 2013 after his father, King Albert II, abdicated for health reasons. Michels resignation came two days after demonstrations against the UN pact in central Brussels descended into scuffles, with police forced to use tear gas and water cannon to restore order. A number of governments refused to sign the non-binding UN Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. They included the United States and some European Union countries, among them Austria which holds the EUs rotating presidency until December 31. Judge issues unexpected ruling, saying all prisoners in Lulas situation should be freed while appeals are under way. A Brazilian Supreme Court judge has issued a surprise ruling that could lead to the release of former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who was jailed this year on a corruption conviction. Lula was jailed in April after being sentenced to more than 12 years in prison, and faces six other trials for alleged corruption. He has maintained his innocence claim, dismissing the charges as a political plot against him. Justice Marco Aurelio Mellos decision on Wednesday suspends the enforcement of the same courts earlier ruling that allows for convicts to be jailed after their sentence is upheld on the first appeal, as was the case with Lula. Mellos decision must next be considered by the full panel of the Supreme Court, which is divided on the issue of whether to allow those convicted to remain free until their case fully winds through Brazils complex and backlogged legal system. It is not yet clear if Lula could be freed from prison before the full court makes any decision, which would not happen until early next year, as the court goes into recess later on Wednesday. If the decision stands, Lula could go free until he exhausts all appeals, a process which could take years. Gleisi Hoffmann, who leads the leftist Workers Party that Lula founded, said via Twitter that the party had already filed legal requests before the top court to plead that Lula be freed. The office of Brazils prosecutor general said it was studying Mellos decision and weighing its options. Prosecutors strongly oppose any backtracking on the ability of lower courts to order convicts to prison after their conviction is upheld on a first appeal. Brazils incoming justice minister Sergio Moro, the lower court judge who condemned Lula and who oversaw the trials resulting from the countrys sprawling Car Wash corruption investigations, has said he will introduce legislation to pass a law mandating that those convicted on appeal be sent to jail. Lula was president from 2003 to 2010. He rode a commodities boom and used social policies that helped lift millions from poverty. He easily led early polls for this past Octobers presidential election and registered to run. But he was blocked from doing so by a law that strips those convicted of crimes upheld on appeal from running for office, a decision that would not be impacted by his possibly being freed. If Lula is released, it would galvanise Brazils demoralised left, still reeling after Octobers election of far-right president-elect Jair Bolsonaro, who has vowed to reverse policies instilled during Lulas two terms. Reversal comes after protests by evangelical churches and ordinary citizens in public meetings on the new constitution. Cubas National Assembly has said language opening the way to the legalisation of same-sex marriage will be removed from the draft of the countrys new constitution to respect all opinions. A parliamentary commission responsible for drafting the constitution on Tuesday proposed to omit language defining marriage as the union of two people with absolutely equal rights and obligations following protests by evangelical churches and ordinary citizens in public meetings over the matter. The Commission proposes to defer the concept of marriage, that is, to leave it out of the Constitutions draft, as a way to respect all opinions, the National Assembly said in a tweet, calling matrimony a social and legal institution. 181111192818890 Instead, the issue should be addressed in the family code that is set to be updated shortly after the new constitution has been approved at a referendum in early 2019. The constitutional commission is headed by the head of the ruling Communist Party and former President Raul Castro. His daughter, Mariela Castro, is a legislator known as Cubas highest-profile advocate for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual rights. The commission had in July unveiled the first draft of Cubas new constitution to update a Soviet-era one, including an article redefining matrimony as gender neutral. Homosexuality is a divisive issue in the island nation, and while many younger, urban citizens and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender activists welcomed the amendment, a majority of Cubans appeared to reject it. The dropping of the gay marriage language comes despite the pledge by President Miguel Diaz-Canel, who assumed office in April, to eliminate all kinds of discrimination from society. The new constitution, which has already won initial acceptance from parliament and will replace the 1976 constitution, will be submitted to the referendum in February next year. In the draft, there is no mention of a communist society, though the document does reaffirm the socialist nature of the political system and the leading role of the Communist Party. It also recognises the right to private property, the role markets can play and the importance of foreign investment. The dropping of the gay marriage language is the third dramatic reversal this month for a government that for decades has issued most laws and regulations with little public debate or insight into the working of the Communist Party. The government last week eliminated some of the most-disliked sections of new restrictions on entrepreneurs that were met with widespread public criticism. And tough new limits on artistic expression were delayed after protests and complaints from Cuban artists. Governor cites likelihood of violence and bans all public rallies, saying it applies to all presidential candidates. The governor of Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, has banned campaigning in the city ahead of Sundays presidential vote for security reasons, a move denounced by the opposition. Andre Kimbuta, a member of the ruling coalition, announced his decision on Wednesday following crackdowns by security forces on opposition supporters last week that killed at least seven people and caused a fire that destroyed thousands of voting machines. The information in our possession attests that in all the political camps of the main presidential candidates, extremists have prepared and are preparing for a street confrontation in the city of Kinshasa during election campaign activities, Kimbuta said in a statement, without elaborating. The long-delayed election is meant to choose a successor for President Joseph Kabila, who is due to step down after 18 years in power. If successful, it would be the DRCs first democratic transfer of power. Kinshasa is an opposition stronghold, where security forces killed dozens of people during protests against Kabilas refusal to step down when his mandate officially expired two years ago. Campaigning is due to end at midnight on Friday in the race between Kabilas preferred successor, Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary, and two main challengers, Felix Tshisekedi and Martin Fayulu. Regimes fear Fayulu had scheduled a rally in Kinshasa on Wednesday. Kimbutas only objective is to prevent Martin Fayulus rally. This hasty cancellation, while the crowd is already mobilised, is dangerous and shows the regimes fear, Moise Katumbi, a Fayulu supporter, wrote on Twitter. Opposition leaders say the government is trying to rig the results in Shadarys favour with new electronic voting machines and falsified voter registrations. The government denies it has engaged in fraud. Kimbuta said the only way presidential candidates could campaign in Kinshasa would be through the media, where Shadary has a clear advantage due to sizeable campaign funds and state or ruling party control of many media outlets. 181209154314779 However, a rare national opinion poll in October showed Tshisekedi leading the race at 36 percent, well ahead of Shadarys 16 percent. Fayulu had eight percent. More than 40 million people in DRC are eligible to cast their vote on Sunday. The elections are a huge challenge for the DRC, which has not seen a peaceful transition of power since it gained independence from Belgium in 1960. Kabila, 47, who succeeded his assassinated father in 2001, is at the helm of a government that critics say is notorious for corruption, incompetence and rights abuses. Kabila should have stepped down in 2016 but he stayed on, invoking a caretaker clause in the constitution. Protests against this move were bloodily repressed. Twenty-one candidates are vying to replace him. Known for his tough reputation, Cammaert is tasked with monitoring ceasefire in Hodeidah, withdrawal of warring sides. United Nations, New York The Dutch general tasked with monitoring the ceasefire in Hodeidah faces a daunting task in policing the government and rebel forces massed around Yemens port city. Major General Patrick Cammaert will leave New York this week to travel to Yemen and oversee the truce between the Houthis and the Saudi Arabia-backed government after the two sides reached an agreement in Sweden last Thursday. Hes got a challenging road ahead and he will be working with both sides to figure out how to ensure the implementation of the ceasefire agreement and what the verification mechanisms are going to be, his colleague Sahr Muhammedally told Al Jazeera. Muhammedally, a Middle East expert at the Center for Civilians in Conflict, a campaign group of which Cammaert is also a board member, predicted tense talks between her colleague, a veteran peacekeeper, and the Houthis and the government of Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi. Thats going to be a huge challenge. Will the internationally-recognised government allow the Houthis to have their forces to patrol Hodeidah and provide security? Will the Houthis allow government forces in? asked Muhammedally. 181215205243978 Under the deal agreed in Sweden, the UN is responsible for setting up a Redeployment Coordination Committee to oversee the ceasefire and ensure troops vacate Hodeidah city and the ports of Hodeidah, Saleef and Ras Isa. Tough reputation That committee will be led by Cammaert, a retired general with experience in Sri Lanka, Cambodia and DR Congo, where he was known for his tough approach during peacekeeping missions. In 2005, Cammaert took command of the 15,000-strong UN peacekeeping force in eastern DRC, where he enforced a principle that UN forces are impartial and not neutral. Speaking to the BBC in 2007, Cammaert said Being neutral means that you stand there and you say Well, I have nothing to do with it, while being impartial means that you stand there, you judge the situation as it is and you take charge. His Eastern Division indeed took charge in the region, when, in early 2005 his troops killed 50 fighters in Ituri after losing nine of its own soldiers in an ambush. Under his mandate in Yemen deal, a yet-to-be-defined group of local security forces will be tasked with patrolling the city and ports. According to Muhammedally, Cammaert will likely struggle to find candidates for this force who are acceptable to the Houthis and the government. He may opt for a group of former police officers from the Hodeidah area, she said. The composition of the internal security force will be a challenge, Muhammedally, a lawyer, told Al Jazeera. Getting the right force, which is seen as legitimate by people in Hodeidah, is essential. The mandate, competencies and training to engage with civilians is also critical. UN blue helmets will not be armed The UN will convene Yemens warring parties for the first meeting of a Redeployment Coordination Committee on Wednesday, to discuss the redeployment of all forces from the Hodeidah area, UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said on Tuesday. It will include military/security representatives from the two sides, Dujarric told reporters. After a week of UN-sponsored peace talks in Sweden, the Iran-aligned Houthi group and Saudi-backed Yemen government forces agreed last Thursday to cease fighting in the Red Sea city and withdraw forces. The truce began on Tuesday. 181218173047752 The full mutual redeployment of all forces from the city of Hodeidah and the ports of Hodeidah, Saleef and Ras Isa shall be completed within a maximum period of 21 days after the ceasefire enters into force, Dujarric said. The security force will not be a UN blue helmet operation and its members will not be armed, Dujarric said. Meanwhile, the UN Security Council is considering a resolution that asks UN chief Antonio Guterres to submit proposals by the end of the month on how to monitor the ceasefire and redeployment of forces. The draft resolution calls on all parties to the conflict to take further steps to facilitate the unhindered flow of commercial and humanitarian supplies including food, fuel, medicine and other essential imports and humanitarian personnel into and across the country. Diplomats said it would likely be voted on later this week. The conflict has pushed Yemen, the poorest country on the Arabian Peninsula, to the verge of famine, and millions of people rely on food aid. More than 80 percent of Yemens imports used to come through Hodeidah port, but that has slowed to a trickle. Many European companies planning for an economic shock in case the nightmare scenario becomes real next year. The European Union and businesses have ramped up planning for the fallout from the United Kingdom leaving the bloc without a divorce deal with just 100 days until Brexit. Many European companies are planning for an economic shock in case the nightmare scenario becomes reality on March 29 next year. European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker on Wednesday said it would be an absolute catastrophe if the UK leaves the European Union without a transition deal in place. For this reason, the commission and EU member states are working hard to avoid such a scenario, Juncker added, but it takes two to manage a decent tango. Prime Minister Theresa Mays failure to find a deal the British parliament will approve means the worlds fifth-largest economy now faces three choices: agreeing on a last-minute deal, halting Brexit, or leaving the EU without an agreement. No deal means there would be no transition, so the exit would be abrupt. Bank of England Governor Mark Carney said leaving the EU with no transition could be akin to the 1970s oil shock. May has yet to win the support of a deeply divided parliament for the agreement she struck last month with EU leaders to maintain close ties to the bloc. No alternative However, British politicians have been unable to agree on any alternative Brexit course, deepening concerns the UK will, as May has warned, drop out of the worlds biggest trading bloc without a deal. Businesses of all sizes are reaching the point of no return, with many now putting in place contingency plans that are a significant drain of time and money, the heads of Britains five biggest business lobby groups said. The risk of a no-deal Brexit is rising. The EU said it would avoid the interruption of air traffic, keep financial and other trade open, and respect British citizens residency rights in the bloc if Britain left without a deal in March. The Commission has called upon Member States to take a generous approach to UK nationals who are already resident in their territory, the European Commission said in a statement on Wednesday. The Commission expects the reassurances given by the UK authorities that, even in case of no deal, the rights of EU citizens in the United Kingdom will be protected in a similar way to be formalised soon so that it can be relied upon by citizens. Warning from corporate giants The worlds biggest companies, from Apple and Toyota to JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, have cautioned that Brexit could complicate their businesses. Business leaders fear that additional checks on the post-Brexit UK-EU border will clog ports, silt up the arteries of trade and dislocate supply chains across Europe and beyond. 181216181904731 Firms are pausing or diverting investment that should be boosting productivity, innovation, jobs and pay, into stockpiling goods or materials, diverting cross-border trade and moving offices, factories and therefore jobs and tax revenues out of the UK, the business groups said. The British government said on Tuesday it would implement plans for a no-deal Brexit in full and begin telling businesses and citizens to prepare. May has delayed a vote on her deal until mid-January, prompting some MPs to accuse her of trying to force parliament into backing her by running down the clock as the March 29 exit date approaches. On Wednesday, May urged the leaders of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to listen to business and back her deal. Without one, the UK would trade with the EU under World Trade Organization terms. Brexit supporters say while there may be some short-term disruption, in the long-term, the UK will thrive outside what they cast as a doomed experiment in German-dominated unity and excessive debt-funded welfare spending. Move follows the slashing of US funding to humanitarian agencies working in Gaza Strip and West Bank. The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) says it will cut its aid next year to over 190,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and occupied West Bank. In a statement on Wednesday, the UN agency said it needs another $57m to continue providing for 360,000 impoverished Palestinians in 2019. The budget shortages will hit some 27,000 Palestinians in the West Bank who will lose food assistance, while another 166,000 people in the occupied territory and Gaza will see a 20 percent decline in food aid. Raphael du Boispean, a WFP spokesperson, attributed the crisis to the recurrent problem of declining donations. The Palestinians have faced major budget cuts this year after the United States slashed funding for the UNs Palestinian refugee programme, UNRWA, and for USAID programmes in the Palestinian territories. 180824200738805 Devastating effect WFP is concerned that these cuts may have a devastating effect on the food security, livelihoods and welfare of the people it serves in Palestine, the statement said. Stephen Kearney, WFPs country director in Palestine, told Reuters news agency that the body was forced to make the cutbacks mainly because the amount of funding that we are receiving is dropping drastically. Its not just WFP, its across the whole humanitarian community as donor contributions significantly fall, Kearney said, blaming the shortfall on cuts by the US, WFPs biggest contributor, and other countries in aid to Palestinians. On Monday, the UN and the Palestinian Authority had appealed for $350 million in aid for Palestinians next year, saying much more was needed but they had to be realistic after a year of funding cuts. The situation is particularly alarming in Gaza where the World Bank warned in a report in September that the economy was collapsing. The report described the besieged territorys economy as being in a free fall with unemployment estimated at more than 50 percent. Downward spiral feared Palestinians and humanitarian workers fear the cuts will cause a downward spiral as people buy less from businesses and they in turn purchase less from suppliers. WFP assistance goes to the poorest and most food-insecure communities, who are classified as facing deep poverty. Most families in these communities struggle to live on less than $1 a day and are unable to meet their basic food, clothing and housing needs. Most of the help provided by WFP is through electronic cards, which people use to buy food at a network of 185 shops. 181219060748480 In the Gaza town of Deir al-Balah, shopkeeper Mohammad al-Dirawi said he had gained about 400 new customers since he joined the programme and employed three new workers. We depend 90 percent on the work with the WFP, he said. God forbid, if it stops, we may not be able to continue in the supermarket. Aref Abdel-Jawwad, owner of a dairy in Deir Al-Balah, said he sells 50 to 70 percent of his products to WFP-approved shops. He fears he will have to cut the hours of his employees, each earning around $300 a month. Mustafa Kassiha, a dairy farmer in Rafah, said Abdel-Jawwads dairy buys all his milk. This is our only income. There is no alternative to it, he said. Medan, Indonesia Indonesian human rights lawyer Ranto Sibarani is trying to remain optimistic. His client, Meiliana, a double minority in Indonesia as a Chinese-Indonesian and a Buddhist, is awaiting the outcome of her final appeal later this month against a blasphemy conviction. In August, the mother of four was sentenced to 18 months in prison by a court in North Sumatra over a disputed comment about the volume of her local mosques speakers. Meiliana is hopeful that justice will be served and she will be freed, Sibarani told Al Jazeera. Shes surprised that her case even went to trial. Meilianas legal troubles began when a neighbour in her hometown of Tanjung Balai claimed that she had asked for the volume of her local mosques speakers to be lowered, saying that they hurt her ears. According to Sibarani, Meiliana only remarked that the volume appeared to have increased in recent years, and made no mention of wanting the speakers to be turned down. No recordings of the conversation were presented at her trial. But while Sibarani is hopeful about Meiliana, and despite the ire that her case has caused including an online petition calling for her release Indonesian authorities appear to be doubling down on reporting cases of perceived religious intolerance or blasphemy. To that end, a new mobile application released last month by the Jakarta prosecutors office has made it easier for members of the public to report suspected cases of religious heresy. The Smart Pakem app takes its name from Bakor Pakem, a division sitting under the umbrella of the Jakarta prosecutors office that has been extremely influential when pressuring the government to ban religious groups, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW). The app, which can be downloaded for free via the Google Play store and is listed under the education label, has sparked fears among rights groups and activists that it will be used to target religious minorities in the Muslim-majority nation. Smart Pakem enables users to report complaints about issues of heresy or deviant beliefs online previously, those had to be submitted in writing and could lead to Bakor Pakem launching an investigation. 170503075654145 Featuring a list of organisations deemed to be heretical, the app will be used as a resource by the prosecutors office to collect and store information on groups believed to be practising faiths beyond the countrys six officially recognised religions: Islam, Catholicism, Protestantism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism. It also states the names of the leaders of these organisations groups, including Ahmadiyyah, Gafatar and Shia, along with the addresses of their offices. This information could be seen as a way of encouraging attacks on these individuals or their places of work, according to activists, and has led to calls for the app to be revoked. All Smart Pakem is going to do is exacerbate cases of religious intolerance in Indonesia, says Sibarani. Its just going to cause more conflict between the religious communities and now all disputes will be settled through making a complaint via the app, rather than between individuals. Educate the public Baiq Wardhani, a lecturer in politics at Universitas Airlangga, says Smart Pakem needs to be treated with caution. How do you define heresy? This will trigger a lot of debate because the definition of the word depends on ones beliefs, she told Al Jazeera. The app is obviously a violation of the national constitution, so its stupid that the Jakarta prosecutors office would allow it to be available on peoples mobile because it can be easily abused for peoples own interests. Mukri, the prosecutors office spokesperson who like many Indonesians only goes by one name, did not respond to Al Jazeeras requests for comment. Local media have quoted officials at the prosecutors office as saying that the app was designed to educate Indonesians and improve the transparency of the reporting process. The objective is to provide easier access to information about the spread of beliefs in Indonesia, to educate the public and to prevent them from following doctrines of an individual or a group that are not in line with the regulations, Nirwan Nawawi, a spokesperson for the prosecutors office, told the AFP news agency in a statement in November. Clash of old and new Indonesias blasphemy law, known locally as Pasal 156A KUHP, carries a maximum five-year prison sentence. Introduced in 1965 under Indonesias first President Sukarno, the law was originally put in place to clamp down on indigenous beliefs across the archipelago, but in recent years it has been increasingly used to jail religious minorities. According to HRW, the law was only used eight times in its first four decades but saw a spike in sentencing under President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (2004-2014), with 125 convictions. Since 2014, under current President Joko Widodo, more than 20 people have been convicted of blasphemy. Usman Hamid, the executive director of Amnesty Indonesia, warned that the app will certainly trigger wider, as well as systematic, repercussions against anyone or [a] community deemed as deviant by Bakor Pakem, vigilante groups and hardliners reporting to the app. 170509164249733 Hamid also argued that the release of Smart Pakem is yet another step towards a more conservative form of politics in Indonesia. Since Yudhoyonos era, weve seen a series of closures and burnings of houses of worship, banning of organisations, imprisonment of leaders as well as persecution against civilians deemed as deviant. It has been driven by Bakor Pakem as theyre the one with authority to name groups or individuals as deviant, added Hamid, urging Widodo to disband the body. Andreas Harsono, a researcher at HRW, described Smart Pakem as a troubling clash of old and new. This app is the combination of an archaic act a law that is being abolished in more than two thirds of the world and a modern technology. The combination could be dangerous, more dangerous than using traditional communication means like landline or face-to-face reporting. The app has so far been downloaded more than 1,000 times, and Harsono said Google is facing a challenge in its decision over how to navigate between Indonesias blasphemy law and the United Nations regulations to revoke that toxic law. Last year, a group of human rights experts from world body called on the country to scrap the crime of blasphemy following the conviction of Jakartas ex-Governor Basuki Ahok Tjahaja Purnama after comments related to verses in the Quran were deemed to be blasphemous. Criminal laws that penalise blasphemy represent an unlawful restriction on freedom of expression, and disproportionately target persons belonging to religious minorities or traditional religions, non-believers and political dissidents, Ahmed Shaheed, special rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief, said at the time. For Sibarani, Meilianas lawyer, the release of the Smart Pakem app risks provoking similar cases like the one of his clients, considering the ease with which members of the public can now report instances of perceived religious intolerance. Even without an app, Meiliana ended up in prison. With the release of Smart Pakem, theres a real fear that therell be even more Meilianas in prison in the future, he says. Ray Okech, 33, has gotten into trouble many times for doing his job as a journalist in South Sudan. Not one to shy away from covering political, human rights or corruption stories, Okech has been arrested more than four times while on duty. I was also threatened by security officials and beaten up, just because they dont understand how media operates, said Okech. Like many other journalists in the country, Okech did not plan to work in the media. Unable to get a place on the agriculture business programme at the university in Juba, Okech sought alternatives and came across a year-long course in broadcast journalism offered by an American NGO. Excelling at the course landed him a full-time position at Eye Radio station in Juba in 2011, the year South Sudan declared independence from Sudan and just two years before the worlds youngest country became embroiled in a civil war. When the war started, things got very difficult, recalled Okech. The security situation deteriorated quickly. It became dangerous to travel around the country. The murder of South Sudanese reporter Peter Moi in 2015 was another blow to journalists in the country. Ray used to work with him and cover stories together. I saw him just 15 minutes before he was shot dead. He told me he was afraid, he said he was being threatened while doing a story. He told me he didnt want to cover politics any more. Mois murder came just days after South Sudans President Salva Kiir verbally threatened journalists who reported against the country. Slight improvement According to Reporters Without Borders, at least 10 journalists have been killed in the country since 2011. South Sudan is ranked 144th out of 180 countries on the World Press Freedom Index. It is a one-place improvement from last year. We have seen some changes. According to our media partners, there has been a lot less harassment of journalists at the hands of security authorities, said Laura Bain, team leader for Journalists for Human Rights in South Sudan. The editor-in-chief at the Juba Monitor (an independent English language daily), Anna Nimiriano, recently said that in the last year she could only think of two incidents of censorship at the newspaper. Misconceptions about journalism in the country extend beyond the authorities. When you use your camera, they consider this as a weapon and journalists as enemies, said Maura Ajak, a 29-year-old reporter at Catholic Radio Network. People are still traumatised from what happened during the war. They fear answering even the most simple questions because they are afraid to get into politics and, subsequently, get arrested. Ajak did not plan to become a journalist either. She had to stop her applied science programme at university due to financial issues. Because of her language skills, Maura decided to try her luck in journalism. Ive learned how to live through hardship and find good stories even when everything seems bad, said Ajak, who reports on child soldiers, refugees, and rape survivors. They (people) fear answering even the most simple questions because they are afraid to get into politics and, subsequently, get arrested. Maura Ajak, reporter It takes time and is exhausting. But its important to be close to them, see the reality and tell people the truth instead of rumours. In addition to all the other challenges, journalism in the country is not a well-paid profession. Majority of the journalists barely make enough to look after themselves and their families. In addition, there are travel costs for reporting and also buying equipment. Ajak usually earns around $120 a month, unless she gets additional funds from her work with foreign media. She also has to provide for her six-year-old daughter, who lives abroad with her grandmother. Ajak has not seen her daughter for more than two years. Child soldiers is an area that Ajak covers through her reporting [Stefanie Glinski/AFP] Its the best decision for now, she said. Sending children and families out of the country, especially to neighbouring Sudan and Uganda, is common due to a lack of quality education and security in South Sudan. Okecha sent his wife and two children abroad in 2016 due to the security situation. This October, he decided to leave his job at the radio station and join his family for some time, as his recent story made him worried for his safety again. Ajak does not plan to leave South Sudan anytime soon and considers conferences and training abroad as her short breaks outside the country. My future is here, she said. I feel its my role to do something positive for my country that will be a legacy for next generations. I hope each day something good can happen. We Shall Have Peace is a documentary produced by Contrast VR, Al Jazeeras immersive media studio, that explores South Sudan through the lens of trauma and healing. Air Marshall Alex Badeh shot dead near Abuja as authorities struggle with increase in violence in oil-rich Niger Delta. Nigerias former chief of defence Air Marshall Alex Badeh, who was facing trial for alleged fraud, criminal breach of trust and money laundering, has been killed by unknown gunmen. Badeh was shot dead on Tuesday on the outskirts of the capital, Abuja, further highlighting worsening security problems in the country. Badeh died from gunshot wounds sustained when his vehicle was attacked while returning from his farm along the Abuja-Keffi road, a statement by Nigerias air force read. Security analysts say the government is overwhelmed by the increasing violence. The Abuja-Keffi road on which Badeh was killed has become a security nightmare with robberies happening almost on daily basis, Cheta Nwanze, head of research at Lagos-based SBM Intelligence, told Al Jazeera. The former defence chief had been standing trial since 2016 for allegedly diverting about $20m allocated for the fight against Boko Haram, an armed group that fights for strict Islamic law to be implemented in the countrys northeast. Anti-corruption officials found $1m in cash in one of Badehs mansions during investigations. He was among several top security chiefs accused of stealing billions of dollars meant for tackling insurgency in the northeast. Boko Haram has killed scores of soldiers in recent months and analysts say the troops are ill-equipped, fatigued and have reached a breaking point. A pipeline protection official walks past crude export lines in Nigerias Niger Delta area [Al Jazeera] Niger Delta oil war The country is also struggling with increasing violence in the oil-rich Niger Delta region, which largely accounts for the nations wealth. The relative peace in the area has come under threat as communities protest what they say is a breach of a deal with the government. More than a hundred communities in the southern Delta State are aggrieved that a contract for the protection of a key crude export line, which provided jobs for former fighters, has been awarded to another firm. For somebody to just come and dislodge them from their work and begin to run the streets, they will resolve going back to the creeks, going back to the forests and begin to constitute nuisance everywhere, youth leader Tennyson Oriunu told Al Jazeera. We dont want war, when there is war there is no development, when there is killings there is no peace, and our state cannot grow, our local government cannot grow, the communities too cannot grow, Oriunu added. The state-run Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation had recently awarded a contract to local firm Ocean Marine Solutions for the protection of the Trans Forcados pipeline that is frequently targeted for oil theft. The 87km pipeline, run by Heritage Energy Operational Services, pumps more than 200,000 barrels a day to the export terminal. Tennyson Oriunu wants the government to resolve complaints by oil-producing communities [Al Jazeera] Amnesty breach The pipeline contract is part of a costly amnesty programme for rebels and communities. Some former leaders of armed groups in the region are concerned that the impending loss of jobs would lead to another round of violence. If you dislodge these people, they will become idle, and when they become idle, the devil will come to open a workshop in their heart, General Ebirie, a former leader of an armed group, told Al Jazeera. Security experts are calling for immediate calm to consolidate peace in the area. The issue in the Niger Delta is complicated, and will require a genuine effort to assuage communities who have lost trust in the Nigerian state, Nwanze said. When there is a broad-based complaint by a community, it is that much harder to calm, he added. The countrys oil industry was plunged into a cycle of sabotage in 2016 when a group, the Niger Delta Avengers, carried out a series of attacks on facilities. The group demanded a fairer share of oil revenues for the impoverished and polluted southern region. The attacks affected production and a drop in output hit the countrys foreign earnings. Nigeria is Africas biggest crude producer and oil sales account for two-thirds of government revenue. Analysts say that violence in the Niger Delta could exacerbate the political tension ahead of Februarys general elections. President Muhammadu Buhari, who came to power in 2015 pledging to end Boko Haram violence, is under increasing pressure to act as he gears up to seek re-election in 2019. Buhari, 76, is standing for re-election in a February ballot [File: AP] International conspiracy? The Nigerian government has expressed concerns over the role of international agencies in the war against the Boko Haram. The military has in the past been critical of international organisations operating in the country and has hit out at organisations reporting that it committed rights violations and war crimes during its fight against Boko Haram. The uprising in northeast Nigeria began in 2009 and has spread to neighbouring Cameroon, Chad and Niger, killing at least 27,000 people and leaving millions dependent on aid for survival. Last week, the military banned UNICEF from operating in the country over claims it was training spies who support Boko Haram. The military said the organisation had been training people to sabotage its counterinsurgency efforts by reporting alleged human rights abuses by soldiers. The ban was overturned within hours. US Ambassador to the UN says Israel-Palestine peace plan is different, but Palestinians say its dead on arrival. Outgoing United States Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley commented on Washingtons yet-to-be-announced plan for Israeli-Palestinian peace, saying it is much longer and takes advantage of new technology. Speaking at a UN Security Council meeting on Tuesday, Haley gave no tangible details of what has been dubbed by US President Donald Trump as the deal of the century. It is much longer. It contains much more thoughtful detail, Haley told the council which she said she has read. It recognises that realities on the ground in the Middle East have changed in powerful and important ways. She added the document has a lot both sides will like and things they will not like. The Palestinians have everything to gain by engaging in peace negotiations, Haley said. This plan will be different from all previous ones. The critical question is whether the response to it will be any different. Plan is dead on arrival The plan, spearheaded by Trumps son-in-law Jared Kushner and US envoy Jason Greenblatt, was meant to revive the stalled and dormant peace process between Israel and Palestinian leaders, with the status of Jerusalem and the ongoing expansion of the illegal settlement project in occupied Palestine being the main sticking points and obstacles to reaching a final agreement. Haley said Israelis and Palestinians as well as countries around the world have a choice: focus on the parts they dislike, which she said means returning to the failed status quo of the last 50 years, or focus on parts they like and encourage peace negotiations to move forward. She said moving forward to negotiations and peace will need leaders with real vision to do it. But Palestinian leaders have refused to participate in the US-led effort since December 2017, when the Trump administration turned its back on decades of US policy by recognising Jerusalem as Israels capital and moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv. In response, Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian UN ambassador, told reporters the plan was dead on arrival. She [Haley] refused to listen to these positions that she heard for the last two years and she left without listening to them insisting that the replacement of the global consensus with something that is so vague which we dont know will succeed, Mansour said. She is wrong. It will not succeed. The only thing that has a chance of success is to implement the global consensus. Internationally agreed requirements Immediately before the meeting, eight European Union (EU) members stood outside the UNSC chamber and read a joint statement emphasising the EUs strong and continued commitment to the internationally agreed requirements for Israeli-Palestinian peace. The EU is truly convinced that the achievement of a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders with Jerusalem as the capital of both states, that meets Israeli and Palestinian security needs, and Palestinian aspirations for statehood and sovereignty, ends the occupation and resolves all final status issues is the only viable and realistic way to end the conflict and achieve just and lasting peace, the statement said. Israels UN Ambassador Danny Danon said late last month that US officials have told Israels government they expects to release the long-awaited plan in the beginning of 2019. The UNs special coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Nikolay Mladenov told the council he remains concerned by the weakening of international consensus and the absence of collective efforts to achieve an end to the [Israeli] occupation and the realisation of a negotiated two-state resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. At the end of 2018, we are nowhere closer to reviving efforts for a negotiated solution, he said. Without a political horizon, all our collective and individual efforts merely contribute to managing the conflict rather than resolving it. Mladenov also reported to the council on Israels compliance with a December 2016 resolution that condemned Israeli illegal settlements, and said Israel has taken no steps to comply with the resolution and has continued expanding settlements and constructing new ones. Over the past year, he said that although Gaza has been the most volatile, the risk of an explosion in the West Bank has also grown. Washington responds to a wide range of malign activity, including interference in the 2016 presidential vote. The US Treasury sanctioned 16 members of Russias GRU military intelligence agency over a wide range of malign activity, including interference in the 2016 presidential vote and hacking international organisations. The move came on Wednesday in response to Russias continued disregard for international norms, the Treasury said in a statement. Those targetted included Victor Alekseyevich Boyarkin, a former GRU officer who acted on behalf of sanctioned Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, it said. Deripaska and Boyarkin were involved in providing Russian financial support to a Montenegrin political party ahead of Montenegros 2016 elections, the Treasury said. Deripaska was among several oligarchs, senior government officials and a state-owned Russian weapons trading company that the US sanctioned in April. Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, two GRU agents, who allegedly took part in the attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal in the United Kingdom, were also among the sanctioned. Russias military unintelligence The measures also apply to two individuals and three companies tied to the Russian troll farm, the Internet Research Agency (IRA), accused of trying to manipulate US public opinion. The Treasury also targetted Aleksei Morenets and Evgenii Serebriakov, officers in the GRU who played an integral role in compromising the database of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) in 2016, as well as assisting the GRUs attempted cyber intrusions into the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). To date, this administration has sanctioned 272 Russia-related individuals and entities for a broad range of malign activities, the Treasury said. Steven Mnuchin, the treasury secretary, was quoted as saying: The United States will continue to work with international allies and partners to take collective action to deter and defend against sustained malign activity by Russia, its proxies, and intelligence agencies. Following Wednesdays actions, all property and interests in property of these persons subject to or transiting US jurisdiction are blocked and US persons are generally prohibited from engaging in transactions with them. WSJ says Saudi effort to forge ties with Israel is faltering after crown prince was implicated in journalists murder. A covert US-backed initiative to improve ties between Saudi Arabia and Israel is facing setbacks after Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and two of his aides were implicated in a journalists killing, according to the Wall Street Journal. Prince Mohammed, whom the US Senate blamed for Jamal Khashoggis killing in October, spearheaded the outreach to Israel, a longtime foe, the Journal said in a report on Tuesday. But the global outcry over Khashoggis murder in October and fallout within the royal court has diminished the princes influence and dampened Saudi Arabias appetite for risky foreign policy endeavours, the Journal said, citing people familiar with the matter. Things have definitely cooled off right after Khashoggis murder, a senior Saudi government official told the Journal. The last thing the kingdom wants is for this to come out now and cause another backlash. Saudi Arabia does not officially recognise Israel and King Salman, who has taken a more active role in government in the aftermath of the Khashoggi crisis, recently described resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict as the kingdoms foremost priority in the region. The effort to improve Riyadhs ties with Israel was also hindered, the Journal reported, when two close advisers to Prince Mohammed lost their jobs over their suspected role in Khashoggis murder. The two aides, former royal court adviser Saud al-Qahtani and former deputy intelligence chief Ahmed al-Assiri played key roles in behind-the-scenes contact between Saudi Arabia and Israel, the Journal said, citing people familiar with their work. Al-Qahtani issued directives to the Saudi press to help soften Israels image and was also involved in the kingdoms purchase of advanced surveillance technology from Israeli firms, the Journal said, citing unnamed Saudi officials. Meanwhile, al-Assiri, al-Qahtanis subordinate, secretly travelled to Israel several times to discuss how Saudi Arabia could benefit from Israeli technology, according to the Journal. That would make him the most senior Saudi official known to have reportedly set foot in the country. Despite the setback, the Saudis and Israelis were likely to continue building ties in secret, the Journal said, because of shared business and security interests. It added that the Saudi government has been considering an investment of at least $100m in various Israeli technology companies and begun issuing a special waiver to Israeli businessmen allowing them to travel to the kingdom on special documents, without using their Israeli passports. Legislation now goes to the House where it is expected to pass before being signed by President Donald Trump. The Senate passed a sweeping criminal justice bill late on Tuesday that addresses concerns that the nations war on drugs had led to the imprisonment of too many Americans for non-violent crimes without adequately preparing them for their return to society. By a vote of 87-12, the Republican-led Senate passed and sent to the House of Representatives the First Step Act, which would ease the way for some prisoners to win early release to halfway houses or home confinement. The Senate passage of the bill culminates years of negotiations and gives President Donald Trump a signature policy victory, with the outcome hailed by scores of conservative and liberal advocacy groups. The House is expected to pass the bill this week, sending it to the presidents desk for his signature. The Senate legislation aims to establish programmes to head off repeat offenders and protect first-time non-violent offenders from harsh mandatory minimum sentences. Earlier this year, the House passed a bipartisan bill focusing on prison reforms, which did not include sentencing reforms. Trump congratulated the Senate on passing the bill and said he looked forward to signing it into law. This will keep our communities safer, and provide hope and a second chance, to those who earn it. In addition to everything else, billions of dollars will be saved, Trump tweeted. 2.2 million people imprisoned The United States leads the world in the known prison population, with about 2.2 million people jailed at the end of 2016. During Senate debate of the bill, Democratic Senator Dick Durbin noted the US had five percent of the worlds population, but 25 percent of the worlds known prison population. He added that minority groups bore the brunt of tough minimum sentences that judges have been directed to impose as a result of a decades-old law that has exploded the numbers of jailed people. The majority of illegal drug users and dealers in America are white. But three-quarters of the people serving time in prison for drug offences are African American or Latino, Durbin said. Inmates walk the exercise yard at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville, California [Rich Pedroncelli/AP Photo] In response to criticism from some conservatives that the legislation could prompt the release of violent criminals into society, the bipartisan measure was reworked to scale back the discretion judges would have in some sentencing cases. Before passing the bill, the Senate defeated amendments by Republican Senators Tom Cotton and John Kennedy that would have further tightened requirements. Those amendments would have excluded child molesters and other violent felons from early release, required notification of victims before offenders are let out of prison early and included a plan to track the effectiveness of anti-recidivism programmes. If the bill is passed by the House and signed by Trump, it will be seen as a major victory for advocates who have worked for years on similar pieces of reform legislation but were continually blocked by conservatives and scepticism within the Republican leadership. Years in the making The vote in the Senate was all but uncertain until Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced the chamber would take up the bill before the end of the year. McConnell had previously refused to give a vote to a more expansive bill introduced during the presidency of Barack Obama. McConnells announcement this month about the vote came after Trump threw his support behind the legislation in November, urging McConnell to bring the bill to a vote. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) (L) and Sen. Cory Gardner (R-CO) head to the floor to vote to begin debate on a bipartisan criminal reform bill [Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images/AFP] [Daylife] The years bipartisan negotiations brought together politicians across the political spectrum and advocacy and rights groups on opposing sides. The American Civil Liberties Union said on Twitter it was glad to see common sense prevail in the Senate voting to move this bill closer to the finish line. The advocacy group added that the legislation is by no means perfect but were in the midst of a mass incarceration crisis and the time to act is now. Jason Pye, the vice president of legislative affairs at FreedomWorks, a conservative advocacy group, called the senate vote historic, and urged the House to pass the bill so it can be signed by the president. Other groups that supported the bill included the Fraternal Order of Police, the Center for American Progress and the Koch brothers, among others. Inside Tajikistan: A history of music and storytelling We meet Tajik musicians holding on to their musical roots as they try to keep their centuries-old tradition alive. A Turkish court has sentenced a nephew of Fethullah Gulen, a religious leader accused by Ankara of orchestrating a 2016 coup attempt, to seven-and-a-half years in prison on terrorism-related charges. Anadolu state news agency said on Tuesday that Selman Gulen was sentenced for being a member of a terrorist organisation. The prosecutor had asked for seven-and-a-half years to 15 years. Selman Gulen told the court in the capital, Ankara, that he had met his uncle only once in his life, as he denied the allegations. He charged that the court was sentencing him only because he was a relative of Gulen and demanded his acquittal. Turkey blames Fethullah Gulen and his FETO movement for a coup attempt on July 15, 2016, by a faction in the military. Gulen has denied any role in the failed coup, which left more than 250 people dead and 2,000 injured. Once an ally of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, he lives in self-imposed exile in the United States. Turkey also considers Gulens movement to be a terrorist group and has arrested thousands of people with alleged connections to him. Turkish Defence Minister Hulusi Akar told parliament on Monday that 15,154 members of the armed forces have been sacked since the failed coup for their links to FETO. According to Anadolu, 326 of them have since got their jobs back. On Tuesday, 70 people were arrested for their alleged connections to the movement in operations across Turkey, Anadolu reported. They included soldiers on active duty, former police officers and a medical student. Last month, Turkeys interior ministry said nearly 218,000 people have been held for their alleged links to the abortive putsch. Trump looking at extradition Turkey has long demanded the extradition of Gulen, who lives in the US state of Pennsylvania. Washington has so far said that Ankara has not presented sufficient evidence against him. On Sunday, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said that Erdogan and US President Donald Trump discussed the extradition issue on the sidelines of the recent G20 summit in Buenos Aires. In Argentina, Trump told Erdogan they were working on extraditing (Fethullah) Gulen and other people, Cavusoglu said. On Monday, a senior White House official said that Trump did not commit during the meeting with Erdogan to extradite Gulen. A day later, White House spokesperson Sarah Sanders said that the US president had told his Turkish counterpart he would look at the question of extraditing the religious leader. The only thing he said is we would take a look at it but nothing committal at all in the process, said Sanders, speaking at the White House. Nothing further at this point beyond that nothing committal at all in that process. US envoy Zalmay Khalilzad says he would like to see a roadmap agreement reached before Aprils presidential election. The United Arab Emirates said talks it is hosting between the United States and the Taliban have yielded positive results. The US-Taliban reconciliation talks produced tangible results that are positive for all parties concerned, the UAEs official WAM news agency said on Wednesday. A new round of talks would be held in Abu Dhabi to complete the Afghanistan reconciliation process, it said without providing further details. The two days of meetings in the Emirati capital are Washingtons latest attempt at ending Afghanistans 17-year conflict, which has cost it nearly $1 trillion since 2001 when it led an invasion to overthrow the Taliban government of Afghanistan following the September 11 attacks. President George W Bushs administration at the time accused the Afghan group of harbouring Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda, which allegedly carried out the attacks. The Taliban, which has not confirmed meeting Afghan officials, said it had held preliminary talks with the US envoy. In a statement released after the talks, a Taliban spokesperson said the focal point of discussion was the withdrawal of foreign troops. the root cause of all problems and biggest obstacle to peace is the occupation of Afghanistan and bringing it to an end, Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid said. Taliban said the indiscriminate bombings against civilians must be stopped immediately. Roadmap before presidential election US envoy Zalmay Khalilzad said he had productive meetings in the UAE with Afghan and international partners to promote intra-Afghan dialogue towards ending the conflict. Khalilzad tweeted he met with Pakistani officials on Wednesday to brief them before travelling to meet Afghan leaders in Kabul. He said he would like to see a roadmap agreement reached before Afghan presidential elections, scheduled for April. In another breakthrough, three representatives of the Haqqani network Hafiz Yahya, Saadullah Hamas and Dr Faqeer were also present at the talks, The Associated Press quoted an anonymous Taliban source as saying. Although part of the Taliban, the Haqqani network has its own military committee. Its leader, Sirajuddin Haqqani, is deputy head of the Taliban. The groups prowess on the battlefield makes its presence at the meeting particularly significant because its unlikely any agreement could be enforced without their support. 181217151651379 Other attendees included officials from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, which along with the Emirati hosts were the only other countries to recognise the Taliban rule during its five-year reign starting in 1996. The Taliban has refused to meet directly with the Afghan government, viewing it as a puppet of the US. The armed group controls nearly half of Afghanistan and is more powerful than at any time since the 2001 invasion. UK airline cites improving security situation, a decade after it suspended flights following an attack in Islamabad. Islamabad, Pakistan The United Kingdoms flag carrier, British Airways, will resume direct flights to Pakistan in June, a decade after suspending services to the South Asian nation over security concerns, the airline has announced. The service will resume with three flights each week between the two countries capitals, London and Islamabad, British Airways head of sales for the Asia Pacific and the Middle East Robert Williams told a news conference in Islamabad on Tuesday. Its exciting to be flying between Islamabad and Heathrow from next year, which we believe will be particularly popular with the British Pakistani community who want to visit, or be visited by, their relatives, Williams said. The UK is home to an estimated 1.17 million people of Pakistani origin, according to the British Office for National Statistics, making it one of the largest diaspora hosts for the South Asian country. The Pakistani government has lauded the decision as an indicator of improving security and economic investment opportunities in the country. Pakistan is once again getting connected with the world, said Syed Zulfikar Bukhari, the Pakistani prime ministers special assistant on overseas Pakistanis and human resource development. Bukhari is himself a dual national of the UK and Pakistan. Delighted to learn British Airways will be resuming flights to Pakistan, tweeted Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi following the announcement. This decision is an acknowledgement of Pakistans continued efforts for peace & elimination of terrorism. The British Airways flights will resume from June 2, 2019, it said in a statement. Direct flights British Airways is the first major European airline to resume direct flights to Pakistan since services were suspended due to security concerns in the mid-2000s. The airline had suspended services after a deadly truck bombing at Islamabads Marriot hotel in 2008 killed more than 50 people. In the interim, Gulf-based airlines Emirates, Qatar Airways and Etihad Airways stepped in to absorb the bulk of the countrys international air traffic. Pakistan has been battling the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, an umbrella organisation of armed groups that has vowed to overthrow the government and enforce a strict interpretation of Islamic law, since 2007. Since 2014, a series of military operations has seriously degraded the Tehreek-e-Talibans ability to launch frequent attacks targeting civilians and security forces, with violence dropping significantly as the group was displaced from its erstwhile headquarters in the northwest of the country. Sporadic heavy-casualty attacks, however, have continued to occur, as the Pakistan Taliban has shifted its operational headquarters to eastern Afghanistan. Asad Hashim is Al Jazeeras digital correspondent in Pakistan. He tweets @AsadHashim. White House says US has started returning troops home after Trump declared ISIL has been defeated in Syria. The United States has started withdrawing its troops from Syria, the White House said on Wednesday, after President Donald Trump declared that the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also know as ISIS) group has been defeated in the country. White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said that victories over ISIS in Syria do not signal the end of the Global Coalition or its campaign. We have started returning United States troops home as we transition to the next phase of this campaign, she added. The United States and our allies stand ready to re-engage at all levels to defend American interests whenever necessary, and we will continue to work together to deny radical Islamist terrorists territory, funding, support and many means of infiltrating our borders. Sanderss comments came after reports surfaced that the US was considering a full troop withdrawal from the country. A complete, rapid withdrawal, if confirmed, would upend assumptions about a longer-term US military presence in Syria, which US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and other senior US officials had advocated to help ensure ISIL cannot re-emerge. Still, President Donald Trump has previously expressed a strong desire to bring troops home from Syria when possible. Prior to Sanderss statement on Wednesday, Trump tweeted, We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency. A US fighter stands near a military vehicle, north of Raqqa city, Syria [File: Rodi Said/Reuters] The timing of a potential full withdrawal was not immediately clear. An unnamed US official told Reuters news agency that all State Department personnel are being evacuated from Syria within 24 hours. The official added that the US plans to pull military forces out of the country once the final stages of the last operation against ISIL are complete and that the timeframe for the troop pullout is expected to be between 60 to 100 days. 181218173659515 The Pentagon declined to comment, saying only that it continued to work with partners in the region. Turkey factor The US still has about 2,000 troops in Syria, many of them special operations forces working closely with an alliance of Kurdish and Arab groups known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF. The partnership with the SDF has outraged NATO ally Turkey, which views the US-backed Kurdish Peoples Protection Units (YPG) as an extension of an armed group fighting inside Turkey. The deliberations on US troops come as Ankara threatens a new offensive in northern Syria. 181217153154007 On Monday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said his country may launch the new military operation at any moment, adding that Trump has given a positive response to Turkeys plans in a phone call between the two leaders. The announcement came days after Erdogan announced that Turkish forces would launch a new cross-border operation against the YPG to the east of the Euphrates River in northern Syria. A US military vehicles drives in the Syrian town of Darbasiya next to the Turkish border [File: Rodi Said/Reuters] The US is supporting Kurdish forces east of the Euphrates, where YPG troops have been fighting against ISIL. But Ankara recently again voiced frustration about what it says are delays in the implementation of a deal with the US to clear the YPG from the town of Manbij, located west of the Euphrates in YPG-controlled areas. On Wednesday, Ahmet Berat Conkar, a Turkish MP who is also on the foreign affairs committee in parliament, said that the US presence in northern Syria in cooperation with the YPG is a great risk. He told Al Jazeera that the US presence in YPG-controlled areas is creating problems between the two sides. Last one percent ISIL declared its so-called caliphate in 2014 after seizing large swaths of Syria and Iraq. It established its de facto capital in the Syrian city of Raqqa. 181214104213461 According to US estimates, the group oversaw about 100,000 square kilometres of territory, with about eight million people under its control. It had estimated revenues of nearly $1bn a year. Brett McGurk, US special envoy for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, said last week that the group was down to its last one percent of the territory it once held in its self-styled caliphate. The group has no remaining territory in Iraq. Hajin, the groups last major stronghold in Syria, is close to being seized by US-backed SDF forces. After losing Hajin, ISIL will control a diminishing strip of territory along the eastern bank of the Euphrates. The group also controls some desert terrain west of the river in territory otherwise controlled by the Damascus government and its allies. But US officials have warned that taking back the groups territory would not be the same as defeating it. Even as the end of the physical caliphate is clearly now coming into sight, the end of ISIS will be a much more long-term initiative, McGurk told a State Department briefing on December 11. 181211134022694 US Marine Corps General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, cautioned earlier in December that the US had trained only about 20 percent of Syrian forces required to stabilise areas captured from ISIL. Grave error A complete withdrawal of US troops from Syria would still leave a sizeable US military presence in the region, including about 5,200 troops across the border in Iraq. Much of the US campaign in Syria has been waged by warplanes flying out of Qatar and other locations in the Middle East. Still, Mattis and US State Department officials have long fretted about leaving Syria before a peace agreement can be reached to end that countrys brutal civil war, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced around half of Syrias prewar population of about 22 million. Syrian Democratic Forces and US troops are seen during a patrol near the Turkish border in Hasakah [File: Rodi Said/Reuters] In April, Mattis said, We do not want to simply pull out before the diplomats have won the peace. You win the fight and then you win the peace. ISIL is also widely expected to revert to guerrilla tactics once it no longer holds territory. A US withdrawal could open Trump up to criticism if ISIL reemerged. Trump has previously lambasted his predecessor, Barack Obama, for the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq that preceded an unravelling of the Iraqi armed forces. Iraqi forces collapsed in the face of ISILs advance into the country in 2014. Reacting to reports of a possible troop withdrawal, Republican US Senator Lindsey Graham, often a Trump ally, said a withdrawal would have devastating consequences for the US in the region and throughout the world. An American withdrawal at this time would be a big win for ISIS, Iran, (President) Bashar al-Assad of Syria, and Russia, Graham said in a statement. Republican Senator Marco Rubio agreed, saying a full and rapid withdrawal of US troops from Syria would be a grave error with implications beyond just the fight against ISIL. Additional reporting by Umut Uras @Um_Uras. Both sides lay blame on each other for clashes on first day of UN-brokered truce in strategic port city of Hodeidah. Houthi rebels and forces loyal to the Yemeni government have accused each other of violating a ceasefire in the western city of Hodeidah, less than 24 hours after the UN-brokered agreement came into effect. Residents reported shelling for nearly one hour on the eastern and southern outskirts of the Houthi-held city on Tuesday, whose strategic docks are the point of entry for 70 percent of imports for millions of Yemenis. The Houthi-aligned Al Masirah TV network accused forces backed by the Saudi-UAE coalition of shelling several sites, including areas east of the airport. Meanwhile, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) news agency, WAM, quoting a Yemeni source, said that the Houthis fired mortar bombs and rockets at the May 22 hospital in the eastern suburbs. 181215205243978 A total of 21 violations since the ceasefire commencement have come to our notice, a member of the Saudi-UAE coalition told the AFP news agency on condition of anonymity. If the UN continues to drag the chain and take too long to get into the [military] theatre, they will lose the opportunity altogether and the agreement will turn into a dead duck. The AFP reported early on Wednesday that the city was calm despite intermittent gunfire during the night. The situation is fragile and its expected to be fragile for the next couple of days, said Hakim Almasmari, editor-in-chief of the Yemen Post. But since UN representatives are expected to be on the ground pretty soon, these attacks will gradually disappear. Meanwhile, residents in the capital told Al Jazeera that air attacks targeted the al-Dailami airbase in Sanaa, close to the capitals airport. Sky News Arabia reported that the Saudi-UAE coalition destroyed an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and a launch platform. Al Jazeera could not independently verify the report. Civilians continue to bear the brunt After eight days of talks in the Swedish town of Rimbo last week, representatives from the Houthi movement and the Saudi-UAE-backed government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi agreed to pull back their fighters from Hodeidah and allow the deployment of UN-supervised neutral forces and the establishment of humanitarian corridors. The truce, the first significant breakthrough in peace efforts since the war erupted in 2014, was one of a number of confidence-building steps to pave the way for a wider ceasefire in the impoverished Arabian Peninsula country and for a framework for political negotiations. The UN is due to convene by video link with the warring parties later on Wednesday to discuss the troop withdrawals and the rebel pullout from the docks of Hodeidah, Saleef and Ras Isa. Unarmed observers from the UN-chaired Redeployment Coordination Committee will oversee the process on the ground and will answer to Patrick Cammaert, a retired general with experience in Sri Lanka, Cambodia and DR Congo. Caroline Seguin, programme manager at Doctors Without Borders, said despite the relative calm in Hodeidah, the situation was still perilous for civilians. The situation is very bad. Access to care is limited, specifically in the area of Hodeidah inside the city but also around the city, she told Al Jazeera. There is less and less hospital capacity because staff left because they were near the front line. Whereas some hospitals have now been destroyed and can no longer provide care to the civilian population. The conflict has had a devastating impact on the entire country with 22 million people, including 11.3 million children, in desperate need of humanitarian assistance. UN should have reopened Hodeidah port Hussain al-Bukhaiti, a pro-Houthi activist, called the Rimbo agreement deeply flawed, saying it failed to immediately address the countrys dire situation. The Sweden agreement linked the flow of humanitarian aid to the security situation in Hodeidah. They [the UN] should have reopened Hodeidah port. They should have allowed food and medicine to come into Hodeidah even though its under Houthi control because as UN has said before, most of the humanitarian aid is coming through Hodeidah, al-Bukhaiti added. Western nations have pressed the Saudi-UAE coalition to end the nearly four-year war in Yemen that has killed an estimated 60,000 people. According to Save The Children, as many as 85,000 children may have starved to death. The alliance, which receives arms and intelligence from the West, intervened in March 2015 to restore the government of Hadi who was toppled by the Houthis months earlier. Zimbabwe post-election clashes: Inquiry condemns military action Zimbabwes military comes under fire over its reaction to the post-election protests. Powell said though most economists see US inflation easing by mid-2022, We cant act as if were sure of that. Although I didnt care for the Weekly Standard for reasons other than those given by President Trump, I admit that I disliked this now-defunct fortnightly as intensely as he did. When a Canadian friend discovered it was about to close, he asked me in an email What do you want for the other seven days of Hanukah? This friend was right that I was relieved to see the magazine disappear even if I didnt regard it, like the President, as dishonest and pathetic. Rather I viewed it as an utterly superfluous appendage of the neoconservative empire, which didnt contribute anything new to our political debate that other, well-subsidized neoconservative organs werent already saying. I was amused to learn that the leftist Vox website regrets the loss of a publication that stood up for conservative principles. Voxs editors fear that an era of conservative media is over, and they quote WS contributor Charles Sykes about how an independent and honest voice of conservatism has been stilled. I suppose independent for Sykes and Vox means promoting the #NeverTrump campaign. But even in that department Weekly Standard was not particularly original. Its editors would have had to compete for the honor of dumping on Trump, supposedly from the right, with Rich Lowry, Kevin Williamson, Ron Dreher, Ben Shapiro, David French and about half of the Allstars and news commentators on Fox News. An obvious reason for the growing disfavor in which subscribers and funders came to view the magazine was the extent to which certain of its key figures, e.g., Max Boot, John Podhoretz, and above all Bill Kristol, unleashed their anti-Trump animus. Kristol and Boot are regularly on CNN bashing the Prez, while Podhoretz, a cofounder with Kristol of the magazine, expresses his anti-Trump bile in op-ed pieces for another neoconservative publication, the New York Post. WS may have been set up as an object of activity for two princes of neocon royal lineage, the way medieval kings accorded principalities and estates to their progeny in order to keep them occupied. But the magazine yielded another advantage for those whose careers were intertwined with it. It gave an affiliation to news commentators on Fox, who were repeatedly introduced as working for the Weekly Standard. I notice that Ron Dreher, who is the leading blogger for the American Conservative, recalls fondly his signal honor in having been allowed to write for the Weekly Standard. In some Washington circles this fortnightly has cachet, owing perhaps to the fact its editors and contributors get on to TV with some regularity. The few times I forced myself to read through issues I found the contents to be formaldehyde. Not because they were badly written, but because the views offered were entirely predictable. As a modern European historian, I could predict the slant of anything that would appear in my field in the Weekly Standard. Germans and Russians were always the fall guys, no matter what the subject. Treatments of World War I, which was a complex struggle with many villains, looked like propaganda that came out of the English foreign office circa 1917. (Contrary to the WS party line, there really were two guilty sides in that disaster.) Although hardly a dove on questions of national defense, sometimes I found the magazine to be downright belligerent. There is a difference between wanting to protect ones country and trying to unload our latest democratic model on the unwilling. I doubt the editors understood this difference. And while Im no fan of some of the more puerile things tweeted by Trump, I also recognize that on the whole hes been an effective chief executive. That is certainly not the impression that one received from the Weekly Standards NeverTrumpers. John Nolte, writing in Breitbart, is spot-on in his description of them as sanctimonious social climbers tirelessly virtue-signaling their hatred of Trump to the rest of the anti-Trump media community. Matthew Yglesias tells us that the future of this venerable conservative magazine is in doubt for the sin of being anti-Trump. No, it collapsed because its funders lost patience with their investment. Rupert Murdoch carried the publication generously for fourteen years and Philip Anschutz for another nine, by which time it became apparent that Yglesias right-wing fat cats refused to go on financing a Pink Elephant, for telling us what other media outlets are already telling us. Allow me to vent my personal grievance. For over thirty years I have sought funding for an enterprise comparable to Bill Kristols on behalf of the independent Right. I am already an old man and have still not succeeded and its unlikely that Ill achieve my goal in the years that remain to me. Not surprisingly, Kristol and his friends never gave me a voice of any kind. They differed with me on what conservatism should be and worked to keep me out of their conversation. Reading about how their magazine failed, I wont deny that I felt some Schadenfreude. But more importantly, I think it may be time to hear other, less conformist voices on the right. On November 2018, we learned that there are two different Americas. They are not black and white; they are not rich and poor. They are the ones that has failed to learn from history, convinced that socialism is too extreme to the American psyche to merit serious attention, and the other that clandestinely believes that socialism, in fact, has already arrived and is making sure that America can no longer live without it. The collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991 and the subsequent dissolution of the so-called socialist camp did not result in the demise of Marxist ideology. Marxism exhibited remarkable endurance. It successfully adapted to a new reality and relocated to the United States, where it acquired a new life within the Democratic Party. In 2008 this virus culminated in the election of the Marxist-socialist Barack Obama, whose principal achievement was the successful transformation of the Democratic Party into the de facto Social Democratic Party. For those who are not familiar with the terminology: Social democracy is a political ideology that has as its goal the establishment of socialism through implementation of a policy regime that includes, but is not limited to, high taxation, government regulation of private enterprises, and establishment of a universal welfare state. The elections are a clear warning to America that Karl Marxs vision; Democracy is the road to socialism is poised to be fulfilled. The Democrats have dropped all liberal or progressive pretenses. They run on pro-Marxist ideology, denouncing capitalism and promising miraculous fulfillment of egalitarian dreams. And, for the most part, score significant victories. Even in the states which the Republicans won, they won with razor-thin margins. In Texas, Florida, Arizona, Mississippi, and Nevada, and even Californias Orange County, which have been the bastions of capitalism and free enterprise, the socialists have taken over or came too close for comfort. The Republican Party also lost the House. Although under Paul Ryans leadership it was Republican in the name only, the loss couldnt be understated. In the absence of an ideological counterweight, the Democratic Party over the last few decades has built a huge army of supporters and a diversified arsenal of election weaponry. The millions of Americans who depend on the government one way or another are the Democrats army. Today, 22 million Americans -- 14 percent of the labor force -- are employed by governments at the federal, state, and local levels. Moreover, about 50 percent of Americans do not pay income tax, and millions receive welfare checks, food stamps, and other forms of government assistance. The slogan of the Boston Tea Party, No taxation without representation is being replaced with representation without taxation. Those strategic advantages are augmented by the most destructive weapons in the Democratic Partys arsenal -- illegal voting. In the regions where socialism has not yet attained political meaning and the concept of economic equality still has little reference to the American voters, the Democrats are offering suffrage to foreigners. The people of California have already subordinated their voting rights to the millions of immigrants crossing their open borders. Recently, California began automatically register illegal aliens to vote when they obtain or renew a driver's license. In Texas, Arizona, and Florida, the Democrats organize massive voter registration drives to register illegal aliens to vote and devised 'ballot-harvesting,' which in reality is a voter manufacturing technique that is designed to keep the ballots coming until the results flip. In the process, the Democrats gave a new meaning to every vote to be counted and invented a new definition of democracy; it is no longer voting; its counting. If a consensus on the legitimacy of American elections breaks down, the very legitimacy of our democracy would be questioned. As John Adams put it, Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. Those other have been exploiting the inadequacy of our constitution with no sense of legal or moral restraints in the effort to bring this country in conformity with the socialist principles. For those who havent learned much in school or suffered historical amnesia and voted for socialism, here is a sober reminder; just like all the democracies preceding ours, this one isnt immune to self-destruction. To prevent what would be otherwise inevitable, reason must confront falsehoods with the superior principles of religion, free enterprise, and individual liberty. We must stop hiding behind the empty assertion that we are lovers of freedom and take a stand. We have to reject the Democratic rubbish and recognize the obvious; the country that has twice elected a black president cannot be racist; attacks on the Second Amendment are an attempt to disarm the law-abiding citizen; the political system responsible for millions of deaths cannot be superior; the capitalist economic system, which is based on individual liberty, cannot be immoral; no borders means no sovereignty; and, economic equality can only occur in poverty. Should the challenges exceed the level of our endurance, and the conversion to a new reality is allowed to materialize, Americas future will look like the Soviet past and we will become the unfortunate generation, dying bankrupt and telling our children and grandchildren, Work hard and pay, pay, pay forever for our failure to stop the utopian dream. Alex Markovsky is a senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research, a conservative think hosted at Kings College, New York City, which examines national security, energy, risk-analysis and other public policy issues, He is the author of Anatomy of a Bolshevik and Liberal Bolshevism: America Did Not Defeat Communism, She Adopted It. Mr. Markovsky is the owner and CEO of Litwin Management Services, LLC. One would think that in war the duty of a soldier is to kill the enemy before he kills you or your fellow soldiers. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are different in that the enemy doesnt usually obey the rules of war, like wearing uniforms and rank insignia, and there are no front lines per se, only improvised explosive devices and sniper fire from second-floor windows or civilians used as human shields. That is where Mathew Golsteyn found himself in 2010 when the Green Beret killed a Taliban bomb-maker who had killed two Marines, Sgt. Jeremy R. McQueary and Lance Cpl. Raymon A. Johnson, in a war where only one side obeys the rules and the other is trapped by rules of engagement that make no sense and an Obama administration treating the whole thing as a law enforcement matter: Golsteyn, in 2010, had been deployed to Afghanistan with the 3rd Special Forces Group. During the Battle of Marja, two Marines in his unit ended up getting killed by booby-trapped explosives hidden in the area, and Golsteyn and his men later located the suspected Taliban bomb maker. But there was a problem: the alleged terrorist was not on a list of targets U.S. forces were cleared to kill, Fox News previously has reported. After the man was detained, Golsteyn said the suspect refused to talk to investigators. Under the rules of engagement, Golsteyn was ordered to release him. However, Golsteyn was concerned that if he did so, the suspect would have in turn targeted Afghans who were helping U.S. soldiers Golsteyn told Fox News he ended up killing the suspected Taliban bombmaker -- although details of where and when the killing occurred are in dispute. Two years later, he's facing a murder charge for it. Major Mathew Golsteyn's immediate commander has determined that sufficient evidence exists to warrant the preferral of charges against him, U.S. Army Special Operations Command spokesman Lt. Col. Loren Bymer told Fox News in a statement Friday. Major Golsteyn has been charged with the murder of an Afghan male during his 2010 deployment to Afghanistan. If the bomb-maker had been targeted with a drone strike, would that have been murder? Does not being on official kill list make it murder? Yet killing suspected terrorists and those who made war on America and its allies from high altitude was an official policy of the Obama administration, most notably resulting in the death of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki , the 16-year-old son of terrorist leader Anwar al-Awlaki: Cornered by reporters with video cameras, former White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, a senior adviser to President Obama's reelection campaign, attempted to defend the kill list that the Obama Administration uses to determine whose body should next be blown apart. American drone strikes have resulted in hundreds of dead innocents in the last four years, even as the program has killed a number of high-level al Qaeda terrorists Asked how their kill list can be justified, Gibbs replies that "When there are people who are trying to harm us, and have pledged to bring terror to these shores, we've taken that fight to them." He was the son of Anwar al-Awlaki, who was also born in America, who was also an American citizen, and who was killed by drone two weeks before his son was, along with another American citizen named Samir Khan. Of course, both Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan were, at the very least, traitors to their country -- they had both gone to Yemen and taken up with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and al-Awlaki had proven himself an expert inciter of those with murderous designs against America and Americans: the rare man of words who could be said to have a body count. When he was killed, on September 30, 2011, President Obama made a speech about it; a few months later, when the Obama administration's public-relations campaign about its embrace of what has come to be called "targeted killing" reached its climax in a front-page story in the New York Times that presented the President of the United States as the last word in deciding who lives and who dies, he was quoted as saying that the decision to put Anwar al-Awlaki on the kill list -- and then to kill him -- was "an easy one." So, no doubt, was Mathew Golsteyns decision not to wait till he was added to a kill list to kill the Taliban bomb-maker before he could kill more American soldiers. But why wasnt he charged with murder in 2011 when he took a polygraph test for a job at the CIA and volunteered the information? The US Army launched a criminal investigation into the incident in 2011 but no formal charges were filed at the time because of a lack of physical evidence, military officials said. In 2014 Major Golsteyn was stripped of his Silver Star medal, the third highest award for valor in the US military, and received an official reprimand for his actions. Yet he was not charged with murder in 2011. Would it have jeopardized the reelection chances of President Obama in 2012 to have a Green Beret charged with murder while you are using drones to kill other bomb-makers from high altitude? So why charge him now? Has the military justice system become as corrupted by political correctness as the civilian version, and come to embrace the liberal notion that terrorists are not enemy combatants but merely civilians who need to be read their Miranda rights? Few are rushing to Mathew Golsteyns defense as they did with deserter Bowe Bergdahl, with Obama willingly trading terrorist Taliban leaders who slaughter Americans for such a traitor, and welcoming and consoling Bergdahls parents at the White House while he ignored Bergdahls desertion in the heat of battle in Afghanistan. Golsteyn's mission was to support Marine and Afghan forces by targeting Taliban command, logistic, and intelligence units. As allied forces struggled to win government control over central-northern Helmand province, Moshtarak saw some of the bloodiest fighting of the Afghan war. He had seen his comrades die, blown apart by bombs such as those made by the bomb-maker he killed. Unlike Obama, he was reluctant to put a Taliban killer back on the battlefield to kill again. Like Obama, he killed a terrorist in wartime without a trial. The only difference is that Obama used drones from high altitude firing missiles to which no Miranda warning had been attached. President Trump is right to say he will investigate this prosecution of an American war hero. Mathew Golsteyn should be pardoned, then invited to the White House with his parents to receive the thanks of a grateful nation. Daniel John Sobieski is a free lance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investors Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications. Tucker Carlson pointed out a few days ago how the already insufferable leader of the Congressional Democrats has recently been "ordained.an archbishop in the church of progressive sanctimony." For a while now, Nancy Pelosi's been the country's expert on morality (e.g., border wall: immoral; abortion on demand: moral). She's now taken to telling the country how much she prays, and she's urging others to do it, too at least that old sinner, Donald Trump. After last Thursday's televised squabble in the Oval Office, Pelosi shared with reporters how she told Trump she was praying for him and urged the president (whom she also called a "skunk" while ridiculing his manhood) to accept the Democrats' budget proposal with no funding for a border wall. "In fact," she said with stomach-turning piety, "I asked him to pray over it." When a smug person ends an argument by telling you to "pray over it," she's really saying, "Ask God. He knows I'm right!" Summarizing her and Chuck Schumer's meeting with Trump, she told the media, "I myself thought we should open the meeting with a prayer, which I did. I told him about King Solomon, when he was to become king of the Jews, he prayed to God, he said: 'I need you to give me great understanding and wisdom, Lord.'" King Solomon is Pelosi's favorite Bible character, especially because he proposed solving a problem by cutting a baby in half. Now Sister Nancy's praying for Trump to keep the government open so federal employees can finish their Christmas shopping. It's an axiom that if a conservative says his faith informs his political decisions, he'll be condemned for establishing a state religion, while liberals get to veer back and forth over the church-state centerline as freely as those motorists who love to text while driving. Right now the liberal media are applauding the way Pelosi "schooled President Donald Trump about the Bible," but it's not clear why. It's not as if they're suddenly in favor of anyone being schooled in the Bible, especially anyone in a public classroom. Pelosi never bats an eye without a political motive. This Saint Nancy act might be her attempt to occupy the spiritual high ground that, obviously, Donald Trump has shown no interest in occupying himself. Pelosi wouldn't dare try this with a president like George W. Bush, who, while he didn't boast about his piety on TV, was recognized as genuine in his Christian faith prompting the left's usual reaction: Ross Douthat wrote in 2006 that "the fear of theocracy has become a defining panic of the Bush era." Theology was less of an issue for liberals during the Obama years; he was their messiah, and they just worshiped him. Meantime, Obama conspicuously dissed orthodox Christians with everything from calculated snubs and criticism to gratuitously tormenting the Little Sisters of the Poor, all the while devotedly celebrating the unblemished virtues of Islam. In 2015, Hillary bluntly stated that "[d]eep-seated ... religious beliefs ... have to be changed" to accommodate the unlimited abortion license. Then, last year, Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez said it is "not negotiable" that "[e]very Democrat" support abortion. Pelosi tried to mitigate Perez's remarks by saying "of course" there's room for pro-lifers in the Democratic Party, but try to find one who's not actually voting Perez-style. This year, Pelosi watched the Democrats lurch wildly to the extreme left. For decades before that, they were trusted allies in the left's war on conventional morality and religion (except Islam!) for being repressive, patriarchal, and counterrevolutionary. It may be that, alarmed that the Democrat brand has become too materialistic, amoral, and atheist, she thinks she can give it religion. Maybe she can draw an unfavorable comparison between the reprobate and undisciplined Donald Trump and herself: the "ardent, practicing Catholic," who exhorts the President to beg for "the great understanding and wisdom" that she (and Chuck Schumer?) have already been granted by God. Haven't Republicans marched under the banner of morality and Christian values long enough? Now that they've elected the unholy Trump, why can't the Democrats seize that banner for themselves? For one thing, because no evangelical or conservative Catholic would ever buy it. Sure, the Democratic Party is crowded with Catholics, but the serious ones left years ago. The leading unserious Catholic is Pelosi herself, who professes her devotion to the faith but does it while living in open, willful defiance of the Church's crystal-clear teaching against abortion: "It is the teaching of the Catholic Church from the very beginning that the killing of an unborn child is always intrinsically evil and can never be justified." When her duplicity threatened to become an issue in 2004, Pelosi pretended that, moved by her "ardent" devotion to the Church, she had been studying the Church's teaching on the beginning of life "a long time," and she stated falsely to Tom Brokaw on Meet the Press that the Church has never defined it. Asked when human life begins, she replied, "We don't know," and that "[t]he point is, that it shouldn't have an impact on the woman's right to choose" the "it" being when a human life begins, which shouldn't have an impact on the decision to get an abortion. Easy mistake to make when your catechism is Roe v. Wade. Later, when a reporter mentioned the Gosnell infanticides and challenged her own support for partial-birth abortion, an agitated Pelosi snarled back that "[a]s a practicing and respectful Catholic, this is sacred ground to me when we talk about this[.] ... This shouldn't have anything to do with politics." But as a politician, she never stops talking about it, and the sacred ground she was talking about wasn't human life, but the exercise of a mother's "free will" to terminate her child. In response, New York's Cardinal Egan said, "Anyone who dares to defend that [the unborn] may be legitimately killed because another human being 'chooses' to do so or for any other equally ridiculous reason should not be providing leadership in a civilized democracy worthy of the name." Her own bishop reluctantly corrected her misstatements in a public letter, necessitated by "the widespread consternation among Catholics" of her deliberate distortions of Catholic doctrine. Pope Benedict counseled her, in person, on the Church's express teaching, "which enjoins all Catholics, and especially legislators," to protect "human life at all stages of its development." Pelosi, " the respectful Catholic" who presumed to tell Trump to pray for wisdom, emerged from that meeting no wiser for it, obtusely extolling the "Church's leadership in fighting poverty, hunger and global warming." Jesus warned against hypocrites who make a public display of praying "that they may be seen by men." The way Pelosi pretends to exemplify "prayerful" politics, and the way she told Trump "in private" that she's praying for him and immediately announced it in a televised press conference is pure Pelosi: cynical, addlebrained, phony. If it might hurt Trump, she'll pontificate how every MS-13 killer retains a "spark of divinity," then goes right back to her life's work snuffing out that spark from 60 million innocents and counting. The Bible never says it's intrinsically evil to build a wall or protect a border, but it's still got that commandment against murder. Let the Democrats canonize this Pharisee if they need a patron saint. Her feast day can fall on January 22. T.R. Clancy looks at the world from Dearborn, Michigan. You can email him at trclancy@yahoo.com. Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr. Identity and intersectionality politics has won a hollow victory. Tweets surfaced from circa 2011 by comedian Kevin Hart. The tweets disparaged the homosexual community, which caused the Oscars committee to communicate to Hart that if he issued a public apology, he could continue as host of the Oscars. Instead, Hart chose to step down. His rationale is that he is a different person in 2018 than he was in 2011, and providing some coerced, obligatory apology is not in anyones best interest. Harts decision was not atonement enough for Chad Griffin, President of the Human Rights Campaign. Griffin Tweeted, You have a rare opportunity to take responsibility, teach people in this moment, & send a message to LGBTQ youth that they matter & deserve dignity and respect. You say youve grown. Show us. Make amends for hurtful things youve said & affirm LGBTQ people. The irony of a marginalized people group calling out another marginalized people group is not lost on the masses. Many respondents to Chads tweet queried as to what more could Kevin Hart do? How can Hart atone? What can wash away Kevins sins? As many are scratching their heads trying to make sense of Kings demands on Hart, a great conundrum still faces the Oscars: who will be the high priest of 2019s Oscars? In their collective work, Understanding the Times, Myers and Nobel, define a worldview as a pattern of ideas, beliefs, convictions, and habits that help us make sense of God, the world and our relationship to God and the world. A worldview is religious in nature and everyone has a worldview, even those who are atheists or not traditionally religious hold values and beliefs similar to the religious. Progressivism is a worldview because it has a pattern of ideas, beliefs, convictions, and habits. There are progressives who ascribe to a deity and others that do not, but lack of a deity does not relieve the religious element. Progressives use their worldview to make sense of the world around them in order to develop practices to live out their values. Progressive ideas, beliefs, and convictions may sound familiar: when they go low, we go high. A womans right to choose. Universal healthcare is a human right. Open borders. Millions will die. Real socialism has never been tried. Common sense gun control. Hate speech is not free speech. Fascist anti-fascism. For progressivism to make sense of the world and its relationship with a deity, the Marxist worldview is a great start. Marx and Engels embraced Darwinian evolution, which dispensed of a deity and created the belief that humanity is linearly evolving into a more enlightened people. The first step to a better world is God is dead and we are his murderers, which opened the door for subjective instead of objective morality. Progressivism follows suit with communist and evolutionary ideologies, yet makes room for a deity as long as that deity is not insulting or contradictory to a rival deity. Much of this ideology culminated in the Humanist Manifestos of 1933, 1973, and 2003. Also, many religions hold there is a dark or evil force challenging the journey to eternal peace. For progressives, Donald Trump is that evil force who ushered in the American apocalypse with the defeat to the heir of Utopia. As far as convictions and habits, these beliefs seem to be carried out via marches, constant denouncements of Trump, condemnations of racism to anyone who disagrees with progressivism, ANTIFA violence, disruptions of college campus assemblies, virtue signaling on social media, and the list could go on. Another place the progressive worldview is showcased is in the religious observance of the annual Oscars and its deity: the golden Oscar. The elite of Hollywood gather to worship and sacrifice to the Oscar, similar to the pagan elite of antiquity who came to sacrifice to Dagon or Mithras. The wealthy get the best worship experiences. Remember, a worldview aids the worldview holder in making sense out of the world. If one reads through the transcript of Jimmy Kimmels 2018 Oscar monologue, one will see Kimmel, serving as high priest at the Oscars church service, makes sense of the world at various points. He denounces the misogyny of Hollywood (the Hollywood everyone is there to celebrate). He neglects to confess the sins of his former show in which he paraded scantily clad women on trampolines so their bouncing breasts would keep ratings high, and he praises the inclusivity of the Oscars while also condemning the lack of inclusivity. After a quick jab at Americas Founding Fathers, he brings everyones attention to Saint Streep, the patron saint of Hollywood progressivism. In 2017, high priest Kimmel used the progressive worldview to make sense of the world by asking Streep to stand for applause while he contrasted her saintliness to the dark forces of Donald and Ivanka Trump. Finally, Kimmel informs everyone the platform (or pulpit) is a place for the winners of awards to champion and communicate the progressive worldview to America. To deny that progressivism is a religion is to ignore its worldview and religious elements. The Oscars committee has a challenge on its hands to ensure progressive America is reminded of all it believes. Now that Kevin Hart is no longer the high priest of the Oscars, the committee must find a worthy high priest to preach the progressive worldviews beliefs, habits, convictions, and ideas. The committee must find a high priest who will make sense out of the world, and discern the forces of evil working against progressivism. In December, the PowerBlog is marking the centenary of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyns birth (Dec. 11, 1918) At the NewYork Times, Solzhenitsyn biographer Michael Scammell says the Russian novelist and historian did more than anyone else to bring the Soviet Union to its knees. For his critical approach to Soviet life, Solzhenitsyn was evicted from the state-sponsored Writers Union and became a virtual outlaw in his own country. But he was far from alone. Many talented and independent writers Varlam Shalamov (a fellow chronicler of the Gulag), Andrei Sinyavsky, Yuli Daniel and Joseph Brodsky were circumventing the Soviet censorship with a new publication format called samizdat. It consisted of self-published poems, stories, novels, human rights appeals and political manifestoes that were secretly circulated in typed and mimeographed copies; in many cases, they were also sent abroad. By the end of the 1960s, the leading writers and activists came to be known as the Dissident Movement. Their goal was to bring about freedom of expression and peaceful political change in the Soviet Union, and they garnered a global audience of readers. Besides writers, their ranks included scientists, engineers, academics, lawyers, even rebellious workers; their unofficial leader was the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Andrei Sakharov. Solzhenitsyn sympathized and cooperated with Sakharov and the other dissidents, but he didnt always agree with them, and he continued to follow his own path. In 1973, still in the Soviet Union, he sent abroad his literary and polemical masterpiece, The Gulag Archipelago. The nonfiction account exposed the enormous crimes that had led to the wholesale incarceration and slaughter of millions of innocent victims, demonstrating that its dimensions were on a par with the Holocaust. Solzhenitsyns gesture amounted to a head-on challenge to the Soviet state, calling its very legitimacy into question and demanding revolutionary change. After his return to Russia, Solzenitsyn continued to speak out against wrong turns in his homeland, particularly the chaos that followed the collapse of communism. Scammell: Solzhenitsyn disapproved of what he saw as the new [Yeltsin] regimes adulation of the West and its foolish desire to introduce a form of Western democracy. What he advocated was a strong leader, who maintained strict order in the country, encouraged more religion and state support for the Orthodox church, together with a revitalized patriotism and a return to traditional values. He seemed to get his wish in 2000, when Mr. Yeltsin handed the presidency over to a man who shared Solzhenitsyns nationalist views and personified his ideal of a strong leader: Vladimir Putin. The new Russian leader made a show of welcoming Solzhenitsyn to his residence and seeking his advice, and in 2007 he bestowed a state award on the author for his humanitarian activities (Solzhenitsyn had refused similar awards from Mr. Gorbachev and Mr. Yeltsin). Solzhenitsyn died in 2008, before Mr. Putin showed his true colors with the coldblooded murders of opposition figures, the creation of an authoritarian state, the invasion of Ukraine and the Crimea, and the whittling down of local democracy in the provinces. (Solzhenitsyn might well have approved of the Ukrainian measures, since he was half-Ukrainian by birth, but not the others.) After his death Solzhenitsyn was given a sumptuous funeral and buried at the Donskoy Monastery in Moscow. In 2010 The Gulag Archipelago was made required reading in Russian high schools. Moscows Great Communist Street has been renamed Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Street, his centennial is being celebrated with great pomp this week in Russia, and a statue of him in Moscow is planned for the near future. All this would give the writer great satisfaction. But though feted and exploited by questionable allies, Solzhenitsyn should be remembered for his role as a truth-teller. He risked his all to drive a stake through the heart of Soviet communism and did more than any other single human being to undermine its credibility and bring the Soviet state to its knees. Home page photo: Soviet naval infantrymen carrying AK-74 assault rifles. 1985. Wiki commons/public domain A new report by a nationwide alliance of leading colleges and universities highlights Emory Universitys efforts to improve opportunity for low- and moderate-income students. Emory, one of the 108 member institutions that make up the American Talent Initiative (ATI), was cited for its goal of having 20 percent of its students be recipients of Pell grants, which are federal grants to low- and moderate-income students. With over 20 percent of Emorys current first year class being Pell eligible, Emory is well on its way to meeting this goal. Our goals for access and affordability of an Emory education pair very closely with the overall goals of ATI, says John Leach, Emorys assistant vice provost and director of financial aid. We are happy to partner with ATI in getting the word out to low- and moderate-income students that an Emory education is affordable. Earlier this year, U.S. News & World Report cited Emory as #5 among national universities in economic diversity. Launched in December 2016, ATI is a program of Bloomberg Philanthropies and is led by the Aspen Institutes College Excellence Program and Ithaka S+R. ATI is also supported by the Gray Foundation. Members of the ATI have increased enrollment of students who receive Pell grants by 7,291 since the 2015-16 school year. This momentum, according to the new report, indicates that ATI is on track to reach its goal to make the nations top colleges more accessible for 50,000 additional low- and moderate-income students by 2025. Emory joined ATI in April of this year. Emory is welcoming to all talented students, regardless of family income, says John Latting, associate vice provost and dean of undergraduate admission. The way we approach the admission process and financial assistance are consistent with that perspective. Some examples Latting cites: Emory meets the full demonstrated need of every U.S. student admitted. At Emory, financial aid isnt just about low-income families. We are addressing access for all sorts of families, middle-income families as well as low-income families, he says. Emory admissions also is part of a pilot partnership with the College Board that provides information about the level of opportunity that students have had both in their high schools and their neighborhoods. Through this program we are conscious of students who dont have a lot of opportunities or resources, and are able to make better admissions decisions, says Latting. ATI leaders say that sharing information among member institutions and documenting progress publicly through tools such as their impact report play an important role in the initiative. We want to recognize the member institutions not only for their concrete progress, but also for the remarkable spirit of collaboration. To help move ATI forward, many institutions have shared information that they would not otherwise, says Catherine Bond Hill, managing director at Ithaka S+R, which authored the report. We are glad to gather this initial information, and look forward to sharing future reports that contribute new lessons and strategies for success in this critical area of educational opportunity. "El Chapo" is going to spend a long time in jail. In fact, the evidence against El Chapo is so strong that everyone is talking about Emma, his wife and the mother of two little girls. According to news reports, Emma (Mrs. Chapo) was absent from the last proceedings: El Chapo's Brooklyn federal trial threatened to turn into an episode of "The Real Housewives of the Sinaloa Cartel" on Monday when the wife of the accused Mexican drug lord went AWOL, puzzling even her pint-size defendant hubby. El Chapo's wife, Emma Coronel Aispuro, had attended every single day of her husband's trial for the past six weeks. Her absence in the courtroom Monday seemed to come as a surprise even to her alleged-kingpin husband, who spent much of the proceeding nervously searching the room for his wife, a former beauty queen. A source familiar with the wife's habits said they [sic] had no idea exactly where she was but confirmed she was still in New York. El Chapo in custody (photo credit: ICE). All we can do is speculate, of course. Maybe Emma did not want to hear about her husband's relationship with Colombian cocaine-trafficker and witness Jorge Cifuentes. It's not a pretty story, as we are learning daily. Maybe Emma took her money and disappeared somewhere. After all, she is a young woman who maybe does not want to spend the rest of her life married to a man sitting in a U.S. jail. Life is too short for that! Maybe she went shopping and forgot about the trial. Nobody knows, and maybe we should not care. From now on, I will think of pretty Emma when they spin "She's Not There" by The Zombies. She wasn't there, and it's very interesting. PS: You can listen to my show (Canto Talk) and follow me on Twitter. Tucker Carlson has been peerless in his coverage of the issues raised by the caravan of Central Americans that announced its plan to storm the border and demand amnesty from within our territory, gaining automatic freedom to be released for a hearing sometime in the future, thanks to current law. Thanks to his reporting and interviews with local officials in Tijuana, we learn that locals sound distinctly Trump-like in their anger over being besieged by: ... people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people." These words, spoken by candidate Trump, are very similar to the laments in Tijuana over the crime, garbage, drug use, and other problems brought by the caravan. But as Carlson gleefully notes, while Trump was excoriated for racism, the locals in TJ are every bit as Hispanic as any member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. The mau-mauing of Trump as a racist can't be accomplished on them, raising awkward questions about Trump's accusers. For generating such a powerful argument, Carlson is now being mau-maued himself, with an advertiser boycott underway. On his program Monday, he spoke of his intent to soldier on: Meanwhile, the people profiting from the policy don't want the rest of us to think about it too much. Those who won't shut up get silenced. You have seen it a million times, it happens all the time. The enforcers scream, 'racist!' on Twitter, until everyone gets intimidated and changes the subject to the Russia investigation or some other distraction. It's a tactic, a well-worn one. Nobody thinks it's real. And it won't work with this show, we are not intimidated. We plan to say what's true until the last day. And the truth is, unregulated mass immigration has badly hurt this country's natural landscape. Take a trip to or southwestern deserts if you don't believe it. Thanks to illegal immigration, huge swaths of the region are covered with garbage and waste that degrade the soil and kill wildlife. Update: Fox News has provided us a statement on the boycott: Statement from FOX News 12-18-18 "We cannot and will not allow voices like Tucker Carlson to be censored by agenda-driven intimidation efforts from the likes of Moveon.org, Media Matters and Sleeping Giants. Attempts were made last month to bully and terrorize Tucker and his family at their home. He is now once again being threatened via Twitter by far left activist groups with deeply political motives. While we do not advocate boycotts, these same groups never target other broadcasters and operate under a grossly hypocritical double standard given their intolerance to all opposing points of view." HuffPost seems to approve of the boycott and repeats the common distortion of conflating illegal aliens with immigrants. But it usefully provides a list of advertisers trying to silence Carlson for me and maybe you to boycott. Go and read the whole thing, but here are numbers one through three: Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell appeared before the media yesterday and said there would be no partial shutdown of the government on Friday because the White House had backed off its demand that Congress approve $5 billion in funding for the border wall. McConnell thinks the president would accept a short-term funding bill and not insist on funding the wall. Oh, really? When it comes to Donald Trump, expect the unexpected. Expect the president to blow up conventional wisdom. And expect Trump to ignore his party leaders and do what he has always done: whatever the hell he wants. Politico: McConnell's efforts to soothe an inflamed debate between the president and Democratic leaders capped a day of unsuccessful negotiations between McConnell and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York and a softening public position from the White House. Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders indicated the president could accept less than the $5 billion from Congress that he had previously demanded, and Schumer did not rule out a short-term spending bill that would punt the border fight to next year. Trump, of course, revels in the daily drama and, on Tuesday, refused to admit defeat or pledge that he would win the standoff. After McConnell and Schumer spoke to reporters, the president said he wants more border security and was coy on whether he'll sign whatever Congress sends him. "We'll see what happens," he told the news media. Schumer already thinks he's won. When Democrats take control of the House in January, the always iffy chances for funding a border wall will disappear completely. The Democratic minority leader knows this and will be playing for time by agreeing to a short-term perhaps less than 60 days spending measure. In fact, Democrats think they have Trump over a barrel: Earlier Tuesday, McConnell suggested to Democrats that they pass the bipartisan Senate homeland security funding bill and its $1.6 billion for fencing plus an additional $1 billion in spending Trump could use on the wall, which Schumer deemed a "slush fund." The Democratic leader soon called McConnell to reject the proposal and stood behind a bill offering flat funding for the Department of Homeland Security, which would provide $1.3 billion for fencing. "The Republican offer today would not pass either chamber," Schumer told reporters. He said his caucus would "very seriously" consider a short-term spending bill, which would thrust a spending fight into the lap of presumptive House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at the beginning of the new Congress. The round of failed talks followed a key breakthrough: Sanders admitting publicly that Trump would take less than $5 billion in border wall funding from Congress as a condition for keeping the government funded. She said on Fox News that the administration would work with Hill leaders on passing a bipartisan bill providing $1.6 billion in fencing and would try to move more money around within the government to fund the border wall. Schumer said he would withhold congressional approval for that. You'd think they'd know by now that Trump does not play by their rules. Sanders can say whatever she wants. She gets her marching orders from top White House aides. McConnell can also declare whatever he wants. He's getting his information from the president's advisers. But no one has yet been able to penetrate the mind of the president. And my guess is, Trump knows that his chance for funding the border wall is slipping away, and he will dig in, trying to force compromise. Chuck Schumer's celebrating may be a bit premature. McConnell's original proposal for wall spending is the basis for a compromise, and Trump might see a shutdown and the furlough of hundreds of thousands of federal workers as a victory that his base would cheer. In fact, even if Trump signs off on a short-term fix, that doesn't mean he won't shut down the government with the House Democrats in control. This battle is not over, and with the importance Trump attaches to his signature campaign promise to build a wall, it's likely he's not giving up. While the so-called Women's March movement continues to implode amid public revelations of the known deep bigotry of its leaders; while rape-enabler Hillary Rodham Clinton continues to whine over her election loss; while unverified rape accuser and political pawn Christine Blasey Ford is invited to trivialize real rape victims, a real female victim of multiple horrible rapes and sexual slavery eloquently related her brutal past in war and her triumphant survival as she accepted the Nobel Peace Prize. Did you hear about it? Probably not, as the awardee isn't wallowing in victimhood or political correctness but continues to speak out. Slightly redeeming itself after awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to terrorist Yasser Arafat, who went on to slaughter more innocents, and to former president Barack Hussein Obama (D) shortly after he was elected and hadn't done anything worthy of peace (a pattern he continued and worse for the eight years of his presidency), the Nobel Peace Prize committee honored Nadia Murad in 2018 "for [her] efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict." Twenty-five-year-old Murad is a Yazidi, a religious, cultural, ethnic minority residing mainly in Iraq and surrounding Muslim-dominated nations being slaughtered by the Muslim ISIS terrorist group over the past few years. After most of the inhabitants of her town were ravaged and killed, including her immediate family, Murad and other females were sold into sexual slavery. After the slow defeat of ISIS terrorists, the young Murad was freed and now forcefully speaks out against her savage captors, diligently working to prevent further occurrences, as she bluntly explained in her Nobel acceptance speech last week, scolding those who look the other way. I want to talk to you from the bottom of my heart and to share with you how the course of my life and the life of the entire Yazidi community have changed because of this genocide, and how ISIS tried to eradicate one of the components of Iraq by taking women into captivity, killing men and destroying our pilgrimage sites and houses of worship. ... I lived my childhood as a village girl in Kojo, south of Sinjar region. I did not know anything about the Nobel Peace Prize. I knew nothing about the conflicts and killings that took place in our world every day. I did not know that human beings could perpetrate such hideous crimes against each other. As a young girl, I dreamed of finishing high school. It was my dream to have a beauty parlour in our village and to live near my family in Sinjar. But this dream became a nightmare. Unexpected things happened. Genocide took place. As a consequence, I lost my mother, six of my brothers and my brothers children. Every Yazidi family has a similar story, one more horrible than the other because of this genocide. Excerpts cannot do her justice; read her entire speech. And then read the speech of her co-winner, Dr. Denis Mukwege, who, surviving equal evil in the Congo, tirelessly works to prevent further atrocities. A few days after the glittering events in Oslo, Murad returned to the remains of her native village to celebrate a Yazidi holiday, through which the memories of her murdered family and others live on. In August 2014, this school in Kocho the last Yazidi village in Sinjar taken by IS (Islamic State) became a scene of horror. It was where IS gathered villagers after a fortnight siege, during which time they failed to pressurise village elder Ahmed Jasso into agreeing the whole village would convert to Islam. Militants confiscated personal property before segregating women and children from men older than 15. The former were taken to the upper level of the school from where, as detailed in Murads autobiography The Last Girl, they watched in horror as male relatives were loaded onto trucks in small groups and driven away. When they heard shooting, they knew the men had been executed. Older women, deemed worthless by IS, were also killed, including 78 who are buried in a mass grave in the village of Solagh on the outskirts of Sinjar. Younger women such as Murad, along with children, were abducted and enslaved, either forced to become sabyyia (sex slaves) or, in the case of young boys, trained as IS fighters. No, Nadia Murad won't be donning a cozy fuzzy pink cap to protest imagined slights or even real, unpleasant, and wrong ones anytime. This strong, courageous woman, along with many others like her, will continue to remind the world of the real evils that exist, forcefully agitating for improvements as she builds a life for herself, honoring those who were lost. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, who has already demonstrated to us what he's made of, first through his elite Navy SEAL service to the U.S., which included significant war injuries, and then his magnanimous behavior toward a 25-year old Saturday Night Live comic who mocked his war wounds, is showing his class once again. Here's the story of their next encounter from Fox News: Texas Rep.-elect Dan Crenshaw said he called Pete Davidson after hearing about the disturbing social media message the "Saturday Night Live" star posted over the weekend. Crenshaw, the former Navy SEAL who wears an eyepatch on his right eye after he was injured by an I.E.D. in Afghanistan, was mocked by Davidson on "SNL" in November. Crenshaw told KPRC Houston (via The Hollywood Reporter) that he reached out to the star after seeing the 25-year-old's social media message. "I talked to him personally [Sunday]," he said. "We don't go back very far. We're not good friends. But, I think he appreciated hearing from me. I told him everyone had a purpose in this world. God put you here for a reason. It's your job to find that purpose. And you should live that way." The guy hasn't even been sworn in as a Texas congressman, and already we are seeing two examples of magnanimous behavior from him toward an antagonist in what are obviously testing conditions. The poor little fellow, Pete Davidson, who has great comic gifts yet was so down in the dumps that he sounded as if he wanted to commit suicide in a social media post, got an unprompted phone call from Crenshaw, helping him to get perspective on his life and to make it worth living. Since many comics and other artists (think Robin Williams) are depression-prone, that was a supreme act of kindness. What a wonderful gift for the young man, and from a guy Davidson had unthinkingly mocked for his disfiguring service injuries. In doing this, not only did Crenshaw project himself to be stoic and masculine, the way dads used to be before the political correctness era (he mentioned that SEALs don't get offended earlier), but he also projected that most valued element of masculinity, which is strength. Only the strong can project magnanimity. Weak people are incapable of it. One can hope that that phone call helped him, and the young man gets the help he needs. I'd hate to see him "disappear from the earth," given how bright and talented he is. Nobody should end it all, even if he isn't bright and talented. As for Crenshaw, one can only imagine that his wisdom is the result of not just coming from good people, but also his perspectives obtained as an elite serviceman and patriot, forged in the heat of battle. If so, that reveals to us two things: that there are extraordinarily strong, kind, and magnanimous people in our service ranks, and that Crenshaw is going to be one hell of a good and wise congressman and, quite possibly, someone more of us will be delighted to elect to higher office. Personal character is just the start. Texans have found a diamond. Image credit: Screen grab from Texas Business Radio via Vimeo. Since Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and almost all Democrats oppose giving $5 billion for the border wall, which would save the U.S taxpayer hundreds of billions of dollars in the long run, I have some ideas based on things Obama did that journalists and other Democrats didn't care about. Trump is asking his Cabinet officers to find legal ways to get the extra funds. Obama never cared about paying for Obamacare legally. He wanted to keep Obamacare going, so he just stole billions from funds that Congress hadn't authorized to pay for shortfalls. He also diverted billions (meant for low income housing) from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac funds that should have gone to shareholders. The billions that came in each year from Fannie and Freddie masked the huge deficits. The deficit would have been even higher if the Obama administration had not confiscated all the profits of these government-sponsored entities, not actual agencies. Obama loved to cook the books and treat federal dollars as his own to do as he pleased. Obama also was able to come up with $1.7 billion in unmarked bills to reward the tyrants in Iran. I am sure that money did not benefit the Iranian people. The Obama administration also had slush funds at the EPA, the Justice Department, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to use for political purposes and to reward political supporters. There is no end to the illegalities and scandals of the Obama administration, and yet Obama repeats that there were no scandals. The "fact-checking" media and other Democrats don't care. Thank goodness we have a president who wants to look for legal ways to get the funds to pay for the sensible border barrier. People should also remember that Democrats including Schumer, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Obama all voted for a border fence back in 2006, when Democrats were trying to show how tough they were on illegal immigration with an election coming up. Unlike Trump, they didn't care about their campaign promises and didn't fund what they voted for. I am sure that journalists and other Democrats will be happy if Trump finds the money legally. They certainly didn't care when Obama used so much of our money illegally. The border wall would also go toward controlling government spending. The U.S. will give Central American countries and Mexico more than $10.6 billion in development aid as part of an effort with the Mexican government to combat illegal immigration and the refugee problem. The joint announcement by the State Department and the Mexican government comes as Congress and the president are embroiled in a budget battle over funding for a border wall. Associated Press: The U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation "is prepared to invest and mobilize $2 billion in additional funds for projects in southern Mexico that are viable and attract private sector investment," according to the statement. "This amount is in addition to the $2.8 billion in projects for Mexico through OPIC's current investment pipeline." Ebrard said "The commitments established here signify more than doubling foreign investment in southern Mexico starting in 2019." The problems of illegal immigration and refugees will not be solved solely by pouring money in the region or by enhanced border security. Neither will those problems be solved by Mexico or the U.S. alone, or any other individual Central American country. This is a regional problem demanding a comprehensive regional response. The Democrats and the media are downplaying the idea that this is a "crisis," but Donald Trump is correct in assessing the situation as one. Our border has been in crisis for decades, and precious few presidents and politicians in Congress have been willing to address it. Give Trump credit for a far more intelligent response to the crisis than either Presidents Bush and Obama. Fortunately, most of the money earmarked for Mexico and Central American will be private development funds administered by the Overseas Private Investment Corporation. But regardless of whether the money is from public or private sources, the same problem in spreading it around persists: corrupt, greedy politicians and bureaucrats stealing money for themselves and their cronies. The Overseas Private Investment Corporation has rules and checks to make sure the money is well spent. It's hard to say how successful they can be in preventing graft. Nor is it possible to say that investments made with the money will be wise and well spent. In the end, it's a crap shoot as to whether that money will do much good. Billions for investment and nothing for a border wall? Politics aside, the wall won't prevent refugees from continuing to stream toward our southern border. Keeping them home in the first place should be one of our priorities. It would be better for us, better for them, and better for the region if they didn't feel the need to escape the conditions that bring them to our doorstep in the first place. This image of the Betsiboka Rivers estuary in northwest Madagascar provides tantalizing evidence of catastrophic erosion that has been plaguing this small island country in the Indian Ocean for the past fifty years. The bright red color seen in the rivers jellyfish-like tentacles and the sandbars in between is the result of iron-rich sediments that gets washed from the hills during heavy rain and deposited in the rivers mouth. It is estimated that as many as 400 tons of soil per hectare is washed away every year during the rainy season turning the Betsiboka River blood red and leaving deep gorges, known as Lavaka, in the highlands. Astronauts who took this picture remarked that it looks as if Madagascar was bleeding to death. Deforestation has long been an issue for Madagascar as it is one of the worlds top biodiversity conservation sites because of the large number of endemic species that live here and rely on the islands forest cover, one that the island is rapidly losing. Madagascars isolation from the African continent for millions of years has preserved and produced thousands of species of plants and animals found nowhere else on Earth. Nine out of ever ten species of plants and animals found in Madagascar are endemic. This large number of unique species makes deforestation a great threat to global biodiversity. Photo credit: oldedoe/Flickr In the past two thousand years, Madagascar has lost more than 90 percent of its original forest. This forest loss is largely fueled by tavy, a traditional slash-and-burn agricultural practice imported to Madagascar by the earliest settlers. Typically, an area of the rainforest is cut and burned to turn it into rice fields. After a year or two of production the field is left unused for 4-6 years before the process is repeated. After a couple of such cycles, the soil is exhausted of nutrients and cant grow any more rice. It is then abandoned and a new area of the rainforest is chosen. Tavy leaves the land barren colonized only by scrub vegetation or grass that cannot anchor the soil making it prone to erosion and landslides. The problem worsened after the 1950s as a result of increased coffee production for the island's economy. In addition to traditional agricultural practice, illegal logging for timber and fuel have resulted in dramatic loss of rainforest. With a population of 14 million people and growing, Madagascar is under enormous pressure to meets the needs of its people and still preserve the natural environment, observes NASA. Scientists fear the rapid, additional clearing of the islands forests for cash crops such as cotton and tobacco endangers the habitat of the many plant and animal species unique to the island while at the same time creating soil erosion problems that impact water quality and the future productivity of agricultural lands. Deep gorges left by erosion is a common feature in Madagascar. Photo credit: Frank Vassen/Wikimedia Photo credit: NASA Photo credit: Axelspace Emory Law has been recognized by the Council on Legal Education Opportunity (CLEO) with a 2018 CLEO Edge Founders Award, in honor of CLEOs 50th anniversary, for having significant impact on diversifying the legal profession. One hundred fifty individuals, law schools and legal organizations were recognized, from more than 600 nominations. Both Emory Law and professor emeritus Nathaniel Gozansky received awards. In 1961, Emory Law led the charge to admit minority law students when two Emory administrators successfully sued Georgia to overturn a discriminatory state constitutional tax provision that blocked minority students from enrolling in private schools. (See Emory v. Nash 218 Ga. 317, 1962.) Shortly thereafter, Emory Law enrolled its first African American students. Their careers set milestones within the Atlanta and federal judicial communities. But while legal obstacles to admitting law students from diverse populations had diminished, economic barriers precluded many minority students from enrolling. In 1966 and 1967, armed with a grant from the Field Foundation, Emory Law introduced the Pre-Start program, CLEOs predecessor, to allow minority students to attend summer legal courses. Based on this hands-on classroom training, 12 students were admitted to Emory Laws next class. In 1968, Emory became one of four institutions to host CLEOs inaugural summer program. CLEO established its national offices in Atlanta and, shortly thereafter, professor Gozansky became its associate director. Gozansky not only expanded the program, he navigated the political currents that threatened CLEOs growth and future. By 1972, his and others work led to CLEOs move to Washington, D.C. Emory Laws support of CLEO remains as steadfast as it was 50 years ago, says Jim Hughes, interim dean of Emory Law. We are acutely aware of the pathways CLEO provided for our first 50 years of minority alumni, which in turn expand the opportunities for our current students. We will continue to work proactively to ensure that our community exemplifies Emorys core values of diversity, inclusion and respect. According to Huaweis official EMUI Twitter handle, a bunch of Huawei and HONOR smartphones are getting updated as we speak. Huawei has started to roll out Android 9 Pie-based EMUI 9 update to the Huawei Mate 10, Mate 10 Pro, P20, and P20 Pro. In addition to that, HONOR, which is technically a separate company, is rolling out the update to the HONOR Play, View 10, and HONOR 10. Most of these phones will receive their updates in Europe, as theyre sold unlocked by the company in that region the most. This update has been in beta for a while now, and it seems like Huawei finally got to a point where it can share a stable build of it. Do keep in mind that this update is rolling out to unlocked units of these phones according to the report, so if your phone is carrier-branded, youll have to wait a bit more. If this report is accurate, Huawei actually managed to trump Samsung in this regard, as the Korea-based tech giant is still rolling out Android 9 Pie beta updates to its flagships, while Huaweis flagships rolled out with Android 9 Pie, and more phones are just receiving the update, it seems. So, Whats New? Huaweis Emotion UI (EMUI) skin is not exactly a light implementation of Android, for better or worse, it is considerably heavier than stock Android, which is not necessarily a bad thing, as it brings a ton of additional features to the table. The moment you fire up EMUI 9, you will notice that the design is a bit different than what youre used to on EMUI 8, and if you didnt use EMUI, youll notice that it looks considerably different than stock Android. Aside from the design, Huawei also included new gestures system in EMUI 9. So, if you enable gesture navigations, you will be able to swipe up from the bottom to head to your home screen, swipe up and pause to launch the overview menu, while swiping from either left or right sides of the display will act as a back button. Huawei Share, Wireless Projecting, AI E-Commerce, and other features have been added to EMUI 9, though truth be said, youll probably not use most of these features, even though they can come in handy in some situations. AI E-Commerce, for example, allows you to tap the image with two fingers or point the camera at the product youre interested in, and this software should be able to find it for you online, to purchase. Weve seen such apps in the past, and none of them worked as it should, even though it sounds great on paper. Huawei did include an AI video editor in the mix, a video editor which can identify faces and create separate video highlights for each person, which can be handy if youre not a perfectionist and like to do everything yourself, of course. GPU Turbo 2.0 should improve the way these phones handle games, as it should boost gaming performance, while you should be able to see some battery improvements as well, as this is Android 9 Pie after all. These are only some of the changes, Huaweis Emotion UI skin is quite capable, though if you dont like over-the-top skins with tons of features, it may not appeal to you. Advertisement When Can I Expect This Update To Hit My Phone? Huawei said that the update is rolling out to all devices that are listed, but it may take a while for the update to reach your smartphone, as per usual. These updates are rolling out gradually, which essentially means that you may receive it in the next five minutes, or it may take a week or two for it to arrive to your smartphone, just be patient. You can, of course, always try to locate the installation file and flash it to your device, but you will lose everything data-wise on your smartphone, and its not worth the hassle, its better to wait for the update to arrive, and let the phone do its thing, as youll get to keep your data, and waiting a bit wont hurt you, at least thats what wed recommend you do. Same goes for both Huawei and HONOR smartphones, as in both cases Android 9 Pie is arriving, but the gradual rollout applies. Google is refocusing attention on the principles surrounding its AI-related efforts following recent closures of its controversial Projects Dragonfly and Maven. The search giant is centering that around two distinct categories including the raising of employee awareness and reviews of both products and deals to ensure they adhere to its AI standards. Central to both sides of that is ethics, beginning with new training programs based on a Santa Clara University Markkula Center for Applied Ethics project. The course is intended to ensure that both technical and non-technical Google employees are equipped to handle multifaceted ethical issues as they arise in day-to-day work. Thats supplemented by a more direct new primer on fairness in the companys free Machine Learning Crash Course, guiding workers developers across the board through inherent biases associated with AI and how to address that. An AI Ethics Speaker Series has been launched as well, featuring experts external to Google discussing the implications of AI and ethics in various cultures and professional disciplines. Rather than leaving employees to turn that knowledge into unbiased and ethically sound apps, the company has now established a formal review structure backing up the above-mentioned ethical training and built on its AI Principles. Each project will undergo the review process and there are no fewer than three core groups meant to help lower risks associated with those. At the top of that is a group of senior executives that will address cross-product or cross-technology projects as well as any that grow beyond the complexity of the remaining two groups. Just below that is a group of senior experts from various fields across the Alphabet ecosystem with the technological, functional, and application knowledge. At its base, thats held up by a designated innovation team comprised of researchers, social scientists, ethicists, human rights specialists, policy and privacy advisors, and legal experts that will be responsible for overseeing daily operations and performing initial assessments. Background: As alluded to above, Googles shift in ethical standards and the decision to bolster AI Principles seems to follow and is likely related to at least a couple of fairly significant controversies faced by the company over the year. The more recent of those was encompassed under the internal codename Project Dragonfly. That was an extremely secretive effort by the company that remained mostly obscure even for employees and would have resulted in the launch of Googles Search services in China for the first time in years. The ethical blowback caused by the project, resulting in a further backlash from employees chiefly stemmed from restrictions in the region pertaining to censorship of search terms and heavy government monitoring. However, employees were also kept out of the loop, including in privacy and other areas of policy. Google had consistently claimed the project was not anywhere near finished, more of a quandary being explored than a full-fledged new piece of software. The company never managed to convince its employees or the general public that was the case though, leading to a relatively firm string of questions from the US government. Advertisement Separate from Project Dragonfly but related to Googles recent history with ethical implications tied in with the program is Project Maven. That was reportedly shut down in June after internal leaks showed that new technologies were being generated solely for the use of the US government. Summarily, those were AI-based inventions that would have, according to officials, been used to root out extremist activities and human right abuses. Googlers called out the project and many resigned or threatened to because of Mavens close ties to the military and secrecy around the project. Concerns also surfaced relatively quickly that the results of the project would be linked to weapons technology, creating an ethical dilemma. It was around that same time that the companys initial ethical framework for AI Principles was introduced. The new standards are reported by Google to at least partially be behind a decision by the companys Cloud division not to sell general-purpose facial recognition solutions. The search giant recently revealed that it had concluded that it would be unethical to sell the technology without comprehensive consideration for how it might be used. More importantly, the company publicly recognized that abuses are likely to occur with any implementation of AI with regard to privacy and the tracking of users, regardless of the intentions behind the software. Google also took the opportunity presented by that announcement to reveal a grant to be paid out toward the creation of the Asia Pacific AI for Social Good Research Network, which seems inexorably linked to concerns about the Alphabet subsidiarys recent activities in the Asia region. Impact: The latest updates to Googles AI Principles have not been around for long enough to be far-reaching but the company is off to a good start nonetheless. The search giant says that as many as 100 Googlers have, for example, already gon through its Santa Clara University co-created Ethics In Technology Practice course. Moving forward that will be made accessible to every employee associated with the company. Its AI Ethics Speaker Series has already held a total of eight sessions featuring eleven different speakers covering AI in the criminal justice system and bias that can appear in natural language processing. The fairness module, meanwhile, has been used to train more than 21,000 Googlers and is currently available in just English but will be spreading to all eleven that the Machine Learning Crash Course is presented in soon. Although none of the new solutions is likely to address the entirety of the issues behind AI at Google, it does show some initiative following a substantial amount of broad-ranging pushback and should lead to positive changes. Lenovos CEO has just shared a rather interesting image on his Weibo (Chinese social network) account, an image that is showing the companys upcoming smartphone. Now, some of you will notice that this phone looks almost the same as the Lenovo Z5 Pro GT that launched yesterday, the design is the same, but the back cover is a bit different. Well, theres a good reason for that, this smartphone is actually expected to be a special edition variant of the Lenovo Z5 Pro GT, as it will ship with Ferrari branding on the back, which is clearly visible in the provided image. This phone will allegedly be called the Lenovo Z5 Pro GT Ferrari Edition, and considering that the companys CEO is already teasing it, it will probably become official in the near future. It Will Be Similar To The Lenovo Z5 Pro GT The Lenovo Z5 Pro GT, which became official yesterday, is pretty much a definition of an overkill smartphone. That device comes with 12GB of RAM on the inside, while it is fueled by Qualcomms latest and greatest SoC, the Snapdragon 855. Having that in mind, this Ferrari Edition smartphone will probably utilize that very same configuration, with 12GB of RAM and Snapdragon 855, while the company will either include 512GB or 1TB of storage on the inside. It is actually possible that this phone ends up being identical to the Lenovo Z5 Pro GT on the inside, and that Lenovo ends up changing up the back side of the phone only, simply to differentiate it. On top of that, you can expect to get a ton of Ferrari software content on the inside, ranging from wallpapers and live wallpapers to ringtones. Advertisement Design & Specs The Lenovo Z5 Pro GT will sport almost no bezel on the front, it will include a really thin chin below the display, while a display notch will not be there, nor will a display camera hole. The phone will ship with a sliding camera mechanism, though, and its two front-facing cameras will be hidden until you slide the phones display down. The device will include two cameras on the back, while its back side will be curved. A fingerprint scanner will be included in the package, but it will be included under the display, same as on the Lenovo Z5 Pro GT. Specs will probably remain unchanged compared to its sibling, which means well get a 6.39-inch fullHD+ Super AMOLED display, 12GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. 16 and 24-megapixel cameras will be included on the back of the phone, while you will be able to find 16 and 8-megapixel cameras on the front, the 8-megapixel camera will be used for facial scanning. A 3,350mAh battery will be a part of the package as well, while youll be able to find two SIM card slots inside of this phone. If youd like to know more about its specs, check out our Lenovo Z5 Pro GT announcement. Its Competition? Advertisement You have probably noticed that there are a couple of smartphones out there which are released as special edition phones with names of sports car manufacturers included in the mix. OnePlus had recently introduced its McLaren Edition OnePlus 6T smartphone, while Honor is planning to release the Honor V20 Maserati Edition soon, if rumors are accurate. Interestingly enough, those two phones are expected to be the Lenovo Z5 Pro GT Ferrari Editions competition, at least when it comes to sports car branding and high-end phones category. All of these smartphones will sport different price tags, though, so it remains to be seen how will they compare once everything is announced. Smartphone manufacturers are using sports car brand names mainly for marketing purposes, having such a special edition smartphone attracts people, even though those phones are usually considerably more expensive than their regular counterparts, and aside from a bit more RAM (in some cases), and a different paint job, they do not bring anything new to the table. Something similar will happen with the Lenovo Z5 Pro GT Ferrari Edition, quite probably, though chances are it will attract some Ferrari fans. Having said that, if youre not a Ferrari fan, getting the regular Lenovo Z5 Pro GT may be the best option, as youll save some money along the way. Well need to wait for Lenovo to actually announce this phone in order to be able to compare its price tag with the Lenovo Z5 Pro GT. HMD Global is in the process of acquiring Bluetooth certificates for what seems to be the upcoming Nokia 9 PureView Android flagship, as newly discovered documents reveal the existence of three variants of the device bearing the model numbers TA-1087, TA-1082, and TA-1094. The former two are new and havent hit the media radar before, but the TA-1094 is a model number that has been previously associated with the Nokia 9 PureView and was mentioned in databases of other regulatory agencies based in China earlier this year. Hardware details are missing from the newly emerged Bluetooth application but at least confirm the upcoming Android handset will offer Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity. Background: A Bluetooth certificate usually indicates that the product being certified is nearing its market release, but HMD Global hinted in a recent interview that the Nokia 9 PureView is not scheduled for an official unveiling this year. Instead, market watchers expect the flagship to be unveiled in January at CES in Las Vegas, or later near the end of February during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The OEM previously confirmed that it wishes to have a bigger focus on the flagship smartphone segment next year, and this should mean that the Nokia 9 PureView will not be the only Nokia-branded smartphone of its kind to hit the shelves in 2019. As yet, its not entirely clear whether all three model numbers refer to the same device range, i.e. the Nokia 9 PureView, but the TA-1094 should certainly denote one variant of the flagship. On the other hand, the TA-1087 and TA-1082 could be variants of the same device meant for other markets, or they could end up being different Nokia-branded smartphones altogether. Impact: Although not yet official, the Nokia 9 PureView is expected to sport the Snapdragon 845 chipset from Qualcomm and not the latest Snapdragon 855 solution. This means that HMD Globals upcoming flagship certainly wont be 5G-enabled, and this is further strengthened by the Bluetooth documents describing the tested devices as 4G smartphones with Bluetooth support. As the moniker implies, the Nokia 9 PureView is expected to deliver a powerful main camera setup featuring three sensors or more, so its possible that the flagship will focus on improving upon existing imaging features of the Finnish companys mobile portfolio rather than adopting brand-new technologies. The device has been seemingly code-named Olympic on account of sporting five rear-facing cameras which, in theory, should provide extremely versatile tools for post-processing and augmented reality, but time will tell if this will be the case. A previous leak also suggested that the device should be running Android 9 Pie out of the box. HMD Globals ongoing software strategy is not to fiddle with custom implementations of Googles operating system too much and simply focus on deploying timely firmware updates, so the Nokia 9 PureView should be shipped with Googles latest mobile OS version and be among the first in line for future OS upgrades throughout 2019 and beyond. Whether or not it will provide a feature-rich camera application worthy of the PureView moniker remains to be seen. A new alleged Nokia 9 PureView case has just surfaced online, and it basically reports the same thing other cases did. If you take a look at these two images, you will be able to see your regular, generic case, which has seven cutouts on the back, just like every other case for this phone that weve seen in the last couple of months. This is a see-through case, and aside from reaffirming that the Nokia 9 PureView will ship with seven rings on the back, it also reaffirms that the Type-C port, microphone, and a loudspeaker will be placed on the bottom of the device. Theres nothing really spectacular about this leak, or anything of the sort, but it does, once again, shares the same info that other leaks shared, which makes us believe that the real Nokia 9 PureView will sport seven rings on the back, five of which are reserved for its cameras. Seven Rings = Seven Cameras? You will notice that there are seven rings included on the back of this phone, but only five of those cutouts are reserved for the devices cameras. The sixth cutout is there for an LED flash, and the seventh for some sort of a dual-sensor, at least based on rumors. The Nokia 9 PureView, as its name says, will include PureView camera technology, which we havent seen in a long time at this point, since Nokias Lumia days. PureView technology was great at the time, as the Nokia 808 PureView, and its Lumia sibling, were basically the best camera smartphones around. That PureView sensor that Nokia utilized, however, was quite large back then, and it remains to be seen what has changed through the years. Nokia acquired rights to use PureView technology and branding from Microsoft, that actually happened earlier this year, so were in the dark as to what exactly is Nokia preparing. Advertisement Delays, Delays And Some More Delays The Nokia 9 PureView was actually expected to arrive back in September, and it was supposed to be called the Nokia 9, as a direct successor to the Nokia 8. The phones launch was postponed at the time, and if reports are to be believed, HMD Globals Chief Product Officer, was the main man behind the delay, as he didnt think that the phone is ready to be announced just yet. Several more delays followed after that, and HMD Global managed to get PureView rights from Microsoft in the meantime, and that played a part in those delays as well, quite probably, as HMD Global wants the phones cameras to be on point. The latest delay, which was reported quite recently, actually occurred because of the phones camera as well, as theyre still not where theyre supposed to be. The device is expected to arrive in early 2019, but it remains to be seen what will happen. Snapdragon 845 or 855? Advertisement The Nokia 9 PureView was supposed to launch with the Snapdragon 845, as it was supposed to arrive a couple of months back, but considering all of these delays, it would not be surprising if HMD Global actually opts for the Snapdragon 855, as the chip had been announced recently, and the very first smartphone with that chip on the inside has already been announced, the Lenovo Z5 Pro GT. So, considering that HMD Global wants to release the Nokia 9 PureView as its flagship, the smart thing to do would be to include the latest flagship chip, in this case the Snapdragon 855. Nokia actually made a mistake of releasing the Nokia 8 Sirocco with the Snapdragon 835 in February last year, when the Snapdragon 845 was already around, and not only that, but the company set a rather high price tag on the phone, which did not really result in good sales for the smartphone. The same may happen with the Nokia 9 if HMD Global is not careful, as releasing a flagship smartphone with last years chip may not be the best idea in the world. Design & Specs The Nokia 9 PureView will be made out of metal and glass, at least if rumors and leaks are to be believed, as the phones CAD-based renders did surface a while back. The Nokia 9 PureView will not sport a display notch, nor a display camera hole, instead, it will ship with bezels above and below the display, though those bezels will not be too thick. The phone will sport a rather large display, a display that will be at least 6 inches in diagonal, and were expecting to see HMD Global utilize an OLED panel in this case. The phone will pack in at least 6GB of RAM, though its possible that well see variants with more RAM as well. Android 9 Pie will come pre-installed on the phone, and the device will be a part of Googles Android One project. On top of all that, HMD Global is expected to include a rather large battery, a unit larger than 4,000mAh. Trump lashed out on Twitter (ironically) yesterday, to state that the three big tech companies of Silicon Valley Facebook, Google and Twitter have all been biased towards the Democrats, and helping the Democrats get their message out there. President Trump was claiming that Twitter was making it much harder for people to join him (he likely meant his follower count was too low, at 56 million followers). This comes after the CEOs of all three companies have testified on Capital Hill regarding this bias, with Googles CEO being the most recent one. This has been an ongoing thing for all three companies. Many believe that they are all biased towards Democrats, after all the executives at most tech companies in Silicon Valley have contributed to Democrats campaigns in the past, so that isnt a huge surprise. This all comes just days after a bombshell report that the Senate had commissioned, went public. Which found that the Russians used every single social media platform available, to help influence the 2016 Presidential Election, and help get Trump elected. Originally, the Russians were just looking to keep Hilary Clinton from getting elected, and by the end of the year, that meant getting Trump elected. In these reports, it was found that Russians used Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit and Pinterest to help influence the election in 2016, and that continued to the mid-terms this year. The main purpose behind this was to undermine citizens trust in the US government, and it did work to a degree. Twitter has responded to the Presidents allegations here, stating that it does not punish its users, due to them being conservative versus a liberal. It also mentioned that the reason why Trumps following count went down recently, was due to the purge of bots that it did over the summer. The President lost about 300,000 followers, and he was one of many who saw some pretty big drops in following counts over the summer. So this is not unique to the president. The reason for these purges were to keep follower numbers from being inflated but also get rid of accounts that arent being used anymore, or were used by robots and not real people. All told, Twitter actually purged around nine million accounts over the summer. And while your follower counts may be lower now, they are more likely to be engaging followers that are actually reading your stuff. Which is even more important, especially as social media becomes a part of everyday life. Advertisement Background: This is not the first time that Trump has called out Twitter for its bias and it likely wont be the last. Since Trump was elected and took office in January 2017, he has gone after several companies on Twitter. Not only Twitter, but also companies like Amazon, and even going after world leaders like the leaders of China and North Korea as well. Its a platform that the president uses prolifically, even though his aides urge him not too. However, his lashing out at Twitter, over different issues, have been debunked several times. As Twitter mentioned in its response, Trumps follower count dropped because the bots were removed from Twitter. There has also been research that shows the most popular news stories on sites like Twitter, come from conservative news outlets, like Fox News. But this hasnt stopped republicans from claiming that social media sites and search engines like Google, are censoring them. Impact: This was bound to happen. With all the algorithms that companies particularly Facebook, Google and Twitter use, it was bound to look like their content is being censored in some way or another, even if it isnt true. These algorithms are used to scale these services, seeing as Google could not go through all of the content published in a single day to figure out where it would rank best in search results for each query. Which is why algorithms are so important to these companies. But it does give the appearance that some content is being hidden or pushed down the news feed, when it actually isnt. Or if it is, its because you havent engaged with that content in the past, and thus likely wont want to see it. In the new year, bias for Facebook, Google and Twitter are likely going to be some pretty big topics. These are things that are not going to go away, and until the three can figure out a way to keep content from looking bias, it likely wont be going away anytime soon. Verizons multimedia and digital content subsidiary Oath will be rebranded as of January 8 under a new Verizon Media Group banner, the company has announced. The resulting conglomerate, including several revitalized Yahoo brands, HuffPost, Tumblr, AOL, Verizon Digital Media Services, TechCrunch, Oath Ad Platforms, and several other properties will form one pillar of the company. The rebranding is part of a larger move by the mobile carrier to better position itself to compete in upcoming technologies across a number of categories including AR, VR, AI, machine-learning, mobile-edge computing, and 5G. Those are also avenues Verizon Media Group will be pursuing for delivery of its content. Background: Oath has served as a subsidiary of Verizon since 2015, bringing together its various media offerings while retaining their brand recognition. Of the brands the carrier has been relaunching, Yahoo has largely been at the forefront of the charge. Over the past several months, the service provider has debuted Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Lifestyle, Yahoo News, and a dedicated Yahoo app. Each of those offers content thats well suited to their respective branding. For example, Yahoo Finance features live market coverage and other content related to finance. Starting on January 7 that will run bell-to-bell and the company has further plans to launch a Premium variety of the service offering exclusive transaction tools and data sets to investors. Yahoo Sports, Lifestyle, and News bring forward a similar relationship between content and category. The new Yahoo Mail, conversely, follows a similar route but with the added benefit of features that help users discover shopping deals and coupons. Finally, the Yahoo app brings together portions of those separate services to suit users preferences and lifestyle in a fashion not completely dissimilar to the Google app. Oath has meanwhile been rebranded as well as Oath Ad Platforms. The group will continue to push forward on the advertising and brand-building fronts, delving further into technologies such as VR and other 3D formats. The company began exploring its prospects back in June in partnership with the VR ad specialists at Admix and programmatic trading infrastructure BidSwitch. That was predominantly centered around exploring the uses of the technologies but also in expanding on the standards used for those from standard consumer services to theatrical experiences. Moving forward, the primary focus of those efforts will almost certainly center more directly on exploring and taking advantage of new advertising opportunities across the broad spectrum of services and platforms in use by other Verizon Media Group properties. Advertisement Impact: Verizons announcement isnt entirely unexpected with consideration for this years merger between AT&T and Time Warner or the proposed merger between T-Mobile and Sprint. Both cases represent a fundamental shift for mobile carriers. The latter is more straightforward and could result in serious competition in mobile provider services if successful. The merger between AT&T and Time Warner allows the mobile provider to offer over-the-top features and compete directly more completely in both digital content delivery and cell services. In order to maintain its position near the top in the US, Verizon is keeping its services well-defined with separate focuses but under a more unified branding scheme. Its also redirecting its focus outward to expand on its offerings. The announcement represents a small step in that direction Posted on: December 19, 2018 5:12 AM In the Third Chapter of Johns Gospel, Jesus says at one point, God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that all who believe in him should not perish but have everlasting life. For years, Ive often thought that that passage only referred to Jesus giving his life as a sacrifice on the cross. And to be sure, that is part of what it means. But some years ago I was reading a commentary by Raymond Brown, on the Gospel of John, and Professor Brown said that that passage not only speaks of Jesus willingly giving his life on the cross, but it actually speaks of Christmas, of God giving his very self, his very son to the world, not for anything God could get out of it, but for the good and the welfare and the well-being of the world. Of us. Someone once said, in a Christmas poem, Love came down at Christmas. Thats what love is. To give, and not to count the cost. To give, not for what one can get, but for what the other can receive. Thats what love is. God so loved the world, that he gave. I realised recently how powerful that passage really is, when I saw an old poster from 1938. A poster produced by the Episcopal Church at that time, to encourage Episcopalians and other Christians, and other people of faith and good will, to do whatever they could to help Jewish refugees fleeing tyranny in Europe. To help people from all over Europe seeking refuge in America, this land of freedom. The poster depicts Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus. Theyre fleeing persecution in Palestine, as Matthews Gospel says. And the poster depicting Mary, Joseph, and Jesus says in the tag line, In the name of these refugees, help all refugees. God so loved the world, that he gave, even to the point of risking his own son. And in the name of those refugees, in the name of that Jesus, help all refugees, all people who suffer, anyone whos alone, everyone who is in need. Thats what love does. Love came down at Christmas, because God so loved the world, that he gave. In those days, a decree went out from the Emperor Augustus, that all the world should be registered. Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem because he was a descendent from the House of David. He went to be registered with Mary, to whom he was engaged, and who was expecting a child. While they were there, she gave birth to her first-born son, and wrapped him in bands of cloth and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn. Meanwhile, in that region, there were shepherds, living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. Then the angel of the Lord stood above them. And the glory of the Lord shone round about them, and they were terrified. The angel said unto them, Do not be afraid, for behold, I am bringing you good news of great joy for all people. To you is born this day, in the City of David a Saviour, who is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign. You will find the child wrapped in bands of cloth, lying in a manger. And suddenly, there was with the angels a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and peace to all people on earth. Have a blessed Christmas. Have a merry Christmas. Have a joyful Christmas. God love you, God bless you, and may God hold us all in those almighty hands of love. The Most Revd Michael B Curry Presiding Bishop and Primate The Episcopal Church Posted on: December 19, 2018 6:19 PM [Episcopal News Service, by David Paulsen] A delegation from the US-based Episcopal Church who represented Presiding Bishop Michael Curry at this months United Nations climate conference in Poland is heralding the conference members agreement on next steps toward reining in global warming and the successful resolution of a key impasse over word choice. The Episcopal delegation bore witness to significant developments in international climate change policy, the delegations leader, California Bishop Marc Andrus, said this week in a written statement about the conclusion of COP24, known officially as the 24th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Nearly 200 countries met from 2 to 14 December in Katowice, Poland, with the goal of developing a framework for implementing the 2015 Paris Agreement, which seeks to keep global warming under the threshold of 2 degrees Celsius that scientists predict is necessary to prevent a spiralling catastrophe of melting glaciers, rising sea levels and related weather extremes. In 2016, the Episcopal Church was granted UN observer status, which allows members of the delegation to brief UN representatives on the Episcopal Churchs General Convention climate resolutions and to attend related meetings. At COP24, the delegation promoted a more ambitious goal of keeping global temperature rise within 1.5 degrees Celsius. Andrus said most member nations acknowledged the need to ramp up ambitions for reducing carbon emissions, while also attending to a just transition for the most heavily impacted countries who are also the most under-resourced for adaption. The US State Department Tuesday called on the armed men that occupied Libyas Sharara oil field in the desert, south of the country, to hand over the oil facility to the National Oil Corporation (NOC), which has declared force majeure. The United States continues to monitor the situation at the Sharara oil field and echoes the UN Support Mission for Libyas call for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of armed elements in the area, which is crucial to allow oil production for the benefit of all Libyans to resume, said the state departments deputy spokesperson Robert Palladino, in a press release. We call on all parties to resolve issues through constructive dialogue and peaceful means in the spirit of compromise, rather than through threats of violence, Robert Palladino said. The oil field, which produces 315,000 barrels per day, has been taken over on Dec.8 by armed protestors, under the Fezzan Anger Movements banner. The protestors were joined by tribesmen and state guards demanding salary payments and development funds. The protestors called on the UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA) to provide better living conditions in the impoverished southern region. The closure of Sharara will be maintained until the GNA meets the demands of the inhabitants of the marginalized south of Libya, which is severely deprived of services, said Mohamad Emeguel, spokesman of the protestors. We call on the GNA to guarantee the supply of fuel (to petrol stations) and cash to banks, to pay more attention to the dilapidated medical sector, to reopen airports and to help disaster-stricken cities in the south, he told AFP by telephone. NOC has declared force majeure at El Sharara oil field, a week after announcing a contractual waiver on exports from the field following its seizure by protesters. Pumping will restart only after alternative security arrangements are put in place, NOC said in a statement late on Monday. The State Department Deputy Spokesman underscored in his release that Libyan oil facilities, production, and revenues belong to the Libyan people. The National Oil Corporation and all sovereign state institutions must be allowed to work on behalf of all Libyans, free of threat and intimidation. Libyas oil resources must remain under the exclusive control of the legitimate National Oil Corporation and the sole oversight of the Government of National Accord. The United States stands in solidarity with Libyan leaders and urges their continued effort to improve fiscal transparency, strengthen economic institutions, enhance security, and ensure just distribution of the countrys resources, within the framework of the Libyan Political Agreement and the Plan of Action formulated by UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General Ghassan Salame, he added. The MoU promises to increase the cooperation between the two companies, directly benefitting the Abu Dhabi and UAE trade and supporting the Abu Dhabi Leadership vision 2030. The signing of MoU came in conjunction with the official inauguration of CSP Terminal Abu Dhabi. The two parties, ADT & CSP Abu Dhabi, will facilitate a significant increase in the contribution to the non-oil GDP growth for the Emirate of Abu Dhabi. The agreement further seeks to ensure that customers can continue to enjoy the world class customer experience of Khalifa Port. Khalifa Ports growing importance in local, regional and global trade is further cemented by its inclusion as the main regional hub of the Chinese Belt and Road initiative which is expected to be a substantial contributor to the overall growth of Abu Dhabi and the UAE economies as a whole. The MoU was signed by Abdullah Al Hameli, Acting CEO of ADT and Capt. JU Weiping, director and general manager of CSP-Abudhabi and was witnessed by Captain Mohamed Juma Al Shamisi, Chairman of ADT and CEO of Abu Dhabi Ports and Captain Xu Lirong, Chairman of China Cosco Shipping Corporation. Abdullah Al Hameli, acting CEO of ADT said: the signing of this MoU with CSP-Abudhabi is of key importance, not only to our two companies, but to the future success of Khalifa Port and our customers, the Abu Dhabi and UAE trade. Through close collaboration, we aim to significantly support the increase in contribution to the GDP growth of Abu Dhabi. This will be done in full support of the Abu Dhabi leadership vision and we expect that this agreement will serve as a spring board for jointly achieving new levels of excellence. I have no doubt that our work together will deliver admirable results well into the future. On 14 December 2018, Lithuanian Army General Romualdas Giedraitis presided the reception ceremony of the first two PzH2000 (Panzerhaubitze 2000) self-propelled howitzers acquired from the German army. Upgraded PanzerHaubitz PzH 2000 originating from the German army, delivered to the Lituanian army (Picture source: V. Zalatoriute) "In a modern military conflict, as we can see from the military actions in Ukraine and other hot spots, effective artillery is one of the most important defense means and, at the same time, pillars of deterrence. These fully upgraded armored heavy SPHs will undoubtedly strengthen the defense capabilities of the Lithuanian Armed Forces as they are today setting the highest possible standard in the field of indirect artillery, "said Gediminas Jeglinskas, the Deputy Minister of National Defense. The PzH2000 transferred to the Lithuanian Artillery Battalion were acquired from the German Army under a treaty signed in September 2015. A total of 18 modernized SPHs will be assigned to combat missions. "This is the best Christmas gift for the Artillery Battalion. These gifts will further motivate the soldiers of the Battalion to seek the status of the highest firepower battalion in the Lithuanian Armed Forces. The soldiers must achieve their goals, show the best results, but also take care of thei new weapons, "Lieutenant Colonel Marijus Jonelis, commander of R. Giedraitis Artillery Battalion. Lithuanian troops will begin military training with these SPHs soon, and the first shootings are scheduled to take place in the spring of 2019 during exercises Ugninis griausmas. To this day, the battalion's most powerful gun was 105 mm. The PzH2000 can destroy targets distant of around 11 kilometers. With self-propelled shells, the range can be increased to 40 kilometers. German representatives have already trained Lithuanian soldiers who will carry out the maintenance and servicing of this equipment, as well as the troops using it, as well as operation officers. Lithuanian soldiers participated in various courses and meetings with German specialists who presented their experience both in Lithuania and at the German Artillery School. It is planned that all modernized SPHs will be transferred to the Lithuanian Armed Forces by the end of 2019. Google Arts & Culture has just opened a virtual recreation of the pre-fire museum, which was completely destroyed in a fire in September. In addition, the Smithsonian has launched a program that will let 14 displaced researchers continue their work with residencies at the National Museum of Natural History and the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. The Art Newspaper The half-goat-half-devil has been St. Nicholass sidekick and enforcer for hundreds of years, warning little Austrian children that theyd better not be naughty. Traditionally hed only appear once a year and his mask and costume would be more-or-less homemade, but todays masks have things like glowing LED eyes, and there are Krampus shows with heavy-metal accompaniment that feels like a rock concert mixed with a rodeo. Public Radio International This week the construction of Cloud Arch, a Junya Ishigami-designed steel archway planned for George Street, was deferred until after the tramline is finished. Originally dubbed the most significant artwork built in Australia in decades by Sydneys lord mayor, Clover Moore, the council blamed cost blowouts and obstruction by the light rail contractor Acciona. The Guardian 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. Only three months after the launch of the AfricaEurope Alliance, the European Commission presented the first progress made in boosting investment and creating jobs in Africa at the High-Level Forum Africa-Europe held in Vienna, Tuesday. The Forum was hosted jointly by Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, as EU President, and Paul Kagame, President of Rwanda and Chairman of the African Union for 2018. President of the Commission Jean-Claude Juncker reiterated Europes ambition for a true and fair partnership among equals between Africa and Europe, when presenting the first results of the AfricaEurope Alliance for Sustainable Investment and Jobs, launched three months ago in a bid to deepen economic and trade relations between the two continents. According to a press release by the European Commission, the EU External Investment Plan aims to raise significant sustainable investments in Africa and European neighborhood countries by 2020. From the 44 billion announced, programs already in the pipeline will mobilize 37.1 billion of investments. The new projects announced at the Forum Tuesday include an EU guarantee (NASIRA Risk-Sharing Facility), the first of its kind under the EU External Investment Plan. It will use EU funds worth 75 million to leverage up to 750 million of investments for entrepreneurs in Sub-Saharan Africa and the EUs southern neighborhood. Alone this is expected to create 800,000 jobs and benefit those who usually struggle to access affordable loans, such as small and medium sized enterprises, internally displaced people, refugees, returnees, women and young people. A new Agri-Business Capital fund worth 45 million will support smallholder farmers by increasing their access to finance. The plan is expected to attract more than 200 million in investments and benefit as many as 700,000 households in rural areas. Another program worth 61.1 million will support solar power plants in Morocco and 46.8 million will be invested in depolluting the Kitchener Drain in the Nile Delta region in Egypt. The EU, which is also committed to support business and investment climate reforms in Africa, has pledged over 540 million for that purpose in 2018 alone, exceeding the Africa-Europe Alliances commitment to increase EU support to 300-350 million per year for 2018-2020, the Commission explained in its press release. Besides, it added, Public-private dialogues to promote Sustainable Business for Africa (SB4A) have been established in Cote dIvoire, Ethiopia, Morocco, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, Tunisia and Uganda. Similar dialogues in 25 additional African countries are currently being prepared. This will help to boost decent job creation, in particular for young people and women. The dialogues were launched in Abidjan during the EU-Africa business forum in November 2017. LCM has experienced significant growth in recent years, generating a cumulative return on invested capital of 138% over the last seven years to 30 June 2018, with approximately 95% of litigation projects achieving settlement with 88% of those being profitable and an average time to complete of 27 months. This year, it launched its EMEA operations by opening an office in London, and opened an office in Singapore in November 2018, which will cover the Singapore and Hong Kong markets. For the UK and Asian expansion, all risk management for the portfolio and treasury functions for LCM will remain with Head office in Australia. Most legal departments not digital-ready As the corporate world becomes increasingly digitised it seems that legal departments are lagging. Eight in ten in-house teams are unprepared to support the digital initiatives of their firms according to a report from consultancy firm Gartner. Among the eight new partners of US-headquartered international firm Vinson & Elkins (V&E) is a London-based lawyer whos dual-qualified in Australia and England and Wales. Scott Stiegler will become a partner of the firm on 1 January, rising from senior associate. He has been promoted along with Mike Bielby, Prentiss Cutshaw, and Jaren Taylor in Dallas; Danielle Patterson, Scott Rubinsky, and Brittany Sakowitz in Houston; and Jamie Tabb in Washington DC. These lawyers have each demonstrated a strong commitment to V&E and our clients, and we are excited to welcome them to the partnership, V&E chairman Mark Kelly said. We are confident they will continue to make significant contributions not only to their individual practice groups, but to the overall strategic objectives of the firm. Photo: Turkish Armed Forces/Handout/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images When the Pentagon announced on Wednesday that it planned to remove its remaining 2,000 troops from the Syria, it wasnt clear, exactly, when it intended to do so. As the Washington Posts Alex Horton pointed out on Twitter, different news outlets initially reported different versions of the story: What's happening with Syria, and how firm is it? Depends on your source: WSJ: the U.S. military is preparing to withdraw its forces from NE Syria CNN: planning underway for full and rapid withdrawal of US troops Reuters: Trump considering withdrawing U.S. troops Alex Horton (@AlexHortonTX) December 19, 2018 President Trump, meanwhile, declared mission accomplished on his Twitter account: We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency. Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 19, 2018 Reuters subsequently reported that, along with the troops, U.S. State Department personnel are also being evacuated from the country within 24 hours. The Pentagon eventually offered a half-explanation for the decision. The Coalition has liberated the ISIS-held territory, but the campaign against ISIS is not over. We have started the process of returning U.S. troops home from Syria as we transition to the next phase of the campaign, Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White told the Daily Beasts Spencer Ackerman. Its not clear, though, what that next phase will look like, or even if the Pentagon will still remove all American troops from the country. This is a mess, but it does look like the Trump administration has begun to pivot away from its earlier strategy. Officials had repeatedly expressed a commitment to remain in Syria. The new policy is were no longer pulling out by the end of the year, James Jeffrey, secretary of State Mike Pompeos representative for Syria engagement, told the Post on September 6. Later the same month, John Bolton said that the U.S. planned to stay in Syria as long as Iran remained present there. Were not going to leave as long as Iranian troops are outside Iranian borders, and that includes Iranian proxies and militias, Bolton told the U.N. General Assembly. Bolton, of course, is fond of saber-rattling at Iran, which makes this pivot strange. While Trump has offered the rationale that ISIS has been defeated in Syria, Iran is still present there and ISIS is still active, albeit with less territory than it once held; meanwhile, the U.S. government itself concedes that at least 104 civilians are dead as a result of the four-year-long air-strike campaign against the terror group. (Human-rights workers told NPR in November that the real death toll is likely much higher.) Trumps announcement is also interestingly timed. At Foreign Policy, Lara Seligman reported Wednesday that on Tuesday, less than 24 hours before Trump declared mission accomplished in Syria, the U.S. State Department approved a tentative $3.5 billion sale to Turkey of Raytheons Patriot surface-to-air missile system, in a potential breakthrough that could pave the way for smoother Turkey-NATO relations after a tumultuous few years. The Raytheon sale doesnt necessarily have anything to do with Trumps announcement, and as Seligman notes, Turkey hasnt explicitly accepted the deal. But Turkey had previously threatened to attack U.S.-backed Kurdish militants in north Syria, and the total departure of U.S. troops leaves the Kurds vulnerable to a Turkish assault. This wouldnt even be the first time wed made allies of the Kurds only to abandon them later. The administrations decision, and Trumps tweet in particular, invokes an old spectacle George W. Bush standing proudly on the deck of an aircraft carrier in 2003, a Mission Accomplished banner displayed behind him. At the time, the U.S. had not accomplished anything in Iraq except destabilization, a trend it failed to reverse in later years. The U.S. has put itself into a similar bind now. Though Trump didnt make the initial decision to put boots on the ground in Syria, he continued that intervention and devised his own political justifications for it. Arguments against U.S. intervention in Syria appear ever wiser in hindsight; we appear to have learned nothing from our older, bloody mistakes in Iraq, least of all our own complicity in creating the enemy our troops in Syria have been deployed to fight. We are again in a place we shouldnt be, and there are no good options left not for the Kurds, and not for Syria. Defensible Data Disposition Most organisations are drowning in the large volume of data they create. With data growth at an all-time high, and no signs of it slowing down, the ability to deal with massive amounts of data inside your organisation can be overwhelming. Not only does this generate higher storage costs, but keeping unnecessary data can have other severe consequences. For example, you may have been able to defensibly delete data that later turns into a smoking gun against you in a case. Another risk is that if your organisation is ever the victim of a breach, more data than necessary will be exposed, which could lead to potential fines and reputational harm. Keeping unnecessary data is both risky and expensive. Deleting data, in accordance with a reasonable and enforced retention policy and schedule, and in accordance with any duties to preserve documents, that has no regulatory, business, or legal purpose has a number of benefits. Confidentiality: Deleting data helps maintain and protect proprietary information and trade secrets; and protects against data breaches and identity theft. Accessibility: An organisation can improve its ability to access preserved records more efficiently and effectively, thus making retained records more usable and valuable over time. Cost Savings: Regular disposal of unnecessary records and unstructured data, in accordance with a reasonable and enforced retention policy and schedule, and in accordance with any extant litigation holds, will substantially reduce the storage and related costs that result from unnecessary records and data retention. In addition, data reduction leads to more efficient systemic operations by permitting systems and backups to run faster, and also reduces the amount of time and cost required to search for and review records and data, e.g. in response to litigation and investigatory requirements. Email, shared drives, and user shares get clogged with redundant content, personal multimedia files and aged data. Determining what information has ongoing business value and what can be deleted is a complex process. The challenge to remove data without value means most organisations end up hoarding and stockpiling this content and expanding their storage capacity year after year - eating away at restricted IT budgets. Organisations can often recoup significant storage capacity by following a few simple policies. These suggestions may easily uncover tons of unnecessary data: The champ was back in court in Dublin, Ireland, looking like a superstar. He was driven there in a blacked-out BMW and made the short walk to the courthouse flanked by bodyguards. RT says he did not address the bench during the procedures, except to say thank you when the judge informed him that he was good to go.Its unknown why he was pulled over last summer in the first place, but he ended up being charged of driving without a license and driving without insurance. According to the same media outlet, McGregors team managed to convince the court that he had just forgotten the proper documentation elsewhere not that he didnt have it at all.All documents were forwarded to the judge before the hearing, so McGregors appearance was a mere formality, to hear the judge telling him he was cleared of charges. He had good reason to smile for photos and wave to the fans when he came back out, but he didnt stop to chat.This was McGregors second driving related mishap in Ireland. In 2017, he was stopped for and eventually charged with speeding: he was doing 96 mph in a 62 mph zone in his Range Rover. That time, there was nothing his attorneys could do to help him out, so he was fined 1,000 and received a 6-month driving ban.In July this year, McGregor was in court in Brooklyn , New York, for charges related to an April incident, in which he and his posse attacked a bus full of UFC fighters. McGregor initiated the attack by throwing a dolly towards the bus, smashing a window, but he only got a slap on the wrist after agreeing to apologize. The incident actually occurred last December, but Kent Police has just now released the CCTV footage that helped convict the two, Warren Hearne, 36, and Danny Frost, 27. You can also find it at the bottom of the page: its of the you have to see it to believe it kind.According to prosecutors, the taxi was driven by Abdulawar Malikzadev, who happened to be inside when the car was engulfed by flames Metro reports. Malikzadev had picked Hearne and Frost from a local pub, after they were thrown out.They told him they wanted to stop at a gas station to buy beer, but they also threatened him with an iron bar and tried to open the doors while the car was moving. Eventually, Malikzadev pulled in at the GB station, and Hearne got out. He never went inside to buy beer, though.As the footage shows, he lingered outside the car and eventually went to the gas pump. He returned and started dousing the back seat in gas. The driver came out to confront him and, to his luck, walked away from the entire scene moments before Hearne threw a lighter inside.Clearly, the attack hadnt been planned, because Frost was still inside the car when the fire broke. In fact, he barely made it out unharmed but still ran after his mate.Hearne was sentenced to 6 years and 4 months, while Frost to 5 years and 7 months behind bars. Malikzadev wasnt hurt, but his car was destroyed: it burned for 10 full minutes before firefighters came and then for another 3 minutes until they were able to put out the blaze.This was an extremely dangerous thing to do, which could have caused significant harm to anyone nearby at the time, investigating officer Detective Constable Kay Brown told the court, as per the same publication. Luckily the driver escaped the incident without injury but his vehicle, which is his livelihood, was destroyed in the fire. I hope this sentence will give them time to consider the consequences of their actions and make better choices in the future. Autoblog flew to Australia to take a spin in the Ranger Raptor, concluding that its disappointing the U.S. wont get it because its totally f***ing awesome. Regarding the EcoBlue under the hood, senior producer Christopher McGraw underlines that the throttle has to be mashed to the floor if you want to overtake at highway speeds.Even though theres little between this engine and the EcoBoost in terms of torque (369 pound-feet for the bi-turbo diesel plus 210 horsepower), were guessing the large diameter of the wheels and off-road gearing arent helping either. On the other hand, the Ranger Raptor is brilliant in regular driving conditions and off the beaten track.Off-road improvements include an impressive ground clearance and redesigned bumpers for 32.5-degree approach and 24-degree ramp-over and departure angles. The first-ever Ranger to get the Raptor treatment also features rear coil-over suspension with Watts linkage, Fox Racing shock absorbers, and the all-important Management System.Over in the Land Down Under, pricing for the Ranger Raptor kicks off at 74,990 dollars. Its the most expensive pickup in the mid-size segment in Australia, translating to $53,950 at the current exchange rate. For reference, the AEV-upgraded Chevrolet Colorado ZR2 Bison starts at $48,045 and the Jeep Gladiator in Rubicon flavor will be priced in the ballpark of $50,000.Ford of Europe made a case for this truck in the Old Continent, where it will arrive by mid-2019 to lead the Rangers lineup. The Raptor will slot above the Wildtrak and Wildtrak X with the 3.2-liter turbo diesel five-cylinder engine. As for towing capacity and payload, make that 2,500 and 758 kilograms (5,512 and 1,671 pounds). Afaq Iftikhar is originally from Pakistan and doesnt have a British citizenship. Hes not insured and he has a family with 3 kids that he has to provide for. Right now, doctors have told him that they havent been able to save his eye, despite the 4-hour surgery he underwent.Over the weekend, Iftikhar picked up 2 women and 1 man from outside a local pub. He drove them for a while and then, one of the women got sick and started vomiting in the car. Thats when he pulled over and informed them that they would have to get out. Meanwhile, the other woman was stealing money from inside the car, the Mirror reports.Iftikhar told them he would be calling the police, so they attacked him. The woman who had vomited took out her shoe and stabbed him in the eye with the heel, rupturing it beyond repair, it would seem. The other two punched and kicked him, and also took all the money they could get their hands on.I got out to ask the girl vomiting to come out, and found one girl stealing money from the front of the cab. I told them I would call the police, and then the guy and girls threatened me. They were saying what're you gonna do?, the driver recalls. I told them to go and not pay but they attacked me. I told them to take what they wanted and leave me alone, one of them took my car keys.Iftikhar is now fearing the prospect of being declared legally blind, because that would mean he wont be able to drive a taxi anymore.I'm scared that I could lose my job because of this. Because I am a private hire taxi driver I do not get the same protections as black cabs, he says. If I had had a security panel between the driving seat and the passengers it would have been a different story.Police are investigating the attack but, as of now, have no suspects in custody. The Chambers County Sheriffs Office has released footage from the scene of a rollover crash that occurred last week. Its edited to include footage from the dashcam in the police cruiser and from the bodycams on the 2 officers, and it shows their heroic deed and the danger they faced.The officers have been identified as Braedon Boznango and Carlton Carrington, but the victims identity hasnt been disclosed. He remains at a hospital in Houston, in critical condition.[Deputies] found a vehicle fully engulfed in flames from the rollover crash. There was an unconscious male lying in the front seat with his abdomen and legs on fire. The two deputies approached the vehicle without regard for their own safety and began reaching inside the vehicle to rescue the sole occupant, the statement from the department reads, as posted on Facebook Upon arrival on the scene, the officers were alerted of the presence of an unconscious man in the car by a woman. She didnt help them in getting the man out.Once they managed to pull the man out of the burning vehicle , the deputies tossed him in a nearby puddle, thus effectively putting out the fire that was still burning on him.Both deputies were uninjured during their rescue of this man, however, the intensity of this fire melted parts of their equipment while on their uniforms, the statement adds.Reactions to the post, which has attained near-viral status, include heartfelt praise for the 2 officers, who rushed to aid the driver and did their best to take him to safety. And now, that concept of giving back is expanding, as Porsche AG is establishing similar training centers in other countries under the Porsche Aftersales Vocational Education (PAVE) program, following the model that was first established in Manila by Porsche Philippines. It's called the Porsche Recruitment and Training Centre Asia (PTRCA), a scholarship-based technical school established by Porsche Philippines under PGA Cars with the aid of the Don Bosco Technical Institute. The center teaches deserving young candidates from underprivileged communities the skills necessary to build their careers with Porsche centers not just locally, but around the world. Some may see Porsches as mere toys for the wealthy and famous, but in the Philippines, Porsche is setting an example of giving back to the underprivileged since 2008. Porsche has established centers similar to PTRCA in Cape Town, South Africa and more recently one in Puebla, Mexico. A future site for another similar facility will be in Tokyo. Porsche says these facilities have scholarships aimed at giving access to candidates from socially disadvantaged backgrounds. Porsche has also extended cooperation contracts with 10 educational institutions along with the continuation of the Porsche Elite Apprentice Program (PEAP). The opening of these new centers is in line with the transformation of the auto industry particularly with the need to have a workforce well versed to meet the changes. According to Porsche's Vice President for Aftersales, it is important to educate our future qualified technicians today through our unique vocational education programs. The automotive industry is undergoing a fundamental transformation: New technologies are emerging in ever-shorter cycles, and job profiles are changing not least because advancing digitalisation is increasingly transforming the car into a rolling smartphone. Even with an icon such as the 911; in its latest version it shows the direction things are headed in, continued Shukraft. The results of the example set by the Philippine-based PTRCA, incidentally the first Porsche technical school outside of Germany, are undeniable. Many Filipino PTRCA graduates are employed globally at different Porsche Centers in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. 1 big thing: Oil crashes through the floor The commentary atop the IEA's monthly oil market report a week ago was headlined "A floor under prices?" and said Brent crude "seems to" have found one around $60-per-barrel. That question mark, in retrospect, is doing lots of work. Where it stands: Prices plummeted by several dollars per barrel in trading Tuesday, the latest sign of volatility that's carrying the day despite the OPEC+ efforts to stabilize the market. Brent crude fell to roughly $56-per-barrel, while WTI, the U.S. benchmark, dropped sharply into the $46-per-barrel range. But they're more or less holding steady on Wednesday morning, trading around $56.58 for Brent and $46.85 for WTI. Why it matters: The falling prices create challenges for petro-states and could hinder the U.S. shale patch if the doldrums remain. Here's Bloomberg: "The plunge in U.S. oil prices has wells in some parts of the Permian Basin below break-even levels, threatening to put the brakes on the record flow from the prolific field." The big picture: Concerns about a slowdown in economic growth and trade battles eating into demand, the robust amount of crude sloshing around, and broader market woes are all creating downward pressure on prices. Brent has come down from $86 in early October, its highest level in 4 years, while WTI has come down by around $29 since then. What they're saying: The market is experiencing price carnage, maximum pain and considerable downside pressure, Robin Bieber of the brokerage PVM oil tells Reuters. "Enveloping supply concerns is the increasing likelihood of a protracted economic downturn in China that continues to stoke fears of demand slowdown," Stephen Innes of the trading platform Oanda said in a note quoted by MarketWatch. What's next: Late this morning the Energy Information Administration will release its closely watched weekly data on U.S. oil storage levels. Venture Capital Deals BYJUS, an India-based K-12 learning app developer, has raised $540 million in new funding led by Naspers Ventures, with the Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) also participating. www.byjus.com SpaceX, Elon Musk's Hawthorne, California-based private space exploration company, is raising $500 million in new funding from Baillie Gifford and existing investors at a $30.5 billion valuation, according to the Wall Street Journal. http://axios.link/12K7 Cambridge Mobile Telematics, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based mobile telematics and analytics provider, has raised $500 million in new funding from SoftBank Vision Fund. www.cmtelematics.com Zwift, a Long Beach, California-based multiplayer online training and racing platform for cyclists and runners, has raised $120 million in funding led by Highland Europe. http://axios.link/xREo The Wing, a New York-based network of co-working offices for women, has raised $75 million in Series C funding led by Sequoia Capital, with Upfront Ventures, Airbnb, NEA, WeWork and individuals also participating. http://axios.link/nGhx Entrada Therapeutics, a Boston-based biotechnology company, has raised $59 million in Series A financing led by 5AM Ventures and MPM Capital, with Roche Venture Fund, MRL Ventures Fund and Agent Capital also participating. http://axios.link/KH8X Erasca, a San Diego-based creator of oncology drugs, has raised $42 million in Series A financing led by City Hill Ventures and Cormorant Asset Management. http://axios.link/oGII Rothy's, a San Francisco-based maker of women's shoes, has raised $35 million from Goldman Sachs. http://axios.link/8GiM Bellhops, a Chattanooga, Tennessee-based moving service, has raised $31.4 million in Series C funding led by Advance Venture Partners led the round, with Canaan, Initialized Capital, Lerer Hippeau Ventures and Nashville Capital Network also participating. http://axios.link/aVc6 Price f(x), a Munich-based startup that offers cloud-based pricing software, has raised 25 million ($28.5 million) in Series B funding led by Digital + Partners and Bain & Company, with Credo Ventures and Talis Capital also participating. http://axios.link/cTGN Temi, a New York-based maker of a personal robot, has raised $21 million in new funding led by ex-Alibaba CTO John Wu, with Generali Investments S.p.A and Ogawa also participating. www.robotemi.com Securly, a San Jose, California-based maker of software for kids online safety, has raised $16 million of Series B funding led by Defy Partners, with participation from Owl Ventures. http://axios.link/HAML Aristea Therapeutics, a San Diego-based drug developer, has secured $15 million in Series A funding from Novo Holdings A/S. http://axios.link/R5BO Import.io, a Los Gatos, California-based provider of web data integration tools, has raised $15.5 million in Series B funding led by Talis Capital, with IP Group, OpenOcean, Oxford Capital and Wellington Partners also participating. www.import.io Tridiuum, a Philadelphia-based digital health company, has raised $9.5 million in Series B funding led by Sopris Capital, with Fresenius Medical Care Ventures, Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Southeastern Pennsylvania and Martinson Ventures also participating. http://axios.link/J2WH Formant, a San Francisco-based maker of robot data management software, has raised $6 million in seed funding from SignalFire. http://axios.link/Vmz1 ExecVision, an Arlington, Virginia-based maker of customer conversation management software, has raised $5.4 million in funding led by Edison Partners, with existing investors also participating. www.execvision.io AvantStay, a Los Angeles-based service for booking group travel, has raised $5 million in new funding led by Bullpen Capital, with F-Prime Capital, Zeno Ventures, and Convivialite Ventures, Abstract Ventures and Presidio Bay Ventures also participating. avantstay.com Morressier, a Berlin-based research discovery platform, has raised $4.5 million in funding led by Cherry Ventures. http://axios.link/XJ2q Elementary Robotics, a Pasadena, California-based robotics company, has raised $3.6 million in new funding led by Fika Ventures and Fathom Capital, with Toyota AI Ventures, Ubiquity Ventures, Riot.vc, Osage University Partners, and Stage Venture Partners also participating. http://axios.link/dDMd Nomics, a Boston- and Minneapolis-based cryptocurrency data company, has raised $3 million in Series A funding led by Arthur Ventures. http://axios.link/sXkf Cybeats, a Toronto-based cybersecurity company, has raised $3 million in funding led by Ripple Ventures, with GreenSoil Building Innovation Fund, MaRS IAF, MLA48, ScaleX and Inovia Capital also participating. www.cybeats.com Blade, a Mountain View, California-based cloud-based gaming company, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Charter Communications. http://axios.link/ZsdH A Trump-backed bipartisan criminal justice bill passed the Senate Tuesday night by a margin of 87-12, despite ongoing efforts by Sen. Tom Cotton and other hardline conservatives to sink it. Why it matters: For years, advocates and lawmakers have worked to reform the federal prison system only to have their efforts fall apart at the last minute. But with the help of Jared Kushner in the White House and a bipartisan Senate coalition, the First Step Act has made it past the Senate and will now likely become law impacting thousands of current federal inmates. What's next: The bill is going back to the House, where it is also expected to pass. The House passed a less expansive version of the bill earlier this year. After that it'll head to the president's desk for signature. Details: The bill would... Send up to 4,000 prisoners home by increasing the amount of time inmates can cut off of their sentences due to good behavior. Allow more male and female inmates to serve time in house arrest or halfway homes instead of prison cells, with exceptions for high-risk inmates. Require that prisoners be placed within 500 miles of family. Outlaw shackling during child birth. Mandate the provision of sanitary napkins and tampons to female inmates. Reduce the mandatory penalty from life to 25 years for a third conviction of certain drug offenses, and from 25 to 15 years for a second conviction. Prohibit the doubling up, or "stacking," of mandatory sentences for certain gun and drug offenses. Give judges more discretion in giving less than the mandatory minimum for certain low-level crimes. Make the 2010 Fair Sentencing Act retroactive, which changed sentencing guidelines to treat offenses involving crack and powder cocaine equally. This could impact nearly 2,600 federal inmates, according to the Marshall Project. The big picture: This bill would only impact the 180,789 people incarcerated in federal prisons, but many of the changes reflect reforms already implemented in many states. This does not bode well for Trumps move toward privatization. Photo: MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images On paper, the Veterans Choice Program sounded like a great idea. Pragmatic, even. When it launched in 2014, under the Obama administration, both parties appeared united on its merits; defenders said it would give veterans a way to bypass real problems at the Department of Veterans Affairs by allowing them to seek subsidized, private care in their own communities. In June, legislators replaced the Choice program with the $55 billion MISSION Act, which expanded and allegedly streamlined private care options. But a new report co-authored by Isaac Arnsdorf of ProPublica and Jon Greenberg of PolitiFact suggests that in practice, the Choice program mostly enriched the contractors the VA hired to manage it, while the veterans it purportedly helped still faced obstacles to care. That doesnt bode well for the MISSION Act, nor for the VAs broader obligation to veterans. Of the $10.3 billion the VA spent on the Choice program since 2014, Arnsdorf and Greenberg report that most of the funds went to two private contractors, TriWest and Health Net. The two companies have spent $1.9 billion on overhead costs alone, and charge the department at least $295 each time they refer a veteran to private care. Its not obvious, either, what the VA gets for its money, since veterans enrolled in the Choice program didnt necessarily receive improved care. The VA inspector general and the Government Accountability Office previously found that wait times for Choice patients remained longer than is stipulated by law. As Arnsdorf and Greenberg also noted, the inspector general found that veterans and doctors both say that TriWest and Health Net failed to pay for services on time; for their part, the contractors said that the VA didnt pay them on time, either. The Choice program existed because of an old premise: that private care guarantees higher-quality, more efficient service. In fact, overhead costs for the Choice program are far more expensive than is average for private industry. Tricare, provided by the Department of Defense to cover active-duty service members and their dependents in addition to retirees, activated reserve, and national guard members, is less expensive still; 8 percent of Tricares costs go to overhead, compared to 24 percent for TriWest and Health Net. The two companies did incur some extra costs because they were also charged with setting up the Choice program, but even so, their costs remain unusually high. Even excluding the costs of setting up the new program, the Choice contractors overhead still amounts to 21 percent of revenue, wrote Arnsdorf and Greenberg. Health Net no longer works on the Choice program, but TriWest would not provide a full breakdown of its fee to Arnsdorf and Greenberg, meaning that theres no way to know how much the contractor charged per service. But there are some irregularities: In many cases, the contractors $295-plus processing fee for every referral was bigger than the doctors bill for services rendered, the analysis of agency data showed. In the three months ending Jan. 31, 2018, the Choice Program made 49,144 referrals for primary care totaling $9.9 million in medical costs, for an average cost per referral of $201.16. A few other types of care also cost less on average than the handling fee: chiropractic care ($286.32 per referral) and optometry ($189.25). There were certainly other instances where the medical services cost much more than the handling fee: TriWest said its average cost per referral was about $2,100 in the past six months. TriWest and Health Net are both under investigation for overcharging the federal government, by an Arizona grand jury and the Justice Department respectively. Despite this, the Trump administration recently expanded TriWests contract, and the company stands to profit significantly from the MISSION Act now that the VA has terminated its contract with Health Net. The VA is set to award Community Care Network contracts to meet its obligations under the MISSION Act, but it has yet to do so. The VA has said its aiming to pick the contractors for the new program in January and February. Yet even if the VA meets this latest deadline, the contracts include a one-year ramp-up period, so they wont be ready to start in June, write Arnsdorf and Greenberg. That means TriWest will by default become the sole contractor for the new program. Veterans service organizations and other veterans advocates have long feared that Trump intends to privatize the VAs health care services. Those fears only ratcheted upwards when Trump fired Veterans Affairs secretary David Shulkin over scandals that look relatively mild when compared to the misdeeds of Ryan Zinke and Scott Pruitt, both of whom outlasted Shulkin in the Cabinet. Originally appointed by Barack Obama, Shulkin was widely perceived to be an opponent of privatization. His replacement, Robert Wilkie, is more conservative, and plagued by scandals of his own; a former aide to Trent Lott, Wilkie once praised Jefferson Davis as a martyr to the Lost Cause in a speech to the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Nevertheless, the VA itself has disputed the notion that privatization is imminent. In an April statement on its website, the department emphatically asserted that there is no effort underway to privatize VA, and to suggest otherwise is completely false and a red herring designed to distract and avoid honest debate on the real issues surrounding Veterans health care. The Trump administration may not intend to privatize the VA fully, but its expansion of private options like the Choice program complicates the VAs ability to fulfill its mission to veterans. ProPublica and PolitiFact have provided new evidence that Choice might not work as intended, but there are other warning signs. A recent study by researchers at Dartmouth College found that VA hospitals outperform private facilities in 121 regional markets. As reported by the Military Times, the study rated more than half of the VA hospitals reviewed as the best local option for death rates among patients with surgery complications and treatment of bloodstream infections after surgery. From these results, researchers recommended the reconsideration of private care options, or at least the expansion thereof. The VA responded with a press release that mostly praised its own facilities, but pivoted, at the end, to a defense of private community care. While VA supports most of the studys findings, the agency does not agree with the authors stance on community care, which ignores the fact that for decades it has served as a vital tool for ensuring VA has the ability to provide Veterans the best, most timely health care possible, and that it enjoys strong bipartisan support, as evidenced by passage of the MISSION Act, it asserted. Choice had bipartisan support, and so did the MISSION Act. But while the VAs medical facilities are hardly flawless, its increasingly difficult for anyone to argue that expanding private options will get veterans the health care they need. Private care, it turns out, might not be the gold standard after all. Alleged torture of women's rights activists in Saudi Arabia which the Saudi government denies is being investigated by the Saudi Human Rights Commission, the Wall Street Journal reports. The big picture: The activists, who campaigned for women to gain the right to drive, were arrested earlier this year while Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman touted himself as a reformist of the kingdom's strict cultural laws. MBS has recently come under more scrutiny from U.S. lawmakers for his policies and behavior. Details: Per the Journal, the commission has heard accusations of waterboarding, sexual harassment, electrocution, and more. A top aide of MBS, Saud al-Qahtani, "allegedly oversaw some aspects ... and threatened at least one woman with rape and death." The WSJ reports that at least eight of the 18 activists in custody have been physically abused. The Commission reports to Saudi King Salman. Last week, the U.S. Senate issued a sharp rebuke of the Saudi kingdom and broke from the Trump administration in its support of the Saudis. The bottom line: It's doubtful any real charges will come from this. President Trump updated Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a phone call on Monday about his decision to pull U.S. forces out of Syria, Netanyahu said today in a statement. Netanyahu said both Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reassured him the U.S. will still have other ways to influence the situation in Syria even without forces on the ground. Why it matters: Netanyahu has lobbied Trump very hard in the past not to pull out U.S. troops. Israel has been fighting for the last two years against Iranian entrenchment in Syria. It's most concerned about the U.S. pulling its forces from al-Tanf base, which blocks Iran from forming a land corridor from via Iraq and Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon, and to the Mediterranean. Netanyahu said in his statement: "This is a U.S. decision and we will study its timetable, its implementation and its repercussions for us. In any case, we will make sure Israel's security is preserved and we will defend ourselves from this arena." The latest: The Pentagon has walked back the White House statement that the battle against the Islamic State, or ISIS, is over, but confirmed that troops are beginning to come home without providing a timeline. In a series of Wednesday morning tweets, President Trump blasted a lawsuit from New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood that led to the Trump Foundation's dissolution as a personal attack instead of a credible legal challenge, calling it "a total double standard of 'justice.'" The big picture: Media reports have alleged that Trump used funds from the now-shuttered foundation to pay for hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal costs among other extravagant personal expenditures. Trump has continuously denied the allegations since they first arose in late 2016, claiming "100% of money goes to wonderful charities." How it happened: The Washington Post's David Fahrenthold first reported in September 2016 that Trump had spent $20,000 of the foundation's money to purchase a portrait of himself at a Mar-a-Lago auction. Fahrenthold followed up with another report that Trump used $258,000 from the foundation to settle legal disputes regarding his businesses, including Mar-a-Lago, and purchased another portrait of himself for $10,000. from the foundation to settle legal disputes regarding his businesses, including Mar-a-Lago, and purchased another portrait of himself for $10,000. New York's then-Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced an investigation into the foundation around the same time, stating that it "may have engaged in some improprieties." an investigation into the foundation around the same time, stating that it "may have engaged in some improprieties." Following his 2016 election win, Trump said he wanted to dissolve the foundation to avoid any appearance of conflict of interest, but the attorney generals office refused, stating that doing so would require the its approval given the ongoing investigation. Underwood, Schneiderman's successor, filed the lawsuit in June 2018 alleging the foundation was used for "unlawful political coordination" with the Trump campaign to benefit Trump's personal and business interests. That led to Tuesday's decision that saw the foundation agree to dissolve in compliance with Underwood's lawsuit. The foundations remaining $1.75 million will be distributed to other charities approved by Underwood's office and a state judge. What to watch: Underwood's office has said it will continue to pursue its lawsuit, which ultimately seeks $2.8 million in restitution and bans for Trump and his adult children, who also served on the foundation's board, from serving on other New York non-profit boards. Go deeper: The 17 know Trump-related investigations By Narmina Mammadova Azerbaijan spends significant efforts to export its agriculture products to more European and CIS countries and this already begins to bear fruits. Over the past several years, the share of local agricultural products in export has significantly increased. Azerbaijan exports its fruits and vegetables to Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Poland, Latvia, Georgia, as well as some European counties such as Italy and Germany. The export value of fruits and vegetables in January-October 2018 amounted to $ 405.5 million. In January-November of 2018, Azerbaijan exported 549,369 tons of fruits and vegetables worth $ 495,060. According to the State Customs Committee, this is 56,585 tons (11.48% ) and $42,332 ( 9.35%) more compared to the same period last year. For January-November months, exports of fruits and vegetables amounted to 2.76 percent of total exports of Azerbaijan. The main fruit and vegetable products exported from Azerbaijan are pure nuts, tomatoes, palm, apples, cherries, potatoes, cucumber and gherkins, onions, peaches, pomegranates, fresh grapes and so on. In 2017, Azerbaijan's income from exports of fruits and vegetables increased by 42.4 percent, reaching $253.66 million. These productions had a share of 4.1 percent in total exports. Today, there is a strong competition in European market, which is mainly provided by North Africa and Southern European countries. Despite the fact, Azerbaijani fruits, which are distinguished by being organic, can take a worthy place in the European market. The export missions play an important role in expanding non-oil exports and promoting the domestic made products. To date, Azerbaijan Export and Investment Promotion Foundation (AZPROMO) has organized 13 export missions to 10 foreign countries-Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Qatar, Kazakhstan, Hungary, China, Russia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia. Exhibitions, organized by the state bring excellent results. National entrepreneurs took part in different international exhibitions-Gulfood 2017, Prowein, ANUGA, Worldfood Moscow 2017 and the International Exhibition of Wines and Alcoholic Beverages in Hong Kong to promote the brand. President Ilham Aliyev signed the decree on large-scale promotion of local non-oil products in foreign markets as Made in Azerbaijan on October 5, 2016. This decree includes nine different support mechanisms to stimulate exports and promote Made in Azerbaijan abroad. Depending on the support mechanisms, the costs relating to their realization are fully or partially covered by the state budget. Promotion of the Made in Azerbaijan brand on foreign markets became one of the priorities of the countrys foreign economic policy. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Laman Ismayilova International Mugham Center hosted a concert in honor of famous jazz composer and pianist Vagif Mustafazade on December 18. The event was held by the Vagif Mustafazade Charitable Foundation and the Ministry of Culture, Azertag reported. The concert featured works of country's jazz legend. The Youth Chamber Orchestra performed the work "Vagifeye Devam". The orchestra was conducted by People's Artist of Azerbaijan Yalchin Adigozalov. Afterwards, well-known jazzman Emil Afrasiyab, honored art worker Javan Zeynalli, Isfar Sarabski, Mirjavad Jafarov appeared on the stage. The musicians captivated audiences with spectacular concert. Vagif Mustafazade is the founder of Azerbaijani jazz mugham movement that emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s in Baku, as a result of the mixture of these two styles. Throughout years, he wrote numerous jazz compositions, including fugues, preludes, ballads and scherzos, many of them written in the 1970s. He released a total of eight albums, all with different line-ups, mood and style. By the beginning of 1960s, Vagif was gaining recognition outside of Azerbaijan. Winner of numerous jazz festivals such as "Tallinn-66", "Tallinn-67", Baku festival "Jazz 69", Donetsk 1977 festival, and "Tbilisi-78", Vagif Mustafazadeh always fascinated listeners with his originality and virtuosity. Musician's death was a shock to many people. He was only 39 years old when he died on stage while performing in Tashkent (Uzbekistan) in 1979. Jazz schools around the world have recognized Vagif Mustafazadeh as a phenomenal musician. His works represent a unique combination of eastern and western schools, of tradition and innovation. --- Laman Ismayilova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Lam_Ismayilova Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Laman Ismayilova A documentary about great Azerbaijani composer will be presented in Baku. The film will be screened at Nizami Cinema Center on December 19, Trend Life reported. The film was shot by DIWI TV Company (Russia) by order of the Azerbaijani Ministry of Culture in accordance with the decree of President Ilham Aliyev on the 100th anniversary of the outstanding national composer. The screening starts at 17:00. Having synthesized Eastern and Western musical traditions, his works cover essentially all genres. The works by Gara Garayev are performed all over the world. Garayev inherited his love of music from his parents. His father Abulfaz Garayev was a famous pediatrician in Baku. Abulfaz Garayev was known for his kindness and generosity. When patients were too poor to pay for treatment, he often left money under the prescription that he had written out for them. He knew Azerbaijani folk music very well and loved to sing. Garayev's mother, Sona Khanim, was among the first graduates of the Music School, the Baku branch of the Russian Music Society. At the age of eight, Garayev first entered the junior music school at the Azerbaijan State Conservatoire. His exceptional musical talents let him to study simultaneously in two faculties at the conservatoire. His teachers were Georgi Sharoyev, Leonid Rudolf, and the prominent Azerbaijani composer Uzeyir Hajibeyli. In 1938, Garayev composed his first musical piece, a cantata "The Song of the Heart" to the poem by Rasul Rza. It was performed in Moscow's Bolshoi Theater in the same year. He was only 20 years old at the time. Garayev returned to Baku in 1941. He began teaching students at Azerbaijan State Philharmonic Society. In 1945, both he and Jovdat Hajiyev wrote the "Motherland" opera, for which they were awarded a prestigious Stalin Prize. At the age of 30, Garayev was again awarded this prize for his symphonic poem "Leyli and Majnun", based on the same-titled famous work of Nizami Ganjavi. In 1952, under the direction of the choreographer P. A. Gusev, Garayev's "Seven Beauties" ballet was staged at the Azerbaijani Theater of Opera and Ballet. Based on Nizami Ganjavi's famous poem, "Seven Beauties", it became the first Azerbaijani ballet and opened a new chapter in the history of classical music of Azerbaijan. His ballet, "Path of Thunder", staged in 1958, was dedicated to racial conflicts in South Africa. In the same year, he wrote the score for the documentary film" A Story About the Oil Workers of the Caspian Sea", directed by Roman Karmen and set at the Oil Rocks. Through his life, Garayev wrote nearly 110 musical pieces, including ballets, operas, symphonic and chamber pieces, solos for piano, cantatas, songs and marches, and rose to prominence not only in Azerbaijan, but also worldwide. He brilliantly juxtaposed features of Mugham with jazz, blues, African music, European counterpoint styles, and developments related to the 20th century Western music such as the 12-tone technique. Garayev died on May 13, 1982 in Moscow at the age of 64. The composer has left a legacy of music that will be felt for generations to come. The memory of great composer will always live in the hearts of Azerbaijani people. President Ilham Aliyev signed an order on October 17 to mark the 100th jubilee of the legendary Azerbaijani composer. The Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the Ministry of Education and the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences, are tasked to prepare and execute an action plan for the jubilee in consideration of proposals of the Union of Composers. --- Laman Ismayilova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Lam_Ismayilova Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Laman Ismayilova The Azerbaijan-China friendship concert, featuring performance of the Azerbaijani classical music, was held in Beijing, China. The event was co-organized by the Heydar Aliyev Foundation and the Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, Trend reported. The concert was attended by high ranking officials from the People's Republic of China (PRC), including President of the Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries Li Xiaolin, employees of the Chinese Communist Party, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Government of the People's Republic of China and other public agencies. The Azerbaijan-China friendship concert is one of a series of events promoting Azerbaijans rich culture and music in the Chinese land. The Azerbaijani-Chinese friendship was depicted as early as the 12th century in the poem "Seven Beauties" by the brilliant Azerbaijani poet and thinker Nizami Ganjavi, who glorified the image of the Chinese beauty in the work. Azerbaijan-China friendship and cooperation, which has strong foundations, is even richer and more diverse today. Speaking to a ceremony prior to the concert, Azerbaijani Deputy Prime Minister Ali Ahmadov emphasized that the relationship between Azerbaijan and China, which dates back to the ancient Silk Road, are those of friendly and partner countries. Ali Ahmadov noted that Azerbaijan attaches great importance to its relations with China. He said the political dialogue between the two countries, which is based on mutual respect and trust between President Ilham Aliyev and the Chairman of the People's Republic of China Xi Jinping, creates great opportunities for boosting bilateral relations. The Deputy PM also highlighted the active role the Heydar Aliyev Foundation headed by First-Vice President of Azerbaijan Mehriban Aliyeva in expanding humanitarian ties between Azerbaijan and China and implementing various cultural projects. While highlighting Xi Jinpings "One Belt, One Road " initiative, Ali Ahmadov stressed that this important initiative, supported by Azerbaijan from the first day, and encompassing the deepening of economic, humanitarian and cultural ties between states and peoples, made Azerbaijan and China even closer. Azerbaijan, contributing to "One Belt, One Road" initiative by commissioning the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway, is also interested in implementing various projects with China in the humanitarian sphere. The Deputy Prime Minister spoke about active role of the Heydar Aliyev Foundation, led by the First Vice-President of Azerbaijan, Mehriban Aliyeva, in expanding the Azerbaijani-Chinese humanitarian ties and implementing various cultural projects. The events implemented in China by the Heydar Aliyev Foundation, which promote ancient history and rich culture of Azerbaijan in the world, will allow the peoples of the two countries to get to know each others cultural values. Vice Chairperson of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) Shao Hong said the ancient Silk Road has laid the foundation of friendly relations between the two countries. During the 26 years that have passed since the establishment of diplomatic relations between Azerbaijan and China, mutual understanding and trust continuously deepened, and friendship-based cooperation developed in various areas. Having brought to the attention that Azerbaijan is an important country also within the framework of the direction of the strategy "One belt, One Road", Shao Hong said that over the past period Azerbaijan was actively involved in the implementation of this initiative. Shao Hong also brought to the attention that Azerbaijani musicians are very famous in the world. He said that a friendship concert is a great opportunity to better familiarize the Chinese people with the national culture of Azerbaijan. The concert featured performance of works by famous Azerbaijani composers such as Uzeyir Hajibayli, Fikrat Amirov, Gara Garayev, Niyazi and others. The concert was held at China National Centre for the Performing Arts. Azerbaijan State Chamber Orchestra conducted by Fuad Ibrahimov, as well as folk artists Murad Huseynov, Samir Jafarov, Enver Sadihov, Honored Artist Sahib Pashazade and other musicians performed the works of famous Azerbaijani composers Uzeyir Hajibeyli, Fikret Amirov, Gara Garayev, Tofig Guliyev as well as music pieces of European composers. The audience met Azerbaijani musicians with a storm of applause. The performance of traditional Chinese music on tar was a real surprise for spectators. Notably, the concert was held in the framework of cooperation between the Heydar Aliyev Foundation and Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries. In November last year, a memorandum was signed between Heydar Aliyev Foundation and Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries. As part of the visit, the Azerbaijani delegation led by Deputy Prime Minister Ali Ahmadov met with Vice Chairperson of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference Shao Hong and President of the Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries Li Xiaolin to discuss the issues of bilateral cooperation. During the visit, the delegation including Assistant to the First Vice-President of Azerbaijan, Executive Director of the Heydar Aliyev Foundation Anar Alakbarov and Chairman of the State Committee on Work with Diaspora Fuad Muradov familiarized themselves with the museum of the Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries. --- Laman Ismayilova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Lam_Ismayilova Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Trend Azerbaijani Ambassador to Russia Polad Bulbuloglu has been unanimously re-elected as chairman of the Board of the CIS Interstate Humanitarian Cooperation Fund, Vestnik Kavkaza reports with reference to TASS. The election was held at a joint meeting of the Board of the Fund, the CIS Council for Humanitarian Cooperation and the Council of Heads of State News Agencies, held at the Moscow headquarters of the CIS Interstate Humanitarian Cooperation Fund. The meeting was attended by co-chairman of the Board of the CIS Interstate Humanitarian Cooperation Fund, Special Representative of Russian President for International Cultural Cooperation Mikhail Shvydkoy, chairman of the Council for Humanitarian Cooperation, adviser to the President of Tajikistan Abdujabbor Rahmonzoda and other members of the CIS humanitarian cooperation governing bodies. Stability doesnt hinder development, said Shvydkoy, congratulating Polad Bulbuloglu on his election as chairman of the Board of the CIS Interstate Humanitarian Cooperation Fund. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Trend The report presented at the plenary session of the European Parliament in Strasbourg was in the interests of Azerbaijan, co-chairman of the EU-Azerbaijan parliamentary cooperation committee, Azerbaijani MP Javanshir Feyziyev said Dec. 18, Trend reports. He said that the report not only reflected the territorial integrity, protection of Azerbaijan's borders, but also the settlement of conflicts in the Eastern Partnership countries in line with the principles of peace and territorial integrity. "In addition, the document mentioned helping refugees and forced migrants, as well as people suffering from conflicts in the Eastern Partnership countries," he added. Feyziyev said that this time also Armenia traditionally reacted to the reports submitted to the European Parliament. The proposal of the Armenian lobbyists was rejected with 525 votes against, he noted. "All this is the result of an independent foreign policy pursued by Azerbaijan," he said. "As a result of the well-thought out foreign policy pursued by President Ilham Aliyev, Azerbaijan's position is supported in Europe. It is time to put an end to the policy of double standards in relation to Azerbaijan." --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Trend Finding ways to resolve the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict will remain the main task for Azerbaijan in 2019, Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov said Dec. 18 at a reception for heads of the diplomatic corps, dedicated to results of 2018, Trend reports. One of the important tasks was to strengthen Azerbaijans independence, he said. Mammadyarov added that he devoted most of the time to finding ways to resolve the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. The main goal is to achieve some tangible results, he said, noting that this is not only his dream, but he also thinks that this is a dream of every Azerbaijani. He said that at the last meeting in Milan with his Armenian counterpart, the sides reached some kind of mutual understanding for the first time over a long period. Mammadyarov noted that next month there will be a meeting with the Armenian foreign minister. The Azerbaijani foreign minister added that ways to resolve the conflict will be discussed. Azerbaijan stands for the peaceful resolution of the conflict, he said. The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz Lamar Alexanders remarkable career is due to come to an end in 2020. How will he comport himself between now and then? Photo: Erik S. Lesser/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock When Republicans gained two Senate seats in the November midterms, the leverage occasionally moderate gadflies Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski had over their more conservative and Trumpy colleagues declined accordingly. But adding to Mitch McConnells power were the retirement of two senators who had developed a real antipathy to Donald Trump, Arizonas Jeff Flake and Tennessees Bob Corker. In looking for a possible successor to Flake and Corker as conservatives willing to defy Trump on occasion, speculation has centered on another Tennessean who has now insulated himself from Republican primary blowback by announcing his own retirement in 2020: Lamar Alexander. The Washington Posts James Hohmann thinks the very veteran Republican pol could have the right stuff to be a rebel himself: Now that hes decided not to seek reelection, the former cabinet secretary, governor and presidential candidate has two years to pursue his pragmatic instincts for compromise unencumbered by fear of blowback from grass-roots activists or donors. He can negotiate deals that would be able to pass a Democratic House, especially around health care or education, and possibly even speak out against Trump, who is temperamentally his opposite. Becoming a lame duck might embolden the 78-year-old to embrace the role of senior statesman. He is perhaps now as well positioned as anyone in the upper chamber to break the fever of tribalism that has infected and diminished what was once the worlds greatest deliberative body. This ode to Lamar! (the exclamation point is forever attached to his first name after his 1996 presidential campaign used it relentlessly) isnt just the standard effort to imagine the Senate of yore in which solons from both parties gathered in the cloakroom to govern the nation across party lines. Alexander really is a man from a lost era. He worked in the Nixon White House. His first gubernatorial nomination was in 1974, the Watergate year that handicapped Republican candidates everywhere. After he won the governorship in 1978, he soon became a national bipartisan leader of his fellow chief executive, with a focus on education policy. He served as Poppy Bushs education secretary back when that job in a GOP administration meant marshaling bipartisan and business support for standards-based reform of public schools rather than subsidization of private schools. Alexanders two runs for president (in 1996 and 2000) were bedeviled by bad timing. His first run began as a populist-outsider crusade (his slogan, aimed at a deeply unpopular Democratic-run Congress, was Cut Their Pay and Send Them Home), that eventually ran out of steam after his own party won Congress in the 1994 landslide. He finished third in both Iowa and New Hampshire and dropped out. His 2000 campaign never made it to the starting gate after a poor performance in the 1999 Ames Straw Poll. Soon afterwards, Alexander began his long Senate career by beating a conservative rival in the primary to succeed Fred Thompson and then a relatively popular Democratic congressman. In the Senate he has been a loyal Republican on partisan votes, but has also been distinguished by a willingness to work closely with Democrats in the development of legislation, particularly as ranking Republican and chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP). The best recent example is his work with Patty Murray on an ultimately unsuccessful effort to keep Donald Trump from destroying the provider subsidies needed to make Obamacare work effectively. The whole effort was eventually abandoned earlier this year after a dispute over an anti-abortion rider Republicans insisted upon a not atypical fate for bipartisan legislation in the Trump era generally. But Alexanders suitability for the role of a possible anti-Trump gadfly goes deeper than his personal political record. He is among the last living survivors of the once-robust legacy of southern moderate Republicanism. Rooted in the Appalachian region (Alexanders hometown is Maryville, in the shadow of the Great Smoky Mountains), so-called Mountain Republicans formed their allegiance with the GOP not out of opposition to the New Deal or the civil rights movement, like many Republicans in other parts of the South and beyond, but in opposition to the Confederacy. So, by and large, Republicans from these areas have lacked the ideological rigidity of their flatland colleagues. Alexanders Tennessee mentor, Howard Baker, from the same background, was a notably moderate Senate leader during his partys slow transition to movement-conservative domination in the Reagan years. Senate Democrats clearly hope Alexander will persist in his bipartisan habits going forward, as Hohmann notes: Chuck Schumer said he felt a pang of sadness when he saw the afternoon news alert that Alexander was retiring while riding the Amtrak from New York to Washington. The Senate minority leader immediately phoned him. He reminded me he will still be around for two years and wants to work together to get things done, an Alexanderian statement if there ever was one, Schumer said in a floor speech last night. But the Tennesseean is also close to Mitch McConnell, that consummate partisan wire-puller. And Alexanders personal style doesnt exhibit much taste for the kind of intense confrontation that bucking Trump would invite. So the odds are high that whatever he tries to accomplish in private, Lamar Alexander will drift towards retirement representing a dignified implicit dissent from what Donald Trump and conservative ideologues have together done to his party and to the Senate but wont make much noise about it. With him will depart another vestige of traditions that were already endangered when he was working for Richard Nixon. By Leman Mammadova Azerbaijan will soon export hazelnuts to the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The Ministry of Economy told AZERTAC that Azerbaijan Export & Investment Promotion Foundation (AZPROMO) organized the next export missions to the Gulf countries, to Abu Dhabi and Sharjah, the capital of UAE and to the capital of Saudi Arabia, Riyad. Export missions to promote Made in Azerbaijan brand, to introduce Azerbaijani products to the Gulf countries, include 29 Azerbaijani companies operating in the fields of export missions, furniture, plastic pipes and fittings, tourism, textile, pomegranate juice, hazelnuts, canned goods, tea, mineral water and etc. During the meeting with the representatives of Sharjah Chamber of Commerce and Industry within the framework of export mission to the United Arab Emirates, discussions were held on the expansion of export opportunities and the development of economic cooperation between the entrepreneurs of the two countries. In addition, the Azerbaijani entrepreneurs familiarized themselves with the activities of the international Free Economic Zone, Sharjah Coop and Abu Dhabi Coop supermarkets in Sharjah Airport. Representatives of foreign companies were informed about the Azerbaijani products and exchanged views on the increase of exports. The local products presented at the meetings were met with great interest by foreign companies. Thus, Azerbaijani company "Khan-El" operating in Zagatala and the "Haghanyat General Trading" of the UAE signed an agreement on the export of hazelnut products. According to the contract, the company will start exporting Azerbaijani hazelnuts to the UAE in the near future. The mission members got acquainted with the process of creating "Azerbaijan Trade House" in Dubai. Azerbaijan is known as one of the few countries in the world enjoying favorable climate conditions suitable for hazelnut growing. The hazelnut, especially in the northern regions of the country, fully rippens by the end of July and the harvesting process lasts from mid-August to mid-September. Hazelnut growing is the main source of income for the population in the northwestern regions of Azerbaijan. It is also mainly a family business in Balakan, Zagatala, Gakh, Gabala, Khachmaz, and Shabran regions. Today, Azerbaijan has become the worlds third largest hazelnut producer and exporter. As many as 20,850 tons of hazelnut were exported in 2017. The main markets for the Azerbaijani hazelnut are Italy, Russia and Germany. Several varieties of hazelnuts, such as Atababa, Ashrafli, Ghalib, Ganja, Sachagly, Topgara and Yagly, are cultivated in Azerbaijan. Many of the country's hazelnut orchards are situated in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains in the regions of Gakh, Zagatala and Balakan. Azerbaijan is trying to expand its export routes and enter new markets. At exhibitions in Dubai (Gulfood 2017) and Germany (Prowein), where Azerbaijani companies took part in a single stand, orders for exporting hazelnuts to Spain were received. In 2019, Zagatala nuts processing plant plans to export products to the Swiss market. During the Azerbaijani export missions visit to Switzerland preliminary agreements on hazelnut export were reached with Switzerland's GN-company, Varistor and Delica and other influential companies. In the course of the mission, Switzerland agreed to import 220 tons of hazelnuts worth $ 125,000. The total volume of hazelnut export from Azerbaijan to Switzerland was 22 tons in 2017. In 2016, Ferrero, the worlds largest buyer of hazelnuts, has started purchasing large quantities of Azerbaijans hazelnuts. Last year Azerbaijan produced 45,500 tons of hazelnut, which was 32.9 percent more than in 2016. The country exported hazelnuts worth over $100 million in 2017. The export missions of Azerbaijan continue to expand with the aim of promoting country's non-oil products abroad. As many as 25 export missions are expected to be organized in 2019. Local entrepreneurs will participate in major trade fair in Russia, UAE and Germany in February. The new market at which Azerbaijan aims is South Korea, Azerbaijan will be participating in the food fair there in May 2019. The export of non-oil products will stimulate the expansion of the Azerbaijani products and will further strengthen the non-oil sector's share in the structure of the GDP. Development of the non-oil sector mainly depends on the export of non-oil products and the main goal is to expand access to new markets, besides traditional markets. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Leman Mammadova BP and Azerbaijani Energy Ministry signed a Memorandum of Understanding to jointly explore potential opportunities for the development of renewable energy in the country on December 18. The memorandum was signed in the context of the recent announcement by the government of Azerbaijan that it is developing a regulatory framework for renewables in the country, BP told Trend. Azerbaijani Energy Minister Parviz Shahbazov said at the signing ceremony that increasing alternative and renewable energy production and raising their role in the energy security are currently important issues to be solved, as set by the head of state of Azerbaijan. We are currently studying the international experience, developing the countrys legal framework and conducting consultations with international companies for the development of renewable energy. With the document we signed today, what Azerbaijan has accomplished in the area of renewable energy sources will enter a new stage of development. I believe our long cooperation with BP based on a strong partnership in the oil and gas sector will be beneficial for the renewable energy sector as well, enabling us to contribute together to the development of clean energy, the minister noted. BP's Regional President for Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey, Gary Jones said that BP supports the legislative framework being developed in Azerbaijan for the renewable energy sector. The company looks forward to working with the Azerbaijani government to understand and jointly explore the potential renewables opportunities in the country, he added. Globally, we have been in the renewables sector for more than 20 years and have a great deal of experience to share with the country. Renewable power production is expected to remain the fastest growing form of energy in the world as the energy mix is shifting towards lower carbon sources. We welcome the recent announcements by the Government to develop a regulatory framework for renewables and are pleased to have signed todays MoU to help the countrys efforts in this area," Jones noted. BP has been operating in the renewable energy sector for more than 20 years. Today BP is one of the best wind and solar power producers in the world although its investments in renewable energy resources are less than oil and gas. Hydrocarbons, which are the traditional source of energy used by the world for many years, are gradually being run out and, thus, make the use of alternative and renewable energy sources urgent. By 2030, energy demand in the world will increase by 45 percent. The favorable geographic location and climatic conditions allow the widespread use of environmentally friendly alternative energy sources in Azerbaijan. Most of the potential on the renewable energy in Azerbaijan accounts for the solar energy estimated at 5000 megawatts. Wind power accounts for 4,500 megawatts, biomass - 1,500 megawatts, geothermal energy - 800 megawatts, and the rest 350 megawatts - the potential small hydropower plants. The potential of renewable energy sources in Azerbaijan exceeds 25,300 megawatts, which allows producing 62.8 billion kilowatt/hour of electricity per year. Aiming to lessen its dependency on oil, Azerbaijan impelments a number of measures for further development of alternative energy sector. The State Agency for Alternative and Renewable Energy Sources plans to implement 23 projects worth 13 million manats as part of the strategic roadmap for the development of public services in 2018-2020. The projects cover the construction of 420 megawatt wind, water and biofuel power plants. The capacity of wind power stations will be 350 megawatts, solar power stations will be 50 megawatts, and biofuel power plants will be equal to 20 megawatts. Currently, the State Agency for Alternative and Renewable Energy Sources negotiates with a number of foreign investors to finance projects for wind power plants in the Caspian Sea to develop renewable energy supply. It should be noted that Energy Ministry and Norway's Equinor plan to cooperate in alternative and renewable energy sources. Moreover, "green" power station is expected to be created at the Baku International Sea Trade Port. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Leman Mammadova Azerbaijan and Georgia maintain high-level relations in all spheres, especially in energy field. Both countries have already taken initiatives for global projects in the region. A Memorandum on the prospects of Azerbaijani-Georgian power systems was signed. Azerenergy President Baba Rzayev met with Davit Tvalabeishvili, Manager of Georgian State Electrosystem, who is on a visit to Azerbaijan on December 18, Azerenergy told AZERTAC. During the meeting, the sides exchanged views on the state of the power systems of Azerbaijan and Georgia, and also discussed contractual relations and the construction of a 330 kW two-way (duplex) transmission line. Following the discussions, the memorandum was signed. In November, Azerenergy produced 1.965 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity. Azerbaijan exported 1.380 billion kWh of electricity worth $64.9 million, that is 444.7 million kWh of 47.55 percent more than in the previous year, according to the State Customs Committee (SCC). The electricity was sold at $0.047 or AZN 0.0799 a kWh. Electricity export made up 0.42 percent of Azerbaijans total export. Azerenergy JSC is the main exporter of electric energy in Azerbaijan. Georgia is expected to double electricity imports per year. According to the forecast of Georgian Ministry of Economy and Sustainable Development, Georgia will import more than 2.8 million kWh of electricity in 2019. The current import was 1.4 million kilowatt / hour. The maximum limit for imports in the next year is predicted to be 407.9 million kWh in March. In January-July this year, Azerbaijan exported electricity worth 26.9 billion to Georgia. The creation of the Azerbaijan-Georgia-Turkey energy bridge will enable to integrate into the European electricity market in the future. Georgia can join the European energy system through the submarine power line in the Black Sea. It is expected to implement line linking of Georgia with Bulgaria and Romania. More than $ 3 billion will be spent on construction. In this case, Georgia will be connected to the European energy grid, that means Azerbaijan will also be able to supply electricity to Europe. Bilateral diplomatic relations between Baku and Tbilisi are manifested in the various fields particularly trade, transport and energy since 1992. The two countries broadly cooperate in regional energy development, transportation and economic partnership projects such as Southern Gas Corridor, Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline (BTC), Kars-Tbilisi-Baku railway (BTK), the TRACECA, and the BSEC. SOCAR also is deeply involved in the energy market in Georgia which was established in 2006. The company's activity includes retail and bulk selling of fuel in Georgia, importing of petroleum and liquid gas, construction of oil terminals and warehouses. At present, there are over 70 filling stations operating in the country. Azerbaijan ranks fourth among Georgia's biggest trade partners, after Turkey, Russia and China. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Abdul Kerimkhanov Yerevan is frightened by any actions of Baku, even in the most peace-loving initiatives it sees far-reaching military plans. Last week, an important decision was made in terms of protecting the sovereignty and security of Azerbaijan. There was a redistribution of forces, extremely significant and with a serious eye on the future. The President of Azerbaijan, the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, Ilham Aliyev, has instructed the transfer of combat posts and military facilities on the state border with Armenia to Gazakh and Agstafa regions to the control of the State Border Service. That is, the state border between Azerbaijan and Armenia will henceforth be guarded by border troops, and not by parts of the regular army. Elchin Guliyev, head of the State Border Service, said at a reporting meeting on the results of the service and combat activities of the State Border Service in 2018, the decision of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief is aimed at further increasing the combat capability of military units and units of the country's Defense Ministry, creating new reserve forces and strengthening the combat readiness of personnel. With this decision, Azerbaijan once again demonstrated that it has no claims on the internationally recognized territory of Armenia. Baku respects international law. At present, Armenia is recognized by the international community within the existing borders, and the Azerbaijani side does not intend to change anything, although it has all the possibilities and grounds for this. Replacing the regular army with border guards is another proof of good intentions and a blow to Armenian propaganda, which frightens its own population of the border area with Azerbaijani aggression. This is a definite signal to the mediating countries, unequivocally speaking about the clear border that is being drawn in Azerbaijan between war and peace. However, Yerevan should not consider this as a weakening of the positions of Azerbaijan and a decrease in the level of security in the frontline zone. The border area continues to remain the front line because Armenia continues provoking tension in Karabakh. The state border and border settlements of Azerbaijan are also under the constant sight of Armenia. Numerous incidents by Yerevan have a clear goal to provoke an interstate conflict with the possibility of drawing allies into the process. The reaction from the Armenian side did not immediately follow, but frightened voices are already heard. Some Armenian military experts have shown concern over the actions of Baku on Armenian-Azerbaijani border. Of course, experts are aware of the deplorable situation of the Armenian armed forces, and therefore their fears are quite understandable. Moreover, it is well known that the peace process does not meet the interests of Armenia, and therefore the representatives of the former and current military circles are doing everything to prevent it. In reality, Armenia does not take any steps to defrost the situation. The current authorities have no success in terms of improving the economy of Armenia and the life of the Armenian people as a whole. In such a situation, it is necessary to revise the old myths of the Armenian propaganda and to do everything possible to improve relations with neighbors, especially with Azerbaijan and Turkey. It is difficult to build a democratic state with rights and freedoms for citizens when these citizens are empty in their wallets due to bad relations with their neighbors and the fact that as a result of this, all important economic projects bypass Armenia. --- Abdul Kerimkhanov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @AbdulKerim94 Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Abdul Kerimkhanov Kazakhstan and Romania intend to strengthen cooperation across the entire spectrum of bilateral relations, expanding cooperation in the areas of information technology, innovation and agro-industry. The Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Roman Vasilenko, made an official visit to Romania, the press service of the Kazakh Ministry of Foreign Affairs reports on December 17. Meetings were held with representatives of the Romanian official and business circles, and the mass media. During the meeting with the Deputy Chairman of the Chamber of Deputies of the Romanian Parliament Florin Iordache, the parties noted the high level of development of inter-parliamentary cooperation in recent years and expressed mutual desire to further strengthen relations. In 2019, a delegation of the Mazhilis of the Parliament led by the chairman of the inter-parliamentary friendship group "Kazakhstan - Romania" Bakhytzhan Ertayev will visit Bucharest. In addition, Vasilenko held a series of meetings with members of the Romanian government. The current situation and prospects for the development of cooperation in the field of agro-industrial complex were discussed with Petre Daea, Minister of Agriculture. The parties agreed to hold Daea's visit to Kazakhstan in the second half of 2019, as well as to elaborate a cooperation agreement between the ministries of Kazakh and Romanian agriculture. Vasilenko discussed the possibilities of expanding interaction in the field of information technology and digitalization with the Minister of Communications and Information Society of Romania Alexandru Petrescu. During the meeting, the Romanian politician voiced an invitation to his Kazakh counterpart, the Minister of Information and Communications Dauren Abaev, to visit Bucharest in 2019. The parties also agreed to work out the signing of a bilateral agreement on cooperation in the field of information technology. Also, the Kazakh delegation visited the largest city of Transylvania, Cluj-Napoca, where it met with the prefect of the Cluj county, Ioan Kerekesh, to discuss prospects for the development of relations between the regions of Kazakhstan and Romania. As part of negotiations with the business circles of the districts, Cluj and Muresh, Vasilenko familiarized the local business community with the Kazakh investment climate and potential by inviting Romanian businessmen to the development of the Kazakhstan market and the use of financial and tax incentives provided to foreign investors. Kazakh diplomats also familiarized themselves with the activities of the IT cluster of Cluj-Napoca, which is one of the largest information technology development centers in South-Eastern Europe. Following the meeting with the leadership of the cluster, an agreement was reached on holding events jointly with the Astana Hub International Technopark, including organizing a visit to Romania of the leadership of the Kazakh IT hub and signing a memorandum of cooperation. At the same day, an interesting discussion took place on the prospects for the development of information technologies in the Honorary Consulate of Kazakhstan with Kazakh students studying at various universities in Cluj-Napoca. In January-September, the trade turnover between Kazakhstan and Romania amounted to $ 1.27 billion, which is 45 percent more than in the same period of 2017. --- Abdul Kerimkhanov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @AbdulKerim94 Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Abdul Kerimkhanov Iran has announced the discovery of about 40 new oil and gas fields and expects to start their development in the near future, said the head of the exploration department of the National Iranian Oil Company, Salef Hendi, on December 18. Currently, Iran is conducting exploration for hydrocarbons of about 60 percent of its territory, including where, until recently, such searches were considered unpromising. As many as 14 blocks of newly discovered hydrocarbon deposits are ready for the tender. One of these areas is the north-west of the country, where preliminary work revealed oil reserves. Hendy told reporters in Tehran that preliminary surveys of exploration department show that oil and gas fields can be found in the Bostanabad and Miyane regions in the province of East Azerbaijan. "We will soon begin more detailed studies in these areas", added Hendy. In addition, in the province of Ardabil, a promising area of Mogan was identified, where pilot hydrocarbon production is already underway. In the Gulf of Oman, Iranian experts have discovered gas deposits at a depth of 800 m. Hendy declared that Iran came out on top in the world in terms of oil and gas reserves. Just a few years ago, we were persuading foreign, particularly Chinese, companies to sell us certain types of drilling equipment, and now we fully provide ourselves with everything necessary in this area. With the return of U.S. sanctions, we are not faced with any problems, exploration for hydrocarbons goes on," he concluded. Iran ranks first in the world in terms of mastering the largest gas reserves. With a total volume of 188 trillion. cubic meters of natural gas reserves in the world, 34 trillion cubic meters refers to Irans recognized reserves, representing 18 percent of the total world reserves, 51 percent of the Middle Easts total reserves, and 40 percent of the total natural gas reserves of the oil-exporting countries (OPEC). Irans gas reserves are located in gas fields, gas caps, or oil fields. Iran is among the countries that have many common oil and gas fields with neighboring countries. From the number of 28 common oil and gas fields of Iran with its neighbors, 18 fields are oil, 4 - gas, and 6 - both have oil and gas. So there are common oil fields with Iran and Kuwait, Qatar, Azerbaijan, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Turkmenistan. Some of Irans common gas fields with neighboring countries are the Salman (with Saudi Arabia), Mobarak (with the UAE), Hengam (with Oman), Farsi (with Saudi Arabia), Gunbadli (with Turkmenistan) and South Pars (with Qatar) fields. --- Abdul Kerimkhanov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @AbdulKerim94 Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Trend Exports of Irans petrochemical products, excluding gas condensate, increased by 23 percent during the first eight months of this Iranian year (started March 21, 2018) compared to the same period last year, said Masoud Kamali Ardakani, director general of the exports development office of Irans Trade Promotion Organization (TPO), Trend reports via IRIB. The export value exceeded $22 billion in the eight months, he noted. He said that compared to the same period last year, export of petrochemical products increased by $10.3 billion (32 percent), export of bitumen and industrial oils grew by $1.8 billion (14 percent), while the export of polymer and chemical products increased by about $1.4 billion (40 percent). He added that compared to the same period last year, export of mining materials, including metal ores, steel, non-ferrous metals, pipes and profiles increased by $4.4 billion (more than 9 percent). Non-industrial exports, including cement, tiles, ornamental stones and other products, also increased by $1.4 billion (16 percent), he said. Ardakani stressed that exports of household appliances increased, adding that exports of electric and non-electric household appliances grew by $360 million, or 22 percent. They were mainly exported to Azerbaijan, Turkey, Iraq, Afghanistan and Turkmenistan, he said. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Abdul Kerimkhanov The World Bank (WB) Board of Directors approved a $100 million loan to Uzbekistan as part of the Integrated Development of Medium Cities project, Uzbek media reported. The funds will be allocated by the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), which is part of the WB group. Hideki Mori, head of the WB in Uzbekistan, said that for the first time, the WB will finance a project on urban development in Uzbekistan. He declared that project will help improve living conditions in the middle cities of the Bukhara, Tashkent and Namangan regions, and will support the efforts of the government of the country aimed at social and economic development of the regions. In Uzbekistan, medium-sized cities with a population of 50,000-100,000 people play the role of a base for economic development. More than 40 percent of the country's urban population, or about 1.5 million people, live in cities with a population of less than 100,000. The project, supported by the WB, will contribute to the development of urban infrastructure, public places and municipal services in the middle cities of Uzbekistan, in particular, in Kagan (Bukhara region), Chartak (Namangan region) and Yangiyule (Tashkent region). The total population of these settlements is 165,000 people. The project will strengthen the institutional capacity of central and local governments in the field of urban management, urban infrastructure, the provision of municipal services to the population, the development of urban transport systems, sustainable tourism and partnerships with the private sector. The experience gained during the implementation of the project in the above pilot cities will be used in the development of the National Program for the Development of Medium Cities of Uzbekistan. In Uzbekistan, the WB today funds the implementation of 19 projects totaling $ 3.4 billion to support the economic and social development of the country. These projects include support for macroeconomic reforms, agriculture, the water and sanitation sectors, health, education, energy, transport, and regional development. They contribute to the countrys economic growth and higher living standards for the people of Uzbekistan. Founded in 1944, the WB has 189 member countries, staff from more 170 countries, and offices in over 130 locations. WB has more than 10,000 employees in more than 120 offices worldwide. Today the Bank Groups work touches nearly every sector that is important to fighting poverty, supporting economic growth, and ensuring sustainable gains in the quality of peoples lives in developing countries. --- Abdul Kerimkhanov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @AbdulKerim94 Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Abdul Kerimkhanov In the near future it is planned to create a Dutch Agrotechnology Center in Uzbekistan, Uzbek media reported. A meeting of the project participants at the headquarters of the Dutch company Leli took place on December 17. Representatives of a number of leading Dutch firms and companies, as well as the Ministry of Economic Affairs of the Netherlands, discussed the practical aspects of project implementation. A full-cycle cluster will operate in the Center being created with technical assistance from companies from the Netherlands. Dutch technologies for the cultivation of land, agricultural production, animal husbandry, as well as manure processing and storage of agricultural products and the production of finished dairy products (Dutch cheeses) will be introduced there. Diler Khakimov, the Ambassador of Uzbekistan to the Benelux countries, presented the project participants detailed information on the latest changes in the agro-industrial policy of the country, including the results of the last visit of President Shavkat Mirziyoyev to Kashkadarya region. Particular emphasis was placed on the presentation of privileged business conditions for foreign investors. As emphasized, the implementation of systemic measures in the agrarian sphere has allowed achieving not only qualitative but also very tangible quantitative results. In recent years, the volume of agricultural production has increased as a whole by more than two times. This made it possible to increase per capita meat consumption by 1.3 times, milk and dairy products - by 1.7 times, potatoes - by 7 times, vegetables - by more than 2 times, and fruits - by almost 4 times. "Experts estimate the export potential of the agricultural sector of Uzbekistan at more than $ 5 billion. The Republic is gradually becoming one of the major exporters of high-quality and competitive fruit and vegetable and dairy products," the Foreign Ministrys press service said. At the meeting, the ambassador gave specific answers and substantive explanations on the issues raised by company representatives. Following the meeting, an agreement was reached on the start of the project in early 2019. A visit to Uzbekistan of the companies heads included in the consortium will be held in January or the first half of February 2019. The 25th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Uzbekistan and the Netherlands, which have always developed on the basis of mutually beneficial cooperation and mutual respect, has been marked in 2017. The Netherlands attaches great importance to cooperation with Uzbekistan within the EU. The Netherlands is a world leader in the production of breeding materials, modern technologies, innovations and expert experience in agriculture. High agricultural productivity in the Netherlands is associated with a unique form of interaction between Dutch farmers, breeding farms, technology providers, research centers, food processing companies and the government. The constant flow of investment, high innovation and partnership principles are the unique expertise that the Netherlands is willing to share with its partners around the world. The Dutch agricultural sector is very productive and innovative. In general, the entire agri-food chain from seeds to the final consumer is fully represented in the Netherlands, where in each segment there are world-class companies. The agricultural sector has a high level of mechanization. In agriculture, only 2 percent of the working population is employed, but the sector produces significant surplus value, both for the food sector and for export. The Netherlands is the second largest exporter of agri-food products in the world. The Netherlands is the 20th largest economy in the world and the fifth largest economy in the Eurozone. --- Abdul Kerimkhanov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @AbdulKerim94 Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd (M&M) today unveiled the brand name of its highly-anticipated new car. The product, which was initially code-named S201, will be called XUV 300. The XUV, which is a compact SUV, is pitched to be from the family of Mahindra's XUV 500. As per the company, the XUV includes several characteristics of XUV500, including design and agility. The XUV300 will be manufactured at the company's manufacturing facility at Nasik, Maharashtra, and is expected to be launched in February 2019. The XUV 300 is expected to take on the likes of Maruti Vitara Brezza and Hyundai Creta. The company has said the XUV300 draws from the SsangYong Tivoli, a mini SUV by the Korea-based auto company, which has sold over 260,000 vehicles in over 50 countries since its launch in 2015. "It's always an emotional moment when your family expands. Please join me in congratulating the XUV5oo for the new member in its family...A new cheetah racing ahead...," tweeted Mahindra & Mahindra Chairman Anand Mahindra, indicating the company's plan to launch the XUV 300 soon. It's always an emotional moment when your family expands. Please join me in congratulating the XUV5oo for the new member in its family...A new cheetah racing ahead... pic.twitter.com/2zs56K8p7s - anand mahindra (@anandmahindra) December 19, 2018 "The XUV300's headlamps integrate with the fog lamps forming a Cheetah-like tear-duct, while the pronounced wheel arches are inspired from the muscular haunches of the Cheetah. Its modern grille, sculpted bonnet, pronounced shoulder & body lines along with an elevated stance, give the XUV300 a bold and charismatic road presence," the company said in a statement. "XUV500 enjoys huge equity in consumers' minds and now with the XUV300, the XUV brand will evolve into a family of vehicles that stands for sophistication with performance," Pawan Goenka, Managing Director, M&M, said. An electric variant of the XUV is also expected to hit the road by 2020. Experts say the XUV300 could be one of the most promising launches from Mahindra & Mahindra. The Twitter handle of Anand Mahindra was abuzz with people reacting to the launch of the XUV300. "Congrats MahindraXUV500 ...Be more responsible you are an elder brother now..," tweeted a user, to which Anand Mahindra replied saying, "You got it...Bade Bhaisaheb!" Adding a little bit of humour, another user said "It's (XUV3oo) is baby beast 300". "Bade miyan to bade miyan.....chote miyan to subhan Allah....!!!! @mahindra XUV 300," tweeted another user. I like that phrase... The Baby Beast... https://t.co/CKuSAZm2Es - anand mahindra (@anandmahindra) December 19, 2018 Yes Bank has recommended the name of its board member Brahm Dutt for the post of Chairman to the RBI, according to sources. The Chairman post fell vacant after resignation of Ashok Chawla in November following issues related to probity. "The bank has sent the name of Dutt to the Reserve Bank for the Chairman post," a source said Tuesday. Since Dutt is already a part of the bank and understands various aspects of the system in a better way, it would be good to have him as the chairman, sources said. The bank's spokesperson could not be reached for comments. Dutt, a retired bureaucrat, is currently an independent director on the bank's board, which has eight members. The other board members are MD&CEO Rana Kapoor, Lt General Mukesh Sabharwal, Subhash Kalia, Ajai Kumar, Pratima Sheorey, Uttam Agarwal and TS Vijayan. Vijayan -- former LIC and Irdai chief -- was inducted into the board only recently along with Agarwal who is a chartered accountant with expertise in taxation, finance and restructuring. Besides, the bank has to recommend name/s for MD&CEO post to the RBI as Kapoor has been denied extension post January 31, 2019 by the the central bank. Cory Watson Attorneys, a nationally recognized personal injury law firm based in Birmingham, Alabama, has named Hamilton Jordan as a new associate attorney. Hamilton Jordan earned his undergraduate degree from Auburn University and his Juris Doctor from Samford University's Cumberland School of Law. His compassion and desire to help those in need brought him to Cory Watson Attorneys, where he focuses his practice on areas such as products liability, civil litigation, motor vehicle accidents, and personal injury law. Prior to joining Cory Watson Attorneys, Jordan represented clients in numerous fields of personal injury litigation involving car accidents, tractor-trailer accidents, and premises liability. Jordan has also practiced in general civil litigation, including products liability employment law, sexual harassment, and insurance defense. About Cory Watson Attorneys Cory Watson Attorneys is a nationally recognized personal injury law firm based in Birmingham, Alabama, with more than $2.7 billion in recoveries for clients. Attorneys are frequently appointed to leadership positions in national cases involving pharmaceuticals and defective medical devices. Firm practice areas include Personal Injury, Product Liability, Class Actions, Mass Torts, Pharmaceutical Litigation, Wrongful Death, Asbestos, Mesothelioma, Car Accidents, Truck Accidents, Catastrophic Injury, Aviation, Recalled Products, and Environmental Litigation. To learn more, please visit http://www.CoryWatson.com. Banking services across India could be severely affected, as members of Indian Banks Association (IBA) go on a strike to protest the merger of public sector banks and bipartite wage settlement. The All India Bank Officers' Confederation (AIBOC) and United Forum of Bank Unions (UFBU) have called for strikes on December 21 and December 26, respectively. The bank unions have called for a strike to protest against the merger of Bank of Baroda (BoB), Dena Bank, and Vijaya Bank. The merger of these three banks was approved by the government in September this year. Ashwani Rana, the vice president of National Organisation of Bank Workers, has said all unions under UFBU will take part in the strikes. The UFBU is an umbrella body comprising of 9 employee and officer unions. The AIBOC has also written an appeal for rescinding the proposed merger of the PSBs to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The letter questioned the capability of the merged entity: "In the issue of merger of Vijaya Bank with Bank of Baroda and Dena Bank we find this is pertinent to mention here for greater clarity that NPA (%) has reached a whopping 24.9% (Rs. 16,361 crore) in respect of Dena Bank, while it is 13.2% (Rs 56,480 crore) and 6.5% (Rs 7,526 crore) for Bank of Baroda and Vijaya Bank respectively as at 31st March 2018," it said. "The question that naturally comes knocking is how does creating a new bank with bad loan ratio of 24.9 % (Dena Bank) and 13.2% (Bank of Baroda) respectively genuinely helps any one? On the contrary it will pull down the performance of Vijaya Bank. What it does is that it sweeps under the carpet the bad state of Dena Bank and BoB," the letter added. The bank unions feel that the mergers of these three banks will also lead to job cuts in the banking sector, apart from allowing private sector banks to dominate the industry. "Bank mergers in Indian scenario will eventually lead to decline in job opportunities, youth unemployment, lack of systematic job profiles with huge pendency of disparate work processes among merged banks and entities, huge debt ridden NPAs. Post-merger consolidation in India will open flood gates for foreign or private sector banks to inundate the Indian banking sector with cut throat competitive attitude while completely ignoring the social obligation and responsibilities coupled with obvious and absolute disregard towards socio-economic role," the letter said. The AIBOC strike on December 20 is also against Indian Banks' Associations (IBA) move to leave officers of scale IV and above out of the bipartite wage settlement scope. Authorities with the Galveston County Sheriff's Office are asking the public to help locate a 15-year-old girl who was last seen in Bacliff on Dec. 14. According to Texas EquuSearch, Mercedes "Sadie" Lee was last known to be wearing camouflage print pants, and a black hoodie over a black long-sleeved shirt. She reportedly was known to be carrying a few things with her, including a a pair of burgundy-colored jeans, a pair of blue jeans, a pair of black jeans, a pair of camouflage type jeans and a teal-colored, velour throw blanket. Despite a hectic year that kicked off with a ransomware attack, Allscripts closed out 2018 by maintaining a top spot on Black Book's EHR rankings. Here are five of the most-read stories about Allscripts reported by Becker's Hospital Review this year: 1. Allscripts investigating ransomware incident, some services unavailable to customers In January, Allscripts investigated a global ransomware attack that affected applications hosted in its data centers in Raleigh and Charlotte, N.C., and shut down its electronic prescribing of controlled substances system. 2. Hackers indicted in SamSam ransomware attacks on Allscripts, hospitals A grand jury in New Jersey indicted two Iranian hackers in connection with the ransomware campaign that crippled more than 200 organizations, including Allscripts and several hospitals, universities and cities. 3. Lyft, Allscripts partnership aims to make it easier for patients to make medical appointments Allscripts and ridesharing company Lyft teamed up to help patients find nonemergency transportation to and from their medical appointments. 4. Allscripts confirms layoffs Allscripts confirmed staff layoffs in December, which it says were part of a "rebalancing effort." 5. Allscripts ranks as No. 1 in Black Book's survey: Top 10 integrated EHRs Allscripts ranked as the top integrated EHR, practice management and revenue cycle management platform for health systems and integrated delivery networks, according to a Black Book Market Research survey. 2018 was a year of change for athenahealth. Here are five of the most-read stories about athenahealth reported by Becker's Hospital Review this year: 1. Elliott Management makes all-cash offer for athenahealth at $160 per share, says company 'is not working' Elliott Management made an unsolicited, all-cash offer for athenahealth at $160 per share in May, sending the company into a monthslong saga over whether it would sell itself or remain an independent entity. 2. Jonathan Bush steps down as athenahealth CEO: 4 things to know Athenahealth co-founder Jonathan Bush resigned as president, CEO and member of the company's board in June. 3. UnitedHealth a 2nd-round bidder for athenahealth UnitedHealth Group was reportedly one of the second-round bidders to express interest in acquiring athenahealth. 4. RCM company nThrive seeks merger with athenahealth RCM company nThrive proposed a merger with athenahealth. 5. Veritas Capital, Elliott Management affiliate to buy athenahealth for $5.7B Private equity firm Veritas Capital and Evergreen Coast Capital, an affiliate of hedge fund Elliott Management, have agreed to buy athenahealth for an estimated $5.7 billion in cash. Livongo Health, a wearables company aimed at chronic disease management, tapped former president of Cerner Zane Burke as its CEO, according to Crain's Chicago Business. Mr. Burke will take over the day-to-day operations of the company from current CEO Glen Tullman. Mr. Tullman will remain executive chairman of Livongo. In September, Mr. Burke announced he would step down from his role at Cerner, which re-sold Livongo products like its cellular-enabled glucometer. When asked why he decided to transition to Livongo, Mr. Burke told Crain's: "I'd taken [the job at Cerner] as far as I could. I've known Glen since we competed with each other" when Mr. Tullman was CEO of medical-records software vendor Allscripts. Livongo Health hopes to soon go public, and Mr. Burke could help it get there. He helped grow Cerner from a $150 million startup with 1,000 employees into a $5 billion public company with more than 28,000 workers. South Georgia Medical Center in Valdosta is reportedly planning to negotiate new contracts with two cardiothoracic surgeons who were terminated earlier this year, according to WALB-10 News. Joe Johnson, MD, and Randall Brown, MD, said in July they received letters from C. Ross Berry, the CEO of SGMC at the time, indicating their contracts with the hospital had been terminated. The surgeons worked at the SGMC CardioVascular Institute. The same month the surgeons were terminated, protestors gathered outside the hospital seeking an explanation for SGMC's decision regarding the two surgeons. That decision, in part, also led Mr. Berry to resign from his position as chief executive in October, claiming the hospital authority failed to allow him to do his job and thwarted his attempts to resolve issues at SGMC. After the protests, the hospital authority voted to keep the surgeons on staff for a 90-day period. Dr. Johnson confirmed to the Valdosta Daily Times in November that hospital officials decided not to renew either physician's contract. The hospital has yet to release a statement on why Drs. Johnson and Brown were terminated, WALB-10 News reports. However, the hospital authority voted Dec. 14 to negotiate new contracts with both surgeons. "This decision underscores the board's absolute dedication to providing comprehensive cardiac services in the region and continuous access to medical care," SGMC said in a statement obtained by WALB-10 News. To access the full report, click here. Partners HealthCare filed its application with the Rhode Island Department of Health to finalize its proposed acquisition of Providence, R.I.-based Care New England Dec. 17. The Boston-based health system also plans to file a notice of material change with the Massachusetts Health Policy Commission regarding the merger later this week. Under the proposed deal, which Partners and CNE announced in April 2017, CNE would be absorbed into Partners' Brigham Health in Boston. Brigham Health is the parent company of Boston-based Brigham and Women's Hospital and several other entities. "This relationship will extend our existing affiliations across the Care New England system, bringing new resources to support patient care and physician training and expanding access to research through clinical trials. We're committed to investing in Rhode Island's healthcare economy by becoming active members of the local business community," Elizabeth Nabel, MD, president of Brigham Health, said in a statement. Partners and CNE also finalized their affiliation agreement with the Providence-based Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, which will serve as the primary academic research and teaching institution for the proposed deal. Once the organizations' application to Rhode Island state regulators is deemed complete, officials will have 90 days to issue a ruling. Partners and CNE's regulatory filing with the RIDOH comes on the heels of the Federal Trade Commission's decision not to challenge the proposed merger. Vancouver, Wash.-based PeaceHealth has entered a definitive agreement to acquire Zoom+Care, a Portland, Ore.-based provider of on-demand retail and digital healthcare. Under the deal, PeaceHealth will acquire Zoom+Care's 37 neighborhood clinics in Oregon and Washington. Zoom+Care, which offers urgent care, primary care, specialty care, mental health and telemedicine, will have a separate leadership team and board of directors. "The addition of Zoom to PeaceHealth's networks accelerates our vision of ensuring greater healthcare accessibility and affordability in our communities while increasing our ability to meet the on-demand needs of today's consumer," Liz Dunne, president and CEO of PeaceHealth, said in a press release. "What is so exciting about this relationship is the complementary nature of our organizations and our shared passion for being the stewards of our communities' health and well-being." The transaction is expected to close Dec. 31. More articles on healthcare industry transactions: LifePoint, LHC Group finalize 2 acquisitions Baptist Health, Boca Raton Regional to merge in 2019 Tower Health acquires 19 urgent care centers Maryland's attorney general is asking a judge in his state to weigh in on a recent ACA ruling as he seeks to protect the health law, according to a Reuters report. On Dec. 14, U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor of Texas ruled that the ACA's individual mandate requiring people to have health insurance was unconstitutional and the rest of the law is invalid. Now, Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh has filed a lawsuit asking U.S. District Judge Ellen Hollander in Baltimore to counter that ruling and declare the ACA constitutional, according to Reuters. The lawsuit also challenges the legality of President Donald Trump's November appointment of Matthew Whitaker as acting U.S. attorney general. The Trump administration has asked for the case to be dismissed, claiming Maryland lacks legal standing to file the lawsuit, according to the report. Judge Hollander is reportedly expected to consider the administration's motion to dismiss, as well as the claim regarding Mr. Whitaker. This month, President Trump nominated William Barr to serve as permanent U.S. attorney general. More articles on legal and regulatory issues: 12 latest healthcare industry lawsuits, settlements Pennsylvania health system, CEO will pay $12.5M to resolve billing probe Feds join lawsuit accusing Sutter Health of Medicare Advantage fraud A patient reportedly smuggled a gun into the University of Kansas Health System St. Francis campus in Topeka on Dec. 14 and shot himself, according to WIBW-13 News. Police told the publication they received a call about a shooting incident around 1:30 p.m. Dec. 14. Investigators said the unidentified patient allegedly brought the gun into the hospital in a duffle bag. A police department spokesperson told WIBW-13 News the patient survived the self-inflicted gunshot wound. The health system did not comment to the publication on where the shooting took place inside the facility. To access the full report, click here. A federal judge asked CVS Health and Aetna to ensure some of their operations remained distinct while he continues a review of the companies' merger, according to The New York Times. Here are five things to know: 1. On Dec. 18, Judge Richard J. Leon of the U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia proposed assigning a government monitor to make sure the companies took steps to "preserve the ability to unwind CVS' acquisition of Aetna in the event an unwinding is necessary." 2. CVS Health completed its $70 billion acquisition of Aetna Nov. 28, in a move the companies said will "make a complicated system simpler for all." In October, CVS entered into an agreement with the Department of Justice to move forward with the acquisition, as long as Aetna agreed to sell its standalone Medicare Part D prescription drug plans to Tampa, Fla.-based WellCare Health Plans. WellCare is set to assume control of the 2.2 million-member business Dec. 31. 3. During the Dec. 18 hearing, Mr. Leon re-emphasized his concerns with the Justice Department's antitrust review. He told government lawyers their conduct had been "tone deaf" and "unnecessarily defensive," according to The New York Times. Mr. Leon added he needed more time to review public comment, including that from the American Medical Association, on the settlement. 4. Lawyers for CVS and Aetna agreed to operate Aetna's health insurance business separate from CVS. Aetna will maintain control over what it sells and how it prices products, and the payer's employees will retain their compensation and benefits. CVS said it will keep up a firewall so competitively sensitive information is not exchanged between the two companies. The companies also said they would respond to Mr. Leon's request for government monitoring in a few days. 5. The lengths to which Mr. Leon can go to block the merger rests on how the Tunney Act is interpreted. The Tunney Act is a federal law requiring the Justice Department to get a federal court's approval for merger settlements. The Justice Department said the Tunney Act doesn't require the department to review parts of a merger it didn't find concerning, according to The New York Times. For the full report, click here. More articles on payer issues: Cigna-Express Scripts deal clears regulatory hurdles in California, New York Aetna, Oscar fined in violation of insurance laws Tenet, Cigna dispute heats up ahead of contract deadline Edinburgh, Texas, police have identified the victims of an ambulance crash that killed a patient, Emergency Medicine Technician and injured a paramedic, according to the Journal of Emergency Medical Services. Felipe Huerta Jr., 32, an EMT for Hidalgo County, and 68-year-old Delia Cortines, a patient, were killed Dec. 16 when the driver of a Ford truck drove into oncoming traffic and hit the ambulance, local station KVEO-TV reported. Andrea Rodriguez, a paramedic, was in the back of the ambulance when it crashed. She is is in the hospital and expected to recover, according to local new stations cited by the Journal of Emergency Medical Services. More articles on clincal leadership and infection control: Tennessee hospital will exhume patient's body after her burial without family's OK 5 hospitals in the spotlight for patient safety issues and how they're fixing them Major food companies pledge to use antibiotics responsibly The rise of antibiotic resistance is more closely related to occasional antibiotic use by many people, rather than repeated use among fewer individuals, according to a study published in eLife. For the study, researchers from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston examined antibiotic use among 60 million Americans using 2011-14 data from Truven Health MarketScan Research Database and Medicare. They compared this information with 2012-15 data from ResistanceOpen, a database that tracks antibiotic resistance. In total, researchers assessed 72 pairs of antibiotics and bacteria to see if antibiotic prescription rates correlated with resistance. In 2011, 34 percent of people received antibiotics, with 10 percent of the population using 57 percent of the antibiotics. Researchers discovered a similar distribution for every year included in the study. They also found a link between increased antibiotic use and heightened resistance. Low-intensity, occasional antibiotic use had a stronger influence on resistance rates than intense use by fewer people, according to the researchers. "Our findings suggest that combatting inappropriate antibiotic use among people who don't take many antibiotics may be just as important, or more important, to fighting resistance than focusing on high-intensity users," lead author Scott Olesen, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in Harvard's department of immunology and infectious diseases, said in a press release. "More antibiotic use generally means more antibiotic resistance, but it seems like the number of people taking antibiotics might matter more than the amount they're taking." More articles on clinical leadership and infection control: Chicago hospital performs record 54 heart transplants in 2018 2 killed, 1 injured in Texas ambulance crash Top 10 infection control, patient safety stories in 2018 Sarah Farrell, RN, a nurse at Attleboro, Mass.-based Sturdy Memorial Hospital, is donating a kidney to a patient care assistant she works with at the facility, reports the Taunton Daily Gazette. Ms. Farrell learned she was a donor match to 53-year-old Eileen Montville Nov. 7. Ms. Montville was diagnosed with a progressive kidney disease at age 17 and has been undergoing dialysis for the past three years. The two women have worked together for several years but were not close friends until they were assigned the same shift in May. That's when Ms. Farrell learned Ms. Montville was on a waiting list for a kidney. "I had no idea how much she has to struggle every day to stay alive," Ms. Farrell told Taunton Daily Gazette. "For me it's like donating a dollar. It's only a kidney. I have two. Everyone wants to make it about me, but it's really not." The women will undergo their transplant surgeries Dec. 18 at Boston-based Tufts Medical Center. The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine in Oakland awarded a $5.6 million research grant to UC Davis Health researchers Diana Farmer, MD, and Aijun Wang, PhD, for their work on stem cell therapies for spina bifida. Here are seven things to know: 1. Dr. Farmer serves as the chair of Sacramento, Calif.-based UC Davis Health's department of surgery. She and Dr. Wang will use the funding to continue their decade-long research efforts on spinal cord injuries and nerve regeneration. 2. Prior to his appointment at UC Davis, Dr. Wang studied nerve regeneration, scaffolding and stem cells. During his postdoctoral research fellowship at UC Berkley, Dr. Wang connected with Dr. Farmer, who was a surgeon at UC San Francisco. 3. "Dr. Farmer is a fantastic surgeon she's been interested in [spina bifida] for a long time, and with her coming from the clinical side and me coming from the biomedical-engineering side, it's a great combination," Dr. Wang said. 4. Dr. Farmer recruited Dr. Wang for her spina bifida research when she went to UC Davis. The team focused their research on stem cell therapies and whether they could provide further benefits to babies with spina bifida while still in utero. 5. Their research used stem cells from donor placentas and involved placing them on bioengineered scaffolds to help cover and close the wounds of fetuses with spina bifida to prevent as much damage as possible to their spinal cords. 6. They tested their proposed therapy on small animals with surgically mimicked conditions, which demonstrated positive outcomes. 7. Drs. Farmer and Wang are interested in researching this therapy for use after birth, having seen positive results from English bulldog puppies born with spina bifida that they treated with stem cells. Here are 12 key notes from orthopedic and spine device companies in the past week. Jocelyn Idema, DO, recently implanted Centinel Spine's newest generation of its prodisc L lumbar artificial disc replacement. Johnson & Johnson issued a new share-repurchase plan to buy back $5 billion in stock. WishBone Medical signed a licensing agreement for its guided growth plating system for children with deformed limbs. With two manufacturing facilities in Shannon and Oranmore, Ireland, Zimmer Biomet celebrated 10 years of Irish operations. Mizuho OSI said cheers to its 40th anniversary as a leader in operating room technology and patient positioning solutions. Overland Park (Kan.) Surgical Suites is the first Midwestern outpatient surgery center to offer robotic-assisted partial and total knee replacement using Smith & Nephew's Navio Surgical System. OrthoPediatrics fully launched its small stature scoliosis system in the U.S. Medical device company Conformis will implement various strategies in 2019 to improve its overall business model and achieve profitability in 2021. Stryker board member Ronda Stryker and her husband donated $30 million to Atlanta-based Spelman College in support of a new center for innovation and the arts. DJO plans to move its headquarters from San Diego to Dallas early next year. Irvine, Calif.-based Hoag Orthopedic Institute began enrolling patients in Zimmer Biomet's mymobility clinical study, which aims to analyze patient experiences with the device company's new app. In2Bones Global launched its PEEK PitStop Subtalar Implant for flat foot deformity. Northern Ireland saw 6,855 new businesses emerge in the last year while 4,940 closed, a new government study has shown. The Northern Ireland Inter Departmental Business Register (IDBR), which counts businesses registered for VAT or operating a Pay As You Earn (PAYE) scheme, showed 74,060 firms on its books in March 2018, 2,445 or 3.4% more than in 2017. It doesn't include micro-businesses falling below the VAT threshold or those which don't operate a PAYE scheme. It means many self-employed workers are not counted on the register. It's the fourth year running that the number of businesses has increased in Northern Ireland. It follows a sustained period of post-recession decline between 2008 and 2014. But while the number of new firms appearing on the register increased by 16%, the number closing also rose for the third consecutive year. It leaves Northern Ireland business 'birth rate' at 11%, the lowest among the UK countries. Construction recorded the largest increase during the year, with 535 businesses emerging on the register. The agriculture, forestry and fishing sector, which accounts for 25% of all businesses, also grew, with 440 more companies registered. Economist Andrew Webb, a director at business advisory firm Baker Tilly Mooney Moore in Belfast, said the figures offered some positive indicators. "Encouragingly, one in five of the new businesses were in construction which is always a good bellwether of how the wider economy is faring." However, he said that the good news was tempered by Northern Ireland's rates of growth, which he said remain "stubbornly lower" than in the other UK countries. "Enterprise is a key driver of productivity and economic growth and we need a step change in the rates of business starts here," said the economist. "Achieving this step change has been puzzling policy makers for decades, but there is evidence from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor that our younger generations are more open to the idea of starting their own businesses. He continued: "Initiatives such as the various incubators that are springing up across the city will help increase the profile of entrepreneurship and hopefully lead to a more dynamic business start-up community." All council areas saw an increase in the number of businesses over the year. Newry, Mourne and Down topped the growth table with 410 more businesses, while Belfast remained Northern Ireland's business centre, with 10,560 firms employing 30% of the workforce here. The Mid Ulster district contains the second largest number of NI businesses (8,865), just ahead of Armagh, Banbridge and Craigavon (8,555), Newry, Mourne and Down (8,520), and Fermanagh and Omagh (8,055). Of the 74,060 registered firms, just 2.4% were non-NI owned. However, those businesses account for a quarter of all employees. Some 88% of all companies on the register employ less than nine people. From Greg Swank, 12-4-2 You are about to read a list of 45 goals that found their way down the halls of our great Capitol back in 1963. As... Around 40,000 homes and offices in Northern Ireland struggle to get a decent broadband connection, prompting warnings that it could affect our ability to attract high-tech investment. Around 40,000 homes and offices in Northern Ireland struggle to get a decent broadband connection, prompting warnings that it could affect our ability to attract high-tech investment. The region is still not "fit for purpose", according to a report by communications regulator Ofcom. The findings, detailed in Ofcom's Connected Nations 2018 report, have been criticised by industry leaders and politicians, who are now demanding action. Angela McGowan, CBI NI director and chair of the NI Broadband Industry Forum, said a lack of connectivity is jeopardising our competitive ability. "There has been marginal improvement of the connectivity of Northern Ireland over the last year with regards superfast and ultrafast broadband coverage, but there is still more to be done," she said. "The fact that 5% of residents can't get sufficient broadband speeds and 11% don't have access to superfast speeds is unacceptable. "Investment in new future-proof broadband infrastructure is vital for competitiveness in the 21st century. "If Northern Ireland wants to attract high-tech, high-growth sectors to all parts of the region we need a digital infrastructure that's fit for purpose." DUP leader Arlene Foster, a former Enterprise Minister, said: "The provision of proper broadband infrastructure across all parts of Northern Ireland is vital for families and businesses, particularly in rural areas. "Making progress on issues such as the delivery of improved broadband connectivity is why we need to see the Assembly and Executive back, with ministers taking decisions that can progress these projects that will improve the lives of people right across Northern Ireland." Jonathan Rose of Ofcom said that although mobile phone coverage in Northern Ireland has improved, too many people and businesses are still struggling for a signal. "We're particularly concerned about mobile reception in rural areas," he said. "As we release new airwaves for mobile, we're planning rules that would extend good mobile coverage to areas that haven't had it. "That will help ensure that rural communities have the kind of mobile coverage that people expect in towns and cities, reducing the digital divide." Around 40,000 homes and offices - or 5% of properties in Northern Ireland - still cannot get broadband speeds needed to meet a typical household's needs, with most located in rural areas. This is down from 55,000 premises in 2017 - a drop of 27%. Ofcom defines this as broadband offering a download speed of at least 10Mbit/s, with an upload speed of at least 1Mbit/s - although it expects these requirements to increase over time. Ofcom's report also shows that broadband remains worse in rural areas, where properties are often situated a long way from the telephone exchange or local street cabinet. A Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) spokesman said the report was "disappointing". "If we are to encourage a balanced regional economy in Northern Ireland, it is vital that businesses in rural areas can access broadband with download and upload speeds compatible with running a business," he said. Around 17% of rural premises here (37,000) are not getting basic broadband services, compared to less than 1% in urban areas. Local authorities that are more rural and with more dispersed properties have a higher number of premises that cannot access 10Mbit/s. Although significant, the number has reduced over the last year. In one council area, Fermanagh and Omagh, almost one in five premises (19%) can't get a service delivering more than 10Mbit/s. Mid-Ulster (11%) and Newry, Mourne and Down (8%) also have significant numbers of premises that fall into this undesirable category. SDLP MLA Justin McNulty said border communities are the most disadvantaged in terms of broadband and mobile services. "This report reinforces this fact but it's nothing new to those of us who live and work along the border," he said. "But I believe the facts on the ground are even worse. This can't continue. We need to see action and we need it urgently." The broadband Universal Service Obligation, due to be introduced in 2020 and which will give consumers and businesses the right to request a decent broadband connection, will help those with the slowest connections. Superfast broadband - defined by Ofcom as a download speed of 30Mbit/s or more - was available to 89% of homes and businesses here by September 2018, up from 86% a year earlier. UK-wide availability is 94%. However, availability is lower in rural areas where only 67% of premises have access to a superfast service. Coverage of mobile services here has also improved in recent years. However, as with broadband, coverage it is less extensive in rural areas. The report states 88% of Northern Ireland's geographic area is now covered by all four operators for telephone calls, up from 80% in June 2017. Almost one million people from Northern Ireland used Dublin Airport in the first nine months of the year. Dublin Airport Authority (DAA) confirmed yesterday that it had broken the 30 million passenger milestone in 2018 for the first time in its history with 12 days of trading left. DAA told the Business Telegraph: "About 965,000 Northern Ireland residents used Dublin Airport in the first nine months of this year, which was a 4% increase on the same period in 2017." When inbound visitors using Dublin Airport to travel across the border are factored in, the number for the whole of 2018 is expected to exceed two million. Belfast International Airport, meanwhile, has experienced a difficult year dogged by complaints of long queues in its security area and frustrating delays in baggage. Wilson James took over the airport's security services on November 1, promising to recruit 50 new staff in a bid to tackle the problem. Belfast International Airport also lost its only transatlantic route in October when Norwegian Air pulled the plug on its New York flights, citing a lack of demand. The move prompted a scathing statement from the airport, labelling Norwegian's offering as "inferior", accusing the airline of "moronically channelling much greater levels of Northern Ireland passengers onto Dublin flights". DAA, which is led by Dalton Philips, said yesterday that its transatlantic traffic rose to 3.8m this year, representing an increase of 16% on last year. The number of people using the airport for connecting flights between Europe and North America also shot up by 18% to 1.7m in the year to date. The airport said that the 30m milestone had followed 57 months of continuous growth in passenger numbers. It's just three years since Dublin Airport passed the 25 million passenger threshold. Since 2011 it has added 130 new routes, bringing on 30 new airlines. The airport plans to add 18 more routes next year. These will include new services to Toronto Hamilton, Halifax Nova Scotia, Dallas-Fort Worth, Calgary, Minneapolis-St Paul, Montreal and Kiev. Meanwhile, easyJet has said it is preparing for a record-breaking Christmas, with more than 3.75m passengers expected to fly over the festive period of December 17 to January 4. The airline expects the busiest day of the festive period to be on December 23, with more than 13,000 passengers set to fly from Belfast International Airport on 104 flights. EasyJet UK country manager Ali Gayward said: "We're seeing high demand across our network on December 23 as more people than ever are flying either home or on holiday with us." The Bank of England made 10m of purchases without following proper procedures and has 800 desks sitting empty at its Threadneedle Street offices, an inquiry into its costs has revealed. A National Audit Office (NAO) probe unearthed 200 purchases above 25,000 that were made without staff consulting the Bank's central procurement team in the year to December 2017. The spending watchdog said savings of up to 200,000 could have been made on 2m of these purchases. The NAO report also found that 800 desks are allocated but sitting empty at the Bank's headquarters on any given day, while it has more than 700 job titles, which it said is creating unnecessary complexity. The report comes less than a week after the Bank announced changes to its expenses policy after MPs slammed "staggering" costs run up by officials, including more than 11,000 spent on one flight. The NAO said the Bank would need to "transform" the way it operates the central services function to continue meeting its self-imposed target to cap annual costs at 476m. Amyas Morse, head of the NAO, said: "The Bank of England has rightly recognised that its central services need reform and has started to take action. "However, the Bank should not underestimate the scale of change required. "Improvements will only be possible if staff across the Bank are encouraged to embrace a more cost-conscious culture." The NAO said the purchases made without consulting the central procurement team largely related to IT costs. Apart from death and taxes, one of the most certain things in life is a prediction from a southern writer that Catholics will soon outnumber Protestants in Northern Ireland, leading quickly to a majority for Irish unity. The front-runner in these attempts to disconcert unionists used to be the southern historian and writer Tim Pat Coogan, a former editor of Eamon De Valera's Irish Press newspaper. The baton was later taken up by David McKittrick, Belfast correspondent of the liberal London Independent. The most recent entrant into this field is the Dublin economist, broadcaster and journalist David McWilliams. McWilliams came to prominence for correctly describing the Irish economic boom of the early-Noughties as a credit bubble that would soon collapse. His celebrity now depends as much on his ability as a stand-up comedian and co-founder of the Kilkenomics festival. In true Irish fashion, McWilliams has managed to make economics amusing. Although not in the league of Michael Lewis, or P J O'Rourke, he has nonetheless built something of an international reputation. His connection with Northern Ireland is through marriage into an east Belfast Protestant family, a link he makes good use of in his writing and talks. He was the star turn at an Ulster University Brexit symposium last year, in which he contrasted the economic failure of the north with the glittering success of the Republic. He particularly stressed the replacement of Ulster as the dominant seat of manufacturing in Ireland with that of the modern Republic. This was done in a light-hearted vein, but he did not always remain on the right side of the narrow line between comedy, parody and triumphalism. This was particularly the case with his predictions of eventual Irish unity, which appeared to be based on thin evidence. All of this might have been of only local interest until McWilliams was recently given front-page coverage in the Financial Times, an influential paper with a wide international readership. Again, the same themes were the failure of the northern economy and the inevitability of Irish unity. The core of his case on unity was that the Catholic share of Northern Ireland's population had been rising for almost a century and would soon overtake that of Protestants. In doing so, he committed the simplest of statistical errors - drawing a straight line between two points in time and assuming that the trend would continue unchanged in future. He used the 2011 census to argue that Catholics were already a majority among the under-four-year-olds and implied this would continue to build a majority as these and future cohorts grew up. In fact, the percentage of four-year-olds described (presumably by their parents) as Catholic was 44% of the total population of under-fours. What McWilliams had done was to compare the number of Catholic under-fours with those described in the census as Protestants. In doing so, he left out those who had no religion and the substantial number of those whose parents had refused to answer the religion question. The 2011 census clearly shows that the percentage of the population who described themselves as Catholic had peaked among those born almost two decades ago and has subsequently slowly declined. Among those who were teenagers in 2011, 46% said they were Catholics, but among the under-fours in 2011 the figure was lower, at 44%. If this falling trend continues, there will never be a Catholic majority. Since Catholic birth-rates are now close to those of Protestants, it seems likely the trend will, indeed, continue. Predictions for the future share of Catholics in the population also depend on migration and here there is major new factor. One-in-20 of Northern Ireland's Catholics is now from Poland, Lithuania, Portugal and the Philippines. The future constitutional preference of these immigrants and their children is hard to predict. It is certainly wrong to accept McWilliams' glib equation of Catholicism with Irish nationalism. The 2011 census showed that only half of Northern Ireland's Catholics identify as "Irish" and under half have an Irish passport. The authoritative Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey shows that, even in 2017/18, the proportion of Catholics who support eventual Irish unity is 41%. Only 7% express a desire for immediate unity. Among the whole population of Northern Ireland, only 20% supported Irish unity in the 2017/18 survey. McWillams had assumed that Brexit had increased support for Irish unity as a means of remaining in the EU. In this, he echoed the assumption of Sinn Fein that because 56% voted Remain in the 2016 referendum, this must have included many Protestants. However, the assumption that this may have implied growing support for Irish unity among Protestants appears to be wrong. The NI Life and Times Survey shows virtually no change in support for Irish unity among self-described Protestants since the pre-referendum years. Moreover, the 2017 General Election showed a huge 108,000 increase in the DUP vote and a one-third collapse in the vote of the UUP, which then supported Remain, but has subsequently changed its stance. It seems most likely that, while some Protestants preferred the UK to remain within the EU, this did not mean that they preferred Northern Ireland to remain in the EU if the UK was out. More movement in support for Irish unity is observed among Catholics, or those with no religion, but even here the change is not large. We do not know why so many Catholics support Northern Ireland's place within the UK, but we can guess that the NHS, free school education, a generous social security system and low-cost housing are all factors. McWilliams tries to argue that the Republic of Ireland is a much more successful economy and that its people are richer. He seems not to know that Professor John Fitzgerald of ESRI in Dublin (and a more eminent economist than himself) has recently calculated that living standards are 25% higher in Northern Ireland compared to the south. Although wages are generally higher in the south, higher taxes and fees and inferior levels of public-service provision mean that northerners do better, even before we take cheaper housing into account. Nor does the north's dependence on public spending indicate a weak private sector, as McWilliams simplistically suggests. Rather, it reflects the way the UK works. The high birth-rates of the past created an excess of labour in Northern Ireland, which a sedately growing UK economic union was not designed to accommodate. Instead, public services (and hence jobs) were provided for a growing population. While the south relies on its rip-off tax-haven status to employ a growing population, the UK provides public spending in a way that is fully sustainable. Many seem to like it that way. Dr Graham Gudgin is chief economic adviser of Policy Exchange, described as the most influential think-tank on the centre-Right. He is honorary research associate at the Centre for Business Research at the University of Cambridge and visiting professor at Ulster University. I have the privilege of meeting so many people who follow my column, or who have been inspired to become an organ donor because of the amazing life-saving stories which are covered across the media. However, when my mum was invited to meet and speak with the final year health studies students at South Eastern Regional College, she had a big surprise in store. With a newly expanded organ donation presentation, she headed off to Newtownards at the invitation of course co-ordinator Nikki Rainey. Shortly after meeting with the students, she was told that they have been following my column in their lessons as they study all aspects of organ donation. What an accolade to have a class of students learning from my own quirky kidney journey. Mum was talking to them all about our transplant experience earlier this year, as well as her work to promote organ donation and efforts to deliver an opt-out system for Northern Ireland. She was also highlighting the dedicated support being provided across Northern Ireland to kidney patients through Kidney Care UK. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to join her, but I hear she had a fabulous time and she tells me that the students were clued up on their studies, which made for a super question and answer session. I would like to send them best wishes as they finish their coursework and thank them for their interest. Organ donation also hit the headlines last week thanks to the Department of Health announcing a new policy. To give a little bit of background, back in 2016 the Assembly passed two pieces of legislation which my mum had written, to provide, for the first time, a requirement for the Department of Health to promote the gift of life through organ donation. Mum was on hand to see Chief Medical Officer Dr Michael McBride announce that the department was putting funding of 250,000 behind the new policy to encourage giving the gift of life. How fitting it was to be announced on Northern Ireland's organ donation discussion day - and in the month of Christmas. The announcement was made possible because of the Secretary of State announcing in October that our local departments could make decisions in the absence a working Assembly. What an amazing thing it is to see a good news story like this coming out of this decision - thank you to everyone involved in delivering it. Decisions like this will have the impact of spawning conversations and donation decisions around Northern Ireland, which have the power to save lives. This time last year I was facing a Christmas on dialysis, joined by my fellow patients, and of course our wonderful nurses and auxiliaries, and I know exactly what it is like to be given hope through the decision of others, firstly in 2009 and then earlier this year. Decisions save lives and this new policy is a huge step forward. This year I'm looking forward to having some real family time free from the thoughts and constraints of dialysis, a feeling I wish every dialysis patient could experience. And I'm wishing you all a very happy Christmas from my family to yours. Just do one thing for me: when you are opening all those neatly wrapped gifts on Christmas Day and you have the whole family around, have a chat about giving the ultimate gift and you could become a life-saver. Williams partner Janine, his grandmother May and mother Louise; the rider with his daughter Ella (inset), and (below) William in action The heartbroken mother of late road racing hero William Dunlop says her family are facing a "poignant and raw" first Christmas without him. The 32-year-old Ballymoney rider died in a crash during practice for the Skerries 100 race in Co Dublin back in July. It was the third tragedy to hit the Dunlop family. William's legendary uncle Joey Dunlop died in 2000 racing in Estonia, and just eight years later death struck again when his father Robert was killed during a practice session at the North West 200. William had been looking forward to the birth of his second child with his partner Janine Brolly. His "pride and joy", little Ella, marked her second birthday just three days after her Daddy was buried. The couple's baby girl, Willa Wren, was born two months after her father's passing. At the time William's devastated partner said she had no doubt that he would have been "besotted" with his new baby and said she was "grateful for two precious girls who are keeping my heart beating". Now the family are facing a tough Christmas without a much-loved partner, son, father and brother. William's mother Louise says that it will be very hard. "The first Christmas without William will be really tough," she told the Belfast Telegraph. "William has only left us a few months ago and we are just not really able to want to do a lot or see people. That raw stage is still here. We just want time and space because you cannot get over things as easily now, particularly when it was someone so young and it was very unexpected. It is hard, but you have to do things. There is an awful lot of people going through exactly the same thing as we are." Louise says that Janine is finding the loss of her partner and father of her two children particularly difficult. At the time of his funeral Louise paid a special tribute, promising to tell their girls "how special Daddy was and how much he loves them". 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 PACEMAKER, BELFAST, 23/8/2017: William Dunlop on the start line for practice at the Classic TT. PICTURE BY STEPHEN DAVISON William Dunlop racing during practice at Skerries today. Pacemaker PressEye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 9th May 2017 Vauxhall International North West 200 practice sessions. Pictured: Paul Jordan and William Dunlop. Picture: Philip Magowan / PressEye Philip Magowan / PressEye William Dunlop racing during practice at Skerries today. PACEMAKEER BELFAST 07/07/2018 PACEMAKER, BELFAST, 20/3/2017: William Dunlop with his Caffrey International R6 Yamaha he will race in the Supersport class in 2017. PICTURE BY STEPHEN DAVISON PACEMAKER, BELFAST, 7/7/2018: William Dunlop in action on the Temple Golf Club Yamaha during practice for the Skerries 100 today. William died in crash during the session. PICTURE BY DEREK WILSON PACEMAKER, BELFAST, 2010: Michael and William Dunlop in their father Robert's Memorial Garden in Ballymoney, Co. Antrim. PICTURE BY STEPHEN DAVISON PACEMAKER, BELFAST, 7/7/2018: Gardai at the scene where William Dunlop suffered a fatal crash during practice for the Skerries 100 today. Northern Ireland- 13th August 2014 Mandatory Credit - Matt Mackey/Presseye.com William Dunlop in action on board his superbike at practice for the Dundrod 150 and Ulster Grand Prix road races. PACEMAKER, BELFAST, 25/8/2017: Michael and William Dunlop at Classic TT practice tonight. PICTURE BY STEPHEN DAVISON PACEMAKER, BELFAST, 17/5/2014: William Dunlop celebrates after winning the opening Superbike race at the Vauxhall International North West 200. PICTURE BY STEPHEN DAVISON William Dunlop and his partner Janine arrive at the Adelaide Motorcycle Awards in Belfast in 2014. PICTURE BY STEPHEN DAVISON PACEMAKER, BELFAST, 17/1/2014. PACEMAKER BELFAST 03/06/13: Brothers Michael (MD Racing Honda) and William Dunlop (Milwaukee Yamaha) in the winners enclosure after finishing first and third in the opening Monster Energy supersport race on his MD Racing Honda at the 2013 Isle of Man TT PHOTO BY STEPHEN DAVISON/PACEMAKER PACEMAKER, BELFAST, 23/1/2015: That's my boy! William Dunlop, winner of the Race of the Year category at the Adelaide Motorbike awards with his mother Louise. PICTURE BY STEPHEN DAVISON William Dunlop at the Armoy Road Races in 2016. Picture: Philip Magowan / PressEye Philip Magowan PressEye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 27th April 2017 Cookstown 100 Road Races. Pictured: William Dunlop. Picture: Philip Magowan / PressEye Philip Magowan / PressEye PACEMAKER, BELFAST, 1/5/2015: William Dunlop during Tandragee 100 practice. PICTURE BY STEPHEN DAVISON PACEMAKER BELFAST 12/05/2015 William Dunlop (Tyco BMW Motorrad Racing) during Tuesday's practice for the North West 200 Road races. Photo Stephen Davison/Pacemaker Press PACEMAKER, BELFAST, 24/7/2015: William Dunlop (CD Racing Yamaha) celebrates winning the opening 600cc race at the Armoy road races on Friday evening. PICTURE BY STEPHEN DAVISON PressEye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 30th May 2017 Isle of Man TT Practice Week Pictured: William Dunlop. Picture: Philip Magowan / PressEye Philip Magowan / PressEye Mandatory Credit: Rowland White / PressEye Motor Cycling: Tandragee 100 Venue: Tandragee Date: 1st May 2015 Caption: William Dunlop Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 10th August 2016 Practice sessions for the Plant Lubrication Dundrod 150 and the MCE Insurance Ulster Grand Prix get underway. Pictured: William Dunlop. Picture: Philip Magowan / PressEye Philip Magowan PressEye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 12th May 2017 Vauxhall International North West 200 Pictured: William Dunlop with fans. Picture: Philip Magowan / PressEye Philip Magowan / PressEye PressEye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 07th June 2017 Isle of Man TT RL360 Quantum Superstock Race Pictured: William Dunlop. Picture: Philip Magowan / PressEye Philip Magowan / PressEye PressEye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 10th August 2017 Dundrod 150 Gym Co Ultralightweight / Lightweight Race Pictured: Paul Jordan and William Dunlop. Picture: Philip Magowan / PressEye Philip Magowan / PressEye PressEye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 09th August 2017 Ulster Grand Prix & Dundrod 150 Practice Pictured: William Dunlop. Picture: Philip Magowan / PressEye Philip Magowan / PressEye Mandatory Credit: Rowland White PressEye Road Racing: Cooktown 100 Venue: Orritor Date: 30th April 2016 Race: Supersport 2 Caption: William Dunlop celebrates @Press Eye Ltd Northern Ireland- 3rd June 2013 Mandatory Credit - Brian Little/ Presseye William Dunlop (Milwaukee Yamaha) at Creg-Ny-Baa during Monday's Royan London 360 Superstock Race over the Mountain Course during the IOM TT 2013. Brian Little Northern Ireland- 13th May 2014 Mandatory Credit - Picture - Matt Mackey/Presseye.com Vauxhall International 2014 North West 200. Tuesday practice. William Dunlop Tyco. Press Eye Ltd Northern Ireland 26th April 2013 - Mandatory Credit - Picture by Matt Mackey/presseye.com Cookstown 100 road races practice evening. Ballymoney rider William Dunlop. PACEMAKER BELFAST, 9/5/2006: Robert Dunlop is the most successful rider in the history of the North West 200 with 14 wins and as he goes for win 15 in 2006 he will have strong competition from his own sons Michael and William. PICTURE BY STEPHEN DAVISON PACEMAKER, BELFAST,2007: The Dunlop family enjoyed a winning day at teh Mid Antrim 150 with Michael, Dad Robert and William all winning a race apiece. PICTURE BY STEPHEN DAVISON PACEMAKER, BELFAST, 2008: Robert Dunlop and his three sons Daniel, Michael and William. PICTURE BY STEPHEN DAVISON / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp PACEMAKER, BELFAST, 23/8/2017: William Dunlop on the start line for practice at the Classic TT. PICTURE BY STEPHEN DAVISON She poignantly wrote in a tribute on William's official website that the area where "he really shone brightest was as a father". Louise says his little girls are helping everyone in the family cope with their loss. "We are getting through and Janine and the girls are getting us all through too," she said. "But they have their own struggles as well, Janine in particular. "Just at the moment we are just not functioning very well. It's not easy. We don't know what we will do on Christmas Day. At this moment in time we are just taking it day by day. We are just trying to get through the next few weeks and months, and get Janine through it and the girls. "It's just about taking each day as it comes. For Janine it is particularly hard. It is her future gone, she is grieving for the girls as well as for herself. It is all just very painful and still very raw at the moment." 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 Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Previous Next Close The funeral of William Dunlop takes place in Ballymoney on July 11th 2018 (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph) Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph PACEMAKER, BELFAST, 11/7/2018: Motorcycle racer William Dunlop's brother Michael, carries his coffin at the funeral at Garryduff Presbyterian church outside Ballymoney today. Dunlop was killed in a crash during practice for the Skerries 100 last Saturday. PICTURE BY STEPHEN DAVISON PACEMAKER, BELFAST, 11/7/2018: Motorcycle racer William Dunlop's partner Janine and his mother Louise, (centre) at his funeral at Garryduff Presbyterian church outside Ballymoney today. Dunlop was killed in a crash during practice for the Skerries 100 last Saturday. PICTURE BY STEPHEN DAVISON PACEMAKER, BELFAST, 11/7/2018: A biker pays his respects at motorcycle racer William Dunlop's funeral at Garryduff Presbyterian church outside Ballymoney today. Dunlop was killed in a crash during practice for the Skerries 100 last Saturday. PICTURE BY STEPHEN DAVISON PACEMAKER, BELFAST, 11/7/2018: Grief stricken. A young fan at motorcycle racer William Dunlop's funeral at Garryduff Presbyterian church outside Ballymoney today. Dunlop was killed in a crash during practice for the Skerries 100 last Saturday. PICTURE BY STEPHEN DAVISON PACEMAKER, BELFAST, 11/7/2018: Racers Glenn Irwin and Derek Sheils and their partners Laura and Alicia pay their respects at motorcycle racer William Dunlop's funeral at Garryduff Presbyterian church outside Ballymoney today. Dunlop was killed in a crash during practice for the Skerries 100 last Saturday. PICTURE BY STEPHEN DAVISON PACEMAKER, BELFAST, 11/7/2018: Bikers pay their respects at motorcycle racer William Dunlop's funeral at Garryduff Presbyterian church outside Ballymoney today. Dunlop was killed in a crash during practice for the Skerries 100 last Saturday. PICTURE BY STEPHEN DAVISON PACEMAKER, BELFAST, 11/7/2018: A huge crowd of mourners brave the rain at motorcycle racer William Dunlop's funeral at Garryduff Presbyterian church outside Ballymoney today. Dunlop was killed in a crash during practice for the Skerries 100 last Saturday. PICTURE BY STEPHEN DAVISON PACEMAKER, BELFAST, 11/7/2018: A huge crowd of mourners brave the rain at motorcycle racer William Dunlop's funeral at Garryduff Presbyterian church outside Ballymoney today. Dunlop was killed in a crash during practice for the Skerries 100 last Saturday. PICTURE BY STEPHEN DAVISON PACEMAKER, BELFAST, 11/7/2018: Members of the Loughshinny Club (black and yellow shirts) organisers of the Skerries 100 races where motorcycle racer William Dunlop was killed in practice last Saturday, join the mourners at his funeral at Garryduff Presbyterian church outside Ballymoney today. Dunlop was killed in a crash during practice for the Skerries 100 last Saturday. PICTURE BY STEPHEN DAVISON PACEMAKER, BELFAST, 11/7/2018: Hawk team bosses Steve and Stuart Hicken at motorcycle racer William Dunlop's funeral at Garryduff Presbyterian church outside Ballymoney today. Dunlop was killed in a crash during practice for the Skerries 100 last Saturday. PICTURE BY STEPHEN DAVISON PACEMAKER, BELFAST, 11/7/2018: William Dunlop's grandmother May at the motorcycle racer's funeral at Garryduff Presbyterian church outside Ballymoney today. Dunlop was killed in a crash during practice for the Skerries 100 last Saturday. PICTURE BY STEPHEN DAVISON PACEMAKER, BELFAST, 11/7/2018: Race marshals pay their respects at motorcycle racer William Dunlop's funeral at Garryduff Presbyterian church outside Ballymoney today. Dunlop was killed in a crash during practice for the Skerries 100 last Saturday. PICTURE BY STEPHEN DAVISON PACEMAKER, BELFAST, 11/7/2018: Racers Glenn Irwin and Derek Sheils pay their respects at motorcycle racer William Dunlop's funeral at Garryduff Presbyterian church outside Ballymoney today. Dunlop was killed in a crash during practice for the Skerries 100 last Saturday. PICTURE BY STEPHEN DAVISON PACEMAKER, BELFAST, 11/7/2018: A huge crowd of mourners brave the rain at motorcycle racer William Dunlop's funeral at Garryduff Presbyterian church outside Ballymoney today. Dunlop was killed in a crash during practice for the Skerries 100 last Saturday. PICTURE BY STEPHEN DAVISON PACEMAKER, BELFAST, 11/7/2018: William Dunlop's former 125cc racing rivals Melissa Kennedy, William Cowden and Nigel Moore pictured at the motorcycle racer's funeral at Garryduff Presbyterian church outside Ballymoney today. Dunlop was killed in a crash during practice for the Skerries 100 last Saturday. PICTURE BY STEPHEN DAVISON PACEMAKER, BELFAST, 11/7/2018: Former road racers Brian Reid, Steven Cull and sponsor Davy Glover at motorcycle racer William Dunlop's funeral at Garryduff Presbyterian church outside Ballymoney today. Dunlop was killed in a crash during practice for the Skerries 100 last Saturday. PICTURE BY STEPHEN DAVISON PACEMAKER, BELFAST, 11/7/2018: Ryan Farquhar at motorcycle racer William Dunlop's funeral at Garryduff Presbyterian church outside Ballymoney today. Dunlop was killed in a crash during practice for the Skerries 100 last Saturday. PICTURE BY STEPHEN DAVISON PACEMAKER, BELFAST, 11/7/2018: A huge crowd of mourners brave the rain at motorcycle racer William Dunlop's funeral at Garryduff Presbyterian church outside Ballymoney today. Dunlop was killed in a crash during practice for the Skerries 100 last Saturday. PICTURE BY STEPHEN DAVISON PACEMAKER, BELFAST, 11/7/2018: Race marshals pay their respects at motorcycle racer William Dunlop's funeral at Garryduff Presbyterian church outside Ballymoney today. Dunlop was killed in a crash during practice for the Skerries 100 last Saturday. PICTURE BY STEPHEN DAVISON PACEMAKER, BELFAST, 11/7/2018: A race marshal is overcome by emotion at motorcycle racer William Dunlop's funeral at Garryduff Presbyterian church outside Ballymoney today. Dunlop was killed in a crash during practice for the Skerries 100 last Saturday. PICTURE BY STEPHEN DAVISON PACEMAKER, BELFAST, 11/7/2018: Roger Chen from Taiwan was a mourner at motorcycle racer William Dunlop's funeral at Garryduff Presbyterian church outside Ballymoney today. Dunlop was killed in a crash during practice for the Skerries 100 last Saturday. PICTURE BY STEPHEN DAVISON Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 11th July 2018 Funeral for road racer William Dunlop at Garryduff Presbyterian Church outside Ballymoney in Co. Antrim. The 32-year-old was killed while participating in the practise session of the Skerries 100 in Co. Dublin lat Saturday. William's father Robert was also buried from Garryduff Presbyterian Church when he died at the North West 200 road race in 2008. Jackie Fullerton pictured the funeral service. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 11th July 2018 Funeral for road racer William Dunlop at Garryduff Presbyterian Church outside Ballymoney in Co. Antrim. The 32-year-old was killed while participating in the practise session of the Skerries 100 in Co. Dublin lat Saturday. William's father Robert was also buried from Garryduff Presbyterian Church when he died at the North West 200 road race in 2008. Mourners pictured the funeral service. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 11th July 2018 Funeral for road racer William Dunlop at Garryduff Presbyterian Church outside Ballymoney in Co. Antrim. The 32-year-old was killed while participating in the practise session of the Skerries 100 in Co. Dublin lat Saturday. William's father Robert was also buried from Garryduff Presbyterian Church when he died at the North West 200 road race in 2008. Family and friends pictured the funeral service. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 11th July 2018 Funeral for road racer William Dunlop at Garryduff Presbyterian Church outside Ballymoney in Co. Antrim. The 32-year-old was killed while participating in the practise session of the Skerries 100 in Co. Dublin lat Saturday. William's father Robert was also buried from Garryduff Presbyterian Church when he died at the North West 200 road race in 2008. Family friend and sports commentator Liam Beckett pictured the funeral service. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 11th July 2018 Funeral for road racer William Dunlop at Garryduff Presbyterian Church outside Ballymoney in Co. Antrim. The 32-year-old was killed while participating in the practise session of the Skerries 100 in Co. Dublin lat Saturday. William's father Robert was also buried from Garryduff Presbyterian Church when he died at the North West 200 road race in 2008. MP Ian Paisley Jnr pictured the funeral service. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 11th July 2018 Funeral for road racer William Dunlop at Garryduff Presbyterian Church outside Ballymoney in Co. Antrim. The 32-year-old was killed while participating in the practise session of the Skerries 100 in Co. Dublin lat Saturday. William's father Robert was also buried from Garryduff Presbyterian Church when he died at the North West 200 road race in 2008. Family and friends pictured the funeral service. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 11th July 2018 Funeral for road racer William Dunlop at Garryduff Presbyterian Church outside Ballymoney in Co. Antrim. The 32-year-old was killed while participating in the practise session of the Skerries 100 in Co. Dublin lat Saturday. William's father Robert was also buried from Garryduff Presbyterian Church when he died at the North West 200 road race in 2008. Road racer Glenn Irwin pictured the funeral service. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 11th July 2018 Funeral for road racer William Dunlop at Garryduff Presbyterian Church outside Ballymoney in Co. Antrim. The 32-year-old was killed while participating in the practise session of the Skerries 100 in Co. Dublin lat Saturday. William's father Robert was also buried from Garryduff Presbyterian Church when he died at the North West 200 road race in 2008. William Dunlop's brother Michael arrives for the funeral service. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 11th July 2018 Funeral for road racer William Dunlop at Garryduff Presbyterian Church outside Ballymoney in Co. Antrim. The 32-year-old was killed while participating in the practise session of the Skerries 100 in Co. Dublin lat Saturday. William's father Robert was also buried from Garryduff Presbyterian Church when he died at the North West 200 road race in 2008. Family and friends pictured the funeral service. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 11th July 2018 General view of the PSNI officers at the scene of the Cluan Place bonfire in east Belfast as contractors remove material from the 11th night bonfire. A large police operation was also put in place with over 100 PSNI officers in riot gear present at the scene. Councillor Jim Rodgers speaks to the police. Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye. Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press E Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 11th July 2018 Funeral for road racer William Dunlop at Garryduff Presbyterian Church outside Ballymoney in Co. Antrim. The 32-year-old was killed while participating in the practise session of the Skerries 100 in Co. Dublin lat Saturday. William's father Robert was also buried from Garryduff Presbyterian Church when he died at the North West 200 road race in 2008. Mourners pictured the funeral service. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 11th July 2018 Funeral for road racer William Dunlop at Garryduff Presbyterian Church outside Ballymoney in Co. Antrim. The 32-year-old was killed while participating in the practise session of the Skerries 100 in Co. Dublin lat Saturday. William's father Robert was also buried from Garryduff Presbyterian Church when he died at the North West 200 road race in 2008. Mourners pictured the funeral service. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 11th July 2018 Funeral for road racer William Dunlop at Garryduff Presbyterian Church outside Ballymoney in Co. Antrim. The 32-year-old was killed while participating in the practise session of the Skerries 100 in Co. Dublin lat Saturday. William's father Robert was also buried from Garryduff Presbyterian Church when he died at the North West 200 road race in 2008. Family friend and sports commentator Liam Beckett pictured the funeral service. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye William's partner Janine as the funeral of William Dunlop takes place in Ballymoney on July 11th 2018 (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph) Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph The funeral of William Dunlop takes place in Ballymoney on July 11th 2018 (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph) Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph The funeral of William Dunlop takes place in Ballymoney on July 11th 2018 (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph) Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph The funeral of William Dunlop takes place in Ballymoney on July 11th 2018 (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph) Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph Michael Dunlop The funeral of William Dunlop takes place in Ballymoney on July 11th 2018 (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph) Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph Daniel Dunlop The funeral of William Dunlop takes place in Ballymoney on July 11th 2018 (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph) Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph William's partner Janine as the funeral of William Dunlop takes place in Ballymoney on July 11th 2018 (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph) Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph The funeral of William Dunlop takes place in Ballymoney on July 11th 2018 (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph) Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph William's partner Janine as the funeral of William Dunlop takes place in Ballymoney on July 11th 2018 (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph) Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph William's partner Janine as the funeral of William Dunlop takes place in Ballymoney on July 11th 2018 (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph) Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph The funeral of William Dunlop takes place in Ballymoney on July 11th 2018 (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph) Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph The funeral of William Dunlop takes place in Ballymoney on July 11th 2018 (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph) Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph The funeral of William Dunlop takes place in Ballymoney on July 11th 2018 (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph) Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph Motorcycle racing fans attend the funeral of Road Racing champion William Dunlop at Garryduff Presbyterian Church, Ballymoney after he died in a crash during practice for the Skerries 100 in County Dublin. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Wednesday July 11, 2018. See PA story FUNERAL Dunlop. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA William Dunlop funeral The funeral of William Dunlop takes place in Ballymoney on July 11th 2018 (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph) Kevin Scott / Belfast Telegraph TV presenter Adrian Logan attends the funeral of Road Racing champion William Dunlop takes place at Garryduff Presbyterian Church, Ballymoney after he died in a crash during practice for the Skerries 100 in County Dublin. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Wednesday July 11, 2018. See PA story FUNERAL Dunlop. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 11th July 2018 Funeral for road racer William Dunlop at Garryduff Presbyterian Church outside Ballymoney in Co. Antrim. The 32-year-old was killed while participating in the practise session of the Skerries 100 in Co. Dublin lat Saturday. William's father Robert was also buried from Garryduff Presbyterian Church when he died at the North West 200 road race in 2008. William Dunlop's family, including his brother Michael(back right) carry his coffin from the church after the funeral service. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 11th July 2018 Funeral for road racer William Dunlop at Garryduff Presbyterian Church outside Ballymoney in Co. Antrim. The 32-year-old was killed while participating in the practise session of the Skerries 100 in Co. Dublin lat Saturday. William's father Robert was also buried from Garryduff Presbyterian Church when he died at the North West 200 road race in 2008. William Dunlop's family, including his brother Michael(back right) carry his coffin from the church after the funeral service. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 11th July 2018 Funeral for road racer William Dunlop at Garryduff Presbyterian Church outside Ballymoney in Co. Antrim. The 32-year-old was killed while participating in the practise session of the Skerries 100 in Co. Dublin lat Saturday. William's father Robert was also buried from Garryduff Presbyterian Church when he died at the North West 200 road race in 2008. William Dunlop's family, including his brother Michael(back right) carry his coffin from the church after the funeral service. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 11th July 2018 Funeral for road racer William Dunlop at Garryduff Presbyterian Church outside Ballymoney in Co. Antrim. The 32-year-old was killed while participating in the practise session of the Skerries 100 in Co. Dublin lat Saturday. William's father Robert was also buried from Garryduff Presbyterian Church when he died at the North West 200 road race in 2008. William Dunlop's family carry his coffin from the church after the funeral service as fellow road racer Glenn Irwin looks on. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 11th July 2018 Funeral for road racer William Dunlop at Garryduff Presbyterian Church outside Ballymoney in Co. Antrim. The 32-year-old was killed while participating in the practise session of the Skerries 100 in Co. Dublin lat Saturday. William's father Robert was also buried from Garryduff Presbyterian Church when he died at the North West 200 road race in 2008. William Dunlop's family, including his brother Michael(back right) carry his coffin from the church after the funeral service. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye Press Eye - Belfast - Northern Ireland - 11th July 2018 Funeral for road racer William Dunlop at Garryduff Presbyterian Church outside Ballymoney in Co. Antrim. The 32-year-old was killed while participating in the practise session of the Skerries 100 in Co. Dublin lat Saturday. William's father Robert was also buried from Garryduff Presbyterian Church when he died at the North West 200 road race in 2008. William Dunlop's family, including his brother Michael(back right) carry his coffin from the church after the funeral service as fellow road racer Glenn Irwin looks on. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp The funeral of William Dunlop takes place in Ballymoney on July 11th 2018 (Photo by Kevin Scott for Belfast Telegraph) In July thousands of mourners packed the quiet country road outside Garryduff Presbyterian Church in Ballymoney to say goodbye to William. In the five months since the family have been inundated with messages of support. Louise says that hearing people speak so warmly of her son has been a huge comfort to her and her family. She says that the family have received gifts, cards and letters from all over the world from people who have been touched by her son's life and who loved him. She adds the family are extremely proud of all that he achieved in his short 32 years. "A lot of people haven't forgotten William and certainly that has been a comfort to us," she said. "He made such an impression on people. And that was really quite shocking, because he was quite a quiet and private person. But people seemed to have warmed to him greatly for that. We are just grateful that we had him in our lives for as long as we did. It is just so raw and painful at the moment and we are just trying to get through every day. "I just want to thank everyone who has been thinking of us and sending gifts. They are still coming. The biking community are like a family. They have all rallied around us. They have been wonderful, as they always are. And the continued support from friends, family and the church really is much valued by us. "I can't believe the outpouring of love and support. I've had letters from as far away as New Zealand and Australia and all over the world. We've had letters from borough councils in Northern Ireland, from every corner of the globe. William truly touched people and we have to be proud of the 32 years that he was with us. He achieved so much and we are so proud of him. So many people loved him. "We indeed know it's not easy for other people in exactly the same position as us. So we just have to make the best of it and get through." William was a devoted family man. Speaking to the Belfast Telegraph in 2016 after Ella was born, he said he didn't think being a dad would change the way he thought, but that it "makes you realise there is more to life than motorbikes and winning". Now he is gone, Louise says the family get flashes of him in Ella. "The girls, particularly Ella, are so like their father. Ella is the double of him and her little ways and her mannerisms are his. I thought she might lean more to Mummy, but she's not, she's her Daddy's girl," Louisee explained. Louise has been trying to keep herself busy so as not to dwell on the grief and loss that is never far from her mind. She says Christmas will be particularly hard for them all with the empty chair at the table. "I think we can speak for most people and say that it is a really hard time," she said. "But you just try to get through it day by day, with the help of friends and the church. At the minute I am just preoccupied. Sometimes that is the only way to do it - to keep incredibly busy. It's almost like you don't want to dwell on things. Christmas will come and go like every other day, but it's a particularly poignant thing for most families who have gone through this - it's that empty chair. "As time goes on things do start to look a little bit brighter. But just at the minute it has only been months, and it is quite hard. You get through on autopilot almost. "Janine has to be strong now, and she has been. We'll get through it for the girls. Every day after Christmas and every month after Christmas. We just want to thank everyone for thinking of us." Thousands of troops are to be put on standby to help with potential disruption from a no-deal Brexit, it has been revealed. Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson's announcement that 3,500 regular soldiers and reservists will be "held at readiness" came as Cabinet agreed to ramp up preparations for the UK crashing out of the European Union without a deal. With just 100 days to go to the March 29 scheduled Brexit date, businesses were urged to consider implementing their own contingency plans and households "should also make preparations". Mrs May was accused by Liberal Democrat leader Sir Vince Cable of "psychological warfare" in a bid to persuade MPs to support her Brexit deal when it returns to Parliament in January. And former minister Nick Boles said he would resign the Conservative whip if no-deal Brexit ever became official Government policy, in order to "vote in any way necessary to stop it from happening". But Downing Street insisted the Government was simply taking "sensible" steps to prepare for all eventualities, while stressing that delivering a Brexit under the terms of Mrs May's deal remains its "top priority". However, Sinn Fein MEP Martina Anderson said deploying the army showed the extent of the Brexit chaos. She added: "We have had the appointment of a minister for food shortages, reports of potential food and medicine shortages and report after report warning of the dire economic consequences of Brexit. Now we have the British government putting thousands of its soldiers on standby. If that's not a crisis then I don't know what is. "Surely this is the time to step back and reflect on the Brexit madness and realise the catastrophe it would be for everyone." A 100-page information pack telling businesses of possible changes to the way they trade with EU states will go live online on Friday - with 80,000 emails going out to firms thought likely to be most affected. And advice to private individuals will be issued over the coming weeks through adverts, websites and direct communications. Areas expected to be covered include bank card payments in the EU and travelling to the continent with pets. Asked whether families should feel able to go ahead with plans to travel to Europe for the Easter holidays, the Prime Minister's official spokesman said: "I'm not aware of any reason they shouldn't do that." Around 2bn has already been allocated for spending by Whitehall departments for Brexit preparations, and Chancellor Philip Hammond announced last night how a further 2bn will be shared out. The extra funding for 2019/20 will be focused on priority areas including borders, trade and security. Twenty-five Government departments will receive additional money, with the Home Office set to receive almost one quarter of the sum - 480m - to increase Border Force capability with "hundreds of new officers", and to help it prepare the EU Settlement Scheme. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) will be given 410m. HM Revenue and Customs will get an extra 375m, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Beis) 190m and the Department for International Trade will receive an additional 128m. Northern Ireland businesses have been warned "brace yourself", as a no-deal Brexit looms large - with just 100 days to go until the UK leaves the European Union. Confederation of British Industry NI director Angela McGowan warned that the uncertainty over Brexit was "throttling firms and threatening jobs". Read More And the Civil Service here confirmed that it's engaged in planning on a "reasonable worst case scenario" basis. Meanwhile, the Cabinet has agreed to activate all of the Government's no-deal plans while it urged businesses to consider implementing their own contingency plans and said households should also make preparations for the March 29 exit. Lorraine Nelson, tax manager at advisory firm Grant Thornton said some companies were now looking at saving money to pay for increased tariffs and regulatory requirements. Those added costs would apply if the UK leaves without a trade deal and resorts to World Trade Organisation rules. Expand Close Seamus Leheny / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Seamus Leheny But she warned that only a minority of businesses are planning. "The majority have kicked the can down the road, thinking 'surely something will come through, something will happen'. "But now that governments are pressing the button on their no-deal plans, that's a red light for business to do the same." Seamus Leheny of the Freight Transport Association said a meeting in London today of the UK-wide haulage industry group would have a 'no-deal' agenda. "We can't sit any longer. We've tried until now to say there could be a deal. But we can't take the risk of thinking everything is fine then crash out on no-deal without anyone having done any preparations," he said. "Here's what we're telling people - brace yourself. You need to do audits of your operations, your supply chains, your routes, and look not just at the Irish context of your cross-border operation, but also at your international operations." Ms McGowan urged politicians to take responsibility for Brexit and conclude a deal as "companies and the country have had enough of chaos". Expand Close Theresa May held a Cabinet meeting in London yesterday to discuss the Brexit situation / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Theresa May held a Cabinet meeting in London yesterday to discuss the Brexit situation "Uncertainty is throttling firms and threatening jobs - not in the future, but right now. "We need to know for certain that a no-deal Brexit will not happen because until we receive assurances on that, damage to investment, jobs and future growth will continue. "Over 85% of businesses and organisations surveyed in Northern Ireland have made their views clear: a backstop is better than a no-deal scenario." Expand Close NI Secretary of State Karen Bradley / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp NI Secretary of State Karen Bradley Manufacturing NI chief Stephen Kelly noted how some members have already announced moves to open up in the EU. Pharma giant Almac is opening a centre in Dundalk, while MJM marine outfitters is opening new offices in Poland. Mr Kelly said: "When we surveyed members at the beginning of this year, 38% said they had plans to shift production out of the UK. This does not necessarily mean four out of 10 factories are to close, but it does mean NI and the UK is not viewed as a stable long-term investment location. "With news today that the UK Cabinet are encouraging businesses to activate their contingency plans, we expect those who can, with the cash available, will make their move in the new year. "All of this is deeply frustrating. Our manufacturing community has come through the financial crisis and rebuilt markets, their businesses and jobs. Many are angry that UK politics is getting in the way of them creating more wealth and work." A spokeswoman for the Executive Office, which is in charge of the NI Civil Service, said that since the Chequers Deal was announced in July, "there has been a greater focus on no-deal planning across government, including the contingency plans that would be necessary in the event of a no-deal outcome". "The Northern Ireland Civil Service has been engaged in this process and we have been developing plans on a 'reasonable worst case scenario' basis." Farmers yesterday reiterated their warning that a no-deal Brexit would effectively mean the closure of export markets to farmers here - including important avenues such as the sale of lamb to France. Ulster Farmers Union presdient Ivor Ferguson said: "A 'no-deal' Brexit is a very risky outcome and would have disastrous consequences for farming in Northern Ireland. Farmers would face up to 90% tariffs on exports and unfair competition in the UK market from lower standard food products imported from outside Europe." No-deal Brexit: the key questions What is no-deal Brexit? On March 29 the UK would quit the EU without a withdrawal agreement with the European Union covering issues including the Irish border, expats rights in Europe or a future trade deal, among other things. What will happen if Britain leaves the EU without a deal? Either a cataclysm of biblical proportions or a minor hiccup on the path to self-determination, depending on your point of view. Who is concerned? Various industries from pharmaceuticals to farming, haulage to aircraft production have warned that dropping out would be catastrophic for business and jobs. There have also been warnings about consumer protection, food supply and safety, and availability of medicines. Hang on, medicines? Many drugs like insulin that are vital to Britons health are manufactured partly or entirely abroad, including in the EU. There have been warnings timely imports of perishable substances could be hindered by increased customs checks at British borders. Ministers are drawing up plans to fly in vital drugs and give priority to lorries carrying medical supplies at gridlocked ports. What does the Government say? Theresa May has used the prospect of a no-deal Brexit, and the damage it could cause, as a carrot/stick to convince sceptical MPs to back the withdrawal agreement in a vote. This follows more than 100 technical papers on no-deal planning released by departments in the summer. Has it worked? Not so far. The Government was forced to pull a vote planned for December 11 in the face of almost certain defeat. It has been rescheduled for mid-January, with critics suggesting that Downing Street hopes MPs might see the March leaving date approaching fast and cave in. What has to happen to get us to that stage? Not necessarily very much at all. If Theresa Mays hugely unpopular withdrawal agreement is voted down by MPs in January, and no consensus can be reached in the bitterly divided Commons on an alternative, no-deal would effectively become the default. Can the effects be mitigated? Some MPs, reportedly including Cabinet ministers, have suggested a managed no-deal Brexit, in which there is a two-year transition period after March 29 as with the withdrawal agreement which would give us more time to be ready to counter the negative impacts. But not everyone thinks it would be disastrous? No. Some Brexiteers argue that many of the warnings are overblown and part of Project Fear to either stop Brexit altogether or keep the UK in a closer relationship with the EU than they would like. Others simply think they are wrong and the UK could drop out of the EU and do global business on World Trade Organisation terms quite happily. What do economists say? Separate assessments from Whitehall and the Bank of England in November painted a grim picture of the impact of a no-deal Brexit on the UK economy. The Bank warned Britain could be tipped into a recession worse than the financial crash, with an 8% cut in GDP, unemployment surging by as much as 7.5% and house prices falling by almost one-third, while a cross-Government analysis found the UK economy would be 9.3% smaller after 15 years. The backstop is intended to prevent a hard border in Ireland. The Northern Ireland Affairs Committee has launched an inquiry into the implications of Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit deal for Northern Ireland. The inquiry will focus on mechanisms for avoiding the Northern Ireland Brexit backstop, which has become a barrier to getting Mrs May's deal through Parliament. Read More If the backstop is implemented Northern Ireland will remain aligned with EU rules and remain part of the single market with checks on some goods coming in from the UK. The backstop would be implemented if a trade deals cannot be reached by the EU and UK Government during the 21 month Brexit transition period after the UK leaves the EU on March 29. It is intended to prevent a hard border on the island of Ireland. Mrs May postponed the scheduled vote on her Brexit deal on Tuesday December 11 as she accepted it would be defeated due to concerns around the backstop. She travelled to Brussels last week for an EU Summit in an attempt to secure reassurances from EU leaders about the backstop. The Northern Ireland Affairs Committee will also examine the level of Northern Ireland's planning for a no-deal Brexit. The committee has asked for written evidence on four separate issues arising from Mrs May's agreement: How implementation of the backstop would work in practice for Northern Ireland Scrutiny of the mechanisms in the Withdrawal Agreement which govern implementation of the backstop What steps need to be taken during the implementation period to secure an overall EU-UK deal which removes the need for the backstop Northern Irelands preparedness for a no deal Brexit Chair of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee Dr Andrew Murrison MP said concerns remained around the backstop. "The backstop has emerged as a central concern in the Governments Brexit agreement and uncertainties remain about the effectiveness of no-deal planning," Dr Murrison said. "My Committees inquiry will explore the implications of the agreement for Northern Ireland. The deadline for written submissions to the committee will be 5pm on Monday January 21. The PSNI has been awarded over 16m in additional funding. The PSNI has been awarded 16.48m to help prepare for Brexit, the Northern Ireland Office (NIO) has confirmed. PSNI Chief Constable George Hamilton had previously asked the Home Office to fund 400 extra officers to allow him to deal with the repercussions of Brexit. He welcomed the announcement and said that it would allow police to recruit 308 officers and staff by April 2020. We welcome the announcement of additional Brexit funding for @PoliceServiceNI which we will invest in policing with the community and #KeepingPeopleSafe. It will also allow us to recruit a total of 308 additional officers and staff by April 2020. Sir George Hamilton (@SirGHamilton) December 19, 2018 Read More The Chief Constable has warned that the return of infrastructure to the Irish border could make border posts a target for dissident republican violence. Secretary of State Karen Bradley welcomed the added funding, saying it would help manage "pressures and contingencies arising from EU exit preparations, reflecting the specific and unique concerns in Northern Ireland". "The UK Government has invested significantly in the PSNI, with over 230million of additional security funding over the course of the 2010 Parliament and 131million over the current spending review period." Policing Board Chair Anne Connolly said the board would be tackling police funding in the new year. "Resources available to the PSNI and their allocation to day to day delivery of the policing service is one of the key issues that the Board will be discussing with the Chief Constable in the New Year and in the development of policing plans for the time ahead," she said. Speaking last month Police Federation for Northern Ireland (PFNI) chairman Mark Lindsay called for certainty, direction and clarity around Brexit and what it will mean for policing in the region after March. He said the UK Government must give police financial assurances they will have the resources to patrol the Irish border in the event of a no-deal Brexit. We need hundreds more officers if the UK crashes out of the EU without a deal. The case has already been made by the PSNI for more resources, and decisions are now overdue, Mr Lindsay said. If You Enjoy My Articles, Please Consider Supporting My Writing By Giving A Donation Of Any Amount. Thank you! DUP deputy leader Nigel Dodds has said the fact there are just 100 days left until the UK leaves the European Union should focus minds on achieving a "sensible exit from the EU". Mr Dodds said he wants the remaining time used "to secure the necessary changes to the legally binding withdrawal agreement that will be needed to secure the necessary support in Parliament". He added: "Time was wasted by signing a deal in the face of mounting opposition and then attempting to sell that deal when it was abundantly clear MPs right across the House of Commons would not support it. "If the European Union is truly serious about wishing to avoid a no-deal exit then agreement can be secured in the time that is left. "The Government must continue to prepare for all eventualities. Those preparations must begin to include taking advantage of the opportunities available when the United Kingdom is outside the EU. "Whilst the time available is limited, this can focus minds. If the Prime Minister demonstrates that she is not prepared to accept a deal only on the EU's terms then we can secure an agreement that will allow for a sensible exit from the European Union." Ulster Unionist leader Robin Swann wants to see the focus on getting the right deal for the UK. "The last thing we need is the distraction of a second referendum," he said. "I would rather see the Government and Parliament focusing on getting the right deal over the next 100 days. "It is absolutely vital that we expend all our energies on getting a deal with the European Union which preserves the UK's economic and constitutional integrity and provides a pathway to a positive trading relationship with the EU in the future. If that means extending Article 50 so that we are not boxed in by our own timescales, then so be it. "The United Kingdom is the fifth largest economy in the world so these are issues which cannot be addressed casually and recklessly. The impact will last for decades to come." Sinn Fein vice-president Michelle O'Neill warned that a no-deal scenario is increasingly likely. She said: "News that the British Parliament is preparing for a no-deal Brexit is further evidence of the economic catastrophe their chaotic approach is leading towards. "They have spent more time fighting among themselves and trying to placate the DUP and Brexiteers rather than dealing with the issues that actually need addressed. "This reckless approach has made the prospect of a disastrous no-deal crash much more likely. "We will continue working with the Dublin Government and the EU27 to protect the Good Friday Agreement and protect the backstop as our only insurance policy against a hard border and the economic catastrophe that would bring. "But if that is not possible and Westminster insists on driving toward a no-deal crash, then a referendum on Irish reunification, as provided for in the Good Friday Agreement, must be called as the only sensible, logical and entirely rational response." The SDLP's Claire Hanna is also fearful of a no-deal. "Brexit has brought with it extreme social, economic and political difficulties. It is vital that the UK Government do not let us drift into no-deal over the next 100 days, turning a crisis into a catastrophe," she said. "The SDLP support a second referendum to confirm consent of the public for the impacts of Brexit, which would look very unlike the many promises made by the Leave campaign. "People need to be aware that the backstop is essential for any Brexit deal - it is our insurance policy in the event that a more comprehensive relationship cannot be worked in the 'future relationship' phase of negotiations," she added. Alliance's Stephen Farry said his party fears the UK is "careering towards the cliff-edge". "Across the House of Commons there is a worrying failure to understand the basic choices and options available," he argued. "Short of a decision to Remain, any other version of a managed Brexit involves a withdrawal agreement... Alliance's first preference is a People's Vote." More than 300 new police officers and staff could be recruited in Northern Ireland by 2020 if a no-deal Brexit emerges, PSNI chief constable George Hamilton said. More than 300 new police officers and staff are to be recruited in Northern Ireland by 2020 for Brexit preparations, the force has said. The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) received a 16 million windfall from the Chancellor. It will be responsible for policing the Irish border after the divorce. The ethos of policing with the community has been central to our planning and I want to reassure the communities we serve that this money will be used to keep people safe, by preventing harm, protecting people and bringing offenders to justiceGeorge Hamilton Chief Constable George Hamilton said: Since the referendum result, PSNI have been working with our partners to ensure we are in the best position possible to respond to any changes presented by Brexit. We welcome this additional funding which will allow us to recruit a total of 308 additional officers and staff by April 2020 and make some investment in our estate, IT and infrastructure. The ethos of policing with the community has been central to our planning and I want to reassure the communities we serve that this money will be used to keep people safe, by preventing harm, protecting people and bringing offenders to justice. Deputy chief constable Stephen Martin said extra money will also be invested into infrastructure and IT, including more police vehicles, radios and computers for the new officers and staff. He said there were no plans to re-open any of the old police stations along border areas that were closed in recent years or to increase the size of the PSNI estate. We have stopped the sale of three stations in Warrenpoint, Aughnacloy and Castlederg, purely as a precautionary measure. If we find we dont need them, we will continue to sell them, he said. The EU and UK have said they want to avoid the return of a hard border physical checks or infrastructure after Brexit. Brexiteers favour using technology in lieu of physical checks on goods on the frontier, which would require customs officers and potentially a police presence. Expand Close Brexiteers have favoured using technology in lieu of physical checks on goods on the frontier, which would require customs officers and could potentially require a police presence (Deborah McAleese/PA). PA Archive/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Brexiteers have favoured using technology in lieu of physical checks on goods on the frontier, which would require customs officers and could potentially require a police presence (Deborah McAleese/PA). Opponents have said the technology does not exist. Businesses have said they are horrified at the prospect of a no-deal exit. The Policing Board oversees police in Northern Ireland and chairwoman Anne Connolly said: Resources available to the PSNI and their allocation to day-to-day delivery of the policing service is one of the key issues that the board will be discussing with the chief constable in the new year and in the development of policing plans for the time ahead. Northern Ireland Secretary Karen Bradley said the extra money would help the PSNI manage pressures arising from EU exit preparations and reflect the unique and specific concerns in the region. The UK Government has invested significantly in the PSNI, with over 230 million of additional security funding over the course of the 2010 parliament and 131 million over the current spending review period. Constitutional Research Council (CRC) donated 425,622 to the DUP, which funded a series of pro-Leave adverts, including a high-profile wraparound ad in the Metro newspaper A 435,000 donation to the DUP from a pro-Brexit group was not reported to the Electoral Commission (EC), it has been revealed. The BBC has reported that the Scottish unionist funding organisation 'Constitutional Research Council' (CRC) has been fined 6,000 for failing to report the donation. Read More However the EC accepted that the donation and it's donors were permissable. CRC is chaired by Scottish conservative Richard Cook (pictured above). The group's failure to report the donation was revealed in news correspondence from the Good Law Project, an anti-Brexit group. After an investigation the EC ruled that there was "no reasonable excuse" for failing to report it, along with other political contributions and gifts recieved. The DUP received the donation during the Brexit referendum campaign and spent 282,000 of the money on an advert in the Metro newspaper. A BBC Spotlight programme asked questions about whether the DUP incurred joint spending with other EU referendum campaigners but did not declare it under a common plan. Under Electoral Commission rules, groups are not allowed to work together in order to get around funding limits. The DUP denied wrongdoing and always insisted it acted within electoral law. Expand Close A DUP advertisement that appeared in The Metro / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp A DUP advertisement that appeared in The Metro Following the airing of the documentary in June, the Electoral Commission requested further evidence from BBC Northern Ireland but were told there was no other significant information other than what was in the programme. In August the Electoral Commission announced that there were "no grounds" for an investigation into the issue. Sinn Fein's Gerry Kelly has hit out at a 16.48m cash injection for the PSNI ahead of Brexit - asking why funding has not been made available for legacy inquests. The announcement on Wednesday means the PSNI will be able to recruit 308 additional officers and staff by April 2020. Chief Constable George Hamilton previously called on the Home Office to fund an additional 400 extra officers. The British Treasury has no problem in making funding available for policing a Brexit rejected by the majority of the people in the north," Mr Kelly said. This action is in stark contrast to the continued delays by the British government in releasing the funds requested by the Lord Chief Justice for legacy inquests. Read More Families have already been waiting far too long for answers, some of them almost half a century. That is unacceptable and I am calling on the British government to immediately release the funding to the Lord Chief Justice so he can clear the backlog of inquests. The funding of legacy inquests in Northern Ireland has longed proven contentious. The probe into the shooting of 10 people in the Ballymurphy area of west Belfast in 1971 - currently taking place at the Belfast Coroner's Court - faced years of delays before beginning. In 2016, Northern Irelands Lord Chief Justice, Sir Declan Morgan, proposed that a specialist unit be set up that could deal with the cases within five years. However, politicians have so far failed to agree to stump up the 10 million needed to fund the process. The Police Federation for Northern Ireland, the representative body for most of Northern Ireland's police officers, welcomed Wednesday's announcement of investment into policing. Chair of the organisation Mark Lindsay said: This allocation is welcome and allays some of our concerns. Preparing for Brexit is a task of monumental proportions with many unknowns. If the UK crashes out at the end of March, there will obviously be significant additional pressures placed on our officers. The implications are immense. "This money will deliver hundreds more officers and staff but the allocation shouldnt be taken to mean that that is the end of the matter. It may very well be the case that in response to issues thrown up by a hard exit of the EU that further additional financial resources will be required." He added the situation after Brexit takes place was "unchartered waters" and the security need should face ongoing review. DUP MLA Mervyn Storey, a member of the Northern Ireland Policing Board, said additional funding was something which the DUP had previously raised with the Prime Minister. "Whilst some people have predicted that Brexit could be used as an excuse for violence it is important that all parties make it abundantly clear that there is no justification for anyone to threaten or use violence in any circumstances," he said. "It is important that no-one should engage in scaremongering, but everyone should welcome this funding which will allow for over 300 new officers to be recruited. I would hope that process can take place as quickly so those recruits can be on the streets as soon as possible. The UUP's Alan Chambers also welcomed the cash boost, but noted staff levels were still well below levels recommended in the Patten Report. "This does not address the major problems facing the PSNI in terms of staffing levels or repair the damage caused by successive budget cuts," he said. "Nor can we get away from the fact that this is a Police service that is seriously short of numbers. The Patten Report recommended that the PSNI should have 7,500 officers plus an enlarged part time reserve of up to 2,500 officers. Given that the PSNIs own website said it has 6,638 officers as at 1 December 2018, it is clear that the PSNI is seriously under-staffed, and the force is only operating due to extensive use of overtime and the dedication and professionalism of our officers and their commitment to the job they do." Sinn Fein MLA John O'Dowd has expressed his dismay after it emerged the Banbridge Electoral Office is set to close. Mr O'Dowd said that the decision was taken due to a decision by the Electoral Office to centralise their services in Belfast. The Banbridge office is set to close on Friday December 21. Mr O'Down said he had "grave concerns" around the closure of local electoral offices. Electoral offices play a key role in ensuring people can exercise their democratic right by enabling them to register to vote, obtain an ID card and access Postal or Proxy votes," the Upper Bann MLA said. These closures will impact on all of that. This does not represent good planning or practice and could have a negative impact on the democratic process in several constituencies. Sinn Fein will be seeking an urgent meeting with the Electoral Office to discuss this matter. A spokeswoman for the Electoral Office said: "Public consultation on the future of electoral services in Northern Ireland began in 2016. We delivered online registration services for Northern Ireland in June of 2018. "The parties are aware that the Electoral Office must now operate with much reduced funds from government. In order to operate within budget and optimise public services the Electoral Office will now centralise services in Belfast during 2019. "Planning over the past three years will ensure that our services keep up with digital developments as we work to deliver what is increased accessibility for people in Northern Ireland." The campaign to compensate victims of Libyan-sponsored IRA terrorism has taken "a small step forward" after Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt agreed to appoint an independent liaison between the Government and those affected. The work would include assessing how many people could potentially qualify for compensation and what levels of redress should be requested. An estimated 12bn in Libyan assets seized after the fall of the Gaddafi regime remains frozen in the UK. The bereaved and injured have been lobbying the Government for years to support their bid for compensation to be paid out of the frozen assets. Ulster Unionist peer Lord Empey said the announcement of an assessor at least "provides some encouragement that the Government is prepared to look at how a measure of justice might be provided for UK victims of Libyan-sponsored terrorist attacks". He said: "While no firm undertakings were given by the Foreign Secretary, the fact is that this is the first time that the Government has done anything other than bat the problem away. "This week marked the 35th anniversary of the IRA bomb at the Harrods store in London when six people were killed and 90 injured. "The injustice of the current situation was clearly demonstrated at this atrocity. Most of the victims were British, one was an American citizen. The family of the US citizen were properly compensated whereas the families of the British victims were not, even though they were standing beside each other at the time of the blast which was caused by Libyan supplied Semtex." DUP MP Emma Little-Pengelly also welcomed the move. "Whilst this is a small step along the road it is still significant. This campaign has been running for more than a decade," she said. Gaddafi armed the IRA with massive amounts of weaponry, including Semtex used in attacks at a Remembrance Day ceremony in Enniskillen in 1987, Warrington in 1993, and as a detonator at London's Docklands in 1996. Jonathan Ganesh, president of the Docklands Victims' Association, which has been campaigning for compensation, said the recent event to remember the anniversary of the Harrods bombing should serve as a reminder to the Government that many people still need help. He said: "This breaks my heart and sadly this service illustrated continuing pain the victims of terror are still going through every day." Susanne Dodd, whose father Inspector Stephen Dodd was among the six people killed in the Harrods attack, said the UK Government had "disgraced my brave dad and all the IRA victims" so far. Bosses at Belfast's Grand Opera House have banned all glassware from the theatre after an incident during a performance at the weekend. The move came after a man in a private box hurled a glass at a stage-effect helicopter that was 'flying' panto dame May McFettridge above the sold-out audience at Jack And The Beanstalk. The glass broke on impact and shards showered the musical director and people in the first rows of the stalls, including a large number of children. Police arrested two men who were later freed on bail pending further enquiries. The private boxes have until now been the only parts of the Opera House where theatre-goers could use glasses and glass bottles. In other areas patrons are permitted only to use drinks in plastic bottles or cups purchased at the bar. However, the Opera House yesterday said it was now withdrawing all glassware. It said: "Following the incident on Saturday 15 December at the performance of the pantomime Jack And The Beanstalk, we have taken the decision to withdraw all glass and glassware from boxes with immediate effect. "The safety of audiences, actors, stage crew and staff remains our number one priority, and we believe this is a sensible and pragmatic measure to take." One source said: "The management had no other choice. You can't run the risk of someone being injured. People don't take their families to the pantomime for this sort of awful behaviour to ruin their day or evening out. But no one in Belfast can ever remember anything like this happening before." It's understood that the PSNI is hoping to talk to several cast members including John Linehan, the actor who plays May McFettridge, to see if they can provide any additional information about the unprecedented attack. Mr Linehan told friends that he knew the stage helicopter had been struck by an object but he never imagined that anyone would throw a glass. One friend said: "John was more concerned about the impact that the throwing of the glass might have on the audience rather than on himself." Reports said May McFettridge, the star of the Belfast panto for 29 years, had earlier been engaged in 'her' usual pre-show banter with the entire audience including occupants of the boxes. It's become a tradition of the panto for May to interact with the audience and to crack jokes about where they come from, how they look, and the state of their sobriety. One theatre insider said: "Nobody takes offence. They know that May doesn't mean any harm." A live nativity set was wrecked by Storm Deirdre on Monday night - but local builders have rallied to fix it in time for Christmas. The grotto next to St Mary's Church, Belfast, which housed donkeys, a goat called Tinsel and Holly the sheep, was closed yesterday after strong winds blew the roof off. Organiser Orla Sheehan said: "It's a bit of a setback but we will try to rebuild it and get going again because it brings so much joy to the city, especially to the children, but also people of all ages." Christmas trees were also blown around the back of the grotto and the electrical supply was also affected. Ms Sheehan added: "We had to make the area safe and could not let the public in and we had to send the animals that came to the crib home." The team of five builders from Building and Restoration Northern Ireland (BARNI) Ltd paused work on the city's Boutique Hotel in Bank Square to come to the rescue. The hi-vis heroes - Tommy Rafferty, Joe Lynch, Ryan McFall, Darryl McFaul and David Bawn - were seen sawing and hammering away yesterday in a rush to rebuild the wooden structure. Ms Sheehan said: "It was just wonderful. "It's fantastic to see the community spirit in the city and that the men were happy to stop doing their own job and come and give us a hand." The popular Christmas manger opened on December 13 and is now in its sixth year. Christmas carols are sung from 2pm to 5pm daily, as well as prayers for world peace. It opens daily from 10.30am to 6pm and will close on January 6. The money raised by the crib will go to Mill Hill Missionaries from St Mary's Church for Tuesday's Child's Following Yonder Star Christmas Appeal, which will help children affected by war in the Sudan. Meanwhile, weather forecasters have played down hopes of snow for Northern Ireland this Christmas. The Met Office defines a white Christmas as one in which at least one snowflake can be observed falling anywhere in the UK, throughout the 24 hours of December 25. Meteogroup meteorologist Paul Mott told the Belfast Telegraph that the chances of a full blast of snow could be as little as "15-20%," with temperatures set to be around the average for the time of year. A ferry passenger has described how lorries were "tossed about like they were a child's toys" and said it was "very lucky no-one was killed" during a dramatic incident on the Larne to Cairnryan ferry yesterday. Coalisland lorry driver and father-of-two Niall McErlean (43) spoke out after lorries overturned on P&O's European Causeway ship in adverse weather conditions during the morning sailing. Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Previous Next Close Passenger pictures Passenger pictures A crushed car is lifted off PA Crushed vehicles. PA Toppled lorries on the European Causeway, a P&O ferry travelling from Larne to Cairnryan PA / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Passenger pictures Dramatic video footage of the incident captured by Mr McErlean showed several large lorries lying on their sides on the vessel. Other images from the scene showed lorries toppled against each other and cars crushed by the impact. According to Police Scotland, there were 52 passengers and 56 crew on board, none of whom were injured. However, the force said that a number of passengers had been "confined to their vehicles" due to "movement on the deck". In a statement posted on social media, Police Scotland said that it was notified shortly after 7.40am yesterday of "a number of vehicles having overturned on the P&O European Causeway Ferry while sailing from Larne to Cairnryan". It added: "A multi-agency response was implemented and emergency services attended Cairnryan Port awaiting the ferry. "During a choppy sailing, there has been a movement of vehicles on the car deck and this has caused around six vehicles to tip over onto their side. "We are able to confirm all 52 passengers and 56 crew on board are safe and well and no-one has any injuries." Police said the ferry had "docked safely at Stranraer" with Scottish Fire and Rescue Service, ambulance crews and Police Scotland in attendance. In an update yesterday afternoon, Police Scotland said that all passengers had been "safely disembarked from the ferry". The spokesperson added: "Most passengers were able to continue their journeys as normal, but a small number received support from P&O Customer Experience Team regarding onward travel or accommodation. "No injuries were reported and the emergency services in conjunction with P&O would like to thank everyone involved in the recovery operation." Posting on Twitter last night, P&O Ferries Updates said it appeared that normal service would resume on the route from 4am today. In a statement issued yesterday, a spokesperson for P&O Ferries said: "We can confirm that an incident took place on the European Causeway this morning. "In extreme weather conditions, a number of vehicles have moved position on the decks causing damage onboard. "All passengers and crew are safely accounted for, there are no reports of injuries and the emergency services are in attendance." Mr McErlean (below) said the ordeal was a "scary experience". He told the Belfast Telegraph: "I got on at 4.30am, it was running late due to the high winds and it was rough going across. "It took a turn for the bad in the middle, the boat went into a big dip and that's when the wrecking started. "It could have been a big wave, and when it came back out of it, that's when it did all the wrecking." Mr McErlean said that some lorry drivers were "trapped in their cabs" during the drama that unfolded. "There were lorries that had been tossed about like they were a child's toys. "There were drivers on the bottom deck who were trapped in their cabs - at least three or four were trapped in their lorries. "In front of my lorry there was a trailer with a lot of lemonade on top of a bus. There were two or three other lorries pushed into a corner. "There were lorries on the middle deck with people trapped in them, but the bulk of the wrecking was on the other deck, where four were cowped." Mr McErlean said that passengers were then ushered into the ship's reception area. "It was a frightening experience," he continued. "They're very lucky no-one was killed. "The wind calmed down a wee bit after that." He added: "When we got into port I was the first lorry off at 1.30pm. "I had to continue with my journey - my lorry is okay, but my trailer was badly scraped and damaged." "Everyone was well warned that the storm was coming in, and we were going out into the heart of it," he said. The Belfast Telegraph asked P&O why the sailing was not cancelled, given the adverse weather conditions. We also asked what measures were implemented to keep the lorries in place on the deck, and whether additional measures had been put in place due to the adverse weather conditions. No response had been received to these queries at the time of going to press. Minority spokesperson on foreign affairs Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa has alleged, the government has bought at an inflated $12m, a property in Norway to be used as an embassy. He says the cost inflated claiming only a year ago, the property was bought for $3.5million. He presented documents on the floor of Parliament to back his claims of malfeasance at the Foreign Affairs ministry. But the Speaker of Parliament Prof. Mike Oquaye rejected his evidence ruling they were unreliable. The Foreign Affairs minister Shirley Ayorkor Botchway in a heated response outside the floor of Parliament has said an offer for the purchase of the building was made but it has not been accepted. The MP has published a summary of his allegations reproduced below. Summary of Facts: Address: Sigyns gate 3, 0260, Oslo. Land Number: 215, Title Number: 522 Built in 1918 (100 year old property) A 6 bedroom residence being converted into a Chancery for Ghanas new Mission in Norway Contractors on site as recent as last week Thursday 13th December, 2018 carrying out renovations (Video evidence available) Records show that a previous buyer Lillian Olsson bought the property in 2014 for 25,250,000.00 Norwegian Kroner (NOK) equivalent to US$2,930,098.38 LISTEN: Audio: Mahama chides NPP govt over drone project According to a Norwegian Financial Newspaper known as Finansavisen, Lillian Olsson sold the property in August 2017 to an unknown buyer for NOK 31,000,000.00 equivalent to US$3,598,108.00 Ghanas Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration has made presentation to Parliaments Select Committee on Foreign Affairs that Ghana is purchasing this same building at a staggering NOK 105,180,000 equivalent to US$12,218,487.13 This latest purchase price by our Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration appears to inflate the cost of the property by a whopping US$8,620,379.13. The US$8,620,379.13 inflated figure by current exchange rate works out to someGHS 41,771,340.13. The new purchase price has been described as UNETHICAL by Real Estate Brokers who have spoken to the Norwegian press on the matter. (Evidence available) Other associated costs of this purchase presented to Parliaments Committee on Foreign Affairs have also been grossly inflated. Note for example, our checks in Norway for the cost of Registration of Documents is NOK 525 and not NOK 50,000 as claimed by the Ministry. (A rip off by some NOK 49,475 equivalent to 5,743.03) Additional checks in Norway indicate that Structural and Evaluation Reports are not charged separately as that is part of the agency fees. Therefore, the NOK 40,000.00 (US$ 4,645.38) charged after a pricy NOK 2,500,000.00 (US$ 290,519.00) agency fee is another example of how scandalous this whole transaction is. Another transaction cost found to be strange is the NOK 90,000 legal fees which our contacts in Norway tell us ought not to feature in this transaction. This explains why the second transaction the purchase of the Ambassadors Residence has no legal fees in its cost breakdown. Furthermore, it is most disturbing to note that despite this outrageously inflated transaction; US$16,500,000.00 is the amount brought to Parliament for approval as the total cost for the purchase of the two facilities (that is the Chancery at NOK105,180,000 and the Ambassadors Residence at NOK 25,775,000 = NOK 130,955,000 equivalent to US$15,197,995.62). This means clearly that the total cost for the transaction was also inflated by over US$ 1.3 million. It is instructive to note that funding for these purchases is the US$50 Million loan facility bequeathed to the current Government by the former Mahama Administration. As per the Foreign Ministrys own documents to our committee, they are also purchasing a Chancery, Residence and paying for a Relocation Cost in Paris all at US$ 5,256,133.35. In Geneva they are purchasing a Chancery for US$ 3,024,706.00, a Residence in the Vatican for US$2,031,178.32 and a Chancery in Tel Aviv for US$ 4,500,000.00. It is curious that the Oslo transaction is outlandishly higher than all these in cities where properties are considered far more expensive than in Oslo. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Finance in a document submitted to the Foreign Affairs Committee reveals that on 20th October, 2018, an amount of GHS 15, 337,152.58 was released to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to cater for the Establishment of Diplomatic missions in Oslo, Norway and Consulate-General in Port Louis, Mauritius and Guangzhou, China. Source: adomonline.com Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video Childcare costs are keeping women out of the workplace, according to an SDLP MLA. The cost of childcare is keeping women in Northern Ireland out of the workplace, according to an SDLP MLA. South Down MLA Sinead Bradley was speaking as the Department for the Economy (DfE) published its report into 'Women in the Labour Market in Northern Ireland'. She called for affordable childcare to be made available to women in Northern Ireland to make it easier for them to enter the worklpace. The DfE report revealed that the employment rate for men has been consistently higher than for women over the past ten years. Over the past 10 years there has consistently been more economically inactive women than men. At July-September 2018 a third of working age women were economically inactive, compared to 23% of men. The most common reason for inactivity among women was family and home commitments, while this was the least likely reason for men. The most common reason for men to be inactive was being sick or disabled. Economic activity rates were lowest for women with a youngest dependent child of pre-school age. The report found that "this has the greatest impact on the inactivity rate of women aged 25-34 years, the age grouping with the highest proportion of mothers of pre-school age children". "Women continue to be much more likely to work part-time hours than a man, and if employed are likely to have a job in the service sector, particularly the public administration, education and health sectors," the report said. Although the number of employees is evenly split between men and women, the number of self-employed men is more than double the number of self-employed women. Expand Close The SDLP's Sinead Bradley / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp The SDLP's Sinead Bradley The report discovered that the unemployment rate for men is consistently higher, with two-thirds of those unemployed men, and one-third women. Ms Bradley described the findings of the report as "outrageous". In regards to women in the workplace, there is often a lot of talk about the need to smash through the glass ceiling and rightly so; yet it is vital that we dont forget that there remain women who simply are unable to walk out their front door to go to work in the morning due to the sheer expense of childcare," the South Down MLA said. It is absolutely incumbent upon parties here to ensure all barriers are being demolished to allow women to have full and equal access to fulfilling their careers. "The SDLP have long called for affordable childcare that is ready and available to all working parents to help restore this imbalance." Ms Bradley said that families in Northern Ireland had less access to free childcare than the rest of the UK. At it stands, families in Northern Ireland are entitled to a mere 12.5 hours of free childcare per week, a huge disparity in comparison to the 30 hours provided to families in England," she said. "Frustratingly however, elected representatives here are being prevented from legislating for more free childcare due to the ongoing stalemate between the DUP and Sinn Fein. Freddie Scappaticci, who is alleged to be the Army agent Stakeknife Jon Boutcher - the English police chief who's demanding access to information from top secret MI5 files to assist his inquiry into the activities of the Army's highest placed informer in the IRA - doesn't readily take "no" for an answer, according to people who know him. The Chief Constable of Bedfordshire isn't a man to be trifled with, they say, pointing to an officer who has repeatedly gone public to defend his force in the face of criticism from watchdogs over its performance and who has spoken out against racism in the police. "He's a resolute, stubborn career policeman who doesn't take any prisoners when it comes to a showdown," said one English journalist who has seen him in action. "And he isn't shy about appearing in front of the cameras to get his message across to the public." That unyielding obstinacy is a quality that could hold Mr Boutcher in good stead as the latest English investigator to try to unravel claims of collusion and the uneasy relationships between the police here and organisations like MI5 and the Army's Intelligence Corp's Force Research Unit (FRU), whose brief through the Troubles was to defeat the IRA and loyalist paramilitaries. However, it's accepted that many of the supposed upholders of the law frequently overstepped the mark and became law-breakers who didn't just recruit terrorists to act as moles within their organisations, but sometimes turned a blind eye to what they were doing - literally letting them get away with murder in the dirty war raging in Northern Ireland. Mr Boutcher's inquiry, Operation Kenova, started in January 2017 focusing on the murderous activities of the Army's most valuable asset in the IRA codenamed Stakeknife, a ruthless republican allegedly linked to as many as 50 killings over a 17-year period. Stakeknife is alleged to be 72-year-old Freddie Scappaticci, who has denied any wrongdoing. Scappaticci was arrested by Operation Kenova officers last January. A team of 50 detectives have been probing, among others, police officers, members of the Army, the IRA and MI5. On Monday Mr Boutcher released a progress report on his inquiry, which he said had been "hugely complex and at times challenging". But the statement said the Kenova team had been "steadfast" in their approach to gathering every possible piece of evidence, which they intended to submit in files to the Director of Public Prosecutions here next year. Mr Boutcher said people suspected of being involved in offences under investigation, including murder and torture dating back to the 1970s, were now being brought in for questioning, among them members of the security forces and the IRA. The statement said the Kenova detectives had gathered more than 12,000 documents and conducted 129 interviews with witnesses, victims and families, securing 1,000 statements. Mr Boutcher said his detectives had spoken to people with links to government, the police, military, intelligence agencies and paramilitary organisations. He added that he was fulfilling a promise to families that he would do everything in his power to get the truth for them about the abduction and brutal murder of these poor victims - offences committed, he said, by cowards. Mr Boutcher said the team was utilising new advances in evidence gathering. He explained: "We are using ground-breaking techniques to review and uncover forensic evidence which was not previously available and that has allowed us to drive this investigation further than has been previously possible. "We have managed to obtain a number of new DNA profiles and unidentified finger marks which are highly likely to belong to offenders. This evidence is all helping us to piece together a picture of what really happened." Mr Boutcher is clearly confident that he can shine a light into the dark and often impenetrable world of British intelligence and the collusion between them and the terrorists. His is not the first inquiry to try to get to the heart of the controversy. Other English police investigators such as John Stalker and Sir John Stevens tried, with varying levels of success, to crack the claims that British intelligence was working hand in glove with killers. Stalker, the Deputy Chief Constable of Greater Manchester, was sent in to investigate the so-called 'shoot to kill' deaths of republicans by the RUC in 1983, but he was removed from the inquiry three years later amid allegations about his associations with criminals - claims which were later rejected. Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Colin Sampson took over the inquiry, but his report was never fully published. Although it later emerged that he had said there was sufficient evidence to justify the prosecution of three police officers and two MI5 operatives over the killing of unarmed Lurgan teenager Michael Tighe. Sir John Stevens, who would become head of the Metropolitan Police later, headed up three more official inquiries into collusion between loyalist killers and the security forces. He initially found that collusion was neither widespread nor institutionalised, but later said he'd uncovered collusion at a level which was "way beyond" his original view in 1990. It was claimed that Stevens met with a wall of silence from RUC Special Branch as he tried to investigate the role of double agent Brian Nelson in a number of UDA killings, including the miurder of Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane. Bizarrely, the Stevens team's offices inside a secure RUC complex at Seapark outside Carrickfergus were badly damaged in a fire in January 1990. It was reported that smoke alarms and heat sensors mysteriously weren't triggered by the blaze and it was said that telephone lines had been cut. The RUC said the fire was accidental and Sir John initially accepted those findings, though one source said he did so "through gritted teeth", and later blamed the FRU for the blaze. Several figures linked to the FRU later admitted that it was an arson attack which was carried out by their members to destroy evidence in a bid to protect an agent inside loyalism, Brian Nelson, who was due to be arrested the next day. Several newspapers said that after the blaze the Stevens detectives at Seapark were greeted by choruses of the Billy Joel hit We Didn't Start The Fire. Several decades on, Jon Boutcher clearly believes that he can successfully lift the lid on collusion. He, or people close to him, it would seem, were behind the briefing of Sunday Times journalists at the weekend about Mr Boutcher's "determination" to dig deep into the Stakeknife affair. The newspaper said that Mr Boutcher will ask MI5 to give his Kenova team a statement detailing what it knew about crimes carried out by Stakeknife, including as many as 17 murders. The demand is said to have followed the uncovering of a number of secret documents at MI5 headquarters by Kenova detectives, who are part of a 35m investigation into not only Stakeknife's alleged murders, but claims of kidnapping and tortures as well. MI5 has been asked by the Kenova team to supply a statement about what the organisation knew about what Stakeknife was doing - and being allowed to do. Scappaticci's name figured in a high-profile trial at Belfast Crown Court in 1991, when he was said to have been the leader of the IRA's internal security unit, the so called 'nutting squad', that interrogated suspected informers. Journalists covering the trial of a number of men charged in connection with the kidnapping and false imprisonment of double agent Sandy Lynch were surprised by the number of references to Scappaticci, who was never charged with any offences. An MI5 source told the Sunday Times that Kenova had uncovered documents "which are very telling about the role that our man played in certain things". "They are documents that the service has kept that they probably should have got rid of. Boutcher has upset quite a few people at the service. "He is not in a cosy relationship with them. The victims' families are his priority. "People were doing things that may have been deemed operationally necessary at the time, but may no longer be acceptable." Earlier this month Scappaticci appeared in a London court charged with possession of extreme pornography, including bestiality. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three months' imprisonment, suspended for 12 months. Mr Boutcher said Scappaticci's conviction was secured after material including photographs was seized as part of Operation Kenova. The court heard that Scappaticci told police he wasn't sexually interested in animals, and preferred women with big breasts. He said he wasn't doing anyone any real harm, adding that he had depression. At the launch of Operation Kenova in June 2016, sitting alongside PSNI Chief Constable George Hamilton, Mr Boutcher vowed that he wouldn't wither in the face of opposition from British intelligence services. Sceptics said at the outset the Kenova team would be stopped from completing its job because the evidence it could unearth would be too sensitive for the British intelligence to allow into the public arena. But Mr Boutcher, who has recruited the services of advisers from police forces around the world for his oversight team, said: "If any of this perceived resistance happens, I will challenge it." DUP MP Emma Little-Pengelly has found herself under fire again on Twitter after she appeared to tell an academic that she was more qualified to understand the Brexit withdrawal agreement than they were. Dr Katy Hayward from the sociology department at Queen's University had commented on a speech given by Co Antrim-born Labour MP Kate Hoey over the weekend. "How bold. To speak out on behalf of Northern Ireland, while standing beneath the slogan: 'Believe in Britain'," Dr Hayward had written. Mrs Little-Pengelly criticised the academic and in the ensuing debate she tweeted: "Withdrawal agreement is a legal text. "With the greatest of respect, I will trust my judgement as a barrister to understand it rather than Katy, who may be qualified as an academic but who is a sociologist with an arts degree from Ulster University." She added in a further response: "Obviously my knowledge of the law is greater as a Barrister rather than Katy as a sociologist??" While her original tweet was quickly deleted, it was still spotted by other former Ulster University graduates who took exception. The South Belfast MP later appeared contrite, tweeting that she had actually taught and lectured at the university. "It was a badly worded tweet that did not say what I was intending to, hence I deleted it immediately" she said. "We all word things badly at times. "I know people want to use it to attack me nevertheless." Author and Ulster University graduate Claire Allan called on politicians to think carefully about what they're saying before posting on social media. "The nature of Twitter is such that it's all too easy to react in a knee-jerk fashion and hit send without really thinking about the nuances of your language," she said. "A lot of us have done it. "However, there should be an extra onus on elected officials to think about the impact of their words." The DUP said: "Mrs Little-Pengelly was responding to a specific comment challenging her relative capabilities on this issue. "She acknowledged the tweet could have been misread and removed it in less than a minute after responding. "In a previous role, Mrs Little-Pengelly taught and lectured law in the Ulster University and continues to work closely in support of the university. "No offence was intended in any way." Professor of law and social justice Grainne McKeever, who is also co-director of the Ulster University law clinic, described Mrs Little-Pengelly's tweet as "very disappointing". The red-coloured Hyundai i30 car Robert Murray was believed to be driving / Credit: PSNI The last known image of Robert Murray / Credit: PSNI The family of a 36-year-old Portavogie man are becoming increasingly concerned for his wellbeing. Robert Murray was last seen in the Main Street area of the Co Down town on Monday at around 10pm. Inspector McGuigan said: He is described as being around 56 tall, of medium build with short ginger hair and blue eyes, and was last seen wearing a black gilet, an Adidas training top white striped arms, blue jeans and navy/white trainers. "We believe at this time that Robert is driving a red coloured Hyundai i30 car with the VRM XEZ 5917. I would ask Robert or anyone who knows of his whereabouts to please contact police in Newtownards on 101 and quote reference 117 18/12/18. Irish premier Leo Varadkar has said that at a time when some of the world is looking inwards, Ireland is looking out, hinting at Brexit and American foreign policy. The Taoiseach was launching a Global Schools programme at Dublins Ringsend College when he was asked about Brexit. Im in Ringsend College in Dublin this morning to launch Global Schools. Throughout 2019 Irish diplomats & peacekeepers will be visiting secondary schools to talk about their important work overseas & why we want to double our global footprint by 2025. #GlobalIreland pic.twitter.com/VOarGQT7BF Leo Varadkar (@LeoVaradkar) December 19, 2018 Rather than seeing ourselves as an island, and turning our back on the world and a lot of people now are looking inwards, you see it a lot in eastern Europe, you see it America, theyre looking inwards, they dont want outsiders, they dont want visitors, they dont want migrants coming to their country and we see Ireland very differently, we see ourselves as a country at the heart of the European Union, he said. Mr Varadkar explained to the college pupils the benefits of free movement within the EU, telling them of the career and educational opportunities without visa hindrance or paperwork. Asked by one student why UN membership was important during Brexit, Mr Varadkar added that strong relationships with other nations would help Ireland post-Brexit. Because the UK are leaving the EU, our relationships are going to change and we need to make sure we keep a close relationship with them as our nearest neighbour. Now theyre leaving the EU, its going to be a different place, France and Germany are going to have more influence, which can sometimes be good and sometimes be bad, and we need to be making closer relationships with them too, and the smaller countries in the EU, which are very like Ireland. Taoiseach @campaignforleo is in @RingsendC this morning to launch the #GlobalIreland Schools programme Diplomats and peacekeepers will visit schools in 2019 to talk about Irelands role in the world. pic.twitter.com/4MZcXla0gb Irish Foreign Ministry (@dfatirl) December 19, 2018 We need to make relationships with other countries in the world, because if we find we cant trade with the UK as much as we used to, and cant sell to them some of the products we make, we need to be able to sell them to other places, like China, for instance. China used to be a very poor country and now its very wealthy. The Global Schools programme is an element of Global Ireland, the Governments policy to double Irelands impact in the world by 2025. Global Ireland has been dubbed the most ambitious renewal and expansion of Irelands international presence ever undertaken by an Irish government. British ministers have agreed to make no-deal Brexit planning an operational priority amid continued opposition to Prime Minister Theresa Mays draft agreement. Mr Varadkars deputy, Simon Coveney, said on Tuesday that he would bring a dossier to the Irish Cabinet with a contingency plan on various Brexit outcomes. Of course we have to prepare for (a no-deal Brexit), the Tanaiste told RTE Radio Ones Morning Ireland. That is the other side of the story. A request for a High Court judge to have no involvement in a challenge to the validity of a search warrant over the suspected theft of confidential documents from the Police Ombudsman's Office represents "an affront to the rule of law", he said today. Mr Justice McCloskey described the contents of a letter which effectively asked him to withdraw from hearing the case as "totally unprecedented". The request was made by the company behind a documentary into the loyalist murders of six men in the 1994 Loughinisland massacre, with the backing of victims' relatives. In August two award-winning journalists involved in the film 'No Stone Unturned', Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey, were arrested, questioned and released as part of the probe into the suspected theft. Detectives from Durham Constabulary, supported by officers from the PSNI, also searched three properties in Belfast - two residential and the third a business premises. Lawyers representing the documentary maker, Fine Point Films, and the journalists, are now challenging the legality of the search warrant. They claim it did not cover all of the material seized. Police have given an undertaking not to examine any of the documents and computer equipment pending the outcome of the legal action. At a review hearing today counsel for Fine Point Films stressed the request was being made respectfully to avoid a formal bid to have Mr Justice McCloskey recuse himself. A similar move was made in an earlier challenge to the Ombudsman's report into the Loughinisland killings - because of the judge's role as a barrister in separate litigation 17 years ago. Expand Expand Expand Previous Next Close The Loughinisland victims: Patsy OHare, Barney Green, Adrian Rogan, Eamon Byrne, Daniel McCreanor and Malcom Jenkinson (Loughinisland/PA) Press Association Images OTooles bar in Loughinisland after the UVF shot dead six people The Heights Bar in Loughinisland, Co Down the morning after the massacre (PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp The Loughinisland victims: Patsy OHare, Barney Green, Adrian Rogan, Eamon Byrne, Daniel McCreanor and Malcom Jenkinson (Loughinisland/PA) Despite rejecting claims in that case that he could be seen as unintentionally biased, he consented to a limited re-hearing in front of a judicial colleague. But Mr Justice McCloskey said he was "absolutely stunned" by the letter submitted in the current proceedings. "The court is in receipt of a totally unprecedented letter, written on behalf of a range of people, most of whom are not parties to these proceedings," he said. "The letter contains the extraordinary suggestion that a judge of the High Court of Northern Ireland is not sufficiently impartial or fair or independent to give case management directions in this case." According to the judge, the contents were "sadly misconceived". "It is, on its own, an affront to the rule of law," he continued. Expand Close Families of Loughinisland victims with solicitor Niall Murphy and Emma Rogan, whose father Adrian Rogan was killed in the 1994 pub shooting, speak to the media outside Belfast High Court / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Families of Loughinisland victims with solicitor Niall Murphy and Emma Rogan, whose father Adrian Rogan was killed in the 1994 pub shooting, speak to the media outside Belfast High Court "It portrays a total misunderstanding of the relevant tenets of the rule of law. The letter should never have been written." Mr Birney, 51, and Mr McCaffrey, 48, were both present in court for the review hearing. The court was told up to 40 grounds of challenge have been advanced in the bid to have the search warrants judicially reviewed. Claims of incompatibility with human rights law and the Official Secrets Act feature in the case. Adjourning proceedings to early next year, the judge imposed a deadline for police to confirm if they intend to oppose the action moving to a full hearing. The double funeral of Elizabeth McCartan and Davy Scott The double funeral of Elizabeth McCartan and Davy Scott A Belfast couple who died within hours of each other after 40 years together have been laid to rest. Elizabeth (Liz) McCartan (58) and Davy Scott (64) both passed away last Friday. The devoted pair were buried in identical coffins at Roselawn Cemetery yesterday after a service held in the family home in south Belfast, where mourners spilled out on to the Ormeau Road. Liz, a Catholic, met her Protestant partner Davy at a dancehall in the late 1970s. Their family had previously spoken of taking comfort from their "beautiful love story". Liz's devastated sister Kathryn McCartan said the couple's relationship was "like Romeo and Juliet". Liz's mother Joyce became a peace campaigner after her son Gary was murdered by the UVF in the family's Ormeau Road home in May 1987. Described as a "brilliant" aunt and uncle, Liz and Davy were laid to rest with the ashes of beloved pet dog Cheeky, who died last year. Theresa Mays plans for securing reassurances from Brussels on her Brexit deal are a wee bit nebulous, Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has said. Speaking after talks with Mrs May in Downing Street, Ms Sturgeon echoed the remark of European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker which infuriated the Prime Minister at last weeks EU summit. The comment came as Home Secretary Sajid Javid launched the Governments plans for immigration policy after Brexit, which Ms Sturgeon said amounted to an act of vandalism on the Scottish economy. Meanwhile, in Brussels, the European Commission activated plans for a possible no-deal Brexit on March 29, making clear that they are designed to protect the vital interests of the EU. A day after the Cabinet gave the green light to full-scale no-deal preparations in the UK and 100 days before the scheduled date of Brexit, the Commission said it was essential and urgent to act to avoid major disruption if the UK crashes out without an agreement. Plans cover 14 areas most likely to be affected, ranging from financial services to aviation, customs and carbon emissions trading. Business groups issued a stark warning of the threat of no-deal Brexit, saying many firms are now reaching the point of no return. In a joint statement, the UKs five main business organisations said contingency plans for a no-deal were a significant drain on companies time and money. Firms are pausing or diverting investment that should be boosting productivity, jobs and pay, said the British Chambers of Commerce, CBI, EEF, Institute of Directors and Federation of Small Businesses. Mrs May is understood to have urged leaders from the devolved administrations to pull together to back the Withdrawal Agreement she reached with Brussels in November. The Prime Minister met the First Ministers of Scotland and Wales and representatives of the Northern Ireland Civil Service at a gathering of the Joint Ministerial Committee in Downing Street as she seeks to build a Commons majority for her deal. But as she emerged from Number 10, Ms Sturgeon restated the Scottish National Partys determination to vote against the deal when it returns to the Commons in January. Expand Close Prime Minister Theresa May visited Heathrow Airport to publicise the Governments immigration plans (Niklas Hallen/PA) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Prime Minister Theresa May visited Heathrow Airport to publicise the Governments immigration plans (Niklas Hallen/PA) And she said it was unacceptable for the PM to delay the vote in the hope of running down the clock to Brexit and leaving MPs with the choice only between her deal and no deal. Ms Sturgeon, who backs a referendum on the final terms of the Brexit deal, said: Its beyond me that any Prime Minister would want to have as her legacy turning the UK inwards and making it less open and welcoming to people from the rest of the world. On a visit to Heathrow on Wednesday, Mrs May said that the UK was talking to the EU about some further assurances to assuage the concerns that Members of Parliament had on a particular issue in the Withdrawal Agreement. But asked if the PM had spelt out what was being done, Ms Sturgeon said: It was a wee bit nebulous. Theres not a lot of detail there. She says shes working with the EU, trying to find assurances. I pressed her to give a bit more detail on that. I have to say it wasnt forthcoming. Welsh First Minister Mark Drakeford told reporters in Downing Street that a second referendum would be unavoidable if no deal was agreed by MPs and there was not a general election. The Prime Minister should put her deal to the House of Commons and see what support she can mobilise for it and see whether there are any alternatives a Norway-plus arrangement for example that might have a better chance of responding to where the centre of gravity in the House of Commons may currently lie, he said. If the House of Commons is deadlocked we need a general election and a new House of Commons. If we are denied that then it seems to me unavoidable that the decision would have to go back to the people. In the Commons, shadow Brexit secretary Sir Keir Starmer said Labour MPs would not be forced by the shortness of time into choosing between Mrs Mays deal and no deal. In a debate called by the opposition, Sir Keir said: I dont think for one moment that this House if going to accept the binary choice that the Prime Minister will attempt to put before us. A choice between bad and even worse is not a meaningful choice. Nor is leaving the EU on March 29 next year without a deal viable. It has never been viable and as every day goes past it becomes less and less viable. Sir Keir said that serious consideration should be given to extending the two-year Article 50 process leading to Brexit on March 29 2019. Environment Secretary Michael Gove acknowledged that a no-deal Brexit would have a negative economic effect. But he told the Commons Environmental Audit Committee: It is also the case that those impacts will be acute for a short period and mitigable not totally but to an extent. And he reassured MPs: Supplies of ambient products that are stored without chilling or freezing, I think will be fine. If people want Belgian beer or French wine, I dont think thats going to be an issue. Martin McGuinness at Milltown Cemetery after Michael Stone went on rampage The sister of one of notorious loyalist killer Michael Stone's victims has won High Court permission to challenge his eligibility to seek parole. Deborah McGuinness was granted leave to apply for a judicial review of Department of Justice calculations of his time served in prison. Her brother, Thomas McErlean, was among three mourners murdered by Stone in an infamous gun and grenade attack on an IRA funeral in Milltown Cemetery, west Belfast in March 1988. The ex-UDA man was also the gunman in another three separate killings. Milkman Patrick Brady was murdered in south Belfast in November 1984, 12 months before joiner Kevin McPolin was shot in the head in Lisburn, Co Antrim. In May 1987 Dermott Hackett, a bread server, was found dead in his van between Drumquin and Omagh. He had been shot up to 16 times with a submachine gun. Stone, 63, was freed under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement in 2000, but returned to jail six years later for trying to kill Sinn Fein leaders Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness at Stormont. In 2013 he was told that he must serve the remainder of a 30-year sentence for waging his sectarian murder campaign. It was believed this meant he may not even be considered for release until this year. With a parole hearing described as "imminent", Ms McGuinness launched her legal challenge. Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Previous Next Close Stone carrying out his attack at Milltown Cemetery in March 1988 Mourners panicking at Milltown Cemetery, Belfast, after a gun and hand grenade attack was launched by loyalist Michael Stone Martin McGuinness at Milltown Cemetery after Michael Stone went on rampage Stone launches his attack at Milltown cemetery The funeral procession for the Gibraltar Three / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Stone carrying out his attack at Milltown Cemetery in March 1988 Mr Justice McCloskey identified her central challenge as being the Department's calculation that Stone had served the 30-year tariff by July 2018. "The sole question for this court is whether this calculation is vitiated by illegality," he said. In an order drawn up following the hearing, the judge confirmed: "The court being satisfied that an arguable case with a reasonable prospect of success has been established, leave to apply for judicial review is hereby granted." Both Stone and the Parole Commissioners have the status of interest parties in the case. "The fact of an imminent parole hearing is noted," Mr Justice McCloskey added. On that basis he agreed to fast-track the challenge to a full hearing in early January. Expand Expand Previous Next Close Michael Stone walking free from the Maze prison back in 2000 Michael Stone / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Michael Stone walking free from the Maze prison back in 2000 The Department of Health (DoH) has announced a regional review of neurology services after accepting that waiting lists had become "unacceptably long". The announcement follows the biggest patient recall ever in Northern Ireland earlier this year when over 3,000 patients of Belfast-based consultant neurologist Dr Michael Watt were recalled. The recall was ordered after a Royal College of Physicians report raised concerns about Dr Watt. Dr Watt is currently suspended by the Belfast Trust. The review will be led by a team headed by consultant neurologist Dr John Craig and will identify the service configuration for the next 10-15 years. It will identify how services can be remodelled to improve care and include consideration of innovative service improvements. The review will also consider how governance can be strengthened, building on learning from the recall of patients in the Belfast Trust and the Regulation and Quality Improvement Authoritys Review of Governance of Outpatient Services. Permanent Secretary of the DoH Richard Pengelly admitted that neurology services had been under "significant pressure" for some time. "Waiting lists have become unacceptably long. This review will drive improvements both through the identification of initiatives which can be taken forward quickly, as well as the identification of longer-term strategic reforms," he said. The Department is committed to ensuring that the voice of service users and carers is central to the review. To that end, we will be working closely with the Northern Ireland Neurological Charities Alliance to design and deliver a programme of engagement to achieve this. Expand Close Richard Pengelly / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Richard Pengelly Dr Craig said the review would be an opportunity to transform services for patients. "I am pleased to be leading the review and look forward to working not just with colleagues from across the whole service, but I am especially keen to work with those who use our services and so to ensure their voices are heard and are central to the future of neurology services in Northern Ireland, he said. The interim report is expected to be completed by March 2019 with a final report due by June 2019. Jamas nos callaran Fisica y culturalmente Nec plus ultra, nec variatur Precio del Brent To get the BRENT oil price, please enable Javascript. Precio del WTI To get the oil price, please enable Javascript. Paginas vistas en total Dolar USA Vs Euro Sin ellas, no seremos Deja vu Nada que celebrar Hasta cuando? Colombia Hoy Para nunca olvidar 'Parasite' painted on a statue of Queen, Elizabeth in Kent, England Sin palabras La UE le apunta a la paz Cada vez mas solo Precio del Oro To get the gold price, please enable Javascript. LULA y su Pueblo Bye Bye Homenaje al genial Quino Fueron ellos Una imagen que resume Tan bajo ha caido que se deja tocar el trasero? Porky y el Nene (archiconocido narcotraficante) Ladrones al poder Asi mira el perrito a su amo Crazy Clamor popular La nueva inquisicion Bolivia Chile Hoy Eso es todo amigos! Piensalo! Pinerachet No More Trump Adios Macri, hasta nunca La Marioneta se desinfla Asi o mas cinico Almugre Mexico en 1794 Mas arrastrado imposible Hasta cuando! La pura verdad Solidaridad con Palestina Serie Capitalismo Espejismos de la clase trabajadora Asi es! Comerciantes o delincuentes No pasaran! Asi es la vida USA HOY 01/01/1959 La avaricia no tiene limites AYUDA HUMANITARIA? Chile Hoy Asi son las cosas Mapa Electoral de Venezuela Patagonia argentina? Un aniversario mas del mayor genocidio de la Humanidad Retrato del franquismo en Espana Visca Catalunya! El Chulo de Madrid Cuando la policia se roba la democracia Una imagen dice mas que mil palabras La purita verdad Asi gobierna la maldita burguesia Mi pobre clase media Como Chavez nadie Comparte La Colmena via twitter Twittear Programa de la MUD Asi o mas clarito Por que Trump no ataco Corea del Norte? Hace 15 anos Por que la OEA no se pronuncio? Una verguenza nacional La luz que nos guia La Union Europea Premio Nobel de la Paz? Feudalismo ayer y hoy Obama, el mentiroso Curiosa coincidencia Un mundo de cerdos No es extrano? La Marioneta Los ricos protestan, los pobres celebran MARICORI Y OBAMA Cuantas muertes este ano? 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Por culpa de Chavez Cerveza Polar Algun dia Colombia volvera a la ideologia de Bolivar Translate LOS REVOLUCIONARIOS NO TOMAN CACA-COLA No se trata solamente de un capricho, sino de una sana actitud en todos los sentidos. Desde la solidaridad con el pueblo colombiano donde la empresa Caca-Cola ha cometido los mas grandes abusos contra sus trabajadores incluyendo el presunto secuestro y asesinato de los dirigentes del sindicato, hasta la proteccion de la salud de nuestros hijos, enviciados por ese jarabe de cola y azucar, que les produce obesidad prematura. Pensemos tambien los revolucionarios, que ese dinero que gastamos en los refrescos es utilizado por esas empresas para financiar el terrorismo en nuestro pais. Es cierto, no se trata solo de la Caca-Cola, sino tambien de la cerveza, de los cigarrillos y todos esos articulos innecesarios y mas que eso, daninos para nuestra salud. Podriamos incluso pensar en un dia de parada para cada uno de ellos. Es cuestion de irnos organizando. Pero para empezar, que tal si dejamos de comprar Caca-Cola y sus similares? Cuando lo extraordinario se vuelve cotidiano... Discurso del Acto de Grado en Barinas en 12 de Febrero del 2005 Queridos Graduandos: Mas que un discurso, quiero dirigirles algunas palabras que escribi anoche, despues de visitar en las clinicas, a los estudiantes heridos, a consecuencia de los enfrentamientos con la policia de hace apenas dos dias. Me ha tocado por razones del destino, ser la persona que les otorgue el titulo que bien merecieron con sus estudios. Y me siento sumamente orgulloso de serlo. Me consta que la Universidad de Los Llanos Occidentales Ezequiel Zamora, a pesar de lo dicho por los enemigos de esta universidad, es una universidad de primera. No tendremos la mejor planta fisica, en los salones hace calor. En el comedor hace calor. Pero no es en lo material que las cosas deben valorarse. El mayor capital es el ser humano. Y en eso, nuestra UNELLEZ, lo digo con conocimiento de causa, esta sobrada. Los llaneros venezolanos son nobles, valientes, de coraje. En la UNELLEZ hacen vida, en este momento, aproximadamente 67000 personas. El 97% de ellas son estudiantes. Jovenes que, como Ustedes hasta el dia de hoy, buscan ese titulo, que constata los anos de dedicacion y de estudio. Los jovenes son el rio de la vida, ustedes graduados deben ser los capitanes de esos barcos que naveguen por el rio de la vida. Nuestra Patria atraviesa momentos muy dificiles porque decidio dejar de ser esa matrona de edad vetusta y complaciente, para ser joven, rebelde y altanera. Nuestra imagen ya no es la de una acaudalada ricachona mayamera. En nuestro rostro brilla ahora la sonrisa del Che Guevara, con su diente delantero torcido, su pelo largo y su boina con la estrella. Entender esto, a mi me ha tomado practicamente toda la vida. Tengo 53 anos, y ya perdi mi oportunidad de derramar sangre joven a causa de un ideal. Ustedes son jovenes, estan en la flor de la vida. No cometan por favor el error de renunciar a su instinto de rebelion. El Che Guevara fue Ministro de a Economia en Cuba. Los billetes y las monedas se adornaban con su rostro. Nada de eso le importo. Primero fue a Angola donde paso un penoso ano de combate. Despues se fue a Bolivia, donde encontro la muerte. El Che era el ultimo que comia, el que cargaba la mochila mas pesada. Siempre se sacrificaba por los demas en un estoicismo que mas parecia fervor religioso que ideologia marxista. Si quieren un modelo de vida. Ahi lo tienen. Dije hace unos momentos que el 97% de la poblacion de la UNELLEZ es estudiante. Se imaginan Ustedes la Universidad que podriamos tener si todos los estudiantes tuvieran la abnegacion, la combatividad del Che? Los momentos que se avecinan van a requerir de una gran unidad del pueblo venezolano. La alternativa de continuar siendo libres o regresar a la pobreza se nos planteara en los proximos dias de forma enmascarada, o quizas peor, desenmascarada, vestida con uniforme de soldado del Imperio. Por nuestra parte podemos esperar lo mejor. La macroeconomia no podria ir mejor, la justicia social ha mejorado notablemente. Las misiones ocupan un papel muy importante en el pago de dicha justicia social. Aqui en Barinas ya hemos cumplido con dos de las misiones, la mision Robinson y la mision Sucre. No hay analfabetismo y no hay exclusion en la educacion superior, en estas tierras de Zamora. Pero ay malhaya! Son precisamente estos exitos los que nos hacen mas antipaticos al Imperio. Para ellos, somos inclusive un mal ejemplo que se esta contagiando al resto del continente y cuidado sino al resto del mundo. Nunca venceremos al Imperio. Estara siempre ahi, acechando. Por lo menos hasta que el mismo no se autodestruya. Porque, sepanlo senores, el neoliberalismo es canibal. Cuando le ataque el hambre, se devorara a si mismo. Ustedes, queridos graduandos, a partir de hoy pasan a conformar la elite profesional que debe sostener este pais en los proximos cuarenta o cincuenta anos. Anos decisivos para el logro de nuestra libertad y del rescate de nuestra Soberania. No se dejen comprar. No se dejen corromper. No se dejen gritar. No se dejen pisar. Que nadie les diga que comer, o que vestirse, o que leer. Sean siempre autenticos, rebeldes, contestatarios. Pero eso si, profundamente patriotas, dignos de ser hijos de Bolivar. Muchas gracias y que Dios los bendiga. Alguna duda? Medio siglo de Holocausto Palestino Oscar Zanartu Nacio en Caracas en 1960. Ha realizado exposiciones individuales en las galerias Minotauro, Clave y San Francisco, y en salas de Coro, estado Falcon, y Puerto Ordaz, estado Bolivar. En Paris su obra ha sido exhibida en el Centro Cultural Tanagra, en la Exposicion Cite Internationale des Arts, en las galerias De Mars y Arver Space, al igual que en la Galeria Municipal Levallois, en Levallois Perret (Francia). En muestras colectivas, su obra se ha expuesto en Belgica, Francia, Estados Unidos y Venezuela; en Caracas intervino en la exposicion "Del genesis a la memoria", 1995, organizada por la Fundacion La Previsora. En 1982 obtuvo el Premio Nacional Critven y en 1990 la Mencion de Honor Jose Antonio Paez, en la Embajada de Venezuela en Paris. En 1991 se le concedio el primer premio de Pintura Itinerante, en Levallois Perret, Francia. OZ1 OZ2 OZ3 OZ4 Homenaje a Jason Galarraga La Victoria de Samotracia Odalisca Mas fotos de la nevada del pasado agosto 2008 La Sierra Nevada de Merida Nuestro precioso Churum Meru Homenaje a Picasso Autoretrato Sabes lo que bebes en una Coca-Cola? La formula de la Pepsi tiene una diferencia basica con la de la Coca-Cola y es intencional, para evitar el proceso judicial. La diferencia es a proposito, pero suficientemente parecida como para atraer a los consumidores de Coca-Cola que prefieren un gusto diferente con menos sal y azucar. Mi profesion? Tuve que aprender quimica, entender todo sobre componentes de gaseosas, conservantes, sales, acidos, cafeina, enlatado, produccion, permisos, aprobaciones y muchas otras cosas. Monte mi propio mini-laboratorio de analisis de productos. Sal en la Coca Cola? A patadas. El Cloruro de Sodio no solo refresca sino da mas sed, como para pedir otra gaseosa. Y no resulta desagradable porque la sal mata literalmente la sensibilidad al dulce... del que por cierto tambien tiene mucho: 39 gramos de azucar. De los 350 gramos de producto liquido, mas del 10% es azucar, o sea que en una lata de Coca-Cola mas de un centimetro y medio es puro azucar en polvo. Aproximadamente tres cucharadas soperas llenas de azucar por lata!!La formula de la Coca Cola es muy sencilla: Concentrado de azucar quemado caramelo- para dar color oscuro y gusto Acido fosforito (para darle el sabor acido) azucar (HFCS-jarabe de maiz de alta fructosa) Extracto de hojas de la planta de Coca (Africa e India) y otros pocos aromatizantes naturales de otras plantas Mucha Cafeina Conservante que puede ser Benzoato de Sodio o Potasio Dioxido de Carbono en cantidad para sentir freir la lengua cuando se bebe Sal para dar la sensacion de refrigeracion El uso del acido fosforito y no del acido citrico como en todas las demas gaseosas, es para dar la sensacion de dientes y boca limpia al beber. El acido fosforito literalmente frie todo y dana el esmalte de los dientes, cosa que el acido citrico lo hace en menor grado.Trate de comprar acido fosforito para ver las mil recomendaciones de seguridad que te dan para su manipulacion (quema el cristalino del ojo, quema la piel, etc...). Esta prohibido usar el acido fosforito en cualquier otra gaseosa; solo la Coca Cola tiene permiso. Porque claro, sin el acido fosforico, la Coca Cola sabria a jabon.El extracto de coca y otras hojas casi no cambia en nada el sabor. Es mas bien un efecto cosmetico. El extracto forma parte de la Coca-Cola porque legalmente tiene que ser asi. Pero sin el, no se nota ninguna diferencia en el gusto, que esta dado basicamente por las cantidades diferentes de azucar, azucar quemada, sales, acidos y conservantes.Sabor a que...? ja, ja, ja. Aqui en Bartow, sur de Orlando, hay una empresa quimica que produce aromatizantes y esencias para zumos. Envian diariamente camionadas de sales concentradas y esencias para las fabricas de helados, gaseosas, jugos, enlatados y comida colorida y aromatizada.Cuando visite por primera vez la fabrica, pedi ver el deposito de concentrados de frutas, que deberia ser inmenso, especialmente los de naranja, pina, fresa y tantos otros. El encargado me miro, se rio y me llevo a visitar los depositos inmensos... pero de colorantes y componentes quimicos. Las gaseosa de naranja no contiene naranja. En los zumos dizque de fresa, hasta los puntitos que quedan en suspension estan hechos de goma (una liga quimica que envuelve un semi-polimero). Pina, es un popurri de acidos y goma. La esencia para helado de aguacate usa peroxido de hidrogeno (agua oxigenada) para dar la sensacion espumosa tipica del aguacate. Bebidas Light? Quieres saber la cantidad de basura que tiene un refresco 'light'? Yo ni siquiera los uso para destapar mi lavaplatos pues temo que danen los tubos de PVC. Los productos endulzantes 'ligth' tienen una vida media muy corta. Por ejemplo el Despues de toda mi experiencia con la produccion de bebidas embasadas, puedo afirmar sin dudar un segundo: la mejor bebida es el agua, como tambien los jugos exprimidos de naranja o limon. Nada mas, cero azucar y cero sal. Publicado por loretahur En realidad, la formula secreta de la Coca-Cola se puede detallar en 18 segundos en cualquier espectrometro optico, y basicamente la conocen hasta los perros. Lo que ocurre es que no se puede fabricar igual, a no ser que uno disponga de unos cuantos millones de dolares para ganarle la demanda que te metera la Coca-Cola ante la justicia (ellos no perderian).La formula de la Pepsi tiene una diferencia basica con la de la Coca-Cola y es intencional, para evitar el proceso judicial. La diferencia es a proposito, pero suficientemente parecida como para atraer a los consumidores de Coca-Cola que prefieren un gusto diferente con menos sal y azucar.Tuve que aprender quimica, entender todo sobre componentes de gaseosas, conservantes, sales, acidos, cafeina, enlatado, produccion, permisos, aprobaciones y muchas otras cosas. Monte mi propio mini-laboratorio de analisis de productos.A patadas. El Cloruro de Sodio no solo refresca sino da mas sed, como para pedir otra gaseosa. Y no resulta desagradable porque la sal mata literalmente la sensibilidad al dulce... del que por cierto tambien tiene mucho: 39 gramos de azucar.De los 350 gramos de producto liquido, mas del 10% es azucar, o sea que en una lata de Coca-Cola mas de un centimetro y medio es puro azucar en polvo. Aproximadamente tres cucharadas soperas llenas de azucar por lata!!La formula de la Coca Cola es muy sencilla:Concentrado de azucar quemado caramelo- para dar color oscuro y gustoAcido fosforito (para darle el sabor acido)azucar (HFCS-jarabe de maiz de alta fructosa)Extracto de hojas de la planta de Coca (Africa e India) y otros pocos aromatizantes naturales de otras plantasMucha CafeinaConservante que puede ser Benzoato de Sodio o PotasioDioxido de Carbono en cantidad para sentir freir la lengua cuando se bebeSal para dar la sensacion de refrigeracionEl uso del acido fosforito y no del acido citrico como en todas las demas gaseosas, es para dar la sensacion de dientes y boca limpia al beber. El acido fosforito literalmente frie todo y dana el esmalte de los dientes, cosa que el acido citrico lo hace en menor grado.Trate de comprar acido fosforito para ver las mil recomendaciones de seguridad que te dan para su manipulacion (quema el cristalino del ojo, quema la piel, etc...). Esta prohibido usar el acido fosforito en cualquier otra gaseosa; solo la Coca Cola tiene permiso. Porque claro, sin el acido fosforico, la Coca Cola sabria a jabon.El extracto de coca y otras hojas casi no cambia en nada el sabor. Es mas bien un efecto cosmetico. El extracto forma parte de la Coca-Cola porque legalmente tiene que ser asi. Pero sin el, no se nota ninguna diferencia en el gusto, que esta dado basicamente por las cantidades diferentes de azucar, azucar quemada, sales, acidos y conservantes.Sabor a que...? ja, ja, ja.Aqui en Bartow, sur de Orlando, hay una empresa quimica que produce aromatizantes y esencias para zumos. Envian diariamente camionadas de sales concentradas y esencias para las fabricas de helados, gaseosas, jugos, enlatados y comida colorida y aromatizada.Cuando visite por primera vez la fabrica, pedi ver el deposito de concentrados de frutas, que deberia ser inmenso, especialmente los de naranja, pina, fresa y tantos otros. El encargado me miro, se rio y me llevo a visitar los depositos inmensos... pero de colorantes y componentes quimicos.Las gaseosa de naranja no contiene naranja.En los zumos dizque de fresa, hasta los puntitos que quedan en suspension estan hechos de goma (una liga quimica que envuelve un semi-polimero).Pina, es un popurri de acidos y goma.La esencia para helado de aguacate usa peroxido de hidrogeno (agua oxigenada) para dar la sensacion espumosa tipica del aguacate.Quieres saber la cantidad de basura que tiene un refresco 'light'? Yo ni siquiera los uso para destapar mi lavaplatos pues temo que danen los tubos de PVC. Los productos endulzantes 'ligth' tienen una vida media muy corta. Por ejemplo el aspartamo , despues de tres semanas mojado, pasa a tener gusto de trapo viejo sucio.Para evitar eso, se agregan una infinidad de otros productos quimicos, uno para alargar la vida del aspartamo, otro para neutralizar el color, otro para mantener el tercer quimico en suspension porque sino el fondo de la gaseosa quedaria oscuro, otro para evitar la cristalizacion del aspartamo, otro para realzar el sabor, dar mas intensidad al acido citrico o fosforito que perderia su sabor por el efecto de los cuatro productos quimicos iniciales... y asi sucesivamente.Un consejo final !!Despues de toda mi experiencia con la produccion de bebidas embasadas, puedo afirmar sin dudar un segundo: la mejor bebida es el agua, como tambien los jugos exprimidos de naranja o limon. Nada mas, cero azucar y cero sal.Publicado por loretahur MARGARINA o MANTEQUILLA La margarina fue producida originalmente para engordar a los pavos; cuandolo que hizo en realidad fue matarlos.Las personas que habian puesto el dinero para la investigacion quisieronrecobrarlo asi que empezaron a pensar en una forma de hacerlo.Tenian una sustancia blanca, que no tenia ningun atractivo como comestible,asi que le anadieron el color amarillo, para venderselo a lagente en lugar de la mantequilla.Que tal esa?... Ahora han sacado algunos nuevos sabores para vender mas alos incautos como usted y yo.CONOCE USTED la diferencia entre la margarina y la mantequilla?Siga leyendo hasta el final... porque se pone bastante interesante!Comparacion entre mantequilla y margarina: 1.- Ambas tienen la misma cantidad de calorias. 2.- La mantequilla es ligeramente mas alta en grasas saturadas: 8 gramos,comparada con los 5 gramos que tiene la margarina. 3.- Comer margarina en vez de mantequilla puede aumentar en 53% el riesgo deenfermedades coronarias en las mujeres, de acuerdo con un estudiomedico reciente de la Universidad de Harvard. 4.- Comer mantequilla aumenta la absorcion de gran cantidad de nutrientesque se encuentran en otros alimentos. 5.- La mantequilla provee beneficios nutricionales propios mientras lamargarina tiene solo los que le hayan sido anadidos al fabricarla. 6.- La mantequilla sabe mucho mejor que la margarina y mejora el sabor deotros alimentos.7.- La mantequilla ha existido durante siglos mientras que la margarinatiene menos de 100 anos. Ahora... sobre la margarina: 1.- Es muy alta en acidos grasos trans. (Si, esos que recien ahora loscientificos descubrieron que son malisimos y los gobiernoscomenzaron a prohibirlos) . 2.- Triple riesgo de enfermedades coronarias. 3.- Aumenta el colesterol total y el LDL (el colesterol malo) y disminuye elHDL (el colesterol bueno). 4.- Aumenta en cinco veces el riesgo de cancer. 5.- Disminuye la calidad de la leche materna. 6.- Disminuye la reaccion inmunologica del organismo. 7.- Disminuye la reaccion a la insulina. Y he aqui el factor mas inquietante (AQUI ESTA LA PARTE MAS INTERESANTE! ):A la margarina le falta UNA MOLECULA para ser PLASTICO...!!Solo este hecho es suficiente para evitar el uso de la margarina de porvida, y de cualquier otra cosa que sea hidrogenada (esto significaque se le anade hidrogeno, lo cual cambia la estructura molecular de lassubstancias).Usted puede ensayar lo siguiente:Compre un poco de margarina y dejela en el garaje o en un sitio sombreado.Dentro de unos dias notara dos cosas: * No habra moscas; ni siquiera esos molestos bichos se le acercaran (esto yale debe decir a usted algo). * No se pudre ni huele mal o diferente porque no tiene valor nutritivo; nadacrece en ella. Ni siquiera los diminutos microorganismos puedencrecer en ella.Por que? Porque es casi plastico!! No a la guerra, Si a la Paz Misterios de la ciencia... Los costos de la guerra medicos y capitalismo... Capitalismo... medicos (2) Quien educa a nuestros hijos? Los Medios... Sin Palabras... Chistes feministas - Cual es el problema, Eva? - Se que me has creado, que me has dado este hermoso jardin, todos estos maravillosos animales y esa serpiente con la que me muero de risa... pero no soy del todo feliz... - Como es eso, Eva? - replico Dios desde las alturas. - Me encuentro sola, y ademas estoy harta de comer manzanas... - Bueno Eva, en tal caso, tengo una solucion... creare un hombre para ti. - Que es un hombre? - Un hombre sera una criatura imperfecta, con muchas artimanas. Mentira, hara trampas, sera engreido... vamos, que te va a dar problemas... Pero, va a ser mas fuerte y rapido que tu y le gustara cazar y matar cosas... Tendra un aspecto simple, pero como te estas quejando, le creare de tal forma que satisfaga tus... eh... necesidades fisicas... Y tampoco sera muy listo, y destacara en cosas infantiles como pegarse o dar patadas a un balon... Necesitara tu consejo siempre para actuar cuerdamente. - Suena bien - dijo Eva, mientras levantaba la ceja ironicamente. - Cual es el truco?. - Pues... que lo tendras con una condicion. - Cual? - Como te decia, sera chulo, arrogante y muy narcisista... asi que le tendras que hacer creer que le hice a el primero... recuerda... es nuestro secreto... de mujer a mujer. Por que a los hombres no les puede dar la enfermedad de las vacas locas? Porque todos son unos cerdos Un dia, en el Paraiso, Eva llamo a Dios: Tengo un problema.- Cual es el problema, Eva?- Se que me has creado, que me has dado este hermoso jardin, todos estos maravillosos animales y esa serpiente con la que me muero de risa... pero no soy del todo feliz... - Como es eso, Eva? - replico Dios desde las alturas.- Me encuentro sola, y ademas estoy harta de comer manzanas...- Bueno Eva, en tal caso, tengo una solucion... creare un hombre para ti.- Que es un hombre?- Un hombre sera una criatura imperfecta, con muchas artimanas. Mentira, hara trampas, sera engreido... vamos, que te va a dar problemas... Pero, va a ser mas fuerte y rapido que tu y le gustara cazar y matar cosas... Tendra un aspecto simple, pero como te estas quejando, le creare de tal forma que satisfaga tus... eh... necesidades fisicas... Y tampoco sera muy listo, y destacara en cosas infantiles como pegarse o dar patadas a un balon... Necesitara tu consejo siempre para actuar cuerdamente.- Suena bien - dijo Eva, mientras levantaba la ceja ironicamente.- Cual es el truco?.- Pues... que lo tendras con una condicion.- Cual?- Como te decia, sera chulo, arrogante y muy narcisista... asi que le tendras que hacer creer que le hice a el primero... recuerda... es nuestro secreto... de mujer a mujer.Por que a los hombres no les puede dar la enfermedad de las vacas locas? Porque todos son unos cerdos Ellas... Ellas (2)... Tres venganzas femeninas VENGANZA NUMERO 1 Hoy mi hija cumple 21 anos y estoy muy contento porque es el ultimo pago de pension alimenticia que le doy, asi que llame a mi hijita para que viniera a mi casa y cuando llego le dije: -Hijita, quiero que lleves este cheque a casa de tu mama y que le digas que: Este es el ultimo maldito cheque que va recibir de mi en todo lo que le queda de su puta vida!!! Quiero que me digas la expresion que pone en su rostro. Asi que mi hija fue a entregar el cheque. Yo estaba ansioso por saber lo que la bruja tenia que decir y que cara pondria. Cuando mi hijita entro, le pregunte inmediatamente: -Que fue lo que te dijo tu madre? -Me dijo que justamente estaba esperando este dia para decirte que no eres mi papa! VENGANZA NUMERO 2 Un hombre que siempre molestaba a su mujer, paso un dia por la casa de unos amigos para que lo acompanaran al aeropuerto a dejar a su esposa que viajaba a Paris. A la salida de inmigracion, frente a todo el mundo, el le desea buen viaje y en tono burlon le grita: - Amor, no te olvides de traerme una hermosa francesita Ja ja ja!! Ella bajo la cabeza y se embarco muy molesta. La mujer paso quince dias en Francia. El marido otra vez pidio a sus amigos que lo acompanasen al aeropuerto a recibirla. Al verla llegar, lo primero que le grita a toda voz es: - Y amor me trajiste mi francesita?? - Hice todo lo posible, - contesta ella - ahora solo tenemos que rezar para que nazca nina. VENGANZA NUMERO 3 El marido, en su lecho de muerte, llama a su mujer. Con voz ronca y ya debil, le dice: - Muy bien, llego mi hora, pero antes quiero hacerte una confesion. - No, no, tranquilo, tu no debes hacer ningun esfuerzo. - Pero, mujer, es preciso - insiste el marido - Es preciso morir en paz. Te quiero confesar algo. - Esta bien, esta bien. Habla! - He tenido relaciones con tu hermana, tu mama y tu mejor amiga. - Lo se, lo se Por eso te envenene, hijo de puta!!! machismo y cibernetica Chiste machista La NASA ha enviado al espacio una mision experimental tripulada por dos monos y una mujer.Apenas abandona la atmosfera, se establece comunicacion con Houston. -Atencion, simio 1, verifique sistemas hidraulicos, controle adecuada presion de los propulsores de arranque. A 60.000 pies disminuya un 25% la velocidad. El simio hace la sena de OK. -Atencion, simio 2, nivele al cruzar la estratosfera y active sistemas anticongelantes. No olvide monitorear sistemas de comunicacion e indicadores de presion. Comprendido?. El simio hace la sena de OK. -Atencion, Houston llamando a mujer: no se olvide. -Mujer: Si, si, ya se! -interrumpe enojada- que no me olvide darles de comer a estos monos de mierda y que no se me vaya a ocurrir tocar nada!. .Spaghetti, Spaghetti, Spaghetti, Spaghetti, Spaghetti. Un abogado mantiene un romance con su secretaria.Al poco tiempo, esta queda embarazada y el abogado, que no quiere que su esposa se entere, le da a la secretaria una buena suma de dinero y le pide que se vaya a parir a Italia.Esta pregunta: Y como voy a hacerte saber cuando nazca el bebe ? El abogado responde: Para que mi mujer no se entere, tan solo enviame una postal y escribe por detras: Spaghetti. Y no te preocupes mas, que yo me encargare de todos los gastos. Pasan los meses y una manana la esposa del abogado lo llama al bufete, algo exaltada: Querido, acabo de recibir el correo y hay una postal muy extrana viene desde Italia. La verdad, no entiendo que significa.El abogado, tratando de ocultar sus nervios, contesta:Espera a que llegue a casa, a ver si yo entiendoCuando el hombre llega a casa y lee la postal, cae al suelo fulminado por un infarto.Llega una ambulancia y se lo lleva. Ya en el hospital, el jefe de cardiologia se queda consolando a la esposa y le pregunta cual ha sido el evento que precipito tan masivo ataque cardiaco. Entonces la esposa saca la postal y se la muestra diciendole: No me explico, doctor; el solamente leyo esta postal. Vea usted mismo lo que trae escrito.Spaghetti, Spaghetti, Spaghetti, Spaghetti, Spaghetti."Tres con salchicha y albondigas y dos con almejas Gol !!!! Chistes de Borrachos Entra un borracho a su casa todo manchado con lapiz labial por todos lados hecho un desastre, y la mujer le pregunta:-Hombre que te paso?Y el borracho le responde:-No me vas a creer, me pelee con un payaso! Este es un borracho que entra en un bar y le dice al camarero:-Me da cinco copas de whisky?Al rato:-Me da cuatro?Al rato:-Me da tres copas?Despues:-Me da dos copas?Luego le dice:-Me da una copa?Y le dice al camarero:-Ves? Cuanto menos bebo, mas borracho estoy! A woman has been hospitalised after being struck in the back of the head with an object while making her way to her car. The victim was struck from behind with either a stick or a bat in the Lisnisky Lodge area of Portadown on Tuesday December 18. She fell to the ground before being struck several more times to her head and her body before the assailant left the scene. The woman received hospital treatment for cuts and bruises. Police are appealing for anyone with information about the incident to contact them in Lurgan on 101, quoting the reference 309 with the date 18/12/2018 An EU initiative to support peace and reconciliation in Northern Ireland will continue until the end of 2020 under a no-deal Brexit, the European Commission said. An EU initiative to support peace and reconciliation in Northern Ireland would continue until the end of 2020 under a no-deal Brexit, the European Commission has confirmed. The Peace programme has distributed significant financial support for community and voluntary groups since the end of the violence and is aimed at promoting cross-border co-operation and cohesion between different groups. It helped build a peace bridge a pedestrian walkway spanning the River Foyle linking the two communities in Londonderry, or Derry as nationalists call it and the Skainos urban regeneration centre in east Belfast. As part of its no-deal contingency planning, the EC reiterated its commitment to ensuring programmes between the border counties of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland can continue in all scenarios. #Brexit: European Commission implements no-deal Contingency Action Plan in specific sectors. Commission also proposing Regulation to continue the #PEACE programme in Northern Ireland until end of 2020 in event of a no deal scenario: https://t.co/snnUp0zE5S pic.twitter.com/55rkLdCLg5 EU Commission in Ireland (@eurireland) December 19, 2018 It said: Given its importance, the commission has today made a proposal for a regulation to continue the Peace programme in Northern Ireland until the end of 2020, in the event of a no-deal scenario. As for the period after 2020, the commission has already proposed as part of its proposals for the next multi-annual financial framework to continue and strengthen cross-border support for peace and reconciliation in the border counties of Ireland and Northern Ireland. A new programme (Peace IV, 2014-2020) was launched on January 14 2016, with a strong emphasis on investment targeted at children and young people. It is worth 270 million euro (243 million). Expand Close The Peace programme has distributed financial support for projects including building the Peace bridge in Londonderry (Paul Faith/PA) PA Archive/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp The Peace programme has distributed financial support for projects including building the Peace bridge in Londonderry (Paul Faith/PA) According to the European Parliament, the Peace programme has provided opportunities for participation and dialogue, and has brought decision-making and responsibility for community development closer to the people. It has funded a range of projects, including support for victims and survivors, young people, small and medium-sized businesses, infrastructure and urban regeneration, as well as projects in support of immigrants. It said the programme is seen as an example of peace-building policy to be shared throughout Europe and other regions. Queen's University Belfast has said it won't be accepting new students to the "highly problematic" Presbyterian-run Union Theological College (UTC) in 2019. A review by a panel of senior academics at Queen's University has raised concerns about the diversity of teaching available. The Belfast college admits around 150 theology students each year, with some training for ministry in the Presbyterian Church. The BBC reported that the review found the current undergraduate theology course covered a diverse subject matter, but was taught "entirely from a particular theological and religious perspective" and that teaching staff were male and "predominantly from a Presbyterian background". The report added that admission to undergraduate programmes would be suspended as a single denomination providing all undergraduate theology provision was "highly problematic and not sustainable in today's post-conflict Northern Ireland". The College was also accused of having no plan to address the lack of full-time female teaching staff and diversity in staffing and curriculum. The decision will affect new undergraduate students due to begin their studies in 2019, but current students will be permitted to continue. Queen's University has said it will consider how this will affect Union College's future and that it will help those who have applied to study in 2019 find alternative courses. A spokesperson for UTC called the review findings "very speculative and totally unsubstantiated". "We very much regret and are disappointed by the decision taken," they said. They said suggesting that students had not been exposed to a breadth of theological perspectives contradicted reports from external examiners in theology for many years. The spokesperson added it was not by choice that Union College had become the sole provider of undergraduate degree programmes after three other theological colleges - the Methodist Edgehill College, Irish Baptist College and Belfast Bible College - no longer offered courses. "As to why Northern Ireland's three other theological colleges found themselves unable to work with Queen's University is, of course, an open question," they said. "Is the real issue that there is no place for a Christian college linked to the Queen's University of today?" DUP MLA Christopher Stalford voiced his support on Twitter. "Union is a fine college which has produced many great thinkers, preachers and lecturers. This is Queen's loss," he said. The latest decision follows a previous review in 2016 which raised similar issues. It's believed a key factor in the latest review was a decision to suspend a theology professor for comments in the media. Laurence Kirkpatrick had described Union College as an "exclusively Presbyterian male teaching faculty," and that: "I'd be broken-hearted if anyone said I'd been bigoted against a Catholic or gay student." His comments followed a controversial decision by the Presbyterian General Assembly to deny anyone in a same-sex relationship to be a full communicant member of the Church or have their children baptised. A spokesman for Queen's said, that following the review, the university had concerns regarding "the breadth and diversity" of the teaching and curriculum being delivered. "The University has taken the decision to suspend entry to all undergraduate programmes for the forthcoming 2019-20 academic year," he said. "The University is now considering the implications of the review for the longer term future of Theology provision through the Universitys Institute and the associated programmes. This requires comprehensive engagement with relevant stakeholders, including Union Theological College, which is now underway. "The University is committed to ensuring that issues raised by the review will be addressed and its priority is to continue to support students who have already begun their course. "Prospective students that have already applied for 2019-20 entry to affected programmes are being contacted and will be supported to find suitable alternatives," said the spokesman. A woman who came to the aid of a disabled joiner after he was shot outside a west Belfast church claimed she was approached by a soldier who threatened to shoot her. The Ballymurphy inquest yesterday heard evidence from Maureen Heath, who witnessed the shooting of John McKerr (49) outside Corpus Christi Church on August 11, 1971. Eyewitness accounts from Mrs Heath, who is now deceased, were read out at the hearing. The court also viewed a YouTube video from 2007 in which she told her story at a public meeting. Mrs Heath had recalled being in her home on the morning of the shooting, opposite the church on Westrock Drive. Earlier Mr McKerr had let her and other parishioners into the chapel to say prayers despite the Army having imposed a curfew. A short time later Mrs Heath had been preparing to leave her family home to visit her mother. As she was putting on her coat she heard a shot. When she looked out of the window she saw Mr McKerr walking slowly along the railings outside the church. According to Mrs Heath, he turned back and looked in the direction of Corry's timber yard to see where the shot had come from. A second shot then rang out and she saw the ex-serviceman, who lost a hand in the Second World War, fall "flat down on his face" to the ground. She ran to help Mr McKerr and saw a small wrinkle in the centre of his forehead, but then noticed that one side of his head was "blown out". Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Previous Next Close Riots : Belfast. January 1971. Soldiers frisking passengers and driver of a car on the Springfield Road, near Ballymurphy. (14/01/1971) Riots: Belfast. August 1970. Soldiers shelter behind their riot shields during rioting at Ballymurphy. (04/08/70) Riots : Belfast. August 1970. The common sight in the Roman Catholic estate at Ballymurphy, Belfast, as young rioters attack the army with missiles during the troubles. (04/08/70) Ballymurphy: troops stand by at the junction of Springfield and Whiterock Roads (20/09/1970) Riots : Belfast. January 1971. Catholic housing estate, Ballymurphy. (15/01/1971) Mourners file past the coffin of Father Hugh Mullan, one of the 10 people killed (PA Archive) PA Archive/PA Images Father Hugh Mullan. Shot at Moyard Park. 9/8/1971 THE FUNERAL HEARSE CARRYING THE BODY OF FATHER HUGH MULLAN TRAVELS ALONG THE ROAD IN BALLYMURPHY ESTATE. 12/8/1971 Joseph Murphy was one of 10 people shot dead by British soldiers in West Belfast in 1971 Pacemaker Press 17/6/10 John McKerr who is one of the 11 people died in the Ballymurphy Massacre in 1971 in West Belfast Pacemaker Press 17/6/10 Fr Hugh Mullan who is one of the 11 people died in the Ballymurphy Massacre in 1971 in West Belfast Pacemaker Press 17/6/10 Joseph Corr who is one of the 11 people died in the Ballymurphy Massacre in 1971 in West Belfast Pacemaker Press 17/6/10 Danny Teggart who is one of the 11 people died in the Ballymurphy Massacre in 1971 in West Belfast Pacemaker Press 17/6/10 Danny Teggart who is one of the 11 people died in the Ballymurphy Massacre in 1971 in West Belfast Pacemaker Press 17/6/10 Danny Teggart who is one of the 11 people died in the Ballymurphy Massacre in 1971 in West Belfast Press Eye Ltd Northern Ireland - 25th January 2012 Mandatory Credit - Photo-Jonathan Porter/Presseye. Ballymurphy massacre relatives call for a meeting with the Prime Minister, David Cameron. 10 people were shot dead by soldiers in west Belfast in August 1971. The victims, which included a priest and a mother-of-eight, were killed over the course of three days in August 1971 by members of the Parachute Regiment during Operation Demetrius, when people suspected of paramilitary activity were interned. Relatives Rita Bonner, John Teggart and Briege Voyle pictured at the top of the Whiterock Road in west Belfast beside a mural depicting the shootings. / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Riots : Belfast. January 1971. Soldiers frisking passengers and driver of a car on the Springfield Road, near Ballymurphy. (14/01/1971) Mrs Heath knelt down and felt for a pulse as she said prayers for the fatally injured man. Two men came to her assistance and held Mr McKerr's head while she tried to bandage it to stop the bleeding as they waited for an ambulance to arrive. In her accounts, Mrs Heath said: "People began to shout that the soldiers were coming. As the two ambulance men were putting the stretcher on the ground and we were placing Mr McKerr onto it, all I heard was 'don't move or I'll shoot'. I was kneeling down with my back to this voice. I looked around and saw this big soldier standing with his rifle." While the ambulance crew went back to their vehicle, Mrs Heath stood up and faced the soldier. "I told him to go ahead and shoot me. I thought my life wasn't worth much as they'd shot our priest, who was a good man," the inquest heard. She was referring to the shooting two days previously of Fr Hugh Mullan, who was killed as he ministered to wounded and dying parishioners. At this point Mrs Heath said she felt a hand on her shoulder and an officer told her to calm herself, to which she replied: "How can I calm down when that man's lifeblood is running out of him and you won't let him be put in the ambulance." She said the officer then got the soldier to put his rifle down and allowed Mr McKerr to be taken away in the ambulance. Yesterday the inquest also heard reports from three pathologists who all agreed that Mr McKerr had been shot in the right side of his head. However, they said it was not possible to say from which position the shot had been fired. Mr McKerr died nine days later in hospital as a result of the wound to his head and other medical complications, including meningitis. Two men have been arrested and a firearm has been seized after an incident during an eviction in Roscommon. Vehicles were set alight and a number of people required hospital treatment after another group attended the property during the eviction on Sunday. A dog was seriously injured and had to be put down. As part of continuing investigations into the incident at Falsk, Strokestown, planned searches were carried out at four locations, including houses and outhouses. One firearm was recovered and a number of vehicles including a lorry were seized. Two men, in their 50s and 60s, were arrested and were detained at Castlerea Garda Station. Today I spoke with members of the McGann family in Strokestown who were subjected to a forced eviction last week. Subsequently the McGann's, who are family friends, requested that I release the following statement on their behalf: pic.twitter.com/hfdsgTxmAl Matt Carthy TD (@mattcarthy) December 18, 2018 Wednesday mornings operation followed a number of searches carried out in Co Dublin and Co Meath on Monday. Members of the Special Detective Unit recovered a number of items including documentation and phones. Speaking on Wednesday at Castlerea Garda Station, Chief Superintendent Tony Healy said: We would again like to thank the community for their continued support following recent events in Strokestown and would again appeal to anyone with information to come forward and contact us here at Castlerea Garda Station. An eviction order was executed on Sunday during which two brothers and a sister were removed by a private firm. The McGann family released a statement on Tuesday saying they had been left shocked by the ordeal that had been thrust upon them. The family, who released the statement through their former neighbour, Sinn Fein MEP Matt Carthy, asked that the Taoiseach refrain from commenting further. Expand Close Leo Varadkar (Niall Carson/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Leo Varadkar (Niall Carson/PA) We wish to make clear we condemn all forms of violence and want to see the rule of law upheld, but we have also been deeply upset by the use of inflammatory language that has characterised much of the media reportage. They added that they were disappointed by Leo Varadkars comments when he was asked about the incident by Sinn Feins Pearse Doherty. The Taoiseach told Mr Doherty: When it comes to Sinn Fein and the rule of law and public order and condemning violence, it doesnt take very long for your balaclava to slip. The family said Mr Varadkar had yet to adequately respond to the incident, and asked him to refrain from making comments that further compound their distress. We believe our plight has been exploited by some wishing to further their own narrow agendas and we were particularly disappointed at comments made today by An Taoiseach Leo Varadkar during Leaders Questions in the Dail. The Taoiseach made no reply when asked in Dublin on Wednesday morning if he had any apology to make to the family. The Prince and Princess of Wales leave the Lindo Wing following the birth of Prince Harry (PA) Prince William also made an early foray Down Under, here in Auckland, New Zealand with his parents (PA) An ex-Irish man who joined the IRA has denied he was part of an assassination plot against Prince Charles and Princess Diana. In an interview with the Irish Examiner, Kieran McCarthy spoke of what drove him to terrorism and claimed media reports of the alleged plot against the royal couple were untrue. But he declined to comment on whether he targeted Army bases. McCarthy was arrested in 1990 in Belgium along with others in an IRA active service unit, weeks before the royals were due to visit. He served 10 months in jail. "We didn't even know they were coming. It was pure coincidence," he said. "It wasn't the operation we were planning. We were planning a variety of operations at the time." Now an independent councillor in Cork, he is writing a book about his experiences. McCarthy said his sympathies for the IRA began when serving along the border with the Irish Defence Forces. He claimed British "undercover snatch squads" were crossing the border with the assistance of loyalists and killing republicans. "(That) made me further question what we in the Irish Army were doing on the border. We were a toothless tiger," he said. He alleged British soldiers badly treated him and colleagues crossing the border to visit a market in south Armagh in 1976. Expand Expand Previous Next Close Diana, Princess of Wales and Prince Harry arrive at St Georges to Lady Helen Windsors wedding in 1992 (Tony Harris/PA) PA Archive/PA Images Princess Diana with her bodyguard Ken Wharfe PA / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Diana, Princess of Wales and Prince Harry arrive at St Georges to Lady Helen Windsors wedding in 1992 (Tony Harris/PA) "They grabbed us and put us up against the wall, with their guns trained on us," he said. "They knew we were Irish Army. They were just making an example of us in front of the community. They were saying it was their country. That was a turning point for me." He was aware of other Irish soldiers who joined the IRA. Kenny Donaldson, a victims rights campaigner with the South East Fermanagh Foundation, said McCarthy's IRA past could not be defended. He said: "No matter what real or perceived grievances he or others had, there was never justification for the use of terrorism and criminal violence in the pursuance of or defence of a political objective." Masterchef star Gary Maclean is calling on Scots to turn down the temperature on their turkey to avoid food waste this Christmas. The Glasgow chef said too much meat gets dumped after over-cooking leaves it dry and inedible. Its one of three top tips the 2016 champion of Masterchef: The Professionals is offering after teaming up with Zero Waste Scotland in the fight against festive food waste. The group said the equivalent of 100,000 turkeys will be thrown away in Scotland this Christmas. Buy a turkey thats smaller than the size you think you need. Turn down your oven and cook your turkey upside down to ensure the juices stay in the breast meat. Invest in a temperature probe to help you cook with confidence. Get clever with carving to make sure you get the most out of the whole bird. When serving allow guests to request their preferred portion size. Gary said: Turkey is most likely to end up in the bin due to buying a bird thats far too big or serving up a roast thats dry and inedible from overcooking at high temperatures. My top turkey tips are threefold buy a turkey thats smaller than you think you need, turn down your oven to cook your turkey for longer on a lower temperature and get confident with carving. The latter means you can serve your turkey buffet-style at the table with guests able to request a portion size thats right for them. Ylva Haglund, from Zero Waste Scotland, added: We all have a tendency to overbuy at this time of year but just a few small changes can go a long way in reducing the amount of food waste generated over the festive season. Alexander Perepilichnyy collapsed and died while jogging near his home in Surrey in 2012 (Family handout/PA) A coroner found a Russian whistle-blower died of natural causes rather than poisoning after bungling police provided just 20% of the puzzle, a campaigner has said. Surrey Police came under fire for its initial investigation after multi-millionaire Alexander Perepilichnyy, 44, collapsed and died while jogging near his home in Weybridge, Surrey, on November 10 2012. Coroner Nicholas Hilliard QC identified a number of police failings but concluded Mr Perepilichnyy died of sudden arrhythmic death syndrome (Sads). Im satisfied that I can properly and safely conclude that it is more likely than not he had died from natural causes, namely SadsCoroner Nicholas Hilliard He said: I do not think I can completely eliminate all possibility he was poisoned, although I regard it unlikely on all the evidence I have heard. Im satisfied that I can properly and safely conclude that it is more likely than not he had died from natural causes, namely Sads. Around the time of his death, Mr Perepilichnyy had been helping UK-based Bill Browders Hermitage Capital Investment expose a 230 million US dollar (142 million in November 2012) money-laundering operation. Mr Browder, who has campaigned for anti-corruption laws to crack down on international criminals, blamed police for failing to find out how the married father-of-two died. Speaking at the Old Bailey after the ruling, he said: The judge was working on a puzzle with only 20% of the pieces because of the Surrey Police incompetence in investigating. Mr Browder went on: They lost the stomach samples. They lost the computer files of Perepilichnyy, they lost financial records, never treated it as a crime scene and as a result he (the coroner) could not come to any conclusions about what happened up there. He could not get any direct evidence because police did not do an investigation. I do not know how he was murdered, theres no way we can without a proper investigation. Mr Browder said he was determined not to give up, saying he would work on this politically. Expand Close Bill Browder criticised Surrey Police (Dominic Lipinski/PA) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Bill Browder criticised Surrey Police (Dominic Lipinski/PA) He added: (Russian President Vladimir) Putin cannot be allowed to send his people here and the authorities sweep it under the carpet. Detective Chief Superintendent John Boshier, of Surrey Police, said: We accept that some organisational failings were made in the early stages. Mr Perepilichnyys family insisted the coroner reached the only conclusion possible, despite lurid conspiracy theories. In a statement they said: The family have always believed that Alexanders tragic death was of natural causes. After an inquest that has taken over six years and has seen endless media speculation and lurid conspiracy theories, the coroner has followed the evidence and drawn the only conclusion possible of death by natural causes. The family said publicity had only served to magnify the distress and trauma and called for everyone to take note of the findings and stop adding to the grief. The inquest heard evidence that Mr Perepilichnyy had faced threats in the months before his death and had taken out millions of pounds in life insurance. He had recently fought off a legal challenge by a debt recovery firm allegedly led by a prime suspect in the Alexander Litvinenko poison case, Dmitry Kovtun. But he died before he could give evidence against his former private banking clients, who he had claimed had targeted Hermitage companies for the tax fraud. The coroner said Mr Perepilichnyys death was not initially treated as suspicious at the scene as no-one reported any ill effects or concerns. As a result, no forensic post-mortem examination was done until 18 days later and Mr Perepilichnyys stomach contents were thrown away before it could be tested for poison. Expand Close Detective Chief Superintendent John Boshier said organisational failings were made (Dominic Lipinski/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Detective Chief Superintendent John Boshier said organisational failings were made (Dominic Lipinski/PA) Had police looked carefully they could have found an article linking Mr Perepilichnyy to the alleged fraud and that he was hiding in London, the coroner said. Despite extensive toxicology tests, no poison was identified in the Russians body, although experts refused to rule it out. Mr Hilliard said those behind the fraud on Hermitage had an obvious motive to stop Mr Perepilichnyy from giving evidence against them at an upcoming hearing in Switzerland. Mr Perepilichnyy was not a high-profile critic of the Kremlin, unlike others who were previously murdered. Mr Hilliard said he received a letter on Tuesday from the Metropolitan Police counter-terrorism unit confirming they are not conducting an investigation into Mr Perepilichnyys death at the hands of a hostile agent. Mr Hilliard said: There is nothing that points significantly towards poisoning rather than Sads. And there is nothing significantly that points away from poisoning and towards Sads. Whatever happened to Mr Perepilichnyy, it was highly unusual and in reality it was poisoning or Sads. In the two days before his death, Mr Perepilichnyy, who was worth 50 million, had been on a romantic break in Paris with his ex-model girlfriend Elmira Medynska, 28, and had vomited after eating fish during their last supper. While he may have suffered from food poisoning, the coroner said it did not contribute to his death the next day, after he went home. The coroner said Mr Perepilichnyy had eaten sorrel soup for lunch on the day of his death. It was prepared by his wife, who also ate some but suffered no ill-effects. Mr Hilliard rejected claims in a BuzzFeed article that Mr Perepilichnyy was murdered on the orders of Mr Putin or those close to him. And the allegation British authorities were involved in covering it up for the sake of Russian relations did not bear scrutiny in the light of the Skripal poisoning. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn speaks during Prime Ministers Questions in the House of Commons, London (House of Common/PA) Jeremy Corbyn has been accused of misogyny after appearing to call Theresa May a stupid woman during Prime Ministers Questions. The Labour leader was seen saying something under his breath after the Prime Minister likened his attempt to force a confidence vote in her earlier this week to a Christmas pantomime. The Opposition leaders spokesman denied he made the alleged remark as the video footage went viral on social media on Wednesday afternoon. Mrs May suggested Mr Corbyn apologise if he had indeed used inappropriate language as the row overshadowed a heated PMQs that had focused on Brexit. Speaking on a subsequent visit to Heathrow Airport the Prime Minister said that with 2018 marking the centenary of women getting the vote I want to see more women encouraged to come into Parliament and not put off by the sort of remarks that they might feel have been said in Parliament. She added: The Speaker made very clear that if a Member of Parliament uses inappropriate language then they should apologise. The almost immediate circulation of footage of Mr Corbyn prompted uproar in the Commons, with shouting and heckling as a succession of MPs demanded action from Speaker John Bercow. Expand Close Jo Churchill MP urging Commons Speaker John Bercow to look at a video clip of Jeremy Corbyn on a mobile phone as (left to right) Education Secretary Damian Hinds, Andrew Stephenson MP, Mike Freer MP and Health Secretary Matt Hancock look on Press Association Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Jo Churchill MP urging Commons Speaker John Bercow to look at a video clip of Jeremy Corbyn on a mobile phone as (left to right) Education Secretary Damian Hinds, Andrew Stephenson MP, Mike Freer MP and Health Secretary Matt Hancock look on But he triggered a furious response from a slew of female MPs, including Commons leader Andrea Leadsom after refusing to take immediate action because he had not seen the incident. Mr Corbyn had already left the Common chamber by the time the points of order were raised and his spokesman later said he had not said anything that required an apology. Other Conservative MPs were quick to attack the opposition leader, with party chairman Brandon Lewis urging him to either apologise or clarify. Expand Close Theresa May speaking during Prime Ministers Questions Press Association Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Theresa May speaking during Prime Ministers Questions Deputy Tory chairman James Cleverly said on Twitter that this kind of misogynistic language must not be tolerated, and the Health Secretary Matt Hancock added: The mask slips. Jeremy Corbyns abuse of the Prime Minister shows what a reactionary misogynist he is. Mr Corbyn also faced criticism from his own backbenches, with Walthamstow MP Stella Creasy, who has talked publicly about misogynist abuse she has faced on social media, saying: This is not ok. PMQs is a hotbed of emotions but I hope that Jeremy will accept this kind of behaviour isnt his normal good nature or what we expect of progressive men. This is not ok. PMQs is a hotbed of emotions but I hope that Jeremy will accept this kind of behaviour isnt his normal good nature or what we expect of progressive men #21stcenturycalling https://t.co/N9MpSNeYv4 stellacreasy (@stellacreasy) December 19, 2018 The Labour leaders spokesman said afterwards that Mr Corbyn had said stupid people, referring generally to MPs who were not taking the issues being debated seriously. He said he had confirmed the word spoken with the Labour leader personally, adding: He did not call her a stupid woman and so I dont think theres any basis for an apology. There were audible cries of shame and disgraceful as Tory former minister Sir Patrick McLoughlin used a point of order during PMQs to suggest Mr Corbyn should come back into this chamber and apologise. Mr Bercow, who hit the headlines in May himself after being accused of calling Commons Leader Andrea Leadsom a stupid woman, told MPs that any MP who failed to follow House conventions on conduct had a responsibility to apologise. He added: I am happy to look at that evidence if that evidence exists. I would come back on the matter as advised by the Clerk after the two statements to the House. But he clashed with Mrs Leadsom after she raised a point of order over an incident involving the Speaker. Expand Close Leader of the House of Commons Andrea Leadsom raises a point of order in the Commons PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Leader of the House of Commons Andrea Leadsom raises a point of order in the Commons She said: If individuals who are found to have made unwelcome remarks should apologise, why it is that when an opposition member found that you had called me a stupid woman, you did not apologise in this chamber? After repeated jeers and banging from Tory MPs, Mr Bercow said: I dealt with that point months ago in remarks that I made to the House of Commons to which Ms Leadsom in our various meetings since has made no reference and which requires from the chair today no elaboration whatsoever. Tory backbencher Anna Soubry also questioned his response, saying: If it was one of my male colleagues on this side of the house that had used that expression against a woman on the front bench of the opposition, you sir would take action immediately. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn says something under his breath after the Prime Minister likened Labours attempt to table a no confidence motion in her to a pantomime, during Prime Ministers Questions in the House of Commons, London. Jeremy Corbyn has become embroiled in a misogyny row after being accused of mouthing stupid woman at Prime Minister Theresa May during Prime Ministers Questions. The Labour leader was shown saying something under his breath after Mrs May likened his attempt to force a confidence vote in her earlier this week to a Christmas pantomine. It brought condemnation from Tory MPs, with party chairman Brandon Lewis urging him to either apologise or clarify. But a spokesman Mr Corbyn denied he had said stupid woman, instead insisting he had mouthed stupid people, referring generally to MPs. The Commons descended into uproar as MPs attempted to get Speaker John Bercow to take action against Mr Corbyn, who had left the chamber, and bring him back to explain his remarks. Expand Close Jo Churchill MP urging Commons Speaker John Bercow to look at a video clip of Jeremy Corbyn on a mobile phone as (left to right) Education Secretary Damian Hinds, Andrew Stephenson MP, Mike Freer MP and Health Secretary Matt Hancock look on (UK Parliament/Mark Duffy/PA) Press Association Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Jo Churchill MP urging Commons Speaker John Bercow to look at a video clip of Jeremy Corbyn on a mobile phone as (left to right) Education Secretary Damian Hinds, Andrew Stephenson MP, Mike Freer MP and Health Secretary Matt Hancock look on (UK Parliament/Mark Duffy/PA) Deputy Tory chairman James Cleverly said on Twitter: This kind of misogynistic language must not be tolerated. And Health Secretary Matt Hancock added: The mask slips. Jeremy Corbyns abuse of the Prime Minister shows what a reactionary misogynist he is. The mask slips. Jeremy Corbyns abuse of the Prime Minister shows what a reactionary misogynist he is https://t.co/i6hS6z461o Matt Hancock (@MattHancock) December 19, 2018 Mr Corbyn faced criticism from his own backbenches, with Walthamstow MP Stella Creasy saying: This is not ok. PMQs is a hotbed of emotions but I hope that Jeremy will accept this kind of behaviour isnt his normal good nature or what we expect of progressive men. This is not ok. PMQs is a hotbed of emotions but I hope that Jeremy will accept this kind of behaviour isnt his normal good nature or what we expect of progressive men #21stcenturycalling https://t.co/N9MpSNeYv4 stellacreasy (@stellacreasy) December 19, 2018 The Labour leaders spokesman said that Mr Corbyn had said stupid people, referring generally to MPs who were not taking the issues being debated seriously. He said: He did not call her a stupid woman and so I dont think theres any basis for an apology. Mr Bercow, who hit the headlines in May himself after being accused of calling Commons Leader Andrea Leadsom a stupid woman, told MPs that he did not see what Mr Corbyn had said but that any MP who failed to follow House conventions on conduct had a responsibility to apologise. In response to repeated requests to look at the evidence, Mr Bercow said: I am happy to look at that evidence if that evidence exists. I would come back on the matter as advised by the Clerk after the two statements to the House. But Tory backbencher Anna Soubry questioned this, saying: If it was one of my male colleagues on this side of the house that had used that expression against a woman on the front bench of the opposition you sir would take action immediately. Police Scotland are searching for the driver who failed to stop after the collision (Andrew Milligan/PA) An elderly woman has been injured in a hit-and-run crash in Dumfries. The 72-year-old was knocked down on Galloway Street by a dark-coloured, five-door, saloon-style car at about 7.40am on Tuesday. Police said the car stopped momentarily and then drove off, turning on to Glasgow Street. The woman, who was wearing a bright orange jacket, was taken to Dumfries and Galloway Royal Infirmary. She had bruising, as well as a potentially fractured right ankle. Constable John Macbeth said: It amazes me that the driver of the car failed to stop after the crash. We are keen to hear from anyone who might have witnessed this collision and has not already spoken to police, or anyone who may have captured the vehicle on their dash cameras. I would also encourage the driver of the car to come forward to clear the matter up. Police at Dumfries can be contacted through the 101 number. A blind amphibian that buries its head below ground level has been named after US President Donald Trump. The caecilian, a type of Panamanian amphibian, was given the new title Demorphis donaldtrumpi after an environmental construction company bought the rights to name it for 25,000 dollars (20,000) at a Rainforest Trust auction. Envirobuild said it made the decision because of President Trumps views on climate change. We bought the naming rights for a caecilian that can only see light and dark at @RainforestTrust's charity auction. @RealDonaldTrump must see the world in black & white to think climate change is a hoax; hes a perfect namesake! #COP24 #charitytuesday https://t.co/497929Dklk pic.twitter.com/xD2YXxBJ3W EnviroBuild (@ENVIROBUILDcom) December 18, 2018 Founder Aidan Bell said the name caecilians is taken from the Latin Caecus, meaning blind', pointing out that the creatures have rudimentary eyes which can only detect light or dark. Capable of seeing the world only in black and white, Donald Trump has claimed that climate change is a hoax by the Chinese, Mr Bell added. That referred to a tweet sent by Mr Trump in 2012, reading: The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive. More recently Mr Trump said he was joking, stating in an interview with CBS: I dont think its a hoax. I think theres probably a difference. But I dont know that its man-made. I will say this: I dont want to give trillions and trillions of dollars (to fight climate change). I dont want to lose millions and millions of jobs. Leading scientists around the world agree that climate change has been primarily brought about by human activity, and UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres recently described it as the single most important issue we face as world leaders met for a summit in Poland. Last year, Mr Trump withdrew the US from the 2015 Paris climate agreement, and his administration has supported the continued use of fossil fuels in industry. Expand Close Protests outside the American Embassy in London as Donald Trump announced he was withdrawing from the Paris agreement (David Mizoeff/PA) PA Archive/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Protests outside the American Embassy in London as Donald Trump announced he was withdrawing from the Paris agreement (David Mizoeff/PA) On his companys website, Mr Bell said: As Demorphus donaldtrumpi is an amphibian, it is particularly susceptible to the impacts of climate change and is therefore in danger of becoming extinct as a direct result of its namesakes climate policies. According to University College London, caecilians are a group of limbless, burrowing amphibians which resemble earthworms or slick snakes. They mostly inhabit moist tropical and subtropical regions of the world such as South and Central America and sub-Saharan Africa, and spend the majority of their lives below the earths surface. Envirobuild said it was not an overtly political organisation, but added: We do feel very strongly that everyone should do everything they can to leave the world in a better way than they found it. Glitter, the substance, loved by youngsters for making Christmas cards and baubles, is being banished at Tops Day Nurseries a chain of 19 nurseries across the South of England because of concerns about the damage it does to the environment. A former Nasa engineer has built a high-tech anti-theft device to horrify thieves who steal Christmas packages from outside peoples homes. Frustrated after a parcel was stolen from his porch in California, YouTuber Mark Rober spent months building a bait trap which would cover thieves in glitter, stink spray and shame when they opened it. Someone stole a package from me. Police wouldnt do anything about it so I spent the last six months engineering up some vigilante justice. Revenge is a dish best served fabulously, he wrote in a Facebook post sharing the video. The footage has been viewed nearly 25 million times on YouTube since he shared it on Monday. Hidden inside the box for a smart speaker is an accelerometer so the device knows when it is jostled or shaken and a GPS monitor to prime the trap if it is moved from outside Mr Robers home. Four smartphones were installed to film the action from every angle, along with a can of fart spray, which goes off every five seconds, and a pound of the worlds finest glitter to be thrown everywhere after the lid is lifted off. I just felt like something needs to be done to take a stand against dishonest punks like this, said Mr Rober, who worked at the American space agency for nine years and has more than four million followers on YouTube for his bizarre and amusing inventions. If anyone was going to make a revenge bait package and engineer the crap out of it, it was going to be me. Riveting video from a vigilante engineer who decides to take on doorstep package thieves. So good. https://t.co/g1urwysIh7 Chris Sacca (@sacca) December 18, 2018 By way of a warning to more observant criminals, he addressed the package to Harry and Marv the villainous burglars in classic Christmas film Home Alone sent by Kevin McCallister, Macaulay Culkins prankster hero in the film. The results did not disappoint. After getting an alert that the package had been taken, Mr Rober traced it to a nearby car park where he found it dumped on the ground, open and surrounded by traces of glitter. This is like recovering the black box from a crashed airplane, he said. The recovered footage showed a young man open the package only to be covered in a cloud of glitter. He swiftly discards it in a fit of sweary, incredulous anger. I genuinely laughed so hard at this @MarkRober video that I teared up. An absolutely perfect, overengineered response to the awful problem of people stealing packages from one's porch. https://t.co/BgU225TtSn Anil Dash (@anildash) December 18, 2018 Mr Rober loaned the trap to a friend who had also been a victim of package thefts, catching a further four thieves in the process. Get that shit out of here, you shouldnt even have grabbed that shit, says one man to his friend as they contemplate what to do with a car full of glitter and fart spray. The moral of the story is dont take other peoples stuff, concluded Mr Rober. Officials apprehend an escaped inmate after being found soaking in a hot tub still wearing her yellow prison outfit (Pike County Sheriffs Office/AP) An escaped inmate is back in custody after being found soaking in a hot tub at an old peoples centre, still wearing her yellow prison outfit. The Pike County Sheriffs Office in Ohio said the 34-year-old woman fled after being brought in on drug-possession charges on Tuesday. She was captured by the sheriff and the local police chief several hours later when a caller reported the woman sitting in the hot tub at a senior communitys activity centre in Waverly. Authorities have not explained how or why the woman ended up there. The sheriffs office said the woman is being charged with felony escape in addition to the initial charges for alleged heroin possession. President Donald Trump has said that US troops do not need to remain in Syria. The president tweeted on Wednesday: We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency. His tweet followed a series of news reports that the US is preparing to withdraw its troops from Syria. The news was first reported by the Wall Street Journal. Responding to the reports, Pentagon spokesman Col Rob Manning issued a statement, saying: At this time, we continue to work by, with and through our partners in the region. Authorities in South Africa have issued an arrest warrant for the wife of former Zimbabwe leader Robert Mugabe over an alleged assault. The warrant follows a long legal process during which a South African court this year ruled that the government acted illegally in granting diplomatic immunity to Grace Mugabe when the alleged attack was first reported. It also marked another setback for Grace and Robert Mugabe, who have kept a mostly low profile since the former president was forced from office in November 2017. Robert Mugabe, whose command over Zimbabwe once seemed impregnable, is now 94 years old and ailing. I can confirm that a warrant for the arrest of Grace Mugabe was issued last Thursday. We are following the Interpol processes, said South African police Brig Vishnu Naidoo. Whether Zimbabwe would assist South African authorities with any extradition request is in doubt, though the arrest warrant means Grace Mugabe would be vulnerable if she visits her sons, who stay in South Africa. She also owns a house there. Grace Mugabe allegedly attacked model Gabriella Engels in a hotel on August 13, 2017, whipping her with an extension cable that cut her forehead. However, Mrs Mugabe was allowed to return to Zimbabwe despite calls for her prosecution. She travelled with her husband, who was then president of Zimbabwe and attending a regional summit in Pretoria. Robert Mugabe was ousted only a few months later after a military takeover, impeachment proceedings led by the ruling party that once backed him and large demonstrations for his removal. Representatives of Grace Mugabe have said that Ms Engels was the actual aggressor in the altercation between the two. AfriForum, a South African group that represented Ms Engels, said the court ruling that Grace Mugabe had no right to diplomatic immunity had allowed police to proceed with an investigation. Were now at a point where an arrest is possible, said Kallie Kriel, the groups CEO. We believe that this sends out a strong message that nobody is above the law, not even if your surname is Mugabe. Donald Trump has argued for the withdrawal since he was a presidential candidate (Amnesty International/PA) Donald Trump is pulling all 2,000 US troops out of Syria, officials announced Wednesday, as the president suddenly declared victory over the Islamic State. He was contradicting his own experts assessments and sparked surprise and outrage from members of his party, who called his action rash and dangerous. The US began airstrikes in Syria in 2014, and ground troops moved in the following year to battle the Islamic State, or Isis, and train Syrian rebels in a country torn apart by civil war. Mr Trump abruptly declared their mission accomplished in a tweet. On Wednesday, as Vice President Mike Pence met top military leaders in the Pentagon, Mr Trump tweeted: We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency. Later, Mr Trump posted a video on Twitter in which he said it was heartbreaking to have to write letters and make calls to the loved ones of those killed in battle. Now its time for our troops to come back home, he said. His declaration of victory is far from unanimous. The decision will fulfil Mr Trumps long-stated goal of bringing troops home from Syria, but military leaders argue that Islamic State remains a threat and could regroup as it battles in Syrias long-running civil war. Mr Trump has argued for the withdrawal since he was a presidential candidate. But the decision underscores the division between him and his military advisers, who have said in recent weeks that pockets of IS militants remain and US policy has been to keep troops in place until the extremists are eradicated. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who remains concerned about Iranian efforts in the area, reacted in non-committal fashion after talking with Mr Trump by telephone. This is, of course, an American decision, he said. Israel will learn of the timetable and manner of withdrawal, he said, and no matter what we will safeguard the security of Israel and protect ourselves from this arena. Leading Republican senators reacted with displeasure to the news. Senator Lindsey Graham, typically a Trump backer, said he was blindsided by the report and called the decision a disaster in the making. He said: The biggest winners in this are ISIS and Iran. There will be much resentment and feeling of abandonment that will be directed toward American personnel. The confusion surrounding our Syria policy is making life much more difficult and dangerous for Americans in the region. Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) December 19, 2018 Marco Rubio of Florida said the withdrawal would be a grave error with broader implications beyond the fight against IS. Just last week, the US special envoy to the anti-Isis coalition, Brett McGurk, said US troops would remain in Syria even after Islamic State was driven from its strongholds. I think its fair to say Americans will remain on the ground after the physical defeat of the caliphate, until we have the pieces in place to ensure that that defeat is enduring, Mr McGurk told reporters on December 11. Nobody is declaring a mission accomplished. Defeating a physical caliphate is one phase of a much longer-term campaign. And two weeks ago General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the US still has a long way to go in training local Syrian forces to prevent a resurgence of IS and stabilise the country. He said it will take 35,000 to 40,000 local troops in north-eastern Syria to maintain security over the long term, but only about 20% of them have been trained. Mr Trumps national security adviser, John Bolton, said in September that the US would keep a military presence in Syria as long as Iran is active there. Were not going to leave as long as Iranian troops are outside Iranian borders and that includes Iranian proxies and militias, he said. James Stavridis, a former Navy admiral who served as top Nato commander, tweeted Wednesday that Pulling troops out of Syria in an ongoing fight is a big mistake. Like walking away from a forest fire that is still smoldering underfoot. Big winner is Iran, then Russia, than Assad. Wrong move. The withdrawal decision, however, is likely to be viewed positively by US ally Turkey, and comes following several conversations between Mr Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan over the past weeks. The Turks have targeted US-backed Kurdish troops along the Syria-Turkey border, which Turkey considers an insurgent threat. A US withdrawal including the end of joint US and Turkish patrols along the border could open the door for more Turkish operations against the Syrian rebels. Just hours before the withdrawal decision became public, the State Department announced late Tuesday that it had approved the sale of a 3.5 billion dollar (2.7 billion) Patriot missile defence system to Turkey. The US first launched airstrikes against IS fighters in Syria in 2014. In the years that followed, the US began partnering with Syrian ground forces to fight the extremists. The Pentagon recently said that IS now controls just 1% of the territory it originally held. Ali Hassan with his two-year-old son Abdullah in a Sacramento hospital (Council on American-Islamic Relations/AP) A Yemeni mother blocked by the Donald Trump administrations travel ban has won her fight for a waiver that would allow her to travel to California to see her dying two-year-old son. Basim Elkarra of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Sacramento said Shaima Swileh had been granted a visa and will be flying to San Francisco on Wednesday. She has been living in Egypt but is from Yemen, whose citizens are restricted from travelling to the US under the Trump administrations travel ban. Mr Elkarra said the boys father, Ali Hassan, is a US citizen who brought their son to California in the autumn for treatment for a genetic brain condition. He is on life support at an Oakland hospital. The visa came after the council filed a lawsuit. Expand Close Ali Hassan with his two-year-old son Abdullah (Council on American-Islamic Relations/AP) AP / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Ali Hassan with his two-year-old son Abdullah (Council on American-Islamic Relations/AP) Ms Swileh and the boy had been living in Egypt and she had hoped to accompany them but was not given a visa to enter the United States. As Ms Swileh and her husband fought for a waiver, their sons health declined. Last week, doctors at UCSF Benioff Childrens Hospital in Oakland put him on life support. Mr Hassan was losing hope his wife would ever be allowed into the US and was considering pulling his son off life support to end his suffering, but then a social worker at the hospital reached out to the council, whose lawyers sued, Mr Elkarra said. Every avenue was going to be exhausted to get this young woman to see her son, Mr Elkarra said. He said Ms Swileh lost months with her child over what amounted to unnecessary delays and red tape. The boys father was visiting his son at the hospital on Tuesday and was not immediately available for comment. This is the happiest day of my life, Mr Hassan said in a statement provided by the council. This will allow us to mourn with dignity. State Department spokesman Robert Palladino called it a very sad case, adding: Our thoughts go out to this family at this time, at this trying time. He said he could not comment on the familys situation but that generally cases are handled individually and officials try to facilitate legitimate travel to the United States while protecting national security. These are not easy questions, he said. Weve got a lot of foreign service officers deployed all over the world that are making these decisions on a daily basis, and they are trying very hard to do the right thing at all times. 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 It is now 100 days until the UK is due to leave the European Union and, two years after the nation voted to take this action we are no closer to discovering what shape that divorce will take. (stock picture) It is now 100 days until the UK is due to leave the European Union and, two years after the nation voted to take this action we are no closer to discovering what shape that divorce will take. However, the portents are not encouraging. With Prime Minister Theresa May being continually humiliated both by her own party and by the EU over her exit deal and the Tories and Labour with no consensus on an alternative, the once unthinkable prospect of a no-deal exit is moving from a remote possibility to a probability. Certainly the business community, which in Northern Ireland sees the Mrs May deal as an option affording it the ability to deal both with the EU and the wider global community, is bracing itself for what once seemed the Doomsday option. The Brexit debate locally has been remarkable in one way - political unionism and corporate unionism were, if not at loggerheads, singing from very different hymn sheets. Business can point out the burgeoning trade between Northern Ireland and the Republic as one imperative for keeping cross-border business going as usual. Last year, exports to the other regions of the UK from Northern Ireland fell by 20% while exports to the Republic rose by 16%. Such statistics indicate the importance of cross border trade and it should be incumbent on all the political parties here to make every effort to avoid a no-deal Brexit and to mitigate the harm that leaving the EU will do to the local economy. Given the importance of trade with the UK including Northern Ireland to the Republic's economy, the Irish government could give the beleaguered Mrs May some help by persuading the other EU countries to find some strong assurances that they are not totally bent on making the UK's exit as painful as possible. A no-deal Brexit will do enormous harm to the Republic's economy and it is not in its interest to see the whole island impoverished. The options facing the UK - going with the Prime Minister's discredited deal, crashing out with no deal, withdrawing the Article 50 declaration which triggered the exit process, holding a second referendum to allow for more time for fresh negotiations or staying in the EU, all have their supporters, but most lack a realistic chance of being accepted by Westminster. By default we could be turning a political crisis into an economic catastrophe. Usually at this time of year retailers are counting down to Christmas, and rightly so, as the month of December accounts for about an eighth of what retailers sell across the whole year. But this year is different. This year we are counting down to Brexit and at the moment a no-deal scenario is becoming more and more likely, causing great concern to Northern Ireland's high streets. A no-deal outcome means that there will be no transition, no cushion for business or consumers, and it means that life will change radically on 29 March, 2019. We will fall out of the EU single market and into World Trade Organisation rules and tariffs. Those tariffs would mean that prices for consumers will almost certainly go up. That French Camembert on the post-Christmas dinner cheeseboard could become as much as 30% more expensive, and imported meat products could be up by similar amounts. And that is before we start adding the non-tariff barriers that on food and beverage can be up to 29% of the cost of the product. There are those who say that our trade with the rest of the UK far outweighs our trade with Ireland and the EU, and they are right, it is bigger. But what they are not saying is that everything from manufacturing components to food ingredients can come from Ireland or the EU so integrated are our supply chains, or the fact that 60% of our goods go across the border to get to GB. But most of all, they want us to make it a binary choice of trade with the UK, or trade with the EU. However, our integrated trade has not been built up in the 20 years since the Good Friday Agreement, it has been built up over 40 years of being a member of the EU. We need both markets to allow business to be successful and to protect our consumers. There are those who argue that we will get trade deals and they may be right. Trade deals will come, but the average length of time to make a free trade agreement is over four years and many can take double that. Here in Northern Ireland we already have a lower economic starting point. We already have half of the discretionary income of households in the UK. We already have the highest level of indebtedness of anywhere in the UK and we already pay more for everything from car insurance to fuel. Households and businesses here cannot afford the price rises caused by a no-deal for six months never mind four years. But it is not just the trade, customs tariffs and delays. Overnight, we will fall out of thousands of pieces of legislation and regulation and we lose cooperation on civil judicial matters, telecoms, data flow, driver licensing, motor insurance, intellectual property, and the list goes on and on. There will be effects in every part of our lives. Look at the industries who are standing together: retail, manufacturing, farming, processing, freight, hospitality and others. Then ask yourself, why these diverse sectors are standing together for the first time. My letter to Santa is very short this year. Can we have a deal please? Aodhan Connolly is director of the Northern Ireland Retail Consortium New People's Army guerrillas with face painted to conceal their identities look at photos from their digital camera at their rebel encampment southeast of Manila, Nov. 23, 2016. Communist guerrillas abducted two army officers and a dozen pro-government militiamen after they attacked a patrol base before dawn Wednesday in the southern Philippines, officials said. The attack came just days before a Christmas truce unilaterally declared by the rebels was to come into effect. The government has not reciprocated it and said that in light of the new clashes, it was not inclined to do so. More than 50 heavily armed New Peoples Army (NPA) rebels launched the surprise attack on the governments militia detachment in Sibagat town in southern Agusan del Sur province, according to Army Maj. Gen. Ronnie Villanueva, commander of the Armys 4th Infantry Division. Theres an ongoing pursuit operation to recover the hostages, Villanueva said, adding that a combined army-police force has been activated and were on the trail of the suspects and their captives. He said blamed a two NPA units active in the area as behind the attack. The rebels overran the base, carting away several assault rifles from its armory, according to a police report. Two army officers and 12 militiamen were also taken as hostages, army officials said. Villanueva said that the hostages were protected under the International Humanitarian Law (IHL), which requires the NPA to inform the families of their captives of the status and location of the captured combatants. Newly assumed Philippine Armed Forces chief of staff Lt. Gen. Benjamin Madrigal said that most of the captured militiamen and soldiers were in their bunkers sleeping when the attack occurred. They did not notice that the rebels were crawling toward their patrol base, Madrigal told reporters in Manila. He said this incident bolstered the government argument that it should not declare a Christmas truce. He asked: Is that their way of showing truce? Sandara Amihan, spokeswoman for the rebels northeastern Mindanao region, said the captured government forces were being treated as prisoners of war. She assured their families they would be treated humanely. The raid was carried out without a single shot fired. Fourteen soldiers and militiamen have been captured. We will treat them accordingly, Amihan told a local radio in Cotabato city. The rebels latest attack came hours after President Rodrigo Duterte told a gathering of village officials in the southern city of Davao that the NPA should not be considered as revolutionaries. They are all criminals. Do not consider them revolutionary. They are just plain bandits and that is the way we should treat them, Duterte said in his speech Tuesday night. Dont surrender anymore because if I see you again I will shoot you. No more surrender because you are a cruel and brutal people, he said. You do not deserve mercy. The incident occurred days while the rebel group was gearing up for a show of force to celebrate its half-century mark on Dec. 26. The NPA earlier declared a five-day unilateral ceasefire for Christmas day and New Year. On Tuesday, the NPA attacked a police station in Magallanes town in central Sorsogon province, wounding three officers, and prompting security forces to order a heightened state of alert. "They are planning a big celebration in different parts of the country, especially in areas where they have many members including Bicol, Samar, Negros and Mindanao, Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana told reporters in Manila. In light of the fresh attacks, presidential spokesman Salvador Panelo said that Duterte was not inclined to reciprocate the communists truce. "If you're going to have a truce, you might as well show your sincerity by not doing anything contrary to what your intention is, he said in Manila. The president is always open to end bloodshed in this country. He doesn't want any killing among Filipinos, but for as long as they violate the terms of a peace talk then the President will never allow it to happen, he said. The NPA, armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), has been waging a guerrilla campaign in the countryside during the past five decades. Military estimates placed the NPA strength at more than 5,000 men scattered in more than 60 guerrilla fronts throughout the country. Exiled communist party leader Jose Maria Sison said Duterte, a self-described leftist who was once his student, said the rebel forces were just carrying out tactical offensives ahead of the dates the truce was supposed to take effect. But he said that Duterte has shown no signs of reciprocating their truce, showing an apparent disdain for the ceasefire. Every time there is an incident which he wishes to blame on the NPA, he goes ranting to the press instead of letting his negotiating panel submit the complaint to the joint monitoring committees, Sison said in a statement. But worst of all, he calls on his armed minions to go further on killing rampages, he said. Karl Romano in Dagupan City, Dennis Jay Santos in Davao City and Jeoffrey Maitem in Cotabato City contributed to this report. For Immediate Release, December 19, 2018 Contacts: Tierra Curry, Center for Biological Diversity, (928) 522-3681, tcurry@biologicaldiversity.org Nick Cady, Cascadia Wildlands, (314) 482-3746, nick@cascwild.org Oregon Sued for Not Stopping Coastal Marten Trapping State's Last Two Populations of Cat-like Carnivores at Risk of Local Extinction PORTLAND, Ore. The Center for Biological Diversity and Cascadia Wildlands sued the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife today for failing to ban the trapping of imperiled Humboldt martens in Oregons coastal forests. Todays lawsuit, filed in Multnomah County Circuit Court, comes after the secretive animal, a relative of the mink, was proposed for protection under the federal Endangered Species Act. Fewer than 200 Humboldt martens survive in Oregon. In August the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission directed the Department of Fish and Wildlife to draft rules to curtail coastal marten trapping, in response to a petition from conservation groups seeking a ban on marten trapping west of Interstate 5. Marten trapping season opened statewide Nov. 1, but the department did not enact rules to limit marten trapping in coastal forests, despite the directive. Oregon needs to immediately ban coastal marten trapping, or future generations may never get to encounter these furry, fierce little forest creatures, said Tierra Curry, a senior scientist at the Center. Science, the law and common sense all say the state must end this unsustainable trapping before we lose them forever. Following the largest mammal survey ever conducted in the state, researchers from Oregon State University and the U.S. Forest Service recommended eliminating trapping of coastal martens as a first step in rebuilding the states imperiled populations. Scientists concluded that the human-caused mortality of just two or three martens per year could wipe out the population on the central coast within three decades. Three martens were killed by cars last year on Highway 101, so trapping of even a single marten this season would push the subspecies toward local extinction in Oregon. It is wildly irresponsible that the Department of Fish and Wildlife allowed the commercial trapping season for Humboldt martens to open in November, said Nick Cady, legal director at Cascadia Wildlands. The state doesnt require marten trapping reports to be turned in until March, so they have no way of knowing how many coastal martens are being killed this winter. There is such a thin margin for error here, this could be it for the species. Humboldt martens are so rare they were thought to be extinct until they were rediscovered in 1996. There are only four surviving populations, with two in Northern California, one on the southern Oregon coast and one on the central Oregon coast. Earlier this year the California Department of Fish and Wildlife protected Humboldt martens as endangered. California banned their trapping in 1946. There are two subspecies of Pacific martens in Oregon. Humboldt martens on the coast are critically imperiled, but interior martens from the Cascades and eastern mountain ranges are not imperiled. For Immediate Release, December 19, 2018 Contacts: Jaclyn Lopez, (727) 490-9190, jlopez@biologicaldiversity.org John Cassani, (239) 633-7274, cassani@calusawaterkeeper.org Maia Raposo, (212) 747-0622, mraposo@waterkeeper.org 'Red Tide' Lawsuit Launched After Feds Ignore Wildlife Harms of Lake Okeechobee Discharges U.S. Army Corps to Extend Algae Bloom-triggering Discharges Through 2025 ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. Conservation groups today filed a notice of intent to sue three federal agencies for failing to assess harm to Floridas endangered species before approving the ongoing release of Lake Okeechobee waters polluted with toxic, nutrient-rich agricultural waste. The discharges likely help drive the catastrophic Red Tide algae blooms killing Floridas coastal wildlife. The groups are challenging the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers plan to extend through 2025 deadly discharges from the lake into the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie rivers. The discharges harm protected marine species like sea turtles and Florida manatees and trigger toxic algae blooms that limit use of waterways and cripple local economies. Todays notice gives the Army Corps, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service 60 days to respond to the claims submitted by the Center for Biological Diversity, Calusa Waterkeeper and Waterkeeper Alliance. Even as the Red Tide wreaks havoc, the Corps keeps treating Floridas rivers like a toilet, said Jaclyn Lopez, Florida director for the Center for Biological Diversity. Year after year our waterways are polluted and the health and livelihoods of Floridians are threatened. Floridas residents, from fisherman to manatee, deserve better. Before approving long-term schedules for discharges from Lake Okeechobee, the Corps is supposed to work with scientists from the Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service to assess risks to plants and animals protected under the Endangered Species Act. But the agencies have ignored the impacts of the algal blooms and failed to consider how the ongoing damage would harm populations of manatees, sea turtles, smalltooth sawfish and coral for the next seven years. LORS is responsible for discharges that impact over 200,000 acres of habitat for the endangered smalltooth sawfish, said John Cassani, Calusa waterkeeper. The Caloosahatchee is important pupping habitat for sawfish, and the Corps discharges threaten to harm this vital nursery. It has been well documented that the current schedule for discharges from the lake causes harm to the rivers, their estuaries and marine animals. The harmful discharges are managed by the Corps to prioritize agricultural needs. The releases, which include algae and nutrients that are allowed to accumulate in the lake, cause significant harm to water quality and wildlife. Government agencies are supposed to uphold and enforce our nations laws, explained Waterkeeper Alliance executive director Marc Yaggi. Sadly, the Army Corps has been violating the very laws it is sworn to uphold, causing incalculable damage to endangered and threatened species like manatees and sea turtles that rely on clean healthy waterways and coasts to survive. We intend to force the Trump administration to immediately end its dereliction of duty and to protect threatened marine life and coastal economies from the impacts of harmful algal blooms before it's too late. Past analyses of the Corps schedule for the lake failed to consider the long-term impacts of high volume discharges beyond three years, discounted the effects of harmful algal blooms and did not consider habitat impacts triggered by climate change. In 2008 the Corps updated its plan for managing the discharges with the goal of lowering the risk of damage to the Herbert Hoover Dam, which retains the lake. But the plan was supposed to be reconfigured within three years to incorporate the impacts of structural improvements to the dike and water quality upgrades projected to come from the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan. The dike repairs are behind schedule, the Everglades plan has not been completed and toxic algae blooms continue to kill countless marine animals. Meanwhile the Corps has opted to simply extend the current water-management plan through 2025 without assessing the harm to protected wildlife and water quality. With the help of the Cryogatt System in terms of Safety measures; Radio Frequency Safety Net help detect the embryos, Sperm and eggs. Fertility clinics can now safely, quickly and accurately identify and audit Jaslok Hospital and Research Centre takes first of its kind initiative by installing Asia's first Cryogatt System for IVF (In-Vitro Fertilization). Cryogatt has developed Globally-Unique patented RFID systems which operate at accepted safe levels for delicate biomedical samples. During IVF, there is usually a surplus of embryos and this technique will help in storing and tracking the embryos. With the help of the Cryogatt System in terms of Safety measures; Radio Frequency Safety Net help detect the embryos, Sperm and eggs. Fertility clinics can now safely, quickly and accurately identify and audit. Dr Firuza Parikh, IVF Specialist at Jaslok Hospital and Research Centre was quoted saying, "We are thrilled to have always been amongst the first centres in the world to harness new technology to provide the highest quality care for our patients. For the people who have a blocked tube, IVF provides the best opportunity of having a child using their own eggs. Couples with male infertility problem might have a much higher chance of conceiving with IVF than conceiving naturally. People who suffer from PCOS (Polycystic Ovary Syndrome), where there is a hormone imbalance leading to irregular menstrual cycles. IVF has been proven very successful in patients with PCOS, who will not conceive with ovulation induction. Many other problems like these can be taken care of with the help of IVF and it can help people have a family of their own. George Alex Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Operational Officer at Jaslok Hospital and Research Centre said, IVF helps patients who are unable to conceive. Medicines and procedures required for IVF rarely are associated with problems or complications. While many couples who are unable to bear children opt for IVF, doctors, nurses, technicians and staff of Jaslok Hospital will be there with you every step of the way, providing you with the comfort, support and expertise you need. Dr Firuza Parikh, further added saying, "Embryos, sperm and ova can be indefinitely stored at -196 degrees Centigrade. The samples are traditionally placed in vials that are either bar coded or labelled manually. One has to be very careful that there is no mix up of biological samples. Sometimes the labels can become unstuck on defreezing. Also the correctly labelled straw has to be identified and removed from the other samples in less than 15 seconds. Any longer exposure can damage the biological material." IVF also helps patients to avoid passing on certain genetic conditions, and allows hopeful parents to plan having children after establishing a career or achieving other milestones. The launch resulted in safeguarding the samples using fast, faultless RFID solutions. PR Newswire SUGAR LAND, Texas, Dec. 18, 2018 SUGAR LAND, Texas, Dec. 18, 2018 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- You've Got Maids is pleased to announce that we are opening a new house cleaning franchise in the Greater Houston area. You've Got Maids of Sugar Land will be offering services in Sugar Land, Missouri City, and Stafford. You've Got Maids was founded in Orlando in 2005, and has been selectively awarding franchise locations since 2010. The brand has locations from coast to coast, successfully operating in over twenty states, and has been a trusted name in professional house cleaning in Houston for multiple years. You've Got Maids has locations already providing premium-level house cleaning services in the Katy and Houston Heights areas. You've Got Maids of Sugar Land is owned and operated by Lorna Broomfield. Lorna has a strong interest in the community and has already committed to giving back to the Sugar Land area. Lorna has partnered with Cleaning For A Reason, a charity that matches cancer patients with cleaning services who are willing to offer free cleaning in that time of need. You've Got Maids has been partnering with Cleaning For A Reason for years, and has donated well over $150,000 dollars in charitable cleanings thus far. Along with Lorna, You've Got Maids is positioned to increase our commitment to this great cause. Lorna recently completed a comprehensive training program at You've Got Maids corporate headquarters in Charleston, S.C with Founders Frank & Cynthia Berger. You've Got Maids of Sugar Land is now welcoming quotes for service. You've Got Maids provides high-quality service, and makes each home a happier, cleaner, and healthier place. We use a HEPA-Filter Backpack Vacuum, which removes nearly all the dust, dirt, allergens, bacteria, pet dander, and other pollutants from the air in your home; our customers literally breathe better air! For people suffering from allergies, this technology makes their life better. You've Got Maids is also the only maid service to use the methodical and detailed 52-Point Spring Cleaning system. Combined with the most innovative, environmentally friendly products, You've Got Maids provides an unbeatable house cleaning service. You've Got Maids works in teams to provide world-class service to retain customer happiness and we also promote efficiency to give our customer the best price. We bring all the cleaning supplies and equipment our service requires. You've Got Maids works with an onsite team leader who supervises the process to ensure quality. All employees are trained, uninformed, and have passed criminal background checks and drug screens. You've Got Maids is a licensed, bonded, and insured company. Call Lorna today to improve your lifestyle, to get back those hours you spend cleaning with our weekly or biweekly home cleanings! You've Got Maids proudly offers 100% Satisfaction Guarantee with every single cleaning! From coast to coast, You've Got Maids is growing one exhilarated customer at a time, and much of our business comes through referrals. For more information about You've Got Maids, call 713.777.8439, or visit sugarland.youvegotmaids.com. SOURCE You've Got Maids Malaysia Airports, Airlines Booking Fees and Taxes - All You Need To Know With many people travelling many times a year from Malaysia, some travellers have been hit hard by hidden booking fee charges from airlines and also the increasing airport taxes and fees. Well, this article sheds light on all you need to know about the Malaysia Airports and Airlines booking fees and taxes, that may even shock you. Over the years, many air travellers have had things easy, but in the last few years, much has changed in terms of online booking fees and even the increasing airport taxes. Debates over this have been common between the airport officials and airlines, which has also been publicized on mainstream media, and of course on social media too. All You Need To Know About Malaysia Airports and Airlines Booking Fees and Taxes Flying through KLIA2 nowadays can be quite stressful Frustrations keep increasing nowadays when travellers find a cheap priced ticket to and from a destination, and only to find out that the total fee to pay has increased at the payment page. Frustrations keep increasing nowadays when travellers find a cheap priced ticket to and from a destination, and only to find out that the total fee to pay has increased at the payment page. This simply means, when you make that booking to Bali, Indonesia, and you will see to and from ticket costing only RM450.00, and when you are about to make a payment, it jumps to RM490.00. If you go back 10 or 15 years back, booking airline tickets in Malaysia was such a joy, and I remember those days when there was a free ticket promotion on AirAsia, I only paid the fuel surcharge. Yes, back then, it was under RM100 per person, and I clearly remember booking a ticket to Laos for two-person in 2008 for under RM200.00. This was also during the free air ticket promotions, and there were only minimal charges imposed. AirAsia's booking fees and taxes noted when you book a flight ticket Hidden Charges For Booking Airline Tickets Online Nowadays, things are different, and sometimes complicated for the passengers, but some do not really care. They just want to travel, and that is all, regardless of the fees and so on. Lately, there has been several complaints from consumers about the exuberant hidden fees when they make an airline ticket booking online. In December of 2018, outspoken blogger Wee Choo Keong had published an article about the hidden airline booking fees that totals up to RM38.00 per booking. Back in January of 2018, local newspaper The Sun Daily also ran and article about the end of extra charges by airlines in Malaysia . However, to date, nothing has changed, or there could be even other kinds of fees. I have taken the initiative to explore some of the popular airlines in Malaysia and listed down all the different fees involved when you make an airline ticket booking online; Passenger Service Fee - RM11.00, RM35.00 or RM73.00 Booking Service Fees - RM20.00 Credit Card Processing Fees - RM8.00 Debit Card Processing Fees - RM4.00 Direct Debit Payment Fees - RM6.00 KLIA2 Fee - RM3.00 *Fees above based on November 2018 The taxes and fees when booking online for Malaysia Airlines Malaysia Airports Passenger Service Charge Fees (PSC) Also in 2018, there was much controversy over the passenger service charge or PSC, and the government had intervened in this area where a new tariff was imposed on passengers travelling out of Malaysia. Previously, the PSC at the KLIA2 was priced at RM50.00 per person before the revision. To understand more about this situation, read this article published on The Malaysian Reserve , dated 23 July 2018. For those who still do not know what is this all about, below is a break down of the passenger service charge or PSC fees per person up to 2018; Domestic Travel - RM11.00 per person Asean Countries Travel - RM35.00 per person International Flights - RM73.00 per person You should also know that the Passenger Service Charge is also collected by Malaysia Airports, and not the airlines or government, with a reason for running the airport. With this PSC tax collected by Malaysia Airports , the issue about KLIA2 is still a hot topic, where many consumers have and still are complaining about the poor facilities and layout of the terminal. One main question being thrown about who designed KLIA2? While it looks modern, but overall, it is not passenger-friendly at all. If you have taken an AirAsia flight, you will know what I mean. Malindo Airlines booking fees section with all the taxes and charges Malaysia Airport Departure Tax On top of the PSC imposed on passengers travelling from airports, there has also been a new departure levy being imposed on travellers. This is not the same as the PSC. Effective 1st June 2019, air travellers will have to pay a new airport departure tax, which has been high on debated among consumers and also industry players. The New 2019 Malaysia airport departure tax is; Asean Countries - RM20.00 per person Non-Asean Countries - RM40.00 per person When you total everything up, you are in for a nice hefty amount paid in all kinds of taxes. This will surely add up to consumers travellers cost, while it does not really affect business travellers. But for some strange reason, Malaysian always amaze me, as when the news breaks, everyone will complain, but give it a few weeks or months, and everything goes back to normal. The Minister at the transport ministry had stated that the departure levy imposed at the airports is in line with raising revenue for the government. He also stated that other countries including Thailand and Indonesia have been collecting a departure tax for all passengers in their respective countries. One of the main reasons cited for this departure tax is to encourage the development of domestic tourism among the local Malaysians. The fees when booking Firefly Airlines ticket online MAVCOM Promises Service Level Agreement Policy On July of 2018, the Malaysian Aviation Commission or Mavcom, under the new executive chairman Dr Nungsari Ahmad Radhi, pledged to introduce a service level agreement (SLA) policy between airport operators and airline service providers. This was created to ensure the continuous growth and sustainability of the aviation industry, as it has never been done before in the history of Malaysia. Over the years, the controversial passenger service charges (PSC) rates have been major issues for airlines, which affected all airports in Malaysia, regardless if they were small or large. Check Airline Fees and Charges in Malaysia After much research and reading online, I managed to bump into a page on AirAsia where they have listed down all the fees that a passenger has to pay for their travels. Honestly, this is a very good guide done by AirAsia, and they have a search button for fees depending on where you are flying too. Check the AirAsia Fees and Charges page if you want to know more about any other fees, namely if you are travelling with infants, sporting equipment and so on. Fees listed in that page are also one way direct flights, hence if you are connecting or transiting, you may need to check it twice for the different destinations. The great thing about the fees section is that AirAsia is being very transparent about all their fees. You can check the following fees on that page; Baggage Fees (Online and At Counter Fees) Sports Equipment Fees (Online and At Counter Fees) Other Baggage Information Seat Booking Fees (All types) Handling Fees Processing Fees Flight Changing Fees Cancellation Fees Wheelchair Service Fees However, for those booking online tickets on AirAsia, you should take note of the processing and payment fees, as they are all clearly stated below; - Processing Fee (direct debit) is non-refundable and is charged per passenger, per booking for payments made via UnionPay, Alipay, WeChat, CCAvenue, Rupay, India Wallet, LINE Pay, NAPAS and PayPal. Others will be charged per booking. - Processing Fee (credit, debit, charge cards) is non-refundable and is charged when payment is made by credit debit or charge cards per guest per way at point of purchase. - Please note that airport tax refund can be subjected to a Processing Fee (credit, debit, charge cards)(where applicable). Refund Processing Fee is waived for refunds made in Korea Won for bookings made in Korea. - Booking service fee applies to all bookings made via Call Centre, Sales Offices, Airport Sales Counters, Indonesia AirAsia Carrefour booth and ATSC's. Passengers at KLIA2 International Departure Section Conclusion Due to many complaints over the years, some consumers are pointing their fingers at the Ministry of Transport, and why they are allowing this to happen. You will easily come across many articles published by the mainstream media where airlines, airports and government people will be pointing fingers or trying to work out issues on the airports, taxes and so on. Finally, consumers may think that budget airline or even full-service airlines may be cheap when they offer promotional flights, but when you look at all the fees imposed, you will be surprised. OTTAWA - A timeline of the Meng Wanzhou case, and rising tension between Canada and China. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 19/12/2018 (1078 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. OTTAWA - A timeline of the Meng Wanzhou case, and rising tension between Canada and China. 2018 Aug. 22: A New York court issues a warrant for the arrest of Huawei Technologies chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou. Dec. 1: Canadian authorities arrest Meng at Vancouver's airport while she is en route from Hong Kong to Mexico, after an extradition request from the Americans. The news becomes public on Dec. 5. Dec. 6: China demands Canada release Meng and "immediately correct the mistake" officials made in arresting her. The Chinese also say they were not briefed on the reasons for Meng's arrest. In Ottawa, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says Meng's case is part of an independent legal process with no outside political influence. Dec. 7: Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland says Canada's envoy to China has briefed Chinese officials about Meng's case. She declines to comment on suggestions from analysts and former diplomats that China will likely retaliate by jailing Canadians. In Vancouver, Meng appears in court, where allegations of fraud are laid out. The U.S. alleges Meng misled American banks in a bid to get around American sanctions on Iran. Dec. 8: Canada's ambassador to China, John McCallum, is summoned to a meeting with China's assistant foreign minister so the country can register complaints about Meng's arrest. "China strongly urges the Canadian side to immediately release the detained Huawei executive ... or face grave consequences that the Canadian side should be held accountable for," the assistant minister, Le Yucheng, says in a statement. Dec. 9: China summons the American ambassador to China to lodge similar complaints about Meng's case and demand the U.S. rescind the order for her arrest. Dec. 10: Chinese authorities arrest two Canadian men. Michael Kovrig, who was on leave from Global Affairs Canada, and entrepreneur Michael Spavor. Kovrig's arrest becomes public on Dec. 11. Spavor's becomes public on Dec. 12. Meanwhile, China's vice premier, with responsibility for the domestic economy, and U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin talk about the ongoing tariff battle between the two countries. Dec. 11: In the morning, Kelly Craft, the U.S. ambassador to Canada, tells reporters it is "absolutely false" to assume a political motive behind the Meng's arrest. Later in the day, Meng is released on $10 million bail. In an affidavit submitted for a bail hearing, Meng, 46, details a lifetime of health issues, including thyroid cancer, sleep apnea and high blood pressure. The day ends with U.S. President Donald Trump telling Reuters in an interview that he would "certainly intervene" in Meng's case "if I thought it was necessary" to help forge a trade deal with China. Dec. 12: China's foreign ministry says it has no information about Kovrig, but says the organization he worked with - the International Crisis Group - was not registered in China, making its activities in the country illegal. The Liberals spend the day outlining how the extradition process will work, reiterating that it is an independent process. Trudeau reaffirms Canada's commitment to the rule of law, "regardless of what goes on in other countries." Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould says she takes her "extradition responsibilities and obligations very seriously" and that the final decision on extraditions lies with her. Freeland warns any comments made in the United States could be used by Meng's lawyers before Canadian courts, which would have to judge their relevance in deciding whether to follow through on the American extradition request. Dec. 13: Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer accuses Trudeau of taking a "naive approach" to China, leaving Canada without "the leverage that we might otherwise have" to resolve the situation. He calls on Trudeau to reach out to the highest levels of the Chinese government. Earlier in the day, Trump's trade adviser, Peter Navarro, says the arrests of the two Canadians were plainly a response to Meng's arrest: "That's the Chinese playbook and again the problem we always have with China is when we launch legitimate concerns over whatever it is, China comes back and does these kinds of actions." China's foreign ministry says Kovrig and Spavor have been detained on suspicion of "endangering national security." Dec. 14: Canadian officials are granted consular access to Kovrig, and McCallum meets with him in Beijing. Meng's case comes up during a meeting between Freeland and U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, with the two agreeing that no politics be injected into the extradition process. Pompeo publicly calls on China to release Kovrig and Spavor. In an interview with The Canadian Press, Trudeau says Canada will shortly be granted consular access to Spavor. Dec. 16: Canadian diplomats in China are granted consular access to Spavor. Dec. 19: Global Affairs Canada says a third Canadian has been detained in China. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says the government has no reason to believe the case is linked to the detention of Kovrig and Spavor. The next day, China's Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying says the Canadian woman, Sarah McIver, received an administrative penalty for illegal employment. Dec. 20: Indictments unsealed in the United States allege two Chinese citizens targeted companies in Canada and around the world as part of a years-long hacking campaign to steal data. Dec. 21: Kovrig's employer, the International Crisis Group, says he has not been given access to a lawyer while in custody. A source familiar with the conditions of Kovrig's detention says he is questioned three times a day and kept in a room with the lights on continuously. Freeland formally demands both men be let go, calling in a statement "for their immediate release." Similar statements come out from the United States, Britain and the European Union. Dec. 22: During a visit to Canadian peacekeepers in Mali, Trudeau says countries around the world are "extremely disturbed" by China's detention of Spavor and Kovrig. Dec. 24: China's foreign ministry calls out the U.S., Britain and EU, saying the trio should be condemning Canada for Meng's arrest. Spokeswoman Hua Chunying says Canada should "correct its mistakes" and stop acting at the behest of the United States. She says Kovrig and Spavor's rights are being respected in custody. Dec. 27: Chinese state media bring up the case of a Canadian man charged with drug smuggling. The Global Times, an English-language publication of the official People's Daily, says Robert Lloyd Schellenberg appeal of his conviction will be heard on Dec. 29. Global Affairs says the case has been ongoing for several years. Dec. 28: Global Affairs confirms that McIver has returned to Canada after being released. Dec. 29: A Chinese court orders a retrial for Schellenberg, raising the possibility of a harsher sentence, including death. The Wall Street Journal reports Chinese authorities took the odd measure of inviting a number of news outlets to the appeal. Dec. 30: Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne says in a statement that her government is "very concerned" about Kovrig's and Spavor's detentions. Earlier in the day, a group of 36 Australian academics demanded their government "call for the immediate release of these two detainees." 2019 Jan. 3: In a press conference, China's prosecutor general Zhang Jun says Kovrig and Spavor "without a doubt" violated Chinese law. He says the investigation is also following the rule of law, but doesn't provide more details about the allegations. MONTREAL - The flow of asylum seekers using Roxham Road has slowed slightly, but locals like Susan Heller who live near the country's busiest illegal crossing know that can change in a hurry. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 19/12/2018 (1078 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Quebec has received the large majority of refugee claimants walking across the border from the United States, and it is not a coincidence that political leaders from the province -- Francois Legault and Maxime Bernier -- saw political gains to be made in adopting a hard line against immigration. An abandoned stroller is seen at the border leading into Canada from the United States where asylum seekers regularly cross near Champlain, NY, on Wednesday, April 18, 2018. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Paul Chiasson MONTREAL - The flow of asylum seekers using Roxham Road has slowed slightly, but locals like Susan Heller who live near the country's busiest illegal crossing know that can change in a hurry. Heller's farm in southwestern Quebec is not far from the ditch at the U.S. border that has drawn international attention with thousands of crossings in the past two years. She volunteers as part of Bridges not Borders, a group of locals who've been calling attention to the migrants' plight. Every Sunday, a few members of the group head to the American side of the border in Champlain, N.Y. to hand out water in the summer and warm clothes in the winter to the dozen or so asylum seekers crossing on foot. They greet the taxis and shuttle buses dropping the migrants off before they cross the border and disappear into a temporary building the RCMP built this year on the Canadian side. An American counterpart covers the other six days of the week. "We have, let's say, half a minute to say 'Welcome!' " said Heller, who has lived on Roxham Road for 51 years, about a kilometre from the border. "They are very stressed because this is the last hurdle before they get to Canada, so they're really not listening to you .... We mostly say to them, they're going to be okay." Heller's once-quiet stretch of rural road has become ground zero for an intensifying debate on immigration, in the province and in the country. Coalition Avenir Quebec Leader Francois Legault, who was elected Premier Oct. 1, complained in 2017 that the border was becoming a "sieve." Last April, Jean-Francois Lisee, then leader of the Parti Quebecois, proposed a fence blocking off the crossing. The Coalition's winning election platform included a promise to reduce all immigration into Quebec including refugees by 20 per cent. And since Legault's election, he has demanded that Ottawa pay $300-million to cover the costs of health, education and other services provided to the migrants. Paul Clarke, executive director of Action Refugies Montreal, an advocacy group that works with refugees, said the rhetoric surrounding newcomers to the country is likely to get more heated with a federal election around the corner. "I think theres going to be a lot of things said by a lot of people, and the more extreme views sometimes get the most publicity," Clarke said. "It's important that we keep the context in terms of human rights and recalling that we're talking about people who are leaving difficult situations wherever they are." The flow of irregular border crossers over the last two years has led to a backlog of refugee claims at the Immigration and Refugee Board, with wait times of close to two years before claims are heard. Clarke called for added resources from the federal government to accelerate the process. "The quicker they can get resources into the IRB so people have their hearing and they can know whats happening, the better it is for all concerned," Clarke said. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has pledged $173 million to improve border security and decrease the time it takes to process asylum seekers claims. And last week the federal government announced compensation of between $2,500 and $25,000 for residents dealing with increased commotion near the Roxham crossing. In 2017, more than 90 per cent of the 20,593 irregular crossers into Canada came through Roxham Road. So far in 2018, it is more than 95 per cent. The latest figures reveal a drop in the number entering in November 1,019 apprehended across Canada by the RCMP, the lowest figure since June 2017. In November 2017, the number was 1,623. Francine Dupuis, a spokesperson for PRAIDA, an organization in Quebec that offers medical and social services to asylum seekers, said the numbers crossing in recent months have stabilized. The majority end up working, their kids go to school and her group never hears from them again, she said. She saw a spike in Haitian arrivals in the summer of 2017. This year Nigerians accounted for the bulk of people her organization helped, but their numbers have recently levelled off. People from other African countries facing strife are over-represented among the irregular arrivals, she said, as are South Americans. But those trends can shift quickly, and Dupuis said they're ready for whatever happens next. "I'd say we're dealing with the usual crowds of people coming from countries where horrors or wars are happening," she said. At first, many asylum seekers remained in Quebec, but now, those who don't speak French or don't want to learn tend to head to Ontario, which has had its own problems dealing with the crush and is also seeking federal compensation. Dupuis notes that Ontario didn't have the same infrastructure in place as Quebec and will have to develop services. "If you don't receive them well, you're going to have problems after, because they integrate much better if you ease their entrance into the country," she said. Francois Dore, a retired police officer who lives just a few kilometres from the border, said before the dramatic increase in 2017, residents would routinely find asylum seekers roaming the street, heading north, looking to be picked up by authorities so they could begin the refugee claim process. He said he has no issues with desperate people looking for a better life. "If they can make it, and if they can be an asset to Canada if they can do well then all the better," Dore said. Dore recalled the story of one man, a Yemeni asylum seeker who arrived at Roxham Road two years before the 2017 crush. Dore met the man, a lawyer, as he returned to the border in 2017 with a television crew to see the crossing point again, a pilgrimage that came just a few days before he was to be reunited with his family. "I remember asking the guy, 'Was it the right choice you made when you crossed the border that way?' " Dore said. "He told me, tears in his eyes, 'It was the only way.' " LONGUEUIL, Que. - Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques took a break from his scientific responsibilities aboard the International Space Station Tuesday to ponder a more profound question. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 18/12/2018 (1079 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Astronaut David Saint-Jacques, aboard the International Space Station, greets a group of children gathered at the Canadian Space Agency headquarters in Longueuil , Que., on Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Paul Chiasson LONGUEUIL, Que. - Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques took a break from his scientific responsibilities aboard the International Space Station Tuesday to ponder a more profound question. "Can you see Santa Claus from the International Space Station?" Elise asked as Grade 1 and 2 students from the elementary school Saint-Jacques attended were linked up with him at Canadian Space Agency headquarters. Saint-Jacques' face lit up as he promised he would do his best. "Santa Claus, I don't know whether we will manage to see him. We can see the North Pole from here, but it's a little at the edge of the horizon," he said. "We are going to try to look for him. We have good binoculars." The questions from the pyjama-clad students of Ecole des Saint-Anges in St-Lambert, Que. followed a story time from space, in which Saint-Jacques read a new space-themed e-book launched Tuesday by the space agency. "The Explorers Club" tells the story of Layla, Niko, Gemma and Mathias as they set off on their own space mission to find a lost dog. It is aimed at encouraging interest in space, science and reading in young children. Saint-Jacques took the opportunity to play the clown in space's microgravity, spinning his microphone and shooting upwards when the rocket in the story blasted off. When a child named Matteo asked how he washed in space, Saint-Jacques spilled a few drops of water from a container to show how they float. "Just talking to him, just saying hello to him was really impressive," Maxence, 8, said at the end of the event. He was particularly intrigued by the absence of gravity. "I could do acrobatics and play ball," he said. Lilianne imagined games of floating tag and the tricks that could be played on her friends. "I don't know how they do it, floating in all those machines," she said. "And what surprises me is they can do almost anything they want, but instead of doing it on the ground, they do it in the air." The children were also interested in what Christmas in space would be like. Saint-Jacques said he and his fellow astronauts Anne McClain of NASA and Oleg Kononenko of the Russian space agency, Roscosmos brought special food to share the culinary traditions of their respective countries. Some questions reflected real concerns in the minds of the children, in particular when one girl asked if Earth's most polluted areas were visible from space. "When we fly over large cities, we can see that there is a grey cloud over them. Air pollution is the easiest thing to see," Saint-Jacques replied. "We can also see the effect of global warming because we can see that glaciers in the mountains are smaller now than they were 100 years ago." The stars of "The Explorers Club" are the children and their dog, but Saint-Jacques makes an appearance as the astronaut in the space station with a message. "Dream big and reach for the stars. Dare to explore!" he tells them. WASHINGTON - Living alongside the United States has been likened to sleeping with a twitching, grunting elephant a political animal that's now on the verge of a full-blown, delirious fever dream. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 19/12/2018 (1079 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence meet with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington on December 11, 2018. THE CANADIAN PRESS/AP, Evan Vucci WASHINGTON - Living alongside the United States has been likened to sleeping with a twitching, grunting elephant a political animal that's now on the verge of a full-blown, delirious fever dream. So strap in, Canada. To borrow a phrase from Bette Davis, it's going to be a bumpy night. For proof, look no further than this week's breathtaking Oval Office confrontation between Donald Trump and two people sure to be among the most painful thorns in the president's side in 2019: presumptive House Speaker Nancy Pelosi the leader of the Democratic majority that takes over in January and her Senate minority counterpart, Chuck Schumer. In full view of a phalanx of reporters and TV cameras, they argued loudly and at length about Trump's demand for $5 billion in taxpayer dollars for his famous southern border wall, a condition over which the president declared he would let the U.S. government grind to a funding halt. "I am proud to shut down the government for border security, Chuck, because the people of this country don't want criminals and people that have lots of problems and drugs pouring into our country," Trump said. "I will take the mantle of shutting down, and I'm going to shut it down for border security." The new year will bring a new reality to Washington, one some say Trump is just now beginning to grasp: a combative and defiant Democrat majority in the House of Representatives that will be loath to give the White House any political victories. "This new Congress will be something different from the Congress that we have now," Pelosi told a news conference after their meeting. "It'll be about transparency. It'll be about reaching out, extending the hand of friendship to work in a bipartisan way to find common ground where we can and stand our ground, as Thomas Jefferson said, like a rock where we can't." If the Oval Office encounter was any indication, common ground will be in short supply. 2019 will also surely be about Russia, about the ties between Vladimir Putin and Trump and his campaign, about Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort and special counsel Robert Mueller and his ongoing effort to explore their myriad links and whether, in the end, the American people elected their president under false pretences. Depending on the outcome of that investigation, it may also about impeachment. "Mueller is just the huge X-factor here," said Steve Kornacki, a national political reporter for NBC News and author of "The Red and the Blue: the 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism," which explores the gulf between Americans on either side of the Republican-Democrat divide that has been growing for 25 years. "There's this energy on the Democratic side to impeach Trump obviously to investigate the hell out of him, but also to impeach him. Almost inevitably, whatever Mueller reports, it's only going to activate that Democratic base to push for the Democratic House to act." Since 1998, impeachment has been a dirty word in Washington. Then, Republicans, giddy with their own congressional might and egged on by the cutthroat political ambitions of then-speaker Newt Gingrich, pushed to impeach Bill Clinton over perjury and obstruction of justice charges linked to allegations of sexual misconduct. The effort, which Gingrich was convinced would give the Republicans 30 or 40 more House seats in that year's midterm elections, backfired spectacularly, trimming the GOP majority by five and ultimately forcing the speaker to hand over the gavel before the year was out. Two people who had front-row seats to that implosion? Trump's new political nemeses, Nancy and Chuck. Schumer became a senator in 1998, ousting a three-term Republican in New York after the Clinton impeachment debacle fired up the Democrat base. Pelosi was in the midst of a long career representing her California district in the House as she watched Gingrich the principal architect of modern-day "red and blue" tribalist politics go down in flames. "Those things were formative experiences for them, and it's obviously why both of them were so eager to keep their party from talking about impeachment on the campaign trail this year, because they feared it would fire up Republicans, it would dent Democratic prospects," Kornacki said. "I'm very curious to see how far that instinct extends when we start getting something more definitive back from Mueller." Jockeying for position before 2020 will also thicken the plot. There are believed to be upwards of two dozen Democrats with presidential aspirations; a wide-open nomination contest could make the pressure to ignore the lessons of history and pull the trigger on Trump almost impossible for Congress to resist. "If they do decide to move," Kornacki said, "that becomes the driving story of 2019 and 2020." The Democrats picked up 39 seats in this year's midterms, the so-called "blue wave" that also significantly diminished the number of Republicans who weren't necessarily big Trump supporters. In a way, that purge has given the president a bulwark against the risk of a bipartisan revolt: the Republicans who remain are more fiercely loyal. Trump, meanwhile, seems to believe he has all the support he needs. "It's hard to impeach somebody who hasn't done anything wrong and who's created the greatest economy in the history of our country," he told Reuters in an interview this week just the latest example of a president who seems to have as much faith in his grassroots supporters as they have in him. "I'm not concerned, no. I think that the people would revolt if that happened." Follow James McCarten on Twitter @CdnPressStyle WINNIPEG - Razak Iyal still wakes up in the middle of the night feeling the icy winds on Christmas Eve two years ago when his life drastically changed. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 19/12/2018 (1079 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Razak Iyal, one of two asylum seekers who walked across the Canada/US border in December and lost his fingers and toes because of severe frostbite, is photographed as he enters his refugee hearing in Winnipeg, Tuesday, June 13, 2017. THE CANADIAN PRESS/John Woods WINNIPEG - Razak Iyal still wakes up in the middle of the night feeling the icy winds on Christmas Eve two years ago when his life drastically changed. "It comes into my dreams all the time. I am thinking about it. When you wake up from the bed you see your hands and you don't have your fingers," Iyal, 36, said in an interview last month. A powerful winter storm was pounding southern Manitoba as Iyal and Seidu Mohammed, whom he had met at a bus station in Minneapolis in 2016, made their way to the Canada-United States border near Emerson. The overnight wind chill dipped to -30 C as the men trudged through snowy fields in the dark. They spent hours in the cold before they were noticed by a trucker. By that time, the two men had severe frostbite. Iyal would lose all his fingers but keep his thumbs. Mohammed lost all 10 digits. For all that they left behind, including family and jobs, Iyal said the two men have gained a supportive community, a new home and a bright future. "For me and Seidu, we would say that when we came to Canada (it's unfortunate) this happened to us. But we are happy we are in Canada because we met good people around us, who are encouraging us," Iyal said. "Once it happened, what can we do? We just stay focused. We just pray to God that one day we will overcome this thing that happened to us." The two men from Ghana were among the first wave of irregular refugee claimants to cross the border into Canada after the election of Donald Trump and his executive orders on immigration. The number of people crossing at non-official entry points to claim asylum in Manitoba increased for many months in 2017, but has since dropped significantly. Twenty-three asylum-seekers were intercepted by RCMP in the province in October. Iyal said he fled Ghana because his life was threatened in a dispute over the inheritance of his late father's property. He has not seen his wife since about 2012. He said the danger he would face back home increased after he arrived in Canada. Some media reports in Ghana said he was a homosexual because he travelled with Mohammed, who is bisexual. The LGBTQ community in the African nation is suppressed. Both men were granted refugee status in 2017. Iyal and Mohammed met just before deciding to make the harrowing trek across the border and the experience has forged a lifelong bond. They speak every day and support each other in navigating a new home and life without fingers. "I love him the way he is, and he also loves me the way I am. We love each other as brothers." Both men still face significant challenges trying to achieve their Canadian dream. After a year of doctors, rehabilitation and adapting to life fingerless both men are looking to get work and give back to the communities who have supported them. Iyal said his friend is taking English courses and other classes. Iyal is looking for a job he can do without his fingers. He is working with the Society for Manitobans with Disabilities and will soon be doing a course to become a security guard. After that, Iyal hopes to bring his wife to Winnipeg. When anyone asks if the snow-filled journey was worth it, Iyal responds that Winnipeg is where he has finally found a home. "This is where I find myself," he said. "This is where I find good people around me. This is where I find a new community, a new city and a new province. "Here is my home. This is where I want to spend the rest of my life with my family." CALGARY - Tearful loved ones stood and applauded after a jury found a man guilty of first-degree murder in the deaths of a Calgary woman and her five-year-old daughter. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 19/12/2018 (1078 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. CALGARY - Tearful loved ones stood and applauded after a jury found a man guilty of first-degree murder in the deaths of a Calgary woman and her five-year-old daughter. Edward Downey, 48, had testified he didn't kill Sara Baillie and Taliyah Marsman in July 2016. Edward Downey is seen in this undated handout photo provided by the Alberta Courts. THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO, Alberta Courts *MANDATORY CREDIT* "Now, I can go home and bury Sara and Taliyah's ashes and forever let them rest in peace," Baillie's mother, Janet Fredette, said after Wednesday's verdict. "Our hope is that in time and little by little, this powerful love we feel for the girls will gradually take up more and more space in our minds each and every day, that pictures and sounds of the happier times will settle on us and drive out the darkness that has become part of our daily lives." It took the jury less than three hours to reach its verdict. The conviction comes with an automatic life sentence, but it has yet to be determined whether Downey will have to wait 25 or 50 years to be eligible for parole. The Crown has indicated it's seeking consecutive periods of parole ineligibility and all but one juror recommended the same. A sentencing date is to be set in January. The Crown's theory was that Downey believed Baillie, 34, had influenced her best friend to break up with him and to decline to work as an escort. The prosecution further argued that Baillie's daughter was a witness who needed silencing. "Sara died trying to help her friend out of a bad situation. She is a hero," Fredette said. "Sara's death has ensured that no other individual will be harmed by Mr. Downey." Downey looked straight ahead as the verdict was read and showed no emotion. The trial heard that Baillie was found dead in a laundry hamper in her daughter's closet with duct tape wrapped around her face, neck and wrists. Taliyah was gone. The girl's remains were found in some bushes east of the city three days later. Both died by asphyxiation. Downey repeatedly denied killing Baillie and her daughter. He testified that the day Baillie was found dead, he met two other men one he called Terrance and a friend of Terrance's at Baillie's place to buy cocaine, but Downey had to get money from home. Downey told court that before he left, the man identified as Terrance was arguing with Baillie and asked for tape. He said he ripped some off a roll the friend chucked over, not thinking much of the request. Two of Downey's partial fingerprints were found on duct tape that had been wrapped around Sara's face, the trial heard. The Crown told jurors Downey invented the two men and called Downey's version of events "patently absurd." Cellphone pings from Downey's phone helped police zero in on the location of Taliyah's body. Downey testified he was in the area checking out drug stash locations instead of going to a planned meet-up spot to finish the drug deal. Fredette thanked police, Crown and Victims Services. "It has been a long two and a half years to get to this moment in time," she said. "We are most pleased with the outcome of the trial and we are certain justice will be served following this verdict." WINNIPEG - Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister says his government will enforce a cannabis retailers' fee on First Nations store owners in the new year, setting up another potential clash with Indigenous leaders. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 19/12/2018 (1078 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister says his government will enforce a cannabis retailers' fee on First Nations store owners in the new year, setting up another potential clash with Indigenous leaders. Pallister responds to questions during a news conference at the first ministers meeting in Montreal on Friday, Dec. 7, 2018. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Paul Chiasson WINNIPEG - Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister says his government will enforce a cannabis retailers' fee on First Nations store owners in the new year, setting up another potential clash with Indigenous leaders. The Progressive Conservative government is requiring all cannabis retailers to pay what it calls a social responsibility fee. The levy amounts to six per cent of each retailer's total annual revenues, starting in 2019. The annual fee is to be paid within six months after the year ends. Stores on reserves will not be exempt, Pallister said. "Every Manitoban has a social responsibility," Pallister said in a year-end interview with The Canadian Press. "And any company in Manitoba that wants to market cannabis whether it's on-reserve, off-reserve, on urban reserves, I do not care shares that social responsibility." Among the dozen or so private retail outlets that have opened so far across the province, two run in partnership with the Long Plain First Nation on urban reserves in Winnipeg and Portage La Prairie. Long Plain Chief Dennis Meeches said the fee should not be applied on reserve land and he is considering legal action. Meeches said the levy appears to be much like the provincial sales tax, which does not apply to sales to First Nations consumers on reserves. "We're just examining our options to see whether or not this is an attempt by the premier to skirt the PST (exemption)," Meeches said. Cannabis should be treated like tobacco, Meeches said. Through a rebate system, the province exempts tobacco sales on reserves to people with Indian status from its tobacco tax. "If this is allowed to go unchallenged, what else may come down the pike?" Meeches said. Pallister said the province has the right to impose a fee on businesses, whether on or off reserve. "We have the ability to establish a social responsibility levy." Under a section of the federal Indian Act, any personal property of a First Nations member situated on a reserve is exempt from taxation. But taxes aimed at businesses are often applied. For example, Manitoba's Health and Education Levy a tax on companies with payrolls exceeding $1.25 million a year applies on reserves as long as the company is incorporated and not that of a sole proprietor or band council. Pallister has been embroiled in disputes with Indigenous leaders on other fronts since taking office in 2016. He is facing opposition in some quarters over a plan to limit the use of spotlights for night hunting, and once said he feared it might become a "race war." He is also facing a court challenge by the Manitoba Metis Federation over a proposed benefits agreement concerning Manitoba Hydro projects that was scuttled. MONTREAL - Innu writer Maya Cousineau Mollen travelled to Paris from Quebec hoping to find that Robert Lepage had heard the grievances of Indigenous artists about his play "Kanata." But after attending a preview Saturday of the previously cancelled show, she came away disappointed. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 19/12/2018 (1078 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Canadian playwright, actor, film director and stage director Robert Lepage, of Quebec City, speaks to reporters at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa on November 10, 2010. Innu writer Maya Cousineau Mollen travelled to Paris from Quebec hoping to find that Robert Lepage had heard the grievances of Indigenous artists about his play "Kanata." But after attending a preview Saturday of the previously cancelled show, she came away disappointed. "One of the things we asked (Lepage) when we met him over the summer, was for him to convince us that we didn't need to be there," Cousineau Mollen said in an interview from Paris Tuesday. They wanted to be persuaded Lepage's account was true enough to the Indigenous experience "that we didn't need to be part of the project." THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick MONTREAL - Innu writer Maya Cousineau Mollen travelled to Paris from Quebec hoping to find that Robert Lepage had heard the grievances of Indigenous artists about his play "Kanata." But after attending a preview Saturday of the previously cancelled show, she came away disappointed. "One of the things we asked (Lepage) when we met him over the summer, was for him to convince us that we didn't need to be there," Cousineau Mollen said in an interview from Paris Tuesday. They wanted to be persuaded Lepage's account was true enough to the Indigenous experience "that we didn't need to be part of the project." From what she saw on the weekend, she said, "I wasn't convinced." What was initially billed as a premiere Saturday was downgraded to a dress rehearsal, and people who had paid for their tickets were offered refunds. The official premiere is now scheduled for Wednesday night. Last summer, Cousineau Mollen was one of about 30 Indigenous artists and activists who met with the internationally acclaimed director after a national controversy erupted over the production of "Kanata." The producers promised Kanata would explore Canadas history "through the lens of the relationship between white and Aboriginal people." But Indigenous activists and artists accused Lepage of producing a culturally insensitive play with little input from the communities portrayed. When the show's North American co-producers backed out because of the controversy, Paris's Theatre du Soleil cancelled its planned production of "Kanata" as part of a festival this month. But in September, Lepage announced the show would go on, under a new name: "Kanata Episode 1 The Controversy." Artists who saw the play last weekend said the new version focuses on missing and murdered Indigenous women in Vancouver. But as hinted at in the new title, there is a subplot of a non-Indigenous artist struggling with her right to portray Indigenous subjects. Cousineau Mollen said the production would have benefited from having an Indigenous person as co-director. She was particularly unsettled by a graphic scene in which a young Indigenous female character is murdered by a character modelled on Canadian serial killer Robert Pickton. Pickton was arrested in 2002 and convicted of six counts of second-degree murder in 2007. The remains or DNA of 33 women were found on Pickton's property in Port Coquitlam, B.C., and many of his victims were Indigenous. Cousineau Mollen said due in part to that "raw and violent" scene, the play "would not have been well received" in western Canada had it played there instead of Paris. Guy Sioui Durand, a Huron sociologist and art critic, also travelled to Paris to see the show. He did not appreciate how Lepage incorporated the controversy surrounding the production within the plot. A French painter grapples with whether she has the right to paint portraits of the murdered Indigenous women, he explained. "It's as if by putting the controversy in the play, Lepage and the theatre are painting themselves as victims alongside the murdered women," Sioui Durand said after returning to Montreal. "It doesn't work. Nothing is settled." His verdict is that the play "wasn't great. It wasn't a work of art." But he prefers seeing Kanata staged to having it shut down. "I don't want anything to do with censorship," he said. Gerty Dambury, who is part of a Paris-based collective called "Decolonize the Arts," invited Cousineau Mollen and Indigenous filmmaker Kim O'Bomsawin to Paris to see Lepage's play. O'Bomsawin screened her documentary on missing and murdered Indigenous women at a separate event. Dambury said the French aren't particularly sensitive to the issue of cultural appropriation when a dominant culture appropriates elements of a minority group's culture. "It's not very much discussed," Dambury said from Paris. "And those who talk about it do so in a negative way. They talk about it as a way to censor artists and to prevent them from doing what they want, how they want." HALIFAX - The assets of a shuttered Cape Breton call centre have been awarded to an Iowa-based businessman for $1.5-million, a deal that will likely save hundreds of jobs in Cape Breton. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 18/12/2018 (1079 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. HALIFAX - The assets of a shuttered Cape Breton call centre have been awarded to an Iowa-based businessman for $1.5-million, a deal that will likely save hundreds of jobs in Cape Breton. Nova Scotia Business Minister Geoff MacLellan confirmed Tuesday that Anthony Marlowe of Marlowe Companies Inc. (MCI) outbid two other interested buyers for the assets of ServiCom Canada during an auction that was part of bankruptcy proceedings in the United States. The call centre in Sydney, N.S., was abruptly closed Dec. 6 after ServiCom's U.S. parent, JNET Communications, filed for bankruptcy protection. Almost 700 people immediately lost their jobs. On Tuesday, MacLellan said the American judge overseeing the bankruptcy proceedings in New Haven, Conn., was expected to finalize the deal for four ServiCom contracts on Wednesday, though Dec. 21 has been set as a deadline. "At this point, there is still a court process that has to unfold," said MacLellan. MCI Canada later issued a statement saying the call centre will reopen as early as Jan. 2, 2019 under a new name: The Sydney Call Centre Inc. The company also confirmed that MCI will enter a nine-year lease for the shuttered facility. However, the company said ServiCom will be responsible for covering unpaid wages and other liabilities. The shutdown followed weeks of pay delays. Most of the workers are owed about four weeks in back pay. Marlowe said it was clear that the bankruptcy proceedings in the United States were unlikely to produce any money for the workers. He said his company would offer sign-on and retention bonuses, but no figures were mentioned. "We hope that this will help lessen some of the financial impacts of the closing," he said in a statement. Marlowe's company was in the process of buying the call centre's assets when it was shut down by the bankruptcy proceedings. He said his company will provide new and ongoing employment for the Sydney area. Again, no numbers were mentioned. "We are in a unique position to be able to quickly bring jobs back to Sydney, provide a valuable service to customers and add talented employees and capacity to the MCI portfolio," Marlowe said. "Expanding into a new country in less than 30 days is a big undertaking, but we have a great team and technology in place to get it done ... We have every confidence that the team in Sydney will further fuel our organization's success." MCI's parent company, Mass Markets, operates four contact centres in Iowa and South Dakota. MCI, headquartered in Iowa City, Iowa, employs about 2,000 people at operations in Iowa, Georgia, Florida, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and South Dakota. Cecil Clarke, mayor of the Cape Breton Regional Municipality, said the pending sale should provide a sense of relief for former ServiCom workers, who had worked at a profitable enterprise. "The speed at which the sale moved through the complications of U.S. bankruptcy proceedings shows Anthony Marlowe of MCI Canada ... is determined to pick up where they left off," Clarke said in a statement. Clarke also commended Cape Bretoners for offering support for their neighbours. "From donations of money and food to concerts, to haircuts and free transit ... people have been pulling together to help their neighbours get through this uncertain time," he said. "I understand that the sale doesn't erase the stress and fear the ServiCom employees have lived through these past weeks, but we can at least move into the Christmas season with a new sense of peace and joy knowing that this dedicated group can get back to work as soon as possible." ServiCom's Sydney operation first opened under different ownership nearly 20 years ago. The call centre provided customer support to major firms, such as OnStar Corp., a subsidiary of General Motors, Sirius XM Satellite Radio, AT&T Inc. and Allstate Insurance company. A bank was entitled to appoint a receiver to take possession of the Diep Le Shaker restaurant on Dublin's on Pembroke Lane, over default on a 1.16m mortgage secured on the premises, the High Court has ruled. The mortgage was granted by Permanent TSB to Arthur and Christine ffrench O'Carroll in March 2008 and was provided on an interest-only basis with payments of 5,722 per month. The ffrench O'Carrolls subsequently defaulted on the repayments. In December 2010, PTSB sent a letter of demand to them for arrears. The letter stated if they did not hand over rental income, it would appoint a receiver to collect that rent from the restaurant and from property in the South Circular Road over which there was also a mortgage. In October 2011, PTSB demanded repayment of the loan within ten days along with repayment of another loan on the South Circular Road properties which now had an outstanding amount of 2.4m. The bank appointed a receiver in 2011 to take possession of the restaurant. In February 2015, the original receiver's appointment was terminated and a new receiver appointed by PTSB. Four months later, June 2015, PTSB sold the loan to Havbell which then appointed its own receiver. The ffrench O'Carrolls brought proceedings against PTSB, Havbell, and all three receivers while Havbell and its receiver counter-claimed against them. They claimed the bank had no entitlement to appoint a receiver because no valid demand had been made for repayment of the entire debt when it wrote its December 2010 letter of demand for the arrears. The bank argued that once there was default on the mortgage, the security became immediately enforceable and it had a contractual right to appoint a receiver. The matter came before Ms Justice Una Ni Raifeartaigh by way of special case dealing with questions of law. In her answers to those questions, she found the 2008 mortgage became immediately enforceable on the occurrence of default on repayments as contained in a clause in the mortgage document. She also found the bank had a contractual right to appoint a receiver without first demanding repayment of the money secured by the mortgage. The British Irish Chamber of Commerce has warned of the dangers a no deal Brexit will have for business and trade between the UK and Ireland. Speaking after the European Commission published its Brexit continency notices with just 100 days until Britain leaves the EU, Director General of the British Irish Chamber, John McGrane said: We now have only 100 days left until the United Kingdom is due to leave the EU. This week we have seen a ramping-up of no deal preparations from both the European Commission and the UK Government. With the Irish Government due to tell us tomorrow its plans for a no deal, it is important for businesses to speak out and warn of the dangers of a no deal and implore that this does not become the objective for Brexit. The uncertainty that businesses are facing has meant that many have already started implementing costly Brexit plans to try and insulate themselves from the effects of a potential no deal. While this is a prudent move, it is at the cost of other business operations," he added. Meanwhile, the Bank of England is expected to keep rates unchanged at 0.75% on Thursday and remain firmly in wait-and-see mode until Brexit uncertainty clears. The last rates decision of 2018 comes as prospects of a Brexit deal are left hanging in the balance, with the economy showing signs of stagnating as businesses, consumers and home-buyers put big spending decisions on hold. The Irish subsidiary of video game giant Electronic Arts was fully entitled to dismiss one of its directors, the High Court has heard. Mark Connaughton SC for Electronic Arts (EA) said the company had acted in a lawful manner when it terminated Philippe Grenets contract of employment on December 10th last. Counsel said the decision was made in accordance with the terms of Mr Grenet's contract of employment and was made on a "no-fault basis." Counsel said his client also rejects any claims that it has played "fast and loose with its corporate responsibilities." Counsel said the decision of December 10 was made after Mr Grenet had been dismissed for alleged misconduct when it was claimed he had made an inappropriate remark in a one to one during a one to one video call with a female colleague. That first decision to dismiss him was withdrawn by the company, the court heard. Arising out of the termination of his employment for the alleged remark Mr Grenet brought proceedings against the company aimed at preventing his dismissal as director of global delivery service for Electronic Arts Ireland in Galway. As part of his action, he seeks to have a temporary injunction, which he was granted earlier this month remain in place until the full hearing of his claim has been determined. The company denies any wrongdoing and opposes the application. Mr Connaughton SC for EA said that no reason was given for EA's decision of December 10, but his client did not have to give one. It denies that the second dismissal was made arising out Mr Grenets decision to bring legal proceedings challenging the first decision to terminate his employment. Counsel also rejected claims the second termination is invalid because the person who made that decision, Mr Mike Pompei, is not an employee of the Galway-based subsidiary. Such an argument was misconceived counsel said, adding that Mr Grenet was not appointed by the board of the Irish subsidiary. Counsel further rejected claims by the plaintiff that the second termination was in breach of the spirit of the temporary injunction granted prior to the second decision to dismiss Mr Grenet. Submissions from both sides in the injunction application concluded before Mr Jsutice Tony O'Connor on Wednesday evening. The Judge said he hoped to give his decision on Friday. Mr Grenet, represented by Oisin Quinn SC and Ray Ryan Bl, was initially dismissed from his position in November for alleged misconduct arising out of an allegation he made an inappropriate remark He denies he told Texas-based staff member, Tracy Simmons, he was not "going to pull my dick out and put it on the table to see who has the bigger dick". He says what he actually said was "I don't want to compare the length of my dick". He accepts the remark was a clumsy, inelegant and ill-advised expression. But he says it means he "did not want to challenge" that particular person on a work matter. He was informed by the company on December 10 last, after he obtained the temporary injunction, it was withdrawing the decision to terminate his employment. However, the letter said that the company was terminating his employment and gave him one month's notice which he did not have to see out. Mr Quinn said the second termination is "a sham" was "contrived" and was clearly related to the earlier decision to dismiss him arising out of Ms Simmons' complaint. Mr Grenet moved to take up the Galway job from France in July with his family. He says he was in charge of 420 EA staff in Galway and another 80 in Texas. Update: Minister for Transport Shane Ross met with Eamon Rothwell, the chief executive of Irish Ferries parent company, Irish Continental Group to express the Governments concern about proposals to shut down the ferry companys Rosslare-Cherbourg route. It is a completely commercial decision, we cant tell him that he cant do it, Mr Ross told RTEs News at One. Mr Ross said that the decision had come as a complete surprise to him and that he will make every effort to ensure that Rosslare is not negatively impacted. He said his discussion with Mr Rothwell had been frank, but off the record. The decision to relocate the Cherbourg route from Dublin port would mean more business for the company, he said. But he acknowledged that it would put more pressure on routes around Dublin. He was asked if he knew if Dublin Port had offered a better deal to Irish Ferries, but he said he had no idea. Im worried that Rosslare should not be disadvantaged. The port should be helped to do better rather than have everything focused on Dublin. Strictly speaking Im hoping the connection will stay the same. Its very bad for Rosslare, but I cant interfere with a commercial decision. Minister of State at the Department of Defence, Wexford TD Paul Kehoe also admitted that he did not see this coming. As a member of the Government, he said he was very disappointed at the manner in which Irish Ferries had communicated this message. It was very vague. Some parts of the argument that they had made about customers preferring to use Dublin just dont stack up he said. Im a user of the service, I have been for three years and all the customers I spoke to all prefer using Rosslare because of its accessibility. It will be even more accessible when the by-passes are finished, he added. This came out of the blue. For anyone to say that the Government had any prior notice is farcical. They are a commercial company, they can do what they like. SIPTU organiser, Paul Cullen, said: This decision is deeply concerning and disappointing for our members employed in the Rosslare Europort and the surrounding region. The port has the potential to become a major gateway for imports and exports after Brexit. However, a failure to fully comprehend the strategic value of the port has led to a lack of investment in it, leading to it being unable to reach its full potential. "This has resulted in a failure to complete infrastructural improvements in the port area, such as a new access road. He added: The decision to end the Rosslare to France route is a commercial one by Irish Ferries. However, it is the responsibility of the Government to work to ensure that there is a future for the Rosslare Europort and the economy of the surrounding area. Earlier: Govt to ask Irish Ferries to reconsider scrapping Rosslare to France service The Government has asked Irish Ferries to reconsider scrapping a ferry service to France. The company said yesterday it is "unlikely" a service will run between Rosslare and France next year. The Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has said it is a disappointing decision and he hopes it will be reconsidered. Leo Varadkar says government is asking Irish Ferries to reconsider this and are disappointed at the decision https://t.co/aog7ZI49uG Sean Defoe (@SeanDefoe) December 19, 2018 Department of Transport officials intend to meet with Irish Ferries to discuss it. Earlier: Hauliers: Irish Ferries claim customers not interested in Rosslare to France service is 'fake news' The Irish Road Haulage Association has said that the vague statement that Irish Ferries is unlikely to operate a service between Rosslare and France next summer, means they are open to negotiation. Verona Murphy of the Irish Road Haulage Association pointed out to the Sean O'Rourke show on RTE Radio One that each ferry carries 1,200 cars and 165 trucks all of which are going to now be on the M50 which already has huge congestion. Ms Murphy called on the Minister for Transport Shane Ross to let the country know hes alive and well and to intervene. Local TD and former Minister for Public Expenditure Brendan Howlin said there had been rumours in the area for some time about Irish Ferries commitment to the route. Its unthinkable that it could happen, that the shortest route would be axed is beyond understanding. It beggars belief. Ms Murphy also questioned a suggestion by Irish Ferries that customers were not interested in the route. Look at the response on social media. Ive been a customer of Irish Ferries for more than 30 years, no one asked me. "Its fake news. Im not sure what was their ulterior motive. Dept to meet Irish Ferries over plan to scrap service between Rosslare and France Department of Transport officials are to meet with Irish Ferries over plans to scrap a ferry service in the south-east. The plans are being described as a "big blow". The company said it is "unlikely" to operate the service next year but will keep the situation under review. In a statement yesterday, they said: "Irish Ferries wish to inform our customers that we're unlikely to operate a service between Rosslare & France in 2019. We continue to keep this situation under review" "Feedback from our customers suggests that it is easier to travel to Dublin Port for most people than it is to get to Rosslare." The Junior Tourism Minister Brendan Griffin said the service is important for the South East region. He said the ferry crossing mainly facilitates Irish tourists holidaying in France, but it also brings French and other European tourists to the region. Sinn Fein TD David Cullinane said it is devastating news for the south-east, especially given the uncertainty around Brexit: Mr Cullinane said: "Obviously at a time when people were hoping for an increased capacity to ensure that we protect the south-east from the worst of Brexit, and bear in mind also that the south-east has a big agri-food sector as well. "I think this will be a huge concern for farmers, for food producers, for the agri-food sector, obviously for passengers as well and for businesses generally." The company will continue to run a passenger service between Rosslare and Pembroke year round. Pharmaceutical companies GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and Pfizer have said that it is too early to say what the implications are for their Irish staff after a partnership between the firms to create a 10.85bn consumer health division. GSK plans to split into two businesses, one for prescription drugs and vaccines, the other for over-the-counter products, after forming the joint venture with Pfizers consumer health division. It will lead to the creation of a consumer health company with a market share of 7.3% which is well ahead of its nearest rivals Johnson & Johnson, Bayer and Sanofi, all on around 4%. GSK and Pfizer will combine their consumer health businesses, with sales of 9.8bn (10.85bn) and 68%-owned by the British company, in an all-equity transaction. GSK employs around 1,700 people in Dungarvan, Cork, Dublin and Sligo, with 90% of the worlds Panadol produced in the Waterford site. GSK also produces Voltorol, Sensodyne and Corsodyl in its consumer health division. GSK announced in August that it was to close its Sligo site by 2021, where it manufactures skincare products, with the loss of 165 jobs. However, staff are said to be confident its Dungarvan facility will form a major part of the new ventures operations in the future. GSKs Cork staff will be unaffected by the deal, as it forms part of the firms pharmaceutical division. A spokeswoman for GSK said: Subject to approvals, we would expect to close the deal in the second half of 2019. The separation is expected to take place within three years of this so we will have a lot of time to understand the implications, if any, for our sites in Ireland. Until then, it is very much business as usual and we will continue to keep our employees informed over the coming months and years as things progress. Pfizer also said the impact locally could not be gauged until the deal went through. A spokeswoman said: Its too early to comment on whether there will be any local impact as the closing of this transaction between Pfizer and GSK is subject to customary closing conditions, including required antitrust [competition] approvals and receipt of cost shareholder approval. For Pfizer, the deal resolves the issue of what to do with its consumer health division, which includes after an abortive attempt to sell it outright earlier this year. The firm is one of Irelands largest private employers, with a workforce of more than 3,200 in six locations, including 600 in Ringaskiddy in Cork, from where it exports bulk pharmaceuticals, the active ingredients in its medications for humans and animals. However, no consumer products, which include Advil painkillers and Centrum vitamins, are manufactured at its Irish plants. Shares in GSK rose more than 3.75%, while Pfizer shares rose 0.75%. Additional reporting Reuters Ireland's largest retail industry body has hit out at what they call 'alarmist' weather warnings issued by Met Eireann, saying they are "significantly damaging footfall". Last weekend, on the penultimate Saturday before Christmas, there was a weather warning which Retail Excellence claim made shoppers stay at home. Earlier this month a heart wrenching video in which a sobbing four-year-old girl from Dublin is told she must spend her third Christmas homeless went viral. Child homelessness in Ireland is the worst in Europe and to highlight this, activists have launched, #MyNameIs. 17,000 cash found in the apartment of a man described as a childhood friend of Daniel Kinahan are the proceeds of crime, the High Court has ruled. The cash was seized by the Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB)in the apartment of Jeremy Skerritt following a search in April 2016. In a ruling, Ms Carmel Stewart deemed that the cash was the proceeds of crime, and appointed a receiver over the monies. Mr Skerritt, aged 42 years, did not contest CAB's application under Section 3 of the 1996 Proceeds of Crime Act, nor was he present in court for the hearing. He did not claim ownership of the money, nor did he give any explanation where the cash came from, CAB said, adding that he had been put on notice of the application. CAB argued the money was the proceeds of crime, namely the sale and supply of controlled drugs, and that Mr Skerritt has no legitimate source of income other than social welfare payments. The court heard the cash was discovered following a search Mr Skerritt's flat at North Circular Road, Dublin 7 on April 7th 2016. The search was conducted as part of Operation Thistle which CAB said was a Garda operation against members of the Kinahan organised crime gang. Gardai found the cash wrapped in tinfoil under a mattress in the centre of the living area in the apartment. CAB said the money was packaged in three bundles of 5000, and one bundle of 2000 all neatly wrapped in tinfoil bundles. The method each parcel was packaged and concealed was consistent with drug dealing and money laundering, CAB said. The court heard Mr Skerritt had 22 previous convictions for offences including assault and drug offences and was jailed for 15 months in 2001 for his part in the assault of an off-duty garda. CAB described Mr Skerritt as a low to mid-ranking member of the Kinahan organised crime and is a childhood friend of one of that gang's leading members Daniel Kinahan. The court also heard that Gardai found a set of keys for an apartment at Lower Baggot Street, Dublin following a search of Mr Skerritt's girlfriend's home in Oliver Bond House, Dublin 8 also conducted on April 7th 2016. When Gardai searched the premises at Lower Baggot Street they discovered a Dutch Moroccan man called Naoufal Fassi. In addition, a quantity of cannabis, a false Belgian ID card, cash, mobile phones, high watches and documents linking the address to the Kinahan organised crime gang was also found in the Lower Baggot Street apartment. After a brief stint in custody in Ireland Fassi was extradited to the Netherlands where following a trial was jailed for 18 years for his role in organised crime and attempted murder. The court heard Daniel Kinahan was a named party on Mr Skerritt's motorbike insurance policy. CAB said the policy, which was discovered in the search of the property at Oliver Bond House came into effect days after David Byrne, who was also a member of the Kinahan organised crime gang, was shot dead in the Regency Hotel attack on 5th 2016. Two psychiatrists have told a trial that a doctor accused of murdering her three-year-old autistic son fulfils the criteria for a special verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity. Both witnesses were in agreement that Maha Al Adheem was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia in July 2017. The Kuwaiti woman was unable to appreciate that what she did at the time was morally wrong and would have been unable to refrain from her actions, the Central Criminal Court has heard. Dr Paul OConnell from the Central Mental Hospital was giving evidence today in the trial of Maha Al Adheem, charged with murdering her only child over a year ago. Ms Al Adheem (43) has admitted stabbing her son and told gardai that a power had made her go to a drawer and remove a knife. The boy was stabbed 20 times and four stab wounds had penetrated his lungs and heart, severing a vital artery. His cause of death was multiple stab wounds to his chest, abdomen and trunk as well as to his right thigh. Ms Al Adheem, with an address at Riverside, Poddle Park, Kimmage, Dublin 12 has pleaded not guilty to murdering Omar Omran on July 10, 2017 at the same address. Dr OConnell told defence counsel Patrick Gageby SC that he was not treating the accused in the Central Mental Hospital so was independent for the purpose of preparing a report for the court. The witness said he interviewed Ms Al Adheem on three occasions this year and she told him she had experienced hearing voices in the past and sometimes could hear a door open by itself. Dr OConnell said the accused qualified as doctor in Iraq in 2003 but it took her nine years to complete a six year medical degree as she was diagnosed with depression and schizophrenia while she was a medical student in 1996. Her mental illness at the time included her becoming reclusive and hearing critical voices which prevented her concentrating on her own thoughts. Ms Al Adheem told the psychiatrist that she had seen an out of this world black cat with no tail from her apartment balcony in Kimmage and as a result prayed on the Quran day and night over three days to ward off its spirit. Dr OConnell said the accused seemed to be deluded that her life was being laid bare on Facebook by a previous suitor who was keeping her under surveillance and had hacked her account. Ms Al Adheem told Dr OConnell that her ex-husband had a limited ability to learn English and he had sensitivities which meant he could not tolerate loud noises including the sound of their baby crying. Her son Omar was born on January 9, 2014 through assisted conception treatment. Their marriage ended when Omar was four months old and Ms Al Adheem applied for a legal separation that year which came into effect in 2016. The accused told Dr OConnell that developmental problems became apparent in Omar when he was two and a half years old and there were issues finding a creche for him as he was non-verbal, needed one-to-one attention and his special needs were evident. Ms Al Adheem felt very depressed in the months prior to the event because of her child's autism and the fact schools were refusing to take her son. On March 14, 2017 she felt suicidal and attended her GP with suicidal thoughts and was admitted to the psychiatry department in St Jamess Hospital for five days, said the witness. A safety plan was put in place for the accused and she told doctors she would seek support from her mother or brother. According to notes generated from St Jamess Hospital, Ms Al Adheem was not presenting with any psychotic phenomena or psychotic ideation when she was discharged from St Jamess Hospital. The court heard the accused had put a knife to her throat at the beginning of 2017 but had not carried out her intent as the baby had cried. Ms Al Adheem said a power took over her on the day of the killing which made her stab her son and she felt her wrists being twisted, said Dr OConnell, adding that this was evidence of the accuseds prevailing delusions where she no longer believed she was in control of her own body. The fact she thought gardai and Dublin Fire Brigade who arrived at the scene were fake people was consistent with someone experiencing paranoid psychosis, he indicated. Dr OConnell said the accused told her she had purchased the silver knife in Lidl and it was like a sword. In conclusion, Dr OConnell said Ms Al Adheem was suffering from a mental disorder - paranoid schizophrenia - at the material time, which impaired her mental functioning. This was evident from her abnormal behaviour leading up to the event and her preoccupation with delusional themes, he said. The doctor said her behaviour suggested that she knew the nature and quality of her acts. However, Dr OConnell stated Ms Al Adheem was unable to appreciate that what she did at the material time was morally wrong and such a state of psychosis was consistent with her being unable to refrain from committing the act. The court heard Ms Al Adheem met two of the limbs required for the special verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity. A second forensic psychiatrist, Dr Lisa McLoughlin of the Central Mental Hospital also gave evidence that the accused was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia at the time which seriously impaired her mental functioning. Dr McLoughlin told prosecution counsel Michael Delaney SC that it would appear Ms Al Adheem was suffering from significant psychosocial stresses when she was admitted to St Jamess Hospital in March 2017 as a result of raising her son as a single parent. I think there is a substantial amount of evidence that she was preoccupied with a black cat at that time, she added. Doctors in St Jamess Hospital who examined Ms Al Adheem after the killing in July 2017 noted that she had psychosis and was a contradictory historian at times, said the witness. Dr McLoughlin said the accused retains the delusional belief about the black cat, although she does not currently see it, and there has been a substantial deterioration in her level of functioning. The witness said she agreed with Dr OConnell that Ms Al Adheem knew the nature and quality of her act. However, she said the accused was unable to appreciate what she did was wrong and would have been unable to refrain from committing the act. The trial resumes tomorrow before Ms Justice Eileen Creedon and a jury of nine men and three women. A Dublin man has been found guilty of dangerous driving causing the death of a father-of-two. Michael Jones (24) drove an Audi A3 which broke a red light at speed before crashing into the side of a Mitsubishi Colt driven by Hong Qing Qu, who later died. The collision happened around 1am on November 17, 2015 at the top of a slip road close to Blanchardstown shopping centre in west Dublin. Jones, a roofer from Whitestown Drive, Dublin had pleaded not guilty to dangerous driving causing the death of Mr Qu at Blanchardstown Rd. south on November 17, 2015. The jury returned a guilty verdict on day nine of his trial at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court after deliberating for just over two and a half hours. As the jury left the courtroom Mr Qu's widow stood up and bowed to the four women and eight men. Judge Patricia Ryan remanded Jones in custody and adjourned the matter for sentencing on January 14, of next year. During the trial Garda Patrick McIlroy told the jury that based on factors including the angle of the impact and the places both cars ended up after the collision, he was able to determine that the Audi A3 had been travelling between 115km/h and 137km/h prior to the collision. Gda McIlroy said that the speed limit for all roads in the area was 60km/h. Witnesses described seeing three men dragging a man from the Audi after the collision and putting him into the back of a third car, a Volkswagen Passat. Witness, Kevin Mooney told the jury that shortly before the collision he was driving home and was passed at high speed by a Passat and a silver Audi A3. He said he had gotten the impression that the cars were either racing or possibly fleeing something. A clinical nurse manager at James Connolly Hospital said she encountered Jones on the ground outside the entrance to the emergency unit. She told the court that Jones said his name was Michael McDonagh and that his leg had been injured in a fall. The jury heard that after the collision Mr Qu was in between the driver and passenger seat of his own car in a bad condition and was choking on his own blood. In a statement read out in court, the deceased's partner said that Mr Qu had called her the night of the incident to tell her that he was finished work and was on his way to the home they shared with their two children. She said Mr Qu always rang her when he was on his way home and that there was nothing different about that night. Gardai arrived later to tell her about the accident and brought her to the hospital where she identified the body of Mr Qu. Judge Ryan thanked the jury members for their care and attention during the trial. Former singing priest Tony Walsh has received a partially suspended sentence for indecently assaulting a teenage boy 35 years ago. Walsh (64), formerly of North Circular Road, Dublin is currently serving a seven and a half year sentence for raping another boy three times in the 1980s. On one of these occasions, he raped the victim with a crucifix. Walsh pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to his latest charge of indecently assaulting a teenage boy on a date in 1983. He has 14 previous convictions for sex-related offences dating from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. Judge Cormac Quinn sentenced Walsh to five years imprisonment but suspended the final 18 months for a period of two years on condition that he keep the peace and be of good behaviour and engage with probation services for two years post-release. Garda John Barrett said the boy had gotten drunk in an unrelated incident, had woken up naked and in pain with Walsh on top on him in a single bed. Gda Barrett told Dara Hayes BL, prosecuting, that this was Walsh's bedroom at the time and that he had placed his penis inside the boy's anus for a split second. The injured party told gardai it had been a stabbing pain and that he had roared and pushed Walsh off him. The then teenager saw Walsh was wearing a white vest with no underwear on. The boy put his clothes on as fast as he could and ran home, where he cried in his room before going to sleep. The court heard he didn't tell anyone because he was so ashamed. Gda Barrett told Mr Hayes that the injured party turned to drinking after this incident. A victim impact report was handed into court but not read out. The garda agreed with Paul Carroll SC, defending, that Walsh's guilty plea had spared the injured party from giving evidence at a trial. Mr Carroll submitted that his client has a release date from his current sentence in 2021. He said Walsh has served in the region of 13 years in jail for all the convictions against him to date. Counsel said he had been instructed to apologise to the injured party and submitted that there had been an inordinate and culpable prosecutorial delay in the case coming to court. He said his client had been in custody for large periods of time and that the offending had stopped a long time ago. He said Walsh had been dealing with his issues and accepted his wrongdoing in the context of keeping his religious faith. Judge Quinn said the aggravating factors in the case were the serious nature of the offence, the age of the injured party, the effect the offence had on the injured party and the very serious breach of trust this offence represented. He said he mitigating factors in the case were Walsh's plea of guilty, his age, his apology, his having already served in the region of 13 years imprisonment and a governor's report which described Walsh as a model prisoner. Judge Quinn backdated the sentence to July 17 last when Walsh entered his plea of guilty. A man in his 30s has been arrested for questioning about an attack on a man in his home on the northside of the Cork city last night. The suspect, who is in his 30s, was arrested in the Gurranabraher area last night a short time after the alarm was raised. He is being detained under the Provisions of Section 4 of the Criminal Justice Act in Gurranabraher garda station. Gardai said a man in his 60s had been taken to Cork University Hospital last night after suffering an apparent stab wound. His injuries are not believed to be life-threatening. An attacker is said to have forced his way into the house and demanded cash last night, but neighbours in the estate off Cathedral Road in Gurranabraher raised the alarm around 6.30pm after calling to the mans house to investigate suspicious sounds. It is believed the suspect answered the door to them and claimed to be a visiting relative. They pressed him for answers before they spotted the homeowner inside in a distressed state. It was clear that he was bleeding from the legs and face. The suspect again tried to dismiss the neighbours by claiming the man had had an accident in the house. But the neighbours knew something was wrong and they retreated to raise the alarm. Locals said gardai, including members of the armed regional response unit, arrived on the scene within minutes but the suspect had fled the scene on foot. The Government has agreed to establish an independent statutory tribunal to deal with claims arising from CervicalCheck. Minister for Health Simon Harris TD secured Government approval to prepare legislative proposals as a matter of priority, but the Government acknowledged this will take time to establish. The Cabinet approved the appointment of Ms Justice Mary Irvine as chair of the tribunal. The Minister will also examine the early establishment of a non-statutory scheme to provide ex-gratia payments for the women affected by the non-disclosure of the audit. The tribunal will be established based on the recommendations set out by Mr Justice Charles Meenan in his recent report on an alternative system for dealing with cases arising from CervicalCheck. Hearings will be held in private and will be less adversarial than the current court process due to the adoption of pre-hearing protocols and case management procedures. Once established, cases will be dealt with in a timely manner, the Government says. The tribunal will differ from the current court process in that it will be voluntary for all parties. Minister Harris emphasised that establishing a tribunal does not, in any way, restrict the right of women or their families to give evidence in public in the High Court, if that is their wish. Minister Harris said: "The tribunal will allow women to progress their cases in a timely and sensitive, less adversarial manner, while equally respecting the constitutional entitlement of all parties to a fair hearing. I want to thank Ms Justice Irvine for taking on this role. I look forward to engaging with her in the new year and progressing with this work as soon as possible. "This will take time to establish but all arms of Government are working to progress as a matter of urgency. "I will also consider the establishment of an ex-gratia compensatory scheme to deal with any accepted non-disclosure to the 221 women and their families and I hope to progress this in the new year." Labour's Alan Kelly TD said that legislation around the CervicalCheck tribunal needs to be enacted as soon as possible in the new year. "Minister Harris needs to ensure that the legislation that is needed for the smooth running of this tribunal is brought in when the Dail resumes in early January," he said. "While the ex-gratia compensation scheme is welcome, I dont believe it does enough to take into account for the impact and hurt caused by the CervicalCheck scandal. "This is a far cry from when the Taoiseach promised live on the Six One News that no woman would have to court and the Taoiseach knows deep down he should have never made a commitment like that that he couldnt keep. "Most importantly, we need to look at the long term health needs and requirements of these women. We need to learn the lessons of the Hep C scandal and ensure a proper plan is in place for victims of the CervicalCheck scandal and their future healthcare." Clinical guidelines have been issued to doctors ahead of new abortion laws coming into effect in January. GPs will be able to provide terminations via medication for women who are under nine weeks pregnant. A pregnant woman between nine and 12 weeks will have to go to hospital for the service. A 24-hour helpline will be in operation to advise women on their options and where the service is available. Dr Tony Cox from the Irish College of General Practitioners said it is important the public knows it is an opt-in service for GPs. The 24-hour helpline, and communications campaign, will help women access a community provider who can offer the service, but we need further clarity on a number of issues, Dr Cox said. It is essential that the public know that this is an opt-in service for GPs, i.e. only those doctors who plan to provide the service will be contracted to do so. A middle-aged man living near University College Cork was approached by four men who said they would clean his chutes for 50 but they got 4,250 by deception on repeated visits by telling him his facia and soffit would have to be replaced. That was the allegation in the case investigated by Detective Sergeant Tim Murphy and Detective Garda David Hickey who arrested and charged two men in Killarney today and charged them in relation to the case. John Casey, who is aged around 50, of Bay 5, St Michaels halting site, Bypass, Killarney, Co Kerry, and Ricky Casey, aged 21, of Ballyspillane, Killarney, were charged with obtaining 4,250 by deception at College Road, Cork, on various dates between February 9 and February 13. Det Sgt Murphy said at Cork District Court that the Director of Public Prosecutions directed that the case could be dealt with at district court level. Judge Olann Kelleher required to hear the allegations in order to decide if he would accept jurisdiction. The sergeant said four men called to the home of the man who is in his 50s and said they would clean the chutes for 50. However, they returned to tell him that his facia and soffit needed replacing, initially at a cost of 2,500. Men returned to his house over the following few days until the householder had paid out a total of 4,250, it was alleged. The judge accepted jurisdiction. There was no objection to the accused being remanded on bail until January 16. Prosecution statements are to be sent to Donal Daly, solicitor. Bail conditions require him to live at the halting site in Killarney, sign at the local garda station on Tuesdays and Saturdays, stay out of Cork city except for legal or medical appointments. Most importantly, he was directed to have no contact direct or indirect with the injured part or his family. Ricky Casey was remanded to the same date on similar bail conditions. The Justice Minister has warned that vigilantes and private armies will not be tolerated in Ireland. It comes after the attack on security men at a property in Co. Roscommon at the weekend. They had forcibly removed a family from the house near Strokestown after a High Court repossession order was made. But Minister Charlie Flanagan says people cannot take justice into their own hands. "While I do not wish to comment on any individual case, I wish to stress that violence is never justified," he said. "An Garda Siochana are the sole legitimate guardians of the peace in this State, charged with upholding the law in the interests of the whole community. "It is never appropriate for vigilante groups to take the law into their own hands and commit acts of serious violence against people, animals or property, as was the case on Sunday. "I strongly condemn the incidents on Sunday and I welcome that An Garda Siochana is investigating the matter. "I am deeply disturbed by the thinly veiled references to vigilantism that have been made in recent days in social media and elsewhere. This is a very dangerous road to go down and vigilantism cannot and will not be tolerated in this State. "While very conscious that the full facts of this particular case are not in the public domain, it is clearly deeply distressing to see a family lose their home, particularly at this time of year. I hope the situation can be peacefully resolved through dialogue and mediation." He added that Justice Department officials are in the process of drafting the Land and Conveyancing Law Reform (Amendment) Bill which aims is to broaden the range of matters a court must take into account when deciding whether to grant a possession order to a lending institution in respect of a borrower's principal private residence. A man accused of murdering his love rival told a "pack of lies" when he claimed the deceased came at him with a knife, a barrister has told the Central Criminal Court. Brendan Grehan SC in his closing speech to the jury in the trial of Dublin man Keith Connorton said that if the accused's account is true then he is guilty of no crime. But the evidence contradicts his account, Mr Grehan said, as he urged the jury to convict him of murder. Mr Connorton (40) has pleaded not guilty to murdering 32-year-old Graham McKeever at the accused's home at Deerpark Avenue, Tallaght on February 18, 2017. He is on trial at the Central Criminal Court. Mr Grehan said Mr McKeever was in the apartment, which belonged to the accused and his girlfriend Claire McGrath (30), not as an intruder but as a guest of Ms McGrath. From the outset, counsel said, Mr Connorton was consistent in saying he found them together, a row broke out and Mr McKeever attacked him and came at him with a knife which the accused managed to grab hold of and turn on Mr McKeever. This, counsel said, describes a "life and death struggle" that if the jury accepts could reasonably be true would mean he is not guilty of murder. Anyone, he said, is entitled to defend themselves using reasonable force. But this account, Mr Grehan said, is a "pack of lies". He told the jury that the prosecution relies on the original statements of Claire McGrath, in which she described Mr Connorton finding her in the apartment with Mr McKeever before arming himself with a knife, threatening her and then stabbing the deceased. Counsel said the prosecution will also rely on the evidence of Deputy State Pathologist Dr Linda Mulligan who described four stab wounds to Mr McKeever's torso, one of which penetrated the heart and caused his death. Mr Grehan will continue his speech to the jury of nine men and three women in front of Justice Tony Hunt tomorrow. Earlier in the day the jury heard from interviews Mr Connorton gave to gardai in which he said that all he wanted was a happy family with his son and Ms McGrath. Following the fatal stabbing his dream was "ruined", he said. Sergeant Kieran Kilcoyne told prosecuting counsel Dara Foynes BL that he interviewed the accused man at Tallaght garda station on February 20, 2017, two days after Mr McKeever died. The witness agreed with Ms Foynes that in those interviews the accused said he first met Ms McGrath at a Luas stop. She was crying after breaking up with her boyfriend and Mr Connorton comforted her. He said she was "beautiful" and they started seeing one another. He described her as a "nice sweet young one" and said he loves her "to bits". He added: "All I want is to be off it [heroin] and having a happy wee family. Now that's all ruined." He had been on a methadone programme for some time and had reduced his daily dose from 115mls to 55mls. Two men have been jailed for life for murdering a drug dealer in May 2015. Andrew Guerrine was stabbed 20 times and dumped on the side of a road in Rathcoole, south county Dublin. Stephen Tynan (41) of Deerpark Lodge, Kiltipper, Tallaght, and Raymond Fitzgerald (37) of Knockmore Grove, Killinarden, also in Tallaght had both pleaded not guilty to murdering Mr Tynans cousin, Andrew Guerrine, at an unknown place between May 22 and May 23, 2015. They were convicted of murder last month following a five-week trial, during which the victims family watched them laughing and joking in the dock at times, something which showed a lack of respect and remorse according to a victim impact statement read out in court today. Tynan is a first cousin of Andrew Guerrine and the court heard he sympathised with his father at a family funeral just hours after the murder. Mr Guerrine was last seen just before midnight on May 22, 2015, on his way in Knockmore in Tallaght on his way to sell drugs. His body was found by a passerby in the early hours of the following morning. He had been dumped on a roadside some 10km away. His sister Edel said he was no angel but described him as a loving father to his daughter and a man who was not violent or malicious but was a gentle giant. Andrew Guerrine. She said the family is now in an absolute hell and she cannot believe her brother was killed by two men who just did not want to pay for some tablets. Both were handed the mandatory life sentence for murder. Sinn Fein have said the health system will not be able to cope if nurses go on strike. 95% of members of the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation voted in favour of industrial action yesterday in a row over pay and staff shortages. A suspended solicitor has consented to High Court orders freezing his accounts below 1.062m, plus orders effectively aimed at winding up his former practice at Ballaghderreen, Co Roscommon. Declan OCallaghan will be entitled to vouched monthly living expenses of 11,600, the president of the High Court, Mr Justice Peter Kelly directed. That sum was agreed between the solicitor and the Law Society and includes mortgage repayments and utility bills. The consent orders also provide Mr OCallaghan will remain suspended from practice and must provide a sworn statement of his assets. They also provide for steps to achieve the sale of three properties his family home in Ballaghderreen, a townhouse in Portugal and a property at Arran Quay, Dublin - with the proceeds going towards clearing the deficit on the account of the Kilraine OCallaghan practice at Pound Street, Ballaghderreen. A sum of 107,816 is also to be paid out on Thursday to a law firm related to certain litigation and the orders provide for handover on Friday of files of the practice to the Society and for it to have access to the practice from then. In making the orders, Mr Justice Kelly noted the Society alleges dishonesty against Mr OCallaghan but Mr O'Callaghan has consistently denied any dishonesty. That issue will be adjudicated on in due course by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal and is not before the court in this application, he said. The Society, he noted, has made two referrals to the SDT of issues concerning Mr OCallaghans practice and it seemed a third referral is likely arising from further investigation reports. It was "important" the court makes clear Mr OCallaghan has asserted at all times he has conducted himself honestly, had at all times sought to act in the best interests of the clients of his firm and intends to personally make good any shortfalls which may be found in the practice and to ensure no client of the practice is at a loss. It was also important to say the Society is not alleging any dishonesty against Mr O'Callaghan's daughters Aoife and Eimear O'Callaghan, who are both solicitors and were made partners in the practice last month for the purposes of ensuring it remains insured, the judge said. Earlier on Wednesday, the judge was told by Nessa Bird BL, for the Society, it wanted the freezing and other orders as it is very concerned the deficit on the practice account may be almost 1m and is increasing and increasing. That 1m sum excluded refund by Mr OCallagan earlier this year of 344,000 in alleged "exorbitant" fees and costs taken from the estate of a bereaved child, plus his refund to some 80,000 to a widowed mother of three in alleged excessive fees, counsel said. The Society is very concerned some of the refunded monies appear to have come from the accounts of other clients, she added. She said inspections of client files disclosed an apparent "pattern" of Mr O'Callaghan taking funds from monies gathered in probate without client authorisation and then subsequently trying to agree costs in relation to the relevant estates. "That is not the way fees are paid," she said. Unless and until fees are agreed and authorised by the relevant client, the monies were not the solicitor's and this involved the "dishonest taking" of client funds. She said the Society previously referred to a 600,000 deficit on the client account but there was a very serious concern of a further deficit on some 320,000 arising from a complaint concerning a client who suffered catastrophic injuries in a road accident and who secured a 5.2m settlement in 2010. She said the full balance of those monies was not paid over and the Society was investigating that. The Society understood special damages were to be paid out of that settlement but a sum of 118,000 to the National Rehabilitation Hospital remained unpaid. There was a further complaint regarding a sum of 16,000 for another client which the client understood had been retained for two years but was no longer held to that client's account. Mr O'Callaghan has said the hospital and the 16,000 would be paid, the court was told. Other concerns were that the solicitor drew fees of some 74,000 from a man's estate "way in excess" of a three per cent charge referred to as well as in excess of his solicitor's attendance note estimating costs at 40,000. Ms Bird said the Alzheimer Society, the sole beneficiary of a deceased woman's estate, was told by the solicitor the residuary estate amounted to 35,000 but was not told he had taken costs of 34,000. The Alzheimer Society has been reimbursed 24,600, counsel said. Later on Wednesday, after talks between the sides, the judge was told Mr OCallaghan was consenting to orders. His counsel Gabriel Gavigan SC said Mr OCallaghan had paid a further 144,000 towards clearing the deficit, bringing to some 671,000 paid by him to date. Mr O'Callaghan is determined to honour his undertaking to ensure no client of the practice will be at a loss, counsel said. A dog handler who used a live piglet as bait to train greyhounds has failed in a High Court challenge to his exclusion from racetracks or coursing events. Christopher Connolly (25), of Farney's Cross, Cappawhite, Co Tipperary, sought to quash a decision by Bord na gCon (Irish Greyhound Board), which regulates greyhound racing in Ireland, to exclude him from events. The Irish Coursing Club (ICC), which regulates coursing, consented to the exclusion order. While living in Australia four years ago, he was the subject of a ban imposed by regulatory authorities in the state of Victoria after he was found guilty of using a piglet as live bait a Tooradin Trial Track. The ban followed an investigation following publicity about incidents where piglets and rabbits were used as live bait at the same track. Ten people involved this activity were also handed bans. Mr Connolly received a lifetime ban but this was reduced on appeal in 2015 to five years with another five suspended on condition he is of good behaviour. The five years is due to expire in 2020. Mr Connolly returned to Ireland in 2015 and in 2016 he applied to Bord na gCon for a "KennelhandAuthorisation" which would allow him to work in the industry he has been involved with for many years. He was refused and he appealed to a Bord na gCon control committee which also found he was "not a fit and proper person to be certified". The appeal committee said there was uncontroverted evidence he had pleaded guilty to three offences in Australia "which were barbaric in nature" and there should be no tolerance of such behaviour. The committee accepted Mr Connolly was involved in the Australian incident to a lesser extent than other participants who were treated more severely than him by the Australian regulators. The committee was not in a position to give a time as to when it might be appropriate to revisit Mr Connollys application. However, noting the five-year ban with five more suspended in Australia, it suggested he "consider his options thereafter". He then brought High Court proceedings against the board and the ICC saying the decision was flawed and should be set aside on grounds including that it is unreasonable and irrational. On Wednesday, Ms Justice Teresa Pilkington dismissed his challenge saying while the decision of the Australian authorities was not binding here, the evidence presented to them was something which Bord na gCon could have regard to when making its decision. He had been afforded proper procedures and due process in accordance with the 1958 Greyhound Industry Act, she said. Update: Two men, in their 50s and 60s, have been arrested in connection with an attack on security guards in Roscommon last week. Searches in four different locations, including houses and out-houses, took place in the county this morning as part of the investigation into the incident which followed an eviction at a house in Strokestown. One firearm was recovered and a number of vehicles including a lorry and teleporter were seized. Gardai have said that they also found documents and phones when they searched houses in Dublin and Co. Meath in connection with the investigation in the last 24 hours Castlerea Garda Station Chief Superintendent Tony Healy said: "We would again like to thank the community for their continued support following recent events in Strokestown and would again appeal to anyone with information to come forward and contact us here at Castlerea Garda Station on 094 9621630 or the Garda Confidential Line 1800 666 111." Gardai say this is a live operation and updates will follow. Earlier: I don't condone the violence in Roscommon, says Sinn Fein TD Sinn Fein's Pearse Doherty has said he does not condone violent vigilante behaviour. It comes after eight security guards were injured and a number of vehicles were burnt out when a group stormed a house in Strokestown, Co. Roscommon last week. The suspected involvement of dissident republicans in the incident has been described as "a very sinister development" by the Justice Minister Charlie Flanagan. The family at the centre of the eviction has criticised the Taoiseach for accusing Sinn Fein of not condemning the violence. The Sinn Fein TD criticised the Government for not speaking out against the manner in which the McGann family was evicted from their home. Mr Doherty said: "I don't condone any violence that happened in Roscommon. "You do not drag anybody and beat anybody out of their own house and I have no problem in saying that I support the hundreds of people from Roscommon and elsewhere who have stood up in solidarity against this type of behaviour." Earlier: Suspected involvement of 'criminal subversives' in Roscommon attack 'very sinister', says Minister The Justice Minister says the suspected involvement of dissident republicans in an attack following the eviction of a Roscommon family from their home last week is a "very sinister development". A group stormed the house in Strokestown, injuring 8 security men with at least six vehicles burnt out. The family at the centre of the eviction has criticised comments by the Taoiseach in which he accused Sinn Fein of not condemning the violence. Justice Minister Charlie Flanagan said criminals cannot be allowed to take the law into their own hands. Mr Flanagan said: "We have what appears to be an involvement on the part of criminal subversives, a carefully organised, planned attack on security men. "That is totally unacceptable in any democratic society, if that is the case, it is a very sinister development in our society." Earlier: 'Our plight has been exploited to further narrow agendas' - Roscommon family on Taoiseach's Dail comments on eviction The family at the centre of an eviction in Co Roscommon say they are disappointed with the Taoiseach's comments in the Dail over the matter. The McGanns believe Leo Varadkar's remarks aimed to deflect attention away from the eviction. Last week, the home of the McGann family in Strokestown, Co. Roscommon was repossessed. In a statement last night issued through Sinn Fein MEP Matt Carthy, the McGanns say they are shocked by the unforeseen events but overwhelmed by the levels of support they have received. "The forced eviction from our home has left our family shocked by unforeseen events that were thrust upon us," they said. "Our ordeal has been further compounded by the inaccurate and ill-informed media coverage of our eviction, and the subsequent events that have occurred. "We wish to make clear we condemn all forms of violence and want to see the rule of law upheld but we have also been deeply upset by the use of inflammatory language that has characterised much of the media reportage." They also said they were particularly disappointed at comments made today by the Taoiseach in the Dail. In the Dail yesterday, there was a heated debate between Leo Varadkar and Sinn Fein's Pearse Doherty over a violent attack on security guards who had removed the family from the property. "We believe our plight has been exploited by some wishing to further their own narrow agendas and we were particularly disappointed at comments made today by An Taoiseach Leo Varadkar during Leaders Questions in the Dail. His remarks, we believe, are a deliberate attempt to deflect attention from some of the very serious issues relating to our eviction. "He has yet to adequately respond to the actions of unidentified security personnel who forcibly, and with considerable violence, removed our family from our home in front of a massive Garda presence that oversaw the eviction nor has he responded to concerns about the legality of the eviction notice." Deputy Doherty had yesterday said reforms were needed to laws to ensure security officials involved in evictions are identifiable. Leo Varadkar fired back and said: "when it comes to Sinn Fein - the rule of law and public order - and condemning violence it does not take very long for your balaclava to slip". The McGanns appealed for privacy, adding they will be making no further statements as the eviction is a legal matter. A 52-year-old woman who claims she was given the incorrect 'normal' diagnosis for a breast cancer gene test eight years ago but is now seriously ill with ovarian cancer has sued in the High Court. The woman, a health care professional who lives in the Dublin area found out in August this year she had late-stage ovarian cancer and she is currently undergoing treatment, but the High Court heard the prognosis is poor. After developing and recovering from breast cancer in 2004, the woman later learned members of her family had a significant history of breast cancer and she had a genetic test in November 2009 for the BRCA 1 or BRCA 2 mutation gene which is linked to breast cancer. The report from the testing laboratory it is claimed showed a pathogenic change of the BRCA 1 gene, but it is alleged in a letter sent to the woman and her treating doctor on January 27, 2010 it was incorrectly stated the breast cancer gene was normal. The woman, whose youngest child is aged 10 has claimed she has suffered a loss of chance and the opportunity to take and seek medical advice to mitigate her risk of developing cancer. She has further claimed if she had been made aware of the mutation and pathogenic change of the BRCA 1 gene, in January 2010 she would have undergone and taken all and any steps necessary to eliminate the possibility of cancer in the future. The woman has brought an action against Our Lady's Children's Hospital, Crumlin, Dublin which provides genetic testing at its Genetics Department, formerly knows as the National Centre for Medical Genetics, Cooley Road, Crumlin, Dublin. In the High Court today Richard Kean SC for the woman told the court that liability has been admitted by the Hospital but causation was still at issue. The woman he said is very seriously ill and the prognosis is very poor. He said the case will take four or five days at trial and asked that it be specially fixed for a date in 2019. Mr Justice Kevin Cross set May 29 for the case to be heard. It is claimed the Hospital had a duty of care to the woman and in particular in relation to the reporting, diagnosing and communication of the finding of November 17, 2009 of the mutated and pathogenic change in the BRCA 1 gene. Genetic test The woman also contends the result she received on January 27 2010, from her November 2009 genetic test was miscommunicated and misdiagnosed. The woman in February 2004 was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a lumpectomy followed by chemotherapy and radiotherapy and made a full recovery. Around 2007/2008 she became aware a member of her family had a significant history of breast cancer and it was decided she should be referred to Our Lady's Children's Hospital, Crumlin and the former National Centre for Medical Genetic Testing to see if she had the BRCA 1 or BRCA 2 cancer-linked gene. If she had the gene mutation it is contended certain treatment including a hysterectomy would have to be considered. The woman had the genetic test and it was sent to a laboratory in Birmingham. The High Court It is claimed the lab report came back with a result which it said was consistent with the clinical diagnosis of familial breast and / or ovarian cancer. On January 27, 2010, the woman got a letter in relation to the genetic testing which stated that "no alteration was identified" referring to the BRCA gene, but the laboratory report was not sent to the woman or her treating doctors. In May 2018 the woman experienced a deterioration in her health, was losing weight and had a loss of appetite. On the August bank holiday 2018 she had pain in her left side and a CT scan showed up a 5cm ovarian tumour. On August 11, 2018, the woman received the diagnosis that she had extensive late-stage cancer and urgent treatment was required. The woman was also advised that her overall chances of survival were in the low percentage regions. This shock diagnosis and prognosis it is claimed has caused the woman and her family severe profound and extreme psychological stress, distress and trauma. In October of this year, the woman's medical team sought all records in relation to her genetic testing, including the lab report of November 2009. It is claimed that it was then discovered by her for the first the reporting, diagnosis and communication given in the January 2010 letter that there was no mutation and or pathogenic change in the BRCA gene was it is claimed manifestly incorrect, wrong and false. Thomond Park will have extra seating for Munster's Champions Cup clash with Exeter on January 19. The province announced that due to ticket demand there will be extra seating increasing the ground's capacity to 26,267. The additional seats will be located on the goal line at both ends of the pitch. Munster stated that over 21,500 have been sold already. Munster currently sit on top of Pool 2 in the Champions Cup with two games left to play. Johann van Graan's men travel to Kingsholm to face Gloucester on January 11 before welcoming Exeter to Thomond Park the following week. Despite leading the pool, it remains tight as only four points separate the four teams. Before facing into another two weeks of European rugby, the interpros await Munster. They face Ulster on Friday at the Kingspan Stadium before playing Leinster in Thomond Park and Connacht at the Sportsground. Russian rocket delivers European spy satellite Revealing a strange geo-political dichotomy, a Russian-built rocket was launched to boost Europe's military reconnaissance capabilities from space. The launch of a Soyuz ST-A/Fregat-M rocket from the ELS facility near Kourou, French Guiana, on Dec. 19, 2018, (after a 24-hour delay due to high-altitude winds), delivered the CSO-1 imaging satellite to serve the needs of the French Ministry of Defense and other European armed forces. The 3.5-ton spacecraft will undoubtedly be used to monitor Russia's military activities. Previous Soyuz launch from French Guiana: MetOp-C Soyuz ST-A mission (VS20) with the CSO-1 satellite at a glance: Spacecraft designation CSO-1 Launch vehicle Soyuz ST-A/ Fregat-M Soyuz-2 family ) (Mission VS-20) Launch site Kourou, ELS Launch date and time 2018 Dec. 18, 13:37:14 local (11:37 a.m. EST) CSO spy satellite constellation Artist rendering of the CSO-1 satellite in deployed position in orbit. The launch of the CSO-1 satellite was the 20th Soyuz mission from the South-American launch site and procured by the European Arianespace consortium. According to the official description provided by Arianespace, the Composante Spatiale Optique (or "optical space component") spacecraft, CSO, was designed for observations of the Earth's surface at very high resolution in the visual and infra-red parts of spectrum from the 800-kilometer Sun-synchronous orbit with an inclination 98.6 degrees toward the Equator. The satellite was reported to be capable of conducting imaging operations in a variety of imaging modes, including day or night in "fair weather." The CSO spacecraft were also reported to be the first French satellites capable of autonomous orbit control, which allowed them to maneuver and boost their altitude without interaction with ground control during flight over oceans and, thus, avoid interrupting imaging activities. Optical system of the CSO-1 satellite. The complete three-spacecraft constellation is expected to work at different altitudes of polar orbit, with CSO-1 and CSO-3 satellites focusing on reconnaissance functions and CSO-2 specializing in the identification of potential targets. As of 2018, the CSO-3 satellite was expected to be launched around 2021 on the Ariane-6 mission. The CSO satellite were developed by the European consortium Airbus Defense and Space and its main optical imaging instrument was provided by the French division of Thales Alenia Space. The CSO network will be operated by the French space agency, CNES (Centre National dEtudes Spatiales) via its mission control center in Toulouse, France, and the French defense procurement agency, DGA (Direction generale de larmement), on behalf of the nation's ministry of defense. CNES served as the contracting authority for the CSO program and its mission ground segment, as well as being the overall co-architect of the system. CNES was also responsible for orbital positioning, in-orbit acceptance testing and operation of CSO satellites. In turn, the DGA agency served as contractor for the development and maintenance of the ground control infrastructure of the project, and it was also responsible for the transfer of reconnaissance data from the satellite to its end users on the ground. The headquarters of the French armed forces was the operating authority for CSO, Arianespace said. Like the two previous French-built military observation systems, Helios-1 and Helios-2, the CSO was made available to other European armed forces. At the time of the CSO-1 launch, Germany, Sweden and Belgium were cited as members of the CSO user team and an agreement with Italy was expected shortly. The CSO network was expected to replace the Helios satellites. According to Arianespace, CSO addressed France and Europes operational needs for global intelligence and strategic surveillance, knowledge of the geographic environment and support for operational deployments. The data from the satellite could be delivered upon request to end users, including military units deployed overseas. Known specifications of the CSO-1 satellite: Spacecraft operator CNES on behalf of DGA Spacecraft developer Airbus Defense and Space (formerly EADS Astrium) Spacecraft platform Custom-built Life span 10 years Liftoff mass 3,565 kilograms Total payload mass 3,716 kilograms Orbit type Sun-synchronous Preparations for flight As of 2011, the first CSO-1 satellite was expected to fly on a Soyuz rocket in December 2016, but the launch date eventually slipped to the end of 2018. The three booster stages of the Soyuz ST-A rocket for the mission were under assembly at the Soyuz facility in Kourou from Sept. 13 to Oct. 4, 2018, and the mission's Fregat upper stage was ready by October 24. The next day, the Fregat was moved to the FCube facility for fueling, which took place place from November 22 until December 5. The three booster stages of the Soyuz ST-B rocket underwent pneumatic and propulsion tests from November 12 to -15, immediately followed by electric tests completed on November 22. The CSO-1 spacecraft arrived at French Guiana on November 5 and was placed at the S1A building for pre-launch processing. On November 28, the spacecraft was transferred from the S1B processing building to the S3B facility in preparation for fueling, which was conducted from December 1 to 3. On December 11, CSO-1 was integrated with the Fregat upper stage and, on December 13, the payload section was encapsulated into its protective fairing to form the upper composite of the rocket. The integrated three stages of the Soyuz launcher were rolled out to the launch pad on December 14, and on the same day, the upper composite was delivered to the pad and hoisted on top of the rocket. The final checks of the payload, the final countdown rehearsal and tests of the rocket were conducted on the pad from December 15 to December 17, concluding with the Launch Readiness Review, RAL, which cleared the mission for the liftoff next day. However, on December 18, Arianespace announced that due to unfavorable high-altitude wind conditions, the launch had to be postponed for 24 hours, until December 19, at 13:37:14 local time in French Guiana (11:37 a.m. EST). Apparently due to the military nature of the mission, Arianespace did not release any photos of the CSO-1 satellite in processing. A few visuals of the satellite appeared in a video footage from Airbus Defense and Space, but it appeared to avoid showing the complete spacecraft and its imaging system. Countdown milestones for the VS-20 mission on Dec. 18, 2018: PRE-LAUNCH EVENTS Time (h:min:sec) Beginning of the meeting for launcher fueling authorization (BTR) -05:00:00 Beginning of launch vehicle fueling with propellant components -04:30:00 Completion of launch vehicle fueling -01:35:00 Mobile gantry withdrawal -01:10:00 "Key-to-launch" command (beginning of Soyuz synchronized sequence) -00:05:09 Fregat transfer to onboard power supply -00:05:00 Upper Composite umbilical drop off command -00:02:25 Ground-board power transfer -00:00:40 Lower stage mast retraction -00:00:28 Ignition -00:00:16 Preliminary thrust level -00:00:14 Full thrust level -00:00:01 Liftoff 00:00:00 CSO-1 satellite lifts off After a 24-hour delay, Soyuz ST-A rocket with the CSO-1 satellite lifted off as scheduled on Dec. 19, 2018, at 13:37:14 local time (11:37 a.m. EST; 16:37 GMT) from the ELS pad in Kourou. After eight seconds of vertical ascent, the rocket headed north over the Atlantic Ocean. Four strap-on boosters of the first stage finished firing and separated one minute 58 seconds in flight. The payload fairing then split into two halves and separated as well. The second stage completed its firing and separated four minutes 47 seconds into the flight. Moments earlier, the main engine of the third stage ignited and fired through the lattice structure connecting the two stages until their separation. Around five seconds after the separation of the second stage, the aft adapter ring on the third stage split in three sections and separated. The powered phase of the ascent for the first three stages of the launch vehicle lasted around nine minutes. The payload section, consisting of the Fregat upper stage and the satellite, then separated from the third stage into a suborbital trajectory just short of orbital velocity. A minute later, Fregat fired its propulsion system for nine minutes to enter a highly elliptical orbit with an apogee close to the planned orbital altitude of the CSO-1 satellite. The stack then climbed passively toward the apogee for 38 minutes and 43 seconds, before Fregat initiated its second engine firing to make the orbit circular. The maneuver lasted one and a half minute. Another five minutes later, the spacecraft was released into its orbit. After the separation of its payload, the Fregat upper stage was programmed to make one more engine firing, entering a burial orbit safely below the CSO satellite. According to NPO Lavochkin, the fourth maneuver with Fregat's main engine was to brake the stage for a destructive reentry into the Earth's atmosphere. The VS-20 mission timeline: Event Scheduled elapsed time Liftoff 0 Stage I separation 1 minutes 58 seconds Payload fairing separation *4 minutes 15 seconds Stage II separation 4 minutes 47 seconds Stage III separation **8 minutes 49 seconds Fregat engine firing 1 begins 9 minutes 49 seconds Fregat engine firing 1 ends 18 minutes 41 seconds Fregat engine firing 2 begins 54 minutes 15 seconds Fregat engine firing 2 ends 55 minutes 44 seconds CSO-1 satellite separation 1 hour 00 minutes 44 seconds Fregat engine firing 3 begins 1 hour 51 minutes 40 seconds Fregat engine firing 3 ends 1 hour 52 minutes 35 seconds Mission end 1 hour 53 minutes 05 seconds Launch of CSO-2 A 1-to-5 scale model of the CSO-1 satellite displayed at Paris Air and Space Show in Le Bourget in 2009. Copyright 2009 Anatoly Zak The payload section of the Soyuz rocket with the CSO satellite. Credit: Arianespace CSO-1 during tests in echoless chamber. Credit: Airbus Testing of solar panel deployment aboard CSO-1 satellite. Click to enlarge. Credit: Airbus Click to enlarge. Credit: Airbus Defense and Space Due to military nature of the CSO-1 mission, few visuals of the spacecraft in processing had been released and those that were appeared to be avoid showing the aperture area of the imaging system. Click to enlarge. Credit: Airbus Defense and Space Payload section containing the Fregat upper stage and the CSO-1 satellite is being prepared for integration with the Soyuz rocket. Click to enlarge. Credit: Arianespace Soyuz-2-1a lifts off with the CSO-1 satellite on Dec. 20, 2018. Click to enlarge. Credit: Arianespace Artist rendering of the CSO-1 satellite separating from the Fregat upper stage. Credit: Arianespace Illustration of solar panel deployment aboard CSO-1 satellite. Credit: Airbus Artist renderings of the CSO satellite in orbit. Credit: CNES Illustration of engine firing aboard the CSO satellite. Credit: Airbus Data from CSO satellites is downlinked to a ground station in Kiruna in Sweden and then channeled to the central control center in Creil, France, from where it is distributed to French users and European allies. Click to enlarge. Credit: Airbus There was a rare moment of bipartisanship in the US Congress last night as the Senate overwhelmingly passed the First Step Act - the first in what could potentially be a series of legislation that aims to overhaul the criminal justice system. Having garnered support from law-and-order conservatives a well as progressive Democrats the bill passed the Senate 87-12. In an emailed statement, a spokesman said that Huawei requires all employees to study and sign guidelines on business conduct every year. "At the heart of the guidelines is the principle of acting in accordance with all local laws and regulations," said the spokesman, Joe Kelly. "Where employees are found to have acted outside these guidelines, the company takes decisive action which can include immediate termination of employment." Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei Ren was an engineer in the People's Liberation Army for nearly a decade before starting Huawei, and military values tenacity, dedication, drive have long suffused the company. Ren said in 2015 that Huawei had toughened its safeguards against employee misconduct. But the following year, in a speech that was emailed to employees, he acknowledged that many workers did not pay attention to internal rules and controls perhaps, he said, because Huawei used to evaluate staff solely according to how much business they won. More recently, in remarks that were emailed to employees, Ren said that it was important to enforce internal standards, but that this should not become a hindrance. "If it blocks the business from producing grain, then we all starve to death," he said, according to a transcript of his comments on a Huawei website. Mounting security concerns Meng's arrest this month has darkened China's relations with the United States, scrambling efforts by the two nations to ease a tense economic conflict. Washington has worked for years to undermine Huawei, regarding its products as potential vehicles for espionage and sabotage something the company denies. Security concerns about Huawei and other Chinese equipment providers are mounting among traditional allies of the United States like Australia, Britain and New Zealand. In Germany last week, Deutsche Telekom said it was taking seriously the "global discussion about the security of network elements from Chinese manufacturers." Loading Huawei was founded in the late 1980s, during the tumultuous early years of China's capitalist revival. Ren was an engineer in the People's Liberation Army for nearly a decade before starting Huawei, and military values tenacity, dedication, drive have long suffused the company. In the early years, squads of Huawei salesmen crisscrossed China in SUVs peddling the company's telephone switches to post offices. Employees were given mattresses so they could nap while working late nights. Company lore, as recounted in employee publications and admiring books by business professors, is heavy on stories of dogged staffers enduring physical hardship. They worked to keep telecom services running despite a terrorist attack in Mumbai and an earthquake in Algeria. They braved cold and sleeplessness to provide mobile coverage to climbers on Mount Everest. Boot camp for new hires Today, the working hours are still long at Huawei, although folding beds at work are more likely to be used for midday shut-eye than for all-nighters, according to three employees. Several Huawei staffers spoke to The New York Times on condition of anonymity, fearing reprisals. New hires at Huawei take part in a boot camp-style training course that involves morning jogs and classes on the company's culture. Employees also compose and perform skits that illustrate how they would persevere and serve their customers in difficult environs, such as war zones, according to three Huawei employees. In a research lab in Huawei's Shenzhen headquarters, a piece of framed calligraphy on the wall reads: "Sacrifice is a soldier's highest cause. Victory is a soldier's greatest contribution." This intense work environment isn't universally admired in China. Internet users savaged Huawei after a 25-year-old employee died of encephalitis in 2006. A spate of employee suicides led to more outrage in the Chinese media. When it comes to staff conduct at Huawei, there are "red lines" that cannot be crossed under any circumstances, four employees told The Times. These include disclosing company secrets and breaking laws and sanctions. Sacrifice is a soldier's highest cause. Victory is a soldier's greatest contribution. Framed calligraphy in Huawei's Shenzen HQ But in company parlance, there are also "yellow lines," employees say. They say they are encouraged to ignore certain internal rules, such as a ban on using gifts or other inducements to win customers, if it benefits the firm to do so. Blurred lines For some people at Huawei, these lines may have become blurred as the company grew rapidly around the globe. In 2002, Iraq's government submitted to the United Nations a 12,000-page declaration on its weapons program, and Huawei was reported to have been named as one of dozens of foreign companies that broke an embargo and sold technology to Saddam Hussein's regime. The company denied at the time that it had supplied equipment to Iraq. It said it had bid on two telecom projects in the country in 1999, but withdrew for commercial reasons. Another test came in 2003, when Huawei was sued by Cisco Systems, an American maker of computer network equipment, for allegedly copying its software and even language from its instruction manuals. The two sides settled out of court. A decade later, T-Mobile said that Huawei employees had photographed and stolen a piece of a smartphone-testing robot named Tappy to help Huawei produce its own robot. Huawei acknowledged the transgressions and said the employees had been fired. A jury later awarded T-Mobile $US4.8 million in damages. Allegations of impropriety of other kinds trailed Huawei's expansion into Africa. In Ghana, an anticorruption group said in 2012 that the company had sponsored the governing party's election campaign in exchange for tax breaks. That year, a Huawei executive was also convicted in Algeria of bribing an official from a state-run telecom operator. Huawei did not comment on the accusation in Ghana at the time. After the Algerian court ruling, the company said it took the court's decision "seriously" and was reviewing the outcome. In a 2013 New Year's message that was published in an employee newspaper, Guo Ping, Huawei's chief executive at the time, acknowledged that rapid growth had created problems and risks. "Not long ago, high-speed growth was Huawei's priority," Guo said. "This helped Huawei mature quickly, but it also caused Huawei's management to become negligent." Now, he said, "we must control the impulse to expand, and hold to account managers who spread themselves too thin." By then, Huawei had said it had halted expansion in one particularly sensitive market: Iran. Still, US investigators now say the company broke the law in connection with its business there. Huawei entered the Iranian market in 1999. Within a decade, the Chinese Embassy in Tehran was boasting that 130 cities in the country were connected to Huawei's fiber optic network. 'I love everything about China' "The Iranian telecom market's reliance on Huawei's products is growing day by day," a 2009 article on the embassy's website said. "Huawei has become the Iranian telecom market's main hardware supplier." Soon thereafter, the United Nations and the United States imposed new sanctions against Iran's nuclear program. In 2011, Huawei said it would not sign new contracts in the country, citing the "complicated" situation there. It also said it would limit its business with existing customers. The accusations against Meng, Huawei's chief financial officer, stem from events in 2013. According to an affidavit that was made public during Meng's bail hearing, Huawei used a company called Skycom as an unofficial subsidiary for doing business in Iran. The filing, which contains information provided by the United States, says that Meng concealed Skycom's link to Huawei to reassure HSBC and other banks that Huawei was not violating US sanctions against Iran. As a result, HSBC and its US subsidiary had cleared more than $US100 million in transactions with Skycom in Iran by 2014, the affidavit says. Huawei still has a presence in Iran. At a cellphone bazaar in Tehran is a store that specialises in the company's devices. Socks, coffee cups and reusable straws: affordable gifts with an eco-focus have recorded the biggest jump in sales in the six weeks leading up to Christmas. Data from point of sale operator Vend drawn from more than 3000 small businesses across November and early December found reusable goods is the product category with the biggest sales increase compared with last Christmas. Founder of eco and ethical retailer Biome Tracey Bailey says the boom in eco goods also presents challenges. Data from the businesses showed that more than $140 million of sales were processed in the first two weeks of December by retailers that use Vend, a point-of-sale retail management platform with a large base of independent and small business users. Sales of products such as reusable coffee cups, canvas bags and even reusable straws were up by more than 1000 per cent compared with the lead-up to Christmas last year. He shot to semi-fame as Queer Eye for the Straight Guy's food and wine connoisseur, but Ted Allen now finds himself carving out a successful second career as the host of Chopped, the food show that wouldn't know a connoisseur if it fell over one and wouldn't know what to do with one if it did. The format: four cafe-level chefs go head to head over a box of mystery ingredients that might include delicacies such as yucca, or watermelon, or Gummi bears. This week's quartet are spared the type 2 diabetes and faced with the ultimate grits challenge, which is the Australian equivalent of making four courses from Vegemite on toast. LD ABC, 7.30pm It is a truth universally acknowledged that when a character says all he wants is a nice, quiet Christmas at the start of the Father Brown Christmas Special that it will be anything but. Set against a backdrop of the British Yuletide cultural certainties of pantomime, men in drag and mince pies, this special doesn't really rise to any great level of special-ness but sticks to the series' tried-and-truisms. The bicycle-loving Father Brown finds himself attempting to solve a mystery in the hotbed of crime that is the sleepy Cotswold village of Kembleford while also decorating the presbytery with festive cheer. Will our ambidextrous pastor resolve a terrible miscarriage of justice in time for the Fairy Godmother scene in Cinderella? Gosh, you'd never guess. LD Sandringham: The Queen at Christmas SBS, 7.35pm If the promise of being privy to the secrets of the Royal Christmas as revealed by insiders (mostly that special breed of person who puts "royal correspondent" on their tax return) doesn't have you salivating like a Corgi over a pork chop there's every chance you're either (a) dead or (b) a Republican. Cobbled together for Christmas 2017 and therefore woefully out of date with all the exciting news pouring from the Windsor family firm in 2018, Sandringham: The Queen At Christmas kindly proffers the former Ms Markle advice on the rules around dresses (lots of them), drinking (lots of it) and etiquette (ditto) to have a right royal shindig with Betty Windsor and all the clan at their tidy bolthole Sandringham and why nobody goes to bed before the Queen without being shot at dawn. Hopefully next year they can update it to include the babies and bitch fights that have been the domain of the royal-obsessed tabloids this year. Better yet, maybe we can divorce ourselves from this lot and go it alone. Tally ho. LD Grace Abbey-Moore has been found safe and well, ACT Policing said on Sunday. The 15-year-old was last seen by her family at about 2am on Monday, December 3 in Richardson and reported missing to police on Monday, December 10. Grace is described as of Caucasian appearance, with brown eyes and long dark hair. She has a thin build and is about 175 cm (5'9") tall. She may have travelled to Sydney, police said. Police were concerned for her welfare and sought to assure Grace she is not in any trouble. Tributes for Gold Coast surfer John MacNamara have flooded in after he died doing what he loved just days before Christmas. Mr MacNamara, known as Johnny Mac, was pulled from the Gold Coast surf on Wednesday morning by a friend who led him to shore after he was hit by his own stand up paddle board near Snappers Rock at Rainbow Bay, near the Queensland/New South Wales border. John Macnamara, known as Johnny Mac, has died after he was hit by his paddle board. Credit:Bill Stewart, Facebook Paramedics were unable to revive Mr MacNamara when they arrived. Friend Tony Stewart said Mr MacNamara was a "true Aussie" who moved to the Gold Coast in 1972 from Cronulla. A man involved in importing nearly 200 kilograms of ice precursor pseudoephedrine in boxes of washing powder has been jailed. Van Dau Tran, 50, was sentenced to eight years and nine months behind bars on Wednesday for his part in importing 190 kilograms of the banned substance in boxes of OMO washing powder. County Court Judge Gerard Mullaly said that amount of precursor, 158 times the minimum commercial quantity, could make a "colossal" amount of methamphetamine. Tran was the sole director of a St Albans Asian grocery company that was the consignee for the shipment, sent from Vietnam to Melbourne in November 2016. The drugs arrived in Australia in late December and were discovered by authorities, who allowed the shipment to be delivered to a Melbourne warehouse in order to monitor those involved. A gun-obsessed thug who shot a man at a child's birthday party was nabbed when he accidentally shot himself in the head using the same gun a week later. Luke Morin was jailed for five years on Wednesday after pleading guilty to the shooting in November last year. His family members swore at Judge Gabriele Cannon as they left court when he was sentenced, yelling "f--- off" and "get f---ed". Luke Morin after he accidentally shot himself in the head. "I might deal with them for contempt later," Judge Cannon said. The states and territories may go it alone developing their own electricity and greenhouse gas emission policy after a fractious meeting of energy ministers ended in acrimony directed at the Morrison government. In a sign of the concern within the Berejiklian government about the damage to the Liberal Party brand by events out of Canberra ahead of the state election in March, NSW Energy Minister Don Harwin led the revolt on Wednesday and won support across the political divide. The strain seems to show for Minister for Resources, Matthew Canavan, in talks with the Minister for Energy, Angus Taylor, at the COAG meeting. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen Mr Harwin, describing the federal government as out of touch with ordinary Australians by refusing to deal with greenhouse gas emissions, said he and the states would push ahead even if Canberra was not interested. "This is an issue that concerns a lot of Australians. This is an issue that people expect their governments to be dealing with. We've heard that message and we're going to keep doing that," he said. Prime Minister Scott Morrison has made a pre-Christmas visit to hundreds of Australian troops deployed in the Middle East. Mr Morrison travelled to Iraq on Wednesday to meet special forces soldiers and other Australian Defence Force personnel training the Iraqi Army to combat Islamic State. "I understand it's a sacrifice - I understand it's a big thing to be away from your family at this time of year - and that's why I've decided to come just to say thank you from one Australian to another," he told troops at the Taji Military Complex north of a Baghdad. Prime Minister Scott Morrison visited Australian troops in Iraq on Wednesday. Credit:AAP It was the Prime Minister's first visit to the Middle East after taking on the top job in August. A Coalition plan to let MPs vote on legislation via a mobile phone app is indulgent, wasteful and will further entrench ministers as out of touch, Labor says. Christopher Pyne, the leader of the governmment in the house, said this week that in the new year, MPs would vote electronically, to cut voting and counting times down by five minutes per vote and provide real-time results. Labor has said no to Christopher Pyne's idea of electronic voting for MPs. Credit:Rohan Thomson But the idea has been slammed by Labor's manager of opposition business, Tony Burke, who said that Mr Pyne had not even bothered to check with Labor if the opposition supported the changes. "They havent even asked if we would support changing standing orders to allow this," Mr Burke said Federal Energy Minister Angus Taylor has faced a "full-on revolt" at a meeting of state energy ministers after he killed the NSW government's push for a new national energy and emissions policy. The backlash then continued after Mr Taylor pushed for a national regulated standard electricity price despite advice from the energy market rule maker it could raise power bills. "[Mr] Taylor was sweating blood," one insider at the meeting said. Federal Energy Minister Angus Taylor sidestepped questions over NSW's split with the government over energy and emissions policy. Credit:Dominic Lorrimer The revolt first started following an opinion piece in the Australian Financial Review by NSW Energy Minister Don Harwin. Prison guards have walked off the job at Woodford, demanding action on overcrowding and extra resources following an alleged bashing of an officer. A 45-year-old prison officer was allegedly attacked at Woodford Correctional Centre about 3pm on Tuesday by an inmate who was serving a sentence for grievous bodily harm. Queensland Corrections staff striking at Woodford Correctional Centre. The man was taken to the Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital and was due to undergo surgery for serious facial fractures. It is understood the prison officer was allegedly attacked after he told a prisoner he would not be moved from a double-up cell to a single cell. Zach Ienatsch is staff writer for the Seguin Gazette. You can e-mail him at zach.ienatsch@seguingazette.com. At the time, Mr Bastiaan was a member of the party's 19-member state administrative committee, while Mr Mitchell was chair of the party's steering committee. Both roles are unpaid and thought to take up more than 20 hours a week of work recruiting new members, mobilising existing members and fundraising, as well as helping to provide broader policy direction for the parliamentary party. Ahead of the 2018 state conference, some party members backed former federal Liberal frontbencher Nick Minchin to challenge Mr Kroger, but the contest never eventuated. Instead, Mr Kroger faced a challenge from long-term party member and energy executive Greg Hannan. With the support of Mr Bastiaan and Mr Mitchell, who together with allies controlled a block of votes believed to be around 400, Mr Kroger was re-elected in a landslide with a majority of 721 to 448 votes. In an exchange sent a week before the conference, Mr Bastiaan jokes it's "time to send [Nick] Minchins dry bones back to Adelaide". Another exchange demonstrates Mr Bastiaan's sour relationship with newly appointed Victorian Liberal leader Michael O'Brien, in which Mr Bastiaan accuses Mr O'Brien of briefing against him, and says: "Grow up and focus on doing your job." When contacted, Mr O'Brien declined to comment on the exchange, which had been uploaded onto a Facebook group. Both Mr Bastiaan and Mr Mitchell vigorously denied the text message and Facebook exchanges. A letter sent to The Age by lawyers acting for Mr Mitchell say he has no recollection of the exchanges and believes that they were fabricated by a third party. He has denied he has any record of the exchanges, and pointed out that on Facebook Messenger it is easy to change "nicknames" of the people in the conversation without seeking permission from the author. Lawyers for Mr Bastiaan said that he did not send, nor was he the author of the text messages. They also said he has no recollection of being privy to the conversations. "We firmly assert that our client does not use pejorative language such as this. He would also not use the word in the context of a religious group and is perturbed to be portrayed in this way," the legal representative said. The lawyer acting for Mr Bastiaan also claimed the phone and number used in the text exchanges was a work phone and not his personal mobile phone. The lawyer claimed it was not password protected, and had been used by numerous other people at his work in the past to send work-related messages. "This clearly highlights that the author and/or sender of the text messages, if they do exist, could be a number of different persons," the lawyer said. The Age has seen live versions of the Facebook message threads and text messages from two sources. The Age has also obtained a separate statutory declaration confirming all messages and screenshots sighted are genuine. Other exchanges seen by The Age from a Facebook group within the Liberal Party representing a conservative faction called "Ankara" include provocative language and statements about various ethnic groups within the party, including those who support the party because "they know communism when they see it". The messages cap a bruising 18 months for the federal party and the Victorian branch, which is still grappling with a crushing state election defeat that has big implications for the party's chances at the next federal election. The Victorian party has also been rocked by high-profile claims of bullying and intimidation by new crossbench member Julia Banks, who blasted the party earlier in the year for cultural and gender bias, bullying and intimidation". Within Victoria, party officials and state MPs have witnessed a broader schism developing among members. The party is now roughly divided into a conservative faction formerly headed by Mr Kroger, supported by Mr Bastiaan and Mr Mitchell, against a more progressive faction including federal heavyweights such as Industrial Relations Minister Kelly O'Dwyer and the president of the Senate Scott Ryan. But the conservative faction has splintered, as state administrative committee members including female vice-president Karina Okotel and a large number of devout Christian and Mormon supporters recruited by Mr Bastiaan and Mr Mitchell distance themselves from the powerbrokers. Several high-profile members of the faction declined to speak to The Age when contacted for comment. In December, prominent anti-Safe Schools campaigner and former faction member Marijke Rancie posted a missive on one of the conservative faction's Facebook chat forums giving notice that she had left the faction. She urged other faction members to avoid being used to bolster another person's power base. "No one should feel that they 'control' anyone's vote or that because they invited them to get involved, that they own their vote," she wrote. Washington: The US is planning a total withdrawal of its forces from Syria as it nears the very end of its campaign to retake all of the territory once held by Islamic State, multiple US officials told US media outlets on Thursday. Such a decision, if confirmed, would upend assumptions about a longer-term US military presence in Syria, which US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis and other senior US officials had advocated to help ensure Islamic State cannot re-emerge. Still, President Donald Trump has previously expressed a strong desire to bring troops home from Syria when possible. On Wednesday, Trump appeared to declare victory against the group and made clear he saw no further grounds for remaining in Syria. Latest News Rate action continues with NAB next to make major move Major rate action as cheapest fixed rates become most expensive AFG buys out BrokerEngine Big news for brokers as aggregator purchases majority stake in key workflow management tool The managing director of a property group is calling on the Western Australian government to help the struggling housing market in the state. Craig Gemmill, from Gemmill Homes, met with the WA housing minister Peter Tinley recently to outline his plan. He is pushing for a substantial increase to the first home owners grant provided by the government, which currently sits at $10,000, as well as changes to the Keystart scheme. Gemmill said, Minister Tinley was very receptive to our ideas, and I know the government is trying to balance the books and bring it back to surplus, but Id love to see the grant raised to $15,000, better yet even $20,000. The government may be hesitant, but you can actually increase the first home owners grant and it wont have an impact until next years budget. Given the delay in approvals and the set group of people who qualify, it ensures it is a manageable increase for the government. The Keystart low deposit home loan was established to help Western Australians unable to meet the deposits required for a home loan from a mainstream bank. Gemmill says tweaking the scheme could help spark the sluggish housing market in the state. While there are signs emerging of the cycle turning back to positive, Gemmill says an injection is needed to get the states housing market truly firing. It is about confidence, he added. We need to instil confidence in the market here in Western Australia. We need to go out with a positive message and encourage buyers to get out there. You have to get people buying right now. There are some really good signs coming, but we really have to encourage these first home buyers to take advantage of the low prices and quicker build times. Gemmill said there were also other options worth exploring that can make life easier for those wanting to use both the First Home Owners grant and Keystart method. One change he suggested was that Keystart recognise higher income limits. Currently it only recognises 30% of regular overtime, whereas banks will recognise 80% when assessing a home loan application. Another change was less restrictive lending. He said Keystart does not allow more than 10% of a borrowers income to go to an existing debt, such as car loans. Finally, he said recent changes by the government to Keystart has seen couples borrowing $50,000 to $60,000 less than previously. Gemmill said he is happy to put his own money where his mouth is, with Gemmill Homes set to introduce several initiatives in early 2019 to assist first-home buyers in their entry to the property market. This is a time when investors tend to come into the market, given the returns, he said. They start buying up all the cheaper properties given the yields available. We need to ensure that the first home buyers are not shut out and they have a real opportunity to enter the market themselves. Through our Goodlife Homes business, we are looking at some packages and incentives that we will roll out in the new year to really ensure that first home buyers coming through can really get some traction in the WA market. We would love to see the government lend a hand as well, as it will make a huge difference. Sign up for our PoliticsNY newsletter for the latest coverage and to stay informed about the 2021 elections in your district and across NYC 84th Precinct Brooklyn HeightsDUMBOBoerum HillDowntown Straphanger sneak A baddie stole a womans card holder while on a train near Fulton Street on Dec. 10, police said. The victim told cops she had gotten on a Manhattan-bound 2 train at Atlantic Avenue at about 8:15 am and felt some sneak pulling her backpack over her shoulder, and when she hopped off the train near Nevins Street at about 8:20 am she realized her card holder containing her credit card and MetroCard was gone, according to authorities. Weapon the loose A cur grabbed a saw and ran down Sands Street on Dec. 10, police said. The bandit picked up the Stihl orange saw laying on the sidewalk near Gold Street at about 2:15 pm and ran off, according to authorities. Taking out the trash A goon punched a guy in the face and stole his phone on Livingston Street on Dec. 10, police said. The victim told cops he was taking out the trash outside of an apartment building between Smith and Hoyt streets at about 5:15 am when the villain attacked him from behind, punched him, and demanded cash. The jerk fled down Hoyt Street with the victims iPhone, according to authorities. No mercy A ruffian stole a handicapped womans phone inside an elevator in a Pacific Street subway station on Dec. 12, police said. The victim, who is in a wheelchair, told cops she had gotten into an argument with the bruiser about him not paying his fare inside the station near Fourth Avenue a little before 1 am when he followed her into an elevator and covered her mouth with his hand, cops said. The villain then grabbed the victims cellphone and ran out of the elevator, according to authorities. Five dollar discount Five nogoodniks stole sandwiches from a Johnson Street deli on Dec. 13, police said. The quintuplet ordered the sandwiches from the bodega near Prince Street and tried to leave without paying $12 for them, cops said. But when an employee tried to stop the crooks from leaving at about 6 am, one of them socked him in the face and then ran off with the sandwiches, according to authorities. Julianne Cuba If you are currently a print subscriber but don't have an online account, select this option. You will need to use your 7 digit subscriber account number (with leading zeros) and your last name (in UPPERCASE). Dear Reader, Business Standard has always strived hard to provide up-to-date information and commentary on developments that are of interest to you and have wider political and economic implications for the country and the world. Your encouragement and constant feedback on how to improve our offering have only made our resolve and commitment to these ideals stronger. Even during these difficult times arising out of Covid-19, we continue to remain committed to keeping you informed and updated with credible news, authoritative views and incisive commentary on topical issues of relevance. We, however, have a request. As we battle the economic impact of the pandemic, we need your support even more, so that we can continue to offer you more quality content. Our subscription model has seen an encouraging response from many of you, who have subscribed to our online content. More subscription to our online content can only help us achieve the goals of offering you even better and more relevant content. We believe in free, fair and credible journalism. Your support through more subscriptions can help us practise the journalism to which we are committed. Support quality journalism and subscribe to Business Standard. Digital Editor Currently, Vietnam has over 800 agricultural, forestry and seafood products in the market but only 50 have geographical indication, 140 have certification marks and collective marks registered for intellectual property rights. Of these, few have been registered for IP protection abroad including Phu Quoc fish sauce, Ban Me Thuot coffee, Binh Thuan dragon fruit and Lo Ren star apple. Many well-known specialties without IP registration have been rampantly faked such as Nang Thom Cho Dao rice and pangasius fish. Phu Quoc fish sauce and Ban Me Thuot coffee have even been faked abroad and Vietnam has taken lot of time and cost to reclaim the brand names. Ms. Nguyen Hong Ly, deputy chairwoman of Vietnam Farmers Association, said that foreign firms have imported many Vietnamese farm produce to process and market under their brand names. Despite having many delicious farm produce; localities, businesses and farmers have not interested in IP protection registration. Hence, Vietnam is still behind Thailand in the Southeast Asia region in the number of products with protected geographical indication. Many products have been registered for name and geographical indication protection but their brand names and labels have not been built. A representative from Hoang Phat Company in Long An province said that because dragon fruits of the company have good quality so farmers have borrowed its variety to grow and market without paying royalties. The company has had authorized agencies intervene and handle but procedures have been complicated. Experiencing IP infringement, Phuc Sinh Company has followed legal proceedings for over five years to gain success. Businesses said that the number of lawyers specialized in IP rights is not many, especially in agriculture field so it has not been advantageous for them to pursuit lawsuit. According Vietnam Farmer Association, farmers have been in the thought of definitive purchase and sale so they do not care about intellectual property registration. So the role of organizations and collective economic models should be improved to increase the number of IP registered products. Professor Vo Tong Xuan, principle of South Can Tho University, said that currently procedures on IP registration are too complicated for farmers. So they should be simplified to suit the current situation of Vietnam. Many farmers have created new plant varieties but been short of financial source and knowledge to do registration procedures. That will affect operations encouraging farmers to create new varieties with unprotected study copyrights. By THANH HAI Translated by Hai Mien Airfares in the fast-growing Indian market are 10 to 15 per cent lower than breakeven levels for airlines, a Boeing Co executive said, as the planemaker raised its long-term jet order forecast for the nation to a record despite market challenges. Major Indian carriers Jet Airways, IndiGo and SpiceJet were all in the red in the September quarter as high oil prices, a weak rupee and intense price competition eroded their margins. It is important for the sustainability of the sector that airlines show more discipline in pricing fares, Dinesh Keskar, senior vice president, Asia ... Earthquakes, terrorist attacks and low oxygen levels on Mount Everest could not hold them back. As the Chinese tech giant Huawei expanded around the globe, supplying equipment to bring mobile phone and data service to the planets farthest reaches, its employees were urged on by a culture that celebrated daring feats in pursuit of new business. They worked grueling hours. They were encouraged to bend certain company rules, as long as doing so enriched the company and not employees personally, according to Huawei workers interviewed by The New York Times. Employees at ... The troubles for Anil Ambani-led Reliance Communications (RCom) are far from over. In a meeting with top officials from the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), Infocomm on Wednesday made it absolutely clear that in accordance with the agreement between the two operators, Jio would not be responsible for any previous liabilities of the latter. in the meeting said it would not be able to grant the no objection certificate (NoC) until RCom gave an undertaking that it would be responsible for any liabilities which might arise. Jio said they would like the agreement to be cleared, but cannot give any such undertaking as asked by So it is now up to RCom, an official in the know of the meeting said. Neither RCom nor Jio commented on the issue. The tripartite meeting on Wednesday was held between RCom, Jio, and to try and reach an agreement over a pending NoC that the telecom ministry had to give for spectrum trading between the two operators. With Jio refusing to budge from its earlier stance, the final outcome of the deal now lies with RCom, which has the option of moving the Supreme Court (SC) to challenge DoTs stance. On December 14, DoT had told the apex court that it would issue the NoC to RCom for the spectrum sale within two days, provided the companys arm, Reliance Realty, did not sell the preference shares that are reflected in the financial statement of 2017-2018. RCom had then assured the SC that it would not do so without prior permission from the department. The governments nod for spectrum sale was in limbo after Jio wrote a letter to DoT on Friday seeking clarifications and assurances that it would not be held liable for RComs dues related to airwaves once its deal with RCom was completed. The condition forced DoT to hold its NoC as the rules state that the government can ask operators to clear dues before it gives a nod. Earlier DoT had insisted that the RCom furnish bank guarantees worth Rs 30 billion. It had rejected the companys offer to pledge land to cover the amount. The problem, DoT officials said, with the corporate guarantee backed by land was that it could get into legal tangle, which was not something the government favoured. A bank guarantee would have been easily encashable, they said. The impasse following the meeting could also mean revival of insolvency against RCom and its arm, Reliance Infratel. Ericsson India had moved an insolvency petition against RCom, which was accepted by the Mumbai Bench of the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT). Later, the two reached an agreement in the NCLAT. According to the agreement, RCom would pay Rs 5.5 billion to Ericsson, failing which the latter could revive its insolvency against the telecom company. RCom had then approached the apex court seeking an extension of the deadline, which was initially September 30 and later changed to December 15. The top court, however, had then made it clear that there would be no extensions beyond that. It had also directed RCom to pay Ericsson interest at the rate of 12 per cent per annum for missing the September 30 deadline. On Wednesday, RCom told the NCLAT that it had not made the payment to Ericsson and would make the payment after it received NoC from DoT for its spectrum sale to Jio. The matter before the NCLAT was adjourned to January 22. This was done in view of the case pending before the SC. The NCLAT on Wednesday also asked RComs arm Reliance Infratel to file an affidavit within three weeks, giving details about the payments that were due to HSBC Daisy Investments (Mauritius). The company has to make a payment of Rs 2.3 billion to RComs minority shareholders of Reliance Infratel, including HSBC Daisy Investments (Mauritius). Minority investors, including HSBC Daisy Investments (Mauritius), had earlier this year moved the NCLAT opposing the sale of RComs tower assets held by Reliance Infratel, alleging oppression of minority shareholders. These investors, who together hold nearly 4 per cent, had then opposed the asset sale alleging that the company had not sought their approval for the sale, which amounted to oppression. HSBC Daisy and RCom had, however, reached an agreement in June, which paved the way for the tower asset sale. As part of its debt reduction efforts, RCom had, in December 2017, signed a Rs 250-billion deal with Jio. The deal included sale of assets mortgaged with different banks to avoid insolvency proceedings. RCom expects to raise Rs 180 billion from the sale of its wireless assets to Jio and real estate assets to Canadas Brookfield, and pare some of its Rs 460-billion debt. At a time when international crude oil prices dropped by over 30 per cent in the last two months, a top executive of state-run Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) said on Wednesday that a drop in oil rates is not a concern for the company as average crude oil prices for the current financial year would still remain over $65 a barrel. This would ensure an increase in profit for the company during the financial year. On Wednesday, the prices of Brent crude was seen at $56.6 a barrel, dipping sharply from the over $80 a barrel mark during the first week of October. The ... The festival was organized by Vietnam Farmers Association, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, the Peoples Committee of Long An province and Mekong Delta Rice Research Institute from December 18 to 24. The organization board has built a rice path with 600 yellow ripe rice pots meaning for the prosperity and well-being of Vietnamese rice. Deputy chairman of Long An province Peoples Committee Nguyen Van Duoc said that the festival aims to honor contributions by farmers, businesses and government agencies for the development of agriculture in general and Vietnamese rice in particular. That is also a chance to honor organizations, individuals, businesses, farmers and scientists for their valuable contributions to economic development achievements in the Mekong Delta. Within the frameworks of the festival, there will be two seminars on rice farming adaptation to salt intrusion and drought and clean rice farming. Right after the opening ceremony, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development and the Vietnamese Farmers Association organized a ceremony to unveil Vietnamese rice logo. By staff writers Translated by Hai Mien Delhi's Patiala House Court will hear the second case filed against Congress leader Sajjan Kumar with regard to the on Thursday at 10 am. The second case against Kumar was filed by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on the recommendation of the Nanavati Commission. Cases were filed against Kumar on charges of murder and rioting in relation to the killing of individuals in Delhi's Sultanpuri area in the aftermath of the 1984 riots. Earlier this month, the Delhi High Court, while hearing the first case, convicted and sentenced Kumar to life imprisonment. Two other accused are facing trials on charges of murder and riots held in Delhi, which occurred after the assassination of the then prime minister Indira Gandhi in 1984. ALSO READ: Sajjan Kumar resigns from Congress after conviction in 1984 riots case According to official records, about 2,800 Sikhs were killed across India, including 2,100 in Delhi, during the clashes, which broke out after Indira Gandhi was assassinated by two of her Sikh bodyguards. An Indian television journalist has been detained for criticizing the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government on social media under laws intended to ensure national security, leading to protests in the capital, New Delhi. Kishorechandra Wangkhem was working for a television channel in the northeastern state of Manipur when he uploaded several video clips last month calling the state's BJP chief minister, N Biren Singh, a puppet of the central government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. "It is nothing but a blatant abuse of the law and powers of the government," ... The Supreme Court's judgement in the Rafale case is "self-contradictory" as it was misled by the government, and the court should recall it to restore its credibility, leader Anand Sharma said here Wednesday. The Supreme Court last week dismissed petitions seeking probe in the deal for purchase of Rafale fighter jets. "The government has not only misled the court but also insulted it with a curative petition saying the court had misinterpreted (the information submitted by the government)," Sharma said. "The government misled the court and dented its credibility. It is up to the Supreme Court to correct the situation by recalling the self-contradictory verdict. It is up to the court to take action," he said. ALSO READ: BJP leaders detained for protesting against Rahul Gandhi over Rafale deal "What is the BJP celebrating? The judgement has dented the dignity and credibility of the apex court which needs to be restored," the leader said and demanded action against the government for perjury. Reiterating the demand for a joint parliamentary committee (JPC) probe, Sharma said the SCwas not the right forum to seek a probe in the matter, as only a JPC has the power to summon files, notings and witnesses. Sharma said the was not interested in what Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley have to say while defending Prime Minister Narendra Modi. "Modi alone knows the truth. Former French President (Francois) Hollande has not retracted his statement that the India partner (in the contract) was identified by the Indian government as a pre-condition for the purchase of 36 jets. Only Hollande and Modi were involved in the decision," he said. "These two ministers (Sitharaman and Jaitley) were not involved in the entire process," Sharma said. The government has approached the court afresh saying that contrary to what the judgement indicated, the report of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) on was not submitted to the Public Accounts Committee of Parliament. To a question about the alliance announced by the Samajwadi Party (SP) and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in Uttar Pradesh while keeping the Congress out, Sharma said Congress has the mandate and people's confidence to defeat the BJP. "Parties like DMK, RJD, NCP are with Congress. We feel there should be a general consensus among other parties as well to oust the BJP which has betrayed the people," he said. An 18-year-old woman, who was set on fire by a stalker for turning down his repeated love proposals, was shifted Wednesday to the Safdarjung Hospital in Delhi as she continued to be critical. The 31-year-old man, a taxi driver, attacked the woman when she was returning from college on December 16. The woman was admitted to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Rishikesh on Monday with 70-80 per cent burns, Rishikesh Medical Superintendent Dr Brahma Prakash said. She was sent in an air ambulance to Delhi this afternoon, he said. The woman continues to be critical and will now be treated at Safdarjung Hospital's dedicated burn ward, he said, adding she had sustained serious injuries on her face and lungs. The man had been staking her after she had rejected his love proposals, police said, adding that he set her on fire after sprinkling petrol over her. After hearing her cries for help, locals rushed to the spot and took her to the hospital. Angry students of her university were demanding capital punishment for the accused who was arrested on the same day the was committed. The delegation was received in Hanoi on December 18 by Tran Quoc Vuong, Politburo member and standing member of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) Central Committees Secretariat.At the reception, U Than Htay informed his host about the outcomes of talks between the USDP and CPV delegations. He congratulated the Vietnamese people on their socio-economic development achievements made during the renewal process.He also noted with pleasure the fine development of the relationship between the two Parties, States, and peoples, stressing that the USDP will do its utmost to continue enhancing the bilateral ties, including support for Vietnamese firms business and investment activities in Myanmar.Vuong welcomed the delegation, saying the visit takes place at a time after the two countries have set up their comprehensive cooperative partnership during General Secretary of the CPV Central Committee Nguyen Phu Trongs visit to Myanmar in August 2017. He expressed his belief that it will practically contribute to fostering the friendship between the two parties and states.He spoke highly of the results of the talks between the two party delegations as well as orientations and measures to strengthen CPV-USDP relations in the time to come.As Vietnam and Myanmar share many similarities and boast long-lasting relations, they should continue to step up collaboration and experience-sharing in national construction and development, especially in economic development, he said.He voiced his hope that the USDP will make active contributions to strengthening the comprehensive cooperative partnership between Vietnam and Myanmar.Earlier, the CPV delegation led by Hoang Binh Quan, member of the CPV Central Committee and head of the committees Commission for External Relations, held talks with USDP guests.The two sides informed each other about the situation of their respective parties and the socio-economic development of their countries; discussed measures to solidify the relations between the two parties and states in the future; and shared views on regional and international issues of mutual concern.Quan said that the CPV is ready to share experience with the USDP in such fields as party building, personnel training, and the building of socio-economic development strategies and polices. He added that the CPV also hopes to increase coordination in multilateral forums of political parties.USDP Chairman Than Htay affirmed that Myanmar will work together with Vietnam to forge ties between the two parties, helping develop the countries relationship in an intensive and effective manner, and in the spirit of the Vietnam-Myanmar comprehensive cooperative partnership, for the interests of the two countries peoples and for peace, stability, cooperation, and development in the region and the world at large. This also contributes practically to the building of a united and strong ASEAN community, he said. VNA The government's decision shaved off economic growth by at least 2 percentage points for the October-December quarter of 2016 in which the move was effected, according to a research paper co-authored by eminent economist India-born Harvard professor Gopinath, 46, is set to take charge as the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) next month. The paper further said that districts experiencing more severe had relative reductions in economic activity, faster adoption of alternative payment technologies and lower bank credit growth. "Our results imply lowered the growth rate of economic activity by at least 2 percentage points in the quarter of demonetisation," said the research paper titled ' And The Economy: Evidence From India's Demonetisation'. The paper is published by US-based National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and its co-authors include economist Prachi Mishra, who had headed the strategic research unit at the RBI, Abhinav Narayanan, manager-research at RBI, and Harvard professor Gabriel Chodorow-Reich is the lead author. According to the paper, also led to a decline in nightlights-based economic activity and a 3 percentage points or more drop in employment generation in November and December of 2016 relative to the counterfactual path. "The cross-sectional responses cumulate to a contraction in employment and nightlights-based output due to demonetisation of 2 percentage points and of bank credit of 2 percentage points in 2016 Q4 (calendar year) relative to their counterfactual paths, effects which dissipate over the next few months," the paper said. Night lights satellite imagery has been seen as an alternative means for measuring economic activity. Night lights-based data rely on a scientific model for reaching at an estimated total economic activities, including formal and informal, for countries and states of the world. The Indian economy grew at 7 per cent in the third quarter (when demonetisation was implemented) of 2016-17 and at 6.1 per cent in the subsequent quarter. In 2017-18, the Indian economy grew by 6.7 per cent. In the six quarters before demonetisation, growth averaged 8 per cent and in the seven quarters after, it averaged about 6.8 per cent (with a four-quarter window, the relevant numbers are 8.1 per cent before and 6.2 per cent after). ALSO READ: Banning high-value notes 'bad idea', demonetisation slowed growth: Rajan The paper also noted that continues to serve an essential role in facilitating economic activities in modern India. It also pointed out that there may be longer term advantages from demonetisation that arise from improvements in tax collections and in a shift to savings in financial instruments and non- payment mechanisms. "Evaluating these long-term consequences requires waiting for more data and an empirical strategy suited to the study of longer term effects," it said. Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a televised address on November 8, 2016 had announced to ban the Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 currency notes from the system aimed at curbing black money, fake currency and terror funding, among others. This policy made 86 per cent of cash in circulation illegal tender overnight, with new notes gradually introduced over the next several months. ALSO READ: Way paved for data on Rs 2,000, Rs 500 notes printed after demonetisation The authors used a new household survey of employment and satellite data on human-generated nightlight activity to measure demonetisation's effects at the district level Gopinath is the second Indian to be appointed to the role of chief economist after Raghuram Rajan. Veteran actor Saira Banu has reached out to Prime Minister begging him for help in tackling the "land mafia" and protecting her husband and legendary star Dilip Kumar's "only house". Tweeting from Kumar's official account on Tuesday night, she said was her last hope in the case because repeated entreaties to Maharashtra Chief Minister had been futile. She named builder Samir Bhojwani, who has allegedly falsely claimed ownership of two plots in Pali Hill on which Dilip Kumar's bungalow is built. "To the honourable @PMOIndia Shri @narendramodi. Awaiting for appointment. I'm tired of repeated assurances from CM @Dev_Fadnavis "I Am Trying". Sir you are the last hope of protecting Dilip Sahab's only house from land mafia Samir Bhojwani. I beg (sic)." was in on Tuesday for a day and met producers and actors to discuss issues related to the Hindi film industry but Saira Banu could not meet him. She said she plans to follow up with the PM on the matter. "I did not meet the prime minister here as he has been busy. But I have learnt that his office has asked people here to look into the matter. I have tweeted about it. I will meet him in if needed. I have no idea how I will follow this up. But I will follow it up," the 74-year-old told on Tuesday. Fadnavis said on Monday that he will speak to Kumar, 96, and his family to allay their fears over the property issue involving Bhojwani. Kumar's bungalow is located in the upscale Pali Hill area of Bandra. Earlier this year, Saira Banu had approached police and lodged a complaint against Bhojwani. In January, the Economic Offences Wing (EOW) of Police registered a case of cheating against the builder for allegedly trying to grab the veteran actor's bungalow. After the offence was registered, a team of EOW sleuths raided Bhojwani's residence in Bandra from where they seized weapons, including knives and daggers, officials said. Bhojwani was arrested by EOW in April and has since been released from jail. Junior and mid-level officials of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) are upset with a new circular that reduces their eligibility for the next promotion. And their agitation may not be out of place when one looks at the shrinking scope for promotions at the top itself. The human resource (HR) challenge seems to be one of the most important issues that newly-appointed RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das will have to tackle, apart from bigger ones such as reserves transfer to the government and maintaining the autonomy of the RBI. The central banks HR department stirred up a ... A newly-discovered blind amphibian will be named after Donald in recognition of the US president's stance on climate change, according to a media report. EnviroBuild, a UK-based sustainable building materials company, announced on Tuesday that it would be using Dermophis donaldtrumpi as the name for the amphibian with no legs and poor eyesight. The company says the name still will need to undergo peer review, but that other animals have been named after presidents in the past. The name was chosen by Aidan Bell, the boss of the firm which paid thousands at an auction for the right, The Guradian reported. The small creature is blind and has an ability to bury its head in the ground. These features Bell said match the US leader's opinion on climate change. The company said Trump's was "the perfect name" for the limbless animal The Panamanian underground amphibians are particularly vulnerable to global warming. Dermophis donaldtrumpi, 10 centimetres in length and belonging to group of snakelike animals called caecilians, was recently found in Panama by a group of scientists. Its naming rights were auctioned off in a fundraiser for Rainforest Trust, a non-profit rainforest conservation organisation, the report said. The winning bid of $34,478 was made by Aidan Bell, the head of a UK-based sustainable building materials company called EnviroBuild. "It is the perfect name," Bell said. "Caecilian is taken from the Latin caecus, meaning 'blind', perfectly mirroring the strategic vision President has consistently shown towards climate change," he said. Bell said Trump's worldview resembled a caecilian's, whose eyes can only detect light and dark. "Capable of seeing the world only in black and white. Donald has claimed that climate change is a hoax by the Chinese," he added. The world's leading scientists agree that climate change is primarily human-induced. ALSO READ: Real globalists deny it, but climate change is the actual 'New World Order' But Trump, whose administration has pursued a pro-fossil fuels agenda, has accused those scientists of having a "political agenda" and cast doubt on whether humans were responsible for the Earth's rising temperatures. "I don't know that it's manmade," he said in an interview with CBS's 60 Minutes in October. "I'm not denying climate change but [temperatures] could very well go back," he added, without offering evidence. Trump in May withdrew the US from the Paris climate change agreement, which commits countries to keeping a limit on rising global temperatures. He justified this decision by asserting that he had been elected to serve the citizens of Pittsburgh and not Paris and the deal disadvantaged US businesses and workers. Caecilians lost their limbs at least 60 million years ago to better burrow in the earth, and live almost entirely underground. "Burrowing its head underground helps when avoiding scientific consensus on anthropomorphic climate change and also appointed several energy lobbyists to the Environment Agency, where their job is to regulate the energy industry," Bell said. Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Hua Chunying's Regular Press Conference on December 19, 2018 2018/12/19 Q: We have noted that on December 13, US National Security Adviser John Bolton made some remarks to criticize China when announcing the US administration's new Africa Strategy. A lot of people in the US and many African countries criticized that. Some US officials and research institutions pointed out that China's infrastructure constructions in Africa have met Africa's most urgent needs for development and that US criticism on China-Africa cooperation just makes itself unwelcome and is not worth the candle. They believe that the tone of Bolton's speech is too negative and confrontational. The US Africa policy should not be aimed mainly to attack China. If the US competes with China with such kind of mentality, the US is doomed to fail. Many Zambian senior officials asked Bolton to take back his erroneous remarks. A Tanzanian senior official said that China-Africa relations are underpinned by brotherhood and based on mutual respect. For people who complain about China-Africa relations, are they willing to make great sacrifices for the independence and development of African countries as Chinese people have done? What is your response to that? A: I have noted relevant reports. The new US Africa strategy and the relevant remarks made by the US official you mentioned have aroused such widespread doubt and criticism from the international community and even people in the United States. The relevant US official should indeed reflect on that. When conducting cooperation with Africa, China always follows the principles of sincerity, real results, amity and good faith and upholding justice while pursuing shared interests. At the 2018 Beijing Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, President Xi Jinping outlined China's "five-no" principle in developing relations with Africa: no interference in African countries' pursuit of development paths that fit their national conditions; no interference in African countries' internal affairs; no imposition of our will on African countries; no attachment of political strings to assistance to Africa; and no seeking of selfish political gains in investment and financing cooperation with Africa. This establishes a benchmark of self-discipline in China's cooperation with Africa and demonstrates the code of ethics for international development cooperation. No one knows better than the African people as to whether the China-Africa friendship is true or not, whether China-Africa cooperation is for real benefits or not, and whether China's assistance to Africa works well or not. The US side should think about whether its new Africa strategy is designed to promote Africa's development or target China-Africa cooperation. If it is the former one, China and the US can leverage their respective strengths to jointly support Africa's development. If it is the latter one, I believe that the African people are sharp-eyed and the US will be not only asking for a snub but also inviting humiliation. Q: The fourteenth review of the US trade policy is taking place at the World Trade Organization. We noted that on the first day of the review, 40 members have submitted over 1700 written questions. Sixty-four members voiced their concerns over the US policy measures in their addresses, including obstructing the selection of the members of the Appellate Body and increasing tariffs on steel, aluminum and automobiles under the pretext of "national security", asking the US to engage in the multilateral trading system in a constructive manner and play a positive role. The EU ambassador to the WTO said that the WTO is in a deep crisis and the US is at its epicenter. What's your comment? A: As to the ongoing US trade policy review at the WTO, China's Permanent Representative to the WTO, Ambassador Zhang Xiangchen, has made an impressive and eloquent statement to elaborate on China's clear position and attitude. As you said, in this trade policy review, representatives of many WTO members have expressed their concerns, worries and criticism over the US unilateralism and trade protectionist policies. We hope the US will conscientiously heed the call of the WTO members with an open mind, earnestly shoulder its responsibility, and faithfully fulfill its obligations under the multilateral trading system. Q: The Commerce Ministry said about an hour ago that there was a phone call between Chinese and US vice-ministerial officials. Could you give us more details? Who were on this call from the Chinese and US sides? What was discussed? A: I have noted that China's Commerce Ministry has released a brief piece of readout. I am not aware of the specifics and I would refer you to the Commerce Ministry. Q: The National Post in Canada reported that a third Canadian has been detained in China. Can you confirm this and offer more details? A: I am not aware of the situation mentioned by you. The Chinese competent authorities previously have taken compulsory measures in accordance with the law against two Canadian nationals, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, who are suspected of engaging in activities that endanger China's national security. We have elaborated on the relevant situation. Follow-up: So you cannot confirm that? You have not heard of any information? A: No, I have not heard of that. Q: Some analysts think that President Xi Jinping in his speech yesterday did not mention the influence of market economy on the reform and opening-up or put forth the new goals for the reform and opening up. What influence will this have on the China-US trade talks? A: Yesterday, the full text of the important speech delivered by President Xi Jinping at the gathering in celebration of the 40th anniversary of China's reform and opening up has already been posted online. I hope that you can have a careful reading of that. President Xi Jinping took stock of the achievements of China's reform and opening-up in the past four decades in an all-round and profound manner and charted the course for China's development in the future. We all feel heartened by that speech. I believe that it can help the international community to get a better understanding of where China came from, where it now stands at and where it is heading for, which will also boost the confidence in China's development prospect. The China-US trade talks are being advanced by the economic teams from the two sides in an orderly manner in line with the spirit of the consensus reached by the two heads of state at their summit. We certainly hope that the two sides can strive for win-win outcomes through consultations on the precondition of mutual respect, equality, good faith and matching words with deeds. Q: US President Donald Trump on December 18 signed a bill into law, approving the creation of the Space Command. This means the US has now officially set up a space force which is in charge of space affairs. According to a report by relevant US institution previously, such a move is aimed to guard against the military use of outer space by China and Russia. What's your comment? A: Outer space is all humanity's property. China always advocates the peaceful use of outer space and opposes the placement of weapons and an arms race in outer space. In particular, we oppose turning outer space into a new battlefield. We hope that the international community, in particular relevant major countries, will work together to earnestly uphold the lasting peace and tranquility in outer space. Q: According to reports, US Special Representative for Syria James Jeffrey said that the US would not seek to overthrow Bashar Assad's regime. Instead, the US will ask the Syrian government to make a complete change, otherwise Syria cannot get funds for reconstruction from the Western countries and their financial institutions. What is your comment? A: China always believes that the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of Syria should be upheld and respected and that the future of Syria should be independently decided by its people. The relevant parties to the Syrian issue should follow the spirit of the Resolution 2254 of the UN Security Council to advance the inclusive Syrian-led and Syrian-owned political process on the basis of respecting Syria's sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity. China stands ready to join hands with the international community to continue to play a positive and constructive role in promoting the proper settlement of the Syrian issue at an early date. Q: According to reports, while speaking at a press conference of the Africa-Europe High-Level Forum on December 18, President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker claimed that Chinese aid contributes to a massive increase in debt among African countries in many cases. This is not happening in conjunction with Africa and Europe, and that is why they are better. What's your comment on this? A: China has always followed the principles of sincerity, real results, amity and good faith and upholding justice while pursuing shared interests when conducting practical cooperation for mutual benefits and win-win results with African countries. Such cooperation has provided strong support to economic development and the improvement of livelihood in Africa, which is widely applauded by the African people and recognized by the international community. There is not any African country saddled with debts due to its cooperation with China. The issue of African countries' debts is a product of the unjust international economic order. What is the cause of the debts issue in some African countries? Who are the major creditors? The facts are just clear-cut. We hope the relevant side will do what they should do and earnestly increase their support to Africa's economic development. Q: Huawei yesterday received foreign journalists and answered their questions. Do you think this will help resolve the case of Meng Wanzhou? A: Huawei's briefing on the company for foreign journalists will help people to get a better and all-round understanding. You may refer to Huawei for the specifics. Many are concerned about Huawei recently. As the world's largest telecom equipment supplier, Huawei has good cooperation with many countries around the globe. The quality, credibility and reliability of its products have been widely and fully recognized by its cooperation partners. No one is able to give any evidence that Huawei has posed any security threats as certain countries or people have claimed. Despite not having any factual basis or solid evidence, certain countries have politicized normal development of science and technology and cooperation, slandered and suppressed Huawei and other Chinese high-tech companies on such unwarranted charges as "possible security threats" and with presumption of guilt. This is in essence a flagrant practice of hegemony in science and technology as well as trade and investment protectionism, which also breaches the WTO rule of non-discrimination. China's right to development, including that of Chinese high-tech enterprises should be fully respected. Relevant parties should be clear that any slander or attack will never stop Chinese enterprises' steps towards growing and going global. Q: I have two questions. First, a Vatican delegation came and met with Chinese bishops recently. Do you have more details to share? What were discussed? Second, Germany is tightening rules on national security investigations over non-EU shares purchases. Some say this is because of growing disquiet over takeovers by Chinese firms. For example, Midea took over Kuka. What is your comment? A: Regarding your first question, China is always sincere about improving its ties with the Vatican and has been making unremitting efforts in this regard. China and the Vatican signed the provisional agreement on the appointment of bishops in September this year, which represents an important outcome in the process of improving our bilateral ties. The two sides will maintain communication to implement the relevant spirit of the agreement. With regard to your second question, as far as I know, the ongoing discussions in Germany and the actions it might take are not explicitly targeted at specific countries or companies. Now China-Germany relations are developing with a sound momentum. During the Fifth China-Germany Intergovernmental Consultations in July this year, the two sides issued a joint statement which lays emphasis on opposing all forms of protectionism. In the face of the complicated situation where protectionism and unilateralism are surging, all relevant parties, when rolling out relevant policy measures, should avoid sending out the wrong signal to the outside world. As two major economies in the world, China and Germany should shoulder the responsibility to jointly uphold free trade and multilateralism and inject positive energy into bilateral high-level mutually beneficial cooperation and safeguarding an open world economy through expanding opening-up to each other. We hope that Germany can create a fair and open market access environment and stable system framework for the investment of Chinese enterprises and other foreign enterprises there. Q: Japanese Defense Minister Takeshi Iwaya inspected the Izumo for the first time after he took office. What is China's comment on his inspection of the Izumo and the upgrading and modification of the ship? A: I already answered questions regarding this issue yesterday. I would like to reiterate that due to what happened in history, Japan's moves in the field of military security have been closely followed by its neighboring countries in Asia and the international community at large. We urge Japan to earnestly learn lessons from the history, adhere to the strategy of "purely defensive defense", stay committed to the path of peaceful development and act cautiously in the area of military security. Facebook Inc said it did not give some companies access to people's data without their permission, after the New York Times reported on Tuesday that the social network allowed some large technology companies greater access to user data. The paper reported that Facebook allowed Microsoft's Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users' friends without their consent, citing documents from 2017. "None of these partnerships or features gave companies access to information without people's permission, nor did they violate our 2012 settlement ... Not for the first time in the Brexit process, confusion reigned in the UK parliament on December 17, when opposition leader, Jeremy Corbyn, proposed a vote of no confidence in the prime minister, Theresa May, only to later appear to backtrack. The prime minister ended up walking out of the chamber. Opposition MPs from other parties are now furious with both May and Corbyn. Heres how to understand the latest Brexit chaos. What was the motion put forward by Jeremy Corbyn? Jeremy Corbyn told the House of Commons on Monday afternoon that he would be tabling a motion of no ... When lawmakers asked YouTube, a unit of Google, to provide information about Russian manipulation efforts, it did not disclose how many people watched the videos on its site that were created by Russian trolls. Facebook did not release the comments that its users made when they viewed Russian-generated content. And Twitter gave only scattered details about the Russian-controlled accounts that spread propaganda there. The tech companies foot-dragging was described in a pair of reports that the Senate Intelligence Committee published on Monday, in what were the most ... The rise of China in the East and populists in the West means that, by mid-2018, economies run by mainstream democratic parties accounted for just a third of the combined gross domestic product of the Group of 20 nations, down from 83 percent in 2007, according to Bloomberg Economics. And that was before the election of two more populist presidents, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in Mexico and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. . In 20 years I havent operated in an environment like this, ever, ... Dear Reader, Business Standard has always strived hard to provide up-to-date information and commentary on developments that are of interest to you and have wider political and economic implications for the country and the world. Your encouragement and constant feedback on how to improve our offering have only made our resolve and commitment to these ideals stronger. Even during these difficult times arising out of Covid-19, we continue to remain committed to keeping you informed and updated with credible news, authoritative views and incisive commentary on topical issues of relevance. We, however, have a request. As we battle the economic impact of the pandemic, we need your support even more, so that we can continue to offer you more quality content. Our subscription model has seen an encouraging response from many of you, who have subscribed to our online content. More subscription to our online content can only help us achieve the goals of offering you even better and more relevant content. We believe in free, fair and credible journalism. Your support through more subscriptions can help us practise the journalism to which we are committed. Support quality journalism and subscribe to Business Standard. Digital Editor Germany's Office for Information Security (BSI) has issued warnings to several German firms named by the United States as possible victims of hacking attacks, a newspaper reported, adding that Chinese activity against German firms had increased. Cyber experts have long warned that Germany - with its high level of technology expertise - is a particularly attractive target for cyber attackers of all kinds, including state actors. "Construction and materials research, engineering firms and some big commercial enterprises are the focus for hackers," the Sueddeutsche ... The result of bad bargains India struck at the political level in accepting some provisions of the Paris Agreement came to haunt it in the shape of final rulebook three years later at Katowice. The rulebook to the Paris Agreement had been under negotiations for three years, starting 2016. During these years negotiations were hit by a change of regime in the US and developed countries at large strategically driving the starting point of the talks far away from the Paris Agreement. It took a collective effort of developing countries, in which India played its role, to make sure that the ... US Secretary of State had a rare meeting with Nepal's Foreign Minister Pradeep Gyawali as part of the Trump administration's effort to thwart increasing Chinese influence in the Himalayan nation. Pompeo described his meeting on Tuesday with Gyawali as historic and said this demonstrates America's commitment to its strong partnership with Nepal. He emphasised the great potential for further development of US-Nepal ties, State Department deputy spokesperson Robert Palladino said. During the meeting, Pompeo highlighted the enduring strength of the US-Nepal partnership and the close people-to-people ties that form the foundation of the relationship. "The two leaders discussed Nepal's USD 500 million Millennium Challenge Corporation compact, Nepal's central role in a free, open, and prosperous Indo-Pacific, and global issues, including North Korea," Palladino said. Three years after the Paris Agreement was struck, we now finally know the rules or most of them, at least for its implementation. The Paris Rulebook, agreed at the UN climate summit in Katowice, Poland, gives countries a common framework for reporting and reviewing progress towards their climate targets. Yet the new rules fall short in one crucial area. While the world will now be able to see how much we are lagging behind on the necessary climate action, the rulebook offers little to compel countries to up their game to the level required. The national ... The gravity of the existential threat we face from Islamic Jihad is truly of epic proportions. It is essentially a battle pitting free-civilized man against a totalitarian barbarian. What is at stake is the struggle for our very soul - namely who we are and what we represent. The lives that were sacrificed for individual rights and freedoms that we've come to cherish are being chiseled away from right under our noses by the stealth jihadists. And many of us are in denial and totally clueless. The left's appeasement and pandering to evil is nothing new. What makes their utopian delusions so infuriating and unpardonable is that it is not only they who will have to pay the consequences, and deservedly, so, they are thwarting and undermining our best efforts at resistance and are thus dragging us down in the process as well. By Peter Lancz,, the head of the Raoul Wallenberg World Campaign Against Racism. Days after India's central drug regulator CDSCO seized samples of Johnson & Johnson baby powder from the firm's plant in Himachal Pradesh's Baddi, state drug controller Navneet Marwaha said that appropriate action will be taken in the matter after the reports of the sample test are out. The samples were seized after a report by a London-based news agency, Reuters, claimed that Johnson & Johnson's raw talc and finished powders sometimes tested positive for small amounts of (cancer-causing) asbestos for the last few decades. Speaking to ANI, Marwaha said, "Johnson & Johnson was making baby products in association with VVF India Ltd in Baddi. On the basis of news reports, an inspection took place and samples were collected which will be sent for investigation. On the basis of the report, appropriate action will be taken." The company, which has a huge market in India, dismissed the reports, calling it "one-sided, false and inflammatory". "The Reuters article is one-sided, false and inflammatory. Johnson & Johnson's baby powder is safe and asbestos-free. Studies of more than 100,000 men and women show that talc does not cause cancer or asbestos-related disease. Thousands of independent tests by regulators and the world's leading labs prove our baby powder has never contained asbestos," the company's statement read. The statement further stated that Johnson & Johnson will continue to defend the safety of its product. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) AIADMK MPs on Wednesday staged a protest in front of the Gandhi statue inside the Parliament premises against the construction of dam on Cauvery river. Earlier in the day, Telugu Desam Party (TDP) MPs also staged protests in front of the Gandhi statue over their demand for a special category status for the state Andhra Pradesh. Earlier on Wednesday, two MPs, one each from Congress and Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) gave adjournment motion notices in Lok Sabha over demonetisation and Rafale issue respectively. CPI-M MP Mohammed Salim also gave an adjournment motion notice in Lok Sabha, during the ongoing Winter Session of the Parliament, over Rafale deal issue while Congress MP Ranjeet Ranjan gave an adjournment notice in Lok Sabha over demonetisation. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Minister of State for Civil Aviation Jayant Sinha on Wednesday asserted that the number of airports in the country has increased from 67 to 101, while air traffic has doubled since 2014. Addressing the media a day after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) retained India's aviation safety assessment at Category 1, Sinha said: "In 2014, when our government came to power, FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) had just downgraded India. Subsequent to that we have doubled air traffic now. We have increased the number of airports from 67 to 101 now, so there has been an exponential and dramatic increase in both air traffic and airports." Speaking about safety and quality of the aviation sector, Sinha asserted that the government has immeasurably strengthened our systems. "It is a matter of tremendous satisfaction for us that two of the premier regulators in the world- the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) and the FAA have come to India, have conducted a very serious audit and FAA has once again maintained our category 1 rating. It has expressed satisfaction with the manner in which DGCA is regulating safety in India," he added. Sinha also expressed hope that FAA category 1 rating will be followed by enhanced score by the ICAO and said, "As far as ICAO is concerned, our numbers have gone up to 74, after we address some of the licensing issues that they have pointed out which had resulted initially in lower score but once we addressed those issues our numbers have gone up to 74 per cent. Once we put in place the full licensing regime, our expectation is we will go up from a score of 74 to 82, which puts us well ahead of the global average and which continues to demonstrate our very strong safety record." FAA conducted an audit of the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) in July this year to confirm India's adherence to the standards laid down by ICAO and oversight of Indian airlines. During consultations held with FAA in early November, DGCA presented the actions taken to address the findings of the July 2018 audit. FAA is an operating mode of the U.S. Department of Transportation. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Conference (NC) president Farooq Abdullah on Wednesday asserted that the Army should have used water cannons or tear gas instead of bullets. His observations were in the context of seven civilians' deaths following an encounter in Pulwama last week. "The Army should have used water cannons or tear gas instead of bullets. People, who died, cannot come back. We hope the Army and police will not carry out such operations in the future," said Abdullah. Three terrorists were killed in an encounter that broke out on Saturday in Pulwama's Monghama area of Sirnoo village. Seven civilians and one security personnel too lost their lives in the gun battle. Abdullah further emphasised that elections should be held in the valley and President's rule must come to an end. "There should be elections and people must choose their representatives who can work," he said while speaking to media. On September 8, Abdullah had said that his party will boycott Lok Sabha and Assembly elections if the government fails to take a stand on Article 35Aand Article 370. The Conference (NC) had also boycotted the Jammu and Kashmir municipal polls over lack of clarity in the Centre's stance on Articles 35A. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The United Kingdom has readied 3,500 troops, who are on standby, in case of a no-deal Brexit, with a parliamentary vote on the Withdrawal Agreement coming up on January 14, 2019. "We've as yet not had any formal request from any government department but what we are doing is putting contingency plans in place," UK's Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson told the House of Commons on Tuesday (local time). He further said that the 3,500 service personnel would be on standby to help any government department in the face of a contingency, according to CNN. UK Prime Minister has until now survived one no-confidence motion against her while another motion was tabled by the Leader of the Opposition, Jeremy Corbyn, in the Commons on December 17. Meanwhile, the UK government has started preparing for the possibility of no-deal with the European Union (EU) and will start sending out advice to businesses and households that will be affected by the withdrawal. Corbyn had earlier described the agreement as a "botched" deal, voicing the sentiments of many Members of Parliament who believe the same. May had halted the parliamentary vote on the deal on December 10 to put forth the concerns vocalised by British MPs with her European counterparts. She visited Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium to meet with European leaders for the same on December 11, where the European Commission (EUCO) reiterated that the deal will not be renegotiated. There are only a few months to go until the UK withdraws from the EU on March 29, 2019. In 2016, over 50 per cent of the UK electorate had voted to leave the EU, following which the British government had triggered Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, beginning the country's process of exiting from the bloc. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath will on Wednesday meet the father of the civilian who was killed during the mob violence in Bulandshahr, which also claimed the life of sub-inspector Subodh Kumar Singh. On December 3, the sub-inspector, along with the civilian, Sumit, died in the violence which erupted after the carcasses of 25 cattle were found in forests close to a police post. The locals had alleged that the carcasses found were of cows which were slaughtered illegally. According to sources, the post-mortem examination conducted on Singh had confirmed gunshot injury to his head. Police have arrested a total of 17 people in the case, while another accused has surrendered. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on Wednesday said that the Bulandshahr violence was a conspiracy by those who have lost political ground and want to communalise the atmosphere. "The Bulandshahr incident was a political conspiracy by those who are losing their base. It is done by those who want communal riots through cow-slaughter and are also involved in manufacturing spurious liquor and killing innocent people," said Adityanath while speaking to reporters on the first day of Uttar Pradesh Assembly's winter session. "They are cowards and they cannot face any challenge from the front. Seeing that they are losing their ground they hatched Bulandshahr conspiracy," he added. The chief minister was reacting to the criticism his government is facing in handling the Bulandshahr violence in which two people, including a police officer, were killed on December 3. The Uttar Pradesh administration arrested 17 people in connection with the violence but the main accused in the cop's killing remains at large. However, Adityanath said that the Bulandshahr conspiracy has been unearthed and his government is committed to maintaining law and order in the state. On December 3, violence erupted in Bulandshar after the carcasses, allegedly of 25 cattle, were found in forests. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) AgustaWestland chopper deal middleman Christian Michel is suffering from dyslexia, his counsel Aljo K Joseph claimed on Wednesday even as a Delhi court reserved its order for December 22 on his bail plea. "He (Michel) has become weak since he was also in custody in Dubai for five months on CBI's request. We are ready for any condition of bail. You have already granted bail to other accused. CBI had questioned him five times in Dubai and for 15 days in Delhi. He is suffering from dyslexia, and he has been asked to write in cursive writing," said Joseph. Christian Michel, the alleged middleman in the Rs 3600 crore AgustaWestland helicopter deal, arrived in New Delhi on December 05 after being extradited to India from Dubai. He was later sent to CBI custody. During the hearing at Patiala House Court, the CBI opposed Michel's bail plea, arguing that he knows certain facts, which put him in a position to influence the investigation. Joseph claimed that his client was cooperating in the investigation, and hence, is liable to be granted bail. But the CBI argued that Michel was influential enough to try and remove evidence, saying "He (Michel) was making efforts to run away from Dubai just before his extradition. His dispatches show high links in the defence ministry and people in politics. Many of them are witnesses in our case. We cannot take the chance that he will influence witnesses. We have brought him here with great difficulty." The AgustaWestland VVIP helicopter deal, finalised during the previous government of Manmohan Singh, had got mired in allegations of kickbacks. The 54-year-old Michel is an accused in the case along with some others including former Air Chief SP Tyagi. According to the Enforcement Directorate charge sheet filed in a court here two years back, Michel had received kickbacks to the tune of 30 million Euros from AgustaWestland for the deal involving a purchase of 12 VIP helicopters. The deal, signed in 2007, was scrapped in 2013 following the bribery allegations. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Bihar Police on the directions of the Enforcement Directorate (ED) has seized the property of a Naxalite, Vinay Yadav on Wednesday. The confiscated property includes one construction vehicle, two cars, and three buses. Yadav is an infamous Naxalite of Bihar and Jharkhand with more than 50 cases registered against him in both the states. The Jharkhand government has declared a reward of Rs 15 lakh while Bihar government has declared Rs 3 lakh on Yadav. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Family of a Hyderabadi man, who died in Saudi Arabia 17 days ago, suspects a foul play in his death and has urged External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj to help in the repatriation of the body. "He spoke to us last on December 2, and unfortunately died after two hours and we got to know about the incident on December 3 by his colleague. My father's employer is claiming that he died due to heart attack, but we are confused that how he died," Syed Ibrahim Sheybaz, son of the deceased Syed Farooq Kasim told ANI. Kasim was working in a transport agency in Saudi Arabia for the last six years and contacted his family every day, said his kin. The son even approached the Indian Embassy in Riyadh. "When we approached the Indian Embassy in Saudi Arabia, they are saying that they are waiting for local authorities to give the report," Sheybaz added. The grieving relatives added that they were told that the Saudi Arabian authorities are investigating the matter, but 17 days on, they are yet to receive a response from them. Shehbaz added that he had requested External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj to help the family in repatriating the body to India so that they could perform the final rites of the deceased in India as soon as possible. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The share of the Indian economy in the world (measured as a ratio of India's GDP to world's GDP at current US$) has increased from 2.6 per cent in 2014 to 3.2 per cent in 2017 (as per World Development Indicators database). This was stated by Minister of State for Finance Pon Radhakrishnan in a written reply to a question raised in Rajya Sabha on Tuesday. The average share of the Indian economy in the world from 1960 to 2013 was 1.8 per cent. The average growth of the Indian economy during 2014-15 to 2017-18 was 7.3 per cent, fastest among the major economies in the world. The Indian economy is projected to be the fastest growing major economy in 2018-19 and 2019-20 (International Monetary Fund October 2018 database). This is borne by the GDP growth of 7.6 per cent in the first half of 2018-19. As per the estimates available from Central Statistics Office(CSO), the per capita income (measured as per capita net income (at current prices))of the country increased from Rs. 86,647/- in 2014-15 to Rs 112,835/- in 2017-18, recording a30.2 percent growth from 2014-15 to 2017-18. Meanwhile, Union Minister Suresh Prabhu while addressing the India-Turkey business forum organised by FICCI on Tuesday said that in coming years India will be five trillion dollar economy. He said, "India will be 5 trillion dollar economy in 7-8 years and already we have complete road-map for it. On Monday, we launched a major program for making one trillion dollars of manufacturing in India that will happen in the next 6-7 years; the comprehensive plan has been prepared. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha and her Indian counterpart Sushma Swaraj agreed to redouble bilateral trade to 50 billion USD by the year 2030. Both the leaders met here at the Jawaharlal Nehru Bhavan and reviewed multifaceted cooperation under the Special Strategic Partnership between the two countries. While co-chairing the ninth Joint Commission meeting in New Delhi, both the ministers expressed satisfaction over the growth in bilateral trade and investment over the past two years. They also agreed to increase bilateral trade to USD 50 billion by the year 2030. "We shared the view that early conclusion of ongoing negotiations to upgrade our bilateral Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) and implementation of trade facilitation measures already agreed upon will help us move towards this target," the ministers said, according to a statement released by the Ministry of External Affairs. Swaraj and Kyung-wha explored new avenues of Korean investment in India's infrastructure modernisation and encouraged Korean companies, known for their technological feats and global outlook, to create newer opportunities by partnering in the Government of India's flagship initiatives such as 'Make in India', 'Skill India', 'Digital India' and 'Smart City'. The ministers further discussed potential cooperation in the energy sector. "As two large energy consumers of Asia, closer consultations between us serve our mutual interest in securing predictable energy supplies at stable prices. From the Indian side, we also extended an invitation for Republic of Korea (ROK) to join the International Solar Alliance," Swaraj said in her statement. "Foreign Minister Kang and I also exchanged views on regional and global issues of common interest. I conveyed to Foreign Minister Kang that India sees ROK as an indispensable partner in its 'Act East' policy and in its vision of the Indo-Pacific," Swaraj added. The ministers also acknowledged the complementary aspects of India's Act East Policy and ROK's New Southern Policy that creates a natural synergy for strengthening and creating new avenues for our cooperation, including in the wider region. They agreed on the importance of a free, open, peaceful and rules-based order as being essential for achieving our common goal of peace, stability and prosperity in our shared region and beyond. Sushma reiterated the Indian government continued support to the efforts made by President Moon Jae-in of South Korea, to address the Korean nuclear issue and promote inter-Korean ties through dialogue and negotiation. India also expressed its sincere hopes that these efforts will bear fruits to usher in a new era of peace and stability in the Korean peninsula. In addition to this, Swaraj and her counterpart shared the view that terrorism, in all its forms and manifestations, is a global scourge, and resolved to combat it through coordinated regional and global efforts. "To conclude, I believe that our discussions today have laid a sound foundation for the sustained momentum of our Special Strategic Partnership. I look forward to continuing my close consultations with Foreign Minister Kang to this end," Swaraj said. Kyung-wha, who is on a two-day visit to India, and Swaraj also reviewed the follow-up action on decisions taken during President Moon's visit to India, earlier in July, and explored some new possibilities. She is slated to emplane for South Korea tonight. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed that the nation will "protect itself" as US President Donald Trump indicated plans for pulling troops out from Syria. "We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency," Trump had tweeted on Wednesday, after which a US Defence official told CNN that planning is underway to pull the 2,000-strong troops out of the country. The President's statement attracted criticism from American media outlets and senior Republican Senators like Lindsey Graham who tweeted, "With all due respect, ISIS is not defeated in Syria, Iraq, and after just returning from visiting there -- certainly not Afghanistan." However, The Jerusalem Post reported Netanyahu as claiming that US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo had assured him that the US would retain influence in Syria. The opposition in Israel has slammed Netanyahu for the US exit from the nation, labelling it as a "diplomatic failure" on the Prime Minister's part. After the US announcement, it has been speculated that a lack of American troops in Syria will give rise to the influence of Russia and Iran in the region. The US troops aligned with the Syrian Kurds to push back the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) in Syria where fighting has been ongoing since 2011, according to Al Jazeera. Trump had, in April this year, claimed that he would "love" to get out of Syria at a joint conference held with French President Emmanuel Macron in the White House. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Paisabazaar.com, India's largest online marketplace for financial products, and Karnataka Bank today announced a strategic partnership to offer the bank's home loan product to customers on the Paisabazaar platform. Through this partnership, consumers will now be able to choose and apply for a home loan from Karnataka Bank, directly through the Paisabazaar platform. Paisabazaar.com works with 30 partners for its home loan product, which includes India's biggest private and public banks and HFCs. "With an increasing number of consumers using digital channels to meet their lending needs, Karnataka Bank is excited to partner with Paisabazaar.com, to offer our home loan product to a massive customer base. Together, we aim to offer simple and convenient processes to help our customers meet one of their biggest life goals, that of buying their own home," said Mahabaleshwara M S, Managing Director and CEO, Karnataka Bank. "As a market leader, we aim to provide maximum choice to our consumers, across products. This convenience of choice becomes particularly relevant for products with long-term commitment, like home loans, as the the right product can help consumers save significantly in the long run," added Naveen Kukreja, CEO and Co-founder, Paisabazaar.com. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Kerala High Court on Wednesday rejected Malayalam actor Dileep's plea seeking Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) inquiry into the molestation of an actress in February last year. Dileep, who is accused of allegedly conspiring the assault and abduction of the actress, had moved a lower court in Kerala and the state's High Court seeking access to the memory card containing digital evidence which was filed by the Kerala police but did not get a favourable outcome. The courts had agreed with the police contention that evidence cannot be handed over to the accused. Dileep later filed an appeal before the Supreme Court seeking access to the evidence. During the Supreme Court hearing held last week, the bench headed by Justice AM Khanwilkar said it will first decide whether the memory card containing the clip, which is part of a police report under the Evidence Act, is a "material or document". The apex court further said that the trial court will not frame charges against the actor until it decides the issue. The court posted the matter for further hearing on January 23. The actress, who has worked in Tamil and Telugu films, was abducted and allegedly molested inside her car by a group of men, who had forced their way into the vehicle on the night of February 17, 2017, and later escaped. According to police, the conspiracy to abduct and assault the actress in a moving car was allegedly hatched by Dileep. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) On meeting External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj here on Wednesday, repatriated Indian Hamid Ansari's mother Fauzia Nehal Ahmed Ansari thanked the minister saying, "Mera Bharat mahaan, meri madam mahaan, sab madam ne hi kiya hai." The Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Raveesh Kumar tweeted, "Welcome home, son! Indian national, Hamid Ansari returns home after six years of incarceration in Pakistan. EAM @SushmaSwaraj warmly welcomed him in Delhi today." Ansari was arrested six years back after he went to Pakistan to meet a woman he had befriended through social media. He returned to India yesterday after completing his three-year prison sentence in Pakistan jail. Ansari reunited with his family at the Attari-Wagah border last evening. His mother, Fauzia Nehal Ahmed Ansari, who called her son's release "a victory of humanity", said that he had no "bad intentions". "My son went with noble intentions. Hamid had no bad intentions, but initially went missing and was later caught and framed. He shouldn't have gone without a visa. His release is a victory for humanity," Hamid's mother told ANI on Monday. Ansari was awarded three-year imprisonment by a military court in December 2015 after being slapped with charges of espionage and involvement in anti-state activities on him. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Muttahidda Qaumi Movement's (MQM) Coordination Committee Convener Dr Nadeem Ehsan said that MQM has nothing to do with gangsters from South Africa. The paramilitary Rangers had fraudulently claimed they belong to MQM South Africa chapter. In fact, that notorious scheme was part of ongoing tricky business of the military establishment for maligning the MQM. However, the scheme has badly flopped and the establishment was exposed after real facts and details about the South African gang have been made public by the MQM. The paramilitary Rangers are thus hiding their faces after having been exposed by the MQM. The Convener said this in a press video briefing and was flanked by members of the Coordination Committee. He said that the establishment is constantly placing the MQM under misleading and hate-mongering media trial but has utterly failed in its malicious agenda. The recent activity of the establishment in which it staged a drama of unearthing a large cache of arms and ammunition and alleged the MQM had owned it has flopped. As a matter of fact, the arrested gangsters have never been in MQM as workers or under any category but they are in real gangsters belonging to Punjab. They are Rana Zahid, Ali Bhatti, Ali Rashid and Atique Billa. These criminals belong to a gang of criminals based in Johannesburg in South Africa. They are involved in heinous crimes such as murder, kidnapping for ransom, smuggling and other crimes. These criminals are wanted to Police in South Africa. The Convener said that surprisingly, these notorious criminals regularly attend events and functions organised and hosted by the Pakistani Embassy in South Africa and their photographs with Pakistani envoys ion South Africa are all available on the internet. Dr Ehsan said that, as far as Shuja Ud Din Bobbi is concerned, the MQM had ousted him from the Movement on Jul 28, 2018 and Pakistani and international media was properly informed through official release. Likewise, the paramilitary establishment had a few days ago, tried to establish a connection between the MQM and a real estate builder Anis. In fact, Anis is an active member of PSP, which is a gang of criminals created by the military establishment and portrayed as political party. "As far as the MQM South Africa is concerned, is a strong forte of the MQM and strictly follows the discipline of the MQM." The MQM Coordination Committee Convener Dr Ehsan said that, "Unearthing the concealed cache of arms and ammunition by the paramilitary Rangers from different houses in Azizabad is just a flopped scheme." The paramilitary Rangers are enjoying complete control over that area since Aug 22, 2016. He asked the paramilitary Rangers to explain to the people of Pakistan and the world as how it is possible for the smugglers of arms and ammunition to easily transport large caches of arms and ammunitions while the military and its paramilitary forces are stationed at each corner of the city and the country. The paramilitary Rangers have during past a decade raided thousands of houses but they faced no resistance which is proof that the MQM and its designees and workers are pure political and non-violent. Henceforth, the military establishment and its paramilitary forces and intelligence agencies should stop maligning the MQM as their every maligning act against the MQM has bounced back with sheer humiliation. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Enforcement Directorate (ED) summoned Asha Thakur, the wife of Muzzafarpur shelter home rape case accused Brajesh Thakur, and their son Rahul Anand, on December 26 and 24, respectively. Meanwhile, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) filed a charge-sheet against 21 people at the special Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) court on Wednesday. Last week, the CBI had informed the Supreme Court to have prepared as many as 21 charge sheets against the accused in the shelter home rape case. The apex court had ordered the CBI to look into antecedents, connections, and influence of Brajesh Thakur and his NGO- Seva Sankalp Evam Vikas Samiti. Prior to this, the apex court on November 28 had issued an order to Chief Minister Nitish Kumar-led Bihar government to hand over all the investigation report against 17 shelter homes of Muzaffarpur and their owners to the CBI. The decision to hand over the case to CBI was taken by the apex court after the state government failed to file a correct FIR in the incident. More than 40 minor girls were allegedly sexually assaulted over a period of time in the shelter home which was run by Brajesh Thakur's state-funded NGO. Subsequently, the NGO was blacklisted and the girls were shifted to other shelter homes in Patna and Madhubani. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The NITI Aayog on Wednesday unveiled its comprehensive Strategy for New India, defining clear objectives for 2022-23, and calling for a steady acceleration of the economy to achieve a GDP growth rate of about 8 per cent on an average during 2018-23. Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley released the document in the presence of NITI Aayog Vice-Chairman Rajiv Kumar, Members Ramesh Chand and VK Saraswat and CEO Amitabh Kant. The government think tank said that such a growth rate would raise the country's economy size in real terms from USD 2.7 trillion in 2017-18 to nearly USD 4 trillion by 2022-23. The forward of the strategy document has been penned down by the Prime Minister in which he outlined the documents attempt to bring innovation, technology, enterprise and efficient management together, at the core of policy formulation and implementation. "It will encourage discussion and debate, and invite feedback for further refining our policy approach. We believe that economic transformation cannot happen without public participation. Development must become a Jan Andolan," asserted the Prime Minister. The document has been prepared by NITI Aayog after having in-depth consultations with all three groups of stakeholders, businessmen, academics including scientists, and government officials. A consultation was also held with different sets of stakeholders including scientists and innovators, farmers, civil society organisations, think-tanks, labour representatives and trade unions and industry representatives. The document incorporated suggestions received from central ministries as well as states and Union Territories. "Over 800 stakeholders from within the government - central, state and district levels - and about 550 external experts were consulted during the preparation of the document," informed NITI Aayog in a press statement sharing details of the strategy document. "The overarching focus of the Strategy document is to further improve the policy environment in which private investors and other stakeholders can contribute their fullest towards achieving the goals set out for New India 2022 and propel India towards a USD 5 trillion economy by 2030," it further added. The document comprises 41 chapters and has four sections, Drivers, Infrastructure, Inclusion and Governance. "The first section on Drivers focuses on the engines of economic performance with chapters on growth and employment, doubling of farmers' incomes; upgrading the science, technology and innovation eco-system; and promoting sunrise sectors like fintech and tourism," informed NITI Aayog. It has also endorsed replacing the Agricultural Produce Marketing Committee Act with the Agricultural Produce and Livestock Marketing Act and expansion of e- Agriculture market. For ensuring the maximum employment creation, it has recommended the complete codification of labour laws and a massive effort to upscale and expand apprenticeships. The strategy document also stressed on the need to expedite the establishment of the Rail Development Authority (RDA), which would advise or make informed decisions on an integrated, transparent and dynamic pricing mechanism for the railways. It also envisions the establishment of 10,000 Atal Tinkering Labs by 2020, delivering all government services at the state, district and gram panchayat level digitally by 2022-23 and shifting the part of the workload out of regular court system to address the backlog of pending cases. The strategy document is a detailed exposition across 41 crucial areas which recognises the progress already made, identifies binding constraints, and suggests the way forward for achieving the clearly stated objectives. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar on Tuesday met Vietnam's Ambassador to India, Pham Sanh Chau, and discussed various issues related to bilateral relations between the two countries. During the meeting, Nitish discussed the significance of Buddhist pilgrimage sites in Bihar to the envoy. He stressed about the historic cities of Vaishali, Rajgir and Bodh Gaya, considered as holiest sites of Buddhism, an official statement read. The Vietnamese ambassador spoke about his interest in yoga, which the Bihar Chief Minister appreciated and extended an invitation to him to visit a yoga institute in Munger. Furthermore, the envoy invited Nitish to pay a visit to Vietnam next year at an appropriate time. The Vietnamese ambassador honoured the Bihar Chief Minister with an insignia, while the envoy was felicitated with a scarf and an insignia. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) He assured them of the Government of India's full support for making the Panchayati Raj model a success and responsive to the people's basic necessities and grievances, according to a statement issued by the PMO. The Prime Minister congratulated the local representatives for the courage displayed by them in the face of heavy odds; and for successfully participating in the democratic process, despite threats and intimidation, the statement said. Elections to 1,100 Urban Local Body wards in Jammu and Kashmir were held after a gap of 13 years and to 35,000 Panchayats after seven years in Nov-Dec 2018. The Panchayat elections saw a voter turnout of 74 percent despite the terrorists warning against the conduct of the polls. To take the process forward, a training programme for 40,000 grass-roots representatives will be undertaken soon. The Sarpanches will be provided a monthly honorarium of Rs 2,500 and Rs 1,000 per month will be disbursed to each Panch. The Prime Minister told the 48 Sarpanches of Panchayats that his government will stand shoulder to shoulder with the local government representatives for the welfare of the state, to fulfil the aspirations of the masses, it added. The delegation, led by President of the All Jammu & Kashmir Panchayat Conference Shafiq Mir, conveyed its appreciation to the Prime Minister for empowering the institutions of local self-governance through the successful and peaceful conduct of Panchayat elections in Jammu and Kashmir. Modi urged the members of the delegation to prioritize people's interests, as the people have reposed enormous faith and hope on them. Empowerment of grassroots institutions is a significant step in taking Jammu and Kashmir away from the path of violence and secure the rights and development of the local populace. He also appreciated the participation of women in the recent Panchayat elections. Devolution of powers at the grassroots level is a unique opportunity for people to become stakeholders in their own developmental process. The J&K Panchayat Act was passed in 1989, but only three of the allotted 25 functions under the Act were actually provided budgetary support. The Government has now amended the J&K Panchayati Raj Act of 1989 and transferred Rs 2,000 Crore per annum to the Panchayats. Another Rs 1,200 Crore has been made available to the Urban Local Bodies. The Panchayats will directly monitor activities pertaining to 19 departments/subjects and carry out audits of government schemes and projects. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday hit out at the Congress party over the double standards practised by the party with regard to Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs). "Before every election they begin to make noise about EVMs, trying to create an atmosphere of doubt. After elections, however, if Congress performs well, they seem to accept the results that have come out of the same EVM," Prime Minister Modi said while interacting with the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) booth level workers from Puducherry and Tamil Nadu via video conference. Prime Minister Modi further said that the perfect answer to the Congress' 'undemocratic' behavior is to strengthen democracy. "Information and awareness are important for democracy. We should keep people informed about Congress and its dangerous games," he added. Prime Minister Modi further alleged that the Congress humiliated the Indian Army, Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) and other institutions of democracy. "Recently, they (Congress) questioned the Supreme Court's verdict, just because they didn't like the decision. Earlier, just because they couldn't threaten the court into doing what they wanted, they tried to even impeach the Chief Justice of India (CJI)," he said. BJP karyakartas (cadre) from Puducherry, Vellore, Villupuram, Kanchipuram, and South Chennai were among the participants of the interaction. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The newly-formed Congress-led Rajasthan government on Wednesday waived farm loan up to Rs 2 lakh. The Ashok Gehlot-led state government will bear a burden of Rs 18,000 crore. This comes a day after the BJP-led government in Assam waived the farm loan worth Rs. 600 crore in Assam. Earlier this week, similar decisions were taken by the Congress government in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh where the Chief Ministers of respective states, Kamal Nath and Bhupesh Baghel announced farm loan waivers soon after taking charge. The Congress party has been cornering the Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led government over agrarian crisis while accusing it of overlooking the farmers' distress. On Tuesday, Congress president Rahul Gandhi has said that he will not let Prime Minister Narendra Modi sleep until all farms loans are waived. "We will not let Prime Minister Modi sleep till he waives loans of farmers, all opposition parties will unitedly demand this. Till now, Prime Minister has not waived a single rupee of farmers," the Gandhi scion had said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Taliban will engage in peace talks with the Afghan government only if foreign troops are withdrawn from the country, Alexander Venediktov, an aide to the Russian Security Council secretary, said in an interview with Sputnik. "The Taliban movement, which, according to our estimates, has exceeded 60,000 members, refuses to negotiate directly with the leadership of Afghanistan, declaring it a protege of the United States that does not enjoy the real support of the people .... Their leaders say it will be possible to hold negotiations, but only after the issue of the withdrawal of 16,000 foreign troops is resolved," Venediktov said. According to the official, Taliban militants consider their fight to be a forced response to the presence of US and NATO troops. On Monday, a delegation of US officials launched talks with the Taliban movement in the United Arab Emirates. Following the talks, media reported, citing Taliban officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, that the US delegation had proposed that the Taliban conclude a truce for a period of six months, join the government of national unity and become part of the political system of Afghanistan. The Taliban, for its part, demanded that the United States release all imprisoned members of the group, lift the ban on their movement, remove the names of the Taliban leaders from the international "black lists" and also announce a specific date for the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, according to the sources. Earlier on Wednesday, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid disproved this information. The talks are still underway. Afghanistan has long been in a state of turmoil, with the government fighting the Taliban radical movement, which has been holding vast territories in rural areas under its control and regularly launches offensives on key big cities. The situation has been exacerbated by the activities of the Islamic State terrorist group (banned in Russia), which has been operating in Afghanistan since 2015. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) US President Donald Trump has signed a memo to establish a US Space Command as a unified combatant command. "This action reflects the value of space contributions to national security, the evolution of the threats to U.S. space systems, and the importance of deterring potential adversaries from attacking U.S. space systems," Patrick Shanahan, the Deputy Secretary of Defense tweeted. He further underscored the urgency of addressing space as a "war fighting domain", hailing the move as a "critical step". "U.S. Space Command will allow us to accelerate our space capabilities to defend our National interests and deter our adversaries," Shanahan underlined. Referring to the Space Force and the Space Command, he further said, "Once both organizations are fully operational, the differences between Space Force and U.S. Space Command will largely parallel those of the other five military services and four functional combatant commands." The Space Force will serve as a force provider for personnel, assets, etc while the Space Command will serve as the operational command that will lead space operations by employing space capabilities. "We will work with Congress to determine the timeline to full operational capability for US Space Command," the Deputy Secretary lastly said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The US State Department on Tuesday said that they are not yet aware of campaigns organised by US-based pro-Khalistan Sikhs for Justice (SFJ), adding that such calls come under freedom of speech. "I am not aware of it. That's- I mean, I'm just not aware of it today. I haven't seen these reports. We have freedom of speech in the United States, we have freedom of association, and these are bedrock principles of American society," said Robert Palladino, Deputy Spokesperson of the State Department told reporters. The SFJ is a US-based hardliner group, which recently sought Pakistan's support for its controversial social media campaign 'Referendum 2020' to separate Punjab from India. Having failed to garner support in Punjab, the group now plans a 'Referendum 2020' poll in major cities of the US, Europe, Australia and other countries. When asked that if the State Department is aware of such campaigns carried out on the US soil and is taking any measures to curb such activities, Palladino said, "We have freedom of speech in this country that's protected by our First Amendment, and that is a bedrock of American society and the American Constitution, and I, unfortunately, don't have anything on this specific case. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) US Congressman Joaquin Castro has called for the resignation of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner Kevin McAleenan following the death of a 7-year-old Guatemalan girl in US custody. According to Sputnik, Castro while addressing the media said, "I also discovered that there were other disturbing facts, like during the 94-mile bus ride where she started to present serious symptoms of medical and bodily failure, there was nobody onboard that could offer any kind of medical help to her and no medically trained personnel." The Congressman further claimed that the chief admitted that the CBP violated US law by not informing Congress within 24 hours of the Guatemalan minor's death. Calling CBP facilities "under-resourced", he also mentioned that the facilities lacked proper medical equipment in case of an emergency. The minor died due to dehydration and shock, after being taken into US custody for crossing into the US from Mexico with her father and a large group of migrants along a remote stretch of New Mexico desert. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) At a hearing of the Foreign Affairs Committee on Monday, foreign minister Peter Szijjarto tells Parliament that there are at least 13 countries set to vote against the UN Migration compact on 19 December. The countries who will vote against the plan include the Visegrad Four group of Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, as well, Bulgaria, Latvia, Austria, the United States, Israel, Australia, Dominica and Brazil, Peter told at the hearing. Minister Szijjarto also has asserted that Hungary will also reject the sister document, which has been hailed as even worse than the Migration pact, The Global Compact on Refugees. This is is said to allow migrants to enter Europe through a backdoor and as the minister said, Hungarian communities across the border will not be sacrificed for geopolitical interests or under international pressure. Referring to the unbelievable pressure western allies have deployed on Hungary in the effort to have Hungary relinquish its position vetoing Ukraines NATO integration, the foreign minister insists that Hungary would stand firm until Ukraine drops its anti-Hungarian policies. The Delhi High Court on Wednesday extended interim protection granted to Telugu Desam Party (TDP) leader YS Chowdary who has been accused of money laundering and financial irregularities. The court posted the matter for further hearing on January 16. Chowdary had recently approached the Delhi High Court seeking quashing of allegations against him. During today's hearing, the counsel representing the TDP leader told the court that he was questioned by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) for a total of six hours without permitting a lunch break. However, the ED countered Chowdary's claim saying that the leader was offered lunch and refreshments but he refused it. ED also told the court that Chowdary is not required for questioning at the moment. The ED had issued summons to Chowdary on November 24 and 27 after the investigative agency raided his residential premises. During the raids, the ED seized six high-end cars (Ferrari, Range Rover, Benz), which are allegedly registered in the name of dummy companies. These vehicles were seized under the provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002 (PMLA), the ED had said in a statement. Refuting all charges against him, Chowdary had stated that all the companies established by him were "law-abiding and fully complied with all regulations." Chowdary accused the Bharatiya Janata Party of political vendetta, saying: "This is a case of political vendetta because the (TDP) alliance was called off (with BJP). I have been the former minister of the present government". (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Biocon will be watched. Ogivri, a biosimilar Trastuzumab jointly developed by Biocon and Mylan, has been approved in the European Union (EU). The announcement was made before market hours today, 19 December 2018. The European Commission has granted Marketing Authorization for Ogivri to Mylan. The European Medicines Agency's Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP) previously issued a positive opinion recommending approval of Ogivri as a biosimilar to Roche's Herceptin (Trastuzumab) on 18 October 2018. Ogivri is indicated for the treatment of patients with HER2 positive early breast cancer (EBC), metastatic breast cancer (MBC) and metastatic gastric cancer (MGC). Under supervision of the relevant healthcare professional it can be prescribed as either monotherapy or in combination with other medicines dependent on the relevant diagnosis. J. Kumar Infraprojects said it is in receipt of letter of acceptance from National Highways Authority in the name of J.Kumar J.M. Mhatre (JV) in which J.Kumar is the lead partner for construction of Dwarka Expressway from Shiv Murti Intersection at Km.20 of NH-8 till Rail Under Bridge (RUB) near Dwarka Sector - 21, from Km 0.800 to Km 5.300 package l in Delhi on EPC mode amounting to Rs 1349 crore. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 18 December 2018. NTPC announced that unit 6 of 500 MW capacity of Feroze Gandhi Unchahar Thermal Power Station has been synchronized with grid after boiler restoration. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 18 December 2018. IDFC Bank and Capital First announced the completion of merger following the receipt of all requisite shareholder and regulatory approvals and the merged entity will be called IDFC First Bank, subject to shareholders' approval. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 18 December 2018. Following the merger, the board of IDFC Bank approved the appointment of Mr. V. Vaidyanathan, founder and chairman of Capital First, as managing director and chief executive officer of the merged entity, subject to shareholders' approval. On a combined basis, IDFC First Bank has on-book loan assets of Rs. 1,02,683 crore, as per the last reported financial results for the quarter ended 30 September 2018. The retail loan book will now contribute 32.46% to the overall loan book. The merger was announced on 13 January 2018, and as per the terms of the merger agreement shareholders will receive 139 shares of IDFC Bank for 10 shares held in Capital First. The board has fixed 31 December 2018 as the record date for determining the shareholders of Capital First who shall be entitled to receive shares of IDFC Bank, as consideration pursuant to the scheme. Karnataka Bank as part of digital initiative has announced its strategic partnership with Paisabazaar.com, one of the India's largest online platforms for financial products to offer the bank's home loan product to customers. Through this partnership, consumers will now be able to choose and apply for a home loan from Karnataka Bank, directly through the Paisabazaar platform. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 18 December 2018. Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services said its board will meet on 21 December 2018 to consider issuing non-convertible debentures with a shelf limit of Rs 10,000 crore. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 18 December 2018. Yes Bank said it sold 1.23 crore equity shares of face value Rs 10 each, constituting 2.1279% of the paid-up share capital of Fortis Healthcare ('FHL'), in various tranches last being on 18 December 2018, resulting into a change in holding of the bank by more than 2% of the total shareholding of FHL, from the last disclosure made by the bank on 15 March 2018. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 18 December 2018. PVR said its board will meet on 21 December 2018 to consider raising funds. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 18 December 2018. Lemon Tree Hotels said it signed a license agreement for a 69 room property located at Viman Nagar, Pune, Maharashtra under the company's brand 'Lemon Tree Hotel'. The hotel is expected to be operational by March 2019 and shall be 3rd hotel besides other 2 owned hotels of the company in Pune. Carnation Hotels, the hotel management arm of the company will be operating and marketing this hotel. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 18 December 2018. Powered by Capital Market - Live News (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Glenmark Pharmaceuticals announced its foray into the branded dermatology segment in the United States. The branded portfolio for the US market will be developed and commercialized by Glenmark Therapeutics Inc., USA, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Glenmark Holding, SA. This represents an important step in the company's long-term strategy to build a robust branded business in the US, alongside the company's existing and successful generics business. In support of this new business, Glenmark Therapeutics recently acquired the rights to seven branded dermatology products from Exeltis USA, Inc. The acquisition includes Ecoza (econazole nitrate) topical foam, 1%, an antifungal medicine indicated for the treatment of interdigital tinea pedis or athlete's foot, and Recedo topical gel, a leading prescription product for scar management. The cumulative sales of the seven acquired brands were USD 9 million. All the acquired products are currently approved and marketed in the US, giving Glenmark Therapeutics an immediate entry into the topical branded products segment. In addition, Glenmark Therapeutics intends to launch other branded dermatology products over the next 12 months. Glenmark Therapeutics' acquisition also includes the Exeltis dermatology field force, which manages well-established relationships with healthcare professionals. Glenmark plans to have a field force of about 30 sales representatives for the branded division. According to IQVIA sales data for the 12-month period ending October 2018, the topical branded dermatology products market in the US is estimated to be valued at USD 1.9 billion and has been growing at a CAGR of 6.6% over the last five years. Powered by Capital Market - Live News (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Ltd is quoting at Rs 235.5, up 1.79% on the day as on 12:44 IST on the NSE. The stock is down 45.42% in last one year as compared to a 4.93% spurt in NIFTY and a 1.57% spurt in the Nifty Energy. Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Ltd is up for a fifth straight session in a row. The stock is quoting at Rs 235.5, up 1.79% on the day as on 12:44 IST on the NSE. The benchmark NIFTY is up around 0.46% on the day, quoting at 10959. The Sensex is at 36474.78, up 0.35%. Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Ltd has dropped around 3.19% in last one month. Meanwhile, Nifty Energy index of which Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Ltd is a constituent, has dropped around 1.07% in last one month and is currently quoting at 14386.2, up 0.71% on the day. The volume in the stock stood at 42.62 lakh shares today, compared to the daily average of 71.88 lakh shares in last one month. The benchmark December futures contract for the stock is quoting at Rs 236.15, up 1.72% on the day. Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Ltd is down 45.42% in last one year as compared to a 4.93% spurt in NIFTY and a 1.57% spurt in the Nifty Energy index. The PE of the stock is 5.41 based on TTM earnings ending September 18. Powered by Capital Market - Live News (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Lemon Tree Hotels has signed a license agreement for a 69 room property located at Viman Nagar, Pune under the company's brand name 'Lemon Tree Hotel'. The hotel is expected to be operational by March 2019 and shall be 3rd hotel besides other 2 owned hotels of the company in Pune. Carnation Hotels, the hotel management arm of the Company will be operating and marketing this hotel. Powered by Capital Market - Live News (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Under PMUY, 5.86 Cr connections have been released so far Minister of Petroleum & Natural Gas, Dharmendra Pradhan interacted with the Chairman/CMDs and Senior Management of Oil Marketing Companies (OMCs) through video conference on the Cabinet decision of the Government to expand the scope of eligible beneficiaries of Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY) to include all poor families in the country to achieve the universal coverage. The Minister appreciated the efforts and proactive role of OMC officials in successfully implementing the Ujjwala scheme with full commitment and dedication. Under PMUY, 5.86 Cr connections have been released so far. Minister expressed satisfaction to the fact that 48% of the PMUY beneficiaries are SC/ ST households. He thanked the OMCs for expanding LPG coverage in India from 55% in 2014 to near 90% now. The Minister further advised OMCs to disseminate the decision to extend the benefits of PMUY to all poor families at ground level and also prepare a detailed road map for its time bound implementation. They were asked to mobilize required equipment to release connections to PMUY beneficiaries in a mission mode. Powered by Capital Market - Live News (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline have entered into an agreement to create a premier global consumer healthcare company with robust iconic brands. The Boards of Directors of both companies have unanimously approved the transaction under which Pfizer will contribute its consumer healthcare business to GlaxoSmithKline's existing consumer healthcare business. The 2017 global sales for the combined business were approximately $12.7 billion. Under the terms of the transaction, Pfizer will receive a 32% equity stake in the joint venture, entitling Pfizer to its pro rata share of the joint venture's earnings and dividends, which will be paid on a quarterly basis. Pfizer will have the right to appoint three out of the nine members of the joint venture's board. The transaction is expected to deliver $650 million in peak cost synergies and to be slightly accretive for Pfizer in each of the first three years after the close of the transaction, which is anticipated during the second half of 2019, subject to receipt of GSK shareholder approval and regulatory approvals, and satisfaction of other customary closing conditions. As Pfizer will own less than 50% of the joint venture, Pfizer anticipates deconsolidating Pfizer Consumer Healthcare from its financial statements following the closing of the transaction. In the near- to medium-term, this deconsolidation is not expected to have a material impact on Pfizer's top-line growth. In addition, given the Consumer Healthcare business records lower margins than Pfizer's other businesses, the deconsolidation is expected to have a slight positive impact on Pfizer's operating margins over the next several years. Following the integration of the combined business, GSK intends to separate the joint venture as an independent company via a demerger of its equity interest to its shareholders and a listing of the Consumer Healthcare business on the UK equity market. GSK will have the sole right to decide whether and when to initiate a separation and listing for a period of five years from closing of the proposed transaction. GSK may also sell all or part of its stake in the joint venture in a contemporaneous IPO. Powered by Capital Market - Live News (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Zee Media Corporation Ltd is quoting at Rs 24.55, up 0.61% on the day as on 12:49 IST on the NSE. The stock is down 45.2% in last one year as compared to a 4.93% slide in NIFTY and a 26.45% slide in the Nifty Media. Zee Media Corporation Ltd is up for a fifth straight session today. The stock is quoting at Rs 24.55, up 0.61% on the day as on 12:49 IST on the NSE. The benchmark NIFTY is up around 0.46% on the day, quoting at 10959. The Sensex is at 36482.5, up 0.37%. Zee Media Corporation Ltd has slipped around 1.6% in last one month. Meanwhile, Nifty Media index of which Zee Media Corporation Ltd is a constituent, has slipped around 2.27% in last one month and is currently quoting at 2492.6, up 0.45% on the day. The volume in the stock stood at 95363 shares today, compared to the daily average of 1.97 lakh shares in last one month. The PE of the stock is 22.76 based on TTM earnings ending September 18. Powered by Capital Market - Live News (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Air Chief Marshal B.S. Dhanoa, Chief of the Air Staff, visited Air Force Station Jodhpur, on Wednesday to interact with the participating forces of the ongoing Ex Aviaindra 2018 between Indian Air Force (IAF) and Russian Federation Aerospace Force (RFASF). Chief of the Air Staff was received by Air Commodore Philip Thomas, Air Officer Commanding, Air Force Station Jodhpur, said Col Sombit Ghosh, PRO Defence, Rajasthan. The second edition of Ex Aviaindra is aimed at exposing RFASF and IAF pilots to single/multi aircraft missions in a Counter Terrorism Scenario within the predefined scope. The 30-member RFASF contingent under Russian forces commander Lt Gen Yuri Sushkov comprised fighter, transport and helicopter pilots, said Col Ghosh. The Chief of the Air Staff was briefed in detail about various phases of the exercise and was apprised of its progress. Post briefing, he visited the RFASF and IAF detachment, wherein he interacted with the personnel of both the Air Forces. During the interaction, Air Chief Marshal welcomed RFASF team and emphasised the importance of joint exercises, as they create an environment of camaraderie and provide an opportunity to learn from each other's best practices. He spoke about the long standing military partnership between RFASF and IAF and the common equipment that both the nations operate. He complimented the efficacy of Russian equipment, as it has played a pivotal role during various IAF air campaigns. Ex Aviaindra is a testimony of the Indo-Russian Military relationship and would enhance mutual cooperation and understanding between IAF and RFASF, added Col Ghosh. --IANS arc/oeb/sed (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Online retail giant Amazon has been slammed by several Sikh bodies for reportedly selling doormats, rugs and toilet accessories bearing the image of the highly-revered Golden Temple and was asked to immediately remove the "disrespectful products" that hurt the sentiments of the community worldwide. Prominent community body in the US, the Sikh Coalition, said in a statement on Tuesday that it was alerted to Amazon selling doormats, rugs and toilet seat covers with the image of Golden Temple. In response, the civil rights organisation said it "immediately contacted Amazon to remove the products while detailing the culturally insensitive problems with the items being sold and the offensive message it sent to Sikhs around the world". "The Golden Temple is not a doormat," it tweeted, adding that in the hours since, through community outreach, several pages had been removed from the Amazon portal. Another group, NGO United Sikhs, issued a statement calling on Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to do the same and said it had received "numerous complaints" from members of the community about the products. Some of the items had been removed from the website on Wednesday, but the Golden Temple toilet accessories remained available, the group said. "It's shocking and extremely disappointing that Amazon offers these products for sale," said United Sikhs operations manager Rajesh Singh. "The merchandise featuring the disrespectful placement of Darbar Sahib shows a total lack of understanding on behalf of Amazon and its employees. We demand Bezos address this issue immediately." The group offered "Sikh awareness training" in "an effort to educate Amazon's staff and prevent anti-Sikh products from being sold on the site in the future". It also "reached out to the manufacturers of the merchandise to demand their production to be ceased immediately". --IANS soni/sed (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A day after Congress President Rahul Gandhi promised a nationwide waiver of farm loans, the BJP-led Assam government on Wednesday announced a credit subsidy, relief of interest on farm loans and incentives for farmers across the state. Assam finance Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma announced the three new schemes for the farmers on Wednesday and added the schemes are being launched on the occasion of 125th anniversary of farmers' uprising at Pothorughat in Darrang district where 140 farmers had laid down their lives. "This is the 125th anniversary of farmers' uprising of Pothorughat. We want to pay tribute to the farmers whose contribution to the economy is unparalleled. The schemes will benefit 27 lakh farmers' families spread over 26,000 villages of Assam," Sarma said on Tuesday. He said the schemes will result in an expenditure of Rs. 1,000 crore. "The Assam Farmers' Credit Subsidy Scheme (AFCSS) will ensure that the government will deposit 25 per cent of the total amount paid by farmers for loans availed between April 1 this year to March 31 next year, subject to a maximum limit of Rs 25,000," Sarma said, addressing a press conference on Wednesday. "This scheme will cover all sorts of term crop loans and short-term loans for plantation such as tea and rubber availed of between the period. The government of Assam will also extend a benefit of 25 per cent of the outstanding amount of the loans availed of by the farmer between the same period with a cap of Rs 25,000 per such account if the farmer is depositing the balance amount to clear the outstanding dues," he said. The scheme will cover 4 lakh farmers with a financial implication of Rs 500 crore. "Through the Assam Farmers' Interest Relief Scheme (AFIRS), the government will extend special support to the prompt paying farmers by providing interest subvention of four percent on short-term crop loans up to a limit of Rs 2 lakh," said the minister. Asked if the schemes are announced to counter the promises of the Congress President, Sarma said what Assam has announced is more than a farm loan waiver, adding that subject to necessary budget provisions, the state government may consider extension of these three schemes in subsequent years. "This has nothing to do with We have already made a budgetary provision. It takes time in Assam for things to materialize. We could have declared these before the panchayat polls, which would have increased some seats for us," he said. --IANS ah/prs (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Bharatiya Janata Party activists on Wednesday held a 'civil disobedience programme' in West Bengal's Howrah district to protest against the denial of permission to the party's proposed Rath Yatra and accused the state government of "undemocratically impeding" their political programmes. The saffron party activists later clashed with the local police when the latter denied permission for the meeting and tried to forcibly remove them from demonstrating by blocking roads. "We know that the common people are inconvenienced due to our civil disobedience programme today. But our party is facing a bigger problem. In spite of being the biggest political party in the world, the BJP is barred from holding rallies and meetings in this state. That is why we are forced to hold such law violation programmes," state BJP president Dilip Ghosh said while addressing the gathering. "The Bengal government is forcing us to resort to such extremism. We are holding civil disobedience in all the districts to protest against this government's role to suppress the voice of the BJP," he said. The BJP leader further alleged that while leaders from other states and neighbouring countries are permitted to hold public rallies in Bengal, the Mamata Banerjee government is deliberately stopping his party from doing the same and stressed such "duality" will not be allowed for long. "All other political parties are allowed to hold meetings in the state. Even Muslim clerics from Bangladesh are allowed to hold meetings here. Leaders like Asaduddin Owaisi from Hyderabad were also allowed but not our leaders. There is neither any curfew in Bengal nor is the BJP a banned organisation, so why such things are happening?" he questioned. BJP's plea to hold the 'Rath Yatra', touted as the "save democracy rally", was rejected by the Bengal Government last week, stating there was "grave apprehension of major breach of peace and communal violence during and in the aftermath" of the programme. The matter is now sub judice in Calcutta High Court.--IANS AAA mgr/sed (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Ailing Goa Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar is being projected as a 'He-Man or Superman' by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and made to pose in staged photo-shoots, the Congress said on Wednesday, chiding the former Defence Minister for skipping the 57th Goa Liberation Day Parade. "The BJP is only indulging in staged photo sessions and they are projecting the CM of Goa as a 'He-Man or Superman'. Parrikar had the time and fitness to inspect an under-construction bridge with doctors alongside him, but could not be present to hoist the tricolour on Goa Liberation Day. That is a really sad state of affairs," Congress spokesperson Urfan Mulla told reporters on Wednesday. The Congress on Monday had dared the 63-year-old Chief Minister to hoist the national flag on the occasion of the state Liberation Day, a day after Parrikar on Sunday made his first public appearance in nearly two months, when he, accompanied by a medical team, inspected an under-construction bridge near Panaji. Parrikar's public appearance on Sunday comes at a time when the Panaji Bench of the Bombay High Court is due to pronounce its order on a petition which seeks making the health status of the ailing Chief Minister public. Parrikar is suffering from advanced pancreatic cancer and has been in and out of hospitals in Goa, Mumbai, New York and Delhi for nearly nine months. The Opposition has demanded Parrikar's resignation on account of his prolonged ill-health. Earlier at the Liberation Day parade on Wednesday, Speaker of the Goa Legislative Assembly Pramod Sawant stood in for Parrikar. "Goa CM Manohar Parrikar could not attend the assembly because of health issues. Therefore I am reading his speech in his absence," Sawant said. The Speaker also extolled freedom fighters who had to struggle and, in some cases, pay with their life for liberating Goa from the Portuguese. He also expressed his indebtedness to the Indian armed forces for liberating Goa. "Indian freedom struggle was incomplete until Goa was eventually freed from 450 years of oppressive Portuguese rule. Portugal used religion to divide and rule to retain power in Goa," Sawant said, while extolling the achievements of the state in the fields of health, education, infrastructure, since liberation. Sawant also encouraged Goans to make the state plastic and garbage free. --IANS maya/mag/vm (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) President Amit Shah on Wednesday categorically said that the ruling NDA will fight the 2019 Lok Sabha elections under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. "No question of leadership change... The NDA and the BJP will contest the 2019 elections under the leadership of Modiji... We shall win with a higher majority," Shah said, speaking at the 'Surging India' "Republic TV" summit. "In 2014, the BJP had government in six states, now we have it in 16 states. So tell me who will win?" the BJP chief shot back to a query by private TV channel head Arnab Goswami. Shah's statement assumes significance after a prominent Maharashtra farmers' leader, the Vasantrao Naik Sheti Swavalamban Mission (VNSSM) Chairman Kishore Tiwari wrote to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief Mohan Bhagwat and general secretary Bhaiyyaji Suresh Joshi, demanding immediate replacement of an "arrogant" Modi with the "gentle" Nitin Gadkari if the BJP wants to win the next elections. Shah added that state and central elections are fought on different issues and "the 2019 elections shall be fought on India..." Setting the agenda for the 2019 elections, the BJP chief also said that the issues discussed will be corruption, national security, how the country's image has gone up in the world and the vastly improved law and order situation. The polls will be fought on how the BJP-led government has worked for the upliftment of millions of poor people by way of five crore gas connections, eight crore toilets, 2.50 crore electric connections, 2.50 crore homes built, medical security for 50 crore people, how every home in the country has a bank account and other achievements of the government in the past four years. "Besides, there is not a single allegation of corruption against this government in the past five years... This is something that has not been seen in the country since long," Shah emphasised. Even after giving a tough fight, however, whatever be the mandate would be acceptable to the BJP, Shah though made it clear. In a veiled attack aimed at the Congress and the Gandhi family, the BJP leader said that since 1960, the country has been in the grip of three monsters -- 'casteism', 'parivaar-vaad' and 'appeasement'. "We have neutralised 'appeasement' by discarding vote-bank politics, we don't take decision liked by the people but that which benefit them. The 'family' (Gandhis) has been almost finished and 'casteism' is largely under control," he explained. On the opposition-formed 'Mahagathbandhan' that might challenge the BJP, Shah pointed out that the opposing 'Grand Alliance' comprises largely state or regional leaders who will "not make any impact in other states... but they would fight against the BJP in all states. "We are not bothered about who will be opposite Modi... We are going to fight the elections on the government's strengths and achievements, not weaknesses," said Shah. To a question on its blow-hot-blow-cold ally in Maharashtra, Shiv Sena, Shah said: "I believe and am confident that they will be with us in 2019. I cannot disclose anything more." Countering the voting figures in the five states and other data presented by Goswami, the BJP chief dismissed them saying they appear different on the table but mean something else in the electoral battle-fields. --IANS qn/in (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A newly discovered amphibian that buries its head in the sand has been named after US President Donald Trump, apparently in response to his comments about climate change, media reported. "Dermophis donaldtrumpi is particularly susceptible to the impacts of climate change and is therefore in danger of becoming extinct as a direct result of its namesake's climate policies," said EnviroBuild co-founder Aidan Bell in a statement on Tuesday. The small, blind, creature is a type of caecilian that primarily lives underground. It was discovered in Panama and named by the head of a company that had bid $25,000 at an auction for the privilege. The company said it wanted to raise awareness about climate change, the BBC reported. Although US presidents tend to receive their fair share of honours, with Bell drawing an unflattering comparison between its behaviour and Trump's, the 45th president might want to ignore the latest. "Burrowing (his) head underground helps Donald Trump when avoiding scientific consensus on anthropomorphic climate change," Bell wrote. The world's leading scientists agree that climate change is primarily human-induced, but Trump, whose administration has pursued a pro-fossil fuels agenda, has accused those scientists of having a "political agenda" and cast doubt on whether humans were responsible for the Earth's rising temperatures, the BBc report said. "I don't know that it's manmade," he said in an interview with CBS's 60 Minutes in October. "I'm not denying climate change but (temperatures) could very well go back," he added, without offering evidence. In November, Trump questioned a report by his own government that found climate change would cost the US hundreds of billions of dollars annually and damage health. "I don't believe it," he told reporters at the time. After taking office he announced that the US would withdraw from the Paris Climate accord, which commits countries to keep a limit on rising global temperatures. He justified his decision by asserting that he had been elected to serve the citizens of Pittsburgh and not Paris and the deal disadvantaged US businesses and workers. --IANS in/ (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A Border Security Force (BSF) junior officer shot and killed himself near the Line of Control (LoC) on Wednesday in Jammu and Kashmir's Poonch district, police said. Assistant Sub-Inspector Satpal Jaswal of the 72 battalion shot himself in Sabra area of Mendhar sector while he was on duty inside a bunker. He was shifted to hospital where doctors declared him dead on arrival, police said. --IANS sq/in (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) on Wednesday announced that it would launch a nationwide agitation demanding a policy on e-commerce from the government and to stop allowing foreign direct investment (FDI) in retail trade. The traders' body said that it would finalise the strategy and timeline for the protest at its National Governing Council meet next month. "CAIT on the strength of 7 crore small businesses will launch a nationwide agitation and the strategy of which will be finalised in forthcoming meeting of National Governing Council of CAIT on 12-13 January at Bhopal," CAIT Secretary General Praveen Khandelwal said at a protest rally here. He said that e-commerce and FDI in retail trade will adversely affect the national economy. Traders staged a protest rally in the national capital on Wednesday demanding a bill in the current session of Parliament on the issue of sealing business establishments in Delhi. According to a CAIT statement, sealing of business establishments in Delhi has created havoc in the city's trading fraternity. "No government agency has definite and correct knowledge about sealing which has resulted into loss of business in Delhi in the past few years. Outstation traders are reluctant to come to Delhi for purchases and, as such, the centuries-old distributive character of Delhi trade is highly distorted," it said. --IANS ravi-bc/prs (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The CBI has filed a charge-sheet in a special court naming all accused in the infamous Muzaffarpur shelter home rape case, including jailed key accused Brajesh Thakur, an official said on Wednesday. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which is probing the Muzaffarpur shelter home case, filed a charge-sheet in special POCSO court. "A charge-sheet has been filed by the CBI against all accused," an official said. Meanwhile, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) has issued notices to Brajesh Thakur's wife Asha Thakur and son Rahul Anand. Both have been summoned to Patna for interrogation on December 24 and December 26 in connection with the case. Of the 42 girls lodged at the short-stay home run by the Brajesh Thakur's NGO, 34 were found to have been sexually assaulted. The crime came to light following a social audit by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, over six months ago. The Supreme Court is monitoring the CBI probe into the case. --IANS ik/nir (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Authorities from China and the US on Wednesday discussed the 90-day truce aimed at putting an end to the trade war between the two countries, China's Commerce Ministry said. In a statement on its official website, the Ministry said it the two sides held a phone call at a "vice-ministerial level" about economic and trade issues that concern both nations. China did not reveal the proposals discussed over the call, or if a new agreement had been reached, Efe news reported. Chinese President Xi Jinping and his US counterpart Donald Trump agreed to a 90-day truce on December 1 during the G20 summit in the Argentinian capital of Buenos Aires. Since then, China has adopted several goodwill measures, including a tariff reduction on imported US vehicles and the resumption of American soy bean purchases. Trump, on his part, halted a proposal that would have raised tariffs on over $200 billion of Chinese goods from 10 to 25 per cent. Negotiations have been threatened by tensions over the detention of Huawei's Chief Financial Officer Wanzhou Meng, who was arrested in Canada after a request by US authorities for the alleged violation of economic sanctions imposed by Washington against Iran. --IANS soni/ (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) George Paul Raff, 68, of Hughesville, MD passed away peacefully Friday, December 14, 2018 at Southern Maryland Hospital Center in Clinton, MD surrounded by his loving family. George was born November 13, 1950 in Boston, MA. He was the son of the late George A. Raff and Margaret F. Carroll Raff. George graduated from Bladensburg High School and went on to serve 3 years in the U.S. Army. He continued to work for the Department of Defense as a Heating/AC Equipment Technician until he retired in 2015 from NAVFAC, Indian Head, MD. George loved the outdoors and was an avid car guy. He spent a lot of his time working on projects around the home and tinkering in the garage fixing things. His passions were spending time with his family and drinking beer with his friends while telling stories from his past and sharing dreams of the future. He always had a smile on his face and never met a stranger while showing compassion and kindness to everyone he met. He was always there lending a helping hand to friends and neighbors when needed. He took great pride in his children and their accomplishments, bragging every chance he got. He enjoyed his retirement and spending his time at home. He enjoyed classic cars and going to car shows, hunting, telling jokes, and taking care of our pet dog Lucy and our two cats Hotrod and Special. He enjoyed relaxing and watching The Simpsons and Barrett Jackson while enjoying his secret stash of snacks. George is survived by his loving wife of 33 years, Penny R. Stone Raff, who he married on April 12, 1985 at Hughesville Baptist Church in Hughesville, MD. He is also survived by his son, Aaron J. "AJ" Raff of Hughesville; his daughters, Kelly R. Raff of Hughesville and Paula Norris of King George, VA. The family wishes to extend their heartfelt gratitude to Charles County 911 call takers and dispatchers, Charles County Department of Emergency Services, Hughesville Volunteer Fire Department, Charles County Sheriff's Office, Charles County Volunteer Rescue Squad, The ER Department and ICU/CCU staff of Southern Maryland Hospital Center, Brenda and Eddie Lukenich, Buster Canter, Gary Runaldue, Dan Bedell, Robert Ansell, along with our family, friends, and neighbors that have prayed and offered support. Our family is blessed and grateful to have the support of people like you. Thank You. Visitation will be held on Wednesday, December 26, 2018 from 5pm-8pm with prayers at 7pm at Brinsfield Funeral Home, 30195 Three Notch Road, Charlotte Hall, MD 20622. Funeral services will be held on Thursday, December 27, 2018 at 11:30am at Brinsfield Funeral Home in Charlotte Hall. Interment will follow at Maryland Veteran's Cemetery, 11301 Crain Highway, Cheltenham, MD 20623 at 1:00pm with Military Honors. Memorial donations may be made to The American Cancer Society, P.O. Box 42040, Oklahoma City, OK 73123. "What we have once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us." - Helen Keller After disrupting India's mobile phone market with brands such as itel, TECNO and Infinix, is all set to launch in 2019 its entire range of consumer durables, including televisions, air conditioners, refrigerators and washing machines, under the Syinix brand, the China-based company's India CEO has said. The company is currently doing "market testing" in Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh with the launch of a 32-inch LED TV for Rs 13,999 and a 40-inch Smart TV at Rs 24,999. "The initial results of market testing in Rajasthan and eastern Uttar Pradesh have been very good. Generally in consumer durables, offer one-year warranty, but Syinix offers 24+1-month warranty. "We will also soon launch 49-inch and 55-inch smart 4K UHD (ultra-high-definition) TV," Arijeet Talapatra, CEO of Transsion India, told IANS in an interview. "We will keep the pricing extremely competitive. Unlike other brands that tend to focus only on key cities, our main focus is tier 2,3,4,5 and 6 markets," Talapatra said, adding that the company was also planning to set up a research and development (R&D) centre in India next year. Transsion entered the India market in April 2016 with the itel brand which quickly struck the right chord with the consumers in the county's small towns and cities who were looking for feature-rich, low-cost mobile phones. The itel brand registered over 200 per cent growth that year. Encouraged by the widespread acceptance of the brand in the very first year of operations in India, the company launched in 2017 two other popular mobile phone brands TECNO and Infinix, besides its smart accessories brand oraimo. The company also introduced an exclusive after-sales service brand, Carlcare. While the itel brand is positioned for the sub-Rs 6,000 market, the TECNO brand caters to the Rs 6,000 to Rs 14,000 market and Infinix phones are available in the Rs 6,000 to Rs 20,000 range. "By bringing smart devices at affordable price, we are democratising technology. As a brand we are trying to build consumer confidence and goodwill. We want our products to go to the masses," Talapatra added. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), Transsion retained its position as one of the top five smartphone sellers in the country as its offline-focused TECNO branded phones grew by 26 per cent, followed by itel with 14 per cent quarter-over-quarter growth in the second quarter of 2018. The online exclusive brand Infinix grew by 45 per cent, registering an overall 53 per cent year-over-year (YoY) growth for the company. In 2018, Transsion was included in Facebook and KPMG's list of top 50 Chinese cross-border brands. "In 2019, we will bring triple camera phone, better specifications and notch display," Talapatra said, adding that the company was prepared to move to the 5G ecosystem along with the industry. Established in 2006, Transsion has made its presence felt in some of the biggest emerging market economies across the world. In 2017, the company sold approximately 130 million devices and achieved revenue of around 20 billion Yuan (Rs 21,000 crore) globally. "India is our key focus area and we are committed to the 'Make in India' programme," Talapatra said, while referring to its manufacturing unit in Noida. "We started with CBU (completely-built-up) and moved to SKD (semi-knocked-down). We are now moving to CKD (completely-knocked-down) and by 2019, we will be 100 per cent CKD," he said. In a scathing attack at Congress, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Wednesday that the Congress has become more cunning since the Emergency and accused it of humiliating every institution, including courts and the Army. He also hit back at the opposition party for demanding a Joint Parliamentary Committee probe into the Rafale fighter jet deal even after the Supreme Court gave a clean chit to the government. The Prime Minister's attack came during his interaction with party workers from Puducherry, Vellore, Kanchipuram, Viluppuram and South Chennai through video-conferencing. "The Congress continuously attacked the Election Commission. They try to create an atmosphere of doubt against the pillar of democracy. However, when the same Election Commission declares results which they like, they seem to be fine with it," he said. He said not only the Election Commission, they have also humiliated the Army, the CAG and every institution important to democracy. "Take the case of courts. Recently they questioned a Supreme Court verdict just because they didn't like the decision. They tried to even impeach Chief Justice," he said. Modi said the last time when the Congress tried to threaten democracy, the people ensured it was stopped. "Reach out to people and tell them the Congress' DNA is still the same. Since the Emergency, they have become even more cunning. But India will not excuse Congress for playing with democracy. This has to be explained to the people," he said. He said the sunlight is the best disinfectant, similarly, information and awareness are important for democracy. "We should keep the people informed about the Congress party and its dangerous games. The perfect answer to undemocratic behaviour of the Congress is to strengthen democracy," he said. The Prime Minister said the opposition parties would do their best to mislead the people, but BJP workers need to counter their onslaught. "We need to improve rapport with people. BJP karyakartas stand out among all parties as most pleasant, informed and hard working. We need to reach out to all groups of people and convince them of the good work done." Responding to questions raised by the party workers on the reforms undertaken in the education sector since 2014, Modi said, "We are not only focusing on outlays, but on outcomes. We came up with the National Institutional Ranking Framework that ranks institutions based on objective criteria to ensure that we help institutions improve their quality and make them competitive." He said reforms are underway in the health sector too, with numerous AIIMS coming up in different states of the country. --IANS bns/prs (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The deadlock in Parliament over Rafale fighter jet deal continued on the seventh consecutive day as the Congress stalled the proceedings over its demand for a JPC probe on which the government kept mum, saying it was ready to discuss the controversial deal. The Rajya Sabha was adjourned for the day minutes after its proceedings began. The Lok Sabha managed to do some legislative business amid uproar and was finally adjourned for the day after witnessing two adjournments in the pre-lunch session. However, amid disruptions by the Congress, the AIADMK and the TDP on different issues, the Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill, 2016 that ensures effective regulation of surrogacy and prohibits commercial surrogacy was discussed and passed by voice vote in the Lok Sabha. As the Bill was passed, Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan called Union Food and Consumer Minister Ramvilas Paswan to initiate debate on the Consumer Protection Bill, 2018. But the AIADMK, the TDP and the Congress members continued with their protest forcing the Speaker to adjourn the House for the day. "I can't solve it. You have to discuss the issue. Please go back to your seats," Mahajan said requesting the AIADMK members, but they did not relent. Throughout the proceedings, Congress members kept raising their demand for a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) probe into the purchase of 36-ready-to-fly Rafale fighter jets deal. The AIADMK members were protesting Karnataka's proposal to construct a dam across the Cauvery at Mekadatu. Telugu Desam Party members, too, protested near Speaker's podium demanding special status for Andhra Pradesh. Earlier the House witnessed two adjournments. When the House reassembled at noon, Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge demanded a JPC probe which was not accepted by the government. "Serious apprehension of irregularities have appeared in the Rafale deal. The matter needs to be investigated and accountability needs to be fixed. That's why we are demanding a JPC probe," he said. He said the Supreme Court has given its judgement based on a letter provided by the government. "Kindly allow a JPC probe. Kindly ask the government to initiate a JPC probe into the matter," Kharge said. Parliamentary Affairs Minister Narendra Singh Tomar responded that the government was ready for a discussion on any issue, including the Rafale deal, but maintained silence over the demand for a JPC probe. Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh, too, said the government was ready for any discussion on Rafale. Communist Party of India-Marxist MP Mohammad Salim accused the government of lying in Supreme Court on the defence deal and supported the Congress' demand for a JPC probe. Trinamool Congress' Sudip Bandopadhyay said his party wants the House to run. He urged the Speaker to convene a meeting of the leaders to break the deadlock. Amid the din, an AIADMK member tore a piece of paper and threw it in the air near the reporters' table. Soon after Mahajan adjourned the House till 2 p.m. Earlier, she adjourned the House during the Question Hour after her attempts to run the House failed with disruptions continuing. The Rafale issue also rocked the Rajya Sabha as the Congress members demanded a JPC probe forcing Chairman M. Venkaiah Naidu to adjourn the House for the day within minutes after it met. It failed to transact any business. The Congress members sought an apology from the government for misleading both the House and the Supreme Court on the acquisition and pricing of Rafale jets, while others trooped near the chair holding placards to demand a JPC probe into the deal. The AIADMK and DMK members protested on the Cauvery issue. Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs Vijay Goel accused Congress of disrupting proceedings and said the government is ready for a discussion on all issues, including the Rafale deal. He said Congress member Anand Sharma had wrongly presented his (Goel's) statement on Tuesday in order to disrupt the House and urged the Chair to correct the record of the earlier proceedings. Naidu said he would look at the records to "verify" the claims. The Congress members loudly objected to Goel's allegation and many of them were on their toes. They trooped into the Chair's podium raising slogans. Bhupendra Yadav of BJP charged the Congress with deliberately disrupting proceedings of the House. As noisy scenes continued, the Chairman adjourned the House for the day. --IANS rak-bns/prs (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Wednesday questioned former Finance Minister P. Chidambaram in the INX Media money laundering case. ED officials grilled the former Union Minister on several issues, including Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) clearance to INX Media in 2007, soon after he arrived at the agency's office around 11 a.m. The agency had issued summons to Chidambaram in November asking him to appear before it for the ED to record his statement. The Delhi High Court had given Chidambaram interim protection from arrest in the case till October 25. The ED and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) were also probing how the UPA minister's son Karti Chidambaram managed to get the FIPB clearance. The junior Chidambaram was arrested on February 28 by the CBI for allegedly taking money to facilitate the FIPB clearance to INX Media when his father was part of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government. He was later granted bail. The son's Chartered Accountant S. Bhaskararaman was also arrested later granted bail. The ED probe so far showed that for the FIPB approval, INX Media's Peter and Indrani Mukerjea met P. Chidambaram, so that there was no hold-up or delay in their application. "P. Chidambaram asked for his son's business interests to be kept in mind. The ED identified payments of Rs 3.09 crore by Peter Mukerjea to ASCPL and associated entities controlled by Karti P. Chidambaram through manipulated debit notes. "During the investigation, it was admitted that debit notes were raised on the directions of Karti to show some transactions which in fact did not occur," the agency has alleged. The ED has said that the money so received by associated entities was channelled back into the ASCPL. The ED has attached properties worth Rs 54 crore belonging to Karti Chidambaram and a firm in connection with the case. The ED has also attached properties belonging to the Mukerjeas in connection with the same case. --IANS rak/in/vm (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Eight candidates are fighting it out for the much-hyped byelection to the Jasdan assembly constituency, polling for which will be held on Thursday. All eyes are on the big two contenders from the BJP and Congress. The election was necessitated after cabinet minister Kunwarji Bavaliya quit the Congress to join the ruling BJP, which elevated him the same day recently. Jasdan in Saurashtra region's Rajkot district has been a pocket borough of the opposition Congress and Bavaliya, who is a prominent Koli community leader. The by-poll has gained significance in the backdrop of the BJP losing three of the Hindi heartland states in the recent state assembly elections. After the exit of Bawaliya, the Congress has fielded another strong candidate from the Koli community, Avshar Nakia, who is known to have a strong ground connect, which analysts say will help him give a good fight to the BJP. The Election Commission has deployed 1,150 personnel for Jasdan's 262 polling stations. Each polling station will have one presiding officer aided by three other personnel. "The observer, the Rajkot SP and the District Election Officer, have decided to appoint one micro observer. The three members have also identified 25 polling sttions where video cameras will be installed. There will be webcasting in some 24 polling stations also, said Murli Krishna, Chief Electoral Officer (CEO), Gujarat. The constituency has 2,32,236 voters comprising 1,22,180 male and 1,09,936 female voters. Besides that, there will be 120 services voters from various forces. "All security arrangements have been made. Today we have dispatched the men and material required for the by-poll," said Murli Krishna. --IANS desai/prs (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Facebook has elevated its senior Indian-origin executive Karandeep Anand to head Workplace -- the company's two-year-old enterprise communication tool now being used by over 30,000 organisations globally including in India. Anand, who was earlier Head of Product for Facebook Marketplace and Payments services, would handle the product team and work closely with Julien Codorniou, current Vice President of Workplace, a Facebook spokesperson told IANS on Wednesday. "We're thrilled that Karandeep is joining Workplace as its new head of Workplace, effectively immediately. Karandeep joins Workplace from Marketplace, and brings with him a wealth of experience from both a consumer and enterprise background," said the spokesperson. As Head of Product for Marketplace and Payments tools, Anand's team was responsible for powering commerce across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp. "Karandeep will be partnering closely with Julien Codorniou, who will stay in his current VP role to lead Workplace sales and partnerships," the spokesperson added. Before joining Facebook nearly four years back, Anand who is an alumnus of International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Hyderabad, spent 15 years at Microsoft in various key roles. "I'm excited to now be part of the journey of bringing Workplace to companies across the globe and help them unlock the potential of their biggest asset -- people," Anand wrote on his LinkedIn profile. Facebook launched Workplace in 2016 to help make companies more connected and productive. Currently, more than 30,000 organisations are using Workplace worldwide -- including Walmart, Heineken, Spotify, Lyft and the Reliance Group. "A company's culture is leading indicator of its success and the productivity of its work force. Workplace brings the power of shaping culture by connecting people at work in ways never imagined before," Anand wrote. Facebook in 2017 launched the desktop version of its Workplace Chat app that can be downloaded by anyone on PC, Mac, Android or iOS. Workplace Chat includes video chat with a co-worker or group, screen sharing and file sharing. "Workplace is one of the fastest growing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) product and a key growth area for Facebook," said Anand. --IANS na/sed (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The fate of 14 miners, who have been trapped in a flooded coal pit in Meghalaya's East Jaintia Hills district for a week, remains unknown as rescuers are battling with the surging water level inside the 370-feet coal pit, an official said on Wednesday. The Meghalaya Human Rights Commission (MHRC) has filed a Suo Motu case against the state government for compensation for the trapped miners inside the illegal mine. A government official, who is overseeing the rescue operations at the Lumthari mining site, about 130 km from here, said the trapped miners are feared dead as the water from nearby Lytein stream is gushing into the pit. "Only a miracle can save these miners. None of us knows where these miners are. They need oxygen and food to survive," the official told IANS on condition of anonymity. The National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) has used sonar system and underwater camera to detect the trapped miners. However, the system failed to locate any of those trapped in the main well due to poor visibility. Experts from Coal India Limited, geologists have visited the site. Meghalaya Police arrested Jrin alias Krip Chulet, the owner of the coal mine from Narwan village. Police said that a hunt is on to arrest the other members of the illegal mining nexus. The accident inside the coal pit on December 13 morning was of significance, especially after the National Green Tribunal (NGT) had ordered an interim ban on "rat-hole" coal mining in the state from April 17, 2014. "The State Human Rights Commission has issued a notice to the Chief Secretary Y. Tsering to conduct an inquiry into the entire matter and submit a detailed report before the State Commission within 30 days," MHRC Secretary Aldous Mawlong said. The State Commission is of the firm opinion to grant interim relief to the next of kin of those unfortunate miners, Mawlong said. "We are putting all efforts to evacuate the trapped miners. We are using all available technology," Assistant Commandant NDRF, Santosh Kumar Singh, told IANS. More than 100 rescuers including 72 members from the NDRF, 23 from State Disaster Response Force (SDRF) and five members of the Fire and Emergency Service were deployed at the site. "We suspect the miners are trapped inside the lateral mining chambers of coal pit. It is difficult to know as to how many chambers are there because of poor visibility," Singh said. Police has registered a case against the mine owner under several sections of the Prevention of Damage to Public Property Act, and Section 21(1) of the Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Act. Chief Minister Conrad Sangma had promised that "appropriate action will be taken at appropriate time against the people who are involved in the illegal mining and this is not acceptable to us". Coal mine accidents are common in the mountainous state because of unscientific mining procedure, commonly known as "rat hole mining". --IANS rrk/in (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A group of former bureaucrats and diplomats have come down heavily on Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath over the Bulandshahr mob violence which they said showed "perverted" fundamental principles of governance and constitutional ethics of the BJP government in the state and slammed the "stony silence" of Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the issue. "The mob violence in Bulandshahr in Uttar Pradesh on Dec 3, 2018, instigated and engineered with malicious intent, led to the cold-blooded murder of a police officer brave enough to step forward single-handedly to pacify the mob, marks the most dangerous turn yet in the direction taken by the of hate in recent times. "It shows that in India's most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, fundamental principles of governance, of constitutional ethics and of humane social conduct stand perverted. The Chief Minister of the state acts as high priest of the agenda of bigotry and majoritarian supremacy -- an agenda which now seems to take precedence over everything else," they said in an open letter. The 83 signatories to the letter -- including former Foreign Secretaries Shiv Shankar Menon (who was also National Security Adviser), Shayam Saran and Sujata Singh, former Ambassador and DGP Julio Ribeiro, former Special Secretary Vappala Balakrishnan, former Delhi Lieutenant Governor Najeeb Jung, Harsh Mander and Jawahar Sircar -- said in the letter that it was a measure of rapid erosion of constitutional values that they as a group had felt a compelling need to speak out about as many as nine times in the last 18 months. "The pace of erosion has been frightening and with each slip, we seem to sink further into a lawless abyss," they said. The Bulandshahr episode, which followed a succession of events aimed at isolating and intimidating Muslim community in Uttar Pradesh, showed that under Yogi Adityanath, hooliganism and thuggery have been mainstreamed into governance, not just to intimidate minorities but to teach a lesson to anyone, including police personnel and others in the administration, who dared to be even-handed in their approach to minority communities. They said there was no doubt that there was nothing spontaneous about the violence that led to the killing of Inspector Subodh Kumar Singh, nor was there any doubt as to who the political elements were that aided and abetted the violence. "This was a deliberate attempt to display majoritarian muscle and send a message to Muslim communities living in the region that they have to live in fear, accept their subordinate status and conform to the cultural diktats of the majority community." The Chief Minister refused to acknowledge the gravity of the incident and its communal intent, condemn the perpetrators of violence or direct the police to take action against them, and instead asked them to focus attention on those responsible for illegal cow slaughter, the former bureaucrats said. "The police authorities draw an equivalence between the killing of a police officer and the illegal slaughter of cows and claim that unless both crimes are investigated together, it will not be possible to come to any conclusions about the violence of the mob and murder of a colleague," they said. Turning their attention to Modi, the former civil servants said: "Our Prime Minister, who is so voluble in his election campaigns and who never tires of telling us how the Constitution of India is the only holy book he worships, maintains a stony silence even as he sees a Chief Minister handpicked by him treat the same Constitution with sheer contempt. "It is evident that for the Sangh Parivar, constitutional morality is of no value, and is necessarily subordinate to the ideals of majoritarian supremacy." They asserted that never before in recent history had the of hate, division and exclusion been so dominant and the poisonous ideology, which had penetrated deep into the body politic. "This is a crucial moment and we can't take it lying down anymore. We call upon all citizens to unite in a crusade against the of hate and division -- a politics which aims to destroy the fundamental principles on which our republic is founded." They urged the citizens to demand the resignation of Yogi Adityanath for his failure to abide by the Constitution to which he has sworn his allegiance and to remind the Chief Secretary, DGP, Home Secretary and all other members of high civil services concern of their constitutional duty to fearlessly implement the rule of law rather than to perverse diktats of their political masters. They also urged the Allahabad High Court to take suo motu cognisance of the Bulandshahr incident and order a judicial inquiry supervised by them to uncover the true facts, expose the political collusion, fix responsibility and recommend action. --IANS and/vsc/nir (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) : Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot on Wednesday took charge of his office at the secretariat here. He first offered his prayers at the temple situated inside the secretariat complex and then offered floral tributes to the statue of Mahatma Gandhi. Thereafter, he entered his office and assumed charge as Chief Minister of the state. Chief Secretary D.B. Gupta and other officials were present on the occasion. One of his first meetings with officials included discussions on loan waivers for farmers. It needs to be mentioned here that while Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh governments have announced loan waivers for farmers, Rajasthan is yet to take a decision on the farm loan waiver promise made in the manifesto as the total loan is estimated to be Rs 1 lakh crore. From the Secretariat, Gehlot also paid a visit to the Governor's House and met Governor Kalyan Singh. --IANS arc/oeb/sed (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) To spread awareness about Internet safety and promote digital citizenship, Google on Wednesday announced the fourth edition of its "Web Rangers" contest that will reward school students who know how to stay smart, safe and savvy online. The competition aims to encourage teenagers to unlock creativity in highlighting the importance of cyber safety, the company said in a statement. The students can choose the category that interests them and put their creativity and skills to test. In the "Campaign" category, the participants have to run their own Internet safety campaign, either individually or as a team of three. It could be one large initiative or a collection of multiple projects like a social media campaign, a video series, awareness drives or all of them - there is no restriction on the format or the number of initiatives, Google said. In "Project" category -- for those who prefer to work individually -- the contestant has to create a video, website, app or a game that should empower users to stay safe on the Internet. "Web Rangers" was launched in India in 2015 with student ambassadors across more than 15 countries. The contest is open to students within the age group of 10 and 17 years and the deadline for submitting the entry is January 21, Google said. --IANS vc/na/sed (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The December Social Services Advisory Board meeting has been cancelled due to the Christmas holiday.Social Services Advisory Board meetings are generally held on the fourth Tuesday of the month at 5:30pm in the Board room inside the Joseph D. Carter State Office Building in Leonardtown.NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN that the Commissioners of St. Mary's County will hold a Public Hearing on Tuesday, January 8, 2019 at 6:00PM in the Chesapeake Building located at 41770 Baldridge Street in Leonardtown, Maryland to consider: Airport Rules Ordinance.Citizens are encouraged to attend and participate in the public hearing. Note that as a result of the evidence and comments made at the public hearing, amendments may be made to the proposed Airport Rules Ordinance. Written comments, questions and suggestions may be submitted on or before January 15, 2019, to:Commissioners of St. Mary's County, P.O. Box 653, Leonardtown, MD 20650ORCSMC@stmarysmd.comCopies of the proposed Airport Rules Ordinance are available in the Department of Public Works and Transportation, 44825 St. Andrews Church Road, California, MD, 20619.Any reasonable accommodation for persons with disabilities should be requested by contacting the St. Mary's County Communications Director at (301) 475-4200, ext. *1342.COMMISSIONERS of ST. MARY'S COUNTYNOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN that the Commissioners of St. Mary's County will hold a Public Hearing on January 8, 2019 at 9:45 a.m. in the Chesapeake Building located at 41770 Baldridge Street in Leonardtown, Maryland to consider proposed revisions to the St. Mary's County Public Ethics Ordinance.Citizens are encouraged to attend and participate in the public hearing.Note that as a result of the evidence and comments made at the public hearing, amendments may be made to the St. Mary's County Ethics Ordinance.Written comments, questions and suggestions may be submitted on or before January 15, 2019 to: Commissioners of St. Mary's County, P.O. Box 653, Leonardtown, MD 20650.Copies of the proposed revised Public Ethics Ordinance are available in the County Attorney's Office, 41770 Baldridge Street, Leonardtown, Maryland and at www.co.saint-marys.md.us Any reasonable accommodation for persons with disabilities should be requested by contacting the St. Mary's County Public Information Director at 301-475-4200, extension *1342.Commissioners of St. Mary's County, MarylandBy: David A. Weiskopf, County AttorneyThe funding utility for St. Mary's County Non-profit entities for the FY2020 Budget year, as awarded by the Commissioners of St. Mary's County, is now open.The Notice of Funding Availability can be found at www.stmarysmd.com/finance/non-profit . Those using the utility should read the notice completely and follow the links. The application process is entirely electronic and must be submitted on-line.The application is for agencies with IRS 501(c)(3) status only. The deadline for submission is January 11, 2019. Late submissions will not be allowed. Final adoption of the FY2020 Budget is anticipated to be in May 2019.Agencies are urged to not delay beginning the application process as it is new for some. The system will allow you to save and go back and edit your submission until the January 11 deadline.Questions about the utility should be emailed to nonprofithelp@stmarysmd.comThe Town of Leonardtown cancelled the Planning and Zoning Commission meeting for Monday, December 17, 2018.The next meeting will be held on Tuesday, January 22, 2019.The Commissioners of St. Mary's County will host their first Public Forum of the New Year on Tuesday, January 8, 2019 at 6:30 p.m. The forum will take place in their meeting room inside the Chesapeake Building, at 41770 Baldridge Street, in Leonardtown.Citizens unable to attend in person, but wishing to voice a concern, may do so on the county's social media platforms. Comments and questions can be posted using the hashtag #CSMCforum on the county's Facebook page at www.Facebook.com/StMarysCountyGovernment or Twitter feed (@StMarysCoGov). Time permitting, comments and questions will be read during the forum. Citizens should include their full name and the location in the county in which they live when posting to social media. Social Media comments will become part of the official record.Commissioners of St. Mary's County Public Forums are televised live on St. Mary's County Government TV 95 (SMCG TV 95) on Atlantic Broadband Cable and streamed live for online viewing on the at stmarysmd.viebit.com/player_live.php?hash=177caff4-f883-4366-9b67-b47f2b974e96 or on the county's YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/user/StMarysCoMDGov/live The forum will re-air on SMCG TV 95 on Sunday, January 13, at 7 p.m. Videos of the Forums are also available for on demand viewing on the county's YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/user/StMarysCoMDGov?feature=mhee as well as the St. Mary's County Government TV 95 video on demand site at www.stmarysmd.com/video/ Individuals wishing to speak at the Public Forum will be allowed up to three (3) minutes to address the Commissioners (those representing a group will be allotted five (5) minutes to speak.) Anyone wishing to provide more detailed comments can do so via email or regular mail.The Commissioners of St. Mary's County can be reached via e-mail at csmc@stmarysmd.com or by U.S. mail at Commissioners of St. Mary's County, P.O. Box 653, Leonardtown, Maryland 20650.The Commissioners of St. Mary's County will hold three additional Public Forums in 2019 on the following dates: April 9, July 9, October 8.All Public Forums will be held in the commissioners meeting room beginning at 6:30 p.m.As Maryland prepares for the 2019 legislative session, over 600 leaders from all levels of the state's public and private sectors prepare to discuss what's next for counties at the Maryland Association of Counties (MACo) Winter Conference on January 2-4, 2019, in Cambridge, MD.Sessions will address county priorities like the opioid epidemic, school facility funding and Next Generation 9-1-1 implementation. The theme of the conference, "Charting the Course," encourages attendees to discuss local government policies and practices and what lies ahead for county government. Participants will focus on challenges and best practices in Maryland county services; building relationships with newly elected officials at the county, state, and legislative levels and strategic planning for the coming years.Every four years, following Maryland's local elections, MACo holds a unique orientation to provide vital education for newly elected county officials. The Newly Elected Officials Orientation will provide a foundation of governance best practices, focusing on local government budgeting and structure, legislative process, and mentoring between veteran and new officials.Attendees will learn how to enhance their leadership in local government with the nearly 30 educational break-out sessions, general sessions, meetings, and briefings taking place at this 3-day event. Sessions will provide a foundational understanding of county government and the deep policy issues of the moment.Commissioner President Randy Guy, a member of MACo's Legislative Committee, will moderate a panel on Legislation, Litigation and Legitimacy: Key Legal Issues for the 2019 Session. Commissioners Eric Colvin (1st District), Michael L. Hewitt (2nd District) and John E. O'Connor (3rd District) will attend the conference. County Administrator Dr. Rebecca Bridgett and Communications Director Tony Jones will also attend."As we get down to the business of serving the people of St. Mary's County, the MACo Winter Conference will provide a number of opportunities to learn from our colleagues from around the State," said Commissioner President Randy Guy. "The conference always allows us some great best practices which can be of benefit to the citizens of St. Mary's County." Telecom giant Huawei is set to invest $2 billion in cybersecurity over the next five years as part of its efforts to ease security concerns, the state-owned China Daily reported on Wednesday. Through the investment, the company will hire more people and upgrade its laboratories, after several governments expressed doubt over the safety of its products, Efe news reported citing the newspaper. "We will open a security transparency centre in Brussels in the first quarter of 2019 to assure clients that our products are reliable," said Huawei's rotating chairman Hu Houkun. The announcement came weeks after the detention of Huawei's Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou in Canada for alleged violation of economic sanctions imposed by the US against Iran. Hu said the firm was waiting for a "just conclusion of Meng's case", according to the daily. --IANS soni/bg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) President's rule will be imposed in Jammu and Kashmir from Wednesday midnight with President Ram Nath Kovind signing a proclamation to give effect to the recommendation of the state Governor Satya Pal Malik. Home Ministry officials said that Kovind has signed the proclamation based on the proposal sent by the ministry following a report by the state governor. The term of Governor's Rule, imposed in the state in June this year, comes to an end on Wednesday. The state had plunged into a political crisis in June this year after BJP withdrew from the coalition government with People's Democratic Party. Last month Malik dissolved the state assembly which had been kept in suspended animation. Under the provisions of Jammu and Kashmir Constitution, Governor's rule can be imposed for six months, but with consent of the President. The Constitution grants special status to Jammu and Kashmir. --IANS rak-ps/prs (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Tokyo has lodged a complaint with Russia over the installation of military barracks on two islands in the Kuril archipelago that are claimed by Japan, a government spokesperson said on Wednesday. The protest was made on Tuesday after the Russian media announced the construction of four barracks on the islands of Etorofu and Kunashiri -- the largest islands in southern Kuril, as well as plans to construct other military facilities, Efe news reported. Japanese government spokesperson Yoshihide Suga said that Tokyo had used diplomatic channels to submit a formal protest with Russia and it would continue negotiations to resolve the issue and sign a peace treaty between the two countries. Four islands of the archipelago's 56 were occupied during World War II by Russia, which has been involved in a dispute with Japan over their sovereignty ever since. The issue is a main point of contention between Moscow and Tokyo. --IANS mag/sed (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Slamming the new Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Kamal Nath's comment on migrants from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on Wednesday said he should not forget about where he originally hails from. "Kamal Nath should remind himself where he actually belongs to. He has a connection with Kanpur and Kolkata. He came as an outsider in his constituency Chhindwara and won the elections," Sanjay Singh, Rajya Sabha MP from AAP, told the media. Immediately after taking oath as CM on Monday, Kamal Nath had told the media that his government would give incentives to those investors who provide 70 per cent of the jobs to the youth from Madhya Pradesh. He had also said that people from other states like Bihar and Madhya Pradesh take away the jobs of locals. "Earlier, it was Maharashtra and Gujarat who have been against migration of people from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar into those states. Now, Kamal Nath has come up with the same ideology. Congress should question him on what grounds he made such a statement and condemn it," Singh added. --IANS som/nir (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Karnataka's 111-year-old revered pontiff Shivakumara Swami of Siddaganga mutt at Tumakuru returned to the mutt from Chennai hospital, where he recently underwent a liver operation, an official said on Wednesday. "The pontiff has recovered from the surgery and is in good health," the mutt's administrative officer S. Vishwanath told IANS from Tumakuru, about 70km northwest from the state capital. The pontiff was flown to Chennai from Bengaluru on December 7 in an air ambulance for the operation to treat his liver and bile duct infection and was flown back after his recovery to Bengaluru on Wednesday. "The swami was able to travel by road to Tumakuru after he was airlifted to Bengaluru from Chennai," the official said. Known among his followers as a walking god and an incarnation of 12th century renowned social reformer Basava, the Lingayat seer is also the head of the Sree Siddaganga Education Society, which runs about 125 educational institutions in the state -- from engineering colleges to business schools. The over century-old Swamiji has been in and out of hospitals of late for treatment of symptoms related to his advanced age. --IANS bha/prs (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Assam Forest and Minister Parimal Suklabaidya on Wednesday visited Kaziranga National Park (KNP) and said security of the park will be enhanced. The minister's visit followed the killing of an adult male rhino in the park's Bagori Range on December 16. Officials said the incident took place in the Bhalukjan area of the Bagori Range. The carcass was found with its horn removed. This is the sixth incident of poaching in KNP in 2018. "The poachers disguised themselves as tourists," said the minister on Wednesday. The carcass of the rhino was first spotted by a tourist who was out on an elephant ride. "We will increase the manpower strength in the KNP soon," minister said. --IANS ah/prs (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Kerala High Court here on Wednesday dismissed a plea by the eighth accused in the infamous actress abduction case, actor Dileep, for a CBI probe into the case. In his petition, Dileep pleaded that he has been framed in the case by the police relying only on the statement of the prime accused, Pulsar Suni. Meanwhile, the prosecution put up their defense by stating that an accused in a case has no right to decide on what sort of probe should take place and, moreover, this is nothing but a ploy to delay the trial in the case. The police probe team has already filed the detailed charge sheet in the case and the court on March 14 summoned all the accused. Dileep was arrested after two rounds of questioning on July 10, 2017, for his alleged role in the conspiracy behind the abduction of the young actress. Dileep's former wife Manju Warrier is one of the witnesses in the case. After being in jail for 85 days, Dileep secured bail. The actress was allegedly abducted on February 17 last year while she was on her way to Kochi from Thrissur. Pulsar Suni, the prime accused, drove her around for two hours before she was dropped near the home of director-actor Lal, who later called the police. --IANS sg/oeb/sed (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The number of journalists killed on duty rose in 2018 and the number murdered in reprisal for their work doubled, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reported on Wednesday. "The number of journalists targeted for murder in reprisal for their reporting nearly doubled in 2018 from a year earlier, driving up the overall count of journalists killed on the job," the CPJ said in the report, which highlighted the killing of US-based Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey. In total, 53 deaths were registered from January 1 to December 15 this year, as compared to 47 in 2017 and 50 in 2016. Among the deaths, at least 34 were "singled out for murder" as compared to 18 journalists killed in the same way in 2017. "Afghanistan was the deadliest country and accounted for much of the increase," the CPJ said, adding that some 13 journalists were killed in the South Asian country -- nine of them on April 30 in a double suicide attack claimed by the Islamic State where the second blast seemingly targeted journalists and first responders who had gathered at the scene. The CPJ also noted the deaths of four reporters at the Capital Gazette newspaper in the US state of Maryland. They were killed by a man whose defamation case against the company had failed. In total, the CPJ said that as well as the 34 reporters killed in reprisal for their work, 11 were killed in crossfire or combat and another eight in dangerous assignments. According to the organization, the global crisis of press freedom was closely tied to "changes in technology that allowed more people to practise journalism even as it made journalists expendable to the political and criminal groups who once needed the news media to spread their message". Another factor was a "lack of international leadership on journalists' rights and safety". The report highlighted the case of Khashoggi in this respect. "The White House, traditionally a strong defender of global press freedom, has equivocated on the blame for Khashoggi's murder despite, according to the (Washington) Post, CIA conclusions that only the Crown Prince could have ordered such an operation," the report said. It pointed out US President Donald Trump's statement that whether Khashoggi's murder was ordered by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman or not, the US "intends to remain a steadfast partner of Saudi Arabia". "Essentially, Trump signalled that countries that do enough business with the US are free to murder journalists without consequence," the report said. The CPJ also highlighted a European crisis, citing the murder of Slovakian reporter Jan Kuciak in February after Malta's Daphne Caruana Galizi in 2017. Both cases remain unsolved, facilitating "a state of impunity that ... inevitably perpetuates further violence". On the other hand, the number of journalists killed in combat or crossfire dropped to the lowest since 2011. --IANS soni/sed (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Late lawyer and human rights activist Asma Jahangir has been awarded the UN Human Rights Prize for 2018. Her daughter Munizae Jahangir received the prestigious award on behalf of her mother. The award is given to individuals and organisations in recognition of outstanding achievement in human rights. Asma Jahangir was announced as one of the four winners of the quinquennial prize in October. Receiving the award for her late mother, Munizae Jahangir dedicated it to Pakistani women and their courage. The ceremony was held at the UN Headquarters in New York on Tuesday. Other prize winners included women's rights activist in Tanzania, Rebeca Gyumi; activist for the rights of indigenous Brazilian communities Joenia Wapichana and Ireland's human rights organisation Front Line Defenders. Previous winners include Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Jimmy Carter and Malala Yousafzai, the News International reported. Asma became the fourth Pakistani woman to be awarded the UN Human Rights Prize. Before her, Begum Ra'Ana Liaquat Ali Khan (1978), Benazir Bhutto (2008) and Malala Yousufzai (2013) had been accorded the honour. Asma, who died in February, was known for her outspoken nature and unrelenting pursuit for human rights as well as for remaining undaunted in the face of extreme pressure and opposition. She is also remembered as a champion of the disenfranchised and for her services towards building a democratic and more inclusive Pakistan. --IANS in/ (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Automobile major Maruti Suzukis Chairman R.C. Bhargava on Wednesday said it plans to stop manufacturing Bharat Stage (BS)-IV compliant cars by the end of 2019. The company's decision is in line with the Supreme Court's order stating that no BS-IV vehicle should be sold in the country from April 1, 2020 as the BS-VI emission norms would come into force. "Broadly, the production of BS-VI will largely come to a stop by December 2019," Bhargava said here during a media interaction. "We may still give you some BS-IV vehicles after December 2019 if there is a customer demand for those vehicles... and if we are sure that we can actually register the vehicle before March 31." Bhargava also observed that the sale of BS-VI compliant diesel vehicles may take a hit as their prices would be significantly higher than BS-VI petrol models. "In BS-VI, diesel car price will go up substantially and we will have to consider the customer preference to a diesel car at the new price of a BS-VI diesel car, which will be roughly Rs 2.5 lakh more than a petrol car of BS-VI," he said. The Indian auto industry will fully migrate to manufacturing only BS-VI compliant vehicles on a pan India basis from April 1, 2020. Earlier, the government had decided to "leapfrog directly from BS-IV to BS-VI grade by April 1, 2020, skipping BS-V altogether." --IANS rrb-rv/mag/bg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) This past summer, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation presented the greater Fort Lauderdale community with an initiative to address the low-income housing crisis in the city. Partnering with a coalition of nonprofit organizations, including the United Way, AHF announced plans to break ground on a residential campus for low-income residents in Fort Lauderdale. SFGN covered the story with a front-page feature because not every gay man lives in a beachside condo. With numerous local community leaders present, the various agencies set out their vision for a housing complex which could advance solutions rather than hopelessness. The position of the South Florida Gay News is solid and certain. We stand squarely and firmly behind the proposal, which is a bold and collaborative initiative. As the Pride Center at Equality Park in Wilton Manors has demonstrated with its own initiative, there are those in our community in need of low cost housing, too. This is an LGBT issue we must own. We are a part of the community, not apart from it. In the past month, however, angry neighbors are rising in opposition to AHFs proposed 680-unit complex. It is the NIMBY Virus, infecting nearby residents - the not in my backyard syndrome. The objections, however, are based on false fears, not credible arguments. This is a humane and needed project which will enhance the reputation of our community. Current statistics indicate that 789,000 Floridians spend more than half of their income on rent each month. You simply cant survive that way. Our cities must be livable. We should embrace the opportunity to create a place where less wealthy residents find and secure clean and safe housing. The project is going up in an area near many other small apartments and office buildings, not far from the county courthouse. The complex will be within a stones throw of downtown Fort Lauderdale, accessible to public transportation and nightlife. It is NOT in the residential neighborhoods of Rio Vista. For decades, the city of Fort Lauderdale has been regressive and repressive when caring for its poor and disenfranchised populations. This is a city where past mayors once asked our citizens to pour kerosene into garbage cans to kill off the homeless. It is time we changed directions. The AHF project gives us a chance to be pioneers. The affordable housing complex is designed to create small, livable housing units. If you are concerned about the growing tides of homeless gathering in urban communities, consider this a project which helps prevents hopelessness. The downtown and centrally located venue for this undertaking will enable its residents to find scores of employment opportunities at the hundreds of nearby restaurants, hotels, and hospitality establishments pouring over on East Las Olas Boulevard and A1A. Not far from the city bus terminal and railroad, residents will have easy access to mass transit and those scooters popping up on every corner of downtown. There wont be an overflow of parking. There will be an overflow of opportunity. The Fort Lauderdale project has been developed by the Healthy Housing Foundation, which is an offshoot of AHF. Its specifically targeted to assist low-income and chronically ill individuals, along with families, focusing on sustainable rental-to-ownership models. Its a humane idea, creating a framework for other communities to follow. AHF has been working to address the housing needs of the chronically ill for 30 years. A program like the Fort Lauderdale project was recently launched in Los Angeles as well. Years ago, AHF was in the forefront of advocating ADAP housing in Miami. Noble goals should be celebrated, not censured. They are treading where others dare not dare. Secure shelter provides sanity of the most fundamental sort. First, of course, is physical security from the storm. But having an affordable roof over your head, which you can call your own, keeps you motivated and healthy, gainfully employed, and off the streets. No matter how small, it gives you something you can call your own. It creates and fosters self-esteem. How many times have we all heard the phrase, There but for the grace of God go I? How many people have you met that are a paycheck away from being broke, who cant afford the most basic of necessities? The city of Fort Lauderdale holds boat parades and air shows, and sponsors museums and performing arts centers. We bill ourselves as a vacation paradise and the Venice of America. We are a rich, luxurious community, lining A1A with hotels and restaurants, where the world comes to sun, swim, and surf. Can we not forget that the sun which tans also burns? Can we not forget that there are good people with empty pockets who need a fair shake and a chance to be part of that dream? Can we open our hearts to a clean, affordable and livable low cost housing project which creates opportunity and hope? We are all entitled to a small ray of sunshine in our lives. Happy Holidays, everyone. A UN spokesman said that the redeployment of forces from the city of Hodeidah and three ports shall be completed within 21 days. "The full mutual redeployment of all forces from the city of Hodeidah and the ports of Hodeidah, Saleef and Ras Isa shall be completed within a maximum period of 21 days after the cease-fire enters into force," Xinhua quoted Stephane Dujarric, spokesman for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres as saying. The UN will convene Yemen's warring parties by video link on Wednesday to discuss the redeployment, he said on Tuesday, adding that the meeting will be chaired by retired major general Patrick Cammaert, who has been appointed as the UN Chair of the Redeployment Coordination Committee. The cease-fire agreement reached between the Yemeni government and Houthi rebels during the UN-sponsored peace talks in Sweden went into effect at midnight local time (2100 GMT) on Monday. The UN-brokered cease-fire covers the strategic Red Sea port city of Hodeidah along with its seaports which are still controlled by the Iranian-backed Houthis, local officials told Xinhua. --IANS vin/ (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Former Union Minister and TDP MP Y. S. Chowdary on Wednesday told the Delhi High Court that the Enforcement Directorate officials have treated him with indignity and denied him to have lunch. The court was hearing Chowdary's plea challenging action initiated by the ED in a case pertaining to the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA). The TDP MP is accused of bank fraud. Chowdary, a member of the Rajya Sabha, is a close aide of Telugu Desam Party (TDP) President and Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu. Chowdary was Minister of Science and Technology in the Modi cabinet till March when the TDP pulled out of the NDA government. Chowdary's counsel told Justice Najmi Waziri that parliamentarian was treated with indignity during his questioning for nearly eight hours on two days: December 4 and 5. Chowdary has appeared before the ED for questioning on December 3, 4 and 5 after the High Court on November 30 directed the probe agency not to take any coercive steps against the former minister. Chowdary's counsel senior advocates Rajiv Nayar and Dayan Krishnan told the court that ED officials breached its order directing the agency not to take coercive action against the former minister. Chowdary's counsel said he was treated nicely on the first day of questioning which began at 11:30 a.m. and concluded at 6:00 p.m. He was allowed to have lunch on the first day. But the former minister was not offered food or permitted to take his lunch by the ED officials the next two days, the counsel added. He was forced to sit in the agency office till 8 p.m. even after the questioning concluded at 6 pm the next two days. However, ED counsel Anil Soni denied the allegations and told the court that the MP was offered food, but he had refused. The court asked Chowdary's counsel to file the allegations in an affidavit and directed the ED to respond to these allegations. Meanwhile, the court extended till January 16 the interim relief granted to Chowdhary asking ED not to take coercive steps against the former minister. --IANS akk/prs (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Under attack from various quarters for his announcement that only those industries that employ 70 per cent locals could avail incentives from the state government, Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Kamal Nath on Wednesday said other states also have the policy of giving preference in employment to locals. Kamal Nath told the media: "Such policy exists in other states too, including Gujarat. So, I have not said anything new. Locals should get preference (in jobs)." Soon after taking oath as Chief Minister on Monday, Kamal Nath had told the media that his government would give concessions to those who invest in Madhya Pradesh provided they gave 70 per cent of the jobs to locals. He had also said that people from other states like Bihar and Madhya Pradesh took away the jobs of locals. --IANS nks/nir (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) government plans to file a reference before the Election Commission against former President Asif Ali Zardari seeking his disqualification over concealment of assets, Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry said on Wednesday. Addressing a press conference here, Chaudhry claimed that nomination papers of the Pakistan Peoples' Party co-chairperson omitted details of an apartment he owned in the US and added that the PTI had directed its Sindh lawmaker Khurram Sher Zaman to file the reference. "Zardari owns an apartment in the US. Under Article 62/63, he was bound to declare his assets which he didn't. He is not eligible to remain a member of Parliament anymore," Chaudhry was quoted as saying by Geo News. He said that Zardari, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) supremo Shehbaz Sharif had already contested their last elections. "Their house of cards has tumbled down," he said. "They didn't let the institutions initiate transparent inquiries. We promised to our voters that we will bring corruption-free political structure." Chaudhry claimed that Pakistan's image was improving abroad due to several anti-corruption probes and it was resulting in more foreign direct investments. --IANS soni/sed (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Patna Pirates pulled off a miraculous 40-40 tie against Bengaluru Bulls in a thrilling Pro Kabaddi League match here on Wednesday. Vikas Jaglan was the hero for Patna as he got one tackle and two raid points to save Patna from certain defeat. Pardeep Narwal was the top scorer for Patna Pirates with 17 points. For Bengaluru Bulls, Rohit Kumar scored 16 points while Mahender got a high five in defence. Patna Pirates are still in contention for a place in the play-offs while Bengaluru Bulls have already qualified. Both teams got a couple of raid points in the first two minutes to be level at 2-2. Pardeep Narwal and Pawan Sehrawat picked up a few more raid points for their teams with Patna leading 5-4 after five minutes. It did look like Patna Pirates would steal a lead as Pardeep Narwal made a two-point raid in the 6th minute to lead 8-5. A super tackle in the 7th minute turned the tide completely in Bengaluru Bulls' favour. Rohit Kumar mad a successful raid in the 16th minute as Bengaluru Bulls inflicted an all out to lead 17-11. Patna Pirates failed to score a single point for nine minutes and paid a price for it as they went into the break trailing 11-20. Patna Pirates defence had a disappointing first half as they could score just three tackle points in 20 minutes. The Pirates began the second half strongly as they inflicted an all out in the 24th minute to level the match at 21-21. It was a solid run as the Pirates scored 10 points in four minutes to wipe out Bengaluru's lead. Pardeep Narwal made a brilliant raid in the 26th minute to come up with a super raid and give Patna Pirates a 26-22 lead. Rohit Kumar tried to wake Bengaluru from their slumber as he made a two-point raid in the 29th minute to trail 25-27. Bengaluru picked up two bonus points as they trailed by just one point with less than 10 minutes to go. It was Rohit Kumar yet again who got a super raid as Bengaluru Bulls led 32-30 in the 33rd minute as they averted an all out once again. Patna Pirates inflicted an all out in the 35th minute to lead 35-34. With less than three minutes to go Bengaluru Bulls led 37-36 but it was still anyone's game. Bengaluru Bulls sent Pardeep Narwal to the bench in the 39th minute as Bengaluru looked to close out the match. There was last-minute drama as Vikas Jaglan got a touch, bonus and raid point to secure a tie for Patna Pirates. --IANS gau/bg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Pregnant women and the extremely obese are among those at high risk for complications from the influenza or flu -- including death -- and should be tested and begin antiviral treatment promptly, according to new guidelines. The new guidelines released by the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA), noted that antiviral treatment should be given within two days after the start of flu symptoms in people both at high risk for complications (such as bronchitis, middle ear infection, and pneumonia), and even for those without. "High-risk individuals who are hospitalised with flu complications are at an increased risk for serious bacterial infections and infectious diseases. Physicians' expertise is critical to ensuring they receive the best care," said Andrew T. Pavia, from the University of Utah in the US. "Annual influenza vaccination is the best way to prevent influenza, but it is not 100 per cent effective. Those at high risk need to be encouraged to seek medical care right away if they develop influenza symptoms during influenza season," added Timothy M. Uyeki, chief medical officer of the National Center for Immunisation and Respiratory Diseases in the US. Influenza testing is important because physicians are more likely to treat patients with antiviral medications if they have a definitive diagnosis, further reducing the likelihood of prescribing antibiotics inappropriately, especially in outpatients. In addition, newer and highly accurate molecular tests that deliver results in 15-60 minutes should be used instead of rapid-influenza diagnostic tests (RIDTs), which produce quick results, the guidelines said. However, it can prove to be falsely negative in at least 30 per cent of outpatients with influenza. Others in the high-risk category include young children (especially those younger than two years old), women who have recently given birth, those with a weakened immune system due to disease or medication (such as people with HIV or AIDS, cancer, who have had an organ transplant or who are on chronic steroids), as described in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. Typical flu signs and symptoms include fever, cough, muscle aches, chills, runny nose and sore throat. Other symptoms can include headache and chest pain. --IANS pb/rt/mag/sed (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Students of the Aligarh Muslim University took out a peace march on the varsity campus on Wednesday to condemn the killing of seven persons on December 15 in Kashmir. The students affiliated to the AMU Students Union carried placards condemning the army action against stone pelters and said they stood in solidarity with those killed in Kashmir. They later submitted a memorandum addressed to President Ram Nath Kovind to a senior district official wherein they demanded that human rights violation be stopped in the valley. Student leaders said that the firing had not only violated human rights blatantly but had also angered the common people of Kashmir. If the protestors were to be stopped water canons, pellet guns or tear gas could have been used but the defence personnel opened fire, the demonstrating students said. --IANS md/oeb/sed (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) India's civil aviation regulator on Wednesday said that aircraft engines manufacturer Pratt & Whitney (PW) has initiated steps to address the issue with its engines that eminated smoke inside aircraft's cabin. The development comes after a Jaipur-Kolkata IndiGo flight on December 10 had to make an emergency landing at Kolkata due to smoke inside the cabin and cockpit area. According to the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) Chief B.S. Bhullar, PW has informed the regulator about its plans to upload a software to fix the glitch which caused over heating of the engine's combustion chamber. Bhullar during a press interaction said that PW will soon be fixing the new issue with its engines that power the Airbus A320 new engine option (Neo) aircraft that are in service with GoAir and IndiGo. The global aircraft engines manufacturer is expected to resolve the glitch in GoAir by December 20 and IndiGo by January 5, 2019. IndiGo in a statement said: "Pratt (PW) has introduced a software upgrade to mitigate the problem. IndiGo's complete fleet will be retrofitted with the software upgrade within 3 weeks." --IANS rv/prs (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) An arrest warrant has been issued by South African prosecutors against Zimbabwe's former First Lady Grace Mugabe for allegedly assaulting a model last year, police said on Wednesday. The move came after a court annulled her diplomatic immunity in July. "I can confirm that a warrant for the arrest of Grace Mugabe was issued last Thursday," police spokesman Vishnu Naidoo was quoted as saying by ZWNews on Wednesday. He said the police were seeking the assistance of Interpol to enforce the warrant. South Africa's government was criticised for letting Grace Mugabe, 53, leave the country after the alleged assault. Gabriella Engels accused the former First Lady of beating the "hell out of me" with an electric extension cord in a hotel room in Johannesburg in August 2017. Pictures on social media appeared to show Engels bleeding from the head after the alleged assault. Grace Mugabe said at the time that she had acted in self-defence after the "intoxicated and unhinged" model attacked her in the room where her two sons lived. She had been jockeying to become Zimbabwe's next President until her husband, Robert Mugabe, was deposed in the military takeover in 2017 after 37 years in power. It was unclear why the reporting of the warrant was delayed and there was no response from Grace Mugabe or Zimbabwean authorities. Lobby group AfriForum, which had been pursuing the case, welcomed the arrest warrant. "It seems that justice is going to take place and we are looking forward to this matter going forward," South Africa's Times Live website quoted AfriForum CEO Kallie Kriel as saying. It is unclear whether South Africa will push for Grace Mugabe's extradition. The Mugabe family owns several properties in South Africa. --IANS soni/sed (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) China on Wednesday said it was not aware of the detention of the third Canadian as reported by the Canadian media. Beijing has already detained two Canadians for allegedly harming national security, a move perceived to be in response to the arrest of Chinese telecom giant Huawei's Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou in Canada. A report in the Global Affairs Canada said the Canadian Foreign Ministry was "aware of a Canadian citizen" who had been detained in China. The ministry, however, did not explain if the third detention was linked to Meng's arrest. In response, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said it was not aware of any arrest. "I have not heard of it," said ministry's spokesperson Hua Chunying. Former Canadian diplomat Michael Kovrig and Calgary-born entrepreneur Michael Spavor were earlier arrested by the Chinese authorities for "endangering" national security. While Kovrig worked for International Crisis Group, Spavor organised tours in North Korea. If confirmed, the third detention will further raise the tensions between China and Canada. Though Meng has been granted bail, she faces possible extradition to the US for allegedly doing business with Iran in violation of US sanctions. --IANS gsh/soni/sed (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Facebook has elevated its senior Indian-origin executive Karandeep Anand to head Workplace, the company's two-year-old enterprise communication tool. Anand, who was earlier Head of Product for Facebook Marketplace and Payments services, would handle the Workplace product team and report to Julien Codorniou who is its Vice President. "I'm excited to now be part of the journey of bringing Workplace to companies across the globe and help them unlock the potential of their biggest asset -- people," Anand wrote on his LinkedIn profile late on Tuesday. Facebook launched Workplace in 2016 to help make companies more connected and productive. Currently, more than 30,000 organisations are using Workplace worldwide -- including Walmart, Heineken, Spotify, Lyft and the Reliance Group. "We're thrilled that Karandeep is joining Workplace as its new head of Workplace, effectively immediately," a Facebook spokeswoman told CNBC. "A company's culture is leading indicator of its success and the productivity of its work force. Workplace brings the power of shaping culture by connecting people at work in ways never imagined before," Anand wrote. Before joining Facebook, Anand spend 15 years at Microsoft in various key roles. Facebook in 2017 launched the desktop version of its Workplace Chat app that can be downloaded by anyone on PC, Mac, Android or iOS. Workplace Chat includes video chat with a co-worker or group, screen sharing and file sharing. "Workplace is one of the fastest growing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) product and a key growth area for Facebook," said Anand. As Head of Product for Marketplace and Payments tools, Anand's team was responsible for powering commerce across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp. --IANS na/in (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A US-based Sikh group's call for a referendum on Khalistan would come under the country's "bedrock principles" of freedom of speech, according to a State Department spokesperson. Asked by a reporter on Tuesday at the Department briefing "if freedom of speech gives one a right to call for disintegration of another country," Deputy Spokesperson Robert Palladino replied: "We have freedom of speech in the United States, we have freedom of association, and these are bedrock principles of American society." The reporter was referring to the "Referendum 2020" campaign on Punjab's secession by a New York-based organisation called Sikhs for Justice. Asked if the State Department was looking into it, Palladino said: "I'm not aware of it. That's -- I mean, I'm just not aware of it today. I haven't seen these reports." The US has constitutionally mandated broad freedom of speech protection actively enforced by courts that cover most expressions of opinions except for active calls for violence or some foreign government-financed campaigns. Several separatist movements campaign in the US, including "Yes California", which wants the state to secede from the US. --IANS al/soni/sed (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) US President Donald Trump is planning a "full" and "rapid" withdrawal of American troops from Syria, CNN reported on Wednesday citing a defence official. The decision would be a reversal from previously stated US policy. Trump had promised earlier this year to pull American troops out of Syria "very soon". According to the report, even though the US will continue to maintain troops in Iraq with the capability of launching strikes into Syria, its withdrawal of ground forces would fulfil a major goal of Syria, Iran and Russia and risked diminishing America's influence in the region. The US has about 2,000 troops on the ground in the country, where they are primarily training local forces to combat the Islamic State, CNN said. The US-led coalition recently denied any change to the US presence in Syria. "Any reports indicating a change in the US position with respect" to the American military presence in Syria "is false and designed to sow confusion and chaos," the coalition said in a statement earlier this month. General Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had said that the US needed to train thousands of local fighters to ensure a lasting defeat of the terror group. --IANS soni/sed (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The US Senate has overwhelmingly approved a sweeping overhaul of the country's criminal justice system that would decrease America's prison population by lowering some mandatory federal sentences and giving inmates added opportunities to earn reductions in jail time. Senators on Tuesday night voted 87-12 for the overhaul in the system that had been viewed by many conservatives and liberals view as "costly and unfair". The First Step Act drew resounding support from both Republican and Democratic lawmakers as well as President Donald Trump. "Congratulations to the Senate on the bipartisan passing of a historic Criminal Justice Reform Bill... This will keep our communities safer and provide hope and a second chance, to those who earn it," Trump tweeted shortly after the vote. "I look forward to signing this into law!" The bill is expected to be endorsed by the House during a vote later this week. It will then go to Trump's desk, ready to be signed into law, the Washington Post reported. The First Step Act would expand job training and other programming aimed at reducing recidivism rates among federal prisoners. It also expands early-release programmes and modifies sentencing laws, including mandatory minimum sentences for non-violent drug offenders. The legislation will reduce the so-called "three strikes" penalty for drug felonies from life in prison to 25 years behind bars. The three strikes rule was introduced when former President Bill Clinton was in office, mandating a life sentence for three or more convictions. The bill also retroactively ends the discrepancy in federal sentences for drug offences involving crack and the powder form of cocaine, which would reduce jail time for thousands of prisoners convicted of crack offences. According to the Post, this change would affect about 2,000 current federal inmates. House Speaker Paul Ryan voiced his support for the bill, saying: "Criminal justice reform is about giving more Americans a chance at redemption. House looks forward to sending it to the president to become law." Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn said that apart from saving money, the bill also aims to invest in "human potential". "We're investing in the men and women who want to turn their lives around once they're released from prison," he was quoted as saying by the Post. The Post also said the reform, which does not cover state jails, will trim altogether 53,000 years of the sentences of current inmates over the next decade, citing data from the Congressional Budget Office. The newspaper added, however, that the figure was disputed by advocacy groups. --IANS soni/ (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) US Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation Zalmay Khalilzad discussed the ongoing peace process in the war-torn country with Pakistan's Army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa here on Wednesday, a military spokesperson said. The development came two days after Pakistan arranged crucial peace talks between the US and the Afghan Taliban in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) -- in the latest push to end the 17-year-long conflict in Afghanistan. Representatives from Pakistan, the UAE and Saudi Arabia also attended the talks. According to a statement by the Pakistani Army's media wing, the US envoy appreciated Islamabad's role in the Afghan peace process and discussed matters related to regional stability in the meeting at the general headquarters in Rawalpindi on Wednesday. It said that General Bajwa reiterated that "peace in Afghanistan is important for Pakistan" and assured that continuous efforts will be made "for bringing peace and stability in the region", Dawn online reported. Earlier this month, US President Donald Trump wrote a letter to Pakistan's Prime Minister Imran Khan seeking his assistance in the Afghan peace process. The US leader had also reportedly sought Islamabad's help in bringing the Taliban leadership to the negotiating table. Trump's letter was followed by a visit from Khalilzad to Islamabad seeking a peaceful resolution of the Afghan conflict. --IANS soni/bg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Leaders and workers of the BJP's Delhi unit, along with its president Manoj Tiwari, were detained near the Congress headquarters Wednesday for protesting against Rahul Gandhi, who they said was spreading "lies" on the The protesters had assembled at the Vigyan Bhawan and raised slogans against the Congress and its president, who has been instrumental in mounting a scathing attack on the Modi government over an alleged "scam" in the deal for the French fighter jets. "We are here to expose the lies of Congress and its president who is spreading lies on the on a regular basis," Tiwari said at the protest. The protesters then tried to move closer to the Congress headquarters at Akbar Road but were stopped at a police barricade. They were later detained and taken to the Parliament Street police station. The district presidents of the Delhi BJP had on Tuesday submitted a memorandum, addressed to the President of India, to respective district magistrates in the city. "Even after the dismissal of petitions challenging the by the Supreme Court, Congress president continues his propaganda, not only insulting the prime minister but also demoralising the defence forces of the country," the Delhi BJP chief said. Notwithstanding the Supreme Court's verdict on the deal, Congress president had on Friday maintained that there was massive corruption in the contract. Despite cold vibes from the Shiv Sena, which had publicly announced to go solo in elections, BJP chief Wednesday said the Uddhav Thackeray-led party would continue its alliance with BJP for the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. Speaking at the Republic Summit here, Shah also indicated that the BJP would gain more partners ahead of 2019 polls than it had before 2014 elections. "Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis is frequently in touch with the Shiv Sena leadership at the state level. The Shiv Sena is already a part of the Central and state governments and it would continue its alliance with the BJP ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections", he said. The Sena, which is the oldest constituent of the NDA, had contested the 2014 Lok Sabha polls in alliance with the BJP, but severed the ties ahead of the Maharashtra assembly elections held in October that year. The Sena later joined the BJP-led governments in Maharashtra and Centre, though grudgingly, as it was averse to play second fiddle to BJP, which emerged as the single largest party in the polls. Interestingly, Sena Tuesday stayed away from the inauguration of various infra projects by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Mumbai metropolitan region and Pune claiming that Thackeray was not invited to the programmes. Shah also sought to play down the Sena fielding its nominees against the BJP in assembly elections held in various states including Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. "They (Sena) have been fielding their candidates in those states even before we came to power. It is their local issue", he said. Commenting on a tweet by Chirag Paswan of the Lok Janshakti Party on differences between the NDA ally and the BJP over seat allotment, Shah said, "Every party wants to grow. They pitch for their leader. Such things are common ahead of every elections". Chirag had tweeted that the NDA was at a crossroads after the Telugu Desam Party and RLSP quit the alliance. "At this juncture and with time still at hand, it is important for the BJP to respect and allay the concerns of the remaining allies," he had said. Shah said the BJP had 25 allies before the 2014 Lok Sabha polls. "Today, we have 31 partners among which six are bigger ones. We are still in talks with some more parties. In the North-East region, we have joined hands with several local non-Congress parties", he said. He described BJP as NDA's nucleus. "We are going ahead for 2019 (polls) as NDA and not only as BJP. BJP will be the nucleus of NDA and Narendra Modi will be the leader of this alliance," he said. Thackeray had earlier this year announced that his party would contest future elections on its own. Thackeray has also taken up the agenda of construction of Ram temple on the disputed site in Ayodhya and had visited the temple town last month. In 2014 polls, the BJP-led Democratic Alliance had won 42 out of the 48 seats in Maharashtra, with BJP winning 23 seats and Sena 18. The Raju Shetti-led Swabhimani Paksha, which was an NDA ally, had won a seat. Shetti left the NDA in 2017 citing dissatisfaction with the Modi government over handling of agrarian issues. A gay minister will push the Australian Labor Party to remove the ban on gay blood donations, or at least revise the law. It currently states that gay men can not donate blood unless they abstain from sex for one year. Andrew Barr, Canberras chief minister, wants the party to either reduce the time to three months, or remove it all together, according to Gay Star News. As many as 1,557 Indians have been released from various prisons of Pakistan whereas a total of 318 Pakistanis were freed from Indian jails in the last four years, the Lok Sabha was told Wednesday. External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, in reply to a question in Parliament, said a total of 174 Indian fishermen were released from Pakistan in 2018 (as on December 13) while 28 Pakistani fishermen were released in India in the same year. In 2018 (as on December 13), four Indian civilian prisoners were released by Pakistan while 21 Pakistani civilian prisoners were released by India, she said. A total of 508 Indian fishermen were released from Pakistan in 2018 (as on December 13) while 60 Pakistani fishermen were released from India in the same year, Swaraj said. In 2017, seven Indian civilian prisoners were released by Pakistan while 60 Pakistani civilian prisoners were released by India, she said. A total of 410 Indian fishermen were released from Pakistan while 9 Pakistani fishermen were released in India in the same year, Swaraj said In 2016, two Indian civilian prisoners were released by Pakistan while 10 such Pakistani prisoners were released by India, she said. A total of 410 Indian fishermen were released from Pakistan in 2016 while 9 Pakistani fishermen were released in India in the same year, Swaraj said. In 2015, four Indian civilian prisoners were released by Pakistan while 44 Pakistani civilian prisoners were released by India, she said. A total of 448 Indian fishermen were released from Pakistan in 2015 while 115 Pakistani fishermen were released in India in the same year, Swaraj said in a written reply. She also said that as per India-Pakistan 'Agreement on Consular Access' signed on May 21, 2008, lists of civilian prisoners and fishermen of each country lodged in the jails of the other are exchanged on January 1 and July 1 of every year. "According to the lists exchanged on July 1, 2018, there were 108 Pakistan fishermen and 249 Pakistan civilian prisoners in India's custody," she said. "Pakistan had acknowledged the custody of 418 fishermen and 53 civilian prisoners who are Indians or believed-to-be Indians in their jails. In addition, there is the issue of 83 missing Indian defence personnel, whose custody has not been acknowledged by Pakistan so far," she added. Minister of State for External Affairs V K SIngh, replying to another question, said a total of 40 Indian nationals died while serving their sentence in jails of 15 foreign countries. He said 8,445 Indian nationals are in prisons in 68 foreign countries. Among these, the highest number of Indian prisoners are lodged in Saudi Arabia at 2,224, he said. The second highest number of Indian prisoners among these 68 countries is in the UAE at 1,606 and the third highest in Nepal at 1,065, he said. In response to another question, Singh said 17 Indian fishermen from Tamil Nadu along with their three fishing vessels were arrested by Sri Lankan Navy on October 29, off Delft Island for crossing the International Maritime Boundary Line and fishing in Sri Lankan territorial waters. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) With British gridlocked and just 100 days until Brexit, the European Union on Wednesday triggered contingency plans designed to cushion some of the shock of a "no-deal" UK exit from the bloc. The EU measures, announced a day after Britain ramped up its own no-deal planning, are intended to alleviate "major disruption" to people and businesses in sectors including financial services, customs, air transport and climate policy. European Commission Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis told reporters that the plan was "an exercise in limiting damage." He said the aim was "to turn an abrupt exit into a more soft landing." Britain is due to leave the EU on March 29, but it remains unclear whether lawmakers will approve the divorce agreement Prime Minister Theresa May's government has negotiated with the bloc. Leaving without a deal risks plunging the British economy into recession and touching off chaos at the borders. The 14 EU actions include temporary one- to two-year measures to allow U.K.-EU financial services to continue and a 12-month provision to keep planes flying between Britain and the bloc. But Dombrovskis stressed that the measures "cannot replicate the benefits of the withdrawal agreement, and certainly it cannot replicate the benefits of EU membership." On Tuesday, the British government stepped up U.K. no-deal preparations, putting 3,500 soldiers on standby and warning thousands of businesses and millions of households to get ready for disruption. The government said the plans which include chartering boats and stockpiling medicines are a sensible precaution. But opposition politicians accuse the government of trying to scare lawmakers into supporting May's Brexit deal. Opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn on Wednesday accused May of "a cynical attempt to drive her deeply damaging deal through this House." "No-deal would be a disaster for our country and no responsible government would ever allow it," Corbyn said. Many businesses agree. Britain's five leading business groups said in a rare joint statement that businesses "have been watching in horror" as political infighting made the prospect of a disorderly Brexit more likely. Organizations including the British Chambers of Commerce and the Confederation of British Industry urged lawmakers to "return to their constituencies over Christmas and talk to their local business communities." "We hope that they will listen and remember that when they return to Parliament, the future course of our economy will be in their hands," the groups said. In a bid to regain some of its vanished political momentum, the British government was publishing long-awaited plans Wednesday for a post-Brexit immigration system that will end free movement of EU citizens to the UK. Home Secretary Sajid Javid said the proposals Britain's biggest immigration changes in more than 40 years would create a "skills-based immigration system built around the talent and expertise people can bring, rather than where they come from." At present, all EU nationals can live and work in Britain under the bloc's free-movement rules, but that will end after the U.K. leaves in March. The government is proposing no limit on the number of well-paid, skilled immigrants who can settle in Britain, but curbs on "low-skilled" workers. The rules will not apply to more than 3 million EU citizens currently living in Britain. The government has said they can stay, even if the UK leaves the bloc without an agreement on future relations. The EU, in its no-deal plans, urged member states to extend the same right to more than 1 million resident British nationals. Immigration was a major factor behind Britain's 2016 vote to leave the EU, and May has made "taking back control of our borders" her key Brexit goal. But that has put her at odds with many business leaders, and some members of her own Conservative government. Big chunks of Britain's economy, from agriculture to health care, have come to depend on European workers more than 1 million of whom have moved to Britain in the last 15 years. Businesses fear that choking off the flow of lower-skilled workers could lead to acute employee shortages. Saffron Cordery, deputy chief executive of NHS Providers an umbrella group for Britain's state-funded health care system said the health sector was "deeply concerned" about the planned changes. "High skills does not equal high pay," she told the BBC. The government plans suggest setting a salary threshold that immigrants will have to meet in order to be given the right to settle in Britain. A figure of 30,000 pounds ($38,000) a year, recommended by an independent report earlier this year, is more than the starting salary for nurses, paramedics, junior doctors and many other professions. Javid said the "exact threshold" would be decided after public consultation. He also said the plan would not commit to reducing net immigration below 100,000 people a year a longstanding goal of the Conservative government that it has never come close to meeting. Net immigration in the year to June was 273,000. Javid said the plans would seek to reduce migration to "more sustainable levels," but would not set a specific target. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) At least 19 staff members of a non-governmental organisation died and six were injured when the bus they were travelling in lost control and hurtled off a cliff in eastern Uganda, police said. "19 people have been confirmed dead and six others critically injured when the bus went off the cliff and crashed in the valley," regional police spokesman, Rogers Taitika told AFP Tuesday. He said the bus was carrying staff with an American NGO who were on their way to the Kapchorwa region for their annual party when it crashed near Sipi, some 300 kilometres east of Kampala. "We are investigating the matter to establish what could have caused the accident," Taitika said. "The dead were identified to be staff of the NGO based in Kiryandongo and Masindi districts (southern Uganda)." More details about the organisation and victims were not immediately available. Uganda has one of the worst records for road safety, due to the poor condition of vehicles and roads as well as dangerous driving. More than 9,500 people died in road accidents in the country between 2015 and 2017, according to figures from the transport ministry, with the situation worsening each year. A UN report last year said 10 people die on Ugandan roads every day and that road accidents cost the country USD 1.2 billion (about one billion euros) -- or five per cent of its Gross Domestic Product. In 2015, President Yoweri Museveni personally sacked 900 officials in charge of building and making roads, holding them accountable for the abysmal state of the network. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A 19-year-old man was Wednesday sentenced to death by a court in Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh for raping and murdering a five-year-old girl in August this year. Additional District Sessions Judge A K Singh held the accused, Anand Kushwaha, guilty under relevant sections of IPC and Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act. The court awarded Kushwaha death sentence under sections 376(A) (rape) and 302 (murder) of the IPC, said special public prosecutor Sheikh Wasim. The convict is a resident of Jatasi in Jabalpur district. The accused and the victim were related. Her father lodged a complaint at a police station at Katangi on August 20 after she went missing, saying that he suspected Kushwaha, the prosecutor said. The girl had gone missing on August 19 when her parents went out for work in a farm. Kushwaha had told them that he had taken out the girl to buy her a chocolate and then left her near her house. During the interrogation he confessed to raping and killing her and dumping the body in the septic tank of his house. The body was recovered from the tank. The police had submitted the charge sheet within four days. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The crucial hearing in a 1984 anti-Sikh riots case, in which a convict was recently awarded death sentence, witnessed heated exchange between two lawyers in the Delhi High Court Wednesday over representing the state. While Additional Solicitor General Aman Lekhi said he has been authorised by the Home Ministry, which had constituted the SIT to probe the riot cases, to represent the prosecution, Delhi government's standing counsel Rahul Mehra contended only he has the right to appear for the state in the case before the high court. A bench of Justices Siddharth Mridul and Sangita Dhingra Sehgal said the job of the Special Investigation Team was to investigate the incident and file the charge sheet and as the trial has concluded, what role is there for SIT now. The court said the state is the prosecutor and SIT cannot take the place of the state. When the two lawyers were arguing in a high-pitched tone, Justice Mridul told them to stop and not to address each other in the court. "Stop it. Please don't address each other before us. Don't do this in the court," the bench said. The court was hearing a reference to confirm the death sentence awarded to convict Yashpal Singh in the 1984 riots case and also his plea challenging his conviction and punishment. As per the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC), the death penalty cannot be executed unless confirmed by the high court. When Lekhi said SIT was investigating the case and the Delhi government has no authority in this, Mehra shot back: "This my turf. There should be a notification authorising Lekhi to appear in the matter. Where is the notification?" Lekhi responded saying the court is not an individual's turf but its everyone's turf. The bench also asked Lekhi to show the notification engaging him in the matter on which the ASG said he was appearing in the case with instructions to appear. The court, however, said: "State is the prosecutor. Mehra represents the state and there is nothing today which can prevent him. You (Lekhi) cannot represent the state, only Mehra can do it unless you show an order in this regard. Let Mehra represent the state and you represent your client (SIT). SIT by no stretch can be called state. State is state." The bench assured the counsel that it was not going to digress from the merits of the matter and it would first hear the state and thereafter, SIT could assist the court. The was not the first time when such heated arguments took place between the two counsel. Earlier, in the Delhi Chief Secretary's assault case, in which Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and his deputy Manish Sisodia have challenged a trial court order, the hearing had witnessed a verbal spat between the lawyers appearing for the AAP government and the Delhi Police over representing the police force in the matter. While AAP-appointed Delhi government standing counsel Mehra had said that only he had the right to appear for police in the case before the high court, ASG Lekhi and Central government standing counsel Anil Soni had contended that they have been authorised by the Deputy Secretary (Home) of Delhi government to represent the state in the matter. During the hearing in the riots case, the bench listed the matter for further hearing on January 29 after Singh's counsel said the paper book was not ready. The bench directed the high court registry to expedite the preparation of paper book and furnish the copies to the counsel for the parties before the next date. Singh, whose production warrant was issued earlier by the court, was produced before the bench from Tihar Jail. He was taken into custody after his conviction by the trial court on November 14. He was sentenced to death on November 20. The trial court had also awarded life term to co-convict Naresh Sherawat in the case relating to the killing of two men in New Delhi during the 1984 riots -- the first convictions in the cases reopened by the SIT. The Delhi Police had closed the case in 1994 for want of evidence, but it was reopened by the SIT. The SIT is investigating nearly 60 cases related to the riots, while it has filed "untraced report" in 52 cases. While this was the first death penalty after the SIT was formed, one Kishori was earlier given the death penalty by a trial court in as many as seven anti-Sikh riots cases. The Delhi High Court had confirmed death penalty only in three cases, which were later commuted to life term by the apex court. The convicts have also been awarded varying jail terms and fines for offences including attempt to murder, dacoity and attacking victims by dangerous weapons. The court spared convict Naresh the gallows while taking note of his medical condition and his lawyer's arguments seeking leniency in the quantum of sentence. Earlier, the court had convicted Singh and Sherawat for killing Hardev Singh and Avtar Singh in Mahipalpur area of South Delhi on November 1, 1984 during the riots that had taken place after the assassination of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi at her residence by two Sikh bodyguards a day before. The case was lodged on a complaint by victim Hardev's brother Santokh Singh. A mob of about 500 persons, led by the two convicts, had encircled the house of the victims and had killed them. It was just one of the incidents out of several others Delhi alone witnessed during the riots that saw around 3,000 people being killed. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Two people, including an engineering student, were arrested by the CB-CID wing of the Tamil Nadu police Wednesday in connection with the recent leak of a mathematics question paper of Anna University. Another wanted person, working in the office of the Controller of Examination (CoE) at the university and allegedly leaked the paper, was absconding and efforts were on to nab him, a CB-CID press release here said. Based on a complaint by the Controller of Examination M Venkatesan, K Suresh Kumar and A Harikrishnan, a B.Tech student, were arrested, it said. Kumar had allegedly obtained a copy of the maths question paper from his relative working in the CoE and given it to Harikrishanan, his childhood friend. Harikrishnan made use of the question paper and also circulated it among his friends, the release said. After information about leak of the Mathematics II paper of the exam held on December 3 emerged, the university had cancelled it and held a re-exam on December 12. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Head scarf-clad Zuhra Nabizada showed no traces of emotion as she handled the machine gun with the ease of a professional during a training session at the shooting range of the Officers Training Academy here. She is part of a group of 19 women from the Afghanistan Armed forces honing their skills at the Academy. Wiping the sweat off her sunburnt face, Afghan Air Force's Second Lieutenant Nabizada said this is her second visit to India. "The first visit was in 2014 to Dehradun to part in a Taekwondo match," she said. India's only academy to impart training to women cadets and officers, OTA is hosting women officers from the Afghanistan Armed Forces for the second time, the first being last year with 20 women. Afghanistan Army's Liaison Officer Captain Sirajulhaq Safi told PTI that this time officers from the country's Air Force have also joined the programme. "Compared to last year, the team this year comprises many young officers," Safi said, adding that his country sees the exercise as a knowledge-sharing experience. The month-long training that began November 26, includes weapons training and drill besides others. Indian Army's Major Ritu Jaswal said the officers were focused and showed keen interest in what was being taught. "Each country has a different weapon system... Most of the time they use MI-16 assault rifles, here they get the opportunity to learn to use the Indian Small Arms System - light machine guns," she said. "However, weather is the major hurdle they face here, as the present temperature in their country is below 5 degree Celsius." December is the time when Chennai experiences cooler climes, Jaswal, who acted as an interpreter for a majority of the women officers who knew only Pashto and Dari, added. Nabizada, a trainee pilot, said it was not just about weapons, but the session also fostered her leadership skills and boosted her self-confidence. She is the only one of her nine other siblings to have chosen a career in the armed forces. The squad has mostly women below 30 years, while a 50-year-old officer is the seniormost. About changes made to the training curriculum since last year, an officer said the duration has been extended to four weeks from three weeks last year. "This has given us more time to teach the officers about everything that is happening in OTA. They also consider it as a lifetime experience," the officer said. According to OTA officials, the officers also visited various places in the city during the training period which will end on December 26. Media personnel were allowed to witness a training session in which the women officers showcased their skills in handling light machine guns at the OTA shooting range, abutting Chennai Airport. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Four alleged drug traffickers, who would smuggle cannabis from Odisha and sell it in Delhi-NCR, were held Wednesday following a gunfight with the police here, officials said. Around 50 kg cannabis and three firearms were seized from their possession in the incident which took place around 1.30 am under Sector 24 police station limits, the officials said. "We had received a tip-off that the gang, carrying a huge quantity of cannabis, would pass by the Adobe square (in Sector 25). A police patrol team was alerted and when they intercepted the suspected car to stop for inquiry, the accused sped away towards the jungles in Sector 54," Inspector Pankaj Pant said. "Being chased by the police, the men eventually opened fire on the policemen and drew retaliatory fire from them," Pant, the Sector 24 station house officer, said. He said nobody was injured in the gunfight and the police team managed to arrest the four men and impounded the vehicle. "When checked by the police, it emerged that they had made chambers in the seats of the car and tried to conceal the cannabis in them," he said. Those held have been identified as Mangal and Gunjan, both locals, and Gulshan Yadav and Rajeev Yadav, both from Bihar, he said. During questioning, the gang members admitted that they would bring the cannabis from Odisha in car and sell it to their contact persons here for sale locally, he said. A case has been registered against the accused persons in charges under the Indian Penal Code, the Arms Act as well as the Narcotics, Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act, the police said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Mumbai witnessed more than 84,000 fire incidents in the last 10 years leading to death of over 600 people, the claimed Wednesday and questioned the state administration's preparedness to handle such mishaps. In case of such incidents in residential buildings, the persons, builders or housing society concerned were held responsible, the Sena said, and asked who was to be then blamed for the fire in the ESIC Hospital here on Monday. Eight people were killed and nearly 176 others injured in the blaze in the government's ESIC (Employees State Insurance Scheme) Kamgar Hospital at Marol in Andheri. The hospital, which is supposed to save lives, became 'yamraaj' (God of death) for patients due to "administrative lapses", the Sena said in an editorial in party mouthpiece 'Saamana'. "Mumbai's high-rises and the fire incidents there have become synonymous. In the last one year, there have been 10 such fire-related incidents and in the past 10 years, there were over 84,000 blaze mishaps in which more than 600 people lost their lives," the Marathi publication claimed. The buildings in Mumbai have become "dormant volcanoes", the Uddhav Thackeray-led party further said. Meanwhile, Congress' Maharashtra unit spokesperson Sachin Sawant said the Kamgar Hospital was working without a final no-objection certificate (NOC), so the state government and the Centre were equally responsible for the mishap. The contractor used sub-standard equipment, he alleged. "Also, the hospital was working without an NOC which was supposed to have been monitored by the Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation (MIDC)," Sawant noted. The mishap occurred due to "blatant corruption, negligence and mismanagement," he said. A 15-year-old girl, who was allegedly set ablaze by two unidentified men in Agra on Tuesday, is critical and undergoing treatment at the Safdarjung Hospital here, police said Wednesday. A class 10 student, the school girl was waylaid by two men, who allegedly poured petrol on her and set her on fire with a lighter, they said. She received up to 75 per cent burn injuries, doctors at the SN Medical College hospital in Aghra said. The girl was later referred to the Safdarjang Hospital in New Delhi , police said. "She is critical but conscious. She is under observation," a senior doctor said. Police are on a look out for the accused who are absconding. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Bermuda recently challenged a law in local courts putting a ban on gay marriage, but they decided to appeal to the London High Court to uphold the ban. They filed the appeal to the Privy Council, the highest appeals court, on Thursday, according to NBC. There are thousands in the conservative island that would side with the ban on gay marriage, and the government said it wants to represent those people. "Constitutional issues are important issues and this Government wants to get it right," the government said in a statement on Thursday. But LGBT rights activists say this is a step in the wrong direction. This is a cynical, bigoted, hypocritical attack on the rights and freedoms of others," Tony Brannon, a gay rights activist in Bermuda told NBC. A man in the US has been sentenced to 15 months in prison for brutally attacking a 53-year-old Indian-origin Sikh taxi driver in Seattle last year. Swarn Singh was assaulted with a deadly weapon by Rory Benson in December 2017, according to Sikhs civil rights group The Sikh Coalition. Benson, who pleaded guilty to assaulting him, was sentenced to 15 months in prison by a court in Seattle on Friday. Singh, who maintains Sikh articles of faith including unshorn hair and a turban, had parked outside an apartment building to drop off Benson and his mother. Benson, who was sitting in the front passenger seat, attempted to suffocate him with a piece of cloth kept in the taxi to wipe the windshield, the coalition said in a statement. He immediately ran out of the taxi, and Benson grabbed a hammer from his bag, chasing him on-foot. Benson hit Singh in the head repeatedly, specifically targeting his turban and knocking it to the ground, it said. He suffered a scalp laceration and a skull fracture as a result of the attack and was rushed to hospital. Benson was arrested. The coalition said it worked with Singh for 11 months to make sure the Bellevue Police Department and the King County Prosecuting Attorney's Office were properly investigating the incident and reviewing appropriate charges. Singh submitted an impact statement to the King County Superior Court, urging his attacker to recognise the damage caused, detailing his injuries and the impact of the assault on the Sikh community. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo held a rare meeting with Nepal's Foreign Minister Pradeep Gyawali as part of the Trump administration's effort to thwart increasing Chinese influence in the Himalayan nation. Pompeo described his meeting on Tuesday with Gyawali as historic and said this demonstrates America's commitment to its strong partnership with Nepal. He emphasised the great potential for further development of the US-Nepal ties, State Department deputy spokesperson Robert Palladino said. During the meeting, Pompeo highlighted the enduring strength of the US-Nepal partnership and the close people-to-people ties that form the foundation of the relationship. "The two leaders discussed Nepal's USD 500 million Millennium Challenge Corporation compact, Nepal's central role in a free, open, and prosperous Indo-Pacific, and global issues, including North Korea," Palladino said. The meeting came amidst China's foray into the land-locked Himalayan nation where Beijing has been investing heavily for the last few years to enhance connectivity and infrastructure. The US is concerned about Chinese investments in the Indo-Pacific and stepped up its efforts to expand its engagements with the countries in the region, including India and Nepal. It fears that Chinese investments and activities are undermining sovereignty and economic stability in the region and will also be a threat to America's vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific. American officials believe that said China's Belt and Road Initiative for infrastructure development and investments in countries in Europe, Asia and Africa lacked transparency and was aimed at fulfilling China's own security and strategic interests rather than promoting economic development. They also warn that Chinese credit could lead to debt trap and undermine sovereignty. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Two days after a massive fire at ESIC Kamgar Hospital at Marol in suburban killed nine people, another blaze broke out at the same facility late Wednesday evening, a senior civic official said. Nobody was injured in the fire, which was reported at 7.54 pm, the official from Disaster Management Unit of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) said. "The fire erupted at an electric box in ESIC Hospital premises at 7.54 pm. All the agencies, including fire brigade, police, ambulance service were rushed to the spot," he said, adding that the fire brigade team managed to bring the blaze under control. "It was extinguished at 8.34 pm," he said. Following Monday's blaze, the entire hospital had been vacated. Monday's incident had left nine people dead and injured 175 others, including some children, who are currently undergoing treatment at various hospitals across the city. Leader of the Opposition in Maharashtra Legislative Assembly Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil visited the hospital on Wednesday and slammed the government saying it has not learnt any lesson from the Kamala Mill fire in December last year, which had claimed 14 lives. A Twitter handle of 'The Voice of Citizens'said, "#MumbaiHospitalFire #hospital Again fire at ESIC hospital at , second incident in a row of hospital fire. #Alert #FireSafety standards below par in hospitals,#human life is getting cheaper for hospitals. : The Andhra Pradesh government Wednesday said that it would soon bring out nine 'white papers', highlighting the state's progress in various sectors since the bifurcation in 2014 and also incorporating a vision for the coming five years. The white papers should disclose facts to the people and reflect the reality, Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu told officials at a high-level review meeting here. While the series of white papers brought out in 2014, post-bifurcation, listed out the problems that confronted the new state on various fronts, the proposed set of white papers would explain the progress made by the state, braving numerous challenges in various sectors, he said. "We should clearly put forth before the people, the tremendous progress we made in the last four years, despite a heavy financial deficit. The various welfare programmes from womb to tomb being implemented, should also be explained in detail," the chief minister said. The proposed white papers would be on subjects like the state's financial position, challenges and problems overcome post-bifurcation, water resources development and progress of irrigation projects, human resources development, industrial growth and job creation, growth of the service sector and infrastructure development, progress of education and health sectors and welfare schemes. The Chief Minister asked officials of various departments to prepare development plans, along with the white papers. "Prepare village, mandal and district development plans, besides the state development plan. Place these plans before the people during the ensuing Janmabhoomi programme from January 2," he said. Naidu directed the officials to bring out the white papers and development plans in clear, understandable language, enabling an elaborate debate among people. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) : Apollo Hospitals here was fined Rs 2 lakh by the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation Wednesday for allegedly letting out effluent onto the road thereby causing damage to it. Commissioner of the civic body M Dana Kishore, who inspected some areas, identified the problem caused by the private hospital and imposed the fine, said a press release from the Municipal Corporation. The letting out of the waste on to the road was causing inconvenience to the public and ambulance service, the release said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) : Puducherry Lieutenant Governor Kiran Bedi Wednesday called upon vice-chancellors of all universities across the country to involve students in implementing the 'University Social Responsibility' scheme to protect the environment and thereby improve quality of life. She made this appeal while inaugurating a two-day conference of the vice-chancellors of universities in the south zone jointly organised here by Pondicherry University and the association of Indian universities (AIU). The Lieutenant Governor said the 36-million student population spread over nearly 1,000 universities could be a vital source for making the country prosperous. She said,''Every student should be involved in implementing the University Social Responsibility scheme which would help ensure a 'Clean India' (Swachch Bharat) and promotion of green environs.'' The Lieutenant Governor said universities might face paucity of funds, but they should build on what they have for better development and improvement in the academic performance of the institutions, as they were not absolutely full of resources. She said she has always been a learner and been interested in the teaching profession. Bedi recalled the reforms she effected in Tihar jail in Delhi and improved the standard of literacy of prisoners. ''It all depends on how strong your will is and how determined you are in implementing reforms,'' she said calling upon vice-chancellors to function as 'reformers, transformers and performers.' Vice-Chancellors had the responsibility to shape the students to face challenges in the future, she said. President of the AIU Sandeep Sancheti, presiding over the conference, said its agenda was 'involvement of technology in higher for building a knowledge society.' He said technology was a 'facilitator and transformer' in the current context of development, while making a reference to the relevance of technological developmental in democracy as could be seen in the role played by electronic voting machines (EVMs). Sancheti said universities could share resources by promoting virtual labs and classrooms and technology had the power to change the world order. Later, he released 'University News', a weekly journal on higher brought out by the AIU. Vice-Chancellor of Pondicherry University Gurmeet Singh and secretary-general of AIU Furqan Qamar were among those who were present on the occasion. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Better compensation to banking correspondents, facilitating paperless banking and introducing chapters in school curricula will spur financial inclusion, said Wednesday. Lack of financial literacy, high cost of banking services and excessive regulatory requirements are the key constraints in the goal for India, the government think-tank said in its 'Strategy for New India @75' document. "The government has launched many flagship schemes to promote and provide financial security to empower the poor and unbanked in the country," it said. There are constraints due to lack of amongst low income households and small informal businesses and high cost of operations of traditional banking model, it noted. Excessive regulatory requirements on products and market entry, and conservative regulatory approach to new technologies are the other impediments, the report highlighted in a chapter on 'Financial Inclusion'. On the way forward, it said an 'Arthik Shiksha Abhiyan' will help improve and may be integrated in the regular school curriculum. Efforts to improve financial literacy should be complemented by mass media campaigns to spread information on financial products and how they are used, said. It also pitched for better incentives for banking correspondents. "Given the infeasibility of locating branches in every nook and corner of the country, bank correspondents are used to reach out to prospective clients. However, an inadequate compensation structure makes correspondent banking unattractive. "The issue of inadequate training is being addressed by the RBI which has developed a framework for certification for both basic and advanced levels. There is also a need to create better monetary incentives for banking correspondents as well as to provide them better training," the report said. The government will also facilitate growth of online and paperless banking, leverage technology to improve the assessment of credit-worthiness for households and informal businesses besides scaling up payment banks and other platforms to expand payments systems in under-served areas. Schemes such as Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana, Pradhan Mantri Mudra Yojana, Stand-Up India Scheme, Pradhan Mantri Jeevan Jyoti Bima Yojana and Atal Pension Yojana, among others, have led to significant progress in the direction of financial literacy. In addition, the promotion of Aadhaar and direct benefit transfer schemes facilitate financial inclusion, it said. The report noted that in 2014, 53 per cent of adults in the country had bank accounts, which jumped to 80 per cent by 2017 and has now become comparable to China. Also, the awareness and use of mobile payments in India had been low compared to peer nations such as Bangladesh, Pakistan and Kenya but it has increased substantially due to introduction of BHIM application post demonetisation, it said. In terms of credit access also, India needs to make up considerable ground compared to these countries. Similarly, bank credit to GDP ratio in India is 51 per cent, as compared to 98 per cent in China in 2016, the report noted. : The Karnataka BJP Unit Wednesday accused the Congress of failing to keep up its poll manifesto promise of waiving farmers' loans even after the lapse of six months since its coalition government with JDS was formed. "6 months on & loan waiver is not a reality in Karnataka. Eventually, farmers of MP, Rajasthan & Chhattisgarh will know about your lying skills. Press statements & tweets don't really mean loans are waived off. Btw @RahulGandhi waiving off loan isn't like getting gold from potato's," the state partyunit tweeted. The remarks come in the wake of AICC President Rahul Gandhi's statement that the Congress had waived farmers'loan and would do so in Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan, where the party had won assembly elections. "CM, Madhya Pradesh, waives farm loans. 1 done. 2 to go," he had tweeted on December 17. Soon after winning the elections in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, Chief Ministers Kamal Nath and Bhupesh Baghel announced waiving farmers' loans. Gandhi also said the Prime Minister is sleeping over the issue and the party would wake him up from his slumber. "The Congress party has managed to wake the CM's of Assam & Gujarat from their deep slumber. PM is still asleep. We will wake him up too," he had tweeted. In reply, the Karnataka BJP said in fact, the Congress should learn from Assam and Gujarat chief ministers and urged them to wake Karnataka Chief Minister H D Kumaraswamy to waive farmers' loans as promised. "Had your family not slept on the country's development for 60 years our farmers would have been self sustainable today. BTW what is stopping you from waking up CM @hd_kumaraswamy towaive off farmers loan as promised. In fact you should learnfrom CM's of Assam & Gujarat," it said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) GFP leader and Goa minister Vijai Sardesai Wednesday attacked the Congress for "targetting" Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar over his health, days after the opposition party asked the ailing BJP leader to unfurl the national flag at the state Liberation Day function Wednesday. Sardesai's Goa Forward Party (GFP) is one of the constituents of the BJP-led coalition government in the coastal state. Three Independent legislators and the Maharashtravadi Gomantak Party (MGP) are other members of the coalition. "Goa is a progressive state and people here are progressive. We have to liberate ourselves from negativity. There is also a political negativity", the Town and Country Planning Minister said while addressing a state Liberation Day event in Margao town in south Goa. Sardesai's remarks came within days of Goa Congress chief Girish Chodankar demanding that Parrikar unfurl the national flag at an official function here to mark the State Liberation Day on December 19. Meanwhile, at the function held this morning, Legislative Assembly Speaker Pramod Sawant unfurled the Tricolour. Sardesai said, "the main opposition party has sidelined all other issues and is targeting the CM over his health. They are hounding him. This is undoing of Goemkars (Goans)", he said without taking the name of Congress. "When one leader is sick, one should not hound him and chase him by challenging him to hoist the flag for liberation day or visit the bridges", said Sardesai. In a rare public appearance in the last few months, Parrikar recently visited two bridges that are being constructed on Mandovi and Zuari rivers. The Congress has been demanding replacement of the ailing chief minister citing his extended absence from office, which the opposition party says has resulted into "collapse of the administration". "The opposition party is only trying to play on (CM's health). I don't think any Goan will feel good about it. We always sympathise with the one who is sick", he said. The minister said the Goa government has been developing the state at a pace that is "historic". "While the government is delivering for the people, it also harbours certain expectations from the citizens. The citizens should be alert but not cynical", he said. Taking potshots at the Congress, he said, "Some people are trying to convince you (people) that ongoing development is (aimed) to finish the state. This negativity should be avoided. We should have a positive mindset", Sardesai added. Parrikar, 63, has been recuperating at his private residence near Panaji since October 14, after he was discharged from Delhi's All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS). A Public Interest Litigation (PIL) seeking health status of Parrikar is currently pending before the Goa bench of the Bombay High Court. The government opposed the PIL citing the fundamental right to privacy of the CM. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Taking a dig at BJP chief Amit Shah over his claim of winning at least 23 Lok Sabha seats from Bengal in the 2019 elections, Trinamool Congress Wednesday said the party should rather focus on retaining the two seats it has in the state. Reacting to the Shah's claims, Trinamool's Derek O' Brien said that the BJP chief and Prime Minister Narendra Modi were involved in only "big talk". "Sitting in Mumbai and Delhi and giving these big statements. The BJP has two seats in Bengal and their first priority should be to hold on to these two seats, because if they don't watch it they will get zero seats like rosogolla," he said. O'Brien added that while the BJP is talking about winning more seats in Bengal, recent bypolls in the state have shown that their vote share is decreasing. BJP, which won 30 per cent of the votes last time, managed only 20 per cent this time, he said. "Now they are claiming that they will win many seats in Bengal. When it comes to numbers and figures they are the 'jumla jodi' -- Modi and Shah. Jumla Jodi who said they will put Rs 15 lakh in your bank account, who will give two crore jobs every year. Jumla Jodi who said they will double farmers' income in two years and who said they will have a clean sweep in the recent elections. So whenever they give figures the figures are jumlas," said the Trinamool parliamentary party leader in Rajya Sabha. Over the last few elections, the BJP has emerged as the main opposition to Trinamool Congress in West Bengal. At a summit in Mumbai, Amit Shah Wednesday said that people of Bengal are waiting for change and his party will win at least 23 seats from the state in the upcoming polls. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Israel High Court ruled last Wednesday that the Interior Ministry cannot refuse to put an adoptive parents name on a birth certificate because of their gender. This comes after the Ministry refused to put two gay mens names on their sons birth certificate. The couple appealed the decision to the court through LGBT advocacy task force, The Aguda, according to the Times of Israel. The judges ruled unanimously that the decision would not only hurt the parents, but the child. Simple legal decisions would be harder to make by not having both parents listed. Were happy that the court reminded the Interior Ministry of something that should have been self-evident that parents are parents, no matter their sex, sexual orientation or gender, the couples attorneys, Hagai Kalai and Daniella Yaakobi, said, according to the Times of Israel. A 49-year-old Assistant Sub-Inspector (ASI) of the Border Security Force (BSF) allegedly committed suicide Wednesday by shooting himself with his service rifle in Jammu and Kashmir's Poonch district, officials said. The officer of the border guarding force, Satpal Jaswal, was found in a pool of blood after his colleagues pursued the sound of a gunshot at his post in forward area in Mendhar Bekt of the district Wednesday morning, they said. Jaswal was admitted to hospital where doctors declared him brought dead, the officials said, adding that a case was registered in this connection. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Social activist Subhasini Ali said Wednesday the Bulandshahr violence was part of a "well-planned conspiracy" by some right-wing Hindutva groups to trigger communal riots across Uttar Pradesh in the run-up to the general election. Ali alleged that the perpetrators of this "conspiracy" were the "same forces who had reaped a rich harvest" following the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots. "I wish to pay tributes to the farmers and all other rural communities in Bulandshahr district who thwarted this conspiracy by taking a remarkable initiative and preventing the violence from turning into a major communal riot," Ali said, while addressing a 'bhaichara (brotherhood)' convention organised by the All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS) in Bulandshahr town. "If these folks had not helped thousands of people who were returning from a Muslim religious gathering (nearby in the district) on that fateful day, they would have got trapped in the conflagration," the former Lok Sabha member said. On December 3, an inspector and a youth were killed when a mob, including right-wing activists, attacked policemen after cattle carcasses were found in a field in Siyana area of the district. Ali said the inspector, Subodh Kumar Singh, was a "martyr" for the cause of justice and communal harmony, and should be duly honoured by the state government. The social activist said the police should refrain from harassing innocents under pressure from right-wing Hindutva groups. Ali alleged that these groups, which had "blessings" of the state government, were pressurising the local administration and the police to not arrest the real culprits. D P Singh, the AIKS state president, said the inspector deserved a national bravery award posthumously and a resolution was passed in the day to pay tributes to him. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Two officials of the South Eastern Coalfields Ltd (SECL) have been suspended in connection with the death of its three employees at an underground coal mine of the company in Korba district of Chhattisgarh on Sunday. Senior Manager Radhelal Sinha and Deputy Manager (mining) Omprakash Singh were suspended on Tuesday for alleged negligence, SECL Area General Manager (Korba) J P Dwivedi said on Wednesday. "The action was taken based on the probe report of the Directorate General of Mines Safety (DGMS) into the incident that took place at Bagdewa mines of the SECL, a subsidiary of Coal India Ltd," he said. Both the officials were posted at Bagdewa mines located under Bakimongra police station area, around 250 kms from the state capital Raipur. Mining supervisor Laxmikant Prasad (42), workers Ramadhar (35) and Ajay (33), were killed on December 16 evening after they allegedly entered into a non-functional tunnel, where the oxygen level was very low. The probe into the incident by the DGMS pointed negligence on the part of Sinha and Singh. After the report was submitted to the SECL, action was taken against the duo, Dwivedi said. Meanwhile, local police officials said investigation into the accident was underway and those found guilty would be booked soon. Following the incident, Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel had announced a compensation of Rs 75,000 to the kin of each deceased. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Aimed at addressing regional imbalance, the Karnataka cabinet Wednesday decided to shift some government departments, boards and commissions to the north Karnataka region. In principle approval had been given for shifting of some offices to north Karnataka, but locations were yet to be finalised, sources said. The proposal was to shift the offices, including those of Krishna Bhagya Jala Nigam Limited, Karnataka Neeravari Nigam Limited and Directorate of Sugar and Commissionerate for Cane Development, to north Karnataka, mostly Belagavi, where the Suvarna Vidhana Soudha, the state legislature complex, modelled on the Vidhana Soudha in Bengaluru, is located. Plans were also on to shift one member of the Karnataka State Human Rights Commission to the region, along with two State Information Commissioners, and one Upa Lokayukta office, the sources said. As the demand for a separate north Karnataka state resurfaced, Kumaraswamy in July had said the state government was mulling shifting some government offices to Suvarna Vidhana Soudha in the region, in an attempt to address alleged discrimination. Following this, a cabinet sub-committee was constituted under Minister R V Deshpande, which in its report had recommended shifting of the offices to the region. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) State-owned Canara Bank Wednesday said it would raise up to Rs 3,000 crore by issuing Basel III-compliant bonds. The decision was taken at the bank's board meeting held on Wednesday, it said in a regulatory filing. The board has decided to raise additional tier-I capital through Basel III-compliant additional tier-I perpetual bonds in rupee terms for an amount not exceeding Rs 3,000 crore, the bank said. Canara Bank said it can raise the funds in single or multiple tranches, depending on market conditions. Banks across the globe have to mandate themselves with the Basel III standards that seek to protect them against unfavourable economic conditions by improving and strengthening their capital planning processes. The norms are being implemented to mitigate concerns on potential stresses on asset quality and consequential impact on performance and profitability of banks. Being implemented in phases since April 1, 2013, India is expected to fully implement Basel III standards by March 2020. Stocks of Canara Bank closed 2.04 per cent higher at Rs 274.55 apiece on the BSE. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Telecom regulator Trai contended in the Delhi High Court on Wednesday that it cannot access information on phone tapping nor disclose such details as it could lead to prejudicially affecting the sovereignty and integrity of the country. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India told a bench of Chief Justice Rajendra Menon and Justice V K Rao that phone tapping was carried out by law enforcement agencies and this information cannot be accessed by it from the service providers. Trai submissions were made in its plea challenging a Central Information Commission's (CIC) order which said the telecom regulator has powers to find out from service providers which mobile user's phone was being tapped. The CIC's decision was upheld by a single judge bench of the high court and Trai, in its appeal, has sought quashing of both the orders. The high court did not, as an interim direction, stay the single judge's decision after the lawyers for the RTI applicant, on whose plea the CIC order was issued, assured the bench that the commission's order would not be enforced and no contempt plea would be filed against Trai for not complying with it. The bench then issued notice to the RTI applicant, Supreme Court lawyer Kabir Shankar Bose, and asked him to indicate his stand on the plea by the telecom regulator by January 16, 2019, the next date of hearing. Trai, in its appeal, has contended that only law enforcement agencies are authorised to intercept or tap phones and disclosure of the same would render such actions infructuous. The telecom regulator has said that directions for interception of a phone number are issued only by government officials of certain ranks and such information cannot be collated by Trai and furnished to a consumer/subscriber as it would "prejudicially affect the sovereignty and integrity of the nation". It has also contended that such information, pertaining to security of the nation, is exempted from disclosure under the Right to Information (RTI) Act. Bose had moved the CIC after his telecom service provider, Vodafone, declined his request for information on whether his phone was being tapped. The company had claimed that it did not come under the ambit of the RTI Act. He had then moved Trai which said it did not have the information he had asked for. Subsequently, the CIC in its September 12, 2018 order asked Trai to obtain the information from the telecom company and to provide it to Bose. The regulator challenged it in the high court and the single judge on November 20 upheld the CIC decision saying that Trai has the powers to call for any information or conduct an investigation where it considers expedient. The single judge also said that Trai has the obligation to get the information from the private body and furnish the same to the service subscriber, Bose. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The CBI Wednesday filed a voluminous chargesheet in the Muzaffarpur shelter home case in which over 30 inmates were allegedly sexually abused. Brajesh Thakur, owner of the NGO which ran the home, and around 20 people were named as accused. The agency filed its charge sheet against Thakur, his employees, his associate Shaista Parveen and a government officer Rekha Rani before a special court. Special POCSO judge R P Tiwari directed the probe agency to prepare a summary of the charge sheet, which ran into several hundred pages, in order to facilitate further hearing. In its charge sheet, the CBI confirmed that the girls were subjected to sexual abuse and slapped the stringent Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act against the accused. It also dealt with alleged violation of rules, aiding and abetting the heinous crimes against the girls, criminal conspiracy and other charges, sources in the investigative agency said. More serious offences like murder, rape, involvement of people, who were part of exploitation racket, will be chronicled in a future charge sheet, the sources added. They said identification of the perpetrators, alleged customers and others, is a time consuming process as the victims, who are in shock and trauma, are not being examined by the CBI, but experts from the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (NIMHANS). It is important that they are interviewed and counselled by experts because of the sensitive nature of the case, their age, and trauma that they bore for years, the sources said. Filing of this charge sheet will ensure that the arrested persons may be kept behind bars by the courts as they will not be able to exploit of the chance of seeking bail for the want of charge sheet even after 90 days of their arrest, they said. The agency has alleged that the then assistant director of the state social welfare department Rekha Rani had known about the abuse at the NGO-run shelter home of Thakur, but she turned a Nelson's eye towards it, the sources said. Parveen's house was allegedly used by Thakur's aides for abusing the girls, they said. The development comes a week after the CBI told the Supreme Court, which is monitoring the investigation, that its charge sheet in the case was ready but the agency was "discussing whether to file a consolidated final report or have a separate one on each victim". The scandal at the shelter home called 'Balika Grih', run by Brajesh Thakur's NGO 'Seva Sankalp Evam Vikas Samiti', came to light earlier this year in a social audit by the Mumbai-based Tata Institute of Social Sciences. During initial investigation by police, all the inmates were made to undergo medical tests which confirmed that about 30 of them, all minor girls, had sexual intercourse. The investigation was handed over to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) by the Nitish Kumar government on July 26. Besides Thakur, who is lodged in a jail in Patiala, other accused include his employees, many of them women, and some of his relatives. The building housing the shelter home was demolished after it was found that the structure was raised in violation of the approved plan. Meanwhile, a notice was affixed on the premises of Thakur's residence, situated adjacent to the building which housed the shelter home, directing his wife Asha and son Rahul Anand to appear before the Enforcement Directorate (ED) office at Patna next week. A case of money laundering was lodged against Thakur a couple of months ago based on a report received by the ED regarding his assets from the economic offences unit of the Bihar police. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The number etched on the bracelet around Mohammed's wrist gave the 13-year-old soldier comfort as missiles fired from enemy warplanes shook the earth beneath him. For two years Mohammed fought with Yemen's Houthi rebels against a military coalition led by Saudi Arabia and backed by the United States. He says he tortured and killed people and didn't care whether he lived or died. But if he died, the bracelet would guarantee his body made it home. "When I become a martyr, they enter my number in the computer, retrieve my picture and my name, then print them with the name 'Martyr' underneath," Mohammed said. It would be pasted to the lid of his coffin for return to his family. Mohammed was among 18 former child soldiers interviewed by The Associated Press who described the Houthis' unrelenting efficiency when it comes to the recruitment, deployment and even battlefield deaths of boys as young as 10. While both sides in the four-year civil war have sent children into combat in violation of international human rights conventions, the Houthis are believed to have recruited many more than the coalition often forcibly. The Houthis have inducted 18,000 child soldiers into their rebel army since the beginning of the war in 2014, a senior Houthi military official acknowledged to the AP. He spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the information. That figure is higher than any number previously reported. The United Nations was able to verify 2,721 children recruited to fight for all sides in the conflict, the large majority for the Houthis, but officials say that count is likely low, because many families will not speak about the issue out of fear of reprisals from Houthi militiamen. The Houthis say officially that they don't recruit children and send away those who try to enlist. Some of the children told the AP they joined the rebels willingly, mainly because of promises of money or the chance to carry a weapon. But others described being forced into the service of the Houthis abducted from schools or homes or coerced into joining in exchange for a family member's release from detention. Many can be seen manning checkpoints along main roads across northern and western Yemen, AK-47s dangling from their narrow shoulders. Others are sent to the front lines as foot soldiers. A 13-year-old named Riyadh said half of the fighters he served with on the front lines in Yemen's mountainous Sirwah district were children. Rebel officers ordered them to push forward during battles, even as coalition jets zoomed overhead, he said. He said he pleaded with his commander to let the young fighters take cover during airstrikes: "Sir, the planes are bombing." The reply, he said, was always: "Followers of God, you must attack!" An unknown number of child soldiers have been sent home in coffins. More than 6,000 children have died or been maimed in Yemen since the beginning of the war, UNICEF reported in October. But the U.N. agency has not been able to determine how many of those minors were combatants and the Houthi-run Defense Ministry does not release its records for casualties. A former teacher from the city of Dhamar said that at least 14 pupils from his school were recruited and then died in battle. Their pictures were placed on empty classroom seats in 2016 during the Week of the Martyr, which the Houthis celebrate each year in February. Most of them were fifth and sixth graders, he said. An education official from Dhamar confirmed his account. The two spoke on condition of anonymity because of fear of retribution. The teacher said some of the dead children's parents were Houthi leaders who willingly sent their sons to the front lines. "It's painful because this is a child and they are all my children because I was their teacher," he said. "They were taken from the school and returned in coffins." The Houthis and the coalition forces began peace talks in Sweden two weeks ago, but an end to the war appears far off. Many worry about what will become of the children who fought in the Middle East's poorest country once a peace treaty is signed. Naguib al-Saadi, a Yemeni human rights activist who founded a Saudi-funded counseling center in Marib for child warriors, said "the real problem with Houthi recruitment of the children will be felt in 10 years when a generation that has been brainwashed with hatred and enmity toward the West comes of age. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Nepal on Wednesday signed an agreement with a Chinese state-run construction company for conducting a detailed project report for a 27-km monorail project in the capital city of Kathmandu, an official said. Kathmandu Metropolitan City (KMC) mayor Bidya Sundar Shakya and China Railway Construction Corporation (CRCC) director of overseas business management department Zhao Guangbing signed the Memorandum of Understanding here, a top official said. CRCC's China Railway 25th Bureau Group Corporation Limited will complete the Detailed Project Report (DPR) within a year. According to the preliminary study report, the proposed monorail along Kathmandu's 27 kms ring road would cost an estimated Rs 116 billion (USD 1.03 billion). The Chinese company said that the project will be completed within three years after submitting the DPR, KMC's deputy mayor Hari Prabha Khadgi Shrestha said. "It is the beginning of a long-term project in Nepal and first of its kind. We will do our best to make it successful," Zhao said. Based on the agreement, the Chinese company will bear all the expenses for the DPR. The contract for the railway project would be awarded through open competition under the Build, Own and Operate (BOOT) model, Shakya said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A gay man from Moscow, Russia accused a Lublino police officer of punching him to the ground and kicking him. He said he called an ambulance and got treatment at a hospital. The police said the 55-year-old man named Valery, according to Pink News, hit his head on the ground several times to injure himself, and tried to cause a scandal. They also said the policeman called the ambulance. Valery filed a complaint to the Investigative Committee of Russia with a Russian LGBT advocacy group, Stimul. Although more than 10 days have passed since Valerys statement about the crime, employees of the Lublino investigation department are not in a hurry to interview even the victim, says Stimuls lawyer Anton Ryzhov, who has been following Valerys case. Ryzhov hopes that after interviewing the parties involved, a criminal case will be opened. The Coast Guard and Pollution Control Board will supervise efforts to recover a dredger that ran aground off Karaikal coast last month due to Cyclone 'Gaja,' Karaikal district collector R Kesavan said Wednesday. The dredger 'Veera Prem' is owned by Mumbai-based Mercator Ltd and had been anchored at Karaikal port for the past few months.It holds about 250 tonnes of oil, according to officials. "The challenge is to recover the dredger without causing any oil spill. So, we have taken guidance from the Indian Coast Guard and the pollution control board," the collector said. The shipping company has sought the help of a Gujarat based company to recover the dredger. The collector said the company has been directed to submit a detailed plan before commencing the recovery efforts. A team from a Gujarat-based company has arrived at Karaikal to recover the dredger which ran aground near TR Pattinam in the district on November 16 due to the cylone. 'Gaja' crossed the Tamil Nadu coast between Nagapattinam and Vedaranyam, about 300 km from Chennai, leaving behind a trail of destruction in Nagapattinam district and also in several other districts and claiming over 60 lives. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A complaint was lodged in a court here on Wednesday against Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Kamal Nath for allegedly hurting the sentiments of the people of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh with his comments on migrant workers. Social activist Tamanna Hashmi filed a petition before the Chief Judicial Magistrates court under IPC sections 153 (provocation with intent to cause riot), and 504 (intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of peace). "Lot of industries are set up in which people from other states, like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, come to work. I do not want to criticise them, but the youth of Madhya Pradesh are deprived (of jobs)," Nath had said on Monday announcing a new state government policy under which industries availing investment incentives will need to give 70 per cent employment to local youths. In the complaint, the petitioner has claimed to have felt aggrieved by Nath's statement. The court is yet to fix a date for hearing of the complaint case. The senior Congress leader's remarks, which he made shortly after being sworn in as Madhya Pradesh's chief minister, has drawn flak from the ruling JD(U)-BJP combine in Bihar. The RJD, an ally of the Congress in Bihar, has also termed the remarks as avoidable, though it accused the BJP of blowing the matter out of proportions. PTI CORR NAC SNS Speaking to reporters in Bhopal on Wednesday, Nath defended his comments saying other states including Gujarat also have policies giving employment preference to locals. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Congress and NCP are yet to iron out differences over a few key Lok Sabha seats in Maharashtra in their seat-sharing talks, sources from both the parties said late Wednesday night. The state leaders of the two parties held another round of talks Wednesday, in which no consensus could be reached regarding seven to eight seats, sources said. Maharashtra Congress chief Ashok Chavan said the contentious issues will be sorted out soon. "We discussed todayhow to accommodate smaller partners in the grand alliance. We are meeting leaders of CPI, CPM and Swabhimani Shetkari Sanghthana tomorrow," he said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Amid speculation of a possible alliance between the Congress and the AAP in Delhi for the 2019 elections, former chief minister Sheila Dikshit said Wednesday her party high command will decide whether or not such an arrangement takes place with the Arvind Kejriwal-led party. Dikshit, the senior Congress leader who was the chief minister of Delhi for 15 years (1998-2013) and a one-time bitter critic of Kejriwal, said she will not question any decision her party takes on an alliance with the AAP. Both the parties are understood to be in touch to explore possibility of an alliance for the seven Lok Sabha seats in the national capital. "I have nothing to do with it. It's the high command which has to take a decision. Whatever its decision, I am not going to question it," Dikshit told PTI on being asked about possibility of an alliance with the AAP. Delhi Congress president Ajay Maken has repeatedly rejected possibility of any alliance with the AAP in Delhi. In June this year, addressing a joint press conference alongwith Dikshit at Delhi Congress office, Maken had categorically rejected chances of his party joining hands with the AAP in Delhi. AAP sources had said back-channel talks are currently on between the two parties. However, there is no official word on it from the two sides. In case the two parties come together to contest the Lok Sabha elections in Delhi, the BJP will be faced with an uphill task to retain its tally of seven seats it won in 2014. In 2014 Lok Sabha polls, the BJP swept the elections scoring 7-0 while AAP and Congress drew blank. The AAP came second while the Congress stood third. However, in six seats, the combine votes of the AAP and the Congress were much more than that obtained by the BJP. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Hitting back at the Congress, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Wednesday it has humiliated every institution of democracy, be it the Army or the CAG. He said the main opposition party even questioned a Supreme Court verdict just because it did not like it, apparently hinting at the continued assault by the party on him over the Rafale deal. The prime minister was interacting with booth level workers of Vellore, Kanchipuram, Viluppuram and south Chennai districts of Tamil Nadu, and Puducherry, through video conferencing from New Delhi. "The Congress party has become more cunning since the days of Emergency," he said, sharpening his assault on the Congress. Congress president Rahul Gandhi had on Sunday lashed out at the Modi government, saying he will not allow the "destruction" of institutions like the Supreme Court and the Reserve Bank of India. The BJP government believes "only one idea should run India", Gandhi had told a public rally organised by his party's southern ally the DMK in Chennai. Modi asked party workers to increase their outreach by creating awareness about his government's welfare schemes. "From housing to health care, from sanitation to skills, there are schemes for every section of society," he said, and asked booth level workers to reach out to people about those measures. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) In a stinging counteroffensive against the Congress, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Wednesday the opposition party had "humiliated" institutions important to democracy like the Army and the CAG. Modi also hit out at the Congress for its continued diatribe against him over the Rafale deal after the Supreme Court's verdict holding there was no wrongdoing. "If you thought they (the Congress) only had a problem with EC and EVMs, now wait. They have humiliated the Army, CAG and every institution important to our democracy," he said during an interaction with polling booth level BJP workers of Tamil Nadu and Puducherry through a video conference from New Delhi. He was apparently referring to the Congress questioning the veracity of the surgical strikes targeting terrorist launch pads in Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir and for contesting the Comptroller and Auditor General's finding of Rs 1.86 lakh crore loss to the exchequer in the coal scam. Congress president Rahul Gandhi had on Sunday lashed out at the Modi government, saying he will not allow "destruction" of institutions like the Supreme Court and the Reserve Bank of India. The BJP government believes "only one idea should run India", Gandhi had told a public rally organised by his party's southern ally the DMK in Chennai. Referring to the Supreme Court's judgement on the contentious Rafale fighter jet deal, the prime minister said the Congress was opposing it just because it did not like the verdict. "They (the Congress) questioned an SC verdict just because they did not like the decision. Earlier, just because they could not threaten the court into doing what they wanted, just beacuse the court was being fair, they tried to even impeach the Chief Justice of India," he said. The Congress had earlier this year moved a notice in Parliament for impeaching the then Chief Justice Dipak Misra, seeking his removal on five grounds of "misbehaviour". It was, however, rejected by Rajya Sabha Chairman M Venkaiah Naidu on April 23. Responding to a question of a party worker on taking on the Congress over its "false" propaganda, Modi said the perfect answer to "undemocratic behaviour" lay in strengthening democracy. "Like the sunlight, which is the best disinfectant, information and awareness are important for democracy. Hence, people need to be apprised of the behaviour, attitude and dangerous games of the Opposition, including the Congress. "They will do their best to spread lies but it is in our hands to spread truth. They will do their best to mislead people but it is in our hands to expose them," he said. He asked the BJP cadre to tell people that before every election the Congress party started making noise about EVMs to create an atmosphere of doubt. But when results were in their favour, they accepted it. Likening the Congress and opposition parties to a student blaming the school, teacher and examiner if his results were not favourable, Modi said, "The same thing is happening in the case of our opposition, too. This has to be explained to the people." Hailing people as the greatest force protecting democracy, the prime minister said the last time Congress tried to threaten it, people threw them out of power. He was apparently hinting at imposition of Emergency by Indira Gandhi in 1975. "Reach out to people and tell them the Congress' DNA is still the same. Just because Emergency saw a big fightback from the people now they have become more cunning in their tactics. But yet again India will not excuse the Congress for playing with democracy." Modi asked party workers to increase their public outreach by creating awareness about his "hardworking" government's welfare schemes. "From housing to health care, from sanitation to skills, there are schemes for every section of society," he said, and asked booth level workers to reach out to people about those measures. He said, if people were confused or misinformed, BJP workers could seek help of the Narendra Modi app to arm themselves with data and information. Emphasising the need for strengthening the party at the polling booth level, Modi said,"Mera booth sabse majboot (strong). After all, the party that wins at the booth level wins the elections....meet (people) them regularly, share their joy, their sorrow and serve them." He also interacted with beneficiaries of the Centre's Mudra loan scheme and lauded a woman, expressing happiness that she had now become a job giver. Modi asked BJP workers to inform people about how the education sector had undergone a transformation under his government. In the last four years, he said, the focus was broadened from only the outlays to include outcomes. "Similarly, the earlier approach was only about teaching. Going a step ahead, the government looked at learning. We are improving quality of education and increasing quantity of opportunities," he said. Modi said the government came up with the National Institutional Ranking Framework for rating institutions based on objective and verifiable criteria. It was made available seperately for streams such as engineering, management, pharmacy, architecture, humanities and law. He also talked about the steps taken for setting up branches of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in different states, including Tamil Nadu. Modi said over 13,000 skill development centres were imparting livelihood training to lakhs of youth in 375 different skills. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) British opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn faced calls to apologise on Wednesday after being accused of muttering "stupid woman" at Prime Minister Theresa May during a heated exchange over her delaying tactics on Brexit. But a spokesman for the Labour leader denied he used the phrase, which sparked uproar among ruling Conservative MPs in the House of Commons, insisting he had said "stupid people". Corbyn mouthed the words after clashing with May over her decision to delay until January a Commons vote on her unpopular Brexit deal -- just weeks before Britain leaves the EU on March 29. London and Brussels this week stepped up planning for a "no deal" scenario, and Corbyn warned during prime minister's questions on Wednesday that this would be "a disaster for our country". He said that by delaying a vote by MPs, May was "recklessly running down the clock, all in a shameful attempt to make her own bad deal look like the lesser of two evils". May hit back by mocking Corbyn's position on Brexit and describing as a pantomime his failure to call a vote of confidence in her government despite demands from his own MPs. Footage of the "stupid" comment quickly went viral on social media, watched by MPs on their phones as they sat in the Commons chamber -- and one of them asked May what she thought. "Everybody in this House, particularly in this 100th year of women getting the vote, should be encouraging women to come into this chamber and to stand in this chamber and should therefore use appropriate language in this chamber when they are referring to female members," she said. Several Conservative MPs said the alleged comment was a reflection of abusive language faced by many female politicians and a culture of bullying in parliament that has become a focus for concern. Some female Labour MPs also weighed in, with Stella Creasy tweeting: "This is not ok." But Corbyn's spokesman said: "He's clear that he did not say stupid woman and has no time for any kind of misogynistic abuse." He said the "stupid people" remark was a response to "the attempt to belittle what is being discussed" on Brexit, adding: "This is a national crisis." Commons Speaker John Bercow said he did not see the incident himself but, if true, Corbyn would have to apologise in front of parliament. In chaotic scenes, however, Bercow -- who has himself been accusing of bullying and using abusive language -- was shouted down as Conservative MPs rallied to May's defence. Commons leader Andrea Leadsom, a government minister, even stood up to ask Bercow why he had not apologised for allegedly calling her a "stupid woman" earlier this year. Bercow replied that the issue had been resolved at the time. He had admitted muttering "stupid" in an argument about scheduling of Commons business. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Cuba will leave out of its new Constitution changes that would have paved the way for legal same-sex marriage, despite majority support in local assemblies, a government official said. The measure, which had majority support across the Communist-ruled island, would have changed the definition of parties in a marriage from man and wife to "between to people." But "the draft Constitution will not define which parties enter into a marriage... So that is now out of constitutional reform discussions overall," Council of State secretary and drafting coordinator Homero Acosta was quoted as saying by state media. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Hamid Nihal Ansari, the software engineer who has returned home after spending six years in a Pakistani jail, Friday had an emotional interaction with External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj as tears rolled down his cheeks while narrating his ordeal. "Please forgive me...Thank you so much," Ansari, accompanied by his mother and a number of family members, told Swaraj as she embraced and patted him. On her part, Swaraj, who was personally monitoring Ansari's case, hailed his courage and said destiny had taken him to that country and that he should not feel sorry. "You have lots of courage...You should not say sorry," Swaraj told a teary-eyed Ansari, who returned to India on Tuesday. Ansari was arrested in Pakistan in 2012 for illegally entering Pakistan from Afghanistan, reportedly to meet a girl he had befriended online. Authorities in Pakistan had slapped charges of espionage against him. Ansari's mother Fauzia too thanked Swaraj and her ministry for all the assistance to the family in its legal battle in Pakistan. "Mera Bharat Mahan. Meri madam (Swaraj) Mahan (My India is great. My madam is great," an emotional Fauzia told Swaraj while hugging her. Officials said 33-year-old Ansari became emotional while explaining the difficult phase he had to endure in Pakistan. Ansari and the family thanked Swaraj and the Ministry of External Affairs for persisting with the case and taking it up with Islamabad. The Mumbai resident, who returned to India after crossing the Wagah-Attari border, was imprisoned in the Peshawar Central Jail after being sentenced by a military court on December 15, 2015. According to official sources, India issued 96 notes verbales to Pakistan seeking consular access to Ansari. The decision to release him was on account of relentless pressure from New Delhi, they said. Shortly before his arrival on Tuesday, Ansari's mother Fauzia Ansari told reporters that the prayers of the family and of all those who wished for his safe return had been answered. His father, Nihal Ansari, said, "It is a new dawn for us." Ansari's jail term ended on December 15 but he was not able to leave for India as his legal documents were not ready. On Thursday, the Peshawar High Court gave the Pakistan government a month's deadline to complete his repatriation process. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Hamid Nihal Ansari, the software engineer who has returned home after spending six years in a Pakistani jail, met External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj on Wednesday and narrated his ordeal. Officials said 33-year-old Ansari, who came back to India on Tuesday, became emotional while talking about the difficult phase of his life in Pakistan. Ansari, who was accompanied by his mother and other family members, also thanked Swaraj and the Ministry of External Affairs for persisting with the case and taking it up with Islamabad. The Mumbai resident, who returned to India after crossing the Wagah-Attari border, was imprisoned in the Peshawar Central Jail after being sentenced by a military court on December 15, 2015. According to official sources, India issued 96 notes verbales to Pakistan seeking consular access to Ansari. The decision to release him was on account of relentless pressure from New Delhi, they said. Shortly before his arrival on Tuesday, Ansari's mother Fauzia Ansari told reporters that the prayers of the family and of all those who wished for his safe return had been answered. "I am immensely happy today. I don't have words to describe my feelings," she said. His father, Nihal Ansari, said, "It is a new dawn for us". Ansari was arrested in 2012 for illegally entering Pakistan from Afghanistan, reportedly to meet a girl he had befriended online. His jail term ended on December 15 but he was not able to leave for India as his legal documents were not ready. ALSO READ: Indian returns after 6-year jail stint in Pak, meets family at Wagah border On Thursday, the Peshawar High Court gave the Pakistan government a month's deadline to complete his repatriation process. In reply to a habeas corpus petition filed by his mother Fauzia Ansari, the high court was informed that he was in custody of the Pakistan Army and was being tried by a military court. A Russian social media operation aimed at helping Republican nominee Donald Trump win the 2016 presidential election included efforts to polarize voters around LGBT issues and, in some cases, pushed LGBT voters to support Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders. The operation also posted a message aimed at lonely LGBT teenagers, an effort believed intended to blackmail vulnerable youth. It is evident that the campaigns sought to demobilize African Americans, LGBT, and liberal voters, states one of two reports made public Monday by the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. This was attempted through organic posts that attacked [eventual Democratic nominee] Hillary Clinton. Content referred to President Clintons 1996 signing into law of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) as an attack on the gay community, and in another, argued that Hillary supports Muslims, who the post insinuates are anti-gay. Organic post refers to posts on social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, that are made without using paid services to boost distribution. Both reports investigated the attempts by Russian operatives to use social media to spread disinformation about political issues and to create divisiveness within the American public. Both reports refer to the operatives as Russias Internet Research Agency (IRA). One report, The Tactics & Tropes of the Internet Research Agency,was produced by a firm called New Knowledge, which deals with national security and digital media. The second report, The IRA, Social Media and Political Polarization in the United States, 2012-2018, was produced by experts at the University of Oxford and the social media data company Graphika. The Oxford report noted that, of the 20 most Liked Facebook pages managed by the Russian IRA, one called LGBT United ranked eighth in terms of the number of Likes it received (almost two million). The LGBT United posts were shared almost one million times, prompting almost 400,000 reactions and drawing 87,500 comments. A chart in the Oxford report indicates the investigation found the Russian IRA spent about $5,500 on at least 70 ads targeted to LGBT people through websites and mobile apps. More than 80,000 people who saw the ads clicked through to reach the IRAs Facebook page. The largest targets of the IRA political messaging were African Americans and conservative voters. Campaigns targeting the LGBT community were most abundant and successful during pride month, June, of 2015. In mid-to-late 2015, said the report, ads about Being Patriotic and LGBT United produced the majority of organic posts. In 2015, there were a total of 4,108 organic posts from a few of these campaigns. In total, more than half (2,139) targeted right-wing users. LGBT United accounted for almost all of the rest (1,814 posts). According to the report, the IRA messages were framed with antagonism towards groups that are perceived as anti-gay, including certain religious groups and right-wing conservatives. While there was a limited amount of discussion that sought to drive some of these voters towards Bernie Sanders or third parties, patterns of trying to reduce trust in the political system were more apparent, said the report. Claims meant to demerit Hillary Clinton are occasionally peppered into this content, but are relatively infrequent. We interpret messaging to this group as an attempt to increase polarization between liberals and conservatives around LGBT rights, a well-known wedge issue between these groups, said the Oxford report. The New Knowledge report quotes an IRA Facebook posting about the controversy surrounding a gay Breitbart contributor, Milo Yiannopoulos, and efforts to ban a speech by him on the campus of the University of California Berkeley. The fucking lefty scumbags seeded destruction around at UC Berkeley overnight in response to the planned speech by a right-wing firebrand Milo Yiannopoulos whos an actual gay! Whos intolerant now? stated the post. New Knowledge also noted that some IRA persona, such as @MRNyc2015, pretended to be a liberal gay man to deliver active voter suppression messages, including suggestions that Everyone needs to vote ONLINE. One New Knowledge report chart indicates that one of the top performing Instagram accounts created by the IRA was rainbow_nation_us. The death toll in the rose to nine Wednesday with a 65-year-old woman succumbing to her injuries, a civic official said. 175 injured people, including some children, are currently undergoing treatment at various hospitals across the city. Shila Murvekar died at Seven Hills hospital this afternoon and with this the death toll reached nine, a Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation official said. The fire broke out in the government-run ESIC Kamgar Hospital at Marol in suburban Monday, killing six people. The death toll rose to eight Tuesday with two persons dying in different hospitals. The 325-bed hospital did not have the Occupation Certificate (OC) from fire department, a mandatory certification needed for such institutes to function. Nearly 375 people, including patients and visitors, were in the five-floor hospital when the fire broke out, an official said. The blaze appeared to have erupted after a short-circuit near the rubber rolls stored on the ground floor, he said. Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis on Tuesday ordered a probe and the union labour ministry had announced compensation for the victims. A Delhi court Wednesday reserved for December 22 its order on bail plea of Christian Michel, alleged middleman charge-sheeted and arrested in the AgustaWestland VVIP chopper case. The 57-year-old British national told Special Judge Arvind Kumar that he was not required for custodial interrogation and no purpose will be served by keeping him in further custody. "My handwriting has already already been taken. There were no original documents with the CBI to match it with. I have volunteered to provide all the documents," Michel told the court. He was in CBI custody for 15 days. Michel was arrested in the UAE and extradited to India on December 4. The next day, he was produced in the court, which allowed his five-day custodial interrogation by the CBI which was later extended by five more days. Michel is among the three alleged middlemen being probed in the case by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). The others are Guido Haschke and Carlo Gerosa. Both the agencies notified an Interpol red corner notice (RCN) against him after the court issued a non-bailable warrant against him. The CBI opposed the bail application, saying Michel might flee as he had already tried to escape from Dubai just before his extradition. The probe agency said that Michel was an influential person having links with people from the ministry and other bureaucrats and politicians, many of who are its witnesses in the case. "We brought him with so much difficulty. Some new facts have emerged and we need to have follow ups on those. He has not been a cooperative witness. A lot more to be unearthed of out own. He has no roots in India here. He has property etc but he may sell them and go away," the probe agency said. The court had earlier extended by four days the CBI custody of Michel on the ground that he needed to be confronted with various documents in the case. The CBI had said that he was required to be taken to the premises of Pawan Hans India Ltd in Mumbai to verify his version of his alleged attempted negotiations to buy back WG-30 helicopters, to identify the shipper and to confront the officials of Pawan Hans India. The agency said that voluminous documents have been received from various countries pursuant to the 'Letter of Requests' and the accused was yet to be confronted with a number of them. The defence counsel had opposed the CBI application for further remand, saying already enough time was granted to the agency and nothing incriminating was found against the accused. The CBI has alleged there was an estimated loss of Euro 398.21 million (about 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 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. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) regulator DGCA is assessing the "health" of cash-crunched on a fortnightly basis following a financial audit of the carrier in August this year, a senior official said Wednesday. As part of this exercise, which is carried out under a particular provision of a civil requirement (CAR), various aspects of the airline's functioning, including aircraft maintenance, are being looked at from the safety point of view, the official said. "The health of is being monitored every 15 days. This is being done as per a CAR and the exercise started four to five months ago," a senior Directorate General of Civil (DGCA) official said. The NRI Naresh Goyal-promoted private carrier is grappling with significant financial distress in the face of three back-to-back quarterly losses, which have resulted in cash drought and subsequently default on payments to aircraft lessors and a section of staff, among others. "During the monitoring, various aspects from the view point of safety are looked at. This includes assessing whether the airline is able to maintain its aircraft and schedule," official added. The UAE national carrier Etihad Airways holds 24 per cent stake in Jet Airways, which it acquired in 2013. Notably, in late August the DGCA had carried out a financial audit of to assess its fiscal health and ensure that the carrier was not compromising on safety due to financial stress. ALSO READ: Jet to return 8 Boeing 737 aircraft to lessors following cash crunch With a net debt of Rs 80.52 billion as on September 30, and losses in excess of over Rs 10 billion each in the last three quarters, airline is working on ways to raise funds and reduce costs. Last month, Jet Airways Chief Executive Officer Vinay Dube had said the airline was in active discussions with various investors to secure sustainable financing. As part of this, besides its on-going negotiations with Etihad, the airline also had "preliminary" level discussions with the Tata group in the recent past. At the same time, SBI, the largest lender to Jet Airways, has ordered for a "forensic" audit of Jet Airways books between April 2014 and March 2018 for alleged financial irregularities. The forensic audit is being carried out by EY. British opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn was accused of being a sexist and a misogynist and faced calls on Wednesday to apologise for apparently calling embattled Prime Minister Theresa May a "stupid woman" as they clashed in Parliament over her controversial Brexit deal. The incident happened days after European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said he did not personally insult Prime Minister May by calling her "nebulous" after footage emerged of a fiery clash between him and her in Brussels over a supposed jibe. The May-Corbyn clash took place during the Prime Minister's Questions in the House of Commons over her Brexit deal, calling her decision last week to delay a vote on it a "deeply cynical manoeuvre" from a "failing" prime minister. May, 62, hit back at Corbyn, 69, saying he had not tabled his promised no-confidence motion, and had then tabled one that was ineffective. "I know it's the... pantomime season," she told MPs, "is he going to put a confidence vote? Oh yes he is," she said, prompting backbench Tories MPs to chant "oh no he isn't". Continuing the pantomime theme, she told the Labour leader "look behind you - they are not impressed and neither is the country". Corbyn could be seen saying something under his breath in response. Former minister Patrick McLoughlin used a point of order to accuse Corbyn of having "muttered" that May was a "stupid woman". Conservative MPs called on Corbyn to be ordered to apologise. Speaker John Bercow said he had not seen the alleged incident and so could not "immediately" rule on it. A spokesman for Corbyn said: "He did not call her a stupid woman and so I don't think there's any basis for an apology. As I understand it, he said 'stupid people'." The spokesman said Corbyn was referring generally to MPs who were not taking the issues being debated seriously. Asked about lip readers saying that Corbyn had said "stupid woman", he added: "Lip reading is open to doubt - he is adamant he didn't say it." The Labour leader had "no time for misogynistic statements", the spokesman said, after some Conservatives accused Corbyn of being sexist. The row continued after Prime Minister's Questions, with a string of female Conservative MPs joining in with calls for an apology. Commons leader Andrea Leadsom turned on the Speaker himself, reminding Bercow of his failure to apologise to her for calling her a "stupid woman" during an incident earlier this year. Bercow said he had already dealt with that matter. He repeatedly insisted he wanted to see the evidence before "pronouncing" on Corbyn's "innocence or guilt". Tory MP Caroline Johnson said the issue had caused "significant upset" and asked when the Speaker would respond. Bercow said her request was "reasonable" and he would respond later on Wednesday. Liberal Democrat MP Wera Hobhouse said: "Sexism in any work place is not acceptable and it is time Jeremy Corbyn left the 1980s behind. "Young women from up and down the country will have watched this exchange today and it is no surprise so many of them are put off participating in If the allegations are true, Jeremy Corbyn must apologise," she said. Prime Minister May survived a separate no-confidence vote tabled by members of her own Conservative Party last week but she came out of the process badly bruised. The deadlock has raised the prospects of either a second referendum or of a no-deal Brexit when the negotiating time with the European Union runs out on March 29 next year. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Mumbai police said Wednesday that the Economic Offences Wing (EOW) has expedited its probe against a builder accused of trying to grab a bungalow of actor Dilip Kumar and his wife Saira Banu. A case has been registered against builder Sameer Bhojwani at the suburban Khar police station on Saira Banu's complaint, an official said. Saira Banu had recently taken to Twitter to appeal Prime Minister Narendra Modi for help in the matter. Bhojwani is accused of forging title documents of the star couple's Rs 250 crore-worth bungalow in Pali Hill area here and registering it in someone else's name. Investigation by the EOW is going on and the accused has got an anticipatory bail, the spokesperson of the Mumbai Police said Wednesday. The EOW has challenged the bail in the higher court, he said. "The investigation will take its natural course, but instructions have been given to the officers to expedite it," he said. "The EOW has given priority to this case," he added. Saira Banu had met Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis earlier and said she apprehended danger from the accused person, after which the Joint Commissioner of EOW spoke to her, the police spokesperson said. Another case of alleged cheating and forgery has been registered against Bhojwani at Khar police station on the complaint of one Divyakant Ranjeet Khatau, he said. In this case, Bhojwani is accused of grabbing, by using a fake power of attorney, a Rs 300 crore property of the Seth Gulraj Khatau Trust on Aksa beach. Bhojwani was arrested in this case and later got bail. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Former Union minister P Chidambaram was Wednesday questioned by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in connection with the INX Media money laundering case, official sources said. He arrived at the agency's office in Jamnagar House, near India Gate, at around 11:15 am along with his lawyer. This is the first time that the 73-year-old former finance and home minister is being grilled by the ED in this case. Sources said the senior Congress leader was asked to depose before the investigating officer (IO) of the case to record his statement under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) and was given a time for Wednesday. It has earlier questioned him in the Aircel-Maxis PMLA case. The Delhi High Court, last month, had extended till January 15 the interim protection from arrest granted to Chidambaram on his pleas seeking anticipatory bail in the INX Media case lodged by both the ED and the CBI. The court had also directed him to cooperate with the investigation. The central probe agency has questioned Chidambaram's son Karti Chidambaram in the INX Media case in the past and has also attached his assets worth an estimated Rs 54 crore, located in India and abroad. The ED had registered a PMLA case in this deal case on the basis of a CBI FIR and had alleged that irregularities took place in the FIPB clearance to INX Media for receiving overseas funds to the tune of Rs 305 crore in 2007 when P Chidambaram was the Union finance minister. It had registered an Enforcement Case Information Report (ECIR), the ED's equivalent of a police FIR, against the accused named in a CBI complaint, including Karti Chidambaram, INX Media and its directors Peter and Indrani Mukerjea. Karti Chidambaram was also arrested on February 28 by the CBI for allegedly taking money to facilitate the FIPB clearance to INX Media in 2007. He was later granted bail. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) major Wednesday said the has approved and granted marketing authorisation to its Ogivri, jointly-developed with Mylan, for the treatment of certain breast and stomach cancers. "Ogivri, a Trastuzumab jointly developed by and Mylan, has been approved in the The has granted marketing authorisation for Ogivri to our partner Mylan," said in a regulatory filing. Biocon said the European Medicines Agency's Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP) had previously issued a positive opinion recommending approval of Ogivri as a to Roche's Herceptin (Trastuzumab) on October 18, 2018. Ogivri is indicated for the treatment of patients with HER2 positive early breast cancer, metastatic breast and metastatic gastric Shares of Biocon were trading 0.41 per cent higher at Rs 643.25 apiece on BSE. A 35-year-old former vice president of a multinational company was arrested for chain snatching at Vashi in Navi Mumbai, police said Wednesday. Sumitsen Gupta, a resident of Vashi was arrested on December 12, an official said. "He had earlier stolen a sedan car near Fortis Hospital in Vashi. He used that vehicle for chain-snatching," the official added. The incident of car theft was recorded on a CCTV camera installed in the area, based on which he was identified, the official said, adding that Gupta was finally arrested in Vashi itself. He was produced before a court, which sent him to police custody till Thursday. In December last year, the accused was also arrested for allegedly stealing a pistol of a CRPF jawan, he said. "Gupta had also been booked for domestic violence in 2015," the official said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Supreme Court has held that under the scheme of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC), an executive magistrate cannot direct the police to register an FIR on the basis of a private complaint lodged before him. The top court, however, said that if a complaint is lodged before an executive magistrate on an issue over which he has an jurisdiction, then he can himself lodge an FIR in the matter after conducting an administrative inquiry. A bench of Justices R F Nariman and Navin Sinha set aside the order of Lucknow bench of Allahabad High Court by which it had refused to quash an FIR lodged against a private college on the direction of a Sub-Divisional Magistrate (SDM). On January 31, 2018, SDM, Unnao in Uttar Pradesh had directed the police to lodge an FIR against a college run by Naman Pratap Singh after a student made a private complaint to the officer alleging that she had been duped into taking admission in an unrecognised institution. The bench after perusing various provisions of CrPC said,"It is therefore apparent that in the scheme of the Code, an Executive Magistrate has no role to play in directing the police to register an FIR on basis of a private complaint lodged before him". The court said that after reading the FIR, it reveals that the police has registered the FIR on directions of the SDM which was clearly impermissible in the law as he (SDM) does not exercise powers under Section 156(3) of the CrPC. The court, however, said, "If a complaint is lodged before the executive magistrate regarding an issue over which he has administrative jurisdiction, and the magistrate proceeds to hold an administrative inquiry, it may be possible for him to lodge an FIR himself in the matter". The top court said that in the instant case, the very institution of the FIR is contrary to the law and without jurisdiction and hence is liable to be quashed. It said that section 154 of the CrPC provides for registration of a FIR at the instance of an informant, reduced into writing and signed by the person giving it while Section 154(3) stipulates that in the event of a refusal on part of police officer to record such information, it may be sent in writing and by post to the Superintendent of Police, who will direct investigation into the same. The bench said that even section 190 of the CrPC provides for taking of cognizance by a Magistrate either on a complaint or upon a police report. "Similarly, Section 156(3) provides that any Magistrate empowered under Section 190 may order such an investigation, and which also includes the power to direct the lodgement of an FIR. The Code in Section 200 of CrpC provides for lodging of a complaint before the Magistrate, who after examination of the complainant and witnesses, if any, can take cognizance," the bench said. It said that nothing prevented the student from lodging an FIR before the police or if the circumstances so warranted, then she could have approached the superintendent of police under section 154(3) of CrpC. "Alternately, the respondent (student) could have moved the Magistrate concerned under Section 156(3) of the Code in the event of the refusal of the police to act. Remedy was also available to the respondent by filing a complaint under Section 200 of the Code before the jurisdictional Magistrate," the bench said. The court while refusing to go into the merit of the case said that any complaint made by the student under the established provision will therefore have to be considered by the appropriate authority or forum in accordance with law. Naman Pratap Singh has moved the apex court challenging the order of Lucknow bench of Allahabad High Court by which it had refused to quash the FIR. He had contended that no objection certificate has been obtained from the Chatrapati Sahuji Maharaj University, Kanpur for establishment of the three-year law course and affiliation was also granted by the varsity. He said that they have also deposited a sum of Rs 3.5 lakh with the Bar Council of India and were awaiting permission from it for starting the law course. Singh argued that the question of any fraudulent misrepresentation by the appellants, persuading students to take admission in an unauthorised institution simply does not arise. "Several students have taken admission in full awareness of the existent facts with no grievances and have sworn affidavits to that effect," he had said. The student, who had lodged a complaint against the college contended that by misrepresentation and cheating she had been persuaded to take admission in an unrecognised institution. "There are several students who are aggrieved," she had claimed. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Le Collectif Cheikh Yassine a organise un certain nombre dactivites et de festivites pour les enfants de Gaza sous le theme La joie des enfants de Gaza pour lAid . Ces activites ont commence le premier jour de lAid et continue jusquau 4eme jour de lAid dans la bande de Gaza. Plusieurs activites, ont ete organisees parmi lesquelles : des competitions recompensees par des prix, des jeux, des animations et des chants presentes par un groupe ainsi que des distributions de cadeaux et daides financieres. Scientists have identified a fossil plant species that suggests flowers bloomed in the Early Jurassic, more than 174 million years ago, according to a study. Before now, angiosperms (flowering plants) were thought to have a history of no more than 130 million years, according to the study published in the journal eLife. The discovery of the novel flower species, which the researchers named Nanjinganthus dendrostyla, throws widely accepted theories of plant evolution into question, by suggesting that they existed around 50 million years earlier. Nanjinganthus also has a variety of 'unexpected' characteristics according to almost all of these theories. Angiosperms are an important member of the plant kingdom, and their origin has been the topic of long-standing debate among evolutionary biologists. Many previously thought angiosperms could be no more than 130 million years old. However, molecular clocks have indicated that they must be older than this. "Researchers were not certain where and how flowers came into existence because it seems that many flowers just popped up in the Cretaceous from nowhere," said Qiang Fu, Associate Research Professor at the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology, China. "Studying fossil flowers, especially those from earlier geologic periods, is the only reliable way to get an answer to these questions," Fu said. The team studied 264 specimens of 198 individual flowers preserved on 34 rock slabs from the South Xiangshan Formation -- an outcrop of rocks in the Nanjing region of China renowned for bearing fossils from the Early Jurassic epoch. The abundance of fossil samples allowed the researchers to dissect some of them and study them with sophisticated microscopy, providing high-resolution pictures of the flowers from different angles and magnifications. They then used this detailed information about the shape and structure of the different fossil flowers to reconstruct the features of Nanjinganthus dendrostyla. The key feature of an angiosperm is 'angio-ovuly' -- the presence of fully enclosed ovules, which are precursors of seeds before pollination. In the current study, the reconstructed flower was found to have a cup-form receptacle and ovarian roof that together enclose the ovules/seeds. This was a crucial discovery, because the presence of this feature confirmed the flower's status as an angiosperm, researchers said. Although there have been reports of angiosperms from the Middle-Late Jurassic epochs in northeastern China, there are structural features of Nanjinganthus that distinguish it from these other specimens and suggest that it is a new genus of angiosperms. The team now wants to understand whether angiosperms are either monophyletic -- which would mean Nanjinganthus represents a stem group giving rise to all later species -- or polyphyletic, whereby Nanjinganthus represents an evolutionary dead end and has little to do with many later species. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) German Chancellor Angela Merkel has no plans to reshuffle her Cabinet, Merkel's spokesman said Wednesday after a one-time rival of the chancellor hinted he'd be interested in joining the government, Merkel's Christian Democratic Union is trying to heal internal divisions and prevent future rifts after the politician in question, Friedrich Merz, narrowly lost the race to succeed Merkel as party leader. Merkel ally Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer defeated Merz on December 7. Merz, a former leader of the CDU's parliamentary group who is popular with the party's conservative right wing, emerged from a decade away from front-line to seek the leader's job. He declined earlier this month to seek election to another senior party position and it remains unclear what, if any, role he will play in the future. Asked by Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung daily newspaper whether he'd be interested in becoming a minister, Merz said he would have the confidence to do so "because of my experience in business and " "However, this is not in my hands, but is a matter for the chancellor," he said, adding "we will see" after more discussions in the new year with Kramp-Karrenbauer. The Cabinet job most obviously suited to Merz would be that of economy minister, currently held by Merkel ally Peter Altmaier. Merkel's spokesman, Steffen Seibert, was asked Wednesday whether the chancellor planned a reshuffle soon to make space for Merz. "The chancellor doesn't plan a Cabinet reshuffle," Seibert said. Merkel relinquished her party's leadership after a difficult year for the CDU. She has said she plans to remain chancellor for the rest of the current parliamentary term which could last until 2021. She and Merz have had a difficult relationship in the past. Kramp-Karrenbauer is the favourite to run for chancellor in the next election, but isn't guaranteed to become the candidate. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Maharashtra forest department has brought four elephants from Kanha Sanctuary to capture the two cubs of tigress Avni who was killed last month. While Avni, who the government claimed had turned man-eater and killed a dozen people in Yavatmal district's Pandharkavda area, was shot dead on November 2, her cubs, christened C1 and C2, are missing. The killing of the tigress had kicked up a huge controversy, with wildlife activists blasting the state government. Now, elephants from Kanha Sanctuary in Madhya Pradesh have been 'commissioned' to capture the two half-adult cubs, local forest department official said. According to forest officials, the cubs are capable of hunting on their own. The four pachyderms -- Shiva, Pavanputra, Chanchalkali and Himalaya -- reached Darathi base camp Tuesday. They would be used to search for the cubs within Anji-Ralegaon forest belt, where trap cameras have noticed the cubs' movement. The forest department has put up a wire fencing to restrict the cubs's movement. "We have set up 110 trap cameras and 54 Pressure Impression Pads in the area to keep track of the cubs' movement. On select locations we have tied goats for them to feed on," said the official. During the hunt for their mother, an elephant had been brought in from Tadoba Sanctuary, but it became violent and attacked and killed a tribal woman in Ralegaon tehsil. The elephant was then sent back. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The authorities Wednesday did not allow fresh traffic on the Jammu-Srinagar national highway after shooting of stones from a hillock overlooking the road left hundreds of vehicles stranded, officials said. It was decided to clear the stranded vehicles and therefore no fresh traffic was allowed on the 270-km highway either from Srinagar or Jammu this morning, the officials said. They said the decision to reopen the traffic on the highway will be taken later in the day after all the stranded vehicles are cleared and the situation near the scene of shooting of stones reviewed. A massive landslide struck the highway, the only all weather road linking Kashmir with the rest of the country, at Gangroo near Ramsu on December 19, forcing the closure of the highway for two days. Though the authorities after hectic efforts removed the debris and ensured reopening of the road Friday, the intermittent shooting of stones at the same spot over the past five days caused frequent disruption in the smooth movement of the traffic. The traffic on the highway is restricted to one-way over the past several months, playing alternatively from the twin capitals of Srinagar and Jammu, in view of the ongoing four-laning project. "The shooting of stones continued almost throughout the day yesterday, leaving hundreds of Jammu-bound vehicles stranded, resulting in massive traffic jam. The road was cleared for traffic around midnight, but again the shooting of stones forced suspension of the traffic this morning," a traffic department official said. He said the shooting of stones stopped Tuesday afternoon again, allowing the traffic department to show green signal to the stranded vehicles. Most of the passenger vehicles have already been cleared and now the concentration is on the heavy vehicles, the official said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The government is likely to make additional capital infusion in the public sector banks, Economic Affairs Secretary said Wednesday. This will be over and above Rs 1.35 trillion capital infusion announced by the government for the public sector (PSBs) in October last year to meet global capital risk norms called Basel III. Asked whether the government is considering to make additional capital infusion in PSBs, Garg said, "Yes...wait for the supplementary which is coming up tomorrow. Most probably tomorrow". Additional capital infusion would be done through recapitalisation bonds as has been the practice since October 2017. This does not have any impact on the fiscal position of the government as recap bonds are part of below the line items. According to sources, the government is considering additional capital infusion of up to Rs 300-400 billion in PSBs as they have been unable to raise required funds from the markets. As part of the capital infusion plan announced by the Ministry in October 2017, the government envisaged that public sector (PSBs) would raise Rs 580 billion from the stock markets by March 2019 to meet Basel III norms. However, due to subdued market conditions, have been unable to raise enough funds from the markets so far. In addition, non-performing assets of many banks have seen a spurt in the first two quarters of this fiscal, putting stress on their bottom lines. However, the banks have got a breather in respect of Capital Conservation Buffer (CCB), a part of Basel III norms. The RBI, at its last board meeting of November 19, deferred the requirement to meet the CCB target by one year, leaving about Rs 370 billion in the hands of banks. Despite this relaxation, PSBs need more funds to meet global capital norms called Basel III as the RBI has retained the capital to risk weighted assets ratio (CRAR) at 9 per cent, sources said, adding that the shortfall could be around Rs 300 billion. The government had decided to take a massive step to capitalise PSBs to the tune of about Rs 2.11 trilllion over the next two years -- through budgetary provisions of Rs 181.39 billion, recapitalisation bonds of Rs 1.35 trillion, and the balance through raising of capital by banks from the market while diluting government equity estimated at Rs 580 billlion. As per this plan, the remaining capital infusion is about Rs 420 billion. Earlier this year, the government pumped in Rs 113.36 billion into five PSBs -- PNB, Allahabad Bank, Indian Overseas Bank, and -- to improve their financial health. The Geological Survey of India has discovered gold and platinum group elements in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, respectively,a senior official said Wednesday. GSI has discovered two major deposits that pertains to gold and Platinum Group Elements, M Sridhar, Additional Director General, GSI, Southern Region, told reporters. The gold was found in Karnataka's Ajjanahalli. GSI has estimated a resource of 1.26 million tons, he said. The Platinum Group Elements (PGE) were discovered at Tasampalaiyam in Tamil Nadu, M Sridhar, Additional Director General, GSI, Southern Region, told reporters. "We have estimated a resource of 0.402 million tons with a cut off of 1.52 ppm (parts per million) and 0.329 million tons with a cut off of 1.72 ppm," he said. Limestone was discovered in Guntur and Kurnool districts in Andhra Pradesh, Belagavi district in Karnataka and Cuddalore district in Tamil Nadu, Sridhar said. In Andhra Pradesh, GSI recently discovered a diamondferous kimberlite in Wajrakarur Kimberlite Field which is a known area for diamond picking, he said. GSI has conducted a preliminary survey at Uddanam area near Srikakulam in Andhra Pradesh where a high incidence of kidney problems among the local population has been noticed, he said. "We have collected the potable water there, drinking water and other sources of water, we have analysed that, it proved that it does not contain anything in abnormal quantities and that too an element that can cause a kidney problem. That way, we have ruled (it) out," he said. GSI has taken up another research programme as the problem remained there even after water was ruled out as a cause for the kidney problems, he said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) ISRO's geosynchronous launch vehicle Wednesday successfully injected into orbit the country's latest advanced satellite that will substantially enhance the communication systems of the Indian Air Force. After a 26-hour countdown, the GSLV-F11, carrying the 2,250kg GSAT-7A, lifted off at 4.10 pm from the second launch pad at Sriharikota, situated about 110 km from Chennai. Around 19 minutes after lift-off, the GSLV-F11 injected GSAT-7A into the intended orbit. It will be placed in its final geostationary orbit using the onboard propulsion systems. According to the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), the satellite would take a few days after separation from the launcher to reach its orbital slot. ISRO scientists broke into cheers as the satellite was injected into orbit. According to the space agency officials, the advanced communication satellite would facilitate exclusive frequency flight communication for the IAF. From the Mission Control Centre, ISRO Chairman K Sivan said Wednesday's "successful and safe" launch was the third one in 35 days and came close on the heels of the "grand success" of two missions in November. The GSLV-F11 successfully injected the "advanced" communication GSAT-7A into orbit, an elated Sivan said, describing the mission as "wonderful." This was the heaviest satellite lifted by the GSLV with indigenous cryogenic stage, he said. It came with many firsts, including increased propellant loading and other features, the ISRO chief said. The "cryogenic stage is burnt to depletion to get a super synchronous transfer orbit to enhance the life of the satellite," he said. The mission life of the GSAT-7A, built by ISRO, is eight years. It will provide communication in Ku-band over the Indian region. The advanced communication satellite also came with new technology regarding the antenna to improve the performance, Sivan said. Its solar panels have been deployed and orbit raising manoeuvres will be done from Thursday morning from Bengaluru, he said. Wednesday's mission also gave the scientists some anxiety "as the weather god was not very conducive some one week back," Sivan noted. However, the meteorological team here gave correct predictions, he said and congratulated the ISRO team members behind the successful launch, the last of this calendar year. "This is the last mission of this year. We are going to initiate the new year with a grand mission soon," he said. Sivan said the new year would see ISRO taking up challenging launches, including the Chandrayaan-2 moon mission. The GSLV-F11 is the ISRO's fourth generation launch vehicle with three stages. Four liquid strap-ons and a solid rocket motor at the core form the first stage of the launch vehicle, while the second stage is equipped with a high-thrust engine using liquid fuel, ISRO said. The Cryogenic Upper Stage forms the third and final stage of the vehicle. The seventh launch of 2018 from Sriharikota marks the 69th mission of GSLV-F11 for ISRO. On November 14, ISRO's GSLV-MkIII-D, which is dubbed by the ISRO as the 'Bahubali' or "fat boy" of Indian rockets, injected into orbit a 3,423 kg communication satellite GSAT-29, the country's heaviest to be put into orbit. India's earth observation satellite HysIS and 30 other co-passenger satellites from eight countries were launched onboard ISRO's trusted workhorse Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle on November 29. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Council is likely to slash tax rates on automobile tyres to 18 per cent from 28 per cent currently in its next meeting Saturday, an official said. The move is part of the overall plan to rationalise the highest tax bracket of 28 per cent after Prime Minister Narendra Modi Tuesday said that 99 per cent of over 1,200 goods and services will attract 18 per cent or less (GST). "A 28 per cent tax on automobile tyre impacts common man because ultimately he has to shell out the tax. The overall focus on December 22 Council meet will be to lessen the burden on common man," an official told PTI. Currently there are 34 goods left in the highest tax bracket of 28 per cent. The list include commonly used items like 'new pneumatic tyre of rubber' (automobile tyre), digital camera, air conditioners, dish washing machine, set top box for TV, monitors and projectors as well as construction item like cement. The official said, while a rate cut on cement to 18 per cent is likely to cost about Rs 200 billion annually to the exchequer, the Council is still likely to go ahead. ALSO READ: The new GST test "Cement is an area where huge instances of evasion was taking place. If tax rates come down more people will buy it from the formal channel and would also boost housing sector as well," the official added. The other items which are likely to retained in the 28 per cent slab include aerated drinks, cigarette, bidi, tobacco products, pan masala, smoking pipes, automobiles, aircrafts, yachts, revolvers and pistols, gambling lottery. GST has five tax slabs of 0 per cent, 8, 12, 18 and 28 per cent with daily essential items attracting nil tax rates and luxury, sin and some white goods at the highest tax slab. Modi Tuesday indicated that the 28 per cent slab of GST would only be restricted to a few select items, such as luxury and sin goods. "We are of the opinion of making GST as smooth as possible for the enterprises. In earlier days, the GST was framed according to the existing VAT or excise tax structures exercised in those respective states. (With) the discussions held from time to time, the tax system is getting improved," Modi had said. In the first eight months (April-November) of the current fiscal, the government has mopped up over Rs 7.76 lakh crore from GST. The 2018-19 budget had estimated annual GST collection at Rs 13.48 lakh crore, which means a monthly target of Rs 1.12 lakh crore. EY Tax Partner said "the industry as well as consumers have been eagerly looking forward to pruning of the goods in the 28 per cent category which today amongst others include cement, camera, two wheelers, tyres, etc. However, the Government would need to analyse the same from the perspective of impact on GST revenue collections". The Haryana government has decided to install solar energy plants on gram panchayat land through Haryana Power Generation Corporation Limited (HPGCL). A decision to this effect has been taken in the review meeting of New and Renewable Energy Department held under the chairmanship of Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar here Wednesday. A written communication should be sent to all gram panchayats with immediate effect that if they want to get solar energy plant installed on their land, whether barren or fertile, then they can contact and submit their option to Renewable Energy Department provided that land should be at least 10 acres, the chief minister said. Apart from this, if a panchayat instals solar energy plant at its own resources then HPGCL will provide technical assistance, an official release said. Haryana Minister O P Dhankar apprised in the meeting that Badhsa, Ghaglan and other villages of district Jhajjar have been applying for establishing solar power plant. On this, it was decided that HPGCL will initially establish solar power plant in these villages on pilot project basis. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The commerce and industry ministry has taken up the issue of 'angel tax' notices being sent to with the finance ministry, Union Minister has said. Several have raised concerns on taxation of angel funds under Section 56 of the Income Tax Act, which provides for taxation of funds received by an entity. "We have taken up the issue," the commerce and industry minister said in a tweet. He said this in response to a tweet by Chairman of Manipal Global Education T V Mohandas Pai, who has sought "urgent" intervention by the government in the matter. An income tax official said ,"notices issued on angel tax to may be for those that are not recognised by the department of industrial policy and promotion (DIPP)". Earlier in April, the government gave relief to startups by allowing them to avail tax concession if total investment including funding from angel investors does not exceed Rs 10 crore. As per a notification by the commerce and industry ministry, an angel investor picking up stakes in a startup should have a minimum net worth of Rs 2 crore or should have an average returned income of over Rs 25 lakh in the preceding three financial years. Section 56 of the Income Tax Act provides that where a closely held company issues its shares at a price more than its fair market value, the amount received in excess of the fair market value will be charged to tax the company as income from other sources. Startups also enjoy income tax benefit for three out of seven consecutive assessment years. To avail the concessions, startups would have to approach an eight-member inter-ministerial board of certification. An angel investor is the one who funds a startup when it is taking baby steps to establish itself in the competitive market. Normally, about 300-400 startups get angel funding in an year. The government launched the Startup India initiative in January 2016 to build a strong ecosystem for nurturing innovation and entrepreneurship. The Madras High Court Wednesday quashed a March 4, 2016 order of the Election Commission rejecting a request of the Tamil Manila Congress (TMC) headed by former union minister G K Vasan for allotment of bi-cycle symbol to it. Passing the order, Justice T Raja remitted the matter back to the EC and directed the TMC to give a fresh representation. The commission should consider the matter afresh and pass orders within eight weeks, he said. The Tamil Manila Congress was floated by veteran Congress leader G K Moopanar in 1996. The EC had then recognised it as a state party and allotted the bi-cycle symbol. After the demise of Moopanar in 2001, Vasan took over as the party president. It later merged with parent party Congress, but again Vasan and his supporters broke away in 2014 and revived the TMC. However, despite repeated applications for allotment of bicycle symbol, the EC rejected it. Hence the party filed the present petition. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Madras High Court has upheld a lower court order declining to discharge a Puducherry-based doctor in a case relating to the sexual assault of a minor girl patient in the Union Territory in 2016. Justice V Parthiban dismissed the criminal revision petition filed recently by Dr P Rajendran challenging the order of Special Court under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act in Puducherry, rejecting his petition to discharge him from the proceedings. Confirming the order of the lower court, the judge said, "This court is of the considered view that the conduct of the petitioner at the time of undertaking the medical examination has to be established one way or the other only during the trial in order to conclusively come to a conclusion..." "By facing the trial, no prejudice would be caused to the petitioner since it is always open to him to come out unscathed by establishing his professional credentials and bona fides as claimed by the petitioner himself," he observed. "At the same time, he cannot shut out the prosecution at the threshold and seek to discharge himself by mechanical application of Section 41 of the POCSO Act," he added. On July 9, 2016, the girl, aged about 13 years, had visited the hospital run by Rajendran along with her maternal uncle and maid servant following complaints of stomach ache. They met the doctor who prescribed for a scan. Thereafter, it was alleged that the doctor had asked the minor girl to lie down on the testing bed in his room, instead of giving treatment for stomach ache and removed her top. According to prosecution, the petitioner had misbehaved with the girl and committed aggravated sexual assault on her as defined under Section 9(e) of the POCSO Act. Subsequently, a case was registered against the petitioner for the offences under Sections 9(e) and 10 of the POCSO Act. During the trial, the Special Court judge had taken cognisance of the final report filed by police after the investigation and on July 31 this year, dismissed the plea filed by the petitioner. Following this, the doctor had moved an appeal in the high court. In his petition, the doctor submitted that absolutely no ingredients were made out by the prosecution to constitute the offence under Section 9(e) of the POCSO Act to connect him with the alleged offence. He also pointed out that Section 41 clearly excludes medical examination done by medical examiner from the purview of Sections 3 to 13 of the POCSO Act when such medical treatment is undertaken with the consent of parents or guardian. Refusing to discharge the petitioner, the court said, "If the case of the petitioner is to be accepted that the medical practitioners need to be protected under all circumstances under Section 41 of the POCSO Act, it would mean that no medical practitioner can ever be prosecuted and convicted even if there is involvement in POCSO offence. Such scenario would not have been the intention of Parliament while enacting the law." "After all, the objective of the POCSO Act was to protect children from perpetrators of sexual assault and it cannot stand stymied at the threshold by discharging the person like the petitioner who stood charged for offences under Sections 9(e) and 10 of the POCSO Act, the judge noted. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) India's score in the UN aviation watchdog ICAO's air safety oversight audit has improved and the Federal Aviation Administration has retained the highest safety rating, officials said Wednesday. Civil Aviation Minister Suresh Prabhu said the domestic aviation sector's "safety has been extremely good". Both the ICAO and the FAA have given high safety ratings for the country, he added. Aviation regulator DGCA's chief B S Bhullar said that as per provisional figures, India's score in the ICAO audit has gone up to 74 per cent. It is currently at 57.44 per cent. Besides, he said the FAA has retained 'Category 1' rating for India. Minister of State for Civil Aviation Jayant Sinha said the country's safety record is excellent and that there are no structural deficiencies. India is the fastest growing domestic aviation market in the world and registered double-digit growth for the 50th consecutive month in October. The International Aviation Safety Assessment (IASA) rating of 'Category 1' means the carriers from the assessed state may initiate or continue service to the US in a normal manner and take part in reciprocal code-share arrangements with American carriers. The FAA carried out an audit to confirm India's adherence to the standards laid down by the ICAO and oversight of Indian airlines in July. In January 2014, the FAA downgraded India's aviation safety ranking and it was upgraded to 'Category 1' in April 2015. The American regulator conducts IASA programme to assess the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) of each country that has carriers operating to the US. An IASA assessment determines if the foreign CAA provides oversight to its carriers that operate to the US as per the international standards. Meanwhile, the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) carried out the Universal Safety Oversight Audit Programme for India in November 2017 and another team of the watchdog came in February this year. The audit result showed that the country's score declined to 57.44 per cent from 65.82 per cent earlier, placing India below Pakistan, Nepal and many other nations. An ICAO team visited India last month and assessed the action taken on issues related to three areas that were audited by the watchdog in November 2015. Those pertained to Aerodromes and Ground Aids, Air Navigation Services (ANS) and Aircraft Accident and Incident Investigation. The ICAO looks at eight areas during an audit. They include Primary Aviation Legislation and Civil Aviation Regulations, Civil Aviation Organisation, Personnel Licensing and Training, Aircraft Operations and Airworthiness of Aircraft. During the November 2017 visit, the ICAO team assessed five areas -- Personnel Licensing and Training, Aircraft Operations, Airworthiness of Aircraft, Primary Aviation Legislation and Civil Aviation Regulations, and Civil Aviation Organisation. The government is in the process of empowering the DGCA to regulate air traffic controllers and its implementation, expected in the first half of 2019, will help further improve the audit score. Currently, ratings of air traffic controllers are done by the Airports Authority of India (AAI), which is also the provider of air traffic control services. India and South Korea Wednesday resolved to deepen regional and global coordination in combating the challenge of terrorism and explored new avenues for boosting trade and investment ties. The issues were discussed during 9th India-Korea Joint Commission Meeting. The Indian delegation was headed by External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj while the Korean side was led by Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha. In a media statement, Swaraj reiterated India's continued support to the efforts being made by South Korean President Moon Jae-in to address the Korean nuclear issue and promote ties with North Korea through dialogue and negotiation. She hoped that the efforts will bear fruit and usher in a new era of peace and stability in the Korean peninsula. Swaraj said she also conveyed to Kang that India sees South Korea as an indispensable partner in India's 'Act East' policy and in its vision of the Indo-Pacific. "We also shared the view that terrorism in all its forms and manifestations is a global scourge and resolved to combat it through coordinated regional and global efforts," she said. Ties between India and South Korea were upgraded to the level of special strategic partnership during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Seoul in 2015. "We expressed satisfaction over the growth in bilateral trade and investment over the past two years. We agreed to redouble our efforts to realise our leaders' vision of raising the quantum of our bilateral trade to USD 50 billion by the year 2030," Swaraj said. "We shared the view that early conclusion of ongoing negotiations to upgrade our bilateral Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) and implementation of trade facilitation measures already agreed upon will help us move towards this target," she added. The External Affairs Minister also said both sides explored new avenues of Korean investment in India's infrastructure modernisation. "We encouraged Korean companies, known for their technological feats and global outlook, to create newer opportunities by partnering in government of India's flagship initiatives such as 'Make in India', 'Skill India', 'Digital India' and 'Smart City'," she said. In the meeting, both sides also discussed potential cooperation in the energy sector. "As two large energy consumers of Asia, closer consultations between us serve our mutual interest in securing predictable energy supplies at stable prices," Swaraj said, adding the Indian side also extended an invitation to South Korea to join the International Solar Alliance. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Former Union minister P Chidambaram arrived at the Enforcement Directorate (ED) office for questioning in the INX Media money laundering case on Wednesday, official sources said. They said the senior Congress leader was asked to depose before the investigating officer (IO) of the case to record his statement under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA). He arrived around 11:30 am along with his lawyer. The central probe agency has earlier grilled Chidambaram's son Karti Chidambaram in this case and has also attached his assets worth an estimated Rs 54 crore, located in India and abroad. The ED had registered a PMLA case in this deal case on the basis of a CBI FIR and had alleged that irregularities took place in the FIPB clearance to INX Media for receiving overseas funds to the tune of Rs 305 crore in 2007 when P Chidambaram was the Union finance minister. It had registered an Enforcement Case Information Report (ECIR), the ED's equivalent of a police FIR, against the accused named in a CBI complaint, including Karti, INX Media and its directors Peter and Indrani Mukerjea. Karti Chidambaram was also arrested on February 28 by the CBI for allegedly taking money to facilitate the FIPB clearance to INX Media in 2007 . He was later granted bail. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Former Union minister P Chidambaram was Wednesday questioned by the (ED) in connection with the Media case, official sources said. He arrived at the agency's office in Jamnagar House, near India Gate, at around 11:15 am along with his lawyer. This is the first time that the 73-year-old former finance and home minister is being grilled by the ED in this case. Sources said the senior leader was asked to depose before the investigating officer (IO) of the case to record his statement under the Prevention of Act (PMLA) and was given a time for Wednesday. It has earlier questioned him in the Aircel-Maxis PMLA case. The Delhi High Court, last month, had extended till January 15 the interim protection from arrest granted to Chidambaram on his pleas seeking anticipatory bail in the Media case lodged by both the ED and the The court had also directed him to cooperate with the investigation. The central probe agency has questioned Chidambaram's son in the Media case in the past and has also attached his assets worth an estimated Rs 540 million, located in India and abroad. The ED had registered a PMLA case in this deal case on the basis of a FIR and had alleged that irregularities took place in the FIPB clearance to INX Media for receiving overseas funds to the tune of Rs 305 crore in 2007 when P Chidambaram was the Union finance minister. It had registered an Enforcement Case Information Report (ECIR), the ED's equivalent of a police FIR, against the accused named in a complaint, including Karti Chidambaram, INX Media and its directors Peter and Gujarat cadre IPS officer Rajnish Rai has approached the Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT) in Ahmedabad against the rejection of his request for voluntary retirement by the central government. Rai, who had arrested D G Vanzara and two other IPS officers in the Sohrabuddin Sheikh alleged fake encounter case in 2007, earlier sought voluntary retirement but it was rejected on the ground that "inquiries were pending or contemplated against him," as per his application before the CAT. He was last transferred as Inspector General of the CRPF's Counter Insurgency and Anti-Terrorism (CIAT) School at Chittoor in Andhra Pradesh. He had earlier this year sought voluntary retirement with effect from November 30 after completing 50 years of age under provisions of the All India Services (Death-Cum- Retirement Benefit) Rules, 1958, but the Centre rejected his plea in October. In April 2017, while working with the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) at Shillong in Meghalaya, he had submitted a report on "a suspected fake encounter during a joint counter-insurgency operation of security forces, resulting in the killing of two persons of the NDFB(S)," he said in his application. After his retirement was "not agreed to by the competent authority since he was not clear from the vigilance angle," Rai approached the CAT's Ahmedabad bench on December 5. Rai, a 1992-batch IPS officer from Gujarat, in his application sought to "set aside the letter rejecting his retirement and allow his retirement." The CAT's Ahmedabad bench recently issued notices to the central and Gujarat governments returnable on January 1, 2019. On November 3, 2018, when he informed the Ministry of Home Affairs' secretary that he had relinquished charge as IG, the ministry wrote asking him to join back "in view of the fact that his application for retirement had not been accepted by the competent authority of MHA," the application stated. Rai was in August 2014 transferred out of Gujarat as the Chief Vigilance Officer of the Uranium Corporation of India Limited (UCIL) at Jaduguda in Jharkhand. In April 2015 he was transferred to the CRPF at Shillong. After his report on the "suspected fake encounter" (in the North East) he was transferred to the CIAT at Chittoor and a "departmental misconduct" charge sheet was served upon him, Rai said. He had approached the CAT at Hyderabad against the charge sheet which stayed the proceedings against him. When Rai was with the Gujarat CID in 2007, he had arrested senior IPS officers D G Vanzara, Rajkumar Pandian and Dinesh MN in connection with the alleged fake encounter of Sohrabuddin Sheikh. Sheikh was killed in an alleged fake encounter near Gandhinagar in November 2005. His wife was also believed to have been done to death. Prajapati, an aide of the gangster who was believed to be the witness to the encounter, was allegedly killed by police at Chapri village in Gujarat's Banaskantha district in December 2006. The Sohrabuddin killing case was transferred to Mumbai in September 2012 on the request of the CBI for a fair trial. In 2013, the Supreme Court had clubbed the alleged fake encounter case of Prajapati with that of Sheikh. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) India on Wednesday successfully launched its latest advanced satellite that will give a big boost to the strategic communication and networking capabilities of the Indian Air Force(IAF). In a launch that came with many firsts, the 2,250 kg geo-stationary satellite GSAT-7A built by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) provides for a secure mode of communication and will be for the exclusive use of the IAF. Dubbed as "Angry Bird", the satellite is expected to enable the force to interlink different ground radar stations, ground airbase and Airborne early warning and control (AWACS) aircraft. After a 26-hour countdown, ISRO's rocket GSLV-F11 carrying the satellite lifted off at 4.10 pm from the second launch pad at Sriharikota, about 110 km from Chennai. Around 19 minutes after the lift-off, the geosynchronous launch vehicle injected the satellite into the intended orbit. It will be placed in its final geostationary orbit using the onboard propulsion systems. According to ISRO, the satellite would take a few days after separation from the launcher to reach its orbital slot. ISRO scientists broke into cheers after the satellite was placed into the designated orbit. According to the space agency officials, the advanced communication satellite would facilitate exclusive frequency flight communication for the IAF. "The launch is a tremendous jump in our networking capabilities. It will be very beneficial to our communication network," IAF chief Air Chief Marshal B S Dhanoa told reporters in Jodhpur. The mission life of the GSAT-7A is eight years. It will provide communication in Ku-band over the Indian region. From the Mission Control Centre, ISRO Chairman K Sivan said the "successful and safe" launch was the third one in 35 days and came close on the heels of the "grand success" of two missions in November. The GSLV-F11 successfully injected the "advanced" communication GSAT-7A into orbit, an elated Sivan said, describing the mission as "wonderful." This was the heaviest satellite lifted by the GSLV with indigenous cryogenic stage, he added. The mission came with many firsts, including increased propellant loading and other features, the ISRO chief said. The "cryogenic stage is burnt to depletion to get a super synchronous transfer orbit to enhance the life of the satellite," he said. The satellite also came with new technology regarding the antenna to improve the performance, Sivan said. Its solar panels have been deployed and orbit raising manoeuvres will be done from Thursday morning from Bengaluru, he said. Wednesday's mission also gave the scientists some anxious moments "as the weather god was not very conducive some one week back," Sivan noted. However, the meteorological team here gave correct predictions, he said and congratulated the ISRO team members behind the successful launch, the last for this calendar year. "This is the last mission of this year. We are going to initiate the new year with a grand mission soon," he said. Sivan said the new year would see ISRO taking up challenging launches, including the Chandrayaan-2 moon mission. The GSLV-F11 is the ISRO's fourth generation launch vehicle with three stages. Four liquid strap-ons and a solid rocket motor at the core form the first stage of the launch vehicle, while the second stage is equipped with a high-thrust engine using liquid fuel, ISRO said. The Cryogenic Upper Stage forms the third and final stage of the vehicle. The seventh launch of 2018 from Sriharikota marks the 69th mission of GSLV-F11 for ISRO. Sivan said the second stage propellant loading of the launch vehicle was increased from 37.5 tonnes to 40 tonnes while cryogenic stage propellant loading from 12 tonnes to 15 tonnes along with enhanced thrust value for cryogenic stage, he said. "This has been successfully demonstrated in this mission and we got 2,000 km more than what we expected. This is a great achievement," he said. Referring to the salient features of the Wednesday launch, Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre Director S Somanath said the vehicle was an improved version where scientists brought changes in the cryogenic stage as well as second stage to improve payload capability. "This resulted in a lot of engineering changes and new elements. The (GSLV) vehicle itself is 1.5 metres longer than the previous GSLVs and it calls for understanding aerodynamics, hardware design and control systems," he said. He congratulated the ISRO team for "meticulously" undertaking all the new changes and making a successful launch. "This is the sixth consecutive success of the GSLV. It only shows that this vehicle is going to stay longer and to make more missions in the years to come with improved capability," he said. On November 14, ISRO's GSLV-MkIII-D, which is dubbed by the ISRO as the 'Bahubali' or "fat boy" of Indian rockets, injected into orbit a 3,423 kg communication satellite GSAT-29, the country's heaviest to be put into orbit. India's earth observation satellite HysIS and 30 other co-passenger satellites from eight countries were launched onboard ISRO's trusted workhorse Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle on November 29. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The CBI Wednesday told a Delhi court that an Italian court order that there was no evidence of corruption in the case relating to AgustaWestland VVIP chopper deal was "full of error" and will not hold in Indian courts. The Central Bureau of Investigation(CBI) made this submission in the court which sent Christian Michel, an alleged middleman in the graft-tainted chopper deal, to judicial custody till December 28 after the CBI said he was not required for further custodial interrogation that had lasted 14 days. The court also reserved for December 22 its order on Michel's bail plea. Michel was produced before Special Judge Arvind Kumar on expiry of his 4-day CBI custody--the third spell--and the probe agency said he was not required for further custodial interrogation. In his bail application, the accused told the court through his advocate Aljo K Joseph that he was cooperating with the investigation throughout last several years and also during his 14-day CBI custody, which ended today. He contended that the CBI was carrying out the proceedings against him with the same facts and the same accusations that the Italian Court had arrived at a finding of acquittal. CBI counsel D P Singh opposed the bail plea, saying the accused was very influential and was capable of hampering the probe, and added there was not enough material from the Indian side before the Italian court. "The foreign court order is full of error and will not hold in Indian courts. It considers all the conspiracy, offence, but does not reach any conclusion. It was also not based on documents supplied by Indian authorities," Singh said. "Neither there was enough material from Indian side, nor help was sought from or given by the Indian authorities. They were prosecuted and convicted earlier but later got acquitted only on technicalities." On January 8, the Italian court acquitted former Finmeccanica president Giuseppe Orsi and AgustaWestland CEO Bruno Spagnolini on charges of illegal payment in the deal to sell 12 AW101 helicopters to India. Both are accused in the present case filed by the CBI. The CBI submitted that if granted bail, Michel may flee the country as he already tried to escape from Dubai just before the extradition to India early this month. In his bail plea, Michel also sought leniency from the court on the ground he was suffering from dyslexia. Singh said the accused was facing prosecution in Italy, the UK and India. "He(Michel) did not join probe in these countries but issued press statement which was all propaganda. He was unreachable. He has not come here by himself but has been brought," the CBI said, adding that dyslexia had nothing to do with the bail plea. Michel was arrested in the UAE and extradited to India on December 4. The next day, he was produced before the court, which allowed his five-day custodial interrogation by the CBI. It was extended by five more days, and later for another four days. In the bail application, the accused claimed: "The CBI questioned the accused at Dubai for more than four hours in February 2017 and in June 2018 on three occasions. During this interrogation, the accused had already handed over sufficient documents and materials to the officials. This shows the complete cooperation of the accused/applicant towards the investigation process. "Even after landing in India, during these days of CBI's custodial interrogation, the accused has fully cooperated and is still ready to cooperate while he is enlarged on bail." The application added that despite being a party to the Italian proceedings, the Indian government initiated a proceeding for the same facts and against the same defendants in India. "On December 4, the UAE extradited Michel to India to face a proceeding, with the same facts and accusations that the Italian court had arrived at while acquitting others. "Even though the acquittal was relating to other accused, the Italian judgment was in relation to the same transaction and it had relevant paragraphs analyzing the present accused," the accused said, adding that he was in the custody of the UAE police for a long time. He claimed that further investigation by the CBI has not revealed any incriminating material against him or to prove any allegations in the charge sheet. He told the court he supplied all the documents pertaining to the transactions to the CBI on earlier occasions to prove his innocence, but the agency was not willing to take any of those documents on record. "The accused is ready and willing to cooperate with the investigation under any conditions on bail," the application said. Singh contended that Michel has high links in ministries, with people in politics, bureaucracy, many of whom are witnesses in the case. "We brought him with so much difficulty. Some new facts have emerged and we need to have follow ups on those. He has not been a cooperative witness. A lot more to be unearthed. He has no roots in India here. He has property here but he may sell them and go away," he said. In September 2015, the Indian Authorities issued an arrest warrant against Michel and had applied a Red Corner Notice through INTERPOL, against him. Meanwhile, the court also sought CBI's reply by December 22 on a plea of co-accused and former Air Chief S P Tyagi, seeking permission to go the US. Michel is among the three alleged middlemen being probed in the case by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) and the CBI. The others are Guido Haschke and Carlo Gerosa. The CBI has alleged there was an estimated loss of Euro 398.21 million (about 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 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. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A high-level team of the Inland Waterways Authority of India (IWAI) would visit Tripura on December 26 to conduct a survey and decide on the location for a jetty for a new waterway connecting India and Bangladesh, the state government said Wednesday. The new Indo-Bangla waterway has been proposed between Ashuganj river port in eastern Bangladesh and Sonamura in Sipahijala district of Tripura through rivers Gomati and Meghna. Tripura Chief Minister Biplab Kumar Deb met Union Minister Nitin Gadkari at New Delhi on the issue on Tuesday. "It was decided that a high ranking team from IWAI would visit Tripura on 26th and 27th December, 2018 and decide on the location of the jetty/finalize the location of land for the project of inland waters in Gomati river from Tripura to Bangladesh," a government statement said. Sources in the Chief Ministers Office (CMO) said, Sonamura, which is about 60 km from here, was initially chosen as the location for the jetty and a preliminary survey was also conducted by the state government. However, it was up to the IWAI officials to decide, they said. Last month, Chief Minister Biplab Kumar Deb had said a new waterway would come up within six months for movement of container ships between Sonamura and Ashuganj river port. Once it was completed, goods to the state would directly reach Sonamura town from Bangladesh easily, Deb had told reporters. The central government would soon start dredging Gomati river on the Indian side for the new waterway to connect Ashuganj port on Meghna river covering about 60 km, he said. The secretary to the department of shipping of the central government had recently visited the state and inspected the sites. The official had told the state government that dredging of Gomati river and construction of a small river port would be completed in less than six months. Tripura shares a 856 km border with Bangladesh. Kolkata is 645 km by road via Assam from here and if the new waterway is built, it would ease transportation of goods and the distance would be reduced to half. Indo-Bangla connectivity would also considerably ease connectivity in the route. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Tamil Nadu government Wednesday contended in the Madras High Court that late chief minister Jayalalithaa was not a convict in the wealth case as the Supreme Court had abated charges against her and hence, there was no bar on constructing a memorial for her. State Advocate General Vijay Narayan made the submission before a bench of Justices M Sathyanarayanan and P Rajamanickam during the hearing of a petition opposing the memorial, coming up on the Marina Beach here. The bench reserved orders on the petition by advocate M L Ravi after hearing the arguments. The petitioner contended Jayalalithaa had been convicted in the case and hence, the state government should not build a memorial for her. Countering the petition, the AG submitted Jayalalithaa was acquitted by the Karnataka High Court in the case in which she had been accused of amassing wealth disproportionate to her known sources of income during 1991-96 when she held the office of chief minister for the first time. The Supreme Court in its February, 2017 order on the appeal against the high court verdict had abated the charges against Jayalalithaa in view of her death on December 5, 2016 and convicted others. Therefore, she was not a convict and hence, there was no bar on the government building a memorial for her, Narayan submitted. Citing existing memorials for late chief ministers including C N Annadurai and M G Ramachandran, he argued that Jayalalithaa being a six-time chief minister and a popular leader was also entitled to a memorial. Replying to the argument that about Rs 50 crore public money was being spent on the construction of the memorial, the AG said this was a matter where no public interest was involved. Almost all the leaders throughout the world have memorials and the people have accepted them. He informed that the court that the construction of the memorial would be completed by March, 2019. Chief Minister K Palaniswami and Deputy Chief Minister O Panneerselvam had on May 7 this year laid the foundation stone for the memorial, abutting Jayalalithaa's burial site on the Marina beach front. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A journalist, who had criticised the BJP-led governments at the Centre and in Manipur on social media, has been sentenced to one year in detention by a local court, according to a statement issued by the state home department. The chief judicial magistrate of Imphal West district passed the order on December 14. The statement was accessed by PTI on Wednesday. The Advisory Board of the Security Act (NSA), in its sitting held on December 11, had examined the allegations levelled against the journalist, Kishorechand Wangkhem. On December 13, the board recommended that there were "sufficient grounds" to detain Wangkhem under the provisions of the NSA, the statement said. Manipur Governor Najma Heptulla approved the advisory board's recommendation to detain the journalist for a maximum period of 12 months under the The 39-year-old Imphal-based journalist was detained under the on November 26 for allegedly uploading videos criticising the BJP-led governments in Manipur and at the Centre for observing Rani Jhansi's birth anniversary. Wangkhem works with a local TV channel and the videos that he had uploaded on November 19 in English and Meitei were not related to his official work, officials had said earlier. In the video clips, Wangkhem had purportedly said he was saddened and shocked to learn that the present government in Manipur was observing the birth anniversary of Rani of Jhansi, according to media reports. He reportedly said Rani of Jhansi's deeds had nothing to do with Manipur and the state was observing her birth anniversary because the Centre had asked it to. In this context, he allegedly called Chief Minister Biren Singh a "puppet of the Centre" and a "puppet of Hindutva". The chief minister had claimed that the Rani of Jhansi had played a role in the unification of India. November 19 is the birth anniversary of Laxmibai, the Rani of Jhansi, who was one of the leading figures in the 1857 sepoy mutiny. Wangkhem's wife Ranjita Elangbam told PTI on Wednesday that she has appealed to the MHA to "cancel" the charges against him under the but has not received any reply till now. Targeting the Congress, BJP chief Amit Shah Wednesday said judicial procedure was 'influenced', which led to no convictions for so long in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots. The Delhi High Court Monday sentenced Congress leader Sajjan Kumar to imprisonment for life, the first conviction of a politician in the 1984 riots in which over 2,700 people were killed. "The judicial procedure was influenced which led to no convictions in the anti-Sikh riots of 1984. It made people furious over the issue even after 34 years of the incident," Shah said at the Republic Summit here. He said the NDA government set up another Special Investigation Team (SIT) after coming to power in 2014 and the convictions are taking place as per this body's findings. "This (Sajjan Kumar) is the fourth judgement that has come out," Shah pointed out. Despite there being the Misra Commission followed by Nanavati Commission, police did not carry out investigations properly in any case, Shah said. Referring to allegations of a journalist that he had seen Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Kamal Nath leading a march against Sikhs (during riots), Shah said, "It has been seen by many people. The SIT is looking into all cases related to 1984 anti-Sikh riots." "I believe the SIT we have set up will take the cases of 1984 anti-Sikh riots to their logical end. And we have made all provisions to equip the SIT," the BJP leader said. Asked about the time required for the legal battle over the Ram temple issue to get over, Shah said, "If the Supreme Court conducts daily hearings of the Babri demolition case, it will not take more than 10 days to get a verdict." "Ayodhya is a title issue. The BJP clearly states that we want to build a temple on the same site. The case was pending before the SC much before 2014. We have requested the court to clear the case and complete its hearings at the earliest," Shah said. Countering senior Congress leader and lawyer Kapil Sibal's demand for conducting the case hearing after the 2019 elections, he said, "I feel the case should be cleared at the earliest. Whatever decision SC wants to take, they should take it at the earliest." On not following the Supreme Court's verdict in the Sabarimala temple case, he said Sabarimala is related to religious faith and that "in some cases, there is no need for a judicial review." When one goes to a gurudwara (a religious place of Sikhs), one has to cover the head with a cloth, he said. "The god (Lord Ayyappa) is believed to be unmarried. It is the belief of locals. Why do you need a judicial review here. Here it is not about equal rights of men and women," Shah said. He said there are 12 temples in the country where men are not allowed inside. "Does it mean it is an injustice to men," he said. "If you are talking about equal rights for men and women, Hindus in this country have carried out so many social reforms on their own and without any order," he said. "The entire country rejected the 'Sati' pratha (a Hindu practice whereby a widow immolates herself on the funeral pyre of her husband) and child marriage while it accepted the Dowry Prohibition Act and the Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act. No one ever raised voice against it," he said. All these decisions were taken in order to protect women's dignity, Shah added. "There are many court decisions which cannot be followed, like ban on putting up loudspeakers on mosque or ban on Jallikattu; who is following it? In such decisions, let people decide about their beliefs. This should not be brought in judicial review, is my personal opinion," he said. Terming the triple talaq bill as a "social reform and not a religious issue," he said even Pakistan does not allow triple talaq to women. There are many Islamic countries where triple talaq is banned, he said. "We have brought the bill in Parliament and we will go ahead with it. It is up to the opposition to show whether they want to support Muslim women or oppose it," Shah said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) One person died at a protest on Tuesday against the arrival of the "pro-Kabila" candidate in a city in central DR Congo, days ahead of elections that will see the country emerge from the 17-year presidency of Joseph Kabila. The unrest in Tshikapa, a city in the restive central Kasai region, also saw the presidential party's headquarters being ransacked, according to witnesses. Details of how the victim died in Tshikapa were still emerging, but one local NGO said soldiers had opened fire to disperse protesting crowds in the city and shot a market woman in the head. Another local source confirmed the death but gave no details of how the victim was killed. There was no immediate official confirmation from local authorities. The violence comes after at least one other person was killed and more than 80 injured in weekend clashes in the city, the latest unrest in the tense build-up to the December 23 ballot. "The soldiers, who were supporting the police, opened fire to disperse the demonstrators. A woman who was selling embers at the Sokajik market was hit in the head," said the head of a Congolese NGO which was on site. A campaign trip by "pro-Kabila" candidate, Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary, a former interior minister and close ally of the president, was cancelled after the violence. "The candidate Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary will reschedule the visit to Tshikapa tomorrow or the day after tomorrow after assessing the security situation," one of his relatives told AFP. Images of the raided presidential offices were widely shared on social media. Video posts also showed hundreds of young people, some armed with sticks, marching and chanting on Tuesday against the arrival of Ramazani Shadary. "At the moment, the city is paralysed. Only armed soldiers and police are moving but there are groups of young people who want to confront the security forces," said Fabien Ngweshi, a journalist based in Tshikapa. A number of people have been killed in pre-election violence since the beginning of campaigning on November 22. A civil rights group, the Congolese Association for Access to Justice (ACAJ), said in a statement on Tuesday that ten people have died. Twenty-one candidates are running to replace 47-year-old Kabila, who has ruled the mineral-rich nation since the assassination of his father in 2001. Western governments are closely watching the election violence and vote outcome in the vast African state, which has never known a peaceful transfer of power since independence from colonial Belgium in 1960. The focus on the election comes as authorities reported at least 45 deaths since Sunday in ethnic violence in western DR Congo, sparking a massive exodus of refugees to neighbouring Congo-Brazzaville. "The violence started on the night of 15-16 December ... the provisional toll is 45 dead and more than 60 injured," Gentiny Ngobila, the governor of Mai-Ndombe province told AFP. "The violence is not linked to the electoral campaign under way in the country. It is a conflict between two communities," he said. A total of 4,358 refugees have arrived in an area some 300 km north of Brazzavile, an official in the neighbouring country said. "Today (Tuesday) we have recorded three deaths: two children, one and three years old, from their wounds, and a woman," Francois Ntsuini, sub-prefect of Makotimpoko in the Plateaux region, told AFP. "We also received 53 wounded, mostly with shotgun wounds. They are currently being treated," he added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) At the centre of a controversy over his remarks insinuating that youths in his state were losing out on jobs to migrants from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Kamal Nath Wednesday said other states including Gujarat also have policies giving employment preference to locals. The 'job deprivation' remarks made by Nath soon after taking oath on Monday had drawn all-round criticism, with parties like the BJP, RJD and JD(U) expressing their disapproval. Defending his comments, Nath told reporters here on Wednesday, "Such policy exists in other states also. Is it not there in Gujarat? What is new in it?" The chief minister was speaking after chairing a high-level meeting of police officers at the police headquarters here. Announcing a new state government policy under which industries availing investment incentives will need to give 70 per cent employment to local youths, Nath had said, "Lot of industries are set up in which people from other states, like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, come to work. I do not want to criticise them, but the youth of Madhya Pradesh are deprived (of jobs)". "So those who want to come here and take advantage of the investment policies will have to give employment to 70 per cent locals of Madhya Pradesh. I have already signed on the file in this regard", he had said soon after being sworn in as the state's new chief minister. The BJP-ruled Gujarat had witnessed protests against migrants from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in October this year. Asked about his meeting with police officials, Nath said the morale of the police force should remain intact and "the police uniform be respected". (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Kartarpur Corridor from Dera Baba Nanak in Punjab's Gurdaspur district up to the International Border will cost Rs 85-Rs 100 crore, officials said Wednesday. The corridor will facilitate easy passage to the Sikh pilgrims to the historic Gurdwara Darbar Sahib in Pakistan's Kartarpur. Gurdwara Darbar Sahib is located on the banks of the Ravi river in Pakistan, where Guru Nanak Dev, the founder of Sikhism, had spent 18 years of his life. The corridor will be built by the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI). Punjab Public Works Department Minister Vijay Inder Singla said, "A sum of Rs 85 crore to 100 crore is estimated to be spent on constructing the Kartarpur Corridor". It will also involve cost of land acquisition for the four-lane highway from Dera Baba Nanak up to the International Border, he said. The Union Cabinet had on November 22 decided to develop and build the passage from Dera Baba Nanak in Gurdaspur district to the International Border. Following this, the foundation stone for the Kartarpur Corridor was laid on November 26 at Dera Baba Nanak whereUnion minister Nitin Gadkari had said that his ministry would try to complete the construction work of the corridor expeditiously. Kartarpur is located in Shakargarh in Narowal district of Pakistan's Punjab. The gurdwara in Kartarpur is located about three to four km from the Indo-Pak border in Pakistan. The Pakistan government had also held thegroundbreaking ceremony of the corridor on their side on November 28. The Punjab cabinet had recently passed a special resolution to set up a Dera Baba Nanak Development Authority for the development and beautification of the area in and around Dera Baba Nanak. AKartarpur Gate has also been proposed to be set up on the Indian side of the International Border which would stand out as a monumental symbol to commemorate the 550th 'Prakash Purb' (birth anniversary) of Guru Nanak Dev. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) President Ram Nath Kovind will attend the centenary celebrations of the city-based Yoga Institute next week. The institute, established in 1918 by Yogendraji, will hold a two-day concluding function of its year-long centenary celebrations on December 28 and 29 at the suburban Bandra- Kurla Complex (BKC) where Kovind will be the chief guest. "President Kovind will grace the historic occasion and conclude the year-long celebrations on December 28. Maharashtra Governor Ch Vidyasagar Rao, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and other dignitaries will also be present," the institute's director Dr Hansa J Yogendra told reporters on Tuesday. Yoga, panel discussions and workshops on related issues will be held during the two-day event, she said. Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu had in December last year inaugurated the centenary celebrations of the institute. He had said that yogic philosophy has all the properties to fight lifestyle problems of modern days. The Yoga Institute was earlier this year selected for the prime minister's award for outstanding contribution for promotion and development of yoga. It has produced more than 50,000 yoga teachers and has over 500 publications to its credit. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) : BJP on Wednesday staged a protest in the Karnataka assembly by entering the well of the House on the farm loan waiver issue, alleging that the government was "lying" to farmers. Slogans like "down down to the government that is lying", "loan waiver should be implemented" reverberated in the assembly, which is holding its winter session here. With the ruling Congress-JD(S) MLAs also on their toes to defend the government, the scene turned chaotic. Chief Minister H D Kumaraswamy was locked in a high pitch verbal duel with Opposition BJP leader B S Yeddyurappa during the debate on drought. As Yeddyurappa raised questions on loan waiver, stating that only Rs 50 crore was waived so far,Kumaraswamy raised his voice and said "my government is stable. We are strong financially. I need not wait for any nationalised bank (for going ahead), whether they agree or not." He also alleged that the opposition was misleading and confusing farmers on the loan waiver issue. Questioning the Chief Minister's conduct, Yeddyurappa asked him to behave "responsibly." BJP members too raised objections to Kumaraswamy's conduct and entered into the well of the House, shouting slogans against the government, leading to an adjournment. "The government was only making claims about loan waiver for the last six months, but has only waived Rs 50 crore from nationalised banks so far. There was no clarity on cooperative bank loans also. When questioned, the Chief Minister has no clear answers and responds irresponsibly. This is not the way," Yeddyurappa said. Speaking on the farm loan waiver issue, Kumaraswamy asked farmers and opposition to "trust" his government. Listing out the steps taken by the government to implement the loan waiver, he said the government has full clarity on farm loan waiver and we have created a separate cell with an IAS officer for this purpose." About 44 lakh farmers who obtained loans from both nationalised and cooperative banks would benefit from the waiver, the Chief Minister said. "We can't lie to people on such an important issue as we have to face the Parliament elections next year," he said. Pointing out at issues with nationalised banks on loan waiver,he said they had earlier announced a one time settlement for NPA accounts,but now had gone back on their words. State government officials were negotiating with these banks, he said, as he accused Yeddyurappa of being in constant touch with the same banks. Angered by the Chief Minister's comments, Yeddyurappa asked "what do you mean?. Speak responsibly," triggering a war of words between both the leaders. Earlier too, both leaders had a heated exchange on the issue of the Chief Minister allegedly being inaccessible to people as he was now stays in a five star hotel. Reacting to charges by Yeddyurappa while initiating the debate last week, Kumaraswamy said he had taken a room at a five star hotel in Bengaluru due to health reasons as he has been advised for a morning walk by doctors, which was not possible at his private residence. He also said no office files or officials were allowed to his hotel room and he was not involved in any transfer racket. "If there is any proof that I was involved in the transfer racket, I will not stay in office for a second," he said, adding that he was accessible to the public and regularly addressed their needs. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A US court has removed from abeyance a lawsuit challenging work authorisation to H-4 visa holders after the Trump administration delayed a formal notification over the issue that can impact spouses of H-1B visa holders that include Indians. The Barack Obama administration in 2015 allowed H4 visa-holders - mainly spouses of the H-1B visa-holders - to be gainfully employed in the US. The group 'Save Jobs USA' took the matter to the appeals court after a district court upheld the Obama administration's decision. The visa is a non-immigrant visa that allows US companies to employ foreign workers in speciality occupations. H-4 visas are issued to the spouses of H-1B visa holders, a significantly large number of whom are high-skilled professionals from India. The US Court of Appeals, District of Columbia, in its order on December 17 ordered that the motion to schedule briefing and oral argument be granted and this case challenging work authorisation to of H-4 visa holders "be removed from abeyance." At least three times, the Trump administration told the court that it has decided to revoke the Obama-era decision and a formal notification would be issued soon. While the notification on the matter is yet to be issued, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in its annual agenda has said that it is determined to revoke work authorisation to certain categories of H-4 visa holders. It had said that the notification would be issued this month. In September, Save Jobs USA which had filed the lawsuit urged the court to remove the abeyance and move forward with the case. The case is before a three-member bench, which includes Indian-American Sree Srinivasan. In its submission, Save Jobs USA argued that even though the case has been delayed, no proposed rule has been submitted to the Office of management of Budget. "Justice delayed is justice denied," Save Jobs USA said and rued that the longer the case remains in abeyance, the longer American workers will "suffer injury from the presence of foreign competitors in their job market". As per the latest court order, the case is no longer held in abeyance and the new briefs must be submitted by Save Jobs USA by January 16, 2019. The Trump administration has time till February 22, 2019 to file its response. In a related development, the court also granted permission to 'Immigration Voice' to intervene in the case. Immigration Voice is a nonprofit organisation working to alleviate problems faced by legal high-skilled foreign workers in the "This is a major development because the Court of Appeals does not typically allow a party to intervene at the appellate level and it is significant that the court granted our motion to intervene," Immigration Voice said Tuesday. "That indicates the court has some concern (and with good reasons) that our interests will not be adequately represented by the DHS/Government," it said. "Since the court has also granted our motion to intervene, we get to file a brief in opposition to the new brief that Save Jobs USA will file under the soon to be issued briefing schedule," it argued. Given that the DHS has already declared its intent to get rid of H4-EAD programme, the court's acceptance of its motion to intervene gives them a fighting chance to make a representation on behalf of its members for whom H4-EAD is so important, Immigration Voice said. Spouses of H-1B visa holders are not allowed to work with just an H-4 visa. There is, however, an option to obtain an EAD pass which allows them to work with an H-4 visa. "For that outcome, the intervention in the lawsuit is the only thing that is keeping H4-EAD programme alive and it stands between 50,000+ families from losing their right to provide for their families," Immigration Voice said. According to an official, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) continues to review all employment-based visa programmes, including H-4 EADs. "No decision about the Obama administration regulation granting work authorization to certain H-4 spouses is final until the rule-making process is completed," the official told PTI. The Expedition 57 commander handed over control of the International Space Station today in a traditional ceremony. He and two of his crewmates will then head back to Earth Wednesday just in time for the holidays. Commander Alexander Gerst ceremonially transferred command of the orbital lab today to cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko who officially begins his lead of the station when the homebound crew undocks tomorrow. Kononenko is staying behind with Expedition 58 Flight Engineers Anne McClain and David Saint-Jacques who will stay on the station until June. Gerst and Flight Engineers Serena Aunon-Chancellor and Sergey Prokopyev are winding down their 197-day mission in space. The trio will undock from the Rassvet module inside the Soyuz MS-09 spacecraft Wednesday at 8:40 p.m. and parachute to a landing in Kazakhstan about three-and-a-half hours later. Prokopyev will command the Soyuz flight back to Earth tomorrow flanked by Gerst and Aunon-Chancellor. Today he is packing and readying the spacecraft for the departure. The undocking and landing activities will be broadcast live on NASA TV. There was still time for science on the orbital lab today as Gerst explored how astronauts manipulate objects in space. Results could improve the design of space habitats and impact neurology patients on Earth. He also joined Aunon-Chancellor for ultrasound scans and blood sample collections as they wrap up their human research studies. On-Orbit Status Report Change of Command Ceremony: Expedition 57 CDR Alexander Gerst handed off station command to Expedition 58 CDR Oleg Kononenko this afternoon. The Expedition 57 Crew (Alexander Gerst, Sergey Prokopev, Serena Aunon-Chancellor) are scheduled to undock from ISS tomorrow, December 19 at 7:40PM CT with landing set to occur at 11:03PM CT. Advanced Plant Experiment-05 (APEX-05): Today the APEX-05 Petri Plate was removed from the FIR/LMM (Fluids Integrated Rack/Light Microscopy Module), closing out the experiment. The team reports that successful imaging of root tips was accomplished. Originally the APEX-05 experiment flew on SpaceX-13 and was partially completed except for the imagery of the two LMM (Light Microscopy Module) plate samples as the LMM was not operating at the time. A new LMM wide-field camera has been installed, and two LMM samples were re-flown on SpaceX-16. The Spaceflight-induced Hypoxic/ROS Signaling (APEX-05) experiment grows different wild and mutant varieties of Arabidopsis thaliana, in order to understand how their genetic and molecular stress response systems work in space. Airway Monitoring: The crew performed the necessary calibrations, followed by Low nitric oxide (NO) and High NO measurements for the ambient pressure session in the US Lab. The ground team reported they believe they obtained a good data set from today's session. The ESA Airway Monitoring investigation aims to determine in detail the pulmonary NO turnover in weightlessness and in combined weightless, hypobaric and hypoxic environments. The goal is also to determine the lung diffusion capacity for NO with dust particles present in the ISS atmosphere. This investigation studies the occurrence and indicators of airway inflammation in crewmembers, using ultra-sensitive gas analyzers to analyze exhaled air. This will help to identify health impacts and support maintenance of crewmember well-being on future human spaceflight missions, such as to the Moon and Mars, where crewmembers will have to be more self-sufficient in identifying and avoiding such conditions. Grip Supine session: The crew performed the GRIP science tasks while restrained on the chair and wearing a noise-cancelling system. ESA's Grip investigation tests how the nervous system takes into account the forces due to gravity and inertia when manipulating objects. Results from this investigation may provide insight into potential hazards for astronauts as they manipulate objects in different gravitational environments. They also support design and control of haptic interfaces to be used in challenging environments such as space, and provide information about motor control that will be useful for the evaluation and rehabilitation of impaired upper limb control in patients with neurological diseases. Nanoracks Module 74: Today a crewmember sequentially placed the 6 microplates into the Plate Reader-2 for scanning, and then stowed them back into Module-74. This is day 10 of the scanning operations. The Module-74 experiment investigates the Effects of Microgravity on Controlled Release of Antibiotics and Curing Mechanism of a Novel Wound Dressing (Hydrogel Formation and Drug Release in Microgravity Conditions) and studies the formation and drug release from cross-linked or mixed hydrogels in microgravity. TangoLab-2 card cube replacement: Today a crewmember swapped out experiment cubes on Card #12 and re-inserted the Card back into the TangoLab-2 unit. The new cube (EMLT_TOC01) mission name is Organs-On-Chips as a Platform for Studying Effects of Microgravity on Human Physiology. Its goal is to analyze the effect of microgravity and other space-related stressors on the brain-blood barrier (BBB). It uses fully automated tissue chip technology, a Brain-Chip consisting of living neuronal and vascular endothelial cells in a micro-engineered environment. Completed Task List Activities: Cargo Transfer to Dragon Ground Activities: All activities are complete unless otherwise noted. JEMRMS activity to relocate SEDA-AP from EFU11 to EFU13 in prep for jettison Two-Day Look Ahead: Wednesday, 12/19: Payloads Bone Densitometer calibration Biolab TCU Cleaning Functional Immune Lighting effects Microbial Tracking-2 NR-module 74 scan Standard Measures Time Perception Team Task Switching Systems Soyuz 55S Undocking Thursday, 12/20: - Crew Off Duty Today's Planned Activities: All activities are complete unless otherwise noted. Acoustic Monitor Setup for Static Measurements Water Recovery and Management (WRM) Waste Water Bag (WWB) Split Deactivating Vozdukh Atmosphere Purification System []. Activating Vozdukh to mode 4 Ultrasound 2 HRF Rack 1 Power On Health Maintenance System (HMS) Ultrasound 2 Scan Sanitary and epidemiological status monitoring Calibrations, Low NO and High NO measurements MRM1-FGB interface screw clamp tightening At Home In Space Questionnaire Sanitary and epidemiological status monitoring LBNP Exercise (FINAL) Water Recovery Management (WRM) EDV Changeout Descent Private Medical Conference (PMC) Plate Reader2 Module-74 Microplate Scan Handover of Increment XX Crew Charging GoPro HERO3 camcorder battery in Soyuz 739 (6 pieces) - initiate/ Video & Audio Bringing ODF up to date using Soyuz 741 delivered files DECLIC Directional Solidification Insert Removal AIRMON Power off and Stow Countermeasures System (CMS) Treadmill 2 (T2) Exercise Session DECLIC Removable Hard Disk Drive Removal DECLIC Instrument Removal Preparation DECLIC Locker Removal Modifying damper loading for right-seat - in Soyuz 739. Change mode to (heavy). Food Acceptability Questionnaire Meteor On Board Training Review GRIP setup in the SEATED configuration Meteor Hard Drive Swapout Microbial Habitat Monitoring On-Orbit Hearing Assessment (O-OHA) with EarQ Software Setup and Test Charging GoPro HERO3 camcorder battery in Soyuz 739 (6 units) - terminate / Video & Audio AIRMON Power off and Stow PHOTOBIOREACTOR. Removal of kits from -B #05 and Transfer to Soyuz 739 REGENERATSIYA-1. Transfer of containers to Soyuz # 739 ASEPTIC. Hardware Transfer to Soyuz 739 GRIP setup in Supine position Photo/TV Airway Monitor Video Tear down in LAB ASEPTIC. - No.02 Thermostat Deactivation and Removal Crew Departure Preparations for Return to Earth On-Orbit Hearing Assessment (O-OHA) with EarQ Software Setup and Test GRIP science performance in supine position Stowage of Equipment to be returned by Soyuz 739 (P/L Container) Note 6 Cargo Transfer from Soyuz 741 with IMS update Internal Audio Subsystem (IAS) Crew Quarter (CQ) Audio Cable Configuration Microbial Tracking-2 Sample MELFI Retrieval Insert Crew Departure Preparations for Return to Earth Fluids Integrated Rack Rack Doors Open Replacement of filters on 1, 2 dust collectors in FGB LMM APEX-05 LMM Petri Plate Remove HRF Generic Ambient Blood Collection Setup Fluids Integrated Rack Rack Doors Close HRF Generic Saliva Collection Setup P/L Glacier Sample Removal VZAIMODEISTVIE-2. Experiment Ops Soyuz 739 P/L Container Transfer Operations Report TangoLab-2 Card Cube Replace Plate Reader2 Module-74 Microplate Scan GRIP stow HRF Generic Saliva Collection Setup Team Task Switching Experiment Survey Signing of RS crew handover statement Change of Command Please follow SpaceRef on Twitter and Like us on Facebook. Lok Janshakti Party (LJP), a key constituent of the ruling NDA, Wednesday pressed for finalisation of the coalition's seat-sharing arrangement in Bihar by month-end while making it clear it will not agree for anything less than six Lok Sabha seats and one in Rajya Sabha. The assertion was made by LJP's state president Pashupati Kumar Paras, younger brother of the party chief and union minister Ram Vilas Paswan, a day after the party's parliamentary board chairman expressed dissatisfaction over no headway being made on the seat-sharing issue despite several meetings with the leaders. Paras said the Democratic Alliance (NDA) has "undoubtedly" weakened in Bihar with exit of partners like Jitan Ram Manjhi and Upendra Kushwaha. Speaking to reporters here, Paras said Kushwaha parted ways after he ran out of patience, as chief Amit Shah and JD(U) chief Nitish Kumar made an announcement that their parties would contest an equal number of seats without taking into account that there were other constituents. Ideally, all partners should have sat together and arrived at a seat-sharing formula through consensus, he said, while asking what would be left for other allies following a decision by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Janata Dal (United) deciding to fight on an equal number of seats in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. "Lack of clarity on the issue led to the RLSP's exit. A final decision on sharing of seats among the remaining allies must be arrived at by December 31," said Paras, who is also a member of the Nitish Kumar cabinet in the state. He said Chirag Paswan's tweets reflected the party's sentiments and the seat-sharing formula must be timely and respectable. Pointing out that the party had contested seven seats in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, the state chief said there was no reason why it would settle for less than that for the 2019 elections, or for six Lok Sabha seats and one in Rajya Sabha. There has been speculation that the chief and union minister may not fight the Lok Sabha polls next year owing to bad health and leave his Hajipur (reserved) constituency for some family member and himself opt for the Upper House. In a series of tweets, had on Tuesday cautioned the against damage to the in the event of the BJP's failure to arrive at a seat-sharing formula that was respectable for other allies. His tweets have triggered speculations that the party, which was part of the Congress-led UPA for a decade before switching over to the BJP-led coalition during the 2014 polls, was bracing for changing sides yet again. Reacting to the developments, RLSP's Upendra Kushwaha said the should follow his example and leave the He alleged the BJP and Nitish Kumar in their arrogance were hell bent upon destroying the smaller parties. State BJP spokesman Nikhil Anand, however, sought to downplay the latest outbursts from the LJP leaders saying the NDA remains intact and any delay in announcing a seat-sharing formula could be due to the top leaders of his party having been busy in assembly polls for five states. He said things will be settled amicably and in time. JD(U) spokesman Rajiv Ranjan Prasad said the tuning between all three constituents of the NDA in Bihar is perfect and there is no need for getting alarmed over the tweets. He asserted that all three parties -- JD(U), BJP and LSP -- will fight together and the NDA will win all 40 Lok Sabha seats in the state. Senior Congress leader Prem Chandra Mishra, however, said the recent defeat of the BJP in its strongholds of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan has put a question mark on the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his allies have become uncertain about their own prospects. The LJP's stance has to be viewed in this light, he said. RJD vice-president Shivanand Tiwary squarely blamed Nitish Kumar for the present crisis in the NDA, saying he is like a "Brahmin" who has to be appeased at the cost of others. He said it would not come as a surprise if the LJP becomes the next casualty in the NDA. The Lok Sabha was adjourned for the second time on Wednesday amid uproar after the government rejected the opposition demand for a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) probe into the Rafale deal. As the House re-convened for the second time in the noon, members from the Congress, AIADMK and TDP trooped into the Well, holding placards and shouting slogans. While AIADMK members protested the construction of a dam across the Cauvery river, those from the Congress demanded a JPC probe into the Rafale deal. The TDP sought to raise issues related to Andhra Pradesh. More than 40 members were in the Well. Some members from the ruling BJP also sought to raise certain issues from their seats. Mallikarjun Kharge, Leader of the Congress in the Lok Sabha, said there were "serious apprehensions" in the minds of the people over the Rafale deal and this needs to be probed by the JPC. Kharge said there was a "massive loss" to the state exchequer because of the deal besides "loss" of Transfer of Technology to the state-run Hindustan Aeronautical Limited. Responding to this, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Narendra Singh Tomar said the government is ready for a discussion on this issue, but rejected the demand for a JPC. Home Minister Rajnath Singh said the government was ready to discuss any issue demanded by the opposition, including the Rafale deal. During the Question Hour, Sanjay Jaiswal, BJP MP from West Champaran, slammed Congress leader and Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Kamal Nath for his remarks against migrants from UP and Bihar. Minister of State for Shipping Pon Radhakrishnan moved a privilege motion against an IPS officer from Kerala. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Madagascans voted on Wednesday in a run-off election between two rivals who have waited years to come face-to-face in a fiercely personal battle for power in the Indian Ocean island. The clash between Marc Ravalomanana and Andry Rajoelina could revive instability in the impoverished country if the result is rejected by the losing candidate or fraud allegations are widespread, analysts warn. The two contenders came a close first and second in November's preliminary vote, far ahead of their competitors. Ravalomanana and Rajoelina were both banned from running in the 2013 vote as part of an agreement to end recurring crises that have rocked Madagascar since independence from France in 1960. "My choice is already made, but I keep it to myself," 45-year-old housewife Monique Norosoa told AFP as she voted in the capital Antananarivo. In the first round, Rajoelina won 39 percent compared with 35 percent for Ravalomanana. Both camps alleged they were victims of fraud and cheating. Ravalomanana, 69, was first elected as president in 2002 but was forced to resign seven years later by violent demonstrations supported by Rajoelina, the then mayor of the capital Antananarivo. Rajoelina, 44, was installed by the army and ruled until 2014. "There are fake ID cards and fake voter cards circulating right now... if the interior ministry does not do anything, there will be problems," Ravalomanana said in the candidates' TV debate ahead of polling day. "I will work and do anything to make Madagascar a developed country," he pledged, underlining his experience and character in contrast to the younger Rajoelina. Rajoelina used the debate to strike an authoritative tone, saying he would unite the country and vowing to respect the result. "Let us agree that it is the choice of the Madagascan people who will lead the country," he said, adding he would "be the president of everyone, from north to south and from east to west." About 45 percent of the 10 million registered voters abstained from the first round, and the two surviving contenders criss-crossed the country via helicopter as they pulled out all the stops to secure votes. Both candidates have spent lavishly on campaigning, with promises and handouts distributed liberally to voters who are among the poorest in Africa. With the personalities of the two contenders dominating the election, such as poverty, corruption and lack of basic services have been largely pushed to one side. Some analysts warn the election fall-out could damage the country's chances of development. "We have two egos face-to-face who do not see themselves losing and who could go on until breaking point, especially if the results are very tight," said Sahonda Rabenarivo, of the Observatory of Political Life in Madagascar (Sefafi). Former education minister Paul Rabary, a fringe candidate who was eliminated in the first round, said the stakes were high. "For Marc Ravalomanana, his network cannot survive if he does not take power. For Rajoelina, his personal history is sullied by the (2009) coup, so he must win to rescue his honour." Ravalomanana is a former milkman from a peasant family who went on to build a business empire, while Rajoelina is a former party planner and successful entrepreneur with slick communication skills. Madagascar is well known for its vanilla and precious redwood, yet is one of the world's poorest countries, according to World Bank data, with 76 percent of people living in extreme poverty. Outgoing president Hery Rajaonarimampianina was eliminated in the first round after collecting just nine percent. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Spain's deputy prime minister on Wednesday rejected claims by Catalan separatists that the Madrid government's decision to hold a cabinet meeting in Barcelona is a provocation. Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez will hold its weekly cabinet meeting on Friday in Barcelona, the capital of the wealthy northeastern region. But that is a year to the day Madrid held snap elections in the region after blocking the region's move for independence. Pro-independence groups in Catalonia have called on their supporters to protest the meeting on the streets of Barcelona Friday, and police have already made plans to boost their presence there. "To come on that day is a provocation," jailed separatist leader Jordi Turull told AFP in an interview Monday. But Deputy Prime Minister Carmen Calvo insisted Wednesday the cabinet meeting "was not a provocation". It would be held "in a situation of normality", she said. In October 2017, Catalan leaders pushed ahead with a controversial independence referendum despite warnings from Madrid, then declared independence on the basis of the results. The then conservative Spanish government responded by deposing the Catalan executive, dissolving the regional parliament and calling snap elections for December 21. A number of Catalan separatist groups have called for street protests. "On December 21, we will be...ungovernable," a radical grass-roots group, the Committees for the Defence of the Republic (CDRs), said on Twitter Wednesday. "Lets topple the regime," said the tweet, accompanied by a picture of Spain's King Felipe VI on fire. Calvo said she would meet Thursday with the head of the Catalan regional government, Quim Torra. She would also hold talks with Catalonia's vice president, Pere Aragones. Sanchez's six-month-old Socialist government held a cabinet meeting in the southern city of Seville in October. It plans to hold another in the western region of Extremadura, in what it says is an effort to bring the executive closer to voters. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The multi-crore Punjab National Bank (PNB) scam, Sohrabuddin Shaikh encounter case and the sensational Sheena Bora murder case made in Maharashtra courts, while an order staying the state government's plastic ban also hogged limelight during 2018. The Enforcement Directorate (ED) filed an application in a PMLA court here against diamond businessman Nirav Modi for his alleged involvement in the Rs 14,000 crore scam for cheating the PNB. Apart from Modi, his uncle Mehul Choksi and several officials of the bank are also accused in the case. The ED also filed a plea in the PMLA court to declare liquor baron Vijay Mallya as a fugitive economic offender. A UK court recently ordered extradition of Mallya, who is wanted in India on charges of fraud and money laundering amounting to around Rs 9,000 crore. The court is hearing arguments in both the cases. The high court in April declined to stay the implementation of the state government's decision to ban plastic materials, saying it cannot overlook the adverse impact of plastic waste on the environment. The Maharashtra Plastic and Thermocol Products (Manufacture, Usage, Sale, Transport, Handling and Storage) notification was issued in March, banning all kinds of plastic and thermocolproducts, including bags, dish, cups, plates, glasses, containers, small PET bottles and decoration items. The notification was challenged by plastic and PET container manufacturers' associations. A Mumbai court in May awarded life sentence to gangster Chhota Rajan and shooter Satish Kaliya for killing journalist Jyotirmoy Dey in Mumbai in 2011. Journalist Jigna Vora, who was an accused in the case, was acquitted by the court due to lack of evidence. In June, a court in Thane framed charges against Congress chief Rahul Gandhi in an alleged defamation case filed against him by RSS worker Rajesh Kunte. Kunte had filed the complaint after watching Rahul Gandhi's speech at an election rally in which he alleged that the RSS was behind the killing of Mahatma Gandhi. The Congresschief will now face trial in the case. A special CBI court in commenced and completed trial in the alleged fake encounter case of gangster Sohrabuddin Shaikh, his wife Kausar Bi and associate Tulsi Prajapati in which22 people, including policemen from Gujarat and Rajasthanpolice, are accused. Shaikh and his wife were allegedly killed in 2005 by the Gujarat Police, while Prajapati was killed in another such encounter in 2006 in a joint operation by the Gujarat and Rajasthan Police. The HC upheld the dischargegranted to former Gujarat ATS chief D G Vanzara, Gujarat IPS officer Vipul Agarwal, and four others from Rajasthan and Gujarat Police in September. Later, in November, the HC dismissed a petition filed by the Bombay Lawyers Association questioning the CBI's decision not to challenge the discharge granted to BJP chief Amit Shah in the case. A sessions court also commenced trial against former media baron Indrani Mukerjea and her now estranged husband Peter Mukerjea for allegedly killing her daughter Sheena Bora in 2012. Also accused in the case is Indrani's ex-husband Sanjeev Khanna. After the trial began, the Mukerjeas filed a divorce petition in a family court here. A special NIA court in November commenced trial in the September 2008 Malegaon bomb blast case against Lt Col Prasad Purohit and Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur and others. The accused are facing trial under the stringent Unlawful Activities Prevention Act and the Indian PenalCode for terror activities, criminalconspiracy and murder. Six people were killed and over 100 injured when an explosive device strapped on a motorcycle went off near a mosque in Malegaon town of Nashik on September 29, 2008. In a case pertaining to the Shiv Sena's Thackeray family, the HC in November permitted Jaidev Thackeray, the estranged son of Sena supremo late Bal Thackeray, to withdraw his suit challenging his father's will. Jaidev had challenged his father's will of December 13, 2011, in which the late Sena founder had not left a farthing for him. He later sought to close the matter. After the #MeToo movement gained momentum, film director Vikas Bahl moved the HC seeking a direction to his former partners Anurag Kashyap, Vikramaditya Motwane and Madhu Mantena to refrain from speaking to the media or posting on social media about the case in which a female employee alleged sexual harassment by Bahl in 2015. Bahl also filed a defamation suit against his former partners, seeking Rs 10 crore damages from them for ruining hisreputation. The application is pending for hearing. After the blaze at two eateries in the Kamala Mills Compound in Mumbai claimed 14 lives in December 2017, the high court in February appointed a three-member judicial committee to probe into the the incident. The committee submitted its report in September after which the court asked the government and the city civic body to look into therecommendations and implement the same. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Himachal Pradesh Chief Minister Jai Ram Thakur Wednesday urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to let the Satluj Jal Vidyut Nigam (SJVN) remain a joint venture in the "best interest" of the hill-state, an official statement said. Thakur called on Modi at New Delhi and formally invited him to attend the state-level rally being held in Dharamshala on December 27 on the completion of one year of his government, it added. Modi agreed to attend the event, the statement said further. The SJVN is a joint venture between the Centre and the Himachal Pradesh government, with a joint holding of 90.63 per cent. State-run NTPC is likely to acquire the Central government's stake in SJVN but the Himachal Pradesh government has expressed concerns. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) intends to file an application to appeal against a British court's verdict in favour of his extradition to India, the embattled liquor baron's legal team confirmed on Wednesday. The 63-year-old businessman told reporters soon after the ruling by Westminster Magistrates' Court Chief Magistrate Emma Arbuthnot last week that he would consider the verdict in detail and decide his next course of action. "Mallya has now been able to consider the court's decision and intends to file an application for permission to appeal at the appropriate time," said Anand Doobay, Partner at UK-based Boutique Law LLP, who has been Mallya's solicitor through the extradition trial process. Under the Extradition Treaty procedures, the Chief Magistrate's verdict has been sent to UK Home Secretary Sajid Javid because it is the minister who is authorised to order Mallya's extradition and has two months within which to make that decision. The Home Secretary's order rarely goes against the court's conclusions as he has to consider only some very narrow bars to extradition which are unlikely to apply in this case, including the possible imposition of a death penalty in a particular case. "Whatever that decision (by the Home Secretary), the losing side has up to 14 days within which to approach the High Court and seek leave to appeal. Any appeal if granted will be heard at the Administrative Court [High Court], noted a statement by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), which represents the Indian government in the extradition case. Mallya is wanted in India for alleged fraud and money laundering charges amounting to an estimated Rs 90 billion. A 35-year-old man has been arrested for allegedly stalking a TV actor, a senior police official said Wednesday. Abdul Sheikh, the accused, allegedly followed the woman actor in his car in suburban Khar area. He also allegedly abused her using filthy language, the actor said in her complaint. Sheikh was arrested under IPC sections 354 (D) (stalking) and 509 (word, gesture or act intended to insult the modesty of a woman), said DCP Paramjit Singh Dahiya. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A suspected member of the Manjeet Mahal gang allegedly involved in killing a member of a rival gang in 2017 was arrested from southwest Delhi's Vasant Kunj, police said Wednesday. Vishal alias Chabbu had been evading arrest in the case since February 2017, they said. Based on a tip-off, a trap was laid at Nangal Dewat in Vasant Kunj where the accused had come to meet his associate. Subsequently, Vishal was apprehended after a brief chase, said Devender Arya, Deputy Commissioner of Police (southwest). A country-made pistol along with two live cartridges were recovered from his possession, he said. During interrogation, Vishal confessed about his involvement in killing Dinesh alias Mangu, Arya added. The accused told police that he came in contact with Anshul Dhankar and Vikas Dalal who were reportedly sharp-shooters of the Manjeet Mahal Gang. They hatched a conspiracy to kill Dinesh who belonged to the Nandu gang, the DCP said. Last year, on February 19, Vishal along with Dhankar intercepted Dinesh, who was riding a scooty in the Chhawla area, and fired thrice on his forehead, he said. The accused duo were wearing helmets to conceal their identity, Arya said. At the same time, a CCTV footage of them killing Dinesh went viral on social media following which police arrested Dhankar. However, Vishal managed to hide himself and changed his residence, the senior officer said. A case in connection with the incident was registered at Chhawla police station, he added. Since then, Vishal was evading arrest and was declared a proclaimed offender on December 14, 2017, by the Dwarka court, police said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Union minister Smriti Irani Wednesday claimed that a narrative was being pushed forward in India, wherein many countrymen were told that it was not "cool" to be patriotic. "What is extremely interesting to note is that while we speak about India, at the same time there are many Indians who are told it is not cool to be patriotic," Irani said at the Republic TV Summit here. "Why would you shed a tear when the national anthem is played, why would you want to stand? In fact, the best way to celebrate the democracy is by saying 'Bharat ke sau tukde hoge' and I disagree with it," She added. Her response came after journalist Arnab Goswami read a quote of Irani, where she said she loves the country and there is "nothing regressive, saffron about it". The minister said she stood by the statement and was not "apologetic" about it. "Why should an Indian be apologetic about being patriotic or loving their country or flag in this very country? Why would you divide us by saying 'your sense of nationalism is a bit communal and mine is more secular'. I think that's a big abomination in terms of nationalism and patriotism how I perceive it to be...," she said. She was speaking as part of the debate between her and actor-politician Kamal Haasan. When Goswani asked Haasan about one of his past statements wherein he had said he doesn't like patriotism being tested at random places, the actor said, "When you play national anthem in cinema theatres, that's not the place to test it." Irani responded saying, "I don't think the national anthem is played to test someone's patriotism. A community of people come together and celebrate that this is the one thing we have in common. We don't have our languages, culture in common, but the goosebumps we get when national anthem plays is common." Haasan said "goosebumps happen when it's done in a proper atmosphere" and added that he himself had experienced that. "But if it happens everyday, it loses its effect," he said further. During the event, Irani narrated an incident from International Film Festival of India (IFFI), where something went wrong with the audio and "all Indians in one voice started singing the national anthem". "They didn't feel squeamish because the French or other foreign dignitaries were around. They were proud that we as Indians, irrespective of our diversity, sang our national anthem," she said. "I don't want to be apologetic about it. I don't think my nation seeks validation from me. I don't think the soldier on the border is seeking my validation, 'sing this national anthem for me'. He stands there so that I can sing it anytime anywhere I want," she added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Quota and caste violence took centre stage in Maharashtra during the year, which also saw ruling BJP and Shiv Sena continue their blow-hot-and-cold relationship. Marathas, who constitute around 30 per cent of the state's 12 crore population, got 16 per cent reservations in jobs and education after a protracted pro-quota agitation. The Devendra Fadnavis-led government set up the State Backward Class Commission which declared Marathas as socially and educationally backward class citizens. The previous Congress-NCP regime had granted 16 per cent quota to Marathas, but the decision could not withstand legal scrutiny. The Rane committee, which recommended the 16 per cent quota, lacked statutory powers, which the Commission had. The Maratha quota decision has been challenged in the Bombay High Court, even as the state government decided to go ahead with its mega recruitment drive for 36,000 of the 72,000 vacant posts in various departments. In July, Maratha quota protests turned violent in Marathwada and spread across the state after a youth Kakasaheb Shinde allegedly committed suicide by jumping in the Godavari river in Aurangabad district. On January 1, an event to mark the 200th anniversary of the Koregaon-Bhima battle in Pune district in which the British Army comprising Dalits defeated upper-caste Peshwas, was marred by incidents of stone pelting and vandalism. Several towns and cities in Maharashtra remained on edge as Dalit protests against the violence spilled over to Mumbai, with agitators damaging scores of buses and disrupting road and rail traffic. In September, the Pune police raided the premises of rights activists in Maharashtra, Telangana, Delhi, Haryana and Goa and arrested Vernon Gonsalves in Mumbai, Arun Ferreira from Thane, Gautam Navlakha in Delhi, Sudha Bharadwaj in Haryana, and poet Varavara Rao in Hyderabad for suspected Maoist links. Police said the five were part of a conspiracy to create unrest among Dalits and target Prime Minister Narendra Modi. There was a thaw in the BJP-Shiv Sena relations towards the year-end. After four years, Maharashtra Assembly had a deputy speaker after the BJP offered the seat to the Sena, move aimed at pacifying the bickering ally. Fadnavis and Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray travelled in the same car after participating in an event. The two saffron partners, who fell out before the 2014 assembly polls, have been in an uneasy relationship. The acrimonious affair reached its peak during the Palghar Lok Sabha by-polls in May when Sena fielded Shriniwas Wanaga, son of BJP MP Chintaman Wanaga, whose death necessitated the election. Political observers feel Uddhav Thackeray's Ayodhya visit in November and his party's pitch for building the Ram temple there is an attempt to beat the BJP at its own game. In 2019, Maharashtra will vote for the Lok Sabha and Assembly polls. The Congress and NCP renewed their alliance this year. NCP president Sharad Pawar took the lead in holding a Save Constitution march in Mumbai and began a consultation process with like-minded parties to join hands to take on the BJP. Shiv Sena's opposition to the Nanar refinery project in coastal Konkan region led to tensions between the saffron partners. Thackeray addressed a rally in Nanar and Industries Minister Subhash Desai announced that he was scrapping the land acquisition notification for the project. Fadnavis said the minister had no right to do so but later announced that the notification had been scrapped. BJP president Amit Shah met Thackeray in June at the latter's Matoshri residence in suburban Bandra. After poll reverses in the Hindi heartland states, all eyes will be on how the BJP handles the Sena. The BJP-led state government declared drought in 151 talukas in 26 districts and sought Central assistance of Rs 7,962.63 crore for drought relief. The government said it deposited Rs 17,000 crore in bank accounts of 40.17 lakh farmers under the agri loan waiver scheme. The Opposition countered this claim, saying the BJP government had initially announced Rs 34,022 crore farm loan waiver. The year saw farmers and tribals taking out long march twice and also farmers going on strike to press for various demands. In October, a person was killed as a speed boat carrying government officials, media persons and TV crew overturned when they were on their way for a 'puja' at the proposed Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Memorial in the Arabian Sea off Mumbai coast. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Amid a controversy over his comments linking job deprivation of his state's youth to influx of workers from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Kamal Nath on Wednesday said other states including Gujarat also have policies favouring employment to locals, even as a complaint was filed against him in a Bihar court. Some BJP MPs also raised the issue in Parliament, accusing Madhya Pradesh's new chief minister of inciting hatred against people of other states. "Lot of industries are set up in which people from other states, like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, come to work. I do not want to criticise them, but the youth of Madhya Pradesh are deprived (of jobs)," Nath had said on Monday announcing a new state government policy under which industries availing investment incentives will need to give 70 per cent employment to local youths. The remarks, made by Nath soon after he was sworn in, had drawn all-round criticism, with parties like the BJP, RJD and JD(U) expressing their disapproval. Defending his comments, Nath told reporters on Wednesday in Bhopal, "Such policy exists in other states also. Is it not there in Gujarat? What is new in it?" Taking objection to the comments, a social activist, however, filed a complaint against Nath in a court in Muzaffarpur, Bihar, while alleging that the remarks made by the new chief minister of Madhya Pradesh were "insulting" for the people of Bihar and Uttra Pradesh and they were feeling aggrieved. Tamanna Hashmi, the activist who has filed several complaints in the past against politicians making controversial comments, filed his plea against Nath before the Chief Judicial Magistrates court under IPC sections 153 (provocation with intent to cause riot), and 504 (intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of peace). In the complaint, the petitioner has claimed he felt aggrieved by Nath's statement, alleging it was against the country's unity. The court is yet to fix a date for hearing of the complaint case. The senior Congress leader's remarks, which he made shortly after being sworn in as Madhya Pradesh's chief minister, has drawn flak from the ruling JD(U)-BJP combine in Bihar. The RJD, an ally of the Congress in Bihar, has also termed the remarks as avoidable, though it accused the BJP of blowing the matter out of proportions. In Rajya Sabha, Chairman M Venkaiah Naidu allowed BJP's Bhupendra Yadav to make his submission on Nath's statement amid slogan-shouting from the opposition as well as treasury benches over the Rafale deal and other issues. Yadav said a person holding a constitutional post cannot incite hatred against persons of other states and so his Zero Hour mention on the subject be taken on record. In Lok Sabha also, Sanjay Jaiswal, BJP MP from West Champaran in Bihar, slammed Nath for his remarks. The comments by various political leaders in the past about influx of migrant workers in their respective states, most noticeably in Maharashtra, have often triggered controversies. In October this year itself, Gujarat had seen widespread protests against migrants from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and other states. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Mindfulness training may improve the effectiveness of intensive weight management programmes, helping people shed the extras kilos more effectively, scientists say. The research, published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, suggests that it could be an excellent strategy for healthcare providers in preventing and managing obesity. Individuals who participated in mindfulness training as part of an intensive weight management programme lost more weight in six months than other programme participants who did not attend mindfulness courses. Mindfulness is a mind-body practice where individuals learn to achieve heightened awareness of their current state of mind and immediate environment in the present moment. The study looked at how this practice could be used to help individuals with obesity. Obesity worldwide has nearly tripled since 1975, according to the World Health Organisation. As of 2016, more than 1.9 billion adults worldwide met the criteria for overweight or obesity. "This research is significant as we have shown that problematic eating behaviour can be improved with mindfulness application. We are the first centre in the United Kingdom that created a structured multidisciplinary course incorporating mindfulness and assessed its effectiveness in patients attending obesity clinics," said Petra Hanson, PhD student at University of Warwick in the UK. The study examined weight loss among 53 people who were attending the multidisciplinary tier 3 weight management program at University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust. Among those recruited into the study, 33 participants completed at least three of four mindfulness sessions. The course included discussions of the difference between mindful and mindless eating as well as an introduction to Compassionate Mind Therapy, which highlights the need to be aware of self-criticism as well as the importance of self confidence in achieving behaviour change. Mindfulness course participants lost, on average, three kilograms in the six-month period following the classes. Individuals who only attended one or two of the four courses lost, on average, 0.9 kilograms during the same period. The non-completers tended to weigh more at the outset of the study than those who finished the group mindfulness course. Those who completed the mindfulness course lost 2.85 kilograms more, on average, than a control group of 20 individuals in the tier 3 obesity management program who did not participate in the course. "Surveys of the participants indicate mindfulness training can help this population improve their relationship with food. Individuals who completed the course said they were better able to plan meals in advance and felt more confident in self-management of weight loss moving forward," said Hanson. "Similar courses can be held in a primary care setting or even developed into digital tools. We hope this approach can be scaled up to reach a wider population," he said. "Mindfulness has huge potential as a strategy for achieving and maintaining good health and wellbeing," he added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The civil aviation ministry along with the Airports Authority of India (AAI) Wednesday launched an official mobile app for the global aviation summit to be held in Mumbai next month. The app named 'GAS 2019,' which is available on both play store and iOS, enables users to interact with the co-delegates and speakers besides providing a platform for networking through personal and group chats, an official release issued by a private publicity firm said. Significantly, both the ministry and AAI have their own publicity departments as well. The two-day summit which will take place from January 15, is expected to be attended by a host of dignitaries from India and abroad, it said. Besides the transport and civil aviation ministers from Laos, Thailand, Bangladesh, Nepal and Jamaica, senior airline and airports executives from India and abroad are also expected to participate in the global summit, which will be first-of-its-kind in India, as per the release. Also the Directorate Generals of Civil Aviation (DGCAs) from 22 countries along with President of the International Civil Aviation Organization, Director-General, the International Air Transport Association, Director-General, the Airports Council International, Director-General of Civil Air Navigation Services Organization (CANSO) will also be participating in the Summit in Mumbai, it added. The summit is being hosted by the civil aviation ministry along with the AAI and industry lobby Ficci. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Mobile handset makers including Honor, Samsung and OnePlus have emerged as the most engaging brands on Twitter in India during 2018, using the social platform to drive brand awareness as well as product launches. According to Twitter's 'top 10 most engaging brands' tally, top 5 spots were taken up by handset makers -- Honor India, Samsung India, OnePlus India, Xiaomi India and Motorola India. The list also included State Bank of India, Wipro, Amazon India, Tata Sky and Mercedes Benz India. "In 2018, Indian brands on Twitter raised the bar for consumer engagement through innovative and inspirational brand campaigns. From driving brand awareness to product launches, brands in India adopted an always-on approach to cultivate a deep, meaningful relationship with their customers," Twitter said in a statement. Google India led the list of brands in terms of video views, followed by Samsung India, Honor India, Nexa, Tata Motors, Motorola India, Flipkart, LG India, Vistara, and Hero MotoCorp. "Video continued to be the flavour of the year, with an increasing number of brands opting for different formats of video to visually showcase their products and services, driving up audience engagement...with people logging into Twitter to connect with companies for a variety of reasons, brands are now looking at unique and relevant ways of reaching out to their audiences on the platform," the statement said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Ministry of Civil Aviation Ministry has "apparently gone overboard" in extending concessions to Delhi airport operator DIAL, the Public Accounts Committee said Wednesday. The Delhi International Airport Ltd (DIAL) is operating the Indira Gandhi International Airport here on public private partnership. The PAC has flagged various concerns in the report on 'Implementation of Public Private Partnership - Indira Gandhi International Airport, Delhi' tabled in Parliament. The ministry has "apparently gone overboard while extending concessions to the DIAL, has been privy to preposterous commercial expansion at the airport and has been disappointing in monitoring the implementation of the PPP project by the DIAL," the report said. The panel, headed by senior Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge, also said that it desires that a cost - benefit analysis be carried out to see whether such projects are actually serving the public interests or only benefitting the private partners. Further, the committee has suggested a review of the DIAL's performance be undertaken by a Committee of Secretaries (CoS). GMR group is the majority shareholder of the DIAL. Others are the Airports Authority of India (AAI) and Germany's Fraport. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Congress on Wednesday accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of hypocrisy, double-speak and dishonesty and said his hint of reducing taxes below 18 per cent for 99 per cent items comes out of political compulsions after the BJP's defeat in recent assembly elections. Congress spokesperson Abhishek Singhvi said that the prime minister earlier poked fun at Rahul Gandhi when he suggested 'one nation, one tax' and capping of taxes at 18 per cent tax under the Goods and Services Tax (GST). "Modiji termed Rahul Gandhi's demand for a 18 pc (or less) GST rate as 'Grand Stupid Thought', but the three state electoral losses forced him to apply the same. Doublespeak, duplicity, dishonesty of PM Modi and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley is now out in the open. "100 days are left for the Lok Sabha elections to take place, and PM Modi has suddenly woken up to the fact that the GST implemented by his Government is poorly implemented," he told reporters. Singhvi said the Congress party which is the original proponent of the GST, has been hammering the fact from day one, that the GST implemented by the Modi government is not 'One Nation, One Tax' but 'One Nation Seven Taxes' with rates of 0.25 pc, 3 pc, 5 pc, 12 pc, 18 pc, 28 pc and 40 pc (which was later shelved) and possibly more. He said the Congress chief has been at the forefront of demanding a single tax rate for GST, not exceeding 18 pc, but Modi government did not listen to the voice of people. "After a deep slumber and when the alarm bells for the BJP have started ringing in the Hindi heartland, PM Modi has suddenly woken up. In a media conclave, yesterday, he has 'hinted' that 99 pc of all items would be taxed at 18 pc or at less. This is still a 'hint' and not a 'decision'," he said. He said Since the rollout of GST from July 1 last year, under a 'mighnight drama' in Parliament, the GST Council has undertaken four rounds of rate rationalisation and thanks to Gujarat polls, the GST rates on many items were reduced from 28 to 18 pc, "after the government was forced to heed the advice of the Congress party and experts on flaws in GST". The Congress leader also said that the Chief Economic Adviser to the government had clearly recommended a GST rate of 15-15.5 per cent and demonstrated that it was a revenue neutral rate, but that "an arrogant Modi Government, drunk with power, refused to heed to its own CEA". Singhvi also cited various statements of the prime minister and union ministers Jaitley and Piyush Goyal against Congress leaders on the GST. "We want to ask Arun Jaitley as to what changed in the past 5 months, that now the Modi Government is forced to adopt the 'flawed idea' of Single Tax Rate? Was it the absolute drubbing they received from the hands of the electorate in 5 states or was something else? "In July, this year, PM Modi exhorted that 'Milk, Mercedes can't be taxed at single GST rate'....We want to ask PM Modi, what forced this stupendous reversal and roll back," he said. Singhvi also said that on November 29, 2017, during the Gujarat poll campaign, PM Modi made a remark saying Congress President Rahul Gandhi's demand for a single tax rate in GST is "Grand Stupid Though'. "Acronym Expert, Modiji is however not an 'economic expert'. Yesterday he was almost forced to concede to Shri Rahul Gandhi's demand. "'Modi-nomics' is the art of back stabbing people with flawed economic decisions, ruining their livelihood with unwitting announcements, stealing their jobs with economic mismanagement and forcing the small businesses to shut down by unleashing economic anarchy," he said. Pointing to a survey by the All India Manufacturers' Organisation (AIMO) that there have been steady job loss and declining profits since 2014 and demonetisation and roll-out of GST responsible for it, he claimed it underlines the job loss were reported at the rate of 43 pc in the trader segment, micro-segments reported job losses of 32 pc, small segments reported 35 pc and medium-scale industries reported 24 pc job losses. "This is PM Modi's legacy of economic mismanagement and jumlas," the Congress leader said, adding that "it is time for them to go for of doling out poll lollypops, but people understand this double-speak and hypocrisy". Meanwhile, Congress leader P Chidambaram Wednesday said "belated wisdon" has dawned on the Modi government, as he accused it of "unscrambling" the egg after having "scrambled the egg needlessly when GST was introduced". "Government says 99% of goods will be at 18 per cent GST. Belated wisdom. We should have started with 18 per cent as the standard rate. "Having scrambled the egg needlessly when GST was introduced, Government is trying to unscramble it! Typical of NDA. "BJP/NDA governance mantra is 'Leap before you look'. Which is the reason for the damage caused by GST to businesses, especially MSMEs," he said on Twitter. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Hamid Nihal Ansari, who returned to India after spending six years in a Pakistani jail, Wednesday said the motivation to take care of his parents had sustained him during his imprisonment. Ansari (33), a software engineer, was arrested in Pakistan in 2012 for illegally entering the country from Afghanistan, reportedly to meet a girl he had befriended online. Authorities in Pakistan had slapped charges of espionage against him. "After six years, when I saw them (his family) I was still in Pakistan. They were crying and spreading their arms while Pakistani authorities were completing paperwork with me and I kept asking them to speed up. I just ran towards them (family) and fell on my knees, 'Ammi mujhe maaf kar de'. I was asking for forgiveness from everyone," he told India Today in an interview. The Mumbai resident, who returned to India after crossing the Wagah-Attari border, was imprisoned in the Peshawar Central Jail after being sentenced by a military court on December 15, 2015. He Wednesday said he wanted to meet the girl because she was in distress. "She asked for help and I started hunting for a visa. There were people from Pakistan who posed as friends and said they would help. I thought from the heart and not from brain. They asked me to come through Afghanistan. They kept fake ids and documents in my pocket," he told the channel. He said there were policemen waiting for him before he reached the girl's house and arrested him. "The moment I got arrested I thought I was doomed. That moment I thought I was never going to go home but then as time went by I started getting hope that I would go home," he said "The first three years I spent underground alone, sometimes they would give me food, and sometimes they wouldn't. I had this motivation that I have to go back home and serve my parents. I have given them a huge pain and this will be my repentance. This is the least I can do," he said in the interview. Early Wednesday, Ansari had an emotional interaction with External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj as tears rolled down his cheeks while narrating his ordeal. Officials said Ansari became emotional while explaining the difficult phase he had to endure in Pakistan. According to official sources, India issued 96 notes verbales to Pakistan seeking consular access to Ansari. The decision to release him was on account of relentless pressure from New Delhi, they said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) State-owned MSTC Ltd would start reverse e-auction of onions to aid Nasik farmers who have been reeling under price crash following bumper production, an official said Wednesday. Mother Dairy would lend support to the endeavour by procuring 20 tonnes of onion a day, the official said. "We have decided to support the onion farmers of Nasik. We have technology in place to carry out auction of agri commodities. Our officers are already there to execute a plan of offering a market for the farmers," MSTC chairman and managing director B B Singh said Wednesday on the sidelines of an MSME conclave organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) here. Reserve auction is a type of auction in which the roles of buyer and seller are reversed and the lowest price discovery is made from a base price. Onion prices in Maharashtra's Nasik fell below Rs 2 a kg forcing farmers to dump the crop, while the same commodity sells for Rs 25-30 a kg in markets such as Delhi-NCR and Kolkata. "We will commence reverse e-auction of the crop for Mother Dairy in the next 4-5 days with a floor price of not less than Rs 6-8 a kg which we hope to help better price realisation in the period of crisis," he said. The input cost for cultivation of a kilogram of onion has been fixed at Rs 8.50 by the Directorate of Onion and Garlic Research (DOGR). Mother Dairy has assured to procure 20 tonnes of onions daily to sell them through its 150-odd retail outlets in the Delhi-NCR region. Singh said MSTC is in talks to engage more buyers like Spencers, Reliance Fresh and other organised retailers to create demand for the onions grown in Nasik. However, MSTC is yet to reeive any positive feedback from private retail chains of the country in the venture, Singh said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Amid a raging debate on data localisation, richest Indian Mukesh Ambani Wednesday said "data colonisation" is as bad as previous forms of colonisation and India's data must be controlled and owned by Indians. Speaking at Republic Summit here, Ambani, who is chairman of energy-to-telecom conglomerate Reliance Industries Ltd, said data of an individual or business belongs to them and not to corporates who could use it to monetise from them. "In this new world, data is the new oil. And data is the new wealth. India's data must be controlled and owned by Indian people and not by corporates, especially global corporations," he said. Throwing his weight behind Indian authorities seeking companies to store data locally, he said the Supreme Court has mandated that data privacy is sacrosanct. "Therefore, for India to succeed in this data-driven revolution, necessary steps will have to be taken to migrate the control and ownership of Indian data back to India - in other words, Indian wealth back to India," he said. "Data colonisation is as bad as the previous forms of colonisation." Data freedom, he said, is as precious as the freedom won in 1947. The government wants companies doing business in India to store all customer data locally. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in April ordered companies to store the "the entire data relating to payment systems operated by them... in a system only in India" so as to ensure "unfettered supervisory access" for "better monitoring." Companies like Google had complained about the six-month deadline. The government too is considering a draft data-security law that requires data centres for all companies be physically located within India. Also under consideration is an e-commerce policy that requires the storage of customer data in India. "Fundamentally, I am a big believer in the power of all of us together rather than a power of few. I think that will differentiate China and India in the long-run. My belief is that a decentralised empowered world where everybody being equal is better off than where few people are in power. That is true for data world," he said. Ambani said the world will have to go from aggregator model to a distributor model as he backed those arguing for preventing foreign companies from repatriating and making money off of Indian consumers' data. "Important thing is that data of an Indian belongs to him. It does not belong to a corporation, whether it be Indian or global. The only right that the corporation has is exactly like a bank that if I give you a fixed deposit locker and you put your money. which is your data in my locker, it doesn't become mine that I take that money and gamble on the stock market. If I make gain take it and then say I have given back your Rs 100. It doesn't work like that," he said. Fundamentally, he said, the data belongs to the individual. "If I use or monetise it in any way, I have to transparently share with you the gains of that," he said. "I strongly feel on data ownership and the way data should be monetised for every single entity. This is true for individual, small merchants, small shops, small businesses, and large businesses. Even my business data should be my own data. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) An engineering report deemed the steep ramp a public safety hazard. It will be closed for two years, during which time, officials hope to make it ADA compliant. A 38-year-old woman from Mumbai, who was allegedly trafficked to Kuwait City under the pretext of employment but was forced to work as a domestic help for a local resident there, has been rescued with the help of Indian embassy. The victim, identified as Sairabanu Shaikh, was reunited with her husband and other family members Tuesday night, after she was rescued with the help of the embassy and a Mumbai-based foundation, her husband said Wednesday. Shaikh, a Bandra resident who worked as a social worker, said she spent harrowing three months when she was in the Arab country. Shaikh came into contact with a placement agency while she was collecting donation for a community wedding and helping senior citizens. She said the owner of the agency asked her and her husband Haidar Mulla if they are willing to work in Kuwait. Shaikh said she was told that they are initially supposed to work in an unorganised sector before getting a job that involves taking care of ailing patients in Kuwait. Shaikh said she proceeded to Kuwait in September alone, as the departure visa of her husband was not ready. She said she landed in Kuwait with other women from India and met an agent named Ali. She said Ali sent her to a mansion of an Arab where she was forced to do domestic chores. "I used to do cooking, cleaning, dusting and mopping, which would start early morning and continued till late night", she said. After working at the mansion for at least a month, Shaikh called up Ali and told him that she didn't want to work there anymore. "Ali contacted my employer and collected my salary. However, he kept me at his home where I was forced to do domestic chores again", Shaikh said, adding that she was not allowed to leave home as she didn't have a civilian ID card of Kuwait. She alleged that Ali tortured her and demanded Rs 2 lakh for sending her back to India. "By the time, I got a chance to speak to my husband who lodged a complaint with Indian Embassy in Kuwait. He also sought help from Abraham Mathai, the chairperson of Harmony foundation", she said. Shaikh said she managed to sneak out of Ali's residence in Kuwait on December 2 and hired a taxi that took her to the Indian embassy. "After completing all formalities, I was given a flight ticket for India. I reached here on Tuesday", she said. Her husband Haider expressed happiness. "Whatever my wife suffered should not happened again with any other Indian woman, so we are going to file a complaint at local police station against the placement company and the agent", he said. Mathai said Shaikh was sent to Kuwait illegally, which is a case of "human trafficking". "It is good to see that she is reunited with her family", said Mathai. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Navy chiefs of India and Thailand discussed a range of bilateral issues on Wednesday, the Indian Navy said. The two countries also signed an agreement on white shipping arrangement. The Commander-in-Chief of the Royal Thai Navy, Admiral Luechai Ruddit, called on Indian Navy Chief Admiral Sunil Lanba at Naval Headquarters here, the Navy said. "During the meeting a host of Bilateral issues were discussed and a Technical Agreement on White Shipping Information Exchange was also signed," the Navy posted on its Twitter handle. Ruddit also met Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman. India and Thailand share a robust defence ties. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Nepal occupies a special place in the Indo-Pacific region and must remain stable and prosperous, the Trump administration has said, asserting that America has a "profound stake" in the success of the Himalayan nation. Alice Wells, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia said the two countries can work together to effectively tackle shared challenges and bolster their ties. "The United States has a profound stake in the success of your country. Nepal occupies a special place in an Indo-Pacific region that is, and must remain, stable, free, open, and prosperous," she said on Tuesday. "By working more closely together, we can effectively tackle shared challenges and bolster linkages across the region for the benefit of all," Wells said in her remarks at a dinner reception for the visiting Nepalese Foreign Minister Pradeep Gyawali. Earlier in the day, Gyawali had a successful meeting with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, during which they reaffirmed their strong respective commitments to the US-Nepal partnership. "They discussed new ways to advance our mutual interests through closer cooperation. This historic meeting opened a new chapter in the story of our friendship," Wells said. America's commitment to Nepal has been steadfast for over seven decades, she said. "We stood alongside the people of Nepal on their journey toward democracy, and the American people have made possible decades of support for Nepal's economic development. Today, we continue to stand by Nepal in support of economic reforms that will increase living standards, attract US investment, and lead to enduring prosperity," Wells said. She said the proposed USD 500 million 'Millennium Challenge Corporation Compact' will expand Nepal's electricity infrastructure and improve its road networks. "Underpinning the partnership between our two governments, of course, is the affection and goodwill our citizens have for one another. Our people-to-people ties have never been stronger," she said. This past year, Nepal was the South Asian country with the largest increase in students choosing to pursue their higher studies in the United States. With a 14 per cent increase from the previous year, there are now over 13,000 Nepalis enrolled in US higher education institutions, she said at the reception. The American people also have an abiding admiration for Nepal's extraordinary cultural heritage as demonstrated by the contribution of nearly USD 3.5 million to preserve important Nepali landmarks through the Ambassador's Fund for Cultural Preservation, Wells said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Wednesday Israel will defend itself after the US withdraws from Syria, a decision the premier said he has discussed with President Donald Trump. "We will study its timetable, how it will be implemented and - of course -- its implications for us. In any case we will take care to maintain the security of Israel and to defend ourselves in this area," Netanyahu said in an English language statement released by his office. The Israeli prime minister said he had discussed Washington's plans on Tuesday with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Trump. "We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency," the US leader wrote on Twitter, referring to the Islamic State group. Trump was hinting at plans to pull out of Syria, which were subsequently confirmed by a US official. "Full withdrawal, all means all," the US official told AFP on condition of anonymity. Currently, about 2,000 US forces are in Syria, most of them on a train-and-advise mission to support local forces fighting IS. Their withdrawal will be implemented "as quickly as possible", the official said without providing a timetable. Israel has launched dozens of strikes in Syria since the war started in 2011, targeting Iranian positions and those of Hezbollah as well as weapons convoys to the militant group. Both Iran and Hezbollah support Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and are enemies of Israel. Observers have warned a withdrawal of US troops from Syria would see Assad - along with his Russian and Iranian allies - secure his influence over the country and wider region. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) NIA raided three places in Tamil Nadu's Coimbatore Wednesday in connection with the alleged plot to kill Hindu outfit leaders, officials said. Police arrested five people in September on a tip-off that they had hatched a plan to kill Hindu Makkal Katchi chief Arjun Sampath and Hindu Munnani leader Mookambikai Mani, among some others. Later, two more were arrested for giving them shelter and arranging transport for them. According to police, these people were inspired by ISIS modules and other terror outfits and hatched the plot. The investigation was subsequently handed over to the National Investigating Agency or NIA. Today's raids were conducted at the houses of three of those arrested. The searches started after NIA officials reached the city this morning, police said. They carried out searches at the houses of Faisal in Ukkadam, Ashiq in Chandran Street and Anwar in Kuniamuthur, police said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Government think-tank has pitched for completing labour reforms, increasing participation of women workers, implementing minimum wage, improving employment data collection and broadening social security in its 'Strategy for New India @75' document released on Wednesday. The Aayog also made a case for easing industrial relations to encourage formalisation, saying there should be increase in severance pay, in line with global best practices. It also asked for overhauling the labour dispute resolution system to resolve disputes quickly, fairly and at low cost and strengthening labour courts/tribunals for timely dispute resolution. Calling for enhancing skills and apprenticeships, the Aayog said the Labour Market Information System (LMIS) is important for identifying skill shortages, training needs and employment created. It said LMIS should be made functional urgently and government should ensure the wider use of apprenticeship programmes by all enterprises which may require an enhancement of the stipend amount paid by the government. On labour law reforms, it has suggested completing the codification of labour laws at the earliest and pitched for simplification and modification of labour laws applicable to the formal sector to introduce an optimum combination of flexibility and security. It said the government should make the compliance of working conditions regulations more effective and transparent and the National Policy for Domestic Workers needs to be brought in at the earliest to recognise their rights and promote better working conditions. About enhancing female labour force participation, it said the government should ensure employers' adherence to the recently passed Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Act, 2017, and the Sexual Harassment of Women at Work Place (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act. It is also important to ensure implementation of these legislations in the informal sector and make sure that skills training programmes and apprenticeships include women, the document said. On employment data, it said that government should ensure that data collection for the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PFLS) of households initiated in April 2017 is completed as per schedule and data disseminated by 2019. It also asked the government to conduct an annual enterprise survey using the Goods and Service Tax Network (GSTN) as the sample frame and increase the use of administrative data, namely EPFO, ESIC and the NPS, to track regularly the state of employment while adjusting for the formalisation of the workforce. About wages, it said the government should make compliance with the national floor level minimum wage mandatory and expand the Minimum Wages Act, 1948, to cover all jobs, besides enforcing the payment of wages through cheque or Aadhaar-enabled payments for all. On social security and working conditions, it asked the government to enact a comprehensive occupational health and safety legislation based on risk assessment and employer-worker cooperation. It said workers' housing on site will help to improve global competitiveness of the Indian industry, along with enhancing workers' welfare. It also recommended enhancing occupational safety and health (OSH) in the informal sector through capacity building and targeted programmes and ensuring compulsory registration of all establishments to ensure better monitoring of occupational safety as well as recreation and sanitation facilities. It also made a case for enhancing transparency in the labour inspection system by allowing online complaints and putting in place a standardised and clear mechanism. About the constraints, it said a large share of India's workforce is employed in low productivity activities with low levels of remuneration across industry sectors, which is especially true of the informal sector where wages can be one-twentieth of those in firms producing the same goods or services but in the formal sector. It pointed out that a large number of workers that are engaged in the unorganised sector are not covered by labour regulations and social security. This dualistic nature of the labour market in India may be a result of the complex and large number of labour laws that make compliance very costly. In 2016, there were 44 labour laws under the statute of the Central government. More than 100 laws fall under the jurisdiction of state governments. The multiplicity and complexity of laws makes compliance and enforcement difficult, it said. It also said according to the India Skill Report 2018, only 47 per cent of those coming out of higher educational institutions are employable. "We currently lack timely and periodic estimates of the work force. This lack of data prevents us from rigorously monitoring the employment situation and assessing the impact of various interventions to create jobs," it said. The Niti Aayog Wednesday unveiled a strategy document with an aim to accelerate growth to 8 per cent and propel the country towards a USD 5-trillion economy by 2030. The 'Strategy for New India @ 75' document, prepared after extensive consultations with over 800 stakeholders from within the government - central, state and district levels, was released by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley. "The overarching focus of the strategy document is to further improve the policy environment in which private investors and other stakeholders can contribute their fullest towards achieving the goals set out for New India 2022 and propel India towards a USD 5 trillion economy by 2030," it said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Odisha government Wednesday said the damage caused to standing crops and stocked paddy due to heavy rain triggered by Cyclone 'Phethai' is being assessed to provide assistance to affected farmers. The government stepped up the exercise to ascertain the extent of damage to the farm sector as the situation limped back to normal in the southern and western regions of Odisha, which were battered by downpour due to the cyclone. Phethai struck coastal Andhra Pradesh Monday. Heavy rainfall coupled with high-velocity squally winds had pounded several parts of south and west Odisha on Monday and Tuesday. Revenue Minister Maheswar Mohanty said district collectors have been directed to submit reports about the damage and details about farmers affected by the calamity in their respective areas. Based on their reports, the extent of damage caused by the cyclone would be assessed to provide financial assistance to the affected farmers, he said. The minister said assistance would be extended to the affected farmers from the State Disaster Response Fund and also in accordance with the prescribed norms to those covered by insurance. Though no major destruction was inflicted on Odisha, the cyclonic storm caused major damage to standing crops and harvested paddy stocked in the southern and western regions of the state, officials said. Besides paddy, other crops like cotton, pulses and vegetables were also damaged due to rainfall, they said. Special Relief Commissioner (SRC) Bishnupada Sethi said there were reports about damage to paddy crops in some districts and the process of collecting details is underway in order to make a thorough assessment. However, there was no major damage to stocks in procurement areas as precautionary measures had been taken to cover the paddy, he said. The SRC said Balangir district had recorded the highest rainfall of 92.4 mm, followed by 77.9 mm in Jharsuguda and 74.4 mm in Sambalpur on Monday and Tuesday under the impact of the cyclone. While 100 blocks received more than 50 mm of rainfall, the average rainfall in the state during the period was recorded at 37.5 mm, he said. Heeding the state government's advice, farmers in many parts of Odisha had taken precautionary measures to protect their crops from rain. However, farmers in several areas still suffered considerable losses as the rain damaged standing paddy and cotton crops, along with harvested paddy stocks stashed in open fields. In view of the cyclonic storm as many as 11,600 people were evacuated in Gajapati district, an official said. With the weather turning dry gradually, the state will witness a fall in temperature by 2 to 3 degree celsius from Thursday, said H R Biswas, director of the met centre here. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A farmers body in Odisha Wednesday announced that it would try to meet and submit a memorandum to Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his visit to the state slated on December 24. The farmers in the state are demanding higher MSP for paddy, which is now fixed at Rs 1750 after an increase of Rs 200 by the Centre. "We will like to meet the prime minister and apprise him about the problems being faced by farmers of Odisha, besides seeking to know the central government's stand on enhancing the MSP of paddy," Akshya Kumar, the convenor of Naba Nirman Krushak Sangathan (NNKS) which is leading the farmers' agitation, told reporters here. Kumar said that as the prime minister would be visiting the state, there are plans that the farmers would meet him at the meeting venue at Khurda near here. "We have heard from the state government that it has been writing to the prime minister on the farmers' issue. This will be for the first time when farmers will attempt to meet him," he said. NNKS leader said that the farmers of Odisha have been demanding proper price of agricultural produces, pension for elderly farmers and prestige. Kumar announced that the farmers will also stage a dharna in front of Raj Bhavan here on January 8 here to press their demands. The proposed dharna will take place the same day as the demonstration planned by the ruling BJD in front of the Parliament on farmers issue. The state unit of BJP has chalked out a strategy to ghero Odisha secretariat on the same issue. The BJP activists will also gherao chief minister Naveen Patnaik's residence on the same day. The Sanghathan has also announced that they would intensify agitation from February 1 if the state government fails to meet their demands price, prestige and pension by the deadline of January 31 set by it. Opposition Congress too plans to stage a demontsration near Raj Bhavan demanding farm loan waiver and enhanced MSP on paddy, sources in the party. The CPI-M has also demanded increase in the MSP to Rs 3000. The NNKS members had on December 14 held a march to Raj Bhavan and submitted a memorandum to Governor Ganeshi Lal over several demands. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) On the 57th Liberation Day of Goa, the state government Wednesday appealed to the people to make the coastal state free of plastic and Various programmes were held across to mark the occasion. In absence of ailing Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar, Legislative Assembly Speaker Pramod Sawant unfurled the flag at the official function held here this morning. Parrikar, 63, has been recuperating at his private residence near here since October 14, after he was discharged from Delhi's All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS). was freed from the Portuguese dominion on December 19, 1961 after a freedom movement and Army operation. It was granted full statehood in 1987. In his 10-minute speech made in Konkani, Sawant touched upon Parrikar's inability to attend the event on medical grounds. "The state government is trying hard to make plastic and free, but the efforts can become fruitful only with the active participation of citizens. On this day, let us take the pledge to make Goa free of plastic and pollution", he said. Lakhs of tourists visit Goa every year for its picturesque beaches. The problem of plastic items being dumped haphazardly by tourists at various beaches is a cause of concern for the administration as well as environmentalists. During his address, Sawant listed out various developmental programmes, infrastructural works and employment generating initiatives taken up by the BJP-led government with the help of the Centre. "Completion of two bridges over Mandovi and Zuari rivers, in addition to the existing ones (bridges), will help streamline flow of traffic from North Goa to South Goa", the speaker said. Sawant also recalled the sacrifices made by freedom fighters and citizens to get Goa liberated from the 450-year rule of the Portuguese in 1961. He also hailed the Indian armed forces for pushing the Portuguese military out of the state in 1961. Meanwhile, addressing a gathering in Margao in south Goa, GFP leader and state Town and Country Planning Minister Vijai Sardesai stressed the need to liberate oneself from "regressive ideas, pseudo activism, external interference and patronising attitudes". "Liberation of Goa happened in 1961, but we should remember that liberation is a continuous process and it can never be over", said the minister whose Goa Forward Party (GFP) is one of the constituents of the BJP-led coalition government in the coastal state. "Only adversaries have changed since 1961. We have new threats from inside and outside. We also have to liberate ourselves from our prejudices, negativity, dogmas and petty rivalries. We should also liberate ourselves from dependence to take Goa forward", he said. Underlining the need for "neo-liberation", the minister said, "we need neo revolutionaries, neo-activists and neo-Goemkars (Goans)". The board will this week consider a demand from the government to list its overseas investment arm Videsh on bourses, but an IPO of the firm is ruled out in near future as it will have to first separate assets in sanction-hit nations and take approval of lenders. The Oil and Natural Gas Corp (ONGC) board is meeting on December 20 and 21 to consider among other things a share buyback. The board will also be appraised of a demand from the Department of Investment and Public Asset Management (DIPAM) for the listing of OVL, sources with direct knowledge of the development said. The listing, which will involve an initial public offering (IPO) being floated, may not happen in near future for multiple reasons. These range from markets are not being right for an and production company to list, to complexities involved in getting a firm like to be listed. OVL, sources said, has assets in countries like Venezuela, Iran, and Sudan, which are exposed to some or other western sanctions. These assets will have to be first separated from the company. While this may not be a difficult task, but it would involve issues of capital gains and tax thereon, they said. Also, is heavily under debt and such a move would require taking approval of all the lenders - yet another tedious job. A third of its $28.45 billion (Rs 1.51 trillion) investment in 41 projects in 20 countries has been financed by loans. More importantly, has been only in acquisition mode till now and hasn't yet reached a last economic model where it can stand on its own feet. The company is dependent on its parent for even guarantees for taking loans. OVL has great assets and it would reach that economic model once couple of its assets like the giant gas field in starts production, they said. Sources said the matter being put up before the board is more of an academic exercise and may not necessarily translate into a decision on listing. OVL projects are in the development stage and an IPO will get the best value when these projects are monetised, they said. OVL's giant gas field in will start production sometime in 2022 when two LNG trains of 12 million tonnes per annum capacity are set up and gas exported in cryogenic ships. Its Farzad-B gas field in is on hold in view of US sanctions on the nation. Also, its Venezuelan oilfields are producing much less than their potential, he said. According to a letter the Department of Investment and Public Asset Management (DIPAM) wrote to management in August that the listing of OVL would help unlock value by improving its corporate governance and efficiency. ONGC had helped the government meet its disinvestment target last fiscal when it bought a 51.11 per cent stake in state-owned Hindustan Petroleum Corp Ltd (HPCL) for Rs 369 billion. After failing to find a buyer for Air India, DIPAM is again looking at ONGC to meet the Rs 800 billion revenue mobilisation target set out for it in the Budget for 2018-19 from the sale of government stake in PSUs. OVL, which is 100 per cent owned by ONGC, has so far invested Rs 1.5 trillion ($28.36 billion) in 41 projects it has across 20 countries. In the letter, DIPAM said PSUs with a positive network and no accumulated losses should be listed to unlock value. It, however, did not state how much stake in OVL should be sold for its listing. Market regulator Sebi calls for a minimum 25 per cent public float for a listed company. Sources said proceeds of a potential listing of OVL would accrue to its parent ONGC but the government would seek a special dividend to reap that. The government owns 67.45 per cent in ONGC. If ONGC were to declare entire proceeds of OVL listing as a special dividend, the government would get 67.45 per cent of it. The government had in 2015 as well asked ONGC to list OVL. But the state-owned firm had at that time told the government that it was not the right time to list as were subdued and the company would not get the right value. have since rebounded and the government is looking to cash in on that. Under its portfolio, OVL has reserves of 711 million tonnes of oil and oil equivalent natural gas. In 2017-18, it produced 9.35 million tonnes of crude oil, up from 8.43 million tonnes in the previous year. Together with natural gas, the output was 14.16 million tonnes of oil equivalent, up from 12.80 million tonnes in the previous year. It reported a net profit of Rs 9.81 billion on a turnover of Rs 104.18 billion in 2017-18 fiscal. This compared with a net profit of Rs 7.01 billion on a turnover of Rs 100.80 billion in the previous fiscal. It had reported a net loss of Rs 36.33 billion in 2015-16 due to a sharp drop in (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.) West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Wednesday said the issue of opposition prime ministerial candidate could be discussed after the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. Her comments came in the backdrop of Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) president M K Stalin's proposal to announce Congress chief Rahul Gandhi as the opposition's prime ministerial candidate. "It could be discussed only after the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, once the opposition alliance emerged winners. All (opposition) parties will meet and decide on the issue. We will accept that," Banerjee told reporters at the state secretariat. Asked whether she was one of the contenders for the job, the Trinamool Congress supremo said, "This is not the time to discuss this issue. And I am not alone. We are working together. We are solidly together," she said. The TMC earlier said announcing prime ministerial candidate now would be premature would as it would divide the Opposition camp. On reports of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and the Samajwadi Party (SP) coming together for the 2019 Lok Sabha polls without the Congress, Banerjee said, "This is very good. It is local compulsion. We appreciate that." The Congress could also be fighting alone in places due to similar compulsions, she said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Over 100 government websites, including some managed by the National Informatics Centre (NIC), were hacked this year, Parliament was informed Wednesday. "As per information reported to and tracked by the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), 172 and 105 government websites, which includes 74 and 31 websites hosted on NICNET managed by National Informatics Centre (NIC) were hacked during the year 2017 and 2018 (up to November), respectively," Minister of State for Electronics and IT, S S Ahluwalia said in a written reply to Lok Sabha. He added that in tune with the dynamic nature of IT and emerging cyber threats, continuous efforts are required to be made by owners to protect networks by way of hardening and deploying appropriate security controls. Government has taken several measures to enhance the cyber security posture and prevent cyber attacks including breaches and hacking, he further stated. To another query, Ahluwalia said a total of three, 14 and six financial fraud incidents affecting ATMS, cards, point of sale (PoS) systems and Unified Payment Interface (UPI) have been reported during the years 2016, 2017 and 2018 (up to November), respectively, as per information reported to Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In). Further, Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has registered a total of 1,191, 1,372, 2,059 and 921 cases of fraud involving ATM/debit cards, credit cards and Internet banking frauds reported (amount involved Rs 1 lakh and above) during the year 2015-16, 2016-17, 2017-18 and 2018-19 (up to September 30, 2018), respectively, he said. "The CERT-IN issues alerts and advisories regarding latest cyber threats and counter measures on regular basis to ensure safe usage of digital technologies. Regarding securing digital payments, 28 advisories have been issued for users and institutions," the minister stated. In response to another question, Ahluwalia said a total number of 53,081 cyber security incidents (including 53 ransomware incidents) were observed during the year 2017, as per CERT-In. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Aviation regulator DGCA Wednesday said that Pratt & Whitney is taking steps to fix the issue of smoke being emitted from its engine, after an IndiGo plane made an emergency landing last week after detection of smoke mid-air. The IndiGo incident, involving an A320 neo aircraft, was the first time globally that smoke was detected from a Pratt & Whitney engine, a senior DGCA official said. IndiGo and GoAir operate A320 neo planes powered with P&W engines and in recent times, some of these aircraft have faced glitches. On December 11, a Jaipur-Kolkata IndiGo flight made an emergency landing in Kolkata after smoke engulfed the plane mid-air and the government has ordered a probe into it. Following the incident, Pratt & Whitney is taking steps to cool the combustion chamber of engines and bring down the temperature by up to 40 degree celsius, DGCA Director General B S Bhullar said. According to him, P&W is taking the steps on its own and is expected to be done for the A320 neo aircraft fleet of GoAir by December 20 and that for IndiGo's A320 neo planes by January 5, 2019. Such cases have been seen in planes that have completed 800 flight hours or less, he added. There was no immediate comment from P&W on the issue. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Pakistan's renowned social activist Asma Jahangir was posthumously honoured by the UN with a prestigious award. Jahangir, an outspoken critic of Pakistan's powerful military establishment, fought against religious extremism and for the rights of oppressed minorities in She died of cardiac arrest at the age of 66 in February. She was honoured with the 2018 Prize, an award given every five years since 1968. Jahangir's daughter Munizae Jahangir received the award on her behalf from President of the UN General Assembly Mara Fernanda Espinosa at a special ceremony here Tuesday. Among who won the award include girls' education rights activist Rebeca Gyumi of Tanzania, Brazil's first indigenous woman lawyer Joenia Batista de Carvalho and Front Line Defenders from Ireland, working to protect defenders at risk. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said that the work of the honourees and that of other human rights defenders around the world is essential for the collective efforts to sustain peace and ensure inclusive sustainable development and respect for human rights for all. "Often their work is dangerous. We regularly hear of abuses against human rights defenders murder, disappearances, torture, arbitrary imprisonment and other attempts to silence them. "Yet, these courageous individuals and groups remain committed to shining a light on the dark corners of the globe, wherever human rights violations occur," he said in his remarks to the General Assembly's Prize in the Field of Human Rights award ceremony. The event commemorated the 70th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, marked annually on December 10. Guterres said human rights defenders give voice to the voiceless and shield the powerless against injustice. "They stand for all rights economic, civil, political, social and cultural. They support the rule of law or work peacefully to change laws so women and girls, indigenous communities, minorities and other marginalised groups may exercise their rights," he said. Guterres said they they work to empower people through education, and help to protect other human rights defenders from harassment, intimidation or arrest. As part of the UN's activities in observance of Human Rights Day, which coincided with the Declaration's anniversary, the champions in the field from across the world, convened at the General Assembly Hall to be recognised for their outstanding contributions. Every five years, the Prize in the Field of Human Rights is awarded to organisations and individuals which embody excellent activism in defending human rights. The four winners join a notable group who have been recognised since the Prize was established by the General Assembly in 1966, including prominent figures such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Jimmy Carter, Malala Yusafzai and this year's Nobel Peace Prize winners, Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad, as well as organisations such as the Amnesty and the Committee of the Red Cross. Marking the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Espinosa said it was one of the most important contributions that the world body has made to mankind, reflecting the collective aspirations of an order founded on human dignity and with a view to making the world a better place. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said upholding all people's human rights is the only possible path to peace. Pakistan's renowned social activist and an outspoken critic of the country's powerful military establishment Asma Jahangir was posthumously honoured by the UN with a prestigious human rights award. Jahangir, who fought against religious extremism and for the rights of oppressed minorities in Pakistan, died of cardiac arrest at the age of 66 in February. She was honoured with the 2018 United Nations Human Rights Prize, an award given every five years since 1968. Jahangir's daughter Munizae Jahangir received the award on her behalf from President of the UN General Assembly Mara Fernanda Espinosa at a special ceremony here Tuesday. Among others who won the award include girls' education rights activist Rebeca Gyumi of Tanzania, Brazil's first indigenous woman lawyer Joenia Batista de Carvalho and Front Line Defenders from Ireland, working to protect human rights defenders at risk. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said that the work of the honourees and that of other human rights defenders around the world is essential for the collective efforts to sustain peace and ensure inclusive sustainable development and respect for human rights for all. "Often their work is dangerous. We regularly hear of abuses against human rights defenders murder, disappearances, torture, arbitrary imprisonment and other attempts to silence them. "Yet, these courageous individuals and groups remain committed to shining a light on the dark corners of the globe, wherever human rights violations occur," he said in his remarks to the General Assembly's United Nations Prize in the Field of Human Rights award ceremony. The event commemorated the 70th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, marked annually on December 10. Guterres said human rights defenders give voice to the voiceless and shield the powerless against injustice. "They stand for all rights economic, civil, political, social and cultural. They support the rule of law or work peacefully to change laws so women and girls, indigenous communities, minorities and other marginalised groups may exercise their rights," he said. Guterres said they they work to empower people through education, and help to protect other human rights defenders from harassment, intimidation or arrest. As part of the UN's activities in observance of Human Rights Day, which coincided with the Declaration's anniversary, the champions in the field from across the world, convened at the General Assembly Hall to be recognised for their outstanding contributions. Every five years, the United Nations Prize in the Field of Human Rights is awarded to organisations and individuals which embody excellent activism in defending human rights. The four winners join a notable group who have been recognised since the Prize was established by the General Assembly in 1966, including prominent figures such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Jimmy Carter, Malala Yusafzai and this year's Nobel Peace Prize winners, Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad, as well as organisations such as the Amnesty International and the International Committee of the Red Cross. Marking the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Espinosa said it was one of the most important contributions that the world body has made to mankind, reflecting the collective aspirations of an international order founded on human dignity and with a view to making the world a better place. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said upholding all people's human rights is the only possible path to peace. Born in January 1952 in Lahore, Asma co-founded and chaired the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. After obtaining LLB degree from the Punjab University in 1978, she started her career as an advocate at high and Supreme courts. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Pakistan government plans to extend the tenure of controversial special military courts established for speedy trial of terror related cases after the Peshawar School massacre in December 2014, according to a media report on Wednesday. The military courts were initially established after the December 2014 attack on the Army Public School in Peshawar which had left 150 people, mostly children, dead. The special military courts were set up for two years in January 2015 for the speedy trial of militants and its tenure was extended for another two years in 2017 which is set to expire on January 6. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Pakistan's government has agreed to take fresh steps to address the money laundering and terror-financing issues, in an effort to avoid being blacklisted by Financial Action Task Force (FATF) ahead of its crucial meeting next month, officials said. Currently placed on the Paris-based FATF'S 'grey list', Pakistan has been scrambling in recent months to avoid being added to a list of countries deemed non-compliant with anti-money laundering and terrorist financing regulations by the FATF, a measure that officials here fear could further hurt its Finance Minister Asad Umar on Tuesday chaired a high-level meeting of the National Executive Committee (NEC) on anti-money laundering, where a report titled 'Terrorism Financing Risk Assessment' was presented. It was also the first comprehensive risk assessment report jointly prepared by the National Counter Terrorism Authority (Nacta) and the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA). The meeting approved the findings of a report that foreign funding, drug trafficking, kidnapping for ransom, extortion, robbery and bank heists were the primary sources of terror-funding in Pakistan. Highlighting that the terror financing has roots outside Pakistan's borders, the report said the hostile agencies were fuelling terrorism in Pakistan by providing funding to sub-national terrorist groups. Officials said that the report was prepared as part of implementation on a 27-point action plan that the FATF handed over to Pakistan as a prerequisite to exit the grey list. Out of these 27 actions agreed with the FATF, Pakistan is required to deliver on 10 points by January 2019. Officials said that most of the tasks set out by the FATF have been met and others will be fulfilled before the deadline. They said the areas highlighted in the report would be addressed through legal and administrative actions in order to meet the commitments made with the FATF. The report says that the role of the law enforcement agencies was critical to implement these recommendations, particularly to curb the sources of terror financing, the sources said. The NEC meeting was told that the issue of terror financing through cryptocurrency was addressed by the State Bank of Pakistan that already barred the financial institutions in dealing with cryptocurrency. The FIA informed the meeting about actions taken to curb hawala business and action against bit-coin currency dealers, while the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan said that it had notified changes in the Intermediaries (Registration) Regulations, 2017 aimed at implementing the FATF requirements. The meeting decided to speed up enforcement of action and following a result-based approach to meet the FATF obligations, officials said. Pakistan would submit a compliance report to the Asia Pacific Joint Group next month. The group will then present Pakistan's case in the FATF meeting in February 2019. A team of experts from FATF's Cooperation Review Group (ICRG) is scheduled to visit Pakistan in the first week of January to assess the progress made by it on an action plan agreed in June to address global concerns. The country will have to deliver on all the 27 points by September next year. In case it fails, Pakistan can be blacklisted, which carries serious financial implications. By January 2019, Pakistan will also have to demonstrate effective implementation of targeted financial sanctions against the assets of the UNSC designated persons and entities and their affiliates. These include Daesh (ISIS), Al Qaeda, Falahi Insaniyat Foundation (FIF), Jamaat-ud-Dawa, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohmmad, Haqqani Network and persons affiliated with the Taliban. Patna Pirates scored three points in less than 20 seconds to pull off a 40-40 tie against Bengaluru Bulls in a thrilling Pro Kabaddi League match here on Wednesday. Vikas Jaglan was the hero for Patna as he got one tackle and two raid points to save the Pirates from a certain defeat. Pardeep Narwal was the top scorer for Patna Pirates with 17 points. For Bengaluru Bulls, Rohit Kumar scored 16 points while Mahender got a high five in defence. Patna Pirates are still in contention of a place in the playoffs while Bengaluru Bulls have already qualified. Both teams got a couple of raid points in the first two minutes to be level at 2-2. Pardeep and Pawan Sehrawat picked up a few more raid points for their teams with Patna leading 5-4 after five minutes. It did look like Patna Pirates would steal a lead as Pardeep made a two-point raid in the sixth minute to led 8-5. A super tackle in the seventh minute turned the tide completely in Bengaluru Bulls' favour. Rohit mad a successful raid in the 16th minute as Bengluru Bulls inflicted an all out to lead 17-11. Patna Pirates failed to score a single point for nine minutes and paid the price for it as they went into the break trailing 11-20. Patna Pirates' defence had a disappointing first half as they could score just three tackle points in 20 minutes. Patna Pirates began the second half strongly as they inflicted an all out in the 24th minute to level the match at 21-21. It was a solid run as Pirates scored 10 points in four minutes to wipe out Bengaluru's lead. Pardeep made a brilliant raid in the 26th minute to come up with a super raid and give Patna Pirates 26-22 lead. Rohit tried to wake up Bengaluru from their slumber as he made a two-point raid in the 29th minute to trail 25-27. Bengaluru picked up two bonus points as they trailed by just one point with less than 10 minutes to go. It was Rohit yet again who got a super raid as Bengaluru Bulls led 32-30 in the 33rd minute as they averted an all out once again. Patna Pirates inflicted an all out in the 35th minute to lead 35-34. With less than three minutes to go, Bengaluru Bulls led 37-36 but it was still anyone's game. Bengaluru Bulls sent Pardeep to the bench in the 39th minute as Bengaluru looked to close out the match. There was last-minute drama as Vikas got a touch, bonus and raid point to secure a tie for Patna Pirates. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Actor Aahana Kumra, who had accused Sajid Khan of inappropriate behaviour during a professional meeting, says people in the industry are now scared post the #MeToo movement. The actor says fear, which wasn't there earlier, has set in the industry and it is a good development. "Something good that has happened in the film industry because of these conversations (is) that people are scared while speaking to women. At least that fear has come and that fear is important. Respect has always been there but it's important to have that fear," Aahana told reporters. The actor was speaking at the launch of her ZEE5 webseries "Rangbaaz", Tuesday night. Aahana said the #MeToo movenent has been a "huge realisation" for both men and women and a time of serious introspection. "When big CEOs, content writers and casting agents are removed or get their names removed from films, which is happening, they get a huge setback. Then they also realise they have done something bad to someone. "Life is so long that you don't realise you have hurt someone because you are living your life comfortably. You don't even realise that you have made people around you feel bad. #Metoo movement has been a huge realisation for both men and women," she added. The actor had herself come out and spoken about Sajid after the filmmaker was outed for indecent behaviour and sexual misconduct by two actors and a journalist. Aahana said the women who came out were brave and her going public with the ordeal has given her a much needed closure. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Jammu and Kashmir Governor SatyaPal Malik said Wednesday that people should be proud of the country's armed forces and their sacrifices, and support families of those killed in the line of duty. People, besides visiting shrines, should also go and meet the families of "martyrs" in villages and contribute for their well being, he said at a function of the state Sainik Welfare department here. The department had organised the event to mark the 2018 armed forces flag day celebration. "If we have be most proud of anything in this country, it is our armed forces and their martyrdom. If you cannot participate in their martyrdom, at least you should come forward to remember them", Malik said. There are several organisations and institutions that support widows, parents and children of "martyrs" and "if you (the people) support them even with just a penny, it is big thing", the governor said The sacrifices made by the country's armed forces has no match in the world, he said. "Instead of going to shrines (tiraths), including Haridwar, please go and visit the villages of this country where we have martyrs from the armed forces and meet their widows, children and their parents," Malik said. He said the armed forces day, is a day when one can remember the sacrifices made by soldiers and pay respects. "They (personnel of the armed forces) live in the worst conditions, harsh climate, difficult terrains. More Army personnel die in the Siachen glacier sector due to hostile terrain and harsh climate, than they die in wars," he said. The governor said when "we sit in our cosy room in blankets, they (Army jawans) walk in heavy snow to save our country from enemies". "I will urge the society to come forward to help them and I have full hope that the people will remember our martyrs. Let us boost the morale of our armed forces and help them and remember them too", he said. The department had also organised a patriotic song competition in which six teams participated.These teams were selected out of 1,200 schools. Ahead of the programme, school children had visited homes of families of those killed in the line of duty and war heroes and penned their experiences in the form of essays. The best essays were selected and winners were awarded by Governor Malik. On the occasion the Inner Wheel Club and Rotary Club Elite of Jammu, adopted families of those killed in the line of duty. To support non-pensioner widows, financial help was given to 20 of them and the management of a old age home in Jammu, sanctioned a monthly pension scheme for them. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Union minister Ramdas Athawale has said people will get Rs 15 lakh "slowly" into their bank accounts and not in one go. Athawale said assurances were made earlier but there were "technical difficulties". The government does not have so much money and it has sought funds from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), but it is not obliging, he told reporters at Islampur in Sangli district on Monday. "Rs 15 lakh will not come at a time...it will come slowly... government does not have so much money and it has sought money from the Reserve Bank but it is not giving...yes, an assurance was made but there are still technical difficulties," he said. The Minister of State for Social Justice was replying to a question on Prime Minister Narendra Modi's promise to bring back black money stashed in foreign banks. Modi, during the 2014 Lok Sabha election campaign, had prominently highlighted the issue of black money and promised to bring it back. Termed Modi as an "active" prime minister, Athawale said the BJP-led NDA will win the 2019 elections and Modi would again become the PM. Athawale's Republican Party of India (Athawale) is an an ally of the BJP. Congress chief Rahul Gandhi had earlier said the prime minister betrayed the people, claiming that he had not fulfilled promises of providing two crore jobs every year and "depositing" Rs 15 lakh in their bank accounts. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Eleven foreign crew, including eight Poles, kidnapped by pirates off Nigeria in October have been freed and are safe, Poland's foreign ministry said. "The crew of the Pomerania Sky taken at the end of October have been freed. All the sailors including the eight Poles are in a safe place and waiting to return to their families," Polish Foreign Minister Jacek Czaputowicz said, cited by PAP national agency. The ministry did not give details about how the crew were freed. The crew, which local media said also included two Filipinos and a Ukrainian, were taken when the Liberian-flagged German-owned vessel was attacked 60 miles off Nigeria en route from Angola. It was the fifth case of kidnapping of Polish sailors in the Gulf of Guinea since 2013, according to the ministry statement. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Poland has signed a long-term deal with a US company for supplies of liquefied natural gas as part of an effort to reduce its dependence on Russian energy. Port Arthur LNG, a subsidiary of Sempra Energy, and Poland's state gas company PGNiG jointly announced Wednesday the agreement for the sale of 2.7 billion cubic meters per year of gas to Poland over a 20-year period. In a statement, they said that is enough to meet about 15 percent of Poland's daily gas needs. "This agreement marks an important step toward Poland's energy independence and security," US Secretary of Energy Rick Perry said. Sempra Energy's CEO Jeffrey Martin said the deal helps his company "advance our vision to become North America's premier energy infrastructure company." No financial details were disclosed, in line with the secretive nature of gas deals, which are sensitive politically given Russia's dominance of Europe's energy market. In recent weeks Poland also signed long-term deals for gas with American suppliers Cheniere and Venture Global Calcasieu Pass and Venture Global Plaquemines LNG. These deals have been sealed as both Poland and the United States have been trying to stop Nord Stream 2, a pipeline under construction that, when finished, would transport gas from Russia to energy-hungry Germany. Poland, along with several other European countries, see Nord Stream 2, which bypasses Ukraine, as a political project meant to weaken that country and gain leverage over Europe by making it more dependent on Russian gas. Officials for the Nord Stream 2 dispute that view, saying it is merely a commercial project and would not cut off Ukraine. Also Wednesday, US Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan met with Polish Foreign Minister Jacek Czaputowicz in Warsaw, the last stop in a visit to several countries in the region. Ahead of his visit, the State Department said he would meet with Polish leaders to discuss shared concerns over Nord Stream 2, among other issues. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Rajkot police in Gujarat announced a reward of Rs 50,000 Wednesday for information about the severed head of an unidentified child found near the Aji river in the district. The child is estimated to be in the age group of 5-12 years. The head was found near Bhagvati Para Tuesday, while the remaining body is still missing. "We have announced a reward of Rs 50,000 to anybody who gives us information regarding the severed head," said inspector R S Thakar of Rajkot B-division police station. The police were also investigating if the gruesome killing had anything to do with 'black magic' ritual, he said. "We have sent the head for examination to forensic experts who will first determine if it was a boy or a girl," inspector Thakar said. The police were also sifting through missing children data to get a clue as to the child's identity, he said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) For the first time, the iconic Potala Palace, the official residence of the Dalai Lama was closed to visitors on Wednesday due to heavy snow in Lhasa, Tibet's capital. The Dalai Lama resided at the 1,300-year-old Potala Palace before he fled to India in 1959 following the take-over of Tibet by China. Due to the heavy snow, the steep stone stairs leading to the palace atop a hill became slippery, according to a statement released by the palace's administrative office late Tuesday. "The palace is only closed on the Tibetan New Year's Eve and the second day of the New Year. There was no closure due to weather in the past," state-run Xinhua agency quoted Jorden, deputy director of the palace administrative office as saying. Over 440 palace staff and some 30 firefighters participated in the snow removal, Jorden said. This winter's first snow in Lhasa came early Tuesday morning and did not stop until Wednesday morning. The city saw 10 cm of snow, and the temperature dropped to minus 9.4 degrees Celsius at 9 AM Wednesday, according to the regional meteorological bureau. The regional meteorological bureau issued a yellow alert for a blizzard Tuesday morning. The palace has been converted into a museum. It was declared a UNESCO world heritage site in 1994 and is the most famous tourist attraction in Tibet. Over 1.45 million tourists visited it in 2017. The construction of the palace took 45 years and was completed in 1694. The Potala Palace was built in the seventh century and was expanded in the 17th century, covering an area of 41 hectares atop a craggy hill in the heart of Lhasa. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Government think tank Niti Aayog in its strategy document Wednesday suggested for the a plethora of reforms like promoting smart grids, auctioning of energy, of discoms, payment of subsidies by direct benefit transfer and introducing 100 per cent metering for electric supply, etc. The Aayog unveiled 'Strategy for New India @75' for New India, which defines clear objectives for 2022-23 in a detailed exposition of 41 crucial areas and suggests the way forward for achieving them. It made a case for promoting smart grids and smart meters and also said that all Power purchase agreements (PPAs) including those with state generation companies (GENCOs) should be based on competitive bidding. The Aayog also asked the government to introduce a capacity market to encourage flexible capacity for peak power demand and intermittency. According to the strategy document, privatising state distribution utilities and/or the use of a franchisee model will reduce aggregate technical and commercial (AT&C) losses and discoms (power distribution firms) may adopt a franchisee model for its retail business in rural areas and stipulate a minimum level of performance parameters, including the use of decentralised generation sources and storage systems for local reliability and resilience. On autonomy of power regulators, it said that regulatory bodies need to be further strengthened and made truly independent. For the agriculture sector, the Aayog said that an upfront subsidy per acre of land through direct benefit transfer (DBT) may be considered instead of providing separate subsidies for fertilisers, electricity and crop insurance, etc. It also suggested promoting use of solar pumps for agriculture and said that local discoms should buy surplus power from farmers. On unscheduled load shedding, the Niti strategy document suggested that discoms may be fined for load shedding and the government should ensure effective enforcement of a cap on cross-subsidy and open access. About open access, the Aayog said it is also necessary to remove high open access charges and government should actively promote cross-border electricity trade to utilize existing/upcoming generation assets. It also pitched for introduce time-of-day tariff to promote the use of renewable energy and performance-based incentives in the tariff structure. To manage the demand for power, it is necessary to introduce 100 per cent metering, net metering, smart meters and metering of electricity supplied to agriculture, the strategy paper recommended. On power transmission, it has recommended to provide a mechanism for cost-effective power grid balancing (gas-based, hydro or storage). It said that renewable purchase obligations (RPO) should be strictly enforced and inter-state sale of renewable energy should be facilitated and it is necessary to have national level markets and regulations for balancing of power. Central level agencies like the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission or National Load Despatch Centre should socialise the costs of balancing inter-state transmission systems (ISTS) connected power plants, over the entire system, on the lines of the point of connection (PoC) or a similar mechanism, it said. It said that commercial biogas needs to be promoted by providing subsidy to consumers. On energy efficiency, the Aayog said that the Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE) should come out with a white paper on its 5-year strategy on energy efficiency in various sectors and specify energy consumption norms. It suggested that state designated agencies (SDAs) need to be more empowered and provided with adequate resources to implement EE related programmes. There is a need to ensure greater participation of energy service companies (ESCOs) using appropriate financing models with a risk-sharing mechanism, particularly by public sector banks. The document said that states should adopt the second version of Energy Conservation Building Code (ECBC) in their building by-laws and ensure faster implementation. The Niti Aayog also made a case for promoting mandatory use of LED and replacement of old appliances in government buildings with five-star appliances. It further said that the number of appliances covered under the Standards and Labelling (S&L) programme should be increased. It also asked to widen and deepen the perform, achieve and trade (PAT) programme, make Energy Saving Certificate (ESCert) trading under the PAT scheme effective by ensuring strict penalties against defaulters. For the MSME sector, the Aayog said that the BEE should develop cluster-specific programmes for energy-intensive industries to introduce energy-efficient technologies. It said that the Forum of Regulators and State Electricity Regulatory Commissions (SERCs) should provide for lower heat rate requirements for new power stations. Old and inefficient plants consuming more than the threshold energy should be retired in a phased manner and use of the public transport system should be promoted, suggested the document. Public transport systems may be converted to electric in a time-bound manner and the government should expand the corporate average fuel efficiency standards (CAFE) beyond passenger cars to other vehicle segments, it added. All recommendations are in view of government's goal to make available 24x7 power to all by 2019, achieve 175 GW of renewable energy by 2022 and reduce emission intensity of GDP in a manner that will help India achieve the intended nationally determined contribution (INDC) target of 2030. Newly wed couple Priyanka Chopra and Nick Jonas hosted their wedding reception for family and friends in Mumbai. It seems celebrations have not ended for Priyanka and Nick as 19 days after their grand wedding, the first reception in the city was held for family, friends and the media at a suburban hotel in Juhu on Wednesday evening. Another reception is scheduled for Thursday evening for Bollywood celebrities at a five-star hotel in suburban Bandra. The venue was decorated with white lilies, orchids and candles, featuring an entwined N and P in the backdrop. Wearing a strapless traditional Indian lehenga in blue and gold, Priyanka looked gorgeous as she accessorised her outfit with a huge diamond necklace. While Nick was seen in a grey colour suit and black T-shirt. After posing for the shutterbugs, Priyanka thanked everyone for coming. "I am going to take your attention for two seconds... It means so much to us that all of you came tonight. This has been an extremely special chapter in my life and I wanted my husband to meet all the special people who have contributed to it. "So thank you very much for being here, friends of my parents, my dad who I know is here. Thank you very much for coming and I hope you have a wonderful time tonight," Priyanka said. Looking at her hubby, she added, "And this is my husband, Nick Jonas". While Nick said, "This is my first show in India. And thank you all so very much for coming out." "I wasn't too far from here that I took Madhu (Priyanka's mother) out to lunch and asked her if I could marry her daughter. So to be here tonight with all of you...the people who have helped shape who she has become means the world to me. To be embraced with such open arms, it's just unbelievable. Tonight is about celebrating and spending time, it is my first introduction with you all." Priyanka and Nick tied the knot at Jodhpur's iconic Umaid Bhawan Palace on December 1. They married as per Christian and Hindu rituals. The extravagant wedding was followed by a reception in Delhi on December 4, which was attended by PM Narendra Modi. After their Delhi reception, the couple went off to Oman. As per media reports, Priyanka later went back to New York, to promote her movie "Isn't It Romantic". (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Puducherry Chief Minsiter V Narayanasamy Wednesday accused Lt Governor Kiran Bedi of issuing "arbitrary oral" instructions to traffic police on dealing with violations of rules, saying she should send written orders on which he would take the final decision. After holding a meeting with the traffic police officers, he took strong exception to the action of police in conducting surprise checks of documents of motorists and levy of spot fine on busy roads based on the "oral instructions" of Bedi. The chief minister, who has been locked in a tug-of-war with Bedi on various issues, told reporters here that he had received a number of complaints from public that the police action was causing difficulties to them during peak hours. He held the meeting a day after Bedi, a former IPS officer, pulled up police personnel after she spotted numerous lapses in management of traffic during a drive she undertook in a private car 'incognito' in the town. Bedi in a communication to the media Tuesday had said she issued a verbal warning to police officers after summoning them for a meeting at her office. Narayanasamy said police conducted surprise checks for verification of documents like license and insurance based on oral instructions of the Lt Governor. "I have asked the police officers that they should give reasonable time to vehicle owners to get documents in case they were not carrying the papers. "Any oral instruction arbitrarily issued by the Lt Governor and implemented by the police was causing practical difficulty to the people," he said. The Lt Governor should issue written instructions by adopting the required procedure. Such instructions should be placed first before the Director General of Police and then before the Chief Secretary. "It is the Chief Minister who will take a decision ultimately after receiving the file from Chief Secretary on measures including spot fine to deal with violators of traffic rules. No oral instructions can therefore be given arbitrarily by the Lt Governor to the police," Narayanasamy said. Any immediate action would only harass the people particularly with tourists coming in large number into the Union Territory, he contended. Bedi and Narayanasamy have been at loggerheads over various issues with the latter had even demanded her recall while objecting to her style of functioning. He and the ruling Congress have accused her of taking decisions without consulting the elected government. Bedi, however, has been insisting that she was only exercising her powers as the administrator of the union territory. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh Wednesday strongly condemned toilet seats with the image of the Golden Temple being reportedly sold by a company on an online retail website. He was apparently referring to a claim by a Sikh body in the US that doormats, rugs and toilet seat covers with the image of the Golden Temple were being reportedly sold by some sellers on Amazon. The Sikh Coalition said in a statement Tuesday that it was alerted to products such as doormats, rugs and toilet seat covers with the image of one the most historically significant Sikh sites, the Golden Temple, were being sold by some sellers on Amazon. The chief minister said it has hurt the religious sentiments of the entire Sikh community. "Strongly condemn use of pictures of Sri Darbar Sahib with toilet seat by Philiphome Universal. It has hurt the religious sentiments of Sikh community worldwide. Demand immediate withdrawal of the seat by the company and an apology," Amarinder Singh said in a tweet. The chief minister also sought an apology by the company which used the image of the Golden Temple in a wrong way. The Sikh Coalition, a civil and legal rights organisation, said in the hours since, through community outreach, several pages have been removed from the website. The products seem to have been removed from Amazon's website as a message that "Sorry, we couldn't find that page" appears when running a search for the items, it said. "It has come to our attention that several sellers are posting products onto your platform that culturally appropriate the imagery of the Golden Temple and spiritual imagery of other eastern cultures," the Sikh Coalition's senior manager of advocacy and policy Sim Singh said in a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Senior Vice President and General Counsel David Zapolsky. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Undead Archives I have finally salvaged my pre-Blogger TDR archives and added them into Blogger. They are almost totally in the form of one giant post for each month. And the formatting strayed from the originals. Sorry. But historians everywhere can rejoice that this treasure trove of my thoughts is restored to the world. The entire Question Hour was washed out in the Uttar Pradesh Legislative Assembly Wednesday amidst uproar by the opposition Samajwadi Party and the Congress over various issues, including plight of farmers and law and order situation. As the House assembled for the day, members of the SP and the Congress rose in their seats and tried to raise issues of public interest. SP members, donning red caps, took out placards that read "kanoon vyastha past hai, Yogi Baba mast hai" (There is no law and order, while CM Yogi is unconcerned), "BJP terey zamaney mein, police pit rahi thaney mein" (In BJP regime policemen are being beaten up inside police stations), "kisan virodhi ye sarkar nahi chalegi" (This anti-farmers government will not run), besides other slogans. Speaker Hriday Narain Dixit requested the members to take their respective seats so that the Question Hour could be run smoothly, but his plea went unheeded. The speaker also said that "bringing placards inside the House is objectionable". He later adjourned the House for 30 minutes and extended it for the entire Question Hour, till 12.20 pm. Opposition members later claimed that the present government was unconcerned towards the plight of poor and farmers and there is no law and order in the state. Congress Legislature Party (CLP) leader Ajay Kumar Lallu told reporters there is no law and order in the state. "Police and people are beating up each other. 'Bheed Tantra' (mob system) is ruling the roost and there is no say of police. Bulandshahr violence and other such incidents expose tall claims of the BJP government," he said. It was the second day of the brief winter session of the state legislature Wednesday. Both the assembly and the Legislative Council were adjourned on the first day of the current session Tuesday after condoling the deaths of former chief minister N D Tiwari, BJP legislator Patel Ram Kumar Verma and Union minister Ananth Kumar. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) SAD president Sukhbir Singh Badal Wednesday asked why Congress chief Rahul Gandhi was "afraid" of taking action against senior party leaders Jagdish Tytler and Kamal Nath for their alleged role in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots. The Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) leader further asked the Gandhi scion to reveal whether he was waiting for the court to convict the veteran leaders before taking action against them. "It seems Rahul is afraid to take action against the perpetrators of a genocide," the former Punjab deputy chief minister said. The Congress chief should explain his "silence" and also clarify why he tried to "mislead" the people by claiming that none of the Congress leaders were involved in the riots, he added. The Delhi High Court had on Monday sentenced Congress leader Sajjan Kumar to life imprisonment for conspiring to commit murder during the riots in which thousands of Sikhs were killed after the assassination of prime minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards on October 31, 1984. Badal said while convicting Kumar, the court had even pointed out that "political patronage" was extended to the convicts and demanded that the Election Commission take action against the Congress. "This is a fit case for derecognisation of the Congress (party)," he claimed. He further said that the SAD would continue its fight to get justice for all the 3,000 victims. "We will take each and every case to its logical conclusion and ensure that all Congressmen responsible for the barbarism are brought to justice and hanged for their crimes against humanity," he said. The SAD chief thanked Prime Minister Narendra Modi for paying heed to the party's request to reopen all cases pertaining to the riots. "We are thankful to Modi ji for acceding to our request which has already led to two convictions," he said. Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) president Gobind Singh Longowal suggested that the witnesses and lawyers associated with the cases be felicitated at the Akal Takht, the supreme temporal body of Sikhs. Longowal announced that the witnesses Jagdish Kaur, Nirpreet Kaur and Jagseer Singh as well as senior advocates H S Phoolka, R S Cheema and Gurbaksh Singh and their respective teams would be honoured at the Akal Takht on December 26. Meanwhile, party's core committee passed a resolution condemning the Congress government in Punjab for allegedly vitiating the atmosphere in the state prior to the Panchayat elections by "resorting to large scale irregularities". Though, the SAD was not contesting the panchayat elections, slated for December 30, on the party symbol, workers aligned with it were allegedly not allowed to enter government offices to file their nominations. The core committee noted that the State Election Commission (SEC) was allegedly failing in its responsibility to hold free and fair elections. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The West Bengal Congress is of the opinion that the party's national president Rahul Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi should refrain from attending the proposed opposition rally to be held here by the TMC in January. The Congress should instead send a party leader to the rally just for the sake of representation, sources in the party said on Wednesday. West Bengal Chief Minister and Trinamool Congress supremo Mamata Banerjee, who was invited to the swearing-in ceremony of Kamal Nath, did not attend the programme and sent party MP Dinesh Trivedi instead. The Congress' state unit leadership, including West Bengal Pradesh Congress Committee chief Somen Mitra will meet Rahul Gandhi in New Delhi Thursday to discuss the party's strategy in the state in view of the Lok Sabha election next year and organisational matters, sources said. "We feel that Rahul Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi should refrain from attending the January 19 rally. They should instead send just a representative in a tit for tat for what the TMC did during the swearing in ceremony of Kamal Nath in Madhya Pradesh," a sources in the Congress said. The Congress' state unit is upbeat after the party's win in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan in the recent assembly polls. "We will convey our opinion to the party leadership. It is for them to decide," a state Congress leader said. The state Congress leadership has been vocal against the TMC also for not giving credit to Rahul Gandhi for the grand old party's victory in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. "Why should Congress' top leaders attend TMC's opposition rally when it is not at all ready to give the Congress the credit for the victory in the assembly polls in three Hindi heartland states?" another state Congress leader asked. The TMC has called a rally of opposition parties on January 19 at the Brigade Parade grounds in Kolkata. All opposition parties, including the Congress have been invited to it. The TMC along with some other opposition parties, including the TDP had distanced themselves from DMK president M K Stalin's comment proposing the name of Rahul Gandhi as the prime ministerial candidate. The TMC had said that such an announcement would be premature as it might divide the opposition camp. Hitting back at the Trinamool Congress, Mitra said, "The Congress high command has never said that the party would like to contest the Lok Sabha polls along with the TMC in West Bengal. Our party leadership has told us to strengthen our own organisation in the state." The state Congress had ridiculed the TMC saying its leaders are having "sleepless nights" fearing that their dream of Banerjee becoming the prime minister might not be fulfilled. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) BJP general secretary Kailash Vijaywargiya Wednesday accused Congress president Rahul Gandhi of speaking the "language of Pakistan" and seeking information in the Rafale issue that the neighbouring country wants. "Why Rahul is asking the questions to the Centre on the issue of Rafale deal whose answers Pakistan wants to know? Why you (Rahul) appear to be standing with the enemy country?" Vijaywargiya said at a BJP event here. "In the lust for power, why are you speaking the language of Pakistan," added the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader. "In the Rafale issue, the Supreme Court ruled in favour of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government. Rahul should be ashamed, but now he is demanding that a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) be constituted to probe the deal," he said further. The apex court had last week dismissed petitions seeking probe into the alleged irregularities in the Rafale fighter jet purchase deal. "If Rahul has guts, he should debate it in the Lok Sabha. But the Congress is creating a ruckus in the lower house and disrupting its proceedings," he said. Earlier, the BJP general secretary also claimed that during the victory processions of the Congress in the Assembly elections, slogans of "Pakistan Zindabad" were raised. "Whenever Congress wins and the party takes out a victory procession, people shout Pakistan Zindabad, but Congressmen remain silent on this," he alleged. However, Madhya Pradesh Congress spokesperson Neelabh Shukla termed Vijaywargiya's statement as highly objectionable. "It is a very irresponsible statement. He should come out with evidence, or apologise publicly for making a false allegation," Shukla said. The BJP tried to polarise voters and disrupt the communal harmony in the recently concluded assembly elections but people voted the party out, he added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot took charge at the Secretariat here on Wednesday and held meetings with officials to discuss waiving farm loans, official sources said. The newly appointed CM held meetings in this regard with the chief secretary and officials of the finance, agriculture and cooperative departments, they said. The Congress had promised in its election manifesto to waive off farm loans within 10 days of coming to power. Before taking charge, Gehlot offered flower tributes to a statue of Mahatama Gandhi and thereafter offered prayers at a Ganesh Temple on the Secretariat premises. Chief Secretary D B Gupta, Principal Secretary to chief minister Kuldeep Ranka and other senior officers were present on the occasion. He also met IAS and IPS officers who paid him courtesy visits. Later, the chief minister met Governor Kalyan Singh and returned to the chief minister's office to hold other meetings, the sources said. It was his first meeting with the governor after taking oath as the CM. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Two days after being sworn in, the Congress government in Rajasthan Wednesday waived short-term crop loans from cooperative banks and loans of up to Rs 2 lakh taken by farmers from other banks. This will put a burden of Rs. 18,000 crore on the exchequer, Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot told reporters here. The move is line with the action taken by the governments in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, the two other states where the Congress won the recent assembly elections. The decision was taken after a proper detailed discussion with officials from the concerned departments. A roadmap has been prepared so that the officers face no problem in following the decision, Gehlot told PTI. Congress president Rahul Gandhi had promised during election campaign to waive farmers' loan in 10 days after the Congress comes to power and we have fulfilled the promise by issuing the order, he said. The promise was also repeated in the Congress manifesto for Rajasthan, where the party won 99 out of the 199 seats for which polling took place on December 7. Gehlot attended office the first time on Wednesday but has held meetings with officials at his home after being sworn in on Monday. The waiver will apply to loans taken up to November 30, Gehlot said. Farmers' short-term crop loans from cooperative banks will be waived. Along with this, farmers' loans of up to Rs 2 lakh from nationalised and other banks will also be waived, he said. Targeting the previous government, Gehlot said it had waived short-term crop loan of only up to Rs 50,000 taken from cooperative banks. Now the Rs 50,000-limit has been removed, Gehlot said referring to the scheme the BJP government had announced earlier this year. He said the Vasundhara Raje government's scheme would have cost Rs 8,000 crore, but only Rs 2,000 were actually spent in writing off the loans. The remaining burden has been passed on to the new Congress government, he claimed. Gehlot said farmers unable to pay back their loans were committing suicide in the state. The chief minister took charge of his office in the morning after offering flowers at an idol of Mahatma Gandhi and praying at a Ganesh temple on the secretariat premises. After meetings with officials, he visited Governor Kalyan Singh and then returned to his office for another round of meetings. Chief Secretary D B Gupta, Principal Secretary to CM Kuldeep Ranka and officials from finance, cooperative and other departments attended the meetings. On Tuesday, Rahul Gandhi had said the opposition will not rest till the Narendra Modi government waives farm loans across the country. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The proceedings in the Rajya Sabha were washed out for the seventh day Wednesday after the opposition and treasury benches clashed over the Rafale deal and Tamil parties protested over the Cauvery issue. The Rajya Sabha was adjourned for the day after Congress members holding placards seeking a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) into the Rafale deal trooped into the well of the House soon after official papers were laid on the table. They joined members of the AIADMK and DMK who have been trooping to the well of the House over the Cauvery issue ever since the Winter Session of Parliament began on December 11. Treasury benches countered the Congress by raising banners seeking an apology from Congress President Rahul Gandhi following the Supreme Court clean chit to the Rafale deal. Amid the uproar, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Vijay Goel demanded that Congress deputy leader Anand Sharma withdraw the remarks made by him in the House on Tuesday. Goel said Sharma had wrongly quoted him to say that he had demanded an apology from Rahul Gandhi on the Rafale issue. He said he was fully aware that Gandhi was not a member of the House and had only asked for an apology from the Congress following the Supreme Court ruling on the Rafale deal. Goel charged Sharma with misleading the House and said the government is ready for a discussions on all issues including the Rafale deal. Chairman M Venkaiah Naidu said he would look into the records. Naidu also allowed Bhupendra Yadav (BJP) to make his submission on the statement made by the newly sworn-in Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Kamal Nath on migrant workers from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. He said a person holding a Constitutional post cannot incite hatred against persons of other states and so his Zero Hour mention on the subject be taken on record. As the slogan shouting from both sides continued, Naidu said, "It is very clear that none of you want the House to run". "I don't want this (ruckus) to be seen by the people," he said, while adjourning the proceedings for the day. Earlier as the House met, Naidu mentioned that 97 Rajya Sabha MPs contributed over Rs 36.5 crore from their MPLAD funds for relief and rehabilitation works in flood-ravaged Kerala. Also, 60 MPs contributed their one month's salary, totalling Rs 58.69 lakh, towards the same cause. He appealed to members to contribute generously for the relief and rehabilitation of Kerala flood victims. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The BJP's West Bengal unit Wednesday organised 'law violation programme' in various parts of the state to protest the Trinamool Congress (TMC) government's refusal to allow the proposed Rath Yatra programme in the state. BJP activists clashed with the police in Howrah, South Dinajpur and Hooghly district after the party was denied permission for a protest meeting. "We are forced to hold law violation programmes because the police and the administration is behaving like cadres of the TMC. We were denied permission to hold our Save Democracy rally. Now when we want to organise protest meeting, that too has been denied," state BJP president Dilip Ghosh said while addressing the law violation programme in Howrah. "We are a political party which is running the government at the Centre. The state government is behaving in such a way as if we are a party of extremists. We are a party of nationalist forces," he said. It is only in West Bengal that opposition parties are not allowed to hold rallies, Ghosh said. BJP president Amit Shah was scheduled to flag off three chariots from different parts of the state. The chariots were meant to travel across the state's 42 parliamentary constituencies over the next one-and-a-half months before concluding in Kolkata, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi was likely to address a rally. The 'Rath Yatra' was scheduled to start from Cooch Behar district on December 7, but was stalled, following which the BJP had moved the high court. A division bench of the Calcutta High Court had directed the state chief secretary, home secretary and the director general of police to hold a meeting with three representatives of the BJP by December 12 and take a decision on the rally by December 14. After the meeting, the Mamata Banerjee-led government had on Saturday denied permission for the 'Rath Yatra' on the ground that it might cause communal tension before the coming Lok Sabha polls. BJP then again knocked on the Calcutta High Court's door. As part of its protest programme, the party had organised a rally in Arambagh area of Hooghly district on Monday. The BJP leaders have also threatened to organise a "law violation" campaign in the state if they are stopped from holding the protest rallies. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The West Bengal government on Wednesday told the Calcutta High Court that intelligence reports expressing apprehensions of breach of communal harmony were the reason for denial of permission to BJP's 'rath yatra' rallies in the state. Countering the state government's stand, BJP counsel S K Kapoor alleged that the denial of permission was pre-determined and without any basis, adding that "in the worst days of the British period Mahatma Gandhi held the Dandi March and nobody stopped him" but "now the government here says it won't allow a political procession". The matter will be taken up for hearing again Thursday, when Justice Tapabrata Chakraborty said he will pass an order on the petition moved by the BJP challenging the state government's denial of permission to its rally. Kapoor told the court that the state government has not put forward any objective data to bolster its claim and was trying to forcibly stop a political party from holding processions, which is a Constitution-guaranteed right. Advocate General Kishore Dutta submitted a sealed report to the court and said that the stated issues in BJP's brochure publicising the yatra are communally sensitive in nature. He submitted that the court has limited scope of judicial review in an administrative decision to not allow the yatra on the basis of intelligence inputs and apprehensions of communal tension. He also stated that 2,100 permissions were granted for different political rallies and meetings in West Bengal from 2017, but in this case the 'rath yatra' was not allowed owing to the apprehensions. Appearing for the state police, counsel Anand Grover submitted that the BJP has stated that the programme was of huge proportion with three 'rath yatras' beginning from three parts of the state and covering all districts spanning 34 days when a total 154 public meetings would be held. This would require huge deployment of security personnel. He said that if the BJP wishes to hold meetings in a few districts, it can be allowed, but rallies of such a huge proportion cannot be given approval owing to logistical reasons and apprehensions that these rallies may turn into communal propaganda, as expressed in the intelligence reports. Kapoor said his party wants to hold the rallies to generate public opinion that may go against the ruling party in the state and it is the duty of the police to control and maintain law and order. Alleging that the denial of permission was pre-determined and without any basis, Kapoor claimed that this was a return to the police state. The BJP counsel said that the police cannot on its own deny permission to hold a rally and has to move the court of a magistrate to obtain a prohibitory order on giving reasons for seeking such an order. On December 6, a single-judge bench of the HC had refused to give permission to the BJP to hold the yatra, which was scheduled to be flagged off by BJP national president Amit Shah from Cooch Behar in North Bengal on December 7, was following which the party had approached the division bench. The division bench on December 7 asked the West Bengal chief secretary, the home secretary and the director general of police to hold a meeting with three representatives of the BJP and take a decision on the 'yatra' by December 14. The state government after parleys with the three-member team had refused permission for the rath yatra on December 15 on the grounds that it might lead to communal tension. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The system of the is currently "falling short" of its objectives and there is a room for improvement, a top official of the global trade body has said. The (WTO), established in 1995, describes itself as the organisation whose primary purpose is to open trade for the benefit of all. Last week at the last formal session of the year of the General Counsel, 164 members in the authorised a process of consultation to go forward with respect to reform which is "extraordinary and a sea change", Deputy Director General Alan Wolff told a Washington audience. "I think that many important people are seeing a path forward, that reform is needed and most recently evidenced at the G20 ministerial in Buenos Aires in which they said that the system is currently falling short of objectives and there is room for improvement," he said. "We, therefore, support the necessary reform of the to improve its functioning," Wolff said Monday during his appearance at the Peterson Institute for Economics, a top American thin-tank. According to Wolff, there has been plenty of lip service paid over the years to a multilateral trading system and very little investment in it. "Very low investment by business, very little investment by most of the major trading countries and I have a litany of those that I would consider under investors that since they respond poorly to my saying," he said. Expressing optimism over WTO reforms, Wolff said despite noteworthy exceptions, there is a widespread fundamental understanding of nearly all governments of the utility of having a multilateral system, not just regional systems, not just bilaterals but multilateral. "The only way to get tariffs across the board within agreed bounds, the only way to have non-discrimination, the only way to have product standards that work worldwide is to do it multilaterally," he said. The WTO delivers benefits through the multilateral trading system that can't be duplicated through plurilateral agreements, he said. "As I say non-discrimination on a global basis. Agricultural subsidies cannot be negotiated among a few countries. They have to be negotiated more broadly. Industrial subsidies have to be negotiated more broadly," Wolff said. Further, WTO agreements keep the world from being re-divided into trading blocks and they, the rules of the multilateral trading system, underpin the USMCA, the Eurasian free trade agreement, the new continental African free trade agreement. They all are based upon the WTO rules, he said. Also, there is a common effort to improve the system, not scrap it. "The sharpest critic of the WTO whose name will be familiar to all of you said in May at the ministerial if we didn't have the WTO we would have to create. That's not anyone running for the door and in fact, no member is left and 22 are seeking entry currently," Wolff said. Wolff asserted that the multilateral trading system will prevail because nations who have tried alternative models ignoring the market fail. Observing that without the rule of law there is chaos, he said there is no place where one you can craft rules of general application other than in the WTO. "My conclusion national policies will ultimately align themselves with economic reality," the top WTO official said. Referring to the trade war between the US and China, he said neither side has claimed a legitimacy under the rules for the latest rounds of tariff escalation against each other. "It's not in my position to condone or condemn any party, any member, but my neutrality does not extend to the WTO which I happen to favour and I think that the rules have to play a role," he said. He said the US and the Chinese are now driving on both sides of the road slightly -- some things are within the rules and some things are not within the rules. "What should be done, the way to a solution I would hope the truths that exist detente, not the final outcome which no one can predict," he said. Wolff argued that an appellate function is necessary for consistency of decisions and to deal with egregious errors because there will be egregious errors. "But we are not there yet but the conversations have begun today in Geneva. Consultations are starting today and tomorrow in Geneva with interested countries, member countries as to what they think should be done with respect to the Appellate Body. So we are beginning," he added. The WTO currently has 164 members, of which 117 are developing countries or territories. We're always interested in hearing about news in our community. Let us know what's going on! Submit Enterprises Ltd (REL) Wednesday said its subsidiary Finvest (RFL) has lodged a criminal complaint with the Economic Offences Wing of the Delhi Police against promoters Malvinder Mohan Singh and Shivinder Mohan Singh. The complaint also names REL ex-CMD Sunil Godhwani, among other directors, for cheating, fraud and misappropriation of funds to the tune of Rs 7.4 billion. " Finvest, a subsidiary of Religare Enterprises has filed a criminal complaint with the Economic Offences Wing of the Delhi Police against the promoters of REL Malvinder Mohan Singh and Shivinder Mohan Singh as well as REL's former CMD, Sunil Godhwani, N K Ghoshal, the directors and officers of the promoter entities and other unknown persons for various offences under the Indian Penal Code," REL said in a regulatory filing. The complaint has been registered for various offences including cheating, criminal breach of trust, misappropriation, fraud and forgery and criminal conspiracy, REL said. "The complaint was filed basis internal inquiries (including an independent forensic review) undertaken by the new RFL board and management," it said. REL was controlled by the warring Singh brothers until February 2018. Post their exit from the board of REL in February 2018, the boards of REL and RFL have been re-constituted. Pursuant to reconstitution, the REL and RFL boards now consist of professionals widely recognised in their respective fields, who are unconnected to the promoters, it said further. "The reconstituted boards have appointed a new professional management to manage the affairs of REL and its subsidiaries. Through the inquiries undertaken by the new RFL Board and management it has discovered siphoning and misappropriation of funds of RFL amounting to approx Rs 7.4 billions in aggregate through loans to entities that are controlled by, connected to or known to the promoters or their associates," REL said. Earlier this month, the feud between the brothers took an ugly turn when they allegedly came to blows, following which the younger brother Shivinder said the incident had closed any possibility of them working together to resolve the issues. The relationship between the Singh brothers, erstwhile promoters of Fortis Healthcare and Ranbaxy, went sour after allegations of fund diversion from the healthcare chain emerged. It reportedly aggravated further over payment of arbitration award to Daiichi Sankyo. Shivinder had offered to pay his share of the Rs 35 billion award to the Japanese drug maker in a dispute related to the acquisition of Ranbaxy Laboratories. Earlier in September this year, Shivinder had filed a petition before the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT), alleging that collective and ongoing actions of Malvinder and ex-Religare chief Sunil Godhwani led to a systemic undermining of the interests of and their shareholders. Congress leader Pramod Tiwari Wednesday termed as "rumours" the reports of the BSP and the SP joining hands for the 2019 polls. He said Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) chief Mayawati and Samajwadi Party (SP) president Akhilesh Yadav had not officially announced their alliance so far. Responding to a query, the former Rajya Sabha member added that the Congress did not want division of votes against the BJP in the upcoming general elections. "As per my information, neither Mayawati ji nor Akhilesh ji have officially announced about it (alliance). I think these are all rumours...I want to thank Mayawati ji and Akhilesh ji for supporting Congress in forming governments in Rajasthan and Madya Pradesh," he told reporters here. "As far as Congress is concerned, it does not want division of votes against the BJP," he added. Tiwari also hit back at Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who had Sunday termed the previous defence deals by the Congress government as "tainted" and dubbed Italian businessman Ottavio Quattrochi and alleged middleman Christian Michel as "uncles" (of Congress). Speaking in Rae Bareli on December 16, Modi had said, "I want to know from the Congress as to why it is agitated and speaking lies repeatedly. Is it because there is no Quattrochi mama or Christian Michel in the defence deals done by the BJP government." On a query over the allegation that the Congress delayed the Rafale deal by over a decade, Tiwari said there was no delay. "The actual process of open bidding started in 2009 and the deal was about to get completed...We pursued for better fighter planes, better price and a better deal," he said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Filmmaker Rima Das' Assamese feature "Bulbul Can Sing" is set to have its European premiere at the 69th Berlin International Film Festival next year. The development comes a day after Das' award-winning "Village Rockstars" ended its dream run at the Oscars 2019 as India's official entry in the Best Foreign Language Film category. "Bulbul Can Sing" is a coming-of-age drama about a teenage girl, Bulbul, living in a village in Assam, fighting her way through love and loss as she figures out who she really is. Berlinale on Wednesday announced the film as part of its first 16 programme picks for the festival, to be held from February 7 to February 17 next year. Das, who is enroute India from the US, said she is overjoyed after receiving the "'Bulbul Can Sing' is selected for Berlinale! I can't explain in words how happy I am. After the film premiered at Toronto, I didn't think we would get an invitation from Berlin because top festivals like Cannes, Berlin, Toronto, and Venice usually ask for a world premiere. They accept other films only in case of an exception. So it's a huge achievement," she said in a statement. "After getting immense love and appreciation from people for 'Village Rockstars', it was very challenging for me to come out with a new film which would meet people's expectation. But seeing the extraordinary journey of 'Bulbul...' I feel more hopeful now. I want to thank my family, friends and film team and everyone who believes in my movies and me. Yes, we will keep our faith alive to keep dreaming, she added. According to the festival's website, "Bulbul..." falls under the 'Generation 2019: Hell-Bent Women - On Both Sides Of The Camera" segment. "The poetic snapshots of life out in the country and in the classroom collectively paint a portrait of a trio of friends: Bulbul, Bonny and Sumu. Threatened by the traditions of their patriarchal village community, their youthful light-heartedness is put to a hard test," is how the festival described Das' film. As per the website, in the run-up to the 42nd edition of Generation, so far 16 feature-length films from a total of 16 production and co-production countries have been invited to screen in the section's two competitions, Kplus and 14plus. "Bulbul..." falls under the Generation 14plus category. Other films in the section include "Beol-sae" (House of Hummingbird) from Republic of Korea; "The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open" from Canada / Norway; "Goldie" and "Knives and Skin" from (USA); "Guo Chun Tian" (The Crossing) from China; "Holmo nuori sydan" (Stupid Young Heart) from Finland / Netherlands / Sweden and "We Are Little Zombies" from Japan, among others. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The pared early gains but managed to end 5 paise higher at 70.39 against the US on Wednesday on increased selling of the greenback by exporters amid benign crude and smart gains in domestic equities. This is the third straight session of gains for the domestic unit, during which it has rallied by a hefty 151 paise. Traders said sustained selling of the American currency by exporters and banks ahead of the US Fed policy decision propped up the rupee, while sliding eased current account deficit concerns. At the Interbank Foreign Exchange (forex), the opened on a firm note at 70.05. It gained further to hit a high of 69.86 following selling by exporters, before finally closing at 70.39, up 5 paise. The Tuesday had rallied by a whopping 112 paise, its best single-day gains in over five years, to settle at 70.44 against the US traders said investor sentiment was supported by a sharp fall in bond yields and the continued infusion of liquidity by the RBI by way of open market operation. "A bearish view on added strength to the rupee. On the global front, the market is expecting dovish hike by Fed which is likely to calm investors' nerves in the emerging markets like India," said Vinod Nair, Head of Research, Geojit Financial Services Ltd. Globally, Brent crude, the international oil benchmark, was trading at over a one-year low of $56.27 per barrel. Market benchmark BSE Sensex settled 137.25 points, or 0.38 per cent, higher at 36,484.33, continuing its rising streak for the seventh session. The NSE Nifty too ended 58.60 points, or 0.54 per cent, higher at 10,967.30. The Financial Benchmark India Private Ltd (FBIL) set the reference rate for the rupee/dollar at 70.1094 and for rupee/euro at 79.8153. The reference rate for rupee/British pound was fixed at 88.7431 and for rupee/100 Japanese yen at 62.38. Meanwhile, foreign institutional investors (FIIs) bought shares worth Rs 1.4476 billion Tuesday, as per provisional data. (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.) A report was sought from the state government on its announcement to waive rural electricity bills as it came two days before an Assembly by-election, the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) of Gujarat said Wednesday. It also sought another report from the BJP government as some of its leaders claimed Tuesday that the Centre had cleared a proposal for an AIIMS in Rajkot, said CEO S Murali Krishna. Krishna told reporters in Gandhinagar that the concerned departments -- Energy and Health -- have submitted their reports. "We sought reports from these two departments yesterday following the announcements...we wanted to examine if these announcements violated the Model Code of Conduct (in force on account of December 20 Jasdan bypoll)," the IAS officer said. "We received the reports today. We will examine them and draw the Election Commission's attention to the issue," he said. Hours before campaigning for the Jasdan bypoll ended at 5 PM Tuesday, the Gujarat government announced a complete waiver of unpaid electricity bills of Rs 625 crore under a one-time settlement scheme for over 6 lakh people in rural parts of the state. Under the scheme, irrespective of the dues, including principal amount and interest, people living in rural areas can restore their electricity connection by paying a fee of only Rs 500. Afterwards, minister Saurabh Patel also congratulated the people of Rajkot saying the Union government has given a clearance for establishment of an All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in Rajkot. The BJP's state unit chief Jitu Vaghani, who was campaigning in Jasdan, then also thanked the Centre for allocating an AIIMS to Rajkot. However, there was no official announcement from the Centre about the AIIMS. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) South African police said Wednesday an arrest warrant had been issued for Grace Mugabe, wife of former Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe, after she allegedly assaulted a model in Johannesburg in 2017. "The police investigated and we made an application to the courts and the courts granted a warrant for the arrest... for the assault of Gabriella Engels," police spokesman Vishnu Naidoo told AFP. The Randburg Magistrates court in Gauteng province issued a warrant of arrest on December 13, charging Mugabe with "assault causing grievous bodily harm". "We are following the Interpol ( International Criminal Police) processes, so we applying for assistance to secure her arrest," Naidoo added. The 53-year-old allegedly beat up Engels using an electrical extension cord at a upmarket hotel in the business district of Sandton where her two sons were staying. The model suffered cuts to her forehead and the back of her head. At the time, the government granted Mugabe diplomatic immunity, allowing her to leave South Africa. Lobby group AfriForum, which has been pursuing the case on Engel's behalf, welcomed the arrest warrant. Robert Mugabe, 94, was ousted as president of Zimbabwe in November 2017 after a brief military takeover when generals stepped in to end speculation that he was positioning his wife to succeed him. President Emmerson Mnangagwa, has said Mugabe has been in Singapore for medical care and now unable to walk because of ill health and old age. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A 15-year-old school girl received burn injuries after she was set ablaze allegedly by two unidentified motorcycle-borne men near the city, police said Wednesday. The girl, a class 10 student, was Tuesday waylaid by two men, who allegedly poured petrol on her and set her ablaze with a lighter, they said. She received up to 75 per cent burn injuries, doctors at the SN Medical College hospital said. The girl was later referred to the Safdarjang Hospital in New Delhi for treatment, police said. Police are on a look out for the accused who are absconding. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Jammu and Kashmir Governor Satya Pal Malik on Wednesday likened a section of the country's wealthy to "rotten potatoes", saying they don't have any sensitivity towards society and do no charity. Malik, who has often spoken out against wealthy politicians and bureaucrats in Kashmir, was addressing a function of the state's Sainik Welfare Society. "The big segment of society in this country, those who are wealthy -- in Kashmir, politicians and bureaucrats are all wealthy -- do not have any sensitivity towards society. They do not do charity of even a single rupee," Malik said. "But there are a few like this in the upper classes. Please do not take it badly, I consider them 'rotten potatoes', not human beings," Malik said while addressing the function here. He made his remarks in Hindi, using the term "sade se aalu" to describe the rich who don't do charitable works. "When a journalist posed a question to the country's wealthiest man, who spent Rs 700 crore on the marriage of his daughter, whether he undertakes any charity, he said he does not do charity but adds to the wealth of the country," Malik said without taking any names. "In Europe and other countries, they do charity. The Microsoft owner does charity of his 99-per cent wealth. But he said he does not do charity, but adds to the wealth of the country. Does he increase the wealth of the country by spending Rs 700 crore on the marriage of his daughter?" the governor went on to ask. With Rs 700 crore, Malik elaborated, 700 big schools could have been built in the state and 7,000 widows of slain soldiers could have brought up their children. "But they will not (do charity). The sensitivity that should be in this (upper class) section of the society is not there," he rued. Society is not formed due to the upper classes, but from farmers, employees, people working in industries and men in the armed forces, Malik said. "Let us boost the morale of our armed forces and help them and remember them," he said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Royal Dutch Shell has signed an agreement to take 49 per cent stake in Cleantech Solar - a leading developer of solar energy systems in South East Asia and India, according to a statement. Shell will have an option to increase its holding in Cleantech after 2021. The deal is expected to close in January 2019. Cleantech Solar in a statement said, "Shell Eastern Petroleum (Pte) Ltd (Shell) has signed an agreement to acquire a 49 per cent interest in the company, with the possibility to increase its position after 2021". This investment will be Shell's second major solar investment this year, giving it an immediate path to an established commercial and industrial platform in Southeast Asia and India. In January, Shell acquired stake in US solar company Silicon Ranch Corp. Cleantech Solar will continue to operate under its existing management and name. "Over the last four years, Cleantech Solar has witnessed substantial growth, having signed over 120 contracts with local and multinational corporations in the region. Their solar plants have generated over 100 million kWh units of electricity, thus helping customers fulfill their sustainability goals," the statement said. Headquartered in Singapore, Cleantech Solar owns and operates more than 120 solar power plants across the region, representing over 200 MW of projects, with the majority being in operation and the rest under construction and development. "We are very impressed by Cleantech Solar's record of developing lasting relationships with multinational and regional corporations who are eager to implement subsidy-free renewable energy into their corporate strategies," said Marc van Gerven, Shell Vice President of solar and storage. "Asia is a significant commercial and industrial solar generation market for Shell and we are proud to work with Cleantech Solar as a leading solar company in the region". Cleantech Solar Chairman and Founder Raju Shukla said: "From the day Cleantech Solar was founded, we wanted it to become the most trusted provider of solar power for the leading corporations of Asia. This partnership with Shell, a global energy company, brings their resources and capabilities as they build a global renewable power business and it gives us a tremendous boost in our home region". (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Punjabi community here on Wednesday urged Governor Tathagata Roy to disband a state governemnt formed panel, headed by the deputy chief minister, for allegedly issuing orders with an intent to displace members of the community. Leaders of the Harijan Panchayat Committee, an organisation representing the community, also requested Roy to take proactive steps to ensure that the authorities provide land pattas to the 218 Sikh families living in the area. The government set up a high level committee headed by Deputy Chief Minister Prestone Tyngsong to consider all aspects of the violence that took place earlier this year. The High Level Committee "has been issuing illegal orders for survey of properties of the poor Sikhs to the Shillong Municipal Board with the intention of dislocation of Sikhs," Harijan Panchayat Committee chairman Gurjit Singh said in a memorandum submitted to the governor. The High Level Committee has been acting in a biased and malafide manner, he alleged. The delegation informed the Governor that the Sikhs came from Punjab more than two centuries ago to serve the army here and became part and parcel of this society over the years. Although non-indigenous people do not have the rights to own land in the state, the community urged the governor of their struggle for right to live and right to housing. The delegation also requested the Governor to direct the state government to officially name the area as "Punjabi Colony". Currently the area where the Punjabi community people live here is known as Sweepers' Colony. Meghalaya government recently expressed unhappiness with the decision of the Punjab government approving Rs 60 lakh compensation to the Sikh community residing here who were affected during the violence in June. On May 29 this year, clashes erupted when a bus driver and his friend were attacked at the Sweepers Colony area and they received injuries. As rumours of the assaulted victims dying in hospital spread on social media, people attacked the residents following which the entire area was put under curfew for over a month. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Some people in the BJP need to speak less, Union minister Nitin Gadkari said here Wednesday. Politicians in general need to be more economical while speaking to media, the senior BJP leader said during an interaction at the Republic Summit. Asked what prompted the BJP to hold as many as 70 press conferences in a day on the Rafale jet purchase issue, Gadkari said, "We have so many leaders, and we so like to speak before the (TV journalist's) boom, so we have to give them some work." Gadkari recalled a scene from Bollywood film "Bombay to Goa" (1972) where parents of a voracious child cover his mouth with a piece of cloth to stop him from eating. "There is a need for such a cloth (to be put on the mouth) for some people in our (party)," the BJP leader said. Asked if people who needed such a "gag order" included those who talked about the caste of Hanuman or Congress chief Rahul Gandhi's gotra, Gadkari said he was "joking". Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath had said at a poll rally that Hanuman was a Dalit, while UP BJP chief Mahendra Nath Pandey had mocked Rahul Gandhi's Italian lineage and said his gotra was "Gotra Itlus". "See, I was joking," Gadkari told the interviewer. Gadkari said neither he nor Prime Minister Narendra Modi give sound bytes to media after an event. "Politicians should have little less interaction with the media and this (policy) is required (to be followed) a little bit more in the BJP," said the Union minister, known for his candour. Referring to the Congress' demand that the Rafale purchase be probed by a Joint Parliamentary Committee, Gadkari asked if the JPC is bigger than the Supreme Court. Most of the charges the Congress levelled "had no relevance" and it is better not to reply to them, the minister added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) In an apparent attack on the Opposition, Finance Minister on Wednesday said sound policy, not slogans will help in alleviating poverty and fulfilling aspirations of people. He said slogans have transient life and people soon realise that they cannot be implemented. There is an obvious debate on whether sound policy pays more or slogans pay more, he said after the release of 'Strategy for New India @75' prepared by NITI Aayog. "In a democracy, these debates will always arise...The aspirational people who have a high level of aspiration and very low level of patience now will point out on day two or day three about the inability to convert slogans into reality," Jaitley said. However, he said, "Sound policy will always put the economy on track in which it will get perpetually people out of poverty and give them a better quality of life." President on Tuesday said his party and other opposition parties would force Prime Minister to waive farmer loans, and that the will do it after 2019 general election if the Modi government failed to act immediately. "The course we have adopted is now gradually perfected itself with Indian model in which you grow faster, you utilise the resource of the state in order to pull out millions of people out of poverty, give them a better quality of life...each decision is really aimed in this direction," Jaitley said. "Historically, we have squandered several opportunities. Fortunately, we are on the cusp of making history wherein the last few decades India has started making full utilisation of those opportunities and that seems to be the course to go ahead," he added. About NITI Aayog's strategy document, he said it will be fruitful for the government. The document aims to accelerate GDP growth to 8 per cent and propel the country towards a $5-trillion economy by 2030. "The overarching focus of the strategy document is to further improve the policy environment in which private investors and other stakeholders can contribute their fullest towards achieving the goals set out for New India 2022 and propel India towards a $5-trillion economy by 2030," it said. A Memorandum of Understanding was Wednesday signed between Southern Naval Command Headquarters and Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham for academic and research collaboration. The MoU was signed between Vice Admiral Anil Kumar Chawla, Flag Officer Commanding-in-Chief, Southern Naval Command (SNC) and P Venkat Rangan, Vice Chancellor, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, a Defence release said here. The MoU, signed in the universitys campus at Coimbatore, would encompass fields of mechanical engineering, electronics and communication, computer science and other areas of mutual interest such as bio science, medical and cyber security, the release said. Vice Admiral AK Chawla emphasized the essentiality of such partnerships in academia between the armed forces and civil establishments towards developing new technologies, providing out-of-box solutions to complex technological issues as well as in pursuing the mission of Make in India. He said signing of the MoU between the academic establishment and Indian Navy will form the foundation for exchange of ideas and development of new technologies in the future. Southern Naval Command being the Training Command of the Indian Navy, focusses on providing quality training to all personnel of the Navy which has reached out and inked MoUs with some of the best institutions of excellence in the country. The first of such MoUs was inked with Cochin University of Science and Technology in 2002 under which the university recognises the course curriculum of all training establishments and awards MTech, MSc, PG Diploma, BSc and Diploma certificates to the trainees on passing out. Similar MoUs have also been inked with institutions like the IITs at Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Guwahati, the release added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Art of Living founder Sri Sri Ravi Shankar has met Lebanese President Michel Aoun and Prime Minister Saad Hariri and discussed about the ongoing civil war in Lebanon, his organisation said here Wednesday. The spiritual leader, who was visiting the Middle East country after 15 years, also met Labanese scholars, policymakers and the general public, an AOL statement said. The AOL founder had in the past visited Jordan and Lebanon as part of his peace mission, it added. The foundation had been operational in refugee camps in Tripoli since last 2 years, it said. Aoun lauded Ravi Shankar's efforts in conflict resolution in the region, the AOL said. International Association For Human Values, founded by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, has been working with the locals and the refugee communities, including Syrian refugees in Lebanon and Jordan to provide rehabilitation and trauma relief with a vision to help them rebuild their lives more meaningfully, it said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Railways informed the Parliament on Wednesday that introduction of a superfast train between Delhi and Purnea in Bihar was not "feasible" due to operational constraints despite demands made for such a train even from the local MP. Minister of State for Railways Rajen Gohain said in a written reply in Lok Sabha that at present, there was no proposal for introduction of the superfast train between Delhi and Purnea. "Demands, including that from the Member of Parliament, have been received for introduction of new train between Delhi and Purnea, which have been examined but not found feasible, at present, due to operational constraints including terminal constraints at either ends," he said. However, the two pairs of existing Mail/Express services including Delhi-Katihar Champaran Humsafar Express (bi-weekly) via Purnea introduced in April 2018, available between Delhi and Purnea, are considered adequate to cater to the present level of traffic, he added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A British man suspected of orchestrating one of the most brazen cocaine trafficking shipments to Europe in recent years told a French court that his bragging about it was "just a script." Robert Dawes, 46, has been on trial since last week over the 2013 seizure of 1.3 tonnes of cocaine in an Air France plane shortly after it landed at Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport from Caracas. He was arrested in a dawn raid at his luxury resort in Benalmadena, Spain, in November 2015 after Spanish police filmed a conversation at a hotel in Madrid where Dawes claimed ownership of the drugs. Soon after he was extradited to Paris, and since then his defence teams have tried to have the video recording dismissed as evidence on legal technicalities. But during six hours of questioning Tuesday, Dawes surprised the judges -- and evidently his own lawyers -- by saying the claim was only a ploy to end what he called heavy-handed surveillance by Spanish police, by getting himself arrested. "That was all a script," a close-cropped Dawes, wearing faded jeans and a long sleeve black and grey T-shirt, told the specially composed court consisting only of judges. "I spoke about airports, shipping ports, like I was involved in something," Dawes said of his meeting with a Colombian associate, Fernando Cepeda. Asked if he knew there was a microphone hidden in a nearby plant, Dawes said: "That's why I told Cepeda on the telephone three times, sit in the same place!" But he reiterated he had no involvement in the Air France shipment, which was stuffed in 30 unregistered suitcases and had a street value of some 240 million euros (USD 275 million). "The facts don't lie in this case, I've no connection with these people," he said of the two other Britons and three Italians also on trial. Nathan Wheat and Kane Price were arrested after undercover officers tricked them into trying to transport some of the cocaine to Italy shortly after its arrival in September 2013. Marco Panetta, Vincenzo Aprea and Carmine Russo were also arrested in the operation. "I know in my heart that I'm not involved in this crime," Dawes said. Asked why he had stayed three years behind bars, while his wife and three children remained in Spain, without telling investigators the claim was fake, Dawes said his lawyers had advised silence while appealing the video's admissibility. His surprising new evidence came after the state prosecutor announced that his defence team had submitted a forged document trying to prove that Spanish police had no legal authority to make the surveillance video. Asked how the document came into his possession, Dawes appeared not to understand his translator, answering only that if he had access to the full Spanish findings he could "prove my innocence". Dawes, from a town outside Nottingham, central England, has a long record of convictions since his teenage years, but has never been found guilty of drug trafficking charges. After years of investigations, however, police believe he became one of the largest drug importers to Europe, with alleged links to the Italian mafia and South American cartels. At the time of his arrest, Spanish police said Dawes "headed up the biggest criminal organisation in Britain and Europe devoted to drug trafficking, money laundering and murder". He is also accused of buying large amounts of drugs from Italy's secretive 'Ndrangheta mafia, which is thought to run much of Europe's cocaine trade from Calabria. But Dawes said Tuesday that he and his family had been successful with a variety of businesses in Spain, including furniture and window manufacturing, management consulting and property investments. That gave him ample opportunity to travel and make contacts, some of who featured in other recordings secured by Spanish police suggesting Dawes' involvement in deals involving huge amounts of cash. Asked about one recording in which Dawes discusses a real estate deal in Colombia, he said "it was just chit-chat." The verdict is expected Friday. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Taliban say their latest talks with the US envoy focused on the withdrawal of NATO troops from Afghanistan, the release of prisoners and halting attacks on civilians by pro-government forces. US peace envoy Zalmay Khalilzad met with the Taliban this week in the United Arab Emirates, with Saudi, Pakistani and Emirati officials also participating. The Afghan government sent a delegation to the UAE but it did not take part in the talks. Khalilzad tweeted Wednesday that the talks were "productive," without mentioning the Taliban by name. Since being appointed in September, Khalilzad has met with all sides to try to restart peace talks aimed at ending America's longest war. The Taliban control nearly half of Afghanistan, and are more powerful than at any time since the 2001 US-led invasion. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) TDP MP Y S Chowdary was not offered food or permitted to take his lunch by the officials of the Enforcement Directorate during his questioning for nearly eight hours on two consecutive days, the Delhi High Court was told on Wednesday. Chowdary's counsel claimed before Justice Najmi Waziri that there was gross violation of his human rights and breach of order of the court which had earlier directed that no coercive steps be against him. He said the MP was treated with indignity. When the court asked senior advocates Rajiv Nayar and Dayan Krishnan, appearing for Chowdary, whether any food or refreshment was offered to him during the day long questioning by the ED, the counsel said "no" and added that even after the questioning got over at 6 PM, his way was blocked by the agency's officials till 8 PM. "If that is so, it is breach of human rights and dignity and also constitutional rights. We will look into it," the judge observed. The ED counsel, however, refuted the allegations and said the MP was offered food but he refused. "I am denying the allegations. He was offered food once but he refused. He had bananas," central government's standing counsel Anil Soni, representing the ED, said. The Telugu Desam Party (TDP) leader Chowdary's counsel said he would file an affidavit in this regard and the court asked the ED to respond to it. The court was hearing Chowdary's plea seeking quashing of the November 27 summons issued to him on the ground that it was "bad in law" as he was not named in the Enforcement Case Information Report (ECIR), the FIR or the chargesheet. The court also extended the interim relief earlier granted to him, asking the agency not to take any coercive steps against Chowdary pursuant to the summons issued to him to appear before it in connection with a money laundering case. After getting the interim protection on November 30, Chowdary had joined the questioning session by ED on December 3, 4 and 5. His counsel said the questioning began at 11:30 AM and concluded at 6 PM and on the first day he went for lunch in the company of two ED officers and on the next two days he was not allowed to have food. The court had earlier sought the response of the Ministry of Finance and the ED on Chowdary's plea. He has also claimed in his petition that he was not connected with the offences mentioned in the ECIR in question, which was registered on the basis of a cheating and forgery case lodged in February 2016 against a Chennai-based company -- Best and Crompton Engineering Projects Ltd -- and its directors. The FIR against the company and its directors was lodged on the basis of a complaint received from the Central Bank of India. According to the petition, even though the TDP MP was not named as an accused in the charge sheet, FIR or ECIR, the ED had searched the premises of the Sujana Group, headed by him, on October 8 without a warrant. Thereafter, on November 24, the central probe agency had raided his official residence and offices in New Delhi and Telangana and his statement was also recorded and on November 27, the summons was issued to him, the plea said. It also said Chowdary had replied to the summons and sought an adjournment of two weeks, after which, on the same day (November 27), the ED had issued fresh summons, asking him to appear before it on December 4. Chowdary has claimed in his plea that the ED, "with ill will and malice conducted illegal raids and searches on the premises of his employees" after the TDP "withdrew its support and alliance from the ruling party" at the Centre. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Ten people were killed and one was injured when their minibus was struck by a roadside bomb in a troubled region of western Ethiopia, local television reported Wednesday. The blast occurred on a highway near the border between the regions of Oromia and Benishangul Gumuz, the pro-government EBC channel reported, quoting regional security official Kemal Endris. Dozens of people have died and nearly 100,000 have been displaced by violence in the border zone. Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has received international praise for his reformist agenda since coming to power in April. However, he is grappling to contain a wave of inter-communal violence in several parts of the country, mostly over land. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A Thai YouTube personality is facing defamation charges after making comments about dresses worn by Thailand's Miss Universe candidate, one of which was designed by a daughter of the country's king. The monarchy is considered sacred in Thai society and few dare to criticise the institution for fear of running afoul of strict royal insult laws, which are supposed to only cover the king, queen, heir-apparent and regent. But criticism of other members of the royal family is still considered off-limits for members of the Thai public. The fashion fracas started on Monday after Wanchaleom Jamneanphol, a YouTube personality who goes by the nickname "Mixy Bigmouth", made unflattering Facebook comments about a blue dress worn by the Thai Miss Universe contestant and designed by Princess Sirivannavari Nariratana. Jamneanphol's comments went viral and Kitjanut Chaiyosburana, an aspiring politician contesting next year's national election, told AFP on Wednesday he filed defamation charges against her. "I think internet idols are like an actor or actress with many followers... so if they commit wrongdoing online it should not end up with just apologies," Kitjanut said Wednesday. Under local law, any Thai citizen is permitted to file defamation charges on behalf of another person, and convictions can carry prison sentences of up to two years. A Thai police spokesman confirmed that the the woman was under investigation but she has yet to be formally charged. Wanchaleom -- who did not immediately respond to a request for comment -- removed her original viral post and apologised for her comments on Monday night. "To Princess Sirivannavari Nariratana, I had no intention to insult the monarchy," she wrote. "I feel remorse and regret for this incident." She also promised to exercise "wisdom and prudence" for future social media postings. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A third Canadian has been detained in China, the Canadian government has said, but Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the latest case doesn't seem to the fit the pattern of the previous two and said he favours deescalating the tensions. The first two cases appeared to be in retaliation for the arrest of a top Chinese tech executive in Canada on behalf of the United States. Global Affairs Canada said it is aware of a third Canadian citizen detained in China and consular officials are providing assistance to the family. Trudeau said in French on Wednesday it appears to be a routine case, not involving the sort of national security charges listed against the other two. He brought up the possibility of it being a visa issue. "There are tens of thousands of Canadians that live, travel and work in China," Trudeau said at a year-end conference. He added that the new case "doesn't seem to fit the pattern of facts on the previous two." He said officials are working to get more details. Asked at what point he'll escalate his concerns to China's president, Trudeau said political posturing or statements are not necessarily going to help those detained. "Escalation or very strong political statements can actually end up being counterproductive to," Trudeau said. "Escalation and political posturing might be satisfactory in the short term to make yourself seem like you are stomping on the table and doing something significant, but it may not contribute to the outcome we all want." Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, was arrested in Canada on Dec. 1 at the request of the US, which wants her extradited to face charges that she and her company misled banks about the company's business dealings in Iran. The Chinese then secretly detained two Canadians on Dec. 10 on vague suspicions of "engaging in activities that endanger the national security" of China. Beijing didn't allow Canadian officials to see Michael Kovrig, a former diplomat in China, for four days and Canadian entrepreneur Michael Spavor for six days. Meng is out on bail in Canada. David Mulroney, a former ambassador to China, said it would be highly unusual if the third arrest is a coincidence. "It's possible but I find it unlikely," he said. Mulroney said it would be problem for Canada and China. "One detention is bad enough. Two is terrible. Three underlines how ruthless China can be," he said. "It serves as a reminder for people that China is a detention state." The case has set off a three-way diplomatic spat in which Canada is stuck in the middle. US President Donald Trump complicated matters by saying he might intervene in the case if it would help clinch a US trade agreement with China much to the consternation of Canadian officials who said the arrest was not political and they were just following their extradition treaty obligations. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) chief Raj Thackeray on Wednesday asked farmers to throw onions at ministers if they did not listen to their woes. The MNS chief was speaking to onion farmers at Kalwan in Nashik district of Maharashtra, a major onion-producing hub. "If ministers do not listen to you or if they do not fulfil your demands, throw onions at them," he said. A farmer from the district was in recently when he sent his meagre earnings from onion sale to the prime minister's office to protest falling prices of the bulb. The MNS chief is on a tour of Nashik since Tuesday. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Traders' body CAIT Wednesday held a rally over its demand that the government should bring a bill in the current session of Parliament to stop sealing here. The Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) also urged the government not to allow foreign direct investment (FDI) in the country's retail sector. In a statement, the CAIT demanded that the government should announce a policy on e-commerce. The Union Cabinet earlier this year permitted 100 per cent FDI in single-brand retail under automatic route, while also easing local sourcing norms. Besides, a top official last week said the government has no proposal to change the existing foreign direct investment (FDI) policy in the multi-brand retail trading sector. Federation of Retailer Association of India (FRAI), a representative body of 4 crore micro, small and medium retailers announced its support to CAIT's protest and demanded the government to revoke Walmart's acquisition of Flipkart. "FRAI also appeals the Government of India to revoke the Walmart Flipkart deal as the livelihood of millions of families are at stake because of deep discounting, loss funding and market concentration strategies adopted by the internet marketing companies," it said in a statement. The traders also demanded the government to bring a Bill in current session of Parliament to stop sealing in Delhi or bring an ordinance soon after the current session. CAIT Secretary General Praveen Khandelwal said the body would launch a nation-wide agitation and its strategy will be finalised in the Governing Council meeting of the industry body on 12-13 January at Bhopal. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) US President Donald would attend the annual meeting in in January, the White House has said. For the second consecutive year, would attend the global meet. "As you know, the will take place in Davos, Switzerland from January 22 through 25. The President will attend, as he did last year," White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said. Notably, had declined India's invitation to attend the annual Republic Day Parade in New Delhi on January 26. The White House had cited scheduling conflicts as one of the reasons. Sanders said Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin will lead the delegation, and that will also include Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, and Secretary of Labour Alex Acosta. Other members of the delegation include Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao, Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen, US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, Small Business Administrator Linda McMahon, Advisor to the President Ivanka Trump, Senior Advisor to the President Jared Kushner, and Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Coordination Chris Liddell. The United Arab Emirates said on Wednesday that reconciliation talks it hosted between the United States and Taliban officials from Afghanistan produced tangible and positive results. The two days of meetings aimed at ending Afghanistan's 17-year conflict were held in Abu Dhabi, with the attendance of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. The "US-Taliban reconciliation talks" produced "tangible results that are positive for all parties concerned", state-run WAM agency said. A new round of talks would be held in Abu Dhabi "to complete the Afghanistan reconciliation process," WAM said without providing further details. The meetings are the latest in a flurry of diplomatic efforts as Washington seeks a way out of the Afghan conflict, which began with the US invasion in 2001. US envoy Zalmay Khalilzad said he had "productive" meetings in the UAE with Afghan and international partners "to promote intra-Afghan dialogue towards ending the conflict". Khalilzad tweeted that he met with Pakistani officials on Wednesday to brief them, before plans to travel onwards to meet Afghan leaders in Kabul. An Afghan negotiating team travelled to Abu Dhabi for "proximity dialogue" with the Taliban in preparation for face-to-face meetings, presidential spokesman Haroon Chakhansuri said Tuesday. The Taliban has not confirmed meeting Afghan officials, saying Tuesday they had held "preliminary talks" with the US envoy. They also said they had held "extensive" meetings with officials from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and the UAE, repeating demands for international forces to be withdrawn from Afghanistan. Those three countries were the only ones to recognise the Taliban government during its five-year rule from 1996. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A UK government White Paper on its post- visas and strategy unveiled in Parliament on Wednesday is expected to benefit Indian students and professionals, with a focus on skills rather than country of origin. The UK's future skills-based system, tabled in the House of Commons by UK Home Secretary Sajid Javid, removes any cap on highly-skilled migrants from anywhere in the world and improves the post-study work offering for international students. The proposals, set to be phased in from December 2021 after the proposed transition period for Britain's exit from the (EU), claim to level the country's playing field with the end of free movement for people from within the 28-member economic bloc. "As we leave the European Union, free movement will end. This will be a system where it is workers' skills that matter, not which country they come from," British Prime Minister said in her foreword to the strategy. "We are taking a skills-based approach to ensure we can attract the brightest and best migrants to the UK," added Javid, who made a reference to his own Pakistani origins as the "son of immigrant parents". Under the new proposals, an annual cap of 20,700 on the number of skilled work visas issued will be removed, likely to benefit doctors and IT professionals from India, among others. There will also be a new 12-month visa route for workers at any skill level for a temporary period to allow businesses to hire the staff they need on a time-bound basis. "People arriving on this route will not be able to bring family members with them, won't accrue rights to settle in the UK and will have a 12-month cooling off period once their visa expires," the UK Home Office said. The onerous requirement for labour market tests by employers wanting to sponsor an overseas skilled worker are also to be done away with. The plans were broadly welcomed by the (CII), which said the White Paper recognises the value offered by skilled workers from countries like "Indian Industry has long called for a fair, transparent and skills-based immigration system, and today's proposals go some way to achieving these goals, said Jim Bligh, of (TCS) and Chair of CII's UK Business Forum. "Tackling the UK's skills gaps, particularly in digital and technology, must remain a key focus for government and it is welcome that this paper recognises the value that skilled workers from overseas can bring to helping improve the UK's skills base, he said. Under changes proposed to attract international students to the UK, the government said it would "improve the current offer" to those who have completed a degree who want to stay on in the UK to work after they have completed their studies by offering six months' post-study leave to all Master's students and Bachelor's students studying at an institution with degree-awarding powers. This is aimed at giving them more time to find permanent skilled work and to work temporarily during that period. "We will also allow for students studying at Bachelor's level or above to be able to apply to switch into the skilled workers route up to three months before the end of their course in the UK, and from outside of the UK for two years after their graduation," the White Paper notes. Universities UK International, the representative group for the country's higher education institutions which has been campaigning for a better post-study offer, said the proposals recognise the important contributions made by international students to the UK. "Allowing graduates to stay on for longer to find work in the UK sends the message that international students are welcome here, and we value the skills they bring. These changes will have a real, positive impact on the students who come here to study and their opportunities after graduating," said Vivienne Stern, Director of Universities UK International. However, the group added that it will continue to campaign for a longer two-year post-study work visa. As part of some of the more contentious aspects of the new immigration White Paper, the government will hold a consultation on a minimum salary requirement of 30,000 pounds for skilled migrants seeking five-year visas and low-skilled workers may be able to apply for short-term visas of up to a year. The document forms the basis for the Immigration and Social Security Coordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill, to be published on Thursday, which ends free movement for EU nationals and creates the legal framework for a future UK borders and immigration system after It also creates parity in the way migrants can access the country's benefits system, which will apply equally to both EU and non-EU nationals. The new system will be implemented in a phased approach from 2021, following an extensive 12-month programme of engagement with businesses, stakeholders and the public, the Home Office said. While it does not make a specific reference to the ruling Conservative Party's manifesto pledge to bring immigration down to the tens of thousands annually, the government stressed that the target remains in place. The United States said Wednesday it will try to speed up private aid into North Korea, in a goodwill gesture as President Donald Trump seeks a fresh summit. Stephen Biegun, the US special representative on North Korea, said that the United States will be more lenient in enforcing its blanket ban on US citizens' travel to the totalitarian state when dealing with aid workers. "I understand many humanitarian aid organisations operating in the DPRK are concerned that strict enforcement of international sanctions has occasionally impeded the delivery of legitimate humanitarian assistance to the Korean people," said Biegun, referring to the North by its official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. "I will be sitting down with American aid groups early in the new year to discuss how we can better ensure the delivery of appropriate assistance, particularly through the course of the coming winter," he told reporters as he arrived for talks in South Korea. The Trump administration has generally refused to let US aid groups operate in North Korea, seeking both to maximise pressure and to ensure the safety of Americans. North Korea - which for years had received aid from US aid groups, some of them religious - is among the poorest countries in the world. A famine in the 1990s killed anywhere from hundreds of thousands to millions of people, according to various estimates. Trump held an unprecedented summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in June and is eager for a second meeting aimed at ending Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program. Announcing the move, Biegun credited North Korea with the swift expulsion of an American who tried to enter illegally last month. The United States banned citizens from visiting North Korea - the only country for which such a restriction exists - after the detention of Otto Warmbier, a student who was repatriated comatose and died soon afterward. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The United States is preparing to withdraw its troops from Syria, US media reported Wednesday, a major move that throws into question America's role in the region. A US defense official told CNN the US was planning a "full" and "rapid" withdrawal of troops. The Wall Street Journal said the withdrawal would be from northeastern Syria. The Pentagon refused to comment. Currently about 2,000 US forces are in Syria. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) US' special peace envoy to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad Wednesday met Pakistan Army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa to discuss regional security and peace process in the war-torn country, days after his crucial meeting with Taliban representatives in the UAE. The talks between the US and Taliban representatives were held in Abu Dhabi this week. Officials from Pakistan, the UAE and Saudi Arabia also participated in the talks. Khalilzad reportedly held two rounds of negotiations with Taliban leaders in Qatar before the new round of talks. Army spokesman Major General Asif Ghafoor said in a tweet that "regional security and Afghan peace process were discussed" in the meeting. "Visiting dignitary appreciated Pakistan's efforts for Afghanistan peace process. COAS (Chief of Army Staff) reiterated that peace in Afghanistan is important for Pakistan and assured continuous efforts for bringing peace and stability in the region," Ghafoor said. It was Khalilzad's third trip to Pakistan in recent months. According to diplomatic sources, Pakistan helped in arranging the direct talks between the US and Taliban, creating a ray of hope for ending more than 17-year-old Afghan conflict. It was the second time Pakistan arranged direct talks between the US and Taliban representatives after a similar initiative fell apart in 2015 at the hill resort of Murree, near Islamabad. The US administration has appreciated Pakistan's role in arranging the meeting with Taliban leaders. Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan, after taking office in August, made it clear that Pakistan wanted to establish peaceful ties with all its neighbours. Earlier this month, US President Donald Trump wrote a letter to Prime Minister Khan, asking for help to arrange talks with the rebels. Trump, however, earlier this year accused Pakistan of doing nothing despite take billions of dollars from the US. Washington also suspended millions of dollars in military aid to Islamabad. In one of the America's longest war, the US has spent over USD 1 trillion in Afghanistan since the coalition forces ousted the Taliban in 2001. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The United States has started to withdraw its troops from Syria, the White House said Wednesday, asserting that it has been able to defeat the Islamic State in the strife-torn country. "We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency," Trump tweeted soon after which the White House announced that its troops have started returning from Syria. "Five years ago, ISIS was a very powerful and dangerous force in the Middle East, and now the United States has defeated the territorial caliphate. These victories over ISIS in Syria do not signal the end of the Global Coalition or its campaign," White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said in a statement. She said the United States troops have started returning home. "The US and our allies stand ready to re-engage at all levels to defend American interests whenever necessary, and we will continue to work together to deny radical Islamist terrorists territory, funding, support, and any means of infiltrating our borders," she said. The Pentagon declined to give any comment immediately. "At this time, we continue to work by, with and through our partners in the region," Pentagon spokesman Col Rob Manning said when asked whether the US military is preparing for a full withdrawal of forces in northeast Syria. The Wall Street Journal described it as a abrupt decision by the Trump Administration. "US officials began informing partners in northeastern Syria of their plans to begin immediately pulling American forces out of the region, where they have been trying to wrap up the campaign against Islamic State," the daily said, quoting unnamed official. Several US lawmakers warned the Trump Administration that this was a grave error. Republican Senator Marco Rubio said that the full and rapid withdrawal from Syria is a grave error with broader implications beyond just the fight against ISIS. "The President's tweet is dangerous, premature and wholly inconsistent with the facts on the ground in Syria and our military's advice. I have travelled to Syria to review our mission, and our military has performed well beyond expectations," said Senator Jeanne Shaheen. Shaheen said he is very concerned that "an ill-informed and hasty withdrawal of troops will "breathe new life into ISIS" and other terrorist groups and cede America's leadership role to Russia, Iran and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Actor Deepika Padukone's debut production, to be directed by Meghna Gulzar, is titled "Chhapaak" and will see the actor in the role of acid attack survivor and activist Laxmi Agarwal. "A Death in the Gunj" actor Vikrant Massey is the latest to join the cast of the film. "Honoured to be part of #Chhapaak! Thank you @meghnagulzar Ma'am for giving me this opportunity & believing in me. Looking forward to working with the supremely talented @DeepikaPadukone," Massey wrote. Deepika welcomed the actor to the film with a tweet. "Welcome to the team @masseysahib !!!Thrilled to have you on board!!!" she wrote. In an interview with PTI, Gulzar said she chose Agarwal's story because it gives her the scope to tell a larger story about acid violence in India. "In the film with Deepika on acid violence, I'm using Laxmi Agarwal as a subject because she is the most known acid fighter. Plus her case and her story has been the most relevant in terms of where legislation on acid violence, medical advancement, compensation for victims and things like that was concerned. "There was a whole socio-medical and legal impact that her case had. Therefore, I am using her as a lens to tell a larger story on acid violence in India because even though acid is banned and the sale of acid is regulated in our country as of five years now, we still have acid attacks. It is still the simplest thing to get in a 'kirana' store in a tier-3 city," the "Raazi" director had said. In 2005, while Laxmi was waiting at a bus stop in Delhi, she was attacked by an assailant, a man twice her age, known to her family and an unlikely suitor whose advances she had declined. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Vir Das is headed to Netflix again and the actor said he is currently working on his third outing with the streaming giant. Last year, the actor-comic became the first Indian to have his own Netflix comedy show, "Abroad Understanding". His second, "Losing It", started streaming on the platform from December 11. Das said the show will go on floors in 2019. "I am currently working on the script for the third special. We will shoot it next year. The response for 'Losing It' has just been phenomenal and I look forward to working on another one," he said in a statement. The actor-comic would be the only Indian so far to do three back-to-back shows for Netflix. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A Delhi court Wednesday reserved for December 22 its order on the bail plea of Christian Michel, alleged middleman arrested in the AgustaWestland VVIP chopper case, and sent him to judicial custody till December 28. Michel was produced before Special Judge Arvind Kumar on expiry of his 4-day CBI custody where the probe agency said that he was not required for further custodial interrogation. He was arrested in the UAE and extradited to India on December 4. The next day, he was produced before the court, which allowed his five-day custodial interrogation by the CBI. It was extended by five more days, and later for another four days. In his bail application, the accused told the court through his advocate Aljo K Joseph that he was cooperating with the investigation throughout last several years and also during his 14 day CBI custody, which ended today. He told the court that CBI was carrying out the proceeding against him with the same facts and the same accusations that the Italian Court had arrived at a finding of acquittal. The accused also sought leniency from the court on the ground that he was suffering from dyslexia. CBI counsel D P Singh opposed the application saying the accused was very influential and was capable of hampering the probe, and added that there was not enough material from the Indian side before the Italian court. "Neither there was enough material from Indian side, nor help was sought from or given by the Indian authorities. They were prosecuted and convicted earlier but later got acquitted only on technicalities. The foreign court order will not hold in Indian courts. It considers all the conspiracy, offence, but does not reach any conclusion," he said. He added that the accused was facing prosecution in Italy, UK and India. "He did not join probe in these countries but issued press statement which was all propaganda. He was unreachable. He has not come here by himself but has been brought," the CBI said, adding that dyslexia had nothing to do with bail. In the bail application, the accused claimed: "The CBI questioned the accused at Dubai for more than four hours in February 2017 and in June 2018 on three occasions. During this interrogation, the accused had already handed over sufficient documents and materials to the officials. This shows the complete cooperation of the accused/applicant towards the investigation process. "Even after landing in India, during these days of CBI's custodial interrogation, the accused has fully cooperated and is still ready to cooperate while he is enlarged on bail." The application added that despite being a party to the Italian proceedings, the Indian government initiated a proceeding for the same facts and against the same defendants in India. "On December 4, the UAE extradited Michel to India to face a proceeding, with the same facts and accusations that the Italian court had arrived at while acquitting others. "Even though the acquittal was relating to other accused, the Italian judgment was in relation to the same transaction and it had relevant paragraphs analyzing the present accused," the accused said, adding that he was in the custody of the UAE police for a long time. He claimed that further investigation by the CBI has not revealed any in incriminating material against him or to prove any allegations in the charge sheet. He told the court he supplied all the documents pertaining to the transactions to the CBI on earlier occasions to prove his innocence, but the agency was not willing to take any of those documents on record. "The accused is ready and willing to cooperate with the investigation under any conditions on bail," the application said. Opposing the bail application, the CBI said that if granted the relief, he may flee from justice as he already tried to escape in Dubai just before the extradition. "He has high links in ministries, with people in politics, bureaucracy, many of whom are witness in the case. We brought him with so much difficulty. Some new facts have emerged and we need to have follow ups on those. He has not been a cooperative witness. A lot more to be unearthed. He has no roots in India here. He has property here but he may sell them and go away," the agency said. In September 2015, the Indian Authorities issued an arrest warrant against Michel and had applied a Red Corner Notice through INTERPOL, against him. Meanwhile, the court also sought CBI's reply by December 22 on a plea of co-accused and former Air Chief S P Tyagi, seeking permission to go the US. Michel is among the three alleged middlemen being probed in the case by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) and the CBI. The others are Guido Haschke and Carlo Gerosa. The CBI has alleged there was an estimated loss of Euro 398.21 million (about 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 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. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Two research students of IIT-Roorkee and a foreign scholar have accused at least five professors of the premier institute of sexual harassment, police said Wednesday. The women have approached the Haridwar police over the past 10 days in this regard, Haridwar SSP Ridhim Agarwal said. Two complaints were received on email and phone while one researcher lodged a formal complaint with the police last week, the SSP said. The foreign scholar has alleged that she was sexually harassed by the professors in 2015 when she had visited the institute to deliver a lecture. "As we do not have the number of the foreign scholar, we have sent her an email asking her to provide more details to enable us to investigate the matter. Another complainant who approached us through a telephonic message on last Sunday has not come forward to lodge a formal complaint yet," the SSP said. However, one of the researchers who had lodged a formal complaint with the police last week told media that her supervisor at the institute harassed her sexually and mentally. She said when she approached the institute's top authorities, they only replaced the supervisor with another professor, who she alleged has reputation of harassing women. "My supervisor harassed me sexually and mentally over the past two years besides using caste slurs against me. I complained to the director and dean but they forwarded it to the women's cell. "The head of the women's cell said the supervisor will be changed but no action can be taken against him," the researcher told reporters. A three-member SIT has been formed to probe the matter, the SSP said. A statement from the IIT-Roorkee on the foreign scholar who has levelled allegations of sexual harassment against the professors said an inquiry by the Internal Complaints Committee concluded that the complaint does not constitute any gender-based discrimination and harassment. On the complaint lodged by a research scholar of the institute, it said the matter is being looked into. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) All Shaima Swileh wants is to give her son one more kiss before he dies. The Yemeni woman is about to get her wish after winning her fight for a waiver from the Trump administration's travel ban so she can fly to California where her 2-year-old son is on life support. The State Department granted Swileh the waiver on Tuesday after lawyers with the Council on American-Islamic Relations sued this week, ending a year-long battle for the family. Swileh is planning to fly to San Francisco on Wednesday to see Abdullah at UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital in Oakland. "This will allow us to mourn with dignity," the boy's father, Ali Hassan, said in a statement provided by the Sacramento chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Hassan, who is a US citizen and lives in Stockton, brought Abdullah to California in the fall to get treatment for a genetic brain disorder. "My wife is calling me every day wanting to kiss and hold her son for the one last time," Hassan said, choking up as he made a public plea at a conference Monday, a day before the government granted the visa. The couple moved to Egypt after marrying in war-torn Yemen in 2016 and had been trying to get a visa for Swileh since 2017 so they could all move to California. Citizens from Yemen and four other mostly Muslim countries, along with North Korea and Venezuela, are restricted from coming to the United States under the travel ban enacted under President Donald Trump. When the boy's health worsened, the father decided to go ahead to California in October to get their son help. As Swileh and her husband fought for a waiver, doctors put Abdullah on life support. "I am emailing them, crying, and telling them that my son is dying," Hassan said in an interview with The Sacramento Bee newspaper. After getting electronic responses, Hassan started losing hope and was considering pulling his son off life support to end his suffering. But then a hospital social worker reached out to the council, which sued Monday, said Basim Elkarra of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Sacramento. Swileh lost months with her child over what amounted to unnecessary delays and red tape, Elkarra said. State Department spokesman Robert Palladino called it "a very sad case, and our thoughts go out to this family at this time, at this trying time." He said he could not comment on the family's situation but that in general cases are handled individually, and US officials try to facilitate legitimate travel to the United States while protecting national security. "These are not easy questions," he said. "We've got a lot of foreign service officers deployed all over the world that are making these decisions on a daily basis, and they are trying very hard to do the right thing at all times." Immigration attorneys estimate tens of thousands of people have been affected by what they call blanket denials of visa applications under Trump's travel ban, which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld in a 5-4 ruling in June. The waiver provision allows a case-by-case exemption for people who can show entry to the US is in the national interest, is needed to prevent undue hardship and would not pose a security risk. But a lawsuit filed in San Francisco says the administration is not honouring the waiver provision. The 36 plaintiffs include people who have had waiver applications denied or stalled despite chronic medical conditions, prolonged family separations or significant business interests. "We hope this case makes the administration realize the waiver process is not working," Elkarra said. "Thousands of families have been split apart, including families who have loved ones who are ill and are not able to see them in their final hours. I'm sure there are more cases like this." In addition to the waiver, the government gave Swileh a visa that will allow her to remain in the United States with her husband and begin a path toward US citizenship, Elkarra said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) By Guy Faulconbridge and Robin EmmottLONDON/BRUSSELS (Reuters) - With just 100 days until Brexit, businesses and the European Union ramped up planning for the risk that the United Kingdom will leave without a divorce deal, the nightmare scenario for many companies which are now planning for an economic shock.Prime Minister Theresa May's failure to find a deal the British parliament will approve means the world's fifth largest economy now faces three main choices: agreeing a last-minute deal, halting Brexit or leaving the EU without a deal.No deal means there would be no transition so the ... By Guy FaulconbridgeLONDON (Reuters) - With just 100 days until Brexit, the United Kingdom is on the brink of leaving the European Union without a divorce deal, the nightmare scenario for many businesses which are now planning for an economic shock.Prime Minister Theresa May's failure to find a divorce deal the British parliament will approve means the world's fifth largest economy now faces three main choices: agreeing a last-minute deal, halting Brexit or leaving without a deal.No deal means there would be no transition so the exit, set in law as 2300 GMT on March 29, would be abrupt. Bank ... (This Dec 18 story corrects chairman's last name to Hu in paras 11, 14 and last para)By Sijia JiangHONG KONG (Reuters) - Huawei Technologies on Tuesday said it would spend $2 billion over the next 5 years to focus on cybersecurity by adding more people and upgrading lab facilities, as it battles global concerns about risks associated with its network gear.The typically secretive Chinese technology giant made the comments at one of its most indepth press conferences at its Dongguan offices, after welcoming about two dozen international journalists into its new campus in the southern Chinese ... By Francesco CanepaFRANKFURT (Reuters) - The European Central Bank said answers to an online test it used since 2014 but had been warned about by staff were available online to job applicants, and admitted some candidates may have cheated.One staffer said that, as the test was not monitored, some also pooled their answers with friends at "pizza parties" in front of a large screen, according to a posting on an ECB intranet forum.The test, which is supposed to assess a candidate's ability to process information, has been used by the ECB to sift mass applications for junior roles, most recently ... By Francesco CanepaFRANKFURT (Reuters) - The European Central Bank has won a court case over the handpicking of President Mario Draghi's closest adviser, surviving the most high-profile challenge so far to hiring practices at the euro zone's mightiest institution.The European Union's top court has thrown out an appeal against the appointment of German economist Roland Straub as "manifestly inadmissible" and upheld the ECB's right to fill certain positions without an open recruitment process, the ruling showed. Straub, who was appointed in February 2017, plays a key role in formulating policy ... By Jan Strupczewski and Francesco GuarascioBRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Commission has reached a deal with Italy over the country's 2019 budget that avoids immediate EU disciplinary steps against Rome, Commission Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis said on Wednesday, sending Italian bond yields sharply lower.His announcement signalled a breakthrough in a market-shaking clash between Italy and Brussels, whose fiscal rules are designed to protect the euro zone from a debt crisis. The row has worried investors, pushed up Italy's borrowing costs and depressed bank stocks.Under the compromise, ... TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan's popular perception of the country's ties with the United States worsened significantly this year, an opinion poll showed on Wednesday, battered by U.S. President Donald Trump's hostile trade policies.The annual poll by Gallup and the Yomiuri newspaper showed the proportion of Japanese people who see the relationship between world's largest and third-largest economies as "good" posting its largest decline since 2000.Since his campaign to become president in 2016, Trump has complained about Japan's $69 billion trade surplus with the United State, particularly in the ... KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - Malaysia on Wednesday charged a second former banker at Goldman Sachs Group Inc in connection with a suspected money-laundering scheme at state fund 1MDB and said it had issued a summons to the bank.Malaysia this week filed charges against Goldman Sachs in connection with its role as underwriter and arranger of bond sales that raised $6.5 billion for 1MDB, the first criminal action against the bank over 1MDB. Tim Leissner, a former partner for Goldman Sachs in Asia, was also charged this week.Goldman Sachs has consistently denied wrongdoing and on Monday said certain ... NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India will tax most goods at below 18 percent in a further simplification of the Goods and Services Tax, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said, aiming to shore up support among businesses that have struggled with the new system.GST, India's most biggest tax reform, sets rates from 28 percent to 5 percent on most items, replacing an array of federal and state duties. Modi told a conference on Tuesday that the government was looking to simplify the tax that was launched last year and would reduce the number of items in the highest bracket to just luxury goods."Today, we are ... By Marwa Rashad and Stephen KalinRIYADH (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia's finance minister said on Wednesday that cash settlements from an anti-corruption campaign would net "not significantly less" in 2019 than the 50 billion Saudi riyals ($13.3 billion) collected in 2018.Mohammed al-Jadaan also said in a Reuters interview that construction giant Saudi Binladin Group, in which the government took a roughly one third stake under the campaign, would soon have a "normal board" with family members and representatives of government ownership.He added that the kingdom's sovereign wealth fund, the Public ... Singapore's central bank on Wednesday said it had issued a lifetime prohibition order against former Goldman Sachs' banker Tim Leissner after he admitted to charges related to an investigation into scandal-plagued Malaysian state fund 1MDB. The ban is an upgrade of the Monetary Authority of Singapore's 10-year prohibition order against Leissner issued last year. The order, among other things, prevents him from performing any regulated activity under the Securities and Futures Act (SFA). Goldman Sachs has been under scrutiny for its role in helping raise funds ... By Arno Schuetze and Christoph SteitzFRANKFURT (Reuters) - Thyssenkrupp will propose as chairwoman Martina Merz, whose background includes roles at Volvo, Bosch and Lufthansa, the German company said, as it prepares to spin off its capital goods units.Appointed to its supervisory board last month, Merz, 55, is expected to be confirmed as a member at a shareholder meeting on Feb. 1, Thyssenkrupp said. Once confirmed, she will be proposed as the board's chairwoman.The move caps a landmark year for the group, which included a deal to merge its steel unit with a rival, the resignation of both its ... By Stephanie NebehayGENEVA (Reuters) - The United States and China clashed anew at the World Trade Organization on Wednesday, accusing each other of undermining the multilateral trading system, according to texts of speeches at closed-door talks seen by Reuters.U.S. Ambassador Dennis Shea also rejected a comment made by the European Union (EU) on Monday that Washington was at the "epicentre" of the crisis."The crisis is caused by the fundamental incompatibility of China's trade-distorting, non-market economic regime with an open, transparent and predictable international trading system," Shea ... Uber has lost its latest court bid to stop its British drivers being classified as workers, entitling them to rights such as the minimum wage, in a decision which jeopardises the taxi app's business model. Two drivers successfully argued at a tribunal in 2016 that the Silicon Valley firm exerted significant control over them to provide an on-demand service, and that they should cease to be considered as self-employed, which gives few protections in law. An employment appeal tribunal upheld that decision last year, prompting Uber to go to the Court of Appeal. On Wednesday, a ... By Foo Yun CheeBRUSSELS (Reuters) - Search company Yelp and lobby group Consumer Watchdog lost their joint bid to intervene in Google's challenge of a 2.4 billion euro ($2.7 billion) EU antitrust fine after a court said they had no direct interest in the case.The Luxembourg-based General Court also rejected applications from other Google rivals, according to a ruling on its website https://bit.ly/2SUzaJr. The European Commission penalised Google, the world's most popular internet search engine, last year for favouring its own comparison shopping service.The case was triggered by British ... In a case similar to the Nirav Modi scam involving Punjab National Bank's (PNB) Brady House branch in Mumbai, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Wednesday arrested 10 accused, including eight PNB officials, in a fraud case worth over Rs 9 crore involving the same PNB branch. Interestingly, most of these PNB officials were also named as accused -- and later on, arrested by the agency -- in the Nirav Modi case. The fraud involves the directors of a company, Chandri Paper and Allied Products Pvt Ltd, who were arrested by the CBI for defrauding the PNB. In March, the CBI had booked ex-DGM of PNB, Gokulnath Shetty, and single window operator, Manoj Hanumat Kharat, and these two directors, Ishwardas Aggarwal and Aditya Rasiwasia of Chandri Papers. Shetty, a key player in the PNB scam worth over Rs 13,700 crore, is already accused of fraudulently issuing many LoUs to Nirav Modi's companies without any due diligence. Now, he has been accused of issuing two LoUs, using the same modus operandi, to Chandri Papers. These LoUs were issued to an SBI branch in Antwerp, Belgium, on April 25, 2017. The agency on Wednesday said: "Two directors Ishwardas Aggarwal and Aditya Rasiwasia and public servants Manoj Kharat, the single window operator, Sanjay Kumar, then branch head, Amar Jadhav, Sagar Sawant, Bechu Tiwari, then chief manager, Yeshawant Joshi, then manager of foreign exchange department, Praful Sawant, Mohinder kumar Sharma, chief internal auditor of PNB, have been arrested and remanded to the CBI custody till December 21." "The case was registered on the allegations of defrauding of Punjab National Bank, MCB, Brady House, to the tune of around $1421311.82 (Rs 9.09 crore) in the matter of dishonest and fraudulent issuance of two Letters of Undertakings (LoU), aggregating to the said amount, in favour of State Bank of India (SBI), Antwerp, Belgium," CBI spokesman Abhishek Dayal said. NIRAV MODI AND THE PNB SCAM Diamantaire Nirav Modi, the founder of $2.3 billion worth Firestar Diamond, was booked by the CBI on February 5 in connection with a cheating case that involved transactions of over Rs 280 crore. Punjab National Bank then reported it had detected fraudulent transactions worth around Rs 10,000 crore. The CBI received two complaints from PNB against Nirav Modi, however, it is unclear if the complaints were linked to the banks' revelation that it had detected $1.8 billion (over Rs 10,000 crore) fraud. Also read: Nirav Modi refuses to change! Continues to fleece people even after PNB scam Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), the country's largest software exporter, on Wednesday said it has been ranked number one in the Top Employer Institute Asia Pacific 2019 rankings. The IT Bellwether has recognised as the number one Top Employer in Australia, Hong Kong, India, Malaysia, and Singapore, and a Top Employer in the Philippines and China, the company said in a paress release. Commenting on the development, TCS Asia Pacific Director and Head of Human Resources Kunnumal Sudeep said: "TCS is proud to be ranked as number one in the latest Top Employer Certifications for Asia Pacific." "Our employees are our greatest asset and the key element of our success. This recognition is a testament to the considerable investment we are making to ensure our Asia Pacific workforce is highly engaged and enabled to ensure future-readiness for our customers in the Business 4.0 era," he said. Also Read: TCS ruling a blessing in disguise for the IT industry Based in the Netherlands, the Top Employers Institute evaluates companies worldwide, taking into consideration employee conditions, talent development and enablement throughout all levels of the organisation, and continuous improvement and excellence in employment practices.??Applicants are certified after undergoing a stringent research and standards review process, and an evaluation by independent auditors. TCS has been recognised for its outstanding performance as a top employer, at global and regional levels (Europe, Latin America, North America, Asia Pacific) as well as in 29 countries. In a separate release, the IT major said that it has launched a next-generation, private cloud in Canada to help forward-thinking enterprises move rapidly along the digital maturity curve. Also Read: Infosys, TCS, Wipro spending lot more on lobbying in Trump's America "TCS' Enterprise Cloud Platform (ECP) is a dynamic solution stack that provides multiple, flexible cloud infrastructure options including IaaS, PaaS, and state-of-the-art hybrid cloud capabilities which enable highly secure orchestration between on premise and public cloud environments," the company said in a filing to the exchange. Meanwhile, shares of TCS were trading at Rs 1,966.55 apiece, down 1.10 per cent, against previous closing price of Rs 1,987.70 on the Bombay Stock Exchange. Edited by Chitranjan Kumar Vijay Mallya intends to file an application to appeal against a British court's verdict in favour of his extradition to India, the embattled liquor baron's legal team confirmed on Wednesday. The 63-year-old businessman told reporters soon after the ruling by Westminster Magistrates' Court Chief Magistrate Emma Arbuthnot last week that he would consider the verdict in detail and decide his next course of action. "Mallya has now been able to consider the court's decision and intends to file an application for permission to appeal at the appropriate time," said Anand Doobay, Partner at UK-based Boutique Law LLP, who has been Mallya's solicitor through the extradition trial process. Under the Extradition Treaty procedures, the Chief Magistrate's verdict has been sent to UK Home Secretary Sajid Javid because it is the minister who is authorised to order Mallya's extradition and has two months within which to make that decision. The Home Secretary's order rarely goes against the court's conclusions as he has to consider only some very narrow bars to extradition which are unlikely to apply in this case, including the possible imposition of a death penalty in a particular case. "Whatever that decision (by the Home Secretary), the losing side has up to 14 days within which to approach the High Court and seek leave to appeal. Any appeal if granted will be heard at the Administrative Court [High Court], noted a statement by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), which represents the Indian government in the extradition case. Meanwhile, Mallya remains on bail on an extradition warrant executed by Scotland Yard in April last year after the Indian authorities brought fraud and money laundering charges amounting to Rs 9,000 crores against the former Kingfisher Airlines boss. Also read: Vijay Mallya congratulates Sachin Pilot, Jyotiraditya Scindia on poll victories; Twitterati heaps sarcasm While Mallya's legal team had argued in the UK court that the default on the loans sought by the now-defunct airline were the result of business failure, the CPS had claimed fraudulent intentions by the businessman in seeking and then dispersing those loans. Judge Arbuthnot, in her ruling delivered on December 10 at the end of a year-long trial, concluded there is a case to answer in the Indian courts over substantial "misrepresentations" by the "flashy billionaire" of his financial dealings. The judgment had also dismissed the defence team's attempt to challenge the case on human rights grounds by claiming that Barrack 12 of Arthur Road Jail in Mumbai, where the businessman is to be detained following his extradition, did not meet the requirements. The UK court said it was satisfied with the various assurances provided by the Indian government, including a video of the jail cell, which had not only been recently redecorated but was also far larger than the minimum requirement threshold. Mallya needs permission to appeal against this verdict within 14 days of the Home Secretary's decision, and the case would then proceed to the UK High Court if the appeal is allowed. There is some limited recourse for the case to go on to a further level of the Supreme Court, but that is only possible if the High Court certifies that the appeal involves a point of law of general public importance, and either the High Court or the Supreme Court gives leave for the appeal to be made. A total of 20 banks have received the capital infusion from the government in FY18 and FY19 so far, among which Punjab National Bank received the maximum amount of Rs 13,900 crore. IDBI Bank and the State Bank of India followed with Rs 12,471 crore and Rs 8,800 crore, respectively. Ever since the government announced bank recapitalisation plan in October 2017, a total of Rs 1.28 lakh crore has been infused in the PSBs through infusion and mobilisation of capital from the market. As per the government, this has led to an improvement in India's global-rank for getting credit. As per the World Bank's Ease of Doing Business Index, India's 'credit' rank has also improved from 44 in 2016 to 22 in 2018 after the bank recapitalisation. In a written reply to a question in Rajya Sabha on Tuesday, Shiv Pratap Shukla, Minister of State for Finance, said the Centre had announced recapitalisation of PSBs to the tune of Rs 2.11-lakh crore in 2017, of which Rs 88,139 crore was infused in FY18, while Rs 65,000 crore was pumped in FY19 till November. Other banks who received capital infusion included Allahabad Bank Rs 6,444 crore; Andhra Bank Rs 3,909 crore; Bank of Baroda Rs 5,375 crore; Bank of India Rs 9,232 crore; Bank of Maharashtra Rs 3,173 crore; Bank of Maharashtra Rs 3,173 crore; Canara Bank Rs 4,865 crore; Central Bank of India Rs 7,512 crore; Corporation Bank Rs 4,742 crore; Dena Bank Rs 3,045 crore; Indian Overseas Bank Rs 6,851 crore; Oriental Bank of Commerce Rs 3,571 crore; Punjab and Sind Bank Rs 785 crore; Syndicate Bank Rs 3567 crore; UCO Bank Rs 6,507 crore; Union Bank of India Rs 4,524 crore; United Bank of India Rs 2,634 crore; and Vijaya Bank Rs 1,277 crore. Also read: Bank recapitalisation: Five major implications of the reform package for PSBs The government had announced the bank recapitalisation considering poor financial conditions of these PSBs due to the rising NPAs. However, later the RBI also tightened the noose around 11 of the PSBs by putting them under the Prompt Corrective Action measure, under which their lending, as well as expansion capabilities, were curtailed. The banks that were put under the PCA included Dena Bank, Allahabad Bank, United Bank of India, Corporation Bank, IDBI Bank, UCO Bank, Bank of India, Central Bank of India, Indian Overseas Bank, Oriental Bank of Commerce and Bank of Maharashtra. Meanwhile, the government has also maintained the entire bank recapitalisation exercise has resulted in several benefits to the customers, including access to banking services from home and mobile through digital banking, and enhanced customer ease. Also read: Bank recapitalisation to mitigate PSB risks but NPAs to impact performance, says Fitch Ratings "During this time, as many as 33.4 crore bank accounts have been opened under Jan Dhan programme till December 5, with a balance of about Rs 84,800 crore. This also led to increased availability of loans up to Rs 10 lakh to the non-corporate, non-farm small or micro enterprises under Pradhan Mantri MUDRA Yojana," said a government statement. Edited by Manoj Sharma Drug major Biocon's plans of tapping the biosimilar or -- reverse engineered new versions of biotech origin drugs -- got a fillip following the European Commission's approval and marketing authorisation to its biosimilar Ogivri. Ogivri (Trastuzumab), jointly developed by Biocon and Mylan, is the biosimilar version of Swiss drug maker Roche's Herceptin, a blockbuster breast cancer drug with sales of $6.9 billion a year worldwide. The drug is also indicated for gastric cancer treatment. Roche's leading product, Herceptin has over $2 billion sales in the European Union. The European Medicines Agency's Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP) had previously issued a positive opinion recommending approval of Ogivri as a biosimilar in October. The approval for Ogivri is the third biosimilar approval for Biocon in the EU. It had earlier got approvals for Pegfilgrastim and insulin glargine. Biocon is developing about 11 biologic and insulin products. In most of these products, while Biocon will develop the product, Mylan will handle its marketing in major markets and regulatory processes. Biocon also has a strategic partnership with Sandoz for developing next generation immunology and oncology biosimilars. Ogivri had got approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (USFDA) in December 2017 as the first USFDA-approved biosimilar for Herceptin in the US. The drug is yet to be launched in the US. A couple of days ago, the US FDA had approved South Korean drug maker Celltrion and Israel generic major Teva's Herceptin biosimilar Herzuma. Companies like Pfizer Samsung and Amgen have also developed biosimilars for Herceptin and a few more companies are chasing development of the same biosimilar. Biocon had earlier given a guidance of $200 million revenue in FY19 from its biosimilar portfolio. The company had total revenues of Rs 4,336 crore in 2017-18. In the first half of FY19, biocon got Rs 617 crore revenues from its biologics business, a growth of 82 per cent. Last year revenues for Biocon from biologics were Rs 770 crore. Financial service providers are hoping to regain access to Aadhaar-based verification after the Supreme Court judgment barred them from doing so. In a new turn of events, the Union Cabinet said that it would seek approval from the Parliament to amend the laws that will allow banks and telcos to verify user details using Aadhaar. To this end, fintech companies are now writing to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) requesting the inclusion of all regulated entities in the amendment to Aadhaar laws that will be put in front of the Parliament. A senior executive at a payments company said to The Economic Times that if the amendment is brought only for banks then the rest of the fintech industry will suffer. Hence the industry is reaching out to the ministry to request them to account in all regulated entities within the purview of the amendment. Essentially, these companies are looking for a way in after the Aadhaar-based verification routine was struck down by the Supreme Court in its September 26 judgment. Fintech companies said that because they could no longer access Aadhaar, they were unable to provide instant onboarding. Meanwhile, on Monday the Centre had said that it would seek approval from Parliament to amend the Aadhaar laws as well as abide by the Supreme Court's ruling. In fact, Chairman of the Fintech Convergence Council, an industry body for fintech companies under Internet and Mobile Association of India, Naveen Surya said that it is required that Aadhaar access be granted to all entities regulated and licensed by multiple regulator and not only restrict it to banks and telcos. Experts believe that the RBI's KYC guidelines keep in mind the PML (Prevention of Money Laundering) rules of the government. If both the PMC Act and the Aadhaar Act are amended then there will be legal backing for making Aadhaar on of the 'Originally Seen and Verified' documents required for the process. The UIDAI had also said that they will offer offline Aadhaar verification that will keep the Aadhaar number secure and not reveal biometrics. The great Indian tenacity to find a way around any law, howsoever foolproof the framers might have thought it to be, is in full display in case of the Good and Services Tax (GST). A member of the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs (CBIC) recently said that from April to November this year, the department has detected nearly Rs 12,000 crore worth of GST evasion. People have found new ways to evade tax or defraud the system, and this is causing losses to the revenue department. Claiming input credit tax against fake invoices is becoming one of the most common ways to defraud the system. Just last month, the Bengaluru Central Tax department arrested three persons with fake invoices worth Rs 1,200 crore. The modus operandi is to sell these fake invoices for a commission of 1-2 per cent to businesses looking to claim input credit against fake invoices. For example, by selling fake invoices (of a good or service which attracts 18 per cent GST) of say Rs 500 crore, one can make Rs 5-10 crore. The buyer of these invoices then can claim input tax credits of 18 per cent or Rs 90 crore. "This practice is very rampant and in many different ways," says a West Delhi-based chartered accountant. For example, goods are sold to one customer (who did not ask for a pakka bill) and the bills are sold to some other person, who could claim tax credit. The buyer and the seller both share the booty while the facilitator gets a 2 per cent commission. A lawyer explained a more sophisticated version of the same trick used by traders and businesses. He explains: Often those who buy goods in cash do not insist on pakka bills. These bills are then sold to entities in the business of exporting goods. But instead of exporting the 'genuine' goods, they would export the miniature or fake versions of these goods, thus claiming both input credit as well as duty drawbacks." In another such example, businesses took credit on gifts under the guise of sales promotion. Under GST law, credit is not allowed on gifts. In yet another method, family-owned businesses book personal expenses like holidays, LCD/LED, fridge, AC or other white goods as business expenses and take credit on these expenses. The Manmohan Singh-PV Narasimha Rao combination may have unleashed unprecedented economic reforms in 1991 changing the course of Indian economy, but Singh was not the first choice to be PM Rao's Finance Minister. Rao first offered the job to economist and Singh's friend Dr IG Patel who could not take up the job. Dr PC Alexander who was advising the PM suggested Singh's name. After Rao's approval he came to see Singh at his residence to inform him. "I was then the chairman of the University Grants Commission. The next morning I went to the office as usual. Narasimha Rao ji was searching for me. He asked me: Where are you? I said I am at the UGC. He said hasn't Dr Alexander mentioned to you what we have for you. I said I didn't take him very seriously. Narasimha Rao Ji said: No. You go and dress up and come for the swearing in ceremony. That's how I became an accidental finance minister," Singh told the gathering to peels of laughter. The rest, as they say, is history. Singh was addressing the gathering at the launch of his new book 'Changing India'-a six-volume collection of his writings and speeches since 1956. In his long career, Manmohan Singh served the government as the Secretary, Chief Economic Advisor, RBI Governor, UGC Chairman, Planning Commission Vice Chairman, finance minister and eventually as the prime minister for a decade. At the same event, the former Prime Minister said that the relationship between the government and the RBI is like that of "husband-wife" and the difference of opinions must be resolved in a manner that the two institutions work in harmony. The comments came against the backdrop of Urjit Patel resigning as RBI Governor earlier this month amid a tussle between the central bank and the finance ministry on matters ranging from the appropriate size of reserves the central bank must hold to the easing of lending norms for sectors such as small and medium enterprises. Talking to reporters on the sidelines of the launch, Singh, who is also a former RBI governor, said one has to respect the autonomy and the independence of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). "At the same time, I would say the relation between government and RBI is like husband-wife relationship. There will be hiccups, there will be difference of opinion, but ultimately these must be harmonised in a manner that these two great institutions can work in harmony," Singh said. Following the resignation of Patel, the government appointed former Economic Affairs Secretary Shaktikanta Das, who spearheaded normalisation of economy post demonetisation of November 2016, as new RBI Governor. "Whosoever is Governor of RBI, I wish him well," Singh said. (With PTI inputs) Also read: 'I still have that handwritten note': Manmohan Singh recollects Narasimha Rao's decision on rupee devaluation Also read: When scholarly Manmohan Singh had to repeat a class Swiggy executive who was out for delivery rushed to help the rescue workers at ESIC Kamgar Hospital when he saw smoke billowing out of the building. A fire broke out at the hospital on Monday at 4:00 pm, claiming 8 lives and injuring as many as 145 patients and visitors. The 20-year-old Sidhu Humanabade eventually saved 10 lives. Recalling how he scaled five storeys along with the firemen to help the people stuck in the building, Humanabade added, "We have to help others in distress, there is no question of being frightened to help out," The Times of India quoted Humanabade. He said that he climbed using the fire brigade's ladder and used stones to break the glass. Humanabade had to stand on the window ledges and got on to the floors to direct people to the ladder so that they could climb down. However, the smoke made it difficult for him to see much or to breathe properly, the daily mentions. Humanabade said that he had placed a ladder on the third-floor window ledge to help an elderly woman climb down but the ledge crumbled down as she reached the ladder making her fall. "I could do nothing as she fell," he added. Three hours after the rescue operation wrapped up, Humanabade told the firemen that there was an ache in his chest. Humanabade was eventually admitted to the hospital for inhaling soot. He also had his first meal in 15 hours on Tuesday. When his family reached the hospital, they found Humanabade on oxygen support and fluids via IV. The doctor who attended Humanabade said he would be fine. Humanabade who grew up in Airoli in Navi Mumbai is a Class X-pass and had moved in with his uncle at Andheri for his Swiggy job. As for the food that Humanabade was out to deliver - it was still in his delivery bag. (Edited by Anwesha Madhukalya) Also read: Mumbai fire: Six-month old among 8 deceased at ESIC Kamgar Hospital in Andheri The Sensex and Nifty closed higher in trade today led by a rally in banking and auto stocks. Global markets were mostly higher ahead of an expected rate hike by the Federal Reserve. While the Sensex closed 137 points higher to 36,484, Nifty ended 58.60 points in the green at 10,967. The indices logged a positive start today with the Sensex rising 137 points at 36,476 and Nifty gaining 37 points to 10,945. Top Sensex gainers were Asian Paints (3.36%), Axis Bank (2.88%) and SBI (2.68%). Sun Pharma (2.10%), IndusInd Bank (1.70%) and Infosys (1.64%) were the top Sensex losers. Meanwhile, the Reliance Communications (RCom) stock closed 9.63% lower at 14.26 after the department of telecommunications (DoT) said it can't approve the deal to trade airwaves between Reliance Jio and the Anil Ambani-owned telco as it does not conform to its guidelines. The Reliance Communications stock plunged 13.77% on the BSE to hit an intra day low of 12.74 level. Top sectoral gainers were auto stocks with the BSE auto rising 219 points to 21,391. The BSE bankex (203 pts) and BSE oil and gas (144 pts) were the other major sectoral gainers. Bank Nifty gained 123 points to 27,298. On the other hand, IT stocks were the top sectoral losers on a strong rupee with the BSE IT index falling 153 points to 14,300 level. Meanwhile, the BSE mid cap and small cap indices closed 229 points higher to 15,519 and 159 points higher to 14764 level in trade today. Market breadth was positive with 1639 stocks closing higher compared to 985 falling on the BSE. On a net basis, foreign portfolio investors (FPIs) bought shares worth Rs 144.76 crore on Tuesday, while domestic institutional investors (DIIs) were net sellers to the tune of Rs 182.6 crore, provisional data available with BSE showed. Global markets World stocks were mostly higher on Wednesday ahead of an expected rate hike by the Federal Reserve, while Asian indexes were weighed by Japanese data that showed its exports slowing in November. In Europe, Germany's DAX gained 0.1 percent to 10,756.02 and France's CAC 40 was 0.3 percent higher at 4,768.28. Britain's FTSE 100 index rose 0.4 percent to 6,727.83. Wall Street was set for an optimistic open. S&P 500 futures rose 0.5 percent to 2,551.30 and Dow futures added 0.4 percent to 23,710.00. Japan's Nikkei 225 index fell 0.6 percent to 20,987.92 while South Korea's Kospi rose 0.8 percent to 2,078.84. Hong Kong's Hang Seng was 0.2 percent higher at 25,865.39. The Shanghai Composite index shed 1.1 percent to 2,549.56. Australia's S&P ASX 200 gave up 0.2 percent to 5,580.60. Shares were higher in Taiwan and Southeast Asia. Edited by Aseem Thapliyal 19 Dec 2018, 3:59 PM Centre asks states to accept driving licence, vehicle docs in electronic format The Union transport ministry has asked states to facilitate acceptance of driving licence and other documents like vehicle registration certificates in electronic format by enforcement agencies. Vehicle owners can also show their documents like driving licence, RCs and insurance certificates through mobile apps like Digilocker and mParivahan app, the Road Transport and Highways Ministry said Big GST relief! PM Modi says 99% items to be put under 18% or below slabs Indicating that further simplification of the Goods and Services Tax is on the anvil, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said his government wants to ensure that '99 per cent things' attract sub-18 per cent GST slab. Before implementation of the GST, registered enterprises only numbered 65 lakh, which has now risen by 55 lakh, Modi said, addressing the Republic Summit IDFC Bank merges with Capital First, new entity called IDFC First Bank New generation private sector IDFC Bank and non-banking financial company Capital First announced the completion of their merger on Tuesday, creating a combined loan asset book of Rs 1.03 lakh crore for the merged entity IDFC First Bank. The board of IDFC Bank approved the appointment of V Vaidyanathan, founder and chairman of Capital First Ltd, as Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of the merged entity. RBI increases liquidity infusion to Rs 50,000 crore The Reserve Bank on Tuesday said it has decided to scale up the amount of liquidity infusion by Rs 10,000 crore to Rs 50,000 crore this month after a review of the evolving liquidity conditions. The central bank had earlier announced to infuse liquidity amounting to Rs 40,000 crore through the purchase of government securities under Open Market Operations (OMOs) during December. The RBI has already injected Rs 20,000 crore through two OMO purchase auctions. LIC makes open offer to acquire 26% stake in IDBI Bank State-owned IDBI Bank Tuesday said it has received final letter from Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) for an open offer to acquire additional 26 per cent in the lender.The open offer has been made at a price of Rs 61.73 a share, which is in connection with LIC's acquisition of 51 per cent controlling stake in IDBI Bank. Trump to attend Davos World Economic Forum US President Donald Trump would attend the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos in January, the White House has said. For the second consecutive year, Trump would attend the global meet. Notably, Trump had declined India's invitation to attend the annual Republic Day Parade in New Delhi on January 26. The White House had cited scheduling conflicts as one of the reasons. Trump accuses Facebook, Twitter, Google of Democrat bias US President Donald Trump took a swipe at tech giants Facebook, Twitter and Google, accusing them of being biased in favor of opposition Democrats. "Facebook, Twitter and Google are so biased toward the Dems it is ridiculous!" Trump tweeted. "Twitter, in fact, has made it much more difficult for people to join @realDonaldTrump. Trump's tirade follows a detailed US Senate report on Russian troll farms that disrupted the 2016 US presidential election via social media. Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Minister Creed has welcomed the announcement of 2 million in funding from the Marine Institute and the European Regional Development Fund for a major project on Atlantic climate change led by Dr Gerard McCarthy of the ICARUS Climate Research Centre at Maynooth University. The project aims to improve the understanding of the links between trends in Atlantic temperatures and climate change. It will be supported by Professor Peter Thorne, Director of the ICARUS Climate Research Centre at Maynooth University, Professor Andrew Parnell, Dr Niamh Cahill, Dr Conor Murphy, and Dr Rowan Fealy, at Maynooth University. Maynooths lead team will utilise approximately two-thirds of a total 2 million funding with the balance utilised by co-investigators in Trinity College Dublin, led by Dr Robin Edwards. The project team will use advanced geological techniques to reconstruct Irelands sea level, and combine these estimates with the modern National Tide Gauge Network managed by the Marine Institute, to better understand how sea levels have been changing around Ireland and the edges of the Atlantic. The A4 project will bring the field of decadal climate prediction to Ireland. This emerging field hopes to lead to improved estimates of the future climate over the period of a decade by using the predictability of the ocean. Welcoming the project, Minister Creed said, "This funding being provided will enable Maynooth University to increase the research capacity to broaden Irelands knowledge at a societal level, to better understand the ocean and climate change. The research will contribute to national climate adaptation as well as international climate policy, supporting enhanced forecasting capabilities and contributing to adaptation and mitigation strategies and actions." Vice President for Innovation at Maynooth University, Professor Ray ONeill added, "This major funding award reflects the global significance of the climate science research being undertaken at the ICARUS Climate Research Centre at Maynooth University. Enabled by this funding, Gerard McCarthys expertise, and that of his national and international partners, will significantly advance understanding of how Ireland and the Atlantic region more broadly will be affected by climate change in the years ahead." Source: www.businessworld.ie It was announced today that 7 Irish not-for-profit organisations have been given the green light to launch projects in communities across the country, thanks to their success in the second round of the Ulster Bank Skills & Opportunities Fund 2018. The Fund has awarded grants totalling 150,000 to be shared between the winning projects. It is hoped the fund will help people to access financial capability and enterprise skills and opportunities, in order to gain qualifications, get into employment or start their own business ultimately strengthening local communities. The winning community organisations have been chosen following a public vote online. Of the ten #skillsandopportunities projects shortlisted, the winners are: Dress for Success, Dublin. Grow It Yourself (GIY). Longford Womens Link. St John of God School Islandbridge, Dublin. Spina Bifida Hydrocephalus Ireland. Irish Girl Guides. NCAD Access Programme, Dublin. The latest and final funding award takes the total issued by the Ulster Bank Skills & Opportunities Fund to Irish-based organisations over its four year life-span to more than 650,000. Speaking this week, Head of Marketing at Ulster Bank, Tony Boylan said, "At Ulster Bank, its important to us to stay closely linked to the communities in which we operate so we are delighted to support these fantastic organisations. This is the fourth year of our Skills & Opportunities Fund, and we have had wonderful feedback and tremendous success stories in that time. We know that the winning projects will have a tangible, positive impact on the people and communities involved and we wish them all success in the future." Source: www.businessworld.ie The United States and China clashed again at the World Trade Organization (WTO) on Wednesday, accusing each other of undermining the multilateral trading system, according to speeches from the closed-door talks seen by Reuters. U.S. Ambassador Dennis Shea accused China of seeking to "outright steal" technology in strategic industries and dump its products on U.S. markets, saying "this is not acceptable." China's envoy said that "reckless actions" by the Trump administration were the root of the crisis but that China hoped that in the follow-up to their leaders' summit, the two powers can "move in the same direction with mutual respect to contribute to the stability of world economic and trade environment." (Reuters) Source: www.businessworld.ie By Teng Jing Xuan / Dec 19, 2018 06:21 PM / Environment Chinas agriculture ministry has responded to reports that its cafeteria doesnt serve genetically-modified food by denying that it gives staff special treatment, Voice of China reports. To my understanding, we dont have a special supply channel. We eat what everyone else eats. Its all purchased from the market, Zhang Taolin, vice-minister of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, said Wednesday, according to Voice of China. Zhang also reiterated that genetically modified organisms that pass international food safety standards pose no additional risk to consumers. Voice of China didnt specify which reports Zhang was referring too. But Cui Yongyuan, a popular TV host, has posted alleged evidence that the Ministry of Agriculture cafeteria avoids GMO food. Suspicion of GMOs runs deep among the Chinese public, whose anxiety over their food supply has been amplified by major food safety scandals. While the country imports a large volume of GMO soybeans each year, its government has abandoned GMO research projects and only allows a handful of GMO crops to be cultivated within its borders. Related: Chinese State Newspapers Argue Over Genetically Modified Soybeans news, latest-news The ACT government is failing to enforce its own building regulations, leaving apartment owners to fight costly legal battles against developers and the government in the courts, the head of an owners corporation says. Owners of apartments in a Kingston stage two block at 22-24 Eyre Street will head back to the ACT Supreme Court early next year after a mediation session with the developer, Morris Construction Corporation, failed to reach a resolution. As an ACT Legislative Assembly examines the territory's building regulation, owners corporation executive committee chairman John Grant has gone public, saying the developer had not acted in good faith in more than six years of talks. Mr Grant and the 120 other unit owners are challenging the developer in the court alleging serious building code violations, including alleged defective construction work in a concrete slab in the basement of the apartment block. But the corporation and a host of parties to the case, including the ACT government, have denied any liability for the allegedly defective work, or in the government's case, approving a certificate of occupancy and use when owners claim it did not meet the building code. Mr Grant said the owners corporation first raised the issues with the developer in August 2012, and negotiated in good faith for some four years, but a lack of action by the developer led the owners to file a building complaint in August 2016. Since then, after further failed negotiations and the government failing to issue a rectification order for the alleged defects, the owners say they were forced to take action in the ACT Supreme Court in an effort to fix the problems. The owners have only decided to go public in the wake of comments by the developer that the corporation was working collaboratively with the unit owners to resolve the situation - a statement Mr Grant said could not be further from the truth. He said those responsible for the construction appeared to be fighting tooth and nail to deny what the owners believed was a reasonable expectation - that the A-class, structurally sound building promised by the developers was provided. "The executive committees experience has been that Morris Construction Corporation and, or its representatives have denied the defects, attempted to delay and obfuscate any actions," he said. "The owners of the apartments are stressed and frustrated by the poor quality of the building and the significant defects that could potentially threaten health and safety." However, a spokesman for Morris Construction Corporation said it had participated in the mediation process fully and while that had not yet resolved the matter, it had led to further investigations by both sides. Importantly the building is safe and I will continue to work with the owners corporation in an attempt to resolve the matter," he said. But beyond the builders, the owners believe the territory government should not have issued a certificate of occupancy and use for the building, claiming that the certificate misled buyers about the structural safety and compliance of the apartments with the building code. In the legal proceedings, the government has denied all allegations about the certificate made by the owners corporation, and all defendants in the case have strenuously rejected the allegations of defective work. But Mr Grant said, as the nation had seen in the banking Royal Commission, it was not good enough for a government regulator to simply give a rubber stamp approval or authority, and he now believed the construction regulatory system was broken. "The government regulator must be expected to take reasonable steps to ensure that the building is ready for occupancy it has a clear duty of care in this respect," he said. "From the construction problems that have occurred in the ACT for many years and continue to occur today, it is not unreasonable to conclude that the construction occupations registrar fails in its reasonable duty of care." A spokeswoman for Access Canberra said as the matter was still before the Supreme Court, of which the territory was a party, it was not appropriate to comment. She also said the government was "committed to supporting safe and quality building in the ACT and would take action where is it appropriate". Despite hoping a resolution could be reached, Mr Grant said the owners corporation was now losing faith in the ACT government's regulation of the building industry, and whether those responsible for the allegedly poor construction were actually genuinely trying to rectify the defects. "The underlying laws and regulations are generally adequate, regularly reviewed and updated; the problem is lack of regulatory oversight and enforcement," he said. "The sources of the problem are the absence of even basic regulatory enforcement and the abject failure of the government regulator to reasonably perform its duty of care." /images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-ct-migration/1314184f-da90-4ebc-834c-b805c5955eb4/r0_152_3961_2390_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg news, crime A former Comcar driver who operated an illegal brothel in Braddon, who was arrested after a number of police raids earlier this year, pleaded guilty in the ACT Magistrates Court on Wednesday. Dimitrios Brendas, 37, was arrested and charged in September when police raided his Braddon flat after receiving a tip off from a sex worker. On Wednesday he pleaded guilty to operating a brothel other than at a prescribed location. It was discovered after his arrest that Brendas' day job was to drive MPs around as a Comcar driver, it is understood he has been stood down from driving parliamentarians. On September 4 police raided a Reid property and found an illegal brothel being operated from the premises. Four Thai nationals were deported as a result of the raid. Documents tendered at an earlier hearing said one of the sex workers discovered at the Reid property handed police a note with Brendas' Braddon address. She later told police there were two women working there for a man named Jimmy and one was sick and wanted to go home. Police also seized mobile phones that contained images of women in their underwear provided to individuals to organise sex at the Braddon property and details of how to gain access to the flat. The documents state when police entered the Braddon property they found Brendas, piles of linen and copious amounts of cleaning products along with lubricant and tissues on the bedside table in one of the rooms. Police were able to identify Brendas' phone number as one that had been coordinating the arrival of customers to the Braddon unit, asking if a customer was using condoms and arranging payments. Brendas is the landlord of a building in Fyshwick that houses a legal brothel called Sassy Gina's. The Sex Workers Regulation states that ACT brothels may only be located in Mitchell and Fyshwick. Brendas is due back in court for sentencing in January. /images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-ct-migration/d2eb7f36-633d-4cdd-913c-19c8a7866a0a/r0_94_751_518_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg news, latest-news Online travel companies are on notice that they are subject to Australian law after a man successfully sued global travel giant Expedia, a consumer law expert said Tuesday. A tribunal ordered Expedia pay Canberra man Hugh Selby more than $600 in damages after its Wotif website misled him when he booked two nights at the Rocky Point Beachfront/Paradise in Haleiwa, Hawaii. He and his wife had paid for what appeared to be a neat beachside shack with stunning views of the ocean. However, when they arrived to check in for their holiday in April this year the couple found their $300-per-night room was actually in the basement of a deteriorating property. The ACT Civil and Administrative Tribunal found Wotif had engaged in misleading and deceptive conduct in breach of the Australian Consumer Law, as the website had proclaimed it had heaps of local knowledge and that you could book with confidence, and that proved not to be true. "The accommodation was, as a matter of fact, not as described on the website but in a dilapidated and run-down condition, and with no sea views," tribunal senior member Jann Lennard said. The decision was a reminder to the Expedias of the world that they needed to be careful, University of Canberra consumer law expert Dr Bruce Baer Arnold said. He said the idea that cyberspace was a regime free from law or only subject to US law was nonsense. You are covered by Australian law and you need to be careful about what claims you make," he said. "What we're seeing increasingly is individual countries asserting their law in relation to their citizens [and] activity that takes place within their jurisdiction, and they're asserting it fairly effectively." Dr Arnold said Mr Selbys case could prompt copycat litigation by other consumers seeking a fix that yes you're right, you were misled, and therefore the Australian Consumer Law will come to the rescue. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission might also be prompted to issue a warning to both consumers and online services to be careful, he said. He said the consumer watchdog could also decide to take the site to court over its conduct. In August, the ACCC announced it was taking hotel comparison site Trivago - owned by Expedia - to the Federal Court, alleging it made misleading price representations in TV and online advertisements. Chairman Rod Sims said the case highlighted growing concerns the ACCC had about comparison platforms. The ACCC was concerned websites such as Trivago gave the impression they were designed to benefit consumers when in fact listings were based "on which supplier pays them the most money", he said. Expedia, in its defence against Mr Selby's suit, said it was not liable for the nature of the advertisement or the quality of the accommodation and it pointed to exclusion clauses also published on the website. It also argued the statements were just puffery - a sales pitch. Dr Arnold said the arguments the company ran at the hearing were ludicrous, and the arguments about puffery had law academics rolling on the floor. Puffery, he said, was a recognised legal concept which referred to the making of an exaggerated statement but with recognition that no reasonable person would take it at face value. He gave the example of cosmetics advertising that promised youth. "What we have with this travel site is, this is not puffery, the whole reason that you go to the travel site is to get information on which you would rely, Dr Arnold said. He said he expected the Expedias of the world to change their messaging in the wake of the case. /images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-ct-migration/adc6eca3-a16e-4dfd-b609-d9a2dba7f381/r0_53_1000_618_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg news, latest-news Bupa Aged Care in Calwell has been slapped with sanctions after failing to meet key outcomes, including clinical care and medication management. The nursing home was audited by the Department of Health in October and informed in December it would not receive funding for any new residents until May. It must also appoint an advisor to help it meet its clinical responsibilities and provide additional training to staff. BaptistCare Griffith nursing home also failed a snap audit in August this year and faced similar sanctions. Bupa apologised to residents and their families and said it was committed to taking action immediately. "We sincerely apologise that we have failed to live up to the high standards you rightly expect of us and that we set for ourselves," a letter to residents' families read. According to an audit report completed by the Australian Aged Care Quality Agency, the nursing home did not meet 13 of 44 expected outcomes. Those outcomes included clinical care, medication and pain management, mobility, dexterity and rehabilitation. "Information about changes in clinical condition are not always effectively communicated," the report read. "Some care recipients/representatives interviewed are not satisfied with the clinical care being provided to the care recipient and some express concern about staff clinical knowledge and skills." The report said there were no systems in place to ensure residents' medication was managed safely and correctly. It said the home's monitoring system failed to identify errors related to medication administration or storage of medication. The auditors said they saw incidents of physical and verbal aggression and care recipients were not satisfied with the management of such behaviour. Residents were not provided with rehabilitation and were forced to pay for private physiotherapy instead, the report read. "Management and staff acknowledge there is insufficient staff allocated to support care recipient mobility and dexterity," the audit read. The home was also criticised for not routinely including cultural celebrations relevant to residents and for a lack of up-to-date training for infection control and manual handling. The interim chief operating officer of Bupa Australia Aged Care, Carolyn Cooper, apologised to residents and their families. "We are deeply sorry that the home has been sanctioned by the Department of Health this does not represent the high standard of aged care that our residents deserve," she said. "We are committed to making improvements at the home and regaining the trust of our residents and their families." Ms Cooper said the home was working with the department to address the issues identified in the report and would keep residents and their families updated. "We have appointed consumer champion Beth Wilson, who is the former Health Services Commissioner of Victoria, to consult with residents and families at our care homes to consider how to improve our focus on what matters to residents, and their families," she said. "Ms Wilson visited the Calwell care home on the weekend to meet with residents and their families. "We encourage any residents or family members with concerns to contact us on 1800 804 888 or email bupaagedcarefeedback@bupa.com.au." /images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-ct-migration/ae1738a1-62bc-46fb-9011-cd623b366770/r0_65_1000_630_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg news, act-politics A federal parliamentary committee examining the restoration of territory rights could be key to unshackling the ACT and Northern Territory to legalise voluntary euthanasia, a longtime campaigner says. With the ACT looking to revive its push to repeal the Andrews Bill next year, former ACT Labor MLA Mary Porter said sharing personal stories would be critical to overturning the decades-old legislation that has prevented the territories from making laws on assisted dying. Ms Porter, who made end-of-life issues a signature of her decade in the ACT Legislative Assembly, urged the ACT to keep up the pressure on Federal Parliament to revoke the laws. "That doesn't mean to say if the bill is repealed the ACT would make a decision to put in place legislation that would allow voluntary euthanasia, but we should be given the opportunity to discuss it," Ms Porter, who retired to Lake Macquarie in 2016, said. "We shouldn't be ruled by the federal government on what legislation we enact and don't enact. The whole idea of self-government is that we don't have a controlling parent on the hill telling us what we can and can't do. People in the ACT surely know what they want by now. We don't need a parent, we're all grown up now." Ms Porter said personal stories that came from a parliamentary inquiry were critical to changing Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews' mind on euthanasia. The state legalised assisted dying in 2017, with the scheme to commence next year. "Just tell the stories. They need to get the stories out there. I have seen my mother die a painful death, I saw my father-in-law die a painful death. When you experience it yourself you know it's important to tell the stories of how those people would have chosen something different," she said. Ms Porter said a federal inquiry could be an "opportunity for those stories to be told". While an ACT parliamentary inquiry is currently exploring end of life choices, Ms Porter said the territory's "hands are tied, no matter what the inquiry comes up with, you can't do a thing until Andrews Bill is repealed". Chief Minister Andrew Barr, who'll continue to lobby for the repeal of the Andrews Bill next year, said he had no objection to a federal parliamentary inquiry, although he noted it was a matter for Federal Parliament. However ACT-based MP Andrew Leigh, who has a private member's bill on the notice paper on territory rights, said it was his preference that the current Parliament debate and pass the legislation as soon as possible. He noted the House of Representatives was different to the Assembly, and the government decides which bills are referred to a committee. Asked whether a Shorten government would explore the bill through a committee, Mr Leigh reiterated that he wanted the bill passed before the federal election. Ms Porter's comments came after the ACT and Northern Territory lost a bid for a binding vote on restoring territory rights on euthanasia at Labor's national conference. Instead, federal parliamentarians will be "encouraged" to help overturn the Andrews Bill, which prevents the territories making laws on euthanasia. Greens candidate for Canberra Tim Hollo said the watered-down motion was evidence Labor needed "a strong Greens presence to pull them towards better policies". Six Labor senators helped to defeat a bill to restore territory rights in August, including Pat Dodson, Don Farrell, Chris Ketter, Deborah O'Neill, Helen Polley and Alex Gallacher. Senator Gallacher had intended to vote for the bill but changed his mind at the last minute. The bill was defeated by two votes. "Encouragement is a baby step in the right direction," Mr Hollo said. Asked about the defeat of the Leyonhjelm bill and the Labor motion, Ms Porter said it was disappointing to see people confuse the issue of territory rights and voluntary euthanasia. "Because people have such strongly held views on voluntary euthanasia and get so passionate about it, it clouds every other discussion we have. I tried to avoid that when I was having discussions with people as a member," she said. Mr Leigh said "perfect should not be the enemy of good" and the motion "advances Labor's position on territory rights". The co-ordinator of the ACT chapter of Exit International, David Swanton, said he was "generally disappointed" politicians had not separated the issues of territory rights and euthanasia. "I'm flabbergasted at the stupidity. I should say that euthanasia is occurring unregulated in the ACT right now," Dr Swanton said. Meanwhile Mr Barr's motion to eliminate the 12-month deferral period for gay men to donate blood passed the conference. A spokesman for Mr Barr said the motion had been changed slightly in consultation with Catherine King's office and was based on clinical advice to state that Labor would act urgently on any advice from the Blood Service and the Therapeutic Goods Administration to reduce the deferral period for men who have sex with men. The new motion acknowledged that the Australian Red Cross Blood Service had previously recommended that the current 12-month deferral period was "excessive and beyond what is required to maintain a safe blood supply", and that the Blood Service was currently reviewing the deferrals policy again. Once that review is complete, the Blood Service will make a submission to the Therapeutic Goods Administration to relax the deferral periods. The TGA rejected a similar request in 2013. /images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-ct-migration/9bffa2ea-741a-4059-9b8e-131a4b504cab/r0_33_2000_1163_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg Our Promise: Welcome to Care2, the world's largest community for good. Here, you'll find over 45 million like-minded people working towards progress, kindness, and lasting impact. Care2 Stands Against: bigots, racists, bullies, science deniers, misogynists, gun lobbyists, xenophobes, the willfully ignorant, animal abusers, frackers, and other mean people. If you find yourself aligning with any of those folks, you can move along, nothing to see here. Care2 Stands With: humanitarians, animal lovers, feminists, rabble-rousers, nature-buffs, creatives, the naturally curious, and people who really love to do the right thing. You are our people. You Care. We Care2. Population declines were also common, with losses occurring in nine states and Puerto Rico. The nine states that lost population last year were New York (down 48,510), Illinois (45,116), West Virginia (11,216), Louisiana (10,840), Hawaii (3,712), Mississippi (3,133), Alaska (2,348), Connecticut (1,215) and Wyoming (1,197). Many states have seen fewer births and more deaths in recent years, said Sandra Johnson, a demographer/statistician in the Population Division of the Census Bureau. If those states are not gaining from either domestic or international migration they will experience either low population growth or outright decline. Nationally, natural increase (the excess of births over deaths) was 1.04 million last year, reflecting 3,855,500 births and 2,814,013 deaths. With fewer births in recent years and the number of deaths increasing, natural increase has declined steadily over the past decade. In 2008, natural increase was nearly 1.8 million (based on National Center for Health Statistics data). Also released today were national- and state-level estimates of the components of population change, which include tables on births, deaths and migration. The best bang for your buck! This option enables you to purchase online 24/7 access and receive the Sunday, Tuesday & Thursday print edition at no additional cost * Print edition only available in our carrier delivery area. Allow up to 72 hours for delivery of your print edition to begin. Print edition not available for Day Pass option. There is a huge shopping mall in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin -- think of a suburb of Milwaukee -- and about two-to-three miles away from the Mayfair Mall is where the Childrens Hospital of Wisconsin is located. The fact the renowned medical center is in the vicinity of the mall is what we call a salient point, which are very important when a story is presented that many, many people swear is true. We also know that fat and jolly soul, Mark Leonard, was a professional Santa his moniker was Santa Mark -- and he was under an appearance contract with the mall for 1994 through 1999. This was confirmed by Nancy Conley, the malls marketing director, who said the same thing that many others confirmed Mark is one of the best ever -- because he really got into it, adoring the kids who would climb onto his lap. This story is about a nine-year-old who couldnt climb onto his lap or sit on his chunky thigh about this very time in December of 1998. And that was the night Santa Mark really got into it like never before or since. I was lucky enough to back into this story over the weekend when I got a whiff in my Morning Readings. Soon I discovered Santa Marks wife, Susan Morton Leonard, was able to trace down the tale of what happened 20 years ago. As a matter of fact, she wrote a story that has been widely circulated and, since she has the inside skinny with Santa himself, I think it is right and proper we hear from the No. 1 Elf herself! * * * SANTA MARKS BEST CHRISTMAS EVER (In the words of his wife, the elf Susan Morton Leonard) A little boy and his grandmother came to see Santa at The Mayfair Mall in Wisconsin. The child climbed up on Santas lap, holding a picture of a little girl. Who is this? asked Santa, smiling. Your friend? Your sister? Yes, Santa. he replied, My sister, Sarah, who is very sick. he said sadly. Santa glanced over at the grandmother who was waiting nearby and saw her dabbing her eyes with a tissue. She wanted to come with me to see you, oh, so very much, Santa! the child exclaimed. She misses you. he added softly. Santa tried to be cheerful and encouraged a smile to the boys face, asking him what he wanted Santa to bring him for Christmas. When they finished their visit, the grandmother came over to help the child off his lap, and started to say something to Santa, but halted. What is it? Santa asked warmly. Well, I know its really too much to ask you, Santa, but ... the old woman began, shooing her grandson over to one of Santas elves to collect the little gift which Santa gave all his young visitors. The girl in the photograph my granddaughter well, you see she has leukemia and isnt expected to make it even through the holidays. she said through tear-filled eyes. Is there anyway, Santa, any possible way that you could come see Sarah? Thats all shes asked for, for Christmas, is to see Santa. Santa blinked and swallowed hard and told the woman to leave information with his elves as to where Sarah was, and he would see what he could do. Santa thought of little else the rest of that afternoon. He knew what he had to do. What if it were MY child lying in that hospital bed, dying? he thought with a sinking heart, This is the least I can do. When Santa finished visiting with all the boys and girls that evening, he retrieved from his helper the name of the hospital where Sarah was staying. He asked Rick, the assistant location manager, how to get to Childrens Hospital. Why? Rick asked, with a puzzled look on his face. Santa relayed to him the conversation with Sarahs grandmother earlier that day. Comm on.Ill take you there. Rick said softly. Rick drove them to the hospital and came inside with Santa. They found out which room Sarah was in. A pale Rick said he would wait out in the hall. Santa quietly peeked into the room through the half-closed door and saw little Sarah on the bed. The room was full of what appeared to be her family; there was the grandmother and the girls brother he had met earlier that day. A woman whom he guessed was Sarahs mother stood by the bed, gently pushing Sarahs thin hair off her forehead. And another woman who he discovered later was Sarahs aunt, sat in a chair near the bed with a weary, sad look on her face. They were talking quietly, and Santa could sense the warmth and closeness of the family, and their love and concern for Sarah. Taking a deep breath, and forcing a smile on his face, Santa entered the room, bellowing a hearty, Ho, Ho, Ho! Santa! shrieked little Sarah weakly, as she tried to escape her bed to run to him. Santa rushed to her side and gave her a warm hug. A child the tender age of his own son 9 years old gazed up at him with wonder and excitement. Her skin was pale and her short tresses bore telltale bald patches from the effects of chemotherapy. But all he saw when he looked at her was a pair of huge, blue eyes. His heart melted, and he had to force himself to choke back tears. Though his eyes were riveted upon Sarahs face, he could hear the gasps and quiet sobbing of the women in the room. As he and Sarah began talking, the family crept quietly to the bedside one by one, squeezing Santas shoulder or his hand gratefully, whispering Thank you as they gazed sincerely at him with shining eyes. Santa and Sarah talked and talked, and she told him excitedly all the toys she wanted for Christmas, assuring him shed been a very good girl that year. As their time together dwindled, Santa felt led in his spirit to pray for Sarah, and asked for permission from the girls mother. She nodded in agreement and the entire family circled around Sarahs bed, holding hands. Santa looked intensely at Sarah and asked her if she believed in angels, Oh, yes, Santa I do! she exclaimed. Well, Im going to ask that angels watch over you. he said. Laying one hand on the childs head, Santa closed his eyes and prayed. He asked that God touch little Sarah, and heal her body from this disease. He asked that angels minister to her, watch and keep her. And when he finished praying, still with eyes closed, he started singing, softly, Silent Night, Holy Night. all is calm, all is bright The family joined in, still holding hands, smiling at Sarah, and crying tears of hope, tears of joy for this moment, as Sarah beamed at them all. When the song ended, Santa sat on the side of the bed again and held Sarahs frail, small hands in his own. Now, Sarah, he said authoritatively, you have a job to do, and that is to concentrate on getting well. I want you to have fun playing with your friends this summer, and I expect to see you at my house at Mayfair Mall this time next year! He knew it was risky proclaiming that to this little girl who had terminal cancer, but he had to. He had to give her the greatest gift he could not dolls or games or toys but the gift of HOPE. Yes, Santa! Sarah exclaimed, her eyes bright. He leaned down and kissed her on the forehead and left the room. Out in the hall, the minute Santas eyes met Ricks, a look passed between them and they wept unashamed. Sarahs mother and grandmother slipped out of the room quickly and rushed to Santas side to thank him. My only child is the same age as Sarah. he explained quietly. This is the least I could do. They nodded with understanding and hugged him. One year later, Santa Mark was again back on the set in Milwaukee for his six-week, seasonal job which he so loves to do. Several weeks went by and then one day a child came up to sit on his lap. Hi, Santa! Remember me?! Of course, I do. Santa proclaimed (as he always does), smiling down at her. After all, the secret to being a good Santa is to always make each child feel as if they are the only child in the world at that moment. You came to see me in the hospital last year! Santas jaw dropped. Tears immediately sprang in his eyes, and he grabbed this little miracle and held her to his chest. Sarah! he exclaimed. He scarcely recognized her, for her hair was long and silky and her cheeks were rosy much different from the little girl he had visited just a year before. He looked over and saw Sarahs mother and grandmother in the sidelines smiling and waving and wiping their eyes. That was the best Christmas ever for Santa Claus. He had witnessed and been blessed to be instrumental in bringing about this miracle of hope. This precious little child was healed. Cancer-free. Alive and well. He silently looked up to Heaven and humbly whispered, Thank you, Father. Tis a very, Merry Christmas! -- By Susan Morton Leonard, Santas wife * * * And now, gentle reader, you have a choice only you and you alone can make. If you believe in miracles, starting from the first Christmas ever and holding steady up until now, you will understand that hope is very real and so are miracles, most especially during Christmas Week. If you do not believe in miracles, my Christmas Prayer is that while you still have time, little Sarah and Santa Mark join me in the hope that maybe youll try a little harder. royexum@aol.com The County Commission on Wednesday narrowly voted against the controversial sewage treatment plant on Mahan Gap Road to serve North Ooltewah. In the first vote, five commissioners voted to deny the special exceptions permit. They were Chester Bankston, Randy Fairbanks, Chip Baker, Katherlyn Geter and Sabrena Smedley. Commissioners David Sharpe and Greg Martin voted no. Commissioners Tim Boyd and Warren Mackey passed. Afterward, Commissioner Boyd changed his pass to a yes and Commissioner Mackey changed his pass to a no. The vote came to a capacity crowd. Outside, dozens of others were not able to get inside. The vote came though County Mayor Jim Coppinger said the Hamilton County Water and Wastewater Treatment Authority (WWTA) had not been able to find another acceptable site. He said to move further north would cost $18 million to $21 million. He said growth in that part of the county is being stymied by the lack of adequate sewage treatment. County Mayor Coppinger called the decision "the most important in my tenure here since 2011." Commissioner Bankston has opposed the proposal from the start, and he quickly moved for denial as soon as the matter was brought up. He got a quick second from Commissioner Fairbanks. Then there was lengthy discussion from both sides. Commissioner Fairbanks said he knew a new plant needs to be built, but he said, "The concern that people out in that area have is a hill I can't get over." Commissioner Baker said he did not believe that all alternatives had been explored, including the possibility that a private waste handling company might buy out WWTA. Commissioner Geter had earlier expressed health concerns for the residents living near the plant. Chairman Smedley noted that she is a realtor and said she recently lost a $1 million deal because of the sewage issue. She said she cast her vote because she also did not feel that moving ahead with WWTA at this time was the right choice. She said she had spoken with officials of a private firm that might be able to build the plant faster and cheaper than the WWTA. County Mayor Coppinger said he had not heard from any private company that would take on the project. He said it was decided two years ago during a review of the WWTA that it would be better to keep it in place in order to have more control of growth and of the rates charged to customers. He also said that if a plant is not built at Mahan Gap that it would likely be used for sewage storage, which he said would likely be more objectionable to neighbors than a sewage plant. He said the permit was just the first step in a lengthy process and that the matter would have come back later to the County Commission for further approval. County Mayor Coppinger said the city's Moccasin Bend Sewage Treatment Plant does not have the capacity to take additional effluent from the county. And he said the city recently raised the rate by 20 percent to WWTA. He said county officials thought that the site where TVA is building a power center in Meigs County might be an option. But he said TVA was just planning to use a drip system costing less than $1 million. He said the whole site did not drain well enough for a septic system. He also said that federal grant dollars are not available for sewage treatment plants and that a new one has not been built in Tennessee for a number of years. County Mayor Coppinger said only yesterday a developer wanted to put in 150 lots in East Brainerd for new homes, but only 62 were approved due to sewage problems. He said job growth has been holding down taxes in Hamilton County, but that jobs may quit coming here if the infrastructure for growth is not in place. He said E. coli is already in nearby Savannah Bay that apparently comes from inadequate septic systems. The opposition called up attorney John Cavett, who said that restrictions in the deed could prevent the construction of a sewage treatment plant. He said that if the plant was approved that there were people ready who had money who would file a suit against the county that might go to the Supreme Court and tie the matter up for years. Commissioner Boyd said without a wastewater treatment plant, the county "ain't gonna grow no more." He said he believed that if the plant is built, that within a year "nobody is even going to know it's there." While were disappointed by todays vote, we know that we must continue to find ways to meet the future needs of Hamilton County, said WWTA Executive Director Mark Harrison. The last thing any of us want is to stall economic development or find ourselves in a moratorium that will effectively stop the healthy economy weve worked so hard to accomplish. WWTA Board Chair Mike Moon said, The WWTA Board was unwilling to add an additional $16 to $21 Million to move the proposed plant to another location. We are going to have some huge financial challenges with the upcoming Consent Decree and as a board, we decided to take steps that would allow us to keep the pricing as low as possible while meeting the communitys needs. Both Harrison and Moon noted that the decision by the Hamilton County Commission was an extremely difficult one and that they appreciated the questions and concerns expressed by commissioners. Todays vote will cause additional challenges as we plan to meet future needs, said Chair Moon. However, we remain determined to do all we can to take steps to continue the strong economy we all enjoy. We appreciate the passion of the Ooltewah community and the time given to public consideration and discussion by the Hamilton County Commission. More than 700 disadvantaged children and senior citizens will receive gifts this holiday season from Volkswagen Chattanooga team members. Plant employees volunteered their time and participated in the Salvation Army of Greater Chattanoogas annual Angel Tree program. For the fifth consecutive year Volkswagen Chattanoogas information technology department volunteered at the Salvation Army warehouse, building more than 150 childrens bicycles and filling nearly 500 Angel Tree orders. At the plant, team members from various departments helped fill unclaimed or returned Salvation Army Angel requests. The Salvation Army of Greater Chattanooga Angel Tree program provides necessities and holiday gifts for disadvantaged children, senior citizens and families in Tennessee and neighboring counties in Georgia. Sergeant Peter Turk tendered his resignation from the Chattanooga Police Department e ffective Tuesday. The Chattanooga Police Department opened an internal investigation of Sgt. Turk on Thursday after he was taken into custody for solicitation of prostitution. The arrest came during a joint enforcement operation between the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and the Chattanooga Police Department's Vice Unit. Sgt. Turk was off duty and not part of the enforcement operations. The TBI's criminal case, which is separate from CPD's Internal Affairs investigation, remains active and ongoing. 2 in 5 British millennials don't know Jesus is the baby in the Nativity; don't know Joseph and Mary Christian Post Contributor | 18 December, 2018 by Stoyan Zaimov A survey has found that as many as two out of five British millennials do not know that Jesus Christ is the baby in Nativity scene displays. The survey, carried out by research company OnePoll on behalf of Hotels.com, found that 39 percent of 2,000 Britons aged between 21 and 38 did not know the baby's identity. A similar amount, or 37 percent of respondents, also did not know about Joseph and Mary, Jesus' earthly parents. The poll, which examined a number of other questions regarding family and Christmas, found that less than 10 percent of young people were able to name the gifts by the three wise men in the story, namely gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Six percent said that they believed the story of Santa Clause was somehow linked with the Nativity. "Of course I know about Jesus and Joseph and Mary, although I'm not too sure what the three wise men were doing or the Angel Gabriel for that matter," said one of the respondents, 29-year old Craig Munro. "It is shocking that some people in my age group don't know the story of the Nativity, but time moves on and some traditions go out of the window I suppose," he added, according to MailOnline. As for how people prefer to spend Christmas, one in 10 millennials said they did not want to spend it at their in-laws' home. A fifth said that they would prefer to spend Christmas in the company with friends instead. Only 10 percent noted that they made plans for a get-together with friends over the holidays, however. "We all love getting together with friends and family at Christmas, and everyone celebrates it differently," said Adam Jay, president of Hotels.com, according to The Independent. Various surveys have documented a decline when it comes to religious faith in Britain. One study released in 2017 by ComRes found that only six percentof British adults could be classified as practicing Christians. When looking at the Christian respondents, the poll found that as many as 55 percent of believers never read the Bible. A third, or 33 percent of Christians said that they never attend church, and another 29 percent said that they never pray. Rachel Jordan, the Church of England's National Mission and Evangelism adviser, admitted at the time that the results showed "a real sense of the scale of the task ahead." Read more about the Nativity on The Christian Post. Are Christians who commit suicide condemned to Hell? Christian Post Contributor | 18 December, 2018 by Leah MarieAnn Klett Responding to the question of whether or not Christians who commit suicide go to Heaven, ethicist Russell Moore said that because the blood of Christ covers sins past, present and future, the "last thing we do" does not determine where we will spend eternity. Moore, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, said he's often asked the question by worried individuals whose loved one committed suicide. "They worry," he said. "Does this mean because this person essentially the last act on earth was a sin, does this mean that that person is in Hell? And the answer to that is no." "This person is in Christ. That means that the blood of Christ covers that person's sins, past, present and future. And so we're not saved on the basis of the last thing that we do being something that is acceptable to God. We're saved by the grace and mercy of God." But sometimes, Moore said he's hesitant to weigh in on whether or not Christians who commit suicide go to Heaven because he fears some will view it as permission to commit suicide. "It's not OK," he underscored. "A suicide is murder. Suicide is the attacking of the image of God. And suicide is horrible. It's not only a sin but a sin that leaves wreckage and devastation all over the place." "And so if you're someone who's asking that because you're contemplating suicide, I would just plead with you to talk to people in your life and get help because life is worth living." Many individuals who commit suicide are in a place of "deep, deep anguish and distress of various sorts" or suffering from mental illness, Moore pointed out, adding we "ought to view them with compassion." "The response that we ought to have when someone we love commits suicide is not to blame people, not to blame that person, not to be angry at that person," he concluded. "Nor is it to wonder, 'Does this mean that this person is outside of the reach of God's grace?' God's grace covers a multitude of sins, including those that are so hurtful that we hesitate to even talk to them." Amid a dramatic increase in suicide over the last two decades, a number of faith leaders have weighed in on whether or not those who commit suicide are condemned to Hell. Recently, a Michigan priest came under fire for suggesting at the funeral of an 18-year-old college student that he might not go to Heaven because he took his own life. "It was his time to tell everybody what he thought of suicide, [and] we couldn't believe what he was saying," the teen's father, Jeff Hullibarger, told the Detroit Free Press. "He was up there condemning our son, pretty much calling him a sinner. He wondered if he had repented enough to make it to Heaven. He said 'suicide' upwards of six times." Apologist and New Testament scholar Dr. Jeremiah Johnston has argued that suicide is not the unforgivable sin. "The only sin that God cannot forgive is the sin of rejecting Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior," he told CP earlier. "Do people who commit suicide go to Hell? Some people teach that suicide is the 'unforgivable sin.' God forgives that sin. Is it a sin? Absolutely. But the salvation we receive from Jesus Christ is eternal, regardless of our mental state or our spiritual maturity or immaturity. Otherwise, the Gospel is void. Do you know how many Christians die unexpectedly with unconfessed sin in their life?" Read more about suicide on The Christian Post. Atheist group lawsuit over West Virginia school Bible classes should move ahead: 4th Circuit Christian Post Contributor | 19 December, 2018 by Samuel Smith The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit has overturned a lower court's decision to dismiss a lawsuit filed against a West Virginia county for offering Bible classes in its middle and elementary schools. On Monday, the Fourth Circuit sided with parent Elizabeth Deal, who sued on behalf of her daughter to stop the county from allowing the "Bible in Schools" program to be taught in Mercer County, a program that had been in county schools for nearly 80 years before it was suspended last year. The elective program provided 30 minutes of weekly Bible instruction for elementary school students and 45 minutes for middle school students "as a part of the regular school day," according to the court's ruling. The county itself had administered the BITS program and designed its curriculum for "specially employed BITS teachers" since 1986. The curriculum reportedly included lessons on the crucifixion, the Ten Commandments, Moses and other elements of the Christian belief. Although administered by the school board, the program was privately funded through a nonprofit organization called Bluefield Bible Study Fund. The appeals court noted that while the program was "ostensibly voluntary," because parents were required to return a permission slip to allow their child to attend, nearly every student participated. As for Deal, she is agnostic and wouldn't allow her daughter, Jessica, to participate in the class because she wanted her daughter to learn about multiple religions and make her own religious decisions. According to the court ruling, Jessica was made to sit in the "coatroom area" in the back of the classroom during the BITS teaching. After the mother complained, Jessica was then sent to another classroom, the school library or the computer lab during the BITS teachings. Meanwhile, the "county never offered any alternative instruction to Jessica during the BITS program." In addition, Deal claims her daughter faced harassment from other students because she did not participate in the program. Ultimately, Deal decided it was best to send Jessica to school in another school district that doesn't have the BITS program. Represented by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Deal's case was previously dismissed by a federal district court judge last year after the county suspended the program and terminated all teaching positions affiliated with it to provide time for a curriculum review. The county maintained that Deal's case was now moot after the suspension and added that because Jessica no longer attends school in the county and has not vowed to return, that the family lacks legal standing to seek injunctive relief. However, FFRF, one of the nation's leading secular groups that advocates for a strict separation of church and state, argued that injunctive relief was still needed to prevent the school from re-instituting the BITS program in the future. The Fourth Circuit agreed and remanded the case back to the U.S. District Court to rule on the merit of the case. "In sum, the County has not carried its burden of showing that subsequent events make it 'absolutely clear' that the suspended version of the BITS program will not return in identical or materially indistinguishable form," the ruling reads. "Appellants' current claims are therefore not moot. Of course, this does not prevent the district court from addressing mootness in the future if presented with that issue." Read more from "Atheist group lawsuit over West Virginia school Bible classes should move ahead: 4th Circuit" on The Christian Post. A good goal for engaged citizens would be to read a biography of all of the major U.S. presidents and one on a couple of the more obscure presidents. By major presidents, I refer to those who have an exalted place in American History because of the importance of their contributions and because of the extraordinary times in which they lived. With elegant simplicity, the apostle John writes, the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us (John 1:14). It is clear, it is straightforward, and it is almost unbelievably strange. The conviction that God became man, not as a mere theological concept but as a concrete event in the history of the world, is at the heart of the Christian faith. This is the mystery of the Incarnation. To say that God became man is one thing, but it is another to imagine a young mother lulling a fussy baby to sleep, hot tears streaming from his pink, sleepy eyes, and to say that this tiny being is God incarnate, the Savior of all, the king of the universe. Each year, Mary, Did You Know? brings this wondrously odd aspect of our faith to Christmas radio stations and holiday playlists. In 2014, Grammy-winning group Pentatonix released its striking a cappella cover of the song, taking this decidedly Christian Christmas song to platinum status this year. Originally written by Mark Lowry of the Gaither Vocal Band in 1991, the song has long been a staple of the evangelical Christmas repertoire and slowly made its way to the mainstream with covers by notable musicians such as CeeLo Green, Clay Aiken, and Jordan Smith. Lyrically, the song rests upon the question Mary, did you know? and reflects on Christs earthly ministry and cosmic reign. Musically, it is simple, a lullaby. The sweet sadness of the melody has squeezed tears from the eyes of many an unsuspecting listenerincluding my own. But not all Christians have been pleased with this Nativity tune. As the song resurfaces each Christmastide, so do the enthusiastic complaints regarding its sappiness and its condescension toward Mary. To me, the vigorous outcry against the songs sentimentality has always seemed a strange objection. Certainly, there is a sugary sweetness to the lyrics referring to Marys baby boy, but Mary, Did You Know? is a lullaby, not a theological treatise or a grand orchestral piece. Some songs are simple, gentle, and intended to be so. Should we insist that Jesus Loves Me incorporate a more complex account of original sin? Surely not. This rejection of Mary, Did You Know? seems to reflect our suspicion of the soft, the sentimental, the childish. Yes, it is a song that is likely to make your mother cry, but in a world grown hard and cold with cynicism, soft-heartedness is not necessarily a bad thing. Surely as followers of a God who elevates the meek and childlike, we can celebrate art that breaks, even for a moment, the spell of our hopelessness, even if it is on the verge of sappy. If listeners can get beyond artistic interpretation to focus on the words of the song, however, the lyricsthough simple and at moments affectedare profoundly scriptural. Mary, Did You Know? actually traces the character of Christ from the messianic prophecies of the Hebrew Bible (save our sons and daughters from Isaiah 43:6), to Jesus earthly ministry (healing the blind, walking on water, etc.), and finally Christs cosmic reign (as heavens perfect Lamb, rule the nations, the Great I Am, etc.). In all, its a fitting summation of the role of Christ. The content of the song is not shallow or sentimental, and while it can sound saccharine when Lowry croons it out in perpetual fermata, Pentatonixs version undeniably expresses a certain gravity and solemnity. The second criticism seems more compelling to me. Listeners have complained that, yes, Mary knew that she was going to bear the Messiah, the promised salvation of Israel, and that, therefore, the rhetorical question upon which the song rests is either redundant or condescending. Article continues below Lutheran writer Holly Scheer declared the song the most biblically illiterate Christmas tune, saying, the biblical account of Christs conception and birth shouldnt need to ask if Mary knew because the Bible plainly tells us she did. Many others similarly argue that to predicate an entire song on this question diminishes the pivotal nature of Marys role in Gods salvation plan, reducing her to a sweet but ultimately clueless new mother. This concern is a valid one. For many years, Protestant Christians have largely emphasized Marys youth and downplayed her divine appointment, often out of concern over Catholic veneration of the mother of God. Yet Scripture clearly presents to us a remarkable depiction of Mary in her special role as God-bearer and prophetic hymn writer. The narrative of the Annunciation (Luke 1:26-38), and the content of the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55), make it obvious that Mary knew her child would be the Messiah. So, in that sense, yes: Mary knew. But here, again, we approach the unleapable hurdle of the Incarnation. Mary knew her child would be the Messiah, as we now know that God became man. But that sort of knowledge does not leave us without questions. As Mary rocked her baby to sleep, night after night, did she not wonder what it would all mean, how her childs Messiahship would play out in all its startling particularity? Luke 2:19 says, Mary treasured all these things, pondering them in her heart. It is fair for us to assume she had plenty of questions among those ponderings. Mary, Did You Know? directs its curiosity to these quandariesnot because Mary was ignorant of the factsbut because the Incarnation is much more than a doctrine, or an event, that can simply be accepted and understood. It is a mystery to be encountered. The Incarnation is a hard thing to get our heads and our hearts around. We may accept the doctrine, while still feeling as though weve missed the more essential something in the story. Sometimes, then, we must seek other tools to help awaken our awe and etch the beautiful reality of the gospel into our hearts. One of the fruitful aspects of art is that it can help us move past intellectual assent toward attentive wonder. This is the attitude into which Mary, Did You Know? invites us. The question Mary, did you know? is not a factual one but a rhetorical one. It opens space for contemplation, curiosity, and wonder. The song invites us to peer over Marys shoulder as she rocks the Christ child to sleep, to witness the vulnerability of God, to meditate on the vastness of heaven contained in tiny fingers grasping for the comfort of his mothers hand. As with many good pieces of art, rather than merely instructing us in doctrinal truths, the song invites us into mystery and worship. Far from diminishing Mary, it invites to look to her as we attempt to understand the mystery of the Incarnation. For who would know this wonder, this strangeness, and this beauty better than the woman in whose womb the Son of God grew? Joy Clarkson is a PhD candidate in theology, imagination, and the arts at Saint Andrews University on the east coast of Scotland. She tweets, hosts a popular podcast about theology and the arts, and is releasing her first book (Girls Club, 2019) in February. For 50 years, John has baptized Jesus in private. But last week on the western bank of the Jordan River, landmines were cleared to allow visitors a first look at a faded fresco of the baptism in a crumbling Ethiopian Orthodox monastery. Trudging through mud while avoiding well-marked areas warning of live charges remaining from the Six-Day War, intrepid pilgrims once again received iconic witness of the beloved Son. Israel placed the mines between 1967 and 1971 because there was a war, Marcel Aviv, head of the Israel National Mine Action Authority, a branch of the Defense Ministry, told the Times of Israel, standing a few hundred yards from Jordan. But now its empty because its a border of peace. Israel partially reopened the Qasr al-Yahud baptismal site in 2011. But visitors could only trek a narrow path from the Greek Orthodox St. John the Baptist Monastery to the Jordan River. Their number has steadily grown, with the Epiphany holidayobserved on January 18a particularly popular draw. Last year, more than 590,000 visitors came, according to Israeli newspaper Haaretz. So far in 2018, more than 800,000. Once the landmines are fully cleared, Aviv believes the number will triple. De-mining began in earnest in March, though the initial agreement between the churches, the Israeli government, and the Palestinian Authority was signed in May 2016. A team of 22 Georgian minesweepers has so far removed 1,500 of an estimated 6,500 targets, rendering safe 50 out of 250 acres of land. Now accessible along the one-mile stretch of historic churches are properties belonging to the Greek, Franciscan, and Ethiopian Orthodox. Clearance still awaits for the Russian, Syrian, Romanian, and Coptic facilities. The oldest is a Byzantine church which was destroyed by an earthquake in 1024 A.D. and rebuilt in the 12th century. Consistently a pilgrimage site, the other churches were built from the 1930s onward. These ancient monasteries may or may not appeal to Protestants, who make up half of the yearly 2.6 million religious tourists in Israel. (CT previously reported on how your vacation can help the Christians of the Middle East, but that Arab Christians are disproportionately infrequent pilgrims.) There is a competing baptism site on the Jordanian side of the river. For what its worth, a mosaic map of the sixth century in the floor of an Orthodox church near Mt. Nebo indicates that John the Baptist baptized on both sides of the Jordan, said Imad Shehadeh, president of the Jordan Evangelical Theological Seminary. They tried to be politically correct even back then. Qasr al-Yahud means Castle of the Jews in Arabic, but some scholars believe that castle is a corruption of a term originally meaning break. This would refer to the tradition that the site also marks where God broke the Jordan River, allowing the Jews to cross into the Promised Land. Tradition also locates here the ascension of Elijah into heaven. The work, made complicated by recent flooding, is carried out by an Israeli firm and the British charity HALO Trust. Over half of the $4.6 million project was funded by donations. A representative of each church accompanies the minesweepers upon entry, to ensure nothing is stolen or damaged. Booby traps were laid in some buildings to prevent their use as hideouts. Palestinian staff provide logistical support, helping also to earn local trust. For the past eight years, HALO has cleared other sites in the West Bank, coordinating between Palestinians and Israelis. But there are still approximately 35 square miles of landmines in the West Bank, according to The Wall Street Journal. Aviv aims for Qasr al-Yahud to be fully cleared by December 2019. He has a vision that Israel will be fully de-minedincluding the Golan Heights and Syrian borderin the next two decades. Will the baptism site foreshadow an epiphany of peace? This is such a special place to be as a Christian, Agneiszka Witek, a pilgrim from Warsaw, Poland, told the Times of Israel. Im happy for the peace between Israel and Jordan I believe they can live together on the same river. Another 60 Christians arrested from Chinese church where 100 were already detained Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment Another 60 members of the underground Early Rain Covenant Church in Chengdu, China, were arrested this past Sunday, in an ongoing crackdown against the Protestant congregation. Police have reportedly been attempting to force churchgoers to pledge to leave the church. This time, according to World Magazine, the arrests took place at a park where the congregation had decided to meet, due to the church building being shut down in a previous raid earlier in the month when 100 worshipers were detained. The church members had been praying and reciting part of their Catechism, reading: What is your only comfort in life and death? That I am not my own but belong with body and soul, both in life and in death, to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ. Several other Christians who met at a separate location in the field of a nearby university were also taken by police. As ChinaAid noted, the church's pastor, Wang Yi, has been charged with "inciting subversion of state power." Some of the 100 Christian leaders and students who were arrested earlier in December had to leave their children unattended. A prayer letter released by the church after the arrests claimed that at least three believers who were detained by the Communist Party authorities had been tortured. Photos of the injuries from the alleged torture have since emerged online, showing bruises and others signs of beatings that the Christians suffered. One church member, who wished not to be identified, told BBC News that the lock on the church was broken, some of the churchgoers' homes were ransacked, and a number of believers were "under house arrest or are followed all the time." "On Sunday, some members tried to gather at other places for worship but got taken away as well. The Church building has been manned with police and plain-clothes officers, not allowing anyone to enter to do worship service," the church member added. She revealed that police have also been pressuring congregants to sign documents asking them to leave the church and take their children out of its Bible school. Several other underground churches have been shut down this year, with both Catholic and Protestant congregations heavily targeted by the administration of President Xi Jinping. Video footage from this year shows Communist officials severing crosses from church buildings and demolishing churches altogether. Wang had written a letter in the event that he would be taken by Chinese Communist authorities. It was released last week. In it, Wang expresses how he is filled with anger and disgust at the persecution of the church by this Communist regime, at the wickedness of their depriving people of the freedoms of religion and of conscience." The Early Rain Covenant Church pastor said that following the Bible, he accepts and respects the fact that this Communist regime has been allowed by God to rule temporarily." At the same time, I believe that this Communist regimes persecution against the church is a greatly wicked, unlawful action. As a pastor of a Christian church, I must denounce this wickedness openly and severely, he added. The calling that I have received requires me to use non-violent methods to disobey those human laws that disobey the Bible and God. My Savior Christ also requires me to joyfully bear all costs for disobeying wicked laws. Christian, Jewish leaders decry 'heart-sinking religious persecution in letter to Chinese President Xi Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment Johnnie Moore and Rabbi Abraham Cooper have written an open letter to Chinese President Xi Jinping, decrying what they called the heart-sinking persecution of religious believers. Moore, who is president of the Congress of Christian Leaders and a commissioner on the United States Commission for International Religious Freedom, called out the various crackdowns on Christians and Muslims in China in a letter published in Newsweek on Monday. The letter, jointly written with Cooper, the associate dean and director of the Global Social Action Agenda at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, pointed out that China has been growing as an economic and political superpower in the 21st century. "Yet, today, we fear we witness a heart-sinking regression as the Chinese government seems to be reaching for an altogether different set of values, values anchored in a darker time when religion, and religious leaders, were viewed as a threat instead of as valued citizens," Moore and Cooper wrote. "We urge you, as the undisputed leader of your nation, to put a halt to the recent closure of places of worship, the detention of clergy and believing citizens, and to policies that have forced the reeducation of countless others, especially affecting your Muslim and Christian citizens," they asked. "What should the world choose to think about a government that will arbitrarily place hundreds-of-thousands of its own citizens into internment camps to re-educate them, on the basis of their religion alone?" Pastors and Christian believers have been crying out at the church demolitions, arrests of entire congregations, and raids of both official and underground churches, which intensified following the implementation of the revised religious regulations in February. Reports from earlier this year separately found that close to one million Uighur Muslims are being held in Chinese concentration camps, supposedly for "re-education" purposes. The true test of a great civilization is not only its prosperity, its technology or its strength but its acceptance and tolerance of its people. No country, large or small, can claim to be great let alone to be a leader in the world while arbitrarily suppressing the small but steadfast prayers of a believer, the reverend and the rabbi urged. Furthermore, rather than giving the world the impression that Chinese society is threatened by the free exercise of religion, China should, in fact, become a world leader that sees the value of pluralism and diversity in its society. Moore told The Christian Post in a phone interview in September that the communist government's actions are "incomprehensible." "My personal experience with Chinese Christians is that they are incredibly patriotic about their country" and that they support their government, he told CP. He positioned that the house churches are "filled with patriotic citizens." "Why now? Why all of a sudden?" he asked about the crackdowns. "It's a sign of weakness, it demonstrates paranoia," Moore added. Sam Brownback, the U.S. Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom, meanwhile spoke out against the latest major raids on Christians in China, when over 100 worshipers were detained at Early Rain Covenant Church in Chengdu. The church's pastor, Wang Yi, was charged with state subversion. China's using same old playbook: using political charges of 'state subversion' to attack Early Rain Church Pastor Wang Yi & wife Jiang Rong for simply practicing their faith. #China must respect the right to #freedomofreligion & belief guaranteed in Chinese Constitution, Brownback wrote on Twitter on Tuesday. Christian neighbor attempts to slay dragon Christmas yard display Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment A Louisiana woman took to Twitter with a letter she received from an anonymous neighbor concerning her inflatable dragons Christmas decorations, which her neighbor claimed did not represent the true meaning of Christmas. Diana Rowland, an author whose books specialize in zombies and demons, has made it a yearly tradition to decorate her front yard with dragons for both Halloween and Christmas. This year, however, one of her neighbors decided to leave her a note that has since gone viral. Your dragon display is only marginally acceptable at Halloween, the note from the neighbor read. It is totally inappropriate at Christmas. It makes your neighbors wonder if you are involved in a demonic cult. Rowland chortled at the letter, according to BuzzFeed News. She then responded to the hate mail by adding halos and additional Christmas decor to her dragons. I did consider removing them for about a nanosecond, and then went, Nope, she said. In the letter, the neighbor wrote that Rowland may need help understanding the true meaning of Christmas, which is widely known to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, but the former detective turned fantasy author believes she is doing her part to spread delight this Christmas season. I think [the person who sent the note] misses the point about what Christmas is. Christmas is about joy. Thats what it boils down to, she added. If youre a Christian, youre feeling joy about the birth of Christ. We should all be looking for things to be joyful about. Our dragon holiday display got fan mail! (And apparently the "true meaning of Christmas" involves judgmental bullshit?) ???? pic.twitter.com/7NLZKkEW2x Diana Rowland (@dianarowland) December 15, 2018 Rowland pegged the note judgemental and posted it on social media for her followers. But to her surprise, it went viral and she received thousands of responses from people celebrating her choice of Christmas decorations. Its got more reactions than I ever expected, she maintained. I think this obviously resonated with a lot of people. I think there are a lot of people who have experiences with bad neighbors. Several people on Twitter vowed to send Rowland money through a crowdfunding site to help buy additional dragons as a response to her neighbor. While Rowland did update her lawn from three to now five festive dragons, she does not want people to send her money. I've been getting a lot of messages about fundraisers/collections to buy me MORE DRAGONS, but I would much rather any Dragon Army money be donated to a worthy charity of your choice. Let's make this holiday season about joy and charity for all. Thanks!! she Tweeted. Church, mother of Kelsey Berreth keep faith for daughter missing since Thanksgiving Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment Police in Woodland Park, Colorado, said they are still working with the FBI and other law enforcement agencies to locate 29-year-old Kelsey Berreth as her mother Cheryl Berreth is reportedly leaning on her faith for a positive end to the search. The multi-jurisdictional task force comprised of the Woodland Park Police Department, local law enforcement, CBI and FBI continue to follow-up on information and leads surrounding Kelseys disappearance, a release from the Woodland Park Police Department said Monday. As stated in Sundays update, the multi-jurisdictional task force completed its search of the Frazee property in Florissant, Colorado on Saturday, December 15. Because the warrant is sealed, there are no details available from the search. Investigators have worked nearly non-stop during the weekend and through Monday on this case, which remains the top priority for the Woodlands Police Department, it continued while noting that, Kelsey has not been located and there have been no arrests to date. Kelsey Berreth was last seen publicly entering a Safeway grocery store in Woodland Park, just north of Colorado Springs on Thanksgiving, NBC reported. Her fiance, Patrick Frazee who does not live with her, said he last saw her on Thanksgiving afternoon, when he went to pick up their daughter from her home. Police told The Denver Post that the only signs of Kelsey after that were text messages from her cellphone which pinged off a cell phone tower near Gooding, Idaho to her work and her fiance. Kelsey wasnt reported missing until 10 days later by her mother. I can't think of anywhere she's gone where she hasn't told me, Cheryl Berreth told NBC in a recent interview. It's just not in her character to do something, to just take off and be gone." Berreths uncle, Ed Stanfill, agreed in an interview with KOAA. He said that even though his niece was a reserved person who didnt mind her own company, her disappearance is out of character. Typically, shes fairly quiet. I mean, shes really reserved, Stanfill said. Its not normal. Kelsey and her mom typically talk quite often. I mean, they were attached at the hip since she was little. I mean, they were best friends. Other family members like the 29-year-old mothers cousin, Jodee Garretson, 50, of Pasco, Washington, told The Denver Post, she supported the conclusion that Kelsey would never have just disappeared without telling anyone where she would be. Kelseys a sweet, sweet girl. Shes very grounded. Shes a committed, reliable person. I dont believe for one minute that she would leave on her own without telling her family where she was going, Garretson said. She explained that she recently spoke with Kelseys mother who told her the family wants Kelseys name to stay in the news until she is found. She has a real strong faith. Shes relying on her faith to get through this devastating time, Garretson said of Cheryl Berreth. Earlier this month, the Sandpoint Seventh-day Adventist Church in Idaho, where Kelseys parents are members, said the church was holding prayer vigils for the family. There is no breaking news about the Berreth's daughter, Kelsey at this time. But I will pass on to you the strength and comfort that our prayer vigil and other prayer initiatives on behalf of Kelsey and the family have been to Cheryl and Darrell. They wanted me to pass that on to you, thank you very much for your prayers! Pastor Alvaro Sauza revealed to members in a statement on Facebook. The Woodland Park Police Department has pledged to pay up to $25,000 for information that leads to the location or safe return of the young mother. Tips can be called into the Woodland Park Police Department at (719) 687-9262 or emailed to the dedicated email account at kelsey@city-woodlanpark.org for investigators to follow up. Evangelicals hail Senate passing bipartisan prison reform bill, despite some Christian opposition Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment The U.S. Senate voted 87-12 to pass the First Step Act, a major prison reform bill, which has received evangelical support but also some Christian opposition. Russell D. Moore, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, tweeted his thanks to the Senate for the vote on Tuesday. "The #FirstStepAct has been a long time in the making, and it is a good and needed development," Moore wrote. The ERLC added in a tweet of its own that "this criminal justice reform bill has been a key part of our legislative agenda and we are thankful for the broad coalition that led to this victory!" Prison Fellowship, America's largest outreach to prisoners, and one of the biggest Christian ministries to push for the bill, applauded the Senate for passing the First Step Act. "This legislation will help reduce recidivism by preparing men and women to fulfill their God-given potential through restorative programming, including improved substance-abuse treatment programs, life-skills classes, and vocational training building job readiness to fuel local economies. This is about getting smart on crime by giving men and women, made in the image of God, the tools to change their lives," said James Ackerman, president and chief executive officer of Prison Fellowship. Craig DeRoche, senior vice president of advocacy and public policy, added: "Today, the Senate refused to double down on the failed policies of the past. The FIRST STEP Act's passage reflects America's growing demand for smarter and more restorative solutions to crime." The bill includes efforts to reduce the federal recidivism rate, and offers time credit incentives for federal inmates to participate in rehabilitative and vocational training programs. Among the other notable provisions, it reduces the second strike mandatory minimum of 20 years to 15 years, while the 3rd strike goes down from a mandatory minimum of life in prison to 25 years. "This bill in its entirety has been endorsed by the political spectrum of America," said Sen. Richard J. Durbin, D-Ill, one of the legislation's main backers. "I cant remember any bill that has this kind of support, left and right, liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican," he added, according to ABC News. The New York Times pointed out that one of the major effects will be that thousands of inmates will become eligible for immediate sentencing reductions, while thousands of new offenders will receive reduced sentences. Were not just talking about money. Were talking about human potential, Senator John Cornyn, R-Tex., said on Tuesday. Were investing in the men and women who want to turn their lives around once theyre released from prison, and were investing in so doing in stronger and more viable communities. Despite the strong bipartisan backing and evangelical support, more liberal Christian bodies, such as the National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA, which includes various mainline Protestant denominations, had argued that the changes do not go far enough. The United States is home to 5 percent of the worlds population and 25 percent of the worlds prison population. The current mass incarceration crisis was birthed out of racist intentions, and we must be just as intentional about addressing the embedded racism if we are to have any meaningful reform. This bill does not move us any closer to justice on either issue, the NCC had argued earlier in December. One proposal in the bill that the NCC strongly opposed was the use of electronic monitoring as a form of surveillance for released prisoners. President Donald Trump meanwhile took to Twitter to explain his support for the First Step Act, which he backed in November. "America is the greatest Country in the world and my job is to fight for ALL citizens, even those who have made mistakes. Congratulations to the Senate on the bi-partisan passing of a historic Criminal Justice Reform Bill," Trump tweeted on Tuesday. "This will keep our communities safer, and provide hope and a second chance, to those who earn it. In addition to everything else, billions of dollars will be saved. I look forward to signing this into law," he added. The bill will now have to go back to the House, where an initial version was approved earlier in 2018. If, as expected, it passes there again, it will be presented to Trump for his signature. Harvest Bible Chapel, James MacDonald scrutinized for culture of fear, intimidation; church denies Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment A prominent Chigaco-area evangelical megachurch is under scrutiny for an alleged culture of intimidation, fear, and suspicious financial activities, allegations the church says amount to an unfair attack from a journalist with an "unhealthy fixation" on it. Harvest Bible Chapel, which has several campuses across the Chicago area, was the subject of an eight-month-long investigation by former Moody Radio host and author Julie Roys, who published her findings in the most recent issue of World magazine. Her report detailed the actions of former elders who believed that longtime pastor James MacDonald was unfit to serve any longer in light of the New Testament requirements for being an elder or pastor. In 2013, eight of them penned a letter describing how MacDonald loved and mismanaged money, bullied people, and was known for "abusive speech," "outbursts of anger" and making misleading statements. This set in motion a dispute that garnered some notable press coverage at the time. MacDonald ultimately apologized for the harsh way church leadership had disciplined three of those eight former elders and those three elders accepted his apology in exchange for leaving the church alone and allowing the current elders to reform the ministry. Yet now those three elders and others say that they think no reforms have been implemented and that the culture of abusive treatment and shady financial activity has continued. Writing on her blog Tuesday, Roys elaborated further, quoting Randy Williams, a current HBC elder and former chairman of the church's executive committee a group of a few elders and MacDonald that make financial and legal decisions for the church who said in a November 2017 text message to a pastor at an independent Harvest Bible Chapel in Indianapolis that he was recusing himself from EC activities and the leadership team because MacDonald and the senior leaders conduct themselves with "deceitfulness and manipulation," and are trying "to run a cult and control the masses." "I dont see anything short of a public media expose getting James [MacDonald] on his knees," Williams concludes. Harvest's bylaws state that the executive committee has the "sole responsibility" for approving annual budget and salaries for MacDonald and senior staff. Two other pastors once linked with HBC David Wisen, teaching pastor at Harvest Bible Chapel Spring Lake, and Bill Borinstein, former pastor at Harvest Bible Chapel North Phoenix likewise express in a separate text thread from July 2017 their concerns with how the church's affairs are being run and about MacDonald's ongoing patterns of behavior. Roys obtained those words via a subpoena in defense of a lawsuit Harvest filed against her weeks before her investigative report was published. She explains that in recent years the church brought under its authority formerly independent nonprofit entities like MacDonald's radio broadcast called "Walk in the Word" and the now disbanded church planting network, Harvest Bible Fellowship, enabling the shifting of funds between them. A 2017 audit revealed that when HBF dissolved, the church used $1 million from Walk in the Word to cover its liabilities. Harvest also used money from Walk in the Word to pay for the creation of a "fenced trophy whitetail deer herd" at Camp Harvest, year-round church-owned facility in Newaygo, Michigan. "According to a web page Harvest posted on Oct. 30, people may hunt at the camp for $6,000-$8,000 per deer, with proceeds going to a Camp Harvest scholarship fund," Roys reported. The church acknowledged in a statement that Walk in the Word pays the camp a small annual maintenance fee for food, etc. for the herd as a thank you gift to the church. Roys' reporting chronicled accounts of Harvest leadership expelling children from the church school when their father would not agree to sign a "noncompete" agreement an agreement to not plant a church within 50 miles of the campus. She also highlighted how the church reportedly kept secret 20 percent of the budget, including paying MacDonald and his sons, and how he constructed a large new home with luxury elements, including a 10-car garage, while maintaining the house was under 5,000 square feet (not counting the garage and basement). The exact value of the house is disputed. MacDonald says his home was appraised for $1.4 million, a 2017 Kane Co. tax bill (which reported the house size as 8,500 square feet) listed the market value at $2.1 million, and Borinstein estimated in the text thread that the house is worth $4-5 million. The Evangelical Council of Financial Accountability, however, is defending Harvest. In a statement posted on HBC's website, it was noted that the council visited the church on Dec. 10 and examined the accusations against the church related to their broadcast and church planting entities. As part of its ongoing compliance review process, ECFA staff were on-site at Harvest Bible Chapel earlier this month. Of particular interest was the churchs compliance with ECFAs Standard 6, Compensation-Setting and Related-Party Transactions. Harvest Bible Chapel is in full compliance with each of ECFAs Seven Standards of Responsible Stewardship and remains a member in good standing with ECFA, the statement reads. This week, it was announced on SBC Voices that MacDonald is withdrawing from the upcoming Southern Baptist Convention's Pastors' Conference and is also foregoing all outside speaking engagements. In a statement, MacDonald maintained that the World story was a sordid re-hashing of opinions from a few "disgruntled former members." "Harvest Bible Chapel has owned its mistakes and endured to become a happier and healthier church, whose members recently pledged financially, in their walk/work for Christ, and in their promise to share Christ with others at unprecedented levels. The anticipated attack that comes with Gods kingdom moving forward has come, sadly, not from those in the world but from other professing Christians," he said. "We have chosen the high road and refused to engage in public assault on people we once served closely with who just cant seem to 'let it go,' even after all these years. The Elders are privy to many grace-filled private attempts to reconcile, extended in hopes that these unhappy Christians would find peace." CP reached out to MacDonald Tuesday, inquiring specifically about his decision to withdraw from the SBC pastors' conference and outside speaking engagements and about the comments in the text threads Roys posted Tuesday. A church spokesman replied in an email Wednesday that MacDonald has "been praying for a while about limiting his travel and speaking outside of Harvest. He felt led of the Lord to go ahead and do so for a season. That prayer preceded recent events. The HBC elders issued statements Tuesday of their own, defending MacDonald, the elder board and their actions. They believe Roys is attacking the elder board, has an "unhealthy fixation" with Harvest, and is trying to show that MacDonald does not submit to Elder authority and has no accountability, something they insist is "false." The Tuesday elder statement also asserts that Randy Williams is not the man they know who said what he did in the text threads Roys published and that he has not been available to them. "If Randy Williams was secretly antagonistic about the health of our collective governance, it was not known to any of us. We offer him the grace we all need in the context of regrettable words or actions. Love prompts us to believe he does regret these words," the statement reads. "Based upon what is known about his love for our church and Pastor James, we believe he must have read what Julie Roys published and felt devastated. Love compels us to believe the best; if that is not the case, we will of course make it known here." HBC filed an emergency motion in court, an entry of protective order Friday to seal all the documents Roys subpoenaed, which the judged denied Tuesday morning. They then filed a regular motion which will be heard in January. Roys' lawyer, Charles L. Philbrick, confirmed in a brief phone interview with The Christian Post Wednesday that Roys was not legally obligated to keep the specific text messages she released confidential. CP will update this story as more emerges. Harvest Bible Chapel Sues Former Members, Julie Roys for Defamation Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment The multi-campus Harvest Bible Chapel in greater Chicago along with founder James MacDonald, has slapped several former workers and independent journalist Julie Roys with a defamation lawsuit alleging the publication of false information about the church, its finances and governance that resulted in the loss of 2,000 members. "Two weeks ago, after six years of 'taking it too personally,' our church's Board of Elders decided to take legal action against those who have harmed our ministry through their careless campaign to discredit," MacDonald revealed in an extended statement on the lawsuit that was filed a week ago in the Cook County Circuit Court. "It isn't that some of the criticism wasn't fair. I believe in the marketplace of ideas and of regular, vibrant discussion inside a local church. It's just that their words were often untrue, their information was incomplete, and over time their tone of reasonableness disintegrated, exposing their obvious goal of ending our ministry. Over a threeyear period, their materially harmful untruths drove more than 2000 members out of our church a church we founded with a handful of people more than 30 years ago and have given our lives to," MacDonald explained in the statement in which he said he was "devastated." Along with the 13,000-member church, which is a cooperating member of the Southern Baptist Convention and MacDonald, a recent report from the Cook County Record also names Senior Executive Pastor/Chief Operating Officer James Scott Milholland, Elder Board Chairman Ronald Duitsman and Elder Board member William Sperling among the plaintiffs against the former members and Roys. Defendants Ryan M. Mahoney, Melinda Mahoney, Scott W. Bryant and Sarah Bryant are accused of funding and operating a blog called The Elephant's Debt, which the church alleges defrauds and defames. Roys is accused of defaming the church through her role as host of a show on Moody Radio in Chicago, as well as on her personal website. Harvest Bible Chapel notes in the lawsuit that since the church's founding in 1988, it grew into an organization that included more than 100 churches by 2014. The organization also developed schools and broadcasting facilities that led to the accumulation of assets worth more than $100 million and some 400 employees. The complaint alleges that Ryan Mahoney was a Harvest Christian Academy teacher until 2010 when the church didn't renew his contract for allegedly negating MacDonald's sermons in his classroom, and offering a cynical view of the church and its culture. Mahoney allegedly met Scott Bryant at the church, who also became "equally divisive after being declined a teaching opportunity that he repeatedly pursued." Both men allegedly stopped attending the church at the same time, and "began publishing negative and defamatory information about Harvest" on Bryant's personal website called Blood Stained Ink, which would eventually become The Elephant's Debt, which was launched in October 2012. The website alleged that the church was $70 million in debt in 2010 "and barely survived a bankruptcy in 2006," information which the lawsuit disputes. It also alleged that MacDonald has problems with gambling, is financially unstable, and leads the church with an authoritarian style all disputed by the church. Roys is accused of working "extensively and in mutual partnership" with The Elephant's Debt authors in the lawsuit, which notes that her husband previously worked with Mahoney. The church is alleged to have canceled Roys' appearance as a keynote speaker for a February 2017 women's event after she allegedly tried to get Moody Bible Institute board members to remove MacDonald's "Walk in the Word" radio program from its network, the Cook County Record noted. Roys is alleged to have declined to meet with church leadership for a story on Harvest she is currently reporting for World Magazine. Roys denied writing anything for The Elephant's Debt when contacted by The Christian Post for comment on Wednesday. Bryant and Mahoney also sought donations in a statement on their website to help with the legal fight ahead on Tuesday. "As you can well imagine, the news that James MacDonald and Harvest Bible Chapel was suing not only an independent journalist and us, but our wives as well, was stunning to say the least. More than a few of you have already asked how you might assist us through donations to a legal defense fund. As we suspect you know, a case of this kind can be quite expensive; and we are sure to be incurring at least tens of thousands of dollars in legal expenses and other costs," the statement said. "Several attorneys that we have spoken with have already suggested to us that if the case goes to trial over the course of 24 months, the final cost could run well into the high six figures." They also promised to return donations as equitably as possible if Harvest Bible Chapel withdraws the lawsuit or the final cost turns out to be less than expected. "While the authors of this website would never have chosen to resolve our differences in a litigious manner, we are confident that the legal process will ultimately uphold the values of the first amendment right to freedom of religion, freedom of speech and freedom of the press, all of which are essential to safeguarding the values of the Protestant Reformation and our common life," Mahoney and Bryant wrote in an earlier statement. In his statement, MacDonald does not dispute that the church had incurred nearly $70 million in debt and did not have failures in leadership concerning how elders were appointed. He said they made efforts at righting their failures but the bloggers remained relentless. "We loved these former members dearly, so our first efforts were to follow the biblical teaching on personal offense. We held many congregational meetings, owning the confusion from our conferences and confessing our failures to be broader and more transparent with our governance. We instituted policies to keep similar mistakes from happening in the future and continued aggressively reducing our mortgage (still on track to be mortgage free by 2023)," he wrote. "We sought reconciliation with former leaders or staff the bloggers identified as offended. Yet it was never enough. Again and again, as something trivial, controversial or difficult would happen in the church, the bloggers would show up online as carnal commentators distorting the record, then giving voice through comments to people who used anonymity to say the cruelest and most vile things," he continued. He said the decision by church leaders to settle the dispute in court was studied and prayerful and said they feel justified on the course taken against "fake news." "We are indeed living in an age of rage, fueled by 'fake news' where the presumption of innocence has almost universally given way to the presumption of guilt. Due process seems entirely disregarded in our national discourse and, for the church, this cultural decline can cause great damage to worship communities," MacDonald argued. "'Turn[ing] the other cheek' (Matthew 5:39) is a compelling command for dealing with people who offend us personally but no one struggles with dialing 911 when a criminal act is underway. What about wrongs society agrees are so destructive that laws are established to prevent their continuance? Again, we know what to do when the activity is criminal (call the police), and we understand what to do with ecclesiastical matters (call the local church Elders), but what about when bloggers are civil lawbreakers and the activity is demonstrably illegal?" he asked. MacDonald noted that his ministry consulted with many others on their decision to deal with "digital attackers" and they got "near unanimous confirmation of our thinking." "We have carefully reviewed the Scriptures related to the purpose of human government and the church. We have contacted many influential pastors and biblical scholars, and received near unanimous confirmation of our thinking. Now it's time to step up and say 'enough is enough,' employing less traditional but entirely biblical provisions from God," he wrote. "No more sitting by doing nothing while digital attackers ravage the body of Christ. We filed our lawsuit this week. Please pray for hearts to soften, for hostility to end, and for this blight on the body of Christ, fashioned in bitterness, to be struck down by God's established authority, while we continue our mission to live a life of love toward all who have come to trust and appreciate the ministry we offer," he ended. Has the decline of Christianity led to extremist political cults in America? Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment As churches and other religious communities in the United States find themselves with declining membership and attendance, some have argued that a new religion, the political cult, has taken their place. In a recent exchange of arguments, three social commentators tackled the argument of whether the declining influence of Christianity in western culture has fueled the rise of political extremism. Andrew Sullivan, author and columnist with New York Magazine, had a piece published Dec. 7 titled Americas New Religions that argued politics was filling the need for meaning found with growing secularization. Everyone has a religion. It is, in fact, impossible not to have a religion if you are a human being, wrote Sullivan, who defined religion as a way of life that gives meaning, a meaning that cannot really be defended without recourse to some transcendent value, undying Truth or God (or gods). The need for meaning hasnt gone away, but without Christianity, this yearning looks to politics for satisfaction. And religious impulses, once anchored in and tamed by Christianity, find expression in various political cults. Sullivan went on to describe political cults as new and crude, saying that they lack refinement and experience, with examples being found on both ends of the spectrum. We have the cult of Trump on the right, a demigod who, among his worshippers, can do no wrong. And we have the cult of social justice on the left, a religion whose followers show the same zeal as any born-again Evangelical, continued Sullivan. They are filling the void that Christianity once owned, without any of the wisdom and culture and restraint that Christianity once provided. Sullivan warned that these cults, both left and right threaten liberal democracy due to their rejection of compromise, doubt, reason, and the primacy of the individual. They demonstrate, to my mind, how profoundly liberal democracy has actually depended on the complement of a tolerant Christianity to sustain itself as many earlier liberals (Tocqueville, for example) understood, he noted. Ezra Klein, founder and editor-at-large at Vox, penned a Dec. 11 rebuttal to Sullivans piece, arguing that Sullivans essay on political tribalism shows hes blinded by his own. Yet even as Sullivan decries political tribalism, here is his theory of it: A decline in people practicing his form of Christian faith has led to a rise in political cultists who find their ultimate meaning in politics, who will stop at nothing to achieve their political goals, and who cannot be reasoned or compromised with, wrote Klein. This is not an analysis of the thinking deepening our political divides, but a demonstration of it. Klein also argued that Sullivans analysis was ahistorical, pointing to past times when American politics was violent and disruptive even though Christianity was more widely practiced. The consensus is that American politics was far more illiberal in our past than in our present, continued Klein. The era Sullivan looks back on fondly was, by almost any measure, more illiberal in its politics and more fundamental in its conflicts, in part because the meaning of America who got to participate in it, and whose claims it heard was so deeply contested. Warren Henry, contributor to the conservative publication The Federalist, defended Sullivan and argued in a Dec. 13 piece that Kleins rebuttal was grossly oversimplified. Henry quoted from influential seventeenth century philosopher John Lockes Letter Concerning Toleration, which stated in part that the toleration of those that differ from others in matters of religion is so agreeable to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Lockes principles were transmitted to Americans by pre-Revolutionary pastors. Thomas Jefferson took those principles to their logical conclusion in the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which extended freedom to all faiths, wrote Henry. Sullivan is not claiming that Christianity lowers the stakes of political conflict. Rather, he is claiming the Lockean idea of tolerance allows political conflict to replace (or separate from) religious conflict in the philosophical sense. Henry went on to argue that the political cult intolerance Sullivan described can be seen on the Vox website itself. Fanatical intolerance also fuels the desire to destroy institutions protecting the heretics. This is why Kleins website promotes 'The case for abolishing the Supreme Court,' and attacks the Senate and the Electoral College, continued Henry. Moreover, elevating group identity over the individual leads to the lefts current disregard for the presumption of innocence and other basic tenets of due process. It leads to the illiberalism Sullivan describes. Sullivan also responded to Klein's rebuttal, explaining in a Dec. 14 piece he took issue with Klein's focus on tribalism, explaining that his original piece was meant to focus on "cults" not "tribes." "... theyre not the same thing. A tribalism based on race or region or gender or partisanship, for example, is not a religious phenomenon," responded Sullivan. "At best, Klein seems to be saying that all politics and life is tribal, and that every political argument is ultimately a tribal one. And I profoundly disagree. So, I might add, would every leading light of the liberal philosophical tradition. Was Locke tribalist? Montesquieu? Constant? Tocqueville? Rawls? Please." "The core subject of the column was what happens to politics once God is dead and my point is far from new or original," Sullivan continued. "It is that the religious impulse will always be part of human nature, and it will occupy politics if it no longer finds expression in a spiritual space. Think of Soviet communism as a replacement religion for Orthodox Christianity, or national socialism for Protestantism. These were, in many ways, atheist theocracies, with all of the mind control and none of the occasional acts of mercy. They saturated politics with the question of ultimate meaning; and, in that feverish quest, they killed tens of millions of people and enslaved the rest. Red-blooded religious fanaticism has no time for liberalism." James MacDonald Reflects on 30 Years in Ministry, #MeToo, Millennials and Future of Faith in the US Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment Christians must return to the hard work of making disciples, abandon the less-is-more approach to church, and examine our own failures when considering the ongoing #MeToo fallout, says Pastor James MacDonald. In an interview with The Christian Post, the longtime pastor of the multicampus Harvest Bible Chapel in Illinois, candidly shared what he's learned and continues to learn about the heart of Jesus, and where he sees the Body of Christ going amid profound cultural changes. With three decades now behind him, MacDonald is already visioncasting and planning for the next 30 years, alongside his three children who are also active in ministry. MacDonald founded HBC in 1988 with 18 people and today hosts 13,000 at their seven Chicago-area campuses every week. Below is a lightly edited transcript of James MacDonald's interview with The Christian Post. CP: In 30 years of ministry, what is the greatest difference you see in terms of doing ministry in Chicagoland, and, more generally, in America, when you started versus 2018? Broadly speaking, what did American evangelical Christianity look like then, in your view, and what does it look like now? JM: Back in the late '80s I think we were kind of enamored with the idea that if we would make less of the message and strip it down to essentials that we could reach more people. That less would reach more. And now I don't know anyone who isn't convinced that that actually isn't the case. Less is more does not reach more people, it doesn't make better disciples. Only more [substance] makes better disciples. And it's really hard work. Jesus was more gifted than any person on Earth and He spent three-and-a-half full years on 12 people and didn't get all of them to the finish line. So it's really a time consuming, exhausting thing making disciples, and I think I've seen the church swing back toward a focus on quality. We've said for years in our church "not a quantity of disciples, but quality of discipleship." And more and more, I hear pastors leaning in that direction. CP: What has contributed to the breakdown such that some churches operated in such a way that they did not effectively couple evangelism with substantive discipleship? JM: The primary type of evangelism that we see in the Scriptures is one-on-one. Jesus with Nicodemus, Jesus with the woman at the well, Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch. And that does not in any way negate mass evangelism. In Acts Chapter 2 we see a mass evangelism situation with the coming of the Holy Spirit. But was that normative or an exception? I think typically we see one-on-one evangelism and to subjugate the Sunday morning, which is so needed for infusion of spiritual strength through proclamation [of the Word], through worship, through fellowship, from giving and serving. All of those things stoke the fire of a Christ follower's vertical relationship [with God]. And to subjugate Sunday morning to passive participation in drawing out the net horizontally [to other people] is, I think, increasingly seen as not adequate to sustain in a strong, growing church. That's the reason why in 2012 I wrote the book Vertical Church. We have to come back to that as our primary focus. CP: Since the fall of 2017 we've seen the #MeToo and #ChurchToo movements take off with credible allegations of sexual misconduct and abuse appearing in influential places. What do you make of this, particularly when it's happening within churches and Christian ministries? And how ought churches respond in light of these harrowing developments? JM: The first thing to say is that we shouldn't be sharing our opinions on this subject when that question has a biblical answer. And because it has a biblical answer it's the only answer that matters. If you and I were in a conversation and Jesus was sitting beside us, He wouldn't be asking what I thought very often. And so the Scripture says "He who sins in the presence of all, rebuke in the presence of all that others may fear." And you look in the book of Acts when they lied about their tithe, Annanias and Sapphira were taken, "and great fear came upon the Church." The only response to public exposure of private failure should be to look in the mirror, even when disaster strikes. Remember the tower of Siloam that fell on those people and Jesus says [in Luke 13] "You don't think something worse could happen to you? Do you think they are worse people than you because this happened to them?" And so in every instance when calamity strikes, when personal failure is exposed, we should be looking in the mirror. We should be saying: "There but for the grace of God go I." We should be deepening our own reflection and repentance. And most of all, we should not be piling on and shaming others but we should be responding with grace and with genuine reflection upon the needs of our own heart. Because none of us are all that we have articulated to be important. And I'm not saying leaders shouldn't be an example. Of course, leaders need to be an example, and if they are not an example of the believer then they should step down. But example of the believer does not mean example of perfection. That's why we're all worshiping Jesus again this Sunday morning. CP: Many narratives exist as to why we are seeing the rise of the "nones," growing numbers of those who do not affiliate with any particular denomination. There is also significant statistical data showing that millennials are abandoning their faith and exiting the church. What is your take on why this is happening as one who has been at this in the trenches for all these years? And what can pastors and leaders do to recapture the hearts and minds of this disillusioned generation? JM: To me, that whole paragraph is in some ways problematic. Just as watching every night on television cars floating down the street and people in rowboats with their houses underwater kind of makes me a little numb to the pain of that. I think in the same way, hearing these broad statistics about trends in the Church can make me numb to the millennials that I know. And I think that our church is not seeing that trend (No. 1). All three of our children are millennials, have strong and growing faith, and are serving the Lord. I think authenticity is the key. And I don't mean that in any way as a buzzword. I mean legitimate, self-reflective, nonsuperior, non self-righteous way of viewing others. And you know, Jesus told that story about the two men who went up the temple to pray. And the one man prayed in his heart "God, I thank you that I am not like other men." And to me, that is so much of the evangelical church. Faux-superiority, a misplaced sense of the fact that Jesus Christ died of the cross for my sins says nothing about me, but it says something about Him. That's why it's called grace. But we always want to draw a dotted line from the finished work of Christ and to me, and add some personal significance. And the problem with that is it causes Christians to act superior. And Jesus said let the man who said "God be merciful to me, a sinner," is the man who went down to his house justified, not the self-righteous person. I'm not saying this in judgement of anyone. This is what we teach our people, and I wrestle with these things myself, and I think the big turnoff in the Church today is this sense of condemning the gays, the social issues and I know what the Bible says about the these things and we wouldn't compromise on any of them. But holding to the Scripture versus punishing the sinner, those are different aren't they? And Jesus Christ said [in John 8 when speaking to the woman caught in adultery] "where are your condemners" and then he said "Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more." I was just having a conversation this morning with a pretty well-known Christian leader who had kind of sounded off on Twitter about what he thought another Christian leader should be doing. And I just privately appealed to him that we don't do that. We are under very direct orders about how we can speak about other people in the family [of God.] But then people jump in and say, "Oh but Jesus, He called them blind guides." Well, but that's false teachers, unregenerate people. And you can't apply the prophetic portion of Christ's ministry to our brothers and sisters in Christ with whom we're going to spend eternity. And in regard to them, we need to absorb disappointment rather than expose it to the eyes of people who don't know Christ. And the constant bickering between Christians is really what grieves the heart of God and causes people to be disillusioned. Even a surface reading of the New Testament would lead any literate person to the conclusion that love is the summa cum laude. All failures are a failure to love. This is something that I have come to with heartfelt conviction too late, and I can look back after 30 years of ministry on a loudmouthed version of myself with great regret and grief. CP: What is next for Harvest Bible Chapel in the next five to 10 years? JM: You're going to hear a lot more about Vertical Church, our Vertical Worship is going all over the world, our latest was nominated for two Dove Awards. We're all about leading people back to the substantive Christian message and we've had four pillars for 30 years: Unapologetic Preaching, Unashamed Adoration, Unceasing Prayer, and Unafraid Witness. And we're taking an unprecedented step as we launch what we're calling "next 30." We're adding a fifth pillar, which is Unconditional Love. And at the end of the day, that is the main thing. And we're talking a lot in our church right now about what we call "love 2 live 2 love." You're not living until you're loving God. That's the first great commandment, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength." And then "live 2 love." You're not really loving God unless you're loving others. And Jesus said the second is like the first. And not like it because they are both great, and not like it because they are both about love. But like it because he was only asked for one and he gave two because they are inseparable. I wish I'd learned that a lot earlier in my ministry. The sextoy market is growing quite rapidly in India right now. Although it is not a big trend, it is a hot topic on the internet as it is secretly expanding its market. In this article, we will focus on sextoy and introduce recommended sextoy for Indian beginners of sextoy by gender. India, the birthplace of the Kama Sutra, is very strict about sex. Also, premarital sex is basically not allowed. Therefore, there are many people who are sexually restricted. But what happens when you continue to be sexually restricted? Frustration may build up and you may end up taking your sexual stress out on your partner. If you are able to adopt sextoy in a timely manner, you can get rid of those problems. I want to have more exciting sex than Im having now. I want more variation in masturbation I want to get even stronger pleasure than I do on my own. If you have any of these problems, please stay with me until the end. What is sex toys for Indian? Sextoy, as the name implies, is a toy used during sex and masturbation. It is a generic term for vibrators, Egg-vibrators, Electric massagers, dildo, handcuffs and condoms. They are used to make regular sex more exciting or to make masturbation more pleasurable. Because sextoy is very stimulating, it can help you to get rid of the problems and frustrations of being in a rut of sex with your partner for a long time, or if you are unhappy with the lack of pleasure in sex with your partner. The ability to satisfy your desires with movement, texture, and size, which cannot be done by a normal human being, can help you to be satisfied with sex and, as a result, improve your relationship with your partner. It is also said to help improve sexual dysfunction (inability to get an erection or ejaculate) and difficulty in feeling during sex (insensitivity), which is attracting more attention than in the past. In recent years, the demand for sextoy has increased due to the spread of smartphones and the Internet and the increasing number of people using online shopping. Even those who are concerned about the appearance of sextoy (and find it difficult to purchase) can now easily obtain it by using mail order. In the case of online shopping, most of the stores have taken steps to ensure that the contents of the products delivered to you are not revealed, so you can purchase them without your family members knowing. Until a while ago, you had to go to the store where the adult goods were sold to buy them, so it was quite a hurdle to overcome. Also, many people may have an image that sextoy is somehow embarrassing to own. But nowadays, some of them are so stylish and cute that you cant believe they are sextoy at a glance. More and more people are using them for travel and outdoor use because they are not too bulky and are suitable for carrying around. Sextoy situation in India Before introducing the recommended sextoy for Indians, lets talk about one of the sextoy situations in India in recent years. In India, due to the high concentration of population, the following six cities have particularly high sales of sextoy in India. Mumbai Kolkata Bangalore Delhi Chennai Hyderabad These cities account for roughly 70 percent of sextoy sales in India. In the future, the percentage of sextoy use will gradually increase in other cities in India as well. If you never talk about sextoy publicly, that girl in your neighborhood might be a sextoy user too. If you are interested in sextoy, you dont have to suppress your desire for it. What are Sextoys for beginner? Among all sextoys, sextoy for beginners are vibrators, dildo, masturbators, Sex Lubricants, and condoms. Sex Lubricants and condoms, which are familiar to people who have had sex, are also a great beginners sextoy. I will explain the details of each toy later, but there are many sextoy products that are painful to use and can only be used after some anal expansion. I assume that the Indian readers of this article are people who have not had much experience with sextoy. If such people use professional sextoy suddenly, they are at risk of injury or trauma. Therefore, to introduce sextoy, you need to start with a beginners version and gradually become familiar with it. Advantages of using sextoy for Indians There are three advantages of using sextoy for Indians You can masturbate in a wide variety of ways. Can have stimulating sex Can develop new sexual zones If you try to masturbate with your own fingers or hands, it tends to be a pattern. However, with sextoy, you can easily masturbate in a variety of ways. You will definitely be fascinated by the attraction of new stimulation. Also, your daily sex life will be more exciting than ever. There are many things in sextoy that are visually stimulating and give you a strong and intense feeling of pleasure. This allows you to see your partners promiscuity in a way that you wouldnt normally see it. When you are in a relationship, sex with your partner may become a pattern, but it can also eliminate these problems. It can also lead to the development of new sexual zones (which is the training of sexual stimulation to allow you to feel orgasms). For more information on the development of new sexual zones, see the following articles [Women's Erogenous Zone]How to find and develop, 7 hidden sexual zones !![In India] In this issue, we will dissect the female erogenous zone! ..." Many of you may be like that. Men, in particular, shou... Thus, the use of sextoy can only be a good thing for the men and women of India. Sextoy for beginner men in India So, lets continue with the recommended goods for Indian sextoy beginners. For ease of understanding, we will introduce them by gender. Lets start with the men! The following five goods are recommended for novice Indian sextoy men Masturbator Cock rings Love Doll Sex Lubricants Toys for the prostate Lets check each one in detail. Masturbator The masturbator is a sextoy for men that elaborately reproduces a womans vagina, mouth, and anus, and is one of the most popular sextoy products. It is used by men to masturbate, and it is popular because it provides stronger stimulation and pleasure more easily than using hands. Most are made of good quality silicone, and their softness is something that cannot be achieved with ones own hands. They can provide stronger pleasure than a real womans vagina, so be careful not to overuse them. (You wont be able to have an orgasm in a womans vagina anymore.) Again Male masturbators are a wonderful toy. I do not need any favourite timing, bothersome bargaining. You do not have to worry too much. Revolutionize your masturbation time! ! ! Made in Japan is a wonderful kinky toy.#sextoysindia #SexToyIndia #Japanhttps://t.co/4k70QGzoTP pic.twitter.com/tRVdxTKPpa SEXToys India PR (@SextoysIndia) November 12, 2018 Some of them are disposable, while others can be washed and used over and over again, so its fun to buy a few to use depending on your mood. If you want to know more about masturbator, please click here Really pleasant male masturbation and how to do it Are you in a rut with your daily masturbation routine? I'm going to show you five ways men masturbate that you might ... [For Beginners] How to choose and use a male masturbator without fail Gentlemen.Have you ever used a masturbator? The person who sees this article is probably the one who has not experien... Cock Ring A cock ring is literally a ring-shaped sextoy that is worn on a mans penis. It maintains an erection by binding the penis with a ring of rubber and blocking blood flow. It is sometimes used as an accessory to be worn on the penis, and may be made of metal or plastic as well as rubber. In some cases, cock rings have parts or vibrators attached to them that stimulate the vagina, so they kill two birds with one stone, giving a woman pleasure while maintaining an erection. Cock rings are also sometimes used to treat erectile dysfunction. It can help with erectile dysfunction, where the penis doesnt get hard when you get an erection or doesnt last long when you try to insert it. Men who are prone to breakage or who are unsure of the hardness and size of their erections can use a cock ring to increase the size of their penis and maintain an erection for a longer period of time. Cock rings vary in price from around RS700 to over RS2000 with a vibrator function. Some of them do not fit your penis, so you should check the size of the cock ring before you buy. You should know the size of your partners or your own penis when it is erect. [Penis enlargement] What is a cock ring? Types and usage Cock rings can make your penis bigger and harder. It also makes sex with women more fulfilling and increases your sat... Love Doll Love dolls, also known as Dutchwives, are dolls with the appearance of a woman who can experience simulated sex. There are dolls that look like a woman, but they have no face and only have their breasts and lower torso cut off, and some dolls are so realistic that they can actually be mistaken for real women. Some expensive dolls can cost more than 1 million yen, and the quality of the doll is easily influenced by the price. The higher the price, the higher the quality of the doll will be, the closer it will be to the real woman, and the cheaper the doll will be, the less elaborate it will be, making it look like a real doll! Something is wrong! That is also true. You cant go wrong if you choose a balance between price and taste. There are stores that allow you to make custom-made love dolls, so you can create a girl of your choice. You can make a girl of your choice. You can start with inexpensive love dolls at first, and once you get used to it, you can try custom-made love dolls. If you want to know more about Love doll, please click here Thorough explanation of the charm of sex dolls! Have you ever heard of sex dolls that are used primarily for pseudo-sex purposes? It is a doll that is quite close to... Sex lubricants Sex lubricants are used as a substitute for lubricating fluid during sex or as a lubricant for men to use masturbator rules. It is not uncommon for women to have difficulty getting wet, depending on their physical condition, or to have difficulty getting wet due to their constitution. Forcing the penis into the vagina at such times can cause painful intercourse. There are various types of Sex Lubricants, some with a warming effect, some with a cooling effect, and some with a scent. Changing the Sex Lubricant used during play is recommended as a good sex accent. If you want to learn more about Sex Lubricants, click here. What is sex lubricant?Explain the difference and usage of each ingredient The word "sex toy" may seem like a hurdle to overcome, but lotion is actually one of the most familiar sex toys. Many... Toys for the Prostate Another sextoy for men is prostate toys. The most famous prostate toys include Enemagra, which was originally a prostate massager developed by an American urologist to treat an enlarged prostate line. Modern prostate toys are imitations of Enemagra that have spread as sextoy for men. Many people think of prostate toys as being used by gay men, but in fact they are often used by straight men. What is the prostate? The prostate is an organ found only in men. It is a walnut-sized organ located deep in the pelvis, just below the bladder, and its primary role is to protect and nourish sperm. You cannot touch the prostate gland from outside the body, but you can touch it by inserting a finger or sextoy through the anus. By inserting a finger or sextoy through the anus and touching the prostate and developing it, you can feel intense orgasms. Orgasms felt in the prostate are mainly dry orgasms, which are orgasms that do not involve ejaculation. (You can also feel orgasms with ejaculation through prostate stimulation.) The prostate is called the male G-spot, and dry orgasms can be much more intense than ejaculation. Therefore, men who are able to develop a prostate can become addicted to the pleasure. sextoy for beinner women in India The following are the recommended goods for Indian women who are new to sextoy. The following three are recommended for use by women who are new to sextoy. Vibrator. Dildo Electric Masserger Lets check out what each one is in detail. If you want to check out womens toys, click here. [BEST25]Sex Toys for Women in IndiaThat Can Help You Have an Orgasm There are many women who pretend to feel orgasm during sex. But don't worry, you don't have to pretend to feel orgasm... Vibrators A vibrator is a sextoy that vibrates with an Egg-Vibrator to provide stimulation and is often referred to simply as a vibrator. Some vibrate as well as rotate, and there are many variations of sextoy. It is quite a popular sextoy, and is well recognized by people who do not know much about sextoy. Its usage is similar to that of a massager, but it is more compact and easier to carry than a massager, and many of them look as cute as a lipstick or a macaroon, so they are popular among women. For a while, a famous influencer on twitter said, This is good! You may have heard of the topic of this article by introducing the recommended vibrators. Vibrators are great for women to use on their own, but they are also recommended for men who have difficulty satisfying women with sex. Since it is powered by electricity, it is far less tiring than moving your hands by yourself. This makes it easier to satisfy a woman with sex because you can caress her for longer than usual. Vibrators are mainly used on the female side, but they can also be used on men. When used on men, they are used to attack the nipples and glans, and in both cases it is recommended to wear a condom for hygiene reasons. Introducing how to use the vibrator, its purpose, and how to choose it! Vibrator uses the vibrations caused by the rotation of the motor to provide stimulation. It is one or two of the most... Dildo A dildo is a model sextoy made to mimic a male penis. It can be made of silicone, elastomer (think of it as a material similar to PVC), metal or glass. A dildo can be used by a man for his female partner during sex, or by a woman for masturbation to get pleasure from it. They are mainly inserted into women, but some can be used in the male anus as well. It is sometimes used synonymously with vibrators, but the vibrator is not the same thing as a vibrating device. A model of a penis that does not vibrate is a dildo. Some of them have suction cups that can be attached to the floor or wall so that you can enjoy realistic masturbation without using your hands. For fun, there is a dildo made in the shape of your partners penis. This one is also popular as a gift, and if youve been together for a long time and are having trouble finding a gift for your partner, you might want to pick one. To learn more about dildo, please click here. What is Dildo: Orgasms with Dildos for Men and Women A dildo is a model of a male organ that is used by women for masturbation and by men to stimulate the prostate gland. Th... Electric Masserger A Electric Masserger is a hand-held electric massager, also known as a handheld massager, and can usually be purchased at electronics stores. It was originally designed to relieve stiff shoulders and back pain, so the hurdle of buying one in a physical store is quite low. Many people may have seen or used it in some form or another, as it is often installed in leisure hotels. Such a massager is highly recommended for beginners because it is easy for women to get pleasure from it when they use it during masturbation. It is larger than Egg-Vibrator and vibrations are stronger than those of Egg-Vibrators and vibrators, so even just hitting the clitoris can give you a great deal of pleasure. For those women who have never had an orgasm during sex with their man, the massager may be a good way to get a feel for what it feels like to have an orgasm. It looks and feels like an electric massager, so you wont have to feel awkward if your roommate finds out. If you are in a rut of having sex with your partner, if you want to feel an orgasm through masturbation, or if you are thinking of using a sextoy, why dont you try it from a simple massager? To learn more about Electric Masserger, click here. What is a massager? Introducing types, selection methods, and usage Originally, the Magic-wand vibrator and the massage machine were sold as a home massage machine used for the back and th... How to choose a sextoy for Indian Now that weve covered the different types of sextoy, heres how to choose one. Especially if you are trying sextoy for the first time, pay attention to the following three points: Does the size fit you (the partner)? Does the size fit you (your partner)? Is the environment able to produce sound without problems? Price range First of all, the choice of size is quite important. Most sextoy are used against or inserted into the genitals, but the genitals are very delicate organs for both men and women. For this reason, using an inappropriate size may cause damage. Secondly, the environment should be able to produce sound without problems. Some sextoys not only wear, but also rotate and vibrate. Its easier to get pleasure from something that moves than something that doesnt, but the fact that it moves means that the internal rotors make some noise. If you live in a house with thin walls or if you have roommates, you may not be able to concentrate because of the noise, so it is best to choose one that is silent or has a low noise level. Especially in India, where many people live with their families, it is very important that you dont have to worry about sound when you use it. Finally, there is the price range. The price range of sextoy ranges widely, from around RS500 at the cheapest to RS10,000 or more at the highest. Its good to consider how much money you can afford and how much you want to buy. Do you want your family to not find out about sextoy? I live with my family and want to use sextoy without them finding out! If you are a man, you should buy a camouflage sextoy that does not look like a sextoy at first glance. For men, there are many masturbators that do not look like a sextoy, and for women, there are vibrators that only look like cosmetics. If you choose such a type, youll be safe in case your family members find out. How to buy sextoys in India The best way to purchase sextoy is through online shopping. For more information on how to purchase sextoy, please see the article below. Sextoy is one of them. Therefore, you can easily get sextoy in India by using online shopping. SexToysINDIA is a long established and stable sextoy store and you can have sextoy delivered to any place in India. They also offer cash on delivery, so those who are worried about shopping with a credit card do not have to worry. Of course, the latest security is in place, so your information will not be taken out when you use your credit card. To begin with, many people may be concerned about whether they are legally allowed to purchase sextoy. ikmAs it turns out, its not illegal. Right now, it is not open to the public because the Indian adult market is still in the development stage, but it will gradually spread from now on. Take advantage of sextoy and open the door to new pleasures and culture. Cautions for Indians using sextoy When using sextoy, keep the following three things in mind Keep sex toys clean Watch out for electrical leakage Beware of the heat generated by the body while using a sex toy As I mentioned earlier, many sextoy products are used for the delicate zone. Therefore, it is most important to keep the sextoy itself clean. It is very important to keep the sextoy itself clean, because if a slight scratch is created by friction, bacteria can enter and breed there. It is safe to wear a condom when using the masturbator, just in case. In addition, many sextoy devices are powered by a power source, so if they are not waterproof, there is a possibility of electric shock or malfunction due to wetness. Some may even develop heat during continuous use. If the fever becomes too much, you may get burned, so be careful. If you get a fever during use, stop driving the sextoy immediately and refrain from using it. You will enjoy sex more if you keep it safe and use it correctly. Summary What did you think? In this article, we have introduced the recommended sextoy for the beginners of sextoy in India. The sextoy market is growing rapidly in India and it will continue to grow steadily in the future. As India is a rather closed-minded country, it can be difficult to be open about ones sexual habits and values. However, being faithful to ones desires by properly dissolving ones sexual desire is very effective for ones physical and mental health. If this is your first time to learn about sextoy, or if you are interested in using sextoy, why not give it a try? Indian Sextoys for ur best! will introduce you to sextoy and other trivia about sextoy, sexuality, and sexuality for men and women. I want to read more! If you think its a great idea, please bookmark it. Nearly 1 in 4 GOP midterm voters 'leaning against' voting for Trump in 2020, poll finds 37 percent of Americans think marriage is 'outdated' or are 'not sure' Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment WASHINGTON Nearly one-quarter of Americans who voted for Republican candidates for Congress in the 2018 midterms say they are definitely not or leaning against voting for President Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential elections, a soon-to-be-released poll has found. Speaking at a lunch event in the build-up to the the American Principles Project Foundations fifth-annual Red White and Blue Gala dinner at the historic Mayflower Hotel last week, University of Texas at Austin sociology professor and author Mark Regnerus presented data from an extensive post-midterm survey that sought to examine the impact that family structures had on the 2018 midterm elections. The survey, which was conducted for the Austin Institute for the Study of Family and Culture, is based on a nationally representative sample of 5,285 Americans who were questioned just following the Nov. 8 election. We went into the field a couple days after the election and pulled out of the field may be a week-and-a-half later, Regnerus told donors and other supporters in attendance for the event hosted by the socially conservative think tank. Got this data last week. I am showing you what very few people have seen. According to Regnerus, the survey found that married Americans carried the bulk of the weight of the GOP House vote in the 2018 midterm while just 27 percent of respondents who have never been married and 27 percent of cohabitors voted for Republicans in the 2018 House vote. The survey also found that 79 percent of married Americans said they definitely plan to vote in the 2020 presidential election, which would become their highest turnout rate, Regnerus said. He added that turnout records were also set for married Americans in 2014 and 2018. Also among the findings, 84 percent of respondents who said they voted for President Donald Trump in the 2016 election said they again intend to back him in the 2020 presidential election. Meanwhile, 13 percent of respondents who said they voted for a Republican for the House of Representatives in 2018 are definitely not going to vote for Trump in 2020. Additionally, 10 percent of respondents who voted for Republican for Congress in 2018 said they were leaning against voting for Trump in 2020. If you put that if you put that together, that is almost a quarter of GOP voters who said: I dont know about this president for next time, Regnerus explained, disclosing that results could be different once there is a better picture of who the Democratic candidate will be in 2020. Only 53 percent of GOP midterm voters said they are definitely voting for the president in 2020. Additionally, over half of Trumps 2016 voters who voted for Democrats for House of Representatives in 2018 say they are leaning against voting for Trump in 2020. The survey also found that only 2.3 percent of respondents who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 said they plan to vote for Trump in 2020. I am not going to lean too heavily into this stuff because there is no Democratic candidate yet and until you have one, you are kind of asking questions into the dark: what do you think about the current president? Regnerus said. The survey also asked respondents whether or not they think marriage is outdated as an institution. In 2014, only 9 percent of the American public agreed in some form that marriage is outdated while another 23 percent said they were not sure. But in 2018, 12 percent of respondents said that marriage was outdated and 25 percent said they werent sure. So, this is 37 percent of the public thinks marriage is outdated or they are not sure, Regnerus relayed. In the midterms, these two packs hung together. None of them supported their House GOP candidate at a rate above 22 percent. That is dramatic. Americans who said marriage is definitely not outdated voted Republican at 58 percent, he added. Among the white subsample of those who said marriage is definitely not outdated, 70 percent voted Republican. According to Regnerus, there are several influential factors that indicate whether a person thinks marriage is outdated. If they think extramarital sex can sometimes be permitted, if they think pornography is OK, if they think adolescent transgender transitions are OK. People who think these are OK are more likely to think marriage is outdated, he added. Only 31 percent of young men [20 to 24] and 48 percent of women strongly disagree with the statement marriage is outdated, he added. So, a good share of women still think it is good and fewer men think it is good. Regnerus explained that nonwhites are more likely to think of marriage as outdated, as well as unhappy and pro-choice people. These are the things that coalesce and press people towards wondering whether marriage is here for the long run, he added. Regnerus stated that 40 percent of people who strongly agreed that marriage is not outdated said they are not intending to vote for Trump in 2020, even though many of them voted for Republicans in their House races in 2018. It was a good predictor of how they voted in the midterms but it is not a good predictor of how they think in 2020, Regnerus said. It is linear but it is not super strong. It doesnt mean that there are not a fair number of people who are not crazy about our current president. One new question that was asked in the poll this year that wasnt asked in 2014 was a question of whether or not the respondents felt secure on a 1-to-4 scale. The poll found that Americans who said they felt very secure were 2.4 times more likely as people who said they felt very vulnerable to have voted for a Republican in their house race. When we look at security by marital status though, married respondents [are] most secure, Regnerus said. They are also the most healthy. They are also the happiest and they are also the most likely to vote. Marriage pays these benefits independently. The survey also asked respondents whether they support free markets. Almost 90 percent of people who are most in support of free markets voted for the GOP House candidate in an election that didnt go well, Regnerus said. What that tells you is a fair amount of Americans since Republicans largely didnt fare well are trending away from support for free markets. He added that liberal Americans are significantly more antagonistic toward free markets in 2018 than they were in 2014. Although there are many issues that divide Americans politically, Regnerus said that the new data indicates that views about polyamorous relationships and hormonal and surgical transitions for transgender adolescents are two of the best predictors of polarization. Regnerus concluded by stating that marriage is a package deal. It provides security for people. They are less likely to feel vulnerable. It is a context for stable reproduction, sociability, employment, conservatism in public and private matters and aversion of external threats. By that, I do not mean Russia and China or anything like that but an aversion to external threats to the family, he said. The one thing I conclude is that these things all matter independently of each other but they coalesce around the same kinds of people and it is not enough to just support free markets and think I am going to be free market on all these things free market on issues of sexuality and marriage and free market on economy. You cant be agnostic on marriage and family without undermining the idea of how we support a free market and how we get there. The kind of building blocks to a healthy economy and a healthy society is through the family and through marriage. We can see it in this data. We saw it in 2014. As an associate professor of sociology, Regnerus' interests are in sexual behavior, family, marriage and religion. He is also a senior fellow at the Austin Institute for the Study of Family and Culture. He has authored three books from Oxford University Press, including the 2017 title Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy. Pro-lifers slam Francis Collins' support for fetal tissue research; not official position, HHS says Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment The Department of Health and Human Services has clarified that National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins recent comments on the value of fetal tissue research do not represent an official position for the federal government entity. A noted evangelical geneticist, Collins recently garnered outrage and calls for his resignation by pro-life groups when he expressed support for fetal tissue research at a meeting of NIHs Advisory Committee to the Director (ACD) in Bethesda, Maryland. There is strong evidence that scientific benefits come from fetal tissue research, [which] can be done with [an] ethical framework, said Collins, as reported by Science Magazine. Family Research Council President Tony Perkins said in a statement released Monday that Collins remarks were more reflective of the previous administration rather than the Trump administration, which has consistently advanced the sanctity of human life. Taxpayers expect their tax dollars to go to ethical and effective science. The fact is aborted baby parts havent been used to treat any person of a single disease, stated Perkins. However, tax dollars are contributing to an industry that fosters the trafficking of body parts from aborted children. We must instead pursue the alternatives, and testimony before Congress in the House Government Reform hearing last week demonstrated the availability of noncontroversial approaches. A spokesperson for HHS emailed The Christian Post a statement regarding the matter, distancing themselves from any comments Collins might have made on the subject. As stated in September, we are conducting an internal audit and review of the Departments research, policies and procedures of the use of fetal tissue in research, read the statement. No decision has been made regarding any changes in those policies. Nothing that Dr. Collins said should be seen as pre-judging the outcome of the review. Lila Rose, president and founder of Live Action, said in a statement on Tuesday that she believed Director Collins must be replaced with someone who recognizes that children who are killed by abortion should be mourned, not experimented on. Abortion is a barbaric and horrific human rights violation. It is unconscionable that taxpayers are forced to fund the gruesome baby body parts trade and that our tax dollars have been used to create demand for aborted children's parts, stated Rose. Greg Schleppenbach, associate director of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities, said that he found Collins comments deeply disturbing. Research using fetal tissue from aborted babies is unethical and should not continue under his leadership, stated Schleppenbach. Researchers have demonstrated the ability to both pursue excellence in research and to avoid violating the rights and dignity of nascent human beings. Dr. Collins can and should lead the NIH in a way that honors both ends, incentivizing research that all Americans can support. In late September, HHS terminated the Food and Drug Administration's contract with the California-based Advanced Bioscience Resources for "fresh" human fetal tissue following outcry from pro-life groups. "After a recent review of a contract between ABR, Inc. and the [FDA] to provide human fetal tissue to develop testing protocols, HHS was not sufficiently assured that the contract included the appropriate protections applicable to fetal tissue research or met all other procurement requirements," stated HHS in September. "As a result, that contract has been terminated, and HHS is now conducting an audit of all acquisitions involving human fetal tissue to ensure conformity with procurement and human fetal tissue research laws and regulations." Racist Trump Voters Less Religious Than Nonracist Trump Voters, Survey Says Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment Trump voters with unfavorable attitudes to minority groups were less religious, while Trump voters who attended church often were less likely to demonstrate racist attitudes, according to a new report. Twenty-six percent of nonreligious white Trump voters said their white identity was "extremely important" to them, while only nine percent of religious white Trump voters answered the same. Only about half, 48 percent, of nonreligious Trump voters said they have warm feelings toward black people, while nearly three-in-four, 73 percent, of religious Trump voters said the same. Similar patterns emerged with attitudes toward Hispanics and Asians. The report, written by Emily Ekins, research fellow and director of polling for The Cato Institute, used the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group surveys conducted in 2016, 2017, and 2018. The sample included 6,005 Americans interviewed between April 5 and May 14 of this year, 4,705 of whom had been previously interviewed. When asked if racial and religious diversity is at the core of American identity, 83 percent of Trump voters who attend religious services weekly agreed. Trump voters who never attend religious services were the least likely to agree at 67 percent. Trump voters who attend church weekly were also the least likely to agree with Trump on immigration. About half of them supported a border wall (49 percent), wanted less legal immigration (48 percent), and opposed a path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants (51 percent). Among Trump voters who never go to church, about two-thirds agree with Trump on those issues: 65 percent, 67 percent, and 68 percent, respectively. White evangelicals comprised an important part of the coalition that helped Trump win office. Their support for him has been a topic of interest due to what many see as Trump's display of values antithetical to Christianity, such as his mean tweets, misogyny, race-baiting, adultery and narcissism. The findings are consistent with the view that Trump's most religious supporters voted for him more out of concerns about a Hillary Clinton presidency than affinity for Trump. For example, Southern Evangelical Seminary President Richard Land, executive editor of The Christian Post, explained his reasons for voting for Trump in an August 2016 CP op-ed this way: "Mr. Trump will in all probability not be a good president, and he will do many things with which I profoundly disagree. However, I fear Hillary Clinton may be a terminal president who will destroy this venerable republic." The report found evidence that Trump's anti-Muslim attitudes are rubbing off on some of his religious supporters. Feelings toward Muslims were low across the board for Trump voters. But in 2016, the weekly churchgoers were the most likely to have warm feelings toward Muslims, at 27 percent. That number dropped, however, 13 percentage points, to 14 percent in 2017, the lowest among all the church attendance groups that year. Writing about the report on Saturday, Ross Douthat, a conservative columnist for The New York Times, noted that Trump's devout Christian supporters made the gamble that backing Trump would delay the decline of their influence in American culture, but in doing so, they allied "with a leader whose core appeal depends upon and possibly furthers the de-Christianization of conservatism." "Such a bet might be understandable as an act of desperation. But it's hard to see how it can reverse de-Christianization, and easy to see how it might accelerate it. Which, on the evidence of this survey, is something that secular liberals should fear as well," he concluded. Secret FBI files show threats against Billy Graham, called 'phony preacher' who doesn't know Bible Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment Late North Carolina evangelist Billy Graham was threatened more than once, and called a phony preacher in letters newly released by the FBI. The massive document, containing close to 500 pages of material on Graham, has been released nearly 10 months following the world famous preacher's death in February at the age of 99. Some letters that Graham received threatened his life, along with the lives of then-President Gerald Ford, former President Richard Nixon, members of the CIA, and other institutions. One hand-written letter from March 4, 1975 reads: We are sending a copy of this letter to that phony preacher man Billy Graham he is as wicked as the CIA." It adds: We are fed up with such wickedness in high places and it time to kill all the CIA men. Old phony Graham dont preach on CIA from the Bible because he dont know his Bible that well. As WSOC pointed out, federal agents determined that the letter was written by a mentally ill woman from Iowa. The woman, whose name was withheld, was not prosecuted, in part because of her mental aberration, and also because the ability on the part of the writer to carry out the threats seems remote and the letters (which are similar in content) are more in the nature of remarks by an irate citizen voicing complaints about the government in general. When questioned by the FBI, the woman at times would break down into tears and cry long passages from the Bible and within the next minute she would be laughing and carrying on a jovial conversation. Another letter Grahams office received threatened to to kill all the FBI, and to kill Billy Graham. A separate letter, also determined to have been written by a possibly mentally disturbed person, argued that "world leaders are mentally ill," that "they most be destroyed," and that "time has come to kill world leaders for crime in high places." Religious and political leaders around the world hailed Graham's impact on spreading the Gospel when he passed away in February. The preacher was known as "pastor to the presidents," having met every U.S. president since World War II through Barack Obama. Former President Bill Clinton said of the evangelist back in 2007 at the dedication of the Billy Graham Library in Charlotte: "Every life Billy Graham ever touched including people who never became president, never spoke at a crusade is better because he was a good and faithful servant of the two most important commandments (to love God with all your heart and to love your neighbor as yourself)." Russia targeted blacks, Latinos, Christians, in campaign to boost Trump, report finds Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment Russian-backed social media accounts conducted a widespread effort to target African-Americans, Latinos, and devout Christians to aid the Trump presidential campaign, according to recently released report. The Computational Propaganda Research Project released a major analysis on Monday titled The IRA, Social Media and Political Polarization in the United States, 2012-2018 that detailed the actions of Russias Internet Research Agency. According to the report, which was made for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, from 2013 to 2018, the IRAs social media content was seen by tens of millions of people in the United States on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Between 2015 and 2017, more than 30 million American users of various political backgrounds shared content from Facebook and Instagram accounts created by the IRA. Russian-backed social media content was designed to interfere in several US elections, most notably the 2016 presidential election, by doing things that included campaigning for African American voters to boycott elections or follow the wrong voting procedures in 2016, encouraging extreme right-wing voters to be more confrontational, and spreading sensationalist, conspiratorial, and other forms of junk political news and misinformation to voters across the political spectrum. The top 20 IRA Facebook pages represented efforts to influence a diverse range of Americans, with pages including Army of Jesus, LGBT United, Brown Power, United Muslims of America, Defend the 2nd, and Born Liberal. The largest IRA page, Being Patriotic, had over 6.4 million likes and more than 4.4 million shares. Army of Jesus, an IRA targeting Christians, was the 6th largest with about 2.3 million likes and over 650,000 shares. The report found that the IRAs not only promoted Trump, but also sought to discourage LGBT individuals and African Americans from voting for Hillary Clinton and instead told them to vote for third-party candidate Jill Stein. Content referred to President [Bill] Clintons [1996] signing into law of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) as an attack on the gay community, and in another, argued that Hillary supports Muslims, who the post insinuates are anti-gay, explained the report. Attacks on Clinton and calls for voter disengagement were particularly clear in Blacktivist during September, October, and November 2016, with statements such as NO LIVES MATTER TO HILLARY CLINTON. ONLY VOTES MATTER TO HILLARY CLINTON (Blacktivist, 29 October 2016), another one argues that black people should vote for Jill Stein (Blacktivist, 7 October 2016), or not vote at all, with the claim: NOT VOTING is a way to exercise our rights (Blacktivist, 3 November 2016). Since the election of Donald Trump, there have been many revelations about the interference of Russia-backed Internet trolls and social media accounts who supported Trump. In 2017, Congress released approximately 3,000 ads promoted by Russian social media accounts that served to polarize the American public with inflammatory imagery and captions. One of the headline-grabbing memes from the Army of Jesus IRA account showed a demonic Hillary about to do battle with Jesus Christ, with the caption "'Like' if you want Jesus to win.'" "Army of Jesus" started late in 2016, just before the election, the report noted. Another post by the "Army of Jesus" group showed Satan arm-wrestling Christ, with the former declaring "If I win Clinton wins!" and the latter replying, "Not if I can help it!" The report found, however, that most of the "Army of Jesus" posts had positive messages, and the page only grew in popularity after the election. "These posts are rather different to others that targeted conservatives and right-wing users. Instead of negative messaging about immigrants and antagonism towards liberals, these messages involved a more conciliatory discourse centered on Christianity as a means to heal the divides that crystallized in the US by the end of 2016. These posts encouraged users to put less faith in politics and instead be faithful to God: 'America is in trouble and the solution is not in the politics, not the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. The only hope for this nation is GodLike if you agree!'(Army of Jesus, 6 November 2016)," the report stated. Although the accounts in question have now all been shut down, Facebook, Twitter, and Google officials have all testified before Congress regarding the Russian interference. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), member of the SSCI, said in a statement last year that the revelations about the ads heralded "cataclysmic change." "What we're talking about is a cataclysmic change. What we're talking about is the beginning of cyberwarfare," stated Feinstein. "What we're talking about is a major foreign power with sophistication and ability to involve themselves in a presidential election and sow conflict and discontent all over this country. We are not going to go away, gentlemen. And this is a very big deal." Follow Michael Gryboski on Twitter or Facebook Justice is Merriam-Websters Word of the Year for 2018; did evangelicals give it a boost? Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment Justice is blind. Justice is served. Justice is, according to Martin Luther King Jr., where the arc of the moral universe bends toward. It is also Merriam-Websters word of the year for 2018. Merriam-Webster released an announcement on Monday stating that Justice was the most looked-up word in 2018 on their website, having seen a 74 percent increase compared to 2017. The concept of justice was at the center of many of our national debates in the past year: racial justice, social justice, criminal justice, economic justice, stated the dictionary company. In any conversation about these topics, the question of just what exactly we mean when we use the term justice is relevant, and part of the discussion. Merriam-Webster concluded that news events like attorney Robert Muellers investigation and the heated debate over the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh were contributing factors. Justice has varied meanings that do a lot of work in the languagemeanings that range from the technical and legal to the lofty and philosophical. For many reasons and for many meanings, one things for sure: justice has been on the minds of many people in 2018, continued Merriam-Webster. Other heavily searched entries on the dictionary website included Nationalism, Pansexual, Lodestar, Epiphany, Feckless, Laurel, Pissant, Respect, Maverick, and Excelsior. Stan Lees motto and salutation excelsior spiked following his death in November. He used the word to conclude each of the monthly columns he wrote for Marvel Comics, noted the dictionary site. Justice has been a word found in the center of major debates and discussion points among evangelical Christians during 2018, and the social justice debate was #9 on The Christian Post's top 10 stories of 2018. In August, influential California Pastor John MacArthur criticized what he called evangelicals' "newfound obsession with the notion of 'social justice'" in a series of blog posts. That was followed by a statement signed by other evangelical leaders. Specifically, we are deeply concerned that values borrowed from secular culture are currently undermining Scripture in the areas of race and ethnicity, manhood and womanhood, and human sexuality. The Bible's teaching on each of these subjects is being challenged under the broad and somewhat nebulous rubric of concern for 'social justice, read the statement in part. Others evangelicals criticized the statement. Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, responded that he believed people who would say [they oppose social justice] don't really believe it [because they] don't act that way when it comes to the issues they care about and in most cases rightly care about. In almost every case, we are not really talking about 'social justice' and we are not even talking about social engagement broadly. We are almost always talking about race, said Moore. I don't even want to concede to the conceit that what we are talking about is a broader issue of social engagement because again, that is almost never the case. Some of the very people who would say this are the people who have talked about, and rightly so, abortion and the systemic public problem of abortion. In September, the National Association of Evangelicals decided to update their For the Health of the Nation public policy guide to include a new category titled Racial Justice and Reconciliation. "The United States has a tragic history of genocide against Native Americans, the cruel practice of enslaving Africans, and the unjust segregation and exploitation of immigrants and the descendants of slaves," noted the updated guide. "While the United States has made significant strides toward legal and social equality in principle, the legacy of racism and implicit racial bias still leaves many Native Americans, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Hispanics and other ethnic minorities vulnerable to a variety of social ills." Many evangelical pastors preached or wrote on the issue of justice in 2018, including Matt Chandler, Tim Keller, Trip Lee and Bartholomew Orr. Preaching in April at the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission MLK50 conference in Memphis, Chandler expressed concern about some of the inconsistencies among his God-fearing flock when it comes to racial issues. "If I preach the sermon out of the book of Isaiah on justice, my inbox would fill with their glee that I would broach the subject. But if I applied it to the subject of race, then all of a sudden I was a Marxist or I've been watching too much of the liberal media. If I spoke on abortion, I was applauded as courageous, as a ferocious man of God, and yet when I would tackle race I was being too political," Chandler said. At the Together for the Gospel conference in Louisville, Kentucky, Virginia pastor David Platt remarked, "Churches can be the most powerful impetus for justice in our culture on the issue of race if we will humble ourselves before God and one another, if we will repent and pray and work together for justice in a way that brings great glory to our God." Outrage after priest suggests at funeral that teen who committed suicide might not go to Heaven Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment Rev. Don LaCuesta, a priest at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic Church in Temperance, Michigan, is now under fire for suggesting at the funeral of an 18-year-old college student that he might not go to Heaven because he took his own life. Jeff and Linda Hullibarger, parents of Maison Hullibarger, who committed suicide on Dec. 4, are now calling for LaCuesta to be fired for traumatizing his friends and family at his funeral on Dec. 8, the Toledo Blade reported. Its not OK, Jeff Hullibarger told the publication. He needs to be held accountable. According to The New York Times, the Hullibargers had expected uplifting words for the friends and relatives attending the funeral of their son at the church where all six of their children were baptized and confirmed in the Catholic Church, but said what they got from LaCuestas pulpit was condemnation. "It was his time to tell everybody what he thought of suicide, [and] we couldn't believe what he was saying," Maison's father told the Detroit Free Press. He was up there condemning our son, pretty much calling him a sinner. He wondered if he had repented enough to make it to Heaven. He said 'suicide' upwards of six times. When some people started walking out of the funeral crying, including boys who were his sons age, the bereaved father walked to the pulpit and whispered to the priest, "Father, please stop." LaCuesta, however, would not relent. "People told me there was almost a smirk on his face," Jeff Hullibarger said. "We wanted him to celebrate how Maison lived, not how he died," Maison's mother said. In a statement that has since been shared widely, the Archdiocese of Detroit apologized that LaCuesta failed to bring comfort to the family. It was also noted that the priest was suspended from funeral duties and would undergo additional training and review. "After some reflection, the presider agrees that the family was not served as they should have been served. For the foreseeable future, he will not be preaching at funerals and he will have his other homilies reviewed by a priest mentor. In addition, he has agreed to pursue the assistance he needs in order to become a more effective minister in these difficult situations, the archdiocese said. "We have been in contact with the family since learning of this situation, and we will continue to offer our support going forward." As many Christians, including pastors, have been victims of suicide, some have been challenging the enduring "myth" that suicide victims are condemned to Hell. Kayla Stoecklein, widow of late Inland Hills Church Lead Pastor Andrew Stoecklein, who died after attempting suicide at his California church in August, wrote on a blog, "This is a common misbelief about suicide and it breaks my heart ... I believe with 100% of my soul that Andrew is in heaven. Andrew had a real, raw, authentic, and infectious relationship with Jesus. Thousands of people will be in heaven because of him." Kay Warren, best-selling author and Bible teacher who co-founded Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California, with her husband, Rick, also supports the view that suicide doesn't condemn a Christian to Hell. Warren's son, Matthew, fatally shot himself at the age of 27 in April 2013, after a long and private struggle with mental illness. "God's promised us that Matthew's salvation was safe and secure. Matthew gave his life to Jesus when he was a little boy. And so, I'm absolutely 100 percent confident based on the work of Jesus that Matthew is in Heaven," she told The Christian Post in an earlier interview. Email Whatsapp Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment Another week another example of how physician-assisted suicide targets the vulnerable. This time: Aspergers patients. In 2010, 38-year-old Tine Nys was one of approximately 1,000 people euthanized in Belgium. Nys was not suffering from a terminal illness. In fact, she wasnt sick at all. As Ive mentioned before on BreakPoint, despite how its sold around the world, inevitable death isnt a requirement for euthanasia in Belgium. The standard for eligibility is unbearable and untreatable suffering, which has come to include psychological suffering. Between 2005 and 2014, 124 people diagnosed with a mental and/or behavioral disorder were euthanized in Belgium. These included conditions such as depression and dementia. But in Nys' case, its wasnt even clear she was suffering at all, much less in an unbearable and untreatable sense. Nys had been diagnosed with Aspergers Syndrome, a mild form of autism. Aspergers is characterized by, among other things, difficulty in social situations and restricted interests. Its also characterized by remarkable focus and persistence, attention to detail, and an aptitude for recognizing patterns. If that doesnt sound especially unbearable, youre correct. And many people agree. Venture capitalist Peter Thiel has called Aspergers a possible big advantage in places like Silicon Valley. In fact, the person who helped me write this commentary will tell you that he displays more than a few Aspergers characteristics, and he and I both will tell you that those characteristics help him do the amazing job he does. If all that was wrong with Nys was Aspergers, then even under Belgiums absurdly lax standards, her request for euthanasia should not have been approved. And so her family filed a criminal complaint against the doctors who approved her request. Heres the good news: the head of Belgiums euthanasia review commission announced he would no longer accept patients referred by Nyss psychiatrist, Lieve Thienpont, who, by the way, partially justified Nyss death by referring to her family as seriously dysfunctional, wounded, (and) traumatized with very little empathy and respect for others. Still, this is too little, too late. As early as 2015, Belgian doctors were aware of the high number of requests that this psychiatrist fielded and how many of them were approved. Heres more good news: in late November, Belgian officials opened a criminal investigation into this psychiatrist, and into two other doctors concerning the circumstances of Nys death. The bad news is this will do nothing to roll back Belgiums culture of death. After all, Thienpont isnt the only Belgian doctor approving requests for euthanasia from people whose unbearable and untreatable condition is simply psychological or even autism. Shes simply the doctor most associated with a practice the New York Post called controversial and hotly debated. Thats not the same thing as illegal. The case of Tine Nys is more evidence that talk about protecting vulnerable people from euthanasia once the cat is out of the bag is just that, talk. Since 2002, more than 10,000 people have been euthanized in Belgium, and before Thienpont, only one other case was referred to prosecutors and that one was eventually dropped. Once you concede that some lives are not worth living, then the criteria for what not worth living means will inevitably expand. Euthanasia isnt nor has it ever been about alleviating suffering. Its about personal autonomy, the right to live or die as you choose, and the advancement of a culture of death. After all, it only took Belgium eight short years to go from euthanizing terminal cancer patients to killing people whom, under different circumstances, might be working in Silicon Valley. Or for that matter, writing for BreakPoint. Resources Euthanasia and Its Victims From Right to Die to Duty to Die, Eric Metaxas | BreakPoint.org | February 15, 2018 Always Care, Never Kill: How Physician-Assisted Suicide Endangers the Weak, Corrupts Medicine, Compromises the Family, and Violates Human Dignity and Equality, Ryan T. Anderson | Heritage.org | March 24, 2015 Originally posted at Breakpoint. Email Whatsapp Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment On Tuesday, The Washington Post ran an opinion piece by Charlie Camosy, an associate professor of theology at Fordham University. In the op-ed, Camosy, who identifies as a left-leaning pro-lifer, criticizes the March for Life for having writer and commentator Ben Shapiro as their keynote speaker at this Januarys March. Camosy states that speakers like Shapiro and President Trump alienate moderate and liberal pro-lifers and make it difficult to build the broad-based coalition necessary to reverse Roe v. Wade and change abortion policy in this country. Camosys criticism is misguided. During the past few years, Ben Shapiro has emerged as one of the most incisive conservative commentators in the country. He has over 1.7 million followers on Twitter and his Daily Wire website receives over 140 million page views on a monthly basis. Furthermore, Shapiro is anything but a robotic Trump booster. In both his podcasts and writing he has offered both praise and criticism for the Trump administration. His appearance will give this Januarys March for Life some star power and should certainly generate some extra attention for this years march. Whats more, Camosy uses Shapiros invitation as evidence that politically liberal pro-lifers are marginalized by March for Life organizers. His arguments are unpersuasive. He states that non-conservative pro-life groups hold alternative events around the March because they are uncomfortable with its tenor. However, these events are not meant to protest the March, but rather to give like-minded pro-lifers a chance to socialize and network. Furthermore, groups representing liberal pro-lifers participate in various strategy meetings, and many of these groups have booths at both the Students for Life of America (SFLA) conference and the Cardinal OConnor conference at Georgetown. Both conferences routinely attract large crowds of enthusiastic, and politically diverse, college students. Camosy claims that pro-lifers have lost ground among young people after Trumps election. He goes on to say that the youth outreach group, SFLA has quit using the term pro-life in their activist work because of unpleasant connotations. However, SFLA President Kristan Hawkins says that this is a mischaracterization. Writing on Facebook, she said SFLA uses the phrase anti-abortion because politically liberal groups have co-opted the phrase pro-life for other issues and diluted its meaning. For that reason, it is simply easier when recruiting potential members to ask students if they are pro- or anti-abortion. Furthermore, there is a broad body of survey data which shows that the current generation of young people is more receptive to pro-life arguments than their predecessors. The pro-life movement has always been ideologically diverse and pro-lifers would do well to highlight that diversity. However, non-conservative pro-lifers should realize that successful outreach to Democrats may take a while to develop. For instance, ten years ago, groups supporting same-sex marriage did not invest much time worrying about their lack of support from Republicans or conservatives. They made consistent inroads into the Democratic Party, gained ground in the court of public opinion, and eventually won the support of some Republicans. Similarly, a pro-life movement that continues to gain in popularity will, over time, secure the support of more Democratic officeholders. Overall, the pro-life movement has quietly made great progress in recent years. There has been a sharp and durable increase in the number of pro-life laws being enacted at the state level. A higher percentage of unintended pregnancies are being carried to term. Most importantly, Americas abortion rate continues to fall. That said, most of these positive developments receive scant attention from the mainstream media. It is unfortunate that media outlets like The Washington Post are eager to highlight internal tensions in the pro-life movement instead of giving pro-lifers an opportunity to promote our arguments and tout the impressive progress we have made. Originally posted at cnsnews.com Michael J. New is a Visiting Associate Professor at Ave Maria University and an associate scholar at the Charlotte Lozier Institute. Follow him on Twitter @Michael_J_New By Trend Iraqi Airways has opened a branch in Azerbaijan, Trend reports Dec.19 citing Vergiler newspaper of the countrys Ministry of Taxes. The companys branch was registered in Azerbaijan on October 30, 2018 at the following legal address: Baku, Khatai district, Nobel Avenue, 15, class. 1212, apt. 124. The legal representative of the company is the Iraqi citizen Abdulkarim Ahmed. Iraqi Airways is the national carrier of Iraq, headquartered on the grounds of Baghdad International Airport in Baghdad. It is the second oldest airline in the Middle East. Iraqi Airways operates domestic and regional service. Its main base is Baghdad International Airport. 'A church without Putin, Moscow poison': Ukraine elects new Orthodox bishop in major Christian rift Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment Ukrainian leaders celebrated the election of a new bishop separate from the Russian Orthodox Church on Saturday, though the latter has warned of all-out persecution. Metropolitan Epiphanius was celebrated at St. Sophias Cathedral in downtown Kiev by hundreds of other bishops, priests, and church figures, The New York Times reported. The newly independent Ukraine Orthodox Church is expected to officially be granted autonomy in January, despite the wishes and protests of the larger Russian Orthodox Church. Ukrainian President Petro O. Poroshenko, quoting national poet Taras Shevchenko, declared that Ukraine will no longer drink Moscow poison from the Moscow cup." He added that citizens should remember the day as the final acquisition of independence from Russia. Poroshenko added that he will travel with Metropolitan Epiphanius in January to Istanbul, the church's historical foundations, to collect the autonomy order, known as the Tomos of Autocephaly. What kind of church is this? the president prompted. This is a church without Putin. What kind of church is this? It is a church without Kirill, he added, referring to Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, the Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church. What kind of church is this? It is a church without prayers for the Russian government and Russian military. The rift between the Russian and Ukrainian church, one of the biggest in the Christian world in centuries, formed in the wake of the continuing war in Ukraine against Russian separatists. The violence in the country escalated in 2014, following the annexation of Crimea by Putin, which has been strongly condemned by Western world leaders. Kirill, on the other hand, warned of "all-out persecution" for Russia-supporting Orthodox believers in Ukraine, however. The Russian church leader sent a letter to United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, as well as to European political leaders and Pope Francis, asking for protection of believers in Ukraine. "The interference by the leaders of the secular Ukrainian state in church affairs has recently assumed the shape of undue pressure being exerted on the bishops and priests of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which can be defined as the start of all-out persecution," Kirill said in an official statement on December 14, as translated by Radio Free Europe. The major disagreement already caused the Russian Orthodox Church to sever its ties with the central Orthodox Church community back in October. The move was in protest of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople's decision to recognize the Ukrainian Orthodox Church as independent from Russia. "We now stand before a new church reality: we no longer have a single coordinating center in the Orthodox Church and we must very clearly recognize that," Metropolitan Ilarion, the Moscow Patriarchate's head of external relations, said at the time. "The Constantinople Patriarchate liquidated itself as such a center." Metropolitan Tikhon, primate of the Orthodox Church in America, commented on the issue in a letter back in September. "We are deeply aware of the pain and trauma in the life of Orthodox people caused by ecclesial schism which weakens Orthodox witness and evangelism in society. Such pain and trauma have been wounds in the life of Orthodox Christians in Ukraine for several decades," wrote Tikhon in the letter that was shared with The Christian Post. "Schism, division, and mutual antagonism are not only canonical problems they are pastoral and spiritual challenges demanding the healing power of Christ and Christian faith." British school district to teach 8-y-o kids that 'all genders' can have periods Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment As more girls today are seeking to transition to become transgender boys, a town in England has advised its sex education teachers to tell students as young as eight that all genders can have periods. The Brighton & Hove City Council has recently issued new guidelines advancing what is referred to as a #periodpositive charter approach that supposedly is designed to eliminate the stigma around menstruation. The councils new guidelines were issued on Dec. 3 and will impact what is taught to students as early as grade four (8-9 years old). The guidance states that trans boys and men and non-binary people may have periods. Language and learning about periods is inclusive of all genders, cultures, faiths and sexual orientations, the guidance reads. For example; girls and women and others who have periods. The council has ordered that waste bins for used period products should be provided in all toilets for children. After initial criticism of the guidelines, the city council, which oversees dozens of area schools, defended the new guidance in a statement to Mail Online, saying that the council is only encouraging effective education on menstruation and puberty. The councils guidance comes as previous reports indicated last month that there were over 40 students at a secondary school in Brighton who identify as a gender different than their biological sex. [W]e hope to reduce stigma and ensure no child or young person feels shame in asking for period products inside or outside of school if they need them, the statement from the Brighton & Hove City Council reads. We believe that its important for all genders to be able to learn and talk about menstruation together Our approach recognizes the fact that some people who have periods are trans or non-binary. Among critics of the guidance is conservative parliamentarian David Davies. Davies told the Daily Mail that the new Brighton & Hove guidance is insanity. Learning about periods is already a difficult subject for children that age, so to throw in the idea girls who believe they are boys also have periods will leave them completely confused, Davies was quoted as saying. Transgender Trend, a U.K.-based coalition of parents concerned about the current trend to diagnose gender non-conforming children as transgender, also voiced its concern. Girls going through puberty are already having a difficult time, Transgender Trends Stephanie Davies-Arai told the Daily Mail. What they should be given is clear language to be able to talk about their bodies and their female biological functions without couching it in politically correct terms. Earlier this year, it was reported that the U.K. National Health Service began investigating why there has been an over 4,000-percent increase in the number of children looking to transition to the opposite sex. The data suggest that girls are more likely to want to transition to become a boy. According to the U.K. Express, there were 40 girls who sought to transition in the U.K. over nine years ago. But in 2017-2018, there were over 1,806 girls looking to transition. Christian mother says she was fired from Girlguiding UK for allowing kids to use 'love my God' oath Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment A Christian mother has claimed that she was fired from Girlguiding U.K. after she allowed children to use the phrase love my God when making pledges to join. Girlguiding U.K, the countrys leading organization for girls and young women, has insisted that the woman resigned, however. Emma Jeffery told The Daily Mail that she was not trying to shove religion down peoples throats just offering them a choice. The phrase love my God had been replaced in the Girlguiding oaths in 2013 with the more secular develop my beliefs. Jeffery says that she was initially allowed to offer parents of girls to choose which phrase to say as part of their promise, but argues that in November she was told by County Commissioner Karen McFarlane that such an arrangement breaches the rules. The mother of two, who had been a leader at 1st Abbeydale Rainbows group in Gloucester, was told that she had to agree to leave out references to God in the text, or leave the organization. The very name Rainbows is taken from the story of Noahs Ark, it was given to Noah as a gift from God, she said, in reference to the Biblical story in Genesis. If the Scouts dont feel the need to be so didactic about their promise, why does Girlguiding have to be so inflexible? A Girlguiding spokesperson clarified that the 100,000 volunteers at the organization are "expected to follow our policies and volunteer code of conduct at all times," however. "Were aware a Girlguiding leader resigned from her role following a complaint made that she wasnt using the standard wording of the Promise," the statement continued. "The leader was not withdrawn from Girlguiding. The complaint is being handled internally." Some parents have come out in support of Jeffery, including Lisa Kerr. We love the fact that Emma gave our daughter the option when she did her promise of using the old one or the new, Kerr said. As a Christian family, our daughter wanted to say the promise where she can publicly promise to love my God. Girlguiding U.K. attracted controversy back in November 2017 as well, after it said that transgender members born as male who identify as female will be allowed to use the same shower and tent space as girls. "Some people may not feel comfortable sharing accommodation so in this case an alternative option should be provided. This should be done discreetly, in conversation with the young person and, if appropriate, their parent or carer," the organization clarified at the time. David Davies, Conservative MP for Monmouth in South Wales, spoke out against the move at the time. "If transgender girls who are physically male are going to be sharing facilities, it's going to make some girls threatened and uncomfortable and the Guides shouldn't be doing that," Davies argued. UK judge accuses Iranian who raped girl of faking conversion to Christianity to avoid deportation Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment A U.K. judge has said that he will not deport an Iranian asylum seeker who raped a girl, even though he suspects his professed conversion to Christianity is not genuine. The 28-year-old Iranian man, who wasnt named, was sentenced to five years in prison after raping a 17-year-old girl in 2012. Louis Kopieczek, the immigration tribunal judge, shared last week his suspicions that the asylum seeker has since claimed he converted to the Christian faith in order to avoid deportation, given the danger for Christians and other religious minorities in Iran. Kopieczek noted that even if the conversion was not genuine, however, the Iranian's social media accounts, which include hundreds of Bible verses, would make it very dangerous for him to return to Iran: "In all the circumstances, I am satisfied that the appellant has established that there is a real risk that on his return he would be questioned about the details of his asylum claim and that questioning would reveal that he has posted on Twitter... [and] interrogation would involve a real risk of ill-treatment amounting to a breach of [his human rights]." Kopieczek warned: Even in relation to someone who could be said to have made up stories to make their asylum case better, the point is that the authorities would regard it as besmirching their name and accusing them of human rights violations. In 2015, the asylum seeker was found by then Home Secretary, Theresa May, to be a genuine, present and sufficiently serious threat to the public, the Telegraph pointed out. The Home Office had tried to position that his social media activity was not anti-Islamic in nature. The man, whose Twitter account had garnered 5,000 followers and 86,000 likes, had made himself too visible to Iranian authorities who would question the Christian imagery he used, Kopieczek ruled, however. There have been numerous cases where Muslims converting to Christianity when they come to Europe have been accused of only trying to help their asylum application chances. Pastor Gottfried Martens of Trinity Lutheran Church in Berlin, which in September 2015 saw a huge spike in membership due to mass conversions of Iranian Muslims, admitted that could be the reality in many cases. "I know there are again and again people coming here because they have some kind of hope regarding asylum," Martens said at the time. "I am inviting them to join us because I know that whoever comes here will not be left unchanged," the pastor added, however. He insisted that even if many Muslim men and women are indeed only pretending to have been converted, he believes that the Gospel message is still changing their hearts. Don't blame migrants for your problems, Pope Francis warns world leaders Pope Francis on Tuesday condemned nationalist leaders who blame migrants for their countries' problems and themselves fostered mistrust in society by pursuing dishonest gain and xenophobic and racist policies. The 82-year-old pope, who has made defence of migrants a plank of his papacy, made the comments in his message for the Catholic Church's World Day of Peace on January 1. It is sent to heads of state and government and international organisations. It comes at a time when immigration is one of the most contentious issues in countries such as the United States, Italy, Germany and Hungary. Francis has sparred with US President Donald Trump and Italian right-wing league leader Matteo Salvini over the rights of migrants. 'Political addresses that tend to blame every evil on migrants and to deprive the poor of hope are unacceptable,' said the pope, who did not mention any countries or leaders. He said today's times were 'marked by a climate of mistrust rooted in the fear of others or of strangers, or anxiety about one's personal security'. Francis said it was sad that mistrust was 'also seen at the political level, in attitudes of rejection or forms of nationalism that call into question the fraternity of which our globalised world has such great need'. Last week, the pope praised the United Nation's first Global Compact on Migration, which sets objectives for how the management of migration can be improved. A number of nations, including the United States, Italy, Hungary, and Poland did not attend the meeting in Morocco. Francis denounced a list of 'vices' by politicians who he said undermined authentic democracy and brought disgrace to public life through various forms of corruption. Among these he included misappropriation of public resources, dishonest gain, xenophobia, racism, lack of concern for the environment, and plundering of natural resources. He proposed eight 'Beatitudes of the Politician' first formulated by the late Vietnamese Cardinal Francois-Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan as a guide for the behaviour of public office holders. These, he said, would set goals for politicians who, among other qualities, should have a deep understanding of their role, personally exemplify credibility, work for the common good and accomplish radical change. Impact of asylum and benefits system is 'heartbreaking', says Scottish minister A Scottish minister who led the campaign for a 10-year-old orphan to be saved from deportation says the UK asylum and benefits system is leaving people in hardship. Rev Brian Casey, minister of Springburn Parish Church, has been at the forefront of campaigning for Giorgi Kakava to be allowed to remain in Scotland permanently. Kakava, originally from Georgia, has been in the UK since he was three but was faced with the possibility of deportation after his mother died in February. After a high profile campaign that involved the Church of Scotland and support from local politicians, he was granted asylum by the UK Home Office in July but only until his 18th birthday. A petition started by Casey demanding that he be allowed to remain in Scotland has been signed by nearly 90,000 people. As the campaign continues, Casey is hosting a Christmas party at Springburn Parish Church for vulnerable members of the community. Asylum seekers, refugees and people facing hardship as a result of changes to the benefits system will be among the guests on Christmas Eve. Casey said it was the duty of Christians to show hospitality to strangers, especially the vulnerable. 'My congregation and I are very grateful to all the generous people who donated money to ensure that disadvantaged families in the parish get some Christmas cheer,' he said. 'I have been the minister here for four years and during that time I have witnessed first-hand the impact of austerity, benefit sanctions and a hostile environment for refugees and asylum seekers. It has been heartbreaking. 'So our event is tinged with sadness because it shines a light on the number of people locally who are feeling desperate at this time of year. 'We are delighted that we can offer some help but acutely aware that whatever we do will never be enough.' Over 4,000 was raised through crowdfunding to host 64 families at the party who have all been referred by a local primary school, housing association, foodbanks and cancer charity Marie Curie. In addition to a Christmas dinner and festive activities, families will receive Christmas gifts and a 50 Tesco voucher. The party is being supported by Paul Sweeney, MP for Glasgow North East, and Bob Doris, MSP for Glasgow Maryhill and Springburn, who have both previously spoken out in support of Kakava's asylum bid. Doris said: 'The warmth and love shown by Rev Brian Casey and the local Church to support those most in need has been inspirational. So has the response to the call for donations. 'Congregations in my constituency often provide real leadership in making those most vulnerable feel welcome and offer support. That has certainly been the case in Springburn. 'I wish everyone involved a happy and peaceful Christmas.' Sweeney commended Springburn Parish Church for 'making sure that everyone has the opportunity to feel loved and supported'. 'I feel outrage that our welfare system has been so damaged by the action of austerity that such measures are needed at all to help those in crisis,' he said. 'But it speaks to the compassion of our community that they are willing to make this effort.' According to Scottish Government figures, Glasgow is home to around 5,000 asylum seekers, more than any other single area in the UK. However, they are not allowed to work, leaving it to churches and local charities to help them survive. In addition to UK rules around seeking asylum, the Church of Scotland has been critical of how the Universal Credit scheme is being implemented. Universal Credit merged six benefits into a single monthly payment, but the Church said that delays in payments are leaving people worse off than before, and that it should be immediately halted and revised. Living Advent Calendar is a hit with Hertfordshire village Advent calendars come with all sorts of fillings nowadays, not just chocolate. But the village of Redbourn in Hertfordshire has taken the idea of marking each day of Advent by opening a new door to a new level. The doors are real ones, and behind each one there are people waiting to spring a different surprise. 2018 is the second time Redbourne's Living Advent Calendar has run. It's organised by a committee involving the village's Anglican, Catholic, Methodist and independent churches and other local representatives. Each evening at 6.15 pm anything up to a hundred people will gather outside a different door in the village to see what's inside and it might be a nativity scene, a ukelele band, a primary school choir, a poetry reading or a magician even a performance of Cinderella. Fifteen minutes later it's all over until the next day. Every performance is suitable for both children and adults, and a guide to the events printed and distributed beforehand, and available online tells people where to go. It's a brilliantly simple idea that has caught the imagination of Redbourn's 6,000 inhabitants. 'It's brought the whole community together,' says Penny McAdam, one of the organising team. She instances a special needs school which put on a simple nativity performance, which many local people had never been inside, and an over-60s exercise class. 'Lots of people come and chat before it starts,' she says, adding that most tend to walk to the venue even though the village is quite spread out. Even last night's rain didn't put the audience off around 50 turned out for a handbell performance. And for those worried about the insurance implications of an event like this it's fully covered by Ecclesiastical, the UK's leading insurer of church premises. Click here for more information about Redbourn's Living Advent Calendar. No room at the inn? Why Jesus was really laid in a manger The New English Translation (NET) Bible is a fresh scholarly translation in modern English with an important unique feature: notes that record the translators' decisions. STEPBible, the powerful study tool from Tyndale House, Cambridge, has these notes in full, so that when we wonder 'What's behind that translation?' the answer is at hand. It even gives new clues about the real reason why Mary and Joseph couldn't get a room. Imagine a girl about to give birth, turning up at a hotel. Who wouldn't give up their room for her? In a gregarious society like ancient Israel, everyone would soon hear about it, so why didn't anyone help her? The likely answer lies in a note in the NET Bible at Luke 2:7, where it points out the word translated 'inn' (kataluma) usually means a 'guest room'. It tells us that various scholars conclude that Joseph went to his family home, and it was his parents' who told them: 'There's no place for you in the guest room.' We know Joseph's family lived in Bethlehem, because he was registering for taxation there. The Gospels use this fact to point out Joseph's Davidic ancestry, but Romans weren't interested in genealogy. They only wanted to know which door to hammer on when taxes were due. Joseph wasn't expecting a warm welcome at his family home. This was partly because his parents hadn't chosen his bride he met her while working away in Nazareth. But it was mostly because she was visibly pregnant after too few months of marriage, and Joseph admitted he wasn't the father. This scandal was apparently too much for his parents, who refused to let them into their respectable home telling them to use the shed instead. Their neighbours presumably didn't want to cause offence by undermining this decision. So Jesus was born in the family shed. Living with shame and scandal was yet another burden that Jesus bore for us. The NET Bible has two unique features that make it invaluable for studying the Bible in this way. First, for the first time, the public was invited to join in. The first round of translations were put on the web for 'beta testing'. Anyone could email to say, 'I don't know any Hebrew, but this English doesn't make sense to me,' or 'I'm an expert on this passage and I'd like you to know...' Knowing the world was looking over their shoulders must have concentrated their minds, and it stopped them from translating just for their own denomination. They knew there would be immediate push-back if they didn't produce a text that a wide range of believers could accept. The other unique feature is the extensive notes. There are more than 60,000, which averages about 50 notes per chapter, or about two per verse. Some notes explain the background context and lifestyle information needed to understand the text, rather like a study Bible. Others point out when different manuscripts would produce a slightly different translation. The bulk of the notes explain why the text is translated as it is. This was the first Bible that made the translators explain themselves. If they missed out a word or added one, they had to say why. And if commentators pointed out that something is ambiguous, they had to say why they'd chosen that option or simply say that it could be understood differently. And very many times they add notes simply to help explain aspects of the text which can't be expressed in English. The Bible opens up when you use STEPBible and the NET Bible together. They form a great tool for Bible students, or for anyone who ever asks: 'What's behind that translation?' STEPBible can be downloaded here or you can use it at www.STEPBible.org. Rev Dr David Instone-Brewer is Senior Research Fellow in Rabbinics and the New Testament at Tyndale House, Cambridge. The extraordinary prayer life of Thomas Cochrane, missionary to China Towards the end of his life, missionary Thomas Cochrane declared: 'All my prayers have been answered.' That is some claim, and when I first came across it, as a teenager, I was sceptical. Many years later I inherited Tom's papers, including his day books, and when I wrote his biography, Thomas Cochrane and the Dragon Throne, they helped me to understand how he could make that claim. Born in Greenock, Scotland in 1866, Cochrane was converted at the age of eight and soon started to get up at dawn every day, to spend at least an hour on what he called 'knee drill.' He would pour out his heart, repenting of his boyish sins, pleading for grace, praying for his family and friends and lamenting the evil he saw around him. Soon he was begging God to give him 'the right person' so that he could save at least one soul a day. As he grew as an evangelist, so did the size of that request. Then sudden tragedy struck. When he was 13 his father died, leaving Tom's mother a penniless widow with three children. Tom showed a degree of faith astonishing in one so young. He wrote: 'God has been pleased to take Father away before us. The Lord gives and the Lord takes away, blessed be the name of the Lord. We are not quite sure what we will do, but we will see.' Suddenly his childhood and schooldays were over. Now he was working long hours for slender wages in an office by day and Greenock docks by night. For 10 years he was the family's wage earner, protecter and defender. Meanwhile he set his heart on becoming a medical missionary and every spare moment was taken up with studying. Yet he longed to spend more time with God. His prayers echoed that of Martin Luther: 'I have so much to do today, that I shall need to spend three hours in prayer.' Once trained, he asked the missionary society he had approached to send him to 'the neediest place on earth' and they sent him to Mongolia. Life there was hard and dangerous: Westerners in general and missionaries in particular were often resented, if not actively opposed. Cochrane could have been killed on more than one occasion, and he faced the greatest danger during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, when over 30,000 people were killed, including 300 missionaries. He and his family, and that of his co-worker, Rev James Liddell (father of the Olympic runner, Eric Liddell) escaped. Prayer moulded Tom. The truth is that as a medical student and a missionary, he learned what many Christians never learn: not just to cry out in prayer, but to wait patiently for the answers to come. He spent as much time listening to God as in crying out to him; significantly he described this as 'my times of thunder', for it was then that he heard the voice of God speaking. His prayer habit was 'a perfect hour spent each day in the presence of God'. His day books are frank about his failings and frustrations. He once wrote that the greatest challenge facing a Christian is to understand the meaning of the word holy and how to live a life that is set apart and pleasing to God. It was difficult for he was a man in a hurry and any delay was irksome. He had little time for colleagues who did not see things his way or dragged their heels. Men and women who accomplish great things for the Kingdom are often like that. They have an edginess that comes from strong convictions and a sense of urgency. I liken them to successful businessmen whose dynamism borders on the ruthless. Nonetheless Tom grew into a man of great self-control, rarely raising his voice and firm but fair in his judgments. This proved of great value on the mission field. When he had to confront a Chinese person he did so in way that did not cause him or her to lose face. He learned the wisdom of the Chinese saying: 'If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow.' When he conceived the idea of a western medical school in Peking, he had no money, influence or sympathisers. The society around him was ignorant of science and hostile towards the innovations of the 'foreign devils'. He prayed a simple prayer: 'Father God, help me to touch the Dragon Throne!' Working in obscurity amongst beggars in the city's slums, he prayed it every day for nearly five years. When the time was right, God answered it with an astonishing sequence of miraculous events. The final event involved the dreaded Empress-Dowager Cixi, who was virulently anti-Christian; she had backed the Boxer rebels in 1900 and had the blood of thousands of Christians on her hands. Against all expectations, she not only gave permission for the school to be built, she donated 10,000 ounces of silver to fund it. Later Tom was granted an audience in the Summer Palace and became the only missionary to stand before her. Through God's grace, he did indeed touch the Dragon Throne. I believe the reason that Tom Cochrane could say, without a hint of boastfulness, 'All my prayers have been answered,' lay in the fact that he listened intently for God's thunder before he committed himself to a word of petition. Prayer has been described as submitting the human spirit to God's Spirit and aligning our will to be in perfect agreement with his. It takes far more listening, self-humbling and patience than most of us possess, but if we succeed something wonderful happens. We pray only the prayers which the Holy Spirit approves, which the Son commends to the Father and which the Father is pleased to grant. Andrew Adam's career has included being a medical officer in the RAF, journalism, pathology and male modelling. Since retiring from medicine, he has been a church elder, a police chaplain, a street pastor and a guest speaker on Cunard liners. Thomas Cochrane and the Dragon Throne is published by SPCK. By Trend The Azerbaijani state will provide descendants of martyrs funds in the amount of 11,000 manats, said Azerbaijans President Ilham Aliyev during the ceremony to give out apartments to servicemen in Sabunchu district, Baku. The process of payment of these funds has already begun. About 10,000 families will receive this cash from the state, said the president. It is a very significant day in the life of military personnel today. A total of 394 servicemen families are being provided with apartments by the state in this beautiful building. I sincerely congratulate you on this occasion and wish you continued success. I hope you live comfortably in this beautiful building. As you may know, I signed a decree a few years ago to enhance the social protection of servicemen. According to the decree, the state provides apartments to the families of military personnel with an impeccable service record. To date, the state has provided apartments to 1,279 families of military personnel. All apartments are beautiful. I have personally attended the opening of these buildings, and the apartments I have seen today are also very comfortable, spacious and renovated. Azerbaijan is one of a handful of countries where such programs are implemented. This is further evidence and yet another example of the attention our state is paying to military personnel, noted the head of state. President Aliyev pointed out that conditions of service are also improving for military personnel. In recent years, major repair work has been carried out in many of our military units. Many military units have been completely rebuilt. The conditions of service for our servicemen, soldiers and officers have significantly improved. Today, approximately 75-80 percent of our military compounds, military units and military bases fully meet the required standard. In the coming years, we plan to repair the military units that are still in need of repair. The state allocates and will continue to allocate funds for these purposes. I should also note that thousands of houses and apartments have been built and put into operation for the families of martyrs and those handicapped in the Karabakh war in recent years. This year alone, the state has provided apartments to 626 martyr families and those handicapped in the Karabakh war. At least 800 apartments will be provided next year. People of this category are also provided with the cars by the state. They have been provided with thousands of cars, said the head of state. President Aliyev went on to add that the problems of compatriots affected by the war are also being addressed. This year, 5,800 displaced families have been provided with new houses and apartments. This is a record figure in recent years. We will continue this policy next year. You are also aware that the first decree I signed immediately after the presidential election this year was associated with improving the financial situation of the descendants of martyrs. The state will provide descendants funds in the amount of 11,000 manats. The process of payment of these funds has already begun. About 10,000 families will receive this cash from the state. The lists are being updated now, and thousands of families will improve their financial situation as a result of this program. This is a sign of the attention the state is paying to the heroism of martyrs, the care for their families. However, as in all other spheres, the principle of justice should also be paramount in this area, said the president. Further, the head of state noted that the process of army building in Azerbaijan is progressing fast. Azerbaijan is among countries with a strong army. The material and technical infrastructure of our army is strengthening, the most sophisticated equipment and weaponry are being acquired. The two military parades held this year have demonstrated our military prowess to the whole world. Our army stands out on a global scale for the level of its technical equipment. Of course, our strong military potential is the key factor for resolving the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. The combat capability of our army is increasing. Today, our army is ready to perform any task, it is capable of doing that. The events of recent years clearly demonstrate that. I can say that this year, as a result of our armys successful operation on the Armenian-Azerbaijani border in the Nakhchivan direction, 11,000 hectares of land completely passed under our control. We have taken over strategic heights. The capture of these heights allows us the opportunity to exercise full control over the strategic roads and communications on the territory of Armenia. Both the April fighting and the successful Nakhchivan operation once again testify to the high level of professionalism and combat capability of our army. There is a high spirit in our army and it can perform any task, said the president. Of course, I want to say again that the paramount factor for resolving the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, along with all other factors, is our military power and our strength. We are increasing and will continue to increase our strength. I should also note that very important contracts have been signed this year. As a result of the implementation of these contracts, the most modern weaponry and ammunition will be delivered to our country. The machinery and weaponry available to us today enable us to crush any military target of the invaders with high precision and great destructive power. Of course, the strength of any country, including those in a state of war, is determined first of all by its military might, President Aliyev added. The head of state pointed out that of course, a special place in the process of army building is occupied by social protection of servicemen, the solution of their housing problems and the improvement of conditions of service. The fact that this beautiful building will be home to about 400 families of military personnel is a good example and confirmation of my words. Once again, I congratulate all the military personnel who will live in this beautiful building on this occasion. I also congratulate you on the upcoming Day of Solidarity of World Azerbaijanis and wish you a Happy New Year. Thank you! the president concluded. The Holocaust Museum Houston plans to re-open its much-enhanced campus on June 22. The expansion more than doubles the museums size, to a total of 57,000 square feet, making it the nation's fourth largest Holocaust museum and the first to be fully bilingual in English and Spanish. CEO Kelly J. Zuniga and other leaders envision the museum as a super-regional hub for Holocaust education and a national voice for human rights and social justice. With the rise in anti-Semitism, hate crimes and threats to human rights within our own country, our role in education and outreach is more important than ever before, Zuniga said. She expects student field trip attendance to increase by 50 percent within a year of the reopening and projects 35 percent growth in general attendance. The completion of the $34 million project is the next big marker of an $800 million transformation underway in the Houston Museum District, following the 2018 openings of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houstons Glassell School of Art and Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation Center for Conservation and the Menil Drawing Institute. Much has changed, inside and out. The landmark cylinder designed by Ralph Appelbaum Associates at the Holocaust Museums 5401 Caroline campus has a new opening that will emit light at night and brighten its interior during the day. The main Bearing Witness: A Community Remembers gallery there has almost doubled and now houses two of the museums prized artifacts: A railcar akin to those that transported Jewish prisoners to concentration camps and a rescue boat like those used by Danish fishermen to ferry Jewish neighbors to neutral territory. The cylinders first-floor has a new welcome center, and a second floor was added to feature paintings by Holocaust survivor Samuel Bak. Just as dramatically, the museums original, one-story east wing has been expanded to three floors. Facilities there include four permanent and two temporary exhibition galleries; a new, 200-seat auditorium with a stage; a cafe; a library; classrooms and offices. Touring exhibitions from Israel, China, Canada and South Africa are already on the books for the next three years. And a 175-seat outdoor amphitheater is taking shape outside. The new facility was designed Houston firm Mucasey & Associates, with exhibition and media design by Appelbaum. Both firms participated in the creation of the museum 22 years ago. Houston-based PGAL is the architect of record. Museum officials said 88 percent of their $49.4 million capital campaign has been secured. Leading up to the the reopening, the museum will debut a new bilingual website and host Coexistence, an internationally-acclaimed outdoor exhibition, opening in May at Hermann Park. Holocaust Museum Houston exhibits are currently on view at 9220 Kirby Drive, Suite 100, a temporary space that will close on May 16. Admission is $8-$12; free on Sundays. molly.glentzer@chron.com Just over a month after El Tiempo Cantino closed the much loved 1308 restaurant in Montrose, the company is ready to add another store to its collection of Tex-Mex restaurants. The long-delayed El Tiempo at 12440 Northwest Freeway is expected to open tomorrow, Dec. 20, according to co-owner and executive chef Domenic Laurenzo, grandson of the legendary restaurateur Mama Ninfa Laurenzo. The site, the former Red Onion restaurant, is a 250-seat restaurant with a patio that is expected to open later. A Nigerian citizen was charged with fraud, money laundering and identity theft in a complaint unsealed Tuesday, according to a press release from the office of the U.S. attorney for Southern District of Texas. Osondu Igwilo, 49, was the alleged ringleader of an international scam where those working with him impersonated U.S. bank officials, made false promises of investment funding and told victims they had to make payments before receiving their funding. The money was allegedly laundered through U.S. bank accounts before being sent to Nigeria. Battleship Texas is scheduled to reopen its third deck and engine room on Jan. 5, completing a five-year repair, restoration and safety upgrade. The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department will host a ribbon-cutting for the grand reopening that day, and visitors will be able to see the engine room for the first time in more than two years. The aging battleship is celebrating its 104th year, so the first 104 visitors will be admitted for free. Just a few years ago, the USS Texas was in a dire spot. The dreadnought was taking on water and funds to salvage it were scarce. The ship was designated a U.S. National Historic Landmark, and was involved in Allied Forces attacks at Normandy, Iwo Jima, Okinawa and in North Africa. A Battleship Texas Commission brought the ship from Maryland to its decades-long location in La Porte where it became the country's first memorial battleship. But time and water conspired and caused complications, prompting expensive improvements. An initial stage of renovation began five years ago, when the ship's troubled engine room and other areas of the stern, which had been taking on water, were repaired. The Texas Legislature secured $25 million for the second phase, which was completed earlier this year. The reopen program begins at 8:45 a.m. on Jan. 5. Visitors can begin to form a line at 7:30 that morning. After the 104 free visitors have boarded, other visitors will have to pay the $12 entry fee; $6 for those older than 65; $3 for children 5-11. Active and retired military personnel, Texas State Parks Pass holders and children under 4 are admitted without charge. More on Battleship Texas here. David J. Phillip, STF / Associated Press Crude oil prices began rebounding a little on Wednesday morning with new federal data showing that the nation's stockpile of petroleum supplies unexpectedly declined from the week prior. Commercial crude stocks dipped slightly by about 500,000 barrels - after industry prognosticators predicted a build a day prior - and overall petroleum inventories fell by 10.3 million barrels. The decline was led by distillate fuel oil, which is used to make diesel and heating oils, which fell by 4.2 million barrels. Where some see a snack-filled machine, Burton Hill and Cheryl Spruell-Hill see an under-filled niche. The northwest Houston area couple launched their company, Healthy Zone Vending, in September. Healthy Zone Vending offers businesses the option of having a vending machine filled with healthy drinks and snacks as an alternative to traditional vending machine items. Hill and Spruell-Hill were researching ways to make additional revenue and said the healthy vending concept matched their healthy eating habits, as Spruell-Hill is a vegetarian and Hill tends to eat healthy. They hoped to address the difficulty of finding a healthy snack on short notice at work, or while traveling. That was something we were really passionate about that we identified with a lot, Hill said. The first location to receive a Healthy Zone Vending machine was The Work Well, a northwest Houston co-working space from local developer Caldwell Companies. Miranda Hadamik, director of The Work Well, said the machine was well-received by clients of the space. GOOD FINDS: Foods to buy if you are trying to be healthy on a budget Many of our members requested additional drinks and snacks, but as everyone is a little more health-conscious these days, it was hard to find an option that had good snack options, Hadamik said. When Cheryl contacted me, I thought it was the perfect fit. Hill and Spruell-Hill said they decided the business is a good fit for Cy-Fair after researching statistics on obesity and diabetes. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 13.7 million children in the United States are obese and 9.4 percent of adults had diabetes in 2015. According to Healthy You Vending, only 3 percent of vending machines within a 20 mile radius of the Cy-Fair area have healthy options available. Healthy Zone Vending purchases its machines through Healthy You Vending. Formerly the standard vending machine company 1800Vending, Healthy You Vending has been an established vending company for 18 years. Instead of franchising, Healthy You Vending sells machines to potential partners, allowing entrepreneurs like Hill and Spruell-Hill to buy machines, stock them with healthy items, and station the machines where they decide. Jill Navidomskis, location procurement director for Healthy You Vending, said the business completely shifted to healthy vending machines three years ago after initially offering it as an option in 2013 when the owners noticed healthier eating trends in the country. At that time there was the big push with Michelle Obama and nutrition in schools and the country really took a turn to focus on a more healthy lifestyle, Navidomskis said. Kind of on a whim, our owners put up a healthy vending machine on one page of our traditional vending machine website. PASSION FOR HEALTH: Owner of Whole Foods' first black-owned juice brand wants success to inspire Navidomskis said the future of the industry is promising as Healthy You Vending machine sales continue to increase year after year. According to Navidomskis, the healthy vending industry is very popular in Boston and the northwest United States. Texas is one of the highest penetrated areas due to the population of cities like Houston and Dallas, but the business is slower in the deep south, she said. We had a lot of competitors in the traditional vending business and soon after we started the healthy division of our company, several of our national competitors followed suit and started their own division of healthy vending machines, Navidomskis said. Although the aim is for machines to be filled with healthy snacks like Clif and Kind bars, vendors can add traditional items as they see fit. Each buyer is given an account with United Natural Food Industries a distributor of organic and natural foods but Healthy You Vending has no discretion for what any vendors who buy their machines put in them. If [clients] want XYZ chip, well put it in there, Hill said. However, he said Healthy Zone Vending will encourage clients to opt for healthier snack and beverage alternatives like Skinny Pop and Perrier. The couple said they are not looking to oust standard vending machines. If they want to keep their machine with Doritos and Cheetos, thats fine because Im not competing with that, Hill said. Hill and Spruell-Hill aim to continue expanding Healthy Zone Vendings presence in the Houston area and are looking at schools and hospitals as potential clients in the future. We try to cover all of the basics because if you think about it, people that are gluten-free wouldnt even look at typical machines, Spruell-Hill said. They wouldnt buy anything because they dont have any options. chevall.pryce@chron.com The spirit of the holiday season usually brings out the joy of giving for most people, but for scammers, the holidays are a season of taking. Buying gifts and donating to charities creates countless opportunities for scammers to swindle consumers out of personal information and hard-earned money. Shoppers are encouraged to be mindful of scamming fraudsters, who unlike the Grinch, will not return your money or gifts. The Better Business Bureau of Greater Houston and South Texas is warning consumers to beware with these Twelve Scams of Christmas: 1. Fake or Look-Alike Websites/Social Media pages: When stores sell out of popular merchandise, customers may find the items online on a different website or social media page instead of the official retailers site. Some of these sites can be legitimate, but others may not be. Remember, its easy to mimic a real website. Make sure the website has https:// at the beginning of its web address. The s indicates the website is secure. If shopping via social media, double-check the site being visited is the business official social media page. Some dishonest sites will take consumers money and run, leaving them without the gift or money to buy it elsewhere. Check with BBBSETexas.org before ordering online from a business. 2. Counterfeit Goods: Luxury goods at extremely low prices might be cheap counterfeits. Handbags, jewelry, watches, wallets, and electronic devices are among the top of the list of items counterfeited. Always buy from reputable sellers and be cautious using online marketplaces. 3. Phony Charities: Everyone is in a generous mood during the holidays, so scammers take advantage of that generosity with fake charity solicitations in email, on social media sites, via crowdfunding pages, by text and even in person. Check out charities at BBBSETexas.org before donating. 4. Social Media Gift Exchange: Purchasing one gift and receiving 36 sounds like a great deal, but this seasonal scam is actually a pyramid scheme. 5. Grandparent Scams: Seniors should be cautious if they get a call from a grandchild claiming to be in an accident, arrested or hospitalized while traveling in another country. Never send money without first confirming with another family member that its true. 6. Free Gift Cards: Unsolicited texts or emails offering free gift cards are often just a ploy to get personal information that can later be used for identity theft. 7. Malicious E-Cards: Electronic cards can be great fun but be careful. Two red flags to watch out for are: (1) the senders name is not apparent, and (2) shoppers are required to share additional information to get the cards. 8. Fake Shipping Notifications: These emails can have attachments or links to sites that will download malware on shoppers computers to steal their identity and their passwords. Dont be fooled by holiday phishing scams. 9. Fake holiday jobs: Retailers and delivery services need extra help at the holidays but beware of email or text message solicitations that require shoppers to share personal information online or pay for a job lead or hire customers without an interview. Apply in person or go to the retailers' main websites to find out who is hiring. 10. Unusual Forms of Payments: Be wary of anyone who asks consumers to pay for holiday purchases using prepaid debit cards, gift cards, wire transfers, third parties, etc. These payments cannot be traced and cannot be undone. 11. Puppy Scams: Be very careful buying pets online, especially during the holidays. Consumers may get a puppy mill pooch with problems, or they may get nothing at all because it was a scam. 12. Fake Letters From Santa: Many legitimate businesses offer personalized letters from Santa, but some copycat scammers are only looking to glean personal information from unsuspecting parents. Check with BBBSETexas.org or call our phone line at 409-835-5951 for more information, and be sure to research any business before making a purchase or charity before donating. American Renegades J.K. Simmons and Sullivan Stapleton (300: Rise of an Empire) star in this action film about a SEAL team who discover a treasure in a Bosnian lake. Director Steven Quale made Final Destination 5. Rated PG-13. Playing at AMC Gulf Pointe 30, Houston. Aquaman Will this aquatic DC superhero swim to glory on the big screen or quickly drown without a trace? Thats what comic-book-movie fans are asking about this $160 million film starring Jason Momoa and directed by James Wan of Saw and The Conjuring fame but advance word is not good. Rated PG-13. Playing throughout Houston. Ben Is Back Teens in emotional distress is a theme this year, ranging from Boy Erased to Beautiful Boy. Now, Boy Erased star Lucas Hedges is a drug addict arriving home for the holidays where mom (Julia Roberts) is skeptical of why he has returned. Peter Hedges, Lucas real-life dad who has made such films as The Odd Life of Timothy Green and Pieces of April, directs. Rated R. Playing at Regal Edwards Grand Palace 24, Houston; AMC Willowbrook 24, Houston. Between Worlds Another week, another Nicolas Cage movie. In this thriller he meets a woman who says she meets spirits when shes suffocating. Yes, really. Rated R. Playing at AMC Studio 30, Houston. Bird Box Danish director Susanne Bier is known for such films as In a Better World and the TV series The Night Manager. In Bird Box, she moves in a horror direction with Sandra Bullock playing a blindfolded woman who has to find her way through a strange terrain. Trevante Rhodes (Moonlight), John Malkovich and Jacki Weaver co-star. Rated R. Playing on Netflix. Bumblebee Director Travis Knight earned major kudos for his first film, the animated Kubo and the Two Strings and reviews for his Transformers prequel are surprisingly strong. Starring Hailee Steinfeld, it focuses on the yellow-and-black VW Bug character whos a favorite among Transformers fans. Rated PG-13. Playing throughout Houston. Holmes and Watson Theres usually a brand-name comedy opening on Christmas week and this year is no exception. Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly, and Ralph Fiennes star in this comedic take on the Sherlock Holmes legend. Its directed by Etan Cohen of Get Hard fame. Rated PG-13. Opening Tuesday throughout Houston. If Beale Street Could Talk Barry Jenkins follows his moving Moonlight with an adaptation of James Baldwins tragic romance about a couple separated by an accusation of rape. Set in mid-20th century, its a beautifully rendered and haunting meditation on love, race and spiritual survival. Stephan James (Selma, Race) and newcomer KiKi Layne are supported by a strong cast including Regina King who was just nominated for a Golden Globe. Rated R. Opening Tuesday at the Landmark River Oaks, Houston. Second Act Jennifer Lopez is a retail worker who decides to change her life in this comedy also featuring Milo Ventimiglia, Vanessa Hudgens and Leah Remini. Rated PG-13. Playing throughout Houston. Swing Kids This South Korean film tells the story of a prison camp in the Korean War where the prisoners and soldiers stage a musical to add a little color to their dreary lives. Unrated. Playing at AMC Studio 30, Houston. Vice This anarchic biography of Dick Cheney, which is going to divide audiences into camps of love-it or hate-it, dominated the recent Golden Globe nominations. Christian Bale completely immerses himself into Cheneys persona and Amy Adams is nearly equally persuasive as his wife. Its directed by Adam McKay who brings the same tongue-in-cheek, liberal sensibility he used to explain the Great Recession in The Big Short to the life of the former vice-president. Which is to say, its probably not going to play well in the Cheney household. Rated R. Opening Tuesday throughout Houston. Welcome to Marwen Marwencol, the 2010 documentary about a man brain-damaged in a vicious attack who builds a 1/6-scale version of a WWII-era town in his back yard, captured the imagination of film-festival attendees worldwide, winning honors from Austins SXSW to the Zurich Film Festival. Now, Robert Zemeckis (Forrest Gump) has turned the mans struggle into a Christmas-present of a movie, a feel-good feature starring Steve Carell, Janelle Monae and Diane Kruger. Rated PG-13. Playing throughout Houston. After surfacing for a cameo teaser appearance in Batman v Superman and a proportional slice of the action in Justice League, the DC Comics superhero Aquaman (born in 1941) takes center stage, on land and under the sea, in Aquaman. The Game of Thrones actor Jason Momoas great in close-ups, surly and charismatic, with eyebrows that suggest all sorts of fun. The director James Wan came up via the Saw franchise, but he also has several good films to his credit, Insidious and Furious 7 among them. This is not one of them. Already a huge hit in China, Aquaman opens this week in North America, riding a wave of yeah, not too bad, kinda fun praise from various quarters. Reports of its not-badness turn out to be cruelly misleading. Watching this movie is like getting trapped in a waterpark, over a long weekend. Without a bartender in sight. Watching this movie is like spending two hours and 27 minutes staring at a gigantic aquarium full of digital sea creatures and actors on wires, pretending to swim. Watching Momoa wield his gleaming trident in battle against his half-brother, Patrick Wilsons King Orm, or throwing various submarine parts at the vicious high-seas pirate played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, makes you long for the relative visual/spatial clarity of the years second-lamest superhero picture, Avengers: Infinity Wars. Gripes, specific: Aquaman Rated PG-13: for sequences of sci-fi violence and action, and for some strong language Running time: 143 min. * (out of 5) See More Collapse Klutzy screenwriting. David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick and Will Beall stumble all over the place trying to set up simple origin-story exposition. Its not rocket science. Its a story of how Arthur Curry, the lighthouse keepers son, was born to Queen Atlanna of Atlantis, and how he must prevent an apocalyptic surface war waged by Orm and associates, while aquamanning-up to claim a leadership role down where the fishies go. Good director, wrong strategy. Director Wan loads up Aquaman with bombastic, horror-inspired jump scares. Why? Elsewhere, the protracted, numbing brutality betrays the hand of executive producer Zack Snyder, who directed both Justice League and Batman v Superman. And no more need be said about that. The designs. Over in the Marvel Studios realm, Black Panther proved a triumph of production, costume, digital and practical design collaboration. Wakanda became a place you wanted to explore. In Aquaman, the underwater kingdoms look like Avatar threw up all over The Incredible Mister Limpet. Theres one effective and rather beautiful series of shots, when our hero dives down, down, down to the Kingdom of the Trench, with deadly beast-fish swarming all around. As Mera the superheroine, Amber Heard dutifully deadpans her way through the torturous romantic banter. She lends an air of early-50s B-movie cheese to the proceedings. The films just sincere enough where it counts the family stuff, featuring Nicole Kidman as Aquamans selfless mom to float this soggy mediocrity for a global audience. Welcome to Marwen is a misjudgment only a first-rate filmmaker could make. I hope Im in the minority with this opinion. Its a drag to respond poorly to the latest from director/co-writer Robert Zemeckis, who landed in my top 10 as recently as 2012 (for Flight). The Chicago natives early progression from the exuberant flops I Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978, one of next months Criterion Collection releases) and Used Cars (1980) to his first certifiable pop classic (Back to the Future, 1985) remains gratifying proof that a commercial filmmaker can hit it big without losing his way. Maybe Zemeckis particular solutions to the narrative challenges posed by Welcome to Marwen simply dont feel satisfying or emotionally authentic to me. All I can do is try to explain why. The story behind Welcome to Marwen has been recounted, beautifully, by the 2010 documentary Marwencol. (That films director, Jeff Malmberg, served as an executive producer on the Zemeckis film.) In 2000, Kingston, N.Y., resident Mark Hogancamp was nearly killed in a brutal five-man assault. The beating left Hogancamp with a traumatic brain injury, severe impairments and virtually no memories of his life until that night. Hogancamp sought refuge in a wholly invented world, built to his own specifications and filled with 12-inch-high plastic figures. This was Marwencol, Hogancamps fantasy Belgian town, and the site of various and variously therapeutic World War II scenarios involving his alter ego, Capt. Hogancamp; a powerful sorceress; a passel of sexy, available female warriors; and an onslaught of Nazis hellbent on the captains destruction. Built carefully in his yard to 1:6 scale, Hogancamps Marwencol turned into an extended photo shoot, with Hogancamp capturing images of the imaginary town and its inhabitants. The results found their way to a Manhattan art gallery in 2006, and the rest is a peculiar and reassuring slice of found history, asserting the power of one imagination over some pretty awful circumstances. Theres so much to this story: Hogancamps post-traumatic stress disorder, the hate crime that brought him to the edge of the abyss, the creative outlets by which he turned that suffering into something else. Its clear why Zemeckis was compelled to attempt a big-screen dramatization of this defiantly small-scale universe. Steve Carell plays Hogancamp and, in the extended motion-capture animation sequences, the studly captain. Roughly half the movie takes place in Marwen, as vignettes of combat, carousing, torture and romance are interlaced with real-world scenes. Screenwriters Caroline Thompson and Zemeckis freely fictionalize their version, so that Nicol, the friendly woman new to Hogancamps neighborhood, played by a warmly empathetic Leslie Mann, becomes an audience conduit. For Hogancamp, Nicols threatening ex-boyfriend (Neil Jackson) triggers memories of the homophobic thugs we see in flashback. Welcome to Marwen Rated PG-13: for sequences of fantasy violence, some disturbing images, brief suggestive content, thematic material and strong language Running time: 116 minutes ** (out of 5) See More Collapse The foot-high women in Hogancamps Belgian enclave are played by Janelle Monae (G.I. Julie); Eiza Gonzalez (Caralala); Diane Kruger (as Deja Thoris, the Belgian witch); and others. Unsettling objects of desire, certainly, and Zemeckis knows it. We spend a lot of time with these figures, in Hogancamps alternate reality. Marwen (here shortened from Marwencol) very quickly becomes the very thing Welcome to Marwen cannot overcome. The way Zemeckis shapes these stop-motion animation scenes, theyre meant to be exciting, funny, scary, a little of everything. But they whack the movie completely off-kilter. We lose the strange, quiet intimacy of Hogancamps careful manipulation of this world. The real-life scenes dont feel like Hogancamps real life; they feel like a Hollywood falsification of it, despite Carells and Manns valiant efforts. By Trend Azerbaijans strong military potential is the key factor for resolving the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, said Azerbaijans President Ilham Aliyev during the ceremony to give out apartments to servicemen in Sabunchu district, Baku. The process of army building in Azerbaijan is progressing fast. Azerbaijan is among countries with a strong army. The material and technical infrastructure of our army is strengthening, the most sophisticated equipment and weaponry are being acquired. The two military parades held this year have demonstrated our military prowess to the whole world. Our army stands out on a global scale for the level of its technical equipment. Of course, our strong military potential is the key factor for resolving the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, said the head of state. President Aliyev pointed out that the combat capability of Azerbaijans army is increasing. Today, our army is ready to perform any task, it is capable of doing that. The events of recent years clearly demonstrate that. I can say that this year, as a result of our armys successful operation on the Armenian-Azerbaijani border in the Nakhchivan direction, 11,000 hectares of land completely passed under our control. We have taken over strategic heights. The capture of these heights allows us the opportunity to exercise full control over the strategic roads and communications on the territory of Armenia. Both the April fighting and the successful Nakhchivan operation once again testify to the high level of professionalism and combat capability of our army. There is a high spirit in our army and it can perform any task, added the head of state. Friendswood police recently investigated reported burglaries and thefts. Burglary A vehicle burglary was reported Dec. 13 at The Goddard School, 1650 Friendswood Lakes Blvd., police said. The victim entered the day care at 5:28 p.m. and returned to her vehicle two minutes later to find the passenger-side window smashed and her purse stolen, according to the report. A handbag and keys were stolen during a vehicle burglary Dec. 15 at Stevenson Park, 1100 S. Friendswood Drive, police said. The victim parked at noon and returned to her vehicle at 2 p.m. to find the rear passenger window smashed, according to the report. Police investigated a vehicle burglary Dec. 16 at Atria Senior Living Facility, 1310 S. Friendswood Drive. The drivers-side rear window was smashed and purse taken from the trunk between 9:15 a.m. and 2 p.m., police said. Theft The snatch-and-grab theft of a new iPhone XR from T-Mobile, 210 E. Parkwood Ave., was reported Dec. 13, police said. A power washer, 2-gallon gas can and ladder were stolen from a backyard patio Dec. 14 in the 1400 block of Osborne Drive, police said. A trailer was stolen Dec. 15 or Dec. 16 from a large vacant lot at 1101 S. Friendswood Drive, police said. The trailer, described as a black, 20-foot 2014 Lamar flatbed with Texas license plate 543597J, has a black, metal toolbox attached to the front and a spare tire mounted to the tongue, according to the report. A 5-foot Bobcat bucket and about 40 pieces of rebar were loaded on the trailer, police said. Fraud A Friendswood woman learned someone had used her identity to obtain a $650 loan when she received a past-due notice from CashNetUSA, according to a Dec. 11 police report. A Friendswood mans stolen identity led to warrants for his arrest, according to a Dec. 12 police report. The suspect allegedly used the mans identifiers when he was stopped for traffic violations. Criminal mischief A homeowner claimed juvenile suspects accessed open land behind his residence, drove ATVs and caused damage, according to a Dec. 14 police report filed in the 1700 block of White Wing Circle. Assault Police charged a Friendswood woman, 27, with assault, family violence Dec. 10. She allegedly assaulted her husband at Baywood Apartments, 5025 FM 2351. Police charged a 20-year-old Friendswood man with disorderly conduct after a fight in progress reported Dec. 14 at Sonic Drive-In, 806 S. Friendswood Drive. Before officers arrived, the dispatcher reported a blue Ford pickup involved in the disturbance was leaving the scene, police said. An officer stopped the suspect vehicle at the intersection of West Castlewood and Cedarwood avenues and determined the driver had been punched by his brother, the suspect, according to the report. The suspect allegedly placed his brother in a choke hold and pulled him over the center console and out of the truck. The suspect was taken into custody, and the brother received a citation for disorderly conduct, police said. Narcotics A Matagorda man, 34, was taken into custody for possession of drug paraphernalia after a traffic stop for expired registration Dec. 14 in the 300 block of East Parkwood Avenue, police said. The officer found two syringes in a passengers purse and a pipe in the center console during a vehicle search, according to the report. Police charged a Friendswood man, 30, with possession of a controlled substance after a traffic stop for an equipment violation Dec. 15 in the 200 block of East Parkwood Avenue. A vehicle search yielded methamphetamine, and bond was set at $2,000, police said. A Friendswood man, 25, was charged with possession of drug paraphernalia after a traffic stop for an unsignaled turn Dec. 16 in the 4100 block of Friendswood Link Road, police said. The vehicle reportedly had no license plate lights and no brake lights. A passenger also had a loaded handgun in her lap, police said. The officer found a bag of marijuana and residue, smoked marijuana cigarettes in the ashtray, cigarillos and marijuana shake during a vehicle search, according to the report. Driving while intoxicated Police charged a Houston woman, 51, with DWI after a suspicious vehicle was reported Dec. 14 in the 2300 block of Butler Drive. An officer arrived to find the vehicle stopped in the middle of an intersection, police said. The driver, who said she was lost, failed a field sobriety test and consented to a blood draw, according to the report. A Rosharon man, 25, was charged with DWI after an injury accident Dec. 16 in the 1000 block of Cowards Creek Court, police said. Another motorist witnessed the accident and told police the driver exited his vehicle, stumbled across the yard and laid down by a tree, according to the report. The driver refused a breath or blood test, and bond was set at $1,500, police said. Police charged an Alvin woman, 28, with DWI after a traffic stop for speeding and straddling the dashed lane line Dec. 17 in the 400 block of West Parkwood Avenue. She reportedly failed a field sobriety test and refused a breath or blood test. Public intoxication Police took a Friendswood man, 23, into custody for public intoxication after a reported disturbance Dec. 10 in the parking lot at Kroger, 3135 FM 528. Officers arrived to find the man running through traffic, police said. Traffic A Houston man, 32, was charged with driving while license invalid Dec. 10 in the 2800 block of West Parkwood Avenue, police said. He reportedly was driving a commercial vehicle and had stopped for an inspection. Police charged a Houston man, 44, with expired registration Dec. 15 in the 3000 block of FM 528. He had outstanding Friendswood traffic warrants and was taken into custody, police said. A 57-year-old La Porte man was charged with driving while license invalid Dec. 16 in the 200 block of West Parkwood Avenue, police said. Found property An Uber driver found a scooter and other childrens toys near the Rotary Pavilion at Stevenson Park, 1100 S. Friendswood Drive, according to a Dec. 15 police report. The items were placed in evidence for safekeeping, police said. Lone Star College-Kingwood students and staff will soon return to their regular academic routines when the spring semester starts on Jan. 14. Many Lone Star College stakeholders are excited to return to Kingwood after six out of the nine campus buildings flooded during Harvey, causing about $60 million in damages. LSC-Kingwood President Katherine Persson said LSC officials knew the damage was significant after their first walk through. When we walked through and saw the extent of the damage and how high the water was we knew that we had a tough task in front of us, Persson said. Buildings that were reconstructed are the Classroom A Building, Classroom B Building, Science Instructional Building, Administration and Performing Arts Center, Fitness and Training Center and the library. The renovated library will not be complete until March 2019, according to LSC officials. Lone Star College spent $56 million in renovation costs. While reconstructing the six new building, Lone Star College officials were looking at ways to prevent future flooding. One thing they did was relocating the major network closet from the first floor of Classroom Building A to the second floor. They also moved their mass communication system from their former Classroom Building A to the Student Conference Center. Communication panels were all raised to above flood line and LSC-Kingwood is working on building a new health care facility on high ground. Lone Star College officials are also discussing the implementation and cost of water barrier doors with FEMA. Working without a campus While the majority of the campus was being renovated, LSC-Kingwood staff was tasked with continuing class. Persson said faculty and staff met at an employees residence to solve this issue. We had to switch something like 72 percent of our over 1,200 classes to a hybrid or online course, Persson said. We lost six of our nine buildings, but all of the power was out, so we had no campus for a while. They planned how to shift (classes) online or find other homes for their classes, especially some of the hard to duplicate, specialty health care programs. The LSC-Kingwood president said switching to a hybrid or online course was an adjustment for many students and staff. Growth after the storm Students were willing to go to other sites (for class). Actually, we saw our highest enrollment after Harvey because I think students that had extensive damage else where in the greater Houston area werent ready to start classes the week or two weeks after Harvey. We had a delay; we didnt start until three weeks later and I think thats why we picked up enrollment, Persson said. LSC-Kingwoods student enrollment is at about 12,700 students as of this fall according to Persson. District 8 Lone Star College Board of Trustee Mike Sullivan, who was recently elected in November, said although he was not involved with the campus rebuilding process as a trustee, he was involved as a community member. I watched the administration and how they come together for the good of the students, the students success, as well as our faculty and staff, Sullivan said. Sullivan said it is exciting to see student enrollment increase during the rebuilding process. A lot of people didnt abandon us, which is nice, Sullivan said. Enrollment was down just a little bit but it flattened out and its on the upswing again. Its very exciting that were going to be back home if you will. Were going to have new equipment, new facilities, just a lot of good things. Getting back to normal Tessa Travitz, a LSC- Kingwood psychology student, said while the campus was closed for renovations she wasnt able to utelize all of the resources at LSC-Kingwood. Travitz took the time to take her core classes and look at other degree choices if she were to ever switch degree plans. Fortunately for Travitz, she was able to take some courses at the LSC-Atascocita campus. It was a little bit of a bummer not getting to have the full student life atmosphere on campus, she said. Travitz is very excited to start class again at the LSC-Kingwood campus this upcoming semester. Im just excited to see the full liveliness of the campus and get to see the students and bring the diversity back, Travitz said. kaila.contreras@chron.com "Everybody has a purpose in this world. God put you here for a reason," U.S. Rep-elect Dan Crenshaw told Pete Davidson when he reached out to the "Saturday Night Live" (SNL) star via phone over the weekend, according to Newsweek. "Know that you have value and you can do more good than you realize for people." The words of kindness were delivered after the 25-year-old comedian shared a cryptic Instagram post, now-deleted, on Saturday, insinuating he was contemplating suicide. "I really don't want to be on this earth anymore. I'm doing my best to stay here for you but I actually don't know how much longer I can last," Davidson's alarming message read. "All I've ever tried to do was help people. Just remember I told you so." RELATED: Texas' Crenshaw mocked by 'Saturday Night Live' for eye patch Crenshaw's actions also come after Davidson mocked the appearance of the former Navy seal, who wears an eye patch post losing an eye in Afghanistan, on an episode of SNL on November 3. The two seemingly quashed their differences the following Saturday when Crenshaw joined Davidson on SNL to take a few jabs of his own. "This is Pete Davidson. He looks like if the meth from 'Breaking Bad' was a person," he said. RELATED: SNL mocked my appearance. Here's why I didn't demand an apology [Opinion] Twitterverse is showing the 34-year-old Texas Republican some appreciation for his actions, with many praising him for showing heart. "Sometimes Help Comes From Where You Least Expect it. Dan Crenshaw, Who Was Made Fun Of On SNL by Pete Davidson Over His War Injury, Reached Out To Pete After an Alarming Cry For Help in a Tweet," remarked @mariettaposts. "Hey, @DanCrenshawTX, thanks for continuing to show the world that humanity and decency transcend politics." said @kendilaniannbc. Davidson has spoken publicly about the seriousness of mental health and his own struggles with borderline personality disorder. Crenshaw told KPRC it's tough to see someone in such pain. "You know you don't want to see somebody in that kind of position to the point where they're actually putting out a cry for help on social media. That's not a good place to be in," he said. Davidson's post sparked concern about his safety and well-being not only from Crenshaw but from his legion of social media followers and fellow celebrities including Jon Cryer, Jada Pinkett Smith, Machine Gun Kelly, and his ex-fiance Ariana Grande, who ran to be at his side. "I'm downstairs and I'm not going anywhere if you need anyone or anything. I know u have everyone u need and that's not me, but i'm here too," she posted on Twitter. After Davidson posted his worrying message on Saturday, he made only a brief appearance on SNL. He introduced a musical performance by Miley Cyrus and appeared in a pre-taped segment satirizing the efforts to find a host for the Academy Awards, but did not participate in any of the live comedy sketches, per the New York Times. It was the show's last episode of the year. If you or someone you know is considering suicide, please contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), text "help" to the Crisis Text Line at 741-741 or go to suicidepreventionlifeline.org. Marcy de Luna is a digital reporter specializing in social media, the famous, and food. You can follow her on Twitter @MarcydeLuna and Facebook @MarcydeLuna. Read her stories on our breaking news site, Chron.com, and on our subscriber site, HoustonChronicle.com. | Marcy.deLuna@chron.com | Text CHRON to 77453 to receive breaking news alerts by text message Updated Story Dec. 20 Mercedes "Sadie" Lee has been found safe in Iowa, according to Texas EquuSearch. Circumstances surrounding the case or an explanation for Lee's disappearance was not provided. The search organization posted, "Not every case we work on turns out this way, so we consider this our Christmas miracle." Original Story Dec. 19 Authorities with the Galveston County Sheriff's Office are asking the public to help locate a 15-year-old girl who was last seen in Bacliff on Dec. 14. According to Texas EquuSearch, Mercedes "Sadie" Lee was last known to be wearing camouflage print pants, and a black hoodie over a black long-sleeved shirt. She reportedly was known to be carrying a few things with her, including a a pair of burgundy-colored jeans, a pair of blue jeans, a pair of black jeans, a pair of camouflage type jeans and a teal-colored, velour throw blanket. A LOOK BACK: Neighborhood area crimes that shocked residents in 2018 Anyone with information on Lee's whereabouts is asked to contact the Galveston County Sheriff's Office at 281-534-3515 or Texas EquuSearch at 281-309-9500. Rebecca Hennes covers community news. Read her on our breaking news site, Chron.com, and on our subscriber site, houstonchronicle.com. | rebecca.hennes@chron.com | Text CHRON to 77453 to receive breaking news alerts by text message Operating as a family business for the past 20 years, La Casita Mexican Restaurant in Porter has grown as East Montgomery County expands, and it will continue to do so with the help of the East Montgomery County Improvement District. After moving into a location where several other restaurants have called home in the past, the owners of La Casita Alex Sanchez and Steve Rodriguez wanted to renovate and remodel the spot to suit their brand and make it more welcoming to customers. My family and I had worked in various restaurants for years when this particular location became available; it was the perfect fit for La Casita, said Rodriguez. When we opened our location in Porter, we opened the doors within two weeks. While we had La Casita restaurants in other communities, this is our home and where we ultimately wanted to open an additional La Casita. We started from a blank slate and began to build from there. As they grew in popularity in the EMC community and beyond, EMCID President/CEO Frank McCrady along with a few of the Board of Directors met with La Casitas owners during a visit to the restaurant to encourage them to seek out assistance, specifically through a small business loan through the East Montgomery County Economic Development Corporation to assist with improvements at the restaurant that will provide a better experience for customers. EMCID offers cash and non-cash incentives to companies that locate or expand within the boundaries of the District. Incentive funds can be used for training, building improvements, furniture, equipment, fixtures and various needs. The EDC offers low-interest loans with flexible terms customized to fit businesses needs. Rodriguez and Sanchez put together a plan for their expansion and renovation, which includes re-painting the inside and outside of the restaurant, expanding the overall square footage for additional seating, new flooring, wood detail on the front entrance, building a patio onto the back of the restaurant and re-paving the parking lot. The duo then presented that plan to McCrady. We presented our plan to the EMCID Board of Directors who approved our funding and wanted to help us with these projects; we couldnt be more thankful, said Rodriguez. McCrady took the time out of his busy schedule to help us with the paperwork and EMCID is truly here to help us as a small business if it is needed. These improvements help us to create more jobs and improve our sales which, in turn, help the local economy. Its the exact reason the EDC exists, says McCrady. Were happy to help businesses with funding for these types of projects. We want you to grow. We want to help more people in East County find jobs here in our community. Its a win-win for everyone, said McCrady. The owners of La Casita had already begun parking lot improvements, but the loan helped finish the job as well as the other projects. According to Rodriguez, lunchtime during the week, as well as Fridays and Saturdays, continue to be their busiest days which is why adding the patio on the back will help, especially for those customers who wish to enjoy their meal outside. The patio is not expected to be completed until early 2019 since they want to make sure it is done right. The new patio will give our customers a chance to enjoy the weather, said Rodriguez. We will also have a fireplace for the colder months; 80 percent of the time we have temperate weather where our guests can enjoy a meal outside. Our customers are very loyal to us, so we thought they deserved better and wanted these improvements. La Casita was also able to purchase a van wrapped with their logos which has enabled them to grow their catering business, too. The van allows them to transport more food for larger catering jobs. We are very grateful to our customers and to EMCID, you all have helped us to be successful and provide the best for our customers, said Rodriguez. For more information on how EMCID and the EDC can help with business expansion and improvements, go to www.emctx.com/services/economic-development. Harris County Precinct 5 Constable Ted Heap said his office is looking to add two clerical positions to assist with data entry and crime reporting. The new full-time clerks will help deputies at the constables office compile statistics and would be responsible for merging multiple entries in a database that could have otherwise caused confusion, Heap said. Their main responsibility will be managing the reporting required by the National Incident Based Reporting System to the Universal Crime Reporting Program, Heap said. The NIBRS is a national database used by law enforcement to collect and report crime data, according to the United States Department of Justice. The Harris County Commissioners Court on Tuesday voted to approve the creation of the two clerical positions at their regularly scheduled meeting. Heap said the clerks will take over responsibilities previously held by the Harris County Sheriffs office administration team. Hundreds of crime reports come in to the database from officers in the field and the clerks will assist law enforcement by removing duplicate entries and merging them, Heap said. By doing this, clerks will reduce the amount of time and overhead spent on reviewing and gathering crime data, he added. The clerks will also assist the records division in getting public records to the public and the media. Records requests come in by the truckload, Heap said. Anything that comes in from the public, the media or attorneys, we have to go in, redact and edit it before we release it. Commissioners approved a maximum hourly wage for the clerks of $22.32 for a 40-hour work week. A clerks wage will be determined by experience, Heap said. The positions will be funded by Harris County Precinct 5 Offices existing budget. Heap said the agency will post the jobs by Dec. 22, but he anticipates that the office will look from within at first and then expand the search. michelle.iracheta@chron.com In a 4-1 vote Thursday, the Conroe City Council amended its tree ordinance removing the requirement of a tree survey and urban forester among the many changes that ease the burden on developers Councilman Seth Gibson was the lone nay vote. We need to either table it or vote it down and come back and work on this so it is fair and equitable for all citizens of Conroe, Gibson said during the councils Thursday meeting. This ordinance has so much red in it it has almost taken a blood bath. The 83,000 people in town are who Im looking after, not a couple of developers pockets. Mayor Toby Powell, who requested the changes to the ordinance, said the ordinance needed to be tweaked. Sometimes we need to go back and review ordinances and make it more feasible for developers and the citys permitting and code departments, he said. According to Marc Winberry, the ordinance now allows developers to get a permit to begin clearing the land before submitting a development plan for the property. The developer can set aside a bank of trees and get a permit to clear the remainder of the property and then follow up with the final tree plan and landscape plan. This will undoubtedly make it easier to accomplish that development activity on the front end, Winberry said. But at the same time by requiring that preservation bank the objective is to ensure there are enough trees left on the site to be able to still achieve the required preservation part of the ordinance. Mayor Pro Tem Duke Coon asked Winberry if the amendment will allow clear-cutting. I would say one mans clear-cutting is another mans development, Winberry said calling clear cutting a slippery term. Coon asked numerous times if the ordinance still requires a 30 percent tree canopy for developments. Winberry said yes, however, that is 30 percent requirement is post development and the canopy can consist of preserved and newly planted trees. The ordinance will allow commercial developers to choose where trees will be preserved but must meet the 30 percent canopy. The amended ordinance repeals preservation zones in front of the development. Winberry also pointed out the amended ordinance offers credits to developers who preserve existing trees and increases credits for planting new trees. it allows the landowner great flexibility to do what he wants to do with his property without imposing the burden of a permit, Winberry said. Before the vote Thursday, Gibson urged fellow council members to hold off on the changes. I dont believe we should be rushing this through this quick, he said noting the tree ordinance was developed following concerns from residents about clear-cutting. We have totally forgotten about them with these changes to help out one of two developers who dont want to follow the rules. Councilman Duane Ham, who did not attend the councils workshop discussion regarding the changes to the ordinance, said he did not understand the entire ordinance and asked the council delay approving it and form a committee to research the changes. While Gibson didn't name specific developers, according to campaign finance reports for council members Duane Ham, Raymond McDonald, Jody Czajkoski and Mayor Toby Powell, local developers Daniel Signorelli and Michael Stoecker donated almost $30,000 to their campaigns from July 2016 to June 2018. Just over $17,000 of that was to Ham's campaign which Stoecker serves as campaign treasurer. Coon and Gibson both self-fund their campaigns and show no donations. cdominguez@hcnonline.com When David Alexander Gonzalez Romero first came to the United States from El Salvador in 2009, the first thing he wanted was a high school diploma. The Woodlands College Park High School student, though, wasnt able to graduate on time because he didnt pass a certain section of a standardized test. I didnt graduate because my English wasnt that good. Its hard to learn, Romero said. But on Monday night, as he stood in his navy cap and gown, 26-year-old Romeros life changed. He received his diploma thanks to the passage of a state bill that lets him graduate based on his course work, not his scores on a standardized test. Romero was one of 68 students from six high schools Caney Creek, Conroe, Hauke, Oak Ridge, The Woodlands College Park and The Woodlands who received their diplomas at the Conroe Independent School District 2018 Mid-Year graduation. The ceremony took place at The Woodlands College Park High School, where the auditorium was abuzz with excitement as parents, grandparents, siblings and spouses showed up to see their graduate receive his or her diploma. Gregg Colschen, assistant superintendent for secondary education, guided the 30-minute ceremony with help from graduating students who led the attendees in the pledge of allegiance and Texas pledge. This ceremony is specifically designed for students who wish to graduate early or those who needed some extra time and are graduating late. Graduating student Danielle Martin spoke to those scenarios when she gave her remarks to the audience. She commended those students who graduated early, and acknowledged that those graduating late didnt give up. No matter how long it takes, you always have time to finish the race. Complete your journey and keep working toward your dreams, Martin said. Members of the districts board of trustees, central administration and campus administration sat on stage as the students names were called and they walked across the stage one by one. Once all graduates were awarded their certificates, Colschen honored a special needs student who died earlier this year with a posthumous diploma. That students brother and sister accepted the diploma on her behalf in an emotional moment. As for Romero, hes been working as a cook at a local steakhouse for almost 10 yearsbut hes ready to move on. His dream is to be a police officer. Now I have the chance. I have all of the doors open so I can do whatever I want to. Its something Ive been wanting for a long time, Romero said, whose wife, child, mother and other family members were in attendance at the ceremony to cheer him on. Romeros principal, Mark Murrell, said that its always wonderful to watch students walk across the stage, but that its extra special to see a student like Romero graduate. Language was a barrier, but his intelligence wasnt (a barrier). He never gave up. Hes an incredible person and is dedicated to his education, and (this is) going to open up doors for him. Its a life-changing night, Murrell said. jane.stueckemann@chron.com The city of Montgomery has approved a new animal ordinance in a split vote. Listen, there is going to be unintended consequences to this and we are jumping out there and going to do things that we have no idea what is going to result from it , Councilman John Champagne Jr. said. The city council discussed the proposed ordinance for reconsideration with public feedback during the Dec. 11 meeting. The council considered making adjustments to the ordinance such as for consistency and revisited some policies related to animals with a reputation for being an aggressive breed. The content of the ordinance states that its the behavior of the dog rather than the breed of the dog that makes it dangerous and the behavior of the dog is not isolated to the circumstances that happened, there is a hearing at which circumstances are considered. I dont think it gets much fairer than that, Councilwoman Rebecca Huss said. Champagne, who was not proposing a ban, pointed out what he considered to be flaws in the writing, including related to subjectivity, and questioning who and what decided what is a bad acting dog, which the council address with definition in the ordinance. Huss added during the discussion that municipalities that have blanket breed bans have not actually seen reductions in dog bites during the conversation. The council considered more comprehensive policies, including adding animal care standards and more restrictive limitations on the number of specific animals such as cattle, horses, sheep, and pigs based on property size 1.5 acres for the first animal, 1 acre for additional animals with exemptions for 4H and FFA projects. Councilman Champagne voiced concern about the exception. Their animals are somehow a higher, more acceptable form of animal? Champagne questioned. Tell me, what subjective criteria did you use that that animal is better than some other animal? Huss explained the goal of FFA or 4H student is usually to raise the animal to go towards college and that it is typically a temporary situation. Champagne asked if another person had a temporary situation to raise, feed, and slaughter an animal if it would be allowed. I understand all that but thats saying someone else isnt as important, Champagne said. While Huss understood the councilmans concern as well about unintended consequences, she addressed why the council felt a need to address the ordinance. We find ourselves at this point because the logic and middle road that we rely on to live next to each other in harmony doesnt seem to work anymore and we have been required by circumstances to get to this point and write things down, Huss said. And in doing so, we dont want to knock out the things that are an important part of our community After learning the city received feedback from two people regarding the exception and Huss noted the programs were important enough to be at the school district, Champagne again clarified his concern about unintended consequences he noted he was sure everyone involved with the ordinance wanted to do what was right. The council, which has had several meetings and public notices sent about the animal ordinance prior to the vote, noted by moving forward they could more effectively amend the ordinance, if needed. During the lengthy discussion, Champagne asked to respectfully make the motion to vote to accept the ordinance presented as is, with no amendments a yay or a nay. The ordinance passed with Councilwoman Huss and Councilman Jon Bickford for and Champagne and T.J. Wilkerson against the ordinance that required a majority vote. Mayor Sara Countryman broke the tie vote in favor of the ordinance. I will say what I said before, it can always be changed, Bickford said. I would rather have it enacted and change it than not have it enacted. mellsworth@hcnonline.com Bahrain-based GFH Financial Group (GFH) said it was named Best Investment Bank- Middle East and Best Islamic Bank Bahrain at the Islamic Business & Finance Awards - EMEA 2018, held recently in Dubai, UAE. In its 13th year, the annual awards gathered together more than 200 Islamic bankers and financiers from across the Middle East and Africa (MEA) to celebrate the industrys best and brightest and their accomplishments over the past year. Mohammed Abdulmalik, the chief placement officer, accepted the awards on behalf of the group, said a statement from GFH. Among the industrys most prestigious honours, the awards cover a wide range of financial services categories and are determined through an online poll held on the magazines website with participation from nearly 10,000 readers and industry players and peers. Designed to highlight, encourage and reward the exceptional performance and growth of the international Islamic business and finance community, GFHs wins continue to underscore market recognition of the groups strong financial and investment results across its core business lines as well as its continued position as a market leader, innovator and pioneer in the global Islamic banking and finance industry, it stated. TradeArabia News Service 3 1 of 3 Stafford MSD / Stafford MSD Show More Show Less 2 of 3 Stafford MSD / Stafford MSD Show More Show Less 3 of 3 The Stafford Municipal School District was honored to participate in the ABC Channel 13 Share Your Holidays Food Drive, in partnership with the Houston Food Bank, on Dec. 7. Stafford MSDs Maintenance and Operations delivered the donations - which were collected at campuses throughout the district over the past month -- to the Ismaili Jamatkhana Center in Sugar Land where there was a Share Your Holidays Celebration. Two years after a federal judge overturned his death sentence due to bad jury instructions, a Houston cop killer on Wednesday was given life behind bars for a decades-old crime in which defense lawyers said the state destroyed some of the evidence needed to retry the case. With graying hair and chains clinking in front of a half-full benches, 59-year-old Arthur Lee Williams shuffled into court Wednesday morning and walked out with a life sentence for the capital murder of Houston police detective Daryl Shirley. To the slain officer's surviving family it was a deeply disappointing outcome. "The criminal justice system ultimately failed my family by not ensuring your execution," said Jason Shirley, who ultimately went on to become a police officer himself. "You should have been put to death for killing my dad." The former detective's only daughter - who was 11 months old when her father was killed - sobbed as she showed the court a toy bear, the one stuffed animal she still had from her father. "You deserved the death penalty and I hope you spend every day of the rest of your life knowing that the only reason you are still breathing is because your victims have shown mercy," said Sara Poole. "I'm lying if I say I have forgiven you." But retrying the case could have posed an uncertain outcome. Since the 1982 killing, multiple witnesses have died, the laws have changed and the 911 tape was taped over, according to a defense filing entered last month. Had prosecutors taken him back to a jury for a new punishment, he could have been immediately eligible for parole if the state failed to secure a death verdict again. Instead, both sides agreed to two consecutive sentences: one life with parole term for the murder, and one 60-year bid for a prior aggravated assault. "He won't be eligible for parole until he's nearly 100 years old," said Harris County prosecutor Lori DeAngelo. In the months before the slaying, Williams was on parole and living in a Minnesota halfway house, according to court records. But in early 1982, he absconded to Houston where he lived with his sister and hid out under the alias Marvin Dean Hogues. Authorities in Minnesota put out an arrest warrant, and sent it over to Houston police. So on the afternoon of April 28, Detective Daryl Shirley - wearing street clothes and a cowboy hat - showed up at the apartment where Williams was staying, looking to make an arrest. He spotted Williams and a friend walking outside, and called out to the wanted man, using his real name. Williams hollered for help as the officer put a gun to his head, and a scuffle broke out. In the process, Williams shot Shirley twice with his own weapon. Then, he picked up the pistol and ran off. He was arrested two days later. In the decades since, attorneys have wrangled over whether Williams really knew Shirley was a cop when he shot him - and whether the jury should have known to consider that at punishment. Though he was originally sentenced to death in 1983, the case took decades to make its way through the state court system during appeals, a fact that at one point apparently baffled the federal appeals judge then handling the case. "Williams has tried to litigate legal challenges to his trial since the time of his conviction and sentence," Judge Nancy Atlas wrote in 2015. "Inexplicably, the state review took three decades to run its course. For reasons unclear from the record, state habeas review itself plodded on for twenty years, only concluding in 2012." One long-standing claim stemmed from concerns about why prosecutors had struck six black jurors, removing all African-Americans from the jury panel. "Detective Shirley was white; Williams is black," a federal appeals court noted last year. "At Williams' trial, the prosecution used peremptory strikes against six prospective black jurors. The jury that eventually convicted Williams had no black members." Defense lawyers alleged on appeal that it was the "practice and policy" of the district attorney's office at the time to strike all black jurors. Though the federal judge acknowledged a "suspicious pattern" in Williams' case, the court decided he didn't sufficiently prove that a pattern of racial bias was the reason the jurors were tossed. Ultimately, Williams ended up back in a Harris County court this week as the result of a completely different issue: bad jury instructions. At the time of his trial, Texas law included three special questions that juries should consider when voting on a death sentence - but none of those questions addressed mitigating evidence. Yet, a later Supreme Court decision required that jurors be told they could consider favorable factors - like personal background or mental disability - when deciding whether to greenlight a death sentence. In Williams' case, the state argued that Shirley had unquestionably identified himself as a police officer. Defense attorneys disputed that. Plus, they said, Williams had been assaulted a few months earlier when a man claiming to be a police officer forced his way into the apartment and robbed him - so he was already suspicious of strangers posing as lawmen. Though the defense brought that up at trial, the jury was never told to consider it during punishment phase, when they needed to decide whether or not Williams deserved a death sentence. After decades of appeal, a federal court in 2016 - while upholding his conviction - overturned his death sentence. Last month, defense attorney Anthony Osso filed a motion asking to take a death sentence off the table in light of the destroyed 911 tape. Williams is the second Harris County killer taken off death row this year over bad jury instructions. In June, Michael Wayne Norris was given two back-to-back life sentences - a fate that will keep him behind bars for life. Like Norris, Williams wasn't eligible for life without parole because it wasn't a sentencing option at the time of the slaying. Instead, in Wednesday's plea deal, he waived the right to a jury trial and was sentenced to life with parole. He also took responsibility for a 1982 aggravated assault, even though the statute of limitations expired and the victim has since died. That agreement will net him 60 years behind bars, after he's formally sentenced for it in June. "We have been dealing with this for 36 years," said the former officer's oldest son, Steven Shirley. "We should have never known your name." Five employees at a South Houston bar have been charged with serving alcohol to an underage patron who authorities said then drove the wrong way and crashed into an SUV, killing a 23-year-old mother and injuring her child and mother. The five, employees at Servi-Car el 3 on Houston Boulevard, are all accused of serving 19-year-old Erick Hernandez at least a dozen alcoholic drinks over six hours Sunday night. On Sunday night, based on seized surveillance video, a visibly intoxicated Hernandez left the bar at 10:49 p.m., according to the Harris County district attorneys office. At 10:51 p.m., authorities said his pickup swerved across three lanes of College Avenue and crashed into a car driven by Taylor Phillips who died at the scene. This family should be celebrating the holiday, but is instead planning a funeral, said Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg in a statement. This tragedy should never have happened. EXCLUSIVE AT HOUSTONCHRONICLE.COM: An in-depth look at Houston's dangerous roads and drunk drivers. In the case, Mildred Garcia, 21, Anna Evelyn Lule, 19, Jaquin Guadalupe Gonzalez, 19, and Jazely Marie Barrera, 21, are charged with misdemeanors associated with serving Hernandez. Gustavo Tejada-Garcia, 28, the manager of the bar, is charged with misdemeanor possession of an unauthorized beverage charge, namely tequila. Hernandez is accused of being drunk when he crashed head-on into an SUV driven by near Hobby Airport. Phillips died on impact, prosecutors said in court. Her 1-year-old son and 48-year-old mother were injured in the crash. Prosecutors with the Harris County District Attorneys office said none of the bar employees who served Hernandez ever asked for his ID. Hernandez was charged with second-degree felony intoxication manslaughter in Phillips death. He was released on a $30,000 bond Tuesday night, court records show. On Wednesday, a judge ordered that Hernandez cannot drive as a condition of his bond while the charge is pending. He was also issued a 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew and will be required to wear an alcohol-detecting ankle monitor. Hernandez, as well as his attorney, David Garza, declined to comment. Based on video, Hernandez had spent six hours drinking inside the Frontera Events Venue in the 1000 block of Houston Boulevard, ultimately downing a dozen alcoholic beverages including at least three tequila shots, according to Sean Teare, chief of the Vehicular Crimes Division at the Harris County District Attorneys Office. Servi-Car el 3 is a part of Frontera Events Venue, authorities said. Hernandez was drinking with another person inside the bar, Teare said. This is a 19-year-old kid at a bar, Teare told reporters Wednesday morning. The bar is like any other bar. They had live music. They were dancing. They were there for six hours, and they never stopped drinking during the six hours. Surveillance video indicates that Sunday not was not the first time Hernandez had been in the bar, Teare said. He eventually left the bar that night and hopped in his Ford F-150. Less than a minute later, Phillips was dead. Firefighters had to free Hernandez from his truck after the crash, Teare said in court. Hernandez was given a test to determine his blood-alcohol concentration and Teare expects it to be pretty high based on the amount of drinks surveillance video shows him drinking before the crash. As for the bar, the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission is investigating the circumstances leading up to the crash. If convicted, Hernandez is facing up to 20 years in prison. The Houston metro area is the deadliest in the nation for fatal crashes related to alcohol and drugs, according to a Houston Chronicle analysis of federal data. The dubious distinction has drawn the attention of prosecutors. Ogg, since taking office in 2017, has worked with the Texas Alcohol Beverage Commission on education campaigns aimed at establishments that sell or serve alcohol, and focused on prosecutions of people who sell alcohol to minors who later are suspected of causing deadly crashes. Charges have followed some of the regions most high-profile fatalities involving alcohol and underage drivers. In April, Clear Lake bartender Amy Allen, 40, was charged with two counts of selling liquor to a minor, both misdemeanors, following a Feb. 28 crash. Gumaro Munoz Campos, 29, was charged Aug, 6 with a liquor violation following a horrific crash in Atascocita that killed Salma Gomez and Chloe Robison, both 16. Campos, via his lawyer, denied in court selling Jaggar Clayton Smith, 17, the liquor purchased prior to the July 25 wreck that split Smiths car in two when he slammed into a tree in the median of Timber Forest Drive. Still, courts and prosecutors have been mixed on imposing penalties. Allen received deferred adjudication in September, meaning she will spend no time behind bars and the charges could disappear if she avoids other crimes. The bar owner's son, Devin Jackson, 24, and another man, John C. Medina, 23, pleaded guilty to one count of furnishing alcohol to a minor and both also received deferred adjudication. Dug Begley contributed to this report jay.jordan@chron.com NEWS WHEN YOU NEED IT: Text CHRON to 77453 to receive breaking news alerts by text message | Sign up for breaking news alerts delivered to your email here. Joseph Little, a graduate of Houston's St. Thomas High School, died of strokes due to seizures induced by the combination of snorting of Adderall and smoking marijuana, according to an autopsy. On Monday, the Travis County Medical Examiner released a report regarding the accidental death of Texas A&M University freshman Joseph Little, who died on August 29, 2018. Little's death was allegedly caused by seizures and strokes due to toxic effects of the prescription drug Adderall, an amphetamine, the coroner ruled in the autopsy report. The report also revealed that Little may have combined Adderall, which abc13 says he snorted, with smoking marijuana. The report states the 18-year-old "may have smoked marijuana at the evening (fraternity) rush event and ingested Adderall to stay awake for the pledge event the next morning." Immediately following Little's death, the Dean of Student Life reportedly launched an investigation related to possible alcohol, drug, and hazing violations in Phi Gamma Delta fraternity, of which Little was a member. The fraternity was subsequently suspended from campus and has appealed the decision. Little, who was a graduate of Houston's St. Thomas High School, was at a housing complex in College Station at the time of his passing, according to abc13. The Department of Student Activities and the Office of the Dean of Student Life within the Division of Student Affairs are reviewing this recently-released report to determine any additional actions. A criminal investigation is ongoing. Marcy de Luna is a digital reporter specializing in social media, the famous, and food. You can follow her on Twitter @MarcydeLuna and Facebook @MarcydeLuna. Read her stories on our breaking news site, Chron.com, and on our subscriber site, HoustonChronicle.com. | Marcy.deLuna@chron.com | Text CHRON to 77453 to receive breaking news alerts by text message Two deputies are being hailed as heroes after pulling a man from a burning car last week in Chambers County. Chambers County Sheriff's Office deputies Braedon Boznango and Carlton Carrington were called out to a rollover crash in the 3800 block Texas Highway 124 around 8:30 p.m. Dec. 13. Dramatic video from the deputies' bodycams and dashcams show them frantically running to the burning car in the middle of a pasture. A woman who witnessed the wreck told them that there's a man unconscious inside the car. The deputies found the man partially hanging out of the passenger-side window with his legs and stomach on fire, according to the sheriff's office. Both deputies helped pull the man from the vehicle and dragged him to a nearby pond to douse the flames. He was airlifted to a Houston hospital in critical condition. Neither deputy was injured, although the intensity of the flames melted part of their equipment on their uniforms. 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 | Text CHRON to 77453 to receive breaking news alerts by text message Global independent safety science company UL has introduced a new testing and commissioning service for the Middle East and North Africa (Mena) region that helps determine the energy efficiency of buildings. The launch of UL's new building envelope testing and commissioning services comes at a time when countries across the Mena region are striving to reduce energy consumption. The building envelope, often referred to as the facade and roof, consists of the thermal, weather and air barriers separating building interiors from the outdoor environment. The thermal performance of the envelope products and systems is critical to achieve energy efficiency and performance, said a statement from UL. The service provides performance testing and assessments to determine the rate of air infiltration and thermal performance of the entire building enclosure assemblies and components, it stated. The new service was unveiled at the recent Big 5 show in Dubai. The company said this expertise helps building owners, contractors, consultants and architects design and build more energy-efficient buildings from pre-construction all the way through to post-installation. "UL believes this service, being offered to customers in the region for the first time, will be of interest due to the commitment of various Mena governments to reduce energy consumption. The UAE is making huge strides towards its goal to double the energy efficiency in buildings and reduce 30 per cent of energy demand by 2030," remarked Hamid Syed, the VP and general Manager of UL Middle East. "To be in line with the UAE governments policy to reduce Dubai's electricity consumption by 30 per cent by 2030, businesses must aim to improve their energy efficiency and set affordable and clean energy goals to ensure a sustainable environment for future generations. Similar objectives have also been set in most countries across the region," stated Syed. Therefore, we know this is a service the construction industry will be interested in and were delighted to introduce it at The Big 5, where we received excellent feedback from clients who visited us, he added. In addition to the launch of building envelope testing and commissioning servie, UL showcased its fire containment and building inspection services with a focus on its expertise in the ducting industry with products such as fire-rated ducts along with environmental services and fire and life safety services.-TradeArabia News Service Officials are awaiting a medical examiner's ruling to determine whether to upgrade charges against a man accused of beating his girlfriend so badly she was placed on life support and later died, Converse police officials said. Ryan Stanush, 28, is currently facing a charge of aggravated assault causing serious bodily injury. He was booked into the Bexar County Jail Friday on a $100,000 bond. READ ALSO: Woman found unresponsive after apparent scooter crash on East Side According to Converse police, Stanush rushed Dorinda Ma, 25, into Northeast Baptist Hospital on Friday. She was not breathing and showed serious signs of trauma. Doctors placed her on life support, but just over two days later, she was taken off and died. Stanush told investigators Ma's injuries were the result of "rough sex," but doctors said her injuries were not consistent with such an explanation, authorities said. Converse police detectives interviewed him and later secured a warrant for his arrest. FIND OUT FIRST: Get San Antonio breaking news directly to your inbox According to Ma's LinkedIn profile, she was formerly an English teacher at Mercedes High School in the Rio Grande Valley with the Teach for America program. Daniel Trevino, the superintendent of Mercedes ISD, said she taught at the district for two-and-a-half years and resigned in November citing personal reasons. "She was greatly loved and respected by her students and peers. There will be a tremendous void in the Mercedes High School staff as we struggle with this tragic news," he said. Converse Police Lt. Jeff Shook said Ma was living in San Antonio at the time of the attack. Her Facebook profile contains a photo of herself with Stanush. The caption reads "Boyfriend". Text "NEWS" to 77453 for breaking news alerts from mySA.com Caleb Downs covers crime in San Antonio and Bexar County. Read him on our breaking news site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com | cdowns@mysa.com | @calebjdowns Significant events of 2018 in Pasadena included a lawsuit by the city seeking demolition of a historic building it deems unsafe, the resignation of the citys first Hispanic police chief and actions at area schools to ensure student safety in the wake of a mass campus shooting in nearby Santa Fe. The shadow of Santa Fe While Pasadena ISD and La Porte ISD were still recovering from Hurricane Harveys toll on campuses and students families, the district moved to address security concerns and anxiety among students and parents in the wake of the May shooting at Santa Fe High School just weeks before the last day of the school year. On social media, parents asked for more security on campuses, with some calling for metal detectors to monitor entrances. In the initial, precautionary response to the Santa Fe shooting, both the Pasadena and La Porte school districts increased campus security measures through partnerships with city police departments to provide additional officers at strategic locations at campuses and surrounding areas. In the week after the shooting, cases of terroristic threats on campuses resulted in students being taken into custody. Pasadena ISD confirmed that a student was arrested on May 23 for bringing a handgun to school at Beverly Hills Intermediate School, but officials said there was no indication of any intent to use the weapon. At La Porte ISD, officials verified that two students were taken into custody for making threats. Police chief resigns Pasadena City Council accepted on Nov. 6 , in a 7-2 vote, to accept Police Chief Al Espinozas resignation after almost three years in the role effective Nov. 30 amid questions about the circumstances of his departure. Espinoza had been appointment by Mayor Jeff Wager in spring 2017 to replace retiring chief Michael Thaler. Two of the councils three Latino members, Sammy Casados and Cody Ray Wheeler, voted against accepting Espinozas letter of resignation, with Casados claiming that Espinoza, who has been with the police department for 39 years, was being forced out. Espinoza did not respond to any comments about his retirement at the meeting, but later said in a written statement to the Pasadena Citizen on Nov. 9, Every Police Chief serves at the pleasure of the Mayor. Mayor Jeff Wagners office did not respond to repeated requests for comment on Espinozas retirement or who would lead the police department going forward. However, Casados said in an interview that he received an email from the citys human resources director, Daniel Pennington announcing that Assistant Police Chief Josh Bruegger was taking over as acting chief effective Nov. 7. EDC indictments In February, six current and former members of Pasadenas economic development board were indicted on misdemeanor charges of violating the Texas Open Meetings Act by a grand jury for holding two private meetings in November 2016 with a contractor. President Roy Mease, vice president Ernesto Paredes, treasurer Brad Hance, secretary Jackie Welch and board members Jim Harris and Emilio Carmona were all accused of violating the Texas Open Meetings Act, according to a news release issued by the Harris County District Attorneys Office. Mease serves as the Port of Houston Authority Commissioner, a position he was appointed to by the city in 2013. Mease, an attorney, also has had a contract with the city of Pasadena to collect delinquent taxes and ticket fines on behalf of the city since the 1990s. Some on City Council have urged that the contract be terminated or that another firm be hired when Meases contract is up. But in response to calls for Meases resignation at one meeting where payments to Mease were approved for the tax collection services, Wagner commented that an indictment is not a conviction. Bank building lawsuit The city of Pasadena is filed suit against the owners of the former First Pasadena State Bank building, a 12-story landmark at Southmore Avenue and Pasadena Boulevard, on June 29, in Harris County District Court, claiming that code violations spanning more than a decade have left the structure unsafe. The city seeks $65,000 in back code violation fees the city claims that building owner Pasadena Southmore LP and property lien holder Green Bank NA have failed to comply with building standards for the property at 1001 East Southmore Ave. The city is demanding that the owner either tear down the building built in 1962 or reimburse the city for demolition costs. Historian David Pomeroy said in a previous Chronicle interview that construction of the building helped establish the area near the new City Hall as a commercial area. When finished, the building, still the only skyscraper in Pasadena, was an anomaly in the community. Its design was meant to reflect a growing city. It was seen as progressive and modern, all those things you wanted in a city at that time, said David Bush, executive director of Preservation Houston, a nonprofit which promotes restoration efforts. Other events The Pasadena Strawberry Festival, an annual community favorite which began in 1974, saw smaller crowds and overall participation down, compared to past years. We didnt do as well as expected, but we did OK, said Bert Muston, the festivals executive director. Muston estimates that the festival, held May 18-20, drew in 25,000 people a decent number, she said, but significantly down from 55,000 to 60,000 in previous years. Its a big difference, and we also noticed that we were down in cook-off spots and mud volleyball spots, and cookers told us they were down in sponsors, she said. The festival raises funds for student scholarships and community projects. Lingering effects of Hurricane Harvey and a May 19 explosion at the Kuraray America Inc. plant in Pasadena may have hurt attendance. Scholarships given in 2018 from the festival totaled $40,000; donations to nonprofit groups that work the festival totaled $32,000. During the year, Pasadena ISD recognized the achievements of two principals, Joe Saavedra at Pasadena High School and Andrea Gilger at McMasters Elementary School, for strides their campuses made in student performance. Since 2019, Saavedra has seen the graduate rate increase from 67 percent to nearly 90 percent. Gilger was singled out for successfully obtaining a grant that brought a new playground to the school and surrounding neighborhood. She also initiated projects that engaged parent and community participation and saw recorded progress in student performance, with the school receiving a met standard for the 2016-2017 school year. jjones@chron.com Alvin Independent School District recently closed on land for its fourth comprehensive high school, which will go in Iowa Colony. A 2015 school bond issue funded the land, off Texas 288 and CR 64, and a recently passed bond will fund construction of the 550,000-square-foot, two-story building. The Spring Early College Academy will officially start classes at Lone Star College - North Harris once the 2019-2020 school year begins. On Tuesday, Spring ISD superintendent Rodney Watson and Lone Star College - North Harris president Gerald Fernandez Napoles signed a partnership deal for the academys move to the campus. Were forever grateful and were forever humble with the support we have from Lone Star, Watson said. While planning for the academy began in 2009, the first classes began in 2011, allowing students to earn an associates degree along with a high school diploma. The Spring Early College Academy has been a work in progress since it was established in 2011 in temporary buildings near Westfield High School. It would rain and they would have to go from one building to the next and theyd be walking in the grass and the mud trying to get to class on time. We felt very sorry for them, but we were doing the best that we could for them at the time. They now get the opportunity to be on a college campus, said Rhonda Newhouse, president of the Spring ISD board of trustees. In 2016, the district moved the academy to 14450 T.C. Jester Blvd., which was originally meant to be used as an administrative building. Once the current SECA campus is emptied, the district plans to convert it into a new campus, currently known as middle school 9. The new school is expected to house up to 400 students who will be chosen through a lottery after applying with a recommendation. SECA principal Diana Kimberly said that while the plans have not been finalized for the academys move to LSC-North Harris yet, about 10 classrooms will be available for freshman and sophomore level classes. Upperclassmen will be able to take college courses with college students. This provides the opportunity for our students to be more immersed in the college life and have access to the tutorial labs, the resources, all the aspects of college life since they are working for their associates degree, Kimberly said. mayra.cruz@chron.com 2019 Economic Outlook Conference set for Feb. 8 The annual Economic Outlook Conference, created and produced by The Woodlands Area Chamber of Commerce, is set for Friday, Feb. 8, 2019 from 7:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. at The Woodlands Waterway Marriott & Convention Center. The conference, which The Chamber will be hosting for the 33rd consecutive year, will provide insights into the projected growth of the economy in Montgomery County and Texas. The Economic Outlook Conference is the premier business event in The Woodlands area, bringing together nationally-recognized speakers, industry leaders and the business community to look at what is ahead for Montgomery County, said J.J. Hollie, president and CEO of The Woodlands Area Chamber of Commerce. The theme of this years conference is The Pathway to Sustainable Growth, with numerous speakers at the event, including John Hofmeister, former president of Shell Oil Company as the keynote, expected to talk about key components that drive the local economy. Aside from the keynote luncheon, the event will also feature a CEO Leadership Panel including Sallie Rainer, CEO of Entergy Texas, Inc.; Lonnel Coates, CEO of Lexicon Pharmaceuticals, Inc.; Charles D. Stokes, CEO of Memorial Hermann Health System; and Paul H. Layne, President of Central Region - The Howard Hughes Corporation. Tickets are available now at www.woodlandschamber.org/EOC. Early bird ticket prices are $149 for members and $179 for non-members through Dec. 31. On Jan. 1, 2019, ticket prices increase to $169 for members and $199 for non-members. Moviehouse & Eatery coming to Creekside Park The Howard Hughes Corporation announced that Moviehouse & Eatery will open its first Houston location at Creekside Park Village Center in The Woodlands. The luxury, dine-in theater will be located in a new 12-acre retail development, Creekside Park West, within the center. Moviehouse & Eatery will include 11 wall-to-wall screens, full-service food and beverage service at every luxury reserved recliner, a full bar and a scratch kitchen. The Moviehouse & Eatery will anchor the initial phase of the retail development, making Creekside Park the first village in The Woodlands with its own theater. Along with the approximately 42,370-square-foot movie theater, Creekside Park will include new retailers, restaurants with outdoor patios and a gathering courtyard, complete with outdoor fountain seating. Creekside Park West will feature a Craftsman-style architectural design in keeping with the theme prevalent in the Village of Creekside Park. The development will be located on Kuykendahl Road between Creekside Forest Drive and West Harmony Place. An extended forest preserve and attractive stone wall will be placed between the development and nearby residences. Construction is slated for completion in December 2019. Band Shell now owned by The Woodlands Township The Howard Hughes Corporation, and its wholly-owned subsidiary, The Woodlands Development Company, have officially conveyed the Band Shell and Boardwalk at Hughes Landing to The Woodlands Township. On behalf of residents and businesses in The Woodlands, were pleased to accept the Band Shell, the accompanying public green space and the Boardwalk into the vast system of parks and pathways in The Woodlands Township, said Gordy Bunch, Chairman of the Board of Directors for The Woodlands Township, in a press release. Were known around the world for our extensive and quality public spaces for our residents and visitors. The Band Shell and this public space is a quality place visited by thousands of visitors every month. We appreciate The Howard Hughes Corporation on this quality development along Lake Woodlands. The Band Shell and Boardwalk are home to community events like the Rock the Row free concert series and the annual Arbor Day Celebration. Information in this article was compiled from press releases. Ralph Hicks wasnt lugging five or six large green trash cans into a room at the South County Community Center in The Woodlands to clean up. He was dragging the cans into the space for a Christmas party he was holding. As he turned the trash cans upside-down, Hicks explained that the Christmas party is specifically for the Let Them Drum nonprofit, a weekly gathering of both special needs and typical children who want to drum: whether its on hand drums or steel drums. The trash cans were no longer trash cans. They were transformed into drums. Our typical kids can come to get volunteer service credit. Our autistic, Down syndrome kids, or whatever disability they feel more comfortable, Hicks said. Hicks started the club about seven years ago, but it was certified as a nonprofit organization a few years ago. The group now has more than 225 children registered, both special needs and typical children. While there are different levels of drumming basic hand drumming that works on volume tolerance and playing responsive rhythms, more advanced steel drumming that focuses on learning specific notes and an all-star group that performs at events the basic principles of letting the children drum at the weekly meetings are the same. Hicks said that when he started the group, he expected kids and their families to think the drumming was just a fun activity. But now, he knows its much more than that. These moms are hugging me in tears, saying that they havent seen their special needs son smile that long in years. It really hit me, that this is something special, Hicks said. For Sonya Bersani, the drumming and resultant joy enables her to see her child connect with others, which is often a difficult task. Bersani has been bringing her non-verbal, autistic son Eric to the group for about a year and a half. Its hard to communicate and connect with him. But when hes (at the drum group), hell catch the beat and echo it. Hes able to communicate in a way thats unspoken, Bersani said. That experience, Bersani said, is an incredible feeling as a mother. Its an amazing feeling to see him and so many other kids with special challenges just getting together and goofing off. It doesnt matter what their disability is, theyre just accepted, Bersani said, who also admitted that she drums at the meetings as much as her son does. Another parent who attends the group, Jennifer Ellestad, brings her 10-year-old autistic son Eli to the group. Theyve only been attending for a few months, but Ellestad said she has noticed a difference in Eli. Its hard to get him involved in something, so its nice to see that he can sit and focus on this, Ellestad said. He went from being super reluctant to leading the charge every time (Hicks) asks for a volunteer. While Hicks teaches music and percussion at Mitchell Intermediate School, and it was there that he began the club, he has a familial connection to this music therapy passion. Hicks said he realized that drumming was important when he was able to use it to connect with his nephew, who has a condition on the autism spectrum. One day, Hicks drummed on his thighs when his nephew, who wouldnt make eye contact with him before, repeated the rhythm. The two ended up laughing and having a conversation together, even making eye contact because of the drum beats. I thought it was amazing, Hicks said. Hicks started researching group drumming and then got in contact with a music therapy professor from Sam Houston State University who helped him develop the program. There is also a Let Them Drum chapter in Klein, and Hicks said he is looking to expand partnerships into the Cypress area, Salt Lake City and possibly Oklahoma City. Its cool how people come to us. Well find a teacher that has special needs in their family or some personal story that will draw them to us, Hicks said. Hicks said that for now, though, hes focusing on improving what the organization already does. Its so much more about the experience than the education, Hicks said. jane.stueckemann@chron.com The United Arab Emirates has become a member of the Global Alliance for Buildings and Construction (GABC), an initiative launched at the United Nation's Conference of Parties (COP21) held as part of the Lima Paris Action Agenda. Representing the UAE, the Ministry of Infrastructure Development signed the membership on the sidelines of the the United Nations meeting in Poland to discuss climate change. Commenting on the announcement, Nusseibeh Al Marzouqi, the director of sustainability and technical studies at the Ministry of Infrastructure Development, said that the UAE has made significant progress in reducing the impact of climate change by launching national programmes and initiatives leading to the development of the construction sector with minimal carbon emissions. "The ministry, supported by the directives of the UAE government, has developed innovative solutions in the field of sustainability, buildings and green roads that contribute to the existence of radical solutions to challenges of climate change," she added.-TradeArabia News Service Dubai Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) has opened a new training centre at the Dubai Marina, aiming to upgrade the skills and abilities of employees, which will serve RTAs strategic objectives and goals. The memorandum of understanding (MoU) was signed by Mattar Al Tayer, director-general and chairman of RTA and Abdulla Ali bin Zayed Al Falasi, director general of Dubai Government Human Resources Department. Al Tayer and Al Falasi toured the three-level training facility, which can accommodate 350 trainees. It has 17 training halls equipped with the latest training aides, smart apps and edge-cutting educational technologies. The centre includes an innovation hall, meeting room, 50-seat theatre, smart-learning library, computer lab, and an assessment centre. It comprises four divisions namely administrative and technical training, skills improvement and logistical support. The guests attended a briefing about the centre, which is designed to hone the administrative and professional skills of human resources, and deliver high-quality training programmes that meet the needs and expectations of RTA in improving employee performance and abilities. It will also carry out administrative leaders preparation programme, job tracks programmes and Emirati talents development programmes. The centre provides a training platform for the best training practices and solutions, builds partnerships with local and international bodies, improves training activities, and enhances employee competencies to cope with the government plans and RTAs strategic objectives. It also provides a sustainable training environment for career progression besides attracting and retaining excellent human resources. The MoU aims to boost cooperation in training, education and the empowerment of human resources. It also covers scientific research in support of government performance and the publishing of the best government practices. It also seeks to enrich the knowledge content of educational and training activities with practical skills of government business through the adoption of pioneering training programmes. Al Tayer was delighted with the opening of the new training centre, which contributes to realising RTAs 7th Strategic Goal (RTA Excellence). It also supports RTAs efforts aimed to uplift its standing as the first career choice for trained human resources. Achieving such an objective requires increasing RTAs competitive edge in attracting highly professional personnel and developing a comprehensive system for attracting, motivating and retaining employees through caring for their career development on practical and scientific qualification. RTA nurtures an environment conducive to career progression; which opens the way for promising young Emiratis to take up key leadership posts and contribute to the realisation of RTAs strategic objectives. Training is very much an integral part of training tools for improving human resources and their job competencies, said Al Tayer. RTA is seeking to realise the directives of leaders in providing an optimal training environment that enables young leaders to envision the future and have innovative skills for leading the future. The provides a host of training programmes such as Qeyadi, which was introduced in 2009 to groom first, second and third generation of RTA leaders, and version 4 of the programme targets young engineers. It has also introduced the New Manager programme aimed to instil fresh managers with the tools and information needed during the first 100 days of taking their positions in order to help them understand the culture of the RTA systematically. RTA has also Edaad Programme designed to prepare fresh Emirati graduates for taking jobs in the RTA, Academy Programme for scholarships, and Tamkeen 3 month programme for Emirati graduates who havent been employed after one year from graduation, explained Al Tayer. Al Falasi stressed the commitment of the Human Resources Department to cooperate with all Dubai Government departments with the aim of qualifying Emiratis at the highest international standards. Training is currently getting critically important. The technological advancements are so fast that human resources departments need to have continuous learning and training to empower human resources to keep pace with such global developments, said Al Falasi. Training aims to strengthen the points of weakness of employees and train them on the skills that empower them to successfully take up higher positions. It also boosts the spirit of belonging among employees and motivates them to work and improve themselves inside and outside RTA. The Dubai Government Human Resources Department provides a variety of training courses and programmes through the Dubai Institute for Human Resource Development of the Department. It aims to polish the skills of Dubai Government Employees through designing training programmes befitting the needs and scope of each department, he concluded. TradeArabia News Service ArabiaWeather, a leading weather company in the Middle East and North Africa (Mena), has signed a deal with Greece-based Raymetrics, a global leader and manufacturer of atmospheric light detection and ranging (Lidar) systems, aimed at revolutionising dust forecasting in the region. Inked in October, the agreement will help enhancing the quality and accuracy of ArabiaWeather forecasts, said a statement from the company. By virtue of the partnership, Raymetrics SA will complement ArabiaWeather's decision support solutions and weather forecasts with advanced hardware - including a state-of-the-art regional Lidar network - consequently elevating the latter's personalised, relevant and precise weather coverage, in turn, benefitting ArabiaWeather's end-users including consumers, enterprises and governments, it said. As a company operating in a geography where sand and dust storms are frequent, ArabiaWeather will further bolster its specialized dust forecasting capabilities, hence improving readiness and emergency response. Ehab Al Shurafa, managing partner at ArabiaWeather, said: We are very excited about our partnership with Raymetrics SA, as it will help us deliver greater value to our existing and future clients. The MoU will also enable ArabiaWeather and Raymetrics SA to promote collaborative projects that leverage each company's unique strengths, resources and cutting-edge technologies in order to deliver timely, accurate and localized weather information and services to private and public sector entities across the Mena region. Furthermore, the partnership will allow Raymetrics SA to benefit from ArabiaWeather's regional experience and standing in order to expand its reach within the Mena. Nikos Kontos, chief executive officer of Raymetrics SA, added: Our organisation and ArabiaWeather have a common vision for the Mena region, and this partnership is the foundation for achieving it. TradeArabia News Service More than 1,300 exhibitors from 59 countries will be showcasing their latest offerings at Intersec 2019, a leading trade and networking event for safety, security and fire protection, which opens next month in Dubai, UAE. The annual event will run from January 20 to 22, at the Dubai International Convention and Exhibition Centre. Organised by Messe Frankfurt Middle East, the expo will encompass the seven sections of commercial security; fire and rescue; perimeter and physical security; safety and health; homeland security and policing; information security; and smart home and building automation. More than 500 exhibitors from across the world have already confirmed their presence at Intersec 2019, including two-thirds of the world's Top 50 security providers, as global security brands continue to make a beeline for the mega safety and security event, to tap into and harness the enormous growth potential of the wider regional market, said the organisers. Recent market figures released by Knowledge Partner 6W Research estimates that the Middle East market for commercial security will reach $7.4 billion by 2024, achieving a sustained compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16.6 per cent. The research indicated that demand for IP-based video surveillance systems, access control and intrusion detectors would continue to drive the market, which is fuelled by increased government spending on infrastructure projects and the imposition of stringent regulatory policies, creating increased opportunities for global security brands. Upcoming mega events in the region, such as the Expo 2020 in Dubai and the expected influx of millions of additional visitors are also expected to create demand for the latest in video surveillance systems and intelligent monitoring apparatus. Access control systems continue to remain in high demand in the Middle East, registering a market revenue of $300 million in 2017. Increasing awareness of security threats and a growth in IT spending will keep the market driving ahead. Meanwhile the demand for biometric access controlled systems has surged across the Middle East with the growing adaption of fingerprint and eye scanners across the region. The largest share of deployment of such systems in the region remains in the commercial sector. According to 6W Research, the market for intelligent video analytic software and systems is also on the rise across the entire region and are expected to create huge growth opportunities for manufacturers, vendors and distributors. Andreas Rex, show director, Intersec, said: Commercial security continues to be one of the chief driving sectors of Intersec as companies across the region continue to invest in cutting-edge intelligent security systems to protect their investments and facilities in an increasingly complex security scenario. As the most influential and significant international trade platform for safety, security and fire protection in the wider region, Intersec 2019 will showcase a wide spectrum of the latest developments in the commercial security sector, he added. Leading international security solutions provider CP Plus will be front and centre at Intersec 2019 with their latest range of intelligent surveillance products. Gaurav Khemka, director, CP Plus, said: Indeed, we have had a long association with Intersec, and we look forward to it each year with renewed enthusiasm. Video surveillance has evolved manifold over the years and as a market leader we have always strived to stay ahead of the competition. The new age surveillance is all about automation, intelligence, and resource efficiency. This year we are focused on showcasing our artificial intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) based technologies - IP surveillance solutions; Network PoE switches; 4K analog HD solutions with H.265+ Codec; law and enforcement solutions such as bodyworn cameras and Mobile DVRs; command and control room solutions including Integrated VMS and health monitoring systems; time and attendance solutions with cloud management; and multi-apartment video door phone systems, he added. Intersec 2019 will also have a number of extra features including the Future Security Summit which will address key issues such as: AI, security integration, emergency preparedness and response, data protection, IoT and much more. Also returning is the SIRA Forum, with the latest updates in security law and industry regulations in Dubai, while a one-day Fire Safety and Protection Conference will involve authorities, fire chiefs, engineers, fire fighters and emergency response professionals, it stated. TradeArabia News Service Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc), and its project partner Cepsa, a Spain-based global integrated energy company, have awarded a front-end engineering design (Feed) contract, as both companies move forward with plans to develop a world-scale Linear Alkyl Benzene (LAB) plant in the Ruwais Derivatives Park. The LAB project is the first of the derivative units to be advanced under Adnocs Dh165 billion ($45 billion) Ruwais downstream investment programme. The Feed contract, a key milestone in the development of the LAB project, has been awarded to Tecnicas Reunidas, a Spanish engineering company which has been active in the UAE since 2006. This is the third Adnoc contract to Tecnicas Reunidas this year. In September, a consortium of Tecnicas Reunidas and UAE-based Target Engineering Construction was awarded an EPC contract for the second phase of Adnoc LNGs Integrated Gas Development Expansion Project. And, in November, the Spanish group had secured a Dh5.1 billion ($1.4 billion) engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contract to upgrade and expand Adnocs Bu Hasa field, which will increase the fields crude oil production capacity to 650,000 barrels per day (bpd). The LAB project will be jointly operated by Adnoc and Cepsa, a wholly-owned unit of Abu Dhabis Mubadala Investment Company, which has more than five decades of experience in LAB. When it comes on stream, the plant will produce 225,000 tonnes per annum (tpa) of Normal Paraffins (NP) and 150,000 MTPA of LAB. Adnoc Refining & Petrochemicals business unit manager Abdulla Ateya Al Messabi said: The LAB plant will be a key component of Adnocs plans to develop a new, large-scale, manufacturing ecosystem in Ruwais through the creation of the Ruwais Derivatives Park. The park will act as a prime catalyst for the next stage of Adnocs petrochemical transformation by inviting partners to invest and produce new products and solutions from the growing range of feedstocks that are available in Ruwais. This will enable the creation of numerous new petrochemical activities and value chains. The awarding of this contract, after a rigorous and robust tendering process, is yet another strong signal that Adnoc is accelerating its 2030 growth strategy. It is also a prime example of Adnocs determination to support the diversification of Abu Dhabi's industrial base, as we pivot downstream to meet growing demand for petrochemicals, both in the region and beyond into Asia. LAB is the most common raw material in the manufacture of biodegradable household and industrial detergents. It is also used in house cleaners, fabric softeners and soap bars. The main feedstock for the LAB complex will be straight-run Kerosene and other streams that are by-products from Adnoc Refinings operations in Ruwais. Miguel Paradinas, deputy CEO of Tecnicas Reunidas, said: This award supports our strategy to deliver value-added services in projects involving technologies in line with TR know-how and experience. It also reinforces our relationship with two priority TR clients, Adnoc and Cepsa, and consolidates our position in a strategic country where we have been working continuously for the past ten years. The Indian Ocean Basin LAB market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 5 percent between 2016 and 2030, according to market research conducted by Colin A. Houston & Associates Inc., a leading global market research and advisory company. The Asia-Pacific region is the largest and highest-growing market for LAB, with high demand from the industrial and household cleaning products sector. With a strong logistics base and diverse transportation links, Abu Dhabis strategic location allows easy access to serve these growth markets. Jose Manuel Martinez, Cepsas head of Chemicals, said: The award of the FEED contract is a significant milestone in Cepsas relationship with Adnoc, with whom we are working on a number of projects in the upstream, downstream and petrochemical sectors." "As an Abu Dhabi-owned company, we are keen to support Adnocs downstream expansion plans, in Ruwais, and the diversification of the UAE economy. At the same time, Abu Dhabis strategic location will enable us to strengthen our presence in the key markets for LAB products, in the Middle East, India and South-East Asia, he stated. Alongside the Ruwais Derivatives Park, Adnoc also plans to develop the Ruwais Conversion Park that will spur new business creation even further down the petrochemical value chain and act as a catalyst for the creation of focused industry clusters that can not only supply products and solutions, using the derivatives and other facilities available, but also leverage the proximity of Ruwaiss interconnected ecosystem to drive expertise, innovation and entrepreneurship. Across both parks, in addition to supplying feedstocks, Adnoc will make available developed land, infrastructure, utilities and shared services at attractive rates to partners. It will become a destination of choice for domestic and international partners who wish to set up their businesses or manufacturing facilities in the UAE, one of the worlds most stable, attractive and business-friendly investment destinations.-TradeArabia News Service HRD Antwerp, a European leading authority in diamond certification, has entered a partnership with Dubai-based jewellery retailer Stargems to certify their entire jewellery inventory through the establishment of a diamond jewellery grading lab. This co-operation will ultimately ensure the transparency and authenticity of each jewellery piece, said a statement from DMCC. As a result of the collaboration, HRD Antwerp will open its first diamond jewellery grading lab in the Middle East, located inside Turkish Trade Center (TTC) in Almas Tower in the DMCC Free Zone. HRD Antwerps laboratories use the most sophisticated technology and rely on the extensive expertise of their in-house research department to certify diamonds, it stated. Shailesh Javeri, the chairman of Stargems Group, said: "Within the diamond industry, trust is key. As a retailer, we want our customers to have confidence in our products. By certifying our entire inventory with the highly reputable HRD Antwerp brand, our customers can be assured about the authenticity and quality of our jewellery." With this new partnership, HRD Antwerp aspires to expand its presence in the Middle East by targeting some of the largest and most promising diamond markets, he added. HRD Antwerps CEO, Michel Janssens said: "We are delighted to be setting up our first diamond jewellery grading lab in the Middle East. Transparency and authenticity form the bedrock of our work and we want to make sure that Stargems clients purchase their jewellery with full confidence and peace of mind." "We look forward to beginning our partnership and introducing a new standard to the industry," he added. Both Antwerp and Dubai are global leaders in the diamond trade and this partnership will undoubtedly contribute to further strengthening the ties between the two diamond hubs. It will also have a positive impact on the industry as whole, boosting trust and confidence of consumers. Welcoming the deal, DMCC Executive Chairman Ahmed Bin Sulayem said: "We are thrilled to be welcoming HRD Antwerp to both Dubai and the DMCC community. We fully support this collaboration, which we believe will have a positive impact on the industry as a whole." "We at DMCC are fully committed to the highest standards of quality, authenticity and transparency and this is exactly the type of partnership that reinforces these values," he added.-TradeArabia News Service Atout France, the national French tourism development agency, has announced the launch of France.fr, the official dedicated Arabic website for France as a destination. With the goal of welcoming 100 million tourists to France by 2020, the Arabic version of the website has been developed to increase interest and footfall from the region. France.fr is fully adapted with the traveller from the Middle East in mind. The content created takes into consideration cultural nuances and traditions. Social Media platforms are now also available in Arabic to inspire and encourage followers to share their experiences. User-friendly and optimised for mobile consumption, the new website contains content and information on tourism in France, hotels, restaurants, things to do, culture and heritage, events and museums. Digital innovation is at the heart of our marketing initiatives and we have placed a significant focus on content creation, curation and distribution of the content on France in a number of languages to remain truly connected to people around the world. The websites aim is to boost Frances appeal as a touristic destination, improving its ranking as a top travel destination for the Arab traveller, explained Karim Mekachera, regional director of Atout France in the Middle East. Key features of the website include: 1. Before you set off or : A section entirely dedicated to travel information including customs and visa, transportation, accommodation, geography, climate and many more practical pieces of information. 2. Things to do : Viewers of the site can learn about the outstanding cultural attractions accessible for visits, such as taking hikes amongst the peaks, romantic tours, or family cruises. 3. Places to go : The section of the site creates awareness of the vast numbers of locations that can be visited, including the Alpes-Mont Blanc to Normandy, Provence to the Loire Valley, and from Paris to Tahiti. The site has information on more than 30 destinations that are ready to be discovered. 4. Happening now in France : A page dedicating to sharing news on festivals, exhibitions, concerts and major events, everywhere in France, showcases how there's always something going on in the country. This page is great for visitors to check on activities and schedule them during their trip. 5. An interactive map: The website now includes an interactive map element that is fully responsive to give a rich experience across the platform. We are pleased to offer a local language domain for all Arabic speaking travellers who can now benefit from a localised platform providing more relevant content to help them prepare for a great trip, Mekachera added. To further enhance user experience, the developers of the website will be gathering and studying consumer feedback to continuously improve and update the website. Updates will also be released including new content specific to the market including shopping, halal food, luxury accommodation and more. - TradeArabia News Service SUGAR LAND -- Pierryck Castellazzi so wanted to leave France and live in the United States that he took on the identity of a dead 6-year-old Midwestern boy. Now, the illegal immigrant, a convict, wants to go home. The Frenchman who took the name Charles Eugene Epley is asking for a pardon from Gov. Rick Perry that would release him from his Texas prison sentence for murder. If a pardon is granted, Epley would return to his homeland. The French consul general's office in Houston supports Epley and forwarded his request for a conditional pardon to the Texas Board of Pardons and Parole. Several French officials have written letters on Epley's behalf, arguing that a prolonged incarceration will make it more difficult for him to settle back into French society. But the family of murder victim Kenneth Churchill, Epley's stepfather, says Epley should stay in prison, and Fort Bend County District Attorney John Healey agrees. Epley, who is incarcerated at the Ramsey One Unit in Brazoria County, has served almost 13 years of a 40-year sentence. "The citizens of Fort Bend County have heard all the evidence as to Epley's crime, and heard any mitigating evidence which he cared to offer at this trial. Please honor the jury's decision by keeping Epley incarcerated in Texas' correction system," Healey wrote earlier this month to the board. Healey, then an assistant district attorney, helped prosecute Epley for what remains one of Fort Bend County's bloodiest murders. On April 14, 1989, Churchill, 54, a state prison employee, was shot at least six times and bludgeoned with a fireplace poker about 12 times, prosecutors said. When sheriff's deputies arrived, Epley was observed removing rubber gloves as he prepared to dispose of the body, investigators said. He asked, "Is there a problem, officers?" Prosecutors said Churchill was killed after he ordered his stepson to leave the house. Epley denied involvement and said Churchill was killed over a homosexual tryst involving a longtime friend and a teenage boy from Houston. Epley, according to Churchill's relatives, talked Churchill into marrying Epley's mother, a French immigrant. The marriage would ensure Epley's younger brother legal admittance from France into the United States, relatives said. "It was a marriage of convenience," said Donna Unangst, a niece of the murder victim who lives in Westchester, Pa. After her uncle's death, Unangst was able to trace that Epley wasn't who he said he was. In an effort to blend in the United States, Pierryck Castellazzi used the name of a dead Nebraska boy. Should the board agree that Epley go free, the panel will send its recommendation to Perry. A conditional pardon is often used to release an inmate to another country or to immigration officials for deportation. If the pardon is not granted, Epley's next chance at being released from prison is in August 2005, when his parole review is scheduled. He has been denied parole twice before. The Immigration and Naturalization Service ruled in October 2002 that Epley be deported to France or any alternate country once released from prison. As in the past, Epley, 46, declined an interview request from the Houston Chronicle. Epley says prison life has led him to suffer severe and chronic pain. Among his ailments, he says, are post-traumatic stress disorder, migraine headaches, periodontal disease and depression. Denis Simonneau, French consul general based in Houston, said he has visited Epley regularly and that Epley's health is seriously deteriorating. Epley says if he stays in jail, he'll continue to be isolated from French society, making it harder for him to return. Meanwhile, a contingent of supporters in France would welcome Epley home and offer him jobs. "I am concerned that a longer incarceration could deteriorate and compromise Mr. Charles Epley's chances of functioning productively in the French society," Toulouse Mayor Philippe Douste-Blazy said. "I believe that the French environment would be more therapeutic and that Mr. Charles Epley, if released, could for the benefit of his reinsertion, be part of our social life and activities with the city services, very active with humanitarian institutions. Mr. Charles Epley could be also a translator in our services." French lawyer Jean-Paul Escudier wrote that Epley could work at his law firm because of his knowledge of the U.S. legal system and command of the English language. Churchill's relatives and Healey, the district attorney, are doing all they can to keep Epley behind bars. "This has been going on for 15 years," Unangst, Churchill's niece, said. "It's been 15 years of constant grief. We went to the parole board two years ago. For this to come up again this soon, I just can't believe it." Unangst, along with her siblings, also wrote to the board countering Epley's request to go free. Epley's pardon request is his latest try to get out of prison. In 1995, Epley and attorney Mike DeGeurin tried to get Epley moved to a French prison. Healey reminded the board that Epley committed the most heinous crime of all, "the taking of a human's life." Dubai-based Emirates and South African Airways (SAA) are expanding their strategic cooperation with enhancements to their codeshare agreement, opening up new destinations for both Emirates and SAA customers. Pending governmental approval, SAA and Emirates have signed an enhanced commercial partnership which will see the relationship between the two carriers grow and strengthen their already successful codeshare agreement signed in 1997, across a wide spectrum of commercial and customer touch points. Included in the new agreement are plans to enhance the frequent flyer programmes, Emirates Skywards and Voyager by SAA. Emirates became a Voyager airline partner in 2000, which means Voyager members are able to earn and redeem Miles on flights operated by Emirates; and similarly, Skywards members are able to earn and redeem Miles on SAA-operated flights. The airlines will separately work on other areas of bilateral cooperation and an exchange of best practices across multiple airline functions. This agreement marks a significant step forward in the execution of our strategy and in transforming our business. It will enable us to explore and leverage synergies between ourselves in a much more enhanced relationship of mutual benefit. Our route network and that of Emirates complement one another. The expansion of our partnership will further strengthen key focus areas of the implementation of our turnaround plan, said SAA CEO Vuyani Jarana. We remain deeply committed to our decades-long relationship with SAA, and the forthcoming expansion of our codeshare agreement is an exciting development and a significant milestone in our history in South Africa, said Sir Tim Clark, president, Emirates Airline. We have seen great success with the codeshare agreement, having enabled greater connectivity to both SAA and Emirates customers, by offering more choice, flexibility and ease of connections to a wide range of cities via Dubai and across more points in Southern Africa. Increasing the scope of our agreement underpins the strong bonds we share with SAA and our belief that this enhanced partnership will enable further success and gain to the airlines and their customers." In 2017/18, the codeshare agreement between Emirates and SAA saw approximately 90,000 passengers benefit from seamless travel and greater connectivity. Emirates launched operations to South Africa in 1995 with flights between Dubai and Johannesburg. The relationship between SAA and Emirates spans over 20 years dating back to June 1997 with the signing of Emirates first-ever codeshare agreement, whereby the SAA code started to appear on flights operated by Emirates to Dubai. SAA is able to offer its customers seats on the eight daily flights operated by Emirates between South Africa and Dubai (four daily flights from Johannesburg including its iconic A380 aircraft, three daily flights from Cape Town and one daily flight from Durban). The enhanced agreement means the codeshare will be expanded across both carriers networks. - TradeArabia News Service Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg on Tuesday persuaded Commissioners Court to hold off approving $14 million in repairs to the flood-damaged criminal courthouse in downtown Houston. Ogg said the county should spend more time evaluating whether to repair or replace the 20-floor tower before sinking more money into it. Commissioners were set to approve nearly $14 million to repair the buildings elevator shafts and remodel parts of floors two through 20. To spend $14 million right now puts us on a trajectory that really puts the cart before the horse, Ogg said in a rare appearance before the court. You deserve more information to make a reasoned choice about the direction to follow, ultimately. Extensive flooding to the courthouse at 1201 Franklin during Hurricane Harvey displaced hundreds of prosecutors, public defenders and courtroom staff to offices across the city. The diaspora has left Ogg and many of her staff at 500 Jefferson, more than a mile from the courthouse and county jail. The top four floors of the courthouse have reopened, though the countys criminal justice system still is trying to catch up from Harvey 16 months ago. Ogg said she worried that repairs to the building would force those reopened courtrooms to close again. Based on the evidence, I have a reasonable doubt. I think it will disrupt our functions, Ogg said. We can use those courtrooms now. County Engineer John Blount estimated the cost of repairing the building at $86 million. He said a new structure would cost $430 million and take four years to complete. Precinct 1 Commissioner Rodney Ellis said paying for a new building may require the county to persuade voters to approve a bond issue. They may be unlikely to do so after passing a $2.5 billion flood protection bond in August, which taxpayers will be paying off over the next decade to 15 years. Precinct 3 Commissioner Steve Radack proposed removing the repairs from Tuesdays agenda, and his colleagues agreed. The move punts the thorny issue to the incoming court, which in January will include Democrats Lina Hidalgo as county judge and Adrian Garcia as Precinct 2 commissioner. zach.despart@chron.com www.twitter.com/zachdespart A 41-year-old Houston man whom a federal judge called evil was ordered Tuesday to serve 30 years in prison for sex trafficking four boys over several years through his home massage business and attempting to prostitute one of them during the 2012 Olympics in London. In July, a jury swiftly convicted Jason Daniel Gandy after a three-day trial on four counts of sex trafficking of minors, one count each of transporting a minor, transporting child pornography and sexual exploitation of a child. At his sentencing Tuesday, Chief U.S. District Judge Lee H. Rosenthal called Gandy an abuser of vulnerable human beings. You are evil, the judge said, according to an account provided by the U.S. Attorneys Office, and most evil are those who willingly exploit others for their own gratification. Following his 30-year term, Gandy will remain under supervision for life, with restricted access to children and the Internet. He must also register as a sex offender, Rosenthal said. During the crowded hearing, three men in their 20s and early 30s testified that Gandy had shattered their feelings of self worth and stole their innocence, leading them to substance abuse and suicidal thoughts. Gandy then offered a rambling, nonsensical speech in what his lawyer described as a detached tone of voice, touching on his childhood, the conditions of his confinement and his victims. A Justice Department news release said Gandy exhibited no remorse and attempted to portray himself as victim. Sentencing guidelines called for a term of life in prison, but Gandys lawyer, Sean Buckley, asked the judge for a reduction, arguing that due to his well-documented mental illness, Gandy has lived a very tortured existence as a prisoner prior to sentencing. After the hearing, Buckley said the trial gave Gandy a deeper understanding of the pain his actions caused. Today was difficult for everyone involved, but it was an important first step in my clients long road to redemption, Buckley said. Immigration officers became suspicious and halted Gandy at a London airport in July 2012 after he and a 15-year-old boy arrived on a flight from Houston. Gandy and the boy, who was not a relative, were returned to Houston on separate airplanes. Immigration and Customs Enforcements Homeland Security Investigations took over in Houston. Witnesses at Gandys trial testified that Gandy operated a massage business out of his home and used the teenager to provide massages and allowed customers to fondle the boy. Gandy compelled the teen to touch the customers genitals. Jurors heard about Gandy footing the bill for the London trip and the boys passport. Gandy had planned to have the boy perform erotic massages during the London Olympics. The investigators told the court that Gandy had sexually abused the boy. Agents later learned that Gandy had similarly victimized multiple young men, some as minors and some as adults. Four men who were minors when Gandy exploited them also took the stand, telling jurors how Gandy manipulated them into performing massages and sexually gratifying customers. gabrielle.banks@chron.com A Houston Police Department public affairs officer has been charged with DWI after being found with several pill bottles during a hazardous driving incident, according to court documents. A witness began following Muzaffar Siddiqi, 56, on Monday as he drove southbound on Interstate 69 near Hillcroft, police said. Siddiqi's white Toyota Camry, which had a flat tire, first struck a guard rail and then continued driving south while weaving on the shoulder. Siddiqi got to the Bellaire exit, re-entered the roadway, and finally exited on Beechnut, where he hit the left curb of the feeder road, the witness told police. He also hit the right curb, and by the time he got to a Toyota dealership parking lot, Siddiqi's car was smoking, the witness said. It eventually caught fire. Police responded to the incident around 10:25 a.m. Siddiqi told an officer that he knew he hit a curb, but that he didn't remember striking the barrier. He also said he didn't know his tire was flat, or that his car was smoking and on fire, police said. He said he was just going from HPD headquarters downtown to the Toyota dealership in southwest Houston for "routine service," according to charging documents. Officers recovered two blue pill containers in his car, with at least 10 pills inside. One of them was a hydroxyzine pill, police said. Police believed that Siddiqi was intoxicated -- he swayed while he was standing still, talked slowly, slurred his speech and wasn't quick to respond to questions or engage, police said. Siddiqi is a senior police officer assigned to the Public Affairs Division, spokesman John Cannon said. He was sworn in in 1998. Previous Houston Chronicle articles also identified Siddiqi as HPDs liaison to convenience store owners and the Muslim community. Hell be relieved of duty today with pay, pending the outcome of an internal affairs investigation. Houston police caught a man wanted on a felony warrant out of Tennessee after he crashed during a pursuit early Wednesday. Police first tried stopping the man around 12:30 a.m. after he committed a traffic violation in the 5900 block of Guhn, near Tidwell and U.S. 290, police said. Multiple criminals got the chance to smile for the camera this year as surveillance videos and dashcam footage captured extreme crimes in the Houston area. A violent robbery triggered by a local bank teller, police chases that ended in shootings and brazen employees defending themselves all made up some of the most notable incidents. A South Houston events venue was under investigation Tuesday following intoxicated manslaughter charges filed against a 19-year-old customer, who authorities allege drifted across three lanes of traffic before striking another car, killing a young mother. Erick Raphael Hernandez of Pearland had several drinks before his F-150 truck struck a black SUV head-on Sunday night containing Taylor Phillips, 23, who died at the scene, said Sean Teare, chief of the Vehicular Crimes Division at the Harris County District Attorneys Office. Also in the SUV were Phillips 1-year-old son and her 48-year-old mother, who each received minor injuries. Investigators from the Harris County Vehicular Crimes Task Force, which includes agents from the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission, are looking into the places that may have served Hernandez alcohol in the hours before the 10:51 p.m. crash. On Tuesday, the state agency announced its investigation into Frontera Events Venue at 1202 Houston Blvd. in South Houston. Frontera Events Venue could not be reached for comment. Hernandez told officers at the scene of the crash, in the 1500 block of College Avenue near Hobby Airport, that hed had five drinks that night, Teare said, but his actions and receipts on the floor of his car indicated he drank a lot more. You have these total and true innocents, who are doing absolutely nothing wrong literally just driving on our roads and people like Erick Hernandez drive the wrong way and wipe out beautiful lives, Teare said. Its as tragic as a case can get, in my mind. Investigators are using surveillance footage from unnamed bars Hernandez visited that night to determine exactly how much he had to consume. While Phillips family members were transported to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, depending on the extent of those injuries, the District Attorneys Office may brings more charges against Hernandez, Teare said. He may also be charged for possessing a fake ID that investigators found in his car. Teare said his division hopes to find and prosecute whoever made it. As (fake IDs) go, its a pretty good one, he said. Somebodys out there making them. I dont think Mr. Hernandez has the wherewithal to do this himself. Since Frontera Events Venue started serving liquor in October 2017, it has received two citations from the TABC, said spokesperson Chris Porter. In February, Frontera was cited for serving alcohol to a minor, and in May, it was fined $900 for serving alcohol after-hours, Porter said. Five additional complaints have been made against Frontera Events Venue, but those didnt result in citations. Businesses that serve liquor can shield themselves from liability under Texas Safe Harbor Act if they require all employees to undergo TABC training. So in cases where a bartender serves alcohol to an intoxicated person or a minor, only the server would be charged, not the business, Porter said. But mitigating circumstances such as death can allow TABC and local authorities to prosecute the business anyway, Porter said. If the vehicular crimes task force finds any connection between Frontera and the crash that killed Phillips, the venue will probably be charged, Teare said. Teare urged consumers to plan their way to get home, through Uber, Lyft, another taxi service, or a designated driver, before starting to drink. To the sellers and servers, the owners of these establishments, just be responsible, he said. Check IDs. If you see that someones obviously intoxicated, stop selling them alcohol. Do those things, and everything is going to be fine. But that small percentage of those sellers, servers and owners out there that encourage and actually do violate the law and over-serve and sell to minors, those are the ones were going to come after. Hernandez is scheduled to be in the 209th state District Court on Wednesday morning for an arraignment. He posted his $30,000 bail Tuesday morning. WASHINGTON It's been more than a decade since Texas, a state known for its death-chamber, embarked on a project of criminal justice reforms now credited with reducing crime, shuttering prisons, and saving taxpayer dollars. On Tuesday, those reforms took a step toward going national with Senate passage of bipartisan legislation uniting fiscal conservatives and social liberals in one of the most far-reaching sentencing reform packages in years, reducing some federal penalties and giving judges more leeway in sentencing offenders. The First Step Act, shepherded by Texas Republican John Cornyn, represents a rare instance of bipartisan agreement in a polarized Congress still struggling to keep the government open in a protracted dispute with President Donald Trump about immigration and border wall funding. It also marks a remarkable consensus among libertarians and Christian conservatives looking for cost-effective prison reforms and social justice advocates seeking less punitive alternatives to long-term incarceration for nonviolent offenders. A pet cause of Trump advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner the son of a convicted white-collar criminal the bill is expected to be approved by the House and get to the president's desk, possibly before the New Year. The overwhelming 87-12 vote in the Senate belied weeks of contentious negotiations and arm-twisting to bring along law enforcement groups and conservative lawmakers, particularly Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, a holdout who remained concerned with shortening prison terms for violent offenders and serious drug traffickers. A series of last-minute changes excluding the most hardened criminals helped remove some political hurdles, even if that cost the support of some liberal groups who said the bill does not go far enough to address criminal justice disparities toward minorities. Backers hailed the First Step Act as a long overdue effort to reduce the revolving door of recidivism. It would lower mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders and offer the possibility of early release to many inmates through job training and vocational education programs. In a floor speech Tuesday, Cornyn said the focus of the bill is rehabilitation. "Almost everybody in prison will serve their time and get out of prison," he said. "The question for us is, will they be better prepared to live life on the outside in a productive way, or will they simply reengage in a turnstile?" Cornyn cited the benefits of prison reform in Texas, which has seen incarceration rates drop by 23 percent and crime drop by 34 percent between 2005 and 2016. Eight state prisons closed along the way. "In Texas, in 2007 or thereabouts, we had some far-sighted, visionary leaders actually who decided instead of just being tough on crime, which Texas has always had a reputation for, we needed to be smart on crime, too," Cornyn said. "We're not just talking about money," he added. We're talking about human potential. We're investing in the men and women who want to turn their lives around once they're released from prison, and we're investing in so doing in stronger and more viable communities, and we're investing tax dollars into a system that helps produce stronger citizens." Final passage of the bill would provide a legacy achievement for Cornyn, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate with aspirations to one day become his party's Senate leader. His upcoming political journey takes him through a 2020 reelection campaign, which got underway this month with endorsements from key conservatives like fellow Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who had been rumored as a potential Republican primary challenger. The First Step Act also burnishes Cornyn's reputation for pragmatism, even as he has solidly aligned himself with a president who is better known for telling police officers not to be "too nice" to prisoners in their care. Cornyn's bill, however, offers a little something to everyone, from the American Civil Liberties Union to the Koch brothers and the evangelical community. On Monday, with the Senate embarking on preliminary votes on the bill, the conservative Faith and Freedom Coalition issued a "key vote" alert putting lawmakers on notice that their votes on the First Step Act would be included in their 2019 congressional scorecard. "Congress spent years talking about reforms to reduce recidivism and restore lives," Coalition Chairman Ralph Reed said in a statement. "It is time to act." Texas conservatives also weighed in on humanitarian and fiscal grounds. "For years, our prison system grew in spending and declined in results," said Kevin Roberts of the Texas Public Policy Foundation. "The notion of redemption was abandoned. Cost-effectiveness was discarded for the sake of punishment." The First Step Act, Roberts continued, "applies conservative principles to our corrections system. These principles will transform that system into something better." But amid last minute concessions to conservative critics, a coalition of liberal faith groups came out against the bill this week, saying it doesn't go far enough to reform the nation's prison system. In a letter urging lawmakers to reject the bill, the signers, including the National Council of the Churches of Christ, said it fails to meet their demands for comprehensive social reform. "We seek reforms that acknowledge the impacts of structural and systemic racism perpetuated by public policy," they said. Critics have also said the impact of the bill is overstated, given that it applies only to federal inmates, who represent a fraction of all the people behind bars. Nevertheless, momentum for the bill has been building in recent weeks, boosted in part by a new study by the bipartisan reform group FWD.us showing that nearly half of all adults in the U.S. about 113 million people have an immediate family member who has been incarcerated. "These new findings bring to light the staggering scale of the United States' incarceration crisis," said Todd Schulte, president of FWD.us. "This research corroborates what too many families have known for too long. Our current criminal justice system is harming our economy, communities and families." The bill also got a push from Cruz after he was able to include a measure excluding many types of violent offenders from being released early. "With these changes, this bill gives nonviolent offenders a better chance at rejoining society while keeping violent offenders behind bars," he said. Cornyn acknowledged the concerns of law enforcement groups about providing early release to violent criminals who use guns to commit crimes. Under a "new and improved" version of the bill, he said, firearms offenders would not be eligible for any sort of early release. "Earned time credits" for supervised release also would be limited, and it would be easier for officials to revoke early release for inmates who commit "non-technical" infractions. Among the First Step Act's major reforms, those imprisoned under 1990s-era three-strikes laws would face maximum 25-year sentences, not automatic life terms. The bill also would make retroactive a 2010 law that reduced the sentencing disparity between powder-cocaine and crack-cocaine offenses. The bill's chief opponent was Cotton, who dubbed an earlier version of the bill a "jailbreak." In a Wall Street Journal essay, he argued that amid the current drug epidemic gripping the U.S., this is "exactly the wrong time to go soft on crime." Much of the legislation is based on prison reform legislation Cornyn first introduced in 2014 with Rhode Island Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse. But much of the late-stage maneuvering in the Senate has involved the newer sentencing components of the First Step Act. Many of the provisions in the First Step Act passed the House in May with overwhelming support, by a 360-59 vote. The revised version is also expected to clear the House with broad approval. At the recent iteration of the Middle East Hospitality Excellence Awards, the five-star Dubai International Hotel, located at the Dubai airport, won Gold and Silver recognition for its F&B services, Timeless Spa and Purchasing. Adding to its winning streak in 2018, Dubai International Hotels team has yet another reason to celebrate during the festive season. This airport hotel is home to nine outstanding restaurants, ranked within the top 10 on TripAdvisor, serving a delicious fare ranging from Continental, Indian, Asian, Arabic to authentic Spanish food. With the hotels F&B offerings presenting innovative delicacies with silver service par excellence, Sunil Nair won Gold for F&B Service of the Year while Galagedarage Piyasena won silver for Purchasing of the Year. With over 1,000 candidates competing to take home the nomination of being one of the best in their category, the Middle East Hozpitality Excellence Awards acknowledge and honour outstanding achievement in quality, innovation and service. Following an unbiased, fair judging process, winners for each category at the prestigious Middle East Hospitality Excellence Awards are selected purely on the basis of online votes, received from over 185,000 votes for various categories. This 530-key hotel located within Dubai International Airport (Terminal 1 and 3) greets thousands of tourists and is home to thousands of transit guests. With 71 treatment rooms, the hotels Timeless Spa is focused on holistic fitness, offering the finest rejuvenating and relaxing treatments and therapies. Timeless Spa at Dubai International Hotel has won Silver for Spa of the Year at the Middle East Hospitality Excellence Awards 2018. Harmoniously combining ancient beauty secrets with wellness therapies, Timeless Spas signature treatments and wellness therapies are recognised among the finest spas in the UAE. Awards and accolades motivate the team to combine efforts and function as one single unit whilst focusing on delivering memorable guest experiences. Gaining recognition at the Middle East Hospitality Excellence Awards 2018 is a testament to our teams dedication and service excellence. We are both humbled and thrilled to have won these awards and are grateful to all who have voted for us, said general manager Avinash Menon. - TradeArabia News Service WASHINGTON The border wall saga continues likely into 2019 and beyond, key Texas lawmakers said Wednesday. With no funding agreement in sight for President Donald Trumps promised border wall, congressional leaders moved Wednesday to put off until Feb. 8 a spending showdown that could partly shut down the federal government. The effort to avert a potential closure came after the White House signaled it might back down from Trumps demand that Congress provide $5 billion, suggesting instead there are other ways to get money for the border wall. A new funding bill by Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell came after several days of mixed messages from the White House about whether Trump would accept a short-term deal to avoid a shutdown. Even as White House aide Stephen Miller said the president was absolutely willing to shut down the government over the wall, Trump floated a plan to have the military build it, an idea that has run into skepticism from Republicans and Democrats alike. Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn, ending his six-year stint as GOP majority whip, said Trump is considering reprogramming past Defense Department appropriations, including money for U.S. Army Corps of Engineers construction projects. Im sure the president has his lawyers looking at whether thats feasible, Cornyn said, and whether he could do that without Congress approval. Cornyn blamed Democrats for the impasse, saying Trump faced incredible intransigence by incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. For subscribers: Houston Rep.-elect Sylvia Garcia gets another shot at Dreamer legislation On Tuesday, Schumer rejected the GOPs latest offer of $1.6 billion border security spending, plus $1 billion in reallocated money for immigration enforcement other than a wall. Schumer called the additional pot of money a slush fund. While expressing disappointment in the Democratic response, Cornyn voiced his own reservations about repurposing unspent defense dollars for a border wall. Theres always competing demands for money and I would want to know where that money would be shifted from, Cornyn said Wednesday. If its shifted from some account that is a noncritical function, then I might be open to it. But if its taking money out of the pockets of our soldiers and sailors, airmen and Marines, I would not. We should have been taking a stand For Trump, signing a temporary funding measure without additional money earmarked for a wall still would mark a major concession. It comes on top of the administrations announcement Tuesday that it will relax some of the background check requirements for people sponsoring migrant children, a move that could speed the release of thousands of children being held in government facilities like the controversial tent camp in Tornillo. Related: A moral disaster: AP reveals scope of migrant kids program Immigrant advocates credited Trumps capitulation to the Democrats strengthened bargaining position in the wake of midterm elections that saw them gain 40 House seats, winning control of the chamber starting in January. On this side of the midterms, Trump doesnt seem so strong, invincible and domineering, does he? said Frank Sharry, executive director of the advocacy group Americas Voice. The Senate passed by a voice vote a resolution extending current government funding until Feb. 8. The resolution goes on Thursday to the House, where some conservatives urged Republicans to dig in while they still command majorities in both chambers. Let me get this straight, tweeted Ohio Republican Jim Jordan, a founding member of the House Freedom Caucus. Our chances of getting the Wall will be better in February when Nancy Pelosi is Speaker than now when we have the majority? Give me a break. Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows of North Carolina tweeted that the government funding extension will be a Christmas present for Democrats: Democrats will win, the wall will not be built, and Congress will once again have punted when we shouldve been taking a stand. Facing a Friday night deadline to head off a holiday government shutdown, Senate Republican leaders said they had little choice, finding themselves unable to approve wall funding without Democratic votes. I hope that this continuing resolution will provide us the time to work out our differences in a thoughtful manner and reach a bipartisan consensus on important national priorities, Appropriations Committee Chairman Richard Shelby of Alabama said. Pelosi and other Democrats also questioned whether there are enough Republican votes in the lame-duck House to pass the $5 billion funding request for a wall, which Trump originally said would be paid for by Mexico. Among those who have opposed Trumps wall proposal is Texas Republican Rep. Will Hurd, whose district is along the U.S.-Mexico border. Congress already has passed most of the governments 2019 funding, but at least six agencies are operating under a stopgap funding law that expires at midnight Friday. Among them is the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees border security and the wall. The Senates original homeland bill for 2019, approved on a bipartisan basis, includes $1.6 billion for border security. The House is expected to take up the new funding extension today, possibly ending a standoff that has been building for months. Either way the battle for Trumps wall is not over. The fight over this will continue, Cornyn said, probably up to and including the 2020 election. kevin.diaz@chron.com AUSTIN A mysterious third person has claimed responsibility for the lewd text messages that prompted a sex harassment investigation of influential State Sen. Charles Schwertner, leaving the inquiry inconclusive and raising even more questions. There is not enough evidence to prove that Schwertner sent the text messages and a picture of his genitals to a college student who went to him for career advice, investigators with the University of Texas concluded. The investigators did find, however, that Schwertner used an encryption app to hide his phone number. The investigation revealed the possibility that a third person who had passwords to Schwertners LinkedIn account and the Hushed encryption app Schwertner used had sent the messages, pretending to be the senator. Neither Schwertner nor the third person who claimed responsibility through an attorney, according to UT documents fully cooperated with investigators, leaving them guessing as to what really happened. Though an unidentified third person, through an attorney, claims responsibility for sending the text messages and photograph, we cannot test the truthfulness of that claim, reads the report, which was released to Hearst Newspapers on Tuesday in response to an open records request. The report continues: Schwertner has access to information that could allow a more definitive conclusion to this matter, but (he) is unwilling to share that information, and the University lacks authority to compel him to cooperate more fully. Its unclear whether Schwertner, chairman of the Senate Health and Human Services Committee, will be subject to another investigation by the Texas Senate, which revised its sexual harassment policy this spring. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who oversees the Senate, said in September he would wait until the conclusion of the UT investigation to decide. His staff said Tuesday that Patrick was reviewing the report. An orthopedic surgeon from Georgetown, Schwertner was accused of sending lewd sexually explicit messages to the woman, a University of Texas graduate student who approached him to learn more about health care and politics. After exchanging messages on LinkedIn about attending a committee meeting and giving him her phone number, the woman received a text message that appeared to be from Schwertner: Sorry. I really just wanted to [have sex with] you, it said. Other messages followed, including a picture of his penis, the records show. Other messages included: Send a pic? Ill send you one. Its me. Want me to prove? And I have more proof of life, with a smiley face. Schwertner has denied sending the messages or the picture, going so far as to take a lie detector test. Polygraph administrators paid by Schwertners attorneys concluded he was not deceptive when asked about the allegations. I do not condone sexual misconduct of any kind, Schwertner said Tuesday in an emailed statement. The University of Texas has closed their investigation because I did not send the offensive text messages in question. I appreciate the steadfast support of my family, friends and the voters who believed in and reelected me just weeks ago. This unfortunate matter is now closed. Finally, I thank God for the strength he has graced me with during this troubling time. His attorneys, David and Perry Minton of Austin, said in a statement they were pleased with the outcome but were frustrated the university would not ensure Schwertner confidentiality if he agreed to speak with the investigators. The report did not include the name of the third partys attorney. Related: Texas state Senator accused of sexual misconduct releases polygraph results These are not the actions of an innocent man. Senator Charles Schwertner is a liar and clearly unfit to serve in elected office, said Crystal Perkins, the Texas Democratic Party executive director in an emailed statement. The University of Texas investigation was supposed to establish whether Schwertner violated Title IX, which prohibits sexual harassment. The university hired Johnny Sutton, a former U.S. attorney for the Western District of Texas and a partner at the Ashcroft Sutton Reyes law firm, to investigate. The investigation included forensic examinations of both Schwertners phone, and the students phone. That analysis determined the senator and the third person used the same Hushed account to communicate to each other, the UT records say. Schwerter would not disclose who the third person is or their relationship, according to the investigation report. The investigation also found that the Hushed app included an electronic trace of communications that established the text messages and photograph the student received were not sent from Schwertners cell phone. Related: Texas Senate waits while UT investigates sexual harassment claims against Sen. Schwertner Investigators say Schwertner refused to disclose whether he had multiple devices, such as another iPhone or iPad, which could also have been used to send the messages. The third persons cell phone was also not made available and investigators were not able to verify claims made by the third persons attorney. The Red Sea Development Company, a wholly-owned entity of Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF), has unveiled the masterplan of its mega luxury tourism project, which will see 22 islands being developed to provide premium facilities for tourists as part of the project that is expected to create an estimated 70,000 jobs. The ambitious Red Sea project will not just contribute SR22 billion ($5.86 billion) to Saudi Arabias GDP, but play a major role in the kingdoms economic-diversification drive a chief objective of Vision 2030 by attracting approximately one million tourists per year. Phase One of the project, scheduled to be completed in 2022, will include an airport, marinas, residential properties, recreational facilities and up to 3,000 hotel rooms, said its top official. Red Sea Development Company CEO John Pagano was speaking at the visual presentation ceremony held recently in the presence of King Salman bin Abdulaziz at Araqa Palace in Riyadh. He underlined its economic and development goals and the projects objective to become a global destination for luxury tourism. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, chairman of the Red Sea Development Company, was also present at the meeting along with senior comopany officials. King Salman lauded the team for planning a project that will propel Saudi Arabia to a prominent position on the global tourism map and create investment opportunities for the Saudi Arabian private sector while simultaneously preserving the nations cultural and environmental heritage.-TradeArabia News Service In June, a man entered the newsroom of the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland, and shot and killed four journalists and a media worker. Their names were Rob Hiaasen, Gerald Fischman, John McNamara, Wendi Winters, and Rebecca Smith. It emerged later that the shooter had been harassing and threatening the Gazette for years. Earlier this year, a independent music journalist Zachary Stoner was also shot and killed, bringing the total number of members of the press killed in 2018 in the United States to five. (The US Press Freedom Tracker has not established the motive in the murder of Stoner, but there are some indications that it could be related to his work.) Before 2018, the last time a journalist was killed in direct reprisal for their work in the United States was in 2007, with the murder of Oakland-based reporter Chauncey Bailey. In 2017, when the US Press Freedom Trackera reporting website and database attempting to systematically document press freedom violations in the United Stateslaunched, we did not anticipate the need to track the number of murdered journalists, or to add a killed tag to the Trackers incident database. The journalistic landscape in the United States is volatile, and 2018 has been a harrowing year for press freedom. The Tracker has documented more than 100 press freedom incidents since January, from murders and physical attacks to stops at the border and legal orders. 2018 saw an aggressive uptick in the number of leak investigations by the Trump administration compared to 2017. Five government employees or contractors have been charged with allegedly sharing information with the pressReality Winner, Terry Albury, Joshua Schulte, James Wolfe, and Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwardsand there could be others that have not been publicly reported. Fewer journalists were arrested in 2018 than 2017, which was marked with high levels of protests, at which numerous members of the press were arrested. Though the number is still disturbing: at least 11 journalists were arrested while doing their jobs this year. In 2018, journalists were also arrested at protests, but others were arrested while documenting police interactions and courtroom proceedings. Editors note: This story is done in conjunction with the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which runs the US Press Freedom Tracker in partnership with a coalition of journalistic rights groups, including the Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters Without Borders, Index on Censorship, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. FPF maintains the day-to-day operations of the Tracker, and the coalition shares knowledge to provide up-do-date information about emerging threats to press freedom for the public. Sign up for CJR 's daily email 1 Leak case counted in 2017 4 Leak cases in 2018 Since 2008, the United States government has aggressively prosecuted journalistic sources. In eight years, the Obama Justice Department brought charges against at least eight people accused of leaking to journalistsThomas Drake, Shamai Leibowitz, Stephen Kim, Chelsea Manning, Donald Sachtleben, Jeffrey Sterling, John Kiriakou, and Edward Snowden. At the end of 2017, the Trump Justice Department prosecuted one government contractor in connection with a leak caseReality Winner. But by the end of 2018, the Tracker has documented another four casesa significant uptick bringing the total number of prosecutions under Trump up to five. Terry Albury became the first person to be charged under the Espionage Act in 2018. In April, he pled guilty to disclosing confidential government information, and was sentenced in October to four years in prison. While the news organization in question was not named in the charges against Albury, reporting has identified it as The Intercept, and he is assumed to have shared information about targeted FBI surveillance of monitorities and monitoring of journalists. The most recent known leak case is that of Treasury official Natalie Mayflour Sours Edwards who was arrested and charged in October, and stands accused of giving details about suspicious banking transactions to a reporter at BuzzFeed News. The Justice Department has indicated they are investigating dozens more. 6 Legal orders and subpoenas counted in 2017 21 Legal orders and subpoenas in 2018 The Tracker counts legal orders that are made by state and federal government agencies against journalists, such as subpoenas by prosecutors for journalists to produce their reporting materials or testify in court. This could also include legal orders by private entities on the behalf of public officialssuch as an October subpoena by a private attorney for a Chicago police officer for Jamie Kalven, an independent journalist to testify in a trial. Kalven fought the subpoenaarguing that reporters privilege protects him from testifying about his reportingand won. It wasnt the first timeKalven was also subpoenaed to testify and reveal his confidential sources at the end of 2017 in a different case. The Department of Homeland Security also subpoenaed the editor of an immigration law journal in an attempt to identify the source of a leaked ICE memo, which the editor of the journal had published. The Tracker has documented a total of 27 subpoena or legal order caseswith 21 of those occurring in 2018. Its likely that many subpoenas are not reported, and many legal orders for journalists records are conducted with high levels of secrecy. Therefore, the number of legal order and subpoena cases counted by the Tracker are likely to be a severe undercount, making a straight comparison of the data between years sometimes difficult. 2018 also saw the first publicly known seizure by the Trump administration of a journalists communications records, when the Department of Justice seized years of New York Times reporter Ali Watkins phone and email records as part of an investigation into her confidential sources. She was notified of this seizure after the fact, so she had no way to challenge the seizure in court. 53 Physical attacks in 2017 35 Physical attacks in 2018 Across the country, journalists were attacked and interfered with by police and protesters in the course of their reporting. A freelance journalist was decked in the face by a police officer in August, and a police officer body-slammed and shoved other reporters covering the same rally. On other occasions, journalists were pushed to the ground and shot with less-lethal rounds by police. And reporters were also attacked by far-right protesters covering rallies in 2018such as Portland Mercury reporter Kelly Kenoyer, who was shoved in July by a right wing demonstrator, and independent journalist Jon Ziegler, who was struck by white nationalists with a shield while reporting in January. Its a physical attack when a journalist faces violence, injury, equipment damage, or aggressive interference as the result of a targeted act by a public or private individual. Weve documented 35 such incidents this year. When explosive devices were sent to CNN headquarters in New York City in October, this also comprised a physical attack. The entire bureau was quickly evacuated and the NYPD bomb squad was dispatched, and CNN employees were permitted to return once the building was cleared. Another suspicious package addressed to CNN was found later at a post office in Georgia, near CNNs global headquarters. 33 Arrests in 2017 11 Arrests in 2018 Twelve journalists were arrested doing their jobs in 2018, compared to 34 in 2017. While the 2018 numbers are lower than the year before, the circumstances around the bulk of arrests are strikingly similar. In both years, journalists were arrested at protestsspecifically, fascist and anti-fascist demonstrations, and in several cases, protests in opposition to pipeline constructions. In 2017, there were two events in which large journalists were arrestedprotests on Trumps Inauguration Day in January, and protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline. There were comparatively fewer arrests in 2018. Photojournalist Michael Nigro was arrested while documenting an act of civil disobedience in Missouri, and Karen Savage, a freelance reporter, who was arrested multiple times in the course of covering a pipeline resistance protest in Louisianas Atchafalaya River Basin. In one case, Savage said that after arresting her, sheriffs deputies put her in the back of a police car and drove around through sugar cane fields for around an hour. It was a very clear intimidation tactic to stop me from covering the story, Savage said. I will go back, she added. Im not going to let them intimidate me. Its our job to hold these officials accountable. While covering a protest in Tennessee, Manuel Duran was also arrested this April. All charges against him were quickly dropped, but he was transferred to the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and has remained in ICE detention since the spring. I was doing my work and nothing more, like any other journalist does, he said. And at least two journalists were arrested while taking photographs of police. Susan Greene, after photographing a police interaction in Denver, and Edgar Mendez, for trespassing onto police property to take pictures of squad cars for a story. I wondered afterwards if what happened to me was because of my brown skin, or because I was a reporter writing about the MPD, Mendez wrote in a first-person account of the incident for the Neighborhood News Service. You have to remember that my arrest occurred at a time when President Trump had attacked people of Hispanic descent, repeatedly declared that all the news he didnt agree with was fake news, and begun to call the press the enemy of the people, a sentiment he continues to espouse. We have attempted to systematically count press freedom violations in the United States since January 2017, the month that Trump entered into office. Much of the rhetoric about the press freedom climate in the United States has focused on President Trump. We have documented numerous threats and chilling statements by Trump, and other administration officials like ex-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, that pose serious threats to journalism in the United States. The Trump administration has charged at least five alleged sources of journalists with crimes in less than two years in officea pace that would shatter the Obama administrations record on leak prosecutions. Trump has threatened his critics, seized a reporters communications in pursuit of her source, and blamed journalists for creating violence. His Department of Justice has secretly charged WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and if the charges in question relate to Assanges publishing activities, the press freedom implications would be profoundly devastating. And in November, Trump revoked the press credentials of a reporter that persistently asked him a follow-up question. But journalists faced diverse threats in the United States while reporting the news in 2018, and many of them have nothing to do with Trump. The journalistic landscape has continued to shift since we began counting incidents at the US Press Freedom Tracker, and we will continue to document threats to free expression as they evolve in coming years. Note: The categories and cases above do not represent all of the types of incidents that the US Press Freedom Tracker documents; the Tracker catalogs incidents in more than a dozen categories, and the full database is available here. The Tracker also maintains an API endpoint and a link to easily download our data. Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today Camille Fassett is a reporter at Freedom of the Press Foundation, and documents incidents of press freedom violations across the country for the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker. She is also a researcher at police accountability nonprofit and data collective Lucy Parsons Labs. Alex George had already been through a lot. In the summer of 2017, four weeks after graduating from the University of Michigan, she moved to Chattanooga, Tennessee, at the age of 22, to work as a general assignment reporter at WTVC, an ABC-affiliate, on a two-year-contract. Then, in May, after a gruelling first year at the station, she was diagnosed with a primitive neuroectodermal tumor, a rare form of pediatric bone cancer. On May 9, George told viewers about her tumor, saying on air that she would be moving back to her familys home, near Philadelphia, to kick some cancer butt and come right back. She smiled, but her voice started to break. I didnt just want to disappear and hide this, she said. ICYMI: Reporter attends school meeting longer than other journalists. That ended up being a good decision. Georges long-term disability benefits, which allowed her to take partially-paid time off for 90 days, were extended for another 90. In mid-September, George was told by her bosses at WTVC that she would eventually receive a check-up call from Mike Costa, who was the stations general manager; Tom Henderson, the news director; and HR representatives from WTVC and Sinclair Broadcast Group, WTVCs owner. I didnt really know what to expect, she recalls. She thought she might be told of a shift from long-term disability to unpaid leave, which would allow her to stay on Sinclairs medical benefits plan. But she was worried. I felt it wasnt the check-up call like they kept saying it was. On November 19, after undergoing several rounds of chemotherapy and surgery, George received the call, only to learn that Sinclair was terminating her contract before it was up. (The station is an ABC affiliate but because it is Sinclair-owned, the network isnt involved with on-site decisions.) George was informed that WTVC and Sinclair were terminating her contract and benefits as of December 1. She says she was told that Sinclair was not legally obligated to hold onto her position, but there was no further explanation given about why she was being let go. She was also asked about her health. I could not believe they had the audacity to fire me and then asked me how I was doing, she says. Sign up for CJR 's daily email She had about two weeks to figure out if she would go on COBRA, her own plan under the Affordable Care Act, or her parents health plan under the ACAs young adult coverage. I had so many questions, she tells CJR. It was shocking to think that someone would do this in someones greatest time of need. ICYMI: A reporter asked for 20 years of lottery winner data. After analyzing the records, he noticed something unusual. Georges next chemotherapy treatment was scheduled for early December. How am I going to do this? she recalls thinking. What if I go in and they cant give me the chemo? Is this a death sentence? Before, her monthly insurance contribution was $200 per month. Under COBRAthe plan she chose it increased to $570 per month, along with out-of-pocket medicines like prescription mouthwash ($70 a bottle) that George needs to treat her mouth sores. COBRA tends to be pricey, but for George, it was the best option, because it would allow her to retain the approvals and timeline for care shed received under her old plan, and her parents plan has high deductibles. As for what George and her family plan to do after COBRA, which will expire after 18 months, she tells CJR, I hope to have another job with insurance. A spokesperson for Sinclair sent CJR a statement on Georges termination that details the companys competitive disability policy before adding that, We have also expressed to Alex that once she is ready to return to work, we would be happy to meet and explore possible roles for her. On November 26, Costa announced on Facebook that he would be leaving WTVC after more than 14 years. In a conversation via LinkedIn message, Costa said there were many reasons for his decision to leave WTVC. When asked by CJR if Georges termination was one of them, he did not answer. When asked about details of the conference call, Costa said he cannot and will not speak for Sinclair. Costa tells CJR he had nothing but respect and admiration for Alex. He adds, She is mature beyond her years. I have never met a more upbeat person who has tackled a tough situation with as much of a positive attitude and determination as Alex has. She was a hard worker who was willing to listen, learn, and grow. She has a very bright future in broadcast news. On December 7, George revealed on social media why she would not be returning to WTVC. The decision was not made by me it was @WeAreSinclair, she wrote. They terminated my contract. Viewers and other journalists expressed sadness, frustration, and disappointment. Some offered prayers for Georges recovery and her future. A few people, such as Mike Rosenberg, a reporter for The Seattle Times, and Steve Keeley, a morning news reporter of Fox 29 in Philadelphia, noted on Twitter that in September George had been voted Best Columnist/Reporter by the community in the Chattanooga Free-Presss annual Best of the Best awards. She worked harder than anyone ever to be broadcast journalist& so respected in first job out of college named Best of the Best in Chattanooga. Moorestown neighbor&former @FOX29philly intern @alexgeorgeNC9 in midst of cancer battle gets contract terminated by Sinclair. Cruel&cold pic.twitter.com/Ui06yfMDVB Steve Keeley (@KeeleyFox29) December 7, 2018 Imagine battling cancer & your company fires you. It happened to 22-year-old reporter, Alex George. Merry Christmas from Sinclair Broadcast Group. It's not like SBG could not keep her on. It had revenues of $2.7 BILLION in 2017. @newschannelnine https://t.co/PjXuDjpsEm Rebecca Aguilar (@RebeccaAguilar) December 12, 2018 Since George announced her termination, she has heard from other Sinclair reporters and mentors saying they dont want to work for the company. People are angry, she tells CJR. I think that just shows corporate greed when they have so much revenue and yet theyre still telling somebody We cant afford your sickness for the next six months. She is still disappointed by the treatment she received from her bosses. Its understanding what the employee needs and caring about your employees, she says. To tell someone with a terminal illness that theyre not getting better fast enough is not acceptable as a corporation. TRENDING: Student uncovers decades of sexual misconduct allegations against professor Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today Karen K. Ho is a freelance business, culture and media reporter, based in New York. She is also a former Delacorte Fellow at CJR. Follow her on Twitter @karenkho. Any woman who has spent more than a couple of hours on Twitter has likely experienced some form of casual harassment or even outright abuseand these attacks are even more likely if the woman in question happens to be a journalist or a politician. On Tuesday, a new report from Amnesty International put some numbers behind those kinds of incidents, and the numbers are not good. According to the study, which analyzed hundreds of thousands of tweets sent in 2017, female journalists and politicians were subjected to some kind of harassment or abuse on the social network roughly every 30 seconds, and women of color experienced significantly higher levels of abuse: they were 84 percent more likely to be mentioned in abusive or harassing tweets. (The full results, part of Amnestys Troll Patrol project, are available here.) Amnesty says the report, which was conducted with artificial-intelligence software company Element AI, is the largest ever study of the way women are harassed online. The two organizations asked 6,500 volunteers from 150 countries to look through almost 300,000 tweets sent to 778 politicians and journalists in the US and the UK. Politicians were selected from all the major parties, and the journalists came from a wide variety of publications, including The Daily Mail, The New York Times, and The Guardian, as well as news sites such as Pink News and Breitbart. We have the data to back up what women have long been telling usthat Twitter is a place where racism, misogyny, and homophobia are allowed to flourish basically unchecked, Milena Marin of Amnesty told The Financial Times. RELATED: Study shows Twitter might affect a journalists news judgement Tweets were categorized as abusive if they fit Twitters definition of abuse, including content that promotes violence or hatred based on gender, race, or ethnicity. (Some of the tweets were later removed, Amnesty said.) The study also included tweets that were defined as problematic, meaning they contained hurtful or hostile content that reinforced negative or harmful stereotypes about a group of individuals based on race or some other criteria. Amnesty acknowledged that these tweets may qualify as legitimate speech, but argued that they can still have the effect of silencing an individual or groups of individuals, and that including them was necessary to highlight the breadth and depth of toxicity on Twitter in its various forms. Amnesty also pointed out that Twitter has often talked about trying to promote healthy conversation, and therefore its helpful to know the full extent of problematic content that flows through the service. And the study was based on public data provided by Twitter for 2017. By definition, that database would not include any tweets that were deleted for abuse before that date, which suggests that the actual rate of abuse and harassment could be significantly larger. Vijaya Gadde, the head of trust and safety for Twitter, said in a statement seen by Wired that any kind of abuse detracts from the health of the service, and that the company is committed to holding ourselves publicly accountable toward progress in this regard. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has said publicly that he wants to improve the civility of discussion on the platform, after years of criticism that the service spent too little time thinking about abuse and harassment and too much time focusing on growth metrics like engagement. The Amnesty study shows that there is still a long way to go before female journalists and politicians are likely to see their experience on Twitter as civil or healthy. Sign up for CJR 's daily email RELATED: Which one of these three types of journalists are you? Heres more on Twitter and its fight against abuse: Transparency : Last week, Twitter released its regular transparency report, and for the first time included detailed statistics on enforcement of its rules around abuse and other violations of its terms of use. It said more than 6 million accounts were reported for possible violations from January to June 2018. : Last week, Twitter released its regular transparency report, and for the first time included detailed statistics on enforcement of its rules around abuse and other violations of its terms of use. It said more than 6 million accounts were reported for possible violations from January to June 2018. Learning : Twitter has been working with a machine-learning research outfit called Cortico, which grew out of MITs Media Lab, in an attempt to find a way of detecting abuse before it is flagged by users. Casey Newton of The Verge spoke with one of the founders of Cortico about that effort. : Twitter has been working with a machine-learning research outfit called Cortico, which grew out of MITs Media Lab, in an attempt to find a way of detecting abuse before it is flagged by users. Casey Newton of The Verge spoke with one of the founders of Cortico about that effort. Engagement : The problem of abuse on Twitter is similar to the problem the company has with trolls and fake accounts, and those who have followed the service from the beginning say it has often downplayed both of these issues because it has been more focused on growth and engagement. : The problem of abuse on Twitter is similar to the problem the company has with trolls and fake accounts, and those who have followed the service from the beginning say it has often downplayed both of these issues because it has been more focused on growth and engagement. An old story : In 2015, the nonprofit group Women, Action and Media was given access to Twitters abuse-reporting system for several weeks and flagged hundreds of tweets. It said 27 percent included hate speech, 12 percent included threats of violence and 67 percent said they had notified Twitter more than once. : In 2015, the nonprofit group Women, Action and Media was given access to Twitters abuse-reporting system for several weeks and flagged hundreds of tweets. It said 27 percent included hate speech, 12 percent included threats of violence and 67 percent said they had notified Twitter more than once. Reporting while female: For female journalists, the rampant abuse and harassment on Twitter is just a digital version of the kind of attacks they often suffer in the offline world. Anne Helen Petersen wrote for CJR about the problems journalists can suffer when reporting while female. Other notable stories: Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today Mathew Ingram is CJRs chief digital writer. Previously, he was a senior writer with Fortune magazine. He has written about the intersection between media and technology since the earliest days of the commercial internet. His writing has been published in the Washington Post and the Financial Times as well as by Reuters and Bloomberg. Two of the nations largest retailers and a third company are named in a New York lawsuit claiming the companies imported and sold childrens toys with lead levels up to 10 times higher than federal limits. New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood said in the lawsuit filed in an Albany court Thursday that Walmart, Target and Randolph, New Jersey-based LaRose Industries, importer of the Cra-Z-Jewelz jewelry-making kits, committed thousands of violations of state laws regulating the safety of childrens toys sold in New York. Underwood, a Democrat, said tests the attorney generals office conducted on kits purchased across the state in 2015 and 16 found that wristbands sold with the items contained lead at levels of 120 to 980 parts per million. The federal Consumer Product Safety Act for childrens products set the limit at 100 parts per million. LaRose recalled the toys in 2016 after additional testing corroborated the New York tests. Underwood said the states lawsuit stems from the test findings and the agencys follow-up investigation. Our lawsuit seeks to hold these companies accountable for the failures that allowed lead-contaminated toys on store shelves, while forcing them to take responsibility for the safety of the products they sell, she said. The lawsuit seeks civil penalties from the companies and a court order requiring them to ensure they dont ever again sell toys containing high lead levels in New York. Spokespeople for Bentonville, Arkansas-based Walmart and Minneapolis-based Target both said the companies stopped selling the toys after the recall. Walmart spokesman Randy Hargrove said the company has discussed the matter with Underwoods office and will address the allegations in court. Target spokeswoman Danielle Schumann said referred additional questions to LaRose. A message was left with LaRose seeking comment. Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Four former employees and an owner of the Massachusetts facility responsible for a nationwide fungal meningitis outbreak that has killed more than 100 people and sickened hundreds were convicted Thursday of fraud and other offenses. A Boston jury acquitted another employee, pharmacist Joseph Evanosky, of all charges after several days of deliberations. The defendants were among 14 people charged in 2014 following an investigation into the outbreak, which sickened almost 800 people. The CDC put the death toll at 64 as of October 2013. Federal prosecutors say more than 100 people have now died. The outbreak was blamed on contaminated injections of medical steroids made at the now-closed New England Compounding Center in Framingham, given mostly to people with back pain. Prosecutors said the New England Compounding Center made drugs in unsanitary conditions, sent untested products and deceived regulators. The workers convicted Thursday were not accused of producing or sending the injections that caused the outbreak, but of sending and approving other contaminated and substandard drugs. Over the course of years, the defendants callously disregarded patient health by cutting corners and prioritizing profits over safety. And they got away with it by defrauding federal and state regulators, U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling said in a statement. Evanosky, who worked in one of the compounding pharmacys so-called clean rooms, where the drugs were made, was cleared of racketeering and other offenses. He was an innocent man who never should have been charged in the first place, said his attorney, Mark Pearlstein. Among those found guilty was part owner Gregory Conigliaro, who was charged with conspiring to defraud the Food and Drug Administration. His lawyer declined to comment. Pharmacist Gene Svirskiy was the only defendant convicted of the most serious charge of racketeering. An email requesting comment was sent to a lawyer for Svirskiy, who was also found guilty of mail fraud charges. Other defendants, including pharmacist Christopher Leary, were acquitted of several counts but convicted of others. Learys attorney, Paul V. Kelly, said the legal team plans to file post-trial motions and will appeal if necessary. Attorney John Cunha Jr. blasted prosecutors for bringing what he called an outrageous case against his client, pharmacist Alla Stepanets. Stepanets, who was accused of approving drug shipments with fake patient names like Donald Trump, was found guilty only of misdemeanor charges. The number of not guiltys shows you how severely overcharged this case was, Cunha said. So far, 11 people charged in the meningitis outbreak investigation have been convicted. Two other pharmacists are scheduled to go to trial next year. In January, Glenn Chin, a supervisory pharmacist, was sentenced to eight years in prison after he was convicted of racketeering and mail fraud. He was cleared of second-degree murder charges, which could have brought a life sentence. Co-Owner Barry Cadden is serving a nine-year prison term for his role in the outbreak. He was also acquitted of second-degree murder. Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. A Texas lawmaker has proposed subsidizing the states underfunded windstorm insurance and flooding assistance by building casinos in coastal counties. State Rep. Joe Deshotel filed the bill on Dec. 7 to cover the cost of the Texas Insurance Agency by proposing to tax licensed casinos, Galveston County Daily News reported. The measure would give the Texas Lottery Commission the authority to issue six licenses to operate casinos across six counties. The proposal would generate an 18 percent gaming tax of a casinos revenue and use some of the money to ensure the windstorm association has sufficient capital to cover its insured deficits and operating expenditures. Deshotel, who first filed a similar bill in 2015, said this latest iteration would send part of the tax to a flooding assistance trust fund. The governors office could then use the trust fund for emergency assistance during natural disasters like Hurricane Harvey. Just like the lottery, where a portion of funds go to public education, this is a need thats underfunded, Deshotel said. If the lottery helps education, we can help with the problem of windstorm, which is disproportionately paid for by the coastal counties. Earlier this year, Gov. Greg Abbott blocked a proposal by the associations board to raise commercial and residential rates by 10 percent. Both Democrat and Republican members of the legislature have opposed legalized casinos over the years for a variety of reasons. Deshotel said he anticipated that opposition to continue in the next session. Its something we should do regardless of whether the funds are dedicated to those issues, he said. Every bordering state to Texas has legalized gambling. We lose millions of dollars in potential tax revenue to those areas. We have the consequences of gambling, but none of the positives. The Texas Legislative Session begins on Jan. 8. The deadline to file bills is March 8. Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. A seaside bluff collapse that briefly interrupted train service last week near San Diego was the fourth such landslide since August, but officials insist the trains are safe to ride, according to a newspaper report Sunday. A long-planned project to stabilize the eroding cliffs in Del Mar will break ground by summer, the Los Angeles Times reported. The plan includes reinforcing sea walls and repairing aging drainage structures. In the meantime, transportation officials say the trains that run along the bluff are safe barring a major earthquake. The tracks are inspected at least twice a week and any time there is erosion, said Stephen Fordham with the North County Transit District. For now, the landslides pose more danger to those walking on or beneath bluffs than to train operations, according to officials. Though warning signs are posted around the cliffs, pedestrians routinely ignore them. Train traffic was halted for two hours when the rain-saturated cliff tumbled down last Monday. The collapse followed other similar landslides on Oct. 5, Sept. 27 and Aug. 22, the newspaper reported. In one case, a section of rock that broke loose was reportedly 50 feet (15 meters) wide. Officials have said the main reason the bluffs are failing is that urban runoff seeps into the ground when residents and businesses irrigate their properties. Coastal erosion from waves and wind also plays a significant role. There have been three bluff stabilizations, as well as various drainage improvements, since 1998, costing a total of about $5 million. The new round of projects, which is expected to run through 2050, has an estimated price tag of around $90 million, the Times said. Transportation officials have said that in the long term, the 2-mile (3-kilometer) section of train track that runs through Del Mar will have to be relocated. Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. BEACHWOOD, Ohio -- Theft, Cedar Road: At 4:50 p.m. Dec. 13, an Erie, Pa., girl, 17, was arrested for theft and obstructing official business at Dillard's at Beachwood Place mall, 26300 Cedar Road. With the girl was a Meadville, Pa., woman, 18, who was charged with theft, contributing to the delinquency of a child, receiving stolen property and obstructing official business. Also arrested was an Erie, Pa., woman, 22, who was charged with contributing to the delinquency of a child and possession of criminal tools. The total value of the theft was $959. OVI, Interstate 271: At 2:30 a.m. Dec. 12, police stopped a car that was speeding on I-271 southbound. The driver, a Maple Heights man, 46, was found to be intoxicated. The man failed field sobriety and blood-alcohol content tests. He was charged with OVI, prohibited blood-alcohol content and speeding. Driving under suspension, Cedar Road: At 10 a.m. Dec. 12, an officer stopped a car for showing expired license plates. The driver, a Maple Heights man, 32, was subsequently found to be driving with an expired license. The vehicle's passenger, who was also the car's owner, was cited for allowing an unlicensed driver to drive her car and for misdemeanor possession of marijuana. She is a 23-year-old resident of Maple Heights. Marijuana possession, Green Road: At 12:25 a.m. Dec. 14, police stopped a car that was speeding. The driver, a Shaker Heights man, 25, was also cited for possession of marijuana and driving without a license. Marijuana possession, Belvoir Boulevard: At 9:10 a.m. Dec. 14, police stopped a car driven by a Cleveland man with a suspended license. The man, 32, was charged with driving under suspension and marijuana possession. Marijuana possession, Cedar Road: At 3:40 p.m. Dec. 14, security at Beachwood Place informed police about a suspicious man. Police found the man, 26, of Parma Heights, to be in possession of marijuana. The quantity of the marijuana the man possessed led to a felony charge. Hit-skip, Community Drive: At 2:30 p.m. Dec. 15, after an investigation, police arrested a Cleveland man, 26, who had, the day before, struck a car from behind and driven away from the scene. The man was also charged with driving under suspension and failure to keep an assured clear distance ahead. OVI, Chagrin Boulevard: At 3:25 a.m. Dec. 15, an officer stopped a car for speeding, not driving within marked lanes and not using headlights. The man was subsequently found to be intoxicated. He was charged for the traffic violations, OVI and having an open container of alcohol in an automobile. OVI, Richmond Road: At 7:10 p.m. Dec. 15, police arrested a Beachwood man, 42, for operating a vehicle while intoxicated. The man was also charged with marked-lanes and turning violations, as well as driving with a prohibited blood-alcohol content. Theft, Community Drive: At 4:20 p.m. Dec. 16, a resident reported a delivered package stolen from their porch. OVI, Richmond Road: At 12:35 a.m. Dec. 16, police stopped a car due to it traveling outside of marked lanes. The driver, a Euclid man, 40, was subsequently found to be intoxicated. He was charged with OVI, having an open container of alcohol in a motor vehicle, driving under suspension, speeding and for the marked-lane violation. If you would like to discuss the police blotter, please visit our crime and court comments page. BROADVIEW HEIGHTS, Ohio -- A Kentucky-based home builder with an office in Brecksville wants to build 42 upscale, paired townhomes on the north side of Ohio 82, about 2,000 feet west of Broadview Road. First, however, Drees Homes would need voters to rezone the proposed 16-acre site from a single-family district to the city's unique Town Center Special Planning District Zone B, which allows townhomes. The Broadview Heights Planning Commission will consider the rezoning and townhome plan Wednesday night (Dec. 19). Ultimately, City Council will decide whether to place the rezoning on the ballot, possibly in May. In his rezoning application to the city, Thom Sutcliffe, land acquisition manager with Drees Homes in Brecksville, said the proposed townhome site consists of four parcels now containing two single-family homes. The land, just west of Weeping Cherry Village apartments, is owned by Louis P. Colantuono and Matthew and Ashley Fiala. The site is just outside the city's Special Planning District B -- a multi-use zone that allows, among other uses, restaurants, bars, schools, museums, offices, auto-repair shops, retail stores and churches, along with low-, medium- and high-density housing. Town Center Special Planning District Zone B surrounds Town Center Special Planning District Zone A, which is centered around the Ohio 82-Broadview Road intersection and which allows many of the same uses as Zone B. "I have owned this land for many years and have found that, due to its location adjacent to the current (Special Planning District B) property and its dynamic topography, no other use is feasible ..." Colantuono said in a Nov. 21 letter to the city. "I believe (the townhome proposal) is the best use of this property, and that this simple expansion of District B would make a common-sense solution to this challenge." The Fialas also sent a letter, with the exact same wording, to the city. Sutcliffe didn't return calls, and Colantuono couldn't be reached, regarding what they meant by "dynamic topography," although on his rezoning application, Sutcliffe checked off the descriptors "wooded," "flat," "steep and hilly," "rolling," "wetland" and "stream or pond." "Drees Homes believes that this zoning change will allow these parcels of land to offer the most applicable use of the land possible in its unique location to the city center, as well as becoming an upscale buffer between the city center and the adjacent single-family properties," Sutcliffe said in his rezoning application. It's unknown whether Drees has an option to buy the four parcels, contingent on the rezoning. During a Dec. 3 meeting of council's Building Codes & Public Building, GPZ Committee, council members reacted favorably to the proposed rezoning and townhome plan, according to unapproved meeting minutes. At the meeting, Sutcliffe said he had been talking with Colantuono and the Fialas about developing their land for 18 months. Originally, they discussed building single-family homes, but the plan changed due to "the dynamics" of the property. Sutcliffe said the townhomes would overlook a ravine on the property. Almost half the land would remain green space, at least partly due to wetlands. Home prices would start in the $285,000 range. Kristina Sorensen, the city's economic development director, said the proposed townhome project is in harmony with the purpose of Special Planning District B, which is to provide various housing options so that residents living in the district can walk to and patronize businesses in the town center. City Engineer Gary Yelenosky said the site is "challenging," but added that Drees Homes has designed homes and subdivisions well in the past. He said he believed the developer would do the same this time. Sutcliffe said he doesn't anticipate the project would need zoning variances. PAINESVILLE, Ohio - A Painesville Municipal Court judge set bond Tuesday for a Madison man accused of raping a young girl. Michael C. Brown, 32, faces a first-degree felony of rape and a third-degree felony of gross sexual imposition, court records show. The charges stem from an investigation that began last month after police received a complaint of an alleged sexual offense between a man, later identified as Brown, and an 8-year-old girl, Madison Township police said Wednesday in a press release. Judge Michael Cicconetti set Browns bond at $250,000, police said. If he makes bond, Brown will be subject to house arrest and GPS monitoring, according to police. Brown is expected to appear in Painesville Municipal Court for a preliminary hearing Dec. 26. Anyone with information about this investigation is asked to call Det. Tim Doyle of the Madison Township Police Department at 440-428-2116. To comment on this story, visit Wednesdays crime and courts comments page. CLEVELAND, Ohio A Cleveland man is accused of attacking and robbing a man after they argued at a relatives home on the citys East Side. Ronnie Butts, 27, is charged with aggravated robbery in a Dec. 9 incident on Rondel Road near St. Clair Avenue, according to court records. He is not in custody but a warrant was issued Monday for his arrest. Butts attacked a 54-year-old man, causing facial injuries that required the man to seek treatment at a hospital, court records say. The victim and his girlfriend were visiting relatives when he argued with Butts and another unidentified man. The victim decided to leave, according to a police report. Butts pulled up behind the victim in his car. Butts punched him several times in the head, then pulled a hooded sweatshirt over the mans face, police reports say. Butts also struck the victim in the back of the head with an unknown object, police reports say. Butts rifled through the mans pockets and took a cellphone, a pair of glasses, keys and $47 in cash, police said. He then got back into the car and drove away. The 54-year-old man reported the incident two days later at the Fifth District police station. Butts criminal history includes prior convictions for burglary, assault and carrying concealed weapons, according to Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court records. To comment on this story, visit Wednesdays crime and courts comments page. CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A Parma man who smothered his sister with a pillow, then drove her SUV to a bar in Buffalo was sentenced Tuesday to spend the rest of his life in prison. Mark Shankle, 55, pleaded guilty to one count of aggravated murder in the Feb. 15 death of his 55-year-old sister Vicky Zabala. Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court Judge Nancy McDonnell sentenced Shankle to life in prison with his first change for parole after 25 years, when Shankle will be 80 years old. Shankle suffered a lifelong dependency on alcohol, and lived with Zabala in a home on Torrington Avenue in Parma. Mark Shankle threw his life away at a young age through his involvement with alcohol and drugs," Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Michael OMalley said in a statement. "His sister took him in because she had a big heart, but unfortunately her kindness led to her death. Its unclear what provoked the Feb. 15 attack. Shankle called his other sister asking when Zabala would be home, Assistant Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Andrew Santoli said. He used a pillow from the family room to smother Zabala when she got to the house, then removed the back license plate from her 2013 Chevy Equinox and replaced it with one from his car and drove to Buffalo. Shankle called his and Zabalas mother and told her to send the coroner to their house, because Zabala was dead, Santoli said. The mother called her other daughter, who went to the home and called police. Investigators quickly zeroed in on Shankle as a suspect. Zabalas Equinox was equipped with OnStar, which investigators used to track the SUV to a convenience store in Buffalo, Santoli said. Police in that city went to the store and found Shankle drinking at a bar across the street and arrested him, Santoli said. Parma detectives drove to the Buffalo police department and interviewed Shankle, according to court records. He told them that he didnt remember killing Zabala because he was blacked out from drinking, Santoli said. Shankles attorneys asked McDonnell to throw out his statement because, after police read him his rights before their interrogation, Shankle told them that he was too poor to afford an attorney, records say. A detective told him that they would get him an attorney, but continued with the interrogation, their motion says. Shankle pleaded guilty on Dec. 13, before McDonnell ruled on the motion, according to court records. To comment on this story, please visit Wednesdays crime and courts comments page MAYFIELD HEIGHTS, Ohio -- Criminal damage, Longridge Road: A man reported Dec. 10 that his vehicle had been damaged when it was kicked by another man when he was dropping clothes off at his home. He said the incident was the result of an ongoing custody dispute over a dog. The other man said he had accidentally kicked the vehicle when he slipped on some ice. Officers found nothing consistent with the claim of slipping on ice and cited the man, 57, for criminal damaging. Reports indicate that both men appeared intoxicated. Counterfeiting, SOM Center Road: A Rite-Aid manager reported Dec. 1 that a young man had tried to use two counterfeit $100 bills to load credit to a Green Dot card. She refused the transaction and said the man did not seem concerned when she kept the bills. Impaired driving, Interstate 271: A Beachwood woman, 22, was arrested for OVI Dec. 6 after driving on a portion of the roadway that was closed due to an accident. Theft, Mayfield Road: A Mayfield Heights man, 18, and a Chagrin Falls woman, 20, were cited Dec. 8 for a theft they had committed at True North Shell the previous day. Officers recognized the man when seen on surveillance video. The pair admitted stealing soda, energy drinks and popcorn, and also said they had stolen from Fresh Thyme and Dollar Tree. Theft from mail, Commonwealth Avenue: A resident reported Dec. 7 that his Green Card was stolen from his mailbox after it was delivered in August. No suspects were identified. Fraud, Mayfield Road: A 20-year-old resident was a victim of a scam reported Dec. 7 in which he purchased over $2,700 worth of Google Play gift cards and sent the redemption codes to an unknown person claiming to be from the Social Security Administration. The victim was led to believe that there was fraudulent activity involving his identity. He had initially purchased half the cards, then borrowed money from a friend when told he had to pay additional fees. Impaired driving, Mayfield Road: A Chardon woman, 36, was arrested for OVI after she caused a crash with another vehicle around 12:45 a.m. Dec. 8. Suspicion, Mayfield Road: A woman, 18, said Dec. 10 that she was twice approached on two separate days by men in vehicles while she was walking near Parker Drive. She said they were different men and that both motioned for her to come to their vehicle. She said she ignored them and they left the area. She was concerned after hearing a report of a girl missing from the area. Grand theft, Mayfield Road: A Ganley Nissan manager reported Dec. 10 that a vehicle was missing from the inventory and that one set of its keys was also missing. She believed that an employee or customer found the keys and took the vehicle, valued at $23,000, without permission. Impaired driving, Mayfield Road: A Solon man, 37, was arrested for OVI Dec. 10 and charged for having a firearm in the vehicle and not informing officers that it was there. See more Mayfield Heights news at Cleveland.com/hillcrest. If you would like to discuss the police blotter, please visit our crime and courts comments page. CLEVELAND, Ohio A 17-year-old John Adams High School student was arrested Friday on suspicion of sexually assaulting a fellow student at school, according to police. The teen was arrested at the school and taken to the Cuyahoga County Juvenile Detention Center, where he was booked and released to his parents, police reports say. The incident happened about 11:30 a.m. Friday. The boy spotted the girl in the hallway and asked her to brush his hair, police reports say. The two argued over how hard the girl was brushing his hair and she tried to leave. The boy chased after her, grabbed her by the arm and forced her to perform a sex act on him, according to police reports. The girl ran off again, the boy chased her in the hallway and took the girls boot. A security guard spotted the two and broke up the incident. Both students gave written statements to police about the incident and the boy was arrested by Cleveland police. To comment on this story, please visit our crime and courts comments page. PIKE COUNTY, Ohio A woman who escaped sheriffs deputies while being booked on drug charges was found about three hours later sitting in a hot tub, still wearing the jails yellow jumpsuit. Autum Satterfield, 34, fled the Pike County sheriffs booking center at about 4 p.m. Tuesday, according to the Columbus Dispatch. She was facing a charge of possession of heroin. Pike County deputies, Waverly police, the State Highway Patrol and local fire departments were involved in the search for Satterfield. Her jail-issued shoes were found at a nearby farm, 10tv.com reports. A helicopter with thermal cameras was then called in to help with the search. Moments later, dispatchers received a 911 call saying a woman wearing a yellow jumpsuit had been spotted sitting in the hot tub at the Bristol Village Activity Center in Waverly. Satterfield was arrested at the center, still sitting in the hot tub. She will now face a felony escape charge, authorities say. To comment on this story, visit the crime and courts comment section. CLEVELAND, OhioThe board of the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority voted today to hire a search firm for a new leader and a public transit consulting firm for a new vision. For up to $85,000, Krauthhamer and Associates of Bethesda, Md., will search for a new staff leader for RTA. For up to $173,691, Jarrett Walker and Associations of Portland, Ore., will recommend both modifications and innovations in routes, vehicles and more to take effect through the early 2020s. The authority has already commissioned separate studies of its operations, rail cars, fares and economic impact. Leaders plan soon to consider hiring another consultant to use the studies' results to propose a strategic plan. Board member Georgine Welo, who led the search committee, said, It took something of a disaster to bring all this forward, but its an exciting time. If youre going to redo your kitchen, you want to make sure everything is done, the plumbing and electricity, not just a new cabinet. RTAs long-time president, George Dixon III, resigned this spring amid allegations of owing the authority more than $1.1 million for undeserved benefits, mostly healthcare. RTAs 18-year staff leader, Joe Calabrese, stepped down in September to serve as a senior advisor before retiring in early 2020. State aid and sales tax receipts have also fallen. Like Calabrese and the current interim leader, Flounsay Caver, the permanent leader will start out as chief executive officer, general manager and secretary-treasurer. But board members are considering passing the secretary and treasurer duties before long to one or more other staffers. Officials hope to hire someone to start in March and to receive up the vision study in October. Leaders of both firms have promised to seek input from the board, staff, riders and public before making recommendations. Board member Valarie McCall, former chair of the American Public Transportation Association, has worked with both firms through the association and praised them both. From the audience of todays meeting, Rev. Pamela Pinkney-Butts urged the board to give Caver the permanent job without a search. Dr. Caver has earned that position, and he does an excellent job. But Chris Stocking, head of the advocacy group Clevelanders for Public Transit, said, We need to make sure were bringing in the right person and were asking the right questions. Caver has spent 15 years with RTA, overseeing operations, the budget and more. AKRON, Ohio One man is dead and another man was wounded Monday night in a shooting at a home near the Highland Square neighborhood. Akron police say a 30-year-old man was pronounced dead at the scene with a gunshot wound to the chest after being found on the kitchen floor of the home on the 800 block of Stadelman Avenue. The back door of the home was open when police arrived. Officers were sent to the home just after 11 p.m. by another 30-year-old male, who was wounded in the stomach in the shooting. The man was able to drive himself to the Cleveland Clinic Akron General Hospital, where he was in stable condition. Police have not made any arrests and say the motive for the shooting is unknown. They are not releasing the identification of the victims until family members are notified. Anyone with information on the shootings can call detectives at 330-375-2490 or 330-375-2TIP; the U.S. Marshals Service at 1-866-4-WANTED; or Summit County Crimestoppers Inc. at 330-434-COPS. Tips can also be sent by text to TIPSCO with at 274637 (Crimes). Callers can remain anonymous. To comment on this story, visit Tuesdays crime and courts comment section. CLEVELAND -- The near-downtown coffee shop was set to close for the day and the young barista was fidgeting. Looking in the direction of a well-dressed couple who had walked in twenty minutes earlier, she made a polite announcement. We close in 3 minutes. I should have told you earlier. Im sorry, she said sounding genuinely apologetic. As the couple rose to leave, I could not resist having some fun. After all, Clevelands Artefino Cafe is well known for displaying the work of local artists and its routine hosting of impromptu political interviews. Are you really kicking out Governor Mike DeWine and his wife? I teased. Before the embarrassed employee could respond, Mike DeWine smiled at her and simultaneously corrected me on his current job title: Governor-elect. And, do you know of any other place around here where we can continue our conversation? he asked the barista. The brief coffee shop exchange with the barista Monday afternoon offered an authentic glimpse into an earthy side of DeWine. After eight years of the out-sized television personality of Governor John Kasich, who once publicly called a Columbus police officer an idiot for issuing him a traffic citation, now comes DeWine, an unassuming governor-elect who understands that closing time means just that. DeWine wears the mantle of modesty quite well. He possesses an authentic country folksiness that likely comes courtesy of his Yellow Springs, Ohio birth pedigree, as well as decades living in the village of Cedarville, Ohio. But, make no mistake about it: DeWine has never lacked colossal ambition. Few men have ever held unwavering designs on the office of Ohio Governor more strongly than DeWine. In 1990, he challenged Bob Taft and George Voinovich in the GOP primary for governor. The then rural congressman realized he wasnt ready to govern the state and accepted Voinovichs offer to serve as his running mate. Now, nearly three decades later, DeWine will be sworn in as Ohios 70th chief executive, boasting one of the most potent political resumes of any Ohio governor, including the two who went on to become United States presidents. He also appears to be crystal clear on his focus and confident in his ability to deliver. Watch where I go the first few days. Watch where I put the spotlight. Our agenda is going to be about children. Its going to be about Ohios future, said DeWine. When I met with DeWine I anticipated our conversations to center around childrens issues, as well as his plans to continue to battle Ohios raging opioid crisis. Those issues were the cornerstones of his bruising campaign against Democrat Richard Cordray. That race was one of the most expensive and closely watched mid-term elections in the nation. However, it was Fran DeWine, his wife of 51 years, who proved to be equally passionate on the issue of children during the conversation. Her husband listened intently as Fran DeWine, the mother of 8 adult children and 23 grandchildren, described her vision for the governors mansion, where the governor and first lady plan to move into early in 2019. Its a home that needs to be lived in. Its a place that needs children running around. Its a place that should be inviting, lively and full of energy, said Fran DeWine, who met her future husband when both were first-grade students in Yellow Springs, Ohio. During the gubernatorial campaign, DeWine pledged to expand access to early childhood education, increase access to mental health services, and reform Ohios inconsistent foster care system. With his creation of a cabinet level post of Director of Childrens Initiatives as his first action as governor-elect, his focus on children couldnt be more emphatically stated. As Ohio continues to withstand bruising population loss, and business defection, this incoming governor appears to be relentlessly focused on the future of children, which is the states best short and long-term hope. Now awaiting Ohio Senate action is a significant measure that, with a few tweaks, could become a national model by making police body camera footage a public record. A limited number of exceptions would rest mostly on personal privacy grounds. Substitute House Bill 425 has attracted no opposition, although Dennis Hetzel, president of the Ohio News Media Association, has suggested modest changes that could be made via amendments on the Senate floor. In June, Ohio's House voted 94-0 for HB 425. On Dec. 6, the Ohio Senate's Government Oversight and Reform committee reported out a substitute bill on a similarly unanimous 10-0 vote. State Rep. Niraj Antani, a Miamisburg Republican who is the bill's prime sponsor, said the Senate may vote on the bill today. The bipartisan bill's other prime sponsor is state Rep. Hearcel Craig, a Columbus Democrat. Co-sponsors include Democratic Reps. Stephanie Howse, of Cleveland; Kent Smith, of Euclid; and John Rogers, of Mentor on the Lake; and Republican Reps. Tom Patton, of Strongsville; and Steve Hambley, of Brunswick. HB 425 "can be one of the nation's best laws involving body cameras," Hetzel said in Senate testimony last month -- although he urged lawmakers to reduce the list of 17 new exceptions the bill would add to state public-records law. Hetzel also argued the bill should be restricted to body cameras until more testimony could be heard on the implications of a House amendment that added police dashboard camera footage to the bill. "Case law around dash cam footage is well established," Hetzel said. The inclusion of dash cams in HB 425 was unnecessary, he added, "and deserves greater discussion." The Ohio ACLU's Gary Daniels said the bill's exemptions focused laudably on personal privacy issues, and testified to the Senate that passing HB 425 "will not only be good for Ohio, it will establish our legislature as a national leader on the best ways for state legislators to provide assistance on the use of police body cameras." Daniels did raise one concern, noting that additional legislation would still be needed to clarify when police body cameras had to be activated - or turned off. Senators should consider floor amendments limiting HB 425 to body-camera footage until the implications of including police dashboard camera footage in the legislation can be more fully explored. Senators should also seek to reduce the number of exceptions the bill adds to Ohio's public records law. Overall, however, HB 425 is an excellent bill - a bipartisan Statehouse consensus that should help assure Ohioans of law-enforcement accountability. About our editorials: Editorials express the view of the editorial board of cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer -- the senior leadership and editorial-writing staff. As is traditional, editorials are unsigned and intended to be seen as the voice of the news organization. Have something to say about this topic? * Send a letter to the editor, which will be considered for print publication. * Email general questions about our editorial board or comments on this editorial to Elizabeth Sullivan, director of opinion, at esullivan@cleveland.com. * Use the comments to share your thoughts. Then, stay informed when readers reply to your comments by using the "Follow" option at the top of the comments, & look for updates via the small blue bell in the lower right as you look at more stories on cleveland.com. PARMA HEIGHTS, Ohio -- Threats, West 130th Street: On Dec. 13, police were dispatched to a West 130th Street business after an employee received an email from an unknown sender who threatened to blow up the building unless the business sent money via Bitcoin. The employee felt the email was a scam, but does wish to prosecute if the offender is caught. Police are investigating. Drunken driving, Berkshire Road: On Dec. 14, police were dispatched to Berkshire Road regarding a car crash. An arriving officer talked to one of the drivers, who smelled like booze. The man, who had driven his car into a parked vehicle, was arrested for drunken driving. He was also cited for causing the accident. Harassment, Stumph Road: On Dec. 14, two Stumph Road women called police after being victims of constant harassment from the same individual. Police are investigating. Burglary, Ridge Road: On Dec. 12, police observed a car driven by a man who was suspected of burglary. The driver was arrested. Shoplifting, West 130th Street: On Dec. 11, police were dispatched to Old Time Pottery after an employee watched two women load four bed comforters into a car and walk through checkout without paying. An arriving officer talked to the employee of the West 130th Street business, who said the suspected shoplifters left in a gray or tan Volkswagen. The officer was unable to locate the vehicle. Fraud, Stoney Creek Lane: On Dec. 11, police were dispatched to a Stoney Creek Lane home after a resident discovered that someone had opened an account for furniture using her personal information. There are no suspects. Police are investigating. If you would like to discuss the police blotter, please visit our crime and courts comments page. COLUMBUS, OhioGov. John Kasich on Wednesday voiced doubts about challenging President Donald Trump in 2020, saying right now he couldnt beat the president in a Republican primary. I dont get into things that I dont think I can win, the term-limited governor said during a Columbus Metropolitan Club luncheon. And I think right now, today, inside the Republican Party, I cant beat him [Trump] in a primary. Kasich again brought up the prospect of running for president as a independent, though he noted that such candidates usually dont win. I dont have to be a candidate to have a voice, the governor said. Because I will have a voice, believe me. However, Kasich indicated he could change his mind if the political winds change. Well see, he said. Kasich, a two-term governor and former congressman from suburban Columbus, ran against Trump in the 2016 Republican presidential primary. While Kasich won headlines for finishing second to Trump in the New Hampshire primary, the only state he won before dropping out of the race was his home state. Kasich also indicated he would soon veto legislation that would shift the burden of proof in use-of-force cases from the defendant to the prosecution. Ohio is the only state in the nation to require defendants in use-of-force cases to prove they acted in self-defense, rather than make it the prosecutions job to show that the defendant didnt act in self-defense. The legislation, House Bill 228, would also loosen a number of Ohio gun-control rules including allowing individuals to challenge local gun-control ordinances in court. Kasich expressed frustration that the Republican-dominated legislature failed to act on his package of gun reforms, including a proposed red-flag law that would allow authorities to confiscate guns from those deemed to be a threat to themselves or others. This really infuriates me, the governor said of lawmakers refusal to act on his proposals. The governor indicated he will sign House Bill 491, which would relax high-school graduation standards for the classes of 2019 and 2020. I think were signing it, he said. The governor also said he would make an announcement by Thursday on two abortion bills passed by the legislature earlier this month. One, a so-called heartbeat bill, would prohibit abortions when a fetal heartbeat can be detected; the other would outlaw the procedure used for almost all second-trimester abortions. Kasich previously vetoed a different heartbeat bill in 2016. He didnt indicate Wednesday what he would do with the two bills now in front of him. COLUMBUS, OhioGov. John Kasich on Wednesday vetoed legislation that would make Ohio the last state in the nation to shift the burden of proof in self-defense cases from the defendant to prosecutors. The term-limited Republican governors decision to veto House Bill 228 is likely to be the first in a series of battles with the GOP-dominated legislature over legislation passed during his final days in office. Under the bill, it would be up to prosecutors in use-of-force cases to prove that a defendant did not act in self-defense. Ohio is the only state that puts the burden of proof on defendants to show they used force in self-defense. HB 228 would also loosen a number of Ohio gun-control rules including allowing individuals to challenge local gun-control ordinances in court. Kasich indicated earlier on Wednesday that he intended to veto the legislation Why would I sign a bill that gives more power to the gun advocates? the governor said during a Columbus Metropolitan Club luncheon. For the first time in my lifetime, the possibility of somebody coming through that door and shooting us exists, he continued. And we cant do anything because of rotten, stinking politics. Kasich called himself a Second Amendment person, but added, I also agree that there are some important restrictions that we need to put on the Second Amendment. The legislation does include one part of a package of gun reforms Kasich has called for: prohibiting straw man purchases in which someone buys a gun for someone else. Such purchases are already illegal under federal law; this bill would make it a third-degree felony on the state level. It now remains to be seen whether proponents of the bill can get enough votes in the Ohio House and Senate to override Kasichs veto. While the bill needed only a majority to pass, a veto override requires the support of 60 percent of lawmakers in each chamber. HB 228 passed both the House and Senate one vote short of the 60-percent threshold, though some Republicans who were absent at the time could provide the deciding vote. Even if that happens, the override still wouldnt happen if even a single supportive lawmaker didnt show up to the rare post-Christmas session days, which were only recently added. Before passing HB 228, lawmakers tried to make the bill more palatable by removing a controversial and much-publicized stand your ground provision that would eliminate a persons duty to retreat before using force in self-defense. Right now, state law only allows no duty to retreat when defendants are in their home or vehicle. Last week, lawmakers passed a number of other bills that Kasich is also expected to veto, including a pay raise for lawmakers and other elected officials and a heartbeat bill that bans abortion when a fetal heartbeat can be detected (which can be as soon as 6 weeks into a pregnancy). The Ohio General Assembly also sent Kasich a second abortion bill that would ban the procedure used for almost all second-trimester abortions. The governor hasnt indicated whether hell sign that legislation. CLEVELAND, Ohio Holly Bland was 19 and working her way through college at the Kent State University campus in Ashtabula when she discovered she was pregnant. Her partner was in the military, and she didnt see him often. She knew she didnt want to have a baby, so she took to the internet to research options. The second I found out that I was pregnant, I already knew I didnt want to carry the pregnancy. I had already made that decision in my mind. Its just one of those things that you dont think about until it happens to you, sometimes. I had already made the decision when I was younger, Bland said. I just dont want to be a mom. Bland, who had an abortion in 2014, is open about her experience now. She works for Preterm, a Cleveland abortion clinic, and is speaking out because she wants to humanize abortion. Its a normal experience that many people share, Bland said. But when she was pregnant, she was afraid to tell anyone about her abortion, because no one talked about it when she was growing up. It was considered a bad thing. I didnt want anyone to know because I felt shameful at first because of the stigma, she said. Bland initially connected with crisis pregnancy centers nearby, and said they tried to dissuade her from getting an abortion. She eventually made an appointment to have an abortion at Akron Womens Medical Group, but it wasnt easy. Clinics are busy she said, and she couldnt afford to miss a class or a shift at her two jobs, at Dairy Queen and a grocery store. It took a week for her to get in to the Akron Clinic. Then, she was five weeks pregnant. Thats earlier than many women know theyre pregnant. A pregnancy is generally counted as 40 weeks long, beginning with a womans last menstrual period. By the time a woman misses her period, shes generally considered four weeks pregnant. Bland said she knew so early because she usually got sick during her period. When she got even sicker this time around, she had a suspicion she might be pregnant. Since Ohio requires a 24-hour waiting period before an abortion, Bland had to schedule another trip for the procedure. When Bland tried to coordinate her schedule with the clinics, she couldnt get in for another two weeks. Bland was seven weeks pregnant when she had her abortion a point that could be illegal under the proposed abortion restriction, known as the heartbeat bill, which was approved by the Ohio legislature this year, and is now on Gov. John Kasichs desk. She went into credit card debt to pay the $650 cost. If abortion wasnt an option in Ohio, Bland said she would have tried to cross state lines for the procedure and likely would have lost a job because of the time off she would have had to take. If abortion wasnt an option at all, Bland said she doesnt believe she would have been able to graduate college, or move away from Ashtabula. She said her own experience with abortion influenced her desire to work in her current job, taking patients information when they arrive at Preterm. If I absolutely was forced to follow through with the pregnancy, Im not sure what I would have done, she said. Blands sex education in high school had centered around abstinence. Students signed a contract promising not to have sex and, in exchange, they received restaurant coupons. Bland didnt tell her parents until later. Bland said she and her father, who is conservative, have been able to move past it. Bland said her mother was supportive and told her of her own abortion. That made me kind of wish I would have told her when it was happening, Bland said. Because I would have felt less alone. U.S. President Donald Trump speaks after signing bill H.R. 390, the Iraq and Syria Genocide Relief and Accountability Act of 2018, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Tuesday, Dec. 11, 2018. "The president has been clear, that the USMCA deal would provide additional revenue through the deal that would show that Mexico is paying for the wall," press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters Tuesday, referring to the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. The argument is part of the White House's position on border security as Trump urges Congress to pony up $5 billion for the wall while lawmakers seek a spending deal to avoid a shutdown on Saturday. Yet the administration has struggled to explain how the pact an updated version of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which was signed 25 years ago ensures that Mexico will actually foot the bill for the barrier. President Donald Trump and the White House are claiming that the newly renegotiated North American trade deal will mean that Mexico is going to pay for the southern border wall promised by Trump on the campaign trail. Trump tweeted last week that the money would come from savings, not necessarily revenue: "Our new deal with Mexico (and Canada), the USMCA, is so much better than the old, very costly & anti-USA NAFTA deal, that just by the money we save, MEXICO IS PAYING FOR THE WALL!" TRUMP TWEET The president repeated his argument with a tweet Wednesday morning, saying "Mexico is paying (indirectly) for the Wall through the new USMCA." TRUMP TWEET 2 Asked directly at a recent forum on trade in what sense Mexico could pay for the wall, one of Trump's key economic advisors deflected. "I'm not an immigration expert, so I'm not going to weigh in on that issue," said Clete Willems, deputy director of the president's National Economic Council and a former chief counsel at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. Sanders offered a vague response when reporters pressed her for an explanation Tuesday. "He's saying revenue provided and money that would be saved through the USMCA deal, we could pay for the wall four times over and by doing that new trade deal, we have the opportunity to pay for the wall," she said Experts question whether the renegotiated agreement would generate much new revenue, as USMCA is very similar to NAFTA. "I expect essentially zero change in revenue collected from tariffs arising through the USMCA. Under both the existing NAFTA and President Trump's proposed new deal, the United States charges zero tariffs on trade with Canada and Mexico," said Chad Bown, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Mexico, for its part, has been adamant all along that it will not pay for a wall. "The issue of the 'wall' has not been part of any conversation with President Trump or his government, tweeted Mexico's foreign minister, Marcelo Ebrard. "Now our talks are about investment and development and we hope so continue." WATCH: Controversial walls in history: From Berlin to the US-Mexico border Strong demand for aircraft, plane parts and services and defense products led manufacturer Boeing to boost its dividend and share buyback programs on Monday, the company's Chief Financial Officer, Greg Smith, tells CNBC. Boeing's board of directors voted Monday to raise the company's quarterly dividend by 20 percent in 2019, bringing it to $2.05 per share. The board also approved a $20 billion share buyback program, replacing its prior authorization of $18 billion from last December. The moves were seen as a sign of confidence in Boeing's business, which produced a record amount of commercial airplanes by the end of this year's third quarter and has exceeded cash flow expectations. In the last five years, Boeing has repurchased about 230 million shares and increased its dividend by about 325 percent. "We've got about 5,800 airplanes in backlog, which is about seven years of production," Smith told CNBC's Jim Cramer in an exclusive interview. "As we look beyond that, there's a need for 43,000 aircraft over the next 20 years. So we see a continued growing market, and part of that growing market is a replacement element. And this is about having the right products and services in the marketplace to win." Boeing has also been investing in "productivity and innovation" and winning multi-billion-dollar contracts with the U.S. Armed Forces, both major positives when it comes the company's long-term prospects, Smith said Tuesday. "We've been making significant investments in the business around productivity and innovation to ensure that we've got the right products and services in the market, not just for today, but in that 43,000 aircraft market combined with a service growth market and a defense market to win," he said on "Mad Money." "That's what's giving us the confidence." Smith also brushed off lingering concerns about Boeing's business in China, which accounts for roughly a quarter of the manufacturer's airplane orders. "There's a need there for about 7,700 aircraft over the next 20 years, and we've been working in China for about 50 years," he told Cramer. "And then, just drilling down on the fundamentals within the country, the growth in the middle class and that 10 percent of the population has a passport, we see continued, great opportunities there and a portfolio that can meet those needs within that market over the long term." When asked whether other airlines would step up if China's demand for planes tapers as a result of trade tensions with the United States, Smith said "we've certainly got strong demand." Shares of the aerospace giant, which has a market value of $186.3 billion, rose more than 1 percent in after-hours trading Monday and another 3.77 percent in Tuesday's session. Boeing's stock is up more than 11 percent year to date, with shares settling Tuesday at $328.06. In late November, Wall Street firm Cowen said Boeing was its No. 1 stock for 2019 because airplane production is in a "sweet spot" and set a $445 price target. In October, Boeing's third-quarter earnings and revenue results topped analysts' estimates, with revenue topping forecasts by more than $1 billion. The company also raised its full-year 2018 earnings guidance. Workplace by Facebook, the company's communications tool for companies, has a new leader. The company's Karandeep Anand is now the head of the London-based Facebook division, according to an update on his LinkedIn profile. "I'm excited to now be part of the journey of bringing Workplace to companies across the globe and help them unlock the potential of their biggest asset - people," Anand wrote on his LinkedIn profile. Anand will work closely with Julien Codorniou, the Facebook vice president who has been the leader of Workplace, a spokeswoman for Facebook told CNBC. Anand will handle the Workplace product team, which includes developers, engineers, researchers and data scientists, while Codorniou will remain in charge of sales and partnerships. "We're thrilled that Karandeep is joining Workplace as its new head of Workplace, effectively immediately," the spokeswoman said. "Karandeep joins Workplace from Marketplace, and brings with him a wealth of experience from both a consumer and enterprise background. We're excited to have him on board." In its two years of existence, Workplace by Facebook has nabbed big-name customers such as Walmart, Starbucks and Chevron, but it has otherwise yet to make a significant dent in the enterprise communications software market and trails rivals Microsoft and Slack, which is expected to go public next year. The service is used by 30,000 organizations, according to the most recent figures Facebook shared in October 2017. By comparison, Microsoft Teams is used by 329,000 organizations, the company announced in September, while Slack in May said its service is used by 500,000 organizations, including 70,000 paying organizations. During his nearly four years with Facebook, Anand has been the head of product for a number of other divisions, including Marketplace, Audience Network and Ad Solutions. Prior to Facebook, Anand spent 15 years with Microsoft in a variety of roles. --CNBC's Jordan Novet contributed to this report. WATCH: Here's how to see which apps have access to your Facebook data and cut them off The Huawei sanctions fraud case rattled markets, stunned the tech world and put U.S. agencies on the spot. All three will be monitoring the next several weeks to see what's next. Huawei is one of China's largest companies and is the second largest producer of mobile phones in the world. On Dec. 1, police in Vancouver arrested Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou while she was on a 12-hour layover between Hong Kong and Mexico. Meng, the daughter of Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei, was charged in Vancouver over allegations that the company defrauded several banks, including HSBC and Standard Chartered, by concealing payments from Iran in violations of sanctions. The case is defying expectations, said Amanda DeBusk, chair of the global international trade practice at Dechert law firm. It not only triggered volatility in U.S. markets. It also has led to a series of responses from China that DeBusk believes will give incentive to Canada to settle the case rather than extradite Meng. Two Canadians have been arrested in China this month. "Canadians will be expecting further retaliation if, in fact, they transport Ms. Meng to the United States and into the hands of U.S. authorities," said DeBusk. "Normally, of course, extradition with the Canadians is sort of routine, ho-hum, the person is brought back to the United States, then you go through the criminal process in the U.S.," said DeBusk. "But nothing is normal about this case." In fact, a third Canadian has been reported detained in China, but Canada's diplomatic agency did not link it to Meng's arrest and no further details were available, according to the Toronto-based National Post. UPS attributed the shift to more consumers buying gifts for themselves this year, encouraged by the good deals online earlier in the holiday season, and to companies making the returns process easier. For the first time ever, UPS has forecast the busiest day for returns will be Wednesday. Typically, the busiest day for returns falls on Jan. 3, after people have opened their gifts and made it through any New Year's Eve celebrations. But the Atlanta-based carrier says it expects a record 1.5 million packages to be returned Dec. 19, compared with 1.3 million expected on Jan. 3, 2019. With a drawn-out shopping season and more people ringing up purchases online, the number of packages being returned is actually starting to spike ahead of Christmas, not after it. Even apparel subscription service Rent the Runway is trying to make it easier for customers to return clothes by opening drop boxes within some of WeWork's co-working spaces. "There are a lot of these rental services now ... and we have a lot of parties going on during the holidays," Kathleen Marran, vice president of U.S. marketing for UPS, told CNBC, adding another reason for returns to be spiking in December. "People are deciding what they want to keep or don't want to keep earlier this year." Americans alone returned more than $90 billion of goods during the 2017 holiday season, according to Optoro, a tech firm that processes more than $1 billion worth of returns each year from companies like Target and Under Armour. Optoro said it expects that amount to rise each year, as e-commerce sales continue to climb. (Shoppers are more likely to return an online purchase than one they made in a store.) It's estimated about $380 billion in merchandise is returned to retailers, annually, and growing. Importantly for retailers to take note of, nearly 90 percent of consumers say they're less likely to buy from a retailer or brand if they have a poor experience with a return, Optoro found in surveying 600 people. Fifty-five percent of people say they've outright chosen not to buy something because a return policy wasn't flexible enough. Now, with more companies including Walmart and Amazon this holiday season offering shoppers the option to buy online and still have items arrive by Dec. 25, carriers UPS, FedEx and the U.S. Postal Service are expecting record activity coming in and out of their centers. In addition to deliveries, they'll be juggling a surge in returns. "As long as there is a label on the package, so we know where it starts and ends, it's really simple for us," Marran said about UPS handling so many returns. "It's not as complicated [for carriers] as people may think it is." WATCH: Amazon Air no threat to FedEx Key West, Florida, United States - April 13, 2012: a tightrope walker tosses of skittles. Show of street artists that takes place every day during the sunset celebration at Mallory Square in Key West. bennymarty | iStock Editorial | Getty Images Receiving a monthly Social Security benefit is something plenty of retirees count on. Unless they can't. By the Social Security Administration's estimates, 48 percent of married couples and 69 percent of unmarried individuals get half or more of their income from Social Security. For about 1 in 5 couples, and 44 percent of single people, Social Security represents 90 percent or more of their income. But 3 percent of people age 60 to 89 are what the government calls "never beneficiaries" who, true to that term, never receive Social Security. And others may encounter circumstances that reduce, suspend or eliminate their benefit. Here's who can't always count on a Social Security safety net: Non-covered workers Hero Images | Getty Images Roughly 11 percent of those "never beneficiaries" are employees who worked in jobs that receive a public pension and don't pay into Social Security. Among the groups potentially affected: government workers, teachers and railroad employees. (For example, a 2014 report from advocate TeacherPensions.org estimated 1.2 million teachers or about 40 percent of the nation's public K-12 teachers aren't covered by Social Security.) Navigating this area of Social Security gets tricky, said certified financial planner Mark LaSpisa, president of Vermillion Financial Advisors in South Barrington, Illinois. You could be eligible for some benefits if your work record includes time at other jobs that did pay into Social Security but different provisions may kick in that reduce your own benefit by up to 50 percent, or even completely wipe out spousal or survivor benefits. Don't expect a straightforward answer, said LaSpisa, who once spent two years helping a client determine her eligibility for Social Security based on the record of her deceased husband, who had worked for a railroad. "Most of the [Social Security] offices have no clue how to handle this, because it's not a normal process," he said. Felons William Mahar | Getty Images In many cases, a criminal record doesn't preclude someone from receiving Social Security benefits. But there are a number of exceptions that can limit eligibility in select circumstances. For example, Social Security rules generally prevent someone convicted of the "felonious and intentional homicide" of a worker from receiving benefits based on that deceased individual's record. In other words, killing your spouse makes you ineligible to claim a survival or spousal Social Security benefit on his or her record. Social Security benefits are also typically suspended for otherwise eligible individuals who are currently incarcerated, once they have been confined for 30 days. "Your benefits can be reinstated starting with the month following the month of your release," according to the government. Delinquent debtors hept27 | iStock | Getty Images Heading into retirement with debt could be a recipe for disaster, if you can't keep up with your obligations. The Department of the Treasury can withhold a portion of your Social Security benefit to collect on delinquent legal obligations such as child support or alimony, as well as tax debts and other non-tax debts owed to a federal agency (think: federal student loans). "No matter what kind of financial trouble you get in, student loans don't really disappear," said Victoria Fillet, a certified financial planner with Roosevelt Investment Group in New York. How much can be taken depends on the details of your debt, but the cap for federal debts is typically around 15 percent of your monthly benefit. The government isn't shy about wielding that power. In fiscal year 2018, collections from consumers' Social Security benefits to cover Department of Education debts totaled $191.5 million; for unpaid federal tax debts, more than $384.9 million, according to data from the Department of the Treasury. Expats Vintage classic american oldtimer car in Havana Cuba Grafissimo | iStock | Getty Images Moving overseas for retirement can be a smart financial strategy and one that generally won't affect your Social Security payments. Many overseas banks accept direct deposit of Social Security checks. But retirees bound for a few specific locations may not be able to receive their benefits. "The U.S. Department of the Treasury prohibits making payments to persons residing in Cuba or North Korea," according to the Social Security Administration. "If you are a U.S. citizen residing in Cuba or North Korea, you can get all the payments we withhold once you move to a country where we can send payments." The Social Security Administration also restricts payments to U.S. citizens who retire to nine other locales Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan are also be unable to receive benefits, unless they successfully apply for an exception through the Social Security Administration and agree to restricted payment conditions. Infrequent workers A Social Security Administration office in San Francisco. Getty Images Turkey is not softening its stance on the U.S.-backed Kurds in northern Syria, whom it has threatened to attack much to the alarm of American officials. Speaking to CNBC in Doha Sunday, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu maintained that Ankara would not accept continued Kurdish paramilitary presence in the area. He argued that contrary to Pentagon warnings, Turkish actions would not endanger U.S. troops working alongside the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) that his government views as a primary enemy. "We are not risking American soldiers' lives, our target is the PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party) and YPG terrorist organization, as it was in Afrin," Cavusolgu said, referring to Turkey's January offensive against Kurdish paramilitary units in the Kurdish enclave of northern Syria. Erdogan's focus on the Kurds as a primary threat has complicated Washington's plans in Syria, which include relying on YPG fighters to push out the Islamic State. Turkish President Recep Erdogan threatened on Friday that his forces would enter the northern Syrian town of Manbij if the U.S. doesn't remove the Kurdish fighters. "But if America believes that they are the shelter, the protector of this terrorist organization, that is something else," the minister said. "And we have the channels between the militaries to avert any friendly fire or accident, we have this channel and we have good mil-to-mil (military-to-military) cooperation as well." Pentagon: Unilateral military action is 'of grave concern' The White House has repeatedly warned against carrying out any such plan, and the threat from Erdogan prompted a call with President Donald Trump the same day during which the two agreed to "more effective coordination" between their countries' operations in Syria. At least 2,000 U.S. troops are working alongside the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in the country's north. The Pentagon said that "unilateral military action into northeast Syria by any party, particularly as U.S. personnel may be present or in the vicinity, is of grave concern." While Ankara and Washington are allies against IS in Syria, the two are at loggerheads over U.S. support for the YPG the backbone of the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces which the Pentagon says has been vital in the anti-IS fight and in ridding much of northern Iraq and Syria of the terrorist group's presence. Turkey stresses the group's ties to the separatist PKK, a Turkish and U.S.-designated terrorist group that's carried out a violent decades-long insurgency in Turkey. Turkish army troops gather near the Syrian border at Hassa, in Hatay province on January 21, 2018. Bulent Kilic | AFP | Getty Images If you dream of working remotely, you are not alone. More than 4 million employees slightly more than 3 percent of the entire U.S. workforce work from home for at least half the time, according to Global Workplace Analytics, a telecommuting research site. Some fields have more remote jobs than others. FlexJobs found that seven fields had high rates more than 50 percent of remote career opportunities over the last year. Some of these rapidly growing career areas are somewhat surprising, since they aren't typically associated with remote work. A "remote job" is defined as a professional-level job that allows the worker to work from home either entirely or part of the time. Other names for these types of gigs include telecommuting jobs, virtual jobs, at-home jobs and other similar names. These categories have seen high remote-job growth in 2018: President Donald Trumps former attorney Michael Cohen arrives at US Federal Court in New York on December 12, 2018, where he is expected to be sentenced after pleading guilty to a number of charges. What's in the vault? Someone on Wednesday filed a document saying something in connection with a criminal case against President Donald Trump's former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen. But who filed it and what it says are a mystery. The document, which is sealed from public view, was "placed in vault" at U.S. District Court in Manhattan, according to a docket entry. The filing came a week after Cohen, 52, was sentenced to three years in prison for his guilty pleas in cases brought separately by federal prosecutors in New York, and by the office of special counsel Robert Mueller. The sealed document was filed in a case brought against Cohen by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York. In that case, Cohen pleaded guilty to tax evasion, making false statements to a bank, and to campaign contribution crimes related to the payments of hush money to two women who claim they had affairs with Trump. WATCH: Trump underreported payments to Cohen in disclosures, a potential violation Authorities around the world, including the United States, Switzerland and Singapore have looked into anti-money laundering breaches relating to 1MDB. Singapore's central bank on Wednesday said it had issued a lifetime prohibition order against former Goldman Sachs' banker Tim Leissner after he admitted to charges related to an investigation into scandal-plagued Malaysian state fund 1MDB. The ban is an upgrade of the Monetary Authority of Singapore's 10-year prohibition order against Leissner issued last year. The order, among other things, prevents him from performing any regulated activity under the Securities and Futures Act (SFA). Goldman Sachs has been under scrutiny for its role in helping raise funds through bond offerings for 1Malaysia Development Bhd, which is the subject of investigations in at least six countries. "After careful consideration of Mr Leissner's admission to participation in the conspiracy, as well as US DOJ's criminal actions against him, MAS has decided to vary the PO against him," the MAS said in a statement. Goldman Sachs has consistently denied wrongdoing. An S-400 Triumf surface-to-air missile system seen in St. Petersburg's Palace Square during a dress rehearsal for a military parade. Peter Kovalev | TASS via Getty Images WASHINGTON Russia will deliver its S-400 missile defense system to Turkey despite the U.S. State Department's decision to sell a rival platform to Ankara for $3.5 billion. The S-400, a mobile long-range surface-to-air missile system, is the Kremlin's answer to America's Patriot and THAAD platforms. Lockheed Martin makes the THAAD, or terminal high altitude area defense, system, while Raytheon makes the Patriot. Last year, Ankara signed an agreement with Moscow for the S-400 missile system, a deal reportedly worth $2.5 billion. All the while, Turkey has helped finance America's most expensive weapons system, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. In short, these two big-ticket weapons systems that Turkey hopes to add to its budding arsenal can be used against each other. An F-35 fighter jet is seen as Turkey takes delivery of its first F-35 fighter jet with a ceremony in Forth Worth, Texas, USA on June 21, 2018. Two such planes destined for Turkey are yet to leave American soil. Atilgan Ozdil | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images The Russian-made S-400 missile system, which is equipped with eight launchers and 32 missiles, is capable of targeting stealth warplanes like the F-35 fighter. Turkey's march toward procuring the Russian missile system has raised concerns among its fellow NATO members and Washington, who are wary of Moscow's increasing military presence in the region. Meanwhile, Congress has pushed back on the scheduled transfer of two F-35 jets to Turkey. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that the Russian and U.S. transactions should be seen as separate from each other, and that Moscow was in the process of supplying Ankara with the S-400. "We are fulfilling agreements that we have with our Turkish colleagues. You know that the contract is being fulfilled. This will be continued," Peskov told reporters Wednesday. A Russian S-400 surface-to-air missile system. Sergei Malgavko | TASS via Getty Images What's more, the State Department approved a proposed sale of the Patriot missile defense system to Ankara on Tuesday. "This sale is consistent with U.S. initiatives to provide key allies with modern systems capable of being networked to defend against regional instability," a State Department spokesperson, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said ahead of the announcement. The potential sale of the Patriot system complicates Russia's sale of the S-400 to Turkey since the two missile systems cannot be operated together. Additionally, the F-35 jets that Turkey also hopes to buy cannot be operated in conjunction with the S-400. "Turkey cannot buy both," Tim Ash, a senior emerging markets strategist at Bluebay Asset Management, said of the development. "I think the U.S. will pull both the Patriot sale and F-35 deal if Turkey goes along with the S-400," he added. "Net-net, I think the news about Patriot is still a positive, as it shows the U.S. and Turkey are talking and moving back closer together. That said, the Turks might be trying to drive too hard a bargain, and might end up with nothing as a result." Turkey said last month that its purchase of the Russian missiles was a done deal and could not be canceled, according to a Reuters report. Ankara said it needed to buy further defense hardware however, which could be bought from the United States, the report said. Asian stocks were mixed on Wednesday ahead of a policy decision by the U.S. Federal Reserve. The widely anticipated trading debut of SoftBank Corp, the mobile unit of Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group, ended in disappointment. The company's shares closed 14.5 percent lower than its initial public offering price of 1,500 yen ($13.36). It was the most heavily-traded stock on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. SoftBank Corp's 2.65 trillion yen ($23.6 billion) IPO is the largest ever in Japan and the second-largest in the world behind Alibaba's $25 billion IPO in 2014. "I'm not 100 percent surprised that it's down this much. If they'd been able to hold above that 1,500-level (IPO price), it could have been a different story," said Andrew Jackson, head of Japanese equities at SooChow CSSD Capital Markets Asia. "Once it dipped below it, a lot of these retail investors, first-time investors who don't really know much about the markets, are probably in a big hurry to get out," Jackson told CNBC's "Street Sign," noting that around 90 percent of those that subscribed to SoftBank Corp's IPO were retail investors. In the broader Japanese market, the Nikkei 225 finished the day 0.6 percent to 20,987.92 and the Topix closed 0.41 percent down to 1,556.15. Greater China markets were mixed. The Shanghai composite ended the day 1.05 percent lower at 2,549.5634 and the Shenzhen composite fell by 1.376 percent at the close to 1,294.4853. Meanwhile, Hong Kong's Hang Seng Index was 0.12 percent higher in late Asian trading hours. Shares of top Chinese oil firms fall following the plunge in oil prices overnight. Petrochina shares fell 3.28 percent in Hong Kong and 2.1 percent in Shanghai. Shares of China Petroleum and Chemical Corp slipped 4.85 percent in Hong Kong and 2.75 percent Shanghai. Energy stocks in Australia were also mostly lower. Origin Energy tumbled by 5.69 percent at the close, while Woodside Petroleum fell by 1.82 percent. The slipped by 0.16 percent to 5,580.6 at the end of Wednesday's trading session. South Korean stocks, meanwhile, ended the session higher with the Kospi index rising 0.81 percent to 2,078.84. Fed decision coming It was another volatile trading day in the U.S., which saw the three major indexes ending the day broadly flat. The closed 0.01 percent at 2,546.16, the Dow Jones Industrial Average added 0.35 percent to 23,675.64 and the Nasdaq composite inched up 0.45 percent to 6,783.911 points. One widely watched event coming on Wednesday in the U.S. is the monetary policy decision by the Federal Reserve. The central bank is expected to hike its benchmark overnight lending rate for a fourth and final time in 2018, and its outlook for 2019 will also be scrutinized by investors. "The key for me is not whether they hike or don't hike, I'd be very surprised if they pause ... the question is what do they convey about the path moving forward. Do they lower the dot projection from three to two or is it even more dovish than that? So the story really isn't about the December hike, it's what 2019 and critically what 2020 looks like," Frances Donald, head of macroeconomic strategy at Manulife Asset Management, told CNBC's "Squawk Box." China's opening up China is reportedly starting its Central Economic Working Conference this week after Chinese President Xi Jinping's Tuesday speech to mark the 40th anniversary of the country's market opening and reform. David de Garis, director of economics and markets at National Australia Bank, said he expects China to "reset growth and reform objectives" this week. That could provide further hints into the status of China's ongoing tariff fight with the U.S., which is now on hold until March. Among the details that could come out from China include the growth target for 2019, growth-supportive policies and reform measures essential for a deal with the U.S., de Garis wrote in a morning note. Currencies President Donald Trump and China's President Xi Jinping make joint statements at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, Nov. 9, 2017. China and the United States have held a telephone call about trade and economic issues, China's Commerce Ministry said on Wednesday. The call was at a "vice ministerial level", the ministry said in a one-line statement, without providing any other details. U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping during the plenary session at the G20 Summit on July 7, 2017 in Hamburg, Germany. Mikhail Svetlov | Getty Images The United States and China may have called a truce on tariffs, but tensions remained high during a diplomatic meeting in Switzerland this week. International frustration over America's protectionist stance boiled over during a closed-door review of U.S. trade policy at the World Trade Organization, according to an official in Geneva. India called America unpopular. Japan made reference to Old Glory, urging the U.S. never to take down "the flag of the free." And China invoked the spirit of legendary comic book creator Stan Lee to scold the U.S. Ambassador Zhang Xiangchen said Spider-Man is his favorite of Lee's creations and cited the superhero's famous philosophy: "With great power comes great responsibility." Then he took the United States to task. "It is unfortunate that we are seeing now, especially during the last year, a different America with severe mismatched power and responsibility," Zhang said. The WTO is designed to be a forum for countries to air their grievances, and reviews of members' trade policies can often become heated. Still, the tone of the two-day meeting this week was unusually sharp. Countries took issue with a host of American actions, according to the Geneva official. Tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum topped the agenda, especially since they were ostensibly imposed to safeguard national security. But members also complained about the rising U.S. deficit, international provisions in the new tax law and the expanded use of national security reviews to impose duties. "A top dog should act like a top dog," Zhang said. "It cannot only see a narrow spectrum of its own self-interest, and it certainly should not do whatever it wishes at the sacrifice of others." U.S. Ambassador Dennis Shea vigorously defended the administration and cast blame back on China. He accused Beijing of forcing American companies to give up critical technologies and, if that didn't work, stealing the intellectual property instead. "China apparently believes its power comes with little or no responsibility," he told the WTO. "This is a conversation that we will pick up in the near future." The Washington, D.C., attorney general said Wednesday it will sue Facebook over the Cambridge Analytica scandal on Wednesday. D.C. prosecutors said in the lawsuit that Facebook misled users in violation of the District's Consumer Protection Procedures Act by allowing them to download an app produced by Cambridge Analytica which then improperly collected private information from the users without making them aware. "We're reviewing the complaint and look forward to continuing our discussions with attorneys general in DC and elsewhere," said a Facebook spokesperson in a statement to CNBC. The district attorney said the maximum penalty under the act is $5,000 "per violation." It was not immediately clear what may constitute a single violation according to the law. Prosecutors said 852 D.C. users downloaded the misleading application provided by Cambridge Analytica but that a much larger portion of D.C. residents, approximately 340,000 people, had their data collected because they were friends of those initial users through Facebook. This could mean Facebook faces a fine of up to $1.7 billion if all 340,000 instances are considered "violations" under the statute. "We think change clearly needs to take place at that company," said D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine. The effort is not part of a multistate effort, said Racine in a Wednesday press briefing about the lawsuit, and he was unsure if a wider effort involving more state lawsuits had been organized. Here's the full press release announcing the lawsuit: Attorney General Karl A. Racine today sued Facebook, Inc. for failing to protect its users' data, enabling abuses like one that exposed nearly half of all District residents' data to manipulation for political purposes during the 2016 election. In its lawsuit, the Office of the Attorney General (OAG) alleges Facebook's lax oversight and misleading privacy settings allowed, among other things, a third-party application to use the platform to harvest the personal information of millions of users without their permission and then sell it to a political consulting firm. In the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, some Facebook users downloaded a "personality quiz" app which also collected data from the app users' Facebook friends without their knowledge or consent. The app's developer then sold this data to Cambridge Analytica, which used it to help presidential campaigns target voters based on their personal traits. Facebook took more than two years to disclose this to its consumers. OAG is seeking monetary and injunctive relief, including relief for harmed consumers, damages, and penalties to the District. "Facebook failed to protect the privacy of its users and deceived them about who had access to their data and how it was used," said AG Racine. "Facebook put users at risk of manipulation by allowing companies like Cambridge Analytica and other third-party applications to collect personal data without users' permission. Today's lawsuit is about making Facebook live up to its promise to protect its users' privacy." Facebook, Inc., headquartered in Menlo Park, California, is a digital social networking service with more than 2 billion active users around the world. Through a website and a mobile application, Facebook allows users to communicate and share content with personalized networks of "friends." As part of its business model, Facebook collects data that touches on every aspect of users' personal lives. This includes information provided by the user (name, gender, birthdate, email address, hometown, interests, education, political affiliation, photos, messages, etc.) and information about users' digital behavior (their friends, "likes," "shares," clicks on the site, and more). Facebook offers social networking services for free and uses the personal data it collects to sell targeted advertising to marketers. It also allows third-party developers to build applications that operate on the Facebook platform and offer services including calendar and email integration, games, and quizzes. In 2013, Facebook allowed Aleksandr Kogan, a researcher affiliated with England's Cambridge University, and his company, Global Science Research (GSR), to launch an app on the Facebook platform called "thisisyourdigitallife." The app claimed to be a personality quiz and offered to generate a personality profile in exchange for users downloading the app and granting it access to their Facebook data. Although only 852 Facebook users in the District installed Kogan's app, it also collected the personal information of those users' Facebook friendsamounting to nearly half of all District residents. GSR then sold that information to Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm. An investigation by OAG found that this abuse was among the many examples of Facebook's failure to protect consumers' data adequately. The investigation found that Facebook violated the District's Consumer Protection Procedures Act (CPPA), which prohibits unfair and deceptive trade practices. Among the ways that Facebook harmed consumers, the complaint alleges, are: Misleading users about the security of their data: Facebook represented to users that it would protect the privacy of their personal information, and that it required applications and third-party developers to respect consumers' privacy. However, Facebook allowed Kogan to collect and sell the data of users who had not downloaded or used Kogan's app. Failing to properly monitor third-party apps' use of data: Although Facebook was aware as early as 2014 that Kogan wanted to download the personal information not only of his app's users, but also of his users' friends, Facebook failed to monitor or audit the app to see if it was abiding by Facebook's policies for third-party applications and user data. Making it difficult for users to control data settings for apps: Facebook maintained confusing and ambiguous privacy and applications settings that made it difficult for consumers to control how their data was shared. Instead of allowing users to control access to their information on third-party apps directly from its main privacy settings page, Facebook required users to go to a different part of its platform for third-party app privacy settings. This made it harder for consumers to realize that apps could be harvesting their data. Failing to disclose the Cambridge Analytica breach to consumers for more than two years: Facebook first became aware in 2015 that Cambridge Analytica had obtained millions of users' data. The company conducted a cursory investigation and confirmed that the data had been improperly harvested from users and then sold to Cambridge Analytica. However, Facebook did not inform users affected by the breach until 2018. Failing to ensure users' improperly obtained data was deleted: Even after it confirmed its users' data had been improperly harvested, Facebook took Cambridge Analytica at its word that the company had deleted the data. They did this even though Facebook staffers were embedded with the Trump campaign and other campaigns, working alongside Cambridge Analytica staff to use the data to target voters. Failing to inform consumers that some companies could override data privacy settings: Facebook also failed to inform consumers that it granted certain companies, many of whom were mobile device makers, special permissions that enabled those companies to access consumer data and override consumer privacy settings. OAG is seeking an injunction to ensure Facebook puts in place protocols and safeguards to monitor users' data and to make it easier for users to control their privacy settings. In addition, OAG is seeking restitution for consumers, penalties, and costs. Correction: This story has been updated to correct an earlier version. The lawsuit by Washington, D.C., is not the first suit to be filed against Facebook over the Cambridge Analytica scandal. A one-month old baby in the Pacific island of Vanuatu became the first person in history to be given a vaccine delivered commercially by drone on Tuesday. The drone travelled almost 25 miles to deliver medical equipment to the remote area of Cook's Bay, which is usually only accessible by foot or locally operated boats. Thirteen children and five pregnant women were vaccinated in the area that lacks basic healthcare system. Tech from Australian firm Swoop Aero successfully delivered the vaccines to Cook's Bay, marking the first time a government has contracted a commercial drone company to transport vaccines to remote areas. Vanuatu's government is looking to integrate drone delivery into its national immunization program and roll the technology out for wider distribution of medical supplies. Vaccines are difficult to transport as they must be stored at precise temperatures. Vanuatu is a particularly difficult location for vaccine delivery due to its warm climate and a limited number of roads across its 80 islands. Around one in five Vanuatuan children consequently miss out on essential childhood vaccinations. Social media companies were "willfully blind" to Russia's misinformation campaign undermining the 2016 U.S. election, and it's time to dump stocks in the industry, money manager Ross Gerber told CNBC. The co-founder and CEO of Gerber Kawasaki Wealth and Investment Management thinks Facebook, Facebook-owned Instagram and Twitter are a liability and predicts things could get worse for the industry. "I think we've all given tech leaders a pass on their morals for way too long," Gerber said Tuesday on "Closing Bell." "They have acted incredibly to the detriment of this country. ... It's just time for them to pay." Two new reports found that Facebook and Twitter, along with Alphabet's Google, did "the bare minimum" to comply with the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation into Russian misinformation on their platforms. Facebook responded to the reports, saying, in part, "Congress and the intelligence community are best placed to use the information we and others provide to determine the political motivations of actors like the [Russian] Internet Research Agency." It said it it will continue to "fully cooperate." In a statement provided to CNBC, the platform said it has "made progress in helping prevent interference on our platforms during elections ... and funded independent research on the impact of social media on democracy." Twitter said in a statement its "singular focus is to improve the health of the public conversation on our platform" and that it has made significant strides since 2016 "to counter manipulation of our service." In addition to the problems caused by Russian influence, Gerber said he thinks social media's popularity has reached a ceiling and usage could be on a downturn. "We do think social media use has peaked with the advent of inventions like Screen Time," an app that can be used to limit device usage, he said. "I think we're all spending a lot less time on social media for our health." Facebook has had a rough year of negative headlines about the company's handling of its users data and privacy. Shares of the company are down nearly 20 percent on the year and nearly 35 percent from a 52-week high set in July. Twitter stock, on the other hand, has gained 40 percent in 2018 but is off about 30 percent from a 52-week high it reached in June. Disclaimer With a modified Tesla Model X zipping through a Boring Company tunnel Tuesday night, Elon Musk took the wraps off his vision of a high-speed tunnel system he believes could ease congestion and revolutionize how millions of commuters get around cities. "I thought it was epic," said Musk as he described how he felt being whisked through the Boring Co.'s demonstration tunnel. "For me it was an epiphany, like 'this thing damn well worked.'" Musk, who founded the Boring Co. two years ago after complaining that traffic in Los Angeles was driving him "nuts," says the demonstration tunnel cost approximately $10 million to complete. Engineers and workers have been boring the 1.14-mile-long tunnel underneath one of the main streets in Hawthorne, California. One end of the tunnel starts in a parking lot owned by Musk's Space X. The other end of the demonstration tunnel is in a neighborhood about a mile away in Hawthorne. Elon Musk, co-founder and chief executive officer of Tesla Inc., speaks during an unveiling event for the Boring Co. Hawthorne test tunnel in Hawthorne, California, U.S., on Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. Robyn Beck | Bloomberg | Getty Images During his Tuesday evening presentation, Musk described the Boring Co.'s tunnels as "an actual solution to the soul-crushing burden of traffic," laying out the ways they could be integrated into cities to one day make transportation faster and easier. Tuesday afternoon, the Boring Co. gave reporters demonstration rides through the tunnel in modified Tesla Model X SUVs, going between 40 and 50 miles per hour. Engineers have attached deployable alignment wheels to the two front wheels of the Model X. Those alignment wheels stick out to the side of the main wheels and act as a bumper along the track walls inside the tunnel, keeping the Model X on course and preventing the vehicle from running into the side walls of the tunnel. A modified Tesla Model X electric vehicle carrying Elon Musk, co-founder and chief executive officer of Tesla Inc., drives through the tunnel as it arrives for an unveiling event for the Boring Co. Hawthorne test tunnel in Hawthorne, California, U.S., on Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. Robyn Beck | Bloomberg | Getty Images "If driver passes out or goes crazy those tracking wheels ensure the car stays on track," said Musk. While the Boring Co.'s first tunnel may be complete, it is far from being finished. The surfaces are bumpy and have yet to be smoothed out. As a result, the demonstration ride, for now, is rough and passengers in the Model X definitely feel the alignment wheels bumping into the track walls to keep the SUV on course. Musk has talked repeatedly of boring a series of high-speed loop tunnels in major cities to ease congestion. In June, the Boring Co. signed a deal with the City of Chicago to develop matching 17-mile, high-speed transit tunnels between the city's business district and O'Hare Airport. When he announced the deal, Musk envisioned it taking no more than three years to dig the tunnel and breaking ground on the project within three to four months, but more than a half year later, the project has yet to receive approval from government and regulatory groups. That raises the question of whether the Boring Co. can dig and develop high-speed loop tunnels as quickly as Musk promises. Facebook gave tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Netflix unprecedented access to user information, according to an investigation by The New York Times. The partnerships are the latest in a long series of privacy concerns surrounding Facebook, and a potential violation of the company's 2011 agreement with the Federal Trade Commission. Facebook has been accused of violating the consent decree a misstep that would likely carry a multibillion-dollar fine several times over the last year. This report, though, alleges Facebook maintained improper partnerships far more recently, with a huge number of companies, and knowingly. The FTC declined to comment on the latest report, but has previously confirmed a probe into the company's privacy practices. And as Facebook continues to suffer security breaches, increasingly detailed user profiles stored across widespread networks and shared among companies leave consumers vulnerable. Facebook stock was down more than 2 percent on Wednesday morning, as most other tech stocks were rallying. Facebook allowed tech companies to view private messages and contact information as recently as this year, the Times report says, which would violate the FTC's orders against sharing a user's information without their consent even if a friend has opted in. Before that, Facebook allowed the third parties access to other data, like lists of friends and email addresses. Companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, Spotify and Apple had special agreements with Facebook that let them access the data, the report says. The partnerships would also contradict Facebook's public statements about third-party apps. Facebook has been auditing its partnerships to root out any inappropriate access to user information in the wake of a scandal involving British research firm Cambridge Analytica. In a blog post Wednesday, Facebook admitted to granting tech companies wide-ranging access but said it was a means to help users. The company said the features were key to the core functionality of Facebook, and said many of them have been shut down. "To be clear: none of these partnerships or features gave companies access to information without people's permission, nor did they violate our 2012 settlement with the FTC," Facebook said. Read the full New York Times investigation. The employees of one family-owned Michigan company are going to have a very merry Christmas this year: Michigan-based FloraCraft is gifting nearly $4 million in holiday bonuses to its 200 employees just in time for the holidays. FloraCraft headquartered in Ludington is a leading manufacturer of foam products for the craft and floral industries, with products sold at retailers like Walmart, Amazon, Michaels, Joann and Hobby Lobby. The company, which was founded in 1946, employs roughly 200 people. The idea for the generous gift came from owner and chairman Lee Schoenherr, who has run the company since 1973. The surprise was announced on Dec. 14 at the company's holiday luncheon, in which employees applauded (some even shedding a few tears) in response to the news. "This is something [Lee's] been wanting to do for many years," Eric Erwin, president and CEO of FloraCraft, tells CNBC Make It. "In February, he told the board, 'you know, I really think this is the year we've got to figure out how to do this.' We spent a better part of the year making sure we had the right program in place." Each gift will be based on longevity of service, the company says, and will be shared to full-time team members as a cash bonus and a gift to the employee's 401(k) account. While the amounts of the gifts will vary, the average bonus will be about $20,000 per worker, the Detroit Free Press reports, with the first installment made by the end of 2019. A second cash bonus and special bonus to 401(k) accounts will be gifted by the end of March 2020. For employees who have worked at the company for over 40 years, gifts will top $60,000. FedEx sank 12 percent on Wednesday, posting its worst day in more than 10 years, a day after Chairman and CEO Frederick Smith said most of the issues facing the company are the result of politicians around the world. "I'll just conclude by saying most of the issues that we're dealing with today are induced by bad political choices," Smith said. "I mean, making a bad decision about a new tax, creating a tremendously difficult situation with Brexit, the immigration crisis in Germany, the mercantilism and state-owned enterprise initiatives in China, the tariffs that the United States put in unilaterally. So you just go down the list, and they're all things that have created macroeconomic slowdowns." The stock is also on track for its worst month since 1978. The "new tax" Smith mentioned refers to the Treasury Department's proposed regulations covering a one-time transition tax on unrepatriated foreign earnings, which was enacted as part of President Donald Trump's massive tax cut legislation. The company said in a government filing that "certain guidance included in these proposed regulations is inconsistent with our interpretation that led to the recognition of a $225 million benefit in 2018. Notwithstanding this inconsistency, we are confident in our interpretation and intend to defend this position through litigation, if necessary." The chief executive's comments came as FedEx reduced its 2019 earnings guidance and reported weakness in its international business. The logistics company lowered its full year 2019 earnings guidance to a range of $15.50 to $16.60 per share, down from $17.20 to $17.80 per share. Analysts expected $17.33 per share. Among Smith's global concerns were political turbulence between United Kingdom and the European Union as well as a growing trade dispute between the U.S. and China. Washington has slapped tariffs on billions of dollars worth of Chinese exports over the past 12 months in an effort to force China to address alleged theft of intellectual property and other economic policies. Beijing has responded with similar retaliatory tariffs. Merging the consumer health businesses of GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer will help GSK invest more heavily in its pharmaceutical and vaccine development, GSK CEO Emma Walmsley told CNBC on Wednesday. Earlier, GSK and Pfizer said they will combine their consumer health portfolios, which include brands like ChapStick, Tums, and Nicorette, into the largest producer of over-the-counter drugs. Combined, the units generated $12.7 billion in revenue last year. The two companies plan to close the deal in the second half of 2019 and spin off the joint venture sometime within three years. GSK will hold a 68 percent stake in the joint venture, while Pfizer will hold the rest. Over-the-counter products typically give pharmaceutical companies steady revenue streams, whereas name-brand prescription drugs can be a volatile business when they lose their patent exclusivity. "This opportunity is truly a unique one in an all-equity deal to create the world's leading over-the-counter drugs company, a leading consumer health-care company with significant value creation for shareholders," Walmsley said in a "Squawk Box" interview. "But it also allows us to strengthen our number one priority, our pharma pipeline." Walsmley said the consumer business will still help GSK with cash flow but merging it with Pfizer's consumer unit will create a company with "significant" scale that can focus on only consumer. Meantime, GSK can keep investing in pharmaceuticals and vaccines. In March, GSK bought Novartis out of its stake in their consumer health venture. Now with the Pfizer deal, London-based GSK expects to save 500 million pounds (about $632 million) by 2022 for expected total cash costs of 900 million pounds and noncash charges of 300 million pounds. The company plans to reinvest up to 25 percent of the cost savings from the deal into the company's innovation efforts. Walmsley took the helm in April 2017 and has since promised to reinvigorate the company. Investors have soured as other manufacturers have built robust pipelines of pharmaceutical products while GSK's has lagged. She hired Dr. a new chief scientific officer, Hal Barron, who formerly led research and development at Alphabet's Calico. In July, GSK announced plans to invest $300 million in consumer genetics company 23andMe and form a four-year collaboration to discover medicines using 23andMe's database collected from its at-home DNA tests. And earlier this month GSK said it would buy Tesaro, a company with a number of cancer treatments in its pipeline, for $5.1 billion. Italy and the European Commission, the EU's executive arm, have announced a new budget deal after weeks of wrangling over the country's 2019 spending plans. Italy's government said last week that it would lower its deficit target for next year to 2.04 percent, down from an original target of 2.4 percent. The target was confirmed by the Commision on Wednesday. "The Italian government has come a long way, only a few weeks ago there was confrontational rhetoric," the European Commission's Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis said Wednesday, meaning that the Commission can avoid launching disciplinary measures against Italy, he told reporters. "The solution is not ideal but it allows us to avoid an 'Excessive Deficit Procedure' at this stage One important positive element is that the new budget is based on a plausible economic scenario," he said. "Credible and sustainable budgetary policies cannot be planned on over-optimistic forecasts," he added, alluding to Italy's original draft budget. Although Italy has made revisions to its spending plans, Dombrovskis stressed that the composition of the spending still raised concerns, particularly the main expansionary measures the citizens' income and rollback of pensions reforms (including lowering the retirement age). "When these measures will fully come into force they will result in higher costs for the years to come. In 2020 and 2021, Italy intends to compensate the costs by raising value-added tax (VAT). However, we know that in the past Italy has not activated this kind of safeguard. If this happens again large resources will need to be found elsewhere." The new measures also contain higher taxes on companies and cuts in planned investments, Dombrovskis added, which he said "are not growth-friendly steps, however these could be offset by better use of available EU structural funds." Tweet Todd Evans, animal handler with Dawn Animal Agency, holds the Aflac Duck on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in New York. Japan Post on Wednesday said it will buy 7 percent of U.S. insurer Aflac for about $2.4 billion, as the postal and financial conglomerate seeks new profit-drivers to counter weak growth prospects. Japan Post, majority-owned by the government, will acquire the stake in Georgia-based Aflac through open market or private block purchases, the companies said in separate statements. Without buying any additional shares, Japan Post's stake will grow to 20 percent in terms of voting rights after four years in accordance with shareholder rights given by Aflac, the companies said. In accounting rules, Japan Post would be able to book Aflac's profit as its own in proportion to its stake when it holds 20 percent or more. "Aflac's growth will contribute to Japan Post's profit," Japan Post Chief Executive Masatsugu Nagato said at a news conference. Known for the Aflac Duck character, the U.S. company garners 70 percent of its revenue from its Japan business, where it is the oldest and biggest cancer-insurance provider. The two companies already have a tie-up agreement that allows Aflac to sell its cancer insurance policies at post offices across Japan. Japan Post, about 57 percent government held, owns Japan Post Bank and Japan Post Insurance, in addition to its mail delivery business with 24,000 post offices nationwide. With almost all of its profit coming from the financial units, Japan Post has been struggling to find new businesses that can become growth drivers. The purchase is Japan Post's second multibillion-dollar bet after the $4.9 billion acquisition of Australian logistics company Toll Holdings in 2015. It had to write down the bulk of Toll's value only two years after the deal due to its weak performance. President Donald Trump argues about border security with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) in the Oval Office on December 11, 2018 in Washington, DC. A federal judge on Wednesday struck down a Trump administration policy that made it more difficult for victims of domestic abuse and gang violence to claim asylum, and ordered the government to return to the United States any plaintiff in the case who was deported. In June, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a legal opinion finding that domestic abuse and gang violence were not permissible grounds for asylum claims, saying at the time that "the asylum statute is not a general-hardship statute." U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan struck down the restrictive policy in an order that declared that the rules broke with longstanding federal and international laws. "And because it is the will of Congress not the whims of the Executive that determines the standard for expedited removal, the Court finds that those policies are unlawful," Sullivan wrote. The plaintiffs who brought the case, who were represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies, include 12 adults and children who told U.S. asylum officers that they were victims of sexual abuse, kidnappings and beatings in their home countries. They were denied asylum in the United States despite a finding that their fears were sincere. Under the rules established in June, the officers determined that they did not meet the standard of having a credible fear of persecution. The ACLU trumpeted Sullivan's decision in a statement on Wednesday blasting the administration. "This ruling is a defeat for the Trump administration's all-out assault on the rights of asylum seekers," said Jennifer Chang Newell, managing attorney of the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project, who argued the case. "The government's attempt to obliterate asylum protections is unlawful and inconsistent with our country's longstanding commitment to provide protection to immigrants fleeing for their lives." Sullivan's ruling is likely to be appealed by the Trump administration. Shortly after it was filed, the Justice Department asked Sullivan to stay his ruling pending a decision by the government about whether to appeal, and, if it does, through the duration of the appeals process. Wednesday's ruling is the latest development in what became a dramatic legal battle. During an August court hearing over whether Sullivan would temporarily halt the Trump administration policy, the judge learned that the government had earlier that morning put two women on a flight back to El Salvador. The women said they had fled sexual abuse in the country, including rape, stalking and death threats. Sullivan ordered the government to "turn the plane around." The ruling comes one day after Sullivan made news by castigating Trump's former national security advisor Mike Flynn, who appeared before Sullivan on Tuesday in an unrelated hearing. Sullivan told Flynn that "arguably you sold your country out" and at one point suggested that he might be guilty of "treason," though he later walked those comments back. Despite his otherwise fervent support for President Donald Trump, Sen. Lindsey Graham on Wednesday became the president's loudest critic once again. The South Carolina Republican tore into Trump after media outlets reported that the U.S. was planning to pull its troops out of Syria. The reports were confirmed soon after by the White House and the Pentagon and by Trump, who in a celebratory tweet declared victory against ISIS in Syria. Trump tweet Graham hammered Trump on Twitter and in an official statement from his office, as well as in remarks to reporters, where he said that Trump's decision could undo the progress made against the Islamic militant group. "I'll have to say if Trump withdraws from Syria and they do come back, like I think they will, he'll be one of the reasons they came back," Graham said. A U.S. official told Reuters that all State Department personnel in Syria will be evacuated from the country within 24 hours, and that all U.S. forces will depart once that final operation against ISIS has been completed. The troops are expected to be withdrawn within 60 to 100 days, the official told Reuters. The State Department did not comment when reached by CNBC. Graham has become one of the president's closest allies and loudest defenders. The senator has been credited as the difference-maker in the confirmation of Trump's second Supreme Court Justice nominee, Brett Kavanaugh. But Graham's remarks Wednesday offered the senior senator's second public break with Trump administration this month. In early December, Graham cut against the White House's position that no "direct evidence" connected the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. "There's not a smoking gun, there's a smoking saw," Graham said at the time. On Wednesday, Graham said the decision to withdraw "would be a huge, Obama-like mistake," and that it "will also be viewed as a boost to ISIS desire to come back." In a statement from his office, Graham said: "An American withdrawal at this time would be a big win for ISIS, Iran, Bashar al Assad of Syria, and Russia. I fear it will lead to devastating consequences for our nation, the region, and throughout the world." Graham and other lawmakers also pushed back hard on Trump's assertion that ISIS's forces in Syria had been "defeated." That mission was "my only reason for being there," Trump said in the tweet. "With all due respect," Graham responded, "ISIS is not defeated in Syria, Iraq, and after just returning from visiting there -- certainly not Afghanistan." Graham tweet Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., said Trump's declaration of victory "is simply not true." Kinzinger tweet White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement that "the United States has defeated the territorial caliphate," but added that "these victories over ISIS in Syria do not signal the end of the Global Coalition or its campaign." Trump has previously expressed a desire to withdraw the 2,000-or-so troops still in Syria. And not every Republican opposes the idea: Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said he was "happy to see" Trump declare victory in the Wednesday morning tweet. Paul tweet Still, many of that policy's harshest critics were in Trump's own party. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said Wednesday that withdrawal would be a "grave error" and a "bad idea" because it "potentially helps ISIS." The policy also "runs the risk of triggering a broader conflict that could pull the United States in, but most certainly will impact our close ally in the region, Israel," Rubio said. Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., tweeted that the move "will embolden bad actors" in the region." He urged Trump to work with Congress on a long-term strategy that "denies a win for Vladimir Putin, Bashar al-Assad, and the Iranian mullahs." Cory Gardner tweet Graham, speaking to reporters, said the move makes the United States "dramatically less safe." "ISIS would not be alive today if it were not for Obama's decision to withdraw from Iraq. And I'll have to say if Trump withdraws from Syria and they do come back, like I think they will, he'll be one of the reasons they came back," Graham said. "So yes, this makes us less safe if there it's a fact a withdrawal." Congressional leaders got behind a short-term measure to fund the government Wednesday as an impasse over President Donald Trump's border wall threatens a partial government shutdown. Still, the president gave no indication whether he would sign it as a funding deadline loomed. The so-called continuing resolution would fund the government through Feb. 8, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced. The Senate will take up the measure later Wednesday, the Kentucky Republican said. Lawmakers need to pass spending bills by midnight Friday to avoid a partial shutdown. The plan would push the ongoing debate over immigration and border security into next year, when Democrats will hold control of the House and Nancy Pelosi will likely be speaker. "We need the government to remain open for the American people," McConnell said on the Senate floor. He contended that Democrats have not taken border security seriously enough, saying they had an "allergy to sensible immigration policies." Senate Democrats will back it, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Wednesday. "We would have preferred one of our two options, but I'm glad the leader thinks the government should not shut down over the president's demand for a wall, and Democrats will support this CR," the New York Democrat said on the Senate floor. Democratic leaders offered two separate proposals to fund the government for a longer period, but Trump has not accepted them. In a statement, Pelosi lamented a "missed opportunity to pass full-year funding bills." However, she said Democrats "will support this continuing resolution." Senate Republicans need nine Democratic votes to reach the 60-vote threshold to pass spending bills. House Republicans do not need Democratic support to approve the legislation. A senior administration official told CNBC on Wednesday that the White House would "take a look" once Congress passes a plan. On Tuesday, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the president would want to see what Congress passes before he decides whether to sign it. Last week, Trump said he would be "proud" to shut down the government over the border wall. President Donald Trump looks up as he holds a Cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington, U.S., October 17, 2018. Kevin Lamarque | Reuters WASHINGTON --- On Wednesday morning, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said a spending bill to keep the government open through Feb. 8 had been finalized overnight and would be introduced in the Senate within hours. Democrats also signaled they were on board with the deal, which would fund the government for six weeks, but provide no additional money for President Donald Trump's border wall. The only person who had not yet weighed in on the deal was Trump himself. While congressional leaders were busy negotiating, the president was still sounding a defiant note. "One way or the other, we will win on the Wall!" he tweeted early Wednesday. As the window for reaching a deal grew narrower this week, members of Congress anxiously waited for guidance from the White House on what kind of deal the president would accept. But none came. Instead, there was a barrage of tweets from Trump about the border wall he has long promised to build, and hints from press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders that the administration might try to fund the wall by siphoning funds away from other government agencies. On Capitol Hill, meanwhile, the rough outlines of a short-term spending bill to keep the government open began to take shape on Tuesday evening. At the White House, Trump was attending two previously scheduled holiday receptions. If Trump signs this continuing resolution before departing for his private club in Florida on Friday, as lawmakers in both parties hope he will, it would avert a partial government shutdown that would have hurt Republicans politically. But it would also mark a stunning retreat from the president's negotiating position just a week ago, when he told Democratic congressional leaders in a contentious Oval Office meeting that he would be "proud to shut down the government for border security." There has arguably never been a time in Trump's life when he viewed himself as more of a central character in high-stakes negotiations than he does now, in his current role as president of the United States. But in reality, people close to Trump have long since realized that his active participation in sensitive negotiations is often more likely to endanger a good outcome than to advance it. "The president tweets and talks aggressively about topics that he thinks are winning issues, and that can translate into a lot of pressure on negotiators at the working level, both the politicals and the career" bureaucrats, said a former Trump administration official who has participated in high-level trade talks led by the president. "Some issues are better without a lot of heat." Not everyone is as measured in their critiques. "Trump is an anarchist. It was his approach in business, it is his approach as president," said Jack O'Donnell, a former president of the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in a June interview with The New York Times. "It does not take good negotiating skills to cause chaos. Will this ever lead to concessions? Maybe, but concessions to what? Not anything that resembles a deal," O'Donnell added. "I just do not see him getting much done." That Trump could prove to be a net negative for sensitive negotiations is a tough pill to swallow for a president who ran as the world's greatest dealmaker. On the campaign trail, Trump pledged to strike "beautiful" deals with America's allies, and to extract painful concessions from his adversaries. But two years into his first term, many of the deals that Trump has directed the most attention toward have yet to materialize. There is no trade deal with China, no immigration deal with Congress, no nuclear deal with North Korea, and no deal to repeal and replace Obamacare. This is not to say that there have not been any big deals signed on Trump's watch. This fall, there was a major agreement reached to update NAFTA for the 21st century. The talks that led to this deal were overseen by U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer. But Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, also played a key role in resolving tensions that Trump had aggravated. There was also a deal reached last weekend to keep the Paris climate agreement alive. This time, the deal came together with the help of U.S. negotiators despite Trump's announcement last year that the U.S. would withdraw from the pact at the earliest date allowed under the rules, which is late 2020. Oil operations in the Permian Basin near Midland, Texas Nick Oxford | Reuters Oil prices rose on Wednesday, recovering somewhat from a sharp sell-off during the previous session, after U.S. data showed strong demand for refined products. Sentiment remains negative, however, as investors grapple with weakening demand and worries about oversupply. Benchmark Brent crude oil settled 98 cents, or 1.7 percent, higher at $57.24 a barrel. The front-month U.S. light crude contract, which expires on Wednesday, closed 96 cents higher at $47.20 a barrel, a 2.1 percent gain. The second-month contract was up $1.10 a barrel to $47.70 around the settlement. The markets slumped on Tuesday, extending a recent run of poor performance. Global benchmark Brent tumbled 5.6 percent on Tuesday, just above a 14-month low reached during the session, while WTI lost 7.3 percent, falling to its lowest level since August 2017. Crude inventories fell by 497,000 barrels in the week to Dec. 14, smaller than the decrease of 2.4 million barrels analysts had expected. The decline was the third consecutive decrease, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said. Distillate stockpiles, which include diesel and heating oil, fell by 4.2 million barrels, versus expectations for a 573,000-barrel increase, the EIA said. Distillate demand rose to the highest since January 2003, which bolstered buying, particularly in heating oil futures, the market's proxy for diesel. Heating oil futures gained 2.8 percent to $1.803 a gallon. "The complex is piecing together a modest advance so far today but only one that offsets a miniscule portion of recent losses," Jim Ritterbusch, president of Ritterbusch and Associates, said in a note. Broader financial markets have been under pressure on worries that higher U.S. interest rates could slow domestic growth. Crude futures briefly pared gains after the Federal Reserve raised its benchmark interest rate on Wednesday. The stock market turned negative and the U.S. dollar strengthened following the announcement. Oil is sold in dollars, so a stronger greenback makes crude more expensive for holders of other currencies. Brent has lost more than 33 percent of its value and WTI has fallen 38 percent since the beginning of October as crude supply has increased. Austria's OMV is the latest firm to join an international cluster of energy multinationals helping the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in its push toward gas self-sufficiency. ADNOC, the state-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, has awarded OMV a 5 percent stake in the development of its Ghasha concession, ADNOC's offshore ultra-sour gas mega project. Development will cover Hail, Ghasha, Dalma, and other natural gas fields offshore Abu Dhabi. The Vienna-based oil and gas company joins Italy's ENI and Germany's Wintershall as partners to ADNOC ENI and Wintershall earlier this month were awarded a 25 percent share and 10 percent share of the concession, respectively. OMV's 5 percent constitutes the remainder of the 40 percent of the Ghasha concession earmarked for foreign investors. ADNOC's latest move underscores its integrated gas strategy, a plan to gradually develop its sizable gas reserves and bring the UAE to gas self-sufficiency, which it hopes will ultimately enable its transition from a net importer of natural gas to a net exporter. Abu Dhabi expects the project to produce over 1.5 billion cubic feet of gas per day when it comes on stream around the middle of the next decade enough to provide electricity to more than 2 million homes, the ADNOC's press release said. Once complete, executives predict it will also produce over 120,000 barrels of oil and high-value condensates daily. US President Donald Trump and US Vice President Mike Pence at the 'Make America Great Again' campaign rally at McKenzie Arena, in Chattanooga, Tennessee on November 4, 2018. President Donald Trump has been telling his closest political advisors in recent weeks that he wants Vice President Mike Pence to be with him on the ticket in 2020, CNBC has learned. The development comes amid media speculation that Trump could ditch Pence in favor of another running mate. Trump has told confidants that he wants Pence to be his running mate in the next election, and the vice president has privately told him he's ready to defend the administration against a likely onslaught of Democratic presidential candidates running to replace them, according to three people with direct knowledge of the matter. During a November news conference, Trump himself asked Pence if he would be his running mate. The former Indiana governor nodded his head "yes." However, since then, Vanity Fair reported that Trump was thinking about ditching Pence. The latest news might not end the speculation about Pence's fate, though, since Trump is known to change his mind without notice as his recent search for a new chief of staff demonstrated. Britain's financial watchdog said it had fined Santander UK Plc 32.8 million pounds ($41.49 million) after it failed to effectively process the accounts and investments of customers who had died. The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) said Santander UK did not transfer funds worth more that 183 million pounds to beneficiaries, directly affecting 40,428 customers. It added that in some cases funds were held for many years. The retail and commercial bank, owned by Spain's Banco Santander, also had "serious failings" in its probate and bereavement process, FCA said. Probate refers to the right to manage the affairs of the deceased. "Santander is very sorry for the impact these failings have had on the families and beneficiaries affected. We accept the FCA's findings and have fully cooperated with their investigation," Santander UK Chief Executive Officer Nathan Bostock said. "We have now transferred the majority of customer funds and made significant improvements to our whole probate and bereavement process." ($1 = 0.7905 pounds) A convoy of US forces armoured vehicles drives near the village of Yalanli, on the western outskirts of the northern Syrian city of Manbij, on March 5, 2017. Shortly after Trump's Twitter declaration, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders confirmed in a statement that "We have started returning United States troops home as we transition to the next phase of this campaign." Numerous Republican lawmakers reacted harshly to reports of the withdrawal, decrying the decision as a grave mistake that could even restore ISIS's strength. That morning, news reports said the U.S. military was planning a complete and sudden withdrawal from Syria in a reversal of U.S. policy, as the declining threat of ISIS has been supplanted by increasing tensions with other world powers in the region. On Wednesday evening , Trump sent a follow-up tweet, saying "it's time to bring our great young people home!" Defeating the militant Islamic group in the region, he said, was "my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency." President Donald Trump declared in a tweet Wednesday that the U.S. mission to defeat the so-called Islamic State in Syria has been accomplished. "Five years ago, ISIS was a very powerful and dangerous force in the Middle East, and now the United States has defeated the territorial caliphate," Sanders said. "These victories over ISIS in Syria do not signal the end of the Global Coalition or its campaign." Sanders added that the U.S. and its allies "will continue to work together to deny radical Islamist terrorists territory, funding, support, and any means of infiltrating our borders." Chief Defense Department Spokeswoman Dana White said in a statement that "the campaign against ISIS is not over," despite the transition out of Syria: "The Coalition has liberated the ISIS-held territory, but the campaign against ISIS is not over. We have started the process of returning U.S. troops home from Syria as we transition to the next phase of the campaign. For force protection and operational security reasons we will not provide further details. We will continue working with our partners and allies to defeat ISIS wherever it operates." A U.S. official told Reuters that all State Department personnel in Syria will be evacuated from the country within 24 hours, and that all U.S. forces will depart once that final operation against ISIS has been completed. The troops are expected to be withdrawn within 60 to 100 days, the official told Reuters. The decision would take 2,000-plus U.S. servicemembers out of the country, ending the ground strategy against the Islamic State, a U.S. defense official told The Washington Post. The move appears to contradict the existing stance on the conflict in Syria advocated by senior Trump administration officials. They called for a longer-term presence in the country and even to expand the mission beyond defeating ISIS. National security advisor John Bolton reportedly said in September that the U.S. was "not going to leave as long as Iranian troops are outside Iranian borders." Before the White House's announcement Wednesday, Defense Department spokesman Col. Rob Manning told reporters, "At this time, we continue to work by, with and through our partners in the region." The surprise pivot comes just days after Turkey reaffirmed to CNBC that it would not soften its rhetoric against the U.S.-backed Kurds in northern Syria. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said his country's military was "not risking American soldiers' lives" through its targeting of the Kurdish factions. During a news briefing Wednesday morning, a spokeswoman for Russia's foreign ministry knocked the existing U.S. forces in Syria as "a dangerous obstacle to the path to" a peace settlement, Reuters reported. The spokeswoman also accused the U.S. of keeping its troops in Syria illegally. The State Department and the Russian Foreign Ministry did not respond to CNBC's requests for comment on the reports. Later Wednesday, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a close ally of the president, warned in four-tweet thread that removing the U.S. presence in Syria would be a mistake of "Obama-like" proportions. Graham tweet Graham added: "A decision to withdraw will also be viewed as a boost to ISIS desire to come back." Graham tweet 2 In a Facebook livestream, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said that "while ISIS has been significantly degraded ... it is not fair or wise to say that they have been defeated." "I believe the decision was a grave error that will have incredible consequences, potentially not fully thought through," Rubio said. "This is a bad idea because it actually, it goes against the fight against ISIS, and potentially helps ISIS," Rubio said, adding that "this decision runs the risk of triggering a broader conflict that could pull the United States in, but most certainly will impact our close ally in the region, Israel." GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, who currently serves as an Air National Guard pilot, responded to Trump more tersely: "This is simply not true." Kinzinger tweet Bazaar Corporate Radar | Feb 22, 2021, 12:00 AM IST Bazaar Corporate Radar Bazaar Corporate Radar is your window into the minds of top CEOs, Boardrooms, global economists, fund managers and sector analysts. If it?s making news, you?ll find it on Bazaar Corporate Radar. Colorado Politics is published both in print and online. Our website features subscriber-only news stories daily, designed for public policy arena professionals. Member subscribers also receive the weekly print edition of our award-winning newspaper, containing outstanding features and news stories, in their mailboxes every Saturday. You have permission to edit this article. Edit Close The Missourians Opinion section is a public forum for the discussion of ideas. The views presented in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Missourian or the University of Missouri. If you would like to contribute to the Opinion page with a response or an original topic of your own, visit our submission form The new land route, alternative to sea route, will link the EU countries with India and Southeast Asian countries. In Tashkent, a protocol was signed for the construction of a railway line from Mazar-i-Sharif through Kabul to Peshawar and further to Pakistan's ports of Gwadar and Karachi. They plan to build a number of high-voltage power lines Surkhan Puli-Khumri Doshi Surabai Jelalalabad Peshawar along the railway. According to the organizers, this will not only ensure that the railway works effectively, but will also help stabilize the situation in Afghanistan. It's not the only railway project in the Greater Central Asia region, which Tashkent is preparing to implement. The five-year program to improve Uzbekistan's transport infrastructure and diversify foreign trade routes was adopted in 2017. According to the Uzbek Foreign Ministry, the document provides for the practical implementation of several international transport corridors, including Uzbekistan-Turkmenistan-Iran-Oman, Uzbekistan-Kyrgyzstan-China and the trans-Afghan route, which provides access to the seaports of Iran (Bandar Abbas and Chabahar) and Pakistan (Gwadar and Karachi). The road to Turkmenistan, where the railway bridges across the Amu Darya were opened this May, started its operation. This gives Uzbekistan access to the Caspian and South Caucasus and further to the Black Sea ports of Turkey, Romania and other countries. Construction of the Uzbekistan-Turkmenistan-Iran route is frozen until a political decision is made on the project. The deterioration of the situation in the Near and Middle East, as well as around Iran complicates the situation. The project to build the Mazar-i-Sharif-Kabul-Peshawar railway line is promising. Its implementation may provide employment to some 30 thousand Afghans and will allow Kabul to obtain annual benefits of $400-500 million from transit, according to experts. "In general, the practical implementation of these initiatives will transform Central Asia not only into an international transit hub, but also a key link in the transcontinental economic space between South Asia, the Asia-Pacific Region, the CIS, Europe and the Middle East," Uzbekistan's Foreign Ministry said on Monday following the presentation of Uzbek transport projects held in Washington. According to director of the Tashkent Center for Research Initiatives 'Ma'no' Bakhtiyor Ergashev (Uzbekistan), widespread external support, not only from the interested countries of the region, but also from the U.S., will contribute to the successful implementation of the railway project at the current stage. Therefore, the project has every chance to be implemented in the foreseeable future. Andrei Kazantsev, director of the Center for Central Asia and Afghanistan at Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO) of Russian Foreign Ministry, believes that this project fits into American logic, but it is not yet known whether the U.S. will provide it with financial and political support. "Washington has its own old project in the framework of the Greater Central Asia geopolitical concept - 'New Silk Road'. The goal is to develop transport routes in southern Afghanistan, as well as integrate Central Asia, Afghanistan with South Asia. But it was a project of the president Barack Obama. After Donald Trump came to power, the White House's agenda for Afghanistan has changed significantly. Therefore, the United States lost interest in this project. As for Russia, Moscow has a common concept of laying the North-South transport corridor, but it doesn't play a key role. Perhaps, it could take part in these projects - as they do not contradict the Russian position," Andrei Kazantsev told Vestnik Kavkaza. Doctor of Historical Sciences, expert on Central Asia and the Middle East Alexander Knyazev noted that the railway construction project presented by Uzbekistan is a reanimation of the Indo-Volga railway project that existed in the 1870s. In the 19th century, the project was hampered by the "uncertainty of the geopolitical position of Afghanistan." After almost a century and a half, history repeats itself, and the discussion of any trans-Afghan communications whether railways or gas pipelines goes with the same remark about the uncertainty of the situation in Afghanistan. "Tashkent has been trying for several years to find the means and pave the way for building a railway line across the Afghan territory from Mazar-i-Sharif to Herat, with further connections to the Iranian railway network and Iranian ports in the Persian Gulf. Tashkent's willingness to ensure the U.S. loyalty, which controls the situation in Afghanistan, forces them to adhere to a Afghan policy line, contrary to Moscows interests in the Afghan direction. Its not by chance that in the project under discussion, Russia and Kazakhstan take a non-committal position, expressing their willingness to discuss it, but not reaffirming their willingness to participate," Knyazev told Vestnik Kavkaza. According to the expert, Russia is interested in meridional transport corridors. Hypothetically, the Russian side (and the Kazakh side) would have shown more interest in the railway corridor project, which exists only in the form of a political idea, which, connecting the north of Kyrgyzstan with the south, would connect Kyrgyzstan with Tajikistan and with the Pakistani railway network, only indirectly affecting the north-east of Afghanistan's troubled territory. Such a project would bring Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan out of the transport impasse, reducing their transit dependence on Tashkent, but at the same time making it even more dependent on Moscow. Perhaps this is a project of the future, but even in theory it comes in conflict with the interests of Uzbekistan. Indeed, Tashkent is not just trying to become a region-wide transport hub, but also to improve its regional political status. The railway from Uzbekistan to Pakistan through Afghanistan is contrary to the interests of China as well, which has its own views on the trans-Afghan transport projects going through the territory of Uzbekistan and are designed to diversify commodity flows. For example, the project of an automobile and subsequently railway road from China to Afghanistan's Badakhshan, and then divided into two branches: through Mazar-i-Sharif, and through Kabul and Kandahar, with further connections to Iran. However, in making an effective assessment of the Afghan situation's development perspectives, Beijing has so far refrained from starting any work on the ground. Moreover, China has a well-known ChinaPakistan Economic Corridor, which is already in operation with a railway segment on a large part, and which crosses the entire territory of Pakistan from north to south. It is along this corridor through which the majority of Chinese goods for Afghanistan are shipped, and Beijing does not need any competitors in this matter. Another problem of all trans-Afghan transportation lines is the fact that Afghanistan doesn't have enough both commodity potential and capacity of the Afghan market. Numerous railway projects - even those backed up by some marketing appeal - are designed exclusively for transit. Today, this transit - in the objectively necessary volumes - is carried by road, being controlled by very powerful shadow groups, primarily Pakistani ones. It may be recalled that one of the main managers in creating the famous Taliban movement was the Peshawar-based transport mafia, to which the Taliban were supposed to provide a favourable treatment in the early 1990s. This mafia's channels of influence on the Taliban have not gone away, and one can only think about the attitude of the Taliban groups, which control most of the countrys territory, to the construction planned by Uzbekistan. Increased air connectivity between Singapore and secondary cities of India The air connectivity between Singapore and secondary cities of India has further been boosted with the introduction of new links to Pune and Vijaywada. These new routes have strengthened Changi Airport of Singapores overall connectivity to various cities of India. Jet Airways of India started a new daily service between Singapore and Pune on December 1. This is the first international link of Pune with Asia and has been started in view of heavy demand of the local people of Pune to start air connectivity with Singapore. In addition to this, Jet Airways have also launched an additional daily service each to Mumbai and New Delhi. With this, the total weekly services from Singapore to both Mumbai and New Delhi have been increased to 45 and 42 respectively. The air connectivity between Singapore and secondary cities of India has further been boosted with the introduction of new links to Pune and Vijaywada. Photo: Connected to India On December 5, Indigo launched twice weekly services from Vijayawada to Singapore increasing connectivity between Andhra Pradesh and Singapore in support of ongoing government collaborations between the two cities. Speaking about the latest connectivity between Singapore and Indian cities of Pune and Vijaywada, Lim Ching Kiat, Managing Director of Air Hub Development, Changi Airport Group said, Together with our airline partners Jet Airways and Indigo, we are pleased to welcome two new non-stop links to Pune and Vijayawada. These new routes reflect Indias importance to Changi as a key growth market and further augment the airport as the regions leading air hub. We hope that more Indian travellers will enjoy what Singapore has to offer, he added. As a result, Changi Airport is connected to 18 Indian cities by 300 weekly one-way services an 18 per cent increase in the number of weekly one-way service compared to the same period last year. India was also the sixth largest market for Changi Airport, registering more than 4.2 million passenger movements in 2017. There is also good news for Indian people transiting through Singapore. Now, they can enjoy two-way transit through the newly enhanced 96-hour Visa Free Transit Facility (VFTF), regardless of whether they are travelling by air or sea. Previously, VFTF was only applicable to one-way air travel. Joseph Lee is a property professional. He stood as a Conservative candidate in Addiscombe East ward, Croydon, in the local elections in May. Cllr Jeet Bains is a councillor in Croydon and a management consultant. Labours Sadiq Khan doesnt exactly have a reputation for listening. In fact his hands-over-ears approach is a common complaint amongst charities, campaigners and even Labour-controlled councils. However, following months of hard work, grit and resilience, a grass-roots community campaign, spearheaded by Conservative activists on the outskirts of Croydon, has managed to cut through the bureaucracy and raise alarm bells at City Hall. Addiscombe in Croydon is a vibrant borough suburb, home to a diverse mix of people in terms of age, occupation, and background. In August 2016, Blackhorse Lane Bridge a crucial piece of infrastructure that serves as a gateway to the north of Croydon and central London was closed to vehicle access by Croydon Council and Transport for London for an undefined period. One year later, nothing had changed. It was time for local Conservatives to act. As soon as we started talking to local residents about it, the scale of anger became clear. Since the closure of the bridge, traffic congestion had reached crisis levels during rush hour, affecting commuters, local businesses, and families taking their children to school. The knock-on effect to the neighbouring bridge and local tram stop meant that frustrations were also growing in the wider community. Our campaign effectively had four main elements: Regular written communication Mentioning this campaign in our regular leaflets wasnt enough (although we did that as well). Over the course of nine months we regularly sent letters, bespoke flyers and other communications to residents. By focusing on a single issue we attracted a far wider readership than we would otherwise have encouraged. Social media A closed bridge surrounded by closure signs are God-sends for captivating pictures and videos. Within a few days of tweeting, we were not alone residents started engaging. We had photos taken next to the concrete obstructions and no-entry signs, and a devastating video made next to the office of the local Labour MP whose office is right next to the bridge. The video was shared thousands of times on Twitter. Residents petitions Knocking on doors and talking to local people is great, but to take it to the next level we wanted people to join the campaign. Through organising a petition both online and off we were able to show the strength of local anger and deepen our engagement. We attended council meetings to present these petitions and to ask public questions. Business engagement Given the length of the bridge closure, small businesses on the local high street were naturally affected. Business owners started a campaign for a business rate discount to compensate for lost earnings. We continue to support this campaign and help give it exposure. It wasnt long before the local Labour party started agitating. The Labour MP wrote to residents and expressed her displeasure. The Council started to recognise the seriousness of the issue but passed the buck to the Mayor. Our London Assembly Member, Steve OConnell, quizzed the Mayor personally although, hilariously, the primary response of Labour-controlled City Hall was to pass the buck straight back to the Labour-controlled Council. Crucially, however, we got Mayor Khan to state on the record that this wasnt good enough and that he will be taking a personal interest in this. Finally, TfL and the Council wrote to residents acknowledging the concern and promising action. A new date was set for the reopening and the job of the campaign is now to hold the various Labour-controlled bodies to account. The campaign was designed with the primary purpose of representing residents and serving the community. However, it also brought political results. In this years council elections, we won a council seat in the Addiscombe East ward by just eight votes one of the few Conservative gains in London. This campaign was hard work over a number of months and there is no transferable formula that will work for everyone. However, for anyone thinking about planning a similar campaign we would recommend the following: Keep it hyper-local Those of us interested in local politics tend to think about a Council ward as the smallest building block of community. But in reality this is far too big to be considered local by residents. A really local campaign needs to be something that will be of interest to a cluster of streets. Use as many platforms as possible From council meetings to social media we saturated the campaign across every channel available. Initially we were sceptical as to how social media would work. But not only did this help us reach younger people but we were surprised by the number of people who told us that their grandchildren had shown them a picture from twitter or similar. Too much, simply isnt When were caught up with a campaign we live and breathe it day and night. As such we naturally worry that were boring people with a simple issue. In reality, people who lead busy lives might hardly notice unless we really go at it hammer and tongs. For every resident who says theyve received a number of communications on it, there will be several who have no idea that a campaign is in motion. Expect dirty tactics from other parties. As Conservatives we naturally gravitate toward fair play. Other parties do not always play by the same rules. If a campaign is gaining traction, expect personal attacks and deceit especially on social media and make sure you have prepared yourself psychologically. We all know that when Labour is in control, listening is not exactly top of their agenda. But as we have shown in a small corner of Croydon, when we tap into the anger of residents, craft an effective campaign, and pursue it with resilience, it is possible to create real and lasting change in our communities. An extraordinary email has gone out this afternoon to the members of Grantham and Stamford Conservative Association, sparked by Nick Boless tweet yesterday in which he threatened to resign the Conservative whip if the government were to announce that no deal Brexit had become its policy. Philip Sagar, the Associations Chairman and, it seems, various of its members are very unhappy about their MPs position, leading to an email headlined Statement in response to Nick Boles MP. Ive enclosed the full text below and Boless reply, which was also included in Sagars email. Suffice to say that it seems relations locally are very tense: Statement by Philip Sagar, Grantham & Stamford Conservative Association Chairman Whilst I know Nick is sincere is his belief that a No deal Brexit would be bad for our countrys economy and jobs and that at all costs a disorderly Brexit must be avoided, I fear his twitter post of yesterday has gone too far in threatening to immediately resign the Conservative whip and vote in anyway necessary to stop it happening if no deal becomes government policy. It will, and has already, reignited the calls for his deselection from party members and ex party members, many of whom have already contacted me. Unlike Anna Soubry, Nick said immediately after the referendum that he got the message from his employers his constituents and that he would work to achieve a successful Brexit. To date he has consistently voted to give effect to the referendum decision, he voted for Article 50 and the Withdrawal Bill and has been instrumental in trying to find an alternative solution to the current impasse by coming up with a plan B that could command the support of Parliament when Theresa Mays less than perfect deal fails as it surely will. I have been mostly happy to support his pragmatism to date. Whilst I voted leave, mainly because of Project fear and the Osborne threats of punishment budgets, I never wanted to be part of a Federal Europe only a common market that I voted for in 75, I think David Camerons timing and reasons for calling the referendum were suspect and selfish to say the least. I am though pragmatic and recognise that we were never going to get the easy deal we were promised by some. Unfortunately the EU has behaved as I feared it would in its arrogant high handed and at times disrespectful treatment of our Prime Minister. They are in no mood to compromise further, why should they, as they see a divided predominantly remain Parliament that has vowed not to allow a no deal Brexit. The recent, and unusually speedy ECJ ruling that the U.K. can withdraw Article 50 and remain a member with existing benefits is clearly part of their plan to get us to stay by pushing the people towards another vote or a General Election as they believe our media accurately reflects a change in attitude and that we will vote to stay. So far our Media and the majority of our MPs have unwittingly colluded and played their part to a tee including now I am afraid my friend and our MP Nick. A no deal threat now is probably too late in the day but what else can we do if we are to get the Europeans to take us seriously and at the last minute offer some more concessions especially on the hated and humiliating back stop. They have a long history of 11th hour dealing. For Nick to fall in line now with the likes of Anna Soubry and threaten (but not in so many words) to potentially bring down the government is not in my view patriotic but is sadly only an act of personal political suicide if indeed he were to actually go ahead and do it and I am sorry that he felt the need to make this threat at all it is not helpful to the debate. Response by Nick Boles MP Since August I have held three meetings with members of the Grantham & Stamford Conservative Association to discuss Brexit. The most recent of these was 10 days ago. At each of these meetings I have made clear that I am not willing to countenance leaving the European Union without a deal. I have also asserted my firm opposition to a second referendum. It is because I believe it is essential that we leave the European Union on 29th March with a deal that I have been promoting Norway Plus as a Plan B, in the event that Theresa Mays deal is defeated. Yesterday the Cabinet met to discuss preparations for a no deal Brexit. While I accept that it is prudent for government to plan for all eventualities, I was beyond horrified to learn that members of a Conservative Cabinet were actively promoting a so-called managed no deal. This is a dangerous myth. No Conservative should trifle with the livelihoods and security of the British people in the way that advocates of a managed no deal Brexit seem willing to do. All Members of Parliament owe a duty to the country that is greater than their duty to their party. It is for this reason that I would feel compelled to resign the Conservative whip if at any point before 29 March government were to make a no deal Brexit the objective of government policy. Two weeks ago I co-sponsored the Grieve amendment to the programme motion on the meaningful vote. This secured for MPs the right to amend any government motion in relation to our withdrawal from the EU. All the opposition parties joined 25 Conservative MPs including Sir Oliver Letwin and Sir Nicholas Soames in voting for the amendment. The government was defeated and it passed. I am proud of my role in this initiative and stand ready to work with MPs of all parties to assert our right to stop a disastrous no deal Brexit. A government led by Jeremy Corbyn would be as damaging to the British people as a no deal Brexit and I will never do anything to make it more likely. The best way for the Conservative Party to keep Corbyn in opposition where he belongs is for Conservative MPs to vote for a Brexit deal and deliver the result of the 2016 referendum in a way that preserves the prosperity and security of the British people. Nick de Bois: What my government experience taught me about No Deal and why planning must be stepped up Nick de Bois was Chief of Staff to the former Brexit Secretary, Dominic Raab. Before that he was MP for Enfield North 2010-2015. He is author of Confessions of a Recovering MP. As we fast approach March 29 2019 and our exit from the European Union, the clamour for not doing so without a deal in place grows to a deafening crescendo. From calls for second referendums from both within the government and outside to poorly considered alternatives of Norway, EEA, EFTA (and a combination of all three), plus of course the emergency extension of Article 50 all, it seems, because leaving on the 29th March without a deal is too frightening to consider. Its not. As Roberto Azevedo, the head of the World Trade Organisation, has said, a no-deal Brexit would not be the end of the world but added it would not be a walk in the park either. He is right. Although some paint the defaulting to WTO rules as a walk in the park, that ignores the complex set of bi-lateral arrangements that help smooth trade on WTO rules which, on their own, do not break down sufficient barriers to trade either in goods or services to the degree we are used to with the EU. But those underlying measures are being put in place where possible And of course countries that have been trading with us under EU FTAs are already seeking to replicate those arrangements with the U.K with Japan being the most obvious example. Enough, however, is not being made of the opportunities that would open up under WTO rules and leaving the Common Commercial Policy and the Customs Union of the EU. Bluntly, the U.K would be free to introduce substantive countervailing measures to help drive a new era of trade and growth outside membership of the EU. First, we could introduce temporary import tariff duty cuts; the immediate recovery of full legislative and regulatory control, a swifter end to our EU financial contributions, the introduction of new free trade deals and wide-ranging fiscal measures to stimulate growth and investment. These ideas, and others, were put to the cabinet last September as part of a No Deal Cabinet Planning session. We hear little about this because Ministers, with the exception of Dominic Raab, didnt want to talk about them. It is regrettable that government still resists the calls to make the case for the opportunities that can be grasped from leaving the EU without a deal. I well remember the representations from Treasury and BEIS to focus on the risks and play down the opportunities. I wont pretend that seeking a deal is not the preferred option, and that reducing friction and barriers to trade has more chance of success with a U.K./EU deal than without, but refusing to countenance No Deal and presenting to the public a one-sided assessment of the risk and not the opportunities from No Deal has been a flawed negotiating strategy, and has allowed a climate of irrational fear to fester making any deal better than no deal the new Government policy. Countervailing opportunities aside, we are allowing a narrative to emerge that the government is ill-prepared for mitigating the risk of No Deal. During my stint as Chief of Staff to Raab, I was enthused by the considerable No Deal planning work undertaken by the Department for Exiting the European Union under instruction from ministers. Much of that entered the public domain in August when we launched 106 technical notices advising business, consumers and NGOs on what preparations were underway or steps that business would need to take to plan for leaving the EU without a deal. Ensuring continuity of supply and services has been the cornerstone of preparedness for No Deal, which is why the U.K has stated, for example, that it will recognise EU product and safety standards and recognise professional qualifications so that we can continue to benefit from EU imports, logistics, skills and services from our neighbours. It remains to be seen if these moves will be reciprocated. At the time I left the department, the EU refused to let UK officials engage widely with member states or the Commission to mutually agree sensible steps to ensure minimum disruption in the event of No Deal. The work has been done on our side: it would be a wholly malicious move by the EU not to reciprocate now as No Deal looms. Nevertheless, whilst the planning for No Deal continues on this side of the channel, it remains at risk of not being ready in time for our exit from the EU simply because Number 10 has been too cautious to embrace the plans by putting the full weight of government resources behind them to ensure successful implementation. That should change now and yesterdays announcement that the cabinet should ramp up preparations is frankly not enough. If the Government fails to get its proposed Withdrawal Agreement through Parliament then, as the law stands, the U.K. will come out of the EU in March most probably without an agreement on the terms of our divorce and what our future relationship will look like. The excitable talk of Parliament or even some members of the Cabinet stopping us leaving without a Ddeal is simply a distraction from focusing on being prepared for departure without a deal. The right course of action now is for the Government make implementing No Deal plans the official policy, and immediately shift the full resource of government behind that policy. Indeed, the cabinet has already been told that it have passed the recommended date for doing that. Any further delay is at best irresponsible, at worst bordering on reckless. It doesnt matter how loud the chorus of calls become for a second referendum, Norway Plus or claims that parliament wont allow No Deal to happen. The reality is that in law we are set for leaving on the 29th March at 11pm. Parliament voted for it and now the Government should get ready for it. They have the tools in place; all they need is conviction. Rob Wilson is a former Minister for Civil Society, and was MP for Reading East from 2005 2017. Theresa May must feel like the pet shop keeper in the famous Monty Python sketch, where the irate customer tries to return his dead Norwegian Blue parrot. May wasnt selling a dead bird to MPs, but you dont have to go far within the corridors of power at Westminster for someone to tell you that her Withdrawal Deal is dead. Selling someone a dead parrot let alone a dead deal takes a remarkable salesperson and a high degree of ruthlessness. Its still hard to imagine how anyone within Number 10 could have believed the Withdrawal Deal was ever going to fly in its original state, as it was an agreement that fell off its perch well before it got out of the shop. But how dead is it? Is it merely resting (for those of you who know the sketch), pining for the Norwegian fjords, stunned, or actually bang-it-hard-on-the-counter dead? If you listen to all the commentators, experts and politicians, it deceased, expired, dead. As things stand today, the deal is dead but could it be resuscitated? What would it take to make it attractive enough to break through the Westminster logjam? The Government understands it will take a large dollop of desperation for some form of its deal to be accepted. Desperation from Ministers, MPs and the EU to find some form of accommodation to avoid a No Deal Brexit. The Prime Minister is currently able to sit back and watch the chaos as Norway plus, Canada plus plus, a second referendum and Labours promised model all fight like ferrets in a sack. Meanwhile, the only negotiated deal on the table is hers as the tick-tock to the deadline grows louder. If you peer through the fog of war this does look and feel like a tactic, and one that the EU has probably agreed. However, both the Prime Minister and the EU know that allowing the clock to tick down close to midnight without certainty is high risk. Labour and opposition parties could hold firm and many Tories hate the deal and like the idea of No Deal enough to simply leave without agreement and trade on WTO terms. Hence the Prime Minister is forced to negotiate again, even though the EU appears not to be playing ball. My firm belief is that the EU will give ground in January but will it give enough? Heres the four things I believe the Prime Minister needs to do to have a chance with the Withdrawal Treaty. First, and most important, the dreaded backstop arrangement will need to change. The UK must be able to leave it without what is an effective EU veto. This is the issue that most vexes those who believe in UK independence and sovereignty. The Prime Minister knows this and she has moved her position significantly due to the no confidence vote, promising MPs she would deliver legally binding terms that deliver certainty as opposed to best endeavours or assurances. She now has to deliver a legally enforceable agreement with the EU that either sets an end date to the backstop or, for example, give Parliament a vote as to when the backstop ends. I understand several ideas around how the trade deal might be used to stop the trigger of a backstop are now being considered. The key issue is that the UK must have power to decide to end any customs union-style arrangements within a time limited period. Second, there needs to be clarity around when the UK can enter into its own free trade deals. The obvious answer would be at the end of the transition in December 2020, but with the EU able to extend a backstop indefinitely no date can currently be set for the beginning of new trading relationships. Whilst we can negotiate during the transition and backstop periods, we cannot implement trade deals. The trade benefits of an outward-looking UK are essential to delivering the benefits of Brexit, so the Prime Minister has to have certainty about when they can begin to smooth the way for her Treaty. Third and particularly important for the DUP and other Unionists is the question of whether Northern Ireland will be subject to different rules and regulations from the rest of the UK now and in the future. Of course the plan currently on the table means that it will. Separating Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK on regulation of goods or customs arrangements is simply not going to be acceptable due to the political ramifications in Northern Ireland. The Prime Minister must therefore deliver a UK-wide temporary transition arrangement, that concludes for Northern Ireland at the same time as the rest of the UK. If she doesnt, Scotland will certainly ask for the same special customs arrangements with the EU, putting pressure on the Union of the UK. Treating all parts of the UK the same is a key test of success. Fourth, sovereignty is the golden thread that runs through Brexit for many people. Those who voted for Brexit do not want to be ruled by foreign courts like the ECJ, so the question of whether its jurisdiction continues is an important one. The Prime Minister will have to provide evidence that its days of interfering in UK law are time-limited and that UK law has supremacy. In the same vein, sovereignty over our seas is part of what is known as taking back control. Scottish Tory MPs in particular want it absolutely clear that Parliament will decide who fishes in our rich and fertile waters. As we saw at the last EU summit, the French President wished to use letting the UK exit the backstop as a bargaining chip to get what he wanted for French fishermen. Getting the EU to agree to what largely amounts to the Prime Ministers own red lines is no easy task. With a Conservative Party that does not want Theresa May leading it into another General Election and over a third of her Parliamentary Party having no confidence in her as their leader, her room for manoeuvre is severely limited. She simply has to get concessions for her deal to go through. Despite the failure of the no confidence vote, the EU will know that if the meaningful vote fails in January, the Prime Minister could be toppled and chaos will reign and there will be no way of stopping it. The implications for the EU, when it has so many of its own problems, are unthinkable. One might think nothing has changed, as everything is still in one almighty logjam In Parliament and with the EU. But of course things have changed after Conservative MPs no confidence vote, and the EU knows it. They know the person they have painstakingly negotiated with over the past two years will be toppled if they do not compromise and they will not be able to control what follows. An avoidable political, constitutional and possibly an economic crisis will leave the EU badly scarred. So the EU will make concessions, so now is the time for the Prime Minister to prepare for No Deal as never before and hang tough with the EU for the things she needs conceded. If she does, and its still a substantial if, her Norwegian Blue of a dead deal might just surprise everybody, take wing and fly. Andrew Gimsons PMQs sketch: Corbyn is a stupid man, so has no idea how to defuse an inglorious row If Jeremy Corbyn were a quick-witted man, he would have thought of some graceful remark which closed the stupid woman affair before it escalated into an inglorious means of denouncing not only him but the Speaker, John Bercow. Corbyn could have said: I am sorry, Mr Speaker. I allowed myself for a moment to think that some of what was being said by members opposite was not particularly intelligent. They used after all to rejoice in the name the stupid party. But I unreservedly agree that no woman in this place should ever be called stupid, or should fear, if she gains election to this House, that she will be called stupid. The Speaker would surely have been happy to accept something along those lines. But Corbyn is a stupid man, and scuttled out of the Chamber as soon as PMQs were over. Sir Patrick McLoughlin rose in his wrath on a point of order, accused the Leader of the Opposition of calling the Prime Minister a stupid woman, and demanded that Corbyn return to the Chamber and apologise. Bercow deployed the blind eye defence: I saw no such thing. Tory members got very cross with him. The Leader of the House, Andrea Leadsom, asked the Speaker why when you had called me a stupid woman you did not apologise. I dealt with it months ago, Bercow retorted. And I am leaving it at that. He was not allowed to leave it at that. Anna Soubry piled in, declaring that if one of her male colleagues on the Tory benches had said such a thing, the Speaker would take action immediately. I would deprecate it unreservedly, Bercow said, but the Tories were by now very cross with him, and seemed to have forgotten about Corbyn. They too were being slightly stupid. Dame Margaret Beckett, from the Labour benches, accused them of fomenting an orchestrated riot and of trying to shout the Speaker down. This occasion illustrated the contempt felt for Bercow on the Tory benches. And prosy lectures about good behaviour unfortunately come more easily to him than anything which might mend fences. The Chamber was filled for an uncomfortably long time with clouds of canting, self-righteous, ludicrously overblown protest. Everyone was tired, and ready to be cross. Some had doubtless engaged, the night before, in dull and deep potations at various Christmas parties. Many of those who protested loudest will almost certainly have used language at least as offensive in the recent past. But one cannot say such things in Parliament, where debate is only possible because members are obliged to treat each other as honourable. Ken Clarke, the Father of the House, wisely left the Chamber at an early stage during these exchanges, perceiving that no good could come of them. Theresa May had mocked Corbyn for dithering, and had encouraged her own troops to mock him by crying oh yes he is followed by oh no he isnt, after which she added look behind you theyre not impressed. Many people were slightly embarrassed by this pantomime act. Sensitive souls could be seen lowering their heads and raising their hands to their foreheads. Leading lip-readers, consulted within minutes, said Corbyn had at around this point said stupid woman. Nor did he wear a look of injured innocence. What a stupid affair. But perhaps at every stage of human existence we need something to get scandalised by, or to claim to be scandalised by. How otherwise would we get any manners? Here is a summary of how the backstop came to happen. Brexit offers Ireland a limited upside, and an extensive downside. A report from the Lords European Union Committee suggested that Ireland stands to suffer the greatest loss to GDP of all other member states. It will undoubtedly take a short-term hit. Following the conventional wisdom that leaving the EU will be bad for Britains economy, even over the long-term, the committee added that the cost to Ireland could be even bigger. But perhaps the biggest Brexit effect on Ireland is not so much economic as political even psychological. Britain and Ireland entered the Common Market on the same day. This has come to be seen as symbolic. The two countries have a troubled mutual history. The European project liberated Ireland, opening up new horizons wider than those offered by its neighbour, whille constraining Britain, binding its policy to a bigger enterprise. The EU is seen in Ireland as integral to the Anglo-Irish Agreement, Northern Irelands peace process and the Belfast Agreement paving the way for a golden age in Anglo-Irish relations, capped by the Queens visit to Ireland in 2011. The two countries grew closer and closer still. Both are English-speaking, market-orientated, America-friendly and, to some extent, bound together in a common British Isles economy. By the time of the 2016 referendum, no two EU countries were closer. No European leader lobbied harder for David Cameron than Enda Kenny. Ireland did not want the protectionist bloc in the EU to be left stronger, its own contributions to the Union to be higher, and for it to be exposed as its main English-speaking country, with the Commission poised to make difficult waves over its corporation tax rates. After the referendum result, Ireland stayed on auto-pilot concerned to minimise the impact of Brexit and work with Britain to do so, building on over 40 years of improved relations. Initially, Kennys government looked to manage the land border between the two countries in much the same way as Theresa Mays wanted, exploring the use of technology to avoid checks on the frontier and mulling how two different regulatory regimes might be reconciled. Dismissed now as fantastical unicorns, these were real horses up and if not quite running, at least cantering. During 2017, this changed. The reasons are mixed but, to cut to the chase, Irelands Government came to ask itself, as the wider Brexit negotiations intensified, why it should break with its fellow EU members to accommodate a country that was leaving. The Prime Ministers Lancaster House speech in January convinced Irelands Government, which had wanted to believe otherwise, that Britain was now set on leaving the Single Market, if not the Customs Union too. In June, May lost her majority and allied with the DUP. The second didnt go down well in Dublin and the first was seen to leave her weaker. In any event, planning the land borders future turned out to be complex. With Mays conceding on the sequencing of the talks, the Irish Government began to ask itself if she might not eventually fold, too, on the Customs Union and Single Market even, perhaps, on Brexit itself. Furthermore, it didnt take to David Davis and had never liked Boris Johnson, at least since his campaigning for Leave in the referendum. May might be sincere in wishing to avoid a hard border, but could the Brexiteers really be trusted for, after all, are they not the future of the Conservative Party? At any rate, Ireland threw in its lot decisively with its fellow EU members, and the very language that governed talk of a hard border began to change. To the British side, the phrase means border posts, checkpoints, cameras, barriers, barbed wire all the paraphernalia of the Troubles. To the Irish side, it has come to signify any departure whatsoever from the customs and regulary status quo. The backstop proposal bound that settlement into the Joint Declaration, and caught London by surprise. And so the journey from last Decembers joint report to this years Withdrawal Agreement began. It is sometimes claimed that Leo Varadkar instigated the change in Irish policy. This isnt so. It began under Kenny, though his successor certainly intensified it. So we have stalemate. And it is no exaggeration to say that the success or failure of Mays negotation, and whether Britain leaves with a deal or without one, hangs on what happens to the backstop. Anglo-Irish relations turn out to have consequences. That Lords Committee proposed a draft bilateral agreement between the UK and Ireland in order, inter alia, to answer the border question. The idea was dying even as its report was leaving the printers. Three lessons emerge for our Government from this story. They are founded on a truth which it helps to demonstrate. Ireland thinks about Britain a lot not because it wants to, but because it has to. Thats what comes of living alongside a bigger neighbour with which one has a difficult history. Britain, by contrast, thinks about Ireland a lot less, sometimes scarcely at all. First, government is not well set up for Anglo-Irish diplomacy. The new Department for Exiting the European Union delegated Ireland to Robin Walker, an able Minister, but a junior one. Davis was mostly engaged elsewhere. The Northern Ireland Office has no institutional memory of the story stretching back through the Belfast Agreement to the troubles. By her own admission, the Secretary of State was unaware, prior to her appointment, that unionists dont vote for nationalist parties, and vice-versa. What experience there is rests largely on a single appointment that of Jonathan Caine, one of her SpAds, who has previouly served no fewer than four former Conservative Secretaries of State, and has experience stretching back over 25 years. The only figure at the centre with a feel for Anglo-Irish relations is David Lidington, who was Shadow Secretary of State under David Cameron. Second, the Government and Whitehall and Westminster more broadly made no real effort, post-referendum, to feel Irelands pain. May is not exactly cut out to do the Bill Clinton bit, but Lidington might have been used more. (Camerons former Secretaries of State, Theresa Villiers and Owen Paterson, were both Brexiteers.) The Government ought to have been searching around to find what special measures it might deploy to help support Irelands economy, in the event both of deal and no deal. Finally, a better-briefed Downing Street would have grasped the significance of the backstop, and reacted accordingly when it was first proposed. One of its foundations is the claim that it is necessary to protect the Belfast Agreement. This is contestable. The DUP was opposed to the agreement at the time, and so is not in the best position to tangle with Dublin about the assertion (though, as some readers will remember, it has plenty to say about it: see Lee Reynolds piece on this site). Other Unionists are better situated. David Trimble, who co-negotiated the agreement, argues that the backstop doesnt strengthen the agreement, but undermines it. Number Ten should have better utilised this co-winner of a Nobel Peace Prize and other Ulster Unionists from that period, such as Paul Bew, one of Trimbles main advisers at the time. Instead, it busied itself reassuring Johnson and Michael Gove that the backstop would have no legal force. So where now? In the short-term, Anglo-Irish relations will be sticky. Essentially, Varadkar is risking a rational gamble that Britain will either back down on the backstop, or else rescind Brexit altogether. As we write, it looks as though he may succeed. If so, public attitudes to Ireland here may cool somewhat, but the Taoiseach has presumably factored this into his thinking. Indeed, there is a strong case for arguing that Irish diplomacy is the biggest single winner of the Brexit negotiations to date. For Britain, the proposed deal presents problems so well rehearsed that we need not repeat them. But some EU27 member states have difficulties with it, too: to some extent, it prises apart the four freedoms, offering Britain favourable Single Market access (though not frictionless trade) without EU budget payments or freedom of movement. But such losses will worry Ireland less than the big gain of the backstop. Some claim that it represents a push for Irish unity. Rightly or wrongly, we dont read it that way. Rather, the backstop would, in Irelands view, seal an all-island arrangement that has underpinned prosperity and minimised violence. Varadkars gamble may fail. No Deal is the status quo in Britain, and so cant be ruled out. If it happens, he will doubtless fall back on blaming the Brits. Bashing Mays Government has done him no harm at all so far, and he must keep a careful eye on Fianna Fail, on whose support his government relies not to mention potential successors to his post in Fine Gael, such as Simon Coveney. None the less, the effects of No Deal could be so toxic as to wreck not just his government but Irelands economy. Negotiating triumph would turn to diplomatic disaster. There are signs of nervousness in Ireland about this possibility. What of the longer-term? Any analysis should rest on two foundations. First, the UK will put its own interests first whatever happens to Brexit during the months ahead. Ireland needs no reminder of this commonplace, given its experience since the referendum two years ago. Second, Ireland will do likewise not as a junior adjunct to the UK but as a fully-fledged member of the EU27, which has incentives to look after its smaller member states, and back them up diplomatically, as we are seeing. One Minister told ConservativeHome that, over this longer-term, Britain needs a new strategic partnership with Ireland. Just as it was our closest ally when we were EU members, but leaning out he said so it should fulfil the same role for a UK on the outside, as we lean in. That Ireland itself will want as good a relationship as possible with its neighbour is a given, or should be. Some will say that this sites proposals so far first feeling Irelands pain over Brexit; then contesting its view of the backstop are self-contradictory. To which our reply is that theres a good old-fashioned word for trying to understand your partner while advancing your interests: diplomacy. Ireland certainly isnt an enemy and should be a friend. But perhaps Britains relationship with it is best viewed instead through the functional and workmanlike lens of partnership: after all, the better relations with Dublin are, the more comfortable nationalists in Northern Ireland are likely to feel about the Union. We are under-using the institutional means at our disposal to further a future partnership: the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference, the British-Irish Council, the All-Parliamentary Group on Ireland. Senior Ministers and MPs need to attend them as a matter of course, and not delegate attendance to juniors. Since British and Irish politicians and diplomats will no longer meet and mingle within the EU institutions, new forums must be found, formal and informal. Relationships are everything, another Minister pointed out to this site. And Downing Street needs to ramp up its expertise. If the language of partnership sounds flavourless and thin, and Conservatives yearn for something a bit richer, it might be worth us glancing back at our own history. Ireland is arguably a conservative country with two centre-right parties whose rivalry stretches back to the civil war without a Conservative Party. As in Germany, the term is a no-no (though obviously for different reasons). None the less, the grandfather of modern conservatism was an Irishman. Would Burke, with his European sensibility and reverence for circumstance, have been horrified by the rupture that is Brexit? Or would he have seen the EU as an ideological project a theory of the kind he came to oppose at the end of his career? It is useless to pose such counterfactuals: one ends up projecting ones preoccupations on the past, which is another country. But conjecture has a way of bubbling up all the same. What can be said for certain is that Burke never forgot the country of his birth. Nor did his opponents allow him to. Even when folded into Whig establishment factions, and operating as a spokesman for them, he was targeted by anti-Irish, anti-Catholic enemies. Burke was an Anglican, but Conor Cruise OBrien argued through an entire book, The Great Melody, that Burkes Irish and religious formation is key to understanding his stances, shifts and apparent volte-faces. It was woven into his constituency clash with Bristol merchants over free trade. Most of us lack Burkes driving reasons for engagement with Ireland, but they find an echo in something wider-reaching than politics namely, the mass of working and family relationships and connections between the UK and Ireland. Which reinforces Alan OKelly and Hugh Byrnes idea of a Conservative Friends of Ireland Group as a timely one. Back at the level of formal politics, there is a Brexit and broader lesson: overlooking Ireland has consequences. Adding calorie counts to menus has been a popular point of discussion recently. While some believe its key to pushing consumers to make healthier food choices, others are convinced the act is pointless. Though researchers have spoken out on both sides of the argument, a group of researchers from Dartmouth College recently found that restaurants that have both pictures of food and calorie counts are more likely to sway consumers ordering habits. Our findings suggest that calorie-labeling may alter responses in the brains reward system when considering food options, said researcher Andrea Courtney. Moreover, we believe that nutritional interventions are likely to be more successful if they take into account the motivation of the consumer, including whether or not they diet. The brains role The researchers had 42 undergraduates participate in the study, with students looking at nearly 200 images of food both with calorie counts and without. The group was split almost evenly between those who dieted and those who didnt, as the researchers believed the two groups would make different food choices. Everyone was shown the same images, and most of them included fast food items. While hooked up to an fMRI machine, the participants were asked to rate how much they wanted to eat the food on a scale from one to four, and then how likely theyd be to choose the food items in the dining hall on the same scale. The researchers found that both dieters and non-dieters were affected by the combination of food pictures and calorie counts. After seeing both, the participants were less likely to choose the unhealthy items. However, when the calorie counts came off the food pictures, the results were a bit different. Those who dieted regularly were more likely to continue to avoid fattier foods, whereas the non-dieters didnt have the same response. The researchers saw these results as positive, as they further prove that consumers who are looking for healthier options will continue to seek them out when calorie counts arent available. However, when calorie counts are present, they help guide consumers choices. In order to motivate people to make healthier food choices, policy changes are needed that incorporate not only nutritional information, including calorie content, but also a public education component, which reinforces the long-term benefits of a healthy diet, said researcher Kristina Rapuano. Posting calorie counts Earlier this year, chain restaurants with at least 20 stores were required to start providing customers with calorie information as part of the Affordable Care Act. Though experts went back and forth on the pros and cons of this venture, the goal was to have consumers making healthier choices when they eat out. Later in the year, researchers explored the effects of having calorie counts on menus and found that consumers were more likely to order something with fewer calories when the calorie information was in a prominent place. What this paper shows is that a trivially simple intervention could increase the power of calorie information on menus, said researcher Steven Dallas. The calorie labeling policy should not necessarily be deemed a failure, and could in fact become a powerful tool in combating the obesity epidemic. Yesterday in Geneva, the foreign ministers of Russia, Turkey and Iran - the guarantor countries of the Astana format - discussed with the special envoy of the UN Secretary General for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, the political structure of the SAR. They presented the results of their consultations with the Syrian parties on the composition of the Constitutional Committee, the first meeting of which is to be held in early 2019 in Geneva. The committee should prepare the ground for the drafting of a new constitution and holding of the elections. The parties agreed that the Constitutional Committee should be guided by the spirit of compromise and constructive participation in its work in order to achieve general agreement among its members, which will provide support to the Syrian people. It is assumed that these steps will initiate a viable and long-term political process, carried out by Syrians themselves with the assistance of the United Nations, in accordance with the decisions of the Congress of the National Syrian Dialogue (CSND) in Sochi and the UN Security Council resolution 2254. Russia, Iran and Turkey reaffirmed their commitment to the sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity of the SAR, noting that these principles should be respected by all parties. As Reuters writes in the article Russia, Iran, Turkey back new Syria constitution body but fail to agree makeup, Staffan de Mistura, U.N. Special Envoy for Syria who steps down on Dec. 31, has tried since January to clinch agreement on the identity of 150 members of a new constitutional committee to revitalise a stalled peace process. President Bashar al-Assads government and the opposition fighting to topple him have each submitted a list of 50 names. But Russia, Iran and Turkey have haggled over the final 50 members from civil society and independent backgrounds, diplomats say. The three countries are coming with a proposal for the third list, which has been the heart of the problem, one diplomat following the negotiations closely told Reuters. Turkey and other nations would consider working with Assad if he won a democratic election, Cavusoglu said on Sunday. Turkey supports rebels who control part of northwest Syria. Assad, whose forces have reclaimed most of Syria with Russian and Iranian support apart from Idlib, a northwestern province, has clung to power throughout the conflict and is widely seen as being loath to yield power after it ends. Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem, in comments reported by state media on Monday, said it was early to talk about the constitutional committee starting work. He blamed attempts at interference by Western states for the hold-up in its formation. Syrian authorities have only ever signalled a readiness for amendments to the existing constitution and also said these must be put to a referendum. De Mistura said at the weekend that the constitutional committee could be a starting point for political progress. It does touch, for instance, on presidential powers, it could and should be touching on how elections are done, on division of power, in other words a big issue, he said. We are analyzing the site. Please wait a few seconds.. LONG SAULT, Ontario The Sault Crew was busy getting residents in the holiday spirit on Saturday, Dec. 15, offering wagon rides around the village between 4:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. We do this every year with the wagon rides, explained Shane Perry, volunteer with the Sault Crew. We decorate a wagon, go through the village, look at lights and get the community together. The wagon, pulled by a tractor, was adorned with Christmas lights and tinsel this year. On board was a stereo playing Christmas tunes. In exchange for a magical ride around the community, residents were asked to donate a non-perishable food item to the Long Sault Legion, which will be donated to a local food bank. Attendees could warm up inside the Legion with food and refreshments. Although there was more grass than snow on the ground during the evening of wagon rides, Perry said that the event inevitably gets everyone in the holiday spirit. Once we start going around the village, everyone sees and heads out. They know, it has become kind of a tradition, said Perry. Russian military base in Gyumri has repeatedly attracted attention due to reports about criminal activities. Politically, some experts call it "an important component of Russian-Armenian relations," while others believe that this base has no real meaning anymore. Latter group includes chief editor of the "Journalist Truth" newspaper, Vladislav Shurygin. He spoke about his point of view in an interview with Vestnik Kavkaza. - What is significance of the 102nd military base in Gyumri for Russia today? - I believe that this base is useless. There's no point in keeping it anymore. It was a personal concession, or, more precisely, personal favor of late Minister Defense Pavel Grachev, who maintained good relations with Armenian leadership. In order to guarantee protection to Armenia, he created this military base there. It never played any serious military role, just demonstrated our presence there. Considering policy and role of the current Armenian leadership, we can easily get rid of this base and not lose anything in the meantime. - Does this mean that Russia doesn't need to maintain military presence in Armenia at all? - This presence isn't of great importance for one simple reason - Armenia is an isolated state. Political future of this country depends on how it will build relations with its neighbors. It was always preferable for us to have better relations with Azerbaijan, but due to certain political circumstances, we have developed them poorly. - Is military cooperation with Azerbaijan in Russia's interests? - Of course. First of all, Azerbaijan is a fairly rich country that's able to purchase lot of different weapons. Second of all, Azerbaijan and Russia are traditionally connected by friendly obligations. Azerbaijan relies on the Russian Federation in certain issues. This does not mean that Azerbaijan is going to rush into Russia's arms tomorrow, but it needs close and predictable relations with our country. TURKSOY Permanent Council of Culture Ministers has proclaimed 2019 as the year of the great Azerbaijani poet and thinker Imadeddin Nasimi as well as the great Turkish poet Ask Veysel in the Turkic world. The corresponding decision was adopted at the council's 36th meeting held yesterday in Kastamonu, Turkey, AzerTAc reported. The British weekly newspaper Economist has named Armenia as the country of the year, saying the South Caucasus nation has a "chance of democracy and renewal" after street protests led to a peaceful change of government. "Our annual 'country of the year' award goes not to the most influential nation, nor to the richest, nor to the one with the tastiest food. It celebrates progress," the London-based weekly news magazine wrote. According to the article, "an ancient and often misruled nation in a turbulent region has a chance of democracy and renewal." "For that reason, Armenia is our country of the year," the newspaper stressed. The newspaper said that choosing the 'country of the year' is tricky, because stellar performance in one year is no guarantee of future success - last years pick, France, is now racked by riots. Nikol Pashinyan, a charismatic and bearded former journalist and MP, "was swept into power, legally and properly, on a wave of revulsion against corruption and incompetence," the Economist said on December 18. He was elected to the prime minister's post in May after spearheading weeks of mass protests that forced his predecessor, long-entrenched leader Serzh Sarkisian, to resign. On December 9, acting Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyans bloc 'My Step' has received 70.43% of the vote during the Armenian parliamentary elections. The Prosperous Armenia party, led by Gagik Tsarukyan and the Armenian Renaissance party, led by Edmon Marukyan, have also entered the parliament, scoring 8.27% and 6.37% of the vote respectively. The My Step bloc got 88 of 132 seats in the parliament. Armenian politicians and political scientists warmly welcomed this sign of attention from the UK. The Prosperous Armenia party's representative Naira Zohrabyan, speaking with Vestnik Kavkaza, said that she is completely agree with The Economist weekly newspaper. "What happened in Armenia in April was an unprecedented bloodless revolution for the entire post-Soviet space. This revolution was not against Russia, the European Union or the United States, but against corruption and the total power of the Republicans, who did not give any progress to either the country or the people. This revolution was against lawlessness," she said. "I absolutely agree that Armenia can become the country of the year, with a revolution, which had only one winner - the people. Pashinyans team expresses the opinion of the majority of the people, and I can say that yes, the people won," Naira Zohrabyan stressed. Ex-mayor of Yerevan Vahagn Khachatryan also expressed gratitude to London for recognizing the state coup in Armenia as a democratic event of the year. "Its very nice that the actions of Nikol Pashinyans team are assessed in the West in such a way. In principle, it was a surprise for all of us that we were able to get rid of the regime, which reigned in the country for 20 years. I think Armenia is worthy of such an assessment," he said. The Diamond Princess has arrived in Singapore from Japan to join the Sapphire Princess for a homeporting season that will last until March 2019. This is the first time that Princess Cruises has based two ships in Singapore as the Sapphire Princess arrived on Nov. 28. The Sapphire Princess, sister ship to the Diamond Princess, is homeporting in Singapore for her fifth season and will sail to Southeast Asian destinations on three- to 13-day voyages. During this time, she will also embark on a Grand Asia voyage return trip from Singapore to Shanghai over the Christmas and New Year period. The Sapphire Princess will then continue sailing in the region after which she will sail to Europe for the summer season. The Diamond Princess will offer Christmas and New Year sailings from Singapore to Southeast Asian destinations. For holiday sailings, the Diamond offers a 10-day roundtrip sailing from Singapore to Kota Kinabalu, Nha Trang, Ho Chi Minh City, Bangkok and Ko Samui. The New Year itinerary offers a 10-day sailing from Singapore to Bali, Port Klang, Penang (late night) and Phuket. A cruise provides the ideal setting to connect with loved ones and celebrate the festive season together. With two ships homeporting in Singapore for the first time, were offering guests an expansive schedule of sailings to experience some of the most incredible destinations in the region, while celebrating in style on the high seas, said Farriek Tawfik, Director Southeast Asia, Princess Cruises. The Sapphire Princess will return to Singapore for her sixth homeporting season next year which will include a cruise to see the Annular Solar Eclipse from the Straits of Malacca. The Diamond Princess will undergo a dry dock in Singapore before she returns to Japan in February for her sixth season, sailing roundtrip from Tokyo (Yokohama) and Kobe. The March-November 2019 season features 60 departures on 40 unique itineraries, visiting 41 destinations in seven countries. Sailing to Northern Europe on April 13, Ponant will offer a "Gastronomy, Vineyards & Grands Crus" over nine nights in partnership with Ducasse Conseil and Chateau Latour aboard the L'Austral. Sailing from Lisbon to Portsmouth, port calls include Leixoes, Saint-Jean-de-Luz, Bordeaux (overnight), Pauillac, Belle-Ile-en-Meg, Guernesey and Honfleur aboard the 264-guest ship. It will be a fully culinary experience, according to the cruise line, incorporating visits to vineyards ashore. Guests will be treated to two very special gala dinners prepared by Xavier Boireau, chef at the Rech restaurant, a seafood institution in Paris, and Francis Fauvel of Ducasse sur Seine, the first 100 percent electric cruise-boat restaurant. To round off this experience, the master cheesemonger, Bernard Antony, will be onboard, offering a selection of cheeses. The gourmet cruise will also feature to the chance meet geographer and wine historian Jean-Robert Pitte and famous sommelier Eric Beaumard. Both are set to deliver lectures throughout the cruise. While calling in Pauillac, guests will be able to visit and taste wine at a number of famous vineyards. By nightfall, the ship will be moored opposite Chateau Latour and guests will be able to take part in a gala dinner. The Celebrity Edge made her maiden call to Puerto Rico on Tuesday, according to the Puerto Rico Tourism Company, as the ship docked in San Juan. To welcome the ship, port officials organized the "Festival del Encanto," celebrating Puerto Rican heritage and customs, with pier-side dancing, music and other festivities. Carla Campos, executive director of the Puerto Rico Tourism Company, welcomed the ship personally, exchanging plaques with the captain. She thanked Celebrity Cruises in her prepared remarks for the company's continued business, pointing out 10 Edge calls scheduled this season that will bring an economic impact of over $2.5 million to the island. Anthony Maceira, executive director of the Ports Authority, was also on hand to welcome the new ship, helping to arrange a water cannon salute as the 129,000-ton vessel sailed into the harbor. The Edge next calls at San Juan on January 1; January 15; January 29; February 12; February 26; March 12; March 26; April 9 and April 23. "The cruise industry continues to grow on the island by leaps and bounds. With the arrival of the Celebrity Edge, we are seeing three first-time calls in a one month period," said Campos. "These, plus three more we are expecting this month and next, take us to a total of six inaugural visits for the fiscal year, and represents a significant boost to our economy." Norwegian Cruise Line today announced a variety of value-added benefits for guests sailing on Norwegian Joy in 2019, including the opportunity to receive all six Free at Sea options at no cost as well as the addition of 14 gateways to its free and reduced airfare initiative, with free flights from 11 cities including Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver and Phoenix. All guests who book a balcony or a higher stateroom category on a 2019 cruise aboard Norwegian Joy will receive a beverage package, shore excursion credits, a specialty dining package, and an internet package all for free, Norwegian said. They can also take advantage of the free and reduced airfare initiative as well as Norwegians Friends and Family Sail Free option, which allows the third and fourth guests in a stateroom to sail complimentary. In advance of Norwegian Joys arrival in the U.S. in April, we are very excited to welcome her and our guests with a variety of enticing savings including free and reduced airfare, which has been a very compelling benefit for those booking vacations next year, said Andy Stuart, president and chief executive officer of Norwegian Cruise Line. We are also very happy to offer, for the first time ever, all six Free at Sea options, so I encourage anyone looking to cruise in 2019 to take advantage of this exciting, limited-time opportunity. The Norwegian Joy Take All Six initiative, which equals up to $4,000 in savings, is available through Dec. 30, 2018. Broward Countys Port Everglades has welcomed Holland America Lines newest cruise ship, Nieuw Statendam, on its maiden call to the United States, on Wednesday Dec. 19. The ship arrived early in the morning and its inaugural Port Everglades sailing is scheduled to depart at 5 p.m. The ship returns Sunday, December 23. "Holland America Line has been a primary customer for Port Everglades since the mid-1930s. This winter season, we will welcome 10 Holland America cruise ships, and have the distinct honor of being the host port for the Nieuw Statendams official naming, said Port Everglades Chief Executive and Port Director Steven Cernak. Neiuw Statendam will be named on February 2, 2019 at Port Everglades. The ship sailed to Port Everglades on a transatlantic voyage from Civitavecchia, Italy, which began on December 5. Holland America accounted for more than 11.5 percent of the total number of cruise passengers who traveled through Port Everglades in FY 2018 (October 1, 2017 through September 30, 2018). Gail Howard has had it with the Catholic Church. Howard is co-leader of the Connecticut chapter of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, a support and advocacy group. She said was unmoved by the recent news that the Archdiocese of Hartford is joining other Catholic organizations that will release a list of member clergy who have been credibly accused of abuse. The Bridgeport Diocese released something similar in October, and dioceses and archdioceses across the country are publishing lists of their own. Experts tie this apparent explosion of transparency to the August release of a Pennsylvania grand jury report that revealed the names of more than 300 priests accused of child abuse in that state. Howard admits these are positive steps for the church, but said they are insufficient and too late, particularly for those whose lives have been irreversibly damaged by abuse. Im just done with the Catholic church, she said. Others are more accepting of the churchs recent gestures. I think this does indicate that the Archdiocese (of Hartford) has a real commitment to transparency, said Michael W. Higgins, a distinguished professor of Catholic thought at Sacred Heart University. I think this is the right thing to do, and I think theyre doing it for the right reasons. A scandal explodes For decades, the Catholic Church both in Connecticut and nationwide has come under fire for hiding abuse, largely by moving those accused from parish to parish. But the Pennsylvania grand jury report set off a chain reaction of revelations intended, at least from the churchs standpoint, to show accountability. Dioceses and archdioceses in many states have unveiled lists of credibly accused clergy, and other actions have been taken, including the removal of Theodore McCarrick, the retired archbishop of Washington, as a cardinal after an assault allegation against him was found to be credible. Higgins said removing a cardinal is an extremely rare occurrence. The Connecticut Catholic community got on board in October, when the Diocese of Bridgeport released a report showing that the diocese had paid $52.5 million to settle abuse claims since 1953. The diocese also published a list on its website of 26 of its priests credibly accused of sexual abuse. Then last weekend, Hartford Archbishop Leonard P. Blair announced the decision to release the names of the credibly accused. The archdiocese also said it would contract for a further independent review of all our clergy files to identify any additional names from the present, going back to (its founding) 1953. The organization also announced plans to publish the amount of money paid out as a result of the abuse, and the source of those funds. The states Catholic leadership has also had a shakeup. Michael C. Culhane has stepped down as executive director of the Connecticut Catholic Conference the public policy office of the church in the state and former state Republican party leader Christopher Healy has taken the job. Healys background includes helping to run Connecticut campaigns for former GOP presidential candidates Bob Dole and John McCain. Healy also ran the congressional campaign of Lisa Wilson-Foley, who eventually pleaded guilty to conspiring to hide payments to disgraced former Gov. John Rowland, who acted as her secret consultant. But not all Catholic dioceses in the state have committed to this attempt at transparency. On Wednesday, The Associated Press reported that the Diocese of Norwich said it has no information on whether or not it will release the names of priests accused of abuse. Not enough Higgins cheered the churchs recent decisions. He said its hard to know what the outcome of these revelations will be, but that there will be political consequences; there will be moral consequences and there will be legal consequences. Others arent so sure, including Cindy Robinson, a partner in the Bridgeport law firm Tremont, Sheldon, Robinson and Mahoney, which was part of the 2005 global mediation before U.S. Magistrate Judge William I. Garfinkel that involved 43 people making accusations against 14 priests within the Archdiocese of Hartford. Robinson said that while the review planned by the archdiocese sounds good on paper, it will only be effective if it is truly independent, and that will, in large part, depend on whether the reviewer has total access to all records, files and secret archives. When reached for comment, a spokesperson for the Hartford Archdiocese said it had no further updates beyond Blairs statement. Howard said what she would like to see is stronger investigation by state legal authorities. We need truth, she said. We need all the truth and we need it come from people responsible for investigating crime in Connecticut. However, when reached for comment, Chief States Attorney Kevin T. Kane said his office was not aware of having received any complaints at this time that have not been sufficiently investigated. Any further information received would be reviewed and acted on as appropriate as governed by the applicable statute of limitations and other criminal laws, Kane said. In Connecticut, the criminal statute of limitations for felony sex crimes is five years, with the exception of class A felonies, such as sex crimes against minors, or crimes with DNA evidence. The civil statute of limitations is 30 years past reaching the age of majority, meaning that in most cases, someone who was abused as a child has until his or her 48th birthday to make a claim. Both Howard and Robinson said it can take victims decades to come forward, and these limits mean that even when they do, they might not receive any justice. Those people (accusing the clergy) can take most of their lives to believe it wasnt their fault, Howard said. Governor-elect Ned Lamont opened his campaign for governor in January without a deep appreciation of the criminal justice reforms undertaken by the administration of Gov. Dannel P. Malloy. On Tuesday, he promised to take office next month with the ambition of improving on Malloys substantial record. For me, criminal justice reform is so important. Its the right thing to do, and its the smart thing to do, Lamont said, addressing a criminal-justice policy group co-chaired by Cathy Malloy, a reform activist. Turning to the first lady, Lamont said, This is something were going to continue to do in a serious way. Fifteen policy groups organized by his transition team began making their policy recommendations Monday, with five reports released every day for three days. The criminal-justice presentation Tuesday is only one of three Lamont intends to accept personally. We have these policy teams, and its incredibly hard work that people are putting in and its not going to go to waste, said Lamont, a Democrat. This is one I really wanted to go to. Criminal justice reforms were a wedge issue during the campaign to succeed Malloy, a two-term Democrat who did not seek reelection. Lamont and petitioning candidate Oz Griebel published outlines on criminal justice issues, and in debates they generally applauded the legislative and executive policies pursued by Malloy under the umbrella of what he calls his Second Chance initiatives, which are part of a national reassessment of an era of mass incarceration. Republican Bob Stefanowski ran to the right of Lamont, criticizing the Department of Corrections good-time credit program and ignoring a challenge by the ACLU to join the other candidates in publishing a criminal-justice platform. Criminal-justice advocates were generally pleased by Lamonts stands during the campaign, while urban Democrats faulted him for not giving them greater emphasis. On Tuesday, Lamont called mass incarceration a terrible experiment and pledged his commitment to policies intended to save people from criminal records where possible and offer rehabilitation aimed to reducing recidivism for those who go to prison. I came here because I learned a lot over the last year in terms of the fact that Connecticuts been a real leader on these reform efforts, Lamont said. Ive seen firsthand what a difference is made in a lot of peoples lives, especially young people made a terrible mistake when they were younger, and they serve their time. And they shouldnt be punished for life. So its the right thing to do and the smart thing to do. His ambitions will be challenged by fiscal constraints. Current projections show he will face a $1.7 billion budget shortfall in his first year less than half the shortfall Malloy had to confront eight years ago, but still considerable. Correction Commissioner Scott Semple, a data-driven reformer who is retiring after 30 years in the Department of Correction, said further advances in reducing recidivism will require some investments, such as as adding teachers. The highest rate of recidivism is among inmates who leave prison without at least a high-school degree. James Forman Jr., a Yale law professor who co-chaired the policy group, cited a RAND Corporation finding that every dollar spent on vocational training and general education in prison yields $4 or $5 in savings from lower rates of incarceration in the first three years after an inmates release. Rep. Toni Walker, D-New Haven, a transition team leader and the co-chair of the legislatures Appropriations Committee, told Forman that anything that saves money will get a quicker hearing by lawmakers. Forman, a volunteer teacher in prison as well as an academic who studies criminal justice policies, said investing now will yield savings. Were not going to save it tomorrow, but its not going to be in 40 years, Forman said. Forman won the Pulitzer Prize this year for his non-fiction book, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America. He said the invitation by the governor-elect to advise the transition came at one of the busiest times of the academic year, and the process was necessarily frantic. But he said he appreciated the opportunity to shape public policy. You cant pass this up, he said. The policy groups policy recommendations and supporting data filled a thick binder, copies of which were not released. But a two-page summary warned Lamont that tough-on-crime attitudes that led to mandatory minimum sentences for many crimes, including non-violence drug possession, have not entirely disappeared. These attitudes must be countered by strong smart-on-crime leadership from the top on down. Data should guide us, and justice-involved individuals and their families can place a human face on the urgency of reform, they warned in the summary. Support for reform exists on both sides of the aisle and among a diverse range of people in the state. Policymakers must understand that some spending is necessary to maximize long-term savings, and justice reinvestment is required to keep crime rates low. They recommend Lamont introduce several criminal justice reform bills at the start of the 2019 legislative session, several pursuing reforms attempted by Malloy. They favor the legalization of marijuana and, among other proposal, wiping clean the records of persons with simple possession convictions. BRIDGEPORT - The Maple Syrup Man is in a jam after police said they found an unregistered assault rifle in his home. Robert Somley, the Monroe landscaper who received notoriety for enticing a married woman to have sex with him with maple syrup and blueberry jam and then allegedly secretly video recording her, had just posted $150,000 bond for allegedly threatening to out his sex interest when he was arrested again on Wednesday. Back to the slammer he went after a judge ordered him held on an additional $75,000 bond on the new charges of illegally possessing an assault weapon and possession of high capacity magazines. It reads badly but things are not always as they seem, Somleys lawyer, Thomas Cocco said. The truth will come out through the judicial process. Police said the woman was helping Somley move out of the home he had been evicted from when Somley said he needed to take a break. After about 20 minutes the woman went looking for Somley and found him in the home, naked watching pornography on a laptop, police said. When the woman questioned what Somley was doing, police said he responded that he needed to relieve himself before continuing work. Police said the woman left and went back to loading a trailer. But, after a short while, decided that she too needed to take a break. When she went back into the home this time she found Somley naked and dribbling maple syrup on his body, police said. Police said the woman confessed that this sight was a turn on for her and she demanded to be allowed to participate. In addition to the syrup, police said the couple engaged in foreplay with blueberry jelly. All the while, police said Somley was taking video of the situation. When the woman found out there was video, police said she demanded that Somley delete it all, but he refused. The 52-year-old Somley was arrested for violating a protective order when police said he told the victims best friend that she needed to tell the victim, that if she did not drop all the charges he would completely destroy her, that he would go public with her name. When police later went to Somleys home to secure any weapons he has they said they found an unlicensed AK-47 rifle and nine high-capacity magazines. The combat teams of a battalion of S-400 Triumf surface-to-air missile systems stationed in Crimea redeployed launchers, practiced detecting targets and destroyed a notional enemys air attack weapons in drills, representative of the Black Sea Fleets press office Alexei Rulev said. "The combat units of S-400 Triumf surface-to-air missile systems from a large unit of the Southern Military Districts Air Force and Air Defense Army that are stationed in Crimea held air defense drills," TASS cited the statement as saying. The troops practiced displacing launchers and radar stations and then moved to new positioning areas. After deploying the launchers, the combat crews checked their position on the ground, after which they made them ready for operation and started gathering data on the air situation. The drills wrapped up with electronic launches: the combat teams detected, tracked and destroyed the target simulating a notional enemys air attack weapons. NEWTOWN - A homegrown charitys mission to make the world a kinder place in memory of an animal-loving first-grader has hit a growth spurt. The Catherine Violet Hubbard Foundation - the charity determined to build a $10 million animal sanctuary in memory of the first-grader who was slain in the Sandy Hook massacre - raised $438,000 toward the goal at a gala earlier this month. We cant do this without having a building, says Jennifer Hubbard, the mother of the slain first-grader, and a co-founder of the CVH Foundation, speaking of the animal care programs the charity has been offering at its 34-acre field in Newtown. Our immediate need is to be able to raise the funds and build the building, so we can scale our programs - we are at a tipping point. On the outside, the sanctuary will be comprised of a country veterinary clinic and a multi-purpose education house, joined by a colonnade that represents the outstretched arms of its namesake. On the inside, the sanctuary will look something like the childs imagination, when she would pretend to care for all the animals, her mother said. There is an intrinsic beauty between people and the animal kingdom, and if we can support that - if we can support the animals that Catherine loved - then we are not only doing her memory justice, but we are also creating a kinder world for the people who still grace this earth, Hubbard said. Television host Gretchen Carlson said as much at the CVH gala on Dec. 1, where the Greenwich celebrity and CVH board member was the master of ceremonies. Catherine was only six years old when she died, but in those precious years, she figured out something that most people need a lifetime to realize, Carlson said. Her gentle spirit, her whisper of kindness to the creatures she loved so dearly, and her promise to one day care for all the animals of this world - Catherine knew her mission. The celebratory spirit of the gala, which featured Monkees drummer Micky Dolenz, was tempered by the solemn anniversary two weeks later, marking six years since a gunman killed 26 first-graders and educators at Sandy Hook school. Proceeds from the gala will help the foundation continue pre-construction site work at its property near the towns Fairfield Hills campus, where the foundation has held wildlife education programs and family-themed events. The foundation has raised $2 million to date and needs at least twice that much to begin construction, Hubbard said. More Information How to help For donation information visit https://cvhfoundation.org/make-a-gift or contact the foundation: Catherine Violet Hubbard Foundation Inc. PO Box 3571 Newtown, CT 06470 info@cvhfoundation.org See More Collapse This will be a place of healing where children would see their innate beauty through the eyes of animals, which is exactly the kind of place Catherine would have wanted to visit, Hubbard said. The mission for the sanctuary is to enrich the lives of all beings through compassion, acceptance and determination - those things that are most Catherine. Jane Goodall, the noted primatologist who was honored with a kindness award at the CVH gala, saluted the sanctuary and its namesake in a video tribute. Catherine was a remarkable human being, Goodall said. And I know from her earliest age she was passionate about animals and determined to do all that she could to help them. rryser@newstimes.com 203-731-3342 BRIDGEPORT Charlie Stallworth, pastor and state representative, sat Tuesday afternoon on a cushioned bench at the front of his East End Baptist Tabernacle Church. At a wooden podium a few feet away and four years ago, on New Years Day 2015, then-ex-Mayor Joe Ganim delivered his long-delayed public apology for his pay-to-play corruption schemes that ended Ganims first administration in 2003. He stood right there, Stallworth recalled of hosting Ganims Mea culpa that launched a political comeback. Later in 2015 Ganim, with the help of Stallworth and others, defeated incumbent Bill Finch in the Democratic mayoral primary, then won back his old job of running Connecticuts largest city in that years general election. Now Stallworth is looking ahead to Ganims 2019 mayoral re-election bid and considering challenging him in a primary. Stallworth plans to make a decision by the middle of January. The dream that existed then in conversation with him is not the dream that was fulfilled in the actual unfolding of the administration, Stallworth, 54, told Hearst Connecticut Media Tuesday. For Stallworth, who is black, the white Ganims comeback was supposed to begin a more inclusive era for the regular, non-politically-connected residents particularly those living in lower-income areas like the East End whom the fallen, ex-convict mayor appealed to with talk of personal mistakes, second chances and redemption. I believe the community was invited in to make the campaign happen, but not invited in to decide what would be best for Bridgeport to help create the vision and plan for the city, Stallworth said, adding voters have been used in a way that would better some, not everybody. For example, Stallworth said, Ganim has recently focused his administrations attention on the violence, poor maintenance and unsanitary living conditions at Charles F. Greene Homes public housing on Highland Avenue. That, Stallworth insisted, is because the mayor wants another four years in office. Ganim could and should have done something at Greene Homes sooner, Stallworth said. We just have to get to the place where were not playing games with people and manipulating people to get the next election, the next vote, but to be serious, Stallworth said, adding he expected more announcements and photo opportunities from City Hall in the coming months to try to re-energize Ganims 2015 base. Ganim in a statement for this story said, I am sure there are individuals with thoughts of running, and I appreciate that. While others may be doing that, I will continue to create jobs, clean up neighborhoods, build the city's tax base with development projects and a stable budget, and make improvements in public safety, said the mayor. I will continue to fight every day to make Bridgeport the best that it can be for all of our residents. Rocky relations and primaries Stallworth, who was born in Alabama, relocated to Bridgeport from that southern state 13 years ago to take over East End Baptist. He is entering his ninth year representing Bridgeport in the state General Assembly. Ganim and Stallworth have had a rocky relationship for a few years. Hired in 2016 for a $99,000 job overseeing diversity for Ganim, Stallworth was demoted in December of that year to part-time and his pay was reduced to $49,643. Over that winter, Stallworth publicly clashed with the mayor over the administrations decision to discipline a prominent black police officer, Lt. Lonnie Blackwell, by demoting him to sergeant. Stallworth resigned from his city position in late March 2017. On Tuesday he said he had wanted to do more from within City Hall to promote diversity among municipal personnel and the hiring of small minority contractors. Then last April, the city announced that Stallworth was hired as a $2,500 consultant helping to recruit minorities for a new class of police officers. Ganims office, however, recently confirmed to Hearst that the contract with Stallworth never came to fruition. Stallworth on Tuesday said he concluded the effort to use him in the cop recruitment drive was a public relations stunt and he was not being given enough time to do a good job. This past summer, Stallworth, very briefly, was a candidate for lieutenant governor but not with Ganim, who had launched an ultimately failed bid for governor. Stallworth allied himself with another losing gubernatorial contender, Guy Smith of Greenwich. Until Tuesday, Stallworth has, publicly, remained mostly silent about Ganims job performance. Ive allowed him to be mayor, he said. Though critical of Ganim for allegedly forgetting the people who returned him to office, Stallworth has been accused by critics of doing the same in the 126th House District. But he has fended off primary challenges in 2016 and earlier this year. Stallworth said he has not spoken to Ganim about a potential run for mayor, but did talk to close Ganim ally Democratic Town Chairman Mario Testa. Stallworth has also had conversations with another potential primary contender, state Sen. Marilyn Moore. Moore for months has been considered a potential Ganim challenger for the citys top job, in part because of her reputation as an independent willing to criticize the mayor and Testa. And the recently re-elected state lawmaker has never denied the possibility of a mayoral run. Theres a lot of people who are unhappy with Joe, Moore said Tuesday, confirming she and Stallworth talked about potential mayoral bids quite a while ago. Im not in a place where I want to make a decision today or next week, said Moore, who has been helping out with Democratic Governor-elect Ned Lamonts transition to office and looking ahead to the upcoming legislative session. Im thinking about whats good for the city, how we move forward, and whats best for the state. If either Moore, who is also black, or Stallworth were elected mayor, they would be Bridgeports first minority chief executive. Stallworth emphasized some voters may find that appealing, but said, Im not trying to run to be the black mayor. ... I believe the hunger (voters feel) is for someone who can identify with my pain, not my complexion. Stallworth, Moore and any other potential Ganim challengers also face immediate fundraising disadvantages. The incumbent has already raised more than $170,000. Stallworth said he would have to run a grass-roots peoples campaign just like the Ganim campaign he was part of in 2015. The way U.S. Congressman Joe Kennedy III of Massachusetts sees it: A patchwork of laws governing the sale and use of recreational and medical marijuana compounds the dysfunction surrounding legalization of marijuana. Writing in the science-based website STAT, Kennedy expressed the necessity for the US government to implement strong, clear, and fair federal guidelines. To do that requires us to remove marijuana from the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) and legalize it at the federal level. His position is a reversal from Kennedys earlier opposition to legalized marijuana. But the 38-year-old congressman, who has served in Congress since 2013, said his mind has been changed through his own research and experiences. He is perhaps the most famous name in politics to come out in favor of nationwide legalization of marijuana, but hes not alone in talking about the issue. Related: 11 Facts Cannabis Entrepreneurs Should Know About the Black Market Kennedys Argument The timing of Kennedys essay is no fluke. It appeared just as his home state of Massachusetts began legal recreational marijuana sales. Also, Michigan voters made their state the 10th to legalize adult-use marijuana at the ballot box in November. Kennedy wrote that when it comes to marijuana, the federal government has ceded its responsibility -- and authority --to thoughtfully regulate marijuana. Marijuana remains a Schedule I illegal drug at the national level, on par with heroin and LSD, even as people in many states can now use it recreationally or for medical reasons. One thing is clear to me: Our federal policy on marijuana is badly broken, he wrote. Kennedy listed issues that had changed his mind on marijuana. Meeting parents of epileptic children need marijuana to calm seizures. He noted the FDA approval of Epidiolex, a marijuana-based drug that addresses seizures. Veterans who say marijuana helps ease their post-traumatic stress disorder The racial disparity in drug arrests, where a black teen will get arrested for smoking a joint while his white friends did the same with impunity. The fact that cannabis research in the U.S. is falling behind because research is difficult with cannabis on Schedule I The lack of federal guardrails, such as those in place for alcohol and tobacco, to protect public health and safety and ensure equal justice. Related: Hemp Legalization Clears House, Off to President for Final Approval Bipartisan Support Kennedys essay came out after voters returned control of the U.S House of Representatives to the Democratic party. That appears likely to open the door for debate on marijuana legalization at the national level. Jim McGovern, a Democrat from Massachusetts and the incoming House Rules Committee chair, has said he will allow debate on marijuana legislation to reach the House floor. Thats something that didnt happen with Texas Republican Pete Sessions chairing the committee since 2013. Even Republicans are moving on the issue. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell , a Kentucky Republican, has said he wants language lifting the federal ban on industrial hemp farming included in the Agriculture Improvement Act. Related: States Are Starting to Certify Organic Cannabis Because the Feds Won't Action Needed Kennedy called for removing marijuana from the Schedule I list where it has been since the 1970s. He further called for federal guidelines to legalize cannabis at the national level, much as Canada did earlier this year. He said such action would the federal government to thoroughly and thoughtfully regulate marijuana. He specifically mentioned: The ability to set packaging and advertising rules so that they do not target kids The ability to set labeling requirements and quality standards, so consumers know what theyre buying. The ability to dedicate money to encourage safe use and spread awareness about the risks of impaired driving. The creation of tax revenue for research on mental health effects, safe prescription drugs and reliable roadside tests Of course, when your name is Kennedy and youre a politician from Massachusetts, anything you say gets noticed. Thats even truer when you call for nationwide legalization of marijuana. NORML, which supports marijuana legalization, greeted Kennedy's essay with open arms, tweeting: Welcome to the right side of history, Joe Kennedy. Youll find the waters of justice are warm. Follow dispensaries.com on Instagram to stay up to date on the latest cannabis news. Related: Looks Like Congress is Finally Making a Comeback with 3 New Chief Ministers Joe Kennedy Calls Current U.S. Marijuana Policy Dysfuntional 5 Considerations You Should Take Before Declaring a Company Stand on Politics or Social Change Copyright 2018 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved NORWALK All lanes on the northbound Merritt Parkway have reopened after a truck hit the West Rocks Road bridge Tuesday night. Connecticut State Police shut down a section of the Merritt Parkway in Norwalk after a truck reportedly hit an overpass. The highway closure was announced around 9:50 p.m. The northbound lanes were closed between Exits 40B and 41 and the southbound lanes were shut down between Exits 41 and 40B, according to the Department of Transportation. Dispatch reports indicated a truck hit the overpass. The driver reportedly did not suffer serious injuries and there was no serious damage done to the bridge, one trooper told the dispatcher. On Nov. 29, a tractor-trailer truck struck a bridge over the Merritt in the same area. The driver of that truck - Christopher Alexander, 43, of Charlotte, N.C. - was charged with evading responsibility resulting in property damage or injury, police said. A Westport police investigation determined that Alexanders truck had earlier hit a tree, a sign post and an unoccupied parked car, dragging it out of its parking space, before leaving the scene off Exit 41. police said. Alexander then drove south on the Merritt, hitting the bridge where his trailer became stuck. Police arrested him at the scene. UFC lightweight champion Khabib Nurmagomedov criticized the reported for asking him why the fighter does not enter the octagon with a Russian flag, but wearing a recognizable Caucasian sheepskin headwear, the papakha. "I always do", he told the Russian news agency Ura.ru, explaining that the flag of Russia is displayed on the screens above the cage. "Everyone in America those who don't know about Dagestan, Chechnya, and the Caucasus calls me Russian." "So, we are one nation for them. Most importantly, our people should not divide. The ones like you, for example. And do not ask me such silly questions," Sputnik cited Nurmagomedov as saying. In his op-ed on the importance of supporting PILOT funding in Connecticut (Why PILOT Doesnt Fly Right, Dec. 10), Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim correctly points out that cities play a vital role in anchoring and supporting neighboring communities, attracting new residents and employers to the region and offering a variety of important services, institutions, vibrant city centers and the arts. Many of these organizations and entities are tax-free, reflecting their overall value to city residents and surrounding towns. Granting property tax exemptions to qualifying nonprofits, including higher education, has been around longer than the U.S. Constitution. This practice is based on British tax models that recognized the value these entities provide, and their role in enhancing education, health and the general welfare of each state. But this lost revenue leaves gaps in local budgets, and those gaps are causing pains as municipalities struggle with dwindling state resources, decreasing property tax revenues and increased expenses. At the same time, neighboring municipalities utilize and benefit from these not-for-profit organizations. It is an unjust skewing of the burden to municipalities that welcome hospital, colleges and justice facilities. To its credit, Connecticut is ahead of the national curve when it comes to a valuable policy designed to help compensate municipalities for revenue lost to tax-exempt organizations such as colleges and universities, nonprofit hospitals and cultural organizations. This compensation was supposed to lessen tension between cities and their tax-exempt stakeholders and help them focus, instead, on the many symbiotic educational outreach, recreation, service and arts programs they share with their local communities. Called Connecticuts Payment in Lieu of Taxes program, or PILOT, it is one of a handful in the nation. Few states besides Connecticut offer payment to towns for the revenue that would have otherwise come in from tax-exempt institutions. PILOT statutory changes in 2015 created new tiered payment schedules commensurate to the share of PILOT-eligible property on a citys grand list and how that share compares to the share of such property in other municipalities. Under current law, the grants must be proportionately reduced if the states annual appropriation is not enough to fully fund them. And that is where Mayor Ganims ire is justifiably focused. As the state struggles with an onerous budget deficit and lower tax revenue, it has not met its PILOT obligations to local cities. Ganim points out that PILOT reimbursements have been plummeting over the last 10 years, and he is encouraging Gov.-elect Ned Lamont to work with the Legislature to more fully fund PILOT revenue to municipalities like Bridgeport and other cities facing financial upheaval and service challenges. Smaller, more affluent contiguous communities, he stresses, reap significant value from these services and amenities while the cities unfairly bear the brunt of the cost. Connecticuts PILOT program acknowledges that colleges, universities and hospitals benefit everyone residing in our state, culturally and economically. Now, as a new administration takes its seats in Hartford, it is essential that our leaders look at every possible opportunity to stem the migration of workers, students and employers out of Connecticut to other states where job growth, innovation, quality-of-life attractions and thriving cities are dwarfing our states efforts and tapping our traditional strengths. While campaigning, Lamont spoke to the importance of bringing back or creating new jobs, attacking high taxes and addressing rising cost-of-living issues, all important issues for Connecticut residents and voters. He also recognized that our states private and public colleges and universities play a vital role in fueling Connecticuts economy and future prosperity, and that we are essential educators, employers and active community partners. He has indicated support for funding the PILOT program. Tax-exempt status for institutions of higher education and hospitals provides necessary and important support that helps us effectively pursue our basic mission of teaching, research and service. Members of the flora and fauna crowd who want nothing to interfere with their Elysian fields homesteads are inappropriate and selfish. We join Mayor Ganim in imploring the governor and General Assembly to ensure statutory funding of PILOT and remind legislators looking for quick fixes not to undermine tax-exempt protections that help preserve these vital pillars of Connecticuts economic stability and future growth. These institutions are for the entire population, the credibility of Connecticut and its prosperity. John J. Petillo is president of Sacred Heart University. Its time to round up the news medias Person, Lie, Quote, Word and Correction of the Year. Time magazine named four journalists and a newspaper staff as a collective Person of the Year. Time called them guardians in the war for truth. As a former news hound myself, I was glad to see journalists honored. One Time cover shows Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi dissident who was killed and dismembered in Turkey by a squad connected to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Khashoggi had criticized Saudi Arabias regime in opinion pieces carried by The Washington Post and other outlets. A second cover shows a Philippine journalist arrested on charges of tax evasion. Her online news service had been critical of Philippines President Rodrigo Dutertes government. A third cover shows two Reuters reporters who were imprisoned in Myanmar. They had been investigating the mass killing of Rohingya Muslims by security police in the predominantly Buddhist country. A fourth cover shows staffers of the Capital Gazette newspapers in Annapolis, Md., where four journalists and a sales assistant were shot to death in June. The survivors managed to put out an issue of The Capital the next day. Charged with murder was a man who held a grudge against the newspaper for reporting his guilty plea to criminal harassment. Unlike the others recognized by Time as guardians, these journalists were not targeted by a government force. Lie of the Year? PolitiFact.com picked the stream of falsehoods posted on the internet after the February shooting at a Parkland, Fla., high school, in which 17 students and staff members were killed. Baseless claims were made about students who survived and became anti-gun activists. One student was said to be an actor from California. Another was said to have ties to Cuba. Quote of the Year? Fred Shapiro, associate director of the Yale Law School library, picked truth isnt truth. It was said in August by Rudy Giuliani on NBCs Meet the Press. Giuliani, President Donald Trumps personal attorney, was asked by host Chuck Todd whether Trump should testify in special counsel Robert Muellers investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Giuliani said testimony is somebodys version of the truth, not the truth. Todd said, Truth is truth. Giuliani responded: No, it isnt truth. Truth isnt truth Word of the Year? Oxford Dictionaries picked toxic. It means poisonous. This year more than ever, people have been using toxic to describe a vast array of things, situations, concerns and events, said the British publisher. Correction of the Year? CJR.org, the website of the Columbia Journalism Review, liked this one published in November by The Wall Street Journal: Vladimir Putin is president of Russia. An editing mistake erroneously identified him as Vladimir Trump. Paul Janensch, of Bridgeport, was a newspaper editor and taught journalism at Quinnipiac University. E-mail: paul.janensch@quinnipiac.edu. As NAFCU continues to pursue an exemption for credit unions from the Financial Accounting Standards Boards (FASB) current expected credit loss (CECL) standard, the association will monitor two meetings today for updates on possible guidance or relief. NAFCU will monitor FASBs board meeting today, slated to begin at 8 a.m. Eastern. On the boards agenda is a discussion on issues related to the standards implementation. NAFCU has devoted considerable time and resources to educate credit unions on CECL requirements, and to share the industrys concerns with FASB. The association has also shared concerns with lawmakers, the NCUA and Federal Reserve, and has worked to obtain certain changes and more guidance on the standard. During a House Financial Services subcommittee hearing last week focused on CECLs impact on financial institutions, witnesses noted that larger financial institutions are having trouble preparing for this standard and said smaller financial institutions especially those focused on small-business lending and other services typically offered by smaller institutions will have an especially difficult time complying with CECL. Leader of Frances far-right party 'National Rally' Marine Le Pen plans to attend the Yalta International Economic Forum due to be held in April 2019, Co-Chairman of the YIEF Organizing Committee Andrei Nazarov said after meeting her in Paris. "We received confirmation that Marine Le Pen is planning to take part in the April 19 plenary meeting in Yalta," Nazarov said. He added that Louis Aliot, Vice President of the National Rally, will also attend the forum, which "will enable us to discuss many issues here in Crimea." The official noted that the discussion will focus on economy and politics, and the issue of "the Russian Crimea." "The fact that the National Rally recognizes Crimea as part of Russia is very important as the current double standard policy in the world misleads many people," TASS cited Nazarov as saying. The organizers expect that some 50 French politicians and entrepreneurs will take part in the forum. The Fifth Yalta International Economic Forum will be held in Crimea on April 17-21, 2019. The French delegation is expected to become the forums honorary guest. Dr. Oz's U.S. Senate in Pa. What to know about him and where he lives We will likely no longer have the Ministry of Diaspora in the structure of the new government, Acting Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan said during the meeting with young entrepreneurs on December 19, News.am reported. Now we are at the stage of discussions. Our most important task is to achieve a more effective level of governance, including in relations with the diaspora. Yes, it is likely that there will not be a Ministry of Diaspora in the structure of the new Government of Armenia. But this does not mean that we will not be able to make these ties effective with the help of other structures, Pashinyan said. Russian President Vladimir Putin is expected to answer questions about the economic situation, international and regional problems at the annual news conference tomorrow, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. "As for topics, certainly, this is the countrys economy and our economy amid rather unfavorable international environment," he pointed out. The Kremlin spokesman stressed that the international environment has become "aggressive and hostile." "This refers not only to Russia, but the entire system of world economy, trade and economic relations is changing. However, experts cannot say where this transformation will lead to. The views are totally opposite," TASS cited him as saying. Peskov said that Putin will also field questions on Russias relations with the United States. He added that after the news conference, a number of issues and the discussion on the solutions to them are usually included in the presidents decrees. A campaign to raise awareness of Ebola has left social media users baffled, after bloggers posed for gruesome selfies with make-up that made they look bruised and bleeding. Instagram influencer Kristine Verheyden from Belgium, for instance, shared two images with her 15,200 followers including one alarming snap where it looked as if her eyes were bleeding. The pictures were part of a campaign by Doctors Without Borders Netherlands (Artsen Zonder Grenzen) called 'Face it' to draw attention to life-threatening illnesses. However, some have called the images 'inappropriate' and 'strange', including a nurse for Medecins Sans Frontiers who accused the organisation of 'stigmatising' Ebloa patients and treating them as 'objects of horror'. Another concerned commenter said it looked as if influencers were 'ridiculing' sufferers. As part of the Doctors without Borders campaign social media influencers including Belgian blogger Kristine Verheyden are sharing harrowing selfies with bloodied and bruised faces and eyes to resemble the symptoms of Ebola The campaign, featuring influencers such as Kristine, is to raise awareness of Ebola and to encourage people to donate to Doctors Without Borders Netherlands to fight the outbreak of the condition Kristine Verheyden initially alarmed her followers when she posted the bizarre selfies. 'What's going on??' 'I was really shocked about this,' 'what's wroooong??' commented some visibly shaken fans. Verheyden eventually revealed the truth: 'I have participated in a campaign for @artsenzondergrenzen and for that we have infected the Internet with Ebola, to make you aware About these horrific diseases, that @artsenzondergrenzen fight against every day, are real !!' Dutch actress Eva van de Wijdeven, presenter Nellie Benner and makeup guru Mascha Feoktistova also took part in the campaign. Former Newcastle Falcons rugby player Jay Jay Boske from Utrecht, shared an image of himself with bloodshot eyes and painful looking lesions on his face, created by make-up Radio host Barry Paf from The Netherlands posted this smiling selfie with bloody make-up to remind people Ebola is still rife in various countries All participants called for people to donate money to Doctors Without Borders Netherlands in order to help fight Ebola outbreaks around the world. However, their social media stunt divided Instagram users with one writing on Mascha's post: 'What a very strange way to spread "awareness" of Ebola. 'By smearing some make-up on your face and then making a smiling selfie, it is more like pretending to ridicule the problem. Not to mention the remark "this is how I would look with Ebola" in the photo. Come on. The campaign imagery has been blasted by some members of the public who thought that posts by influencers such as blogger Mascha Feoktistova seemed to be 'ridiculing' the problem Blogger Mascha Feoktistova posed in front of the mirror with the fake blood, contact lenses and darkened make up around the eye area for the campaign 'As an MSF nurse working in DRC now, I am very concerned seeing this Ebola awareness campaign,' another wrote. 'I know the intent was very good and trying to help, yet these images are very inappropriate and stigmatising to our patients with Ebola. 'We need to treat our patients with dignity and not treat them as objects of horror,' reads one comment on the Artsen Zonder Grenzen's Instagram page. The campaign has come under fire from medical staff with some branding posts, such as this one by presenter and actress Nellie Benner from The Netherlands, insensitive Medical staff are 'very concerned' by the campaign which has taken the social media world by storm Some seemed to be under the impression that the selfies aimed to raise awareness about domestic violence rather than Ebola. Others followers completely missed the mark and complimented the influencers on their beauty. Ebola symptoms are diverse and unforgiving. They go from fevers and severe headaches to abdominal pain, vomiting and unexplained bleeding and bruising (as depicted in the pictures). Right now the Democratic Republic of Congo is going through its worst outbreak. 25 cases have been reported in the last few weeks and the virus is reported to have reached on of the country's biggest cities, Butembo. Miss USA Sarah Rose Summers publicly apologised after mocking two Miss Universe contestants' poor English skills in an Instagram Live session. The contestant, who made it to the semi-finals of the pageant in Thailand last Wednesday, said she never intended to insult Miss Cambodia or Miss Vietnam. And now Miss Universe Australia 2015, Monika Radulovic, who is now the HIVITA Health and Beauty Ambassador, has weighed in on the saga, telling FEMAIL that the pageant is 'not the right place' for such comments. 'It wasn't the right place for such comments': Former Miss Universe Australia Monika Radulovic [left], 28, weighed in on Miss USA's [right], 24, mocking of her rivals ability to speak English 'I don't know her intentions but I hope her intentions were good,' Monika, 28, told FEMAIL. 'I don't know if she said it in that [negative] way intentionally, but I don't think it was the right place to ever say something like that,' the psychology graduate added. During the Miss Universe 2018 pageant, Miss USA's Sarah Rose Summers, 24, poked fun at Miss Vietnam and Miss Cambodia on social media for not being able to speak English. Sarah appeared in an Instagram Live video on Miss Colombia Valeria Morales' account along with Miss Australia Francesca Hung. 'I don't know if she said it in that [negative] way intentionally, but I don't think it was the right place to ever say something like that,' Monika (pictured) told FEMAIL Sarah said Miss Vietnam's H'Hen Nie 'pretends to know so much English' before adding that she feels bad for Miss Cambodia, Rern Sinat, who 'doesn't speak any English and not a single other person speaks her language.' After the comments went viral, Sarah posted an apology on Instagram, saying she did not 'intend to hurt' her fellow competitors. Despite Sarah's catty remarks, Monika told FEMAIL that her experience backstage at Miss Universe 2015 was 'incredibly friendly'. 'It's actually really nice backstage. For at least my experience the girls were very friendly, and there was no cattiness,' she said. During the Miss Universe 2018 pageant, Miss USA poked fun at Miss Vietnam, H'Hen Nie, [left] and Miss Cambodia, Rern Sinat, [right] on social media for not being able to speak English Monika went on to reveal how most of her time backstage was spent sitting in the makeup chair for up to 'three hours plus'. 'You would be surprised to hear how long it actually takes to get ready. None of the girls even look like themselves,' she explained. 'The call time could be anywhere from six hours before show time, just to make sure everyone is ready on time. And then the actual sitting in the hair and makeup chair would be around three hours plus.' Moscow hopes that the new Armenian leadership will find courage to resists US blackmail and will make decisions independently, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin said in an interview with Sputnik, UrduPoint reported. In late October, US National Security Adviser John Bolton held a visit to the Armenian capital of Yerevan. In his address to journalists, Bolton said, commenting on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, that Washington would continue supporting a peaceful resolution to the conflict, stressing that Armenia should not be dependent on "one major power", given that US equipment was "better that the Russian anyway." "Against the backdrop of radical changes in the country, which happened this year, Washington's meddling into its internal and external political affairs becomes more and more unceremonious . .. We hope that the current Armenian leadership ... will find courage to resist unconcealed external blackmail and pressure, and will defend its sovereign right to make decisions independently, in line with national interests," Karasin said. He slammed Bolton for qualifying Armenian experience as "historical cliches" and calling on Yerevanto immediately join Iran sanctions and start buying US weapons. "If this is the public side of the US-Armenian relations, then one can only imagine the arm-twisting that happens behind the scenes," Karasin said. An eye cream that promises to mimic the effects of Botox has been revealed as the most Googled beauty product of 2018. French brand, Filorga's Time-Filler Eyes eye cream had more searches than cult brands such as GHD straighteners, Huda Beauty, as well as Urban Decay and Fenty Beauty cosmetics this past year. The company, which was founded in 1978, creates products that promise similar anti-ageing effects to injectibles have in an at-home formula. The 47 product came to the fore when Marks & Spencer's included its beauty advent calendar, prompting searches to soar in the past few months and the retailer to sell out. Skincare products have proved to dominate Google search over the last year, which makes it no surprise the most popular item is an eye cream Filorga's Time-Filler Eyes has been ranked the number one beauty and skincare product of 2018 as it has been most searched for The highly coveted item, which contains 'Botox-like active ingredients' targets three main issues people want to address; wrinkles, eyelids and lashes, as well as under-eye hollows and dark circles.' It contains wonder ingredient Hyaluronic Acid, which helps the skin retain its natural moisturise and promotes the production of new cells. Tripeptide works to stimulate collagen production, which can plump up wrinkled skin. The formula, which costs $59 from Nordstrom in the U.S., acts to plump hollow areas to help reduce the appearance of dark eye bags, the active ingredients act to firm the area around the socket. What's in Filorga's Time-Filler Eyes cream? Hyaluronic Acid: Holds in moisture and stimulates the skin to repair cells. Tripeptide: Amino acids that help stimulate collagen production to lift and plump up tired or wrinkled skin. Advertisement Meanwhile, a lifting complex helps to volumise lashes to give the appearance of looking wide-eyed. Only a few drops of the Filorga product should be applied around the eyes contour, as well as upper eyelid and root of the eyelashes every morning and evening. The product has received numerous five star reviews online. One customer raved about the item on Feel Unique website, which stocks the item: 'Filorga is one of the best brands I have ever used as far as moisturisers go. 'It actually does improve the texture and quality of the skin, both eye cream and face cream, smoothes fine lines and wrinkles and the eye cream also does a very good job conditioning the lashes thereby enhancing any mascara used.' The product has received numerous five star reviews online and has sold out at M&S after it was included in the retailer's beauty advent calendar A second wrote: 'At the moment this is my favourite eye cream. Even my upper eyelids started showing promising changes in a very short time. 'I like the texture and it applies easily, not much is needed. I'm glad I purchased it. My skin is very very sensitive, no issues with this cream.' Although Filorga's Time-Filler Eyes has sold out at M&S, it is still available to purchase from Feel Unique, Debenhams, Look Fantastic and Amazon. Solvej Swings has Kourtney Kardashian's seal of approval. The small family-owned company, way out in Matiere in country New Zealand, has experienced a surge in sales for their $220 AU, non-plastic, baby and toddler swing. It comes after the eldest of the reality TV clan recommended the product in her holiday gift guide. Kardashian approved! Kourtney, 39, has created a HUGE demand for a $220 wooden swing, produced by a small family-owned business in New Zealand Kourtney's recommendation has not only increased sales, but allowed the family-owned company to now outsource. 'In the beginning we did everything ourselves, and now we have come to the stage where we can start to employ people,' owner Thomas Mortimer told New Zealand's News Now. 'They can do all the sewing, woodwork and everything and we can just start to manage this thing,' he added. It's a huge win for the company who produce the swings in an old bank, in Matiere, in country New Zealand. Gift guide: The eldest of the reality TV clan recommended the product, a $220 AU, non-plastic, baby and toddler swing, in her holiday gift guide Kardashian effect: Owner Thomas Mortimer (right) told New Zealand's News Now that Kourtney's recommendation has allowed the company to now outsource What sets the brand apart is their craftsmanship and product materials. Each swing is sourced from local timber, cut to size in the town's old butcher's shop, and designed with rot proof canvas, yachting braid, stainless steel fittings and non-toxic paint. The swings, which offer a nine-year guarantee, can easily be packed down for storage, and are available in seven colours. Seamstress for the brand Liz Dufty told New Zealand's News Now that it comes as no surprise the Kardashians would endorse the brand, as the family 'loves quality'. So for Solvej Swings, who retail in Australia, Europe and Asia, one question remains: next stop Tinseltown? Since she became the Duchess of Sussex earlier this year, Meghan Markle has wowed the fashion world with her impeccable style - while also offering insight into her personality through her choice of meaningful, thought-out designs. As was the case when the pregnant duchess stepped out on Tuesday for a visit to the Royal Variety nursing home, wearing a chic bump-enhancing ensemble, which she accessorized with small, but incredibly, meaningful ring that offers the wearer protection, happiness, luck, health, and good fortune. The 14KT rose gold design, which was created by Turkish brand Kismet by Milka and retails for 250 ($440 AUD/$300 US) features a hamsa - an ancient symbol that is made up of an open hand with an eye embedded in the palm. The pregnant Meghan (pictured) has made a name for herself with outfits that are both fashionable and laced with meaning; her latest is no exception Meghan opted for a ring with an hamsa on it (pictured on her right hand), which is imbued with meaning and said to bring its owner happiness, luck, health and good fortune In the case of Meghan's ring, the eye features a delicate sapphire at its centre. '[The ring] has an evil eye ring to repel negativity - yes!' one Twitter user commented of the ring. '[The ring] has an evil eye ring to repel negativity - yes!' one Twitter user commented 'A ring of protection, very sweet!,' another added. A further user wrote that it is there to symbolise 'protection from the evil eye'. The hamsa is an ancient Middle Eastern amulet symbolising the Hand of God, and is traditionally recognised in many cultures as a sign of protection. It is also seen in some religions as a symbol of health, happiness, peace, and prosperity. This choice of accessory is all the more pertinent, given the swell of stories surrounding Meghan's continued estrangement from her father, and her and Prince Harry's recent Christmas card choice. Speaking to Daily Mail Australia about her line, Milka explained that she first started designing jewellery at the age of just seven years old. She hand-crafted an assemblage of unique pieces and sold them in Turkey. This choice of accessory is all the more pertinent, given the swell of stories surrounding Meghan's continued estrangement from her father and she and Prince Harry's recent Christmas card choice Several years later, world-renowned stars have graced the red carpet wearing her designs: 'I had a dream and I made it come true with hard work. Seeing Madonna and Beyonce wear my designs, it is amazing to see strong women doing that - and that's what I want, to empower strong women,' she told FEMAIL. Of course, this isn't the first time that the 37-year-old Meghan has made a point with her fashion. As far back as September 2017, Meghan made headlines when she donned a 'Husband' named shirt by friend Misha Nonoo when she and Harry made their first joint public appearance at the Invictus Games in Toronto in September 2017 - pre-empting their wedding eight months later. Again in Sydney earlier this year, less than 24 hours after announcing her pregnancy, the mother-to-be stepped out in a beautiful white dress by the Australian designer Karen Gee. The dress was titled the 'Blessed' style. While travelling in New Zealand, the royal kept her feet dry in a pair of aptly named 'Reign' boots by the Muck Boot Company. This isn't the first time Meghan has made a point with her clothing: She kept her feet dry in New Zealand with aptly named 'Reign' boots by the Muck Boot Company (left) and in Sydney earlier this year, she wore the 'Blessed' dress by Australian designer Karen Gee style (right), less than 24 hours after announcing her pregnancy In September 2017, Meghan made headlines when she wore the 'Husband' shirt by friend Misha Nonoo while making her first public appearance with Prince Harry Meghan has also been known to have a wardrobe that echoes her humanitarian values; these Outland jeans are made from ethically and environmentally sound raw materials Image consultant and celebrity stylist Ceril Campbell recently claimed that Meghan's wardrobe conceals an 'underlying message' that 'subtly' promotes her values as a humanitarian and advocate for female empowerment. She explained: 'There is an always an underlying message on every single thing she wears, which gives her values and her messages out to the public; which is all about saving the planet being green empowering women but subtly.' This includes her Rothy's ballet pumps that are made from recycled plastic water bottles, as well as her Outland Denim black jeans worn on the trip to Australia. The founder of Outland Denim launched the brand after a chance encounter with an anti-trafficking group inspired him to open up a factory in Cambodia to offer job opportunities for young women from remote villages. The fashion brand also says it sources the most ethically and environmentally sound raw materials, from organic cotton pocket linings to recycled packaging. A royal expert has revealed that the Duchess of Sussex is facing something of a public backlash because she's putting herself out on a limb by trying to modernise the monarchy. Royal biographer Claudia Joseph appeared on the Victoria Derbyshire programme on BBC Two to discuss the public reaction to the pregnant Duchess, and claimed that Kate Middleton received less of a backlash when she joined the royal family due to her 'quiet nature'. Speaking alongside fashion designer Amal Fashanu and journalism professor Suzanneh Franks, the panel dissected just why Meghan, 37, is subject to negative rumours that she's been rude to staff and cut off friends who are no longer useful. While Amal argued that her race and background have seen her being treated differently to Kate, Suzanneh claimed that her more vigorous approach to the role of Duchess is the reason she's courted more controversy. Royal biographer Claudia Joseph has revealed that the public are pleased Meghan, pictured at Brinsworth House in London, is trying to modernise the royal family, but warned that royalists may be concerned she's moving too fast Agreeing with Suzanneh, biographer Claudia said: 'The reality is that Kate is a very different person. 'She's very quiet, she's not trying to change the Royal family, she's not trying to do anything differently, she's like William. 'She doesn't like the publicity, she doesn't like to be in the public eye. She has been in the press, there have been lots of stories about her over time. 'Not so quickly perhaps, but she's not breaking the rules in the same way as Meghan. 'The reality is people admire Meghan because she's trying to bring the Royal family into the 21st century.' Claudia claimed that Kate Middleton received less of a backlash when she joined the royal family due to her 'quiet and less involved nature', adding: she's not trying to change the Royal family, she's not trying to do anything differently, she's like William Meghan, seen in June with the Queen, has long been vocal of her stance on feminism, politics and human rights, as well as reportedly being responsible for Harry skipping the royal annual Christmas shoot, due to the duchess being an avid animal lover Meghan has long been vocal of her stance on feminism, politics and human rights, as well as reportedly being responsible for Harry skipping the royal annual Christmas shoot, due to the duchess being an avid animal lover. Last month it was revealed Harry and Meghan would be moving out of their Kensington Palace cottage to the grounds of Windsor, to avoid their first child- due in spring 2019, growing up 'in a goldfish bowl'. However behind the scenes reports claimed the move could be due to a rift between the Cambridges and the Sussexes, who are due to join the other senior royals to spend Christmas with the Queen at her Sandringham country residence in eastern England next week. Royal biographer Claudia Joseph (seen second right) appeared on the Victoria Derbyshire programme on BBC Two on Tuesday, speaking alongside fashion designer Amal Fashanu and journalism professor Suzanneh Franks, on why Meghan, 37, has fascinated the nation Claudia claimed that Meghan's more vigorous approach to the role of duchess is the reason she has courted more controversy than 'quiet' Kate who doesn't appear to get as involved Additionally Meghan has had to endure regular public outbursts from her half sister Samantha Markle, and her father Thomas. On Monday, Thomas directly appealed on television to Queen Elizabeth to intercede and end his estrangement from his daughter whom he has not seen since he missed her wedding in May to Harry, Elizabeth's grandson. And while Meghan has maintained a dignified silence amid his regular demands, experts have claimed she may have an easier life if she does the same when it comes to royal matters. At the beginning of the month Tom Bower, unauthorised biographer of Prince Charles, spoke out about her passionate nature, appearing on Good Morning Britain. Comparing her to Harry's late mother, he claimed: 'The problem is in my view that she is trying to be Diana. 'She's trying to adopt the new role, and the tragedy of the story is it'll end in the same way unless someone steps in from the Palace and says "look this is the way it's done here".' Lorraine Kelly has leapt to the defense of the Duchess of Sussex for her supposedly 'demanding' behaviour, saying she relates to some of her ways. It was recently reported that pregnant Meghan, 37, had been emailing staff at 5am with requests, and she's said to start her day as early as 4:30am. Speaking on her ITV chat show, Lorraine, who has gotten up early for years to host breakfast television, argued that Meghan wasn't being a diva, but is just being 'organised'. 'I'm there with you, Meghan!' the 59-year-old said. 'If she's writing emails at five it's because she's up doing her yoga, isn't it? She does all that.' Lorraine Kelly (pictured on her ITV chat show on Wednesday) has said Meghan Markle is 'organised' and a fellow early riser like her after reports that the royal is 'demanding' It was recently reported that the Duchess of Sussex. had been emailing staff at 5am with requests and she is said to start her day at 4:30am. Pictured: Meghan at the Royal Variety Charity's Brinsworth House in Twickenham yesterday According to the Mail on Sunday, Meghan sends six or seven texts a day to palace aides containing ideas and requests, as well as very early morning emails. Lorraine said Meghan was just contacting staff to be helpful as she wanted to put her all into being a duchess. And the TV presenter, who hosted breakfast shows including GMTV and Daybreak, said she sympathises with Meghan's early starts. 'I hear you, Meghan. I'm there with you, love,' she continued. Report claim that Prince Harry, 34, and Meghan have not endeared themselves to royal household staff with their somewhat 'dictatorial' behaviour. Pictured: Harry (left) and Meghan (right) during a visit to Abel Tasman National Park in New Zealand in October Lorraine (middle) presenting on GMTV in 1993 with Michael Wilson (left) and Eamonn Holmes (right) 'Just because she's doing it they don't have to answer them at five. She's getting workouts out of the way I actually think that's quite organised.' She added: 'I think she wants to do the best job that she can.' There have been reports that Prince Harry, 34, and Meghan have not endeared themselves to royal household staff with their somewhat 'dictatorial' behaviour. Lorraine said Meghan was just contacting staff to be helpful as she wanted to 'do her best'. Pictured: Meghan at the Royal Variety Charity's Brinsworth House in Twickenham yesterday The Mail reported that Meghan had wanted air fresheners for the musty odour of St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle. Recently he Sunday Mirror claimed that Meghan's personal assistant Melissa Toubati resigned after just six months, having broken down in tears over the stress of her job. A source familiar with the 39-year-old Frenchwoman's time working for the Duchess of Sussex told the newspaper: 'Her job was highly pressurised and in the end it became too much. 'She put up with quite a lot. Meghan put a lot of demands on her and it ended up with her in tears.' MasterChef The Professionals judge Monica Galetti has hit back at critics of the show for featuring an all white, male final, saying it's 'insulting' to her. The BBC Two cookery show has been slammed by viewers on social media in recent weeks over its perceived lack of diversity. It is the fourth time in six years that all the finalists have been white men on the cookery show. However, judge Monica Galetti issued a scathing response on Twitter to the criticism, telling one viewer they needed to 'check themselves' before making 's*** up'. Scroll down for video Top chef Monica Galetti issued a strongly worded response to a critic who had suggested that MasterChef The Professionals isn't diverse enough; the show features an all white male final for the fourth time in six years in 2018 Last night's show saw the four remaining contestants - from 48 at the show's beginning - praised for their skills After user @jok4p wrote: 'It's really rather hard not to point out how the masterchef finalists are all men...White men! #racist #sexist' Respected chef Galetti, 43, fired back: 'Are you referring to me in this tweet? As one of the Chef judges on Mastercheftheprofessionals that is coloured and a woman I find this insulting. 'Check yourself... and maybe use your voice to stand up for something that really needs it, not making up s*** that isnt true.' The row continued as @jok4p turned her attentions to the equality issue, asking Galetti, who was born in Samoa and owns a restaurant in London's Soho: 'Hi Monica, you just suggested I should "check myself" and use my voice for other stuff so thanks 4 assuming all these nice things about me. 'The argument is exactly the same as the one with the Oscars 2 years ago. I hope you understand how I came to point out the very obvious. Good day.' 'Are you referring to me?' Monica Galetti responded that she was insulted by the tweet about diversity and equality Last night's episode of the show saw the remaining four finalists facing the Chef's Table challenge, in which some of the world's best chefs gather to dine...with the finalists providing the food Clearly upset, Galetti hit back again, saying: 'You are one bitter lady. For the record Im not paid by BBC. Equal pay is where we are at & having same agent as a co presenter makes sure of this. 'Please stop now...I have better things to do and you have such negative energy its like spreading poison. I hope you find peace.' The build-up to the final has been marred by accusations from viewers that the show frequently features an all white male line-up in the final of the competition. Since the show began ten years ago in 2008, just two women have won MasterChef the Professionals, Claire Lara in 2010 and Keri Moss, who was awarded the title jointly with fellow contestant Anton Piotrowski, in 2012. However, the programme's makers have defended the show saying all the chefs progressed only on merit. Speaking about last week's semi-final, a MasterChef the Professionals spokesperson said: 'The final eight chefs in last nights line-up was diverse, and as fans of the show will know the chefs who cook the best dishes on the day go through to the next round.' Last night's final saw just four chefs remain from the original 48 - as they cooked for the industry's top chefs during the Chef's Table challenge. Sat around the dining table eating their food were some of the nation's finest gourmands including Atul Kochhar, Nigel Haworth and Michael Caines. Princess Charlotte is taking weekly ballet lessons, just like older brother Prince George, it has been revealed. Charlotte, three, has started attending a dance school in south London, according to sources. The youngster was no doubt inspired when she visited rehearsals of The Nutcracker with mother Kate, 36, earlier this month. A love of dancing clearly runs in the family, with George, five, understood to also be having ballet lessons at his school, Thomas's Battersea. Princess Charlotte (pictured at Princess Eugenie's wedding in October) is taking weekly ballet lessons at a south London dance school, it has been revealed According to People, Charlotte has been taking private ballet lessons every week for several months. Prince William has previously revealed that both his elder children George and Charlotte 'love dancing'. Meanwhile, Kate has been spotted at The Nutcracker at the Royal Opera House in previous years, including a recent visit to rehearsals with Charlotte. Social media photos emerged showing the pair in the auditorium, following a sneak-peak appearance earlier this month. Princes George, five, (pictured in Canada in 2016) is understood to also be having ballet lessons as part of the curriculum at his school, Thomas's Battersea Kate looked perfectly polished in a fitted black turtleneck and what appeared to be a grey tartan skirt. Meanwhile, young Charlotte was dressed in a pretty white dress with delicate puff sleeves. Both Charlotte and George have followed in the footsteps of their late grandmother Princess Diana, who was known to have fondness for dancing. As well as taking ballet lessons, Charlotte may have got her first taste of performing on the stage at her nursery's nativity play. Willcocks Nursery School in Kensington - where the youngster has been enrolled since January - put on their traditional festive play earlier this month, but it is not clear if the royal had a part in the production. Kate, 36, brought her three-year-old daughter Charlotte along to watch a rehearsal of the Royal Ballet's production of The Nutcracker at the Royal Opera House, in London, earlier this month. Pictured, the Duchess with Charlotte in Poland in July 2017 Twitter users have shared their hilarious reaction to watching Home Alone as adults. The conversation was kicked off by Sian Welby, a Heart FM DJ from London, who revealed she had watched the nineties Christmas favourite this week, but was left stunned by some of the stunts. Taking to Twitter , Sian, 32, admitted her 'very adult' concerns on seeing it again, confessing that she now sympathised with the burglars and even worried that they could have been killed. And her sentiment was shared by dozens of users online, who revealed they felt similarly upon watching the film as adults. Some were left pondering the medical bills and the cost of redecorating the McCallister family home, while others said they felt Kevin should be taken into care. Twitter users shared their hilarious reaction to watching Home Alone as adults, after British DJ Sian Welby, 32, pointed out her very 'grown-up' concerns on seeing the 1990 flick this week British fans revealed they had watched the nineties Christmas favourite this week, but were left stunned by some of the stunts including the medical bills Taking to Twitter in a post that racked up over a thousand likes, Sian wrote: 'You know you're officially an adult when you watch Home Alone and actualy feel sorry for the burglars and find yourself wincing like 'ooosh that iron could have killed him!'. And dozens of followers agreed, worrying about the injuries caused to the burglars breaking into eight-year-old Kevin's home, after he was left home alone at Christmas. One user admitted: 'That happened to me just this week. I laughed as a kid, but winced as an adult thinking about the doctor visit costs and long-term injuries. I would have left after the ice stairs incident.' Another concerned follower added: 'When Harry stood on that nail on the stairs - always makes me wince'. Followers revealed their feelings on seeing the film as adults- with some pondering the medical bills and others revealing that their thoughts had strayed to how they would decorate the McCallister family home And admitting they were overwhelmed with concerns while watching the film recently, one said: 'I watched Home Alone 2 last weekend with my nieces and I think I've properly s*** the 6 year old one up with my constant concerns of 'that would KILL him' 'he would be DEAD already!' 'That would've burnt him TO DEATH'!'. (sic) 'First time my kids watched it and felt the need to keep repeating to them 'that would actually kill someone', another said. Worrying that overdue medical bills may have been the reason the burglars resorted to crime, another pondered: 'Imagine if healthcare costs were why they resorted to stealing in the first place'. And referring to the gold-toothed burglar Harry Lime, played by actor Joe Pesci, a sympathiser added: Maybe to pay off Harrys dental bill?'. Dozens of followers worried about the injuries caused the the burglars breaking into eight-year-old Kevin's home, after he was left home alone at Christmas Elsewhere the important question of how Kevin's dad could afford such a huge house came back up, after a similar conversation went viral earlier in the month. One follower tweeted: 'Things I wonder about: What did Mr McCallister do for a living? How much is that huge house? Why did Old Man Marley appear so menacing in that store? Thing that now shock me: When Harry & Marv say all those threats to an 8 year old boy'. And sharing their very adult worries, another admitted: 'You know when you are an adult when you watch home alone when you go 'I wonder what the mortgage would be for a house that big'. Following up on the fascination with the McCallister's mansion, based in the Chicago suburb of Winnetka, another tweeted: 'I googled it and the house sold for $1.58M in 2011. An interiors fan added: 'I like to look at the house and think how is update the colour schemes, but keep the layout. Though, maybe remodel the kitchen to make it more spacious and lighter.' Elsewhere the important question of how Kevin's dad could afford such a huge house came back up, after a similar conversation went viral earlier in the month Meanwhile others watching the film through fresh eyes questioned how realistic the stunts were, adding: 'When you actually realised some of those 'stunts' wouldn't actually work scientifically'. Dissecting the scene which sees Kevin fly down the stairs and make it out of the house in one piece, another said: 'Used to worship that movie, then made the mistake of studying physics. At that angle, he doesn't make it out the door alive.' Agreeing, another suggested: 'Given he flies out the door perfectly straight, in addition to a left turn, he must make a quick adjustment to the right. 'Taking Macaulay Culkins apparently superior reaction speed into account, I fear he could have had a more lucrative career as a race car driver.' Advertisement The Duchess of Cambridge and the Duchess of Sussex attended their first formal engagement together since rumours of a rift first emerged. Kate, 36, and Meghan, 37, joined husbands Prince William, 36, and Prince Harry, 34, and other members of the royal family for the Queen's traditional Christmas lunch at Buckingham Palace. The outing comes amid continued speculation over the state of relations between the two couples, with a flurry of reports in recent weeks hinting at tension both between Meghan and Kate - and William and Harry. Prince Andrew, 58, Princess Anne, 68, and their father the Duke of Edinburgh, 97, were among the first to arrive for the family gathering today, followed shortly afterwards by the Countess of Wessex, 53, and her daughter Lady Louise Windsor, 15. Princess Beatrice, 30, was also, although her sister Princess Eugenie and brother-in-law Jack Brooksbank have not yet been seen. Peter Phillips, 41, and his wife Autumn, travelled separately, with six-year-old daughter Isla spotted in the back of his car. Prince George, five, and Princess Charlotte, three, were accompanied by their nanny in the backseat of their parents' car, while their Grandfather Prince Charles, 70, appeared without his wife the Duchess of Cornwall, who is sick with a heavy cold. Family outing: The Duchess of Cambridge and the Duchess of Sussex are attending their first joint formal engagement since rumours of a rift first emerged. Pictured, Kate arriving with her husband Prince William, their son Prince George, five, and the nanny. Three-year-old Princess Charlotte joined her big brother in the back seat Bringing the glamour: The Duke and Duchess of Sussex drove their own car into the palace for the family meal Good spirits: The Duchess of Sussex flashed a smile as husband Prince Harry drove her into Buckingham Palace Gracious: The Duchess of Cambridge, dressed in a sherbet pink dress, waved at supporters as she arrived with her family Festive favourite: Meghan sported an Erdem dress, as seen leaving palace, which she first wore in January 2016 Sophisticated: Meghan, pictured leaving the Christmas lunch, wore her hair sleek and straight for the engagement Annual gathering: Prince Philip, 97, was smart in a patterned blue tie as he made the journey to Buckingham Palace Fresh-faced: Princess Beatrice, 30, arrived for the festive lunch after a night out in London hangout Annabel's with friends Mother-daughter time: Lady Louise Windsor, 15, rode in the front seat of the car with Sophie Wessex as the family arrived Flying solo: Prince Charles, 70, appeared to be attending without his wife the Duchess of Cornwall, 71 Off to gan-gans! Three-year-old Princess Charlotte, left, and Prince George, five, right, were spotted in the back of the car Co-ordinated: Princess Anne and her husband Vice Admiral Sir Timothy Lawrence dressed in dark coats and red scarves as they arrived for the Queen's traditional Christmas lunch at Buckingham Palace Lunch at Mum's! Prince Andrew, pictured, was among the first members of the Royal Family seen arriving for the festive feast Proud father: Princess Anne's son Peter Phillips drove his daughters Savannah and Isla to the family reunion on Wednesday Full car: Mike and Zara Tindall, pictured in the front seats, arrived with daughter Mia Grace, just seen in the back Radiant: Autumn Phillips, the wife of Peter Phillips and Princess Anne's daughter-in-law, arriving for the meal on Wednesday A cherished royal tradition, the lunch at the palace provides the monarch with the opportunity to spend time with those relatives who don't join her at the Sandringham Estate in Norfolk over the festive season, as well as close members of the family who will be there on the day itself. The Countess of Wessex arrived without her husband Prince Edward in a low-key ensemble of burgundy jacket, chunky knit scarf and a pair of glasses. Her daughter Lady Louise was similarly laid-back in a denim shirt. Heading home: The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge leaving Buckingham Palace with Prince George and Princess Charlotte Sweet: Princess Charlotte appeared to be waving to supporters through the window of her parents' car as she left Cheerful: Five-year-old Prince George smiled from the back seat of his parents' car as they left Buckingham Palace today Elegant: Pregnant Meghan, 37, opted for a high-neck number with a delicate lace trim as she joined husband Harry Glittering: While little could be seen of the Duchess of Sussex's outfit, her sparkling diamond earrings were in full view Light-hearted moment: William and Kate shared a smile as they arrived for lunch with Charlotte, three, in the back seat Autumn Phillips, mother of the Queen's great-granddaughters Savannah, seven, and Isla, six, brought a splash of colour to proceedings in a vibrant purple top. She arrived in a separate car to her husband and daughters. The Duchess of Cambridge, elegant in a pink Stella McCartney dress, arrived with Prince William, Prince George and Princess Charlotte. The Duchess of Sussex plumped for a pretty Erdem floral number which she previously wore for a TV appearance in January 2016. Meanwhile Princess Anne co-ordinated with husband Vice Admiral Sir Timothy Lawrence in a dark winter coat and bright red scarf. The Princess Royal added a sporty pair of sunglasses to the look. Princess Beatrice wore the same River Island coat she was seen out in last night and Zara Tindall showed off her style credentials in a dress by trendy label Maje. Printed perfection! Zara Tindall removed her coat to reveal a pretty red and white patterned dress as she left the family lunch Jolly good time: The mother-of-two smiled as she left Buckingham Palace after the afternoon with her family Back together: Peter and Autumn Phillips left together after arriving for the festive meal in two separate cars Accessories change: Princess Anne ditched her sunglasses as she left Buckingham Palace later on Wednesday afternoon Off for a stroll: Vice Admiral Sir Timothy Lawrence, left, took a walk after the lunch. Right, his wife Princess Anne in the car Busy week: Princess Beatrice, who attended without her sister Princess Eugenie, left the festivities in her own car Husband and wife: Lady Sarah Chatto, daughter of Princess Margaret, left the lunch with husband Daniel Chatto Staff have been busy giving Buckingham Palace a festive makeover, with impressive fir trees have erected in the Marble Hall earlier this month. The trees, which were grown in Windsor, were adorned with royal-themed hangings, while a traditional garland decorated with baubles has been put up along the grand staircase. The Queen no doubt has ensured that Buckingham Palace looks the part as she hosts members of the royal family as part of her annual pre-Christmas lunch. The traditional lunch at the Palace usually takes place mid-week, shortly before the royal family head to Sandringham for the 25th. Back to London: The Duke of Edinburgh, who spends much of his time at Windsor Castle, returned for the festive feast Sprightly: The Duke of Edinburgh, who was seen carriage driving earlier this week, was joined by family for lunch in London Festive cheer: Autumn Phillips shared a joke with a female companion as she arrived in a separate car from husband Peter Glowing: Mother-of-two Autumn flashed a smile as she passed photographers on her way into Buckingham Palace Big smiles! Sophie Wessex beamed as she drove daughter Lady Louise Windsor, 15, to the family meal on Wednesday Keeping it casual: Sophie Wessex, left, donned her glasses while Lady Louise Windsor, right, sported a trendy denim shirt Pop of colour: Princess Anne's daughter-in-law Autumn Phillips donned a purple ensemble for the family gathering Royal tradition: Princess Anne's husband Vice Admiral Sir Timothy Lawrence, pictured, looked dapper in a red scarf The annual event provides the monarch with the opportunity to spend time with members of the extended family who will not be joining her at her Norfolk estate, as well as senior royals. The Queen and her family usually wait until the day before Christmas to decorate their tree at Sandringham House in Norfolk, gathering in the White Drawing Room on Christmas Eve to put the finishing touches to a 20ft tree cut from the estate. This year, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, along with George, Charlotte, and Louis, will be celebrating Christmas this year in Norfolk, despite previous reports that they would be spending the day with the Middletons. It comes amid rumours of a rift between the Cambridges and Sussexes, following the announcement Meghan and Harry will be moving away from Kensington Palace to Frogmore Cottage in Windsor next year. Dapper: The Duke of Kent arrives with daughter-in-law Sylvana Windsor and granddaughter Lady Marina Windsor Chic: Lady Helen Taylor, daughter of Edward Duke of Kent, opted for classic black as she joined her family for the meal Family reunion: Prince Michael of Kent and Princess Michael of Kent arrive in their own car for the royal gathering Perfectly polished: Lady Rose Gilman, daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester, with her daughter Lyla Gilman Coming together: The Duke of Gloucester and wife Birgitte wave to crowds gathered outside Buckingham Palace Regal in red: Lord Frederick Windsor, son of Prince and Princess Michael of Kent, arrives with wife Sophie Winkleman It's one of Disney's most popular films, but one mother has stopped her children from watching Bambi - because it's too traumatic. The film features an iconic tear-jerking scene in which Bambi's mother is shot and killed by hunters. Speaking on ITV's This Morning, journalist Alley Einstein said parents don't realise how traumatic the scene is and don't offer their children the right 'support' after they've watched it. However, her comments sparked outraged among viewers, with many accusing her of being a 'snowflake'. Journalist Alley Einstein (pictured on This Morning on Wednesday) said she doesn't let her children watch Bambi because it is 'too traumatic' The show was discussing the film after news that a Missouri poacher was ordered to watch the movie at least once a month as part of his sentence for illegally killing hundreds of deer. Presenters Ruth Langsford, 58, and Eamonn Holmes, 59, were hosting a debate on whether the film was too traumatic for children in light of it being used as part of sentencing a criminal. Ms Einstein agreed that that it was, saying: '[It came out] a generation ago, now it's time to move on. 'We dont want to have these children who are going to be dumped in front of it without support from their parents after watching this traumatic scene.' Her comments sparked outraged among viewers on Twitter (pictured), with many accusing her of being a 'snowflake' She refuted the argument that it teaches children that animal cruelty is wrong, and said that should be the job of parents. She continued: 'Why cant parents teach their children without the help of Bambi? What is it about people, why cant they actually parent their children and not rely on everybody else?' Ms Einstein also hit out at the film for not having a strong female role model after Bambi was left to fend himself when his mother was shot. She added: 'The mother is ripped away and Bambi is left to fend for himself, now of course this is the overwhelming thing that comes through all the Disney films. Bambi features a scene in which the deer and his mother (pictures) are running away from hunters before his mum is shot and killed Ms Einstein said parents don't realise how traumatic the scene is and don't offer their children the right 'support' after they've watched it. Pictured: Ms Einstein (left) with journalist Sonia Poulton (right) 'Name me one Disney film which has a strong maternal mother staying in the film that doesnt get killed off, or that doesnt get lost ta the beginning of the film, there isnt one.' Her comments caused a stir among viewers, with many taking to Twitter to disagree with her. One tweeted: 'Bambi has been around for many years... i watched it as a child & never did me any harm! All these stupid people moaning need to get a grip..' 'Snowflake alert!,' another posted. Sonia Poulton (pictured on This Morning on Wednesday) said children should be able to watch Bambi because it teaches them important lessons A third said: 'This is why we have generation snowflake now. Because people protected their children for the horrors of the REAL WORLD and now they can't handle what they're seeing/experiencing.' On the show Ms Einstein was debating journalist Sonia Poulton, who said children should be able to watch Bambi because it teaches them important lessons. She explained: 'It's about human entitlement, human cruelty, what we do to animals, loss, grief, how children cope with it. 'Traumatic it certainly is, and I still think children should watch it.' Presentation of the documentary film "Qara Qarayev. Yol" (Qara Qarayev. Road") was held today in Baku in the "Nizami" cinema center, Vestnik Kavkaza correspondent reported. This film was made by Russian TV company DIVI at the request of the Ministry of Culture of Azerbaijan in accordance with order of President Ilham Aliyev on 100th anniversary of outstanding Azerbaijani composer Qara Qaraev. This movie tells about life and work of outstanding Azerbaijani and Soviet composer Qara Qaraev, whose biography seems quite stable and happy. Film includes memoirs of composer himself, as well as interviews with his students, colleagues and relatives. As scriptwriter Nina Smirnova told Vestnik Kavkaza, shooting lasted almost a year. They started in December of last year, and editing was completed by mid-September. According to her, this movie was filmed in several countries at once. She also noted that authors of this movie have been thinking about its title for a long time, and as a result, they figured out that a lot of its parts were associated with roads. Issue with its title was resolved during editing. Executive producer Dmitry Dulov stressed that it was difficult to create movie about such an important person. "There's a huge number of opinions on how to film, and those opinions come from people who mean a lot in this world. And it's always very hard to combine all of those opinions. In addition, many famous people participated in the shooting process, so it was necessary to deal with them all," he noted. A mother is looking forward to her first proper Christmas with her seven children after spending last December in hospital with her surprise triplets. Identical triplets - Thai, Tyler and Tomas were conceived naturally - at odds of 160,000 to one - after Mary McCandlish, 36, from Barrhead in East Renfrewshire decided she wanted one last baby to add to her family of four. Mary had Thai, Tyler and Tomas by Cesarean section last October weighing just 3lbs, 21bs and 1lb. After spending last Christmas at Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow, while the boys were fighting for their lives in an incubator, Mary is looking forward to their first Christmas at home. This year they'll be at home with big brothers Peter, 17, Emily, 15, James, seven, and sister Katrina, 14. Mary McCandlish, 36, from Barrhead in East Renfrewshire, had Thai, Tyler and Tomas by Cesarean section last October weighing just 31b, 21b and 1lb. Tyler was born at only 30 weeks old, weighing in at just 2lbs, along with his two brothers Thai and Tomas. 'We spent last Christmas sitting around three little incubators watching the boys fight to survive,' said Mary. 'My triplets were born 10 weeks early by cesarean section after doctors decided it would be too risky for the pregnancy to continue. 'I am just 5ft 1in and felt I had done well to get to 30 weeks in pregnancy. 'The boys were running out of space in the womb and doctors wanted to give them the best chance to survive. Last Christmas: 'We spent it sitting around three little incubators watching the boys fight to survive,' said Mary The baby boys had to be delivered 10 weeks early as doctors feared they would not continue to thrive in the womb much longer. They were all linked to the same placenta which struggles to feed babies after 30 weeks. Premature babies' lungs are not fully developed enough to breathe on their own and it is vital for them to work well enough to get oxygenated blood to their brains and the rest of their bodies. 'Even when they were born the doctors couldn't promise that they would all survive but they blossomed from the moment they took their first breath.' Thai was just 3lbs when he was born and had to survive in an incubator for the first 10 weeks of his life. The premature triplets were put together in a single super-sized incubator in hospital, once they were able to breathe on their own. Their tiny hands reaching out to grasp each other in the way they had done in the womb. But earlier this year, after 10 weeks in hospital, the boys were allowed home to join their four big brothers and sisters at home. The bond between the triplets is a close one. Mary says they only have to look at one another and they burst into giggles. Thai arrived home first, followed by Tyler and then Tomas. Mary says she this will be the best Christmas ever for the family. 'It will be one of the busiest in any home in the country, I'll bet. Led with laughter and fun, the way any family's should be. 'The older kids will be playing with mobile phones and the triplets will probably abandon their toys and want to play with the boxes.' The bond between the triplets is a close one. Mary says they only have to look at one another and they burst into giggles. 'If Tomas has a toy the other two will make a grab for it and the trio will erupt in laughter. The boys and Mary spent last Christmas at Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow. 'They are either laughing or tussling with each other,' said Mary. 'And they don't mind mucking in and helping', said Mary. Having triplets in the family could either be a recipe for chaos or a master-class in being a supermum. 'It helped that I managed to get into a routine as soon as the boys came home from hospital,' said Mary. 'They were sleeping from 9pm till 8am after a few weeks at home. 'Having had four children before certainly helped, but I think the key to coping with triplets is to be relaxed. If you are wound up and anxious, your babies will be too.' The triple pregnancy was diagnosed when Mary had her first hospital scan at 12 weeks. Mary was told then that the odds of having identical, non-IVF triplets were 160,000 to one. After 10 weeks in hospital, the boys were allowed home to join their four big brothers and sisters at home. Sonographer Gayle McTaggart, a twin herself, said: 'Identical triplets are incredibly rare. They come about after a fertilised egg divides into two and one of them splits again to create a total of three babies. All the boys share the same DNA because they started from one fertilised egg. 'We are absolutely delighted that Mary managed to carry her triplets for 30 weeks. 'It's a miracle considering she is only 5ft 1in and the babies shared the same placenta.' Prince George and Princess Charlotte joined their royal cousins as they attended the Queen's traditional lunch at Buckingham Palace today. George, five, looked serious as he arrived for the family feast with younger sister Charlotte, three, who appeared to be happily waving out of the car window. The royal youngsters, who were joined by nanny Maria Teresa Turrion Borrallo, were driven from their home at Kensington Palace by father Prince William, with their mother Kate sitting in the front seat alongside him. Prince Louis, who is still just seven months old, did not appear to join the rest of the family at the Christmas lunch today. Prince George, five, was seen arriving at the Queen's traditional lunch at Buckingham Palace today, alongside nanny Maria Teresa Turrion Borrallo (left) Princess Charlotte, three, appeared to be waving out of the window as she arrived at the Palace with her parents However, George and Charlotte were joined by their cousins at the event, including Lady Louise Windsor, Isla Phillips, and Mia Tindall. Lady Louise, 15, looked stylish in a denim shirt as she arrived at the Palace with her mother Sophie Wessex. Meanwhile, Isla, six - the youngest daughter of Peter Phillips and his wife Autumn - wore a festive red tweed dress as she was driven to the Christmas lunch by her father. Mia, four, was seen arriving at the Palace with mother Zara and father Mike, although baby sister Lena did not appear to accompany them for the lunch. Lady Louise, 15, was seen looking stylish in a denim shirt as she arrived at the Palace for the Christmas lunch with her mother Sophie Wessex Isla Phillips, six, wore a festive red tweed dress as she arrived at the Queen's Christmas lunch with father Peter Phillips Mia, four, (pictured behind Mike, left) was seen arriving at the Palace with mother Zara and father Mike, although baby sister Lena did not appear to accompany them for the lunch The youngest generation of the royal family have had plenty opportunity to spend time with each other this year, thanks to two big weddings. Charlotte and George, along with Savannah and Isla Phillips and Mia Tindall, acted as bridesmaids and pageboys at Princess Eugenie's wedding, while Lady Louise and her brother James, Viscount Severn, were special attendants. Maud Windsor, who is the daughter of Lord Frederick Windsor and granddaughter of Prince and Princess Michael of Kent, was also a bridesmaid at Eugenie's wedding, and was spotted arriving at the Queen's lunch today. The Queen's traditional Christmas lunch provides the monarch with the opportunity to spend time with members of the extended family who will not be joining her at her Norfolk estate, as well as senior royals. George and Charlotte were seen in the back seat of the car as they arrived at the Palace with Kate and William George, five, looked to be in a serious mood as he arrived at the Palace for the traditional pre-Christmas get-together George and Charlotte were joined by nanny Maria Teresa Turrion Borrallo in the back, as father William drove them from Kensington Palace to the lunch The young royals were later seen leaving Buckingham Palace with Kate and William, following lunch with the Queen Charlotte, three, was seen looking out the window as the Cambridges headed home to Kensington Palace The family gathering at the Palace usually takes place mid-week, shortly before the royal family head to Sandringham for the 25th. The Queen and her family usually wait until the day before Christmas to decorate their tree at Sandringham House in Norfolk, gathering in the White Drawing Room on Christmas Eve to put the finishing touches to a 20ft tree cut from the estate. This year, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, along with George, Charlotte, and Louis, will be celebrating Christmas this year in Norfolk, despite previous reports that they would be spending the day with the Middletons. It comes amid rumours of a rift between the Cambridges and Sussexes, following the announcement Meghan and Harry will be moving away from Kensington Palace to Frogmore Cottage in Windsor next year. Maud Windsor, who is the daughter of Lord Frederick Windsor and granddaughter of Prince and Princess Michael of Kent, was spotted arriving at the lunch (far right) Maud, five, and younger sister Isabella, two, (front) were seen leaving Buckingham Palace after the lunch Maud and sister Isabella were seen leaving the lunch with parents Lord Frederick Windsor (far left) and Sophie Winkleman (far right) Prince William is set to meet with television royalty when he interviews Sir David Attenborough in the New Year. The Duke of Cambridge and the veteran broadcaster will join forces at the Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January Kensington Palace has confirmed. On day one of his two day visit William will take part in a conversation with Sir David on stage, discussing the broadcaster's work over the decades and highlighting the importance of the natural world. The talk will also highlight the urgent challenges and opportunities facing the next generation of environmental leaders. The Duke of Cambridge will interview Sir David Attenborough during his visit to Davos in Switzerland in the New Year. Pictured together at the Tusk Trust Awards in 2016 The following day the duke will join a panel discussion on mental health and use the opportunity to highlight his belief that the world's major employers - many of whom will be represented at Davos - have a vital role to play in promoting mentally healthy societies and workplaces. Sir David Attenborough has previously met with Prince William on several occasions with the royal most recently honouring his work at the 2016 Tusk Conservation Awards. The Duke gave thanks for Sir Davis's 'immense contribution' to conservation and for inspiring generations around the globe to care for the natural world. William will take part in a conversation with Sir David on stage, discussing the broadcaster's work over the decades and highlighting the importance of the natural world. Pictured: William presenting the broadcaster with the award Earlier this year Sir David appeared alongside the Queen in ITV documentary The Queen's Green Planet And the legendary broadcaster met with William's grandmother the Queen for an ITV documentary The Queen's Green Planet shown earlier this year. The Queen reportedly ordered staff to cut the use of plastic after watching Sir David's Blue Planet II series on the threat to our oceans. The ITN documentary followed the progress of the Queen's Commonwealth Canopy project. The Queen's Commonwealth Canopy project initiative aims to preserve areas of indigenous forest across the 52 countries of the Commonwealth, representing the lasting legacy of the Queen's leadership. Sir David and the Queen share a strong rapport during their chat and have known each other for a long time, with the broadcaster producing the Queen's televised Christmas Day address for more than five years in the 1980s and 1990s. A royal expert has claimed Meghan Markle may regret cutting contact with her father if something happens to him, branding it a 'dangerous game'. Robert Jobson, who recently released an unofficial biography on Prince Charles entitled Charles at Seventy: Thoughts, Hopes and Dreams, urged the pregnant duchess to give into Thomas Markle's pleas for contact. Meghan, 37, and her father, 74, have reportedly not spoken since he missed her wedding to Prince Harry in May, after being exposed for setting up a paid photoshoot with paparazzi. And now Robert has warned Meghan that if anything happened to her father, who has suffered with heart problems and made a tearful plea to his daughter on GMB on Monday, any emotions shown would be branded 'crocodile tears'. Speaking to the Express, he claimed: 'I believe Meghan is playing a dangerous game. A royal expert has claimed Meghan Markle may regret cutting contact with her father if something happens to him, branding it a 'dangerous game' 'When you still have both parents alive, you have no idea what it will be like living without one or both of them. 'He is not in the best of health and I would urge Meghan to make contact with him and to try and build bridges. 'Once he is gone, any tears that will flow will be seen as crocodile tears. She will regret not making contact if something happens to him.' Meghan's reported silence towards her father follows a string of incidents, including pulling out of walking her down the aisle after he set up staged paparazzi shots earlier this year. Robert Jobson, who recently released an unofficial biography on Prince Charles, urged the pregnant duchess (seen as a child with her father) to give into Thomas Markle's pleas for contact Thomas Markle has in the past claimed to have suffered with heart problems and made a tearful plea to his daughter on GMB on Monday He then continued his campaign by giving an array of interviews, accusing Meghan of being 'controlling' while pleading that she get in contact with him. Meghan has had to endure regular public outbursts from her half sister Samantha Markle, and her father Thomas. On Monday, Thomas directly appealed on television to Queen Elizabeth to intercede and end his estrangement from his daughter whom he has not seen since he missed her wedding in May to Harry, Elizabeth's grandson. Speaking from San Diego, he told Good Morning Britain: 'I love you very much, you're my daughter and I would really like to hear from you. 'Whatever differences we have, we should be able to work them out.' Royal expert Robert has warned Meghan that if anything happened to her father any emotions shown would be branded 'crocodile tears' On Monday, Thomas directly appealed on television to Queen Elizabeth to intercede and end his estrangement from his daughter whom he has not seen since he missed her wedding in May to Harry, Elizabeth's grandson He continued by telling host Piers Morgan: 'I'm very disappointed by it I'm not sure why it's happening.' He went on: 'This can't continue forever. I don't plan to be silent for the rest of my life. 'I love my daughter very much and she has to know that, and I would really appreciate if she would call me, just reach out to me. 'There has to be a place for me. I'm here, she knows it.' Robert Jobson, who recently released an unofficial biography on Prince Charles entitled Charles at Seventy: Thoughts, Hopes and Dreams Mr Markle suggested Harry and Meghan may have been influenced by press reports about him, saying: 'The funny thing about my daughter and Prince Harry is that they believe everything they read in the paper. 'What's happened, I'm not sure. I'd love to talk about it. I think it comes back to the fact that reporters pick up on interviews I've done and write their own stories and tell lies.' He also denied a suggestion that Meghan had a tendency to dump people if she had no use for them, saying: 'That's really not a character trait. 'She's always been very polite to everyone, never been rude to anyone. I don't know what's really happening right now.' Mr Markle concluded his interview by wishing Harry and Meghan a 'merry Christmas' and saying he would spend the festive period with friends, giving out presents to unfortunate children. Meghan has maintained a dignified silence amid his continuous demands. Meghan has also had to endure regular public outbursts from her half sister Samantha Markle (seen) who has given an array of interviews on the family Camilla was forced to pull out of the Queen's annual Christmas lunch today due to sickness. The Duchess of Cornwall is suffering from a 'heavy cold' Clarence House has confirmed and it is believed to be the reason she was not at Buckingham Palace on Wednesday. The 71-year-old royal has also cancelled an appearance at the Olympia Horse Show this evening. Her husband the Prince of Wales was seen arriving at Buckingham Palace alone this afternoon where he joined other members of the royal family for lunch. The Duchess of Cornwall skipped the Queen's annual Christmas lunch on Wednesday due to a 'heavy cold'. Pictured: Camilla at an event last week Despite Camilla's absence Charles will not be without company with both his sons Princes William and Harry attending with their families. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge arrived alongside two of Charles' grandchildren Princess Charlotte and Prince George who were accompanied by their nanny Maria Borrallo. Prince Louis is believed to have remained at home. Following on behind was Prince Harry and his pregnant wife Meghan, who were all smiles upon their arrival at the palace. Also absent this afternoon were Princess Eugenie and her new husband Jack Brooksbank who are both also believed to be unwell. Both Charles and Camilla are set to join other close royal family members at the Christmas Celebrations at Sandringham next week and so she is likely to be resting up in preparation. Prince Charles was seen arriving at the event held at Buckingham Palace alone today While Camilla may have been absent Charles was not without company with both of his sons and three of his grandchildren in attendance today Princess Eugenie (pictured at a premiere last night) was also absent today with both her and husband Jack Brooksbank thought to be unwell The annual event today provides the monarch with the opportunity to spend time with members of the extended family who will not be joining her at her Norfolk estate, as well as senior royals. Staff have been busy giving Buckingham Palace a festive makeover, with impressive fir trees have erected in the Marble Hall earlier this month. The trees, which were grown in Windsor, were adorned with royal-themed hangings, while a traditional garland decorated with baubles has been put up along the grand staircase. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge arrived alongside two of Charles' grandchildren Princess Charlotte and Prince George who were accompanied by their nanny Maria Borrallo Following on behind was Prince Harry and his pregnant wife Meghan, who were all smiles upon their arrival at the palace The Queen no doubt has ensured that Buckingham Palace looks the part as she hosts members of the royal family as part of her annual pre-Christmas lunch. The traditional lunch at the Palace usually takes place mid-week, shortly before the royal family head to Sandringham for the 25th. The Queen and her family usually wait until the day before Christmas to decorate their tree at Sandringham House in Norfolk, gathering in the White Drawing Room on Christmas Eve to put the finishing touches to a 20ft tree cut from the estate. This year, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, along with George, Charlotte, and Louis, will be celebrating Christmas this year in Norfolk, despite previous reports that they would be spending the day with the Middletons. It comes amid rumours of a rift between the Cambridges and Sussexes, following the announcement Meghan and Harry will be moving away from Kensington Palace to Frogmore Cottage in Windsor next year. Lara Trump's one-year-old son, Luke, got to have plenty of cuddles with his grandparents while enjoying an intimate White House gathering ahead of the Christmas holiday. The 36-year-old wife of Eric Trump has been sharing photos from their visit to Washington, D.C. last Tuesday, and exactly a week later she took to Instagram to post a snapshot of her mother, Linda Sykes, holding Luke in the Oval Office. The heartwarming image shows the little boy curled up in his maternal grandmother's arms as she rests her cheek on his head. Too cute: Lara Trump took to Instagram on Tuesday to share a sweet photo of her mother, Linda Sykes, holding her one-year-old son, Luke, in the Oval Office Family: The photo was taken last Tuesday during their visit to the White House, Luke also posed for a snap with his grandfathers, President Donald Trump (front) and Robert Yunaska (back) 'No love like Mimi love,' Lara captioned the picture. In the snapshot, Luke is wearing a tiny navy blue velvet suit coat and a matching bow tie. Instead of dress shoes, he has on a pair of child-friendly high-top Vans sneakers. Following their White House visit last Tuesday, the proud mom posted plenty of pictures of her son, including one of him with both of his grandfathers. The black and white photo shows Luke being held by his paternal grandfather, President Donald Trump, who is smiling while holding him in the air. Lara is on Luke's left, while her mother, Linda, and father, Robert Yunaska, stand behind them. All smiles: Lara held Luke in her arms as they posed for a photo in front of the Christmas tree in the Oval Office last week Matching: The mom and her one-year-old son both looked dapper in navy suits 'Tuesday with Grandpa, Grandpa & Mimi,' she wrote when sharing the image. The mother-of-one also made sure that she and Luke posed for a photo in front of the Christmas tree in the Oval Office. In the image Lara shared last Tuesday, she and Luke are wearing navy blue suits and standing between the president's desk and the tree in the Oval Office. The mom paired her sleek suit with slate gray cap-toe pumps, and she can be seen smiling brightly at her little boy. On the day of their visit, Trump signed the H.R. 390-Iraq and Syria Genocide Relief and Accountability Act of 2018 in the Oval Office, but the president still managed to get a photo with his ninth and youngest grandchild. Family: It's unclear if her husband, Eric Trump, 34, was with them, but they spent some quality time with Lara's brother, Kyle Yunaska (far left) at Trump International Hotel Washington, D.C. Feeling festive: Lara later shared a photo of herself posed with Eric in the Cross Hall of the White House It's unclear if Eric, 34, was with them, but a few days later, Lara posted a photo of herself posing with her husband in front of a decorated Christmas tree in the Cross Hall of the White House. Lara is changed out of her navy suit and wearing a sleeveless red dress featuring a mock turtleneck. She paired the form-fitting number that grazed her ankles with shiny gold stilettos. Eric matched his wife by wearing a red tie with his suit for the festive White House gathering. Lara also spent some quality time with her family from North Carolina at Trump International Hotel Washington, D.C. during their visit. Last Tuesday, she shared an Instagram Stories photo of herself holding Luke while posing with her brother, Kyle Yunaska, and two others in front of the hotel's giant Christmas tree. Pre-holiday sweat: On Tuesday, Lara back to her daily grind and working out with her trainer Mike Maloney 'NC Home Team,' she captioned the image. Lara clearly has fond memories of her time in Washington, D.C., but she is back to her daily grind in New York City ahead of the holiday. On Tuesday morning, she was at the gym with her trainer Mike Maloney, and she reposted his video of her workout. In the clip, Lara is doing lunges while swinging a kettle ball side to side. Her blond hair is up in a messy bun, and she is wearing a sleeveless black tank and gray marble-patterned leggings. It was reported last week that President Trump is planning on spending 16 days at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, over the holiday. Last Christmas, Lara, Eric, and Luke split their time between Mar-a-Lago and her family's home in Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina. Although it's unclear what their plans are this year, they will likely spend some time with both of their families. The Belgium royal family has assembled for what is sure to be a festive evening at a traditional Christmas concert at the Brussels Royal Palace. King Philippe and Queen Mathilde were joined by their three children Crown Princess Elisabeth, Princess Eleonore, Prince Emmanuel and Prince Gabriel - who put on a brave face despite having injured his foot. The 15-year-old Belgian prince posed alongside his family in front of the palace's Christmas tree wearing a foot brace this evening. It is not clear how the teenager injured himself and the MailOnline has contacted the Royal Palace for a comment. King Philippe and Queen Mathilde were joined by their three children Crown Princess Elisabeth, Princess Eleonore, Prince Emmanuel and Prince Gabriel - who put on a brave face despite having injured his foot Despite his brace the prince looked smart, posing for photos in a two piece suit with a festive red tie with younger brother Emmanuel, 13, opting for a similar ensemble but with a blue tie. The heir apparent Elisabeth, who has returned from Wales, where she is studying to Belgium for Christmas, looked elegant in a black and white zig-zag printed dress for the occasion. The couple's youngest child Eleonore, 10, was pretty in a red velvet pleated dress with matching red tights for the occasion. Despite his brace the prince looked smart, posing for photos in a two piece suit with a festive red tie alongside his siblings and parents The family are back together as a six after Princess Elisabeth returned from her studies in Wales for the Christmas break Queen Mathilde, meanwhile, did away with her usual gowns and opted for a chic pair of black pants and a wrap around white blouse. The 45-year-old mother-of-four added a touch of bling in the form of a diamante necklace and wore her hair in a bouffant style. The king himself looked his dapper best in a two piece suit complete with a burgundy tie as he lead the way during this evening's event. The proud parents watched on as their youngest lit a lantern as part of the ceremony before placing it on the altar After posing by the ornate Christmas tree and life-size nativity scene the family joined other guests in the palace ballroom for the concert After posing by the ornate Christmas tree and life-size nativity scene the family joined other guests in the palace ballroom for the concert. The proud parents watched on as their youngest lit a lantern as part of the ceremony before placing it on the altar. This is likely the last time we will see the Belgian royals before they head off on their Christmas break. Princess Eugenie and her husband Jack Brooksbank were among the absentees from the Queen's Christmas lunch today. The couple are believed to have been too 'unwell' to attend the event at Buckingham Palace today, which would have been their first as a married couple. It comes a day after the Princess of York attended a late-night charity film premiere of 'Sharkwater Extinction' at the Curzon Soho in central London. Joining the likes of Cressida Bonas and Holly Branson, Eugenie had seemed in good health during the screening but both she and Jack are thought to have become unwell overnight. Princess Eugenie and Jack Brooksbank (pictured in 2016) are thought to have been too 'unwell' to attend the Queen's Christmas lunch today Eugenie's sister, Princess Beatrice, was in attendance today, arriving at the palace wearing the same coat she had been seen wearing while out with friends at Annabel's Mayfair the night before. Eugenie and Jack were not the only royals to be struck down by illness on Wednesday with Camilla also forced to pull out. The Duchess of Cornwall is suffering from a 'heavy cold' Clarence House has confirmed and it is believed to be the reason she was not at Buckingham Palace on Wednesday. Eugenie had attended the 'Sharkwater Extinction' premiere in London last night and is thought to have been struck down by illness over night Eugenie's sister, Princess Beatrice, was in attendance today, arriving at the palace wearing the same coat she had been seen wearing while out with friends in Mayfair the night before The 71-year-old royal has also cancelled an appearance at the Olympia Horse Show this evening. Her husband the Prince of Wales was seen arriving at Buckingham Palace alone this afternoon where he joined other members of the royal family for lunch. The annual event today provides the monarch with the opportunity to spend time with members of the extended family who will not be joining her at her Norfolk estate, as well as senior royals. Staff have been busy giving Buckingham Palace a festive makeover, with impressive fir trees have erected in the Marble Hall earlier this month. The Duchess of Cornwall also skipped the Queen's annual Christmas lunch on Wednesday due to a 'heavy cold'. Pictured: Camilla at an event last week Prince Charles was seen arriving at the event held at Buckingham Palace alone today The trees, which were grown in Windsor, were adorned with royal-themed hangings, while a traditional garland decorated with baubles has been put up along the grand staircase. The Queen no doubt has ensured that Buckingham Palace looks the part as she hosts members of the royal family as part of her annual pre-Christmas lunch. The traditional lunch at the Palace usually takes place mid-week, shortly before the royal family head to Sandringham for the 25th. The Queen and her family usually wait until the day before Christmas to decorate their tree at Sandringham House in Norfolk, gathering in the White Drawing Room on Christmas Eve to put the finishing touches to a 20ft tree cut from the estate. Medics should be trained to ask women requesting the morning-after pill whether they have been victims of domestic violence, researchers say. Women who have been abused are more than twice as likely to ask for hormonal emergency contraception, according to a study. The scientists behind the research said making the link could help identify more abuse victims and refer them to specialist support services for help. Doctors, sexual health practitioners and pharmacists all have the power to dish out the morning-after pill, which can also be bought over-the-counter. Women asking for the morning-after pill are more than twice as likely to be victims of domestic violence than in the general population, according to a study by the University of Bristol and Queen Mary University of London Researchers at both the University of Bristol and Queen Mary University of London analysed the medical records of more than 200,000 women. They found domestic violence victims are around two times more likely to ask for the morning-after pill than women who have not been abused. And this figure rises to a 2.8-fold increase among women aged between 25 and 39. This is because controlling men can force their partners into having unprotected sex or rape them, leading to an increased risk of unwanted pregnancy. Up to a third of emergency contraceptives are handed out by doctors, The researchers said the profession should be made aware of this link in existing domestic violence and abuse training. WHAT IS THE MORNING-AFTER PILL? Emergency contraception can prevent pregnancy after unprotected sex or if your contraceptive method has failed. The most commonly used method is the emergency contraceptive pill, also known as the morning-after pill. It must be taken up to three-to-five days after sex, depending on the brand. The pill works by preventing or delaying the release of an egg. It can make you feel sick, dizzy or tired. Most women are able to take the morning-after pill. It is also permitted to prescribe it to girls aged under 16. Source: NHS Choices Advertisement The training should also extend to community pharmacists who give out around half of emergency contraceptives and medics working in sexual health clinics. This would widen the team of people taught to spot potential abuse victims and help them seek help. Domestic violence and abuse (DVA) is a 'major health problem', the researchers said, with devastating consequences for the women involved. 'Our findings are in line with evidence from studies in other countries suggesting that women experiencing DVA use more emergency contraception than other women,' said Joni Jackson, a London-based researcher and author of the study. 'GPs, pharmacists and sexual health practitioners are at the frontline responding to these requests, with community pharmacists dispensing 50 per cent of all emergency contraceptive pills. 'This presents an important opportunity to identify women experiencing DVA, signpost them to appropriate support services, and potentially save lives.' The charity Women's Aid said 1.3million women in the UK experienced domestic abuse last year alone, and that forced unprotected sex is not uncommon. Katie Ghose, the charity's chief executive, said: 'We know that abusers use sexual violence as part of a repeated pattern of domestic abuse, including raping their partner or coercing her into having unprotected sex. 'Many survivors visit their local pharmacy or GP surgery with health issues that are linked to their experiences of domestic abuse. 'It might also be one of the few places where a survivor can safely disclose her experience of abuse and be signposted to the support she needs. 'It is vital that all health professionals receive in-depth domestic abuse training, co-delivered by specialists like Womens Aid, so that they know how to give the right response to survivors and refer them to their local specialist support service.' Bristol's Dr Natalia Lewis added: 'We have already seen improvements in GPs' ability to identify and refer women experiencing DVA through the success of the IRIS (Identification and Referral to Improve Safety) programme. 'IRIS has recently been adapted for sexual and reproductive health services. 'Our findings support the case for adapting the IRIS intervention to the community pharmacy setting, although more research is needed to explore if and how this could be done.' She usually spends her morning at the Good Morning Britain studio or behind the desk at Smooth Radio. But yesterday, Kate Garraway slipped on a volunteer vest to help bring festive cheer to patients on the Victoria Ward at the Whittington Hospital in north London. The broadcaster, 51, took a few hours out of her day to serve hot drinks and mince pies to those in need after reading about the Daily Mails Christmas campaign to help recruit more volunteers alongside charity Helpforce. Kate Garraway helps out by joining the tea trolley doing the rounds with volunteer Guides Henry and Loretta at Whittington Hospital in North London Kate Garraway slipped on a volunteer vest to help bring festive cheer to patients on the Victoria Ward By last night, 24,540 people had pledged a total of 1,393,920 hours to the NHS in response to the campaign. Joining forces with regular volunteers Loretta Mitchell and Henry Webb, Miss Garraway chatted to patients and made them teas and coffees. The Mail and Helpforce are asking readers to pledge three hours a week or one day a month to their local NHS for six months. Miss Garraway said she was happy to lend a helping hand after the years of support her local NHS hospital had given her and her family. The broadcaster, 51, took a few hours out of her day to serve hot drinks and mince pies to those in need The TV star recently had a scare when she was rushed from the Good Morning Britain studios to Whittington, thinking that she had contracted meningitis. Id felt a little bit unwell the day before and then got up early for GMB and felt really unwell and the producer was like You need to get yourself to A&E and because this is closest to where I live they whipped me in here and soon sorted me out, she said. Ive got a lot of past experience with this hospital. Ive got a daughter who plays a lot of sport so Im always getting phone calls from the school saying, Shes twisted this or shes wrenched that. Youd better get it checked out. I virtually have my own chair in A&E, she said. After seeing the work the volunteers do on the ward, Miss Garraway said it can sometimes be just as rewarding for the volunteers as it is for the patients they help. Its a brilliant idea this campaign because its clearly going to be great for the hospitals to have that extra help, she said. Theyre not doing anything that medical staff are doing. Theyre there to do extra things that can really make someones day. For the volunteers its brilliant. Longstanding volunteer Mr Webb, 82, said he loves giving back to the hospital staff who helped care for his wife when she was alive. Kate has voiced support for the Daily Mails Christmas campaign to help recruit more volunteers alongside charity Helpforce When I lost her there was no way I was going to watch daytime television so someone suggested that I volunteer and it was a no-brainer. They looked after my wife so well that I thought why not, he said. Miss Garraway said: The great thing is you can do as much or as little as you can. Stars including JK Rowling, Sir Cliff Richard, Geri Horner, Sir Tom Jones and Joanna Lumley have lent their support to the campaign, alongside Prime Minister Theresa May and Simon Stevens, the chief executive of NHS England. Prospective volunteers can register their interest by filling out a simple form online. They will carry out vital hospital roles such as mentoring patients, collecting prescriptions, providing friendship and even transporting blood. Wednesday marks the second anniversary of Russian envoy to Turkey Andrey Karlov's murder. The diplomat was shot dead on December 19, 2016, by an off-duty Turkish police officer, Mevlut Mert Altintas, at the opening of an art gallery exhibition in Ankara. The attacker was killed at the scene by the police. Burhan Ozbilici, an Associated Press photojournalist, who won the 2017 World Press Photo of the Year award for his image of the assassination of Russia's ambassador to Turkey, told Sputnik that he wanted to bring flowers to the diplomat's grave in Russia. "My dream is to come to Russia and put flowers on the grave of Andrey Karlov. As a photographer, I was charmed by his charisma I felt his calm confidence, deep soul and started taking pictures of him with great love He was not only a politician and a diplomat but first of all a representative of the great Russian culture," Ozbilici said, Sputnik reports. The photojournalist said a friend had invited him to come to the exhibition, stressing that he had no feeling that something tragic was going to happen. "I knew nothing about this exhibition and the participation of the Russian ambassador. My friend told me about the opening of the exhibition and offered me to attend it. And I started taking pictures. And it just so happened that I stood close to him at the last minutes of his life," Ozbilici noted. Ozbilicis photograph captured Altintas shouting while holding a gun after killing Karlov at the exhibition. Health chiefs are set to announce a crackdown on salt levels in food after a damning report revealed two in three manufacturers missed Government targets. Todays Public Health England analysis found that while improvements have been made in certain produce including breakfast cereals and baked beans others have been ignored. Meat products, such as sausages, mince and cooked meats, all failed to meet the recommended average levels, with 43 per cent exceeding the maximum target. Only half 52 per cent of all average salt reduction targets for products consumed in the home were achieved last year. Only half 52 per cent of all average salt reduction targets for products consumed in the home were achieved last year Campaigners said the failure to reduce salt further amounted to a national tragedy. Professor Graham MacGregor, chairman of Action on Salt, said the result was that thousands of unnecessary strokes and heart attacks have occurred and billions of pounds have been wasted by the NHS, and tragically more than 4,000 premature deaths per year have occurred. The NHS and World Health Organisation say adults should not have more than one teaspoon (6g) of salt a day. Eating too much can put strain on the blood vessels and heart, raising the risk of high blood pressure, heart attack, heart failure and stroke. Meat products, such as sausages, mince and cooked meats, all failed to meet the recommended average levels, with 43 per cent exceeding the maximum target The Government has been working for 12 years to encourage the food industry to voluntarily lower levels. Axeing guilt aisles does work Taking away guilt aisles from supermarkets really does work, as customers buy almost a fifth fewer unhealthy snacks. Shoppers in stores which banned treats at checkout queues bought 17 per cent fewer small packs of chocolate, sweets and crisps. Impulse-buys of snacks to eat on the go before getting home fell by three-quarters. The Government is planning to ban the treat-laden guilt aisles that see parents pestered for sweets by their children. A study led by the University of Cambridge and published in the journal PLOS Medicine looked at the six out of nine major supermarkets that have already brought in bans. Co-author Dr Katrine Ejlerskov said: Our findings suggest that, by removing sweets and crisps from the checkout, supermarkets can have a positive influence on the types of purchases their shoppers make. Training obese people in mindfulness helps them slim, University of Warwick experts found. After just four 90-minute sessions, participants lost an average of 6.6lb in six months far more than the 0.4lb lost by those who did not undergo the training. Advertisement Last month, Health Secretary Matt Hancock said salt intake had fallen by 11 per cent in under a decade, but if it fell by a third it would prevent 8,000 premature deaths and save the NHS more than 500million a year. In categories such as pizzas, pasta, quiche, processed potato products, stocks and gravies, both manufacturers and retailers producing own-brand produce met all targets. Yet meat products that were inherently salty, including bacon and sausages, had changed comparatively little. Dr Alison Tedstone, PHE chief nutritionist, said: While we have seen some progress, those that have taken little or no action cannot be excused for their inactivity. Companies were asked to meet average and maximum targets for salt content per 100g, with maximum targets ranging from 0.13g in canned vegetables to 3.75g in curry pastes. Retailers were found to have made more progress than manufacturers towards achieving average targets, with 73 per cent success compared to 37 per cent. Ready meals, soups, biscuits, rice, other cereals and meat alternatives did not meet any targets. Overall, 81 per cent of products consumed in the home had sodium levels at or below their maximum target level. Restaurants, takeaways and meal delivery businesses achieved 71 per cent below the maximum target levels, although health officials admit these targets are less stringent. Public Health Minister Steve Brine said: While it is encouraging to see the food industry is making progress towards the salt reduction targets we set in 2014, we know there is more to do. Thats why we committed to further reducing salt intake in our prevention vision. Next year we will put forward realistic but ambitious goals and set out details of how we will meet them. Andrea Martinez-Inchausti, Deputy Director of Food Policy at the British Retail Consortium said: Retailers know how crucial it is to encourage healthier choices and this report points to some of the outstanding progress on removing salt by our members, both supermarkets and food-to-go businesses. For some salt categories, 100 per cent of foods now meet the Governments challenging targets for salt reduction. 'However, the retail industrys commitment to food safety in products where salt acts as a preservative has meant some targets havent seen as much progress. Thousands of pensioners who have been injured after a fall are set to leave hospital earlier thanks to volunteers. More than 255,000 attend hospitals every year in England due to a fall, costing the NHS an estimated 2.3billion annually. With the number of over-65s set to rise by over 40 per cent by 2039 to more than 16 million, experts say the problem will soar. Thousands of pensioners who have been injured after a fall are set to leave hospital earlier thanks to volunteers The British Red Cross has been working in hospitals and the community to help patients go home and cut the risk of repeat falls. It has run pilots to help end pyjama paralysis, getting patients out of bed and on their feet after studies showed it boosts health and gets them home sooner. Other schemes include transporting vulnerable patients after they have been discharged and carrying out home checks to minimise their future risk of falls. The charity is now looking to expand its work within the NHS by using volunteers, in addition to its trained staff. It hopes to benefit from some of those who have signed up to the Daily Mails NHS volunteer recruitment campaign. Jackie Tate has been leading a project for the British Red Cross in Ipswich. The initiative, working alongside East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust, helps with everything from rehabilitation to establishing further support at home. It aims to prevent patients from deteriorating further during long hospital stays, with officials warning just ten days in hospital can equate to ten years of ageing. The initiative, working alongside East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust, helps with everything from rehabilitation to establishing further support at home Miss Tate said: Patients are often happier to talk to us and tell us their fears because were impartial. Weve found it is taking pressure off staff because we can actually sit and comfort these patients. Figures show emergency readmissions among the elderly and vulnerable have risen by 22.8 per cent in the last five years. Daphne Hadley, 88, from Amersham, Buckinghamshire, received regular visits from Red Cross volunteer Liz McConnon after being hospitalised by a fall. She said: Well always have a nice chat and she might put the vacuum around or put the washing out and change the bed things I find difficult. Its so lovely to have a visit. It makes such a big difference. A one-month-old baby has become the first child in the world to ever be given a vaccine that was delivered by a commercial drone. Joy Nowai, is from Vanuatu - a cluster of islands in the South Pacific, where one in five youngsters miss out on essential childhood jabs. The drone took just 25 minutes to travel almost 24.8miles (40km) over rugged mountains until it reached the remote Cook's Bay, which has no hospital or electricity. Only accessible on foot or by small local boats, the same journey usually takes hours. Scroll down for video One-month-old Joy Nowai (pictured left with her mother Julie Nowai, 28) is the first child ever to be given a vaccine delivered by a commercial drone. She is pictured right with her mother, father Samuel Nowai, 29, and eight-year-old sister Nelita at their home in Vanuatu Joy, among with 12 other children and five pregnant women, were vaccinated after jabs were delivered by an Australia-made drone called Swoop Aero. Pictured is another drone - WingCopter - which also took part in the UNICEF-supported Vanuatu Drone Trials Once landed, a nurse vaccinated 13 local children and five pregnant women against polio, TB, hepatitis B, measles and rubella. Joy, who was born on November 15, was immunised against just TB and Hep B. These should have been given within a day of her birth but there were no nurses available. Mrs Nowai said: 'I was worried when baby Joy didn't receive her first vaccine or child health book to record vaccines as the nurses were away. I know it's important for her to be healthy. 'I am so happy the drone brought the medicine to Cook's Bay as I don't have to walk several hours for her vaccine; it is only 15 minutes walk from my home.' UNICEF, which supported the vaccine programme, said the innovation has the potential to be a 'game changer' in child health. 'Today's small flight by drone is a big leap for global health,' the charity's executive director Henrietta Fore said. 'With the world still struggling to immunise the hardest to reach children, drone technologies can be a game changer for bridging that last mile to reach every child. 'This is innovation at its best and shows how we can unlock the potential of the private sector for the greater good of the world's children.' Nurse Miriam Nampil, 55, is pictured vaccinating Joy while she is being held by her mother Vanuatu is a cluster of more than 80 mountainous islands in the South Pacific that cover 808miles (1,300km). Its terrain, along with its warm climate, make delivering jabs tricky How are drones changing the world? Drone use is already growing across an array of applications. They range in size from something that could slip into your pocket right up to the behemoth weaponry used by militaries around the world. And they are not only in the skies - they can also be found driving on the ground, inspecting sub-sea pipelines, crawling into tight gaps too dangerous for humans or even rocketing off to outer space. They are used by emergency services, including search and rescue and tackling fires, through to innovations in agriculture, construction, humanitarian aid, wildlife preservation and personal security. It is predicted that drones will spawn a 70billion ($100bn) industry by 2020. E-commerce, package and fast food delivery have yet to fully develop in this sector but companies such as Google and Amazon are investing heavily in the application of drones. Advertisement Vaccines have to be stored at specific temperatures, which makes them difficult to transport. Not only does Vanuatu have a warm climate but it is also made up of more than 80 mountainous islands covering 808miles (1,300km), which makes delivering jabs particularly tricky. The drone took off from a remote village on the island of Erromango to Dillon's Bay on the west of Vanuatu and then on to Cook's Bay on the east side. It was met by a cultural welcoming dance, with families travelling several kilometres to see the drone land. Miriam Nampil, a registered nurse, who administered the vaccines, said: 'It's extremely hard to carry ice boxes to keep the vaccines cool while walking across rivers, mountains, through the rain, across rocky ledges. 'I've relied on boats, which often get cancelled due to bad weather. As the journey is often long and difficult, I can only go there once a month to vaccinate children.' The difficult journey means many youngsters in Vanuatu miss out on essential childhood vaccines. 'But now, with these drones, we can hope to reach many more children in the remotest areas of the island,' Ms Nampil, 55, said. Ms Nampil is pictured giving a polio vaccine to nine-month-old Larissa while she is being held by her mother Amanda, 22. In total, 13 children and five pregnant women were immunised Ms Nampil is pictured alongside nurse Narai Harry unpacking the vaccines from the drones Drones carried the vaccines in Styrofoam boxes that contained ice packs and a temperature logger. An electronic indicator was triggered if the temperature swung out of an acceptable range. Vanuatu's Ministry of Health, with support from UNICEF, carried out the so-called Vanuatu Drone Trials with two drone operators - Swoop Aero and WingCopter - last week. Swoop Aero - the Australian company behind Vanuatu's drone delivery - passed the first phase of the trials by landing within two metres of the target after a 31mile (50km) flight over numerous islands. This is the first time a government has paid for a commercial drone company to transport vaccines to remote areas. The drone operators are selected after a bidding process and do not get paid if the vaccines are not delivered. The Government of Vanuatu hopes to one day integrate drone vaccine delivery into its national immunisation programme, as well as to use drones more widely to distribute health supplies. A woman has been left permanently disfigured after she was hit by an out-of-control firework that broke every bone in her face and caused her to lose an eye. Kristie Young, 38, of Edmonton, Kentucky, was chatting with friends at a BBQ in July 2015 when a firework accidentally got fired into her face. After spending 41 days in intensive care fighting for her life, the former factory supervisor then spent a further 273 days in rehabilitation before finally being allowed to go home. But Ms Young still cannot stand or walk after the horrific accident caused her to suffer a brain haemorrhage that has left her paralysed on the left side of her body. The firework-safety advocate has endured 30 operations since the ordeal and hopes to have reconstructive surgery to rebuild her eye socket so she can be fitted with a prosthetic eyeball. Kristie Young has been left permanently disfigured after she was hit by an out-of-control firework that broke every bone in her face and caused her to lose an eye. Pictured since the ordeal, Ms Young has endured 30 surgeries and has struggled to accept her apperance Pictured before the accident, which took place at a friend's BBQ in July 2015, Ms Young remembers nothing of the incident apart from swimming in the pool earlier in the day After being unable to bear her appearance, Ms Young now wears an eye patch when out Speaking of the accident, Ms Young said: 'I don't remember anything about the night. The last thing I remember is swimming in the pool earlier that day. 'But from what I've been told, no one really knows what went wrong. 'One of the fireworks must have been faulty, because instead of going into the air to explode it went sideways. I was just standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.' After being rushed to hospital, Ms Young's father was told to prepare for the worst. Although she pulled through, Ms Young has been left with a 'totally different' face. 'I had broken every bone in my face and I had to have surgery to remove the front part of my skull,' she said. 'My face is totally different now. 'I hate saying this but at the beginning there were several times when I could not bear to look at myself in the mirror. I would ask my nurse to cover up the mirror so I wouldn't have to look at my reflection. 'One thing that was very difficult for me was when I renewed my license. Looking at my new picture was a tough moment.' Ms Young spent 41 days in intensive care fighting for her life, and then a further 273 days in rehab, before finally being allowed to go home. Pictured in the months after the accident, Ms Young would ask her nurse to cover up the mirrors in her hospital room to hide her reflection Ms Young says her face is 'totally different', which has had a 'traumatic effect' on her. Keen to move on with her life, Ms Young is pictured right out and about wearing an eye patch Ms Young, who has no children but is an aunt-of-five, struggles to accept the cruel stares of strangers. 'It's hard because when you go anywhere, even Walmart, people stare,' she said. 'Kids ask you questions but adults don't. 'It makes me very sad because my youngest great nephew was born four days after my accident, so he has never seen me any other way. He doesn't know what I look like. 'This has a traumatic effect on me. It rips my heart apart.' Being unable to walk or stand, as a result of her brain haemorrhage, led to Ms Young losing her job. 'It was so devastating when I lost my job,' she said. 'I cried for days. I really enjoyed it. 'It wasn't my dream job but I had so much pride in it. When I overheard my dad saying I had lost my job, it was a blow.' Ms Young relies on a walker to get around and can only stand if she leans on something for support. Pictured in the months after the accident, Ms Young hopes to one day have reconstructive surgery to rebuild her eye socket, which will make her eligible for a prosthetic eyeball. But she will still be unable to blink due to her having no eyelid and her nerves being too damaged Although her mobility is severely limited, regularly attending physical and occupational therapy has enabled Ms Young to reach the point where she can shower independently and take care of herself. Looking to the future, Ms Young hopes to one day have surgery so she can have a prosthetic eyeball fitted. Ms Young, who has just 30 per cent vision in her remaining eye, said: 'I hope I will be able to get a glass eye. 'But it will never blink because I don't have an eyelid and the nerves have been damaged. I try not to think about it too much.' Although the aftermath of the accident has been difficult, Ms Young has found happiness in a new relationship with her girlfriend Megan Simpson, 31, who she met four months ago. 'It's exciting and it occupies a lot of my time,' she said. According to the Insurance Journal, eight people lost their lives in firework accidents in the US in 2017, which Ms Young believes is eight too many. 'Those deaths are completely unnecessary and preventable,' she said. 'I think we should just avoid fireworks or at least be especially careful with them. Go enjoy the fireworks at a public display rather than at home. 'I would never go near them again that's for sure.' Experts say there is no need for women with implants to panic and risk is low Breast implants linked to cancer and once commonly used in the UK have been taken off the market. French authorities have banned the sale of Allergan's Natrelle textured implants by refusing to renew their safety approval for use in France and Europe. Although the official guidance does not refer to cancer, there are growing concerns in the industry about links to anaplastic large cell lymphoma (ALCL). Experts have urged women not to panic and said there's no need to remove the implants from patients who have already had them put in. Up to 99 per cent of women in the UK with implants are believed to have textured ones, but it is not known how many have the affected brand. A popular type of textured breast implant made by the company Allergan has had its safety approval withdrawn by French authorities, who have banned it from being sold in Europe (stock image) The implants being recalled are made by Allergan, which is thought to make most of the textured implants used in the UK and the 'majority' of women with implants have textured ones The risk of surgery is higher than that of developing the rare but treatable type of cancer, said Paul Harris, president of the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons. Allergan's implants may have had a market share as high as 50 per cent in the UK ten years ago, The Guardian reported. In the wake of the news, the BAAPS today advised its members to stop using the implants. The ban does not apply to the US. Mr Harris said: 'The news... will be a cause for understandable concern for many patients, particularly those who have implants currently in place. 'It is important however to recognise this is a precautionary step taken by the regulators whilst the link between breast implant surface and BIA-ALCL becomes clear. 'We advise any patients with new symptoms such as swelling or pain to contact their implant surgeon for specific advice. 'Otherwise they should make a routine appointment when available to discuss their concerns.' A statement from France's National Agency for the Safety of Medicines and Health Products (ANSM) confirmed yesterday the product's CE mark (European Conformity) was removed on Monday. WHAT WAS THE PIP SCANDAL? French company Poly Implant Prothese (PIP), which is now out of business, was found to have made silicon breast implants using silicon intended for mattresses, not for medical use. PIP implants were withdrawn from use in the UK in 2010, but by it is estimated 47,000 woman had the implants before this happened. 20,000 women sued the company responsible for testing the implants TUV Rheinland and were awarded 2,600 each. PIP implants are not though to pose any serious health risk, but are two to six times more likely to rupture. If they rupture they should be removed because they can become misshapen and cause pain, swelling and enlarged lymph nodes in the armpit. The NHS does not recommend women having PIP implants removed unless they are problematic women can discuss the implants with their surgeon if they are concerned. Most PIP implants were used in private clinics and hospitals, but a small number were given in NHS operations for women who had breast cancer surgery. Source: NHS Advertisement Surgeons will no longer be allowed to use the implants and those being held in medical clinics must be sent back to the manufacturer, the ANSM said. It said: 'From now on, these medical devices can no longer be marketed in France and in Europe. 'ANSM today asked Allergan to recall products in stock at all health facilities.' The ANSM had, in November, recommended surgeons stick to using smooth implants while experts considered the safety implications of textured ones. A committee of the French organisation will meet in February to make its final decision on whether the implants will be allowed again. The statement added: 'At this stage, the ANSM has not identified any immediate risk for the health of women carrying the implants concerned. 'ANSM reminds that women with breast implants should be monitored annually.' Concerns around the safety of the implants has grown in recent years as women have been diagnosed with a condition called BIA-ALCL breast implant associated-anaplastic large cell lymphoma. Allergan's Biocell implants are thought to have the highest risk of the cancer, according to the Association of Breast Surgery, with as many as one in 3,817 patients developing it. Among most patients the condition is confined to the area containing the implant and removal is a successful treatment. Marc Pacifico, BAAPS council member and plastic surgeon added: 'The majority of patients in the UK with breast implants will have textured surface implants in their breasts. 'According to all the latest scientific data these remain safe devices and there is no indication for any woman to consider removing or replacing their implants. 'Patients should continue with any planned follow-up they have arranged.' 'I'd never have had them had I known' Julie Harris, who has cancer caused by her breast implants Julie Harris has helped countless women undergo breast surgery. As a consultant nurse for two decades at the Harley Medical Group in Manchester, she sat down with hundreds of women and advised them to have implants inserted. Mrs Harris, 57, was so confident in the technology that she underwent the procedure herself. Initially, in 2005, she had PIP implants inserted. But when fears started to emerge in 2012 that PIP implants could leak, Mrs Harris had them removed and were replaced with Allergan implants. Tragically, in August this year, she was diagnosed with breast implant acquired anaplastic large cell lymphoma (BIA-ALCL). Her doctors are worried the cancer has spread to her arm and Mrs Harris, a mother of two from Cheshire, is now undergoing a combination of chemotherapy and immunotherapy in a bid to save her life. If that works she will have to have a gruelling bone marrow transplant next year. If anyone had breathed a word about cancer risk I would never have had the Allergan implants, she said. Having gone through the scare over the PIP implants I would not have done that again. I would just have had them removed and had an uplift. Mrs Harris is furious that other women have been put at risk thanks to her advice. None of the patients were given fully informed consent, because I did not have that information myself, she said. Everything I knew, I told them, but I could not tell them about the cancer risks because I was never told. The first case of BIA-ALCL was recorded as long ago as 1997 - but until recently patients were not told of the risk. Even when Mrs Harriss left breast started swelling up in 2016, the chance of lymphoma was disregarded. I was told there was just a 1 in 300,000 chance that the implants would cause cancer, she said. The chance was seen as too small to be real, so it was dismissed. Now we know it is more common. Yes, it is still very rare, but we need more people and health professionals to know about it and recognise it, so other women are not put in the same position as me. Julie Harris (right) with her daughter Kelly on her wedding day last month Advertisement MOTHER 'DEVELOPED CANCER AFTER ALLERGAN TEXTURED IMPLANTS' Debbie Grokes, a 38-year-old mother of two, had textured implants put in to replace her previous ones made by the now-infamous PIP brand. After the PIP scandal broke and a woman was confirmed to have died of cancer associated with the implants, she worried her implants would make her ill, too. So when offered free replacements by the surgeon who had done her first operation, Mrs Grokes said yes. Debbie Grokes, a mother of two from Billericay, Essex, developed cancer after having textured implants put in after her PIP ones were removed I was told the replacement implants were made by a company called Allergan, she said. The new, coarser-textured implants were put in in May 2012 and the PIP ones were removed. At first, everything was fine. Then, in the summer of 2016, my left breast started to swell when we were on holiday in Ibiza.' Unable to contact the company which had put the implants in, Mrs Grokes went to hospital where they drained the fluid and found no signs of infection. She said her breast repeatedly swelled up and an NHS doctor told her she would need the implants removed privately which she desperately wanted but could not afford. After numerous tests both private and NHS, she was eventually diagnosed with anaplastic large cell lymphoma (ALCL) a rare form of cancer in the immune system in July 2017, around a year after her problems began. The next day I was referred for a scan to see if it had spread,' she said. 'Which it hadnt, but I couldnt wait to get the implants out. Im married, Ive got children my life was at risk.' With financial help from her uncle she stumped up 4,700 to have the implants removed privately because of 'long NHS waiting times', and had chemotherapy to prevent the cancer coming back. Mrs Grokes added: 'Im clear of the cancer and well now, and Im fine about how I look. I dont care about the size of my breasts Im happy without implants.' Advertisement A houseplant has been modified by scientists to clean the air inside the house of hazardous particles. Air filters do not keep smaller molecules, including chloroform and benzene, which have both been linked to cancer, at bay. Pothos ivy was edited in the laboratory to have the power to remove these molecules in the air and use them as food to grow. When the plants were put in a glass tube filled with polluted air, the concentrations dropped significantly over the next few days, being almost undetectable. However, the team at the University of Washington said a good flow of air was needed in a room for the particles to reach the plants' leaves. A houseplant, pothos ivy, has been modified by scientists at the University of Washington to clean the air inside the house of hazardous particles not controlled by air filters Researchers tested the modified ivy's ability to remove pollutants in the air compared with normal ivy. Concentrations in the glass tubes with the modified ivy dropped significantly over the next few days, being almost undetectable Dr Long Zhang, pictured in the lab, who is a research scientist in the civil and environmental engineering department, said they used pothos ivy as it is a robust plant Chloroform is present in small amounts in chlorinated water, and benzene, which is a component of gasoline, and therefore from exhaust fumes, can build up in homes when people shower or boil water. Study senior author Professor Stuart Strand said: 'People haven't really been talking about these hazardous organic compounds in homes, and I think that's because we couldn't do anything about them. 'Now we've engineered houseplants to remove these pollutants for us.' The team modified the plants to express a protein called cytochrome P450 2E1, or 2E1 for short, which can be found in the human liver. Professor Strand said: 'We decided we should have this reaction occur outside of the body in a plant, an example of the 'green liver' concept. 'And 2E1 can be beneficial for the plant, too. Plants use carbon dioxide and chloride ions to make their food and they use phenol to help make components of their cell walls.' The researchers made a synthetic version of the gene and introduced it into pothos ivy - which the team used for its ability to be versatile in many conditions. Study lead author Dr Long Zhang said: 'We wanted to do this in pothos because it's a robust houseplant that grows well under all sort of conditions.' The plant doesn't flower in temperate climates so the genetically modified plants wouldn't be able to spread via pollen. The work took more than two years. Dr Zhang said: 'That is a long time, compared to other lab plants, which might only take a few months.' Plants in the home would need to be inside an enclosure with something to move air past their leaves, such as a fan, according to the study senior author, Professor Stuart Strand The researchers modified the plants to express a protein called cytochrome P450 2E1, or 2E1 for short, allowing it to use the compounds in the air as food for growth HOW CAN YOU IMPROVE AIR QUALITY IN THE HOME? Emma Hammett, a qualified nurse, revealed the best ways you can reduce air pollution: Keep all areas clean and dry as possible. Open windows for 5-10 minutes daily. When showering, use an extractor fan to remove moisture from the air. Or open a window. Keep the door shut to limit the spread of damp air. In humid kitchens or damp bathrooms keep surfaces clean. Surfaces with soap scum or grease can be fertile breeding grounds for mould spores. In the kitchen, keep an eye out for mould in refrigerator drip pans, washing machine door seals and dustbins. When cooking use an extractor fan or open a window. Keep lids on saucepans when cooking. Wipe down wet windowsills to remove condensation. Condensation can lead to mould and fungi to grow. Deal with any mould in the home. Check for and rectify any water leaks in bathrooms, kitchens and the hot water tank. Check your flues are working well and get your chimney swept regularly to enable smoke and pollution particles to leave the room. Keep the room temperature in the home stable. The recommended temperature is 18 degrees. High humidity can keep the air moist provides perfect conditions for mould to thrive. If you have a long-term lung issue, consider investing in an indoor air quality sensor. This will tell you the air temperature, relative humidity, the levels of pollutants, dust particles and carbon monoxide. Source: First Aid For Life Advertisement The researchers then tested the modified plants ability to remove pollutants from air compared to normal pothos ivy. They put both types of plants in glass tubes and then added either benzene or chloroform gas into each tube. Over 11 days, the team tracked how the concentration of each pollutant changed in each tube. For the unmodified plants, the concentration of either gas didn't change over time. But for the modified plants, the concentration of chloroform dropped by 82 per cent after three days, and it was almost undetectable by day six. The concentration of benzene also decreased in the modified plant vials, but more slowly. By day eight, the benzene concentration had dropped by about 75 per cent, the findings, published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, said. In order to detect these changes in pollutant levels, the researchers used much higher pollutant concentrations than are typically found in homes. But the team expects that the home levels would drop similarly, if not faster, over the same time frame. Plants in the home would also need to be inside an enclosure with something to move air past their leaves, such as a fan, according to Professor Strand. He said: 'If you had a plant growing in the corner of a room, it will have some effect in that room. 'But without air flow, it will take a long time for a molecule on the other end of the house to reach the plant.' The team is now working to improve the plants' capacity by adding a protein that can break down another hazardous molecule found in home air - formaldehyde. Formaldehyde, which is present in some wood products as well as tobacco smoke, was first classified as a probable human carcinogen in 1987 by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Professor Strand said: 'These are all stable compounds, so it's really hard to get rid of them. 'Without proteins to break down these molecules, we'd have to use high-energy processes to do it. 'It's so much simpler and more sustainable to put these proteins all together in a houseplant.' Chloroform is a coluorless liquid with a pleasant odour and a slightly sweet taste, which was used as an inhaled anaesthetic during surgery in the past. Benzene is a natural part of crude oil and gasoline, cigarette smoke and forest fires. It is widely used in products such as plastic and synthetic fibres. It is a known carcinogenic, and can also affect the blood, immune and nervous system. People have today been warned to stop using the 'herbal' skin cream Zudaifu because it contains illegal steroids. The product, which claims to be a Chinese herbal remedy, actually contains a prescription-only drug which could be dangerous. Zudaifu cream is sold to help people with skin conditions like eczema, psoriasis and rosacea but people must stop buying it immediately, regulators said. Selling steroids without a proper licence is illegal and if they are used without the advice of a doctor they can cause lasting damage especially to children. The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) warned Zudaifu contains a steroid which can only be dispensed on prescription, so any companies selling it online or in shops are doing so illegally The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has announced people should stop using Zudaifu and report sellers to the authorities. It revealed the cream is not a licensed medicine so is being sold illegally because it contains clobetasol propionate, a controlled substance. The cream can be found online for as little as 1. The organisation's Dr Chris Jones said: 'We have identified a potentially harmful cream described as a natural Chinese herbal medicine on the market. 'Selling creams directly to the public that contain strong steroids is illegal and they are potentially dangerous if they are used without medical supervision. 'Steroids must only be prescribed by healthcare professionals who follow strict criteria when prescribing them and can monitor patients using them. 'They can suppress the skins response to infection and can also cause long-term thinning of the skin.' He added: 'If steroids are applied long term, particularly on children, they can lead to other medical problems. 'Our advice to anyone who has bought it previously or is currently using Zudaifu cream particularly on young children and babies is to stop using it immediately. 'If you have any questions, please contact your healthcare professional.' The warning follows one earlier this year in which another so-called Chinese herbal medicine, Yiganerjing cream, was found to contain the same steroid. People unsure about whether a medicine claiming to be herbal or natural is genuine should check for a Marketing Authorisation (MA), Product Licence (PL) or Herbal Registration (THR) number. In December 2017, when Tony Gibson started forgetting how to get around his home, his wife Danielle knew something wasn't right. She started labeling the rooms in their house and would often have to pick him up when he got lost running errands. The couple traveled from their Lebanon, Tennessee, home to Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville in hopes of learning answers. After a month of tests, neurologists discovered the father-of-four, 33, had developed a degenerative brain disease caused by the same infectious proteins that trigger the infamous 'mad cow disease' in animals. Tony Gibson, 33, from Lebanon, Tennessee, began having a decline in cognitive skills last year. Pictured: Tony with his wife Danielle The couple visited Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville in hopes of learning answers. After a month of tests, Tony (left and right with his daughters) was diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease 'He would say: "I'm going to the bathroom" and I would say: "That's not the bathroom",' Danielle told DailyMail.com. 'So I started labeling every room in the house. And that lasted about a month until he couldn't read anymore.' Tony's condition started to deteriorate even more. He would go to the neighbor's home to take care of the 'his dog' - even though he and Danielle don't have a dog. He would lie in bed with Danielle and tell her he wanted to have kids with her - even though they were raising four children together. It got so bad that he would get lost while running errands, so Danielle wouldn't let him drive anymore. The couple traveled to Vanderbilt four months after the symptoms started, and Danielle was convinced he was suffering from dementia. After a month of tests, neurologists delivered a much different diagnosis: Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD). CJD is a rare, degenerative brain disorder that is caused by coming into contact with tissue that has been infected, such as eating contaminated meat. Danielle says she doesn't know how her husband contracted CJD and doctors say he is one of the youngest patients they've ever seen. It is caused due to abnormal versions of a protein known as prion. Prions are normally harmless but, when misshapen, they become infectious and create lesions, according to the Mayo Clinic. CJD cannot be transmitted in the air or through sexual contact. CJD is a rare, degenerative brain disorder that is caused by coming into contact with tissue that has been infected, such as eating contaminated meat. Pictured: Tony and his wife Danielle Danielle says she doesn't know how her husband contracted CJD and doctors say he is one of the youngest patients they've ever seen. Pictured: Tony, Danielle and one of their daughters WHAT IS CREUTZFELDT-JAKOB DISEASE? Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) is a rare, degenerative brain disorder. It is caused by abnormal proteins known as prions. Prions are normally harmless but, when misshapen, they become infectious and create lesions, Sufferers contract CJD by coming into contact with tissue that has been infected, such as eating contaminated meat. About one in a million people worldwide become infected, with just 350 annual cases occurring in the US. Symptoms, which worsen rapidly over time, include: Loss of intellect and memory Personality changes Loss of balance and coordination Slurred speech Vision problems and blindness Abnormal jerky movements Loss of mobility Most sufferers die within a year of symptom onset, usually due to an infection caused by immobility. There is no cure. Treatment focuses of relieving symptoms and making sufferers comfortable via painkillers and antidepressants. Source: CDC Advertisement Symptoms include depression, anxiety, memory loss, personality changes, impaired thinking, difficulty swallowing and difficulty speaking. The mental deterioration is rapid, usually occurring within a few months. Many sufferers lapse into coma. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CJD risk rapidly increases after age 50. Usually symptoms begin to appear around age 60 and approximately 70 percent of sufferers die within a year. There is no treatment or cure for CJD. Treatment plans currently involve lessening the severity of symptoms and making those affected comfortable. CJD occurs in three forms. One is sporadic with no known causes, which accounts for 85 percent of cases, according to the National Institutes of Health. This is the type that doctors believe Tony developed. Another form is hereditary. Those with a family history of the disease and have a genetic mutation account for 10 to 15 percent of US cases. The rarest form is acquired CJD, which is when the brain or nervous system tissue becomes infected through exposure - only causing one percent of cases. A type of CJD called variant CJD (vCJD) can occur from eating infected beef. First described in 1996 in the UK, this beef is already infected with a disease that is similar called bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or 'mad cow disease'. About one in a million people around the world become infected, with just 350 cases occurring annually in the US. The mental deterioration is rapid, usually occurring within a few months. Many sufferers lapse into coma. Danielle said that when Tony (left, with Danielle, and right) was diagnosed, doctors told her that he had one year to live The father-of-four is still alive, but he requires round-the-clock care, so he's been placed in a nursing home in Hendersonville. Pictured: Tony with Danielle and their four daughters Danielle said that when Tony was diagnosed, doctors told her that he had one year to live in the best case scenario. The father-of-four is still alive, but he requires round-the-clock care, so he's been placed in a nursing home in Hendersonville. She said she hopes to educate others about the symptoms of the devastating illness by sharing her husband's journey. 'I want to doctors to be more aware that this is a thing and to educate people' she said. 'Google this and know what to look for. We need funding for research.' The family has created a GoFundMe page to cover the cost of Tony's medical bills and provide financial relief for his wife and children. So, far $25 has been raised out of a $7,000 goal. The Ebola death toll in the Democratic Republic of Congo has reached 319, official figures have revealed. Health chiefs fear 542 people in the African nation have been struck down in the second biggest outbreak of the virus in history. The World Health Organization (WHO) said efforts to contain the outbreak, which began in August, have been challenging. Aid workers have found it difficult to provide help in the worst affected regions of the DRC because of ongoing armed conflict. The death toll of Ebola has reached a suspected 319, including 271 confirmed, in the Democratic Republic of Congo during the second biggest outbreak in history It comes as neighbouring countries remain on high alert amid fears the killer virus responsible for a brutal epidemic in 2014 - could spread. The confirmed figures show 491 people have been struck down with Ebola with a further 51 currently undergoing testing. The WHO data also revealed the confirmed death toll is 271, as the remaining 48 deaths continue to be thoroughly investigated. Experts warn the infection is being spread because people are moving in and out of the region, while some communities are not engaging. Provinces North Kivu, which includes the heavily populated cities of Beni, Kalunguta and Mabalako, and Ituri remain the centre of the outbreak. Some areas, which had previously recovered, have seen a reintroduction of cases, such as Musienene - where the last reported case was 32 days ago. International groups are finding it difficult to provide aid during armed conflict in the region. Pictured, a member of the medical staff western Uganda, December 12 The public health agency estimates that more than a million refugees and internally displaced people are traveling through and out of North Kivu and Ituri, contributing to the rapid spread. Pictured, a medical assistant uses a non-contact thermometer to check the temperature of people at the border between the Congo and Uganda, December 12 North Kivu and Ituri remain the centre of the outbreak. Pictured, a health worker feeds a boy suspected of having the Ebola virus, September 9 Health experts have said this Ebola outbreak, the tenth to strike Congo since the virus was discovered there in 1976, is like no other. Aid workers face the threat of attack from armed groups and resistance from a wary population in a region that had never faced an Ebola outbreak before. Armed rebels have attacked, kidnapped and killed medical staff trying to combat the outbreak and equipment has been destroyed, making it difficult to help victims. Tracking suspected contacts of Ebola victims remains a challenge in areas controlled by rebels. Ebola can be transmitted between humans through blood, secretions and other bodily fluids of people - and surfaces - that have been infected. The treatment of Ebola itself has taken an experimental turn in DRC, where scientists are now conducting a real-time study of how well pioneering drugs work. More than 160 people there have already been treated with the drugs, and the way people are treated won't change, but scientists will now be able to compare them. Four experimental drugs are being used to try and combat the disease mAb 114, ZMapp, Remdesivir and Regeneron. Patients will get one of the four, but researchers won't know which they were given until after the study. Dr Jeremy Farrar, director of Wellcome, a UK charity who has funded research into the vaccine being used in the DRC, told MailOnline: 'The Ebola vaccine and now also potential treatments available as part of clinical trials are having a huge impact. 'But, we are in a crucial phase and it is an incredibly challenging and frightening environment for health workers. The next month, over Christmas and New Year, will be critical to what happens to this outbreak.' The outbreak has been plagued by security problems, with health workers attacked by rebels in districts where the virus has been spreading. The WHO have said they are struggling to work with 'non-engaged' communities. Pictured, a woman cries during the funeral of a child, suspected of dying from Ebola December 17 Last week, officials announced more Ebola cases are being diagnosed in the city of Butembo, 35 miles (56km) away from Beni, where most of the outbreak is happening. Experts warn the quick spread makes tackling the virus more complicated because containing it has been challenging enough in the one city. They fear experimental vaccines which have been doled out to thousands of people, and have reportedly prevented the death toll rising into the thousands, will run out. It comes after news broke last week that hundreds of health workers in South Sudan will be given Ebola vaccinations amid fears the virus will spread. No cases have been confirmed in neighbouring South Sudan yet, but the country is on 'high alert', according to the World Health Organization (WHO). More than 2,000 healthcare and frontline workers in the country will be offered a vaccine to try and stop the spread. Teams of vaccinators are ready to conduct the vaccinations, starting in the capital, Juba, on December 19. The UN Refugee Agency warned there is an influx of Congolese refugees seeking shelter in South Sudan because of conflict in the DRC. Dr Farrar said: 'This Ebola outbreak is taking hold in an incredibly complex region and extends into dangerous conflict areas. 'The number of cases and deaths is concerning but the DRC public health teams, WHO and other international partners continue to provide an incredible response.' Scores of gay and bisexual men in England face being turned away from getting HIV prevention pill PrEP, politicians have warned. Currently, the drug is only given to people in England if they are part of a trial. But that is expected to be full within a matter of months. In the hope of allowing more at-risk patients to get the drug, MPs have written a letter to health minister Steve Brine urging him to expand the trial. The group of 14 MPs and peers warned that demand for PrEP, branded a 'promiscuity pill' by critics, has 'far outstripped availability'. Lloyd Russell-Moyle, an MP for Brighton, was the lead signatory on the letter to public health minister Steve Brine. Mr Russell-Moyle, 32, last month announced in Parliament he has been living with HIV for a decade Men are already being turned down in some areas of the UK and there has even been a report of someone catching HIV after being denied the medicine. The drug full name pre-exposure prophylaxis involves someone taking daily HIV drugs before they are infected with the virus. This means if the virus does enter their body, it is unable to take hold in the blood stream and they do not become infected it essentially works as a barrier. Although PrEP is available on the NHS in Scotland and Wales, the same is not true in England, where it is only available as part of a 13,000-person trial. But experts fear all the trial slots for gay men will be filled in early 2019, even though homosexuals make up more than half of new HIV diagnoses. WHAT IS PrEP? THE HIV PREVENTION DRUG THAT STOPS 90 PERCENT OF TRANSMISSION This drug in particular is fixed-dose combination of two anti-retroviral drugs, tenofovir and FTC, in one pill. They work together to interfere with an enzyme which HIV uses to infect new cells, slowing down the virus's attack or preventing it altogether. The drug is designed for people that have not yet been exposed to the virus to protect themselves against it. Alternatively, people who have been exposed can take PEP (post-exposure prophylaxis), a month-long course of drugs started within 72 hours of exposure. Advertisement A total of 53 per cent of the 4,363 HIV diagnoses in 2017 in England were among gay and bisexual men, figures show. Gay and bisexual men are most susceptible to catching HIV because anal sex carries a 10 times higher risk of infection than vaginal. This is due to cells in the anus being more susceptible to HIV, as well as fluid in semen and the anus' lining carrying more HIV than vaginal secretions. Other high-risk people include those with HIV-positive partners. The lethal virus progressively damages the cells in the immune system, weakening the body's ability to fight infections. Left untreated, this leads to AIDS the collective name for a series of deadly infections which the weakened immune system cannot tackle. Lloyd Russell-Moyle, a Brighton MP who recently announced he was HIV positive in Parliament, was among those who signed the letter. He said: 'During my speech in Parliament last month, I called on the Government to take immediate action to avoid this cliff-edge scenario. 'We know of people who have become infected with HIV because they cannot access this HIV game-changer. 'I want to see PrEP have a long-term home as part of sexual health services, but in the meantime, NHS England and local authorities must act now and agree to increased places on the trial.' Lord Guy Black, the first openly gay Conservative peer, and founder of LGBT charity Stonewall, Lord Michael Cashman, were both also among the signatories. Caroline Lucas MP, former leader of the Green Party said: It is dangerous and short-sighted of the Government to withhold PrEP from those most at risk of HIV. 'When taken as prescribed, PrEP is almost 100 per cent effective at stopping HIV so Steve Brine should urgently ensure NHS England and local authorities add new places to the trial. In their call for PrEP to be made widely available the MPs wrote: 'Since the start of the trial in October 2017, nearly 10,000 places have been filled. 'And despite an increase of 3,000 places for gay and bisexual men, its forecast that all those places will be full by early 2019. This cliff-edge scenario is simply not an option.' The letter added: 'There has already been one report in the media concerning an adult becoming infected with HIV after being refused access to PrEP via the Impact Trial due to there being no places available at their local clinic. 'This is unacceptable and we risk failing other gay and bisexual men if the current situation continues.' The other MPs who signed the letter were: William Wragg, Dame Caroline Spelman, Caroline Lucas, Peter Kyle, Ben Bradshaw, Helen Hayes, Paul Williams, Catherine West, Norman Lamb, Sarah Champion, Lord Michael Cashman, Baroness Liz Barker and Lord Guy Black. U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley gave a hint of the Trump administrations peace plan for Israel and the Palestinians, saying its long, takes advantage of new technology, and has a lot both sides will like and things they wont like. The U.S. ambassador told the U.N. Security Council that "both sides would benefit greatly from a peace agreement, but the Palestinians would benefit more, and the Israelis would risk more." Haley said neither Israelis nor Palestinians should make peace at "any price" but she highlighted the differences between the two sides. "Israel wants a peace agreement but it does not need one," the Associated Press cited her as saying. On the other hand, according to the U.S. ambassador, the Palestinian people "are suffering terribly, while their leadership clings to 50-year-old demands that have only become less and less realistic," and a peace agreement holds the prospects "of a massive improvement in the quality of their lives and far greater control over their political future." Haley said "it is with this backdrop in mind that the Trump administration has crafted its plan for peace between Israel and the Palestinians." Scientists have developed a 'smart needle' with a camera to make brain biopsies safer. The device - as thin as a human hair - enables surgeons to avoid piercing blood vessels that could cause a life-threatening brain bleed. Tests have found it can detect vessels with up to 98 percent accuracy by lighting up risky areas with infrared light. A computer system then identifies the blood vessels and sends out an alarm to the surgeon. The team, led by the University of Adelaide in Australia, says the new tool will 'revolutionize' surgery and could prevent hundreds of life-threatening complications, and even deaths. SCROLL DOWN FOR VIDEO Scientists have developed a 'smart needle' - as thin as a human hair - with a fiber-optic camera inside it that identifies blood vessels to avoid surgeons piercing it and causing a fatal bleed A brain biopsy is a procedure that removes sample of abnormal tissue for examination. The cells taken can show if the tissue is benign or cancerous. Needles are used to access tumors or lesions that are deeper in the brain. After procuring a suspect piece of tissue, pathologists run a number of tests to determine whether or not the area of the brain is diseased - and what course of action should come next. The process from start to finish takes about five to seven days. Biopsies are a crucial part of the diagnostic process and quite safe, but when their done on an organ as delicate and difficult to access s the brain, even small complications can quickly become life-threatening. Hemorrhage during surgery is associated with mortality rates of up to three percent. 'Brain biopsies are minimally invasive operations, but still [carry] the risk of damage to blood vessels that is potentially fatal,' said Dr Robert McLaughlin, chair of biophotonics at Adelaide Medical School. First, surgeons insert the 'imaging needle' into the brain. Next, a fiber-optic camera that's encased inside the needle shines infrared light on the brain tissue. A computer system determines where blood vessels are within that tissue, which helps the surgeon avoid them. The needle was just successfully tested in a trial involving 11 patients at Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital in Perth, Western Australia. 'These patients were undergoing other types of neurosurgery and consented to allow us to safely test how well the imaging needle was able to detect blood vessels during surgery,' said Dr McLaughlin. 'This is the first reported use of such a probe in the human brain during live surgery - and is the first step in the long process required to bring new tools like this into clinical practice.' He is hoping it could be in widespread clinical use within the next five years. Trial leader Dr Christopher Lind, consultant neurosurgeon at Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital and the University of Western Australia, said the needle could be a tool that will 'revolutionize' neurosurgery. 'Bleeds are a risk in many types of neurosurgery. There is a great opportunity for new technologies like this to help us reduce those risks,' he said. 'To have a tool that can see blood vessels as we proceed through the brain would revolutionize neurosurgery. It will open the way for safer surgery - allowing us to do things we've not been able to do before.' The US government told doctors Wednesday to consider prescribing medications that reverse overdoses to many more patients who take opioid painkillers in a move that could add more than $1 billion in health care costs. Assistant Secretary for Health Brett Giroir, a doctor appointed by President Donald Trump, announced the guidance, saying it's important for doctors to discuss overdose dangers with patients. Prescribing naloxone such as Narcan along with opioids forces a conversation that will lead to 'a more informed decision by the patient,' he said. The action comes a day after a close vote from a Food and Drug Administration expert panel endorsing the idea of rewriting opioid drug labels to include a naloxone recommendation for many or all patients. An FDA document said such a move could add more than $1 billion in health care costs. 'Even at a billion, it would be an investment that is well worth it,' Giroir said. US officials are urging doctors to prescribe more naloxone - including the nasally-delivered version of the drug, Narcan (pictured, file image) More than 47,600 Americans died of opioid overdoses last year, a toll that has been rising for two decades. The street drug fentanyl is the top killer today, but prescription painkillers are still a problem, contributing to nearly 15,000 overdose deaths last year. Naloxone comes in a nasal spray, an injection and an automatic injector. The Narcan nasal spray costs about $125 for a two-dose kit, although government programs can get it for less. The automatic injector can cost as much as $4,000 per kit, although its maker recently authorized a cheaper generic version. Critics said prescribing the antidote to pain patients does not address the growing share of fatal overdoses caused by illicit opioids, and could cause shortages for programs that hand out the kits to street drug users. It 'will have the unintended consequence of derailing efforts to provide naloxone to the very effective community programs we know are successful in saving lives,' said Dr Raeford E. Brown Jr, who heads an expert panel advising the FDA. The new guidance tells doctors to consider prescribing the antidote to patients on high doses of opioids, heavy drinkers, people with sleep apnea and other breathing problems, people taking benzodiazepines such as Xanax and people with addiction or mental health problems. It expands upon a similar recommendation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In April, US Surgeon General Jerome Adams issued the office's first national public health advisory in 13 years, calling on more Americans to start carrying naloxone and urging more federal money to be dedicated to broadening access. Most states allow people to get naloxone from a pharmacy or community program under a statewide prescription and some states require doctors to also prescribe naloxone to patients on high doses of opioids. The FDA is working toward an over-the-counter version of naloxone. Brown said the government should use its emergency authority to buy and distribute large quantities of naloxone and immediately make it available over the counter. Trump directed the health agency to declare the opioid crisis a public health emergency last year. 'That's the difference between declaring a public health emergency and actually acting as if there's a public health emergency,' Brown said. ___ Follow AP Medical Writer Carla K. Johnson on Twitter: @CarlaKJohnson ___ The Associated Press Health & Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content. A new sign outside the Crown & Anchor, in Brixton, South London, reads: 'We will only be accepting card payments. Apologies, but it is the digital age.' The pub made the decision to go cashless in October this year, to deter burglars after several break-ins. It is one of a handful of cafes, pubs and shops across Britain to ditch cash entirely in recent months. In some cases, retailers claim customers prefer to pay by card because it is faster and easier. A major report published today reveals that Britain is in danger of sleepwalking into a cashless society within the next 15 years But experts warn that rising bank charges and disappearing branches mean businesses are at risk of being forced to ditch cash before customers are ready, because it has become expensive and inconvenient. A major report published today reveals that Britain is in danger of sleepwalking into a cashless society within the next 15 years. The Access To Cash Review warns that going cashless too soon could mean millions of people are financially excluded and at risk of exploitation. The elderly, disabled and vulnerable could lose their independence, as many give cash to carers, neighbours or friends to do their weekly shopping. Handing over their card and PIN would put them at huge risk, as banks would not pay out in the event of fraud. People who use cash as a way of managing their budgets will face challenges, too, the report adds. If businesses drop cash altogether, cash shoppers will not have as much choice in the High Street, and as it is the poorer members of society who are more likely to use cash, it could result in a 'poverty premium'. Meanwhile, in rural areas, where broadband and mobile connectivity can be poor, card machines will not always work. And such reliance on technology could bring society to a standstill if there was a cyber-attack or an IT meltdown as we saw during the Visa network outage earlier this year. Here we explain what's driving the cashless revolution. Rising fees forcing firms to ditch cash Shops insisting on digital payment is the most likely cause of the 'death knell of cash', according to the Access To Cash Review's research. 'As one consumer group told us, there's no point protecting access to cash if you can't use it,' says the report. There is currently no obligation for retailers to accept cash, and increasing numbers of shops, car parks and buses are choosing to abandon it. For years, retailers and other small businesses have preferred customers to pay in cash because they are charged a fee for every card transaction. But, according to the report, firms are now concerned about the growing challenges of accepting cash. The Federation of Small Businesses says cash is becoming more expensive to handle. Figures from the British Retail Consortium show that the average cost of processing a cash payment rose from 1.29p in 2013 to 1.46p in 2016. Meanwhile, over the same period, the cost of accepting card payments fell though it is still more expensive from 8.83p to 5.55p. In addition, research compiled for Money Mail reveals that cash deposit charges at some major banks have doubled in the past six years. For example, in 2012, the maximum charge for depositing cash with Barclays was 85p, compared to 1.50 today. With Danske Bank, the maximum was 72p, but is now as much as 1.50. While Lloyds Bank's maximum fees across its accounts have gone up from 89p to 1. A spokesman for Danske Bank says this fee applies only to small business customers signed up to its digital account as an incentive not to return to face-to-face deposits. The fee on its regular small business account tariff has gone up by 10p, to 82p. A spokesman for Barclays says it provides free banking to new businesses and loyalty rewards of up to 50 per cent. 'On average, many clients actually pay less to deposit cash than in 2012,' he adds. Mike Cherry, chair of the Federation of Small Businesses, says: 'The decision to go cashless should be a proactive one for small business owners it shouldn't come about as the result of unreasonable banking fees. 'The small business banking market has been dogged by lack of competition and scandals for too long. We'd urge small businesses to shop around regularly for the best small business banking deals.' Dumping cash saved me a small fortune! A 19th-century pub in a village with around 107 residents is hardly a place youd expect to be a cash-free zone. But landlord Mike Keen (pictured) claims The Boot, in Freston, near Ipswich, Suffolk, is the first pub in England to reject coins and notes. Mike, 49, who has worked in catering for most of his life, first became intrigued by the idea when he visited a cashless cafe earlier this year. Six months ago he re-opened The Boot, then derelict, ending a nine-year drought when the village was without a pub. He says: The banks charge a fortune for you to pay cash in. You queue for ages to speak to a cashier and then have to pay for the privilege of putting your money into your account. By going cashless I save time having to deposit the cash, and also save time having to cash up at the end of the day. I just press a button and its done. If Mike had accepted cash at the pub, he would have had a 4.2-mile drive to his nearest bank branch in Ipswich. He adds: There are also fewer security issues. You dont have staff walking around with 2,000-worth of notes, and you reduce the chances of the pub itself being robbed. We even have lower insurance premiums because the risk of theft goes down. At first, Mike had concerns about how reliable the internet connection would be in an old building. While there have been a couple of hiccups, Mike has now installed boosters to ensure the pub stays connected, as well as a dongle, a device that can be used as a back-up if the internet fails. Now Mikes regulars can spend as little as 1 on a lime and soda and tap their cards to pay. I got a great reaction anyway because I was opening the pub after such a long time, says Mike. Overall the pubgoers have been supportive of the move and intrigued by such a modern business model taking place in a Grade II-listed property. So far the landlord has only received one angry email from someone claiming that by not paying in cash their movements could be tracked by the Government or anyone who checks their bank statement. I can definitely see a time where cash will become defunct, says Mike. No banks left to drop off money Closing bank branches means business owners must travel further to deposit their money. Almost two-thirds of Britain's bank branches have closed their doors over the past 30 years, according to consumer group Which? A fifth of households are now more than 3km from their nearest branch, with rural communities hit especially hard. Cafe owner Mike Haggerton resorted to card-only payments in the summer, after the closure of an RBS branch meant he would have to take a two-hour, 60-mile round trip from the Scottish Highlands to Perth, just to deposit cash. Mike, who owns the Habitat Cafe, says he had no option but to refuse cash payments because he had been left 'without adequate banking facilities'. Carla Taylor made her bar, Social 7, in Salford, Greater Manchester, cashless in September after realising that 93 per cent of its transactions were made by card. Earlier this month, the bar faced a hiccup when technical problems meant its card machines didn't work for around an hour. But Carla, 36, says she has now installed a back-up server in case the internet goes down again. 'We've saved on management costs by cutting the time it takes to count money and sort change orders,' she says. 'We've had a great response from customers. I am embracing the change, but I would say the banking industry has pushed me into this position Carla Taylor, bar owner 'I am embracing the change, but I would say the banking industry has pushed me into this position. By the time we went cashless, we were on our fourth RBS/NatWest branch after three had shut down.' More and more businesses are now turning to their local Post Office to make deposits, but many have reported problems with large queues and the level of service. Some Post Office branches also only accept deposits of up to 1,000. The Cheshire village of Lymm lost its last bank, Lloyds, in July last year. A Barclays branch closed its doors in 2015 and Cheshire Building Society shut in 2014. It means that many of the village's 12,000 residents now have to travel to nearby towns that are six or seven miles away to do their banking though Lymm finally got a Post Office earlier this year, which has helped. 'Lots of local businesses have been impacted and have had to get card machines, which they didn't have previously,' says councillor Graham Gowland. Lymm business owner Stephen Shelmerdine says that 65 pc of purchases at his cafe, the Coffee House, are now made by card the opposite of when the shop first opened seven years ago. Stephen says: 'The service at the Post Office is great, but there is a limit to the amount of cash you can deposit there.' The Access To Cash Review warns that going cashless too soon could mean millions of people are financially excluded and at risk of exploitation Full tills tempt thieves Businesses say they also incur security costs when keeping cash on their premises or when moving it to the bank or Post Office. Michael Mulcahy, co-owner of modern convenience store The Hoarder, in Fulham, London, says: 'Every week you hear of another independent shop being broken into, so going cashless keeps the business, and the staff, safer. We also don't need to spend the time cashing up at the end of the night.' Michael adds: 'I think some retailers assume that, if they do 30 per cent of transactions with cash, they will lose 30 per cent of customers if they go cashless. But they won't, customers just use their cards instead.' Across town, all three branches of trendy London coffee shop The Watch House have gone cashless. One of the sites was broken into three times in three weeks in 2017 with cash stolen and it was forced to go cashless after a till was damaged. It made the owner, Roland Horne, realise the shops could remain cashless and eliminate the risk of any more break-ins. He admits that in one of his shops he lost a quarter of customers at first, but maintains that it was the right decision. 'It is progressive, it is safer, it is more efficient,' he says. 'The idea of pieces of metal and paper notes to pay for things is not required in this day and age. 'In our shops in community and residential areas, it was more of an issue. Some people wanted to use cash and, if they couldn't, they were off.' Roland says it also meant no more trips to the bank, where he had encountered difficulties in depositing cash because, he was told, he did not have the correct type of business account. He adds that his shops remain 'flexible', however, and he has even given free coffees to customers who order drinks and then realise they have forgotten their card or do not have one at all. And he has taken precautions to try to avoid any technological issues. He says: 'We were completely reliant on our Wi-fi working to be able to process payments, so we have doubled up and now have a SIM card terminal, too, just in case.' With vanishing cash machines we have no choice Vanishing ATMs are another reason customers are becoming more reliant on cards. More than 200 machines are being removed or swapped for ones that charge for withdrawals every month, according to Britain's largest ATM network, Link. Remote areas are among the hardest hit, as their cash machines are used less frequently. The Access To Cash Review says: 'The earliest closures of ATMs and branches have been in remote and rural areas because activity levels and volumes tend to be lower than in busy urban areas. 'This makes it harder for locals to access cash, and also increases the costs for local retailers using cash which pushes them to digital only. This risks leaving pockets of consumers unable to access local services, and increased pressure on the margins of local merchants and retailers who choose to accept cash.' The Northumbrian village of Otterburn does not have a single ATM. And, until a Post Office service returned to the village hall last month, the only way for its 654 residents to get cash was to take up to 50 cashback from the local shop. This meant they were completely reliant on debit and credit cards. If the shop was closed, they would have to travel to the next nearest village four miles away. Gordon Moore, 58, who owns the Border Reiver Village Shop in Otterburn, says he thinks a cashless future may not be far away. 'I wouldn't be surprised if all our purchases were made by card in 15 to 20 years' time,' he says. 'You have to move with the times.' However, in some rural areas the internet connection is still not strong enough for card machines to work properly all of the time. So, in many towns and villages and for many people, cash is still the only practical payment method. A UK Finance spokesman says: 'Customers and businesses are increasingly opting for the convenience of paying in a way that suits them, with debit card payments overtaking cash for the first time last year. 'But the UK is far from becoming a cash-free society and, despite cash being less important than it once was, it will remain a payment method that continues to be valued and preferred by many. Money, money, money: But the Abba Museum only takes cards We ditched cash too fast: Sweden's regret Sweden is expected to become the world's first entirely cashless society, writes Louise Eccles. Hundreds of traders already refuse to take cash, citing bank branch closures and high bank charges, as well as convenience and security. Around 85 per cent of payments are made by card compared to 34 per cent in the UK. Last year Money Mail visited the Scandinavian country to see for ourselves how the cashless movement was taking hold. We found that cash is now so rare that even market stalls, churches and homeless people accept card payment. But steps are being taken to slow down the pace of its cashless revolution amid fears the country could be creating a problem. Earlier this year, members of the public were even urged by a Government body to keep cash at home in case of a crisis. A leaflet entitled 'If Crisis or War Comes' was sent to every household in the country by The Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency. Among the advice was that everyone should 'keep cash in small denominations'. Echoing fears that Swedes could struggle to buy goods in a crisis, it said people should be prepared in the event that 'payment cards and cash machines do not work', and that 'mobile networks and the internet do not work'. The nation's central bank, Sveriges Riksbank, is also concerned the country could be vulnerable to cyber-attacks and technology failures if it relies on card payments alone. It also pointed out that by eradicating cash, banks are effectively in complete control of our money. If this development continues without the Riksbank taking action, we risk finding ourselves in a situation in which the payment market is completely dominated by private players Swedish bank review Launching a review this year, it said Sweden's decline in cash had been 'rapid' and 'dramatic' and they were 'practically alone' in the world with regards to the unique challenges they faced. The central bank is even examining the possibility of introducing its own e-currency, the e-krona, as well as 'making card payments and withdrawing cash possible in an offline situation'. A report said: 'If this development continues without the Riksbank taking action, we risk finding ourselves in a situation in which the payment market is completely dominated by private players . . . Incorrectly handled, this could lead to monopoly situations. 'There exists a risk for cyberattacks, which may increase in the future. I consider that Sweden's preparedness will be weakened if, in a serious crisis or the event of war, we have not decided in advance how households and companies will pay for fuel, food and other necessities. Making it possible to make payments offline may also be necessary to ensure that payments can be executed in all parts of the country.' In Sweden, most people have a mobile phone app called Swish which allows instant payments to be made securely between individuals. Shops, hotels and restaurants are not obliged to accept cash as long as they have clearly signalled this to their customers, for example with a sign. But a parliamentary committee in Sweden is looking into whether it should be mandatory for banks to offer cash withdrawals and deposits. The proposal would also force banks to provide 'reasonable access' to cash, with Swedes having to travel no more than 16 miles to a cash machine. Ron Delnevo, European executive director for the ATM Industry Association, says: 'Many Swedes who would prefer to use cash are being hindered from doing so by a general banking policy of not handling notes or coins at bank branches. Faced with this massive inconvenience, it is hardly surprising that some Swedes have, reluctantly, given up using cash.' The Access To Cash Review warns that Britain needed to learn from Sweden's mistakes to stop people being left behind. There at times appears to be a concerted effort to diminish Britain's economic performance. Political wrangling over Brexit is without doubt having a deleterious impact on confidence as the British Chambers of Commerce asserts in its latest survey. It warns that output this year will come in at 1.2 per cent and 1.3 per cent in 2019, below the Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts last month. As a lobby group representing businesses it might better deploy its energies in worrying about how a Corbyn government might destroy prosperity. Looming threat: A Labour government headed by Jeremy Corbyn would bring prosperity to a halt The idea that Brexit is putting the brakes on output has validity. If that is the case and the Government eventually finds some way through the thicket of Remain supporters, extreme Brexiteers, second-referendum fans and all the rest, the UK economy could look decidedly more healthy than most of its peers. Latest numbers from the Paris based OECD show that in the third quarter of the year Britain was the second fastest growing Group of Seven rich economies after the US. Our European neighbours are having a torrid time. Germany's economy contracted by 0.2 per cent, Japan lost 0.6 per cent of output, Italy was minus 0.1 per cent and France, before the yellow jacket protests, was trailing Britain. And it is not looking much better going forward. The latest Business Climate Indicator for Germany is at a 27-month low. The German car industry is going through a restructuring with Volkswagen warning that the 27billion it is setting aside won't be enough to meet the EU's greener car requirements. In spite of the BCC's attempt to dampen the spirits, it should be noted that job creation has not been harmed by Brexit, demand for labour remains strong and real wages are rising. Citizens may be cautious about spending, but imagine the fuss if people were excessively loading up on credit cards. What is clear is that an alternative government headed by Jeremy Corbyn would bring prosperity to a halt. Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell has cautioned that a Labour government might lead to a run on the pound. It is already happening. Nationalisation of the railways might have appeal, but seizure of up to 10 per cent of the shares in every company with 250 workers or more would be the biggest attack on free markets in the nation's history. This is before we consider hikes in wealth taxes, higher corporation tax and the threat to lower the threshold for the highest rate of income tax. Credit Suisse and other London-based wealth managers are advising clients to move capital and wealth offshore. Assets are being parked offshore and some cash invested in 'safe' houses in places as far away as Florida. Britain's business organisations need to wake up. Brexit is not the cause of capital flight. It is the imagined image of moving vans arriving at Number 10 carrying Jeremy's chattels. Fossil hunt Shell has not been top of the class when it comes to oil exploration. But it has been skilful at harvesting undeveloped assets. The group's 47billion purchase of BG in 2015 was seen as risky as the oil price tumbled, but eventually came good. Its latest target looks to be Endeavor Energy which is big in Texas's Permian Basin. Originally the asking price was $15billion (11.9billion) but potential buyers including Chevron and Exxon Mobil baulked. Shell now has come in at a much lower price of $8billion (6.3billion), partly dictated by demands by the owners that it hang on to mineral rights requiring buyers to pay royalties on new discoveries. With Shell's free cash flow of just under 5billion in the last quarter, buying Endeavor would not be a stretch. Whether piling more deeply into fossil fuels is a good idea is wholly different question. Waking the baby Johnson & Johnson wrote the book on how to deal with a corporate disaster with its response to the Tylenol poisoning scandal of the 1980s. It is having a far harder time handling revelations that it allegedly covered up the fact that Baby Powder, a product with a century of history, may have contained 'small amounts' of cancer-causing asbestos. The scent of scandal has already wiped 32billion of J&J's share price and done reputational damage to a firm with a carefully nurtured image of safe hygiene products. One wonders what 'Woody' Johnson, US ambassador to the Court of St James and heir to the J&J fortune, makes of it all. I am 80 and have been a widow for 27 years. I have terminal cancer and am currently receiving chemotherapy treatment, which is not nice at all. In April, I started receiving letters from TV Licensing, which said that my house does not have a licence. I replied each time, giving my licence number. I would never watch TV without one I'm not that sort of person. Then I received a letter saying: 'As there is no record of a TV Licence at your address, you should expect a visit from an enforcement officer. 'If you are caught watching or recording live TV, on any channel or device, you could face a fine of up to 1,000 plus any legal costs.' There was even a red stamp on it reading 'visit approved' and it seemed to be personally signed by an enforcement officer. It was so frightening. If they checked, they would see I have a valid licence, so why do they continue to chase me? Mrs J. K., Wallingford, Oxon. You have had a total of five letters from TV Licensing since April each more threatening than the last. Every time, you either sent a letter or emailed to explain you do not have to pay as you are over 75 and entitled to a free licence. What's so baffling is that the firm let you enjoy your free licence in peace for five years before it began chasing you. Even more frustrating is that it would have taken minutes for it to check your account and see you had a valid licence number, as you repeatedly pointed out. TV Licensing blames 'human error'. A spokesman says: 'We are very sorry for any concern caused by the letters sent to Mrs K's property in error. We have spoken to her to offer our sincere apologies. 'These letters should not have been sent and it should have been resolved sooner. The service she has received is not acceptable and we will be taking all necessary steps to address this.' May I suggest if a company is planning to send threatening letters to anyone, let alone an 80-year-old widow, it might want to at least carry out basic checks first to ensure it has its facts correct. If letters are automated, firms should seriously consider their potential impact on older or vulnerable people. You have YOUR say Every week, Money Mail receives hundreds of your letters and emails about our stories. Here are some from our article about how delivery drivers are throwing parcels over fences, leaving them on doorsteps even forcing them through cat flaps... They can lob my parcel over the fence, put it behind a pot or fake my signature I'd prefer any of those to a 'missed delivery' card and awful queues at the depot. O. C., London. My son's neighbour orders online all the time, but is never home for deliveries. The driver used to beg my son to take them in, but he'd end up with parcels blocking his hall for up to a week. Now, he refuses to take any in. N. P., Peterborough, Cambs. I ordered a rug and the driver tossed it over my fence. I complained and got a 20 gift card. W. T., Cardiff. I was waiting for a parcel when I got a text from the retailer saying the driver was running late and it would come the next day. But it arrived at 10.45pm when I queried the text, the driver said: 'I don't give up.' That's service. L. R., Brackley, Northants. I'm friends with an elderly couple in my building. One day, I asked if they would accept my deliveries. They love it and now take in other residents' parcels, too. They only get out one day a week, so used to get lonely. J. H., London. Not all delivery people are bad. I live in the Scottish Highlands and, due to the lack of decent shops, I order online a lot. The drivers are pleasant and courteous. One even gives me a biscuit for my dog every time he comes. A. E., Scotland. If you aren't prepared to stay at home for a delivery, don't order online. Our roads are clogged up with delivery vans. Get out there and buy from bricks-and-mortar shops. We need to prevent the death of the High Street. C. E., Birmingham. I opened an eBay account in September, listing eight coins with a reserve price of 300. It says for new customers, there is a free listing with no sale, no fee. After ten days with no sale, I took down the listing. However, eBay then invoiced me for 120. I protested but, to my annoyance, this sum has been taken from my account. I have emailed to query it, but have not received a response. L. M., Bridgwater, Somerset. Something didn't quite sound right with your letter, so I asked eBay to take a closer look. Well, here's what went wrong you listed your items with a reserve price of 3,000, not 300. When you set a reserve on eBay, there is a fee of 4 per cent of the reserve price, capped at 150. It is payable even if you don't sell the items: in your case, 4 per cent of 3,000 is 120. This is an optional feature and you will have received a notification explaining this. However, eBay accepts that you made a mistake in adding an extra zero to your reserve price. So it is prepared, as a gesture of goodwill, to refund you 108 the 120 you've paid minus the 12 you would have been charged if you'd set the reserve as 300. With plenty of unwanted gifts likely to make it on to eBay after Christmas, we should all take the time to be careful with typing, and read any terms and conditions. Straight to the point I bought two vouchers worth 154 from Groupon. One was for a face peeling treatment and the other an eyebrow micro-blading treatment. When I later decided to cancel the vouchers, I was told I could only have a credit voucher, as Id missed its 14-day window for a refund. Id prefer the cash. E. A., Cheltenham, Glos. Groupon says you cancelled the micro-blading treatment two months and five days after you bought it and the face peeling voucher two months after purchase missing its 14-day window by quite a way. However, after I contacted the firm on your behalf, it has decided to offer you a full cash refund as a gesture of goodwill. *** I read in Money Mail that it was possible for someone to inherit half their spouses additional state pension the so-called State Earnings Related Pension Scheme, or SERPS when they die. I thought you could inherit more than this? D. W., via email. It depends when you were born. When SERPS was introduced in 1978 as a top-up to the state pension, the Government did allow 100 per cent to be passed on. However, this proved too expensive and was reduced to 50 pc in the early 2000s. It means that spouses or civil partners of men born on or before October 5, 1937, and women born on or before October 5, 1942, can inherit 100 per cent of their SERPS. For anyone born after that date, the amount you can inherit decreases on a sliding scale to 50 per cent, depending on their birthdate. *** My cousin asked for her Vodafone mobile account to be closed last December, but this was never done and it continued to send bills. I have power of attorney for her, but no one will answer any of my letters. J. E., Ivybridge, Devon. Vodafone says it does not have a power of attorney registered on this account. It claims in October, your cousin requested a Porting Authorisation Code (PAC), which is needed to move a phone number from one mobile network provider to another. It says she was told this would expire if it wasnt used within 30 days and the account would remain open. She was sent an email and text to confirm this when the code was not used. After contacting the firm, it has now closed the account. I bought a tablet, which my friend set up with my BT router. I used it a few times, then did not use it for several months. When I tried to use it again in August, I found the battery was flat and it would not recharge. In September, I bought another and employed a technician to connect it to BT, but it would not accept the data and passwords I'd used before. BT promised to send a letter with the necessary details. This never materialised. Thus began a ridiculous saga. BT told my technician that it disconnects accounts not used for more than a month. It means I have been paying for a connection (a total of 164.97) that didn't exist for at least four months. Yesterday, my tablet was, at last, connected. But I am very annoyed with BT's service. J. M., West Lothian. You have included copies of five letters you sent to BT. You tell me none was answered. Your technician also phoned BT on several occasions to try to remove the block on your service. It seems your email address was locked due to inactivity. But there is no reason you should have had such a palaver getting online. BT has now set you up with a new address. It has also offered a credit to cover the period you were unable to use the service, plus a further goodwill gesture. The FTSE 100 closed up 64.35 points at 6765.94 and the pound was at $1.27 against the dollar. Drug making giant GlaxoSmithKline has agreed a tie-up with US rival Pfizer that will see the companies merge their consumer healthcare divisions to create a business with combined sales of 9.8billion. Elsewhere, Wetherspoon boss Tim Martin has waded into the Brexit debate once again by slamming MPs for having no idea how being in the EU customs union costs British consumers money. The index is up moderately into the green as attention turns to the US Federal Reserve meeting this week. Tim Martin, the chairman of pub group JD Wetherspoon, has written a letter to every single MP in the country explaining his dismay that many politicians do not seem to know how the customs union works. Brexit-supporting Mr Martin claims a high proportion of politicians have 'no knowledge' of how the system operates. Mr Martin said: 'The customs union is an undisguised protectionist system that imposes import taxes on 12,651 non-EU imports, including oranges, rice, bananas and children's clothes and shoes. Speaking out: Brexit-supporting Mr Martin claims a high proportion of politicians have 'no knowledge' of how the system operates 'The customs union pushes up prices for consumers and the tariff income is collected by the UK Government and is sent to Brussels. 'It is worrying that MPs have no knowledge at all as to how the customs operates and how it costs their constituents every day.' In the letter being sent on Thursday and seen by This is Money, Mr Martin said: 'The undisguised protectionist nature of the EU is not in doubt, and it is not possible to articulate a coherent view as to our future trading relationship with the EU unless the existing system, which keeps shop prices artificially high, is understood.' The letter emerged after Mr Martin appeared on BBC Politics Live on 17 December with Vicky Ford, the Conservative MP for Chelmsford, and Rushanara Ali, the Labour MP for Bethnal Green and Bow. Panelist and chief leader writer at the Observor, Sonia Sodha, reportedly said during the BBC Politics Live television show: 'It's just wrong to say the EU is protectionistthe EU is not protectionist. It's ridiculous to argue that (it is).' 'The customs union pushes up prices for consumers and the tariff income is collected by the UK Government and is sent to Brussels', Mr Martin said During this week's BBC Politics Live show, Mr Martin said that businesses can 'thrive from uncertainty', adding it would be 'pathetic' to demand assurances from the government. He told BBC Politics Live: 'Well I think as the saying goes, if you want certainty you've got death and taxes. 'So businesses surely are built to thrive from uncertainty, and most businesses which have done well have taken advantage of it. 'I do think it's slightly pathetic to say 'give me certainty'.' In November, Wetherspoon said it expected its annual results to be weaker than the previous year, despite sales growing 'strongly'. In a trading update for the 13 weeks to 28 October, the chain said like-for-like sales increased by 5.5 per cent, and total sales were up 6.2 per cent. Despite strong growth, chairman Tim Martin said the company was dealing with tough comparatives, having delivered several years of record profits. Shares in JD Wetherspoon are up 0.28 per cent or 3p to 1,084p. A retired detective is suing the filmmakers who produced the Netflix series 'Making a Murderer' alleging the documentary defamed him. Former Manitowoc County Sheriff's Detective Andrew Colborn, who helped convict Steven Avery for the 2005 killing of photographer Teresa Halbach, filed the lawsuit on Monday in Manitowoc County Circuit Court in Wisconsin. Colborn contends the 2015 series which documents Avery's case was edited to make viewers think he and others planted evidence to frame Avery and his nephew, Brendan Dassey. The complaint names filmmakers Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos, Netflix itself, the streaming service's executives Lisa Nishimura and Adam Del Deo, along with editor Mary Manhardt as defendants. Former Manitowoc County Sheriff's Detective Andrew Colborn (right), who helped convict Steven Avery for the 2005 killing of photographer Teresa Halbach, filed a lawsuit against Netflix (logo at left) on Monday alleging defamation in season one of 'Making a Murderer' Michael Griesbach, Colborn's attorney, released a statement saying of his client: 'His reputation and that of Manitowoc County, itself, has been severely and unjustly defamed,' Michael Griesbach, Colborn's attorney, said in a statement. 'He is filing this lawsuit to set the record straight and to restore his good name.' The lawsuit argues the makers of the film 'omitted, distorted, and falsified material and significant facts in an effort to portray [Colborn] as a corrupt police officer who planted evidence to frame an innocent man.' It went on to say, 'Defendants did so with actual malice and in order to make the film more profitable and more succesful' The entire premise of season one of Making a Murderer is unpacking the lingering question of whether Steven Avery (pictured), a salvage yard owner who had already spent 18 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit, and his nephew Dassey, had been framed for the murder of Halbach, who was a 25-year-old photographer. The complaint names filmmakers Laura Ricciardi (right) and Moira Demos (left), who are shown visting SiriusXM Studios on October 18 in New York City Netflix executives Adam Del Deo (left) and Lisa Nishimura (right), and editor Mary Manhardt are also named in the complaint. Del Deo and Nishimura are shown attending the 28th Annual Producers Guild Awards at The Beverly Hilton Hotel on January 28, 2017 in Beverly Hills, California The entire premise of season one of Making a Murderer is unpacking the lingering question of whether Avery, a salvage yard owner who had already spent 18 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit, and his nephew Dassey, had been framed for the murder of Halbach, who was a 25-year-old photographer. In 2003, Avery was exonerated by DNA evidence for his 1985 conviction for the sexual assault and attempted murder of Penny Beerntsen. After he was released, he filed a $36 million lawsuit against Manitowoc County alleging negligence in their policing and investigation, which was eventually settled out of court. Two years later, Avery became a suspect in the Halbach murder, and he and Dassey were convicted and sentenced to life in prison in 2007. Colborn's lawsuit is centered around a specific scene in episode five of the first installment of the 'Making a Murderer' series, where Colborn is testifying about a phone call he made to police dispatch regarding the vehicle that belonged to Halbach, which was later discovered on Avery's property. As it's shown in the documentary, Colborn asks dispatch on a recorded call to run a license plate number which comes back as belonging to Halbach, who had already been identified as a missing person at that point. When Colborn gets that information, he immediately can be heard saying, 'Ninety-nine Toyota?' which is the year and make of the car belonging to Halbach that was found on Avery's property. Teresa Halbach, 25, the victim whose death Avery and Dassey were convicted of, is shown In the film, Avery's then-lawyer Dean Strang asks Colborn about the call while he's on the stand, and implies the way he responded to the dispatcher made it seem as though he was looking at Halbach's car, which wasn't said to have been discovered on Avery's land until two days after that call. Colborn's lawsuit disputes how that scene was portrayed in the show, stating that Strang's insinuation was objected to, and that objection was sustained in court at that time. The lawsuit also states that Colborn's affirmative response to Strang in that moment is not factually accurate, and that him saying 'Yes' was actually taken from a later question related to running routine license plate checks. 'Their manipulation of this crucial line of testimony falsely conveyed to viewers that plaintiff located Halbachs SUV somewhere other than at the salvage yard days earlier and likely assisted other law enforcement officers plant it there at a later time,' the suit reads. 'The impression is false and gave to viewers the exact opposite impression of what plaintiff was asked and how he responded at trial.' Netflix and the parties named in the lawsuit could not immediately be reached for comment. Meanwhile, season two of 'Making a Murderer' dropped on Netflix in October, which is focused on the post-conviction process for Avery and Dassey. Avery's new representation, Kathleen Zellner, filed an appeal for retrial June of 2017, citing ineffective counsel, which was denied four months later in October. The following month, Zellner filed documents implicating Dassey's older brother, Bobby, in the murder of Halbach. Today, Avery remains in prison, and so does Dassey, despite a couple of small victories in 2017. Dassey, who is mentally impaired, confessed at the age of 16 to helping Avery murder Halbach, but later recanted that confession and stated it was coerced. Today, Avery remains in prison, and so does Brendan Dassey (pictured), despite a couple of small victories in 2017 Dassey, who is mentally impaired, confessed at the age of 16 (shown) to helping Avery murder Halbach, but later recanted that confession and stated it was coerced A lower court and a three-judge panel of an appeals court later agreed that it was an involuntary confession, but that decision was reversed upon appeal to the full Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in December 2017 by a vote of 4 to 3, and his conviction was upheld. In a dissenting opinion at the time, Judge Ilana Rovner wrote: 'Dassey was subjected to myriad [of] psychologically coercive techniques, but the state court did not review his interrogation with the special care required by Supreme Court precedent. His confession was not voluntary and his conviction should not stand, and yet an impaired teenager has been sentenced to life in prison.' When the Supreme Court of the United States decided not to hear Dassey's case in June, his fate was sealed. In addition to Colborn's lawsuit, authorities of Manitowoc County will also get a chance to make their case in the court of public opinion, thanks to the forthcoming docu-series, 'Convicting a Murderer.' Filmmaker Shawn Rech began production on telling the stories from the 'other side' of the trial in February. 'When Making A Murderer was produced, many on the law enforcement side of the story could not, or would not, participate in the series, which resulted in a one-sided analysis of the case,' Rech told Deadline Hollywood. 'This docuseries will examine the case and the allegations of police wrongdoing from a broader perspective. It will also share with viewers the traumatic effects of being found guilty and vilified in the court of public opinion.' A 31-year-old DIY tinkerer in north China has shot to fame for his 'utterly useless' yet hilarious inventions. A meat cleaver smartphone case, a barbecue foosball table and an earthquake-proof noodle bowl are among the more than 80 questionable contraptions created by Geng Shuai from Baoding city, Hebei province. The former welder, nicknamed 'useless Edison', has drawn more than 2.6 million fans on popular video app Kuaishou, where he regularly holds live-streams and posts videos of his offbeat stainless steel inventions from his workshop. A barbecue foosball table and a self-defence sword-tie are among the more than 80 questionable contraptions created by Geng Shuai (pictured) from Baoding, Hebei province Geng, nicknamed 'useless Edison', has drawn more than 2.6 million fans on popular video app Kuaishou, where he regularly holds live-streams and posts videos of his offbeat inventions 'You see, there are many problems we encounter in our day-to-day life - I just use my creativity and welding skills to solve these issues that no one else has addressed,' a proud Geng told MailOnline as he introduced a motorbike with its own toilet. After graduating junior high school, Geng went to Beijing for a career in welding. Early last year, Geng quit his job to focus full time on making his quirky gadgets, such as a knife hair comb and a Thor hammer purse that is both 'fashionable and practical'. Among his first inventions that went viral by the millions was the meat cleaver phone case, which Geng is seen dramatically whipping out from his pants pocket in a demonstration video. He then flips open the cover, glares at the camera and demands threateningly: 'Can I have your number...?' Among his first inventions that went viral by the millions was the meat cleaver phone case, which Geng is seen dramatically whipping out from his pants pocket in a demonstration video Last Wednesday, Geng donated 11 pieces of his work for an online auction hosted by e-commerce platform Taobao. His brainchild, the meat cleaver smartphone case, was sold for 5,200 yuan (600), nearly eight times its market price of 680 yuan (78) His latest invention, a vacuum cleaner with a massive metal retractable arm, looks like something straight out of a Terminator movie while his earthquake-proof noodle bowl, balanced by a heavy stand, allows the hungry user to continue slurping throughout the natural disaster. His shower sword, which dispenses soap in the hilt, is made with cleaning sponge and will make the wielder feel like a hero during bathtime. But Geng is most proud of his wearable shoe-stool, which allows the user to squat down and sit on his or her foot for a break. The passionate inventor, however, did not address viewers' concerns of severe numbness that would most certainly entail. 'I think this was the most controversial piece - so many people hated it,' Geng said, clearly unbothered. 'Many followers said this is probably the most useless thing I've invented - but then, how would they know if they haven't tried it?' he touted. 'I think it's great - visually and practically.' Geng's latest invention, a vacuum cleaner with a massive metal retractable arm, looks like something straight out of a Terminator movie Geng is most proud of his wearable shoe-stool, which allows the user to squat down and sit on his or her foot for a break. However, many viewers are concerned about their foot going numb However, not all his creations are perfect, as he admits himself. But his hilarious 'fail videos' have kept eager followers coming back for more. In one video, a suited up Geng shows off a large stainless steel sword that doubles as a tie, perfect for those who are looking for some extra protection on the streets. 'But I think the measurement is a bit off...,' he smiles nervously as the tip of the sword hovers dangerously over his crotch area during his attempt to sit down - much to the amusement of his fans. The social media star puts up his inventions for sale on social media app WeChat, but business has been slow, Geng admitted. His best-selling product is his Thor hammer purse, marketed at 100 yuan (11.50) apiece. He has sold six. Fashionable and practical: Geng shows off his Thor hammer purse on one of his viral videos In one video, a suited up Geng shows off a large stainless steel sword that doubles as a tie. But the measurement seems a bit off, he said while trying to sit on a chair Geng's earthquake-proof noodle bowl, balanced by a heavy stand, allows the hungry user to continue slurping throughout the natural disaster with no interruptions His source of income - which is necessary to support his wife and their two young children - is mostly from his fans, who would 'tip' him for his videos on Kuaishou. 'Every time I click on one of your new videos I'm so nervous. I'm so worried that you might invent something that's actually useful,' a user commented on one of his clips. 'Even though your inventions are pretty much useless, I can't stop watching your videos - I respect your skills and creativity!' another user said. It takes Geng between a day to a week to produce an invention after designing the gadget. 'People like watching me because this is something they can't do themselves,' he said. 'Some of them also enjoy my clips because it's rare to see someone so passionate about their job nowadays.' After blunting the edge of the cleaver, Geng transforms it into a cleaver-comb Geng's barbecue foosball table makes cooking more fun while his shower sword is made with cleaning sponge and will make the wielder feel like a hero during bathtime He created a 'paper' plane with stainless steel, which would just land with a thud on the ground Last Wednesday, Geng donated 11 pieces of his work for an online auction hosted by e-commerce platform Taobao. His brainchild, the meat cleaver smartphone case, was sold for 5,200 yuan (600), nearly eight times its market price of 680 yuan (78). 'Income from the auction will be donated to children who can't go to school due to financial challenges,' he said. 'I'm at a place in life where I'm really happy. I love inventing, this is exactly what I want to do.' President Donald Trump and his children have congratulated the Senate for passing a sweeping criminal justice reform bill, with Ivanka Trump praising her husband Jared Kushner for his role in steering the legislation. The Senate passed the bill by a vote of 87-12 on Tuesday night, in a bid to address concerns that the nation's war on drugs had led to the imprisonment of too many Americans for non-violent crimes' The Senate passage give Trump a signature policy victory, with the outcome hailed by scores of conservative and liberal advocacy groups. The House is expected to pass the bill this week, sending it to the president's desk for his signature. Trump quickly spoke out in praise of the bill, saying he fully intended to sign it. The Senate passed a criminal justice reform bill on Tuesday. Pictured: A Christmas tree stands in front of the U.S. Capitol building in Washington DC on Monday Senators are seen congratulating each other on the bill's passage on Tuesday evening 'America is the greatest Country in the world and my job is to fight for ALL citizens, even those who have made mistakes. Congratulations to the Senate on the bi-partisan passing of a historic Criminal Justice Reform Bill,' Trump wrote on Twitter. 'This will keep our communities safer, and provide hope and a second chance, to those who earn it. In addition to everything else, billions of dollars will be saved. I look forward to signing this into law!' Trump's children didn't hold back their enthusiasm either. 'Lots of vision, grit and elbow grease by many (so proud of my husband!) to secure the votes being counted now,' Ivanka Trump wrote on Instagram as the bill was on the verge of Senate passage. 'It took a Republican House, Senate and White House to fix the problems created by the Bill Clinton 90's crime bill,' Don Trump Jr wrote on Twitter. 'The Senate did it's [sic] job tonight in an incredibly bipartisan fashion by passing the First Step Act! When both sides work together in good faith with the White House lots can be accomplished for the benefit of America! A job well done to all!' The bill gives judges more discretion when sentencing some drug offenders and boosts prisoner rehabilitation efforts. It also reduces the life sentence for some drug offenders with three convictions, or 'three strikes,' to 25 years. Another provision would allow about 2,600 federal prisoners sentenced for crack cocaine offenses before August 2010 the opportunity to petition for a reduced penalty. Ivanka Trump is seen arriving home on Tuesday night, shortly before she praised her husband Jared Kushner for his role in steering a criminal justice reform bill So proud: Ivanka paid tribute to Jared for helping to guide the legislation through the Senate, posting this photo of her husband and gushing praise for his work on the bill What is in the 'First Step' criminal justice reform bill? The Senate on Tuesday passed a sweeping criminal justice overhaul. The House is expected to pass the bill this week, sending it to President Donald Trump for his signature. The bill: Attempts to focus the toughest sentences on the most violent offenders by lowering mandatory minimum sentences for prior drug felonies, including reducing the life sentence for some drug offenders with three convictions, or 'three strikes,' to 25 years. Gives judges more discretion when sentencing nonviolent drug offenders. Allows about 2,600 federal prisoners sentenced for crack cocaine offenses before August 2010 the opportunity to petition for a reduced penalty. Encourages prisoners to participate in programs designed to reduce the risk of recidivism, with the reward being an earlier release to a halfway house or home confinement to finish out their sentence. To win over wary senators, sponsors tweaked the bill to prevent those convicted of violent firearm offenses, sexual exploitation of children and high-level fentanyl and heroin dealing from participating. Clarifies that prisoners can get seven additional days of credit for good behavior for each year of their sentence. The credits are deducted from a sentence to allow for early release. An inmate serving a 10-year sentence who earns the maximum credit would be released 70 days earlier than under current law. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the change would save $414 million over the coming decade. Currently, the federal corrections system oversees about 184,000 inmates whose sentences range from less than one year to life. Advertisement The vote also thrilled Democrats. Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., said the nation's prisons are full of Americans who are struggling with mental illness and addiction, and who are overwhelmingly poor. He said the nation's criminal justice system 'feeds on certain communities and not on others,' and said the bill represents a step toward 'healing' for those communities. 'Let's make no mistake, this legislation, which is one small step, will affect thousands and thousands of lives,' Booker said. When the bill appeared to have stalled in recent weeks, Sen. Charles Grassley, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, pleaded with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to bring it up for a vote. With Trump's urging, McConnell eventually agreed, and voted for the bill as well. 'The First Step Act takes lessons from history and from states - our laboratories of democracy - to reduce crime, save taxpayer dollars and strengthen faith and fairness in our criminal justice system,' Grassley said. The Senate turned back three amendments Tuesday from Republican senators Tom Cotton of Arkansas and John Kennedy of Louisiana, who said the bill endangered public safety. Supporters voiced concerns that passing any of the amendments would have sunk the bill. One amendment would have excluded more prisoners from participating in educational and training programs that allow them to earn credits. Those credits can then be used to gain an earlier release to a halfway house or home confinement to finish out their sentence. Another amendment would have required that victims be notified before a prisoner gets that earlier release. The third would have required the Federal Bureau of Prisons to track and report the re-arrest rate for each prisoner who gets early release. 'While the bill has marginally improved from earlier versions, I'm disappointed my amendments to exclude child molesters from early release and to protect victims' rights were not adopted,' Cotton said. 'I also remain concerned that reducing sentences for drug traffickers and violent felons is a threat to public safety.' Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said the bill already carves out some 60 different crimes that make prisoners ineligible for early release to a halfway house or home confinement. He said Cotton's amendment was too expansive and would prevent at least 30,000 prisoners from participation. The U.S. Capitol Building Dome is seen before the sun rises in Washington on Tuesday Durbin said the Federal Bureau of Prisons also gives victims the opportunity to be notified upon a change in the prisoner's status, but it's a choice. He said about 10 percent of victims choose not to be notified because of the trauma involved in revisiting the crime. Meanwhile, the amendment from Cotton and Kennedy would make it a requirement. 'Supporting the Cotton amendment is basically saying to these crime victims, 'We're going to force this information on you whether it's in the best interest of your family, whether you want it or not,'' Durbin said. 'That is not respectful of crime victims.' The bill would affect only federal prisoners, who make up less than 10 percent of the country's prison population. An array of liberal and conservative advocacy groups rallied in support of the bill. For example, the Koch brothers-backed group, Americans for Prosperity, applauded senators for putting 'policy ahead of politics.' The American Civil Liberties Union said the bill was 'by no means perfect. But we are in the midst of a mass incarceration crisis, and the time to act is now.' Law enforcement groups were more split. It was backed by the Fraternal Order of Police and the International Association of Chiefs of Police but opposed by the National Sheriff's Association. The union representing federal prison guards also joined in supporting the measure. After pulling out its troops from Syria, the US may continue to act in the region through its allies, including "unofficial and questionable ones", Chairman of the Russian Federation Council's (upper house of parliament) Foreign Affairs Committee Konstantin Kosachev stated, commenting on US President Donald Trumps decision to pull out the US forces from Syria, TASS reports. On his page in Facebook, the senator wrote that US statements concerning the pullout of troops from Syria "are an inevitable step after previous claims about the defeat" of the Islamic State terrorist group (outlawed in Russia). "According to logic, if the enemy is defeated, then who will the US fight against? Or they would have to confirm that [they are fighting against] the legal Syrian government, which was supposed implicitly since the very beginning?" Kosachev wrote. The Russian senator added that Trump was facing "two domestic challenges in the US", one of which "demands the US to mind its own business more and stop warring for the interests of others," while another urges the US "not to give Syria away to [Bashar] al-Assad and the "bad" Russia, as this may be seen as a defeat of the US." "This is why the decision may be double-sided - to pull out the Americans, but to keep acting through allies, including unofficial and questionable ones. I do not rule out that they will actually perform this showy gesture with the pullout of US troops. But whether this will change anything in Syrias political and military situation - thats the big question," the senator concluded. Two Tory peers with links to Russia are facing sleaze probes amid claims they tried to lobby ministers. The standards commissioner in the Lords has launched full-blown investigations into Lord Barker of Battle and Lord Fairfax of Cameron. Lord Barker, who served in David Cameron's government, chairs energy firm EN+, in which oligarch Oleg Deripaska has a significant stake. The company was targeted by US sanctions in April over 'malign activities' by Russia. Security minister Ben Wallace revealed in October that he had received separate requests from the peers for 'government assistance for Russian associates'. Security minister Ben Wallace turned down a meeting with Lord Barker (pictured left). Mr Wallace did meet with Lord Fairfax (right) Mr Wallace turned down a meeting with Lord Barker 'to discuss sanctions', but did hold talks with Lord Fairfax. In a letter to the Foreign Affairs Committee, Mr Wallace said the peer 'wished to discuss his experiences working for Sovcomflot', the state-owned Russian shipping company. Both the Tory peers have flatly denied any wrongdoing. But the Lords standards commissioner, Lucy Scott-Moncrieff, has now agreed to look into complaints against them. Lord Barker is being probed over 'alleged breach of the Code in relation to personal honour, parliamentary services and paid advocacy'. Lord Fairfax is facing investigation for 'alleged breach of the Code in relation to parliamentary services and paid advocacy'. A source close to Lord Barker said he had made clear in his message to Mr Wallace that he had 'no ask' of the government. 'There is nothing in this. At no point has Lord Barker lobbied any Government Minister as the publicly available correspondence makes explicitly clear, all of which will be forwarded to the Commissioner,' the source said. Lord Fairfax did not respond to emails from MailOnline, but previously insisted he had been 'scrupulous to declare his interests as a director and senior executive of Sovcomflot' and had 'not sought to use his position in the House of Lords to advance Russian interests or influence in the UK'. He said he wanted to raise 'circumstances' around a Russian national who his firm had been 'in litigation' with, and has since been granted asylum in the UK. Tory MP Bob Seeley, a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, said it was a 'very important' development and the situation was 'very worrying'. 'I think it is right that (the investigations) are happening,' he told MailOnline. 'We have to be careful to protect the integrity of our system.' Mr Seeley repeated his call for Britain to get a 'foreign powers act' to limit Russian influence in the UK. The United States pledged $5.8 billion in aid and investment Tuesday for strengthening government and economic development in Central America, and another $4.8 billion in development aid for southern Mexico. The U.S aid aims to promote better security conditions and job opportunities as part of a regional plan to allow Central Americans and Mexicans to remain in their countries and not have to emigrate. It came as the White House signaled that Trump would accept less than the $5 billion he had been demanding to fund a southern border wall, as the threat of a partial government shutdown looms. The stark contrast drew outrage from conservatives, who questioned why the U.S. should be increasing aid to its southern neighbors while the Trump administration struggles to wring border security funding out of Congress. 'Well there you go. No $5B for southern wall but $10.6B to others. How angry are you?' conservative radio host Wayne Dupree wrote on Twitter. The White House said on Tuesday that Trump might accept less than the $5 billion he has demanded for border security, even as the US announced $10.6B in aid to Mexico and Central America as part of a package to help address the security and create job opportunities The aid package is a win for new Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (above), who has pushed for greater US development spending in Central America The aid plan was announced in a joint U.S.-Mexican statement released by the State Department and read aloud by Mexican Foreign Relations Secretary Marcelo Ebrard in the Mexican capital. 'In sum I think this is good news, very good news for Mexico,' Ebrard said. Newly inaugurated President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador waxed poetic about the plan to provide jobs so people won't have to emigrate. 'I have a dream that I want to see become a reality ... that nobody will want to go work in the United States anymore,' Lopez Obrador said at a morning news conference before the announcement. The combination of public and private investment for the stay-at-home effort doesn't require congressional approval, unlike Trump's signature project to stem illegal immigration - a border wall. The U.S. State Department issued a simultaneous statement saying 'The United States is committing $5.8 billion through public and private investment to promote institutional reforms and development in the Northern Triangle,' a term that refers to Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. Lopez Obrador's administration has said it is also interested in agricultural, forestry and tourism projects in southern Mexico, and the U.S. said it will contribute to those efforts. The U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation 'is prepared to invest and mobilize $2 billion in additional funds for projects in southern Mexico that are viable and attract private sector investment,' according to the statement. 'This amount is in addition to the $2.8 billion in projects for Mexico through OPIC's current investment pipeline.' Caravan migrants are seen after crossing the Mexico-US border fence from Mexico into San Diego on Sunday. The US pledged $10.6 billion in aid to Mexico and Central America Tuesday Ebrard said 'The commitments established here signify more than doubling foreign investment in southern Mexico starting in 2019.' Southern states like Chiapas and Oaxaca are home to many of Mexico's poorest communities. Lopez Obrador, who took office December 1, has sought to make development in that region a priority, including plans for a 'Mayan train' stretching from touristy parts of the Yucatan Peninsula down to Chiapas. It was unclear if Mexico would give anything in return. A planned announcement about Mexico's migration policy was postponed until Wednesday. The United States has reportedly wanted Mexico to allow migrants seeking asylum in the United States to remain in Mexico while their applications are processed. Ebrard had previously suggested that about $25 billion in U.S. investment would be an appropriate figure for what Mexicans and Central Americans have dubbed 'The Alliance for Prosperity' in the region. The lawyer who was shot by Dick Cheney during a quail-hunting trip says he will watch the new movie about the vice president which will include the moment he was gunned down. Harry Whittington tells DailyMail.com he and his family are planning to see Vice, starring Christian Bale as Cheney, and Mark Bramhall as the attorney, but admits the scene is not an accurate portrayal of the infamous incident. And 12 years after the accident, which left him with 30 pellets in his face, the 91-year-old reveals he has 'no hard feelings' towards the man who nearly killed him. Speaking from his Austin, Texas home, Whittington told DailyMail.com: 'I'm planning to watch it and some of my daughters have talked about going to see it after watching the trailer.' Twelve years later: Harry Whittington tells DailyMailTV he will watch the new film about Vice President Dick Cheney and says he has 'no hard feelings' towards the man who nearly killed him. Whittington's injuries are pictured above during a 2006 press conference 'I told them I would go with them. 'We don't know much about the film and have not been contacted by the producers. The trailer is not exactly what happened and there was no automobile involved.' The incident, dubbed 'Quailgate,' was one of the most bizarre episodes for Cheney, now 77, during his eight-year tenure as George W. Bush's vice president. Cheney and Whittington had been hunting for quails on a ranch in Riviera, Texas on February 11, 2006, when the former VP fired at what he thought was a bird that had flown up into the sky. Instead, he shot Whittington, who was 78 at the time, and sent him falling to the ground, his face and body riddled with nearly 150 birdshot pellets. The shooting, which was widely ridiculed in the media and on Saturday Night Live, will be brought to the big screen again on Christmas Day, with a star-studded cast including Amy Adams as Cheney's wife Lynne, Steve Carell as defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Sam Rockwell as President Bush. But Whittington says the movie trailer, which shows Cheney inside a vehicle taking aim with a rifle, differs from how the actual event unfolded. Recounting the incident, he said: 'We were behind some bird dogs and were walking along, the Vice President was off to my left side. Not so accurate: In the trailer for Vice, Christian Bale, who plays Cheney, is seen firing a rifle from his car and accidentally shooting Whittington Whittington, who is played by actor Mark Bramhall (pictured) said the trailer does not accurately portray the real version of events, and said there was 'no automobile involved' Bale (left) has been praised over his performance - for which he gained 45lbs - ahead of the film's Christmas Day release 'I saw him swing his gun toward a bird which flew up. I remember that motion and then smelling the gunpowder. 'I woke up and I was in an ambulance on the way to hospital.' Whittington underwent surgery to remove the pellets from his face and body. He also suffered a minor heart attack due to the lead that entered blood vessels near his heart. 'I still have a few pellets in my body but they are not causing any problems,' he added. 'I have no hard feelings toward the Vice President. It was 12 years ago but it's one of those stories that doesn't go away. 'I had been hunting for 50 years before this happened and it was an accident, I can see how it can happen.' Whittington says he is in touch with Cheney 'occasionally' - they last saw each other a few months ago - and says that they were 'acquaintances.' Although it was an unfortunate accident, Cheney suffered backlash due to the administration's 20-hour delay in disclosing the incident. But after it became public, the story became fodder for the media and a gift to late night comedians at a time when the Bush administration was already unpopular. The accident marked yet another scandal for the Bush administration which was further criticized after it disclosed the incident to the public 20 hours after it had occurred. Whittington is pictured speaking to the press in front of Christus Spohn Corpus Christi Hospital-Memorial where he was treated The main gate to the Armstrong Ranch is seen February 15, 2006 in Texas where Cheney accidentally shot 78-year-old lawyer Harry Whittington Cheney (pictured during hunting pheasants in South Dakota in 2002) had been known to be an avid hunter and had been hunting for quails at the time of the accident The president was facing criticism due to the invasion of Iraq and the treatment of terrorism detainees. Cheney had also been vilified by critics for expanding the role of the vice president which earned him comparisons to Darth Vader. Late night talk show host David Letterman began one of his shows by saying: 'Good news, ladies and gentlemen, we have finally located weapons of mass destruction - it's Dick Cheney.' In January 2007, Texas Monthly magazine published a front cover with the words: 'If You Don't Buy This Magazine, Dick Cheney Will Shoot You in the Face.' Entrepreneurs printed t-shirts which read: 'I'd rather go hunting with Dick Cheney than driving with Ted Kennedy.' Even President Obama joked about the incident two years later at the White House Correspondents' Dinner saying Cheney was 'very busy working on his memoirs, tentatively titled, How to Shoot Friends and Interrogate People.' In 2011, Cheney addressed the event in his memoir, In My Time, where he wrote he did not see Whittington 'until it was too late.' Vice, which was directed by The Big Short director Adam McKay (center) has received acclaim ahead of its release, but critics have also pointed out the film's political bias. The cast includes Sam Rockwell (far left) as President Bush, Amy Adams (second left) as Cheney's wife, Christian Bale, and Steve Carell (far right) as Donald Rumsfield Cheney wrote: 'I will never, as long as I live, forget the sight of Harry falling to the ground after I fired.' Cheney called Whittington a 'true gentleman' about the incident and said that he regretted not putting out a press statement until the night of the incident. Vice has been nominated for nine Critics' Choice Awards, six Golden Globes and two Screen Actors Guild Awards - ahead of its release. There has even been talk of an Oscar nomination for Bale, but the film has also attracted criticism over its liberal bias. Michael Brown, who served as undersecretary of defense under Bush, called the film an 'attempt to get in a one-two punch against Republicans and conservatives prior to the 2020 election.' Aside from highlighting Cheney's biggest blunder, the film portrays him as a megalomaniacal, power-hungry schemer, but Brown says 'nothing could be further from the truth,' maintaining that Bush relied on other advisers as much as his VP. Among the other scandals covered in the film are Cheney's second DUI arrest in 1963 and him losing his scholarship to Yale. Critics have said that Vice is not the best film of director Adam McKay, who directed the Oscar-winning The Big Short in 2015. According to a review on The AV Club, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky called Bale's performance - for which he gained 45lbs - is 'the most interesting and consistent thing about the film.' Overall the film was 'glib and superficial,' the review said. Canadian man Andre Tamine was to be paid $158,000 for his role in smuggling more than 70kg of cocaine into Australia For nearly two months, Canadian man Andre Tamine cruised the seas on a multi-country trip bound for Australia, while hiding a drug haul in his cabin worth $29million. The 65-year-old was to be paid $158,000 for his role in getting more than 70kg of cocaine into the country aboard the Sea Princess - with the help of porn star Isabelle Lagace, 30, and 25-year-old escort Melina Roberge. But Tamine will instead spend at least five years and seven months behind bars after his brazen attempt was thwarted by authorities when the luxury ship docked in Sydney in August, 2016. He subsequently pleaded guilty to importing a border-controlled drug. NSW District Court Judge Kate Traill, in sentencing Tamine on Tuesday to a maximum of eight years and five months in prison, found he was more than a just courier in the importation. Former porn star Isabelle Lagace (right) and 25-year-old escort Melina Roberge (left) have been jailed for their roles in the smuggling operation Roberge (pictured) previously told a court she was motivated to import the drugs by her addiction to social media He'd boarded the Sea Princess in England in July 2016 with fellow Canadians Legace, Roberge, and a fourth person, after being offered a role during a trip to Morocco. The fourth person disembarked in Nova Scotia, Canada, leaving Tamine and the women to continue on to Sydney - with the cruise making stopovers in countries including Ireland, the United States, Panama and Peru. When authorities raided the trio's two cabins as the ship arrived in Sydney, they found 72.6 kilograms of cocaine. Tamine was sentenced for 42.7 kilograms of the drug found in his cabin - amounting to 32.1 kilograms of pure cocaine. Tamine, Roberge and Lagace were caught attempting to smuggle cocaine on board the Sea Princess cruise ship (pictured) In an affidavit tendered to court, Roberge wrote that at the time she was 'a stupid young woman who was governed by a superficial desire to take pictures of myself in exotic locations' Roberge and Lagace have also pleaded guilty to their charges and been jailed. The judge said Tamine was offered more money for his involvement than Roberge and Lagace and she was satisfied his role was greater. She said his conduct constituted a 'significant breach', given the quantity of the drug involved and the estimated street value of up to $29million. She accepted he was genuinely remorseful, with the 65-year-old writing in a letter to the court he feels embarrassed, humiliated and apologetic to the Australian community. 'I stupidly did as others told me to do, rather than stand up for myself,' the letter read. Roberge's cabin mate, Canadian former porn star Isabelle Lagace (pictured), was sentenced to at least four-and-a-half years in jail in November last year The drugs (some pictured) were found on the cruise ship, which docked in Sydney in August 2016 In the note, he said drugs caused 'nothing but hurt and destruction' and he was thankful the drugs on the cruise ship 'were seized and never made it to land'. Roberge, meanwhile, pleaded guilty in February for her role in what was the largest ever drug seizure on a cruise ship landing in Australia. She told the NSW District Court she was motivated by her addiction to social media. In an affidavit tendered to court, Roberge wrote that at the time she was 'a stupid young woman who was governed by a superficial desire to take pictures of myself in exotic locations and post them on Instagram to receive likes and attention'. 'I have devastated so many people in the process,' she said. Roberge said at her sentencing hearing that she initially refused when her 'sugar daddy' asked her to carry drugs on the cruise. Roberge (left and right) met her 'sugar daddy' in 2015, and they began an intimate relationship while she worked as an escort for him, according to a statement of facts She later agreed when told she could enjoy a free holiday in helping the group, after learning that another person had dropped out. 'I was meant to just be there and look like I was on holiday and look like a cover for everyone else. Other people would be there to look after the drugs,' she said. Roberge claimed she made the decision without thinking about the consequences, and said she had since met people in jail who struggle with drug addictions. 'I do not want to be part of that. I want to be able to help them,' she said. Roberge and Lagace documented their luxury cruise on social media before attempting to import the drugs Lagace (pictured) worked in a bar in the Canadian city of Longueuil and took off suddenly on her trip, telling few about her plans She declined to name her 'sugar daddy' in court, citing fear for her family and friends in Canada. Her barrister Avni Djemal said she played no part in dealing with the drugs and had been young and naive. Mr Djemal said she was 'one of the most co-operative prisoners in the system' with a high chance of rehabilitation. People close to Roberge have previously told Daily Mail she had always set her sights on having the best that life can bring and was 'all about money, money, money'. A former boyfriend said: 'She was a flirt and moreover she was just a superficial young woman. Melina was lovely and attractive, but she wanted money and people who had money. Roberge (pictured with her mother) said she had since met people in jail who struggle with drug addictions The Canadians' social media accounts reveal a love of travel and an active lifestyle 'It was all about money with her and she was dating older men too because they had the cars and the power to give her the lifestyle she wanted badly. 'That meant the best restaurants and having nicely done hair and the finest clothes.' He said he had kept in touch with her through Facebook and raised an eyebrow at her lifestyle, which included travelling to the best holiday spots in the world. 'It was money that drove her, and if she did that smuggling it just shows that money can't buy you happiness,' he added. People close to Roberge have previously said she was 'all about money, money, money'. Some of the drugs seized in 2016 are pictured Roberge (pictured) claimed she made the decision to smuggle the drugs without thinking about the consequences Roberge was sentenced to a maximum eight years behind bars with a non-parole period of four years and nine months. Lagace, her cabin mate and a former porn star, was sentenced to at least four-and-a-half years in jail in November last year after admitting she tried to smuggle the drugs to clear a $20,000 debt. Lagace worked in a bar in the Canadian city of Longueuil and took off suddenly on her trip, telling few about her plans. In an online post, she gave a clue to her carefree lifestyle when she said: 'If I offend you, cry me a river. I'll bring snacks and a raft. I will literally float down your tears; eating chips and working on my tan.' The haul, found on the Sea Princess (pictured), is the largest ever drug seizure on a cruise ship landing in Australia Lagace posed for a series of nude photographs which appeared to be taken when she was aged 19 Lagace posed for a series of nude photographs which appeared to be taken when she was a 19-year-old. She was handed a sentence of seven years and six months, but after the non-parole period was backdated to her arrest date, she will likely be released in 2021. Lagace previously said she was angry to have been involved with the 'dirty, filthy drug trade'. 'This will haunt me for the rest of my life... I have embarrassed my family, my friends, myself,' she said. Tamine is set to be released on March 27, 2022. In an online post, Lagace said: 'If I offend you, cry me a river. I'll bring snacks and a raft. I will literally float down your tears; eating chips and working on my tan' A man who raped his young granddaughters when they were just eight and 12 has been jailed for six years. One victim, who is now 22, told the court how she still struggled to hold down a job and even tried to overdose after the abuse. She also became estranged from her family after they refused to believe her step-grandfather, who is now 69, had been molesting her. During one horrific attack the man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, forced the girl to perform oral sex on him while she lay with her head in his lap. The girl, who was 12 when the attacks took place, told the court she had been demonised by her family, 'labelled a liar' and 'blamed for a lie I never told'. The grandfather pleaded guilty to three counts of rape, six counts of indecent treatment of a child under 16 and one count each of attempted rape and common assault. A man who raped his young granddaughters when they were just eight and 12 has been jailed for six years (stock image) Judge Catherine Muir told the man he preyed on two young girls who were vulnerable and trusted him, The Courier-Mail reported. 'She made complaints in 2008 and they were not believed this makes this case particularly awful,' Judge Muir said. The woman faced her abuser in court and made an emotional speech explaining she now suffers post-traumatic stress disorder. After she was cut off by her family, the woman kept the attacks to herself but it all got too much and she overdosed on painkillers in 2011. She then opened up to a psychologist about the ordeal, but it wasn't until 2016 that she finally told police. Crown prosecutor Stephanie Gallagher told the court the 69-year-old raped his granddaughter twice in one day when she was visiting him. Both young girls, who were aged just eight and 12 at the time their grandfather began the assault, tried to tell their family but they didn't believe them (stock image) Some of the attacks even occurred while the girls were sleeping in the same bed as him. Three years after the horrific rape, the young woman said her grandfather touched her sexually when they were in a car together. 'There can be no doubt that this offending has had a drastic impact on her life and it continues today although the offences occurred over a decade ago,' Ms Gallagher said. Defence barrister James McNab said his client had been undergoing counselling sessions and didn't want to put the girls through anymore hardship. The grandfather has been sentenced to six years prison with parole eligibility on December 20, 2020. A traffic reporter is taking her former employer to court over claims she was bullied and harassed by her boss. Olympia Kwitowski has taken her complaints to the Federal Court, suing The Australian Traffic Network (ATN) and its Queensland operations manager Jay Lane after she was fired earlier this year. Mr Lane, an on-air personality, is alleged to have told lies about Ms Kwitowski 'having sex with one of the pilots in one of the rooms downstairs'. Olympia Kwitowski (pictured) has taken her complaints to the Federal Court, suing The Australian Traffic Network (ATN), the Queensland operations manager Jay Lane after she was fired earlier this year Ms Kwitowski is seeking $120,000 in compensation as she claims she has been 'greatly injured in her business, personal and professional reputation and has been and will be brought into public disrepute, odium, ridicule and contempt' Ms Kwitowski reportedly has audio evidence of Mr Lane allegedly making crude sexual remarks, according to The Courier Mail. According to court documents Mr Lane allegedly defamed the reporter by slating her work, and then the number of shifts she was being given as a causal reporter dropped. Ms Kwitowski is seeking $120,000 in compensation as she claims she has been 'greatly injured in her business, personal and professional reputation and has been and will be brought into public disrepute, odium, ridicule and contempt'. Mr Lane, an on-air personality, is alleged to have told lies about Ms Kwitowski 'having sex with one of the pilots in one of the rooms downstairs' After ATN and Mr Lane both lodged defences denying the claims, the case is now going through court-ordered mediation, which will resume in February. ATN's legal representative said they do not comment on matters before the court. ATN is a part of the biggest supplier of traffic information reports to radio stations around Australia, Global Traffic Network. Former FBI Director James Comey told Republican lawmakers he dispatched two agents to interview Mike Flynn because he had told Vice President Mike Pence information that didn't square with classified information he had reviewed. Comey sat down with Republican Oversight and Judiciary Committee members Monday for a sealed interview, only to come out afterward and bash Republicans for a 'shameful' attack on the Justice Department. Behind closed doors, Republicans pressed him on the decision to interview Flynn, Trump's former national security advisor, as well as his account of a one-on-one conversation with Trump where Comey says the president asked him to let the Flynn matter go. Former FBI Director James Comey said he sent agents to interview Michael Flynn 'because one of the FBI's jobs is to understand the efforts of foreign adversaries to influence, coerce, corrupt the Government of the United States,' Their closed-door confrontation emerged just after a federal judge excoriated Flynn for having 'sold out your country' by lying to the FBI during his interview and for failing to disclose his work for a foreign power. Comey said he sent agents to interview Flynn just days into his White House tenure 'to see if they could, by interviewing Mr. Flynn, gain an understanding about why the Vice President was making statements that purported to repeat statements he had made that were false.' Oversight panel chair Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina asked Comey if he knew Pence's statements were false, and Comey answered 'Correct.' Pence was denying that anyone in the administration had discussed the removal of sanctions with Russia, something Flynn now admits occurred. Former FBI Director James Comey savaged President Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers who dragged him into another closed-door interview on Monday Comey spoke about the decision when he ran the FBI to send two agents to interview Flynn which ultimately led to Flynn pleading guilty to lying House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C. grilled Comey about his decision to interview Mike Flynn 'It is not the FBI's job, unless I'm mistaken, to correct false statements that political figures say to one another. So why did you send two Bureau agents to interview Michael Flynn?' Gowdy pressed. 'Because one of the FBI's jobs is to understand the efforts of foreign adversaries to influence, coerce, corrupt the Government of the United States,' Comey responded. 'So they were sent there as part of that counterintelligence mission to try and understand why it appeared to be the case that the National Security Advisor was making false statements about his conversations with the Russians to the Vice President of the United States.' 'I knew certain classified facts about the nature of his interactions with the Russians. I knew that the Vice President was making statements that he attributed to conversations he'd had with Mr. Flynn that were starkly at odds with those classified facts,' Comey added. Comey also provided the reasons he didn't schedule the meeting through the White House counsel's office or explicitly tell Flynn he had a right to have a lawyer present. The White House on Tuesday maintained that Flynn was 'ambushed,' although Flynn in open court denied that was the case and said he knew it was a crime to lie to the FBI. 'First, the Deputy Director called him, told him what the subject matter was, told him he was welcome to have a representative from White House Counsel there, Comey said, referring to fired deputy director Andrew McCabe. 'So he knew what he was going to be asked about. He was an extraordinarily experienced person and so reasonably should be assumed to understand you can't lie to the FBI. Second, it's not protocol. The FBI does not do that in noncustodial interviews. And, third, you want to find out what the witness will say to you before you heat up an interview by raising the prospect that the witness might be lying to you.' 'You knew exactly what General Flynn had said to the Russian Ambassador before you interviewed him,' Gowdy asked. 'Yes,' Comey responded. As Fox News reported, Comey told lawmakers one of the agents he dispatched was a "career counterintelligence agent" who has not been identified. The other was Peter Strzok, the FBI lawyer Trump regularly rips on Twitter as one of the 'FBI lovers' for his affair with former FBI lawyer Lisa Page. At the start of the interview, Gowdy appeared to press Comey for violating a request from Trump to keep their meeting which reportedly figures in a potential obstruction of justice case 'private.' Asked by Gowdy what he thought it meant, Comey said it meant 'that the two of us were speaking together alone, that there was nobody else participating in the conversation. 'So by "private" you meant that there was nobody else in the room?' Gowdy followed up. Then he came back to the line of questioning. 'So you didn't take "private" to mean confidential, that this is just between us?' 'That's a good question,' Comey answered. 'Let me think about it for a second. I think I took it as, is this just the two of us in this conversation?' 'But that would've been readily apparent to both 5 of y'all, that you were the only two in the room, wouldn't it?' Gowdy pushed back. Gowdy then asked Comey whom, if anyone, he shared a memo he wrote about the event, which he testified earlier he found jarring. 'Sometime shortly after I wrote it, I shared it with the senior leadership team of the FBI.' 'Pardon me. Could you say that again?' Gowdy interjected, getting Comey to repeat his answer. Cancer patients can look forward to a revolutionary new cancer therapy that promises to supercharge immune cells to hunt and destroy cancer cells. The new drug, heralded as a new era in medicine, was approved this week for Australian patients with aggressive blood cancers. Up until now, desperate sufferers who did not respond to conventional treatments headed overseas to receive a shot of the 'custom-made' drug and experienced 'miraculous' results. Cancer patients can look forward to a revolutionary new cancer therapy that promises to supercharge immune cells to hunt and destroy cancer cells Daniel Clarke, 45, (far right) made the trip to Boston with his family (pictured) to undergo CAR-T therapy for his leukemia, known as diffuse large B cell lymphoma Daniel Clarke, a Qantas engineer from Sydney's Sutherland Shire, made the trip to Boston to undergo CAR-T therapy for his leukemia, known as diffuse large B cell lymphoma (DLBCL). 'I was advised that that the available treatment options in Australia would not have a good chance of achieving remission for my lymphoma, and the only real hope for a cure was CAR T-cell therapy,' he wrote on the Rare Cancers Australia website. Although he was initially given a poor prognosis, one month after treatment scans showed the cancer was gone. 'I felt like someone had just handed my life back to me,' Mr Clarke told the Sydney Morning Herald. 'It has all happened so quickly. Late September we came here not knowing what to expect, hoping for the best, fearing the worst. Then come November I was in complete remission.' The new Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-Cell Therapy (text above), heralded as a new era in medicine, has been approved for use in Australia for patients with aggressive blood cancers The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) has approved CAR-T therapy - the first of its kind - for use in paediatric and young adult patients with B-cell precursor acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) and adult patients with DLBCL who have failed other treatments, including chemotherapy. CAR-T therapy involves extracting a patient's white blood and immune T-cells and genetically re-engineering and reprogramming them before infusing them back into the body. The new cells are then encoded to recognise cancer cells, allowing the body to fight the cancer itself. The approval was based on two global clinical trials that showed a 62 per cent relapse-free survival rate at 24 months in paediatric ALL patients and a 43 per cent probability of overall survival at 18 months in adult DLBCL patients. CAR-T therapy involves extracting a patient's white blood and immune T-cells and genetically re-engineering and reprogramming them before infusing them back into the body (Pictured: Vials containing biological samples are stored on ice) Pharmaceutical giant Novartis, which owns the therapy, is increasing lab capabilities to meet growing demand and excitement in the medical world. Europe, Canada and Switzerland have already given their stamp of approval and the company said they are increasing capacity at their facilities in the US and Switzerland to support production on a global scale. Because the cell therapy is so new, it does not fit into existing categories such as 'drugs' and is therefore ineligible for funding via the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt (above) said he wanted to make Australia one of the global treatment centres for CAR-T therapy The treatment will become available at three treatment centres (the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney, the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre and the Royal Melbourne Children's Hospital in Melbourne) but patients potentially face $598,000 in costs. Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt said he wanted to make Australia one of the global treatment centres for CAR-T therapy and was working with other state and territory ministers to provide access to patients through the public system as soon as possible. 'I propose that CAR-T therapies such as Kymriah be funded in accordance with the mechanisms provided in the National Health Reform Agreement,' he wrote in a letter this week. Michael Dickinson at Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, who helped lead a clinical trial, said the idea was 'revolutionary'. 'When we saw the change, it was a eureka moment. The durability of the treatment and scalability are exciting,' Dr Dickinson said. Richard Vines, founder of Rare Cancers Australia, has helped raise $100,000 for three families so they can travel to the US for treatment. He said two children had died because they became so sick they couldn't get on a plane. Because the cell therapy is so new, it does not fit into existing categories such as 'drugs' and is therefore ineligible for funding via the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (Pictured: Illustration of a Lymphoma cancer cell) Mr Clarke said his main priority now is his three children Sarah, 8, Katelyn, 13, and Josh, 13. 'They are my inspiration to keep fighting this cancer, which has been a part of our lives for the past six years,' Mr Clarke said. 'Only a parent who has had a life-threatening illness knows what that moment is like, seeing their childrens beautiful smiling faces at the school gate, knowing that no matter what you do to try to keep a semblance of normality these sensitive young souls will pick up on the anxiety and grief as soon as they get in the car for the journey home. 'Days like those are utterly heartbreaking, but they ultimately fuel our determination to do whatever it takes to get through this, and to keep hoping for a life where cancer is part of our familys history, not our future.' Leanne Clarke, Daniel's wife, said the treatment was 'nothing short of a miracle'. 'Quite simply, it means my children get to celebrate this Christmas and hopefully many, many more with their dad,' she said. 'There could be no greater gift.' US immigration authorities are struggling to understand why a growing number of Guatemalan asylum seekers have been flocking to an extremely remote and dangerous stretch of New Mexico desert, where seven-year-old Jakelin Caal fell gravely ill earlier this month. Caal and her father were found at the desolate Antelope Wells crossing on December 6 with 161 other migrants. The little girl started vomiting on the bus ride to the nearest Border Patrol station 94 miles away. She had stopped breathing by the time she arrived and her temperature was 105.9 degrees. She died at a hospital in El Paso, Texas, after experiencing liver failure and swelling on her brain, according to officials. This week alone, Customs and Border Protection officers encountered groups of 257 and 239 people consisting of Guatemalan families and unaccompanied children, CBP Commissioner Kevin McAleenan said Tuesday. Scroll down for video Desolate: This week alone, Customs and Border Protection officers encountered groups of 257 and 239 people consisting of Guatemalans at the extremely remote Antelope Wells border crossing in New Mexico The Antelope Wells port of entry has been in the news after 7-year-old Jakelin Caal died in the custody of US Customs and Border Protection after crossing into the US with her father on December 6 and falling ill The Border Patrol found groups of more than 100 people along the entire US border with Mexico about eight times during the budget year that ended September 30 and encountered nearly four times that amount since October 1. 'This is a brand new phenomenon,' McAleenan told reporters in a conference call. 'It's really challenging our resources.' Antelope Wells is the site of one of about three dozen Border Patrol 'forward operating bases' in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas - bare-bones facilities designed to increase enforcement in remote areas. About four agents are assigned to Antelope Wells and they sleep at the base on eight-day shifts to avoid having to drive home every day. CBP Commissioner Kevin McAleenan says migrants have been boarding commercial buses from Guatemala to reach the Antelope Wells crossing in New Mexico in four or five days straight Migrants have told agents that they took commercial buses from Guatemala to New Mexico in four or five days straight: a sharp contrast to the traditional route that can take 25 to 30 days to reach the US border and includes rest stops at 'stash houses' along the way, McAleenan said. It's unclear why Guatemalans are choosing such a remote spot, but McAleenan said it may be less expensive for smugglers to pay other criminal organizations fees to pass through. The US is working with Mexico to determine the reasons behind it, hoping to redirect traffic to the nearest cities, El Paso and Nogales, Arizona. Families began arriving in large groups about once or twice a week since mid-October and the trend has accelerated in recent weeks, McAleenan said. The families are generally seeking out US agents to turn themselves in, raising questions about why they would go to such lengths when they could do so in large cities. This map shows the sequence of events that led of Jakelin's passing at a Texas hospital Claudia Maquin, 27, shows a photo of her daughter, Jakelin,in Raxruha, Guatemala, on Saturday, which is now the subject of a congressional investigation All along the border, migrants are increasingly turning themselves in to US authorities to seek asylum or other form of humanitarian protection. The US has shifted additional medical personnel and more vehicles to Lordsburg and Antelope Wells to help manage the influx of people. 'In a group as large as 250 you're going to have medical issues,' McAleenan said. 'You're going to have people that have the flu, and people that have scabies or lice or other skin conditions, and so we are making hospital runs with pretty much every group that arrives at this time.' Only about 30 vehicles a day enter the US at the Antelope Wells, compared to tens of thousands at San Diego's San Ysidro crossing, the nation's busiest. McAleenan said buses typically drop off Guatemalans near Antelope Wells and they go over a barbed-wire fence to reach the US. McAleenan gave a tour of the area to members of the Democratic Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Rep. Joaquin Castro, of Texas, said the group had seen many young children and their parents in the facility, and called for a congressional investigation into the conditions at the facility and Jakelin's death. Her body was expected to be returned to Guatemala on Thursday, and then taken to her hometown of San Antonio Secortez. Jakelin's death sparked a firestorm. Border Patrol agents said they did all they could do to help the girl who seemed healthy when she first encountered them. But it's not clear if there was a translation issue. New Mexico Rep. Ben Ray Lujan, from left, Texas Reps. Joaquin Castro and Al Green toured the the Border Patrol Station in Lordsburg Tuesday as part of a fact-finding mission sparked by Jakelin's death Border Patrol agents were speaking to her father, 29-year-old Nery Caal, in Spanish, as they are required to do, but his first language is the Mayan tongue known as Q'eqchi'. Attorneys in Texas representing the girl's father criticized US officials for asking him to sign a form that asks questions with check boxes of 'yes' or 'no.' ''Claims good health' was handwritten in the 'additional comments' section. Jakelin's official cause of death has not been released, pending the results of an autopsy. The family also disputed the accounts by US officials that the girl walked for days in the desert without food or water before crossing. The father's lawyers said Caal took care of his daughter, giving her sufficient water and food, and she appeared to be in good health. The Trump administration has made curbing illegal immigration a signature issue - and some advocates say its policies are prompting more people to cross in increasingly dangerous ways. Immigration officials say their system is strained and not equipped to handle such a high volume of families who can't be easily returned. Charles Michel (pictured) has quit after he was left leading a minority government Belgium's Prime Minister has quit less than two weeks after his main coalition partner quit in a row over migration, leaving him leading a minority government. Charles Michel, who took office in 2014, lost New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) backing over his support for the UN migration pact, a source of anger for anti-immigration parties. The resignation comes two days after demonstrations against the pact in central Brussels descended into scuffles, with police forced to use tear gas and water cannon to restore order. After a debate in parliament where opposition parties refused to lend their support to keep his government working until legislative elections in May next year, Michel announced he would quit. 'I have taken the decision to submit my resignation and it is my intention to go to see the king immediately,' Michel said, jumping before lawmakers could push him with a motion of no confidence. Afterwards, King Philippe received Michel but will hold consultations before deciding whether to accept his resignation, the palace said in a statement. Agriculture Minister Denis Ducarne of Michel's liberal MR party, criticised left wing and green parties for risking 'paralysis and crisis for our country' instead of cooperating. The prime minister (pictured) had come up against criticism from anti-immigration parties following his support for the UN migration pact The Flemish nationalist N-VA, led by powerful Antwerp mayor Bart De Wever, had made political demands which Michel judged 'unacceptable' - notably on possible constitutional changes. The liberal premier has steadfastly defended the Marrakesh migration pact, saying it presented an 'opportunity for better European and international cooperation.' The non-binding UN accord, which would promote a common global approach to migrant flows, was initially supported by all four parties in Belgium's coalition. But the N-VA changed its mind in late October and pulled out of the coalition the day before Michel flew to Morocco to sign the deal. Belgium has a history of division between wealthier Dutch-speaking Flanders in the north and the run-down French-speaking former industrial heartland of Wallonia in the south. This has contributed to political instability, and Belgium holds the modern European record for going the longest time without a government, a whopping 541 days in 2010-2011. But Michel had so far held together a delicate four-way coalition involving liberals, Flemish Christian Democrats and the nationalist N-VA, which which eventually wants a separate homeland in Flanders. The United States has begun pulling troops from Syria, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said on Wednesday, TASS reports. "We have started returning United States troops home as we transition to the next phase of this campaign," Sanders said in a statement. According to Sanders, "five years ago," the Islamic State terrorist group (banned in Russia) was "a very powerful and dangerous force in the Middle East, and now the United States has defeated the territorial caliphate." Washington launched a military operation against Islamic State in Iraq in June 2014 and in Syria in September 2014. Nonetheless, she stressed: "These victories over ISIS in Syria do not signal the end of the Global Coalition or its campaign." "The United States and our allies stand ready to re-engage at all levels to defend American interests whenever necessary, and we will continue to work together to deny radical Islamist terrorists territory, funding, support, and any means of infiltrating our borders," the White House press secretary warned. A federal appeals court panel ordered an unnamed company to comply with a subpoena Tuesday in a case that has been connected to special counsel Robert Mueller. The court ruled against the unnamed company in the sealed case, providing a win for prosecutors and upholding a lower court ruling. The case has attracted attention, which peaked Friday when the judge ordered an entire floor of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals closed during a hearing in Washington. The ruling publicized by the court does not confirm Mueller's role, which has been suspected based in part on conversations heard around the courthouse. A judge ruled against a company regarding a grand jury subpoena in a case that has been linked to Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Prosectors prevailed in the case An appeals court panel upheld a lower court judge's ruling in Washington, D.C. The order came on a day Mike Flynn appeared in court for sentencing for lying to the FBI The company inside 'Country A' was claiming immunity from the subpoena under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, TPM reported. But Judge Beryl Howell held that the company fell within an exception for commercial activities. Howell, who is overseeing the Mueller probe, held the company in contempt of court. The judge also ordered the firm to pay a 'fixed monetary penalty to increase each day the Corporation fails to comply.' But the judge raised the possibility it would be hard to enforce raising the possibility the company and the country are far afield and perhaps beyond lacking treaty obligations or other agreements where the U.S. could force compliance. A three judge panel heard the case on appeal from a district court. The judges did not resolve the company's immunity claim in their ruling. During arguments, the company argued that the relevant statute didn't apply to 'foreign sovereign defendants.' A mother was mowing her front lawn when she was allegedly ambushed and bashed by a group of teenagers over a teenage love triangle. Emma McKenzie, a single mum from Mill Park in north-east Melbourne, claims she was attacked the group of youths and another woman about 2:30pm Tuesday. The gang allegedly came looking for Ms McKenzie's 14-year-old son after he broke off a relationship with a neighbour's 15-year-old daughter amid a messy 'love triangle' feud. CCTV footage shows the moment a group of seven people began brawling on the footpath, but up to 20 people reportedly joined the scuffle later on. One woman could be seen stomping on a man's head while another woman, reportedly Ms McKenzie, was repeatedly punched, dragged to the floor and kicked. Another woman appears to threaten the group with a boomerang. Scroll down for video A mother was brutally bashed by a group of teenagers out the front of her house while she was mowing her lawns A neighbour called the police about half an hour after the fight started when she saw one person getting assaulted with a tree branch. One of the girl's fathers allegedly arrived in the black vehicle and engaged in the brawl, attacking Ms McKenzie's son and throwing him to the ground. 'Initially it was between her 14-year-old son and some teenagers who live across the road,' 9News reporter Lana Murphy told 3AW. 'We understand this is all fueled by a break-up between Emma's son and a 15-year-old who lives across the road.' '(Emma's CCTV) shows some pretty confronting images, she was flung to the ground, she was punched multiple times in the head by a grown woman and some teenagers. Ms McKenzie was left with bruises covering her body and a black eye after the assault. Ms Mckenzie was left with bruises covering her body and a black eye after the alleged assault The gang allegedly came looking for Ms Mckenzie's 14-year-old son after he broke off a relationship with a neighbour's 15-year-old daughter Ms McKenzie claims she was punched multiple times in the head and beaten with a plank of wood. A spokeswoman from NSW police force confirmed to Daily Mail Australia that all involved parties knew one another. 'All parties were given warnings and no arrests have been made at this stage,' the spokeswoman said. Police are currently investigating the exact circumstances surrounding the incident. Britain risks slipping from being the world's fifth-biggest economy to its seventh-largest next year after Brexit, analysts have warned. Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PwC) projected economic growth in 2019 of 1.6 percent for Britain - assuming the shock of a no-deal Brexit in March is avoided - versus 1.7 percent for France and 7.6 percent for India. PwC expects India to rise to fifth place next year from seventh, and France to remain at sixth, since Britain's economy slowed and the value of the pound slumped after the 2016 referendum. 'The UK and France have regularly alternated in having the larger economy, but subdued growth in the UK in 2018 and again in 2019 is likely to tip the balance in France's favour,' PwC economist Mike Jakeman said. Britain risks slipping from being the world's fifth-biggest economy to its seventh-largest next year after Brexit, analysts have warned (stock image, London Stock Exchange) PwC projected economic growth in 2019 of 1.6 percent for Britain - assuming the shock of a no-deal Brexit in March is avoided 'India is the fastest-growing large economy in the world, with an enormous population, favourable demographics and high catch-up potential due to low initial GDP (gross domestic product) per head. 'It is all but certain to continue to rise in the global GDP league table in the coming decades.' Ranking is based on the size of national economies in U.S. dollar terms. The predictions come as Cabinet ruled thousands of troops are to go on standby, ferry space is to be reserved for emergency supplies and families are to be warned as part of contingency preparations for a no deal Brexit. Theresa May and her ministers decided yesterday to spend billions on the backup plans - despite insisting the PM's deal remained the 'most likely scenario'. The world's strongest economies 2019 (prediction by PwC) 1. US 2. China 3. Japan 4. Germany 5. India 6. France 7. UK An International Monetary Fund (IMF) paper last month claimed that 'potential trade costs have had a considerable and statistically significant negative impact on firm investment in the UK after the referendum'. The summary added: 'At the same time, the post-referendum sterling depreciation has likely contributed positively to investment expenditure by more foreign-oriented firms'. Previously Andrew Gray, Head of Brexit at PwC, said in a statement: 'With just over 100 days to go before the end of March 2019, further delays in holding the meaningful vote will be of great concern, however, businesses need to hold their nerve. 'The delay means businesses need to be even more proactive and diligent in their Brexit planning. There are still a number of hurdles to jump before any outcome is certain. 'We are still advising organisations to keep preparing for both a deal and no deal and continue to implement their contingency plans. For many businesses this may mean taking further action which they had hoped to avoid.' A couple who filmed themselves beating their new puppy with a slipper have lost an appeal against an animal cruelty fine. Sydney couple Ms Chen and Mr Deng claimed they accidentally uploaded shocking footage of themselves beating their pet Spitz to Chinese social media site Weibo. In the footage the dog is seen cowering on the floor surrounded by rubbish in the couple's apartment in the affluent inner city suburb of Forest Lodge while being threatened and beaten repeatedly. Scroll down for video A Sydney couple accidentally uploaded footage (pictured) of them beating and terrifying their puppy with a slipper to the Chinese social media site Weibo Upon discovering the video the RSPCA levelled charges against the cruel pair who appeared in the Downing Centre Local Court on October 11. 'Each pleaded guilty to committing an act of cruelty after they shared a video beating their white Spitz puppy on social media. Apparently intending only to share with a family member,' the RSPCA said. They were each fined $600 and ordered to pay RSPCA costs of $755.42 and prohibited from purchasing, acquiring, taking control of or possessing any animals for 12 months. The pair filed an immediate appeal which was later dismissed by Judge Michael King. 'One offender recorded and uploaded the video of the punishment inflicted on the puppy, the other offender was striking the puppy twice on the head and seven times on the body while restraining it,' Judge King said. 'Each blow you can hear a loud thud, it is clear the animal is in a highly distressed state. 'Animals can't speak up for themselves when cruelty is inflicted it is often done in private. 'The sentences must operate on the general public. In the circumstances the penalty imposed is appropriate.' The puppy has been in RSPCA foster care since being rescued from Mr Chen and Mr Deng, and may be released and available for adoption in the future. The RSPCA took the pair to court for animal cruelty and they were both fined $600, ordered to pay a further $755 to the RSPCA and banned form owning animals for 12 months RSPCA NSW Inspector Tanya Dominguez said people needed to understand the limits of discipline training for their pets as many mistook cruelty for training. 'It's really important for people to understand that dogs do not do anything maliciously, nor do they understand discipline,' she said. 'Reward based, positive training is scientifically proven to have better and faster results, while punishment only confuses and scares the dog. 'Often destructive behaviour is a symptom of boredom. It's always better to give dogs plenty of distraction and mental stimulation in the way of toys and activities to prevent unwanted behaviours.' The RSPCA New South Wales Inspector advised the puppy would be seized to provide him veterinary treatment and he was transported to an RSPCA veterinary hospital. A veterinary report concluded: 'The animal has been unreasonably, unnecessarily and unjustifiably tormented and terrified causing pain and suffering, as evidenced by its distressed vocalisation as it is restrained and repeatedly beaten on the body with the slipper.' An Ohio sheriff is under investigation after he was accused of taking money that was confiscated during drug busts and using it to fuel an alleged gambling problem. The allegations against Pike County Sheriff Charles Reader were made in an anonymous complaint that was sent to the Ohio Auditor's Office last month. A special prosecutor has since been appointed to investigate the claims. Ohio sheriff Charles Reader has been accused of stealing money confiscated during drug busts and then using them to fuel an alleged gambling problem The complaint, obtained by the Cincinnati Enquirer, claims that Reader stole money that was confiscated during drug arrests and later stored in his office's safe. It states that only Reader has access to the safe, although it did not disclose how much money was allegedly stolen. 'We believe he is taking money from this safe and using it for his personal use,' the complaint reads. The anonymous complaint claims that Reader stole money that was confiscated during drug arrests and stored in his office's safe. He is now under investigation by the auditor's office The complaint claims that Reader has borrowed thousands of dollars from two deputies and gambled it away. It also alleges that the sheriff allowed his daughter to drive cars that had been impounded by his own office. 'He is a compulsive gambler and never has any money,' the complaint reads. 'Reader just does whatever he wants and no one ever calls him on it. We are scared to death of him.' The complaint was released by the State Auditor's Office on Monday following requests filed under Ohio's Public Records law. James Boulger, Reader's attorney, said he believes the allegation that Reader stole money from drug busts will be the 'main focus' of the investigation. 'I think that may be cleared up pretty quickly,' Boulger told the Columbus Dispatch. Boulger said he is 'not aware' of the sheriff having a gambling problem but would not say that Reader doesn't gamble. He also noted that it was not illegal for Reader to borrow money from friends. Boulger said he believes the allegations could be connected to 'bitterness' from the fact that some senior personnel were recently laid off from the sheriff's office. 'It's rough, really rough,' Boulger said of the accusations. 'It's the community he grew up in.' Reader's office was in charge of the investigation surrounding eight family members who were murdered in Pike County in April 2016. He is pictured here in November during a news conference to discuss developments in the case The attorney expects Boulger to release a more detailed response to the allegations later this week. Pike County Prosecutor Rob Junk requested a special prosecutor take over the investigation due to his 'working relationship' and 'status as legal counsel' for the sheriff's office. Reader's office was in charge of the investigation surrounding eight family members who were murdered in Pike County in April 2016. Just last month six people were finally arrested in connection to the horrific deaths. A man has died after a shooting in north London, where police have arrested three males on suspicion of murder. Officers were called to reports of a man suffering a gunshot wound in Edmonton, Enfield at around 9.15pm on Tuesday. The victim, whose age is not yet known, was pronounced dead at the scene at 10.10pm. The man's death is the 126th murder in the capital this year, after an 18-year-old boy was killed in Eltham last Tuesday. Police are pictured at the scene in Enfield on Tuesday night, where a man was shot dead in north London Officers raced to the scene in Edmonton where a man was found to be suffering from fatal gunshot wounds The victim was pronounced dead at the scene following the shooting in Edmonton on Tuesday night Left, an officer is pictured at the scene in north London on Tuesday night and, right, police vehicles attend the Enfield shooting Officers were called to this road in Edmonton at about 9.15pm to reports of a man suffering from a gunshot wound There were no reports of any other injuries at the scene, as police, including armed officers, were pictured attending the incident in social media posts. A Met Police spokesman told MailOnline: 'Police were called by London Ambulance Service at approximately 21:15hrs on Tuesday, 18 December to reports of a man suffering a gunshot wound. 'Officers, including firearms officers, attended the scene. 'The victim was pronounced dead at the scene at 22:10hrs. 'No reports of any other injuries. Three males were arrested at the scene on suspicion of murder. Cordons remain in place. Enquiries continue.' A man has died after hitting his head during an early morning paddle-board surf at a famous Queensland beach. The incident happened shortly after 4.30am off Snapper Rocks at Greenmount beach, a world famous surfing spot hailed by many as 'legendary' and 'the true surfers' paradise'. John MacNamara, 70, is thought to have had a heart attack which caused him to fall off his board. A man has died after hitting his head during an early morning paddle-board surf at a famous Queensland beach John MacNamara (pictured), 70, is thought to have had a heart attack while paddle-board surfing, which caused him to fall off his board How Mr MacNamara received the blow to the head remains unclear, but it is thought he was either hit by his own board, or that he hit a rock as he fell. He fell into the water next to a friend, who became concerned when the 70-year-old did not resurface. The friend pulled him out of the surf to find him unconscious and he was then tended to by lifeguards. Mr MacNamara had reportedly been paddle-board surfing, which combines both paddle-boarding and surfing. Emergency services were called to the beach at 4.42am and arrived just before 5am. The incident happened shortly after 4.30am off Snapper Rocks at Greenmount beach, QLD Emergency services arrived at the beach shortly before 5am but Mr MacNamara was sadly pronounced dead at the scene The 70-year-old was tragically pronounced dead at the scene. According to the Gold Coast Bulletin, a hearse arrived at around 8.15am to remove his body from the beach. Known locally as Johnny Mac, the man was a much-loved figure in the local community and his body was surrounded by 30 of his friends and family and a further 100 onlookers. In a Facebook post, friend Bill Stewart wrote that Mr MacNamara died 'doing what he loved most'. 'Always happy, always with a big smile and always encouraging those around him,' he wrote. Known locally as Johnny Mac, the man was a much-loved figure in the local community and his body was surrounded by 30 of his friends and family and a further 100 onlookers 'Always happy, always with a big smile': Friend Bill Stewart wrote on Facebook that Mr MacNamara had died 'doing what he loved most' 'I will miss you dearly mate - as will we all!' Mr MacNamara had spent 40 years of his life as a fireman, as well as serving in Vietnam for two years. Local resident Emily Archdeacon to the Brisbane Times the community was 'in shock'. 'It's such a sad loss, especially being this time of the year, just before Christmas,' she said. 'We're all locals to the area, the beach is really well patrolled and safe, so it's very unfortunate to hear the sad news.' A woman has been sexually assaulted in a car after accepting a lift by two men posing as ride-share drivers. The victim had been enjoying a night out with friends in Melbourne when she walked past a vehicle under Queens Bridge at about 3.30am on July 29. The men stopped her, told her that it was a ride-share vehicle and offered her a lift home. She was lured into the car and driven to Albert Park, where she was sexually assaulted, Victoria Police said. The victim punched one of her attackers in the face and managed to flee before calling police. A woman has been sexually assaulted in a car after accepting a lift by two men posing as ride-share drivers. Detectives released these images of a man, who is believed to be a witness only and not involved in the incident The two men are perceived to be of Indian or sub-continental appearance and aged between 25 and 35. The vehicle involved is believed to be a silver, mid 2000s model Toyota Yaris hatch. Investigators have released CCTV of the car on the night, as well as an image of a similar vehicle. Detectives have also released images of a man they are hoping to identify who they believe had spoken to the victim earlier in the night. He is believed to be a witness only and not involved in the incident. Anyone with any information about the incident is urged to contact Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000. New Zealand bikie gangs are considering joining forces to protect their land from incoming groups deported from Australia under harsh new laws. Leaders of Black Power and the Mongrel Mob have met to discuss the influx of Australian bikies, who often come fully patched from groups like the Rebels and Comancheros, and are believed to pose a threat to local gangs. Sonny Fatu, president of Mongrel Mob, told Stuff the new groups, who are mostly made up of New Zealanders deported from Australia for criminal behaviour, were attempting a modern-day land grab. He warned that if the groups start claiming land and growing in numbers, things would become very ugly. 'New Zealand will witness organised crime and gang violence on a level they have never seen before,' he said. 'Worst case scenario - a lot of trouble. A lot.' Two of New Zealand's most notorious bikie gangs are in talks to join forces against international groups, who are beginning to move in to the country The Mongrel Mob and Black Power have decades of bitter history, but are concerned about the growing presence of other gangs, such as the Bandidos and Comancheros Fatu wants to see Mongrel Mob and Black Power reach a pact that would end a division between the two groups, with the goal of heading off the new international threat. He said if the gangs could work together, they would be able to defend their patch. He believes if a pact is not reached, brazen public killings like those seen in Australia could be on the cards for New Zealand. 'When there is dysfunction - whether it be a dysfunctional family, a dysfunctional workplace, even a dysfunctional gang - there is no order. There is no direction, there are no codes.' Many of the groups are popping up as a result of Australia's harsh deportation laws, which see New Zealand citizens convicted of criminal behaviour sent back to New Zealand Mongrel Mob is one of New Zealand's most notorious street gangs. It was formed in the 1960s and has a reputation for violent dealings. Many of its members have been kicked out of Australia. Its main rival, Black Power, is largely involved in organised crime in New Zealand and its members are mainly of Maori and Polynesian descent. The two rivals have had a number of violent run-ins over the years. In August, a high school was shut down after a brawl related to the two gangs broke out, including both students and parents. But the violence could be coming to an end as larger threats to the New Zealand gangs begin to appear. Sarge McKinnon, Black Power Tokoroa president, said a new, joint outlook was necessary to ensure survival not just of the clubs, but of themselves too. 'I no longer see the Mongrel Mob as my enemy. I see you fullas as my brothers,' he said. 'Everyone is coming against us. Everyone that is not Black Power or Mongrel Mob, we have to consider to be against us.' While both groups appear to be in favour of the idea, telling media it's the best way to keep things safe, the police have a different idea. One Black Power leader said the gangs had to stick together, as they now shared an enemy Police Association president Chris Cahill said he believed the merger was less about protecting the community from violence and more about protecting their criminal interests. But Mr Cahill did not deny the influx of international gangs was a problem. 'They're better financed to start with, they're more organised and they've learnt to combat police methods previously - so yes, that does increase the risk. He said police numbers had been boosted to deal with the threat, and said having local bikie groups fight newcomers off was not a helpful solution. 'Two wrongs don't make a right,' he said. Tory manifesto commitments could be torn up as the government ramps up preparations for no deal Brexit, it emerged today. Pledges on social care and new technical qualifications are in the firing line for 'reprioritisation' amid the desperate scramble to get ready for crashing out of the EU. The PM's de facto deputy, David Lidington, has been tasked with identifying which policies cannot be delivered while the Government is tackling Brexit. The shredding of promises made at last year's election comes after the Cabinet agreed yesterday to activate all no deal contingency plans with just 100 days until Brexit. It emerged today Health Secretary Matt Hancock has chartered the NHS's own plane to fly in crucial medical isotopes necessary to treat cancer. Under the backup plan, Mr Hancock's plane will fly regularly between the West Midlands and Maastricht-Aachen carrying the critical supplies, the Huffington Post revealed. Ministers gave the green light to 320 no deal back up plans yesterday at a fractious Cabinet meeting. Theresa May (pictured at No10 today) has activated all 320 no deal Brexit contingency plans The PM's deputy David Lidington (left) has been tasked with identifying which policies cannot be delivered while the Government is tackling Brexit. Philip Hammond (right) announced 2billion extra for no-deal planning in the Budget last year It emerged today Health Secretary Matt Hancock has chartered the NHS's own plane to fly in crucial medical isotopes necessary to treat cancer Among the plans is putting 3,500 troops on standby to tackle any no deal disruption after exit day on March 29. Millions of families will be given information on how best to prepare themselves for a no-deal Brexit with adverts due across TV, radio and online. Millions of businesses have also been told to prepare. HM Revenue & Customs will email 80,000 firms directly while a 100-page 'Partnership Pack' will be published on Friday to help all companies get themselves ready for turmoil. Raab: 'No deal? Give 39bn to businesses' Former Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab has said the 39bn the UK will not have to pay the EU if we leave without a deal should be given as tax breaks to businesses. Writing in The Daily Telegraph Mr Raab, who resigned his post in November after four months, said leaving the EU without a deal and agreeing to trade on WTO terms would end 'torturous Brexit haggling'. He said the money could be used by the Treasury to support companies put at risk by the 'significant but manageable' disruption of a no deal Brexit, which he said would only be short term. Advertisement Mrs May's spokesman refused to comment on whether families will be warned about food stockpiling - or reports Northern Ireland could be left dependent on generators. But doubts have been raised about whether it is already too late, with claims only a third of the money allocated so far has been spent, and shipping space is already fully booked. During the cabinet meeting Work and Pensions Secretary Amber Rudd - among those cabinet ministers most ardently opposed to no deal - is reported to have said: 'Just because you've put a seatbelt on, it doesn't mean you should crash the car'. Amid claims the public might be alarmed by the dramatic preparations, Mrs May's spokesman insisted: 'These are the actions of a sensible Government to ensure people are prepared'. It came as four minor opposition parties co-tabled a formal no-confidence motion in the Government under the terms of the Fixed Terms Parliament. Unlike Jeremy Corbyn's proposed vote on Monday this motion would have the power to topple the Conservatives if passed - but the government is only duty bound to schedule such a vote if called to do so by the official Leader of the Opposition. At yesterday's Cabinet ministers stressed the PM's deal with Brussels remains the Government's top priority and best no deal mitigation. However, they said they were determined to prepare for 'every eventuality'. Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson (left) and Attorney General Geoffrey Cox (right) leaving yesterday's fractious Cabinet meeting 10 Downing Street. Mr Williamson said 3,5000 troops would be put on standby to help in the event of a no deal Brexit 'Cabinet agreed that with just three months until our exit we have reached the point where we need to ramp up those preparations,' the PM's spokesman said. 'We will set in motion the remaining elements of our no deal plans.' Brexit Secretary Steve Barclay said: 'The Government's priority is to secure a deal - that hasn't changed. Parties' bid to topple government The SNP and other opposition parties have tabled a vote of no confidence in the UK Government. L-R Ian Blackford, SNP Westminster leader; Sir Vince Cable, Liberal Democrat leader; Adam Price, Plaid Cymru leader; Caroline Lucas, Green Party MP It comes after Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn demanded a Commons vote on the Prime Minister's future when she confirmed a vote on her Brexit deal would not take place until after Christmas. The SNP, Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru and the Greens tabled a vote of no confidence in the UK government following a meeting on Tuesday evening. They said the decision follows constant pressure on Mr Corbyn to table a motion of no confidence in the UK government under the Fixed Term Parliaments Act, which he has not done. But under the terms of the legislation the Government is only required to allow time for such a vote if it is tabled by the Leader of the Opposition. Advertisement 'But alongside that, as part of our continuation of preparing for no deal, a responsible Government needs to ensure that we are ready for that default option - which we don't want to happen - but we are ready in the event that it did happen. 'That's why at Cabinet today we agreed that preparing for no deal will be an operational priority within Government, but our overall priority remains to secure a deal.' Mr Barclay said the 'tempo' of guidance from Government to businesses and households on how to prepare for a no-deal exit from the EU would increase. 'We need to get over to business that this is something they have to prepare for' with 'a matter of 14 weeks until we leave the European Union', Steve Barclay said. Shadow Brexit Minister Jenny Chapman condemned the plans. She said: 'It is testament to the Prime Minister's failure in these negotiations that the Government is now spending billions of pounds of taxpayers' money to prepare for a no deal Brexit that is rejected by Parliament and many of those sat around the Cabinet table. 'A no deal Brexit would be a disaster for jobs, the economy and the border in Northern Ireland. It is simply not a viable option.' Ms May promised an overhaul of social care during the election last year, and although she backed off the original proposals, work has been ongoing in Whitehall. However, staff have already been shifted off the project to beef up the Brexit effort, according to The Times. Other manifesto promises that could be vulnerable include pressing ahead with the new T-Level qualifications - billed as a technical alternative to A-levels - and benefits sanctions against universal credit claimants. Defence Secretary reveals 3,500 troops on standby Extra personnel could be needed at British ports, at the border or even to help police civil disobedience if a no deal Brexit leads to food shortages or other problems Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson told MPs yesterday 3,500 troops will be 'held at readiness' to help with a no-deal Brexit. Mr Williamson said the troops could be used by any department as needed - but that no specific requests had yet been made for them. Extra personnel could be needed at British ports, at the border or even to help police civil disobedience if a no deal Brexit leads to food shortages or other problems. Downing Street insisted the use of soldiers was common - pointing to how troops helped out successfully in the running of the Olympics. Speaking in the Commons, Mr Williamson said: 'We've as yet not had any formal request from any Government department but what we are doing is putting contingency plans in place, and what we will do is have 3,500 service personnel held at readiness - including regulars and reserves - in order to support any Government department on any contingencies they may need.' Ministers book space on ferries for critical supplies Transport Secretary Chris Grayling had mooted the Government leasing entire roll-on, roll-off lorry ferries Reserving space on ferries for critical supplies is among the contingency plans triggered by the Cabinet yesterday. Downing Street confirmed the proposal was among 320 work streams, which have been in preparation for months, given a green light today as Britain prepares for the possibility of no deal. Mrs May's spokesman said 'medical supplies' were among the things that could be brought in if the normal Channel links break down. Transport Secretary Chris Grayling had mooted the Government leasing entire roll-on, roll-off lorry ferries. Families to get advice on how to prepare for no deal Families will be told to make their own preparations for a no deal Brexit over the coming weeks, Downing Street warned. The Government will use a variety of 'channels' to get information out to citizens about what might happen and what they should. Mrs May's spokesman said the public could look at the 106 notices issued over the summer about what might happen and promised 'more detailed' information would be issued over the coming weeks. Asked if the public should be frightened by the announcements, the spokesman said: 'Securing a deal remains the Government's top priority. 'As a sensible Government it is our duty to make sure we are prepared for all scenarios.' Up to 10,000 lorries could be parked in Kent if no deal causes delays at the ports Dover has room for 1,720, Manston Airport near Margate, which has been purchased by the Department for Transport, could fit 4,000 and 4,500 could be parked on the M20 - as happened when 'Operation Stack' was triggered in 2015 More than 10,000 lorries could be parked in Kent to cater for queues of trucks heading for France in event of a no-deal Brexit. First lorries would be parked at Dover, then on Manston Airport and finally the M20. Dover has room for 1,720, Manston Airport near Margate, which has been purchased by the Department for Transport, could fit 4,000 and 4,500 could be parked on the M20 - as happened when 'Operation Stack' was triggered in 2015. Further contingency plans that emerged in November suggested the 10-mile long M26 could also be pressed into service for overflowing lorries. Amber Rudd (left) has been calling for MPs to vote on a range of options if Mrs May's deal falls. Ministers led by Sajid Javid have been clamouring for contingency plans to be stepped up What no deal plans are already in place? Chancellor Philip Hammond unveiled 3billion for no deal plans at the Budget in Autumn 2017 - all of which is due to have been spent by exit day. It has been spent on: 300 extra frontline officers for Border Force, plus 1000 staff to tackle border issues 1,300 extra staff at the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs Reforms to the Competitions and Markets Authority to ensure it can also act as the UK State Aid regulator Drawing up more than 100 no deal 'notice' advising different sectors how to prepare for possible problems, including at the border Replacing regulatory agreements currently dependent on the EU with UK versions in areas like nuclear cooperation Advertisement Despite overwhelming opposition from Tories, the DUP, Labour, the SNP and Lib Dems, Downing Street still hopes that MPs will come round to her Brexit plan during the forthcoming Christmas break. But with just 100 days to go before the UK leaves and Parliament deadlocked, the prospect of the UK crashing out is becoming ever more real. Ministers led by Sajid Javid, Matt Hancock and Andrea Leadsom have been clamouring for contingency plans to be stepped up. Cabinet was presented with three options yesterday - escalating preparations with 2billion more funding, keeping planning at the same level, or dropping the idea of no-deal altogether and hope that Mrs May's deal is accepted by MPs. They agreed with the PM that the state of readiness must be ramped up, activating all plans. They recommended businesses should also ensure they are suitably prepared and activate their no deal plans. Citizens should also prepare in line with the technical notices issued over the summer and inline with further, more detailed notices that will be issued over the coming weeks. Commons Leader Andrea Leadsom said today that she believes a 'managed no deal' Brexit is possible if the PM's plan cannot get past Parliament Mr Hammond is said to be frustrated that only a third of the estimated 2.2billion funds previously allocated have been spent so far. Health Secretary Matt Hancock last night revealed the scale of the purchases to ensure there are not shortages of essential medicines. He said the NHS has become the biggest buyer of fridges in the world as no-deal Brexit plans ratchet up Speaking on the BBC's Newsnight, Mr Hancock said the Department of Health's plans were in place with a 'few exceptions'. 'I've become the largest buyer of fridges in the world, I didn't expect that,' he said. The Russian oil industry was born in Baku, and modern oil workers should not forget about the contribution of Baku specialists to the development of this industry and about the Russia-Azerbaijan close ties in oil and gas developments, rector of the Gubkin Russian State University of Oil and Gas Viktor Martynov said, speaking with the correspondent of Vestnik Kavkaza. "Our friendship with the Azerbaijani oil industry workers and our cooperation must be maintained. We should not forget that the Russian Empire's oil industry was born in Baku, the modern oil industry appeared in the United States and Baku at the same time, thanks to which our and their engineering schools have developed in parallel. 150 years after they started to develop Baku fields, the oil and gas industry is a leading one both in Azerbaijan and Russia, and we must work together to ensure that people remember our connections," he said. "It is necessary to tell the younger generation about the oil discoverers, about the engineers who invented modern technology and the technologies that we still use. Cooperation between Russian and Azerbaijani scientific schools is also important, as well as training of personnel on the same technical principles. We should not separate our oil and gas sectors, although they are national in every country - but very often people move from country to country due to a new job, joint scientific conferences are held. We must contribute to the exchange of ideas, new technologies and the joint upbringing of young people in the traditions of Baku and Russia oil workers," Viktor Martynov urged. The rector of the Gubkin Russian State University said that the university maintains friendly relations with the Azerbaijan National Institute of Oil and Gas and the SOCAR Corporate University. "These ties are very fruitful, we often meet at various events. This year we plan to open an audience named after Aziz Mirzazade," he said. Viktor Martynov also said that the university was pleased with the news that the Surgut airport will be named after Farman Salmanov. "It was a very good idea. Farman Salmanov Airport is right tbhing, its necessary that young people not forget who discovered all these deposits. I want to say that Salmanov visited our university many times. We even had the Farman Salmanov scholarship once. So this is good news for all oilmen," the rector of the Gubkin Russian State University concluded. William Tyrrell can't be confirmed dead based on current evidence - and police are still following 'active leads' to find the missing toddler, a court has heard. A directions hearing was held at Glebe Coroners Court in Sydney on Wednesday, ahead of an inquest into the three-year-old's disappearance and suspected death. William vanished while playing in his grandmother's front yard at Kendall, on the New South Wales mid-north coast, in September 2014. William Tyrrell can't be confirmed as dead based on current evidence, a court has heard NSW Police divers search a dam in 2015 for evidence of missing boy William Tyrrell The inquest will begin with a week-long hearing in Sydney in March 2019 before resuming in August. Counsel assisting the coroner, Gerard Craddock SC, told the court on Wednesday it wasn't possible to conclude William was dead. 'The police investigation into his disappearance is ongoing and police are following active leads at present,' Mr Craddock said. He said William was in foster care and it was that, combined with the circumstances of his disappearance, that meant there was jurisdiction to hold an inquest. William vanished while playing in his grandmother's front yard at Kendall, on NSW's mid-north coast, in September 2014 Deputy State Coroner Harriet Grahame also told the court William could be alive. 'It isn't presently possible to conclude that he is dead. [The inquest] will seek to determine if he is alive or dead,' Ms Grahame said, according to Fairfax. William's foster parents, who attended the hearing, made no comment as they left the court. Deputy State Coroner Harriet Grahame told the court William could be alive. Pictured: Police search bushland at Batar Creek earlier this year, looking for evidence in the case Police have returned to search the Colorado ranch of a man whose fiancee has not been seen since Thanksgiving. Investigators said that the Monday visit to the Florissant ranch of Patrick Frazee, 32, was part of a 'routine follow-up' to the search warrant executed there over the weekend in the disappearance of 29-year-old Kelsey Berreth. 'Kelsey has not been located and there have been no arrests to date. Investigators continue to make steady progress with multiple investigative leads in the case,' said Woodland Park Police Chief Miles J. De Young in a statement on Tuesday night. Frazee was the last known person to see Berreth before the young mother's disappearance on November 22 after dropping their daughter off with him. Patrick Frazee (left) from Florissant, Colorado, is yet to be questioned by police over the disappearance of his fiancee Kelsey Berreth (right) who has been missing since Thanksgiving Day An aerial image (pictured) of police searching Patrick Frazee's property at Wildhorn Road in Florissant Police have not named Frazee as a person of interest. The initial search executed at the cattle rancher's 35-acre property on Saturday included heavy digging equipment and cadaver dogs. Earlier this week, it was revealed that nothing appeared out of order in Berreth's home before she vanished without a trace. There were freshly baked cinnamon rolls in her kitchen that she had left out to cool. Her luggage and makeup were untouched. Her car was still in the driveway. Only her cell phone and purse were gone. These are just some of the confusing details surrounding Kelsey's baffling case as police continue to struggle to find any answers - or even leads. But no one has received more questions than Frazee, Kelsey's fiancee and the father of her one-year-old daughter Kaylee. Frazee, 32, was the last person to see Kelsey after she dropped off Kaylee at his home just before she vanished. On Monday police released footage of Berreth entering a Safeway in Woodland Park with her baby on November 22, which is the last visual confirmation police currently have of her Just before the drop-off, Kelsey was captured on surveillance footage at a Safeway supermarket a mile away from her home with Kaylee. Three days later, on November 25, a text was sent from Kelsey's phone to the flight school work she worked as an instructor. The message said that she would be taking the next week off. Frazee told police he also received a text from Kelsey's phone that day, although the details of the message have not been disclosed. The last trace of Kelsey's phone was that same day, 800 miles from her home near Gooding, Idaho. Kelsey was reported missing on December 2 by her mother Cheryl Berreth, who had been unable to reach her. Cheryl had contacted Frazee, who said he hadn't heard from Kelsey since the November 25 text, according to the Daily Beast. Kelsey's mother told various news outlets that she had last spoken to her daughter twice on the phone on Thanksgiving morning. In one call, Kelsey asked for a recipe. Berreth, a 29-year-old flight instructor, has been missing since November 22 Cheryl told CBS News that Kelsey seemed 'happy' and that she didn't have plans for a 'big Thanksgiving meal at her home or anything like that'. Frazee, who neighbors describe as a 'shy old-fashioned cowboy', has not been ruled out as a suspect in Kelsey's disappearance. Police and FBI specialists conducted a two-day search of his sprawling and remote ranch in Florissant, Colorado on Friday and sent out a public plea asking him to sit down with them for an interview. Woodland Park Police Chief Miles De Young said officers didn't find Kelsey during the search. No other details on what was found have been released. De Young also made a public plea for Frazee to sit down with investigators for questioning and said he was only in contact via his lawyer - who claims he is cooperating. 'There have been numerous questions about whether Patrick is a suspect or a person of interest. At this point, we are considering every possibility,' De Young said during a press conference on Friday. 'I'm not willing to jump to conclusions or label people involved in this highly complex investigation.' Police have since announced a reward of up to $25,000, which has been donated anonymously, for information that leads to Kelsey being found. In a picture provided by Kelsey's cousin Jodee Garretson, the 29-year-old mom is seen (Center) with her cousin, mom Cheryl Berreth, two years ago just before Kelsey moved from Washington state to Colorado DailyMail.com can reveal Frazee lives with his mother Sheila, 64, on a family ranch where he makes a living by raising and selling cattle as well as horseshoeing. The 6ft 3in farrier's 35-acre ranch includes a one-and-a-half story home and a 1,300 sq ft barn, according to Teller County records. In Florissant, some told DailyMail.com that Frazee was a respected horse-handler who was a good father to baby Kaylee. But Michell Guterl, 50, who has known Frazee since he was 16, said she refused to let him work on her horses because of how he handled them. Guterl told DailyMail.com at a candlelit vigil for the missing woman: 'He was a farrier, we rodeoed together. He's a horseshoer, he roped at a lot of the rodeos that we went to. I used to see him all the time.' 'He worked on my horses for a real short time till he punched one in the gut with a rasp and that was about the last time I let him work on my horses.' '[He did it] just because the horse won't stand still, it's kind of common, but horses are very sensitive, they can sense, and my horse was very sensitive. 'He just smacked him with a rasp, it was uncalled for.' The alleged incident happened back when he was a teenager, but according to Guterl, Frazee's behavior wasn't a one-off. 'It's a characteristic that was ongoing for years,' she said. 'Anytime he was at a rope and his horse didn't act right, he'd rip on his face, kick him. In the community, we were all at ropings and stuff, but if the horse doesn't do exactly what it's supposed to do you don't just beat them.' Recalling a rodeo in nearby town Cripple Creek several years ago, she described Frazee losing his cool with his horse. 'He got mad because his horse didn't do good and somebody didn't heel just right to help him get in the money and he got so mad he left out of Cripple Creek Rodeo, flipped his horse trailer with his horse in it and almost killed that horse,' she said. 'He got mad, tries to get his vehicle out of there and there's too many cars tightly packed in. Lots of people were there.' A former girlfriend who dated Frazee more than six years ago declined to speak to DailyMail.com but her current partner said: 'He cheated on her while she was in the hospital, take that for what it's worth.' Asked whether Frazee was ever abusive, the partner said: 'He never beat on them (girlfriends) or anything like that. On animals he was rough, he was pretty aggressive with dogs and horses.' 'Patrick is a horseshoer, I heard once he was thumping on the horse "saying this is how you've got to do it," that horse reared up and kicked him right in the forehead, he got a bunch of stitches and his [then] girlfriend hauled him to the hospital to get stitches.' The man, who knew Frazee from school at Woodland Park High, said he was a 'recluse for sure'. Frazee was seen earlier this week speaking to a reporter at his home (left) and was also pictured with his daughter on the same day (right) Officers (pictured) are seen combing the area around Frazee's property in Florissant on Friday Hank Fildes, 34, who lived close to Frazee growing up said he's heard 'mixed things' about Frazee's alleged rough behavior with animals. 'It's hard to elaborate on Patrick, he was quiet and shy. He had his own friends circle and stayed close to his friends,' Fildes said. 'He did come across, "I'm a big tough cowboy." But that's that cowboy way, got be strong. 'That's how he was raised, he raised horses. I think if you're raised country that's normal, if you're raised city it's going to seem harsh. It's not wrong in his eyes.' 'Sometimes there's neglect and over abuse yes, he'd tread the fine line on it I'd say. You've got make a horse submit to what you want to do. You've got to be kind of firm. You shouldn't hit them.' Kelsey had been living in the mountain community of Woodland Park, about 15 miles from Florissant, in a townhouse she bought in June. Her neighbor Angie Gerber, 71, said she had assumed Frazee lived there with Kelsey and the baby, and said she saw him come and go in a red work truck. Friends and neighbors of the 32-year-old cattle rancher have described his as 'quiet and shy' and an 'old fashioned cowboy' Gerber was away for the Thanksgiving holiday and her last interaction with Kelsey was the week before, when she gave her a baby gate for the house. 'She seemed fine. She's a gorgeous baby and Kelsey was just a great neighbor, she was always really quiet and there was never any problem at all. All of us are praying she's okay,' Gerber said. On December 3, the day after Cheryl reported her missing, an aunt wrote in a Facebook group: 'Our niece is missing and has not been seen for a week. Her phone was last pinged near Gooding, Idaho. She told her ex when she dropped off their baby that she was heading to family in Washington. Please help us get the word out to the truckers in that area last week. If anyone has seen her contact the authorities immediately.' 'She broke up with her ex on Thanksgiving, he said she dropped off the baby and was heading to Soap Lake, Washington to visit. No one knew anything about the visit.' Kelsey's cousin JoDee Garretson, 50, confirmed to DailyMail.com that the message was posted by an aunt who is Cheryl's sister. Garretson said she didn't know if the information was correct and revealed Kelsey's mother later asked the aunt to take the post down. The message adds another dimension to the mystery surrounding this case as police and Cheryl have said Frazee and Kelsey were engaged but not living together. Berreth worked at Doss Aviation which trains US army pilots. A text was sent from her phone to her job on Sunday, November 25 saying she was taking the next week off Cheryl told NBC News that the couple did not have a wedding date set but that their relationship 'has been good'. 'They're loving. It hasn't been ideal, you know, given the economy and things,' she said. 'They had plans that haven't worked out as they would have liked. But they've dealt with that and they've made things work regardless.' She also said the couple were planning to find a home of their own, but Frazee's cattle farming job had been affected by poor prices. Garretson says she is sure her cousin did not disappear willingly and described her as a very loving mother who would never have left her daughter. 'Kelsey's so reliable and responsible, she's a mom, she would never leave her child. She was very excited [to be a mom], and she was a great mom,' Garretson said. Garretson said the family want Frazee to sit down with investigators and to let Cheryl see her grandchild. 'I can only imagine as a mom if one of my children went missing, it would be killing me not to get to the grand baby,' she said. 'I just can't imagine how much it would mean to hold that baby.' A beachside paradise and celebrity hot-spot has been dubbed the anti-vaxxer capital of Australia. Despite drastically improved vaccination numbers within New South Wales where 94 per cent of children are immunised, the popular holiday destination of Byron Bay is dragging the overall number down. Byron Bay's vaccination rate sits at 66.8 per cent, and is essentially an immunisation black spot due to an increase in families choosing not to vaccinate their children. The introduction of a No Vax No Play campaign in pre-schools has been widely accepted in most communities, but a number of Byron Bay locals have voiced their concerns, 7.30 reported. While New South Wales as a whole has improved drastically on vaccination numbers, with 94 per cent of children fully vaccinated by 12 months, holiday hot spot Byron Bay is dragging the overall number down (stock image) Katharina Gorka, a parent against vaccinations, recently found out that her son can't join his sister at daycare next year due to the laws The Mt Warning Community Pre-School near Byron has seen a dramatic decrease in enrolments since the introduction of the laws, jeopardising the school's capability to stay open and continue to provide services. Pauline Hurcombe from the school said half of the students aren't vaccinated. And while they're allowed to stay, their younger siblings aren't welcome under the new laws. 'What do we do with those kids that are missing out? That is my concern. Where is the policy for them?,' she said. And the concern isn't hers alone. Local mothers are also concerned that their children are missing out on crucial milestones based on their decision to not vaccinate. A beachside paradise and celebrity hot-spot has been dubbed the anti-vaxxer capital of Australia The introduction of a No Vax No Play campaign in pre-schools has been widely accepted in most communities, but a number of Byron Bay locals have voiced their concerns (stock image) Katharina Gorka, a parent against vaccinations, recently found out that her son can't join his sister at daycare next year due to the laws. 'I don't think it is fair, to be honest. It makes me feel like we are a bit excluded from society.' LOWEST VACCINATION STATISTICS IN NEW SOUTH WALES 1. Byron Bay (Northern NSW) - 66.8 per cent 2. Bellingen (Mid North Coast) - 82.3 per cent 3. Kyogle (Northern NSW) - 85.5 per cent 4. Lismore (Northern NSW) - 89.7 per cent 5. Tweed (Northern NSW) - 90.6 per cent Advertisement 'I have a set opinion on vaccinations and that is not going to change,' she said. The local preschools say while the laws stem from good intentions, most anti-vaxxers in the community won't budge on their ideals. Several councillors in the region are openly anti-vaxx, with some locals sharing an open distrust of medicine and science, The Daily Telegraph reported. The Byron Shire Council recently voted in support of allowing anti vaccination campaign propaganda to be displayed on council-owned venues. Despite Chris Hemsworth, Matt Damon and Miley Cyrus frequenting Byron Bay, the locals appear to be trapped within their alternative bubble, Dr Sue Page said. 'In that alternative lifestyle set you are sold homeopathic products or organic food and any small business is trying to build a market... They don't go and see a doctor because he or she is in the pocket of the pharmaceutical companies, they go see a naturopath,' she said. In contrast, smaller rural communities have managed to vaccinate 100 per cent of local children. Gundagai and Boorowa in New South Wales Murrumbidgee region, as well as Bombala in Southern New South Wales and Blayney in Western New South Wales, have vaccinated every child in their regions. Just a day before Sayfullo Saipov allegedly got into a truck and killed eight people on a Manhattan bike path on Halloween 2017, he was being wiretapped by the FBI. Saipov's defense attorneys have revealed that one of the recordings was from October 30, 2017, while other conversations were recorded over a three-year period. While it has not been disclosed whether Saipov, 30, discussed the alleged attack in the recorded conversations, it does suggest he was talking to others who were being surveilled by the FBI. Saipov, who legally moved to the US from Uzbekistan in 2010, allegedly drove a rented pickup truck down a bike path along Manhattan's Hudson River on October 31, 2017, killing eight people before crashing into a school bus. Just a day before Sayfullo Saipov allegedly got into a truck and killed eight people on a Manhattan bike path on Halloween 2017, he was being wiretapped by the FBI He then allegedly ran down a highway while waving both a paintball and pellet gun and shouted 'God is great' in Arabic. Saipov was shot in the stomach by a police officer and then arrested at the scene. It was the deadliest terrorist attack in New York since September 11, 2001. Saipov is now facing eight counts of murder, 12 counts of attempted murder in aid of racketeering, and providing material support to the Islamic State group. While he was recovering overnight in the hospital following the attack, Saipov told two FBI agents that he had been inspired by ISIS videos he watched on his phone. He told the agents that he had begun planning the attack a year earlier and chose to use a truck to inflict maximum damage. Saipov also told agents that he 'felt good about what he had done'. Saipov allegedly drove a rented pickup truck down a bike path along Manhattan's Hudson River on October 31, 2017, killing eight people before crashing into a school bus Saipov is now facing eight counts of murder, 12 counts of attempted murder in aid of racketeering, and providing material support to the Islamic State group. Pictured are police at his house in Paterson, New Jersey following the attack The FBI recordings were disclosed by Saipov's defense attorneys as part of a motion to suppress the very statements he made to the two FBI agents on the day of the attack. Saipov's attorneys said they received 'numerous audio recordings of conversations between Mr Saipov and various targets of FBI surveillance', according to the New York Times. They also received 1,000 pages of translated summaries of calls, which they said were mostly made in Uzbez. It remains possible that Saipov was not the FBI's actual target during the surveillance, but had been involved in conversations with others who were being wiretapped by the FBI. Saipov told the agents that he had begun planning the attack a year earlier and chose to use a truck to inflict maximum damage Saipov's lawyers said they were told by prosecutors that the wiretapped conversations would not be used during Saipov's trial. But the defense claims that the FBI agents who questioned Saipov had interrogated him 'about matters and contacts' that overlapped with the FBI surveillance. Saipov's lawyers have asked the court to throw out statements he made to the agents, arguing that he was questioned while under the effect of powerful drugs as he recovered from gunshot wounds. Saipov goes to trial next fall. The defense has noted that New York is a non-death-penalty state and claim the federal death penalty law is too flawed to enforce. The federal government said it will seek the death penalty if Saipov is convicted at trial, which will begin next October in Manhattan's Federal District Court Saipov's lawyers have opposed the death penalty, pointing that tweets sent by President Donald Trump after the attack have politicized the case Saipov's lawyers already have opposed the death penalty in the case on other grounds, including tweets that were sent about the attack by Donald Trump. After Saipov's arrest, the president tweeted" 'SHOULD GET DEATH PENALTY' and 'Should move fast. DEATH PENALTY'. The federal government said it will seek the death penalty if Saipov is convicted at trial, which will begin next October in Manhattan's Federal District Court. Saipov has pleaded not guilty. EU workers arriving in the UK after Brexit will lose their right to claim billions of pounds in benefits, Home Secretary Sajid Javid will reveal today. As part of the biggest immigration shake-up for decades, Mr Javid will say that new migrants from the bloc will not qualify for generous welfare payments, saving the taxpayer around 4billion a year. Instead, they will be treated the same as workers from the rest of the world meaning they are barred from pocketing handouts. Ministers are keen to introduce a global benefits system to mirror the new post-Brexit immigration regime, in which Europeans would be forced to apply for work visas like non-EU citizens. Sajid Javid wants EU immigration to Britain slashed by 80 per cent after Brexit, claims about the planned policy paper on the UK border say The benefits crackdown was revealed as the Home Office prepared to publish its long-awaited immigration white paper which is more than a year late. Following ferocious Cabinet clashes, Theresa May faced down Chancellor Philip Hammond and Business Secretary Greg Clark to include a 30,000 minimum salary threshold for skilled workers. Even as late as yesterday evening, it was unclear if the document would be unveiled as ministers struggled to resolve heated disagreements. As part of the blueprint: Migrants must earn at least 30,000 before they are allowed to come to Britain on five-year-long visas. But foreign workers on lower pay could be allowed in where occupations facing shortages or if they work for tech start-ups. Low-skilled migrants can get temporary one-year visas if they have jobs but once the permit expires they must leave the country for at least 12 months. To stop crops rotting in fields, farmers could hire low-skilled workers on seasonal visas. Freedom of movement for people will end, fulfilling a manifesto commitment. The controversial net migration target of 100,000 looked set to be axed a move Mrs May resisted. Instead, levels are likely to be sustainable. The Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill will crack down on welfare payments claimed by EU workers arriving after the end of December 2021. Under current Brussels rules, EU workers arriving under free movement rules can claim the same benefits as UK citizens. Official data from before the 2016 Brexit referendum showed that EU workers received more than 2.2billion in tax credits and housing benefits, 1.1billion in out-of-work payments and 700million in child benefit. But non-EU nationals on visas are not allowed to claim until they been given leave to remain or settlement typically after about five years. EU citizens and their families who are already in Britain before the transition date will still be able to claim benefits. Andrew Broad has been seen walking hand in hand with his wife Rachel after a 'sugar baby' nearly 20 years his junior leaked saucy texts he had sent her The wife of disgraced 'sugar daddy' MP Andrew Broad has appeared publicly by his side as allegations of the man's misconduct begin to leak. Broad, the MP for the regional Victorian seat of Mallee, set tongues wagging across the country after texts he exchanged with a 'sugar baby' known online as 'Sweet Sophia Rose' were leaked to New Idea this week. As his constituents pored over details of his sordid encounter, from texts that tried to make 'g'day' a sexy term to details of the politician's penny-pinching ways and fondness for James Bond, Mr Broad's life appeared to crumble. He resigned from his position as Assistant to the Deputy Prime Minister on Monday and announced he would not contest the May federal election on Tuesday, telling media he had let his constituency and his family down. Despite his apparent failings, wife Rachel has stood by his side. The pair were seen hand in hand on Monday, and a leaked email obtained by The Herald Sun reveals she played a role in his decision to quit politics. In an email sent to members of the Nationals Mallee branch on Tuesday night, he said he'd decided not to re-contest the election during a conversation with his wife as they walked through Mildura that morning. The 43-year-old said the scandal was not the only factor in their decision, with Broad also spending a lot of time away from home, leaving him unable to help his wife with their new foster child. 'We have had a year when I have been away too much, where extra responsibilities have been placed upon us with an additional foster child, and I made a grave error of judgement and allowed myself to be in a situation that is not appropriate,' Mr Broad wrote. 'Politics is a strange vocation, I have always said that I would try to speak common sense and not get a big head.' Amy, a 'sugar baby' who is known online as 'Sweet Sophia Rose' (pictured), says she received explicit texts from Mr Broad after agreeing to meet him for a dinner date, where the Victorian politician referred to himself as James Bond and whinged about the menu's high prices While he and his wife arrived for lunch on Monday in separate cars, their relationship appeared to be on the mend, with Broad adding a cryptic message to his letter. 'It is humbling to be loved by others, even when they know your failings,' he wrote. Andrew and Rachel Broad have been married for 19 years. The conservative politician, who has often referred to his deep Christian faith during his time in Parliament, has been slammed for the apparent hypocrisy of his actions. His 'sugar baby', who goes by Amy offline, told New Idea Broad sent her bold and explicit messages after they had finally agreed to meet for dinner. In his dating profile, she alleges he told her he was 'an Aussie lad'. 'I know how to ride a horse, fly a plane and f--k my woman. My intentions are completely dishonourable,' he wrote. Amy claims he told her he had 'booked a flashy room to seduce you back to' after dinner, despite the young woman stating on her profile there would be no physical intimacy between her and her clients. New Idea report the pair met at the Aqua Restaurant in Hong Kong, where Mr Broad allegedly whinged about the price of a meal and bragged about his powerful position. Amy said Mr Broad 'delivered his 'election speech' on the date, detailing why he should be voted in by the public. 'He kept saying he was very important and that when he left he would have to throw away his phone,' she told the magazine. 'He referred to himself as James Bond several times.' In screenshots of what Amy claims are text messages sent between the pair, Mr Broad, a former farmer, appears happy to capitalise on his Australian upbringing. After Amy tells him she thinks Australian accents are 'so sexy', he sends back what appears to be a sext. 'I pull you close, run my strong hands down your back, softly kiss your neck and whisper, 'G'day mate',' he writes. After the bombshell revelations emerged, senior members of the Nationals told The Herald Sun the party knew of more of Mr Broad's indiscretions, which date back at least three years. In the last 12 months alone, the Herald reports three separate women told the Nationals of Mr Broad's inappropriate conduct. The women claimed they had seen Mr Broad acting out in hotels and bars and threatened to out him in the media. Mr Broad was one of the first Nationals MPs to publicly call for Barnaby Joyce's resignation as deputy prime minister after news emerged of his affair with his much younger former media adviser Vikki Campion. He referenced the issue again in a tweet on February 22, quoting the late American evangelist Billy Graham. 'Quote from the late Billy Graham: 'When wealth is lost, nothing is lost; when health is lost, something is lost; when character is lost, all is lost',' he wrote, adding these were: 'telling words for the leadership of the National Party'. A man has died after he was found face down in the water at Bondi Beach. The man, aged in his 40s, was discovered unconscious in the surf at the iconic beach. Emergency crews and a rescue helicopter rushed to the southern end of the beach around 11.45am. A man found face down at a popular beach has been rushed to the hospital in serious condition (pictured) The man had been rock fishing before he ended up in the water, a police spokesman said. He had not been wearing a life-jacket at the time. A spokesman for the NSW Ambulance said the man had gone into cardiac arrest, he was pulled from the water and CPR was performed at the scene. 'Lifeguards were on the scene immediately and made contact with the patient there straight away. The man was taken to St Vincents Hospital in a serious condition but died short time later, a hospital spokesman said. President Donald Trump has said that Democrats misunderstand his plans for a 'beautiful' and 'artistically designed' southern border wall. 'The Democrats, are saying loud and clear that they do not want to build a Concrete Wall - but we are not building a Concrete Wall, we are building artistically designed steel slats, so that you can easily see through it,' Trump tweeted on Tuesday night. 'It will be beautiful and, at the same time, give our Country the security that our citizens deserve. It will go up fast and save us BILLIONS of dollars a month once completed!' he continued. It came as a looming budget impasse over Trump's demands for $5 billion in border wall funding appeared to dissipate somewhat, with the White House signaling that the President might accept substantially less. Trump is seen inspecting border wall sample sections in March. He tweeted on Tuesday that Democrats misunderstand his plans for a beautiful and artistic border wall If the standoff is not resolved, parts of the government will shut down at midnight on Friday. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders indicated on Tuesday that Trump doesn't want to shut down the government, though just last week he said he'd be "proud" to over the issue of border security. One option circulating on Capitol Hill would be to approve government funding at existing levels and kick the issue into the next Congress. It was a turnaround after days of impasse. Without a resolution, more than 800,000 government workers could be furloughed or sent to work without pay beginning at midnight Friday, disrupting government operations days before Christmas. Salvadoran migrant Jovani Antonio, 24, who traveled with caravan to the Mexico-US border, poses for a picture outside his tent in a street in downtown Tijuana on Tuesday Honduran migrants stand in line for breakfast inside an empty warehouse that opened its doors to migrants in downtown Tijuana, Mexico on Tuesday Breakfast of rice, beans and tortilla chips is prepared for Honduran migrants inside an empty warehouse that opened its doors to migrants in downtown Tijuana on Tuesday With Trump appearing to soften on his demand for wall funding, conservatives were outraged to learn of a deal announced earlier on Tuesday, which will send $5.8 billion in aid and investment for strengthening government and economic development in Central America, and another $4.8 billion in development aid for southern Mexico. The U.S aid aims to promote better security conditions and job opportunities as part of a regional plan to allow Central Americans and Mexicans to remain in their countries and not have to emigrate. The stark contrast drew outrage from conservatives, who questioned why the U.S. should be increasing aid to its southern neighbors while the Trump administration struggles to wring border security funding out of Congress. 'Well there you go. No $5B for southern wall but $10.6B to others. How angry are you?' conservative radio host Wayne Dupree wrote on Twitter. Warm-hearted police officers dressed in Santa hats and carrying sacks full of toys have made an impromptu visit to sick kids who will spend Christmas in hospital. Police from the Capalaba station in Brisbane decided to bring Christmas early to some much deserved kids at the Lady Cilento Children's Hospital on Monday. With smiles and laughs, officers went through the wards to give special gifts to the children including handmade teddies, colouring books and stickers. Officers from the Queensland Police Service have once again given back to the community after visiting a children's hospital with Santa sacks full of gifts With smiles and laughs, police officers and police liaison officer's went through the ward's to give special gifts to the sick kids including hand made teddies, colouring books and stickers The officer's were still required to wear there police uniforms however some leniency was given for Santa hats and tinsel which they draped over their flak jackets The officers were still required to wear their police uniforms however some leniency was given for Santa hats and tinsel which they draped over their flak jackets. Acting Senior Constable Vrinda McCauley first took officers to the children's hospital in 2017 and was eager to repeat the act of kindness this year. 'Today, we saw lots of smiles and laughs from not only the sick children but also their siblings and parents,' he said. Acting Senior Constable Vrinda McCauley first took officers to the children''s hospital in 2017 and was eager to repeat the act of kindness this year 'With Christmas only around the corner, it is important bring joy into the lives of those who may not be home on the special day,' One eager child managed to beat the line and dig deep into Santa's toy sack to see what special gifts were inside 'With Christmas only around the corner, it is important bring joy into the lives of those who may not be home on the special day.' He also took the opportunity to heap praise on community groups for their support of the initiative. 'A special mention needs to go out to all the amazing volunteers at local craft groups who have hand-made all the teddies, without you none of this would of been possible,' she said. 'On behalf of all the police elves that were here with me today and the Capalaba police, we wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a safe new year.' The U.S. government said on Tuesday that it is reviewing reports of forced labour at a Chinese internment camp where ethnic minorities are sewing clothes that have been shipped to the U.S. market. U.S. Customs and Border Protection said in a statement that reporting by The Associated Press and other media 'for the first time appears to link the internment camps identified in Western China to the importation of goods produced by forced labor by a U.S. company'. The AP tracked shipments from a factory in a camp in China's far western Xinjiang region to Badger Sportswear in North Carolina. The company ships clothing to universities, colleges and schools around the United States. China's state broadcaster released footage of a vocational training centre in Hotan, Xinjiang, in October. Beijing has been accused of using such establishments to detain Muslims The programme from China's CCTV in October shows Muslim trainees working in a garment factory at the Hotan Vocational Education and Training Center in Hotan, Xinjiang In this photo taken on December 5, residents of Hotan, Xinjiang, pass by the entrance to the 'Hotan City apparel employment training base' where Hetian Taida has a factory Experts and a human rights organisation say that possibly as many as one million Uighurs, Kazakhs and others from predominantly Muslim groups are arbitrarily detained in such camps, whose functions range from political indoctrination to forced labour. Previous detainees have described how they were tortured and brainwashed inside such centres. The AP reported yesterday that some detainees were made to work in manufacturing and food industries. A satellite image shows buildings around the Kunshan Industrial Park in Artux in western China's Xinjiang region in September. This is one of the Muslim internment camps in Xinjiang, where up to one million Chinese ethnic minorities are believed to be held In this photo taken on December 5, two layers of barbed wire fencing ring the 'Hotan City apparel employment training base'. It has been revealed that people are made to work inside such establishment without compensation and some of the products are shipped to the U.S. Following the recent news media reports, Badger said that it had suspended business with Chinese supplier Hetian Taida Apparel and was investigating. A statement on its website says 'one percent or less' of Badger products was sourced from Hetian Taida. The Washington-based Workers Rights Consortium (WRC), which has agreements with many educational institutions to make sure the products they sell on campus are ethically manufactured, said that 'forced labor of any kind is a severe violation of university codes of conduct.' The group's executive director, Scott Nova, said in a message to affiliate universities that, building off the AP's report, WRC had gathered additional evidence indicating the factory that supplied Badger with collegiate apparel was 'one and the same' as the factory inside the highly-guarded internment compound seen by AP reporters. 'Hotan City apparel employment training base' (pictured) is one of a growing number of internment camps in Xinjiang, where by some estimates one million Muslims are detained Detainees in centres such as the 'Hotan City apparel employment training base' (pictured) are forced to give up their language and their religion and subject to political indoctrination An ethnic Uighur woman walks in front of a giant screen with a picture of Chinese President Xi Jinping in the main city square in Kashgar in Xinjiang. The largest concentrations of Muslims in China today are in the western provinces of Xinjiang, Ningxia, Qinghai and Gansu The factory was featured on a Chinese state television segment in October that characterised the camp as a vocational training centre that helps minorities steer clear of religious extremism and gain employable skills. The state-run China Daily published an article on Tuesday which profiled ethnic minorities in Xinjiang who have been recruited to work in garment factories. The story featured a 23-year-old woman named Burebgul Ali who was described as being 'reluctant to work at the factory.' 'But after skills training and learning Mandarin,' the story said, 'Burebgul found her job quite comfortable and could make at least 3,000 yuan ($435) per month.' The AP spoke to a dozen former detainees and individuals who had friends or family in similar centers in Xinjiang who said they were given no choice but to work at factories on site. The Uighurs and Kazakhs, who were interviewed in exile in Kazakhstan, said that even professionals were trained to do factory work. It's against U.S. law to import products of forced labor. Customs and Border Protection said it is part of its mission to enforce 'both laws to protect individuals from forced labor and our Nation's economy from businesses profiting from this form of modern slavery.' For three years, Mosul's women were covered in black from head to toe and its men had to keep their beards long. Salons were shut, and plastic surgery considered a crime. But more than a year after the Islamic State group's ouster, the Iraqi city is flaunting its more fabulous side. Need to zap away a scar or a burn? Cover up a bald spot with implants? Whiten teeth for a dazzling smile? Mosul's plastic surgeons and beauticians are at your service. Raji Najib, a Syrian living in Mosul, recently made use of the city's aesthetic offerings. Beauty clinics are now doing a bustling trade in Mosul offering services which were ruled to be illegal under ISIS rule An Iraqi woman (left) and man (right) get a lip injection at a beauty clinic in the northern Iraqi city The 40-year-old had long been self-conscious of his bald spots, until his Iraqi friends told him what had worked for them -- hair implants at a new clinic in their hometown. 'They told me the equipment was modern, the nurses competent and the prices good,' Najib said. In Mosul, the average hair implant procedure costs around $800, including the follow-up after the operation. Nearly 90 kilometres (50 miles) to the east in Iraq's Arbil, or even further north in Turkey, the same operation costs at least $1,200. Plasma injections to prevent hair loss cost around $63 in Mosul, but at least $20 more in Arbil. In addition to the difference in price, Najib would have had to put up money and time for travel. An Iraqi woman undergoes a high-tech facial treatment at a newly-opened aesthetic clinic Members of the Iraqi security forces recently celebrated in the city to mark the first anniversary of the victory over the Islamic State (IS) group 'Going to a clinic in Mosul is much easier, as I don't have time to travel outside Mosul,' he told AFP. Decades ago, only one department in Mosul's hospitals offered plastic surgery, and only to those who had a severe accident or were trying to eliminate a physical handicap from birth. Mosul, and Iraq more broadly, have been shaken by waves of conflict since the 2003 US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein and paved the way for a sectarian war. Religious hardliners forced women to cover up or stay at home, and extremists in particular targeted hairdressers, many of whom closed their shops in fear. Another shock came in 2014 when the Islamic State group swept across much of Iraq's north, with the jihadists making Mosul their de facto capital. The religious police of IS enforced ultra-strict rules on dress for all residents, making sure women showed no skin and men wore ankle-length capris and long beards, with no moustache. A hairdresser styles the hair of a customer at a beauty salon. Five beauty clinics are said to have opened up since ISIS were routed from the city The religious police of IS enforced ultra-strict rules on dress for all residents, making sure women showed no skin and men wore ankle-length capris and long beards, with no moustache The city has since gotten a makeover. Five beauty clinics have opened since Mosul was recaptured last summer by Iraqi security forces, and they can hardly keep up with the flow of customers, most of them men. Muhannad Kazem told AFP he was the first to relaunch his city's beauty business with his clinic, Razan, which offers teeth whitening services and other dental care. His secret? 'The employees came from Lebanon, and the treatments and machines were imported,' said Kazem, 40. The city's medical services were hit hard by IS's three-year reign and the months-long battle to oust it. According to reports, the new beauty clinics can hardly keep up with the flow of customers Most of the clinics' customers are said to be men who go in for the same skin and hair treatments as women The available hospital beds in Mosul dropped from 3,657 before 2014 to just 1,622 last year, according to the local human rights commission. But the city is rebuilding, and one new commercial centre houses the Diamond Dental Clinic in the bottom floor, with the Shahrazad beauty centre upstairs. A poster at the entrance advertises what's on offer: injections of botox and other fillers, slimming surgeries, dermatological operations, and more. Inside the glossy interior are men and women alike, an unthinkable sight under the iron-fisted rule of IS. A female employee carefully injected serums to prevent hair loss into the scalp of a woman gritting her teeth, one of the dozen customers streaming in per day. Beautician Alia Adnan said the physical and mental impact of the jihadists on people in Mosul has been long-lasting. 'They have hair or skin problems because of the stress and the pollution that Mosul's residents were exposed to, both under IS and during the clashes,' she told AFP. A nursing home in Adelaide has been heavily criticised for serving up largely 'inedible' food since reopening last week. Mandy Jamieson - one of the first patients to move in to the Daw Park Repatriation General Hospital - has posted multiple images online of the poor quality of food she has been served so far. The pictures show lumpy grey gravy, colourless pieces of dry fish and small piece of very over-cooked quiche. Scroll down for video. A nursing home in Adelaide has been heavily criticised for serving up largely 'inedible' food since reopening last week Speaking to 9news, Ms Jamieson called the food 'disgusting', and claimed the chips she was once served were still frozen in the middle. 'The food is...I wouldn't serve it to my dog,' she said. 'It's bland, it's dry, it sticks to your mouth you just can't swallow it.' The meals are provided to the facility from a private company that also serves food to another local healthcare unit. Mandy Jamieson (pictured) - one of the first patients to move in to the Daw Park Repatriation General Hospital - has posted multiple images online of the poor quality of food Repatriation General Hospital in Daw Park, Adelaide, has 20 beds and is designed to provide high quality care and service for long-stay patients with complex needs. Healthcare Minister Stephen Wade has apologised to patients for the 'disappointing' food. 'SA Health became aware[over] the weekend and has been actively pursuing them since,' he said. 'It's not surprising that in any substantial move there will be teething problems.' The pictures show lumpy grey gravy, colourless pieces of dry fish and a small piece of very over-cooked quiche with a scattering of limp lettuce leaves Southern Adelaide Local Health Network said it had apologised to patients at the facility, and that it was working with the supplier to ensure food was 'of the standard we all expect'. 'We think that food is a basic necessity and we would only expect the highest quality so it's very disappointing to hear that has happened,' said SA Health spokeswoman Catherine Hughes. Earlier this week, a care home in Victoria was slammed for serving residents some questionable food, including a plate of green, powdered eggs. Healthcare Minister Stephen Wade (pictured) has apologised to patients for the 'disappointing' food: 'It's not surprising that in any substantial move there will be teething problems' A man who stabbed his victim to death with a stolen knife from Woolworths will spend 20 years behind bars. Shaun Falkiner, 28, attacked Alexander Watts, 25, on a pedestrian crossing outside the the Elizabeth Shopping Centre, in Adelaide, in April 2017. Falkiner's girlfriend Renee Davies sobbed outside after Justice Trish Kelly sentenced her boyfriend to two decades in prison. The Supreme Court previously heard that around 25 minutes before the attack Falkiner had pushed a woman who complained about the incident to her friend, Mr Watts. Mr Watts started following Falkiner through the shopping centre shouting something like: 'Why would you hit a woman?' Scroll down for video Falkiner's girlfriend Renee Davies (pictured) sobbed outside after Justice Trish Kelly handed him two decades behind bars Shaun Falkiner, 28, (right) stabbed 25-year-old Alexander Watts (left) to death on a pedestrian crossing outside a shopping centre The court heard Falkiner's girlfriend Renee Davies (left) had encouraged her boyfriend (right) and father of her children to attack Mr Watts, a father-of-four, by calling him 'weak' The court heard Falkiner's girlfriend Renee Davies had encouraged her boyfriend and father of her children to attack Mr Watts, a father-of-four, by calling him 'weak', 9 News reported. Renee Davies (above) she was 'emotional and upset' as she left court on Wednesday Falkiner then stole a kitchen knife from Woolworths which had a 20-centimetre blade. He claimed he acted in self-defence because the victim had been following him. Falkiner's lawyer Bill Boucaut previously told the court his client did not intend to kill Mr Watts and inflicted the stab wound as a 'half-hearted warning shot'. During sentencing on Wednesday, Justice Kelly said she accepted Falkiner did not intend to kill Mr Watts. 'The fact that you were prepared to forcefully thrust such a large knife into a vulnerable part of the body speaks an intention at the very least to cause grievous bodily harm,' Justice Kelly said as reported by ABC News. Falkiner (pictured) was sentenced to life in prison with a 20-year non-parole period. He will be eligible for parole in 2037 Falkiner followed Watts outside Elizabeth Shopping Centre (pictured) in April 2017 with a long-bladed kitchen knife he stole just minutes earlier 'You must now pay for your decision to use that knife in those fatal few seconds as you crossed the pedestrian crossing that night. 'There is no excuse for ever introducing a violent weapon such as a large knife into any altercation.' Outside court Mr Watt's mother Belinda Bezzina said nothing would bring her son back. 'I will hate you for what you have done until the day you die and I will never forgive you for it,' she told 9 News. Falkiner was sentenced to life in prison with a 20-year non-parole period. He will be eligible for parole in 2037. A former TV presenter broke out in sores, developed a lesion on her brain, and became homeless after trying to clean her mould-infested unit. Nicole Christine moved in to a rented flat in Ringwood, in Melbourne's east, in 2014 which had mould all through the bathroom due to a water leak. One day she decided to clean the skylight with a mop and bucket, and though she scrubbed it off she gave herself a 'mould shower'. Former TV presenter Nicole Christine broke out in sores, developed a lesion on her brain, and became homeless after trying to clean her mould-infested unit Just days later she developed painful blisters on her skin and face and soon after began to lose her hair and couldn't think straight. 'My cognitive skills were those of a child, I had to use an asthma pump for the first time in my life and I was in a permanent state of confusion due to brain fog,' she said. 'My excellent memory was now a thing of the past and I would forget so much, even what I was saying mid way through a sentence.' Doctors couldn't work out what was wrong with her and then an MRI showed a lesion on her brain that couldn't be explained. She also suffered from chronic fatigue, dental issues that required several teeth to be pulled out, and bacterial infections in her nose. She is now living out of her car (pictured) and using a wig to cover up sores on her skin Just days after cleaning the mould, she developed painful blisters on her skin and face and soon after began to lose her hair and couldn't think straight Ms Christine struggled to find a cause for her debilitating symptoms until she realised the mould in her flat had poisoned her. Finally she was diagnosed with chronic inflammatory response syndrome, caused by build-up of biotoxins in the body that can come from mould. 'You are lucky you're not in a wheelchair,' he doctor told her. A building inspection declared the unit uninhabitable due to there being so much mould and when the landlord did nothing she decided to move out. Everything she owned had to be thrown away as it was so contaminated it would make her even sicker. Doctors couldn't work out what was wrong with her and then an MRI showed a lesion on her brain that couldn't be explained She also suffered from chronic fatigue, dental issues that required several teeth to be pulled out, and bacterial infections in her nose Her symptoms improved dramatically but after living at her mother's house she got worse again because any significant mould would set her off. 'I can start unravelling before your eyes, within a matter of minutes. Sometimes those effects can last days or weeks or even months if I have spent too long somewhere that is toxic to me,' she said. 'My skin starts reacting or my legs go wobbly or I get dizzy and nauseous or start coughing like I am choking.' For the past 18 months she has slept in her car, on friends' couches, and even in a tent in the bush in an effort to clear her system. Ms Christine (pictured before her illness) struggled to find a cause for her debilitating symptoms until she realised the mould in her flat had poisoned her For the past 18 months she has slept in her car, on friends' couches, and even in a tent in the bush in an effort to clear her system Unable to work for years, Ms Christine has no money left and is living off welfare and the occasional singing gig when her health allows. 'Most of time I am in a wig and costume, which helps hide the damage done from my illness,' she said. 'I no longer do television work and nowadays I shy away from cameras.' With almost no budget she has been unable to find a rental free of mould that she can afford and has no idea when she will have a place to call home. 'I try my best to remain positive and because I work hard at pretending I am okay, it's often easy for people to forget just how sick I am and how easily my health can turn if I am in the wrong building,' she said. CIRS is the focus of a Federal Government inquiry into biotoxin-related illnesses, with more than 100 sufferers writing submissions. An infamous Chicago drug trafficker has testified at the trial of Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman, revealing how he met the feared drug lord at a mountain compound and received shipments of cocaine in trucks filled with produce and even live sheep. Pedro Flores, 37, testified on Tuesday at Guzman's trial in Brooklyn, saying that with his identical twin brother Margarito Flores he distributed some 60 tons of cocaine in the U.S. for the Sinaloa Cartel. It was the first time that either brother had been seen in public since 2015, when they were both sentenced to 14 years in prison in a sweetheart deal for turning federal informants on the notorious cartel. Flores testified that he had worked his way up from street dealing in Chicago's Little Village neighborhood, eventually running afoul of supplier in Mexico, who kidnapped him when he was on the run from a federal indictment. Pedro Flores, 37, (above) testified on Tuesday at Guzman's (right) trial, saying that with his identical twin brother he distributed some 60 tons of cocaine in the U.S. for the Sinaloa Cartel Pedro Flores (left) and his identical twin brother Margarito Flores (right) worked their way up from street dealing in Chicago's Little Village neighborhood to become major traffickers Flores testified that the kidnappers handcuffed and blindfolded him, and took him to a remote house where they held him for several days until his brother secured his freedom, the Chicago Tribune reported. His brother's first words to him, he said, were that he smelled bad and: 'I met Chapo.' In exchange for dealing with the kidnapper, Guzman wanted the twins to use their experience distributing cocaine in the U.S. for the Sinaloa cartel, Flores said. Flores described his first meeting with Guzman in 2005, saying he was taken by private plane to a rough landing strip on the incline of a mountain. Driving from the airstrip to the compound, Flores said he saw grisly signs of the cartel's violence, including a naked man chained to a tree, who crouched and stared at the truck as it passed. Accused Mexican drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman watches testimony in this courtroom sketch as he appears in Brooklyn federal court earlier this month Guzman appeared from the thatched-roof concrete villa wearing a hat, with a shiny handgun in his waistband and an AK-47 propped nearby, and his first words were to tease Flores for wearing shorts, the court heard. 'He said with all that money, I couldn't afford the rest of the pants?' Flores said. Another Sinaloa cartel leader, Ismael 'El Mayo' Zambada, was there for the negotiations, Flores said. 'You guys have my respect,' he quoted Zambada as saying. 'Imagine if you guys were triplets.' Flores said that the brothers used their know-how to turn Chicago into a national distribution hub for the Sinaloa cartel, taking advantage of the city's central location. As he grew more comfortable with Guzman, whom he called 'The Man', Flores began to give him regular gifts - gold plated guns, which he admits were too heavy and inspired by watching too many movies, as well as a gag gift of a pair of jean shorts like the ones he wore to their first meeting, given in a box shaped like a Viagra pill. The drugs flowed north in trucks filled with fruit and vegetables - sometimes so much of them that it affected market prices in Chicago when the brothers dumped their cover goods, Flores said. Authorities escort Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, center, from a plane to a waiting caravan of SUVs at Long Island MacArthur Airport, in Ronkonkoma, N.Y. in January 2017 One time, the brothers received a shipment of cocaine in a truck full of live sheep. Flores said they were baffled about what to do with the sheep, and eventually paid a friend $10,000 to get rid of the sheep. 'I'm looking at a bunch of live sheep,' Flores said. 'What are we gonna do with them?' 'I was concerned the cover loads were getting kinda weak,' he recalled. Around 2008, Flores said he began to fear for his life when the cartel split into two factions, with both sides insisting that the twins deal exclusively with them. The bloody civil war within the cartel meant 'we were in a lose-lose situation,' he said, 'because we had to choose a side.' Flores contact the DEA and began working as an informant, even making recordings of Guzman with a digital recorder that he bought at a Mexican Radio Shack. The jury is expected to hear the recordings in the coming days, as Flores continues his testimony. Guzman has denied that he was the leader of the Sinaloa cartel, saying he is being set up by shady government cooperators. If convicted, he faces life in prison without parole. A hardline Muslim has declared that anyone who celebrates Christmas will burn in hell for committing a crime against Islam that is worse than sin. Nassim Abdi, a Western Sydney preacher from the Saudi-funded Ahlus Sunnah Wal Jamaah Association, said commemorating the birth of Jesus Christ was more egregious than having sex outside of marriage or drinking alcohol. The Salafist fundamentalist, who follows a seventh-century version of Sunni Islam, used the Arabic term for polytheism, shirk, to describe the idea of acknowledging Christianity. Scroll down for video Western Sydney preacher Nassim Abdi (pictured) said celebrating Christmas was more unforgivable than committing a sin and would see someone go to hell 'for eternity' He said doing this would see someone go to hell, using another Arabic term to highlight how he regarded this as the most serious of crimes against Islam. 'Shirk is much worse than committing a sin. A person believes in Christmas, he goes to Jahannam for eternity,' he said in February. The preacher told Muslims at an Auburn mosque that acknowledging Christmas was even worse than drinking alcohol, which is prohibited in Islam, and having premarital sex, known as zina. 'For you to celebrate Christmas is worse than for you to drink alcohol and commit zina,' he said. The fundamentalist Salafist (right) said celebrating Christmas (Sydney's Martin Place left) was more egregious than drinking alcohol, forbidden in Islam, and having premarital sex Wollongong-based sheik Jamil El Biza (pictured) told his Facebook followers on Christmas Day last year they should avoid wishing Christians a Merry Christmas to please Allah Mr Abdi isn't the only ASWJ leader speaking ill of the Christian holy day, with Wollongong-based sheik Jamil El Biza telling his Facebook followers on Christmas Day last year they should avoid wishing Christians a Merry Christmas to please Allah. 'I'd rather be resurrected on the day of judgement, with the fact I made a few hundred million unhappy with me because I refuse to say "Merry Christmas", rather than being brought forward before Allah and having to explain to him why I congratulated a Christian who worships Jesus as lord,' he said. Sheikh Feiz Muhammad, a senior leader of the ASWJ in Australia, has previously told Muslims it was sinful to observe non-Muslim events, such as the Easter Show in Sydney. 'Is it part of the sharia? Are we allowed to entertain ourselves with celebrations that are built on non-Muslim concepts?,' he said. Sheikh Feiz Muhammad (pictured), a senior leader of the ASWJ in Australia, has previously told Muslims it was sinful to observe non-Muslim events, such as the Easter Show in Sydney 'If you go on the belief, 'I just want to join in and have the fun, you know, just have a night out, and enjoy myself but I don't believe in all this nonsense', that's a major sin. 'It's a what? It's a major sin.' The video was produced in December 2016, telling Muslims that celebrating Christmas or New Year would be the work of the devil. Nassim Abdi was condemned by New South Wales government ministers Mark Speakman and Pru Goward in September for declaring wives had a duty to provide sex for their husbands. He has also previously said it was sinful for women to show their ears in public and for Muslims to let their children hear music in the car or be allowed to dance to it. Officials in the national security and military establishments are reportedly unhappy with President Donald Trumps stated intention to intervene in the case of a former Green Beret charged with murdering a suspected Afghan bomb maker. Trump tweeted on Sunday: At the request of many, I will be reviewing the case of a U.S. Military hero, Major Matt Golsteyn, who is charged with murder. He could face the death penalty from our own government after he admitted to killing a Terrorist bomb maker while overseas. Golsteyn has admitted to shooting and killing a man in Afghanistan because he suspected he was a bombmaker for the Taliban militant group. Golsteyn admitted twice to the killing, once in an interview for a job at the CIA and again during an interview with Fox News Channel. Officials in the national security and military establishments are reportedly unhappy with President Donald Trumps (above) stated intention to intervene in the case of a former Green Beret charged with murdering a suspected Afghan bomb maker Maj. Matthew Golsteyn has admitted to shooting and killing a man in Afghanistan because he suspected he was a bombmaker for the Taliban militant group The decorated war hero said on Monday his interview with Fox News led to his indictment. I'm here right now because of that interview, Maj. Matthew Golsteyn told NBC News. I'm a little numb, he said. The President's involvement has some concerned that it would affect his receiving a fair trial, according to NBC News. '[As] commander in chief, [Trump] has an obligation to ensure a fair administration of military justice,' said Rachel VanLandingham, the former chief of international law with United States Central Command under President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama. VanLandingham is now a professor at Southwestern Law School. She said Trump's tweet put pressure on lower-level commanders in the military. So far, there has been no decision on whether to prosecute Golsteyn. Under U.S. law, the Army has an obligation to investigate and prosecute any war crimes. While Trump legally could pardon Golsteyn before a potential trial, legal analysts said it would send a bad message about the independence of the rule of law. 'For the most just outcome, what you want is the judicial system - whether theyre inside the military or whether theyre inside the federal corrupt system - to operate independently,' said Dr. Karen Greenberg, director of Fordham Law Schools Center for National Security. 'To interfere in the charging or other procedural part of the military trial would be unacceptable,' Greenberg said. Trump's tweet is 'one more sign of the presidents disregard for the courts, and their presumed independence from White House interference,' she said. In 2016, Golsteyn sat down with Fox News, which interviewed him for a special titled How We Fight. In the interview, Golsteyn told host Brett Baier that he tracked down an Afghan man whom he suspected was behind the bombs which killed two U.S. Marines. Watch the latest video at foxnews.com Fox Privacy Policy In 2016, Golsteyn sat down with Fox News, which interviewed him for a special titled How We Fight. In the interview, Golsteyn told host Brett Baier that he tracked down an Afghan man whom he suspected was behind the bombs which killed two U.S. Marines Golsteyn told Baier that he killed the Afghan because letting him go would have led to additional problems. 'You realize quickly that you make things worse. It is an inevitable outcome that people who are cooperating with coalition forces, when identified, will suffer some terrible torture or be killed,' he said. The story of the Afghan bomb maker first came out after Golsteyn told the CIA about it during a polygraph test in November 2011, two months before he was promoted from captain to major. Golsteyn admitted both during the CIA interview and in the Fox News segment that he killed the bomb maker, who he suspected was responsible for an explosion that killed Sgt Jeremy McQueary, 27, and 19-year-old Lance Cpl Larry Johnson. The Army Criminal Investigation Command, acting on information from the CIA, looked into the incident but could never find anyone to corroborate Golsteyn's claim and couldn't find any remains of the Afghan national. Golsteyn was never charged with a war crime, and the 2015 board of inquiry didn't attempt to establish whether he actually killed the Afghan. Instead, the panel considered whether he should be retained as an Army officer based on a reprimand in his personnel record. The board determined that Golsteyn was guilty of conduct unbecoming an officer and he was discharged. Julie Golsteyn went on Fox & Friends Weekend on Sunday to defend her husband The mom-of-two said the allegations her her husband are 'disgusting' and 'almost laughable' Watch the latest video at foxnews.com Fox news Privacy Policy It also revoked Golsteyn's Special Forces designation and the Silver Star. Golsteyn's interview on Fox News breathed new life into the case and reportedly prompted the United States Criminal Investigation Command to reopen the investigation. Golsteyn's immediate commander determined that there was 'sufficient evidence' to warrant the 'charges against him', US Army Special Operations Command spokesman Lt Col Loren Bymer said in a statement. The new charges will be reviewed to determine if the case should go to trial. If convicted, Golsteyn could face the death penalty. His wife and father spoke out in his defense over the past 48 hours, insisting that the former decorated officer had done nothing wrong. On Sunday, Golsteyn's wife, Julie, appeared on Fox & Friends Weekend to express her dismay with the decision to bring the charge against her husband for doing his job. 'He was lucky enough to survive war and has come home to be ripped apart by his own government and the Army leadership,' Mrs Golsteyn said on air. 'I know my husband, I know his heart and I know his character,' Golsteyn's wife said during the Sunday interview. 'And to think that he killed someone in cold blood ... is absolutely... I don't even have a word for it. It is just so disgusting.' Donald Trump said he will review the case of a Green Beret facing murder charges after killing an Afghan bomb maker he suspected was responsible for the death of two of his Marines Matt's father, Jerry Golsteyn (left), said on Fox & Friends Monday he is 'all for' Trump, as the commander-in-chief, taking a look at Matt's case Watch the latest video at foxnews.com Fox news Privacy Policy Julie, who has two sons with Matt, including a two-month-old baby, called the charged against her husband 'almost laughable' and urged those in positions of leadership to 'crawl out from the blanket of anonymity' and take responsibility for what has happened to her spouse. Late Sunday morning, Trump, who is known to be an avid viewer of Fox & Friends, pledged to take a look at the case against Golsteyn. If Trump were to intervene, it may count as unlawful command influence that could result in Golsteyn's case being thrown out. But Pentagon spokesman Army Col Rob Manning told the BBC on Sunday that the charges against Golsteyn are a 'law enforcement matter'. 'The Department of Defense will respect the integrity of this process and provide updates when appropriate,' Manning added. On Monday morning, Jerry Golsteyn appeared on Fox & Friends, describing his son 'a young man of character' and saying he is 'all for' Trump taking a look at Matt's case. 'Last time I checked, he's the commander-in-chief,' the Green Beret's father said on the program. Golsteyn admitted both during a CIA interview and in a Fox News segment that he killed an Afghan bomb maker he suspected was responsible for the 2010 deaths of Sgt Jeremy McQueary, 27, (left) and 19-year-old Lance Cpl. Larry Johnson (right) 'If [Trump] feels that something is not going as it should go, Im more than happy to get him in there and look at the situation and make decisions.' Jerry Golsteyn said it has been very difficult for the family in light of the fact that the military had previously cleared his son of any wrongdoing, only to bring the charge against him years later. 'It was an enemy combatant,' the father said of the slain Afghan. 'He was a known bomb maker, he was identified, and actions taken were to protect the lives of the villagers and those in his unit and the people around him.' Trump and other senior military and administration leaders have issued statements about military criminal cases in the past, triggering legal appeals and other complications as the courts work to insure impartial proceedings. The president, however, does have broad authority to pardon criminal defendants. McQueary's parents spoke out in defense of Golsteyn after the charges were announced this week. Debbie Kleinschmidt, McQueary's mother, said she does not believe Golsteyn should face charges for killing the suspected Aghan bomb maker 'I think that's crazy,' David Kleinschmidt, McQueary's stepfather, told the New York Post. 'I don't understand why they are bringing this up again. 'We were in a war - and things happen in war. Personally, I think they should just drop [the charges] I'm glad the guy is dead.' 'Our rules that we have to follow are not the rules that the Taliban follows,' added Deborah Kleinschmidt, McQueary's mother. 'So why punish our guy for something that the enemy is doing to us? I'm sure his family has to be stressed out beyond belief. And my heart goes out to them.' 'If anything, Golsteyn may deserve a medal, not a murder rap,' said David Kleinschmidt. 'I'm glad he found the guy. I'm glad the guy's dead because I don't think he should have been in society.' McQueary, of Nashville, Indiana, was survived by his wife and infant son (pictured together) Johnson, a native of Scranton, Pennsylvania, was remembered by family and friends as a proud Marine and a friendly youth with a close-knit family McQueary and Johnson had been working with Golsteyn's Green Beret team in the Taliban-controlled town of Marjah when they were killed in a bazaar explosion. After the bombing, Golsteyn gathered intelligence and searched nearby homes for the terrorist. The following day, a pair of Afghan men who were cooperating with the US turned over a suspect they had tied up who they claimed was responsible for the Marines' deaths, but the man was freed almost immediately because of lack of evidence. Shortly after the suspected bomb maker's release from custody, Golsteyn allegedly tracked him down and killed him. Days later, Golsteyn led about 80 troops into a four-hour firefight in Marjah, where he repeatedly exposed himself to enemy fire as he helped evacuate a wounded Afghan soldier and directed air strikes against the Taliban. He was awarded the Silver Star medal. Golsteyn admitted both during a 2011 CIA interview and in a 2016 Fox News segment that he killed the bomb maker The story of the Afghan bomb maker only came out after Golsteyn told the CIA about it during a polygraph test in November 2011, two months before he was promoted from captain to major. He is pictured here in Afghanistan in 2010 The story of the Afghan bomb maker only came out after Golsteyn told the CIA about it during a polygraph test in November 2011, two months before he was promoted from captain to major. He revealed that he had killed the bomb maker just days before that medal-winning battle. 'I have had commanders look me in the face and tell me I have done nothing wrong,' Golsteyn said. Golsteyn (pictured alongside an Afghan soldier) was never charged with a war crime, and the 2015 board of inquiry didn't attempt to establish whether he actually killed the Afghan Nine people have been hospitalised with snake bites in 24-hours as scorching weather puts the deadly reptiles in 'hyper-drive mode'. Queensland has already recorded 800 snake bites in the past year with nine of those bites occurring on Monday, The Courier-Mail reported. That means that more than one per cent of all snake bites in the state over the past year occurred in a single day. Nine people were hospitalised with snake bites overnight as Queensland saw a massive spike in snake bite figures in a single 24 hour period (file photo) One patient was picked up in Kenmore at about 10.30am suffering from a snake bite to the hand and was rushed to the Royal Brisbane Hospital. A child was bitten on the foot less than an hour later at a Jindalee home and was rushed to the Queensland Children's Hospital in a stable condition. But then at 2pm that same afternoon a teenage boy was also bitten on the foot in Bunya before being taken to hospital in a stable condition. Meanwhile a woman from far north Queensland was bitten on the hand by a snake and also had to be hospitalised. A further five snake bites were reported that night, in locations ranging from Eumundi, near the Sunshine Coast, to Emerald, Jensen, Witta and Innisfail. The nine people suffered bites to their hands and feet within a 24 hour period on Monday which makes up one per cent of all snake bites in Queensland in the last year (file photo) All nine people were admitted into hospital in a stable condition. Luke Huntley from Snake Catcher Noosa told Daily Mail Australia that the warmer weather from spring to Summer was the natural time for snakes to become more active. 'Coming into spring snakes are much more active, they go from being slow and lazy to what we call "hyper-drive" mode,' he said. 'They are totally driven by nature, the boys are out looking for the girls and the girls are usually waiting around for the boys.' Mr Huntley also had advice for anyone who might encounter a snake. 'The message I would send out is to absolutely remain calm,' he said. 'As long as people stay calm and call a professional then everyone wins.' The oldest living veteran in the United States has been admitted to the hospital because of a bout with pneumonia, his family said. Richard Overton, who celebrated his 112th birthday in May, has been in the hospital since last Wednesday, his cousin, Volma Overton Jr, told KXAN-TV. Doctors say that Richard has been feeling better of late and could be released from St. Davids Medical Center in his hometown of Austin, Texas. 'He needs everybody's prayers,' Volma Overton Jr. said. The last time Richard was in the hospital was in August. Volma Overton Jr said that prayers for him worked in getting him healthy again. Richard Overton, who celebrated his 112th birthday in May, has been in the hospital since last Wednesday, his cousin, Volma Overton Jr During World War II, Overton served in the all-black 1887th Engineer Aviation Battalion, helping build airfields in the Pacific theater Overton was born on May 11, 1906 in Texas, where his grandfather moved after being freed from slavery in Tennessee. He was married twice but didn't have any kids. He divorced his first wife in the 1920s and his second wife died in the 1980s. During World War II, Overton served in the all-black 1887th Engineer Aviation Battalion, helping build airfields in the Pacific theater. For decades, Overton worked as a courier for a furniture store, retiring at the age of 85. Overton is seen bottom right during a 2013 meeting at the White House with then-President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden For decades, Overton worked as a courier for a furniture store, retiring at the age of 85 These days he holds court at his Austin home where he receives a constant stream of visitors, many of them strangers who have read about him in news stories. Unfortunately, his family has been struggling to foot the bills to keep him in the home, since he now requires round-the-clock care. His cousin Volma Overton, who oversees his care, says his veteran's benefits would cover the costs to move him to an assisted living facility, but says such a loss of independence would 'kill him'. The family started a Go Fund Me to help raise money for his care, and it has raised more than $452,000 so far. Last July, Overton was the victim of an identity theft at the hands of unknown fraudsters who drained his bank account. The 112-year-old's Social Security and banking account numbers had been used to make seven withdrawals over several months. The family declined to say how much was stolen but said it was a 'significant amount of money,' which had been used to purchase savings bonds. Bank of America stepped in and restore his lost funds. Michelle Obama poked fun at the Trumps last night when Jimmy Fallon asked what she was thinking when she left Capitol Hill on her last day as the First Lady. Fallon showed her a picture of her and Barack boarding Air Force One after Donald Trump's inauguration in January 2017. He said: 'This is you, this is after the Trump inauguration just waving from Air Force One. Can you just walk me through what... 'Bye Felicia,' Obama blurted out, drawing rapturous applause and whooping from the audience of NBC's Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. The phrase is used to say goodbye to someone you dislike or don't care about. Michelle Obama pulled a face when discussing the moment Melania Trump awkwardly gave her a gift at Donald Trump's inauguration Michelle Obama poked fun at the Trumps last night when Jimmy Fallon asked what was she was thinking when she left the White House for the last time (pictured is that moment in 2017) Melania had given her a Tiffany's box (pictured is the moment in 2017) containing a 'beautiful frame' - which she received in front of the cameras, pulling a face indicating it had caught her off guard Also on the show, she pulled a face when discussing the moment Melania Trump awkwardly gave her a gift at the inauguration. Melania had given her a Tiffany's box containing a 'lovely frame' - which she received in front of the cameras, pulling a face indicating it had caught her off guard. After a few seconds of not knowing what to do with the gift, Barack took it from her and gave it to a member of staff. Describing her final moments as the First Lady, Obama said: 'A lot was going on that day. 'Right before that my daughters' friends decided they needed a sleepover for the last day. I was like: "are you guys kidding me?" ' Describing her final moments as the First Lady, Obama said to Fallon: 'A lot was going on that day.' Referring to Melania's gift, she added: 'So, there was that and then there was the Tiffany's box. 'It was just a lot.' She said she told them: 'We're leaving, you've got to take all your stuff, pick up the blankets and the bears,' adding, 'and they were all crying and I was just like "get out, we've got to go".' Referring to Melania's gift, she added: 'So, there was that and then there was the Tiffany's box. 'It was just a lot.' Also in the show, Obama pulled a prank on unsuspecting tourists in New York, teaming up with Fallon to surprise them on an elevator. The stunt, which Fallon has pulled once before with Paul McCartney, involved the late night host and former first lady waiting on a random floor of NBC's headquarters in 30 Rockefeller Plaza as an elevator with a tour group stopped and opened its doors. In one gag, the pair were sitting and reading each other's books, dropping them down to reveal their faces to the screams of the tour group. Fallon surprised one group of tourists on the elevator before holding up a red blanket When he dropped the blanket, they were shocked to see Michelle Obama before them In another, scene, Fallon opened a giant Christmas present to reveal Michelle Obama, who looked chic in a leather jacket, black blouse, and black 3x1 jeans In another, Fallon opened a giant Christmas box to reveal Obama - who looked chic in black leather jacket, black blouse, and black 3x1 jeans - waiting inside, delighting the tourists. In one particularly odd scene, the elevator doors opened to reveal Obama skipping rope. Later in the show, Obama sat down with Fallon for an interview to promote her new book, Becoming. Early in the interview, Obama revealed the poor impression that her future husband made the first time they met, when he was working for her at a law firm in Chicago. 'He wasn't good with time until we got married,' she said. 'He was late. The first time. First day of work, his first job, dude was late. I was like, triflin', brother.' Obama also explained her husband's motivation for seeking a second term in the presidency. Later in the show, Michelle Obama gave a wide-ranging interview to Fallon She said her husband only sought a second term to get Secret Service protection for their teen daughters. Barack Obama is seen with daughters Malia and Sasha above in 2014 'The second term of the presidency was really fueled by Barack's desire to keep them with their agents into their teen years,' she joked. 'He was like, we've got to win, because I don't want those girls walking around. He wanted men with guns with them.' In one memorable moment in the interview, Obama said that her thoughts upon leaving the White House for the last time were 'Bye, Felicia'. 'A lot was going on that day,' added Obama, explaining that her daughters had insisted on a final sleepover with friends on the last day of her husband's presidency. 'And then there was the Tiffany's box,' she said, referring to the gift that Melania Trump gave her, causing momentary awkwardness as she wasn't sure what to do with it. 'It was a lot.' Asked by Fallon whether she remained optimistic about the country, she responded: 'I am.' 'We owe young people that optimism, that hope, because what's the alternative?' They come into this world with so much promise and openness; we're the ones that shut them down. 'They need to know their story can be my story,' Obama continued. 'If you live like I did a little working-class kid who made her way up to becoming First Lady of the United States, a best-selling author, traveling the world there is reason for hope,' she said. 'There are dark days in so many of our journeys, but we have to push that arc toward hope. That is what I try to do every day.' Obama explained that writing a memoir is part of the First Lady 'assignment'. 'It's a great story!' Fallon gushed. 'You came from basically nothing, and became the First Lady of the United States!' 'Go figure,' she responded modestly. Obama said that she could have written an entirely other book focused on her time in the White House, but that it would have been 800 pages, and taken her husband 800 days to read. A vigorous South Bronx mother straddled a car thief and kicked him around on the street in order to keep him detained until help arrived. An entertained female neighbor witnessed the scuffle and filmed it from her Melrose apartment Tuesday around 7:30am. Footage shows 49-year-old mom Tihisha Jones after she auto-started her Honda Pilot and witnessed a young man, identified as 19-year-old Bernado Santiago, in the front seat during the attempted auto theft. The woman filming cheered the mom on as she wrestled the suspect and said: 'Dude tried to steal her car... she caught him, pulled that sh*t out the vehicle and beat his a**. That's what I'm talking about... get that sh*t.' This vigorous South Bronx mother detained a car thief and kicked him around on the street until help arrived An entertained female neighbor witnessed the scuffle and filmed it from her Melrose apartment Tuesday around 7:30am Footage shows 49-year-old Tihisha Jones after she auto-started her Honda Pilot and witnessed 9-year-old Bernado Santiago inside of it. She is seen sitting on him The witness erupted in laughter after and added: 'He ain't going nowhere... she got her kids with her...come on, look at the sh*t. Welcome to the f***ing Bronx!' Jones kicked the suspect in the leg and held him down as he lay helplessly on the ground with his shirt fell off. Santiago covered his head in fear of Jones, who didn't seem to flinch throughout in altercation that could have been dangerous. The mother straddled Santiago as he lay on his side with his head on the pavement. Jones is pictured speaking about the incident later Tuesday The woman filming continued to holler with excitement. A group of officers finally ran out of their vehicle to assist and the man was placed in handcuffs. 'I know he cold as f***,' the woman filming added, as he was arrested in the cold, sans shirt. The teen has been charged with attempted grand larceny, petty larceny and criminal stolen possession of stolen property. The mother proceeded to drive her child to school after. Jones later told News 4 New York: 'He's lucky I didn't kill him... that's the thing, he's lucky.' A group of officers finally ran out of their vehicle to assist and the man was placed in handcuffs A transgender former inmate has lost a discrimination case after accusing a jail of 'offending her dignity'. Leilani Tafao, 39, was serving time at the all-male Southern Queensland Correctional Centre for break and enter. She claims he was repeatedly referred to as 'him' or 'mister', The Courier-Mail reported. She was was born male but has identified as female since her early teenage years. Leilani Tafao (pictured) felt a prison in Queensland offender her dignity by referring to the transgender inmate as a male Leilani Tafao (pictured) accused an Australian jail of offending her diginity - the claims of the transgender woman were dismissed She began hormone therapy at the age of 15 and has also undergone partial gender reassignment surgery. Tafao's discrimination claim said she was criticised for skipping, wearing flowers in her hair, being sexually flirtatious on occasion as well as displaying feminised behaviour when behind bars. She then added she was placed on discriminatory intensive management plans (IMPs) leading up to her release in 2015. Mark Walters, Director of Southern Queensland Correctional Centre director Mark Walters disagreed with Tafoa's claims. He told a tribunal that representatives from the Spring Creek jail were not disrespectful to Tafao by referring to her as a male, pointing to the fact that the jail housed 380 male prisoners and was overcrowded. Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal member Anne Fitzpatrick agreed that the use of male pronouns 'offended the dignity' of Tafao, but felt the safety of the former inmate was sufficient for the prison not to focus on her gender identity, as opposed to her gender. Leilani Tafao (pictured), a former inmate at the Southern Queensland Correctional Centre, accused the jail of 'offending her dignity' by referring to her as male 'I do not consider that she (Tafao) was being asked in the IMPs to do anything other than moderate sexual behaviours which posed a threat to her own safety in the prison environment,' Ms Fitzpatrick said. Tafao's claim was formally dismissed in mid-November. President Donald Trump signed a letter of intent to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, CNN has claimed. Anchor Chris Cuomo obtained a copy of the signed letter, which he showed viewers during his show on Tuesday night. The revelation comes just two days after Rudy Giuliani, the president's attorney, claimed the letter existed but had never been signed. 'It is signed by Donald J. Trump,' Cuomo told viewers. 'How do I know it was? Because we've been told by his lawyer, and it is.' President Donald Trump signed a letter of intent (pictured) to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, CNN anchor Chris Cuomo revealed on Tuesday night The signed letter - dated October 28, 2015 - discussed negotiations to build a Trump hotel, as well as condominiums and commercial property, in Moscow 'Here's the letter. Cohen didn't sign it. The president did.' The signed letter - dated October 28, 2015 - discussed negotiations to build a Trump hotel, as well as condominiums and commercial property in Moscow. It revealed that the project would have given Trump's company a '$4million upfront fee, no upfront costs, a percentage of the sales, and control over marketing and design', according to CNN. The deal also said that Trump would be able to name the hotel spa after his daughter Ivanka. 'For a deal that didn't mean anything, it's a lot of pages, man,' Cuomo said. 'With a lot of detail about what they wanted and how they wanted it and how he would be paid.' 'And there's his signature,' he declared, holding up the page with Trump's signature close to the camera. While campaigning for the presidency in 2016, Trump repeatedly claimed he had nothing to do with Putin or Russia. The revelation comes just two days after Rudy Giuliani, the president's attorney, claimed the letter had never been signed The deal also said that Trump would be able to name the hotel spa after his daughter Ivanka But Giuliani revealed on Sunday that Trump had spoken to his former personal attorney Michael Cohen about the project for longer than previously indicated. He seemed to indicate that Trump addressed the issue in his written responses to questions from special counsel Robert Mueller and that the talks went on through the 2016 general election. 'According to the answer that he gave, it would have covered all the way up to November of 2016,' Giuliani said on ABC's This Week. Trump's attorney Michael Cohen leaded guilty to lying to Congress about plans to build a Trump property in Moscow last month Last month, Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about plans to build a Trump property in Moscow. He originally told a Senate committee that the project was dropped in January 2016 but later admitted that was untrue and he had continued to pursue the matter until June 2016. Giuliani revealed last week that Trump told Mueller's team he spoke to Cohen about the project but did not specify exactly when those conversations took place. The former New York City mayor said the president doesn't remember when the conversations took place but is safe in what he told the special counsel because he said the discussions happened sometime during the 2016 campaign. Those conversations could have been in June or July of 2016, Giuliani noted. 'Up until November 2016, they could have had a conversation about Trump Tower Moscow, and it went nowhere,' he told CNN. 'It was a real estate project. There was a letter of intent to go forward, but no one signed it,' he said. Cohen told prosecutors he considered going to Moscow himself and that he raised the possibility of Trump going there during the general election campaign to seal the deal. He said he personally briefed Trump about Trump Tower Moscow on several occasions, as well as Trump family members. Last week Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison stemming from federal charges of tax fraud and bank fraud, and campaign finance violations. Giuliani, who is representing Trump in the Russia investigation, was asked about a variety of topics that are believed to be subjects of interest to Mueller and his team during his appearance on the Sunday shows. He was asked whether the president was aware of the infamous June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between members of the campaign - including Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and then campaign manager Paul Manafort - and a Russian lawyer promising dirt on Hillary Clinton. 'That is definitely he didn't know about it,' Giuliani said on ABC. 'And I think that's consistent testimony.' A health worker allegedly stabbed outside a hospital will today appear in court after being charged in connection with the incident. Mother-of-one Donna Maxwell, 42, was found stabbed in the abdomen at Ailsa Hospital near Ayr last month. Both Ailsa and the neighbouring Ayr Hospital were locked down for hours amid a huge police operation. The police cordon at Ailsa Hospital in Ayr, North Ayrshire, after the incident last month Staff and pupils at the nearby Queen Margaret Academy were also told not to leave the school while Police Scotland's Major Inquiry Team searched the area. Dog handlers and a police helicopter were called to the scene to assist, as Maxwell spent two days in hospital recovering from a serious knife wound to her abdomen. Maxwell, from Irvine, Ayrshire, was yesterday arrested in connection with the incident and is expected to appear at Ayr Sheriff Court today. A Police Scotland spokesman said: We can confirm that a 42-year-old woman has been arrested and charged in connection with an incident at Ailsa Hospital, Dalmellington Road, Ayr, which occurred shortly after 10am on Thursday, November 22, 2018. A report has been sent to the procurator fiscal and she is expected to appear at Ayr Sheriff Court on Wednesday, December 19, 2018. This is the chilling moment a convicted paedophile child murderer lured a sobbing eight-year-old girl away from a bus stop in Russia. The killer and sex attacker had only been released days earlier from a 20-year jail term when he approached the girl in Kyzyl city, Russia, and lied that he was a policeman. He walked up to her at her school bus stop before telling the child that her parents were waiting for her at the police station and he would take her to them. Footage shows the unnamed man grabbing her by the hand and walking her along several streets looking for a place to rape her, detectives said. Footage captures the moment a convicted paedophile child murderer (right) lured a sobbing eight-year-old girl away from a bus stop in Russia The killer and sex attacker had only been released days earlier from a 20-year jail term when he approached the girl in Kyzyl city, Russia, and lied that he was a policeman In a law enforcement video, the handcuffed man (pictured) shows a woman state investigator the crime scene close to the filling station 'The girl began to cry,' a law enforcement source told Plus Inform newspaper. 'The accused man failed to calm her and tried to scare her. He hit her in the abdomen with his fist. The child began to cry louder. 'Her cries attracted the attention of a few men (at the filling station). One of them reprimanded the accused man, so he fled.' This saved the girl from a horrific sex attack and possibly murder, according to sources close to the case. Police were called and were soon able to identify the known paedophile and murderer from CCTV footage. He was detained in Kyzyl, capital of the Tyva region in Siberia. In a law enforcement video, the handcuffed man shows a woman state investigator the crime scene close to the filling station. Chilling footage shows the unnamed man grabbing her by the hand and walking her along several streets looking for a place to rape her, said detectives based on his confession The man is accused of attempting to rape the girl. Under Russian law he can be jailed for up to 20 years if convicted. He is pictured showing police the spot where he took the child 'We sat down here, on these very concrete blocks,' he said. 'I tried to calm her, using words, I was not using violence at first on her. So I made her sit here, on these concrete blocks.' He was detained in May when the incident took place, but details were only revealed now that the case has been passed to a court in Kyzyl. The man is accused of attempting to rape the girl. Under Russian law he can be jailed for up to 20 years if convicted. The Russian Investigative Committee said today he had been released from prison only nine days before he lured the girl away from the bus stop. He had served 20 years in jail for killing an underage girl in 1998. His previous convictions were for rape and other 'violent sexual actions' against a minor aged under 14 and and murder with the intention of covering up the other crimes. Drugs giants GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer have agreed to merge their consumer healthcare divisions. The two rival pharmaceutical firms will create a new business expected to produce annual sales of 9.8 billion. GSK is the UK company behind several well-known brands, including Aquafresh toothpaste and Beechams cold and flu treatment. GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer have agreed to merge their healthcare divisions to create a new business with sales of 9.8 billion Pfizer, based in Connecticut, USA, is worth 15.8 million and own brands like Chapstick, Advil painkillers and Centrum multi-vitamins. GSK will control 68 per cent of the new business, 'laying the foundations' for its new health care operation. A spokesman said the merger will save the company 500 million by 2022, a quarter of which will be reinvested into the business. The deal paves the way for British group GSK to have two UK-listed companies, one specialised in the development of drugs and the other in consumer healthcare. In a statement, GSK said: 'Within three years of the closing of the transaction, GSK intends to separate the joint venture via a demerger of its equity interest and a listing of GSK Consumer Healthcare on the UK equity market. 'Over this period, GSK will substantially complete the integration and expects to make continued progress in strengthening its Pharmaceuticals business and R&D pipeline.' In a separate statement, Pfizer said the joint venture 'will be a category leader in pain relief, respiratory, vitamin and mineral supplements, digestive health, skin health and therapeutic oral health and will be the largest global consumer healthcare business'. A budget travel website has collapsed, sparking fears Australian holidaymakers will be left stranded over the Christmas period. The Australian Federation of Travel Agents announced on Wednesday that Bestjet had gone into liquidation. The travel website has been put under the administration of Brisbane-based accounting firm Pilot Partners. The Australian Federation of Travel Agents announced on Wednesday that Bestjet (pictured) had gone into liquidation The collapse of the Brisbane-based company comes just six weeks after it changed hands. According to Travel Bulletin, the travel website was recently sold to McVicker Investment Group. Customer Holly Matthews (pictured) bought tickets for her family for an overseas trip through the travel website 'I see great opportunities to employ additional staff members within the company to expand the business further,' Robert McVicker Sr told the bulletin at the time. That vision seemed to have been quickly squashed. The wife of former Air Australia boss Michael James founded the company after her husband's airline company cratered in 2012. ASIC had prohibited Mr James from managing corporations for three years after Air Australia became bogged down in $97 million worth of debt. Bestjet was promptly stripped of its industry accreditation more than a year-and-a-half ago. The travel website has not made a good reputation for itself and copped severe criticism from its past customers. Customer Holly Matthews bought tickets for her family for an overseas trip through the travel website. 'The holiday was for February for my dad's 50th,' she told Daily Mail Australia. Now she doesn't know if the trip is going to happen at all. 'We booked tickets to Thailand with Singapore Airlines,' she said. The collapse of the Brisbane-based company comes just six weeks after it changed hands (stock photo) 'There is seven of us, so [we spent] just over $7,000 for all our flights.' Since the administration Ms Matthews has been in contact with the airline. Singapore Airlines told her the tickets had been cancelled and refunded to the travel website. Ms Matthews said she had reached out to Bestjet, but received no response. Mr Westbury told customers of the travel website to double check their tickets had not been cancelled. 'I have a heavy heart that at Christmas time, consumers are faced with this,' he said. Ms Matthews said she had reached out to Bestjet, but received no response (stock photo) The collapse follows from the recent folding of HotelQuickly. Thousands of families were left out of pocket coming into Christmas after the dodgy hotel booking website dropped their reservations. HotelQuickly, a booking platform listed as an option on TripAdvisor with 640,000 followers on Facebook, sent customers an email advising their bookings had been cancelled, but claimed they would be provided with vouchers for credit on the site. Blaming the cancellations on an 'unforeseen issue', the company said they were 'working very hard to come up with a manageable solution' - but customers say they haven't heard a peep from the HotelQuickly since and are still waiting to see what's happened to the thousands of dollars they gave to the company. There will be no cap on short term workers coming to the UK until at least 2025, new immigration proposals out today reveal. The plans include a five-year scheme that will mean anyone from the EU will be able to come to the UK to look for work for years after Brexit. Unlike today the workers will need a visa in advance and will only be allowed to stay for a year because EU free movement is being axed. They will also not be allowed to bring family members or claim benefits. But the system means net migration to the UK might not fall and could even increase in the years after Brexit despite a decade of Tory promises to bring numbers down. Another route to come into the UK would be to have a job offer with pay of more than 30,000 a year, in which case people would be able to stay for five years. Home Secretary Sajid Javid unveiled the proposals today more than a year after they were first due. In a swipe at Theresa May he refused to back the long-standing target of getting net immigration down to the tens of thousands. Mrs May insisted at PMQs the target remained in place - answering with an abrupt 'Yes' when challenged on Mr Javid's remarks. There will be no cap on short term workers coming to the UK until at least 2025, new immigration proposals unveiled by Sajid Javid (pictured in the Commons today) reveal In a swipe at Theresa May (pictured today in Downing Street) Mr Javid refused to back the long-standing target of getting net immigration down to the tens of thousands Unveiling his plans in the Commons, Mr Javid said: 'We are building a fair and sustainable immigration system that answers the concerns people have rightly had about free movement. What is in the new policy on immigration? Home Secretary Sajid Javid unveiled a new immigration system today for Brexit Britain. It includes: For the first time ever, everyone who comes to Britain will need some form of permission. For the first time ever, everyone who comes to Britain will need some form of permission. Migrants must earn at least 30,000 before they are allowed to come to Britain on five-year-long visas. But foreign workers on lower pay could be allowed in where occupations facing shortages or if they work for tech start-ups. Low-skilled migrants can get 'temporary' one-year visas if they have jobs but once the permit expires they must leave the country for at least 12 months. Even tourists will need an 'Electronic Travel Authorisation', a new document that must be bought before travel to the UK. Low-skilled workers could get seasonal visas to stop crops rotting in fields. Freedom of movement for people will end, fulfilling a manifesto commitment. Freedom of movement for people will end, fulfilling a manifesto commitment. The controversial net migration target of 100,000 is not directly mentioned. Instead, the policy paper cites the Tory manifesto and the Home Secretary has refused to repeat the promise. Advertisement 'An immigration system that is designed in Britain, made in Britain and that serves our national interest.' Mr Javid's plans set out the creation of a skills-based system which treats EU nationals in the same way as people from the rest of the world if they want to settle permanently. There will be no cap on the number of highly skilled workers who can come to do jobs like being doctors or engineers. Other skilled workers will be allowed to come but will have to meet tough income requirements. A proposed threshold of 30,000 triggered a major row today as business groups and the NHS said it was disqualify too many people in professions such as nursing. The rule has been sent out for further consultation after the issue also caused deep divides inside Government. Chancellor Philip Hammond and Business Secretary Greg Clark said it should be stripped from the plans. There will be no way for low skilled workers to come to the UK for long term jobs under the new system. For the first time ever, all travellers to the UK will need some form of permission to come. Tourists will need at least an 'Electronic Travel Authorisation', a security check they will need to apply for in advance. This is all that will be required of EU nationals and those from 'low risk' countries such as the United States, Australia and New Zealand. Travellers from other countries will still need a tourist visa as today. Even as late as yesterday evening, it was unclear if the document would be unveiled as ministers struggled to resolve heated disagreements. As part of the blueprint: Migrants must earn at least 30,000 before they are allowed to come to Britain on five-year-long visas. But foreign workers on lower pay could be allowed in where occupations facing shortages or if they work for tech start-ups. Low-skilled migrants can get 'temporary' one-year visas if they have jobs but once the permit expires they must leave the country for at least 12 months. To stop crops rotting in fields, farmers could hire low-skilled workers on seasonal visas. Freedom of movement for people will end, fulfilling a manifesto commitment. The controversial net migration target of 100,000 looked set to be axed a move Mrs May resisted. Instead, levels are likely to be 'sustainable'. As he unveiled the plans this morning, Mr Javid effectively axed the 'tens of thousands' promise on immigration as he unveiled long-delayed reforms to border rules. The Home Secretary refused seven times to repeat the target in an extraordinary interview this morning - and confirmed it does not feature in post-Brexit plans due to be published later. Instead he insisted the goal is to achieve 'sustainable' levels of immigration. The shift will be seen as a fresh blow to the authority of the PM, as she struggles to cling on amid a storm over her Brexit deal. Mrs May has been a champion of the Tory target for bringing net annual immigration below 100,000, which was first declared a decade ago when David Cameron was leader. But they have never come to close to meeting the aim. In the most recent figures, net arrivals were running at 273,000 a year. Mr Javid said: 'There is no specific target. It will be a system that will bring net migration down to more sustainable levels,' he said. 'If you look at the current level of migration, the latest stats show 273,000. Most people agree that is very high, certainly by historical standards. 'In the last two decades it has been in the hundreds of thousands. If you go back further than that it was much lower. 'What we want to do is bring it to a level where it is sustainable, in the sense that it meets first our economic need and at the same time, though, it is not too high a burden on our communities or on our infrastructure.' Net immigration to Britain rose to 273,000 in the first half of 2018 despite a continued fall in arrivals from the EU according to ONS data out today (pictured). The Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill will crack down on welfare payments claimed by EU workers arriving after the end of December 2021. Under current Brussels rules, EU workers arriving under free movement rules can claim the same benefits as UK citizens. Official data from before the 2016 Brexit referendum showed that EU workers received more than 2.2billion in tax credits and housing benefits, 1.1billion in out-of-work payments and 700million in child benefit. But non-EU nationals on visas are not allowed to claim until they been given leave to remain or settlement typically after about five years. EU citizens and their families who are already in Britain before the transition date will still be able to claim benefits. A third Canadian citizen has been detained in China, Canada's National Post newspaper reported on Wednesday, citing the Canadian foreign ministry. A spokesperson with Global Affairs Canada said it was 'aware of a Canadian citizen' who has been detained, but did not provide further details, citing the Privacy Act. At a daily news briefing in Beijing, China's foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said she was unaware of the situation. Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou arrives at a parole office with a security guard in Vancouver on December 12. She was arrested on Dec 1 by Canadian police The department did not suggest the detention of the third Canadian was linked to the arrest of Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou on December 1 in Vancouver. 'I am unaware of the situation you're referring to,' Hua said in response to a reporter's question about the detention of a third Canadian citizen. The National Post could not confirm the identity of the detained citizen. But a source who had spoken to the individual's family told the newspaper that the individual was not a diplomat or an entrepreneur. Meng was detained at the request of the U.S., which accuses Huawei of using a Hong Kong shell company to sell equipment to Iran in violation of U.S. sanctions. Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig (pictured) were both picked up after Canada arrested Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou on a U.S. extradition request She is the also vice chairman of Huawei, the second-largest smartphone creator in the world and the daughter of the company's founder, Ren Zhengfei. After three days of hearings, Meng was released on bail of C$10million (US$7.4million) on Tuesday evening - on the condition she surrender her two passports and agree to wear an ankle bracelet. She will have to stay in Vancouver and its suburbs and confine herself to one of her two Vancouver homes from 11pm to 6am. She is to return to court early next year for what could be an extended legal proceeding. Her case has set off a diplomatic furore among the three countries and complicated high-stakes U.S.-China trade talks. In apparent retaliation, China has detained a former Canadian diplomat, Michael Kovrig last week. He is facing accusations of harming state security. Canadian businessman Michael Spavor arrives at Beijing Capital International Airport after a trip to North Korea in January 2014. John McCallum, Canada's ambassador to Beijing, met Spavor on Sunday, the Canadian ministry said A second Canadian, Michael Spavor, a businessman with deep ties to the North Korean government, has been detained also for 'activities that endanger China's national security', Beijing confirmed. On Monday, John McCallum, Canada's ambassador to Beijing, met Spavor on Sunday, the Canadian ministry said. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau - who said on Friday the detentions were unacceptable - told CTV his government was taking the situation very seriously. 'We have engaged with the Chinese officials to determine what exactly conditions are they being detained under? Why are they being detained?' he said in an interview aired on Sunday. McCallum met Kovrig for the first time on Friday. Piers Morgan has accused three 'militant' vegans who stormed a Waitrose supermarket in a bizarre protest of hypocrisy for not doing the same to their meat-eating parents. Ashti, Ella and Dylan were among 18 members of the vegan campaign group Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) who formed a human chain around the meat aisle of a Brighton Waitrose this week. They carried blood-stained plates, flowers for the dead animals and placards saying: 'It's violence not food'. Taking on Piers Morgan on Good Morning Britain in a debate about militant veganism today, the trio refused to answer whether their parents eat meat. When they finally admitted some of their parents are not vegan like them, the GMB presenter claimed they should be protesting against their parents - instead of 'terrorising old people in supermarkets'. Pictured left to right: Vegan activists and members of the 'militant' group Direct Action Everywhere who stormed a Waitrose in Brighton to protest against meat eating, Ashti, Ella and Dylan appeared on Good Morning Britain to talk about veganism The three women were joined on the show by vegan Apprentice star Kayode Damali (left) who defended their actions earlier in the week and Dominika Piasecka, of the Vegan Society (right) who believes there are more effective ways of spreading the vegan message Piers asked them: 'Do your families eat meat?, to which one replied: 'That's irrelevant'. Another said: 'I think it's not important...,' but Piers cut her off, asking her again 'Do any of your parents eat meat?' One of the women replied, flustered: 'My mother doesn't...Changes are happening.' The trio on Good Morning Britain were among 18 members of the vegan campaign group Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) who formed a human chain around the meat aisle of a Brighton Waitrose this week (Dylan and another pictured) But Piers insisted on his line of questioning, saying: 'There's a point to the question. 'My point being if your family members eat meat why are you not stampeding into their rooms when they're eating their Christmas turkeys and protesting at your own families?' One activist argued: 'Vegans do have those conversations with their families and friends. But what these animals are facing is injustice.' A former leading member of Direction Action Everywhere is the daughter of a wealthy meat vendor. Morgan Kayleigh Giampaolo is the daughter of American businessman David Giampaolo, who runs Pi Capital and is Chairman of Gousto, where customers can buy steak, sausage and lamb. Morgan was among those who stormed Brighton's Touro steakhouse in another protest, playing the sounds of animals being slaughtered to shocked diners, in early December, but she has now cut ties with the group. The three other women were joined on the show by vegan Apprentice star Kayode Damali, who defended their actions earlier in the week. He also took on Piers, who argued that killing insects during wheat farming to make bread is the same as killing animals to eat them as meat. Former Direct Action Everywhere member and protester Morgan Kayleigh Giampaolo (pictured) is the daughter of American businessman David Giampaolo, who runs Pi Capital and is Chairman of Gousto, where customers can buy steak, sausage and lamb The presenter asked: 'Do you eat bread? You're aware of how bread gets made, wheat crops and everything? Who is Morgan Kayleigh Giampaolo? Former Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) member Morgan Kayleigh Giampaolo is the daughter of American businessman David Giampaolo. He runs investment club Pi Capital and is chairman of Gousto, a firm that sells up-market ready meals that include steak, sausage and lamb. She lives in East Sussex with her mother Kendra McConnell, who is separated from her father. She took part in the 'militant' vegan protest at Brighton's Touro steakhouse in early December. But she has now cut ties with the group and has not been associated with them since the protest on December 5. No one was arrested over the incident. Advertisement 'You're aware that literally billions of little bugs get killed? 'Because to me there's a hypocrisy at the heart of it. This little guy here, his mates and his family, they all get slaughtered so you can eat your bread. 'You get my point, there are all these beautiful little insects, mice, rats, all these other little creatures, they get destroyed in the production of wheat crops so you can munch on your bread. 'So tell me the difference ideologically between me eating a Christmas turkey and you eating bread, which you know involves the slaughter of million of young critters?' Apprentice contestant Kayode tried to respond, but was told by Piers to 'calm down' and 'it's not your show'. When he did get the chance to reply, he argued: 'I appreciate your point about the insects being killed, but what we need to realise is the intent behind it. 'No one is intending for us to kill these insects for us to eat bread. 'However when you eat a steak or whatever, the intent is very much there. You're deliberately killing that animal.' Ashti, Ella and Dylan of Direct Action Everywhere are pictured left, with Piers Morgan and Susanna Reid centre and Apprentice star Kayode Damali and Dominika Piasecka of the Vegan Society right Vegan activist Dylan and host Piers Morgan have an animated discussion about veganism Apprentice contestant Kayode Damali (second right) was told to 'calm down' by host Piers (left), with co-host Susanna Reid (second left) and Dominika Piasecka (right) stuck in the middle Piers replied: 'When you eat your bread, you know it involves the slaughter of animals.' Who were the activists who stormed Waitose and a steak house? How animal rights protest group with branches across UK was founded in San Francisco Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) is an animal rights protest group that was originally set up in San Francisco in 2013. Its mission is to achieve 'total animal liberation' and the creation of a law requiring 'species equality'. Associated groups then spread throughout the US, protesting against conditions at farms used by Whole Foods and organising sit-ins at Chipotle restaurants against animal violence. By December 2014 the organisation had spread across the globe, with groups established in 90 cities in 20 countries, and in the present day it has organised protests in 217 cities in 43 countries. In the UK it has branches in Liverpool, Brighton, Bristol, Coventry, London, Birmingham, Portsmouth, Cambridge, north east England, Belfast and Scotland. DxE pledge to take non-violent direct action but its disruptive demonstrations have been branded bullying. Members in the US have previously been charged with burglary and theft after raiding farms and stealing livestock. Advertisement But Kayode insisted: 'If we as vegans were so concerned about killing insects we wouldn't leave our house because we'd be too scared of stepping on an ant. 'I could be sitting on ants right now. There are certain things we cannot help.' In a bizarre exchange, Piers then said humans are doing 'the same as animals in the jungle' by eating meat - eating in a bid to survive. But Kayode came back with: 'If you're comparing people to animals - so what, ducks rape other ducks, are you suggesting that's what we should do as well? Not at all. You can't compare every single aspect of animal behaviour to human behaviour.' Dominika Piasecka, of the Vegan Society, was also on the show this morning. She believes the Direct Action Everywhere protest was not the best way of promoting veganism. She said: 'I understand their pain, but I think there are more effective ways to spread the vegan message. 'I think all of these guys have their hearts in the right place. But I think we have to keep in mind how you guys, the non-vegans perceive us.' Direct Action Everywhere, whose leading members include the daughter of a millionaire meat merchant, also stormed a steak-house in Brighton to play animal slaughter noises to diners at the start of December. Their Waitrose protest, which took place on the afternoon of December 16, triggered calls to the police. No arrests were made. The brother of Big Brother winner John Loughton has died with a third sibling charged with his murder. Father-of-two Roddy Loughton, 26, died after an incident in a house in Edinburgh and his older brother Steven, 29, appeared at the city's sheriff court yesterday. They are both siblings of John, 31, who scooped a 50,000 prize when he won Big Brother spin-off Celebrity Hijack on E4 in January 2008. Father-of-two Roddy Loughton (left), the brother of Big Brother: Celebrity Hijack 2008 winner John Loughton (right) died after an incident in a house in Edinburgh John scooped a prize of 50,000 when he won Big Brother: Celebrity Hijack in January 2008 Roddy's family, including his mother Donna McColl, said he was a 'loving dad, son and brother' and they were 'shocked and devastated beyond words' by his death. In a statement issued to the Daily Record, they added: 'We want to thank all the family, friends and local community for their well wishes and support.' Roddy, who was also praised by relatives as someone with 'a sensitive soul, great sense of humour and adored his kids', leaves two young daughters. He was found fatally injured in the Muirhouse area of the Scottish capital in the early hours of Monday, and police later said they had made an arrest. John entered the Big Brother house aged 20 when he was Scottish Youth Parliament chairman John - pictured with former Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan at a Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Perth, Scotland, in October 2011 - is now a youth campaigner Steven appeared in private at court, charged with murder. He made no plea or declaration and was remanded in custody until another appearance next week. One friend of Roddy praised him on social media for being 'a nice guy', while another described him as having a 'heart of gold'. John entered the Big Brother house aged 20 when he was Scottish Youth Parliament chairman and studying sociology and politics at Stirling University. A decade later, John who won 54 per cent of the public vote in the final - is now a youth campaigner and activist - and has launched a social enterprise company. Black Mountain is a little known landmark with a dark and mysterious history, if you believe the legendary stories. Tucked away in far north Queensland, the mountain is known by traditional indigenous owners as Kalkajaka, the place of the spear, and was the site of bloody battles between warring ancestral clans and Dreamtime spirits. The landmark is also notoriously dubbed the 'Bermuda Triangle' of Queensland for the stories of early explorers, horses and cattle vanishing into the boulders without a trace, never to be seen again. Black Mountain (pictured) in far north Queensland near Cooktown is also known as Kalkajaka Located 25 kilometres from Cooktown, the imposing mountain range consists of massive granite boulders which stack precariously on one another. It's an important meeting place for the Eastern Kuku Yalanji Aboriginal people and is the source of many Dreamtime stories. Aboriginal tales describe the mountain as a haunted place, home to various evil spirits and demons lurking within, according to Mysterious Universe. European colonists became part of the mountain's folklore when they arrived in the area, according to the Queensland Department of Parks. 'Stories abound of people, horses and whole mobs of cattle disappearing into the labyrinth of rocks, never to be seen again,' the website states. 'Beneath the outer boulders lies a maze of passages and chambersenticing to explorers of unusual places, or those wishing to hide away from pursuers. In the ink dark interior, sheer drops, pockets of bad air or unexpected encounters with snakes or bats could easily cause panic and injury to intruders entering that eerie underworld.' The websites advises against visitors from venturing onto the boulder field. 'People have been injured and have died trying to climb Black Mountain,' it states. There are legendary tales of people, horses and mobs of cattle vanishing into the labyrinth of rocks of Black Mountain without a trace Pilots' report aircraft turbulence and magnetic effects (thermal currents), along with reports of loud bangs (cracking boulders) and mournful cries (wind and water) have added to Black Mountain's mystery. Czech tourist Danny Mackerle still has eerie memories of the time he camped at the site with his dad 18 years ago. They heard strange noises in the middle of the night but found nothing upon further inspection. 'We heard a stone crumbling from the rock above us. It sounded quite close and we thought it might be an animal. But it climbed all the way down, we could hear the crunching of the bushes and dried up leaves. It sounded like human steps,' Mr Mackerle told 9 News. 'We still don't know what happened that night ... but for me something inexplicable is definitely going on there.' Black Mountain (pictured) is notoriously dubbed the 'Bermuda Triangle' of Queensland Geologist Gavin Dear lives near the foot of the mountain and doesn't believe in the myths which he described as ridiculous, having conducted his own tests. 'It's very mysterious for sure and it does have a special power, I have no doubt about that, but it's still just a mountain of boulders,' he told 9news.com.au He believed the disappearances have more to do with mishap than mystery. 'If you try and climb to the top you've got about 200 calculated leaps you have to make between boulders," Mr Dear told the ABC in October. 'If you have a knee fail or slip, you can tumble down there and you just will not come out. No matter how rational I am, I'm always doing my best not to p*** off the mountain.' Prosecutors are closing in on two Libyans suspected of being involved in the Lockerbie bombing, it emerged today. US and Scottish investigators are hopeful they will get permission to interview Abdullah al-Senussi believed to have been behind the atrocity and Abu Agila Mas'ud, the suspected bombmaker. Both men are currently held in a Libyan prison. Former Libyan intelligence chief Abdullah al-Senussi, (left) in custody in 2014, and suspected bombmaker Abu Agila Mas'ud (right) are set to be questioned by UK authorities over the Lockerbie bombing British authorities are close to being able to question two men suspected of involvement in the Lockerbie bombing, it emerged today Improved relations between Libya and the UK could now see both men questioned by British authorities, The Times reported today. As Gaddafi's brother-in-law and right-hand man, Senussi has long been suspected of masterminding the bombing of Pan Am 103. The former spy chief, known as the black box of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's regime was among the most feared figures in Libya. Mas'ud was a shadowy figure in Gaddafi's regime, who was known as a technical expert. He was named in the 1999 indictment against Megrahi, but never faced charges He was jailed for 10 years in July for using remote-detonated explosive devices to booby-trap the cars of Libyan opposition members in 2011, after revolution broke out. A Pan Am jumbo jet exploded over Lockerbie on route from London to New York on December 21, 1988. All 259 people on board were killed. Another 11 people were killed on the ground. It is the deadliest ever militant attack in Britain. Libyan intelligence officer Abdel Basset al-Megrahi was jailed for life in 2001 after being found guilty of the attack, in association with others who were never identified. Megrahi was later released because he was suffering from cancer. All 259 people on board were killed when the bomb went off on the passenger jet in 1988. Another 11 people were killed on the ground. Freed Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohmet al-Megrahi arrives with Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's son Saif al-Islam in Tripoli in 2009 In 2003, Muammar Gaddafi accepted Libya's responsibility for the bombing and paid compensation to the victims' families but he did not admit to personally ordering the attack. Today's development comes after Fayez al-Sarraj, the country's UN-backed prime minister, said his government is willing to extradite Hashem Abedi, wanted for questioning in Britain after the attack at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester in which 22 people were killed. Hashem's brother, Salman Ramadan Abedi, was the suicide bomber who carried out the Manchester attack. The assurances have given police involved in the Lockerbie investigation encouragement, according to the newspaper. It said officers described Libya's response to diplomatic approaches as 'positive and constructive'. Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi was the one person convicted for the bombing. He died in May 2012. Karl Stefanovic's long-time manager has dodged questions from the media just hours after her television star client was dumped from the Today show. Sharon Finnigan offered no comment to waiting media outside her Sydney mansion on Wednesday afternoon, just hours after Channel Nine confirmed Stefanovic, 44, was parting ways with the breakfast program after almost 14 years in the role. Dressed very casually in a T-shirt, three-quarter pants and a loose ponytail, a concerned-looking Ms Finnigan was on the phone as she arrived home. Looking unimpressed with the media outside her home, she remained silent as reporters asked if she had spoken to Karl, before rushing inside her house. Karl Stefanovic's manager Sharon Finnigan (pictured) arrived at her Sydney home looking concerned, hours after her star client was dumped from The Today Show Stefanovic is currently at US luxury ski resort town Aspen on his honeymoon with new bride, shoe designer Jasmine Yarbrough. Ms Finnigan attended the newlyweds' four day lavish nuptials in Mexico earlier this month. 'Wishing you all the happiness in the world love you both,' she posted on Instagram, along with a photo of her with the groom. Ms Finnigan was reportedly present when Nine chief executive Hugh Marks delivered the news to Stefanovic over the phone, The Daily Telegraph reported. Ms Finnigan attended her star client's four day lavish nuptials in Mexico earlier this month Sharon Finnigan looked unimpressed with the media outside her home on Wednesday The 2011 Gold Logie winner remains contracted with the network and will start filming season two of This Time Next Year in February. It's currently unknown if he has any other projects in the works at Nine. 'For the last 14 years Ive co-hosted the best show on television. I cant thank Nine enough for the opportunity. I never in my wildest dreams thought I would be good enough to host this grand show for so long,' Stefanovic said in a statement. 'Thanks to our viewers mostly, you are what matters most. Its been a tough time. Thanks for hanging in there. I look forward to seeing you in another capacity at this great network soon.' Dressed very casually in a T-shirt and three quarter pants and a loose ponytail Ms Finnigan was on the phone as she arrived home Channel Nine Director of News and Current Affairs Darren Wick added: 'Nine and Karl Stefanovic have agreed it is time for him to step off the Today Show.' 'For over 14 years Karl has been at the centre of the Today Show bringing his unique personality and perspective to the days news and current affairs. 'An announcement on the new line up and format of the Today Show will be made in the coming weeks.' The embattled breakfast star still has 12 months left on his $3million contract. Rumours have swirled for months that Karl was set to be axed from the Today show on the back of terrible ratings driven by viewers' unhappiness at his controversial personal life. Karl Stefanovic's manager Sharon Finnigan (pictured) dodged questions from the media Amid a blaze of negative headlines, Karl's divorce, his new marriage and his attitude towards colleagues, have tarnished his public image. As a result, the Today show has nosedived in the ratings, plunging to a 12-year low in recent months. The start of the program's downward spiral can be traced back to September 2016, when it emerged Karl had separated from his wife and the mother of his three children, Cassandra Thorburn. Sharon Finnigan (pictured) was reportedly present when Nine chief Hugh Marks delivered the news to her client Karl Stefanovic over the phone A few months after the split, Karl began dating former-model-turned-shoe-designer Jasmine Yarbrough, who is ten years his junior. Today's ratings declined steadily after Karl began dating Jasmine in late 2016, hitting that humiliating 12-year low in September this year. In March earlier this year, Peter and Karl were embroiled in the now infamous 'Ubergate' scandal after their private phone conversation in a taxi was leaked to New Idea magazine. In the 'b**chy' 45-minute conversation, Peter complained about his role on Weekend Today while Karl 'angrily' complained about his Today show co-host Georgie Gardner, saying she needed to 'step up... if she wanted to stay on the [Today] show.' Sharon Finnigan (pictured) refused to answer journalists' questions outside her Sydney home as she escaped indoors Shakeups in the Today show team started in early December, when executive producer Mark Calvert abruptly left, announcing he was 'stepping down' after 'five rollercoaster years.' Speculation then started to ramp up that Karl could get the axe from Today following two years of declining ratings. On Wednesday morning, Daily Mail Australia learned that there were 'crisis talks' at Nine as the network 'clears house.' 'Karl remains in contract': Darren Wick, Director of News and Current Affairs at Channel Nine, confirmed that Karl would be staying with the network and will continue to host This Time Next Year (pictured) 'Everybody in the newsroom' has been talking about the rumoured departure of the network star after his lavish wedding to Jasmine Yarbrough in Mexico, sources told Daily Mail Australia. An insider said: 'He just has to go. Today is in desperate need of a fresh start. He isn't leaving Channel Nine altogether, he's just being pulled from the breakfast slot.' Karl joined the network back in 2000 as a reporter for National Nine News in Brisbane. He replaced Steve Liebmann as the host of the Today show in 2005, and won the coveted Gold Logie for Most Popular Personality in 2011. A political group that names and shames convicted paedophiles has pictured an innocent family man on their website. The Sensible Sentencing Trust, a group that targets criminals from New Zealand, pictured the innocent man next to personal details of a convicted paedophile, subjecting the man to social media abuse, death threats and a tarnished reputation. The man, who shares a first and last name with the convicted paedophile, was only notified of the blunder after a client saw the image and contacted him. The photo had been up on the website for more than two years and was viewed more than 574 times and was even shared by the local school. The Sensible Sentencing Trust claims to protect the people of New Zealand with their no-holds barred attitude towards justice and by naming and shaming convicted paedophiles Their database features hundreds of names, pictures and personal details of convicted criminals which are uploaded by volunteers (Pictured: The SST Founder former Conservative Party candidate Garth McVicar) Posted on the school's community Facebook group, they captioned the photo with a warning to parents and children that he was a threat to kids. After being notified of the image, the man swiftly contacted SST and took the matter further to the Privacy Commissioner, John Edwards. The man had to go to great lengths to take the image down from social media, had to reassure schools, the community and his friends that he was not a paedophile and had to take the matter to NetSafe as well as the police. Meanwhile, he suffered a major financial loss with his business, with customers, including the one who alerted him to the photo, telling him they will no longer be working with him. After Mr Edwards thoroughly investigated the incident, he condemned SST in a statement on Wednesday, calling the trust 'continuously negligent, cavalier, and dangerous', the New Zealand Herald reports. He revealed how the incident had humiliated the man and his family and described the process of trying to clear his name an 'emotional nightmare.'. The man also developed severe anxiety when out in public; terrified he would be recognised in the streets. 'Agencies must take reasonable steps to check that personal information is accurate before they use it,' Mr Edwards said. 'Relying on the assistance of unpaid volunteers does not excuse the Sensible Sentencing Trust of its legal obligations.' New Zealand's Privacy Commissioner, John Edwards (pictured) is outraged and deeply concerned about the incident, and is now questioning the SST's capabilities The SST, which was founded by former Conservative Party candidate Garth McVicar, reportedly brought the error down to a volunteer submitting the photo and forgetting to verify its accuracy. They said they do not know who uploaded the photo and even confessed that its volunteers do not receive any type of privacy training. After failing to agree to a settlement, the matter will now be taken to the Director of Human Rights Proceedings. 'An innocent man was implicated for a terrible crime, his reputation tarnished and potentially put at risk of violence, Edwards wrote in his notes. The trust has now deactivated the database and is checking all of the offenders' records. Detectives questioning a celebrity medium in Brazil, accused of sexually abusing more than 300 women, have reported spooky goings-on during their two hour interrogation. Unexplained incidents ranging from a 'bizarre' computer crash to wiring on electrical appliances suddenly 'short circuiting' appears to suggest supernatural forces were at play during the interview. The mysterious problems unnerved cops but didn't deter them from collecting the testimony from faith healer, Joao Teixeira de Faria, who is known as Joao de Deus John of God on Sunday night in Goiania. Joao Teixeira de Faria, better known as John of God, arrives at the Dom Inacio Loyola House in Abadiania, Brazil on Wednesday last week Detective Karla Fernandes, responsible for coordinating the task force investigating the allegations, claimed that as the spiritual guru began to speak, strange things started to happen. She said to Folha de Sao Paulo: 'Suddenly the computer that was being used to transcribe the suspect's answers to the allegations seemed to have a life of its own and the commands on the keyboard wouldn't work. 'When the clerk tried to enter the medium's statement, the keys locked on a specific letter and 'OOOOOOO' was recorded continuously on the screen for a few seconds.' Although this has never happened before, bemused agents put the incident down to a faulty computer. Detectives questioning the spiritual healer (center) claim electronic equipment in the room started to malfunction But when the printer in the room began to print without receiving a command and a fridge blew up, their thoughts turned to paranormal interference. Det Fernandes said: 'It was hot in the interrogation room and I decided to turn on the air conditioning. 'I plugged the lead into an extension shared with a mini-fridge and the electrical wiring suddenly exploded, burning out the fridge. Everyone in the room screamed with fright.' According to the officer, the 76-year-old spiritual healer, who is accused of sexually molesting women during private consultations at his clinic, stayed silent. She said: 'Although these things happened and surprised us, they failed to interfere with our work. He (John of God) didn't say a word.' Twelve women have accused Brazilian spiritual healer Joao Teixeira de Faria, 76, of sexually abusing them while he treated them at his clinic Casa de Dom Inacio de Loyola in Abadiania Court documents show that Teixeira tried to withdraw nearly $9 million before surrendering to police on Sunday. The documents seen by The Associated Press are part of a judge's ruling rejecting bail. Fagner Pinho of the prosecutor's office also said Wednesday that investigators found firearms and large quantities of cash in a house used by Teixeira as a spiritual retreat. Investigators also believe that two unexplained incidents which occurred prior to Teixeira giving himself up, could be linked to the occult. A police clerk, who was meant to transcribe the faith healer's testimony at the police station in the rural town of Annapolis, was run over in a car accident and broke his arm. Investigators originally intended to question the suspect at this small outpost. But the unexpected incident meant the interview had to be transferred to Goiania, the capital of the state of Goias. And last Friday as the press staked out John of God's house in the city of Abadiania, rumours began to circulate that 'spirits' had cursed the reporters, photographers and TV camera crew who had camped for nearly 24 hours waiting for the psychic healer to surrender after a warrant was issued for his arrest. Thousands gather at his clinic daily for the chance to be healed by Faria, who is said to have supernatural powers Hardened professionals admitted they started praying when a news agency photographer in the press pack suddenly fell ill and lost consciousness for a few minutes. Many who were reluctant to admit the 'episode' was associated with John of God's 'mystic powers', did concede that a paranormal association wasn't so 'far-fetched'. Det Fernandes agreed the unexplained happenings cannot be 'flippantly' dismissed. 'I accept that we are dealing with a situation that involves beliefs and mystic energies,' she said adding she believes John of God has supernatural powers. 'I'm spiritualist and a believer in the spirit world and the paranormal. Although I'm not afraid, I do have a healthy respect for the unknown.' Faria's followers wait for their turn to be attended, at his 'healing center' Casa de Dom Inacio de Loyola, in Abadiania, 120 km southwest of Brasilia Teixeira has denied allegations that he sexually violated hundreds of women, including his own daughter, under the pretence of administering mystical treatments. His lawyer claimed his client is being 'persecuted' and the complaints made by hundreds of women, with the number now topping some 500, are coming from 'people who want to destroy him.' Many people also say they were underage at the time of the abuse. The mystic has been detained in custody and on Monday as agents started the search of the faith healer's premises, a court denied an appeal for bail. The bombshell allegations have sent shock waves across the world. John of God became famous for performing 'miracle surgeries' on hundreds of thousands of people from all over the globe. He has been practising since 1976 and is revered as a 'powerful' spiritual force. He has been interviewed by Oprah and has treated Bill Clinton. Many followers have allegedly been cured of cancers, disabilities, psychological illnesses and numerous other ailments while attending his alternative treatment clinic in central west Brazil. In this extraordinary clip, Santa can be seen taking flight with an entire flock of geese. Sat in his microlight and flying through the skies near Saint-Flour Airfield, Massif Central, France, Santa was joined by the giant V of geese, who travelled alongside him during his journey. Santa smiles and waves at the camera as the geese swoop through the air, and the beautiful French countryside can be seen below. The geese seem unperturbed by the microlight as they fly only a few feet ahead of the contraption. The videographer and pilot is Christian Moullec, who has been flying with his geese for a number years, while Christian's friend, Jacky Herbert, dressed as Santa. Mr Moullec captured the amazing scenes on this month, and in total there were 14 geese that decided to join the pair for the flight. Santa was joined by the giant V of geese, who travelled alongside him during his journey over France He said: 'It was important to offer the most beautiful gift to Santa Claus: a flight with birds, free in the sky. 'I had this idea that Santa Claus thinks that his reindeer are not as easy to fly with as my birds and that my flying birds are more beautiful than his reindeer. 'When I fly with birds, I am a like bird allowed in the sky by a very strange force. 'It's definitely great.' Mr Moullec, from Cantal in France, first starting flying with birds back in 1995 in a bid to migrate them to areas where they were well protected, helping to stop their numbers declining. The videographer and pilot is Christian Moullec, (pictured left) who has been flying with his geese in his microlight for a number years, while Christian's friend, Jacky Herbert, (pictured right) is dressed as Santa Since then, he has dedicated his life to raising and training orphaned geese and helping birds on the brink of extinction. Christian, dubbed 'Birdman,' admitted it was a very long and difficult process encouraging the birds to fly with him but said he loved sharing his unique flying experience with others. The Frenchman encourages passengers on his microlight to reach out and touch the birds mid-flight. He added: 'I fly with different species of birds - geese, swans and cranes. 'The most fascinating thing is that the birds in flight are amazing and that these birds follow me as a guide. 'I must therefore be the spokesperson for birds to tell the human world that it is urgent to protect migratory birds.' High street banking giant Santander has been fined 32.8 million for failing to pass on 183m to beneficiaries of customers who had died - including 130,000 a Holocaust survivor wanted to give to children's charities. The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) said Santander was guilty of 'serious failings' over the issue, which directly affected 40,428 customers and lasted for three years. Santander also failed to disclose information relating to the issues with the probate and bereavement process to the FCA after it became aware of them, according to the regulator. Santander did not transfer funds totalling over 183m to beneficiaries when it should have done, with 40,428 customers directly affected. Pictured: File photo of a Santander branch The bank apologised to families of deceased customers who were affected by its errors, which took place between January 1, 2013 and July, 11 2016. Mark Steward, executive director of enforcement and market oversight at the FCA, said: 'These failings took too long to be identified and then far too long to be fixed. What to do about money when a loved one dies Following a campaign by the Mail, you can now inform all major banks of a loved one's death in a single step. The Death Notification Service means grieving families no longer have to call multiple banks to inform them of a death. Instead, they can fill in a form online or make one phone call and select which banks they want to be notified. Previously, telephone numbers were tricky to find, staff didn't know what was needed to fill in the relevant forms. Each company wanted different paperwork, and some of their letters were horribly insensitive. You can reach the website here: https://www.deathnotificationservice.co.uk/ Advertisement 'To the firm's credit, once these problems were notified to the board and senior management, they were fixed properly and promptly. 'But recognition of the problem took too long. Firms must be able to identify and respond to problems more quickly especially when they are causing harm to customers.' Santander said it has completed a 'comprehensive tracing exercise' and has transferred the majority of funds in deceased customers' accounts to their rightful beneficiaries, with compensatory interest where appropriate. The bank has also conducted a root-and-branch review of its probate and bereavement processes and brought in a raft of changes. Nathan Bostock, Santander UK chief executive, said: 'Santander is very sorry for the impact these failings have had on the families and beneficiaries affected. We accept the FCA's findings and have fully co-operated with their investigation. 'We have now transferred the majority of customer funds and made significant improvements to our whole probate and bereavement process, ensuring we provide both a sensitive and efficient service to our bereaved customer representatives and those who are managing the estates of people who have passed away.' Nathan Bostock, Santander UK chief executive, apologised for the failings. He is seen on the right with then London Mayor Boris Johnson announcing Santander as the new sponsor of London's cycle hire scheme on February 27, 2015 A much-loved cafe in Houston has been forced to shut after 35 years because millennials found it too 'old fashioned' and left negative online reviews. The Fountain View Cafe was popular with seniors and its regular stalwart customers. But owner Steve Drayer was forced to close the diner after his customers started falling away and his profits decreased. He said the negative online reviews were too much to overcome, and that he didn't know how to connect with millennials, who wanted new 'cutting edge' cuisine. During his 35 years behind the grill, the cafe owner believes he served up more than 7.5 million eggs and fried more than 30lbs of bacon every weekend. The restaurant had a loyal following among Huston locals and senior customers but could not compete in the millennial market Owner Steve Drayer believes he served up more than 7.5 million eggs and fried more than 30lbs of bacon during his 35 years as the boss of Fountain View Cafe But millennials complained the food was not 'fresh' and was 'too greasy'. He added that he never knew how to respond to online critics and that he wished he could have connected more with millennials who would leave negative comments on Yelp, TripAdvisor and Facebook. Drayer told KHOU 11: 'It breaks my heart. I didn't want to close. It [the cafe] reminded them of how diners were when they were kids.' One review on Yelp stated: 'Ordering took 15 minutes. long line. Waited another 45 minutes for two basic scrambles. Biscuits seemed like they were picked up from the frozen food section of the grocery store. Owner Steve Drayer said he didn't want to close his beloved cafe but was forced to due to millennials negative comments 'Scrambles were too greasy. Luckily there were unlimited refills of coffee. Would only recommend if you have had a rough night and are looking for a greasy breakfast.' A Facebook comment said: 'Don't bother. The manager is like the soup nazi, waited an hour for breakfast and finally walked out and the mgrs only response is we are busy (the place was half full). [sic]' The closure was announced on Facebook on December 3, stating: 'We sadly regret to announce Fountainview Cafe is permanently closing its doors as of today, we are thankful and blessed for 35 years in business and all the customers and friends we made over these amazing years!' After the social media announcement angry diners expressed their frustration at Fountain View's closure. Samantha Mitchell said: 'This is so heartbreaking. Will you please post the recipe for your pancakes so we can try to replicate them at home? Fountain View Cafe was forced to shut after a stream of negative online comments from younger diner Some negative reviews complained the food at Fountain View Cafe was 'too greasy' and not fresh enough Other comments on social media complained that the food took too long to arrive, even when it was not that busy 'I grew up going to your restaurant and moved to Dallas 14 years ago but have never forgotten those wonderful pancakes. I would like to make them for my family so the spirit of FVC can live on.' Lynsay Gaines wrote: 'So sad to hear. Been my favorite breakfast spot from childhood to my adulthood. Have brought my children. Best wishes.' Greg Lilly said: 'Wow, Im in shock. Im glad I got a couple meals in last week before the closure. I just cant believe it. 'This was literally the best breakfast in Houston. Such a welcoming environment, a place to meet and take friends. You will be missed, no doubt.' Drayer said he found it difficult to match young diners expectations of what 'cool' food was. He said: 'I took it [negative comments] personally. What do you mean that's not fresh? Of course it's fresh. Fresh wasn't the same connotation for them [millennials] as it was for me. 'For them, not fresh meant it wasn't cool, it wasn't cutting edge. That's not what I was trying to be. I want to be old-fashioned.' Now his beloved cafe is shutting down, Drayer hopes to work on a new cookbook of recipes he devised from the restaurant. A Thai YouTube star is facing charges for criticising a Miss Universe contestant's 'ugly' dress - that was designed by the king's daughter. Wanchaleom Jamneanphol is said to have made the comments about a blue outfit worn by Thai beauty queen, Sophida Kanchanarin, at the pageant in Nonthaburi province. The dress was designed by the king's 31-year-old daughter, Princess Sirivannavari Nariratana. Thailand's lese-majeste law bans criticism of the monarchy. Thai millionaire tycoon Kitjanut Chaiyosburanato filed charges against internet star Jamneanphol after lashing out at her 'irresponsible behaviour'. A Thai YouTube presenter is facing charges for criticising a Miss Universe contestant's 'ugly' dress - that was designed by the king's daughter. The outfit (pictured) was worn by Thai beauty queen, Sophida Kanchanarin, at the pageant in Nonthaburi province Thai millionaire tycoon Kitjanut Chaiyosburanato filed charges against internet star Wanchaleom Jamneanphol (pictured) after lashing out at her 'irresponsible behaviour' According to the Guardian, the presenter has now deleted her Facebook post and apologised, insisting she 'did not have any intention to insult or disrespect the high institution'. She added: 'I merely did not know the full consequences of my actions via my posts and comments, which caused damage to Your Royal Highness and the monarchy.' However charges have been accepted by Thai police in their technology crime suppression division, the Guardian reports. Sophida Kanchanarin made the top ten of the Miss Universe final, which was won by Miss Philippines, Catriona Gray. Born in 1987, Princess Sirivannavari is the youngest of five children born to King Vajiralongkorn and former consort Sujarinee Vivacharawongse. The dress was designed by the king's 31-year-old daughter, Princess Sirivannavari Nariratana (pictured). Thailand's lese-majeste law bans criticism of the monarchy She studied fashion and textiles at the Faculty of Fine and Applied Arts at Chulalongkorn University and studied couture at the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne. She has shown catwalk collections in Paris and Bangkok and has her own fashion clothing line 'Sirivannavari.' She is a regular at the Paris Fashion Week. The monarchy is a powerful and widely revered institution in Thailand. King Bhumibol Adulaydej, who died in 2016 aged 88, was widely loved and considered semi-divine by some. His son, King Maha Vajiralongkorn, later ascended the throne. Article 112 of Thailand's criminal code says anyone who insults the king, queen, heir or regent will be punished with up to 15 years in prison for each offence. Since a coup on May 22, 2014, the junta has been accused by human rights groups of using the laws as a way to silence its critics and of applying them more widely. The military government has also tried to pressure messaging services and social media firms, including Facebook, to help remove content critical of the monarchy. A seal has been rescued by an animal welfare group after they spotted it with a pink frisbee around its neck - a year after they helped another seal stuck in the same way. David Vyse, of Friends of Horsey Seals, said the second Atlantic grey was rescued at Horsey beach, on the Norfolk coast, on Wednesday. The seal, with a pink plastic disc around her neck, has been named Mrs Pink Frisbee by the group and is now being treated at an RSPCA centre. She was first spotted in September and a team of four volunteers finally managed to capture her using special nets and a stretcher. The Atlantic grey seal was rescued with a pink frisbee around her neck on Horsey beach, Norfolk on Wednesday Mr Vyse described it as a 'horrible predicament' for Mrs Pink Frisbee, a female grey seal who he estimates is about four years old. He said the frisbee is 'deeply embedded and extremely infected'. The first Atlantic grey, nicknamed Mrs Frisbee, was rescued at Horsey beach in 2017 by volunteers from the group. The yellow plastic disc, which cut into the seal's neck as she grew bigger, was removed at the RSPCA's East Winch Wildlife Centre near King's Lynn. She was nursed back to health and released into the wild in February this year. Mrs Pink Frisbee has been taken to the RSPCA centre at East Winch for treatment. David Vyse, of Friends of Horsey Seals, said the frisbee is 'deeply embedded and extremely infected' and the seal was taken to the RSPCA centre at East Winch for treatment Mr Vyse said there have been four more reported sightings of seals with frisbees around their necks off the Norfolk coast. When Mrs Frisbee was admitted to the RSPCA centre last year she was described as having an extended neck like a concertina. She was given antibiotics and steroids, and fed a mackerel diet. She swelled from 67kg (10 stone 7lbs) to 180kg (28 stone 4lbs) in the five months before her release back into the North Sea. An adorable pair of grey seals were also pictured nuzzling up for a kiss after being caught on camera frolicking in the surf on a Welsh beach. Wildlife photographer Andrew Fusek Peters spotted the two seals on Sunday in Angel Bay, North Wales. They had been playing in the surf for several hours before completing their mating ritual. Sealing the deal: The pair of seals canoodle in the surf after spending several hours flirting on the beach in Wales Wildlife photographer Andrew Fusek Peters, 53, from Shropshire captured the shots after watching the couple play in a makeshift hide on the cliffs on Sunday People are not allowed to step on to the beach in Angel Bay in North Wales so Mr Peters said he waited patiently for the perfect shot using a long lens Mr Peters' captured a series of stunning shots of the seals from a makeshift hide on a cliff overlooking the beach. People are not allowed to walk on to the beach but Mr Peters was still able to spot the seals performing an elaborate mating ritual on Sunday afternoon. Mr Peters, 53, from Lydbury North in Shropshire, said: 'For conservation reasons photographers are not allowed on the beach so I stayed on a cliff with a long lens. 'I was thrilled with the images, these two beautiful seals were flirting with each other and rolling around in the waves. 'They look almost human as they have mating behaviour and it was wonderfully capped with them even kissing each other.' The happy couple feature in a series of stunning pictures of the seal colony on the beach and Mr Peters said he was thrilled with how the images had come out But scientists have warned young seals could be at risk from man-made toxins released being released into British waters (pictured are the pair splashing around at Angel Bay, Wales) Seal pups numbers in England hit record high According to The National Trust, the number of seal pups born in England is hitting record levels: 2,602 pups counted at Farne Island off Northumberland Up from 1,740 counted during the breeding season in 2014 Numbers also increasing at Blakeney Point in Norfolk 2,802 new arrivals there this year compared to 2,000 in 2014 Experts say healthy number are thanks to good food supply and a lack of predators Advertisement But scientists in Scotland have warned young seals could be at risk from man-made toxins released being released into British waters. A study by Abertay University in Dundee has found contaminants in chemicals could be making its way into seal mothers' milk. The chemicals - known as PCBs (Polychlorinated Biphenyls) and DDT (Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) - can be found in paint or electrical transformers but a ban on the substances introduced in 2000 has started to reverse some of the effects. Lead researcher Dr Kimberley Bennett said: 'We've known for a long time that high levels of these chemicals are very dangerous and can hamper reproduction and immunity in marine mammals. The National Trust said baby seal numbers in England were at an all-time high on Farne Island in Northumberland and Blakeney Point in Norfolk 'They may even drive some populations towards extinction. 'Efforts to reduce levels in the environment have been successful. 'But our new research shows that blubber, which is a vital for seals and whales, could be vulnerable to harmful effects [from these chemicals].' Grey seals in the UK usually mate for around eight weeks during the autumn months or early in the winter. Females can raise pups and breed for up to 25 years of their lives and usually live until they are around 35. They do not mate for life and often only a few males dominate the breeding among the colony. Emergency individual insulated pods, with key coded doors are an 'unfortunate necessity' and a 'better option than what most local authorities are offering' to homeless people, according to a charity. Pods in Newport, Wales, have been introduced to offer a safe space for homeless people, with homeless charities welcoming the development. But despite this, the project has been turned down for a Welsh Government grant after it was revealed the government is set to invest more that 30million in tackling homelessness over the next two years. It had been announced that an extra 1.34 million over the winter months, including 25,000 for every local authority would be awarded to aid rough sleepers. Specific funding was also awarded to Swansea, Cardiff, Newport and Wrexham, which are the areas with the most complex rough sleeping issues. The emergency pods (pictured above) which were created by the Amazing Grace Spaces project The news of the pods comes as a group of men launched themselves into a cluster of tents homeless people in Hull were sleeping in. Two men have been charged with the alleged attack and a third man, who voluntarily spoke to officers in connection with the incident, has been released without charge According to a recent study by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, more than one homeless person died every day in the UK during the last 12 months. Earlier this month in Cardiff, a homeless man's tent was also set on fire with him, his partner and his dog inside. This is the disgusting moment a thug appears to perform a running drop kick at a tent containing two homeless men who had bedded down for the night in a city centre street In September a homeless man was found dead after he had been sprayed with red paint after he was forced to leave his council house, after his mother died from cancer. Images of Michael sitting on the ground spattered by paint - fired at him from a Supersoaker water gun - caused outrage in his home town of Middlesbrough, North Yorkshire, and across the country when it went viral online. He was found dead three days later. The Amazing Grace Spaces project, which aims to provide a 'Safe Space to Recover' by providing access to quality affordable accommodation, in an innovative way is seeking alternative funding, and Stuart Johnson, who looks after design and operations at the company, said the idea came after years of working in night shelters and asking those sleeping rough what they wanted. The shocking footage of Mr Cash (pictured above) had been uploaded to Facebook before later being removed Flowers were left in the spot where Mr Cash was spray painted red 'Our vision is for people to stay overnight - to reach people who find it hard to engage because they've been on the streets so long. 'With this, because they need a code to access it, they come back to you - you build up a trust, they can trust you, you can trust them and then help them and see how they want to move forward.' Speaking to the MailOnline, John Puzey, a director at Shelter's Welsh arm said: 'Emergency pods are an unfortunate necessity and they are a better solution than whats on offer in many Welsh local authorities right now. However it is vital that pods are not seen as a long term solution to street homelessness, they must be part of a system aimed at moving people into permanent homes with the right support and healthcare. The inside of the pods are fitted with a toilet and bed 'We also believe that the design and location of these pods are very important to ensure peoples safety and to prevent them being victimised whilst using them. But the public needs to understand that pods are not a permanent solution but an emergency response. We must keep focusing on the need to provide people with permanent, affordable homes.' This is while Lindsay Cordery-Bruce, chief executive of The Wallich told the BBC that the pods were a useful tool. 'We'd welcome more of them - but the support has to be in place so that it doesn't just become somewhere else where somebody feels excluded. 'I think there's a misconception about homelessness out there we're talking about buildings, when we're actually talking about exclusion. 'The evidence and the science on this is really clear, it's about how we engage the person, rather than what sort of pod space or bed space we offer them. 'How we meet people in their own environment where they're comfortable, how we take services to them is the key to solving homelessness, rather than expecting people to navigate complex systems.' The Welsh Government said: 'We will continue to work with Newport City Council and other partners to prioritise the most effective appropriate projects to support people to move off the street and into longer term housing solutions.' One homeless man, Wayne Evelyn, who became homeless 10-years-ago when his relationship broke down said if the pods had existed when he had become homeless then he would have used them. How does the key-coded door work? The pods created by the Amazing Grace Spaces project come complete with a key coded door in order to keep the person inhabiting the pod safe. Users of the pods will require a code to access it. Every couple of days the code changes, in order to keep the pods functional and safe for use. The aim is that the users of the pods will then return to the company in order to receive a new code, building trust and an ongoing relationship Advertisement 'If you're in a place where you can open the door and you can shut the door, you feel safe,' he said. 'There's no end to the places I've slept. I was staying awake walking the streets, I was scared to go into hostels sometimes because things get stolen, and what little you have got you don't want to lose - when you're homeless what little you have got, means double to you.' Speaking to the BBC Mr Evelyn said he still managed to make it to his shifts at a bakery, however the pressure of not having a home led to a confrontation with someone he had been staying with and he was later jailed after admitting to grievous bodily harm. 'I'm very sorry for what happened. I wish I could apologise for what I've done every day. I'm glad that I've done all these [anger management] courses and I've learned how to be a part of society now. 'The only reason it happened is because I was homeless - if I wasn't homeless I'd never have ended up in jail.' Mr Evelyn is now taking medication for anxiety which he developed after finding it difficult to manage various living situations. 'The majority of the time if they offer you a place, you must accept it. But sometimes you see things that happen, you get scared and you don't trust anyone. When you suffer with anxiety it's difficult to be around people you don't know.' China said today that it opposed the 'weaponisation' of space as it criticised U.S. President Donald Trump's orders to create a new command centre for controlling military space operations. Trump yesterday ordered the creation of 'Space Command', a new organisational structure within the Pentagon, an effort to better organise and advance the military's vast operations in space that could cost as much as $800 million (632 million) over the next five years. The move comes amid growing concerns that China and Russia are working on ways to disrupt, disable or even destroy U.S. satellites. U.S. President Trump yesterday launched the 'Space Command', a new organisational structure within the Pentagon that will have overall control of military space operations The centre will be the Pentagon's 11th combatant command. The move comes amid growing concerns that China and Russia are working to disrupt, disable or even destroy U.S. satellites The 'Space Command' will be separate from Trump's goal to build an entirely new branch of the military called 'Space Force' - but could be a step in that direction. 'I direct the establishment, consistent with United States law, of United States Space Command as a functional Unified Combatant Command,' Trump said in a memo to Defense Secretary Defense Jim Mattis yesterday. Speaking at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida's Cape Canaveral, Vice President Mike Pence said the new U.S. Space Command will integrate space capabilities across all branches of the military. 'It will develop the space doctrine, tactics, techniques and procedures that will enable our war fighters to defend our nation in this new era,' Pence said. SpaceCom, as it will inevitably come to be known, will be the Pentagon's 11th combatant command, along with other well-known commands including Central Command and Europe Command. Speaking at the Kennedy Space Center yesterday, Vice President Mike Pence (pictured) said the U.S. Space Command will integrate space capabilities across all branches of the military Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said at a press briefing today that 'China has consistently proposed the peaceful usage of space, and opposes the weaponisation of space and a space arms race'. 'We oppose even further turning space into the new battleground,' she added. It is not the first military space entity proposed by the U.S. president this year. In June, Trump said he wanted to create 'Space Force', an entirely new branch of the military, alongside the Navy, Marine Corps, Army, Air Force and Coast Guard. He insists such a move is necessary to tackle vulnerabilities in space and assert U.S. dominance in orbit. But its creation is not a done deal, as it needs to be approved by Congress, and the concept has met with some scepticism from lawmakers and defence officials wary of the cost and added bureaucracy. China has also bolstered its space capabilities in recent years. Earlier this month, the country launched a rover heading to the far side of the moon, a global first that could boost Beijing's ambitions to become a space superpower. In 2013, China landed its first probe on the moon, Yutu or 'Jade Rabbit'. A distraught Waleed Aly has described the 'horrific' moment authorities strip-searched him during a trip overseas. The Project host made the confession to viewers on Wednesday night, revealing he was the subject of a violating strip search while trying to leave Israel. 'I was trying to leave Israel and as I was I leaving they just picked me out and just took me aside and it just went for hours basically,' he said. Aly, a devout Muslim, said the incident had left him shaken and angry. Scroll down for video A distraught Waleed Aly (pictured) has described the 'horrific' moment authorities strip-searched him during a trip overseas Waleed Aly (pictured) made the confession to viewers on Wednesday night, revealing he was the subject of a violating strip search while trying to leave Israel 'The thing about it is you dont know where its going to end and they explain nothing youre just in this situation, you dont know why, the power imbalance is horrific and you have no idea where it is going,' he said. A visibly distraught Aly made the recollection after a segment aired on the Channel 10 talk show about NSW police and the number of searches they had performed. According to the program, searches had doubled in the years 2016-17. Among the strip searches are claims children as young as 11 have been involved. The startling revelation has jump-started an inquiry from the Law Enforcement Conduct Commission. Aly chatted with activist Rachel Evans about her own experience at the hands of authorities. The host then went on to say he shared a similar experience. While he admitted the strip search wasn't as thorough as Ms Evans, he had had to strip down and remove his pants in front of authorities. He would not give any detail on when the strip search in Israel happened. Hundreds of victims saw their savings disappear after the collapse of Steve Long's Universal Wealth Preservation Trust, the High Court heard. He is seen outside the court on December 14 An alleged fraudster accused of ripping off hundreds of pensioners has been jailed after he failed to help former clients track down a missing 25 million. Hundreds of victims saw their savings disappear after the collapse of Steve Long's Universal Wealth Preservation Trust, the High Court heard. They had been enticed into entrusting their money to his Ipswich-based firm by claims it could avoid their heirs' inheritance being swallowed by care home fees and the taxman. No criminal charges have been brought, but he is now facing 27 damages claims from families amidst what prosecutors say is 'cogent evidence' of a 'massive fraud'. In breach of his duties as a trustee, Mr Long is accused of using clients' money to prop up his businesses and transferring millions abroad, where they have disappeared. Despite claiming now to have little more than the clothes on his back and a push bike, he is alleged to own valuable properties in Mexico. As part of the claims, he was ordered to provide information to help track down the missing money so that his former clients can try to get it back. And after failing to do all that he was ordered, he has now been jailed by Mrs Justice Rose for eight months for 29 contempts of court. 'The claimants want to know what has happened to the very substantial sums of money that they entrusted to Mr Long and his colleagues,' she said. 'In some cases, they handed over all of their savings. I am sure they are desperate to know what has happened and to see if it is possible to salvage any of that money.' Mr Long ran several companies under the Universal Wealth umbrella, which held seminars at which potential clients were advised how to maximise their heirs' inheritance. The companies went under earlier this year and their base in Dencora House, Ipswich, where at one time 100 employees worked, now stands abandoned. For the 27 claimants, barrister Oliver Hyam said there is '...cogent evidence that Long has perpetrated a massive fraud against hundreds of victims...' 'Large sums of money...cannot be located by the settlors or beneficiaries of a number of trusts,' he told the court. 'The claimants now have compelling evidence that Long paid away at least 12.2m of trust money in the period from 19 June 2016 to 25 June 2018. 'The overall scale of Long's activity appears to be considerably larger than this because, for example, Long states that he paid approximately US$2.5m...to his HSBC account in Hong Kong in October/November 2015. 'Moreover, Long's activities commenced, on his evidence, no later than 2006. Overall, around 25m is thought to be missing.' Mr Long has been investigated by police and, although he has not been charged and there are no live criminal proceedings, civil claims have begun. His assets have been frozen and he appeared before Mrs Justice Rose to face allegations of breaching a number of court orders designed to assist ex-clients in recovering their money. Most seriously, he had failed to provide bank statements which would show where the clients' money went, and to disclose his assets worldwide. But for Mr Long, Vivienne Tanchel said he was not in breach of some of the orders because he did not know about them and because much of the information sought is in the hands of police. He also suffers from mental health difficulties, having attempted suicide earlier this year, which might have caused 'forgetfulness' about assets in Mexico, she told the judge. Some of those fighting for return of savings entrusted to Steven Long's Universal Wealth, outside High Court, December 14, 2018. From left to right: Angus McDonald, Pauline McDonald, Jenny Reynolds, Peter Stevens and Nigel Cryer Giving evidence, Mr Long - who was not asked if he admits or denies the fraud allegation - said he did not know about the order for disclosure of his assets because of his mental health problems. He had moved and was living in Arundel, West Sussex, and did not open the mail which arrived, he told the judge. 'I just wasn't in a state to be able to deal with anything,' he said. 'I hadn't been for some time prior to that.' Mr Hyam said Mr Long should have known his assets were frozen because his debit cards were blocked and any suggestion that he is merely forgetful is 'nonsense'. 'If you are suffering from depression, you don't forget you own two properties in Mexico,' he said. He told the judge: 'He falsely states that he owns no assets, other than a few personal possessions which are primarily clothing, a push bike and a few sundry items of little to no value. 'There is overwhelming evidence that he owns assets in other jurisdictions, including but not limited to property in Mexico, including affidavit evidence from [his wife] to this effect.' He continued: 'Long plainly could have complied with the orders - by compiling documents from third parties - or from memory. 'It is inconceivable that he does not recall - broadly speaking - the accounts through which trust money flowed and where it ended up. 'His failure to disclose this, and his apparent omissions on the question of his assets, is obviously contemptuous.' Giving judgement, Mrs Justice Rose said she found Mr Long in contempt of court because of 29 breaches of the various orders. 'I am sentencing Steven Peter Long to an immediate custodial sentence of eight months for contempt of court,' she said. Long was handcuffed in court in front of some of the former clients suing him and led out to start his sentence. The claimants' solicitor, Shivani Varma, of Kleyman and Co, said: 'The committal of Mr Long to prison does not allow the claimants to recover their money, however we hope it will focus Mr Long's mind to the fact that he cannot simply plead ignorance in a case where millions of pounds belonging to hundreds of elderly people have gone missing. 'Mr Long's committal to prison indicates just how serious the non-compliance with a freezing order is regarded by the courts. 'If you have been served with a freezing order but choose not to read it and comply, that is not a sufficient defence, as we found out today.' New security camera images have emerged showing a Saudi death squad on the day journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered. Frames from CCTV footage show members of the 15-man execution team moving through Istanbul's Ataturk Airport before the writer was butchered at the city's Saudi consulate. They are also shown entering the consulate and leaving the building before returning to the airport after the gruesome killing. New pictures have emerged of a Saudi hit squad accused of murdering journalist Jamal Khashoggi. One image shows security specialist Saad Meshal Albostani (wearing a green shirt), Khalid Aedh G. Alotaibi (wearing yellow shoes), Abdulaziz Mohammed M. Alhawsawi (carrying an orange back-pack) at Istanbul Ataturk Airport ahead of the killing One image shows intelligence officer Maher Abdulaziz M. Mutreb wearing a suit and white shirt at airport security ahead of flying out of the country Another shows Mustafa al-Madani entering the consulate building ahead of Khashoggi's death. Turkish officials say al-Madani was captured on CCTV walking by Istanbul's famous Blue Mosque in what appears to be Khashoggi's clothes, a few hours later Khashoggi (pictured), a Washington Post columnist and critic of Saudi policies, was killed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2 after entering to obtain documents for his marriage One image shows intelligence officer Maher Abdulaziz M. Mutreb wearing a suit and white shirt at airport security ahead of flying out of the country. Mutreb, part of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's security team, was the lead negotiator inside the consulate, according to a senior Saudi official. Another shows Mustafa al-Madani entering the consulate building. Last month, it was reported that his voice was thought to have been recorded from within the consulate saying 'it is spooky to wear the clothes of a man whom we killed 20 minutes ago.' Turkish officials say al-Madani was captured on CCTV walking by Istanbul's famous Blue Mosque in what appears to be Khashoggi's clothes, a few hours later. Saudi Arabia is seeking the death penalty against five out of 21 people under investigation in connection with the murder of Khashoggi. Five senior government officials have also been dismissed. Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist and critic of Saudi policies, was killed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2 after entering to obtain documents for his marriage. Footage captured from security cameras shows Brigadier General Mustafa al-Mmadani, a member of the 15-man execution team, is seen after his arrival at the Istanbul Ataturk Airport prior to Khashoggi's murder Another hit-squad member, intelligence officer Mohammed Saad H. Alzahrani (wearing black trousers) is pictured arriving in Istanbul Maher Mutreb (pictured in a white shirt arriving at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2) is a senior intelligence officer and part of Prince Mohammed's security team CCTV captures intelligence officer Naif Hassan S. Alarifi (wearing a black t-shirt), a member of the 15-man execution team, entering the residence of Saudi Arabia's Consulate in Istanbul at 11.08am Saudi Arabia initially denied knowledge of his fate, then offered contradictory explanations including that he was killed in a rogue operation and that the killing was premeditated. Those varying accounts drew international scepticism. A Saudi public prosecutor said in November that Khashoggi was killed by lethal injection, then dismembered and handed over to an unidentified 'local cooperator'. The whereabouts of his remains are still unknown. Turkish security sources say that when Khashoggi entered the consulate, he was seized by 15 Saudi intelligence operatives who had flown in on two jets just hours before. A senior Saudi official confirmed to Reuters they were among those under investigation, and on Thursday the U.S. Treasury imposed sanctions on all of them under the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act, along with two other officials. Most of the 15 worked in the Saudi military or security and intelligence services, including at the royal court, according to Saudi and Turkish officials and several sources with ties to the royal court. Maher Mutreb (wearing a suit and white shirt) is pictured leaving the residence of Saudi Arabia's Consulate in Istanbul on October 2 - the day Khashoggi was killed Another frame, taken at 7.48pm on October 2, shows members of the hit squad leaving the residence of Saudi Arabia's Consulate Men were filmed climbing into the back of a black van parked outside the residence of Saudi Arabia's Consulate at 7.48pm on the day Khashoggi was murdered Another hit squad member is pictured moving through security at Istanbul Ataturk Airport after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi Brigadier General Mustafa Mohammed M. al-Madani (wearing a black t-shirt) and Saif Saad Q. Alqahtani (wearing a red t-shirt) are seen before their departure at Istanbul's Ataturk Airport after Khashoggi disappeared Turkey's pro-government Sabah newspaper published what it said were photographs of the men taken from surveillance footage at the airport, two hotels they briefly checked into, the consulate and the consul's residence. The following profiles of some of those detained or dismissed are based on those photographs, Saudi media reports and information from Saudi officials and sources. SAUD AL-QAHTANI Saud al-Qahtani, seen as the right-hand man to Prince Mohammed, was removed as a royal court adviser and is the highest-profile figure implicated in the incident. He joined the royal court under the late King Abdullah. He rose to prominence as a confidant in Prince Mohammed's secretive inner circle. He regularly spoke on behalf of the crown prince, known as MbS, and has given direct orders to senior officials including in the security apparatus, the sources with ties to the royal court said. Tasked with countering alleged Qatari influence on social media, Qahtani used Twitter to attack criticism of the kingdom in general and Prince Mohammed in particular. He also ran a WhatsApp group with local newspaper editors, dictating the court line. Qahtani had tried to lure Khashoggi back to Saudi Arabia after he moved to Washington a year ago fearing reprisals for his views, according to people close to the journalist and the government. In an August 2017 Twitter thread asking his 1.35 million followers to flag accounts for a black list for monitoring, Qahtani wrote: 'Do you think I make decisions without guidance? I am an employee and a faithful executor of the orders of my lord the king and my lord the faithful crown prince.' The senior Saudi official said Qahtani had authorised one of his subordinates, Maher Mutreb, to conduct what he said was meant to be a negotiation for Khashoggi's return to the kingdom. Qahtani also supplied Mutreb with unspecified information based on his earlier conversations with Khashoggi, the official said. The public prosecutor said a travel ban has been imposed on Qahtani while the investigation continues, but four sources based in the Gulf told Reuters this week that he is still at liberty and continues to operate discreetly. He is 40 years old, according to the U.S. Treasury. Qahtani did not respond to questions from Reuters. Reuters was not able to reach Mutreb for comment. Murdered: In the audio allegedly recorded at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on the day of Jamal Khashoggi's murder, the journalist is called a 'traitor' and told he will 'be held to account' MAHER MUTREB General Maher Mutreb, an aide to Qahtani for information security, was the lead negotiator inside the consulate, according to the senior Saudi official. Without naming him, the public prosecutor said the lead negotiator was the person who decided to kill Khashoggi rather than repatriate him. Mutreb is a senior intelligence officer and part of Prince Mohammed's security team. He appeared in photographs with the crown prince on official visits this year to the United States and Europe. According to the Saudi official, Mutreb was selected for the Istanbul operation because he already knew Khashoggi from their time working together at the Saudi embassy in London. 'He knew Jamal very well and he was the best one to convince him to return,' the official said. Mutreb received Khashoggi at the Saudi consul's office around 1:25pm. He began by urging him to come home and claimed he was wanted by Interpol, the official said. The official said Khashoggi told Mutreb he was violating diplomatic norms and asked whether Mutreb planned to kidnap him. Mutreb said yes, the official said, in an apparent attempt to intimidate Khashoggi. Sabah newspaper published stills from surveillance cameras that appear to show Mutreb entering the consulate three hours before Khashoggi, and later outside the consul's residence. Britain's Foreign Office confirmed that Mutreb served as a first secretary at the Saudi embassy in London for a period including 2007. He is 47 years old, according to the U.S. Treasury. SALAH TUBAIGY Salah Tubaigy is a forensic expert at the Saudi interior ministry's criminal evidence department, according to a biography posted online by the Saudi Commission for Health Specialties. In the Istanbul operation, he was supposed to remove evidence such as fingerprints or proof of the use of force, according to the Saudi official. Tubaigy spent three months in 2015 at Australia's Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine to observe death investigation procedures and learn about the use of CT scanning for mass fatality incidents, director Noel Woodford told Reuters. Photographs from the institute's 2015 annual report, which resemble the suspect named by Turkish media, show Tubaigy wearing medical scrubs, a smock and rubber gloves in a laboratory setting, and separately chatting with colleagues. Tubaigy did not respond to an email sent by Reuters. The Saudi Society of Forensic Medicine lists him as a board member. He earned a master's degree in forensic medicine from the University of Glasgow in 2004, the biography shows. A university spokeswoman declined to comment. Tubaigy is 47 years old, according to the U.S. Treasury. According to Turkish officials, the audio recording shows Jamal Khashoggi was strangled to death and dismembered soon after entering the consulate AHMED AL-ASIRI Ahmed al-Asiri, former deputy head of General Intelligence, was among those sacked by King Salman. The public prosecutor said he was the one who ordered the operation to repatriate - but not kill - Khashoggi. Asiri joined the military in 2002, according to Saudi media reports, and was spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition which intervened in Yemen's civil war in 2015. He was named deputy chief of foreign intelligence by royal decree in April 2017. U.S. Treasury sanctions announced on Thursday did not include Asiri. Reuters was unable to reach him for comment. MOUSTAFA AL-MADANI Moustafa al-Madani led the intelligence efforts for the 15-man team in Istanbul, the senior Saudi official said. According to that official, Madani donned Khashoggis clothes, eyeglasses and Apple watch and left through the back door of the consulate in an attempt to make it look like the journalist had walked out of the building. Madani is a government employee who studied at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Saudi Arabias Eastern Province, according to a Facebook profile with photographs resembling the suspect identified by Turkish media. He is 56 years old, according to the U.S. Treasury. Reuters was unable to reach Madani for comment. University officials could not immediately be reached for comment. MESHAL SAAD ALBOSTANI Meshal Saad Albostani is lieutenant in the Saudi Air Force from the Red Sea port of Jeddah, according to a Facebook profile with multiple photographs resembling the suspect identified by Turkish media. The senior Saudi official said he was responsible for the Istanbul team's logistics. Albostani studied at the University of Louisville in Kentucky, according to Facebook. University officials contacted by Reuters said they could not confirm a graduate of that name. A LinkedIn profile matching his name and photo says he has served in the air force since 2006. He is 31 years old, according to the U.S. Treasury. He could not immediately be reached for comment. MOHAMMAD AL-OTAIBI Mohammad al-Otaibi is the Istanbul Consul General. He gave Reuters a tour of the consulate four days after the murder, opening cupboards, filing cabinets and wooden panels covering air conditioning units in an effort to show that Khashoggi was not on the premises. Otaibi left Istanbul ten days later and has not been heard from since. He was sanctioned on Thursday by the U.S. Treasury, which said he is 51 years old. OTHER MEMBERS OF THE TEAM Abdulaziz Mohammed al-Hawsawi is a member of the security team that travels with the Saudi crown prince, according to a New York Times report that cited a French professional who has worked with the royal family. He is 31, according to the U.S. Treasury. Reuters could not reach him for comment. General Rashad bin Hamed al-Hamadi was removed as director of the general directorate of security and protection in the General Intelligence Presidency. General Abdullah bin Khaleef al-Shaya was removed as assistant head of General Intelligence for human resources. General Mohammed Saleh al-Ramih was removed as assistant head of General Intelligence for intelligence affairs. None of the three generals were affected by U.S. Treasury sanctions announced on Thursday. They could not be reached for comment. The Treasury also named 10 other Saudis. The murder of Jamal Khashoggi: Key moments surrounding the writer's disappearance and death Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who wrote critically of the kingdom's policies and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, was killed in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. Turkish officials say a 15-men team tortured, killed and dismembered the writer, while Saudi Arabia says he died in a 'fistfight.' Here are some key moments in the slaying of the Washington Post columnist: BEFORE HIS DISAPPEARANCE September 2017: The Post publishes the first column by Khashoggi in its newspaper, in which the former royal court insider and longtime journalist writes about going into a self-imposed exile in the U.S. over the rise of Prince Mohammed. His following columns criticize the prince and the kingdom's direction. September 28, 2018: Over a year after the Post published his first column, Khashoggi visits the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, seeking documents in order to get married. He's later told to return October 2, his fiancee Hatice Cengiz says. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says a plan or a 'road map' to kill Khashoggi was devised in Saudi Arabia during this time. September 29: Khashoggi travels to London and speaks at a conference. October 1: Khashoggi returns to Istanbul. At around 4.30pm, a three-person Saudi team arrives in Istanbul on a scheduled flight, checks in to their hotels then visits the consulate, according to Erdogan. The Turkish president says another group of officials from the consulate travel to a forest in Istanbul's outskirts and to the nearby city of Yalova on a 'reconnaissance' trip. Jamal Khashoggi (right) arriving at the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul on October 2 THE DAY OF HIS DISAPPEARANCE 3.28am, October 2: A private jet arrives at Istanbul's Ataturk Airport carrying some members of what Turkish media will refer to as a 15-member Saudi 'assassination squad.' Other members of the team arrive by two commercial flights in the afternoon. Erdogan says the team includes Saudi security and intelligence officials and a forensics expert. They meet at the Saudi Consulate. One of the first things they do is to dismantle a hard disk connected to the consulate's camera system, the president says. 11.50am: Khashoggi is called to confirm his appointment at the consulate later that day, Erdogan says. 1.14pm: Surveillance footage later leaked to Turkish media shows Khashoggi walking into the main entrance of the Saudi Consulate. No footage made public ever shows him leaving. His fiancee waits outside, pacing for hours. 3.07pm: Surveillance footage shows vehicles with diplomatic license plates leaving the Saudi Consulate for the consul general's home some 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) away. 5.50pm: Khashoggi's fiancee alerts authorities, saying he may have been forcibly detained inside the consulate or that something bad may have happened to him, according to Erdogan. 7pm: A private plane from Saudi Arabia carries six members of the alleged Saudi squad from Istanbul to Cairo, the next day returning to Riyadh. 11pm: Seven members of the alleged Saudi squad leave on another private jet to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, which the next day returns to Riyadh. Two others leave by commercial flights. Erdogan confirms reports that a 'body double' - a man wearing Khashoggi's clothes, glasses and a beard - leaves the consulate building for Riyadh with another person on a scheduled flight later that day. CCTV images showed a a private jet alleged to have been used by a group of Saudi men suspected of being involved in Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi's death INITIAL REACTION October 3: Khashoggi's fiancee and the Post go public with his disappearance. Saudi Arabia says Khashoggi visited the consulate and exited shortly thereafter. Turkish officials suggest Khashoggi might still be in the consulate. Prince Mohammed tells Bloomberg: 'We have nothing to hide.' October 4: Saudi Arabia says on its state-run news agency that the consulate is carrying out 'follow-up procedures and coordination with the Turkish local authorities to uncover the circumstances of the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi after he left the consulate building.' October 5: The Post prints a blank column in its newspaper in solidarity with Khashoggi, headlined: 'A missing voice.' October 6: The Post, citing anonymous Turkish officials, reports Khashoggi may have been killed in the consulate in a 'preplanned murder' by a Saudi team. October 7: A friend of Khashoggi tells the AP that officials told him the writer was killed at the consulate. The consulate rejects what it calls 'baseless allegations.' October 8: Saudi Arabia's ambassador to Turkey is summoned over Khashoggi's disappearance and alleged killing. LEAKED FOOTAGE October 9: Turkey says it will search the Saudi Consulate as a picture of Khashoggi walking into the diplomatic post surfaces. October 10: Surveillance footage is leaked of Khashoggi and the alleged Saudi squad that killed him. Khashoggi's fiancee asks President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump for help. October 11: Turkish media describes Saudi squad as including royal guards, intelligence officers, soldiers and an autopsy expert. Trump calls Khashoggi's disappearance a 'bad situation' and promises to get to the bottom of it. October 12: Trump again pledges to find out what happened to Khashoggi. October 13: A pro-government newspaper reports that Turkish officials have an audio recording of Khashoggi's alleged killing from his Apple Watch, but details in the report come into question. INTERNATIONAL UPROAR October 14: Trump says that 'we're going to get to the bottom of it, and there will be severe punishment' if Saudi Arabia is involved. The kingdom responds with a blistering attack against those who threaten it, as the manager of a Saudi-owned satellite news channel suggests the country could retaliate through its oil exports. The Saudi stock exchange plunges as much as 7 percent at one point. Khashoggi (pictured), went missing after entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul October 15: A Turkish forensics team enters and searches the Saudi Consulate, an extraordinary development as such diplomatic posts are considered sovereign soil. Trump suggests after a call with Saudi King Salman that 'rogue killers' could be responsible for Khashoggi's alleged slaying. Trump says Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will travel to the Mideast over the case. Meanwhile, business leaders say they won't attend an economic summit in the kingdom that's the brainchild of Prince Mohammed. October 16: A high-level Turkish official tells the AP that 'certain evidence' was found in the Saudi Consulate proving Khashoggi was killed there. Pompeo arrives for meetings in Saudi Arabia with King Salman and Prince Mohammed. Meanwhile, Trump compares the case to the appointment of now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing, saying: 'Here we go again with you're guilty until proven innocent.' October 17: Pompeo meets with Turkey's president and foreign minister in the Turkish capital, Ankara. Turkish police search the official residence of Saudi Arabia's consul general in Istanbul and conduct a second sweep of the consulate. October 18: A leaked surveillance photograph shows a member of Prince Mohammed's entourage walked into the consulate just before Khashoggi vanished there. October 20: Saudi Arabia for the first time acknowledges Khashoggi was killed in the consulate, claiming he was slain in a 'fistfight.' The claim draws immediate skepticism from the kingdom's Western allies, particularly in the U.S. Congress. October 22: A report says a member of Prince Mohammed's entourage made four calls to the royal's office around the time Khashoggi was killed. Police search a vehicle belonging to the Saudi consulate parked at an underground garage in Istanbul. CCTV emerges showing a Saudi intelligence officer dressed in a fake beard and Jamal Khashoggi's clothes and glasses on the day he went missing. October 23: Erdogan says Saudi officials murdered Khashoggi after plotting his death for days, demanding that Saudi Arabia reveal the identities of all involved. October 25: Changing their story again, Saudi prosecutors say Khashoggi's killing was a premeditated crime. November 2: Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan claims the order to kill Khashoggi came from the highest levels of the Saudi government. Earlier the same day, Yasin Aktay, a ruling party adviser to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said he believed the body had to have been dissolved in acid. November 4: Khashoggi's sons Salah and Abdullah Khashoggi issue appeal for his remains to be returned so that he may be buried in Saudi Arabia. November 10: President Erdogan says Turkey gave the audio recordings linked to the murder to 'Saudi Arabia, to Washington, to the Germans, to the French, to the British'. November 13: Turkish media reports that the luggage carried by the Saudi 'hit squad' included scissors, defibrillators and syringes that may have been used against Khashoggi. November 15: Saudi Arabia's public prosecutor announces that he is seeking the death penalty for five out of 11 suspects charged in the murder. Shalaan al-Shalaan said the person who had ordered the killing was the head of the negotiating team sent to repatriate him, and exonerated Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman. On the same day, the U.S. Treasury announces sanctions against 17 Saudi officials, including the Consul General in Turkey, Mohammed Alotaibi. November 16: A CIA assessment reported in the Washington Post finds that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the assassination. November 18: Germany bans 18 Saudi nationals believed to be connected to the murder from entering Europe's border-free Schengen zone. Berlin also announces it has as halted previously approved arms exports to Saudi Arabia amid the fallout. Advertisement A judge has rejected a bid by an elite prep school graduate to cut his jail sentence for sexually assaulting a 15-year-old classmate. Owen Labrie was jailed for ten months after being convicted of sexually assaulting the underage girl at St. Paul's School in New Hampshire as part of a sexual conquest ritual. The 23-year-old from of Tunbridge, Vermont, was acquitted of raping the girl but found guilty of misdemeanor sexual assault charges, endangering the welfare of a child, and a computer charge. According to a police report last year a group of eight boys in school dorm competed for sexual conquests to have their names engraved on a victory crown. He applied shorten his prison term because he had 'become more mature', his layers argued. But a judge at Merrimack County Superior Court rejected the appeal yesterday and ordered him to serve the remainder of his sentence. Judge Larry Smukler appeared unmoved by defense arguments Labrie had already been punished by being under a curfew and having to wear an electronic monitoring device. Owen Labrie arriving at Merrimack County Superior Court for his amended sentence hearing after he was convicted of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old classmate in 2015 Victim Chessy Prout spoke publicly about the assault and has since become an advocate for sexual assault survivors, co-writing a memoir with Boston Globe journalist Jenn Abelson Instead, Smukler said, his decision to uphold the sentence took into account 'justice for the victim'. He accepted a defense request that Labrie, who is currently not in custody, begin serving the sentence the day after Christmas but rejected a request that he be allowed out for work release. Judge Smukler said: 'Given the crimes and the circumstances, it is just not appropriate to amend the sentence.' Prosecutors wanted Labrie to serve the remainder of his sentence. Labrie was acquitted in 2015 of raping a 15-year-old classmate as part of 'Senior Salute' - a game of sexual conquest, at St. Paul's School whereby a senior would email a younger girl in expectation she would meet up with him. But a jury found him guilty of misdemeanor sexual assault charges and endangering the welfare of a child. He also was convicted of using a computer to lure an underage student for sex, requiring him to register as a sex offender. Labrie did not speak during the hearing, nor did he comment to reporters as he left the courthouse. Several of his relatives and friends also left without speaking to reporters, with one crying as she walked out. Owen Labrie, followed by his attorney Jaye Rancourt, leaves Merrimack County Superior Court after his amended sentence hearing yesterday in which a judge refused to shorten his jail term New Hampshire police say they've learned of a new game of sexual conquest at an elite prep school where a student was charged in 2014 over a game called the 'Senior Salute.' A group of eight boys in a St. Paul's School dorm apparently competed to have their names put on a crown Labrie's attorney, Jaye Rancourt, said: 'Disappointed. It's been a very long haul for him. He was a very young man at the time he was convicted. We had hoped four years later would be a different outcome. Unfortunately, it wasn't.' In making her case for suspending the sentence, Rancourt detailed how Labrie had followed the rules since his conviction, other than the curfew violation that resulted in him serving two months in jail. She noted he has recently worked two jobs, partly to pay for the cost of the electronic monitoring, and presented the court with several letters from employers that spoke to his 'character and hard work'. Rancourt also talked about how Labrie has struggled to find work because of the case and how he and his family have been subjected to abuse, including piles of hate mail. Owen Labrie talks with lawyer Robin Melone as they wait for his appeal of ineffective counsel to begin, which was rejected, last month St. Paul's School in New Hampshire was dogged by revelations of the 'Senior Salute' sexual conquest ritual carried out by pupils She acknowledged Labrie 'had a great deal of remorse' but insisted the school was also to blame for allowing 'a highly sexualized culture' that 'fostered if not encouraged some of this behavior.' 'He recognizes that he was not respectful to women... and that is very shameful for him,' Rancourt said. 'This young man now has to live the rest of his life with the majority of people in the world thinking that is him... when in fact it's not. 'He is actually a very caring, sensitive individual whose life has been unalterably changed by this case and the publicity that it has generated.' Last month, the state Supreme Court upheld Labrie's convictions on the computer charge. The court dismissed arguments by Labrie's lawyers that prosecutors had failed to prove intent in his use of the computer and that the law was meant to be used to target internet predators and pedophiles, not cases like this. Labrie will now have to serve his ten-month sentence after Christmas after his appeal to shorten the term was rejected The court is also considering a separate appeal in which Labrie's lawyers argue he deserves a new trial over ineffective counsel. His lawyer argued his original counsel in the 2015 case failed to mount a defense against the computer charge or effectively communicate that Labrie had no intention of having sex with Chessy Prout when he sent her the messages. The lead trial lawyer, J.W. Carney Jr., is a well-known defense attorney whose clients included the late Boston gangster James 'Whitey' Bulger. Two years ago, Prout spoke publicly about the assault for the first time. Now 20, Prout has since become an advocate for sexual assault survivors and co-wrote a memoir, 'I Have The Right To: A High School Survivor's Story of Sexual Assault, Justice, and Hope,' with Boston Globe journalist Jenn Abelson. The school's alumni include former Secretary of State John Kerry and former FBI Director Robert Mueller, who was just appointed as special counsel in the Russia probe in to President Trump's 2016 election campaign. A bogus aristocrat dubbed the 'Lord of Fraud' could be freed from prison after his wife lost a bid to block the sale of their 1.2m Tudor mansion. Hugh Rodley, who called himself a Lord, was jailed for seven years in 2012 for fleecing up to 600 pensioners in a boiler room fraud. He was already serving an eight-year sentence for plotting to steal 229m from a Japanese bank in one of the biggest ever cyber crimes of its kind in 2009. The now-71-year-old was then threatened with another seven years in prison if he didn't repay his victims 1.2m of the stolen 6m by selling his house. But his estranged wife Pamela had opposed the order, claiming that the deeds were made out in her name, potentially condemning Rodley to more time behind bars. Judge Andrew Goymer has now ordered an enforcement receiver be appointed to help sell the mansion in Tewksbury, Gloucestershire. 'Lord' Hugh Rodley could avoid extra time in prison after a judge dismissed his estranged wife's bid to block the sale of their mansion The judge said the couple, though now estranged, worked together during the previous hearings to avoid losing the home. 'I concluded that Mr and Mrs Rodley were not just unreliable witnesses but dishonest witnesses, that they had intended to hoodwink the prosecution and they intended to hoodwink me. 'They were both quite clearly determined, whatever happened between them, that this property did not fall into the hands of The Crown.' Prosecutor Jenny Carter-Manning said the manor was already under offer: 'The property has been on the market for 1.3 million, it was reduced to 1.25 million and in the circumstances it seems the offer is 950,000. His wife Pamela had tried to block the sale Judge Goymer, who retired last year but returned to Southwark Crown Court to hear the case, said: 'Hugh Rodley was convicted after a trial before me in July 2012 for conspiracy to defraud. He was sentenced to seven years in prison. 'I found that Mr Rodley had an equitable interest in relation to Tudor Manor, not withstanding that the legal title was in his wife's name. 'The position currently is that there have been various changes of estate agents marketing the property, the upshot of it is that currently a purchaser has been found. These negotiations have not resulted, as yet, in a sale.' The judge said 'Lady' Pamela had objected to the order but that Andrew Bousfield, representing Hugh Rodley, had backed the application. 'He has expressed that the assets should be released and if the outstanding amount of the confiscation order be paid, his client will be released.' In the boiler room scam Rodley, along with Julian Silver, 49, Adam Corbett, 38, and Sonny Willis, 35, targeted the elderly and sold them worthless shares. The gang drew up 'sucker lists' of people they planned to exploit and splashed their criminal fortune on flash cars, including an Aston Martin, Range Rover S3 and a Lotus Elise. Rodley, Silver, Corbett and Willis were found guilty of running the scam between 2004 and 2007 after a trial at Southwark Crown Court. The men employed high pressure sales techniques and promised 'rich rewards' to trick members of the public to invest in firms they claimed were to be floated on the stock market. They said the cash would be invested in 'exotic' and 'fail-safe' projects such as land development Europe and Asia, but none of the firms were ever floated. Investors were cherry-picked using so-called 'sucker lists', detailing people who had already invested in some shares. One 87-year-old man lost more than 800,000 to the fraudsters. Victims were told they would quickly make 'handsome profits' when the companies were floated on the Alternative Investment Market. But most people had little or no contact with the fraudsters afterwards having signed a contract setting out the amount of shares they had agreed to. Rodley - born Brian McGough in Ireland in 1947 - had claimed he was not part of any plot to con investors but was convicted by a jury. The father-of-three, of Tudor Manor in Tewksbury, will be freed once the property is sold and the Crown can reclaim the outstanding money. Speaking after Rodley failed to repay the 1,236,736 in 2016 Stephanie Jeavons, Deputy Director of the NCA's Economic Crime Command, said: 'Rodley is a career criminal who has funded his lavish lifestyle at the expense of others. 'This default sentence shows the seriousness of his failure to pay - the confiscation order remains in place and we will continue to work with our partners in the City of London Police to recover his criminal profits.' The Pope blessed an expectant mother's ultrasound image as she showed him a picture of the foetus on her iPhone at the Vatican. She was standing among the throng of people who reached out to the Pope at his weekly general audience at the Vatican on Wednesday. Pope Francis blessed the child which was displayed on a grainy blue ultrasound image on the woman's smartphone screen. The Pope makes a sacred blessing on the ultrasound image presented to him by an expectant mother on Wednesday Babies are held forth alongside phones as hundreds of images are snapped of the Pope while he greets the audience and passes on his blessings Pope Francis smells a Christmas panettone cake offered to him by a pastry chef during the weekly general audience The Pope greeted crowds of people including newborn babies, a baker who presented him a panettone cake and women in their bridal gowns in the Paul VI hall. Pope Francis urged the people that Christmas cannot just be about swapping presents and indulging in a massive consumer binge, urging the faithful to remember its original purpose to mark Christ's birth. 'The advertising machine tells us we have to exchange more and more new presents to give us a surprise. But is that the sort of celebration that God wants?' Francis asked the regular open audience in the Vatican. 'No, Christmas is about listening to the silent voice of God,' he said. 'Please, I ask you, let us not turn Christmas into a fashionable event! 'It is not Christmas if we seek out the bright lights, if we load up on presents but then don't help even one poor person,' said the Pope who is well known for his criticism of social inequality and injustices. Families are overjoyed as they pose for pictures with the pope and even a miniature Pope Francis figurine is held by an enthusiastic woman The Pope meets with Catholics at the audience on Wednesday who wait to receive his blesisng; including bride and groom couples and young parents with their newborn babies The Pope greets the faithful who appear overjoyed with Christmas spirit as they reach out to him and smile The Pope clutches a woman's hand as she receives his blessing, surrounded by children who gaze up at the Catholic leader A woman who blew the whistle on a sex offender working at an orphanage yesterday said its bosses were 'hell-bent' on keeping the scandal quiet. The Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry (SCAI) heard that managers at Aberlour Orphanage in Moray were determined to prevent governors finding out about Eric Lee's prolific abuse. The 'sadistic' housefather was jailed in the early 1960s for sexually abusing ten children and was only brought to justice after a staff member overheard one of the victims talking about their ordeal. A 77-year-old witness, using the name Catherine, said the eight-year-old boy told her 'I'm not alone' when he disclosed the abuse. Lee later admitted a string of sex offences against children aged eight to 12. The Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry (SCAI) heard that managers at Aberlour Orphanage in Moray (pictured) were determined to prevent governors finding out about Eric Lee's prolific abuse The SCAI hearing in Edinburgh heard there had been 'sadistic elements' to Lee's abuse. Catherine, who was around 14 when she began working at Aberlour in 1956, told the inquiry she overheard a boy talking about having been sexually abused by Lee, who was a housefather and scoutmaster. She reported it to her boss who was 'completely distraught'. But she was subsequently 'kept very much in the dark about what happened' and was 'told not to talk about it'. Catherine said: 'They [bosses] were hell-bent on keeping everything quiet so it did not get out to the Press and the board of governors.' Life at the home, she added 'went on as before'. Lee was arrested in August 1963 and convicted at the High Court in Aberdeen on September 13, 1963. But the inquiry heard a letter was not sent from the home to local authority children's officers until early October 1963 stating that a housefather had been jailed for 'indecent interference' with boys. The witness said Press coverage at the time had been relatively limited. The inquiry is being chaired by Lady Smith (pictured) and heard from an ex-employee using the name of Catherine, who reported Lee's abuse when she worked there as a teenager James Peoples, QC, senior counsel to the inquiry, said the sexual abuse had been 'on a pretty grand scale'. Later Romy Langeland, chief executive of Aberlour between 2001 and 2006, told the inquiry that during her time in charge there had been 'absolute dedication' to 'child welfare'. Yesterday, the Mail revealed that three of Britain's biggest childcare charities, including Aberlour Child Care Trust, are at the centre of police investigations into allegations of child abuse. The other two are Barnardo's and Quarriers. Police Scotland has confirmed it is investigating claims of historic abuse relating to the three organisations. The charities have come under scrutiny at the SCAI, which has heard a catalogue of claims from survivors formerly in their care. A spokesman for Aberlour said: 'We are cooperating with the SCAI.' Barnardo's Scotland said: 'Barnardo's is aware of one on-going investigation. As with all inquiries we are assisting the police in an open and transparent way.' A Quarriers spokesman said: 'We at Quarriers reiterate our full and unequivocal apology to anyone who suffered abuse while in our care.' The inquiry, before Lady Smith, continues. Anthony Bentley (pictured), from Pembroke in Wales, will spend Christmas behind bars after messaging an ex asking if she was ok A jilted boyfriend will spend Christmas behind bars after sending a Facebook message to his ex asking if she was ok. Anthony Bentley sent the message via the social media website despite having a restraining order to stay away. The 45-year-old from Pembroke in Wales was sent to prison for 10 weeks by magistrates. Haverfordwest Magistrates Court heard a three-year restraining order was imposed in August banning him direct or indirect contact with the woman. Prosecutor Dennis Davies told how Bentley sent her a message asking: 'Are you ok?'. That was followed 10 days later by a second, which read: 'Please say something, I'm ok, just hope you are.' Mike Kelleher, defending, said Bentley sent the messages after his ex's profile was suggested to him by Facebook. He said the profile name did not match that of his ex - and so Bentley had not been sure whether it was actually her or not. Mr Kelleher said neither of the messages were 'in any way threatening', but said Bentley accepted they constituted 'indirect contact'. Bentley, of Pembroke, West Wales, pleaded guilty to contacting an ex-girlfriend via social media on November 5, and again on November 15. The 45-year-old was sent to prison for 10 weeks by magistrates in Haverfordwest (pictured is Haverfordwest Magistrates Court) after he breached a restraining order banning him from contacting her Haverfordwest magistrates sentenced Bentley to ten weeks in prison. 'These are serious offences,' said the chairman of the bench. 'You should not have communicated with her.' Bentley was also ordered to pay 85 costs and a 115 surcharge. As he was led away Bentley told magistrates 'I am sorry to let you down.' A mother was left with a large gash across her neck following a brazen daylight robbery. Police in Victoria are still hunting for a man with several sores around his mouth who attacked the woman, 37, before making off with her purse. The incident took place at around 3.30pm on Thursday November 29 in the Melbourne suburb of St Kilda. SCROLL DOWN FOR VIDEO The Melbourne woman (pictured) after she was brutally attacked by a thug in St Kilda Police are on the hunt for a man with several sores around his mouth (pictured) who slit a woman's throat in broad daylight before making off with her purse Victoria Police said the victim had been walking down the street when she was approached by the man. He threatened her with a knife and demanded she hand over her purse. When she refused he lunged forward and cut her throat, leaving her with a 8cm gash on her neck. The man then stole the victim's purse before she managed to call police. Investigators have since released a digital image of the man, believed to be in his 30s and of caucasian appearance. They have also appealed for witnesses to come forward. Anyone with any information about the incident is urged to contact Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000. Pope Francis has accepted the resignation of Los Angeles auxiliary bishop Monsignor Alexander Salazar, following historic allegations of misconduct with a minor. The Vatican announced the resignation in a one-line statement, giving no details of the alleged incident. The current archbishop of Los Angeles, Most Rev. Jose Gomez, said the archdiocese was made aware of the claim in 2005, which dates back to the 1990s. Gomez said prosecutors declined to bring charges, but that the archdiocese forwarded the complaint to the Vatican office that handles sex abuse cases. Gomez said that office, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, imposed precautionary measures against Salazar and that a further investigation by the archdiocese's independent review board found the allegation to be credible. Catholic Bishop Alexander Salazar attends a community prayer meeting in 2015. He has now resigned over 'credible' allegations Gomez said Salazar, 69, has 'consistently denied any wrongdoing.' The archdiocese said it had received no other allegations against Salazar. 'These decisions have been made out of deep concern for the healing and reconciliation of abuse victims and for the good of the church's mission,' Gomez told the Los Angeles faithful in a letter. 'Let us continue to stay close to the victim survivors of abuse, through our prayer and our actions.' Gomez said that the alleged misconduct occurred while Salazar was a parish priest in the 1990s, and that the claim was never directly brought to the archdiocese. Other details weren't released. Pope Francis accepted the resignation over misconduct allegations which dated back to the 1990s The resignation comes during a year in which the clerical abuse scandal has exploded anew. In July, Francis removed McCarrick, the retired archbishop of Washington, as a cardinal after a U.S. church investigation determined that an allegation he groped a minor in the 1970s was credible. Subsequently several adult seminarians have said he pressured them to sleep with him. McCarrick has denied the initial allegation and through a lawyer has said he looks forward to invoking his right to due process. The McCarrick scandal exposed the loopholes in how the church treats allegations of misconduct against bishops, who are answerable only to the pope. Bishops have largely escaped the same scrutiny as ordinary priests accused of misconduct in the decades-long sex abuse scandal, and until recently they have rarely been sanctioned or removed for covering up for abusers. Two university friends were killed in a horror crash on an icy A-road just a week before Christmas as Storm Deidre battered the north of Britain. Rebecca Ward, 22, and Philippa Bertram, 20, died after their Fiat 500 collided with a blue Mini Cooper in treacherous weather conditions on Saturday afternoon. Their heartbroken families paid tribute to the students today, describing how their worlds had been 'shattered' by the news. The pair, who were studying fashion marketing at Nottingham Trent University, were travelling on the A628 Woodhead Pass in South Yorkshire when the crash unfolded. The collision was one of several attended by police in the area that day, with weather warnings in place due to 'icy roads, surface water, wind and heavy rain'. Rebecca Ward (left) and Philippa Bertram (right) died after their Fiat 500 collided with a blue Mini Cooper in treacherous weather conditions on Saturday afternoon Officers said that one of the two women was the driver of the car, while another female passenger survived with serious injuries. A number of witnesses stopped at the scene to help the victims following the crash, which occurred as the north was hit by snow, ice, freezing rain. In a statement, Rebecca's family said: 'Becky was a beautiful girl both inside and out who enjoyed life to the full. 'She was in her final year at Nottingham Trent University. Becky will be greatly missed by her family, boyfriend and many friends.' Police had to cordon off the area in South Yorkshire where the crash took place Philippa's family added: 'Our precious daughter Philippa has been suddenly taken from us. 'She was our world and our joy and we were so proud of her, but our lives have been shattered by what has happened.' Philippa's former boyfriend Ashiqul Islam wrote his own tribute online, in which he said it was 'an honour' to have met her. 'Never in a lifetime would I have thought I'd hear such shocking news, especially at such a young age,' he added. Philippa pictured on a night out. The crash was one of several attended by police in the area that day, with weather warnings in place due to 'icy roads, surface water, wind and heavy rain' Philippa's former boyfriend Ashiqul Islam wrote his own tribute online, in which he said it was 'an honour' to have met her Rebecca, who was studying fashion marketing at Nottingham Trent University, was travelling on the A628 Woodhead Pass in South Yorkshire when the crash unfolded 'Only 11 days before your 21st birthday, you really were taken from us too early. 'I'm struggling to process a reality in which you're not with us anymore and I'm absolutely heartbroken. You have such a sweet, pure, innocent, amazing and beautiful soul and you deserved to live a long, happy life filled with love. 'I only hope that you're in a better place now. We have countless memories together and I will cherish them always. 'You were an amazing daughter, sister, and best friend to many and it's an honour for me to say that you were my girlfriend.' Large parts of Scotland, Ireland and northern England were issued amber 'danger to life' warnings for snow and ice ahead of Storm Deidre at the weekend. Sub-zero temperatures, strong winds and heavy snow and rain were forecast across much of the country, leading to treacherous driving conditions and travel disruption. Professor Eunice Simmons, deputy vice-chancellor at Nottingham Trent University, said: 'Sadly, we have been informed about the death of two of our students. 'Our thoughts are with their families at this time. Bereavement support is being offered to students and staff at the university.' The collision was one of several attended by police in the area that day, with weather warnings in place due to 'icy roads, surface water, wind and heavy rain' (pictured: ground frost near the Tan Hill Inn in the Yorkshire Dales on Saturday, the day of the crash) Stephen Lawrence suspect Jamie Acourt has been moved into a comfortable prison wing with special facilities after he was punched by an inmate, a source claims. Acourt, 42, was reportedly attacked by a black prisoner last week just days into a nine year sentence for his role in a 3 million drugs plot. Acourt was arrested over the 1993 racist stabbing of Stephen, 18, but was never charged or taken to trial - despite an inquest ruling the teen was 'unlawfully killed'. Jamie Acourt, 42, (left) was reportedly attacked by fellow prisoner Tyrone Archer, 39 (right) last week just days into a nine year sentence for his role in a 3 million drugs plot. Both mug shots are undated Acourt's attacker was named by a source as fellow HMP Wandsworth inmate Tyrone Archer, 39, from Croydon in south London, according to The Sun. Due to the attack last week, prison insiders say Acourt has been moved away from the normal cells and into a cushy segregated section at HMP Wandsworth. The insider claims he has access to a kitchen, can cook his own meals, has private access to a games room with a 50 inch HD TV, and gets more time out of his cell. The source said: 'Acourt was attacked by a fellow inmate last week so he was moved by prison staff. He was in one of the main wings before. Now he's living a top luxury lifestyle. Acourt is pictured in May after being arrested in Barcelona on drugs charges following a joint operation between Spanish police and the Met 'It's shocking. Acourt is let out of his cell at 8am and can live like a normal human being until 9pm at night. Others are barely even allowed for one hour a day. 'He has access to a kitchen with a stove, fryer, and toaster so can make his own meals. He even has access to a private games room with a 50 inch HD TV.' Five suspects - including Jamie Acourt - were arrested after the 1993 attack of Lawrence. Two men, Neil Acourt and Luke Knight, were charged, but the CPS dropped the charges. Stephen's family launched a private prosecution in 1994 against Gary Dobson, Luke Knight and Neil Acourt, but they were acquitted in 1996. An inquest a year later recorded a verdict of unlawful killing 'in a completely unprovoked racist attack by five youths'. Regarding the move, a Prison Service spokesperson said he couldn't comment on individual prisoners. He added: 'A prisoner at HMP Wandsworth (pictured in a file photo) has been put on report after punching a fellow prisoner on 12 December' In 2012, Dobson and Norris were found guilty of Stephen's murder after new evidence came to light. Stephen Lawrence was killed in a racist attack while he was waiting for a bus in on April, 22, 1993 Jamie and his brother Neil, 43, were ringleaders of a gang that couriered tonnes of cannabis between London and the North-East. Jamie fled to Spain in February 2016 after police started investigating and he was extradited in June this year and denied conspiracy to supply Class B drugs. But he changed his plea on the second day of his trial at Kingston Crown Court on Friday, December 7. He was allegedly attacked by another inmate last Wednesday while being readied for exercise with other inmates. His attacker is said to have hit the back of his head as he walked on to the prison landing. He did not need medical assistance. Regarding the move, a Prison Service spokesperson said he couldn't comment on individual prisoners. He added: 'A prisoner at HMP Wandsworth has been put on report after punching a fellow prisoner on 12 December.' Balvinder Singh (pictured above) was hit head-on by the Hyundai Jason Bannister was driving A serving police officer who was jailed for 18 months after he admitted killing a 59-year-old man, will get to keep his job. Jason Bannister, 45, pleaded guilty to death by dangerous driving and has been told he can keep his job despite killing shopkeeper Balvinder Singh. Birmingham Crown Court heard how Mr Singh had been driving his Mercedes Sprinter van when he was hit head-on by a Hyundai, being driven by Bannister in Wolverhampton on December 29 2016. Despite the conviction, Staffordshire Police said that it had not released an image of Bannister due to 'safeguarding issues'. Speaking to the MailOnline, Staffordshire Police said: 'Officers who have a criminal record are individually assessed and vetted. This depends on the type of conviction and whether or not the conviction places the public at risk or would undermine the publics confidence in policing. 'In this case, the Chief Constable has carefully assessed the matter before reaching a decision and as the officer does not pose a continued risk and his actions were not aggravated by malice or dishonesty, he will stay with the force but will not be paid for the duration of his custodial sentence. 'All custody images are individually risk assessed and are usually issued by the Force who dealt with the incident which in this case is West Midlands Police.' Death by dangerous driving can carry a sentence of up to 14-years in prison as well as a fine. At a Staffordshire Police Special Case Hearing on Friday December 14, Chief Constable Gareth Morgan found that Bannister's conduct amounted to gross misconduct and he was issued with a final written warning and retained in service. The Hyundai (left) and the van (right) pictured on Cannock Road, Wolverhampton, after the accident Ch Con Morgan said: 'The events that led to this hearing are profoundly tragic for all involved, but none so much as the family of Balvinder Singh. 'The pain and loss felt by his family is evident in the statements submitted to the court and to this hearing. Jason Bannister's remorse and acknowledgement of his guilt is also very clear. Death by dangerous driving how are the perpetrators sentenced? According to the CPS (Crime Prosecution service, the offence of causing death by dangerous driving is committed under section one of the Road Traffic Act 1988 and occurs when the suspects driving is a cause or factor in the death of another person. It is an offence triable only be indictment and currently carries a maximum penalty of 14 years imprisonments and/or an unlimited fine. However the UK government had previously suggested the sentence be upped to life imprisonment, in November last year. The court must ban the driver for at least 2 years, unless special reasons are found. Advertisement 'The purpose of misconduct hearings is not simply to punish. I am satisfied that these exceptional circumstances warrant the application of my discretion provided for in the regulations. 'Jason Bannister's service record underscores that he has served the public in an exemplary fashion throughout his time in Staffordshire Police and provides significant reassurance that he would do so in future. 'I know that nothing can undo the tragedy that blights the life of the Singh family as a result of this tragedy, but in my view Jason Bannister should not be prevented from rebuilding and rehabilitating his life having served his custodial sentence. 'Therefore, after much deliberation and reflection, I have made the decision to retain Jason Bannister in service in these specific and unprecedented circumstances.' Bannister, from Wombourne, Staffordshire, will not be paid for the duration of his custodial sentence. He was also banned from driving for three years and nine months, after the accident on Cannock Road in Wolverhampton. Shortly after his death, Mr Singh's family said: 'He was the most loyal and hard-working family man, with three children and six grandchildren who were his everything one of which he never got to meet. 'He was loved throughout the community.' A mysterious light that kept changing shape was spotted in east China last night, leaving residents baffled. Witnesses shared pictures of an unidentified object appearing in the night sky of Hangzhou city, Zhejiang province at about 4.20am local time on Tuesday. Experts at a Nanjing observatory said the illuminated object is very likely Venus, one of the brightest planet in Earth's night sky. Hangzhou resident Mr Zhang snapped a photo of the illuminated object seen in the night sky at about 4.20am local time on Tuesday Zhang, who was still working at the Zhuantang residential district at the time, said he immediately took his camera and snapped the photos. He said that the strange phenomenon lasted more than two hours before the illuminated object disappeared at about 6:40am, or around sunrise. The perplexing pictures show the mysterious light shifting from a heptagon to a circle while remaining in the same position in the sky. 'The object was shining so bright against the night sky,' Zhang told Qianjiang Evening News. 'It looks very eerie.' He claimed that he saw a smaller object circulating the light before it split in two parts. The perplexing pictures show the mysterious light shifting from a heptagon to a circle while remaining in the same position in the sky. Experts say it is very likely planet Venus Zhang said that the strange phenomenon lasted more than two hours before the illuminated object disappeared at about 6:40am, or around sunrise Eagle-eyed commenters on Weibo identified the dazzling object as Venus, one of the brightest planets, while others thought they were seeing a 'heptagon star'. 'Are aliens coming?' one user asked. According to experts at the Zijinshan Astronomical Observatory, it is very likely that the shape-shifting object was in fact Venus. 'Venus was very bright today,' a staff member said, adding that the change of shape observed was probably due to problems with the camera's auto-focus. He said that the observatory have been keeping track of Venus sightings, which usually occur between 4am and sunrise. Venus is one of of the five planets visible without a telescope, with the rest being Mercury, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. It is so bright because its thick clouds reflect most of the sunlight that reaches it back into space, and because it is the closest planet to Earth. Venus can often be seen within a few hours after sunset or before sunrise as the brightest object in the sky (other than the moon), according to Cool Cosmos. Severe storms have again lashed Australia's east coast, with Sydney, the Hunter Valley and the NSW mid-north coast in the firing line. Large hailstones, heavy rainfall and damaging winds were forecast for the state's north coast and west to Walgett, the Bureau of Meteorology warned at 8.45pm. At least one plane was grounded after it was reportedly struck by lightning as it approached Sydney Airport. Severe storms have again lashed NSW's east coast with Sydney, the Hunter Valley and the mid-north coast in the firing line According to estimates from the Bureau of Meteorology, there were a staggering 7000 lightning strikes per hour in a 50 kilometre radius around Richmond throughout the evening Passengers have since taken to social media, expressing their terror as the plane was rocked by the bolt. 'Our plane got hit by lightning on approach to Sydney just then,' Nicolas Rakotopare tweeted. 'Loud bang and lightning hitting the left wing.' Another passenger wrote 'Our plane was hit by lightning on approach, much louder than I would have thought'. Air Services have since said they did not receive any reports of lightning striking a plane but assured all flights are now operational with some moderate delays still apparent. Large hailstones, heavy rainfall and damaging winds were forecast for the state's north coast and west to Walgett, the Bureau of Meteorology warned at 8.45pm According to estimates from the Bureau of Meteorology, there were a staggering 7000 lightning strikes per hour in a 50 kilometre radius around Richmond throughout the evening. There were around 100 within 10 kilometres of Sydney Airport. A house on Tulipwood Drive, Colyton in Sydney's west was also struck by lighning during the storm, NSW Fire and Rescue confirmed, The Daily Telegraph reports. About 1000 homes lost power around Hornsby in northern Sydney and a further 500 homes in Dural were also affected. Sydney was one of the cities to be worst hit by the storms with Coffs Harbour, Gosford, Armidale, Tamworth and Narrabri also receiving a lashing. Scone, in the upper Hunter, recorded 36mm of rain in half an hour on Wednesday night and winds up to 114 km/h were recorded at Merriwa. Ausgrid said crews were working to restore power. Dust was also whipped up by thunderstorms at Dubbo earlier in the afternoon. Sydney was one of the cities to be worst hit by the storms with Coffs Harbour, Gosford, Armidale, Tamworth and Narrabri also receiving a lashing (Pictured: the Wednesday storm rolls into Sydney's Bondi Beach) A hospital patient who suffered complications after surgery died because the doctors treating her didn't have the right equipment and weren't well trained, an inquest heard. Michelle Ginsburg Smith, 50, went to the Churchill Hospital in Oxford to have her thyroid removed in July last year. Just a few hours after the procedure her wounds started bleeding, cutting off the air supply to her brain and causing a cardiac arrest. An inquest heard yesterday that junior doctors and nurses on the ward had not received adequate training to respond to the emergency, switchboard operators had failed to give accurate information to the specialist resuscitation team, and that vital emergency medical equipment was not immediately available. Medics found the Kripsy Kreme store manager had suffered a serious brain injury due to lack of oxygen and she was put on life support. A High Court judge ruled her life support should be withdrawn in February. Speaking after the inquest her family spoke of their heartbreak and said they had been 'robbed of a daughter, sister, aunt and wife'. Michelle Ginsburg Smith, 50 (pictured with husband Mark) went to the Churchill Hospital in Oxford to have her thyroid removed in July last year but she died seven months later after a post-op bleed Michelle's husband of 10 years Mark Ginsburg, 56, described the 'devastating' final months of her life after the coroner's verdict today. The social worker said: 'Michelle was a uniquely enchanting person, whose magic touched everyone she met. 'Those seven months were devastating for everyone that saw her: I fervently hope that Michelle herself was never aware of her dreadful situation. 'We will always be angry at what happened to Michelle before and following her original surgery. 'The principal reason Michelle had to stay in hospital following surgery was due to risk of bleeding. 'Yet none of the staff caring for her had any training or information on what do if there was a bleed. 'Nor were low-cost prevention measures such as an emergency box or advice sheet provided. 'It is vital that staff across all sectors of the NHS do not forget the potential risks patients can face simply because such accidents may rarely happen. 'Hospital staff face incredible pressures and deserve the equipment, training and support needed to do their job. 'If they had it is difficult not to think that Michelle would have received emergency care as soon as her airway was compromised. 'This would have resulted in her being able to breathe much sooner, she would have avoided her brain injury and ultimately she would still be with us today.' Mrs Ginsburg-Smith's sister Yvette Small, added: 'These past 18 months have been incredibly hard for the family. An inquest into Mrs Ginsburg-Smith's death at Oxfordshire Coroner's Court heard vital equipment to cut her stitches were not by her bedside as they should have been and emergency teams couldn't find her because they didn't know which ward she was on. She is pictured with her husband of 10 years, Mark 'It breaks my heart to know that we will never see her, hold her and talk to her ever again. 'When Michelle 'woke up' after her emergency surgery I believe she knew that she couldn't communicate or function the way she used to. 'Sitting by her bedside holding her, hushing her like a frightened child is all we could do. 'My loving darling Michelle wasn't the same person anymore. She had no quality of life. 'This tragedy, that we feel should have been avoided, robbed us of a daughter, sister, aunt, wife and friend. To say we are heart-broken is an understatement.' Rosamund Rhodes-Kemp, Oxfordshire assistant coroner, recorded a narrative verdict after a two day inquest, but refused to find neglect had played a part in the death. She also recommended all thyroid emergency boxes be renamed 'Shelley boxes' in Michelle's memory. Ms Rhodes-Kemp told the two-day inquest at Oxfordshire Coroner's Court it would remind medical staff of the importance of the boxes. Mrs Ginsburg Smith had her thyroid operation at the Churchill Hospital in Oxford (pictured) The inquest heard how the senior catering manager, who had most recently worked for Krispy Kreme, had gone into hospital for a thyroidectomy on July 13. But following the surgery the specialist recovery ward for ear, nose and throat patients was full and so she was sent to the hospital's Upper GI ward. At around 1.50am the emergency call was sent out that Mrs Ginsburg-Smith was suffering a cardiac arrest after a post-operative bleed, cutting off the air supply to her brain. The inquest heard how doctors did not know how to immediately open the neck wound to clear the airways, instead waiting for equipment to cut the stitches away - equipment which would have been readily available at the bed side in a 'post thyroidectomy box' on the specialist ward. While there was also a five-minute delay in the 'crash team' reaching Mrs Ginsburg-Smith because it had not been told which ward she was on. A spokesman for Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust said 'a full investigation' had been carried out after her death 'to learn lessons for the future'. They added the trust 'fell short' of their usual standards and apologised to the family. The spokesman said: 'We are very sorry for the sad outcome of Mrs Ginsburg-Smith's care in our hospitals and offer our sincere condolences to her family and loved ones. 'After her death we carried out a full investigation to establish what had happened and to learn lessons for the future. WHAT IS A THYROIDECTOMY? A thyroidectomy is the medical term for the removal of the thyroid gland, often as a result of cancer of an overactive thyroid. The thyroid gland, which is small and shaped like a butterfly, produces hormones which regulate the body's metabolism. Patients who have their entire thyroid gland removed need daily treatment with hormones to make up for the loss of function. The Mayo Clinic, a respected health centre in the US, states that a thyroidectomy is 'generally a safe procedure'. However, it warns risks can include bleeding, infection, airway obstruction. Some patients can be left with a hoarse voice. The operation can last between 45 minutes and three hours - depending on how complex it proves, according to the American Thyroid Association. Figures suggest nearly 150,000 thyroidectomies are carried out in the US each year - while the number is smaller in the UK. Advertisement 'We strive to provide the highest quality standard of care for all our patients. 'We recognise that we fell short of these standards in the care which Mrs Ginsburg-Smith received.' The equipment needed to cut Mrs Ginsburg Smith's stitches should have been kept in a 'post thyroidectomy box' by her bedside - but none were available. Doctors did not know how to immediately open the neck wound to clear the airways by hand and instead waited for equipment to cut the stitches away. Ms Rhodes-Kemp said Michelle's death had been 'devastating' for the family and had had 'profound repercussions' for the clinical staff involved. Oxford University Hospitals has since rolled out a number of changes to improve post-operative care for thyroidectomy patients. Thyroidectomy patients are now always sent to recover on the specialist unit at the hospital and that 'post-thyroidectomy boxes' are present at each bedside. A new training initiative had since been rolled out to staff locally and nationally in order to better respond to post-thyroidectomy bleeds. A man 'armed with kitchen knives' allegedly stabbed three people on a rampage through two London doctors' surgeries today. Three people were taken to hospital after they were attacked in St Stephen's Health Centre in Tower Hamlets and The Tredegar Practice in Bow, east London by a man wielding a '12-inch blade'. According to bystanders, the man burst into The Tredegar Practice around 11am and stabbed two men before lunging towards a mother-of-three in the waiting room as patients fled. He was then tackled by a brave have-a-go hero before he ran out of the surgery and to the nearby St Stephen's Health Centre, where he allegedly attacked a wheelchair-bound woman. Three remain in hospital, although their injuries are not understood to be life threatening. Police were tonight questioning a 40-year-old suspect in relation to the stabbings. Scotland Yard said in a statement: 'Police were called at 11.06am on Wednesday, 19 December to reports of a stabbing at a health centre on St Stephen's Road, Tower Hamlets. 'Officers, including specialist firearms officers, attended and found three people suffering from stab injuries. 'They were taken to hospital; their injuries are not being treated as life-threatening. A man was detained nearby and taken to hospital suffering from an injury. A Met Police spokeswoman said: 'A 24-year-old man and a 33-year-old man at the first location; and a third victim, a 77-year-old woman, at the second location. 'The three were all taken to hospital by the London Ambulance Service; their injuries have now been deemed non life-threatening. All remain at hospital. 'Another woman made her own way to hospital with a minor injury, and was later discharged.' She added: 'A 40-year-old man was arrested inside the second location on suspicion of causing grievous bodily harm, and taken to hospital suffering from a minor injury. 'He was treated and then discharged. He is currently in custody an east London police station. Cordons remain in place while enquiries are ongoing. 'This incident is not believed to be terror-related.' Armed police were deployed, but the incident was not treated as 'terror-related'. Footage posted on social media shows a man at the scene being led into a police van just wearing a pair of tight 'budgie smuggler' swimming trunks and a pair of boots. Teams of paramedics are at the scene in Tower Hamlets this afternoon after three people were stabbed Pictures and video from the scene show a man in his underwear being led to the police van Police were called to St Stephen's Health Centre in Tower Hamlets, shortly after 11am this morning where they found people with stab injuries The mother-of-three was waiting in the surgery when the suspect, wearing Army-style camouflage clothing, burst in clutching a kitchen knife. She said the man lunged at her with a blade between 10 and 12 inches long. She saw some patients run out of the waiting room as a man tried to wrestle the knife away from the attacker before she locked herself in a toilet. The mother, who did not want to be named, said: 'He had camouflage kit with his hood up with glasses. The knife was massive. As I looked up, I saw him waving it. 'There was a load of shouting. He was just lunging at people and I started screaming.' She said a young man waiting with his mother intervened and tried to stop the attacker. 'He lunged at me then stepped backwards because the other guy was shouting. I think he was trying to defuse it, and trying to stop him. 'He has saved people because he stopped others from getting injured, he was probably worried about his mum as well. 'He was very brave. It was terrifying because the only thing I could think about was my kids. I locked myself in the toilet. I was in there for about about seven minutes.' Police have confirmed the incident is not terror related. Police on the scene outside Tredegar Practice GP surgery on St Stephen's Road Police confirmed a man was detained and taken to hospital to be treated for his injuries Billy Jones, 27, who works near St Stephen's Health Centre, said he saw a male patient running from the surgery. He said the knifeman was 'wielding a knife in each hand' when he attacked the wheelchair-bound woman before hiding himself in the surgery. Mr Jones said: '[The patient] was quite shaken and said, 'there's a man in there, he's come in there bearing two knives. He stabbed an elderly lady out of nowhere.'' Mr Jones said other witnesses claimed the woman was in a wheelchair. He said: 'It was a lady probably in her 60s or 70s. She was in a wheelchair - that's what I heard.' According to witnesses, the man entered the surgery in east London before launching the knife attack An arrest warrant has been issued for Zimbabwe's former first lady Grace Mugabe, following claims she assaulted a model partying with her sons in Johannesburg last year. Gabriella Engels, 21, claimed Robert Mugabe's wife attacked her with an electrical cable in August 2017, leaving her needing stitches for gashes to her face and scalp. Mrs Mugabe, 53, denied the assault insisting an 'intoxicated and unhinged' Ms Engels attacked her with a knife after the model had gone to see the Mugabes' sons at a luxury hotel in Johannesburg's Sandton district. An arrest warrant has been issued for Grace Mugabe (pictured) following claims she assaulted a model partying with her sons in Johannesburg last year Alleged attack: Gabriella Engels claims Grace Mugabe beat her in a hotel room after she found the model in the company of her sons After the alleged assault, the South African government granted Mrs Mugabe diplomatic immunity and she returned to Zimbabwe despite calls for her prosecution. But that immunity was overturned by a South African court this year after Ms Engels challenged the decision. 'The police investigated and we made an application to the courts and the courts granted a warrant for the arrest,' police spokesman Vishnu Naidoo told AFP. The Randburg Magistrates Court in Gauteng province issued a warrant of arrest on December 13, charging Mugabe with 'assault causing grievous bodily harm'. 'We are following the Interpol (International Criminal Police) processes, so we applying for assistance to secure her arrest,' Naidoo added. 'I can confirm that a warrant for the arrest of Grace Mugabe was issued last Thursday,' South African Police Service spokesman Vishnu Naidoo said, adding that police were seeking Interpol's help to enforce the warrant. The 20-year-old (pictured) had been partying with Robert Mugabe Jr, 25, and Chatunga Mugabe, 21 Whether Zimbabwe would assist South African authorities with any extradition request is in doubt, though the arrest warrant means Grace Mugabe would be vulnerable if she visits her sons, who stay in South Africa. She also owns a house there. There was no immediate comment from Mrs Mugabe or from authorities in Harare. Following the alleged attack, Ms Engels, who was 20 at the time, tweeted a picture of a wound on her head. She wrote on Twitter: 'What is a girl compared to a women beating you and 10+ body guards standing back leaving her to do this s***. 'She split my head open in 3 places with an extension cord and used the plug to hit me.' At the time, it was reported that Mrs Mugabe's sons Robert Jnr and Chatunga, who are in their 20s, were staying at the hotel where the alleged assault took place. Mrs Mugabe was seen as a potential successor to her 94-year-old husband Robert (pictured with his wife), who ruled Zimbabwe from 1980 until he was ousted in a coup late last year, at the time of the alleged incident in a luxury hotel in Johannesburg's Sandton district Mrs Mugabe was seen as a potential successor to her 94-year-old husband Robert, who ruled Zimbabwe from 1980 until he was ousted in a coup late last year, at the time of the alleged incident in a luxury hotel in Johannesburg's Sandton district. She has denied assault, claiming Engels had infact attacked her with a knife. South African advocacy group Afriforum, which represented Engels, has dismissed her version of events. Mrs Mugabe has retreated from the limelight in Zimbabwe since her husband was ousted in the November 2017 coup. Current President Emmerson Mnangagwa recently revealed Robert Mugabe had been in Singapore for medical care and was now unable to walk because of ill health and old age. In 2009, Grace Mugabe was reportedly granted immunity in Hong Kong after repeatedly punching a British photographer for taking pictures of her at a luxury hotel. Robert and Grace Mugabe have been living in virtual seclusion since his fall from power in November last year, after 37 years in office. The couple were seen in public on July 30 when they voted together in the country's first elections since his ousting. A teenager who excitedly texted her two best friends to say she had passed her driver's test tragically died behind the wheel less than four hours later. Kimberley Berente, 17, from Mandurah south of Perth, messaged her friends on Tuesday morning 'I got my licence' just before 9am. The trio then set off to a nearby beach in Bouvard to celebrate the milestone, but by 12.30pm, the bubbly teenager driver was dead. Scroll down for video Kimberley Berente (pictured) tragically died in a car accident on Tuesday just hours after getting her driver's licence Kimberley Berente (pictured) tragically died on Tuesday following a fatal car accident - she passed her driver's test just hours earlier The Suburu Outback (pictured) flipped several times, with driver Kimberley Berente suffering fatal head injuries Berente lost control of her Subaru Outback, rolling the vehicle several times on the unsealed and corrugated dirt track. Local police on the scene described her head injuries as 'catastrophic'. The two passengers in the car managed to climb from the wreckage with just a few minor cuts and bruises. Both girls are recovering at Royal Perth Hospital. Investigators don't believe speed was a factor behind the fatality, instead pointing to driver inexperience. All three girls were believed to be wearing seat belts. The haunting text message Kimberley Berente sent her two friends just hours before her death White Hill Road in Bouvard, south of Perth, (pictured) is a well-known corrugated dirt road that is unsealed and bumpy WA Detective Senior Constable Steven Morgan described the fatality as 'just awful'. 'It's a tragedy at any time, but coming up to this time of year where families want to be together,' he told Yahoo7 News. Several of Berente's friends posted tributes on social media, describing the Year 11 Halls Head College student as a bubbly girl who was also a motocross enthusiast. 'You will always be in my heart, you precious, precious soul,' one friend wrote. ''You never know what it feels like to lose your best friend until you actually have lost them. You were such a beautiful person and you always lit up my day,' wrote another. Kimberley's school friends visited the crash site on Wednesday, hugging each other and laying flowers by the side of the road. Locals called for clearer signs to be erected on the dangerous road where the accident took place. Locals told Seven News better signage was needed on White Hill Road, where the accident happened. 'There is a sign at the beginning of the road to say that the condition of the road are subject to change,' Mandurah resident Mike McVilly told 7 News. 'If they could probably put a more permanent speed reduction sign of, say, 40 or at least 50 maximum kilometres per hour, that would be a big benefit, I'm sure.' Hackers have taken over Qantas' official number and sent scam texts to thousands of customers attempting to con them out of thousands of dollars. The text message addresses the customer by their first name, telling them they have won a prize from the Australian airline's weekly mystery box competition, with a link to the supposed prize. The text message appears legitimate as it is received in the same message thread as previous messages sent by Qantas. The text message addresses the customer by their first name telling them they have won a prize from the Australian carrier's weekly mystery box competition, with a link to the supposed prize (Stock) How to avoid scams Never click on a link to download a file about bookings from a website, including our own. If there is no reference number then it is a scam. Your Qantas e-ticket would be in a PDF file. Anything else is a scam. There is only one official Qantas Facebook Page. Source: Qantas Advertisement 'You've won our mystery box this week,' the message reads. 'Please use this link to schedule the delivery.' The fake prizes offer $1500 in travel credit for just $1, while the scam link contains fake reviews from previous 'winners', news.com.au reported. In a statement, Qantas said they were aware of the scam texts making their way around to its customers and have asked them not to click on it. 'These messages are not genuine and encourage customers to click on a link which requests personal information,' a spokesperson said. 'Unfortunately scammers can change sender ID names, which makes it confusing for the recipient to recognise when a legitimate message has been sent and when it is a scam. In a statement, Qantas said they were aware of the scam texts making their way around to its customers and have asked them not to click on it (stock) 'These messages because of the sender ID name can then be grouped with genuine messages with Qantas. 'We will never ask customers to click a link to download a file about bookings from a website, including our own.' According to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) scams target people of all backgrounds, ages and income levels. Every year scams cost Australians millions of dollars and cause considerable non-financial harm. 'Scammers will take advantage of special days or major events like Christmas to fleece people of their money or personal information,' ACCC Deputy Chair Delia Rickard said. The late DJ Avicii has left his entire 20million fortune to his parents, legal documents filed in his native Sweden reveal. Legal forms made public by the Swedish Tax Agency, have revealed that the artist's parents Klas Bergling and Anki Liden are set to inherit their son's wealth of 231million kronor (20million, $25.5million). The internationally acclaimed DJ, whose real name was Tim Bergling, was found dead in Muscat, Oman in April this year. Following his death, his family penned an open letter saying the 28-year-old 'could not go on any longer and wanted peace'. Scroll down for video Avicii, whose real name was Tim Bergling, was found dead at a hotel in Muscat, Oman in April this year Under Swedish law, the money will automatically be gifted to his parents since he was unmarried with no children and had not written a last will and testament at the time of his death - Swedish newspaper Expressen.se reported. He was also said to have had debts of 96.5million kronor (8.42m) in the US and 841,330 kronor (73,430) in Canada, which were paid before his parents inherited his estate. Avicii made a fortune during his short career, cashing in $28million in 2014 alone, earning $250,000 a night when playing out sold-out shows, according to GQ. Avicii himself was less bothered about his millions, saying in 2013 that he 'noticed straight away when I started making money, that I don't need that much money'. Proud parents: Avicii's parents, Anki Liden and Klas Bergling are seen watching him perform in Stockholm, Sweden during one of his final live shows Family: Avicii is pictured as a child with his mother, who is an actress, at film premieres In 2012 he donated the entire income of his U.S. tour - more than one million dollars - to hunger relief charity Feeding America, and in 2013 he gave one million euros to Swedish aid organisation Radiohjalpen. After his death, his family released a statement revealing that Avicii did not want to go on and had been struggling with mental health issues at the time of his death. 'He really struggled with thoughts about Meaning, Life, Happiness. He could not go on any longer. He wanted to find peace,' the statement said. Despite a meteoric rise to success following the release of hit-single Le7els in 2011, Avicii announced in 2016 that he would not longer perform live, following years health problems caused by stress and alcohol abuse, as well as severe anxiety. Tragedy: The family of the Swedish DJ, whose real name was Tim Bergling, said the 28-year-old 'could not go on any longer and wanted peace' A recent documentary, Avicii: True Stories shed light on the extreme pressure he was under, performing 320 shows in a single year. In the documentary, Avicii, a self-confessed introvert, speaks frequently about using alcohol as a crutch to be able to perform, drinking every day during his hectic tour, and to help him with his crippling anxiety and stress. At the age of 21 he was diagnosed with acute pancreatitis - a potentially life-threatening inflammation of the pancreas - due in part to excessive drinking. In 2014, Bergling was again hospitalised and forced to have his gallbladder and appendix removed. A former real estate agent allegedly captured on CCTV peeping through a 13-year-old girl's bedroom window last month has appeared in court for the first time. Isaac Nelson Teu, 30, was flanked by family members and his lawyer Paul Kenny when he appeared in Manly Local Court on Wednesday. He was arrested at his former real estate workplace on Sydney's northern beaches on December 7, a week after police released CCTV footage of the alleged act on November 30. Isaac Teu (pictured), 30, was a a real estate agent on Sydney's northern beaches before he was arrested by police at his former workplace on December 7 Teu allegedly also peered into the girl's window on October 4, according to court documents. The 30-year-old appeared in court to make several changes to his bail conditions, including a change of address from Collaroy to Wheeler Heights, the Manly Daily reported. He also sought permission for his sister to supervise him in addition his wife if he leaves his place of residence outside the curfew hours of 8pm and 6am. A man was allegedly captured on CCTV peeping through a 13-year-old girl's bedroom window last month Teu, 30, (centre) was flanked by family members and his lawyer outside court Prosecutors indicated they were considering whether the case should be moved from the local court to the district court where more serious cases are heard, Seven News reported. Teu was charged with two counts of peeping/prying, two counts of stalking or intimidation with the intent to cause physical or mental harm and one count of entering land with the intent of committing an indictable offence. It's alleged the teenage girl noticed the man looking through the window of her Collaroy Plateau home on Sydney's northern beaches at around 10.45pm on November 30. She alerted her parents, who searched the property and called police after they couldn't find the suspect. They watched CCTV of the incident, which allegedly showed a man pacing before peering inside a ground-floor window and walking off. Northern Beaches Crime Manager Detective Inspector Michael Boutouridis told reporters at the time that police take these reports seriously. 'Families have the right to feel safe in their own homes but incidents such as these can be extremely distressing, especially when children are involved,' Det Insp Boutouridis said. Teu must report to Dee Why Police Station three times per week, not go within 500 metres of the girl, cannot leave the country and must not be under the influence of drugs or alcohol. He refused to answers questions from the waiting media outside court. The case was adjourned to return to Manly Local Court on January 23. The husband of a British diplomat has been accused of beating up his wife at their New York home over the clothes she was wearing during an evening out. Youssef Amrouche was charged with felony assault and harassment over the alleged incident at the couple's apartment in Turtle Bay in Midtown earlier this month. The 37-year-old was initially not charged over the alleged attack due to his wife's diplomatic immunity, but in a rare move, the UK authorities rescinded this protection allowing criminal proceedings against him to be launched. The victim, who works for the UK ambassador to the United Nations and whose identity has not been revealed, was allegedly left with redness and swelling to her face. Youssef Amrouche was charged with felony assault and harassment over the alleged incident She works as a secretary for a UK diplomat to the United States, and met Amrouche when she was stationed in his home country of Morocco, the New York Post reports. Prosecutors allege Amrouche got into an argument with his spouse in their apartment on December 8 over the clothes she had worn out that evening. He allegedly then slapped her, put her in a headlock and dragged her around their apartment. Amroche was not arrested when police arrived at the scene but was then taken into custody when his diplomatic immunity was waived on Tuesday and he was charged by police. The United Nations headquarters in New York where the unnamed woman worked for a UK ambassador to the UN The New York District Attorney sent a letter to the Mayor's Office for International Affairs in a bid to get the office to appeal to the State Department for help getting the British authorities to let him prosecute. A Foreign and Commonwealth Office spokesman told MailOnline: 'We do not comment on individual cases. 'Where a crime is alleged, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has processes in place for waiving immunity as appropriate and where requested.' Raul Contreras, a City Hall spokesman told the New York Post: 'We take domestic violence seriously, and we're glad the UK accepted our request to waive diplomatic immunity.' Youssef Amrouche was charged with felony assault and harassment over the alleged incident at the couple's apartment in New York Amrouche appeared before a judge for the first time in relational the case today and was arraigned on $7,000 bail in the Manhattan Criminal Court. Diplomatic immunity can prevent domestic law enforcement from prosecuting diplomats living in that country. Under international law certain foreign government officials are not subject to the jurisdiction of local courts. The US State Department gives certain immunities and protections to members of foreign diplomatic missions and consulates and often extends it to their spouses, children and family if they are a high ranking official. A father in China has donated his own skin repeatedly to save his severely burnt daughter because he couldn't afford the skin grafts needed for her operations. Li Zhifeng, a farmer, has given his scalp as well as the skin from his left arm and entire left leg for his child. His daughter, 17-year-old Li Chenxi, was seriously injured during a gas explosion in October and sustained two-to-three-degree burns on 80 per cent of her body. Scroll down for video Li Zhifeng (pictured) said: 'As long as my child needs it, I would donate (my skin) anytime' His wife Zheng Guohong takes care of him after he donated the skin on his arm and entire leg Although the girl was taken to the hospital in time, Mr Li was told by the doctors that she was in critical condition and it would cost him more than 300,000 yuan (34,453) to buy new pieces of skin for emergency transplants. Mr Li, from central China's Henan province, couldn't afford the bill, which was astronomical for him. Therefore, he told the doctors to take skin from him. Mr Li told the press that life had just begun for his daughter and he would do whatever he could to save her - no matter how painful it is. He said to Pear Video: 'As long as my child needs it, I would donate it anytime.' His wife told reporters that in order to provide enough skin for his daughter, Mr Li would undergo one operation, wait for the skin to grow back before donating it again. 'He has already had part of his scalp removed six or seven times,' Ms Zheng told China News in a video report. On October 20, he had skin from his entire left leg taken. Mr Li (pictured with his daughter Chenxi, right) said he would save his child no matter what. Schoolgirl Chenxi (left), 17, was severely burnt in a gas explosion at home on October 3 In order to pay for the surgical procedures and hospital care, Mr Li and his wife, Zheng Guohong, have pawned their house and borrowed money from relatives. So far, their medical bills have amounted to more than 1.6 million yuan (183,400) and the number is still growing. Chenxi has undergone 17 skin grafts in the past two months. Surgeons have used skin from herself and her father in the surgical procedures. In order not to worry Chenxi, who has been under intensive care, Mr Li told his wife to hide the fact that he had been donating his skin from their daughter. He told his wife to tell the girl that he had been away for work in another city; while in reality, he was recovering in a hospital ward just two storeys underneath his daughter's. The man said as long as he was alive, there would be hope for his daughter. His wife told reporter emotionally: 'I don't want either of them to go through pain, but this is all for Niu Niu (their daughter's nickname).' She said she had suggested the doctors take skin from her instead, but her husband insisted to go under the knife. he has donated the skin on his entire left leg so it could be transplanted onto his daughter Mr Li and his wife have pawned their house and run into debts in order to save their daughter The Li family live in the city of Xinxiang. Apart from Chenxi, Mr Li and his wife also have a son, who is 11 years old. Chenxi was burnt on October 3 in an explosion caused by a gas leak at home. She and her younger brother were writing their homework and their parents were doing farm work in the field. Mr Li said he rushed home as soon as he got a phone call from a neighbour telling him there was a fire in his house. He said when he got home, he saw his daughter lying next to the sink. She was said to be so burnt that the skin on her arm had been separated from the flesh and all of her clothes had gone. Chenxi was immediately taken to the No. 2 People's Hospital in Xinxiang. While the girl has stayed strong throughout the treatment, she remains unaware of what her father has done for her. She recorded a film of herself from her intensive care unit on October 20 telling his father that she would try to recover soon - not knowing her father had donated the skin from his left leg on the same day. Chenxi has undergone 17 operations since she was injured in the house fire on October 3. 'I just want her to recover as soon as possible,' the 17-year-old's father told China News In the video, she asked her father to take her out for a walk when she could leave the unit and told him that 'I can't love you enough'. Mr Li said his daughter was a strong-willed girl and before she got injured, she brought so much laughter to the family. 'I just want her to recover as soon as possible,' the man told China News. The family still need around 700,000 yuan (80,272) to continue the treatment for Chenxi. In order to raise the funds, Mr Li chose to leave the hospital on December 4 to borrow money from relatives and friends - despite the fact that he was still wounded. He said the hospital was pressing them to pay up the bills, and he feared that his daughter's treatment would be delayed otherwise. His wife told China News that the family had received about 100,000 yuan (11,472) donations from the public and they were grateful for the kind strangers. Chenxi is recovering well, according to the doctors. President Donald Trump on Wednesday claimed the military would build his border wall and Mexico would pay for it - indirectly under the new trade agreement. 'Mexico is paying (indirectly) for the Wall through the new USMCA, the replacement for NAFTA! Far more money coming to the U.S. Because of the tremendous dangers at the Border, including large scale criminal and drug inflow, the United States Military will build the Wall!,' he tweeted. His declaration comes after the White House ditched its demand for $5 billion in funding for the border wall amid negotiations to keep the government open. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell meanwhile announced that he was bringing a bill to the floor that would keep the government open until Feb. 8. It doesn't contain funding for Trump's border 'wall' it only allows for fencing to be built in a continuation of the current government policy. The vice president reportedly told senators during a luncheon that Trump would sign the measure, if it passes, staving off a shutdown just in time for the billionaire president to jet down to his private club in Palm Beach for his annual Christmastime visit. President Donald Trump vowed he 'will win on the wall' after the White House signaled it was ditching its demand for $5 billion in funding for his signature issue Trump said the new trade deal means Mexico will pay for his wall The GOP's top vote counter, John Cornyn, told CNN that Mike Pence affirmed that Trump would sign the bill that punts the debate over his border wall to next year. That bill has not cleared the legislative branch yet, however, and the White House did not respond to DailyMail.com's request for comment. Earlier in the week, the White House denied that Trump was mulling a short-term spending bill that doesn't fund his wall, but as a shutdown loomed the presiddent's spokeswoman indicated that Trump would sign whatever the Senate sends him. White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders also said Tuesday that Trump has tasked every Cabinet secretary to look through agency funds to see what if anything they can redirect to the border wall. Trump has claimed he could tap the military or use money that's reaped from his trade accord. There is nothing in the trade agreement that requires Mexico to pay for the wall. The administration is making a more nuanced argument that taxpayers and businesses will be saving money on goods and services that they will inject back into the U.S. economy. Sanders insisted on Tuesday that savings through the trade deal with Mexico and Canada would provide the revenue that would pay for wall. 'The President has been clear that the USMCA deal would provide additional revenue through that deal that would show that Mexico was paying for the wall,' she said. She added: 'He's saying that the revenue provided and the money that would be saved through the USMCA deal, we could pay for the wall four times over. And by doing that new trade deal, we have the opportunity to pay for the wall.' The agreement isn't even legal yet. Although the three leaders of the U.S., Canada and Mexico signed the trade deal, the legislative bodies in each respective country must approve it before its binding. None of them have done so. And there's no direct line of revenue from the agreement to the U.S. Treasury. Tax revenue generated by the trade provisions would not come from Mexico but from U.S. tax payers and corporations. A fact check by the Anneberg Public Policy Center found Trump's claim of indirect payment by Mexico to be false. The center talked to economists to see if the USMCA would provide enough revenue to pay for the wall, using a figure the White House released in January: $25 billion. 'Even if we accept conceptually the argument that government revenue attributable to the revised trade agreement constitutes 'Mexico paying for the wall,' there are no plausible assumptions of USMCA's impact that would see government revenue increase by $25 billion,' Geoffrey Gertz, a fellow in the Global Economy and Development program at the Brookings Institution, told the center. Trump previously has threatened to use the military if Democrats wouldn't fully fund his border wall. As commander-in-chief he can issue orders to the troops. But Congressional Democrats have warned that the Pentagon does not have the power to redirect funding to the border wall. The Constitution requires Congressional approval before money can be allocated and spent, which Democrat argues applies to this move. President Trump has also directed his Cabinet secretaries to look for funds that could be converted to building his border wall, which Democrats have also protested as illegal. Sanders said the White House legal team was examining if such a move could be made. 'That's their entire job is determining whether or something is legal and we are looking to those individuals to find out those specific pots of money that can be used for that,' she said at her briefing Tuesday. White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said the administration's legal team was looking into whether the White House could redirect funds to build the border wall Trump is vowing to fight for his wall It's estimated it would cost $5 billion to build the president's border wall Trump also vowed on Wednesday he 'will win on the wall' after the White House signaled it was ditching its demand for $5 billion in funding for his signature issue. 'One way or the other, we will win on the Wall!,' Trump tweeted on Wednesday morning as the clock ticked toward Friday's partial government shutdown. His protestation comes amid Congress' push for a two-month stop gap solution that would fund the government through February 8, which would keep it open through the holidays. Trump's tweet didn't offer any specifics on what he was looking for in a win and whether he'd want the money appropriated in any stop-gap measure or would be willing to wait and take up the fight again in the new year. The president tweeted twice on the matter Wednesday morning. An earlier tweeted suggested he had more thoughts to come with he wrote: 'In our Country, so much money has been poured down the drain, for so many years, but the Democrats fight us like cats and dogs when it comes to spending on Boarder Security (including a Wall) and the Military. We won on the Military, it is being completely rebuilt. We will win...' But he deleted that tweet and, six minutes later, offered a more succinct tweet: 'In our Country, so much money has been poured down the drain, for so many years, but when it comes to Border Security and the Military, the Democrats fight to the death. We won on the Military, which is being completely rebuilt. One way or the other, we will win on the Wall!' Lawmakers are scheduled to leave town on Friday and Trump is looking to go Mar-a-Lago for the holidays. Hopes were raised on Tuesday a deal would happen before Friday's deadline when the White House signaled it would be willing to accept less than the $5 billion that Trump has been demanding for his wall. 'We will work with Congress if they will make sure we get a bill passed that provides not just the funding for the wall, but there's a piece of legislation that's been pushed around that Democrats actually voted 26-5 out of committee that provides roughly $26 billion for border security including $1.6 billion for the wall,' White House press secretary Sarah Sanders told Fox News. 'That's something that we would be able to support as long as we can couple that with other funding resources.' The president on Tuesday sidestepped a question on whether he was still willing to shut down the government to get his $5 billion in funding. 'We need border security,' was his response. As for a government shutdown, Trump said: 'We'll see what happens. It's too early to say.' Republicans in the Senate pushed for a compromise that would agree to the $1.6 billion Democrats are willing to fund for the wall while giving Trump some funds to play with - thus giving the president a win in his retreat. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell proposed a bill containing the $1.6 billion for the wall along with a $1 billion so-called 'slush fund' that the president could use on boarder security. Democrats, however, rejected the offer. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnnell (left) and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (right) are working on a temporary measure to fund the government Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said his caucus 'would not accept a billion dollar slush fund' for the president. 'Leader Schumer and I have said that we cannot accept the offer they made of a billion-dollar slush fund for the president to implement his very wrong immigration policies, so that won't happen,' noted expected, incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. A short-term funding extension, called a 'continuing resolution,' would let lawmakers avoid the images of a government shutdown at Christmas while punting the solution to Democrats, who take control of the House of Representatives in January. It would prevent the third government shut down this year after temporary closures in January and February during funding fights. Any deal would have to be signed off on by Trump and lawmakers remain unsure exactly what the president would accept. The White House kicked the can down Pennsylvania Avenue to Congress on Tuesday. 'You know, at this point, the Senate has thrown out a lot of ideas. We're disappointed in the fact that they've yet to actually vote on something and pass something,' Sanders said at the White House press briefing. 'So when they do that, we'll make a determination on whether or not we're going to sign that.' McConnell said he was sure the government would remain open. 'Yeah I am,' he said when asked about it on Tuesday. Trump on Tuesday said 'we'll see' what happens in regards to a shutdown Funding for the government runs out Friday at midnight Most areas of the federal government have already been funded through other appropriations bills. Roughly 25 percent of agencies are operating off of a Continuing Resolution that will technically expire early Saturday morning. Roughly 420,000 federal workers, including most law enforcement, would be deemed essential in the course of a shutdown and required to remain on the job. They would receive back pay in the event of a partial government closure, CNN reports. All other workers would be considered non-essential and sent home on an unpaid leave of absence. Congress typically gives them back pay for days missed, costing the government time and money for work that wasn't actually done. It can take weeks for the money to arrive, especially if the shutdown lasts until Democrats take control of the House the first few days in January, putting a financial squeeze on families over the Christmas holiday. The Departments of Homeland Security, Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, State, Interior, Agriculture, Treasury, Commerce and Justice would be affected. A 25-year-old mother-of-three is in critical condition after her angry ex-boyfriend set her on fire outside her job at a Tim Hortons in New York State. Jessica Cameron remained in Erie County Medical Center's burn unit Tuesday and is expected to undergo a number of surgeries in the next few days following the attack on Monday at the Tonawanda branch of the coffee shop. Law enforcement said the 28-year-old suspect who they did not name - called Cameron out to an area where the chain brand's dumpsters are located on Niagara and Seymour Streets, then threw flammable liquid and set her alight. The pair have been in a dispute over child custody. Scroll down for video Jessica Cameron is in critical condition after her ex-boyfriend set her on fire outside her job at a Tim Hortons in New York State on Monday afternoon The suspect called Cameron out to an area where the chain brand's dumpsters are located on Niagara and Seymour Streets, then threw flammable liquid and set her alight The man who also works the Tim Hortons truck - sustained burns himself in the 3pm attack Courtesy of WKBW The man who also works the Tim Hortons truck - sustained burns himself to his face and arms in the 3pm attack and is being treated at the same place as his victim. 'His intent was to start his girlfriend on fire and somehow the fire came back at him and caught him on fire too,' City of Tonawanda Police Captain Fredric Foels told News 4. The officer said he admitted to being the culprit at the scene where they found him 'was lying in wait' by a bin. Law enforcement did not name either of the two people involved but Cameron's relatives publicly identified her. 'They used fire extinguishers to put them out. And the male did make a comment to the officers when they put him the ambulance, "yeah I caught her on fire, arrest me",' WIVB.com reports City of Tonawanda Police Captain Fredric Foels said. An officer said the man admitted to being the culprit at the scene where they found him 'was lying in wait' by a bin The 25-year-old remained in Erie County Medical Center's burn unit Tuesday. She is expected to undergo several surgeries following the attack in Tonawanda The Tim Hortons branch closed due to employees being upset by the incident but planned to reopen by 10pm on Monday. Police had recently been called to the couple's house over a custody dispute. The woman has three young sons aged between one and four years old. She shared two of the boys with the suspect. 'When you have a conversation with him, you would have never thought anything of this. We had no idea. We knew they were having a little problems or whatever but we had no idea the severity of it,' Tim Hortons Assistant Manager Kassandra Kern told News 4. The victim who has worked for Tim Hortons for years has a GoFundMe page set up in her name by a stranger named Danielle Spooner. Hoping to be a 'light in the dark' for the family, it had raised $9,307 of a $10,000 goal by Wednesday to help support her children. She noted the page could be verified by contacting the mayor's office. Cameron's children are being cared for by their maternal grandparent. The 28-year-old suspect is the father of two of Cameron's three young children and police said they were recently called to their home about a custody dispute Tim Hortons Assistant Manager Kassandra Kern said they knew the duo was having problems but didn't expect the attack The victim who has worked for Tim Hortons for years has a GoFundMe page set up in her name by stranger Danielle Spooner. It had raised $9,307 of a $10,000 goal by Wednesday Her mother Christina Cameron who lost her nine-year-old daughter in July - said via the crowdfunding page: 'Please pray for us. For my Jessica, for her beautiful boys, for her siblings, her grandparents, her nieces and nephews, her many family and friends. This is going to be a very long road.' A donation box has been set up for her by co-workers and contributions for Cameron's three young sons are being accepted at the City of Tonawanda Fire Department. The family is hoping people will be able to provide pajamas, gift cards for food, gas and diapers. A donation box has been set up for her by co-workers and contributions for Cameron's three young sons are being accepted at the City of Tonawanda Fire Department Checks for the family were being made to the Jim Harszlak Foundation. 'Everyone's devastated. Everyone's very close to her, we're like a family,' says Cameron's manager Colleen Curtis said. 'A lot of people know her that come here. She's been here for so long a lot of the regulars would probably want to help her.' Cameron's former partner could face an attempted murder charge but no charges have been made so far. A Montana man claims he was shot at by a hunter 'who mistook him for Bigfoot' and rationalized the potentially-deadly case of mistaken identity by saying: 'If I see something that looks like Bigfoot, I just shoot at it.' The accidental target - an unnamed 27-year-old from Helena - told police he was out at shooting practice on Sunday when he suddenly became a target himself. He said one bullet landed three feet to his left and another whizzed past him on the right, causing him to take cover in a nearby patch of trees as more shots rang out. Once the gunfire appeared to have stopped, the man came out to confront the shooter, who was sitting in a black Ford F-150. He said the shooter told him: 'I thought you were Bigfoot,' adding: 'I dont target practice but if I see something that looks like Bigfoot, I just shoot at it.' A 27-year-old man claims he was shot at by a hunter in a black Ford F-150 pickup truck who 'mistook him for Bigfoot' while he was out at target practice on Sunday near Helena, Montana (stock photo depicting the mythical character) The man insisted that he was not Bigfoot, and the shooter responded by advising him to wear orange to avoid becoming a target in the future. The alleged victim conceded that the shooter had a point about his target practice attire, but reported the incident to Lewis and Clark County police the following day anyway. Sheriff Leo Dutton then relayed his story to local media. Dutton said local authorities are now looking for leads in identifying the man in the black pickup, but added that 'there was some question about the veracity of the report', in part because it was delayed an entire day. Police checked the area where the shooting allegedly took place but didn't find the truck, according to ABC Fox Montana. The man reportedly couldn't describe his alleged shooter and said he didn't want to pursue charges or speak with deputies, Dutton said. However, after reports of the alleged shooting appeared in local news outlets, another woman came forward with a similar story, potentially corroborating the man's account. The woman, who has also not been named, told authorities that she had been shot by a man in a black F-150, whom she also confronted. She was able to provide police with a better description of the alleged shooter but did not make any mention of Bigfoot in her report. Dutton said an investigation is underway and that if the reports turn out to be true, the shooter could face charges of attempted negligent homicide. 'It is of great concern that this individual might think its okay to shoot at anything he thinks is Bigfoot,' Dutton said. The police chief said he does not believe the public is in danger because the activity seems to be localized to the North Hills near Helena. There are a number of alleged Bigfoot sightings in the US every year as some 16 percent of Americans believe the furry humanoid creature is real despite a lack of categorical evidence. Earlier this year, one woman went so far as to sue the state of California to get it to recognize the legends as an actual species so it could be protected. That suit was dismissed on the grounds of noncompliance, but the woman vowed to rewrite and refile the suite after consulting with attorneys. Police are hunting a 'racist' man who posed as a makeup artist and caked an Asian customer's face white before fleeing the shop when staff spotted him. Tony Brown, CEO of Beales in Bournemouth, Dorset, said he was shocked by the racially-aggravated assault and that he had never heard of anything like it before. The Indonesian woman in her 50s was approached by a man at the store's MAC make-up counter and was offered a free makeover at around 3pm on December 9. Police have appealed for information which leads to this man, who is wanted in connection with the racially-aggravated assault Believing the man to be a member of staff, the victim accepted to have her face 'roughly caked' in the pale foundation. When staff noticed what was happening they approached the man and he ran off. The victim was left with irritation and redness to her face. Mr Brown said: 'I have been in retail more years than I like to admit and I have never heard of anything like this before. 'This is something you really can't legislate for. As soon as the staff saw what was going on they approached the man and he left the store. 'They then looked after the victim as well as they could and the police were called. It was a bizarre occurrence.' The victim, who lives in Bournemouth, was said to be 'very upset' by the incident. Police have released CCTV images of a suspect but have yet to identify him. The suspect appears to be in his 20s and has short brown hair and stubble. He was wearing a black top and coat and blue jeans at the time of the incident. The incident took place on the ground foor of Beales department store in Bournemouth, Dorset Police are appealing for information about the incident, which took place in front of other shoppers on the ground floor. Police Constable Alex Knapp, of Bournemouth police, said: 'The victim is understandably very upset by the incident. 'I would ask that anyone with information, or who can identify the man pictured, contacts Dorset Police. 'We take hate crime very seriously and we are carrying out a full investigation to identify the man responsible.' Anyone with any information about the incident should contact Dorset Police or Crimestoppers. Donald Trump's attorney Rudy Giuliani was forced Wednesday into an embarrassing admission that he was wrong to say the president had not signed a letter of intent to build a Trump Tower Moscow during the presidential campaign. The ex-New York mayor admitted to Reuters that he had 'made a mistake' by denying on CNN on Sunday that a signed letter of intent existed. CNN published the letter late Tuesday and showed it was dated October 28, 2015, prompting the climbdown by Giuliani, the latest example of him saying he misspoke while defending the president on television. 'If I said it, I made a mistake,' Giuliani said of his previous denial about Trump having signed the letter. 'There's nothing wrong with his signing it. When he did it, he wasn't president yet.' The letter was also signed by Andrey Rozov, who owns Russia-based I.C. Expert Investment Co. The White House did not respond to a request for comment. Giuliani had said in a Sunday interview on CNN that the letter existed but 'no one' had signed it. The president's attorney Rudy Giuliani admitted late Tuesday that Donald Trump did sign a letter of intent to build one of his signature tower in Moscow after documentary evidence surfaced that conflicted with his previous claims Cornered, Giuliani said the letter was 'bulls***' because it never went anywhere President Donald Trump signed a letter of intent (pictured) to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, CNN anchor Chris Cuomo revealed on Tuesday night The signed letter that's dated October 28, 2015 outlined plans for a Trump hotel, as well as condominiums and commercial property in Moscow That fell apart in public on Tuesday when CNN's Chris Cuomo's obtained a copy of the signed letter and showed viewers during his 9 p.m. show. 'It is signed by Donald J. Trump,' Cuomo told viewers. 'How do I know it was? Because we've been told by his lawyer, and it is.' Cornered, Giuliani said the letter was 'bulls***' because it never went anywhere. 'That was the end of it,' Giuliani told the New York Daily News on Tuesday evening. 'It means nothing but an expression of interest that means very little unless it goes to a contract and it never did.' He also seemed to 'forget' what he'd told CNN on Sunday, because the Trump attorney also said, 'I don't think I said nobody signed it.' The signed letter that's dated October 28, 2015 outlined plans for a Trump hotel, as well as condominiums and commercial property in Moscow, complete with an Ivanka Trump-branded spa. It revealed that the project would have given Trump's company a '$4 million upfront fee, no upfront costs, a percentage of the sales, and control over marketing and design', according to documents published by CNN. 'For a deal that didn't mean anything, it's a lot of pages, man,' Cuomo said. 'With a lot of detail about what they wanted and how they wanted it and how he would be paid.' 'And there's his signature,' he declared, holding up final page of the letter that bears Trump's signature so that the camera could capture it. While campaigning for the presidency in 2016, Trump repeatedly claimed he had nothing to do with Vladimir Putin or Russia. It has since emerged that he was pursuing a Trump Tower project there as late as the general election. Trump told DailyMail.com on Nov. 29 that he couldn't remember when he put a halt to the conversation, he was busy running for president at the time, but it was sometime before he was elected. The president mentioned 'a form' that was put forward, which seems to refer to the letter of intent, as he spoke to reporters congregated at the White House, and said his interest 'lasted a short period of time' in the tower that was 'an option' and he ultimately decided against. 'I didn't do the project. I decided not to do the project. So I didn't do it. So we're not talking about doing a project; we're talking about not doing a project,' he asserted. The deal also said that Trump would be able to name the hotel spa after his daughter Ivanka Giuliani acknowledged on Sunday that Trump had worked with his former attorney Michael Cohen on the project for longer than previously indicated. He indicated that Trump said in his written responses to questions from special counsel Robert Mueller that the talks may have continued late into the 2016 election. 'According to the answer that he gave, it would have covered all the way up to November of 2016,' Giuliani said on ABC's 'This Week' program. He told CNN's Dana Bash that same day: 'It was a real estate project. There was a letter of intent to go forward, but no one signed it.' Trump's attorney Michael Cohen leaded guilty to lying to Congress about plans to build a Trump property in Moscow last month Last month, Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about plans to build a Trump property in Moscow. He originally told a Senate committee that the project was dropped in January 2016 yet later admitted that was untrue and he had continued to pursue the matter until June 2016. Giuliani revealed last week that Trump told Mueller's team he spoke to Cohen about the project but did not specify exactly when those conversations took place. The former New York City mayor said the president doesn't remember when the conversations took place but is safe in what he told the special counsel because he said the discussions happened sometime during the 2016 campaign. Those conversations could have been in June or July of 2016, Giuliani noted. 'Up until November 2016, they could have had a conversation about Trump Tower Moscow, and it went nowhere,' he told CNN. Cohen told prosecutors he considered going to Moscow himself and that he raised the possibility of Trump going there during the general election campaign to seal the deal. He said he personally briefed Trump about Trump Tower Moscow on several occasions, as well as Trump family members. Last week, a judge sentenced Cohen to three years in prison stemming from federal charges of tax fraud and bank fraud, and campaign finance violations. Presenting the letter of intent on Tuesday, Cuomo noted it's not Cohen's name that is on documents it's Donald Trump's. 'Here's the letter. Cohen didn't sign it. The president did,' he said, holding it up. Giuliani told the Daily News after the primetime program that Trump had 'of course' signed the letter of intent, adding, 'How could you send it but nobody signed it?' A female gym teacher in Iowa was arrested for being drunk on the job with a blood alcohol content level of .224 on Monday. Erin Ellerbach, 38, was arrested after conducting a breath test at the Dubuque middle school, according to court documents. The educator, who has now been fired, taught physical education at Jefferson Middle School. Erin Ellerbach, 38, was arrested on Monday afternoon after conducting a breath test at the Dubuque middle school The former educator taught physical education at Jefferson Middle School Just before 2.15pm, minutes before students were released, administrators called police and informed them that there was an intoxicated person on the facilities. School officials found a 16oz can of Mike's Harder Strawberry Lemonade that was open Officers reported that the teacher showed several signs of intoxication before her test yielded results of .224, KDTH reports. Ellerbach - who appears to have two children on social media - was said to have reeked of booze and had slurred speech along with irritated eyes. School officials found a 16oz can of Mike's Harder Strawberry Lemonade that was open. Two closed cans were also found in the woman's office. The popular alcoholic beverage contains eight per cent of alcohol. Ellerbach was charged with Public Intoxication. She was placed on leave but has since been fired from the district. MSNBC's Chris Matthews predicted on Monday that Donald Trump could resign soon as part of a deal with special counsel Robert Mueller in a bid to spare his family from prosecution. 'The president's children stand right in the line of Mueller's investigative progress,' Matthews said on Hardball, referring to Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr. 'They stand as the next dominoes to fall. Therein lies the problem, where earlier Mueller subjects have given [President] Trump up, these two lack the option to do that. MSNBC's Chris Matthews (pictured) predicted on Monday that Donald Trump could resign soon as part of a deal with special counsel Robert Mueller in a bid to spare his family from prosecution Matthews said the president may consider striking a deal with Mueller's team to avoid prosecution for himself, Ivanka and Trump Jr (all pictured). That deal would see the president resigning from office Matthews said Ivanka and Trump Jr can 'hardly testify against their father', adding that if Mueller 'will not be stopped and the kids will not fall to him, we see the president's adult children heading to prison'. However, the host said that may not happen if the president strikes a deal with Mueller. 'But what if the prosecutor were to offer the president an alternative?' Matthews said. 'What if he were to say he would let the children walk if the old man does the same? That would mean giving up the presidency in exchange for acquittals all around not just for himself, but for all his kids,' he added. Matthews even highlighted the resignation of former Vice President Spiro Agnew in 1973. Agnew struck a deal with prosecutors in order to avoid prison time for tax evasion. 'Leverage the office while you still have it. So let's watch the probable events of the coming weeks bring all this to a breaking point,' Matthews said. 'It is going to be historic.' Since Mueller began his investigation into Russian election interference and any possible collusion with the Trump campaign, 33 individuals and entities have been criminally indicted. Since special counsel Robert Mueller (pictured) began his investigation into Russian election interference and any possible collusion with the Trump campaign, 33 individuals and entities have been criminally indicted Last Tuesday, a judge agreed to delay Trump's former national security chief Michael Flynn's (right) sentencing for lying over secret communications with Russian officials. And last week, Trump's former lawyer, Michael Cohen (left), was sentenced to three years in prison Last Tuesday, Judge Emmet Sullivan agreed to delay Trump's former national security chief Michael Flynn's sentencing for lying over secret communications with Russian officials. Sullivan said Flynn had behaved in a 'traitorous' manner while he was in the White House in early 2017 and threatened to impose a stiff prison sentence, rejecting a recommendation by prosecutors that the retired three-star general benefit from cooperating and receive no jail time. But the judge gave Flynn the option to delay his sentencing, to better demonstrate why he merited a light punishment. 'I want to be frank with you, this crime is very serious,' Sullivan said. 'I'm not hiding my disgust, my disdain.' 'Arguably, you sold your country out,' he added. Last week, Trump's former lawyer, Michael Cohen, was sentenced to three years in prison for crimes that included arranging payments during the 2016 election to silence women who claimed affairs with Trump. A Florida Air Force veteran has raised nearly $1million to build President Donald Trump's promised border wall. Triple amputee Brian Kolfage, 37, created the GoFundMe account on Sunday titled We The People Will Fund The Wall, and in three days has already raised over $900,000 of its $1billion goal. 'It's up to Americans to help out and pitch in to get this project rolling,' the page reads. 'If the 63 million people who voted for Trump each pledge $80, we can build the wall.' Trump is demanding $5billion to build the southern border wall with Mexico, and is threatening to shut down the government if he can't get the funding. A GoFundMe page titled We The People will Fund The Wall was created Sunday and in three days it has already raised over $900,000 of its $1billion goal Purple Heart recipient Brian Kolfage, 37, created the page and said: 'Its up to Americans to help out and pitch in to get this project rolling' Kolfage is a triple amputee who created the GoFundMe page Sunday The fundraising page says it has contacted the Trump Administration to secure a point of contact where all the funds will go, but adds it has 'many very high level contacts already helping'. 'As a veteran who has given so much, 3 limbs, I feel deeply invested to this nation to ensure future generations have everything we have today,' the page says, elaborating on Kolfage's history as a Purple Heart Medal recipient. The married father-of-two lost both legs and his right arm in a 2004 insurgent attack in Iraq. 'Too many Americans have been murdered by illegal aliens and too many illegals are taking advantage of the United States taxpayers with no means of ever contributing to our society,' it continues. Kolfage says his grandparents immigrated to the US legally, adding, 'they did it the correct way and it's time we uphold our laws and get this wall BUILT!' 'Its up to Americans to help out and pitch in to get this project rolling,' the page says. Meanwhile, President Trump on Wednesday claimed the military would build his border wall and Mexico would pay for it - indirectly under the new trade agreement. The married Florida father-of-two lost both legs and his arm in 2004 insurgent attack in Iraq Trump said Wednesday the new trade deal means Mexico will pay for his wall 'Mexico is paying (indirectly) for the Wall through the new USMCA, the replacement for NAFTA! Far more money coming to the U.S. Because of the tremendous dangers at the Border, including large scale criminal and drug inflow, the United States Military will build the Wall!,' he tweeted. His declaration comes after the White House ditched its demand for $5 billion in funding for the border wall amid negotiations to keep the government open. Trump also vowed on Wednesday he 'will win on the wall' after the White House signaled it was ditching its demand for $5 billion in funding for his signature issue. 'One way or the other, we will win on the Wall!,' Trump tweeted on Wednesday morning as the clock ticked toward Friday's partial government shutdown. White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said Tuesday the administration's legal team was looking into whether the White House could redirect funds to build the border wall. An innovative busker has found a clever way to get past the cashless society he claims is ruining the industry. Peter Clayton from Adelaide sings and plays the guitar on the street for donations from strangers, but says people having no cash is hurting his passion. 'It's not just metalking to other buskers it just feels like the cashless society is starting to bite,' he told Seven News. Peter Clayton from Adelaide sings and plays the guitar to anyone who would enjoy listening to him but said people having no cash is hurting his passion. Following a trial in Melbourne where buskers began using EFTPOS machines to accept payments, Mr Clayton decided to trial it for himself. In hopes of inspiring passerbys to support him, Mr Clayton places some of his own coins into his guitar case. 'There's nothing worse than staring into an empty case,' he said. Skyla Morgan, another busker on the streets of Adelaide, told the publication that their experiences are starting to feel empty because of the lack of cash. Following a trial in Melbourne where buskers began using EFTPOS machines to accept payments, Mr Clayton decided to trial it for himself. 'If someone wants to give me something, hopefully after I finish the song, (I) enter an amount on the phone, and they just payWave,' he said. Mr Clayton hopes other buskers would pick up the trend to help them with their passion for busking. An innocent Kansas dad freed from jail after serving 17 years for a robbery he didn't commit is set to get $1.1million in compensation after supporters argued a doppelganger with a similar name could have been to blame. Richard Anthony Jones, 42, was jailed in 1999 for the robbery in the parking lot of a Walmart in Roeland Park, Kansas, based on an eyewitness account. He was freed last year when a judge ordered his release after supporters found evidence that another man, Ricky Amos, who looked just like him lived near the Walmart. An attorney on the case said: 'Everybody has a doppelganger. Luckily we found his.' Richard Anthony Jones from Kansas City, Kansas, pictured right, was released after he spent 17 years in prison because police found his lookalike, Ricky Amos, left A judge ordered his release because there was no evidence linking him to the crime and the victims concluded they couldn't tell Richard, right, from Ricky, left No physical, DNA or fingerprint evidence that tied him to the crime and Jones, who always maintained his innocence and said he was at his girlfriend's house at the time. Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt said: 'We are committed to faithfully administering the new mistaken-conviction statute the legislature enacted. 'In this case, it was possible on the existing record to resolve all issues quickly, satisfy all of the statute's requirements, and agree to this outcome so Mr. Jones can receive the benefits to which he is entitled by law because he was mistakenly convicted.' Tricia Bushnell, the executive director of the Midwest Innocence Project, which helped represent Jones, said: 'We are absolutely very happy by the result. 'This is why we've all worked so hard to get compensation in the state of Kansas. This will allow Richard to start to rebuild his life after the years that were taken, and that means a lot.' Amos said at the hearing that he did not commit the robbery and the statute of limitations on the crime has passed which means he cannot be prosecuted. Jones is now back with friends and family and will receive $1.1 million compensation Jones reached a settlement under a law providing compensation to people wrongly imprisoned. He is pictured shortly after his release At his new trial Jones' lawyers argued that the lineup, pictured, of suspects presented to the victims at the time was 'highly suggestive' His defence team presented the other man at a June 2017 hearing and after the victim and witnesses withdrew their identification of Jones, Johnson County District Judge Kevin Moriarty ordered Jones' release. The lineup police had put forward to the victims 17 years ago was 'highly suggestive' Jones's lawyers argued because he was the only who resembled the criminal they described. Amos testified at the hearing that he did not commit the robbery and while not saying he had committed the crime, Moriarty found that no reasonable juror would have convicted Jones. Under the settlement, Jones was granted a certificate of innocence and will receive counseling and health care through the state for two years. The settlement requires final approval by a state council. Schmidt said Jones is the first person to agree to a settlement payout under a new state law that provides compensation to people who are wrongly imprisoned. Two other mistaken conviction lawsuits are pending in Kansas. Joy Collins, 44, has been charged with child neglect likely to cause great bodily injury or death and trespassing A California mom accused of ordering her eight-year-old daughter to crawl under a train so they wouldn't miss their bus has been charged over the girl's death. Joy Collins, 44, of Fresno, is said to have yelled 'hurry up' at 'reluctant' Joyanna Harris to cross underneath the stationary freight. Collins had already passed with her older son, nine, but as little Joyanna made her way under the mile long train it began to move, police say. Fresno Police Chief Jerry Dyer said the youngster got stuck and was dragged about 500 feet after the train stopped for just 12 seconds. She was dead after suffering traumatic injuries and was partially dismembered when officers arrived on the scene on Monday, Your Central Valley reports. Police say Collins had forced her children to make the same dangerous crossing at the BNSF tracks at Diana and Belmont in Central Fresno at least seven times before. Collins was arrested on suspicion of child neglect likely to cause great bodily injury or death, as well as trespassing. Police Chief Dyer said Collins told her children that they had to 'hurry or they would miss the bus', KTLA reports. Joy Collins, 44, of Fresno, is said to have yelled 'hurry up' at 'reluctant' Joyanna Harris, pictured right, to cross underneath the stationary freight Joyanna was dead after suffering traumatic injuries and was partially dismembered when officers arrived on the scene on Monday Police said Collins told her children that they had to 'hurry or they would miss the bus' Joyanna got stuck and was dragged about 500 feet after the train stopped for just 12 seconds Dyer said: 'The mother then told the nine-year-old son to cross the railroad track. The son then crawled underneath one of the rail cars to get over to the west side. 'Upon being encouraged by the mother to cross the track, she too made her way underneath the rail car and attempted to get to the other side. 'A mother placed her daughter in a position where she could be seriously injured or killed, and that's what we have to look at. 'We have a responsibility to hold that person accountable.No one last night wanted to arrest the mother for this crime, but the law is the law. She placed her child in grave danger.' The freight train stopped for just 12 seconds and was up to a mile long ABC30 reports Collins had previously been contacted by the Department of Child Protective Services and her son is currently in their care. Crista Miller, who lives nearby, told Your Central Valley: 'I heard the little girl say 'mom mom', then I heard the train start up and I told my boyfriend to go help because there was a kid under the train. 'This is awful, this is terrible it's the worse thing I've ever seen in my life and I'm probably not going to be able to get the images out of my head.' After several deadly California wildfires ravaged the state destroying more than 250,000 acres of land and killing at least 90 people state-wide, officials are suggesting banning people from living in fire-prone areas. California's top firefighter Ken Pimlott says that the government and citizens must act now to protect their lives and property from future infernos that will inevitably set the state ablaze once again. Pimlott, the Director of the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, is offering one final warning to his golden state neighbors before retiring from the agency this Friday, ending his 30-year career. He suggests the government should ban home construction in vulnerable areas including subdivisions in thickly forested mountainous areas or Southern California canyons surrounded by tinder-dry chaparral. California's top firefighter Ken Pimlott says the local government should ban citizens from living in fire-prone areas after the state was devastated by the vicious Camp Fire and Woolsey Fire this year He suggests the government should ban home construction in vulnerable areas including thickly forested mountainous areas or Southern California canyons. Medical personnel pictured above evacuating patients from Paradise on November 8 However, achieving such bans will be a tough feat as people continue to flock to California, where the population has doubled since 1970 to nearly 40million people. The severe housing shortage has pushed construction to rural areas, despite the threat of potential fire. Despite the devastating Camp Fire in Butte County and the Woolsey Fire near Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County supervisors approved a massive rural housing development on Tuesday. Developers say that the giant 19,000 home community will be prepared for future fires. The development, set to be located in the rugged mountains 65 miles north of downtown Los Angeles - a 'very high' fire hazard zone - will be built with anti-ember construction and buffers around homes. It will also include four new fire stations and roads wide enough for people to evacuate. Pimlott says that if housing communities aren't banned in fire zones, then they have to buckle down and fireproof construction to stand against not just fires but earthquakes, hurricanes and tornadoes too. Ken Pimlott, the director of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, offered state officials a final warning to ban people from living in fire-prone areas Pimlott said 'we owe it' to homeowners, firefighters, and communities 'so that they don't have to keep going through what we're going through'. A plane pictured above dropping fire retardant on homes in Lake Elsinore, California on August 8 The deadly Camp Fire killed 85 people and burning 14,000 homes to the ground, aerial footage of a burned neighborhood in Paradise pictured above on November 15 Commercial and public buildings should also be built strong enough to withstand fires and be a shelter for hundreds when fires spark. California is already home to the nation's most robust building requirement programs for new homes in fire-prone areas. Now it's up to local land managers or state level legislators to crack down and ban construction in vulnerable areas. Pimlott said 'we owe it' to homeowners, firefighters, and communities 'so that they don't have to keep going through what we're going through'. 'We've got to continue to raise the bar on what we're doing and local land-use planning decisions have to be part of that discussion,' he said to AP. This year has been an incredibly difficult one for California. After two years of drought, much of the state's forests and mountains went up in flames. This year's wildfires have been the deadliest in a century for the state of California. Embers pictured above in the Delta Fire on September 6 November's fire in the northern California town of Paradise was the deadliest in U.S. in a century, killing 85 people and burning 14,000 homes to the ground. In 2017 a fire ripped through Santa Rosa in the San Francisco Bay Area killing 22 people and destroying more than 5,000 structures. Pimlott says the vicious fires in California have continued to defy prediction since 2013. Each year the fires have gotten worse and more intense - driven by dry forests and climate change. While the future of California's construction laws remains up in the air, the state is doing more to eliminate brush and dead trees that serve as fuels for wildfires. The state will also add seven large firefighting aircrafts and replace a dozen old helicopters. Firefighters will also be provided with counseling and enough vacation time for medical check-ups to cope with the mental and physical stress of fire season. Islamic State militants have executed nearly 700 prisoners in the last two months in eastern Syria, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The UK-based war monitoring group said the executed were among 1,350 civilians and fighters that the jihadists had been holding in territory near the Iraqi border. The terror group control a shrinking strip of land east of the Syria's Euphrates River around the town of Hajin, which US-backed forces took last week. Last week ISIS' largest remaining fortification at Hajin was seized by US-backed militia as 900 jihadist fighters were decimated in battle. Scroll down for video Members of the Islamic State group brandish flags proudly in Raqqa in 2014; the group have now been forced into an ever diminishing corridor to the east of the Euphrates A map showing the south east of Syria, where ISIS have been pushed into a narrow corridor east of the Euphrates where one of their last strongholds, Hajin, was taken by US-backed militia on December 14; a pocket of desert territory to the west still remains under jihadist control A picture from Twitter purportedly shows an airstrike raining down on the ISIS held town of Hajin before its capture on December 14 The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), led by the Kurdish YPG militia, has battled Islamic State around Hajin for months with support from US air superiority and special forces. SDF commander-in-chief Mazloum Kobani said last week that at least 5,000 IS fighters remain holed up in the enclave, including many foreigners who will fight to the death. Kobani was speaking just before the successful capture of Hajin, east of the Euphrates on December 14. Mazloum Kobani, SDF commander in chief, said last week 5,000 ISIS fighters still remained in the diminishing territory, which included Hajin, where 900 were said to have fought to the death on December 14 Donald Trump speaking last week, he said: 'We've done a very, very major job on ISIS,' and claimed they would be utterly routed within the next 30 days This was the last big town held by the terrorists before 17,000 troops from the SDF alliance began their operation in September. According to Abdel Rahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, at least 900 jihadists and 500 SDF fighters were killed in the battle for Hajin. Last Tuesday US President Donald Trump predicted the jihadist group would be fully defeated within a month. 'We've done a very, very major job on ISIS,' he said . 'There are very few of them left in that area of the world. And within another 30 days, there won't be any of them left.' Islamic State's self-proclaimed caliphate has crumbled after different offensives across Iraq and Syria, though its fighters still operate in the desert border region and mount attacks. They were driven from nearly all their former territory in Syria last year in separate campaigns waged by the US-backed SDF on the one hand, and the Russian-backed Syrian government on the other. A 22-year-old cruise ship passenger named Luke who has been missing aboard the Carnival Fantasy since Sunday night has been pictured (above) as officials continue extensive search efforts Photographs have emerged of a 22-year-old man who has been missing aboard the Carnival Fantasy cruise ship for three days. The man, identified as 'Luke', boarded the Mexico-bound ship on Saturday at the Port of Mobile in Alabama with a group of nine people and three chaperones. The chaperones told officials that Luke, who has special needs, ran off on Sunday night and hasn't been seen since. An extensive search has been carried out by the boat crew, the Mexican Navy and a canine team, but officials say there is still no sign of the missing passenger. He has also not been spotted during multiple reviews of surveillance footage. Luke was pictured in the media for the first time on Tuesday evening after the ship docked in Cozumel, Mexico. His information was shared on the Facebook group 'Cruise Cargo Life', where one commenter who claimed to know Luke posted a photo of him with additional details. 'Here's another photo of Luke taken about a week ago. Please share and keep your eyes open for this young man,' Tanessa Schulman wrote. 'He's autistic and hasn't had his meds since he went missing. He's probably frightened/disoriented (assuming he's hiding). 'His friends and family back home are heartbroken. Thanks for your search and prayers!' A fellow passenger on board the Carnival Fantasy shared a photo of a flyer posted around the ship asking for information about Luke's whereabouts. The ship departed from the Port of Mobile in Alabama on Saturday and docked in Cozumel, Mexico, on Tuesday Officials say Luke, who reportedly has special needs, was with a group of nine people and three chaperones. The chaperones said he ran off on Sunday night and hasn't been seen since The Carnival Fantasy cruiseliner is seen docked at the Port of Mobile in Alabama (stock image) In a statement made to Fox News on Monday, Carnival said: '[The passenger] is part of an organized group of nine traveling with three chaperones, and was last seen in his stateroom. 'He ran without warning out of the stateroom, and after his chaperone was unsuccessful in locating him, the chaperone notified the ship's crew,' the cruise line said in a statement to Fox News. Carnival has not announced plans to shorten or stop the cruise. 'While the onboard search continues, we have activated our CareTeam to provide support to the guest's family and traveling companions. Our dual focus remains on locating the guest, and supporting his family, as well as his traveling companions,' Carnival said. An extensive search has been carried out by the boat crew, the Mexican Navy and a canine team, but officials say there is still no sign of the missing passenger Parts of the Carnival Fantasy ship have been roped off (pictured) as the investigation continues Luke was reported missing the same day the US Coast Guard called off a search Sunday for 26-year-old Carnival Victory cruise ship passenger Thomas McElhany. McElhany was filmed going overboard about 35 miles off Islamorada in the Florida Keys on Friday. The Coast Guard said its helicopters, planes, and cutters covered nearly 2,100 square miles during the 32 hours that crews searched for Thomas McElhany. This comes after the US Coast Guard ended its search Sunday for Thomas McElhany, 26, (pictured) who was reported overboard early on Friday morning from the Carnival Victory cruise ship off the coast of Florida 'He didn't fall. According to authorities, it was an intentional act,' Kimberly Wyatt, a news director who happened to be on board the cruise ship, said of McElhany. Passengers aboard the Carnival Victory ship were alerted that a passenger was missing at around 3am Eastern on Friday, according to people who were on board the ship. 'We were woken up by the public announcement system paging an individual a bit after 3am,' a passenger identified on Twitter as Diana Jorio tweeted. 'It was determined he went overboard at 5.30am and 6am we turned around. I was such a sad way to end an otherwise wonderful trip.' A photo of McElhany was shown on televisions all over the cruise ship. A letter signed by Captain Roberto Tine was delivered to each guest's cabin on Friday, confirming that the man was shown on camera going overboard. It added that the ship's CareTeam had been assisting the man's family on board and thanked guests for their patience. 'Please continue to keep our guest and his family in our thoughts and prayers,' it read. The Carnival Victory cruise ship (pictured) was about 35 miles away from Islamorada in the Florida Keys when McElhany is believed to have gone overboard A Scottish expat was shot and killed on her own doorstep in America just two weeks after moving in. Elizabeth Peterson, 64, known to pals by her maiden name Liz Sutherland, was found dead outside her home in Birmingham, Alabama on Saturday night. Police said she died as a result of a single gunshot wound but added no suspects were in custody. Liz Sutherland (pictured right with her older sister Morag Sutherland Donlevy) was shot on the doorstep of her home in Birmingham, Alabama on Saturday night The 64-year-old formerly from Port Glasgow had only moved into the apartment two weeks earlier, friends said She moved into the apartment following a recent break-up with her American husband, who she married four years ago, it was reported. Detectives in Alabama are investigating the shooting as Ms Sutherland got out of her car at around 10.15pm on Saturday. Officers were called after witnesses heard a woman screaming in a car park and found Ms Sutherland lying on the ground there. Police continue to attempt to establish a motive behind the cold-blooded killing. Ms Sutherland, who was originally from Port Glasgow, had moved into her apartment only two weeks before her death, according to reports in America. Witnesses were said to have heard shouting and gunfire in Southside area of the city. Ms Sutherland had recently separated from husband Edward Peterson, who she married in 2014 Friends and family paid tribute to a 'loving soul' who brought 'infectious joy' to the room. Friends and family paid tribute to a 'loving soul' who brought 'infectious joy' to the room. Writing on Facebook, Ms Sutherland's older sister Morag Sutherland Donlevy, said: 'I read and re-read all the lovely condolences for Elizabeth and I cannot fathom the entire thing. 'My mind wanders to an image that I do not want to see. 'We believe in the hereafter and I know for sure my sister did. 'So, in that respect she is safe in the arms of the angels. For me, I am a blank right now.' Ms Sutherland had recently separated from husband Edward Peterson, who she married in 2014. Friends said she worked at Children's of Alabama and was studying for a degree in social work. Mrs Donlevy, 73, described it as a 'tragedy' and said the killer was 'a maniac'. Posting a childhood snap online when the sisters were aged 19 and 10, she wrote: 'Back in the day I took her everywhere with me. I shopped for her, slept with her and listened to her wee tales. 'She loved to dress-up. She would take mammy's lace curtains off the window to play bride. Friends and family were left devastated by her death describing her as a 'beautiful friend' (Ms Sutherland pictured) 'She could put her hands to anything - knit, sew, crafts, make draperies, blinds and even cook. 'That is the life this maniac destroyed. 'I hold tightly to the fact that she is the winner in the end as she is finished with this cruel world. 'Her soul lives on. Rest in Peace wee sis.' Friend Allison Phillips said she was devastated at lost a 'beautiful friend, full of life'. She added: 'Our hearts are absolutely broken beyond belief. She loved everyone and was always willing to help anyone. 'I am still in shock that i wont see her on Christmas.' A spokesman for Birmingham Police Department said in a statement: 'No suspects are in custody. Investigators delayed the release of information on this investigation to pursue possible leads that were developing. 'Additional information will be released as it becomes available.' An Arizona husband told police he struck his wife on the head with a wrench and then strangled her with a belt on Monday because her medical needs following a stroke became a financial burden on the family. Jonathan Conaway, 45, from Phoenix had lost his job recently, and said he decided to kill his wife Janice, 43, so that their two young boys would not have to take care of her, KPNX News reported. Court documents show that Conaway admitted that the couple 'had been having problems since they were married 14 years ago,' and that 'the money problems became worse when Jonathan lost his job two weeks ago.' Jonathan Conaway (left) claims to have murdered his wife Janice Conaway (right) by striking her with a wrench to the head and then strangling her with a belt He admitted killing her while the children were at school. After he hit her on the head with the wrench to stun her, Jonathan strangled her with a belt, eventually shining a light in her eyes to confirm she was dead. Jonathan then called the police just after 9am, told them that his wife was dead and then hung up the phone. Police found her body on the couch with noticeable head trauma. Following his arrest, the Conaways' two young boys were taken into the state's care, according to KPNX News. Jonathan Conaway claims he murdered his wife because of the financial burden on the family following her stroke and the loss of his job according to court documents When police arrived at the Conaways' home, Jonathan admitted to kill Janice whose body was found on the couch with noticeable trauma to the head Jonathan also claims that he and Janice were having problems ever since they were married 14 years ago The 45-year-old remains in jail on $1 million bond on a first-degree murder charge, according to Fox 10 Phoenix. Jonathan Conaway was most recently employed as a cloud engineer with Lumen21, a cloud infrastructure and services company, according to his social media profile. Janice was employed as campus assistant with the Paradise Valley Unified School District, who released a statement regarding her death. 'PVSchools is deeply saddened to learn that Janice Conaway, a beloved campus assistant, has passed away. Naturally, this loss within our community impacts our families, students, and staff. Our thoughts are with her family and friends.' Jonathan Conaway is being held on $1 million bond on the charge of first degree murder A reporter with a local Honduran television network had her cell phone stolen during a live broadcast in a shameless mugging caught on camera. Fany Fuentes was conducting a segment for a show on LTV on Tuesday afternoon when two young men slowly approached from behind while she was talking to a woman. An unnamed suspect swiped her phone from her left hand and ran off, leaving his cohort behind in the middle of a shopping center in the capital city of Tegucigalpa. Fany Fuentes, a reporter for local Honduran network LTV, was conducting a live interview Tuesday when her cell phone was stolen One of the thieves (left) looked at his cell phone before the television reporter's phone was stolen by his criminal partner Fuentes (wearing yellow coat) approached one of the two suspects (center) while the main culprit tried to flee the scene The accomplice stood near the scene of the crime and tried to distract Fuentes as he walked by her side looking at his cell phone. Fuentes, 23, sought assistance from a cop who was standing near the spot where the live segment for 'Arroz con Mango' [Rice with Mango] was being filmed. The uniformed cop gave chase to the suspect before the thug ran directly into an unit of patrol police officers standing outside a clothing store. Incredibly, the prime suspect was under arrest within 20 seconds of committing the crime. A team of Honduran police officers detain the young man who is accused of stealing a local reporter's phone while a live interview was being filmed The reporter is then seen running towards the cop as her camera operator trails her while she narrates the alarming incident. She then took her smartphone back while the cops placed the suspect in handcuffs. 'He grabbed it from me,' Fuentes said while still on-air as the cops led the young man away. President Donald Trump declared victory over ISIS in Syria on Wednesday, as the Pentagon made preparations for an immediate troop withdrawal. 'We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency,' the president wrote on Twitter. The announcement came under immediate scrutiny, as policymakers admitted they had been blindsided and worried that Trump was making a monumental misstep. Allies of the president on Capitol Hill called it a 'huge Obama-like mistake' and 'great disservice' to the nation. One GOP congressman said he was 'speechless' and that Iran and Russia are probably 'cheering.' The White House launched a defense of the policy on a conference call on Wednesday afternoon with reporters in which a senior administration official claimed that no one should be 'surprised' by the announcement, because Trump has been saying he wants to get out of Syria since he was a candidate. President Donald Trump declared a victory in Syria in the U.S. campaign against ISIS as the military prepares for a total pullout After declaring victory on Twitter, President Trump, who had no public schedule Wednesday, released a video from the White House where he said: 'We have beaten them and we've beaten them badly. We've taken back the land.' Yet, the same official could not offer a timeline for the troops are actually leaving, saying it was was still under design by the Pentagon. 'It's not that I'm not telling you, it's that I don't know, quite frankly,' the senior official said. The person directed all questions of that nature to the Department of Defense. Trump declared victory in Syria over ISIS on Wednesday morning in a surprise announcement that the U.S. was pulling troops out of the region GOP lawmakers were miffed that Trump declared victory against ISIS over Twitter before they had been notified of his intent to withdraw troops. Vice President Mike Pence just happened to be on Capitol Hill for a weekly meeting with Republican senators on Tuesday and took the brunt of the criticism behind closed doors, CNN reported. 'It doesnt feel to me there was any inter-agency process,' Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Corker said of the conversation with the vice president. 'Im not sure even the principles knew.' Corker suggested that Trump just 'woke up' and decided to make the policy announcement. He told reporters at the Capitol hours later that he was at the White House for a planned meeting with Trump when the president, who has not been seen all day, cancelled on him. The Tennessee Republican is leaving Congress for good at the end of this year and is effectively a lame duck. His complaints were shared by other lawmakers, however, who begged Trump to rethink his position. Texas Sen. John Cornyn, the GOP whip, said it was a 'mistake' to leave Syria and the matter would most certainly be investigated by the upper chamber. 'I think the first mistake was to surprise Members of Congress. Nobody likes to be surprised,' he told CNN. Graham also chided Trump for announcing the withdrawal on Twitter. In a tweet, he said, 'Withdrawal of this small American force in Syria would be a huge Obama-like mistake.' 'This is the role of the Congress. To make administrations explain their policy, not in a tweet, but before Congress answering questions,' he told reporters later. Graham said he was 'annoyed' and pledged 'aggressive' oversight of the move. Sen. Marco Rubio likewise said the withdrawal is a 'great disservice' to the nation and a 'big mistake' that invites 'America's adversaries America is an unreliable partner.' 'Todays decision will lead to grave consequences in the months and years to come,' the Republican senator cautioned. A senior administration official refused to get into the details of the 'deliberative process' a short time after on a call with reporters during which the White House said that National Security Advisor John Bolton had been calling lawmakers all day. 'He's very committed to keeping them informed,' the senior official said. The official was left exposed on the call when a reporter brought up Bolton's September claim that the U.S. would not leave Syria until Iran's military and its proxies do. 'I think the issue here is that the president has made the decision, and so previous statements he gets to do that, that's his prerogative,' the official said in an admission that Trump was undermining his own aides. Responding directly to complaints that legislators were informed after the fact, the person said, 'The president's views have been well known, so I really don't see this as a surprise.' The official said that the comparison that Graham and others were making to Obama's withdrawal of U.S. troop from Iraq in 2011 was 'apples to oranges,' because the drawdown was much larger and came about as a result of a failure to come to an agreement with the Iraqi government about leaving troops in the country. 'The president has judged that the purpose for which those troops have been put into Syria has been accomplished to the point where they can reposition,' the person said. As for Sen. Graham, the official said 'he is entitled to his opinion' but it's unreasonable to think that the U.S. is going to turn 'Syria into a utopian democracy.' Trump's declaration came after the Wall Street Journal and other outlets quoted Pentagon officials saying the U.S. would soon begin pulling out remaining forces, which number about 2,000. 'The Pentagon has an order to get to move troops out of Syria as quickly as possible,' a U.S. official told the paper. The White House said in a statement following Trump's announcement that troops have 'started returning' home and a transition has begun. 'Five years ago, ISIS was a very powerful and dangerous force in the Middle East, and now the United States has defeated the territorial caliphate. These victories over ISIS in Syria do not signal the end of the Global Coalition or its campaign,' White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said in a statement. 'We have started returning United States troops home as we transition to the next phase of this campaign.' She added, 'The United States and our allies stand ready to re-engage at all levels to defend American interests whenever necessary, and we will continue to work together to deny radical Islamist terrorists territory, funding, support, and any means of infiltrating our borders.' Turkish president Recep Erdogan was likely to welcome the move. His country shares a border with Syria. So was Russia, which is allied with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and is establishing a permanent military presence in the country as part of a deal with Damascus, and Iran. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis is said to have pressed Trump not to pull out America troops out of concern that ISIS will rebound. It still controls some territory in region. GOP senators expressed the same sentiments on Wednesday as they vented their frustrations. GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger disputed the president's claim that ISIS had been defeated Graham compared Trump to his Democratic predecessor Barack Obama's resolve to pull troops out of Iraq, which critics say paved the way for ISIS to develop. Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger also disputed the president's claim that ISIS had been defeated. 'This is simply not true,' Kinzinger wrote after retweeting the president. He said in another message, addressing Trump's decision to pull out troops, 'Really? Iran is rejoicing right now. We left Iraq, and had to come back. I would sure hope the President and his advisers are smarter than this.' Kinzinger said on CNN later that he was 'speechless' and that terrorists would be 'emboldened' by the withdrawal. 'This makes no sense to me,' he said. 'I don't get it.' He said that Moscow and Tehran are 'cheering' over the decision he claimed makes America less safe. House Foreign Affairs Chairman Ed Royce said he too was 'disturbed,' because while 'ISIS is on the run, its not yet defeated.' 'The limited number of U.S. forces in Syria is critical to rooting out these terrorists and stopping Iran from moving fighters and missiles to Israels doorstep. Our presence is also key to helping leverage a political transition to end Syrias civil war,' he contended. 'The last administration showed what happens when arbitrary political deadlines rather than reality on the ground dictate policy in war zones. We must learn from the mistakes of the past, not repeat them.' Retired Gen. Mark Hertling also turned in a devastating review in an appearance on CNN, saying the move appeared to be 'transactional' in nature, having to do with an arrangement with Turkey and Russia. 'This was very surprising to menot only the announcement but the timing. I don't understand why it is happening now,' he told the network. 'The U.S. Forces have just started an offensive with the Syrian defense forces and the Kurds against the town of Hajin, which is considered an ISIS stronghold You're talking about making both the Russians, the Syrian Bashar Al Assad, the Iranians and the Turks very happy about this move because the Kurdish forces are going to see this as us turning against them one more time.' Hertling added: 'What is interesting that has not been brought up yet is there seems to be a transactional element to this, too,' Raw Story reported. 'Over the last days the U.S. Has sealed the deal with Turkey for $3.5 billion worth of Patriot missile systems that were signed yesterday by our State Department. I'm sure that played a role, a little bit, in this.' This April 2, 2018 photo shows a general view of a US military base in the al-Asaliyah village, between the city of Aleppo and the northern town of Manbij. The United States is preparing to withdraw its troops from Syria, a major move that throws into question America's role in the region Syrian Democratic Forces and U.S. troops are seen during a patrol near Turkish border in Hasakah, Syria November 4, 2018 The State Department subsequently cancelled its daily briefing with reporters. The White House held a call for journalists but neither Trump nor his spokeswoman appeared before cameras. Just last week the Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, McGurk, said at a State Department briefing that ISIS had not been defeated. 'Even as the end of the physical caliphate is clearly now coming into sight, the end of ISIS will be a much more long-term initiative. Weve talked about that many times. Nobody working on these issues day to day is complacent. Nobody is declaring a mission accomplished,' he'd said. 'Defeating a physical caliphate is one phase of a much longer-term campaign.' He said that ISIS was down to one percent of controlled territory and said the coalition was shifting its focus to how to sustain the gains it had made in the region. 'Were prepared to maintain the stabilization effort in Iraq and Syria,' he said. A U.S. Air Force munitions team member uncases the laser-guided tip for a 500 pound bomb to be loaded onto an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), for airstrikes on ISIL targets on January 8, 2016 at a base in the Persian Gulf Region U.S. troops patrol near Turkish border in Hasakah, Syria, November 4, 2018 Posted on Aug. 27, 2014, by the Raqqa Media Center of the Islamic State group, a Syrian opposition group, which has been verified and is consistent with other AP reporting, shows a fighter of the Islamic State group waving their flag from inside a captured government fighter jet following the battle for the Tabqa air base, in Raqqa Trump has said for months that he wants to 'get out' of Syria and would recall troops as soon he was able. His announcement on Wednesday that it had already started to happen, however, is what startled lawmakers. The U.S. was believed to have about 2,000 troops in Syria, where Trump led a three-party coalition that dropped bombs on Assad's forces for illicit use of chemical weapons. Some 5,200 troops are still believed to be across the border in Iraq, a number that the Pentagon has declined as a matter of routine since Trump took office to confirm. Trump has derided Barack Obama for withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq. Republicans claim that the move left a power vacuum in the country that ISIS took advantage of. He in 2016 contended repeatedly that Obama was the 'founder of ISIS' and claimed he was the terror group's 'most valuable player.' Autum Satterfield, 34, fled while being booked on drug-possession charges An escaped inmate is back in custody after being found soaking in a hot tub at an Ohio senior living community, still wearing her yellow jail outfit. The Pike County Sheriff's Office says 34-year-old Autum Satterfield fled while being booked on drug-possession charges Tuesday. She was captured by the sheriff and the local police chief several hours later when a 911 caller reported the woman sitting in the hot tub at the Bristol Village Activity Center in Waverly, roughly 60 miles south of Columbus. Authorities haven't explained how or why the woman ended up there and a message seeking further comment was left Wednesday for the sheriff. Video of the arrest shows two officers approaching Satterfield, who appears to be lounging in the hottub. She escaped to a senior living community where she was found in a hot tub They're holding a flashlights when they reach the woman who seems unfazed by being caught. 'Step out of the hot tub,' one officer says. 'Get up,' the other demands, to which Satterfield incoherently responds. His office says she is being charged with felony escape in addition to the initial charges for alleged heroin possession. Diego Agustin Farias signed up to protect citizens as a Buenos Aires police officer but at night he is accused of secretly terrorising women - allegedly stabbing at least two. Farias, 29, was wanted for the stabbing of two women - and the beating of another - near a local park, Argentine news outlet Info Cielo reported. On Monday, police officers in the city of La Plata finally tracked down the man, nicknamed the 'crazy man on the bicycle'. Diego Agustin Farias, a police lieutenant in Buenos Aires, Argentina, was arrested Monday night just a day after he stabbed a 19-year-old woman Brenda Agustina Ayuza, 19, was standing at a bus station in La Plata, a city in the province of Buenos Aires, when the suspect approached her and drove a blade into her abdomen and then laughed before escaping on a bike A law enforcement source told El Dia that Farias could have also been involved in the December 3 stabbing of a 21-year-old woman near Saavadrea Park, where all of the crimes took place. According to investigators, a unit of undercover police officers set up a surveillance perimeter around the park, near the site of the two most recent scenes where Farias went on a weekend stabbing spree. Images retrieved from closed circuit surveillance cameras that showed Farias fleeing the scene of one of his weekend attacks made it possible for cops to match him with the description the victims had provided. The cops arrested Farias riding the same white bike he allegedly escaped on after Saturday and Sunday's attacks. Police officers also confiscated a blade, but cops are not sure if it was the same blade used in both crimes. According to police reports, on Saturday night, Farias beat Silvina Marceton, 28, and stabbed Evelina Valenti, 43, above the area of her kidney. He then escaped without stealing anything from the defenseless women. Farias continued his crime wave Sunday night at about 10:20pm local time when he encountered Brenda Agustina Ayuza, 19, at a bus stop. Argentine police officers arrested a 29-year-old cop who was allegedly riding around the town of La Plata stabbing women When he wasn't on duty with the Buenos Aires Police, Diego Agustin Farias used a bike (pictured), approached several women and stabbed them before fleeing The suspect approached his victim and did not say a word before he stabbed her and fled. 'I saw a guy who was getting near me on a bike ,and that's when I noticed that there was something wrong,' Azuya told El Dia. 'All of a sudden, without saying anything, he put his hand back and stabbed me once when he got to me. ... On top of that he was laughing, said Azuya, who was released from the hospital on Tuesday. Azuya suffered a seven centimeters deep cut, right above her bellybutton. The wound was a centimeter off her stomach. Amazon is benefiting from making their $175billion Marketplace so difficult to run a successful business that top sellers are hiring experts to help reinstate them when their accounts are sabotaged by jealous rivals, it has been claimed. Some six million third-party sellers competing to become the default account for a product use 'dirty tricks' such as buying fake reviews for rivals, posting fake negative reviews or hijacking accounts to get a user suspended, according to an expose from The Verge. The fraudulent schemes have not only cost banned sellers millions of dollars but due to the notoriously tough process of proving a user is a scam victim, the popularity of independent consultants helping sellers navigate the tricky Amazon Terms of Service has soared and the website could soon bank off their success. Cynthia Stine - a former seller who currently has two books being sold on Amazon about how to best make money on Amazon specializes in helping the website's sellers tackle the extremely difficult process of proving their innocence in the brand's own version of court. Independent consultant Stine claims she has heard the e-commerce platform is even planning on listing businesses like her own, eGrowth Partners, as more users search for experts to help them end their suspension quickly and return to earning via the site. Scroll down for videos Amazon Marketplace sellers have turned the company's strict rules against them by convincing them rivals have broken the websites rules to benefit themselves Sellers who have sent complaints about 'dirty seller tricks' directly to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos after rivals have paid for fake reviews to convince the website that users should be banned She said about her eagerness to be listed on the alleged forthcoming section: 'I figure I'm going to get everything I can out of it while the getting's good.' The stringent terms and conditions are designed to tackle counterfeiters, money laundering and stolen goods sold via the Marketplace which raked in more than double the $83million in sales from Amazon Retail this year. While brands may want to avoid Amazon Marketplace altogether, they often feel they have no choice because someone else will simply resell their products on their and earn a profit. But some sellers have used Amazon's notoriously strict rules and complicated process of suspension and reinstatement to trick the website's algorithm, which uses certain keywords to flag concern or considers the click-through-to-buy rate when decide whether to punish a user. With Amazon taking in $19billion in the first half of this year from Marketplace, 18 percent of the entire revenue of the $1trillian company, sellers rely on it so much for business that some scam victims have even paid off insiders to unblock their account, according to Stine. Independent consultants like Cynthia Stine (pictured) earn money by studying the complicated rules and helping sellers get back on Amazon Marketplace It's something Stine believes is worthwhile for sellers who have tried to send complaints about 'dirty seller tricks' directly to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. It's similar to a September Wall Street Journal report that said an employee had been fired for sharing internal data to help one business take down others, as part of a bribe. Although that individual has since been let go, the Verge reports it has since seen similar communication on WeChat since then. Stine's clients include businesses that have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in potential earnings while they wait in limbo for Amazon to decide their fate. The Marketplace acts as their warehouse, shipping company, and operates the business' financial systems. Former Amazon employee Chris McCabe said the consultant business has saved businesses from death. He told The Verge: 'If they don't get their Amazon account back, they might be insolvent, laying off 10, 12, 14 people, maybe more.' Stine claims that the website's rules don't state exactly how they can get themselves back on the platform but says she has learned Amazon wants the blocked user to admit guilt and explain how they will rectify the problem rather than proving their innocence. Stine is a former seller who currently has two books being sold on Amazon about how to best make money on Amazon and specializes in helping the website's sellers tackle the extremely difficult process of proving their innocence when their account is suspended Her 25-employee business works with 100 suspended clients to find any minor way they can 'confess and repent'. She charges $2,500 per appeal or $5,000 for fast-track service. Stine's East Dallas-based operation thrives because sellers can explain their issue to a human a service Amazon doesn't offer helping the many users who would otherwise have no idea how to resolve a dispute. The problem could stem from anything such as wooden photo frame giving a buyer a splinter to a dog toy being too chewy but both users rating the products with the maximum of five stars and not actually registering a complaint. On the other hand a 'not as described' complaint could be that shoes were too small, so seller might add a note advising the buyer to wear thin socks as a resolution to get their account active again. Perhaps less obvious ways other business try to wreak havoc is by buying ads for a rival brand that click through to unrelated products resulting in a lower click-through-to-sale rate and generally put the potential buyer off that brand. Stine summarized Amazon's vague suspension problem as: 'I'm putting you in jail but not telling you what you did, now give me a justification for why I should let you out and you won't do it again.' But her clients have sought the help of people high up at the company to push for a faster resolution, the report claims. Fraudsters have paid off performance team members to get insider information on rivals and even scam victims have paid them to have accounts reinstated quickly The Verge said the huge imposter problem often persuades harmed sellers to team up with Amazon by enrolling in its fulfillment program, buying Amazon's labels or making their brand exclusive to Amazon for special protections. Individuals included in the report suggested only the more successful sellers get tangled up in the complicated process that results in punishment from Amazon - the largest e-commerce business in world that controls half of online retail in US. Kevin Harmon sells books and DVDs from North Carolina and said the company froze $20,000 of his money over a damaged DVD. 'Amazon is a clear monopoly that is somehow being allowed to destroy industry after industry,' he claimed. 'They don't crush you when you're small. They wait until you've got employees and lease obligations and business loans and warehouses full of product, and THEN they reveal that they don't need you anymore.' Stine added: 'We tell people: whenever you're successful on the Amazon, you have a target on your back.' Performance teams in India and Costa Rica have to work with restricted processing forms that don't provide opportunity for a personalized resolution. The report also noted that employees must deal with a claim every four minutes and reinstating users counts against their incentives. Amazon told The Verge in a statement that they are very strict about their process. Amazon said in a statement that their strict rules are in place to protect sellers and buyers In fact, one seller included in the report noted that a year since their listing was hijacked and they received $2million in damages after going to court, Amazon still hadn't reinstate their account until the patent office website updated their information. 'We have zero tolerance for abuse of our systems and if we find bad actors who have engaged in this behavior, we will take swift action against them, including terminating their selling accounts, deleting reviews, withholding funds, and taking legal action,' the company wrote. Swapping registered emails on the US Patent and Trademark Office can be done without a password and tricksters have used it to register in a popular company's name on Amazon. But Amazon insisted to The Verge that the occurrence is rare said they use machine learning to help stop fraudsters while 'working closely with brands, the USPTO, and others to continue to strengthen our protections and stay ahead of these bad actors'. Amazon said in the statement: 'In order to protect both customers and sellers, we have selling policies that all sellers agree to and we take swift action against those that violate them. 'We have an appeals process where sellers can explain how they will prevent the violation from happening in the future or let us know if they believe they were compliant.' A man who attacked police with a sword outside Buckingham Palace while repeatedly screaming Allahu Akbar has been found not guilty of preparing acts of terrorism. Mohiussunnath Chowdhury, 27, told jurors his claims to support ISIS were 'in jest' and his attack was because he was 'depressed' and 'wanted police to kill him'. They unanimously acquitted the Uber driver, who lashed out at three officers on August 25 last year. One of the officers said he had 'fought for his life' in the terrifying incident but a jury had failed to reach a verdict in June this year. Court drawing of Mohiussunnath Choudhury who was found not guilty of a terror plot A police image of the sword used during the incident outside Buckingham Palace After that trial collapsed, Chowdhury was held at Belmarsh Prison - where he passed the time sketching pictures of an Islamist terrorist gunning down a man outside Number 10. His latest trial was shown the drawing - in which the attacker is depicted shouting Allahu Akbar as blood sprays on the front door - along with a sketch of a plane hitting the Twin Towers in New York. Prosecutors at this trial said Chowdhury had chosen 'self-radicalisation' and had scoured the internet for articles linked to Jihadi John and ISIS beheadings. He had also sketched a picture of a man shooting at 10 Downing Street Today Chowdhury, of Luton, Bedfordshire, bit his lip, raised his eyebrows and then saluted the jurors after they spent 11 hours and 36 minutes considering the verdict. During the trial at the Old Bailey Chowdhury claimed he was depressed and wanted police to kill him. He had repeatedly shouted 'Allahu Akbar' (God is greatest) while wrestling for control of a four-foot blade at Constitution Hill in central London. Chowdhury had driven his blue Toyota Prius at a marked police van before officers sprayed him with CS gas when they saw him sat in his car with the deadly weapon. Officers attended the scene outside of Buckingham Palace in August last year Dashcam footage shows PC Gavin Hutt walk towards Chowdhury's car outside of Buckingham Palace He had been pictured (left and right) buying items before the attack. Chowdhury denied preparing terrorist acts by obtaining a Samurai sword, purchasing a knife sharpener, preparing a suicide note, and driving to the area adjacent to Buckingham Palace He had set off from his home with the sword and a blade sharpener before swerving in front of the police van at about 8.30pm. Chowdhury said he had been feeling lonely and depressed and only wanted to get himself killed by brandishing the blade to police officers. He said he had 'so many chances' to get out of his car and kill the officers but chose not to. Chowdhury claimed he felt guilty about being a UK citizen since Muslims in Yemen were being killed by British weapons supplied to Saudi Arabia. In a WhatsApp group chat Chowdhury was asked if his profile picture was an ISIS flag, and he responded: 'It is an ISIS flag. I support ISIS,' followed by a laughing emoji. He later told jurors it was all 'in jest'. Chowdhury was born in London in May 1991 and later moved to Luton, working as a self-employed Uber driver. He had previously penned drawings of the Twin Towers being bombed whilst he was in prison Further social media was revealed showing Chowdhury praising the Westminster Bridge terrorist Khalid Masood and claiming all the non-Muslim victims of the atrocity would go to hell. Chowdhury urged his family to 'struggle against the enemies of Allah' including the Queen and British soldiers in a suicide note left on his sister's laptop. Sneha Chowdhury, 24, said her brother was 'not a trouble-maker, just a practical joker' whose interests included 'cartoons, funny stuff and things like memes'. She said she found it odd when he suggested they watch 'The State', a Channel 4 documentary about the rise of ISIS. Chowdhury had conducted internet searches for beheadings and 'Prophet Mohammed crimes' and 'Mohammed sex slaves'. Image above shows the wound from the sword which was inflicted on PC Ian Midgley during the incident Prosecutor Timothy Cray said Chowdhury planned to die as a martyr, fighting in the name of Allah, in the wake of the terror attacks at Westminster and London Bridge last year. Chowdhury was driving along the south east side of the road nearest the palace when he saw the marked police van coming the other way from St James' Park way. As Chowdhury swerved across the road the officers inside initially thought the driver might be drunk or on drugs, the court heard. The samurai sword (pictured above) used to attack police outside of Buckingham Palace by Mohiussunnath Chowdhury PC Ian Midgley and PC Gavin Hutt bravely approached Chowdhury and managed to overpower him and retrive the sword. PC Hutt said Chowdhury started screaming 'Allahu Akbar' while wielding the sword. Investigators found Chowdhury had searched beheadings in Chechnya, Islamic State beheadings and Jihadi John on the internet. This image was taken on the scene during the incident last year outside of Buckingham Palace He told the court: 'I felt lonely and depressed. I told my sister I didn't want to live anymore. 'My intention was only to show the sword to a soldier or the police and so get them to shoot me. A map of the route Chowdhury had taken on the day of the attack outside of Buckingham Palace 'If I was going to do any acts of terrorism, I could have got out the car with my sword when Mr Gavin was approaching. I had so many chances. I reject the allegations of terrorism. Chowdhury said he had felt guilty being a citizen of the United Kingdom while Muslims in Yemen were being killed by weapons that the government sold to Saudi Arabia. 'I came across articles criticising the UK government for selling weapons to Saudi Arabia who were killing these people,' he explained. PC Ian Midgley opened the passenger door of a Toyota Prius and reached inside to grab the samurai sword (pictured above) 'Since I realised we were giving aid to them and at the same time providing the weapons for them to be killed, I thought this was a massive contradiction. 'I felt depressed and guilty. I felt I was also responsible for the decisions taken by my government while my family were dying. 'I had to shun these people, and show my disapproval. At the time I did not know how to do it. There was nothing I could do. I just wanted to disassociate myself from my government's decision.' A former Florida middle school teacher today was sentenced to three years in prison for having sex with her 14-year-old student and sending him nude photos of herself. Stephanie Peterson, 27, learned her fate after pleading guilty in October to one felony count of lewd or lascivious battery sex act with a child and one felony count of transmission of harmful material to minors by electronic means. Seventh Judicial Circuit Court Judge Paul Zambrano delivered the sentence after Peterson's defense successfully argued for a downward departure from the minimum sentence of five years the prosecution had requested. Peterson earlier faced the prospect of spending up to 10 years in prison. Scroll down for video Case closed: Stephanie Peterson, 27, a former Florida middle school teacher, today was sentenced to three years in prison for having sex with her 14-year-old student Peterson is pictured in a white sweatshirt standing between her two defense lawyer and listening to Judge Paul Zambrano at her sentencing Wednesday Peterson was led of the courtroom in handcuffs. She was sentenced to 36 months for a felony count of battery sex act Peterson was sentenced to 36 months for the battery sex act and to time served for transmission of harmful material, followed by two years of house arrest and five years of sex offender probation, reported WKMG. She must avoid contact with all minors, but the judge made an exception for her brother's two children. The verdict came after the court heard emotional victim impact statements from the boy's family, and testimony from Peterson's mother, brother and step-father who all pointed a finger of blame for what happened at her recently diagnosed bipolar disorder and begged for leniency. The former New Smyrna Beach Middle School science teacher was arrested in February after the 14-year-old told his parents about their relationship. He confessed to his parents that Peterson would pick him up from their home at 11pm and that they often spent hours together at her home while her firefighter husband was at work. Peterson's family said that around the time she was diagnosed with a bipolar disorder at age 25, the young teacher started dressing provocatively and using a lot of makeup The defense argued that Peterson turned to alcohol, marijuana and cocaine as part of an effort to self-medicate herself The teen claimed he had sex with Peterson in her house and car as well as a barn behind his own house from November 2017 to January 2018. Two dozen relatives and friends filled the courtroom to support Peterson. Her mother, elementary school teacher Johnna Peterson, took the stand in her daughters defense, describing her as a caring person who excelled academically both in high school and college, and who always went out of the way to help others. She puts everybody first, Mrs Peterson said. According to Mrs Peterson, her daughter and son's biological father was abusive, and later on he severed all ties with his children. Peterson had been struggling with depression from an early age, and then at 25 she was diagnosed with a bipolar disorder, which dramatically altered her behavior. The mother said that from the time of her arrest, Peterson has been receiving mental health treatment and taking part in a support group for people suffering from a bipolar disorder. Petersons adoptive father, attorney Phil Peterson, and her older brother, Justin, both appeared as character witnesses, telling the court about her fraught mental health history and her profound remorse for her actions. The court also heard from the victims grandmother, who accused Peterson of taking advantage of her only grandchild at a time when he was most vulnerable because of his mothers illness. The childs mother also delivered a victim impact statement, speaking through sobs about the heart-wrenching effects of her sons relationship with his teacher on his life. I dont think I will ever be able to put into words the devastation and sadness he has gone through, the boys parent said. He is no longer the vibrant, funny, light-hearted child. He is now untrustworthy of new people, and even old friends. The woman tearfully talked about her sons bouts of uncontrollable rage and crying, which has required counselling. The boy also has been struggling with making new friends in high school, where the mother said he has been subjected to cruel taunts from bullies who labelled him a teacher f***er. Peterson's mother, Johnna, appeared as a character witness, talking about her daughter's impressive academic record and her struggles with mental illness Peterson's step-father, attorney Phil Peterson (right), also spoke out in her defense Peterson has been taking medications for her bipolar disorder, attending AA and support group meetings My child is gone, the mother said through tears. When given a chance to speak in her own defense, Peterson rattled off a prepared statement, showing little emotion during the reading, except when talking about her failed suicide attempts, including inside a police car. Every day I wish I could scream, I'm sorry, she said. There are not enough words to describe the amount of remorse I feel for what had taken place. She added: sorry doesn't even begin to sum up my emotions. I will continue to be sorry until the day I die. Peterson's defense argued during Wednesday's hearing that at the time of her trysts with the underage victim, she was in a manic state and self-medicating her mental health condition with alcohol, marijuana and cocaine after being prescribed the wrong drug. The former teacher's lawyer, Aaron Delgado, appealed to the judge to consider sentencing his client to probation and community service instead of prison time, citing mitigating circumstances in Peterson's life related to her medical history and her spotless record. The prosecution countered by arguing that Peterson should have known better than to have sex with a 14-year-old boy and take illegal narcotics. 'She knew what she was doing. She knew what she was doing is wrong,' the prosecutor stated, asking the judge not to depart from the sentencing guidelines. 'Stephanie Peterson is not a victim. Stephanie Peterson is here because of her actions, and actions have consequences,' the prosecutor added. Before delivering the sentence, Judge Zambrano addressed Peterson directly, saying that she did nothing to help her mental illness by turning to alcohol and drugs, and then crossing the line by pursuing a sexual relationship with a child. 'You're actions have life-long consequences to you and to this child for the rest of his life,' he said. 'That memory will never be taken from him.' A reputed Latin Kings gang member accused in the road-rage beating death of a New York City firefighter has been charged with murder. Joseph Desmond, 29, pleaded not guilty to one count of second-degree murder on Tuesday in Brooklyn Supreme Court. He faces 25 years to life in prison if convicted. Authorities say Desmond beat FDNY firefighter Faizal Coto, 33, to death with a 'hard object' after the pair got got into a minor accident on the Belt Parkway in South Brooklyn on December 9. Speaking to the court at a bail hearing Tuesday, Brooklyn prosecutor Andres Palacio described how Desmond 'violently [struck] the left side of [Cotos] temple, causing multiple fractures of his skull and hemorrhaging of the brain', adding that the injuries caused 'almost instant death'. Judge Vincent Del Giudice granted Palacio's request for the Staten Island man to be held without bail. Joseph Desmond, 29, has been charged with second-degree murder in the December 9 road-rage beating death of New York City firefighter Faizal Coto, 33. Desmond, a reputed Latin Kings gang member, pleaded not guilty in Brooklyn Supreme Court on Tuesday (pictured) A judge granted the prosecutions' request that Desmond be held without bail due to the brutal nature of the crime. The Staten Island man is seen walking into the courtroom in handcuffs Coto, a 33-year-old off-duty FDNY firefighter (left and right) was beaten to death in a suspected road-rage incident on December 9 after a collision on a highway in south Brooklyn Police say that Coto was driving his 2008 Ford Mustang down the Belt Parkway at about 4.45am when he got into a minor fender bender. Surveillance video shows that Coto's Mustang pulled to the shoulder along with the other vehicle, a gray or silver 2006 Infiniti G35 with New York license plate JEA 2402. A physical altercation ensued, and Coto was struck in the head with an unknown object by one of the occupants of the Infiniti, police said. Desmond (above in his mugshot) was arrested on December 10 after when a task force of NYPD cops and US Marshals tracked him down at a roadside motel in South Amboy, New Jersey The Infiniti sped away from the scene of the brutal beating, and a passing motorist alerted authorities upon seeing Coto lying on the shoulder by his car with severe trauma to his face and head. Paramedics rushed the firefighter to Coney Island Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. Desmond was arrested the next day after a task force of NYPD cops and US Marshals used his vehicle registration to track him down at a roadside motel in South Amboy, New Jersey. According to court filings, the suspect told arresting officers: 'Man, I was going to surrender Wednesday. My car has been all over the news and I was going to visit parole on Wednesday anyways.' He then told investigators: 'No disrespect, sir, but Im not talking. Im just going to stay quiet.' Desmond is schedule to appear back in court on March 1. Desmond (pictured leaving the court Tuesday) faces 25 years to life in prison if convicted Police say officers responding to the Belt Parkway crash (pictured) found Coto lying next to his damaged 2008 Ford Mustang with head trauma around 4.45am The vehicle involved in the minor crash that is believed to belong to Desmond is pictured. During his arrest, the suspect allegedly told police: 'Man, I was going to surrender Wednesday. My car has been all over the news and I was going to visit parole on Wednesday anyways' Coto, who was with the fire department for three years, was assigned to a Coney Island engine company. He was also an aspiring rapper and hip hop artist performing under the name FAIYA. Coto recently posted on Facebook that he was getting back into his music and he thanked his fans for their support. Loved ones shared an outpouring of shock and grief on Coto's Facebook page upon the news of his death, saying he would have never started the altercation that led to his death. 'I just don't understand how this could have happened to you! So full of life and so friendly to everyone!', wrote Cristina Palmeri. 'He was proper, decent and lovely, friends with all and a dream maker,' wrote Louis Rigaud Bois. 'He will be for ever in our hearts and his passing is a reminder to us all that the world is evil and we should never stop enjoying and cherishing the present with our friends and families.' Former Labour whip Fiona Onasanya (pictured leaving the Old Bailey today) was found guilty of perverting the course of justice by trying to dodge a speeding fine Former Labour whip Fiona Onasanya could face jail after she was found guilty of perverting the course of justice. The 35-year-old lied to police to avoid a speeding charge following a retrial at the Old Bailey today found. With her political career in tatters, she has been formally suspended by the party and is now facing calls to resign as an MP. The solicitor was accused of colluding with her brother Festus after her car was seen speeding at 41mph in a 30mph zone in Thorney, near her Peterborough constituency at 10pm on July 24 2017. Last month Mr Onasanya, 34, admitted three counts of perverting the course of justice, a week before he was due to face trial with his sister, who denied the charge. The MP, who was elected in June 8 2017 but stood down as a Labour whip last month, will be sentenced along with her brother on a date yet to be set. She had tried to avoid prosecution for the offence by claiming that Aleks Antipow was the driver of the Nissan Micra. Mr Antipow, a former lodger, was at home with his parents in Russia 1,800 miles away. Onasanya had claimed she left the form at her mother's house and had no idea who was driving the car. She 'mistakenly' claimed she was in London when the speeding ticket was issued - but mobile phone records placed her at the scene. It was then suggested she might have been in the car but not driving. Onasanya was elected as a Labour MP as part of the 2017 general election, which took place just a few weeks before the car was seen speeding Festus Onasanya (right), the 33-year-old brother of Labour MP Fiona Onasanya, was accused of colluding with his sister (left) to pervert the course of justice. Jurors in the first trial were told she 'didn't know' who was behind the wheel when the speed camera was triggered. Authorities tried to contact Onasanya at her home and in Westminster after they were unable to track down Mr Antipow at a false address. When the Cambridgeshire Police camera unit asked Onasanya to provide correct information, she replied: 'I have supplied the details made known to me as well as the licence information... I have provided a completed nomination previously.' Onasanya's rise and fall Fiona Onasanya was elected in June 2017 general election after defeating Conservative MP Stewart Jackson by just 607 votes. She was quickly appointed Labour whip and as Parliamentary Private Secretry to Shadow Defence Nia Griffith. During the EU referendum campaign, she supported remain. She could now be jailed after she was found guilty of perverting the course of justice. Advertisement In a phone call on November 2 last year, she told an investigator that she 'stands by her nomination', jurors heard. When the Cambridgeshire Police camera unit asked Onasanya to provide correct information, she replied: 'I have supplied the details made known to me as well as the licence information... I have provided a completed nomination previously.' In a phone call on November 2 last year, she told an investigator that she 'stands by her nomination', jurors heard. Festus Onasanya admitted to perverting the course of justice a week before the first trial to avoid speeding prosecutions on three different occasions, including for the incident on July 24. The singer-come-delivery driver already had nine points on his licence and risked losing his job if he received any more. Earlier last year, his MP sister had also been caught speeding and filled out a NIP correctly and completed a speed awareness course to avoid three points. A day after the first trial began at the Old Bailey, Onasanya's former communications manager came forward to place her at his house in Thorney on the evening of July 24. Christian DeFeo told jurors he never imagined in his 'darkest dreams' that he would give evidence against the woman who he helped to election victory last June. The Nissan Micra was seen speeding at 41mph through a 30mph zone in Thorney near Peterborough on July 24, 2017 Jurors were also told that Onasanya had texted a landscape gardener minutes after the car was clocked speeding. Giving evidence, Onasanya denied lying to police for the sake of three points on her licence. She did not recall visiting the DeFeo house on July 24 but could not rule out being behind the wheel. While being pursued over the NIP, Onasanya was admitted to hospital for three days last September, having suffered a relapse of multiple sclerosis. The episode confirmed the devastating diagnosis, she said: 'I was told I had a relapse and they had found more lesions on my brain. 'I probably was not in the best head space. I've just been told I had got an incurable degenerative disease. I think that would preoccupy anyone.' When she asked her brother about the ticket, Festus told her it was all 'sorted', she claimed. Onasanya's lawyer Christine Agnew QC described Festus as a charming chancer who tried to play on his sister's standing as a lawyer and MP to get him 'out of the hole'. During the trial, Labour chief whip Nicholas Brown lent his support to his colleague, describing her as 'honest, trustworthy and reliable'. The Onasanya siblings face possible jail time when they are sentenced at the Old Bailey by Judge Nicholas Hilliard QC on a later date. Fiona Onasanya defeated the Conservative incumbent Stewart Jackson at the 2017 election, winning with a majority of just 607 votes. Uber today lost its latest court bid to stop British drivers from being classified as workers, entitling them to rights such as the minimum wage. The ride-hailing firm had been trying to overturn employment tribunal findings which could pave the way for tens of thousands of its UK drivers to receive paid holiday. But at London's Court of Appeal today, senior judges gave their judgment that Uber drivers are 'workers' - rather than being 'self-employed', as the company contended. Unions welcomed the 'early Christmas present' for Uber drivers, with implications for the wider 'gig economy' - but the firm insisted it would appeal in the Supreme Court. Uber today lost its latest court bid to stop British drivers from being classified as workers The Court of Appeal upheld the earlier tribunal decisions by a majority of two to one. Master of the Rolls Sir Terence Etherton, with whom Lord Justice Bean agreed, said today that the tribunal was 'not only entitled, but correct' to find that each of the claimants was driving for Uber as a 'worker'. Dismissing Uber's appeal, he added: 'As to the reality, not only do we see no reason to disagree with the factual conclusions of the (tribunal) as to the working relationship between Uber and the drivers, but we consider that the (tribunal) was plainly correct.' Lord Justice Underhill, dissenting, said drivers should only be treated as working from the moment they accept a trip. He said the issues raised in the appeal were matters of policy which Parliament was 'better placed' to consider than the courts. He added: 'The whole question of whether and how to adapt existing employment law protections to the development of the so-called gig economy, and in particular to the use of service-provision platforms such as Uber, is under active review by the Government at present.' Sir Terence allowed Uber permission to appeal to the Supreme Court. In November 2017, the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) dismissed Uber's appeal against an earlier tribunal ruling that former drivers Yaseen Aslam and James Farrar were 'workers' at the time they were operating for Uber. But, at a hearing in October, the company's barrister Dinah Rose QC said the finding that Uber drivers were workers ignored the fact that its relationship with drivers was 'typical of the private hire industry'. Former drivers James Farrar (left) and Yaseen Aslam (right, pictured in July 2016) argued they were 'workers' at the time they were operating for Uber Uber was not 'unusual' because of the relationship between it and its drivers, 'but because the Uber app enables it to operate on a much larger scale than traditional minicab companies', she argued. The initial employment tribunal found Uber's agreements with drivers contained 'fictions, twisted language and even brand new terminology', and that the contracts 'did not correspond with the practical reality'. However, Ms Rose said that the contracts 'reflected the true relationship and terms of the agreements between the parties'. How the ruling follows a long-running row over Uber and 'gig economy' Uber, which could be valued at nearly 100billion in a flotation, has faced protests, regulator crackdowns and licence losses around the world as it challenges existing competitors and rapidly expands. In Britain, the self-employed are entitled to only basic protections such as health and safety but workers receive the minimum wage, paid holidays and rest breaks. Uber has introduced a number of benefits for drivers in recent months. Unions argue that the gig economy - where people often work for various firms at the same time without fixed contracts - is exploitative. However Uber says its drivers enjoy the flexibility and on average earn much more than the minimum wage. Uber had argued in court that its practices have been widely used for decades in Britain by minicabs, private hire vehicles which cannot be hailed in the street like traditional black taxis. Though the company argued that the employment case applies to only two drivers, Uber has tens of thousands of drivers in Britain who could argue they deserve the same status as the former drivers covered by the decision. The court says some 40,000 drivers use the platform in the UK, though the company said the number had grown since the submission to 50,000. Advertisement She added that both tribunals had 'erred in law' in concluding that the pair were workers, submitting that they had 'wrongly disregarded the written contracts in which the parties' agreements were recorded'. Jason Galbraith-Marten QC, for Mr Aslam and Mr Farrar, said there was 'no express agreement' by which the claimants appointed Uber 'to act as their agent and setting out the nature and extent of that agency'. He said that the tribunals' task was therefore to 'determine the true nature of the (implied) agreement' between drivers and Uber. Mr Galbraith-Marten said the tribunals were 'entitled to ask whether the claimants are genuinely in business on their own account' or whether they were 'providing their services' to Uber. He added that, if Uber was not acting as the drivers' agent, 'the purported driver-passenger contract is indeed a fiction'. Today, Mr Aslam, one of the drivers involved in the case, said: 'I'm delighted with today's ruling, but frustrated that the process has dragged on for over three years. 'It cannot be left to precarious workers like us to bring companies like Uber to account and, despite the personal price we have had to pay, we are the lucky ones. 'We know of many that are under such hardship that it would be unimaginable for them to take a multi-billion pound company to court. 'It is now time for the Government and the Mayor of London to act and stop letting companies like Uber take them for a ride.' The other driver in the case, Mr Farrar, said: 'I am delighted today's ruling brings us closer to the ending Uber's abuse of precarious workers made possible by tactics of contract trickery, psychological manipulation and old-fashioned bullying. 'However, I am dismayed that implementation of worker status for drivers is further delayed while Uber seeks yet another appeal. 'This is nothing more than a cynical ploy to delay inevitable changes to its business model while it pursues a record breaking 120 billion US dollar stock market flotation. 'It's time for Uber to come clean with all its stakeholders and abide by the decision of the courts.' The ride-hailing firm has been attempting to overturn employment tribunal findings This afternoon, Tim Roache, general secretary of the GMB union, said: 'We're now at a hat trick of judgements against Uber - they keep appealing and keep losing. 'Uber should just accept the verdict and stop trying to find loopholes that deprive people of their hard won rights and hard earned pay. 'This is the perfect early Christmas present for GMB's Uber members, but this case is about the wider 'gig economy' too. Employers are on notice that they can't just run rough shod over working people to put more on the bottom line for shareholders.' MP Frank Field added: 'This is another stunning victory for workers against the exploitation and poverty wages that stem from bogus self-employment in the gig economy. This is another stunning victory for workers against the exploitation and poverty wages that stem from bogus self-employment in the gig economy Frank Field, MP 'The Government's job now is to ensure justice is delivered for workers all year round, not just at Christmas.' Before the October hearing, hundreds of 'precarious workers' attended a demonstration organised by the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB), which represents Mr Aslam and Mr Farrar. IWGB general secretary Jason Moyer-Lee described the demonstration as 'the articulation of the legitimate rage of the precarious workers and the exploited workers of the UK'. And today, he commented: 'It is becoming increasingly ridiculous for so-called 'gig economy' companies to argue that the law is unclear when they lose virtually every tribunal and court case. 'Companies like Uber continue to get away with depriving their workers of basic rights because the government does virtually nothing to enforce employment law and the Tories' so-called reforms announced this week will do nothing to change that.' Speaking today, Andrew Chamberlain, deputy director of policy at the Association of Independent Professionals and the Self-Employed, said: 'The first thing to remember is this wasn't a ruling on all self-employment or even the rest of the gig economy. 'This was about two drivers in particular circumstances. The fact is most people in self-employment and the gig economy enjoy their flexibility and are happy with their status. 'What this latest twist in the Uber saga does show, however, is just how complex this area is, and how much it takes to prove who is and isn't self-employed. 'Self-employment is dynamic, always changing and very diverse. This case is only the latest example of how our creaking, outdated employment statuses simply aren't keeping up. 'To clear the confusion of the gig economy and help more people work how they want in employment and self-employment the government must introduce a statutory definition of self-employment.' Also today, Nigel Mackay, partner in Leigh Day's employment team, said: 'We are very pleased that the Court of Appeal has again upheld the Employment Tribunal's findings that Uber drivers are workers of Uber. 'This is the third time that the drivers have been victorious in their fight for workers' rights but Uber has yet to give their drivers what three legal decisions have ruled they are entitled to - holiday pay and to be paid at least the national minimum wage. 'We hope that Uber now faces up to its responsibilities instead of spending time and money in the courts attempting to deny its drivers these rights.' A spokesman for Uber said: 'This decision was not unanimous and does not reflect the reasons why the vast majority of drivers choose to use the Uber app. 'We have been granted permission to appeal to the Supreme Court and will do so. 'Almost all taxi and private hire drivers have been self-employed for decades, long before our app existed. 'Drivers who use the Uber app make more than the London living wage and want to keep the freedom to choose if, when and where they drive. 'If drivers were classified as workers they would inevitably lose some of the freedom and flexibility that comes with being their own boss. 'Over the last two years we've made many changes to give drivers even more control over how they use the app, alongside more security through sickness, maternity and paternity protections. 'We'll keep listening to drivers and introduce further improvements.' The company has about 40,000 drivers and 3.5 million customers in the British capital. Advertisement A rare tornado tore through a town west of Seattle on Tuesday afternoon, leaving what authorities have described as 'catastrophic' damage in its wake. The National Weather Service has dispatched a storm damage survey team Port Orchard, Washington, to determine just how powerful it was. No injuries have been reported in the town of 14,000 as of Wednesday afternoon. Dramatic images show houses with their roofs completed ripped off and dozens of trees toppled in the street as residents assess destruction on their properties. SCROLL DOWN FOR VIDEO A rare tornado tore through Port Orchard, Washington, on Tuesday, leaving what authorities have described as 'catastrophic' damage in its wake. Aerial footage from local officials shows the damage from above Slide me The Kitsap County Sheriff's Office said the storm was contained mainly to neighborhoods in east and south Port Orchard. One affected area can be seen above before (left) and after (right) the tornado blew through The twister touched down on Tuesday around 2pm local time, according to the National Weather Service. A witness posted a video of the massive column on Twitter (above) Port Orchard is located about 15 miles west of Seattle, across Puget Sound on the Kitsap Peninsula (as seen above) Residents can be seen surveying the damage to their homes from the street in the hours after the storm passed through Powerful winds ripped the roof clean off the top of the home pictured above surrounded by massive amounts of debris As of Wednesday morning no injuries have been reported in the town of 14,000. Residents and emergency personnel seen walking along debris-littered Harris Road after it the tornado ripped through the town Workers cut the limbs of a downed tree to make it easier to remove from a store parking lot on Wednesday in Port Orchard Rescue teams work to remove a tree that had fallen in front of a business, damaging its roof, on Wednesday morning The roof of Salmonberry Dry Storage appears to have been torn off in the storm, causing the structure's sides to collapse A man uses a bulldozer to plow through the wreckage at the storage facility on a wet Wednesday morning Based on radar imagery and video evidence, the tornado touched down south of Port Orchard shortly before 2pm, the NWS in Seattle said on Twitter. The Kitsap County Sheriff's Office told local media the damage was 'catastrophic' and contained to neighborhoods east and south of a Walmart in Port Orchard. About 50 buildings were affected, Deputy Scott Wilson told the Seattle Times. Emergency teams were unable to survey the area before nightfall on Tuesday, Wilson said. Relief efforts kicked into high gear on Wednesday as local law enforcement has been working with emergency management partners to learn the extent of the damage. The sheriff's office says power lines were down and roads were closed in the area. The state of Washington averages just two and a half tornadoes per year, and December tornadoes are extremely rare, according to meteorologists. Port Orchard is located about 15 miles west of Seattle, across Puget Sound on the Kitsap Peninsula. Residents are seen evacuating their homes on Harris Road in the wake of the tornado, an unusual occurrence in Washington Emergency response efforts were stunted when night fell on Tuesday, but some crews were seen working in the dark (above) Relief efforts kicked into high gear as the sun rose on Wednesday morning and rescue crews gained visibility Strong winds tore apart a construction site, even ripping open a steel storage container, as seen in this photo from the NWS Workers use a chainsaw to break down trees that had landed on the roof of a home in Port Orchard Port Orchard resident Matt Hargis is seen walking through a mess of downed trees behind the Walmart in Port Orchard A cluster of trees on the edge of one Port Orchard neighborhood were flattened by high-force winds Anastaisia Zunk, whose home had its roof completely torn off by the tornado, posted photos of her damaged home on a GoFundMe page set up to help her family cover repair costs. The description on the page, which has raised more that $3,200 in just 14 hours, reads: 'The hope is to ease this family's worries during this difficult time during the holiday season. Everything in the house has been destroyed due to the storm following the tornado. 'It's gonna be a while to re-build and to get the family back in the house, so anything helps.' Emily Silverman told local TV station KOMO-TV she was driving to a store with her husband at the time that the tornado touched down. 'It's raining and it's pouring down really bad and before you know it everything was flying everywhere,' Silverman said. 'Our car back windows blew out, our side windows blew out. I thought I was a goner.' The couple's two-year-old son was in the back seat. 'So glad he's OK because the whole back window just busted in,' Silverman said. 'It was just crazy. I've never seen anything like this in my life.' A roof strut sticks up out of a yard on Plymouth Way after the twister tore through the Seattle suburb on Tuesday afternoon Emergency responders huddle on Harris Road to map out the response as the town begins to assess the tornado damage A badly-damaged home is seen among dozens of toppled trees, many of which fell straight into the structure Alejando Vargas Martinez, 15, was shot execution style while walking to school Police are offering a $10,000 reward for help catching the killer of a Florida teen shot execution style while walking to school. Alejando Vargas Martinez, 15, was making his way to class in Orlando at 6:30am on Tuesday when he was gunned down on a quiet street next to an elementary school. The shooting happened just half a mile from Boone High School campus and police have not released a motive for the slaying. His aunt, Dolka Martinez, told Spectrum News: 'He was such a great boy, a good son, awesome brother, nephew. He was such a lovable boy.' Tragic Alejando, who was pronounced dead at hospital, walked to school everyday. Sheriff John Mina said: 'Certainly the death of a child, a 15-year-old, is extremely tragic and to happen one week before Christmas, I can't imagine how the parents are feeling right now.' Police are now offering a $10,000 reward for any help in identifying the slain teenager's killer or killers. His family have set up a GoFundMe page to help raise money for funeral expenses for Martinez, Click Orlando reports. It is the second Boone High School student death in as many months, The Orlando Sentinal reports, and the school was put on lockdown following the shooting. His aunt, Dolka Martinez, pictured left, paid tribute to her 'awesome nephew', pictured right Alejando was gunned down on a quiet street next to a school half a mile from his campus Tragic Alejando walked to class on this quiet street next to an elementary school everyday Principal Dusty Johns wrote on Facebook: 'We were made aware by law enforcement that early this morning one of our students was tragically killed on the way to school. 'Our thoughts and prayers are with the family as they go through this extremely difficult time. 'We will have a crisis team on campus to provide counseling assistance for students and staff. In addition, out of an abundance of caution, we will have additional law enforcement presence on campus. 'The safety and well-being of our students is my top priority.' Orange County School Board member Linda Kobert described Alejando as 'a great kid' who was 'well-known and well-liked.' She added: 'It's just a question mark as to any kind of motive.' Another Boone student, Kody Larue, was found dead last month at a nearby home. Police believe his mom Leslie McKinley, 47, took her own life after killing her son, according to reports. A flurry of companies in China are now giving discounts to customers with Huawei mobile phones amid an outpouring of support for the tech giant's arrested finance chief Meng Wanzhou. Restaurants, supermarkets and tourist attractions across the country have announced they will offer a variety of benefits to visitors who have a Huawei phone with them, according to videos and images posted on social media. As tensions between China and the US grow over Meng's case, other Chinese firms have earlier declared their alliance to Huawei by punishing employees who bought an Apple iPhone. A flurry of companies in China are now giving discounts to customers with Huawei mobile phones amid an outpouring of support for the tech giant's arrested exec Meng Wanzhou Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou, arrives at a parole office with a security guard in Vancouver. She was arrested by Canadian police at the request of the US on December 1 A restaurant is offering 10 per cent off to customers who use Huawei phones Videos and images of companies pledging their support to Meng were posted on popular short video app Douyin - also known as TikTok - under the hashtag 'support Huawei'. 'Anyone with a Huawei cell phone will have 50 yuan (5.8) taken off their final bill plus discount. Anyone who destroys their Apple phone in public gets a free pair of spectacles priced at 999 yuan (114)!' A big red banner draped over the entrance of an eyewear store in Xinxiang city, Henan province read. A noodle shop in Xi'an city, Shaanxi province is seen offering free meals to all Huawei employees. Another restaurant offering Xinjiang cuisine says it will give customers a 20 per cent discount if they flash their Huawei phones, while a Shenzhen-based chain fruit shop is also offering customers 12 per cent off everything. 'Anyone with a Huawei cell phone will have 50 yuan (5.8) taken off their final bill plus discount. Anyone who destroys their Apple phone gets a free pair of spectacles priced at 999 yuan (114)!' A big red banner draped over an eyewear store in Xinxiang, Henan read The Shennong Mountain Scenic Park (pictured) in Henan province said they will waive the 80-yuan (9) entrance fee for any tourist with a Huawei phone The Shennong Mountain Scenic Park in Henan province said they will waive the 80-yuan (9) entrance fee for tourists with a Huawei phone. From Dec 16 to Dec 29, visitors who show their Huawei or Honor phones at the door and follow the park's social media account can get in for free, according to a notice published on the park's website. Honor is Huawei's sub-brand. 'Take amazing photos with Huawei phones. Best wishes to our friends around the world who support Huawei,' the statement added. Although many net users questioned whether the act was discriminatory or legal, it did not deter other tourist sites to follow suit. Bai Guo Yuan, a Shenzhen-based chain fruit shop is also offering 12 per cent off everything for customers with a Huawei phone. A noodle shop in Xi'an offers free meals to Huawei staff A Xinjiang restaurant (right) is seen offering customers a 20 per cent discount if they show their Huawei phones while a tofu shop (left) says it will give its clients 10 per cent off The White Cloud Cave of Mount Kong, a scenic spot famous for its crystal formations in a series of cave chambers in Xingtai city, Hebei province, said in an official notice that visitors with a Huawei or Honor phone can gain free entry from Dec 18 to Dec 23. 46-year-old Meng, Huawei's chief financial officer and daughter of founder Ren Zhengfei, was arrested by Canadian police in Vancouver on December 1 at the request of the U.S. The US has accused Huawei of using a Hong Kong shell company to sell equipment to Iran in violation of US sanctions. It also says Meng and the tech company misled banks about its business dealings in Iran. After three days of hearings, Meng was released on bail of C$10 million (US$7.4 million) on Tuesday evening - on the condition she surrender her two passports and agree to wear an ankle bracelet. She will have to stay in Vancouver and its suburbs and confine herself to one of her two Vancouver homes from 11pm to 6am. The White Cloud Cave of Mount Kong in Xingtai city, Hebei province, said in an official notice that visitors with a Huawei or Honor phone can gain free entry from Dec 18 to Dec 23 The White Cloud Cave is a scenic spot famous for its crystal formations in cave chambers She is to return to court early next year for what could be an extended legal proceeding. Her case has set off a diplomatic furore among the three countries and complicated high-stakes U.S.-China trade talks. Last week, several Chinese organisations and business groups have issued notices urging staff members to show their support for the Chinese telecommunications giant by boycotting iPhones. One of Huawei's suppliers, Shenzhen-based LCD display maker Menpad, said it will punish any employee that buys the popular American smartphone with a fine of 100 per cent of the market price in the next three years. Conversely, it will reward staff who buy Huawei or ZTE phones by giving them a 15 per cent subsidy. Lisa Duan, a visitor from China, holds a sign in support of Huawei outside of the BC Supreme Court bail hearing of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou. Meng has been released on bail 'The company will also cease to buy any American products such as office equipment, computers and cars,' Menpad said in a statement on its website last Monday, adding that it will double the sales commission to any employee who manages to sell its products to the US. Chengdu-based RYD Information Technology said on Monday that it would only source Huawei equipment where possible from now on. The midsized startup said on its official social media account that it would also offer employees a 15 per cent subsidy on Huawei products. Xinjiang Nor-West Star Information Technology said in a statement they will only support Huawei, saying that it 'actively backs the calls to support Huawei and protect national brands with real action'. A second Tory MP accused John Bercow of branding her a 'stupid woman' today as Andrea Leadsom led a Conservative revolt against the Speaker. The Leader of the House seized on a furious row over Jeremy Corbyn jibing 'stupid woman' at Theresa May to revive the same charge against Mr Bercow. After the Speaker warned MPs he could not sanction the Labour leader, another Tory MP Vicky Ford accused Mr Bercow of making the remark at her. A furious Mr Bercow wagged his finger and insisted Ms Ford had never made the allegation before and that he 'refutes it 100 per cent'. When the row first broke out in the aftermath of PMQs Mrs Leadsom raised a point of order to refer to an incident earlier this year where Mr Bercow was accused of calling her a 'stupid woman'. Mr Bercow has been dogged by accusations of bullying for months and his personal feud with Mrs Leadsom has led to a deep freeze in relations with the Government. Andrea Leadsom (pictured in the Commons today) led a Tory assault against Speaker John Bercow today as a sexism storm engulfed the Commons and left it in chaos After the Speaker warned MPs he could not sanction the Labour leader, another Tory MP Vicky Ford accused Mr Bercow of making the same remark at her (pictured( A furious Mr Bercow wagged his finger (pictured) and insisted Ms Ford had never made the allegation before and that he 'refutes it 100 per cent' Mrs Leadsom said: 'If individuals who are found to have made unwelcome remarks should apologise, why it is that when an opposition member found that you had called me a 'stupid woman', you did not apologise in this chamber?' After repeated jeers and banging from Tory MPs, Mr Bercow said: 'No no I'll deal with the point. Which other MPs have been accused of sexist remarks in the Commons? David Cameron telling Angela Eagle to 'calm down dear': In April 2011 the former PM was slammed for jeering at Ms Eagle as she heckled him alongside Ed Miliband. Jeremy Corbyn 'mansplaining' International Women's Day to Theresa May: The last time Mr Corbyn got into trouble at PMQs, he told Mrs May it was IWD when she had not mentioned it herself - prompting her to snap back that he did not need to remind her. Boris Johnson calls Emily Thornberry by her husband's name: During a furious clash, the ex-Foreign Secretary was told off John Bercow for mocking his Labour shadow as 'Lady Nugee' - her formal title but one which she does not use professionally. William Hague brands a Labour MP a 'stupid woman': The jibe has been used before when the ex-Tory leader attacked Labour's Cathy Jamieson in 2013. He later apologised. John Bercow compared Esther McVey to a washing machine: The Speaker has been repeatedly accused of sexist remarks. In 2015 he cut off the then Employment Minister to quip 'I'm reminded of the feeling when one think the washing machine will stop but it doesn't'. He apologised. John Bercow brands Andrea Leadsom a 'stupid woman': Bercow was in trouble again in May this year when he was overheard criticising Mrs Leadsom to Labour's chief whip Nick Brown. The Commons Leader hurled it back at him during today's furious exchanges. Advertisement 'I dealt with that point months ago in remarks that I made to the House of Commons to which Ms Leadsom in our various meetings since has made no reference and which requires from the chair today no elaboration whatsoever.' The Speaker added that 'the matter has been treated of and I am leaving it there'. She said when evidence was presented that 'you had called me a stupid woman you did not apologise in this chamber'. But former minister Anna Soubry then rose to claim that if the Tory MP had said the same thing to a Labour MP 'you sir would take action immediately'. 'With great respect to the chair I have to say this, if it was one of my male colleagues on this side of the House that had used that expression against a woman on the frontbench on the Opposition you sir would take action immediately. 'Please would you deal with it as you often do, Mr Speaker, in a fair way, but also from the point of view of women in this House who are fed up over decades of being abused by men.' Mr Bercow, who was being shouted at and heckled by Tory MPs, responded saying: 'I cannot be expected to deprecate the behaviour of an individual which I did not witness.' Mr Bercow returned the Commons three hours later to give his ruling on Mr Corbyn. In response, Ms Ford said she 'did not believe' Mr Corbyn before turning her fire on the Speaker to blast: 'I have heard the words ''stupid woman'' being used in this chamber about myself and I am afraid to say I have heard it from yourself in the Speaker's chair.' Mr Bercow pointed at the MP and said: 'You have at no time previously... made that allegation against me. You have not come to me and said that. 'To my knowledge I am not in receipt of a letter alleging that. If there is such an allegation I refute it 100 per cent.' Mr Bercow faced furious pleas from Tory MPs to act against the Labour leader in the aftermath of PMQs (pictured). MPs including Health Secretary Matt Hancock tried to show the Speaker footage of Mr Corbyn's jibe Jeremy Corbyn flatly denied saying the words 'stupid woman' when he was summoned back to the chamber this evening The incendiary row was triggered when Mr Corbyn was engulfed in a sexism row today over calling Mrs May a 'stupid woman' during bitter clashes at PMQs today. The Labour leader faced a furious backlash from Tories and his own MPs after appearing to mouth the jibe during a stormy Commons session. In a brutal pre-Christmas exchanges, Mrs May had accused Mr Corbyn of descending into 'pantomine' over Brexit, saying his own party was not behind him. But as the PM said down to cheers, Mr Corbyn seemed to mutter: 'Stupid woman.' The remark was not picked up on microphones, but politicians from both sides of the House were in little doubt what he said - as were lipreaders. However, hauled back to the House hours later, Mr Corbyn flatly denied saying the words. 'I did not use the words 'stupid woman' about the Prime Minister or anyone else,' he said. Despite the rebuttal, virtuoso percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie, who is deaf and can lipread, agreed with the interpretation. Bizarrely, Hollywood actor Rob Lowe also waded in, saying he had seen the insult 'with my own eyes'. When the slur was raised with her in the chamber, Mrs May retorted that all MPs must refer to women in an 'appropriate' way. And after PMQs ended the House descended into chaos as Tories demanded Speaker John Bercow haul Mr Corbyn back to apologise. This is the sickening moment a Syrian refugee was attacked inside a high school bathroom by a bully who reportedly wanted to vape inside the stall that was occupied by the victim. In a video posted on Facebook by high school senior, Alexis Work, the 14-year-old victim is seen walking out of the stall when she's confronted by another teen at Chartiers Valley High School in Bridgeville, Pennsylvania. During the first few moments of the video, it's hard to make out exactly what the two are saying to one another, but at one point, the teen in the lavender sweater threatens the hijab-wearing victim. 'You're lucky you're from another language because I will crush you b***h,' the girl in the sweater yells. This is the sickening moment a Syrian teen (seen wearing a hijab) was attacked inside a Pennsylvania high school's bathroom by a bully (pictured in purple) who reportedly wanted to vape inside the stall that was occupied by the victim 'You're lucky you're from another language because I will crush you b***h,' the girl in the sweater yells. She then pushed the 14-year-old victim backwards into the stall and began pummeling her in the head She then pushed the girl backwards into the stall and began pummeling her in the head. 'I'm not punching you, you punched me first,' yelled the victim. The victim managed to get a couple of punches after realizing the bully wasn't going to stop. In the video, the sweater-wearing girl continued attacking the student, even as she fell to the floor and screamed: 'Leave me alone.' Eventually, the video ended with the person recording walking out of the bathroom. But according to Work, who shared the incident online on Saturday, the fighting continued even after the clip ends. In the video, the sweater-wearing girl continued attacking the student, even as she fell to the floor and screamed: 'Leave me alone' The victim (pictured) ended up with a concussion and severe bruising once the fight was finally over The video was posted on Facebook by high school senior, Alexis Work, who said the incident occurred at Chartiers Valley High School (pictured) in Bridgeville, Pennsylvania. Collier Police Chief Craig said that criminal charges are pending The victim ended up with a concussion and severe bruising once the fight was finally over. Work told WTAE that the attacker 'is suspended from school until Thursday and has a court hearing on Thursday, in which the school is going to attempt to expel her'. She said in her Facebook post that she was 'livid' after watching the video for the first time. Work, who wasn't there, said she obtained the video from another student. According to WTAE, the Council on American-Islamic Relations is now calling for a state and federal investigation because the student who was attacked is Muslim. The council believes the incident was a hate crime. However, the Collier Township police, who are investigating the incident, say they're ruling out a hate crime. Collier Police Chief Craig said that criminal charges are pending. The Chartiers Valley School District released a statement condemning the attacker's actions. 'Chartiers Valley School District does not condone or tolerate violence of any kind and will enforce consequences to the fullest extent,' the school said. 'The District considers matters of student safety and security to be of utmost importance and strives to provide a safe and welcoming learning environment for all of its students and staff.' A man has been found dead at a Washington DC Amtrak station after becoming trapped in an escalator. A spokesperson from Amtrak said that the man was found dead early on Tuesday morning by a commuter at the New Carrollton train station. The commuter found the unidentified man just after midnight in the portion of the station that is used by both Metro and MARC, ABC 7 reports. Scroll down for video A spokesperson from Amtrak said that the man was found dead early on Tuesday morning by a commuter at the New Carrollton train station The commuter found the unidentified man just after midnight in the portion of the station that is used by both Metro and MARC Authorities who have reviewed surveillance footage shared that the man had been climbing up an escalator that was going in the opposite direction. The man suddenly fell backwards and hit his head on the escalator as he reached the top, according to NBC Washington. It was later discovered that his clothing had gotten stuck in the escalator. Authorities who have reviewed surveillance footage shared that the man had been climbing up an escalator that was going in the opposite direction. It was later discovered that his clothing had gotten stuck in the escalator Prince George's County police are assisting the Amtrak Police with the case. They are also working to notify the man's next of kin. Investigators are trying to determine how long the man had been lying on the escalator and whether he had been trying to ride public transportation. At the time of the incident, no Amtrak trains were running. Service was not affected on Tuesday morning but local authorities did stay in the area to continue investigations. Scott O'Brien, 44, (pictured leaving court) launched a barrage of homophobic slurs and asked him 'Are you a funny c***?' A construction boss who pushed a TfL worker towards Tube tracks after being asked to move back has avoided jail after he apologised in court. Scott O'Brien, 44, rushed towards Gustavo Gonzalez on the Baker Street platform after being asked to step back from the yellow line. As he approached the TfL worker on September 7, O'Brien launched a barrage of homophobic slurs and asked him 'Are you a funny c***?' Mr Gonzales was then hit over the with a rolled out newspaper and taunted with homophobic remarks, Westminster Magistrates' Court heard. O'Brien pushed another worker, Kaleem Naeem, towards the tracks just moments after he tried to intervene. He then tried to headbutt Mr Naeem but only made contact with his hand. O'Brien admitted assaulting Mr Gonzalez by beating but denied a second charge of assaulting Mr Naeem by beating and using threatening words to cause alarm or distress. In a statement to court, O'Brien said: 'I am very apologetic for everything and I just want to get it sorted as soon as possible.' He avoided jail but was sentenced to a 12 month community order which included 120 hours of unpair work. O'Brien was also ordered to pay 965 in court costs and victim surcharges. The building site project manager told the court: 'The gentleman was taking the mick out of me over the tannoy is that allowed? 'I went back to speak to him, yes. I tapped him with a newspaper. I did it in a jokey way.' Earlier Magistrate Jay Cheyne told O'Brien: 'We found Mr Naeem a credible and compelling witness. The shocking incident took place at Baker Street platform on September 7 'You could have got on the train and left the station. Instead you remained and prolonged the situation. 'You pushed Mr Naeem in the chest. We find as fact, you used threatening and abusive words to both London Underground workers. 'You used aggressive and homophobic language towards Mr Gonzalez.' O'Brien, of Herts, admitted assault by beating and was convicted of further charges of assault and using threatening words to cause alarm or distress in respect of Mr Naeem. Despite police under staffing and lack of training, officials say the shooting death of University of Utah student athlete Lauren McCluskey could not have been prevented. University of Utah revealed their findings from an independent review of campus police Wednesday, which found the department of public safety to be 'understaffed' and having 'gaps in training.' The review was conducted in the aftermath of 21-year-old McCluskey's death when she was found murdered in a car by ex-boyfriend and registered sex offender Melvin Rowland, 37, weeks after she reported his behavior to the University and it failed to act. University of Utah's President Ruth Watkins said Wednesday that they will implement the recommendations from the review, but added the report 'does not offer us reason to believe this tragedy could have been prevented'. Lauren McCluskey, 21, was killed by ex-boyfriend Melvin Rowland, 37, in October, prompting an independent review of campus police by the University of Utah University of Utah revealed their findings from an independent review of campus police Wednesday which found police under staffing, gaps in training and failure of a sex offender notification system The report found a program called O Track, or offender tracking, failed to notify officers that Rowland was out on parole after serving nine years in prison for sexually abusing a minor. McCluskey broke up with Rowland after a month of dating when she learned he had been lying about his name, age, and his criminal past. She reported him to campus police twice afterwards, on October 12 and 13 and was working with a detective to build a case against him. Rowland could have been jailed for violating his parole in the harassment, but university police never flagged him to parole officials due to the failure in the O Track system. Campus police were also unable to track him down in the days leading up to when he fatally shot McCluskey, of Pullman, Washington as she was walking home from night class. He turned the gun on himself just a few hours later after being cornered by police. Rowland had a long history of manipulating women into sex and lied to McCluskey about his age, name and criminal past Rowland murdered Lauren at her dorm, the South Tower Medical Plaza Student Housing, before going on a date with a woman and visiting the State Captitol. Hours later, he killed himself at Trinity AME Church McCluskey from Pullman, Washington and was a senior studying communications, 'an accomplished student athlete', and a star on the school's track and field team Watkins said Wednesday: 'Melvin Rowland was a criminal, a manipulative evil criminal. He exploited countless individuals.' According to his jail records, Rowland was convicted on July 19, 2004 of attempted forcible sexual abuse and enticing a minor. He served nine years in prison Commissioner of Public Safety John T Nielsen called him 'a very clever, very bright career criminal.' The university outlined several steps they will be taking to ensure the students' safety, which include streamlining the reporting process for cases that potentially involve personal safety, directing police officers to conduct mandatory offender information checks and evaluating current record management systems. 'I am holding myself and my leadership team responsible for making these changes,' Watkins said. 'Our commitment to Lauren, her friends and family, as well as our students, parents, staff, faculty and community is that safety will continue to be a top priority at the University of Utah,' she added. The university said it will also add staff in the University of Utahs Behavioral Intervention Team, Department of Public Safety (UUPS) and Housing and Residential Education (HRE), as well as train officers and HRE in the Lethality Assessment Program. 'We are acting on all the insights and recommendations in the review team's report, which identified gaps in our training, awareness and enforcement of certain policies and offers us a roadmap for strengthening security on our campus,' Watkins said. A key witness to the murder in Congo of two U.N. experts was poisoned with insecticide while in custody, it emerged today. The deadly chemical was discovered in the stomach of the witness who was found dead in his military cell in Congo on October 23, Swedish broadcaster SVT reported. The U.N. is still conducting tests to determine conclusively whether the witness, identified in the report as Tshikele Kengayi, ingested a lethal dose of the poison. He was being held in a military prison and his death has sparked fears the Congolese authorities are trying to suppress evidence relating to the two murders. American Michael Sharp, 34, and Sweden's Zaida Catalan were killed in March 2017, while investigating possible violations of U.N. sanctions against Congo. UN Swedish employee Zaida Catalan was found dead in the Democratic Republic of Congo Sharp, Catalan, interpreter Betu Tshintela, driver Isaac Kabuayi and two motorbike drivers went missing March 12 last year in Central Kasai while investigating violence and alleged human rights violations by the Congolese army and local militia groups. The pair were said to have been murdered by a group of armed men while investigating reports of mass atrocities in the Congolese province of Kasai. The murderers documented the killings on a phone camera. Congo has blamed the killings on the Kamwina Nsapu militia active in the central Kasai provinces. But rights groups have said security forces may have been involved, which the government denies. The U.N. report also says the Congolese prosecution suspects Col. Jean de Dieu Mambweni is behind the murders, SVT said, citing a new confidential report by the United Nations. He was arrested in early December after failing to disclose that he had met with Sharp and Catalan just two days before they were brutally murdered. UN experts Michael Sharp was found dead alongside his colleague Zaida Catalan in Congo The Congolese colonel was remanded in custody. The report also states a militiaman charged with taking part in the assassination of Catalan and Sharp, worked for the Congolese Army. The report, dated December 12 and written by Robert Petit, an attorney sent to Congo by the U.N. secretary-general to assist in the ongoing investigation, said 'further testing is planned to confirm if the substance was in lethal quantity,' according to SVT. Suicide by taking insecticide has been reported in Africa before and a Zimbabwe cabinet minister killed himself in the 1980s by ingesting rat poison. The fiance of a missing Colorado mother who vanished on Thanksgiving was spotted dumping trash at a waste facility with two other men after police searched his ranch for the first time. Patrick Frazee, whose fiancee Kelsey Berreth vanished on November 22 after dropping off their daughter with him, was seen at the plant in Divide on Monday after police had left his ranch. Employees at the ranch said Frazee was driving a white pick-up truck which was towing a trailer. He did not get out of the vehicle but the two other men did to unload trash from the trailer. The two other men drove in two separate cars. It is not clear if they arrived at the same time as Frazee or not. Staff called police after recognizing Frazee and officers arrived to watch him through binoculars. Patrick Frazee was seen at this waste facility on Monday in Florissant, Colorado, after police had searched his ranch. He was seen in a pick-up truck towing a trailer which two other men emptied. Police were called and later searched his home again but he is still not a suspect in his fiance's disappearance Frazee's fiance Kelsey Berreth, left, has been missing since Thanksgiving and he is the last person to have seen her alive They returned to his ranch on Tuesday afterwards to carry out their second search and they also retrieved bags of trash from the waste facility. The Woodland Park Police Department is still however refusing to name Frazee as a suspect. The FBI, which is also involved in the search for Kelsey, has said nothing about the investigation. On Tuesday, Woodland Park police officers said their return to Frazee's ranch was a 'routine follow up' search. The Department is now offering a $25,000 reward to anyone who has information which could lead to Kelsey's whereabouts. According to KRDO, the employees at the plant called them and the police after he arrived. According to workers at the waste facility, Frazee stayed in his pick-up truck while two other men emptied trash from a trailer attached to it Multiple police cars were seen at the plant but police would not confirm why they were there. Frazee's attorney has insisted that he is cooperating with police and that he has nothing to hide. He still has custody of their young daughter but has repeatedly refused to speak to media. He says he was the last person to see her alive on November 22 when she dropped off their daughter with him. Kelsey was last seen on surveillance cameras that morning grocery shopping with the pair's daughter. Police searched his ranch on Monday (above) but returned after seeing him at the waste facility and searched it a second time on Tuesday Frazee still has the couple's daughter in his care. They are shown last week as he refused to answer journalists' questions It was not until November 25 that her concerned mother told police to say she had not heard from her. She was officially reported missing on December 2. Despite being engaged and sharing a daughter, Kelsey and Frazee do not live together. Very little is known about their relationship. Her mother has spoken out only to plead for information which could lead to her return and the authorities are being extraordinarily tight lipped about her disappearance. They revealed that when they searched her home, there were cinnamon rolls left out on the counter which had recently been baked. Her cell phone pinged on November 25 in Idaho, hundreds of miles from her home. On the same day, Frazee and her colleagues at a flight instruction school say they received text messages that she was not going to be at work for the following week. Friends have described Frazee as a 'kind, old-fashioned cowboy' who would 'never' hurt her. Police first searched his 35-acre property on Friday after the FBI became involved. A sheriff's deputy in Florida horrifically killed his wife, daughter and granddaughter, before shooting himself dead in front of his fellow deputies outside of a high school. Hillsborough County Sheriff's deputy, 58-year-old Terry Strawn, killed his wife Theresa, 54, and his 6-year-old granddaughter Londyn at their home, before killing his 32-year-old daughter Courtney at her home, according to the Tampa Bay Times. Terry then shot himself dead in front of Plant City High School. His cousin Jimmy Strawn, posted to Facebook about the awful tragedy, 'This morning my cousin, Deputy Terry Strawn, killed his wife, daughter, and granddaughter, then killed himself. We are truly devastated and are still trying to wrap our heads around it.' 'Please,' his cousin urged, 'if you are considering suicide, REACH OUT!! We would have done ANYTHING for Terry, Theresa, Courtney, and little Londyn. We miss you and love you all.' Hillsborough County Sheriff's deputy Terry Strawn, 58, right, killed his wife, Theresa, 54 (left) his 6-year-old granddaughter Londyn (pictured) at their home, before killing his 32-year-old daughter Courtney (in green) at her home Terry started with the Hillsborough County Sheriff's office in 1991, and had briefly retired and returned to the force after retiring two-years-ago (right, Courtney with her daughter in 2014) The Hillsborough County Sheriff's office is seen investigating one of the homes where the victims were killed in Dover, Florida The incident unfolded before 7am Wednesday morning. Deputy Strawn went onto the main sheriff's radio channel to say 'he had caused harm to his family.' 'Then he advised was going to kill himself at Plant City High School,' Hillsborough County Sheriff Chad Chronister said during a press conference Wednesday. 'A supervisor got on the air to try to calm him down, to ensure him it's a temporary problem.' The deputy mentioned financial and health issues on the radio, Chronsiter said, but he had no more details. While he was on the radio, three deputies went to the high school and spotted him just off the school property. A Hillsborough County Sheriff Forensics Deputy enters a home where a deputy killed his relatives in the area of Dover, Florida before killing himself near a high school in Plant City The Hillsborough County Sheriff Chad Chronister and his staff investigates a deputy killed who three relatives at their homes in Dover, then killed himself near Plant City High School A Hillsborough County Sheriff Office Forensics vehicle enters a subdivision where a deputy killed three of his relatives at their homes in Dover Hillsborough County Sheriff Chad Chronister enters a community where the deputy killed his family members Hillsborough County Sheriff Chad Chronister (picutred) declined to identify the sheriff's deputy or the two women and child he killed Wednesday morning in Plant City, Florida Sheriff Chronister held a press conference on Wednesday following the incident The sheriff's department made sure to let the community know the incident was not related to the school while urging motorists to stay out of the area They made every attempt to stop him from killing himself, but they were unable, according to Chronister. At Plant City High, staff was trying to keep people away from the scene of the Sheriff's Office investigation on the northeast area of the campus, the Tampa Bay Times reports. There were reports of shots fired just before 7am but students and staff were not involved. The school was not placed on lockdown. The rural town of Plant City was rocked by the news that a sheriff's deputy had killed two women and a baby at two different homes before going to Plant City High School and shooting himself dead in front of three other deputies The deputy had been with the Hillsborough County Sheriff's office since 1991. There was 'no indication whatsoever that would lead us to believe' that the deputy would do something like this, Chronister said, according to ABC Action News. He had retired two years ago but was brought back on to do security at a local elementary school following the Parkland school shooting. The Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office made the decision to hire him back permanently, and according to Chronister the deputy was so happy to be hired back as a full time deputy sheriff. Names of the victims and the deputy weren't immediately released. This is the second time a Hillsborough County Sheriffs deputy was involved in a murder-suicide. On Sept. 24, a deputy killed his wife and then himself while the couples four children were home. As the final days of the Republican-controlled House came to an end, former Attorney Gen. Loretta Lynch came to the Capitol under a subpoena and promptly got grilled by lawmakers about her infamous tarmac meeting with President Bill Clinton. Lynch was in the Capitol complex under a subpoena, just days after former FBI Director James Comey gave a second interview to two GOP-run committees. Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland told DailyMail.com that lawmakers did quiz Lynch about the tarmac meeting, but didn't provide any details. The behind-closed doors meeting was expected to last hours Wednesday. After arriving on Capitol Hill, she didn't address reporters and immediately met with members of the House Judiciary and House Oversight and Government Reform Committees. Former US Attorney General Loretta Lynch (C) arrives to testify before members of the House Judiciary and House Oversight and Government Reform Committees, on Capitol Hill. She was immediately quizzed about her tarmac meeting with former President Bill Clinton During the meeting on a Pheonix airport tarmac, Lynch, who had arrived on her own plane, met with President Bill Clinton during the heat of the 2016 presidential campaign. Under fire afterward, she said the two did not discuss the status of the FBI's email investigation of Hillary Clinton, which Comey announced in July 2016 did not meet the bar for prosecution. Pressure on Lynch during the campaign ultimately persuaded Comey to on his own announce the decision not to prosecutor Clinton, rather than having the attorney general put out a statement. He was later slammed by members of both parties for his public handling of the matter. Lynch, a former federal prosecutor in New York, got grilled about her tarmac meeting. Former FBI Director James Comey savaged President Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers who dragged him into another closed-door interview on Monday This wild goose chase now ends with not with a bang but a whimper, said Raskin, whose party will soon assume investigatory power. When I got into the room I saw two members asleep. One Democrat and one Republican,' he continued. 'I will not identify them by name. But I feel as if my GOP colleagues are going through the motions on this and, you know, they are riding out a paranoid deep state conspiracy theory. Following his own grilling Monday, Comey blasted Republicans for misdirected oversight in comments to reporters. 'Another day of the Hillary Clinton emails and the Steele dossier this while the president is lying about the FBI, attacking the FBI and attacking the rule of law in this country. How does this make any sense at all?,' Comey told reporters. 'People who know better, including Republican members of this body, have to have the courage to stand up and speak the truth, not be cowed by mean tweets or fear of their base,' Comey fumed. 'Their silence is shameful,' Comey added. According to an Inspector General's report on the June 2016 tarmac meeting: 'Former President Clinton said that he recalled walking toward Lynchs plane with his Chief of Staff, and that Lynch and her staff were getting off the airplane. He said that he greeted Lynch, who was on the plane, and Lynch stated, [L]ook its a 100 degrees out there, come up and well talk about our grandkids.' Lynch said that former President Clinton boarded the plane in a matter of seconds, suggesting that he was in the stairwell near the door to the plane,' according to the report. 'Lynch said that she was very surprised that he wanted to meet with her because they did not have a social relationship, and she was also surprised to see him right there in the doorway so quickly.' According to Clinton's account: 'I just wanted to say hello to her and I thought it would look really crazy if we were living in [a] world [where] I couldnt shake hands with the Attorney General you know when she was right there,' as Quartz recounted. But the report said of Lynch: 'Lynch estimated that she talked to former President Clinton for approximately 20 minutes before a member of her staff came back onto the plane, as we describe below. She said that she became increasingly concerned as the meeting "went on and on." Lynch said that when she thought about it later that evening and discussed it with her staff about in the context of the case, she concluded that it was just too long a conversation to have had. Itwent beyond hi, how are you, shake hands, move on sort of thing. It went beyond the discussions Ive had with other people in public life, even in political life, it went beyond that [in terms of length]. Idunn Schneider, 45, of Issaquah, Washington, is charged with two counts of malicious prosecution and tampering with physical evidence A Washington state woman's attempt to pin claims of sexual and domestic assault against a police chief and another officer turned back around on her as she faces criminal charges for making up her accusations. Idunn Schneider, 45, of Issaquah, Washington, is now facing charges of two counts of malicious prosecution and tampering with physical evidence, according to court documents. Bellevue Police Chief Steve Mylett was accused of rape by Scheider who allegedly fabricated evidence to back it up. Mylett was placed on paid leave for months until he was cleared, according to MyNorthwest. Scheider had also falsely accused former Officer John Kivlin of tampering with evidence and violating a no-contact order for punching her in the face. She 'used a sophisticated ruse to deceive Kivlin, law enforcement, prosecutors, and the court' the court documents state. Chief Mylett was accused this summer during the investigation into her claims against Kivlin and another Bellevue police officer, both of whom Schneider had met online. Schneider claimed that she met the police chief through a fetish website for people into rough sex, and that he eventually raped her in his rental home in Bothell, Washington, the Seattle Times reported. However her story fell apart when underwear she provided investigators did not have DNA evidence of Mylett present and when it turned out she had faked email exchanges setting up their meeting. Additionally, Mylett and his wife did not live in the Bothell house at the time of the alleged assault Her separate claims that another, unnamed officer sexually assaulted her after a night of drinking did not lead to charges. Bellevue Police Chief Steve Mylett (shown) was reinstated after being cleared of rape charges leveled by Idunn Schneider 'I think people should be held accountable for their actions,' Chief Mylett said during a press conference for his reinstatement. 'I think the process of the claims that were made against me worked, and I think another process will take place and I am confident that the right decisions will be made.' Kivlin was less lucky after serving three separate jail stints totaling 49 days, splitting with his wife, resigning from the job and being forced to sell his home, Kivlin's attorney said. Schneider accusing him in April led to his arrest and subsequent release. But, her continually adding new charges, along with her falsified evidence, led to Kivlin being rearrested and held on ever higher amounts of bail. Schneider has a history of falsely reporting consensual sexual encounters with men on Craigslist as rape, the Times also reported. Despite the rarity of false rape accusations, she had made untrue claims twice previously, according to a detectives affidavit. Prosecutors declined to charge Schneider in a previous similar cases due to mental health concerns, the sheriff's office said in October. A cheeky long tail macaque was almost crushed for stealing a banana out of the mouth of an orangutan. The clip, filmed on November 16, shows the orangutan pushing away and holding the macaque by the head while he finishes a mouthful of banana. 'A long tail macaque is trying to steal a banana out of an orangutan's mouth and is being punished for it. At the end, the macaque was shocked but not injured,' says the filmer. 'I filmed this at one of the nicest places on earth: Tanjung Puting National Park, Borneo, Indonesia. 'A long tail macaque is trying to steal a banana out of an orangutan's mouth and is being punished for it. At the end, the macaque was shocked but not injured.' Extinction in the wild is likely in the next decade for Sumatran orangutans and soon after for Bornean orangutans. Both the Sumatran species, known as Pongo abelii, and the Bornean species, also described as Pongo pygmaeus, are critically endangered according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species. Deforestation has led to the Sumatran and Bornean Orangutans' rainforest habitats to disappear at an alarming rate which is leading to the clearance of the land for pulp paper and palm oil plantations, with the remaining forest degraded by drought and forest fires. The orangutans which are displaced end up starving to death, being killed by plantation workers as pests, or die in the fires. The long tail macaque had more than it bargained for when it decided to help itself to the orangutan's banana The cheeky monkey grabbed the food straight from the orangutan's mouth The orangutan made a grab for the monkey in punishment for its determined grab for food The furious ape left the monkey in shock after pinning him down in revenge following the bust-up at Tanjung Puting National Park, Borneo, Indonesia In just a few weeks in prison, Chris Watts received close to 60 letters from complete strangers that expressed both love and hatred for the murderer. A majority of the letters were from women, and many of these included photos that the sender purported to be of them as well as promises to send more images or add money to Watts' commissary account. Other letters, which were obtained by DailyMail.com after filing a request under the Colorado Open Records Act, were from individuals wishing death on Watts, and expressing a desire that he be both physically and sexually assaulted behind bars. Bikini lady: One of the women who corresponded with Chris Watts sent along this photo (above) Correspondence: The letter that accompanied the bikini photos from a woman in Brooklyn Penpal: Tammy from Ohio (above) wrote Watts a number of times while he was in prison Friendly exchange: One of the many letters Tammy sent to Watts in prison (above) Growing close: Tammy frequently included photos of herself for Watts to see while he read the letters (above) Left in the cold: Tammy (above) and the other women seemed to suggest that Watts was not writing back in their follow-up letters Terminator: Not all good news: Watts also learned he had been fired in jail (above) There were also a few certified letters for Watts, including one from his employer Anadarko informing him that he had been terminated on the same day he confessed to killing his wife and disposing of his daughters' bodies in oil tanks. NBC and ABC producers also wrote to Watts on numerous occasions seeking interviews. It does not appear that Watts wrote back to any of the women based on follow-up notes from a few of the senders, who often included more photos and expressed their love for the felon and belief that he was innocent of all crimes. Watts' more persistent fan was a young grandmother living in Hawaii who sent him at least 5 letters during the first six weeks that he was incarcerated at the Weld County Jail. Keeping in touch: Candace was another woman who wrote to Watts multiple times while he was at the Weld County Jail (above) New friend: One of Watts penpals sent along these two photos of herself To the point: A woman named Ashleigh checked to see if Watts wanted to write to her in the letter she sent to him in jail Laurel often wrote Watts letters that were three or four pages long, and included post cards from Hawaii. 'I'm not expecting to hear back from you (at least not yet) and I totally understand. And my purpose in writing to you is to solely give you a glimmer of HOPE, and maybe a laugh or smile,' she wrote in a letter sent in late September. 'Things have a way of turning around. Try to keep your thoughts positive my dear. You can get through this !!!' She then added before signing off: 'Until next week. Keep the faith.' A month prior, in her first letter to Watts, she asked if he needed any books or had a TV, eager to send him things that might help him pass the time behind bars. She also wrote that she was hoping to soon be moving to Colorado as her daughter lived there, but that plan fell through when her daughter instead elected to move to Hawaii. Tammy, a middle-aged woman who also frequently corresponded with Watts, sent at least six photos with her letters. 'You don't know me but I think you might want to,' wrote Tammy in her first letter. She included two full page images in that correspondence which were then sent back to her as they were too large. Payback: One woman referred to Watts as 'Christeen' and expressed a desire for Watts to be raped by his fellow inmates (above) Not a fan: Another woman described Watts as 'vile' and a 'monster,' writing that she hoped god would have mercy on Watts' 'pathetic soul' Fly away: One woman sent Watts four feathers to represent his dead wife, daughters and unborn baby Postcards from the edge: Laurel from Hawaii sent the most letters to Watts, and a number of postcards (above) Another woman asked that the four feathers she sent be given to Watts as they represented his wife, daughters and unborn son. There was also a woman who simply asked Watts to write back whether or not he wished to communicated with her. Then there were a number of people who wished harm and retribution on Watts for murdering his family. One woman referred to Watts as 'Christeen' and expressed a desire for Watts to be raped by his fellow inmates. On the back of her letter she wrote: 'Good luck Christeen, you gonna need it!!!!' She then added: 'Die bitch!!!' Another woman described Watts as 'vile' and a 'monster,' writing that she hoped god would have mercy on Watts' 'pathetic soul.' Ruksana Ashraf, 44, from Edinburgh, made 180,000 worth of fraudulent insurance claims relating to tragedies in which more than a hundred people lost their lives A woman who made dozens of fraudulent insurance claims totalling nearly 180,000, including ones relating to the Grenfell Tower fire, Manchester bombing and Borough Market terrorist attack, has been jailed for three years. Ruksana Ashraf admitted three counts of fraud relating to false insurance claims made to RSA, Aviva, and Legal and General between 2012 and 2017. The court heard the 44-year-old from Edinburgh had used multiple mobile phone SIM cards and fake names and addresses to take out dozens of insurance policies and then make bogus claims. Ashraf also admitted one count of possessing criminal property in relation to receiving vouchers from insurers instead of compensation. Ben Holt, prosecuting, said the successful claims totalled 50,116, but Ashraf had also tried to scam a further 129,030, claims which were not successful. Three of Ruksana Ashraf's fraudulent insurance claims was made in relation to the Grenfell Tower fire She also claimed against the Manchester Arena suicide bombing, in which 22 people were killed and 139 were wounded, more than half of them children. Snd she said she had been affected by the terrorist outrage at London Bridge and Borough Market in which a gang yelling 'This is for Allah' killed seven and wounded 48 He told Inner London Crown Court on Wednesday that Ashraf made claims relating to Grenfell Tower and two major terrorist attacks. Mr Holt added: 'Some of those claims related to terrorist attacks or natural disasters that had recently happened. 'Three claims were said to arise from the Grenfell Tower, two from the bombing on the Arena in Manchester and one from the terrorist attack on Borough Market in London. 'I do accept that the idea behind the fraud is slightly different in so far as the defendant was not making false representation to the council that they were a resident and liable for payment. 'But it does need to be borne in mind that this defendant was claiming to be present at natural disasters when clearly she wasn't.' Daniel King, defending, appealed for a suspended sentence and said his client had not used the cash to live an 'exotic' lifestyle. The court heard Ashraf, of Saughton Mains Terrace, Edinburgh, had turned to drink and gambling following two abusive relationships and was carer to her elderly mother. Ashraf did not claim she was living at Grenfell or due for council recompense but her insurance scam did relate to the tragedy Mr King added: 'She also accepts that those claims relating to the tragedies of Grenfell Tower, at Borough Market and then the Manchester Arena demonstrate a callous and heartless underlying feature of this fraudulent activity.' But Judge Wood QC said he could not impose a suspended jail sentence because of the length of offending and sophistication of the scam. He added: 'Sometimes in these class of cases one is told that the defendant was in desperate need of money and in her plight succumbed to temptation. 'Here the mitigation is substantially to the effect she is in a position her mother needs her care and depends on her and she herself is not in the best of health.' Jailing her for three years, the judge said it was disgraceful to have used terrorist attacks and disasters to make false claims. He added: 'The defendant has quite disgracefully made reference to the tragedy at Grenfell and terrorist attacks causing loss of life at Borough and Manchester and that has caused distress to others.' Theresa May has not kept jewellery she was given by Donald Trump when he visited the UK, it was revealed today. The US president and his wife Melania came to Britain over the summer for the first time since he entered the White House. According to the latest 'transparency' information published by the government, they brought 'jewellery and a jewellery box' for the PM. The exact nature of the present is still not known. But it seems Mr Trump might have gone overboard in trying to demonstrate the continuing strength of the Special Relationship. The disclosure reveals that Mrs May chose not to pay to keep the gifts herself - amid hints that they were simply too expensive. It seems Donald Trump (pictured with Theresa May duringhis visit to the UK in July) might have gone overboard in trying to demonstrate the continuing strength of the Special Relationship Under Whitehall rules, ministers can keep gifts up to the value of 140. But above that they must be declared and if the politician wants to keep the present they must pay the balance above that sum. The latest register for Mrs May states that the offering from the president in July was valued 'above limit', and 'held by the department' - the fate of anything ministers choose not to purchase with their own money. No10 sources suggested the premier might have chosen not to hold on to the jewellery because it was 'some way over' the 140 threshold. By contrast, she did opt to pay to keep some jewellery she was given by designer Mirta Frosini during the three months to September. The visit by Mr Trump was thorny for Mrs May, and she did not skimp on presents for him and the First Lady. She gave him a chart tracing his Scottish ancesrty back to his great, great, great grandfather Kenneth Macleod, who was born near Stornoway in 1776 - the year the US declared independence. Downing Street said at the time that the present 'underlined the deep historical links that many modern-day Americans have with the United Kingdom'. Mrs May gave Melania perfume by Floris London, the oldest independent family perfumer in the world having been established in 1730. Princess Diana, Winston Churchill and Marilyn Monroe are said to be among those who have worn the firm's scents. Police have finally located a Missouri woman's missing 12-foot-tall tiny house after it was stolen over the weekend. Meghan Panu of St. Louis was heartbroken to learn her 12 by 20 feet cedar mobile home suddenly vanished from where she last parked it. She devoted two years to creating the home, her passion project, as a part of her senior thesis in environmental studies at Webster University, and planned to move into it in the spring. Jefferson County Sheriff Dave Marshak said detectives found the home Wednesday morning about 30 miles from St. Louis in the unincorporated community of House Springs, after receiving an anonymous tip. Missouri woman Meghan Panu said her 12 by 20 foot tiny house was stolen over the weekend Found! On Wednesday Jefferson County police found the home in a deserted road in a wooded area in House Springs, about 30 miles from where it went missing in St. Louis To add to the Christmas miracle, the towing company retrieving her mobile home said they will return it to her free of charge after the story of the missing tiny home went viral It was found deserted in a dirt road in a wooded area. To add to the Christmas miracle, the towing company retrieving her mobile home said they will return it to her free of charge after the story of the missing tiny home went viral. Marshak said police will continue to investigate who stole the eco-friendly miniature home. Marshak alerted the public that the home was discovered on Wednesday morning. 'Detectives located this TinyHouse in House Springs, Mo. this morning, and are working to locate the owner (reported stolen from St. Louis City),' he tweeted. Elated, Panu updated her Facebook followers saying 'TINY HOUSE FOUND'. Alarm was first raised on Saturday morning when Panu received a call asking if she had moved the tiny home overnight from where she last parked it in front of a Refab building supply store on Michigan and Gravois avenues in St. Louis. She updated her followers on Monday saying the house was last seen on highway I-40 heading towards California before it was later found on Wednesday Locals said they saw a Ford red pick-up truck hitching and towing away the tiny house On Sunday she posted a plea on her Instagram St. Louis Tiny Living for help in locating the home after it disappeared some time between Friday night and Saturday morning She said she did not and realized it was stolen. She posted a desperate plea for help on Sunday on her Instagram St. Louis Tiny Living after finding just a few blocks of wood where her tiny mobile home once stood. She says the home was stolen between 10.30pm on Friday to 11am on Saturday. 'You hear about stolen cars and trailers all the time but this is a stolen house. So it's shocking in so many ways and it sticks out,' she said to KMOV. She approached local businesses and frantically went through their surveillance cameras to try to catch the culprit. Some residents have reported seeing a red Ford pick-up truck pulling the home. 'It sticks out, it's tempting to take but I put a lot of love and passion and effort into this project, so I just want it back,' Panu said. 'There's such little regard for the effort, and the time, and the love that I've put into this, and I think that's what's the most frustrating to me - that it's not just a material possession,' Panu said The cedar home is 12 feet tall and 20 feet wide. She was in the process of finishing and furnishing the interior and planned to move into the home in the spring 'It's been a hectic few days, but we're getting this house back one way or another. Thanks for the love,' she wrote to her followers on Monday Home for the holidays! Panu will be reunited with her wooden tiny house on Wednesday 'Im just hoping that maybe state patrol will flag it and pull it over, but in the meantime its just been a waiting game,' she said over the weekend to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. On Monday evening she updated her Instagram followers saying the house was spotted on the I-40 highway heading towards California. 'It's been a hectic few days, but we're getting this house back one way or another. Thanks for the love,' she posted. Panu said she dedicated hundreds of hours to the home and was still working on its interior. She had planned to furnish it and move in by spring. 'We were working eight-hour days, several days out of the week. So, I would go from my classes at Webster, and I would drive out to Ballwin and work on the house, and I loved that. I loved the hustle of that,' she said to KTVI. Such tiny, minimalistic homes have become a popular fad for conservationists and those seeking to live a more eco-friendly lifestyle. 'There's such little regard for the effort, and the time, and the love that I've put into this, and I think that's what's the most frustrating to me - that it's not just a material possession,' she said over the weekend. 'It's not just a car. It's a place where I was going to sort of build roots and grow in my community,' she added. A shop manager whose hopes of having children were destroyed by NHS blunders has won her fight to seek out a surrogate mother in California - with taxpayers footing the bill. In the first case of its kind, senior judges ruled the 35-year-old would not be be breaking the law by undergoing commercial surrogacies in America. And, although they are banned in Britain, the NHS was ordered to shoulder the six-figure cost of two pregnancies for profit in California. Woman wins right to fly to California in the US to find a surrogate mother The decision means the cost of trips to California to find a surrogate mother willing to carry Ms X's children for reward will be added to the NHS damages bill. The shop manager, referred to only as Ms X and who cannot be identified, won almost 600,000 damages from the NHS last year. That was after medics at Whittington Hospital missed four opportunities to diagnose cervical cancer. But the judge refused to award her the costs of commercial surrogacies in California, where surrogacy rules are far more liberal than in the UK. Sir Robert Nelson said commercial surrogacy is 'still illegal' in the UK and ruled that making the NHS pay the bills would be 'contary to public policy'. Reversing that decision today, Lord Justice McCombe, who was sitting with Ladies Justice King and Nicola Davies, ruled that the would-be mum was 'not proposing to do anything illegal' under English law. He ruled that Ms X was entitled to enough damages to, as far as possible, put her back in the same position that she would have been in but for the NHS's admitted negligence. He believes that includes funding of two commercial surrogate agreements in California. The exact amount of the woman's total payout from the Whittington Hospital NHS Trust will now have to be recalculated in the light of the court's decision. Whilst outlawing commercial surrogacies in the UK, the Surrogacy Arrangements Act 1985 'does not ban such acts from taking place abroad,' he said. And he concluded: 'It cannot be said that an intending mother's recourse to commercial surrogacy remains counter to the public policy of English law.' The decision means the cost of trips to California to find a surrogate mother willing to carry Ms X's children for reward will be added to the NHS damages bill. The court heard earlier that having at least four children was the woman's 'central ambition' - her sister has 10 - but radical surgery made her infertile. Twelve of her eggs were harvested and frozen before the operation, and experts said that would be enough to give her a family of two children. Under English law it is illegal to advertise in search of surrogate mothers and they, too, are banned from advertising their services. Surrogate mums cannot make a profit from carrying a child for nine months and can only be paid their 'reasonable expenses'. They are the legal parents of children they bear, and that can only be changed by court order following a birth. And that has led to cases of surrogate mothers refusing to give up children to their intended parents. The woman's lawyers said she objected that, in the UK, 'it is the surrogate mother who chooses the intended parent, rather than the other way round.' And she was frightened by 'the idea of being at the mercy of someone else's choosing, and attending informal parties to meet surrogate mothers.' Ruling on the case, Lord Justice McCombe said the purpose of the commercial surrogacy ban in Britain is to stop surrogacy becoming a 'business'. Those who trade in surrogacies commit a criminal offence and agreements that they make with would-be parents are illegal and unenforceable. But the judge said that would not make Ms X herself a criminal if she entered into a commercial surrogacy agreement in Britain. She won almost 600,000 damages last year after hospital failed to diagnose her cervical cancer There was also nothing in English law that prevented her from travelling to California to find surrogate mothers willing to carry her babies for profit. The judge added: 'Nothing in the legislation suggests that Ms X's act of entering into a commercial surrogacy agreement in California would be counter to the law or morals of UK statutes. 'It would be incoherent to deprive Ms X of her claim for damages at the outset when she personally proposes no wrongdoing either under Californian law or under the laws of the UK. 'It cannot be said that an intending mother's recourse to commercial surrogacy remains counter to the public policy of English law. 'The law cannot bar the recovery of damages for the cost of such surrogacy.' The exact amount of the woman's total payout from the Whittington Hospital NHS Trust will now have to be recalculated in the light of the court's decision. The judges earlier heard that, despite two smear tests and two biopsies, the woman's invasive cancer went undiagnosed for five years. She was in 'considerable pain and discomfort' but her 'unusual and troubling symptoms were discounted whenever she attended hospital.' By the time cancer was finally diagnosed, her tumour was so large she needed massive surgery and intense radiotherapy. The NHS trust 'admitted negligence' in failing to spot signs of cancer in smear tests in 2008 and 2012 and biopsies in 2012 and 2013. Her infertility was 'a terrible blow to her as one of her central ambitions in life was to found her own family.' 'She was so devastated by the news that she would be unable to bear children that she postponed her cancer treatment on two occasions in order to take a second and third opinion on whether fertility sparing surgery was indeed no longer available to her.' Aged just 29 when cancer was diagnosed, she went through premature menopause after the operation. And, coming from a large family, she found it deeply distressing to visit her sister and her 10 children. 'It is upsetting to her to look at small children when she feels that she may never become a mother herself,' Sir Robert Nelson said in his ruling last year. Still determined to have a family, her 'first choice' was to travel to California where commercial surrogacies are lawful and binding. She wanted to have at least four children, using her own frozen eggs, supplemented by donor eggs. Ms X's lawyers earlier argued that UK surrogacy laws are 'due for reform as life has moved on'. She would 'suffer psychologically' if forced to use the UK's restrictive surrogacy system, said barrister, Claire Watson. The mother of the Maryland man is believed to have jumped from a Carnival cruise ship has made a desperate plea for answers about her sons disappearance off the coast of Florida. 'Is there anyone that was aboard the Carnival Cruise victory that my son Thomas (Alex) McElhany was on that met, saw or interacted with him , that might answer some questions,' Allison McElhany wrote on Twitter Sunday. 'Thanks for your thoughts and prayers,' she said. The US Coast Guard called off the search for Thomas Sunday as surveillance footage shows he appear to intentionally go overboard. Thomas McElhany, 26, from Maryland had been reported as missing from a Carnival cruise ship Friday and the US coast guard search was called off (he's pictured with mother Allison) His mother Allison McElhany took to Twitter in a desperate plea for answers Sunday as the search for her son was called off Thomas' mother changed her profile photo on Facebook to a picture of her with her son when he was young. According to Allison's Facebook, she is also a widow. The Coast Guard says its helicopters, planes, and cutters covered nearly 2,100 square miles during the 32 hours that crews searched for McElhany. The Carnival Victory reported McElhany missing on Friday about 35 miles off Islamorada in the Florida Keys, launching the search. Coast Guard Cmdr. David Aldous said in a statement that it is always a difficult decision to suspend a search 'He didnt fall. According to authorities, it was an intentional act,' Kimberly Wyatt, a news director who happened to be on board the cruise ship, told the Orlando Sentinel on Friday. Wyatt later reported that cameras on board confirmed McElhaney went overboard, though it has not been definitively determined if it was intentional. The ship was about 35 miles away from Islamorada in the Florida Keys when McElhany is believed to have gone overboard. Allison took to Facebook to share a baby photo of her son. She is also a widow, according to her Facebook A helicopter, vessel and surveillance aircraft were used in the search effort. A tweet confirming the tragedy by news director Kimberly Wyatt is shown Passengers aboard the Carnival Victory cruise ship were alerted that a passenger was missing at around 3.00am Eastern on Friday, according to people who were on board the ship. It is believed that Thomas intentionally went overboard 35 miles away from Islamorada in the Florida Keys 'We were woken up by the public announcement system paging an individual a bit after 3am,' a passenger identified on Twitter as Diana Jorio tweeted. 'It was determined he went overboard at 5:30 am and 6:am we turned around. I was such a sad way to end an otherwise wonderful trip.' A photo of McElhany was shown on televisions all over the cruise ship. A letter signed by Captain Roberto Tine was delivered to each guest's cabin on Friday, confirming that the man was shown on camera going overboard. It added that the ship's CareTeam had been assisting the man's family on board and thanked guests for their patience. 'Please continue to keep our guest and his family in our thoughts and prayers,' it read. Wyatt tweeted that said she had seem McElhany between 1.00am and 1.30am. The cruise ship participated in search efforts before being relieved by the Coast Guard, Carnival said. The ship was heading back to its homeport in Miami after a four-day cruise when the passenger was reported missing. The stops on the route included Key West and Cozumel. For confidential support in the US, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or click here. For confidential support on suicide matters in the UK, call the Samaritans on 08457 90 90 90, visit a local Samaritans branch or click here. For confidential support in Australia, please call Lifeline on 13 11 14 or click here. A gang of rogue roofers has been jailed for a total of almost 18 years for fleecing a string of elderly people - including one man who was told they would repair his home for 'a tenner and a drink for the lads' which ended up costing 18,500. The group, who were from Scotland and the north east, targeted their elderly victims by cold-calling on them and claiming they needed urgent repairs for work. As soon as they started the work, the gang would increase the size of the job. The gang operated across the north east between July 2016 and January 2017. Shaun Doyle, left, and George Flannigan, right, received the longest jail terms of almost four years as they had previous convictions for similar offences Mark Genery, left, claimed he was a heroin addict. He was jailed for almost three years, while his co-accused William Stewart, right, also received two years and nine months in prison Among those involved in the gang was 39-year-old Mark Genery who Teesside Crown Court heard was addicted to heroin. Prosecutor Andrew Finlay said: These defendants were variously involved in a conspiracy to defraud elderly people in relation to roofing works done on their properties between the period July 2016 and January 2017. 'They would do this by cold calling victims, secure agreement to undertake the work and then inflate the price of the work and/or recommend unnecessary work.' Judge Sean Morris said: 'This was very nasty offending against the weak and vulnerable. 'It was a well planned, well organised fraud. It was a fraud that set out to fleece elderly people of their savings. 'These were people in the late evenings of their lives, if I may be so bold as to say so. 'They were people who easily confused. It is quite clear that this was deliberate targeting of victims because of that very vulnerability. 'They are frail, they could be forgetful, they could be overtrusting.' Genery from Stockton, was jailed for two years and nine months. The judge told him: 'You involved yourself in a conspiracy to rip off elderly people. 'You were a labourer and you were working for heroin. 'It's not a case where you've been coerced or intimidated. It's not a one-off offence. 'You put yourself in a position of your own free will. Taking heroin is a lifestyle choice.' Genery and others conned a man in his 70s in Thornaby, first offering to fix loose roof tiles for 'a tenner and a drink for the lads'. The pensioner was quoted 5,000 for more repairs and he eventually paid an inflated price of 18,500 in December 2016. On Christmas Eve, Genery collected the final cash payment from the householder, who was unhappy with the rising price but trusted the men. A professional surveyor said the repairs were 'wholly unnecessary' and the only minor maintenance needed would have cost a fraction of the price. The gang's work was of such poor quality it had to be repaired itself. Genery and others targeted a man in York who handed over 9,500 for 'entirely unnecessary' repairs to a roof in good condition. The victim tried to withdraw another 9.500 until the bank refused to authorise it, fearing he was being scammed. Genery's phone was pinpointed near the North Yorkshire home of an 89-year-old man who paid 17,000 to the fraudsters for 'unnecessary, incomplete and inadequate work'. As they left the victim one of the gang said: 'I hope we've left you enough to get by on.' Genery and five other men admitted conspiracy to defraud. Andrew Turton, defending Genery, said he was remorseful, vulnerable and wanted to come off drugs. Father and son Paul and James Masterton from Newcastle were handed a one year community order and told to pay 1,000 each to one victim while completing 250 hours of unpaid work The longest sentences were given to Shaun Doyle and George Flannigan, both of whom had similar frauds on their records. Doyle, 33, was already serving a four-and-a-half-year sentence for 'exactly the same thing', imposed in January. Judge Morris told him: 'You were one of the main players, if not the main player in my view, along with Mr Flannigan. 'You are a very unpleasant offender who has no conscience about fleecing elderly victims.' Doyle was jailed for three years and five months, added to his existing jail term. Flannigan, 25, Kinross, was jailed for three years and 11 months. Flannigan and Doyle were both given indefinite criminal behaviour orders banning them from cold-calling or doing building, repairs or maintenance works at the homes of people aged 60 and over. Andrew Hardy, 32, from Tyne Dock, South Tyneside, was jailed for three years and three months. William Stewart, 23, from Ellington, York, was jailed for two years and nine months. Graham Thom, 27, from Turriff, Aberdeenshire, was jailed for 21 months as the judge said he was a drug addict intimidated by others. Phone analysis showed Hardy delivered money to Stewart in the Stockton area. Other victims included a now-deceased man in Pocklington who paid 11,000 for unnecessary roof work, and a 91-year-old Gateshead man. Gang members had their bank accounts frozen as investigators closed in with reports to trading standards along with phone, number plate and CCTV evidence. Two other men - father and son Paul and James Masterton, from Newcastle - were each given a one-year community order with 250 hours' unpaid work and a six-month tagged curfew between 6pm and 6am, and must pay 1,000 compensation each to one victim. James, 35, admitted money laundering while Paul, 67, admitted forgery. Judge Morris praised the 'thorough and professional' investigation by North Yorkshire County Council which brought the group to book. 'It left them nowhere to go,' he added. Horrific footage shows deformed turkeys at a farm run by a company which supplies major British supermarkets and restaurants, activists claim. Animal rights group Surge Activism claim the footage was shot at a farm in Sudbrooke, Lincolnshire, earlier this year, which sells to Tesco, Morrisons, and Lidl. Young birds suffering with leg problems, struggling to walk or slumped on the ground have emerged in the worrying clips. Unwell turkeys being pecked by other birds are also claimed to have been film undercover by the group. Avanta Food Group runs the farm, which is owned by Faccenda Foods, but it is not claimed the meat from this particular farm ended up on the shelves of the leading supermarket chains. Ed Winters, founder of Surge Activism, said: 'These animals are treated as nothing other than commodities. 'This is the bleak reality of what life is like for farmed animals in the UK, a country that preaches to have some of the highest animal welfare standards in the world. 'What this proves is that welfare regulations will never be able to safeguard these animals and as long as there is demand, there will be exploitation. 'The only way to truly end animal suffering is to live a vegan lifestyle.' Shock footage of deformed and traumatised turkeys is claimed to have been taken at a Sudbrooke farm in Lincolnshire by Surge Activism Mr Winters added: 'Turkeys form strong social bonds with their families and flockmates, sometimes travelling in the wild with groups of 200 or more. 'Turkeys have friends, likes, dislikes, and desires however right now millions of turkeys across the UK are spending their lives in confinement, crammed desperately amongst each other, never seeing daylight until the day they are killed. 'The retailers claim high animal welfare standards and pride themselves in working closely with regional suppliers via traceability and provenance.' Surge Activism claims it got hold of the footage legally back in January this year and the birds are aged between eight and 26 week-old. Faccenda's supply has more than a 500m turnover per year and is Britain's largest privately owned business, which employs more than 3,500 people nationwide. Every year, it processes more than 100 million turkeys and chickens. Worrying footage appears to show birds with leg problems slumped on the ground which was uncovered earlier this year But Avanta, which runs the farm, said the footage was 'edited' but it featured 'turkeys that were suffering with health issues, which should have been addressed sooner.' A spokesman said: 'The undercover footage from early in 2018 has been edited to focus on a small number of turkeys that were suffering with health issues, which should have been addressed sooner. 'We've addressed this with the team on the farm. 'As soon as we first saw this film, in March this year, we immediately took action. Unwell birds are said to have been pecked on by other birds in the worrying clips just released 'We identified the farm involved and requested three independent audits, as well as increasing the number of visits by our own team. 'None of these audits reported concerns about the health of the birds on site, or the environment they were living in. 'However, we are not complacent and remain vigilant. 'We will continue to monitor and always encourage anyone with concerns to contact us so that we continue to meet the highest standards. 'We accept that the undercover footage shows turkeys that are having difficulty walking and that we should have identified and removed these birds sooner. The farm supplies leading supermarket chains including Tesco but this meat is understood not to have reached the stores 'We remain concerned about the practice of breaking into farms and disturbing birds with bright lights while they are sleeping.' A Lidl spokesman said it did not stock any of Faccenda's turkey products in any of its stores. Meanwhile, Tesco and Morrisons have been contacted for comment. A British Retail Consortium, which represents major UK supermarkets, said: 'Our members take their responsibilities to animal welfare very seriously and work closely with trusted suppliers so that high welfare standards are upheld. 'They have strict processes in place and will thoroughly investigate any evidence of non-conformity to ensure that any problems are immediately addressed.' Lidl's spokesman made clear they did not stock any of the turkey products A previous version of this article carried a claim that the footage was shot at a farm which sells to Aldi. Since publication, Aldi have been in touch to advise that they are not supplied by this farm, and have not been supplied by them for at least 12 months. We are happy to make this clear. Another savaging: Judge Emmet Sullivan ruled against the Trump administration the day after savaging Mike Flynn, the president's former national security adviser A federal judge on Wednesday blocked Trump administration policies that prevented immigrants who suffered gang violence or domestic abuse in their home countries from seeking asylum. U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan declared that some of the guidance that then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued this year cannot be used to determine whether an immigrant has a credible fear of persecution or torture in their home countries, the first step to making an asylum claim in the U.S. The judge said the administration's policy on asylum seekers violates federal immigration law and that 'it is the will of Congress -- not the whims of the executive' that sets the standards for expedited removal. It was yet another legal blow for President Donald Trump's efforts to harden immigration policies without Congress changing laws. The judge who issued the ruling attracted attention one day earlier for his public excoriation of former Trump administration adviser Michael Flynn, saying he felt disgusted and disdainful of Flynn's crimes. He allowed Flynn to postpone his sentencing so Flynn could continue cooperating with investigators and get credit that could allow him to avoid prison. Sullivan is an appointee of successively presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Another case involving whether migrants can claim asylum if they crossed the border illegally was in court Wednesday in San Francisco. A judge has temporarily stopped that November policy change, and Wednesday's proceedings were to determine whether that stay should be continued. The administration has asked the Supreme Court to allow that asylum policy to go forward. Responding to Sullivan's ruling, a Justice Department spokesman, Steven Stafford, said Sessions' guidance had followed the requirements for asylum under U.S. law. 'We are reviewing our options with regard to this ruling, and we will continue to restore the rule of law in our immigration system,' he said. Change of plan: This group of asylum seekers were lined up at the Mexican border at Brownsville, Texas, in July. If any of them were processed and deported under the Trump hardline rules, they must now be found and brought back to the U.S., the judge ruled Trump administration officials say the asylum process is being exploited by immigrants who are counting on passing the initial credible-fear screening and being released into the country. Only about 9 percent of all people who initially claim asylum are granted it, and tens of thousands of families from Central America are coming to the U.S. every month. The immigration policy change had an immediate impact. Immigration lawyers say people whom they expected would pass credible-fear screenings began to fail them, and lawyers say immigration judges are signing off on more denials during appeals, effectively ending what could have been a yearslong asylum process before it began. But Trump officials also say the number of people claiming credible fear has risen dramatically. Asylum can be granted to people who were persecuted in their home country or could be persecuted if forced to return. Thousands of people seek asylum each month at U.S. Customs and Border Protection stations along the southwest border. The American Civil Liberties Union sued the government over the June 11 change on behalf of 12 parents and children who were wrongly found not to have a credible fear of return. Sullivan's ruling impacts thousands of cases where immigrants are in expedited removal proceedings. Among the plaintiffs was a woman identified only by a pseudonym, Grace. The ACLU said Grace's partner beat her and her children, and sexually assaulted her and her daughter. Once, the ACLU says, her daughter suffered a miscarriage after he attacked her. The lawsuit says police did not act when she contacted them. The lawsuit says Grace was found not to have a credible fear of persecution. The judge also ordered the government to return any of the plaintiffs who may have been deported back to the U.S., and prevent further deportations. 'This ruling is a defeat for the Trump administration's all-out assault on the rights of asylum seekers. The government's attempt to obliterate asylum protections is unlawful and inconsistent with our country's longstanding commitment to provide protection to immigrants fleeing for their lives,' said Jennifer Chang Newell, managing attorney of the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project, who argued the case. A tradesman has been charged with murder over the death of a teenager who drowned in a bathtub five years ago. Steven Copo-Horton, 18, was found unconscious in the tub at a home in Emerton in Sydney's west in October 2013 and couldn't be revived. Detectives from the unsolved homicide unit on Tuesday arrested a 44-year-old man after taking over the investigation in March. He was charged with murder and refused bail to appear at Parramatta Local Court on Thursday. Police will allege in court the man 'deliberately drowned Mr Copo-Horton in the bathtub that night'. Steven Copo-Horton (pictured as a child) was found unconscious in the tub at a home in Emerton in Sydney's west in October 2013 and couldn't be revived The family of Mr Copo-Horton said it had been a long and difficult five years since his death. 'Stevie was so full of life; always happy and full of hugs and kisses,' the family said in a statement. 'Stevie touched the lives of so many people just by being him.' Homicide Squad Commander Detective Superintendent Scott Cook said investigators 'never gave up on this case'. 'Five years on from the initial police response, we have now put a man before the courts,' Det Supt Cook said. 'The public can be assured that the Homicide Squad, working with local police and the community, will always seek justice for victims of homicide.' A tradesman (pictured left) has been charged with murder over the death of a teenager who drowned in a bathtub five years ago A former security guard for the U.S. firm Blackwater was found guilty of murder on Wednesday for his role in a notorious massacre of unarmed civilians in downtown Baghdad in 2007. Nicholas Slatten, 35, was convicted of first-degree murder by a federal jury in U.S. District Court in Washington after five days of deliberations. Slatten was convicted of killing Ahmed Haithem Ahmed Al Rubia'y, 19, an aspiring doctor who was one of more than a dozen civilians killed by Blackwater guards in Baghdad's Nisour Square on September 16, 2007. Nicholas Slatten, 35, was convicted of first-degree murder by a federal jury in U.S. District Court in Washington after five days of deliberations. Slatten is seen above in Washington, D.C. on June 11, 2014 Slatten is pictured top left with his comrades in the 82nd Airborne during his first tour of duty in Iraq in 2003 Slatten is seen left with his father, Darrell, after he returned from his second tour of duty in Iraq While escorting a diplomatic convoy, Blackwater guards opened fire in the bustling square with sniper rifles, machine guns and grenade launchers - allegedly without provocation - leaving at least 14 civilians dead and at least 18 wounded. The Iraqi government says the toll was higher. The shooting deepened the resentment of Americans in Iraq four years after U.S. forces toppled dictator Saddam Hussein and raised questions about the expanded use of armed contract guards by the US government. Slatten was convicted of killing Ahmed Haithem Ahmed Al Rubia'y, 19, (pictured) an aspiring doctor who was one of more than a dozen civilians killed by Blackwater guards in Baghdad's Nisour Square on September 16, 2007 The US Attorney's Office presented testimony from 34 witnesses during the trial, including four who came to the United States from Iraq to testify. According to the government's evidence, Slatten, of Sparta, Tennessee, was the first to open fire. No date was set for his sentencing. The U.S. Attorney's Office said the murder charge calls for a mandatory sentence of life in prison. It was Slatten's third trial on the charges. His first conviction was thrown out and the jury was unable to reach a unanimous verdict at his second trial. Slatten was one of four Blackwater guards who were found guilty in 2014. He was originally sentenced to life in prison while the three others were given 30-year prison sentences An appeals court has ordered that the three other Blackwater guards be resentenced. They are currently in custody pending resentencing. The dreams of being granted asylum and starting out fresh in the United States were cut short for two Honduran teens, who were assassinated during an ambush in Tijuana. Assistant prosecutor Jorge Alvarez said the two boys, between the ages of 16 and 17, and another friend, were lured into a trap Saturday when they left their shelter and met two girls that invited the trio for a sexual tryst at a local motel. Alvarez said two of the teenagers were strangled to death. One of the Central American victims showed signs of a stab wound. On Wednesday, law enforcement authorities in the state of Baja California revealed images of the three suspected killers identified as Esmeralda, Carlos y Francisco Javier. Their full last names were not released. The suspects were charged with murder, battery and kidnapping. The names of the boys were not made public. Law enforcement authorities in Tijuana arrested on Monday three suspects, including a woman identified as Esmeralda (pictured), who are accused of assassinating two Honduran migrant teens Saturday An assistant prosecutor revealed that three Honduran migrant boys were lured into a trap and taken to a hotel where they thought there were going to have sex with two girls. Carlos (right) is one of three suspects accused of killing two of the boys According to reports from the investigation, the surviving boy was let go by the captors. He told investigators that he and his buddies met two local girls in the Mexican border city and during the conversation mentioned that they were walking around looking for a place to cash a check. In turn, the girls said that they were walking around trying to look for a lost pet dog and invited the Honduran trio to a motel in the city center for a sexual encounter, according to Mexican news outlet Zeta Tijuana. Once inside the motel, Alvarez said that the one of the girls made a phone call and the boys were accosted by a group of men. The Tijuana assistant prosecutor said the boys were never in possession of a check. He also said that the migrant boys were part of group that was going to be smuggled across the border and into the United States. Instead, the judicial official said that they boys were targeted because the assassins figured the Honduran teens were carrying a large sum of money. Francisco Javier (right) is suspected in participating in the savage murder of two teens who left their native land of Honduras with hopes of being granted asylum at the Tijuana-United States border Authorities in Tijuana rounded up Esmeralda (second from left), Carlos (center) and Francisco Javier (second from right) and charged them with the murder of two The boy who escaped showed signs of being choked. The bodies of his two friends were dumped outside in the middle of a road. Alvarez said the remains of the two murdered teenagers are being held by the local medical forensic service agency and that the Attorney General's office would be in contact with the Honduran consulate to expatriate the victims to their native land. Patrick O'Brien, the lead guitarist for death metal band Cannibal Corpse, was arrested for assault and burglary in Tampa, Florida, on December 10. The 53-year-old allegedly broke into a neighbor's home and began shouting: 'The rapture is coming' before assaulting a deputy responding to reports of the break-in, according to newly-obtained court filings. His mug shot is pictured Newly-obtained court documents describe the chaos that ensued on the night Patrick O'Brien, lead guitarist of the death metal band Cannibal Corpse, was arrested for assault and burglary moments before his home caught fire. O'Brien entered a neighbor's home in Tampa on the night of December 10, alarming two people inside, according to an arrest warrant obtained by the Tampa Bay Times. When they asked him to leave the premises, the 53-year-old guitarist allegedly ignored them and began shouting: 'The rapture is coming.' O'Brien then pushed a woman in the home to the ground as he ran out to the backyard and the couple called 911, the warrant says. When Hillsborough County police arrived they found O'Brien hiding behind a fence near the yard. A deputy wrote in arresting documents that he gave 'multiple commands' to surrender before O'Brien lunged with a knife and the deputy stunned him with Taser and put him in handcuffs. Just as O'Brien was apprehended, flames were spotted at the property he was renting just a half-mile away. The fire is believed to have been ignited by explosive devices inside. Hours before the excitement unfolded, O'Brien had allegedly called relatives to warn them about 'the rapture' and tell them 'aliens have landed'. The following day when fire marshals returned to scope out the burned wreckage, they discovered a large cache of weapons, potential explosive devices and flamethrowers, according to court documents. As O'Brien was being arrested, flames were spotted at the home he was renting just half a mile away. Fire officials have said the blaze was ignited by explosive devices inside the home Fire crews are seen battling the flames at O'Brien's rental home. It took them a considerable amount of time to get the fire under control because explosives kept detonating inside OBrien (on stage in July) was charged with aggravated assault on a law enforcement officer and burglary of an occupied dwelling with assault. He posted $50,000 bail on December 14 OBrien was booked into Hillsborough County jail on charges of aggravated assault on a law enforcement officer and burglary of an occupied dwelling with assault. He wore a suicide vest and was shackled to deputies during his first court appearance on December 11. A judge ordered OBrien to undergo a drug and alcohol evaluation before he could be released on bail. However, that condition was removed the following day, according to court records, and he was freed on $50,000 bail on December 14. According to the Tampa Bay Times, O'Brien was arrested one day after Cannibal Corpse announced it would be opening for thrash metal band Slayer on the North American leg of its farewell tour. Band members and management have not publicly said whether O'Brien's legal trouble will affect the tour slot. Cannibal Corpse has released 14 albums since the band formed in 1988 in Buffalo, New York. The band's most well-known songs include Bloodstained Cement and Icepick Lobotomy'. Jessica Alice Cook, 33, 'told police her baby would sleep a lot and she wouldn't wake him to feed' and has now been charged with abuse or neglect of a child resulting in death A Missouri couple have been accused of starving their six-week-old-baby to death after he weighed more than a pound less when he died than when he was born. Little Kanaan Compton appeared malnourished when paramedics were called to his home in Crystal City in February, according to court records. His parents Phillip Thomas Leon Compton, 31, and Jessica Alice Cook, 33, have now been charged with abuse or neglect of a child resulting in death. The newborn was born last Christmas Eve weighing more than six pounds and died six weeks later weighing just five, The St Louis Dispatch reports. Court documents say paramedics were called to their home to reports of a baby having difficulty breathing, Fox 2 Now reports. Scroll down for video Tragic Kanaan Compton was born last Christmas Eve weighing more than six pounds and died six weeks later weighing just five after being rushed to Mercy Jefferson Hospital in Festus Kanaan was rushed to Mercy Jefferson Hospital in Festus but died less than an hour later. Compton, 31, is said to have told investigators 'he thought the child was fine, due to him and Ms. Cook both being very skinny' and said he 'thought his wife was feeding him'. Phillip Thomas Leon Compton, 31, is also accused of starving his six-week-old-baby to death after he weighed more than a pound less when he died than when he was born But the new dad is said to have admitted the tot hadn't had a bowel movement in more than five days. He said he thought his partner had sorted it and said his own mom even contacted him to say Kanaan appeared thin and needed to see a doctor, according to cops. The police report says first time dad Compton 'called Ms. Cook in multiple times to check on the child rather than getting out of bed' on the morning of his son's death. It adds: 'After being woke by Ms. Cook who was scared for the child, Compton went into the bathroom before checking on the condition of the child.' A lawyer for Compton, Lenny Kagan, told The St Louis Dispatch: 'He worked full time and was only assuming his wife was feeding his child. 'He is a first-time parent and a good guy. His life has been turned upside down. 'It's a 100 percent tragic accident. Phillip is devastated. The family is devastated.' Compton is said to have told investigators 'he thought the child was fine, due to him and Ms. Cook both being very skinny' and he 'assumed his partner was feeding the baby' A police report says first time dad Compton 'called Ms. Cook in multiple times to check on the child rather than getting out of bed' on the morning of his son's death Police say the couple cancelled doctors appointments due to bad weather, no way of getting there or simply forgetting. Cook is said to have told police her baby would sleep a lot and she wouldn't wake him to feed. The baby's gran reportedly asked people to pray for Kanaan's parents following his death and said the family was heartbroken. Compton and Cook, who does not have an attorney, were only charged Friday but officials have not said why it has taken 10 months for the arrest. An autopsy said Kanaan died as a result of malnutrition and probable dehydration. A teenager who killed a newlywed couple after slamming a stolen Lexus into their car is a 'coward' and a 'dog', according to a grieving family. Eric Victorsen, now 20, ran a red light at 114km/h in Wantirna, in Melbourne's east, hitting a Holden Commodore driven by Matt Goland, 38, as his wife, Bita, 32, sat beside him in April. He was sentenced to 13 years jail in the Victorian County Court on Thursday after pleading guilty to two charges of culpable driving causing death and one count of leaving the scene of an accident. 'Despite your bleak future prospects the court has some hope you will mature in custody,' Judge Geoff Chettle told Victorsen. 'I am heartily sick of listening to the horror of victim impact statements in cases like yours.' Earlier, Mr Goland's father Michael and mother Helen begged for justice, telling the Herald Sun the 'gutless' driver will re-offend if it isn't served. 'He killed my children and for this, he will never be forgiven or forgotten. They've shown no remorse we need a justice system, not a legal system,' Mr Goland said. A teenager who killed Matt Goland as his wife Bita (pictured) after slamming a stolen Lexus into their car is a 'coward' and a 'dog', according to a grieving family Mr Goland's father Michael and mother Helen (pictured at the scene) are begging for justice, saying the 'gutless' driver will re-offend if it isn't served Eric Victorsen (pictured was behind the wheel of the stolen car. He pleaded guilty to two counts of culpable driving causing death and was jailed for 13 years A 16-year-old girl previously pleaded guilty to culpable driving (accessory after the fact) and was slapped with a community-based order. Mrs Golan told the paper she hopes the April crash lives with the teenagers forever. 'I hope Matt turned around and looked them in the eye, scared to death and I hope they have nightmares about it for the rest of their lives,' she said. The couple were just minutes from their east Melbourne home when the stolen vehicle crashed into them. The teenagers fled the scene. The newlyweds (pictured) had been married just 12 months earlier in a dream ceremony in Bali A Lexus four-wheel-drive travelling south along Stud Road in Wantirna South collided with an eastbound black Holden Commodore (pictured) Matt Goland, 38, died at the scene and Bita Zaeim, 32, was rushed to hospital but died a short time later Acting Superintendent Stuart McGregor at the time said the 'abhorrent' events seemed to be 'a bit of a game' for the teenagers. 'There's nothing fun about this, this is not a game, this is real life, this is where people have died and this is where people will be going to jail,' he said. 'Everyone in the community just cannot understand how someone can think it's right to travel at speed - horrendous speeds - through a red light and then when you know you've done so much damage to another car... to two people... and just flee.' Mr and Mrs Golan visited the Wantirna South crash site just moments after they were told the pair had died. Matt Goland and Bita Zaeim (pictured) had only been married for 12 months Locals are seen visiting the scene of the hit and run to pay their respects to the victims Sup McGregor said the memory of informing the next of kin about the fatalities was haunting. 'I've had to stand at the intersection with the parents of one of the deceased, I've been able to explain how it has occurred but not why,' he said. 'The image of mum and dad of the male passenger will probably stay with me for the rest of my life.' The newlyweds had been married just 12 months earlier in a dream ceremony in Bali. Photos of the joyous occasion showed Matt and Bita smiling in a loving embrace, ecstatic at having just started the rest of their lives together. Major Collision Investigation Unit detectives pictured investigating circumstances surrounding the crash The occupants of the Lexus (pictured) ran westbound on Stud Road after the crash Russia's government is accusing the United States of forcing Russian national Maria Butina to falsely confess that she's a secret agent for the Kremlin. On Thursday Butina pleaded guilty to joining a conspiracy on behalf of the Kremlin to infiltrate the Republican party via the NRA just before Donald Trump's presidential election in 2016. The 30-year-old pleaded guilty to a count of 'conspiracy against the United States' when she appeared in federal court in Washington D.C. in a deal with prosecutors. But the Kremlin insists that the charge is 'ridiculous' and she was coerced to make the confession. The Kremlin says that the U.S. forced Russian national Maria Butina, 30, to falsely confess that she was a secret agent for Moscow. She pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiring against the U.S. government in federal court in Washington D.C. on Thursday Maria Butina was able to infiltrate the National Rifle Association. She admitted she was directed by a powerful Russian handler 'Butina confirmed that she had done a deal with U.S. investigators and confessed to being a foreign agent,' Maria Zakharova, the spokeswoman for the Russian foreign ministry, said during a press briefing in Moscow. 'Having created unbearable conditions for her and threatening her with a long jail sentence, she was literally forced to sign up to absolutely ridiculous charges,' she added. Her guilty plea sparked fury in Moscow, as the government accused the U.S. of 'torture' and compared her ordeal to the 'medieval Inquisition'. Butina is a gun rights activist who established Russian gun rights group Right to Bear Arms in 2011. She was a tough critic of Russia's strict firearms laws and called for the legalization of short-barreled guns to civilians. She went on to become the 'unpaid special assistant' to Aleksandr Torshin, a Russian senator close to Putin, a high-ranking official of the Russian Central Bank, and lifetime member of the NRA in the U.S. Butina is a gun rights activist who established Russian gun rights group Right to Bear Arms in 2011 and moved to the U.S. to build ties between her organization and the NRA Admission: Maria Butin said 'absolutely' as she stood, flanked by attorney Robert Driscoll, and was asked if she understood what she was pleading guilty to on Thursday She and Torshin moved stateside to allegedly develop close ties between the NRA and Right to Bear Arms. She often expressed support for President Donald Trump on her various social media pages. She's accused of trying to create a back channel for Russia through her activist groups including the NRA. She was arrested on July 15, 2018 in D.C. and charged with conspiracy for allegedly violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act because she didn't register as a foreign agent. She pleaded not guilty to the charges on July 18. She was ordered to be jailed by a district court judge pending trial. On Thursday she admitted to acting at 'the direction' of a Russian official, who was not named in court, but previously been identified as Torshin. Together they worked on the 'Diplomacy Project'. She also used her boyfriend conservative political operative Paul Erickson, 56, to help her as she tried to use his ties with the NRA to set up the back channels. In working with the NRA she managed to meet high profile Republicans including Donald Trump Jr and posed for pictures with Rick Santorum and Scott Walker. In one email she sent to her boyfriend she said they were 'coming to establish a back channel of communication' - and he emailed another unnamed person saying that 'reaction to the delegation's presence in America will be relayed DIRECTLY' to Vladimir Putin. When she got senior members of the NRA to come to Moscow she emailed her handler: 'We should let them express their gratitude now, we will put pressure on them quietly later.' Question time: This was the moment Maria Butina questioned Donald Trump on relations with Russia at a 2015 'freedom forum' event linked to the NRA Maria Butina, a gun-rights activist poses for a photo at a shooting range in Moscow, Russia. Russian woman Maria Butina has been jailed in the U.S. on charges that she tried to infiltrate U.S. political organizations as a covert Russian agent Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson said: 'Having created unbearable conditions for her and threatening her with a long jail sentence, she was literally forced to sign up to absolutely ridiculous charges' Moscow maintains that she's been falsely accused. 'We designated her as a political prisoner from the very first days,' Zakharova said to CNN last week. 'It's not about justice, it's not justice. It's just inquisition. It's medieval inquisition. Because she is intimidated, she was tortured and was not treated like a human being, not like a woman. I think she was treated and is still treated probably as a terrorist or something like that,' she added. Zakharova says her case is politically motivated. 'All the details of that case was closely connected with (the) political relationship between Russia and the United States because all that happened just after two presidents met each other and held negotiations and of course that was (more) evidence that this is a political case and she is a political prisoner,' she said. Butina's legal team and U.S. prosecutors face a 5pm (EST) deadline to submit legal filings regarding their positions on the case at the U.S. District Court in Washington. She faces up to five years in prison and deportation from the U.S. A status hearing in the case is scheduled for Feb. 12, 2019. Cell phone footage showed the aftermath of a deadly shooting and car crash in Miami Beach, Florida. Stephen Lott, 48, the owner of the white Mercedes-Benz G-Class SUV can be seen on the ground attempting to explain himself to police on the scene Tuesday morning after he shot a car thief, according to WPLG News. 'He tried to run me over,' Lott calls out while prone in front of officers. 'You know who I am, I am not a threat.' Stephen Lott (shown) lay flat on the ground awaiting authorities after shooting a suspected car thief who tried to take his SUV in Miami When the camera shows the crash site, the luxury vehicle is embedded in the wall of an Office Depot building and the right front wheel still spinning. The alleged thief was still in the driver's seat. The driver of the vehicle was later taken to the Jackson Memorial Hospital and died from his injuries. Police did not identify the man who Lott contends tried to steal his ride. 'It's believed the Mercedes was being detailed and someone got in the truck and drove off,' Officer Ernesto Rodriguez, a Miami Beach police spokesman, said according to the Miami Herald. 'The owner (Lott) sees what's happening and discharges his firearm.' Stephen Lott was cuffed by police after the incident. He was eventually interviewed and released The white Mercedes-Benz G-Class SUV plowed through a power pole and slammed into the side of an Office Depot after the driver was shot by Lott The chaotic exchange occurred in a busy commercial area of Miami Beach on 18th Street where the car wash that Lott had taken his SUV sits across the street from the office supply retailer. Extricating the man in the SUV also took some extra time since the Mercedes plowed into a power pole requiring cops to hold off until workers from Florida Power & Light could arrive to shut off the current. After being cuffed, Lott was interviewed by investigators regarding the shooting, which his lawyer maintains was justified, WPLG reports. Authorities say they are still reviewing the evidence to determine if any charges should be filed. Police had to wait until Florida Power & Light was able to turn off the current before they could safely extract the driver After police were able to get the driver, he was taken to Jackson Memorial Hospital, where he died from his injuries. He remains unidentified The alleged car thief is seen being taken out of the SUV after crashing into the side of an Office Depot in Miami Beach Nearly 150 brumbies in the Hunter Valley have been shot by helicopter and left to die in the bush in a 'cruel and inhumane' attempt to control their numbers. The Defence Department used helicopters to shoot the wild animals from the air in the Singleton Military Reserve area in New South Wales on Wednesday. The Defence Department said the 'environmental pests' were causing erosion, damaging vegetation and presenting a risk to Australian Defence Force members undertaking training. Scroll down for video. More than 150 brumbies in the Hunter Valley have been shot dead by the Defence Department in a 'cruel and inhumane' bid to control their numbers As such, they said they had made the 'difficult decision to control the feral horse population'. However, locals have slammed the method used, calling it an 'absolute massacre'. Kim Waters told Daily Mail Australia she had been driving along a nearby road when she heard the helicopter and 'gunfire, a lot of gunfire'. Ms Waters said she also saw a large truck entering and leaving the area, and believes it was carrying dirt to cover up the dead horses. Local resident Kim Waters (pictured) said she saw helicopters and heard 'a lot of gunfire' Ms Waters said she also saw a large truck entering and leaving the area, and believes it was carrying dirt to cover up the bodies Later on she saw a tractor and forklift truck. Hunter Heritage Horse Group member Bec Hardy also heard gunfire in the area and told 7news it was a 'very cruel and inhumane way' to carry out the cull. Former Nationals MP Peter Cochran joined the debate yesterday, telling 2GB there is no way the shooters would be able to kill every horse from the air, and some will still be alive but in pain and with horrendous injuries. 'For anybody to suggest you can shoot off a moving platform at a moving target and get an accurate shot is absolute nonsense,' he said. 'What's going on today is nothing short of a massacre.' 'Cruel and inhumane': Hunter Heritage Horse Group member Bec Hardy (pictured) also heard gunfire in the area and has slammed the Defence Department's methods Ms Waters had been working with the Australian Brumby Alliance on a separate proposal for controlling brumby numbers in the Singleton Military Reserve area (pictured) Equine aerial culling is illegal in NSW, but because the activity took place on federal land, the government was unable to step in. The wild horses have been in the area since around the 1930s and Ms Waters said she had been working with the Australian Brumby Alliance on a separate proposal for controlling brumby numbers in the area. She believes the Defence Department should have waited and considered their proposal before going ahead with the cull. The Defence Department said 'a range of control measures have previously been tried to manage the feral horse population', with little success. In 2014, the department tried to capture and re-home the brumbies but said this caused the animals too much trauma and stress. The Defence Department said 'a range of control measures have previously been tried to manage the feral horse population', but with little success Other earlier attempts also included ground shooting, but the department said this was only partially successful and that it presented too much of a risk to personnel. The Defence Department today confirmed it had 'substantially completed' the feral horse population control measures. 'Further verification will take place in the coming days before the measures are considered finalised,' the statement read. A homeless man died today after he was found collapsed outside the Houses of Parliament. He was found unresponsive next to the entrance in Westminster, central London, last night at about 11.30pm. Medics administered first aid and rushed him to hospital, where he died in the early hours of this morning. Tributes have been left at the spot where Mr Remes was found unresponsive before later dying in hospital Friends of the dead man told Huffington Post how they sleep in the walkway every day. The victim is believed to be a 45-year-old Hungarian called Gyula Remes. He had been working as as a kitchen assistant at Charing Cross station and sleeping rough for months. His cause of death is not yet known but his friends say he had taken the drug Spice and drank alcohol. Police confirmed the death is not thought to be suspicious. He is the second homeless person to have died after regularly sleeping rough in Westminster this year A handwritten note was left at the scene in tribute to the Hungarian who has been working as a kitchen assistant but was still sleeping rough Homeless Jamie Leigh, a friend of the man said 'this shouldn't happen in our country', adding that Mr Remes had hoped to find a better life in London. MPs were told about the death by Labour frontbencher Sir Keir Starmer, who said: 'I'm given to understand that tragically one of those sleeping just outside the entrance and exit to this place died in the last 24 hours or so.' Gabor Kasza (pictured outside Parliament) said that his friend had been taking spice before he was found 'all blue' According to his friend Gabor Kasza, 22, Mr Remes had been drinking that night and had been given a cigarette, which he suspected had been laced with the synthetic drug spice. 'He was drinking, very heavily, and someone gave him some kind of cigarette which he smoked. 'He said he was going to lie down and then when I came back a few hours later, he was all blue. 'We couldn't resuscitate him. It was definitely spice.' It comes after Marcos Amaral Gourgel, a 35-year-old Portugese man, was found dead in the same spot in Westminster back in February. At the time Portuguese government officials confirmed Marcos, who was of Angolan origin, had been deported in 2014 and 2016. Its Ministry of Portuguese Communities Abroad told respected Portuguese daily Expresso: 'In 2014 he was deported to Portugal by the British authorities and assisted on his return. Just 10 months ago Marcos Amaral Gourgel was found in the same spot (pictured: tributes from the time) 'In 2016 we were made aware he had been deported again from the UK for being in the country illegally.' Respected Portuguese daily Correio da Manha claimed his first deportation happened after he served prison time for sexually abusing a child. It was not made clear how the dead man, who is understood to have had dual Angolan and Portuguese nationality, managed to return to the UK. A prison escapee who notoriously dug his way out of a Bali prison has taunted police and boasted that he's back in Australia in time for Christmas. Shaun Davidson, 35, from Perth, tunnelled his way out of Bali's notorious Kerobakan Prison last June and has been on the run ever since. He was just three months shy of finishing his one-year sentence for passport fraud. On Thursday morning, Davidson took to Facebook to tell his followers he's back in his home country for the festive season. Australian man Shaun Davidson (pictured), 35, who tunnelled out of a notorious Bali prison, has taken to Facebook to boast that he's back in Australia for Christmas 'Hey hey I'm back for Xmas ppl,' he said in a Facebook post and tagged Perth Airport Davidson (pictured) fled from Bali's notorious Kerobakan Prison in June 2017 'Hey hey I'm back for Xmas ppl,' he said in a Facebook post and tagged Perth Airport. Friends and followers of the prison escapee shared their enthusiasm for his return. 'Welcome home champ,' one man said. 'Haha, what for real??' another said. 'Be careful mate,' another warned. Davidson has been on the run since escaping a Balinese prison more than a year ago One week earlier, Davidson boasted that he had narrowly dodged the authorities at an airport. 'Just went through customs got pulled aside for secondary inspection most nervous I've been so far. Hahaha still walked free positive vibes only,' Davidson wrote on Facebook. Davidson had less than three months left on a one-year sentence for passport fraud when he escaped the Balinese jail. He got out through a tiny tunnel along with three other inmates, two of whom were recaptured. Davidson regularly updates his eager Facebook followers about his whereabouts as he continues to hide from authorities Davidson (pictured) escaped from the Bali jail through a tiny tunnel along with three other inmates, two of whom were recaptured Advertisement Prime Minister Scott Morrison has made a pre-Christmas visit to hundreds of Australian troops deployed in the Middle East. Mr Morrison travelled to Iraq on Wednesday to meet special forces soldiers and other Australian Defence Force personnel training the Iraqi Army to combat Islamic State. 'I understand it's a sacrifice - I understand it's a big thing to be away from your family at this time of year - and that's why I've decided to come just to say thank you from one Australian to another,' he told troops at the Taji Military Complex north of a Baghdad. Prime Minister Scott Morrison has made a pre-Christmas visit to hundreds of Australian troops deployed in the Middle East Mr Morrison travelled to Iraq on Wednesday to meet special forces soldiers and other Australian Defence Force personnel training the Iraqi Army to combat Islamic State It was the Liberal prime minister's first visit to the Middle East after taking on the top job in August Mr Morrison acknowledged that for many troops it would be the first Christmas away from their families and friends. Others had endured the tyranny of distance many times before As he broke bread with hundreds of soldiers across Iraq from before dawn until well after dark, Mr Morrison (pictured with Lieutenant Eve Parker, Sgt Brodie Stewart and Sgt Jason Cox) repeatedly stressed he would honour their contributions long after their active service It was the Liberal prime minister's first visit to the Middle East after taking on the top job in August. A planned visit to Afghanistan was cancelled due to operational security reasons, on advice from the Chief of the Australian Defence Force. As he broke bread with hundreds of soldiers across Iraq from before dawn until well after dark, Mr Morrison repeatedly stressed he would honour their contributions long after their active service. He acknowledged that for many troops it would be the first Christmas away from their families and friends. Others had endured the tyranny of distance many times before. 'On behalf of my family, to you and your families, I want to say thank you very much for your service,' Mr Morrison said. 'But I also want to thank you as a prime minister, as the leader of the government, as a member of the Australian Parliament, on behalf of our entire nation.' There are now about 800 Australian soldiers deployed in Iraq and Australia's main logistical hub in the Middle East Addressing special forces troops at a Baghdadi base, the prime minister conceded that while each had chosen to serve, many other major decisions were beyond their control Tens of thousands of Australian soldiers have served in the region since 2001. There are now about 800 Australian soldiers deployed in Iraq and Australia's main logistical hub in the Middle East. Roughly 300 of these troops are involved in Task Force Taji. The rotating group has trained almost 40,000 Iraqi soldiers since its mission began in 2015. Its focus has gradually shifted from delivering frontline training to mentoring Iraqi security forces. Under their guidance, Iraqi supervisors now teach their own troops infantry skills such as cordoning, searching, ambushing and marksmanship. Captain Steve Moye, who is just one month into his first deployment, has noticed an immediate impact. 'Even just in the four weeks we've been here the improvement in the individual skills of the Iraqi soldiers has been exponential,' he said. Australia has 150 ADF troops assigned to the air task group, along with 80 special operations soldiers. Addressing special forces troops at a Baghdadi base, the prime minister conceded that while each had chosen to serve, many other major decisions were beyond their control. 'I would hate you to think that as you are doing that - and there are great days, and there are really difficult days - that on any of those days, you didn't know how much your country appreciated you.' With a wife and two kids back home in Brisbane, Captain Moye was forced to reshuffle birthday parties and open Christmas presents early before he was shipped overseas. Just how he will cope on Christmas remains to be seen. 'We'll see how I go on the day.' Handshakes and small talk gave way to brass bands and a bilateral meeting when Mr Morrison sat down with newly-elected Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi at his palace in Baghdad Lance Corporal Manika Goode, a transport and logistics expert, will be leaning on her fellow troops come Christmas Day. 'We're all really close so it'll make it a lot easier,' she said. Handshakes and small talk gave way to brass bands and a bilateral meeting when Mr Morrison sat down with newly-elected Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi at his palace in Baghdad. Mr Abdul-Mahdi stressed the need for ongoing security co-operation to liberate Iraq from the Islamic State terrorist organisation, and on improving economic relations to drive investment and jobs. He described terrorism and poverty as 'common enemies' of Iraq and its people. 'The stability of Iraq is the stability of the region, and the stability of the region would be stability for the whole world,' Mr Adbul-Mahdi said. Along with its contribution to an international effort to conquer Islamic State, Australia is a major contributor of humanitarian aid to Iraq. Australia has supplied $180 million to Iraq between 2014 and 2020. While Islamic State militants are largely suppressed in Iraq, the leaders did not canvass any significant reduction in the number of Australian troops or amount of aid. Instead, they discussed how Australian aid could be better spent on reconstruction works and delivering essential services to all regions of Iraq. 'That's what will make them independent, free and sovereign,' Mr Morrison told an AAP reporter who travelled with the prime minister to the Middle East. Brazil's President-elect Jair Bolsonaro will take office on January 1. He said Tuesday parts of France have become 'unliveable' because of migrants Brazil's president-elect Jair Bolsonaro has said parts of France have become 'unliveable' because of migrants, employing rhetoric similar to Donald Trump's before he became the US president. Bolsonaro, who takes office on January 1, made the xenophobic remarks late Tuesday in a live video feed on his Facebook page. The extreme right-wing politician was elected in October on a hardline anti-crime and anti-corruption platform and has been dubbed the 'Tropical Trump.' 'Everybody knows what is happening in France. Some parts of France are simply unliveable,' Bolsonaro said on Facebook. He said that, despite a good welcome by the French, migrants were not integrating. 'You know how those people are, right? They have something in them, they don't give up their roots and they want to make their culture, their acquired rights and their privileges prevail,' he said. 'France is suffering because of that. Part of the population, part of the military, some of the institutions are starting to complain about that. We don't want that for Brazil.' It was not clear what recent events prompted Bolsonaro's outburst. Nor did he explicitly say whether he was referring to Muslim migrants, though those with North African heritage form the biggest group of migrants in France after Europeans. France is currently in the grip of 'yellow vest' anti-government protests unrelated to migration. It has been rocked by a number of recent deadly attacks, notably in November 2015 in which 130 people were murdered in Paris by radicalized French and Belgian gunmen, and last week in the city of Strasbourg where a French ex-convict killed five people in a rampage claimed by the Islamic State group. The extreme right-wing politician was elected in October on a hardline anti-crime and anti-corruption platform and has been dubbed the 'Tropical Trump' France's embassy in Brazil declined to comment on Bolsonaro's declarations. The rhetoric by Bolsonaro recalled that of Donald Trump in December 2015 during his presidential campaign. Speaking to US network MSNBC, Trump claimed 'they have sections in Paris that are radicalized, where the police refuse to go there. They're petrified. The police refuse to go in there.' Trump also said parts of London were similarly dangerous, and used those assertions to justify a 'total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.' After becoming president, Trump issued an order that largely bars citizens from five Muslim-majority countries getting US visas. Bolsonaro did not say whether he would impose tighter immigration controls, but did repeat that he will pull Brazil out of a nonbinding global migration pact ratified by the UN General Assembly on Wednesday. The anti-immigrant rhetoric by Bolsonaro recalled that of Donald Trump in December 2015 during his presidential campaign 'Unfortunately, Brazil... signed the pact. We are not against migrants, but we must be have very rigorous criteria for those entering Brazil. We are going to denounce and revoke this pact on migration,' he said. In the same Facebook video, Bolsonaro said he would do everything possible to counter the governments of Venezuela and Cuba, calling their leaders 'dictators' and saying neither was invited to his inauguration. Before and after his October election Bolsonaro has signalled he wants closer ties with the United States and with Trump. Bolsonaro controversially said in November his intention was to move his country's embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, joining the US mission there, although added 'it hasn't been decided yet.' Almost all other countries believe the status of Jerusalem first needs to be resolved through negotiations but Israel claims all the city as its capital, while Palestinians claim the eastern part as the capital of their future state. Brazil's president-elect has also followed Trump in taking a harder stance against China, his country's biggest trading partner, although members of his incoming government warn any actions against the Asian powerhouse could crimp the economy. Last month, Trump's national security advisor, John Bolton, visited Bolsonaro and said the US anticipated a 'dynamic partnership' with the Brazilian leader. Agents with U.S. Customs and Border Protection have arrested two Chinese nationals suspected of using an ultralight aircraft to illegally cross the southern border. At around 1.45am on Tuesday, Border Patrol agents detected the aircraft entering U.S. airspace in Southern California's Imperial Valley, across the border from Mexicali. Running without lights, the ultralight traveled well into the U.S., landing near Calipatria some 30 miles from the nearest border crossing, CBP said in a statement. Agents tracked the craft to its landing site, but the fixed-wing ultralight took off on a return course for Mexico before it could be seized. The US border is seen from the Mexican side in the El Centro sector, where an ultralight smuggled two Chinese nationals into the U.S. on Tuesday. White vehicle barriers are seen In the vicinity, Border Patrol agents found two Chinese nationals who they suspect entered the country illegally on the ultralight craft. The two men were ages 30 and 23, CBP told DailyMail.com. Agents also discovered a 36-year-old Mexican national in a waiting vehicle whom they suspected was part of the human smuggling scheme. The Mexican national was found to be legally present in the U.S. in possession of a border crossing card. All three were arrested and transported to Calixico Station for processing. It was the second time in as many days that CBP tracked an ultralight craft in an illegal crossing on that stretch of the border. On Sunday at about 12.10am, agents tracked an ultralight with no lights crossing the border into the U.S. near Calexico. The aircraft swooped over the border, descended to a low altitude, and then gained altitude and flew back into Mexico. Agents responded to the location and discovered two brown zippered bags lying under heavy brush, a metallic cage and a bicycle in the agricultural field where the aircraft was observed to have dropped in altitude. On Sunday, CBP seized 60 duck taped bundles of meth (above), a metallic cage and a bicycle in the field where an ultralight aircraft was observed to have dropped in altitude Border Patrol also spotted two individuals in the vicinity who were interviewed and arrested on suspicion they were receiving the dropped narcotics. At the station, agents unpacked 60 duck taped bundles containing white powder-like substance inside of the two zippered bags that tested positive for the characteristics of methamphetamine. The combined weight of the packages totaled 129.33 lbs., with an estimated value of $1,422,553. 'Ultralight aircraft not only pose a threat to legitimate air traffic in the vicinity, but also to national security,' said Chief Patrol Agent Gloria I. Chavez in a statement. 'These aircraft are able to carry small payloads of dangerous cargo or dangerous people.' Huawei defended its global 5G ambitions and network security in the face of Western fears that the Chinese telecom giant could serve as a Trojan horse for Beijing's security apparatus. 'Despite efforts in markets creating fear about Huawei, using politics to interfere with growth, customers continue to trust us and continue to work with us and build networks with our technologies,' deputy chairman Ken Hu told reporters in Dongguan city, Guangdong province on Tuesday as cited by CNN. 'It's like a running race. We are leading,' Hu stressed as he expressed confidence that the company's technology is 'significantly more advanced' that that of its rivals. Concerns have mounted as countries begin to plan and roll out fifth-generation mobile communications, or 5G, the next milestone in the digital revolution, bringing near-instantaneous connectivity and vast data capacity. Visitors look at a display for 5G technology from Huawei in Beijing in September Employees seen near a Huawei 5G sign on display inside its headquarters in Shenzhen Hu warned excluding Huawei from fifth-generation networks in Australia and other markets would hurt consumers by raising prices and slowing innovation. Australia and New Zealand have barred Huawei in 5G networks on security grounds. They joined the United States and Taiwan, which have broader curbs on Huawei amid the arrest of the company's CFO Meng Wanzhou in Canada. Japan's cybersecurity agency says suppliers including Huawei that are deemed high-risk will be excluded from government purchases. The latest curbs have had little impact on Huawei, which is the biggest global maker of network gear and a leader in 5G development. 'There is no evidence that Huawei poses a threat to the national security of any country,' Hu said, adding geopolitical concerns have caused a few countries to forego its equipment. 'Banning a particular company cannot resolve cybersecurity concerns,' he said. 'Huawei's record is clean.' Huawei's research and development centre in Dongguan city, Guangdong province Hu emphasised the information-sharing and collaboration centres Huawei is building in Europe, Canada, and elsewhere to evaluate products. Those are based on a cyber evaluation centre the company built in Britain a decade ago to share information with regulators, though it has not fully resolved concerns. Reuters last week quoted sources as saying that Huawei planned to spend US$2 billion (1.6 billion) to address British authorities' securities concerns. Britain has been one of Huawei's biggest international markets. Huawei is the world's largest supplier of telecommunications network equipment and second-biggest maker of smartphones, with revenue of about US$92 billion (73 billions) last year. Unlike other big Chinese technology firms, it derives half of its revenue from overseas. On Tuesday, Huawei said it expects revenue to exceed US$100 billion (79 billion) this year, a 8.7 per cent rise from last year. Volcanic eruptions could help cool down the planet next year, the Met Office has said. The year 2016 was the warmest year on record and 2017 third hottest on record. Forecasters said that 2018 while still among the hottest years ever recorded - will be relatively cooler. This is because a weather event called La Nina cooler than average sea temperatures in the south Pacific will reduce the global temperature. But the Met Office warned that if active volcanoes erupt it could further cool the planet down. Scroll down for video A graph showing global average temperature relative to the 18501900 baseline. The grey line and shading shows the 95% uncertainty range. The forecast value for 2018 and its uncertainty range are shown in green and black NATURAL DISASTERS OF 2017 Experts say global warming can make certain events, like floods, drought and hurricanes, more frequent and sometimes worse. Monsoon rains in Bangladesh, India and Nepal that killed more than 1,200 people and affected 40 million people (August) Spain and Portugal battle extreme drought (November) 17 hurricanes roll across the Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean, including Harvey, Irma and Maria Arctic Report Card said Arctic was melting at twice the pace of the rest of the world Advertisement The Met Office forecast that the global average temperature for 2018 would be between 0.88C and 1.12C with a central estimate of 1C. This is compared to temperatures before 1850-1900 the industrial revolution. 2016 the hottest year on record was 1.14C warmer than pre-industrial levels. 2015, the second hottest year, was 1.08C warmer, while 2017 was third hottest at 1.05C warmer than pre-industrial levels. Professor Adam Scaife, head of long-range prediction at the Met Office, said: '2018 will be very warm globally but is unlikely to exceed the recent record, set in 2016 but could be cooled further from volcanic eruptions. Professor Scaife added: For example, Balis Mount Agung, which has recently experienced modest eruptions, could cause a temporary but significant drop in global temperatures if it undergoes a major eruption in the coming year. When big volcanoes erupt, it emits a layer of ash in the atmosphere that can reflect heat back into space, cooling down the Earth. Volcanoes have two main types of eruption: effusive and explosive. An effusive reaction consists of a gentle and steady flow of lava on the surface. Pictured is Mount Etna in the east coast of Sicily FIGURES FOR WMO GLOBAL AVERAGE TEMPEARTURE ANOMALY (+/- 0.1 C): Year 18501900 pre-industrial baseline C 19611990 average C 19812010 average C 2017 1.05 0.75 0.44 2016 1.14 0.84 0.53 2015 1.08 0.77 0.46 2014 0.92 0.61 0.3 2013 0.84 0.54 0.23 2012 0.8 0.5 0.19 2011 0.76 0.46 0.15 2010 0.89 0.58 0.27 2009 0.83 0.52 0.21 2008 0.72 0.41 0.1 2007 0.81 0.51 0.2 2006 0.81 0.51 0.2 2005 0.86 0.55 0.25 2004 0.75 0.45 0.14 2003 0.81 0.5 0.19 2002 0.8 0.5 0.19 2001 0.74 0.43 0.13 2000 0.61 0.3 -0.01 1999 0.61 0.31 0 1998 0.83 0.52 0.21 1997 0.69 0.38 0.08 The forecast for 2018, including the range of uncertainties, again placing the coming year amongst the warmest years on record: 16 of the 17 warmest years on record have now occurred since the year 2000. Dr Doug Smith, Met Office research fellow, said: For 2018, the global temperature will remain high, but the current La Nina conditions suggest that average temperatures will be around 0.1 degrees lower than we would otherwise expect in 2018. Mount Etna is known as one of the most powerful volcanoes on the planet, but now one researcher thinks it may not be a 'real' volcano after all. Despite the tonnes of molten rock it spews across the island of Sicily, Etna also produces around 7 million tonnes of steam, carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide every year. As a result, one scientist claims the mountain is more like a giant hot spring than a 'true volcano'. Scroll down for video Mount Etna is the highest volcano in Europe and measures 3,330 metres (10,926 feet). It spewed around 70 million tonnes of lava onto the island of Sicily in 2011 and also produces around 7 million tonnes of steam, carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide every year MOUNT ETNA Etna, at 3,330 metres (10,926 feet), is the highest volcano in mainland Europe. The volcano is one of the most active in the world. It produces around 7 million tonnes of CO2, water and sulphur dioxide every year. In 2011, it spewed nearly 70 million tonnes of lava. The last time Etna posed a serious threat to villages on its slopes was in 1992, when lava streams headed towards Zafferana, a town of 7,000 people. In a spectacular operation, Italian and US soldiers used controlled explosions to divert the flow. Advertisement Professor Carmelo Ferlito, from the University of Catania in Sicily, studied the volcano and how it is fuelled, according to a report in the New Scientist. It is commonly believed that the water, CO2 and sulphur dioxide produced from Etna's eruptions are released from magma as it rises to the surface. Professor Ferlito says that for this to be true, Etna would need to erupt ten times more lava than it currently does. Another theory that tries to account for the large amounts of gas produced states that the gas escapes before the lava reaches the surface and then the lava retreats back into the Earth. This constant flux caused by the magma produces a 'breathing' affect, as the crust rises and falls with the movement of the lava. To maintain the output of gases though, this would require an injection of more than 10,000 kg of magma every second. This would 'inflate the volcano like a children's balloon', Professor Ferlito says. This constant flux of the mountain produces a 'breathing' affect, as the crust rises and falls with the movement of the magma beneath. This animation was captured by NASA and shows the movement of the Earth around the volcano Professor Ferlito's research focuses around the idea that the amount of different materials found is not explained by current theories. The study suggests that the chamber that feeds the volcano doesn't just hold magma, instead it has lots of carbon dioxide, water and sulphur dioxide 'Only 30 per cent is molten rock,' says professor Ferlito. Such a system is closer to a hot spring than to a volcano. The source of the water to feed the eruptions could come from the water-rich pockets inside the Earth, according to professor Ferlito. In his research paper, he also points to the growing evidence of a huge amount of water in the Earth's mantle - the section of the Earth below the crust. Research published last year says that there is as much water here as in all of the Earth's oceans combined. Dr Kayla Iacovino, a volcanologist from Arizona State University told New Scientist the idea is 'inventive'. Dr Iacovino proposed an alternative theory in 2015 that suggests the gas comes from deep within the Earth as magma churns around producing gas. This paper was published in Earth-Science Reviews. While fireworks might be a sign of celebration for humans, they don't elicit quite the same reaction from dogs. Dogs have a very acute sense of hearing, making some everyday events like fireworks and thunderstorms troublesome for canines, as they can be too loud for them. However, Ford may have developed a solution with its noise-cancelling dog house. Scroll down for video While fireworks might be a sign of celebration for humans, they don't elicit quite the same reaction from dogs. Ford may have developed a solution with its noise-cancelling dog house The carmaker created a futuristic-looking dog kennel that uses noise-cancellation panels and Ford's active noise control technology to create an insulated environment for pets. It works similarly, in part, to noise-cancelling technology found in headphones in cars, according to Ford. The company's active noise control technology works by fighting noise with noise. 'Once microphones inside the prototype kennel detect the sound of the fireworks, a built-in audio system emits opposing frequencies that in effect cancels out the noise completely or at least reduces it significantly,' Ford explained. The carmaker created a futuristic-looking dog kennel that uses noise-cancellation panels and Ford's active noise control technology to create an insulated environment for pets 'High-density cork, ideal for sound proofing was an integral part of the design. '...When microphones pick up high levels of noise from the engine or transmission, this is counteracted using opposing sound waves from the cars audio system,' the firm added. In effect, it reduces the noise of fireworks to a level that doesn't disturb dogs' ultra-sensitive hearing, Ford said. 'The result? No more stress for your pet,' Ford explained. 'A concept for now, but with the potential to mean a much better start to the year, both for your dog and for you.' A recent study by the University of Bern in Switzerland found that some 50 percent of dogs show signs of fear with fireworks, such as panting and getting anxious or nervous HOW DOES ACTIVE NOISE CONTROL SOUND-CANCELLING TECHNOLOGY WORK? Active noise control is found in high-end noise cancelling headphones and promises to reduce the amount of ambient sound entering a wearer's ears. Each headphone speaker is equipped with a microphone, which enables the system to detect the waveforms of sounds entering them. It then generates an exact match for these sound waves, which is then inverted. When these two opposite signals meet, it cancels out the offending outside sounds. Some systems claim to be capable of reducing noise by up to 90 per cent, although this may be as low as 50 per cent in some models. The technology has existed for several decades, but has relatively recently been used in commercial headphones. Even more recently, it has begun to be applied in industrial and other public situations. Full size speakers equipped with the technology is used to cancel out the disruptive noises of transformers, compressors and other low frequency machinery. A number of institutions are also working on ways to incorporate it into residential and commercial buildings, like homes, shops and offices. Advertisement In a video, the company showed what the structure is made out of, including noise-cancellation panels and the active noise control, which looks similar to speakers. There's also an automatic glass door, 'anti-vibration block risers' and sound-proof ventilation. It turns out noise sensitivity is a big problem for many dogs. A recent study by the University of Bern in Switzerland found that some 50 percent of dogs show signs of fear with fireworks, such as panting and getting anxious or nervous. 'We wondered how the technologies we use in our cars could help people in other situations,' Lyn West, marketing communications at Ford of Europe, said in a statement. In a video, the company showed what the structure is made out of, including noise-cancellation panels and the active noise control, which looks similar to speakers The company's active noise control technology works by fighting noise with noise. In effect, it reduces the noise of fireworks to a level that doesn't disturb dogs' ultra-sensitive hearing 'Making sure dogs and their owners could enjoy a stress-free New Years Eve seemed like the perfect application for our Active Noise Control system, and we have a few more ideas in progress as to how our everyday lives might benefit from a little Ford know-how.' For now, Ford says the dog kennel is just a concept, meaning it's not for sale. The project is one of several initiatives that fall under Ford's 'Interventions' series, which aim to take automotive tech and apply it to everyday problems. Facebook has made it nearly impossible for users to avoid having their location tracked. A new report has found that even if users turn off location tracking on Facebook, the firm will still use their IP address, as well as other information like their check-ins and the city listed on their profile to discern where they are and generated targeted ads, according to Gizmodo. This experienced was recounted by Aleksandra Korolova, an assistant professor at the University of Southern California, who examined how Facebook tracks a user's location. Scroll down for video A new report has found that even if users turn off location tracking on Facebook, the firm will still use their IP address, as well as other information like their check-ins and the city listed on their profile to discern where they are and generated targeted ads 'When it comes to one of the most privacy-sensitive types of data, location, Facebook does not provide meaningful controls and is misleading in its statements to users and advertisers,' Korolova explained. '...Taken together, Facebook creates an illusion of control rather than gives actual control over location-related ad targeting, which can lead to real harms.' Korolova turned off location tracking on Facebook, doesn't check into places and doesn't list a city on her profile, yet she continued to see location-specific ads on Facebook. For example, when she visited Glacier National Park, she saw an advertisement for things to do in Montana, Gizmodo noted. She discovered that this is because the firm looks at a user's IP address and may use that to show targeted advertisements on their feed. A user's IP address gives internet firms a rough idea of where they live, including their state, city or zip code, according to Gizmodo. Pictured is a graphic that explains how Facebook discerns a user's location even when their location services are turned off. It looks at a user's IP address, WiFi connection and other data This information is then utilized by many brands so they can show users advertisements relevant to their location, interests, age, gender and other demographic information. Users can avoid being tracked by deleting the Facebook app on their phone, using a virtual private network or deleting their Facebook altogether, Gizmodo noted. Facebook maintains that this is a common practice and that internet users should already be aware of it. 'Facebook does not use WiFi data to determine your location for ads if you have Location Services turned off,' a Facebook spokesperson told Gizmodo. 'We do use IP and other information such as check-ins and current city from your profile. 'We explain this to people, including in our Privacy Basics site and on the About Facebook Ads site,' the firm added. Facebook maintains that collecting a user's IP address for targeted advertisements is a common practice and that internet users should already be aware of it WHAT IS A VIRTUAL PRIVATE NETWORK (VPN)? A Virtual Private Network (VPN) extends across a public network, and enables users to send and receive data while maintaining the secrecy of a private network. VPN's are often used to allow employees to access the server of their office/workplace to allow for mobile working. They increase privacy and the internet security of users connected to public networks. They are also used to link offices/branches of the same company that are in different locations. Theoretically, all the information that passes through a VPN secure and can not be intercepted by anyone else. Although they do not offer total anonymity online, they are often used to optimise privacy. VPN's can also be used by individuals to allow them to get around geographical restrictions and censorship - for example, accessing the Netflix of the US from the UK or vice versa. Their use in 'geo-spoofing' locations is also used in to aid freedom of speech as many users wish to escape the limitations placed on their browsing by employers, organisations or third-parties. A VPN can also help protect you against malware or cons on the web. Advertisement So while users can do things like turn off location services and opt out of location tracking on Facebook, they can never keep their location entirely private. 'There is no way for people to opt out of using location for ads entirely,' a Facebook spokesperson told Gizmodo. 'We use city and zip level location which we collect from IP addresses and other information such as check-ins and current city from your profile to ensure we are providing people with a good service - from ensuring they see Facebook in the right language, to making sure that they are shown nearby events and ads for businesses that are local to them.' The move presents a shift in policy for Facebook, which said in a blog post in 2014 that 'people have control over the recent location information they share with Facebook and will only see ads based on their recent location if location services are enabled on their phone.' Facebook's privacy management website describes how users can turn off location services, but that the firm will still be able to discern their location using things like check-ins and events While Facebook isn't the only internet firm that looks at a user's IP address to generate ads, some believe the company should be held to a higher standard than others Facebook's change of heart is likely to spark the ire of privacy advocates who say users should be given greater controls over their information and how they're tracked. And while Facebook isn't the only one who looks at a user's IP address, Kolokava believes Facebook should be held to a higher standard. 'The locations that a person visits and lives in reveal a great deal about them,' Kolokava wrote. 'Their surreptitious collection and use in ad targeting can pave way to ads that are harmful, target people when they are vulnerable, or enable harassment and discrimination.' A new full-body airport security scanner is slashing waiting times by allowing passengers to pass through without lifting their hands in the air. Denver International Airport launched the technology last week, which also aims to make the screening process more comfortable. The scanner works in much the same way as the old one, but the simple change of no longer having to hold up your hands is set to revolutionise passing through security. The full body scanner (pictured here at Cologne Bonn Airport, Germany) was launched at Denver International Airport last week. There is currently only one of the scanners at the American airport Passengers will no longer have to step inside a large mechanised scanner, but instead will now stand on a platform in-between two vertical scanners (pictured here at Cologne Bonn Airport, Germany) What is so special about these new scanners? The device works in much the same way as full body scanners already in place at airports across the country. It is designed to detect objects concealed underneath a passenger's clothing using a form of electromagnetic radiation. Previously someone would be asked to step inside a unit where the scanner mechanism can be rotated around their body. But the new scanner can complete the necessary checks simply by asking someone to stand in-between two units - not even requiring them to lift their arms. It is also said to carry out the process seconds quicker than the older units - slashing waiting times at an airport. Advertisement Larry Nau, a director at Transportation Security Administration which will operate the new machinery, told The Colorado Sun: 'The real speed is the determination on, "Is there a threat item on the body?" 'Thats much quicker seconds quicker. When youre processing over 70,000 travelers a day, seconds pick up. They make a difference.' He also noted how the technology will be easier to use for those who find it difficult to lift their hands over their head. No longer will passengers have to enter a large scanner and have a mechanical device swing around them - instead they will stand in-between two large vertical scanners. Kim Day, CEO of the American airport, claims it is the first in the country to use the technology - although they have also been trialed elsewhere in the world. Scientists have been working on new scanners designed for use at airport security for some time now - in a bid to slash to long waiting times. Experts at Cardiff University and QMC Instruments trialed a new scanner at Cardiff Airport between December 4 and 7. Denver International Airport paid for one of the devices itself and hopes it will be the future of passenger screening, drastically reducing waiting times at the hub Much of Denver International Airport still uses the large circular, mechanised scanners which require passengers to stick their hands up in the air It would also no longer require passengers to remove jackets or items from their pockets at security. The walk-through scanner uses sensors originally designed to detect astronomical activity in deep space and has applied the technology to assessing the human body. It studies the faint light emitted by human bodies and spots hidden objects. An operator see the outlines of these dark spots and a computer programme then identifies them from their silhouette to discern between a mobile phone and a gun, for example. Elsewhere, scientists have been working on new scanners to reduce waiting times at airports. This walk-through scanner developed by experts at Cardiff University and QMC Instruments uses sensors originally designed to detect astronomical activity in deep space and has applied the technology to assessing the human body The project is one of eight to have received funding from 1.8 million ($2.3 million) made available by the Government through a defence and security accelerator competition Ken Wood, sales and marketing director of Sequestim, the joint venture between the university and QMC Instruments, said: 'Passenger numbers are expected to double in 20 years, putting airport security facilities under immense pressure. 'Our scanner combines a number of world-leading technologies developed by our team here in the UK. It uses the human body as a source of 'light', in contrast with existing scanners which process reflected and scattered millimetre-waves while the passenger is required to strike a pose. 'Our system only needs a few seconds to do its work. Passengers walking normally through security would no longer need to take off coats and jackets, or remove personal items such as phones.' The project is one of eight to have received funding from 1.8 million ($2.3 million) made available by the Government through a defence and security accelerator competition. Claims that there was a pause in global climate change between the years 1995 and 2013 have been disproved by experts. An international team of climate researchers 'comprehensively disproved' that there has never been a significant 'pause' in global warming in a pair of new studies. They analysed existing data from previous research and found that scientists 'miscalculated' the rate from observations and expectations from climate models. Climate scientists were insistent that global warming was happening but struggled to find an explanation for the pause putting them under intense political 'pressure'. The experts claim that the confusion may have inadvertently led to a reduced action by governments and the public to prevent greenhouse climate change. Scroll down for video Claims that there was a pause in global climate change between the years 1995 and 2013 have been disproved by experts. An international team of climate researchers 'comprehensively disproved' that there has never been a significant 'pause' in global warming in a pair of new studies (stock image) The slowdown in global warming, claimed to have taken place during the first decade of the 21st century, has attracted considerable research attention. The idea gained traction in 2006 when the media and scientific literature observed that average surface temperatures haven't increased since around that time. This caused confusion for governments and the public about the pace and urgency of climate change. Although many scientists insisted that the planet was still warming, they struggled to explain why the hiatus happened. Dr James Risbey, one of the studies lead authors said that the miscalculation could have led to reduced action to prevent greenhouse climate change. Scientists examined how the research and studies tracked the data against the Earth's global mean surface temperature, or GMST. Scientists examined how the research and studies tracked the data against the Earth's global mean surface temperature, or GMST. They found that there was no statistic evidence for the supposed pause in GMST rise and the current and historical figures did not support the claims They found that there was no statistic evidence for the supposed pause in GMST rise and the current and historical figures did not support the claims. One of the studies claims that climate researchers were put 'under pressure' from political leaders and the climate change deniers who held the evidence that humans are not the cause of global warming. One of the studies claims that climate researchers were put 'under pressure' from political leaders and the climate change deniers who held the evidence that humans are not the cause of global warming (stock image) This alleged 'mismatch' between models and reality led some scientists to mistakenly believe global warming has paused. Dr James Risbey, of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia, said that over the last decade many studies have posited this evidence as fact but 'it is inconsistent with their understanding of global warming'. 'Our findings show there is little or no statistical evidence for a 'pause' in GMST rise,' Dr Risbey explained. The idea gained traction in 2006 when the media and scientific literature observed that average surface temperatures haven't increased since around that time. This caused confusion for governments and the public about the pace and urgency of climate change (stock image) THE PARIS AGREEMENT: A GLOBAL ACCORD TO LIMIT TEMPERATURE RISES THROUGH CARBON EMISSION REDUCTION TARGETS The Paris Agreement, which was first signed in 2015, is an international agreement to control and limit climate change. It hopes to hold the increase in the global average temperature to below 2C (3.6F) 'and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5C (2.7F)'. It seems the more ambitious goal of restricting global warming to 1.5C (2.7F) may be more important than ever, according to previous research which claims 25 per cent of the world could see a significant increase in drier conditions. The Paris Agreement on Climate Change has four main goals with regards to reducing emissions: 1) A long-term goal of keeping the increase in global average temperature to well below 2C above pre-industrial levels 2) To aim to limit the increase to 1.5C, since this would significantly reduce risks and the impacts of climate change 3) Governments agreed on the need for global emissions to peak as soon as possible, recognising that this will take longer for developing countries 4) To undertake rapid reductions thereafter in accordance with the best available science Source: European Commission Advertisement Dr Risbey also warned that the full effects of the scientific misdemeanour are not yet known. 'The climate-research community's acceptance of a 'pause' in global warming caused confusion for the public and policy system about the pace and urgency of climate change,' he said. 'That confusion in turn might have contributed to reduced impetus for action to prevent greenhouse climate change.' A possible explanation is the particularly warm El Nino in 1998, which meant that global warming wasn't as obvious in the following years. Scientists also chose to review very specific periods, which without context of other years led to a kind of 'selection bias'. It's also possible that people gathering the climate data 'struggled to communicate the limitations' of the info, which was then misused by climate scientists, according to Professor Kevin Cowtan, of the University of York. 'Additionally, there can be delays of several years in updating surface temperature datasets,' he went on. 'It takes time to find a bias, find a solution, and then for a paper to be published before most providers update their datasets. 'This process is good for transparency, but it may leave users in the position where they download data with knowable biases and unwittingly draw incorrect conclusions from those data.' The two studies were published in Environmental Research Letters. Forensic scientists have reexamined the skeleton of a German prince who died 3,846 years ago, to find signs that he was murdered The team have claimed that they found injuries on the Prince of Helmsdorf's bones consistent with a probable attack by an 'experienced warrior.' The group of archaeologists, in the eastern German city of Halle, Saxony-Anhalt, say that the early findings point to the 'oldest political assassination in history'. Examiners concluded that he was stabbed, 'probably with a dagger', three times in the spine and stomach, possibly while backed up against a wall or on the floor. The Prince of Helmsdorf's family, who are said to be from house Wettin, would have ruled territories during the Iron Age period in the Saxony states in eastern Germany. Scroll down for video Forensic scientists have reexamined the skeleton of the German Prince of Helmsdorf, who died 3,846 years ago, to find signs that he was murdered. State Archaeologist Harald Meller, pictured here, said the extensive research results will be published in the first half of 2019 His bones were taken from his burial mound of Helmsdorf in Saxony-Anhalt and carefully analysed by state archaeologists. Professor Harald Meller said that more extensive research results will be published in the first half of 2019. According to DW, a German news site, the Prince was part of a dynasty of German counts, dukes, prince-electors and kings that once ruled territories in the present-day German states of Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia. 'As far as we can see, we have thereby discovered the oldest truly demonstrable princely murder in world history,' Dr Meller said. Anthropologists inspected the prince's bones in 2012 and suspected signs of injury but were unable to find proof. The Prince of Helmsdorf, is said to be from house Wettin, and his family would have ruled territories during the Iron Age period in the Saxony states in eastern Germany An anthropologist shows the injured eleventh thoracic vertebra of the Prince of Helmsdorf. You can see a notch six millimetres wide and three millimetres deep - probably created by a dagger in the image Nicole Nicklisch, anthropologist, and Frank Ramsthaler, forensic physician, examines the remains of the Prince of Helmsdorf The remaining skeleton of the Prince in a workroom of the State Office for Monument Preservation and Archaeology in Halle/Saale. After 3,828 years it is clear that the ruler fell victim to an assassination, experts claim WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT THE PRINCE OF HELMSDORF? The Prince of Helmsdorf, is said to be from house Wettin, and his family would have ruled territories during the Iron Age period in the Saxony states in eastern Germany. He was said to have been around 30-50 years old at the time of his death It is claimed that he was a 'tyrannic' who was buried under a large hill in Saxony on a bed of oak while wearing gold jewellery. The house Wettin dynasty is one of the oldest in Europe, and its origins can be traced back to the town of Saxony-Anhalt. Members of the family became the rulers of several medieval states The family would have ruled territories during the Iron Age period in the Saxony states in eastern Germany. Advertisement Deputy director of the University of Saarland Institute for Forensic Medicine, said: 'We have been able to verify three clear injuries to the bones. There were likely more injuries, but all three of those we confirmed would have been lethal. 'The murder weapon may have been a dagger, the blade of which would have to have been at least 15 centimeters (just under 6 inches) long.' 'It must have been a trusted person from the environment of the ruler, perhaps a relative, a friend or the bodyguard,' says Dr Meller. 'The ruler was innocent and was surprised by the attack, and may have fallen victim to a conspiracy like Julius Caesar in ancient Rome.' Examiners concluded that he was stabbed with a dagger three times in the spine during an attack, possibly while backed up against a wall or on the floor Mr Ramsthaler said the prince was 'likely stabbed by a powerful and experienced warrior' who thrust his dagger through the prince's stomach and into his spine. They derived this information from a six millimeter wide and three millimeter deep wound in the eleventh thoracic vertebra. The intensity of the injury indicates that the prince would have been stabbed as he stood against the wall, or perhaps while lying on the floor. The stabbing would also have severed arteries, leading to certain death. Archaeologist Meller says a second injury, which came from above and behind the collarbone, splitting the prince's left shoulder blade and likely seriously injuring veins and portions of the lungs, suggests an experienced warrior.' A cloud of gas left over from the Big Bang nearly 14 billion years ago has been discovered by astronomers using the world's most powerful optical telescope. Scientists from Swinburne University of Technology, Australia used the W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawaii, to trace the relic cloud of gas. They found it in the distant universe, and it is just one of three fossil clouds to have been discovered thus far - making them very rare. Astronomers say the ancient gas cloud is 'pristine' and is believed to be untouched and unchanged since it was orphaned by the big bang. Within the gas in the (blue) filaments connecting the (orange) galaxies lurk rare pockets of pristine gas - remnants of the Big Bang that have somehow been orphaned from the explosive, polluting deaths of stars, seen here as circular shock waves around some orange points PhD student Fred Robert, who led the research alongside Professor Michael Murphy, said the discovery offers new information about how the first galaxies in the universe formed. Mr Robert said: 'Everywhere we look, the gas in the universe is polluted by waste heavy elements from exploding stars. 'But this particular cloud seems pristine, unpolluted by stars even 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang.' Over the course of time a great number of stars have lived and died. When a star reaches the end of its life it can explode, creating a supernova. The explosion sends out a large number of waste elements into space and so gas clouds are often filled with this material. When they are not, this is a good indicator that the gas cloud is much older and has not been imbued with these waste elements. Mr Robert said: 'If it has any heavy elements at all, it must be less than 1/10,000th of the proportion we see in our Sun. 'This is extremely low; the most compelling explanation is that it's a true relic of the Big Bang.' The term Big Bang describes the initial expansion of all the matter in the universe from an infinitely compact state 13.7 billion years ago. The initial conditions are not known, but it has been expanding and cooling ever since Mr Robert and his team used two of Keck Observatory's instruments - the Echellette Spectrograph and Imager (ESI) and the High-Resolution Echelle Spectrometer (HIRES) - to observe the spectrum of a quasar behind the gas cloud. The quasar, which emits a bright glow of material falling into a supermassive black hole, provides a light source against which the spectral shadows of the hydrogen in the gas cloud can be seen. Mr Robert said: 'We targeted quasars where previous researchers had only seen shadows from hydrogen and not from heavy elements in lower-quality spectra. 'This allowed us to discover such a rare fossil quickly with the precious time on Keck Observatory's twin telescopes.' Professor Murphy outlined some of the benefits this new research will provide to scientists going forward. He said: 'It's now possible to survey for these fossil relics of the Big Bang. 'That will tell us exactly how rare they are and help us understand how some gas formed stars and galaxies in the early universe, and why some didn't.' The only two other fossil clouds known were discovered in 2011 by Professor Michele Fumagalli of Durham University, John O'Meara, the new Chief Scientist at Keck Observatory, and Professor J. Xavier Prochaska of the University of California, Santa Cruz. Both Ms Fumagalli and Mr O'Meara are co-authors of this new research on the third fossil cloud. Mr O'Meara said: 'The first two were serendipitous discoveries, and we thought they were the tip of the iceberg. 'But no one has discovered anything similar -- they are clearly very rare and difficult to see. It's fantastic to finally discover one systematically.' The results will be published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. It was supposed to be the latest round in the battle of the space billionaires. However, both Elon Musk's SpaceX and Blue Origin, the space firm set up by Amazon's Jeff Bezos, were forced to cancel launches after postponing them yesterday. SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, carrying a roughly $500 million global positioning system (GPS) satellite built by Lockheed Martin Corp, was slated to take off from Florida's Cape Canaveral shortly after 9 a.m. local time (1400 GMT). Scroll down for video A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Fla., Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2018. SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, carrying a roughly $500 million global positioning system (GPS) satellite built by Lockheed Martin Corp, was due to take off from Florida's Cape Canaveral shortly after 9:30 a.m. local time (1730 GMT), but was stopped minutes before takeoff. However, SpaceX said on Twitter it was standing down from the launch attempt of the GPS III to further evaluate an 'out of family' reading on the rocket's first-stage sensors and would confirm a new launch date once that review was complete. Earlier in the day Blue Origin, backed by Jeff Bezos, said it was 'still working through ground infrastructure issues and monitoring incoming weather in West Texas.' It added it was 'Slating next launch window NET Friday 12/21 pending further review.' Blue Origin was due to bring its New Shepard vehicle back to Earth for a landing after launch to recover all the data collected (and, of course, the rocket itself). The experiments on board will study things like the vibrations experienced during spaceflight, a new way to measure fuel levels in microgravity and how to better work with scientific samples in space. The rocket was due to blast off at the same time as SpaceX, 9:30AM, but 30 minutes before launch Blue Origin announced it had scrubbed the launch for the day 'due to a ground infrastructure issue.' SpaceX halted Tuesday's launch of a long-delayed navigation satellite for the U.S. military, postponing for at least a day the space transportation company's first designated national security mission for the United States. SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, carrying a roughly $500 million global positioning system (GPS) satellite built by Lockheed Martin Corp, was due to take off from Florida's Cape Canaveral shortly after 9:30 a.m. local time (1730 GMT), but was stopped minutes before takeoff. 'This abort was triggered by the onboard Falcon 9 flight computer,' a SpaceX official narrating the launch sequence said without providing additional details. He said SpaceX would attempt the launch on Wednesday morning. If the mission is successful it will mark a victory for Musk, a billionaire entrepreneur who has tried for years to break into the market for lucrative military space launches, long dominated by Lockheed and Boeing Co. 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 SpaceX sued the U.S. Air Force in 2014 in protest over the military's award of a multibillion-dollar, non-compete contract for 36 rocket launches to United Launch Alliance, a partnership of Boeing and Lockheed. SpaceX dropped the lawsuit in 2015 after the Air Force agreed to open up competition, according to SpaceX's website. The next year, SpaceX won a $83 million Air Force contract to launch the GPS III satellite, which will have a lifespan of 15 years, Air Force spokesman William Russell said by phone. Tuesday's launch was to be the first of 32 satellites in production by Lockheed under contracts worth a combined $12.6 billion for the Air Force's GPS III program, Lockheed spokesman Chip Eschenfelder said. U.S. Vice President Mike Pence traveled to Florida to attend the launch, which he called 'an important step forward as we seek to secure American leadership in space.' 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 'Once fully operational, this latest generation of GPS satellites will bring new capabilities to users, including three times greater accuracy and up to eight times the anti-jamming capabilities,' said Russell. The GPS satellite launch was originally scheduled for 2014 but has been hobbled by production delays, the Air Force said. The next GPS III satellite will launch in mid-2019, Eschenfelder said, while subsequent satellites undergo testing in the company's Colorado processing facility. The launch marks SpaceX's first so-called National Security Space mission as defined by the U.S. military, SpaceX said. The Hawthorne, California-based company has previously launched payloads for the Department of Defense in 2017 that were not designated as a National Security Space missions. The quick and easy answer to why people are religious is that God in whichever form you believe he/she/they take(s) is real and people believe because they communicate with it and perceive evidence of its involvement in the world. Only 16 percent of people worldwide are not religious. But this still equates to approximately 1.2 billion individuals who find it difficult to reconcile the ideas of religion with what they know about the world. Why people believe is a question that has plagued great thinkers for many centuries - Karl Marx, for example, called religion the 'opium of the people,' while Sigmund Freud felt that god was an illusion and worshippers were reverting to the childhood needs of security and forgiveness. However, a more recent psychological explanation is the idea that our evolution has created a 'god-shaped hole' or has given us a metaphorical 'god engine' which can drive us to believe in a deity. Scroll down for video Why people believe is a question that has plagued great thinkers for many centuries. A more recent psychological explanation is the idea that our evolution has created a 'god-shaped hole' or has given us a metaphorical 'god engine' which can drive us to believe in a deity WHY DO PEOPLE BELIEVE IN GOD? Greater thinkers have been pondering why people believe in god for centuries. One popular theory cites 'cognitive and social adaptations' as the reasoning behind peoples' belief in god. For example, 'cognitive decoupling,' or the common phenomenon of attaching behaviors or actions to someone who isn't in front of us could explain why people are religious. It is a small leap from being able to imagine the mind of someone we know to imagining an omnipotent, omniscient, human-like mind - especially if we have religious texts which tell of their past actions. Religious activities make our brains feel good, encouraging us to repeat them. In addition, household norms tend to encourage people to be religious. Advertisement Essentially this hypothesis is that religion is a by-product of a number of cognitive and social adaptations which have been extremely important in human development. We are social creatures who interact and communicate with each other in a co-operative and supportive way. In doing so we inevitably have stronger attachments to some individuals more than others. British psychologist John Bowlby demonstrated this influence of attachments on childrens emotional and social development, and showed how these can suffer when they are threatened through separation or abuse. We continue to rely on these attachments in later life, when falling in love and making friends, and can even form strong attachments to non-human animals and inanimate objects. It is easy to see that these strong attachments could transfer to religious deities and their messengers. Our relationships depend on being able to predict how others will behave across situations and time. But the things that we form attachments to dont necessarily need to be in front of us to predict their actions. We can imagine what they would do or say. This ability - known as cognitive decoupling - originates in childhood through pretend play. One explanation for why people are religious suggests that it's a by-product of a number of cognitive and social adaptations which have been extremely important in human development It is a small leap from being able to imagine the mind of someone we know to imagining an omnipotent, omniscient, human-like mind - especially if we have religious texts which tell of their past actions. Another key adaptation that may help religious belief derives from our ability to to anthropomorphise objects. Have you ever seen the outline of a person only to realise that it is actually a coat hung on the door? This capacity to attribute human forms and behaviours to non-human things shows we also readily endow non-human entities, such as gods, with the same qualities that we possess and, as such, make it easier to connect with them. In addition to these psychological aspects, the ritual behaviour seen in collective worship makes us enjoy and want to repeat the experience. ARE WE HEADING FOR A GODLESS FUTURE? Graham Lawton, author of the new book 'How to be Human,' suggests that as our lives become more stable, society could become 'godless' as our need for religion fades away. When children encounter religion, Mr Lawson argues they find the explanations it offers intuitively appealing and believable - making them born believers - but this instinct is drummed out of them by education. The author claimed the reason people continue to be believe it because 'they haven't thought that hard about it'. However, although the future will be increasingly secular, humans will never totally lose the god instinct. As long as existential uncertainty exists Mr Lawton claims religion will not disappear completely - even though he believes some of the things in the bible are 'just crazy'. People cling onto moral guidance and existential comfort and they don't let go of them easily, he said. His comments are based on the cognitive theory of religion which states that belief is a by-product of our cognitive equipment. Our brain is primed to see meaning everywhere, which helps us make sense of random events. Children like the idea that there is order and design in the world and it is actually useful as it allows them to reason about possible threats that we cannot see, for example a predator lurking in a nearby bush. According to Mr Lawton, although this is an evolutionary advantage, it also facilitates the build-up of delusional belief and a feeling of rightness. 'To be an actual atheist and reject all religious ideas is not humanly possible - we'll still fill that hole with something, said Mr Lawton. As long as existential uncertainty exists, Mr Lawton claims religion will not disappear completely. Advertisement Dancing, singing and achieving trance-like states were prominent in many ancestral societies and are still exhibited by some today - including the Sentinelese people, and Australian aborigines. As well as acts of social unity, even more formal rituals also alter brain chemistry. They increase levels of serotonin, dopamine, and oxytocin in the brain chemicals that make us feel good, want to do things again and provide a closeness to others. These cognitive adaptations are facilitated by educational and household norms which dont tend to dispute religious ideas. While we are encouraged to challenge other ideas presented to us early in childhood that may not have a strong evidence base such as Father Christmas or the Tooth Fairy this is not the case with religion. These challenges are often discouraged in religious teachings and sometimes regarded as sinful. Regardless of your point of view, the impact of religion and religious thinking on human functioning and evolution is a captivating intellectual debate that shows no sign of ending. Of course, one might argue that god creates everything outlined above but then this leads us onto another, bigger question: what is the evidence for god? This is the incredible video footage that shows the moment a daredevil paramotors across a huge desert. Victor Rodriguez, 30, from Leon, Spain, captured the stunning short film when he embarked on an adventure to cross the country of Oman, in the Middle East, in just his trusty paramotor. Flying since the age of 15, Victor has now been paramotoring for half of his life and describes his passion as 'always making him happy'. Victor Rodriguez, 30, from Leon, Spain, has travelled across Oman in a paramotor. He captured his journey on camera Most of the footage shows Victor soaring through the skies above the desert in the Middle Eastern country At one point, as Victor glided through the air, he passed a group of camels who were running on the sand below Victor, who shot this footage earlier this month, said: 'I've always had a passion for flying. 'This video is part of my big adventure crossing the country with my paramotor. 'I've flown over the pyramids in Egypt, flown over the beaches and culture of Thailand and several other amazing trips.' A paramotor, also called a powered paraglider, consists of a harness, engine and propeller connected to a pilot's back in a hoop frame. A paramotor, also called a powered paraglider, consists of a harness, engine and propeller connected to a pilot's back in a hoop frame Flying since the age of 15, Victor has now been paramotoring for half of his life The frame is then covered in netting to protect the pilot - who is also attached to a paragliding wing. Many of the motors have electric starters, which allows the pilot to adapt his flight to the prevailing conditions and stop and restart the motor while in the air. Oman, which borders the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, is mostly covered by a vast gravel desert plain. Ryanair has fired all its pilots and cabin crew members based in the Netherlands after they did not agree to be 'voluntarily' relocated to bases as far-flung as Morocco and Belarus. The Irish low-cost airline officially filed for the collective firing of all personnel at the Dutch Employee Insurance Agency (UWV), an autonomous government administrative authority that handles unemployment benefits. Ryanair cites bad economic results for its Dutch base at Eindhoven, which was closed on 5th November, as the reason for the mass-dismissal. Ryanair has fired all its pilots and cabin crew members based in the Netherlands after they did not agree to be 'voluntarily' relocated Unions VNV and FNV, which represent the pilots and flight attendants respectively, said they will appeal the mass-firing with the government body. Chairman Joost van Doesburg of pilot union VNV said he is surprised that the UWV accepted Ryanair's application to fire all of its employees in the first place. He said that Ryanair would need to come forward with proof of the bad economic numbers for the firing of all the employees to be accepted, which according to him the low-cost airline has not yet done. According to the unions, Ryanair decided to close its Eindhoven base and get rid of its Netherlands-based employees as a retaliatory measure after pilots went on strike in early October for two days. Sixteen angry Ryanair pilots even started a court case against the airline in the Southern Dutch city of Den Bosch, asking the judge to ban the airline from transferring them to bases in far-flung cities in North Africa and Eastern Europe. A VNV union spokesman said: 'The goal was not higher wages or more days off, but a change in culture and a guarantee of basic rights for employees in accordance with Dutch standards. 'Ryanair has to stop with the divide-and-conquer culture, and has to respect employee's fundamental rights. However, our actions have made Ryanair decide to close its Eindhoven base. 'That means that the pilots are being forced to move to southern or eastern Europe or even to North Africa.' Ryanair flights to and from Eindhoven Airport, pictured, will not cease. They will however be covered by aeroplanes and cabin crew stationed at bases in countries According to the union, while it means that most Ryanair flights to and from Eindhoven will not cease, they will however be covered by aeroplanes and cabin crew stationed at bases in countries with less restrictive labour laws. A pilot told the Dutch court: 'Ryanair is a brilliantly organised dictatorship. As long as you keep your mouth shut it is alright. However, when you cross the line you have to be careful.' The court ruled in November in favour of the pilots, saying they are not obliged to accept a move abroad and that Ryanair has to keep paying their salaries. However, the low-cost airline also claimed victory after the case, sending a letter just a few days after the ruling giving them four days to decide whether to be voluntarily relocated or fired. According to the VNV, Ryanair is 'searching for employees for their new bases, for example in Minsk (capital of Belarus)', where a base may be opening at the end of 2019. Ryanair employees said that the company is also pushing them to accept a transfer to Ryanair hubs in Morocco, Romania, Bulgaria or in the Azores, which is located in the middle of the Atlantic, 850 miles from the Portuguese coast. Asmae Hajjari, head of the FNV Aviation Union which represents the flight attendants, said that 'Ryanair has no respect for their employees' as it gives zero financial support or assistance to deal with the situation. Hajjari said: 'The cabin crew has rental agreements, insurances, subscriptions and other arrangements which they cannot cancel in two and a half weeks.' Besides the 16 pilots, 98 cabin crew members are affected by Ryanair's decision to fire all Netherlands-based personnel. Ryanair spokesman Yann Delomez previously said that its pilots 'have been offered jobs elsewhere in the network'. Delomez told Central European News: 'If they choose not to transfer, then we will respect their wishes, but there will be no jobs remaining at Eindhoven.' He's the iconic actor known for playing Dave Rafter in Australian drama-series Packed To The Rafters. But before he entered the limelight, Erik Thomson appeared alongside Xena: Warrior Princess' Lucy Lawless in a painfully cheesy TV advertisement for a New Zealand bank. Reflecting on his biggest career regrets, Erik, 51, told Daily Mail Australia at the 2018 AACTA Awards on Wednesday that he cringes 'a little bit' when he re-watches them. 'I kind of wished I'd never done that, but at the time I was broke': Packed To The Rafters' Erik Thomson, 51, has revealed the cheesy TV ads he regrets filming in the nineties alongside Xena: Warrior Princess star Lucy Lawless 'I did a series of them with Lucy Lawless and they're just so cheesy,' he explained. I kinda wish I never did that. But at the time I was working in theatre and broke and they paid really well, he added. In the ad, Erik and Lucy play the roles of doting parents to a baby named Stan who are hoping to secure financial security for their growing family. It was acceptable in the nineties! before he entered the limelight, Erik Thomson appeared alongside Xena: Warrior Princess' Lucy Lawless in a painfully cheesy TV advertisement for a New Zealand bank Oh baby! In the ad, Erik and Lucy play the roles of doting parents to a baby named Stan who are hoping to secure financial security for their growing family The Kiwi-born actor rose to fame after he appeared as the God Hades in Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess series in 1995, both filmed in New Zealand. Erik moved to Australia in 1995 where he landed a major role in Australian medical series All Saints. The actor won a Silver Logie for Most Popular Actor in 2003 for his role on the series playing Dr Mitch Evans. Regrets: 'I kinda wished I never did them, but at the time I was broke and they paid really well,' he said (pictured with his All Saints cast) He later appeared in 2004 film Somersault, starring alongside Abbie Cornish and Sam Worthington where he received an AFI Award. Erik married Australian actress Caitlin McDougall in 1999. The pair share two children together, daughter named Eilish, 11 and a son named Magnus, five. They're not just pretty they've just made a pretty sound investment too. Playboy Playmate Jayde Nicole has teamed up with a sextet of similar stunners to launch a new Mexican restaurant in Los Angeles. She joined fellow investors Lindsey Pelas, Emily Sears, Daniella Monet, Tina Louise Tiffany Toth and Jessica Hall this week for a colorful celebration of their new venture Sugar Taco. Rainbow brite: Playboy Playmate Jayde Nicole (second from left) led colorful squad of models to celebrate launch of Sugar Taco in Los Angeles The seven friends hosted a party in the Hollywood Hills where they sampled the plant-based Mexican street food. The 32-year-old Nicole looked scintillating on the night in a figure-hugging red pencil skirt, baring her cleavage in a matching low-cut top. Shane Warne's rumored former fling Emily Sear slipped into sexily silky purple number. Lady in red: The 32-year-old Nicole looked scintillating on the night rocking two scalet looks (pictured with Daniella Monet, L) Nickelodeon stunner Daniella Monet meanwhile rocked three ensembles, jumping from an orange cocktail dress to a white skirt and top to a gorgeous green gown. Glamour model Lindsey Pelas put her own 32DDD assets on dsiplay in a skin-tight bright yellow bodycon dress. The eatery is the brainchild of Nicole, who is an ardent supporter of animal rights. Pretty sound investment: All seven models have invested in the new vegan restaurant (L-R, Daniella, Tina Louise, Jayde, Tiffany Toth) The restaurant will be eco and animal friendly, with solar panels on the roof, reused and reclaimed materials and even a specialised dog menu that donates its proceeds to animal rescues Nicole was also part of the team that opened AV Nightclub, Toca Madera and Tocaya Organica. The vegan Sugar Taco is set to open in LA in early 2019. She was left heartbroken by Nick Cummins on The Bachelor, and was forced to keep the outcome a secret for months until the finale aired in September. And while Brittany Hockley has certainly experienced a tumultuous year in the spotlight, she claims to have absolutely no regrets. Taking to Instagram on Tuesday, the 31-year-old reflected on the challenges she faced and also offered some valuable advice to other singletons. 'It wasn't all roses': The Bachelor's Brittany Hockley (pictured) has reflected on her difficult year after being dumped by Nick Cummins 'In 2017, I came back from an almost three-year, around-the-world trip and I was in a way worried at how I would continue to keep my soul alight after the incredible experiences I had just had,' she wrote. 'I need not have worried. Because 2018 cracked me wide open. [It was] equal parts confronting, inspiring [and] exposing. I laughed, I cried, I learnt.' The radiographer admitted that she wore her heart on her sleeve and took some big chances during the past 12 months. 'That's what life is about. And while it wasn't all roses, it was a damn fun ride,' she added, making a cheeky reference to The Bachelor. 'It was a damn fun ride': While Brittany has certainly experienced a tumultuous year in the spotlight, she claims to have absolutely no regrets She continued: 'I know everything happens for a reason and the future both scares and excites me. I'm running into 2019 with a full heart, happy and with no regrets. I truly hope you can all say the same.' Brittany also offered fans who are currently single some advice she said helped her. 'I know heading into a new year on your own can be really daunting for a lot of people, both men and women (trust me - this used to be me, I'm seven years flying solo) but use this as incentive to go do something you've always wanted to do! The time is now!' she wrote. 'Keep doing the things you love and happiness will find you. Your happiness starts with you. The rest will follow. I can't wait to see what next year brings. I hope you all take a risk.' 'Keep doing the things you love and happiness will find you': Brittany also offered fans who are currently single some advice she said helped her Nick Cummins shocked the nation in September when he failed to pick a winner in the Bachelor finale, dumping both finalists - Brittany and Sophie Tieman. Last month, Brittany reunited with the former Wallaby for first time since filming the final rose ceremony in New Caledonia in late May. The pair were photographed looking tense at The Iconic Swim Show in Sydney, however she insisted to Daily Mail Australia they were on 'really good terms'. Home and Away's Sarah Roberts publicly announced her engagement to co-star James Stewart on Monday. And on-set photos from Sydney's Palm Beach appear to show the moment Sarah told her colleagues the exciting news earlier this month. Sophie Dillman was pictured hugging the brunette in a sweet off-camera moment. Scroll down for video Here comes the bride! Home and Away stars including Sophie Dillman (left) appeared to congratulate newly-engaged Sarah Roberts after James Stewart surprised her with a proposal Sarah and Sophie couldn't wipe the smiles off their faces as they shared a lively conversation in-between filming scenes. Elsewhere on set, James looked in happy spirits as he returned to work following the romantic proposal. The photos were taken on December 5, just five days after the couple got engaged at the restaurant where they had their first date. How sweet! The on-set photos were taken on December 5, just five days after Sarah and James got engaged at the restaurant where they had their first date Sharing the news! Sarah and Sophie couldn't wipe the smiles off their faces as they shared a lively conversation in-between filming scenes in Sydney's Palm Beach Getting into character: Sarah, pictured holding a script, plays personal trainer Willow Harris in Home and Away What's so funny? Sophie seemingly couldn't contain her excitement after hearing Sarah's engagement news as she performed a bizarre dance on the beach Back to work! After their girly chat, Sarah and Sophie filmed a scene with Patrick O'Connor Announcing the news in New Idea on Monday, James revealed he had been planning the proposal for six months. 'My whole face was paralysed and I was so overwhelmed. There were tears and I haven't stopped smiling,' Sarah said. While Sarah had an inkling James was going to propose, she was caught off guard as she thought the proposal may happen on her birthday or during their upcoming holiday to New York. Something to smile about! Elsewhere on set, James Stewart (right) looked in happy spirits as he returned to work following the romantic proposal on November 30 Long time coming! Announcing the news in New Idea on Monday, James revealed he had been planning the proposal for six months Colleagues and partners: James and Sarah fell in love after meeting on set of Home and Away 'I didn't see it coming this soon. When the box came out I thought, "Maybe it's a birthday bracelet", but Jimmy was nervous, a bit sweaty, and his eyes were watery. I knew something was up,' she said. James was previously engaged to his Packed to the Rafters co-star Jessica Marais and the former couple share a six-year-old daughter, Scout. The actor told New Idea that his daughter was keen for him to propose to Sarah. Surprise! 'My whole face was paralysed and I was so overwhelmed. There were tears and I haven't stopped smiling,' Sarah said of the proposal. Pictured wearing her engagement ring Lovebirds: Sarah and James are pictured in Sydney on March 9, 2018 'Scout is watching movies with princesses marrying princes so it was a gag for a long time where she'd say, "When are you going to do that? You better do it quick, dad! You're going to lose her!"' he said. While it's still early days when it comes to planning the wedding, the couple revealed the ceremony will likely take place on the east coast of Australia, Sarah added that she wants her brother to walk her down the aisle. Before finding love with Sarah, James previously dated another Home And Away co-star, Isabella Giovinazzo, but it is believed they split in mid-2017. Laura Dundovic appears to have found her go-to colour for the summer season. The Australian actress and model, 31, slipped into a yellow high-cut bikini on Tuesday, just days after she stepped out in a bright lemon-hued tailored pantsuit. Laura, who won Miss Universe Australia in 2008, put on a sizzling display in the eye-catching swimsuit as she soaked up the sunshine at St Kilda beach in Melbourne. Scroll down for video 'Can you guess my favourite colour?' Laura Dundovic stuns in another yellow ensemble as she slips into a sizzling high-cut bikini at the beach 'Can you guess my favourite colour at the moment?' she captioned the Instagram image. The blonde offered her 88,400 followers a generous glimpse of her peachy posterior as she stood side-on to the camera lens in the cheeky-cut bikini bottoms. The vivid two-piece ensemble further highlighted the stunner's sunkissed frame. Laura, who recently returned home to Sydney after living abroad in the South of France, looked every inch the Aussie beach babe as her sandy-coloured tousled waves fluttered in the seaside breeze. Dressed to impress! Laura turned heads as she (pictured) lead the arrivals at star-studded Melbourne Fashion Festival bash last week Last week, Laura donned another yellow ensemble as she attended the Melbourne Fashion Festival Program and Campaign Launch. She turned heads in a bright tailored yellow pantsuit, featuring three-quarter length trousers. She also showcased her ample cleavage by going topless in the plunging blazer. Glowing! Australian actress and model Laura, 31, shone bright in a tailored yellow pantsuit, with three-quarter length trousers In an interview with Vogue Australia back in 2016, Laura opened up about the secrets behind her killer body. 'Have a healthy lifestyle rather than following a craze. I try to make the right choices everyday from shopping, to cooking, to taking the stairs,' she told the publication. 'I think of how the inside of my body is not just how it looks on the outside.' They excitedly announced their engagement on Monday. And just a few hours after the joyous news was revealed, Home And Away star Sarah Roberts, 34, shared a sweet post with her fiance James Stewart, 43. The newly-engaged actress beamed with happiness as her beau kissed her sweetly under the mistletoe she was conveniently holding above their heads. 'I get to keep him forever': Newly-engaged Sarah Roberts beams with joy as her fiance and Home And Away co-star James Stewart kisses her under the mistletoe in sweet post just hours after they announced their engagement Posing in a Christmas-themed photo booth, James wore a Santa hat while Sarah wore a 'merry Christmas' headpiece. Sarah captioned the photo: 'If you look for it, Ive got a sneaky feeling that love actually is all around. I get to keep him forever. #fiance @__jamesstewart__.' While her left hand was out of view, it's believed Sarah was wearing her impressive sparkler for the photo. James popped the question on November 30, surprising Sarah with a ring at the restaurant where they had their first date. 'She said yes!' James popped the question on November 30, surprising Sarah with a ring at the restaurant where they had their first date In an Instagram post on Monday, James gave fans a first glimpse at his fiancee Sarah's engagement ring. In the photo - simply captioned, 'She said yes' - Sarah rests her left hand against her cheek, showing off her sparkling ring. The ring appears to feature a thin gold band and a flower-shaped diamond. Prized bling: In an Instagram post on Monday, James gave fans a first glimpse at his fiancee Sarah's engagement ring. In the photo - simply captioned, 'She said yes' - Sarah rests her left hand against her cheek, showing off her sparkling ring The couple are currently in celebration mode, and plan to head overseas after spending Christmas with their families. 'I'd like to go away somewhere,' Sarah told TV Week on Monday, with James adding: 'I want to go to New York - I've never seen snow!' The couple's engagement news was revealed in Monday's New Idea, with James revealing he asked Sarah to marry him three weeks ago. 'My whole face was paralysed and I was so overwhelmed. There were tears and I haven't stopped smiling,' Sarah said of the proposal. Wonderful news! The couple's engagement was revealed in Monday's issue of New Idea James was previously engaged to his Packed to the Rafters co-star Jessica Marais and the former couple share custody of a six-year-old daughter, Scout. The actor told New Idea that his daughter was keen for him to propose to Sarah. 'Scout is watching movies with princesses marrying princes so it was a gag for a long time where she'd say, "When are you going to do that? You better do it quick, dad! You're going to lose her!"' he said. She recently returned from a sun-soaked vacation in Fiji. And on Sunday, Love Island Australia star Cassidy McGill was clearly missing the South Pacific island's climes as she returned to Sydney's dismal weather. 'Thunderstorms in Sydney so Ill just reminisce on Fiji,' the 23-year-old captioned a post in a busty bikini. Where she'd rather be? Over the weekend, Love Island's Cassidy McGill reflected on her Fiji vacation by posting more bikini-clad photos after arriving back home in Sydney Cassidy made her mark on reality TV this year, as a dramatic, emotional and unlucky-in-love contestant on Love Island Australia. Flying back from her week away to wet and windy conditions, Cassidy posted throwbacks from her trip, in which she was seen wearing a brown striped two-piece. Flaunting her toned frame in the skimpy bikini, she smiled alongside her blonde pal with the picturesque water behind them. Busting out! Cassidy posted throwbacks from her trip, in which she was seen wearing a brown striped two-piece Perks of being on TV? It appears Cassidy was enjoying the perks of her newfound fame while on what seemed to be a sponsored holiday in Fiji to attend the Your Paradise music festival It appears Cassidy was enjoying the perks of her newfound fame while on what seemed to be a sponsored holiday in Fiji to attend the Your Paradise music festival. Cassidy shared a series of bikini snaps during her trip and made sure to tag page 'Your Paradise' in every photo. Promotional? Cassidy shared a series of bikini snaps during her trip and made sure to tag page 'Your Paradise' in every photo It is unclear whether Cassidy paid for her own holiday or got to travel for free in exchange for promoting the event. Daily Mail Australia has contacted Cassidy for comment. He was left hurt when he was falsely accused of 'getting close' with his newly-single radio co-host Jackie 'O' Henderson, last month. But Beau Ryan, 33, has put the rumours behind him and jetted off on an overseas holiday with his wife, Kara. The couple packed on the PDA as they cruised along the water in a speed boat on Tuesday. 'In Paradise': Kara and Beau Ryan get frisky during a romantic getaway... after it was falsely claimed he was 'getting close' to newly-single Jackie 'O' Henderson After tumultuous few weeks, Kara, 32, looked relaxed in a black bikini and sunglasses as she cuddled up to her husband. Beau also embraced the tropical vibes, wearing nothing but shorts as he soaked up the sun. 'En route to Paradise with Mrs Paradiso #yesineedtoshave,' he captioned a picture posted to Instagram. The loved-up couple appear to be enjoying some romantic time together without their two children, Remi, five and Jesse, one. Relaxation: After tumultuous few weeks, Kara, 32, looked relaxed in a black bikini and sunglasses as she cuddled up to her husband The holiday comes after Beau recently revealed to Daily Mail Australia that he and his family laughed off false rumours that he was 'getting close' to his radio colleague Jackie O following her marriage split. Dismissing the hurtful gossip, the former footy star said that the team at KIIS FM are like 'family'. Beau added that he and his wife Kara have been 'supportive' of Jackie throughout her separation. False rumours: The holiday comes after Beau recently revealed to Daily Mail Australia that he and his family laughed off false rumours that he was 'getting close' to his radio colleague Jackie O following her marriage split 'I wasn't really aware [of her marriage breakdown], kind of like everyone else. I wasn't aware of her situation until recently,' he said. 'We've all been supportive. Kara has been supportive of her.' Beau added that he was 'dragged' into the situation by the press, but fortunately 'it has passed for the moment'. 'We're as happy as ever. Kara and I and everyone at KIIS are a close family. Kara and I are close to Jackie,' he added. Jackie, 43, announced in October that she had split with her husband Lee Henderson after 18 years together. Nothing was off-limits for New Zealand model Bailey Scarlett during a Q&A with fans on Instagram Stories on Monday. Imploring her followers to ask her a question, the 21-year-old Instagram sensation was quizzed about everything from her dating life to what contraception she uses. Bailey - who is a single mother to an eight-month-old son named Riley Arlo - was even asked if she had ever considered terminating her pregnancy. Tell-all: Seemingly nothing was off-limits for Bailey Scarlett during a Q&A with fans on Instagram Stories on Monday, seen here with son Riley Arlo Rather than being affronted by the line of questioning though, Bailey gave an honest answer, revealing she had actually terminated a pregnancy in the past. 'I had one when I was younger, and that was purely because I was so young and had religiously taken the pill, and afterwards, I swore I'd never go through one again,' she confessed. Bailey then explained she was better equipped to raise a child the second time she fell pregnant. Ask anything: Imploring her followers to ask her a question, the 21-year-old Instagram model was quizzed about everything from her dating life to what contraception she uses 'When I found out I was pregnant last year, I was financially stable, renting my own place, own [sic] my own car, etc., so I knew I would be able to give Riley a good life regardless of the circumstances,' she added. 'And I feel as though I've done exactly that and will continue to.' In a separate post, Riley revealed she was currently working as a bartender in a Melbourne bar. Getting serious: Bailey - who is a single mother to eight-month-old son Riley - was even asked if she had ever considered terminating her pregnancy Speaking candidly: Bailey gave honest answers to the questions, revealing she had actually terminated a pregnancy in the past 'The money/tips is really good, which makes it worth it,' she wrote. 'Plus, working at night allows me to not miss out on anything during the day with Riley.' While Bailey is yet to confirm the identity of Riley's father, she did reveal she had only just received her first child support payment. 'It all goes into a savings account for Riley anyways for when [s]he's old enough to have access to it, as it's money for Riley anyways and I didn't work for it, nor did I earn it,' she explained. 'I earn my own and support myself and Riley on my own, hence why I work.' Working hard: In a separate post, Riley revealed she was currently working as a bartender in a Melbourne bar. 'The money/tips is really good, which makes it worth it,' she wrote Australian model Jessica Hart attended the hotly-anticipated screening of Disney's Mary Poppins Returns in New York on Sunday. And it appears the statuesque blonde, 32, decided to channel the film's iconic character as she stepped out to the star-studded event in a navy and red ensemble. The Victoria's Secret stunner donned a midnight blue trench coat, which drew parallels to the outerwear seen on Julie Andrews in the original Mary Poppins film back in 1964. A spoonful of style! Jessica Hart looked stylish in a navy trench coat and matching mini skirt at the Mary Poppins Returns screening in NY on Monday evening Jessica, who hails from Sydney but is based in the US, teamed the attire with a red knit jumper over a white buttoned-up shirt. She added a number of modern highlights to the ensemble, including a navy thigh-skimming pleated skirt and a pair of red suede knee-high boots. The lithe beauty, who has modelled for the likes of Louis Vuitton and Guess, offered onlookers a generous glimpse of her slender stems as she posed in the brief number. Details: The Victoria's Secret stunner donned a midnight blue trench coat, which drew parallels to the outerwear seen on Julie Andrews in the original Mary Poppins film back in 1964 At one stage, the Aussie stunner flashed fans the inside of her jacket, which was lined in a luxurious silk bird print. Jess opted for a luminous makeup palette, consisting of a generous slick of creamy foundation, a dusting of bronzed eye shadow and a pop of highlighter on the cheeks. The blonde added an edgy twist to her look by styling her long tresses in a super straight hairdo. Keeping warm: Jessica, who hails from Sydney but is based in the US, teamed the attire with a red knit jumper over a white buttoned-up shirt Luminous: Jess opted for a luminous makeup palette, consisting of a generous slick of creamy foundation, a dusting of bronzed eye shadow and a pop of highlighter on the cheeks Jessica's latest appearance comes after she revealed the reason behind her split with Greek shipping heir Stavros Niarchos III during a revealing Instagram Q&A in September. The model told one of her Instagram followers during a question and answer session that their 'journey ran its course'. She also added that she's currently 'not' in a relationship. And when probed by two other followers on her split with Stavros, the blonde beauty said that the breakup was 'amicable'. There's no love lost between former reality TV co-stars Jen Hawke and Tara Pavlovic. The pair battled it out for Matty Johnson in The Bachelor in 2017, with Tara later refusing to take part in the show's Paradise spin-off if Jen was involved. And now, 'villain' Jen has blasted Tara during a new interview with Daily Mail Australia. EXCLUSIVE 'It was very much a 'poor me' syndrome': The Bachelor's Jen Hawke (left) blasts Tara Pavlovic (right) as the reality TV 'villain' accuses her former co-star of 'blaming other people her own problems' Jen told Daily Mail that one of the most positive parts about being on The Bachelor was the close friendships she forged. The flip side to that, Jen explained, was that she met people she 'couldn't stand', with Tara being one of them. 'Look, I'm not a fan of Tara, that's no secret,' Jen revealed. 'I think that she and I both, we started off quite close. She and I grew very much far apart. I'm not one who likes to blame other people for my own problems she is. So it is what it is.' Shots fired: Jen said of Tara: 'I'm not one who likes to blame other people for my own problems she is' 'Look, I'm not a fan of Tara, that's no secret,' Jen and Tara both took part in Matty J's season of The Bachelor last year but are no longer close (Pictured: The Bachelor cast in 2017) Jen further clarified what she meant by claiming: 'Tara has a tendency to project things'. 'She blames other people and throws around offensive terms,' Jen continued. The brunette reality star said she was referring to numerous incidents while they lived together in The Bachelor mansion where she overheard Tara refer to people in her life as 'narcissists'. 'Then out of the house I was the narcissist as was [fellow Bachelor co-star] Leah Costa,' Jen further claimed. Jen added that she believed Tara was blaming others for her 'low self-esteem issues', claiming: 'It was very much a 'poor me' syndrome.' The feeling's mutual? In April, Tara (pictured with ex-fiance Sam Cochrane) told Popsugar that she wouldn't have signed up for Paradise if a certain former co-star, widely believed to be Jen, was taking part However, when approached by Daily Mail for comment, Tara seemed unfazed by Jen's opinion of her. 'Sorry, who is Jen? Look, my family, my friends, lawyers and doctors know the truth about what had happened in my life and that is all that matters,' she said. 'What some irrelevant person says about me really doesn't bother me.' 'What some irrelevant person says about me really doesn't bother me': Tara told Daily Mail Australia on Tuesday that Jen's opinion of her doesn't concern her becauseher 'family, my friends, lawyers and doctors know the truth' In April, there were whispers of a feud between the pair, when Tara admitted to Popsugar that she refused to join Bachelor in Paradise if a certain former co-star also signed up to take part. 'The only person I didn't want in there (Bachelor In Paradise) was someone from my season, and I don't even like to use her name anymore,' Tara said. 'I think everyone was on the same boat as me in terms of that. I think a lot of people were pretty much like, 'We're not doing it if she's there!'' At the time, it was heavily hinted that Tara was referring to Jen in the interview. Famed chef George Calombaris married Natalie Tricarico in September, with the nuptials lasting over three days. A who's who of the culinary world attended the wedding, including Nigella Lawson, 58, and Manu Feildel, 44. But George was somehow convinced that 'no one' would show, according to fellow MasterChef and mate Gary Mehigan, 51. Scroll down for video 'He didn't think anyone was going to come': MasterChef's Gary Mehigan (pictured) gave the inside word on George Calombaris' big Greek wedding on Tuesday Speaking to Now To Love on Tuesday, Gary said that George, 40, told him, 'I didn't think anyone was going to come, I thought maybe 10 people would come.' However, some 250 people showed up to watch the top chef tie the knot. Gary also said that the wedding featured a feast of Greek food, such as lamb on spits and a fig tart 'a mile long'. I do! Famed chef George (right) married Natalie Tricarico (left) in September, with the nuptials lasting three days By all accounts, it was a raucous celebration for happy couple, George and Natalie. In October, fellow celebrity chef Matt Moran, 49, revealed he partied with Nigella Lawson until the early hours of the morning at the event. Matt told Nova's Fitzy and Wippa that he was 'lit' at George's Big Day in Greece and at one point saw Nigella still dancing away at 5:30am. Guest list: A who's who of the culinary world attending the wedding, including Nigella Lawson, 58, and Manu Feildel, 44. Pictured from left: George Calombaris, Matt Moran and Nigella Lawson 'I remember seeing Nigella on the dancefloor at 5:30 in the morning... I was lit too actually,' he said. '[The wedding] went for three days... he did it really well. We had the wedding on the Saturday night, then we had the after party on the Sunday and the beach party on the Monday.' The lavish reception is believed to have taken place at the Island Athens Riviera resort, which boasts stunning views of the Mediterranean Sea, according to the Greek City Times. Friends: Speaking to Now To Love on Tuesday, Gary said that George, 40, told him, 'I didn't think anyone was going to come, I thought maybe 10 people would come' George and Natalie met in 2007 following their respective divorces. The couple share two children: son James, seven, and daughter Michaela, five. 'I'm very privileged and lucky to have beautiful and healthy children, and Natalie has been an incredible backbone in everything in my life,' George told The Herald Sun earlier this year. 'She's had to put up with a lot with me. I'm a very lucky man.' Earlier this month, Ash London was officially confirmed as Em Rusciano's replacement on the 2DayFm breakfast show with Grant Denyer and Ed Kavalee. And despite the shake up, the program's ratings have remained steady. According to the eighth and final ratings survey for 2018, the breakfast slot finished with a 4.6 per cent audience share, the same figure as the last survey result. On the up and up? 2DayFM radio ratings remain steady after controversial host Em Rusciano is replaced by Ash London It appears that Ash's regular appearance has not increased or decreased ratings, but kept them consistent. Meanwhile, KIIS FM's Kyle & Jackie O Show finished as the No. 1 rated FM breakfast show in Sydney, with a 10.5 per cent audience share. The survey ran from September 30 to December 8 - shortly after Rusciano departed from the role. At the time, Rusciano announced her resignation on air, telling listeners she would not be returning following the birth of her third child. Steady: The first full survey with Ash, who replaced Em (pictured here) in September, finished with a 4.6 per cent audience share, the same figure as the last survey result 'I want to make it crystal clear that this is entirely my decision and not one I made lightly,' she said. Meanwhile, Hit Network head of content Gemma Fordham said in a statement at the time: 'We are so thrilled for Em and her family that after everything they experienced last year [with her miscarriage] they will have a beautiful baby in their world early next year.' Ash, who rose to fame hosting Channel Eleven Australian's music show The Loop alongside Scott Tweedie, was long the odd favourite to secure the permanent role. As well as her new permanent gig on breakfast radio, Ash will also continue her role hosting Ash London Live weekdays. He's the multi-talented and legendary English comedian who recently took his 'Earl Of Whimsy' tour Down Under. And during his visit, Bill Bailey reflected on the types of jokes Australians love to hear the most - revealing we have a lot in common with British audiences. 'I think that we find similar things funny,' the 53-year-old said while speaking exclusively to Daily Mail Australia. EXCLUSIVE: 'We both have jaded views of authority': Bill Bailey reveals the types of jokes Aussies love to hear and reveals what they have in common with British audiences 'Australian audiences are very similar to British audiences... We both have a slightly sort of jaded view of authority and we also kind of like a bit of the surreal, the absurd and pointing out the absurdities of ordinary life,' he candidly confessed. 'I generally think there's quite a lot of cross over between the British and Australian.' Despite the similarities, the whimsy musician said there isn't much difference between global audiences thanks to the internet and social media. 'We also kind of like a bit of the surreal, the absurd and pointing out the absurdities of ordinary life,' he candidly said of the similarities between Aussie and British audiences while speaking exclusively to Daily Mail Australia. Pictured performing in Stafford, England in 2016 'Generally actually, audiences don't really vary so much these days. I think that's because comedy has become so much more widely available via the internet and so people are much more clued up on the comedy before they come to see it,' he explained. 'I think the old idea that certain places are better for comedy - that's almost faded away a little bit. Global audiences have a similar mindset now.' Nevertheless, Bill believes comedy is a great way of finding out each country's individual quirks. 'I think the old idea that certain places are better for comedy - that's almost faded away a little bit. Global audiences have a similar mindset now,' he added. Pictured in London in 2014 'When you find out what makes people laugh, you can figure out what makes them tick a little bit. It gives you a great insight into countries and cultures and peoples' mindset,' he expressed. Bill discussed the affect social media has on comedy, explaining that we are in a time of 'hypersensitivity' when it comes to viewing, reacting and consuming comedy. 'Virtually anything is commented on in real time. People will pile on, want to be part of some kind of movement - if somebody has said a joke that has offended someone, it's a beacon for everybody to pile on,' he began. 'Virtually anything is commented on in real time': Bill discussed the affect social media has on comedy, explaining that we are in a time of 'hypersensitivity' when it comes to viewing, reacting and consuming comedy. Pictured performing in Southwold, England in 2016 'I hate the term political correctness - it's a misnomer. We have to maybe let go of that, because it sounds a bit like a stern nanny saying ''No! You can't say that!'' he continued. 'And what's correct? By saying there's a correct way of comedy and an incorrect way... comedy has never been correct. That's the whole point, it goes outside the norms.' Bill recalled the importance of revisiting the true meaning behind 'political correctness', to which he explains began by encouraging the act of being polite and respectful to others. 'I hate the term political correctness - it's a misnomer. We have to maybe let go of that, because it sounds a bit like a stern nanny saying ''No! You can't say that!'' he continued 'Calling it political it gives it a baggage it doesn't need - the intentions of political correctness were good, and what it means is being polite and respectful and that's all it meant when it was first coined,' he said. He explained that: 'It meant no, let's not do material that denigrates women. Let's not do material that denigrates people who can't fight back, who are disabled, are in minorities... and unfortunately, it has now become a bit of an albatross in the neck of art. 'It seems like a weighty thing, when it's origins were really good and allowed freedom of expression.' And after concluding a whopping 18-show national stand-up tour in Australia, plus a stop at the Sydney Opera House for the Just For Laughs festival, the globetrotter continues his highly-anticipated tour in the UK. He has also recently released his stand-up show, Limboland, to DVD almost three years after he performed the iconic performance. Limboland recounts hilarious tales including a disastrous family trip to Norway, a heart-rending country and western ballad played on a Bible and a downbeat version of Happy Birthday - all while exploring our expectations of happiness. Recorded in Hammersmith Apollo in West London, Limboland, which released in late November, is also available as a digital download. Bec Judd has been sharing envy-inducing photos of her luxury holiday in Dubai this week. And a quick scroll through recent Instagram posts looks something like an advertisement for Dubai, which has raised questions about who is picking up the bill for the lavish vacation. The Postcards presenter is currently exploring the middle east with her husband of eight years, former AFL star Chris Judd, 35, and their four children, sons, Oscar, six, twins Tom and Darcy, two, and daughter, Billie, four. Scroll down for video Is Bec Judd's lavish holiday a freebie? WAG shares envy-inducing snaps of her luxury trip to Dubai including camel rides and a $4200-a-night hotel And it appears no expense has been spared, with Bec documenting every moment and tagging Visit Dubai - the official tourism board for the holiday hotspot - on every post. 'Dubai is where you'll find us for the next little while. I love this city and it's my 4th time here (3rd for CJ and OJ, 2nd for BJ and 1st time for TJ and DJ),' she wrote in an Instagram post on Saturday. 'Watch over the next week as we take you to some amazing places which are perfect for family fun as well as some of the most insane hotels you've ever seen plus some great date night options for the adults too. 'Check out my Instastories for more. Thanks to @visit.dubai for hosting us all. #visitdubai #mydubai'. Sponsored posts: A quick scroll through Bec's recent Instagram posts looks something like an advertisement for Dubai Seeing the sights: Making the most of their holiday, the family has so far paid a visit to Legoland Dubai and rode camels through the desert Living the good life: It appears no expense has been spared on their lavish vacation, with Bec showing off their luxury trip on Instagram So far, the family has enjoyed stays at the Palazzo Versace Dubai and the world famous Atlantis the Palm. According to Atlantis the Palm's website, family-sized suites at the five-star resort start at $4230 a night. A report by Daily Mail Australia on Saturday revealed the family had flown first class, while the Palazzo Versace charges $3000 a night. They've also paid a visit to Legoland Dubai and rode camels through the desert. Desert fun: Bec has been tagging Visit Dubai - the official tourism board for the holiday hotspot - on every post Back for more: 'Dubai is where you'll find us for the next little while. I love this city and it's my 4th time here,' she wrote on Instagram Life of luxury: 'Watch over the next week as we take you to some amazing places which are perfect for family fun as well as some of the most insane hotels you've ever seen,' she wrote Flying high: A report by Daily Mail Australia on Saturday revealed the family had flown first class to Dubai 'Just magic. You MUST do the @arabianadventures sunset dune dinner safari. You'll never forget it. @visit.dubai #mydubai #visitdubai #arabianadventures,' she captioned a photo of herself walking across the sand in the desert. According to website Inkifi - which offers a calculator for social media influencers to determine the fees of their sponsored posts based on the number of followers they have - Bec can earn over $5200 per sponsored Instagram post. Daily Mail Australia has contacted Bec Judd and Visit Dubai for comment. She's the only child of Olivia Newton-John. And despite her famous mum's squeaky clean image, Chloe Lattanzi has spoken candidly about her own battle with addiction. In a column for Woman's Day on Monday, the 32-year-old revealed her 70-year-old mother pulled her back from the brink. Struggles: Chloe Lattanzi has opened up about her battle with addiction growing up, and how her mum, Olivia Newton-John saved her 'We both struggled - me with addiction, anxiety and anorexia, and Mum with feeling helpless during my darkest hours,' Chloe wrote for the publication. She went on to explain how it was a difficult time for both of them, and revealed they were still coming to terms with it even now. 'I hated that my life was broadcast all over the world. It was horrifying to me,' she continued. Saved: In a column for Woman's Day on Monday, the 32-year-old revealed her 70-year-old mother pulled her back from the brink 'For my mum, it was also a terribly hard time. She felt powerless and didn't know what to do. 'We were just talking about it and she said to me, 'I did everything I could. I sent you to every specialist, every person I thought might be able to help. 'I told her, 'You know Mum, all I really needed was you.'' Hard times: 'We both struggled - me with addiction, anxiety and anorexia, and Mum with feeling helpless during my darkest hours,' Chloe wrote In an interview with The Mail on Sunday back in 2013, Chloe revealed she had been abusing cocaine, alcohol and antidepressants prior to a stint in rehab. 'Fame totally messes you up. I don't blame my mother for my problems, but I would never want to be famous or raise a child of my own around the cult of celebrity. It ruins lives,' she said at the time. 'If there's one thing I've learned, it is that you can't be fragile in this business, or else you end up like Lindsay Lohan.' 'I don't blame my mother for my problems, but I would never want to be famous or raise a child of my own around the cult of celebrity. It ruins lives,' she told The Mail on Sunday Olivia also addressed her daughter's demons during a 2016 interview with 60 Minutes. 'I think it's hard to be the child of a person in the limelight, I really understand that,' she told the program, as reported by Daily Mail Australia. 'There's privilege but there's also other things that come along with that.' Her boyfriend Kyle Sandilands is said to be on the mend after battling an illness in recent months. And on Monday, Imogen Anthony, 27, enjoyed a wild night out without her 47-year-old beau. The self-proclaimed 'loud mouth' partied the night away in a daring green dress during a trip to Byron Bay. Party girl! Imogen Anthony, 27, dances wildly in a daring green dress on a night out in Byron Bay without boyfriend Kyle Sandilands, 47 In the clip, Imogen is seen showcasing her dance moves while clutching a red fan. She completed the skimpy look with knee-high silver boots. It comes after several days of partying as recent videos showed her downing tequila and getting a commemorative tattoo. It appeared Imogen may have needed some energy following the final night out, as she flew back to Sydney on Tuesday evening. Red hot! In the clip, Imogen is seen showcasing her dance moves while clutching a red fan Where's Kyle? The KIIS FM host (left) is said to be on the mend after battling an illness in recent months Imogen's close friend Jay Millionaires filmed the beauty tucking into an in-flight treat, before the Virgin aircraft had even taken off. 'Imogen enjoying the complimentary cheesy chicken nugs in business class,' Jay captioned a video of Imogen. The beauty had clearly embraced Byron Bay's famous bohemian style, teaming her dreadlocks with a long leopard print coat and purple palazzo pants for the flight. Airport style! The beauty had clearly embraced Byron Bay's famous bohemian style as she flew back home to Sydney on Tuesday 'Chicken nugs in business class': Her final moments away were documented by her friend Jay, who filmed Imogen tucking into an in-flight treat In footage shared to Instagram over the long weekend, the scantily-clad model looked very slender as she enjoyed a wild time with friends. Kyle, 47, had joked the trip for 'girls and gays only' on a recent episode of The Kyle & Jackie O Show before breaking for Christmas, explaining his absence. Imogen appeared to be making the most of her holiday, even filming herself getting a new tattoo on Sunday night. The new inking on her arm read: 'Tasty like a rain drop'. New ink! Imogen appeared to be making the most of her holiday, sharing several videos of herself getting a new tattoo on Sunday night Having fun! Kyle Sandilands' younger girlfriend looked very slim during a wild party in Byron Bay this week During one of Imogen's Byron parties, she dressed in a black bikini top and tiny denim shorts, which she paired with a cowboy hat. Parts of the footage were filmed at a tattoo parlour, where Imogen could be seen drinking a shot of tequila. A video shared to Instagram by a friend of Imogen's, Katie Alyce, was captioned 'tequila and tattoos'. When Imogen re-posted the clip to her own account, she added the remark: 'And it was the s**ttest tequila ever'. Julia Roberts wished Brad Pitt a happy 55th birthday on Tuesday. The 51-year-old beauty took to Instagram to share a photo of the two of their from their film The Mexican. 'Happy Birthday to one of the all time GREATS,' the Oscar-winning captioned the photo adding the word 'LOVE.' Their film The Mexican, in which they play bickering lovers, came out in 2001. At the time Brad was wed to Jennifer Aniston. And that's the film that Julia met her husband Danny Moder on. Roberts' Instagram account is relatively new with 3.9m followers. Still looking good: Pitt turned 55 on Tuesday; here he is seen in November in Hollywood This note comes out after she talked about when she first realized she was famous: when a fan pestered her for an autograph while she was in a bathroom stall. The actress had just starred in the 1988 film Mystic Pizza at the time of her bathroom encounter. The Oscar-winner told the story during an appearance on Monday's episode of The Hollywood Reporter's Awards Chatter podcast. Strange encounter: Roberts didn't realize just how famous she was about to become until a fan pestered her for an autograph while she was in a bathroom stall; shown at the Ben Is Back premiere in New York on December 3 Her breakout role: Here Roberts is seen in the 1988 movie Mystic Pizza with Annabeth Gish and Lili Taylor The Ben Is Back star had her fame awakening after returning home to Georgia to visit her mother and younger sister. The three caught a movie and Julia stopped by the bathroom afterward. 'It was after the movie was over and I was in the bathroom and there was a woman in the bathroom who said, "Hey, girl in stall number one, were you in Mystic Pizza?"' she said. The pushy fan proceeded to slip something under the stall and asked the Mystic Pizza star to sign it. ''Uh, not right now,'' Julia said. 'And I thought, wait, this is different.' In 1989, a year after Mystic Pizza's release, she would star in Steel Magnolias, which garnered her an Oscar nomination and cemented her status as Hollywood royalty. It's not just regular fans who have become starstruck around the Notting Hill star. Aquaman star Jason Momoa ran into Julia during a taping of The Late, Late Show With James Corden, which both were appearing on. The actor introduced his mother to the Ocean's 11 actress and gushed about meeting her on Instagram, including that the Momoas 'geeked out a lil.' The holiday season is for spending time with family, and Beth Chapman took a break from her cancer treatment Monday to do just that. The 51-year-old wife of reality star Duane 'Dog' Chapman, 66, posted a photo of the couple out for a night of theater and dinner with their children. 'Family Tradition, Theater with the kids for Christmas .. And Churchills for dinner' she wrote in the caption. Two lovers: Beth Chapman, 51, posted a photo of herself and Dog the Bounty Hunter out for a night of theater and dinner with their children Beth was still recovering after being rushed to the hospital on November 26 when a cancerous growth blocked her throat and air flow. Beth and Dog recently departed Los Angeles to head back to their home in Colorado. The doctors 'told us they didn't want her to leave the hospital, but she was adamant, she just wanted to be home,' said Duane, a.k.a. Dog the Bounty Hunter. He also explained the the cancer had spread from her throat into her lungs. Bad timing: Beth was still recovering after being rushed to the hospital on November 26 when a cancerous growth blocked her throat Beth was originally diagnosed with Stage II throat cancer in 2017. The couple announced she was cancer free two months later, but the cancer returned this year. 'They say the cancer follows the path of least resistance, so it goes downward. Half of her lung was full of water,' Duane told Us Weekly. Against doctors' orders: Beth and Dog recently departed Los Angeles to head back to her home in Colorado; shown here in New York in 2014 Beth has tried to keep busy in the face of her cancer diagnosis. On Friday, the reality celebrity posted a video to Instagram of her surprising her stepson for his birthday. Beth and Dog have been married since 2006, and were together for more than a decade before that. He's making waves on Broadway. And ahead of his debut in the highly-anticipated stage show Anastasia, Cody Simpson cut a dapper figure while on the promotional trail in New York City on Tuesday. Arriving at the AOLBuild Series building, the 21-year-old posed for selfies with passersby and waved at doting fans. What a gent! Cody Simpson looked dapper in a long navy trench coat and striped suit as he promoted his Broadway debut in Anastasia in New York on Tuesday Showing his flair for fashion, Cody battled the cold weather in a long navy trench coat. Underneath he wore pinstripe white-and-blue trousers teamed up with a matching collared shirt. For a casual twist, he slipped on a pair of sneakers. Flair for fashion: For a casual twist, he teamed up the smart ensemble with a pair of sneakers Looking good: Underneath, he wore pinstripe white-and-blue trousers teamed up with a matching collared shirt Keeping accessories to a minimum, Cody also wore a long white neck scarf, a pair of chic sunglasses and a black bracelet. He kept his flaxen-coloured locks neatly groomed and parted in the center. Before entering the building, Cody took some time to pose beside a joyful fan for a quick selfie. Nice guy: Before entering the building, Cody took some time to pose beside this joyful fan for a quick selfie Cody is quickly making himself at home in the Big Apple after landing the star role as Dimitri in the hit musical Anastasia. He took over the role on November 29, replacing Zach Adkins, who had his final performance on November 25. The cast also includes Tony nominee Max von Essen as Gleb and two-time Tony winner Judy Kaye as the Dowager Empress. She has amassed a fortune after launching her beauty empire. Now Kylie Jenner is the fifth Wealthiest American Celebrity of 2018. The 21-year-old's net worth of $900 million sees her tied at fifth place with Jay-Z in a new list compiled by Forbes Magazine. Making her mark! Kylie Jenner is Forbes' fifth Wealthiest American Celebrity of 2018 (pictured in Los Angeles in September 2018) This year marks the first time Kylie has landed on the list, which ranks the wealthiest American celebrities based on fortune they have amassed off their fame. The list did not take into account stars whose wealth made their famous. Kylie Cosmetics was launched two years ago, and has already shifted over $630 million in makeup products, according to Forbes. The line is so popular new products typically sell-out within minutes of their release. It's a tie! Kylie ties for the fifth place with Jay-Z, as both stars have been valued at $900 million (Jay-Z pictured June 2018 in Glasgow) She means business! Kylie owns 100% of the company, and advertises heavily on her various social media platforms (pictured November 2015 in Los Angeles) Kylie owns 100% of the company, and advertises heavily on her various social media platforms. 'Social media is an amazing platform,' she previously told Forbes. 'I have such easy access to my fans and my customers.' In just two years since launching her business, Kylie looks on track to unseat Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as the youngest-ever self made billionaire. Fan favorite: Kylie owns 100% of the company, and advertises heavily on her various social media platforms Over the summer she became the face of Forbes' August cover which was headlined 'America's Women Billionaires.' Kylie Cosmetics started off selling just lip kits, but it has since expanded to include concealer, eye shadow, and blush products. In May, sister Kim Kardashian interviewed Kylie about why her beauty business has been so successful. Dressed for success: In just two years since launching her business, Kylie looks on track to unseat Mark Zuckerberg as the youngest-ever self made billionaire She told ES magazine: 'Its the most authentic thing Ive done in my career, and it really relates to me, and I feel like people can tell that Im super passionate about it. 'It came from an insecurity and I turned it into something. I was insecure about my lips, and lipstick is what helped me feel confident. 'And I feel like people could see that its authentic to me, and it was organic, and it just worked!' Success! Over the summer she became the face of Forbes' August cover which was headlined 'America's Women Billionaires' Kylie is in great company on this year's Forbes list. The number one spot on the list this year went to George Lucas, whose net worth was listed at $5.4 billion. The second place spot goes to Steven Spielberg, who is valued at $3.7 billion, while Oprah Winfrey landed in third with $2.8 billion. Michael Jordan's net worth of $1.7 billion placed him in fourth place, David Copperfield's $875 million landed him in seventh, Diddy's $825 million saw him take the eighth spot. Tiger Woods and James Patterson tied for the ninth spot with a net worth of $800 million. Top spots! George Lucas landed in first place, while Steven Spielberg was placed in the second spot Being in a blended family can be difficult, and downright uncomfortable, for everyone involved. But it appears Kourtney Kardashian, 39, and Scott Disick, 35, have come to terms with their new family arrangement, especially when it comes to his relationship with Sofia Richie, 20. 'At this point, Kourtney is so over any drama between Scott and Sofia and her,' a source told Us Weekly. 'She just wants to bury the hatchet and move on with her life. Its best for her, their family and Sofia, too.' Making it work: Kourtney Kardashian is over any drama with Scott Disick and Sofia Richie, and in a 'much better place' with their family arrangement The source added: 'All the drama is water under the bridge and they are all collectively in a much better space.' 'Scott and Sofia are obviously not breaking up any time soon and are very much in love and Kourtney has accepted that.' Kourtney has made more of a conscious effort to get to know Sofia better 'to make sure they are all on the same page' when it comes to her three kids. Keeping things in perspective: 'All the drama is water under the bridge' for the sake of Scott and Kourtney's three kids In fact, the trio have even been seen out in public together, several times, over the last couple of months seemingly getting along with each other. 'Sofia and Kourtney will never be best friends, but Sofia is happy that she has proved to Kourtney that she is great with her kids,' another source told People. 'Sofia is hoping that her relationship with Scott lasts.' All in the family: The former couple split more than three years ago and have been co-parenting Mason, nine, Penelope, six, and Reign, four, ever since The former couple split more than three years ago and have been co-parenting Mason, nine, Penelope, six, and Reign, four, ever since. Scott and Sofia began dating in September 2017. The couple had a brief separation during at one point time but their relationship appears to be solid since their reunion. Over the time span Kourtney has been romantically linked to Luka Sabbat, 21, and Younes Bendjima, 25. She recently stunned fans with a shock makeover at the Love Island Christmas reunion. But, on Tuesday night, Megan Barton-Hanson ditched the extreme platinum extensions and returned to her usual Marilyn Monroe-inspired glamour for the Off Limits Christmas Party at Ritorno Italian Brasserie and Cocktail Bar in London. The blonde beauty, 24, looked sensational with her voluminous blonde curls resting on her shoulders as she arrived in a cleavage-baring pencil dress. Glam: On Tuesday night, Megan Barton-Hanson, 24, returned to her usual Marilyn Monroe-inspired glamour for the Off Limits Christmas Party at Ritorno in London Megan slipped her sensational frame into the maroon bodycon frock, which featured a bold cut-out section at the front to reveal her surgically enhanced chest. The glamour model added height to her toned pins with strappy black stiletto heels and slung the long chain of a simple black bag over her shoulder. Keeping the December chill at bay, Megan opted to wrap up in a long-line furry animal print coat as she made her way to the venue. The reality beauty finished off her look with a flawless make-up application, complete with dusty pink eye shadow. Wow! The blonde beauty looked sensational with her voluminous blonde curls resting on her shoulders as she arrived in a cleavage-baring pencil dress Bold: Megan slipped her sensational frame into the maroon bodycon frock, which featured a bold cut-out section at the front to reveal her surgically enhanced chest Cosy: Keeping the December chill at bay, Megan opted to wrap up in a long-line furry animal print coat as she made her way to the venue Simple: The glamour model added height to her toned pins with strappy black stiletto heels and slung the long chain of a simple black bag over her shoulder The talent management company represents a host of reality stars, including many Love Islanders, who came out in force to celebrate the festive season on Tuesday night. Kendall Rae Knight put on a sleek display in a figure-hugging mini dress in a luxurious shade of emerald. The brunette beauty displayed her tanned legs as she sashayed towards the London hotspot in a pair of silver-barely there stilettos. Stunning: The reality beauty finished off her look with a flawless make-up application, complete with dusty pink eye shadow Sensational: Megan flaunted her famous curves in the skin-tight frock Winner winner: Jack Fincham gave a thumbs up as he arrived at the Christmas party The reality star - who has recently been enjoying a romance with Eyal Booker - oozed elegance with her long locks styled sleek and straight. Her flawless visage was enhanced with a bronzed glow and glamorous false eyelashes, and Kendall boasted a wide smile as she arrived for the star-studded dinner. She finished off her look with a white YSL handbag and a smattering of silver jewellery. Easy does it: The Love Island winner donned light grey jeans and a black shirt for the outing Dapper: Sam Bird strolled to the venue in a stylish ensemble Check mate: Sam jazzed up his plain black jeans and top ensemble with a smart checked coat Here he is: Former Love Islander Chris Hughes also showed up for the festive bash Stunning: Kendall Rae Knight put on a sleek display in a figure-hugging mini dress in a luxurious shade of emerald Halfway through the Christmas edition of Love Island on Monday night, Kendall Rae Knight revealed to Laura Anderson that she and Eyal Booker enjoyed a moment of passion in a nightclub a few weeks ago. So after Eyal - who, like Kendall, was unsuccessful in finding romance in the villa last summer - rocked up to the mansion they were all reuniting in, the scene was set for their flirtations to develop. The first night in the luxury property culminated in the pair heading to the indoor swimming pool for a dip and a kiss. Happy lady: The brunette beauty displayed her tanned legs as she sashayed towards the London hotspot in a pair of silver-barely there stilettos She had just eight days to learn the lead role of Roxie Hart in the West End production of Chicago. But after admitting to nerves following her stage debut last week, Caroline Flack looked on cloud nine as she left her latest performance on Tuesday night. The Love Island host greeted fans and photographers waiting at the Phoenix Theatre's stage door with a huge smile. Treading the boards: Caroline Flack looked on cloud nine as she left her latest performance of Chicago at London's Phoenix Theatre on Tuesday night Caroline, 39, swapped her glam stage costume for a chic low key ensemble for her journey home. She teamed a Gucci t-shirt with a black denim mini skirt, keeping warm in a black winter coat and furry-lined boots. She carried a large leopard print bag while still sporting her on stage makeup. What a night! The Love Island host greeted fans and photographers waiting at the Phoenix Theatre's stage door with a huge smile Beaming: Caroline, 39, swapped her glam stage costume for a chic low key ensemble for her journey home but was still sporting her stage makeup Caroline had some celeb pals cheering her on in the audience for Tuesday's performance. Pixie Lott and her pal Jack Guinness were spotted leaving the theatre, while I'm A Celeb star Vicky Pattison also enjoyed a festive night out with pals at the show. The TV star made her West End debut last week at the Phoenix Theatre in London, just two weeks after announcing she had taken on the lead role of Roxie Hart, replacing Alexandra Burke in the role. 'I've just had my one rehearsal with the band. The only rehearsal I get. I've had eight days to learn the show, one dress run and I go on tonight,' she told fans on social media on the night of her debut. Chic: She teamed a Gucci t-shirt with a black denim mini skirt, keeping warm in a black coat Quick turnaround: The TV star made her West End debut last week at the Phoenix Theatre in London, just two weeks after announcing she had taken on the lead role of Roxie Hart Star: 'I've just had my one rehearsal with the band. The only rehearsal I get. I've had eight days to learn the show, one dress run and I go on tonight,' she told fans on the night of her debut The multi-talented star is performing alongside American YouTube star Todrick Hall until the musical's close on January 5. Caroline admitted her gruelling schedule lately has left her in the 'fittest condition of her life'. Taking to Instagram stories on Wednesday night, the Love Island host, shared a snap of her toned abs, which she credited to her rigorous dancing schedule for living well. She wrote: 'I'm the oldest I've ever been (go figure) but the fittest I've felt - dancing and healthy living is the key - hard at Xmas - but willpower at an all time high.' Pals: Caroline had some celeb pals cheering her on in the audience for Tuesday's performance. Pixie Lott and her pal Jack Guinness were spotted leaving the theatre Julie Bowen shared an amusing anecdote about the time she overdid it with marijuana. The 48-year-old Baltimore native, appearing on Busy Tonight Monday, chatted with host Busy Philipps about the unusual combination of drugs, alcohol and exercise on the E! show. Philipps said she used to smoke marijuana before going on runs, adding, 'Guys, guess what? You can run for a really long time.' Oops! Julie Bowen shared an amusing anecdote about the time she overdid it with marijuana, leading her to crawl on the floor in a daze The Modern Family actress replied, 'Not if you're super f***ing paranoid and you're like, "Oh my God."' Julie, who's also been seen on Ed, Boston Legal and Lost, said that a doctor recommended she use marijuana instead of Ambien for a recurring sleeping problem. Bowen recalled, 'I was like, "I want an Ambien," and she was like, "That's addictive, you need pot." And I was like, "What med school did you go to?"' Bowen said she eventually obtained a supply of edible marijuana items that came with instructions to consume half of the contents of the bag. She cut that amount in half and ate only a quarter of the bag, but it didn't seem to diminish the effects. Recommended: Julie, who's also been seen on Ed, Boston Legal and Lost, said that a doctor recommended she use marijuana instead of Ambien for a recurring sleeping problem Shocked: Philipps explained to her pal, 'Julie, you got way too high!' 'Cut to, I was still married and living at my house at the time, me going down the hall like this,' Bowen said gesturing to crawling and looking for her ex-husband Scott Phillips. 'Five to eight hours later, I was like crying!' said Bowen, to which Philipps explained, 'Julie, you got way too high!' Bowen shot back, 'My doctor told me to!' Elsewhere in the appearance, Bowen revealed she has 'very positive feelings' about whether there will be a season 11 on Modern Family. Looking up: During her appearance on Busy Tonight, Julie Bowen revealed she has 'very positive feelings' about whether or not there will be a season 11 Interesting: The 48-year-old actress was asked by Busy if there will be another season, to which she said: 'I think that there is, I've been told that there is, you know;' pictured with Nolan Gould, Ariel Winter, Ty Burrell and Sarah Hyland Bowen was asked by Busy if there will be another season, to which she said: 'I think that there is, I've been told that there is, you know.' Julie continued: 'The ink is not dry but I have very positive feelings about it.' Busy said: 'OK good. If you're positive, I'm positive.' To which Julie explained: 'And I'm never positive. So if I'm feeling sort of positive...' The actress added: 'Yeah. I don't gleefully go for optimism, I'm like "hmm, maybe," but I think this is pretty good.' Focused: Julie said 'the ink is not dry but I have very positive feelings about it' According to Deadline, Modern Family is close to getting an 11th season. The outlet reports that its stars Sofia Vergara, Ty Burrell, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Julie, Eric Stonestreet and Ed O'Neill are 'close' to securing deals with 20th Century Fox TV. Deadline revealed that while the financial side of it has been reached with the stars there are some issues that still need to be worked out. Giving clues: Julie continued: 'The ink is not dry but I have very positive feelings about it' Real talk: Busy said: 'OK good. If you're positive, I'm positive' The outlet noted there will be 18 episodes if the deals are finalized for season 11. Modern Family show writers Steve Levitan and Christopher Lloyd have previously said they are open to another season after 10 airs. The show first aired on September 23, 2009 on ABC network; Julie stars as Claire Dunphy alongside Ty as Phil Dunphy, Ed as Jay Pritchett, Sofia as Gloria Pritchett, Sarah Hyland as Haley Dunphy, Ariel Winter as Alex Dunphy, Eric Stonestreet as Cameron Tucker and Nolan Gould as Luke Dunphy. They are the films that families happily gather round to watch every Christmas. So perhaps that is why the nations favourite festive movies tend to be those that have stood the test of time in some cases for generations. Top of the list is a film as full of Christmas spirit now as it was when released more than 70 years ago. The uplifting, sentimental Its A Wonderful Life, made in 1946, beat modern box-office smashes such as Love Actually to be named our favourite. The uplifting, sentimental Its A Wonderful Life, made in 1946, beat modern box-office smashes such as Love Actually to be named our favourite Starring James Stewart and Donna Reed, it tells the story of bank manager George Bailey. Facing ruin, Bailey sets out to kill himself on Christmas Eve, but changes his mind when a guardian angel helps him realise he has made a difference in the world. The film, directed by Frank Capra, was nominated for six Oscars. Giving further proof that British viewers love the classics as much as modern movies, two films from the 1950s White Christmas, starring Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye, and Scrooge, the 1951 adaptation of Dickens A Christmas Carol starring Alastair Sim were also in the top ten in a RadioTimes.com poll of 7,000 readers. Love Actually is at number four in the list, behind Elf and The Muppet Christmas Carol. Scrooge, the 1951 adaptation of Dickens A Christmas Carol starring Alastair Sim was also in the top ten in a RadioTimes.com poll of 7,000 readers Love Actually (pictured) is at number four in the list, behind Elf and The Muppet Christmas Carol The Richard Curtis romcom features ten separate Christmas-themed stories, including Bill Nighy as veteran rocker Billy Mack, whose festive version of The Troggs Love Is All Around becomes a surprise chart-topper. US comedy Home Alone, with Macaulay Culkin as an eight-year-old defending his house against burglars when his family leave for Paris without him, is fifth in the list. Perhaps surprisingly, action film Die Hard is sixth. There has been debate over whether the 1988 Bruce Willis blockbuster, which is set on Christmas Eve, can be classified as a festive film. Elf (pictured) and The Muppet Christmas Carol are other festive films on the list US comedy Home Alone, with Macaulay Culkin as an eight-year-old defending his house against burglars when his family leave for Paris without him, is fifth in the list The top ten is completed by National Lampoons Christmas Vacation, starring Chevy Chase, in seventh place and computer animation The Polar Express in eighth. RadioTimes.com editor Tim Glanfield said: If theres one thing thats certain to bring the whole family together, its a good Christmas film. Its A Wonderful Life, sitting effortlessly alongside more modern classics like Elf and The Muppets, proves just that. It turns out theres no sell-by date on Christmas spirit and a film that encapsulates it will stay with us for generations. Today host Karl Stefanovic was ordered by Nine's CEO Hugh Marks to 'lift his game' in September after his turbulent personal life was blamed for the show's dwindling ratings. And after news of his brother Peter's departure from the network this week, the 44-year-old's future with the company looks even more uncertain. As he prepares to return from his honeymoon in the coming weeks, a PR expert has claimed the constant headlines surrounding his wedding may come back to haunt him. EXCLUSIVE: Honeymoon's over! Karl Stefanovic and Jasmine Yarbrough's lavish Mexican wedding 'could impact his future at Channel Nine'. Pictured: Karl on the Today show Karl married 34-year-old shoe designer Jasmine Yarbrough - his second wife - in Los Cabos, Mexico on Saturday, December 8. The wedding was a lavish, four-day affair with a rumoured $500,000 price tag. Nicole Reaney of InsideOut PR told Daily Mail Australia on Wednesday that the scale and extravagance of the ceremony was possibly a 'bad look' for the embattled star. 'With how big the wedding was, it has attracted some media attention towards Karl, which may not have worked for him,' she said. 'The attention didn't work for him': Karl married Jasmine in Los Cabos, Mexico on Saturday, December 8. The wedding was a lavish, four-day affair with a rumoured $500,000 price tag Nicole did observe, however, that Channel Nine publicly supported the wedding by airing footage of the ceremony on the Today show. But this gesture of support is by no means a guarantee that his job is safe. She added: 'It appears changes are afoot with Today - and not solely directed at Karl - with a producer [Mark Calvert] as well as Peter leaving. Like any organisation, no job is truly secure.' Did it backfire? Nicole Reaney of InsideOut PR told Daily Mail Australia on Wednesday that the scale and extravagance of the ceremony was possibly a 'bad look' for the embattled star. Pictured: Karl and his Today co-anchor Georgie Gardner On the bright side, Nicole claimed 'there has been a little shift back towards the "old" Karl' in recent months', following CEO Hugh Marks' 'warning shot' in September. But with ratings nosediving in recent years, it remains to be seen if Karl will ever return to the level of popularity he once enjoyed in the eyes of the Australian public. Karl's peak was arguably in 2011, when he was awarded the Gold Logie for Most Popular Personality at that year's Logie Awards. Golden boy: With Today's ratings nosediving in recent years, it remains to be seen if Karl will ever return to the level of popularity he once enjoyed in the eyes of the Australian public. Pictured at the 2011 Logie Awards in Melbourne However, Nicole insisted that 'any decision to axe Karl won't be taken lightly' by Nine as he is a mainstay of the network and still has some remaining support. 'It all comes down to the ratings, that's what networks are after,' she said. Rumours have persisted for months that the embattled network star may be on his way out due to negative headlines surrounding his personal life. Fall from grace: Another blow to Karl's personal brand occurred in March, when he and his brother Peter (left) were involved in the Ubergate scandal. Pictured in May 2011 in Melbourne Another blow to Karl's personal brand occurred in March, when he and his brother Peter were involved in the Ubergate scandal. Karl himself has also acknowledged the breakdown of his marriage to Cassandra Thorburn and subsequent relationship with a younger woman - shoe designer Jasmine Yarbrough - had a negative impact on his public image. 'He's had a lot of his personal life in the media over this past year, but now with the wedding over one can assume that this should settle now,' Nicole said. Downfall: Today's ratings recently plunged to a 12-year low and Karl himself has acknowledged the breakdown of his marriage to Cassandra Thorburn (left) and subsequent relationship with a younger woman has damaged his public image. Pictured in 2008 New relationship: Karl's romance with Jasmine Yarbrough (right) has been a major turn-off for female viewers. The couple are pictured at the Logie Awards earlier this year According to a statement released on Tuesday by Channel Nine, the official reason for Peter Stefanovic's departure was that he 'decided to explore new opportunities'. However, it was later claimed by former Nine executive Rob McKnight that the Weekend Today host was dropped as part of a 'cost-cutting' strategy. Peter was employed by the network for 15 years, with his older brother Karl about to head into his nineteenth year with the company. Despite Nine backing Karl for 2019, speculation about his future has continued to grow over the past fortnight, with multiple reports claiming he is facing the chop. Daily Mail Australia has contacted Channel Nine for comment. Emily Ratajkowski put her long legs on display on Instagram on Tuesday while showing off a new pair of Adidas running shoes. The 27-year-old model posted several images of herself in black Adidas short tights wearing a pair of black and white sneakers with pink trim. She wrote in the caption for her nearly 21 million followers: 'heaven by @adidasrunning #ULTRABOOST #createdwithadidas'. Running shoes: Emily Ratajkowski took to Instagram on Tuesday and put her long legs on display while showing off a pair of Adidas running shoes Emily also wore a long-sleeved brown crop top and had her long brown hair down around her shoulders. The brown-eyed beauty shared snaps of herself kneeling as she showed off the running shoes. She also posted a snap with her arms raised showcasing her flat abs. Emily graces the cover of the January 2019 edition of Vogue Australia. Top model: The 27-year-old model also showcased her flat abs in another snap on Instagram Brown-eyed beauty: The brown-eyed beauty wore Adidas short tights and a brown crop top In an interview published last week the outspoken model argued that being sexy and a feminist were not mutually exclusive. 'The only argument that I think is sort of interesting is the conversation that somehow I'm playing into a patriarchal society by looking the way I look and capitalising on my sexiness,' she told the publication. 'But I don't really care if me wearing a crop top is somehow playing into some patriarchy, because it makes me feel good about myself, and I shouldn't be limited on that. Cover girl: Emily graces the January cover of Vogue Australia and spoke about her brand of feminism in an interview with the publication 'Making rules as to what a feminist should look like or wear is insane to me,' Emily added. Emily shot to fame in 2013 after appearing topless in the music video for the hit Robin Thicke song Blurred Lines. She married film producer Sebastian Bear-McClard, 37, in a secret courthouse ceremony in February. Roxy Jacenko is no stranger to weathering the storm of publicity disasters. And the 38-year-old has offered some rather blunt advice to her friend Karl Stefanovic and his ex-wife Cassandra Thorburn in the wake of their messy divorce. Speaking to Daily Mail Australia on Tuesday, while stepping out in Sydney with her husband Oliver Curtis, Roxy described the whole saga as a 'trainwreck'. 'Is he the best? I don't think so': Roxy Jacenko (pictured) has weighed in on Karl Stefanovic's personal dramas, offering some blunt advice to his ex-wife Cassandra Thorburn 'To be honest, it's a trainwreck,' she said. 'But you know what? You've got to wish them well. Karl's moved on, he looks happy. And I guess [Cassandra] has to as well,' she said, referencing the Today host's recent marriage to Jasmine Yarbrough. Roxy then turned her attention to Cassandra, who reportedly went on a tirade against her ex-husband at Sydney Airport the day after he got married in Mexico. Word from the wise! Speaking to Daily Mail Australia during an outing in Sydney's CBD with husband Oliver Curtis (right) on Tuesday, Roxy described the whole saga as a 'trainwreck' Listen up, Cass! Roxy's advice to Karl's ex-wife Cassandra Thorburn (right) was, 'Stop talking!' 'Stop talking!' Roxy said, offering some of her trademark no-nonsense advice, before adding: 'I've learned the less said the better'. Despite this, the publicist acknowledged that Cassandra was justified in feeling upset about the divorce, given that she made career sacrifices during her 21-year marriage to Karl. 'She comes from a background of TV producing, she was there from the beginning for Karl, she sort of watched him come through the ranks to become very successful,' she said. She knows what she's talking about! Roxy is no stranger to PR disasters, having been caught cheating on her husband while he was in prison for insider trading Tough job: The publicist did acknowledge, however, that Cassandra was justified in feeling upset about the divorce, given she made career sacrifices during her 21-year marriage to Karl 'And she took the role of being the mum at home. So I suppose [she can say] she put her career on hold. So she's right to be upset. I mean, look, you would be. It's heartbreaking.' Roxy then weighed in on recent reports that Karl had told Cassandra following their split he was the 'best journalist in Australia, possibly the world'. 'Yeah, well that's f**king big-noting himself,' she laughed. 'Yeah well that's f**king big-noting himself': Roxy laughed at reports that Karl had described himself as the 'best journalist in Australia, possibly the world' 'It's hard!' Roxy also took the opportunity to reflect upon Karl and Cassandra's three children - Jackson, 19, Ava, 13, and River, 12 - and how the divorce had affected them 'There's a lot of great journalists out there. Is he the best? I don't think he's the best, but he's good at what he does,' she added. Roxy also took the opportunity to reflect upon Karl and Cassandra's three children - Jackson, 19, Ava, 13, and River, 12 - and how the divorce had affected them. 'I come from a family where I've got divorced parents and I was like 35 when they divorced and still it was very upsetting. So I think age is not a factor,' she said. 'I think it's something that people don't realise': Roxy explained that divorce can difficult for children of all ages Twinning! The mother-of-two put on an affectionate display with her husband as they strolled towards a trendy restaurant in matching outfits 'I think it's something that people don't realise. They think, 'Oh the kids are older, they will cope with it.' It's hard! I was 35 and I was broken-hearted,' she added. Karl separated from Cassandra in mid-2016 after 21 years of marriage. A few months later, the TV star started dating glamorous shoe designer Jasmine Yarbrough, who is nine years his junior. Split! Karl separated from Cassandra in mid-2016 after 21 years of marriage. Pictured in 2008 The couple wed in Mexico last weekend, which prompted Cassandra to launch into a furious 'tirade' against her ex-husband at Sydney Airport the day after the wedding. 'He's thrown three weddings for goodness sake. Who needs three weddings in a year? Give us a break,' Cassandra raged. 'Three weddings and a funeral. We had a funeral and it was my dad's. 'I've done a lot of reading about narcissism... Everything he says is about this fake person who lives in this fake castle, it's not real.' New flame: A few months after splitting with Cassandra, Karl started dating glamorous shoe designer Jasmine Yarbrough (right), who is nine years his junior. Pictured at the Logie Awards After months of speculation, Karl was finally dumped from the Today show on Wednesday. Channel Nine confirmed in a statement that he was leaving the breakfast program after almost 14 years in the role. Darren Wick, Director of News and Current Affairs, said: 'Nine and Karl Stefanovic have agreed it is time for him to step off the Today show. Karl remains on contract with the network and will continue to host This Time Next Year, which records in February. 'For over 14 years Karl has been at the centre of the Today show, bringing his unique personality and perspective to the days news and current affairs. 'An announcement on the new line up and format of the Today Show will be made in the coming weeks.' Karl added: 'For the last 14 years I've co-hosted the best show on television. I can't thank Nine enough for the opportunity. I never in my wildest dreams thought I would be good enough to host this grand show for so long. 'Thanks to our viewers mostly, you are what matters most. It's been a tough time. Thanks for hanging in there. I look forward to seeing you in another capacity at this great Network soon.' Advertisement She is a Made In Chelsea star who is used to the finer things in life. And Louise Thompson has given an inside glimpse of her stunning London home, complete with free-standing bath, opulent decor and furniture for her new puppy Koji. The reality starlet, 28, showcased her envy-inducing bathroom, complete with free-standing bathtub, marble surrounds and chrome furnishings when she shared an Instagram snap of her enjoying a relaxing bath. Lavish: Louise Thompson has given an inside glimpse of her stunning London home, complete with free-standing bath, opulent decor and furniture for her new puppy Koji Cosy: The master bedroom features a super king bed and lavish decor The master bedroom features a super king bed with silver sheets where the star enjoys kicking back with a healthy meal. Silver furnishings and cream walls add to the chic feel of the cosy room. Even new Cavalier King Charles spaniel puppy Koji is treated to a taste of the high life, bedding down in a personalised dog bed in the elegant living room. The front room includes a terracotta chaise longue, tan curtains and edgy artwork, making for a relaxed atmosphere. Cutie: Even new Cavalier King Charles spaniel puppy Koji is treated to a taste of the high life, bedding down in a personalised dog bed in the elegant living room Kicking back: A gorgeous dining room features hardwood floors, a six seater dining table and ornate mirrors, providing an elegant but informal space A gorgeous dining room features hardwood floors, a six seater dining table and ornate mirrors, providing an elegant but informal space. Inside the front door is a sweeping staircase and wooden floors, leading to the chic kitchen decorated with cream cabinets and chrome accessories. The star is engaged to personal trainer Ryan Libbey, 28. Ryan popped the question on his birthday, August 4, while the couple were enjoying a romantic holiday in Los Angeles, and Louise said she 'cried for three days' after the happy surprise. At the time, Louise said: 'I'm still shell-shocked. I've been crying solidly for three days. Stylish: Cream cabinets and leather chairs were seen in the drawing room Elegance: The star relaxes in her comfortable living decorated with patterned chairs 'Its the most exciting thing thats ever happened to me in my entire life. 'Ryan and I have known that we want to spend the rest of our lives together for quite a long time. I love him more and more every day, which sounds so cliched, but its the truth.' The fitness fanatics went public with their romance in the summer of 2016 after meeting when Louise employed Ryan as her personal trainer. Louise found herself the target of widespread criticism after she went public with Ryan just weeks after she split from ex-boyfriend, New York-based denim entrepreneur Alik, 29, who also previously appeared on Made In Chelsea. Come on in: Inside the front door is a sweeping staircase and wooden floors The pair originally met in spring 2014 when they filmed the Made In Chelsea spin-off series in New York City, with Alik then following Louise to London. The relationship hit the rocks when Alik had to return to the US to work for his family business. Making a thinly-veiled dig at his ex on a recent episode of Celebs Go Dating, the US star said: 'I almost married the wrong shoe for God's sake!' Prior to her romances with Ryan and Alik, Louise also dated Made In Chelsea co-stars Jamie Laing, 29, Spencer Matthews, 30, and Andy Jordan, 28. He was arrested a week ago on suspicion of burglarizing his neighbor's apartment. But on Tuesday, it was revealed that actor Josh Henderson will not face any charges because he is the victim of mistaken identity. Henderson, 37, who starred in TNT's Dallas reboot and E!'s The Arrangement, had an alibi for the time of the crime, TMZ reported. In the clear: Josh Henderson, shown in June in Hollywood, was cleared on Tuesday in a case of mistaken identity after being arrested last week on burglary charges He was at home in his own apartment from late afternoon on December 11 and never left throughout the entire evening as proven by surveillance camera footage of his front door. As a result of the video footage, law enforcement cleared the actor of being one of three burglars caught on security cameras. The actor released a statement to People after being cleared of charges. 'This has been an rough week for me. False accusations should never happen to anyone. Ever,' the statement read. Alibi: The actor, who played John Ross on TNT's Dallas reboot (pictured second from left), was in his own home at the time of the burglary and has surveillance camera footage to prove it 'I want to thank my friends and family for supporting me through this. I'm glad the truth is out and I can put this behind me,' it added. The Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office also told people that the 'case was declined due to insufficient evidence'. Last Wednesday, sources close to Henderson had told TMZ he had absolutely nothing to do with the robbery and was brought in 'because one of the neighbors, who was hit, said he recognized Josh's jaw line.' Henderson's neighbors had returned home from a trip to find $7,000 worth of jewelry missing and called the police. After reviewing their own surveillance footage of the crime, the neighbor claimed the actor and two others had stolen their valuables, according to TMZ. Series star: : Henderson, who appeared on ABC's Desperate Housewives, most recently starred on E!'s The Arrangement, which was cancelled in May after its second season Their video shows three men dressed in hats or hoodies climbing over a balcony and then performing the robbery. Officers who responded to the scene watched the surveillance video with the alleged victim who identified Henderson. According to TMZ's source, however, the perpetrators' faces were partially obscured by their outfits, and 'cops could not make their own determination it was Josh in the video.' Nonetheless, they decided to arrest Henderson at that time because the neighbor allegedly claimed to be scared of Henderson. The Tragedy of King Richard the Second (The Almeida Theatre, London) Rating: Shakespeare's Richard II has been shrunk so that it fits inside a grey, metallic prison cell and is completed whoosh in 100 minutes. The Almeida Theatres take on the play starts with the speech Richard normally gives in Act 5, Scene 5, about how he has been unkinged by Bolingbroke. The whole tale is thus in flashback, this broken, wretched Richard reviewing his mistakes as though in a nightmare. Simon Russell Beale, yes, is far too old for a Richard. And yet, as this fallen king bleakly ponders his errors, the casting makes sense. Few do quiet, eloquent despair as well as Mr Russell Beale. The Tragedy of King Richard the Second at The Almeida Theatre gets four stars from Quentin Letts By this point the king has been drenched by pails of water and blood, and soiled, literally, by buckets of earth. The floor of the riveted steel box, in which just eight actors in drab rehearsal clothes have performed the various roles, has been made sticky with destruction. Welcome to an England torn by political turmoil. Well, well. So conceptualised is Joe Hill-Gibbons direction that it feels almost operatic, the text pared back to its best-known arias: John of Gaunts paean to this England, Richard urging his friends to sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings, and the family melodramas of the Duke of York trying to turn in his son for treason. Simon Russell Beale plays the wretched King with a quiet, eloquent despair Quite a lot of the usual force of the play is lost. We do not have a sense of Richard as a cocksure youth (even John of Gaunt looks younger than Mr Russell Beale). Any pathos in Gaunts demise is blown aside by the onward narrative rush. The slow roast of misfortune has become a microwave oven. Yet elsewhere we gain: a clever sense of the gawping of political onlookers as courtiers tiptoe round the edge of the set, striking tableaux of eavesdropping gossip; the wall-battering pressure of events; the confusion around state affairs. It acquires the artistry almost of choreography. Leo Bills Bolingbroke is a weak-chinned usurper, more shoplifter than martial winner. John Mackays York keeps spanking Bolingbrokes bottom when he breaks the order of his banishment. Uncertain audience laughter last night spoilt moments for instance when the king soliloquises on death when a more traditionally-paced production would have prepared them for a contemplative moment. Newcomers to Richard II may be confused. But those familiar with the play should be intrigued. Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi took to social media on Tuesday to celebrate the comedienne's return to stand-up comedy on Netflix. Portia, 45, shared an adorable picture on Instagram of herself smiling with a grinning Ellen, 60, right behind her next to a Christmas tree. The Arrested Development star wrote in the caption for her 1.1 million followers: 'Getting ready for our viewing party for my wife's brilliant Netflix special Relatable!!! Check it out!! #relatable #netflixstandup'. Comedy special: Portia de Rossi took to Instagram on Tuesday and shared a snap of herself with wife Ellen DeGeneres ahead of a viewing party for the comedienne's new Netflix special Ellen a bit later posted an image on Instagram of skywriting high above the Pacific Ocean that read: 'Portia, What's our Netflix password? - Ellen'. The caption for the Instagram posting read : 'Someone didn't take her phone with her to the grocery store. Ellen's new comedy special Relatable premiered on Tuesday on Netflix. It was her first comedy special in 15 years and revolved around the theme of her still being relatable to audiences after achieving fame and success. Going strong: The 45-year-old actress and 60-year-old Ellen, shown in June in Los Angeles, were hosting a viewing part for the Netflix special Ellen DeGeneres: Relatable Ellen joked about the start of her career and the pain of losing her ABC sitcom after coming out as gay. 'I lost my sitcom when I came out and it's not like nobody warned me,' she said 'I mean, everybody warned me. My publicist, my agent, my manager. Anyone making money off of me said, ''Don't do it''.' Sky writing: Ellen also took to Instagram and shared an image of skywriting asking Portia for their Netflix password 'But, you know, my worst fears came true,' she said. 'And that's the reason that people stay closeted. The same people who loved me overnight just hated me because they knew I was gay. Everything changed. And, you know, I went through a depression and people made fun of me and people were writing articles about me, dissecting the whole process and why I did that and that I shouldn't have done it,' she said. Ellen concluded: 'It would help if more people came out'. Out now: The comedienne also took to Instagram to share snaps of herself with pets and wrote in the caption: 'I can't believe you finally get to see my comedy special. Its been a labor of love, and I hope you like it' Long time: Ellen performed her first comedy special in 15 years The Relatable special was performed at the Benaroya Hall in Seattle on August 22 and 23. Ellen has been hosting her daytime talk show The Ellen DeGeneres Show since its debut in September 2003. Portia and Ellen have been in a relationship since 2004 and were married in August 2008 at their home in Beverly Hills, California. Alexandra Henkel-LaPaglia paid her husband, Hollywood actor Anthony LaPaglia, a visit on the set of his latest movie on Wednesday. Ever the doting wife, the 29-year-old shared a sweet selfie of herself cosying up to the 59-year-old actor. 'My man is such a gangster! #setlife #pearlmovie #work,' she wrote on Instagram. Supportive: Alexandra Henkel-LaPaglia paid her husband Anthony LaPaglia a visit on the set of his latest movie on Wednesday A second photo taken by Alexandra showed Anthony walking to the set accompanied by crew members. The couple were married in Hawaii in April of this year, amid controversy surrounding the sizeable age gap between them. '28.4.2018. The day I married the love of my life,' Alexandra wrote on Instagram at the time. Clearly aware of the contention surrounding their relationship, Alexandra singled out the haters in another Instagram post celebrating their three-month anniversary in July. Hard at work: A second photo taken by Alexandra showed Anthony walking to the set accompanied by crew members Newlyweds: The couple were married in Hawaii in April of this year, amid controversy surrounding the sizeable age gap between them Fighting back: Clearly aware of the contention surrounding their relationship, Alexandra singled out the haters in another Instagram post celebrating their three-month anniversary '3 months in... and they said it wouldnt last. Love you bub,' she captioned a photo of herself with the star. Prior to Alexandra, Anthony was married to My Big Fat Greek Wedding actress Gia Carides for 18 years, with the couple divorcing in 2016. They share a 15-year-old daughter together, Bridget. Anthony and Alexandra announced their engagement in April 2017, a year before their wedding. Still going strong: '3 months in... and they said it wouldnt last. Love you bub,' she captioned a photo of herself with the Hollywood star So in love: Anthony and Alexandra announced their engagement in April 2017, a year before their wedding Speaking about his split with Gia, 54, Anthony said it was nobody else's business during an interview with the Herald Sun in April 2016. 'My attitude is that if I dont know someone - and its no disrespect to anyone out there - then I dont care what their opinion is because theyre not me, theyre not in my life and they can have all the opinions they like - they dont know what went on,' he told the newspaper. 'Outsiders are relatively unimportant to me, as long as the people involved know what went on.' Harrison Ford was snapped running errands in the luxe Los Angeles community of Brentwood, California on Tuesday. The legendary actor, 76, was clad in a button-up light blue shirt with dark blue jeans and dark brown shoes, with his grey hair combed on the daytime outing. He wore sunglasses and a wristwatch. The Hollywood icon last month was among the stars to take part in relief efforts following the deadly wildfires that raged throughout the state of California last month. Busy day: Harrison Ford, 76, was snapped running errands in the luxe Los Angeles community of Brentwood, California on Tuesday The hunky star of the Star Wars, Indiana Jones and Blade Runner films recorded a PSA to encourage SAG-AFTRA members who were impacted by the blazes to reach out to the organization regardless of their situation. 'The devastation and loss that have been wreaked by the California wildfires has left tens of thousands of Americans in need of emergency financial assistance,' the Oscar-nominated actor said in the clip. He continued: 'And our fellow SAG-AFTRA members are among those struggling to rebuild their lives. 'If you need help, ask. If you can help, give. Because we're not just actors, voice-over artists, broadcasters and recording actors - we're family, and family sticks together.' Swagger: The actor, who famously played Han Solo in the Star Wars films, walked with confidence in the luxe LA community Out and about: Ford leaned in to avoid the hanging brush of a nearby tree Next up: Ford is linked to a Call of the Wild film adaptation due out next year He noted the existence of a disaster relief fund set up by the SAG-AFTRA Motion Picture Players Welfare Fund and Actors Fund to assist industry workers impacted by the blazes. 'We're all working together, and that's a great start, but we need more help to ensure that our sisters and brothers - many of whom have lost everything - don't face additional hardships in the weeks and months to come,' said the veteran actor, who's been married to Ally McBeal actress Calista Flockhart since June of 2010. They are parents to a 17-year-old son named Liam Flockhart Ford, who Calista adopted at birth in 2001. The actor is also father to four adult children from his previous marriages. Thoughtful: Ford recorded a PSA to encourage SAG-AFTRA members who were impacted by the blazes to reach out to the organization regardless of their situation Karl Stefanovic's 14-year stint on the Today show came to an end on Thursday following a blaze of poor ratings and negative headlines. While rumours that he would be axed from the role have been swirling for months, Karl's legacy of controversy extends back much further. Famous for a laissez-faire approach that saw him host Today drunk after the Logies in 2009, Karl has struggled to woo viewers over to Nine in recent times. From his highly publicised breakup with his wife Cassandra Thorburn to Ubergate and THAT meltdown over pictures of himself checking into a caravan park with 12 cans of rum: How it all went wrong for Karl Stefanovic as he is finally booted from Today A divorce, a marriage and plummeting ratings The start of the program's downward spiral can be traced back to September 2016, when it emerged Karl had separated from his wife and the mother of his three children, Cassandra Thorburn. A few months after the split, Karl began dating former-model-turned-shoe-designer Jasmine Yarbrough, who is 10 years his junior. The pair were married during a lavish four-day wedding in Mexico earlier this month, with glossy images of the expensive occasion hitting newsstands across the country. The beginning of the end? The start of the Today show's downward spiral can be traced back to September 2016, when it emerged Karl, 44, had separated from his wife and the mother of his three children, Cassandra Thorburn (left). Pictured on October 16, 2008 in Sydney New flame: A few months after splitting with his wife, Karl began dating Jasmine Yarbrough (right), who is nine years his junior. Pictured on April 4 Media experts believe Karl's relationship with Jasmine resulted in female viewers turning their backs on the TV star. Earlier this year, media analyst Steve Allen bluntly told The Daily Telegraph that 'basically now people think he is an a***hole'. Discussing his dwindling appeal, Steve added: 'And who could blame them really. 'Here you have his ex-wife who supported him and raised his kids and she's left out in the cold while he is off with his younger girlfriend in various exotic locations on holidays every other week.' Of course, Karl's personal life hasn't been the only thing that has come under public scrutiny. Newlywed bliss: Karl and Jasmine were married during a lavish four-day wedding in Mexico earlier this month (pictured on their wedding day) Cassandra Thorburn's explosive rants Karl's ex-wife Cassandra Thorburn unleashed a series of furious rants and scathing comments in the wake of Karl's wedding earlier this month. Her public separation from the Today host pulled at the heartstrings of the nation, particularly middle-aged women. Cassandra spoke with Woman's Day in October 2017 following her divorce from Karl, and revealed that she was in a 'dark place'. 'The children still have a father but I don't have a husband. He really is dead to me and no, we won't ever be friends again.' Speaking to The Australian Women's Weekly in August 2018, Cassandra then stated both she and her children 'feel like we're dead to his family and almost anyone from our old life.' 'I feel like we've been discarded and disposed of, replaced by a whole new line-up of starters,' she said. 'He really is dead to me': Karl's ex-wife Cassandra Thorburn unleashed a series of furious rants and scathing comments in the wake of Karl's wedding earlier this month Since then, Cassandra has continued to take public swipes at her ex. Most recently following his wedding to Jasmine, Cassandra reportedly told New Idea last week: 'I've done a lot of reading about narcissism... 'Everything he says is about this fake person who lives in this fake castle, it's not real.' The Ubergate scandal Behind-the-scene tensions with Lisa's replacement, veteran journalist Georgie Gardner, also didn't help Karl's public image at the start of 2018. Scandal: In March, Peter and Karl (pictured) were embroiled in the Ubergate scandal after their private phone conversation in a taxi was leaked to New Idea magazine Not friends: Behind-the-scene tensions with Lisa's replacement, veteran journalist Georgie Gardner (right), also didn't help Karl's public image at the start of 2018. Pictured: Georgie rolling her eyes at Karl at the 2018 Logies while being interviewed by Sonia Kruger (left) The animosity between the two presenters reached an apex when the so-called 'Ubergate' scandal made headlines. Karl had been 'overheard' by an Uber driver complaining about Georgie and other colleagues, and the details of his private conversation were leaked to New Idea. According to the magazine, he had criticised his female co-anchor for 'sitting on the fence' and not having enough opinions. Tensions boil over: The animosity between the two presenters reached an apex when the so-called 'Ubergate' scandal made headlines. Karl had been 'overheard' by an Uber driver complaining about Georgie (right) and other colleagues, and the details of his private conversation were leaked to New Idea Warning shot: In September, Karl's boss Hugh Marks fired a warning shot in the wake of the scandal, saying the Today host could face the sack due to the show's decline in popularity When New Idea hit newsstands on Monday 19 March, Georgie branded Karl 'pathetic' on air, supposedly referring to his phobia of dachshunds. However, it was abundantly clear to viewers what she was really referring to. The 'tranny' controversy In 2016, Karl appeared in a controversial Today segment in which the journalist used the word 'tranny' multiple times on-air- a term which is generally considered to be a slur among the transgender community. The star did a live cross to Today show reporter Christine Ahern in Rio after her security guard was 'clocked in the head' by a transvestite who tried to wrangle a camera from the television crew in Copacabana. Christina said her cameraman, Glen Edwards, was so afraid to tell the boss he had lost a camera that he 'held on' during the attempted robbery which prompted Karl to make a joke that he was 'no stranger to the ways of the tranny' and had 'fought off tougher trannies'. On-air blunder: In 2016, Karl appeared in a controversial Today segment in which the journalist used the word 'tranny' multiple times on-air- a term which is generally considered to be a slur among the transgender community Karl also presented a wanted poster with an image of Hugo Weaving in drag from the iconic Australian film 'The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert' which he suggested could be the would-be thief. After intense social media backlash, the Channel Nine host was forced to make a public apology. 'Well as we all know I can be a complete tool. Well yesterday I was worse I was an ignorant tool - and when I say ignorant I truly mean it,' he said. Breakfast TV war: Today's ratings have been declining since Karl began dating former model Jasmine Yarbrough in late 2016, recently hitting a humiliating 12-year low. Meanwhile, Channel Seven's Sunrise continues to dominate and the gap between the rival breakfast shows widens. Pictured: Sunrise hosts Samantha Armytage (left) and David 'Kochie' Koch (right) The departure of Lisa Wilkinson He found himself at the centre of a gender pay gap controversy in October last year when his co-host Lisa Wilkinson resigned after management reportedly refused to pay her the same salary as Karl. Channel Nine CEO Hugh Marks said at the time that Karl was paid more because he had more responsibilities at the network, including his prime time show This Time Next Year, and because Lisa had several commercial agreements outside Nine. The former magazine editor subsequently signed a lucrative deal with Network Ten and began hosting The Sunday Project. Karl's bizarre Today meltdown In June 2017, Karl courted controversy once again when he unleashed a bizarre tirade on the Today show after pictures of himself checking into a country caravan park carrying 12 cans of pre-mixed rum were published. The pictures showed the father-of-three stopping by a bottle shop to pick up the drinks on the way to his accommodation in Yamba, on the NSW north coast, in late April, accompanied by a Channel Nine producer. The host, who earned a reported $3million a year - insisted that he was at the location filming a story about struggling prawn farmers and that 'they deserve a rum or two.' Bizarre outburst: In June 2017, Karl courted controversy once again when he unleashed a bizarre tirade on the Today show after pictures of himself checking into a country caravan park carrying 12 cans of pre-mixed rum were published (as pictured above) He then bizarrely suggested the pictures were an attack on women because he was carrying the rum cans before entering the caravan park with his female colleague. His outburst provoked a strong reaction on social media, with some users taking to Twitter and Facebook to call Stefanovic out as a hypocrite. The rant came at the end of a week of combative comments from Karl, who days earlier claimed he 'didn't care' about the media circus surrounding the return of Schapelle Corby from Bali. Karl's 'drunk' post-Logies coverage In 2009, Karl famously hosted Today while still drunk after the Logie Awards the night prior. In a 2014 interview, Karl admitted he had gone out and got 'smashed' just like any other year - however the footage had endured because of the popularity of YouTube. 'This was the first Logies when stuff really started working on the Internet,' Karl said. 'I remember seeing it on Today Tonight and going, 'Oh God.' I really was drunk, or at least I certainly looked and sounded drunk.' He famously shared a greasy bowl of Nasi Goreng with co-star Lisa Wilkinson on-air to cure his aching head at 6am the morning after. In 2010, Karl admitted that Nine had ordered him to work as a red carpet reporter on Logies night to keep him away from the bar and avoid a repeat performance. Indeed, his hard-partying at the Logies continued in 2016, when he celebrated from dusk to dawn before returning to screens looking very weary the next morning. Raising eyebrows: In 2009, Karl famously hosted Today while still drunk after the Logie Awards the night prior (pictured) Tucking in: He famously shared a greasy bowl of Nasi Goreng with co-star Lisa Wilkinson on-air to cure his aching head at 6am the morning after A year later, he caused a stir once again when he thanked his then-wife Cassandra Thorburn's 'a**e' while accepting the Most Popular Presenter award and the Gold Logie. He said: 'My beautiful wife Cass, who lets me go on these weird and wonderful excursions around the world... a great influence in my life.' 'And she's also got the best a**e I've ever seen,' Karl added as the crowd laughed. Bizarre speech: A year later, he caused a stir once again when he thanked his then-wife Cassandra Thorburn's 'a**e' while accepting the Most Popular Presenter award and the Gold Logie (pictured at the Logies in 2018) The final straw In September, Karl's boss Hugh Marks fired a warning shot in the wake of the scandal, saying the Today host could face the sack due to the show's decline in popularity. On Thursday, Karl finally announced he had parted from Today. The news came a day after his younger Peter abruptly exited the network 'to explore new opportunities.' Bye! On Thursday, Karl finally announced he had parted from Today Departures: Karl's brother Peter (left, in 2011) parted ways with the network on Tuesday The official end Karl's departure was announced on Wednesday, with Channel Nine confirming that he was parting ways with the breakfast program after almost 14 years in the role. 'For the last 14 years I've co-hosted the best show on television. I can't thank Nine enough for the opportunity. I never in my wildest dreams thought I would be good enough to host this grand show for so long,' Karl told Daily Mail Australia in a statement. 'Thanks to our viewers mostly, you are what matters most. It's been a tough time. Thanks for hanging in there. I look forward to seeing you in another capacity at this great Network soon.' 'I never in my wildest dreams thought I would be good enough to host this grand show for so long,' Karl told Daily Mail Australia in a statement as his departure was officially announced, after 14 years in the role Meanwhile, Darren Wick, Director of News and Current Affairs at Channel Nine, confirmed that Karl would be staying with the network and will continue to host This Time Next Year. 'Nine and Karl Stefanovic have agreed it is time for him to step off the Today Show. Karl remains on contract with the network and will continue to host This Time Next Year, which records in February,' Wick said. 'For over 14 years Karl has been at the centre of the Today Show bringing his unique personality and perspective to the day's news and current affairs. 'An announcement on the new line up and format of the Today Show will be made in the coming weeks.' It should be one of the happiest times of his life. But less than two weeks after marrying Jasmine Yarbrough, 34, in a lavish ceremony in Mexico, Karl Stefanovic, 44, has been dropped from the Today show. His axing from the long-running morning show was announced on Wednesday, while still on his honeymoon with his much younger bride. Is Karl's marriage to Jasmine to blame for his downfall? How Stefanovic's exit from Today came days after his lavish wedding and why the couple's 'arrangement' with Nine's rival upset network bosses. The couple are pictured riding around Sydney on a vespa in November 2017 Despite mounting speculation the veteran broadcaster was on the verge of being fired from his long-standing tenure on the program, it's likely to still come as a blow for the star, who has taken a string of public hits in recent months. Furthermore, management at Channel Nine is reportedly furious, after Karl made an arrangement with Who magazine, which is owned by rival network Channel Seven and gave them exclusive rights to the couple's wedding photos. It's understood that while there was no paid deal in place, the same photographer who took the photos for Who magazine was also the photographer for the entire wedding. Unimpressed: Management at Channel Nine is reportedly furious, after Karl made an arrangement with Who magazine, which is owned by rival network Channel Seven and gave them exclusive rights to the couple's wedding photos. Pictured at their wedding in December 2018 'Nine looked at the coverage of Karl's wedding in horror,' a source told The Age on Wednesday. 'It was the final straw; they knew it was damaging their brand and pi**ing off their viewers.' In addition to the coverage in Who magazine, Jasmine also provided Vogue Australia - which is owned by another rival company News Corp - quotes about the wedding for a story to run in February, according to a report by The Sydney Morning Herald last week. Arrangement: It's understood that while there was no paid deal in place, Who provided the photographers for the wedding in exchange for an exclusive spread in the magazine Not happy: Network bosses were allegedly also unimpressed by photos of Karl on media mogul James Packer's super yacht in Italy back in July. Pictured here on James Packer's yacht in June 2017 Network bosses were allegedly also unimpressed by photos of Karl on media mogul James Packer's super yacht in Italy back in July. Once Australian TV's golden boy, beloved for his larrikin personality, Karl's reputation plummeted after he split from his wife of 21 years, Cassandra Thorburn, 47, in September 2016. By February 2017, Karl went public with Jasmine, a former model-turned-shoe designer, who is 10 years his junior. Changing look: In a seemingly desperate effort to keep up with his much younger partner, Karl has overhauled his wardrobe in recent months. Pictured at Gold Coast Airport in April 2017 Controversy: Karl moved on with Jasmine (right) only months after splitting with his wife of 21 years, Cassandra Thorburn. Pictured at Fashion Week in Sydney in May 2017 The couple quickly became fixtures on Sydney's social scene, putting in regular appearances at fashion shows and red carpet events like the Logies. In a seemingly desperate effort to keep up with his much younger partner, Karl has overhauled his wardrobe in recent months, stepping out in trendy hats and fluffy sandals, and riding around on a Vespa scooter. 'I certainly did not expect to meet someone five months after I broke up with my wife. That was not planned, I did not know her before. I met her on a boat in Sydney,' Karl explained in an interview with The Daily Telegraph's Stellar Magazine in July 2017. Out of fashion: Karl has stepped out in a variety of questionable ensembles of late, seen here wearing fluffy sandals. Pictured in July 2017 with Jade Yarbrough at Gold Coast airport Despite telling the publication they were 'taking things really, really slowly', the couple announced their engagement just seven months later, in February this year. By December, they were married, hosting a lavish four-day wedding in Los Cabos, Mexico. Many of Karl's Today colleagues were no-shows at the nuptials, with the ceremony supposedly coinciding with the highly reported Nine-Fairfax merger. Unexpected: 'I certainly did not expect to meet someone five months after I broke up with my wife. That was not planned,' Karl has said of his relationship with Jasmine. Pictured in February 2018 In September, industry website Mumbrella reported the show's metropolitan viewers had dropped to below 200,000 on the back of controversy surrounding Karl and former co-host Lisa Wilkinson and her replacement Georgie Gardner. In October last year, veteran journalist Lisa Wilkinson announced she was leaving the program after being unable to reach a pay agreement. On the fast track: Despite telling The Daily Telegraph's Stellar Magazine they were 'taking things really, really slowly', the couple announced their engagement in February this year According to a report by The Daily Telegraph at the time, Nine bosses had offered the 59-year-old $1.8 million, compared to Karl's $2 million-a-year deal. In an age of empowering women's movements, the gender pay gap took a toll on Karl's already fraying reputation. Things only went from bad to worse for the TV host, when he was caught lambasting Lisa's replacement on the show, Georgie Gardner. Loose-lipped: Things only went from bad to worse for the TV host, when he was caught lambasting Lisa Wilkinson's replacement on Today, Georgie Gardner, during a phone call with his brother, Peter Stefanovic During a phone call with his older brother while in an Uber in March of this year, Peter Stefanovic, 37, spoke with Karl about Georgie, 48, apparently not being up to job. The stunning show of unprofessionalism embroiled the star in a heightened level of scandal even for him. And while he tries desperately to reclaim his once gleaming reputation, the harsh reality is fans started turning away from Karl long before Today's bosses did. Daily Mail Australia reached out to Who magazine and Karl and Jasmine's representatives for comment. Advertisement By The Associated Press Dec. 17, 2018 | FRANKFORT By The Associated Press Dec. 17, 2018 | 04:14 PM | FRANKFORT Kentucky's Republican governor has called the state legislature back in session to consider changes to the state's troubled public pension system. Gov. Matt Bevin issued a proclamation calling the legislature back in session at 8 p.m. EST Monday. The decision comes four days after the state Supreme Court struck down a pension law Bevin signed earlier this year. Kentucky has one of the worst funded pension systems in the country. The state is at least $38 billion short of the money required to pay benefits over the next three decades. Bevin did not say what the legislature would be voting on. Acting GOP House Speaker David Osborne said the state House of Representatives is prepared to meet and the Republican Caucus is willing to do the people's business. They're sisters who both made a huge splash on silver screen as young children in the drama I Am Sam opposite two-time Oscar winner Sean Penn in 2001. And on Tuesday Elle Fanning, 20, flew back home to Los Angeles to be with her older sister Dakota, 24, and the family for the holidays. The Somewhere actress arrived just in time to join her older sister for a well-deserved pampering session at a beauty salon in Beverly Hills. Homecoming: Elle Fanning, 20, flew back to Los Angeles on Tuesday to be with her sister Dakota, 24, and their family for the holidays Making a break with style: Elle looked more like the young starlet that she is by the time she slipped out of the salon to do some holiday shopping at a few local stores Dakota, who was just seven when she hit the big time in Hollywood, opted for a fashionably conservative look while dressed in a long black skirt that hung off her body. She matched it with a white t-shirt, a long black blazer and a pair of white sneakers. The actress arrived with her trademark blonde tresses looking long and flat, but by the time her stylist was done, she had amazing shine and volume, all with a part in the middle. Rejuvenated: The War Of The Worlds star also looked fresh and stylish after some TLC Makeover: Elle joined her older sister (pictured) at a beauty salon in Beverly Hills It was a similar situation for Elle; when she arrived at LAX Airport earlier in the day, her long blonde tresses looked stringy and somewhat unkempt. By the time the stylist was done with her, she had glowing new new highlighted hair and plenty of volume. Eager to get in a little holiday shopping, Elle said her goodbyes at the salon and left to hit some local stores. And she was dressed to impress; changing out of a casual ensemble after arriving back in town, the Super 8 star oozed youthful elegance in a dark floral skirt and a form-fitting black long-sleeve shirt. Elle and Dakota Fanning have both starred in big blockbuster films; the sisters are pictured together in Los Angeles in March 2018 Despite their young ages, both sisters already have impressive Hollywood resumes. Dakota has starred in popular films like: Sweet Home Alabama (2002), Man on Fire (2004), War Of The World's (2005), Charlotte's Web (2006), and all three of the hugely popular Twilight films beginning in 2009. Most recently she starred in Ocean's 8 (2018) and on the TNT series The Alienist. She also has a role in the much anticipated Quentin Tarantino crime mystery Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, which stars Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio. The list of big productions for Elle include Deja Vu (2006), Babel (2006), Reservation Road (2007), Somewhere( 2010) and Super 8 (2011) and Maleficient (2014). She has been in London in recent months filming the follow-up, Maleficent II, alongside Angelina Jolie. Ian Somerhalder was the victim of a vicious food-shaming attack on Tuesday night. The 40-year-old was innocently shopping at a grocery store when a mob turned on him for buying too healthily, or so his lengthy Instagram lament seemed to suggest. The Vampire Diaries stunner posted a meandering rant after getting 'really fired up' by his ignorant fellow shoppers, who were left stunned by the sheer amount of greenery in his cart. Leave him alone: Ian Somerhalder posted lengthy rant after being food-shamed at the grocery store for buying too healthily 'I hope I dont come off as an a**... ' he fruitlessly began, 'A woman just stopped me in the grocery store and told me that she had never seen a basket like mine. I told her that I have never NOT seen this type of basket in my grocery-shopping behavior. 'A few others chimed in saying that it was a very strange sight! WTF? A strange sight?Im in a grocery store. Its food,' he spat. 'It got me thinking and really fired up.' In his accompanying picture, the star shared a picture of himself gently washing the offending foodstuffs, just visible behind his flexed left bicep. The actor then slammed the public for complaining and 'outright b****ing' about healthcare costs, drug companies and doctors. Victim: The Vampire Diaries stunner posted a meandering rant after getting 'really fired up' by his ignorant fellow shoppers, who were left stunned by the sheer amount of greenery in his cart 'I know our system isnt great. Yet, the public poisons itself daily with bad food choices,' he lectured. 'Food is medicine and medicine is food. Its a fact.' 'I dont mean to sound like a d**k - or preachy but this is nuts: how is it, that grown professional people in a major American city have never seen a grocery basket full of normal&healthy foods that just all happen to be green or not processed?' he puzzled. Ian who earned $40,000 per episode of The Vampire Diaries after just the first 22-episode season and likely much, much more by the eighth and final accused others of making excuses for not having the time to exercise. 'We make excuses why we cant find the time to take care of ourselves and we end up past the point of no return... Why is that?' he orated. 'Its hard to see that through a fog of prescription drugs, energy drinks & strong sleep aids. Its hard I know, but its time to change. You wouldnt put the wrong gas in your car, so why would you put wrong food in your body? 'We MUST take responsibility for what we put into our bodies starting now. We can do it. Ok. Ill stop,; he wrote, and finally did. Camping actress Jennifer Garner was glued to her iPhone after dropping her children off at school in Santa Monica on Tuesday. The 46-year-old Golden Globe nominee clutched her morning to-go coffee while clad in black and grey athleisure attire for the errand. The Texan-born, Virginia-raised mother-of-three shielded her make-up free complexion with green-lensed sunglasses, and she scraped her brunette locks into a ponytail. Deep in conversation: Camping actress Jennifer Garner was glued to her iPhone after dropping her children off at school in Santa Monica on Tuesday Jennifer - who appeared to be heading to the gym - has been quietly dating Cali Group chairman John Miller since May. Garner and the 40-year-old attorney-turned-CEO reportedly keep their romance on the down low by mostly spending time together inside her $17.6M Pacific Palisades home. That same morning, the Once Upon a Farm co-founder shared a video of herself wrapping a Christmas present in black gingham paper with a big grin on her dimpled face. The Peppermint action star is determined to transform her six-year-old son Samuel into a ballet fan, but he had trouble following the American Ballet Theatre's new production of The Nutcracker in Costa Mesa. Ready for action! The 46-year-old Golden Globe nominee clutched her morning to-go coffee while clad in black and grey athleisure attire for the errand Listening: The Texan-born, Virginia-raised mother-of-three shielded her make-up free complexion with green-lensed sunglasses, and she scraped her brunette locks into a ponytail Moved on: Jennifer - who appeared to be heading to the gym - has been quietly dating Cali Group chairman John Miller since May DL: Garner and the 40-year-old attorney-turned-CEO reportedly keep their romance on the down low by mostly spending time together inside her $17.6M Pacific Palisades home Merry! That same morning, the Once Upon a Farm co-founder shared a video of herself wrapping a Christmas present in black gingham paper with a big grin on her dimpled face 'He looked over and he said, "Mom, I don't know if I get this movie. I'm not really getting the plot. They are not talking,"' Jennifer said onstage ABT's Holiday Benefit in Beverly Hills on Monday - according to Us Weekly. 'My six-year-old son is going to grow up and appreciate being an audience member.' While hosting the ballet benefit at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, Garner donned a black floral Prada gown and Neil Lane jewelry selected by stylist duo Jill Lincoln + Jordan Johnson. Not into it: The Peppermint action star is determined to transform her six-year-old son Samuel into a ballet fan, but he had trouble following the American Ballet Theatre's new production of The Nutcracker in Costa Mesa (pictured Thursday) Jennifer said onstage ABT's Holiday Benefit on Monday: 'He looked over and he said, "Mom, I don't know if I get this movie. I'm not really getting the plot. They are not talking"' Emcee: While hosting the ballet benefit at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, Garner donned a black floral Prada gown and Neil Lane jewelry selected by stylist duo Jill Lincoln + Jordan Johnson On Tuesday, the self-described 'number one fan' shared a silly video of herself dressed as The Nutcracker hanging out backstage at Segerstrom Hall with the professional dancers. The Alias alum - who trains with former dancer Simone De La Rue - frequently shares #TutuTuesday posts for her 5.3M Instagram/Facebook followers, which clearly caught the eye of the esteemed dance company. But it's unclear if Jennifer's two daughters - Seraphina, nearly 10; and Violet, 13 - with ex-husband #2 Ben Affleck share her passion for all things en pointe. Fangirl: On Tuesday, the self-described 'number one fan' shared a silly video of herself dressed as The Nutcracker hanging out backstage at Segerstrom Hall with the professional dancers BTS: The Alias alum frequently shares #TutuTuesday posts for her 5.3M Instagram/Facebook followers, which clearly caught the eye of the esteemed dance company Fans? But it's unclear if Jennifer's two daughters - Seraphina, nearly 10; and Violet, 13 - with ex-husband #2 Ben Affleck share her passion for all things en pointe (pictured December 9) The Daredevil co-stars finalized their 2016 divorce on October 4 - the same day the 46-year-old Oscar winner announced he'd completed his second stint in rehab for alcoholism. Career-wise, Garner will next voice June's (Brianna Denski) mother in Paramount Pictures' animated comedy Wonder Park, which hits US theaters March 15 and UK theaters April 8. David Feiss replaced Dylan Brown as director of the amusement park flick - which also features Mila Kunis, Kenan Thompson, John Oliver, Ken Jeong, Matthew Broderick, and David Cross. Tuesday was quite the busy day for Amy Adams, who managed to squeeze in a talk show appearance and a Q&A for her new film Vice in New York City. The 44-year-old actress first stopped by NBC's Late Night with Seth Meyers before promoting the political film with a panel with director Adam McKay at MoMA. The auburn starlet was kind enough to stop, sign autographs and pose with fans after the event, which was hosted by The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences. Smiling Amy: Amy Adams greeted fans with a smile and signed autographs after her Vice Q&A Vice Q&A: The actress teamed up with director Adam McKay at the event, which was hosted by the The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences Adams wowed wearing a thick red winter coat as she signed and posed with fans. Before rubbing elbows with the public, Amy wore an elegant black long-sleeved dress and black Christian Louboutin boots, the same classy and elegant outfit she wore to Seth Meyer's earlier in the evening. Inside Adams posed with her director McKay before the Academy screening of Vice, followed by a Q&A moderated by Joe Neumaier. Strike a pose: Adams was spotted outside the Late Night with Seth Meyers building wearing a thick red winter coat as she signed and posed with fans. Award contender: The film is up for Best Picture - Comedy or Musical, with Adams picking up her eighth Golden Globe nomination along for Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical Loves her fans: The redheaded beauty was happy to take photos with her fans Adams portrays Lynne Cheney in this film that charts the unprecedented power wielded by her husband, Vice President Dick Cheney (Christian Bale). The cast also includes Steve Carell as Donald Rumsfeld, Sam Rockwell as George W. Bush and Tyler Perry as Colin Powell. Vice is already in the thick of awards season consideration, having been nominated for six Golden Globes earlier this month. Amy on Late Night: Inside she spoke with Meyers while wearing an elegant black long-sleeved dress and black Christian Louboutin boots Talking with Seth: She kept the same classy and elegant outfit as she went from Rockefeller Center to the Museum of Modern Art just a few blocks away for the Vice Q&A The film is up for Best Picture - Comedy or Musical, with Adams picking up her eighth nomination along for Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical, with Christian Bale landing Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical and Sam Rockwell getting a Best Supporting Actor nod. McKay also picked up two nominations himself, one for Best Director and the other for Best Original Screenplay. Golden Globe nominee: McKay also picked up two nominations himself, one for Best Director and the other for Best Original Screenplay Q&A: Adams posed with her director McKay before the Academy screening of Vice, followed by a Q&A moderated by Joe Neumaier Adams is coming off her critically-acclaimed role in HBO's mini-series Sharp Objects, where she played Camille Preaker. She also has The Woman in the Window in post-production, where she stars alongside Gary Oldman and Julianne Moore. The actress was also recently confirmed to return as Giselle in Disney's Disenchanted, a sequel to 2007's Enchanted with James Marsden and Patrick Dempsey also slated to return. Vice chat: Adams portrays Lynne Cheney in this film that charts the unprecedented power wielded by her husband, Vice President Dick Cheney (Christian Bale) Oscar nominee: The five-time Oscar nominee discussed her new film at a screening hosted by The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences Coming soon: Amy can be seen in Vice when it comes out on Christmas Day She has been one of the most in-demand actresses since she starred in the 2017 action film Baby Driver. But on Tuesday she took a break from filming and dropped by Jimmy Kimmel Live's Hollywood studios to promote the upcoming drama Welcome To Marwen, which also stars Steve Carell and Leslie Mann. The Mexican-born beauty looked every bit the show-stopping movie star when she arrived at the ABC studios in Tinseltown. Making a grand entrance: Eiza Gonzalez, 28, arrived at the ABC studios in Hollywood for an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live on Tuesday With a contingent of ladies by her side, Eiza looked equal parts classy and sexy dressed in black form-fitting pants that flared out from the knees down. She matched it with a white button-down shirt that hugged her toned body and ample assets, but added contrast with its puffy long sleeves. Adding to ensemble, she rocked a black belt with silver buckle, a pair of black pumps and styled her dark brown tresses long and straight down to the middle of her back. Subtle but sweet: The Mexican-born beauty was equal parts classy and sexy in her black and white ensemble Working it: The actress is out promoting Welcome To Marwen, which stars Steve Carell Eiza Gonzalez has eight new movies in some phase of production right now. The 28-year old star has been hard at work filming Godzilla vs. King Kong in Hawaii, alongside Alexander Skarsgard, Rebecca Hall and Millie Bobby Brown. She's also been shooting The Fate Of The Furious spin-off Hobbs And Shaw starring Dwayne Johnson, Jason Statham, Idris Elba and Vanessa Kirby. Following on the heels of Welcome To Marwen, which premieres December 21, will be her American-Spanish fantasy drama Paradise Hills. In demand: The 28-year old has eight more new films in the works Also appearing on Kimmel with Eiza was John Cena. He looked dressed to impress in a gray and black pattered three-piece suit. The 41-year old former pro wrestler has been out in force promoting his new action movie Bumblebee, which also stars Hailee Steinfeld and Pamela Adlon. Cool cat: John Cena arrived for Kimmel wearing in a gray and black three-piece suit Vanderpump Rules star Lala Kent revealed she's '56 days sober' thanks, in part, to the support of her much older fiance Randall Emmett. 'I'm a clean baby!' the 28-year-old bride-to-be announced on Tuesday night's episode of Watch What Happens Live. 'We're just kind of taking a different turn with our life.' PDA pair: Vanderpump Rules star Lala Kent revealed she's '56 days sober' thanks, in part, to the support of her much older fiance Randall Emmett Earlier this month, the SUR hostess admitted to 'self-medicating' with alcohol and marijuana following the April 21 death of her father Kent Burningham. 'Drinking for me was medication instead of celebration,' Lala (born Lauryn) told Cosmopolitan. 'My fiance always says I have this sixth sense where I know when things have gotten to a point where they need to change, so I cant really pinpoint one incident. The 28-year-old bride-to-be announced on Tuesday's WWHL: 'I'm a clean baby! We're just kind of taking a different turn with our life' 'Drinking for me was medication instead of celebration': Earlier this month, the SUR hostess admitted to 'self-medicating' with alcohol and marijuana following the April 21 death of her father Kent Burningham 'I'm going to rep my man so hardcore!' Lala (born Lauryn) told producer/host Andy Cohen that she'll be changing her last name to Emmett after the wedding 'When I really came to the conclusion that I am in that zone of having a problem, I just said enough's enough. I picked up the phone, I called this sponsor that had been recommended to me. Its the best decision of my whole life.' Kent told producer/host Andy Cohen that she'll be changing her last name to Emmett after the wedding since she plans on 'repping my man so hardcore.' The Utah-born beauty made sure to show off her $150K, 18K white gold engagement ring crammed with over 6 carats of diamonds, which was designed by Leon Diamond in New York. Bling: Kent made sure to show off her $150K, 18K white gold engagement ring crammed with over 6 carats of diamonds, which was designed by Leon Diamond in New York She calls 'Daddy husband': On Saturday, the Utah-born beauty and the 47-year-old film producer celebrated being betrothed at Hollywood hotspot Avenue LA Divorced a year ago: The Bravo-lebrity will soon be stepmother to the Miami-born School of Visual Arts grad's two small children with ex-wife Ambyr Childers (pictured December 10) On Saturday, the Bravo-lebrity and the 47-year-old film producer - whom she calls 'Daddy husband' - celebrated being betrothed at Hollywood hotspot Avenue LA after a three-month engagement. Lala will soon be stepmother to the Miami-born School of Visual Arts grad's two small children with ex-wife Ambyr Childers, whom he divorced in December 2017. For the boozy Bravo talk show, Kent wore a sheer Greta Constantine bodysuit, shiny metallic joggers, and stilettos selected by stylist Alexandra Renee Scott. Fishnetting: For the boozy Bravo talk show, Kent wore a sheer Greta Constantine bodysuit, shiny metallic joggers, and stilettos selected by stylist Alexandra Renee Scott Glam: Hairstylist Trace Henningsen coiffed The Row actress' brunette waves And hairstylist Trace Henningsen coiffed The Row actress' brunette waves. Fans can catch more of the 5ft7in stunner - who joined the show in season four - in the 24-episode seventh season of Vanderpump Rules, which airs Sundays on Bravo. Meanwhile, Randall has overseen films such as Reprisal, Mile 22, The Row, and Escape Plan 2: Hades as well as Starz series Power. She has the unique perspective of having made out with both of them on screen. And on Tuesday night Natalie Portman spilled on who is the better kisser between Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis. 'Mila!' she revealed on Watch What Happens Live without a moment's hesitation. 'I mean, obviously!' Unique perspective: Natalie Portman spilled on who is the better kisser between Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis on Tuesday's Watch What Happens Live Host Andy Cohen pointed out she had worked with Ashton in 2011's No Strings Attached and his wife the year before in Black Swan, but Natalie knew exactly where his question was going, finishing for him with a smile: 'I kissed them both.' During the show, the 37-year-old addressed her recent beef with Jessica Simpson, announcing: 'I have only respect and good feelings for her.' The two recently became embroiled in a bizarre online tiff when Natalie said she was left 'feeling confused' when she saw a picture of Jessica in a bikini alongside an article abut her proclaiming to be a virgin almost two decades ago. Jessica reacted on Twitter saying she was disappointed, pointing out that that 'being sexy in a bikini and being proud of my body are not synonymous with having sex.' Of course: 'Mila!' she revealed on Watch What Happens Live without a moment's hesitation. 'I mean, obviously!' Three's company: Host Andy Cohen pointed out she had worked with Ashton in 2011's No Strings Attached and his wife the year before in Black Swan Has thought about it: But Natalie knew exactly where his question was going, finishing for him with a smile: 'I kissed them both' Natalie immediately apologized, explaining she was talking about mixed messages from the media about how girls and women were supposed to behave, rather than shaming the model. On Tuesday Cohen praised their 'nice and respectful dialogue', adding 'if only everybody could squash their beefs that way.' Natalie replied: 'Also I think there's no need for beef between women; we're all in the same society and living with the same pressures... we're allies.' Squashed beef: During the show, the 37-year-old addressed her recent beef with Jessica Simpson, announcing: 'I have only respect and good feelings for her.' Allies: The two recently became embroiled in a bizarre online tiff when Natalie said she was left 'feeling confused' when she saw a picture of Jessica in a bikini alongside an article abut her proclaiming to be a virgin almost two decades ago (picture October 11) During the show, the Oscar-winner discussed some of her fellow famous Harvard alumni, including Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, who now 'has a lot more power' than he did in college. As for Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, he was a freshman when she was a senior, 'So I got to go through college without social media,' she smiled, 'I was very lucky.' The Star Wars star was also asked to rank the prequel trilogy which she did in reverse order: III, II, I but defended the much-maligned Jar Jar Binks, often blamed for the The Phantom Menace's shortcomings. Clubhouse: Natalie was joined by fellow guest Leslie Mann College days: During the show, the Oscar-winner discussed some of her fellow famous Harvard alumni, including Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, who now 'has a lot more power' than he did in college 'Ahmed Best who played Jar Jar is one of my VERY good friends, and he he is so talented and so wonderful, and I was very angry that they said bad things about him,' she said. Other revelations made by the Israeli beauty included what Jude Law smells like 'all good things' and that she pretty much fell in love at first sight with husband, Black Swan dance choreographer Benjamin Millepied. She admitted she knew the Frenchman was a perfect match when she watched him obliviously park his car facing the wrong way. Glee star Matthew Morrison was all smiles with his adorable family at a festive holiday party in New York City Tuesday. Morrison, 40, brought his wife Renee Puente and their one-year-old son Revel to the Brooks Brothers and St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital Annual Holiday Celebration. The happy couple was seen holding up their growing boy, while Matthew gave him a peck on the cheek. Matthew's family: Matthew Morrison brought his wife Renee and their one year old son Revel to the Brooks Brothers and St. Jude Holiday Party in New York Morrison was pictured wearing a white t-shirt under a maroon sweater under a grey sport coat with dark grey pants and brown shoes. His wife Renee was rocking a similar ensemble, with a white shirt under a plaid blazer, with black pants and black heels. Their son Revel was wearing a white shirt and blue jeans with Adidas sneakers. Morrison started dating Puente in 2011, while he was still starring on the hit Fox series Glee. Peck on the cheek: The happy couple was seen holding up their growing boy, while Matthew gave him a peck on the cheek Happy family: Morrison was pictured wearing a white t-shirt under a maroon sweater under a grey sport coat with dark grey pants and brown shoes Morrison announced he was getting engaged to Puente in June 2013, with the help of legendary musician Elton John They got married in October 2014 at a private home in Maui, with their first child Revel born in October 2017. Morrison was caught up in a controversy earlier this year when a video surfaced showing a dog being abused in a film he starred in entitled Crazy Alien. All smiles: Morrison started dating Puente in 2011, while he was still starring on the hit Fox series Glee Happy times: Morrison announced he was getting engaged to Puente in June 2013, with the help of legendary musician Elton John The dog in question was struck so hard so he would bark as loud as possible in the film, which was directed by Hao Ning and has not been set for release yet. After learning about the controversy, Morrison released a statement reading, 'I've just been made aware and seen a video from the set of a film I worked on in China.' 'My heart is broken to see any animal treated this way,' Morrison continued. 'Had I been on set or known about this, I would have made all efforts to stop this. I've called the producers to express my outrage.' Controversy: Morrison was caught up in a controversy earlier this year when a video surfaced showing a dog being abused in a film he starred in entitled Crazy Alien. Morrison also recently guest-starred on ABC's Grey's Anatomy as Dr. Paul Stadler, and he stars in a new musical entitled Broadway 4D. He stars in Broadway 4D alongside Hugh Jackman and Christina Aguilera, and he also hosts the new British reality series The Greatest Dancer, which premieres Saturday, January 5 on BBC One. Morrison was also pictured at the party with Santa Claus and actress Marlo Thomas. Happy Holidays: Morrison was also pictured at the party with Santa Claus and actress Marlo Thomas. Family man: Morrison married Puente in October 2014 at a private home in Maui, with their first child Revel born in October 2017 She was recently forced to deny claims she had been axed from Geordie Shore. And Sophie Kasaei found herself in the centre of another scandal this week as she was accused of 'bad photoshop' by fans after posting bikini snaps from her holiday in Dubai. The 29-year-old reality star took to Instagram on Tuesday to share a snap in a scanty cobalt bikini, later uploading the 'same' snap to her Stories feed - where images disappear after 24 hours. Edited? Sophie Kasaei was accused of 'bad photoshop' by fans after posting the 'same' bikini snap on her Instagram Stories (left) and on her Instagram feed (right) However, in the image on her Stories, the stunning star appeared to have digitally altered her stomach and arms - which did not go unnoticed by fans. According to The Sun, one fan commented: 'Bad Photoshop', however, others were far more complimentary on her feed, sharing: 'I love Sophie.... how did she get so slim???'; 'Wow looking good'; 'You look amazing x' MailOnline has contacted Sophie's representatives for comment. Bikini babe: The 29-year-old reality star took to Instagram on Tuesday to share a snap in a scanty cobalt bikini, later uploading the 'same' snap to her Stories feed Loving it: According to The Sun , one fan commented: 'Bad Photoshop', however, others were far more complimentary on her feed This comes after Sophie hit out at claims that she had been axed from long-running reality series, Geordie Shore, after rejoining the cast in 2016. Last week, a source told The Sun: 'Its one of the biggest shake ups theyd had in a long time and this time Sophies head was on the block. 'She has been told shes taking a supporting role in the next series and will only be appearing on screen at certain points throughout the series. 'When they go into lock-down in the house at the start of January, Sophie wont be living with them', they added. However, Sophie hit out at the claims, informing her 926,000 Twitter followers: 'I mean this is a whole load of b******s Iv just got my contract for the next series and i start my filming tomorrow'. Sophie was axed as a regular cast member on the series in 2013 after she alleged to have used a racial slur - a charge she denied. She returned to the show alongside a host of other former castmates for the Big Birthday Battle in 2016, and became a permanent cast member again for the next series later in the year. Advertisement She is enjoying a dazzling career following her Great British Bake Off win in 2015. And while Nadiya Hussain is every inch the career woman, she proves herself to be just as much a homebody with her Instagram account littered with stunning images of the home she shares with husband Abdal and their three children together - sons Musa, ten, and Dawud, nine, and daughter Maryam, six. The 33-year-old chef keeps her 218,000 followers up to speed on the ins and outs of the Hussain household, with images depicting her decorating process, cosy nights in and many of her well-skilled cooking sessions. Stunning: While Nadiya Hussain is every inch the career woman, she proves herself to be just as much a homebody with her Instagram account littered with stunning images of the home she shares with husband Abdal and their three children together - sons Musa, ten, and Dawud, nine, and daughter Maryam, six (pictured in November) Nadiya became an instant fan favourite on the sixth season of Great British Bake Off, and since winning the show in 2015, Hussain has hosted a number of her own food programmes and released several books. As well as plugging her various products and work on social media, the TV sensation also shares a number of shots of the interior of her home and family life with her three kids and beloved husband. One snap showed her bold approach to interior design as she shared a shot of a cosy corner of the house, complete with a plush armchair sitting in front of stunning forest green walls. A gallery of mirrors, a piece of art comprising of Scrabble tiles and a dainty plant were the perfect adornments to tie the look together for a stylish finish which displayed her well-formed eye for design. Cooking up a storm! The 33-year-old chef keeps her 218,000 followers up to speed on the ins and outs of the Hussain household, with images depicting her decorating process, cosy nights in and many of her well-skilled cooking sessions (pictured in July last year) Happy days: As well as plugging her various products and work on social media, the TV sensation also shares a number of shots of the interior of her home and family life with her three kids and beloved husband Piecing it together: She displayed the before and after shots of her living room after undergoing a home makeover (left, July, right, November) Adding a caption on the shot, Nadiya detailed the design process and the finished product as she wrote: 'I really enjoy decorating. I lie I hate painting and masking and waiting to do the second coat but I really enjoy turning a magnolia space into something that feels like home... 'Finally decorated our living room and it's such a lovely space,where the kids can read, we can have a drink and a chat and with no television in sight it is by far the best room in the house.' Another corner of her beloved living room featured a statement fireplace, with the hearth blocked off by a wall of mosaic while fresh flowers livened up the space and muted artwork added a splash of detail. In a nod to her conscientious kids, the living room also featured a colour coordinated book shelf sitting above a white piano and a guitar - hinting at a musical touch running through the household. Hitting the right notes: In a nod to her conscientious kids, the living room also featured a colour coordinated book shelf sitting above a white piano and a guitar - hinting at a musical touch running through the household (pictured in November) Bold colours: Further images of her back garden showed Nadiya's penchant for bold colours with potted plants lining a trellis (pictyred in June) Yum! She shares a host of images of her home feasts, while also displaying her stylish home in the backdrop Clearly not shy of adding trendy touches, Nadiya proudly showed off her neon light which spelled out Elephant Juice and was inspired by the light in her chef father's Indian restaurant. She wrote a caption reading: 'Finally Ive got my neon, all the rage at the moment but I have wanted one since my dad put an open/closed light up in his restaurant window... 'It was hard to decide what we wanted, even though open and closed was an option we decided on Elephant Juice (for anyone who doesnt get it, mouth the words elephant juice without saying the words out loud and your lips look like they are saying I love you) @brilliantledneon took these simple words and put them in lights and Im so excited to get it on my wall.' Bright lights: Clearly not shy of adding trendy touches, Nadiya proudly showed off her neon light which spelled out Elephant Juice and was inspired by the light in her chef father's Indian restaurant In the pink! She wrote a caption reading: 'Finally Ive got my neon, all the rage at the moment but I have wanted one since my dad put an open/closed light up in his restaurant window' Egg-cellent! Again proving food is the backbone of the home, Nadiya proudly shares snaps of her family chicken coop, where she revealed they get fresh eggs in the morning (pictured in July) Again proving food is the backbone of the home, Nadiya proudly shares snaps of her family chicken coop, where she revealed they get fresh eggs in the morning. Adding a caption on a video of the coop, she said: 'One of the best part of our mornings is collecting the eggs our girls lay for us #chickensofinstagram #fresheggs @omlet_uk eggy has made keeping chickens safe and clean so easy ! That and a little bit of elbow grease from @abumdm'. Among her many talents, Nadiya has also designed a line of crockery which is naturally a pinpoint of her well-used kitchen and adds a splash of colour to the otherwise muted, modern space. Cooped up! She is clearly passionate about her birds as she often shares snaps of the coop on social media (pictured in August) Yummy! Among her many talents, Nadiya has also designed a line of crockery which is naturally a pinpoint of her well-used kitchen and adds a splash of colour to the otherwise muted, modern space (pictured on Saturday) Countdown: Nadiya, who has spoken at length in the past about her Muslim faith, also posted videos of her kids' felt reusable Ramadan advent calendars, used in the month of Ramadan, during which Muslims fast between dawn and sunset as a mark of devotion to their faith and closeness to Allah (pictured in May) A touch of sentimentality was posted on the photosharing site, as Nadiya revealed a unique routine she shares with her kids to help keep unity in the family home. She explained: 'We try and do this one day a week. We have a massive platter that we fill up with dinner and then one by one I feed each of them in turns till dinner is finished. Its their favourite part of the week... 'We talk about our day between mouthfuls and they always say that the food tastes better when I mix it with my hands. I hope I can do this forever or at least till they decide they dont want to do it anymore... 'Till then I will enjoying feeding them every single mouthful. Its a simple thing but makes them happy but it makes them realise they came from one womb and each time they eat from the same plate they are reminded that they will always have each other, despite the squabbles and crossed words... Touching: A touch of sentimentality was posted on the photosharing site, as Nadiya revealed a unique routine she shares with her kids to help keep unity in the family home Eat up: She explained: 'We try and do this one day a week. We have a massive platter that we fill up with dinner and then one by one I feed each of them in turns till dinner is finished. Its their favourite part of the week' Painting and decorating: Fans lauded Nadiya for her innovative ideas as she shared a snap of an arts and crafts session with the kids, in which she protected her dining table with a fitted sheet over the top (pictured in October 2016) 'They have me, we have our huge plate and I will fill it each week and they will sit wriggling in anticipation and for just 30 minutes no fighting just talking with their mouths full and that is just fine with me !! #babies #feeding #love #laughter #oneplate #motherofthreekids #joy #thingsthatkeepustogether'. Nadiya, who has spoken at length in the past about her Muslim faith, also posted videos of her kids' felt reusable Ramadan advent calendars, used in the month of Ramadan, during which Muslims fast between dawn and sunset as a mark of devotion to their faith and closeness to Allah. In a caption under the snap, she penned: 'This is by far the most difficult month of the year. But it is the most anticipated in our house. Our chance to re group... 'Allow ourselves time to re discover ourselves again spiritually and as a family. We eat delicious food but more than anything we appreciate everything that passes our lips. Feel so lucky to have another Ramadhan to share with the people I love the most. Love. Pray. Share. Repeat'. Fans lauded Nadiya for her innovative ideas as she shared a snap of an arts and crafts session with the kids, in which she protected her dining table with a fitted sheet over the top. Stunning: She clearly takes pride in her stunning home as she shares a number of shots online Nadiya Hussain and Abdal have just married for the second time, years after they wed in an arranged marriage, posting a series of sweet pictures on Instagram on Tuesday. The couple wed when she was 19 after meeting him just once. The union had been arranged by their parents and they had a traditional Islamic ceremony in Bangladesh. She posted on Instagram: 'Nothing fancy just love. No frills. Just us. We did it again. I do. I always will. I would do it all over again #married #secondtime @swarovski @whiskdrizzle @abumdm.' The post included a picture of their hands, showing Hussain wearing a double finger ring, and a picture of them signing the wedding certificate. Another photo showed the TV chef and baker's colourful wedding cake, covered in macarons and mini cupcakes. It was recently claimed Angelina Jolie had told her son Brad 'never wanted to adopt him'. But Pax Jolie-Pitt proved there was no animosity between them when he shared a sweet throwback of his dad as a child to mark his 55th birthday. The 15-year-old teen revealed he would be seeing Brad later to celebrate the occasion together - in spite of his parents' differences. Paying tribute: Pax Jolie-Pitt shared a sweet throwback of his dad Brad Pitt as a child to mark his 55th birthday 'Happy Birthday to this stud Love you so much! Cant wait to see you later', he wrote. His older brother Maddox, 17, also paid tribute to the Hollywood actor on social media, wishing happy birthday to 'the coolest dad'. Pax was adopted by Angelina in March 2007 from an orphanage in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, two years after she met Brad on the film set of Mr & Mrs Smith. He wrote: 'Happy Birthday to this stud Love you so much! Cant wait to see you later' The post comes one week after it was claimed Angelina had allegedly told Pax that his father 'never wanted to adopt him,' according to an Us Weekly source. The 43-year-old also reportedly told the boy during the fallout that Brad 'was angry' she had proceeded with the adoption. 'It's harmed his and Brad's relationship, though Brad denied having said that specifically,' the insider claimed. The source claimed that Brad was instead concerned about adopting a three-year-old who didn't speak English less than a year after they welcomed Shiloh, in what was a 'very difficult time for the couple'. Bitter: The post comes one week after it was claimed Angelina had allegedly told Pax that his father 'never wanted to adopt him,' according to a new report Angelina allegedly told him at the time: 'Pax needs me more than Shiloh.' 'They almost ended the relationship, but Brad stayed,' the source added. Late last month, lawyers revealed the star couple had finally come to a custody agreement regarding their six children Maddox, Pax, Zahara, 13, Shiloh, 12, and ten-year-old twins Vivienne and Knox. Angelina reportedly wanted full custody, but settled to share physical and legal custody to avoid dragging the kids into a trial. While the matter has been settled for now, the split has taken its toll on Brad's relationship with each of his children, according to Us Weekly's insider. Happy: Angelina was pictured with youngest three kids Shiloh, Vivienne and Knox at The Grove in Los Angeles on Sunday His relationship with eldest Maddox was already strained, but now the actor 'has accepted that he'll likely never be able to repair their relationship.' 'He's always been headstrong and protective of his mother,' the source said, adding Maddox was his mom's 'closest confidant' during the fallout. Shiloh has 'seemed the most eager and willing [of the four eldest] to work on things with Brad,' the insider claimed. Zahara now has an 'improved' relationship with her dad, they added. Twins Knox and Vivienne meanwhile 'have been sheltered from a lot of the issues', the source said. According to Us Weekly, both actor's parenting skills came under fire following assessments from social workers. His side: The source explained that Brad was instead concerned about adopting a three year old who didn't speak English less than a year after they welcomed Shiloh, in what was a 'very difficult time for the couple' (pictured in 2009, shortly after birth of twins) The source said that while Brad made huge strides 'addressing his anger and psychological issues', one social worker 'felt he had trouble accepting personal responsibility and often blames others for his actions.' Angelina meanwhile was allegedly chastised 'for indulging the kids all the time and creating an unstable living environment.' One case worker reportedly believed she was was currying favor with kids, and that it hurt Brad's relationship with his kids; 'but the worker didn't think Angie was trying to actively sabotage the relationship.' The insider also claimed that Brad and Angelina will never see eye to eye. 'Angelina hasn't offered any concessions about her actions that have contributed to the situation,' the insider added. 'Angelina has a lot of emotional baggage from her own unstable childhood,' the source concluded, describing her as 'extremely complex.' Pitt and Jolie confirmed they were in a relationship in 2006, when she became pregnant with Shiloh. They married in August 2014 but split in September 2016. She's enjoying a relaxing getaway on the Caribbean island of Anguilla. And Naomie Harris kept her fans updated with stunning snaps from her holiday, sharing a striking swimsuit picture on her Instagram page on Tuesday. The actress, 42, showed off her lithe physique in a gold one-piece with cut-out detailing on the hips. Golden girl: Naomie Harris kept her fans updated with stunning snaps from her holiday, sharing a striking swimsuit picture on her Instagram page on Tuesday Naomie showed off her enviable figure in the simple swimwear as she posed by a private pool overlooking the beach. She captioned the snap: 'All that glitters is gold! #Anguilla #caribbean #theartofbelmond @melissaodabash @srmlondon'. 'Hello Sunshine!! Annnd... relax!!', Naomie captioned another picture of her posing in paradise. Chilling out: 'Hello Sunshine!! Annnd... relax!!', Naomie captioned another picture of her posing in paradise Naomie is enjoying a well-deserved break after hitting the promotional trail for her new film, Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle. The new interpretation of the classic Rudyard Kipling novel, in which Naomie voices Mowgli's adoptive wolf mother, was made available Netflix on December 7. The movie also stars Cate Blanchett voicing Kaa the Python, Benedict Cumberbatch as Shere Khan the tiger and Matthew Rhys as hunter John Lockwood. Director Andy Serkis spent a long five years making the project, only for Jon Favreau's rival big screen adaptation, The Jungle Book, to land in cinemas first. New film: Naomie is enjoying a well-deserved break after hitting the promotional trail for her new film, Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle, directed by Andy Serkis (pictured together at the London premiere two weeks ago) While Favreau's 2016 live action remake is more closely based on Disney's 1967 The Jungle Book animation, Andy no longer feel threatened because his film is a 'darker' exploration of the original Kipling material. Discussing Warner Bros. decision to sell the rights to Netflix, Serkis told Vanity Fair:'I genuinely feel like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders, 'It takes away any worry about being judged on an opening weekend, which in this climate, is what everybody judges the film on. 'And people would always judge Mowgli against the other release, you know? This way everybody, across the world, will see this movie.' Lucy Mecklenburgh has insisted she was just saying 'goodbye to a friend' after video footage emerged of her very cosy night out in Dubai with a mystery man. The reality star, 27, was filmed partying with pals at The Penthouse, Five Palm on December 7 away from beau Ryan Thomas, before getting extremely close to the fellow partygoer. In footage obtained exclusively by MailOnline, Lucy was seen planting a kiss on the mystery man's cheek, holding his hand and caressing his back, while sources claimed she was 'rubbing the inside of his leg' and they later left 'two minutes apart'. Up close and personal: Lucy Mecklenburgh has insisted she was just saying 'goodbye to a friend' after video footage emerged of her very cosy night out in Dubai with a mystery man Up close: The 27-year-old former TOWIE star, who has been dating Ryan Thomas since last summer, partied with pals at The Penthouse, Five Palm on December 7 before getting extremely close to the fellow partygoer After the video of Lucy's nightclub moment appeared, the star took to Twitter to claim she was bidding farewell to a friend in the clip - yet the point was met with ridicule from Twitter users, who insisted the exchange was suspicious. She wrote: 'Since when has saying goodbye to a friend turned into a cosy night out?! #ridiculous'. Outburst: She wrote: 'Since when has saying goodbye to a friend turned into a cosy night out?! #ridiculous' Lucy jetted to Dubai with pals earlier this month, where she kept the trip intricately documented on social media with a host of bikini and outfit images sitting alongside a shot taken on the day of her outing to The Penthouse. Instantly recognisable by her flirty yellow gown, the brunette beauty was seen alongside the mystery man during her time at the bar. Placing a hand on his back, Lucy approached the hunk with what appeared to be a tender kiss while she also held his hand during their moment together. Onlookers revealed to MailOnline: 'At The Penthouse, Five Palm, Dubai, Lucy Mecklenburgh walked in with a guy, who was not Ryan... Whispered words: Onlookers revealed to MailOnline: 'At The Penthouse, Five Palm, Dubai, Lucy Mecklenburgh walked in with a guy, who was not Ryan' Close and personal: In footage obtained exclusively by MailOnline, Lucy was seen planting a kiss on the mystery man's cheek, holding his hand and caressing his back, while sources claimed she was 'rubbing the inside of his leg' and they later left 'two minutes apart' 'Lucy seemed "overly" friendly with this guy. She was touching the inside of his legs, kissing his neck, holding his hand for at least an hour. Lucy then left on her own followed two mins later by the guy. They looked very cosy indeed!... 'Ryan is such a lovely guy and doesn't deserve to be treated like this especially as only two days ago they are all over OK! Magazine and she is saying she wants a ring next year from him'. MailOnline has contacted representatives for Lucy and Ryan for comment. After Lucy tweeted her personal explanation for the video, she was met with disdain from followers and viewers of the video, who seemed less convinced. Mellow yellow: Instantly recognisable by her flirty yellow gown, the brunette beauty was seen alongside the mystery man during her time at the bar Hold me close: 'Ryan is such a lovely guy and doesn't deserve to be treated like this especially as only two days ago they are all over OK! Magazine and she is saying she wants a ring next year from him' Shock: Twitter users began using memes, including a GIF of Pinocchio, to claim her story did not check out, with users writing: 'You can convince yourself but no one else. That video speaks for itself!... naughty naughty' Twitter users began using memes, including a GIF of Pinocchio, to claim her story did not check out, with users writing: 'You can convince yourself but no one else. That video speaks for itself!... naughty naughty... 'Bad timing before Christmas that... I know!! So can u still see my original comment on her page then?.. Hmmm, was going to defend you until I saw the video. If you're still in a relationship with Ryan, that was not an acceptable way to 'say goodbye'.' Some fans however accepted Lucy's version of events, with fans writing: 'Wow such innocent video and what a mess people are making of this - our world has become unbelievable, people are loving drama and misery too much. I pray everyone stops spreading this bulls**t'. Lucy went on to block some Twitter users who contradicted her, before retweeting others in a bold display of defiance. Just a day before the video's reveal, Lucy and Ryan, whose relationship flourished when they met on Celebrity Island With Bear Grylls, appeared in a romantic shoot. In depth: Placing a hand on his back, Lucy approached the hunk with what appeared to be a tender kiss while she also held his hand during their moment together Shock: Lucy jetted to Dubai with pals earlier this month, where she kept the trip intricately documented on social media with a host of bikini and outfit images sitting alongside a shot taken on the day of her outing to The Penthouse Happy days: Ryan, 34, admitted that the couple are looking for the perfect home for them to raise children in: 'We want to find a family home that we can stay in for a long time' (pictured with his daughter Scarlett) The couple revealed to OK! magazine that they're planning on buying a house together in the new year to raise their family in. She told her beau that she is hoping for a proposal in 2019 accompanied by a lot of bling: 'Youd better get saving because I want a really heavy left hand'. Ryan, 34, admitted that the couple are looking for the perfect home for them to raise children in: 'We want to find a family home that we can stay in for a long time'. While Lucy added that after a year and a half together the timing is right for them to look at their future. Happy days: While Lucy added that after a year and a half together the timing is right for them to look at their future (pictured Pride Of Britain Awards in October) She added: 'I wouldnt waste my time with someone if I didnt believe we were on the same page about children and getting married. I know we both want the same things in the future.' In June, Lucy and Ryan reportedly split briefly after Ryan was seen getting close to a model in a Manchester club - leading to fury from Lucy. Insider told The Sun: 'Two days ago it looked like there was no way back. Lucy was furious and wouldn't listen to anything Ryan was telling her. She'd been told he had a wandering eye and had got close to a model... Way back when: Lucy's love life has been extremely well-publicised since she burst onto TV screens in 2010 as Mark Wright's (centre) love interest in TOWIE, during which she locked horns with his long-time love Lauren Goodger (third, left) over the Lothario's affections Shock: A year later, Mark popped the question to Lauren in a pub car park however their engagement came to a dramatic close when Lucy and Mark (pictured in 2010) enjoyed a dalliance in Marbella, despite Lucy being in the early stages of her romance with Mario Falcone 'But at the end of the day there is a lot of feeling there and it would be such a waste to chuck it away over some idle gossip.' Lucy's love life has been extremely well-publicised since she burst onto TV screens in 2010 as Mark Wright's love interest in TOWIE, during which she locked horns with his long-time love Lauren Goodger over the Lothario's affections. A year later, Mark popped the question to Lauren in a pub car park however their engagement came to a dramatic close when Lucy and Mark enjoyed a dalliance in Marbella, despite Lucy being in the early stages of her romance with Mario Falcone. Way back when: In November 2011, history repeated itself again when Lucy cheated on her then-fiance Mario (pictured in 2012), who had let her previous dalliance slide due to the infant stages of their love, with Mark yet lied about the latest hook-up for weeks Shocking: Following the bitter dissolution of her relationship with Mario, Lucy later hooked up with co-star Dan Osborne, as it was claimed they made a sex tape on their first night together during The Only Way Is Marbs special in 2013 (pictured together in June 2013) In November 2011, history repeated itself again when Lucy cheated on her then-fiance Mario, who had let her previous dalliance slide due to the infant stages of their love, with Mark yet lied about the latest hook-up for weeks. Following the bitter dissolution of her relationship with Mario, Lucy later enjoyed a fleeting romance with co-star Dan Osborne, as it was claimed they made a sex tape on their first night together during The Only Way Is Marbs special in 2013. Later that year, the clan headed to Las Vegas for another spin-off, during which she struck up a romance with Tom Pearce - as it was revealed they had enjoyed a liaison in the back of a limousine during their stint in Sin City. She celebrated her 10-year wedding anniversary with husband Chris Hughes earlier this month. And Amanda Holden took her appreciation for her other half to another level as she and their daughters Lexi, 12, and Hollie, six, dedicated a sweet song to celebrate Chris' birthday. In the black and white clip posted to Instagram on Wednesday, the BGT judge, 47, showcased her impressive vocals to The Greatest Showman track Tightrope by Michelle Ingrid Williams. True love: Amanda Holden took her appreciation for husband Chris Hughes to another level as she dedicated a sweet song to celebrate his birthday and their tenth wedding anniversary Lookalike daughters Lexi and Hollie bore a striking resemblance to their presenter mother as they took to the studio to celebrate their father's birthday. The former Superstar host was certainly in the musical zone as she displayed her stellar voice while belting out the track. Gushing with joy over the special occasion, Amanda captioned the image: 'A fantastic Daddy and husband. We made this little video for #TheGreatestshowman in our lives to celebrate #10 years married and Chrispys birthday today. Following in her footsteps: The BGT judge, 47, joined her daughters Lexi (L), 12, and Hollie (R), six, in the studio to sing The Greatest Showman track Tightrope by Michelle Ingrid Williams Smitten: They celebrated their 10-year wedding anniversary with a trip to the Maldives last month 'Were sharing this with you too and wish you all a happy & joyous Christmas x To view the full version, head over to my Twitter page', she added. Fans took to her Instagram account in their droves over the adorable gesture as one penned: 'Wow this is amazing. You all have beautiful voices Xxx'. In awe, another wrote: ' Your voice made me cry xxx I actually love this video so much. Xxxx', while a third said: 'Aww, so beautiful & a really loving thing to do for a man you all adore .' Impressive: Lookalike daughters Lexi and Hollie bore a striking resemblance to their presenter mother as they took to the studio to celebrate their father's birthday Deep in thought: The former Superstar host was certainly in the musical zone as she displayed her stellar voice while belting out the track Sweet moment: Amanda showed her youngest daughter the ropes around singing during the intimate studio session It's been a month of celebrations for Amanda and Chris who recently returned from their 'second honeymoon' in the Maldives and a celeb-packed party for the wedding anniversary. The couple tied the knot in December 2008 at Babington House in Somerset - two years after welcoming their first child together. They welcomed Hollie a year after Amanda's tragic stillbirth after falling pregnant with son Theo. Amanda has since candidly spoken of the heartbreak she endured losing her son, admitting it was 'one of the most surreal moments of my life.' 'The Greatest Showman in our lives': The blonde gushed with joy over the special occasion as she described her other half as the 'The Greatest Showman' High spirits: It's been a month of celebrations for Amanda and Chris who recently returned from their 'second honeymoon' in the Maldives and held a party for their anniversary Speaking about her loss in an interview on Giovanna Fletchers Happy Mum Happy Baby podcast recently, Amanda recalled the moment her son's heart stopped: 'They scanned my tummy... and it was one of the most surreal moments of my life. 'I remember hearing this woman screaming and shouting and I was thinking, "Where is that coming from?" And it was coming from me and I didnt even know I was doing it. 'The obstetrician was trying to tell me that my baby's heart had stopped beating and was not alive anymore and I just was saying, "I dont know what Im going to tell Lexi," and this is the woman I could hear, screaming that. And I didnt know it was me. It was the oddest, most awful thing.' Sweet: Fans took to her Instagram account in their droves over the adorable gesture as one penned: 'Wow this is amazing. You all have beautiful voices Xxx' Adding to the pain was the fact that Amanda then learned that she would have to give birth to her son, just moments after learning he'd passed away. 'The weirdest thing was, I forgot completely that I would have to give birth,' she recalled. 'Thats the other thing. You go, "Oh my god I have... get this baby out of me. And I absolutely cannot do that..." I don't how I did that. 'The hours that followed were awful. I refused to have a natural birth, because I just thought I cant do that, I need to have an operation and I need to get this baby out of me, and I was really cross and really heartbroken and all the things. Sweet: The couple tied the knot in December 2008 at Babington House in Somerset - two years after welcoming their first child together Family first: They welcomed Hollie a year after Amanda's tragic stillbirth after falling pregnant with son Theo 'You just cant imagine, I was absolutely scared to death and I kept saying to my midwives, "When he comes out, I dont know if I am going to be able to hold him..." You know, I was so cross, scared to death.' She continued: 'I remember Jackie [Amandas midwife] saying, "We are really struggling to pull him out of you, he doesnt want to leave you," which was really sad. 'She held him in her arms and Chris left the room. He waited 'til right to the moment and said, "Mandy, I cant you know I need to leave the room." 'And I respected anything he wanted to do, was totally fine by me, and he left the room and Jackie just described him to me and I just said, "I just need him, Im still a mummy." Its the weirdest sensation. And I just held him and he was perfect.' Viewers are coming to an end of their four-year wait for the new season of Luther. And Idris Elba has continued to relay his hopes for a movie version of the BBC One TV series, teasing that they are 'very close to doing it next year.' Speaking to LADBible, the British actor, 46, admitted: 'I've always said there should be a movie. I really want to do that and we're very close to doing that next year, hopefully, so let's see.' 'Take it up a scale': Idris Elba, 46, has continued to relay his hopes for a movie version of the BBC One TV series, teasing that they are 'very close to doing it next year' Idris continued: 'For me it would be nice to take Luther up a scale. Make the storyline bigger, make it slightly more international.' Speaking recently in Radio Times' Christmas issue, Idris spoke yet again of the possibility of a movie version of Luther, saying a big screen adaptation would be on a more 'international' scale. He said: 'With Luther as a film, the scale is bigger the crime is bigger, the bad guys are bigger, Luther is bigger and theres a more international lens put on it. 'Its filmed in London now because thats where we are, but if we do a movie version, it can be "Right, then he went to Brazil" and you can be in the favelas because its on this larger scale.' Viewers are coming to an end of their four-year wait for the new season of Luther 'The crime will be bigger': Speaking recently Idris spoke yet again of the possibility of a movie version of Luther, saying a big screen adaptation would be on a more 'international' scale This comes after Idris admitted he thought his hit TV series Luther would be over if he didn't make a new series. The star has been away from the crime drama since the end of 2015, taking time out to focus on his DJ'ing career. But the Londoner told how if he didn't do another series, which is set to air in January, the show would end for good. He told the Daily Telegraph: 'I remember going: "If I don't do it, that's the end of the show. I need to do it." ' 'That's the end': This comes after Idris admitted he thought his hit TV series Luther would be over if he didn't make a new series DCI John Luther is known for sporting his trademark long tweed coat, something show bosses were originally planning to ditch. The actor said: 'They wanted us to change it: "He's not wearing this silly coat. He needs to wear a suit." 'And we were, "No. He's wearing this coat and he won't wear any other coat, and we won't even discuss why he never changes his clothes." ' Idris noted that, along with his acting and DJ'ing careers, he's hoping to branch out into the world of fashion design. Outfit change: DCI John Luther is known for sporting his trademark long tweed coat, something show bosses were originally planning to ditch New four part series: In a press release, BBC recently confirmed that the three year wait for new episodes is finally over The Dark Tower star added he would like to create unisex clothing because his biggest fans are female. In a press release, BBC recently confirmed that the three year wait for new episodes is finally over. 'DCI John Luther is once more called to immerse himself in the deepest depths of human depravity in a new four-part series written by Neil Cross. Wunmi Mosaku joins as new recruit D.S. Catherine Halliday,' the release reveals. The fifth series starts on New Years Day. She's seen her relationship go from strength-to-strength since meeting boyfriend Danny Flasher in late 2016. And Chloe Lewis paid tribute to her love in a sweet Instagram post as she celebrated her two-year anniversary with the handsome stockbroker on Tuesday. The TOWIE star, 27, shared a throwback snap from the couple's recent holiday to the Maldives, which saw the attractive twosome grinning into the camera while posing for a beach selfie. 'The happiest two years to us': Chloe Lewis paid tribute to her boyfriend Danny Flasher in a sweet Instagram post as they celebrated their two-year anniversary on Tuesday Alongside the photo, Chloe wrote: 'The happiest 2 years to us. I dont know what Id do without you. I LOVE YOU.' The TV personality seems to have been pining for her winter sun break in recent days, and has treated her 1 million followers to a series of sizzling swimwear snaps after returning home to Essex. The brunette beauty showed off her toned and tanned form in a white bikini in one shot, before slipping on a leopard print bardot crop top while cosying up to her shirtless boyfriend in another snap. Chloe captioned the photograph: 'We just have the best times. I Love you.' Life's a beach: The TOWIE star, 27, posed in a skimpy white bikini as she shared throwback snaps from the couple's recent holiday to the Maldives Let me take a selfie: The brunette beauty slipped on a leopard print bardot crop top while cosying up to her shirtless boyfriend in another snap The couple spent a week soaking up the sunshine at the envy-inducing Kandima Maldives resort on a pre-Christmas break earlier this month. Before heading to the Maldives for their relaxing break, Chloe and Danny enjoyed a few days in Dubai. The brunette posted more holiday snaps from Le Royal Meridien Beach Resort and Spa as the couple unwound on the first leg of their winter trip. Chloe and Danny met in December 2016, went public with their romance in early 2017, and moved in together in April. Fun in the sun: The TV personality seems to have been pining for her winter sun break, and has treated her 1 million followers to a series of sizzling swimwear snaps after returning home Paradise: The couple spent a week soaking up the sunshine at the envy-inducing Kandima Maldives resort on a pre-Christmas break earlier this month Cute couple: The TOWIE star wrapped her arms around her banker beau as he placed a kiss on her cheek in another shot posted to her Instagram account Life's a beach: The couple enjoyed a beach final stroll, grinning from ear-to-ear as they wandered along the shoreline holding hands The reality star has previously admitted her boyfriend has turned down a role on the ITVBe show that propelled her to fame. Speaking on This Morning in August, she said: 'The show have asked me about him coming on, it's his choice. He's got a good job.' Chloe told Fabulous Magazine in April: 'I'm gonna keep him separate! I'm going to keep him all to myself! I couldn't do a relationship on the show again. 'I would never say never, because I don't know what the future holds - but no, for now, definitely not. Island retreat: Chloe told her Instagram followers it was the couple's 'last day in paradise' while thanking the resort for an 'amazing week' Wild thing: Chloe shared a series of snaps from her idyllic holiday with stockbroker boyfriend Danny earlier this month Taking a dip: The TOWIE star looked incredible as she slipped into a leopard print bikini while cooling off with a dip in the ocean 'But, Danny is all for TOWIE for me, he's like "I want you to do well, I want you to stay on it". 'He loves all the goss and everything, but for him he's got a good job up the city and he does really well so it's not something I think is for him!' Chloe dated former TOWIE co-star Jake Hall, 25, for seven years, but their relationship endured a very public breakdown on the show in 2016. Jake is now a father to daughter River, 13 months, with fiancee, Swedish Real Housewives Of Cheshire star Misse Beqiri, 32, who he has been dating since shortly after his split from Chloe. Heavenly: Chloe shared numerous Instagram stories as she showed her followers around the stunning resort, declaring she will 'never get bored' of the views offered in the island paradise Wow! The TV personality and her banker boyfriend were staying in an envy-inducing water villa during their Maldives break She is often seen putting on a stylish display in her hometown. And Wednesday proved to be no different for Megan McKenna, as she stepped out in Essex looking chic alongside her mother, Tanya. The former TOWIE star, 26, showcased her savvy sense of style in a pair of high-waisted flared jeans and a statement furry coat. Glamorous: Megan McKenna, 26, cut a chic figure as she stepped out alongside her mother in Essex for a lunch date Megan paired her jeans with a striped jumper, that boasted a zip down its front, tucking it into her waistband to accentuate her slender frame. The beauty sported a pair of leather boots and wore a black fedora hat, while leaving her lightened locks down in a sleek and straight style to sit just past her shoulders. She wasn't without her usual glamour for the outing and favoured a heavy make-up look that boasted contoured cheeks and a shimmering pink lip. Megan was seen linking arms with her mum as they made their way to lunch, with the former Ex On The Beach favourite appearing in high spirits. Delight: The former TOWIE star showcased her savvy sense of style in a pair of high-waisted flared jeans and a statement furry coat Fashionista: Megan paired her jeans with a striped jumper, that boasted a zip down its front, tucking it into her waistband to accentuate her slender frame Her appearance in Essex comes after Megan recently released her debut country music album Story of Me, which includes Far Cry From Love and High Heeled Shoes - tracks Megan first performed for fans to see on her ITVBe spin-off There's Something About Megan. The show documented Megan's trip to Nashville where she met with songwriters and performed her own showcase in the famous Bluebird Cafe. On its release Megan's album had topped the charts, reportedly knocking country legend Dolly Parton from the top spot on iTunes. She currently sits at number six. Cracking the charts: Her appearance in Essex comes after Megan recently released her debut country music album Story of Me As well as embarking on her country music career, Megan is looking for love again and has signed up for the new series of E4's Celebs Go Dating. She will star on the dating show alongside her ex-boyfriend Pete Wicks, returning star Sam Thompson, Kerry Katona, Love Island's Georgia Steel and Chelsee Healey. Megan is currently single following her split from ex-boyfriend Mike Thalassitis. She was accused of spending the night with TOWIE's Adam Oukhellou weeks before her make or break holiday with ex Mike Thalassitis - reportedly getting close to him after they partied at London's Libertine nightclub with his sister Yazmin Oukhellou and her boyfriend James Lock in September. It's claimed their romantic tryst came as Megan's ex Mike was away filming for raucous reality TV series Ex On The Beach. Looking for love: As well as embarking on her country music career, Megan is looking for love again and has signed up for the new series of E4's Celebs Go Dating Reality star cast: She will star on the dating show alongside her ex-boyfriend Pete Wicks, returning star Sam Thompson, Kerry Katona and Love Island's Georgia Steel (above) According to The Sun, the former Celebrity Big Brother star hopped across town to party with Adam and their pals shortly after attending a film premiere in the capital. A source told the publication: 'They all decided to continue the night at Adams place which was where he got close to Megan. 'At the time Megan was single and free to spend her days getting to know whoever she wanted. 'Pals close to Megan said she had fun that night and there was definite chemistry between her and Adam but nothing ended up developing between them.' A representative for Megan has since denied the accusations, claiming that the pair partied together at Adam's house but did not become intimate. Karl Stefanovic's axing from the Today show sent shock waves through the Australian media industry on Wednesday. And amid the chaos, the 44-year-old is focused on supporting new wife Jasmine Yarbrough's show business. Within hours of his departure announcement, the father-of-three took to Instagram to support 34-year-old Jasmine's shoe brand Mara and Mine. Happy wife, happy life! Karl Stefanovic focuses on supporting Jasmine Yarbrough's shoe business on Instagram after being axed from Today Karl 'liked' an Instagram post shared by Jasmine's business page for Mara and Mine. The post was announcing the brand's one year anniversary party on Thursday night at their Paddington store in Sydney, offering 20% discount to shoppers. Jasmine also 'liked' the post, although it is doubtful the newlyweds will be in attendance, as they're believed to still be on honeymoon in Aspen, Colorado. Supportive husband! Shortly after news broke on Wednesday that Karl would not return to Today, he took to Instagram to support Jasmine's shoe brand Mara and Mine (pictured) Big achievement! Karl 'liked' an Instagram post shared by Jasmine's business page announcing the brand's one year anniversary party on Thursday night at their Paddington store in Sydney Karl and Jasmine said 'I Do' at the luxurious One & Only Palmilla Resort in Mexico's San Jose del Cabo on Saturday, December 8. Following that, the pair made a brief stop at the Beverly Hills Hotel in LA following their four day wedding celebrations. The couple were joined by Karl's close friend James Packer and his girlfriend Kylie Lim for a dinner date in snowy Aspen on Sunday. Just married! It is doubtful Karl and Jasmine will attend the party, as they're believed to still be on honeymoon in Aspen after saying 'I Do' in Mexico on Saturday, December 8 In a statement issued to Daily Mail Australia on Wednesday discussing his exit from Today, Karl said: 'For the last 14 years I've co-hosted the best show on television. 'I can't thank Nine enough for the opportunity. I never in my wildest dreams thought I would be good enough to host this grand show for so long. 'Thanks to our viewers mostly, you are what matters most. It's been a tough time. Thanks for hanging in there. 'I look forward to seeing you in another capacity at this great Network soon.' It has only just been confirmed they would be filming a reunion to mark the 10-year anniversary of the series. And The Inbetweeners cast have now been spotted filming the hugely-anticipated special, Fwends Reunited, at Elstree Studios in London. The cast of the beloved Channel 4 comedy were all present - save for Emily Atack, who seemingly missed out on the event as she was out celebrating her 29th birthday. On set: The Inbetweeners cast have now been spotted filming the hugely-anticipated special, Fwends Reunited, at Elstree Studios in London Putting in appearances: Emily Head and her father Anthony, best known for playing Giles in Buffy, were also on set Simon Bird, Joe Thomas, James Buckley and Blake Harrison - who played Will McKenzie, Simon Cooper, Jay Cartwright and Neil Sutherland respectively - looked thrilled to be reunited as they sat on a sofa and chatted to the show's host, comedian Jimmy Carr. They were joined by other cast members, including Greg Davies, who played the cantankerous head teacher Mr. Gilbert and Emily Head, who played Simon's love interest Carly. Emily's father Anthony Head, best known for playing Giles in Buffy, was also on set. Fans will remember that Anthony made an appearance in the first Inbetweeners film as Will's dad. Great news: The reunion show, which marks the 10-year anniversary of the series, was only confirmed this week Main men: Blake Harrison, Simon Bird, James Buckley and Joe Thomas were spotted on set (from left to right) - the actors played Neil Sutherland, Will McKenzie, Jay Cartwright and Simon Cooper respectively Missing out: The cast of the beloved Channel 4 comedy were all present - save for Emily Atack, who missed out on the event as she was celebrating her 29th birthday (pictured right) Also present were the female leads who appeared in The Inbetweeners movies, released in which aired in 2011 and 2014. The cast will be looking back at scenes from the hit comedy, which ran for three seasons, from May 2008 until 2010. I'm A Celebrity runner up Emily was nowhere to be seen, however, as she partied the night away. Emily starred in the series as Charlotte Hinchcliffe, the prettiest and most popular girl in the school who has a soft spot for lovable nerd Will. Putting in an appearance: Emily played Simon's love interest Carly in the hit series Back together again: The cast looked back at scenes from the hit comedy, which ran for three seasons, from May 2008 until 2010 After teasing a reunion for some time, the foursome officially announced the show on Wednesday. Appearing in a newly-released promo shot, the hapless foursome posed outside the fictional Rudge Park Comprehensive alongside the now-iconic yellow Fiat Cinquecento Hawaii car as they prepared to film the Channel 4 show on Tuesday. Simon, Joe, Blake and James last appeared on TV screens in 2010 before releasing two hit films, much to the delight of devoted fans of the show. Fan favourite: They were joined by other cast members, including Greg Davies, who played the cantankerous head teacher Fun-filled reunion: The foursome looked thrilled to be reunited as they sat on a sofa and chatted to the show's host, comedian Jimmy Carr Selfie time: Excited audience members took snaps with the cast Taking to Instagram to share the image, James explained to fans that his prominent moustache in the snap was due to the fact he was filming his Eighties set comedy White Gold rather than a detail for his character. Fans soon swarmed the comments section to pen: 'My prayers have been answered!!!... I didn't know u guys were in ur 30s u all look younger tbf... its deadly cant wait to see the special... 'Been waiting for this!! Need to make it a series again, maybe how each of them are getting on since school. Would be epic!!!... Happy days! The Fwends Reunited special comes eight years after the final episode of the risque comedy aired Shocker: Simon, Joe, Blake and James last appeared on TV screens in 2010 before releasing two hit films, much to the delight of devoted fans of the show 'I hope more Inbetweeners movies follow. I know they wouldnt be Inbetweeners anymore, but theres still plenty of hilarity and stories to be shared, from the guys in their adult lives with relationships and jobs, etc.' In May James, who played foul-mouthed Jay, teased fans with the reveal of a reunion as he posted an image with his former co-stars. James posted a picture to Twitter with the caption 'series four pre-production meal' before sending fans into a frenzy - despite lead star Simon insisting that the show is over for good. Speaking ahead of the return, he said: 'We are like family, and any excuse to get together well take. Thats why were doing this show its just an excuse to meet up.' Shocker: Simon, Joe, Blake and James last appeared on TV screens in 2010 before releasing two hit films, much to the delight of devoted fans of the show (pictured in the 2014 movie) Not lasting: In October, James admitted he does not feel the show would be well-received if made now, due to the 'joke police' in modern comedy Ahead of the return, Simon said: 'I get called briefcase w****r, which is obviously a classic. Bumder is a bit of a go-to. All the old favourites.' In October, James admitted he does not feel the show would be well-received if made now, due to the 'joke police' in modern comedy. A decade after the show kicked off, he spoke to Digital Spy about the programme, which he insisted would be problematic to a modern audience. He said: 'Nowadays, it feels very black and white with comedy. There's no in-between, it's just, 'This person said this on television - isn't that terrible? It's killing comedy... There seems to be a joke police, nowadays.' She stars in the new Netflix documentary The American Meme. And on Wednesday, Paris Hilton stepped out for a press day in NYC. The 37-year-old reality star showed off her legs in a black and white perforated dress as she made an appearance on Good Day New York and Andy Cohen's Sirius Radio show. Leading lady: Paris Hilton stars in the new Netflix documentary The American Meme. And on Wednesday, the 37-year-old reality star stepped out for a press day in NYC Hilton, who wore her hair in glamorous curls, teamed her A-line dress with lace-up black pumps and diamond stud earrings. The Simple Life star battled the Big Apple chill in a puffy black jacket, while rocking a pair of cat eye sunglasses. And ahead of her early morning press appearances, Paris grabbed coffee and breakfast from a nearby Starbucks. So chic: Paris showed off her leggy figure in a black and white perforated dress as she made an appearance on Good Day New York and Andy Cohen's Sirius Radio show The American Meme dives into the world of four social media influencers, including Hilton, Josh Ostrovsky, Brittany Furlan, and Kirill Bichutsky. 'It's such an important topic right nowjust how social media has completely changed the world,' she told the hosts of Good Day New York. 'When you see this film, you really get to dive into my life.' The two-hour movie is currently Netflix's number one documentary. 'I'm so proud,' Hilton said. 'I feel like my story has never been told. I really wanted to say my truth and let people know how I really feel and what I've been through.' Order up: Ahead of her early morning press appearances, Paris grabbed coffee and breakfast from a nearby Starbucks Along with American Meme, Paris is also promoting her new fragrancePlatinum Rush. 'I run a huge empire so every product I do I'm involved 100 percentfrom the design of the bottle to the fragrance,' she said. Platinum Rush, which dropped in July, marks Hilton's 24th fragrance. She is turning on the charm during her promotional tour for the new movie Vice. And Amy Adams proved on trend as she was spotted arriving to the Good Morning America studios in New York City on Wednesday. The 44-year-old actress embraced her sophisticated chic style in a camel overcoat and matching high heels for her Big Apple outing. Charming: Amy Adams, 44, was spotted arriving to the Good Morning America studios in New York City on Wednesday Daring to impress, the Oscar winner wrapped her enviable figure in a light blue sweater underneath the tailored coat. She kept her trademark ginger tresses long and loose as they gently cascaded over her shoulders. The day before, Amy stopped by NBC's Late Night with Seth Meyers before promoting the political film with a panel with director Adam McKay at MoMA. The auburn starlet was kind enough to stop, sign autographs and pose with fans after the event, which was hosted by The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences. Embrace: The actress embraced her sophisticated chic style in a camel overcoat and matching high heels for her Big Apple outing Impressive: Daring to impress, the Oscar winner wrapped her enviable figure in a light blue sweater underneath the tailored coat Hair story: She kept her trademark ginger tresses long and loose as they gently cascaded over her shoulders Adams wowed wearing a thick red winter coat as she signed and posed with fans. Before rubbing elbows with the public, Amy wore an elegant black long-sleeved dress and black Christian Louboutin boots, the same classy and elegant outfit she wore to Seth Meyer's earlier in the evening. Inside Adams posed with her director McKay before the Academy screening of Vice, followed by a Q&A moderated by Joe Neumaier. Vice Q&A: The actress teamed up with director Adam McKay at the event, which was hosted by the The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences Adams portrays Lynne Cheney in this film that charts the unprecedented power wielded by her husband, Vice President Dick Cheney (Christian Bale). The cast also includes Steve Carell as Donald Rumsfeld, Sam Rockwell as George W. Bush and Tyler Perry as Colin Powell. Vice is already in the thick of awards season consideration, having been nominated for six Golden Globes earlier this month. Amy on Late Night: Inside she spoke with Meyers while wearing an elegant black long-sleeved dress and black Christian Louboutin boots Talking with Seth: She kept the same classy and elegant outfit as she went from Rockefeller Center to the Museum of Modern Art just a few blocks away for the Vice Q&A The film is up for Best Picture - Comedy or Musical, with Adams picking up her eighth nomination along for Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical, with Christian Bale landing Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical and Sam Rockwell getting a Best Supporting Actor nod. McKay also picked up two nominations himself, one for Best Director and the other for Best Original Screenplay. Golden Globe nominee: McKay also picked up two nominations himself, one for Best Director and the other for Best Original Screenplay Q&A: Adams posed with her director McKay before the Academy screening of Vice, followed by a Q&A moderated by Joe Neumaier Adams is coming off her critically-acclaimed role in HBO's mini-series Sharp Objects, where she played Camille Preaker. She also has The Woman in the Window in post-production, where she stars alongside Gary Oldman and Julianne Moore. The actress was also recently confirmed to return as Giselle in Disney's Disenchanted, a sequel to 2007's Enchanted with James Marsden and Patrick Dempsey also slated to return. Vice chat: Adams portrays Lynne Cheney in this film that charts the unprecedented power wielded by her husband, Vice President Dick Cheney (Christian Bale) Oscar nominee: The five-time Oscar nominee discussed her new film at a screening hosted by The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences Coming soon: Amy can be seen in Vice when it comes out on Christmas Day She's never shy to flaunt her fabulous figure. And Emily Ratajkowski proved on trend as she showcased her enviable physique during a morning outing in Los Angeles on Wednesday. The 27-year-old supermodel flaunted her toned tummy and sculpted abs as she rocked a camel crop top and black sweatpants. Stunner: Emily Ratajkowski, 27, showcased her enviable physique during a morning outing in Los Angeles on Wednesday Daring to impress, the I Feel Pretty actress stomped the streets in box fresh sneakers as she kept her trademark tresses long and loose. Emily was seen without her husband of 10 months, Sebastian Bear-McClard. Emily and Sebastian wed in a secret ceremony at a New York courthouse earlier in the year. Speaking to Marie Claire in May, she revealed that people initially came after her marriage. Flaunt: The supermodel flaunted her toned tummy and sculpted abs as she rocked a camel crop top and black sweatpants 'People came after my marriage, like, "Wow. I give it three weeks." I'm like, "What?",' she said. 'No one can take women seriously on any choices that they make, especially if theyre unique to them and they dont play into the way we think women should get married. Its a constant writing-off.' Meanwhile, the beauty spoke to Vogue Australia and said she 'doesn't really care if wearing a crop-top is somehow playing into some patriarchy.' Impressive: Daring to impress, the I Feel Pretty actress stomped the streets in box fresh sneakers as she kept her trademark tresses long and loose '[Like] I'm playing into a patriarchal society by looking the way I look and capitalizing on my sexiness,' she said. 'It makes me feel good about myself, and I shouldn't be limited on that. Making rules as to what a feminist should look like or wear is insane to me.' 'I think it's sexism. I think in general people dont really want to hear women talk about these kinds of things, and especially women who make money on how they look: they especially resent them using their voice,' she added. He played the sensei of the Cobra Kai dojo in 1984 hit film The Karate Kid. And 72-year-old actor Martin Kove showed how close he is to his iconic character on Tuesday - by wearing his jacket. The star of the forthcoming Quentin Tarantino film Once Upon A Time In Hollywood donned a Cobra Kai bomber jacket as he went grocery shopping in Los Angeles. Signature role: Martin Kove showed how close he is to his iconic Karate Kid character on Tuesday - by wearing his jacket The Rambo: First Blood Part II actor slipped the distinctive jacket on over a check shirt and jeans for the outing. On his feet he kept it casual in Nike sneakers. The screen veteran returned to his signature role as the psychopathic sensei John Kreese in the recent YouTube Premium series Cobra Kai. The series reunited him with original Karate Kid stars Ralph Macchio and William Zabka. Keeping it casual: The Rambo: First Blood Part II actor slipped the distinctive jacket on over a check shirt and jeans for the outing Kove appeared in the first three Karate Kid films as an ex-Special Forces Vietnam veteran who runs the infamous Cobra Kai karate dojo. Throughout the series, he clashes with rival teacher Keisuke Miyagi (played by Noriyuka 'Pat' Morita) and his pupil, Daniel LaRusso (Macchio). While the first film garnered critical acclaim, critics and audiences were less enthusiastic about its sequels. The sensational news that Karl Stefanovic had been axed from the Today show on Wednesday led to his long-term manager's website crashing. And on Thursday morning, SF Celebrity Management director Sharon Finnigan's web page remained broken. Visitors to her website reached an error message, which read: 'Account Suspended. This Account has been suspended. Contact your hosting provider for more information.' Scroll down for video Meltdown! Karl Stefanovic's manager Sharon Finnigan's website CRASHED within hours of him being sacked from the Today show. Pictured at Karl's wedding in Mexico earlier this month The broken website is perhaps symbolic of Karl's newfound career status, and shows just how much public interest there is in the former network star's fall from grace. Indeed, Sharon dodged questions from the media on Wednesday, just hours after her No. 1 client was unceremoniously dumped from the Today show. The manager offered no comment to waiting media outside her Sydney mansion and appeared to be engaged in a tense phone call. Overload? Visitors to Sharon's website on Thursday reached this error message, which read: 'This Account has been suspended. Contact your hosting provider for more information' Karl is currently at on his honeymoon in Aspen, Colorado with new bride, 34-year-old shoe designer Jasmine Yarbrough. Finnigan attended the couple's four-day wedding in Cabo, Mexico earlier this month. 'Wishing you all the happiness in the world love you both,' she captioned a photo shared to Instagram of herself and the groom. Tight-lipped: Sharon dodged questions from the media on Wednesday, just hours after her No. 1 client was unceremoniously dumped from the Today show. She is pictured with guests at Karl's Mexican wedding, including Peter Stefanovic and Sylvia Jeffreys Finnigan was reportedly present when Nine chief executive Hugh Marks delivered the bad news to Karl over the phone, The Daily Telegraph reported. The 2011 Gold Logie winner remains contracted with the network and will resume filming season two of This Time Next Year in February. It is currently unknown if he has any other projects in the works at Nine. Karl Stefanovic was 'blindsided' by Channel Nine's decision to axe him from the Today show, network sources have claimed. Before the 44-year-old flew to Mexico to marry Jasmine Yarbrough earlier this month, he had reportedly been reassured by bosses that his job would be safe. 'Karl had no idea - he left for Mexico thinking he would still be on Today,' a Nine insider told the Herald Sun on Thursday. 'He left for Mexico thinking he would still be on Today': Blindsided Karl Stefanovic (right) had 'no idea' he would be sacked on his honeymoon. Pictured with Jasmine Yarbrough (left) 'They told him face to face. They looked him in the eye. But the writing was on the wall,' the source added. Jasmine and Karl's four-day wedding extravaganza was apparently the ammunition the network needed to finally pull the trigger on the embattled breakfast TV star. 'The Karl situation was a pressure-cooker and we needed to release the valve,' a senior Nine source told the publication. Daily Mail Australia has contacted Channel Nine for comment. Happy wife, happy life! Karl's axing from the Today show sent shockwaves through the Australian media industry on Wednesday - but amid the chaos, he redirected his focus on supporting his wife Jasmine Yarbrough's fashion business Karl's axing from the Today show sent shockwaves through the Australian media industry on Wednesday. But amid the chaos, the father-of-three redirected his focus on supporting his wife's fashion business. Within hours of his departure announcement, he 'liked' an Instagram post shared by Mara & Mine, the shoe brand Jasmine co-founded with Tamara Ingham in 2013. It was his only social media activity at at time when his exit from Today was the biggest news story in Australia. Different priorities? Within hours of his departure announcement, Karl 'liked' an Instagram post shared by Mara & Mine, the shoe brand Jasmine co-founded with Tamara Ingham in 2013 Hmm! It was Karl's only social media activity at at time when his exit from Today was the biggest news story in Australia. Meanwhile, it is believed the newlyweds are still on honeymoon in Aspen, Colorado. Karl and Jasmine said 'I Do' at the luxurious One&Only Palmilla Resort in San Jose del Cabo, Mexico on Saturday, December 8. Nine executives were reportedly furious that the four-day festivities turned into such a media circus, and the wedding is believed to have been the 'last straw' for Karl. Just married! Karl and Jasmine said 'I Do' at the One&Only Palmilla Resort in Mexico on Saturday, December 8. Nine executives were reportedly furious the four-day festivities turned into such a media circus, and the wedding is believed to have been the 'last straw' for Karl In a statement issued to Daily Mail Australia on Wednesday, Karl said of his departure from Today: 'For the last 14 years I've co-hosted the best show on television. 'I can't thank Nine enough for the opportunity. I never in my wildest dreams thought I would be good enough to host this grand show for so long. 'Thanks to our viewers mostly, you are what matters most. It's been a tough time. Thanks for hanging in there. 'I look forward to seeing you in another capacity at this great Network soon.' The Today show's new executive producer Steve Burling has certainly made his presence known in the past few days. The announcement that host Karl Stefanovic would be leaving after 14 years sent a clear message that the program was undergoing significant changes. But the decision to sack Karl - on his honeymoon, no less - may have surprised media insiders as it appears he and Steve were once friends. The man 'behind Karl's downfall': Today's new boss Steven Burling was once Stefanovic's friend - and they even partied with models in New York - so why did he allow him to be sacked on his honeymoon? Pictured with Ashley and Jessica Hart in New York City in June 2015 Steve, also known as 'Burlo', replaced Mark Calvert as Today's executive producer after the latter abruptly resigned earlier this month. Back in June 2015, the TV executive was pictured partying with Karl in New York City with Australian model sisters Jessica and Ashley Hart. In a photo shared to Instagram, the two men smiled broadly while their female companions cuddled up for a friendly photograph. Dumped: In an official network statement announcing his departure from Today on Wednesday, Karl said: 'For the last 14 years I've co-hosted the best show on television. I can't thank Nine enough for the opportunity' 'Oh what a night! #NYC 60 Minutes with these legends would never be long enough. Thank you,' Ashley captioned the image. At the time, Karl was still in a relationship with his ex-wife Cassandra Thorburn - who he would eventually split with in mid-2016. It appears the photo was taken while Karl was interviewing the sisters for 60 Minutes, with Steve being a producer on the current affairs show. It is unclear if Steve was himself involved in the decision to sack Karl from the Today show. Daily Mail Australia has contacted Channel Nine for comment. Cleaning house: The Today show's new executive producer Steve Burling (pictured) has certainly made his presence known in the past few days Dropped: Steve, also known as 'Burlo', replaced Mark Calvert (right) as Today's executive producer after the latter abruptly resigned earlier this month In an official network statement announcing his departure from Today on Wednesday, Karl said: 'For the last 14 years I've co-hosted the best show on television. I can't thank Nine enough for the opportunity. 'I never in my wildest dreams thought I would be good enough to host this grand show for so long. 'Thanks to our viewers mostly, you are what matters most. It's been a tough time. Thanks for hanging in there. I look forward to seeing you in another capacity at this great network soon.' Meanwhile, Nine's Director of News and Current Affairs, Darren Wick, confirmed Karl would still continue to host This Time Next Year despite 'stepping off' from Today. The controversial TV presenter still has 12 months left on his $3million contract. Today's ratings began a steep decline in 2016, after Karl left his wife-of-21-years Cassandra Thorburn and began dating a younger woman - fashion designer Jasmine Yarbrough - later that year. Backlash: Today's ratings began a steep decline in 2016, after Karl left his wife-of-21-years Cassandra Thorburn (left) and began dating a younger woman - fashion designer Jasmine Yarbrough - later that year. Pictured in May 2011 Audience figures plunged to a 12-year low in September, and it's understood network executives finally decided to axe Karl this week after his 'over-the-top' wedding to Jasmine, 34, in Mexico on December 8. Channel Nine insiders told The Australian that management had no choice but to sack the host, 44, due to the 'crazy' media headlines surrounding his personal life. Meanwhile, according to the Herald Sun, Karl was 'assured his job was safe' before flying to Los Cabos for his four-day wedding. He was apparently blindsided by the sacking, with a source claiming: 'Karl had no idea - he left for Mexico thinking he would still be on Today. They told him face to face. They looked him in the eye. But the writing was on the wall.' His portrayal of the troubled DCI who breaks all the rules to get his man has won him critical acclaim and millions of fans worldwide. And Idris Elba has revealed why the US remake of Luther never materialised, having first been greenlit in 2014, but abandoned last year. The Golden Globe winning actor, 46, suggested finding a suitable actor to fill the character's famous overcoat played a part in the project falling apart. Candid: Idris Elba has revealed why the US remake of Luther never materialised, having first been greenlit in 2014, but abandoned last year Acclaimed actor: The Golden Globe winning actor, 46, suggested finding a suitable actor to fill the character's famous overcoat played a part in the project falling apart (above Oscar winner Mahershala Ali was reportedly in the frame to play the troubled DCI) In 2014, US TV network FOX ordered a script for the Luther remake from series creator Neil Cross, with Oscar-winning Moonlight actor Mahershala Ali, 44 reportedly in talks to play the embattled policeman. Speaking to Digital Spy and other publications, Idris, who was involved as a producer to consult on the project, said: 'There's a couple of reasons [why it didn't happen]. One, if I'm really honest, was that they couldn't find a John Luther. 'And two, it was really hard to find a city that felt as big as London, but also as intimate.' The star also added that there was never any discussion of him taking on the title role in the US version. Difficult shoes to fill: Speaking to Digital Spy and other publications, Idris, who was involved as a producer to consult on the project, said: 'There's a couple of reasons [why it didn't happen]. One, if I'm really honest, was that they couldn't find a John Luther' He said: 'Nah there were ideas of John going to America for some of the episodes in our show, but no version of me being an American John Luther.' In March 2017, Dana Walden, Fox Television CEO, candidly discussed why Mahershala's casting didn't come to fruition She said: 'I've seen black, male Luther. I know exactly the best version of it. I saw it with Idris. 'That doesn't mean Mahershala wouldn't have done something really interesting and different. But it ultimately felt like a character who came from the same place, because the US version is even written similarly.' In another suggested interpretation of the character, FOX briefly considered swapping Luther's gender and having Rosario Dawson play the detective. Talented: Mahershala's performance in Moonlight won him the best supporting actor Oscar in 2016 Dana said: 'That was really interesting to me, to take all of the qualities and shortcomings of that character and infuse them all into a woman,' Walden said. 'We talked a lot with [Rosario] but ultimately she wanted shorter commitments, and for broadcast [television], you still need enough episodes to have a satisfying season.' The interview comes ahead of the premiere of the hotly anticipated fifth series of Luther, set for New Year's Day. Plans for a fifth instalment were announced 18 months ago, and filming began earlier this year. The news of Luther's return came as a welcome relief to fans of the thriller series, who said the 2015 two episode special wasn't enough for them and begged for more. Plan: In another suggested interpretation of the character, FOX briefly considered swapping Luther's gender and having Rosario Dawson play the detective Idris' portrayal of the rough and ready, emotionally impulsive cop who breaks all the rules to get his man, has seen him scoop a Golden Globe and SAG award. After battling a cannibal serial killer in the last series - which aired in December 2015 - Luther was last seen walking through his London stomping ground and into an uncertain future in the multi-award winning series. Many questions were left unanswered including what really happened to Alice Morgan - although the new trailer suggests this may well be explained. With John having to deal with the murders of his ex-wife Zoe and partner DS Justin Ripley along with the apparent loss of Alice it is unclear what fresh emotional torment the obsessive DCI will have to endure next. In a press release, BBC recently confirmed that the three year wait for new episodes is finally over, with the show making a comeback within the next few weeks. Coming soon: The interview comes ahead of the premiere of the hotly anticipated fifth series of Luther, set for New Year's Day (series two pictured) 'DCI John Luther is once more called to immerse himself in the deepest depths of human depravity in a new four-part series written by Neil Cross. Wunmi Mosaku joins as new recruit D.S. Catherine Halliday,' the release reveals. While his character is known for his fierce persona, Idris drew parallels between himself and the detective. When asked whether anger has been an issue for him within his life, the hunk insisted: 'No, not really. Everyone's got a temper, though.' The star - who is known for his grey longline coat on the show - credited his outerwear for giving him the 'signature Luther walk'. 'It's what the coat makes me do, I think... There's lots of walking in Luther and it just seems that he gets to where he needs to get to very quickly. Iconic: Idris' portrayal of the rough and ready, emotionally impulsive cop who breaks all the rules to get his man, has seen him scoop a Golden Globe and SAG award 'His father was in the Army and there's a sort of march; it's not in the storyline but it's in his DNA', he reasoned. The Mandela actor admitted he's been left 'disturbed' at his character's storyline at times, due to the series' vicious murders and twisted plot. 'There are lots of really horrible ways to murder in Luther. Typically, the viewer comes with John whenever he walks into a murder scene. 'The audience sees what John sees. What that means is that I see what the murder rooms are like. 'If someone has had their throats slit, there'll be lots of blood and a knife. As much as it's make-believe, the make-up is designed to look realistic and for me, I take that stuff home', he confessed. Idris also confirmed the return of psychopath love interest Alice Morgan, who was believed to have died in the fourth series. Lifting the lid on the latest series, he shared: 'Alice is back after she was left dead OK...We are upping the stakes for John Luther this series. Alice is back and there's unfinished business.' Writer of the beloved crime drama Neil Cross revealed that Luther's unfinished business sealed the deal for him to bring the compulsive cop back. In a statement, he said: 'Now what? It's a question Idris and I get asked a lot. What happened to John Luther after we last saw him striding unbowed through the streets of his city, his blood red London? It can't be over, can it? There's so much we don't know. So much unfinished business. 'The thing is, we've been asking ourselves the same question. Because we love John and wonder what he's up to. And as for me, I'm scared of the monsters. 'The face at the window. The hand under the bed. The shadow at the end of the street. Who's going to stop them, if not John Luther?' She had some scene-stealing moments in the Love Island Christmas Reunion, which aired on Monday night. And Hayley Hughes continued her week in the spotlight as she enjoyed a glam night out in Manchester on Wednesday. The blonde beauty showed off her endless legs in a tiny leopard print mini dress as she enjoyed dinner at the city's Vermilion restaurant. Party time: Hayley Hughes enjoyed a glam night out in Manchester on Wednesday, after her headline-grabbing turn on Monday's Love Island Reunion Hayley teamed her mini dress with ankle length patent boots and a cropped black leather jacket. Her long blonde locks were styled into glossy curls which tumbled around her shoulders while the always glam star completed her look with a full face of makeup. Hayley's outing come after her reunion with her 2018 Love Island castmates during Monday's special Christmas episode. Dinner date: The blonde beauty showed off her endless legs in a tiny leopard print mini dress as she enjoyed dinner at the city's Vermilion restaurant Viewers watching the show though were convinced Hayley was riding on the coattails of her 'dumb blonde' persona in order to get air time, as she outdid herself once again in a conversation about Brexit and the EU. In a conversation with co-star Kendall Rae Knight - who was equally unlucky in love during her stint on the show - Hayley recounted the meeting she had with Nigel Farage, after she left the Love Island villa in July. 'All I know is we're not going to be part of the EU,' she said, adding: 'It's not happening anytime soon though so we don't need to worry about it.' Faking it? Hayley outdid herself once again in a conversation about Brexit and the EU during the Love Island Christmas Reunion earlier this week 'It is now,' Kendall informed her, referencing the current state of political affairs. 'What?' Hayley asked, seemingly upset to hear the news. She was then seen in the Christmas version of the Love Island Beach Hut, saying: 'I know UK stands for United Kingdom. Oh my! She was then seen in the Christmas version of the Love Island Beach Hut, saying: 'I know UK stands for United Kingdom' Unlikely pals: In a conversation with co-star Kendall Rae Knight - who was equally unlucky in love during her stint on the show - Hayley recounted the meeting she had with Nigel Farage, after she left the Love Island villa in July Seriously? Kendall tried to get Hayley up to speed with the current state of political affairs 'But EU is...Espania?' Hayley, it seemed, wasn't fooling anyone, with viewers flocking to Twitter to brand her as 'acting up' for the cameras, to ensure airtime. 'Why does Hayley from love Island pretend to be thick????' asked one fan on the micro-blogging site. A second posted: 'Hayley must be getting paid serious money for continuing to pretend that she's a complete moron!' Not buying it: 'Hayley STILL pretending to be dumb, like Lindsay Lohan in Mean Girls trying to get Aaron to tutor her. Get in the bin,' someone typed on Twitter Dumb blonde? 'Why does Hayley from love Island pretend to be thick????' asked one fan on the micro-blogging site 'Hayley STILL pretending to be dumb, like Lindsay Lohan in Mean Girls trying to get Aaron to tutor her. Get in the bin,' a third typed. 'Took me a good few months to forget how much Hayley annoys me but here she is, this close to Christmas, ruining my ears,' a fourth wrote. 'You're telling me Hayley managed to fill in an application form for Love Island, managed to get on a plane and back and met Nigel Farage but has only just worked out what 'UK' stands for? Hun pls you are noooot funny just irritating [sic],' another typed. Later in the episode she 'revealed' that she didn't know who Dr Alex George was - despite him being sat next to her and one of her co-stars - and was gifted a 'Future Prime Minister' sweater by Caroline Flack. 'Get in the bin!' Viewers branded Hayley fake, playing up for the cameras It gets worse: Later in the episode she 'revealed' that she didn't know who Dr Alex George was - despite him being sat next to her and one of her co-stars No! The Liverpudlian stunned viewers by saying she didn't 'have a clue' about what Brexit meant, before asking, 'So does that mean we won't have any trees?' on an early episode of this year's Love Island The Liverpudlian stunned viewers by saying she didn't 'have a clue' about what Brexit meant, before asking, 'So does that mean we won't have any trees?' on an early episode of this year's Love Island. Following the gaffe - and her exit from the villa - she was invited onto the BBCs Daily Politics show and given the chance to quiz journalist Adam Fleming alongside Brexiteer Nigel Farage and Remainer Alastair Campbell. She said: 'I do care about it i just don't have an understanding, so hopefully Adam will learn me more.' Apt: She was gifted a 'Future Prime Minister' sweater by Caroline Flack Flack's Christmas sack: Caroline swung by to visit during the one off seasonal special She then asked the expert: 'In a nutshell, what is Brexit? Hayley also pitched the question on everyone's lips as she said: 'Yeah I understand. I've got another question - will it make things more expensive?' After this she joined former UKIP leader Farage at the Westminster Arms pub in London to chat further about the state of the country. New Zealand will hold a binding referendum on the legislation of recreational cannabis, the government says. The plebiscite would be held alongside the country's next general election in 2020, Justice Minister Andrew Little told reporters on Tuesday morning. A referendum was promised as part of a deal by the Labour Party to get support from the Green Party to form a government after last year's general election and MPs have been mulling the timing and conditions for some time. Little said the wording of the referendum question was yet to be decided but the government would be bound to uphold the result. Support for loosening rules around recreation cannabis has grown in New Zealand, with a survey by the Drug Foundation this year showing two-thirds of people supported either legalisation or decriminalisation. Nearly 39 per cent per of Kiwis who took part in the 2017 Global Drug Survey said they had used cannabis in the previous year. The announcement comes after Kiwi MPs passed a bill last week that makes medicinal cannabis more widely available and sets up a licensing scheme for commercial growing. Advocates and a start-ups looking to get a jump-start on a potentially lucrative industry say they hope a move will provide a much-needed economic boon for struggling regional towns and see the country's experienced cultivators move into a legal market. Police, meanwhile, have recently been ordered to ease off laying charges against those arrested solely for possession of any drugs in what the government says is a shift towards a health-based approach to substances. Australian federal politics in 2018 has been a cross between House of Cards and Mr Bean. The year began with a filing cabinet full of sensitive government documents being sold in a Canberra second-hand store. Then in August, a cabinet full of insensitive government ministers sold out a prime minister. A swag of seven by-elections - which began with Labor's David Feeney quitting in February over his citizenship status - ended in the government collapsing into a minority in the final weeks of the parliamentary year. Along the way, the Liberals retained government in Tasmania and ousted a 16-year-old Labor government in South Australia. And Labor comfortably held power in Victoria in November, amid a fractious Liberal Party in Canberra and a lacklustre state campaign. The first major hurdle of the year for the coalition government was the revelation in the Daily Telegraph in February that deputy prime minister and Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce's former media adviser Vikki Campion was pregnant with his child. Then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, who instituted the so-called ministerial "bonk ban", put conservatives in his team offside by calling it a "shocking error of judgment" by Mr Joyce. Mr Joyce hit back describing the prime minister's comments as "inept" and hurtful. Michael McCormack stepped into the deputy PM role, leaving a rump of coalition MPs muttering among themselves about the government's leadership and direction. Wins for the Liberals in Tasmania and South Australia - the latter ending a 16-year-old Labor government - were positive news for the government in March. But a 30th Newspoll loss in a row - the benchmark set by Mr Turnbull for ousting Tony Abbott - brought a fresh focus to the federal Liberal leadership. An emboldened Peter Dutton mused out loud in a series of interviews about wanting to one day become prime minister. But keeping a lid on this was public disgruntlement over his handling of offshore detention, his militarization of the immigration system and an AAP story about him fast-tracking visas for European au pairs. A day after the government was hopeful of a popularity boost from a positively received budget chock-full of giveaways such as personal income tax cuts, the citizenship crisis reared its head - forcing out Labor senator Katy Gallagher and bringing into question the eligibility of four lower house MPs. While the personal income tax cuts passed parliament in June, the government was forced to shelve its much-vaunted business tax cuts after Pauline Hanson reneged on her support - losing NSW senator Brian Burston from her party in the process. The July 28 Super Saturday of by-elections - to deal with MP eligibility issues and the retirement of Labor's Tim Hammond for family reasons - took on a national focus when Mr Turnbull framed it as a test of leadership between him and Bill Shorten. With the Liberals failing to win any of the five by-elections, Mr Turnbull played it down. But within a few weeks he was caving in to conservative rebels in his ranks and retreating from plans to legislate climate change targets through the National Energy Guarantee. He won a spill on August 21 by 48 votes to 35, but was mortally wounded. Just days later after botched number-counting by the Dutton forces, Scott Morrison accidentally became the 30th prime minister of Australia, with Josh Frydenberg defeating Greg Hunt for the deputy leadership, paving the way for his elevation to treasurer. Mr Turnbull resigned from parliament, not wanting to be a "miserable ghost", triggering the Wentworth by-election. The new prime minister sought to put his stamp on the government by dumping long-held plans to raise the retirement age to 70 from 67 and elevating the drought to the top national issue. An aged care royal commission, set to start in December, pre-empted a damning Four Corners report. A $4.6 billion peace deal was struck with Catholic and independent schools, heading off another potential election-losing issue, with more money in the kitty for an election year based on the first surplus budget in a decade. A messy week in which Mr Morrison flagged the shifting of Australia's Israeli embassy to Jerusalem and coalition senators voted in favour of Hanson's "it's OK to be white" motion (later backtracking) saw the Liberals' Dave Sharma lose Wentworth to independent Kerryn Phelps. Federal Liberal disunity was blamed on Daniel Andrews securing a landslide victory in the Victorian state election on November 24. In the final fortnight of parliament for the year, the government was rocked by Julia Banks' decision to quit the Liberals and sit on the crossbench, just as Mr Morrison was seeking clear air to talk about delivering the first budget surplus in 12 years. The minority parliament - thanks to Dr Phelps' election - suddenly became a more difficult beast to manage. To reassert at least some semblance of authority, the prime minister secured a change to the leadership spill rules in the Liberal Party room. He also managed to secure a win on national security laws dealing with encrypted communications, but the rest of the final parliamentary fortnight of the year was a shambles. The resignation Nationals MP Andrew Broad from a junior ministry over a sex scandal just before Christmas topped off a horror year. Australians are set to head to the polls five or six weeks after an April 2 budget, with government disunity - seen so clearly during 2018 - front of mind at the ballot box. Dec 19, 2018 | By Cameron Switzerland-based micrometer 3D printing company Cytosurge has 3D printed copper impossble objects the size of red blood cells. Impossible objects are a class of shapes that appear like different shapes when viewed from different angles. They were discovered by Japanese mathematician Kokichi Sugihara, who has won the first prize of the Best Illusion of the Year Contest three times. In a fun way of showing off their FluidFM 3Dprinter, Cytosurge produced one of Sugiharas famous designs in three scales. The largest model has pillars with a diameter of 100 microns, about the same as the diameter of a human hair. The next size down is 30 microns, followed by the cell-sized version thats a mere 10 microns. Only with a powerful electron microscope are these models visible as even the largest would look like a speck of dust to the naked eye. And these parts arent made of photocurable resin like most micro prints. Theyre copper. 3D printing at such a small scale is tricky because this is where chemistry and physics collide. The FluidFM 3Dprinter uses a pipette with a 300nm-wide nozzle; the nozzle is placed within one micron of a conductive surface and a metal ion-containing liquid is dispensed. A negative current is applied to the surface, which accumulates copper ions to solid atoms. After the micron gap between the surface and the nozzle is filled with solid copper atoms, the nozzle moves to the next position. Eventually, the tiniest impossible object is formed. Cytosurge distributes advanced nanotechnology, so this marketing demonstration is a walk in the park for them. Still, its fun to look at, even if you do need a microscope. Posted in 3D Printing Application Maybe you also like: Two Queensland men have appeared in court charged with wasting police resources over a fake dead body prank. Timothy John Buckland and Christopher Frank Matecki are accused of making a false representation by conduct resulting in a police investigation. The charges follow their alleged attempt to prank an Uber driver by loading a fake dead body into the boot of a car at Sherwood, in Brisbane's western suburbs, on July 31. The prank caused the driver to flee and police to set up a crime scene at an apartment complex, where what appeared to be blood was found at the scene. Investigators determined it to be an elaborate hoax which the alleged perpetrators were filming for a YouTube video. Buckland and Matecki both briefly appeared in Brisbane Magistrates Court on Tuesday morning. Neither entered a plea and both were allowed to remain at large until their next court mention on January 14. JANUARY 31 - The government is embarrassed by sensitive cabinet documents found in second-hand filing cabinets bought at a Canberra auction. FEBRUARY 1 - Victorian Labor MP David Feeney quits parliament over citizenship issues, triggering the Batman by-election. 6 - The Daily Telegraph reveals Barnaby Joyce's former media adviser Vikki Campion is pregnant with his child. 13 - PM Malcolm Turnbull says there is "zero" chance of agreement on an indigenous representative body, as parliament marks the 10th anniversary of the Apology. 23 - Barnaby Joyce quits the leadership, citing a sexual harassment complaint by former WA Rural Woman of the Year Catherine Marriott as the "last straw". An inquiry later fails to substantiate the claim. 26 - Michael McCormack becomes Nationals leader. MARCH 3 - The Liberals are re-elected in Tasmania. 8 - Australia and the other 10 nations, minus the US, sign a revamped Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact. 13 - Labor proposes ending the practice of allowing investors to claim tax imputations from dividends, but says two weeks later pensioners are exempt after a backlash from retirees. 17 - The Liberals win government in South Australia for the first time in 16 years. 17 - Labor's Ged Kearney wins the Batman by-election. 26 - AAP reveals Peter Dutton used his powers of discretion as home affairs minister to grant visas on public interest grounds to two au pairs in 2015. APRIL 6 - Agriculture Minister David Littleproud announces a review of live export standards after seeing shocking sheep footage. 9 - PM Malcolm Turnbull loses his 30th Newspoll, the test used to depose his predecessor Tony Abbott. 26 - The Turnbull government abandons the Medicare levy hike to pay for the National Disability Insurance Scheme, with support from Labor. MAY 2 - Labor rising star Tim Hammond quits parliament to spend more time with his family. 8 - Treasurer Scott Morrison delivers his fifth budget, headlined by personal income tax cuts. 9 - The High Court rules Katy Gallagher ineligible to sit in parliament over dual citizenship, triggering the resignation of four MPs. Labor's Justine Keay, Susan Lamb and Josh Wilson, and Centre Alliance's Rebekha Sharkie announce they will contest by-elections, which they win. 10 - Bill Shorten announces bigger personal tax cuts in his budget reply speech. JUNE 3 - Barnaby Joyce and Vikki Campion give a tell-all television interview in exchange for $150,000. 14 - One Nation's NSW senator Brian Burston quits the party. Burston then joins Clive Palmer's United Australia Party. 19 - The $3.8 billion national redress scheme for child sexual abuse survivors passes parliament. 28 - Company tax cuts are shelved after the government fails to win support in the Senate. JULY 5 - A new formula for GST distribution is announced. 28 - Super Saturday of by-elections. AUGUST 5 - The government announces a drought aid package worth $190 million. 8 - Labor MP Emma Husar announces she won't contest the next federal election after weeks of claims she bullied staff. She is later cleared of sexual harassment allegations but not of bullying. 20 - Malcolm Turnbull retreats from plans to legislate climate change targets through the National Energy Guarantee. 21- Malcolm Turnbull spills the leadership of the Liberal Party. He wins by a small margin of 48-35. 22 - Peter Dutton's eligibility for parliament is questioned over his child care centre interests. 23 - The Senate refers the Dutton au pair matter to a parliamentary inquiry. 24 - Scott Morrison becomes Australia's 30th prime minister, defeating Peter Dutton. Josh Frydenberg defeats Greg Hunt for the deputy leadership, becoming treasurer. 31 - Malcolm Turnbull resigns from parliament, triggering the Wentworth by-election. SEPTEMBER 16 - Scott Morrison announces a royal commission into aged care. 17 - Liberal MP Ann Sudmalis announces she's quitting parliament, blaming "bullying" branch stackers. 20 - Scott Morrison strikes a $4.6 billion peace deal with Catholic and independent schools. 24 - ABC managing director Michelle Guthrie is sacked. Chairman Justin Milne resigns three days later. 26 - Scott Morrison rejects the idea of an indigenous voice to parliament, claiming it would be a third chamber. OCTOBER 15 - Scott Morrison reveals he is considering moving Australia's embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. 16 - The government makes an embarrassing backdown after senators voted in favour of Pauline Hanson's "it's OK to be white" motion. 20 - Liberals' Dave Sharma loses the Wentworth by-election to independent Kerryn Phelps. 22 - The government make a national apology to victims of institutional child sex abuse. NOVEMBER 13 - Scott Morrison faces his first major foreign policy test, attending global leaders summits in Singapore and Papua New Guinea. 24 -Labor's Daniel Andrews wins the Victorian state election. 26 - Julia Banks quits the Liberal Party to sit as an independent, bagging her party's right faction. The government announces an April 2 budget will be in surplus, with an election to follow in May. DECEMBER 2- Greens senator Sarah Hanson Young says there should be a strict code of conduct "with consequences" to deter sexualised bullying in federal parliament. 6- Scott Morrison says Australia would now recognise West Jerusalem as Israel's capital but maintain its embassy in Tel Aviv, thereby backtracking on part of his Wentworth byelection promise. 17- Nationals MP Andrew Broad, who represents the Victorian seat of Mallee, stands down as an assistant minister to Deputy Prime Minister and Nationals leader Michael McCormack after questions were raised about his private life. 18- Broad repays $479.62 for two taxpayer-funded domestic flights after it was revealed they were part of a trip to Hong Kong where the married MP had dinner with a younger woman he met online. Energy Minister Angus Taylor says emissions from Australia's electricity sector will meet the Paris target eight years ahead of schedule. Findings from a report due out later this week show emissions from the National Electricity Market will fall to 26 per cent below 2005 levels by 2022. Electricity generation from renewables is projected to increase to 35 per cent by 2021. "Much of the decline will be driven by an increase in renewable energy, which will help meet electricity demand as Australia's economy continues to grow," Mr Taylor said. "With $15 billion worth of committed investment, there will be a 250 per cent increase in electricity generated from wind and solar in the NEM by 2021." Mr Taylor says the government has a "sensible and balanced" plan to deliver affordable and reliable power for all Australians. Labor argues the government is not doing enough to ensure the entire economy meets the Paris target, not just the electricity sector. The brutal euphemism used by former ABC chairman Justin Milne for firing staff has taken out the not-so-coveted title of 2018's worst word or phrase. Milne used the phrase "external career development opportunities" in an email chain with former ABC managing director Michelle Guthrie to refer to firing journalist Emma Alberici over controversial articles that criticised the government's corporate tax plan. He later admitted the phrase was "stupid" and "a silly corporate euphemism for firing her" to the ABC's Four Corners. On Tuesday, his description was validated when The Plain English Foundation selected the phrase to top its list of the worst words of 2018 - an annual catalogue showcasing the lowest examples of doublespeak, spin and non-apologies every year. "For years now corporations everywhere have contorted the English language to avoid an unpalatable reality," executive director Dr Neil James said in a statement. "They use words like demising, disestablishing or deactivating to avoid saying 'job loss'." The phrase beat a long list of other contenders for the 2018 title, with the foundation describing the year as a particularly poor one when it came to double speak. The tech world, the foundation noted, was in particularly poor form this year - with Amazon masking eavesdropping with "voice sniffing" and Facebook labelling Russian election tampering as "coordinated inauthentic behaviour". The Commonwealth Bank also came under fire for chief executive Matt Comyn's revelation that bank staff don't receive bonuses for higher sales but instead enjoy "short-term variable remuneration (to) elicit discretionary effort" at the Royal Commission. Meanwhile, migrant children separated from their parents and held in what looked like cages were actually being held in "tender age shelters", according to the Trump administration. "What these words and phrases have in common is that they deliberately intend to deceive," Dr James said. "By using complex euphemisms, corporations try to avoid being accountable for their actions." A copyright payout owed to US rapper Eminem by a New Zealand political party has been slashed on appeal. The conservative National Party was last year ordered to pay the Detroit musician's label, Eight Mile Style, $NZ600,000 ($A570,530) after using a track that bore striking similarities to the song Lose Yourself in a 2014 election campaign ad. But in a verdict returned by New Zealand's Court of Appeal on Tuesday, judges cut the payment to $NZ225,000 after the party's lawyers questioned how the original sum had been reached. "Given the evidence of the expert witnesses for both sides, it was not open to the High Court to adopt the baseline figure that it did," a court statement said. "The advertising message was only relevant to a relatively small population." Lose Yourself was composed by Marshall Mathers III (Eminem), Jeff Bass and Luis Resto - who formed the Eight Mile Style company - in 2002. Bass played the recognisable opening riff to the 2002 song for the High Court court last year, saying it was the most valuable in the catalogue and had never been used in a political campaign. National paid $NZ4800 for a song called "Eminem-esque" to a production company in 2014, with the tune appearing 186 times on television, as well as on the internet and at a party conference. High Court Justice Helen Cull ruled that song was "substantially" copied and awarded the payment despite the party's arguments it had been told by industry professionals there would no legal issues with Eminem-esque's owners. In October, a representative for Eminem said the rapper would donate any money awarded to hurricane relief efforts in the United States. A crown prosecutor who has seen firsthand the "failings" of state anti-corruption bodies is part of an expert panel which will help the federal government design its own national corruption watchdog. Outgoing NSW deputy senior crown prosecutor Margaret Cunneen will be part of the trio of experts tasked with reviewing legislation for setting up the Commonwealth Integrity Commission. Ms Cunneen has been critical of the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption, which had investigated allegations she had perverted the course of justice, by telling her son's girlfriend to fake chest pains to avoid a police breath test after a 2014 car accident. ICAC was forced to abandon the controversial inquiry in 2015 after the High Court ruled it was outside its jurisdiction. Also on the expert panel is Mal Wauchope, a former Western Australian public servant who was WA Public Sector Commissioner until he stepped down in March. So too is Mick Keelty, former Australian Federal Police commissioner from 2001 to 2009, Attorney-General Christian Porter announced on Tuesday. "The unique experiences of these three individuals across criminal law and prosecution, public sector administration and law enforcement will assist the government to ensure that the model for the CIC is effective, appropriate and balanced," Mr Porter said. The new body will be split into two parts - one investigating corruption in law enforcement, and the other investigating the public sector. The current Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity will handle the enforcement division, and be given more responsibility to investigate bodies like the tax office. The public sector integrity division will investigate government departments, parliamentarians and their staff, the staff of federal judicial officers, and in some circumstances organisations that get federal money. Public consultation is under way. The expert panel will work with stakeholders on draft laws before a proposal is put to cabinet. Labor will lift foreign aid every year if it wins the next election, with the eventual goal to more than double it from the lowest level in Australia's history. The coalition government slashed the growth rate of foreign aid funding, opening the door for other nations to offer controversial loans to neighbouring Pacific countries. At Labor's national conference in Adelaide on Tuesday, factions agreed to aim to get Australia's foreign aid budget towards 0.5 per cent of gross national income. It is currently at 0.22 per cent and will drop even lower if it stays at the same rate. A Labor government will lift foreign aid every year, starting with its first budget, to eventually try to reach the international standard of 0.5 per cent. The party will also call on a Labor government to make progress towards officially recognising Palestine. But the decision will be based on the advice of foreign policy experts, and will be left to a future Labor cabinet. Prime Minister Scott Morrison last week announced Australia will recognise West Jerusalem as Israel's capital, once a two-state solution with Palestine is agreed. A "cyber-tip" to Queensland police has led to US authorities arresting a Florida man accused of exchanging nude images with children in Australia. Vernon Charles Wheat, 23, of Sanford, near Orlando, was arrested on Friday and charged with four counts of child pornography. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement announced the international investigation began when members of the Queensland Police Service contacted US authorities alleging Wheat was sending illicit images to Australian children. The US Department of Homeland Security Investigations turned the case over to FDLE special agents with Orlando's Cybercrime Task Force. A forensic examination of an electronic device registered to Wheat found "evidence of files indicative of child pornography", the FDLE said. An spokesperson contacted by AAP declined to offer details on the original cyber-tip or other aspects of the investigation. Wheat was held without bond at Orange County Jail. AUSTRALIA V INDIA SECOND TEST SNAPSHOT STATE OF PLAY: Australia 326 and 243; India 283 and 140. Australia win the Test by 146 runs to level the four-match series at 1-1. MAN OF THE DAY: Mitchell Starc. Not only did he get two of the five wickets on Tuesday but his searing bouncers had India's tailenders in fear for their safety. His rising delivery that struck Umesh Yadav on the shoulder was a ripper. KEY MOMENT: Hanuma Vihari's downfall. India needed Vihari and Rishabh Pant to score the bulk of the runs if they were to have a legitimate chance of pulling off a win. When Vihari departed at the hands of Starc early on day five it exposed India's long tail. When Pant was sent packing by a great diving catch from Peter Handscomb it was as good as game over. STAT OF THE DAY: 10 wickets at an average of 22.8. That's been Starc's return this series. Not bad for a bloke who was battered from pillar to post on social media after the series opener in Adelaide. QUOTE OF THE DAY: "It's a long time coming. I think this week's just shown the fight and the desire of this team and hopefully we've made a lot of Australians proud." - Starc after Australia claimed their first Test victory in nine months. The family of a young woman killed when her car was struck by an ice-fuelled driver say they're shattered at his eight-year sentence. With time served, Jo Han Lim, 33, will be eligible for parole in under five years but family of Lisa Di Donato say their pain will never end. The 27-year-old was headed home from a yoga class in Rowville on February 15 when Lim smashed into her car at up to 81km/h, killing her on impact. Lim, who turns 34 this week, had smoked ice before breakfast that day, was disqualified from driving and on bail for other driving offences. He pleaded guilty to culpable driving causing death. Lim was already serving a five-month jail sentence, handed down in October, and has spent seven months in custody for this offence. He has extensive prior convictions for driving offences and fines for speeding. In one day in 2013, he was clocked speeding seven times, including at more than 30km/h over the limit on four of those occasions. Born in Malaysia, Lim is an Australian permanent resident but faces deportation on release. Outside court, Ms Di Donato's devastated family said they were "disappointed" and "shattered" by the sentence and the prospect of Lim's deportation was the only saving grace. "Today I'm just going to go home and be sad because in x amount of years he walks out free and we'll never be free, and our loss and pain will always be with us," mother Elena said. County Court Judge Paul Lacava said he took into account four victim impact statements from Ms Di Donato's mother, partner, brother and aunt. "The life of a decent, hardworking young woman with a loving partner and family, who was admired and loved by all, has been lost," he said. He said Ms Di Donato's loved ones felt a "profound sense of needless loss" at Lim's hand. Lim was an ice user at the time of the crash and recorded with 0.19mg of methamphetamine and 0.5mg of amphetamine in his system, when arrested. He also suffered an acquired brain injury in a crash in 2011, that reports presented to court ahead of sentencing noted were "primary contributors" to his offending behaviour. Judge Lacava said the drug use began before that incident and without treatment, his rehabilitation prospects were bleak. Lim has been disqualified from driving for life. Dec 19, 2018 | By Thomas Ganit Goldstein, a fashion design graduate from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, has collaborated with 3D printing manufacturer Stratasys to introduce a new series of unique 3D printed woven shoes. Goldsteins Between the Layers graduation collection, which consists of seven 3D printed outfits and six pairs of shoes, were unveiled at the Arts of Fashion Foundation 2018 Fashion show, which took place at the San Francisco Asian Art museum on 17th December 2018. Goldsteins inspiration for the Between the Layers collection derives from her experiences in Japan, where she learned a traditional weaving technique called "IKAT weaving" at the Tokyo University of the Arts. She began to develop a weaving process using an Orginal Prusa i3 Mk3 3D printer upon her return to Israel. After that, Goldstein has worked closely with Stratasys in the past years to create three sets of shoes using Stratasys Connex3 Color, Multi-material 3D printer. The combination of "IKAT weaving" and 3D printing has enabled truly intricate and customized designs. Stratasys advanced 3D printing technology has opened up endless possibilities for my designs, enabling me to print any design at the voxel level in vibrant colors and a range of materials all in a single print, said Goldstein. This capability to control any voxel for any pattern has enabled me to design without boundaries and to combine 3D printing with traditional weaving techniques to create ultra-realistic shoes. For aspiring designers, the ability to fuse cutting-edge technology with traditional crafts is very exciting, unlocking the freedom to design without limitations of past years. For me, the key to good design is to first get an understanding of the traditional design methods and foundations, and then explore how I can enhance the essence of the traditional method with new technology. Not only does 3D printing accelerate the design process and enable reduced production costs, it also affords designers total freedom of design, explained Goldstein. Were seeing a great deal of interest from the fashion industry regarding the immense opportunities for customization that 3D printing is offering up," Commented Naomi Kaempfer, Creative Director of Art, Design and Fashion at Stratasys. "We urge designers to enjoy and take advantage of the possibilities afforded by the technology to create avant-garde, personalized designs quickly, cost-effectively and without traditional design boundaries. The first set of 3D printed woven shoes can also be seen at the International Trade Fair for the Skilled Trades, taking place in Munich, Germany from the 13th to 17th March 2019, as part of the international competition TALENTE 2019. All images credit: Ganit Goldstein Posted in 3D Printing Application Maybe you also like: Nine people have been charged, mostly with drug offences, after a nine-month investigation into methamphetamine trafficking. The arrests of seven men and two women, aged from 27 to 43, came after police raided 12 properties at Murray Bridge, east of Adelaide. All have been charged with varying counts of tracking in a controlled drug except for a 34-year-old woman who is facing a firearms offence. They are expected to be granted police bail to appear before the Murray Bridge Magistrates Court on a date to be fixed. Detective Chief Inspector Tony Crameri, the officer in charge of the Drug and Organised Crime Task Force, said the operation, conducted under the Amphetamine Type Substance Plan, had targeted ice trafficking in the Murray Bridge region. "Methylamphetamine has a damaging impact upon our community, particularly in regards to health and law and order," Insp Crameri said. "The harms associated with illicit drug use, including Ice, are often magnified in rural and isolated communities." In what was billed as the biggest democratic meeting in Australia there was only one real vote. And that was just how Bill Shorten wanted it. Labor's national conference was smoothly stage managed to ensure the opposition leader got his way on every issue. So that meant agreements behind closed doors on refugees and asylum-seekers, even though there were some strong comments on the stage from Ged Kearney. There was no commitment to raise Newstart, because as one delegate said - it was too expensive a promise to make. The union push for industry-wide bargaining was watered down, although the devil will be in the detail. The only real vote was a tight one on the creation of a Human Rights Charter, which is not an issue in the electorate. And Shorten won anyway. This was a conference carefully run to ensure no one mucked up Shorten's chances. With the Nationals taking the spotlight with a sex scandal on day two, and Labor making a series of positive announcements, it was a smooth three days in Adelaide. Affordable housing will be boosted, foreign aid will be lifted, equal pay for women will be a priority. There was even space to bring Kevin Rudd back into the fold, a little bit of healing for the party. Carefully stage managed too - Rudd didn't even speak for half an hour. Shorten survived the triennial event with his power enhanced and can look forward to next year's election with strong optimism. For about 50 days, Andre Tamine cruised the seas on a multi-country trip bound for Australia while in his cabin sat a clandestine haul worth millions. The Canadian national was to be paid 100,000 euros for his role in getting it into the country aboard a cruise ship. But the 65-year-old will instead spend at least five years and seven months in prison after his attempt to smuggle a large amount of cocaine was thwarted by authorities upon his arrival in Sydney in 2016. He subsequently pleaded guilty to importing a border-controlled drug. NSW District Court Judge Kate Traill, in sentencing Tamine on Tuesday to a maximum of eight years and five months in prison, found he was more than a courier in the importation. He'd boarded the Sea Princess in England in July 2016 with fellow Canadians Melina Roberge, Isabelle Lagace and a fourth person, after being offered a role during a trip to Morocco. The fourth person disembarked in Nova Scotia, leaving Tamine and the women to continue on to Sydney with the cruise making stopovers in countries including Ireland, the United States, Panama and Peru. When authorities raided the trio's two cabins when the ship arrived in Sydney, they found 72.6 kilograms of cocaine but Tamine was sentenced for 42.7 kilograms of the drug found in his cabin. It amounted to 32.1 kilograms of pure cocaine. Roberge, 25, and Lagace, 30, have also pleaded guilty to their charges and been jailed. The judge said Tamine was offered more for his involvement than Roberge and Lagace and she was satisfied his role was greater. She said his conduct constituted a "significant breach", given the quantity of the drug involved and the estimated street value of up to $29 million. She accepted he was genuinely remorseful, with the 65-year-old writing in a letter to the court he feels embarrassed, humiliated and apologetic to the Australian community. "I stupidly did as others told me to do, rather than stand up for myself," the letter said It said drugs caused "nothing but hurt and destruction" and he was thankful the drugs on the cruise ship "were seized and never made it to land". The South Australian and NSW governments have signed an agreement to work towards establishing an electricity interconnector between the two states. The memorandum of understanding sets out a framework for co-operation on the project and commits both governments to a robust and efficient development process. "An interconnector between South Australia and New South Wales is a nation-building project that will allow both states to export their excess energy to one another to help bring down prices and improve the security of our systems," SA Energy Minister Dan van Holst Pellekaan said. University entrance rankings for all Tasmanian high school graduates have been reissued after a blunder saw some students receive the wrong results. Some year 12 students received lower-than-expected Australian Tertiary Entrance Rank (ATAR) rankings on Tuesday after a mistake was made calculating scores for University of Tasmania High Achiever Program and University Connections Program units. ATAR scores were reissued statewide late on Tuesday night, with state Education Minister Jeremy Rockliff assuring students the error would not impact their chances of being accepted into tertiary study. The standard of behaviour in the Nationals could improve if the party had more women in it, according to leader Michael McCormack. He says he is proud of the "outstanding" two women representing the Nationals in federal politics, and is hopeful for others who have thrown their hat into the ring for the next election. The deputy prime minister has expressed the sentiments two days after lurid details were revealed about married Nationals MP Andrew Broad who used a "sugar baby" website to meet up with a younger woman in Hong Kong, charging taxpayers for the domestic leg of the trip. Mr Broad decided on Tuesday not to recontest his northern Victorian safe seat of Mallee at the next election, as well as repay the domestic fare. That was a step welcomed by Mr McCormack who says the MP had showed a "complete lack of discretion". Asked whether boosting the number of women in the Nationals could improve the quality of behaviour in the team, the leader said it would. Senator Bridget McKenzie and Queensland MP Michelle Landry are, at the moment, the only women federal Nationals members out of a total of 22. But Mr McCormack is optimistic the next election, due by May, could boost the parties stocks, with Brisbane-based business identity Susan McDonald running for a Senate spot for the Liberal National Party. Regional Development Australia chair Perin Davey, meanwhile, will run to represent NSW in the Senate for the Nationals. "I would love to see those two actually win those spots and go on to really contribute, not only to our party but to the nation," Mr McCormack told AAP on Wednesday. When it comes to encouraging more women to be part of the Nationals, Mr McCormack has stressed the success of programs that are already up-and-running. "Our women's council are doing an outstanding job at both state and federal level to make sure that women do feel accepted, do feel encouraged to not only run ... but to be members of our party and to contribute at party level," he said. Women have also long been making big contributions behind the scenes in the running of the party, he said. "Women have always contributed mightily to our party, as far as administration is concerned," he said. The leader's own predecessor as Member for Riverina was a woman, Kay Hull, a former truck driver who rose to the rank of party whip. "She sure knew how to discipline the troops," Mr McCormack said. HORROR: A two-year-old girl is raped in Tennant Creek, highlighting the town's and the wider NT's child protection and social problems. (Feb) Strict alcohol measures are imposed. The NT Children's Commissioner says the horrific attack was foreseeable, given the family's problems were well known. Former PM Malcolm Turnbull visits the town after pressure by local media. A man is later charged. CYCLONE: Severe Tropical Cyclone Marcus hits the NT and Kimberley. (Mar). It was stronger than Cyclone Tracey, which levelled the town in 1974. Fortunately, unlike Tracey, there are no deaths. Darwin is shut off with school, events and flights cancelled and power cut off to 26,000 homes. FRACKING GREEN LIGHT: The Labor government lifts its ban on fracking - or hydraulic fracturing - in which a rock is fractured by using a pressurised liquid to access natural gas. The government insists it did so only after a scientific inquiry found the risks could be reduced, but there are claims the federal government pressured them do so in order to receive $260 million extra in GST. (April) DISGRACE: The Territory's former police commissioner John McRoberts becomes the second top cop in Australian history to be jailed. (June) He is guilty of attempting to pervert the course of justice after he was found to have interfered with an investigation into his former lover, NT Crime Stoppers chairwoman Xana Kamitsis, who was jailed for committing fraud as a travel agent. He is sentenced to three years. VISIT: Shinzo Abe becomes the first Japanese PM to visit Darwin since his country's military bombed the city. The attack 76 years ago, in which at least 243 people were killed, was the biggest assault on Australia. Mr Abe and Australian PM Scott Morrison lay wreaths at the Darwin cenotaph in what's seen as a highly symbolic moment. The two leaders announce closer military ties and strategic partnerships. (Nov) CORRUPTION: Independent Commissioner Against Corruption Bruce Lander delivers a damning report into the Oakden nursing home scandal, declaring it a "shameful chapter in the state's history". (Feb) MYSTERY: In a renewed search for the Beaumont Children, who disappeared in 1966, police converge on a factory site in Adelaide amid speculation it was where Jane, 9, Arnna, 7, and Grant, 4, were buried. The dig only uncovers animal bones. (Feb) POLITICS: Liberal leader Steven Marshall ends 16 years of Labor rule in South Australia. His party wins 25 seats in the 47-seat House of Assembly to Labor's 19, with three going to independents. (Mar) CRIME: Steven Graham Peet is jailed for 36 years for the 2016 murders of his partner Adeline Yvette Wilson-Rigney and her two children, with a judge describing his actions at deplorable and incomprehensible. (April) TERROR: Zainab Abdirahman-Khalif is found guilty of being a member of terror group Islamic State with evidence against her including 127 video files and communication with three young African women involved in a terror attack in Kenya. (Sept) COLD CASE: The disappearance of Colleen Adams 45 years ago is resolved with the discovery of her skeletal remains under a concrete slab at a Yorke Peninsula property and the charging of her husband, Geoffrey Adams, with murder. (Sept) VIC TOP STORIES OF 2018 POLITICS: A damning Ombudsman report finds 21 Victorian Labor MPs breached parliamentary guidelines in a $388,000 rort at the 2014 state election. (March). It leads to an active police investigation into what is now known as the red shirts affair, implicating up to 21 MPs, including six ministers. (Aug) POLITICS: Daniel Andrews' Labor government is re-elected for a second term in a landslide victory. Three days later he unveils his new front bench, with half of ministerial positions going to women. (Nov) Opposition leader Matthew Guy and state Liberal Party President Michael Kroger resign in the wake of the thumping. (Dec) COURT: James Gargasoulas is found guilty of six murders after mowing down pedestrians on Melbourne's Bourke Street in January 2017 after what he described as a "premonition from God". (Nov) TERROR: A knife attack on Bourke Street launched by Hassan Khalif Shire Ali kills Italian restaurateur Sisto Malaspina and injures two other men. The attacker later died in hospital. Malaspina is remembered for his warmth and "out there" fashion sense at a state funeral. (Nov) MEDICAL: Surgeons at Melbourne's Royal Childrens Hospital successfully separate conjoined Bhutanese twins Nima and Dawa in a six-hour operation. A team of up to 25 doctors helped to separate the 15-month-olds, who were joined at the torso and shared a liver. (Nov) COURT: Three men - Hamza Abbas, Abdullah Chaarani and Ahmed Mohamed - are found guilty of plotting a Christmas Day 2016 terror attack in Melbourne. (Nov) QLD TOP STORIES OF 2018 GAMES: The Gold Coast Commonwealth Games is hailed a success, however it ends on a sour note with organisers criticised for not televising the entrance of the athletes to the closing ceremony. (April) COURT: Rick Thorburn is sentenced to life in prison for the murder of his 12-year-old foster-daughter Tiahleigh Palmer in 2015. (May) JOGGER: The bizarre case of the "poo jogger" who defecated over 60 times on Brisbane footpaths. It turns out to be corporate executive Andrew Douglas Macintosh after a disgruntled neighbour caught him in the act, snapping a picture after lying in wait for three nights. (June) COURT: Shock jock Alan Jones is slapped with a record defamation payout of $3.7 million. (Sept) CRIME: Toyah Cordingley, 24, is found murdered at a beach north of Cairns, sparking a major investigation, with her killer still at large. (Oct) POLITICS: Laws to remove abortion from the state's criminal code pass state parliament. (Oct) STRAWBERRIES: Needles discovered in supermarket strawberries spark a nationwide recall. (Sept) Former strawberry farm worker, My Ut Trinh, is charged over the initial contamination incidents, however police are still hunting for several copycats. (Nov) SHARKS: Victorian doctor Daniel Christidis dies after being mauled by a shark at Cid Harbour in the Whitsundays. (Nov) There are two non-fatal attacks in the same area in September. FIRE: A record-breaking extreme heatwave leads to an unprecedented start to the bushfire season. While numerous buildings and properties are damaged, there are no thankfully no deaths. (Dec) SEEK announces successful refinancing and upsizing of its syndicated loan facility Refinancing of Syndicated Loan Facility Melbourne, Dec 19, 2018 AEST (ABN Newswire) - SEEK Limited ( ASX:SEK ) ( OTCMKTS:SKLTY ) ("SEEK") today announced the successful refinancing of its syndicated loan facility arranged by HSBC and National Australia Bank comprising revolving facilities of A$625m and US$275m, and two new term loans totalling US$300m.Highlights:- New multi-currency (AUD & USD) syndicated loan facility comprising revolving and term loanso Revolving loan facilities (AUD & USD) with tenors of three, four and five yearso USD term loans with tenors of four and five years- Strong support for the syndicated loan facility reflects strength of the business- No change to debt covenants and pricing has not changed materiallySEEK received strong support which resulted in the syndicated loan facility being over-subscribed. SEEK's new syndicated loan facility includes all 9 banks from the previous facility plus the addition of 10 banks from Canada, China, Singapore and Taiwan.Key features of the new facilities include:Revolving loan facilities- Unsecured, senior debt facility- Tranche A A$375m (3 years), Tranche B A$250m (4 years), Tranche C US$275m (5 years)- No material changes to other key terms or pricing from the previous facilityUSD term loans- Fixed term, unsecured, senior debt facility- Tranche D US$100m (4 years), Tranche E US$200m (5 years)- Terms and conditions consistent with the revolving loan facilitySEEK continues to operate comfortably within its banking covenants, with Borrower Group net debt at broadly comparable levels to 30 June 2018. (see Note below)In discussing SEEK's refinancing, Geoff Roberts, SEEK Group CFO, said"This most recent round of refinancing provides SEEK with greater flexibility and diversity in its capital structure. The addition of the new term loans has increased both the capacity and overall tenor of our debt. SEEK has a strong balance sheet and is very well placed to capitalise on both existing and new growth opportunities in the very large Human Capital Management market. SEEK received very strong support for the refinancing which is testament to its medium to long-term growth profile and cash generation."Note: SEEK Limited Borrower Group net debt of A$806.8M at 30 June 2018 (refer Note 7, page 74 of SEEK Limited's 2018 Annual Report)About SEEK Limited SEEK Limited (ASX:SEK) (OTCMKTS:SKLTY) is a diverse group of companies, comprised of a strong portfolio of online employment, educational, commercial and volunteer businesses. SEEK operates across 18 countries with exposure to over 2.9 billion people and approximately 26 per cent of GDP. SEEK makes a positive contribution to people's lives on a global scale. SEEK is listed on the Australian Securities Exchange, where it is a top 100 company with a market capitalisation close to A$6billion and has been listed in the Top 20 Most Innovative Companies Globally by Forbes, and Number One in Australia. UNDERWORLD: Former Comanchero boss Mahmoud "Mick" Hawi is gunned down outside a gym, years after he stepped away from his colourful life in Sydney's underworld. (Feb) Two members of the rival Lone Wolf club and a third man are charged with the killing months after Hawi's extravagant funeral. FIRE: Bushfires rip through idyllic holiday village Tathra on the state's south coast, cutting the only road out of town and raining embers down on homes. More than 60 houses are destroyed and asbestos is strewn throughout the town, prompting a massive and ongoing recovery effort. (March) FAREWELL: Family and friends of Matthew Leveson, who disappeared in 2007, lay the young man to rest at an emotional ceremony in Sydney years after their son's then-lover, Michael Atkins, was arrested, prosecuted and acquitted of his murder. (March) MURDER: Millionaire property developer Ron Medich is sentenced to 39 years in prison for the execution-style murder of his business foe Michael McGurk in 2009 and the intimidation of his victim's widow a year later. (June) DROUGHT: NSW is declared 100 per cent in drought as years of below-average rainfall bite across primary production areas. (August) DESPAIR: A three-week search of bushland around the home where William Tyrrell disappeared unearths no trace of the toddler who went missing in 2014. Detectives hoped the fruitless search would put pressure on locals withholding information as they announce the case will be handed to the NSW coroner. (Sept) YOUTH POLITICS: The NSW Nationals are embroiled in political turmoil after young conservative members allegedly pair up with neo-Nazis to stack a branch and assume control of the party's youth wing. Dozens are expelled as the internal war spills into the media spotlight. (Oct) ME TOO: Geoffrey Rush's defamation case opens in Sydney. The Oscar winner is suing Nationwide News, The Daily Telegraph and its journalist Jonathon Moran after two 2017 articles allegedly claimed "King Leer" Rush acted inappropriately towards female co-star Eryn Jean Norvill. (Oct) POLITICS: NSW Labor leader Luke Foley resigns in disgrace after pressure from his political enemies triggers ABC journalist Ashleigh Raper to break her silence about allegations he indecently touched her at a Christmas party. Foley briefly threatens legal action but later backs down as Michael Daley replaces him as opposition leader. (Nov) MURDER: Former Newtown Jets rugby league star Chris Dawson is charged with the 1982 murder of his wife Lynette after new evidence emerged and the cold case was thrust into the public consciousness by The Teacher's Pet podcast. (Dec) WA TOP STORIES OF 2018 FAMILY MASS MURDERS: At a farm near Margaret River, a grandfather shoots dead his wife, their daughter and her four children then kills himself. It is Australia's worst gun crime since the Port Arthur massacre. (May) Two months later, a 19-year-old man allegedly kills his mother, sister and brother at their Perth home in Ellenbrook. Another two months later, a 24-year-old man allegedly kills his wife, mother-in-law and three young children at their Bedford home in Perth. ASSISTED SUICIDE: Australia's oldest scientist, 104-year-old David Goodall, did not have a terminal illness but says he stopped enjoying life at about the age of 90. The West Australian travels to Switzerland, where it's legal to take his own life. The England-born Member of the Order of Australia says in an open letter he would have preferred to end his days in "the country of my adoption". (May) CLAREMONT SERIAL KILLINGS: Telecommunications worker Bradley Robert Edwards, 49, pleads not guilty to murdering Jane Rimmer, 23, Ciara Glennon, 27, and Sarah Spiers, 18, in 1996 and 1997, plus separate sexual offences in 1988 and 1995. He is expected to face a lengthy judge-alone trial, starting next year, following what is believed to be Australia's longest-running and most expensive police investigation. (June) WHAT HAPPENED? A 45-year-old guard from the Woodford Correctional Centre was attacked about 3pm on Tuesday. He was airlifted with serious facial fractures which will require surgery. The prisoner accused of punching and kicking the guard is serving a sentence for assault causing grievous bodily harm. The centre was placed in lockdown and counselling offered to all staff. STAFF REACTION Woodford correctional officer met around 6.30am on Wednesday and voted to walk off the job. The prison remains on lockdown before a hearing at the Industrial Relations Commissioner at 4pm on Wednesday. Together Union representing prison guards sent a letter of demand to Corrective Services Minister Mark Ryan demanded issue of overcrowding be addressed. The demands include capsicum spray, body-worn cameras for all officers, half-unit lock downs, two officers per "post" every day, to refer all staff assaults to police for charges to be laid and to install service hatches. The union has requested a response within five days or has threatened to take industrial action across Queensland. WHAT IS TASKFORCE FLAXTON Taskforce Flaxton examined possible systemic issues with a view to raising standards of integrity relevant to detecting, managing and preventing corruption risks associated with Queensland corrective services facilities. It found there had been increased assaults in prisons due to overcrowding. Melbourne Stars allrounder Marcus Stoinis is back bowling in the nets after an ankle injury threatened to derail the start of his BBL campaign. Stoinis rolled his right ankle during a warm-up during the drawn Sheffield Shield clash with Victoria at the MCG last week. He was unable to bowl in the second innings, but scored a swashbuckling 85 that included six sixes to help the Warriors to a share of the points. Stoinis looms as a key player with bat and ball and he's confident he'll be able to carry out both duties when the Stars take on Sydney Thunder in Canberra on Friday night. "It's all good ... I started bowling a couple of days ago and I had a good bowl today out in the nets," Stoinis said on Wednesday. "It's just a little tear in the ligament. It's pulled up pretty well. "It's in a good spot if you're going to do one. "I don't think it's healed, but it's something I can play with. Apparently it will take three or four weeks to heal fully. "But it's something that as long as I'm managing it's all good." Former US president George W. Bush and brother Jeb Bush wait as the casket of their father, former US president George W.H. Bush, is carried upon arrival at his presidential library center Former US president George H.W. Bush, remembered as much for his legacy of service as his impact on history, was buried Thursday, capping days of tribute from a nation that briefly set aside political divisions to honor him. After a state funeral Wednesday in Washington that was attended by the country's five living presidents and foreign dignitaries, Bush's flag-draped casket was flown to Texas for a final farewell. A compassionate national spotlight had shone on Bush's passing and the memorial proceedings throughout this week. But his burial at Bush's presidential library center in College Station, Texas -- alongside Barbara, his wife of 73 years, and their daughter Robin who died of leukemia at age 3 -- was a private family service. "The 41st President of the United States of America, George Herbert Walker Bush, has reached his final resting place," family spokesman Jim McGrath posted on Twitter. Bush, who died Friday at age 94, lay in repose at St Martin's Episcopal Church in Houston, where he was eulogized at a final memorial service by close friend James Baker, who served as his secretary of state. Former US President George W. Bush embraces former US secretary of State James Baker (R) after he gave a eulogy during the funeral for former president George H.W. Bush in Houston "His incredible service to our nation and the world are already etched in the marble of time," Baker said, highlighting the sense of duty, service, and personal grace that drove Bush. Fighting through tears, the 88-year-old Baker recalled how Bush's deeds "expressed his moral character, and they reflected his decency, his boundless kindness and consideration of others, his determination always to do the right thing." - Final resting place - People line the road as the hearse carrying the flag-draped casket of former US president George H.W. Bush heads to a Houston train station, for a final trip to the late leader's presidential library Son George W. Bush, the nation's 43rd president, appeared somber at his wife Laura's side, and stood ramrod straight as military pallbearers carried the casket from the Houston church to a waiting hearse. It was then placed on a train -- with a locomotive painted in the colors and pattern of Air Force One, the presidential jet -- for the final journey to the presidential library, part of a precise series of ritualized events. There were emotional displays along the route in towns like Spring, Magnolia, Navasota and College Station. Crowds of people braved rainy weather to mass beside the tracks, where they held American flags, saluted, cheered and waved goodbye as the train rolled slowly past. Bush was the 12th president to lie in state in the US Capitol rotunda. Thousands paid respects there to a statesman who steered the nation through turbulent times including the end of the Cold War and the marshalling of an international coalition to oust invading Iraqi forces from Kuwait. On Thursday, Baker pointed to Bush's eagerness to forge compromise and peace rather than rattle sabers. "He had the courage of a warrior," Baker said. "But when the time came for prudence, he always maintained the greater courage of a peacemaker." George H. W. Bush Bush was a decorated World War II aviator who nearly died when he was shot down on a bombing mission. He served as a congressman, envoy to China and to the United Nations, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and vice president to Ronald Reagan before winning the White House. At Wednesday's service in Washington, President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania shared a front row pew in the National Cathedral with past presidents Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter and their wives, to honor Bush. Son George delivered an emotional eulogy in tribute to his father. The pair are only the second father-son presidential duo in American history, after John Adams and John Quincy Adams. - An uneasy truce - Since Bush's death, Trump has traded his usual provocative posture for one of solemnity and respect for the Bushes, with whom he has often clashed since his meteoric rise in the world of politics. As Trump toned down the rhetoric this week, Washington's political heat was reduced from a normal boil to a simmer. But at Wednesday's service, tensions were obvious. Trump arrived and shook hands with the Obamas, but his body language turned cold as he failed to acknowledge Hillary Clinton, his defeated Democratic rival in 2016, or her president husband Bill. Russian President Vladimir Putin said about a dozen countries were now producing mid-range missiles of the type banned by the INF treaty A defiant Vladimir Putin on Wednesday threatened to develop nuclear missiles banned under a treaty with the United States after Washington gave Moscow a deadline to comply with the key arms control agreement. The latest spike in tensions came a day after US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Washington would withdraw from a major Cold War treaty limiting mid-range nuclear arms within 60 days if Russia does not dismantle missiles that the US claims breach the deal. Putin dismissed Pompeo's statement as a smokescreen, saying Washington had already decided to ditch the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty (INF). "They thought we would not notice," the Kremlin chief said, claiming the Pentagon has already earmarked an amount for the development of missiles banned by the treaty. "We are against the destruction of this treaty. But if this happens, we will react accordingly." Putin said about a dozen countries were now producing mid-range missiles of the type banned by the INF treaty. Nuclear treaties between the US and Russia "Apparently now American partners believe the situation has changed so much that the United States should also have such weapons. "What will be our answer? A simple one: we will also do this," Putin said. - 'Head off arms race' - Federica Mogherini has warned that Europe does not want to become a battlefield for global powers once again In Brussels, EU diplomatic chief Federica Mogherini urged Russia and the US to save the treaty, warning that Europe did not want to become a battlefield for global powers once again, as it had been during the Cold War. "The INF has guaranteed peace and security in European territory for 30 years now," Mogherini said as she arrived for talks with NATO foreign ministers. In October, President Donald Trump sparked concern globally by declaring the United States would pull out of the deal and build up America's nuclear stockpile "until people come to their senses". Putin at the time warned that abandoning the treaty and failure to extend another key arms control agreement known as the New START, would unleash a new arms race and put Europe in danger. On Monday, the US leader said he wants talks with Putin and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping "to head off a major and uncontrollable arms race". Valery Gerasimov, head of Russia's General Staff, said that Moscow would increase the capabilities of its ground-based strategic nuclear arms. "One of the main destructive factors complicating the international situation is how the US is acting as it attempts to retain its dominant role in the world," he said in comments released by the defence ministry. "It is for these purposes that Washington and its allies are taking comprehensive, concerted measures to contain Russia and discredit its role in international affairs." - 'Ballistic missiles' - The US and Russia are also at odds over Moscow's support for Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria's civil war, and the conflict in Ukraine Signed in 1987 by then US president Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, the INF resolved a crisis over Soviet nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles targeting Western capitals. But it was a bilateral treaty between the US and the then Soviet Union, so it puts no restrictions on other major military actors like China. Pompeo said at a meeting with fellow NATO foreign ministers on Tuesday that there was no reason why the US "should continue to cede this crucial military advantage" to rival powers. NATO said it was now "up to Russia" to save the treaty. The Trump administration has complained of Moscow's deployment of Novator 9M729 missiles, which Washington says fall under the treaty's ban on missiles that can travel distances of up to 5,500 kilometres (3,400 miles) The nuclear-capable Russian cruise missiles are mobile and hard to detect and can hit cities in Europe with little or no warning, according to NATO, dramatically changing the security situation on the continent. US-Russia ties are under deep strain over a number of crises including accusations Moscow meddled in the 2016 US presidential election. The two Cold War enemies are also at odds over Russian support for Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria's civil war, and the conflict in Ukraine. Washington on Tuesday promised Russia more "pain" if Moscow did not release three Ukrainian vessels and 24 sailors captured off Crimea last last month. Israeli soldiers deploy excavators alongside the border wall with Lebanon on December 5, 2018, after the army announced it had discovered Hezbollah infiltration tunnels passing under it Israeli opposition leader Tzipi Livni accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday of over-dramatising the army's discovery of Hezbollah tunnels infiltrating its territory from Lebanon for political gain. Livni told public radio that while she and the rest of the opposition welcomed the army's discovery of the tunnels and their eventual demolition, "the incident must be kept in proportion". "We are not now in a situation where our soldiers are behind enemy lines," said Livni, who served as foreign minister during Israel's 2006 war with Hezbollah. "We are talking about engineering activity within the sovereign territory of the state of Israel," she added, accusing Netanyahu of "blowing the incident out of proportion". Israel announced on Tuesday that it had discovered Hezbollah tunnels infiltrating its territory from Lebanon and launched an operation to destroy them. Army spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Conricus said the "attack tunnels" dug by the Shiite militant group backed by Iran, Israel's main enemy, were not yet operational. He declined to say how many had been detected or how they would be destroyed, but stressed all activities would take place within Israeli territory. Netanyahu, whose electoral appeal rests to a large extent on his image as the Jewish state's "Mr Security", went on television on Tuesday evening to explain the tunnel threat, with armed forces chief of staff Lieutenant General Gadi Eisenkot at his side. On Wednesday he told UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres on the phone that "he expects the UN to strongly condemn the violation of Israel's sovereignty," according to his office's Twitter account. - Seeking to 'sow panic' - Netanyahu also demanded the international community join in demands to "impose increased sanctions on Hezbollah", it added. The Israeli leader is seeking to hold his governing coalition together after last month's resignation of defence minister Avigdor Lieberman over a controversial Gaza ceasefire, which left him clinging to a one-seat majority in parliament. The prime minister took over the defence portfolio after Lieberman's resignation. He has also faced mounting legal woes, with police on Sunday recommending that he and his wife Sara be indicted for bribery, the third such decision against the premier in recent months. The army has dismissed any suggestion of political influence in the operation, but some in the opposition, while supporting the army's actions, have pointed to how Netanyahu handled the announcement. Livni alleged that part of Netanyahu's thinking was to deflect criticism from residents of southern Israel who say he has failed to quash the threat of cross-border rocket fire from militants in the Gaza Strip. "Therefore he made a defensive engineering event into a dramatic military operation," she said, giving two possible reasons for such a move. "Either the prime minister is himself panicking or he wants to sow panic to justify his actions both in delaying elections and abandoning the residents of southern Israel." Livni later told foreign journalists in a phone briefing that the international community should bring greater pressure on Lebanon over Hezbollah's activities. President Donald Trump has stood firm against Democrats as he seeks border wall funding, risking a partial government shutdown if a compromise is not reached by December 21, 2018 An intensifying spending standoff sent US lawmakers scrambling Monday to avert a partial government shutdown, with Republican and Democratic leaders deadlocked over President Donald Trump's demands for border wall funding. As Washington barreled toward a shuttering of key federal agencies in just four days, the White House appeared dug in on Trump's call for Congress to budget $5 billion in 2019 to fund a wall on the US-Mexico border that he insists will check illegal immigration. If no breakthrough is reached, the shutdown would occur over the Christmas holiday -- when most lawmakers flee the US Capitol -- leaving Washington red-faced at the end of the year. The closure could potentially spill into early January, when the new Congress -- including a Democratically-controlled House of Representatives -- is sworn in. Lawmakers involved in funding negotiations suggested the first move would have to come from Trump's team. "We'll see soon, but the clock's ticking away," Republican Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Richard Shelby told reporters. Pro-Trump demonstrators protest near the US-Mexico border in Imperial Beach, San Diego County Democrats are united in their opposition to Trump's ask, saying their intent is to vote for no more than $1.6 billion in border security funding as laid out in bipartisan Senate legislation earlier this month. Trump launched a fresh attack on the opposition party and its offer of wall-less border security funding. "Anytime you hear a Democrat saying that you can have good Boarder (sic) Security without a Wall, write them off as just another politician following the party line," he tweeted. White House senior advisor Stephen Miller said Sunday that building the wall remained a top priority and that Trump was "absolutely" prepared to shut down government to achieve that goal. - Not enough votes - Last week, a defiant Trump said he would be "proud" to shutter the government over border security. Top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer stressed there are not enough votes in Congress to pass wall funding, and that it would be up to Trump to repeal his demand. "President Trump still doesn't have a plan to keep the government open. In fact, the only indication he has given is that he wants a government shutdown," Schumer said on the Senate floor. Democrats have made two offers to Trump, Schumer said: pass a funding stopgap, known as a continuing resolution (CR), for the unfunded agencies for the remainder of the fiscal year through September 2019, or fund most of the agencies and pass a CR for homeland security. Top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer stressed there are not enough votes in Congress to pass wall funding, and that it would be up to Trump to repeal his demand "His temper tantrum will get him a shutdown, but it will not get him a wall," Schumer said. "It's futile." The window for action is narrow. The House is off until Wednesday evening, leaving very limited time before funding for the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and other agencies expires Friday at midnight. Some members of Congress have told US media they see little chance of reaching a compromise in the coming days and have advocated for a short-term stopgap spending bill that would punt the problem until January. Complicating the stalemate, several of the 100-plus lawmakers who are either retiring at year's end or lost their seats in November's midterm elections, mainly Republicans, may not be fully motivated to return to Washington this week for a final federal spending vote. "Many of them don't want to come back," Schumer noted. Should a shutdown occur, it would be relatively limited, as Congress has already funded 75 percent of government operations through September. But Americans have little appetite for the standoff, and Trump would likely suffer if the government closed temporarily, polls show. Forty-three percent of respondents said they would blame Trump and Republicans for a shutdown, compared to 24 percent blaming Democrats, according to a USA Today/Suffolk University Poll. Thirty percent would blame both equally. Fawns like this one pictured in May 2017 in France, have been killed in their hundreds by Berry and his family A judge in Missouri has sentenced a prolific poacher to repeat screenings of "Bambi," the Walt Disney classic weepy about a fawn whose mother is slain by a hunter. David Berry Jr will be forced to watch the animated movie at least once a month during his year-long jail term, the result of what law enforcement officials described as one of their largest-ever poaching investigations. Berry and two family members were arrested on charges of killing hundreds of deer over three years, according to the Missouri Department of Conservation, which announced the sentence in a December 13 statement. "If Bambi gets the point across to him, I don't have a problem with it," Lawrence County prosecutor Don Trotter told BuzzFeed News. "The deer were trophy bucks taken illegally, mostly at night, for their heads, leaving the bodies of the deer to waste," said Trotter. In the last three months of 2015 alone, the Berry family killed around 100 deer, according to photos taken from their phones, said Trotter. Berry had already seen his hunting privileges revoked for past wildlife infractions and was on probation. He and other two men have paid a combined $51,000 in fines and court costs. "In situations like this, with serial poachers who have no regard for the animals, rules of fair chase, or aren't bothered by the fact that they're stealing from others, it's all about greed and ego," Randy Doman, an official with the Missouri Department Of Conservation, told the Springfield News-Leader newspaper. The Walt Disney Company bewitched generations of children with its pioneering animated film, released in August 1942, about a wide-eyed young deer and his doting mom. But the shocking image of young Bambi curled up next to the doe after she is slain by hunters, has become as iconic as any scene in cinema history, credited with opening up taboo conversations about death and helping youngsters cope with bereavement. "Bambi" often leads lists of the saddest moments in cinema, and even moved Time magazine to include the movie among its top 25 horror movies of all time, alongside "Frankenstein," "The Exorcist" and "Night of the Living Dead." Judge Robert George sent Berry to jail for one year and ordered the film viewings to be conducted by the sheriff of the Lawrence County Jail. Berry's attorneys asked for leniency in sentencing because their client's wife had recently had a baby. But the judge was apparently not moved. "You can watch Bambi and think about your own child when you do that," Trotter said. Fourteen people have been ensnared in a multi-year investigation of illegal hunting spanning Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska and Canada. The UN condemned "systematic, widespread and gross" human rights violations in North Korea, whose leader Kim Jong Un is seen here The United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution Monday condemning the "systematic, widespread and gross" human rights violations in North Korea. The non-binding resolution, which was passed by consensus without a vote, welcomes diplomatic efforts to end the crisis on the Korean peninsula. But it emphasizes that members are "deeply concerned at the grave human rights situation, the pervasive culture of impunity and the lack of accountability for human rights violations in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea." It also denounces the use of torture as well as "inhumane conditions of detention, rape, public executions, extrajudicial and arbitrary detention" and "the existence of an extensive system of political prison camps." Pyongyang's mission to the UN attacked the US's willingness to organize a Security Council meeting on human rights in North Korea. In early December, Washington had given up asking for the meeting, which had been held every year since 2014, because it was unsure of the support it would get from partners. But the US hopes to hold the meeting in January with the arrival of new non-permanent council members that could be more favorable to doing so. "The UN Security Council is neither a place for discussion on any human rights issue nor a platform where a human rights issue is politicized to flare up confrontation," North Korea's UN mission said in a statement. "The UN Security Council should not be misused as a platform again where US's high-handedness and arbitrary practice would prevail, and should remain true to its mission and duties as enshrined in the UN Charter," it said. and Resource Mining Dispute Settlement Perth, Dec 19, 2018 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Intermin Resources Limited ( ASX:IRC ) ("Intermin" or "the Company") advises that a resolution has been reached with mining contractor Resource Mining Pty Ltd ("Resource Mining") over claims received by Intermin from Resource Mining relating to the recently completed Teal gold mine Stages 1 and 2.The Teal Gold Mine was mined under a risk share - profit share structure with Resource Mining(see Note 1 below). Intermin and Resource Mining co-funding development on a 50:50 cost and risk share basis to first gold production, with the net operating cash flow thereafter as determined under the agreement between the parties to be shared 75% to Intermin and 25% to Resource Mining.The Company outlined in its announcement to the ASX on 24 October 2018 that it had received cost variation claims from Resource Mining relating to Teal Stage 1 and Stage 2 and that the Company's Representative had made and delivered a determination in relation to the cost variation claims. The claims and the determination were not agreed between the parties and the Company reported that it was working to resolve this matter.Intermin and Resource Mining have now agreed to a full and final settlement of this matter. The total disputed variation claims amount(see Note 2 below) was split on a 50:50 basis, while the remaining net operating cash was split 75% to Intermin and 25% to Resource Mining as originally agreed under the mining contract between the parties.After disbursement of monies to both parties from the project joint bank accounts, Intermin's cash and investments (including GST credits) will total approximately A$7.8 million.Notes:1 As announced to the ASX on 19 July 20162 As announced to the ASX on 24 October 2018About Horizon Minerals Limited Horizon Minerals Limited (ASX:HRZ) is a gold exploration and mining company focussed on the Kalgoorlie and Menzies areas of Western Australia which are host to some of Australia's richest gold deposits. The Company is developing a mining pipeline of projects to generate cash and self-fund aggressive exploration, mine developments and further acquisitions. The Teal gold mine has been recently completed. Horizon is aiming to significantly grow its JORC-Compliant Mineral Resources, complete definitive feasibility studies on core high grade open cut and underground projects and build a sustainable development pipeline. Horizon has a number of joint ventures in place across multiple commodities and regions of Australia providing exposure to Vanadium, Copper, PGE's, Gold and Nickel/Cobalt. Our quality joint venture partners are earning in to our project areas by spending over $20 million over 5 years enabling focus on the gold business while maintaining upside leverage. Former FBI Director James Comey says Republicans need to stand up to President Donald Trump Former FBI director James Comey lashed out at Donald Trump on Monday for telling "lies" and undermining the rule of law, and urged Republicans to stand up to the president. "The FBI's reputation has as taken a big hit because the president of the United States, with his acolytes, has lied about it constantly. In the face of those lies, a whole lot of good people... believe that nonsense," Comey told reporters in the halls of the US Senate. "People who know better, including Republican members of this body, have to have the courage to stand up and speak the truth." Comey spoke after a spurt of anti-FBI tweets from the president over the past week alleged that the investigative body abused its powers in probing his former personal lawyer Michael Cohen and his former national security advisor Michael Flynn. Cohen and Flynn have both been convicted for various crimes and have both offered evidence potentially damaging to their former boss. With Cohen, Trump tweeted on Sunday: "The FBI did something which was absolutely unthinkable & unheard of until the Witch Hunt was illegally started. They BROKE INTO AN ATTORNEY'S OFFICE!" In fact the FBI had a court order to search Cohen's office. As for Flynn, Trump alleged that he had been tricked into lying in a January 2016 interview with the FBI that led to his arest. "So General Michael Flynn's life can be totally destroyed while Shadey James Comey can Leak and Lie," Trump tweeted earlier this month. Comey said that politicians, and especially Republicans, have to stop remaining quiet when Trump makes false statements. "Republicans used to understand that the actions of a president matter, the words of a president matter, the rule of law matters, and the truth matters. Where are those Republicans today?" "At some point, someone has to stand up and in the face of fear of Fox News, fear of their base, fear of mean tweets, stand up for the values of this country, and not slink away into retirement, but stand up and speak the truth." Comey spoke after his second closed-door testimony in a week during which he was quizzed on his oversight of an investigation into the mishandling of sensitive emails by Trump's 2016 rival Hillary Clinton during the election. While the Justice Department has closed the issue after an internal review, Trump and Republicans seeking to protect him from the Russia collusion investigation of Special Counsel Robert Mueller want the Clinton probe reopened. Trump fired Comey in May 2017 after Comey refused to swear his allegiance and roll back the nascent investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Mueller is now believed to be investigating whether that firing and other actions amount to obstruction of justice by the president. In a bid to improve his sagging fortunes as Christmas approaches, Australia Prime Minister Morrison looks almost certain to dole out the goodies to sceptical voters Flagging in the polls and facing a rout in the May general election, Australia Prime Minister Scott Morrison looked to shore up support Tuesday, teasing AUS$9 billion worth of tax cuts. "We support lower taxes," said treasurer and deputy prime minister Josh Frydenberg, touting "important" tax decisions ahead. A mid-year budget released Monday showed the government running a smaller deficit than expected and possible surplus next year. That amounts to a much-needed AUS$9.25 billion (US$6.7 billion) election war chest for Morrison. His conservative coalition is ten points back in the polls and facing a thumping loss to centre-left Labor, according to a recent Newspoll survey. Hoping for a little Christmas cheer to improve his sagging fortunes, Morrison looks almost certain to dole out the goodies to sceptical voters. The government did not spell out what the tax cuts could be, but they were budgeted for in the fine print of the plan under "decisions taken but not yet announced." "This is tax cuts (or possibly spending measures) due to be announced between now and next year's election," said Andrew Hanlan, an economist with Westpac. Experts said the smaller deficit was thanks to higher tax revenues stemming from stronger growth and higher commodity prices. Australia's economy has been growing steadily for decades, but has started to slow amid trade disputes between China and the United States and domestic pressures. An election date has not yet been set, but it is widely expected by May next year. The global gender pay gap will not be closed until the year 2220, a report has warned. The World Economic Forum (WEF) report said there had been some improvements in wage equality this year compared to 2017, when the global gender gap widened for the first time in a decade. But it warned that these were offset by declining representation of women in politics, coupled with greater inequality in their access to health and education. At current rates, the global gender gap across a range of areas will not close for another 108 years, while it is expected to take another 202 years to close the workplace gap, WEF found. The global gender pay gap will not be closed until the year 2220, a report has warned (file picture) At current rates, the global gender gap across a range of areas will not close for another 108 years, while it is expected to take 202 years to close the workplace gap, WEF found The Geneva-based organisation's annual report tracked disparities between the sexes in 149 countries across four areas: education, health, economic opportunity and political empowerment. After years of advances in education, health and political representation, women registered setbacks in all three areas this year, WEF said. Only in the area of economic opportunity did the gender gap narrow somewhat, although there is not much to celebrate, with the global wage gap narrowing to nearly 51 percent. And the number of women in leadership roles has risen to 34 percent globally, WEF said. This year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry may have gone to a female, scientist Frances Arnold (pictured), but a new report says women are still significantly under-represented in employment that require science, technology, engineering and mathematics skills But at the same time, the report showed that there are now proportionately fewer women than men participating in the workforce, suggesting that automation is having a disproportionate impact on jobs traditionally performed by women. And women are significantly under-represented in growing areas of employment that require science, technology, engineering and mathematics skills, WEF said. It decried the particularly low participation of women within the artificial intelligence field, where they make up just 22 per cent of the workforce. 'This gap is three times larger than in other industry talent pools,' the WEF statement pointed out. After years of advances in education, health and political representation, women registered setbacks in all three areas this year, WEF said 'In addition to being outnumbered three to one, women in AI are less likely to be positioned in senior roles,' it said, stressing the 'clear need for proactive measures to prevent a deepening of the gender gap in other industries where AI skills are in increasing demand.' The situation varies greatly in different countries and regions. For instance, while Western European countries could close their gender gaps within 61 years, countries in the Middle East and North Africa will take 153 years, the report estimated. Overall, the Nordic countries once again dominated the top of the table: men and women were most equal in Iceland, followed by Norway, Sweden and Finland. Syria, Iraq, Pakistan and finally Yemen showed the biggest overall gender gaps of the countries surveyed. Among the world's 20 leading economies, France fared the best, taking 12th place overall, followed by Germany in 14th place, Britain in 15th, Canada in 16th and South Africa in 19th. The United States continued its decline, slipping two places to 51st, with the report in particular blaming 'a decrease in gender parity in ministerial-level positions.' Jeff Daniels (L) stars as Atticus Finch and Gbenga Akinnagbe plays the accused Tom Robinson in the Broadway adaptation of "To Kill A Mockingbird" written by Aaron Sorkin It's a story of racial injustice that is seared into the US psyche and required reading for millions of American students. Now, Harper Lee's seminal novel "To Kill a Mockingbird" is a Broadway smash hit, after a modern facelift from playwright Aaron Sorkin that has made the literary classic newly relevant in Trump's America. "Mockingbird" is a sacred text in the United States -- a winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and the inspiration for an Oscar-winning movie. So why make an international bestseller into a play, and how do you make it fresh? The answer seems to be to hire Sorkin -- the creative mind behind hit television show "The West Wing" and an Oscar winner himself for writing the screenplay for "The Social Network" about the creation of Facebook. Sorkin has kept the action in the Jim Crow era of racial segregation, but adapted it for a 2018 audience, in an America still confronted by its "original sin" of slavery and with liberals thirsty for hope under Donald Trump's administration. In an essay for New York magazine, Sorkin called the task "a suicide mission." If the rave reviews since Thursday night's Broadway premiere are to be believed, Sorkin -- who had not written for the stage in more than a decade -- has a fresh hit on his hands. The 1,400-seat Shubert Theatre is already sold out for months into a run expected to end in September 2019, and the buzz surrounding "Mockingbird" is electric. The play -- directed by the award-winning Bartlett Sher -- stars Jeff Daniels as Atticus Finch, the widowed small-town lawyer who defends a black man wrongly accused of rape in 1930s Alabama. "Cases like this happen every day in this country -- people are wrongfully accused, particularly if they are of color," says actor Gbenga Akinnagbe, who is making his Broadway debut as Tom Robinson, the laborer falsely accused of rape by the white daughter of a racist father. "If my portrayal of Tom can get people to... empathize more with human beings who have been cast aside, I think I would have done something important," Akinnagbe told AFP. - Adapting a classic - "To Kill A Mockingbird" author Harper Lee approved of Aaron Sorkin adapting her novel for the stage -- her estate later sued but the matter was settled Sorkin insists that no event in the play doesn't happen in the book, but the only two significant black characters -- the wrongly accused Robinson and maid Calpurnia -- have been expanded into more rounded characters. "It's the kind of thing that would have gone unnoticed in 1960, but in 2018, using black characters only as atmosphere is as noticeable as it is wrong," he explained in the New York magazine essay. It is Finch -- not his daughter Scout, who narrates the book -- who is the central protagonist and given a flaw necessary for dramaturgical purposes. "He believes in the fundamental goodness in everyone, even homicidal white supremacists," Sorkin writes. "This set of beliefs would be challenged." While the trial doesn't begin until chapter 16 in the novel, it comes on stage minutes after the curtain rises. The children Scout, Jem and Dill are played by adults, as the roles were deemed too complicated for child actors. The events of the play resonate in the challenges of today's America. Recent years have been marked by street protests against police killings of unarmed black men. Hate crimes are up. Trump's administration has been accused of discrimination. Racial violence has returned to the headlines. Then there is the #MeToo reckoning with sexual harassment, which the play turns on its head by examining the case of a woman who wrongly accuses a man. - 'Not an homage' - The reclusive Lee gave her approval to Sorkin to write the play shortly before her death in 2016, but her estate sued the production, complaining that the characters had been altered and arguing that the play had departed from the "spirit" of the novel. A settlement was ultimately reached -- with Sorkin agreeing to soften Finch's language, deny him a celebratory whiskey and delete a reference to a rifle in the closet -- in exchange for leaving the expanded black roles intact. Sorkin also opted to bypass "Go Set A Watchman" -- Lee's controversial early draft of "Mockingbird" that was published in 2015 -- in writing the play. "It's not an homage or an exercise in nostalgia," he wrote in New York magazine. "It's a new play." Frederick Weller -- who plays Bob Ewell, the racist father of the accuser -- was effusive about working with Sorkin. "His words are magic -- it's like having jewels in your mouth," Weller told AFP, summing up his role as "the most despicable character I've ever played." "The play ultimately is very hopeful and it will alleviate some of the cynicism and the frustration that can set in," he said. Les Moonves won't receive a severance package from CBS after sexual misconduct claims forced him out from his post as chairman and CEO Les Moonves, the onetime head of CBS, was fired for cause and will not receive a severance package in the wake of sexual misconduct allegations, the television network announced Monday. Moonves, who transformed the corporation into the most watched television network in the country, was one of the most respected executives in Hollywood until he was first publicly accused. Two articles published by The New Yorker -- in July and in September -- detailed allegations against the 69-year-old television titan from 12 different women. He resigned in September. At the time, CBS said Moonves and the network would donate $20 million to supporting the #MeToo movement and equality for women in the workplace. CBS said a company investigation found Moonves guilty of "willful and material misfeasance," and said he refused to cooperate with the probe. He had been expected to receive up to $120 million as part of a severance package that will now not materialize, as it was dependent on the results of the investigation. Moonves's lawyer rejected CBS's findings, calling them "without merit." "The press was informed of these baseless conclusions before Mr Moonves, further damaging his name, reputation, career and legacy," attorney Andrew Levander said in a statement. "Mr Moonves vehemently denies any nonconsensual sexual relations and cooperated extensively and fully with investigators." While the investigation found that harassment and retaliation were "not pervasive at the network," it also uncovered previous incidents of "improper and unprofessional conduct." "The company's historical policies, practices and structures have not reflected a high institutional priority on preventing harassment and retaliation," CBS said, citing the probe. It said investigators found that "inadequate" resources had been allocated to human resources, training and development, diversity and inclusion. "Employees also cited past incidents in which HR and the company did not hold high performers accountable for their conduct and protect employees from retaliation," CBS added. But the network said it had already implemented corrective measures, naming a new "chief people officer" responsible for human resources and retaining outside expert advisors "to develop other initiatives for promoting a workplace culture of dignity, transparency, respect and inclusion." CBS has also seen other harassment claims. On Friday, it confirmed having paid $9.5 million to actress Eliza Dushku, who was written off the script of the series "Bull" after complaining of harassment by the lead actor. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern's government has already moved to legalise medicinal cannabis, with legislation on the issue working its way through parliament New Zealand will hold a referendum on legalising recreational marijuana when the South Pacific nation votes in its next general election in 2020, the government announced Tuesday. The ballot was among the demands the Green Party made during talks to join Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern's progressive coalition government after the 2017 election. Justice Minister Andrew Little said the government had agreed to the timetable, and the result of the referendum would be binding. "It will be held at the 2020 general election," he told reporters, adding "there is a bit of detail still to work through." Ardern's government has already moved to legalise medicinal cannabis, with legislation on the issue working its way through parliament. An opinion poll last year found 65 percent of New Zealanders also supported legalising the drug for recreational use. Pro-reform campaign group New Zealand Drug Foundation welcomed the vote, with its chief Ross Bell saying the current approach to regulating marijuana was outdated and it was time for a change. "Cannabis is New Zealand's most common illegal drug, 50 percent of the country have tried it," he said. "We're still trying to address the problem through a law enforcement approach. We're still criminalising people and not providing help to people who have a cannabis dependency." The conservative National Party opposition leader Simon Bridges said he would be voting against legalisation and accused the government of trying to deflect voters' attention from issues such as the economy and the rising cost of living. "I'm pretty cynical that you've got a government here that wants to distract from the core issues of a general election," he said. Ardern strongly supported legalising medical pot but has not revealed her personal views on recreational marijuana, saying only she does not believe cannabis users should be jailed. The debate in New Zealand comes as New York governor Andrew Cuomo called Monday for the drug to be made legal for recreational use in his state, including America's most populous city. Loic Gouzer, who is stepping down from his post as co-chairman of Americas postwar and contemporary art at Christie's, stands next to "Untitled" by Jean-Michel Basquiat on April 29, 2016 in New York Loic Gouzer, who led the record-breaking 2017 sale of Leonardo da Vinci's "Salvator Mundi," will step down as co-chairman of Americas postwar and contemporary art at Christie's by year's end, the auction house announced Monday. During his seven-year tenure, Gouzer developed a reputation as an innovator ready to take big risks to clinch history-making sales mixing contemporary and historical works. The 500-year-old da Vinci painting depicting Jesus Christ went under the hammer for $450.3 million in November 2017 -- the most expensive work ever sold at auction. It is the only known work by the artist to still be held in a private collection. Gouzer also presided over a 2015 sale of Pablo Picasso's "Les femmes d'Alger (Version 'O')" for the then record sum of $179.4 million. And last month, he led the sale of David Hockney's "Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)" for $90.3 million, an auction record for a living artist. Gouzer, a 38-year-old who spent his childhood in Geneva and is an avid Instagram user, gave no indication of his future plans. "Those who know me best know that my two great passions in life have always been art and the environment," he said in a statement. "I intend to spend the next few months concentrating on conservation and climate issues before coming back to the art world with a new project." In 2013, Gouzer had organized a sale with friend and actor Leonardo di Caprio that raised $39 million for environmental initiatives. Immaculate Nyakato, 65, fled her home in Ituri, eastern DR Congo in fear of violence from another ethnic group They may have fled their homes six months or as much as 20 years ago, but few of them have any faith in the upcoming elections in Democratic Republic of Congo. Until recently, Immaculate Nyakato, 65, lived in Ituri, one of DR Congo's eastern provinces that borders Uganda. For a long time, she put up with the violence that has blighted the gold-rich region. But a few weeks ahead of the December 23 ballot, when voters will choose a successor to President Joseph Kabila, she left her home, fleeing across the border to Uganda. A member of the Hema minority, she felt threatened by the Lendu, another ethnic group. They had come in the night and put a mark on her door and those of her neighbours, she told AFP. That was all the warning she needed. Nyakato gathered her things and what little money she had and crossed to Kyangwali, a refugee camp in Uganda on the other side of Lake Albert. "If there is still war, the elections won't make a difference," she remarked. - Fleeing the violence - She is one of around 123,000 refugees who have fled across the border in recent months. Another is Kabagambe Mahanga, who until last month lived a peaceful life working as a baker in Jina, a village just north of Ituri's capital, Bunia. "People in Jina were scared because they were burning houses at night," he explained, saying the Lendu were known for attacking their enemies with machetes. Another new arrival, Kabagambe Mahanga, says he fled because a rival ethnic group began burning down houses in his village Mahanga quickly left, taking muddy paths and trails to reach the shores of Lake Albert, where he made the perilous 30-kilometre (18-mile) crossing to the other side. "On the boat, I thanked God I was leaving the war and coming to Uganda," he recalled. "But it was so overloaded, it moved slowly and I thought we would die." He is still following the developments back home, particularly the controversy over the touch-screen voting terminals, whose use has been denounced by many as an open door for fraud. "I'm happy if there are elections to allow people to vote," he said. But it would be best if the vote went ahead "without machines". - 'In war, elections mean nothing' - At the camp in Kyangwali, recent arrivals rub shoulders with Congolese refugees who have been there for years. Many have little faith in Sunday's election. For Jerome Mugisa who fled DR Congo 10 years ago, the elections mean nothing if the fighting continues "I'll always be Congolese but for me the elections are nothing," says 25-year-old Jerome Mugisa. "If there is war, elections are nothing." A French-English translator, he arrived in Uganda with his parents during a wave of violence that ravaged Ituri between 1999 and 2003. His parents later tried to go back. But not him. Figures from the UN refugee agency UNHCR show there are currently 782,000 Congolese refugees being hosted in African countries. By far the largest percentage have fled to Uganda, which is sheltering 284,000 of them -- more than a third. Unlike people fleeing eastern countries like Sudan and Eritrea, Congolese do not usually attempt the perilous trek towards Europe. Instead, they seek refuge in one of the nine countries that border this vast central African country which covers some 2.3 million square kilometres (919,595 square miles). More than 123,000 Congolese refugees have arrived in western Uganda alone in recent months For Jean-Bienvenu Likanzu-Mokolo from Kinshasa, safety meant fleeing across the Congo River to Brazzaville, capital of the neighbouring Republic of Congo. Twin capitals, the Kinshasa is visible across the water from Brazzaville's southern districts -- which is why the 50-year-old prefers to stay in the northern part of the city. "It's too painful to see Kinshasa," he says. An associate of opposition heavyweight Jean-Pierre Bemba, a former warlord who went into exile in 2007, Likanzu-Mokolo fled Kinshasa a decade ago under cover of night, escaping in a wooden canoe. Now head of an association of 15,000 DRC refugees, Likanzu-Mokolo had thought he could finally return home when Bemba announced his intention to run in the upcoming elections. But with Bemba barred from running, Likanzu-Mokolo is now thinking of moving even further away. - Deprived of a vote - Deprived of voting rights, these refugees can only watch the vote from the sidelines, along with all their compatriots living elsewhere in the world. Most refugees flee to one of the nine countries flanking DR Congo rather than travelling further afield "I can't vote because I am here in Zambia as a refugee, and it hurts me," said Martin Mputu Bakole, who used to live near Lubumbashi, DR Congo's second city which lies in the south-east, close to the Zambian border. But 20 years ago he fled, and today he repairs watches in Lusaka. Pierre-Marie Lukungu also left Lubumbashi in the 1990s for Lusaka. Today he is leader of the Congolese community in Zambia. "From the time of independence up to this day, Congo has never had good elections," he said of a country which has never known a peaceful transition of power since independence from Belgium in 1960. "Congo has never had a past president who is living. Presidents come into power through coups and leave through coups." Which is why international observers are needed to ensure the elections are held properly, he says. Without them, the elections would be "chaotic" and "dangerous for the Congo, our neighbours and the world at large". So far, Kinshasa has accepted 200 African observers, but none from the European Union. Billions of dollars were allegedly stolen from the 1MDB fund and used to buy everything from yachts to artwork, in an audacious fraud that involved former Malaysian leader Najib Razak and contributed to his government's shock defeat at May elections Goldman Sachs on Tuesday accused the former Malaysian government and state fund 1MDB of lying to the bank, after Kuala Lumpur charged the Wall Street titan over a massive financial scandal. Malaysia's attorney-general Monday filed criminal charges against the US bank and two of its ex-employees over the alleged looting of 1MDB. Billions of dollars were allegedly stolen from the fund and used to buy everything from yachts to artwork, in an audacious fraud that involved former Malaysian leader Najib Razak and contributed to his government's shock defeat at May elections. Goldman has faced mounting questions about its role as the bank helped 1MDB raise $6.5 billion through a series of bond issues. Monday's charges allege the bank's subsidiaries and the two ex-bankers, working with a shadowy Malaysian financier, misappropriated $2.7 billion, bribed officials and gave false statements as they helped 1MDB to raise the cash. But Goldman said in a statement that "certain members of the former Malaysian government and 1MDB lied to Goldman Sachs, outside counsel and others about the use of proceeds from these transactions." "1MDB, whose CEO and board reported directly to the prime minister at the time, also provided written assurances to Goldman Sachs for each transaction that no intermediaries were involved," it said. The Malaysian financier named in the charges, Low Taek Jho, allegedly masterminded the fraud and had huge influence over 1MDB but held no official positions at the fund. He has been hit with several rounds of charges but maintains his innocence. The ex-Goldman bankers named in the charges are Tim Leissner, who worked as Southeast Asia chairman and managing director at Goldman, and Ng Chong Hwa, a managing director at the bank. The bank added that it was "not afforded an opportunity to be heard prior to the filing of these charges against certain Goldman Sachs entities, which we intend to vigorously contest". Malaysian authorities are seeking fines above the $2.7 billion allegedly misappropriated from the bond issues as well as the $600 million Goldman earned in fees, and long jail terms for those accused. As well as Leissner, Ng and Low, Malaysian authorities charged former 1MDB employee Jasmine Loo Ai Swan. The bank's shares fell 2.7 percent Monday after the charges were announced. A US soldier drills in Afghanistan in 2012 A decorated officer in an elite US Army unit killed an unarmed Taliban suspect in Afghanistan. Of that, there appears to be no doubt. What is less certain is whether Major Matt Golsteyn, who has admitted to the killing, should be considered a cold-blooded killer or a war hero. The Army last week charged Golsteyn, a Green Beret special operations reservist, with premeditated murder in the shooting death of an alleged Taliban bomb-maker in volatile Helmand province in 2010. Though highly unlikely, he could ultimately face the death penalty. Golsteyn's case on Sunday was suddenly thrust into the spotlight, when President Donald Trump suggested he might intervene in the long-running legal saga. "At the request of many, I will be reviewing the case of a 'U.S. Military hero,' Major Matt Golsteyn, who is charged with murder," Trump said on Twitter, having apparently seen a sympathetic segment about the case on Fox News. "He could face the death penalty from our own government after he admitted to killing a Terrorist bomb maker while overseas," Trump wrote. Army investigators looked into Golsteyn in 2011 after he took a lie-detector test as part of a job interview with the CIA. He reportedly told agents he had killed an unarmed, suspected bomb-maker detained by his unit, who he believed was responsible for the deaths of two Marines who had died in a roadside bombing. According to court document excerpts, Golsteyn worried that the suspect, who he was unable to detain for more than 24 hours, might make more bombs and kill an Afghan tribal leader who had identified him. Investigators have said Golsteyn and another soldier eventually took the suspect back to his house and killed him. - 'Unlawful command influence' - Legal observers pounced on Trump's tweet, saying it could have a chilling effect on the prosecution and could amount to "unlawful command influence." As the commander-in-chief of the US military, Trump can technically take whatever action he likes in the prosecution of a service member, including issuing a full and pre-emptive pardon. But "he shouldn't be tweeting about it," said Rachel VanLandingham, a former military prosecutor and law professor at Southwestern Law School, "as it sure seems to be a signal to lower-level commanders not to prosecute." "The president is not ensuring justice by his tweet. He is most likely obstructing it," she told AFP. Golsteyn was stripped of a medal and given other reprimands following the 2011 probe, but he was not criminally prosecuted. Then in 2016, during an interview on Fox News, he said he had killed an Afghan man, prompting the Army to re-open the case. Golsteyn's attorney Phillip Stackhouse could not be reached for comment, but he told Fox the Army had sought initially to build a fake narrative in which his client "released this Taliban bomb-maker, walked him back to the house... and assassinated him in his house." As to why Golsteyn is being charged now, Stackhouse said: "The prosecutor in this case has intimated to me that they have new evidence." - Why prosecute? - David "Bull" Gurfein, who runs United American Patriots, which is helping pay for Golsteyn's defense, blasted the prosecution. "Right now we have rules of engagement that are actually in favor of our enemies, as opposed to providing our warriors the ability to address real-world threats," Gurfein told AFP. Republican Congressman Duncan Hunter last week wrote to Trump asking him to look into Golsteyn's case. "He is not a murderer," Hunter wrote. "He is an elite warrior that was executing the mission he was trained to do. He engaged an Afghan bomb-maker, who had built the bomb that was responsible for the death of two Marines only days prior." But VanLandingham noted that the Army has a legal duty to investigate war crimes allegations. "If the major admitted to others that he killed a detainee in US custody, other than in self-defense, that's one of the most straightforward and long-standing war crimes there is, and the Army was legally bound to investigate," she said. "President Trump as commander-in-chief likewise has a legal duty to ensure war crime allegations are investigated and appropriately prosecuted, a duty his tweet seems to show he fails to understand." Military authorities have, to varying degrees of success, prosecuted dozens of cases against US troops accused of unlawful killings or prisoner abuse in Afghanistan and Iraq. In some cases, military jury members are willing to grant wide latitude to defendants, whose alleged wrongdoings occurred while fighting a deadly insurgency under frequently shifting rules of engagement. Trump has intervened in at least one other military case, when as a candidate he branded as a "traitor" Bowe Bergdahl, a US soldier and former Taliban captive. Non-Executive Director Appointment Sydney, Dec 19, 2018 AEST (ABN Newswire) - YPB Group Limited ( ASX:YPB ) ("YPB" or "the Company") is pleased to announce the appointment of Mr. Anoosh Manzoori as a Non-Executive Director with immediate effect.Mr. Manzoori has 20 years experience as an investor and advisor, specialising in fastgrowth technology companies. He is a director of M&A corporate advisory firm Shape Capital and the Executive Chairman of First Growth Funds Limited ( ASX:FGF ) that led the recent $1.5M convertible note investment in YPB.Mr Manzoori is one of the most active investors and corporate advisors in the blockchain and digital assets industry in Australia. He provides YPB with access to strong local and international networks to help support the YPB token launch and commercialisation.Previously, Mr Manzoori founded one of Australia's largest cloud hosting companies reaching over 75,000 customers before selling the company to MYOB Limited in 2008.Mr Manzoori holds a Bachelor of Science degree and a Graduate Diploma of Business Enterprise and is a member of the Australian Institute of Company Directors. He also serves as a Non-Executive Director of CCP Technologies Limited ( ASX:CT1 ).YPB Chairman and CEO, John Houston said,"We are very excited to have Anoosh joining us at this pivotal time in the Company's journey as we seek to scale our commercial growth, incorporate blockchain and continue the development of our world-leading Motif Micro technology. Anoosh brings a wealth of corporate and commercial knowledge and experience as well as a global network of contacts."About YPB Group Ltd DEACTIVATED The Mumbai hospital where eight died in a fire had not sought a proper safety inspection, a fire official told AFP A three-month-old baby was among eight people killed in a fire at a Mumbai hospital, officials said Tuesday, in the latest disaster to highlight lax safety standards in India. The blaze broke out around 4:00 pm (1030 GMT) on Monday on the fourth floor of a government-run hospital in the northern suburb of Andheri. The death toll rose from six to eight Tuesday, a spokesman for the city's disaster management cell told AFP. Another 140 people, including patients, doctors and nurses were rescued and were being treated at hospitals across the city, he said. The cause of the blaze at the ESIC Kamgar hospital is not yet known but a fire official told AFP that the hospital had not sought a proper safety inspection. "It is a 1970s building and no fire safety audit had been carried out," said M.D. Ogle, deputy chief fire officer at the Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation, a state government agency. "It is up to the occupier to seek an inspection." Accidental fires are common across India because of poor safety standards and lax enforcement of regulations. They are particularly common in densely populated Mumbai, India's financial capital. In December last year, at least 14 people were killed when a huge blaze tore through a popular restaurant in the city. Earlier that month, a fire swept through a Mumbai sweet shop, sparking a building collapse which killed 12 sleeping workers. Yemen's flashpoint city of Hodeida was calm following heavy clashes that erupted after a UN-brokered ceasefire started Yemen's flashpoint city of Hodeida was calm on Tuesday following heavy clashes that erupted after the UN-brokered ceasefire started at midnight, pro-government sources and residents said. "There has been complete calm since 03:00 am Yemen time (1200 GMT) in the city of Hodeida," a military source loyal to the government told AFP on Tuesday. The ceasefire agreement struck at the UN-sponsored peace talks in Sweden came into effect at midnight Monday but heavy clashes and air raids continued after the deadline, pro-government sources and residents in the city told AFP. The residents confirmed by phone that there has been no fighting between the government forces backed by the Saudi-led coalition and Iran-aligned Huthi rebels since 03:00 am. But it was not possible to determine if the halt in fighting was in response to the ceasefire or just a temporary stoppage. Residents said that daily fighting would usually be fierce in the evening and at night, before coming to a standstill at dawn. The two warring sides have however welcomed the truce in the strategic Red Sea province. Both the defence ministry of the internationally-recognised government and that of the Huthi rebels said they would comply with the ceasefire. The United Nations said on Monday that the deal was to be implemented at midnight, even though the agreement reached in Sweden last week included an "immediate ceasefire" in Hodeida and its surroundings. A UN official, who requested anonymity, told AFP that the delay to the halt in hostilities was necessary for "operational reasons". A luxury yacht reportedly worth some $250 million was one of the trophy assets allegedly bought with money stolen from 1MDB Malaysia's extraordinary 1MDB corruption scandal allegedly saw top officials loot billions from a state fund and go on a worldwide spending spree -- buying up super-yachts, paintings by Van Gogh and Monet, and financing a Hollywood blockbuster. The controversy has had a huge impact in Malaysia, contributing to the downfall of a coalition that had ruled the country since its independence from Britain in 1957. Malaysia's disgraced former leader Najib Razak goes on trial Wednesday over the scandal, facing seven charges of corruption and money laundering over the alleged theft of some 42 million ringgit ($10.3 million) from SRC International, a former 1MDB unit. It is only a fraction of the money allegedly stolen from 1MDB -- and only the first of several trials over Najib's alleged involvement in the looting of the fund. Hundreds of millions of dollars are believed to have ended up in Najib's accounts alone. Here is a look back at the saga: - What is 1MDB? - 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) is a state investment fund which Najib Razak launched in 2009 shortly after becoming Malaysia's prime minister. Its portfolio has included power plants and other energy assets in Malaysia and the Middle East, and real estate in Kuala Lumpur. The fund was closely overseen by Najib. Whistle-blowers say Low Taek Jho -- commonly known as Jho Low, a jet-setting Malaysian financier close to Najib but with no official positions -- helped set up 1MDB and made key financial decisions. Concerns escalated in 2014 as 1MDB slid into an $11-billion debt hole, and intensifying public scrutiny led to a string of revelations concerning missing funds. The issue exploded in July 2015 when The Wall Street Journal published documents showing Najib received at least $681 million in payments to his personal bank accounts. - Rich living - The US Department of Justice launched a probe due to claims that stolen Malaysian public money was laundered through the US financial system, and filed lawsuits seeking some $1.7 billion in assets allegedly purchased with the cash. In its civil suits, the department said more than $4.5 billion was stolen from 1MDB by high-level officials at the fund and their associates between 2009 and 2015. Tens of millions of dollars in stolen money was used in 2012 by Najib's stepson Riza Aziz, an aspiring film producer, to fund the Hollywood film "The Wolf of Wall Street", starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Hundreds of millions were used, mainly by Riza and Low, to purchase high-end real estate in Beverly Hills, New York and London, a Monet painting for $35 million, a Van Gogh for $5.5 million, a $35 million Bombardier jet, a $100-million stake in EMI Music Publishing, and a $250 million yacht. The US Department of Justice believes $4.5 billion in total was looted from 1MDB. - Election meltdown - Najib desperately sought to contain the scandal, targeting critics and introducing repressive laws, but the allegations hit the popularity of his long-ruling coalition and contributed to its shock election loss in May. A new government headed by veteran politician Mahathir Mohamad, who is 93 and in his second stint as premier, came to office on a wave of public anger, and has reopened investigations. Najib has since been hit with dozens of charges. He denies any wrongdoing. - Goldman's role - Malaysia has also charged Wall Street titan Goldman Sachs over the scandal, alleging the bank and its former employees stole billions of dollars from 1MDB. Goldman units and two ex-bankers are accused of misappropriating $2.7 billion, bribing officials and giving false statements in relation to bond issues they arranged for the fund. They are accused -- along with Low and a former 1MDB employee -- of misappropriating $2.7 billion from the bond issues, bribing officials to ensure they were selected to carry out the work and giving false statements to investors. The two ex-bankers named in the charges are Tim Leissner, who worked as Southeast Asia chairman and managing director at Goldman, and Ng Chong Hwa, a managing director at the firm. The bank has vowed to fight the charges. A key requirement for vaccine deliveries, including by drone, is maintaining the temperature A one-month-old on a remote island in the Pacific archipelago of Vanuatu became the first child to be immunised in a commercial trial of drone-delivered vaccines, the UN children's fund UNICEF said Tuesday. Aid agencies hope the successful run in the country, where one in five children is not fully immunised, could eventually help governments and organisations reach others in far-flung places around the world. "Today's small flight by drone is a big leap for global health," UNICEF executive director Henrietta Fore said in a statement. "With the world still struggling to immunise the hardest to reach children, drone technologies can be a game changer for bridging that last mile to reach every child." While this is not the first time that drones have been used to deliver vaccines, it is the first time such a method has been deployed in Vanuatu, which has 83 islands, most only accessible by boat. It is also the first time a commercial contract is being used for routine immunisations, UNICEF said. A key requirement for the deliveries is maintaining the temperatures at which the vaccines are carried. In warmer places such as Vanuatu, transportation across limited roads has its challenges. In the trial, the drone travelled across almost 40 kilometres (25 miles) of rough and mountainous terrain from the west of the southern island of Erromango to its east, arriving at the remote Cook's Bay. The vaccines were kept in styrofoam boxes that carried ice-packs and a temperature sensor that would be triggered if it exceeded the required range. A total of 13 children and five pregnant women were vaccinated by a registered nurse, UNICEF added. "As the journey is often long and difficult, I can only go there once a month to vaccinate children. But now, with these drones, we can hope to reach many more children in the remotest areas of the island," the nurse, Miriam Nampil, told UNICEF. The agency said Vanuatu's government was considering incorporating drone deliveries of vaccines into their national immunisation programme, and with the supply of other health aids. Huawei has faced a tough year, with some of its services rejected in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Britain, Japan, France and Germany over security concerns Huawei defended its global ambitions and network security on Tuesday in the face of Western fears that the Chinese telecom giant could serve as a Trojan horse for Beijing's security apparatus. The company has been under fire this year, with Washington leading efforts to blacklist Huawei internationally and securing the arrest of the company's chief financial officer in Canada. The concerns have mounted as countries begin to plan and roll out fifth-generation mobile communications, or 5G, the next milestone in the digital revolution, bringing near-instantaneous connectivity and vast data capacity. Huawei has faced a tough year as western countries like the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Britain, pull back from using its products while concerns grow in Japan, France, Germany and even the Czech Republic over security issues. Seeking to dispel those fears, the company took the unprecedented step Tuesday to open research and development labs to reporters at its headquarters in the southern city of Shenzhen. Huawei's rotating chairman Ken Hu told reporters the company has not received any request from the Chinese government for access to information. "There is no evidence that Huawei poses a threat to the national security of any country," Hu said, adding geopolitical concerns have caused a few countries to forego its equipment. He said customers continue to trust the company despite what he sees as efforts to fan fears against the firm. "Banning a particular company cannot resolve cybersecurity concerns," he said. "Huawei's record is clean." Hu emphasised the information-sharing and collaboration centres Huawei is building in Europe, Canada, and elsewhere to evaluate products. Those are based on a cyber evaluation centre the company built in Britain a decade ago to share information with regulators, though it has not fully resolved concerns. While the company opened its doors to the media, Hu skirted questions on the arrest in Canada of Huawei's chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, who faces US fraud charges related to Iran sanctions violations. She is the daughter of Huawei's founder, Ren Zhengfei. "We have confidence in the fairness and independence of the judiciary systems of the countries involved," Hu said. "We look forward to a just conclusion to this matter." - 25 contracts - With 5G's rollout expected to gain pace in coming years, the race to dominate standards and control security and data traffic is playing out now and will set the course for years to come. Huawei has invested years and billions of dollars to prepare for this moment. The firm has secured 25 commercial contracts for 5G, Hu said. The company is on track to reach $100 billion in annual revenue this year, he added. It has more than 80,000 employees engaged in research and development -- almost half of its staff. At its Shenzhen headquarters, dozens of low industrial warehouse-like buildings topped with solar arrays stretch out in one patch of the city to house the researchers. Some of that investment could be squandered if the company is locked out of the lucrative Western telecom markets, experts say. Britain's largest mobile provider BT this month announced it was removing Huawei equipment from its 4G cellular network, days after the head of the MI6 foreign intelligence service singled out the company as a security risk. Hu said BT acted "under political pressure". Last month New Zealand's intelligence agency barred Huawei equipment in the rollout of the country's 5G network, citing similar concerns. Australia and the United States also enacted similar bans earlier this year. - 'Always open' - Distrust of Huawei stems in part from the background of founder Ren Zhengfei, a 74-year-old former People's Liberation Army engineer. Beijing also passed a law in 2015 obliging its corporations to aid the government on matters of national security. This move, along with Beijing's return to state heavy intervention in the economy and society, have sparked alarm in the West. The US has accused Chinese entities of massive cyber-attacks. Huawei showed a different face as it gave a tour of a building dubbed the "White House" for its resemblance to US President Donald Trump's official residence. Scientists in chequered lab coats toiled away on the company's products: powders turned into liquid to dissipate heat, while other materials prevented freezing, or reduced noise. "Huawei is always open," said Sean Yang, director of global cybersecurity and privacy protection. Big characters posters common to China adorned the walls and spurred employees to "protect security". An image grab from a video broadcast by Moroccan news channel KECH24 on December 18, 2018 shows people at the site where the bodies of two murdered Scandinavian tourists were found in the High Atlas mountains Moroccan authorities on Tuesday arrested a suspect over the murder of two Scandinavian women in the High Atlas mountains, a popular trekking destination for tourists. Other suspects are being sought over the killings of the Danish and Norwegian hikers who were found dead on Monday with cuts to their necks, the interior ministry said. The bodies were discovered in an isolated mountainous area 10 kilometres (six miles) from the tourist village of Imlil in the High Atlas range. Imlil is a starting point for trekking and climbing tours of Mount Toubkal, which at 4,167 metres is the highest summit in North Africa. The suspect was arrested in the former imperial city of Marrakesh, a tourist hub located at the foot of the mountains about 60 kilometres north of Imlil, and held in custody for questioning, the ministry said. The Moroccan authorities described it as a "criminal act" but did not give further details about the circumstances of the murders. An image grab from a video broadcast by Moroccan news channel KECH24 on December 18, 2018 shows cars and an ambulance at the site where the bodies of two murdered Scandinavian women were found in the High Atlas mountains The Danish victim, Louisa Vesterager Jespersen, 24, "had her throat cut," her mother Helle Petersen was quoted by the Danish newspaper B.T. as saying. Her family had warned her against going to Morocco "because of the chaotic situation," she added. According to her Facebook page, Jespersen had studied in Norway to be a guide. - 'Every precaution' - Norwegian media named the other victim as 28-year-old Maren Ueland. "Her priority was safety. The girls took every precaution before going on this trip," her mother Irene Ueland told Norwegian broadcaster NRK. The two women studied at a university in southern Norway and had planned to travel together for a month, she said, adding that her last contact with her daughter was on December 9. A Norwegian policeman from the embassy in Rabat is travelling to Marrakesh to act as a liaison between the authorities. The High Atlas mountains are a popular trekking destination for foreign tourists visiting Morocco Security was stepped up in the region and hiking suspended following the discovery of the bodies, Moroccan media said. "It's very bad for the region. There will undoubtedly be cancellations," a local guide, Hossein, told AFP from Imlil. Tourism is a cornerstone of Morocco's economy and the kingdom's second-largest employer, after agriculture. The sector accounts for 10 percent of national income and is one of the country's main sources of foreign currency. After several years of near-stagnation, Morocco welcomed a record 11.35 million visitors in 2017, exceeding the 11-million mark for the first time. Siti Aisyah is one of two women accused of murdering Kim Jong Nam by smearing nerve agent VX on his face at Kuala Lumpur airport The trial of an Indonesian woman accused of assassinating the North Korean leader's half-brother was put on hold Tuesday due to a row over witness statements, the latest delay in the case. Siti Aisyah from Indonesia and Doan Thi Huong from Vietnam have been on trial for over a year, accused of murdering Kim Jong Nam by smearing nerve agent VX on his face at Kuala Lumpur airport. The brazen assassination in February last year shocked the world but the women have denied murder, saying they believed they were taking part in a prank and were tricked by North Korean agents. The women, in their 20s, went on trial together in October 2017 but proceedings have moved slowly due to the large numbers of witnesses and the fact hearings are held infrequently. The defence stage of Aisyah's trial had originally been due to begin in November but was delayed to January after her main lawyer fell ill. And on Tuesday proceedings in Aisyah's case were temporarily halted when the High Court refused to grant her lawyers access to some witness statements, and they decided to appeal. Huong's trial is due to resume in March and the court will rule Friday whether it will go ahead, or be put on hold with Aisyah's. The prosecution stage of the trial, during which the women appeared for hearings together, wrapped up in August. The defence parts of their trials will be held separately. Aisyah's lawyer Gooi Soon Seng said the witness statements were "essential" for the defence and he would appeal the ruling -- a process that could take months. "Without (the statements) there would be a real miscarriage of justice. It would compromise our case," he told reporters at the court in Shah Alam, outside Kuala Lumpur. The seven statements are from witnesses including people who drove Kim Jong Nam around in Malaysia and acquaintances of Aisyah. Prosecutors have refused to hand them over, arguing they should not be made public. Under current laws, the women will be sentenced to death by hanging if convicted of murdering the estranged relative of the North's leader, Kim Jong Un. Malaysia's new government, which took power in May, has vowed to abolish capital punishment for all crimes, although parliament still needs to vote on the change. The British carrier halted services to Pakistan after the deadly Marriott Hotel bombing in Islamabad in 2008 British Airways will resume flights to Pakistan next summer, the carrier announced Tuesday, in a major vote of confidence from a Western airline a decade after suspending operations due to security fears. The British carrier, which halted services in 2008 after the deadly Marriott Hotel bombing in Islamabad, will return in June 2019 with three weekly flights from London's Heathrow airport to the Pakistani capital, airline officials said. BA had six weekly flights to the Pakistani capital before the Marriott attack, which killed more than 50 people and triggered a major drawdown by embassies and international agencies over safety concerns. The carrier's announcement was "a reflection of the great improvements in the security situation in Pakistan" in the years since, said British High Commissioner to Pakistan Thomas Drew in a statement. "We only fly somewhere when we know it's safe to do so," Robert Williams, BA's head of sales for Asia, told a press conference in Islamabad. Tickets starting at $630 were due to go on sale from Tuesday. BA said the route -- which will be serviced by the Boeing 787 Dreamliner -- is among four direct long-haul flights being introduced in 2019, along with Pittsburgh and Charleston in the US, and Osaka in Japan. The announcement caused a stir on Twitter, where it was greeted with jubilation by many Pakistanis. The army tweeted its gratitude to the airline using the hashtag #PeacefulPakistan, while the government's official account proclaimed the country a "new investment destination of Asia". - Dramatic shift - Britain is home to more than a million residents of Pakistani origin, making it the largest Pakistani diaspora community in Europe. The struggling Pakistan International Airlines is currently the only carrier with direct flights between the two countries. Since the Marriott attack the country has been largely dependent on Middle Eastern airlines such as Emirates and Etihad, with most international flights routed through the Gulf, making travel expensive and cumbersome for many passengers. Hong Kong-based Cathay Pacific was one of the last major international carriers to cease operations in Pakistan after dozens were killed during a 2014 siege at Karachi airport by Taliban militants. Pakistan has battled homegrown militancy for nearly 15 years, with tens of thousands of people killed. But the country has seen a dramatic turnaround recently, with security largely stabilised following several military offensives along the Afghan border and crackdowns on insurgents in urban centres. Militants retain the ability to carry out devastating attacks, however, and analysts have long warned that Pakistan has yet to tackle the root problems of extremism. Many Western countries have travel advisories in place to warn their citizens of the potential for kidnapping and bomb attacks, especially in areas near the Afghan border. The announcement came after Prime Minister Imran Khan vowed to revitalise Pakistan's struggling tourism industry in effort to bring in much-needed revenue to its fragile economy. Pakistan has a rich cultural and archaeological heritage, along with serene alpine valleys, pristine beaches and vast deserts peppered with vibrant Islamic shrines. The country is also home to some of the world's tallest peaks including K-2 -- the second highest summit after Everest, which sits atop a region of 120 other mountains rising above 7,000 metres (23,000 feet). The United Nations Humanitarian Air Service (UNHAS) says it needs $3m to keep running its operations in Central African Republic for the next three months UN humanitarian air operations in Central African Republic risk being grounded next month if the service can't raise an immediate $3 million in funding, the World Food Programme warned on Tuesday. The United Nations Humanitarian Air Service (UNHAS) allows aid workers to deliver vital humanitarian supplies to tens of thousands of people in some of the most inaccessible areas of this war-torn country. But a shortage of funding has put the service at risk of shutting down, a UNHAS statement said. "UNHAS, which depends entirely on the support of international donors to finance its operating costs, is in urgent need of $3 million (2.6 million euros) to maintain its service for the next three months and will be grounded after January if there is no immediate injection of funds." The country has suffered bloody sectarian violence that has left thousands dead and forced more than a quarter of its population of 4.5 million people to flee their homes, UN figures show. "CAR has been mired in conflict for years with regular spikes. Roads become impassable and whole parts of the country are often completely cut off from the capital Bangui leaving UNHAS as the main means of transport to access hard-to-reach locations," said spokesman Herve Verhoosel. Of those forced to flee, 700,000 are internally displaced while another 570,000 have fled abroad, with 2.9 million people in need of humanitarian assistance. "In the month of November alone, following clashes in the central, north-west, east and south-east regions of the country, UNHAS provided transport for over 2,000 aid workers -- a record for a single month since it started operations in CAR in 2006," he said. Between January to November, the WFP provided food assistance to more than 1.2 million people, with the UN agency warning losing the air operations would harm an "essential" part of its humanitarian operations. "The need for UNHAS is as great as it has ever been, and it would be a real tragedy for aid operations if it were to close down," said Giancarlo Cirri, the WFP's country director for CAR. Turmoil in paradise? The Comoros islands have endured about 20 coups since winning independence from France in 1975 A court in Comoros has sentenced a top opposition figure to seven years behind bars for assault during a controversial referendum on changes to the constitution. It was the latest in a string of sentences handed down to political figures who opposed a series of constitutional reforms enabling President Azali Assoumani to extend his term in office. In a ruling late Monday, the security court sentenced Ahmed el-Barwane, secretary-general of the opposition Juwa party, for ordering an attack on a soldier during a July referendum on the reforms. It also handed 20 years jail time to another Juwa MP, Tocha Johar, who was also on trial alongside another 20 or so people accused of attacking a policeman. Two of the group were acquitted while the others were handed shorter sentences ranging from several months to three years. "The court's decisions cannot be appealed, which means they are violating the constitution and the international agreements which Comoros is a party to," said lawyer Azad Mze. At the weekend, the court handed down life sentences with hard labour to four senior opposition figures and lengthy jail terms to several others for plotting against the state. The opposition denounced the rulings as "an insult to democracy". - Crackdown on the opposition - Former vice-president Jaffar Ahmed Said Hassani, who fled to Tanzania, was sentenced in absentia to forced labour, while former army chief Colonel Ibrahim Salim was jailed. Hassani fell out of favour with the government in June for his open criticism of Azali's constitutional reforms, which were overwhelmingly passed during July's controversial referendum. The reforms allow Assoumani run for another term in office and overturn a five-year rotation of power between Comoros' three main islands to ensure political balance in this coup-prone country. Following the vote, the authorities launched a crackdown on the opposition, charging at least eight of them with plotting attacks on key government figures. Others have gone into hiding. Although Assoumani was democratically elected in 2016, the controversial referendum -- and what critics say is his increasingly authoritarian rule -- has provoked violent protests. In October, armed rebels in Anjouan island, a Juwa stronghold, fought a week of running battles with the army. The island had been next in line to take over the rotating presidency before the measure was scrapped. The Comoros islands -- Anjouan, Grande Comore and Moheli -- have endured years of grinding poverty and political turmoil, including about 20 coups or attempted coups, since independence from France in 1975. Russia launched air strikes in Syria in support of long-term ally President Bashar al-Assad in 2015 Russia has cut its military flights in Syria from more than 100 per day to fewer than four a week, the defence minister said Tuesday, in another sign the country's conflict is winding down. Russia launched air strikes in Syria in support of long-term ally President Bashar al-Assad in September 2015. Russian support helped Assad's forces reclaim swathes of territory once in the hands of opposition fighters and Islamic extremists. Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu told an annual meeting of top brass that Russia's air force had seen a drastic reduction in the number of sorties in Syria. "Flights have been reduced from 100-110 per day to two to four sorties per week, mainly for additional reconnaissance," Shoigu said, without giving a specific timeframe for the reduction. Shoigu told the meeting, also attended by President Vladimir Putin, that Russia "had completed the withdrawal of its main forces from Syria," not including those based at its Hmeimim airbase and Tartus naval base. Shoigu announced a year ago that Russia had formally ceased its military operation in Syria after helping to clear it of jihadists. However operations have continued, with Russia saying in November its planes had carried out air strikes on Syrian "terrorist groups" in the buffer zone in the northwestern province of Idlib. Syria's war erupted in 2011 following a regime crackdown on anti-government protests, with more than 360,000 killed and much of the country left in ruins. While much of Syria was once rocked by heavy fighting, separate offensives by pro-government and US-backed Kurdish forces have dislodged opposition and jihadist fighters from most of their former strongholds, leaving the northwestern province of Idlib as the last major rebel bastion. Togo has been gripped by a growing wave of political unrest with demonstrators demanding President Faure Gnassingbe step down Togo on Thursday votes in legislative elections that are being boycotted by the main opposition after a year of political upheaval which saw demonstrators demanding President Faure Gnassingbe step down. A coalition of 14 opposition parties has said it will not take part, citing "irregularities" in preparations for the vote and calling for an overhaul of the electoral commission. It has also called for more transparency and constitutional reforms to limit the number of presidential terms. Gnassingbe has been in power since 2005 after succeeding his father, General Gnassingbe Eyadema, who ruled the country with an iron first for 38 years. Ahead of the December 20 parliamentary elections, the opposition called for 10 days of protests to halt the ballot while urging supporters to follow them in a boycott. Earlier this month, at least four people were killed when opposition supporters clashed with the security forces in the capital Lome and several other cities across the country. The opposition put the figure at six dead. Such violence is unusual in this tiny west African country. "We have always said no to these elections, we will do what we can so that they don't take place," coalition coordinator Brigitte Adjamagbo-Johnson said this week. "The government does what it wants in the country," a source within the Panafrican National Party (PNP) told AFP. - 'Don't vote!' - Togo's Faure Gnassingbe took over as president in 2005, replacing his father Gnassingbe Eyadema who had ruled the country with an iron first for 38 years "We could go on like this forever. Don't go to vote, it's a way of no longer supporting the assembly." Created in 2014, the PNP has been at the forefront of the demonstrations but has no representation within parliament. Faced with rising tensions, all religious groups in Togo have called for the polls to be postponed but the ruling party will not budge: the legislative elections will take place with Gnassingbe's Union for the Republic (UNIR) expected to win. The main challenge for UNIR is to secure four-fifths of the parliament's 91 seats -- or 73. It currently holds 62. That would allow it to pass reforms unchallenged in parliament, including changes to the constitution that would pave the way for Gnassingbe to run for office in 2020 and 2025. - Elections instead of reforms - "The Togolese people say no! 50 years is enough" reads a banner carried by protesters during one of dozens of mass demonstrations against the ongoing domination of the Gnassingbe family The polls come after months of talks to solve Togo's political crisis led by Ghana and Guinea, mediators for the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). The regional bloc had pushed for elections to be held by the year's end but the recommendation was dismissed by the opposition as rushed. "ECOWAS made a mistake of not appreciating the socio-political situation in Togo and prescribed elections instead of reforms," said Raphael Kpande-Adzare, spokesman for the FCTD, an umbrella organisation of civil society groups. "ECOWAS is responsible for the victims in the recent days because of its superficiality and complacency." Despite the absence of the PNP and the National Alliance for Change (ANC), two opposition heavyweights, some 850 candidates from 12 political parties will take part alongside several independents. As well as the ruling UNIR, those running include the Patriotic Movement for Democracy and Development (MPDD) of former premier Agbeyome Kodjo, and the Union of Forces for Chance (UFC), led by veteran politician Gilchrist Olympio. - Political renewal - Togo violence Those opposition parties that are running say they want to take the ruling party head on. "The major challenge is to have a bigger presence in parliament in order to have real power to meet the huge needs of the population," UFC spokesman Isaac Tchiakpe told AFP. Togo, he said, had a "compelling need for renewal in its political life, notably by limiting the presidential term." Some 8,000 soldiers and police have been deployed across the country to ensure the safety of the vote, with Security Minister Yark Damehane warning against any efforts to disrupt the vote through violence. "When you decide to boycott a poll, you stay at home. You don't go out to smash up ballot boxes or prevent other citizens from casting their vote," he warned on national television. Another of Libya's key oil installations is seen in the coastal region of Zawiya on August 22, 2013 One of Libya's largest oil fields has been out of production for more than a week, the state-owned National Oil Corporation said Tuesday, blaming a militia for the shutdown. The NOC said early last week that an armed group had seized the Sharara site, prompting it to declare "force majeure" -- a legal measure exempting it from responsibility for failure to deliver on contracts. A video posted online showed southern Libyans saying they were blocking the field to protest against marginalisation and shortages of electricity, fuel and money. The group said Monday it would not allow production to resume until Libya's unity government met its demands. "The closure of Sharara will be maintained until the GNA (Libya's UN-backed Government of National Accord) meets the demands of the inhabitants of the marginalised south of Libya, which is severely deprived of services," said Mohamad Emeguel, who said he was a spokesman for the protesters. "We call on the GNA to guarantee the supply of fuel (to petrol stations) and cash to banks, to pay more attention to the dilapidated medical sector, to reopen airports and to help disaster-stricken cities" in the south, he told AFP by telephone. Libya was plunged into chaos following the NATO-backed uprising that toppled and killed longtime dictator Moamer Kadhafi. Two competing governments and a myriad of armed factions including the Islamic State group have since fought for influence, decimating the North African country's economy. Violence and the ongoing economic crisis have made it impossible for many Libyans to access basic services, especially in the desert south. Libya's vital oil installations have frequently been targets of protests and attacks by groups with a variety of demands. Standoffs over control of Libya's oil sites are often resolved by negotiations between the authorities and tribal groups, but the Sharara situation appears more complex. The site, operated by a consortium of the NOC and four European energy firms, had been producing some 315,000 barrels per day, almost a third of Libya's current output. The NOC said the force occupying the site belonged to the Petroleum Facilities Guard and ruled out negotiations, demanding the gunmen leave "immediately and without conditions". But the unity government's military chief Major-General Abdulrahman Al-Tawil said on Monday that the guard had not been paid since 2014. "They just want their rights," he told Libya al-Ahrar television. Russian President Vladimir Putin, speaking at a defence ministry meeting, said Russia could convert its missiles if the US abandons the INF treaty Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday laid out plans for Moscow to develop mid-range missiles banned under a Cold War treaty with the United States if Washington abandons the deal. Tensions have raged over the fate of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty (INF), with US President Donald Trump promising to walk away from the agreement and Putin threatening a new arms race. Washington this month said it would withdraw from the INF within 60 days if Russia did not dismantle missiles that the US claims breach the deal. The bilateral agreement forbids ground-launched short- and intermediate-range missiles, but not those launched from the air or sea. Speaking at a defence ministry meeting, Putin said Russia's seaborne Kalibr and air-launched Kh-101 cruise missiles -- as well as cutting-edge hypersonic Kinzhal (Dagger) missiles -- would be converted for ground launch if Washington ditches the INF treaty. "It probably won't be very difficult to conduct appropriate research and development and put them on the ground if need be," he said. Putin once again touted the Kinzhal missile, which he first unveiled as part of an array of next-generation nuclear weapons in his annual state-of-the-nation address earlier this year. "No one else has it yet," he said. He said the deployment of Kalibr missiles during Moscow's Syria campaign proved useful, allowing the military to fine-tune "this very promising" weapon. - Third countries to join? - Former Cold War enemies Russia and the US have accused each other of being in breach of the agreement and Washington has said honouring it no longer made sense Putin also suggested he was open to the idea of other countries joining the INF treaty or to starting talks on a new agreement. Signed in 1987 by then US president Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, the treaty bans ground-launched missiles with a range of between 500 and 5,500 kilometres. The deal resolved a crisis over Soviet nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles targeting Western capitals, but put no restrictions on other major military actors like China. "Yes, indeed there are certain difficulties with this treaty," Putin said. "Other countries possessing short- and intermediate-range missiles are not party to it. "But what prevents (us) from starting talks on their accession to the existing treaty or starting negotiating the parameters of a new treaty?" Putin has said about a dozen countries were producing missiles of the type banned by the INF treaty. Military expert Vasily Kashin said it would be fairly easy to convert Kalibr and Kh-101 cruise missiles for ground launch, though the Kinzhal hypersonic missile would need more work. "This is not a threat, this is what will be unavoidable if there is no treaty," Kashin said. He said ground-based intermediate-range missiles were cheaper, so Russia could place more of them in range of European targets, but added that Moscow wanted to keep the treaty to protect itself against a possible US attack. Defence expert Alexander Golts said he doubted it would be possible to rescue the agreement and that expecting China to join the deal was "absolutely unrealistic". "This is 90 percent of China's nuclear weapons capabilities," he said. Former Cold War enemies Russia and the US have accused each other of being in breach of the agreement and Washington has said honouring it no longer made sense. Putin has said that Europe would be the main victim of a new US-Russia arms race. The European Union has urged Russia and the US to save the deal. A 60-day grace period -- granted by the US as a concession to European partners -- on the issue will expire in mid-February. Michael Flynn, former national security adviser to US President Donald Trump, is to be sentenced for lying to investigators about his Russia ties President Donald Trump's former national security advisor Michael Flynn was slated to face sentencing Tuesday over lies he told about his Russia contacts, with a judge expected to give him minimal or no jail time. Flynn was one of the first to face charges in the sweeping Mueller investigation into possible collusion with Moscow in the 2016 election, reaching a plea deal announced just over one year ago. Since then prosecutors say the decorated former Marine general has cooperated substantially in their investigation, earning a recommendation of no jail time from Special Counsel Robert Mueller. It remains unknown what Flynn has told investigators about Trump, whom he served in the White House for just weeks in 2017 before resigning in the wake of scandal. The former top aide was accused of hiding repeated contacts with the Russian ambassador to the United States and conducting illegal paid lobbying for Turkey during the campaign. Then-President-elect Donald Trump (L) with with national security adviser Michael Flynn in December 2016 Mueller filed a memo on how Flynn helped the investigation but it was heavily redacted -- though did refer to 19 interviews he gave. He likely contributed to a separate case unveiled Monday in which his former Turkish-American partner and a politically well-connected Turkish citizen were indicted over a 2016 scheme to get the US government to hand over dissident Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen to Ankara. Trump has maintained that Flynn was illegally tricked by FBI agents into his alleged lies as part of a broader scheme to damage Trump's presidency. "Good luck today in court to General Michael Flynn," the president tweeted early Tuesday. "Will be interesting to see what he has to say, despite tremendous pressure being put on him, about Russian Collusion in our great and, obviously, highly successful political campaign. There was no Collusion!" - Angering Mueller? - Flynn may have angered investigators and the court when, echoing one of Trump's longstanding allegations, he suggested he was tricked by agents of the FBI into lying and alleged that the agents themselves had come under investigation As a star Marine Flynn, 60, was credited for his battlefield intelligence operations and went on to become head of the powerful Defense Intelligence Agency. But he spent just two years in the position before being removed in 2014 by then-president Barack Obama for mismanagement. After that he moved into politics on the far right and joined Trump's election campaign as a senior advisor. In July 2016 he spoke at the Republican convention where he led a now-iconic, rousing chant "lock her up" directed at Trump's Democratic election rival Hillary Clinton. His being named as White House National Security Advisor after the election was strongly opposed by the US intelligence community, where he was seen as someone given to bizarre conspiracy theories and possibly compromised by the Russians. He had been paid several times to join Russian company events, most notably in December 2015 when he sat next to President Vladimir Putin at a gala for the country's state-run RT television. Flynn addresses delegates on the first day of the Republican National Convention on July 18, 2016 In December 2016 he communicated numerous times with Sergei Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to Washington at the time, allegedly promising to lighten sanctions -- a stance seen as undermining the policy of Obama, who was still president. Revelations of those discussions led to Mueller's probe of his actions. Flynn may have angered investigators and the court last week when, echoing one of Trump's longstanding allegations, he suggested FBI agents tricked him into lying and alleged that the agents themselves had come under investigation. Mueller's team sharply rebuffed Flynn, releasing the record of the interview and saying there was "nothing" in the FBI's actions that caused him to lie. An estimated 360,000 people have died in the grinding seven-year Syrian war Russia, Turkey, Iran and the United Nations voiced hope Tuesday that a committee charged with writing a new Syrian constitution will start work early next year. The Damascus government, which is backed by Moscow and Tehran, has not yet agreed to the committee, saying it will only support a process that alters Syria's existing constitution. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov -- flanked by his Iranian counterpart Mohammad Javad Zarif and Turkey's Mevlut Cavusoglu -- read a joint declaration after talks with UN Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura. Russia, Iran and opposition backer Turkey "agreed to take efforts aimed at convening the first session of the Constitutional Committee in Geneva early next year," Lavrov said. The committee has become the centrepiece of UN peace efforts in Syria and aims to set up elections that can turn the page on seven years of devastating war. De Mistura, who will be replaced as UN envoy on January 7, praised the "significant joint input" from the three powers. Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov shakes hands with his Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu in Geneva on Tuesday But the United States, which has tense relations with Russia and Iran, recalled that the initial goal had been to set up the body within 2018. "The establishment and convening by the end of the year of a credible and balanced constitutional committee in Geneva is an important step to lasting de-escalation and a political solution to this conflict," State Department spokesman Robert Palladino said in Washington. - Positive spin? - The meeting marked a final moment in de Mistura's four-year tenure, which did not produce a breakthrough for peace. An op-ed in Syria's pro-government Al-Watan newspaper on Tuesday underscored de Mistura's tense relationship with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime. "In Damascus, we will never be sorry for Staffan de Mistura's departure," Al-Watan said. De Mistura is "leaving with regret that he couldn't destroy the Syrian state and couldn't impose the West's agenda on Syrians," it continued, while chastising efforts to "impose a new constitution on Syrians." Staffan de Mistura will be replaced as UN Syria envoy on January 7 The veteran UN diplomat tried to put a positive spin on his fraught peace push by suggesting that protracted rounds of diplomacy helped limit bloodshed in Syria. De Mistura said he had been contacted by an individual, whom he did not identify, who had conducted "various extrapolations" which indicated that UN-backed talks had saved hundreds of thousands of lives. "The fact that you have been coming up constantly with your team with new meetings, preparatory meetings, inter-discussions, ceasefires that didn't work and then worked and didn't work again... we have been calculating that instead of 540,000 people (dead) there would have been 1.3 million," de Mistura told reporters, quoting the unnamed individual. A UN spokesperson later told AFP that de Mistura was citing an estimated death toll of 540,000 people for Syria that includes combatants. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitor group, has said that an estimated 360,000 people have been killed in the conflict. Congress must pass -- and US President Donald Trump must sign -- a spending bill by midnight on December 21, 2018 or some US government operations will shut down for lack of funding President Donald Trump backed off his demand for $5 billion in border wall funding Tuesday, but his subsequent offer was rejected by congressional Democrats, leaving the opposing sides struggling to avert a partial US government shutdown. Trump had stood firm for days, declaring he needed the funds to build the controversial wall, defiantly proclaiming last week that he would be "proud" to stop some government operations cold after a midnight Friday deadline if he did not get his wish. He appeared to ease that stance early Tuesday when the White House said it did not want a shutdown and was looking for "other ways" to obtain funding, including getting Congress to reprogram $1 billion in unspent funds so Trump could use them on his immigration policies. "The president asked every one of his cabinet secretaries to look for funding that can be used to protect our borders," White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said. Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi -- set to become speaker of the House when Democrats take control of the chamber January 3 -- and top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer shot down the proposal, saying the $1.6 billion in border security funding in proposed legislation is sufficient. "Leader Schumer and I have said that we cannot accept the offer they made of a billion-dollar slush fund for the president to implement his very wrong immigration policies," Pelosi told reporters. "So that won't happen." The deadlock leaves thousands of federal workers in limbo, wondering whether they will be sent home without pay one week before Christmas. Trump said it was still "too early to say" whether a deal could be struck in time. Many Trump supporters backs the president's demand for a wall on the US border with Mexico "We'll see what happens," he said at the White House. "We need border security." If Republican and Democratic lawmakers fail to reach agreement on a spending package by midnight Friday, parts of the government will slide into a shutdown, paralyzing some federal operations. The exact impact is difficult to foretell. About 75 percent of the government is already funded through September 2019. But a quarter of government operations still require spending agreements and could face disruptions, including the departments of justice and homeland security. - 'Not a good option' - House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats have rejected a White House effort to obtain billions of dollars in funding for a border wall sought by President Donald Trump, increasing prospects for a partial government shutdown in late 2018 Republicans presently control Congress, including 51 seats in the 100-member Senate. But a deal in the upper chamber can only advance with 60 votes, meaning Democratic support is vital. Pelosi said the path forward remained unclear, and that a stopgap "continuing resolution," or CR, might be required. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell insisted he remained confident there would be no work stoppage. "I think a government shutdown is not a good option," McConnell said, adding he was in discussions with the White House on ways forward. But he acknowledged that a brief CR might be the likeliest move. "If we end up going with a relatively short-term CR, we will end up, in effect, punting this year's business into next year," McConnell said. Meanwhile, Sanders expressed optimism that the White House could find legal ways to obtain extra funding. "There are certainly a number of different funding sources that we've identified that we can use... that would help us get to that $5 billion that the president needs in order to protect our border," she said on Fox News. Shaima Swileh, a native of Yemen, was granted a US visa to visit her dying two-year-old son Abdullah Hassan, a US citizen like his father Ali -- both of whom are picture here at UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital in Oakland on December 16, 2018 A mother from Yemen was granted Tuesday her wish to see her dying toddler one last time in the United States, which agreed to issue her a waiver from its ban on citizens from several Muslim-majority countries. Two-year-old Abdullah Hassan, a US citizen like his father, suffers from a rare genetic brain condition and is on life support in a hospital in Oakland, California. But his mother, Shaima Swileh, had been unable to join him due to President Donald Trump's order barring visitors from six countries including Yemen. After a tearful televised plea from the boy's father prompted public outrage, the US embassy in Cairo issued a visa for Swileh, who has been living temporarily in Egypt. She will arrive in San Francisco late Wednesday, according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim civil rights group that assisted the family. "This is the happiest day of my life," her husband, Ali Hassan, said in a statement. "This will allow us to mourn with dignity." Hassan said he had been ready to take his son off life support last week after doctors said the case was terminal, with his wife only receiving automated replies when inquiring with US authorities on her visa application. The Council on American-Islamic Relations launched a campaign that it said prompted 15,000 emails to elected officials as well as thousands of tweets. Abdullah's grandfather earlier told the San Francisco Chronicle that Swileh was crying every day as she wanted to see her son "one last time." "To hold him for at least a minute. She's not going to see him forever," he said. - Many more families affected - Abdullah Hassan suffers from a rare genetic brain condition and is on life support Representative Barbara Lee, a Democrat who represents Oakland and took up Swileh's case, had described denying the mother a visa as a level of cruelty that "takes my breath away." She voiced relief at the waiver but added: "So many families are still torn apart by the heinous travel ban." "We can't stop until we end this un-American policy for good," she wrote on Twitter. State Department spokesman Robert Palladino voiced sympathy for the family in the "very sad case." But he said that visas are "decided on a case-by-case basis" in accordance with US laws. The State Department is "ensuring the integrity and security of our country's borders and at the same time making every effort to facilitate legitimate travel to the United States," he told reporters. "These are not easy questions." But such exceptions to Trump's ban are exceedingly rare. The American Civil Liberties Union, which opposes Trump's order, said that only two percent of applicants have been granted waivers. After a tearful televised plea from the boy's father prompted public outrage, the US embassy in Cairo issued a visa for Swileh, who has been living temporarily in Egypt Trump vowed during the 2016 campaign to ban all Muslims from entering the United States, despite constitutional protections of freedom of religion, after a mass shooting in California by a couple of Pakistani descent. In an executive order that triggered chaos before court challenges and revisions, Trump blocked new visas to nearly all citizens of five Muslim-majority countries -- Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen -- as well as North Korea and some officials from Venezuela. A divided Supreme Court in June upheld the ban, which it said was within the president's powers. US President Donald Trump, pictured on October 1, 2018, took his "America First" agenda to the Swiss Alps last year. US President Donald Trump will attend the World Economic Forum in Davos next month, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Tuesday. "The president will attend as he did last year," said Sanders, who added that Trump's daughter and advisor Ivanka would also participate as part of the US delegation to the annual talks held at a Swiss ski resort. Others set to attend include Jared Kushner, Trump's advisor and son-in-law, along with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross. It will be the second time the Republican president has attended Davos, after taking his "America First" agenda to the global business elite last year. In a 15-minute speech at the climax of his debut appearance in the Swiss Alps, Trump offered "America's friendship and partnership" in both trade and security. A guard stands watch at the wall along the US-Mexico border The US lawmaker who led a delegation to New Mexico Tuesday to look into the death of a seven-year-old Guatemalan girl in US Border Patrol custody blamed the tragedy on glaring systematic failures. Jakelin Caal died last week in hospital in El Paso, Texas, after being arrested with her father and others crossing from Mexico December 6. Together they had traveled more than 3,000 kilometers from their hometown of Raxruha, Guatemala. "We learned today that (there was) some very disturbing systematic failure in how the young girl's condition was handled," Joaquin Castro, a Texas congressman and incoming chair of the Hispanic Caucus, told reporters on the border Tuesday in Lordsburg, New Mexico. Lawmakers visited a Border Patrol facility after Caal died last week of "dehydration and shock," local media reported, citing US Customs and Border Protection (CBP). "The issue started when (CBP) violated the law and did not notify Congress within 24 hours that Jakelin had died in their custody," Castro said. "During the 94 miles by bus where she started to present serious symptoms of medical and body failure, there was nobody onboard that could offer any kind of medical help to her," he added. Caal had reportedly had not eaten or consumed water for several days, the CBP told The Washington Post, which reported she began having seizures more than eight hours after being detained. Emergency responders had measured the girl's body temperature at 105.7 degrees Fahrenheit (41 degrees Celsius), the Post said. She died after being flown to hospital. President Donald Trump has made hardline immigration policies a central plank of his presidency, drawing fire from critics who accuse him of demonizing migrants for political gain. Much attention has been focused on caravans of thousands of Central Americans who have made their way to Tijuana, Mexico, just south from San Diego, California in a challenge to Trump, who criticized them as posing an "invasion." But migrants fleeing poverty and gang violence also continue to cross over in New Mexico, Texas and Arizona after enduring dangerous treks through Mexico. With the personalities of the two main candidates dominating the Madagascar election, issues such as poverty and corruption have been largely pushed aside Both candidates in Madagascar's presidential election have claimed victory in the fierce battle for power in the Indian Ocean island. Andry Rajoelina and Marc Ravalomanana -- who have each held the top job in the impoverished country before -- declared themselves winners in the run-off which analysts warned was likely to draw claims of fraud. "Change is coming tomorrow, and today you can say that 'Papa' is elected," Ravalomanana told supporters on Wednesday night at his headquarters, using his nickname. "Whatever happens, only one thing counts, we will win." However, his rival Rajoelina said: "I am sure I'm going to win but we'll wait for the official results." The contenders, who came a close first and second in November's first-round election, were both banned from running in the 2013 ballot as part of an agreement to end recurring crises that have rocked Madagascar since independence from France in 1960. In the first round, Rajoelina won 39 percent compared with 35 percent for Ravalomanana. Both camps alleged they were victims of fraud and cheating. How Madagascar compares to other nations in the Southern African Development Community The polls closed on Wednesday evening. The election count could be tense with the first significant results due only by next week. The EU observer mission, which said turnout was around 50 percent, called for candidates and their supporters to wait patiently for the official results. "It is not by mobilising in the street that they will win, so I ask them resolutely that they refrain from any gesture that could taint the smooth running of the election," mission chief Cristian Preda said Wednesday. - Bitter history - Ravalomanana, 69, was first elected president in 2002 but was forced to resign seven years later by violent demonstrations supported by Rajoelina, the then mayor of the capital Antananarivo. Malagasy Presidential candidate Marc Ravalomanana (R) and Presidential candidate Andry Rajoelina (L) took part in a public debate at the Malagasy Public broadcaster Rajoelina, 44, was installed by the army and ruled until 2014. The two contenders criss-crossed the country via helicopter to secure votes. Both candidates have spent lavishly, with promises and handouts distributed liberally to voters, who are among the poorest in Africa. With the personalities of the two men dominating the election, issues such as poverty, corruption and lack of basic services and infrastructure have been largely pushed to the side. Some analysts warn a fractious election fallout could damage the chances of future development. "The results could be very tight and, in this context, even small irregularities could lead one or the other candidate to contest them," said Marcus Schneider, an analyst at the Bonn-based Friedrich Ebert Foundation. - High stakes - Former education minister Paul Rabary, a fringe candidate who was eliminated in the first round, said the stakes were high: People queue up to buy cheap cooking oil and rice at a shop run by supporters of Madagascar presidential candidate Andry Rajoelina "For Marc Ravalomanana, his business network cannot survive if he does not take power. For Rajoelina, his personal history is sullied by the (2009) coup, so he must win to rescue his honour." Ravalomanana is a former milkman from a peasant family who went on to build a business empire, while Rajoelina is a former party planner and successful entrepreneur with slick communication skills. Outgoing president Hery Rajaonarimampianina was eliminated in the first round after collecting less than nine percent of the vote. His attempts to change the electoral laws this year backfired, sparking nearly three months of sometimes violent protests in Antananarivo. The demonstrators forced Rajaonarimampianina to accept a "consensus" government tasked with organising the election. Madagascar is well known for its vanilla and precious redwood, yet is one of the world's poorest nations, according to World Bank data, with 76 percent of people living in extreme poverty. The island, which is also famed for its unique wildlife, is dependent on foreign aid and burdened by a long history of coups and unrest. "My choice is already made, but I keep it to myself," 45-year-old housewife Monique Norosoa told AFP as she voted in the capital. Donald Trump is facing multiple investigations nearly two years into his presidency Donald Trump rails on an almost daily basis against the federal probe into whether his campaign colluded with Russia to get him elected to the White House. But the investigation by former FBI director Robert Mueller into the 2016 election is just one of many ongoing inquiries into Trump, his businesses and his associates. Trump's ex-national security advisor, retired lieutenant general Michael Flynn, appeared in court on Tuesday for sentencing after pleading guilty to lying to the FBI. And New York's attorney general announced that Trump's personal charity, the Trump Foundation, had agreed to shut down amid a lawsuit accusing it of engaging in illegal activity. Exactly how many investigations target Trump is subject to interpretation because many of the probes overlap with others or have spun off in different directions. But the scrutiny is extensive. And that's before a Democratic-controlled House of Representatives convenes in January with wide-ranging powers to dig into Trump's affairs. Whether Trump could personally face charges while in the White House is a matter of debate -- legal experts are divided on whether a sitting president can be indicted. The following are the main investigations facing Trump as he approaches two years in office: - Russia investigation - Special Counsel Robert Mueller is looking into whether there was any collusion between the Trump election campaign and Russia The core focus of the Special Counsel's probe is whether there were "any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals" associated with the Trump campaign. While Mueller has yet to file any charges alleging outright collusion between the campaign and Moscow, the probe has led to a host of indictments and guilty pleas. One focus of the probe is a June 9, 2016 meeting at the Trump Tower in New York in which a Russian lawyer was to offer dirt on Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. The meeting was attended by Trump's campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, his son Donald Jr., and son-in-law Jared Kushner. Mueller is also looking into whether WikiLeaks' Julian Assange coordinated his leaks of stolen Democratic Party emails with Trump campaign advisor Roger Stone. Twenty-five Russians and three Russian companies have been indicted for interfering in the 2016 election. Manafort was convicted of tax evasion and other charges related to his consulting work for pro-Moscow politicians in Ukraine between 2004 and 2014. Flynn and George Papadopoulos, an advisor to the campaign, pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents about their contacts with Russians and have been cooperating with Mueller. Papadopoulos was given 14 days in prison, while Flynn's sentencing was delayed until March. Michael Cohen, Trump's personal lawyer, was ordered to spend three years in prison after pleading guilty to tax evasion, providing false statements to a bank, campaign finance violations and lying to Congress. Cohen admitted lying to Congress about talks to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, acknowledging the negotiations continued well into the 2016 election campaign. - Campaign finance violations - Trump's former attorney Michael Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison for campaign finance violations and other crimes Trump is facing potential legal jeopardy over hush money payments made to two women who were threatening to go public during the election campaign with claims they had affairs with the Republican candidate. Cohen said $130,000 was paid to porn actress Stormy Daniels and $150,000 to former Playboy model Karen McDougal. Prosecutors have described the payments as illegal campaign contributions intended to influence the election and Cohen said they were made "in coordination and at the direction" of Trump. The president has said he did not instruct Cohen to break the law and has sought to pin the blame for the payments solely on his long-time "fixer." - Obstruction of justice - One avenue of the Mueller probe is whether Trump obstructed justice by abruptly firing then FBI director James Comey and asking him to shut down an investigation into General Flynn. Trump dismissed Comey in May 2017 while he was investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 election, a probe that was eventually taken up by Mueller. - Inauguration spending - According to The Wall Street Journal, federal prosecutors in New York are investigating whether Trump's inaguration commitee misspent some of the record $107 million it received in donations. The newspaper said prosecutors were looking into whether some donors gave money in exchange for access to Trump administration officials. - Profiting off his businesses - One of the cases facing the president is linked to his Trump International Hotel in Washington and an obscure provision in the US Constitution known as the Emoluments Clause, which forbids office holders from accepting money from foreign entities. The attorney generals of Maryland and Washington have sued Trump arguing he is in violation of the clause because his hotel does business with foreign governments. Trump has turned over operations of his real estate empire to his sons and has pledged while in office to donate revenue from foreign governments to the US Treasury. - Trump Foundation - Trump, his sons Eric (L), Don Jr (R) and daughter Ivanka were directors of the Trump Foundation Trump agreed to shut down his personal charity, the Trump Foundation, after it was targeted in a lawsuit by the New York attorney general. State attorney general Barbara Underwood filed a lawsuit against the foundation in June, accusing it of "persistently illegal conduct" to advance Trump's business and political interests. The suit named Trump, sons Don Jr and Eric and daughter Ivanka, who were on the foundation board. The suit, which will move forward despite the agreement dissolving the charity, seeks $2.8 million in restitution and to bar Trump, Don Jr, Eric and Ivanka from serving on the boards of other New York non-profits. - Taxes - In the wake of a New York Times expose about alleged tax evasion by the Trump family, New York state tax authorities said they were looking into the matter. According to the Times, the Trump family managed in the 1990s to avoid paying taxes on hundreds of millions of dollars through "outright fraud" in some cases. WASHINGTON (AP) - The nation bid goodbye to George H.W. Bush with high praise, cannon salutes and gentle humor Wednesday, celebrating the life of the Texan who embraced a lifetime of service in Washington and was the last president to fight for the U.S. in wartime. Three former presidents looked on at Washington National Cathedral as a fourth - George W. Bush - eulogized his dad as "the brightest of a thousand points of light." After three days of remembrance in the capital city, the Air Force plane with Bush's casket left for a final service in Houston and burial Thursday at his family plot on the presidential library grounds at Texas A&M University in College Station. His final resting place is alongside Barbara Bush, his wife of 73 years, and Robin Bush, the daughter who died of leukemia at age 3. His plane, which often serves as Air Force One, arrived at Ellington Field outside Houston in late afternoon. As a motorcade subsequently carried Bush's remains to the family church, St. Martin's Episcopal, along a closed interstate, hundreds of people in stopped cars on the other side of the road, took pictures and shot cell phone video. One driver of a tanker truck climbed atop the hulking vehicle for a better view, and at least 15 firefighters scaled a pair of stopped firetrucks to salute. Upon its arrival at the church, Bush's casket was met by a military band and Houston Democratic Mayor Sylvester Turner. The national funeral service at the cathedral was a tribute to a president, a patriarch and a faded political era that prized military service and public responsibility. It was laced with indirect comparisons to President Donald Trump but was not consumed by them, as speakers focused on Bush's public life and character - with plenty of cracks about his goofy side, too. "He was a man of such great humility," said Alan Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming. Those who travel "the high road of humility in Washington, D.C.," he added pointedly, "are not bothered by heavy traffic." Former President George W. Bush becomes emotional as he speaks at the State Funeral for his father, former President George H.W. Bush, at the National Cathedral, Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2018, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, Pool) Trump sat with his wife, a trio of ex-presidents and their wives, several of the group sharp critics of his presidency and one of them, Hillary Clinton, his 2016 Democratic foe. Apart from courteous nods and some handshakes, there was little interaction between Trump and the others. George W. Bush broke down briefly at the end of his eulogy while invoking the daughter his parents lost in 1953 and his mother, who died in April. He said he took comfort in knowing "Dad is hugging Robin and holding Mom's hand again." The family occupied the White House for a dozen years - the 41st president defeated after one term, the 43rd serving two. Jeb Bush stepped up to try to extend that run but fell short when Trump won the 2016 Republican primaries. The elder Bush was "the last great-soldier statesman," historian Jon Meacham said in his eulogy, "our shield" in dangerous times. But he took a lighter tone, too, noting that Bush, campaigning in a crowd in a department store, once shook hands with a mannequin. Rather than flushing in embarrassment, he simply quipped, "Never know. Gotta ask." Meacham recounted how comedian Dana Carvey once said the key to doing an impersonation of Bush was "Mr. Rogers trying to be John Wayne." None of that would be a surprise to Bush. Meacham had read his eulogy to him, said Bush spokesman Jim McGrath, and Bush responded to it with the crack: "That's a lot about me, Jon." The congregation at the cathedral, filled with foreign leaders and diplomats, Americans of high office and others touched by Bush's life, rose for the arrival of the casket, accompanied by clergy of faiths from around the world. In their row together, Trump and former Presidents Barack Obama, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton stood with their spouses and all placed their hands over their hearts. Simpson regaled the congregation with stories from his years as Bush's friend in Washington. More seriously, he recalled that when he went through a rough patch in the political game, Bush conspicuously stood by him against the advice of aides. "You would have wanted him on your side," he said. Simpson said Bush "loved a good joke - the richer the better. And he threw his head back and gave that great laugh, but he never, ever could remember a punchline. And I mean never." George W. Bush turned the humor back on the acerbic ex-senator, saying of the late president: "He placed great value on a good joke, so he chose Simpson to speak." Meacham praised Bush's call to volunteerism, placing his "1,000 points of light" alongside Abraham Lincoln's call to honor "the better angels of our nature" in the American rhetorical canon. Meacham called those lines "companion verses in America's national hymn." Trump had mocked "1,000 points of light" last summer at a rally, saying: "What the hell is that? Has anyone ever figured that one out? And it was put out by a Republican, wasn't it?" Former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney praised Bush as a strong world leader who helped oversee the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union and helped bring about the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico, signed into law by his successor, Clinton. With Trump, a bitter NAFTA critic, seated in the front row, Mulroney hailed the "largest and richest free trade area in the history of the world." The three countries have agreed on a revised trade agreement pushed by Trump. Earlier, a military band played "Hail to the Chief" as Bush's casket was carried down the steps of the U.S. Capitol, where he had lain in state. Family members looked on as servicemen fired off a cannon salute. His hearse was then driven in a motorcade to the cathedral ceremony, slowing in front of the White House, the route lined with people much of the way, bundled in winter hats and taking photos. Waiting for his arrival inside, Trump shook hands with Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama, who greeted him by saying "Good morning." Trump did not shake hands with Bill and Hillary Clinton, who looked straight ahead. Bill Clinton and Mrs. Obama smiled and chatted as music played. Carter was seated silently next to Hillary Clinton in the cavernous cathedral. Obama cracked up laughing at someone's quip. Vice President Mike Pence shook Carter's hand. Trump tweeted Wednesday that the day marked "a celebration for a great man who has led a long and distinguished life." Bush's death makes Carter, also 94 but more than 100 days younger, the oldest living ex-president. Following the cathedral service, the hearse and its long motorcade drove to the National Mall to pass by the World War II Memorial, a nod to the late president's service as a World War II Navy pilot, then transferred his remains at Joint Base Andrews for the flight home to Texas with members of his family. Bush is set to lie in repose at St. Martin's Episcopal Church before boarding a special funeral train to be carried to his burial Thursday. On Tuesday, soldiers, citizens in wheelchairs and long lines of others on foot wound through the Capitol Rotunda to view Bush's casket and honor a president whose legacy included a landmark law affirming the rights of the disabled. Former Sen. Bob Dole, a compatriot in war, peace and political struggle, steadied himself out of his wheelchair and saluted his old friend and one-time rival. Trump ordered the federal government closed Wednesday for a national day of mourning. Flags on public buildings are flying at half-staff for 30 days. ___ Associated Press writer Darlene Superville in Washington and Juan A. Lozano, David J. Phillip and Nomaan Merchant in Houston contributed to this report. The flag-draped casket of former President George H.W. Bush is carried out by a military honor guard during a State Funeral at the National Cathedral, Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2018, in Washington. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, Pool) The flag-draped casket of former President George H.W. Bush is carried by a military honor guard past former President George W. Bush, President Donald Trump, first lady Melania Trump, former President Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, former President Bill Clinton, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, at the conclusion of a State Funeral at the National Cathedral, Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2018, in Washington. In the second row are Vice President Mike Pence, and his wife Karen Pence, former Vice President Dan Quayle, and his wife Marilyn Quayle and former Vice President Dick Cheney. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster) From left, President Donald Trump, first lady Melania Trump, former President Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton listen during a State Funeral at the National Cathedral, Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2018, in Washington, for former President George H.W. Bush.(AP Photo/Alex Brandon, Pool) The flag-draped casket of former President George H.W. Bush is carried by a military honor guard past former President George W. Bush and wife Laura Bush, President Donald Trump, first lady Melania Trump, former President Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, former President Bill Clinton, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former President Jimmy Carter, and Rosalynn Carter during a State Funeral at the National Cathedral, Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2018, in Washington. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster) President Donald Trump shakes hands with former President Barack Obama during a State Funeral service for former President George H.W. Bush at Washington National Cathedral in Washington, Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2018. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster) The hearse carrying the flag-draped casket of former President George H.W. Bush passes by the White House from the Capitol, heading to a State Funeral at the National Cathedral, Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2018, in Washington. AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin). Former President George W. Bush, right, cries after speaking during the State Funeral for his father, former President George H.W. Bush, at the National Cathedral, Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2018, in Washington.(AP Photo/Alex Brandon, Pool) Former Sen. Alan Simpson, R-Wyo, speaks during the State Funeral for former President George H.W. Bush at the National Cathedral, Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2018, in Washington. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, Pool) Presidential biographer Jon Meacham, shakes hands with former President George Bush after speaking during the State Funeral for former President George H.W. Bush at the National Cathedral, Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2018, in Washington.(AP Photo/Alex Brandon, Pool) Former President George W. Bush and former first lady Laura Bush, top left, watch as the casket of former President George H.W. Bush is carried out after a State Funeral at the National Cathedral in Washington, Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2018.(AP Photo/Susan Walsh) The flag-draped casket of former President George H.W. Bush is carried by a joint services military honor guard during a departure ceremony at Andrews Air Force Base, Md., Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2018. (AP Photo/Steve Helber) MADISON, Wis. (AP) - In a story Dec. 5 about lame-duck legislation approved by Wisconsin lawmakers that would curtail powers of the incoming Democratic governor and attorney general, The Associated Press reported erroneously that Gov. Scott Walker would have 10 days from the date the bills reach his desk to sign or veto them. Walker would have six days to act. A corrected version of the story is below: Next governor will ask Walker to veto lame-duck legislation Next Wisconsin governor will ask Walker to veto GOP legislation to weaken new administration By SCOTT BAUER and TODD RICHMOND Associated Press MADISON, Wis. (AP) - The incoming Democratic governor of Wisconsin said Wednesday that he plans to make a personal appeal to his defeated rival, Gov. Scott Walker, to veto far-reaching GOP legislation that would strip the new administration of some powers. If that doesn't work, he might sue. Wisconsin Republicans pushed through protests, internal disagreement and Democratic opposition to pass the bills after an all-night session. The measures would shift power to the GOP-controlled Legislature and weaken the authority of the office Republicans will lose in January. "The will of the people has officially been ignored by the Legislature," Gov. Tony Evers said, adding that the lawmakers' actions "take us back to Nov. 6," before the election was finalized. "Wisconsin should be embarrassed by this," Evers said. He said he will talk to Walker as soon as the bills reach his desk and that if he cannot persuade the governor to veto the proposals, he will consider lawsuits and any other option "to make sure that this legislation does not get into practice." The early morning votes were the height of a rare lame-duck legislative session. Walker has signaled his support for the bills. He has six days to sign the package after it's delivered to his office. The session unfolded a month after Republicans were battered in the midterm election. They lost all statewide races amid strong Democratic turnout. But they retained legislative majorities thanks to what Democrats say are gerrymandered districts that tilt the map. A Walker spokeswoman said the governor, who was in Washington for former President George H.W. Bush's funeral, would not have any public comment Wednesday. The new legislation tries to protect some of the GOP's achievements in recent years, including a work requirement for some people receiving state health care and the state's role in a lawsuit seeking to overturn the Affordable Care Act. The bills could also make it harder for Evers to renegotiate a $3 billion subsidy for a Foxconn electronics manufacturing facility, a deal spearheaded by Walker. In neighboring Michigan, Republicans who control the Legislature voted to advance a measure that strips campaign-finance oversight power from the next secretary of state, a Democrat. They also moved to give lawmakers authority to stand up for GOP-backed laws if they think the incoming Democratic governor and attorney general are not adequately defending the state's interests. The Wisconsin legislation passed in a session marked by stops and starts as GOP leaders tried to muster enough votes in the Senate. That chamber ultimately approved the package 17-16, with just one Republican voting against it, around sunrise. The Assembly approved it on a 56-27 vote about two hours later, with a single Republican defecting. In one concession, Republicans backed away from giving the Legislature the power to sidestep the attorney general and appoint their own attorney when state laws are challenged in court. "This is a heck of a way to run a railroad," Democratic Senate Minority Leader Jennifer Shilling said as the Senate debate resumed at 5 a.m. after a seven-hour impasse. "This is embarrassing we're even here." Walker is in his final five weeks as governor. Faced with a Democratic governor for the first time in eight years, Republicans came up with a package of lame-duck bills to preserve their priorities and make it harder for Evers to enact his. "You're here because you don't want to give up power," Democratic Assembly Minority Leader Gordon Hintz said as debate concluded in that chamber. "You're sore losers. Does anybody think this is the right way to do business? If you vote for this, shame on you. You will go down in history as a disgrace." Assembly Speaker Robin Vos countered that the bills would ensure a balance of power between the Legislature and the executive branch. "We have allowed far too much authority to flow to the executive," Vos said. "To you, this is all about politics. To me, it's about the institution." Vos last month cited the desire to protect key Republican achievements from being undone by Evers. Among them: a massive $3 billion subsidy to bring Foxconn, a key Apple Inc. supplier, to Wisconsin, along with thousands of jobs. Evers has said he would like to renegotiate the deal. The legislation passed Wednesday would shield the state jobs agency from his control and allow the board to choose its leader until September, likely at least delaying Evers' ability to maneuver on the Foxconn subsidy. The changes would also weaken the governor's ability to put in place rules that enact laws. And they would limit early voting to no more than two weeks before an election, a restriction similar to what a federal judge ruled was unconstitutional. The attorney general's office could also be weakened by a proposal to require a legislative committee, rather than the attorney general, to sign off on withdrawing from federal lawsuits. That would stop Evers and Democratic Attorney General-elect Josh Kaul from fulfilling promises to withdraw Wisconsin from a multi-state lawsuit seeking repeal of the Affordable Care Act. They made opposition to that lawsuit a central part of both of their campaigns. Judges could block the proposals if they become law by issuing temporary injunctions. Democrats would likely need a permanent injunction to stop the changes for good, but Republicans would almost certainly pursue appeals all the way to the state Supreme Court, which is controlled by conservative justices. The Legislature passed another measure to enact Medicaid work requirement rules that Walker recently won a federal waiver to establish. That bill would also give the Legislature oversight over the governor seeking future waivers for health care, a change Democrats said would handcuff the new administration. Rep. Todd Novak of Dodgeville, the only Republican in the Assembly to vote against the bills, said he did so after hearing from "an overwhelming number of voters" in his district who opposed the legislation. "It is my job," Novak said, "to cast my vote in the interest of those whom I represent." ___ Associated Press Writer Ivan Moreno contributed to this report. ___ Follow Scott Bauer on Twitter: https://twitter.com/sbauerAP. MADISON, Wis. (AP) - The Latest on Wisconsin Republican lawmakers moving to limit the powers of the incoming Democratic governor and attorney general (all times local): 4 p.m. The incoming Democratic governor of Wisconsin says he will make a personal appeal to outgoing Republican Gov. Scott Walker to veto legislation that weakens the new administration's powers. Gov.-elect Tony Evers said Wednesday that he also wants Wisconsin residents to urge Walker not to sign the bills. If the bills are signed, Evers says, he will explore litigation or other ideas to ensure the legislation "does not get into practice." The Republican-controlled Legislature approved sweeping changes early Wednesday that weaken the governor's ability to make rules that enact laws. The legislation also shields the state jobs agency from his control until September and cuts into the powers of the incoming Democratic attorney general. Evers says the state "should be embarrassed" by the Republicans' actions and that they have ignored the will of voters. People protest the legislature's extraordinary session during the official Christmas tree lighting ceremony at the Capitol in Madison, Wis., Tuesday, Dec. 4, 2018. Demonstrators booed outgoing Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker on Tuesday during the Christmas tree-lighting ceremony, at times drowning out a high school choir with their own songs in protest of a Republican effort to gut the powers of his Democratic successor. (Mark Hoffman/Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel via AP) ___ 10:45 a.m. Wisconsin's incoming Democratic governor is condemning moves by Republicans legislators to weaken his power. Gov.-elect Tony Evers said Wednesday that Republicans have overridden the will of voters who chose Democrats in last month's election. He says a handful of people desperately want to "cling to power." The Republican-controlled Legislature approved sweeping changes early Wednesday that weaken the governor's ability to make rules that enact laws. The legislation also shields the state jobs agency from his control until September and cuts into the powers of the incoming Democratic attorney general. Outgoing Republican Gov. Scott Walker has signaled he supports the legislation. ___ 8:20 a.m. The Republican-controlled Wisconsin Legislature has approved a sweeping package of bills weakening the incoming Democratic governor and attorney general. The state Assembly approved the lame-duck legislation Wednesday morning. The Wisconsin Senate did the same less than three hours earlier after lawmakers worked through most of the night. The bills now go to outgoing Republican Gov. Scott Walker, who has signaled his support. The measures would limit the governor's ability to promulgate administrative rules, which enact laws and give lawmakers the power to control appointees to the state economic development agency's board. The measures would also require the attorney general to get legislative approval to withdraw from lawsuits. That move is designed to block Democratic Gov.-elect Tony Evers from allowing the incoming attorney general, Democrat Josh Kaul, to withdraw Wisconsin from a multistate lawsuit challenging the Affordable Care Act. The measures also restrict early in-person voting to two weeks before an election. ___ 7:50 a.m. The Wisconsin Senate has narrowly rejected a bill that would have created a state guarantee that people with pre-existing conditions can have access to health insurance. Democrats say the measure provided inadequate coverage and would cause premiums to skyrocket. The bill failed by one vote Wednesday during a lame-duck legislative session where Republicans are focused on measures designed to limit the powers of the incoming Democratic governor and attorney general. That measure is awaiting a final legislative vote in the state Assembly. The pre-existing conditions measure failed after all 15 Democrats in the Senate and two Republicans voted against it. The measure had long been stalled in the Senate due to lack of GOP support. Republican Gov. Scott Walker supported the measure, which became an issue in his failed re-election campaign. Walker lost to Democrat Tony Evers, a staunch supporter of the pre-existing coverage guarantee in the federal Affordable Care Act. ___ 6 a.m. The Republican-controlled Wisconsin Senate has passed a sweeping measure taking power away from the incoming Democratic governor and attorney general, and reducing how long early voting can take place. The measure was approved on a 17-16 vote with all Democrats and one Republican voting against it. The Assembly was expected to give final approval later Wednesday morning and send the measure to Republican Gov. Scott Walker, who has signaled his support. The bill would limit the governor's ability to put in place administrative rules that enact laws and give the Legislature the power to control appointees to the board that runs the state economic development agency until Sept. 1. The legislation would also require legislative approval to withdraw from lawsuits, taking that away from the attorney general. One provision allowing lawmakers to replace the attorney general with their own attorneys was stricken following all-night negotiations among Republicans. ___ 4:40 a.m. The Wisconsin Legislature is preparing to vote on limiting the powers of the incoming Democratic governor and attorney general. Lawmakers were expected to vote early Wednesday morning on the proposal, after spending most of the night hammering out deals in private. The action comes just weeks before Republican Gov. Scott Walker is replaced by Democrat Tony Evers. The proposal up for a vote would weaken the governor's power to put in place administrative rules enacting state laws. It would also allow the Legislature to sidestep the attorney general and hire private attorneys. The Legislature, not the governor, would have the majority of appointments on the state's economic development agency that Evers has said he wants to dismantle. The power to withdraw Wisconsin from a lawsuit challenging the federal health care law would rest with a legislative committee, rather than the attorney general. The proposal would also restrict early voting to no more than two weeks before an election. ___ 12:45 a.m. Republicans who control the Wisconsin Assembly have passed a lame-duck bill enacting a Medicaid work requirement. The measure would prevent incoming Democratic Gov.-elect Tony Evers from withdrawing a federal waiver request to implement the work requirement for able-bodied adults younger than 50. The bill also would require new legislative oversight of waiver requests related to health care made by the governor. The Assembly passed the bill 59-32 early Wednesday morning. The Senate passed the proposal earlier in the evening. It now goes to Gov. Scott Walker for his signature. The bill is part of a package of Republican lame-duck legislation designed to weaken Evers and incoming Democratic Attorney General-elect Josh Kaul. Debate on the rest of the proposals was expected to stretch into early Wednesday in both houses. ___ 12:35 a.m. Wisconsin Republicans are working through the night to bring together enough votes to pass a sweeping package of lame-duck proposals designed to empower the GOP-controlled Legislature and weaken the incoming Democrat replacing Republican Gov. Scott Walker. Republicans pushed on Tuesday night into Wednesday through protests, internal disagreement and Democratic opposition. The measures are designed to weaken both incoming Democratic Gov.-elect Tony Evers and Democratic Attorney General-elect Josh Kaul. Both Evers and Kaul urged Republicans not to do it and warned of lawsuits that would bring more gridlock to Wisconsin when the new administration, and the first divided government in 10 years, takes over. The measures would also limit early voting to no more than two weeks before an election, a move Democrats say is illegal. Attendees sit in the gallery and listen during a special session of the senate, Tuesday Dec. 4, 2018, at the Capitol in Madison, Wis. (Steve Apps/Wisconsin State Journal via AP) State Sen. Tim Carpenter Carpenter, D - Milwaukee, left, speaks during a special session of the senate, Tuesday Dec. 4, 2018, at the Capitol in Madison, Wis. (Steve Apps/Wisconsin State Journal via AP) State Sen. Tim Carpenter, left, D-Milwaukee, questions a list of about fifty appointment referrals submitted to the State Senate at the Capitol in Madison, Wis., Tuesday, Dec. 4, 2018. Demonstrators booed outgoing Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker on Tuesday during the Christmas tree-lighting ceremony, at times drowning out a high school choir with their own songs in protest of a Republican effort to gut the powers of his Democratic successor. (Mark Hoffman/Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel via AP) People protest the legislature's extraordinary session during the official Christmas tree lighting ceremony at the Capitol in Madison, Wis., Tuesday, Dec. 4, 2018. Demonstrators booed outgoing Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker on Tuesday during the Christmas tree-lighting ceremony, at times drowning out a high school choir with their own songs in protest of a Republican effort to gut the powers of his Democratic successor. (Mark Hoffman/Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel via AP) State Sen. Tim Carpenter, left, D-Milwaukee, questions a list of about fifty appointment referrals submitted to the State Senate at the Capitol in Madison, Wis., Tuesday, Dec. 4, 2018. Demonstrators booed outgoing Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker on Tuesday during the Christmas tree-lighting ceremony, at times drowning out a high school choir with their own songs in protest of a Republican effort to gut the powers of his Democratic successor. (Mark Hoffman/Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel via AP) State Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, holds a press conference in the Assembly parlor, Tuesday Dec. 4, 2018 at the Capitol in Madison. The Senate and Assembly are set to send dozens of changes in state law to Gov. Scott Walker's desk. (Steve Apps/Wisconsin State Journal via AP) Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker arrives for the lighting of the state Christmas Tree in the Capitol Rotunda, Tuesday, Dec. 4, 2018 at the Capitol in Madison, Wis. The Senate and Assembly are set to send dozens of changes in state law to Walker's desk Tuesday. (Steve Apps/Wisconsin State Journal via AP) LONDON (AP) - British lawmakers opened Round Two in their bruising battle with Prime Minister Theresa May's government over her Brexit deal, as the release of previously secret legal advice provided more ammunition for opponents of her unpopular divorce agreement with the European Union. May's Conservative government is struggling to convince skeptical legislators that the divorce deal it has struck with the EU is a good one ahead of a vote in Parliament on Tuesday that could sink the agreement and possibly cost May her job. May's deal is in trouble because politicians on both sides of Britain's EU membership debate oppose it. Pro-Brexit lawmakers say it keeps Britain bound too closely to the EU; pro-EU politicians say it erects barriers between the U.K. and its biggest trading partner and leaves many details of the future relationship undecided, subject to negotiations after Britain leaves the bloc on March 29. A defeat in the vote next week would leave the U.K. facing a messy, economically damaging "no-deal" Brexit on March 29 and could topple the prime minister, her government, or both. EU officials have said they agreed upon a Brexit deal with May, and there's no "Plan B." Opening the second of five days of debate, Home Secretary Sajid Javid told legislators Wednesday they should back the Brexit agreement to safeguard Britain's vital security relationship with the EU. "No one can pretend that this deal is perfect in every sense," Javid acknowledged. But he said the alternative was "an uncooperative no-deal" Brexit that would shut Britain out of EU security tools and EU data-sharing organizations. Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May leaves Downing Street in London, Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2018. Britain's Brexit debate has become a bruising battle between lawmakers and Prime Minister Theresa May's government. May is trying to keep her EU divorce deal on track Wednesday after her government was dealt a double blow by Parliament. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth) "It is my belief that the deal on the table is the best option available in ensuring a smooth exit from the European Union," Javid said. But opposition Labour Party lawmaker Chris Bryant said the agreement's vision for future relations with the EU was "no more deliverable than a letter to Santa Claus." "How could a serious member of Parliament vote for nothing more than a wish list?" he said. May is struggling to keep the Brexit deal on track after her government was dealt a double blow by Parliament. In a historic first, legislators on Tuesday found the government in contempt of Parliament for refusing to publish legal advice it received from the country's top law officer about the Brexit agreement. The government had argued that such advice is customarily kept secret. But it bowed to defeat Wednesday and released the reasoning from Attorney General Geoffrey Cox. The main thrust of Cox's advice was already known - the government released a 43-page document about it Monday in a bid to fend off the contempt motion. But the defeat demonstrated the fragility of May's government, which does not have a majority in Parliament. The legal advice also provided fuel for May's opponents, who dislike a "backstop" provision in the Brexit agreement that would keep Britain in a customs union with the EU to guarantee an open border between EU member Ireland and the U.K.'s Northern Ireland. The backstop is intended as a temporary measure, but pro-Brexit lawmakers say it could leave Britain tied to the EU indefinitely and unable to strike new trade deals around the world. The legal advice confirmed that Britain can't unilaterally opt out of the backstop, which requires an agreement by both sides. Cox advised there was a risk the U.K. might become stuck in "protracted and repeating rounds of negotiations." The border backstop is strongly opposed by Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionist Party, which props up May's minority government. The Protestant, pro-British DUP says the deal weakens the bonds of the United Kingdom by treating Northern Ireland differently than the rest of the country. DUP deputy leader Nigel Dodds said the backstop "is totally unacceptable to unionists throughout the United Kingdom and it must be defeated." The DUP and pro-Brexit Conservatives want May to go back to the EU and try to renegotiate the backstop. Both May and the bloc insist the withdrawal agreement can't be changed, and rejecting it means leaving without a Brexit deal. In another blow to May, two dozen Conservative lawmakers voted with the opposition Tuesday to force an amendment to Brexit plans that gives lawmakers more say over what happens next if the deal is defeated in Parliament. Pro-EU legislators say the amendment makes the prospect of a "no-deal" Brexit less likely, because Parliament can direct the government to take that option off the table. Brexit-supporting legislators worry that opponents of Brexit in Parliament may try to water down the terms of departure from the EU, or even reverse the country's decision to leave. International Trade Secretary Liam Fox said Wednesday there was "a real danger that the House of Commons, which has a natural 'Remain' majority, may attempt to steal Brexit from the British people." Fox said that would be "a democratic affront" to the 52 percent of British voters who opted in a 2016 referendum to leave the bloc. ___ See the AP's Brexit coverage at: https://www.apnews.com/Brexit Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May leaves Downing Street in London, Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2018. Britain's Brexit debate has become a bruising battle between lawmakers and Prime Minister Theresa May's government. May is trying to keep her EU divorce deal on track Wednesday after her government was dealt a double blow by Parliament. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth) Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May leaves Downing Street in London, Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2018. Britain's Brexit debate has become a bruising battle between lawmakers and Prime Minister Theresa May's government. May is trying to keep her EU divorce deal on track Wednesday after her government was dealt a double blow by Parliament. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth) Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May Prime Minister Theresa May is congratulated by Conservative Party ministers in the House of Commons after speaking at the start of a five-day debate on the Brexit European Union Withdrawal Agreement, Tuesday Dec. 4, 2018. The British government received a historic rebuke from lawmakers on Tuesday over its Brexit plans, an inauspicious sign for Prime Minister Theresa May as she opened an epic debate in Parliament that will decide the fate of her Brexit divorce deal with the European Union. (Parliament TV/PA via AP) An anti-Brexit campaigner holds a banner in front of parliament in London, Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2018. Britain's Brexit debate has become a bruising battle between lawmakers and Prime Minister Theresa May's government. May is trying to keep her EU divorce deal on track Wednesday after her government was dealt a double blow by Parliament.(AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth) Pro-European activists protest outside the Scottish Parliament, in Edinburgh, Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2018. Britain's Brexit debate has become a bruising battle between lawmakers and Prime Minister Theresa May's government. May is trying to keep her EU divorce deal on track Wednesday after her government was dealt a double blow by Parliament. (Jane Barlow/PA via AP) Anti-Brexit campaigners wave flags in front of parliament in London, Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2018. Britain's Brexit debate has become a bruising battle between lawmakers and Prime Minister Theresa May's government. May is trying to keep her EU divorce deal on track Wednesday after her government was dealt a double blow by Parliament. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth) Anti-Brexit campaigners wave a European Union flag in front of parliament in London, Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2018. Britain's Brexit debate has become a bruising battle between lawmakers and Prime Minister Theresa May's government. May is trying to keep her EU divorce deal on track Wednesday after her government was dealt a double blow by Parliament.(AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth) ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (AP) - A security guard at a Costa Rica Airbnb rental villa was arrested in the death of a Florida woman who was remembered by friends as an avid world traveler and "happy soul," authorities said Wednesday. Carla Stefaniak of Hallandale Beach, Florida, went to the Central American country to celebrate her 36th birthday but never boarded her Nov. 28 return flight after messaging friends that it was "pretty sketchy" at her resort. That prompted her family to raise the alarm with Costa Rican authorities. Officials later found a partially buried body in woods near the Villa le Mas complex and identified it using fingerprints, the country's Judicial Investigation Department said. Stefaniak's family members also traveled to there to help with identification. Security guard Bismark Espinosa Martinez, 32, was arrested in the slaying after he contradicted himself in statements to police, the department said Wednesday. Investigators said blood was found in his nearby apartment. "What happened to Carla is just unimaginable," friend Bugra Demirel of Tallahassee said in a telephone interview. He said Carla was a "happy soul" who made everyone laugh and had a large social media presence. Espinosa Martinez, a Nicaraguan immigrant, was working as a security guard at the complex despite lacking the proper documents to be in Costa Rica, department officials said at a news conference in San Jose. He is believed to have lived in Costa Rica since June. Airbnb removed Villa le Mas - a compound with seven vacation apartments - from its site and said Wednesday that it had reached out to family members to offer condolences. Villa Le Mas's attorney, Federico Jenkins, said the owners are cooperating with the authorities in the investigation. Stefaniak, who was an insurance agent, loved to travel and post photos on Instagram. Her trips included visits to Iceland, Switzerland and Mexico, all documented on social media. For her birthday, she and her sister-in-law decided to visit Costa Rica for a short trip. As with her other journeys, Stefaniak posted photos on her Instagram. On Nov. 23, she posted a photo of her looking at the ocean that said, "Future resident of Costa Rica." Two days later, her last Instagram picture featured her in a turquoise bathing suit, lying near a pool with tropical plants in the background. "I'm going to miss the place," she wrote. On Nov. 27 - her birthday - Stefaniak's sister-in-law returned home; the two women had booked different return flights on different days. Stefaniak reserved an Airbnb about 10 miles (16 kilometers) from the airport in San Jose for her final night in the country. Language wasn't an issue; Stefaniak was born in Venezuela, then moved to Tampa in 2000 with her family and finally settled in South Florida. After her sister-in-law left, an Uber driver took her on a tour of San Jose, then dropped her off at the Airbnb around 5 p.m. on Nov. 27. Demirel said she texted a friend that it was "raining crazy" and the power was out. She added that it was "pretty sketchy here" and included a picture of the Airbnb. "Everything she did she always shared with friends and that's when we knew definitely something was up as soon as we lost contact with her," Demirel said. After Stefaniak failed to board her Nov. 28 flight to Florida, the family discovered a troubling detail: she had checked in for her flight on the 26th. The family alerted Costa Rican authorities and launched a social media campaign to find her. Then came a break: the hotel guard said he'd last seen Stefaniak at 5 a.m. on Nov. 28 and helped her put her bags into a taxi. But then he changed his story, according to Costa Rican media, and authorities scrutinized the details more. The family wondered why she would have taken a car to the airport at 5 a.m. when her flight was in the afternoon. On Tuesday, a body was found half-buried and covered in plastic in a wooded area about 1,000 feet (305 meters) from the hotel. It was Stefaniak. An autopsy revealed that Stefaniak suffered a blunt force wound to the head and cuts on the neck and arms. On Wednesday, her family worked to bring her body home so they could make funeral arrangements. "It's too much for us," her father, Carlos Stefaniak, told ABC Action News in Tampa from Costa Rica. He showed a photo of his four children - Carla and her sister, and their two brothers. "That's my team. They are incomplete." Demirel wondered if the culprit planned to harm Stefaniak from the moment she booked the reservation because her profile photo shows she's "beautiful" and she noted in her reservation that she was traveling alone. Airbnb encourages users to post their photos as an "important way for hosts and guests to learn about each other." "I want people to know these things happen," he said. "Girls traveling alone make decisions to stay at places. We want them to be aware of their surroundings. But it is hard to have fun and have your guard up at the same time." ___ Reporter Javier Cordoba in San Jose, Costa Rica, contributed to this report. KIEV, Ukraine (AP) - Ukraine's Orthodox clerics will gather for a meeting next week that is expected to form a new, independent Ukrainian church, the country's leader said Wednesday, as the authorities ramped up pressure on priests to support the move. The Ukrainian church has been part of the Russian Orthodox Church for centuries, but Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has pushed for the creation of an independent church as he faces March's presidential election. The Russian Orthodox Church and the Kremlin have strongly condemned the move that would split the world's largest Orthodox, warning it could trigger sectarian violence. Poroshenko, who has made an independent church one of the main slogans of his not-yet-announced re-election bid, said that Orthodox communities would gather on Dec. 15 to adopt the charter of the new Ukrainian church and choose its leader. The newly formed community would then be expected to receive independence from the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, the Istanbul-based institution considered the so-called "first among equals" of leaders of the world's Orthodox Churches that has already drafted a charter for an independent Ukrainian church. Ukrainian authorities have sought to portray the Russian Orthodox in Ukraine as supporting Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine - claims that have been rejected by its clerics. FILE - In this Saturday, Nov. 10, 2018 file photo, an aerial photo of the thousand-year-old Monastery of Caves, also known as Kiev Pechersk Lavra, the holiest site of Eastern Orthodox Christians is taken through morning fog during sunrise in Kiev, Ukraine. Ukraine's president has promised the country's Orthodox Christian faithful they will be free to remain part of the Russian Orthodox Church after the creation of an independent Ukrainian church. Amid deteriorating ties with Moscow, Kiev has been pushing for the creation of an autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church that would be free of control from the Moscow Patriarchate. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka, File) As church tensions grew, Ukrainian national security service (SBU) searched Russian Orthodox churches and the homes of Russian Orthodox priests in several cities, stepping up pressure on the clerics. The agency also has summoned dozens of priests for regular questioning. The moves in the Ukrainian capital and in the provinces were part of a criminal investigation into inciting hatred and violence - the charges the priests dismissed as part of official campaign to coerce them into supporting the new independent Ukrainian church. On Wednesday, the SBU announced that it questioned another 14 priests in Rivne and Sarny dioceses as part of a probe on charges of high treason and inciting religious hatred. Tensions over the church come amid a bitter tug-of-war between the two neighbors that began with Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea and support for separatist insurgents in eastern Ukraine. The rift escalated further after a naval incident on Nov. 25 in which the Russian coast guard fired on and seized three Ukrainian navy vessels. Poroshenko responded by declaring 30-day martial law in much of Ukraine. ___ A previous version of this story was corrected to show that the date of the meeting as Dec. 15, not Dec. 5. NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) - Somali commandos backed by U.S. forces raided two al-Shabab checkpoints at which the extremists extort money from commercial vehicles, killing several fighters, Somali intelligence officials said Wednesday. The officials also said two U.S. airstrikes in the area during the overnight raid destroyed an explosives-laden minibus that was prepared for a complex attack on an unspecified location. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media. The U.S. Africa Command in a statement said four extremists were killed in a "self-defense airstrike" after U.S. and partner forces came under attack. It said no civilians were involved. Residents of Awdhegle, a farming village in Lower Shabelle region in southern Somalia, told The Associated Press they had heard gunfire and explosions. "Something big happened here last night. We only know that al-Shabab was under attack, said one elder, who gave his name only as Yusuf for fear of reprisal from the al-Qaida-linked extremists. "Then we woke up to find fighters sealed off the whole area in the morning," he said. The U.S. military has stepped up the fight against al-Shabab since President Donald Trump took office, carrying out more airstrikes in 2017 than over the previous decade. The U.S. has carried out at least 38 airstrikes this year. Al-Shabab "uses portions of southern and central Somalia to plot and direct terror attacks, steal humanitarian aid, extort the local populace to fund its operations and shelter radical terrorists," the U.S. statement said. The extremist group uses widespread extortion of businessmen and travelers to fund its high-profile attacks in major cities such as Mogadishu, collecting millions of dollars a year. The U.S. military in coordination with Somali forces, as well as an African Union force, have targeted al-Shabab's finance operations in recent weeks. Last month, Somali intelligence officials said at least four missiles hit a base for over 30 extremists assigned to collect livestock taxes from nomadic communities in the central Mudug region. In October, the AU force said the head of tax collection in Lower Shabelle region was killed after an ambush on a meeting of al-Shabab fighters in southern Somalia. ___ Follow Africa news at https://twitter.com/AP_Africa BOSTON (AP) - Former Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts will soon announce he won't launch a 2020 presidential campaign, according to three sources familiar with his plans. They did not say why he decided against a run. A formal announcement was delayed as the country observed a day of mourning for President George H.W. Bush, one source said. News of Patrick's plans was first reported by Politico. Patrick, 62, served two terms as governor, from 2007 to 2015, was assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Clinton administration and since leaving the governor's office has been a managing director for Bain Capital. Patrick traveled the country in support of Democratic candidates in the recent midterm elections. Earlier this year, some of Patrick's supporters and close advisers started the Reason to Believe political action committee, "a grassroots organization dedicated to advancing a positive, progressive vision for our nation in 2018 and 2020." Reason to Believe PAC had been holding meetups across the country, including in early presidential primary states. While Patrick is opting against a 2020 run, dozens of Democrats are considering jumping in, including nearly a half-dozen members of the Senate, several House members, and other Massachusetts politicians. On Tuesday, Michael Avenatti, the attorney for adult film star Stormy Daniels and a vocal critic of President Donald Trump, said in a statement that he would not run. Patrick had previously expressed some concerns about breaking through if he sought the nomination, telling David Axelrod, a former adviser to Barack Obama, that he wasn't sure he could stand out in such a large field. FILE - In this Dec. 15, 2014, file photo, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick speaks during an interview at his Statehouse office in Boston. Patrick will soon announce that he will not launch a presidential campaign in 2020, multiple sources confirmed Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2018. (AP Photo/Elise Amendola, File) "It's hard to see how you even get noticed in such a big, broad field without being shrill, sensational or a celebrity, and I'm none of those things and I'm never going to be any of those things," Patrick said in a September interview with Axelrod. ___ Summers reported from Charleston, South Carolina, and Pace reported from Washington. LONDON (AP) - "Antony and Cleopatra," currently running at London's National Theatre, has tragic romance, two top-flight actors and a live snake. No wonder it's a hit. Sophie Okonedo and Ralph Fiennes play the lovers sundered by war and empire in William Shakespeare's tragedy, which is being broadcast live to movie theaters in Britain and internationally on Thursday as part of the NT Live series. Okonedo and Fiennes won acting trophies at last month's Evening Standard Theatre Awards for the roles, immortalized onscreen by Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and memorably played onstage in the 1980s by Anthony Hopkins and Judi Dench. Fiennes says one reason the play endures is that the characters of the Roman military hero and the Egyptian queen are - strange as it seems - so relatable. "We can relate to the messiness of the relationship," Fiennes told The Associated Press. "They're not young lovers. They're mature. They've both got baggage." Fiennes is an old hand at Shakespeare who won a Tony Award for playing "Hamlet" and directed a film version of "Coriolanus." He says the play's power comes from the combination of Shakespeare's "poetic, epic" language and "two very fallible people." In this undated photo released by The National Theatre, a scene from the London National Theatre production of Antony & Cleopatra starring Ralph Finnes, top, and Sophie Okonedo, starring as the lovers rocked by war and empire. The tale of a tragic romance by William Shakespeare, directed by Simon Godwin, has two top-flight actors and a live snake, no wonder it's a hit show. (Johan Persson/National Theatre via AP) "He's not an idealized warrior and she's not an idealized princess," the actor said. "They're full of temperament and tantrums and mood swings, and I think that combination is very moving to people." The production reunites Fiennes with director Simon Godwin, who directed him in George Bernard Shaw's "Man and Superman" at the National Theatre in 2015. It's his first time working with "Hotel Rwanda" star Okonedo, and he praises her "rawness" and emotional range as the besotted queen. Cleopatra is the play's glamour part, Antony a more muted starring role. Reviewers have called Okonedo fiery, funny, regal and playful, while Fiennes has been praised for playing Antony as a "creaky" figure in "tragic decline." His Antony is a hedonistic hero - repeatedly drawn back from duty in Rome to Cleopatra's lush Alexandrian retreat - who is reluctant to admit that his best days are behind him. "He's a man who's trying not to be past his peak," Fiennes said. "You feel he's someone who is letting himself go in Egypt. Enjoying himself, but he's let his responsibilities go." The play's climax - Cleopatra's suicide by asp - is staged with a real snake. Fiennes says cast and crew ensure that the reptiles - there are four who alternate in the role - are "very well looked after." At 55, Fiennes is experiencing one of the richest phases of his career. For years he was a go-to bad guy, receiving an Academy Award nomination for playing a Nazi concentration camp commander in "Schindler's List" and terrorizing young wizards as Lord Voldemort in the "Harry Potter" film series. More recently he's explored a flair for comedy in films including "The Grand Budapest Hotel" and "Hail, Caesar." Next year he'll return to the cloak-and-dagger world of James Bond for a third outing as spymaster M. Fiennes is not about to let any 007 secrets slip. He says Bond filming - delayed by the departure of director Danny Boyle and his replacement by Cary Fukunaga - is supposed to start in spring. He insists he has yet to see a script. He laughs when asked what genre he wants to explore next. "You really hope that a script comes through the door which is something that you'd never dreamed of being asked to play," he said. "That was the case with 'The Grand Budapest Hotel.' I was delighted and surprised that I was being asked to play this character. So I'm just waiting to see what might come my way." ___ Follow Jill Lawless on Twitter at http://Twitter.com/JillLawless In this undated photo released by The National Theatre, a scene from the London National Theatre production of Antony & Cleopatra starring Ralph Finnes as he is carried by other actors. The tale of a tragic romance by William Shakespeare, directed by Simon Godwin, has two top-flight actors, Ralph Finnes and Sophie Okonedo starring as the lovers rocked by war and empire, and a live snake, no wonder it's a hit show. (Johan Persson/National Theatre via AP) Shortly before a 7-year-old Guatemalan girl died in U.S. custody, her father signed a form stating that his daughter was in good health. But it's unclear how much the man understood on the form, which was written in English and read to him in Spanish by Border Patrol agents. The death of Jakelin Caal highlights the communication challenges along the U.S.-Mexico border as agents come in contact with an increasing number of migrants who speak neither English nor Spanish. Her father's native language is the Mayan tongue known as Q'eqchi'. His second language is Spanish. It's unclear whether something was lost in translation or whether it would have made a difference in saving Jakelin after the two were detained and underwent a health screening along a remote stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border. But the case raises questions about the Border Patrol's use of English-only forms. All agents are required to speak Spanish, and they receive formal Spanish training. Reading forms in Spanish is often enough to pose basic questions. But some other Spanish-speaking migrants reported signing paperwork that they later said they did not understand. Scores of immigrant parents who were separated from their children after crossing the border in the spring said they signed forms agreeing to be deported with the understanding that their kids would be returning with them, only to find themselves deported without them. Many had to wait months before being reunited with them in their homelands. Jakelin and her father, Nery Gilberto Caal Cuz, were part of a group of 163 migrants arrested Dec. 6 near a border crossing in New Mexico. Hours later, they were placed on a bus to the nearest Border Patrol station, but Jakelin began vomiting and eventually stopped breathing. She later died at a Texas hospital. Domingo Caal Chub, 61, holds a smartphone displaying a photo of his granddaughter, Jakelin Amei Rosmery Caal Maquin, in Raxruha, Guatemala, on Saturday, Dec. 15, 2018. The 7-year-old girl died in a Texas hospital, two days after being taken into custody by border patrol agents in a remote stretch of New Mexico desert. (AP Photo/Oliver de Ros) Border Patrol officials on Friday said agents did everything they could to save the girl but that she had not had food or water for days. An initial screening showed no evidence of health problems, they said, and her father spoke to them in Spanish and signed a form indicating she was in good health. Attorneys in Texas representing Caal criticized U.S. officials for asking him to sign Form I-779, which asks a series of questions with check boxes of "yes" or "no." In the "additional comments" section on the form was written "claims good health." "It is unacceptable for any government agency to have persons in custody sign documents in a language that they clearly do not understand," the attorneys said in a statement. The family also disputed the accounts offered by U.S. officials that the girl walked for days in the desert without food or water before crossing. The father's lawyers said Caal took care of his daughter, giving her sufficient water and food, and she appeared to be in good health. Jakelin's family is asking for an "objective and thorough" investigation to determine whether officials met standards for taking children into custody. Border Patrol officials did not immediately respond to the family lawyers' statement. The father, who is staying at a shelter in El Paso, Texas, has asked for privacy. Authorities are conducting an autopsy to determine the cause of death. Results are expected in about a week, said Tekandi Paniagua, the Guatemalan consul in Del Rio, Texas. Paniagua, who spoke with Jakelin's father, said the two had walked with the other migrants for about 90 minutes before crossing and Caal told him he had no complaints about how agents treated him and his daughter. Caal speaks broken Spanish. In his impoverished village in Guatemala, Spanish is needed only occasionally, such as when the community deals with schools and health care or for work, Paniagua said. More than two dozen languages are spoken in Guatemala, and the consulate tries to send interpreters as soon as possible to help detained migrants, Paniagua said. But sometimes by the time they get there, the migrants have already signed forms. "We'll ask, 'Do you speak Spanish?' And they'll say yes," he said. "Then we'll ask, 'But do you understand Spanish?' And often they'll say, 'No, I need an interpreter.'" During a hearing last month at a remote tent city in West Texas, federal immigration Judge Robert S. Hough noticed one of the migrants before him was struggling to understand the court proceedings being translated in Spanish and asked him if he spoke another language. The Guatemalan man said yes, he spoke Mam, another Mayan language. Federal immigration courts try to provide interpreters for the many languages, but it's not a perfect fix. "Even if they speak languages like Mam, depending on the village, the language can be different," Hough said. Caal asked the Guatemalan consulate in Texas, which had reached out to him, if he could see his daughter one last time before her body was sent back to her homeland. That request prompted special arrangements at a private funeral home on Friday, when he said goodbye to Jakelin. The consulate asked him if he wanted an interpreter who could explain everything, including the repatriation of her body, in Q'eqchi'. He said he did. After listening to the interpreter, Paniagua said, Caal thanked the consulate and said, "he felt more comfortable in his own language." ___ Associated Press journalist Russell Contreras in El Paso contributed to this report. Elvira Choc, 59, Jakelin Amei Rosmery Caal's grandmother, rests her head on her hand in front of her house in Raxruha, Guatemala, on Saturday, Dec. 15, 2018. The 7-year old girl died in a Texas hospital, two days after being taken into custody by border patrol agents in a remote stretch of New Mexico desert. (AP Photo/Oliver de Ros) Annunciation House director Ruben Garcia answers questions from the media after reading a statement from the family of Jakelin Caal Maquin, pictured at left, during a press briefing at Casa Vides, Saturday, Dec. 15, 2018, in downtown El Paso, Texas. Maquin had received her first pair of shoes several weeks ago, when her father said they would set out together for the U.S., thousands of miles from her impoverished Guatemalan village. Instead she died in a Texas hospital two days after being taken into custody by U.S. Border Patrol agents in a remote stretch of New Mexico desert. (Rudy Gutierrez/The El Paso Times via AP) Claudia Maquin, 27, shows a photo of her daughter, Jakelin Amei Rosmery Caal Maquin in Raxruha, Guatemala, on Saturday, Dec. 15, 2018. The 7-year-old girl died in a Texas hospital, two days after being taken into custody by border patrol agents in a remote stretch of New Mexico desert. (AP Photo/Oliver de Ros) Carlos Rigoberto Caal Cux, 23, reads a newspaper article about his cousin, Jakelin Amei Rosmey Caal in Raxruha, Guatemala, on Saturday, Dec. 15, 2018. The 7-year-old girl died in a Texas hospital, two days after being taken into custody by border patrol agents in a remote stretch of New Mexico desert. (AP Photo/Oliver de Ros) WASHINGTON (AP) - President Donald Trump keeps changing his story in the swirling investigations into Russia election interference and hush money payments to women who say they had affairs with him. He insists that payments to porn actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal during the 2016 campaign were "private transactions" and that any crime committed would be the fault of his former personal attorney, Michael Cohen , not him. That's a change from what the president said before. Trump previously had denied knowledge of payments and dismissed any hint of a crime. In the special counsel's probe into contacts between Russia and the Trump campaign, Trump tried to cast doubt on whether his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn , had lied to the FBI. Flynn in fact pleaded guilty to doing just that. Over the past week, Trump also made a flurry of false or unsupported statements about immigration. He said, with no evidence, that migrants are plagued with disease. He asserted that Mexico has in effect agreed to pay for his border wall, even as he threatens a partial government shutdown if Congress doesn't approve billions of dollars to build it. He twisted federal statistics to claim the recent arrest of 10 terrorists who don't exist. A look at the claims: ___ In this Dec. 11, 2018, photo, President Donald Trump meets with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) COHEN TRUMP: "Remember, Michael Cohen only became a 'Rat' after the FBI did something which was absolutely unthinkable & unheard of until the Witch Hunt was illegally started. They BROKE INTO AN ATTORNEY'S OFFICE!" - tweet Sunday. THE FACTS: It was not a break-in. The FBI executed a search warrant obtained from a judge in conducting the raid and seizing records on a variety of matters, among them a $130,000 payment made to porn actress Stormy Daniels by Trump's lawyer, Cohen. The application for the warrant was approved high in the Justice Department. Former FBI director James Comey tweeted in response Sunday that Trump is "lying about the lawful execution of a search warrant issued by a federal judge." ___ TRUMP: "I never directed him to do anything wrong. Whatever he did, he did on his own." - interview Thursday with Fox News. TRUMP: "I never directed Michael Cohen to break the law ... many campaign finance lawyers have strongly stated that I did nothing wrong with respect to campaign finance laws, if they even apply, because this was not campaign finance." - tweets Thursday. TRUMP: "So now the Dems go to a simple private transaction, wrongly call it a campaign contribution,...which it was not (but even if it was, it is only a CIVIL CASE, like Obama's - but it was done correctly by a lawyer and there would not even be a fine. Lawyer's liability if he made a mistake, not me). Cohen just trying to get his sentence reduced." - tweets Dec. 10. THE FACTS: Whatever the truth, his account is evolving. Trump's description of the payments as a "simple private transaction" - which he couples with his insistence that "did nothing wrong" with respect to campaign finance laws - is not how he explained it just a few months ago. In April, Trump issued a blanket denial that he knew anything about reports of $130,000 in hush-money paid to Daniels, saying reporters would "have to ask Michael Cohen." A month later, he then acknowledged the payments as a "private contract." Trump is now saying if something criminal happened, it would be solely Cohen's fault as his former attorney. Both Cohen and American Media Inc., the company that owns the National Enquirer tabloid, say they made hush-money payments to Daniels and McDougal for the purpose of helping Trump's 2016 White House bid, a campaign finance violation. Both women alleged they had extramarital affairs with Trump, which the White House denies. Federal prosecutors say the payments were made at Trump's direction. For the payments themselves to be a crime rather than a civil infraction, prosecutors would need to show that Trump knew that what he was doing was wrong when he directed Cohen to pay the women and that he did so with the goal of benefiting his campaign. It's unclear what federal prosecutors in New York will decide to do if they conclude that there is evidence that Trump himself committed a crime. In the meantime, Trump's changing version of the truth is running head-on into facts agreed to by prosecutors. ___ RUSSIA INVESTIGATION TRUMP: "Wow, 19,000 Texts between Lisa Page and her lover, Peter S of the FBI, in charge of the Russia Hoax, were just reported as being wiped clean and gone. Such a big story that will never be covered by the Fake News. Witch Hunt!" - tweet Saturday. THE FACTS: The Justice Department's watchdog, in a report released Thursday, found no evidence the FBI intentionally destroyed text messages of former FBI agent Peter Strzok and former FBI lawyer Lisa Page, who were involved in the Hillary Clinton email investigation when they worked for the bureau. The inspector general faulted an FBI-wide software failure that has resulted in large portions of FBI text messages not being archived. The report examined a gap in messages from December 2016 through May 2017 from the phones of Strzok and Page. The FBI ultimately managed to recover thousands of the messages. Some congressional Republicans had suggested the messages were intentionally deleted. The inspector general report said there was no evidence Strzok and Page circumvented protocol. Strzok was removed from special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation after anti-Trump texts were discovered. He has since been fired. Page resigned. ___ TRUMP: "Well the FBI said Michael Flynn, a general and a great person, they said he didn't lie. And Mueller said: 'Well, maybe he did.' And now they're all having a big dispute, so I think it's a great thing that the judge is looking into that situation. It's an honor for a lot of terrific people." - remarks Thursday. THE FACTS: That's not what the FBI said. And Flynn, Trump's former national security adviser, has agreed that he lied to the FBI. He pleaded guilty to it and is to be sentenced this week - the first White House official punished as part of special counsel Robert Mueller's ongoing Russia investigation. The idea that Flynn didn't lie to the FBI picked up steam after Republicans on the House intelligence committee issued a report this year that said ex-FBI director James Comey, in a private briefing, told lawmakers that agents who interviewed Flynn "discerned no physical indications of deception" and saw "nothing that indicated to them that he knew he was lying to them." But Comey called that description "garble" in a private interview with House lawmakers this month. Comey, in essence, said Flynn was a good liar, having a "natural conversation" with agents, "answered fully their questions, didn't avoid. That notwithstanding, they concluded he was lying." As for Trump's comment that the judge is looking into the matter, it's true U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan has asked for documents related to the agents who interviewed Flynn. It's not clear from Sullivan's order whether he considers there to be a dispute to resolve or if he just wants to see the underlying documents as he decides Flynn's sentence. ___ BORDER SECURITY TRUMP: "The Democrats policy of Child Seperation (sic) on the Border during the Obama Administration was far worse than the way we handle it now. Remember the 2014 picture of children in cages - the Obama years." - tweet Sunday. THE FACTS: Democratic President Barack Obama did not have a separation policy. The Trump administration didn't, explicitly, either, but that was the effect of his zero tolerance policy, which meant that anyone caught crossing the border illegally was to be criminally prosecuted, even those with few or no previous offences. The policy meant adults were taken to court for criminal proceedings and their children were separated. In most cases, if the charge took longer than 72 hours to process, which is the longest time that children can be held by Customs and Border Protection, children were sent into the care of the Health and Human Services Department. Zero tolerance remains in effect, but Trump signed an executive order June 20 that stopped separations. Trump also misrepresents 2014 photos of children in holding cells. They did not involve family separation. The photos, taken by The Associated Press during the Obama administration, showed children who came to the border without their parents and were being housed at a Customs and Border Protection center in Nogales, Arizona. The photos were identified as such but wrongly described online as illustrating imprisonment under Trump. ___ TRUMP: "People with tremendous medical difficulty and medical problems are pouring in, and in many - in many cases it's contagious. They're pouring into our country. We have to have border security." - statement in Oval Office meeting Tuesday with Democratic leaders, Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Chuck Schumer. THE FACTS: Trump provided no evidence that people coming into the country, including the caravan at the U.S.-Mexico border, are carrying contagious diseases at a higher rate than the U.S. population. Medical screening is part of the process for vetting people who seek asylum. A study published this month by the UCL-Lancet Commission on Migration and Health called scares about contagion one of the most pervasive myths about migrants. The study found no evidence that migrants pose a significant public health risk to countries such as the U.S. that have good health systems. In fact, migrants themselves face health threats from arduous journeys, violence along the way, or overcrowding in shelters or camps, the Lancet commission said. While some may come from regions where certain diseases are common, the report noted that international tourism and movement of animals spread illness, too. As for the caravan and other migrants from the south, World Bank statistics show Mexico and Central America vaccinate most children against measles, sometimes at a bit higher rate than the U.S. Along the border between Mexico and California, public health departments have long had a system in place to watch for signs of outbreaks of a variety of illnesses, whether they're immigration-related or not. ___ TRUMP: "Our Southern Border is now Secure and will remain that way." - tweet Tuesday. TRUMP: "We need border security. People are pouring into our country, including terrorists. We have terrorists. But we caught 10 terrorists. These are over the last very short period of time - 10. These are very serious people." - statement in Oval Office meeting. THE FACTS: Trump contradicted himself, declaring the border secure and insecure on the same day. And Trump is wrong about the government recently catching 10 terrorists. His statement is a mangling of federal statistics showing that U.S. Customs and Border Protection stopped an average of seven to 10 people a day in the 2017 budget year who were denied entry to the U.S. because they were on a watch list. That average applied to all points of entry, and overwhelmingly from airports, and was not specific to the southern border. The standard for placing someone on the list is reasonable suspicion, a lower bar than the probable cause needed to arrest someone for an alleged crime. The statistics do not show how many might have been arrested or charged with anything. In any event, Trump rendered a daily average as 10 recently captured terrorists in the flesh. As for border security, U.S. arrests on the Mexican border jumped 78 percent in November from a year earlier to the highest level in Trump's presidency. Increased arrests indicate that more people are trying to cross the border illegally. ___ JOBS PELOSI: "We came at a place to say, 'How do we meet the needs of American people who have needs?' The economy has - people are losing their jobs." - Oval Office meeting. TRUMP: "Well, we have the lowest unemployment that we've had in 50 years." - Oval Office meeting. THE FACTS: Trump is correct about jobs. There may always be some layoffs even if the economy is strong. General Motors, for instance, said last month it would cut as many as 14,000 workers in North America in a restructuring aimed at generating cash to spend on innovation, even though U.S. auto sales are near historic highs. But the U.S. economy has now added jobs for a record 98 straight months, dating to October 2010, during the Obama administration. The Labor Department reported the unemployment rate in November stayed at 3.7 percent, a five-decade low, for the third straight month. The job gains are pushing down unemployment rates to historically low levels for a variety of groups. The unemployment rate for men aged 20 and above fell last month to 3.3 percent, the lowest in 18 years. The rate for Americans with just high school diplomas dropped to 3.5 percent, the lowest since December 2000. The African-American jobless rate declined to 5.9 percent, matching May's figure as the lowest on record. That's making it more challenging for businesses to find the workers they need. Employers have posted 7 million open jobs, outnumbering the ranks of the unemployed, which fell last month to just under 6 million. ___ THE WALL TRUMP: "I often stated, 'One way or the other, Mexico is going to pay for the Wall.' This has never changed. Our new deal with Mexico (and Canada), the USMCA, is so much better than the old, very costly & anti-USA NAFTA deal, that just by the money we save, MEXICO IS PAYING FOR THE WALL!" - tweet Thursday. THE FACTS: This is a face-saving statement to mask the fact that Mexico refused to pay for a U.S. border wall, Trump gave up trying to make it do so and U.S. taxpayers are on the hook for it. In essence, Trump is arguing that new terms of trade with Mexico will increase economic growth in the U.S. and produce more tax revenue. That's what everyone hopes trade agreements will do. As part of that, he hopes for a lower trade deficit with Mexico. Neither outcome is assured. The deal negotiated with Mexico and Canada is an update of the North American Free Trade Agreement he railed against, not a transformative pact. The three countries will continue trading in an environment of mainly low or no tariffs, with improvements here and there for all three partners. There is no credible way for Trump to forecast additional growth covering costs that are being charged to U.S. taxpayers if the wall is built. Trade balances depend on too many factors - consumer tastes, exchange rates, overall economic performance, and the choices of thousands of companies among them - and some are well outside any government's control. Trump specifically promised in the campaign that Mexico would pay for the wall. That is not the same as trying to reduce the U.S. trade deficit, which is about the exchange of goods and services among private entities rather than payments between governments. Nor is a trade deficit necessarily a penalty on consumers. It is the result of consumers buying things made in another country. He wants some $25 billion from Congress for wall construction over five years and promises a partial government shutdown if he does not get a $5 billion or so portion in the next week. Congress may or may not give him that. If it does, it will not be because lawmakers expect a refund to the treasury in future years from extra growth produced by a trade deal. ___ TRUMP: "Tremendous amounts of wall have already been built." - statement in meeting Tuesday with Pelosi and Schumer. TRUMP: "People do not yet realize how much of the Wall, including really effective renovation, has already been built." ''We have already built large new sections & fully renovated others, making them like new." - tweets. THE FACTS: Tremendous portions of the wall have not been built. Yes, some barrier renovation has happened, but little wall construction has been completed under Trump. Congress allocated roughly $1.4 billion in the spring - a bit more than 5 percent of what Trump wanted - for border security and specified that the money was not to be used for construction of the prototype wall sections that stand near San Diego. Instead, the money is to strengthen or replace existing fencing with more secure fencing. Altogether, Trump promised in the campaign that he'd build a 1,000-mile (1,600 kilometer-) wall, as high as 40 feet or 12 meters (and have Mexico pay for it, which isn't happening). If some 650 miles (1,050 km) of existing fencing are considered in the equation, that leaves him with about 350 miles (560 km) of wall to build. ___ Associated Press writers Jonathan Lemire, Eric Tucker, Chad Day, Lauran Neergaard, Josh Boak, Matthew Daly and Colleen Long in Washington, and Elliot Spagat in San Diego contributed to this report. ___ Find AP Fact Checks at http://apne.ws/2kbx8bd Follow @APFactCheck on Twitter: https://twitter.com/APFactCheck President Donald Trump speaks to media he visits Section 60 at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Va., Saturday, Dec. 15, 2018, during Wreaths Across America Day. Wreaths Across America was started in 1992 at Arlington National Cemetery by Maine businessman Morrill Worcester and has expanded to hundreds of veterans' cemeteries and other locations in all 50 states and beyond. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster) Where the investigations related to President Donald Trump stand and what may lie ahead for him: WHAT'S THIS ALL ABOUT? Trump is facing criminal investigations in Washington and New York. Special counsel Robert Mueller is looking into whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia and whether the president obstructed the investigation. Trump also plays a central role in a separate case in New York, where prosecutors have implicated him in a crime. They say Trump directed his personal lawyer Michael Cohen to make illegal hush-money payments to two women as a way to quash potential sex scandals during the campaign. ___ WHAT DO I NEED TO KNOW TODAY? President Donald Trump waves as he leaves the Rose Garden of the White House after speaking and taking questions from the media after his meeting with Congressional leaders on border security, Friday, Jan. 4, 2019, at the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin) The chief federal judge in Washington has extended the grand jury hearing testimony in the special counsel's investigation. The grand jury was impaneled in July 2017 for 18 months, and the term was scheduled to expire in the coming days. Federal court rules allow the grand jury's service to be extended up to six months if it is in the "public interest." Separately, now that Democrats have taken over the House, some party members are making noise about trying to remove Trump from office. California Rep. Brad Sherman and Texas Rep. Al Green introduced articles of impeachment against Trump on Thursday, the first day of the new Congress. Also Thursday, House Judiciary Committee Democrats introduced legislation to protect Mueller from being fired. Trump has repeatedly criticized Mueller's investigation. The legislation is designed as a companion to a bipartisan bill that was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee in April. It would allow any special counsel who is removed from office to challenge his or her removal in court and would put into law existing regulations that a special counsel may only be removed for good cause. ___ WHAT'S UP WITH THE ATTORNEY GENERAL NOMINEE? Trump's pick for attorney general, William Barr, sent an unsolicited memo to the Justice Department last year criticizing parts of the Mueller probe as "fatally misconceived." The 20-page memo, sent in June while Barr was in private practice and months before he was selected by Trump for the Justice Department job, may prompt questions about his ability to oversee the special counsel's investigation fairly. The document argues that there could be disastrous consequences for the Justice Department and the presidency if Mueller were to conclude that acts a president is legally permitted to take - such as firing an FBI director - could constitute obstruction of justice, just because someone concludes that there was corrupt intent. ___ SO ... DID THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN COLLUDE WITH RUSSIA? There is no smoking gun when it comes to the question of Russia collusion. But the evidence so far shows a broad range of Trump associates had Russia-related contacts during the 2016 presidential campaign and transition period, and that several lied about the communication. There is also evidence that some people in the president's orbit were discussing a possible email dump from WikiLeaks before it occurred. American intelligence agencies and Mueller have said Russia was the source of hacked material released by WikiLeaks during the campaign that was damaging to Clinton's presidential effort. ___ OTHER QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER: -WHAT ABOUT OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE? That is another unresolved question that Mueller is pursuing. Investigators have examined key episodes such as Trump's firing of former FBI Director James Comey and his fury over the recusal from the investigation of former Attorney General Jeff Sessions. -WHAT DOES TRUMP HAVE TO SAY ABOUT ALL THIS? Trump has repeatedly slammed the Mueller investigation as a "witch hunt" and insisted there was "NO COLLUSION" with Russia. He also says his now-former lawyer, Cohen, lied to get a lighter sentence in New York. ___ For more in-depth information, follow AP coverage at https://apnews.com/TrumpInvestigations PARIS (AP) - A man suspected of supplying the gun that was used in the shooting attack that killed five people near a Christmas market in Strasbourg was handed preliminary terror charges Monday, according to a judicial official close to the investigation. The official, who could not be named with the case ongoing, said the individual appeared before a judge and was charged with criminal association with terrorists, as well as possessing and supplying arms in connection with a terrorist enterprise. The man is suspected of furnishing the weapon that alleged gunman Cherif Chekatt used in the Dec. 11 attack, the judicial official said. He was remanded into custody. Chekatt, 29, died in a shootout with police in Strasbourg Thursday. Two other people were arrested and detained Monday as part of the terror investigation the Paris prosecutor's office is conducting into the attack. They also were suspected of "playing a role in supplying the firearm," said the official. Their arrests bring the number of suspects in custody since the attack to three; Chekatt's parents and two of his brothers were questioned by police last week and released. The death toll from the attack increased to five Sunday night after a Polish man died of his wounds in a Strasbourg hospital. Barto Orent-Niedzielski, 36, lived in the city, where he worked at the European Parliament and as a journalist. The other casualties include a tourist from Thailand and an Italian journalist covering the European Parliament. Residents react during a gathering being held in a central square of the eastern French city of Strasbourg, Sunday Dec.16, 2018 to pay homage to the victims of a gunman who killed four people and wounded a dozen more. The gathering was held in Kleber Square by a Christmas market and near where the gunman opened fire last Tuesday evening. (AP Photo/Jean-Francois Badias) According to some reports, Orent-Niedzielski fought the shooter and stopped him from entering a crowded club, possibly preventing more deaths. Polish President Andrzej Duda wrote early Monday on Twitter that "I knew him by sight. I am shocked. I had not realized that he was the one mortally wounded protecting other people. Honor to his memory. RIP." ___ Two people were arrested and one appeared before a French judge Monday as part of a terrorism-related investigation of the shooting attack that killed five people last week near a Christmas market in Strasbourg, the Paris prosecutor's office said. An official close to the investigation said the man who was in court is suspected of involvement in supplying the weapon that alleged gunman Cherif Chekatt used in the Dec. 11 attack. Chekatt, 29, died in a shootout with police in Strasbourg Thursday. The two detained Monday also were suspected of "playing a role in supplying the firearm," said the official, who could not be named with the case ongoing. Their arrests bring the number of suspects in custody since the attack to three; Chekatt's parents and two of his brothers were questioned by police last week and released. The death toll from the attack increased to five Sunday night after a Polish man died of his wounds in a Strasbourg hospital. Barto Orent-Niedzielski, 36, lived in the city, where he worked at the European Parliament and as a journalist. The other casualties include a tourist from Thailand and an Italian journalist covering the European Parliament. According to some reports, Orent-Niedzielski fought the shooter and stopped him from entering a crowded club, possibly preventing more deaths. Polish President Andrzej Duda wrote early Monday on Twitter that "I knew him by sight. I am shocked. I had not realized that he was the one mortally wounded protecting other people. Honor to his memory. RIP." ___ Samuel Petrequin in Paris and Monika Scislowska in Warsaw contributed to this report. Residents react during gathering being held in a central square of the eastern French city of Strasbourg, Sunday Dec.16, 2018 to pay homage to the victims of a gunman who killed four people and wounded a dozen more. The gathering was held in Kleber Square by a Christmas market and near where the gunman opened fire last Tuesday evening. (AP Photo/Jean-Francois Badias) Residents react during a gathering in a central square of the eastern French city of Strasbourg, Sunday Dec.16, 2018 to pay homage to the victims of a gunman who killed four people and wounded a dozen more. The gathering was held in Kleber Square by a Christmas market and near where the gunman opened fire last Tuesday evening. (AP Photo/Jean-Francois Badias) WASHINGTON (AP) - The fight over President Donald Trump's $5 billion wall funds deepened Monday, threatening a partial government shutdown in a standoff that has become increasingly common in Washington. It wasn't always like this, with Congress and the White House at a crisis over government funding. The House and Senate used to pass annual appropriation bills, and the president signed them into law. But in recent years the shutdown scenario has become so routine that it raises the question: Have shutdowns as a negotiating tool lost their punch? Monday brought few signs of progress. A partial shutdown that could occur at midnight Friday risks disrupting government operations and leaving hundreds of thousands of federal employees furloughed or working without pay over the holiday season. Costs would be likely in the billions of dollars. Trump was meeting with his team and getting regular updates, said White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Trump was also tweeting Monday to keep up the pressure. Exiting a Senate Republican leadership meeting late Monday, Sen. John Thune of South Dakota said, "It looks like it probably is going to have to build for a few days here before there's a solution." The president is insisting on $5 billion for the wall along the southern border with Mexico, but he does not have the votes from the Republican-led Congress to support it. Democrats are offering to continue funding at current levels, $1.3 billion, not for the wall but for fencing and other border security. The Capitol is seen at twilight in Washington, Monday, Dec. 17, 2018. The fight over President Donald Trump's $5 billion wall funds deepened Monday, threatening a partial government shutdown in a standoff that has become increasingly common in Washington. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite) It's unclear how many House Republicans, with just a few weeks left in the majority before relinquishing power to House Democrats, will even show up mid-week for possible votes. Speaker Paul Ryan's office had no update. Many Republicans say it's up to Trump and Democrats to cut a deal. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Trump talk most days, but the senator's spokesman would not confirm if they spoke Monday about a plan. McConnell opened the chamber hoping for a "bipartisan collaborative spirit" that would enable Congress to finish its work. "We need to make a substantial investment in the integrity of our border," McConnell said. "And we need to close out the year's appropriation process." Meanwhile more than 800,000 government workers are preparing for the uncertainty ahead. The dispute could affect nine of 15 Cabinet-level departments and dozens of agencies, including the departments of Homeland Security, Transportation, Interior, Agriculture, State and Justice, as well as national parks and forests. About half the workers would be forced to continue working without immediate pay. Others would be sent home. Congress often approves their pay retroactively, even if they were ordered to stay home. "Our members are asking how they are supposed to pay for rent, food, and gas if they are required to work without a paycheck," said a statement from J. David Cox, Sr., president of the American Federation of Government Employees, the large federal worker union. "The holiday season makes these inquiries especially heart-wrenching." Many agencies, including the Pentagon and the departments of Veterans Affairs and Health and Human Services, are already funded for the year and will continue to operate as usual, regardless of whether Congress and the president reach agreement this week. Congress already approved funding this year for about 75 percent of the government's discretionary account for the budget year that began Oct. 1. The U.S. Postal Service, busy delivering packages for the holiday season, wouldn't be affected by any government shutdown because it's an independent agency. Trump said last week he would be "proud" to have a shutdown to get Congress to approve a $5 billion down payment to fulfill his campaign promise to build a border wall. During his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump promised that Mexico would pay for the wall. Mexico has refused. Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, in a meeting last week at the White House, suggested keeping funding at its current level, $1.3 billion, for improved fencing. Trump had neither accepted nor rejected the Democrats' offer, telling them he would take a look. Schumer said Monday he had yet to hear from Trump. Speaking on the Senate floor, Schumer warned that "going along with the Trump shutdown is a futile act" because House Democrats would quickly approve government funding in January. "President Trump still doesn't have a plan to keep the government open," Schumer said Monday. "No treat or temper tantrum will get the president his wall." One option for lawmakers would be to provide stopgap funding for a few weeks, until the new Congress convenes Jan. 3, when Pelosi is poised to become House speaker. Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso, who is in line to become the No. 3 Republican in the Senate, suggested a stopgap bill could be one way to resolve the issue or a longer-term bill that includes money for border security. GOP leaders, though, were frustrated as the clock ticked away. Leaving the weekly leadership meeting, Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., said any planning was a "very closely held thing. That's why we should never let this happen. We should pass the bills the way we're supposed to pass them." ___ Associated Press writer Laurie Kellman in Washington contributed to this report. In this Dec. 11, 2018 photo, President Donald Trump speaks during a meets with Democratic leaders the Oval Office in Washington. Trump said last week he would be "proud" to have a shutdown to get Congress to approve a $5 billion down payment to fulfill his campaign promise to build a border wall. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) FILE - In this Nov. 2, 2018, file photo, President Donald Trump's White House Senior Adviser Stephen Miller boards Air Force One for campaign rallies in West Virginia and Indiana, in Andrews Air Force Base, Md. The White House is digging in on its demand for $5 billion to build a border wall as congressional Democrats stand firm against it, pushing the federal government closer to the brink of a partial shutdown. Miller says Trump is prepared to do "whatever is necessary" to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File) BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) - A few thousand demonstrators gathered in freezing temperatures outside Hungary's state broadcaster Monday night in a fifth day of protests against the right-wing government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Lawmakers from all opposition parties took to a temporary podium to declare they would continue protests until they are allowed to read out their demands on state television. The protests were sparked by a new labor law that in essence enables the return of a six-day work week, if an employee agrees, with overtime payments potentially unpaid for up to three years. But the demands of protesters have expanded to include cleaning up state corruption, creating an independent judiciary and ensuring neutral state media. "We will continue with protests all the while our demands are not read out over state media. We are not going anywhere," Timea Szabo, a Parliament member for the small, centrist Dialogue party, told the crowd. "The law has not been trampled on in such a way here for 30 years," she said, apparently referring to the roughing up of some legislators by security guards at the MTVA building early Monday. Protesters during the rally held against the government in front of the headquarters of the public broadcaster MTVA in Budapest, Hungary, Monday, December 17, 2018. (Balazs Mohai/MTI via AP) Demonstrators repeatedly chanted slogans like "We won't leave" and "They are lying day and night!" Legislators charged that police took orders from private security guards in forcing them out of the MTVA building, rather than protect their right to enter a public building. Agnes Vadai of the Democratic Coalition, a center-left party, told The Associated Press that she had been manhandled by security guards, "This is nonsense," she said of the lack of help from police officers. "It's their obligation to protect all Hungarian citizens, regardless of their position." The group of 10 lawmakers had entered the building insisting on the right to read their five demands live on air, including the revocation of the labor law. The government has defended the law, saying it will ease the shortage of workers, most especially in the booming auto and manufacturing sectors, and enable employees to earn more money as they wish. Orban's allies have denounced the protests as the work of liberal groups financed by Hungarian-American financier George Soros. The Open Society Foundations, an organization founded by Soros, again denied that Monday. "The Hungarian people are protesting against their government because they have legitimate grievances. Nobody believes Viktor Orban's false assertion that George Soros is behind these protests," the group said in a statement. Independent MP Akos Hadhazy, left, delivers his speech during the rally held against the government in front of the headquarters of the public broadcaster MTVA in Budapest, Hungary, Monday, December 17, 2018. (Balazs Mohai/MTI via AP) Protesters during the rally held against the government in front of the headquarters of the public broadcaster MTVA in Budapest, Hungary, Monday, December 17, 2018. (Balazs Mohai/MTI via AP) Independent MP Bernadett Szel delivers her speech during the rally held against the government in front of the headquarters of the public broadcaster MTVA in Budapest, Hungary, Monday, December 17, 2018. (Balazs Mohai/MTI via AP) Parliamentary deputy of the oppositional Hungarian Socialist Party MSZP Zsolt Molnar, left, helps MSZP deputy Tamas Harangozo climb the fence of the public broadcaster MTVA in Budapest, Hungary, Monday, Dec. 17, 2018. Oppositional lawmakers protest against the amendments to the labour code adopted on Dec. 12, and insist to read out their demands live in the public media. (Zsolt Szigetvary/MTI via AP) NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) - Country band Alabama will mark their 50th year together with a new tour in 2019, more than a year after founding member Jeff Cook announced that he has Parkinson's disease. The Grammy-winning trio of Randy Owen, Teddy Gentry and Cook formed in 1969 in Fort Payne, Alabama, and went on to dominate the sound of country music in the 1980s, scoring dozens of No. 1 hits, including classics like "Mountain Music" and "Dixieland Delight." Guitarist and fiddle player Cook announced in 2017 that he had been diagnosed with the chronic neurological disorder years ago and he would limit his touring with the band. Cook will perform on their new tour, which begins Jan. 10 in Detroit, as much as he's physically able. ___ Online: http://thealabamaband.com FILE - In this Dec. 13, 2016, file photo, Jeff Cook, left, Randy Owen, center, and Teddy Gentry of the group Alabama tapes a song for Dolly Parton's Smoky Mountain Rise Telethon in Nashville, Tenn. Country band Alabama to mark 50 years together with a new tour in 2019, more than a year after founding member Cook announced that he has Parkinson's disease. Cook will join band members Owen and Gentry on the tour as much as physically possible on the tour that begins Jan. 10 in Detroit. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey, File) ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) - Two business associates of Michael Flynn, President Donald Trump's former national security adviser, were charged Monday with illegally lobbying for Turkey as part of a campaign to pressure the United States to expel a Turkish cleric. Bijan Kian and Ekim Alptekin are accused in an indictment of conspiring to "covertly and unlawfully" influence U.S. public opinion and politicians, all while concealing that the Turkish government was directing their work. The campaign came during the final months of the 2016 presidential campaign while Flynn was a top surrogate for Trump's campaign. The case sheds further light on how Flynn and those around him worked to benefit a foreign country in the months before he became one of America's top national security officials. The goal of the work was to get the United States to expel Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen from the country. Gulen, who holds a U.S. green card and lives in Pennsylvania, is a rival of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has accused the cleric of directing a failed coup and who wanted the U.S. to extradite him back to Turkey. Gulen has denied any involvement in the coup. Though Flynn and his company feature prominently in the latest indictment, he is not charged with any new crimes. A retired three-star U.S. Army general, Flynn is to be sentenced Tuesday in a separate case brought by special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. Flynn has pleaded guilty to lying about his Russian contacts. As part of his cooperation in that probe, he has provided prosecutors with voluminous records from his business, Flynn Intel Group, which carried out the lobbying work. Flynn and Kian were co-founders of the firm. Bijan Kian, whose full name is Bijan Rafiekian, leaves the FBI Washington Field Office in Washington, Monday, Dec. 17, 2018. Rafiekian, a one-time business partner of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, has been indicted on charges including failing to register as a foreign agent. According to the indictment, Rafiekian was vice-chairman of Flynn's business group, the Flynn Intel Group. The two worked to have cleric Fethullah Gulen extradited. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin) On Monday, Kian, a former Trump transition official whose full name is Bijan Rafiekian, made a brief appearance in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia. He has an arraignment scheduled for Tuesday. His lawyer, Robert Trout, declined to comment. Alptekin, a dual Turkish-Dutch citizen living in Istanbul whose full name is Kamil Ekim Alpetekin, remains at large. He has previously denied any wrongdoing and said he directed the lobbying on his own. "Ekim maintains that the government of Turkey was not a participant in any of the work that he did with the Flynn Intel Group. He has not changed his story, and he does not plan to," said Molly Toomey, a spokeswoman for Alptekin. Both men are charged with conspiracy and acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government. Alptekin is also charged with lying during an interview with the FBI. The indictment brought by federal prosecutors in Virginia accuses the two men of using Alptekin's company as a cutout to disguise the Turkish government's involvement. Prosecutors say that Turkish officials approved the budget for the $600,000 lobbying contract and received regular progress reports. The indictment does not say Turkey's government directly funded the effort, but it raises questions about an unusual payment arrangement revealed last year. According to the indictment, Alptekin paid Flynn's firm through wire transfers from a Turkish bank account in his name. But prosecutors say he also received portions of the money as "kickbacks" arranged by Kian. Flynn's company was ultimately paid $530,000. Alptekin has said the payments were refunds for unfulfilled work. The indictment also provides the backstory behind a Nov. 8, 2016, op-ed Flynn published in The Hill newspaper titled "Our Ally Turkey Is in Crisis and Needs Our Support," which compares Gulen to Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini. The indictment notes that Flynn's column uses identical or very similar language to that prepared by Kian in a draft op-ed. "We all remember another quiet, bearded elder cleric who sat under an apple tree ... in the suburbs of Paris in 1978," Flynn wrote in the op-ed, mimicking language provided to him by Kian. "He claimed to be a man of God who wanted to be a dictator." Several days before the column was published, Kian crowed to Alptekin in an email about the advantageous timing of the pending op-ed piece coinciding with Election Day. "The arrow has left the bow!" Alptekin, who had complained a week earlier that the Flynn Group had not done enough work to honor the contract, responded that Kian's op-ed was "right on target." But by the end of November that year, the op-ed caught the Justice Department's attention , and that scrutiny ultimately led to Monday's indictment. ___ Day reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Eric Tucker and Michael Balsamo contributed to this report. ___ Read the indictment: http://apne.ws/rgizy1J FILE - In this Tuesday, July 10, 2018 file photo, former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn leaves federal courthouse in Washington, following a status hearing. Flynn is relaxed and hopeful even as the possibility of prison looms when he's sentenced in the Russia probe Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. The retired three-star general pleaded guilty last year to lying to the FBI about conversations he had with the then-Russian ambassador to the U.S. during President Donald Trump's White House transition. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File) Bijan Kian, whose full name is Bijan Rafiekian, leaves the FBI Washington Field Office in Washington, Monday, Dec. 17, 2018. Rafiekian, a one-time business partner of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, has been indicted on charges including failing to register as a foreign agent. According to the indictment, Rafiekian was vice-chairman of Flynn's business group, the Flynn Intel Group. The two worked to have cleric Fethullah Gulen extradited. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin) Bijan Kian, whose full name is Bijan Rafiekian, enters the FBI Washington Field Office in Washington, Monday, Dec. 17, 2018. Rafiekian, a one-time business partner of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, has been indicted on charges including failing to register as a foreign agent. According to the indictment, Rafiekian was vice-chairman of Flynn's business group, the Flynn Intel Group. The two worked to have cleric Fethullah Gulen extradited. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin) Bijan Kian, whose full name is Bijan Rafiekian, enters the FBI Washington Field Office in Washington, Monday, Dec. 17, 2018. Rafiekian, a one-time business partner of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, has been indicted on charges including failing to register as a foreign agent. According to the indictment, Rafiekian was vice-chairman of Flynn's business group, the Flynn Intel Group. The two worked to have cleric Fethullah Gulen extradited. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin) Between 2001 and 2018, there have been an astonishing 19 million deaths from chemotherapy in the U.S.A. More shocking is that roughly only 750000 deaths per year were caused by cancer. You shouldnt consider cancer treatment; the numbers advice against it. This can be attributed to the lack of this knowledge which isnt published by media houses and cancer treatment centres and institutions which are hell-bent on hiding the data. According to Natural News, 75% of doctors would not be subjected to the torture that is chemo. Polls were taken by accomplished scientists at the McGill Cancer Centre from 118 doctors who are all experts on cancer. They asked the doctors to imagine they had cancer and to choose from six different "experimental" therapies. The doctors did not only reject the option of chemotherapy but said they wouldnt allow their families to go through with it. The Side-Effects of Chemotherapy Besides the inflated costs of chemotherapy which range between $30000 and $50000 for just six months, the common side-effects include loss of hair and nausea. But thats barely the whole story. With just a low average success rate of three percent, below are other side-effects of using chemotherapy to treat cancer. Loss of body hair. After youre done with chemo, if you dont die from it, youll experience pain when your hair starts growing again. Secondly, youll have sleeping disorders. Sporadic bursts of diarrhoea, vomiting and nausea. Doctors try to counteract by using pre-chemotherapy medication that hasnt been tested. These meds cause muscle spasms and increased heart rate. Damage of peripheral nerves that cause a burning sensation to your hands and feet. This condition is known as peripheral neuropathy. Chemotherapy works by destroying the cancer cells. While at it, white and red blood cells are not spared; the former leaves the patient vulnerable to infections and infectious diseases. The destruction of Red Blood Cells which causes anaemia, shortness of breath, and fatigue. Reduced bone density that causes seething pain in your bones and joints. This condition is known as osteoporosis. Damage of vital organs such as your heart or liver. Tooth loss and permanent damage of your teeth. Loss of senses such as taste, smell, sight and hearing. A few elite and high-ranking people launched chemical warfare on the rest of humanity by launching the American Medical Association. They abolished affordable natural remedies to common diseases in favour of chemical medication with the sole intention of minting millions from the unsuspecting populace. That heralded the production of processed foods, chemotherapy, GMOs, and vaccines. Even nutrition classes in medical schools were scrapped off. When undergoing chemotherapy, you are likely to acquire different cancers in other parts of your body. A study published in the Journal of Science Translational Medicine concluded the same. Chemotherapy has adverse effects on any patient but the big pharmaceutical companies have veiled its effects because they want to enrich themselves by using this Ponzi scheme. UNITED NATIONS (AP) - The presidents of Serbia and Kosovo traded accusations Monday at the U.N. Security Council over Kosovo's decision to transform its 4,000-strong security force into a regular army and Serbia's threat of armed intervention - but both expressed their readiness for dialogue. Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic accused Kosovo of violating a 1999 U.N. resolution by deciding to form an army and demanded to know from what document "do they derive their so-called sovereign right to form their own military? Where is that written?" He answered: "I can tell you in advance, nowhere." Kosovo's president, Hashim Thaci, countered that his country is a sovereign nation and has an absolute right to form its own army. "If Kosovo made a mistake it is only that it waited for five years ... to establish an army." He added, in obvious criticism of Serbia: "It is belated because we waited for goodwill from those who never showed goodwill towards Kosovo." Kosovo was a province of Serbia and came under U.N. and NATO administration after a 1999 NATO-led air war halted a Serbian crackdown on ethnic Albanian separatists. The Security Council resolution that established the interim U.N. administration left the final status of Kosovo in question. Kosovo's predominantly ethnic Albanian leadership declared independence in 2008, and Kosovo has been recognized by 116 countries. Serbia rejects its secession, and Russia, a close ally and veto-wielding Security Council member, has blocked Kosovo from becoming a member of the United Nations. The council meeting highlighted the nearly two decade-long stalemate over Kosovo and the escalating tensions in the western Balkans. At the same time, both Kosovo and Serbia say they see their futures in the European Union, which has been trying for years to normalize relations between them - so far unsuccessfully. Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia, using the strongest language, accused Kosovo of engaging in "lawlessness" with its decision to transform the Kosovo Security Force into an army and warned that "the situation has become explosive." "The most serious concern is about the possibility of incursions of armed Kosovar Albanian units into the northern Serb-populated regions of Kosovo in order to establish control by force of (the Kosovo government in) Pristina over the whole territory," he said. Nebenzia warned that "triggering such a scenario could lead to bloodshed and become a real catastrophe, return the Balkans to a period of turmoil and bury efforts to stabilize the region." He questioned whether the international presence in the area was ready or able to prevent "such a blitzkrieg scenario." Both Nebenzia and Vucic stressed the restraint that Serbia has shown. "Serbia has always been doing everything to keep stability, to maintain tranquility and peace in the entire region," Vucic said. "We will restrain ourselves of doing wrong steps in the future as well, because we suffered a lot in the past and we don't have more kids to send to different parts of war, hostilities and crises." Kosovo's Thaci said the parliament's decision on forming an army is "irreversible," but added that the transformation will be done in very close cooperation with NATO and will produce a professional, multi-ethnic force. The transformation is "not against anyone," he added, and "Kosovo's army is not and will never be a threat to anybody." Speaking of Serbia, Thaci said, "The problem that our northern neighbor has today is not with Kosovo's army but rather the existence of Kosovo as an independent and sovereign state." "These circumstances make the dialogue between our two countries crucial," he said. "Without dialogue and without a final agreement we will become countries that produce endless and unnecessary drama for domestic consumption, for bilateral consumption, but detrimental for the future of our countries." Serbia's Vucic begged the Security Council "to tame" Kosovo's actions, including its recent hike in tariffs on goods imported from Serbia and Bosnia from 10 percent to 100 percent. "Serbia is always ready to resume the process of dialogue," he said. "We would like to call upon the U.N. to take a bigger role in the future." Before the council met, eight European countries issued a joint statement backing Kosovo's "sovereign right" to gradually transform the Kosovo Security Force into an army, saying this should be "a transparent and inclusive process" over 10 years including all communities in the country. The eight countries - Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Sweden and United Kingdom - also called for an agreement normalizing relations between Serbia and Kosovo. NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) - Republican U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee announced Monday that he won't seek re-election in 2020, giving the red state its second open Senate contest in two years. Alexander said in a news release that he was deeply grateful for being elected to more combined years as governor and senator than anyone else in Tennessee. But the 78-year-old politician said it's now time for someone else to have that privilege. He will serve out his final two years. With Alexander's decision, popular Republican Gov. Bill Haslam told the Chattanooga Times Free Press that he will give "serious consideration" to making a Senate bid. Haslam declined to run for the seat that Republican Sen. Bob Corker is vacating and that Republican Sen.-elect Marsha Blackburn won in November. Haslam is leaving office in January due to term limits. Alexander said he made his decision on an August fishing trip in Canada, but waited to announce until the end of the year to "let it settle and simmer and make sure it was the right decision." On a call Sunday night with President Donald Trump, Alexander said that before he could reveal he wouldn't run again, Trump pointed to Blackburn's win and offered to help Alexander serve another two decades. When Alexander broke the news to him, Trump congratulated him. "He offered the help ... before I told him that I wasn't going to run," Alexander told The Associated Press. "So, I appreciated that." U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., talks with Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam, second from left, and Crissy Haslam, right, before the unveiling of Bill Haslam's official portrait Monday, Dec. 17, 2018, in Nashville, Tenn. Alexander said Monday he is not running for re-election in 2020. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey) A Maryville, Tennessee native, Alexander was governor from 1979 until 1987, helping to bring the auto industry to the state. He was elected to the Senate in 2002 and re-elected in 2008 and 2014. He developed a reputation as a consensus builder, advancing recent laws to address the opioid crisis and overhaul the way music is licensed and songwriters are paid. He also teamed with Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington to try to stabilize health insurance markets after Republican failed to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, to mixed results. "I look at Washington as a split-screen television, and on the split screen side that has all of the political fireworks, I try to stay away from that," Alexander said. "And I try to focus on the problem-solving side ... I find plenty of other Republicans and Democrats who want to work that way." Alexander was a candidate Republican nomination for president in 1996 and 2000 and was U.S. education secretary from 1991 to 1993 under George H.W. Bush. After serving as governor, Alexander was the University of Tennessee's president from 1988 to 1991. Alexander had shown signs that he might have been gearing up for another re-election. His campaign had just ordered up a poll that found he was still very popular among Tennessee Republican primary voters. Alexander's announcement triggered a scramble for candidates to replace him. Just a month ago, Blackburn won Corker's Senate seat by about 10 percentage points against former Democratic Gov. Phil Bredesen. Corker on Monday called Alexander "the legislator of the decade because of the effective way he has worked across the aisle to pass legislation that directly affects the lives of so many throughout our state and around the country." As possible contenders for his job, Alexander listed Haslam and U.S. Ambassador to Japan Bill Hagerty, adding that others could be in the mix. Another Republican name mentioned for a possible bid is Mark Green, a newly elected congressman who hasn't taken office yet. Alexander signaled he wouldn't be intervening in the race. "I'm not going to be involved with picking my successor, I don't expect to be," Alexander said. It's less clear whether an obvious front-runner will emerge for the Democrats, like Haslam would be for the GOP. Some of the many names being floated include Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke, Iraq War veteran James Mackler of Nashville and state Sen. Jeff Yarbro of Nashville. Tom Ingram, a Tennessee GOP strategist with stints as Alexander's chief of staff as governor and in the Senate, said he believes Haslam's decision controls who else considers entering the race. "I don't think he's going to rush a decision," Ingram said of Haslam. "He's going to take some time and really think about it." In October 2017, Haslam decided against running to replace Corker, saying he wanted to remain completely focused on his job as governor. He said he loved being a mayor and a governor, but did not feel the same call to run for Senate at that point. Blackburn announced her bid for the seat later that day. Haslam praised Alexander on Monday, saying, "No one has served our state longer as a governor and senator, and few, if any, have served it better than Lamar." U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., left, shakes hands with Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam before the unveiling of Haslam's official portrait Monday, Dec. 17, 2018, in Nashville, Tenn. Alexander said Monday he is not running for re-election in 2020. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey) U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., left, shakes hands with Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam before the unveiling of Haslam's official portrait Monday, Dec. 17, 2018, in Nashville, Tenn. Alexander said Monday he is not running for re-election in 2020. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey) U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., speaks at the unveiling of the official portrait of Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam, Monday, Dec. 17, 2018, in Nashville, Tenn. Alexander said Monday he is not running for re-election in 2020. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey) WASHINGTON (AP) - Former FBI Director James Comey had harsh words for House Republicans on Monday, saying their silence in response to President Donald Trump's attacks on the Justice Department is "shameful." Comey said Republicans "have to have the courage to stand up and speak the truth, not be cowed by mean tweets or fear of their base." He was on Capitol Hill for a second closed-door interview with two Republican-led committees investigating what they say was bias at the Justice Department before the 2016 presidential election. Republicans argue department officials conspired against Trump as they started an investigation into his ties to Russia and cleared Democrat Hillary Clinton in a separate probe of her email use. Democrats have called the GOP investigation "nonsense." Comey, who led both investigations, mocked the congressional probe, saying the questions were about "Hillary Clinton's emails and the Steele dossier" - two favorite subjects of Republicans who insist there was bias in the department. The dossier was Democratic-funded opposition research on Trump's ties to Russia compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele. "This while the president of the United States is lying about the FBI, attacking the FBI and attacking the rule of law in this country. How does that make any sense at all?" Comey asked. Trump has repeatedly gone after the FBI for bias as his campaign has been under investigation. He has called special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation a "hoax." On Sunday, he called his former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, a "rat" because he has cooperated with prosecutors. Former FBI Director James Comey, with his attorney, David Kelley, far right, arrives on Capitol Hill in Washington, Monday, Dec. 17, 2018, to testify under subpoena in a second closed-door interview with the GOP-led House Judiciary and Oversight Committees in their probe of conduct by federal law enforcement officials in the investigation of President Donald Trump's alleged Russia ties, and Hillary Clinton's emails. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite) Comey said Trump "is calling a witness who is cooperating with his own Justice Department a rat - say that again to yourself at home, and remind yourself where we have ended up." White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders responded Monday night on Twitter, writing: "Republicans should stand up to Comey and his tremendous corruption. ... The President did the country a service by firing him and exposing him for the shameless fraud he is." The House Judiciary and Oversight and Government Reform committees are wrapping up a yearlong investigation into the department's decisions before Democrats take the majority in January. Comey first testified Dec. 7. A transcript released after Comey's first interview showed a heavy focus on the Clinton email probe. A transcript of the second interview will also be released. Former FBI Director James Comey, with his attorney, David Kelley, far right, arrives on Capitol Hillin Washington, Monday, Dec. 17, 2018, to testify under subpoena in a second closed-door interview with the GOP-led House Judiciary and Oversight Committees in their probe of conduct by federal law enforcement officials in the investigation of President Donald Trump's alleged Russia ties, and Hillary Clinton's emails. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite) Former FBI Director James Comey arrives for a closed-door interview with House Judiciary and Oversight Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, Monday, Dec. 17, 2018. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta) Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., a member of the House Oversight Committee, answers questions from reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington, Monday, Dec. 17, 2018, as he and other members of the GOP-led House Judiciary and Oversight Committees arrive to interview former FBI Director James Comey in their probe of conduct by federal law enforcement officials in the investigation of President Donald Trump's alleged Russia ties, and Hillary Clinton's emails. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite) UNITED NATIONS (AP) - With only the United States and Hungary voting no, the U.N. General Assembly overwhelmingly approved a non-binding compact Monday that provides more robust support for countries where most of the world's more than 25 million refugees live. The Global Compact on Refugees also sets out measures to share responsibility to help those who are forced to flee their countries because of conflict or persecution, and ease the burden on the small number of nations that host the majority of refugees. U.N. refugee chief Filippo Grandi called the compact "historic" in a tweet, adding: "It is the biggest effort to broadly share refugee responsibilities that I have witnessed in 34 years of work with refugees." The vote in the 193-member assembly was 181-2, with the Dominican Republic, Eritrea and Libya abstaining. U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed said the Global Compact is very important because "in recent years, we have seen a contagion of closed borders, contrary to international refugee and human rights law." "Millions of refugees are facing years in exile, or risking their lives on dangerous journeys to an uncertain future," she told an event marking the adoption. "Refugees are among those furthest behind. Persecuted, isolated and marginalized in their home countries, and too often in their countries of destination, they have struggled to be counted - and to count." U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Grandi stressed that the compact is not just "a U.N. document that stays in a drawer." The rollout of the compact in 15 countries so far has mobilized $6.5 billion that wouldn't have been accessible otherwise, he said. And it has already created "new momentum" and spurred "extraordinary projects," including in Ethiopia, Kenya and Jordan, in such areas as energy, connectivity, communications and technology. The agreement is separate from another non-binding compact to ensure safe, orderly and humane migration that was approved Dec. 10 by nearly 85 percent of the U.N. member states over fierce opposition from the United States. The Global Compact for Migration is expected to be endorsed by the General Assembly on Wednesday. The Global Compact on Refugees was adopted at a time when a record-high 68.5 million people have been forced to flee their homes. This includes 25.4 million who have crossed borders to become refugees, 40 million who are displaced within their home countries and 3.1 million who are seeking asylum. According to the U.N. refugee agency, nine out of 10 refugees live in developing countries, where basic services like health or education are already strained. Grandi stressed that it's "a tough world" for refugees and migrants who are often stigmatized and politicized as threats. "One message is that these people not only deserve compassion and protection and solidarity, but when given the opportunity, they can make a formidable contribution to society," he said. He called the refugee compact "a powerful expression of how we work together in today's fragmented world" and stressed that "no country should be left alone to respond to a huge influx of refugees." The compact aims to provide more investment from governments and the private sector for infrastructure and services to benefit both refugees and host communities, including access to education. It also aims to address the environmental impact of hosting refugees, promotes the use of alternative energy, and envisions more resettlement opportunities through family reunification, student scholarships, or humanitarian visas so that refugees can travel safely. The compact builds on the 1951 Refugee Convention in addition to human rights and humanitarian law and makes way for a follow-up Global Refugee Forum every four years. Despite the Trump administration's opposition to the compact, Grandi said the United States has voiced support for refugees. And his office is "about to close the year with the highest-ever contribution from the U.S. to the UNHCR," he said. Hungarian Ambassador Katalin Annamaria Bogyay, whose government since 2015 has adopted increasingly strict anti-immigration policies, said existing international laws "adequately address refugee and asylum matters" and the compact was not needed. "The government is also concerned that the differentiation between refugees and migrants as well as the voluntary nature of responsibility sharing is not adequately reflected in the document, she said. ___ This story has been corrected to show that there are 40 million internally displaced people and 3.1 million asylum seekers BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) - Relatives of a black man killed by police in Alabama's largest shopping mall claimed Monday that a state takeover of the investigation is a bid by authorities to protect the officer. Holding a photo of her son Emantic "EJ" Bradford Jr., April Pipkins said the move by Attorney General Steve Marshall to assume control of the probe seemed aimed at shielding the officer, who has yet to be named publicly. The family's lawyers contend the case should have been left with newly elected Jefferson County District Attorney Danny Carr, who is black, or given to Lynneice Washington, another black district attorney who handles cases in the western part of the county. "All the family wants is for justice to be served for my son," Pipkins said during a news conference. "By taking the case from Mr. Carr, we feel they are trying to protect this officer who killed by son." Carr declined comment, but his office reissued a statement from last week saying it was capable of handling the investigation into Bradford's death at a shopping mall in suburban Hoover on Thanksgiving night. Marshall said last week that his office was taking over the investigation to guard against any potential conflicts of interest involving local officials. April Pipkins and her family's lawyer, Ben Crump, hold a news conference in Birmingham, Ala., on Monday, Dec. 17, 2018. Pipkins, the mother of a black man who was shot to death by a police officer in an Alabama shopping mall on Thanksgiving, criticized the state's decision to take over an investigation of the case. Emantic "EJ" Bradford Jr. was fatally wounded after an officer saw him with a gun, authorities said. (AP Photo/Jay Reeves) Joy Patterson, spokeswoman for the attorney general's office, said Monday that correspondence shows Carr "directly conveyed to Attorney General Marshall the presence of Carr's perceived conflicts in this matter" and that Marshall "acted on standard procedure to assume prosecution." "The Attorney General's Office will ensure that the Hoover mall shooting cases are handled with the highest degree of fairness and professionalism as we pursue justice for all parties," Patterson said. Washington said she doesn't believe Carr should have been removed from the case, and she doubts Marshall would now send the case to her. The officer who shot Bradford is involved in about 20 cases pending with area prosecutors, officials said. At least one protest leader involved in demonstrations over the shooting publicly supported Carr in his successful bid to become Birmingham's first black district attorney. Ben Crump, an attorney representing Bradford's family, said relatives were "very suspicious" of the grab by Marshall, a Republican appointee who won his first full term in office last month. The officer should be charged with murder if the evidence supports it, he said. "They feel they're trying to protect this officer," Crump said. Bradford, 21, was shot to death moments after gunfire erupted during a confrontation at the Riverchase Galleria, which was crowded with holiday shoppers. Police initially claimed Bradford was the gunman in that initial confrontation and said an officer shot him. They later said Bradford was not the shooter but an officer heard shots, saw Bradford with a gun and fired at him. Relatives have said Bradford was licensed to carry a weapon. A forensic exam commissioned by the family showed that Bradford was shot three times in the rear portion of his body, including once in the back of the head. A brief portion of videotape reviewed by the family's legal team supports evidence that indicates Bradford was moving away from the officer when he was shot, Crump said. Authorities have refused to publicly release video or other evidence, citing the continuing investigation. April Pipkins and her family's lawyer, Ben Crump, walk to a news conference in Birmingham, Ala., on Monday, Dec. 17, 2018. Pipkins, the mother of a black man who was shot to death by a police officer in an Alabama shopping mall on Thanksgiving, criticized the state's decision to take over an investigation of the case. Emantic "EJ" Bradford Jr. was fatally wounded after an officer saw him with a gun, authorities said. (AP Photo/Jay Reeves) April Pipkins and her family's lawyer, Ben Crump, walk to a news conference in Birmingham, Ala., on Monday, Dec. 17, 2018. Pipkins, the mother of a black man who was shot to death by a police officer in an Alabama shopping mall on Thanksgiving, criticized the state's decision to take over an investigation of the case. Emantic "EJ" Bradford Jr. was fatally wounded after an officer saw him with a gun, authorities said. (AP Photo/Jay Reeves) TAYLORSVILLE, N.C. (AP) - A North Carolina school bus overturned after it was hit by a car on Monday, sending 13 middle school students to the hospital. Twelve of the students had minor injuries in the crash in Alexander County, while one was in critical condition but expected to survive, according to a news release by the North Carolina Highway Patrol. The drivers of the bus and car were also hurt. Master Trooper Jeffrey Swagger said the crash happened near West Alexander Middle School when the car crossed the center line and hit the bus carrying a driver and 19 students. "The bus continued off the roadway and overturned," he said in the release. Six of the children weren't injured and made it to school after exiting through the bus emergency door. The Highway Patrol said the driver of the car, 56-year-old Kimberly Ann Austin of Taylorsville, was charged with driving while impaired and driving left of center. She was being treated Monday afternoon at a hospital. Alexander County emergency personnel respond to a school bus wreck at Icard Ridge Road and Bulldog Lane near West Alexander Middle School in Taylorsville, N.C., Monday, Dec. 17, 2018. The North Carolina school bus overturned after it was hit by a car on Monday, sending at least a dozen of middle school students to the hospital. (Robert C. Reed/The Hickory Daily Record via AP) It wasn't clear if she had a lawyer who could speak for her. A working home phone listing couldn't be found, and the district attorney's office didn't immediately respond to an email asking if Austin has an attorney. In a separate accident Monday, news outlets report a bus driver from Rowan County died after suffering an apparent medical condition while driving. No children on the bus were hurt. NEW YORK (AP) - A woman who climbed the base of the Statue of Liberty on July 4 to protest the separation of families at the Mexican border was convicted Monday of misdemeanor charges by a judge who said a person's viewpoint can't be a factor in whether laws are enforced. The verdict by U.S. Magistrate Judge Gabriel W. Gorenstein came two hours after Therese Okoumou got choked up as she testified, saying images from the U.S.-Mexican border of children being torn from their parents gave her nightmares. She faces up to 18 months in prison at a March 5 sentencing on charges of trespassing, interference with an agency's function and disorderly conduct. Ron Kuby, one of Okoumou's lawyers, told the judge that his client wanted a trial even though it was clear the "likelihood of her conviction today was close to 100 percent." In a courtroom packed with emotional Okoumou supporters, Gorenstein explained that his decision needed to be consistent whether it was Okoumou who climbed the statue or somebody with the exact opposite opinions. He noted that Okoumou repeatedly ignored orders to descend from a perch at the feet of the statue that was high enough that a prosecutor said it could have seriously injured or killed her or tourists below. New York Police Department rescuers were forced to climb a rickety ladder and gird themselves like mountain climbers to safely bring her down. FILE - In this July 4, 2018, file photo from video provided by the New York City Police Department, members of the NYPD Emergency Service Unit work to safely remove Therese Okoumou, who climbed onto the Statue of Liberty to protest the border separation of children. Okoumou was convicted of misdemeanor charges on Monday, Jan. 17, 2018. The charges include trespassing and carry a potential penalty of up to 18 months in prison. (NYPD via AP, File) The nearly four-hour demonstration forced an evacuation of 4,330 people from the statue grounds on one of its busiest days of the year. Okoumou had testified that she couldn't live with the sight of "children in cages" and thought climbing the statue was the only way to bring attention to the issue. "I have had nightmares. I just couldn't live with it," she said. Outside court afterward, she stood alongside Kuby, defense attorney Rhidaya Trivedi and California attorney Michael Avenatti, who served as an adviser in the case, as supporters held signs behind her. "We stand on the right side of history," Okoumou said. "I am not a bit discouraged today." She said she didn't regret her Statue of Liberty protest. In a statement, U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman praised Gorenstein's verdict. "The act of climbing the base of the Statue of Liberty went well beyond peaceable protest, a right we certainly respect. It was a crime that put people at grave risk," he said, citing the work by NYPD and U.S. Park Police officers who rescued her. Gorenstein allowed Okoumou to remain free without addition bail conditions requested by Assistant U.S. Attorney Brett Kalikow, who said Okoumou had twice tried to climb the Eiffel Tower in Paris and was arrested at an August 2017 Department of Labor protest. ___ This story has been corrected to show that the defendant's first name is Therese, not Theresa. VATICAN CITY (AP) - A prominent U.S. archbishop is asking the Vatican for answers about the status of an investigation into alleged sexual misconduct by his predecessor, who was forced to resign in 2015. St. Paul and Minneapolis Archbishop Bernard Hebda wrote a remarkable letter to his flock Friday in which he revealed he sent the Vatican in 2016 a new allegation of improprieties with minors against retired Archbishop John Nienstedt. It was not immediately clear if the alleged incident in Germany was ever investigated. Nienstedt has denied the allegation. County prosecutors informed Hebda of the allegation in 2016. It accused Nienstedt of inviting two minors to his hotel room in 2005 at a Vatican-organized youth rally in Germany to change out of wet clothes, the archbishop wrote. Hebda said Nienstedt "then proceeded to undress in front of them and invited them to do the same." He noted that Nienstedt denied the allegation. Nienstedt resigned as archbishop after Minnesota prosecutors charged the Twin Cities archdiocese with failing to protect children from a predator priest who was later convicted of molesting two boys. FILE - In this photograph taken on Monday, Oct. 18, 2010, Archbishop John C. Nienstedt talks about the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis consolidation plan, which includes closing 21 churches, at his office in St. Paul, Minn. His successor, St. Paul and Minneapolis Archbishop Bernard Hebda wrote a remarkable letter to his flock Friday, Dec. 14, 2018, in which he revealed he sent the Vatican in 2016 a new allegation of improprieties with minors against retired Archbishop John Nienstedt. (AP Photo/Craig Lassig) Nienstedt was one of the first U.S. bishops known to have been forced from office for botching sex abuse investigations. He also faced allegations of engaging in inappropriate sexual behavior with adults. He denied misconduct, and the archdiocese hired two law firms to investigate those claims in 2014, but the results were never made public. Hebda said as far as he knew, the Vatican suspended the 2014 investigation when Nienstedt resigned in June 2015. He called for a resolution to that probe, and for information about the alleged World Youth Day incident, which he learned about after Nienstedt's resignation. "My opinion is this allegation needs to be fully addressed before a definitive resolution of Archbishop Nienstedt's suitability for ministry can be made," Hebda wrote. The Vatican didn't immediately respond to a request for comment Monday. Nienstedt, who was bishop of New Ulm at the time of the alleged incident in Germany, denied the claim in a Monday email to The Associated Press. "I welcome an investigation into this allegation, as I have welcomed all impartial investigations into allegations made against me. At the same time, I do deny the veracity of this allegation," he said. "That being said, I don't want to speak poorly of the men making these accusations." Nienstedt said it's hard to defend himself because it's his word against the word of his accusers, "and, as much as they seem to want to discredit me, I don't want to harm them." Nienstedt's case has taken on new relevance given the sex abuse scandal surrounding ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the retired archbishop of Washington now accused of sexual misconduct with both adult seminarians and at least one minor. Hebda and Auxiliary Bishop Andrew Cozzens have held up both the McCarrick and the Nienstedt scandals as evidence of the need for a lay-led mechanism to review misconduct allegations against bishops, who are answerable only to the pope. Hebda said he is doing what he can within his authority by forbidding Nienstedt from exercising public ministry in his archdiocese. But he said Nienstedt's fate is ultimately in the Vatican's hands. "The matter remains unresolved for the accusers, for Archbishop Nienstedt and for the public," he said. "I share the frustration that is felt by them." The criminal charges against the archdiocese eventually were dismissed, but the archdiocese reached a civil settlement with authorities that was designed to increase oversight and transparency. ___ Forliti contributed from Minneapolis. WASHINGTON (AP) - Legislation that would ease federal sentencing laws for some offenders cleared its first major test vote Monday, garnering overwhelming support in both parties even as some conservatives portrayed the bill as soft on crime. The Senate voted 82-12 to advance the bill. A vote on final passage would come later in the week, but not until the chamber has debated and voted on a series of amendments from opponents that will be brought up Tuesday. The bill would give judges more discretion when sentencing drug offenders and allow about 2,600 federal prisoners sentenced for crack cocaine offenses before August 2010 the opportunity to petition for a reduced penalty. The bill also encourages prisoners to participate in programs designed to reduce the risk of recidivism, with the reward being the accumulation of credits that can be used to gain an earlier release to a halfway house or home confinement to finish out their sentence. To win over wary senators, sponsors tweaked the bill to prevent those convicted of violent firearm offenses, sexual exploitation of children and high-level fentanyl and heroin dealing from participating in the supervised release program - but Senator Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and others want to expand that list. Their amendment would add carjacking, bank robbery by force, felony sex crimes and other "felony crimes of violence" to the list of offenses that make a prisoner ineligible. "Some of those crimes should not be eligible for that program," said Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D. "At this point, I'm probably a no unless they get that done." FILE - In this Dec. 11, 2018, file photo, President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting in the Oval Office of the White House, in Washington. Legislation to ease federal sentencing laws is pitting conservatives against each other as President Donald Trump looks to score a major legislative win before the end of the year. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File) Cotton has been among the most vocal opponents of the legislation, saying: "If other senators want to vote for a bill that's going to let sex offenders and child pornographers and wife-beaters out of prison, that's their prerogative. That's between them and the voters in their state." The bill has created a unique split in the GOP camp, while Democrats are overwhelmingly supportive. Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, a former federal prosecutor, is among the bill's champions. He said he has been haunted by the words of a federal judge who sentenced a low-level drug offender carrying a gun to 55 years in prison, noting that murderers, rapists and terrorists could get less time for their offense. He said only Congress could fix the problem. "Those comments have stayed with me ever since," Lee said. The bill follows the lead of states such as Texas that have experienced a decrease in crime in recent years while keeping fewer people in prison. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said his home state has been able to close eight prisons since undertaking various prison reforms, such as investing in probation staffing and getting prisoners into drug treatment more quickly. "This is not about being tough on crime, or soft on crime," Cornyn said. "This is about being smart on crime and getting the best results." Supporters of the bill warn that amendments from Cotton and Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., could cause the compromise to unravel if the Senate approves any of them as early as Tuesday. A unique cross-section of liberal and conservative advocacy groups have rallied in support of the bill. David Safavian, general counsel for the American Conservative Union, said the bill's critics ignore that offenders would be subject to strict oversight while completing their sentence at halfway houses or in home custody. The prisoners also have to show through objective criteria that they are a low risk to society before obtaining supervised release. Under the current process, nearly half of released federal prisoners are arrested again. "And every case of recidivism is another victim, is another crime, is another prosecution, is another trial, is another prison cell, all funded with taxpayer dollars," Safavian said. "I'm sorry, but there is nothing conservative about protecting a non-functioning prison bureaucracy." If the legislation passes the Senate, the House is expected to approve it quickly. The House had earlier passed legislation that focused on boosting prisoner rehabilitation programs, but did not include changes to sentencing laws that critics say had led to overly harsh sentences for many nonviolent offenders, particularly African-Americans. The bill looked to have stalled a couple weeks ago, but supporters led by President Donald Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner persuaded Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., to allow for the Senate vote before Congress adjourns. ____ Associated Press writer Lisa Mascaro contributed to this report. __ Follow Kevin Freking at https://twitter.com/APKFreking FILE - In this Dec. 14, 2018, file photo the Capitol is seen in Washington. Legislation to ease federal sentencing laws is pitting conservatives against each other as President Donald Trump looks to score a major legislative win before the end of the year. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File) OZARKS, Mo. (AP) - A Missouri poacher has been ordered to repeatedly watch the movie "Bambi" as part of his sentence in a scheme to illegally kill hundreds of deer. David Berry Jr. was ordered to watch the Disney classic at least once a month during his year-long jail sentence in what conservation agents have called one of the largest deer poaching cases in state history, the Springfield News-Leader reports . "The deer were trophy bucks taken illegally, mostly at night, for their heads, leaving the bodies of the deer to waste," said Don Trotter, the prosecuting attorney in Lawrence County. Berry, his father, two brothers and another man who helped them had their hunting, fishing and trapping privileges revoked temporarily or permanently. The men have paid a combined $51,000 in fines and court costs - but the judge ordered a special addition to Berry's sentence for illegally taking wildlife. Court records show he was ordered by Lawrence County Judge Robert George to "view the Walt Disney movie Bambi, with the first viewing being on or before December 23, 2018, and at least one such viewing each month thereafter" while at the county jail. Berry was also sentenced to 120 days in jail in nearby Barton County for a firearms probation violation. This undated photo provided by in Lawerence County Sheriff in Mt. Vernon, Mo., shows David Berry Jr. Berry was ordered to watch the Walt Disney movie at least once each month during his one-year jail sentence in what conservation agents are calling one of the largest deer poaching cases in state history. Lawrence County Prosecuting Attorney Don Trotter says the deer were killed for their heads and their bodies were left to rot. (Lawerence County Sheriff via AP) His father, David Berry Sr., and his brother, Kyle Berry, were arrested in August after a nearly nine-month investigation that also involved cases in Kansas, Nebraska and Canada. The Missouri Department of Conservation said information from the investigation led to 14 Missouri residents facing more than 230 charges in 11 counties. Investigators say David Berry Sr.'s other son, Eric Berry, was later caught with another person spotlighting deer, where poachers use light at night to make deer pause and easier to hunt. The investigation into the Berrys began in late 2015, when the conservation agency received an anonymous tip about deer poaching in Lawrence County. ___ Information from: Springfield News-Leader, http://www.news-leader.com SALT LAKE CITY (AP) - A Utah couple is accused of waterboarding their 9-year-old daughter as a form of punishment. The girl told police that her father and stepmother tied her hands and then placed a towel over her face, held her down in a bathtub and poured water on the towel, according to probable cause statement filed by police last week. The girl said she couldn't breathe during the waterboarding that occurred three times in their home in Provo, about 45 miles (72 kilometers) south of Salt Lake City. She also said she suffered other abuse, including being slapped by her stepmother in the face, causing a nose bleed, the documents show. The couple was booked into jail last week on suspicion of child abuse. They have posted bail and have yet to be charged. The Associated Press isn't identifying the father or stepmother to protect the girl's identity. It's unclear if the couple have attorneys. No listed phone number could be found. The investigation began Dec. 3 following a report from child welfare workers. The court document doesn't say how the workers became aware of the abuse. TAYLORSVILLE, N.C. (AP) - The Latest on a North Carolina bus crash that injured 13 students (all times local): 2:30 p.m. A North Carolina woman has been charged with driving while impaired after a crash with a school bus that sent 13 students to the hospital. The North Carolina Highway Patrol issued a news release saying Kimberly Ann Austin was also charged with driving left of center. The 56-year-old Taylorsville resident was being treated Monday afternoon at a hospital. It wasn't clear if she had a lawyer who could speak for her. A working home phone listing couldn't be found, and the district attorney's office didn't immediately respond to an email asking if Austin has an attorney. The Highway Patrol says that Austin's car crossed the center line and hit the bus carrying a driver and 19 students. The Patrol said 12 of the students suffered minor injuries, while one was in critical condition but expected to survive. Alexander County emergency personnel leave the scene of a school bus wreck at Icard Ridge Road and Bulldog Lane near West Alexander Middle School in Taylorsville, N.C., Monday, Dec. 17, 2018. The North Carolina school bus overturned after it was hit by a car on Monday, sending at least a dozen of middle school students to the hospital. (Robert C. Reed/The Hickory Daily Record via AP) ___ 1 p.m. A North Carolina school bus overturned after it was hit by a car, sending 13 middle school students to the hospital. The North Carolina Highway Patrol said 12 of the students had minor injuries in the crash Monday in Alexander County, while one was in critical condition but expected to survive. The drivers of the bus and car were also hurt. Master Trooper Jeffrey Swagger said the crash happened near West Alexander Middle School when the car crossed the center line and hit the bus carrying a driver and 19 students. No charges had been filed by late morning. In a separate accident Monday, news outlets report a bus driver from Rowan County died after suffering an apparent medical condition while driving. No children on the bus were hurt. MIAMI (AP) - A Florida man is facing charges of posting detailed bomb-making instructions to online sites frequented by extremists such as supporters of the Islamic State group, according to an FBI complaint unsealed Monday. An FBI affidavit charges Tayyab Tahir Ismail, 33, with posting the illegal bomb instructions on at least five occasions between July and September. Ismail, of Pembroke Pines, Florida, is a naturalized U.S. citizen from Pakistan. The charge carries a maximum 20-year prison sentence if he is convicted. The FBI says Ismail posted numerous other messages of support for the Islamic State and did searches on how to build bombs. There is no evidence he actually had live explosives, but there was plenty of extremist rhetoric about carrying out attacks, according to the affidavit. "You are surrounded by methods to hit them. Kill the devil's soldiers without hesitation. Make them bleed even in their own homes," read one message Ismail is accused of sharing online. "There are plenty of methods to attack my brother." One of the bomb-making videos Ismail allegedly shared online showed an instructor with a black scarf covering his face and wearing military fatigues. The video on how to make a bomb in a kitchen also shows a black flag in the background that the FBI says is associated with the Islamic State group. The FBI affidavit says explosives experts believe the bomb instructions posted by Ismail were accurate and could lead someone to build a dangerous device. This Dec. 14, 2018 photo made available by the Broward County Sheriff's Office, Fla., shows Tayyab Tahir Ismail under arrest. An FBI affidavit unsealed Monday, Dec. 17, 2018, charges Ismail with posting detailed bomb-making instructions to online sites frequented by extremists such as supporters of the Islamic State group. (Broward County Sheriff's Office via AP) The affidavit also says Ismail was an associate of James Medina, who is serving a 25-year prison sentence for plotting to blow up a South Florida synagogue and Jewish school. The two lived together while Medina was working on his 2016 plot, which was an undercover FBI sting operation using a fake bomb. "On the day Medina attempted to bomb the synagogue, Ismail learned of Medina's plans to move forward and conduct the attack, but he did not alert law enforcement," the affidavit says. After Medina's arrest, Ismail surrendered several firearms at authorities' request, court documents show. But he was not charged in that case. The FBI says it has been aware of Ismail since October 2010, when he allegedly made terrorism threats at a Florida homeless shelter, claiming he was an "al-Qaida soldier" and would "blow it up." He also responded to an insult from a woman by allegedly saying, "we throw women like her in the ditch." Ismail was arrested Friday, court records show, and he has a Dec. 26 bail hearing. Court records Monday did not list an attorney for Ismail. ____ Follow Curt Anderson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/Miamicurt Whenever Brittany Hawley went to class, her loyal service dog Griffin was there. If she needed her cell phone, Griffin would fetch it. Even when she assisted patients as part of an internship, Griffin was there helping out as well. So it's only fitting that when Hawley was honored for receiving her master's degree in occupational therapy from Clarkson University over the weekend, Griffin was once again at her side - with an honorary diploma of his own. 'I pushed for him to graduate from Day One,' Hawley said Monday. 'Griffin' Hawley, a Golden Retriever service dog, receives an honorary diploma from Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York on Saturday. His owner, Brittany Hawley, is seen left in a wheelchair. She received a graduate degree in occupational therapy Hawley, 25, of Wilson, North Carolina, uses a wheelchair and has chronic pain. She said Griffin does a wide range of physical tasks for her including opening doors, turning on lights and bringing her items she indicates with a laser pointer 'He did everything I did.' The board of trustees of the Potsdam, New York, school honored the 4-year-old golden retriever at a recognition ceremony Saturday, saying he demonstrated 'extraordinary effort, steadfast commitment and diligent dedication to the well-being and student success' of Hawley. Hawley, 25, of Wilson, North Carolina, uses a wheelchair and has chronic pain. She said Griffin does a wide range of physical tasks for her including opening doors, turning on lights and bringing her items she indicates with a laser pointer. But perhaps more important is the comfort the dog provides amid her relentless, severe pain that causes anxiety and depression. Hawley got Griffin through paws4prisons, a program that teaches inmates at West Virginia prisons to train and place high-level assistance dogs. 'The inmates allow many dogs to come up to you and let the dog choose you,' Hawley said. But perhaps more important is the comfort the dog provides amid her relentless, severe pain that causes anxiety and depression 'Some dogs were scared of the wheelchair. Griffin jumped right into my lap and licked me across the face.' Hawley and Griffin worked at Fort Bragg in North Carolina during an internship, helping soldiers with mobility impairments as well as psycho-social disorders. Brushing a dog can help improve a patient's range of motion, and stroking him helps ease anxiety, Hawley said. 'My patients would say, "My therapist today is Brittany and Griffin",' she said. When she applies for jobs, she and Griffin will be a package deal, Hawley said. 'I couldn't participate in anything without him,' she said. 'I'm so used to him being there.' In a story Dec. 17 about a count of homeless people in the U.S., The Associated Press reported erroneously which tax Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority Executive Director Peter Lynn credited for helping reduce homelessness in the 2018 count. Lynn was crediting a Los Angeles city ballot measure that was adopted in 2016, not a county one adopted in 2017. A corrected version of the story is below: US homeless count up slightly, but declines in key cities The national homeless number ticked up in 2018, but declined slightly in some West Coast cities that have experienced the worst of the homelessness crisis By GEOFF MULVIHILL Associated Press A federal report released Monday provides a possible glimmer of hope for the homeless crisis that has gripped many cities up and down the West Coast. The number of people living on the streets in Los Angeles and San Diego, two epicenters of the homelessness crisis, fell this year, suggesting those cities' efforts to combat the problem could be starting to pay off. In Los Angeles, the count fell by 3 percent after a sharp increase the year before. Peter Lynn, executive director of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, said that can be credited to results of six months of increasing affordable housing availability after Los Angeles city voters raised taxes to help in 2016. In 2017, Los Angeles County voters approved another tax increase to provide homeless services, a factor Lynn said will start showing up in future counts. "We're also dealing with the countervailing pressure of housing markets that are pretty unforgiving," he said. Cities in California, Oregon and Washington have driven an overall spike in the number of homeless people nationwide in recent years. This year's count continued that trend, showing 552,800 people without homes across the country, up by about 2,000 from 2017, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's point-in-time tally. It was the second consecutive increase after seven straight years of declines. The number of homeless referred to as unsheltered - those living in the streets, encampments or other open places - was more than 194,000 nationwide. That also was up from last year. More than 37,000 of the unsheltered were in the Los Angeles area this year, down 2 percent from 2017. San Diego, California's second most populous city, also saw a decline in both total homelessness and those on the streets. After a hepatitis A outbreak spread among the homeless population and killed 20 people in 2017, the city turned to industrial-sized tents to house hundreds of people. As the tents went up, officials also cited people camping on downtown streets. Encampments downtown cleared out quickly, but the number along the San Diego River doubled. The city is considering a ballot measure to raise money for affordable housing in 2020. Nationwide, the overall increase this year was driven by a 2 percent rise in the unsheltered homeless population - those living in vehicles, tents and on the streets - along with 4,000 people in emergency shelters after hurricanes, wildfires and other disasters, according to HUD. The numbers of homeless veterans and families continued their long-term declines. At a time when rents are rising faster than wages - especially for lower-income people - an essentially stagnant count is a not a bad sign, said Steve Berg, vice president for programs and policy at the National Alliance to End Homelessness. "Given what's going on with rental housing, it's not exactly good news. But it means communities are pushing back against the headwinds," said Berg, who like other advocates urges caution about reading too much into one-year trends in the homeless count. The homelessness data picture is incomplete because several West Coast areas with large populations, including San Francisco, Portland, Oregon, and California's Orange County, did not conduct new counts of unsheltered homeless populations this year. Those places will do fresh surveys in early 2019. Homelessness has exploded along with a soaring economy in several West Coast cities in recent years and has become a hot local political issue. From 2015 through last year, voters on the West Coast approved more than $8 billion in spending - most of it in tax increases - to address homelessness. In Seattle, which has the nation's largest homeless population outside New York or Los Angeles, the count this year rose to more than 12,000 - more than half of them unsheltered. The number was less than 9,000 just four years ago, and the city has been wrestling with what to do about the problem. The City Council in May passed a $48 million tax on businesses to raise money for affordable housing. But under pressure from Amazon, Starbucks and other companies, it repealed it the next month. Another place in the West with a rising number was the Phoenix area, where the total count this year was nearly 6,300, up 12 percent from the previous year. About two-fifths of people without homes there are in shelters. The region's status as the fastest-growing county in the U.S., with 200 people a day moving in, is a factor in the rising homeless number, said Anne Scott, a human services planner who coordinates the count for the Maricopa Association of Governments. "Some of those folks are not as successful as they hoped to be," she said. "Housing prices are very high. Eviction rates are high. We see a lot of folks who are right on the edge who are slipping into homelessness." New York also had a growing homeless population, with nearly 78,700 people counted - up by more than 2,000. But because of a robust shelter system there, fewer than 1 homeless person in 20 counted is living on the street. Still, like the cities on the West Coast, officials struggle with how to get homeless people permanent homes. HUD Secretary Ben Carson said on a conference call with reporters Monday that no one should be declaring victory over homelessness despite decreases in certain cities. "We still have a long way to go even though there's been significant progress," he said. ___ Follow Mulvihill at http://www.twitter.com/egoffmulvihill PHILADELPHIA (AP) - Philadelphia has seen more homicides this year than in any other in over a decade, as a particularly violent summer morphed into a deadly fall. Police data show that there have been 333 homicides in the city as of Sunday, an 11 percent increase over the same period last year. Even with two weeks left in 2018, this year's total is higher than any year's since 2007, which ended up with 391 homicides. New York and Los Angeles, with populations much larger than Philadelphia's 1.5 million, have had fewer homicides this year. As of Dec. 9, New York City had seen 273 homicides; as of Dec. 8, Los Angeles had 243. In September, Mayor Jim Kenney ordered his staff to come up with strategies to tackle the crisis like a public health emergency. Overwhelmingly, the victims tend to be young, black men in neighborhoods struggling with poverty, city data show. Philadelphia is the poorest big city in the country. FILE - In this Nov. 19, 2018, file photo, police gather at the scene of a quadruple fatal shooting in Philadelphia. Philadelphia's homicide rate is the highest in over a decade, as a particularly violent summer morphed into a deadly fall and the mayor declared gun violence a public health emergency. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File) In a city where near daily shootings are sometimes met with apathy, the spasms of violence this year were so remarkable that they captured the public's attention. Among the most high-profile cases was the death of a high school track star who was about to start Penn State and was shot and killed when he confronted two teens trying to break into his family's house in August. In another, four people were shot in the head in the basement of a home in November. On Friday, a new mom was shot and killed inside her house while her 5-day-old daughter slept in a crib steps away. The police department declined to comment Monday. Vanessa Garrett Harley, who heads up the city's criminal justice and public safety agency, is leading the group tasked with developing a plan to tackle the violence. They're starting with an audit of community-based violence prevention programs around the city, figuring out which programs are working and which aren't. They've also held meetings in communities struggling with gun violence to get input from residents on the front lines, she said. Their action plan should be ready next month, she said. "Just to hear an older woman say she's scared to come off her porch, it sickens me," said Shondell Revell, a city employee who is helping develop the strategic plan. "How do we give her that assurance that the city is there for her and we're dealing with the issues that are happening?" FILE - In this Dec. 14, 2018, file photo, a police officer stands guard outside a home where a woman was murdered on Woodstock Street in Philadelphia. Philadelphia's homicide rate is the highest in over a decade, as a particularly violent summer morphed into a deadly fall and the mayor declared gun violence a public health emergency. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File) MADISON, Wis. (AP) - The fight over restricting early voting in Wisconsin returned to federal court Monday, three days after Gov. Scott Walker signed into law a new limit passed during a lame-duck legislative session. A coalition of liberal groups, with the support of former Democratic U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, asked a federal judge to block implementation of the early voting restrictions. The same judge in 2016 struck down a similar two-week early voting limitation as unconstitutional. Attorneys for the groups argued that Republicans called the lame-duck session "as part of a partisan attempt to retain and regain power" and the early voting limitation was "in direct violation" of the court's 2016 order. Holder, in a statement, said Walker and Republicans showed a "blatant disregard for a previous court ruling and refusal to listen to the will of the people." He called it "another shameful mark on the legacy of Scott Walker and his allies in the Legislature." Walker signed the new limits into law on Friday, just over three weeks before he is replaced by Democratic Gov.-elect Tony Evers who defeated him in November. Other bills Walker signed that passed during the lame-duck session would limit the powers of Evers and the incoming Democratic attorney general. Michigan's Republican legislators also are weighing legislation resembling Wisconsin's that would strip or dilute the authority of incoming elected Democrats. The push in both states mirrors tactics employed by North Carolina Republicans in 2016. CORRECTS SOURCE AND PHOTOGRAPHER - Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker talks about legislation he signed into law and addressed his transitional agenda as he prepares to leave office during a news conference Friday, Dec. 14, 2018 in Green Bay, Wis. Walker signed a sweeping package of Republican-written legislation Friday that restricts early voting and weakens the incoming Democratic governor and attorney general, brushing aside complaints that he is enabling a brazen power grab and ignoring the will of voters.(Jim Matthews/The Green Bay Press-Gazette via AP) Wisconsin Democrats won election to every statewide office on the ballot in November, including defeating Walker. Republicans, however, maintained majority control of the Legislature and quickly convened the lame-duck session to pass bills Walker could sign before he leaves office on Jan. 7. In the November election, the overwhelmingly Democratic cities of Madison and Milwaukee allowed for voting six weeks prior to the election, far longer than in smaller and more conservative communities across Wisconsin. In total, more than 565,000 people voted early, the most for a midterm election in Wisconsin history. Walker and Republicans who pushed for the two-week limit said the time frame for voting early should be uniform across the state, not left up to each community to determine. Walker argued it was an issue of fairness. Local communities could decide when within the two-week period to offer early voting. U.S. District Judge James Peterson, in striking down the two-week early voting limitation in 2016, said then that the move was designed by the Republicans who passed it to give them a partisan advantage and limit the ability of African Americans and Hispanics living in Wisconsin's largest cities to vote. Peterson rejected the fairness argument in 2016, saying then that "the purported consistency is illusory." Rather than working to expand early voting in smaller communities, the state limited it in large ones, he wrote in 2016. The same groups that sued in 2016 - One Wisconsin Institute and Citizen Action of Wisconsin Education Fund - went back to court Monday. Holder's group, the National Redistricting Foundation, is not a part of the lawsuit but voiced support. The groups asked the court to act to strike down the early voting change before the next statewide general election on April 2. They also asked the court to strike down two other provisions related to Wisconsin's voter ID law that were included in the lame-duck bills but previously struck down by Peterson in 2016. One would require university and college IDs used for voting to be unexpired. Another would limit the time period - from 180 days to 60 days - that receipts given to people who are seeking a free ID from the state could be used as valid ID to vote. ___ Follow Scott Bauer on Twitter at https://twitter.com/sbauerAP CORRECTS SOURCE AND PHOTOGRAPHER - Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker talks about legislation he signed into law and addressed his transitional agenda as he prepares to leave office during a news conference Friday, Dec. 14, 2018 in Green Bay, Wis. Walker signed a sweeping package of Republican-written legislation Friday that restricts early voting and weakens the incoming Democratic governor and attorney general, brushing aside complaints that he is enabling a brazen power grab and ignoring the will of voters. (Jim Matthews/The Green Bay Press-Gazette via AP) WASHINGTON (AP) - A spate of American airstrikes against Islamic extremists in Somalia is the latest in a dramatic uptick in U.S. attacks in the Horn of Africa nation since President Donald Trump took office. The weekend strikes, which killed 62 people, targeted al-Shabab militants who want to establish their own version of repressive Shariah law in Somalia. A Somali intelligence officer told The Associated Press that the strikes on Gandarshe, a town along the Indian Ocean coast, were aimed at foiling a planned extremist attack. The U.S. conducted 17 airstrikes in Somalia between 2007 and 2015, according to Bill Roggio of the Long War Journal who has tracked airstrikes in several countries for more than a decade. But those numbers have sharply escalated in recent years. In 2016, the last year of Barack Obama's presidency, the U.S. launched 15 strikes in Somalia. That number rose to 31 in 2017 and at least 45 this year. Al-Shabab once controlled large swathes of Somalia, including much of the capital, Mogadishu. African Union forces have succeeded in pushing the extremists from most major cities, however the group continues to be active in Somalia's rural areas and still launches suicide car bomb attacks in the capital. Last year, a massive truck bomb killed more than 500 people. There are between 3,000 and 7,000 al-Shabab militants in Somalia, along with up to 250 Islamic State group members. The U.S. is targeting training camps and other sites to reduce al-Shabab's the military capacity, said Roggio, who predicts the airstrikes in Somalia will continue at the current pace or increase. "They are effective in keeping al-Shabab at bay, but not effective at defeating them - dealing them a decisive blow," Roggio said. The weekend strikes were aimed at al-Shabab fighters who were preparing a major attack on a Somali government military base in the Lower Shabelle region, said the intelligence official, who insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to publicly discuss the matter. The official said the airstrikes hit both a military camp and battle vehicles in Gandarshe. Al-Shabab has long used the historic town southwest of Mogadishu, as a place to organize and launch attacks, including car bombs that hit the capital. The U.S. military said Monday it carried out four strikes on Dec. 15 in which 34 people were killed and two more on Dec. 16 which killed 28. No civilians were injured or killed in the attacks, U.S. military officials said. The strikes were carried out in close coordination with Somalia's government and were "conducted to prevent al-Shabab from using remote areas as a safe haven to plot, direct, inspire and recruit for future attacks," said the U.S. military statement. The strikes are part of the Trump administration's strategy in Africa that addresses three core U.S. interests on the continent: advancing trade and commercial ties, making sure that money spent on U.S. aid is not wasteful and combating violence and Islamic extremism. After decades of the U.S. largely leaving Somalis to work out their own problems, the Trump administration with its focus on counterterror operations has grown the number of U.S. military personnel in the country to an estimated 500. Two U.S. service members have been killed in Somalia since Trump took office, the first such deaths since 1993. ___ Associated Press writer Lolita C. Baldor in Washington and Abdi Guled in Nairobi, Kenya, contributed to this report. NEW YORK (AP) - Stocks that moved substantially or traded heavily Monday: Molina Healthcare Inc., down $11.72 to $120 Insurers, hospitals and other health care companies fell after a Texas judge ruled that the 2010 Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional. PG&E Corp., down $1.57 to $24.44 California regulators said they opened an investigation into whether the utility falsified gas pipeline safety records. ABB Ltd., down 30 cents to $19.10 The industrial automation company agreed to sell its power grid business to Hitachi of Japan. Goldman Sachs Group Inc., down $4.76 to $168.01 Malaysia filed criminal charges against Goldman and two former executives for their role in the alleged multibillion-dollar ransacking of a state investment fund. Fidelity Southern Corp., up $3.40 to $24.82 The bank agreed to combine with Ameris Bancorp, another financial company headquartered in Georgia. Jack in the Box Inc., up $1.70 to $82.03 The fast food chain said it is exploring strategic as well as financial options to improve value for shareholders. Deutsche Bank AG, down 20 cents to $8.60 European stocks sank Monday and Germany's main stock index entered a "bear market." State Street Corp., up 36 cents to $63.89 Bank stocks performed better than the rest of the U.S. market Monday. IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) - An Iowa congressman likely violated a host of ethics rules in his private business dealings, including his ownership in a company that used false claims and House resources to promote itself, according to an independent report released Monday. The Office of Congressional Ethics launched the review into Republican Rod Blum and his internet marketing business, Tin Moon Corp., following an investigation by The Associated Press earlier this year. Its nonpartisan board voted in July to adopt an investigative report that concluded Blum "may have violated federal law, state law, House rules, and standards of conduct" and called for further investigation. The House Committee on Ethics on Monday released the office's lengthy report , which had been kept confidential as required by congressional rules. Committee leaders signaled that they would not take any further action against Blum, who is leaving Congress after losing his bid for a third term to Democrat Abby Finkenauer in the Nov. 6 election. Democrats had used the AP's revelations and pending investigation to attack Blum during the campaign as unethical. Blum and his longtime business partner, Ed Graham, founded Tin Moon in 2016 during Blum's first term in Congress. It shares a Dubuque office and staff with Blum's other software company, Digital Canal, which invested at least $130,000 for a software license to start Tin Moon, the report found. Tin Moon boasts that it is a "reputation management" company that can help businesses bury unflattering online information, such as Food and Drug Administration warning letters , below positive search results. FILE - In this Oct. 18, 2014, file photo, 1st District congressional Republican candidate Rod Blum speaks during a debate in Waterloo, Iowa. Blum likely violated a host of ethics rules in his private business dealings, including his ownership in a company that used false claims and House resources to promote itself, according to an independent report released Monday, Dec. 17, 2018 by the The Office of Congressional Ethics. (Matthew Putney/The Courier via AP, File) The report found that Blum failed to list Tin Moon as an asset and his role as a director in his financial disclosure form. Investigators also found that Blum's ownership stake of the firm may have been worth as much as $91,000, far more than the $700 private investment that Blum later acknowledged and listed on an amended disclosure form. The report found that Blum may have misused House resources by allowing the company to use his official congressional photo on its website and a false video testimonial of his chief of staff posing as a satisfied customer. Tin Moon also engaged in other deceptive advertising, including falsely claiming to have 11,000 customers and to have won certain awards and endorsements, the review found. Blum, who owns 70 percent of the company, either allowed the deceptive practices or failed to prevent them. In addition, investigators said they found that Blum failed to properly disclose his ownership and transactions related to a different company, Salto de Fede, LLC, on his 2014 and 2015 filings. That company, which has since dissolved, sold six real estate properties in three separate transactions that weren't disclosed, the report found. Blum owned a 42 percent stake in the firm and may have failed to report its investment holdings and $58,000 in income from sales. Investigators said that Blum, his companies, Graham, his chief of staff John Ferland and other associates largely refused to cooperate with their inquiry. The report stopped short of determining whether violations occurred but said the ethics committee should investigate, including by subpoenaing testimony and records from Blum and his associates. It's unclear whether that occurred. Blum responded to the report in an Aug. 2 letter to the ethics committee, which was also released Monday, saying he made a "minor, unintentional oversight" in failing to disclose Tin Moon. He said he was unaware the company used his photo or Ferland's false video and demanded they be removed when he found out. He also said he could not be held responsible for any deceptive advertising since he's only a "passive investor" in Tin Moon and that Graham ran its operations. The report said Blum may have participated in the false advertising, noting that YouTube user "rodblum" uploaded a false Tin Moon testimonial video in 2016. Blum complained that the scope of the inquiry was overly broad, calling the revelations about his failure to disclose Salto de Fede the result of a "fishing expedition." In an April letter to investigators, Graham said that he was responsible for mistakenly using Blum's congressional photo and that he asked Ferland to record the testimonial without Blum's knowledge. WASHINGTON (AP) - The Justice Department on Monday challenged a federal judge's decision to allow a case accusing President Donald Trump of profiting off the presidency to go forward. Justice lawyers want an appeals court to take the case instead. They filed papers Monday asking the U.S. Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, to overrule the Maryland federal judge and allow a mid-case appeal or to dismiss the case outright. The government lawyers also want the court to suspend legal discovery recently approved by U.S. District Judge Peter J. Messitte, which would force 13 Trump corporate entities to turn over business tax returns, receipts and other documents. Justice lawyers have said in court filings that "discovery would necessarily be a distraction to the president's performance of his constitutional duties" and could cause separation of powers concerns. Trump's personal attorney made a similar argument last week. The lawsuit brought by the attorneys general of Maryland and the District of Columbia alleges that because Trump has not divested himself of his business holdings, foreign and domestic government spending at Trump's Washington hotel amounts to gifts to the president in violation of the Constitution's emoluments clause. The filing is the second effort by the Justice Department to delay or stop the proceedings. Messitte responded in November to Justice efforts for a mid-case appeal with a blistering opinion that said merely disagreeing with the court doesn't constitute a required "substantial" reason for appeal. FILE - This Dec. 21, 2016, file photo shows the Trump International Hotel at 1100 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, in Washington. The Justice Department is challenging a Maryland federal judge's decision allowing a case accusing President Donald Trump of profiting off the presidency to go forward. It wants an appeals court to take the case instead. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File) Monday, Justice lawyers fought back with similarly strong language, lambasting the district court for having "clearly abused its discretion" and stopping the appeals court from weighing in. Justice has long argued that the framers of the Constitution did not intend for emoluments to include hotel stays. "The complaint rests on a host of novel and fundamentally flawed constitutional premises," the Justice Department said in its court papers. "Litigating the claims would entail intrusive discovery into the President's personal financial affairs and the official actions of his Administration." A first round of subpoenas in the case filed Dec. 4 target 37 entities, including Trump businesses and the federal agency that oversees the lease for Trump's Washington hotel. Subpoenas were also sent to the General Services Administration and the departments of Defense, Commerce and Agriculture, all of which have spent taxpayer dollars at the hotel or have information on Trump's finances relevant to the case. "President Trump is going to extraordinary lengths to try to stop us from gathering information about how he is illegally profiting from the presidency," D.C. Attorney General Karl A. Racine said in a statement. "Unless the 4th Circuit rules otherwise, we will continue to work hard to gather the evidence needed to put a stop to the President's ongoing violations of the Constitution's original anti-corruption law." A petition to a higher court requires a high standard of proof that would partly rest on showing that Messitte's decisions are clearly wrong and lawyers have no adequate alternative for relief in the case. If the petition is not granted by the appeals court, it is possible that Justice Department attorneys may ask the Supreme Court to consider the case. Otherwise, any appeal would typically wait until the end of the case. Two other lawsuits accusing the president of violating the emoluments clause are being heard in other federal courts. Neither has reached the discovery stage. ___ Follow Tami Abdollah on Twitter at https://twitter.com/latams NEW YORK (AP) - The head of President Donald Trump's inaugural committee said Monday that he's been assured that he isn't the target of a criminal investigation, despite reports that prosecutors are probing the committee's finances. The Wall Street Journal and New York Times reported last week that federal prosecutors in New York are examining whether foreign interests made secret, illegal contributions to the inaugural committee. Inaugural committee chairman Tom Barrack confirmed Monday that special counsel Robert Mueller's office questioned him in 2017 about several topics. But Barrack said his lawyer reached out to Mueller's office last week and was assured he was "not under investigation" and that Mueller's team has no additional questions. "Information about questions asked about in 2017 does not mean that there is a 'new investigation,'" he said in a statement to The Associated Press. "What it means is that the Special Counsel's staff was both professional and comprehensive back in 2017 when I sat for a voluntary interview," Barrack added. "They have shown themselves to be pretty tenacious when they find something they judge worth pursuing." A spokesman for Mueller declined to comment. The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that federal prosecutors in New York are investigating whether some of the inaugrual committee's donors made contributions in exchange for political favors and access to the Trump administration- a potential violation of corruption laws. The newspaper said the inquiry is focusing in part on whether the committee misspent some of the $107 million it raised to host events for Trump's inauguration. The New York Times reported the same day that federal prosecutors are examining whether anyone from Qatar, Saudi Arabia or other Middle Eastern countries made illegal payments to the committee and a pro-Trump super political action committee. Federal law prohibits foreign contributions to inaugural funds. The inaugural committee released a statement Friday saying that it has not been contacted by prosecutors or asked to provide documents. It said committee finances were "fully audited," and the inauguration was "in full compliance with all applicable laws." VATICAN CITY (AP) - The Latest on a U.S. archbishop's request to address sexual misconduct allegations against former St. Paul and Minneapolis Archbishop John Nienstedt (all times local): 11:15 p.m. Former St. Paul and Minneapolis Archbishop John Nienstedt says he would welcome an investigation into an allegation of sexual misconduct that he claims is untrue. In a Monday email to The Associated Press, Nienstedt says it's difficult to defend himself against the claims because it's his word against the accusers' and he doesn't want to harm them. Nienstedt was responding to a letter his successor, Archbishop Bernard Hebda, sent to the faithful on Friday in which he said Nienstedt was accused of inviting two minors to a hotel room in 2005 at a Vatican-organized youth rally in Germany to change out of wet clothes. Hebda said he forwarded that allegation to a Vatican official in 2016, after Nienstedt resigned. Hebda said the allegation needs to be fully addressed before Nienstedt's suitability for ministry can be determined and that Nienstedt won't serve in public ministry in the archdiocese. ___ 7:55 p.m. A prominent U.S. archbishop is asking the Vatican for answers about the status of an investigation into alleged sexual misconduct against his predecessor. St. Paul and Minneapolis Archbishop Bernard Hebda wrote a remarkable letter to his flock on Friday in which he revealed that in 2016 he had sent the Vatican a new allegation of improprieties with minors against retired Archbishop John Nienstedt. Nienstedt resigned as archbishop in 2015 after Minnesota prosecutors charged the archdiocese with having failed to protect children from a predator priest who was later convicted of molesting two boys. He was one of the first U.S. bishops known to have been forced from office for botching sex abuse investigations. But Nienstedt also faced allegations that he engaged in inappropriate sexual behavior with adults, which he denied. ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) - Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton says his proudest accomplishments in his 40 years of politics came late in his career: restoring state government to financial health and funding all-day kindergarten. "Being governor is where I've have accomplished the greatest good for Minnesota," Dayton said in an interview with The Associated Press. Now getting ready to "sashay into the sunset," Dayton said his two terms as governor contrasted with his frustrating single term in the U.S. Senate from 2001 to 2007. As an anti-war activist at Yale University, Dayton earned a spot on President Richard Nixon's "enemies list." He took a more establishment turn later in the 1970s, when he worked as an aide to then-Sen. Walter Mondale and served as the state's economic development commissioner under Gov. Rudy Perpich. He made an unsuccessful first run for the Senate in 1982, self-financing it with nearly $7 million of his personal wealth as a member of the family that launched Dayton's department stores and Target discount stores. After one term as state auditor and an unsuccessful run for governor in 1998, he ousted GOP Sen. Rod Grams in 2000. Now 71, Dayton is not sure what he'll do next. His health problems been aggravated by lung damage that was a complication of his recent back surgery. He fainted during his 2017 State of the State speech and underwent surgery last year for prostate cancer. When Dayton became governor in 2011, the state was facing a $6.2 billion budget deficit with hardly any money in the bank. As he prepares to leave office Jan. 7, the state is projected to have a $1.5 billion surplus for the next two-year budget period, with a $2 billion reserve fund to cushion against future downturns. In this Dec. 14, 2018 photo, Democratic Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton speaks during an interview with The Associated Press at the official Governor's Residence in St. Paul, Minn. Dayton says his proudest accomplishments in his 40 years of politics came late in his career: restoring state government to financial health and funding all-day kindergarten. The 71-year-old Dayton is preparing to retire next month. (AP Photo/Steve Karnowski) Dayton recalled in an interview at the official Governor's Residence on Friday that he overcame political opposition to fund all-day kindergarten statewide, but his "principal disappointment" as governor was that it falls short of the universal early childhood education for all 4-year-olds that was his goal. He also managed to enact his proposal requiring buffer strips between waterbodies and farm fields despite strong opposition from agriculture. He also acknowledged that the initial rollouts of two big information technology projects - the state's MNsure health insurance exchange and the MNLARS driver and vehicle licensing system - "were both disasters." Another big regret for Dayton is that his fellow Democrats controlled both houses of the Legislature for just two of his years as governor, 2013 and 2014. He blamed House Republicans, in particular, for thwarting him. While Democrats won control of the House in the November elections, he said the House for most of his tenure was controlled by "extreme right-wing ideologues who view intransigence as a virtue and any kind of rational compromise as a weakness." Greg Davids, the outgoing Republican chair of the House tax committee, disputed that description and said it was Dayton who had trouble compromising. "I like him very much personally," Davids said. "He did accomplish some really great things, but when he drew a line in the sand there was no talking with him, no working with him." Dayton said he liked being governor best because it allowed him to take the initiative to promote job growth, economic development and water quality, instead of being just once voice among 100 senators. Dayton once famously gave himself an A for effort as a Senator but the whole chamber, including himself, an F for results. He said he found it was hard to make a difference in the Senate minority and being ranked 100th in seniority. He earned derision for closing his Senate office for almost a month in 2004, when none of his colleagues did, over what he considered a terrorist threat. "I felt like I wasn't making any difference," he said. "As governor ... I expended every ounce of energy I've had for eight years and every waking moment, but it's all been worth it." Dayton said his proudest moment in Congress was being among 23 senators who voted against the 2002 resolution that authorized the Iraq War. "I feel good about standing up for what I knew was right ... standing shoulder to shoulder with my good friend and political ally, Paul Wellstone," he said. Dayton predicted that his successor, Democratic Gov.-elect Tim Walz , will have a big advantage in having a Democratic-controlled House under incoming speaker Melissa Hortman, and a Senate with just a one-vote GOP edge under Majority Leader Paul Gazelka. Dayton called him "an honorable man, an honest man" who wants to make government work. "I think it will be a much more productive session," Dayton said. RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) - A Brazilian man charged in Australia with killing his ex-girlfriend eight months ago has told a Brazilian judge that he returned home right after her body was found only because of his father's health problems. Mario Marcelo Santoro is alleged to have strangled Cecilia Haddad, a fellow Brazilian whose body was discovered April 29 in Australia's Lane Cove River. He denies killing her. Australian investigators grew suspicious when they noticed how soon after the body was found that Santoro returned to Brazil. Santoro said at a hearing Monday that he returned to Rio in April instead of May as originally planned because his father was ill. The judge is deciding whether Brazilian prosecutors can try Santoro in Brazil. SANAA, Yemen (AP) - A cease-fire went into force early Tuesday in Yemen's Red Sea port of Hodeida after intense fighting between government-allied forces and Shiite rebels erupted shortly before the U.N.-brokered truce took hold in the contested city, Yemeni officials said. They said artillery shelling and heavy machine gun fire shook districts in the south and east of the strategic city late Monday in the final hour before the cease-fire took effect at midnight. The fighting took place as the two sides were declaring their intention to observe the cease-fire agreed to last week during U.N.-sponsored talks in Sweden between the internationally recognized government and the rebels known as Houthis. Fighting subsided as the cease-fire took effect, with only the sporadic sound of machine guns heard in the city, which handles about 70 percent of Yemen's imports. Under the agreement, a joint committee led by U.N. officers will oversee the cease-fire and the redeployment of the warring parties' forces out of Hodeida, which is currently controlled by the Houthis. Local authorities and police will run the city and its three ports under U.N. supervision, and the two sides are barred from bringing in reinforcements. A cessation of hostilities in Hodeida would spare Yemen a significant spike in civilian casualties since the rebels have shown battlefield resilience as much larger government-allied forces backed by airpower tried for months to retake the city. The two sides fought to a stalemate after weeks of ruinous street-to-street fighting in densely populated districts on the city's outskirts. Yemen's civil war, in which a Saudi-led coalition is fighting on the government's side against the rebels, has pushed much of the country to the brink of famine. U.N. officials say 22 million of its 29 million people are in need of aid. Speaking Sunday at Doha, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that if Yemen's humanitarian situation does not improve, 14 million people there will be in need of food aid in 2019, 6 million more than this year. "There is a high level of hunger in Yemen," he said. "The fact that famine was not yet declared does not in any way diminish our huge concern with the very high level of hunger that exists in Yemen with a number of people dying in very dramatic circumstances." Last week, an international group tracking Yemen's civil war reported that the conflict has killed more than 60,000 people, both combatants and civilians, since 2016. That figure is much higher than the U.N. figure of 10,000 civilian deaths, and has added to the urgency to find a political resolution for the four-year bloodletting. The report from the U.S.-based Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project said more than 28,000 people - both civilians and combatants - were killed in the first 11 months of 2018, an increase of 68 percent from 2017. More than 3,000 were killed in November, the deadliest month since the group started collecting data. It said 37 percent of civilians killed in Yemen in 2018 died in Hodeida. The figures do not include the last few months of 2014, when the Houthi rebels captured the Yemeni capital of Sanaa and much of the country's north, nor the casualties in 2015, when the Saudi-led coalition joined the war on the side of the government. The group said it based its figures on news reports of each incident of violence in the war. JACKSON, Miss. (AP) - Mississippi is trying to revive one the most restrictive abortion laws in the nation. The state's Democratic attorney general, Jim Hood, filed a notice of appeal Monday in support of a Mississippi law that would ban most abortions after 15 weeks. The law was signed in March by Republican Gov. Phil Bryant, and the state's only abortion clinic immediately sued the state. U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves issued a temporary injunction the next day to prevent the state from enforcing the law. Then he issued a more extensive ruling Nov. 20, finding that the law "unequivocally" violates women's constitutional rights. Hood will ask the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn Reeves' decision about the constitutionality of the law. Hood has said other federal circuits have reviewed laws banning abortion at 15 to 20 weeks, but the 5th U.S. Circuit hasn't yet reviewed such a case. Supporters and opponents of the law will file detailed arguments later to the 5th Circuit, which handles cases from Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, and is considered one of the most conservative federal appeals courts. Beth Orlansky, an attorney for the Mississippi Center for Justice, said in a statement Monday that the 15-week ban could hurt low-income women who can't afford to travel to another state for an abortion. Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, said: "Mississippi is knowingly violating women's constitutional rights in a shameless attempt to eradicate abortion access in the state. The district court resoundingly rejected this ban as a clear violation of Roe v. Wade and the appeals court should do the same." The only abortion clinic in Mississippi says it provides abortions until 16 weeks. The Mississippi law and the responding lawsuit set up a confrontation sought by abortion opponents, who are hoping federal courts will ultimately prohibit abortions before a fetus is viable outside the womb, the dividing line that the U.S. Supreme Court set in its 1973 ruling saying that women have the right to terminate pregnancies. In his Nov. 20 decision, Reeves cited Supreme Court rulings and wrote that states may not ban abortions before viability. He wrote that viability must be determined by trained medical professionals, and the "established medical consensus" is that viability typically begins at 23 to 24 weeks after the pregnant woman's last menstrual period. The Mississippi law would allow exceptions to the 15-week ban in cases of medical emergency or severe fetal abnormality. Doctors found in violation of the ban would face mandatory suspension or revocation of their medical license. Because of Reeves' ruling on the Mississippi law, a similar law in Louisiana is on hold. The 15-week abortion ban signed by Louisiana Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards earlier this year contains language saying the law will take effect only if a federal court upholds the law in Mississippi. An Iowa law, also challenged in court, bans most abortions once a fetal heartbeat is detected. ____ Follow Emily Wagster Pettus on Twitter: http://twitter.com/EWagsterPettus . WASHINGTON (AP) - The Latest on the Senate's consideration of criminal justice legislation (all times local): 7 p.m. A major criminal justice bill backed by President Donald Trump has cleared a key Senate hurdle, with supporters securing an 82-12 vote to advance the measure. The Senate will consider a variety of amendments from opponents before holding a final vote later this week. The bill would give judges more discretion when sentencing some drug offenders and allow about 2,600 federal prisoners sentenced for crack cocaine offenses before August 2010 the opportunity to petition for a reduced penalty. The bill also boosts education and rehabilitation programs in federal prisons. FILE - In this Nov. 27, 2018. file photo, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., speaks to reporters as he arrives for a meeting with fellow Republicans, on Capitol Hill in Washington. Legislation to ease federal sentencing laws is pitting conservatives against each other as President Donald Trump looks to score a major legislative win before the end of the year. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File) Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas says a number of states, including his home state, have shown it's possible to reduce prison populations and still lower the crime rate. He says the bipartisan effort is not about being tough on crime or soft on crime. He says, "this is about being smart on crime." _____ 2 p.m. Legislation to ease federal sentencing laws is pitting conservatives against each other as President Donald Trump looks to score a major legislative win before the end of the year. The Senate is expected to advance the bill Monday. Final passage would come later in the week, but not until the chamber has debated and voted on a series of amendments. Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and others want to exclude more prisoners from earning earlier release to a halfway house or home confinement. They also want to require that crime victims are notified before a prisoner is granted supervised release. Supporters of the bill warn the amendments could cause the compromise to unravel. If the legislation passes the Senate, the House is expected to approve it quickly. WASHINGTON (AP) - Michael Flynn may have given extraordinary cooperation to prosecutors, but the run-up to his sentencing hearing Tuesday has exposed raw tensions over an FBI interview in which the former national security adviser lied about his Russian contacts. Flynn's lawyers have suggested that investigators discouraged him from having an attorney present during the January 2017 interview and never informed him it was a crime to lie. Prosecutors shot back, "He does not need to be warned it is a crime to lie to federal agents to know the importance of telling them the truth." The mere insinuation of underhanded tactics was startling given the seemingly productive relationship between the two sides, and it was especially striking since prosecutors with special counsel Robert Mueller's office have praised Flynn's cooperation and recommended against prison time. The defense arguments spurred speculation that Flynn may be trying to get sympathy from President Donald Trump or may be playing to a judge known for a zero-tolerance view of government misconduct. "It's an attempt, I think, to perhaps characterize Flynn as a victim or perhaps to make him look sympathetic in the eyes of a judge - and, at the same time, to portray the special counsel in a negative light," said former federal prosecutor Jimmy Gurule, a University of Notre Dame law school professor. Until the dueling memos were filed last week, the sentencing hearing for Flynn - who pleaded guilty to lying about conversations during the transition period with the then-Russian ambassador - was expected to be devoid of the drama characterizing other of Mueller's cases. Prosecutors, for instance, have accused former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort of lying to them even after he agreed to cooperate. Another potential target, Jerome Corsi, leaked draft court documents and accused Mueller's team of bullying him. And George Papadopoulos, a Trump campaign adviser recently released from a two-week prison sentence, has lambasted the investigation and publicly claimed that he was set up. FILE - In this July 10, 2018, file photo, former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn leaves the federal courthouse in Washington, following a status hearing. Michael Flynn may have given extraordinary cooperation to prosecutors, but the run-up to his sentencing hearing has exposed tensions over an FBI interview in which the former national security adviser lied about his Russian contacts. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File) Flynn, by contrast, has been notably silent even as his supporters advocated a more combative stance. He met privately with investigators 19 times and provided cooperation so extensive that prosecutors said he was entitled to avoid prison altogether. Then came his sentencing memo. Although Flynn and his attorneys stopped short of any direct accusations of wrongdoing, they took pains to note that Flynn, unlike other defendants in Mueller's investigation, was not informed that it was against the law to lie to the FBI. They suggest the FBI, which approached Flynn at the White House just days after Trump's inauguration, played to his desire to keep the encounter quiet by telling him the quickest way to get the interview done was for him to be alone with the agents - rather than involve lawyers. They also insinuate that Flynn, of Middletown, Rhode Island, deserves credit for not publicly seizing on the fact that FBI officials involved in the investigation later came under scrutiny themselves. Former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who contacted Flynn to arrange the interview, was fired this year for what the Justice Department said was a lack of candor over a news media leak. Peter Strzok, one of the two agents who interviewed Flynn, was removed from Mueller's team and later fired for trading anti-Trump texts with another FBI official. Mueller's team has rejected any suggestion that Flynn was duped, with prosecutors responding in a sentencing memo Friday that there was no obligation to warn Flynn against lying. "A sitting National Security (Adviser), former head of an intelligence agency, retired Lieutenant General, and 33-year veteran of the armed forces knows he should not lie to federal agents," prosecutors wrote. Former FBI Director James Comey criticized the broadsides on the Flynn investigation during a Monday appearance on Capitol Hill, saying, "They're up here attacking the FBI's investigation of a guy who pled guilty to lying to the FBI." Trump has made no secret that he sees Mueller's investigation as a "witch hunt" and has continued to lash out at prosecutors he sees as biased against him and those who help them. He's shown continued sympathy for Flynn, though, calling him a "great person" and asserting erroneously last week that the FBI said he didn't lie. Flynn has not tried to retract his guilty plea, and there's every indication the sentencing will proceed as scheduled. Arun Rao, a former Justice Department prosecutor in Maryland, said the defense memo is striking because it's "inconsistent" with Flynn's cooperative stance so far. "You also wonder in this very unusual situation," he said, "whether it is a play for a pardon." It's possible at least some of the defense arguments may resonate with U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan, who directed prosecutors to produce FBI records related to Flynn's interview. That included portions of the notes from Flynn's Jan. 24, 2017 interview with FBI agents. Responding to Sullivan's order, prosecutors filed a redacted copy of the FBI interview notes Monday evening. The notes show FBI agents interviewed Flynn about his Russian contacts, including past trips to the country and his conversations with Sergey Kislyak, then Russia's ambassador to the U.S. Last year, Flynn pleaded guilty to lying about the contents of his conversations with Kislyak during the presidential transition. The notes show Flynn told agents he didn't ask Kislyak not to escalate Russia's response to sanctions imposed by the Obama administration over election interference. But Flynn admitted as part of his guilty plea that he did. The notes also show Flynn told agents he didn't ask Kislyak to see if Russia would vote a certain way on a United Nations resolution involving Israeli settlements. But last year he admitted having asked Kislyak to see if Russia would vote against or delay the resolution. Court papers show Flynn made the request at the direction of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner. Sullivan was the judge in the Justice Department's botched prosecution of now-deceased Republican Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska. He dismissed the case after prosecutors admitted that they withheld exculpatory evidence, prompting the judge to say that in nearly 25 years on the bench, "I've never seen anything approaching the mishandling and misconduct that I've seen in this case." In an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal last year, Sullivan said the experience inspired him to explicitly remind prosecutors in every criminal case before him of their obligation to provide defendants with favorable evidence. He says he has encouraged colleagues to do the same. But while Sullivan has proved especially sensitive to hints of government overreach, nothing about the Flynn case comes close, said Gurule, the law professor. "To portray him as somehow an innocent dupe, as somehow just this innocent victim in the process, this suggestion that there was a perjury trap - it's an absurd allegation," he said. ___ Follow Eric Tucker and Chad Day on Twitter: https://twitter.com/etuckerAP and https://twitter.com/ChadSDay ___ Read the Flynn FBI interview notes: http://apne.ws/xfm8IsO UNITED NATIONS (AP) - The U.N. General Assembly on Monday condemned North Korea's "systematic, widespread and gross violations of human rights" and its diversion of resources into pursing nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles over the welfare of its people. It noted "with concern" that over 10 million North Koreans are estimated to be undernourished and that there is "an unacceptably high prevalence of chronic and acute malnutrition" in the reclusive northeast Asian nation. The resolution, sponsored by Japan and the European Union, was adopted by consensus, though countries including Russia, China, Cuba and Venezuela disassociated themselves from it. Many expressed opposition to assembly resolutions singling out specific countries and said the Geneva-based Human Rights Council should deal with rights issues. North Korea's U.N. ambassador, Kim Song, said his country "categorically rejects" the resolution, calling it "a product of (a) political plot and hostile forces." He accused Japan of "provoking confrontation" with North Korea "by going back against the main trend in (the) Korean peninsula" when delicate political negotiations are underway. Since North Korean leader Kim Jong Un reached out to South Korea and the United States early this year, the two Korean leaders have met several times and Kim held a historic summit with President Donald Trump - with another one expected in the new year. But there has been no significant progress on Kim's commitment to nuclear disarmament, and as a result no lifting of U.N. or U.S. sanctions against North Korea. In this photo provided by the North Korean government, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, sixth from left, visits the Kumsusan Palace of the Sun, where the body of late leader Kim Jong Il is laid, in Pyongyang, North Korea, Monday, Dec. 17, 2018. North Koreans are marking the seventh anniversary of the death of leader Kim Jong Il with visits to statues and vows of loyalty to his son and successor, Kim Jong Un. Independent journalists were not given access to cover the event depicted in this image distributed by the North Korean government. The content of this image is as provided and cannot be independently verified. Korean language watermark on image as provided by source reads: "KCNA" which is the abbreviation for Korean Central News Agency. (Korean Central News Agency/Korea News Service via AP) The resolution's approval followed the U.S. failure to get enough votes to discuss North Korea's human rights record in the Security Council a week ago. It had succeeded for the last four years, and diplomats said the U.S. is likely to try again in the new year when five new members join the council. A statement released Monday by North Korea's U.N. Mission noted opposition to the U.S. move and asserted again that the Security Council "is neither a place for discussion on any human rights issue nor a platform where a human rights issue is politicized to flare up confrontation." Whatever the change in the Security Council's composition, North Korea said it shouldn't be used as a platform "where U.S.'s high-handedness and arbitrary practice would prevail." The General Assembly resolution adopted Monday expresses "very serious concern" at reports of torture, detention, rape, public executions, the imposition of the death penalty, the absence of the rule of law, and "collective punishments extending up to three generations." It also expressed concern at forced labor in North Korea and its "extensive system of political prison camps where a vast number of persons are deprived of their liberty and subjected to deplorable conditions" as well as "all-pervasive and severe restrictions, both online and offline, on the freedoms of thought, conscience, religion or belief, opinion and expression, peaceful assembly and association." The resolution condemns "the systematic abduction, denial of repatriation and subsequence enforced disappearance of persons, including those from other countries, on a large scale." It "acknowledges" the findings of the U.N. commission of inquiry on North Korea in 2014. The commission said testimony and information it gathered "provide reasonable grounds to believe that crimes against humanity have been committed in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, pursuant to policies established at the highest level of the state for decades and by institutions under the effective control of its leadership." The General Assembly strongly urged North Korea "to immediately put an end to the systematic, widespread and grave violations of human rights" by fully implementing U.N. resolutions and recommendations including closing prison camps and releasing all political prisoners. SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - A Northern California utility on Monday said it terminated one of its contractors helping with wildfire recovery after three workers posted on social media insensitive photos and comments poking fun at victims and the region. Pacific Gas & Electric said Bigge Crane and Rigging Co. will no longer help the utility repair widespread damage to its power lines caused by the state's most destructive wildfire on Nov. 8. PG&E spokesman Paul Doherty said he does not know if the San Leandro, California-based company will continue to work with the utility elsewhere in the state. The posts were widely shared on social media and the photos showed the former workers sitting in front of destroyed homes, pretending to drive a burned out vehicle and jumping through the remnants of child's trampoline. One photo showed a dead cat with a beer bottle in its mouth. Bigge's corporate counsel, Randy Smith, said in statement Monday that the company fired the three workers after the Paradise city administrator complained about the posts. "We expressed - and express again - our deepest regrets to the residents of Paradise and Butte County who were egregiously insulted during an already devastating time at the hands of these three individuals," Smith said in a post on the company's Website. FILE - In this Nov. 9, 2018 file photo, Pacific Gas & Electric crews work to restore power lines in Paradise, Calif. The Northern California utility on Monday, Dec. 17, said it terminated one of its contractors helping with wildfire recovery after three workers posted on social media insensitive photos and comments poking fun at victims and the region. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli, File) Smith didn't return a phone call from The Associated Press on Monday. PG&E is facing a growing number of lawsuits alleging its equipment started the Camp Fire that killed at least 86 people, destroyed 14,000 homes and leveled Paradise, a city of 27,000 residents. PG&E reported an equipment malfunction at the time and location where the fire started, causing its stock to plummet 40 percent. The company's share price fell $1.57, or 6 percent, on Monday after the California Public Utilities Commission announced the utility falsified records to hide the fact it didn't have enough workers to locate and mark natural-gas pipelines between 2012 and 2017. Investigators have not determined the cause of the wildfire, but say the utility's equipment caused 17 wildfires last year. PG&E is liable for any damage caused by its equipment even if it's not at fault. TOKYO (AP) - Japan plans its first aircraft carrier and big increases in defense spending and weapons capability in the coming years, according to new defense guidelines approved Tuesday that cite its need to counter potential threats from North Korea and China and other vulnerabilities. The guidelines approved at a meeting of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's Cabinet call for refitting an existing helicopter carrier into a ship that can deploy expensive, U.S.-made F-35B stealth fighters capable of short takeoffs and vertical landings. Japan plans to buy 147 F-35s, including 42 F-35Bs, over the next decade. The guidelines would replace the current defense plan halfway through its intended lifespan and underscore Abe's push to expand Japan's military role and capability to make it, as he puts it, "a normal country." He has long wanted to revise Japan's U.S.-drafted constitution that renounces war and has already broadened the concept of self-defense to allow Japanese personnel to defend allied military forces as Japan increasingly works alongside American troops. Defense officials say Japan needs higher deterrence and increased missile defense and fighter capability as North Korea's missile and nuclear threats remains unchanged in the absence of concrete steps to dismantle them, and China's maritime activity has grown increasingly assertive. The new guidelines say Japan needs to be well-prepared and to show it can withstand threats, noting the archipelago is prone to natural disasters and its coastline is dotted with vulnerable nuclear power plants. Officials say the Maritime Self-Defense Force's helicopter carrier Izumo, a 250-meter- (820-foot)-long, flat-top destroyer that can carry 14 helicopters, is set to be refitted as an aircraft carrier. Japan has relatively little land on which to build runways long enough for conventional F-35s, and an aircraft carrier would be particularly useful in the western Pacific, where Japan tries to defend remote islands, including those disputed with China, and to play a greater role as part of the U.S.-Japan alliance. A cost estimate for the refitted carrier wasn't given. The work would be done over five years and the ship would carry 10 stealth fighters. The refitting of a second helicopter carrier would follow. This May, 2017, photo shows Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force's helicopter carrier Izumo. Japan has adopted new defense guidelines, calling for converting a destroyer into Japan's first aircraft carrier to deploy advanced U.S.-made stealth fighters, as Japan seeks to increase defense spending and bolster arms capability in coming years. The new national defense plan, approved Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018, by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's Cabinet, calls for refitting an existing helicopter carrier into one that can deploy expensive F-35B fighters capable of short take-offs and vertical landings.(Kyodo News via AP) The step is a major shift to Japan's postwar naval defense, which has lacked aircraft carriers in part out of concerns that they may remind Japan's Asian neighbors of aggression by Japan's wartime Navy. Critics say possession of an aircraft carrier would give Japan a strike capability in violation of its pacifist constitution that limits use of force to self-defense only. Japan, under the new defense guidelines, also plans to possess cruise missiles designed to hit enemy targets, which opponents say could violate Japan's pacifist principle. China urged Japan to stick to a defense-only policy and peaceful development. "Due to historical reasons, neighboring countries in Asia and the international community have long been highly concerned about Japan's moves in military and security fields," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told reporters in Beijing. Japan was making "groundless and irresponsible accusations against China's normal defense construction and military activities" to play up the China threat, she said. Defense officials brushed off the criticism, saying Izumo will be a multifunctional warship used as an aircraft carrier only when necessary for national defense. Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said the plan is mainly for fighter pilots in case of an emergency at sea and that it "falls within the minimum necessity allowed under the constitution." He said the revised guidelines presented what Japan truly needs to protect its people and portrayed what Japan's future defense should be. The guidelines say Japan needs to beef up its air defense capability in the Pacific, while expanding surveillance in the area. The Defense Ministry says Japan plans to purchase 105 conventional F-35s and 42 F-35Bs to replace some of its fleet of F-15s. The big price tag for the jets - a F-35B costs about 10 billion yen ($90 million) - will drive up Japan's defense spending, which has already climbed steadily for six straight years since Abe took office at the end of 2012. Japan plans to spend 235 billion yen ($2 billion) to buy a pair of land-fixed U.S. missile defense systems, Aegis Ashore, as well as other American missile interceptors. The Cabinet, under the guidelines, also approved a new Medium Term Defense Program requiring a record five-year defense spending of 27 trillion yen ($240 billion) beginning in 2019, up more than 2 trillion yen ($17.6 billion) from an earlier five-year defense budget. As Japan comes under pressure from President Donald Trump to allow more exports from the U.S., purchases of costly American weapons would be a way to reduce the U.S. trade deficit, while enhancing military cooperation between the allies. Japan's U.S. arms purchases have surged, and the Defense Ministry came under criticism by the government's Board of Audit for agreeing too easily to Washington's hefty asking price. The guidelines said Japan will seek more cost-efficient purchase of advance-capability U.S. equipment, while pushing for more joint research and development. Buying more American weapons, however, would be a setback for Japan's fledgling defense industry and its hopes to develop its own replacement of F-2 fighter jets are uncertain. The guidelines did not mention whether the F-2 successor would be made in Japan or jointly developed. The guidelines also called for setting up a unit specializing in space, cyberattacks and electronic warfare, while integrating the ground maritime and air forces to better coordinate operations. Japan should aim for a unified, simultaneous "multi-dimensional and unified defense capability" that breaks away from the conventional concept of ground, maritime and air defense, the guidelines said. As the fast-aging country faces a declining population and workforce, Japan will accept more women to join the self-defense force, postpone retirement age and promote research and development of robotics and unmanned equipment, the guidelines said. ___ Associated Press researcher Liu Zheng in Beijing contributed to this report. ___ Follow Mari Yamaguchi on Twitter at https://www.twitter.com/mariyamaguchi In this March 23, 2018, photo, U.S. military F-35B fighter jet lands aboard amphibious assault ship Wasp during an exercise in the western Pacific. Japan has adopted new defense guidelines, calling for converting a destroyer into Japan's first aircraft carrier to deploy advanced U.S.-made stealth fighters, as Japan seeks to increase defense spending and bolster arms capability in coming years. The new national defense plan, approved Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018, by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's Cabinet, calls for refitting an existing helicopter carrier into one that can deploy expensive F-35B fighters capable of short take-offs and vertical landings.(Takuto Kaneko/Kyodo News via AP) FILE - This Monday, Dec. 10, 2018, file photo provided by the U.S. Missile Defense Agency (MDA) shows the launch of the U.S. military's land-based Aegis missile defense testing system, that later intercepted an intermediate range ballistic missile, from the Pacific Missile Range Facility on the island of Kauai in Hawaii. Japan has adopted new defense guidelines, calling for converting a destroyer into Japan's first aircraft carrier to deploy advanced U.S.-made stealth fighters, as Japan seeks to increase defense spending and bolster arms capability in coming years. (Mark Wright/Missile Defense Agency via AP, File) CHICAGO (AP) - Two Chicago police officers were fatally struck by a train as they investigated a report of gunshots on the city's far South Side. Eduardo Marmolejo, 37, and Conrad Gary, 31, were pursuing a person heading toward the train tracks when they were hit shortly after 6 p.m. Monday as the commuter train passed through the area, Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson said. Police said the officers were chasing the suspect on foot. "There was no stop at that location so the train was probably going somewhere between 60 and 70 miles per hour," Johnson said during a news conference. Johnson said an individual was taken into custody and a weapon was recovered. He said the investigation was still in the early stages and that more details would be released later. Marmolejo had been with the department for 2 years and Gary for 18 months, Johnson said. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who also spoke at the news conference, said the city had lost "two young men, both fathers with young families." Police investigate the scene where two officers were killed after they were struck by a South Shore train near 103rd Street and Dauphin Avenue on Monday, Dec. 17, 2018, in Chicago. Police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi posted on Twitter that the "devastating tragedy" occurred when the officers were investigating a shots-fired call. (Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune via AP) "There are no words that can express the grief, the sense of loss. It just knocks you back on your heels," he said. Chicago police use ShotSpotter technology, or sensors that monitor for the sound of gunfire and alert police. Johnson said the two officers went to the scene Monday after a ShotSpotter alert went out. "It just highlights again how dangerous this job can be. I often say that the most dangerous thing a police officer can do is take a weapon off of an armed individual," Johnson said. The train that struck the officers was operated by a commuter rail line that links northern Indiana and Chicago, according to media reports. In 2002, Chicago police officer Benjamin Perez was fatally struck by a commuter train while conducting surveillance on narcotics activity on the city's West Side. Two other Chicago officers besides Marmolejo and Gary were killed in the line of duty this year. Officer Samuel Jimenez was killed in a shootout last month after he chased a gunman inside a hospital on Chicago's South Side . The shooter also killed two other people - his ex-fiancee who was an emergency room doctor and a pharmacy resident - before taking his own life. And in February, Cmdr. Paul Bauer was fatally shot while pursuing a suspect in the Loop business district. "I think it's really important that we put our arms around the Chicago Police Department and hold them up and support them at this critical juncture, because we are so dependent on their professionalism and their sense of duty," Emanuel said Monday night. LIMA, Peru (AP) - The three Venezuelan migrants eke out a living 90 seconds at a time in a busy intersection of Peru's capital. When the traffic light flashes red, the acrobatics and break dancing starts. With a captive audience of pedestrians and commuters packed inside city buses, the dancers' headstands, dizzying spins and fast-paced steps on a good day net up to $20 in pocket change - nearly three times the monthly minimum wage in Venezuela. It also earned them a brush with a Hollywood superstar Angelina Jolie. "You never know how it will go in the street," said dancer Karin Rojas. "One day it's good and the next day it's bad." The trio is just part of a flood of Venezuelans fighting for survival after fleeing their homeland and the worst economic crisis anybody in Latin America can remember. Most Venezuelan migrants head to neighboring Colombia, overwhelming border towns. They hawk their valuables on the street, sell hotdogs or repair shoes. In this Dec. 12, 2018 photo, Venezuelan Karin Rojas balances on her head as she breakdances with Angel Fernandez for tips from commuters in Lima, Peru. Rojas, 25, arrived in Lima in 2016, leaving behind her mountainous home in the Venezuelan state of Merida, where she ran a break dancing collective with her husband. (AP Photo/Cesar Olmos) Farther-off Peru is the second-most-common destination. Rojas, 25, and her husband, Francisco Diaz, arrived in Lima in 2016, leaving behind their mountainous home in the Venezuelan state of Merida, where they ran a break dancing collective. In Peru, they met the third partner, Angel Fernandez, a short and stout 22-year-old from their home state. The three settled on a busy intersection in Lima to perform. Six days a week, they bound into the intersection with each red light - an exhausting 80 times over a 13-hour workday. They end some days just $5 richer, and hurting physically. The sun cooks the asphalt. Their palms are covered in calluses and fingers sometimes bleed. Rojas says her bones ache and her head throbs. Still, Rojas said, their life is better than in Venezuela, where she would go two days in a row without eating. Now, she can afford three meals a day. Their dancing also caught the attention of Jolie in October, when the American actress visited Lima as a special envoy for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Their moves impressed Jolie, and she told them not to give up their dreams. Rojas and Diaz hope to parlay earnings from their street dancing into buying a three-wheel motorcycle taxi, a common form of transportation in Lima's poor outskirts. "We're never going to stop dancing," Rojas said. "Dancing helps us forget all of our sorrows." In this Dec. 12, 2018 photo, Venezuelan breakdancers Maria Molina, right, Alex Beltran, on the ground, and Miguel Angel Flores perform for tips from commuters in Lima, Peru. With a captive audience of pedestrians and commuters, the dancers' headstands, spins and steps on a good day net up to $20 in pocket change, nearly three times the monthly minimum wage in Venezuela. (AP Photo/Cesar Olmos) In this Dec. 12, 2018 photo, Venezuelans Maria Molina, upside down, and Miguel Angel Flores breakdance for tips from commuters with in Lima, Peru. Most Venezuelan migrants head to neighboring Colombia, overwhelming border towns, while Peru is the second-most-common destination. (AP Photo/Cesar Olmos) In this Dec. 10, 2018 photo, Venezuelan breakdancer Karin Rojas practices amid other Venezuela breakdancers in Lima, Peru. Rojas' husband Francisco Diaz stands top right, and their dancing partner Angel Fernandez stands second from left. Six days a week, the three work for tips at street intersections for 13-hours, some days earning just $5 dollars. On a good day they net $20. (AP Photo/Mauricio Munoz) Senate overwhelmingly passes criminal justice overhaul WASHINGTON (AP) - The Senate passed a sweeping criminal justice bill Tuesday that addresses concerns that the nation's war on drugs had led to the imprisonment of too many Americans for non-violent crimes without adequately preparing them for their return to society. Senate passage of the bill by a vote of 87-12 culminates years of negotiations and gives President Donald Trump a signature policy victory, with the outcome hailed by scores of conservative and liberal advocacy groups. The House is expected to pass the bill this week, sending it to the president's desk for his signature. The bill gives judges more discretion when sentencing some drug offenders and boosts prisoner rehabilitation efforts. It also reduces the life sentence for some drug offenders with three convictions, or "three strikes," to 25 years. Another provision would allow about 2,600 federal prisoners sentenced for crack cocaine offenses before August 2010 the opportunity to petition for a reduced penalty. "America is the greatest Country in the world and my job is to fight for ALL citizens, even those who have made mistakes," Trump tweeted moments after the vote. "This will keep our communities safer, and provide hope and a second chance, to those who earn it. In addition to everything else, billions of dollars will be saved. I look forward to signing this into law!" Trump added. ___ Kushner credited for pushing rare bipartisan bill WASHINGTON (AP) - It was the first time many liberal advocates had set foot inside President Donald Trump's White House. And they came at the invitation of presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner - a top White House adviser whom many liberal and good-government groups have criticized, questioning his lack of experience in government, potential conflicts of interest and cozy relationship with foreign leaders, including Saudi Arabia's crown prince. But in White House conference rooms and lobbying trips to Capitol Hill, Kushner worked with advocates, legislators and others on both sides of the aisle to try to craft a deal to make the nation's criminal justice system fairer. Now Kushner, the likely subject of new investigations when Democrats take control of the House next year, is getting credit for helping to spearhead what could be the first major bipartisan legislative success of the Trump era: a first-in-a-generation criminal justice overhaul that passed the Senate Tuesday and is expected to pass the House later this week. "I don't think this would have happened without him," said Sen. Corey Booker of New Jersey, a potential 2020 Democratic presidential contender, adding that the bill would have "a profound effect on thousands of families who have been suffering as a result of this broken system." Inimai Chettiar, director of the Justice Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, who attended multiple meetings at the White House and lobbied with Kushner on the Hill, said that while the center's policies are generally "very oppositional" to the Trump agenda, criminal justice offered a rare opportunity for cooperation. Kushner "understands why this is a very important issue and the effect that it could have," she said. ___ Shutdown threat recedes as Trump softens stance on wall WASHINGTON (AP) - President Donald Trump appeared Tuesday to back off his demand for $5 billion to build a border wall, signaling for the first time that he might be open to a deal that would avoid a partial government shutdown. The White House set the tone when press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders indicated that Trump doesn't want to shut down the government, though just last week he said he'd be "proud" to do so. The president would consider other options and the administration was looking at ways to find the money elsewhere, Sanders said. It was a turnaround after days of impasse. Without a resolution, more than 800,000 government workers could be furloughed or sent to work without pay beginning at midnight Friday, disrupting government operations days before Christmas. One option that has been circulating on Capitol Hill would be to simply approve government funding at existing levels, without a boost for the border, as a stopgap measure to kick the issue into the new Congress next month. The chairman of the Appropriations Committee, Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., confirmed late Tuesday his office was preparing legislation to keep government funded, likely into February. The White House preference was for a longer-term package, although the conversation remained fluid and Trump has been known to quickly change course, said a person familiar with the negotiations but not authorized to discuss them by name. "We want to know what can pass," Sanders said at a press briefing. "Once they make a decision and they put something on the table, we'll make a determination on whether we'll move forward." ___ Trump Foundation reaches deal to dissolve amid lawsuit NEW YORK (AP) - President Donald Trump's charitable foundation reached a deal Tuesday to go out of business, even as Trump continues to fight allegations he misused its assets to resolve business disputes and boost his run for the White House. New York's attorney general and lawyers for the Trump Foundation agreed on a court-supervised process for shutting down the charity and distributing about $1.7 million in remaining funds to other nonprofit groups. The agreement resolved one part of the legal drama surrounding Trump, whose campaign, transition, inauguration and real estate empire are all under investigation. Attorney General Barbara Underwood's lawsuit alleging Trump and his family illegally operated the foundation as an extension of his businesses and his presidential campaign will continue. The lawsuit, filed last spring, seeks $2.8 million in restitution and a 10-year ban on Trump and his three eldest children - Donald Jr., Eric and Ivanka - from running any charities in New York. ___ Judge delays Flynn sentencing, 'not hiding disgust' at crime WASHINGTON (AP) - A federal judge Tuesday abruptly postponed the sentencing of President Donald Trump's first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, declaring himself disgusted and disdainful of Flynn's crime of lying to the FBI and raising the unexpected prospect of sending the retired Army lieutenant general to prison. Lawyers for Flynn, who admitted lying to the FBI about his Russian contacts, requested the delay during the stunning hearing in which U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan told the former Trump aide in a blistering rebuke that "arguably you sold your country out." "I can't make any guarantees, but I'm not hiding my disgust, my disdain for this criminal offense," Sullivan said. The postponement gives Flynn a chance to continue cooperating with the government in hopes of staving off prison and proving his value as a witness, including in a foreign lobbying prosecution unsealed this week. The possibility of prison had seemed remote for Flynn, who was smiling and upbeat as he entered the courtroom, since prosecutors had praised his extensive cooperation and didn't recommend any time behind bars. But the judge's upbraiding suggested otherwise and made clear that even defendants like Flynn who have cooperated in special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation may nonetheless be shadowed by the crimes that brought them into court in the first place. The hearing upset what had been a carefully crafted agreement and pushed months into the future a resolution of one of Mueller's signature prosecutions. ___ US reviews report of imports from forced labor in China camp BEIJING (AP) - The U.S. government said Tuesday that it is reviewing reports of forced labor at a Chinese detention camp where ethnic minorities must give up their religion and language and may be subject to political indoctrination. U.S. Customs and Border Protection said in a statement that reporting by The Associated Press and other media "for the first time appears to link the internment camps identified in Western China to the importation of goods produced by forced labor by a U.S. company." The AP tracked shipments from a factory in a detention camp in China's Xinjiang region to Badger Sportswear in North Carolina. The company ships clothing to universities, colleges and schools around the United States. Following the reports, Badger said that it had suspended business with the Chinese supplier and was investigating. The Washington-based Workers Rights Consortium, which has agreements with many educational institutions to make sure the products they sell on campus are ethically manufactured, said that "forced labor of any kind is a severe violation of university codes of conduct." ___ Nevada becomes 1st US state with female-majority Legislature LAS VEGAS (AP) - Nevada became the first state in the U.S. with an overall female majority in the Legislature on Tuesday when county officials in Las Vegas appointed two women to fill vacancies in the state Assembly. The appointments of Democrats Rochelle Thuy Nguyen and Beatrice "Bea" Angela Duran to two Las Vegas-area legislative seats give women 51 percent of the 63 seats in the Legislature. Women will hold nine of 21 seats in the state Senate, falling short of a majority in that chamber. But they will hold 23 of 42 seats in the Assembly, comprising 55 percent in that chamber and giving women enough numbers to make the two chambers an overall female majority. No state has previously had a female-majority or even a 50 percent-female Legislature, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, which tracks women's political representation. Women picked up seats in the Nevada Assembly and Senate during the 2018 November election but fell short of an overall majority. Vacancies created by lawmakers who won election to other offices in November, along with one sitting female lawmaker then allowed women to gain additional seats. ___ NASA's 1st flight to moon, Apollo 8, marks 50th anniversary CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) - Fifty years ago on Christmas Eve, a tumultuous year of assassinations, riots and war drew to a close in heroic and hopeful fashion with the three Apollo 8 astronauts reading from the Book of Genesis on live TV as they orbited the moon. To this day, that 1968 mission is considered to be NASA's boldest and perhaps most dangerous undertaking. That first voyage by humans to another world set the stage for the still grander Apollo 11 moon landing seven months later. There was unprecedented and unfathomable risk to putting three men atop a monstrous new rocket for the first time and sending them all the way to the moon. The mission was whipped together in just four months in order to reach the moon by year's end, before the Soviet Union. There was the Old Testament reading by commander Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders. Lastly, there was the photo named "Earthrise," showing our blue and white ball - humanity's home - rising above the bleak, gray lunar landscape and 240,000 miles (386 million kilometers) in the distance. ___ Stock market woes raise a nagging fear: Is a recession near? BALTIMORE (AP) - Fears of a recession have been mounting with the U.S. stock market appearing to be headed for its worst December since 1931 - during the Great Depression. Wall Street's sustained slump has been fueled by investor concerns about lower corporate profits, higher corporate debt, a festering trade war between the United States and China and a broader global slowdown. So is a U.S. recession imminent? Not necessarily. Plenty of economic gauges suggest that far from being derailed by a stock market that's set to suffer its first annual loss in a decade, the $20 trillion U.S. economy is barreling forward. Employers are hiring, consumers are spending ahead of the holidays and economic growth has been brisk, thanks in part to President Donald Trump's deficit-financed tax cuts. ___ 'Laverne & Shirley' star, 'Big' director Penny Marshall dies NEW YORK (AP) - Penny Marshall, who indelibly starred in the top-rated sitcom "Laverne & Shirley" before becoming the trailblazing director of smash-hit big-screen comedies such as "Big" and "A League of Their Own," has died. She was 75. Michelle Bega, a spokeswoman for the Marshall family, said Tuesday that Marshall died in her Los Angeles home on Monday night due to complications from diabetes. Marshall earlier fought lung cancer, which went into remission in 2013. "Our family is heartbroken," the Marshall family said in a statement. In "Laverne & Shirley," among television's biggest hits for much of its eight-season run between 1976-1983, the nasal-voiced, Bronx-born Marshall starred as Laverne DeFazio alongside Cindy Williams as a pair of blue-collar roommates toiling on the assembly line of a Milwaukee brewery. A spinoff of "Happy Days," the series was the rare network hit about working-class characters, and its self-empowering opening song ("Give us any chance, we'll take it/ Read us any rule, we'll break it") foreshadowed Marshall's own path as a pioneering female filmmaker in the male-dominated movie business. "Almost everyone had a theory about why 'Laverne & Shirley' took off," Marshall wrote in her 2012 memoir "My Mother Was Nuts." ''I thought it was simply because Laverne and Shirley were poor and there were no poor people on TV, but there were plenty of them sitting at home and watching TV." Marshall directed several episodes of "Laverne & Shirley," which her older brother, the late filmmaker-producer Garry Marshall, created. Those episodes helped launch Marshall as a filmmaker. When Whoopi Goldberg clashed with director Howard Zieff, she brought in Marshall to direct "Jumpin' Jack Flash," the 1986 comedy starring Goldberg. WASHINGTON (AP) - A federal judge abruptly postponed the sentencing of President Donald Trump's first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, on Tuesday, saying he could not hide his disgust for Flynn's crime of lying to the FBI and accusing him of selling out his country. Lawyers for Flynn, a retired Army lieutenant general who pleaded guilty last year to lying to the agency about his Russia contacts, requested the delay during a stunning hearing in which U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan gave Flynn a blistering rebuke. "Arguably you sold your country out," Sullivan told Flynn, who was flanked by his attorneys. The judge added: "I can't hide my disgust, my disdain." Sullivan's harsh words raised the prospect that he could send Flynn to prison - an unexpected development since prosecutors have recommended against prison time, citing his cooperation in special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe. The delay allows Flynn to continue cooperating with the Russia probe and get credit for it in his punishment. President Donald Trump's former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn leaves federal court in Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster) The hearing came amid escalating legal peril for Trump, who was implicated by federal prosecutors in New York this month in hush-money payments to cover up extramarital affairs. Nearly a half-dozen former aides and advisers - including Flynn - have pleaded guilty or agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. Flynn became known during the Trump presidential campaign for leading chants of "Lock her up" during rallies, referring to Trump's rival Hillary Clinton. Trump signaled his continued close interest in the case by tweeting "good luck" to Flynn hours before the sentencing hearing. He added: "Will be interesting to see what he has to say, despite tremendous pressure being put on him, about Russian Collusion in our great and, obviously, highly successful political campaign. There was no Collusion!" At the White House afterward, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked if the administration had changed its stance on Flynn or the FBI in light of his admissions and guilty plea. "Maybe he did do those things, but it doesn't have anything to do with the president," she said. "It's perfectly acceptable for the president to make a positive comment about somebody while we wait to see what the court's determination is." Sanders repeated her allegation that the FBI "ambushed" Flynn in an interview in which he denied contacts with Russian officials, and she said of Trump's earlier criticism, "We don't have any reason to want to walk that back." The new delay in sentencing upset what had been a carefully crafted agreement, with Mueller's office saying Flynn had already provided "the vast majority" of information he could. Flynn, who served as national security adviser for only a few weeks, was to be the first White House official sentenced in Mueller's investigation. Prosecutors had praised his cooperation and recommended against prison, and Tuesday's sentencing was expected to be relatively straightforward. Flynn had expected to walk out the courthouse a free man. But the hearing turned on a dime. Sullivan lambasted Flynn for lying to the FBI in the West Wing of the White House and said he wouldn't allow Flynn to minimize the seriousness of his crime. After a prosecutor raised the prospect of Flynn's continued cooperation with other investigations in the future, Sullivan warned Flynn that he might not get the full credit for his assistance to the government if he were sentenced as scheduled. Prosecutors noted that Flynn had provided the "vast majority of his cooperation" already. But Sullivan gave a visibly shaken Flynn a chance to discuss a delay of the hearing with his lawyers, and the court went into a brief recess. When they returned, Flynn lawyer Robert Kelner defended Flynn's cooperation but requested a postponement to allow for him to keep cooperating. Kelner said he expected Flynn would have to testify in a related trial in Virginia involving Flynn's former business associates, and the defense wanted to "eke out the last modicum of cooperation" so he could get credit in any sentence. Kelner asked Sullivan not to penalize Flynn for arguments his lawyers made in sentencing memos that appeared to suggest the FBI had tricked Flynn into lying. He said they only included those to differentiate Flynn from other defendants in the case who had received short prison sentences for lying. But Sullivan fired back. "Neither of those individuals were a high-ranking official who committed a crime while in the West Wing and on the premises of the White House," the judge said. At the hearing, Sullivan told Flynn that he would take into account his extensive cooperation with the government, which includes 19 meetings with investigators as well as a 33-year military career that included service in Iraq and Afghanistan. But he also said he was forced to weigh other factors, including Flynn's decision as national security adviser to lie to the FBI about contacts he had with the Russian ambassador to the United States. The judge set a new hearing date for March. Flynn left the courthouse hand-in-hand with his wife, climbing into a large, black SUV as protesters heckled and supporters chanted "USA!" ___ Read the Flynn FBI interview notes: http://apne.ws/xfm8IsO President Donald Trump's former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn arrives at federal court in Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster) President Donald Trump's former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russia during the presidential transition, arrives for his sentencing at the U.S. District Court in Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta) President Donald Trump's former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and his wife Lori Andrade arrive at federal court in Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster) President Donald Trump's former national security adviser Michael Flynn enters his vehicle as he leaves federal court in Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster) WASHINGTON (AP) - President Donald Trump and leaders in Congress appeared to be pulling back Tuesday from a government shutdown over his $5 billion request for border wall funds, with the first signs of movement toward a possible end to the standoff. The White House set the tone early when Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders indicated Trump - who just last week said he'd be "proud" to shut down the government - doesn't want to after all. The president would consider other options and the administration was looking at ways to find the funding elsewhere, Sanders said. "The president has asked every agency to look and see if they have money that can be used," Sanders said. It was a turnaround after days of impasse. Without a resolution, more than 800,000 government workers could be furloughed or sent to work without pay, disrupting government operations days before Christmas. One option that has been circulating on Capitol Hill would be to simply approve government funding at existing levels, without a boost for the border, as a stopgap measure to kick the issue into the new Congress next year. The White House preference was for such a short-term package, said a person familiar with the negotiations. "We want to know what can pass," Sanders said at a press briefing. "Once they make a decision and they put something on the table, we'll make a determination on whether we'll move forward." House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi of California, the speaker-designate for the new Congress in January, talks to reporters after meeting with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., as Congress and President Donald Trump bicker over his demand that lawmakers fund a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, pushing the government to the brink of a partial shutdown, in Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. Without a resolution, parts of the federal government will shut down at midnight Friday. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite) The turn of events kick-started negotiations that had been almost nonexistent since last week's televised meeting at the White House, when Trump neither accepted nor rejected the Democrats' offer. They had proposed keeping funding at current levels of $1.3 billion for border security fencing and other improvements, but not for the wall. The Senate's top Republican and Democratic leaders began negotiating new proposals and talks were expected to continue. One idea could be a stopgap measure into February. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he was confident there would not be a government shutdown Friday when funding for parts of the government expires. McConnell said a stopgap measure could be approved, though he suggested Nancy Pelosi, who is poised to become House speaker when the Democrats take control Jan. 3, would not want to saddle the new year with a budget brawl. "If I were in her shoes, I would rather not be dealing with this year's business next year," McConnell said. Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer have made it clear they are not interested in funding Trump's border wall. During a meeting earlier Tuesday on Capitol Hill, McConnell had proposed $1.6 billion for border fencing, as outlined in a bipartisan Senate bill, plus an additional $1 billion that Trump could use on the border, according to a senior Democratic aide unauthorized to speak about the private meeting. Democratic leaders immediately spurned the proposal. Schumer called McConnell to reject it. "We cannot accept the offer they made of a billion-dollar slush fund for the president to implement his very wrong immigration policies," Pelosi told reporters. "So that won't happen." Democrats also rejected the administration's idea of shifting money from other accounts to pay for Trump's wall. Pelosi will probably be able to quickly approve a longer-term measure to keep government running in the new year. She called it a "good sign" that the White House appeared to be backing off its demands. The White House showed its willingness to budge as it became apparent the president does not have support in Congress for funding the wall at the $5 billion level he wants. Sanders said Tuesday there are "other ways" to secure the funding. "At the end of the day, we don't want to shut down the government," Sanders said on Fox News Channel. "We want to shut down the border from illegal immigration." Sanders pointed to the Senate's bipartisan appropriation measure for the Department of Homeland Security, which provides $26 billion, including $1.6 billion for fencing and other barriers. It was approved by the committee in summer on a bipartisan vote. "That's something that we would be able to support," she said, as long as it's coupled with other funding. But House Democrats largely reject the Senate's bill because it includes 65 miles of additional fencing along the Rio Grande Valley in Texas. Trump had campaigned on the promise that Mexico would pay for the wall. Mexico has refused. It's unclear how many House Republicans, with just a few weeks left in the majority before relinquishing power to House Democrats, will even show up midweek for possible votes. Many Republicans say it's up to Trump and Democrats to cut a deal. The standoff dispute could affect nine of 15 Cabinet-level departments and dozens of agencies, including the departments of Homeland Security, Transportation, Interior, Agriculture, State and Justice, as well as national parks and forests. Congress did pass legislation to fund much of the government through the fiscal year, until Oct. 1. But a partial shutdown could occur at midnight Friday on the remaining one-fourth of the government. About half the workers would be forced to continue working without immediate pay. Others would be sent home. Congress often approves their pay retroactively, even if they were ordered to stay home. Many agencies, including the Pentagon and the departments of Veterans Affairs and Health and Human Services, are already funded for the year and will continue to operate as usual. The U.S. Postal Service, busy delivering packages for the holiday season, wouldn't be affected by any government shutdown because it's an independent agency. ___ Associated Press writer Laurie Kellman in Washington contributed to this report. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders talks with reporters outside the White House, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) In this Dec. 11, 2018 photo, President Donald Trump speaks during a meets with Democratic leaders the Oval Office in Washington. Trump said last week he would be "proud" to have a shutdown to get Congress to approve a $5 billion down payment to fulfill his campaign promise to build a border wall. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) FILE - In this Dec. 11, 2018, file photo, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., speaks to reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington. The White House on Sunday, Dec. 16, pushed the federal government closer to the brink of a partial shutdown later this week, digging in on its demand for $5 billion to build a border wall as congressional Democrats stood firm against it. Democratic congressional leaders, Schumer and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, have proposed no more than $1.6 billion, as outlined in a bipartisan Senate bill. The money would not go for the wall but for fencing upgrades and other border security. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File) The Capitol is seen at twilight in Washington, Monday, Dec. 17, 2018. The fight over President Donald Trump's $5 billion wall funds deepened Monday, threatening a partial government shutdown in a standoff that has become increasingly common in Washington. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite) SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - South Korean fire department officials said Tuesday that three teenage boys were presumed dead and seven other boys were being treated for injuries after they were found unconscious at a motel in the seaside town of Gangneung. An official from Gangwon Fire Headquarters said the cause of the injuries was unclear although gas leakage was a possibility. He said there were no immediate signs indicating suicide attempts or foul play. The official didn't want to be named, citing office rules. The official said rescue workers at the scene presumed three teenagers had died based on vital signs. He said seven other boys who shared a room were being treated at hospitals. Kim Jin-bok, a police official from Gangneung, said the boys were high school seniors from the capital Seoul who were apparently traveling after taking the national college entrance exam last month. Kim said police officers are investigating the motel's owner, who called police after finding the boys unconscious Tuesday afternoon. FRANKFORT, Ky. (AP) - Days after losing at the state Supreme Court, Kentucky's Republican governor called the legislature back in session Monday to try again to reshape the state's troubled public pension system. Surprised lawmakers from both parties scrambled to make it to the state Capitol for the 8 p.m. start time. After hours of closed-door negotiations, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives introduced two bills written by Bevin's office that would overhaul the pension system and adjourned for the day. They plan to debate the bills this week. The president of the state's largest teachers union put out a call on social media for people to "get in your cars and drive here tonight," and hundreds did so. They sang modified Christmas carols, changing the words of "O Christmas Tree" to "O Governor O Governor, your bill was overturned." They heckled lawmakers from the gallery, with one man shouting "Nixon was more honest!" "I don't care what it takes, we will show up and we will make our voices known no matter what the cost," Kentucky Education Association President Stephanie Winkler said. Kentucky has one of the worst funded public pension systems in the country. State officials are at least $38 billion short of the money required to pay retirement benefits over the next three decades. Earlier this year, the Republican-controlled legislature passed a law that made changes to the pension systems, including moving all new teacher hires into a hybrid plan, restricting how teachers can use sick days to calculate retirement benefits, and changing how the state pays off its pension debt. Members of the Kentucky Teachers Association gather at the stairs leading to the Kentucky House of Representatives to sing Christmas carols in protest of Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin calling a special session of the legislature in Frankfort, Ky., Monday, Dec. 17, 2018. Teachers rejoiced and Republicans despaired across Kentucky on Thursday as the state's Supreme Court struck down a law that had made changes to one of the country's worst-funded pension systems. (AP Photo/Timothy D. Easley) While the law had little impact on current employees, teachers were outraged at the speed in which lawmakers passed the bill in the final days of the legislative session. Lawmakers introduced and passed the bill in just over six hours. Democratic Attorney General Andy Beshear, Bevin's political rival who is also running for governor in 2019, sued to block the bill. He argued the legislative maneuver lawmakers used to pass the bill so quickly was unconstitutional. Thursday, the state Supreme Court unanimously sided with Beshear and struck down the law. While Bevin has the authority to call lawmakers back to the Capitol, he can't force them to vote on anything. Lawmakers could adjourn the session and take no action. In a brief news conference announcing the decision, Bevin said he has had "remarkable amounts" of conversations with Republican legislative leaders over the weekend but did not say if they had come to an agreement. "I have absolute confidence that they have what it takes to get this done. Whether they do or not, I have no control over," Bevin said. "I believe they will because I believe they must." Republican state Rep. Jerry Miller sponsored both bills introduced on Monday. He said the proposals are largely what lawmakers passed earlier this year, plus one new proposal from Bevin that would eliminate a more generous benefit calculation for teachers with more than 30 years of experience. Miller said he did not expect that proposal to pass. "We are trying to help. We're trying to rescue the system," Miller said. Republicans have super majorities in both the House and Senate, totals that were unchanged by the midterm elections. Acting GOP House Speaker David Osborne said lawmakers had "very little input" in the timing of the legislative session or what was put into the bills. He made no promises that they would pass, saying he expects lawmakers to examine the proposals closely beginning with a committee hearing on Tuesday afternoon. "Where that process will lead us as far as changes, whether we actually even take the legislation up, (is) yet to be determined over the next couple of days," Osborne said. House Democratic Leader Rocky Adkins pointed out the state legislature was scheduled to convene on Jan. 8th for a regular session. He questioned why Bevin would call lawmakers back for an expensive special session that cost taxpayers at least $65,000 per day. "I just think basically it's an abuse of power," said Adkins, who is running for governor in 2019. Bevin said urgency was needed because he believed credit rating agencies are preparing to downgrade the state's rating in response to the Supreme Court ruling. Kentucky Speaker of The House David Osborne, R-Prospect, confers with fellow representatives during the opening of a special session at the Kentucky state Capitol in Frankfort, Ky., Monday, Dec. 17, 2018. Days after losing at the state Supreme Court, Kentucky's Republican governor called the legislature back in session Monday to try again to reshape the state's troubled public pension system. (AP Photo/Timothy D. Easley) Protesters shout from the gallery overlooking the Kentucky house of representatives in protest of the special session at the Kentucky state Capitol in Frankfort, Ky., Monday, Dec. 17, 2018. Days after losing at the state Supreme Court, Kentucky's Republican governor called the legislature back in session Monday to try again to reshape the state's troubled public pension system. (AP Photo/Timothy D. Easley) Kentucky state Rep. Rocky Adkins, D-Sandy Hook, raises an objection during the opening of a special session at the Kentucky state Capitol in Frankfort, Ky., Monday, Dec. 17, 2018. Days after losing at the state Supreme Court, Kentucky's Republican governor called the legislature back in session Monday to try again to reshape the state's troubled public pension system. (AP Photo/Timothy D. Easley) Kentucky Republican Gov. Matt Bevin announces he has called the state legislature back in session to vote on the state's troubled pension system, Monday, Dec. 17, 2018, in Frankfort, Ky. The decision comes four days after the state Supreme Court struck down a pension law Bevin had signed earlier this year. (AP Photo/Adam Beam) SAN DIEGO (AP) - The 14 defendants had been charged with entering the country illegally. But there was a problem: When their cases were called in court, they could not show up because they had already been deported. U.S. Magistrate Judge William Gallo quickly concluded that none of the migrants could be prosecuted - a decision that struck at the heart of the Trump administration's zero-tolerance immigration policy, which calls for treating illegal border crossing as a common crime. He dismissed all the charges and ordered that all bond money be returned. The same scene played out every day for several weeks in San Diego - another example of judges challenging President Donald Trump's moves on immigration in ways large and small. Last month, a different judge halted an administration policy to deny asylum to people who enter the country illegally. The dismissals did not free any migrants or allow any of them back into the U.S. But the rulings defeated the purpose of zero tolerance, which is to notch convictions. Gallo and other California judges forced the government to choose between deporting migrants immediately or risking that the criminal cases against them will be dropped. To avoid getting cases dismissed, the administration could not conduct the type of lightning-quick prosecutions that it practices elsewhere along the border. Federal prosecutors introduced the mass hearings on immigration charges in California in July, adopting a model that has been in place for years in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. The hearings soon began running past 6 p.m. regularly. FILE - In this Nov. 30, 2018 file photo, U.S. Border Patrol detain Honduran migrants after they walked onto U.S. territory from Tijuana, Mexico. Federal judges in California have challenged more of the Trump administration's "zero-tolerance" policy on illegal immigration. Their decision in Sept. 2018 to no longer accept pleas at initial appearances led to the dismissal of many cases because the government deported defendants before they could return to court. The judges' stance is another example of how the judiciary, in ways large and small, has put the brakes on some of the administration's efforts to curb immigration. (AP Photo/Felix Marquez, File) Defense attorneys frequently objected that they didn't have enough time to consult with their clients, who appeared in the same clothes they wore crossing the border a day or so earlier. Then, on Sept. 17, Gallo announced that judges would no longer accept guilty pleas at initial appearances, as they do in Arizona and Texas. Instead, they began setting second hearings for five days later. Immigrants who posted bail before their return dates were deported. "The government, in many respects, was duplicitous," Gallo said on a recent Friday, referring to the decision to deport defendants before they could return to court for resolution of their cases. On the same day, Gallo dismissed charges against the 14 defendants, many of them Mexican men who were caught hiding amid boulders and thick brush in rugged mountains east of San Diego. If convicted, first-time offenders can be punished by up to six months in prison. They can be charged with a felony if caught again. The administration countered on Oct. 9, saying it would not deport people until their criminal cases were completed. That stopped cases from being dismissed but introduced new problems: Keeping people in custody for longer periods strained detention space and imposed higher costs. "They wanted it to be a one-day thing, like it is across the whole border, because it's cheaper," said Jami Ferrara, who represents defense attorneys on a panel with judges and prosecutors working on the changes. "It's not a cheap system." It is unclear how many cases were dismissed in San Diego, but defense attorneys estimate it was hundreds. The legal skirmishes in San Diego court have not drawn a public reaction from Trump, and the Justice Department and Customs and Border Protection agency declined to comment. It costs the Marshals Service an average of almost $90 a day to house a defendant. In San Diego, space is at a premium, with room for only 815 people at the main holding facility. To address any space limitations, the Marshals Service has agreements with state and local governments and the federal Bureau of Prisons, as well as contracts with private companies, spokesman Drew Wade said. Many defendants are unable to make bail because some judges insist they be released to "a third-party custodian" in California, often a relative who is responsible for making sure they return to court. But some family members may be reluctant to come forward if they are in the country illegally, and many live far from San Diego. Defense attorneys have objected to the requirement. "It is extremely unusual for courts to require a third-party custodian in misdemeanor cases," said David Loy, legal director for the ACLU of San Diego and Imperial counties. "These are basically federal petty offenses at the lowest level." Mass hearings on immigration charges were introduced in Del Rio, Texas, in 2005 and spread within a few years to other federal courts on the border- except California. Courtrooms in Tucson, Arizona, and McAllen, Texas, filled with about 70 people a day who pleaded guilty at their first appearance and were typically sentenced to time already served. The administration said in May that it would prosecute every illegal entry under zero tolerance. But after a backlash over widespread separation of families, officials retreated in June by generally exempting adults who come with their children. Days later, a federal judge ruled against separating families. In San Diego, each defense attorney is assigned no more than four clients a day and, on most days there are only 10 attorneys, resulting in a cap of 40. Fred Sheppard, an assistant U.S. attorney, recently said in court that the Border Patrol arrests 90 to 140 people a day in San Diego, implying that many are not prosecuted. (The administration says there has been a "slight uptick" in families crossing illegally and turning themselves in since a large caravan of Central American migrants reached Tijuana, Mexico, last month.) The prosecutor spoke as the government presented 43 people for prosecution, three over that day's cap. Three men entered the jury box and were told by Gallo that their cases were being dismissed because they had not had a chance to speak with an attorney. "The system is burgeoning," the judge said. FILE - In this July 18, 2018 file photo, a Honduran man carries his 3-year-old son as his daughter and other son follow to a transport vehicle after being detained by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents in San Luis, Ariz. Federal judges in California have challenged more of the Trump administration's "zero-tolerance" policy on illegal immigration. Their decision in Sept. 2018 to no longer accept pleas at initial appearances led to the dismissal of many cases because the government deported defendants before they could return to court. The judges' stance is another example of how the judiciary, in ways large and small, has put the brakes on some of the administration's efforts to curb immigration. (AP Photo/Matt York, File) BERLIN (AP) - German authorities say police are searching a Berlin mosque as part of an investigation into its imam on suspicion he raised money to support an Islamic fighter in Syria. Berlin prosecutors said Tuesday that 45-year-old Ahmad A., whose last name wasn't given in line with privacy laws, was the target of the raid on the As-Sahaba mosque in the capital's Wedding district. They said in two tweets that A., who preaches under the name Abul Baraa, is suspected of financing terrorism for sending money to "a jihadi fighter in Syria for the purchase of military equipment." The prosecutor's spokesman Martin Steltner told The Associated Press that no arrests were made and that the raids at the mosque and other locations were aimed at obtaining evidence for his office's ongoing investigation. TIJUANA, Mexico (AP) - The asylum claims of six Hondurans were accepted for processing Tuesday, ending a 17-hour standoff involving U.S. authorities, the migrants and two U.S. lawmakers supporting them on a tiny piece of American soil at the country's border with Mexico. The Hondurans had camped out in an area of San Diego's Otay Mesa border crossing past where pedestrians pass a wall plaque delineating the international boundary but before they reach inspectors. They were joined by U.S. Reps. Nanette Barragan and Jimmy Gomez, both California Democrats. "They're on U.S. soil, and they're basically being blocked for presenting themselves for asylum," Barragan said in a video posted on Twitter that she said was taken around 2:40 a.m. The asylum seekers arrived at the crossing Monday afternoon, and after several hours U.S. inspectors agreed to process claims of eight unaccompanied children and a mother and her five children, attorneys said. Six more were initially not allowed into the country and sat on blankets throughout a chilly night before authorities agreed Tuesday to process their claims. "Children are sick, they're crying, they've had to use the bathroom," Nicole Ramos, an attorney at Al Otro Lado, a legal services organization working on behalf of the migrants, said Monday night. "We've had to get blankets and food for them." Customs and Border Protection did not comment on the status of the Honduran asylum seekers, but officials said claims are processed as quickly as possible. Honduran asylum seekers enter the U.S. at San Diego's Otay Mesa port of entry, as seen from Tijuana, Mexico, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. Six Honduran asylum seekers spent a chilly night camped out on a tiny patch of U.S. soil at a San Diego border crossing seeking to have their claims processed. (AP Photo/Moises Castillo) The impasse highlighted a U.S. practice to limit entry for asylum seekers at official crossings when they are at full capacity, which it calls "metering" or "queue management." Authorities emphatically deny they are turning away asylum seekers - something that is prohibited under U.S. and international law - and say they are simply asking them to temporarily wait in Mexico. CBP says a surge in asylum claims has strained resources. The number of people expressing fear of returning to their home countries - the initial step toward asylum - jumped 67 percent at Mexico border in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, rising to 92,959 claims from 55,584 the previous year. Critics contend that CBP is limiting the number of asylum claims to deter people from coming. In San Diego, U.S. authorities funnel asylum claims through the San Ysidro port of entry, the nation's busiest crossing. Asylum seekers themselves manage waiting lists in a tattered notebook on the Tijuana side. The wait at San Ysidro had neared 3,000 names even before a caravan of more than 6,000 people reached the border city last month. Typically 60 to 100 asylum claims are processed per day at the crossing, meaning many migrants will likely have to wait in Tijuana for months. People who appear at the city's other crossing, Otay Mesa, are normally redirected to San Ysidro. But Monday's group managed to reach U.S. soil, which usually means they are transferred to San Ysidro to have their claims processed immediately. ___ Associated Press writer Elliot Spagat in San Diego contributed to this report. A Honduran asylum seeker, his face covered with a blanket, embraces an activist before entering the U.S. at San Diego's Otay Mesa port of entry, as seen from Tijuana, Mexico, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. Six Honduran asylum seekers spent a chilly night camped out on a tiny patch of U.S. soil at a San Diego border crossing seeking to have their claims processed. (AP Photo/Moises Castillo) Activists for migrant rights accompany a group of Honduran asylum seekers at the San Diego's Otay Mesa port of entry, as seen from Tijuana, Mexico, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. Six Honduran asylum seekers spent a chilly night camped out on a tiny patch of U.S. soil at a San Diego border crossing seeking to have their claims processed. (AP Photo/Moises Castillo) Activists for migrant rights pack their belongings after accompanying a group of Honduran asylum seekers at San Diego's Otay Mesa port of entry, seen from Tijuana, Mexico, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. Six Honduran asylum seekers spent a chilly night camped out on a tiny patch of U.S. soil at a San Diego border crossing seeking to have their claims processed. (AP Photo/Moises Castillo) Honduran asylum seekers cover his faces surrounded by activists for migrant rights on U.S. soil at San Diego's Otay Mesa port of entry, seen from Tijuana, Mexico, Monday, Dec. 17, 2018. (AP Photo/Moises Castillo) A Honduran asylum seeker embrace an activist for migrant rights on U.S. soil at San Diego's Otay Mesa port of entry, seen from Tijuana, Mexico, Monday, Dec. 17, 2018. (AP Photo/Moises Castillo) MADRID (AP) - A preliminary hearing in a rebellion case against Catalan separatists Tuesday displayed some of the dynamics between defense and prosecutors expected during a trial that is likely to dominate Spanish politics. Altogether, 18 former politicians and activists from the Catalonia region are charged with rebellion, sedition, disobedience and misuse of public funds for their parts in an attempt to secede from Spain last year. At Tuesday's hearing, a panel of seven magistrates heard from defense attorneys who argued the trial should be heard by the top regional court in Catalonia rather than Spain's highest court in Madrid. Prosecutors countered that Madrid was the proper venue, saying the events that led regional lawmakers to make a unilateral declaration of independence on Oct. 27, 2017 had ramifications outside of Catalonia. The country's top court also has jurisdiction, prosecutors argued, because the secession attempt affected all Spaniards. Supreme Court judges rejected similar defense appeals during the investigative stage of the case. A final decision is expected later this week. Spanish judges preside over a preliminary hearing at the Supreme Court in Madrid, Tuesday Dec. 18, 2018. Spain's Supreme Court held a preliminary hearing ahead of a trial of 18 former Catalan politicians and activists are being accused of rebellion, sedition, disobedience and misuse of public funds for their parts in last year's attempt to secede from Spain. Pictured left to right are: Andres Palomo, Luciano Varela, Andres Martinez Arreieta, Manuel Marchena , Juan Ramon Berdugo, Antonio del Moral and Ana Ferrer. (Ballesteros/Pool Photo via AP) If the top court keeps the case, former Catalan Vice President Oriol Junqueras, activist-turned-politician Jordi Sanchez and 16 other defendants are expected to appear there when the trial proceedings get underway at the end of January. Four defendants are three weeks into a prison hunger strike to protest what they deem unfair treatment by Spain's judiciary. Central government authorities say there is no reason for the strike and the defendants' rights are guaranteed by Spain's independent judiciary. The "trial of the century," as it's been labeled by domestic media, has taken a high political significance. Separatists in the northeastern region have made clear that they will use proceedings to prove that they are being tried for their ideas, and in particular for advancing a secessionist agenda. In addition to prosecutors and state attorneys, a far-right party that has recently emerged in Spanish politics sits on the prosecution bench. Vox wants to use the trial to showcase its hard stance against nationalism and its defense of Spanish unity ahead of European and local elections in May next year. NEW DELHI (AP) - The death toll from a fire that swept through a Mumbai hospital has risen to eight, officials said Tuesday. Dozens of firefighters rushed to the Monday afternoon fire at the government-run ESIC Kamgar Hospital, but smoke engulfed the entire five-story building. At least eight people died in the fire, a police official said Tuesday, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. Among the dead was an infant just a few months old, Indian news reports said. More than 140 people were rescued, with the hospital's patients transferred to a series of nearby hospitals. Deadly fires are common in India, where building inspections are often very lax. "We still don't know the cause yet, but an inquiry is going on," Mumbai Mayor Vishwanath Mahadeshwar told reporters at the scene, vowing that any officials responsible for the fire would be punished. MOSCOW (AP) - The Kremlin has rejected as baseless reports about a Russian political disinformation campaign on U.S. social media. Reports released by the Senate intelligence committee Monday suggested that Moscow's efforts to help Donald Trump in his 2016 presidential campaign through social media were more far-reaching than originally thought, with troll farms working to discourage black voters and "blur the lines between reality and fiction." Dmitry Peskov, spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin, rejected the claims, saying the reports sought to shift blame for social tensions in the U.S. to Russia without offering proof. Peskov reaffirmed a strong denial of any meddling in the U.S. politics. He said in Tuesday's call with reporters that "the Russian government hasn't had anything to do with any kind of interference." RABAT, Morocco (AP) - Moroccan authorities say one person has been arrested in connection with the deaths of two female Scandinavian tourists in the Atlas Mountains, a popular hiking destination. The Interior Ministry says the two women, from Denmark and Norway, were discovered Monday "with evidence of violence on their necks." Moroccan security services said Tuesday that one person had been arrested in Marrakesh in connection with the deaths. An investigation is ongoing. The two women's bodies were found in a remote mountainous region 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) from the village of Imlil, which is typically is the starting point for treks to Mount Toubkal, the highest peak in North Africa. ALMATY, Kazakhstan (AP) - The woman wipes at a tear as she talks about her daughter in China's Xinjiang region. Nurbakyt Kaliaskar, who lives in neighboring Kazakhstan, says her 25-year-old daughter is a college graduate who had a white-collar job. Then she got swept up in a Chinese crackdown on Muslims in Xinjiang. The Muslims are taken to internment camps for re-education and, in some cases, for vocational training before being forced to work in factories, according to an analysis of satellite images and the accounts of former detainees and relatives interviewed by The Associated Press. The government says the participants have signed agreements to be trained. Guard towers and barbed wire around the sprawling complexes that have sprung up in China's barren far west suggest the training isn't voluntary. In this Dec. 6, 2018 photo, Nurbakyt Kaliaskar cries as she speaks about her daughter's detainment in a Chinese internment camp during an interview in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Kaliaskar, who lives in neighboring Kazakhstan, says her 25-year-old daughter is a college graduate who had a white-collar job. Then she got swept up in a Chinese crackdown on Muslims in Xinjiang. (AP Photo/ Dake Kang) Rushan Abbas, 51, of Herndon, Va., holds a photo of her sister, Gulshan Abbas, Monday, Dec. 17, 2018, in Washington. Rushan Abbas, a Uighur in Washington, D.C., said her sister is among the many Uighurs detained. The sister, Dr. Gulshan Abbas was taken to what the government calls a vocational center, although she has no specific information on whether her sister is being forced to work. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin) In this Dec. 8, 2018, photo, Adilgazy Yergazy, a farmer, holds up pictures of his detained little brothers at his home in a village near Almaty, Kazakhstan. Yergazy says two of his little brothers were arrested and taken to internment camps last year, and that this year a factory opened in the camp where they were being held. He heard that his little brother's access to family is limited to a monthly face-to-face visit at the camp. (AP Photo/ Dake Kang) In this Dec. 8, 2018 photo, Mainur Medetbek holds up a portrait of her detained husband at her home in a village outside Almaty, Kazakhstan. Medetbek says her husband was detained over a year ago in an internment camp and was recently transferred to a factory, where he is required to live in dormitories six days a week. She says the ordeal has deprived her family of income and driven her to contemplate suicide many times. (AP Photo/ Dake Kang) In this Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2018, photo, residents pass by the entrance to the "Hotan City apparel employment training base" where Hetian Taida has a factory in Hotan in western China's Xinjiang region. This is one of a growing number of internment camps in the Xinjiang region, where by some estimates 1 million Muslims are detained, forced to give up their language and their religion and subject to political indoctrination. Now, the Chinese government is also forcing some detainees to work in manufacturing and food industries. Some of them are within the internment camps; others are privately owned, state-subsidized factories where detainees are sent once they are released. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan) In this Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2018, photo, two layers of barbed wire fencing ring the "Hotan City apparel employment training base" where Hetian Taida has a factory in Hotan in western China's Xinjiang region. This is one of a growing number of internment camps in the Xinjiang region, where by some estimates 1 million Muslims are detained, forced to give up their language and their religion and subject to political indoctrination. Now, the Chinese government is also forcing some detainees to work in manufacturing and food industries. Some of them are within the internment camps; others are privately owned, state-subsidized factories where detainees are sent once they are released. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan) In this Monday, Dec. 3, 2018, photo, a guard tower and barbed wire fences are seen around a facility in the Kunshan Industrial Park in Artux in western China's Xinjiang region. This is one of a growing number of internment camps in the Xinjiang region, where by some estimates 1 million Muslims are detained, forced to give up their language and their religion and subject to political indoctrination. Now, the Chinese government is also forcing some detainees to work in manufacturing and food industries. Some of them are within the internment camps; others are privately owned, state-subsidized factories where detainees are sent once they are released. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan) In this Monday, Dec. 3, 2018, photo, residents line up inside the Artux City Vocational Skills Education Training Service Center at the Kunshan Industrial Park in Artux in western China's Xinjiang region. Across the Xinjiang region, a growing number of internment camps have been built, where by some estimates 1 million Muslims are detained, forced to give up their language and their religion and subject to political indoctrination. Now, the Chinese government is also forcing some detainees to work in manufacturing and food industries. Some of them are within the internment camps; others are privately owned, state-subsidized factories where detainees are sent once they are released. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan) In this Sep. 17, 2018, satellite image released by Planet Labs, buildings are seen around the Kunshan Industrial Park in Artux in western China's Xinjiang region. This is one of a growing number of internment camps in the Xinjiang region, where by some estimates 1 million Muslims are detained, forced to give up their language and their religion and subject to political indoctrination. Now, the Chinese government is also forcing some detainees to work in manufacturing and food industries. Some of them are within the internment camps; others are privately owned, state-subsidized factories where detainees are sent once they are released. (Planet Labs via AP) In this Dec. 3, 2018, photo, a child stands near a large screen showing photos of Chinese President Xi Jinping near a carpark in Kashgar in western China's Xinjiang region. Across the Xinjiang region, a growing number of internment camps have been built, where by some estimates 1 million Muslims are detained, forced to give up their language and their religion and subject to political indoctrination. Now, the Chinese government is also forcing some detainees to work in manufacturing and food industries. Some of them are within the internment camps; others are privately owned, state-subsidized factories where detainees are sent once they are released. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan) In this Dec. 7, 2018, photo, Sala Jimobai stands with her son, Aqzhol Dakey, holding a picture of her husband Dakey Zhunishan for a photo outside the office of an advocacy group for ethnic Kazakhs born in China in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Jimobai says her husband, a sheep herder, was detained in an internment camp in China's far western Xinjiang region, and later transferred to a factory in October for a month before being released. He is now confined to his brother's village in China. (AP Photo/ Dake Kang) SANAA, Yemen (AP) - A cease-fire on Tuesday halted months of heavy fighting in Yemen's port city of Hodeida, raising hopes that the latest U.N.-led peace efforts can end the civil war and alleviate the world's worst humanitarian crisis. But the truce in the Red Sea city remains fragile, and it's unclear if the Saudi-backed government and the Iran-aligned Houthi rebels can reach a wider peace agreement despite mounting international pressure to end the war. Yemeni officials said the fighting in Hodeida subsided early Tuesday as the cease-fire took effect, with only sporadic fire from automatic weapons heard across the city. Some 70 percent of Yemen's food imports and humanitarian aid enter through Hodeida, which remained open even as the Saudi-led coalition waged a months-long campaign that failed to dislodge the rebels. Aid groups feared the port's closure could plunge Yemen into famine. The truce agreement, reached last week at U.N.-brokered talks in Sweden, calls on both sides to withdraw from the city and its outskirts. A joint committee led by U.N. officers will oversee the cease-fire and the redeployment of forces. Local authorities and police will run the city and its three port facilities under U.N. supervision. U.N. envoy Martin Griffiths has said the committee will get to work swiftly "to translate the momentum built up in Sweden into achievements on the ground." FILE - In this Sept. 27, 2018 file photo, a father gives water to his malnourished daughter at a feeding center in a hospital in Hodeida, Yemen. Officials in Yemen said a cease-fire took effect at midnight Monday, Dec. 18, 2018, in the Red Sea port of Hodeida after intense fighting between government-allied forces and Shiite rebels erupted shortly before the U.N.-brokered truce. Yemen's civil war, in which a Saudi-led coalition is fighting on the government's side against the rebels, has pushed much of the country to the brink of famine. (AP Photo/Hani Mohammed, File) U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said Maj. Gen. Patrick Cammaert, who has been appointed to head the coordination committee overseeing the cease-fire, will depart New York with a team later this week headed for Yemen. He said the Dutch general will convene a first meeting of the committee, which includes military and security representatives from the government and the rebels, by videoconference on Wednesday. Yemen's four-year conflict pits the internationally recognized government, backed by a coalition led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, against Shiite rebels known as Houthis. Iran supports the rebels, but denies allegations from the coalition, Western countries and U.N. experts that it is arming them. The fighting has killed tens of thousands of people, and has driven millions to the brink of starvation. The U.N. calls it the world's worst humanitarian disaster. British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt welcomed the cease-fire, urging all warring parties "to stick to the terms agreed at peace talks last week in Stockholm so we can achieve a long-term political solution to this horrific crisis and end the suffering of so many." The cease-fire is the first step in a process the U.N. hopes will lead to a province-wide truce in Hodeida and the demilitarization of the Red Sea trade corridor, said Peter Salisbury, a senior analyst at the Brussels-based International Crisis Group. "But it's important to note that the deal itself is quite specific in saying that this is not part of a wider peace process: It's an agreement made for humanitarian rather than political reasons," he said. The United States, which supports the Saudi-led coalition, has stepped up pressure to end the fighting amid the fallout from the killing of Saudi dissident journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents, which brought renewed international attention to Yemen's stalemated war. That provided a boost to Griffiths' efforts to bring the two sides together in Sweden. In addition to agreeing on a cease-fire for Hodeida, they also exchanged lists of prisoners ahead of a planned swap to be carried out with the Red Cross. But a wider agreement could prove elusive. The Houthis, who have seized and held much of northern Yemen, including the capital, Sanaa, at great cost, have consistently rejected the government's demands that they withdraw and give up their heavy weapons. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, meanwhile, view the rebels as an increasingly dangerous Iranian proxy. The rebels have fired ballistic missiles deep into Saudi Arabia and have attacked vessels in the Red Sea. The conflict has caused a humanitarian catastrophe. Emaciated children are being brought to overwhelmed clinics, and in some areas families are surviving off leaves boiled into a sour green paste. The fighting and displacement have also generated a cholera epidemic. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned Sunday that if Yemen's humanitarian situation does not improve, 14 million people will be in need of food aid in 2019, 6 million more than this year. "There is a high level of hunger in Yemen," he said, adding that even though the situation has not technically been declared a famine "does not in any way diminish our huge concern with the very high level of hunger that exists." Last week, an international group tracking Yemen's civil war reported that the conflict has killed more than 60,000 people, both combatants and civilians, since 2016. That is much higher than the U.N. figure of 10,000 civilian deaths, and has added to the urgency to find a political resolution. The report from the U.S.-based Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project said more than 28,000 people were killed in the first 11 months of 2018, an increase of 68 percent from 2017. More than 3,000 were killed in November, the deadliest month since the group started collecting data. It said 37 percent of civilians killed in Yemen in 2018 died in Hodeida. The figures do not include the last few months of 2014, when the Houthi rebels captured the Yemeni capital of Sanaa and much of the country's north, nor the casualties in 2015, when the Saudi-led coalition joined the war on the side of the government. The group said it based its figures on news reports of each incident of violence in the war. ___ Magdy reported from Cairo. Associated Press writer Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report. FILE - In this Sept. 29, 2018 file photo, fishermen rest on their boats before fishing at the main fishing port, in Hodeida, Yemen. Officials in Yemen said a cease-fire took effect at midnight Monday, Dec. 18, 2018, in the Red Sea port of Hodeida after intense fighting between government-allied forces and Shiite rebels erupted shortly before the U.N.-brokered truce. Yemen's civil war, in which a Saudi-led coalition is fighting on the government's side against the rebels, has pushed much of the country to the brink of famine. (AP Photo/Hani Mohammed, File) BAGHDAD (AP) - Iraq's parliament confirmed three ministers to Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi's government Tuesday but left other key posts, including ministers of Defense and Interior, vacant as an impasse over the appointments threatened to stretch into its third month. The confirmations come two days after Abdul-Mahdi's controversial nominee to head the Interior Ministry returned to his former posts as the chairman of the Popular Mobilization militias and national security adviser to the prime minister. Falih al-Fayadh retook his seat at a National Security Council meeting on Sunday after he was sacked from his positions by caretaker prime minister Haidar al-Abadi in August for political behavior. Al-Fayadh has been at the center of the deadlock surrounding Abdul-Mahdi's appointees. His nomination to run the Interior Ministry has the backing of the largest Iranian-aligned bloc in Parliament, which includes representatives of the Popular Mobilization Forces. The PMF were formed in 2014 to stop the advance of Islamic State group militants through Iraq. They include several militias funded and trained by Iran. The political bloc of populist cleric Moqtada al-Sadr is opposing Al-Fayadh's appointment at the Interior Ministry, saying it wants to limit outside influence in politics. Sadr's bloc, Sa'eroun, won the largest share of seats in parliamentary elections last May. The Interior Ministry has been under the control of ministers close to Iran since 2010. Abdul-Mahdi was sworn in to his post in October but has governed without a full cabinet after parliament approved just 14 of 22 ministerial appointments. On Tuesday, parliament approved new ministers of culture, planning and higher education, leaving five posts unfilled. But Al-Fayadh's return as national security adviser and chairman of the PMF could soon break the deadlock over the remaining appointments, said Hussein Allawi, director of Baghdad-based Akkad Center for Strategic Affairs and Future Studies. "This gives Abdul-Mahdi an opportunity to name a new nominee to the Interior Ministry," said Allawi. Parliament is slated to meet again Thursday to discuss the remaining cabinet vacancies. BANGKOK (AP) - Police in Thailand say their investigations found that a boat that sank in July in rough weather off Thailand's southern resort island of Phuket, killing 47 Chinese tourists, didn't meet regulatory standards. The July 5 sinking of the Phoenix was one of Thailand's worst recent tourism-related disasters. Three of the boat's operators have been charged with negligence causing death - which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison - and a Marine Department official is one of at least two other people facing criminal charges. Another boat also carrying Chinese tourists sank on the same day but those on board were rescued. Immigration Police chief Maj. Gen. Surachate Hakparn said additional suspects are under investigation. The accidents caused outrage in China about Thai safety procedures. Thai authorities promised justice for the victims, especially because of concern that the disaster could affect the tourism industry. More than 9.8 million Chinese visited Thailand in 2017, accounting for the biggest share of the 35.38 million foreign tourists. Surachate told reporters Monday night that according to their investigations and examination of the vessel's blueprints, the boat had only one watertight door instead of the recommended four, and that it didn't have "marine windows" that could be broken open in case of an emergency. "There were many people who died on the boat because they couldn't break the windows to get out," Surachate said. FILE - In this Nov. 17, 2018, file photo, a crane boat raises the tour boat named the Pheonix from the sea floor in Phuket, Thailand, after sinking over four months ago in rough weather. Police in Thailand say their investigations found that the boat that sank in rough weather in July, killing 47 Chinese tourists, didn't meet regulatory standards. (AP Photo, File) Surachate said police will produce a final report on their investigations next week, adding that experts from China and Germany also helped examine the Phoenix's structure. The Phoenix was raised from the 45-meter- (150-foot-) deep sea floor on Nov. 17 by a crane ship operated by a salvage company from Singapore. Covered in brown algae and sludge, it was then docked at a pier in Phuket. The first company hired to salvage the boat lost a member of its team during its failed operation to lift the vessel. DONGGUAN, China (AP) - The chairman of Huawei challenged the United States and other governments to provide evidence for claims the Chinese tech giant is a security risk as the company launched a public relations effort to defuse fears that threaten its role in next-generation communications. Talking to reporters who were invited to Huawei Technologies Ltd.'s headquarters, Ken Hu complained accusations against the biggest global maker of network gear stem from "ideology and geopolitics." He warned excluding Huawei from fifth-generation networks in Australia and other markets would hurt consumers by raising prices and slowing innovation. Australia and New Zealand have barred Huawei in 5G networks on security grounds. They joined the United States and Taiwan, which have broader curbs on Huawei. Japan's cybersecurity agency says suppliers including Huawei that are deemed high-risk will be excluded from government purchases. The latest curbs have had little impact on Huawei, which is the biggest global maker of network gear and a leader in 5G development. But the normally press-shy company's decision to hold Tuesday's event appeared to reflect concern that if restrictions spread, they might hurt Huawei's access to a 5G market industry analysts say could be worth $20 billion a year by 2022. Hu, who appears at industry events but rarely gives interviews, talked for two hours and 20 minutes with American, European and Asian reporters. "If you have proof or evidence, it should be made known," said Hu. "Maybe not to Huawei and maybe not to the public, but to telecom operators, because they are the ones that buy Huawei." The logo of Huawei stands on its office building at the research and development centre in Dongguan in south China's Guangdong province, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. While a top executive of Chinese tech giant Huawei faces possible U.S. charges over trade with Iran, the company's goal to be a leader in next-generation telecoms is colliding with security worries abroad. Australia and New Zealand have barred Huawei as a supplier for fifth-generation networks, joining the U.S. and Taiwan. Last week, Japan's cybersecurity agency said Huawei and other vendors deemed risky will be off-limits for government purchases. (AP Photo/Andy Wong) Huawei, founded in 1987 by a former military engineer, rejects accusations it is controlled by the ruling Communist Party or designs equipment to facilitate eavesdropping. But foreign officials cite a Chinese law that requires companies to cooperate with intelligence agencies and express concern telecom equipment suppliers might be required to modify products. The emergence of 5G has heightened those fears. The technology is meant to support a vast expansion of telecoms networks to connect self-driving cars, factory robots, medical devices and power plants. That has prompted governments increasingly to view telecoms networks as strategic national assets. "There has never been any evidence that our equipment poses a security threat," said Hu. He added later, "We have never accepted requests from any government to damage the networks or business of any of our customers." Huawei is China's first global tech competitor, making it politically important to a ruling Communist Party that wants to transform the country from the world's low-wage factory into a leader in fields from robotics to clean energy to biotech. The company has 180,000 employees and says sales are on track to top $100 billion this year. The United States and other critics should disclose evidence against Huawei to make clear why they are pursuing a conflict that could have "massive repercussions" if Beijing retaliates, said Scott Kennedy, a Chinese politics specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. U.S.-Chinese relations already are strained over President Donald Trump's tariff hikes on billions of dollars of Chinese imports in a fight over complaints Beijing steals or pressures companies to hand over technology. "It's long past time for those worried about Huawei to air their evidence publicly, not to satisfy China but as an obligation to the American people," said Kennedy in an email. "The U.S. government should publicly prove this coming conflict is worth it." Hu's denials Tuesday echoed previous company statements but marked the first time a Huawei leader directly addressed security complaints, underscoring their sensitivity. Hu noted a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman said Dec. 10 that no law requires companies to modify equipment to permit secret access. "We haven't received any request to provide improper information," he said. "In the future, we will also act in strict accordance with the law in dealing with similar situations." The lack of public evidence has prompted some industry analysts to suggest the accusations might be an excuse to shield U.S. or European competitors against a successful Chinese challenger. Asked about that, Hu said reducing competition would hamper innovation and raise costs for consumers. Hu cited what he said was a forecast by a research firm, Frontier Economics, that the cost of installing 5G wireless base stations in Australia would be 15 to 40 percent higher without competition from Huawei. "You can't make yourself more excellent by blocking competitors from the playing field," he said. Despite "efforts to use politics to interfere with industry growth," Huawei has signed contracts to supply 5G equipment to 25 telecom carriers according to Hu. He said more than 10,000 5G base stations have been shipped. "We are proud to say that our customers continue to trust us," he said. Huawei suffered another setback when its chief financial officer was arrested Dec. 1 in Canada in connection with U.S. accusations the company violated restrictions on sales of American technology to Iran. Hu said he couldn't discuss the Iran accusations because the executive, Meng Wanzhou, is in the midst of court proceedings in Vancouver. Meng, the daughter of Huawei's founder, Ren Zhengfei, faces possible U.S. charges of lying to a bank to conceal Huawei's dealings with Iran. However, Hu said Huawei is "very confident in our trade compliance management." Echoing earlier company statements, he expressed "confidence in the fairness and independence" of courts involved in Meng's case. Asked whether Meng's arrest made Huawei executives reluctant to leave China, Hu laughed and said, "There is no impact on our travel plans. At this time yesterday, I was on a plane" returning from Europe. Another Chinese company, ZTE Corp., was nearly forced out of business this year after it was blocked from buying U.S. technology over its exports to Iran and North Korea. Trump restored access after ZTE paid a $1 billion fine, replaced its executives and hired U.S.-selected compliance managers. Asked whether Huawei would be hurt if it faced similar curbs, Hu said he couldn't talk about something that hadn't happened. But he said the company has a global network of 13,000 suppliers and a "diversified supply strategy" that allowed it cope with Japan's 2011 tsunami and other disruptions. Hu promised repeatedly to expand efforts to respond to "legitimate concerns" from regulators, telecom carriers or the public. Huawei has opened centers in Britain, Germany and Canada for governments to test its equipment and software. Its newest "security transparency center" is due to open in Belgium in the first quarter of 2019. Tuesday's event for reporters included tours of two research-and-development laboratories at Huawei's headquarters in Shenzhen, which abuts Hong Kong, and a cybersecurity testing center at a newly built campus in Dongguan, an hour's drive to the west. The company said it was the first time reporters had been allowed to see those facilities. The cybersecurity lab has facilities used by customers including Spain's Telefonica to carry out their own tests on Huawei equipment and software, according to its director, Martin Wang. "We are open to any discussion with customers about how we can improve cybersecurity," said the company's director of cybersecurity and privacy, Sean Yang. This shows Huawei research and development centre in Dongguan in south China's Guangdong province, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. While a top executive of Chinese tech giant Huawei faces possible U.S. charges over trade with Iran, the company's goal to be a leader in next-generation telecoms is colliding with security worries abroad. Australia and New Zealand have barred Huawei as a supplier for fifth-generation networks, joining the U.S. and Taiwan. Last week, Japan's cybersecurity agency said Huawei and other vendors deemed risky will be off-limits for government purchases. (AP Photo/Andy Wong) A security stands watch as an employee walks out from the Huawei research and development centre in Dongguan in south China's Guangdong province, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. While a top executive of Chinese tech giant Huawei faces possible U.S. charges over trade with Iran, the company's goal to be a leader in next-generation telecoms is colliding with security worries abroad. Australia and New Zealand have barred Huawei as a supplier for fifth-generation networks, joining the U.S. and Taiwan. Last week, Japan's cybersecurity agency said Huawei and other vendors deemed risky will be off-limits for government purchases. (AP Photo/Andy Wong) An information board for employees' shuttle bus is on display near the Huawei office building at its research and development centre in Dongguan in south China's Guangdong province, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. While a top executive of Chinese tech giant Huawei faces possible U.S. charges over trade with Iran, the company's goal to be a leader in next-generation telecoms is colliding with security worries abroad. Australia and New Zealand have barred Huawei as a supplier for fifth-generation networks, joining the U.S. and Taiwan. Last week, Japan's cybersecurity agency said Huawei and other vendors deemed risky will be off-limits for government purchases. (AP Photo/Andy Wong) An information board for employees' shuttle bus is on display near the Huawei office building at its research and development centre in Dongguan in south China's Guangdong province, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. The chairman of Huawei called on the United States, Australia and other governments to provide evidence to back up claims the Chinese tech giant is a security risk as it launched a public relations effort to defuse fears that threaten its role in next-generation communications. (AP Photo/Andy Wong) VATICAN CITY (AP) - Pope Francis says political speeches that harangue migrants and the poor are "unacceptable." Francis issued his annual peace message, which was dedicated this year to the need for politics to promote peace. In listing the virtues and vices of politics, Francis said nationalism was one threat to peace because it destroys trust in a globalized world. Another violation of peace, he said Tuesday, is the proliferation of arms and terror exerted on the innocent and vulnerable that has forced them to flee homes for safety. He said: "Political addresses that tend to blame every evil on migrants and to deprive the poor of hope are unacceptable. Rather, there is a need to reaffirm that peace is based on respect for each person." Pope Francis is caressed by a child during an audience with children and family from the dispensary of Santa Marta, a Vatican charity that offers special help to mothers and children in need, in the Paul VI hall at the Vatican, Sunday, Dec. 16, 2018. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia) ISLAMABAD (AP) - British Airways announced Tuesday it will resume flights to Pakistan in June, a decade after suspending them in the wake of the suicide truck bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad that killed dozens. In a statement, Robert Williams, the BA head of sales for Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, said it was going to be "exciting to be flying between Islamabad and Heathrow" again. BA said flights would resume on June 2, 2019, three times a week and that "tickets are on sale from today." Thomas Drew, Britain's top diplomat in Pakistan, said the resumption of flights was excellent news and would "give a particular boost to our growing trade and investment links." Pakistan's government and its military also welcomed the announcement. Maj. Gen. Asif Ghafoor, the military spokesman, said the development was one of the dividends of the decades-long struggle of the Pakistani nation and security forces to restore peace and stability in the country that are on the way. BA suspended its operations shortly after the Sept. 20, 2008, suicide truck bombing devastated the Marriott in Islamabad, killing at least 54 people and wounding more than 270. FILE - In this Jan. 10, 2017 file photo, British Airways planes are parked at Heathrow Airport in London. British Airways will resume flights to Pakistan in June 2019, a decade after it suspended operations following bombing on the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad that killed dozens, an official of British Airways said in a statement, Tuesday Dec. 18. 2018. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein, File) A little-known militant group calling itself "Fedayeen al-Islam" claimed responsibility for the attack but authorities blamed al-Qaida linked militants. Since the attack, the Pakistani army has carried out several operations against the Taliban, al-Qaida and other extremist groups, seeking to rout militants from their strongholds. However, large-scale attacks still occasionally take place in the country. COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) - Members of Sri Lanka's Parliament on Tuesday questioned whether Mahinda Rajapaksa, who recently quit as prime minister, can hold his seat after earlier relinquishing membership in the political party he represented in the last election. Lakshman Kiriella, a lawmaker from the ruling United National Front coalition, raised the question in Parliament soon after Speaker Karu Jayasuriya announced that he accepted Rajapaksa as the opposition leader because President Maithripala Sirisena had withdrawn from a national unity government with Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe. Jayasuriya said he would rule on the matter on Friday. "We don't want the constitution to be violated any further," said another lawmaker, M.A. Sumanthiran. "If some members have ceased to be members of Parliament, they must withdraw from this chamber now." Rajapaksa last month dropped membership in his former party, led by Sirisena, to represent the Sri Lanka People's Front, the party he formed and served as shadow leader. He took the step after Sirisena dissolved Parliament and called for fresh elections, aiming to form a base independent of Sirisena. Rajapaksa, who is popular among Sri Lankans for winning a decades-long civil war that ended in 2009, was the party's biggest crowd-puller. FILE - In this Saturday, Dec. 15, 2018 file photo, Sri Lanka's disputed prime minister Mahinda Rajapaksa folds his hands in prayer as he is blessed by a Buddhist monk after signing his resignation paper in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Members of Sri Lanka's Parliament on Tuesday questioned whether Rajapaksa, who recently quit as prime minister, can hold his seat after earlier relinquishing membership in the political party that he represented in the last election. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena) However, the Supreme Court restored the same Parliament, calling its dissolution illegal. Rajapaksa resigned as prime minister on Saturday, ending weeks of political instability in the country. The crisis was triggered by Sirisena's move to withdraw his party from a national unity government, sack Wickremesinghe as prime minister and appoint Rajapaksa in his place. Wickremesinghe insisted that he was removed illegally, while Rajapaksa failed to secure majority support in Parliament. Sirisena dissolved Parliament and called for fresh elections, but the Supreme Court suspended the move and restored Parliament. Later, the court issued a final decision, declaring the dissolution of Parliament and the call for elections illegal. By that time, Rajapaksa's opponents had defeated him in two no-confidence votes, but he held on to the office with Sirisena's support until the Court of Appeal suspended him and his Cabinet from functioning in their offices. Rajapaksa and his suspended ministers went to the Supreme Court seeking to remove their suspensions, but the court refused. Rajapaksa was then forced to resign to avert a crisis that would have prevented the government from spending state funds from Jan. 1 without a budget. Sirisena then restored Wickremesinghe, the man he ousted in October, as prime minister. VATICAN CITY (AP) - Pope Francis announced Tuesday a shakeup of the Vatican's communications operations, replacing the longtime editor of the Holy See newspaper and naming a prominent Italian journalist to coordinate the editorial line of all Vatican media. Andrea Tornielli, Vatican reporter for Turin daily La Stampa, was named to the new position of editorial director for the Dicastery of Communications, responsible for coordinating the Vatican's editorial operations. In addition, the Vatican named an Italian writer and professor, Andrea Monda, to become editor of L'Osservatore Romano newspaper. He replaces Giovanni Maria Vian, a church historian and journalist who has headed the daily since 2007. The Vatican's media operations have been undergoing a problematic reform process aimed at reducing redundancies and improving coordination. Among its victims was Vatican Radio and its vast multilingual broadcasts. The first head of the revamped umbrella communications office, which gathered all Vatican media under one department, was forced to resign earlier this year after he misrepresented a letter from retired Pope Benedict XVI and released a doctored photo of it. Francis named Paolo Ruffini, who had led the broadcaster of the Italian bishops' conference, to replace him - the first time a layman had been named to head a Holy See department. In a statement Tuesday, Ruffini said both Tornielli and Monda were bridge-builders who know how to speak to various generations and develop new means of communications. Pope Francis waves to faithful during the Angelus noon prayer in St. Peter's Square, at the Vatican, Sunday, Dec. 16, 2018. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia) Tornielli runs a must-read Vatican blog, Vatican Insider, and is the author of several books about Francis that benefited from access to the pope himself. Tornielli's latest was a forensic critique of an 11-page document by a retired Vatican ambassador accusing Francis of covering up for a disgraced ex-American cardinal. Monda, for his part, has taught religion and literature at various pontifical universities since 2000 and has written cultural articles for Italian Catholic publications, the Vatican said. L'Osservatore Romano, with its storied 150-year history and daily and weekly editions, had sought to retain a certain editorial independence from the rest of the Vatican's other media operations during the reform. Under Vian's leadership, the paper broadened its cultural coverage and launched a women's monthly magazine, "Women Church World," among other things. WASHINGTON (AP) - The Latest on former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn and the Russia investigation (all times local): 7:30 p.m. Judge Emmet Sullivan is throwing another wrench into former national security adviser Michael Flynn's plans. Just hours after delaying Flynn's sentencing, Sullivan is now saying Flynn must stay within 50 miles of the District of Columbia come Jan. 4. Flynn had been allowed to travel freely under the conditions laid out by another judge. But Sullivan says he only learned of that today. He is now requiring Flynn to get his permission before he travels outside that zone, as he typically does in such cases. The order could cause some complications for Flynn, who has been living in Middletown, Rhode Island, near his family. President Donald Trump's former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russia during the presidential transition, arrives with his wife Lori Andrade, for his sentencing at the U.S. District Court in Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta) Sullivan says he is approving Flynn's already planned international travel but will also require him to surrender his passport in January. __ 2:25 p.m. The White House says it is not backing down from its criticism of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's interview of Mike Flynn, the former Trump national security adviser who pleaded guilty to lying to the law enforcement agency. Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders is repeating her allegation that the FBI "ambushed" Flynn in an interview in which he denied contacts with Russian officials. Flynn later acknowledged having lied to investigators during the interview. She says of the FBI criticism: "We don't have any reason to want to walk that back." Sanders had no comment on a federal judge delaying Flynn's sentencing in the matter Tuesday, other than saying, "We wish General Flynn well." ___ 1:05 p.m. A federal judge has agreed to delay former national security adviser Michael Flynn's sentencing so he can continue cooperating with the Russia probe. U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan on Tuesday set a status conference for March. Attorneys for Flynn asked the judge to postpone the sentencing. The stunning request came after Sullivan warned Flynn that if he were sentenced as scheduled Tuesday, he might not get all the credit for his cooperation with investigators that he is entitled to. Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his Russia contacts. Prosecutors had recommended no prison time, citing his cooperation. But the judge's rebuke raised the prospect that Flynn could get a harsher sentence. ___ 12:15 p.m. A federal judge has declared a recess until 12:30 p.m. at the sentencing hearing for former national security adviser Michael Flynn. U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan said Tuesday that he "can't hide my disgust, my disdain" for this criminal offense. Flynn pleaded guilty last year to lying to the FBI about his Russia contacts. Prosecutors are not seeking any prison time for Flynn, citing extensive cooperation in the special counsel's Russia probe. Sullivan said he'll take into account Flynn's service to the country and his cooperation, but will also factor in aggravating factors in deciding his sentence. ___ 12:05 p.m. A federal judge is telling former national security adviser Michael Flynn that "arguably you sold your country out." U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan says he "can't hide my disgust, my disdain" for this criminal offense. He says Flynn committed a "very serious offense" by lying to the FBI on the premises of the White House. The judge is asking Flynn if he wants to postpone his sentencing so that he can get full credit for his cooperation. He says he'll take into account Flynn's service to the country and his cooperation, but will also factor in aggravating factors in deciding his sentence. ___ 12:00 p.m. The White House was still questioning the FBI's tactics in how it handled Michael Flynn's case shortly before President Donald Trump's former national security adviser's sentencing Tuesday. White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders is claiming in an interview with Fox News that Flynn was "ambushed by investigators" and alleges the FBI "broke every standard protocol" and "went outside of the bounds and the scope of the way that they should operate" when they interviewed him in January 2017. Flynn's lawyers have suggested that investigators discouraged him from having an attorney present and never informed him it was a crime to lie. But Flynn told the judge at Tuesday's hearing that he did indeed know that it was a crime to lie to the FBI. He also said he didn't want to formally challenge the interview. ___ 11:55 a.m. A prosecutor with special counsel Robert Mueller's office says it's possible that former national security adviser Michael Flynn may continue to cooperate going forward. But prosecutor Brandon Van Grack told a judge at the sentencing hearing Tuesday that the government was ready to sentence Flynn because of the extensive cooperation he's already given, which includes help that led to a foreign lobbying indictment in Virginia that was made public a day earlier. Van Grack did not elaborate on the type of investigations or issues that Flynn might be called upon to cooperate with in the future. Normally, defendants are sentenced at the conclusion of their cooperation so that a judge can evaluate how much credit they deserve for helping the government. ___ 11:25 a.m. A federal judge is making sure that former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn entered his guilty plea knowingly and voluntarily. That's because of a defense memo in which Flynn said the FBI never warned him that it was against the law to lie to federal agents. He pleaded guilty last year to lying to the FBI. U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan is asking Flynn a series of questions Tuesday to make sure that Flynn wants to move forward with his sentencing hearing. Flynn told the judge that he did indeed know that it was a crime to lie to the FBI. He also says he doesn't want to formally challenge the FBI's interview of him. ___ 10:15 a.m. Former national security adviser Michael Flynn has arrived at the federal courthouse in Washington ahead of his sentencing hearing. Flynn is to be sentenced at 11 a.m. on Tuesday for lying to the FBI about contacts with the Russian ambassador to the United States. He'll be the first White House official punished in special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into potential coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia. Prosecutors are not seeking any prison time for Flynn, citing extensive cooperation that has included 19 meetings with investigators. The sentencing decision will be up to U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan. ___ 7:05 a.m. President Donald Trump is wishing ex-national security adviser Michael Flynn "good luck" in court as Flynn awaits sentencing for lying to the FBI. Trump tweeted hours before Flynn's sentencing Tuesday in federal court in Washington that it "will be interesting to see what he has to say, despite tremendous pressure being put on him, about Russian Collusion in our great and, obviously, highly successful political campaign." The president adds: "There was no Collusion!" In another tweet, Trump again disparages the investigation into possible coordination between his campaign and Russia as a "Witch Hunt." Flynn's lawyers have suggested investigators discouraged him from having an attorney present during a 2017 interview and didn't inform him lying is a crime, but prosecutors scoff at that argument. Flynn has cooperated with the Russia investigation. The special counsel's investigation has produced dozens of criminal charges and four guilty pleas from Trump associates. ___ 12:25 a.m. Michael Flynn will likely walk out of a courtroom a free man due to his extensive cooperation with federal prosecutors, but the run-up to his sentencing Tuesday has exposed raw tensions over an FBI interview in which he lied about his Russian contacts. Flynn has not tried to retract his guilty plea, and there's every indication the sentencing will proceed as scheduled. Flynn's lawyers have suggested that investigators discouraged President Donald Trump's then-national security adviser from having an attorney present during the January 2017 interview and never informed him it was a crime to lie. Prosecutors responded that Flynn didn't need to be warned it's a crime to lie to federal agents to know the importance of telling the truth. President Donald Trump's former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and his wife Lori Andrade arrive at federal court in Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster) BERLIN (AP) - The Washington-based Fulbright Association says its 2018 prize for international understanding will go to German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The organization said Tuesday it had decided to award the prestigious prize to Merkel "for her remarkable, compassionate leadership and her strong commitment to mutual understanding, international cooperation and peace." Merkel has been Germany's leader since 2005 and a central figure in international diplomacy and crisis-resolution efforts in Europe and beyond. In her most controversial decision, she allowed large numbers of asylum-seekers into Germany in 2015. She was named Time magazine's "Person of the Year" in 2015 and earlier this month Harvard University announced she would be its commencement speaker next year. Merkel will be given the Fulbright award at a ceremony in Berlin on Jan. 28. MOSCOW (AP) - President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday rejected the U.S. claim that Russia developed a new cruise missile in violation of a key nuclear treaty, arguing that Russia has no need for such a land-based weapon because it already has similar missiles on its ships and aircraft. Washington warned this month it would suspend its obligations under the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) in 60 days if Russia did not return to full compliance. The U.S. claims the 9M729 cruise missile breaches the INF, which bans all land-based cruise and ballistic missiles with a range of 500 to 5,500 kilometers (300 to 3,400 miles.) Moscow has repeatedly denied the accusation. Speaking to Russia's top military brass Tuesday, Putin rejected the U.S. claim of developing a land-based cruise missile, saying Russia now has similar air- and sea-launched weapons to do the job. Putin said the Russian military has successfully tested air-launched Kh-101 and sea-launched Kalibr cruise missiles with a range of 4,500 kilometers (2,790 miles) in combat in Syria. "It has probably made our partners worry, but it doesn't violate the INF treaty," Putin said. Putin said the treaty signed by U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev didn't limit sea- and air-launched cruise missiles, which the Soviet Union didn't have at the time and the United States did in significant numbers. Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting with the top military staff in the Russian Defense Ministry's headquarters in Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. Putin said that new Russian weapons have no foreign equivalents, helping ensure the nation's security for decades to come. (Mikhail Klimentyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP) The Russian president argued that the pact represented "unilateral disarmament" for the Soviet Union, adding: "God only knows why the Soviet leadership did it." He emphasized that with Russian strategic bombers and navy ships now armed with long-range cruise missiles, it makes the development of similar land-based weapons redundant. "It makes no difference whatsoever if we have a Kalibr-armed submarine or aircraft carrying missiles or similar weapons ashore," he said. "We can strike any targets within the range of 4,500 kilometers from the territory of Russia." Putin added, however, that Russia could easily build such land-based missiles if the U.S. opts out of the INF Treaty, which he described as a key stabilizing factor. "If we have similar air- and sea-launched systems, it wouldn't be that difficult for us to do some research and development to put them on land if needed," he said. Putin added that Russia also has other new weapons that aren't banned by the INF, such as the air-launched Kinzhal hypersonic missile and the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle, saying that they have significantly bolstered Russia's military capability. "No one has hypersonic weapons yet, but we have it," he said. Kinzhal has already been commissioned by the military, which put them in service with a squadron of MiG-31 fighter jets. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said Tuesday that the aircraft carrying missiles have flown 89 patrol missions over the Caspian and the Black Seas this year. Shoigu said the Avangard will enter service with the military next year. Putin suggested that other countries that built intermediate-range missiles should be engaged in talks on a possible new agreement. "Why not start talks on their accession to the treaty, or discuss parameters of a new agreement?" he said. FILE - This undated file photo provided Tuesday, Sept. 19, 2017, by Russian Defense Ministry official web site shows a Russian Iskander-K missile launched during a military exercise at a training ground at the Luzhsky Range, near St. Petersburg, Russia. President Vladimir Putin rejected the U.S. claim that Russia violated the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty by developing a new cruise missile, saying that Russia has other weapons that can do the job. (Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP/File) Russian President Vladimir Putin makes an address during a meeting in the Russian Defense Ministry's headquarters in Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. Putin said that new Russian weapons have no foreign equivalents, helping ensure the nation's security for decades to come. (Mikhail Klimentyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP) Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, pins a medal on a military banner during a meeting with the top military staff in the Russian Defense Ministry's headquarters in Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. Putin said that new Russian weapons have no foreign equivalents, helping ensure the nation's security for decades to come. (Mikhail Klimentyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP) Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting with the top military staff in the Russian Defense Ministry's headquarters in Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. Putin said that new Russian weapons have no foreign equivalents, helping ensure the nation's security for decades to come. (Mikhail Klimentyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP) Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting with the top military staff in the Russian Defense Ministry's headquarters in Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. Putin said that new Russian weapons have no foreign equivalents, helping ensure the nation's security for decades to come. (Mikhail Klimentyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP) NEW YORK (AP) - James Patterson has renewed a most welcome holiday publishing tradition - bonuses for independent bookstore employees. The best-selling author announced Tuesday that 333 workers each will receive $750. The winners, nominated by customers and colleagues among others, are listed on the web site of the American Booksellers Association. Patterson has given more than $1 million to individual book sellers over the past five years and has donated millions to libraries and literacy programs. In a statement Tuesday, Patterson said book sellers have used the money for everything from fixing a car to paying a dental bill. He said he was happy to make "a small difference" in the lives of people who had helped so many in their communities. ___ On the Internet: https://www.bookweb.org/james-patterson-holiday-bonus-recipients-2018 LOS ANGELES (AP) - Actor Shirley MacLaine will receive AARP the Magazine's lifetime achievement honor at the Movies for Grownups Awards next year. The magazine announced Tuesday that MacLaine will accept the Career Achievement Award at a ceremony on Feb. 4, 2019 in Beverly Hills, California. The 18th annual Movies for Grownups Awards will premiere on PBS on Feb. 15. MacLaine won an Oscar for best actress for her role in the 1983 film "Terms of Endearment." She's an Emmy winner and received the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the 1998 Golden Globe Awards. MacLaine says in a statement that the award "means a lot to me personally." The actor joins previous Career Achievement honorees including Helen Mirren, Morgan Freeman, Michael Douglas, Kevin Costner, Susan Sarandon, Robert Redford and Robert De Niro. VATICAN CITY (AP) - The Vatican on Tuesday released the first details of Pope Francis' upcoming high-stakes sex abuse prevention summit, making clear that bishops attending the gathering must reach out to victims before they get to Rome and that accountability is very much on the agenda. Organizers of the Feb. 21-24 summit warned participants in a letter that failure to address the scandal now threatens the very credibility of the Catholic Church around the world. As a first step, they urged the estimated 130 presidents of national bishops' conferences attending the summit to meet with survivors in their home countries "to learn firsthand the suffering that they have endured." Francis invited the church leaders to the meeting to develop a comprehensive response to what has become the gravest threat to his papacy, as the abuse and cover-up scandal erupted anew in the U.S., Chile and elsewhere this year. Survivors have been dubious about what the meeting can accomplish, given the limited time, the varied experiences and needs of national churches and the fact that the problem has already been known for years. "They're just now getting around to this? Good Lord, where've you been?" marveled Barbara Dorris, a survivor of abuse who has been a longtime outspoken advocate for victims. Pope Francis waves to faithful during the Angelus noon prayer in St. Peter's Square, at the Vatican, Sunday, Dec. 16, 2018. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia) Noting that the U.S. scandal first emerged in 2001, she said: "It's been 17 years. If you haven't met with survivors in 17 years, I think that says a lot right there." In revealing the first details of the meeting, the Vatican said it would focus on three main areas: responsibility, accountability and transparency. The reference to accountability suggests that church leaders will confront not only the crimes of priests who rape and molest minors, but the cover-up by their superiors as well. Abuse victims and their advocates have long blasted the Vatican for failing to discipline and remove bishops who fail to protect their flocks, and until recently Francis appeared unwilling to significantly change course. He appointed four key clerics to prepare the meeting: Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich, a Francis-appointee and staunch supporter, Mumbai Cardinal Oswald Gracias, a member of the pope's informal cabinet, as well as the Vatican's leading abuse experts, Maltese Archbishop Charles Scicluna and the Rev. Hans Zollner. Their letter to the global church hierarchy laid out the stakes. "Absent a comprehensive and communal response, not only will we fail to bring healing to victim survivors, but the very credibility of the church to carry on the mission of Christ will be in jeopardy throughout the world," they wrote. "Each of us needs to own this challenge, coming together in solidarity, humility and penitence to repair the damage done, sharing a common commitment to transparency and holding everyone in the church accountable," they said. Their appeal for bishops to meet with victims was an indication that many in the church hierarchy continue to deny the scope of the problem and have never met with a victim. Some bishops' conferences in Africa, for example, have yet to respond to a 2011 Vatican request to develop guidelines to deal with cases. Vatican spokesman Greg Burke said that meeting with victims "is a concrete way of putting victims first and acknowledging the horror of what happened." Francis announced in September that he was convening the summit, signaling awareness at the top of the church that clergy abuse is a global problem and not restricted to some parts of the world or a few Western countries. He did so as he worked to recover from his botched handling of the scandal in Chile, sparked earlier this year when he repeatedly discredited victims of a notorious Chilean predator priest and defended a bishop who had protected him. Francis eventually admitted he was wrong, apologized to the victims and secured offers of resignation from every accused bishop in the country. Francis took action after The Associated Press challenged him on the case and produced evidence that he had received victims' complaints. Francis' papacy was later jolted by accusations from a retired Vatican ambassador that the pope himself rehabilitated now-disgraced American ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who was accused of molesting and harassing adult seminarians. Francis hasn't responded to the allegations, though he has ordered a limited investigation into them. Expectations for the February summit, already high after a year of crisis, took on greater import last month after the Vatican blocked U.S. bishops from taking action to impose new accountability measures on themselves. The Vatican never fully explained why it halted the U.S. measures, part of the communications breakdowns that occasionally bedevil the Vatican. The details of the summit were announced on the same day the Vatican announced a shakeup in its communications operation. Francis named veteran Vatican correspondent Andrea Tornielli as editorial director coordinating Vatican media. And he tapped Italian writer and professor Andrea Monda to head the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano. Monda replaces Giovanni Maria Vian, a church historian and journalist who has headed the daily since 2007 and now becomes its emeritus editor. CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) - More than 1 years since North Carolina's "bathroom bill" was repealed, Charlotte is spending millions to try to attract the visitors turned off by the measure seen as allowing discrimination against LGBTQ residents. Through a public records request, The Charlotte Observer learned Charlotte Regional Visitors Authority has earmarked $3 million total these past two fiscal years for "Post HB2 Marketing/Sales support." CRVA spokeswoman Laura White says the money is for a "comprehensive place branding strategy" to promote Charlotte in regional markets and improve the city's image after House Bill 2 and the unrest that followed the fatal 2016 police shooting of a black man, Keith Lamont Scott. The CRVA's annual report noted North Carolina remains under a travel ban from six states, following the replacement of HB2 with a compromise measure. ___ Information from: The Charlotte Observer, http://www.charlotteobserver.com LOVINGSTON, Va. (AP) - The Atlantic Coast Pipeline has sued a Virginia county over a zoning decision, in an attempt to move the project forward. The Lynchburg News & Advance reports that the Dec. 6 lawsuit filed against Nelson County is the first time the pipeline has sued a locality during the years-long approval process. The lawsuit was filed three days after Nelson County's Board of Zoning Appeals denied the company's variance requests for floodplain crossings. The lawsuit seeks a judgment stating the Natural Gas Act pre-empts the county's floodplain ordinance. A statement from the pipeline's lead partner, Dominion Energy, said they had no choice but to turn to federal court. Nelson County Supervisor Jesse Rutherford says the lawsuit doesn't come as a surprise. The county has yet to appoint legal counsel. ___ Information from: The News & Advance, http://www.newsadvance.com/ LONDON (AP) - The Latest on Britain's exit from the European Union (all times local): 2:30 p.m. British Defense Secretary says around 3,500 troops will be on standby in support of the government to help deal with any disruptions in the event of a "no-deal" Brexit. Gavin Williamson says that while the military hasn't had a formal request to help, "what we will do is have 3,500 service personnel held at readiness - including regulars and reserves - in order to support any government department on any contingencies they may need." The comments came as Britain's Cabinet stepped up preparations for the possibility of a disorderly Brexit. With 14 weeks to go before Britain's departure from the bloc, it remains unclear whether the country will leave with a deal or crash out without one - an outcome that risks touching off gridlock at ports and shortages of goods. ___ A pro-Brexit demonstrator waves a placard with others outside the Houses of Parliament in London Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. The British Cabinet was meeting Tuesday to discuss ramping up preparations for Britain's departure from the European Union without a deal, after Prime Minister Theresa May postponed Parliament's vote on her divorce agreement until mid-January. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant) 1:55 p.m. The British government has decided to ramp up preparations for a "no-deal" Brexit, saying it must be ready for the possibility of that default option. Brexit Secretary Steve Barclay says that while the government remains committed to Prime Minister Theresa May's deal, it needs to be ready in the event it does not come to pass. Following a Cabinet meeting, Barclay said preparations for a disorderly Brexit need to be "much more of a priority for businesses up and down the country." He says with just over 100 days until the March 29 official Brexit date, "a responsible government is preparing for the eventuality that we leave without a deal." ___ 9:15 a.m. The British Cabinet was meeting Tuesday to discuss ramping up preparations for Britain's departure from the European Union without a deal, after Prime Minister Theresa May postponed Parliament's vote on her divorce agreement until mid-January. The discussions are expected to center on how 2 billion pounds ($2.5 billion) in government funding to absorb the potential economic chaos is to be allocated. Communities Secretary James Brokenshire told the BBC that May's government had been taking the prospect of no deal seriously for some time, but that it was "right and proper" to prepare for a disorderly Brexit. But May's Cabinet is divided between Brexiteers who think a no-deal departure could be managed to ease the economic shock and more pro-EU lawmakers who say no-deal Brexit must be avoided at all costs. ___ Follow AP's full coverage of Brexit at: https://www.apnews.com/Brexit Pro and anti Brexit demonstrators wave their placards and flags outside the Houses of Parliament in London, Tuesday Dec. 18, 2018. The British Cabinet was meeting Tuesday to discuss ramping up preparations for Britain's departure from the European Union without a deal, after Prime Minister Theresa May postponed Parliament's vote on her divorce agreement until mid-January. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant) Baroness Evans, left, Leader of the House of Lords with James Brokenshire the Secretary of State for Housing and Andrea Leadsom, Leader of the House of Commons leave after they attended a cabinet meeting at 10 Downing Street, in London Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant) Stephen Barclay the Secretary of State for leaving the EU, walks out of 10 Downing Street, following a cabinet meeting in London Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant) In this photo provided by the UK Parliament, Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May delivers a speech in the House of Commons in London, Monday, Dec. 17, 2018. Prime Minister Theresa May said Monday that the postponed vote in Parliament on Britain's Brexit agreement with the European Union will be held the week of Jan. 14 - more than a month after it was originally scheduled and just 10 weeks before Britain leaves the EU. (Jessica Taylor/UK Parliament via AP) Penny Mordaunt Secretary of State for International Development looks back towards the media after attending a cabinet meeting at 10 Downing Street, in London Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant) Liam Fox Secretary of State for International Trade, left with Jeremy Wright the Secretary of State for Culture leave following a cabinet meeting at 10 Downing Street, in London Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant) Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May leaves 10 Downing Street, in London Monday, Dec. 17, 2018, for the House of Commons to make a statement on the EU Summit held recently in Brussels. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant) THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) - An appeals court has upheld a ban on a Dutch arm of the Bandidos Motorcycle Club, agreeing with a lower court's conclusion that the biker gang forms a threat to public order. In a written ruling issued Tuesday, the appeals court in Arnhem said that members of the Bandidos Motorcycle Club Holland operate in "an atmosphere and culture of violence and threat of violence." But in a blow to Dutch prosecutors' campaign against biker gangs, the appeals court says it is not banning other Dutch branches of the U.S.-based gang or overseas branches. Prosecutors say the gang has dozens of members in the Netherlands. It wasn't immediately clear how many belong to the Bandidos Motorcycle Club Holland and how many to other Dutch branches of the gang. YAOUNDE, Cameroon (AP) - Cameroon's military says it has killed seven suspected English-speaking separatist rebels in Bamenda in the North West region. Four soldiers were rushed to the local hospital, said a health worker, but the military has not reported any dead. The region's army commander, Gen. Agha Robinson, said the military is finding it difficult to battle the rebels because they hide among civilians. The fighting started Monday evening and continued throughout the night, as civilians fled their neighborhoods amid sporadic gunfire. A local student, Stanley Fru, 23, said he saw a stray bullet shatter the leg of an elderly woman who was going to the market early Tuesday morning. "The military was chasing fighters," he said. "All of them were shooting indiscriminately." The fighting in Cameroon's restive region erupted just days after President Paul Biya freed 289 suspected separatists, many of whom later urged the government to release their leaders who remain in jail. "We are urging the fighters to drop their guns," said Deben Tchoffo, the governor of the North West region. He said that the release of the suspected terrorists should be taken as an indication that Biya "wanted peace to return" and pledged to "take care of them and reintegrate them socially and economically." Cameroon's English-speaking separatists have been protesting since 2016 against what they claim is discrimination by the French-speaking majority. Initially the protests by teachers in the country's English-speaking region were peaceful, but in response to a government crackdown some separatists have begun waging a violent campaign. The Cameroonian government said that at least 1,200 people have died in the violence since January, which started after Nigeria detained and extradited separatist leader Julius Ayuk Tabe and 46 other alleged separatists to Cameroon. Several of the recently released suspected separatists said that there will not be peace until Tabe and the others are also freed. The separatists, largely members of the Anglophone population, which accounts for about one-fifth of the largely French-speaking country's 25 million people, have vowed to destabilize the region. ___ Follow Africa news at https://twitter.com/AP_Africa COLLEGE PARK, Md. (AP) - An internet troll who harassed a black college student with racist messages on social media has agreed to a court settlement requiring him to get "anti-hate training," apologize in writing and on video and publicly renounce white supremacy. Tuesday's settlement agreement would resolve Taylor Dumpson's claims against one of the defendants she sued in April over an online harassment campaign orchestrated by a neo-Nazi website publisher. Her lawsuit says The Daily Stormer publisher Andrew Anglin directed his site's readers to cyberbully her after she became the first black woman to serve as American University's student government president. Dumpson sued Anglin and two people who harassed her online. Her settlement agreement is with Oregon resident Evan James McCarty, who posted on Twitter under the pseudonym "Byron de la Vandal," an apparent reference to Byron De La Beckwith, who assassinated civil rights leader Medgar Evers in 1963. Dumpson's attorneys previously asked the federal court in Washington, D.C., to enter default judgments against Anglin and another defendant, Brian Andrew Ade, for their failure to respond to the suit. Anglin and Ade aren't involved in the settlement. Dumpson's ordeal began a day after her May 2017 inauguration as student government president, when someone hung bananas with hateful messages from nooses on the university's campus. Authorities investigated but didn't identify any suspects. Taylor Dumpson, who was the first black woman to serve as student government president at American University and who has been the target of racist trolls, poses for a photo on Friday, Dec. 14, 2018. Her location is not included in this caption for her safety. Evan James McCarty, who harassed Dumpson on social media, agreed on Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018, to a court settlement requiring him to get "anti-hate training" and apologize and publicly renounce white supremacy. (AP Photo) Anglin posted an article about the incident, including links to Dumpson's Facebook page and the American University Student Government's Twitter page. In response to an announcement about Dumpson's whereabouts, McCarty tweeted a picture of bananas captioned, "READY THE TROOPS," and wrote, "OOGA BOOGA," in another tweet directed at her, her suit says. Dumpson, now a 22-year-old law school student, said she wants her lawsuit to "hold people accountable for their bigoted actions." She believes the partial settlement "could raise awareness of issues of racial justice, while also providing for educational benefits." "I guess I was open to the idea that even the perpetrator of a racially motivated act of bias could still be more or less reformed," she told The Associated Press. Deb and James McCarty, Evan's parents, said their family has "sincere empathy" for Dumpson and is "profoundly sorry for the harm caused her." They said their son "is a different person than he was when he hid behind an alias and was persuaded into hateful activity on the internet." "Evan, our son, feels deep regret about his actions and is committed to making changes and moving forward in a positive way," they said in a statement. "At this time, he is focused on continuing to make progress, pursuing his degree, contributing to his community and committed to making amends." Dumpson's lawyers hope the settlement agreement could become a model for encouraging others to abandon white supremacy. McCarty agreed to apologize directly to Dumpson in a video conference that she can record for advocacy and educational purposes. He also agreed to attend at least one year of anti-hate training sessions with a licensed therapist or a qualified counselor, and to complete at least four academic courses on race and gender issues. In addition, McCarty must complete at least 200 hours of community service promoting "racial justice and civil rights" and publicly advocate against hate. "This advocacy could take many forms, such as direct outreach to other white supremacists to attempt de-radicalization," the agreement says. Dumpson is represented by attorneys from the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. Kristen Clarke, the Washington-based group's president and executive director, said the agreement should have a "chilling effect" on those who anonymously spew hate online. "At the end of the day, our settlement should send a strong message to white supremacists and neo-Nazis all across the country that they will be held accountable for their conduct," she said. Anglin's site takes its name from Der Sturmer, a newspaper that published Nazi propaganda in Nazi-era Germany, and includes sections called "Jewish Problem" and "Race War." Domain name registration companies Google and GoDaddy yanked the site's web address after Anglin published a post mocking the woman killed by a man who plowed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. Dumpson's case is one of three federal lawsuits filed against Anglin by targets of his racist and anti-Semitic trolling campaigns. Montana real estate agent Tanya Gersh sued Anglin in April 2017, claiming anonymous internet trolls bombarded her family with hateful and threatening messages after Anglin published their personal information. Muslim-American radio host Dean Obeidallah sued Anglin in his native Ohio in August 2017. Obeidallah's federal suit says Anglin falsely labeled him as the "mastermind" behind a deadly bombing at a concert in England. Dumpson's suit says she was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and "feels constantly afraid and on edge," terrified to leave her home at night. "It's one of the first things I think about in the morning and one of the last things I think about when I go to sleep," she said. Her suit asks the court to rule that the defendants violated the District of Columbia Human Rights Act of 1977 and the D.C. Bias-Related Crimes Act of 1989. The court hasn't ruled yet. SMITH CENTER, Kan. (AP) - Authorities say investigators shot and wounded a 15-year-old after he attacked a woman, fled on horseback and then fired on law enforcement in Kansas. The Kansas Bureau of Investigation says Smith County sheriff's deputies responded to a rural home on Saturday where a 66-year-old woman reported being restrained, beaten and choked. She was taken to a hospital. The bureau says the teen fled on horseback. Kansas Highway Patrol troopers later found the armed teen and spent a few hours trying to apprehend him. Investigators say the teen fired at troopers, and two of the troopers returned fire, striking the teen. He was flown to a Nebraska hospital. The Kansas Bureau of Investigation says he remained hospitalized Tuesday in serious but stable condition. No law enforcement officers were hurt. TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) - Calling her suspension "malicious" and politically-motivated, a former Florida elections official is asking a federal judge to reinstate her after she was removed from office by Gov. Rick Scott. Embattled Broward elections supervisor Brenda Snipes filed a federal lawsuit Monday against Scott and Senate President Bill Galvano, who are both Republicans. Snipes is a Democrat who worked in one of the state's Democratic strongholds. The lawsuit contends that Snipes' due process rights were violated and that the law allowing the governor to suspend elected officials is unconstitutional. "Snipes seeks to fight for her reputation and stand up against the embarrassment that has been caused by Governor Scott's unnecessary and malicious suspension," states the lawsuit. "There are false allegations contained within the executive order and Snipes has never had a proper forum to state her position ... At this point Governor Scott's allegations have gone unchallenged as he sits 'high' on a throne utilizing state resources to continually humiliate Snipes." Snipes, first appointed to her post by then-Gov. Jeb Bush in 2003 and then elected to the job, came under withering criticism for her handling of this year's elections and a legally required recount in close races for governor and U.S. Senate. At the close of the recount, Snipes agreed to resign as of Jan. 4 instead of serving out the two years left in her term. But in late November Scott suspended her immediately from office. Snipes responded by saying she was rescinding her resignation. FILE - In this Nov. 16, 2018, file photo, Broward County Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes watches as Joe D'Alessandro, Election Planning and Development Director, speaks to members of the media after a hand recount in Lauderhill, Fla. Snipes, a former Florida elections official is asking a federal judge to reinstate her after she was removed from office by Gov. Rick Scott. Snipes filed a lengthy federal lawsuit on Monday, Dec. 17, against Scott and Senate President Bill Galvano. (AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee, File) The governor said he was suspending her for misfeasance, incompetence and neglect of duty and appointed his former general counsel to take her place. In his executive order, Scott cited problems during the recount, including reports of more than 2,000 ballots being misplaced. Shortly after the recount started, Scott himself suggested possible fraud, but never offered any concrete examples. Snipes also came under fire in 2017 after she destroyed year-old ballots in violation of law. In her lawsuit, Snipes contends that allegations against her were either untrue or were caused by the governor's own interference after his U.S. Senate campaign sued her during the recount. John Tupps, a spokesman for Scott, criticized the lawsuit. "This lawsuit is a desperate move from someone who has already officially submitted her resignation," Tupps said. "This is simply an attempt by Ms. Snipes to rewrite the history of her failed leadership." The lawsuit targets Galvano because he announced last week that the state Senate would not review her case. Florida law requires the Senate to either remove or reinstate county officials who are suspended by the governor. But Galvano sent a memo to senators saying there is not enough time to investigate the allegations against Snipes before her resignation takes effect Jan. 4. He said a legal review by Senate attorneys had concluded that Snipes had rescinded her "unconditional" resignation too late. Scott replaced Snipes with Peter Antonacci, who has held several posts at the request of the governor but has no elections experience. Antonacci played a pivotal role in the controversial decision to force the ouster of Florida Department of Law Enforcement Commissioner Gerald Bailey in 2015. Antonacci had been president of Florida's economic development agency before he was sworn last week to replace Snipes. BRUSSELS (AP) - The European Union's top diplomat called Tuesday on Kosovo to lift tariffs on goods from Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina as the former Serbian territory faced pushback from longtime allies such as the EU and NATO along with familiar hostilities with Serbia. Kosovo last month slapped a 100-percent tax on Serbian imports, apparently in retaliation after its bid to join the international police organization, Interpol, failed amid intense Serb lobbying. EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said that "it is in the interest of Kosovo to immediately revoke this decision." She urged Pristina to settle its grievances through dialogue. Kosovo broke away from Serbia in 2008 and unilaterally declared independence. Belgrade doesn't recognize the move, nor do a small group of EU states, like Spain for example that fear that recognition might fuel breakaway tendencies in their own countries. Mogherini's appeal came as Kosovo's prime minister accused her of mishandling EU-backed talks on normalizing ties with Serbia. Ramush Haradinaj said the so-called Pristina-Belgrade dialogue led by Mogherini "has not given its expected products." Kosovo prime minister Ramush Haradinaj, center, holds government meeting in Kosovo capital Pristina on Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. Haradinaj blamed Europe Union's foreign policy chief for "deviating the dialogue" on normalizing ties with Serbia. Haradinaj said that, while Serbia is taking major steps toward the integration with the bloc, his country's residents have remained "in a ghetto," not enjoying the visa-free travel to EU countries though it has fulfilled all requirements. (AP Photo/Visar Kryeziu) He said that while Serbia is taking major steps toward the EU integration, Kosovo residents remain "in a ghetto," not enjoying visa-free travel to EU countries even though it claims to have fulfilled the requirements. A news conference planned between Mogherini and Haradinaj in Brussels on Monday was cancelled without reason. Mogherini said Tuesday it was because "we didn't have any news to give," and she noted that Haradinaj didn't raise her handling of the talks with her. Haradinaj has said his government will only lift the tariffs once Serbia recognizes Kosovo's independence. "It is absurd to ask Kosovo to lift the only product it has for the dialogue (with Serbia)," he said at a news conference Tuesday in Pristina. "We cannot accept only to be loaded with tasks and our people remain isolated in a ghetto," he added. Mogherini, speaking alongside Serbian Prime Minister Ana Brnabic, expressed concerned about a return to conflict and warned that "the alternative to dialogue is very dangerous." NATO ambassadors, meanwhile, were weighing Tuesday Kosovo's decision to transform its security force into an army. Belgrade has warned that creating an army in a place it considers Serbian territory could result in an armed intervention. But Kosovo's parliament on Friday overwhelmingly approved the army's formation in what President Hashim Thaci described as "an irreversible act." NATO and the EU have criticized the move, and NATO could reduce cooperation with Kosovo security services, although it seems unlikely to cut the number of troops in its own security force there, KFOR. "There is a long-standing agreement that NATO will have to re-examine our level of engagement with the Kosovo Security Force, should its mandate evolve," spokeswoman Oana Lungescu said in a statement. She underlined that NATO's KFOR will continue "to ensure a safe and secure environment." U.S. President Donald Trump also weighed in, urging Kosovo leaders to reach a reconciliation agreement with Serbia. In a letter to President Thaci, Trump said the EU talks were a chance to reach an "historic accord" and "failure to capitalize on this unique opportunity would be a tragic setback." "I look forward to hosting you and President Aleksander Vucic at the White House to celebrate," Trump wrote. ___ Llazar Semini reported from Tirana, Albania. Kosovo prime minister Ramush Haradinaj, seen on a camera monitor speaks to the media in the Kosovo capital Pristina on Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. Haradinaj blamed Europe Union's foreign policy chief for "deviating the dialogue" on normalizing ties with Serbia. Haradinaj said that, while Serbia is taking major steps toward the integration with the bloc, his country's residents have remained "in a ghetto," not enjoying the visa-free travel to EU countries though it has fulfilled all requirements. (AP Photo/Visar Kryeziu) Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic makes his final remarks of the session during a Security Council Meeting at United States headquarters, Monday, Dec. 17, 2018. The presidents of Serbia and Kosovo earlier addressed the U.N. Security Council on Monday afternoon following Kosovo's decision to transform its existing 4,000-strong security force into a regular army and Serbia's threat of armed intervention. (AP Photo/Craig Ruttle) Kosovo president Hashim Thaci, end of row at left, speaks during a Security Council Meeting at United Nations headquarters, Monday, Dec. 17, 2018, as Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, upper right, and others listen. The presidents of Serbia and Kosovo addressed the U.N. Security Council on Monday afternoon following Kosovo's decision to transform its existing 4,000-strong security force into a regular army and Serbia's threat of armed intervention. (AP Photo/Craig Ruttle) Kosovo prime minister Ramush Haradinaj, speaks to the media during a press conference in Kosovo capital Pristina on Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. Haradinaj blamed Europe Union's foreign policy chief for "deviating the dialogue" on normalizing ties with Serbia. Haradinaj said that, while Serbia is taking major steps toward the integration with the bloc, his country's residents have remained "in a ghetto," not enjoying the visa-free travel to EU countries though it has fulfilled all requirements. (AP Photo/Visar Kryeziu) Kosovo prime minister Ramush Haradinaj, right, holds a government meeting in Kosovo capital Pristina on Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. Haradinaj blamed Europe Union's foreign policy chief for "deviating the dialogue" on normalizing ties with Serbia. Haradinaj said that, while Serbia is taking major steps toward the integration with the bloc, his country's residents have remained "in a ghetto," not enjoying the visa-free travel to EU countries though it has fulfilled all requirements. (AP Photo/Visar Kryeziu) Kosovo prime minister Ramush Haradinaj, seen on a camera monitor as he speaks to the media in the Kosovo capital Pristina on Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. Haradinaj blamed Europe Union's foreign policy chief for "deviating the dialogue" on normalizing ties with Serbia. Haradinaj said that, while Serbia is taking major steps toward the integration with the bloc, his country's residents have remained "in a ghetto," not enjoying the visa-free travel to EU countries though it has fulfilled all requirements. (AP Photo/Visar Kryeziu) PHOENIX (AP) - Arizona's governor on Tuesday appointed U.S. Rep. Martha McSally to replace Sen. Jon Kyl in the seat that belonged to the late John McCain, sending the GOP congresswoman back to Washington just a month after she lost a tight race for the state's other spot in the Senate. McSally, a former air force colonel, lost to Democratic Rep. Kyrsten Sinema in November after a bruising contest in which she contended Sinema committed "treason" by making anti-war remarks in 2003. Now, McSally will join the Senate the same day that Sinema is sworn in. "Arizona needs someone who understands the critical issues, can get to work on day one, and who embodies the spirit of service," Gov. Doug Ducey said at a press conference. The governor said Sinema will be sworn in first on Jan. 3 when the Senate reconvenes after the holidays, making her Arizona's senior senator and its first woman in the chamber. "I'm going to respect the will of the voters," Ducey said. McSally will serve until 2020, when voters will elect someone to finish the final two years of McCain's term. She tried to put the heated campaign behind her. U.S. Rep. Martha McSally, R-Ariz., waits to speak during a news conference Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018, at the Capitol in Phoenix, where Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, rear, announced his decision to replace U.S. Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz. with McSally in the U.S. Senate seat that belonged to Sen. John McCain. McSally will take over after Kyl's resignation becomes effective Dec. 31. (AP Photo/Matt York) "I look forward to working closely with Kyrsten Sinema in the Senate, as we did in the House," McSally told reporters. "There's a lot of common ground between us, and I'm ready to hit it running." Sinema's spokesman didn't respond to a request for comment Tuesday. McSally also has tried to patch up frayed relations with the McCain family, whom she infuriated by following President Donald Trump's lead and not mentioning the dying senator during a signing ceremony for a defense bill named after McCain. McSally met with McCain's wife, Cindy, on Friday. "My husband's greatest legacy was placing service to AZ & USA ahead of his own self-interest," Cindy McCain tweeted Tuesday. "I respect @dougducey's decision to appoint @RepMcSally to fill the remainder of his term. Arizonans will be pulling for her, hoping that she will follow his example of selfless leadership." McSally said she would, calling the late senator an icon and hero and promising to commit "to the standard of service that Senator McCain held, putting country before self." McCain died of brain cancer in August, and his retired longtime colleague, Kyl, was appointed to his seat. Kyl said he would only commit to serving until the end of 2018 and has resigned effective Dec. 31. McSally's appointment puts Arizona back in the political spotlight a month after Democrats won their first statewide race in a decade. Democrats hope that the state swings again in 2020 and are expected to target it both in the presidential race and the contest for McCain's seat. U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego, former astronaut and current gun control advocate Mark Kelly and former Arizona Attorney General Grant Woods, who left the GOP this year, have all considered running as Democrats for the post. That they are all men may have made appointing a woman that much more desirable to the GOP. The intense interest in the seat was a factor in Ducey's convoluted decisions. He initially appointed Kyl while the governor himself was campaigning for re-election. By picking Kyl, Ducey dodged tough political decisions that could have complicated his own re-election bid. McSally is a two-term congresswoman long considered for the Senate by the state's GOP establishment. The first female combat pilot, McSally once sued the U.S. military so she would not be required to wear a head covering while stationed in the Middle East. She rose to the rank of colonel in the Air Force before entering politics. She got a taste for it working for Kyl's office as a national security aide. McSally represented a swing district in Tucson that voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. She carved out a reputation as a moderate who could win tough elections. That ended during this year's Senate campaign. She had been critical of Trump in 2016 but praised him during the midterm election and embraced a tougher stance on immigration. But McSally wasn't able to defeat Sinema, who ran as a centrist and peeled away enough moderate Republicans to win by 2 percentage points. In a postelection memo, McSally strategists argued that she did well in a strong Democratic year. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell lobbied for Ducey to select her. Still, many Arizona Republicans were disappointed by McSally's campaign and questioned whether she would be the strongest choice for McCain's seat. Ducey had limited choices - the GOP's bench is thin in Arizona and McSally was the only woman with federal experience who had campaigned statewide recently. Democrats attacked the appointment following McSally's Senate defeat. "Why appoint a loser when you could find a fresh face with a better shot in 2020?" the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee said in a statement. ___ Riccardi reported from Denver. U.S. Rep. Martha McSally, R-Ariz., speaks, during a news conference Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018, at the Capitol in Phoenix, after Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, rear, announced his decision to replace U.S. Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz. with McSally in the U.S. Senate seat that belonged to Sen. John McCain. McSally will take over after Kyl's resignation becomes effective Dec. 31. (AP Photo/Matt York) U.S. Rep. Martha McSally, R-Ariz., speaks, during a news conference Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018, at the Capitol in Phoenix, after Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, rear, announced his decision to replace U.S. Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz. with McSally in the U.S. Senate seat that belonged to Sen. John McCain. McSally will take over after Kyl's resignation becomes effective Dec. 31. (AP Photo/Matt York) Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey announces during a news conference Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018, at the Capitol in Phoenix, his appointment of U.S. Rep. Martha McSally, R-Ariz., left, to replace U.S. Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., in the U.S. Senate seat that belonged to Sen. John McCain. McSally will take over after Kyl's resignation becomes effective Dec. 31. (AP Photo/Matt York) U.S. Rep. Martha McSally, R-Ariz., speaks, during a news conference Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018, at the Capitol in Phoenix, after Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, rear, announced his decision to replace U.S. Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz. with McSally in the U.S. Senate seat that belonged to Sen. John McCain. McSally will take over after Kyl's resignation becomes effective Dec. 31. (AP Photo/Matt York) Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey announces during a news conference Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018, at the Capitol in Phoenix, his appointment of U.S. Rep. Martha McSally, R-Ariz., left, to replace U.S. Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., in the U.S. Senate seat that belonged to Sen. John McCain. McSally will take over after Kyl's resignation becomes effective Dec. 31. (AP Photo/Matt York) Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey announces during a news conference Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018, at the Capitol in Phoenix, his appointment of U.S. Rep. Martha McSally, R-Ariz., left, to replace U.S. Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., in the U.S. Senate seat that belonged to Sen. John McCain. McSally will take over after Kyl's resignation becomes effective Dec. 31. (AP Photo/Matt York) CHICAGO (AP) - Two Chicago police officers may not have seen or heard the commuter train that fatally struck them because they were focused on another train coming from the opposite direction, a department spokesman said Tuesday. Spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said "very limited" video from a body camera one of the officers was wearing helped investigators piece together how the tragedy might have happened. The officers had run onto an elevated area of the tracks Monday night on the city's far South Side to investigate gunfire. On the video, they "clearly acknowledge" a northbound train just before the southbound train hit them, Guglielmi said. "They must have thought the sound they heard was the northbound train," he said. "They must have missed the sound of the train right behind them." Officers Eduardo Marmolejo and Conrad Gary were doing surveillance after Shotspotter technology that detects the sound of gunfire alerted police about shots fired in the area. Between the sound of the first train and the fact that they were focused on finding a gunman, they were unable to move off the tracks. This undated photo provided by the Chicago Police Department shows Chicago Police Officer Eduardo Marmolejo. Marmolejo and another officer Conrad Gary were fatally struck by a train as they investigated a report of gunshots on the city's far South Side, Monday, Dec. 17, 2018, in Chicago. (Chicago Police Department via AP) The man Mamolejo and Gary were pursuing was taken into custody by other officers a short time later, and a gun was recovered near where the officers were struck. Guglielmi said the man was being questioned and had not yet been charged with any crime. "These brave young men were consumed with identifying a potential threat," Superintendent Eddie Johnson explained to reporters at a news conference late Monday night. Later, Guglielmi said, Johnson led a delegation of the department's command staff to search the area along the tracks to recover the remains of the two officers. Guglielmi said Johnson has met with the families of the two officers. The officers were assigned to the Calumet police district. Marmolejo, 36, had been a member of the department for 2 years; Gary, 31, had been on the force for 18 months. Both were married with children. Marmolejo was the father of three children, one in high school and two younger children; Gary had a 6-month-old daughter. Four Chicago police officers now have been killed in the line of duty this year. The tragedy bore similarities to the 2002 death of Chicago Police Officer Benjamin Perez, who was fatally struck by a commuter train while conducting surveillance on narcotics activity on the city's West Side. Officer Samuel Jimenez was killed in a shootout last month after he chased a gunman inside a hospital on Chicago's South Side. That shooter also killed two other people before taking his own life. And in February, Cmdr. Paul Bauer was fatally shot while pursuing a suspect in the Loop business district. The total is the highest number of Chicago officers killed in the line of duty in one year since five were killed in 2010. Their deaths mark the first time two officers died in the same incident since 1990, according to Dave Bayless, spokesman for the Chicago Police Memorial Foundation. Mayor Rahm Emanuel mourned the officers on Monday night, telling reporters, "I think it's really important that we put our arms around the Chicago Police Department and hold them up and support them at this critical juncture, because we are so dependent on their professionalism and their sense of duty." This undated photo provided by the Chicago Police Department shows Chicago Police Officer Conrad Gary. Gary and another officer Eduardo Marmolejo were fatally struck by a train as they investigated a report of gunshots on the city's far South Side, Monday, Dec. 17, 2018, in Chicago. (Chicago Police Department via AP) Police officers work the scene where two officers were killed after they were struck by a South Shore train near 103rd Street and Dauphin Avenue on Monday, Dec. 17, 2018, in Chicago. Police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi posted on Twitter that the "devastating tragedy" occurred when the officers were investigating a shots-fired call. (Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune via AP) A Chicago police officer stands on the street following the procession with the bodies as two fallen Chicago police officers arrive at the medical examiner's office in Chicago, Tuesday morning, Dec. 18, 2018. Chicago police say two officers investigating a shots-fired call on the city's far South Side have died after being struck by a train.. (Jose M. Osorio/Chicago Tribune via AP) Mourners embrace as the procession with the bodies of two fallen Chicago police officers arrive at the medical examiner's office in Chicago, Tuesday morning, Dec. 18, 2018. Chicago police say two officers investigating a shots-fired call on the city's far South Side have died after being struck by a train. (Jose M. Osorio/Chicago Tribune via AP) Passengers sit on a train while police officers work the scene where two officers were killed after they were struck by a South Shore train near 103rd Street and Dauphin Avenue on Monday, Dec. 17, 2018, in Chicago. Police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi posted on Twitter that the "devastating tragedy" occurred when the officers were investigating a shots-fired call. (Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune via AP) The procession with the bodies of two fallen Chicago police officers arrives to the medical examiner's office in Chicago, Tuesday morning, Dec. 18, 2018. Chicago police say two officers investigating a shots-fired call on the city's far South Side have died after being struck by a train.. (Jose M. Osorio/Chicago Tribune via AP) Police investigate the scene where two officers were killed after they were struck by a South Shore train near 103rd Street and Dauphin Avenue on Monday, Dec. 17, 2018, in Chicago. Police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi posted on Twitter that the "devastating tragedy" occurred when the officers were investigating a shots-fired call. (Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune via AP) WASHINGTON (AP) - The Latest on negotiations over funding President Donald Trump wants for a U.S.-Mexico border wall and the possibility of a partial government shutdown (all times local): 3:15 p.m. Senate Democrats say President Donald Trump isn't paying for his border wall from other parts of the government's budget because doing so would require approval from Congress. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer rejected White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders' suggestion Tuesday that there are ways to pay for the wall using federal money allocated to other things. Schumer said to do so, "They'd need congressional approval, and they're not getting it for the wall." The statement was the latest volley in the standoff over passing a funding bill. Trump, who vowed to make Mexico pay for the wall along the border, is insisting that any budget plan include U.S. funding. Democrats are refusing. If the standoff is not resolved, parts of the government will shut down at midnight Friday. In this Dec. 11, 2018 photo, President Donald Trump speaks during a meets with Democratic leaders the Oval Office in Washington. Trump said last week he would be "proud" to have a shutdown to get Congress to approve a $5 billion down payment to fulfill his campaign promise to build a border wall. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) ___ 3 p.m. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says he's confident that there will not be a partial government shutdown, but discussions are continuing. President Donald Trump and Democratic lawmakers are in a standoff over funding the government, and the main sticking point is Trump's demand for $5 billion in taxpayer dollars for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. McConnell proposed $1.6 billion for border security plus another $1 billion in flexible funding. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer rejected the proposal, saying Democrats would not accept a billion-dollar "slush fund." McConnell says he's "in consultation" with the White House about the path forward. He added that the administration is "extremely flexible on this issue." Asked if he's confident that the government will not shut down, McConnell said, "Yeah, I am." ___ 2:40 p.m. The White House says it's waiting to see what the Senate can pass to prevent a partial government shutdown. Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the Senate has "thrown out a number of ideas." She said that when something passes, the White House will evaluate it. Sanders says: "We want to know what can pass." Sanders says President Donald Trump has asked every Cabinet secretary to look for funding that could be used for border security. Congressional leaders have been negotiating since the White House indicated earlier in the day that Trump does not want a federal government shutdown over his demand for $5 billion for the border wall with Mexico. ___ 2:10 p.m. Democratic leaders are spurning a proposal by the top Senate Republican to avert a partial government shutdown over President Donald Trump's demand for $5 billion for a border wall with Mexico. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell proposed $1.6 billion for border security, as outlined in a bipartisan Senate bill, plus another $1 billion Trump could use on the border, according to a Democratic aide unauthorized to speak publicly about the private meeting. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer called McConnell Tuesday and rejected the proposal, saying Democrats would not accept a billion-dollar "slush fund." House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi also snubbed the proposal: "Right now what they've offered we have not accepted." The White said Tuesday that Trump might accept the Senate bill if other money was also available. -Lisa Mascaro ___ 12:55 p.m. Senate leaders are negotiating to avert a federal shutdown over President Donald Trump's demand for $5 billion for the border wall with Mexico. In talks Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell proposed $1.6 billion for border security, as outlined in a bipartisan Senate bill, plus an additional $1 billion that Trump could use on the border, according to a senior Democratic aide unauthorized to speak publicly about the private meeting. Democrats are likely to reject that, the aide said, and characterized the additional money as a "slush fund." Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi have proposed $1.3 billion. That money would not be for a wall, but for border fencing. Earlier Tuesday, the White House indicated Trump may be willing to accept the Senate bill, if other money was also available. -Lisa Mascaro ___ 11 a.m. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders says the White House is willing to work with Congress to avert a partial government shutdown. President Donald Trump has been demanding $5 billion to fund his long-promised U.S.-Mexico border wall, but Democrats have balked at giving him any more than $1.6 billion for border security. A shutdown could happen at midnight Friday. Sanders said on Fox News on Tuesday there are "other ways that we can get to that $5 billion," including one bill she says would provide $26 billion in border security, including $1.6 billion for the wall. She says, "That's something that we would be able to support" as long as it's coupled with other funding, such as using defense money on border security. She adds that, "At the end of the day, we don't want to shut down the government. We want to shut down the border from illegal immigration." ___ 12:30 a.m. Few if any signs of progress are emerging as President Donald Trump and Democratic lawmakers continue their standoff over funding the government and avoiding a partial shutdown at midnight Friday. The main sticking point is Trump's demand for $5 billion to build a border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Even a partial shutdown would leave hundreds of thousands of federal employees furloughed or working without pay over the holiday season. Costs would likely be in the billions of dollars. Trump doesn't have the votes from the Republican-led Congress to support his demand for border wall construction. Democrats are offering to continue funding at current levels, $1.3 billion, not for the wall but for fencing and other border security. The Capitol is seen at twilight in Washington, Monday, Dec. 17, 2018. The fight over President Donald Trump's $5 billion wall funds deepened Monday, threatening a partial government shutdown in a standoff that has become increasingly common in Washington. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite) FILE - In this Nov. 2, 2018, file photo, President Donald Trump's White House Senior Adviser Stephen Miller boards Air Force One for campaign rallies in West Virginia and Indiana, in Andrews Air Force Base, Md. The White House is digging in on its demand for $5 billion to build a border wall as congressional Democrats stand firm against it, pushing the federal government closer to the brink of a partial shutdown. Miller says Trump is prepared to do "whatever is necessary" to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File) UNITED NATIONS (AP) - U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley gave a hint, but no details, of the Trump administration's peace plan for Israel and the Palestinians on Tuesday, saying it's long, takes advantage of new technology, and has a lot both sides will like and things they won't like. Haley said Israelis and Palestinians as well as countries around the world have a choice: focus on the parts they dislike, which she said means returning "to the failed status quo of the last 50 years," or focus on parts they like and encourage peace negotiations to move forward. The U.S. ambassador, who said she has read the plan, told the U.N. Security Council that "both sides would benefit greatly from a peace agreement, but the Palestinians would benefit more, and the Israelis would risk more." Haley, who is stepping down at the end of the month, said moving forward to negotiations and peace "will need leaders with real vision to do it." She declared: "The world will be watching." Immediately before the meeting, eight European Union members stood outside the Security Council chamber and read a joint statement emphasizing the EU's "strong and continued commitment" to the internationally agreed requirements for Israeli-Palestinian peace - an apparent message to the Trump administration. "The EU is truly convinced that the achievement of a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders with Jerusalem as the capital of both states, that meets Israeli and Palestinian security needs, and Palestinian aspirations for statehood and sovereignty, ends the occupation and resolves all final status issues ... is the only viable and realistic way to end the conflict and achieve just and lasting peace," the statement said. Haley made no mention of any of these issues in her last speech at the council's monthly Mideast meeting, stressing instead the "unshakeable bond" between the United States and Israel, which she has reflected in her nearly two years as U.S. ambassador. "Given my record, some might mistakenly conclude that I am unsympathetic to the Palestinian people," she said. "Nothing could be further from the truth." Haley said neither Israelis nor Palestinians should make peace at "any price" but she highlighted the differences between the two sides. "Israel wants a peace agreement but it does not need one," she said. On the other hand, Haley said, the Palestinian people "are suffering terribly, while their leadership clings to 50-yar-old demands that have only become less and less realistic," and a peace agreement holds the prospects "of a massive improvement in the quality of their lives and far greater control over their political future." She said "it is with this backdrop in mind that the Trump administration has crafted its plan for peace between Israel and the Palestinians." Israel's U.N. Ambassador Danny Danon said late last month that U.S. officials have told Israel's government they expects to release the long-awaited Israeli-Palestinian peace plan in the beginning of 2019. U.S. President Donald Trump calls the plan - drafted by a team headed by his son-in-law Jared Kushner and adviser Jason Greenblatt - the "Deal of the Century." Nikolay Mladenov, the U.N. Mideast envoy, told the council he "remains concerned by the weakening of international consensus and the absence of collective efforts to achieve an end to the (Israeli) occupation and the realization of a negotiated two-state resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict." "At the end of 2018, we are nowhere closer to reviving efforts for a negotiated solution," he said. "Without a political horizon, all our collective and individual efforts merely contribute to managing the conflict rather than resolving it." Mladenov also reported to the council on Israel's compliance with a December 2016 resolution that condemned Israeli settlements in lands the Palestinians want to include in their future state and said the settlements have "no legal validity." The resolution demanded a halt to such activities for the sake of "salvaging the two-state solution." The U.N. Mideast coordinator said Israel has taken "no steps" to comply with the resolution and has continued expanding settlements and constructing new ones. Over the past year, he said that "although Gaza has been the most volatile, the risk of an explosion in the West Bank has also grown." Mladenov warned that "the dangerous escalation of terrorist attacks, clashes and violence in the West Bank" in the past days and weeks have led to deaths of Israeli and Palestinian civilians and Israeli soldiers. Israeli security measures following these incidents, its search operations in the West Bank city of Ramallah, as well as clashes and protests that turned violent "are adding to an already tense atmosphere," he said. Mladenov echoed Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in calling on Israeli and Palestinian security services "to work together to restore calm and avoid escalation." DETROIT (AP) - The parents of a Michigan teenager who died by suicide will ask the local archdiocese to remove the priest who questioned whether their son would go to heaven during his funeral. Jeff and Linda Hullibarger told the Detroit Free Press that they plan to meet with Detroit Archbishop Allen Vigneron on Saturday. The couple said the Rev. Don LaCuesta criticized their 18-year-old son , Maison Hullibarger, while giving a sermon at his Dec. 8 funeral. "He was up there condemning our son, pretty much calling him a sinner (and wondering) if he had repented enough to make it to heaven," said Linda Hullibarger, Maison's mother. The couple wants LaCuesta to be removed as pastor of their church, Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church in Temperance, which is about 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of Detroit. They plan to share with the archdiocese letters they received from others sharing complaints about LaCuesta and his funeral sermons. The Catholic Archdiocese of Detroit apologized to the family about LaCuesta's conduct at the funeral, acknowledging the hurt caused by his "choice to share church teaching on suicide." Death by suicide has been considered sinful by the Catholic Church and other religions for centuries, but the church has softened its stance in recent decades. The Detroit archdiocese released a statement following Maison Hullibarger's funeral, saying that LaCuesta won't preach at funerals "for the foreseeable future." But archdiocese officials said there are no plans to remove LaCuesta from his role as pastor. He celebrated mass at the church this past Sunday with his homilies reviewed by a superior, according to Holly Fournier, an archdiocese spokeswoman. But the Hullibargers decided against attending. "We're kind of soured to the whole religion thing," Jeff Hullibarger said. ___ Information from: Detroit Free Press, http://www.freep.com ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. (AP) - A New Jersey judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed by the family of a man who died when the sand under his feet collapsed as he walked along the shoreline, plunging him into the swirling waters of an inlet. Superior Court Judge John Porto dismissed a lawsuit Tuesday brought by the family of Brad Smith, of Horsham, Pennsylvania, who died in July 2012. The family sued the city of North Wildwood and the state of New Jersey. The judge cited state law granting immunity to governments from injuries occurring on unimproved public property, or land that is in its natural condition. He ruled that conditions at the Hereford Inlet in North Wildwood were naturally occurring, and ended the litigation against the city and state. Two other people died in a nearly identical manner three years earlier, but they were not part of the lawsuit. "This was a very tragic set of facts," the judge said. "That's not overlooked by the court." But he ruled that New Jersey legislators were clear when they enacted a law regarding suits against public entities that governments cannot be sued for injuries sustained by members of the public on land that, while owned by a town or state, has not been altered by those governments. FILE- In this Oct. 25, 2016, file photo, from left, Sandra Smith, left, Tasha Hart and Domonique McNeil speak at a news conference in Egg Harbor Township N.J., about the drowning deaths of relatives at a beach in North Wildwood N.J. On Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018, a judge dismissed Smith's lawsuit, ruling that New Jersey and North Wildwood are entitled to immunity because the land where the death occurred is unimproved public property. At least three people have died at that inlet in similar accidents. (AP Photo/Wayne Parry, File) Porto ruled that the inlet, by definition, is constantly shaped and re-shaped by the actions of wind, currents and tides. Man-made improvements located 400 feet to 600 feet from the water's edge, including a sea wall, did nothing to alter conditions along the inlet's edge, or to cause a dangerous condition that did not exist before, he said. Smith was walking in ankle-deep water at the beach with his daughter when the sand collapsed, plunging them and a friend into the swirling waters. A passer-by on a personal watercraft rescued the girl, who was being held above the waves by her father before he drowned. Three years earlier, Jamila Watkins and 15-year-old Shayne Hart were walking along the water's edge when the sand gave way beneath them, plunging them into the swirling waters of the inlet, killing both of them. Paul D'Amato, a lawyer for Smith's family, presented pre-trial statements from North Wildwood beach patrol officers that said they knew potentially dangerous conditions existed at that particular spot along the inlet, and that similar tragedies were likely to happen again. "We started this case so that no other family would have to go through what they did," D'Amato said afterward. "It's just an incredibly sad day." He said the Smith family would appeal the dismissal of the lawsuit. Follow Wayne Parry at http://twitter.com/WayneParryAC FILE- In this Oct. 25, 2016, file photo, Tasha Hart, top, and Sandra Smith, bottom, clasp hands during a news conference in Egg Harbor Township N.J., about the drowning deaths of relatives at a beach in North Wildwood N.J. On Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018, a judge dismissed Smith's lawsuit, ruling that New Jersey and North Wildwood are entitled to immunity because the land where the death occurred is unimproved public property. At least three people have died at that inlet in similar accidents. (AP Photo/Wayne Parry, File) The nation's largest grocery chain stepped into the driverless delivery market Tuesday, bringing milk, eggs and other items to a customer's home in a vehicle with nobody at the wheel. Although limited to delivering within about a mile (1.5 kilometers) of one Arizona supermarket owned by Kroger Co., it represents the latest step for industries trying to lower delivery costs of everyday items and those trying to launch self-driving cars on public roads. Tuesday's delivery arrived at Shannon Baggett's house in the Phoenix suburb of Scottsdale. She was already receiving groceries weekly from larger, manned self-driving vehicles that the company Nuro developed and launched in August. She said it was surreal to see nobody in the car bringing her milk, eggs and strawberries. "It was very cool to see it pull up. It was a lot smaller than I thought it would be," Baggett said. "I told my husband, 'We just got our groceries delivered by a robot.'" But Tuesday's launch also highlighted some of the many challenges still ahead for autonomous vehicles: One of the compact cars didn't drive as planned at a media demonstration because of a dead battery and had to be pushed up a ramp and onto a truck by several men. Kroger and Nuro, which is based in Mountain View, California, announced Tuesday that they would deliver groceries in the Scottsdale area, using an autonomous vehicle called the R1, which has no steering wheel and no seats for people. An autonomous vehicle called an R1 created to deliver groceries is displayed outside a Fry's grocery store, which is owned by Kroger Co., in Scottsdale, Ariz., Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. The fully autonomous vehicle is set begin piloting public roads Tuesday with no back up driver, though it will be monitored by humans in another automobile. (AP Photo/Brian Skoloff) Nuro will be adding two of its completely unmanned R1 vehicles to its fleet of manned self-driving vehicles that deliver groceries, said Dave Ferguson, president and co-founder of Nuro. When summoned, the R1 will travel within a 1-mile (1.5-kilometer) radius of the Fry's Food store just east of the Phoenix Zoo at speeds up to 25 miles per hour (40 kph) on residential roads but stay clear of main roads or highways, according to Pam Giannonatti, corporate affairs manager at Cincinnati-based Kroger's Fry's division. Customers place an order on their smartphone or laptop and get a text message when the groceries are on their way. Another message will alert them when the delivery is curbside. Once the vehicle arrives, the customer will receive a code to punch in to open the doors, Giannonatti said. Customers will pay a flat fee of $5.95 and can request same-day or next-day delivery. The unmanned delivery vehicles will be followed by a "shadow car," driven by a person with the ability to stop or control it. This car is being used in the early stages of the program out of caution and will be phased out, Ferguson said. "This is not yet at the point where in any way it's economically better than just sending someone out in a car to deliver your groceries," said Bryant Walker Smith, a professor at the University of South Carolina, who teaches about emerging technologies. "It will probably cost much more, and the range is minimal, and there are lots of ways it would not be a true, commercial-scale, viable deployment, but it's an important step on that path." Technological hurdles and apprehension have limited attempts to deploy fully autonomous vehicles on public streets. Uber pulled its self-driving cars out of Arizona this year after one of the ride-hailing service's robotic vehicles hit and killed a woman as she crossed a darkened street in a Phoenix suburb in March. It was the first death involving a fully autonomous vehicle. A backup driver was at the wheel. Waymo, a self-driving car spinoff from a Google project, has been offering free rides in robotic vehicles with no backup driver as part of a test program in the Phoenix area for the past year. Earlier this month, Waymo launched a ride-hailing service available to about 200 people that will have a person behind the wheel in case something goes awry. Giannonatti of Kroger said safety is paramount in this next step of autonomous vehicle technology. Because Nuro's R1 delivery vehicle is unmanned, it was designed to prioritize safety of other drivers and pedestrians without trading off the safety or comfort of a driver or passengers, Ferguson said. The vehicle's size - half the width of a Toyota Corolla - also helps prevent collisions with pedestrians because there's more buffer room, he said. Kroger has been working to boost online sales to keep up with Walmart and Amazon, which bought grocer Whole Foods last year. Tuesday's announcement puts Kroger ahead of Walmart and Amazon in self-driving deliveries, says Jon Reily, vice president of commerce strategy at Publicis.Sapient. "But ultimately," he says, "there are so many challenges with autonomous vehicles" to make it a reality nationwide. Among them: state laws and weather. Arizona's laws have been friendlier to self-driving vehicles, and the weather in Scottsdale is more predictable than in other parts of the country. ___ Associated Press journalists Brian Skoloff in Scottsdale, Arizona, Terry Tang in Phoenix, Joseph Pisani in New York and Michael Liedtke in San Francisco contributed to this story. This undated image provided by The Kroger Co. shows an autonomous vehicle called the R1. Nuro and grocery chain Kroger are teaming up to bring unmanned delivery service to customers. The companies said Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018, that Nuro's unmanned vehicle, the R1, will be added to a fleet of autonomous Prius vehicles that have run self-driving grocery delivery service in Scottsdale, Ariz., with vehicle operators since August. (The Kroger Co. via AP) This undated image provided by The Kroger Co. shows an autonomous vehicle called the R1. Nuro and grocery chain Kroger are teaming up to bring unmanned delivery service to customers. The companies said Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018, that Nuro's unmanned vehicle, the R1, will be added to a fleet of autonomous Prius vehicles that have run self-driving grocery delivery service in Scottsdale, Ariz., with vehicle operators since August. (Andrew Brown/The Kroger Co. via AP) PARIS (AP) - While flaming barricades, shattered glass and skirmishes have occupied Paris during six weeks of anti-government protests, English-speaking observers have fallen back on a favorite pastime: reflecting on France's revolutions. Some journalists detect hints of Russian influence in the fuel tax-driven rallies that appeared mid-November. Far-right American commentators portray the unrest as a rebuke of French President Emmanuel Macron's defense of the global treaty hammered out in Paris that seeks to limit global warming. For some of the most strident American critics , the protests vindicate President Donald Trump's "America First" credo. "The Paris Agreement isn't working out so well for Paris," Trump crowed last week, going on to make the evidence-free assertion that "yellow vest" protesters were chanting "We Want Trump!" Some of those in the best position to know - a French political scientist who has studied social unrest, a researcher who's helped carry out hundreds of interviews with yellow vest demonstrators and an academic who has crunched 2 million protest-related tweets - say evidence for such assertions ranges from the arguable to the nonexistent. "I reject these grand explanations," University of Burgundy political science professor Dominique Andolfatto said. "I think it's a reaction of the gradual buildup of practical measures." Demonstrators wearing yellow vests face riot police officers during a visit by French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian in Biarritz, southwestern France, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. Yellow vest protesters occupied dozens of traffic roundabouts across France even as their movement for economic justice appeared to be losing momentum on the fifth straight weekend of protests. (AP Photo/Bob Edme) Amid the noise, a team of more than 70 academics and students gave themselves an ambitious sociological challenge: getting as complete an idea of who the yellow vests are and what they want. The group has interviewed hundreds so far across France, according to the Center for National Scientific Research's Magali Della Sudda, one of three researchers who launched the project at the Emile Durkheim Center at Sciences Po Bordeaux. In an interim report published in Le Monde newspaper last week, the research team said the protesters generally were of modest financial means and named the cost of living and higher taxes as their top two concerns. Della Sudda said she had yet to encounter protesters voicing the wacky allegations - about bogus terror attacks or secret plans to flood France with migrants, for example - that have spread across Facebook in the wake of the yellow vest rallies. "I've not seen any trace of these kinds of conspiracy theories," she said. Ditto the anxiety over supposed Kremlin interference, a roaming target of blame for political ills since Russian hackers and trolls were caught interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The French arm of Russia Today has covered the protests aggressively, but gets nowhere near as many eyes as more traditional French media outlets. The website of the Moscow-funded broadcaster remains the 17th most-cited in yellow vest-related discussions on Twitter, according to a recent report drawing on 2.3 million tweets sent between Nov. 30 and Dec. 4. Nikos Smyrnaios, an associate professor of media studies at the University of Toulouse who analyzed the tweets, said holding foreign propaganda responsible for France's turmoil treats the French public like a passive receptacle "without critical thought, isolated in its digital bubble, and vulnerable to whatever Russian bot or unfounded conspiracy theory." Some have read the protests as a rejection of Macron's focus on climate change. In an editorial published last month, The Wall Street Journal suggested that Macron needed to abandon his "expensive green piety" and focus on "what voters elected him to do - create jobs and make the French economy great again." In fact, the French - and the yellow vests - still largely cherish green issues. That includes many who crossed over to join marchers at a pro-environment demonstration in Paris on Dec. 8. "It's not a rejection of ecology," Fabrice Ravebet, 40, who is unemployed and participated in the yellow vest protests. What bothered him was the "financial injustice" of forcing poorer drivers to pony up more to keep older cars running while the wealthy weren't taxed on the jet fuel used to fly them off on vacation. English speakers aren't alone in struggling to understand the protesters' motives; French journalists, politicians and union leaders have also wrestled over the origins - and the ultimate direction - of the self-organized movement. Some politicians and commentators have voiced fear that political extremists on the left and right could draw energy and recruits from the ranks of demonstrators. That could yet happen, although many protesters see their movement as nonpartisan. "It's not a left and right thing," said Max Werle, 56, a fluorescent vest-clad office administrator who was among the protesters on Paris' Champs Elysees on Saturday. Next to him, 53-year-old Lionel Toussaint insisted the yellow vests would resist moves by politicians of any stripe to harness the movement for their own ends. "We're apolitical," he said. Both men laughed off the idea that the yellow vests were big Trump fans. If anything, they said, Macron reminded them too much of the U.S. president, who is seen by many in France as a megalomaniac bent on serving the wealthiest sliver of Americans at the expense of everyone else. "Trump and Macron are the same," Toussaint said. The idea that the French would take to the streets saying "We want Trump" was totally implausible in any case, said Ravebet. "Have you ever heard a Frenchman protesting in English?" he said. ___ Online: Raphael Satter can be reached at: http://raphaelsatter.com A demonstrator wearing her yellow vest holds a placard during a visit by French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian in Biarritz, southwestern France, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. Yellow vest protesters occupied dozens of traffic roundabouts across France even as their movement for economic justice appeared to be losing momentum on the fifth straight weekend of protests. (AP Photo/Bob Edme) Demonstrators wearing yellow vests gather during a visit by French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian in Biarritz, southwestern France, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. Yellow vest protesters occupied dozens of traffic roundabouts across France even as their movement for economic justice appeared to be losing momentum on the fifth straight weekend of protests. (AP Photo/Bob Edme) Yellow vests protesters watch riot police officers securing the area during a visit by French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian in Biarritz, southwestern France, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. Yellow vest protesters occupied dozens of traffic roundabouts across France even as their movement for economic justice appeared to be losing momentum on the fifth straight weekend of protests. (AP Photo/Bob Edme) Demonstrators wearing yellow vests gesture towards riot police officers during a visit by French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian in Biarritz, southwestern France, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. Yellow vest protesters occupied dozens of traffic roundabouts across France even as their movement for economic justice appeared to be losing momentum on the fifth straight weekend of protests. (AP Photo/Bob Edme) Students opposing changes in key high school tests, carrying a banner reading "Strike Blockade. Macron out " demonstrate Tuesday Dec.18, 2018 in Paris. Macron has acknowledged he's partially responsible for the anger that has fueled weeks of protests in France, an unusual admission for the leader elected last year. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena) Policemen stand guard during a demonstration of students in Paris, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. France's interior minister is to meet with representatives of police unions, following complaints about working conditions and calls for a work slowdown over what unions say are strained resources after five straight weekends of sometimes violent protests. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena) BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) - The former head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's high-profile office in Colombia has been cleared of wrongdoing following a probe of misconduct allegations, including accusations that he used government resources to hire prostitutes. A DEA letter addressed to Richard Dobrich said the investigation turned up "no evidence to support this allegation" and was being closed. Dobrich provided a copy of the Dec. 7-dated letter, which was signed by Preston Grubbs, the deputy head of the DEA, to The Associated Press. DEA spokeswoman Mary Brandenberger confirmed he had been cleared but declined further comment. The Justice Department's Office of Inspector General had launched a probe into Dobrich, then the DEA's top-ranking official in South America, after receiving an anonymous complaint alleging he directed Colombian drivers working for the U.S. Embassy in Bogota "to procure sex workers," according to a copy of the complaint obtained by the AP. Dobrich, a former Navy SEAL who was injured during a firefight with the Taliban during a counter-narcotics raid in Afghanistan in 2010, called the allegation an attempt at "character assassination," possibly by a disgruntled former DEA employee. "I never dishonored the oath that I took and still care deeply about the DEA's mission and the people who work very hard to tackle serious issues," he said in an interview Monday, adding that he had filed a complaint with Colombian police that may allow them to uncover the author's identity. He also expressed frustration that the anonymous complaint and word of the probe ever got out, saying it had caused harm to his family and reputation, and said DEA leadership should have done more to stand by him in the face of what he called an "obviously laughable accusation." "They treated me like a leper," he said. "This is a great recipe on how to cause chaos in an office." Dobrich said he has filed a grievance with the Justice Department, alleging undue delays in closing the case and clearing his name. Dobrich's tenure as the top DEA executive in Colombia began in 2015, when he was brought in to restore order after a blistering Inspector General's report found several DEA agents had participated in "sex parties" with prostitutes hired by Colombian cartels. That scandal prompted the suspension of several agents and the retirement of Michele Leonhart, the DEA's administrator at the time. Prostitution is legal in Colombia, but Justice Department policy forbids DEA agents from engaging in such activity because it could lead them to be compromised by the drug cartels they are pursuing. "He would've had to been almost over the top stupid to have engaged in that kind of conduct considering the office's history," said Derek Maltz, a former agent who headed the DEA's special operations division. Dobrich, 54, retired from the DEA in October after a nearly three-decade career to take a private sector job. Prior to Bogota, he oversaw the DEA's military-style FAST teams that battled drug traffickers in Afghanistan and Latin America. The DEA's Bogota office is critical to the U.S. efforts to control drug trafficking, and under Dobrich's tenure seizures of cocaine surged to an all-time high at the same time as cocaine production surged. Maltz said he was saddened to see Dobrich leave the agency he spilled blood for on the terms he did. "I have a lot of respect for his courage," Maltz said. "Unfortunately, there's a trend in government where we allow people who write anonymous letters to hurt people who have dedicated their entire life to public service." ___ Mustian reported from New York. PITTSBURGH (AP) - A judge said he will "seriously" consider a motion to bar the death penalty in the case of two men accused of killing five people and an unborn baby at a Pennsylvania cookout. Cheron Shelton, 31, and Robert Thomas, 30, are charged in the March 2016 killings in Pittsburgh's Wilkinsburg suburb. Authorities allege Thomas opened fire on one side and Shelton then gunned down victims running onto a porch for safety. Defense attorney Michael Machen, who would represent Thomas in a penalty phase proceeding if he is convicted of first-degree murder, has asked Common Pleas Judge Edward Borkowski to bar capital punishment as unconstitutionally cruel. He cited a bipartisan commission's report concluding that the state's death penalty process is deeply flawed, with death sentences often resulting from bad lawyering or based on the county in which the crimes were committed. Defense attorneys for Shelton plan to join the motion. Common Pleas Judge Edward Borkowski said Monday that he is seriously considering the motion, noting he had "other concerns" about the application of the death penalty in the commonwealth, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported . The judge noted the cost of prosecuting a criminal case and then housing an inmate on death row, as well as the "impact and trauma" on jurors who must sit on capital cases. "It's a life-changing experience," Borkowski said. "It's a whole process that's fraught with problems." The motion also cited the report's statistics that 14 percent of Pennsylvania's inmates on death row have an IQ of 75 or below, and that 25 percent have an active mental health disorder. In addition, the report said twice as many death row inmates have been exonerated as have been executed in recent decades-- three inmates since 1962 have been put to death by waiving further appeals while six have been cleared. Gov. Tom Wolf in February 2015 imposed a moratorium on capital punishment in Pennsylvania, saying he was awaiting the Pennsylvania Joint State Government Commission report, which was released in June. Prosecutors have 30 days to respond to the motion. The judge is also considering a separate motion to dismiss the charges on the alleged grounds that a detective misrepresented facts in the case. The prosecution said the misstatements weren't purposeful and don't warrant a dismissal. LOS ANGELES (AP) - Amid growing objections, the Los Angeles Unified School District has paused plans to paint over a campus mural of actress Ava Gardner that Koreatown activists contend resembles the Japanese imperial battle flag. School system administrator Eugene Hernandez says there's need for "additional conversation" on the issue. The mural at the Robert F. Kennedy Schools Complex shows Gardner's face against a background of sun rays. Artist Beau Stanton says it has no connection to the Japanese banner. The district reconsidered Monday after the Los Angeles Times reported that artist Shepard Fairey would seek to paint over his mural of RFK at the school if Stanton's work was covered. The campus is at the former site of the Ambassador Hotel, where Kennedy was assassinated in 1968. It's in the Koreatown section of the city. ___ FILE - In this Dec. 13, 2018 file photo, a mural by artist Beau Stanton of actress Ava Gardner is displayed at the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools complex school in Los Angeles. Artist Shepard Fairey will insist that one of his murals be removed from the Los Angeles school if officials follow through on plans to cover up Stanton's mural that some community activists find offensive, the Los Angeles Times reported Monday, Dec. 17, 2018. Both murals are in Koreatown at the Robert F. Kennedy Schools complex on the former site of the Ambassador Hotel where Kennedy was fatally shot in 1968. Stanton's mural depicts actress Ava Gardner against sun rays. Korean activists say it looks like the Japanese imperial battle flag. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes, File) Information from: Los Angeles Times, http://www.latimes.com/ SKOPJE, Macedonia (AP) - Macedonian lawmakers have approved a law offering amnesty to some suspected perpetrators of a violent storming of parliament last year, seeking to boost reconciliation in a deeply polarized society. All 95 lawmakers present in the 120-seat parliament Tuesday backed a draft amnesty law over the April 2017 incident. But the amnesty won't cover organizers of the intrusion and protesters who committed physical violence. According to the new law, people suspected of participating in the melee, who are on trial before Skopje's criminal court, can now file requests for amnesty. A total of 33 people - including conservative opposition lawmakers and supporters - are on trial over the incident, when an angry mob stormed parliament to block the election of a new speaker. More than 100 people, including lawmakers, were injured. CONCORD, N.H. (AP) - A judge declined Tuesday to shorten the jail term for an elite prep school graduate convicted of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old classmate in 2015, saying he needed to consider the victim's family, which wants him to serve the remaining 10 months of his sentence. Merrimack County Superior Court Judge Larry Smukler appeared unmoved by defense arguments that Owen Labrie, 23, of Tunbridge, Vermont had become more mature and had already been punished by being under a curfew and having to wear an electronic monitoring device. Prosecutors wanted Labrie to serve the remainder of his sentence. Instead, Smukler said, his decision to uphold the sentence took into account "justice for the victim." He accepted a defense request that Labrie begin serving the sentence the day after Christmas but rejected a request that he be allowed out for work release. "Given the crimes and the circumstances, it is just not appropriate to amend the sentence," Smukler said. Labrie was acquitted in 2015 of raping a 15-year-old classmate as part of "Senior Salute," a game of sexual conquest, at St. Paul's School. But a jury found him guilty of misdemeanor sexual assault charges and endangering the welfare of a child. He also was convicted of using a computer to lure an underage student for sex, requiring him to register as a sex offender. Labrie did not speak during the hearing, nor did he comment to reporters as he left the courthouse. Several of his relatives and friends also left without speaking to reporters, with one crying as she walked out. Owen Labrie arrives at Merrimack County Superior Court for his amended sentence hearing, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018, in Concord, N.H. A judge has refused to shorten the jail term for Labrie, a New Hampshire prep school graduate convicted of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old classmate in 2015, saying he has to report to jail for the remaining 10 months of his sentence the day after Christmas. (Geoff Forester/The Concord Monitor via AP, Pool) "Disappointed. It's been a very long haul for him," Labrie's attorney, Jaye Rancourt, said. "He was a very young man at the time he was convicted. We had hoped four years later would be a different outcome. Unfortunately, it wasn't." In making her case for suspending the sentence, Rancourt detailed how Labrie had followed the rules since his conviction, other than the curfew violation that resulted in him serving two months in jail. She noted he has recently worked two jobs, partly to pay for the cost of the electronic monitoring, and presented the court with several letters from employers that spoke to his "character and hard work." Rancourt also talked about how Labrie has struggled to find work because of the case and how he and his family have been subjected to abuse, including piles of hate mail. She acknowledged Labrie "had a great deal of remorse" but insisted the school was also to blame for allowing "a highly sexualized culture" that "fostered if not encouraged some of this behavior." "He recognizes that he was not respectful to women ... and that is very shameful for him," Rancourt said. "This young man now has to live the rest of his life with the majority of people in the world thinking that is him ... when in fact it's not. He is actually a very caring, sensitive individual whose life has been unalterably changed by this case and the publicity that it has generated." Last month, the state Supreme Court upheld Labrie's convictions on the computer charge. The court dismissed arguments by Labrie's lawyers that prosecutors had failed to prove intent in his use of the computer and that the law was meant to be used to target internet predators and pedophiles, not cases like this. The court is also considering a separate appeal in which Labrie's lawyers argue he deserves a new trial over ineffective counsel. His lawyer argued his original counsel in the 2015 case failed to mount a defense against the computer charge or effectively communicate that Labrie had no intention of having sex with Chessy Prout when he sent her the messages. The lead trial lawyer, J.W. Carney Jr., is a well-known defense attorney whose clients included the late Boston gangster James "Whitey" Bulger. Two years ago, Prout spoke publicly about the assault for the first time. Prout, now 20, has since become an advocate for sexual assault survivors and co-wrote a memoir, "I Have The Right To: A High School Survivor's Story of Sexual Assault, Justice, and Hope," with Boston Globe journalist Jenn Abelson. BRUSSELS (AP) - Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel submitted his resignation Tuesday amid pressure on his government after the biggest coalition party quit over Michel's support for a United Nations compact on international migration. "I am taking the decision to offer my resignation. I am now going to see the king" to inform him," Michel told Belgian lawmakers. Before the prime minister gave his notice, lawmakers had been demanding he submit his new minority government to a confidence vote. But Michel refused, and a confrontation this week seemed likely. Michel tried to convince the Chamber of Representatives of the reshaped government's plans and said he would be ready to work with the opposition, but his overtures were rejected. His 2019 budget was among the sensitive topics up for debate. Some in the assembly pushed for an election to be held before the regularly scheduled one in May. Michel again refused, saying it would only lead to "stagnation for the whole of 2019." After a short break for reflection, he announced he was resigning instead. As lawmakers applauded, he picked up his briefcase, shook the hands of a number of government ministers, and left. Michel made no comment to reporters upon entering and leaving Belgian King Philippe's residence, the Palace of Laeken in Brussels. FILE - In this file photo dated Thursday, Dec. 13, 2018, Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel arrives for an EU summit in Brussels. Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel has announced his resignation in address at parliament, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018, and says he will notify the king. (AP Photo/Geert Vanden Wijngaert, FILE) The king holds a largely symbolic role in Belgium but becomes a pivotal figure after inconclusive elections or disputes like the current one require the formation of new governments. In a tweet, the Royal Palace said Philippe had received Michel and was "withholding his decision" about what steps to take next. Belgian media said the king would meet party leaders Wednesday before deciding whether to accept the resignation the prime minister tendered on behalf of himself and his government. Michel could be invited to lead a caretaker government until an election can be held. It's the first time the king has faced such a crisis. He ascended to the throne in 2013 after his father, King Albert II, abdicated for health reasons. The right-wing N-VA party quit the government after Michel sought parliamentary approval to support the U.N. compact against its wishes, branding his minority government "the Marrakech coalition," after the city where the migration treaty was signed just over a week ago. The accord is non-binding, but the N-VA said it still went too far and would give even migrants who were in Belgium without authorization many additional rights. The party launched an in-your-face social media campaign against the compact, featuring pictures of Muslim women with their faces covered and claiming that the accord focused on allowing migrants to retain the cultural practices of their homelands. But it quickly withdrew the materials after the campaign received widespread criticism. A number of governments refused to sign the U.N. Global Compact Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. They included the United States, but also a group of European Union countries, among them Austria which holds the EU's rotating presidency until Dec. 31. FILE - In this file photo dated Thursday, Oct. 18, 2018, Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel speaks with the media as he arrives for an EU summit at the Europa building in Brussels. Michel has resigned Tuesday Dec. 18, 2018, after the biggest party in his coalition quit over his support for the U.N. global compact on migration. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco, FILE) HONOLULU (AP) - One of Rep. Tulsi Gabbard's duties when she deployed to Iraq with the Hawaii Army National Guard in 2005 was to scan a list of U.S. combat casualties for names of her unit's soldiers. Her job as a brigade surgeon operations specialist was to make sure these soldiers got the care they needed. This daily confrontation with the cost of war helped propel the 37-year-old Hawaii Democrat on a path to Congress and now, potentially, a run for president. "I saw how few leaders in Washington had foresight and thought through the consequences of the decisions that they made, that they didn't think through the cost of this war that they started and who paid the price," Gabbard told The Associated Press. Whether Gabbard will mount a bid for the Democratic Party's nomination for president is something she said she's "thinking through very carefully." She has visited early primary and caucus states New Hampshire and Iowa in recent months and has written a memoir that's due to be published in May. Gabbard would join a crowded Democratic field if she does run. By some estimates it may include more 30 people, many of whom, like former Vice President Joe Biden, have decades more experience and greater name recognition. File - In this Nov. 6, 2018, file photo, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, greets supporters in Honolulu. Gabbard, a Democratic congresswoman, is eyeing a White House run. The Iraq war veteran has visited New Hampshire and Iowa in recent months and has written a memoir that's due to be published in May. First elected to the state Legislature at age 21, Gabbard throughout her career has ignored suggestions that she wait her turn. (AP Photo/Marco Garcia, File) Yet she won't have to worry about standing out. She's almost guaranteed to be the youngest. Right now, she's barely old enough to run. The Constitution requires the president to be at least 35. She's part Samoan, part Caucasian. She's the first Hindu elected to Congress, and was sworn into office with her hand on the Bhagavad Gita. Her parents homeschooled her and her four siblings. She's a combat veteran. She was first elected to office at age 21, when she won a seat in the Hawaii state House of Representatives. She surfs in her spare time. She first emerged on the national stage as one of the few lawmakers in Washington to back Bernie Sanders' underdog candidacy against Hillary Clinton during the last presidential primary campaign. Her endorsement came in dramatic fashion, with her resigning as a vice chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee to express her support. Indeed, Gabbard has rankled some in her party for her unorthodox moves. After Donald Trump was elected, she met with the then president-elect to discuss the war in Syria. Last year, Gabbard came under intense criticism - including from some Democrats - for traveling to that country and meeting with Syrian President Bashar Assad, whose government lawmakers have accused of war crimes and even genocide during the country's civil war. She doesn't regret the trip and meeting. "If we are serious about pursuing peace, then we have to be willing to meet with those who are friends and adversaries to achieve that peace," she said. She said U.S. wars in the Middle East have destabilized the region, made the U.S. less safe and cost thousands of American lives, At the same time, terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State group are stronger than before the Sept.11 terrorist attacks, she said. "Those who have been setting our country's foreign policy are lost," Gabbard said, placing blame on both Democrats and Republicans. "Our policies have been without clear objective or purpose for some time. And it's cost our country, and it's cost the world, dearly." Many Sanders supporters like Gabbard and will support her if she runs for president, said Howie Klein, the treasurer of Blue America PAC, which was the first political action committee to raise money for Sanders in the last presidential election. But the question becomes, what will happen if Sanders also runs? Klein said it would make "no sense at all" if Gabbard were to run against Sanders. Gabbard may run in the hope Sanders will make her his vice presidential running mate, Klein said. Or she may run to raise her profile, he said. Asked if she would still consider running if Sanders ran, Gabbard said Sanders is a friend and she doesn't know what his plans are. "I'm thinking through how I can best be of service and I'll make my decision based on that," she said. When it comes to domestic issues, Gabbard stands out for doing 180-degree turns on abortion and gay marriage. In 2004, the then-state representative urged Hawaii voters to support a federal constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriages nationwide. She was worried gay marriages licensed in Massachusetts would be deemed valid in Hawaii. "Homosexuals married in Massachusetts will soon come to Hawaii and challenge the 1998 decision by Hawaii's people to ban same-sex marriages," she said at the time. "It is highly likely that federal judges will soon be tearing apart our U.S. Constitution in order to force same-sex marriage down the throats of the people of Hawaii and America." Eight years later, while running for Congress, Gabbard said she would work toward requiring the federal government to recognize same-sex marriage. She also metamorphosed from being anti-abortion to in favor of abortion rights. She explained that serving in the Middle East showed her these positions she once held were rooted in the mistaken idea that it's the government's role to "define and enforce our personal morality." "The next year was full of challenges and soul-searching as my long-held views were challenged by my newfound recognition of the absolute importance of keeping church and state separate," she wrote in a 2011 blog post. The transformation hasn't held her back in Hawaii politics. She notched a come-from-behind victory over former Honolulu Mayor Mufi Hannemann in the 2012 primary and has coasted to re-election ever since. She still hasn't won over the LGBT caucus of the Democratic Party of Hawaii, however. Its chairman, Michael Golojuch, said Gabbard hasn't been there for them when it's mattered most, like when the state Legislature debated a bill legalizing same-sex marriage in 2013. Asked to respond to this critique, Gabbard pointed to her record in Congress supporting gay rights and her high rating and endorsement by the Human Rights Campaign, a national gay rights advocacy group. Honolulu City Councilwoman Ann Kobayashi remembers how she was once a Gabbard foe, having supported her opponent in a race for the city council. But Gabbard didn't hold it against her and they became friends, Kobayashi said. One evening, not long into Gabbard's first Council term, the freshman called Kobayashi to tell her she was going to run for Congress. "I said 'whoa,'" recalled Kobayashi. "And then I said 'I think you'll be good. Go for it. Let's try it.'" Kobayashi called Emily's List, an influential political action committee that helps elect women to public office, on Gabbard's behalf. They campaigned together on rural islands that are part of the congressional district Gabbard was targeting. That campaign - during which initial polls pegged Gabbard's support at 20 percent versus 65 percent for Hannemann - was just one example of the ambitious, young politician launching a bid for office long before many would consider it her time. Gabbard said her experience in Iraq, and subsequent deployment to Kuwait, prompted her to run. "She was so gracious to everyone. She was a very easy sell because her sincerity comes through," Kobayashi said. FILE - In this July 26, 2016, file photo, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-HI., nominates Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-VT., for President of the United States during the second day of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. Gabbard, a Democratic congresswoman, is eyeing a White House run. The Iraq war veteran has visited New Hampshire and Iowa in recent months and has written a memoir that's due to be published in May. First elected to the state Legislature at age 21, Gabbard throughout her career has ignored suggestions that she wait her turn. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File) File - In this Sept. 4, 2012 file photo, then House candidate Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii with the women from the House of Representatives at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C. Gabbard, a Democratic congresswoman, is eyeing a White House run. The Iraq war veteran has visited New Hampshire and Iowa in recent months and has written a memoir that's due to be published in May. First elected to the state Legislature at age 21, Gabbard throughout her career has ignored suggestions that she wait her turn. (AP Photo/Lynne Sladky, File) File - In this March 26, 2016, file photo, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, center, greets voters as she waits with others to vote in the Democratic presidential caucus at a polling station at Kailua Intermediate School in Kailua, Hawaii. Gabbard, a Democratic congresswoman, is eyeing a White House run. The Iraq war veteran has visited New Hampshire and Iowa in recent months and has written a memoir that's due to be published in May. First elected to the state Legislature at age 21, Gabbard throughout her career has ignored suggestions that she wait her turn. (AP Photo/Marco Garcia, File) WASHINGTON (AP) - President Donald Trump and Democratic lawmakers are in a standoff over funding the government, and the main sticking point is Trump's demand for $5 billion to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Trump said during the campaign he was going to make Mexico pay for the barrier - but now he's asking U.S. taxpayers to fund construction. If there's no agreement, a partial government shutdown begins at midnight Friday. Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders signaled on Tuesday that Trump may be willing to work with Congress to avert a shutdown. Here's a look at the status of wall. IS IT A WALL OR A FENCE? In Washington, it depends on who you ask. The president, seeking to show progress on one of his signature campaign promises, has repeatedly said he's begun construction on the wall with smaller amounts of money that Congress approved for border security. The Democrats, seeking to prove they haven't caved to Trump, say they would only fund improvements to border security that include fencing. Honduran asylum seekers are taken into custody by U.S. Border Patrol agents after the group crossed the U.S. border wall into San Diego, California, seen from Tijuana, Mexico, Sunday, Dec. 16, 2018. (AP Photo/Moises Castillo) Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan called it a "border wall system" with Mexico that would include natural barriers and steel fencing that agents can see through. Trump tweeted late Tuesday that his administration was building "artistically designed steel slats, so that you can easily see through it." The March funding bill, passed with support from both parties, funded construction that greatly resembles some form of wall. It included $641 million for 33 miles of construction in South Texas' Rio Grande Valley, the busiest area for illegal crossings. In one section, U.S. Customs and Border Protection wants to install 18-foot-tall bollards with narrow spacing between each post. According to an online solicitation, the agency plans to install the bollards atop "a concrete wall to the approximate height of the levee crest." In some places, the wall and the bollards would exceed 30 feet. Contracts have been awarded to build some 33 miles (53 kilometers) of wall in the Rio Grande Valley. Construction is scheduled to start in February. A federal judge last week ordered two hold-out landowners to allow surveyors onto their property after the government took them to court. ___ WHAT IS ALREADY CONSTRUCTED? Overall some type of barrier runs along about 685 miles (1,046 kilometers) of the 1,954-mile (3,126-kilometer) border. But 654 miles (1,052 kilometers) came before Trump took office, constructed under the Secure Fence Act during the Bush administration. As Republicans have since pointed out, a majority of Democrats in the Senate voted for the act, including then-Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. In budget year 2017, Congress provided $292 million to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to build a steel-bollard wall to replace "ineffective" barrier in Southern California, New Mexico and far West Texas. More than 31 of 40 miles have been constructed, and nine remaining miles are scheduled to be completed by 2019. Construction began on 4 miles (6 kilometers) in far West Texas and New Mexico, and 14 miles (22.4 kilometers) of replacement in San Diego should be done by May 2019. ___ ECOLOGY CONCERNS Several groups have filed lawsuits challenging the administration's waivers of environmental laws to build more quickly. The Department of Homeland Security has used authority received in 2005 to bypass reviews and regulations of border wall construction under the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, and two dozen other laws. In several places, planned construction would cut through protected areas or habitat for endangered species. One conservation-related legal challenge was heard on Tuesday in federal court in Washington. The groups argue the project in New Mexico would displace rare wildlife, including the aplomado falcon and Mexican gray wolf. In South Texas, almost 70 percent of the land at the National Butterfly Center, which provides habitat to migrating species, including monarchs, would be cut off by the planned barrier. The nonprofit that operates the butterfly center has also sued. So far, no judge has stopped the government from moving forward. ___ WHAT WOULD THE GOVERNMENT DO WITH THAT $5 BILLION? Homeland Security officials said they would combine previous funding to construct 330 miles of a "border-wall system" along the Mexican border, including 104 miles in the Rio Grande Valley. Sanders said on Fox News on Tuesday there are "other ways that we can get to that $5 billion," including one bill she says would provide $26 billion in border security, including $1.6 billion for the wall. Sanders did not deny that the White House was exploring a way to use Defense Department funds for the remaining cost of the wall. She said there were "a number of different funding sources" that could be used, and she expected they could find a legal way to use defense money. Trump administration officials have been discussing the possibility of using Defense Department funding as a way around a shut down, but there are legal and congressional hurdles. She said: "At the end of the day, we don't want to shut down the government. We want to shut down the border from illegal immigration." ___ Merchant reported from Houston. LEBANON, Tenn. (AP) - In a story Dec. 18 about an EPA water regulation rollback, The Associated Press erroneously attributed a quote to Environmental Protection Agency acting administrator Andrew Wheeler. It should have been attributed to American Farm Bureau Federation President Zippy Duvall. A corrected version of the story is below: Farmers urged to support Trump rollback of water rules The Trump administration is calling on farmers to throw their support behind a proposal to withdraw federal protections for many of the country's waterways and wetlands By KIMBERLEE KRUESI Associated Press LEBANON, Tenn. (AP) - The Trump administration on Tuesday called on farmers to throw their support behind a proposal to withdraw federal protections for many of the country's waterways and wetlands. Environmental Protection Agency acting administrator Andrew Wheeler and U.S. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Purdue on Tuesday traveled to middle Tennessee to drum up support among the state's agricultural community in their pursuit to replace the Obama-era water protections. "When Obama-EPA put forward these definitions, they claimed it was in the interest of water quality. But it was really about power, power in the hands of federal government over farmers, developers and land owners," Wheeler told the several hundred person crowd in the small town of Lebanon. "We are here today to tell you that we're putting an end of that power grab." Environmental groups have warned the proposed overhaul will be a grave assault on the aims of the 1972 Clean Water Act, the foundational U.S. water protection law. The event was hosted by the Tennessee Farm Bureau, where Tennessee Gov.-elect Bill Lee, U.S. Sen.-elect Marsha Blackburn and U.S. Rep.-elect John Rose - all Republicans - were in attendance among other top agricultural representatives who praised the regulatory rollback of the so-called Waters of the United States rule. The EPA first announced the change last week. Wheeler stressed he anticipates the new EPA's plan will likely draw more than a million responses once it is up for public review in January. He said the EPA received more than 900,000 submissions during the last major effort to repeal the federal water protections - largely from advocates opposing the change. To counter potential negative feedback from environmental groups, Wheeler urged farmers to make sure their voices are heard. "The EPA has done its job, now all of us in this room have to help to get this over the finish line," said Zippy Duvall, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation. The changes would affect what waterways and wetlands fall under jurisdiction of the EPA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The Trump administration would remove federal protections for wetlands nationally unless they are connected to another federally protected waterway. Groundwater, stormwater, most farm ditches, wastewater treatment systems and land already converted for crops would also no longer be regulated under the Clean Water Act. The Clean Water Act bans polluting any "water of the United States" without a permit. However, pinning down a definition of such water has been the subject of legal scrutiny for decades. "Big polluters could not have crafted a bigger free pass to dump if they wrote it themselves," said Blan Holman, managing attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center's Charleston office, in a statement on Tuesday. "This administration's efforts to dismantle the Clean Water Act are a full-frontal assault on one of our country's most important and longstanding environmental safeguards that has prevented unchecked and unlimited pollution from contaminating our waterways and drinking water sources for nearly 50 years." Others counter the protections are an obstacle to farmers and businesspeople - adding that the current state of regulations has caused confusion for land owners, particularly when it came to permit requirements for protecting those federally protected waterways. "We believe that farmers are rule followers ... when you begin with that premise, it's very unsettling to be on our own land doing what you've done for years and then having a federal regulator give you a summons," Perdue said. A scaling back Obama's waterways regulation was a top priority for President Donald Trump when he took over the office. He signed an executive order in 2017 ordering the EPA to eliminate "this very destructive and horrible rule." Obama's administration implemented the rule in 2015, where it asserted that the federal government had oversight of a large range of ditches, lakes, and other bodies of smaller streams and tributaries that fed into waterways protected by the Clean Water Act. DETROIT (AP) - A former United Auto Workers official convicted of accepting bribes from Fiat Chrysler executives has been sentenced to a year in prison. The U.S. Attorney's office says a federal judge in Detroit also ordered Nancy Johnson on Tuesday to pay a $10,000 fine. Johnson pleaded guilty in July to violating the Labor Management Relations Act. She and others were charged in a scheme to strip millions from a Detroit worker training center financed by Fiat Chrysler. The leader, former auto executive Al Iacobelli, was sentenced in August to 5 years in federal prison. The government says Johnson spent $1,100 on a pair of shoes and $1,200 for spa services. She served on a 2015 UAW negotiating committee. GUATEMALA CITY (AP) - Guatemalan authorities said Tuesday that they have withdrawn diplomatic immunity from 11 workers with a U.N.-sponsored anti-graft commission who have investigated cases of alleged corruption - including ones targeting President Jimmy Morales' son and brother. The move marks the latest salvo from Morales in his running dispute with the commission, known as CICIG for its initials in Spanish, after the president refused to renew its mandate in the country earlier this year and then barred its chief from returning to Guatemala from a business trip to the United States. In a notice in the official publication Diario de Centroamerica, the Foreign Ministry said the investigators' credentials had been voided and they were being asked to return them. It added that they no longer "enjoy the privileges and immunities" of their posts. Commission spokesman Matias Ponce said those affected are investigators and litigators involved in high-profile cases. They include lawyers Cesar Rincon and Luis Fernando Orozco, who for years have worked on investigations including one that led to the resignation of now ex-President Otto Perez Molina. Ponce argued that diplomatic immunity for CICIG employees is established under the agreement that created it, and that only the body's commissioner has the authority to withdraw that protection. "The measure seeks to hurt the independence of the work ... be it in the investigations or various litigations in progress," Ponce said, "in addition to constituting an opportunity for possible criminal prosecution against the workers." FILE - In this Aug. 31, 2018 file photo, firecrackers go off as a supporter in favor of a decision by Guatemala's President Jimmy Morales to shut down a U.N.-sponsored anti-graft commission led by Ivan Velasquez, protests outside the United Nations International Commission Against Impunity, CICIG, headquarters in Guatemala City. The Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018, that the country withdrew diplomatic immunity from 11 workers with the U.N.-sponsored anti-graft commission who have investigated cases of alleged corruption, including ones targeting President Jimmy Morales' son and brother. (AP Photo/Moises Castillo, File) During its 11 years operating in Guatemala, CICIG has pressed corruption cases that have implicated more than 600 people including elected officials, businesspeople and bureaucrats. Perez Molina, who is behind bars awaiting trial, denies the corruption allegations against him. The commission has also tried to bring a case involving purported illegal campaign financing against Morales, who similarly denies the allegations. So far lawmakers have refused to remove his immunity of office, preventing any prosecution from taking place. Morales accuses the commission of violating the presumption of innocence of those it has investigated. By refusing to renew its mandate earlier this year, the president effectively gave CICIG until the end of its current term in September 2019 to wind down operations and leave the country. His government later declared commission chief Ivan Velasquez, a Colombian national, persona non grata and refused to let him return to Guatemala from a work trip to the United States. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Marta Larra said via text message that "each of the CICIG workers becomes just another foreigner in national territory which means they must abide by the laws and rules of the country." Adriana Beltran, director for citizen security at the Washington Office on Latin America, called the decision "a clear violation" of Guatemala's obligations under the agreement that created CICIG and an effort to derail the fight against corruption and impunity. "This is a continuation of the Guatemalan government's campaign to neutralize one of the region's most effective initiatives for fighting corruption and organized crime, and backtrack the achievements seen thus far in fighting impunity and strengthening rule of law in Guatemala," Beltran said in a statment. ___ Associated Press writer Peter Orsi in Mexico City contributed to this report. WICHITA, Kan. (AP) - Kansas lawmakers are likely to face renewed debate in the next legislative session about how or whether to hold oil and gas companies accountable for property damage caused by earthquakes in Kansas. Earthquakes have increased in Kansas since 2013 when fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, became more common for oil and gas exploration, although the intensity has been reduced in recent years. Some researchers believe injection of wastewater from the explorations into underground wells contributes to the quakes - a claim that industry officials dispute, The Topeka Capital-Journal reported . Joe Spease, chairman of the Legislative, Energy, and Hydraulic Fracturing committees for Kansas Sierra Club, said the Legislature should impose a fee on companies using injection wells to dump wastewater. He suggested the rate could be based on volume of material injected with the money distributed to property owners with damage. "We want some type of justice for these people," Spease said. "KIOGA attacks us. But people understand most of us concerned about 'frackquakes' are not out to get the oil and gas industry." Ed Cross, executive director Kansas Independent Oil and Gas Association, said companies would go out of business and jobs would be lost if such fees were imposed on the industry. He said it is not possible to link specific damage to a particular injection well. "I don't think there's any proof out there that says it was this or that injection well," Cross said. New research, which is challenged by the oil industry, concluded wastewater injection was responsible in 2017 for several earthquakes felt hundreds of miles from injection hot spots. The disposal of hundreds of millions of barrels of salty water from oil and gas corporations increased pressure within rock formations and that pressure migrated north along faults through Kansas, causing quakes felt in Hutchinson, Hays and Salina, with some felt as far as Jewell County near the Nebraska border. "There were a series of earthquakes in April. It seemed like a Saturday night special kind of thing," said state Rep. Jason Probst, D-Hutchinson. "The people around here shouldn't have to deal with it. It scares people and damages their property." Lawmakers also must consider whether the state will fund beyond June a network of gear installed to track the quakes. Also, the Kansas Corporation Commission is considering making permanent several limitations on wastewater injection. State Rep. John Carmichael, a Wichita Democrat who has felt earthquakes at his home and serves on the House energy committee, said a Kansas Geological Survey analysis of earthquake migration raised a challenge of assigning liability because years could lapse between injection and an earthquake. He said the best approach would be for the state to limit wastewater injection to levels that didn't promote earthquakes. If that isn't possible, he said, requiring oil producers to pay into a trust fund to compensate for property damaged would be reasonable. "Obviously, the oil and gas industry in Kansas and Oklahoma is not very excited because it would raise production costs," Carmichael said. "We have to be careful we don't make it more expensive to produce oil on the Kansas side than on the Oklahoma side." ___ Information from: The Topeka (Kan.) Capital-Journal, http://www.cjonline.com BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) - Street demonstrations against recent labor law changes in Hungary appeared to wane on their sixth day, but opposition lawmakers vowed Tuesday to pursue legal and parliamentary avenues to thwart the government while allowing for a Christmastime lull. About 150 to 200 people assembled outside the Hungarian parliament building in Budapest Tuesday evening, compared to an estimated 2,000 that confronted police a night earlier at the headquarters of state broadcaster MTVA. One opposition lawmaker was sent to the hospital Monday after a clash with MTVA security guards; tests showed he had internal bruising, but no broken bones. Three others complained of rough treatment. Timea Szabo, a lawmaker for the center-left Dialogue party, said the opposition remained committed to fighting the government-initiated changes to overtime work laws. "We're planning civil disobedience actions, road blocks with the trade unions, and further demonstrations," Szabo told foreign journalists on Tuesday. She declined to give details, citing the need to both coordinate action and maintain "the element of surprise". The main focus of the protests has been a law allowing employers to request up to 400 overtime hours from their workers annually - potentially reintroducing a six-day week - while delaying payments for up to three years. Parliamentary deputy of the oppositional Hungarian Socialist Party MSZP Zsolt Molnar, left, watches Democratic Coalition's (DK) deputy Zsolt Greczy, right, receiving help to climb the fence of the headquarters of the public broadcaster MTVA in Budapest, Hungary, Monday, Dec. 17, 2018. Oppositional lawmakers protest against the amendments to the labour code adopted on Dec. 12, and insist to read out their demands live in the public media. (Zsolt Szigetvary/MTI via AP) The right-wing government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, which won a third consecutive term in April's national election, said the overtime rules were designed to ease an acute labor shortage and to enable workers to earn more. The government has said that working overtime will be voluntary for employees. However, critics say that in practice, the changes invite coercion of industrial sector workers who have had their rights subdued for decades. "According to word of the law, there has to be consensus between the employer and employee. But in reality, Hungarian workers are so vulnerable (with respect) to their employers, that no one will dare say that they will not do this overtime," Szabo said. The demonstrations that started after lawmakers approved the new labor laws have been boisterous, but largely peaceful. Parliamentary deputy of the oppositional Hungarian Socialist Party MSZP Zsolt Molnar, left, helps MSZP deputy Tamas Harangozo climb the fence of the public broadcaster MTVA in Budapest, Hungary, Monday, Dec. 17, 2018. Oppositional lawmakers protest against the amendments to the labour code adopted on Dec. 12, and insist to read out their demands live in the public media. (Zsolt Szigetvary/MTI via AP) GUATEMALA CITY (AP) - Guatemalan authorities say they have completed documentation needed to clear the way for repatriation of the body of a 7-year-old migrant girl who died in U.S. Border Patrol custody. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Marta Larra says Jakelin Caal's cadaver is expected to return to Guatemala on Thursday and then be taken to her hometown of San Antonio Secortez. Caal and her father were part of a group of 163 migrants detained Dec. 6 near a border crossing in New Mexico. Hours later they were placed on a bus to the nearest Border Patrol station, but Jakelin began vomiting and eventually stopped breathing. She later died at a Texas hospital. CHICAGO (AP) - A federal judge in Chicago says she's inclined to free a DEA agent on bond pending his trial on charges alleging that he joined the agency specifically to help a murderous Puerto Rican-based group traffic guns and cocaine. Magistrate Judge Susan Cox said at Tuesday's detention hearing that the charges against 41-year-old Fernando Gomez "are among the most serious" she'd seen, given the DEA link, but that prosecutors hadn't shown he is dangerous or a flight risk. She acknowledged, though, that a New York federal judge overseeing the trafficking-conspiracy case has the final say on Gomez's release. Prosecutors allege that Gomez worked for La Organizacion de Narcotraficantes Unidos, or The Organization of United Drug Traffickers, as a suburban Chicago police detective from 2004 and 2011, then joined the DEA. He was arrested last week at the DEA's Chicago office and will be transferred to New York within weeks. A Yemeni mother on Tuesday won her fight for a waiver from the Trump administration's travel ban that would allow her to go to California to see her dying 2-year-old son. Shaima Swileh planned to fly to San Francisco on Wednesday after the U.S. State Department granted her a visa, said Basim Elkarra of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Sacramento, whose lawyers sued this week. The boy's father, Ali Hassan, is a U.S. citizen who brought their son, Abdullah, to California in the fall to get treatment for a genetic brain disorder after the boy's health worsened. Swileh and the boy had been living in Egypt, and she had hoped to accompany them but was not given a visa to enter the United States. Citizens from Yemen and four other mostly Muslim countries, along with North Korea and Venezuela, are restricted from coming to the United States under the travel ban enacted under President Donald Trump. As Swileh and her husband fought for a waiver, their son's health declined. Last week, doctors at UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital in Oakland put him on life support. "I am emailing them, crying, and telling them that my son is dying," Hassan said in an interview with The Sacramento Bee newspaper. This recent but undated photo, released Monday, Dec. 17, 2018 by the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Sacramento, Calif., shows Ali Hassan with his dying 2-year-old son Abdullah in a Sacramento hospital. The boy's Yemeni mother, blocked by the Trump administration's travel ban, has won her fight for a waiver that would allow her to travel to California to see her son. Basim Elkarra of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Sacramento said Shaima Swileh was granted a visa Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018, and will be flying to San Francisco on Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2018. (Council on American-Islamic Relations via AP) Hassan told reporters he wants his wife to be able to kiss their son one last time. "This will allow us to mourn with dignity," he said in a statement provided by the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Hassan was losing hope of getting her a waiver and was considering pulling his son off life support to end his suffering, but then a hospital social worker reached out to the council, which sued Monday, Elkarra said. He said Swileh lost months with her child over what amounted to unnecessary delays and red tape. State Department spokesman Robert Palladino called it "a very sad case, and our thoughts go out to this family at this time, at this trying time." He said he could not comment on the family's situation but that in general cases are handled individually, and U.S. officials try to facilitate legitimate travel to the United States while protecting national security. "These are not easy questions," he said. "We've got a lot of foreign service officers deployed all over the world that are making these decisions on a daily basis, and they are trying very hard to do the right thing at all times." Immigration attorneys estimate tens of thousands of people have been affected by what they call blanket denials of visa applications under Trump's travel ban, which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld in a 5-4 ruling in June. The waiver provision allows a case-by-case exemption for people who can show entry to the U.S. is in the national interest, is needed to prevent undue hardship and would not pose a security risk, but many say the government is denying nearly all visa applicants from countries under the travel ban. A lawsuit filed in San Francisco says the administration is not honoring the waiver provision. The 36 plaintiffs include people who have had waiver applications denied or stalled despite chronic medical conditions, prolonged family separations or significant business interests. "We hope this case makes the administration realize the waiver process is not working," Elkarra said. "Thousands of families have been split apart, including families who have loved ones who are ill and are not able to see them in their final hours. I'm sure there are more cases like this." In addition to the waiver, the government gave Swileh a visa that will allow her to remain in the United States with her husband and begin a path toward U.S. citizenship, Elkarra said. ___ Associated Press journalist Maria Danilova in Washington contributed to this report. ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. (AP) - Miss America may be leaving Atlantic City again. The Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News and the Press of Atlantic City report the Miss America Organization is looking for cities around the country interested in hosting the competition. The newspapers obtained the group's call for proposals from interested cities via a public records request to the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority, whose contract with Miss America has expired. The authority contributed $12 million to the organization over the past three years, but it has not reached a deal on Miss America's funding requests for the 2020 and 2021 pageants. "We have not responded to that," Matt Doherty, the authority's executive director, said. "They're shopping around for the best opportunities for Miss America." A request for comment was sent to the Miss America Organization on Tuesday. In this Sept. 7, 2018 photo, Miss Delaware Joanna Wicks introduces herself at the start of the third and final night of preliminary competition at the Miss America competition in Atlantic City N.J. As it nears the pageant's 100th anniversary, the Miss America Organization is looking for expressions of interest to host the competition from other cities. (AP Photo/Wayne Parry) The exit is not assured. The Press of Atlantic City obtained an email from a Miss America official to the state agency in which the organization considers the idea of using venues in Atlantic City other than its current one to possibly reduce expenses. City and state officials have expressed concern that Atlantic City might not be getting enough bang for its buck in sponsoring the pageant. Under the development authority's previous contract with the pageant, Atlantic City was supposed to receive some benefits that were never delivered, the newspapers reported, including a cut to the city during the Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve telecast. The Miss America Organization is seeking a venue with at least 3,000 seats. It has traditionally used Atlantic City's 12,000-seat Boardwalk Hall, but many seats remained empty during preliminary competition nights, and "seat fillers" were recruited to occupy chairs during the nationally televised finale, the newspapers reported. In return for financial and marketing help, the Miss America Organization is offering to promote the host city in national news conferences, during the TV broadcast of the pageant, in a spot on its website, and in a full-page ad in the Miss America Competition magazine. Miss America would also serve as a spokeswoman for the host city. The pageant originated in Atlantic City nearly 100 years ago. It moved to Las Vegas in 2006 and returned to New Jersey in 2013. In this Sept. 7, 2018 photo, Miss Arizona Isabel Ticlo introduces herself at the start of the third and final; night of preliminary competition at the Miss America competition in Atlantic City N.J. As it nears the 100th anniversary of the pageant, the Miss America Organization is seeking expressions of interest in hosting the competition from other cities. (AP Photo/Wayne Parry) NORFOLK, Va. (AP) - A U.S. Navy hospital ship has returned home after its crew treated thousands of people in Central and South America, including migrants who fled crisis-wracked Venezuela. Kevin Buckley, the commanding officer for medical operations on the USNS Comfort, said Tuesday that 26,000 people were treated for anything from hernias to cataracts. Buckley spoke on a pier at Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia where the Comfort is based. The 11-week mission stopped in countries that included Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. Those nations are home to hundreds of thousands of struggling Venezuelans. Many are desperately seeking health care and fled Venezuela because of a lack of access to doctors and medicine. A recent report estimated 20,000 doctors have left Venezuela since 2012. The Comfort also visited the Central American country of Honduras. Line handlers wait as the US Navy Hospital Ship USNS Comfort arrives pier side at Naval Station Norfolk, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018, in Norfolk , Va., after an 11-week medical support mission to South and Central America. The ship treated over 26,000 patients and conducted approximately 600 surgeries. (AP Photo/Steve Helber) Line handlers wait as the US Navy Hospital Ship USNS Comfort approaches the pier at Naval Station Norfolk, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018, in Norfolk , Va., after an 11-week medical support mission to South and Central America. The ship treated over 26,000 patients and conducted approximately 600 surgeries. (AP Photo/Steve Helber) Navy personnel line the rails as the US Navy Hospital Ship USNS Comfort arrives pier side at Naval Station Norfolk, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018, in Norfolk , Va., after an 11-week medical support mission to South and Central America. The ship treated over 26,000 patients and conducted approximately 600 surgeries. (AP Photo/Steve Helber) Captain Kevin Buckley, Commanding officer for the USNS Comfort, gestures as he speaks to the media as Captain William Shafley III, left, looks on as the US Navy Hospital Ship USNS Comfort arrives at Naval Station Norfolk, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018, in Norfolk , Va., after an 11-week medical support mission to South and Central America. The ship treated over 26,000 patients and conducted approximately 600 surgeries. (AP Photo/Steve Helber) COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) - The State Medical Board has acknowledged for the first time that it has confidential records about the investigation of a complaint involving former Ohio State University team doctor Richard Strauss who is accused of widespread sexual misconduct against students decades ago. The documents can't be viewed by the law firm investigating allegations that Strauss abused scores of male student-athletes in the 1980s and 1990s, but still might help guide its inquiry. It's unclear what the documents say about Strauss. The board and university won't share any details about the documents provided to Ohio State's lawyers earlier this month involving the now-deceased physician. Board communications obtained by The Associated Press indicate that the school sought the records after its outside investigators learned that Ohio State had reported Strauss to the medical board. The records were handed over to the university and its lawyers on the condition that they not be made public or shared with any third party, including the investigators from Seattle-based Perkins Coie. However, Ohio State's lawyers can ask the medical board for permission to share background tidbits with the investigators that could help direct them to relevant information. The board has said it never disciplined Strauss, and it hadn't previously disclosed whether it had record of any complaints related to him. That disclosure was made in the communications obtained by the AP and confirmed Tuesday by board spokeswoman Tessie Pollock. FILE - This undated file photo shows a photo of Dr. Richard Strauss, an Ohio State University team doctor employed by the school from 1978 until his 1998 retirement. Ohio's Medical Board confirms it has confidential records about a complaint investigation involving Ohio State University team doctor Richard Strauss who is accused of sexual misconduct against students decades ago. It's unclear what the documents say about the now-dead doctor. (Ohio State University via AP, File) State law allows the board to share such confidential records with government agencies if they're investigating possible violations of the law or administrative rules. The law firm is investigating the allegations against Strauss and whether Ohio State responded properly to concerns raised about him during his two decades there. Strauss killed himself in 2005. His family has expressed shock at the allegations about him but hasn't responded to subsequent requests for comment. A lawyer for Ohio State told the medical board that Strauss' family is cooperating with the investigation and didn't oppose the board's records being shared with the school. Because the information was provided under a limited legal exception, Ohio State and its lawyers aren't commenting on it, spokesman Ben Johnson said. At least 150 ex-students have alleged sexual misconduct by Strauss between 1979 and 1997, with some saying publicly that they were unnecessarily groped during exams or ogled in locker rooms. The allegations involve Ohio State male athletes from at least 16 sports, as well as Strauss' off-campus medical office and work at the student health center. No one has publicly defended Strauss since the investigation began in April after a former wrestler raised allegations of abuse. Employment records released by the university reflect no major concerns about Strauss. But alumni say they complained about him as far back as the late 1970s, and Ohio State has at least one documented complaint from 1995. The claims have spurred federal lawsuits and an investigation by the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights. Ohio State has urged anyone with relevant information to contact Perkins Coie. The firm isn't proactively contacting possible victims, citing concern for potentially re-traumatizing them. Some Strauss accusers suing the university have questioned the independence of that investigation, noting that lawyers for OSU hired the firm. Ohio State insists that it's committed to uncovering the truth and will publicly share results. Strauss' personnel file indicates he previously did research, taught or practiced medicine at Harvard University, Rutgers University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Washington and the University of Hawaii. Most of those have said they have little record of Strauss, and none has said any concerns were raised about him. The oversight or licensing agencies in most of those states told the AP they found no records of complaints or discipline against Strauss. The Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine said it found no remaining record of him being licensed there and noted it's possible such old records were destroyed once the required period for preserving them passed. ___ Associated Press reporter Collin Binkley in Boston contributed to this report. ___ Follow Franko on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/kantele10 . ___ Have a tip? Contact the author securely at https://www.ap.org/tips FRANKFORT, Ky. (AP) - Called back into session after a stinging loss at the Supreme Court, Kentucky's Republican-dominated legislature decided to go home on Tuesday without passing a replacement pension law despite warnings of financial ruin by the state's GOP governor. Kentucky has one of the worst-funded pension systems in the country, as state officials are at least $38 billion short of the money needed to pay retirement benefits over the next three decades. A pension law signed by Gov. Matt Bevin earlier this year was struck down by the state Supreme Court on procedural grounds last week. Monday, Bevin called lawmakers back into session to pass it again. But when lawmakers arrived, they were frustrated to find the two bills Bevin proposed were different than the law they had passed eight months earlier. "It caused them a great deal of consternation to come in here yesterday, to see the bills last night - when we finally got to see them - and to see they were not what they expected," acting GOP House Speaker David Osborne said. "And it just, it really caused a great deal of pause among a lot of our members." Bevin denied that he or his office had written the proposals, telling reporters: "I've not even read that whole bill." Bevin's attorney had sent lawmakers a letter earlier in the day, telling them they supported removing language from the bill that might prompt a lawsuit. But after meeting with Republican legislative leaders in his office, Bevin said it was clear lawmakers did not have an appetite to pass what he called "a lesser version" of the original pension law. Bevin said that "doesn't bode well for Kentucky." In this May 3, 2018, photo, Travis Brenda, a teacher at Rockcastle County High School, speaks during an interview in Mt. Vernon, Ky. The math teacher was pleased when the state Supreme Court struck down a law that would have made changes to his pension. (AP Photo/Wade Payne) "It honestly makes me sad when I hear people celebrate and dance upon their own financial graves," Bevin said, referring to cheers from public workers in the gallery when lawmakers adjourned the legislative session without passing a bill. "People cheer the fact that the system is now in worse condition than it ever was." Bevin and Osborne said passing a new pension bill will be a priority for the upcoming legislative session scheduled to begin Jan. 8. Republicans will still have super-majorities in both the House and Senate when lawmakers return. But the 2019 legislature will have 32 new members in the House of Representatives, including 16 new Republicans. Many of those incoming members said they were frustrated at lawmakers calling a special session on pensions three weeks before they were scheduled to take office. They included Travis Brenda, a high school math teacher who opposes the pension legislation and defeated House Majority Floor Leader Jonathan Shell in a GOP primary. Brenda noted each day lawmakers were in session cost taxpayers nearly $66,000. "That's more than the households in district 71 are making in a year," Brenda said. "We could handle this problem in three weeks." Bevin said he couldn't afford to wait that long. He said two of the country's three major ratings agencies had already contacted his administration, leading him to believe the state was in danger of a credit rating downgrade that could cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars. Bevin's lawyer, Steve Pitt, told lawmakers in a letter on Tuesday that's why they had changed the pension law by removing provisions they thought would prompt a lawsuit that could put the state in court for another year. "I am confident the Commonwealth would win (in a lawsuit,)" Pitt wrote in the letter to lawmakers. "But the problem with that approach is that the credit markets need certainty now, not a year from now." But some Republican lawmakers bristled at backing down, especially after they had spent the election season campaigning on the pension bill they had passed, known as Senate bill 151. "The current (GOP caucus) members, all but four of which were re-elected, campaigned on 151, were proud of 151 and want to defend 151," Republican state Rep. Jerry Miller said. "So we have a difference with the governor from the standpoint of defending our work as opposed to winding up in court." __ This story has been corrected to say the letter to state lawmakers was from Steve Pitt, Gov. Bevin's attorney, not from state Budget Director John Chilton. Members of the Kentucky Teachers Association gather at the stairs leading to the Kentucky House of Representatives to sing Christmas carols in protest of Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin calling a special session of the legislature in Frankfort, Ky., Monday, Dec. 17, 2018. Teachers rejoiced and Republicans despaired across Kentucky on Thursday as the state's Supreme Court struck down a law that had made changes to one of the country's worst-funded pension systems. (AP Photo/Timothy D. Easley) Kentucky Speaker of The House David Osborne, R-Prospect, confers with fellow representatives during the opening of a special session at the Kentucky state Capitol in Frankfort, Ky., Monday, Dec. 17, 2018. Days after losing at the state Supreme Court, Kentucky's Republican governor called the legislature back in session Monday to try again to reshape the state's troubled public pension system. (AP Photo/Timothy D. Easley) Kentucky state Rep. Rocky Adkins, D-Sandy Hook, raises an objection during the opening of a special session at the Kentucky state Capitol in Frankfort, Ky., Monday, Dec. 17, 2018. Days after losing at the state Supreme Court, Kentucky's Republican governor called the legislature back in session Monday to try again to reshape the state's troubled public pension system. (AP Photo/Timothy D. Easley) House Majority Floor Leader Jonathan Shell, R-Lancaster, left, and Kentucky Speaker of The House David Osborne, R-Prospect, talk Melissa Bybee-Fields, Chief Clerk of the House of Representatives during the opening of the special session at the Kentucky state Capitol in Frankfort, Ky., Monday, Dec. 17, 2018. (AP Photo/Timothy D. Easley) Protesters shout from the gallery overlooking the Kentucky house of representatives in protest of the special session at the Kentucky state Capitol in Frankfort, Ky., Monday, Dec. 17, 2018. Days after losing at the state Supreme Court, Kentucky's Republican governor called the legislature back in session Monday to try again to reshape the state's troubled public pension system. (AP Photo/Timothy D. Easley) Copies of Kentucky House Bill 2 lie on the clerks desk in the House chambers at the Kentucky state Capitol in Frankfort, Ky., Monday, Dec. 17, 2018. (AP Photo/Timothy D. Easley) Kentucky Speaker of The House David Osborne, R-Prospect, left, speaks with House Majority Floor Leader Jonathan Shell, R-Lancaster, during the opening of the special session at the Kentucky state Capitol in Frankfort, Ky., Monday, Dec. 17, 2018. Days after losing at the state Supreme Court, Kentucky's Republican governor called the legislature back in session Monday to try again to reshape the state's troubled public pension system. (AP Photo/Timothy D. Easley) Protesters with the Kentucky Teachers Association sing Christmas carols and hold up signs in the Kentucky state Capitol in Frankfort, Ky., Monday, Dec. 17, 2018. A special session was scheduled to discuss the state employee pension reform bill. Teachers rejoiced and Republicans despaired across Kentucky on Thursday as the state's Supreme Court struck down a law that had made changes to one of the country's worst-funded pension systems. (AP Photo/Timothy D. Easley) WASHINGTON (AP) - The Trump administration Tuesday banned bump stocks, the firearm attachments that allow semi-automatic weapons to fire like machine guns and were used during the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history. The regulation gives gun owners until late March to turn in or destroy the devices. After that, it will be illegal to possess them under the same federal laws that prohibit machine guns. Bump stocks became a focal point of the gun control debate after they were used in October 2017 when a man opened fire from his Las Vegas hotel suite into a crowd at a country music concert, killing 58 people and injuring hundreds more. The regulation was signed Tuesday by Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker. It will take effect 90 days after it is published in the Federal Register, which is expected to happen Friday. Bump stock owners will be required to either destroy them or surrender them to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, a senior Justice Department official said. It is impossible to know just how many bump stocks Americans own because the devices aren't traceable, but ATF has estimated that between 280,000 and about 520,000 have been sold since 2010. Investigators expect most owners will comply with the new rule and ATF will take action against those who don't, the official said. But there's no surefire way to know whether owners are complying. The official briefed reporters on condition of anonymity. FILE - In this Oct. 4, 2017 file photo, a little-known device called a "bump stock" is attached to a semi-automatic rifle at the Gun Vault store and shooting range in South Jordan, Utah. The Trump administration is moving to officially ban bump stocks, which allow semi-automatic weapons to fire rapidly like automatic firearms. A senior Justice Department official said Tuesday bump stocks will be banned under the federal law that prohibits machine guns. It will take effect in late March. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer) White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said President Donald Trump was "once again fulfilling a promise he made to the American people." Trump had promised the ban in March, saying the devices "turn legal weapons into illegal machines." Shortly afterward, the Justice Department started the process of amending firearms regulations to define bump stocks as machine guns. ATF received about 186,000 comments on the proposal. The amended regulations reverse a 2010 ATF decision that found bump stocks did not amount to machine guns and could not be regulated unless Congress changed existing firearms law or passed a new one. In the aftermath of the Las Vegas shooting, some members of Congress sought to ban bump stocks, but no legislation was passed. At least 10 states have sought their own restrictions. The amended rule was met almost immediately with resistance from gun rights advocates, including Gun Owners of America, which said it would file a lawsuit against the Justice Department and ATF to protect gun owners from "unconstitutional regulations." "These regulations implicate Second Amendment rights, and courts should be highly suspect when an agency changes its 'interpretation' of a statute in order to impair the exercise of enumerated constitutional rights," the organization's executive director, Erich Pratt, said. The Justice Department official said the government will fight any legal challenge that may be brought The National Rifle Association called on the Justice Department to provide amnesty for gun owners who already have bump stocks. "We are disappointed that this final rule fails to address the thousands of law-abiding Americans who relied on prior ATF determinations when lawfully acquiring these devices," said spokeswoman Jennifer Baker. Police said the gunman in the Las Vegas massacre, Stephen Paddock, fired for more than 10 minutes using multiple weapons outfitted with target scopes and bump stocks. Paddock fatally shot himself after the shooting. There were 23 assault-style weapons, including 14 fitted with rapid-fire "bump stock" devices, strewn about his 32nd-floor hotel suite at the Mandalay Bay casino-hotel. The largest manufacturer of bump stocks, Slide Fire Solutions, announced in April that it would stop taking orders and shut down its website. The remaining stock of the devices is now being sold by another company, RW Arms, based in Fort Worth, Texas. ___ Associated Press writer Lisa Marie Pane in Boise, Idaho, contributed to this report. ___ Follow Michael Balsamo on Twitter at www.twitter.com/MikeBalsamo1 . The Trump administration on Tuesday moved to roll back an Obama-era policy that was meant to curb racial disparities in school discipline but that critics say left schools afraid to take action against potentially dangerous students. The recommendation was among dozens issued in a new report by Trump's federal school safety commission, which was formed in response to a Feb. 14 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, that killed 17 students and staff members, and sparked a national debate over gun control. The panel was asked to study a range of options to bolster security at America's schools, from the regulation of guns to the regulation of violent video games. Yet rather than suggest a series of sweeping changes, the commission issued 100 smaller suggestions that largely avoid strong stances on topics like gun control and whether schools should arm teachers. "Our conclusions in this report do not impose one-size-fits-all solutions for everyone, everywhere," said Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who led the commission. "The primary responsibility for the physical security of schools and the safety of their students naturally rests with states and local communities." Trump praised the report at a White House event Tuesday, saying "nothing is more important than protecting our nation's children." On the question of whether schools should arm staff members, the panel said it should be left to states and schools to decide, but DeVos said schools should "seriously consider" the option. The report highlights districts that have armed staff members, and it steers schools to federal funding that can be used for firearm training. President Donald Trump listens as Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos speaks during a roundtable discussion on the Federal Commission on School Safety report, in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) Among the biggest proposals is a rollback of 2014 guidance that urges schools not to suspend, expel or report students to police except in the most extreme cases. Instead, the guidance calls for a variety of "restorative justice" remedies that don't remove students from the classroom. President Barack Obama's administration issued the guidance after finding that black students were more than three times as likely as their white peers to be suspended or expelled. The directive warns that schools suspected of discrimination - even if it is unintentional - can face investigations and risk losing federal funding. But the policy came under scrutiny following the Parkland shooting, with some conservatives suggesting it discouraged school officials from reporting the shooter's past behavioral problems to police. Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, one of the most vocal critics, urged DeVos to find a better balance between discipline and school safety. In its report, the commission says the policy was well-intentioned but "may have paradoxically contributed to making schools less safe." It calls for a rollback, saying disciplinary decisions should be left to school officials. It said the Justice Department should continue investigating intentional discrimination but not the unintentional cases that are barred under the 2014 policy. The proposed rollback was praised by some conservative groups but drew sharp criticism from Democrats and advocacy groups. "Despite overwhelming evidence and basic common sense, Secretary DeVos is trying to make the case that it's not weapons of war in schools that make students unsafe, but rather the true danger is schools' attempts to fight racism and inappropriate discipline," said Sen. Patty Murray, the top Democrat on the Senate's committee overseeing education. Along with DeVos, the safety commission includes leaders of the departments of Justice, Health and Human Services and Homeland Security. They issued their findings after more than a dozen meetings with teachers, parents, students, mental health experts, police and survivors of school shootings. At a White House event following the release of the report, families of some shooting victims applauded the commission's work. Andy Pollack, whose daughter, Meadow, was killed in the Parkland shooting, said the Trump administration listened to his concerns about school safety. "This is the most comprehensive report done after a school shooting ever done by an administration, that is going to affect the quality of life of all students and teachers throughout this country," Pollack said. But some critics said the report will do little to improve school safety. The National Association of School Psychologists said the report "largely reiterates already well-known and evidence-based efforts." The group said the report is short on specifics and fails to provide federal funding for its proposals, which many schools can't afford. While the report doesn't explicitly encourage schools to arm staff members, it says they "may consider" the option if their states allow it. And while DeVos has previously said she has no plans to let schools use federal education funding to arm their employees, the panel noted that certain Justice Department grants can be used on firearm training. The nation's two major teachers unions attacked the report, saying it should have focused on gun control rather than arming teachers, which both unions oppose. "We do not need more guns in schools," said Lily Eskelsen Garcia, president of the National Education Association. "It is shameful that the Trump administration is using the real risk of gun violence in our schools to strip vulnerable students of their civil rights, while doing nothing to keep all our students safe." On gun regulation, the commission's only suggested change was a call for more states to adopt laws allowing "extreme risk protection orders," or court orders that temporarily restrict access to firearms for people who are found to pose risks to themselves or others. The group studied whether states should raise the minimum age to buy guns, which is often 18 for rifles and 21 for handguns. Some states have increased the minimum age to 21 for all guns, including Florida, which made the move following the Parkland shooting. It joined others including Hawaii and Illinois. But the panel argues the change doesn't make schools safer. It said there's no research showing that age restrictions reduce killings, and it noted that most school shooters get their guns from family members, not through purchases. Among other proposals, the commission called for more training to help school officials identify mental health problems when students are younger, and it urges schools to hire more military veterans or retired police officers with the training to respond in an emergency. It also suggested measures schools should take to "harden" their buildings, including installing windows with laminated or bulletproof glass, and making sure all classroom doors can be locked from the inside. "Sadly, incidents of school violence are too common, and too many families and communities have faced these horrible challenges," DeVos said. "But Americans have never shied away from challenges, nor have we cowered when evil manifests itself." ___ Associated Press writer Deb Riechmann contributed to this report. ___ Follow Collin Binkley on Twitter at https://twitter.com/cbinkley FILE - In this Sept. 17, 2018 file photo, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos speaks during a student town hall at National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. President Donald Trump's school safety commission is proposing a rollback of Obama-era guidance that was meant to curb racial disparities in school discipline. The commission was led by DeVos and made dozens of policy recommendations in a report released Tuesday. Trump created the panel in March following the deadly school shooting in Parkland, Florida. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke) JT Lewis, brother of Sandy Hook victim Jesse Lewis, left, listens as Andy Pollack, father of Parkland victim Meadow Pollack, speaks with President Donald Trump during a roundtable discussion on the Federal Commission on School Safety report, in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) President Donald Trump opens the Federal Commission on School Safety report during a meeting in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) WEST HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) - A 12-year-old boy was charged Tuesday with killing his sister and seriously wounding his mother in a stabbing at a Connecticut home. West Hartford police said the boy was arraigned at Connecticut Children's Medical Center in Hartford, where he was being treated for minor injuries sustained in Monday's incident. The boy faces one count of murder and one count of first-degree assault and is currently in the custody of the Connecticut Judicial Marshals. The names of the boy and the victims haven't been released, but West Hartford Mayor Shari Cantor released a statement from the family, which has asked for privacy. "We are all enduring a very painful and unimaginable loss," the statement says. "Our family will never be the same. Our daughter was a beautiful child and we will remember forever her smile ... laughter . and remember her for the way she loved and lived." Cantor said community members are also "incredibly brokenhearted." "Today we are mourning the loss of a beautiful young lady and praying for the recovery of her mother," she said in a news release. "Our special community of West Hartford is in pain." Grief counselors were on hand Tuesday at the school the children attended while a local church offered evening services for students and families. Police meanwhile returned to the home in the upscale Hartford suburb where the stabbing happened and continued their investigation. The mother remains hospitalized but in stable condition. Officers responded to the home at about 3:30 p.m. Monday after the mother called 911 to report that she and her daughter had been stabbed by her son. DENVER (AP) - Attorneys for a Colorado baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple on religious grounds - a stand partially upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court - argued in federal court Tuesday that the state is punishing him again over his refusal to bake a cake celebrating a gender transition. Lawyers for Jack Phillips, owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop in suburban Denver, are suing to try to stop the state from taking action against him over the new discrimination allegation. They say the state is treating Phillips with hostility because of his Christian faith and pressing a complaint that they call an "obvious setup." "At this point, he's just a guy who is trying to get back to life. The problem is the state of Colorado won't let him," Jim Campbell, an attorney for the Alliance Defending Freedom, said after the hearing. The conservative Christian nonprofit law firm is representing Phillips. State officials argued for the case to be dismissed, but the judge said he was inclined to let the case move forward and would issue a written ruling later. The Colorado Civil Rights Commission said Phillips discriminated against Denver attorney Autumn Scardina because she's transgender. Phillips' shop refused to make a cake last year that was blue on the outside and pink on the inside after Scardina revealed she wanted it to celebrate her transition from male to female. She asked for the cake on the same day the U.S. Supreme Court announced it would consider Phillips' appeal of the previous commission ruling against him. In that 2012 case, he refused to make a wedding cake for same-sex couple Charlie Craig and Dave Mullins. FILE - In this Monday, June 4, 2018, file photograph, baker Jack Phillips, owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop, manages his shop after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that he could refuse to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple because of his religious beliefs did not violate Colorado's anti-discrimination law in Lakewood, Colo. Attorneys for Philliups are in federal court in Denver Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018, to seek to overturn a Colorado Civil Rights Commission ruling that the baker discriminated against a transgender person by refusing to make a cake to mark the person's transition from male to female. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski, File) The Supreme Court ruled in June that the Colorado commission showed anti-religious bias when it sanctioned Phillips for refusing to make the cake, voting 7-2 that it violated Phillips' First Amendment rights. But the court did not rule on the larger issue of whether businesses can invoke religious objections to refuse service to gays and lesbians. Phillips' lawsuit alleges that Colorado violated his First Amendment right to practice his faith and 14th Amendment right to equal protection. It seeks $100,000 in punitive damages from Aubrey Elenis, director of the Colorado Civil Rights Division. Attorney General Cynthia Coffman says the case should be dismissed because of state efforts to enforce its order against Phillips. A state hearing is scheduled for February to determine what will happen next. Deputy Attorney General LeeAnn Morrill told Senior Judge Wiley Y. Daniel that the commission did not mention religion in its latest finding against Phillips. She said the commission also has used the state's anti-discrimination law to protect people who have faced bias because of their faith. The judge said he thought the Supreme Court's ruling had more relevance in the current case than the state acknowledged and quoted from the justices' opinions during the hearing. He mentioned now-retired Justice Anthony Kennedy's conclusion that the commission had shown "hostility" toward religion. Wiley said he would have to hear evidence before deciding whether to temporarily block state proceedings. In the lawsuit, Phillips' attorneys say he "believes as a matter of religious conviction that sex - the status of being male or female - is given by God, is biologically determined, is not determined by perceptions or feelings, and cannot be chosen or changed." It claims Phillips has been harassed and received death threats and that his small shop was vandalized while the wedding cake case made its way through the courts. WASHINGTON (AP) - It was the first time many liberal advocates had set foot inside President Donald Trump's White House. They had come at the invitation of presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner, a top White House adviser. Many liberal and good-government groups had questioning his lack of experience in government, and raised concerns about potential conflicts of interest and cozy relationship with foreign leaders, including Saudi Arabia's crown prince. But in White House conference rooms and lobbying trips to Capitol Hill, Kushner worked with advocates, legislators and those on both ends of the political spectrum to forge a deal intended to make the nation's criminal justice system fairer. Now Kushner, the likely subject of new investigations when Democrats take control of the House next year, is getting credit for helping to push through what could be the first major bipartisan legislative success of the Trump era. "I don't think this would have happened without him," said Sen. Corey Booker of New Jersey, a potential 2020 Democratic presidential contender. He said the bill would have "a profound effect on thousands of families who have been suffering as a result of this broken system." Inimai Chettiar, director of the Justice Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, attended multiple meetings at the White House and lobbied with Kushner on Capitol Hill. She said that while the center's policies are generally "very oppositional" to the Trump agenda, criminal justice offered a rare opportunity for cooperation. FILE - In this Nov. 14, 2018, file photo, President Donald Trump's White House senior adviser Jared Kushner, right, smiles as former Sen. Jim DeMint of the Heritage Foundation, left, applauds as President Donald Trump recognizes Kushner as he speaks about H. R. 5682, the "First Step Act" in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, which would reform America's criminal justice system. Kushner is being credited for helping to spearhead what could be the first major bipartisan legislative success of the Trump era: a first-in-a-generation criminal justice reform bill that is expected to pass as soon as this week. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File) Kushner "understands why this is a very important issue and the effect that it could have," she said. For Kushner, the criminal justice issue has long been deeply personal. Kushner was in his early 20s and a law and business school student in the mid-2000s when his father was sentenced to federal prison on charges of tax evasion, witness tampering and illegal campaign donations. "When you're on the other side of the system, you feel so helpless," Kushner told The Associated Press in a recent interview. "I felt like, I was on this side of the system, so how can I try to do whatever I can do to try to be helpful to the people who are going through it" and deserve a second chance. The issue was never part of Trump's campaign message. But within months of his father-in-law taking office, Kushner was spotted in the hallways of Congress, coming and going from meetings on the subject. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, said he talked to Kushner as often as five times a day. Kushner worked with groups including the ACLU, Brennan Center, and the conservative Koch brothers' network, along with Republican governors, law enforcement groups, former Obama special adviser Van Jones and reality star Kim Kardashian West. And he got the president on board. Even before Tuesday's Senate vote, though, some of the unlikely allies worked with Kushner on criminal justice were skeptical the working relationships built in recent months will translate into further bipartisan successes. A House vote is expected later this week. The administration enters a new era in January, when Democrats take control of the House. Democrats have made clear that they intend to use their subpoena power to investigate the administration, including Kushner. He is expected to face an onslaught of inquiries digging into everything from his businesses and security clearance to his relationship with the Saudi royal accused of ordering the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Revamping criminal justice, they say, was a unique and rare area of consensus. "The fact of the matter is that many of the policies of the Trump administration are squarely at odds with ACLU principles. And it's lovely to have a rapport on an issue you can agree with," said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. "It might be much harder to find common ground on any other issue." Kushner declined to comment on the record about the expected inquiries, and what the new reality might mean for the president and the White House. He also faced opposition from within the administration, including former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who opposed sentencing changes that helped to bring Senate Democrats on board. Even on Tuesday, critics of the bill were making a final push to amend the legislation, which gives judges more discretion when sentencing some drug offenders and boosts prisoner rehabilitation efforts. But Romero, whose ACLU has filed 107 lawsuits against the administration so far, most challenging its immigration policies, praised Kushner's "tenacity" and "doggedness." "Though we have many areas of disagreement with the White House, it was refreshing to find one area where we could work together," Romero said, adding that, Kushner's personal commitment to the issue "allowed us to break through." Holly Harris, a conservative strategist and executive director of the Justice Action Network, credited Kushner's efforts to put Republican governors supportive of the legislation in front of the president to share their experiences about how similar efforts in their states had helped reduce crime. "Their voices were critical in showing another side of reform to the president," she said of Trump. "He never quit. He never slowed down. He kept moving things," added Grover Norquist, an advocate for lower taxes, who also worked with Kushner. ___ Associated Press writer Mary Clare Jalonick contributed to this report. __ Follow Colvin on Twitter at https://twitter.com/colvinj WASHINGTON (AP) - A federal judge Tuesday abruptly postponed the sentencing of President Donald Trump's first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, declaring himself disgusted and disdainful of Flynn's crime of lying to the FBI and raising the unexpected prospect of sending the retired Army lieutenant general to prison. Lawyers for Flynn, who admitted lying to the FBI about his Russian contacts, requested the delay during the stunning hearing in which U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan told the former Trump aide in a blistering rebuke that "arguably you sold your country out." "I can't make any guarantees, but I'm not hiding my disgust, my disdain for this criminal offense," Sullivan said. The postponement gives Flynn a chance to continue cooperating with the government in hopes of staving off prison and proving his value as a witness, including in a foreign lobbying prosecution unsealed this week. The possibility of prison had seemed remote for Flynn, who was smiling and upbeat as he entered the courtroom, since prosecutors had praised his extensive cooperation and didn't recommend any time behind bars. But the judge's upbraiding suggested otherwise and made clear that even defendants like Flynn who have cooperated in special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation may nonetheless be shadowed by the crimes that brought them into court in the first place. The hearing upset what had been a carefully crafted agreement and pushed months into the future a resolution of one of Mueller's signature prosecutions. "This is a very serious offense. A high-ranking senior official of the government making false statements to the Federal Bureau of Investigation while on the physical premises of the White House," Sullivan said. President Donald Trump's former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn leaves federal court in Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster) He later softened his tone, apologizing for suggesting that Flynn had worked as a foreign agent, "undermining everything this flag over here stands for" while in the White House when that other work had actually already ended. He also backpedaled on an earlier question on whether Flynn's transgressions amounted to treason, saying he didn't mean to suggest they did. Flynn was to have been the first White House official sentenced in Mueller's ongoing investigation into possible coordination between the Trump presidential campaign and Russia. The hearing, though incomplete, marked a remarkable fall after a three-decade military career that included Flynn's tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and oversight of the Defense Intelligence Agency during the Obama administration. Though he served only briefly in Trump's White House, he campaigned vigorously before the election and attracted attention for memorably leading a Republican National Convention crowd in a "Lock Her Up" chant about Hillary Clinton. It all comes amid escalating legal peril for Trump, who was implicated by federal prosecutors in New York this month in hush-money payments involving his former lawyer to cover up extramarital affairs. Nearly a half-dozen former aides and advisers have pleaded guilty or agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. Some, like Flynn, have been tripped up by concealing Russian contacts. Flynn's help in the probes, including 19 meetings with investigators, has been especially notable. Yet he's nonetheless enjoyed Trump's continued sympathy, thanks in part to a sentencing memo last week that tapped into the president's suspicion of law enforcement and took aim at the FBI's conduct during the investigation. Trump tweeted "good luck" to his first national security adviser hours before the sentencing and said: "Will be interesting to see what he has to say, despite tremendous pressure being put on him, about Russian Collusion in our great and, obviously, highly successful political campaign. There was no Collusion!" At the White House afterward, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked if the administration had changed its stance on Flynn or the FBI after his admissions and guilty plea. "Maybe he did do those things, but it doesn't have anything to do with the president," she said. "It's perfectly acceptable for the president to make a positive comment about somebody while we wait to see what the court's determination is." Sanders repeated her allegation that the FBI "ambushed" Flynn in an interview in which he lied. Of Trump's earlier FBI criticism, she said, "We don't have any reason to want to walk that back." Flynn's legal woes stem from transition-period calls with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak that raised intelligence community alarms even before Trump took office. During those conversations, Flynn urged against a strong Russian response to Obama administration sanctions for Russian election interference and also encouraged Russia's opposition to a U.N. resolution on Israeli settlements. But when FBI agents approached him in the White House on Jan. 24, 2017, Flynn lied about those conversations, prosecutors said. Flynn has never said why he lied, but Sullivan nonetheless castigated him for a deception that was then parroted by other senior administration officials. The tone of Tuesday's hearing startled Flynn supporters who hoped his lawyers' arguments about the FBI's conduct - they suggested he was discouraged from having a lawyer present during the interview and wasn't informed it was a crime to lie - to resonate more than it did with Sullivan, who a decade ago tossed out the prosecution of a U.S. senator over government misconduct. But while Sullivan tested those arguments, he was ultimately unmoved and Flynn mostly walked them back. He acknowledged that he indeed knew that lying to the FBI was a crime. Neither he nor his lawyers disputed that he'd lied to agents. Flynn attorney Robert Kelner asked Sullivan not to penalize Flynn for the sentencing memo arguments, saying they were mostly intended to differentiate Flynn from other defendants in Mueller's investigation who'd received prison sentences for lying. Though Sullivan said none of the other defendants was a White House official, Kelner suggested none had been as cooperative. "He made the decision publicly and clearly and completely and utterly to cooperate with this investigation, knowing that because of his high rank, that was going to send a signal to every other potential cooperator and witness in this investigation," he added. After a prosecutor raised the prospect of Flynn's continued cooperation with other investigations in the future, Sullivan warned Flynn that he might not get full credit for his assistance to the government if he were sentenced as scheduled. Sullivan gave a visibly shaken Flynn a chance to discuss a delay of the hearing with his lawyers. The court briefly recessed. When they returned, Kelner requested a postponement to allow for Flynn to keep cooperating. Kelner said he expected Flynn would have to testify in a related trial in Virginia involving Flynn's former business associates, and the defense wanted to "eke out the last modicum of cooperation" so he could get credit. Flynn's lawyers were instructed to submit a status report by March 13. Flynn left the courthouse hand-in-hand with his wife, climbing into an SUV as protesters heckled and supporters chanted "USA!" ___ Read the Flynn FBI interview notes: http://apne.ws/xfm8IsO ___ Associated Press writer Michelle R. Smith in Providence contributed to this report. This courtroom sketch depicts former President Donald Trump's former national security adviser Michael Flynn, standing center, flanked by his lawyers, listening to U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan, right, as he addresses Flynn and points to the American flag inside the federal court in Washington, Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. Sullivan agreed to postpone Flynn's sentencing so he can continue cooperating with the Russia probe. (Dana Verkouteren via AP) President Donald Trump's former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn arrives at federal court in Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster) President Donald Trump's former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and his wife Lori Andrade arrive at federal court in Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster) OSCEOLA, Iowa (AP) - An Iowa judge cited the courthouse arrest of a drunken prosecutor in dismissing charges against a man accused of sexually assaulting a 13-year-old boy. Judge Marti Mertz issued the ruling Monday and chastised Clarke County Attorney Michelle Rivera. The prosecutor's unavailability at a recent hearing in the case "was the finale following unexplained periods of inactivity and lack of responsiveness" since the man's arrest more than a year ago, the judge said. A sheriff's deputy arrested Rivera for being drunk in an Osceola courtroom on Oct. 18, just moments before the man was scheduled to enter a new plea and be sentenced in the case. The man later sought a dismissal because he hadn't been tried within a year of his arraignment. He was initially charged with sex assault and telephone dissemination of obscene material to a minor. Investigators say he admitted engaging in sex act with a minor in August 2017. The state can't refile the same charges against the man, said Mark Pennington, a former Polk County prosecutor not involved in the case "Everybody should be upset about it," Pennington said. "That's why you have to hold elected officials, including county attorneys, to a high standard." This photo provided by the Clarke County Jail in Osceola, Iowa, shows Clarke County Attorney Michelle Rivera. An Iowa judge cited the courthouse arrest Oct. 18, 2018, of Rivera, a prosecutor, for being drunk in an Osceola courtroom in dismissing charges against a man accused of sexually abusing a 13-year-old boy. Judge Marti Mertz issued the ruling Monday, Dec. 17, 2018, while chastising Rivera. (Clarke County Jail via AP) Drake University law professor Robert Rigg, a criminal law expert, said there are options if the state wants to pursue charges. Clarke County prosecutors could attempt to file different charges, such as lascivious acts against a child. Or they could allow federal prosecutors to file their separate charges to get around the double-jeopardy protections the man now has at the state level. "He may end up winning the battle and losing the war," Rigg said. A spokesman for the Iowa Attorney General's office said no one at the county level has sought their help in the case. Rivera and her attorney didn't immediately return messages from The Associated Press on Tuesday seeking comment about the case. Attempts by the AP to reach the victim's parents and their attorney were unsuccessful. Rivera pleaded guilty in the courthouse intoxication incident and was fined $65. The man's attorney, Marshall Orsini, told television station KCCI that his client's release from jail was long overdue. "If the defendant is not put on trial (and) is not tried within a year, you have the potential to have that case dismissed, and that's what happened here," Orsini said. Rivera lost her re-election bid in November. She was arrested again last week in Osceola on charges of operating a vehicle while intoxicated and child endangerment. According to court documents, an officer said Rivera was intoxicated when she dropped her daughter off at a day care. A hearing on the new charges is set for Thursday. SEATTLE (AP) - A rare tornado touched down in a Seattle suburb on Tuesday, damaging several homes and toppling trees, authorities said. Based on radar imagery and video evidence, a tornado touched down south of Port Orchard shortly before 2 p.m., said Brent Bower, hydrologist with the National Weather Service in Seattle. There were no immediate reports of injuries. Emily Silverman told the television station KOMO-TV she was driving to a store with her husband at the time. "It's raining and it's pouring down really bad and before you know it everything was flying everywhere," Silverman said. "Our car back windows blew out, our side windows blew out ... I thought I was a goner." Her 2-year-old son was in the back seat. Residents and emergency personnel on Harris Road in Port Orchard, Wash., on Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018, after a tornado touched down. A rare tornado touched down in a Seattle suburb on Tuesday, damaging several homes and toppling trees, authorities said. (Larry Steagall/Kitsap Sun via AP) "So glad he's OK because the whole back window just busted in," Silverman said. "It was just crazy. I've never seen anything like this in my life." The Kitsap County Sheriff's Office called the damage "catastrophic," saying it was contained to neighborhoods east and south of a Walmart in Port Orchard. Power lines were down and roads were closed in the area, the sheriff's office said. About 50 buildings were affected, Deputy Scott Wilson told the Seattle Times. KOMO-TV reports damage was reported on Rhapsody Drive and at the Bethel Tavern. Video from the television station's helicopter at the scene showed trees down, homes with roofs ripped off and debris scattered across yards. Bower said they wouldn't be able to survey the area before it was dark and that they'd send a team Wednesday morning. They were working with emergency management partners to learn the extent of the damage. The state averages 2.5 tornadoes a year, but December tornadoes are extremely rare, the weather service said on Twitter. Most tornadoes in Washington are rated EF-0s with minor damage, Bower said. Port Orchard is about 15 miles (24 kilometers) west of Seattle, across Puget Sound on the Kitsap Peninsula. Matt Hargis walks through downed trees behind the Walmart in Port Orchard, Wash., on Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018, after a tornado touched down. Based on radar imagery and video evidence, a tornado touched down south of Port Orchard shortly before 2 p.m., the National Weather Service in Seattle said on Twitter. (Larry Steagall/Kitsap Sun via AP) A roof strut sticks up out of a yard on Plymouth Way after a tornado touched down in Port Orchard, Wash., on Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. A rare tornado touched down in a Seattle suburb on Tuesday, damaging several homes and toppling trees, authorities said. (Larry Steagall/Kitsap Sun via AP) Residents evacuate from their Harris Road in Port Orchard, Wash., on Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018, after a tornado touched down. A rare tornado touched down in a Seattle suburb on Tuesday, damaging several homes and toppling trees, authorities said. (Larry Steagall/Kitsap Sun via AP) Emergency responders huddle on Harris Road to map out the response in Port Orchard, Wash., on Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018, after a tornado touched down. A rare tornado touched down in a Seattle suburb on Tuesday, damaging several homes and toppling trees, authorities said. (Larry Steagall/Kitsap Sun via AP) WASHINGTON (AP) - Michael Flynn's wait was almost over. The former national security adviser, about to be sentenced for lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russians, appeared confident that he was about to walk out of court a free man Tuesday morning. He had, after all, spent the past year cooperating with prosecutors, who recommended no prison time. Sharply dressed and straight-backed, the retired Army three-star general joked with his attorneys. He waved to relatives who were in court to support him, saying "Everybody made it!" He turned toward his son, Michael Flynn Jr., and made a V sign with his fingers. But then U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan entered the picture - and the carefully laid plans of prosecutors and Flynn fell apart. During his sentencing hearing Tuesday, Flynn went from a man on the verge of relief to a man shaken, his smile replaced by a tight-lipped grimace as the judge delayed deciding his fate for another 90 days so Flynn could cooperate some more. Looking down over his glasses, Sullivan hinted from the start that things weren't going to go as planned. This courtroom sketch depicts former President Donald Trump's former national security adviser Michael Flynn, standing center, flanked by his lawyers, listening to U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan, right, as he addresses Flynn and points to the American flag inside the federal court in Washington, Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. Sullivan agreed to postpone Flynn's sentencing so he can continue cooperating with the Russia probe. Flynn's wife Lori Andrade, back left, and son Michael Flynn Jr., with red tie, listen. (Dana Verkouteren via AP) He upbraided Flynn for lying to the FBI - in the West Wing no less. He invoked the American flag, and said Flynn's conduct undermined everything it stands for. And then he landed the big one. "Arguably, you sold your country out," he told Flynn, drawing a stunned gasp from many of Flynn's family members. With that rebuke settling over the courtroom - and Sullivan suggesting there might be prison in the general's future after all - the judge asked Flynn if he wanted to confer with his lawyers and consider a delay. Didn't Flynn still have a small amount of unfinished cooperation left? Did he want to get to the last bit of that before the judge imposed a sentence? Flynn retreated to the defense table, whispering with his attorneys. A prosecutor waffled when Sullivan asked if Flynn could have been charged with treason. The judge took a break. Stone-faced, Flynn left the courtroom with his lawyers. He returned, the relaxed smile gone. Faced with a judge who had just accused him of selling out his country, Flynn chose to withdraw, to fight another day, and to wait some more. Even after the judge took back a few of his more stinging comments, Flynn's decision was firm. The judge granted the delay. Ninety more days- at least. And with that, the judge adjourned. "Happy Holidays," he said. ___ Follow Chad Day on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChadSDay BLADENBORO, N.C. (AP) - The attorney for a man at the center of a controversy in a disputed North Carolina congressional race said he hasn't broken any campaign laws and ongoing investigations will prove it. Attorney Cynthia Adams Singletary said in a statement Tuesday that any speculation regarding McCrae Dowless and the 9th District election is premature and unwarranted. Singletary said Dowless was "a highly respected member of our community who is routinely sought after for his campaign expertise." Republican candidate Mark Harris said in an interview last week that it was his decision to hire Dowless, who is the focus in an investigation into how absentee ballots were handled. The state elections board has declined to certify the election results in light of mail-in absentee ballot irregularities in Bladen County and other issues in Robeson County. SANTA ROSA, Calif. (AP) - Sonoma County will pay $3 million to settle a civil rights lawsuit filed by the family of a California teenager who was fatally shot by a sheriff's deputy while holding a pellet gun. The Press Democrat reports the settlement was approved unanimously Tuesday by the county Board of Supervisors, bringing to a close a lawsuit filed in November 2013 by the family of 13-year-old Andy Lopez. Lopez was fatally shot by Sonoma County sheriff's deputy Erick Gelhaus, who saw Lopez carrying what appeared to be an AK-47 but was actually a plastic pellet gun made to look like an assault rifle. Sonoma County Sheriff Robert Giordano offered condolences to the Lopez family. He noted that Gelhaus was cleared of criminal wrongdoing but officials agreed the settlement was the best solution. FILE - In this Oct. 29, 2013 file photo, protesters hold images of shooting victim Andy Lopez during a march in Santa Rosa, Calif. Sonoma County will pay $3 million to settle a civil rights lawsuit filed by the family of a California teenager who was fatally shot by a sheriff's deputy while holding a pellet gun. The Press Democrat reports the settlement was approved unanimously Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018, by the county Board of Supervisors, bringing to a close a lawsuit filed in Nov. 2013 by the family of 13-year-old Lopez. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez, File) FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) - Roger Stone, a former campaign adviser to Donald Trump, has settled a $100 million lawsuit accusing him of publishing false information on the InfoWars website. The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that exiled Chinese businessman Guo Wengui sued Stone in March. In the settlement reached Monday, Stone acknowledged that he publicly stated that Guo had been "convicted of financial crimes in the United States" and "violated U.S. election law." Stone now says, "All of these statements are not true." In a statement Tuesday, Stone clarified that "at no time did I knowingly publish material that I knew to be false." Rather, he said, he made "the terrible mistake of relying on the representations of Sam Nunberg in my reporting." The settlement identifies Chinese-American media tycoon Bruno Wu as "the apparent source of the information" and says it was conveyed to Stone by Nunberg, a former Trump campaign aide. Stone said Tuesday, "When incorrect statements were brought to my attention I apologized and agreed to a retraction." FILE - In this Dec. 6, 2018, file photo, Roger Stone speaks at the American Priority Conference in Washington Thursday, Dec. 6, 2018. Former Trump campaign adviser Stone has settled a $100 million lawsuit accusing him of publishing lies on the far-right InfoWars website. The Wall Street Journal reports exiled Chinese businessman Guo Wengui sued Stone in March, saying Stone accused him of being a "turncoat criminal" who violated U.S. election law. Stone now says his conduct was "irresponsible."(AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File) Guo has criticized high-level corruption in China and applied for asylum in the U.S. The settlement allows Stone to avoid paying any damages if he publishes national newspaper ads apologizing for the statements and retracts the statements online. He still is of interest to investigators probing Russian interference in the 2016 election. WASHINGTON (AP) - The Latest on negotiations over funding President Donald Trump wants for a U.S.-Mexico border wall and the possibility of a partial government shutdown (all times local): 9:10 p.m. President Donald Trump and leaders in Congress appear to be pulling back from a government shutdown over his $5 billion request for border wall funds. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders indicates that Trump doesn't want to shut down the government, though just last week he said he'd be "proud" to over the issue of border security. One option circulating on Capitol Hill would be to approve government funding at existing levels and kick the issue into the next Congress. It was a turnaround after days of impasse. Without a resolution, more than 800,000 government workers could be furloughed or sent to work without pay beginning at midnight Friday, disrupting government operations days before Christmas. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., joined by Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., left, and Majority Whip John Cornyn, R-Texas, right, arrives to speak to reporters about the possibility of a partial government shutdown, at the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. Congress and President Donald Trump continue to bicker over his demand that lawmakers fund a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, pushing the government to the brink of a partial shutdown at midnight Friday. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite) ___ 3:15 p.m. Senate Democrats say President Donald Trump isn't paying for his border wall from other parts of the government's budget because doing so would require approval from Congress. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer rejected White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders' suggestion Tuesday that there are ways to pay for the wall using federal money allocated to other things. Schumer said to do so, "They'd need congressional approval, and they're not getting it for the wall." The statement was the latest volley in the standoff over passing a funding bill. Trump, who vowed to make Mexico pay for the wall along the border, is insisting that any budget plan include U.S. funding. Democrats are refusing. If the standoff is not resolved, parts of the government will shut down at midnight Friday. ___ 3 p.m. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says he's confident that there will not be a partial government shutdown, but discussions are continuing. President Donald Trump and Democratic lawmakers are in a standoff over funding the government, and the main sticking point is Trump's demand for $5 billion in taxpayer dollars for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. McConnell proposed $1.6 billion for border security plus another $1 billion in flexible funding. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer rejected the proposal, saying Democrats would not accept a billion-dollar "slush fund." McConnell says he's "in consultation" with the White House about the path forward. He added that the administration is "extremely flexible on this issue." Asked if he's confident that the government will not shut down, McConnell said, "Yeah, I am." ___ 2:40 p.m. The White House says it's waiting to see what the Senate can pass to prevent a partial government shutdown. Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the Senate has "thrown out a number of ideas." She said that when something passes, the White House will evaluate it. Sanders says: "We want to know what can pass." Sanders says President Donald Trump has asked every Cabinet secretary to look for funding that could be used for border security. Congressional leaders have been negotiating since the White House indicated earlier in the day that Trump does not want a federal government shutdown over his demand for $5 billion for the border wall with Mexico. ___ 2:10 p.m. Democratic leaders are spurning a proposal by the top Senate Republican to avert a partial government shutdown over President Donald Trump's demand for $5 billion for a border wall with Mexico. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell proposed $1.6 billion for border security, as outlined in a bipartisan Senate bill, plus another $1 billion Trump could use on the border, according to a Democratic aide unauthorized to speak publicly about the private meeting. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer called McConnell Tuesday and rejected the proposal, saying Democrats would not accept a billion-dollar "slush fund." House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi also snubbed the proposal: "Right now what they've offered we have not accepted." The White said Tuesday that Trump might accept the Senate bill if other money was also available. -Lisa Mascaro ___ 12:55 p.m. Senate leaders are negotiating to avert a federal shutdown over President Donald Trump's demand for $5 billion for the border wall with Mexico. In talks Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell proposed $1.6 billion for border security, as outlined in a bipartisan Senate bill, plus an additional $1 billion that Trump could use on the border, according to a senior Democratic aide unauthorized to speak publicly about the private meeting. Democrats are likely to reject that, the aide said, and characterized the additional money as a "slush fund." Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi have proposed $1.3 billion. That money would not be for a wall, but for border fencing. Earlier Tuesday, the White House indicated Trump may be willing to accept the Senate bill, if other money was also available. -Lisa Mascaro ___ 11 a.m. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders says the White House is willing to work with Congress to avert a partial government shutdown. President Donald Trump has been demanding $5 billion to fund his long-promised U.S.-Mexico border wall, but Democrats have balked at giving him any more than $1.6 billion for border security. A shutdown could happen at midnight Friday. Sanders said on Fox News on Tuesday there are "other ways that we can get to that $5 billion," including one bill she says would provide $26 billion in border security, including $1.6 billion for the wall. She says, "That's something that we would be able to support" as long as it's coupled with other funding, such as using defense money on border security. She adds that, "At the end of the day, we don't want to shut down the government. We want to shut down the border from illegal immigration." Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., and Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the assistant Democratic leader, talks to reporters about the possibility of a partial government shutdown, at the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. Congress and President Donald Trump continue to bicker over his demand that lawmakers fund a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, pushing the government to the brink of a partial shutdown at midnight Friday. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite) House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi of California, the speaker-designate for the new Congress in January, talks to reporters after meeting with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., as Congress and President Donald Trump bicker over his demand that lawmakers fund a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, pushing the government to the brink of a partial shutdown, in Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. Without a resolution, parts of the federal government will shut down at midnight Friday. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite) ANTANANARIVO, Madagascar (AP) - The counting of ballots has started in Madagascar's runoff presidential election, after the polls closed to end the generally peaceful voting Wednesday. There was a relatively low turnout of voters on this Indian Ocean island nation which is selecting a new president between two former leaders. Andry Rajoelina, 44, president from 2009 to 2014, received 39 percent of the vote in the first round in November, while Marc Ravalomanana, 69, president from 2002 to 2009, got 35 percent. They two are now vying against each other for the first time since political turmoil in 2009 forced Ravalomanana from power. Both have said they will accept the runoff's results. Rajoelina, after casting his ballot in Antananarivo, the capital, said he is confident of the process. "I appeal to all the Malagasy people to vote massively to express their choice so that they can choose who will lead this country," he said. "I am a democrat and I will accept the verdict of the ballot box," he said. An election official holds up a ballot paper during the counting of ballot papers for the runoff presidential election in Antananarivo, Madagascar, Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2018. Voters have begun casting their ballots across the Indian Ocean island nation of Madagascar Wednesday to select a new president in a runoff election that pits two former leaders against each other. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe) When Ravalomanana voted in central Antananarivo he urged the people of Madagascar to vote and to respect the outcome. "With the participation of all the Malagasy population, I hope that we will change Madagascar and we will move forward, we must have courage and also hope," he said. "We must accept the result if it takes place in good conditions and if it follows the democratic electoral process." Ten million voters are registered in Madagascar, a former French colony which is ranked by the World Bank as one of the world's poorest nations, although rich in ecological diversity. More than two-thirds of the island's population of 25 million live in extreme poverty, while corruption is reportedly widespread. Campaigning in the election was largely peaceful. Antananarivo was vibrant in the final days before the vote with the orange T-shirts of Rajoelina and the white and green ones of Ravalomanana worn by hundreds of supporters. Provisional results are expected within a week. ___ Follow Africa news at https://twitter.com/AP_Africa An election official opens a ballot box for the counting of ballot papers for the runoff presidential election in Antananarivo, Madagascar, Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2018. Voters have begun casting their ballots across the Indian Ocean island nation of Madagascar Wednesday to select a new president in a runoff election that pits two former leaders against each other. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe) Party agents and public members watch the counting of ballot papers for the runoff presidential election in Antananarivo, Madagascar, Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2018. Voters have begun casting their ballots across the Indian Ocean island nation of Madagascar Wednesday to select a new president in a runoff election that pits two former leaders against each other. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe) An election official holds an allegedly spoiled ballot paper during the counting of ballot papers for the runoff presidential election in Antananarivo, Madagascar, Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2018. Voters have begun casting their ballots across the Indian Ocean island nation of Madagascar Wednesday to select a new president in a runoff election that pits two former leaders against each other. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe) Party agents and members of the public react to the counting of ballot papers for the runoff presidential election in Antananarivo, Madagascar, Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2018. Voters have begun casting their ballots across the Indian Ocean island nation of Madagascar Wednesday to select a new president in a runoff election that pits two former leaders against each other. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe) Party agents and public members react the counting of ballot papers for the runoff presidential election in Antananarivo, Madagascar, Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2018. Voters have begun casting their ballots across the Indian Ocean island nation of Madagascar Wednesday to select a new president in a runoff election that pits two former leaders against each other. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe) Presidential candidate Marc Ravalomanana leaves the polling station after casting his vote for the runoff presidential election in Antananarivo, Madagascar, Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2018. Voters have begun casting their ballots across the Indian Ocean island nation of Madagascar Wednesday to select a new president in a runoff election that pits two former leaders against each other. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe) Presidential candidate Marc Ravalomanana casts his vote during a runoff presidential election in Antananarivo, Madagascar, Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2018. Voters have begun casting their ballots across the Indian Ocean island nation of Madagascar Wednesday to select a new president in a runoff election that pits two former leaders against each other. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe) Andry Rajoelina, right, casts his ballot paper as an electoral officer looks on during a runoff presidential election in Antananarivo, Madagascar, Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2018. Voters have begun casting their ballots across the Indian Ocean island nation of Madagascar Wednesday to select a new president in a runoff election that pits two former leaders against each other. Rajoelina, president from 2009 to 2014, received 39 percent of the vote in the first round in November, while Marc Ravalomanana, president from 2002 to 2009, got 35 percent. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe) Presidential candidate Andry Rajoelina, right, casts his ballot paper as an electoral officer looks on during a runoff presidential election in Antananarivo, Madagascar, Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2018. Voters have begun casting their ballots across the Indian Ocean island nation of Madagascar Wednesday to select a new president in a runoff election that pits two former leaders against each other. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe) A woman casts her ballot paper during a runoff presidential election in Antananarivo, Madagascar, Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2018. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe) People queue to cast their vote during a runoff presidential election in Antananarivo, Madagascar, Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2018. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe) A man gestures before he casts his ballot paper during a runoff presidential election in Antananarivo, Madagascar, Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2018. Voters have begun casting their ballots across the Indian Ocean island nation of Madagascar Wednesday to select a new president in a runoff election that pits two former leaders against each other. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe) A woman casts her ballot paper as an electoral officer assist during a runoff presidential election in Antananarivo, Madagascar, Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2018. Voters have begun casting their ballots across the Indian Ocean island nation of Madagascar Wednesday to select a new president in a runoff election that pits two former leaders against each other. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe) People queue to cast their vote during a runoff presidential election in Antananarivo, Madagascar, Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2018. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe) A man opens a voting curtain to cast his ballot paper during a runoff presidential election in Antananarivo, Madagascar, Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2018. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe) A woman casts her ballot paper as an electoral officer assist during a runoff presidential election in Antananarivo, Madagascar, Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2018. Voters have begun casting their ballots across the Indian Ocean island nation of Madagascar Wednesday to select a new president in a runoff election that pits two former leaders against each other. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe) Presidential candidate Andry Rajoelina walks towards a ballot box to cast his ballot paper during a runoff presidential election in Antananarivo, Madagascar, Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2018. Voters have begun casting their ballots across the Indian Ocean island nation of Madagascar Wednesday to select a new president in a runoff election that pits two former leaders against each other. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe) Presidential candidate Andry Rajoelina casts his ballot paper during a runoff presidential election in Antananarivo, Madagascar, Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2018. Voters have begun casting their ballots across the Indian Ocean island nation of Madagascar Wednesday to select a new president in a runoff election that pits two former leaders against each other. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe) Presidential candidate Andry Rajoelina, right, speaks to journalist after casting his vote in Antananarivo, Madagascar, Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2018. Voters have begun casting their ballots across the Indian Ocean island nation of Madagascar Wednesday to select a new president in a runoff election that pits two former leaders against each other. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe) Presidential candidate Marc Ravalomanana sits inside vehicle after casting his vote for the runoff presidential election in Antananarivo, Madagascar, Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2018. Voters have begun casting their ballots across the Indian Ocean island nation of Madagascar Wednesday to select a new president in a runoff election that pits two former leaders against each other. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe) Presidential candidate Marc Ravalomanana speaks to journalist after casting his vote for the runoff presidential election in Antananarivo, Madagascar, Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2018. Voters have begun casting their ballots across the Indian Ocean island nation of Madagascar Wednesday to select a new president in a runoff election that pits two former leaders against each other. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe) Presidential candidate Marc Ravalomanana cast his vote during a runoff presidential election in Antananarivo, Madagascar, Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2018. Voters have begun casting their ballots across the Indian Ocean island nation of Madagascar Wednesday to select a new president in a runoff election that pits two former leaders against each other. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe) Presidential candidate Marc Ravalomanana casts his vote during a runoff presidential election in Antananarivo, Madagascar, Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2018. Voters have begun casting their ballots across the Indian Ocean island nation of Madagascar Wednesday to select a new president in a runoff election that pits two former leaders against each other. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe) Presidential candidate Marc Ravalomanana receives his ballot paper during the runoff presidential election in Antananarivo, Madagascar, Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2018. Voters have begun casting their ballots across the Indian Ocean island nation of Madagascar Wednesday to select a new president in a runoff election that pits two former leaders against each other. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe) A woman casts her ballot during a runoff presidential election in Antananarivo, Madagascar, Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2018. Voters have begun casting their ballots across the Indian Ocean island nation of Madagascar Wednesday to select a new president in a runoff election that pits two former leaders against each other. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe) A man comes out of a voting booth to cast his ballot paper for the runoff presidential election in Antananarivo, Madagascar, Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2018. Voters have begun casting their ballots across the Indian Ocean island nation of Madagascar Wednesday to select a new president in a runoff election that pits two former leaders against each other. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe) An electoral officer signs ballot papers for the runoff presidential election in Antananarivo, Madagascar, Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2018. Voters have begun casting their ballots across the Indian Ocean island nation of Madagascar Wednesday to select a new president in a runoff election that pits two former leaders against each other. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe) A old man cast his ballot for the runoff presidential election in Antananarivo, Madagascar, Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2018. Voters have begun casting their ballots across the Indian Ocean island nation of Madagascar Wednesday to select a new president in a runoff election that pits two former leaders against each other. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe) LOS ANGELES (AP) - The Latest on Elon Musk's underground tunnel (all times local): 8 p.m. Elon Musk has unveiled his underground transportation tunnel, allowing invited guests to take some of the first rides ever on the tech entrepreneur's solution to "soul-destroying traffic." Guests boarded Musk's Tesla Model S and were driven on Los Angeles-area surface streets about a mile away to what's known as O'Leary Station on Tuesday. The station sits smack dab in the middle of a residential neighborhood. It consists of a wall-less elevator that slowly took the car down a wide shaft, roughly 30 feet (9 meters) below the surface. Reporters described the rides as bumpy but impressive. At least one experienced motion sickness while another yelled, "Woo!" Elon Musk, co-founder and chief executive officer of Tesla Inc., speaks during an unveiling event for the Boring Company Hawthorne test tunnel in Hawthorne, Calif., on Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. Musk has unveiled his underground transportation tunnel, allowing invited guests to take some of the first rides ever on the tech entrepreneur's solution to "soul-destroying traffic." The tunnel, meant to be a "proof of concept," runs just over a mile under Musk's SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne. (Robyn Beck/Pool Photo via AP) The tunnel, meant to be a "proof of concept," runs just over a mile under Musk's SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne. ___ 6:30 a.m. Tech entrepreneur Elon Musk is set to unveil an underground transportation tunnel that could move people faster than subways. Musk plans to unveil the test tunnel Tuesday, as well as the autonomous cars that will carry people through it. He's also set to show off elevators he says will bring users' own cars from the surface to the tunnel. Tuesday's reveal comes almost two years to the day since Musk announced on Twitter that "traffic is driving me nuts" and he was "going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging." Since then, he's revealed a handful of photos and videos of the tunnel's progress. The tunnel, meant to be a "proof of concept," runs about 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) under Hawthorne, California, Musk's SpaceX headquarters. A modified Tesla Model X rests on an elevator above the pit and tunnel entrance before an unveiling event for the Boring Company Hawthorne test tunnel in Hawthorne, Calif., on Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. Elon Musk unveiled his underground transportation tunnel on Tuesday, allowing reporters and invited guests to take some of the first rides in the revolutionary albeit bumpy subterranean tube - the tech entrepreneur's answer to what he calls "soul-destroying traffic." (Robyn Beck/Pool Photo via AP) FILE - In this Feb. 6, 2018, file photo, Elon Musk, founder, CEO, and lead designer of SpaceX, speaks at a news conference from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. Musk is set to unveil an underground transportation tunnel that could move people faster than subways. Musk plans to unveil the test tunnel Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018, as well as the autonomous cars that will carry people through it. He's also set to show off elevators he says will bring users' own cars from the surface to the tunnel. (AP Photo/John Raoux, File) Candido Delgado, a next-door neighbor of a home where Elon Musk's Boring Company plans to build an elevator shaft below the property for the company's underground tunnel project, gets into his pickup truck Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018, in Hawthorne, Calif. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong) A car is parked in front of a garage of a home where Elon Musk's Boring Company plans to build an elevator shaft below the property for the company's underground tunnel project Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018, in Hawthorne, Calif. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong) NEW YORK (AP) - The number of journalists killed in retaliation for their work nearly doubled this year, according to a report released Wednesday by the Committee to Protect Journalists. The New York-based organization found that at least 34 journalists were targeted and killed for their work as of Dec. 14. In all, at least 53 died while doing dangerous work. That compares with 18 retaliation killings out of 47 deaths documented by the committee in 2017. The committee also said the imprisonment of journalists has been on the rise. "The context for the crisis is varied and complex, and closely tied to changes in technology that have allowed more people to practice journalism even as it has made journalists expendable to the political and criminal groups who once needed the news media to spread their message," the committee said in its annual report. The report came a day after the media freedom group Reporters Without Borders issued its own tally , saying the U.S. was among the top five deadliest countries for journalists this year for the first time, with six dead. Four of those were journalists killed by a gunman in a June attack on the newspaper Capital Gazette in Maryland. In addition, another two journalists died while covering a storm. The shooting, in which another newspaper employee was also killed, was the deadliest single attack on the media in recent U.S. history. FILE - In this Dec. 15, 2014, file photo, Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi speaks during a press conference in Manama, Bahrain. A New York-based organization dedicated to the safety of journalists says the number killed worldwide in reprisal for their work, including Khashoggi, nearly doubled in 2018. Khashoggi was one of 53 journalists killed between Jan. 1 and Dec. 14, 2018, the committee said. (AP Photo/Hasan Jamali, File) The Paris-based group documented 63 professional journalists worldwide who died in 2018. Both organizations investigate and verify the circumstances of every journalist death before listing it in their tallies, but they differ in what circumstances they include. For instance, Reporters Without Borders included the two journalists who died covering the storm. The committee, in addition to retaliation killings, lists journalists who have died in combat, crossfire or on other dangerous assignments. The Committee to Protect Journalists report includes the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, a native of Saudi Arabia fiercely critical of its royal regime. His Oct. 2 death inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul has reverberated on the global political scene amid allegations that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was involved. Khashoggi lived in self-imposed exile in the United States, and had gone to the Saudi consulate to formalize his divorce. He was strangled and dismembered - allegedly by Saudi agents. Saudi Arabia denies Prince Mohammed was involved, but the kingdom did acknowledge after international pressure that the plot was masterminded by Saudi agents close to the prince. Asked whether he believed the crown prince had ordered Khashoggi's murder, President Donald Trump said last month, "Maybe he did and maybe he didn't." While the president condemned the violence against journalists, the committee noted in the report that he has called members of the media "enemies of the people." Time magazine last week recognized jailed and killed journalists as its "person of the year," including Khashoggi, Maria Ressa imprisoned in the Philippines, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo imprisoned in Myanmar, and staff at the Capital Gazette. The deadliest country for journalists this year has been Afghanistan, the committee found. Thirteen journalists were killed there, some in back-to-back blasts staged by suicide bombers and claimed by the militant Islamic State group. In Syria and Yemen, two of the worst civil-war decimated countries, the fewest journalists were killed since 2011. Three died in Yemen, and in Syria, the committee recorded nine deaths compared to a high of 31 in 2012. However, the drop may be due to limited access or extreme risks that discourage media visits, the committee said. FILE - In this Nov. 16, 2018 file photo, members of Arab-Turkish Media Association and friends of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi hold posters showing images of Saudi Crown Prince Muhammed bin Salman and of Khashoggi, as they attend funeral prayers in absentia for him following his killing the previous month in the Saudi Arabia consulate, in Istanbul. A New York-based organization dedicated to the safety of journalists says the number killed worldwide in reprisal for their work, including Khashoggi, nearly doubled this year. Khashoggi was one of 53 journalists killed between Jan. 1 and Dec. 14, 2018, the committee said. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel, File) FILE - In this April 30, 2018 file photo, relatives, colleagues and friends of AFP chief photographer, Shah Marai, who was killed that day in a second suicide attack, carry his coffin in his village, Guldara, a district of Kabul province, Afghanistan. A New York-based organization dedicated to the safety of journalists says the deadliest country for journalists this year has been Afghanistan, where 13 journalists were killed. (AP Photo/Rahmat Gul, File) WASHINGTON (AP) - A federal judge who described himself as disgusted by Michael Flynn's behavior upended a straightforward sentencing hearing, postponing punishment for President Donald Trump's first national security adviser and telling him in a stinging rebuke, "Arguably you sold your country out." Lawyers for Flynn requested the delay Tuesday after a tongue-lashing from U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan raised the prospect that Flynn could spend time behind bars for lying to the FBI about his Russian contacts. Prosecutors hadn't recommended prison, but the hearing that began with the defendant upbeat and smiling took an unexpected turn when the judge said his sentence would take into account not just Flynn's extensive cooperation with investigators but also the lies the Trump administration official told from the grounds of the White House. "I can't make any guarantees, but I'm not hiding my disgust, my disdain for this criminal offense," Sullivan said. The postponement gave Flynn a chance to continue cooperating with the government in hopes of staving off prison and proving his value as a witness, including in a foreign-lobbying prosecution unsealed this week. The possibility of prison had seemed remote for Flynn since prosecutors had praised his cooperation, including 19 meetings with investigators. But the judge's upbraiding suggested otherwise and made clear that even defendants like Flynn who have cooperated in special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation may nonetheless be shadowed by the crimes that brought them into court in the first place. The hearing upset what had been a carefully crafted agreement and pushed months into the future a resolution of one of Mueller's signature prosecutions. President Donald Trump's former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn leaves federal court in Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster) "This is a very serious offense. A high-ranking senior official of the government making false statements to the Federal Bureau of Investigation while on the physical premises of the White House," Sullivan said. He later softened his tone, apologizing for suggesting that Flynn had worked as a foreign agent while in the White House when that other work had actually already ended. He also backpedaled on an earlier question on whether Flynn's transgressions amounted to treason, saying he didn't mean to suggest they did. Flynn was to have been the first White House official sentenced in Mueller's investigation into possible coordination between the Trump presidential campaign and Russia. The hearing, though incomplete, marked a remarkable fall after a three-decade military career that included tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and oversight of the Defense Intelligence Agency during the Obama administration. Though Flynn served only briefly in Trump's White House, he campaigned for him and attracted attention for leading a Republican National Convention crowd in a "Lock Her Up" chant about Hillary Clinton. The hearing came amid escalating legal peril for Trump, who was implicated by federal prosecutors in New York this month in hush-money payments involving his former lawyer to cover up extramarital affairs. Nearly a half-dozen former aides and advisers have pleaded guilty, agreeing to cooperate with prosecutors. Some, like Flynn, were tripped up by concealing Russian contacts. Flynn's help in the probes was especially notable. Yet he's nonetheless enjoyed Trump's continued sympathy, thanks in part to a sentencing memo last week that tapped into the president's suspicion of law enforcement and took aim at the FBI's conduct during the investigation. Trump tweeted "good luck" to Flynn hours before the sentencing and said that, "despite tremendous pressure being put on him," there was "no Collusion!" At the White House, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Flynn's actions had nothing to do with Trump. "It's perfectly acceptable for the president to make a positive comment about somebody while we wait to see what the court's determination is," she said. Sanders repeated her allegation that the FBI "ambushed" Flynn in an interview in which he lied. Of Trump's earlier FBI criticism, she said, "We don't have any reason to want to walk that back." Flynn's legal woes stem from transition-period calls with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak that raised intelligence community alarms even before Trump took office. During those conversations, Flynn urged against a strong Russian response to Obama administration sanctions for Russian election interference and encouraged Russia's opposition to a U.N. resolution on Israeli settlements. But when FBI agents approached him in the White House on Jan. 24, 2017, Flynn lied about those conversations, prosecutors said. Flynn has never said why he lied, but Sullivan nonetheless castigated him for a deception that was then parroted by other senior administration officials. The tone of Tuesday's hearing startled Flynn supporters who hoped his lawyers' arguments about the FBI's conduct - they suggested he was discouraged from having a lawyer present during the interview and wasn't informed it was a crime to lie - would resonate more than it did with Sullivan, who a decade ago tossed out the prosecution of a U.S. senator over government misconduct. But while Sullivan tested those arguments, he was ultimately unmoved and Flynn mostly walked them back. He acknowledged that he indeed knew that lying to the FBI was a crime. Neither he nor his lawyers disputed that he'd lied to agents. Flynn attorney Robert Kelner asked Sullivan not to penalize Flynn for the sentencing memo arguments, saying they were mostly intended to differentiate Flynn from other defendants in Mueller's investigation who'd received prison sentences for lying. Though Sullivan said none of the other defendants was a White House official, Kelner suggested none had been as cooperative. "He made the decision publicly and clearly and completely and utterly to cooperate with this investigation, knowing that because of his high rank, that was going to send a signal to every other potential cooperator and witness in this investigation," he added. After a prosecutor raised the prospect of Flynn's continued cooperation with other investigations in the future, Sullivan warned Flynn that he might not get full credit for his assistance to the government if he were sentenced as scheduled. Sullivan gave a visibly shaken Flynn a chance to discuss delaying the hearing with his lawyers. The court briefly recessed. When they returned, Kelner requested a postponement so that Flynn could keep cooperating. Kelner said he expected Flynn would have to testify in a related trial in Virginia involving Flynn's former business associates, and the defense wanted to "eke out the last modicum of cooperation" so he could get credit. Flynn's lawyers were instructed to submit a status report by March 13. The judge also directed him to stay within 50 miles of the District of Columbia come Jan. 4. ___ Read the Flynn FBI interview notes: http://apne.ws/xfm8IsO ___ Associated Press writer Michelle R. Smith in Providence contributed to this report. This courtroom sketch depicts former President Donald Trump's former national security adviser Michael Flynn, standing center, flanked by his lawyers, listening to U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan, right, as he addresses Flynn and points to the American flag inside the federal court in Washington, Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. Sullivan agreed to postpone Flynn's sentencing so he can continue cooperating with the Russia probe. (Dana Verkouteren via AP) President Donald Trump's former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn arrives at federal court in Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster) President Donald Trump's former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and his wife Lori Andrade arrive at federal court in Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster) SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - A Yemeni mother cradled her 2-year-old son in her lap, pressing her face close to his and clasping his hand as a series of tubes kept his small body alive. Shaima Swileh touched the boy for the first time since winning a more than yearlong legal battle to overcome the Trump administration's travel ban and enter the U.S. to say goodbye to her dying child. A photograph released late Wednesday by the Council on American-Islamic Relations shows Swileh holding her son Abdullah at a hospital in Oakland where he is on life support. Swileh arrived that night at San Francisco International Airport after the advocacy group sued the U.S. to grant her waiver from the travel ban. She got it after a 17-month fight. Swileh, wearing dark glasses and a white headscarf, was mobbed by friends and reporters at the airport. "This is a difficult time for our family, but we are blessed to be together," the boy's father, Ali Hassan, said at the airport, asking for privacy. In this Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2018, photo released by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Sacramento Valley, Shaima Swileh holds her dying 2-year-old son Abdullah at a hospital in Oakland, Calif. Swileh, a Yemeni mother who fought for the right to see her dying son, arrived Wednesday night after the Trump administration gave her a long-sought waiver to its travel ban. (Council on American-Islamic Relations, Sacramento Valley via AP) The couple was driven to see their son at UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital in Oakland, where Hassan brought Abdullah in the fall to get treatment for a genetic brain disorder. Hassan, a U.S. citizen who lives in Stockton, and Swileh moved to Egypt after marrying in war-torn Yemen in 2016 and had been trying to get a visa for Swileh since 2017 so the family could move to California. Citizens from Yemen and four other mostly Muslim countries, along with North Korea and Venezuela, are restricted from coming to the United States under the travel ban enacted under President Donald Trump. When the boy's health worsened, Hassan went ahead to California in October to get their son help. As the couple fought for a waiver, doctors put Abdullah on life support. "My wife is calling me every day wanting to kiss and hold her son for the one last time," Hassan said, choking up at a news conference this week. He started losing hope and was considering pulling his son off life support to end his suffering. But then a hospital social worker reached out to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which sued Monday, said Basim Elkarra, executive director of the group in Sacramento. The State Department granted Swileh a waiver the next day. Department spokesman Robert Palladino called it "a very sad case, and our thoughts go out to this family at this time, at this trying time." He said he could not comment on the family's situation but that in general cases are handled individually, and U.S. officials try to facilitate legitimate travel to the United States while protecting national security. "These are not easy questions," Palladino said. "We've got a lot of foreign service officers deployed all over the world that are making these decisions on a daily basis, and they are trying very hard to do the right thing at all times." Immigration attorneys estimate tens of thousands of people have been affected by what they call blanket denials of visa applications under Trump's travel ban, which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld in a 5-4 ruling in June. The waiver provision allows a case-by-case exemption for people who can show entry to the U.S. is in the national interest, is needed to prevent undue hardship and would not pose a security risk. But a lawsuit filed in San Francisco says the administration is not honoring the waiver provision. The 36 plaintiffs include people who have had waiver applications denied or stalled despite chronic medical conditions, prolonged family separations or significant business interests. In addition to the waiver, the government gave Swileh a visa that will allow her to remain in the United States with her husband and begin a path toward citizenship, Elkarra said. ___ Associated Press Writer Julie Watson reported from San Diego. Shaima Swileh, center, stands with her husband Ali Hassan, second from left, after Swileh arrived at San Francisco International Airport in San Francisco, Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2018. Swileh is the Yemeni mother who won her fight for a waiver from the Trump administration's travel ban that would allow her to go to California to see her dying 2-year-old son. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu) Shaima Swileh, center with her back turned, is greeted by supporters after arriving at San Francisco International Airport in San Francisco, Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2018. Swileh is the Yemeni mother who won her fight for a waiver from the Trump administration's travel ban that would allow her to go to California to see her dying 2-year-old son. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu) This recent but undated photo, released Monday, Dec. 17, 2018 by the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Sacramento, Calif., shows Ali Hassan with his dying 2-year-old son Abdullah in a Sacramento hospital. The boy's Yemeni mother, blocked by the Trump administration's travel ban, has won her fight for a waiver that would allow her to travel to California to see her son. Basim Elkarra of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Sacramento said Shaima Swileh was granted a visa Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018, and will be flying to San Francisco on Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2018. (Council on American-Islamic Relations via AP) This recent but undated photo, released Monday, Dec. 17, 2018, by the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Sacramento, Calif., shows Ali Hassan kissing his dying 2-year-old son Abdullah in a Sacramento hospital. The boy's Yemeni mother, blocked by the Trump administration's travel ban, has won her fight for a waiver that would allow her to travel to California to see her son. Basim Elkarra of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Sacramento, Calif., said Shaima Swileh was granted a visa Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018, and will be flying to San Francisco on Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2018. (Council on American-Islamic Relations via AP) Supporters of Shaima Swileh hold up signs as they await her arrival at San Francisco International Airport in San Francisco, Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2018. Swileh is the Yemeni mother who won her fight for a waiver from the Trump administration's travel ban that would allow her to go to California to see her dying 2-year-old son. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu) Ali Hassan, center, speaks at a news conference after his wife Shaima Swileh, hidden, arrived at San Francisco International Airport in San Francisco, Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2018. Swileh is the Yemeni mother who won her fight for a waiver from the Trump administration's travel ban that would allow her to go to California to see her dying 2-year-old son. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu) Shaima Swileh, right, stands with her husband Ali Hassan after Swileh arrived at San Francisco International Airport in San Francisco, Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2018. Swileh is the Yemeni mother who won her fight for a waiver from the Trump administration's travel ban that would allow her to go to California to see her dying 2-year-old son. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu) Supporters of Shaima Swileh hold up signs as they await her arrival at San Francisco International Airport in San Francisco, Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2018. Swileh is the Yemeni mother who won her fight for a waiver from the Trump administration's travel ban that would allow her to go to California to see her dying 2-year-old son. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu) PTOLEMAIDA, Greece (AP) - If earthquakes struck in slow motion, the results might be visible in a place like the Greek village of Anargyri, a hardscrabble enclave in a black landscape gutted by coal mining. The village in northern Greece once had more than 400 people. Now it has fewer than 50, after being torn apart over decades. Its roads are slowly buckling, its door frames have shifted, its walls and home foundations have cracked beyond repair. Residents are leaving not in panic but out of desperation. One after another, the tiny villages in Greece's lignite belt have been destroyed by mining as the ground becomes too unsteady to hold homes upright. Bells at one church in the area are not rung regularly for fear of causing more cracks in the walls. Cattle farmer Michalis Bitas first noticed the damage to homes in Anargyri in 1986. "That's when mining started locally. It slowly began to eat up the houses before it went on to eat us up too," he said. Bitas is from one of the few dozen households in the village who have refused a power company's offer to move them to a rented apartment in a nearby town. These villagers are demanding full compensation for their homes - a right only granted by law if mining occurs directly below a settlement. In this Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2018, signs close a damaged landslide road in the village of Anargyri near the town of Amynatio, northern Greece. One after another, tiny villages in northern Greece's lignite belt have been destroyed by mining, where there was once a thriving village community there are now fewer that 50 people hanging on to their homes, with the ground becoming too unsteady to hold homes upright. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis) "I have sheep and machinery. What am I supposed to do? Move them into an apartment?" Bitas said. Heavy-duty coal excavators and vehicles on the horizon near the village look like toy trucks, dwarfed by the scale of the blackened mining fields. Greek is still hooked on coal, despite warnings about the dire consequences of global warming issued both by a new scientific report and experts at the recent U.N. climate talks in Poland and despite ambitious European Union-wide targets to replace coal use with renewable energy. Greece is currently the world's 12th largest producer of lignite - known as brown coal - mining 36 million tons annually, according to U.S. federal government energy data. Lignite is a low-grade coal that throws off higher carbon dioxide emissions than black coal. It is often burned near where it is mined since its low energy density makes it too expensive to transport very far. Nearly a third of Greece's electricity is produced by coal-fired plants and the country has no phase-out plan to stop using domestically produced coal, unlike most parts of Western Europe. Despite abundant wind and sun, only around 15 percent of Greece's energy is produced by renewable sources. Most of its reduction in coal use in recent years has been offset by an increased use of imported natural gas. Under measures hammered out with Greece's bailout creditors, the state-controlled power company, PPC, will privatize three coal-fired electricity plants, prolonging their life. Also, contrary to many of its EU neighbors, Greece is on course to expand its dependence on oil and gas as the nation tries to attract overseas investment to counter a financial crisis that lasted nearly a decade. The Greek government has embarked on a major exploration drive for oil and gas off its western and southern coasts. The oil and gas ventures have alarmed environmental groups, which have issued an urgent plea to the Greek government to reverse its course and switch investments to the renewable sources like solar and wind power. "We must act directly to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but our country is moving in the opposite direction," a letter addressed to Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said. It was signed by 34 environmental and human rights groups, including Greenpeace, the World Wide Fund for Nature, Amnesty International and Doctors Without Borders. Greece is planning to invest "in fossil fuels for decades, along with worrying delivery of hundreds of thousands of square kilometers, on and offshore, for hydrocarbon extraction," the letter said. "This would surrender the country to the nightmare consequences of climate change." In Anargyri, despite the destruction of their homes, residents have mixed feelings about coal, since PPC is a key employer that provides 5,000 local jobs. The other attraction is that lignite, mined domestically, is not vulnerable to financial market swings or geopolitical shocks, unlike imported oil and gas, which in Greece mostly comes from Russia. "Clearly, lignite activity will be reduced and will be replaced by other sources of energy, renewable sources of energy," PPC executive Konstantinos Theodoridis told The Associated Press. "But lignite will continue to be a strategic fuel that, in any geopolitical instability, is the only energy-producing fuel that is absolutely controlled by our country," he said. ___ Derek Gatopoulos in Athens contributed. Follow Kantouris at http://www.twitter.com/CostasKantouris ___ Read more about climate issues from The Associated Press at https://www.apnews.com/Climate In this Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2018 a landslide damaged road and house are seen in the village of Anargyri near Amynatio town, northern Greece. One after another, tiny villages in northern Greece's lignite belt have been destroyed by mining, where there was once thriving village communities there are now very few people hanging on to their homes, with the ground becoming too unsteady to hold homes upright. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis) In this Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2018 a crack is seen over religious icons inside the Greek Orthodox church of Agios Nikolaos in the village of Rodonas near Amynatio town, northern Greece. One after another, tiny villages in northern Greece's lignite belt have been destroyed by mining, where there was once thriving village communities there are now very few people hanging on to their homes, with the ground becoming too unsteady to hold homes upright. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis) In this Tuesday, Dec. 11, 2018, a worker of Public Power Company, PPC, operates a heavy excavator in the South Field lignite mine near Kozani town, northern Greece. Despite warnings expressed at the current U.N. climate talks in Poland, backed by ambitious European Union renewable targets, Greece is planning to remain hooked on coal and is on course to expand its dependence on oil and gas, anxious to attract overseas investment as it emerges from a financial crisis that lasted nearly a decade. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis) In this Tuesday, Dec. 11, 2018, a heavy excavator operates in the South Field lignite mine near Kozani town, northern Greece. Despite warnings expressed at the current U.N. climate talks in Poland, backed by ambitious European Union renewable targets, Greece is planning to remain hooked on coal and is on course to expand its dependence on oil and gas, anxious to attract overseas investment as it emerges from a financial crisis that lasted nearly a decade. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis) In this Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2018, a worker of Public Power Company, PPC, walks under the chimneys of Agios Dimitrios Power Plant near Kozani town, northern Greece. Despite warnings expressed at the current U.N. climate talks in Poland, backed by ambitious European Union renewable targets, Greece is planning to remain hooked on coal and is on course to expand its dependence on oil and gas, anxious to attract overseas investment as it emerges from a financial crisis that lasted nearly a decade. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis) In this Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2018, smoke is emitted from the chimneys of Agios Dimitrios Public Power Plant near Kozani town, northern Greece. Despite warnings expressed at the current U.N. climate talks in Poland, backed by ambitious European Union renewable targets, Greece is planning to remain hooked on coal and is on course to expand its dependence on oil and gas, anxious to attract overseas investment as it emerges from a financial crisis that lasted nearly a decade. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis) In this Tuesday, Dec. 11, 2018 shows a general view of the South Field lignite mine near Kozani town, northern Greece. Despite warnings expressed at the current U.N. climate talks in Poland, backed by ambitious European Union renewable targets, Greece is planning to remain hooked on coal and is on course to expand its dependence on oil and gas, anxious to attract overseas investment as it emerges from a financial crisis that lasted nearly a decade. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis) In this Tuesday, Dec. 11, 2018, heavy excavators and vehicles of the Public Power Company, PPC, operate in the South Field lignite mine near Kozani town, northern Greece. Despite warnings expressed at the current U.N. climate talks in Poland, backed by ambitious European Union renewable targets, Greece is planning to remain hooked on coal and is on course to expand its dependence on oil and gas, anxious to attract overseas investment as it emerges from a financial crisis that lasted nearly a decade. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis) In this Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2018 a landslide damaged road is seen as trucks and bulldozers operate at the lignite mine of Amynatio, northern Greece. One after another, tiny villages in northern Greece's lignite belt have been destroyed by mining, where there was once thriving village communities there are now very few people hanging on to their homes, with the ground becoming too unsteady to hold homes upright. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis) In this Tuesday, Dec. 11, 2018 a worker of the Public Power Company, PPC, operates in the South Field lignite mine near Kozani town, northern Greece. Despite warnings expressed at the current U.N. climate talks in Poland, backed by ambitious European Union renewable targets, Greece is planning to remain hooked on coal and is on course to expand its dependence on oil and gas, anxious to attract overseas investment as it emerges from a financial crisis that lasted nearly a decade. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis) In this Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2018 a damaged house is seen after a landslide in the village of Anargyri near Amynatio town, northern Greece. One after another, tiny villages in northern Greece's lignite belt have been destroyed by mining, where there was once thriving village communities there are now very few people hanging on to their homes, with the ground becoming too unsteady to hold homes upright. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis) In this Tuesday, Dec. 11, 2018 workers of the Public Power Company, PPC, operate a blast in the South Field lignite mine near Kozani town, northern Greece. Despite warnings expressed at the current U.N. climate talks in Poland, backed by ambitious European Union renewable targets, Greece is planning to remain hooked on coal and is on course to expand its dependence on oil and gas, anxious to attract overseas investment as it emerges from a financial crisis that lasted nearly a decade. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis) In this Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2018, some belongings of the home owner are seen inside his damaged building in Anargyri village near the town of Amynatio, northern Greece. One after another, tiny villages in northern Greece's lignite belt have been destroyed by mining, where there was once thriving village communities there are now very few people hanging on to their homes, with the ground becoming too unsteady to hold homes upright. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis) In this Tuesday, Dec. 11, 2018, heavy excavators and vehicles operate in the South Field lignite mine near Kozani town, northern Greece. Despite warnings expressed at the current U.N. climate talks in Poland, backed by ambitious European Union renewable targets, Greece is planning to remain hooked on coal and is on course to expand its dependence on oil and gas, anxious to attract overseas investment as it emerges from a financial crisis that lasted nearly a decade. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis) In this Tuesday, Dec. 11, 2018, a worker of Public Power Company, PPC, walks atop of a heavy excavator in the South Field lignite mine near Kozani town, northern Greece. Despite warnings expressed at the current U.N. climate talks in Poland, backed by ambitious European Union renewable targets, Greece is planning to remain hooked on coal and is on course to expand its dependence on oil and gas, anxious to attract overseas investment as it emerges from a financial crisis that lasted nearly a decade. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis) Legal advice provided to the Cabinet on Theresa Mays Brexit deal has warned it could result in the UK becoming stuck for many years in protracted and repeating rounds of negotiations with no lawful power to exit. And it made clear that Brussels could apply to an arbitration panel for Northern Ireland to remain in the EU customs area while the rest of the UK left. The six-page document by Attorney General Geoffrey Cox was released to MPs a day after the House of Commons found the Government in contempt of Parliament for trying to keep it secret. The letter, dated November 13, emerged just minutes before Theresa May faced MPs in a weekly session of Prime Ministers Questions ahead of the second day of a five-day Commons debate on her deal. Democratic Unionist Party leader Nigel Dodds described it as devastating and said it made clear that the proposed backstop arrangement for the Irish border was unacceptable and must be defeated. Devastating legal advice from AG https://t.co/TBnbdPb9F1 Nigel Dodds (@NigelDoddsDUP) December 5, 2018 The Scottish National Partys leader in Westminster, Ian Blackford, called on Mrs May to take responsibility for concealing the facts on her Brexit deal from MPs and the public. But Mrs May rejected the claim, insisting the document contained the same information as a shortened statement made to MPs by Mr Cox earlier this week. Shadow Brexit secretary Sir Keir Starmer said that the 33-paragraph document revealed the central weaknesses in the Governments deal. (PA Graphics) It is likely to be seized upon by Tory critics of Mrs Mays deal, who argue that the backstop arrangement to keep the Irish border open will deny the UK the power to withdraw from a customs union without agreement from Brussels. Mr Cox found that the protocol setting out the terms of the backstop does not provide for a mechanism that is likely to enable the UK lawfully to exit the UK-wide customs union without a subsequent agreement. This remains the case even if parties are still negotiating many years later and even if the parties believe that talks have clearly broken down and there is no prospect of a future relationship agreement, he added. Under the arrangements, for regulatory purposes, GB is essentially treated as a third country by NI for goods passing from GB into NI, he said. All week we have heard from Government ministers that releasing this information. could harm the national interest. Nothing of the sort. All this advice reveals is the central weaknesses in the Governments deal. 2/3 Keir Starmer (@Keir_Starmer) December 5, 2018 And he said that despite assurances from both London and Brussels that it is intended to be temporary the protocol would endure indefinitely under international law until another agreement takes its place. The UK would have no legal means of compelling the EU to conclude any such agreement. The Attorney General warned: In the absence of a right of termination, there is a legal risk that the United Kingdom might become subject to protracted and repeating rounds of negotiations. This risk must be weighed against the political and economic imperative on both sides to reach an agreement that constitutes a politically stable and permanent basis for their future relationship. This is a political decision for the Government. Mr Coxs advice stated that, if Brussels felt that negotiations on a trade deal had broken down or were taking too long, it would be able to apply to the arbitration panel for Britain to be removed from the customs union while Northern Ireland remains effectively creating the border in the Irish Sea, which Mrs May has said no prime minister could accept. But the Attorney General said it was extremely difficult to see the five-member panel being prepared to make such a political decision unless both sides agreed on it. He also noted that the backstop arrangement would be enormously complex for the EU, requiring considerable resources, meaning Brussels would come under pressure especially from Dublin to bring it to an end. Given the lack of any effective means of termination, it is to these very real albeit unquantifiable factors, among others, that the UK may have to trust in seeking a satisfactory outcome, he said. Sir Keir said: Having reviewed the Attorney Generals legal advice, its obvious why this needed to be placed in the public domain. All week we have heard from Government ministers that releasing this information could harm the national interest. Nothing of the sort. All this advice reveals is the central weaknesses in the Governments deal. It is unthinkable that the Government tried to keep this information from Parliament and indeed the public before next weeks vote. On Monday the Attorney General told MPs that it would be "contrary to the national interest" to release his legal advice of 13 November. That legal advice consists of just 33 paragraphs. Perhaps the Prime Minister can tell us which paragraphs breach the national interest? #PMQs pic.twitter.com/gELktjApnX Caroline Lucas (@CarolineLucas) December 5, 2018 Green MP Caroline Lucas questioned Mr Coxs claim earlier this week that the advice should not be published in the national interest. On Monday the Attorney General told MPs that it would be contrary to the national interest to release his legal advice of November 13, said Ms Lucas. That legal advice consists of just 33 paragraphs. Perhaps the Prime Minister can tell us which paragraphs breach the national interest? Ms Lucas said it was weird that the Cabinet was not provided with formal legal advice on the backstop until the very day that the Commons voted for it to be released. To the surprise of some MPs, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn chose not to use any of his six PMQs questions to put Mrs May on the spot over her three defeats over Brexit in the Commons on Tuesday. Mr Cox said the decision to make his legal advice available to MPs by placing it in parliamentary libraries was exceptional and did not set a precedent for any future release of law officers advice. He said the use of the arcane parliamentary procedure of a humble address to the Queen to force the release of the document created constitutional tensions which are not themselves conducive to the proper conduct of public affairs. A meeting with the Queen was so overwhelming for one little boy that he dropped to the floor and crawled out of the nearest door, shouting Bye to amused onlookers. Nine-year-old Nathan Grant was introduced to the Queen as part of her visit to Coram, the UKs oldest childrens charity. Based at the site of The Foundling Hospital in London, Coram has been helping vulnerable children since it gained the Royal Charter in 1739. The Queen visited the charity to open The Queen Elizabeth II Centre a national centre for children named in her honour. The centre has been launched as a celebration of the 350th anniversary of the birth of the founder, Thomas Coram. The Queen was dressed in a jade green coat by Stewart Parvin and matching Rachel Trevor-Morgan hat, with a dress in floral silk in the shades of jade, mint, lavender and magenta. A diamond lily brooch finished the outfit. The Queen was greeted on arrival by Edward Newton, 102, the oldest surviving pupil from The Foundling Hospital. Mr Newton mentioned to the Queen that he remembered King Georges visit to the hospital in 1926, saying I was a little tot. A pupil at the school between the ages of six and 14, Mr Newton left to join the army. The Queen meets Edward Newton, aged 102, who was a Coram child (PA) Author Dame Jacqueline Wilson and former Fame Academy judges David and Carrie Grant, who are Nathans parents, were among those attending. Wilson, who was one of the first Coram fellows, said: I just think its a wonderful organisation and its very much to do with helping children now in new ways. I thought it was a lovely occasion. There was a sort of mixture of formality and informality which worked really well and the Queen was smiling! During the tour the Queen met eight-year-old Lewis, who asked her which was her favourite of the countries she had visited. She replied that it was a difficult question, saying there are so many I couldnt pick one. The day was particularly special for Lewis as it marked one year since he moved in with his adoptive family. The Queen and Shylah Gordon-Clarke, eight, hang a bauble on a Christmas tree (PA) Later the Queen went outside of the centre to add a decoration to Corams Christmas tree. The Queen came to the aid of eight-year-old Shylah Gordon-Clarke as she struggled to add her own decoration to the tree. Shylahs mother Evie Clarke is part of Corams Young Parenthood Programme. One decoration was a copy of Thomas Corams coat and the other a red ribbon, representing the charitys museum. Mr and Mrs Grant, who have supported the charity for a number of years, presented the event. Mrs Grant said: This is an issue that is very close to our heart. We have four children, three birth, one adopted, and they all have special needs. Its important for young people to know they are represented throughout society and to know that they are not alone. Downing Street has dared Jeremy Corbyn to bring a vote of no confidence in the Government in a bid to seek a general election, after blocking the opposition leaders attempt to target the Prime Minister. The Labour leader had demanded a Commons vote on Theresa Mays future after she confirmed a showdown on her Brexit plan would not take place before Christmas. The Labour leader tabled a long-threatened motion of no confidence in the Prime Minister, after she set out the timetable for MPs to pass judgment on her deal with Brussels in January. But the vote faced being opposed by Theresa Mays opponents in her own party and the DUP, and the Government would have to allow Commons time for the confidence vote to take place this week. A Downing Street source said on Monday night: We wont allow time for what is a stunt. The FTPA (Fixed-term Parliaments Act) applies if Labour wants to put down a motion under the terms of that. The Prime Minister had said the Commons would have the chance to debate her Withdrawal Agreement in the week MPs return to Westminster after Christmas on January 7. The crucial vote which was postponed earlier this month to avoid a heavy defeat will take place the following week. Today the Tories have been dragged kicking and screaming to announce a date to vote on Theresa May's botched Brexit deal. pic.twitter.com/imLLe7akAY Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) December 17, 2018 Mr Corbyn told Mrs May: A responsible prime minister would, for the good of this country, put this deal before the House this week so we could move on from this Governments disastrous negotiation. He said it was unacceptable to delay the vote and confirmed he was tabling a motion that this House has no confidence in the Prime Minister. (PA Graphics) The wording of the motion, targeted at Mrs May rather than the Government as a whole, would not trigger the process set out under the Fixed-term Parliaments Act which could eventually lead to a general election. But Labour said it was clearly a confidence motion and should be allocated time for debate by the Government. A House of Commons spokesman said: By established convention the Government always accedes to the demand from the Leader of the Opposition to allot a day for the discussion of a motion tabled by the official Opposition which, in the Governments view, would have the effect of testing the confidence of the House. It will be for the Government to determine whether to schedule time for debate on this. As I told the Huffington Post in this article tonight, Theresa May is running scared of Jeremy Corbyns no confidence vote, just as shes running scared of the vote on her flawed Brexit deal!https://t.co/EbXnfqXy86 Ian Lavery MP (@IanLaveryMP) December 17, 2018 After Downing Street said it would not allow time for a vote on the PM, Labour Party chairman Ian Lavery accused Theresa May of running scared of Jeremy Corbyns no confidence vote, just as shes running scared of the vote on her flawed Brexit deal. Setting out the timetable for the Brexit vote, Mrs May told the Commons: It is now only just over 14 weeks until the UK leaves the EU and I know many members of this House are concerned that we need to take a decision soon. The Prime Minister warned MPs that rejecting her deal would not result in an alternative miraculously appearing. Avoiding no deal is only possible if we can reach an agreement or if we abandon Brexit entirely, she said. In a warning to campaigners calling for a second referendum, she said it would break faith with the British people and do irreparable damage to the integrity of our politics. But one of Mrs Mays closest allies said all options should remain open if the deal is rejected. Work and Pensions Secretary Amber Rudd said it would be important to find out the will of Parliament on how to proceed, while Business Secretary Greg Clark also appeared to back an indicative vote to find out what if anything MPs could support. The Prime Ministers statement came as: Cabinet ministers openly speculated about how to proceed if the deal is rejected. Brussels appeared to dispute claims that negotiations were continuing over the terms of the deal. Planning for a no-deal Brexit was being stepped up, with the Cabinet discussing the next phase in ensuring we are ready for that scenario on Tuesday. (PA Graphics) The smaller opposition parties meanwhile have tabled an amendment to Mr Corbyns no-confidence vote in Mrs May that they say would beef it up into a full confidence vote in the Government. The SNP, Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru and the Green Party have backed the change, laid down on Monday night to trigger the legally binding FTPA provisions. The SNPs Ian Blackford, who signed the amendment, said: It is clear the Prime Ministers tactic has been to run down the clock and deprive Parliament of any alternative to her deal. Jeremy Corbyn seems happy to let her presumably to avoid having to make a decision on a second EU referendum. This is not acceptable people deserve better. If Labour are serious about wanting a general election, they must accept our amendment. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images(WASHINGTON) -- President Trump's decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria has drawn the ire of a usual ally: Lindsey Graham. The Republican senator from South Carolina first blasted Trump on Twitter, writing that the withdrawal of the roughly 2,000 U.S. troops in Syria "would be a huge Obama-like mistake." In a statement, Graham expanded upon his tweet, writing. "While American patience in confronting radical Islam may wane, the radical Islamists passion to kill Americans and our allies never wavers." He added, "An American withdrawal at this time would be a big win for ISIS, Iran, Bashar al Assad of Syria, and Russia. I fear it will lead to devastating consequences for our nation, the region, and throughout the world." Graham serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee. He is often one of the president's fiercest defenders on Capitol Hill, speaking in support of the president during controversial moments like the revocation of former CIA Director John Brennan's security clearance and the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. President Trump hinted at his decision about removing U.S. troops from Syria in a tweet. "We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency," he said. Graham tweeted that declaring victory over ISIS is premature: "With all due respect, ISIS is not defeated in Syria, Iraq, and after just returning from visiting there--certainly not Afghanistan." In the halls of the Senate, Graham told ABC News he will be meeting with Defense Secretary James Mattis and called for a hearing on the decision. In another jab at Trump, he said that foreign policy can't be determined over a tweet. "I want a hearing. I want oversight. This is a Republican president who I try to work with and I like him but he cant be immune from oversight," Graham said. Graham isn't alone in his criticism of the president. Two fellow Republicans have also questioned the White House's decision. Congressman Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., pushed back on the president's declaration of victory over ISIS, tweeting, "This is simply not true." Florida Sen. Marco Rubio told ABC News that pulling troops out of Syria at this time is a "colossal error." In a video posted to his Facebook, Rubio said, "I believe the decision that was made today is a grave error that's going to have incredible consequences that potentially have not been fully thought through." Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul said he supported the president's decision. "We have a president with the courage to declare victory and bring the troops home," Paul said. He added, "I think it takes courage to do this because there are a million naysayers on both sides of the aisle who always want to remain." Copyright 2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved. A man suspected of supplying the gun that was used in the shooting attack that killed five people near a Christmas market in Strasbourg was charged with preliminary terror offences on Monday, a judicial official said. The official said the man appeared before a judge and was charged with criminal association with terrorists, as well as possessing and supplying arms in connection with a terrorist enterprise. The man is suspected of furnishing the weapon that alleged gunman Cherif Chekatt used in the December 11 attack, the judicial official said. He was remanded into custody. Chekatt, 29, died in a shootout with police in Strasbourg on Thursday. Two other people were arrested and detained on Monday as part of the terror investigation the Paris prosecutors office is conducting into the attack. They also were suspected of playing a role in supplying the firearm, said the official. French President Emmanuel Macron pays his respects to victims of the attack (AP) Their arrests bring the number of suspects in custody since the attack to three. Chekatts parents and two of his brothers were questioned by police last week and released. The death toll from the attack increased to five on Sunday after a Polish man died of his wounds in a Strasbourg hospital. Barto Orent-Niedzielski, 36, lived in the city, where he worked at the European Parliament and as a journalist. The other casualties include a tourist from Thailand and an Italian journalist covering the European Parliament. Wczoraj w szpitalu w Strasburgu zmar Bartosz Niedzielski. Piata Ofiara smiertelna zamachu z 11.12. Pracowa w PE i znaem Go z widzenia. Jestem wstrzasniety. Nie zdawaem sobie sprawy, ze to wasnie On zosta smiertelnie ranny chroniac innych ludzi. Czesc Jego Pamieci! RiP Andrzej Duda (@AndrzejDuda) December 16, 2018 According to some reports, Orent-Niedzielski fought the gunman and stopped him from entering a crowded club, possibly preventing more deaths. Polish President Andrzej Duda wrote on Twitter that I knew him by sight. I am shocked. I had not realised that he was the one mortally wounded protecting other people. Honour to his memory. RIP. The UKs relationship with the USA is under disturbing pressure, and if Donald Trump secured a second term in the White House it would result in longer lasting damage to the alliance, peers warned. The Lords International Relations Committee said the actions of the Trump administration over issues including the Paris climate change deal, the Iran nuclear accord and steel tariffs had been contrary to the interests of the UK. After an inquiry which took evidence from senior politicians and foreign policy experts on both sides of the Atlantic, the peers said the UK may have to place less reliance on reaching a common position on foreign policy with Washington than it had in the past. In a wide-ranging report examining the shifting state of global affairs, the committee recommended: Seeking to work closely with China on addressing global challenges while ensuring co-operation is consistent with humanitarian law Continuing to counter and deter the activities of declining power Russia, but remain open to dialogue with Moscow on issues including counter-terrorism and nuclear non-proliferation Appointing a minister with specific responsibility for cyber security and establishing an international coalition of the willing to tackle the increasingly significant online threat. Donald Trump has taken unilateral foreign policy decisions that are contrary to the interests of the UK, peers said (Jane Barlow/PA) With the next US presidential election in 2020, the committee said another Trump victory or the election of another similar administration could further weaken the transatlantic alliance. The report noted that while intelligence and defence co-operation with the US continued, the difficulty the UK and its allies have faced in trying to influence the US demonstrates the challenge of working with the administration. How damaging this will be to what has hitherto been the UKs most important international relationship will depend on whether the current approach is an enduring trend. Should President Trump win a second term, or a similar administration succeed him, the damage to UKUS relations will be longer lasting; and the Government will need to place less reliance on reaching a common US/UK approach to the main issues of the day than has often been the case in the past. The peers noted that some of the decisions taken in Washington do not stem solely from Mr Trumps America First agenda, but form part of a broader shift towards a more inward-looking US. On China, the committee acknowledged concerns over its human rights record and behaviour in cyberspace, but said the UK should continue to work closely with Beijing on international issues. In the longer term, the Government will need to weigh up the strategic challenges posed by Chinas approach to its international role, and its impact on the rules-based international order, against Chinas growing economic significance. Turning to Russia, the peers said the UK should continue to work closely with its allies to counter Russian disinformation campaigns and deter its hybrid warfare tactics. The report added: In the context of a strained transatlantic relationship, an increasingly assertive China, a disruptive Russia and broad shifts to the global balance of power, it remains firmly in the UKs national interest to maintain the strongest possible partnership on foreign and security policy with its like-minded European partners, both bilaterally and at an EU level, after Brexit. Tory former Cabinet minister Lord Howell of Guildford, the committees chairman, said: International affairs are in a state of upheaval, and the re-shaping and conduct of British foreign policy must respond. After a year of taking evidence from our expert witnesses we conclude that, while welcoming existing efforts to adapt, a new strategic approach and vision are both needed, led from the centre of government. Britains big four accountancy firms will have their stranglehold on the audit market challenged as part of a radical shake-up of the scandal-hit industry. A probe into the sector carried out by the Competition and Markets Authority proposes that audits of the UKs biggest companies, listed on the FTSE 350, should be carried out by at least two firms, one of which should be from outside the big four of KPMG, Deloitte, PwC and EY. This, the CMA argues, will give smaller bean counters access to the largest clients, allowing them to develop their experience and credibility, while also ensuring a cross-check on quality. In addition, the CMA is considering a possible market share cap to ensure that some major audit contracts are only available to non-Big Four firms. The role of the dominant big four accountancy giants has come under intense scrutiny recently and the CMAs investigation was sparked by the failures of Carillion and BHS, and the ensuing criticism of the accountants charged with auditing their books. However, the watchdog stopped short of recommending they be broken up. Auditors are coming under scrutiny (PA) The competition watchdogs other proposals include a split between audit and advisory businesses within big four firms, requiring separate management, accounts and remuneration. It also wants closer regulatory scrutiny of auditor appointments and management from within firms. CMA chairman and former Tory MP Andrew Tyrie said: Addressing the deep-seated problems in the audit market is now long overdue. Most people will never read an auditors opinion on a companys accounts. But tens of millions of people depend on robust and high-quality audits. If a companys books arent properly examined, peoples jobs, pensions or savings can be at risk. A separate hard-hitting review has said that the accountancy watchdog is not fit for purpose and should be swept aside and replaced with an independent statutory regulator. Carried out by Legal & General chairman Sir John Kingman, it suggests the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) should be abolished and replaced with the Audit, Reporting and Governance Authority. It would be accountable to Parliament, hold a new mandate, clarity of mission, new leadership and new powers. The review also recommends that self-regulation of major audit firms through their professional bodies should end, with regulation of these firms transferred to the new regulator. Sir John who was asked by the Business Secretary Greg Clark in April to lead the root-and-branch review said: All in all, some of the FRCs critics overstate their case. Nevertheless, I have sympathy with the view that the FRC has tended, overall, to take too consensual an approach to its work. The FRCs approach to its own governance has also not been consistent with either its public importance, or its role in championing governance in the corporate world. We need to take the opportunity to make a fresh start.. One hundred and thirty-nine women were killed by men in 2017, with two in five cases involving excessive violence, a report has found. The latest Femicide Census, drawn up by charity Womens Aid and campaigner Karen Ingala Smith, suggested 58 of the deaths featured overkilling, where more violence is used than is necessary to kill the victim. The reports authors looked at 139 deaths of women and girls aged 14 and over at the hands of men in 2017, including 21 victims of the terrorist attacks in Manchester and London. Composite image of 65 of the 139 women killed by men in 2017 (Handouts/PA) They claim that in our society, mens violence against women and girls is not only routine, but tolerated and normalised, and are calling for funding promises from the Government to stop specialist support services closing down. There were 113 such deaths in 2016, 119 in 2015, and 139 in 2014. Of the victims last year, 64 women (46%) were killed by their current or former partner when the terrorist attacks were excluded, the proportion rose to 54.2%. Thirty (21.6%) were killed by a stranger, including 21 women killed in terror attacks; 24 died at the hands of a man outside their family but known to them, such as a friend, colleague or neighbour; 10 women (7.2%) were killed by their sons, and seven women (4.9%) were killed by another male family member. Most victims were aged between 26 and 55 82 women, 59% of the total and the majority were killed either at their home or the perpetrators. Of those who were killed by their ex-partner, 12 (55%) died within the first month of separation, and 19 (87%) within the first year. Nearly three-quarters of the 126 killers (90) were aged between 26 and 55, and most of the killings involved a sharp instrument (66). Katie Ghose, Chief Executive of Womens Aid, said: Time and time again, we hear of cases where a woman has been killed by a man as an isolated incident, yet the latest Femicide Census report shows yet again that this is not the case. The majority of these cases are not isolated incidents, there are too many similarities in the circumstances where women are killed by men. In four in 10 cases, there was evidence that the perpetrator used excessive violence, more than was necessary, to kill the victim. Despite the extreme level of fatal male violence being used against women, it is clear that not enough is being done to protect women from mens violence and prevent more womens lives being taken. The Government is expected to publish its Domestic Abuse Bill later this week, and Womens Aid is calling for guaranteed funding to stop specialist support services from closing down. Ms Ghose added: Our network of life-saving specialist services is not an optional extra but an essential piece of the jigsaw in our response to domestic abuse and femicide. They not only provide survivors with the support they need to escape abuse but they are also often the key to survivors having the confidence to report the abuse to the police in the first place. The Domestic Abuse Bill must protect specialist services from closure only then can we ensure that every survivor can safely escape and rebuild her life, free from fear and abuse. A Home Office spokesman said: Domestic abuse is a devastating crime that shatters the lives of victims and we are determined to transform our response. This Government will be publishing a landmark draft Domestic Abuse Bill, which will include a statutory Government definition of domestic abuse, introduce new Domestic Abuse Protection Orders and establish a Domestic Abuse Commissioner. The Home Office has made it a statutory duty for Community Safety Partnerships to produce a Domestic Homicide Review to ensure lessons are to be learned from those who are murdered by family or those close to them. We have pledged 100 million to violence against women and girls services between 2016 and 2020. We will soon be publishing a refresh of our VAWG strategy, which will look at further ways we can support victims. New DNA profiles and suspect fingermarks have been uncovered by detectives investigating the Armys notorious IRA agent Stakeknife. Bedfordshire Police Chief Constable Jon Boutcher is investigating the high-ranking Army mole who reputedly led the republican organisations nutting squad, an internal security unit which brutally interrogated and murdered suspected spies during the Northern Ireland conflict. Dozens of detectives are probing more than 50 murders. Suspects including members of the security forces and the Provisional IRA are being brought in for questioning. In 2003, Stakeknife was widely named as west Belfast man Freddie Scappaticci, but he has always strongly denied the allegation. The chief constable said: We are using ground-breaking techniques to review and uncover forensic evidence which was not previously available and that has allowed us to drive this investigation further than has been previously possible. We have managed to obtain a number of new DNA profiles and unidentified finger marks which are highly likely to belong to offenders. This evidence is all helping us to piece together a picture of what really happened to allow us to finally get to the truth. New DNA profiles and suspect fingermarks have been uncovered by detectives investigating the Armys notorious IRA agent Stakeknife, Bedfordshire Police chief constable Jon Boutcher said (Brian Lawless/PA) This investigation has been hugely complex and, at times, challenging, but the team has been steadfast in its approach to gathering every possible piece of evidence. The probe is centred on possible crimes by paramilitaries, agents and Army and police handlers linked to Stakeknife, allegedly the militarys highest-ranking spy within the IRA. Multiple murders, attempted murders, torture and unlawful imprisonments are included. Earlier this month Scappaticci, 72, avoided prison after admitting two counts of possessing extreme pornography. Operation Kenova, the name for the independent police investigation into Stakeknife, has gathered more than 12,000 documents, secured 1,000 statements and conducted 129 interviews with witnesses, victims and families resulting in more than 6,000 investigative actions for the team. Mr Boutcher, who is leading the investigation, recalled: I said at the outset that this would be a wide-ranging investigation and that is exactly what it has been. At the heart of the investigation and the reason we are doing this, are the families without exception they have each shown incredible strength, bravery and humility in speaking to me and supporting Operation Kenova despite various setbacks and disappointments they may have had over the years. I made a promise to those families that I would do everything in my power to get the truth for them and that very much is what this investigation is about. Most of those whom detectives have spoken to have been victims or witnesses but various suspects have been identified, the senior officer added. Investigators based in London and Belfast also conducted full forensic reviews on numerous murder and abduction cases which have led to 199 requests for new forensic examinations, resulting in a number of new DNA profiles and suspect finger marks. Mr Boutcher said he intended to submit full files to the Director of Public Prosecutions in Northern Ireland next year and appealed for anyone with information to come forward. These offences were committed by cowards and its time the truth about those involved came out, he said. Suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst lobbied the Post Office against the practice of installing duplicate telephone lines over fears they could be used to intercept private calls, newly discovered letters have revealed. Ms Pankhurst who was herself the subject of an MI5 surveillance operation wrote to the Postmaster General raising concerns that duplicate lines opened the door to improper use by unscrupulous persons. In two letters found in the BT Archives in Holborn, central London, she argued that the practice was opposed to the best interests of the community and contrary to public policy. She received a response to the first letter, which was dated February 6 1934, but internal, handwritten notes between Post Office employees showed they were instructed to stonewall Ms Pankhurst if she sent any further correspondence. Notes between Post Office staff agreeing to "Stonewall" suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst over her fears her phone calls could be intercepted (Arts and Humanities Research Council) It emerged in 2004 that MI5 had monitored Ms Pankhursts movements and intercepted her letters in the 1930s and 1940s after previously classified government files were released. Among the documents were references to MI5s telephone checks and other intercepted calls. The file contained information on her fight for women to be granted the vote and her work as part of the Workers Suffrage Federation going back as far as 1914. Ms Pankhursts fears about duplicate phone lines were sparked by a news story about a gynaecologist who was struck off following an affair with a patient, the letters revealed. The relationship was exposed by the husband of the patient who arranged with the Post Office which ran the UKs telephone service at the time to duplicate the phone line installed on his house in order to intercept his wifes calls. Detail of newspaper articles relating to newly discovered letters from Sylvia Pankhurst.at the BT Archive in Holborn, London (Arts and Humanities Research Council) The letters were discovered by Dr Sarah Jackson an associate professor at Nottingham Trent University. Dr Jackson, who was conducting the research as part of an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) fellowship, said: Sifting through a file of old press cuttings about wiretapping, I was astonished to find letters from Sylvia Pankhurst to the Postmaster General revealing her concerns about surveillance. In the year that we celebrate the centenary of womens suffrage, the discovery brings home once again the efforts and achievements of this remarkable woman. Dr Jackson told the Press Association: Buried in the files were two letters from Pankhurst about an extension line that had been installed in her home. The first response from the Post Office indicated that this was a normal extension line, but Pankhurst knew it wasnt because she already had a normal extension line installed in her home. Although Pankhursts second letter went unanswered, the notes between employees at the Post Office suggests that responses were drafted but never sent. AHRC researcher Dr Sarah Jackson at the BT Archive in Holborn, London with newly discovered letters from Sylvia Pankhurst (Arts and Humanities Research Council) Employees were instead instructed to ignore stonewall her if she wrote again. Dr Jackson said: It is quite clear that the Post Office knew about the extension line. We dont know whether her concerns that her phone was being tapped were part of wider concerns about privacy, but the timing of the thirties when MI5 were actively monitoring her behaviour suggests she knew she was being monitored. These concerns are not new. People talk about spying being the second-oldest profession. Dr Jackson also suggested Ms Pankhursts concerns were part of her wider ideology: She was very much a socialist. This is a really good example of Pankhurst. People only think about the militant suffragettes, but Pankhurst was quieter than her sister. Christabelle stole the limelight. Sylvia was very involved in Ethiopia, working on causes to do with eradicating fascism and poverty. Professor Roey Sweet, AHRCs director of partnerships and engagement, said: Sylvia Pankhurst is generally remembered today simply as a militant suffragette, but the exciting discovery of these letters reminds us that her fight for womens political rights was part of her lifelong commitment to socialist and revolutionary politics, pacifism and internationalism commitments that would have led to the phone tapping, against which she so rightly objected. Europeans living in Scotland affected by immigration changes due to Brexit will be able to get support from a new 800,000 scheme. Changing rules coming into force in March next year will mean EU citizens and their family members will be required to apply to secure their rights through an online system. Consequently the Scottish Government is introducing a new service, through the Citizens Advice Bureau, to help EU nationals with their immigration status following the UKs expected withdrawal from the European Union. The Citizens Advice Bureau will begin increasing capacity to offer more advice and support, and a solicitor-led helpline will also be established for difficult and complex cases. Visiting Leith Citizens Advice Bureau in Edinburgh on International Migrants Day, Scottish Government Migration Minister Ben Macpherson said: The Scottish Government is absolutely committed to doing all it can to speak up for and in support of EU citizens at this uncertain and anxious time. Scotland is a welcoming and progressive nation and we deeply value the huge contribution of all those who have chosen to make their home here. A new support scheme for EU citizens in Scotland is being launched (PA) We passionately want relatives, friends, neighbours and colleagues from other EU countries to stay in Scotland and that is why this funding will help to give people reassurances about their rights and access advice about how to secure settled status through the UK Governments immigration system. This new Scottish Government funded advice service will be over and above what the UK Government is proposing. By providing additional help, as well as being accessible at Citizens Advice Bureaux across Scotland, our service will have a particular focus on vulnerable and hard to reach groups who may find it difficult, or are unable or unwilling, to apply online without assistance, including people living in remote and rural areas. The Citizens Advice network is highly trusted and I am delighted to be partnering with them on this service. I hope that providing this additional service will help to ensure that EU citizens in Scotland who are relatives, friends, neighbours and colleagues feel welcome, supported and valued during this uncertain time. Commenting on the controversial fee to apply to be recognised as a settled UK citizen of 65 for people 16 or over or 32.50 for under 16s, Mr Macpherson added: The Scottish Government is clear that EU citizens should not be being asked to apply to retain the rights that they already have, and that they certainly should not be charged a fee for that application. We will continue to make the case that the UK Government should scrap their unfair fee for settled status applications. A Home Office spokesman said: The EU Settlement Scheme will make it simple and straightforward for EU citizens to get the status they need and they have until June 2021 to apply. We have already successfully processed many thousands of applications throughout the pilot of the scheme. We are working closely with organisations representing vulnerable EU citizens and we are providing up to 9 million grant funding to ensure they are supported in making their application. Another day of political tensions makes headlines on Tuesday. The Daily Telegraph says Theresa May has challenged Jeremy Corbyn to call a parliamentary vote of no confidence that could lead to the collapse of the Government. Tuesday's Daily Telegraph front page May dares Corbyn to call vote of confidence #tomorrowspaperstoday pic.twitter.com/2bK986FUKj The Telegraph (@Telegraph) December 17, 2018 Her challenge came after she rejected the Labour leaders demand for a Commons vote on her performance as Prime Minister and instead called his bluff, The Times reports. The i says Mr Corbyn accused the PM of dither and delay in staging a vote on her Brexit deal, after she announced the Commons showdown would happen in January. I: Corbyn gives Commons a chance to vote on May #tomorrowspaperstoday pic.twitter.com/lzbJuzSO42 Neil Henderson (@hendopolis) December 17, 2018 Mr Corbyn said it was unacceptable to be waiting almost a month before the meaningful vote, the Metro says. Meanwhile, Mrs May is expected to step up warnings of a no-deal Brexit and ask Cabinet ministers to press ahead with no-deal planning at a meeting on Tuesday, The Guardian reports. What the papers say - December 18 (PA) The Guardian front page, Tuesday 18 December 2018: Corbyn calls for confidence vote as May doubles down pic.twitter.com/EbkP7yEhi4 The Guardian (@guardian) December 17, 2018 The Daily Express says the PM will order her Cabinet to start spending the 1 billion set aside in case of a no-deal Brexit. EXPRESS: Start spending to prepare for no deal Brexit #tomorrowspaperstoday pic.twitter.com/Dnx3NjjVsk Neil Henderson (@hendopolis) December 17, 2018 In other news, the Daily Mail leads on what it labels panic sales, as online stores followed high street shops in cutting prices in an attempt to drum up business. The Daily Mirror reports that Jamie Oliver has agreed a 5 million tie-up with Shell despite campaigning over climate change. And The Sun says Yorkshire Tea has sparked outrage because its new eco-friendly tea bags are ruining cups of tea by splitting. Tomorrows front page: Yorkshire tea sparks uproar because new eco-friendly tea bags are ruining cuppas by falling apart https://t.co/lshxM5HXMi pic.twitter.com/3hB5me76xb The Sun (@TheSun) December 17, 2018 Elsewhere, the Financial Times reports that Britains accounting industry faces one of the strictest regulatory regimes after reports found deep-seated problems. Just published: front page of the Financial Times, UK edition, Tuesday 18 December https://t.co/2ZVesYMmUm pic.twitter.com/KWsBuWcAps Financial Times (@FinancialTimes) December 18, 2018 And the Daily Star claims a vandal named Jesus stormed into a church demanding refuge and smashed a 1,000 window. Katie Price will appear in court after she was charged with being drunk in charge of a motor vehicle. The former glamour model was charged by postal requisition and will appear at Bromley Magistrates Court on January 7. It follows her arrest on suspicion of drink-driving in south-east London two months ago. A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police said: Police in Greenwich have charged a woman with being drunk in charge of a motor vehicle. Katie Price, 40, of Horsham, Surrey, was charged by postal requisition on Monday, 10 December. She is to appear at Bromley Magistrates Court on Monday, 7 January. Katie Price has been charged with being drunk in charge of a motor vehicle (Ian West/PA) The charge relates to an arrest for drink drive on Wednesday, 10 October in Shooters Hill Road, Woolwich. Police at the time said officers had come across a car showing signs of damage stationary at the roadside at about 2am. Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbot has urged Twitter to take action over highly offensive racist and misogynist abuse on the platform after a major study found thousands of tweets disproportionately targeting black female politicians and journalists. The Amnesty International study found that black women were 84% more likely than white women to be mentioned in abusive tweets, with one in ten posts mentioning black women containing abusive or problematic language. A separate Amnesty study published in September 2017 showed that Ms Abbott received almost half (45.14%) of all the abusive tweets sent to female MPs in the run-up to that years general election. In response to the latest findings, Ms Abbott said: My staff still spend a considerable amount of time removing and blocking abusive or threatening posts from social media. Overwhelmingly the abuse is of a highly offensive racist and misogynist character. I have always felt that this type of hate speech can lead to violence, and Twitter has a responsibility to shut these accounts down a lot quicker then it currently does. Diane Abbott has been targeted on Twitter (Stefan Rousseau/PA) She added: Twitter also does not have the option to delete offensive comments once an account has been blocked. This would make a difference to conversations that are taking place. For its latest study, volunteers for Amnestys Troll Patrol crowd-sourcing project analysed 228,000 Tweets sent to 778 female politicians and journalists across the political spectrum in the UK and US. The report found that 7.1% of tweets to women in the study contained abusive or problematic language. According to the report: Abusive content violates Twitters own rules and includes tweets that promote violence against or threaten people based on their race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease. Meanwhile, problematic content was defined as that which is hurtful or hostile, especially if repeated to an individual on multiple or cumulative occasions, but do not necessarily meet the threshold of abuse. Previously, Labour MP Jess Phillips has spoken out about harassment on Twitter after a wave of violent abuse was launched against her in May 2016. At the time, she tweeted: To see the attack of a pack on here check out my mentions 600 odd notifications talking about my rape in one night. I think Twitter is dead. To see the attack of a pack on here check out my mentions 600 odd notifications talking about my rape in one night. I think twitter is dead Jess Phillips MP (@jessphillips) May 30, 2016 Only a month later, parliamentary colleague Jo Cox was murdered by a far-right fanatic Thomas Mair while carrying out work in her constituency. This week fellow Labour MP Luciana Berger tweeted screengrabs of numerous anti-Semitic messages after voicing her position on a vote of no confidence in Theresa May. Having listened to 1000+ constituents & local businesses who have recently been in touch, I strongly believe that we need to stop the uncertainty, get on with a vote of NC & give the country a #FinalSay. By all means disagree with me, but save the racism/accusations of treachery. pic.twitter.com/Hi47YjZAmo Luciana Berger (@lucianaberger) December 12, 2018 Abuse has not been only been directed toward politicians on the left: a University of Sheffield study of tweets between 2015 and 2017 published last year found that male Conservative MPs had seen the most abuse during the period, while female Tory MPs saw the largest increase in abuse. Conservative MP Nadine Dorries said earlier this year that colleagues had been advised by Parliaments Health and Wellbeing Service to close down their Twitter accounts due to the angry messages they were receiving from members of the public. I can confirm that Isabel is correct, MPs are being advised to close down Twitter accounts. https://t.co/TY5tUA63Gz Nadine Dorries (@NadineDorries) July 3, 2018 Amnesty said: Politicians and journalists faced similar levels of online abuse and we observed both liberals and conservatives alike, as well as left and right leaning media organisations, were affected. Kate Allen, Amnesty UKs director, said: Its clear that a staggering level of violence and abuse against women exists on Twitter. These results back up what women have long been saying that Twitter is endemic with racism, misogyny and homophobia. She continued: Twitter is failing to be transparent about the extent of the problem, but if our volunteers can gather meaningful data about online violence and abuse, so can Twitter. The company must take concrete steps to properly protect womens rights on the platform. Vijaya Gadde, legal, policy, and trust and safety global lead at Twitter, said: Twitter has publicly committed to improving the collective health, openness, and civility of public conversation on our service. Twitters health is measured by how we help encourage more healthy debate, conversations, and critical thinking. Conversely, abuse, malicious automation, and manipulation detract from the health of Twitter. Twitter uses a combination of machine learning and human review to adjudicate abuse reports and whether they violate our rules. Our abusive behaviour policy strictly prohibits behaviour that harasses, intimidates or silences another users voice. We are also transparently investing in better technology and tools to enable us to more proactively identify abusive, violative material, to limit its spread and reach on the platform and to encourage healthier conversations. An operation is under way to rescue sailors stuck on a 16-tonne Russian cargo ship that has run aground off a beach in Cornwall in extreme and horrific weather. The massive vessel, believed to be the Kuzma Minin, grounded off Gyllyngvase Beach in Falmouth at about 5.40am on Tuesday. (PA Graphics) The Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) said the 590ft (180m) ship had dragged its anchor and has a list of about five degrees. There is no cargo on board the vessel, which has 18 Russian crew on board, and tugs will be attached to the ship to help re-float it when the tide rises. WATCH #HMCoastguard Winchman Niall Hanson, being lowered down to the #KuzmaMinin to assist the Harbour Pilot onboard. Seas remain rough with 60mph winds. Everyone #allsafe however Newquay Coastguard helicopter remains on standby. An attempt to refloat will be made later today. pic.twitter.com/WCS92nkOFs Maritime and Coastguard Agency (@MCA_media) December 18, 2018 Witnesses have taken pictures of the boat close to the shore. The incident comes after the Met Office issued a yellow warning of severe weather with 65mph winds forecast. (Nigel Kitto/PA) Nigel Kitto, who lives locally, praised the work of the lifeboat and helicopter teams working in horrific conditions. The helicopter and lifeboat have been going in and out and its incredible to see the skill of the helicopter pilot, he said. Lifeboats go to the aid of the Kuzma Minin (@NDK72/PA) The helicopter is going sideways here against the wind and struggling a bit. Its amazing to watch but there are people on board so fingers crossed that everyone gets back to shore OK. The efforts to rescue sailors from the beached tanker come on the eve of the 37th anniversary of the Penlee lifeboat disaster. Names of the men who died in the Penlee lifeboat disaster of 1981 (Barry Batchelor/PA) The 1981 tragedy, which occurred in nearby Penzance, claimed the lives of 16 people in similar circumstances. There are dangerous rocks down there and this brings up memories for everyone, I imagine, Mr Kitto added. Falmouth resident Jess Hughes described this mornings weather on the Cornish coast as extreme. As you come over the crest of the hill theres just this huge ship where there shouldnt be, she told the Press Association. Last night it was horrendously windy and now theres gravel up by the road, so it was a good high tide, she added. An HM Coastguard spokeswoman said in a statement: HM Coastguard is currently co-ordinating assistance to a 180-metre bulk carrier which dragged her anchor and grounded on the western side of the port entrance between Swanpool and Gyllyngvase beaches at around 5.40am. The vessel has 18 Russian crew on board. There is no cargo on board. She currently has a list of five degrees but there is no report of any pollution. 180 metre bulk carrier dragged anchor and grounded on west of port entrance between Swanpool and Gullyngvase beaches this morning. 18 Russian crew on board. No cargo on board, no report of pollution. Tug on way, lifeboat standing by. Coastguard Team have cordoned off ship. Maritime and Coastguard Agency (@MCA_media) December 18, 2018 Tugs are on their way to the vessel and a lifeboat is standing by at the scene. The Falmouth Coastguard Rescue Team have cordoned off an area around the ship. Tugs will be attached to the vessel and as the tide rises, the plan is to re-float the vessel. Half of premises in remote locations across the UK still have patchy or unreliable mobile reception, despite wider improvements to mobile coverage across the country. According to Ofcoms annual report, reliable voice calls are now available to 97% of premises in urban homes and offices from all operators, while 83% have access to complete 4G coverage. In contrast, only 41% of premises in rural areas are able to access good quality data, which is defined as a connection speed of at least 2mbit/s. Getting rural areas connected: todays Connected Nations report shows 91% of the UKs land area has good 4G from at least one operator. But we're also proposing rules to boost reception where it's needed: https://t.co/kjhS5BHXFq pic.twitter.com/cBdiPjkzFL Ofcom (@Ofcom) December 18, 2018 The regulator is planning to release new airwaves for mobile services to tackle the problem, by auctioning two spectrum bands in late 2019 or early 2020, with binding coverage rules. Mobile coverage has improved across the UK this year, but too many people and businesses are still struggling for a signal, said Philip Marnick, Ofcoms spectrum group director. Were particularly concerned about mobile reception in rural areas. (Lauren Hurley/PA) As we release new airwaves for mobile, were planning rules that would extend good mobile coverage to where its needed. That will help ensure that rural communities have the kind of mobile coverage that people expect in towns and cities, reducing the digital divide. Ofcoms Connected Nations report shows improvements in mobile and broadband coverage, but more progress is needed in rural areas. Were releasing more airwaves for mobile, and proposing new rules to help boost coverage: https://t.co/kjhS5BHXFq pic.twitter.com/eeDe1RHXrQ Ofcom (@Ofcom) December 18, 2018 Critics argue that people should not have to choose a mobile network based on the quality of coverage and signal in their area. In some extremes, network coverage even determines what property people decide to buy or rent, said Rob Baillie, from phone comparison site comparemymobile.com. Consumers should only have to focus on the best deals available to them, but instead theyve had to opt for the safest bet, rather than the cheapest option; and often they still have to invest in pricey signal boosters for their home when they dont get the desired service from their network provider. Ofcoms latest Connected Nations report estimates that 39,000 premises are unable to receive either decent broadband defined as speeds of at least 10mbit/s, with an upload speed of at least 1mbit/s or good mobile broadband services. Premises in the Scottish Highlands and Islands and rural areas of Wales are most likely to be affected. The report shows that mobile coverage has improved more broadly across the county, with 78% of the UKs land mass now with complete call coverage outdoors from all four operators, up from 69% the year before. Meanwhile, indoor voice coverage improved 2% on last year, to 92%, though Ofcom said more needs to be done to increase it further. A Scottish Conservative MP has said contingency planning for a no-deal Brexit should have started immediately after the vote in 2016. Colin Clark, MP for Gordon, insisted there must be a plan in place in the event of the UK departing the EU without a deal. Prime Minister Theresa May announced on Monday MPs would not vote on her Brexit deal until the third week in January. Speaking on the BBCs Good Morning Scotland, Mr Clark said: No deal is far from satisfactory but ministers are making preparations and we are getting reassurance. Ive been a businessman my entire life, contingency planning is never a waste of time or a waste of money. With the greatest respect to the Treasury, and I only came in here in 2017, immediately after the EU referendum they should have started making preparations and we would now be in a much more solid place to negotiate with the EU. Colin Clark said planning should have started earlier for a no-deal Brexit (Dominic Lipinski/PA) I admit, we are right up to the wire, we are very close to the 29th of March. We must have contingency planning in place and ministers are acting wholly appropriately. I would have liked to have seen them start a lot earlier, Ive been in business for a long time I would not have left it this late. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn tabled a motion of no confidence in the PM on Monday night, saying she had led the UK into a national crisis. However there have been calls for other parties, including the SNP, the Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru and the Greens, for Mr Corbyn to push for a no-confidence vote against the government as a whole. SNP MP Stephen Gethins described the decision not to call for a no-confidence vote in the government, which if successful, could force a general election, as a wasted chance. Labour have missed an open goal here, a golden opportunity, said Mr Gethins. Were in a really desperate situation at the moment whereby were about to fall off a no-deal Brexit cliff edge. Ian Blackford called for the Prime Minister to get together with leaders of all parties, rather than just trying to appeal to the DUP and the hardline Tories, and that has failed. The Tories failed last week, the Prime Minister came out of a disastrous council in Brussels with the other EU leaders and its fast becoming clear that shes lost control of the situation. The only thing this governments got going for it at the moment is a hopeless official opposition. Scottish Labour deputy leader Lesley Laird said the Mrs May had lost control at Westminster, as well as within her own party. Ms Laird said: We had indicated that we wanted to ensure that parliament had a meaningful vote. Our aim is to bring that back to the House. What was very evident yesterday was that the Prime Minister had completely misread the mood of the House and that is why I think it was absolutely appropriate at the end of listening to that debate yesterday that Jeremy indicated that he was tabling that no-confidence motion in the Prime Minister. It was pretty evident from all across the House that a number of people who had been backing the Prime Minister were extremely frustrated with her inability to allow the House to have its say, and in particular, to have its say before Christmas, as she had committed to. This is all of the Tories making. This is a Prime Minister who does not command authority in her party and it was pretty evident, does not command the authority of the House. A poacher has been ordered to repeatedly watch the movie Bambi as part of his sentence for a scheme to illegally kill hundreds of deer. David Berry Jr, from Missouri, was ordered to watch the Disney classic at least once a month during his year-long jail sentence in what conservation agents have called one of the largest deer-poaching cases in state history, the Springfield News-Leader reported. The deer were trophy bucks taken illegally, mostly at night, for their heads, leaving the bodies of the deer to waste, said Don Trotter, the prosecuting attorney in Lawrence County. David Berry Jr (Lawrence County Sheriff/AP) Berry, his father, two brothers and another man who helped them had their hunting, fishing and trapping privileges revoked temporarily or permanently. The men have paid a combined 51,000 dollars (40,000) in fines and court costs, and the judge ordered a special addition to Berrys sentence for illegally taking wildlife. Court records show he was ordered by Lawrence County Judge Robert George to view the Walt Disney movie Bambi, with the first viewing being on or before December 23 2018, and at least one such viewing each month thereafter while at the county jail. Berry was also sentenced to 120 days in jail in nearby Barton County for a firearms probation violation. His father, David Berry Sr, and his brother Kyle were arrested in August after a nearly nine-month investigation that also involved cases in Kansas, Nebraska and Canada. Missouri Department of Conservation said information from the investigation led to 14 Missouri residents facing more than 230 charges in 11 counties. Investigators said Berry Srs other son Eric was later caught with another person spotlighting deer, where poachers use light at night to make deer pause and easier to hunt. The investigation into the Berrys began in late 2015 when the conservation agency received an anonymous tip about deer poaching in Lawrence County. A warrant has been issued for the arrest of a lookalike of Friends star David Schwimmer after he failed to attend court. Abdulah Husseni, 36, of Spencer Road, Slough, had been summonsed to appear at Blackpool Magistrates Court on Tuesday accused of theft and fraud. District Judge Jane Goodwin issued a warrant not backed for bail after Husseni failed to answer his summons. Blackpool Magistrates Court (Dave Thompson/PA) He had received instructions by post to attend court for 9.30am. Social media users pointed out the likeness to Schwimmers character Ross Geller in the popular US sitcom when police in Blackpool posted an image of a man leaving a restaurant on September 20, carrying what appeared to be beer cans. Schwimmer responded by posting a video to his Twitter account that showed him scurrying through a convenience store carrying a tray of beer before looking up furtively at a CCTV camera. Officers, I swear it wasn't me. As you can see, I was in New York. To the hardworking Blackpool Police, good luck with the investigation.#itwasntme pic.twitter.com/EDFF9dZoYR schwim (@DavidSchwimmer) October 24, 2018 He captioned the video: Officers, I swear it wasnt me. As you can see, I was in New York. To the hardworking Blackpool Police, good luck with the investigation. He added the hashtag #itwasntme to the post. Husseni is said to have stolen a coat, a phone and a wallet from Mr Basrais restaurant in Blackpool. The number of cancer patients who are having to wait longer than the target of 62 days to receive treatment has increased, according to official statistics. The target states 95% of patients urgently referred with a suspicion of cancer will wait a maximum of 62 days from referral to first cancer treatment. However, the figures published by the Information Services Division (ISD), indicate only 81.4% of patients managed to do so a drop of 3.2% from the previous quarter (84.6%). The 95% target was met for the 31-day standard which states patients must be seen within 31 days following a decision to treat to first cancer treatment with 95.1% of patients doing so, a slight increase from 95.0% in the previous quarter. The 62-day standard was met by two NHS Boards, NHS Borders and NHS Lanarkshire, however it has not been met at national level since 2012. In October, the Scottish Government announced an 850 million investment under its Waiting Times Improvement Plan, which aims to substantially and sustainably improve NHS waiting times. The 62-day waiting time target has not been met by health boards (Rui Vieira/PA) Gregor McNie, Cancer Research UK, said: Its worrying these targets are still not being met. Waiting for treatment to start is an anxious time for patients and these delays are far from acceptable. We know some progress has been made and were pleased to see the Scottish Government has committed to improvements through its Waiting Times Improvement Plan. Cancer services in Scotland are struggling to cope as every year more people are referred for diagnostic tests. Staff shortages remain a serious concern. Swift action from the Scottish Government is now needed to ensure there are enough staff in Scotland to deliver the vital tests people need. Health Secretary Jeane Freeman said the failure to meet the 62-day target across Scotland is simply not good enough. Ms Freeman said: Its welcome that 95% of patients were once again treated within the 31 day standard, and that once a decision to treat has been made patients wait on average six days for treatment. However, despite an increase of 31.6% (738) of patients being treated within the 62 day referral standard than ten years ago, performance against this target is simply not good enough. Recently I launched the Waiting Times Improvement Plan which, backed by an investment of 850 million, will drive down waiting times for cancer diagnosis and treatment, outpatient appointments and day case procedures. We are committed to significantly improving the experience of patients waiting to be seen or treated. I have been clear with Health Boards that achieving this will require a focused, intense programme of work that accelerates action that is already underway. Labour Shadow Cabinet Secretary for Health, Monica Lennon said: Cancer remains Scotlands biggest killer and these latest figures prove we need much more ambition and action from the Scottish Government in order to beat it. People living in our most deprived communities continue to experience the worst outcomes. This is not an inevitability; the right public health policies and targeted investment will save lives. Earlier detection and faster treatment are key to this and the Health Secretary must urgently fix the staffing crisis in the NHS and end delays. Scottish Labour is calling on SNP Ministers to use the budget to reduce cancer waiting times so that if your GP suspects cancer you get swift access to diagnosis and treatment. Scottish Liberal Democrat health spokesperson Alex Cole-Hamilton said: These results are an absolute disgrace. No one should be forced to endure such a prolonged period of anxiety and long waits could jeopardise patients chance of recovery. This Autumn, SNP ministers admitted that they dont expect to meet this target until 2021. Scottish Liberal Democrats demand better. Scottish Conservative shadow health secretary Miles Briggs said: It is deeply concerning that cancer referral waiting targets are being increasingly missed. Survival rates for cancer are dramatically improved with early diagnosis and treatment, so lengthening waiting times for cancer are especially concerning. SNP ministers should never have allowed the waiting times to get this bad through repeated mismanagement of NHS Scotland. Detectives have made an urgent appeal about the final movements of the police officer who was found dead in a burn. The body of Dean Morrison was discovered at Barry Burn in Carnoustie at approximately 12.40pm on Sunday. Although officers say the death is not being treated as suspicious, a witness appeal has been issued to try and piece together his last moments. As well as urging anyone who saw the 40-year-old before his death, officers are now calling for help in their search for a scarf he was wearing when he was last seen on Saturday night. Senior investigating officer, Detective Inspector Ray Birnie, said: We are treating his death as unexplained and at this stage there is nothing to indicate it is suspicious. We need to find out what happened to Dean so that we can provide his family with the answers they both need and deserve. Officers are appealing for witnesses after the death of Pc Dean Morrison (Police Scotland/PA) We urgently need to speak to anyone who may have seen Dean between 11.12pm on Saturday 15 December and 12.40pm on Sunday 16 December. If you think you may have seen him, perhaps walking in Carnoustie or within a licensed premises, then please get in touch. He added: Dean was wearing a dark grey puffer jacket, scarf, dark shirt, black trousers and brown shoes. We are searching for the scarf which we know he was wearing when he was last seen. The scarf is made by Next and is multi-coloured striped including brown, green and silver. If anyone finds a scarf matching this description in Carnoustie, please leave it where it is and call us. Carnoustie residents are being told to expect increased police activity in the days ahead including search officers, uniformed officers and the use of a drone. Detectives believe Mr Morrison caught a taxi from Broughty Ferry, near Dundee, on Saturday night to the Angus town. Renewing his call for the driver to come forwards, Mr Birnie said: Despite widespread media coverage and previous police appeals, we are again appealing for the taxi driver to contact us. It is absolutely vital that we find this driver. We know the driver picked Dean up at 11.13pm on Saturday 15 December in Fort Street/Brook Street in Broughty Ferry and may later have dropped him off in Carnoustie. The taxi itself was a black people carrier style with a sliding rear door and an orange light on the roof. We urgently need to speak to the taxi driver to find out where he dropped Dean off. The man who died at Barry Burn #Carnoustie yesterday, has been named as PC Dean Morrison. Ch Supt Todd said : Dean was a highly respected officer who was extremely well liked & popular with his colleagues. Our thoughts are with his family & friends pic.twitter.com/EHyKtinzP5 Tayside Police (@TaysidePolice) December 17, 2018 Police Scotland said Mr Morrison had 16 years of service covering the Tayside area. Chief Superintendent Andrew Todd, Divisional Commander for Tayside Division, added: Dean was a highly respected officer, who was extremely well liked and popular with his colleagues. He was thoroughly professional in his work. His death is a great tragedy and he will be sadly missed by all who knew him and we will do all we can to support them during this distressing time. Our thoughts are with his family and friends. Anyone with any information is asked contact Police Scotland on 101 quoting 1960, or speak to any police officers. Alternatively people with information can contact the independent charity Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111 or via their anonymous online form at crimestoppers-uk.org. The Scottish Liberal Democrats have been fined 500 for failing to deliver accurate spending returns in the 2016 Scottish Parliament election. The Electoral Commission launched an investigation earlier this year following a complaint. The party had previously said there was no substance to the claim, with national leader Sir Vince Cable describing it as mischief. Bob Posner, director of political finance and regulation at the Electoral Commission, said: Political parties and campaigners must provide accurate and transparent spending returns so that they can be scrutinised by voters. In this case, the party aggregated some payments rather than declaring each payment individually as required by the law. As a result it was not possible to identify some of them, resulting in less transparency. A spokesman for the Scottish Liberal Democrats, who paid the fine last week, said: This is a small penalty for a technical fault on the declaration of our election returns. The Scottish Liberal Democrats have been served a 500 penalty by the Electoral Commission (Gareth Fuller/PA) All funds were accounted for but they should have been disaggregated. A pensioner who feared she had lost full use of her body following a stroke has praised a neurological physiotherapy which has helped her regain movement in her left arm. Audrey Fildes, 70, was left bed-ridden for 12 weeks at Leeds General Infirmary after suffering a stroke in November 2015. The former tailor was left paralysed down her left side, and was facing the possibility of spending the rest of her life using a wheelchair. Upon returning to her home in Pudsey, Leeds, Mrs Fildes was reliant upon the support of her husband, David, and twice-daily visits from a carer to help her wash and dress. Fearing she may never be able to walk again, the pensioner started to undergo fortnightly neurological physiotherapy at the nearby Physio Med provider earlier this year. The treatment involves repetitive actions and exercises to kick-start damaged message pathways to the brain and improve movement and co-ordination. Three months after starting the sessions, the stroke victim has now regained the use of her left arm and the fingers in her left hand, and is now undergoing work on her left leg in the hope of increasing mobility and regaining the ability to walk. Senior physiotherapist Shalini Sapru has praised Mrs Fildes after she regained use of her left arm and hand (Physio Med/PA) Mrs Fildes has said she is over the moon with the progress she has made since first visiting Physio Med. She added: As a tailor, losing the use of my left arm and hand was terribly upsetting and, although I might not be ready to make a dress again just yet, I can now hold a glass unaided so Ill be able to raise a toast on Christmas Day, and I cant wait. Discussing the huge impact that his wifes stroke has had on both of them, Mr Fildes said of the sessions: I think the regular change of scenery has been beneficial for both of us and its certainly helped take some of the pressure off me the stress of caring for a once-active partner is huge. Finding reliable treatment has been difficult, so hopefully our story will encourage other stroke victims to keep fighting. Shalini Sapru, a senior physiotherapist at Physio Med, has said she is delighted with the progress Mrs Fildes has made. She said: Audrey has shown great determination to increase her mobility and our next goal is to see some movement in her left leg. Scotlands Justice Secretary is looking at alternatives to controversial plans to merge Police Scotland and the British Transport Police (BTP) north of the border. Humza Yousaf told a Holyrood committee that government officials had been working with both organisations on possible options ranging from voluntary information sharing to new governance set-ups. He said a meeting including both organisations, their oversight bodies, the department for Transport and Audit Scotland, last month resulted in the general consensus current legislation could be used to strengthen the role of the Scottish Police Authority (SPA) in overseeing railway policing in Scotland. The Railway Policing (Scotland) Bill paving the way for a merger was passed in June 2017, despite criticism from opposition parties, the unions and others. Integration was originally due to take place in April 2019, but the timetable was delayed and in September Mr Yousaf said the legislation might never be enacted. In September Mr Yousaf said the legislation might never be enacted (Jane Barlow/PA) In a letter to Holyroods Justice Committee, he said: My officials have been working with stakeholders to explore further the options for enhanced accountability to the Scottish Parliament. The options discussed ranged from voluntary information-sharing agreements to exploring new governance and accountability mechanisms. Last months event demonstrated a general consensus among stakeholders that legislation currently in force could be used to create an arrangement that facilitates a stronger oversight role for SPA in relation to railway policing in Scotland. Both the SPA and British Transport Police Authority have committed to exploring that option further and discussing how it might work in practice. He said he remains committed to keeping the commencement date of the Railway Policing (Scotland) Act under review and integration of the services is the governments long-term goal. He added: However, I recognise that BTP staff and officers in Scotland deserve clarity and stability going forward and I am confident that exploring the above mentioned arrangement in further detail will provide a viable medium term option to enabling governance and accountability of the delivery of railway policing in Scotland. Opposition parties called for the government to scrap the merger plans in full. Labours justice spokesman Daniel Johnson said Mr Yousaf had performed a humiliating u-turn. He said: The public, experts and officers themselves have always been opposed to this ideological move from the SNP government. It is welcome Mr Yousaf has finally recognised the plan to merge is a non-starter and is now pursuing alternatives. The SNP government must now take the possibility of a merger of BTP and Police Scotland completely off the table. His Liberal Democrat counterpart Liam McArthur accused the government of having dismissed out of hand proposals less risky than the merger. He said: That decision cost millions of pounds and alienated the very staff who would be needed to make the policy a success. For BTP officers and staff the future remains uncertain. The Justice Secretary should ditch the original plan, given two years of work has shown it to be unworkable, and focus instead on the other viable options for the future of this service. Discussing Mr Yousafs letter at the Justice Committee on Tuesday, members agreed to write to the organisations involved, including the government, and seek clarity on costs and timescales for the options. Conservative Liam Kerr told the committee the letter indicated interim measures, if successful, might mean full integration is not necessary but regardless of what happens in the medium term, in the long term we are still going to go for merger. He added: I genuinely dont understand that. A Scottish Government spokeswoman said the letter simply updates members on progress. She added the Justice Secretary had indicated the need to identify interim arrangements that could give effect more quickly to the devolution of railway policing, as recommended by the cross-party Smith Commission in August, and committed to to re-considering all options for enhancing accountability of railway policing in Scotland in September. A major independent police probe into the Armys notorious IRA agent Stakeknife is rigorously but fairly investigating members of the security forces, the officer in charge said. Bedfordshire Police Chief Constable Jon Boutcher is gathering information about the high-ranking mole who reputedly led the republican organisations nutting squad, which brutally interrogated and murdered suspected spies and informers during the Northern Ireland conflict. Witnesses have told how records were removed or invented by members of the security forces as part of the wealth of new information unearthed, Mr Boutcher said. New DNA profiles and suspect finger marks have also been uncovered by his detectives and they are due to present files to prosecutors next year in a bid to secure convictions decades after the original wrongdoing. Mr Boutcher said: It is not a witch hunt, it is not a re-writing of history, but it is an authentic search for the truth. It is an investigation that will pull no punches, taking place for the families who have never had an investigation. Jon Boutcher says new DNA profiles and suspect finger marks have been uncovered by detectives investigating the Armys notorious IRA agent Stakeknife (Brian Lawless/PA) Dozens of detectives are probing more than 50 murders. Suspects including members of the security forces and the Provisional IRA are being brought in for questioning. In 2003, Stakeknife was widely named as west Belfast man Freddie Scappaticci, but he has always strongly denied the allegation. The chief constable said detectives were using ground-breaking techniques to review and uncover forensic evidence which was not previously available. They included DNA and finger marks and new exhibits from families. Mr Boutcher added: I can present a wealth of new information, of evidence to the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP). I need to make sure that information is sufficient to persuade him to prosecute people responsible for these offences. The probe is centred on possible crimes by paramilitaries, agents and Army and police handlers linked to Stakeknife, allegedly the militarys highest-ranking spy within the IRA. Multiple murders, attempted murders, torture and unlawful imprisonments are included. Operation Kenova, the name for the investigation, has gathered more than 12,000 documents, secured 1,000 statements and conducted 129 interviews with witnesses, victims and families resulting in more than 6,000 investigative actions. Mr Boutcher said his detectives had access to every document in unedited and at times poorly-indexed form. Most of those whom detectives have spoken to have been victims or witnesses but various suspects have been identified, the senior officer added. Investigators based in London and Belfast also conducted full forensic reviews on numerous murder and abduction cases which have led to 199 requests for new forensic examinations, resulting in several new DNA profiles and suspect finger marks. Mr Boutcher said: Now I think, time will tell, it is the right time for an investigation like this because of the development of the forensic opportunity that we have got. Although these investigations are difficult the longer ago that something occurred, they are not impossible it is not out of reach to find the truth. As long as that is done in a fair and even-handed way to everybody there should be no concerns from the security forces, the paramilitaries, political parties, Government, about an investigation because it is what everybody with any decency should advocate for and want. A free healthy meal will be given to all children who attend a funded early learning and childcare session, the Scottish Government has announced. The Scottish Government published a plan on Tuesday focusing on how expansion of early learning and childcare provision in Scotland will be implemented. The document lays out the national standards which all providers wishing to deliver funded entitlement will have to meet from 2020. Funded entitlement is to be doubled from its current 600 hours per year to 1,140 hours per year from August 2020 for all three and four-year-olds, and eligible two-year-olds. The scheme, developed in partnership with Cosla, will ensure access to outdoor play sessions for all children regardless of where they live. Providers will also be enabled to pay all childcare workers delivering the funded sessions at least the real Living Wage. Childcare and early learning is to be expanded by 2020 (Dominic Lipinski/PA) It will be introduced from August 2020 and will aim to be provider neutral, and give parents a choice over where they choose to access funded hours of childcare for their children. A major new scheme, developed in partnership with @COSLA, that will deliver improvements for children receiving funded early learning and childcare (ELC) has been announced by @MareeToddMSP Find out more -> https://t.co/BWYBrakNuv pic.twitter.com/1PNgEsrEQz ScotGov Education (@ScotGovEdu) December 18, 2018 Minister for Children and Young People Maree Todd said: The earliest years of a childs life are crucial to their development and high quality early learning and childcare plays a vital role in helping children realise their full potential and closing the poverty-related attainment gap. This is a unique opportunity to transform the way we deliver early learning and childcare, which is why we are using the National Standard to ensure no child in ELC goes hungry or misses out on the benefits of outdoor learning, exercise and play. Families were already going to receive an increased number of funded ELC hours by August 2020. Our new Funding Follows the Child approach and National Standard, set out today, will build on this further, ensuring that high quality and choice remain at the heart of the expansion to 1,140 hours. And because we know that children and families benefit most when they have strong, positive and trusting relationships with staff, the National Standard underlines our commitment to a professional, dedicated and skilled workforce who are fairly rewarded for the hard work they do. Coslas Children and Young People Spokesperson, Councillor Stephen McCabe, said: We welcome the publication of the National Standard, which has been developed in partnership by Cosla and the Scottish Government. The National Standard underpins the commitment to nearly double the funded entitlement of Early Learning and Childcare to 1,140 hours per year for three and four-year-olds, and eligible two-year-olds. It is intended to ensure that from August 2020 children will receive a high-quality, accessible service aimed at improving outcomes and tackling the poverty-related attainment gap. On Monday, Unison warned if the Scottish Government is to meet promises to expand free childcare, more staff will have to be trained, with an increase in their wages. A Freedom of Information request made by the organisation to every council and college in Scotland suggested there are not enough people in colleges or on in-work training courses to meet the staffing levels needed for the promised extra hours. The request indicated there are currently 6,983 part-time students and 3,173 part-time students on courses which could potentially lead to a job in childcare, either with or without further study. It also reported around 444 modern apprentices are in local authorities and 1,102 people are undertaking work based training that could qualify them for work in the early years. However, Audit Scotland estimated 12,000 Whole Time Equivalent (WTE) extra staff would be needed for the expansion. Scottish Labours education spokesman, Iain Gray MSP, said: This is the latest in a long line of warnings that the Scottish Government is not doing enough to implement this policy. We have heard from councils, Audit Scotland, nurseries and now the workforce that there is a high risk that there will not be sufficient staffing in place. Throughout this process the Minister has arrogantly told us that everything is going to plan, while repeatedly being told by all the stakeholders that it is not. Childcare expansion has the potential to deliver for young people, but the Government at the moment only stands to let them down. This is what happens when a policy is written to fit on an election leaflet and not to fit around the lives of Scotlands families. Major operations are under way after strong winds battering Britain saw a Russian cargo ship run aground off the Cornish coast and lorries overturn on a ferry in Scotland. The 16,000-tonne Russian vessel Kuzma Minin grounded off Gyllyngvase Beach in Falmouth at about 5.40am on Tuesday, in what witnesses described as extreme and horrific weather. (PA Graphics) Around two hours later at the Cairnryan ferry terminal, in Wigtownshire, six lorries overturned in high winds on a P&O ferry sailing from Larne in Northern Ireland. No one is reported to have been injured in the incident and Police Scotland said all 52 passengers and 56 crew on board are safe and well and no-one was injured. WATCH #HMCoastguard Winchman Niall Hanson, being lowered down to the #KuzmaMinin to assist the Harbour Pilot onboard. Seas remain rough with 60mph winds. Everyone #allsafe however Newquay Coastguard helicopter remains on standby. An attempt to refloat will be made later today. pic.twitter.com/WCS92nkOFs Maritime and Coastguard Agency (@MCA_media) December 18, 2018 In Cornwall, the Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) said the 590ft (180m) ship had dragged its anchor and has a list of about five degrees. The vessel, which has 18 Russian crew on board, was not carrying any cargo. The MCA, which with the police has declared a major incident, said an attempt will be made later today to re-float the ship when the tide rises. The Kuzma Minin ran aground off Gyllyngvase Beach in Falmouth (Ben Birchall/PA) Video footage released by the MCA shows winchman Niall Hanson being lowered down to the ship in 60mph winds. Witnesses have taken pictures of the boat close to the shore. The incident comes after the Met Office issued a yellow warning of severe weather with 65mph winds forecast. (Nigel Kitto/PA) Nigel Kitto, who lives locally, praised the work of the lifeboat and helicopter teams working in horrific conditions. The helicopter and lifeboat have been going in and out and its incredible to see the skill of the helicopter pilot, he said. The helicopter is going sideways here against the wind and struggling a bit. Its amazing to watch but there are people on board so fingers crossed that everyone gets back to shore OK. Lifeboats go to the aid of the Kuzma Minin (@NDK72/PA) The efforts to rescue sailors from the beached tanker come on the eve of the 37th anniversary of the Penlee lifeboat disaster. The 1981 tragedy, which occurred in nearby Penzance, claimed the lives of 16 people in similar circumstances. There are dangerous rocks down there and this brings up memories for everyone, I imagine, Mr Kitto added. Names of the men who died in the Penlee lifeboat disaster of 1981 (Barry Batchelor/PA) Falmouth resident Jess Hughes described this mornings weather on the Cornish coast as extreme. As you come over the crest of the hill theres just this huge ship where there shouldnt be, she told the Press Association. Last night it was horrendously windy and now theres gravel up by the road so it was a good high tide, she added. 180 metre bulk carrier dragged anchor and grounded on west of port entrance between Swanpool and Gullyngvase beaches this morning. 18 Russian crew on board. No cargo on board, no report of pollution. Tug on way, lifeboat standing by. Coastguard Team have cordoned off ship. Maritime and Coastguard Agency (@MCA_media) December 18, 2018 An HM Coastguard spokeswoman said: There will be an attempt later today to re-float the Russian vessel which ran aground earlier this morning off Cornwall. HM Coastguard and Devon and Cornwall Police have declared a major incident due to the large number of people that use the beach and the disruption to traffic in the town. The Secretary of States Representative (SOSRep) Maritime Salvage and Intervention is closely monitoring the situation and the local Environment Group is also being kept informed. Tugs are on their way to the vessel and Falmouth RNLI all-weather lifeboat is standing by at the scene. Falmouth Coastguard Rescue Team have cordoned off an area around the ship. HM Coastguard Search and Rescue helicopter based at Newquay was used to transfer a marine pilot on to the vessel. The attempt to re-float the vessel will take place during high tide later today using harbour tugs. A Scottish Conservative MSP has been criticised after he described the rape clause as an invention to beat the Tories with. Brian Whittle, MSP for South Scotland, made the comments in a wide-ranging interview with Holyrood Magazine. In 2017, the UK government introduced a limit on child tax credits to the first two children. A clause in the rules mean mothers who have a third child as a result of rape can be exempted but would have to provide evidence to do so. Mr Whittle, however, said the clause should be referred to differently. He said: Well, number one, again, this is where politics is appalling, there is no such thing as a rape clause. Thats an invention. Theres an exemption clause. The Conservative MSP made the comments during an interview with Holyrood Magazine (Andrew Milligan/PA) Why dont we call it a children in care clause? Because its part of the same thing. Ill tell you what I think about that, theres a legitimate debate to be had around the child cap that will never happen because, politically, you wouldnt be allowed to say what youve got to say. The term rape clause is an invention to beat the Tories with. Its the invention of another political party. Scottish Labour Social Security spokesperson Mark Griffin described the comments as skin-crawling. This is a staggering interview packed with disgraceful comments from Brian Whittle, with arguments that could have come straight from Esther McVey or Iain Duncan Smith, said Mr Griffin. Calling the rape clause an invention to attack the Tory party is simply skin-crawling. The clause is the product of an unfair cap that was implemented to penalise poor families so George Osborne could hand massive tax cuts to the wealthy. Labour across the UK will redesign social security but Holyrood has the powers to defend families from the cap now. Its clear that the Scottish Tories are every bit as nasty as their colleagues down south and are happy to leave the cap in place. The mask has slipped. SNP MSP Shona Robison added: Brian Whittle has shown total contempt for victims of rape and coercion with his comments, when the reality is that the Tory government has inflicted this policy on low income families. It is staggering that Mr Whittle not only fails to understand the reality of Tory welfare cuts, but thinks he shouldnt be expected to answer for the callous actions and policies of his own party. He seems to be in total denial about the hardship and misery his own party is causing. It is time for the Tories to take responsibilities for their own damaging welfare policies and face up to the real life consequences they are causing their constituents. Vladimir Putin says Russias new weapons have no foreign equivalents and will help ensure the countrys security for decades to come. The Russian president, speaking during a meeting with military chiefs in Moscow, specifically mentioned the new Kinzhal hypersonic missile and the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle, saying they have significantly bolstered Russias military capability. Kinzhal has already been commissioned by the military. Defence minister Sergei Shoigu said aircraft carrying the missiles have flown 89 patrol missions this year. Mr Shoigu said the Avangard will enter service next year. Vladimir Putin speaks to his military chiefs (Mikhail Klimentyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo/AP) Mr Putin said Moscow would have to respond to the planned US withdrawal from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF). He reaffirmed a strong denial of Washingtons claim that Russia had violated the pact, and blamed the US for breaking it. Mr Putin also rejected the US claim that Russia had developed a new cruise missile in violation of the INF, arguing that Moscow has no need for such a land-based weapon because it already has similar missiles on its ships and aircraft. Washington warned this month it would suspend its obligations under the INF in 60 days if Russia did not return to full compliance. The US claims the 9M729 cruise missile breaches the INF, which bans all land-based cruise and ballistic missiles with a range of 300 to 3,400 miles. Mr Putin said the Russian military has successfully tested air-launched Kh-101 and sea-launched Kalibr cruise missiles with a range of 2,790 miles in combat in Syria. It has probably made our partners worry, but it doesnt violate the INF treaty, Mr Putin said. He said the treaty signed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev did not limit sea and air-launched cruise missiles, which the Soviet Union did not have at the time and the US did in significant numbers. The Russian president argued that the pact represented unilateral disarmament for the Soviet Union, adding: God only knows why the Soviet leadership did it. He emphasised that with Russian strategic bombers and navy ships now armed with long-range cruise missiles, it makes the development of similar land-based weapons redundant. It makes no difference whatsoever if we have a Kalibr-armed submarine or aircraft carrying missiles or similar weapons ashore, he said. We can strike any targets within the range of 4,500 kilometres from the territory of Russia. He added, however, that Russia could easily build such land-based missiles if the US opts out of the INF, which he described as a key stabilising factor. If we have similar air and sea-launched systems, it wouldnt be that difficult for us to do some research and development to put them on land if needed, he said. The conviction of Freddie Scappaticci for possessing extreme pornography shows nobody is above the law, the officer leading the independent Stakeknife probe said. In 2003, Stakeknife was widely named as west Belfast man Scappaticci, 72, but he has always strongly denied the allegation. Earlier this month he avoided prison after admitting two unrelated charges. The chief constable of Bedfordshire police, Jon Boutcher, said Operation Kenova investigators were dealing with people fairly. He added: If anybody tries to suppress evidence, if anyone tries to stop us doing what we legally should be doing, I will deal with it, I will use the rule of law to deal with that. When we recently convicted somebody because of things that we found on that persons computer, again here there was a negativity about that prosecution and conviction, is that all that Kenova are doing. The way I would view any such conviction is a demonstration that nobody is above the law, no-one has got immunity. That is how we deal with people, it does not matter who they are. Scappaticci was convicted after material was seized as part of Operation Kenova, the wide-ranging investigation which was launched in June 2016 to investigate allegations of serious criminal activity during The Troubles. Freddie Scappaticci admitted charges at Westminster Magistrates Court which related to at least 329 images, including those involving animals. He admitted charges which related to at least 329 images, including those involving animals. The defendant conducted a number of computer searches on a total of 13 different days between November 2015 and January 2018, a court was told. He was arrested by police in January about offences including murder and abduction, but later released on bail. Mr Boutcher added: We deal with them with great care but if they break the law we will prosecute them for that and hopefully people will begin to realise that. Theresa May will ramp up planning for a no-deal Brexit after Cabinet ministers agreed to make it an operational priority for the Government. The Prime Ministers Brexit deal remains the preferred outcome for the Government but with just over 100 days until the UKs departure from the bloc the intensity of preparations for crashing out in March 2019 will increase. Brexit Secretary Steve Barclay stressed that unless MPs back Mrs Mays deal when it returns to the Commons in January the default option is for the UK to leave without any exit arrangement in place. Some 3,500 troops will be on stand-by to help deal with the impact of a no-deal Brexit, it emerged. Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay said no-deal planning was now an `operational priority (Kirsty OConnor/PA) Speaking after the Cabinet agreed to step up no-deal preparation, Mr Barclay said: Parliament needs to back the deal because the consequence of not doing so is we risk the default of no-deal and a responsible government must prepare for that eventuality. That is what we agreed at Cabinet. That is what we are going to do. He dismissed alternative plans being pushed by ministers including a second referendum or a managed no-deal under which arrangements are made with Brussels to limit any negative impacts of severing ties with the EU. There are a number of scenarios being floated in government without, I think, people really engaging on the consequences of that either the consequence to our democracy of not delivering on the referendum, not having Brexit or the idea that we can cherry-pick and have some managed no-deal where the EU will suspend its own red lines, which I dont think is feasible. In a direct plea to the UKs business community he urged company bosses to make sure they were ready for a no-deal Brexit. It needs to be much more of a priority for businesses up and down the country. In the Commons, Mr Williamson said the Ministry of Defence had not had a formal request for support in no-deal Brexit planning but what we will do is have 3,500 service personnel held at readiness including regulars and reserves in order to support any Government department on any contingencies they may need. A major independent police probe into the Armys notorious IRA agent Stakeknife is not a witch hunt against members of the security forces, the officer in charge said. Bedfordshire Police Chief Constable Jon Boutcher said he was rigorously but fairly gathering information about the high-ranking mole who reputedly led the republican organisations nutting squad, which brutally interrogated and murdered suspected spies and informers during the Northern Ireland conflict. Witnesses have told how records were removed or invented by members of the security forces as part of the wealth of new information unearthed, Mr Boutcher said. New DNA profiles and suspect fingerprints have also been uncovered by his detectives and they are due to present files to prosecutors next year in a bid to secure convictions decades after the original wrongdoing. Mr Boutcher said: It is not a witch hunt, it is not a re-writing of history, but it is an authentic search for the truth. It is an investigation that will pull no punches, taking place for the families who have never had an investigation. Dozens of detectives are probing more than 50 murders. Suspects including members of the security forces and the Provisional IRA are being brought in for questioning. In 2003, Stakeknife was widely named as west Belfast man Freddie Scappaticci, but he has always strongly denied the allegation. Jon Boutcher said although these investigations are difficult they are not impossible - it is not out of reach to find the truth (Liam McBurney/PA). The chief constable said detectives were using ground-breaking techniques to review and uncover forensic evidence which was not previously available. They included DNA and fingerprint and new exhibits from families. Mr Boutcher added: I can present a wealth of new information, of evidence to the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP). I need to make sure that information is sufficient to persuade him to prosecute people responsible for these offences. The probe is centred on possible crimes by paramilitaries, agents and Army and police handlers linked to Stakeknife, allegedly the militarys highest-ranking spy within the IRA. Multiple murders, attempted murders, torture and unlawful imprisonments are included. Operation Kenova, the name for the investigation, has gathered more than 12,000 documents, secured 1,000 statements and conducted 129 interviews with witnesses, victims and families resulting in more than 6,000 investigative actions. Mr Boutcher said his detectives had access to every document in unedited and at times poorly-indexed form. Most of those whom detectives have spoken to have been victims or witnesses, but various suspects have been identified, the senior officer added. Investigators based in London and Belfast also conducted full forensic reviews on numerous murder and abduction cases which have led to 199 requests for new forensic examinations, resulting in several new DNA profiles and suspect fingerprints. Mr Boutcher said: Now I think, time will tell, it is the right time for an investigation like this because of the development of the forensic opportunity that we have got. Although these investigations are difficult the longer ago that something occurred, they are not impossible it is not out of reach to find the truth. As long as that is done in a fair and even-handed way to everybody, there should be no concerns from the security forces, the paramilitaries, political parties, Government, about an investigation because it is what everybody with any decency should advocate for and want. Mobile phone coverage is far worse in Scotland than it is in England, despite customers having to pay out just as much, according to the UKs communications regulator. A report published by Ofcom indicates only 38% of the country can get good 4G services from all operators while 82% of England is covered. The Scottish Government are aiming to deliver superfast broadband to every home and business by 2021. The number of Scottish premises able to access a superfast connection has increased from 87% in 2017 to 92% this year. The Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) has urged the UK Government and Ofcom to take stronger action to improve Scottish mobile coverage. Todays major Ofcom study on the UKs communications networks shows the number of people unable to get a decent broadband has gone down in the UK. Read our plans to do more for rural areas: https://t.co/zaDnEI0d0T pic.twitter.com/9GQxO8YKzM Ofcom (@Ofcom) December 18, 2018 Andrew McRae, the FSBs Scotland policy chair, said: Consumers and businesses in Scotland are paying as much for their mobile phones as counterparts elsewhere in the UK for a service, which this report illustrates, is far worse. Coverage in Scotland is poorer than in England, according to a report (Philip Toscano/PA) While it is good to see Ofcom note that this is unsatisfactory, we need to see action from them, the UK Government and mobile operators to address this long-standing problem. On the other hand, this publication also underlines that Scotland is making good progress on superfast broadband provision, though we still lag both England and Wales. We strongly support the Scottish Governments ambition on this front, though we would underline that expectations amongst communities and firms are very high and they must deliver. Scottish Liberal Democrat Rural Economy and Connectivity Spokesman, Mike Rumbles, said: You must keep your fingers crossed when driving home this Christmas that you arent caught in a 4G blackspot. As we rely increasingly on our mobiles, it is becoming a safety issue to have our rural countryside a 4G not-spot. The Scottish Government has made a lot of promises but has yet to deliver any meaningful change and it must speed up the glacial pace it has been taking to try to reach 100% superfast broadband coverage. It is our rural areas, which have been left to be provided for last. Reliable coverage of 4G and Superfast broadband is an investment into the future. The Scottish Government must get serious and provide rural areas with the coverage we all expect. A 16,000-tonne Russian cargo ship that ran aground off the Cornish coast has been re-floated during high tide. The Kuzma Minin grounded off Gyllyngvase Beach in Falmouth at about 5.40am on Tuesday, in what was described as extreme and horrific weather. Eyewitnesses said the vessel, which had 18 Russian crew on board and was not carrying any cargo, had been successfully re-floated on Tuesday afternoon. (PA Graphics) The Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) and Devon and Cornwall Police declared a major incident. Video footage released by the MCA shows winchman Niall Hanson being lowered down to the ship in 60mph winds. Witnesses have taken pictures of the boat close to the shore and the incident comes after the Met Office issued a yellow warning of severe weather with 65mph winds forecast. WATCH #HMCoastguard Winchman Niall Hanson, being lowered down to the #KuzmaMinin to assist the Harbour Pilot onboard. Seas remain rough with 60mph winds. Everyone #allsafe however Newquay Coastguard helicopter remains on standby. An attempt to refloat will be made later today. pic.twitter.com/WCS92nkOFs Maritime and Coastguard Agency (@MCA_media) December 18, 2018 Nigel Kitto, who lives locally, praised the work of the lifeboat and helicopter teams operating in horrific conditions. The helicopter and lifeboat have been going in and out and its incredible to see the skill of the helicopter pilot, he said. The Kuzma Minin ran aground off Gyllyngvase Beach in Falmouth (Ben Birchall/PA) The helicopter is going sideways here against the wind and struggling a bit. Its amazing to watch but there are people on board so fingers crossed that everyone gets back to shore OK. The efforts to rescue sailors from the beached tanker come on the eve of the 37th anniversary of the Penlee lifeboat disaster. Names of the men who died in the Penlee lifeboat disaster of 1981 (Barry Batchelor/PA) The 1981 tragedy, which occurred in nearby Penzance, claimed the lives of 16 people in similar circumstances. There are dangerous rocks down there and this brings up memories for everyone, I imagine, Mr Kitto added. (Nigel Kitto/PA) Falmouth resident Jess Hughes described this mornings weather on the Cornish coast as extreme. As you come over the crest of the hill theres just this huge ship where there shouldnt be, she told the Press Association. Last night it was horrendously windy and now theres gravel up by the road so it was a good high tide, she added. Tug boats help the Kuzma Minin re-float during high tide (Ben Birchall/PA). As the rescue operation was under way in Cornwall, the emergency services in Scotland were dealing with six lorries overturning on a P&O Ferries sailing at Cairnryan ferry terminal, in Wigtownshire. No one is reported to have been injured in the incident, and Police Scotland said all 52 passengers and 56 crew on board are safe and well. A plan to tackle loneliness and social isolation in Scotland has been launched, with 1 million funding for projects to bring people together. The two-year strategy is funded by the Scottish Government, who want loneliness to be treated as a public-health issue. The scheme will attempt to tackle stigma around loneliness while investing in more-accessible transport to try and connect people in isolated communities. Another element of the plan will see intergenerational and other co-living arrangements tested, in an effort to meet housing needs and reduce loneliness. Older people will also be given opportunities to learn about digital technology as a way to keep in touch and build relationships. Minister for Older People and Equalities, Christina McKelvie cited a recent survey suggesting one in 10 Scots say they often feel lonely and said that rapid technological changes can lead to people withdrawing and losing touch with friends and family. The Scottish Government have launched a plan to tackle loneliness and social isolation (Joe Giddens/PA) The strategy was launched at Bridgend Farmhouse, a community-owned charity in Edinburgh which provides space for learning, eating and exercising. Ms McKelvie said: People often feel afraid to admit they are lonely or isolated yet these feelings can affect anyone at any age, or stage, or walk of life. It is known that social isolation and loneliness can have a significant impact on a persons physical and mental wellbeing which is why we are tackling this issue with a preventative approach allowing loneliness and social isolation to be treated as a public health issue. This is just the beginning of work we are doing to tackle loneliness but we cant do it alone. It is the responsibility of all of us as individuals and communities, and within the public sector, local authorities and businesses to reach out with kindness and build a country where all of us feel welcome within our communities and valued as an important part of society. The new strategy is based on recommendations made to the Scottish Government by a newly-formed group of charities, including Age Scotland, the British Red and the Mental Health Foundation Scotland, who have now welcomed the launched of this plan. Anne Callaghan from the Campaign to End Loneliness said: The new coalition of charities, the Action Group on Isolation and Loneliness (AGIL) welcomes the publication of the Scottish Governments strategy to tackle loneliness and isolation. We are pleased that all of the key recommendations we made to help strengthen the strategy have been adopted, particularly the new cross-ministerial group to help drive the strategy and the formation of an implementation group drawn from civil society to progress it. The announcement of 1m funding spread over two years to test new and innovative approaches is a welcome step but more will be needed. The scale of the challenge is huge and its encouraging that the Scottish Government is looking at how other budgets can be used to tackle loneliness and isolation in Scotland. We are ready to work with the government to help make Scotland a more connected, less lonely, and healthier country and welcome their recognition of our groups potential role. Jeremy Corbyn has become the midwife of Brexit by failing to call a no confidence vote in the Government, according to the SNP. SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford said Labour ducked the issue with its embarrassing stunt of calling for a confidence vote in the Prime Minister during an emergency debate on the EU Withdrawal Agreement. Focusing on the Prime Minister rather than the Government means there is no statutory requirement for the issue to be debated and voted on. Only the leader of the official opposition has the right to demand a vote of no confidence in the Government be taken, potentially toppling the Tories from power. As a result, Mr Blackford said: The leader of the opposition has become the midwife for Brexit. The leader of the opposition is letting the Government off the hook. He has it in his gift to bring a forward a no confidence motion that will test the will of the House and, crucially, will allow his party to move onto the issue of a Peoples Vote. Yesterdays stunt was an embarrassment the SNP and others sought to amend his motion and I am asking him to do what he spectacularly failed to do yesterday and bring forward a motion of no confidence in the Government. Mr Blackford added he was pleading with Labour to work cross-party with the SNP, Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru and the Greens to bring forward the vote. On the basis of the risks we all face we have a responsibility to come together, we have to unite, because its in the interests of all our nations to do that, he said. Based on the very, very real risk there will be no deal as a consequence of the stupidity of what has come from the Government, we now have that responsibility. Today is the day not tomorrow, not when we come back in January today is the day the opposition must put down on a united basis a motion of no confidence. Ian Blackford said Labour is letting the Government `off the hook (PA) As a member of the Privy Council, Mr Blackford said he had seen details of the impact of a no deal Brexit but was sworn to secrecy and urged the Government to publish the sobering details. He added: We have to wake up to the impact of Brexit and the options that are in front of us. Meanwhile, SNP MP Angus Brendan MacNeil (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) asked whether he could table a motion of no confidence in Labour. Raising a point of order on Labours confidence motion, he asked: Is it possible for a backbench MP to table a motion of no confidence in Her Majestys Opposition, given the mess they have made of tabling the motion of no confidence, confusing even their own backbenchers? So, two motions of no confidence, one in the Government and one in that lot over there. Speaker John Bercow responded by saying he was not aware of any precedent for what he cheekily suggests. Anna Soubry at a press conference in London discussing why they feel that Brexit plans should be put to a public vote (Stefan Rousseau/PA) Tory former minister Anna Soubry, raising another point of order on the issue, asked the Speaker whether he could help Labour conduct themselves as a proper, functioning opposition on the same issue. She said: Have you had any communication from Her Majestys Opposition to assist them in the correct procedure and is it the case that you and your excellent clerks are always available to Her Majestys Opposition should they seek any information or advice on how to conduct themselves as a proper, functioning opposition? Mr Bercow replied: The chair is always available to offer advice. In a separate point of order, Labour was accused of playing games with its motion of no confidence in the Prime Minister by Tory former minister Sir Edward Leigh. He said: The Fixed Term Parliament Act is absolutely clear that if Her Majestys Opposition table a motion of no confidence in the Government an immediate debate has to be held and, indeed, if the Opposition had tabled such a motion last night, we would now be discussing a motion of no confidence in the Government. The problem for the leader of the Labour Party is that he does not want an immediate motion of no confidence because if, as is likely it was lost, hed be forced by his party to go for a referendum, so theyre playing games. Mr Bercow said: I should make it clear that there is a strong convention the Government provides time at an early opportunity for a no confidence motion in Her Majestys Government if tabled by the official Opposition. However, and this is important, no such convention applies in relation to this particular motion, which is not a conventional no confidence motion, so thats where things stand. An independent assessor from a legal background is to be appointed to advance a compensation campaign by victims of Libyan-sponsored IRA violence, politicians in Northern Ireland have said. The work would include assessing how many people could potentially qualify and what levels of redress should be requested. Suzanne Dodd, whose police officer father Stephen Dodd was killed in the Harrods store bombing in 1983, said the measure did not go far enough. It is one small step forward, in the last five years of me campaigning this. This week marked the 35th anniversary of the IRA bomb at the London store where six people were killed and 90 injured. Ms Dodd added: Yes it is a small step but what we have to deal with at the moment is I am one of the youngest victims of the Harrods bombing and I am 42 years old. My father, for instance, they have all gone. It has a big knock-on effect, that everyone is getting older and the British Government are just waiting for us to die. The campaign by victims of IRA blasts using Libyan Semtex plastic explosives, including at Harrods, has been running for years. This week marked the 35th anniversary of the IRA bomb at the Harrods store in London where six people were killed and 90 injured (PA) The bereaved and injured are pressing for UK Government support for their bid for compensation paid out of the large number of frozen assets seized from the toppled Gaddafi administration. Dictator Muammar Gaddafi armed the Provisionals with massive amounts of weaponry, extending the Northern Ireland conflict and causing enormous human suffering, MPs have said. These also included bombings at a Remembrance Day ceremony in Enniskillen in 1987, Warrington in 1993, and Londons Docklands in 1996. The DUP and Ulster Unionists met Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt this week. The Foreign Office said it would be writing to MPs to set out the next steps. Commemorations this week marking the anniversary at Harrods (Joe Giddens/PA) UUP peer Sir Reg Empey welcomed the progress. This is all very complicated and delicate work, but is necessary to move things forward. South Belfast DUP MP Emma Little-Pengelly added: There was some positive news in the meeting and a step forward for the campaign. Mr Hunt agreed to draw up terms of reference for the appointment of an independent person who would work with closely with the Government and with victims to advance the campaign. Jonathan Ganesh, president of the Docklands Victims Association, said: We are very pleased that finally after years of campaigning for equality the UK Government appeared to have made a meaningful commitment to the victims of Gaddafi/IRA terrorism. It was undoubtedly the worst moment in the UK history as the UK, France and German governments fought for their victims and we were abandoned by our government. Hopefully we will rectify this appalling injustice that devalued the life of every UK citizen. Thousands of troops are to be put on stand-by to help with potential disruption from a no-deal Brexit, it has been revealed. Defence Secretary Gavin Williamsons announcement that 3,500 regular soldiers and reservists will be held at readiness came as Cabinet agreed to ramp up preparations for the UK crashing out of the European Union without a deal. With just 101 days to go to the scheduled date of Brexit on March 29, businesses were urged to consider implementing their own contingency plans and households should also make preparations. Mrs May was accused by Liberal Democrat leader Sir Vince Cable of psychological warfare in a bid to persuade MPs to support her Brexit deal when it returns to Parliament in January. And former minister Nick Boles said he would resign the Conservative whip if no-deal Brexit ever became official Government policy, in order to vote in any way necessary to stop it from happening. But Downing Street insisted the Government was simply taking sensible steps to prepare for all eventualities, while stressing that delivering a Brexit under the terms of Mrs Mays deal remains its top priority. A 100-page information pack telling businesses of possible changes to the way they trade with EU states will go live online on Friday with 80,000 emails going out to firms thought likely to be most affected. And advice to private individuals will be issued over the coming weeks through adverts, websites and direct communications. Areas expected to be covered include bank card payments in the EU and travelling to the continent with pets. Asked whether families should feel able to go ahead with plans to travel to Europe for the Easter holidays, the Prime Ministers official spokesman said: Im not aware of any reason they shouldnt do that. Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson told MPs that 3,500 troops were ready for deployment in the case of a no-deal Brexit (www.parliamentlive.tv) Around 2 billion has already been allocated for spending by Whitehall departments for Brexit preparations, and Chancellor Philip Hammond announced on Tuesday evening how a further 2 billion will be shared out. The extra funding for 2019/20 will be focused on priority areas including borders, trade and security. Twenty-five Government departments will receive additional money, with the Home Office set to receive almost one quarter of the sum 480 million to increase Border Force capability with hundreds of new officers, and to help it prepare the EU Settlement Scheme. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) will be given 410 million, HM Revenue and Customs 375 million, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Beis) 190 million and the Department for International Trade 128 million. A total of 320 workstreams have been identified by Whitehall departments, with each thought to involve a number of action plans. Civil servants will continue to work on preparations during the Christmas period. Labour Brexit spokeswoman Jenny Chapman said: It is testament to the Prime Ministers failure in these negotiations that the Government is now spending billions of pounds of taxpayers money to prepare for a no-deal Brexit that is rejected by Parliament and many of those sat around the Cabinet table. Mr Williamson told the House of Commons that no formal request has yet come in from Government departments to make use of the 3,500 troops being held at readiness. Downing Street said that these numbers were in addition to the forces normally kept on stand-by by the Ministry of Defence in case of civil contingencies, such as during the 2012 Olympics. Mrs Mays spokesman said the Government continued to believe that Brexit under the terms of the deal struck by Mrs May with Brussels remains the most likely scenario. But he added: We will now set in motion the remaining elements of our no-deal plans. Cabinet also agreed to recommend to businesses and ensure they are similarly prepared, enacting their own no-deal plans as they judge necessary. Citizens should also prepare in line with the technical notices issued in the summer and in line with further more detailed advice that will now be issued over coming weeks. Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay said no-deal planning was now an `operational priority (Kirsty OConnor/PA) Brexit Secretary Steve Barclay warned that unless MPs back Mrs Mays deal in January, the default option will be for the UK to leave without any exit arrangement in place. Parliament needs to back the deal because the consequence of not doing so is we risk the default of no-deal, and a responsible Government must prepare for that eventuality, said Mr Barclay. Repeating his partys call for a Peoples Vote second referendum on Brexit, Sir Vince said: The decision to ramp up the no-deal pressure is psychological warfare. The Conservative Government are attempting to scare MPs, businesses and the public with the threat of a no-deal. Ministers at the weekly Cabinet session at 10 Downing Street choose full implementation of no-deal plans over two other options on the table to continue with the current policy of enacting plans when it became necessary on a case-by-case basis or to scale back no-deal preparations. Work and Pensions Secretary Amber Rudd said that ramping up the preparations did not mean a no-deal outcome, telling colleagues: Just because you put a seatbelt on doesnt mean that you should crash the car. Arguing that Britain will have a positive post-Brexit future if it gets a deal, she urged other ministers to put politics aside and put country before politics by working to build a consensus across the Commons. Justice Secretary David Gauke was scathing about the prospect of a managed no-deal Brexit floated by some ministers, under which arrangements would be made with Brussels to limit the impact of severing ties without an agreement. The responsibility of Cabinet ministers is not to propagate unicorns but to slay them, he told colleagues. Justice Secretary David Gauke was said to have been scathing over the prospect of a `managed no-deal Brexit (Jonathan Brady/PA) Brexit-backing Commons Leader Andrea Leadsom was critical of proposals from ministers such as Ms Rudd and Greg Clark for an indicative vote of MPs to choose from a range of options on the way forward. Mr Barclay dismissed proposals for a second referendum or a managed no-deal, saying: There are a number of scenarios being floated in Government without, I think, people really engaging on the consequences. In a direct plea to the UKs company bosses, Mr Barclay said that preparing for no-deal needed to be much more of a priority for businesses up and down the country. A US federal judge has agreed to delay former national security adviser Michael Flynns sentencing so he can continue cooperating with the Russia probe. Attorneys for Flynn had asked District Judge Emmet Sullivan to postpone the sentencing. The judge will hold a review conference in March. The request came after Judge Sullivan warned Flynn that if he were sentenced as scheduled on Tuesday, he might not get all the credit for his cooperation with investigators that he is entitled to. Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his Russia contacts. Prosecutors had recommended no prison time, citing his cooperation. But the judges rebuke raised the prospect that Flynn could get a harsher sentence. Michael Flynn (Carolyn Kaster/AP) Judge Sullivan earlier lashed out at Donald Trumps first national security adviser, saying I cant hide my disgust, my disdain at his crime. Arguably you sold your country out, he said. Flynn, who served as national security adviser for only a few weeks, will be the first White House official sentenced in special counsel Robert Muellers investigation into possible co-ordination between Russia and the Trump campaign. The hearing took place amid escalating legal peril for the president, who was implicated by federal prosecutors in New York this month in hush-money payments to cover up extramarital affairs. Nearly half a dozen former aides and advisers including Flynn have pleaded guilty or agreed to co-operate with prosecutors. Mr Trump signalled his interest in the case by tweeting good luck to Flynn hours before the sentencing hearing. He added: Will be interesting to see what he has to say, despite tremendous pressure being put on him, about Russian Collusion in our great and, obviously, highly successful political campaign. There was no Collusion! Judge Sullivan told Flynn he would take into account his extensive co-operation with the government, which includes 19 meetings with investigators as well as a 33-year military career that included service in Iraq and Afghanistan. But he also said he was forced to weigh other factors including Flynns decision as national security adviser to lie to the FBI on the premises of the White House about contacts he had with the Russian ambassador to the US. Princess Eugenie has hailed as a hero a Canadian filmmaker who died in a scuba diving accident while making a documentary about illegal fishing and shark finning. Eugenie was among celebrity guests including models Pixie Geldof and Cressida Bonas when she attended the UK premiere of Sharkwater Extinction in London on Tuesday night. The action-packed documentary was made by acclaimed Toronto director and conservationist Rob Stewart, 37, who died while filming off the coast of Florida in January 2017. I think its going to be amazing, Eugenie said before the screening at Curzon Soho cinema. Its such a wonderful cause and Rob is such a hero and inspiration. So any way we can share his message and the story of these sharks and what the world can do to be a part of it is amazing. Princess Eugenie said filmmaker Rob Stewart was an `inspiration as she attended the premiere of Sharkwater Extinction in London (PA/John Stillwell) The princess, who is an ambassador for global ocean charity Project Zero, met the filmmakers mother Sandy Stewart, who finished the documentary with husband Brian after their sons death. Mrs Stewart said she was really, really proud of her son, who always had a passion for the ocean since he was a boy, convincing his entire family to take up diving by the age of 13. Rob did so much for sharks and the oceans. He changed peoples perceptions of sharks around the world, she said. He was the first person to alert the world about shark finning. So hes changed so much. His films are action-adventure and fun to watch. He really made an impact. Actress and model Cressida Bonas arrives for the premiere of Sharkwater Extinction at the Curzon Soho cinema (PA/John Stillwell) Shark Extinction is Stewarts third film, following his award-winning Sharkwater (2006) and Revolution (2012), and it recounts his crusade across four continents to investigate pirate fishing and the illegal shark finning industry. Shark fins are used to make shark fin soup and some traditional cures, and Stewarts film warns the practice is leading to the extinction of the oceans oldest predator. Mrs Stewart, who travelled from Toronto for the premiere, said she and her husband went through 400 hours of their sons footage to piece the film together. Then we hacked into Robs iPad, which Apple said you couldnt do, but we had a clever IT guy, she added. Inside there were scenes, graphics, the exact cinematography he wanted for each scene, the exact messaging he wanted each scene to convey. So it was kind of a roadmap. But nevertheless he left 400 hours of footage so it was a big job. Rob believed if everyone knew what was going on, our morals would kick in and wed use our power to do the right thing. He was right. We ARE the most powerful thing on this planet. And what we choose to do with that power affects all of our futures. pic.twitter.com/TPamx2R9fN Sharkwater Extinction (@teamsharkwater) December 15, 2018 She said Stewart wanted people to live in harmony with nature. Conservation is really the preservation of human life on earth, Mrs Stewart added of her sons message. You cant save something without saving everything. The oceans matter, and the sharks matter to the oceans. Sharkwater Extinction will be released in UK cinemas in February 2019. More than a quarter of young people in Scotland believe that people in their community do not care about them, according to a new report. The research by The Princes Trust and HSBC UK found that young people north of the border feel disconnected from their communities. The Futures At Stake study measured a young persons stake in society through factors such as the degree to which they feel people in their community care about them, and whether they feel they can make an impact on their community. Researchers found that almost a fifth (16%) of young people in Scotland do not believe their actions have an impact in their community. When asked about positive influences, more than a third of them (39%) said they do not believe they have positive role models in their community. However, the overall stake in society score for young people in Scotland is 63, higher than the UK score of 61. A quarter of young people believe people in their community dont care about them, a study has found (David Jones/PA) Kate Still, director of The Princes Trust Scotland, said: Our research shows that young people are disconnected from their communities in early adulthood, at exactly the point when they should be more connected. We make it our mission at The Princes Trust to continually raise the aspirations of young people and connect them to positive role models to help them achieve in life. We need young people to know that they are valued and that their actions matter. At The Princes Trust we are relentlessly practical and positive about how we can turn young peoples lives around, so they have the chance to succeed. To help achieve this we have just launched UK2030, a taskforce that aims to increase opportunities for young people to support them to live, learn and earn. Our vision is that by 2030, we live in a country that puts the needs of young people first, so that every young person can achieve success for themselves and our country. The research, carried out by YouGov, questioned 3,120 people aged 11-30, including 241 in Scotland, in August and September this year. Ian Stuart, chief executive of HSBC UK, said: Every young person deserves the same chance of being connected to job opportunities regardless of where they live or their background. Positive role models are a key factor in raising aspirations and giving young people the chance to reach their full potential in their careers. Were committed to supporting young people and have been working with The Princes Trust since 2012 to help over 33,000 young people get into work, training or education. As parliamentary polls in Bangladesh draw closer, lets take a look at the dynamics of terrorism and study the response of the state, right-wing lobbies, Jamaat and other pro-Pakistan leaders Deferred by a week, following the hanging of top Jamaat leaders for their involvement in war crimes in 1971, the Bangladeshi parliamentary election, now scheduled to be held on December 30 instead of December 23, will be a turning point in the nations political history. Since early this year, security forces have been on guard to manage the tidal violence in the country, even as the Jamaat-e-Islami continues to be outrightly hostile to Awami League cadres. So, if the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) wins the general election and comes to power, the Jamaat-e-Islami, its subterranean ally, will again get a free hand and extract a gory revenge from the Awami League. The BNP had requested that the elections be delayed by a month but permission to that effect was not granted and the Election Commission delayed it by just a week. The inner dynamics of the elections were captured by a senior Bangladeshi watcher who noted: People are eagerly waiting to cast their votes in the next election. Anti-incumbency and corruption are the major factors that are likely to go against the (ruling Awami League) Government. Instead of focussing on issues that affect the public, the Oppositions agenda is limited to releasing its jailed BNP chairperson and have a caretaker Government. It is not clear whether the BNP will participate if its demands are not met. The Government is likely to benefit from Opposition disunity and lack of vision. The BNPs demand for a caretaker Government, however, is in itself impossible as the nations Constitution has no provision for the same anymore. While the Sheikh Hasina Government has banned the Jamaat-e-Islami from contesting the elections, its members have circumvented the clause by propping up the Opposition ranks, which includes the BNP platform with which they have had a coalition Government in the past. After the 2001 parliamentary poll, the BNP-Jamaat combination unleashed widespread violence, especially against the Hindu minority in Bangladesh which mostly supports the secular Awami League. Even as the Jamaat uses every opportunity to target the Hindus, especially by levelling false blasphemy charges, a certain section of the Hindu feudal class supports the BNP-Jamaat combine as well. Some notable examples among them are BNP Standing Committee member, Gayeshwar Roy, and the partys senior foreign spokespersons in London all of whom belong to the Hindu community. Some of the partys foreign associates, including a hardliner like William Nicholas Gomes, changed their faith to Christianity so that they could spread the Jamaats propaganda more easily in British networks. Gomes now writes for a few major international media outlets. It is worth noting that the Jamaat even now has a hold over the BNP cadre. Interestingly, one can spot more flags of the Bangladesh Islami Chhatra Shibir (Jamaats student wing) at BNP rallies than those of the BNP. The BNP was formed on September 1, 1978, by President Ziaur Rahman after Sheikh Mujibur Rahmans assassination on August 15, 1975. Successive military Governments of Khaleda Zia, Hussain Muhammad Ershad and later the BNP-Jamaat, too, actively sponsored militancy in Indias North-East in cahoots with Pakistan and China. Ershad, who is the chairman of the Jatiya Party, has now softened his anti-India stance considerably. Even when in power, as the head of the military Government, Ershad was not virulently anti-India. Commenting on the elections, Barrister Mohibul Hasan Chowdhury Nowfel, Organising Secretary, Bangladesh Awami League, said: For years, Kamal Hossain used to complain about the BNP-Jamaat combine operating terror outfits out of Hawa Bhavan, the base of Tarique Rahman. Hossain was against Hawa Bhawan politics and took a critical stance against it. However, after a while, he went quiet suddenly. Now, Hossain is simply trying to take advantage of the leadership vacuum in BNP. But by doing that, he has started giving legitimacy to the criminal activities of BNP. Meanwhile, Bangladesh has always witnessed foreign interference by Pakistan in its political process. This has intensified after the trials of senior Jamaat-e-Islami leaders who were involved in committing atrocities through death squads (razakars), allied with the Pakistan Army during the 1971 war. Stating that Pakistans diaspora and intelligence community are actively assisting the BNPs convicted leadership in London, Barrister Mohibul Hasan Chowdhury said, These people, especially Tarique, are convicted and absconding from justice. Pakistan used to provide them with financial assistance earlier. Now, it has expanded aid in the form of huge diplomatic assistance. However, except for certain elements in Pakistans intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), even within Pakistan the BNP-Jamaat does not enjoy support from the civil society or the politicians. They are more or less shunned by civil society and politicians in Pakistan. Now, it is just an alliance of evil. It is worth mentioning that the Pakistan military and ISI generals routinely settle in the West post-retirement, to live off the often-illegally made gains during their tenure in Pakistan. Earnings are channelised either through drug trade commissions or activities that Pakistans military establishment remains engaged in, or the various military businesses it runs, marginalising the general population. There are multiple credible books and papers on Pakistans use of its biraderi networks in the UK to lobby and even influence local politics. One such seminal paper is that of Delwar Hussain titled, Globalisation, God and Galloway: The Islamisation of Bangladeshi Communities in London. In his report, Hussain discusses how Pakistans diaspora successfully got third generation Bangladeshis in its fold after the Western attitude towards Muslims changed post 9/11, which is remarkable because their parents had classically been anti-Pakistan due to the memory of the 1971 war. The paper also touches upon the opportunistic politics of Galloway and his defence of convicted war criminals of 1971. As regards India, if the BNP comes back to power by rigging elections through violence, it would take India back to the 1980s in Bangladeshs calculus. There will be no power centre thats pro-India. The only bright side is that there are sections in the senior military brass that are well disposed towards us. Like in the past, support to militants in Indias North-East and Islamist terror outfits like Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami (HUJI) and Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh, that work in concert with the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba, would be revived with active support and direction from Pakistans ISI. Drug trade and counterfeit notes have for long dominated Indias border belt which are Jamaat strongholds and are again run with active support from the ISI. Even though the BNP claims that it wont work against India, can it be trusted? For they made similar claims in 2001, too, and as soon as it returned to power, its State Minister for Home Affairs Lutfozzaman Babar was involved in the Chittagong arms haul destined for militants in Indias North-East. (Aveek Sen is an independent journalist working on cyber security and the geopolitics of Indias neighbourhood, focussing on Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and Bangladesh. Prateek Joshi is a Research Associate at VIF) As many as 60,478 patients of tuberculosis have been notified in Haryana this year. As of December 14, 2018, 50,707 TB patients have been notified in Punjab and 60,478 patients in Haryana. Out of this, the private sector has notified 13,701 patients in Haryana and 9,550 patients in Punjab, said Dr Rajan Sharma, Indian Medical Association, national president elect 2019-20. He said that as of September 2018, 4723 TB patients were notified in Chandigarh, out of which 286 cases were notified by private sector. The number of TB patients notified in Haryana during 2017 was 40,751 and in Punjab, it was 45,313, Dr Sharma said while talking to the mediapersons here. He said that IMA has taken various efforts to achieve the Government of Indias vision to End TB. The IMAs initiatives are part of a joint collaboration with the government to reach out to every private doctor and through them, every TB patient in Chandigarh, Haryana and Punjab, he added. To expand notification further, Government of India has begun a public private partnership against TB called JEET Project (Joint Effort for Elimination of Tuberculosis). Through the engagement of large scale private providers through an interface agency, quality TB care will be seamlessly extended to patients, Dr Sharma said. =Chunabhati police have nabbed errant driver from Agasot village in Sagar who mowed down two persons including a woman near Excellence College in the wee hours on November 23; accused was nabbed on Wednesday. The accused identified as Visvendra Pratap Singh Chandel was nabbed after he remained absconding for around a month and was nabbed from Sagar where he hails from. The two friends and passengers Prasun Pandey and Samiksha Gaur who were in the car at the time of the accident provided information which help in narrowing down on accused. The police are yet to provide details of the accused as he is on his way to Bhopal with policemen. Notably at around 5 in the morning when a couple who used to run a tea and food stall near Kaliasot Dam were injured after their hand cart carrying goods of tea stall hit by speeding car driven by Visvendra and died during treatment. In the accident 50-year-old man and his wife were mowed down who were identified as Hazarilal Mehra (50) and his wife Vimla Mehra (45). The locals claimed that the car was speeding over 100 km/hr which was the reason it met accident and killed the couple who used to run a food stall at Kaliasot Dam for years. The couple was rushed to hospital where the two were declared dead. In the investigation a mobile phone was recovered inside the car and it is locked. For checking the details of the mobile phone were investigated which helped in the investigation. (ANSA) - Rome, December 19 - About 16.654 million Italians will be traveling during the holiday period between Christmas and New Year's Eve, an 8.9% rise on the previous year. They will stay outside their homes for an average of 3.8 nights. Some 36.4%, however, will take a longer holiday encompassing both the holidays, hoteliers' association Federalberghi said. About 88% of the travelers will remain in Italy at Christmas while the rest will travel abroad. At New Year's, 72% will stay in Italy. Overall revenue resulting is expected to total 11.6 billion euros, a 17.6% rise on the previous year. Prof YK Gupta, President, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Bhopal made his maiden visit to the Institute on Wednesday. On this occasion, Prof Sarman Singh, Director of the Institute warmly welcomed him in the presence of all Faculty Members and Officers of the Institute. Prof Gupta is having a vast experience of 35 years which he spent in AIIMS, Delhi in various capacities like Dean and Head, Department of Pharmacology. Immediately after his arrival in the Institute, he planted the sapling of Medicinal Plant along with Director in the Green Zone situated adjacent to Directors Bungalow. During his visit, the President took round of the Hospital where he was accompanied by Director Prof Sarman Singh. He showed and apprised him about various patient care facilities like Cath Laboratory, Radiology, wards, OPD, IPD area. President also interacted with the patients during his visit to hospital. On this occasion, the President inaugurated Surgical Oncology Ward (20 beds), Neurosurgery Ward (12 beds), Burns and Plastic Surgery Ward (20 beds), Eye Bank and Operation Theater Facility for patient care. With this, the AIIMS Hospital is now equipped with the total strength of 574 beds. President also took round of the campus and inspected the Patient Shelter Room, Hostels, Central Library equipped with state-of-art facilities and also visit Institutes Auditorium. During his inaugural speech, while welcoming President, Director of the Institute, Prof Sarman Singh presented the profile of the Institute through PowerPoint presentation. He highlighted the Institutes recent achievements made in the field of patient care, research, academics and also informed about the fresh recruitment and administrative activities undertaken. He said that it is his prime target to achieve the sanctioned strength of 960 beds by mid of next year. He also focused on the recruitment of faculty members for the vacant position which will be completed by March 2019. Prof Singh also shared the future plans and also put forth the prevailing issues and problems and sought the guidance of President. For which President assured his wholehearted support for the betterment and progress of the Institute. Ensuring the highest standards of medical education and patient care will be his top priorities, he added. Bhanumathi Narasimhan, fondly known as Bhanu Didi, sister of Poojya Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and author of the bestseller autobiography of the Gurudev, is on a three-day visit the to the Sri Sri University, Cuttack, from December 18 to 20. She will be conducting a meditation programme and knowledge sessions. The Sahaj Samadhi Meditation programme will be conducted in the morning from 7 am to 9 am and in the evening from 5.30 pm to 7.30 pm. On December 20, she will grace a public satsang followed by knowledge session at the Sri Sri University. Narasimhan has taught these techniques in the many countries across the globe and is an internationally acclaimed meditation trainer. She is also the Chairperson of Women Welfare and Child Care programmes of the The Art of Living, a not-for-profit, educational and humanitarian NGO engaged in bringing stress relief and service initiatives in 155 countries. Under her stewardship, Gift a smile - Care-for- Children project runs The Art of Living Free Schools in 20 States of India, providing free value-based, holistic education to over 67,000 underprivileged children from rural, tribal, and slum areas with a special focus on Girl Child education. Bhanumathi is also the chairperson of the International Womens Conference (IWC). Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav said that canards were being spread about the possible alliance of his party with Bahujan Samaj Party and other small parties. He said that Bharatiya Janata Party was behind such news appearing at regular intervals in a section of the media. It is the dirty tricks department of the BJP that is spreading and even planting stories in a section of the media about the alliance of SP with the BSP and others. Nothing has been finalised as yet and everything will happen in due course, Akhilesh said while addressing a meeting of party MLAs and MLCs in Lucknow on Wednesday. The SP chief also clarified his position over the candidature of Congress president Rahul Gandhi as the oppositions prime ministerial candidate in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. Why should I comment about the candidate for the Prime Ministers office after 2019 Lok Sabha elections? This issue will be decided only after the elections, he said. On Tuesday, Akhilesh had expressed his disagreement with DMK chief MK Stalins suggestion to make Rahul Gandhi the prime ministerial candidate of the anti-BJP front. Akhilesh had said, People are unhappy with the BJP. Telangana CM K Chandrasekhar Rao, Mamataji and Sharad Pawarji have attempted to bring together all leaders for the alliance. If someone is voicing his opinion, it does not mean that all alliance partners will have the same opinion. Akhilesh also said in the meeting that be it Parliament or Assembly, the BJP was scared of debate on burning issues concerning common people, particularly farmers. He charged that the law and order situation in UP was in a shambles and aggressive statements by Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath were vitiating the atmosphere in the state. A senior SP leader said that a section of Hindi media was saying that the SP and BSP had sealed a deal to contest the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. It is also being said that we have agreed to give three seats to Ajit Singhs Rashtriya Lok Dal. The SP chief sees these as a deliberate attempt to sabotage a possible coming together of opposition parties to fight the BJP. We have credible reasons to believe that such reports are appearing at the behest of the BJP, said the senior SP leader. The Forest Research Institute (FRI) has completed twenty seven years of being a deemed university. It was recognised as a deemed university on December 6, 1991 by the UGC. Recognised by the Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education (ICFRE), this institute is associated with the evolution and development of scientific forestry not only in the country but in the entire Indian sub-continent. Known the world over for its impressive Greco-Roman and colonial style of architecture, the FRI offers masters and post-graduate diploma programmes in subjects of forestry, environment management, wood science & technology and cellulose & paper technology. However, the crowning glory of FRI is undoubtedly the diversified research divisions (comprising equipped laboratories, library, herbarium, arboreta, printing press and experimental field areas) and training facility for the Indian Forest Service (IFS). The Forest Research Institute campus hosts the Indira Gandhi National Forest Academy (IGNFA), the staff college that trains officers selected for the Indian Forest Service (IFS). The FRI was first called the Imperial Forest Research Institute (IFRI) and shifted two buildings between 1906 and 1928, settling finally at the New Forest Campus in 1929 where it is still located. Laboratory research in forestry started in 1878 in the small chemical laboratory attached to the Forest School in Dehra Dun. A beginning to organise forestry research was at last made in 1906 with the establishment of the FRI in Dehra Dun. Built over a lush green estate spread over 450 hectares, with the outer Himalaya forming its backdrop, the institutes main building is an impressive edifice, marrying Greco-Roman and Colonial styles of architecture, with a plinth area of 2.5 hectares. The institute has a developed infrastructure of all equipped laboratories, library, herbarium, arboreta, printing press and experimental field areas for conducting forestry research, quite in keeping with the best of its kind anywhere in the world. It is interesting to know that the FRI and the Doon School, both synonymous with the Doon valley, share a close connection. The Doon School was set up as the realisation of a dream of Satish Ranjan Das, one of pre-independent Indias most eminent barristers and a member of the Executive Council of the Viceroy of India. With support from a wide range of eminent Indians of that time, the Indian Public Schools Society was registered as a non-profit making body under the Indian Companies Act in 1929. Unfortunately, SR Das passed away in 1928. Thereafter, his wife and friends collected funds to start the school in September 1935. The society was fortunate to be able to take over the Chand Bagh Estate in Dehradun from the Indian Forest College and to acquire the neighbouring Skinners Estate from the family of the well known Col Skinner of Skinners Horse. In 1926, the forest institute shifted from Chand Bagh to its present location. The building was completed and formally inaugurated in 1929. Over the years, the FRI has remoulded its priorities to the contemporary need of the times. This remoulding culminated into the formation of the Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education (ICFRE) in 1986. The FRI actually began as a small forest school in Dehra Dun in 1878 to impart training to the forest rangers. This school, which was taken over by the Central Government in 1884 and named the Imperial Forest School, formed the nucleus of the present FRI. By the beginning of the 20th century, the school became an institution with a fine museum, herbarium collections, labs and an instructive arboretum. In 1906, research departments were added to the school and it was designated as the Imperial Forest Research Institute and College. The vast and imposing corridors of the beautiful building echo with the valuable observations made by the pioneer forest officers during their tours in the far-flung forests of India. Their informal and frequent forays into the domain of scientific forestry provided the foundation on which the edifice of forestry research has been built. There are seven museums situated in the main building namely timber museum, minor forest product museum, entomology museum, silviculture museum, social forestry museum and pathology museum. Looking at the FRI building and the immense work that has gone on at the institute for the last one century, it is no surprise that the Doon valley is known the world over as the Cradle of Indian Forestry. Twenty seven years of being a deemed university has enhanced the glory and historical importance of this institute that draws scientists, foresters and tourist from all over the world. The District Congress Committee, Ganjam has decided to hold protest meetings at Panchayat level against alleged the failures of the BJD Government and communalism of the BJP across the district. A meeting presided over by DCC president Dr Trinath Behera and attended by 69 zone presidents took a decision in this regard on Wednesday. The BJD Government has failed to establish industries and provide water to agriculture fields. As a result, a large number of youths have gone to Surat to earn living. The Odisha Utsav attended by Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik has disrespected migrant workers only, said leaders. A discussion was also held regarding PCC president Niranjan Patnaiks scheduled Ganjam visit in January. Among others, Pitabasa Panda, Bhokali Sethi, Manoj Jena, Swarupa Tripathy, Anil Parida, Nrusingha Mihsra, Dharma Raju Reddy and Parshuram Sahu were present. VLCC widens its reach in Ukhand, opens its first salon in Rudrapur Rudrpur: VLCC, a leading Indian beauty and wellness chain, announced the launch of their first salon in Rudrapur. The new salon was inaugurated by Sushant Mukherjee, vice-president, Franchise Business, VLCC Healthcare Ltd. Spread across an area of 900 sq. ft., the salon is dedicated to becoming a one-stop destination for all the beauty needs of residents of Rudrapur, the company claimed and added that it would offer a mix of services, including beauty, makeup and hair care treatments, to the local residents. Talking about the launch, Mukherjee said that it was a part of their endeavour to make wellness-driven beauty services accessible to customers everywhere. Indian Oil plans to boost LPG availability under PMUY Dehradun: After approval from the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs for extending the list of beneficiaries under the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY), Indian Oil has drafted a plan for providing LPG connections to all eligible beneficiaries. Addressing its officials across the country, Indian Oil director (Marketing) Gurmeet Singh said that the attempt should be on making every kitchen in the nation smoke-free with the easy availability of LPG. Due to the corporations efforts, the LPG reach across the country has increased from 61.9 per cent in April 2016 to 89.5 per cent in December 2018, he said. Christmas Celebrations at St. Nursery School Dehradun: St. Nursery School celebrated the Christmas festival at its campus on Rajpur Road in Dehradun on Wednesday. Nativity play was staged by the students of classes I and II on the occasion. Among those present were the principal, Vinod Chhabra, chairman of the school V P Chhabra, director. Ashish Chhabra and vice-principal Ruchi. Christmas is a time to give and forgive, said the principal. Varma appointed director (Power), BHEL Dehradun:On his appointment as the director on the Board of Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (BHEL), Manoj Kumar Varma assumed charge as director (Power) of the Public Sector engineering and manufacturing enterprise. Prior to this, he was heading the companys Power Sector- Southern Region (PSSR)-Chennai as the executive director. Varma is a Mechanical Engineering graduate from SGSITS, Indore and an MBA in Marketing from Bhopal University. He joined the company as an engineer trainee at BHELs Transformer Plant, Jhansi and subsequently moved to its Heavy Electrical Plant, Bhopal where he worked in various capacities. The Kitab holds exhibitions in Rajasthan Dehradun:After successful editions of photography exhibitions on the Transgender Communities in India and 'Women in Himalayas' held in Uttarakhand, non-profit initiative The Kitab held a photography exhibition in Rajasthan. Founder of The Kitab, Manik Katyal said, In order to educate and inspire the local communities, we held our exhibition at venues in Jaipur, Pushkar and Bhateri village from December 15 to 19, showcasing a curated exhibition of 40 photobooks from more than 30 countries. At Bhateri village near Jaipur, we organised a special exhibition dedicated to the courage of Bhanwari Devi, who was allegedly gang raped by neighbours and is the catalyst for the implementation of Vishaka sexual harassment guidelines stipulated by the Supreme Court of India in 1997. He added, Our primary mission is to inspire the local community and elevate the voices of weaker sections of society through powerful and impactful photography in the book format. While the beautiful stone items and sculptures of the Lalitgiri-Sukhuapada area is attracting attention of the globe, the State Government has urged the Union Ministry of Textiles for setting up of a Craft Village in the cluster. In fact, Lalitgiri-Sukhuapada area is famous for stone carving cluster, which falls in the Buddhist circuit. Being one of the top destinations for international tourists, stone products have caught the eyes of the travellers. Looking at the bright prospects of business on stone sculptures, a detailed proposal report has been submitted by Odisha State Cooperative Handicrafts Corporation Limited (Utkalika) to the Development Commissioner (DC), Handicrafts, in Ministry of Textiles, Government of India. Secretary Handloom, Textiles and Handicrafts Subha Sarma is in touch with DC Handicrafts in this regard, said sources. While Lalitgiri is in Cuttack district, Sukhuapada is in Jajpur district and both are adjacent to each other and are emerging as a major tourist destination. The villagers of the area create idols, grinders, pots, flower vases out of stones, which are artistically unique. However, due to lack of institutional support, the artisans are facing a lot of difficulties. The Archeological Survey of India has set up the Lalitgiri Museum, which is attracting a large number of Buddhist tourists from all over the world. The Union Government has earlier approved a Craft Village Project in the world famous Raghurajpur of Puri district with a cost of Rs10 crore. Raghurajpur is a heritage village having 200 plus houses and each house has unique item painted on the walls like art gallery. All the villagers are involved in Pattachitra, paintings, masks, toys and stone carvings. The Idco has been implementing the Craft Village Project with the released amount of Rs 6 crore. Rest amount of Rs 4 crore is needed to be released and accordingly, the State Government has approached the DC Handicrafts in this regard. With delay in releasing funds, the project completion is getting delayed, said a senior official in district administration of Puri. Another proposal of issuing identity cards to handicraft artisans of the State is pending with DC Handicrafts. While the State Government has shared the database on handicraft artisans to the Ministry of Textiles, the DC Handicrafts is needed to complete the formalities so that all the artisans will be able to receive their ID cards. The ID cards are necessary as these artisans are moving to various States to join in the national exhibitions and in absence of ID cards they are facing difficulties, said sources. Looking at the large scale potential of handicraft and related development taking place in the State, the Odisha Government has approached Ministry of Textiles to open a Regional Office of DC Handicrafts in Bhubaneswar and another office at Koraput. Odisha yoga teacher Bhagirathi, who was teaching yoga in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, has alleged that he has been threatened and debarred from work at the behest of Indias Consular General Smita Pant. Bhagirathi's ordeal started after Prime Minister Narendra Modi named his two-and-a-half-year-old daughter Subhashree in "Man Ki Baat" on June 28, 2015 saying her yoga mudra got viral in international level. After this, Indian Consular General Smita Pant called him to provide yoga training to her. I provided yoga training to Pant. But when I asked for my remuneration after four months, she started misbehaving with me and threatened to book a case accusing me of being involved in anti-national activities, said a disgusted Bhagirathi at a Press meet here. He further alleged that Pant has started efforts in forming a Vietnam- based National Yoga Forum taking me as its president. I also contributed to strengthen the organisation. Though I have worked as a yoga trainer in Vietnam Lous, Philippines and Singapore since 2007, I had never faced such mental torture, said Bhagirathi, a native of Sirisira near Bolagada in Khordha district. Informing that he has married to a Vietnamese girl and have two children, he lamented saying he is now going through survival crisis as he is not unable to stay either in Odisha or in Vietnam because of the dismal situation. Hanging precariously between life and death, the victim of barbaric burning incident of Pauri has been shifted to Safdarjung Hospital in New Delhi. On insistence of the Chief Minister Trivendra Singh Rawat, the burn victim was flown to Delhi in an air ambulance from Jolly Grant airport at 1.45 pm. Her parents too were flown to Delhi in a private airliner. The public relations officer Prakash Thapliyal told The Pioneer that two doctors, one anaesthetist and one burn surgeon had accompanied the girl in the air ambulance. He further said that the condition of the girl continued to be critical and she was yet to regain consciousness. The shocking incident had occurred in Pauri on Sunday in which an 18-year-old girl, a resident of Peepli village located in Kapolsyun Patti of Pauri, was set ablaze by a stalker when she was returning home from college. The accused, a taxi driver, had allegedly dragged her to the roadside where he tried to sexually assault her. On resistance, he had allegedly poured petrol over her and set her on fire. Rajya Sabha member and Congress Working Committee (CWC) member Kumari Selja claimed that the Supreme Court (SC) had been mislead by the Narendra Modi- helmed NDA Government regarding the controversial Rafale aircraft deal case. It is clear now that wrong facts have been provided to the apex court, she added. However, she steered clear of whether her party would move the apex court, seeking a review of its ruling which gave a clean chit to the Centre. While taking a swipe at the Centre, she said that things are clearly pointing to colossal corruption. She buttressed her point by citing the para 25 of apex court judgement. It mentioned that the report of Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) on Rafale deal should be scrutinised by the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of the Parliament and it should be made public. However, the fact is that there is no CAG report on Rafale. PAC chairman Mallikarjun Khadge has clarified that no such report was placed before PAC by CAG, she said. Giving another example of the apex court being provided with wrong inputs, the Congress leader said that the para 32 and 30 of the judgement mentioned that the deal for offset contract between Reliance and Dassault Aviation was struck in 2012. This is again wrong as Reliance Defence Limited came into existence in March 28, 2015 barely 13 days before Prime Ministers Paris visit during which he declared that India was purchasing Rafale fighters, she said. She further said that as per the SC order, no special consideration for Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) had been made in the deal which again is incorrect. On March 13, 2014, a work share agreement between HAL and Dassault was inked for implementation offset contract, she said. She cited another point to strengthen her argument. Contrary to the SC observation that Defence Acquisition Council ( DAC) gave its nod for the deal, the DAC permission was given a month after Modi Government made declaration for purchase of aircraft, she said. Now, it is crystal clear from the facts being given here that the apex court was misled by the Centre, she affirmed. Continuing with her attack on the Centre vis-a-vis the SC ruling, Kumari Selja claimed that a loss to the tune of Rs 41205 crore to Government exchequer has incurred in the deal as on the basis of International Bid. Notably, then UPA Government in 2012 took a decision to buy Rafale fighter for Rs 526.10 crore a piece. The Modi Government purchased the same aircraft for Rs 1670.70 crore a piece which means that the country has incurred a loss of over Rs 41000 crore, she said. Questioning the intent behind the decision to give precedence to the Reliance Defence Limited-a 13-day-old company-over the 40-year-old public sector undertaking, HAL, Selja said that the Modi Government should explain why Rs 30,000 crore offset contract had been given to Reliance. Continuing her diatribe on the Modi Government, she said that Defence Procurement Procedure (DPP) had been blatantly overlooked by the Government. She said that the Government had also sidelined necessary clearance from Defence Acquisition Council ( DAC) and Cabinet Committee on Security. Barely two days before PMs France visit, Indian foreign secretary said on April 8, 2015 that the proposal to purchase Rafale aircraft had been rejected. Would the PM explain to the nation as to what had happened in the 48 hours that he took a hurried decision to purchase 36 Rafale aircrafts? She alleged that apart from reducing the number of aircrafts from 126 to 36 and putting the security of the country in peril, the Government had even sacrificed the mandatory transfer of technology clause and done away with sovereign guarantee in the deal. On the money trail of the deal, the Congress leader questioned intention behind the decision of Dassault Aviation to purchase 2484000 shares of Reliance Airport Developers limited on a mindboggling premium of 11000 percent in Rs 284 crores. A share of the defunct company (with a turnover of mere Rs 8 lakh) was priced at only Rs 10 and it was purchased at Rs 1154 by Dassault. Was it first instalment of the corruption money? she questioned. Congress for JPC probe The CWC member Selja said that the Congress wants a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) be constituted to probe the Rafale deal. Congress remains consistent in its stand from the beginning that Supreme Court (SC) is not a proper forum on the issue and the court too supported this stance. The Congress president Rahul Gandhi has been consistently asking questions from Narendra Modi both within the Parliament and outside. But PM has been keeping a stony silence, she said. (ANSA) - Brussels, December 19 - The European Commission has decided not to open an infringement procedure against Italy for excessive debt, EU sources said on Wednesday. European Commissioners on Wednesday examined a "technical" agreement reached between Rome and Brussels late on Tuesday on Italy's budget for 2019. The Commission rejected the government's initial draft budget plan, which saw Italy running a deficit of 2.4% of GDP next year to finance key pledges and boost sluggish growth, saying it breached EU rules. Premier Giuseppe Conte's League-5-Star Movement (M5S) government proposed bring the deficit down to 2.04% to stop the EU opening an infringement procedure. The government had said it is not willing to drop its two key pledges, the 'citizenship wage' basic income for job seekers and the 'quota 100' pension reform that will bring down the retirement age for many people. Conte is set to report to the Senate at 13:00 after the breakthrough. To galvanise its workers at the ground level, the Uttar Pradesh unit of Bharatiya Janata Party will organise region-wise booth sammelans which will be addressed by partys national president Amit Shah. A decision in this regard was taken at a meeting of the BJP state office-bearers held in Lucknow on Wednesday. BJP state president Mahendra Nath Pandey said that the party would organise region-wise booth presidents sammelan. On December 25, the birth anniversary of former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpyee will be celebrated at the booth level as Sushasan Diwas (good governance day), Pandey said. Senior leaders of the party, including in-charges of different morchas, regional chiefs and general secretaries would participate in the programme. The BJP state chief said that besides, sector sammelan would be held at each division from December 20 to January 19, in which BJP national officer-bearers, Union ministers and Chief Ministers will take part. In February, the party will identify beneficiaries of both Central and state government schemes and light jyoti (lamp) at their doorsteps and on February 26, Kamal Jyoti Vikas Yatra will be taken out, Pandey said. Briefing about the success of recently-held padyatra on the occasion of the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, the BJP leader said that the party took out yatras in 62,695 wards and organised chaupals in 6,120 villages. Besides, 1.20 crore pamphlets were distributed, highlighting achievements of both UP and Central governments, he said. When asked about the proposed alliance between Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party, Pandey said that the BJP was ready to face any challenge as the proposed alliance was opportunistic and was set to be exposed. A court in Igatpuri in Nashik district of Maharashtra Tuesday granted bail to MNS chief Raj Thackeray in connection with a 2008 case of attack on a hotel by his party workers. Thackeray appeared in Igatpuri court on Tuesday, where Judge K I Khan granted him bail. As part of Maharashtra Navnirman Sena's strident protest against north Indians in 2008, the party workers had attacked a hotel, owned by a north Indian, in Igatpuri. Police had booked six persons, including Thackeray, in this connection. Although the other accused had been acquitted by the court earlier, it had issued summons against Thackeray as he had not appeared before it. Fifty years ago on Christmas Eve, a tumultuous year of assassinations, riots and war drew to a close in heroic and hopeful fashion with the three Apollo 8 astronauts reading from the Book of Genesis on live TV as they orbited the moon. To this day, that 1968 mission is considered to be NASA's boldest and perhaps most dangerous undertaking. That first voyage by humans to another world set the stage for the still grander Apollo 11 moon landing seven months later. There was unprecedented and unfathomable risk to putting three men atop a monstrous new rocket for the first time and sending them all the way to the moon. The mission was whipped together in just four months in order to reach the moon by year's end, before the Soviet Union. There was the Old Testament reading by commander Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders. Lastly, there was the photo named "Earthrise," showing our blue and white ball humanity's home rising above the bleak, gray lunar landscape and 240,000 miles (386 million kilometers) in the distance. Humans had never set eyes on the far side of the moon, or on our planet as a cosmic oasis, surrounded completely by the black void of space. A half-century later, only 24 US astronauts who flew to the moon have witnessed these wondrous sights in person. The Apollo 8 crew is still around: Borman and Lovell are 90, Anders is 85. To Lovell, the journey had the thrill and romance of true exploration, and provided an uplifting cap for Americans to a painful, contentious year marked by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. And Robert Kennedy, nationwide riots and protests of the Vietnam War. The mission's impact was perhaps best summed up in a four-word telegram received by Borman. "Thanks, you saved 1968." NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine who at age 43 missed Apollo marvels over the gutsy decision in August that year to launch astronauts to the moon in four months' time. He's pushing for a return to the moon, but with real sustainability this next go-around. The space agency flipped missions and decided that instead of orbiting Earth, Borman and his crew would fly to the moon to beat the Soviets and pave the way for the lunar landings to come. And that was despite on its previous test flight, the Saturn V rocket lost parts and engines failed. "Even more worrisome than all of this," Bridenstine noted earlier this month, Apollo 8 would be in orbit around the moon on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. "In other words, if there was a failure here, it would wreck Christmas not only for everybody in the United States, but for everybody in the world." As that first moon shot neared, Borman's wife, Susan, demanded to know the crew's chances. A NASA director answered: 50-50. Borman wanted to get to the moon and get back fast. In his mind, a single lap around the moon would suffice. His bosses insisted on more. "My main concern in this whole flight was to get there ahead of the Russians and get home. That was a significant achievement in my eyes," Borman explained at the Chicago launch of the book "Rocket Men" last spring. Everyone eventually agreed: Ten orbits it would be. Liftoff of the Saturn V occurred on the morning of Saturday, December 21, 1968. On Christmas Eve, the spaceship successfully slipped into orbit around the moon. Before bedtime, the first envoys to another world took turns reading the first 10 verses from Genesis. It had been left to Borman, before the flight, to find "something appropriate" to say for what was expected to be the biggest broadcast audience to date. "We all tried for quite a while to figure out something, and it all came up trite or foolish," Borman recalled. Finally, the wife of a friend of a friend came up with the idea of Genesis. "In the beginning," Anders read, "God created the heaven and the Earth ..." Borman ended the broadcast with, "And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you all of you on the good Earth." On Christmas morning, their spacecraft went around the moon for the final time. The engine firing needed to shoot them back to Earth occurred while the capsule was out of communication with Mission Control in Houston. Lovell broke the nervous silence as the ship reappeared: "Please be informed there is a Santa Claus." Back in Houston, meanwhile, a limousine driver knocked on Marilyn Lovell's door and handed her a gift-wrapped mink stole with a card that read: "To Marilyn, Merry Christmas from the man in the moon." Lovell bought the coat for his wife and arranged its fancy delivery before liftoff. Splashdown occurred in the pre-dawn darkness on December 27, bringing the incredible six-day journey to a close. Time magazine named the three astronauts "Men of the Year." It wasn't until after the astronauts were back that the significance of their Earth pictures sank in. American Consumer News, LLC dba MarketBeat 2010-2021. All rights reserved. 326 E 8th St #105, Sioux Falls, SD 57103 | U.S. Based Support Team at [email protected] | (844) 978-6257 MarketBeat does not provide personalized financial advice and does not issue recommendations or offers to buy stock or sell any security. Our Accessibility Statement | Terms of Service | Do Not Sell My Information 2021 Market data provided is at least 10-minutes delayed and hosted by Barchart Solutions. Information is provided 'as-is' and solely for informational purposes, not for trading purposes or advice, and is delayed. To see all exchange delays and terms of use please see disclaimer. Fundamental company data provided by Zacks Investment Research. The following companies are subsidiares of ABB: A88 for Electrical Industries (ABB ARAB) S.A.E., AABB Business Services Sp. z o.o., ABB (China) Investment Limited, ABB (China) Ltd., ABB 0y, ABB A/S, ABB AB, ABB AG, ABB AS, ABB Asea Brown Boveri Ltd, ABB Australia Pty Limited, ABB Automacao Ltda., ABB Automation GmbH, ABB Automation Products GmbH, ABB B.V., ABB Beijing Drive Systems Co. Ltd., ABB Beijing Switchgear Limited, ABB Beteiligungs- und Verwaltungsges. MbH, ABB Bulgaria EOOD, ABB Canada EL Holding GmbH, ABB Capital AG, ABB Electrical Control Systems S. de R.L. de C.V., ABB Electrical Industries Co. Ltd., ABB Electrical Machines Ltd., ABB Electrification Canada ULC, ABB Electrification Norway AS, ABB Elektrik Sanayi A.S., ABB Eletrificacao Ltda., ABB Engineering (Shanghai) Ltd., ABB Engineering Trading and Service Ltd., ABB Finance (USA) Inc., ABB Finance B.V., ABB France, ABB Global Industries and Services Private Limited, ABB Group Investment Management Pty. Ltd., ABB Holding AS, ABB Holdings (Pty) Ltd., ABB Holdings B.V., ABB Holdings Inc., ABB Holdings Limited, ABB Inc., ABB Inc., ABB India Limited, ABB Industrial Solutions (Bielsko-Biala) Sp. z o.o., ABB Industrial Solutions (Klodzko) Sp.z o.o., ABB Industries (L.L.C.), ABB Information Systems Ltd., ABB Installation Products Inc, ABB Installation Products International LLC., ABB Investment Holding 2 GmbH, ABB K.K., ABB Limited, ABB Ltd., ABB Management Services Ltd., ABB Mexico SA. de C.V., ABB Motors and Mechanical Inc, ABB N.V., ABB Norden Holding AB, ABB Pte. Ltd., ABB S.A., ABB S.p.A., ABB SAS, ABB Schweiz AG, ABB Shanghai Free Trade Zone Industrial Co. Ltd., ABB Shanghai Motors Co. Ltd., ABB South Africa (Pty) Ltd., ABB Sp. z o.o., ABB Stotz-Kontakt GmbH, ABB Treasury Center (USA) Inc., ABB Xiamen Low Voltage Equipment Co. Ltd., ABB Xiamen Switchgear Co. Ltd., ABB Xinhui Low Voltage Switchgear Co. Ltd., ABB s.r.o., APS Technology Group, ASTI Mobile Robotics, Asea Brown Boveri S.A., Asea Brown Boveri S.A.E., Asea Brown Boveri SA. de C.V., B + R Industrie-Elektronik GmbH, B&R Holding GmbH, B&R Industrial Automation, B&R Industrial Automation GmbH, Baldor Electric Company, Busch-Jaeger Elektro GmbH, Chargedot, Codian Robotics, Cylon Controls, DynaMotive Ltd., ELBI Elektrik, Edison Holding Corporation, Envitech Energy, Epyon, GE Industrial Solutions, Gomtec, Gresin Grupo Estudios Industriales, Industrial C&S Hungary Kft., Industrial C&S of RR. LLC, Industrial Connections & Solutions LLC, KEYMILE - Business, Kuhlman Electric Corp., Lorentzen & Wettre, Los Gatos Research, Mincom, NUB3D S.L., Newave Energy Holding, Newron System, Power-One, Powercorp, RGM - Rail vehicle power business, SVIA, Spirit IT, Thomas & Betts, Trasfor, Tropos Networks, Validus DC Systems, Vectek Electronics, and Ventyx. Bridgepoint Education, Inc., together with its subsidiaries, provides postsecondary education services in the United States. Its academic institutions, Ashford University and University of the Rockies, offer associate's, bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degree programs in the disciplines of business, education, psychology, social sciences, and health sciences. The company offers its programs primarily through online; and at its campuses. As of December 31, 2017, its institutions offered approximately 1,200 courses and 80 degree programs; and had 45,730 students enrolled. The company was formerly known as TeleUniversity, Inc. and changed its name to Bridgepoint Education, Inc. in February 2004. Bridgepoint Education, Inc. was founded in 1999 and is headquartered in San Diego, California. Read More 34 minutes ago China clears Boeing 737 Max to fly again BEIJING (AP) Chinas aviation regulator cleared the Boeing 737 Max on Thursday to return to flying with technical upgrades more than two years after the plane was grounded worldwide following two fatal crashes. China is the last major market where the Boeing 737 Max was awaiting approval after the United States allowed flights to resume in December 2020 and European Union regulators gave permission in January. Read Article (ANSA) - Rome, December 19 - The EU is not a limit constraining Italy, President Sergio Mattarella said Wednesday. He said Italy was a founding EU member and should be a protagonist of the Union. "It is not enough not to call into question the European choice," he said. Mattarella said the budget talks between the EU and Italy had led to a shared solution thanks to dialogue, which he welcomed. Her called for "lasting" and not "emotional" solutions to EU issues. Mattarella also stressed the importance of seeking social cohesion and of a free press, said democracy did not fear difference but needed it, and stressed that all actors should respect the limits laid down by the Constitution. He said the primacy of parliament should be respected. The head of State also said that the economy was slowing and jobs remained a priority. In other remarks, the president said building a new road bridge in Genoa, where a disaster killed 43 in August, was key to Italy's international credibility. GlaxoSmithKline Plc is a healthcare company, which engages in the research, development, and manufacture of pharmaceutical medicines, vaccines, and consumer healthcare products. It operates through the following segments: Pharmaceuticals; Pharmaceuticals R&D; Vaccines and Consumer Healthcare. The Pharmaceuticals segment focuses on developing medicines in respiratory and infectious diseases, oncology, and immuno-inflammation. The Pharmaceuticals R&D segment focuses on science related to the immune system, the use of human genetics and advanced technologies, and is driven by the multiplier effect of Science x Technology x Culture. The Vaccines segment produces pediatric and adult vaccines to prevent a range of infectious diseases including, hepatitis A and B, diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough, measles, mumps and rubella, polio, typhoid, influenza, and bacterial meningitis. The Consumer Healthcare segment develops and markets brands in the oral health, pain relief, respiratory, nutrition and gastro intestinal, and skin health categories. The company was founded in 1715 and is headquartered in Middlesex, the United Kingdom. Read More Pfeiffer Vacuum Technology AG develops, manufactures, and markets components and systems for vacuum generation, measurement, and analysis. The company also provides helium leak detectors. Its solutions include magnetic and hybrid bearing turbo pumps, and turbo pumping stations; rotary vane pumps, diaphragms, roots, side channels, screws, piston and scroll pumps; vacuum chambers; leak detectors, gas analyzers, gauges, and mass spectrometers; gaskets, filters, valves, flanges, electrical feedthroughs, manipulators, bellows components, and other accessories; and multi-stage vacuum systems, special pumping stations, and calibration and decontamination systems; and flexible services and consultation. It serves analytics, industrial, research and development, coating, and semiconductor markets in Europe, the United States, and Asia. The company markets and distributes its products through its own network of sales companies and independent marketing agents. Pfeiffer Vacuum Technology AG was founded in 1890 and is headquartered in Asslar, Germany. Read More iShares Core MSCI Europe ETF's stock was trading at $39.49 on March 11th, 2020 when Coronavirus (COVID-19) reached pandemic status according to the World Health Organization. Since then, IEUR stock has increased by 41.4% and is now trading at $55.82. View which stocks have been most impacted by COVID-19. iShares MSCI Canada ETF's stock was trading at $23.42 on March 11th, 2020 when COVID-19 reached pandemic status according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Since then, EWC shares have increased by 57.4% and is now trading at $36.86. View which stocks have been most impacted by COVID-19. iShares MSCI Global Agriculture Producers ETF's stock was trading at $23.04 on March 11th, 2020 when Coronavirus (COVID-19) reached pandemic status according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Since then, VEGI stock has increased by 68.5% and is now trading at $38.8147. View which stocks have been most impacted by COVID-19. (ANSA) - Rome, December 19 - European Commissioners on Wednesday are set to examine a "technical" agreement reached between Rome and Brussels late on Tuesday on Italy's budget for 2019. Premier Giuseppe Conte is set to report to the Senate at midday on Wednesday after the breakthrough. The Commission rejected the government's initial draft budget plan, which saw Italy running a deficit of 2.4% of GDP next year to finance key pledges and boost sluggish growth, saying it breached EU rules. Conte's League-5-Star Movement (M5S) government proposed bring the deficit down to 2.04% to stop the EU opening an infringement procedure. The government has said it is not willing to drop its two key pledges, the 'citizenship wage' basic income for job seekers and the 'quota 100' pension reform that will bring down the retirement age for many people. iShares MSCI United Kingdom ETF's stock was trading at $25.60 on March 11th, 2020 when Coronavirus reached pandemic status according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Since then, EWU shares have increased by 24.3% and is now trading at $31.81. View which stocks have been most impacted by COVID-19. There is not enough analysis data for Anglo African Oil & Gas. 3.9 Community Rank Outperform Votes Anglo African Oil & Gas has received 44 outperform votes. (Add your outperform vote.) Underperform Votes Anglo African Oil & Gas has received 32 underperform votes. (Add your underperform vote.) Community Sentiment Anglo African Oil & Gas has received 57.89% outperform votes from our community. MarketBeat's community ratings are surveys of what our community members think about Anglo African Oil & Gas and other stocks. Vote Outperform if you believe AAOG will outperform the S&P 500 over the long term. Vote Underperform if you believe AAOG will underperform the S&P 500 over the long term. You may vote once every thirty days. Previous Next PetroChina Company Limited, together with its subsidiaries, engages in a range of petroleum related products, services, and activities in Mainland China and internationally. It operates through Exploration and Production, Refining and Chemicals, Marketing, and Natural Gas and Pipeline segments. The Exploration and Production segment engages in the exploration, development, production, and marketing of crude oil and natural gas. The Refining and Chemicals segment refines crude oil and petroleum products; and produces and markets primary petrochemical products, derivative petrochemical products, and other chemical products. The Marketing segment is involved in marketing of refined products and trading business. The Natural Gas and Pipeline segment engages in the transmission of natural gas, crude oil, and refined products; and sale of natural gas. As of December 31, 2020, the company had a total length of 31,151 km, including 22,555 km of natural gas pipelines, 7,190 km of crude oil pipelines, and 1,406 km of refined product pipelines. The company is also involved in the exploration, development, and production of oil sands and coalbed methane; trading of crude oil and petrochemical products; storage, chemical engineering, storage facilities, service station, and transportation facilities and related businesses; and production and sales of basic and derivative chemical, and other chemical products. The company was founded in 1999 and is headquartered in Beijing, the People's Republic of China. PetroChina Company Limited is a subsidiary of China National Petroleum Corporation. Read More (ANSA) - Rome, December 19 - The Italian governing coalition under the League and the Five Star Movement (M5S) and the step backwards on mandatory vaccinations by the M5S health minister have resulted in Italy being named among Nature's scientific events to remember from the past year. The journal noted that the year was dominated by concerns over a lack of attention to climate change and growing strains of populism. In addition to Italy, Nature noted the election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, the chaos over Brexit and the Hungarian government's announcement that it would be taking over control of the budget of the Hungarian Academy of Science. In its end-of-the-year stock-taking, Nature said that the harmful effects of climate change are of especial concern, as shown by massive fires in Sweden, British Columbia, and California, at a time when governments are doing little or nothing to solve the problem. Both Australia and the US have recently changed direction in terms of trying to cut emissions. Total Energy Services Inc. provides various products and services to the oil and natural gas industry primarily in Canada, the United States, and Australia. It operates through four segments: Contract Drilling Services, Rentals and Transportation Services, Compression and Process Services and Well Servicing. The Contract Drilling Services segment offers contract drilling services to oil and gas exploration and development companies. As of December 31, 2020, it operated a total fleet of 98 drilling rigs. The Rentals and Transportation Services segment provides drilling, completion and production rental equipment, and oilfield transportation services in western Canada and in the United States. This segment owned and operated a fleet of 87 heavy trucks. The Compression and Process Services segment offers gas compression services; and designs and packages skid style compressors and proprietary trailer-mounted compressors under the NOMAD brand in Canada and the United States, the European Union, Australia, and Mexico. It had 54,800 horsepower of compression in its rental fleet. The Well Servicing segment offers well services. This segment operated a total fleet of 83 well servicing rigs across Western Canada, mid-western United States, and Australia. It has a strategic alliance with Pason Systems Inc. to develop and deploy drilling automation and optimization technologies. The company was founded in 1996 and is headquartered in Calgary, Canada. Read More The following companies are subsidiares of Exxon Mobil: AKG Marketing Company Limited, Aera Energy LLC, Al-Jubail Petrochemical Company, Ampolex (Cepu) Pte Ltd, Ancon Insurance Company Inc., Barnett Gathering LLC, Barzan Gas Company Limited, Caspian Pipeline Consortium, Celtic Exploration Ltd., Coral FLNG S.A., Cross Timbers Energy LLC, Ellora Energy Inc., Esmeroon Oil Transporta Imperial Oil Limited, Esso (Thailand) Public Company Limited, Esso Australia Resources Pty Ltd, Esso Deutschland GmbH, Esso Erdgas Beteiligungsgesellschaft mbH, Esso Exploration Angola (Block 15) Limited, Esso Exploration Angola (Block 17) Limited, Esso Exploration and Production Angola (Overseas) Limited, Esso Exploration and Production Chad Inc., Esso Exploration and Production Guyana Limited, Esso Exploration and Production Nigeria (Deepwater) Limited, Esso Exploration and Production Nigeria (Offshore East) Limited, Esso Exploration and Production Nigeria Limited, Esso Exploration and Production UK Limited, Esso Global Investments Ltd., Esso Italiana S.r.l., Esso Nederland B.V., Esso Norge AS, Esso Petroleum Company Limited, Esso Raffinage, Esso Societe Anonyme Francaise, Exxo Holdings Inc., Exxon Azerbaijan Limited, Exxon Chemical Arabia Inc., Exxon International Finance Company, Exxon Luxembourg Holdings LLC, Exxon Mobile Bay Limited Partnership, Exxon Neftegas Limited, Exxon Overseas Corporation, Exxon Overseas Investment Corporation, ExxonMobil (China) Investment Co. Ltd., ExxonMobil (Taicang) Petroleum Co. Ltd., ExxonMobil Abu Dhabi Offshore Petroleum Company Limited, ExxonMobil Alaska Production Inc., ExxonMobil Asia Pacific Pte. Ltd., ExxonMobil Australia Pty Ltd, ExxonMobil B Resources Company, ExxonMobil Capital Finance Company, ExxonMobil Capital Netherlands B.V., ExxonMobil Central Europe Holding GmbH, ExxonMobil Cepu Limited, ExxonMobil Chemical France, ExxonMobil Chemical Gulf Coast Investments LLC, ExxonMobil Chemical Holland B.V., ExxonMobil Chemical Services (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., ExxonMobil China Petroleum & Petrochemical Company Limited, ExxonMobil Development Africa B.V., ExxonMobil Development Company, ExxonMobil Egypt (S.A.E.), ExxonMobil Exploracao Brasil Ltda., ExxonMobil Exploration and Production Malaysia Inc., ExxonMobil Exploration and Production Norway AS, ExxonMobil Exploration and Production Romania Limited, ExxonMobil Exploration and Production Tanzania Limited, ExxonMobil Finance Company Limited, ExxonMobil Financial Investment Company Limited, ExxonMobil France Holding SAS, ExxonMobil Gas Marketing Europe Limited, ExxonMobil General Finance Company, ExxonMobil Global Services Company, ExxonMobil Golden Pass Surety LLC, ExxonMobil Holding Company Holland LLC, ExxonMobil Holding Norway AS, ExxonMobil Hong Kong Limited, ExxonMobil International Services SARL, ExxonMobil Iraq Limited, ExxonMobil Italiana Gas S.r.l., ExxonMobil Kazakhstan Inc., ExxonMobil Kazakhstan Ventures Inc., ExxonMobil LNG Services B.V., ExxonMobil Lubricants Trading Company, ExxonMobil Oil Corporation, ExxonMobil PNG Limited, ExxonMobil Petroleum & Chemical BVBA, ExxonMobil Petroleum & Chemical Holdings Inc., ExxonMobil Pipeline Company, ExxonMobil Production Deutschland GmbH, ExxonMobil Production Norway Inc., ExxonMobil Qatargas (II) Limited, ExxonMobil Qatargas Inc., ExxonMobil Ras Laffan (III) Limited, ExxonMobil Rasgas Inc., ExxonMobil Research and Engineering Company, ExxonMobil Russia Kara Sea Holdings B.V., ExxonMobil Sales and Supply LLC, ExxonMobil Technology Finance Company, ExxonMobil Ventures Finance Company, ExxonMobil Ventures Funding Ltd., Fujian Refining & Petrochemical Co. Ltd., Golden Pass LNG Terminal Investments LLC, Golden Pass LNG Terminal LLC, Gulf Coast Growth Ventures LLC, Imperial Oil Limited, Imperial Oil Resources Limited, Imperial Oil Resources N.W.T. Limited, Imperial Oil/Petroliere Imperiale, Infineum Italia s.r.I., Infineum Singapore Pte. Ltd., InterOil Corporation, Jurong Aromatics Corporation Pte Ltd, MPM Lubricants, Marine Well Containment Company LLC, Mobil Australia Resources Company Pty Limited, Mobil California Exploration & Producing Asset Company, Mobil Caspian Pipeline Company, Mobil Chemical Products International Inc., Mobil Corporation, Mobil Equatorial Guinea Inc., Mobil Erdgas Verwaltungsgesellschaft mbH, Mobil Exploration & Producing Australia Pty Ltd, Mobil International Petroleum Corporation, Mobil Oil Australia Pty Ltd, Mobil Oil Exploration & Producing Southeast Inc., Mobil Oil New Zealand Limited, Mobil Producing Nigeria Unlimited, Mobil Producing Texas & New Mexico Inc., Mobil SerLimited, Mobil Venezolana De Petroleos Inc., Mobil Yanbu Petrochemical Company Inc., Mobil Yanbu Refining Company Inc., Mountain Gathering LLC, Mozambique Rovuma Venture S.p.A., Palmetto Transoceanic LLC, Papua New Guinea Liquefied Natural Gas Global Company LDC, Permian Express Partners LLC, Phillips Exploration LLC, Qatar Liquefied Gas Company Limited, Ras Laffan Liquefied Natural Gas Company Limited, Ras Laffan Liquefied Natural Gas Company Limited (II), SPI Limited, Saudi Aramco Mobil Refinery Company Ltd., Saudi Yanbu Petrochemical Co., SeaRiver Maritime Inc., South Hook LNG Terminal Company Limited, Tengizchevroil LLP, Terminale GNL Adriatico S.r.l, Trend Gathering & Treating LLC, Wolverine Pipe Line Company, XH LLC, XTO Delaware Basin LLC, XTO ENERGY, XTO Energy Canada, and XTO Holdings LLC. The following companies are subsidiares of 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.. iShares MSCI South Korea ETF's stock was trading at $52.04 on March 11th, 2020 when COVID-19 reached pandemic status according to the World Health Organization. Since then, EWY stock has increased by 48.6% and is now trading at $77.33. View which stocks have been most impacted by COVID-19. (ANSA) - Brussels, December 19 - The European Commission said Wednesday that it has decided not to open an infringement procedure against Italy for excessive debt. The announcement came after European Commissioners examined a "technical" agreement reached between Rome and Brussels late on Tuesday on Italy's budget for 2019. The Commission had rejected the government's initial draft budget plan, which saw Italy running a deficit of 2.4% of GDP next year to finance key pledges and boost sluggish growth, saying it breached EU rules. Premier Giuseppe Conte's League-5-Star Movement (M5S) government proposed bring the deficit down to 2.04% to stop the EU opening an infringement procedure. European Commission Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis said Wednesday that the agreement Brussels had reached with Rome over Italy's 2019 budget was not perfect. "The solution on the table is not ideal," he said. "It does not provide long-term solutions to the Italian economy's problems, but it enables us, for now, to avoid opening a debt procedure, as long as the negotiated measures are fully applied". The government had said it is not willing to drop its two key pledges, the 'citizenship wage' basic income for job seekers and the 'quota 100' pension reform that will bring down the retirement age for many people. European Economic Affairs Commissioner Pierre Moscovici hailed the agreement as "a victory of political dialogue". He said the Commission had preferred to adopt the path of negotiation rather than "confrontation". He said that under the agreed solution, Italy's structural deficit will be no worse than previously, compared to a deterioration of 0.8% under the government's initial budget plan. Conte is set to report to the Senate after the breakthrough. 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 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. The following companies are subsidiares of Accenture: 2nd Road, 2nd Road Pty Ltd., ?What If!, ?What If! China Holdings Ltd, ?What If! Holdings Limited, ?What If! Innovation Singapore Holdings Pte, ?What If! Limited, ?What If! Shanghai Co. Ltd, ?What If! USA LLC, ACN Consulting Co Ltd, AD Dialeto Agencia de Publicidade SA, AD.Dialeto (Digital Agency acquired by Accenture), AGS Business and Technology Services Limited, ASM Research Inc., ASM Research LLC, ATAN, Accenture (Beijing) Mobile Technology Co Ltd, Accenture (Botswana) (Proprietary) Limited, Accenture (China) Co Ltd, Accenture (Shenzhen) Technology Co. Ltd., Accenture (South Africa) (Proprietary) Limited, Accenture (South Africa) Pty Limited, Accenture (UK) Ltd, Accenture 2 Business Process Services S.A., Accenture 2 LLC, Accenture A/S, Accenture AB, Accenture AG, Accenture AS, Accenture Africa Pty Ltd, Accenture Australia Holding B.V., Accenture Australia Holdings Pty Ltd, Accenture Australia Pty Ltd, Accenture Azerbaijan Ltd, Accenture BPM Operations Support Services S.A., Accenture BPM S.C.R.L., Accenture BV, Accenture Branch Holdings B.V., Accenture Bulgaria EOOD, Accenture Business Services for Utilities Inc, Accenture Business Services of British Columbia Limited Partnership, Accenture Business and Technology Services LLC, Accenture C.A, Accenture CAS GmbH, Accenture Canada Holdings Inc., Accenture Capital DAC, Accenture Capital Inc, Accenture Central Europe B.V., Accenture Chile Asesorias y Servicios Ltda, Accenture Cloud Services GmbH, Accenture Cloud Software Solutions Ltd, Accenture Cloud Solutions Australia Pty Ltd, Accenture Cloud Solutions LLC, Accenture Cloud Solutions Ltd, Accenture Cloud Solutions Pty Ltd, Accenture Co Ltd, Accenture Co Ltd., Accenture Communications Infrastructure Solutions Ltd, Accenture Company Ltd, Accenture Consulting Services Ltd Tanzania, Accenture Consultores de Gestao S.A., Accenture Consultoria de Industria e Consumo Ltda, Accenture Consultoria de Recursos Naturais Ltda, Accenture Credit Services LLC, Accenture Customer Services Distribution SAS, Accenture Customer Services Limited, Accenture Danismanlik Limited Sirketi, Accenture Defined Benefit Pension Plan Trustees Ltd, Accenture Defined Contribution Pension Plan Trustees Ltd, Accenture Delivery Poland sp. z o.o., Accenture Dienstleistungen GmbH, Accenture Digital France Holdings SA, Accenture Digital Holdings GmbH, Accenture East Africa Limited, Accenture Ecuador S.A., Accenture Egypt LLC, Accenture Enterprise Development (Shanghai) Co Ltd., Accenture Federal Services LLC, Accenture Finance (Gibraltar) III Ltd, Accenture Finance GmbH, Accenture Finance GmbH in liquidation, Accenture Finance II GmbH, Accenture Finance II GmbH in liquidation, Accenture Finance II Ltd, Accenture Finance Limited, Accenture Finance and Accounting BPO Services S.p.A., Accenture Finance and Accounting Services Srl, Accenture Flex LLC, Accenture GP LLC, Accenture Ghana Limited, Accenture Global Holdings Ltd., Accenture Global Services Ltd, Accenture Global Solutions Ltd, Accenture GmbH, Accenture HR Services Ltd, Accenture HR Services S.p.A., Accenture Healthcare Processing Inc., Accenture Holding GmbH, Accenture Holding GmbH & Co. KG, Accenture Holding GmbH in liquidation, Accenture Holdings (Iberia) S.L., Accenture Holdings B.V., Accenture Holdings France SAS, Accenture Holdings plc, Accenture Hungary Holdings Kft, Accenture Inc, Accenture Industrial Software Limited Liability Company (Accenture Endustriyel Yazylym Cozumleri Limited irketi), Accenture Industrial Software Limited Liability Company (Accenture Endustriyel Yazlm Cozumleri Limited Sirketi), Accenture Industrial Software Solutions Kft, Accenture Industrial Software Solutions SA, Accenture Insurance Services LLC, Accenture Insurance Services SAS, Accenture Insurance Services SpA, Accenture International BV, Accenture International Capital SCA, Accenture International LLC, Accenture International Limited, Accenture International Sarl, Accenture Japan Ltd, Accenture Korea BV, Accenture LLC, Accenture LLP, Accenture Lanka (Private) Ltd, Accenture Limited, Accenture Ltd, Accenture Ltda, Accenture Maghreb S.a.r.l., Accenture Managed Services SRL, Accenture Managed Services SpA, Accenture Management GmbH, Accenture Middle East B.V, Accenture Middle East BV, Accenture Minority I BV, Accenture Minority III Ltd, Accenture Mozambique Limitada, Accenture Mzansi (Pty) Ltd, Accenture NV/SA, Accenture NZ Limited, Accenture Newco LLC, Accenture Nova Scotia Unlimited Liability Co., Accenture OOO, Accenture Operations Sp. z o.o., Accenture Outsourcing SRL, Accenture Outsourcing Services, Accenture Outsourcing Services S.A., Accenture Oy, Accenture Panama Inc, Accenture Participations BV, Accenture Participations II Limited, Accenture Peru S.R.L, Accenture Peru S.R.L., Accenture Post Trade Processing SAS, Accenture Post-Trade Processing Limited, Accenture Process Ltd, Accenture Product Lifecycle Services, Accenture Properties, Accenture Pte Ltd, Accenture Puerto Rico LLC, Accenture S.A., Accenture S.C., Accenture S.L., Accenture S.R.L., Accenture SAS, Accenture SG Services Pte Ltd, Accenture SRL, Accenture Saudi Arabia Limited, Accenture Sendirian Berhad, Accenture Service Center SRL, Accenture Services (Mauritius) Ltd, Accenture Services AB, Accenture Services AG, Accenture Services AS, Accenture Services GmbH, Accenture Services Ltd, Accenture Services Morocco SA, Accenture Services Oy, Accenture Services Pty Ltd, Accenture Services S.r.l., Accenture Services SRL, Accenture Services Sp. z o.o., Accenture Services Sp. z.o.o., Accenture Services and Technology Srl, Accenture Services fur Kreditinstitute GmbH, Accenture Services s.r.o., Accenture Servicos Administrativos Ltda, Accenture Servicos de Suporte de Negocios Ltda, Accenture Solutions Co Ltd, Accenture Solutions Private Limited, Accenture Solutions Pte Ltd, Accenture Solutions Pty Ltd, Accenture Solutions Sdn Bhd, Accenture Sp. z o.o., Accenture Sp. z.o.o., Accenture SpA, Accenture State Healthcare Services LLC, Accenture Sub II Inc., Accenture Sub Inc, Accenture Sub LLC, Accenture Systems Integration Limited, Accenture Sarl, Accenture Tanacsado Kolatolt Felelossegu Tarsasag, Accenture Tanacsado Kolatolt Felelossegu Tarsasag KFT, Accenture Technologia, Accenture Technologia Consultoria e Outsourcing S.A., Accenture Technology Infrastructure Services Pty Ltd, Accenture Technology Solutions (Dalian) Co Ltd, Accenture Technology Solutions (HK) Co. Ltd., Accenture Technology Solutions (Thailand) Co. Ltd, Accenture Technology Solutions - Solucoes Informaticas Integradas, Accenture Technology Solutions - Solucoes Informaticas Integradas S.A., Accenture Technology Solutions GmbH, Accenture Technology Solutions Oy, Accenture Technology Solutions Pty Ltd, Accenture Technology Solutions S.A. de C.V., Accenture Technology Solutions SAS, Accenture Technology Solutions SRL, Accenture Technology Solutions Sdn. Bhd., Accenture Technology Solutions Slovakia s.r.o., Accenture Technology Ventures BV, Accenture Technology Ventures S.P.R.L., Accenture Uruguay SRL, Accenture Vietnam Co., Accenture Vietnam Co. LTD, Accenture Zambia Limited, Accenture do Brasil Limitada, Accenture plc, Accenture s.r.o., Acceria, Acquity Customer Insight Limited, Acquity Group, Adaptly LLC, Adaptly UK Limited, AddVal Technology, Adqptly, Advantium Inc., Agave Consultants Limited, Agilex Technologies Inc., Allen International, Allen International Consulting Group Ltd, Alnova Technologies Corporation S.L., AlphaBeta Advisors, Altima, Altima Asia Ltd., Altima SAS, Altitude, Altitude LLC, Analytics 8 LP, Analytics 8 Pty Ltd, Analytics8, Aorui Advertising (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Apis, Appaloosa Technology SAS, Arca, Ariba - BPO, Arismore, Aspiro Solutions (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd, Avanade, Avanade (Guangzhou) Computer Technology Development Co. Ltd., Avanade (Thailand) Co Ltd, Avanade Asia Pte Ltd, Avanade Australia Pty Ltd, Avanade Belgium SPRL, Avanade Canada Inc., Avanade Denmark A/S, Avanade Denmark ApS, Avanade Deutschland GmbH, Avanade Europe Holdings Ltd, Avanade Europe Services Ltd, Avanade Federal Services LLC, Avanade Finland Oy, Avanade France SAS, Avanade GZ Computer Technology Development Co. Ltd. (SH), Avanade Guangzhou, Avanade Holdings LLC, Avanade Hong Kong Ltd, Avanade International Corporation, Avanade Ireland Limited, Avanade Italy SRL, Avanade KK, Avanade Malaysia Sdn Bhd, Avanade Netherlands BV, Avanade Norway AS, Avanade Poland Sp. z o.o., Avanade Poland Sp. z.o.o., Avanade Schweiz GmbH, Avanade South Africa, Avanade South Africa Pty Ltd, Avanade Spain SL, Avanade Sweden AB, Avanade UK Ltd, Avanade do Brasil Limitada, Avanade Osterreich GmbH, AvantBiz Consulting Limited, Avenai, Axia Ltd., BABCN LLC, BCT Solutions, BCT Solutions Pty Ltd, BPO Servicos Administrativos Ltda, BRIDGE Energy Group, Beacon Consulting Group Inc., Beijing Genesis Interactive Technology Co. Ltd., Benext, Bionic, Blue Horseshoe, Boomerang Pharmaceutical Communications, Boomerang Pharmaceuticals Communications Ireland Limited, Bow & Arrow, Brand Learning, Brand Learning Group Limited, Brand Learning LLC, Brand Learning Ltd, Brand Learning Partners Limited, Brand Learning Pte Limited, Bridge Energy Group LLC, Brightstep AB, Byte Prophecy, CAS, CRMWaypoint, CadenceQuest Inc., Capable Marketer Limited, Capgemini - North American health practice, Capital Consultancy Services Inc., Certus Solutions Consulting Services Ltd, Certus Solutions Ltd, ChangeTrack Research Pty Ltd., Chaotic Moon Studios, Chengdu Mensa Advertising Co. Ltd., Cimation, Cimation UK Limited, Cirruseo, Cirruseo SAS, Clarity Insights, Clearhead, Clearhead Group, Clearhead Group LLC, ClientHouse GmbH, Cloud Sherpas, Cloud Sherpas (GA) LLC, Cloud Sherpas (SN) (PTE.) Limited, Cloud Sherpas New Zealand Ltd., Cloud Talent Limited, Cloudsherpas, Cloudsherpas Inc., Cloudworks, Codagenic Pty. Ltd., Computer Research and Telecommunications LLC, Concrete Desenvolvimento de Sistemas Ltda., Concrete Solutions, Concrete Solutions Ltda., Context Information Security, Coritel S.A., Corliant Inc., CreativeDrive, CustomerWorks Europe SL, Cutting Edge Solutions Ltd, D5 Global Holdings LLC, DAZ Systems Inc, DAZ Systems LLC, DAZSI Systems (India) Pvt. Ltd., DMA Solutions Limited, Davies Consulting, DayNine Consulting, DayNine Consulting (Australia) PTY LTD, DayNine Consulting (Deutschland) GmbH, DayNine Consulting (New Zealand) Limited, DayNine Consulting France SAS, DayNine Consulting Japan K.K., DayNine Consulting LLC, Declarative Holdings, Declarative Holdings LLC, Defense Point Security, Deja vu Security, Design Strategy and Research de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Designaffairs LLC, Digiplug S.A.S., Digiplug SAS, Digital Consulting & Software Services LLC, Droga5, Droga5 LLC, Droga5 Studios LLC, Droga5 UK Ltd., Duck Creek Technologies, Duck Creek Technologies LLC, Deja Vu Security LLC, ESR Labs, Elcurator SAS, Enaxis Consulting, Enaxis Consulting L.P., End-to-End Analytics, Energuia Web, Energuia Web S.A., Energy Management Brokers Ltd., Energy Quote Private Ltd., EnergyQuote JHA, EnergyQuote JHA Ltd., EnergyQuote Trading Ltd., Enimbos, Enkitec, Enterprise System Partners, Enterprise System Partners B.V. , Enterprise System Partners Bilisim Danismanlik Ticaret Anonim Sirketi, Enterprise System Partners Global Corporation, Enterprise System Partners Limited, Enterprise System Partners PR LLC, Enterprise System Partners S.A.S., Entropia, Epylon, Ethica Consulting Group, Evopro Group, Exactside Limited, Exton Consulting, Fairway Technologies Inc, Fairway Technologies LLC, Filmproduction ApS, First Annapolis Consulting, First Annapolis Consulting Inc., First Annapolis Consulting LLC, First Annapolis International, Fjord, Focus Group Europe, Focus Group Europe Limited, Formicary, Formicary Holdings Limited, Formicary Limited, FusionX, FutureMove Automotive, Gapso Servicos de Informatica Ltda., Genfour, Genfour Limited, George Group Consulting L.P., Gestalt LLC, Gestion Altima Canada Inc., Gevity, Global Public Firm S.L., GlobalView SAS, GoodFilm GmbH Filmproduktion Stuttgart, H.B. Maynard and Co. Inc., HRC Retail Advisory, Hagberg Consulting Group, Hangzhou Aiyunzhe Technology Co. Ltd., Happen, Hjaltelin Stahl, Hjaltelin Stahl K/S, Hytracc Consulting AS, Hytracc Consulting Malaysia Sdn. Bhd., Hytracc Consulting UK Limited, Hytracc Holding AS, I-Faber S.p.A., IBB Consulting, IMJ Corp, IMJ Corporation, INCAD, INSITUM, IT One Company Limited, ITBS Servicios Bancarios de Tecnologia de la Informacion SL, Icon Integration, Imagine Broadband (USA) Ltd, Imagine Broadband USA LLC, Imaginea Inc, Industrie&Co, Infoman AG, Infoman Schweiz AG, Informatica de Euskadi S.L., Infusion Development Inc., Infusion Development UK Limited, InfusionDev LLC, Innoveer Solutions India Pvt Ltd, Insitum Consultoria Argentina SRL, Insitum Consultoria Brasil LTDA, Insitum Consultoria Colombia SAS, Insitum Consultoria Europa SL, Insitum Consultoria Peru SAC, Insitum Consultoria S.A. de C.V., Intrepid, Intrigo Systems Inc, Intrigo Systems India Pvt. Limited, Intrigo Systems LLC, Inventor Advertisement (Beijing) Co. Ltd., Inventor Technology Limited, InvestTech, Investtech Systems Consulting LLC, Javelin Group, Javelin Group (Bulgaria) EOOD, Javelin Group Limited (UK), Javelin Group SASU, K Comms Group Limited, KCS.net AG, KCS.net AG West, KCS.net Deutschland GmbH, KCS.net Holding AG, KCS.net Osterreich GmbH, Kaper Communications Limited, Karma Communications Debtco Limited, Karma Communications Group Limited, Karma Communications Holdings Limited, Karmarama, Karmarama Comms Limited, Karmarama Limited, Knowledge Rules Inc., Knowledgent, Knowledgent Group LLC, Kogentix, Kogentix LLC, Kogentix Ltd, Kogentix Singapore Pte. Ltd, Kogentix Technologies Private Limited, Kolle Rebbe, Kolle Rebbe GmbH, Kream Comms Limited, Kunstmaan, Kunstmaan NV, Kurt Salmon, Kurt Salmon Canada LTD, Kurt Salmon UKI, Kurt Salmon UKI Ltd., Kurt Salmon US LLC, LEXTA, LINKBYNET, LabAnswer, LabAnswer Government, LemonXL Limited, Logistics Market Place Limited (UK), Loud & Clear Creative Pty Ltd, MAXIM Systems Inc., MCG US Holdings LLC, Mackevision CG Technology and Service (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Mackevision Corporation, Mackevision Japan Co. Ltd., Mackevision Korea Ltd, Mackevision Medien Design, Mackevision Medien Design GmbH, Mackevision Singapore Pte. Ltd., Mackevision UK Ltd, Maglan, Maglan Information Defense Technologies Research Ltd., Maihiro, Matter, Matter Llc, Maud Corp Pty Limited, Maxamine International, Media Audits Ltd., Media Hive, Mediasenz Pty Ltd., Meredith Specialty LLC, Meredith Xcelerated Marketing, Meredith Xcelerated Marketing Corporation, Meridian Informed Purchasing Ltd., Mindtribe, Mindtribe Product Engineering LLC, MobGen, MobGen Technology S.L, Moonrise NV, Mortgage Cadence, Mortgage Cadence an Accenture Company, Most Champion Ltd, Mudano, N3 LLC, NBS Marketing Inc., NYTEC, Nanjing Demeng Advertising Co. Ltd., Nashco Consulting, NaviSys Inc., NellArmonia, Neo Metrics Analytics S.L., Neo Metrics Chile, Neo Metrics Chile S.A., New Content, New Content Chile SpA, New Content Editora e Produtora Ltda., New Energy Aborda, New Energy Associates Ltd, New Energy Group, New Energy S.r.l., NewsPage, NewsPage (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd, NewsPage China Ltd., NewsPage Pte Ltd, Nice Agency Limited, Northstream, Northstream AB, Northstream Holding AB, OCTO Technology, OPS Rules Management Consultants, Octagon Research Solutions Inc., Octo Technology LTDA, Octo Technology Pty Ltd, Octo Technology SA, Octo Technology SPRL, Octoman SAS, Odgaard ApS, Olikka, Openmind, Openminded, Operaciones Accenture S.A. de C.V., OpusLine, Orbium, Orbium Consulting Ltd, Orbium GmbH, Orbium Holding AG, Orbium Inc., Orbium International AG, Orbium International sp. z o.o., Orbium Licences AG, Orbium Limited, Orbium Pte. Ltd., Orbium Pty Ltd, Orbium Services sp. z o.o., Orbium Sarl, Origin Digital, PCO Innovation, PCO Innovation Canada Inc., PCO Innovation EURL, PIXO PUNCH Limited, PLM Systems S.r.l, POC Holdings, PRION GmbH, PT Accenture, PT Asta Catur Indra, PT Kogentix Teknologi Indonesia, Pach Invest SARL, Pach Invest SAS, PacificLink Group, PacificLink iMedia Ltd., Paja Finanssipalvelut Oy, Parker Fitzgerald Inc, Parker Fitzgerald Inc., Parker Fitzgerald International Limited, Parker Fitzgerald Limited, Parker Fitzgerald PTY Ltd, Parker Fitzgerald Services Limited, Parker Fitzgerald Solutions Limited, Partners Technology Mexico Holdings BV, Pecaso Ltd., Pegasus Production K/S, Perseroan Terbatas. Accenture, Phase One Consulting Group, Pillar Technology, Pollux, Pragsis Bidoop, Pragsis Bidoop UK Ltd, Pragsis Technologies S.L, PrimeQ, PrimeQ Australia Pty Ltd, PrimeQ Ltd, PrimeQ NZ Pty Ltd, Procurian Germany GmbH, Procurian Inc., Procurian International I LLC, Procurian International II LLC, Procurian LLC, Procurian Singapore Pte. Ltd., Procurian Switzerland GmbH, Procurian USA LLC, Proquire LLC, PureApps Ltd., Qi Jie Beijing Information Technologies Co Ltd, Radiant Services, Radiant Services LLC, Random Walk Computing Inc., Reactive Media Limited, Reactive Media Pty Ltd., Real Protect, Realworld OO Systems Ltd., Redcore, Redcore (Asia) Pte Ltd, Redcore (India) Private Limited (India), Redcore (New Zealand) Limited, Redcore Group Holdings Pty Ltd, Redcore Pty Ltd, Renacentis IT Services, Revolutionary Security, RiskControl, Rothco, Rothco Holdings Designated Activity Company, Rothco Unlimited Company, S.C. EnergyQuote S.r.l., S3 TV Technology Limited, S3 TV Technology Ltd., SEC Servizi, SEC Servizi S.p.A., SOPIA Corp., Sagacious Consultants, Sagacious Consultants LLC, Salt Solutions, Sanchez Capital Services Pvt Ltd, Schlumberger Business Consulting, Seabury Airline Planning Group, Seabury Aviation & Aerospace (UK) Limited, Seabury Aviation & Aerospace Asia (Hong Kong) Limited, Seabury Aviation Consulting LLC, Seabury Cargo Advisory B.V., Seabury Consulting, Seabury Corporate Advisors LLC, Seabury Human Capital LLC, Seabury Malaysia Sdn. Bhd., Seabury Structured Finance LLC, Search Technologies BPO, Search Technologies BPO Inc., Search Technologies GmbH, Search Technologies International LLC, Search Technologies LATAM, Search Technologies LATAM S.A., Search Technologies LLC, Search Technologies Limited, Sente Partners LLC, Sentelis, Servicios Tecnicos de Programacion Accenture S.C., Shackleton, Shackleton Barcelona S.L., Shackleton Chile S.A., Shackleton Madrid S.L., Shackleton S.A., Shanghai Baiyue Advertising Co. Ltd., Shun Zhe Technology Development Co. Ltd., Silveo, Simian Pty Limited, SinnerSchrader, 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. Anadarko Petroleum Corporation engages in the exploration, development, production, and marketing of oil and gas properties. It operates through three segments: Exploration and Production, WES Midstream, and Other Midstream. The company explores for and produces oil, natural gas, and natural gas liquids (NGLs). It is also involved in gathering, processing, treating, and transporting oil, natural-gas, and NGLs production, as well as the gathering and disposal of produced water. The company's oil and natural gas properties are located in the United States onshore and deepwater Gulf of Mexico; and Algeria, Ghana, Mozambique, Colombia, Peru, and other countries. As of December 31, 2018, it had approximately 1.5 billion barrels of oil equivalent of proved reserves. The company was founded in 1959 and is headquartered in The Woodlands, Texas. Read More Bank of Montreal provides diversified financial services primarily in North America. The company's personal banking products and services include checking and savings accounts, credit cards, mortgages, and financial and investment advice services; and commercial banking products and services comprise business deposit accounts, commercial credit cards, business loans and commercial mortgages, cash management solutions, foreign exchange, specialized banking programs, treasury and payment solutions, and risk management products for small business and commercial banking customers. It also offers investment and wealth advisory services; digital investing services; financial services and solutions; and investment management, and trust and custody services to institutional, retail, and high net worth investors. In addition, the company provides life insurance, accident and sickness insurance, and annuity products; creditor and travel insurance to bank customers; and reinsurance solutions. Further, it offers client's debt and equity capital-raising services, as well as loan origination and syndication, balance sheet management, and treasury management; strategic advice on mergers and acquisitions, restructurings, and recapitalizations, as well as valuation and fairness opinions; and trade finance, risk mitigation, and other operating services. Additionally, the company provides research and access to markets for institutional, corporate, and retail clients; trading solutions that include debt, foreign exchange, interest rate, credit, equity, securitization and commodities; new product development and origination services, as well as risk management advice and services to hedge against fluctuations; and funding and liquidity management services to its clients. It operates through approximately 1,400 bank branches and 4,800 automated banking machines in Canada and the United States. The company was founded in 1817 and is headquartered in Montreal, Canada. Read More (ANSAmed) - CAIRO, DECEMBER 19 - Twelve Italian firms specialized in technologies to craft marble are visiting Cairo on Wednesday and Thursday, sources in the Egyptian capital report. The mission, organized by the Cairo office of ICE foreign trade agency, in cooperation with Confindustria Marmomacchine, with the participation of Ilpa, Tenax, Marini, Biesse-Intermac, Dellas, Officine Marchetti, Pedrini, Breton, Steinex, Tecnoporro, Omag and Teksped. Technical sessions by companies Isim-Istituto Internazionale del Marmo will be carried out in the industrial marble district of Shak El Toaban. On Thursday, a technical forum will be followed by business meetings with the main Egyptian firms operating in the sector. The event takes place in cooperation with Egyptian partners of the Chamber of industry for construction materials (the Egyptian employers' association) and Imc - Industrial Modernisation Center, and agency of the Egyptian ministry for trade and industry. Egypt is among the main markets for Italian-made marble technology and a growing market for Italian exports, according to data released by Italian statistics agency Istat, elaborated by Confindustria Marmomacchine. In 2016 Egypt ranked 21st as a market for Italian exports in the sector (with 16.9 million euros in exports of machinery). One year later, Egypt ranked sixth with 57.9 million. Data on the first eight months of this year are even more significant at 63.4 million euros, bringing Egypt to second place among countries buying machines and tools to work ornamental stones, only preceded by the US. (ANSAmed) FedEx Corp. is a holding company, which engages in the provision of a portfolio of transportation, e-commerce, and business services. It operates through the following segments: FedEx Express, FedEx Ground, FedEx Freight, FedEx Services, and Corporate, Other & Eliminations. The FedEx Express segment consists of domestic and international shipping services for delivery of packages and freight. The FedEx Ground segment focuses on small-package ground delivery services. The FedEx Freight segment offers less-than-truckload freight services across all lengths of haul. The FedEx Services segment provides sales, marketing, information technology, communications, customer service, technical support, billing and collection services, and certain back-office functions. The Corporate, Other & Eliminations segment includes corporate headquarters costs for executive officers and certain legal and finance functions, as well as certain other costs and credits not attributed to the firm's core business. The company was founded by Frederick Wallace Smith on June 18, 1971 and is headquartered in Memphis, TN. Read More Franklin Covey Co. engages in consulting and training in the areas of strategy execution, customer loyalty, leadership, and individual effectiveness. It operates through the following three segments: Direct Offices, Education Practice, International Licensees and Corporate and Other. The Direct Offices segment includes sales personnel that serve the United States and Canada; international sales offices located in Japan, China, the United Kingdom, and Australia; governmental sales channel; and public program operations. The Education Practice segment includes domestic and international Education practice operations, which are focused on sales to educational institutions such as elementary schools, high schools, and colleges and universities. The International Licensees segment primarily comprised of royalty revenues received from these licensees. The Corporate and Other segment includes leasing operations, shipping and handling revenues, and certain corporate administrative expenses. The company was founded by Brent L. Bishop, Stephen R. Covey and Hyrum Wayne Smith in 1983 and is headquartered in Salt Lake City, UT. Read More There is not enough analysis data for Chaparral Energy. 4.0 Community Rank Outperform Votes Chaparral Energy has received 128 outperform votes. (Add your outperform vote.) Underperform Votes Chaparral Energy has received 88 underperform votes. (Add your underperform vote.) Community Sentiment Chaparral Energy has received 59.26% outperform votes from our community. MarketBeat's community ratings are surveys of what our community members think about Chaparral Energy and other stocks. Vote Outperform if you believe CHAP will outperform the S&P 500 over the long term. Vote Underperform if you believe CHAP will underperform the S&P 500 over the long term. You may vote once every thirty days. Previous Next iShares China Large-Cap ETF's stock was trading at $38.80 on March 11th, 2020 when COVID-19 reached pandemic status according to the World Health Organization. Since then, FXI shares have decreased by 1.8% and is now trading at $38.10. View which stocks have been most impacted by COVID-19. CMC Markets plc, together with its subsidiaries, provides online retail financial services to retail, professional, stockbroking, and institutional clients in Australia, the United Kingdom, and internationally. The company provides its clients with the ability to trade contracts for difference and financial spread betting on a range of underlying shares, indices, foreign currencies, commodities, and treasuries through its trading platform. It also offers Australian clients the opportunity to trade Australian and selected international instruments, including shares, options, managed funds, warrants, and exchange traded funds. In addition, the company provides its clients a range of education opportunities through weekly and monthly webinars and seminars, as well as Trader Development programme, which provides a range of in-platform, on-demand education, and tailored market commentary. CMC Markets plc was founded in 1989 and is headquartered in London, the United Kingdom. Read More CoreLogic, Inc., together with its subsidiaries, provides property information, insight, analytics, and data-enabled solutions in North America, Western Europe, and the Asia Pacific. The company operates in two segments, Property Intelligence & Risk Management Solutions (PIRM) and Underwriting & Workflow Solutions (UWS). The PIRM segment combines property information, mortgage information, and consumer information to deliver housing market and property-level insights, predictive analytics, and risk management capabilities. It also offers proprietary technology and software platforms to access, automate, or track the information and assist its clients with decision-making and compliance tools in the real estate and insurance industries. This segment primarily serves commercial banks, mortgage lenders and brokers, investment banks, fixed-income investors, real estate agents, MLS companies, property and casualty insurance companies, title insurance companies, government agencies, and government-sponsored enterprises. The UWS segment combines property, mortgage, and consumer information to provide comprehensive mortgage origination and monitoring solutions, including underwriting-related solutions, and data-enabled valuations and appraisals. This segment also provides proprietary technology and software platforms to access, automate, or track the information and assist its clients with vetting and onboarding prospects, and meeting compliance regulations, as well as understanding, evaluating, monitoring property values. It primarily serves mortgage lenders and servicers, mortgage brokers, credit unions, commercial banks, fixed-income investors, government agencies, and property and casualty insurance companies. The company was formerly known as The First American Corporation and changed its name to CoreLogic, Inc. in June 2010. CoreLogic, Inc. was incorporated in 1894 and is headquartered in Irvine, California. Read More (ANSAmed) - STRASBOURG, DECEMBER 19 - A State should not impose on Muslims to solve their disputes according to Sharia law, the European Court of Human Rights has ruled. In the ruling, the court condemned Greece for imposing the implementation of Islamic law in an inheritance dispute against the will of a deceased man who had left a will based on Greek civil law. The man's wife, and sole heir according the will valid under Greek law, appealed to the Strasbourg court after a Greek tribunal ruled that, since the man belonged to the Muslim community, his will was not valid and a mufti need to decide on his inheritance according to Sharia law. The woman had lost three-fourths of her inheritance because of that ruling. (ANSAmed) Celanese Corp. engages in the provision of technology and specialty materials businesses. It operates through the following segments: Engineered Materials, Acetate Tow, Acetyl Chain and Other Activities .The Engineered Materials segment includes the engineered materials business, food ingredients business and certain strategic affiliates. The Acetate Tow segment serves consumer-driven applications and is a global producer and supplier of acetate tow and acetate flake used in filter products applications. The Acetyl Chain segment includes the integrated chain of intermediate chemistry, emulsion polymers and ethylene vinyl acetate (""EVA"") polymers businesses, based on similar products, production processes, classes of customers and selling and distribution practices as well as economic similarities over a normal business cycle. The Other Activities segment consists of corporate center costs, including administrative activities such as finance, information technology and human resource functions, interest income and expense associated with financing activities. The company was founded by Camille Dreyfus and Henri Dreyfus in 1918 and is headquartered in Irving, TX. Read More Everest Re Group Ltd. is a holding company, which engages in the provision of reinsurance and insurance services. It operates through the following segments: U.S. Reinsurance, International, Bermuda, and Insurance. The U.S. Reinsurance segment writes property and casualty reinsurance and specialty lines of business, including marine, aviation, surety, and accident and health business, on both a treaty and facultative basis, through reinsurance brokers, as well as directly with ceding companies primarily within the U.S. The International segment offers foreign property and casualty reinsurance through Everest Re's branches in Canada and Singapore and through offices in Brazil, Miami, and New Jersey. The Bermuda segment comprises reinsurance and insurance to worldwide property and casualty markets through brokers and directly with ceding companies from its Bermuda office and reinsurance to the United Kingdom and European markets through its UK branch and Ireland Re. The Insurance segment writes property and casualty insurance directly and through brokers, surplus lines brokers, and general agents within the U.S., Canada, and Europe. The company was founded in 1999 and is headquartere Read More 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. BNP Paribas SA provides a range of banking and financial services in France and internationally. It operates through two divisions, Retail Banking and Services, and Corporate and Institutional Banking. The company offers long-term corporate vehicle leasing, and rental and other financing solutions; and digital banking and investment services, cash management, and factoring services to corporate clients, as well as wealth management services. It also provides credit solutions for individuals under the Cetelem, Cofinoga, Findomestic, AlphaCredit, and Opel Vauxhall brands; savings and protection solutions, including insuring individuals, and their personal projects and assets; and asset management, private banking, and real estate services. In addition, the company offers global market services, including investment, hedging, financing, research, and market intellingence across asset classes; security services comprising clearing, custody, and asset and fund services, as well as corporate trust, and market and financing services; and corporate trade and treasury, debt financing, specialized financing, strategic advisory, mergers and acquisition, and equity capital market services for institutional and corporate clients. The company was formerly known as Banque Nationale de Paris and changed its name to BNP Paribas SA in May 2000. BNP Paribas SA was founded in 1848 and is headquartered in Paris, France. Read More Khashoggi: new pics of alleged hit-squad members in Istanbul Anadolu news agency publishes photos of Mutreb, alleged head (ANSAmed) - ISTANBUL, DECEMBER 19 - Two and a half months after Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, new images published by State-run Turkish news agency Anadolu show members of the alleged hit squad believed to have been sent by Riyadh to kill him. The Turkish news agency published on Wednesday morning several screen shots of surveillance footage recorded on the day of the murder at the entrance of the consulate and at Ataturk airport in Istanbul. The members of the hit squad, allegedly Saudi officials and intelligence officers, landed and departed from the airport in Istanbul. Several shots portray Maher Abdulaziz Mutreb, who is considered the head of the team, who has been repeatedly photographed in the past accompanying Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman during trips abroad. Principal Financial Group, Inc. is a financial company, which offers financial products and services to businesses, individuals and institutional clients. It specializes in retirement solutions, insurance, and investment products through its diverse family of financial services companies and national network of financial professionals. It operates its business through following segments: Retirement and Income Solutions, Principal Global Investors, Principal International, U.S. Insurance Solutions and Corporate. The Retirement and Income Solutions segment provides retirement and related financial products and services primarily to businesses, their employees and other individuals. The Principal Global Investors segment provides asset management services to asset accumulation business, insurance operations, corporate segment and third party clients and also refers to mutual fund business. The Principal International segment offers pension accumulation products and services, mutual funds, asset management, income annuities and life insurance accumulation products. The U.S. Insurance Solutions segment operates through two divisions. Specialty benefits insurance division consists of gro Read More iShares MSCI Italy ETF's stock was trading at $22.18 on March 11th, 2020 when COVID-19 reached pandemic status according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Since then, EWI stock has increased by 41.1% and is now trading at $31.30. View which stocks have been most impacted by COVID-19. Invesco MSCI Global Timber ETF's stock was trading at $22.09 on March 11th, 2020 when COVID-19 (Coronavirus) reached pandemic status according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Since then, CUT shares have increased by 61.2% and is now trading at $35.62. View which stocks have been most impacted by COVID-19. Brookdale Senior Living, Inc. engages in the operation of senior living communities. The firm manages independent living, assisted living and dementia-care communities and continuing care retirement centers. It operates through the following segments: Independent Living Assisted Living & Memory Care, CCRCs, Health Care Services and Management Services. The Independent Living segment is primarily designed for middle to upper income seniors who desire an upscale residential environment providing the highest quality of service. The Assisted Living & Memory Care segment offer housing and 24-hour assistance with ADLs to mid-acuity frail and elderly residents. The CCRCs segment offers a variety of living arrangements and services to accommodate all levels of physical ability and health. The Healthcare Services segment provides home health, hospice and outpatient therapy services, as well as education and wellness programs, to residents of many communities and to seniors living outside communities. The Management Services segment composes of communities operated by the company pursuant to management agreements. The company was founded in 1978 and is headquartered in Brentwood, TN. Read More (ANSAmed) - TUNIS, DECEMBER 19 - Tunisia ''categorically refuses forced expulsions of its irregular migrants from their respective hosting countries'', Tunisian Social Affairs Minister Mohamed Trabelsi said, opening a seminar in Tunis on migration in relation to objectives of sustainable development. The minister added that the Tunisian government supports the right to access basic services and integration projects in hosting countries and does not accept for its migrants to return unless they are willing to do so. In his address, Trabelsi denounced the use of unilateral measures by some hosting countries, stressing that irregular migration can only be tackled with the help of conventions and international agreements. Trabelsi said an estimated 200,000 Tunisians are residing abroad without regular documents. He announced the presentation of a national strategy on migration to Parliament in 2019 with the objective of institutionalizing the system of migration, asylum and residence in Tunisia. Trabelsi continued by recalling that the majority of illegal migrants are fleeing war, human rights abuses and difficult economic conditions, insisting that the migration dossier should be handled with more responsibility and equality between northern and southern Mediterranean countries. He said the world economic system should be fairer. Lorena Lando, head of the mission of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), spoke about the relation between migration and sustainable development targets in the UN's 2030 agenda, noting that a national strategy could be one of the possible solutions for Tunisia to tackle the migration dossier. According to IOM, there are an estimated 60,000 undocumented migrants in Tunisia, while Tunisian migrants living abroad without regular documents are about 1.3 million. (ANSAmed) There is not enough analysis data for Kayne Anderson Energy Infrastructure Fund. 4.1 Community Rank Outperform Votes Kayne Anderson Energy Infrastructure Fund has received 179 outperform votes. (Add your outperform vote.) Underperform Votes Kayne Anderson Energy Infrastructure Fund has received 111 underperform votes. (Add your underperform vote.) Community Sentiment Kayne Anderson Energy Infrastructure Fund has received 61.72% outperform votes from our community. MarketBeat's community ratings are surveys of what our community members think about Kayne Anderson Energy Infrastructure Fund and other stocks. Vote Outperform if you believe KYN will outperform the S&P 500 over the long term. Vote Underperform if you believe KYN will underperform the S&P 500 over the long term. You may vote once every thirty days. Previous Next 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 Thermo Fisher Scientific: 236 Perinton Parkway LLC, 27 Forge Parkway LLC, ABR--Affinity BioReagents, ACI Holdings Inc., ARG Services LLC, ASPEX Corporation, Abgene Inc., Abgene Limited, Acoustic Cytometry Systems Inc., AcroMetrix LLC, Acros Organics B.V.B.A., Advanced Biotechnologies Limited, Advanced Scientifics (ASI), Advanced Scientifics Inc., Advanced Scientifics International Inc., Affymetrix Biotech Participacoes Ltda., Affymetrix Biotech Shanghai Ltd, Affymetrix Inc, Affymetrix Japan K.K., Affymetrix Pte Ltd, Affymetrix UK Ltd, Afora S.A.U., Ahura Scientific, Alchematrix Inc., Alchematrix LLC, Alfa Aesar, Alfa Aesar (China) Chemical Co. Ltd., Alfa Aesar (Hong Kong) Limited, Allergon AB, Alphine Mountain Limited, Ambion Inc., Apogent Denmark ApS, Apogent Finance Company, Apogent Holding Company, Apogent Technologies Inc., Apogent Transition Corp., Apogent U.K. Limited, App-Tek International Pty Ltd, Applied Biosystems B.V., Applied Biosystems Finance B.V., Applied Biosystems International Inc., Applied Biosystems LLC, Applied Biosystems Taiwan LLC, Applied Biosystems Trading (Shanghai) Company Ltd., Applied Biosystems de Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Applied Scientific Corporation, Avances Cientificos de Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Avocado Research Chemicals Limited, B.R.A.H.M.S. Biotech GmbH, B.R.A.H.M.S. GmbH, B.R.A.H.M.S. UK Ltd, BAC BV, BAC IP BV, Barnstead Thermolyne LLC, Beijing Phadia Diagnostics Co Ltd, Bender MedSystems GmbH, BioTrove Corporation, BioTrove International Inc., Bioanalysis Labsystems S.A., Biochemical Sciences LLC, Biolab, BmT GmbH Laborprodukte, Bonsai Tecnologies - Sistemas para Biotecnologia e Industria Unipessoal Lda, Brammer Bio, Bumi-Sans Sendirian Berhad, CAC Limited, CB Diagnostics AB, CB Diagnostics Holding AB, CEPH International Corporation, CHK Holdings Inc., CRS Robotics, CTPS LLC, Capitol Scientific Products Inc., Capitol Vial Inc., Cellomics Inc., CellzDirect Inc., Cenduit GmbH, Cenduit LLC, Cezanne S.A.S., Chase Scientific Glass Inc., Chromacol Limited, Clintrak, Clintrak Clinical Labeling Services LLC, Clintrak Pharmaceutical Services LLC, Cohesive Technologies (UK) Limited, Cohesive Technologies Inc., Columbia Diagnostics Inc., Compendia Bioscience Inc., Comtest Limited, Consolidated Technologies Inc., Consultores Fisher Scientific Chile Ltd, Core Informatics, Core Informatics LLC, Core Informatics UK Ltd., D-finitive Technologies Inc., DCG Systems B.V., DCG Systems C.V., DCG Systems G.K., DCG Systems GmbH, DCG Systems Korea Ltd., DCG Systems LLC, DPI Newco LLC, DSM Pharmaceutical Products Inc., Dharmacon, Diagnostix Ltd., Dionex (China) Analytical Ltd, Dionex (Switzerland) AG, Dionex (UK) Limited, Dionex Austria GmbH, Dionex Benelux B.V., Dionex Brasil Instrumentos Cientificos Ltda, Dionex Canada Ltd., Dionex China Limited, Dionex Corporation, Dionex Denmark A/S, Dionex Holding GmbH, Dionex I LLC, Dionex Pty Ltd., Dionex S.A., Dionex S.p.A., Dionex Singapore Pte Ltd., Dionex Softron GmbH, Dionex Sweden AB, Distribution Solutions International Inc., Doe & Ingalls Investors Inc., Doe & Ingalls Limited, Doe & Ingalls Management LLC, Doe & Ingalls Properties II LLC, Doe & Ingalls Properties LLC, Doe & Ingalls of California Operating LLC, Doe & Ingalls of Florida Operating LLC, Doe & Ingalls of Maryland Operating LLC, Doe & Ingalls of Massachusetts Operating LLC, Doe & Ingalls of North Carolina Operating LLC, Doublecape Holding Limited, Doublecape Limited, Drakeside Real Estate Holding Company LLC, Duke Scientific Corporation, Dynal Biotech Beijing Limited, EGS Gauging Ltd., EGS Gauging Technical Services Company, EP Scientific Products LLC, Ecochem N.V., EnviroEquip Pty Ltd, Epsom Glass Industries Limited, Equibio Limited, Erie Electroverre S.A., Erie Finance Limited, Erie LP Holding LLC, Erie Scientific Company of Puerto Rico, Erie Scientific Hungary Kft, Erie Scientific LLC, Erie U.K. Limited, Erie UK 1 Limited, Erie UK 2 Limited, Erie UK Holding Company, Erie UK Senior Holding Limited, European Laboratory Holdings Limited, Eutech Instruments Europe B.V., Eutech Instruments Pte Ltd., Eutech Instruments Sdn Bhd, Ever Ready Thermometer Co. Inc., FEI Asia Pacific Co. Ltd., FEI Australia Pty Ltd, FEI CPD B.V., FEI Company, FEI Company Japan Ltd., FEI Company of USA (S.E.A.) Pte Ltd., FEI Czech Republic s.r.o., FEI Deutschland GmbH, FEI EFA Inc., FEI EFA International Pte. Ltd., FEI Electron Optics B.V., FEI Electron Optics International B.V., FEI Europe B.V., FEI France SAS, FEI Global Holdings C.V., FEI Hong Kong Company Limited, FEI Houston Inc., FEI Italia Srl, FEI Korea Ltd., FEI Melbourne Pty Ltd., FEI Microscopy Solutions Ltd, FEI Munich GmbH, FEI Norway Holding AS, FEI SAS, FEI Saudi Arabia LLC, FEI Servicos de Nanotecnologia Ltda., FEI Technologies Inc., FEI Technology de Mexico S.A. de C.V., FEI Trading (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., FEI Trondheim AS, FEI UK Ltd., FHP LLC, FRC Holding Inc. V, FS (Barbados) Capital Holdings Ltd., FS Casa Rocas Holdings LLC, FS Mexicana Holdings LLC, FSI Receivables Company LLC, FSII Sweden Holdings AB, FSII Sweden Holdings I AB, FSIR Holdings (UK) Limited, FSIR Holdings (US) Inc., FSUK Holdings Limited, FSWH Company LLC, FSWH II C.V., FSWH International Holdings LLC, Fermentas China Co. Ltd, Fermentas Inc., Fermentas International, Fermentas Sweden AB, Fermentas UK Limited, Fiberlite Centrifuge LLC, Finesse Scientific Equipment (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Finesse Solutions AG, Finesse Solutions Inc., Finnzymes Oy, Fisher Alder S. de R.L. de C.V., Fisher Asia Manufacturing Ventures Inc., Fisher Bermuda Holdings Limited, Fisher BioImage ApS, Fisher BioPharma Services (India) Private Limited, Fisher BioSciences Japan G.K., Fisher BioServices Inc., Fisher Bioblock Holding II SNC, Fisher CLP Holding Limited Partnership, Fisher Canada Holding ULC 1, Fisher Canada Holding ULC 2, Fisher Canada Holding ULC 3, Fisher Canada Limited Partnership, Fisher Chimica BVBA, Fisher Clinical Logistics LLC, Fisher Clinical Services (Beijing) Co. Ltd., Fisher Clinical Services (Bristol) LLC, Fisher Clinical Services (Colombia) LLC, Fisher Clinical Services (Korea) Co. Ltd, Fisher Clinical Services (Mexico) LLC, Fisher Clinical Services (Peru) LLC, Fisher Clinical Services (Suzhou) Co. Ltd., Fisher Clinical Services Colombia S.A.S., Fisher Clinical Services GmbH, Fisher Clinical Services Inc., Fisher Clinical Services Japan K.K., Fisher Clinical Services Latin America S.R.L., Fisher Clinical Services Limited Liability Company, Fisher Clinical Services Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Fisher Clinical Services Peru S.R.L, Fisher Clinical Services Pte Ltd., Fisher Clinical Services U.K. Limited, Fisher Emergo B.V., Fisher Germany Holdings GmbH, Fisher Hamilton China Inc., Fisher Hamilton Mexico LLC, Fisher Holdings ApS, Fisher Internet Minority Holdings L.L.C., Fisher Laboratory Products Manufacturing (Shanghai) Co. Ltd, Fisher Luxembourg Danish Holdings SARL, Fisher Manufacturing (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd, Fisher Maybridge Holdings Limited, Fisher Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Fisher Scientific (Austria) GmbH, Fisher Scientific (Hong Kong) Limited, Fisher Scientific (M) Sdn Bhd, Fisher Scientific (SEA) Pte. Ltd., Fisher Scientific A/S, Fisher Scientific AG, Fisher Scientific Australia Pty Limited, Fisher Scientific Biotech Line ApS, Fisher Scientific Brazil Inc., Fisher Scientific Central America Inc., Fisher Scientific Chile Inc., Fisher Scientific Colombia Inc., Fisher Scientific Company, Fisher Scientific Company L.L.C., Fisher Scientific Costa Rica Sociedad de Responsabilidad Limitada, Fisher Scientific Europe Holdings B.V., Fisher Scientific GTF AB, Fisher Scientific Germany Beteiligungs GmbH, Fisher Scientific GmbH, Fisher Scientific Holding Company LLC, Fisher Scientific Holding HK Limited, Fisher Scientific Holding U.K. Limited, Fisher Scientific Holdings (M) Sdn Bhd, Fisher Scientific Holdings (S) Pte Ltd, Fisher Scientific International LLC, Fisher Scientific Investments (Cayman) Ltd., Fisher Scientific Ireland Investments Unlimited, Fisher Scientific Ireland Limited, Fisher Scientific Japan Ltd., Fisher Scientific Jersey Island Limited, Fisher Scientific Korea Ltd, Fisher Scientific Latin America Inc., Fisher Scientific Luxembourg S.a.r.l., Fisher Scientific Mexicana S. de R.L. de C.V., Fisher Scientific Mexico Inc., Fisher Scientific Middle East and Africa Inc., Fisher Scientific Norway AS, Fisher Scientific Operating Company, Fisher Scientific Oxoid Holdings Ltd., Fisher Scientific Oy, Fisher Scientific Pte. Ltd., Fisher Scientific S.A.S., Fisher Scientific S.L., Fisher Scientific SPRL, Fisher Scientific The Hague I B.V., Fisher Scientific The Hague II B.V., Fisher Scientific The Hague III B.V., Fisher Scientific The Hague IV B.V., Fisher Scientific The Hague V B.V., Fisher Scientific U.K. Limited, Fisher Scientific UK Holding Company 2, Fisher Scientific UK Holding Company Limited, Fisher Scientific Unipessoal Lda., Fisher Scientific Venezuela Inc., Fisher Scientific Worldwide (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Fisher Scientific Worldwide Holdings I C.V., Fisher Scientific Worldwide Inc., Fisher Scientific de Mexico S.A., Fisher Scientific of the Netherlands B.V., Fisher Scientific spol. S.r.o, Fisher Servicios Clinicos (Chile) LLC, Fisher Servicios Clinicos Chile Ltda, Fisher WWD Holding L.L.C., Fisher Worldwide Distribution SPV, Fisher Worldwide Gene Distribution SPV, Flux Instruments, Fuji Partnership, G & M Procter Limited, G V Instruments Limited, GV Instruments Canada Ltd., GV Instruments Inc, Gatan Inc, General Scientific Company Sdn Bhd (M), Genomed molekularbiologische und diagnostische Produkte GmbH, Gerhard Menzel B.V. & Co. KG, Gold Cattle Standard Testing Labs Inc., Golden West Indemnity Company Limited, Goring Kerr Detection Limited, Greenville Service Company Inc., HENO GmbH i.L., Hangar 215 Inc., Helmet Securities Limited, Henogen, HighChem, HyClone International Trade (Tianjin) Co. Ltd, Hybaid Limited, I.Q. (BIO) Limited, IDnostics AG, ILS Laboratories Scandinavia AB, Inel Inc., Inel SAS, InnaPhase Inc., InnaPhase Limited, IntegenX, Intrinsic BioProbes Inc., Intrinsic Bioprobes Inc., Invitrogen (Shanghai) Investment Co. Ltd., Invitrogen Argentina SA, Invitrogen BioServices India Private Limited, Invitrogen Europe Limited, Invitrogen Finance Corp., Invitrogen Holdings LLC, Invitrogen Holdings Ltd., Invitrogen Hong Kong Limited, Invitrogen IP Holdings Inc., Invitrogen Trading (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Ion Torrent Systems Inc., Ionalytics Corporation, JSC Thermo Fisher Scientific, Jouan LLC, Jouan Limited, Jouan SA, Kendro Containment & Services Limited, Kendro Laboratory Products Ltd, Kettlebrook Insurance Co. ltd., Keystone Scientific, KonTEM GmbH, Kyle Jordan Investments LLC, LIFE TECHNOLOGIES CORPORATION, LTC Tech South Africa PTY Ltd., La-Pha-Pack GmbH, Lab Vision (UK) Limited, Lab Vision Corporation, Lab-Chrom-Pack LLC, Lab-Line Instruments Inc., Labomex MBP S. de R. L. De C.V., Laboratoire Service International - L.S.I, Laboratory Management Systems Inc., Laboratory Specialties Proprietary Ltd., LambTrack Limited, Laser Analytical Systems Inc., Liberty Lane Investment LLC, Liberty Lane Real Estate Holding Company LLC, Life Sciences International (Poland) SP z O.O, Life Sciences International Holdings BV, Life Sciences International LLC, Life Sciences International Limited, Life Technologies AS, Life Technologies Australia PTY Ltd., Life Technologies BPD AB, Life Technologies BPD UK Limited, Life Technologies Brasil Comercio e Industria de Produtos para Biotecnologia Ltda, Life Technologies Chile SpA, Life Technologies Clinical Services Lab Inc., Life Technologies Co. Ltd., Life Technologies Czech Republic s.r.o., Life Technologies DaAn Diagnostic (Guangzhou) Co. Ltd., Life Technologies Europe B.V., Life Technologies Finance Ltd., Life Technologies Finland Oy, Life Technologies GmbH, Life Technologies Holdings PTE Ltd., Life Technologies Inc., Life Technologies International B.V., Life Technologies Japan Ltd., Life Technologies Korea LLC, Life Technologies Limited, Life Technologies Magyarorszag Kft, Life Technologies New Zealand Ltd., Life Technologies Norway Investments US LLC, Life Technologies Polska Sp z.o.o., Life Technologies SA, Life Technologies SAS, Life Technologies s.r.o, Linkage Biosciences Inc., Linkage Biosciences S.a.r.l., Loftus Furnace Company, Lomb Scientific, Lomb Scientific (Aust) Pty Limited, MTI-GlobalStem, Marketbase International Limited, Matrix MicroScience Inc., Matrix MicroScience Ltd., Matrix Technologies Corporation Limited, Matrix Technologies LLC, Maybridge Chemical Company Limited, Maybridge Chemical Holdings Limited, Maybridge Limited, Medical Analysis Systems Inc., Medical Analysis Systems International Inc., Medical Diagnostics Systems Inc., Metavac LLC, Microgenics Corporation, Microgenics Diagnostics Pty Limited, Microgenics GmbH, Microm International GmbH, Microm Laborgerate S.L.U, Molecular BioProducts Inc., Molecular Probes Inc., Molecular Transfer Inc., NAPCO Inc., NERL Diagnostics LLC, NOVODIRECT GmbH Labor- und Industrie- Megerate, Nalge (Europe) Limited, Nalge Nunc International (Monterrey) LLC, Nalge Nunc International Corporation, Nanjing WeiKangLe Trading Industrial Co Ltd, NanoDrop Technologies LLC, National Scientific Company, Navaho Acquisition Corp., Neomarkers Inc., New FS Holdings Inc., NewcoGen PE LLC, Nihon Dynal K.K., Niton Asia Limited, NovaWave Technologies Inc., Nunc A/S, ONIX Systems Inc., OXOID CZ s.r.o., Odyssey Holdings Corporation, Odyssey Luxembourg Holdings S.a r.l., Odyssey Luxembourg IP Holdings 1 S.a r.l., Odyssey Luxembourg IP Holdings 2 S.a r.l., Odyssey Venture Corporation, Omega Data Systems, One Lambda Inc, Onix Holdings Limited, Orme Scientific Limited, Owl Separation Systems LLC, Oxoid (ELY) Limited, Oxoid 2000 Limited, Oxoid AS, Oxoid Australia Pty. Limited, Oxoid Company, Oxoid Deutschland GmbH, Oxoid Holding SAS, Oxoid Holdings Limited, Oxoid Inc., Oxoid International Limited, Oxoid Investments GmbH, Oxoid Limited, Oxoid N.V., Oxoid New Zealand Limited, Oxoid Pension Trustees Limited, Oxoid Senior Holdings Limited, Oxoid UKH LLC, PAX - DSI Acquisition LLC, PE AG, Pacific Rim Far East Industries LLC, Pacific Rim Investment LLC, Panomics L.L.C., Panomics S.R.L., Patheon, Patheon API Inc., Patheon API Manufacturing Inc., Patheon API Services Inc., Patheon Austria GmbH & Co KG, Patheon B.V., Patheon Banner U.S. Holdings Inc., Patheon Biologics (NJ) LLC, Patheon Biologics Australia Pty Ltd, Patheon Biologics B.V., Patheon Biologics LLC, Patheon Calculus Merger LLC, Patheon Cooperatief U.A., Patheon Development Services Inc., Patheon Finance LLC, Patheon France SAS, Patheon Holdings B.V., Patheon Holdings I B.V., Patheon Holdings II B.V., Patheon Holdings SAS, Patheon I B.V., Patheon I Holding GmbH, Patheon Inc., Patheon International AG, Patheon Italia S.p.A., Patheon KK, Patheon Life Science Products International GmbH, Patheon Manufacturing Services LLC, Patheon Pharmaceuticals Inc., Patheon Pharmaceuticals Services Inc., Patheon Puerto Rico Acquisitions Corporation, Patheon Puerto Rico Inc., Patheon Regensburg GmbH, Patheon Softgels B.V., Patheon Softgels Inc., Patheon U.S. Holdings Inc., Patheon U.S. Holdings LLC, Patheon UK Limited, Patheon UK Pension Trustees Limited, Pelican Acquisition Corporation, Perbio Science (Canada) Company, Perbio Science AB, Perbio Science BVBA, Perbio Science France SAS, Perbio Science Inc., Perbio Science International Netherlands B.V., Perbio Science Invest AB, Perbio Science Nederland B.V., Perbio Science Projekt AB, Perbio Science Sweden Holdings AB, Perbio Science Switzerland SA, Perbio Science UK Limited, Phadia AB, Phadia Diagnosticos Ltda, Phadia GmbH, Phadia Holding AB, Phadia International Holdings C.V., Phadia Korea Co. Ltd, Phadia Luxembourg Holdings S.a.r.l., Phadia Malta Holdings Limited, Phadia Oy, Phadia Real Property AB, Phadia Sweden AB, Phadia Taiwan Inc., Phadia US Inc., Phadia s.r.o., Pharmacaps Mexicana SA de CV, Phenom-World B.V., Phenom-World Holding B.V, Phenom-World Innovations B.V., Phinotex, Pierce Biotechnology Inc., Pierce Milwaukee Holding Corp., Pierce Milwaukee Inc., Polychromix, Power Sweden Holdings I AB, Power Sweden Holdings II AB, Power Sweden Holdings III Aktiebolag, Princeton Gamma-Tech Instruments LLC, Princeton Security Technologies, Prionics AG, Prionics Asia Ltd., Prionics Deutschland GmbH, Prionics France SAS, Prionics Italia S.r.l., Prionics Lelystad B.V., Prionics USA Inc., Priority Air Express LLC, Priority Air Express Pte. Ltd., Priority Air Express UK Limited, Priority Air Holdings Corp, Priority Solutions International, Promedica Pty Limited, Proxeon, Proxeon Biosystems ApS, Qiagen, REP GBP I-B Blocker Inc., Raymond A Lamb Limited, Remel Europe Limited, Remel Inc., Richard-Allan Scientific Company, Robbins Scientific LLC, Robocon Labor- und Industrieroboter Gesellschaft m.b.H, Rupprecht and Patashnick, Rupprecht and Patashnick (R&P), Russell pH Limited, S.C.I. du 10 rue Dugay Trouin, SCI Inno 92, STC Bio Manufacturing Inc., Samco Scientific (Monterrey) LLC, Samco Scientific LLC, Saroph Sweden AB, Schantz Road LLC, Seradyn Inc., Shanghai Life Technologies Biotechnology Co. Limited, Shanghai Thermo Fisher (C-I) Trading Co. Ltd, Shanghai Thermo Fisher (S) Trading Co. Ltd, Southern Trials (Pty) Ltd., Specialty (SMI) Inc., Spectra-Physics AB, Spectra-Physics Holdings Limited, Spectra-Physics Holdings USA LLC, Spectronex, Staten Island Cogeneration Corporation, Sterilin Limited, Stokes Bio Ltd., Sweden DIA (Sweden) AB, SwissAnalytic Group GmbH, Systems Manufacturing Corporation, TFLP LLC, TFS Breda B.V., TFS LLC, TFS Singapore HK Limited, TFSL Financing GP LLC, TFSL Senior GP Holdings 2 LLC, TK Partnership, TKA Wasseraufbereitungssysteme, TMOI Inc., TPI Real Estate Holdings LLC, TSP Holdings I LLC, TWX LLC, Technology Design Solutions Pty Ltd, Thermedics Detection de Argentina S.R.L, Thermo Allen Coding Limited, Thermo Asset Management Services Inc., Thermo BioAnalysis LLC, Thermo BioAnalysis Limited, Thermo BioSciences Holdings LLC, Thermo CIDTEC, Thermo CRS Holdings Ltd., Thermo CRS Ltd., Thermo Cambridge Limited, Thermo Cayman Holdings Ltd., Thermo Corporation, Thermo DMA Inc., Thermo Detection de Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Thermo Dutch Holdings Limited Partnership, Thermo EGS Gauging LLC, Thermo Eberline Holdings I LLC, Thermo Eberline Holdings II LLC, Thermo Eberline LLC, Thermo Electron (Calgary) Limited, Thermo Electron (Chile) S.p.A., Thermo Electron (Karlsruhe) GmbH, Thermo Electron (Management Services) Limited, Thermo Electron (Proprietary) Limited, Thermo Electron A/S, Thermo Electron Australia Pty Limited, Thermo Electron Export Inc., Thermo Electron Holdings SAS, Thermo Electron Industries, Thermo Electron LED GmbH, Thermo Electron LED S.A.S., Thermo Electron Limited, Thermo Electron Manufacturing Limited, Thermo Electron Metallurgical Services Inc., Thermo Electron North America LLC, Thermo Electron Pension Trust GmbH, Thermo Electron Puerto Rico Inc., Thermo Electron SAS, Thermo Electron Scientific Instruments LLC, Thermo Electron Sweden AB, Thermo Electron Sweden Forvaltning AB, Thermo Electron Weighing & Inspection Limited, Thermo Elemental Limited, Thermo Environmental Instruments LLC, Thermo Fast U.K. Limited, Thermo Finland Holdings LLC, Thermo Finland Holdings MT1 B.V., Thermo Finland Holdings MT2 B.V., Thermo Finnigan LLC, Thermo Finnigan Limited, Thermo Fisher (CN) Luxembourg Holding S.a.r.l., Thermo Fisher (CN) Luxembourg S.a.r.l., Thermo Fisher (CN) Malta Holdings Limited, Thermo Fisher (CN-I) Luxembourg LLC, Thermo Fisher (CN-II) Luxembourg LLC, Thermo Fisher (Cayman) Holdings I Ltd., Thermo Fisher (Cayman) Holdings II Ltd., Thermo Fisher (Finland Holdings 2) LLC, Thermo Fisher (Finland Holdings) Limited Partnership, Thermo Fisher (Gibraltar) II Limited, Thermo Fisher (Gibraltar) Limited, Thermo Fisher (Heysham) Limited, Thermo Fisher (Kandel) GmbH, Thermo Fisher CHK Holding LLC, Thermo Fisher China Business Trust, Thermo Fisher China Business Trust II, Thermo Fisher Costa Rica Sociedad de Responsabilidad Limitada, Thermo Fisher Cyprus Holdings LLC, Thermo Fisher Detection Mexico LLC, Thermo Fisher Diagnostics (Ireland) Limited, Thermo Fisher Diagnostics AB, Thermo Fisher Diagnostics AG, Thermo Fisher Diagnostics AS, Thermo Fisher Diagnostics Aps, Thermo Fisher Diagnostics Austria GmbH, Thermo Fisher Diagnostics B.V., Thermo Fisher Diagnostics GmbH, Thermo Fisher Diagnostics K.K., Thermo Fisher Diagnostics Limited, Thermo Fisher Diagnostics NV, Thermo Fisher Diagnostics S.L.U., Thermo Fisher Diagnostics S.p.A. , Thermo Fisher Diagnostics SAS, Thermo Fisher Diagnostics Sociedade Unipessoal Lda, Thermo Fisher Eurobonds Ltd., Thermo Fisher Financial Services Inc., Thermo Fisher GP LLC, Thermo Fisher German Holdings LLC, Thermo Fisher Germany B.V., Thermo Fisher India Divestco Private Limited, Thermo Fisher India Holding B.V., Thermo Fisher Insurance Holdings Inc., Thermo Fisher Insurance Holdings LLC, Thermo Fisher Investments (Cayman) Ltd., Thermo Fisher Israel Ltd., Thermo Fisher Production et Services SAS, Thermo Fisher Project Cyprus LLC, Thermo Fisher Re Ltd., Thermo Fisher Scientific (Asheville) LLC, Thermo Fisher Scientific (Australia) C.V., Thermo Fisher Scientific (Barbados) Holdings Ltd., Thermo Fisher Scientific (Breda) Holding BV, Thermo Fisher Scientific (Bremen) GmbH, Thermo Fisher Scientific (CN) Limited Partnership, Thermo Fisher Scientific (China) Co. Ltd., Thermo Fisher Scientific (China) Holding Limited, Thermo Fisher Scientific (China-HK) Holding Limited, Thermo Fisher Scientific (DE) Holding S.a.r.l., Thermo Fisher Scientific (Ecublens) SARL, Thermo Fisher Scientific (Finance I) B.V., Thermo Fisher Scientific (Finance I) S.a.r.l., Thermo Fisher Scientific (Finance II) S.a.r.l., Thermo Fisher Scientific (Finance III) LLC, Thermo Fisher Scientific (Finance III) S.a.r.l., Thermo Fisher Scientific (Fuji) LLC, Thermo Fisher Scientific (Guangzhou) Co. Ltd, Thermo Fisher Scientific (Holding II) B.V. & Co. KG, Thermo Fisher Scientific (Hong Kong) Limited, Thermo Fisher Scientific (IVGN) B.V., Thermo Fisher Scientific (IVGN) Limited, Thermo Fisher Scientific (Johannesburg) (Proprietary) Limited, Thermo Fisher Scientific (Mexico City) LLC, Thermo Fisher Scientific (Milwaukee) LLC, Thermo Fisher Scientific (Mississauga) Inc., Thermo Fisher Scientific (Monterrey) S. De R.L. De C.V., Thermo Fisher Scientific (NK) LLC, Thermo Fisher Scientific (PN) Austria Holding GmbH, Thermo Fisher Scientific (PN) UK LLC, Thermo Fisher Scientific (PN) UK Limited Partnership, Thermo Fisher Scientific (PN-I) SRL, Thermo Fisher Scientific (PN-II) SRL, Thermo Fisher Scientific (PN1) UK Ltd, Thermo Fisher Scientific (Panama) B.V., Thermo Fisher Scientific (Panama) Dutch LLC, Thermo Fisher Scientific (Praha) s.r.o., Thermo Fisher Scientific (Real Estate 1) GmbH & Co. KG, Thermo Fisher Scientific (Real Estate 1) S.a.r.l., Thermo Fisher Scientific (Schweiz) AG, Thermo Fisher Scientific (Shanghai) Instruments Co. Ltd., Thermo Fisher Scientific (Shanghai) Management Co. Ltd., Thermo Fisher Scientific (Suzhou) Instruments Co. Ltd, Thermo Fisher Scientific (Thailand) Co. Ltd., Thermo Fisher Scientific AL-1 LLC, Thermo Fisher Scientific AU C.V., Thermo Fisher Scientific AU II Limited, Thermo Fisher Scientific AU LLC, Thermo Fisher Scientific AU Limited, Thermo Fisher Scientific Africa Proprietary Ltd, Thermo Fisher Scientific Aquasensors LLC, Thermo Fisher Scientific Australia Pty Ltd, Thermo Fisher Scientific B.V., Thermo Fisher Scientific B.V.B.A., Thermo Fisher Scientific BHK (I) Limited, Thermo Fisher Scientific BHK (II) Limited, Thermo Fisher Scientific Baltics UAB, Thermo Fisher Scientific Beteiligungsverwaltungs GmbH, Thermo Fisher Scientific Biosciences Corp., Thermo Fisher Scientific Brahms LLC, Thermo Fisher Scientific Brasil Instrumentos de Processo Ltda., Thermo Fisher Scientific Brasil Servicos de Logistica Ltda, Thermo Fisher Scientific C.V., Thermo Fisher Scientific Cayman Investments LLC, Thermo Fisher Scientific Chemicals Inc., Thermo Fisher Scientific China (C-I) LLC, Thermo Fisher Scientific China (S) LLC, Thermo Fisher Scientific China Holdings I B.V., Thermo Fisher Scientific China Holdings II B.V., Thermo Fisher Scientific China Holdings III B.V., Thermo Fisher Scientific China Holdings IV B.V., Thermo Fisher Scientific Chromatography Holdings Aps, Thermo Fisher Scientific Chromatography Holdings S.a r.l., Thermo Fisher Scientific Cyprus I C.V., Thermo Fisher Scientific Cyprus I Ltd, Thermo Fisher Scientific Cyprus II C.V., Thermo Fisher Scientific Cyprus II Ltd, Thermo Fisher Scientific Cyprus III C.V., Thermo Fisher Scientific Cyprus III Ltd, Thermo Fisher Scientific Cyprus IV C.V., Thermo Fisher Scientific Cyprus V C.V., Thermo Fisher Scientific Denmark Senior Holdings ApS, Thermo Fisher Scientific Erie 1 Financing (Barbados) SRL, Thermo Fisher Scientific Erie Financing (Barbados) SRL, Thermo Fisher Scientific Erie Financing S.a r.l, Thermo Fisher Scientific Europe GmbH, Thermo Fisher Scientific FLC B.V., Thermo Fisher Scientific FLC Finance C.V., Thermo Fisher Scientific FLC II B.V., Thermo Fisher Scientific FLC LLC, Thermo Fisher Scientific FSIR Financing (Barbados) SRL, Thermo Fisher Scientific FSIR Financing S.a.r.l, Thermo Fisher Scientific FSUKHCO Financing (Barbados) SRL, Thermo Fisher Scientific Falcon Senior Holdings Inc., Thermo Fisher Scientific Finance Company BV, Thermo Fisher Scientific GENEART GmbH, Thermo Fisher Scientific Germany BV & Co. KG, Thermo Fisher Scientific GmbH, Thermo Fisher Scientific HR Services Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Thermo Fisher Scientific Holdings (Cayman) I, Thermo Fisher Scientific Holdings (Cayman) II , Thermo Fisher Scientific Holdings Europe Limited, Thermo Fisher Scientific IT Services GmbH, Thermo Fisher Scientific India Holding LLC, Thermo Fisher Scientific India Pvt Ltd, Thermo Fisher Scientific Investments (Luxembourg) S.a.r.l., Thermo Fisher Scientific Investments (Malta) Limited, Thermo Fisher Scientific Investments (Sweden) LLC, Thermo Fisher Scientific Investments (Sweden) S.a.r.l., Thermo Fisher Scientific Investments Malta (Sweden Financing) Limited, Thermo Fisher Scientific Invitrogen Financing (Barbados) SRL, Thermo Fisher Scientific Japan Holdings I B.V., Thermo Fisher Scientific Japan Holdings II B.V., Thermo Fisher Scientific Japan Holdings III B.V., Thermo Fisher Scientific K.K., Thermo Fisher Scientific Korea Ltd., Thermo Fisher Scientific LSI Financing (Barbados) SRL, Thermo Fisher Scientific Life CV GP Holdings II LLC, Thermo Fisher Scientific Life CV GP Holdings LLC, Thermo Fisher Scientific Life Enterprises C.V., Thermo Fisher Scientific Life Enterprises GP LLC, Thermo Fisher Scientific Life Financing (Barbados) SRL, Thermo Fisher Scientific Life Financing (Cayman), Thermo Fisher Scientific Life Financing C.V., Thermo Fisher Scientific Life Financing Limited, Thermo Fisher Scientific Life Holdings I C.V., Thermo Fisher Scientific Life Holdings II C.V., Thermo Fisher Scientific Life Holdings III C.V., Thermo Fisher Scientific Life Holdings Limited, Thermo Fisher Scientific Life International GP Holdings LLC, Thermo Fisher Scientific Life International Holdings I C.V., Thermo Fisher Scientific Life International Holdings II C.V., Thermo Fisher Scientific Life Investments C.V., Thermo Fisher Scientific Life Investments GP LLC, Thermo Fisher Scientific Life Investments I S.a.r.l., Thermo Fisher Scientific Life Investments II S.a r.l., Thermo Fisher Scientific Life Investments III S.a.r.l., Thermo Fisher Scientific Life Investments IV S.a.r.l, Thermo Fisher Scientific Life Investments Malta Holding I LLC, Thermo Fisher Scientific Life Investments Malta Holding II LLC, Thermo Fisher Scientific Life Investments Malta I Limited, Thermo Fisher Scientific Life Investments Malta II Limited, Thermo Fisher Scientific Life Investments US Financing I LLC, Thermo Fisher Scientific Life Investments US Financing II LLC, Thermo Fisher Scientific Life NL Holdings GP LLC, Thermo Fisher Scientific Life Netherlands Holding C.V., Thermo Fisher Scientific Life Senior GP Holdings II LLC, Thermo Fisher Scientific Life Senior GP Holdings LLC, Thermo Fisher Scientific Life Senior Holdings C.V., Thermo Fisher Scientific Life Senior Holdings II C.V., Thermo Fisher Scientific Life Senior Holdings Inc., Thermo Fisher Scientific Life Switzerland Holdings GP LLC, Thermo Fisher Scientific Life Tech Korea Holdings LLC, Thermo Fisher Scientific Life Technologies Enterprise Holding Limited, Thermo Fisher Scientific Life Technologies Investment I LLC, Thermo Fisher Scientific Life Technologies Investment II LLC, Thermo Fisher Scientific Life Technologies Investment UK I Limited, Thermo Fisher Scientific Life Technologies Investment UK II Limited, Thermo Fisher Scientific Life Technologies Investments Holding LP, Thermo Fisher Scientific Life Technologies Israel Investment I Limited, Thermo Fisher Scientific Life Technologies Israel Investment II Limited, Thermo Fisher Scientific Life Technologies Luxembourg Holding LLC, Thermo Fisher Scientific Luxembourg Enterprise Holdings S.a r.l., Thermo Fisher Scientific Luxembourg German Holdings S.a.r.l., Thermo Fisher Scientific Luxembourg Life Technologies UK Holding S.a r.l, Thermo Fisher Scientific Luxembourg Sweden Holdings I S.a r.l, Thermo Fisher Scientific Luxembourg Sweden Holdings II S.a r.l., Thermo Fisher Scientific Luxembourg Venture Holdings I S.a.r.l., Thermo Fisher Scientific Luxembourg Venture Holdings II S.a.r.l., Thermo Fisher Scientific Malaysia Sdn. Bhd., Thermo Fisher Scientific Malta Holdings LLC, Thermo Fisher Scientific Messtechnik GmbH, Thermo Fisher Scientific Mexico City S. de R.L. de C.V., Thermo Fisher Scientific Middle East Holdings Inc., Thermo Fisher Scientific Milano Srl, Thermo Fisher Scientific NHK Limited, Thermo Fisher Scientific New Zealand Holdings, Thermo Fisher Scientific New Zealand Limited, Thermo Fisher Scientific Norway Holdings AS, Thermo Fisher Scientific Norway US Investments LLC, Thermo Fisher Scientific Odyssey Financing (Barbados) SRL, Thermo Fisher Scientific Odyssey Holdings Limited, Thermo Fisher Scientific Operating Company LLC, Thermo Fisher Scientific Oy, Thermo Fisher Scientific PN2 C.V, Thermo Fisher Scientific PN2 LLC, Thermo Fisher Scientific PRB LLC, Thermo Fisher Scientific PRB Malta Limited, Thermo Fisher Scientific PRB S.a.r.l., Thermo Fisher Scientific Panama I Cayman Ltd, Thermo Fisher Scientific Peru S.R.L., Thermo Fisher Scientific Pte. Ltd., Thermo Fisher Scientific Re Ltd., Thermo Fisher Scientific SL, Thermo Fisher Scientific Senior Financing LLC, Thermo Fisher Scientific Senior Holdings Australia LLC, Thermo Fisher Scientific South Africa Proprietary Ltd, Thermo Fisher Scientific SpA, Thermo Fisher Scientific Spectra LLC, Thermo Fisher Scientific Spectra Malta Limited, Thermo Fisher Scientific Spectra S.a.r.l., Thermo Fisher Scientific Spectra-Physics Holdings Luxembourg I S.a r.l., Thermo Fisher Scientific Spectra-Physics Holdings Luxembourg II S.a r.l., Thermo Fisher Scientific Spectra-Physics Investments Malta Limited, Thermo Fisher Scientific Switzerland Holdings C.V., Thermo Fisher Scientific TR Limited, Thermo Fisher Scientific Taiwan Co. Ltd., Thermo Fisher Scientific Vermogensverwaltungs GmbH, Thermo Fisher Scientific West Palm Holdings LLC, Thermo Fisher Scientific Wissenschaftliche Gerate GmbH, Thermo Fisher Scientific Worldwide Investments (Cayman), Thermo Fisher Scientific eCommerce Solutions LLC , Thermo Fisher Senior Canada Holdings LLC, Thermo Foundation Inc., Thermo Gamma-Metrics Holdings Pty Ltd., Thermo Gamma-Metrics LLC, Thermo Gamma-Metrics Pty Ltd, Thermo Holding European Operations LLC, Thermo Hypersil Ltd, Thermo Hypersil-Keystone LLC, Thermo Informatics Asia Pacific Pty Ltd., Thermo Instrument Controls de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Thermo Kevex X-Ray LLC, Thermo Keytek LLC, Thermo LabSystems Inc., Thermo LabSystems S.A., Thermo Life Science International Trading (Tianjin) Co. Ltd., Thermo Life Sciences AB, Thermo Luxembourg Holding S.a.r.l., Thermo Luxembourg S.a.r.l., Thermo MF Physics LLC, Thermo Measurement Ltd, Thermo Measuretech Canada Inc., Thermo Neslab LLC, Thermo Nicolet Limited, Thermo Onix Limited, Thermo Optek (Australia) Pty Ltd., Thermo Optek Limited, Thermo Optek S.A., Thermo Orion Inc., Thermo Portable Holdings LLC, Thermo Power Corporation, Thermo Process Instruments GP LLC, Thermo Process Instruments L.P., Thermo Projects Limited, Thermo Quest S.A., Thermo Radiometrie Limited, Thermo Ramsey Italia S.r.l., Thermo Ramsey LLC, Thermo Ramsey S.A., Thermo Re Ltd., Thermo Scientific Microbiology Pte Ltd., Thermo Scientific Microbiology Sdn Bhd, Thermo Scientific Portable Analytical Instruments Inc., Thermo Scientific Services Inc., Thermo Securities Corporation, Thermo Sentron Canada Inc., Thermo Sentron Limited, Thermo Shandon Inc., Thermo Shandon Limited, Thermo Suomi Holding B.V., Thermo TLH (UK) Limited, Thermo TLH L.P., Thermo Trace Pty Ltd., Thermo-Fisher Biochemical Product (Beijing) Co. Ltd., ThermoLase LLC, ThermoSpectra Limited, Trek Diagnostic Systems LLC, Trek Diagnostic Systems Ltd., Trek Holding Company II Ltd., Trek Holding Company Ltd., Trex Medical Corporation, USB Corporation, Union Lab Supplies Limited, United Diagnostics Inc., VG Systems Limited, Westover Scientific Inc., ZAO PE Biosystems, eBioscience GmbH, eBioscience Ltd, eBioscience SAS, and picoSpin LLC. The following companies are subsidiares of PPG Industries: AIPCF V Texstars Blocker Inc., AkzoNobel, Alermac Inversiones S.A. de C.V., Alpha Coating Technologies LLC, Alpha Coatings Inc., Broad Range Development Limited, Brown Brothers Distribution Limited, CG Holdings Manufacturing Co., Centro de Investigacion en Polimeros S.A. de C.V., Chemfil Canada Limited, Chorlton Trade Paints Limited, Comercial Mexicana de Pinturas S.A. de C.V., Comex, Comex Industrial Coatings S.A. de C.V., Consorcio Comex S.A. de C.V., Cristacol S.A., Cuming Microwave Corporation, Deutek SA, Dexmet Corporation, Dexmet Holding Corporation, Distribuidora Kroma S.A. de C.V., EPIC Insurance Co. Ltd., Eberle Design Inc., Empresa Aga S.A. de C.V., Ennis Canadian Holding Company, Ennis Flint Soluciones Seguras Para Trafico, Ennis Highway Traffic Technology (Beijing) Co. Ltd., Ennis Manufacturing Sdn Bhd, Ennis Paint Australia Holding Pty Ltd, Ennis Paint Boya Sanayi ve Ticaret A.S., Ennis Paint Canada ULC, Ennis Paint Germany GmbH, Ennis Paint Netherlands Holdings LLC, Ennis Paint U.K. Holding Company Limited, Ennis Traffic Safety Solutions Pty Ltd, Ennis Flint Mexico, Ennis Flint New Zealand, Ennis Flint New Zealand Holding Pty Ltd, Ennis-Flint, Ennis-Flint Africa (Pty) Ltd, Ennis-Flint Inc., Foshan Bairun Chemicals Co. Ltd., Fpu Industrial S.A. de C.V., Grupo Comex S.A. de C.V., Hemmelrath Automotive Coatings (Jilin) Co. Ltd., Hodij Coatings B.V., Homax Products, Industria Chimica Reggiana I.C.R. SPA, Johnstones Paints Limited, Kalon Investment Company Limited, Kalon South Africa Proprietary Limited, Manchester Thermoplastics LLC, Masterwork Paint, MetoKote Canada Limited, MetoKote Corporation, MetoKote Mexico Holding Inc., MetoKote UK Limited, MetoKote de Mexico S. de RL de CV, PPG AC - France SA, PPG ALESCO Automotive Finishes Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., PPG AP Resinas S.A. de C.V., PPG Aerospace Materials (Suzhou) Co. Ltd., PPG Architectural Coatings (Puerto Rico) Inc., PPG Architectural Coatings Canada Inc., PPG Architectural Coatings Ireland Limited, PPG Architectural Coatings Italy S.r.l., PPG Architectural Coatings UK Limited, PPG Architectural Finishes Inc., PPG Asian Paints Private Ltd., PPG COATINGS SINGAPORE PTE. LTD., PPG Canada Inc., PPG Cieszyn S.A., PPG Coatings (Hong Kong) Co. Limited, PPG Coatings (Kunshan) Co. Ltd., PPG Coatings (Malaysia) Sdn. Bhd., PPG Coatings (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., PPG Coatings (Thailand) Co. Ltd., PPG Coatings (Tianjin) Co. Ltd., PPG Coatings (Wuhu) Company Ltd., PPG Coatings (Zhangjiagang) Co. Ltd., PPG Coatings B.V., PPG Coatings Belgium BV, PPG Coatings Danmark A/S, PPG Coatings Deutschland GmbH, PPG Coatings Europe B.V., PPG Coatings Manufacturing SARL, PPG Coatings Nederland BV, PPG Coatings S.A., PPG Coatings South Africa (Pty) Ltd., PPG DYRUP S.A., PPG Deco Czech a.s., PPG Deco Polska sp. z.o.o., PPG Deco Slovakia s.r.o., PPG Deutschland Business Support GmbH, PPG Deutschland Sales & Services GmbH, PPG Distribution S.A.S., PPG Europe B.V., PPG Finance B.V., PPG France Business Support S.A.S., PPG France Manufacturing S.A.S., PPG Guadeloupe SAS, PPG Hellas S.A., PPG Hemmelrath Coatings Inc., PPG Hemmelrath Lackfabrik GmbH, PPG Holdco SAS, PPG Holdings (U.K.) Limited, PPG Holdings Argentina USA LLC, PPG Holdings Latin America USA LLC, PPG Iberica S.A., PPG Iberica Sales & Services S.L., PPG Industrial Coatings B.V., PPG Industrial do Brasil - Tintas E. Vernizes - Ltda., PPG Industries (Korea) Ltd., PPG Industries (Singapore) Pte. Ltd., PPG Industries (UK) Ltd, PPG Industries Argentina S.R.L., PPG Industries Australia PTY Limited A.C.N. 055 500 939, PPG Industries Colombia Ltda., PPG Industries Czech Republic s.r.o., PPG Industries Delfzijl B.V., PPG Industries Europe Sarl, PPG Industries France S.A.S., PPG Industries International Inc., PPG Industries Italia S.r.l., PPG Industries Kimya a Sanayi VE Ticaret AS, PPG Industries LLC, PPG Industries Lipetsk LLC, PPG Industries Middle East FZE, PPG Industries Netherlands B.V., PPG Industries New Zealand Limited, PPG Industries Ohio Inc., PPG Industries Poland Sp. Z.o.o., PPG Industries Securities LLC, PPG Industries de Mexico S.A. de C.V., PPG Italia Business Support S.r.l., PPG Italia Sales & Services S.r.l., PPG Japan Ltd., PPG Kansai Automotive Finishes Canada LP, PPG Kansai Automotive Finishes U.K. LLP, PPG Kansai Automotive Finishes U.S. LLC, PPG Luxembourg Finance S.aR.L., PPG Luxembourg Holdings S.aR.L., PPG Management (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., PPG Mexico S.A. de C.V., PPG Packaging Coatings (Suzhou) Co. Ltd., PPG Paints Trading (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., PPG Performance Coatings (Hong Kong) Limited, PPG Powder Coatings (Shanghai) Limited, PPG Romania S.A., PPG SSC Co. Ltd., PPG Switzerland GmbH, PPG Trilak Kft., PPG Vietnam Co. Ltd., PRC-DeSoto Australia Pty Ltd., PRC-DeSoto International Inc., PT. PPG Coatings Indonesia, Painter's Supply, Paintzen, Peintures de Paris SAS, Plasticos Envolventes S.A. de C.V., Polymeric Systems Inc., Prismo Road Markings Limited, ProCoatings B.V., ProCoatings BV, Protec Pty Ltd. A.C.N. 007 857 392, Reno A&E LLC, Revocoat France SAS, Revocoat Holding SAS, Revocoat Iberica SLU, Revocoat S.A.S, Road Infrastructure Investment Holdings Inc., SEM Products Inc., Sealants Europe SAS, Sierracin Corporation, Sierracin/Sylmar Corporation, Sigma Marine & Protective Coatings Holding B.V., SigmaKalon (BC) UK Limited, SigmaKalon Group, SigmaKalon Middle East B.V., Sikar (Shanghai) Trading Co. Ltd., Spraylat International Ltd, Texstars LLC, The Crown Group Co., The Crown Group Inc, The Homax Group, Tikkurila Group, Traffic Safety Intermediate LLC, Traffic Safety Parent LLC, United International Business NV, Vanex Inc., Vernisol S.p.A., Versaflex, Viasa S.A. de C.V., Whitford, Whitford B.V., Whitford Corporation, Whitford Jiangmen Ltd., Whitford Ltd. (HK), Whitford Ltd. (UK), Whitford Pte. Ltd., Whitford S.r.l., Whitford Worldwide Company LLC, Worwag Coatings, and Zaganite Industries Pty Ltd. iShares MSCI Japan ETF's stock reverse split on the morning of Monday, November 7th 2016. The 1-4 reverse split was announced on Friday, October 14th 2016. The number of shares owned by shareholders was adjusted after the market closes on Friday, November 4th 2016. An investor that had 100 shares of iShares MSCI Japan ETF stock prior to the reverse split would have 25 shares after the split. Invesco High Income Trust II is a closed ended fixed income mutual fund launched by Invesco Ltd. The fund is co-managed by Invesco Advisers, Inc, INVESCO Asset Management (Japan) Limited, INVESCO Asset Management Deutschland GmbH, INVESCO Asset Management Limited, Invesco Hong Kong Limited, INVESCO Senior Secured Management, Inc., and Invesco Canada Ltd. It invests in the fixed income markets. The fund seeks to invest in securities rated between BB and C by Standard and Poor's. It seeks to maintain an average duration of around three to four years for its portfolio. The fund benchmarks the performance of its portfolio against the Barclays U.S. Corporate High Yield 2% Issuer Cap Inde. It was formerly known as Invesco Van Kampen High Income Trust II. Invesco High Income Trust II was formed on April 28, 1989 and is domiciled in the United States. Read More The following companies are subsidiares of Sealed Air: A.P.S. (Holdings) Limited, AFP Trading (China) Co. Ltd., AFPTOH LTD, APS Automated Packaging Systems GmbH & Co. KG, APS Verwaltungs-GmbH, Air Ride Pallets Hong Kong Limited, Austin Foam Plastics Inc. (dba AFP Inc.), Automated Packaging Systems, Automated Packaging Systems Asia Holding Company Limited, Automated Packaging Systems Comerciale Importacao do Brasil Ltda., Automated Packaging Systems Europe, Automated Packaging Systems LLC, Automated Packaging Systems Limited, Automated Packaging Systems Southeast Asia Co. Ltd., B+ Equipment, B+ Equipment SAS, Beacon Holdings LLC, Biosphere Industries, BluPack (New Zealand), Blue Dot Packaging Pty Ltd., Cactus (Shanghai) Trading Co. Ltd., Cryovac (Malaysia) SDN. BHD, Cryovac Brasil Ltda., Cryovac Holdings II LLC, Cryovac International Holdings Inc., Cryovac LLC*, Cryovac Leasing Corporation, Cryovac Londrina Ltda., Cryovac Packaging Portugal Embalagens Ltda., Cryovac-Sealed Air de Costa Rica S.R.L., DELTAPLAM Embalagens Industria e Comercio, Diversey, Diversey J Trustee Limited, Diversey Trustee Limited, Entapack Pty. Ltd., Fagerdala (Chengdu) Packaging Co. Ltd, Fagerdala (Shanghai) Foams Co. Ltd., Fagerdala (Shanghai) Polymer Co. Ltd., Fagerdala (Suzhou) Packaging Co. Ltd., Fagerdala (Thailand) Limited, Fagerdala (Xiamen) Packaging Co. Ltd., Fagerdala Leamchabung Limited, Fagerdala Malaysia Sdn Bhd, Fagerdala Mexico S.A. de C.V., Fagerdala Mexico Supply Chain S.A. de C.V., Fagerdala Packaging Inc. (Indiana), Fagerdala Singapore Pte Ltd, Fagerdala Singapore Pte. Ltd., Getpacking.com GmbH, Invertol S. de R.L. de C.V., JSC Sealed Air Kaustik, KRIS Automated Packaging Systems Holding Company, Kevothermal LLC, Kevothermal Limited, Nelipak Holdings, Pack-Tiger GmbH, Polyrol Limited, Polyrol Packaging Systems LLC, ProAseptic Technologies S.L., Producembal- Producao de Embalagens LTDA, Reflectix Inc., SLD Air Packaging Paketleme Malzemeleri Ticaret Limited Sirketi, Saddle Brook Insurance Company, Sealed Air (Asia) Holdings BV, Sealed Air (Barbados) S.R.L., Sealed Air (Canada) Co./CIE, Sealed Air (Canada) Holdings B.V., Sealed Air (China) Co. Ltd., Sealed Air (China) Limited, Sealed Air (Israel) Ltd., Sealed Air (Korea) Limited, Sealed Air (Latin America) Holdings II LLC, Sealed Air (Malaysia) Sdn. Bhd., Sealed Air (New Zealand), Sealed Air (Philippines) Inc., Sealed Air (Singapore) Pte. Limited, Sealed Air (Ukraine) Limited, Sealed Air Africa (Pty.) Limited, Sealed Air Americas Manufacturing S. de R.L. de C.V., Sealed Air Argentina S.A., Sealed Air Australia (Holdings) Pty. Limited, Sealed Air Australia Pty. Limited, Sealed Air Australia Real Estate Pty Ltd, Sealed Air B.V., Sealed Air Belgium N.V., Sealed Air Central America S.A., Sealed Air Chile SpA, Sealed Air Colombia Ltda., Sealed Air Corporation (US), Sealed Air Cyprus Ltd., Sealed Air Denmark A/S, Sealed Air Finance B.V., Sealed Air Finance II LLC, Sealed Air Finance Luxembourg S.a.r.l., Sealed Air Funding LLC, Sealed Air General Trading LLC, Sealed Air GmbH (Germany), Sealed Air GmbH (Switzerland), Sealed Air Hellas SA, Sealed Air Holding France SAS, Sealed Air Holdings (New Zealand) Pty. Ltd., Sealed Air Holdings South Africa Proprietary Limited, Sealed Air Holdings UK I Limited, Sealed Air Holdings UK Limited, Sealed Air Hong Kong Limited, Sealed Air Hungary Ltd., Sealed Air Investment and Management (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Sealed Air Japan G.K., Sealed Air LLC, Sealed Air Limited (Ireland), Sealed Air Limited (UK), Sealed Air Luxembourg (I) S.a.r.l., Sealed Air Luxembourg (II) S.a.r.l., Sealed Air Luxembourg S.a.r.l., Sealed Air Management Holding Verwaltungs GmbH, Sealed Air Multiflex GmbH, Sealed Air Netherlands (Holdings) I B.V., Sealed Air Netherlands (Holdings) II B.V., Sealed Air Netherlands Holdings V B.V., Sealed Air Norge AS, Sealed Air OY, Sealed Air Packaging (India) Private Limited, Sealed Air Packaging (Shanghai) Co. Limited, Sealed Air Packaging (Thailand) Co. Ltd., Sealed Air Packaging LLC, Sealed Air Packaging Materials (India) LLP, Sealed Air Packaging S.L.U., Sealed Air Peru S.A.C., Sealed Air Polska Sp. Zoo, Sealed Air Pty Limited, Sealed Air S.A S., Sealed Air S.r.l., Sealed Air South Africa (Pty.) Ltd., Sealed Air Svenska AB, Sealed Air Taiwan Limited, Sealed Air UK Limited Partnership, Sealed Air US Holdings (Thailand) LLC, Sealed Air Uruguay S.A., Sealed Air Verpackungen GmbH, Sealed Air de Mexico Operations S. de RL. de C.V., Sealed Air de Venezuela S.A., Sealed Air s.r.o., Shanklin Corp, Shanklin Corporation, TTS-Ciptec, TXAFP Asia Pacific Ltd., TXAFP GP LLC, and Trigon Industries. SPDR S&P MidCap 400 ETF Trust's stock was trading at $288.91 on March 11th, 2020 when Coronavirus reached pandemic status according to the World Health Organization. Since then, MDY stock has increased by 68.2% and is now trading at $485.85. View which stocks have been most impacted by COVID-19. SunTrust Banks, Inc. operates as the holding company for SunTrust Bank that provides various financial services for consumers, businesses, corporations, institutions, and not-for-profit entities in the United States. It operates in two segments, Consumer and Wholesale. The Consumer segment provides deposits and payments; home equity and personal credit lines; auto, student, and other lending products; credit cards; discount/online and full-service brokerage products; professional investment advisory products and services; and trust services, as well as family office solutions. This segment also offers residential mortgage products in the secondary market. The Wholesale segment provides capital markets solutions, including advisory, capital raising, and financial risk management; asset-based financing solutions, such as securitizations, asset-based lending, equipment financing, and structured real estate arrangements; cash management services and auto dealer financing solutions; investment banking solutions; and credit and deposit, fee-based product offering, multi-family agency lending, advisory, commercial mortgage brokerage, and tailored financing and equity investment solutions. This segment also offers treasury and payment solutions, such as operating various electronic and paper payment types, which comprise card, wire transfer, automated clearing house, check, and cash; and provides services clients to manage their accounts online. The company offers its products and services through a network of traditional and in-store branches, automated teller machines, Internet, mobile, and telephone banking channels. As of December 31, 2018, it operated 1,218 full-service banking offices located in Florida, Georgia, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Maryland, South Carolina, and the District of Columbia. SunTrust Banks, Inc. was founded in 1891 and is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. Read More The following companies are subsidiares of Tenet Healthcare: 1 Subsidiaries of this entity in which Tenet Healthcare Corporation directly and indirectly held a 95% ownership interest at December 31 2020 are set forth in the table below., 25 East Same Day Surgery L.L.C., 300 PBL Development LLC, 45th Street MOB LLC, 601 N 30th Street I L.L.C., 601 N 30th Street II L.L.C., 601 N 30th Street III Inc., AHM Acquisition Co. Inc., AIG Holdings LLC, AIGB Global LLC, AIGB Group Inc., AIGB Holdings Inc., AIGB Management Services LLC, AMC/North Fulton Urgent Care #1 L.L.C., AMC/North Fulton Urgent Care #2 L.L.C., AMC/North Fulton Urgent Care #3 L.L.C., AMC/North Fulton Urgent Care #4 L.L.C., AMC/North Fulton Urgent Care #5 L.L.C., AMI Information Systems Group Inc., AMI/HTI Tarzana Encino Joint Venture, APN, ARC Worcester Center L.P., ASC Old Co. LP, ASC of New Jersey LLC, ASJH Joint Venture LLC, Abrazo Health Network EP Clinical Services LLC, Abrazo Surgical Outpatient Center LLC, Advanced Ambulatory Surgical Care L.P., Advanced Center for Surgery Vero Beach LLC, Advanced Regional Surgery Center LLC, Advanced Surgery Center of Metairie LLC, Advanced Surgery Center of Sarasota LLC, Advanced Surgery Center of Tampa LLC, Advanced Surgical Care of St Louis LLC, Advanced Surgical Concepts LLC, Advantage Health Care Management Company LLC, Advantage Health Network Inc., AdventHealth Surgery Center Celebration LLC, AdventHealth Surgery Center Mills Park LLC, AdventHealth Surgery Center Wellswood LLC, AdventHealth Surgery Center Winter Garden LLC, AdventHealth Surgery Centers Central Florida LLC, AdventHealth Surgery Centers West Florida LLC, Adventist Midwest Health/USP Surgery Centers L.L.C., Alabama Cardiovascular Associates L.L.C., Alabama Digestive Health Endoscopy Center L.L.C., Alabama Hand and Sports Medicine L.L.C., Alamo Heights Surgicare L.P., All Star MOB LLC, Allegian Insurance Company, Alliance Surgery Birmingham LLC, Alliance Surgery Inc., Alvarado Hospital Medical Center Inc., Ambulatory Surgical Associates LLC, Ambulatory Surgical Center of Somerville LLC, American Institute of Gastric Banding Ltd., American Institute of Gastric Banding Phoenix Limited Partnership, American Medical (Central) Inc., Amisub (Heights) Inc., Amisub (Hilton Head) Inc., Amisub (North Ridge Hospital) Inc., Amisub (SFH) Inc., Amisub (Twelve Oaks) Inc., Amisub of California Inc., Amisub of North Carolina Inc., Amisub of South Carolina Inc., Amisub of Texas Inc., Anaheim Hills Medical Imaging L.L.C., Anaheim MRI Holding Inc., Anesthesia Partners of Gallatin LLC, Arizona Care Network Next L.L.C., Arizona Health Partners LLC, Arlington Orthopedic and Spine Hospital LLC, Arrowhead Endoscopy and Pain Management Center LLC, Asia Outsourcing US Inc., Aspen Healthcare, Atlanta Medical Center Inc., Atlanta Medical Center Interventional Neurology Associates L.L.C., Atlanta Medical Center Neurosurgical & Spine Specialists L.L.C., Atlanta Medical Center Physician Group L.L.C., Atlantic Coast Surgical Suites LLC, Atlantic Health-USP Surgery Centers L.L.C., Avita/USP Surgery Centers L.L.C., BBH BMC LLC, BBH CBMC LLC, BBH DevelopmentCo LLC, BBH Imaging Jasper LLC, BBH NP Clinicians Inc., BBH PBMC LLC, BBH SBMC LLC, BBH WBMC LLC, BCDC EmployeeCO LLC, BHC-Talladega Pediatrics LLC, BHS Accountable Care LLC, BHS Affinity LLC, BHS Integrated Physician Partners LLC, BHS Physician Performance Network LLC, BHS Physicians Alliance for ACE LLC, BHS Physicians Network Inc., BHS Specialty Network Inc., BT East Dallas JV LLP, BW Cardiology LLC, BW Cyberknife LLC, BW Hand Practice LLC, BW Office Buildings LLC, BW Parking Decks LLC, BW Physician Practices LLC, BW Retail Pharmacy LLC, BW Sports Practice LLC, Bagley Holdings LLC, Baptist Accountable Care LLC, Baptist Diagnostics LLC, Baptist Health Centers LLC, Baptist Physician Alliance ACO LLC, Baptist Physician Alliance LLC, Baptist Plaza Surgicare L.P., Baptist Surgery Center L.P., Baptist Womens Health Center LLC, Baptist/USP Surgery Centers L.L.C., Bartlett ASC LLC, Baylor Surgicare at Baylor Plano LLC, Baylor Surgicare at Blue Star LLC, Baylor Surgicare at Granbury LLC, Baylor Surgicare at Mansfield LLC, Baylor Surgicare at North Dallas LLC, Baylor Surgicare at Plano LLC, Baylor Surgicare at Plano Parkway LLC, Bear Creek Surgery Center LLC, Beaumont Surgical Affiliates Ltd., Bellaire Outpatient Surgery Center L.L.P., Berkshire Eye LLC, Bloomington ASC LLC, Blue Ridge/USP Surgery Centers LLC, Bluffton Okatie Primary Care L.L.C., Bluffton Okatie Surgery Center L.L.C., Bon Secours Surgery Center at Harbour View LLC, Bon Secours Surgery Center at Virginia Beach LLC, Bozeman Health/USP Surgery Centers L.L.C., Bozeman MOB LLC, Briarcliff Ambulatory Surgery Center L.P., Bristol Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, Broad River Primary Care L.L.C., Brookwood - Maternal Fetal Medicine L.L.C., Brookwood Ancillary Holdings Inc., Brookwood Baptist Health 1 LLC, Brookwood Baptist Health 2 LLC, Brookwood Baptist Health 3 LLC, Brookwood Baptist Imaging LLC, Brookwood Center Development Corporation, Brookwood Development Inc., Brookwood Diagnostic Imaging Center LLC, Brookwood Garages L.L.C., Brookwood Health Services Inc., Brookwood Home Health LLC, Brookwood Occupational Health Clinic L.L.C., Brookwood Parking Associates Ltd., Brookwood Primary Care - Homewood L.L.C., Brookwood Primary Care - Inverness L.L.C., Brookwood Primary Care - Mountain Brook L.L.C., Brookwood Primary Care - Oak Mountain L.L.C., Brookwood Primary Care - Vestavia L.L.C., Brookwood Primary Care Cahaba Heights L.L.C., Brookwood Primary Care Hoover L.L.C., Brookwood Primary Care The Narrows L.L.C., Brookwood Primary Network Care Inc., Brookwood Specialty Care - Endocrinology L.L.C., Brookwood Sports and Orthopedics L.L.C., Brookwood Womens Care L.L.C., Brookwood Womens Diagnostic Center LLC, C7 Technologies LLC, CGH Hospital Ltd., CHIC/USP Surgery Centers LLC, CHN Holdings LLC, CHRISTUS Cabrini Surgery Center L.L.C., CHVI Tucson Holdings LLC, CML-Chicago Market Labs Inc., CRNAs of Michigan, CS/USP General Partner LLC, CS/USP Surgery Centers LP, California Joint & Spine LLC, Camp Creek Urgent Care L.L.C., Camp Lowell Surgery Center L.L.C., Captive Insurance Services Inc., Cardiology Physicians Associates L.L.C., Cardiology Physicians Corporation L.L.C., Cardiovascular & Thoracic Surgery Associates L.L.C., Cardiovascular Clinical Excellence at Sierra Providence LLC, CareSpot of Austin LLC, CareSpot of Memphis LLC, CareSpot of Orlando/HSI Urgent Care LLC, Carmel Specialty Surgery Center LLC, Carondelet St. Marys-Northwest L.L.C., Cascade Spine Center LLC, Castle Rock Surgery Center LLC, Catawba-Piedmont Cardiothoracic Surgery L.L.C., Cedar Hill Primary Care L.L.C., Cedar Park Surgery Center L.L.P., Centennial ASC LLC, Center for Advanced Research Excellence L.L.C., Center for the Urban Child Inc., Central California Healthcare Holdings LLC, Central Carolina Physicians - Sandhills L.L.C., Central Carolina-IMA L.L.C., Central Jersey Surgery Center LLC, Central Texas Corridor Hospital Company LLC, Central Valley Quality Alliance LLC, Central Virginia Surgi-Center L.P., Centura Ventures Surgery Centers LLC, Centura/USP Colorado Springs Surgery Centers L.L.C., Chalon Living Inc., Chandler Endoscopy Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, Charlotte Endoscopic Surgery Center LLC, Chattanooga Pain Management Center LLC, Chesterfield Ambulatory Surgery Center L.P., Chesterfield Anesthesia Associates of Missouri LLC, Chico Surgery Center L.P., Childrens Hospital of Michigan Premier Network Inc., Citrus Heights ASC RE LLC, Clarkston ASC Partners LLC, Clarksville Surgery Center LLC, Coast Healthcare Management LLC, Coast Surgery Center L.P., Coastal Carolina Medical Center, Coastal Carolina Medical Center Inc., Coastal Carolina Physician Practices LLC, Coastal Carolina Pro Fee Billing L.L.C., Coastal Endo LLC, Colorado GI Centers LLC, Commonwealth Continental Health Care Inc., Community Connection Health Plan Inc., Community Hospital LLC, Community Hospital of Los Gatos Inc., Conifer Care Continuum Solutions LLC, Conifer Ethics and Compliance Inc., Conifer Global Business Center Inc., Conifer Global Holdings Inc., Conifer Health Solutions LLC, Conifer Holdings Inc., Conifer Patient Communications LLC, Conifer Physician Services Holdings Inc., Conifer Physician Services Inc., Conifer Revenue Cycle Solutions LLC, Conifer Value-Based Care LLC, Conroe Surgery Center 2 LLC, Coral Gables Hospital Inc., Coral Ridge Outpatient Center LLC, Corpus Christi Surgicare Ltd., Covenant/USP Surgery Centers LLC, CreAtiv Management Company Inc., Creekwood Investors LLC, Creekwood Surgery Center L.P., Crown Point Surgery Center LLC, DH/USP SJOSC Investment Company L.L.C., DH/USP Sacramento Pain GP LLC, DMC Detroit Receiving Hospital Premier Clinical Co-Management Services LLC, DMC Education & Research, DMC Harper University Hospital Premier Clinical Co-Management Services LLC, DMC Huron Valley-Sinai Hospital Premier Clinical Management Services LLC, DMC Imaging L.L.C., Dallas Surgical Partners LLC, DeTar/USP Surgery Center LLC, Delray Beach ASC LLC, Delray Medical Center Inc., Delray Medical Physician Services L.L.C., Denton Surgicare Partners Ltd., Denton Surgicare Real Estate Ltd., Denville Surgery Center LLC, Des Peres Physician Network LLC, Desert Cove MOB LLC, Desert Regional Medical Center Inc., Desert Ridge Outpatient Surgery LLC, Desoto Surgicare Partners Ltd., Destin ASC RE LLC, Destin Surgery Center LLC, Detroit Education & Research, DigitalMed Inc., Dignity/Abrazo Health Network LLC, Dignity/USP Folsom GP LLC, Dignity/USP Grass Valley GP LLC, Dignity/USP Las Vegas Surgery Centers LLC, Dignity/USP Metro Surgery Center LLC, Dignity/USP NorCal Surgery Centers LLC, Dignity/USP Phoenix Surgery Centers II LLC, Dignity/USP Phoenix Surgery Centers LLC, Dignity/USP Redding GP LLC, Dignity/USP Roseville GP LLC, Dignity/USP/John Muir East Bay Surgery Centers LLC, Doctors Hospital of Manteca Inc., Doctors Medical Center Neurosciences Clinical Co-Management LLC, Doctors Medical Center Orthopedics Clinical Co-Management LLC, Doctors Medical Center of Modesto Inc., Doctors Outpatient Center for Surgery LLC, Doctors Outpatient Surgery Center of Jupiter L.L.C., EPHC Inc., EPIC ASC LLC, East Atlanta Endoscopy Centers LLC, East Cobb Urgent Care LLC, East Cooper Coastal Family Physicians L.L.C., East Cooper Community Hospital Inc., East Cooper Hyperbarics L.L.C., East Cooper OB/GYN L.L.C., East Cooper Physician Network LLC, East Cooper Primary Care Physicians L.L.C., East Portland Surgery Center LLC, East West Surgery Center L.P., Eastgate Building Center L.L.C., Effingham Surgical Partners LLC, Einstein Montgomery Surgery Center LLC, Einstein/USP Surgery Centers L.L.C., El Mirador Surgery Center L.L.C., El Paso Center for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy LLC, El Paso Day Surgery LLC, El Paso Urology Surgery Center Curie LLC, Emanate/USP Surgery Centers LLC, Emanuel Medical Center, Emerson Surgery Center LLC, Encinitas Endoscopy Center LLC, Endoscopy Center of Hackensack LLC, Endoscopy Center of South Sacramento LLC, Endoscopy Consultants LLC, European Surgical Partners Ltd., Eye Center of Nashville UAP LLC, Eye Surgery Center of Nashville LLC, FMC Medical Inc., FMCC Network Contracting L.L.C., FPN Frisco Physicians Network, FREH Real Estate L.L.C., FRS Imaging Services L.L.C., FSC Hospital LLC, FSH IT Services LP, First Choice Physician Partners, Flatirons Surgery Center LLC, Folsom Outpatient Surgery Center L.P., Fort Bend Clinical Services Inc., Fort Worth Hospital Real Estate LP, Fort Worth Surgicare Partners Ltd., Foundation Bariatric Hospital of San Antonio LLC, Foundation San Antonio Borrower Sub LLC, Fountain Valley Regional Hospital and Medical Center, Fountain Valley Surgery Center LLC, Franklin Endo UAP LLC, Franklin Endoscopy Center LLC, Fresno Surgery Center L.P., Frisco Medical Center L.L.P., Frontenac Ambulatory Surgery & Spine Care Center L.P., Frye Regional Medical Center Inc., FryeCare Boone L.L.C., FryeCare Morganton L.L.C., FryeCare Physicians L.L.C., FryeCare Valdese L.L.C., FryeCare Watauga L.L.C., FryeCare Womens Services L.L.C., GCSA Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, Gamma Surgery Center LLC, Gardendale Surgical Associates LLC, Garland Surgicare Partners Ltd., Gastric Health Institute L.L.C., Genesis ASC Partners LLC, Geneva Surgical Suites LLC, Georgia Endoscopy Center LLC, Georgia Gifts From Grace L.L.C., Georgia Musculoskeletal Network Inc., Georgia North Fulton Healthcare Associates L.L.C., Georgia Northside Ear Nose and Throat L.L.C., Georgia Physicians of Cardiology L.L.C., Georgia Spectrum Neurosurgical Specialists L.L.C., Georgia Spine Surgery Center LLC, Glen Echo Surgery Center LLC, Golden Ridge ASC LLC, Good Samaritan Medical Center Inc., Good Samaritan Surgery L.L.C., Grapevine Surgicare Partners Ltd., Grass Valley Outpatient Surgery Center L.P., Graystone Family Healthcare - Tenet North Carolina L.L.C., Great Lakes Surgical Suites LLC, Greater Dallas Healthcare Enterprises, Greater Northwest Houston Enterprises, Greenville Physicians Surgery Center LLP, Greenwood ASC LLC, Greystone Internal Medicine - Brookwood L.L.C., Gulf Coast Community Hospital Inc., HCH Tucson Holdings LLC, HCN Emerus Management Sub LLC, HCN Emerus Texas LLC, HCN Laboratories Inc., HCN Physicians Inc., HCN Sunnyvale Holdings LLC, HCN Surgery Center Holdings Inc., HDMC Holdings L.L.C., HMA/Solantic Joint Venture LLC, HMH-USP Surgery Centers LLC, HMHP/USP Surgery Centers LLC, HNMC Inc., HNW GP Inc., HNW LP Inc., HPI Holdings LLC, HPI North LLC, HPI Physicians LLC, HSRM International Inc., HSS Palm Beach Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, HSS/USP Surgery Center LLC, HUG Services Inc., HUMC/USP Surgery Centers LLC, Hacienda Outpatient Surgery Center LLC, Hagerstown Surgery Center LLC, Hardeeville Medical Group L.L.C., Hardeeville Primary Care L.L.C., Harlingen Physician Network Inc., Harper-Hutzel AHP Services Inc., Harvard Park Surgery Center LLC, Haymarket Surgery Center LLC, Hazelwood Endoscopy Center LLC, Health & Wellness Surgery Center L.P., Health Horizons of Kansas City Inc., Health Horizons of Murfreesboro Inc., Health Horizons/Piedmont Joint Venture LLC, Health Services CFMC Inc., Health Services HNMC Inc., Health Services Network Care Inc., Health Services Network Hospitals Inc., Health Services Network Texas Inc., HealthCorp Network Inc., Healthcare Compliance LLC, Healthcare Network Alabama Inc., Healthcare Network CFMC Inc., Healthcare Network DPH Inc., Healthcare Network Georgia Inc., Healthcare Network Holdings Inc., Healthcare Network Hospitals (Dallas) Inc., Healthcare Network Hospitals Inc., Healthcare Network Louisiana Inc., Healthcare Network Missouri Inc., Healthcare Network North Carolina Inc., Healthcare Network South Carolina Inc., Healthcare Network Tennessee Inc., Healthcare Network Texas Inc., Healthcare Partners Investments LLC, Healthmark Partners Inc., Healthpoint of North Carolina L.L.C., Heart and Vascular Institute of Michigan, Heritage Park Surgical Hospital LLC, Hershey Outpatient Surgery Center L.P., Hialeah Hospital Inc., Hialeah Real Properties Inc., Hickory Family Practice Associates - Tenet North Carolina L.L.C., Hill Country ASC Partners LLC, Hill Country Surgery Center LLC, Hilton Head Health System L.P., Hilton Head Regional Healthcare L.L.C., Hilton Head Regional OB/GYN Partners L.L.C., Hilton Head Regional Physician Network LLC, Hilton Head Regional Physician Network Georgia L.L.C., Hinsdale Surgical Center LLC, Hitchcock State Street Real Estate Inc., Holston Valley Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, Holy Cross Hospital Inc., Home Health Partners of San Antonio LLC, Hoover Doctors Group Inc., Hoover Land LLC, Horizon Ridge Surgery Center LLC, Hospital Development of West Phoenix Inc., Hospital RCM Services LLC, Hospital Underwriting Group Inc., Houston Northwest Partners Ltd., Houston PSC L.P., Houston Specialty Hospital Inc., Houston Sunrise Investors Inc., Hyde Park Surgery Center LLC, ICNU Rockford LLC, Imaging Center at Baxter Village L.L.C., InforMed Insurance Services LLC, Integris/USP Health Ventures LLC, International Health and Wellness Inc., Irving-Coppell Surgical Hospital L.L.P., JFK Memorial Hospital Inc., JFP UAP Sugarland LLC, Jackson Surgical Center LLC, Jacksonville Endoscopy Centers LLC, Journey Home Healthcare of San Antonio LLC, KHS Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, KHS/USP Surgery Centers LLC, Kingsport Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, Laguna Medical Systems Inc., Lake Endoscopy Center LLC, Lake Health Care Facilities Inc., Lake Lansing ASC Partners LLC, Lake Surgical Hospital Slidell LLC, LakeFront Medical Associates LLC, Lakewood Regional Medical Center Inc., Lakewood Surgery Center LLC, Lancaster Specialty Surgery Center LLC, Lansing ASC Partners LLC, Lawrenceville Surgery Center L.L.C., Lebanon Endoscopy Center LLC, Legacy Warren Partners L.P., Legacy/USP Surgery Centers L.L.C., Leonardtown Surgery Center LLC, Liberty Ambulatory Surgery Center L.P., Lifemark Hospitals Inc., Lifemark Hospitals of Florida Inc., Lifemark Hospitals of Louisiana Inc., Lone Star Endoscopy Center LLC, Longleaf Surgery Center LLC, Los Alamitos Medical Center Inc., Lubbock ASC Holding Co LLC, MASC Partners LLC, MCSH Real Estate Investors Ltd., MH Memorial City Surgery LLC, MH/USP Bay Area LLC, MH/USP Brazoria LLC, MH/USP Kingsland LLC, MH/USP Kingwood LLC, MH/USP Kirby LLC, MH/USP Main Street LLC, MH/USP North Freeway LLC, MH/USP North Houston LLC, MH/USP Richmond LLC, MH/USP Sugar Land LLC, MH/USP TMC Endoscopy LLC, MH/USP West Houston L.L.C., MH/USP Woodlands Parkway LLC, MSH Partners LLC, MSV Health/USP Surgery Centers LLC, MVH/USP Surgery Centers LLC, MacNeal Management Services Inc., MacNeal Medical Records Inc., MacNeal Physicians Group LLC, Magnetic Resonance Imaging of San Luis Obispo Inc., Magnolia Surgery Center Limited Partnership, Manchester Ambulatory Surgery Center LP, Maple Lawn Surgery Center LLC, Marion Surgery Center LLC, Mary Immaculate Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, Mason Ridge Ambulatory Surgery Center L.P., Mayfield Spine Surgery Center LLC, McLaren ASC of Flint LLC, Meadowcrest Hospital LLC, Medical House Staffing LLC, Medical Park Tower Surgery Center LLC, Medplex Outpatient Medical Centers Inc., Medplex Outpatient Surgery Center Ltd., Memorial Hermann Bay Area Endoscopy Center LLC, Memorial Hermann Endoscopy & Surgery Center North Houston L.L.C., Memorial Hermann Endoscopy Center North Freeway LLC, Memorial Hermann Specialty Hospital Kingwood L.L.C., Memorial Hermann Sugar Land Surgical Hospital L.L.P., Memorial Hermann Surgery Center Brazoria LLC, Memorial Hermann Surgery Center Cypress LLC, Memorial Hermann Surgery Center Katy LLP, Memorial Hermann Surgery Center Kingsland L.L.C., Memorial Hermann Surgery Center Kirby LLC, Memorial Hermann Surgery Center Main Street LLC, Memorial Hermann Surgery Center Memorial City L.L.C., Memorial Hermann Surgery Center Northwest LLP, Memorial Hermann Surgery Center Pinecroft LLC, Memorial Hermann Surgery Center Preston Road Ltd., Memorial Hermann Surgery Center Richmond LLC, Memorial Hermann Surgery Center Southwest L.L.P., Memorial Hermann Surgery Center Sugar Land LLP, Memorial Hermann Surgery Center Texas Medical Center LLP, Memorial Hermann Surgery Center Woodlands Parkway LLC, Memorial Hermann Surgery Center The Woodlands LLP, Memorial Hermann Texas International Endoscopy Center LLC, Memorial Hermann West Houston Surgery Center LLC, Memorial Hermann/USP Surgery Centers II L.P., Memorial Hermann/USP Surgery Centers III LLP, Memorial Hermann/USP Surgery Centers IV LLP, Memorial Surgery Center LLC, Memphis Urgent Care #1 L.L.C., Memphis Urgent Care #2 L.L.C., Merced Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, Mercy/USP Health Ventures L.L.C., Metro Specialty Surgery Center LLC, Metro Surgery Center LLC, MetroWest HomeCare & Hospice LLC, Metrocrest Surgery Center L.P., Metropolitan New Jersey LLC, Michigan ASC Partners L.L.C., Michigan Pioneer ACO LLC, Michigan Regional Imaging LLC, Mid Rivers Ambulatory Surgery Center L.P., Mid State Endo UAP LLC, Mid-State Endoscopy Center LLC, Mid-TSC Development LP, Middle Tennessee Ambulatory Surgery Center L.P., Midland Memorial/USP Surgery Centers LLC, Midland Texas Surgical Center LLC, Midwest Digestive Health Center LLC, Midwest Pharmacies Inc., Midwest Specialty Surgery Center LLC, Millennium Surgical Center LLC, Mobile Imaging Management LLC, Mobile Technology Management LLC, Modesto Radiology Imaging Inc., Monocacy Surgery Center LLC, Mountain Empire Surgery Center L.P., Munster Specialty Surgery Center LLC, Murdock Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, NHSC Holdings LLC, NICH GP Holdings LLC, NKCH/USP Briarcliff GP LLC, NKCH/USP Liberty GP LLC, NKCH/USP Surgery Centers II L.L.C., NKCH/USP Surgery Centers LLC, NMC Lessor L.P., NMC Surgery Center L.P., NME Headquarters Inc., NME Properties Corp., NME Properties Inc., NME Property Holding Co. Inc., NME Psychiatric Hospitals Inc., NME Rehabilitation Properties Inc., NSCH GP Holdings LLC, NSCH/USP Desert Surgery Centers L.L.C., NUCH of Georgia L.L.C., NUCH of Massachusetts LLC, NUCH of Michigan Inc., NUCH of Texas, Nacogdoches ASC-LP Inc., Name of Entity, National ASC Inc., National Ancillary Inc., National Diagnostic Imaging Centers Inc., National HHC Inc., National Home Health Holdings Inc., National ICN Inc., National Imaging Center Holdings Inc., National Medical Services II Inc., National Outpatient Services Holdings Inc., National Surgery Center Holdings Inc., National Urgent Care Holdings Inc., National Urgent Care Inc., Network Management Associates Inc., New Dimensions LLC, New England Physician Performance Network LLC, New H Acute Inc., New Horizons Surgery Center LLC, New Medical Horizons II Ltd., New Mexico Orthopaedic Surgery Center LLC, New Salem ASC RE LLC, Newhope Imaging Center Inc., North Anaheim Surgery Center LLC, North Atlantic Surgical Suites LLC, North Campus Surgery Center LLC, North Carolina Community Family Medicine L.L.C., North Central Surgical Center L.L.P., North Denver Musculoskeletal Surgical Partners LLC, North Fulton Cardiovascular Medicine L.L.C., North Fulton Hospitalist Group L.L.C., North Fulton Medical Center Inc., North Fulton Primary Care - Willeo Rd. L.L.C., North Fulton Primary Care - Windward Parkway L.L.C., North Fulton Primary Care - Wylie Bridge L.L.C., North Fulton Primary Care Associates L.L.C., North Fulton Pulmonary Specialists L.L.C., North Fulton Womens Consultants L.L.C., North Garland Surgery Center L.L.P., North Haven Surgery Center LLC, North Miami Medical Center Ltd., North Shore Medical Billing Center L.L.C., North Shore Medical Center Inc., North Shore Same Day Surgery L.L.C., North Shore Surgical Suites LLC, North State Surgery Centers L.P., NorthPointe Surgical Suites LLC, NorthShore/USP Surgery Centers II L.L.C., Northern Monmouth Regional Surgery Center L.L.C., Northridge ASC RE LLC, Northridge Surgery Center L.P., Northwest Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, Northwest Georgia Orthopaedic Surgery Center LLC, Northwest Regional ASC LLC, Northwest Regional Surgery Center LLC, Northwest Surgery Center LLP, Northwest Surgery Center Ltd., Novant Health/USP Surgery Centers LLC, Novant/UVA/USP Surgery Centers LLC, OCOMS Imaging LLC, OCOMS Professional Services LLC, OLOL/USP Surgery Centers L.L.C., Okatie Surgical Partners L.L.C., Oklahoma Center for Orthopedic and Multi-Specialty Surgery LLC, Old Tesson Surgery Center L.P., Olive Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, Olive Branch Urgent Care #1 LLC, Ophthalmology Anesthesia Services LLC, Ophthalmology Surgery Center of Orlando LLC, Optimum Spine Center LLC, OrNda Healthcorp, OrNda Hospital Corporation, Orlando Health/USP Surgery Centers L.L.C., OrthoArizona Surgery Center Gilbert LLC, OrthoLink ASC Corporation, OrthoLink Physicians Corporation, OrthoLink Radiology Services Corporation, OrthoLink/ Georgia ASC Inc., OrthoLink/Baptist ASC LLC, OrthoLink/New Mexico ASC Inc., Orthopedic Associates of the Lowcountry L.L.C., Orthopedic South Surgical Partners LLC, Orthopedic and Surgical Specialty Company LLC, PAHS/USP Surgery Centers LLC, PDN L.L.C., PHPS Inc., PHPS-CHM Acquisition Inc., PHS/USP Health Ventures LLC, PM CyFair Land Partners LLC, PMC Physician Network L.L.C., PPRE LLC, PSS Patient Solution Services LLC, Pacific Endo-Surgical Center L.P., Pacific Endoscopy and Surgery Center LLC, Pain Diagnostic and Treatment Center L.P., Paley Institute Global LLC, Palm Beach Gardens Community Hospital Inc., Palm Beach International Surgery Center LLC, Palm Valley Medical Center Campus Association, Palos Health Surgery Center LLC, Paramus Endoscopy LLC, Park Cities Surgery Center LLC, Park Plaza Hospital Billing Center L.L.C., ParkCreek ASC LLC, Parkway Recovery Care Center LLC, Parkwest Surgery Center L.P., Patient Partners LLC, Peak Gastroenterology ASC LLC, Pediatric Surgery Center Odessa LLC, Pediatric Surgery Centers LLC, Physician Performance Network L.L.C., Physician Performance Network of Arizona LLC, Physician Performance Network of Detroit, Physician Performance Network of South Carolina LLC, Physician Performance Network of Tucson LLC, Physicians Performance Network of Houston, Physicians Performance Network of North Texas, Physicians Surgery Center at Good Samaritan LLC, Physicians Surgery Center of Tempe LLC, Physicians Surgical Center of Ft. Worth LLP, Physicians Surgery Center of Chattanooga L.L.C., Physicians Surgery Center of Knoxville LLC, Piccard Surgery Center LLC, Piedmont ASC LLC, Piedmont Behavioral Medicine Associates LLC, Piedmont Cardiovascular Physicians L.L.C., Piedmont Carolina OB/GYN of York County L.L.C., Piedmont Carolina Vascular Surgery L.L.C., Piedmont East Urgent Care Center L.L.C., Piedmont Express Care at Sutton Road L.L.C., Piedmont Family Practice at Baxter Village L.L.C., Piedmont Family Practice at Rock Hill L.L.C., Piedmont Family Practice at Tega Cay L.L.C., Piedmont General Surgery Associates L.L.C., Piedmont Internal Medicine at Baxter Village L.L.C., Piedmont Physician Network LLC, Piedmont Pulmonology L.L.C., Piedmont Surgical Specialists L.L.C., Piedmont Urgent Care Center at Baxter Village L.L.C., Piedmont Urgent Care and Industrial Health Centers Inc., Piedmont/Carolinas Radiation Therapy LLC, Placentia-Linda Hospital Inc., Pleasanton Diagnostic Imaging Inc., Point of Rocks Surgery Center LLC, Practice Partners Management L.P., Premier ACO Physicians Network LLC, Premier ASC LLC, Premier Adult and Childrens Surgery Center LLC, Premier Endoscopy ASC LLC, Premier Health Plan Services Inc., Premier Medical Specialists L.L.C., Prince William Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, Professional Anesthesia Services LLC, Professional Liability Insurance Company, Pros Temporary Staffing Inc., Providence/UCLA/USP Surgery Centers LLC, Providence/USP Santa Clarita GP LLC, Providence/USP South Bay Surgery Centers L.L.C., Providence/USP Surgery Centers L.L.C., Pueblo Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, R.H.S.C. El Paso Inc., RE Plano Med Inc., RHC Parkway Inc., RLC LLC, Reading Ambulatory Surgery Center L.P., Reading Endoscopy Center LLC, Reagan Street Surgery Center LLC, Redmond Surgery Center LLC, Renaissance Surgery Center LLC, Republic Health Corporation of Rockwall County, Resolute Health Physicians Network Inc., Resolute Hospital Company LLC, Resurgens East Surgery Center LLC, Resurgens Fayette Surgery Center LLC, Resurgens Surgery Center LLC, Rheumatology Associates of Atlanta Medical Center L.L.C., Richmond ASC Leasing Company LLC, Rio Grande Valley Indigent Health Care Corporation, River North Same Day Surgery L.L.C., Riverside Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, Rock Bridge Surgical Institute L.L.C., Rock Hill Surgery Center LLC, Rockwall Ambulatory Surgery Center L.L.P., Rocky Mountain Endoscopy Centers LLC, Roseville Surgery Center L.P., Roswell Surgery Center L.L.C., SCNRE LLC, SFMP Inc., SFMPE - Crittenden L.L.C., SL-HLC Inc., SLH Physicians L.L.C., SLH Vista Inc., SLPA ACO LLC, SLUH Anesthesia Physicians L.L.C., SMSJ Imaging Company LLC, SMSJ Tucson Holdings LLC, SPC at the Star LLC, SRRMC Management Inc., SSI Holdings Inc., Sacramento Midtown Endoscopy Center LLC, Safety Harbor ASC Company LLC, Saint Agnes/Dignity/USP Surgery Centers LLC, Saint Agnes/USP Surgery Centers LLC, Saint Francis Cardiology Associates L.L.C., Saint Francis Cardiovascular Surgery L.L.C., Saint Francis Center for Surgical Weight Loss L.L.C., Saint Francis Hospital Billing Center L.L.C., Saint Francis Hospital Medicare ACO LLC, Saint Francis Hospital Pro Fee Billing L.L.C., Saint Francis Hospital-Bartlett Inc., Saint Francis Medical Partners East L.L.C., Saint Francis Medical Partners General Surgery L.L.C., Saint Francis Physician Network LLC, Saint Francis Quality Alliance LLC, Saint Francis Surgery Center L.L.C., Saint Francis Surgical Associates L.L.C., Saint Francis-Arkansas Physician Network LLC, Saint Francis-Bartlett Physician Network LLC, Saint Thomas Campus Surgicare L.P., Saint Thomas Surgery Center New Salem LLC, Saint Thomas/USP Surgery Centers II L.L.C., Saint Thomas/USP Surgery Centers L.L.C., Saint Thomas/USP Baptist Plaza L.L.C., Saint Vincent Physician Services Inc., Salmon Surgery Center LLC, Same Day Management L.L.C., Same Day SC of Central NJ LLC, Same Day Surgery L.L.C., San Antonio Endoscopy L.P., San Fernando Valley Surgery Center L.P., San Gabriel Valley Surgical Center L.P., San Martin Surgery Center LLC, San Ramon ASC L. P., San Ramon Ambulatory Care LLC, San Ramon Network Joint Venture LLC, San Ramon Regional Medical Center LLC, San Ramon Surgery Center L.L.C., Santa Barbara Outpatient Surgery Center LLC, Santa Clarita Surgery Center L.P., Savannah Endoscopy Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, Schertz Surgery Center LLC, Scripps Encinitas Surgery Center LLC, Scripps/USP Surgery Centers L.L.C., Seaside Surgery Center LLC, Shands/Solantic Joint Venture LLC, Shelby Baptist Affinity LLC, Shelby Baptist Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, Shore Outpatient Surgicenter L.L.C., Shoreline Real Estate Partnership LLP, Shoreline Surgery Center LLP, Shrewsbury Surgery Center LLC, Sierra Pacific Surgery Center LLC, Sierra Providence Health Network Inc., Sierra Providence Healthcare Enterprises, Sierra Vista Hospital Inc., Silicon Valley Outpatient Surgery Centers LLC, Silver Cross Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, Silver Cross/USP Surgery Centers LLC, Sinai-Grace Premier Clinical Management Services LLC, Siouxland Surgery Center Limited Liability Partnership, Solantic Corporation, Solantic Development LLC, Solantic Holdings Corporation, Solantic of Jacksonville LLC, Solantic of Orlando LLC, Solantic/South Florida LLC, South Carolina East Cooper Surgical Specialists L.L.C., South Carolina Health Services Inc., South Carolina SeWee Family Medicine L.L.C., South County Outpatient Endoscopy Services L.P., South Denver Musculoskeletal Surgical Partners LLC, South Florida Ambulatory Surgical Center LLC, South Fulton Health Care Centers Inc., SouthCare Physicians Group Neurology L.L.C., SouthCare Physicians Group Obstetrics & Gynecology L.L.C., Southeast Ohio Surgical Suites LLC, Southern Orthopedics and Sports Medicine L.L.C., Southern States Physician Operations Inc., Southwest Ambulatory Surgery Center L.L.C., Southwest Childrens Hospital LLC, Southwest Endoscopy LLC, Southwest Orthopedic and Spine Hospital LLC, Southwest Orthopedic and Spine Hospital Real Estate LLC, Southwestern Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, Spalding Regional Medical Center Inc., Spalding Regional OB/GYN L.L.C., Spalding Regional Physician Services L.L.C., Specialty Surgery Center of Fort Worth L.P., Specialty Surgicenters Inc., Spinal Diagnostics and Treatment Centers L.L.C., Spine & Joint Physician Associates, Springfield Service Holding Corporation, St. Augustine Endoscopy Center LLC, St. Christophers Pediatric Urgent Care Center - Allentown L.L.C, St. Josephs Hospital Surgical Co-Management LLC, St. Josephs Outpatient Surgery Center LLC, St. Josephs Surgery Center L.P., St. Louis Physician Alliance LLC, St. Louis Surgical Center LLC, St. Louis Urology Center LLC, St. Lukes/USP Surgery Centers LLC, St. Marys Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, St. Marys Hospital Cardiovascular Co-Management LLC, St. Marys Hospital Surgical Co-Management LLC, St. Marys Levee Company LLC, St. Marys Medical Center Inc., St. Vincent Health/USP LLC, St. Vincent/USP Surgery Centers LLC, Stockton Outpatient Surgery Center LLC, Subsidiaries of USPI Holding Company Inc., Suburban Endoscopy Center LLC, Summit View Surgery Center LLC, Sun View Imaging L.L.C., Sunrise Medical Group I L.L.C., Sunrise Medical Group II L.L.C., Sunrise Medical Group IV L.L.C., SurgCenter Camelback LLC, SurgCenter Northeast LLC, SurgCenter Pinellas LLC, SurgCenter Tucson LLC, SurgCenter at Paradise Valley LLC, SurgCenter of Deer Valley LLC, SurgCenter of Glen Burnie LLC, SurgCenter of Palm Beach Gardens LLC, SurgCenter of Plano LLC, SurgCenter of Southern Maryland LLC, SurgCenter of St. Lucie LLC, SurgCenter of White Marsh LLC, Surgery Affiliate of El Paso LLC, Surgery Center at Mount Pleasant LLC, Surgery Center at University Park LLC, Surgery Center of Atlanta LLC, Surgery Center of Canfield LLC, Surgery Center of Columbia L.P., Surgery Center of Coral Gables LLC, Surgery Center of Okeechobee LLC, Surgery Center of Pembroke Pines L.L.C., Surgery Center of Peoria L.L.C., Surgery Center of Richardson Physician Partnership L.P., Surgery Center of Santa Barbara LLC, Surgery Center of Scottsdale LLC, Surgery Center of Tempe Real Estate II L.L.C., Surgery Center of Tempe Real Estate L.L.C., Surgery Centers of America II L.L.C., Surgery Centre of SW Florida LLC, Surgical & Bariatric Associates of Atlanta Medical Center L.L.C., Surgical Clinical Excellence at Desert Regional LLC, Surgical Elite of Avondale L.L.C., Surgical Health Partners LLC, Surgical Institute Management LLC, Surgical Institute of Reading LLC, Surgical Specialists at Princeton LLC, Surgicare of Miramar L.L.C., Surginet Inc., Surgis Inc., Surgis Management Services Inc., Surgis of Chico Inc., Surgis of Phoenix Inc., Surgis of Redding Inc., Surgis of Victoria Inc., Sutton Road Pediatrics L.L.C., Sylvan Grove Hospital Inc., TENN SM LLC, TFPS IV L.L.C., TH Healthcare Ltd., TH International Services Florida LLC, THV Park Cities LLC, THVG Arlington GP LLC, THVG Bariatric GP LLC, THVG Bariatric L.L.C., THVG Bedford GP LLC, THVG Bellaire GP LLC, THVG DSP GP LLC, THVG DeSoto GP LLC, THVG Denton GP LLC, THVG Fort Worth GP LLC, THVG Frisco GP LLC, THVG Garland GP LLC, THVG Grapevine GP LLC, THVG Irving-Coppell GP LLC, THVG Lewisville GP LLC, THVG North Garland GP LLC, THVG Park Cities/Trophy Club GP LLC, THVG Rockwall 2 GP LLC, THVG Valley View GP LLC, TLC ASC LLC, TMC Holding Company LLC, TOPS Specialty Hospital Ltd., TPG Hospital LLC, TPR Practice Management LLC, TPS VI of PA L.L.C., TRMC Holdings LLC, TSPE LLC, Tamarac Surgery Center LLC, Tempe New Day Surgery Center LP, Templeton Imaging Inc., Tenet Business Services Corporation, Tenet California Inc., Tenet Central Carolina Physicians Inc., Tenet EKG Inc., Tenet El Paso Ltd., Tenet Employment Inc., Tenet Finance Corp., Tenet Florida Inc., Tenet Florida Physician Services II L.L.C., Tenet Florida Physician Services III L.L.C., Tenet Florida Physician Services L.L.C., Tenet Fort Mill Inc., Tenet Global Business Center Inc., Tenet HealthSystem Bucks County L.L.C., Tenet HealthSystem Graduate L.L.C., Tenet HealthSystem Hahnemann L.L.C., Tenet HealthSystem Medical Inc., Tenet HealthSystem Nacogdoches ASC GP Inc., Tenet HealthSystem Philadelphia Inc., Tenet HealthSystem Roxborough LLC, Tenet HealthSystem St. Christophers Hospital for Children L.L.C., Tenet Hilton Head Heart L.L.C., Tenet Hospitals Limited, Tenet Network Management Inc., Tenet Patient Safety Organization LLC, Tenet Physician Resources LLC, Tenet Physician Services - Hilton Head Inc., Tenet Rehab Piedmont Inc., Tenet Relocation Services L.L.C., Tenet SC East Cooper Hospitalists L.L.C., Tenet South Carolina Gastrointestinal Surgical Specialists L.L.C., Tenet South Carolina Island Medical L.L.C., Tenet South Carolina Lowcountry OB/GYN L.L.C., Tenet South Carolina Mt. 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Ambulatory Surgery LLC, Wilmington Endoscopy Center LLC, Wilshire Rental Corp., Winter Haven Ambulatory Surgical Center L.L.C., Wisconsin Specialty Surgery Center LLC, Wymark Surgery Center LLC, and YNHHSC/USP Surgery Centers LLC. Unum Group is engaged in providing financial protection benefits. It operates through the following segments: Unum US, Unum International, Colonial Life, Closed Block and Corporate. The Unum US segment comprises of group long-term and short-term disability insurance, group life and accidental death and dismemberment products, and supplemental and voluntary lines of business. The Unum International segment engages in the operations of UK business, which includes insurance for group long-term disability, group life, and supplemental lines of business that include dental, individual disability, and critical illness products; Poland business primarily includes insurance for individual and group life with accident and health riders. The Colonial Life segment includes insurance for accident, sickness, disability products, life products, and cancer and critical illness products. The Closed Block segment consists of individual disability, group and individual long-term care, and other insurance products no longer actively marketed. The Corporate segment refers to investment income on corporate assets and other corporate income and expenses not allocated to a line of business; and interest Read More 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. Read More Richard II gives up power though its not his choice. His cousin Henry Bolingbroke has returned from exile, led a rebellion, become king of the castle. Richards toppled monarch is now a dirty rascal. Shakespeare stages this concretely a crown passed from one to another. The supposed divinity of majesty proves portable as a party hat. Richard, as often, reaches for an arresting metaphor: here, two buckets on a well. Bolingbroke is currently buoyant with success; his rival sinks in grief. Crown and buckets are virtually the only props in Joe Hill-Gibbons vigorous, rigorous and radically reduced staging at the Almeida, designed by Ultz with Charlotte Espiner. The crown is a spiky bronzed circle. The buckets (labelled for added utility) hold blood, soil and water, to be thrown with derisive force. The play of power is simplified to this icon of monarchy and the crudest containers. The Tragedy of King Richard the Second: the symbol and the slop. Some items in this propwatch series are quietly naturalistic. Only as you watch do they assume a wider meaning, a prism through which to see a production. Not the crown and buckets, which have immediately iconic force. They shine and spoil and suggest the unreliable career in power. The production begins with Simon Russell Beale hushed and roguish Richard speaking some of the deposed kings final lines: I have been studying how I may compare/ This prison where I live unto the world. In its beginning is its end, and were cued into a cyclical pattern rebellion, response and raging paranoia will be the keynotes of power. It also signals the bold distillation of this staging the usual mighty cast (22 in the last RSC production) is here just eight; the three hours of that RSC revival scrunched to 100 minutes. It goes fast no one has to wait for trumpets to pipe down or for the attendant lords to stop shuffling before they speak. No pageantry, the minimum of props;as in Richards bare cell, this confined space stands for everything absolutely every onstage element must be compact with meaning. The stark crown is pure symbol. Its power with pointy bits. Hill-Gibbins has form with messing up classics. The Changeling descended into a terrifying food fight youve never seen a scarier use of trifle. A Midsummer Nights Dream sat on an earthy floor no one passed through the night unsoiled. These choices have metaphoric pizzazz, but also liberate the actors movement, informing the way they run, slip and grapple. In Richard II,the schoolroom simplicity of the props is accompanied by a playground approach to politics. Everyone is onstage throughout the chorus of courtiers hugs the riveted wall (no doors; no escape), clusters in corners, slinks round the gunmetal grey perimeter to avoid detection or tattletale conspiracy. At various moments everyone rucks together, shouting and flailing like tantrum-prone tots:when this happens around Bolingbroke, you see an exasperated Leo Bill wonder why he struggled for power. Is this the glittering prize? A crown and a heap full of headache? On the poster, the crown is a yellow paper creation with towering points, raggedly cut. Its very primary school. Aww, Richard isnt good with scissors but at least he had a go. Some of that childlike vibe remains in the productions actual eight-pronged crown. Previous Richards have sported jewels and elaborate fluting (Ben Whishaw, Charles Edwards) or looked lost in avast crown (Fiona Shaw), but the stark Almeida crown is pure symbol. Its power with pointy bits. Holinsheds chronicle, Shakespeares source for his history, describes Richard abdicating by placing his signet ring onto Bolingbrokes finger. Changing that to a crown amplifies the gesture, charges the unwilling transfer of power with drama. Here cousin, Richard says with provoking politeness, seize the crown. Seize is brilliant. Theres no way Bolingbroke can respond without seeming childish seize says you want this too much, seize says you can have it but you dont deserve it. Russell Beale and Bills truculent usurper both hold on tight and refuse to let go, a tug of want which dignity abandoned long ago. As for the buckets: theres no dignity there. They might be prompted by the deathbed reproaches of John of Gaunt (Joseph Mydell),Richards uncle and Bolingbrokes father, who references the earthy ground of the kingdom, the blood that Richard has drained from his family, the seas that lash this sceptred isle. Or, less portentously, from the refuse pails tipped over Richards head as hes processed through London in disgrace. Two buckets each of soil and blood; several more of water. Bill enacts the plays first killings of two royal aides by hurling a blood bucket over them. Later, Russell Beale is heaped with dirt, then sluiced with water. Muck in his beard, drips down his t-shirt: hes a sorry sight. Stark instruments of authority is this the best a pre-democratic state can do, gunk someone? theyre oddly forbidding. We know a stage gun wont kill anyone, but stage water will drench you. The buckets feel more real than the crown. The anxieties of power more real than the prizes. Follow David on Twitter: @mrdavidjays The first batch of brand new subway cars by a Chinese company were completed at the assembly line in Springfield, Massachusetts and delivered on December 18 to Boston. They will gradually replace the nearly 40-year-old cars presently serving Boston lines. The assembly plant China Railway Rolling Stock Corporation in Springfield, Massachusetts, on Dec. 18, 2018. [Photo: chinanews.com] These new cars are part of a contract between Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) and China Railway Rolling Stock Corporation (CRRC). The MBTA ordered 152 Orange Line subways cars and 252 Red Line subway cars to replace the current ones. CRRC built a 204,000-square-foot assembly plant in Springfield and hired nearly 220 employees. It is CRRC's first American rail car manufacturing facility. Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority ordered 152 Orange Line subways cars and 252 Red Line subway cars. [Photo: chinanews.com] CRRC Vice President Jia Bo, Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker, secretary of Massachusetts Transportation Department Stephanie Pollack, and Chinese Consulate General in New York Huang Ping attended the ceremony and offered congratulations for the completion of the project. Workers at the Springfield plant China Railway Rolling Stock Corporation polish subway cars. [Photo: chinanews.com] This new batch of subway cars are made of stainless steel and are expected to work for 30 years. The average speed of the cars is 63 miles per hour (102km per hour). The secretary said once the cars are all delivered, passengers of the Orange Line will be able to have trains come every four-and-a-half minutes during rush-hour instead of every six or seven minutes currently, which will increase the number of commuters the line can carry in one hour by about 40 percent. New features of the cars include gap mitigation devices, additional passenger emergency intercoms, wider side door openings, automatic passenger counters and closed circuit cameras. The printing cost came down to a substantial Rs 4,912 crore in the following year 2017-18. New Delhi: The cost of printing currency notes escalated to Rs 7,965 crore in 2016-17, the year when the government had banned the high-value 500 and 1,000 rupee bills, the government informed parliament on Tuesday. Also, the printing cost came down to a substantial Rs 4,912 crore in the following year 2017-18 when the RBI had sufficed the shortage of bank notes which was caused due to the governments demonetisation move. The expenditure on printing of notes during 2015-16 (the year prior to demonetisation) was Rs 3,421 crore, finance minister Arun Jaitley said in a written reply to the Rajya Sabha. Rs 79.65 billion (Rs 7,965 crore) and Rs 49.12 billion (Rs 4,912 crore) were spent on printing of banknotes in the year 2016-17 and 2017-18, respectively. In addition, Rs 1.09 billion (Rs 109 crore), Rs 1.47 billion ( Rs 147 crore) and Rs 1.15 billion (Rs 115 crore) were spent on remittance of currency in the year 2015-16, 2016-17 and 2017-18, respectively, Parliament was informed. The ministers reply was in regard to details sought on expenditure incurred by the reserve bank for calling back Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes and destroying them. He was also asked to give expenditure details for replenishing the currency withdrawn during demonetisation. Expenditure on printing of new notes after demonetisation has not been shown separately by the reserve bank of India in its accounts, Jaitley said. The minister also informed the House that no public sector bank, expect for SBI, has reported incidence of casualty during the period of demonetisation. On casualty incidents at all public sector banks during the note ban period, Jaitley said only state bank of India had reported that three staffers and one customer died during the demonetisation drive. A total compensation of Rs 44.07 lakh (including Rs 3 lakh to customer) was paid to their family members, he said. On asked if any study has been conducted on the impact of demonetisation on industry and employment situation in the country, the finance minister said that no specific study has been done by government. Prime minister Narendra Modi had announced the demonetisation of high-value notes on Nov 8, 2016, which wiped out nearly 86 per cent of the total currency notes in circulation. In a separate question asked about the durability of new Rs 500 and Rs 2000 bank notes, minister of state for finance Pon Radhakrishnan said these notes are expected to have normal life as that of older currencies. He, however, said that some design elements have been changed in the new banknotes. The visible changes in the new banknotes are in form of size, color and inclusion of heritage motifs. He also said that there are no issues related to non-recognition of new Rs 500 and Rs 2,000 notes by the ATMs. Mumbai: Ranveer Singh says being best friends with one's spouse is "key to sustaining a romantic relationship". Ranveer tied the knot with his girlfriend of six years, actor Deepika Padukone in an intimate twin wedding ceremony in Italy last month. "Being best friends with each other is truly the dynamic. We are deeply in love with each other but above all we are best friends. We are each other's support system, companions. We have a lot of fun together. "Being each other's best friend is truly paramount, where you can share silences, laughter and light moments. To have somebody who makes the passing of the lifetime a pleasant experience everyday is very rare and precious," the actor told PTI in an interview. The couple started dating on the sets of Sanjay Leela Bhansali's "Ram Leela". The duo then went on to feature in two more of Bhansali's films "Bajirao Mastani" and "Padmaavat." "I feel like the two greatest things I've done in my life is, one, become an actor and two, get myself the most amazing life partner one can hope for," he adds. Ranveer credits Deepika for curating every aspect of their "fairytale" wedding. "I had this fairytale wedding and I keep telling my wife that it's the stuff of dreams. I could not have even dreamed of such a wedding. It's beyond my imagination. I could never have the vision for it. She meticulously curated and designed every aspect of it. "It was everything as it should have been - the most joyous month of our lives, there were tears of happiness throughout. It will be a fond memory in our hearts forever," he says. The actor says someone "very senior" in the film industry told the couple after the wedding that as youth icons their tying the knot has "reinstated everyone's faith in the institution of marriage". "In the day and age we live in, the concept of marriage is questioned sometimes. This person told us how this has made a socio-cultural impact. To make a commitment is a positive sign. I feel lucky and blessed. As cliche as it sounds, she's literally the best thing to have happened to me," he says. Ranveer was speaking on the sidelines of a promotional event of his next, "Simmba". The Rohit Shetty cop-action-drama is scheduled to release on December 28. With film promotions in full swing, the actor says, unlike Deepika, he is not someone who is adept at striking a work-life balance. "This is the kind of workload that I am not used to. It requires discipline and time management, both of which are not my strong points. But my wife is helping me now. She's very good at handling massive workload and still maintaining a work-life balance. I have some support now," he says. Mumbai: Actor Kangana Ranaut, who is making a controversial directorial debut with "Manikarnika: The Queen of Jhansi" after its director Radha Krishna Jagarlamudi left the project, says she loved sweating it out like a technician on the film. At the trailer launch of the film, Kangana said she loved being out in the sun and would swap the luxuries of a star for a seat behind the camera without any hesitation. "I don't know what is it about me but I really love working as a technician. No actor wants to be out in the sun as opposed to being in the AC van. No actor wants to be among 80 sweaty people who are asking you 100 questions. "I don't know what is it about me that I am so comfortable in this job. There is nothing I love more than directing. Even though I don't get to wear make-up or look like my star self or get any special treatment. It is absolutely a worker's life to be honest, but there's something so amazing about this job that I don't know why people even consider this a job. It is so much fun. I think acting is more like a job but directing is a lot of fun. I hope I get more chances to do this. This seems like my first love," she told reporters. Kangana has been credited as the co-director on the film, which was in the headlines after Jagarlamudi left the project abruptly reportedly due to creative differences with Kangana, who plays the title role. Jagarlamudi has not commented on his departure but the producers said he left the film midway as the dates were clashing with his forthcoming project, a biopic on NTR. Kangana, who dressed up as her character of Rani Laxmibai at the trailer launch of the film, said it was Prasoon Joshi, dialogue writer of the film, who suggested she helm the film. "Prasoon Joshi first showed confidence in me and said I would be the right person (to direct the film). I was not ready. When I started shooting for the film, we had action and horse riding and all of that. I felt I was a duck paddling beneath the surface. "It was all too much for me from action to costumes to drama. But the whole team was warm to me. I was conscious as there were a lot of things in the media, gossip and opposition as they don't know what has happened and at this time we could go and clarify things. But everyone was warm to me and I felt confident," she said. The film is set to be released on January 25, 2019 and will clash with Hrithik Roshan's "Super 30" and Emraan Hashmi's "Cheat India". She did not directly comment on the clash but said choosing January 25 was important for them, keeping the patriotic theme of the film in mind. "Nobody pressured me for this release date but I felt this film should have this sentiment as far as the release date is concerned like Republic Day or Independence Day." Though the actor or producers did not directly comment on what was the reason behind Jagarlamudi's departure from the film, Kangana admitted that the subject is "jinxed". "This subject is jinxed, a lot of people tried to make it. When we started this film I got hurt, I got 20 stitches. We faced obstacles like people falling from horse, this was ok but has it ever happened that a director has left the film?" The director's departure is not the only controversy that has come Kangana's way as director Ketan Mehta had accused her and producer Kaman Jain of "breach of trust" as the actor reportedly had said 'yes' to his project but later moved ahead with another director. Kangana said she was overjoyed when writer KV Vijayendra Prasad of "Baahubali" and "Bajrangi Bhaijaan" fame narrated the script to her. "When Vijendra sir came to me I was clapping and absolutely exhilarated when he narrated. I have taken their vision ahead. I could interpret because I have shot 60-70 per cent of the film. As far as creative aspect is concerned I would like to give to the writers. The script was never changed," she said. "It is not that I had to taken someone's vision ahead with the material I was given. I had my own vision. It is a definitely much more difficult to step into someone else shoes," she added. The USP of the brand lies in the fact that it provides international looks and fits in finest fabrics. Tisharth by Shivani is no stranger to the limelight and paparazzi. A fledgling brand, it has already received much limelight due to Shivani Jain's stellar designs and endorsements by both Bollywood and Hollywood celebrities. In fact, a popular fashion event saw Bollywood actress Nushrat Bharucha walk the ramp in Shivani's all-white, mildly sequinned and heavily ruffled gown. Not only that, Briden Starr too has been seen sporting Tisharth by Shivani. In conversation, Shivani says that fashion is not something extraordinary; rather it is something that one deals with on a daily basis. Every morning when we choose what to wear, our choices say a lot about us and how we feel that day, she says adding that the one constant in the world of fashion is that it is ever changing. Speaking about how fashion evolves, Shivani explains, We are constantly being bombarded with new fashion ideas but we have to incorporate style with trends and that is the best fashion for us. Elaborating on Tisharth, Shivani reveals that the USP of the brand lies in the fact that it provides international looks and fits in finest fabrics. The originality of the brands designs makes the audience want more as well, she says. Another point is we have very competitive prices as we want our label to be worn by most of the women, she quips. As for the response she has received, Shivani says that in the three years since its inception, the designs have been spread all across the world and have been endorsed by Bollywood and Hollywood celebrities. A few designers Shivani would like to see sporting her brand include Alia Bhatt, Sara Ali Khan, Anushka Sharma and Katrina Kaif. Jain further adds the brand would love to design for all women achievers across all fields. Currently the founder and designer Shivani, who finds inspiration from the likes of Elie Saab, Jenny Packman and Oscar de la Renta, is working on Tisharths new collection for winter resort 2019 which comprises of gowns and dresses in which they have used fabric manipulation techniques using organza. This is a small capsule collection which has edgy silhouettes and embroideries and apt for the coming season, she says. As for her future plans, she concludes, I am participating in the Paris Fashion Week in February 2019 and go to Milan after that. I and want my label to be available at the stores all over the world. I want to be known as a designer with a global recognition. Manmohan Singh further noted that when he was India's Finance Minister in 1991, he was successful in helping turn a crisis into a 'great opportunity'. (Photo: PTI) New Delhi: Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Tuesday said that he was not only an 'accidental prime minister' of India but also the country's accidental 'finance minister.' "I have been termed as an accident prime minister of the country, but I think that I was also an accidental finance minister," he said after the launch of his book 'Changing India' in the national capital on Tuesday. Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh went on to add that while he was criticised for being a "silent" prime minister, he never shied away from speaking to the press. #WATCH: Former PM Dr Manmohan Singh speaks of the time he was appointed as the Finance Minister in the govt led by PV Narasimha Rao, says "People say I was accidental Prime Minister, I was also accidental Finance Minister". pic.twitter.com/HVJyOoAZEa ANI (@ANI) December 18, 2018 "People say I was a silent prime minister, but I think these volumes (his book 'Changing India') speak for themselves. I was not the prime minister who was afraid of talking to the press. I met the press regularly. In every foreign tour, I had press conferences in the plane or after landing," he noted. Manmohan Singh further noted that when he was India's Finance Minister in 1991, he was successful in helping turn a crisis into a "great opportunity." "Life has been a great adventure and an enterprise, which I relish. I have no regrets. I will never be able to return what my country gave me. Some part of life has been smooth sailing and there were some hiccups," he noted. Singh, who has been very critical of the BJP-led Central government for destroying the economy through the implementation of Goods and Services Tax (GST) and demonetisation, said that despite all the hiccups and hurdles, India will rise to be a superpower. "This country is destined to be a major power. The thrust of India's economic policy has not changed for the last 25 years," he added. CBI had registered FIR on May 15, 2017, alleging irregularities in clearance given to INX Media for receiving overseas funds to the tune of Rs 305 crore in 2007 when P Chidambaram was the finance minister. (Photo: ANI) New Delhi: Senior Congress leader P Chidambaram was at the headquarters of the Enforcement Directorate on Wednesday morning after being summoned for questioning in the INX Media case. Chidambaram role had come under the scanner of various investigating agencies in the Rs 3,500-crore Aircel-Maxis deal and the INX Media case involving Rs 305 crore. It was during his tenure as finance minister in the UPA-I government that clearances from the Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) were given to the two ventures. On November 29, the Delhi High Court had extended the interim protection to Chidambaram in connection with the INX Media case. He has been granted interim protection from the arrest till January 15 next year. Chidambaram had filed an anticipatory bail plea in the Delhi High Court, seeking protection from the arrest by the CBI and the ED. The CBI had registered a First Information Report on May 15 last year, alleging irregularities in the clearance given to media group INX Media for receiving overseas funds to the tune of Rs 305 crore in 2007 when Chidambaram was the finance minister. Chidambaram's son Karti was also arrested in the matter on February 28 for allegedly receiving funds to the tune of Rs 10 lakh in the case. He was granted bail on March 23. The other accused in the case include then INX Media Director Indrani Mukerjea and then INX News Director Peter Mukerjea. Chennai: Unlike men who go to Sabarimala under the guidance of a gurusamy, women have no such person to lead. We are organising them to exercise their rights, said Selvi, a lawyer and activist from Manithi. Around 50 women, led by Chennai based women rights group Manithi are all set to visit Sabarimala on December 23. All the women visiting the temple would observe celibacy for five days before going to Sabarimala, Selvi said, speaking to Deccan Chronicle. Women from Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Odisha will join together and womens groups from Kerala, like the Adivasi womens group, will lead us there. Manithi had written to the Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan seeking support to visit the temple.We got a response informing us that our email has been forwarded to police officers in Pathanamthitta to provide help during our visit,Selvi said, adding that since they are going as a group, they l derive strength from their unity. After Manithi announced their trip on their Facebook page on 16, more women have approached us to help them to go to Sabarimala. It is the right of women and no one should stop them from visiting the temple, we will extend our support to any woman who shows the willingness to visit, Selvi said. Despite receiving discouragement online, the group has not wavered, Selvi says proudly.There has not been any direct threat. Several people have left messages and comments online but that will not bring us down, she says. Despite the Supreme Court verdict on September 28 this year which allows women of all age groups to offer prayers at the shrine, no women had entered the temple due to protest by the BJP and other Hindu outfits. So far, around 16 women have been turned away from entering the temple premises. Hyderabad: The Hyderabad High Court directed the Registry to post the plea of Telugu film actor Prabhas alias Uppalapati Venkata Satyanarayana Prabhas Raju before a division bench which is adjudicating on matters related to the Paigah properties. The actor had approached the court alleging that the revenue authorities were interfering in his property at Raidurg Pan Maktha. Moving a petition through his representative D.V.V. Satyanarayana Raju, he said the authorities had entered the land and attempted to dispossess him without any notice. He had purchased the land in parts in 2005 and 2006 and had paid Rs 1.05 crore for regularisation, he said. He said his application was pending with the revenue authorities but they had tried to demolish structures on the land. When the case came before Justice C. Praveen Kumar, government special counsel said the land was in the category of Paigah lands and cases were pending before a division bench. The court directed the Registry to make available that petition before the bench. It is time once again for smiles and handshakes. After several years of frigid relations, India and the Maldives are back to the bonhomie of a traditional friendship. The new Maldivian President, Ibrahim Mohamed Solih, who won a somewhat unanticipated election victory this October, was in New Delhi this week, calling India the closest friend of his country. President Solihs New Delhi visit and pronouncements marks a radical shift in the decidedly pro-Beijing policy adopted by his predecessor, the rabidly anti-Indian strongman Abdulla Yameen. Mr Yameen had kicked off his authoritative rule by sacking and imprisoning the countrys first democratically-elected President, Mohammed Nasheed, and ruthlessly suppressing real and imagined rivals, including the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Mr Yameen had virtually cut off all relations with India, forcing Prime Minister Narendra Modi to cancel his 2015 state visit to the Maldives. An unperturbed Mr Yameen had continued to cosy up to China, which poured in money into a number of big-ticket projects including a 2-km-long sea bridge linking the Maldivian capital, Male, with its airport. China is believed to have secured permission to build ports and military installations in some of the 1,192 islands that comprise the tiny Indian Ocean republic. Chinese naval ships too began to visit Male. When Male cancelled a planned military exercise with New Delhi, it was clear that the country had slipped into the Chinese camp. Now, with Mr Yameen out and Mr Solih in the top seat, it emerges that Chinese investments in the Maldives were part of a familiar pattern designed to induce indebtedness and further tighten Beijings iron grip. The Maldives is estimated to have racked up over $1.3 billion in debt to China. This amounts to more than a quarter of its entire GDP. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has pledged $1.4 billion in aid to the Maldives which should get that country out of the debt trap sprung by China. This payout is expected to bring Male back to New Delhis fold. A similarly fortuitous turn of political events in neighbouring Sri Lanka has recently gladdened New Delhi. The pro-China political usurper and former President Mahinda Rajapaksa, who had unconstitutionally replaced the countrys democratically-elected Prime Minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe, was forced out late last week. India openly welcomed the reinstatement of Mr Wickremesinghe, and its external affairs ministry spokesman added: We are confident that India-Sri Lanka relations will continue to move on an upward trajectory. Mr Rajapaksa, it will be recalled, had made some major concessions to Beijing and had ended up indebting his country, compelling Colombo to lease out its Hambantota port to China. Mr Wickremesinghe might be pro-India, but this is not the case with a large and powerful section of Sri Lankas political class, which includes the countrys President, Maithripala Sirisena, who had dismissed him. India might have won a reprieve in the Maldives and Sri Lanka, but that could well be temporary. It was the internal politics of the two nations that had worked in Indias favour and not any overwhelming geopolitical dynamic. Like it or not, China will continue to remain an attractive proposition in this region with its deep pockets and the potential of balancing New Delhi. Fears of Indian hegemony in South Asia will similarly remain an ineluctable factor in the geopolitics of the region. On the other hand, fears of the Chinese dragon hug contrasted with Indias tendency to peddle soft power could make regional leaders think twice before once again putting all their eggs in Beijings basket. In the long run, however, matters can only get more complicated in Indias neighbourhood, principally because Chinas commissars are intent on making the Indian Ocean their playground. The rapid development of the Chinese blue water Navy spells ultimate Chinese assertivenesshere as it already is in the China seas. An aggressive rival in the region is already severely testing Indias influence and infusing new uncertainties. The kind of abrupt anti-India shift and an equally abrupt course correction of the kind seen in the Maldives and Sri Lanka, far from being exceptions, could well become the norm in the future. In order to immunise our interests from the mercurial politics of the smaller, inherently insecure regional nations, New Delhi requires a broader, more overarching strategy. One possibility would be a closer and more pragmatic tieup with Japan to secure both the military and economic environment of the Indian Ocean region. Japan, unlike the Western powers, does not possess a negative militaristic persona, despite its historical past. Its defence-oriented military is seen more as a balancing than a bullying or predatory force. The same cannot be said of China or the United States, two nations that are looked upon with considerable suspicion in todays world, especially in the Indian Ocean region. Tokyo, despite its manoeuvres designed to reassure Beijing, is quietly but resolutely moving towards building a formidable naval capability. Its latest decision to build destroyers capable of hoisting the naval version of the US-made F-35 fighter is a major step towards developing a high degree of deterrence as well as the capacity to operate far from its territorial waters. Equally significant is Japans decision to develop a military base in Djibouti, which already hosts a similar US and Chinese presence. These decisions point to Japans seriousness in emerging as a key security player in the Indian Ocean region. New Delhi would do well to dovetail its plans with that of Tokyo. Such an alliance would only be mutually helpful. Japan also has a huge pool of investible capital which could be invested in the region in a judicious mesh of economic and security interests. New Delhi has taken baby steps in this direction but falters due to an excessive concern with Beijings sentiments. While it must comply to a degree with Beijings rigid demands to avert military pressure on its borders, New Delhi must simultaneously, even brazenly, pursue a politico-economic-military alliance with Tokyo. A strong, credible geopolitical alliance in the Indian Ocean region will be the greatest stabilising force. This could also be the best deterrent against future unsettling alliances and detrimental agreements like the ones witnessed in the Maldives and Sri Lanka. SpaceX later tweeted that the Falcon 9 and payload remain healthy and cited an out of family reading on the rockets first stage sensors for the delay. Elon Musks SpaceX halted Tuesdays launch of a long-delayed navigation satellite for the US military, postponing for at least a day the space transportation companys first designated national security mission for the United States. SpaceXs Falcon 9 rocket, carrying a roughly $500 million (395.41 million) global positioning system (GPS) satellite built by Lockheed Martin Corp, was due to take off from Floridas Cape Canaveral shortly after 9:30 a.m. local time (1730 GMT), but was stopped minutes before takeoff. This abort was triggered by the onboard Falcon 9 flight computer, a SpaceX official narrating the launch sequence said, adding that SpaceX would attempt the launch on Wednesday morning. SpaceX later tweeted that the Falcon 9 and payload remain healthy and cited an out of family reading on the rockets first stage sensors for the delay. US Vice President Mike Pence, who travelled to Florida to watch the launch, announced afterward that President Donald Trump would direct the Pentagon to establish a Combatant Command to oversee Americas activities in space. The Space Command, the 11th such Combatant Command in the US military, comes as the United States seeks to grow its military footprint in space. A successful launch would be a significant victory for Musk, a billionaire entrepreneur who spent years trying to break into the market for lucrative military space launches, long dominated by Lockheed and Boeing Co. SpaceX sued the US Air Force in 2014 in protest over the militarys award of a multibillion-dollar, non-compete contract for 36 rocket launches to United Launch Alliance, a partnership of Boeing and Lockheed. SpaceX dropped the lawsuit in 2015 after the Air Force agreed to open up competition, according to SpaceXs website. The next year, SpaceX won an $83 million Air Force contract to launch the GPS III satellite, which will have a lifespan of 15 years, Air Force spokesman William Russell said by phone. Tuesdays launch was to be the first of 32 satellites in production by Lockheed under contracts worth a combined $12.6 billion for the Air Forces GPS III program, Lockheed spokesman Chip Eschenfelder said. Once fully operational, this latest generation of GPS satellites will bring new capabilities to users, including three times greater accuracy and up to eight times the anti-jamming capabilities, said Russell. The GPS satellite launch was originally scheduled for 2014 but has been hobbled by production delays, the Air Force said. The next GPS III satellite will launch in mid-2019, Eschenfelder said, while subsequent satellites undergo testing in the companys Colorado processing facility. The launch marks SpaceXs first so-called National Security Space mission as defined by the US military, SpaceX said. In 2017, the Hawthorne, California-based company launched payloads for the Department of Defense that were not designated as a National Security Space missions. Click on Deccan Chronicle Technology and Science for the latest news and reviews. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter. A food delivery robot caught fire on the campus of UC Berkeley last week. KiwiBot, the autonomous food delivery robot burst into flames while it was enroute for a delivery at the campus. No one was hurt in the incident. KiwiBot has over 100 delivery robots that help distribute food throughout Berkeley and one of the bot blew up into flames, reports online stated. The manufacturer has blamed the incident on human error, citing that someone had inserted a defective battery into the robot that caused a thermal runway. The manufacturer has promised a new software that will monitor all batteries within the bot in future to avoid any such incidences. The head of product at Kiwi said that they are still investigating the cause of the fire as this is the first incident with the company. Kiwi uses many different processes in our delivery operations. One of those processes is relating to replacing the batteries on the robot in case the battery gets low. To help our operations team identify the health of our robots, we use a color visualization method to indicate their battery level: red for robots that need to get the battery replaced asap, yellow for robots that will need to be replaced within an hour, and green for robots that are fine, said the company on its blog post. On the 14th of December this year, one of the batteries for our robot that was idling started smouldering, eventually leading to some smoke and minor flames. A member of the community acted swiftly to extinguish the flames using a nearby fire extinguisher. Within moments of the incident occurring, it had already been contained. The Berkeley Fire Department arrived shortly thereafter to secure the scene, and doused the robot with foam ensuring there was no risk of re-ignition. We took this issue very seriously. Immediately upon learning of the incident, our operations team was dispatched to attend to the robot. We promptly pulled all of our robots from operations, suspending our service until we were able to investigate the root cause. Customers that had orders in progress had their food delivered by hand, minimizing the impact on the service. At no time were customers or members of the public at risk. Kiwi recently unveiled a new battery management process that will ensure that such issues would not be reproduced, the company said. kiwibot While the bot burst into flames on the street, the students at the campus took to their Facebook Page to pay tribute to the robot. They described the robot as a hero and a legend, according to the student paper. The students also called for a moment of silence and a few of them also went on to create a candlelit memorial for the bot. Click on Deccan Chronicle Technology and Science for the latest news and reviews. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter. Huawei has been in the news these past weeks for the arrest of its chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou. (Photo: AP) Huawei Technologies on Tuesday said it would spend USD 2 billion over the next 5 years to focus on cybersecurity by adding more people and upgrading lab facilities, as it battles global concerns about risks associated with its network gear. The typically secretive Chinese technology giant made the comments at one of its most in-depth press conferences at its Dongguan offices, after welcoming about two dozen international journalists into its new campus in the southern Chinese city. Huawei has been in the news these past weeks for the arrest of its chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou - also the daughter of its billionaire founder Ren Zhengfei - in Canada at the request of the United States. This has exacerbated the woes of the Chinese firm, which has already been virtually locked out of the US market and has been prohibited by Australia and New Zealand from building 5G networks amid concerns its gear could facilitate Chinese spying. Locking out competitors from a playing field cannot make yourself better. We think any concerns or allegations on security at Huawei should be based on factual evidence, its rotating chairman Ken Hu said. Without factual evidence, we dont accept and we oppose those allegations. Huawei has been communicating with governments worldwide regarding the independence of its operation, he said. He added that Japan and France had not formally banned its telecom equipment. Recent media reports have indicated moves by these governments to shun the companys equipment. Sources have told Reuters that Japan planned to ban government purchases of equipment. Other media reported that the countrys three top operators planned not to use current equipment and upcoming 5G gear from Huawei and that France was considering adding items to its high-alert list that tacitly targets Huawei. Huawei has repeatedly said Beijing has no influence over it. At the tour of Huaweis Shenzhen headquarters on Tuesday, journalists glimpsed some of Huaweis most advanced R&D labs housed in a three-storey building with a white facade and four columns, referred to by insiders as the White House. Wu said Huawei had secured more than 25 commercial contracts for 5G, slightly above the 22 the Chinese technology giant had announced in November. The company has shipped more than 10,000 base stations for the fifth generation of mobile communications, he said, adding that Huawei expects revenue to exceed USD 100 billion this year - up 8.7 per cent from last year. Huawei is the worlds largest supplier of telecommunications network equipment and second-biggest maker of smartphones and unlike other big Chinese technology firms, derives half its revenue from overseas. Wu said on Tuesday Huawei was looking forward to a just conclusion in the case of Meng, who was arrested in Vancouver on Dec. 1 after US officials alleged Huawei was trying to use banks to evade sanctions against Iran and move money out. She is awaiting possible extradition to the United States in a case that has roiled global markets amid concerns it would exacerbate tensions between the United States and China, which are already strained over trade matters. Meng, the 46-year-old daughter of Ren, has said in a sworn affidavit she is innocent and will contest the allegations against her at trial if she is surrendered to the United States. Wu said Mengs arrest has had no impact on the travel of the companys senior executives. Click on Deccan Chronicle Technology and Science for the latest news and reviews. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter. Click on Deccan Chronicle Technology and Science for the latest news and reviews. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter. The Rafale deal is among the largest government defence contracts in history and plausible suspicion of wrongdoing has been raised, especially by Congress president Rahul Gandhi. (Representational image) The Public Accounts Committee of Parliament, which is mandated to look at how public money is spent, is reported to be preparing to take up crucial questions that form part of the Rafale fighter deal controversy, though there are some difficulties in the way. The PAC chairman, senior Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge, can bring a subject on to the agenda, and once Rafale is taken up, the PAC can summon any official, including the Prime Minister, to answer questions. For this reason alone the BJP members on the committee, who are the majority, may be expected to resist Mr Kharges efforts. But this is par for the course in parliamentary life. If the PAC chairman succeeds in having Rafale discussed before the Lok Sabha election, the committee can summon the Comptroller and Auditor-General and the attorney-general, who presented the governments case on this matter in the Supreme Court. Indeed, the Rafale pricing issue is already before the CAG. It is to be hoped that the work has progressed sufficiently and the CAG can offer the PAC useful perspectives, if summoned. Any delays in the CAGs work can only further the governments purpose if the governments actions and words before the Supreme Court is any guide. The Rafale deal is among the largest government defence contracts in history and plausible suspicion of wrongdoing has been raised, especially by Congress president Rahul Gandhi. His words gain strength from former French President Francois Hollande, whose government signed the Inter-Governmental Agreement on Rafale with the Narendra Modi government. The Supreme Courts December 14 verdict, which lets the government off the hook on key issues, appears to be based on a cavalier treatment of the known facts, and cannot bring closure to the raging controversy and suspicions of bribery, and on the way taxpayers money has been spent. A probe by a parliamentary committee will help to fill gaps and further our understanding. Ideally, a Joint Parliamentary Committee should be constituted. Parliament is the right forum to question the executive, regardless of whether the Supreme Court has gone over the matter. And in this case, the courts judgment cannot carry conviction. It has made glaring factual mistakes in the pricing case, and in the matter of the selection of an industrialist with a poor financial and non-existent work record in the relevant field as a key offset partner (which theoretically can be a conduit for irregular payments). Ironically, even a government that is grateful for the courts judgment was obliged to ask it to correct some factual inaccuracies in the order. It is also astonishing why the court did not ask why the industrialist in question was at all taken to France with Prime Minister Modi. Parliaments intervention is warranted. Bell said Trumps worldview resembled a caecilians, whose eyes can only detect light and dark. (Photo: File) Washington: A newly-discovered blind amphibian will be named after Donald Trump in recognition of the US presidents stance on climate change, according to a media report. EnviroBuild, a UK-based sustainable building materials company, announced on Tuesday that it would be using Dermophis donaldtrumpi as the name for the amphibian with no legs and poor eyesight. The company says the name still will need to undergo peer review, but that other animals have been named after presidents in the past. The name was chosen by Aidan Bell, the boss of the firm which paid thousands at an auction for the right, The Guardian reported. The small creature is blind and has an ability to bury its head in the ground. These features Bell said match the US leaders opinion on climate change. The company said Trumps was the perfect name for the limbless animal. The Panamanian underground amphibians are particularly vulnerable to global warming. Dermophis donaldtrumpi, 10 centimetres in length and belonging to group of snakelike animals called caecilians, was recently found in Panama by a group of scientists. Its naming rights were auctioned off in a fundraiser for Rainforest Trust, a non-profit rainforest conservation organisation, the report said. The winning bid of USD 34,478 was made by Aidan Bell, the head of a UK-based sustainable building materials company called EnviroBuild. It is the perfect name, Bell said. Caecilian is taken from the Latin caecus, meaning blind, perfectly mirroring the strategic vision President Trump has consistently shown towards climate change, he said. Bell said Trumps worldview resembled a caecilians, whose eyes can only detect light and dark. Capable of seeing the world only in black and white. Donald Trump has claimed that climate change is a hoax by the Chinese, he added. The worlds leading scientists agree that climate change is primarily human-induced. But Trump, whose administration has pursued a pro-fossil fuels agenda, has accused those scientists of having a political agenda and cast doubt on whether humans were responsible for the Earths rising temperatures. I dont know that its manmade, he said in an interview with CBSs 60 Minutes in October. Im not denying climate change but [temperatures] could very well go back, he added, without offering evidence. Trump in June last year withdrew the US from the Paris climate change agreement, which commits countries to keeping a limit on rising global temperatures. He justified this decision by asserting that he had been elected to serve the citizens of Pittsburgh and not Paris and the deal disadvantaged US businesses and workers. Caecilians lost their limbs at least 60 million years ago to better burrow in the earth, and live almost entirely underground. Burrowing its head underground helps Donald Trump when avoiding scientific consensus on anthropomorphic climate change and also appointed several energy lobbyists to the Environment Agency, where their job is to regulate the energy industry, Bell said. The Indian rupee has gained146 paise in the last 30 hours against the US dollar on the back of low crude oil prices, increased foreign fund flow and Urjit Patels resignation as the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor. The rupee, in the early morning trade on Wednesday, opened over 34 paise higher against the US dollar at 70.10, after gaining 112 paise on Tuesday. Falling crude oil prices, along with the fall in the bond yields have been propelling rupee since Mondays morning trade. Yesterday, rupee rallied by a whopping 112 paise, its best single-day gains in over five years, to settle at 70.44 against the rupee as softening crude oil prices eased concerns over India's current account deficit expansion. The currency further gained strength as it passed 70 per US dollar mark. It touched an intraday low of 69.89 per US dollar. Its mainly because of the crude oil prices coming down and also there have been increased FPI flows, said Kavita Chacko, Senior Economist with Care Ratings. Brent crude hit a 14-month low of $ 58.26 per barrel, despite the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) announcing 10% cut in the production. Market analysts attribute the phenomenon to the supply-demand mismatch in the global oil markets. While the US crude oil production is at an all-time high, the demand has not seen a similar growth on the back of the shift towards more viable sources of energy. On the other hand, the government 10-year bond yield dropped to 7.238% -- a level last seen on April 9, dropping almost 10.9 basis points, from its Tuesdays close of 7.347%. Bond yield refers to the rate of return or interest paid to the bondholder while the bond price is the amount of money the bondholder pays for the bond. Bond prices and bond yields are inversely correlated. A rising yield is dollar bullish. A falling yield is dollar bearish. There was a perception in the markets that Urjit is too strict. After his exit, you are seeing a lot of positive sentiment in the markets. That is why you are seeing bond-yields going down, and rupee appreciating, an analyst tracking the market said. US Fed will be announcing key policy rates today. It is expected to raise rates by 25 basis points. Many analysts believe that rupee is expected to remain in this range in near future. With the fall in crude oil prices and the announcement of a pipeline of OMOs, we expect the INR to trade between69-72 relative to the USD. 10 year G-sec yields are likely to range between 7.2-7.5% in the near term, Aditi Nayar, Principal Economist, Icra said. The Udupi District Cable Operators Association on Tuesday staged a protest against Telecom Regulatory Authority of Indias (TRAI) revised tariff order for TV channels. Association secretary Kamalaksha Pai, addressing the members, said many dependent on the business will lose their source of livelihood due to the development. The tariff order is forcing cable operators to end their lives, he charged. Pai said many DTH and cable companies offer over 60 HD channels at a price around Rs 225 per month. Under the new tariff scheme, the average distributor price of an HD channel works out to around Rs 15. Thus, if the DTH and cable operators try to provide the same 60 HD channels under the new scheme, they will have to pay Rs 864 to the channel owners. In other words, we will get only Rs 225 from each subscriber. But we, in turn, will have to pay Rs 864 to the channel providers, he said. The consumers are also not going to pay extra for less number of channels just because TRAI has revised the rules. There are 366 cable operators in the district with 1.54 lakh connections. TRAI is making an attempt to mislead the cable operators. TRAIs decision leaves the cable operators bankrupt, he added. Pakistan's renowned social activist and an outspoken critic of the country's powerful military establishment Asma Jahangir was posthumously honoured by the UN with a prestigious human rights award. Jahangir, who fought against religious extremism and for the rights of oppressed minorities in Pakistan, died of cardiac arrest at the age of 66 in February. She was honoured with the 2018 United Nations Human Rights Prize, an award given every five years since 1968. Jahangir's daughter Munizae Jahangir received the award on her behalf from President of the UN General Assembly Maria Fernanda Espinosa at a special ceremony here Tuesday. Among others who won the award include girls' education rights activist Rebeca Gyumi of Tanzania, Brazil's first indigenous woman lawyer Joenia Batista de Carvalho and Front Line Defenders from Ireland, working to protect human rights defenders at risk. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said that the work of the honourees and that of other human rights defenders around the world is essential for the collective efforts to sustain peace and ensure inclusive sustainable development and respect for human rights for all. "Often their work is dangerous. We regularly hear of abuses against human rights defenders murder, disappearances, torture, arbitrary imprisonment and other attempts to silence them. "Yet, these courageous individuals and groups remain committed to shining a light on the dark corners of the globe, wherever human rights violations occur," he said in his remarks to the General Assembly's United Nations Prize in the Field of Human Rights award ceremony. The event commemorated the 70th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, marked annually on December 10. Guterres said human rights defenders give voice to the voiceless and shield the powerless against injustice. "They stand for all rights economic, civil, political, social and cultural. They support the rule of law or work peacefully to change laws so women and girls, indigenous communities, minorities and other marginalised groups may exercise their rights," he said. Guterres said they work to empower people through education and help to protect other human rights defenders from harassment, intimidation or arrest. As part of the UN's activities in observance of Human Rights Day, which coincided with the Declaration's anniversary, the champions in the field from across the world, convened at the General Assembly Hall to be recognised for their outstanding contributions. Every five years, the United Nations Prize in the Field of Human Rights is awarded to organisations and individuals which embody excellent activism in defending human rights. The four winners join a notable group who have been recognised since the Prize was established by the General Assembly in 1966, including prominent figures such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Jimmy Carter, Malala Yusafzai and this year's Nobel Peace Prize winners, Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad, as well as organisations such as the Amnesty International and the International Committee of the Red Cross. Marking the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Espinosa said it was one of the most important contributions that the world body has made to mankind, reflecting the collective aspirations of an international order founded on human dignity and with a view to making the world a better place. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said upholding all people's human rights is the only possible path to peace. Born in January 1952 in Lahore, Asma co-founded and chaired the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. After obtaining LLB degree from the Punjab University in 1978, she started her career as an advocate at high and Supreme courts. Delaware County politics suffered a striking blow last week with the death of Cliff Wilson, the former longtime Democratic Party chairman and current Southeast Delco School Board member. He was a true giant in the Democratic Party and in Delaware County Democratic Party history, said David Landau, who succeeded Wilson as the party head in 2010. Wilson died Friday afternoon following a long battle with liver disease. He would have been 72 years old Tuesday. He spent a decade and a half or more than a decade and a half, 16 years serving the entire county with great dedication during difficult times, said Colleen Guiney, who took up the mantle of Delco Democratic Party chair earlier this year. He is fondly remembered by hundreds of volunteers who worked with him over the years to build the foundation of our party. Landau said Wilson instituted a number of reforms that opened the doors to the rank and file during his tenure as the local party head, including county conventions that allowed for a more democratic candidate selection process. It was a thankless job to be chair of the Democratic Party in the 90s and the early 2000s, in the sense that it was very difficult the county was two-to-one Republican but he stood there and he stayed with it, said Landau. He didnt just give up after one term, he stayed for four terms and really made his mark and laid the foundation for the modern Democratic Party. Guiney said she had many interesting conversations with Wilson since first meeting him in 2004 and that he supported her in taking the reins for the party. I just wish his family well in this very difficult time, she said. We just remember him fondly and are grateful for his service, and hope that his legacy blossoms and flourishes. Wilson also served in a number of other political capacities over the years, including a stint as Folcroft Borough executive director, chairman of the Southeast Delco Democratic Party, chairman of the Radnor Democratic Party, as a member of the Delaware County Board of Elections and as a special assistant to U.S. Rep. Bob Brady. He also recently joined the Association for Professional Genealogists. Before moving to Pennsylvania, Wilson served for eight years in the New York State Assembly, where he was the chairman of the Election Law Committee and the Administrative Regulations Review Commission. His chief of staff in that position, Newsmax columnist John Tantillo, remembered him as a man who could cut to the heart of any political issue. He had a way of explaining politics to the man on the street so that they could understand what it was about, said Tantillo. Tantillo remembered one instance where Wilson, working on then-U.S. Sen. John Glenns 1984 presidential run, stood up to the candidate over siding with the Turks in the Cypress Conflict by pointing out the very low number of Turks living in America at the time when compared to millions of Greeks. He said, Sen. Glenn, do you think maybe you could reconsider your position on Cypress?' said Tantillo. Thats what politics is about, that maybe a few people here today could learn about its all about the numbers. Thats what he was able to say in a very unthreatening way, because he did it in kind of a joking fashion. He did it so perfectly because he was the perfect gentleman. He would put it in a perspective so that it would benefit anyone who was listening, said daughter Erica Wilson. It was always fun watching him in politics. He was really dedicated and intense, and it was his passion, and it came across that way, so it was fun watching him. Erica Wilson said her father had provided this quote to be used on a memorial plaque shortly before his death, which will be included on his prayer card: I believe in Democracy like other people believe in religion. We were born into campaigning for him, she said. My mom was pregnant while handing out stuff for him and then we would, as little kids, play at polling places and walk around handing out stuff, so we were always with him in a political atmosphere. Erica and her sister, Dr. Sharon Wilson, who also sits on the Southeast Delco School Board, said their father was very proud of reforming fire drills in New York schools during his time as an assemblyman and standing against a bill that would remove doctors from children with disabilities. If he was passionate about something, he knew all the details, so he could debate it awesomely because he knew all the facts, said Sharon Wilson. Thats what made him so strong. Tantillo said Wilson had an encyclopedic knowledge of presidents and presidential elections, but his daughters said he also maintained a voracious appetite for history and an almost freakish recall ability for all manner of information. Wilson had the ability to make history come alive in the telling by adding small details and nuance, according to his daughters, especially in his research of their own family history. He did not simply know names and dates, said Sharon Wilson, but would find stories of the people he was researching that he could relate during visits to the graves of long gone family members. If I had a question about anything historical, I could simply ask him and he would know, and possibly even tell me which book to get that knowledge out of that was in the house, said Erica Wilson. Wilson was also very proud of the surge in Democratic voters in the county, his daughters said, which now outnumber Republicans, as well as the historic wins for Democrats at the county level last year. Landau noted Wilson was instrumental in securing the 7th Congressional District seat with Joe Sestak in 2006, despite the daunting registration edge. He definitely was not afraid of an uphill battle, said Erica Wilson. And that extended to his health as well. After suffering a stroke in 2010, Sharon Wilson said her father was not expected to survive brain surgery, but showed almost no residual effects. He went under the knife again for emergency surgery in January and was again not expected to make it through recovery. Again, he soldiered on. Our candidates are winning countywide now, and I think each of them said at one point or another that they stand on the shoulders of giants, said Landau. Thats a reference to Cliff and his leadership, and his time in running the party. He was an historic figure in our party and he will be missed. A memorial service will be held Jan. 5 at McCausland Garrity Marchesani Funeral Home on Chester Pike in Glenolden. Visitors can pay respects beginning at 1 p.m. with a service to follow at 2 p.m. SWARTHMORE Police are investigating what appear to be a pair of connected, racially motivated incidents that blew up on social media at Strath Haven High School this week. The first occurred over the weekend, where Swarthmore Police Chief Brian Craig said racially charged letters had been delivered to some residents there. The second involved a picture of two people wearing what appear to be Klu Klux Klan-style hoods that quickly spread throughout the high school. Wallingford-Swarthmore School District Superintendent Dr. Lisa Palmer dispelled rumors circulating with the images that the district knows who the two people in the picture are and that they had been given early dismissal as punishment. Ive seen the picture but I dont know who the people are, she said. We have not sent children home. That has been running through the community. In terms of where we are with this, we are investigating this situation because it does appear that the two events are linked to children in our high school, so we are trying to investigate that. Palmer indicated in a statement that the name and social media handles associated with the photograph appear to be linked to students in the district, but did not have details and could not say who created the photograph or social media post. Upon learning of this photo, we immediately contacted police and are conducting an investigation in coordination with them, she said. We are extremely disturbed and disappointed at the thought that any of our students might be associated with this kind of vile display of racism. We will very closely follow our district discipline policy as it relates to any student found posting this kind of material on a school device or network, or during school hours. The letter delivered to Swarthmore residents stated that due to amazing changes by President Donald Trump, there is now a law against filthy nutheads like yourself living in our country. The letter goes on to say that the residents would be evicted from their homes at 9 a.m. tomorrow afternoon, but Donald and his crew think its best if you pack ur bags tonight and dont say goodbye to any1. The letter then states that if the writers discover the residents are not in New Mexico (city) then they will 1. Put u up for adoption and 2. Execute u and ur kidos. The letter additionally advises recipients that they can get jobs at McDonalds, Dennys, as legal prostitutes or as a new bather for pro wrestler John Cena. The letter is signed Sincerely, Donald and his Crew, specifically Mike Pence and followed by the #MAGA hashtag. Craig said his department would be coordinating with Nether Providence police in the investigation, though he had only learned of the picture of two people in hoods Wednesday and that the lead investigator from his department was not yet on duty. We share the information back and forth, thats not going to be a problem, he said. Its early in the investigation. Im still trying to fully grasp whats involved, so well work it out. UPDATE: Mark Rober admitted on Wednesday that parts of the video were faked. Read more here. SALT LAKE CITY A former NASA engineer and BYU grad had his video go viral this week for creating a glitter bomb trap that tricks thieves trying to steal Christmas gifts. What happened: In an 11-minute YouTube video, Mark Rober explains how he puts the device, which is hidden inside an Apple Homepod Box, on the porch to attract thieves to his Amazon packages. But when they go to steal the package, the device explodes with glitter, freaking the burglars out and sending them packing. He said he created the bomb to explode when thieves tried to take packages off his porch. When someone tries to steal a package, the GPS in the device measures if it has been moved significantly. If so, then it will explode. The device shoots glitter and triggers a fart spray, according to USA Today. You can see the video below. Why?: Rober, who has gone viral on YouTube before, said he caught thieves on his home security camera but the police said they couldnt investigate the case, BBC News reports. He worked with friend Sean Hodgins to design the device, which took about six months, USA Today reported. Rober decided to record videos of people attempting to steal the device, which has been in the Apple Homepod box. It was stolen on several occasions and re-set to explode and capture the footage every time. On every occasion, the thieves abandoned the package once it had been triggered and they or their property had been doused in glitter, BBC News reports. Viral: The video has more than 6 million views. "If anyone was going to make a revenge bait package and over-engineer the crap out of it, it was going to be me, Rober said, according to BBC News. He said in the video, "The moral of the story is, just don't take other peoples' stuff. Not only is it not cool, but on the plus side, you'll never find yourself in this situation." BYU: According to KSL-TVs Heather Kelly, Rober is a BYU graduate. Why it matters: Salt Lake City is one of the top cities in the country where youre more likely to get a package stolen during the holidays, according to a new report from Safewise.com, which identifies crime stats for cities across the world. HEBER CITY The deadline to donate gifts to Operation Hope is fast approaching. The collaboration between the Wasatch Community Service Alliance and the Christian Center of Park City provides Christmas presents for children up to eighth grade. People can bring new, unwrapped gifts to Christian Center's Heber Valley Center Stage, 55 E. Center, Ste. 180, until Thursday at 3 p.m. Families register for the program and then "shop" for their children from the donated items. These gifts are then wrapped for the families before they leave. In addition to Operation Hope, the Wasatch Community Service Alliance is bringing the Christmas Food Box program to Heber Valley schools. This program provides students with two weeks of supplemental food for the Christmas break a total of 400 food boxes. Donations for both projects can be made online at ccofpc.org or ourwcf.org. SALT LAKE CITY Selection, beer and cold were among the words state-run liquor store customers used most in the Utah Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control's new online feedback system. Overall, consumers rated the agency's wine and liquor outlets a 3 on a scale of 1 to 5. As of Tuesday, the agency had received 2,355 responses mostly through mobile devices to its customer satisfaction survey that went up about two months ago. Cade Meier, DABC deputy director, said the rating isn't satisfactory. "We're chasing after 5s," he said. Common complaints include long lines, not enough parking, lack of staff knowledge, poor product selection and absence of cold beer. Stores are not equipped with coolers. One survey respondent said the outlets need to run more like an Apple store, "not post World War II Eastern Europe." "What we love most about it is people are being real, which is just fine with us," Meier said. "We're attempting to put on our thick skin and do our best to hear these." On the positive side, customers called workers friendly and that the stores have a good selection of products. "I just want those who come into our stores to have a pleasant experience, but I want to stay within the bounds that the law has set. I think we can do that. I think we can modernize some of our stores into a way that people will have a pleasant experience," Meier said. State law calls for alcohol to be reasonably available while ensuring public safety and curbing underage drinking and over-imbibing. Despite some of the negative feedback, sales at the state's 45 liquor stores are booming. Revenue for fiscal 2018 (July 1, 2017, to June 30, 2018) totaled $453.7 million, a 6 percent increase over the previous year. From 2014 to 2018, sales revenue rose $105 million, marking a 6.8 percent annual growth rate over that period, according to the DABC retail sales report. Alcohol profits which totaled $191 million in 2018 mostly go to the state's general fund, school lunch program, underage drinking prevention campaigns and public safety to enforce liquor laws. Distilled spirits made up 54 percent of all sales, followed by wines at 33 percent and heavy and full malted beer at 11 percent. State liquor stores did 11.3 million retail transactions last year, with the average sale being $37.56. December and March were the top-selling months, accounting for about 20 percent of the departments annual sales. Outside of the DABC Salt Lake City club store, which sells primarily to restaurants and bars, liquor outlets in suburban Cottonwood Heights and Sandy sold the highest volumes. Three of the four Park City outlets were also in the top 10. Barton Vodka was the highest selling product, totaling $3.1 million on 270,996 bottles. Five new state liquor stores in Salt Lake, Davis and Utah counties are in the development or construction phase. SALT LAKE CITY A Utah federal judge was among a court panel that dismissed ethics complaints Tuesday against newly appointed Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. U.S. District Judge Clark Waddoups is one of nine members of the 10th Circuit Judicial Council, which U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts assigned to review pending and new complaints against Kavanaugh. The judicial council in the Washington, D.C. circuit where Kavanaugh previously served requested the transfer to the Denver-based 10th Circuit. The panel concluded that Congress did not apply the Judicial Conduct and Disability Act to Supreme Court justices. The law provides rules for handling misconduct complaints. "The allegations made in the complaints are serious, but the judicial council is obligated to adhere to the act," 10th Circuit Chief Judge Timothy Tymkovich wrote for the panel. The complaints "must be dismissed because, due to his elevation to the Supreme Court, Justice Kavanaugh is no longer a judge covered by the act," he wrote. Most of the complaints against Kavanaugh included allegations that he lied under oath during his D.C. circuit confirmation hearings in 2004 and 2006 and his Supreme Court confirmation hearings earlier this year. Others allege that he made inappropriate partisan statements that showed bias and lack of judicial temperament and that he treated members of the Senate Judiciary Committee with disrespect. To date, 83 complaints have been lodged against Kavanaugh. The panel made no finding on the merits of the complaints, citing its lack of jurisdiction. Those filing complaints identified themselves as doctors, lawyers, concerned citizens and others. Tymkovich noted that the judicial council "greatly liberalized" its standards for accepting complaints, including taking postcards as long as they identified the sender. FARMINGTON A man already on the Utah Sex Offender Registry for convictions in two cases now faces new criminal charges. Skyler Ray Pettingill, 30, whose hometown is listed now in court documents as Evansville, Indiana, was charged Tuesday in Davis County's 2nd District Court with enticing a minor, a second-degree felony. On Dec. 13, Pettingill chatted online with an undercover federal agent who was posing as a 13-year-old boy, according to charging documents. Police say they arrested Pettingill after he arrived at a designated location in Farmington where he thought he was going to engage in sex acts with the boy. Investigators also found a second man in the car with him who is also on the sex offender registry, the charges state. That man is not named in court documents. In 2013, Pettingill was convicted of lewdness involving a child and sentenced to up to five years in prison. During that time, Pettingill wrote a letter to the judge in his case, stating he was "ashamed" of what he had done and asked for the opportunity to get treatment in a halfway house. "I will do anything and everything to become a better man," he wrote. "My lack of character has put me where I'm at now. I never wish to come to this point ever again, your honor." In 2008, Pettingill was convicted of an amended charge of attempted sex abuse of a child and was sentenced to up to five years at the Utah State Prison. Burdensome and excessive federal regulations often delay or prohibit American businesses from investing in infrastructure or land development projects that will create jobs, grow crops and improve how we manage our natural resources. Upon taking office, President Donald Trump initiated a process to review and replace these regulatory barriers, which included the Obama administrations 2015 waters of the United States definition. In other parts of the country operating under the 2015 definition, farmers, landowners, municipalities and businesses are spending too much time and money trying to determine whether waters on their land are waters of the United States and subject to federal regulation under the Clean Water Act. In some cases, they pay consultants or lawyers tens of thousands of dollars only to discover that they need federal permits that cover isolated ponds, channels that only flow after it rains and wetlands far removed from the navigable waters the Clean Water Act was specifically designed to regulate. Today, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Army are delivering on the presidents agenda by proposing a new definition for waters of the United States. The agencies proposal would end years of uncertainty over where federal jurisdiction begins and ends. It would clarify the role of our state and tribal partners those closest to and most knowledgeable about their own waters and help them more effectively and efficiently manage their land and water resources. And it would respect the limited powers the federal government has been given under the Constitution and the Clean Water Act to regulate navigable waters. Our new proposal would make it easier to understand where the Clean Water Act applies and where it does not. It would facilitate critical infrastructure projects, reduce barriers to business development and support economic growth. In Utah, a headwater state and a semiarid region, water resources are unique compared with other parts of the country. I encourage landowners, businesses, community members and organizations to consider how this definition would affect the water on your properties and in your watersheds. Under the proposal, traditional navigable waters, tributaries, certain lakes and ponds, impoundments of jurisdictional waters, wetlands adjacent to jurisdictional waters and certain ditches, such as those used for navigation or those affected by the tide, would be federally regulated. More importantly, many ditches, including most roadside or farm ditches, would be excluded from federal regulation. Ephemeral streams those that only flow after it rains would also not qualify as waters of the United States. Now, because of litigation, the 2015 definition is in effect in 22 states, the District of Columbia and the U.S. territories, while the previous regulations, issued in the 1980s, are in effect in the remaining 28 states, including Utah. This unpredictable, regulatory patchwork will not continue under the Trump administration. Going forward, the proposed definition for waters of the United States would establish national consistency and would rebalance the relationship between the federal government and states. States already have regulations for waters within their borders, regardless of whether they are federally regulated as waters of the United States. That means the combination of the agencies proposal and state regulations would continue to provide coverage for the nations water resources as intended by Congress when it passed the Clean Water Act over 45 years ago. Since the beginning of this administration, EPA and the Army have been committed to an open and transparent process for reviewing the definition of waters of the United States and the scope of federal authority under the Clean Water Act. The agencies sought feedback from a broad audience of stakeholders and have developed a proposed rule that reflects the diverse input that was submitted. The agencies proposal will be available for public review for 60 days after the proposed rule is published in the Federal Register. Trump understands that we can have clean air, clean water and a strong economy. By providing greater regulatory certainty and clarity to states and the regulated community, our proposed definition will streamline and accelerate important projects throughout the nation. This means that hardworking Americans will spend less time and money determining whether they need a federal permit and more time growing crops, building homes, modernizing infrastructure, creating jobs and improving the lives of their fellow citizens. SALT LAKE CITY A man who police say threatened to shoot several people in the parking lot of a fast food restaurant, and then crashed into a police car while trying to escape was charged Tuesday. Raul Izarraraz, 26, of West Valley, was charged Tuesday in 3rd District Court with three counts of aggravated assault, a third-degree felony; failing to stop for police, a third-degree felony; DUI, a third-degree felony; and six other misdemeanors. On Dec. 13, two girls were spotted fighting in a McDonald's parking lot in West Jordan, according to charging documents. But when a man approached to try and break it up, Izarraraz walked up to him with a handgun and told him "that if he didn't leave he would kill him," the charges state. Izarraraz also threatened to shoot two other people who witnessed the fight, according to court documents. A West Jordan police officer responding to the parking lot spotted Izarraraz's vehicle near 6200 South Bangerter Highway, the charges state. Izarraraz sped away, but when he attempted a U-turn near 5400 South and 2700 West he crashed into the pursuing officer, causing both cars to become inoperable, according to charging documents. As Izarraraz got out of the car and started to run, the officer noticed he was carrying a gun, the charges state. Izarraraz tripped and fell and the officer ordered him at gunpoint to drop his weapon. "Izarraraz hesitated but then held his hands up as ordered," the charges state. Police found the gun loaded with hollow-point rounds, and while clearing it "a casing that appeared to be spent came out of the chamber," according to court documents. In 2012, Izarraraz was charged in connection with a stabbing in Salt Lake City, according to court records. The case was later dismissed, however, when prosecutors were unable to proceed because witnesses failed to show up for court, the according to court records. PROVO A sales tax hike that would raise $22 million for transportation projects in Utah County has officially come back from the dead. Utah County voters shot it down in 2015, largely due to distrust of the Utah Transit Authority. But thanks to a sweeping transportation bill passed by the Utah Legislature earlier this year that restructured UTA, county leaders were given the power to put it back on the ballot again or enact it themselves. Tuesday, the Utah County Commission voted to enact. Up until Tuesday's vote, Utah County was the only county along the Wasatch Front to not impose the tax. Starting April 1, Utah County shoppers will start paying an extra penny for every $4 spent on taxable goods, not including food. The 0.25 percent sales tax hike is projected to generate an additional $22 million per year for transit and road projects. I'm not voting no because we don't need road funding. I'm voting no because I've heard from the people for a long time on this, and it still rings in my ears. Commissioner Bill Lee Utah County will get 100 percent of the new revenue up until July 1 next year, after which the tax money will be split 20 percent to Utah County, 40 percent to cities and 40 percent to UTA. The vote came after Utah County leaders wrestled with the tax hike for months. At first, commissioners were reluctant to override voters' 2015 decision without more control over how UTA will spend county tax dollars, then they missed a deadline to place it on this year's ballot again after county and UTA officials didn't finalize an interlocal agreement in time. A service agreement to give the county more control of UTA's share of the money about $8.8 million a year still hadn't been finalized before Tuesday's vote. That, and voters' 2015 rejection, was why Commissioner Bill Lee cast the only vote against the tax hike Tuesday. "I'm not voting no because we don't need road funding," Lee said. "I'm voting no because I've heard from the people for a long time on this, and it still rings in my ears." Lee acknowledged efforts to make the tax more "palatable" by adding more county control over the money, but he said "the t's are not crossed and the i's are not dotted" yet without the new UTA board's signature on the service agreement. But for commission Chairman Nathan Ivie and Commissioner Greg Graves, commitments from new UTA board members and Herbert's acceptance of Utah and Tooele County's compromise appointee to the new UTA board, Kent Millington, just the day before was enough to throw their support behind the tax to start a new stream of revenue for Utah County roads and transit. Later Tuesday, Utah County commissioners voted to officially drop their lawsuit against the governor after he rejected two previous names commissioners submitted for him to appoint to the new UTA board. Prior to Tuesday's vote, the commissioners spent months drafting the interlocal agreement with UTA that stipulates the agency's portion of the tax revenue will be used to pay off debt on local UTA projects so it could save on interest and free up more money for road projects. "A lot of times, we can't change what we've been given, but we can take what we've been given and try to make it the best we can," Ivie said. "We've been given a transit partner who has been fiscally very poorly managed," Ivie added, referring to UTA's scandal-tainted past. "Because of the interlocal agreement we have passed and signed, we have the opportunity to save about $74 million in interest from now until the year 2030. That's a huge, huge savings. That frees up enormous amounts of money for us to go ahead and address some needs." Ivie also threw his support behind the tax after proposing a sunset clause that would "force" a future County Commission to re-evaluate the tax by the end of 2028. Graves, who has been pushing the imposition of the tax since earlier this year, said Utah and Tooele counties' appointee won't be a "rubber stamp" trustee and "that should give everybody a lot of comfort." "With Kent Millington, if we tell him we need a service level agreement by Jan. 31, I guarantee you, you'll have a service level agreement by Jan. 31," Graves said. Beth Holbrook, one of UTA's newly appointed trustees, promised commissioners Tuesday she would work with Millington to hash out the service agreement. "I want you to know I will work really hard and work with Kent really hard to make sure that the service agreement we're working on right now will be enacted and adhered to," Holbrook said. Many Utah County mayors and city councils also issued resolutions in support of the tax hike ahead of the commissioners' vote Tuesday. "(Transportation) is the No. 1 issue facing the county, facing the cities, facing the residents," Orem Mayor Richard Brunst told commissioners. "Please enact this. Please move forward. I don't want the county to be the only one that is not funded in this." The transportation tax wasn't the only tax increase Utah County leaders were considering this year. Commissioners were also looking at raising property taxes but last week after a series of public meetings where residents turned out in droves to oppose the tax voted to delay a possible tax hike until at least next year. Tuesday, the Utah County Commission finalized its $88 million 2019 budget without a property tax hike. The transportation sales tax hike's new revenue won't start being collected until April, after which county leaders will factor the new revenue into the budget. SALT LAKE CITY Even if the campus police department wasn't understaffed, overworked and inexperienced, state and University of Utah officials aren't sure officers could have prevented the murder of Lauren McCluskey. "Whether or not we can say with certainty that her death could have been prevented in this particular situation, we just simply cannot do that. All we can say is we hope we have systems in place in the future that will lessen the probability of this kind of a thing happening," said John T. Nielsen, who headed up the three-member panel assigned to investigate how university police handled the McCluskey case. "This report does not offer us a reason to believe this tragedy could have been prevented. But instead, the report tells us how we can improve, added University of Utah President Ruth Watkins. On Oct. 22, McCluskey, 21, a star student-athlete at the U., was shot and killed by Melvin Shawn Rowland, 37, a man she had dated for about a month before she discovered he was a convicted sex offender and nearly two decades her senior. Her death followed extortion attempts by Rowland. McCluskey had made several reports to university police in the days leading up to her death. In November, the university announced that a team comprised of three veteran law enforcers would conduct an investigation of University of Utah police to find out whether more could have been done to prevent McCluskey's death. The team included Nielsen, a former Utah Department of Public Safety commissioner, Keith Squires, who retired earlier this year as public safety commissioner, and Sue Riseling, executive director of the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administration and a former university police chief in Wisconsin. The findings of the report, in addition to the findings of an independent review commissioned by Gov. Gary Herbert to look into how Adult Probation and Parole handled the case and "the justice system overall," were released Wednesday. "We determined that the University of Utah Public Safety is understaffed, not only with respect for the need for more patrol officers, but other officers and detectives trained in the investigation of domestic and interpersonal violence, Nielsen said. The report recommended that the department utilize the Lethality Assessment Protocol, a set of questions officers ask victims of domestic violence to determine whether a victim is at risk for greater violence, specifically homicide. Most police departments across the valley have been using lethality assessment for a few years. The report also found that most of the interaction between officers and McCluskey was done by text, email and phone calls, and recommended that the department require interviews in domestic violence cases be done in person. "Demeanor, anxiety, expressions of fear are much more readily apparent with personal contact, Nielsen said. While it is impossible to say whether a larger staff at the U. and the use of such programs would have prevented the McCluskey tragedy, Nielsen said it would have had an impact on how officers responded. "I think there would have been a greater sensitivity to the kinds of issues that Lauren was facing. This was looked at primarily through the eyes of criminal law rather than the more subtle aspects of domestic violence," he said. The report also found that university officers failed to check Rowland's offender status. "None of the officers involved sought to discover if Rowland was under the supervision of the Division of Adult Probation and Parole, notwithstanding the fact that a criminal history check was conducted and that Lauren suspected that Rowland and his friends were behind the extortion attempts, Nielsen said. But again, Nielsen doesn't know if that information had been discovered and passed on to Rowland's parole officer, if it would have made a difference. "All I can tell you is that the information that could have been available with respect to (Melvin Rowland's) offender status, at least should have been reported to the parole agent. What the parole agent (would do) beyond that, we don't know," he said. The report also found a flaw in the system. When an officer did a background check on Rowland using his driver's license, he was not flagged as being on parole. Current public safety Commissioner Jess Anderson said that was the result of a change the state made in May to comply with federal law. Anderson said his report is recommending changes on the state level to fix that. Still, Nielsen's report also noted that U. officers "seemed to lack the knowledge and awareness" of how the state systems that alert officers of an offender's status with Adult Probation and Parole worked. Other findings of Nielsen's report: A fake email sent to police, purportedly written by Rowland posing as the university's assistant police chief in an attempt to lure McCluskey out of her apartment, went unnoticed until after her death because officers aren't required to check their email on weekends. A report by McCluskey's friends that Rowland had talked about bringing a gun onto campus to give to McCluskey was not given to police. Rowland was frequently violating the campus housing guest policy, and "had easy access to the housing unit," Nielsen said. "There needs to be significantly greater oversight and attention to housing guest policy issues, he said. Campus victim advocates should have been engaged very early in the investigation, but the police department "does not have a coordinated working relationship" with them. The University of Utah Public Safety Department headquarters is "inadequate for current policing and security needs and is poorly located." Watkins said the university is "deeply committed" to making the changes recommended in the report. She said the police department has requested five additional people be hired immediately, including the department's own victim advocate and a detective with specialties in handling domestic violence cases. "Chief Brophy has my full confidence. He accepts the recommendations, agrees with them, and in fact embraces them and the opportunity to learn and move forward, she said, adding that she believed the chief has the "ability, talent and commitment to lead these changes going forward." Riseling noted during Wednesday's news conference announcing the panel's findings that university police officers aren't like traditional city police officers. In addition to working investigations, university police officers are also responsible for major events on campus such as security for guest speakers and sporting events as well as overseeing two major hospitals. Often, as was the case with the officer assigned to the McCluskey case, officers are asked by outside agencies to do follow-up investigating involving victims taken to University Hospital or Primary Children's Hospital. McCluskey's extortion case was not ignored by university police, she emphasized. Furthermore, both Nielsen and Anderson agreed that Rowland, who was on the Utah Sex Offender Registry and in and out of the Utah State Prison three times over the past two decades, was very good at hiding his criminal activity and covering his tracks. "Its my opinion that Melvin Shawn Rowland was about as good at his craft as anybody that I have interacted with. He was a very, very clever, very bright, career criminal, Nielsen said. "He was a very manipulative individual," added Anderson. "He knew exactly what he was doing. He was a true criminal. He always had the right answers when (a parole officer) would show up, and two out of three home visits, he was at home. And he always had a clean phone." Anderson said Rowland was "spoofing" phone numbers, or using numbers that weren't his, to send messages and was using several aliases. Among the messages Rowland is believed to have sent McCluskey from other numbers in the days leading up to her death was a message claiming Rowland had been in a car crash, and another claimed he was dead. But McCluskey was skeptical, according to the report, believing Rowland was trying to lure her out of her apartment. The panel also talked Wednesday about the challenges the university police department faces in hiring new officers due to competing salaries with other law enforcement agencies and the changes made by the state Legislature in retirement benefits for law enforcers. Nielsen's panel will now look at how the University of Utah can improve campus safety overall. That report, scheduled to be completed by next spring, will focus on overall campus safety, including such issues as lighting, student parking closer to buildings and additional safety training for students. Help for people in abusive relationships can be found by contacting the YWCA's Women in Jeopardy program at 801-537-8600, or the confidential statewide Domestic Violence Hotline at 800-897-LINK (5465). Resources are also available online at udvc.org. Cookie banner We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from. To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy. Please also read our Privacy Notice and Terms of Use, which became effective December 20, 2019. By choosing I Accept, you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies. ZION NATIONAL PARK Zion National Park will test a mandatory shuttle service from Dec. 22-31 to relieve traffic congestion within the park during the holiday season, according to officials. The Zion Canyon Scenic Drive will be closed to private vehicles while the mandatory shuttle service is in effect, according to a news release from park officials. Buses in the park will leave the visitor center and head up the canyon every 10 minutes starting at 8 a.m. and ending at 5 p.m. every day. The shuttle will also be available in Springdale, Washington County, "to help visitors make connections within the park and town," the release states. The Springdale shuttles will run from 8:10 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. every 15 minutes. Officials also cautioned visitors to prepare for winter driving conditions, including potential storms and ice. PROVO A couple accused of tying up a 9-year-old girl, putting a towel over her head and pouring water on her will face felony abuse charges. Joseph Maseser Mitchell, 29, and Ilaria Catherina Mitchell, 28, were charged Wednesday in 4th District Court with three counts of child abuse, a second-degree felony; and child abuse, a class misdemeanor. On Dec. 3, the Utah County Sheriff's Office was called to investigate a potential child abuse case. The girl told investigators that she went to the kitchen to get a drink, but forgot she wasn't allowed to do that because it was too late at night, according to charging documents. "Both parents then took her into the bathroom and brought a drink cup. She stated she was held down in the bathtub, her hands were tied together behind her back, and a towel was put over her face. She stated then that her parents poured water over the towel onto her face for about 2 to 5 minutes, and made her stay in the bathtub for 15 minutes. She stated she couldn't hear anything they were saying and couldn't breathe while the water was being poured," the charges state. Joseph Mitchell is the girl's father and Ilaria Mitchell her stepmother, according to court documents. "Ilaria told her at some point during the event that she 'could die from this happening,'" the charges state. The girl told detectives that she had had water poured on her with a towel covering her face three times, according to charging documents. "At the hospital, an injury was noted and photographed on her left hand that appears to be consistent with her hands having been tied. She also had a number of scratches and bruising on her body. She stated that her father told her not to tell anyone about this. This act with the water amounts to physical torture," the charges state. Other punishment the girl allegedly endured from the Mitchells included being hit by a belt, hanger, broom or closed fist, according to the charges. The Mitchells' other two children collaborated their "parents use hangers, belts, shoes, and a cellphone charging cord with which to hit the children," and made the 9-year-old "do physical workouts like squats or push-ups as a punishment." Joseph Mitchell denied the abuse allegations when questioned by investigators. "When asked how his 9-year-old daughter would know how what is essentially waterboarding would work, he didn't know but thought that maybe she heard about it from a neighbor girl," the charges state. SALT LAKE CITY Utah's population has grown more rapidly than any other state in the aftermath of the economic recession, show new estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. The recipe for growth in the Beehive State is unique, and young, growing families are the main ingredient, according to the numbers released Wednesday. In the last year, Utah had the highest rate of natural increase nationwide, a measure that considers new births versus deaths. Thanaa Metwally's family in Murray is among those powering the expansion. Originally from Egypt, Metwally prefers Utah for its snow-capped mountains and the friendliness of its residents. She married a lifelong Utahn and moved to the state roughly 10 years ago, feeling relieved to find it was not the America she had seen on television, teeming with skyscrapers and crowds. "I'd like to stay here. It's kind of quiet," she said Wednesday in Salt Lake City as her three daughters, Noor and Nada, 8-year-old twins, and Amira, age 4, played nearby. Metwally fits another trend in Utah's growth. Those from other states and from abroad have also driven up the population count, contributing more than 113,000 newcomers since 2010. The influx is in part due to a strong job market, said Pamela Perlich, director of demographic research at the University of Utah's Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute. In the Beehive State, unemployment is at 3.2 percent, compared to the national 3.7 percent. Utah also has drawn foreigners to faculty positions at its colleges, welcomed refugees, and has raised its profile as its becomes more urban and forges global connections, Perlich said. Overall, the roughly 400,000 new faces in the Beehive State since 2010 amount to an increase of 14.4 percent, more than twice the national rate of 6 percent, according to the census estimates. "That is consistent with what we've experienced here, which is an economy that's growing, if not the fastest, among the very fastest in the nation," Perlich said. She calls the new figures "demographic confirmation of the economic data." But for some, economics are hardly the reason to call Utah home. Jessica Palmer, of South Jordan, says no raise will mean as much as being close to loved ones. "Family drives a huge part of it," Palmer said Wednesday of the decision she and her husband made to buy a house near her childhood home in Riverton. Her mom still lives there, and she often reminds her two sisters, who have moved to Toronto and northern California, of how nice it could be if they returned home to Utah and took turns babysitting each other's young kids. Her own daughters, Emersyn, 5, and Jemma, 20 months, are among the new crop of nearly 285,000 homegrown Utahns this decade. Palmer, a realtor, has observed subdivisions spring up across what once were vast stretches of farmland near her home. A growing number of potential buyers have hailed from other states like California and Montana. "I've seen the south end of the valley transform," she said. The change in Utah is part of longtime expansion across the Intermountain West, notes Perlich. Neighboring Nevada and Idaho are also home to surging populations, mostly due to newcomers moving from other states, according to the census figures. The figures released Wednesday come on the heels of different projections that point to tapering expansion in Utah. More outsiders moved in and families continued welcome newborns in the last year, other census and state data revealed, but not at the same pace as in the past. At about 3.2 million, Utah's population remains relatively small. Texas, for its part, has swelled by more people than that since 2010, ranking just behind Utah for its rate of growth. The Lone Star State now is home to more than 28 million. Ahead of both Utah and Texas, the District of Columbia claimed the highest growth rate, at 16 percent, raising its population to about 700,000. Perlich acknowledges that some Utahns fear another recession is on its way, but said she doesn't see anything foreboding in the new census estimates or the similar figures she and her colleagues on the Utah Population Committee have calculated. "We see continued strong, but sustainable, growth," Perlich said. "We're not just dependent on high fertility rates for our growth anymore. People are moving here for opportunity. And that's a vote of confidence for the continued growth of our state." In Murray, Metwally and her husband had considered moving to Reno, Nevada, for his job drafting digital models of buildings for architects and engineers. But they agreed to remain in the Salt Lake Valley, where their older daughters love learning in Chinese as part of a dual immersion program at school and where Metwally is pursuing a degree in interior design from Salt Lake Community College. "He had a big offer. I still prefer to stay here," Metwally said. "When I like something, I need to keep it." SALT LAKE CITY A man who once compared himself to serial killer Ted Bundy has been charged with raping and sexually abusing young children after they were dropped off at his mother's baby-sitting business. Theodore Joseph Heaps, 35, of Salt Lake City, was charged Wednesday in 3rd District Court with two counts of rape of a child and three counts of sodomy on a child, all first-degree felonies. Heaps was booked into Salt Lake County Jail Wednesday evening after a $500,000 warrant was issued for his arrest. The alleged crimes happened between 1998 and 2001, according to charging documents. Heaps would have been in his late teens at the time. One girl said she was "repeatedly raped" by Heaps beginning when she was 12, the charges state. A boy said he was 6 when Heaps began abusing him, according to charging documents. Both victims told police the abuse would happen after they were dropped off to be baby-sat by Heaps' mother, the charges state. Heaps was interviewed by police in September. "He confessed to sexually abusing many children who were under the care of his mother's day care business," the charges state. "During the interview (Heaps) named numerous children by name whom he molested." It was after interviewing Heaps that detectives tracked down a third alleged victim and interviewed him. Heaps was convicted of kidnapping in 2007, and of felony child abuse in 2004, according to court records. In 2009, Heaps was placed on probation for his kidnapping conviction. According to a progress report issued by Adult Probation and Parole in 2011, a therapist who treated Heaps appreciated his level of honesty but also noted his behavior was "very disturbing." "He admitted at one time he had re-enacted the sexual abuse of his victims with his girlfriend. He also frequently compared himself to Ted Bundy," the report states. Officials at the probation agency were split on whether Heaps was "being extraordinarily honest" or if he was going to be successful at treatment, a probation officer admitted in the report. The report ultimately recommended his probation be successfully terminated. The Google My Business app is meant to help small and mid-size businesses better manage their listings on Google Search and Maps. Key Highlights: Google My Business App is a free app for small and midsize business (SMBs) The app enables SMBs manage their listing on Google Search and Maps Using the app, SMBs can keep their profile updated and converse with customers as well Google has launched its revamped Google My Business App that is meant to help small and mid-size businesses (SMBs) list themselves on Google Search and Maps. It is a free tool aimed at enabling SMBs to manage their profiles on the move, boost user engagement and manage their online listing, which could help the businesses grow. Users of the app will get to update their profile using the app and also converse with customers. The app comes with new features like a new post button, a customer tab and the bottom navigation bar. Google My Business app is available for download via the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store. The above mentioned new post button will enable business profiles to stand out on Google. Using the app feature, SMBs will get to upload a photo, create an offer or an event, and they can also add it to their profile on Google for users to discover. Businesses will also be able to manage their information on Google from the profile tab and Google says that the edits they make will appear simultaneously across Maps and Search. The customer tab will allow SMBs to interact directly with customers by replying to their reviews and receiving messages. The navigation bar on the bottom of the app is supposed to aid users by providing one-tap access to the home tab, new customers tab, and profile tab. Speaking on the new updated version of Google My Business App, Shalini Girish, Director - Marketing Solutions, Google India said, The new app will encourage businesses to manage their presence on Google in real time, make their profiles more appealing and interact with customers. For instance, if youre a restaurant owner and have a packed house on a Friday night, the app allows you to create a post with a picture of the restaurant to engage with prospective customers on Maps and Search. Its this real-time presence that we hope will go a long way in helping businesses attract new customers and bring back existing ones. Google has been providing services that are said to help SMBs and Digital Unlocked is one of its initiatives aimed at helping businesses gain digital skills via offline and online training module. The company says that over 360,000 small businesses were trained in the past two years. It also has a Google Primer mobile app that is designed to teach digital marketing skills and its Websites with Google My Business is also aimed at enabling SMBs create a free, mobile optimised website in 10 regional languages. Google claims that over 800,000 Indian businesses are already using the service. Related Read: Google Maps now lets users message and chat with businesses The Boring Company, owned by Elon Musk, demonstrates a section of its high-speed transportation tunnel in Hawthorne, California. Cars in the tunnel can supposedly travel at speeds up to 241 kmph safely. Some two years ago, Elon Musk decided to found a new company because traffic in Los Angeles was driving him nuts (that definitely sounds like him, doesnt it?). More specifically, he founded The Boring Company to build a tunnel for high-speed transportation. Today, feeling that his vision had finally taken shape, Musk unveiled the 1.8-kilometre-long tunnel in Hawthorne, California as a proof of concept. During the presentation, The Boring Company was seen sending a modified Tesla Model X SUV through the tunnel at speeds between 64 and 80 kilometres per hour. Musk remarked later on Twitter that cars in the tunnel will later be able to travel at speeds up to 241 kilometres per hour safely. According to Musk, the tunnel cost the company about ten million dollars to build. In the image tweeted by Musk, we see a Model X fitted with an alignment device in the front. The device consists of a deployable wheel gear on either side of the cars front bumper and is what keeps the car from veering off course while passing through the tunnel. According to Musk, the retractable wheel gear can be applied to any autonomous, electric vehicle, not just Tesla. If driver passes out or goes crazy those tracking wheels ensure the car stays on track, he added in a statement. According to a report by CNBC, Musk described the companys high-speed transportation tunnels as an actual solution to the soul-crushing burden of traffic during the Tuesday evening presentation. Currently, the demonstration tunnel starts from the car park of the SpaceX headquarters and runs under 120th Street for up to 3.2 kilometres. Musk commented that he later plans to unveil elevators that bring users cars from ground level to the tunnel. Google Chrome will first silently flag the page and if found at fault, the flag will be enabled to skip these false entries on the back button entirely. You must have witnessed a case when you visited a page looking for something really important, but when you didnt find it and pressed the back button, nothing happened. The page gets refreshed and you are greeted with the same content over and over again, leaving you frustrated. The only way to go to the previous page is by repeatedly clicking the mouse button. Google has taken a note of it and is now planning to roll out a solution for the problem in the backend. Called history manipulation by Chrome team, the issue has been in Googles crosshairs for quite some time now. The reason for this behaviour is simple. Websites are abusing users trust in the back button by maliciously inserting ads into the tab history. This prevents user to go back on the previous page or takes users to a different page than expected. Google has found a way to combat this history manipulation. According to a report in 9to5google, a trio of new code changes has been discovered in Chromiums Gerrit source code management that will help Chrome decide whether a history entry is legitimate or not. Initially, these pages will be silently flagged, and Chrome will send metrics about the pages to Google for analysis. One of the commits says, Adds metrics for history manipulation intervention. This CL uses the skippable flag on a NavigationEntry to log various Metrics. There is no functional change. The ultimate goal of flagging is to skip these false entries entirely when the flag is enabled. A description of a commit reads, Mark entries to be skipped on back for history manipulation intervention. Entries that are added to the back/forward list without the user's intention are marked to be skipped on subsequent back button invocations. This CL only adds the bit and subsequent CLs will add metrics and the intervention logic based on this bit. Today, we are comparing the Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus with the iPhone XS Max too see which flagship device packs better hardware under its hood? The Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus was launched earlier this year with an Exynos 9810 processor and a dual camera set up at the back. On the other hand, the Apple has launched its most expensive smartphone till date iPhone XS Max this year, which carries almost the same design as the iPhone X but has a bigger display in compared to Apples other devices. We are doing a quick spec comparison of the two to see which one is the best when it comes to hardware. The Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus comes with a 6.2-inch Quad HD+ display that offers a resolution of 1440 x 2960 pixels. On the other hand, the iPhone XS Max features a slightly bigger 6.5-inch display that offers a resolution of 1242 x 2688 pixels. When it comes to the performance, the iPhone XS Max is powered by the latest Apple A12 Bionic chipset, which is coupled with 4GB RAM and 64GB internal memory. On the other hand, the Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus is powered by an Exynos 9801 octa-core processor. The device is available in India in three variants 6GB/64GB, 6GB/128GB, 6GB/512GB. As far as the cameras are concerned, both the device comes with dual 12MP sensors at the back. At the front, the Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus has an 8MP unit, while the iPhone XS Max comes with a 7MP sensor. The Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus base model is available in India for Rs 52,990 on Flipkart, while the iPhone XS Max is available on Amazon for Rs 1,07,899. Samsung is expected to use OLED displays with 2K+ resolution in all the three models. Highlights: Regular Galaxy S10 and Galaxy S10+ to have triple rear cameras Galaxy S10 Lite to have dualrear camera All models may have 3.5mm jack Contrary to previous reports which said that the Samsung Galaxy S10+ will have a quad camera setup on the back, a new report has claimed that the smartphone will only have three cameras - just like the regular Galaxy S10. The report also mentions that the Galaxy S10 will have a single punch hole selfie camera and the Plus variant will have two selfie shooters. Whats more, the South Korean giant is said to ship these phones with a 3.5mm jack. The report in PhoneArena also asserts that there will be three Galaxy S10 models - regular, Plus, and Lite - which will vary in size, features and design. Also, the Lite version is said to bear two rear cameras. The Galaxy S10+ is said to feature a 6.4-inch display, while the Lite and the regular models are claimed to have 5.8-inch and 6.1-inch displays, respectively. Samsung is expected to use OLED displays with 2K+ resolution in all the three models. When it comes to the dimensions of the smartphone, the Samsung Galaxy S10+ could measure 157.7 x 75 x 7.8mm, while the regular Galaxy S10 is said to be of 148.9 x 70.9 x 7.8mm dimensions. As mentioned, all these models will have 3.5mm headphone jack, but Samsung may opt to remove it in the Galaxy Note 10. There is a mention of the rumoured fourth 5G-capable S10 but the tech news platform could not confirm its existence. Multiple carriers in the US were reported to be working with Samsung on its 5G device. At the recently concluded Snapdragon Technology Summit in Hawaii, Justin Denison, Senior Vice President of Mobile Product Strategy and Marketing at Samsung Electronics America announced that the South Korean giant is looking to bring the first flagship 5G smartphone to the US in the first half of 2019, using the Snapdragon 855 processor with the 5G X50 modem. The smartphone will be made by Samsung and the network will be provided by Verizon, but it is not clear whether the 5G smartphone will be the Galaxy S10+. The 5G model of the upcoming flagship was spotted with two model numbers, SM-G977U and SM-G977N. These could be two country-specific variants such as one for the US market and the other for the South Korean market. Image courtesy: PhoneArena Related Read: Samsung Galaxy S10+ 5G variant Samsung Galaxy S10 Rumour Roundup Samsung Galaxy S10 Lite In the 22-member PAC, the BJP is in majority with 12 MPs and there is one member each of its allies, Shiv Sena and Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD). New Delhi: The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of the Parliament headed by Congress MP Mallikarjun Kharge is preparing to take up suo moto discussion on the Rafale deal which would pave the way for summoning either the comptroller and auditor general (CAG) or the attorney general (AG), the Centres chief legal advisor, to seek details on the controversial matter. Once the CAG or AG are summoned, the panel could seek details from them on the CAG report on Rafale deal, which is yet to be laid before Parliament, sources said. In the 22-member PAC, the BJP is in majority with 12 MPs and there is one member each of its allies, Shiv Sena and Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD). The Congress has three members in the panel, including Mr Kharge. There are two Trinamul Congress MPs and one member each of the TDP, the BJD and the AIADMK. Mr Kharge could soon select the Rafale issue as part of the agenda for the committees meeting, sources said. Sources said that Mr Kharge, as PAC chairman, is well within his right to include Rafale deal in the agenda for suo moto discussion in the committee. Mr Kharges push for debate on the jet deal comes close to Congress president Rahul Gandhi accusing the Narendra Modi government of misleading the Supreme Court by presenting wrong facts about the CAG report on the Rafale deal in its affidavit filed with the court. Mr Gandhi had questioned why the CAG report on the deal had not yet been shared with the PAC even though it was cited by the Supreme Court in its judgment last week. Soon after the judgment, the government had claimed that a wrong grammatical interpretation had led to confusion in the apex court judgment. Subscriber content preview ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. (AP) A New Jersey judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed by the family of a man who died when the sand under his feet collapsed as he walked along the shoreline, plunging him into the swirling waters of an inlet. Superior Court Judge John Porto dismissed a lawsuit Tuesday brought by the family of Brad Smith, of Horsham, Pennsylvania, who died in July 2012. The family sued the city of North Wildwood and the state of New Jersey. . . . Subscriber content preview BOISE, Idaho (AP) Idaho has signed an agreement with federal authorities to increase logging and restoration work on millions of acres of U.S. Forest Service lands that experts say are increasingly plagued with insect infestations and destructive wildfires. Idaho Gov. C.L. Butch Otter, Gov.-elect Brad Little and U.S. Department of Agriculture Undersecretary Jim Hubbard signed the Shared Stewardship Agreement on Tuesday that could be a template for other Western states. . . . United Methodist Pro-Life Witness Contact: Chelsen Vicari, Institute on Religion & Democracy, 540-239-2170, cvicari@TheIRD.org WASHINGTON, Dec. 19, 2018 /Christian Newswire/ -- United Methodists are invited to gather for a special worship service in celebration of the sanctity of human life on the morning of the annual March for Life. Event Details: Who: Taskforce of United Methodists on Abortion & Sexuality What: Worship service celebrating the sanctity of human life Where: United Methodist Building, 100 Maryland Ave., Washington, D.C. When: January 18, 2019, 9:30 a.m. (EST) IRD will join the Taskforce of United Methodists on Abortion & Sexuality, also known as Lifewatch, for the annual service of worship at 9:30 a.m., Friday, January 18, in the chapel of the United Methodist Building located at 100 Maryland Avenue in Washington, D.C. next to the United States Supreme Court. Bishop Timothy W. Whitaker, Former Episcopal Leader of the Florida Area of the United Methodist Church and a leading Methodist voice on orthodoxy and life, will lead the service. In 2005, Bishop Whitaker made United Methodist history as the first U.S. bishop in modern times to give a major pro-life address. Since then, the United Methodist Church, the second largest Protestant denomination in the United States, has made major strides in moving in a more pro-life direction. At the denomination's 2016 General Conference, delegates repealed 40-year-old language affirming the Roe v. Wade court decision that struck down state laws restricting abortion. General Conference delegates also voted to require church boards and agencies to withdraw immediately from an organization that advocates for abortion on demand. IRD President Mark Tooley commented: "United Methodism like much of America is trending in a pro-life direction. Lifewatch has for decades been a courageous pro-life witness in the church during often challenging times but its perseverance is being vindicated. Bishop Whitaker's early stance for life within United Methodism was a harbinger for which we are grateful." www.TheIRD.org P Chidambaram role had come under scanner of various investigating agencies in Rs 305 crore INX Media case. CBI had registered FIR on May 15, 2017, alleging irregularities in clearance given to INX Media for receiving overseas funds to the tune of Rs 305 crore in 2007 when P Chidambaram was the finance minister. (Photo: ANI) New Delhi: Senior Congress leader P Chidambaram has reached the headquarter of Enforcement Directorate after he was summoned by the probe agency for questioning in the INX Media case. Chidambaram role had come under the scanner of various investigating agencies in the Rs 3,500-crore Aircel-Maxis deal and the INX Media case involving Rs 305 crore. It was during his tenure as finance minister in the UPA-I government that clearances from the Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) were given to the two ventures. On November 29, the Delhi High Court had extended the interim protection to Chidambaram in connection with the INX Media case. He has been granted interim protection from the arrest till January 15 next year. Chidambaram had filed an anticipatory bail plea in the Delhi High Court, seeking protection from the arrest by the CBI and the ED. The CBI had registered a First Information Report on May 15 last year, alleging irregularities in the clearance given to media group INX Media for receiving overseas funds to the tune of Rs 305 crore in 2007 when Chidambaram was the finance minister. Chidambaram's son Karti was also arrested in the matter on February 28 for allegedly receiving funds to the tune of Rs 10 lakh in the case. He was granted bail on March 23. The other accused in the case include then INX Media Director Indrani Mukerjea and then INX News Director Peter Mukerjea. Subscriber content preview The Washington Federal bank building at 1200 N.E. 45th St. has sold for $10.8 million, according to King County records. The seller was Washington Federal, which had owned the University District property for about six decades. . . . Subscriber content preview SEATTLE The new Redwood apartment building, at 111 21st Ave. E., has sold for almost $17.5 million, according to King County records. The seller was 111 21st Ave E LLC, which acquired the property in 2016 for $2.2 million. The buyer was WC Seattle VI SPE LLC, which is associated with Wilshire Capital Partners of Los Angeles. Public records indicate a loan from BDS II Mortgage Capital . . . Subscriber content preview SEATTLE An auto-related property at 2015-2025 Airport Way S. has sold for $37.2 million, according to King County records. The seller was Seattle Metro Properties LLC, which acquired the property in 2011-2012 for almost $11 million. The buyer was SC Seattle RE LLC, which is associated with Swickard Auto Group of Wilsonville, Oregon. Public records indicate a loan from Mercedes-Benz Financial Services. . . . India fast-tracking comprehensive trade pact with Turkey: Suresh Prabhu India is looking to finalise a comprehensive trade agreement with Turkey, commerce minister Suresh Prabhu said, adding that he is trying to fast-track a meeting of the joint committee for economic and technical cooperation. During a meeting with a Turkish trade delegation the commerce minister also took up a proposal by Turkey to deal in local currency, which, he said, is under consideration of the finance ministry. He requested the minister of trade of Turkey to organise the next India-Turkey Joint Committee for Economic and Technical Cooperation meeting as early as possible so that regular discussions on issues of concern between the two countries can be dealt with. The draft Joint Study Group (JSG) report, discussed by both countries in August 2018, needs to be finalised soon so that negotiations may begin, Pabhu said, adding that India has submitted its chapter to JSG Turkey needs to make their submission as early as possible. Prabhu said he will be leading a high level business delegation to Turkey in February next year and will work with his Turkish counterparts to make sure that all the issues being raised in the bilateral meeting by the Turkish side are addressed. Later the commerce minister addressed the IndiaTurkey business forum in New Delhi where he said that India is committed to make bilateral trade balanced and sustainable for both countries. Turkey is an important trade and business partner and both countries can benefit from each other, he said. He invited Turkish construction companies to participate in the business of the growing aviation sector in India, which, he said, is growing at 20 per cent - the fastest growth seen in the aviation sector. He said hundred new airports will be constructed in the next ten years with an investment of $65 billion. India-Turkey bilateral trade has increased significantly in the last one and a half decade. Major Indian exports to Turkey include medium oils and fuels, man-made filaments and staple fibres, automotive spare parts and accessories and organic chemicals. Turkeys exports to India are poppy seeds, machinery and mechanical appliances, iron and steel articles, inorganic chemicals, pearls and precious stones and metals and marble. In 2017-18 bilateral trade stood at $7.2 billion. Turkeys imports from India during 2017-18 amounted to $5 billion while its exports to India during the period was lower at $2.2 billion. Investment flow from Turkey to India from 2000 to 2018 stood at $182.18 million, comprising mostly areas like construction, glass and machineries while outward investment by India into Turkey between 1998 and 2017 stood at $121.36 million. Excerpt from Letters from Kargil In 1999, a war was fought at your doorstep. You may have barely felt a tremor of it. But in the dangerous mountain frontiers of our land, our men in uniform picked up their battered rucksacks and walked right into hell to save it from breaking loose. They were ordinary men like you and me, yet full of extraordinary courage. I was eight years old that May, getting set to begin a fun vacation, like other Indian kids my age. But my father, fortunately or unfortunately, was one of those men called to the front lines to fight in the Kargil war against Pakistan. Like you, I just wanted my dad to myself during the summer holidays. Instead we got only 12 hours with him. That May, my mother, my sister and I had gone to see Daddy in Kheru, Srinagar, where his unit, 315 Field Regiment, was posted. But he was given deployment orders just as we arrived. We never saw him again. Had we known that those were the last twelve hours we would be spending with him, we wouldve done so much more with that time than just eating and sleeping with him before he put on his uniform early in the morning and left, forever. Despite his cheerful exterior, he secretly regretted not seeing us for longer just as much as we did, or probably more. He wrote to Mummy: "Even though the meeting was short, only twelve hours, it was really nice seeing you. Ill see you guys soon. It was 2 July, and it had been more than a month since Daddy had been in Dras, Kargil. We had spent the rest of our holidays with our family in Siliguri, West Bengal, and were returning to Delhi from where we were going to take a bus or cab to our home in Meerut our last family accommodation with Daddy. To our surprise, the whole family came to pick us up from the train station in Delhi. I was told the news later that day. I remember that scene clearly. As I walked into the bedroom full of adults, I saw the shadow of loss reflected on everyones face. I was a child, but I knew something was wrong and immediately turned to look at my mother. John Boyle has been elected to succeed Sheila Nunan as General Secretary in 2019. Irish National Teachers Organisation (INTO) General Secretary Sheila Nunan announced her intention to step down from the position in September 2019, triggering an election for a successor. Three candidates were nominated by INTO branches to contest the election which took place between November 26 and December 17, 2018. 18,147 members of the union cast a ballot in the election with John winning (9,542) 52.6% of the vote on the first count. Deirdre OConnor secured (3,493) 19.3% of the vote and Alison Gilliland received (5,112) 28.2% of the vote. It is anticipated that Mr Boyle will take up office as General Secretary Designate in March 2019. Commenting, Mr Boyle said he had a clear vision for the INTO over the next ten years: "We must be bold and ambitious in demanding the level of investment in education, North and South, that will remove the inequities that currently exist and give every teacher and pupil the room to bloom. We must grow in membership and influence, strengthening ties with sister unions and professional organisations and delivering additional services to members. "I am humbled and immensely grateful to have received the support of so many members. Whether you voted for me, or one of the other fine candidates in this election, I will be your General Secretary. I intend to be a leader that brings members together and holds Government to account. About John Boyle John Boyle was born in Mullaghduff, Co Donegal and now lives with his wife Carmel in Templeogue, Dublin. He has been an INTO activist for over 30 years. He was a staff representative branch and district chairperson and has served on the Central Executive Committee since 2004 representing members in 300 Wicklow and South Dublin schools. John was elected to the position of INTO President for 2017-18. In his spare time, John is an avid sports fan. He also serves on numerous committees in community and education arenas. The Killybegs Fishermens Organisation has welcomed a 30% increase in whitefish quotas for North West fishermen following talks at the Council of Fisheries Ministers. The talks finished early this morning and the KFO has acknowledged the outcome as generally positive in the circumstances with a workable solution adopted to the landing obligation thus avoiding the potential for early closures of a large number of fisheries. However, KFO CEO Sean ODonoghue said it again underlines the imperative to have guarantees around fisheries honoured with Brexit continuing to cause major turbulence in the industry. Achieving an overall increase of 30% in whitefish quota, including Rockall Haddock (+92%), and monkfish (25 %) in for the North West will provide improved fishing opportunities for whitefish fishermen in Donegal. There are also significant increases in Haddock (+20%) Cod (+16%) and sole 394% in the Irish Sea and Haddock (+20%), Hake (+28%) and Megrims (+47%) in the Celtic Sea. Mr ODonoghue welcomed these as very significant wins and reflects the importance of the industry working towards an overall sustainable outcome for the sector. Commenting at the conclusion of the Council in Brussels this morning, Mr ODonoghue said: These were without doubt the most challenging negotiations which Irish fisheries have ever faced, since a hard Brexit potentially throws everything we have agreed into disarray. Of major concern to the KFO and the wider industry, was the landing obligation which will enter its final phase on the 1st January 2019 when all species subject to TACs and quotas become subject to Article 15 of the Common Fisheries Policy. The Implementation of the landing obligation, as laid out in the Commissions proposals, would have had large negative consequences for Irelands whitefish and pelagic sectors as the choke species factor could have triggered the closure of most fisheries in the early months of 2019. The prospect of choke species paralysing the Irish fishing industry was a very credible threat with knock-on effects for a vast array of sustainable fisheries, hitherto able to function normally, being caught in the slip-stream. I am glad to say the Council has adopted a workable solution to the choke situation with the allocation of by catch quotas to the Member States for the five stocks where a zero TAC was set. Minister welcomes deal Donegal minister Joe McHugh also welcomed an increase in fish quotas for fisherman in the North West. Following long negotiations which ended in the early hours of this morning an increase in quotas has been secured for operators in Donegal, he said. This deal delivers on sustainability but it is also a strong result for fishermen, especially those with boats in Greencastle, and it is also giving them a bit of reassurance amid questions on how Brexit will challenge the industry. The overall increase of 30% in whitefish quota for the North West, including a near doubling of the quota for offshore haddock, will really improve fishing opportunities for whitefish fishermen in Donegal. There has been a reduction in haddock in part of the fishery off the north coast but the negotiations are about striking a balance. Minister McHugh also noted that 2019 will see the full implementation of the landing obligation for all stocks in Irish waters, also known as the discards ban, where juvenile fish will no longer be discarded into the sea. We are moving to rebuilding stocks to sustainable levels. Combined with the change in quotas and the actions being taken on stocks, this is a positive result for Donegal and for Ireland, the Minister said. We need to make fisheries viable and sustainable. We need to protect the livelihoods of fishermen going out on the seas in their own boats. At the same time we need to respect the science and work on solutions that meet all those requirements. The deal we have got strikes a balance on that path. READ MORE: Quota negotiations for Irish fisheries are underway in Brussels KFO welcomes the draft withdrawal agreement between the EU and the UK Please allow ads as they help fund our trusted local news content. Kindly add us to your ad blocker whitelist. If you want further access to Ireland's best local journalism, consider subscribing to our ePaper and/or free daily Newsletter . Support our mission and join our community now. New businesses are popping up like mushrooms lately, which means if you are an entrepreneur who has just launched a company, the competition is pretty steep. This is why most small businesses are working so hard to make sure they are able to get the right marketing messages across, even resorting to creating memes to appeal to the Millenial and Gen Z generations (the biggest buying market). But even if your marketing materials or indeed your articles go viral, that is not enough to be top-of-mind. This is where investor help comes in. They can help fund your business to reach more customers and equip you with the right tools and skills to improve, not just its profitability, but the products and services you are selling. So how are you going to appeal to investors? Here are some tips. Have solid branding Let us divide branding to story and identity. Branding story is your way to connect with your audience, or in this case, your investors. It tells them how you conceived of the idea, the steps you took to start a business out of it, and the efforts you are currently doing to make sure it is able to solve a gap in the market. Remember that while investors will look at your finances since the business started, most of them invest because of how they feelabout your brand. Branding identity on the other hand concerns itself with how you present our company to other people. If you have a good representation of what your company is, whether through your logo design or your website, then that is one item off the list of things the investor needs to worry about. For website, make sure your domain name matches your business name or is at least related to it. You can do a domain price check in Australian registrars like Crazy Domains to see if it is available for purchase. If not, use the WHOIS lookup feature to find out who owns your desired domain name. For logo designs, make sure your chosen colour and typefaces matches the personality of your business. There is nothing more vexing to see than a brand whose visual representation is completely disconnected to the company it is supposed to personify. Ensure good performance This may put a lot of pressure on you if you are a business who has only a couple of years to show for. But good business performance is often owed to targeting the right market. So from the start, make sure that you know which demographics are your biggest spending market and focus on them. One of the biggest pitfalls of new businesses is wanting to sell to everyone for more gains, which is not very realistic. Choose a target market, study their spending behaviour, determine the best marketing message, and then continue pushing efforts that will get their attention effectively. Do this constantly and you will be a profitable investment soon. Determine who is the right investor for you More often than not, the biggest reason small businesses fail to secure an investor is because they have chosen to appeal to someone who does not share their business model and values. There will be a clashing of ideas that may have a detrimental effect to your company in the future if you push through with that partnership. Do your research, find out who shares the same values as you and who is willing to contribute their knowledge in helping you grow. Remember that an investor is not just someone who puts money into your company, they must be someone you can collaborate with to ensure success. Right now you might be thinking, maybe you can just choose funding platform like the popular crowdfunding sites we have today. But the danger is that you are basically pitching your business to a lot of people, and that is just too wide a net to cast and runs the risk of failing, especially if there is a disconnect between your business model and the funding platform. Consider these tips first before exploring other options. An investor may only be waiting for the right business with the right mindset to partner with, and that could be you. Body striving to foment trouble in Punjab. Chandigarh: The statement by Sikhs for Justice (SFJ) seeking Pakistans help to liberate Punjab from India has exposed the nefarious designs of the organisation and its nexus with the Pakistani Army and ISI, chief minister Captain Amarinder Singh said on Tuesday. In a hard-hitting reaction to the statement of SFJs legal adviser Gurpatwant Singh Pannu, Captain Amarinder Singh said the cat is now well and truly out of the bag, and the truth of the deep-rooted connection between SJF and Pakistani Army is out in the open. The statement has nailed SJFs lies that it is a peaceful movement to build momentum for a referendum on a separate state of Khalistan, said the chief minister, adding that it is more than evident now that the organisation, with the full support and backing of Pak Army and ISI, is striving to foment trouble in Indian Punjab. Through his statement, Pannu has made clear his intentions of going all out to force the secession of Punjab from India, with the backing of Pak Army and ISI, said the Punjab Chief Minister, rubbishing SFJs claims to the contrary. The chief minister has also taken strong exception to SFJs plans to hold the Kartarpur Sahib Convention 2019, coinciding with the auspicious occasion of the 550th birth anniversary celebrations of Sri Guru Nanak Dev ji. This, he said, has lent credence to his fears that Pakistans decision to open the Kartarpur Corridor was an ISI game-plan to help forces inimical to India, including SFJ. It has also once again proved that the Pak government had always been, and continues to remain, a puppet regime, working at the behest of the Army there, he added. The whole affair is a bigger conspiracy by the Pak Army, which is persistently trying to revive militancy in Punjab, said the chief minister, reiterating his stand on the issue. Captain Amarinder Singh also reiterated that Punjab, and the Indian Army, are well prepared to counter any such plans of the neighbouring country. Punjab is today much better equipped than it was in the 80s and 90s when Pak-backed terrorism had swept the state, he said, warning Islamabad against extending any further support to SFJ or other such outfits that are bent on disturbing the states hard-earned peace. The Pak Army would do well to remember the ignominious defeats it had suffered at the hands of the Indian Army on every occasion it had tried to take on the might of the latter, right from the 1965 and 1971 wars to the more recent Kargil battle, warned Captain Amarinder Singh. 33-year-old Ansari, who returned to India on Tuesday, became emotional while talking about the difficult phase of his life in Pakistan. Hamid Nihal Ansari, who was accompanied by his mother and other family members, also thanked Sushma Swaraj and the Ministry of External Affairs for persisting with the case and taking it up with Islamabad. (Photo: ANI) New Delhi: Hamid Nihal Ansari, the software engineer who has returned home after spending six years in a Pakistani jail, met External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj on Wednesday and narrated his ordeal. Officials said 33-year-old Ansari, who returned to India on Tuesday, became emotional while talking about the difficult phase of his life in Pakistan. Ansari, who was accompanied by his mother and other family members, also thanked Swaraj and the Ministry of External Affairs for persisting with the case and taking it up with Islamabad. Ansari's mother Fauzia thanked Swaraj saying, "Mera Bharat mahaan, meri madam mahaan, sab madam ne hi kiya hai (My India is great, my madam (Sushma Swaraj) is great, it all became possible with the help of madam)." #WATCH Indian National Hamid Ansari who came to India after being released from a Pakistan jail yesterday, meets External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj in Delhi. His mother tells EAM "Mera Bharat mahaan, meri madam mahaan, sab madam ne hi kiya hai." pic.twitter.com/FQEzz99Ohm ANI (@ANI) December 19, 2018 The Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Raveesh Kumar tweeted, "Welcome home, son! Indian national, Hamid Ansari returns home after six years of incarceration in Pakistan. EAM @SushmaSwaraj warmly welcomed him in Delhi today." The Mumbai resident, who returned to India after crossing the Wagah-Attari border, was imprisoned in the Peshawar Central Jail after being sentenced by a military court on December 15, 2015. According to official sources, India issued 96 notes verbales to Pakistan seeking consular access to Ansari. The decision to release him was on account of relentless pressure from New Delhi, they said. Shortly before his arrival on Tuesday, Ansari's mother Fauzia Ansari told reporters that the prayers of the family and of all those who wished for his safe return had been answered. "I am immensely happy today. I don't have words to describe my feelings," she said on Tuesday. His father, Nihal Ansari, said, "It is a new dawn for us". Ansari was arrested in 2012 for illegally entering Pakistan from Afghanistan, reportedly to meet a girl he had befriended online. His jail term ended on December 15 but he was not able to leave for India as his legal documents were not ready. On Thursday, the Peshawar High Court gave the Pakistan government a months deadline to complete his repatriation process. In reply to a habeas corpus petition filed by his mother Fauzia Ansari, the high court was informed that he was in custody of the Pakistan Army and was being tried by a military court. Teacher certification varies wildly, from emergency credentials requiring little more than a criminal background check to masters degree programs like the one offered at the University of Arkansas that fuses student teaching, academic study, and action research. Candidates in the Arkansas master of arts in teaching program are called interns because the depth and intensity of their student teaching is modeled in key ways on the medical professions system for preparing physicians. Interns work with their mentor teachers four days a week, arriving before the students get there and staying at school until their mentor teacher heads home for the day. They plan alongside their mentor teachers, attend all the schools professional development, and build up to a weeklong solo, for which they plan and teach every subject. In every strong teacher-prep program I have seen, the role of mentor teachers is crucial. But being a skilled teacher of children doesnt automatically make you a skilled mentor of new teachers. So how do you teach someone to teach? I put that question to two faculty members of the M.A.T. Program. Heather Young, an assistant professor in the curriculum and instruction department, told me, Your job is to grow baby teachers into mature educators educators you would be excited to learn could be shaping the lives of your own children in the very near future. Be there to catch them when they get bruised but give them the constructive criticism they need to improve. The specific feedback you give is the most important part of your job as a mentor. Bonnie King, a clinical instructor of curriculum and instruction, added, Reassure interns that they are free to try new strategiesclassroom management or instructional. Asking an intern, Are there are any new ideas your instructors or peers have discussed in class that we can try? is an invitation that creates an atmosphere for innovation and collaboration between mentor and intern. Heres some additional advice, from my own experience as a mentor and from experts in the field, on how experienced teachers can become better mentors. 1. Share what you think, not just what you do. Ron Thorpe, former head of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, made a simple but profound point: Student-teachers can see what teachers do in their classrooms every day. But they cant see what teachers think. He emphasized how important it is that we make our thinking visiblenot just what we do, but why we do it. When your student-teacher watches you lead a reading group, make sure to talk with her or him about how you chose those particular kids. What did you notice about those readers during individual conferences that helped you identify their needs? How did you choose and prepare the book? What will your next steps be, and why? Finland has 10 applicants for every spot in a teacher-preparation program , despite comparable salaries to the U.S. Part of the reason teaching is a desirable career in Finland is that its seen as a thought profession that pays careful attention to the mental work involvedthe creativity, problem-solving, reflection, and daily action research that great teachers do on a daily basis. Be sure to make visible to your student-teacher that complex but invisible mental work. 2. Dont assume prior knowledge. Most of us have experienced a botched lesson taught by a student-teacher in which the children arguably know less at the end of the hour than they did at the beginning. For me, those lessons are a reminder that we have had many years to learn this craftthousands of hours of deliberate practice and reflection along with hundreds of hours of professional development. Our student-teachers havent yet put in that time. We need to think through the many things they may not have learned yet about how to teach place value to 2nd graders, or how to teach writing to a kindergartner who only knows a few letter sounds. If we share our insights on the front end, we can strengthen a lesson before it happens instead of imparting our belated wisdom in a post-mortem on the lessons demise. At the same time, we shouldnt let student-teachers lack of experience be a barrier to courageous teaching. Scott Shirey, head of the KIPP Delta charter schools, once said of students content knowledge, Assume they know nothing but can learn anything. The same applies to future teachers. We need to trust that student-teachers can learn to engage children in complex lessons that get at deeper levels of understanding. Better they attempt an ambitious lessona deep discussion of literature with 3rd graders, a mini-engineering project with 6-year-oldsthan play it safe with worksheets. 3. Model humility. We should own the expertise we have developed over years or decades in this profession, but we also need to be honest about our mistakes and imperfections. Our student-teachers, like our students, pay more attention to what we do than what we say. When I raised my voice at a student last month, I told my intern later that day, I shouldnt have yelled at Darius. After a trainer from Teachers College visited us for two days of job-embedded professional development, I shared my takeaways with my intern about the changes Id like to make to the reading block in my classroom. Its easy to be critical of student-teachers gaps and mistakes. But if were going to help them reflect on their mistakes and address their gaps, we have to model how to do that. That begins with admitting to our own flaws. King, the University of Arkansas professor, told me, I help mentors and interns realize that showing vulnerability is an asset in teaching. Once interns see this from their mentors they know its a safe classroom where they can take risks. Author Helena Viramontes once said, We are all works in progress. Thats true of children, interns, and mentor teachers alike. 4. Practice life-work balance. An alarming 44 percent of new teachers leave the profession within five years . We should model dedication to our students and our practice, but we should also model how to take care of ourselves so we dont burn out. Dixie Keyes, a professor at Arkansas State University, wrote, How do teachers ensure they are watching after their own wellness while watching over the wellness of so many little humans in diverse circumstances? One school I visited recently has an entire room dedicated to teachers who need a quiet, peaceful place to rest or take a breath. It has dimmed lights, two sofas, a fountain, and soft music playing. If mentor teachers can share how they engage in self-care (time with family, scheduling no work on weekends, etc.), that could really help our interns in their first few years. Teachers are notorious for doing everything in our power to meet our students needs while completely neglecting our own. In the long run, that doesnt do our students any favors. The children in our care deserve a teacher who is healthy, happy, and well-rested. We need to share with student-teachers how we walk that line between student needs and our own well-being. If we dont, they wont last long in a profession that often chews up and spits out promising teachers before they ever reach their full potential. We know how long it takes to become competent, let alone skillful, at the profession that makes all others possible. We cant tell future teachers how to walk their path, but we can walk it with them. This work is too important to do alone. BJP calls remark a new low in public discourse. New Delhi: Buoyed by the success of its electoral promise on farm loan waiver in three states, the Congress on Tuesday played the farmers card to the hilt with party president Rahul Gandhi calling Prime Minister Narendra Modi anti-farmer and vowing to not let him sleep till all farm loans in the country are waived. Reaching out to distressed farmers from Parliament House complex here, Mr Gandhi told reporters, Modi ji has been Prime Minister for four-and-a-half years but has not waived a single rupee of farmers loans. I want to tell you that the Congress and other Opposition parties will unite till all farm loans are waived. We will stand up and fight against them, we will not retract a single inch, we will not let him (PM) sleep at night till the time Indian farmers loans are waived. If the Modi government does not waive farm loans, we guarantee to waive farm loans if voted to power in 2019, said Mr Gandhi on Twitter, signalling the Congress plan to make farm loan waiver a key poll plank in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. Mr Gandhis fresh offensive against Mr Modi angered the BJP which said that the Congress presidents remark on not allowing the Prime Minister to sleep represents a new low in the countrys public discourse. The ruling party described the Congress efforts to address farm distress as drama and questioned the Opposition partys 60-year track record in farmers welfare. Earlier, Mr Gandhi told reporters after Parliament proceedings that two new Congress chief ministers have kept their word on farm loan waiver. We promised to waive loans in 10 days. In two states, we did it within six hours and we will do it in the third state very soon, he said. The Congress governments in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh waived off farm loans within a day of taking charge. The new government in Rajasthan is also likely to take a similar decision in the coming days. Targeting the Modi government for allegedly ignoring farm distress and promoting a few industrialists, Mr Gandhi said, I want to give this message and tell the farmers that this country is yours and not of 15-20 industrialists. That injustice is being done to you, despite the hard work and toil that help provide food to the country We have done it in three states and we will exert pressure on Narendra Modi to waive farm loans. Reacting to Mr Gandhis wont let the Prime Minister sleep comment, Union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said that nothing better can be expected from the Congress president whose party ensured that Indians did not sleep during its 60 years of rule due to rampant corruption. Friends, I am given to understand that Rahul Gandhi today said that he will not allow Prime Minister Narendra Modi to sleep. This is a new low in the public discourse of the country, Mr Prasad told reporters. Referring to Mr Gandhi addressing the issue of farmer distress and saying that the Congress and other Opposition parties will ensure that all farm loans are waived, Mr Prasad said that this is just drama. He said that the Congress had been in power for about 60 of the last 70 years. What have they done for farmers? They are doing just drama now, he said. Meanwhile, the All India Kisan Sabha, which has been at the forefront of the farmers agitation, announced it plan to hold Gramin Bandh over farmers issues on January 8-9. We will organise a Gramin Bandh which will be spread across rural India, said AIKS general secretary Hannan Mollah. Mexico City, Dec 18 (efe-epa).- Mexican Foreign Secretary Marcelo Ebrard announced Tuesday a collaborative effort with the United States to funnel billions of dollars of investment into southern Mexico and Central America to improve economic development and discourage migration. "The United States and Mexico today commit to strengthen and expand our bilateral cooperation to foster development and increase investment in southern Mexico and in Central America to create a zone of prosperity," he said, reading from a joint statement issued by both governments. "We are committed to promoting strong regional economic growth, good jobs, and expanded opportunity for all of our citizens," Ebrard said. He said the statement represents a US endorsement of the development plan that Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador signed hours after his Dec. 1 inauguration with the leaders of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Those nations, collectively known as the Northern Triangle, account for the lion's share of US-bound Central American migrants. "The United States and Mexico will lead in working with regional and international partners to build a more prosperous and secure Central America to address the underlying causes of migration, and so that citizens of the region can build better lives for themselves and their families at home," he said. He said that Washington is pledging "$5.8 billion in support of institutional reforms, development, and economic growth in the Northern Triangle from public and private sources." Concerning the south of Mexico, Ebrard said that the Lopez Obrador administration is planning to invest $25 billion in five years. The foreign secretary said a meeting of senior officials from both governments by the end of January 2019 to evaluate the new project and create a strategy. Lithium is a coveted raw material because batteries for electric cars cannot do without it. The picture shows a lithium production plant in Argentina. From 2021, a Bolivian-German joint venture will produce up to 50,000 tons of lithium hydroxide per year for the batteries of electric cars in Bolivia. "For the first time in decades, Germany has secured direct access to important, non-native raw materials through the joint venture," says Wolfgang Schmutz. He is head of ACI Systems Alemania (ACISA). On Wednesday, a contract was signed in Berlin with the state-owned Yacimientos de Litio Bolivianos. For more than 70 years, 40,000 to 50,000 tons of lithium hydroxide are to be extracted annually from the Salar de Uyuni, the world's largest salt lake, which lies far away in the Bolivian highlands. Despite its secluded location at an altitude of 3600 meters, it is a bustling place. Almost only Chinese people work here. The workers live in a container settlement near the Salar de Uyuni that is also at an altitude of 3600 meters. One company has already secured access to a huge potassium chloride plant for fertilizers with a production volume of 350,000 tons per year. As part of the German-Bolivian joint venture, the first plant in Salar de Uyuni will produce about 15,000 tons of lithium carbonate per year. ACISA also hopes to win the contract to produce up to 50,000 tons of lithium hydroxide. Both lithium compounds are used in batteries for electric cars, whereby the proportion of lithium in lithium hydroxide is somewhat higher. With a quantity of 50,000 tons per year, batteries can be produced for around one million electric cars with a range of over 300 kilometers. By 2023, VW plans to spend around 44 billion euros on future technologies. Audi plans to spend 14 billion euros on the development of electric cars, digitization, and autonomous driving. But without lithium there would be no batteries. This is why the price per ton has doubled since 2016 to well over 13,000 US dollars at times. The German government intends to provide up to one billion euros in research funding for the promotion of battery cell production. And the lithium for the batteries could come from Uyuni in the future. There are huge deposits in Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia: because they could even be larger than expected, many Lithium stocks on the stock exchanges had come under strong pressure. But that is likely to change soon. "If you look at the plans of VW, Audi, and China, for example, the amount of lithium is certainly not too small," says Heiner Marx, CEO of the Thuringian company K-Utec, which has its origins in potash and rock salt mining in East Germany and plans projects for the salt processing industry worldwide. The race for lithium is therefore in full swing. Bolivian President Morales, however, wants to make sure that a large part of sales remains in Bolivia. In addition, requirements have been changed several times and investment conditions are not exactly stable. Due to a lack of money, the plans were significantly downscaled. "They wanted a white elephant, the result is now just a white mouse," says a connoisseur of the plans. So it remains to be seen whether a treasure really lies dormant in the salt lake for German companies. Relevante Anbieter Jean-Marc Chery of STMicroelectronics Industrial Electronics to Be Expanded 19. Dezember 2018, 13:46 Uhr | Engelbert Hopf, Iris Stroh Jean-Marc Chery, STMicroelectronics: In Europe, a strategy is needed that is geared to the strong local markets, i.e., industry and automotive. We have to decide what is important and what is unimportant. Only then the existing ecosystems around these two target markets in Europe will remain intact. Jean-Marc Chery has been President and CEO of STMicroelectronics since May 2018. Markt&Technik spoke with him about the company and its future, about expectations and about Europe. Markt&Technik: How do you assess ST's economic situation and where do you see the company's strengths? Jean-Marc Chery: Since the second quarter of 2016, our sales have been growing again, first sequentially and then year-on-year. In the meantime, we have achieved double-digit growth for nine consecutive quarters, which I think speaks for itself. In my view, the strengths of our company lie in our portfolio of IP blocks and technologies. We made the right decision to focus the resources we used for smartphones, set-top boxes, and digital TV on automotive and industrial applications. Many semiconductor companies focus on these markets. How do you position ST compared to other suppliers? The industrial sector is very fragmented in terms of applications and even the large OEMs in this sector are very fragmented. There is no high volume industrial application. Automotive is very similar in this respect. In order to serve the different applications, a broad product and technology portfolio is necessary, and we have that. Take a look at automotive: We have everything from the Schottky diode to the 7 nm FinFET ASIC with Mobileye in the spectrum, so that we can address the complete spectrum of automotive systems. We are pursuing a similar goal for the industrial sector. ST occasionally has data converters in its portfolio, but there are proven specialists here who can offer a much more comprehensive portfolio. In your opinion, is there no need to revise the product range? We are currently working on a strategic plan for ST that has not yet been finalized. Generally speaking, I would put it this way: I want ST to be as selective as possible in some applications in order to be successful. Today, for example, we offer power electronics for the communications infrastructure, advanced digital ASICs in competition with suppliers such as Broadcom; ST also acts as a foundry in the analogue sector, etc. So we still have a very diverse portfolio. I am working with my team to identify the growth areas where we can offer differentiated solutions to our customers and where we will focus. We want to offer our customers differentiation opportunities and act less as second source. And as far as data converters are concerned, I can only say that I definitely want to expand our analog business. That is not easy, because analog products typically have a long life cycle and we are competing with existing legacy products. Then how is that going to work? We are very successful with our STM32 controllers and their extensive ecosystem. There are also many analog components in the systems in which our controllers are installed. I would like to use this lever to offer other components on the boards, more sensors, more power management components, more analog products. We have excellent analog technologies in-house, we do not have the history in this area, but that can change. I am confident that we will be able to expand the analog segment. In addition, the market is changing; analog applications are increasingly being digitized. So a company has to offer many more SiPs with analog and digital components that are galvanically isolated. Here, too, ST can score points because we offer one of the best galvanic isolation technologies in the world. We have to take advantage of that. This clearly means that we will increasingly bring analog products onto the market in the future. The ED has already questioned Mr Karti Chidambaram in the INX-Media case and has attached his assets, estimated at Rs 54 crore, in India and abroad. New Delhi: The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Wednesday questioned senior Congress lea-der P. Chidambaram for nearly five hours in connection with the INX-Media money laundering case. This is the first time that the 73-year-old former Union finance and home minister is being grilled by the ED in the case. He had deposed before the CBI in connection with the case on June 6 this year. Sources said Mr Chidambaram arrived at the agencys office in Jamnagar House near India Gate at around 11:15 am along with his lawyer. He was asked to depose before the investigating officer of the case on Wednesday to record his statement under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA). Mr Chidambaram is understood to have been asked about the statements given earlier by his son Karti Chidambaram and few other accused in the case. The Delhi High Court had last month extended till January 15 the interim protection from arrest, granted to Mr Chidambaram on his plea seeking anticipatory bail, in the INX-Media case lodged by ED and CBI. The court had also directed him to cooperate with the investigation. The ED has already questioned Mr Karti Chidambaram in the INX-Media case and has attached his assets, estimated at Rs 54 crore, in India and abroad. The ED had registered a case on the basis of a CBI FIR and had alleged that irregularities took place in the Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) clearance to INX-Media. Overseas funds to the tune of Rs305 crore exchanged hands in 2007 when Mr Chidambaram was the union finance minister. It had registered an Enforcement Case Information Report (ECIR), the EDs equivalent of a police FIR, against the accused named in the CBI complaint, including Mr Karti Chidambaram, INX-Media and its directors Peter and Indrani Mukerjea. Mr Karti Chidambaram was also arrested on February 28 by the CBI for allegedly taking money to facilitate the FIPB clearance to INX-Media in 2007. He was later granted bail. Farooq Abdullah said Governors or Presidents Rule was an autocratic measure and there was no substitute for a popular government. Srinagar: As Jammu and Kashmir is being brought under Presidents Rule on the expiry of six months of Governors Rule from midnight Wednesday, several mainstream parties have demanded the holding of Assembly elections at earliest so that a popular government takes over the reins in the state. Former chief minister and National Conference president Farooq Abdullah told reporters: I think Governors (Rule) and Presidents Rule must come to an end. There should be elections and people must choose their representatives who can work. He said Governors or Presidents Rule was an autocratic measure and there was no substitute for a popular government. The National Conference has been impressing on the incumbent administration to hold elections as soon as possible. We believe that an elected government will be able to deliver in a better way, he said. State CPI(M) leader Mohammad Yousuf Tarigami also demanded holding of elections to the Assembly as soon as possible. He told this newspaper: Our experience is that the governors administration or Presidents Rule through the governor and his advisers and bureaucrats is not an answer to the problems faced by our state. We have for a long time been experiencing this type of administration. In the 1990s, we had it for a longer period. Now we have it in force for the past six months, and our experience is that the situation has only deteriorated and things are getting more complex and more difficult by the day. He alleged that political uncertainly in the state was taking a turn for the worse turn and ordinary people were suffering a lot. In our opinion it is good for the state and its people that elections must be conducted as early as possible. Also, the Supreme Court has ruled that elections should be held within six months after the dissolution of the Assembly, he said, and expressed the hope that the Centre would understand the gravity of the situation. Other mainstream parties also said that elections to the J&K Assembly should be held without any further delay to end the prevailing political uncertainty. The BJP, however, had a different view. It says since the imposition of Governors Rule, the state has seen development in all sectors and that people were happy with it (Centres rule); hence it should continue for some more time. The Centre has recommended the imposition of Presidents Rule on the expiry of six months of Governors Rule. The State was put under Governors Rule on June 20, a day after the coalition of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and BJP collapsed. Governors Rule is imposed in the state for six months under Section 92 of the J&K Constitution, under which all legislative powers are vested with the governor, unlike other states of the country where in the absence of an elected government, Presidents Rule is declared under Article 356 of the Constitution. After Presidents Rule is imposed in J&K under Section 92 of the state constitution, all decisions taken should have the concurrence of the President under Article 74 (1)(i), under which the council of ministers with the Prime Minister at the head will aid and advise the President. On November 22, governor Satyapal Malik dissolved the 87-member Assembly after PDP chief Mehbooba Mufti, supported by the National Conference and the Congress, staked claim to form the government. At the same time, the two-member Peoples Conference led by Sajjad Gani Lone also staked claim to form a government with 25 members of the BJP and other 18 other unknown members supporting it. The governor, Mr Malik, justified his move saying he had satisfied himself that the best course of action was to dissolve the Assembly... to provide stability and security to the state and hold elections at an appropriate time so that a government with a clear mandate is duly formed. He had also claimed receiving reports of extensive horse-trading and the possible exchange of money in order to secure the support of legislators belonging to widely diverging political ideologies to be able to form a government. Such activities are not healthy for democracy and vitiate the political process, he had said, and expressed serious doubts about the longevity of any such arrangement where there were competing claims of a majority. Belgium's PM set to step down after migration row Belgium's PM Michel resigned after migration pact. But King Philippe has decided to put Michel's resignation on hold for a while. Belgium's Prime Minister announced Tuesday that he is set to resign after a Flemish party quit the ruling coalition over an migration pact row. "I HAVE DECIDED TO RESIGN" Speaking at parliament, Charles Michel said: "I have decided to resign. I will immediately go to see the king." King Philippe has the authority to hold, accept, or immediately refuse Michel's resignation. HE DECIDED TO PUT THE RESIGNATION ON HOLD Earlier this month, Michel was left leading a minority government after a party quit over Belgium signing onto a UN migration pact. On Twitter, the Belgian Royal Palace later announced that Philippe has decided to put Michel's resignation on hold. Kremlin: Patriots, S-400 deal with Turkey unrelated Russian S-400 deal with Turkey going forward, says presidential spokesperson, with first delivery set for July A U.S. decision to sell Turkey Patriot air defense systems will have no effect on the existing Russian-Turkish contract for S-400 air defense systems, a Russian presidential spokesperson said on Wednesday. The two processes -- delivery of the S-400s and the possible sale of Patriots to Turkey -- are separate matters, Dmitry Peskov told journalists in Moscow. "These are not related processes, he said. Here we are implementing the agreements we already have with our Turkish colleagues. The S-400 project and contract are under implementation and they will be continued." The first delivery of the S-400 systems is set for July. Russia has no reason to doubt Turkey's pledge not to divulge sensitive technological information to third parties, as stipulated by the S-400 contract, Peskov added. "The implementation of military-technical cooperation between Russia and other countries is necessarily accompanied by legal obligations not to disclose certain categories of sensitive information related to this cooperation. "The Turkish side has the same obligations. We see no reason not to trust our Turkish partners," he said. On Tuesday, the U.S. State Department approved a possible sale of Patriot air and missile defense systems to Turkey for an estimated $3.5 billion. Turkey had been long trying to purchase the air defense system from the U.S. After finding no success, in 2017 Ankara decided to buy Russian S-400 air defense systems. This move provoked criticism from the Pentagon, which warned that purchasing the S-400 would unavoidably hurt Turkish-U.S. relations as well as Turkey's role in NATO, and promised to provide Turkey with defense systems that meets all of its requirements if it were to call off the S-400 deal. Turkey prevented 347 terror acts in 2018: Interior min. Suleyman Soylu also says 697 terror acts were prevented in 2017 Turkey prevented some 347 terror acts in 2018, the country's interior minister said on Wednesday. Speaking at a workshop on counter-terrorism in Ankara, Suleyman Soylu stressed the decrease of terror acts in Turkey. "Last year, we prevented 697 terror acts -- which became 347 this year. There is a tremendous struggle and serious success that can't be ignored," Soylu said. TERROR ATTACKS PREVENTED Soylu pointed out that the world was introduced with the concept of "global terror" with the September 11 attacks in the U.S., which was termed a global terror act by the country. The U.S. then said the fight must be turned to a global one and occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, Soylu added. Turkish interior minister said there was an increase in acts of terrorism worldwide between 2002-2007. "Then, there was a 35 percent decrease between 2007-2011, and after the Arab Spring between 2011-2014, a 350 percent increase was observed due to Daesh, Boko Haram, and PKK/PYD [terror] acts." Soylu underlined that especially after Turkey's Euphrates Shield and Olive Branch operations in northern Syria, the number of global terror acts declined after 2014. He said Turkey captured some foreign nationals attempting to cross the Turkish borders to go to the Middle East to join PKK/PYD and Daesh terrorist groups. "Nearly 9,500 European citizens from 28 EU countries, who attempted to cross to conflict zones and join terrorist organizations like PKK/PYD and Daesh, had a permanent entry ban imposed on them," Soylu said, stressing that France and Belgium were the first two of these 28 EU countries. Soylu further asserted that Turkey had so far imposed permanent entry bans on 69,967 people from 151 countries. Turkey also extradited a total of 7,031 foreign terrorists of 100 nationalities, Soylu added. Turkish troops -- backed by the Free Syrian Army -- liberated large swathes of northwestern Syria from terrorist groups during the Operation Euphrates Shield in 2016, while the Operation Olive Branch dealt a heavy blow to YPG/PKK and Daesh terrorists liberating Syria's Afrin region in early 2018. In its more than 30-year terror campaign against Turkey, the PKK -- listed as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the U.S. and the EU -- has been responsible for the death of some 40,000 people, including women and children. The YPG is its Syrian branch. US approves possible sale of Patriot missiles to Turkey US's sale would include 80 Patriot missiles, 60 other missiles and associated equipment. The U.S. State Department has approved a possible foreign military sale of the Patriot air and missile defense system to Turkey for an estimated total of $3.5 billion, the Pentagon said Tuesday. THE SALE INCLUDES RADAR SETS AND OTHER EQUIPMENTS According to the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, the department approved the sale of 80 Patriot MIM-104E Guidance Enhanced Missiles (GEM-T) missiles, 60 PAC-3 Missile Segment Enhancement (MSE) missiles and associated equipment. The agency notified Congress of the possible sale. The sale includes radar sets, engagement control stations, launching stations, communications equipment, tools and test equipment, range and test programs and support equipment. "THE SALE WILL INCREASE DEFENSIVE CAPABILITIES OF TURKEY" "The proposed sale will increase the defensive capabilities of the Turkey military to guard against hostile aggression and shield NATO Allies who might train and operate within Turkey's borders. Turkey should have no difficulty absorbing this system into its armed forces," said the agency Turkey had been trying to purchase the air defense system from the U.S., but the missiles have never been sold to Turkey when they were needed the most, according to the government. The move comes after Turkey signed a contract with Russia to buy the S-400 air defense system in 2017. Installation of the S-400 system in Turkey is expected to begin in October 2019. Washington has complained that the Russian system is not compatible with weapons used by other NATO countries. PATRIOT MISSILES ARE USED FOR DEFENSIVE PURPOSES Separately, in a report in late November, the Pentagon warned that purchasing the S-400 system would have unavoidable negative consequences for U.S.-Turkey relations as well as Turkey's role in NATO. Patriot missiles are used for defense purposes, mainly to shoot down incoming missiles and planes. The modern cybersecurity landscape has often been compared to a battlefield, with adversaries and defenders alike using military-style strategy and tactics. With nation-states increasingly engaged in cyber attacks, the military analogy isnt just a metaphor, its becoming a reality for how cybersecurity actually works. Among the most well known institutions in the U.S. for studying military practices and strategy is the United States Military Academy at West Point, where Greg Conti spent over a decade researching and training military personnel on cybersecurity strategy. Since 2016, Conti has worked at IronNet Cybersecurity, a company led by former National Security Agency chief General Keith Alexander, helping to train and educate non-military personnel in understanding the modern cybersecurity landscape. In a video interview with eSecurity Planet, Conti provides insight into how military concepts apply to cybersecurity and how enterprises can use that knowledge to defend themselves. Lesson #1: There is a need for military-style strategy and tactics Conti said that in the early days of cybersecurity, the stakes were not as high as they are now. Now, companies can suffer extreme harm and nations can be put at risk from cyber attacks. One of the most commonly used concepts by cybersecurity vendors and researchers it the idea of kill chain, which defines the order of operations used by an attacker to execute an action. The basic idea is that if a defender can disrupt the chain, they can kill the operation. Conti said that while kill-chain is a useful concept, there are in fact, hundreds of military concepts that can be applied to cybersecurity. Another core military technique that has value in the cyber domain is targeting. In the old days, it was just field artillery and canons, Conti said. Now its how do you look across the entire internet and determine what might be targeted. Prioritizing the target landscape and understanding effects-based operations are also key. Conti said military strategy isnt just about blowing things up, its about looking at what effect a given action should have. Lesson #2: Putting a wall around something doesnt secure it Centuries of thought have gone into considering how the physical battlefield operates. Conti noted that while having a perimeter sometimes works, there are lessons that have been learned from counter-insurgency military operations that also apply to cybersecurity. The equivalent to putting a wall around something in the physical world is using some form of firewall or perimeter-based security for IT. There is no perimeter in counter-insurgency; you have to win over hearts and minds to win the battle, he said. Lesson #3: To defend, you need to think like an attacker The idea of thinking like an attacker is not a new concept for cybersecurity and why security conferences often include demonstrations and instruction on hacking concepts. That said, in Contis view there is now a need to also think like nation-state attackers. Even if youre a defender, you can then get into the mind of the organization that is attempting to break into you network, industry sector or country, he said. Lesson #4: Red team penetration testing is a tactical operation Tactical military operations in the physical world involve soldiers with guns. In the cyber domain, tactical operations can be conducted by people on keyboards. A red team penetration test in Contis view is one type of tactical operation. One of the unique attributes that differs from traditional military fighting on a battlefield is that our companies are on the defense all the time, Conti said. So at some point were going to have to figure out how to bring the governments authority to use legal force to bear to deter attackers. Lesson #5: Attribution requires intelligence A core element of military operations that has carried over to cybersecurity is the need for attribution to determine root cause and origin for a given attack. To do attribution correctly requires intelligence, which is something that the U.S. government has enabled to be able to track back attacks. Conti said individual companies can also do attribution to a lesser degree than the government. Companies can use the assets they have available, in combination with threat intelligence?feeds. Lesson #6: There are armies acting in cyberspace today The idea of applying military strategy and tactics to cybersecurity isnt just about providing a better understanding of what is going on, its also about dealing with the reality that there are literally armies operating in cyberspace today. In Contis view, organizations of all sizes are a target of nation-state adversaries. As such, he suggests that organizations need to understand the attack landscape and build appropriate defenses. Conti also suggests that organizations work and partner with other companies in their own sector to make everyone safer. Watch the full video interview with Greg Conti below: ? Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eSecurityPlanet and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist. Genomic analyses can reveal the geographic origins of indigenous Aboriginal Australian remains currently held in museums, a new study reports. Critically, this could allow these remains to be returned to their original communities - a result Aboriginal Australians have fought to achieve for decades. According to the authors, their study has significant implications for future repatriation of ancient peoples, Aboriginal Australians and beyond. Indigenous peoples around the world have been greatly affected by European colonization. Since the arrival of the British to Australia in 1788, Aboriginal Australian remains have been collected for scientific research or for museums. Many indigenous people believe that their ancestors' spirits cannot rest until their remains are returned to their ancestral lands, and thus, over many decades, Aboriginal Australians have requested that their ancestors' remains be returned. Unfortunately, in most cases, the geographic origin, tribal affiliation, or language group of many of these remains, respectively, are unknown, thus preventing repatriation. Recent advances have suggested that genomic analyses could aid in repatriation, yet few genomic studies to date have attempted to recover ancient Aboriginal Australian DNA specifically, and none of them have been able to obtain and sequence nuclear DNA from this region, where the climate is harsh. To determine if genomic analyses can be used to successfully determine the origin of indigenous skeletal remains, Joanne L. Wright and colleagues obtained and sequenced ten nuclear genomes and 27 mitochondrial DNA genomes from pre-European Australian samples of known provenance. They compared these ancient samples to the nuclear genomes of 100 modern Aboriginal Australians also of known provenance. Their analysis showed that, for most all of the ancient nuclear genomes, the most closely related contemporary genome was from people living today in the same geographic region. Their results also suggest that mitochondrial sequences, if used in repatriation efforts in Australia, would result in a significant percentage (~7%) of remains being returned to the wrong Indigenous group. Thus, say the authors, mitochondrial DNA alone is not recommended for repatriation. ### Skin has a remarkable ability to heal itself. But in some cases, wounds heal very slowly or not at all, putting a person at risk for chronic pain, infection and scarring. Now, researchers have developed a self-powered bandage that generates an electric field over an injury, dramatically reducing the healing time for skin wounds in rats. They report their results in ACS Nano. Chronic skin wounds include diabetic foot ulcers, venous ulcers and non-healing surgical wounds. Doctors have tried various approaches to help chronic wounds heal, including bandaging, dressing, exposure to oxygen and growth-factor therapy, but they often show limited effectiveness. As early as the 1960s, researchers observed that electrical stimulation could help skin wounds heal. However, the equipment for generating the electric field is often large and may require patient hospitalization. Weibo Cai, Xudong Wang and colleagues wanted to develop a flexible, self-powered bandage that could convert skin movements into a therapeutic electric field. To power their electric bandage, or e-bandage, the researchers made a wearable nanogenerator by overlapping sheets of polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), copper foil and polyethylene terephthalate (PET). The nanogenerator converted skin movements, which occur during normal activity or even breathing, into small electrical pulses. This current flowed to two working electrodes that were placed on either side of the skin wound to produce a weak electric field. The team tested the device by placing it over wounds on rats' backs. Wounds covered by e-bandages closed within 3 days, compared with 12 days for a control bandage with no electric field. The researchers attribute the faster wound healing to enhanced fibroblast migration, proliferation and differentiation induced by the electric field. ### The authors acknowledge funding from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering of the National Institutes of Health. The study is freely available as an Editor's Choice article here. The American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society, is a not-for-profit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. ACS is a global leader in providing access to chemistry-related information and research through its multiple databases, peer-reviewed journals and scientific conferences. ACS does not conduct research, but publishes and publicizes peer-reviewed scientific studies. Its main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio. To automatically receive news release from the American Chemical Society, contact newsroom@acs.org. Follow us on Twitter | Facebook Filmmaker couple Anjali Monteiro and K.P. Jayasankar talk about their film Saacha, which is on display at the ongoing biennale. Anjali Monteiro and K.P. Jayasankar moved to Mumbai (then Bombay) in the early 70s. Since then, they have been there witnessing each and every change of the city be it the Great Bombay Textile Strike in the 80s or the Bombay Riots in the 90s. Like many early migrants, they saw the cultural and political landscape of the city, the birth place of working class trade union, changing with time. These experiences led the filmmaker couple to create Saacha, a 49-minute film on migrant life in Mumbai, which is on display at the ongoing Kochi Muziris Biennale. At the biennale, the film is exhibited along with poems of Narayan Surve, a renowned Marathi poet, and paintings of popular artist Sudhir Patwardhan that rhyme with the theme. We started filming Saacha in 2000 and completed it in 2001, says Anjali. Both Anjali and Jayasankar are professors at School of Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, and are documentary makers and authors. An adaptation of Saacha was an installation at the art exhibition Project Space: Word. Sound. Power. at the Tate Modern, London, in 2013; and at Khoj, New Delhi, in 2014. While living in Mumbai, one important milestone we witnessed was the textile strike, which ultimately led to the closure of most of the mills that were located on a vast land in the centre of the city. A culture had been formed around those mills. Once the mills shut down, it led to the erosion of that way of life. As filmmakers, who have been living in this city for a long time, we wanted to chronicle that. Thus Saacha happened, explains Anjali. For the biennale, we just technically enhanced the film. Words, images and music form the crux of Saacha, which uses loom as a metaphor. Loom is a space where dynamic forces come together to weave fabric. Hence, it is used as the metaphor here, says Anjali. And, vibrant, thought-provoking music has always been a part of the Leftist movement. We started off with the works of Sudhir, who has been documenting urban life for a long time. Then, we came across Narayan, whose poems are direct and powerful. His words reflect the same theme, but from a different vantage point, says Anjali, while Jayasankar adds, He was part of the working class culture. He was abandoned as a child. It was a mill worker who found him and raised him. Narayan was not very educated, but went on to become one of the most popular Marathi poets. Sudhir Patwardhans paintings show two faces of Mumbai English and Malayalam translations of his poem are plastered on the walls for visitors. Sudhirs paintings, which have two dimensions, show how the face of the city changed. At one side, we see workers travelling on a train; the other side shows concrete jungle that came later. What the couple tries to communicate through their politically charged work is the significance of migrant labour in Mumbais growth, perhaps, in all great cities development. And, the situation goes on even now, which makes their work relevant even after all these years. Kerala is a classic example of migrant force. You can see it around us now, says Jayasankar, a native of Kochi. Saacha further tells us how a community that contributed to the growth of Mumbai was marginalised by other forces that overtook their space. We want their talent, not them. That is our attitude towards them, says Jayasankar. If Mumbai is a safe city now, it is because of those working class culture. Because mills ran for 24 hours, and there were people and food outlets on streets day and night, he adds. Saacha is just one element of the couples efforts towards this issue. Rest of their research materials is available on millmumbai.tiss.edu. Anjali and Jayasankar, who find participation at the biennale as a great honour, say, It is a nice experience. We are so happy to be here and have vowed ourselves to visit the coming biennales as well, they conclude. Saacha is exhibited at the first floor of Aspinwall House, Fort Kochi. The American Heart Association funds study at Children's National to analyze how a forgotten compound may improve metabolic function among children with low cardiac output syndrome (LCOS) Can pyruvate, the end product of glycolysis, help improve cardiovascular function in children who have cardiopulmonary bypass surgery and suffer from low cardiac output syndrome (LCOS)? This question is one that Rafael Jaimes, Ph.D., a staff scientist at Children's National Heart Institute, a division of Children's National Health System, is studying, thanks to a two-year grant from the American Heart Association. The competitive grant awards Dr. Jaimes with $110,000 to study how pyruvate may help improve cardiac output among pediatric patients with LCOS. The compound aims to stimulate metabolic function, now treated by inotropic agents, such as dobutamine and milrinone. These agents ensure optimal delivery of oxygen from the heart to the brain, as well as to other organs in the body, following heart surgery. While these agents help patients with cardiac dysfunction, there is still a critical need for safe and effective therapies. "If there's any detriment in cardiac output, the heart's function begins to degrade," explains Dr. Jaimes. "You see a downward spiral effect with reduced cardiac output because the heart is dependent on its own perfusion. It needs to pump blood throughout the body to survive." This is where the pyruvate study, and the grant, will be applied: Can pyruvate target the essential muscle of the heart and reverse this cardiac destabilization--and as soon as possible? "By increasing the metabolic output of the heart's local muscle, cardiac output increases," Dr. Jaimes explains. "That's going to lead to better recovery." Better recovery could be measured by how fast a child recovers from heart surgery as well as how much time they spend in the hospital, clinically referred to as throughput. A faster recovery could also influence a child's quality of life and reduce overall health care costs. Based on preliminary data that shows pyruvate improves cardiac function in experimental models after ischemic insult, which is what happens when pediatric patients undergo cardiac surgery, Dr. Jaimes believes the results will likely replicate themselves in his preclinical models. To start, he'll test pyruvate using 100 blood samples and discarded tissue from patients. The blood samples will be tested for metabolic markers, including measured pyruvate levels. Part of what encouraged Dr. Jaimes to study how this compound could complement or replace standard therapies was the encouragement he received from his mentors in the field. "Nobody has looked into using pyruvate for almost 30 years," says Dr. Jaimes. "It's not commercially favorable, there's no patent on it, it doesn't have a lot of marketability and there are no financial incentives, so it's been put aside." As part of a discussion with cardiologists at a medical conference in Washington, Dr. Jaimes brought up the idea of using pyruvate for pediatric heart surgeries and received positive feedback. "Once everyone's eyes lit up, I knew I was on to something," says Dr. Jaimes about the encouragement he received to pursue this study. "You put lactate and glucose in your IV solutions," adds Dr. Jaimes. "Pyruvate is an essential nutrient. It's almost an essential sugar so there's no reason not to put it in. If these cardiologists are intrigued by the project, maybe the American Heart Association will be, too." In addition to funding the study, which could support future research about how metabolic makers in the blood can be stimulated to fast-track recovery following heart surgery, the American Heart Association grant is specific to pediatric health outcomes. "The current state of pharmaceutical treatment for patients recovering from cardiac surgery is designed and created for adults," says Dr. Jaimes. "From our research in pediatrics, we know that children aren't small adults." Dr. Jaimes explains that children are different on an anatomical and physiological level. Their cells even look and function different, compared to adult cells, because they haven't matured yet. While congenital heart defects are rare, they affect 1 percent, or 40,000 births worldwide, they often require multiple surgeries throughout a child's lifespan. LCOS impacts 25 percent of patients following cardiopulmonary bypass and the timing of treatment is important. In severe cases, insufficient cardiac output following surgery could impact a child's long-term development, ranging from reasoning, learning, attention and executive function, to developing age-appropriate language and social skills. "The metabolic insufficiencies I'm looking at, which may help improve the muscle function of the heart, are just one piece of a bigger puzzle in pediatric cardiology," notes Dr. Jaimes about ongoing research at Children's National Heart Institute. "We already know pyruvate is safe. We just have to see if it's effective in supporting a patient's recovery in the intensive care unit." Dr. Jaimes will work with his research mentor Nikki Posnack, Ph.D., assistant professor at the Children's National Heart Institute, on this preclinical study throughout the grant's lifecycle, which starts in early January 2019 and ends in late December 2020. ### About Children's National Health System Children's National Health System, based in Washington, D.C., has served the nation's children since 1870. Children's National is one of the nation's Top 5 pediatric hospitals and, for a second straight year, is ranked No. 1 in new born care, as well as ranked in all specialties evaluated by U.S. News & World Report. It has been designated two times as a Magnet hospital, a designation given to hospitals that demonstrate the highest standards of nursing and patient care delivery. This pediatric academic health system offers expert care through a convenient, community-based primary care network and specialty outpatient centers in the D.C. Metropolitan area, including the Maryland suburbs and Northern Virginia. Home to the Children's Research Institute and the Sheikh Zayed Institute for Pediatric Surgical Innovation, Children's National is the seventh-highest NIH-funded pediatric institution in the nation. Children's National is recognized for its expertise and innovation in pediatric care and as a strong voice for children through advocacy at the local, regional and national levels. OAK RIDGE, Tenn., Dec. 19, 2018--A team of scientists has for the first time measured the elusive weak interaction between protons and neutrons in the nucleus of an atom. They had chosen the simplest nucleus consisting of one neutron and one proton for the study. Through a unique neutron experiment at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, experimental physicists resolved the weak force between the particles at the atom's core, predicted in the Standard Model that describes the elementary particles and their interactions. Their result is sensitive to subtle aspects of the strong force between nuclear particles, which is still poorly understood. The team's observation, described in Physical Review Letters, culminates decades of work performed with an apparatus known as NPDGamma. The first phase of the experiment took place at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Building on the knowledge gained at LANL, the team moved the project to ORNL to take advantage of the high neutron beam intensity produced at the lab's Spallation Neutron Source. Protons and neutrons are made of smaller particles called quarks that are bound together by the strong interaction, which is one of the four known forces of nature: strong force, electromagnetism, weak force and gravity. The weak force exists in the tiny distance within and between protons and neutrons; the strong interaction confines quarks in neutrons and protons. The weak force also connects the axial spin and direction of motion of the nuclear particles, revealing subtle aspects of how quarks move inside protons and neutrons. "The goal of the experiment was to isolate and measure one component of this weak interaction, which manifested as gamma rays that could be counted and verified with high statistical accuracy," said David Bowman, co-author and team leader for neutron physics at ORNL. "You have to detect a lot of gammas to see this tiny effect." The NPDGamma Experiment, the first to be carried out at the Fundamental Neutron Physics Beamline at SNS, channeled cold neutrons toward a target of liquid hydrogen. The apparatus was designed to control the spin direction of the slow-moving neutrons, "flipping" them from spin-up to spin-down positions as desired. When the manipulated neutrons smashed into the target, they interacted with the protons within the liquid hydrogen's atoms, sending out gamma rays that were measured by special sensors. After analyzing the gamma rays, the scientists found parity-violating asymmetry, which is a specific change in behavior in the force between a neutron and a proton. "If parity were conserved, a nucleus spinning in the righthanded way and one spinning in the lefthanded way--as if they were mirrored images--would result in an equal number of gammas emitting up as emitting down," Bowman explained. "But, in fact, we observed that more gammas go down than go up, which lead to successfully isolating and measuring a mirror-asymmetric component of the weak force." The scientists ran the experiment numerous times for about two decades, counting and characterizing the gamma rays and collecting data from these events based on neutron spin direction and other factors. The high intensity of the SNS, along with other improvements, allowed a count rate that is nearly 100 times higher compared with previous operation at the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center. Results of the NPDGamma Experiment filled in a vital piece of information, yet there are still theories to be tested. "There is a theory for the weak force between the quarks inside the proton and neutron, but the way that the strong force between the quarks translates into the force between the proton and the neutron is not fully understood," said W. Michael Snow, co-author and professor of experimental nuclear physics at Indiana University. "That's still an unsolved problem." He compared the measurement of the weak force in relation with the strong force as a kind of tracer, similar to a tracer in biology that reveals a process of interest in a system without disturbing it. "The weak interaction allows us to reveal some unique features of the dynamics of the quarks within the nucleus of an atom," Snow added. ### Co-authors of the study titled, "First Observation of P-odd Asymmetry in Polarized Neutron Capture on Hydrogen," included co-principal investigators James David Bowman of ORNL and William Michael Snow of Indiana University (IU). The lead co-authors were David Blyth of Arizona State University and Argonne National Laboratory; Jason Fry of the University of Virginia and IU; and Nadia Fomin of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Los Alamos National Laboratory. In total, 64 individuals from 28 institutions worldwide contributed to this research, and it produced more than 15 Ph.D. theses. The research was supported by DOE's Office of Science and used resources of the Spallation Neutron Source at ORNL, a DOE Office of Science User Facility. It was also supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, the PAPIIT-UNAM and CONACYT agencies in Mexico, the German Academic Exchange Service and the Indiana University Center for Spacetime Symmetries. UT-Battelle manages ORNL for DOE's Office of Science. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov. This research, which has been funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) in the United Kingdom, has just been published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the official publication of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States. Sound can exert force on objects. When ultrasonic waves are used and when the volume is increased considerably, scientists can create an acoustic field capable of moving a whole range of small-sized objects. The new algorithm developed by the team of researchers enables sufficiently complex acoustic fields to capture numerous objects in the desired positions. Advantages of acoustic tweezers These acoustic tweezers have capabilities similar to those of the optical tweezers that won the Nobel Prize in Physics this year and which use lasers to capture and transport microparticles. Yet acoustic tweezers offer various advantages over optical tweezers. Lasers can only travel through transparent mediums, which makes it complicated for them to be used in applications inside biological tissue. By contrast, ultrasound is routinely used in pregnancy ultrasound scanning and in treating kidney stones, as it can penetrate tissue safely and non-invasively. Another advantage is that acoustic devices are 100,000 times more efficient than optical systems. "Optical tweezers are a fantastic technology, but they always come dangerously close to killing the cells they manipulate. By contrast, the acoustic version enables us to generate forces with the same magnitude but with much less energy. There are many applications that call for cell manipulation, and acoustic systems are perfect for that," pointed out Prof Drinkwater, lecturer in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Bristol. To demonstrate the precision of their system, the scientists stuck two millimetre-sized spheres to the ends of a thread and used the acoustic tweezers to "sew" the thread into a piece of fabric. The system can simultaneously control the 3D movement of up to 25 particles in the air. The team hopes that the technique could be adapted to the manipulation of particles in water within approximately one year. Shortly afterwards, it could be adapted for use in biological tissue. "The flexibility of the ultrasound waves enables us to operate on micrometric scales to move cells within printed 3D structures or living tissue," explained Asier Marzo. "But we can also work on a larger scale, for example, to levitate tangible pixels that form various objects in the air." These objects comprising levitating particles that can be observed by several people from different angles are also susceptible to being touched and manipulated directly; in other words, one can use one's hands to drag them. "We are used to two-dimensional pixels enclosed in our monitors, but we would like to see a technology in which objects are made up of tangible pixels that float in mid-air," added the researcher in the Department of Statistics, Computing and Mathematics of the Public University of Navarre. ### Every year trillions of animals migrate for thousands of kilometres between their summer and winter areas. Among them are several species of bats whose journeys in the dark of the night unfold largely unnoticed by humans and have only partially been investigated by science. A reconstruction of individual migration patterns of the common noctule (Nyctalus noctula) in Central Europe has now revealed that travelling distances vary largely among individuals, yet overall females cover longer distances than males. Local bat populations, which remain separate when females rear their offspring in summer, strongly mix in their hibernacula, the roost where they hibernate in winter. Additionally the study showed that individuals rarely change their migration habits - a behaviour that could prove problematic when bats are forced to adjust to rapidly changing ecosystems. The study was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences. An international team of scientists led by the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW) in Berlin used stable hydrogen isotope ratios in minute fur samples to estimate the region of origin of more than 1,000 individuals from 7 wintering areas across Central Europe. This data informed researchers about the migration routes of noctule bats within, into and out of Central Europe. The data reveals that the animals from a hibernacula show a great variety of migratory behaviour: The majority of the bats populate the same region in summer and winter, but in each hibernacula a significant share of animals travelled for longer distances to reach it. "We showed that individuals from a hibernacula can show divergent migratory behaviours with some individual staying local and others being long-distance migrants," says Christian Voigt from the Leibniz-IZW. "This pattern is called partial migration and it causes strong genetic mixing of populations when bats mate during migration and hibernation. During rearing of the offspring in the summer months bats remain separate in distinct regions such as Poland, Russia, the Baltic States, Scandinavia or Germany." Furthermore, data analyses indicate that especially female bats cover long distances in their migration. More often than males, female common noctules came from northern regions to their hibernacula. Correlating these findings with morphologic measurements the researchers show that the females benefit from long journeys. "We derived a coefficient from body mass and forearm length, a body mass index, and were able to show that males are in best shape when they staying in the same region local while among females the ones who travel long distances are in better shape," explains Linn Lehnert from Leibniz-IZW, first author of the study. "We assume that a superior food supply for the insectivorous bats in northern regions is the main reason for this pattern. Females have higher energy demands during pregnancy and nursing which makes it worthwhile for them to shoulder the epic journeys." Males, on the contrary, migrate predominantly during their early life and tend to adopt a regional lifestyle for much of their adult life. Last but not least the scientists analysed isotopic data from 79 individuals that were caught more than once in different years in the same hibernacula. They found that the vast majority of common noctules are creatures of habit. 86 percent showed the exact same migratory behaviour as in a previous year. These firm habits could constrain adjusting to changing environmental conditions, a scenario that becomes more and more probable thinking of global warming, insect decline and other human-induced ecosystem changes. Individuals with a greater flexibility may have better chances to cope successfully with these challenges. In order to reliably assess the resilience of different bat species in connection with migratory behaviour, more research is needed, says Lehnert. "What we do know for sure, however, is how important local hibernacula are for the population of the common noctule bat in Central Europe. A combination of locally embedded and internationally coordinated conservation efforts is needed urgently to protect hibernacula." ### In mammals, generation of new neurons (neurogenesis) is mainly limited to early childhood and occurs in adulthood only in a few regions of the forebrain. One such exception is olfactory neurons, which develop from stem cells via several intermediate stages. "The production of these neurons diminishes with advancing age. In our recent study we wanted to find out the cellular basis and what role stem cells play in the process," says Dr. Carsten Marr, explaining the approach. He is a research group leader at the Institute of Computational Biology (ICB) of Helmholtz Zentrum Munchen. To shed light on this question, an interdisciplinary team of experts from the Helmholtz Zentrum Munchen was formed that included the mathematicians Lisa Bast and Carsten Marr as well as stem cell researchers Dr. Filippo Calzolari (now Institute of Physiological Chemistry at the University Mainz) and Professor Jovica Ninkovic. "Our approach utilised what are known as confetti reporters to perform lineage tracing: In mouse brains, we induced individual stem cells and all their descendants - called clones ? to light up in a specific colour", says Filippo Calzolari. In this way, the scientists could distinguish clones over time by the different colours that give the technique its name. "In the next step, we compared clones found in young and older mice to find out what contribution individual stem cells and intermediates make to the neurogenesis of mature olfactory cells", Calzolari adds. Connect the dots However, systematic analysis of these images proved nearly impossible for humans, in that the available data were extremely heterogeneous, making a comparison of young and old brains difficult. Here the expertise of Carsten Marr and his team came into play. They are specialists in the quantification of single-cell dynamics, i.e. the study of which and how many cells of a large population make which cell fate decisions. To do so, the researchers use artificial intelligence methods, develop mathematical models and deduce algorithms to help analyse the image data. "We compared the confetti measurements with several mathematical models of neurogenesis," explains Lisa Bast. "We found that the ability of self-renewal declines in old age, especially in certain intermediate stages called transit amplifying progenitors." In addition, the analysis showed that asymmetric cell division and quiescence of stem cells increased in older mice. "That means that fewer cells differentiate into olfactory cells in old age as they tend to remain in the stem cell pool and become less active. Therefore, the production comes to a halt", says Jovica Ninkovic. The work is the first in which scientists have been able to quantitatively describe the behaviour of neural stem cells in the living mammalian brain using a mathematical model. ### Further Information Background: Carsten Marr is heading the 'Quantitative Single Cell Dynamics' group at the Institute of Computational Biology (ICB) of Helmholtz Zentrum Munchen. Together with colleagues, he was awarded the Erwin Schrodinger Prize in 2017: The interdisciplinary research team had shown how data from individual blood cells can be used to calculate their further development. The mathematician Lisa Bast works on her PhD thesis in the group of Carsten Marr. Jovica Ninkovic is a Professor at Ludwig Maximilian Universitat Munchen and heading the 'Neurogenesis and Regeneration' group at the Institute of Stem Cell Research (ISF) of Helmholtz Zentrum Munchen. In collaboration with ISF Director Professor Magdalena Gotz and Filippo Calzolari he has recently shown that both the rate of self-renewal and the diversity of stem cell neurons are limited and that the number of stem cells decreases with advancing age. The current work now identifies the specific steps on which these developments are based. Original Publication: Bast, L. & Calzolari, F. (2018): Increasing neural stem cell division asymmetry and quiescence are predicted to contribute to the age-related decline in neurogenesis. Cell Reports, DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2018.11.088 The Helmholtz Zentrum Munchen, the German Research Center for Environmental Health, pursues the goal of developing personalized medical approaches for the prevention and therapy of major common diseases such as diabetes, allergies and lung diseases. To achieve this, it investigates the interaction of genetics, environmental factors and lifestyle. The Helmholtz Zentrum Munchen is headquartered in Neuherberg in the north of Munich and has about 2,300 staff members. It is a member of the Helmholtz Association, a community of 18 scientific-technical and medical-biological research centers with a total of about 37,000 staff members. http://www.helmholtz-muenchen.de/en The Institute of Computational Biology (ICB) develops and applies methods for the model-based description of biological systems, using a data-driven approach by integrating information on multiple scales ranging from single-cell time series to large-scale omics. Given the fast technological advances in molecular biology, the aim is to provide and collaboratively apply innovative tools with experimental groups in order to jointly advance the understanding and treatment of common human diseases. http://www.helmholtz-muenchen.de/icb The University Medical Center of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz is the only medical facility providing supramaximal care in Rhineland-Palatinate while also functioning as an internationally recognized hub of medical science. It has more than 60 clinics, institutes, and departments that collaborate across the various disciplines. Highly specialized patient care, research, and teaching form an integral whole at the Mainz University Medical Center. Approximately 3,300 students are trained in medicine and dentistry in Mainz. With its approximately 7,500 personnel, the Mainz University Medical Center is also one of the largest employers in the region and an important driver of growth and innovation. Further information is available online at http://www.unimedizin-mainz.de Contact for the media: Department of Communication, Helmholtz Zentrum Munchen - German Research Center for Environmental Health, Ingolstadter Landstr. 1, 85764 Neuherberg - Tel. +49 89 3187 2238 - E-mail: presse@helmholtz-muenchen.de Scientific Contact: Dr. Carsten Marr, Helmholtz Zentrum Munchen - German Research Center for Environmental Health, Institute of Computational Biology, Ingolstadter Landstr. 1, 85764 Neuherberg - Tel. +49 89 3187 2158, E-mail: carsten.marr@helmholtz-muenchen.de LSU Boyd Professor of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences R. Eugene Turner has determined a cost-effective way to prevent coastal erosion and protect Louisiana's wetlands. Along with LSU alumna and now University of Central Florida Postdoctoral Fellow Giovanna McClenachan, Turner proposes a simple and inexpensive way to fill in canals that were once used for oil and gas mining. Their research was published recently in the journal PLOS ONE. Dredging channels for oil and gas in Louisiana's wetlands creates rows of spoil banks, or excavated dirt and clay, which accumulate alongside the canals. These banks are long enough to cross Louisiana 79 times from east to west and equal three-quarters of the distance around the Earth. The spoil banks were created by 35,000 permits issued from 1900 to 2017, and 27,000 of those permits are no longer used. Coastal land loss has coincidentally risen and fallen in time and space with this dredging. The land losses can be attributed to the changes in water flow caused by them that causes wetland collapse. Filling the canals with remaining spoil banks is a successful restoration technique rarely applied in Louisiana, and is a dramatically cost-effective and proven long-term strategy. Turner estimates that the price of backfilling all canals in the coastal parishes is about $335 million, or 0.67 percent, of the Louisiana's Coastal Master Plan. This is a fraction of the cost compared to the economic value gained from extracting oil and gas for the last century. "The absence of a state or federal backfilling program is a huge missed opportunity to conduct cost-effective restoration at a relatively low cost," Turner said. ### The importance of research into the role of the immune system in the development and therapy of oncological diseases was emphasized by the Royal Swedish Academy, which recently named James Allison and Tasuku Honjo recipients of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for launching an effective new way to attack cancer by treating the immune system rather than the tumor. In recent decades, it has been proven that the effectiveness of existing anti-cancer therapy strategies (for example, chemotherapy and/or radiation therapy) increases if the applied therapy leads to cell death through the pathway of immunogenic cell death (ICD), which is associated with the activation of the body's anti-tumor immune response, resulting in the most complete elimination of the tumor. Immunity plays an immense role in the body's fight against cancer. Every day, the cells of the immune system check all the cells of our body for "normalcy" and kill the degenerated cells. Sometimes cells hide from the immune system and escape the immunological control, and then a tumor develops. Today, there are many different ways to deal with tumors, but often they prove incurable. However, recent research shows that if the immune system eventually begins to see a tumor, the body can win the fight with it. This is the reason why immunogenic cell death has become an object of close study for researchers at Lobachevsky University in Nizhny Novgorod (Russia). The immunogenic cell death is characterized by the release of damage-associated molecular patterns (DAMPs) and/or cytokines/chemokines by the dying cells, thus launching a strong anti-tumor immune response. Cells that die in the process of immunogenic cell death act as vaccines by activating the immune system, which in turn generates a specific anti-tumor T-cell immune response. Therefore, at present, there is a significant amount of research in experimental cancer therapy aimed at increasing the immunogenicity of dying cancer cells through the use of biomaterials for targeted delivery of anti-tumor agents. A team of researchers from Lobachevsky University (UNN) under Ghent University Professor Dmitry Krysko, Leading Researcher at the Department of General and Medical Genetics of the UNN Institute of Biology and Biomedicine, has published a review article "An emerging role for nanomaterials in increasing immunogenicity of cancer cell death") in the journal BBA - Reviews on Cancer. The article presents the current ideas about the possibility of using nanomaterials in the treatment of cancer, including their ability to induce an immunogenic form of cancer cell death (the so-called ICD). According to Maria Vedunova, Director of the UNN Institute of Biology and Biomedicine, the article highlights the basic principles of the concept of immunogenic cell death, its molecular basis, and discusses the potential use of DAMPs as biomarkers of anti-cancer therapy effectiveness. "The paper also shows the diversity of types and structures of biomaterials used in the development of new therapeutic strategies, and discusses their role in increasing the effectiveness of chemotherapy. In particular, the results of experimental work on animals are presented, proving that the immunogenicity of chemotherapeutic agents can be increased by using biomaterials (nanoparticles of various types, liposomes, etc.) for their delivery. In turn, it leads to a decrease in the risk of metastases and an increase in the long-term survival rate. Besides, the use of biomaterials allows for the delivery at the same time of both a chemotherapeutic agent and adjuvants (for example, the agonists of the main components of the innate immune system -- toll-like receptors (TLR) and indoleamine 2,3-dioxygenase (IDO) inhibitors), which can enhance the role of immune responses in relation to cell death occurring through the immunogenic pathway," Maria Vedunova notes. Another advantage of using biomaterials, continues Tatiana Mishchenko, Senior Researcher at the UNN Laboratory for developing neuroprotection methods, is to implement targeted delivery of a chemotherapeutic agent to tumor cells, thereby significantly increasing the content of the drug in the tumor and reducing its toxicity to normal body cells. "Encapsulation of drugs in nanoparticles also prevents the accumulation of drugs in vital organs (for example, in the heart and intestines) and allows for the use of higher doses, which is impossible when using a free drug that has pronounced side effects," explains Tatiana Mishchenko. The study is of great significance for the development of practical medicine. Within the framework of the research, all modern ideas have been collected about the immunogenic cell death phenomenon that is so important from the point of view of the fight against cancer. Future research and clinical trials will show whether the use of biomaterials is the optimal strategy for modulating the immunogenicity of dying cancer cells and will provide the information required to develop new cancer treatment strategies, in particular, the therapeutic concept of activating the immunogenic cell death in case of glioma (one of the "worst" brain tumors). ### In an article published online by Frontiers in Endocrinology, researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) report that they have identified a potential therapeutic target for lung fibrosis or scarring. They showed in a preclinical model that the protein promotes fibrosis by turning on profibrotic genes and increasing levels of profibrotic factors, including itself. It is particularly attractive as a target because it exerts its influence early, before most other profibrotic factors emerge. IGFBP-5 is upstream of several molecules that are considered key molecules in fibrosis, such as TGF-beta, says Carol Feghali-Bostwick, Ph.D., Kitty Trask Holt Endowed Chair for Scleroderma Research at MUSC, and senior author on the article. So targeting it would allow us to possibly reduce the effect of all of the others that are downstream of it. In lung fibrosis, lung tissue thickens, stiffens and scars. It can no longer function normally. That's why people with lung fibrosis have difficulty breathing. Around 100,000 Americans have lung fibrosis without a known cause, known as idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. Another 50,000 have scleroderma, an autoimmune disease that often leads to lung fibrosis as well as thickening and tightening of the skin. There are currently no FDA-approved drugs that can either stop disease progression or reverse it in these patients, says Feghali-Bostwick. Mortality is high, in some cases higher than cancer, so finding therapies is critical. For these patients, transplant is often the only option. However, not all patients are eligible for lung transplant, and it is not without its complications. New therapies that can stop or reverse lung fibrosis are needed. Feghali-Bostwick and her team showed that insulin-like growth factor-binding protein 5 (IGFBP-5) plays an important and early role in promoting fibrosis. It increases profibrotic gene expression, resulting in excessive collagen being deposited to the extracellular matrix (ECM). The ECM is the network that surrounds cells and serves as the scaffold on which they can build tissue. This excess collagen causes the tissue to stiffen and become fibrotic. These profibrotic genes also help ensure that levels of IGFBP-5 and other profibrotic factors such as matrix crosslinking enzyme lysyl oxidase (LOX) stay high. LOX enables collagen fibrils to cross-link, making tissue stiffer. "IGFBP-5 induces its own gene expression and feedback loop," says Xinh Xinh Nguyen, a graduate student who is working with Feghali-Bostwick and first author on the article. "This suggests that IGFBP5 acts together with profibrotic genes to promote fibrosis and tissue remodeling." The MUSC used collagen-producing cells harvested from patients with IPF or scleroderma to explore the profibrotic effects of IGFBP-5. But they also went a step further, showing similar increases in human lung tissue cores. These cores more realistically mimic the physiologic conditions of living human tissue. "It's important to understand the effects of IGFBP5 in human tissue if you are developing therapies," explains Feghali-Bostwick. "Many therapies work in mice but fail in humans when you get to the human trials. So we have this system where we take lung tissues and put them in an environment that's a human-based tissue." Next steps are to use collagen-producing cells and human lung tissue cores to better understand how the increased levels of LOX caused by IGFBP-5 further promote fibrosis. The MUSC team will also study LOX in a transgenic mouse model that is engineered to overexpress IGFBP-5. This important translational discovery was made possible by the South Carolina Clinical and Translational Research (SCTR) Institute's TL1 predoctoral training program, which instills in graduate students the skills they will need to translate their basic science research to the clinic. Nguyen is a TL1 trainee, and Feghali-Bostwick is her mentor as well as the associate TL1 program director. "The TL1 program is critical in training the next generation of scientists and physician-scientists who can move discoveries from the bench to the clinic," explains Feghali-Bostwick. "Graduate students are our pipeline for the future, and this program teaches them about how to have the right mindset and think about translational research and clinically relevant research." "Participation in the TL1 program has provided me additional learning opportunities to gain expertise in translational research," says Nguyen. "It has enhanced my knowledge about clinically relevant aspects of my project." Nguyen was able to shadow Deanna Baker Frost, M.D., Ph.D., an assistant professor in the MUSC College of Medicine, as she saw patients with scleroderma. Baker Frost is participating in SCTR's Institutional Career Development KL2 program, which focuses on preparing early-career scientists and physician-scientists for translational research. "Xinh Xinh (Nguyen) is doing research on scleroderma, but now she understands better what scleroderma is and understands what patients go through and what their complications are and what they come in for," explains Feghali-Bostwick. "That puts it all in perspective and helps her better understand why she is doing the research she is doing." Feghali-Bostwick believes that there is a natural mentoring relationship between the KL2 and TL1 scholars. "There is less of a gap between them than between senior scientists like myself and TL1s," she says. "It's a good fit; it's a natural fit." ### About MUSC Founded in 1824 in Charleston, The Medical University of South Carolina is the oldest medical school in the South. Today, MUSC continues the tradition of excellence in education, research, and patient care. MUSC educates and trains more than 3,000 students and residents, and has nearly 13,000 employees, including approximately 1,500 faculty members. As the largest non-federal employer in Charleston, the university and its affiliates have collective annual budgets in excess of $2.2 billion. MUSC operates a 700-bed medical center, which includes a nationally recognized Children's Hospital, the Ashley River Tower (cardiovascular, digestive disease, and surgical oncology), Hollings Cancer Center (a National Cancer Institute-designated center) Level I Trauma Center, and Institute of Psychiatry. For more information on academic programs or clinical services, visit musc.edu. For more information on hospital patient services, visit muschealth.org. About the South Carolina Clinical and Translational Research Institute The South Carolina Clinical and Translational Research (SCTR) Institute, a National Institutes of Health Clinical and Translational Science Awards hub, is the catalyst for changing the culture of biomedical research, facilitating sharing of resources and expertise, and streamlining research-related processes to bring about large-scale, change in the clinical and translational research efforts in South Carolina. Our vision is to improve health outcomes and quality of life for the population through discoveries translated into evidence-based practice. For more information, visit https://research.musc.edu/resources/sctr. A joint research team consisting of NIMS, JAEA and the Institut Laue Langevin developed a high-pressure cell composed of completely nonmagnetic materials. The team then succeeded for the first time in the world in analyzing neutron polarization in three dimensions at an extremely high pressure of several gigapascals using the cell developed by the team. This technique is applicable to detailed analysis of electron spin arrangements. The team also discovered a material with potential as a next-generation PC memory material due to the multiferroic properties it exhibited under high pressure. The technique may be used to understand pressure-induced changes in electron spin arrangements in various materials and to develop new materials by controlling spins. Electron spins fundamentally determine the magnetic properties of materials. Recent research focusing on controlling electron spins has led to the development of new functional materials, including multiferroic materials. The use of neutron diffraction techniques, which enable observation of spin arrangements in materials, are indispensable in these material development efforts. Three-dimensional neutron polarization analysis is particularly effective in determining precise spin arrangements while controlling three-dimensional neutron spin orientations. However, use of this technique requires a cell in which a sample material can be kept in a completely nonmagnetic state in order to preserve the degree of neutron spin polarization specific to the sample. Conventional high-pressure cells are unsuitable for use in this analysis because they are composed of magnetic materials that generate magnetic flux. In this research, the NIMS-led team developed a completely nonmagnetic high-pressure cell by replacing conventional magnetic cell materials with nonmagnetic composite materials made of diamond particles. The team then confirmed that use of the newly developed cell does not reduce the degree of neutron spin polarization in a sample material. The team also discovered a material that is non-ferroelectric at normal atmospheric pressure in a nonmagnetic environment but becomes ferroelectric and multiferroic when subjected to several tens of thousands of atmospheres of pressure. The technique developed in this research may be applied to the development not only of multiferroic materials but also of superconducting and other functional materials whose functionalities are closely related to spin arrangements. ### This joint research project was carried out by Noriki Terada (Senior Researcher, Neutron Scattering Group, Research Center for Advanced Measurement and Characterization, NIMS), Toyotaka Osakabe (Leader of the Multiple-Degree-of-Freedom Correlation Research Group, Materials Sciences Center, Sector of Nuclear Science Research, JAEA) and the Institut Laue Langevin in France. Part of this project was supported by a JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (grant number: 15H05433). This research was published in the online British scientific journal Nature Communications on October 22, 2018. Contacts (Regarding this research) Noriki Terada Senior Researcher, Neutron Scattering Group, Research Center for Advanced Measurement and Characterization, National Institute for Materials Science TEL: +81-29-860-4627 E-Mail: TERADA.Noriki@nims.go.jp Toyotaka Osakabe Group Leader, The Multiple-Degree-of-Freedom Correlation Research Group, Materials Sciences Center, Sector of Nuclear Science Research, Japan Atomic Energy Agency TEL: +81-29-282-6094 E-Mail: osakabe.toyotaka@jaea.go.jp (For general inquiries) Public Relations Office National Institute for Materials Sciences Tel: +81-29-859-2026 Fax: +81-29-859-2017 E-Mail: pressrelease@ml.nims.go.jp Public Relations Department Media Relations Section Japan Atomic Energy Agency Tel: +81-3-3592-2346 The reality of ongoing climate warming might seem plainly obvious today, after the four warmest years on record and a summer of weather extremes in the whole northern hemisphere. A few years back however, some media and some experts were entangled in debates about an alleged pause in global warming - even though there never has been statistical evidence of any "hiatus", as new research now confirms. In two recent studies, a group of international scientists joined forces to thoroughly disentangle any possible "hiatus" confusion, affirming that there was no evidence for a significant pause or even slowdown of global warming in the first place. "Claims of a presumed slowdown or pause in global warming during the first decade of the 21st century and an alleged divergence between projections from climate models and observations have attracted considerable research attention, even though the Earth's climate has long been known to fluctuate on a range of temporal scales," says James S. Risbey from CSIRO in Australia, lead author of one of the new studies. "However, our findings show there is little or no statistical evidence for a pause in global warming. Neither current nor historical data support it." "The alleged pause in global warming was at no time statistically conspicuous or significant, but fully in line with the usual fluctuations", explains Stefan Rahmstorf from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, a co-author to both studies. "The results of our rigorous investigation in both studies are as simple as unambiguous: There was no pause in global warming. And global warming did not fall short of what climate models predicted. Warming continued as predicted, together with the normal short-term variability. There has been no unusual slowing of warming, as our comprehensive data analysis shows." There was no pause in global warming Published in Environmental Research Letters, the first new study analyzes variations in global surface temperature in historical context, while the second compares model projections to observations. They scrutinized all available global temperature data sets in all available earlier and current versions and for all alleged time periods of a "hiatus", looking for statistical significance. In no data set and for no time period could a significant pause or slowing of global warming be detected, nor any discrepancy to climate models. Statements claiming the contrary were based on premature conclusions, partly without considering statistics at all, partly because statistical analysis were faulty. A common problem for instance was the so-called selection bias. Simple significance tests generally only apply to randomly drawn samples. But when a particular time interval is chosen out of many possibilities specifically because of its small trend, then this is not a random sample. "Very few articles on the 'pause' account for or even mention this effect, yet it has profound implications for the interpretation of the statistical results," explains Stephan Lewandowsky from University of Bristol in the UK, lead author of the second study. Reduced momentum for action to prevent climate change One reason for the attention that the alleged "global warming pause" received in the public may have been that interest groups used this idea to argue against the urgency of ambitious climate policies to reduce CO 2 -emissions from the burning of fossil fuels. This in turn may have contributed to delays in action to halt global warming, the scientists argue. "A final point to consider is why scientists put such emphasis on the 'pause' when the evidence for it was so scant. An explanation lies in the constant public and political pressure from climate contrarians", adds Naomi Oreskes from Harvard University in the USA and co-author of the second study. "This may have caused scientists to take positions they would not have done without such opposition." ### Articles: James S. Risbey, Stephan Lewandowsky, Kevin Cowtan, Naomi Oreskes, Stefan Rahmstorf, Ari Jokimaki, Grant Foster: A fluctuation in surface temperature in historical context: reassessment and retrospective on the evidence. Environmental Research Letters. [DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/aaf342] Weblink where the article will be published: https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aaf342 Stephan Lewandowsky, Kevin Cowtan, James S. Risbey, Michael E. Mann, Byron A. Steinman, Naomi Oreskes, Stefan Rahmstorf: The 'pause' in global warming in historical context: Comparing models to observations. Environmental Research Letters. [DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/aaf372] Weblink where the article will be published: https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aaf372 For further information please contact: PIK press office Phone: +49 331 288 25 07 E-Mail: press@pik-potsdam.de Twitter: @PIK_Climate http://www.pik-potsdam.de SSB creates 72 new posts to enhance security along Nepal, Bhutan borders. New Delhi: The Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB), which guards the Indo-Nepal and Indo-Bhutan border, has operationalised a total of 72 posts during this year to strengthen its defences to guard the two open Indian borders, a top official said during an event for the 55th raising day of the force on Tuesday. The paramilitary force, as part of the boosting of security infrastructure and enhancing manpower along the borders, has created 18 such posts in Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh. A few of its locations are just next to the Doklam plateau, where the Indian and Chinese forces had a 73 day-long military standoff there in the summer of 2016. Asked if the new border outposts (BoPs) were being created in the aftermath of the Doklam incident, SSB director-general (DG) S.S. Deswal said securing the India-China border was not its mandate and the new posts were established to guard the two open Indian borders with Nepal and Bhutan on the eastern flank of the country. Wherever Indian borders with Nepal and Bhutan run, the SSB is creating infrastructure and is deploying manpower, Mr Deswal said while interacting with reporters on the occasion of the 55th raising day of the force. The force chief said conditions in the border posts are improving at a very fast pace when he was asked about the comments of a recent parliamentary panel report that said the border posts of forces like SSB lacked basic amenities such as clean drinking water and proper electricity. The DG stressed that construction of roads to connect the border posts is the top priority of all the government organisations involved in this task. The DG was also asked the reason as to why a number of officers and jawans were leaving the paramilitary forces or Central Armed Police Forces (CAPFs) over the last few years. He said that the personnel leave in order to avail better job opportunities and avenues. A faster, more cost-efficient, and more accurate method of examining the effectiveness of human pluripotent stem-cell-derived cardiac muscle cells has been discovered, according to researchers from Penn State. Human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) -- human embryonic stem cells and induced pluripotent stem cells -- can be induced to produce other types of human cells through stem cell differentiation. The researchers looked at cardiac muscle cells -- cardiomyocytes (CMs) -- in this study. The goal is to use these cells to treat cardiac conditions, but first the researchers must determine the cell's functionality through characterization, which involves examining how well the cells were modified, and whether or not they are mature, functioning CMs. One clear sign that the cells are functioning is if they are beating, because CMs beat like a heart does. Current methods for determining functionality include using a force transducer, which studies the mechanics of a single muscle cell, and using calcium imaging. However, there are issues with these methods. "CMs derived from hPSCs hold tremendous promise for cell-based therapies for heart diseases," said Xiaojun Lance Lian, assistant professor of biomedical engineering and primary investigator on the project. "Nevertheless, current methods for CM characterization cause undesirable impacts on the cells' functionality and are expensive and time-consuming." To combat these issues, Lian and his colleagues developed a process that is non-invasive and less likely to aversely effect the CMs functionality. The researchers used CRISPR-Cas9, a genome-editing tool, to generate a calcium-indicating reporter stem cell line, which is a type of stem cell line that is more easily analyzed for CM functionality than other stem cell lines. To create this stem cell line, prior to the stem cell differentiation into CMs, the researchers used CRISPR-Cas9 to insert a calcium indicator protein called GCaMP6s into the stem cells. The GCaMP6 protein enables the stems cells to be modified into CMs that can be directly characterized by fluorescence intensity. The intensity of the fluorescence correlates with mechanical strain detected by a video microscope analysis. This analysis shows the cells' responses to cardiac drugs. "Our system is well-established, cost-effective and very sensitive, so it is a more advanced method of CM characterization," Yuqian Jiang, doctoral student in biomedical engineering. "Since it is non-invasive, it is also much better for the CMs and their functionality." And because of the many benefits of the system, the process can further contribute to improved disease modeling and drug screening for treating cardiac diseases, Lian said. Looking ahead, the researchers want to construct an "on switch" for the GCaMP6s protein by adding doxycycline, which will activate a switcher protein known as Tet-On. The research team is also exploring the use of this particular GCaMP6s-enhanced stem cell line for other research. "We can also use this stem cell line for imaging other lineages, like neurons and astrocytes," Jiang said. ### Other authors include Chuanxin Chen, Penn State visiting scholar of biomedical engineering; Lauren Randolph, Penn State doctoral student in bioengineering; Jing Du, Penn State assistant professor of mechanical and nuclear engineering; Yuxiao Zhou, Penn State doctoral student in mechanical engineering; and Xiaoping Bao, postdoctoral fellow at the University of California-Berkeley. This research, recently published in iScience, was funded by Penn State Startup funding and a three-year, $567,000 National Institutes of Health Trailblazer Award. The late Stephen Hawking famously didn't believe in God. Neither does the renowned Richard Dawkins. But is that typical for U.K. scientists? In a new study, researchers from Rice University, Baruch College and West Virginia University find that scientists are indeed significantly less religious than the general population there. In addition, U.K. scientists at elite universities are more likely to never attend religious services than those at less prestigious schools. The study also indicates biologists are more likely to never attend religious services than physicists. "The Religiosity of Academic Scientists in the United Kingdom: Assessing the Role of Discipline and Department Status" utilizes data collected in a survey of biologists and physicists employed at elite and nonelite departments, as past research has suggested the distinction could be relevant in understanding differences in religiosity. The researchers were interested in how U.K. scientists, particularly elite scientists, compared to the general population with regard to religious beliefs. The researchers found that while only 18 percent of people in the U.K. said they do not believe in God, 45 percent of U.K. scientists responded the same way. In addition, the researchers discovered that scientists in elite departments (a categorization based on the number of publications per department, published department rankings and insider knowledge) are about twice as likely to never attend religious services than scientists in nonelite departments. Elaine Howard Ecklund, the Herbert S. Autrey Chair in Social Sciences, professor of sociology, director of Rice's Religion and Public Life Program and the study's lead author, observes that that elite scientists represent the leading edge of the secularizing effects of science. "Individuals who are at the most elite institutions may disproportionately feel the cultural pressure to secularize," Ecklund said. "So, if those methods and mindset are inherently in conflict with religion, then these successful scientists would experience the greatest erosion of religious faith." Ecklund noted that such findings could also be a product of social forces rather than intellectual ones. "This distinction could have an impact on how the public views scientists, in a national context where some minority groups are bringing challenges to teaching evolutionary theory, for example," she said. "Elite scientists might express less religiosity because they assume that, as elite scientists, they are supposed to be or need to be less religious to fit a professional ideal," she added. "Because they might already be on the fringes of that professional ideal in the first place, nonelite scientists may feel less social and cultural pressure to further conform to it." Study co-author Christopher P. Scheitle of West Virginia University's Department of Sociology and Anthropology said this might also help explain why U.K. biologists are more than 2 times more likely to never attend religious services than British physicists. "It is possible that U.K. biologists might be concerned that being seen as a more active participant in religion would violate some professional norm," said Jared Peifer, an assistant professor in the Department of Management at Baruch College's Zicklin School of Business. Ecklund added: "This norm might result from the history of public conflict surrounding issues like evolution and stem cell research, which are most clearly connected to the biological sciences." The researchers hope their work will help foster a better understanding of the social dynamics between religion and science beyond the traditional focus on the U.S. ### The study was funded by a grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation. Rice University has a VideoLink ReadyCam TV interview studio. ReadyCam is capable of transmitting broadcast-quality standard-definition and high-definition video directly to all news media organizations around the world 24/7. Rice also has a university backdrop, 1080p web cam, light kit and wireless mic for Skype interviews. This news release can be found online at http://news.rice.edu/. Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews. Related materials: Study: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jssr.12552 Elaine Howard Ecklund website: http://www.elainehowardecklund.com/ Religion and Public Life Program website: https://rplp.rice.edu/ Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation's top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,962 undergraduates and 3,027 graduate students, Rice's undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is just under 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for lots of race/class interaction and No. 2 for quality of life by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger's Personal Finance. To read "What they're saying about Rice," go to http://tinyurl.com/RiceUniversityoverview. New research indicates that whale teeth are still present past mid-gestation, which is somewhat surprising The humpback whale and a handful of similar whale species have a feeding mechanism utterly unique in the animal kingdom. They open their mouths to scoop in ocean water, then strain it out through plates called baleen. The baleen looks like hairy bristles on a comb and functions as a sieve, leaving krill, small fish and other food for the whale to swallow. Scientists previously established that fetal whales develop the very beginnings of teeth. These teeth will never take a single bite; they don't even erupt from the gums the way they do in human babies. The tiny "germs" are no mystery; they're remnants of real teeth in the whale's land-dwelling, evolutionary predecessors--creatures similar to hippos and cows that lived tens of millions of years ago. San Diego State University graduate student Agnese Lanzetti's attempt to advance understanding of the remarkable biological transformation in humpbacks (Megaptera novaeangliae) was a two-and-a-half year quest involving her mentor, SDSU biologist Annalisa Berta, and resources in New York, Los Angeles, Austin, Texas and Copenhagen. Using whale fetuses obtained from museums and a markedly advanced version of CT scanning, and imaging produced in Austin, Texas, Lanzetti developed new insights into germ and baleen development and other anatomical changes in the whale skull during gestation. "I showed that the teeth are still present way past mid-gestation, which is kind of surprising," Lanzetti said. "Given the lack of research in general on this topic, it was not clearly understood. Many people thought they would lose them very early since then you have to get baleen." New ground Lanzetti earned undergraduate and masters' degrees in geology at the University of Pisa in her native Italy. She started a joint doctoral program at SDSU in 2014 with assistance from a Fulbright scholarship, drawn by her interest in paleontology and whales and Berta's expertise in the subject. "It's not an area that there's a lot of research on," Lanzetti said. "It unites an important aspect of biology, which is development, and evolution." With the slice-by-slice images offered through CT scanning, she established that the tooth germs are present in fetuses as small as seven inches. The subsequent baleen plate development--essential to the whales' survival in a marine environment--occurs over a relatively short span of time. Lanzetti found as many as 40 germs per side in each jaw of the humpbacks. They're less than half a millimeter in size. According to Berta, Lanzetti's results "provide solid evidence that helps answer a long time puzzle to scientists--when and how did tooth loss occur and baleen develop in the world's largest mammals. For the first time scientists now have a better understanding of the development of baleen, important in the evolutionary success of these whales, since it enabled them to filter enormous volumes of water and prey during bulk feeding." Lanzetti's findings, which include other characteristics of the humpback skull, were published this fall in a journal of the American Association of Anatomists. The 3-D models resulting from her work already have been displayed in an exhibit on whale evolution in London. The process Hunting of humpbacks is illegal, so obtaining a new specimen for examination was impossible, as was dissection. Lanzetti began with a fetal whale borrowed from the San Diego Natural History Museum and then obtained additional specimens from museums in Los Angeles, Berkeley and New York. Most of them date back 60 to 80 years. She traveled to Copenhagen for work on a fifth specimen, more than 100 years old and too large to be transported. Similar research has used traditional CT scans of fetal tissue, the same computer-assisted technology used to look for cancers, by creating cross-sectional images, one slice at a time. But in a 2015 study, the tooth germs were not even visible, possibly due to their small size. Lanzetti was the first to employ the more advanced protocol of diceCT, described by one user group as "the gold standard of magnetic resonance imaging," which produced a 3-D visualization as good as dissection. The whale specimens first were soaked in solutions for up to two weeks, using an iodine stain that turns the sample red on the outside and enhances the contrast in the CT images. Lanzetti found a diceCT facility willing to assist at the University of Texas at Austin. Evolutionary biology doesn't attract the same kind of research dollars that go to field work or medical breakthroughs, but Lanzetti received financial support from the American Natural History Museum and the University of California, Riverside, SDSU's partner in her joint doctoral program. One question the research doesn't answer is why the useless germ teeth haven't vanished after tens of millions of years of evolution. Lanzetti said experts have hypothesized the teeth and baleen originate in the same genetic pathway. Under this view, proteins in the genes that are responsible for the teeth may also be needed for development of the baleen. ### A diagnosis of inherited retinal dystrophy can be rather daunting. Patients diagnosed with neuroretinal degeneration face the prospect of losing their sight, sometimes still at a young age. The German Research Foundation (DFG) is now providing funding within a Priority Programme to experts in vision research and clinical ophthalmology throughout Germany in a bid to develop gene and cell-based therapies for treating the currently incurable conditions which can lead to blindness. Among those to benefit from the funding is the research group led by Prof. Dr. Jan Kremers and Dr. Cord Huchzermeyer at Friedrich-Alexander-Universitat Erlangen-Nurnberg (FAU). The scientists working at the Department of Ophthalmology at Universitatsklinikum Erlangen have received funding worth 400,000 euros. In a project at the cutting edge of science, they are making a major contribution to developing innovative procedures for monitoring the newly-developed therapies. The human retina is a complex structure of various cells and layers. As the sensory part of the eye, it converts light impulses into electronic impulses and passes them on to the optical nerve. However, that is by no means all. It also processes signals to allow properties such as colour, brightness and temporal patterns to be coded before they are relayed. If the retina is affected by disease, it can lead to a significant visual impairment, or even a total loss of sight. Many of these diseases are hereditary, such as retinitis pigmentosa, macular degeneration and rod-cone dystrophy. Priority Programme SPP 2127 'Gene and cell based therapies to counteract neuroretinal degeneration' takes an interdisciplinary approach and consists of a nationwide consortium of researchers from the areas of ophthalmology, visual perception, molecular biology, gene therapy, cell therapy, pharmacology, immunology, vectorology and physiology. Over the next three years, funding worth a total of approximately eight million euros is to be made available for developing therapies for currently untreatable inherited retinal disorders, with the option of funding possibly being extended for a further three years. At the same time, clinical examination methods aimed at measuring vision in more detail than ever before are to be established. The group of researchers from Erlangen has an important role to play in developing these innovative procedures for monitoring treatment. Innovative measuring techniques used in the treatment of ophthalmic conditions Sight tests aimed at examining visual perception under very specific conditions (known as silent substitution) have already been developed, validated and established as part of fundamental research at FAU, but have not yet been used on ophthalmic patients. The technique they use is based on the ability to measure the activity of photoreceptors and their connected nerve cells in perception tests with flickering stimuli in healthy people and patients, sorted according to cell type. The stimuli are differentiated according to colour and intensity. Scientists can then isolate the responses of the rods or one of the three types of cones. If the test person perceives a stimulus, the team of researchers know that the photoreceptor they have isolated is responsible for perception. If the threshold, in other words the intensity of the stimulus at which it can still just be perceived by the test person, is higher in one patient than in the control subjects, the scientists assume that the visual pathway connected to this type of photoreceptor must be affected by the disease. The method can also be used to monitor the success of treatment. If treatment is successful, it follows that the threshold of the patient receiving the treatment ought to go down again. LED simulators in the laboratory The stimuli are created using a light-emitting diode (LED) simulator, which has been adjusted and programmed specifically for this purpose in the laboratory and can be controlled extremely accurately via a PC. The advantage of LEDs is that their colour and brightness can be set extremely accurately. The electrophysiological laboratory at the Department of Ophthalmology has exploited these advantages to obtain highly accurate measurements of perception thresholds. These allow detailed information to be obtained concerning the photoreceptors and even the connected visual pathways. The experiments do not only show where and what has changed in the retina as a result of the disease, they also show how it has changed. The highly accurate method designed by the research group from Erlangen can be used to monitor the approaches developed as part of the Priority Programme with the aim of treating neuroretinal degeneration. Later on in the project, the aim is to fine tune and improve the methodological approach even further. The results are also to be used for continued fundamental research, leading to an even better description of how the retina actually works. The long-term goal from a clinical perceptive is for the method to be used to track the progression of disease in patients suffering from conditions such as glaucoma, or possibly even Alzheimer's or diabetes, as well as testing new therapies. 'We are pleased with the success of our work, a result of the close collaboration between doctors and researchers, and are happy that we have managed to make an excellent name for ourselves in clinical research in Germany and in this cutting edge Priority Programme,' explains Prof. Kremers, and Dr. Huchzermeyer adds: 'The project makes it very clear that successful collaboration between clinical and fundamental research is possible.' ### CHAPEL HILL, NC - The UNC School of Medicine has awarded the 19th Perl-UNC Neuroscience Prize to S. Lawrence Zipursky, PhD, of UCLA, and Joshua R. Sanes, PhD, of Harvard University for the "discovery of cell-surface proteins that control circuit assembly in the visual system." Zipursky and Sanes will visit Chapel Hill on March 21, 2019 to receive the prize - a $20,000 award - and give a lecture on their work at 3 p.m. in room G202 of the Medical Biomolecular Research Building (MBRB). "Drs. Zipursky and Sanes have made significant contributions to our understanding of how different types of nerve cells interconnect with one another," said Mark Zylka, PhD, Director of the UNC Neuroscience Center. "Their discoveries represent major advances in understanding how the nervous system 'wires up' to perform all of the everyday tasks such as seeing, moving, and thinking that we take for granted." The nervous system, which includes the brain and retinas, contains many different types of nerve cells that must interconnect with one another in a very precise manner. When faulty connections are made, problems such as seizures, intellectual disabilities, and blindness can arise. Discovering molecules that underlie this extraordinary specificity is a major goal of modern neuroscience. Both Zipursky and Sanes are leaders in this research field, illuminating our understanding of how the brain is built. Zipursky, the Jerome J. Belzer Chair of Medical Research, Distinguished Professor of Biological Chemistry, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, earned his doctorate in molecular biology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and conducted postdoctoral work at the California Institute of Technology before joining UCLA in 1985. Working with fruit flies, Zipursky discovered the Dscam1 (Down Syndrome Cell Adhesion Molecule 1) family of cell recognition molecules. The Dscam1 family has thousands of members that can provide individual neurons with a specific surface marker. These markers allow each type of nerve cell to avoid making connections with themselves as they form numerous connections with other nerve cells. This so-called "self-avoidance" is increasingly recognized as a key mechanism underlying synaptic specificity. "It is incredibly gratifying to have my work acknowledged by the Perl-UNC Prize, Zipursky said. "I am particularly indebted to the students, postdoctoral fellows, and collaborators whose creativity, hard work, and persistence led to the surprising discoveries for which I am being honored. I am delighted to share this award with my good friend Josh Sanes. Our shared passion for work in this area has helped make studying the complexity and specificity of brain wiring so much fun." Sanes, the Jeff C. Tarr Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and the Paul J. Finnegan Family Director of the Center for Brain Science, earned his doctorate in neurobiology from Harvard and conducted postdoctoral research at the University of California-San Francisco before joining the faculty of Washington University in St. Louis in 1984. He held an endowed chair there before returning to Harvard in 2004. Using laboratory mice, Sanes determined how specific connections within different layers of the retina form. He identified a family of molecules known as "sidekicks" that cause neurons to make contact with and adhere to their appropriate partners. These molecules channel the contacts between different types of nerve cells to specific retinal layers. Layer specificity is a fundamental organizing principle in many parts of the nervous system. "It's a real thrill to join the incredible luminaries who have been honored by the Perl-UNC Prize over the years, and a special treat to win it with my friend, colleague, and collaborator, Larry Zipursky," Sanes said. "I view the prize as recognizing the community of basic neuroscience researchers who use a variety of model systems to learn how the brain gets made. It's a good time to be doing this, as evidence mounts that defects in the assembly of this ridiculously complex structure may underlie most psychiatric and many neurological disorders." ### The Perl-UNC Neuroscience Prize is increasingly well known among biomedical scientists. Six of its previous winners went on to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine or the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. One of last year's awardees, Dr. Doris Tsao, subsequently received a MacArthur Fellows "Genius" Grant. The Perl-UNC Neuroscience Prize, established in 2000, is named after former UNC professor Edward Perl, MD, who discovered that a specific type of sensory neuron responded to painful stimuli. Before this, scientists thought that sensory neurons responded to all stimuli and that pain responses were sorted out in the spinal cord. The discovery had a major impact on the field of pain research, particularly in the development of pain medications. Dr. Perl passed away in 2014. Read more about his research in this remembrance. Along with Mark Zylka, the Perl-UNC Neuroscience Prize selection committee consists of William Snider, MD, professor of neurology and founding director of the UNC Neuroscience Center; Ben Philpot, PhD, professor of cell biology and physiology and associate director of the UNC Neuroscience Center; Thomas Albright, PhD, Conrad T. Prebys Chair in Vision Research at the Salk Institute; Vanessa Ruta, PhD, the Gabriel H. Reem & Herbert J. Kayden Assistant Professor of Neurophysiology & Behavior at Rockefeller University; Julie Kauer, professor of neurosciences & medical sciences at Brown University; and Regina Carelli, the Stephen B. Baxter Distinguished Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of Psychology & Neuroscience at the University of North Carolina. DURHAM, N.H.-- From boat enthusiasts to anglers, researchers at the University of New Hampshire have found surprisingly widespread support for offshore wind energy development (OWD) among outdoor recreationists. Also unanticipated was the strong support across the entire political spectrum, from liberals to moderates and conservatives, with respondents seeing OWD as a positive impact upon their recreation experience. "These findings are unique because most previous studies show that recreationists tend to oppose energy development on or near public lands and protected areas," said Michael Ferguson, assistant professor of recreation management and policy. "But most of the respondents in our research embraced the idea of offshore wind development. Besides the benefits of renewable energy, they saw it as a benefit to the entire community and region, creating tourism opportunities, and enhancing their own recreation experiences." In the study, recently published in the Journal of Great Lakes Research, the researchers from UNH and Pennsylvania State University examined more closely factors influencing water-based recreationists' perceptions towards OWD in general on Lake Erie. As part of the study, respondents were asked questions about recreation frequency, OWD support and opposition, political orientation, and perceptions towards climate change. Of the 242 respondents, nearly one-half identified as boaters, with the remaining evenly split between beach users and anglers and all were largely repeat day trip visitors. The results of this study suggested significantly high levels of support for OWD among the water-based outdoor recreationists at Lake Erie across the political spectrum. "Offshore wind energy development has been slow to develop in the United States for various social, ecological, and political reasons," said Ferguson. "But our findings suggest that recreationists may be open to it and supportive of it." Some examples cited for support include unique recreation and tourism attractions like boat tours to OWD sites, better fishing opportunities especially in areas that lack natural structures that would attract more fish (like rocks and reefs), and more job opportunities for everything from construction to tourism related businesses like rentals and restaurants. ### Contributing to these findings are Andrew Mowen, principal investigator and professor of recreation park and tourism management at The Pennsylvania State University; Alan Graefe, co-principal investigator and professor of recreation park and tourism management at The Pennsylvania State University; Samantha Powers, doctoral student in recreation park and tourism management at The Pennsylvania State University; Nate Trauntvein, assistant professor of kinesiology and health science at Utah State University; and Jeffrey Jacquet, assistant professor of environment and natural resources at The Ohio State University. This work was supported in part by Pennsylvania Sea Grant. The University of New Hampshire is a flagship research university that inspires innovation and transforms lives in our state, nation and world. More than 16,000 students from all 50 states and 71 countries engage with an award-winning faculty in top ranked programs in business, engineering, law, health and human services, liberal arts and the sciences across more than 200 programs of study. UNH's research portfolio includes partnerships with NASA, NOAA, NSF and NIH, receiving more than $100 million in competitive external funding every year to further explore and define the frontiers of land, sea and space. KINGSTON, R.I. - December 19, 2018 - Oceanographers at the University of Rhode Island have found that even slight levels of ocean oxygen loss, or deoxygenation, have big consequences for tiny marine organisms called zooplankton. Zooplankton are important components of the food web in the expanse of deep, open ocean called the midwater. Within this slice of ocean below the surface and above the seafloor are oxygen minimum zones (OMZs), large regions of very low oxygen. Unlike coastal "dead zones" where oxygen levels can suddenly plummet and kill marine life not acclimated to the conditions, zooplankton in OMZs are specially adapted to live where other organisms - especially predators - cannot. But OMZs are expanding due to climate change, and even slight changes to the low oxygen levels can push zooplankton beyond their extraordinary physiological limits. "Although the animals in the ocean's oxygen minimum zone have adapted over millions of years to the very low oxygen of this extreme and widespread midwater habitat, they are living at the very limits of their physiological capability," said Karen Wishner, a professor of oceanography at URI's Graduate School of Oceanography and lead author of a new paper on deoxygenation and zooplankton in the Eastern Tropical North Pacific OMZ. "Our research shows that they are sensitive to very small changes in oxygen, and decrease in abundance when oxygen gets just a little bit lower." The research team, which this week published their findings in Science Advances, found more natural variability in oxygen levels in the OMZ than previously known. This has a direct effect on the distribution of many types of zooplankton because, as the team discovered, the organisms respond to a less than 1 percent reduction in oxygen levels. While zooplankton have had millions of years to adapt to conditions in the OMZ, these low oxygen zones may expand rapidly due to climate change, leading to major unanticipated changes to midwater ecosystems. For example, an expansion of the OMZ into shallower waters may make zooplankton more susceptible to predators like fish. If this leads to a zooplankton population crash, it will have impacts all the way up the food chain. "Further loss of oxygen in ocean waters is predicted in the future as a result of global warming, and these animals may be unable to adapt and persist," Wishner said. "They are important components of the food web of oceanic ecosystems, and their loss could potentially impact top predators, including whales and commercially important fisheries." ### Wishner and her colleagues, including GSO professor Chris Roman and GSO marine research specialist Dawn Outram, collected their data off the Pacific coast of Mexico in January and February 2017. Brad Seibel, formerly a professor in the College of the Environment and Life Sciences when the project began and now with the University of South Florida College of Marine Science, was the Chief Scientist of the cruise. Overnight, Roman's "wire flyer," an ocean instrument designed to take oxygen and other measurements as it quickly oscillates up and down in the water column, was towed from the research vessel Sikuliaq for 50 kilometers. During the day, the vessel followed the same path and collected samples of numerous different types of zooplankton using a high-tech sampling net called a MOCNESS. The study was funded primarily by the National Science Foundation's Division of Ocean Sciences. One URI undergraduate (Danielle Moore) and a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship in Oceanography (SURFO, URI's NSF-funded Research Experience for Undergraduates program) student (Shannon Riley from Oregon State University) participated in the research. In humans, different social groups, cities, or regions often have distinct accents and dialects. Those vocal traits are not unique to us, however. A new study from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) has found that short-finned pilot whales living off the coast of Hawai'i have their own sorts of vocal dialects, a discovery that may help researchers understand the whales' complex social structure. The study was published on Dec. 14, 2018, in the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology. "These groups of pilot whales all use the same habitat. The fact that they have different vocal repertoires means that they're purposely not associating with each other," says Amy Van Cise, a Postdoctoral Scholar at WHOI and lead author on the study. "It's sort of like if you've got hipsters and prep kids in the same high school--each group has different slang. They identify themselves with certain speech to maintain that separation." This finding could be especially important for understanding the species, since relatively little is currently known about their social behavior. "On a broad-scale they are understudied, mainly because of where they spend their time," says biologist Robin Baird of the Cascadia Research Consortium, a co-author on the paper. "Hawai'i is one of the only locations in the U.S. where you can fairly quickly and easily get to areas where you can find pilot whales, while staying in good working conditions." In a previous 15-year study of the Hawai'ian whales, Baird and colleagues were able to photograph, identify, and categorize groups of whales, creating a database of associations. The researchers also took tiny biopsies of skin from the back of each whale they approached to gather genetic information. Based on that data, Van Cise found that the lowest and smallest level of organization, called a "unit," of pilot whales, appears to be made up of a handful of directly-related individuals. Those units combine to form "clusters"--essentially extended family--and multiple families together make up a "community" of the whales. This study builds on Van Cise's prior work. Over several years, she and Baird's team took a small boat off the coast of Hawai'i and Kaua'i Islands in search of pilot whales, identified individual whales, and recorded their calls with a specialized underwater microphone. She also continued taking genetic samples from the animals. Once finished, Van Cise and a team of volunteers painstakingly categorized individual types of whale calls on the recordings, sorting them into distinct groups. "That let us effectively make a map of vocal repertoire that we could superimpose onto a map of the whales' social structure," she says. "If two social groups sound similar to each other acoustically, that likely means that that're that they're communicating with each other regularly, using similar habitats or hunting grounds and foraging habits. This gives us a better sense of the social ties between whale groups. In the long term, that could help us understand both their genetic diversity and their evolution." That last part is especially important, Van Cise notes. In each family of whales, the genetic diversity between individuals isn't large--children by necessity share many of their genes with their parents. Across the entire whale population, however, it's a different story. For that reason, she says, it'll be essential to conserve pilot whales at family level, rather than focusing on individuals. "Although pilot whales are not currently endangered, they still face a number of threats. They're hunted in many countries around world, and we think they may be sensitive to navy sonar or other human-made noise in ocean," she says. "When you hear of mass whale stranding incidents on a beach, it's often pilot whales, because the entire social group strands. That's the strength of the social tie--if leader of a group beaches itself, all the animals in group will beach themselves." ### Also collaborating on the study were Sabre D. Mahaffy of Cascadia Research Collective and Jay Barlow of the NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center. Funding for the study was provided by grants from the Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center and Office of Naval Research, as well as Commander, Pacific Fleet. SoundTrap acoustic recording equipment was purchased with funding from the SIO/NSF IGERT fellowship program. DMON data collection was funded by the Office of Naval Research, award numbers N000141110612 and N00014-15-1-2299. The WHOI Marine Mammal Center and the Sawyer and Penzance Endowed Funds also provided funding. The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is a private, non-profit organization on Cape Cod, Mass., dedicated to marine research, engineering, and higher education. Established in 1930 on a recommendation from the National Academy of Sciences, its primary mission is to understand the oceans and their interaction with the Earth as a whole, and to communicate a basic understanding of the oceans' role in the changing global environment. For more information, please visit http://www.whoi.edu. Sea levels are rising globally from ocean warming and melting of land ice, but the seas aren't rising at the same rate everywhere. Sea levels have risen significantly faster in some U.S. East Coast regions compared to others. A new study led by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) reveals why. Over the 20th century, sea level has risen about a foot and a half in coastal communities near Cape Hatteras in North Carolina and along the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia. In contrast, New York City and Miami have experienced about a 1-foot rise over the same period, while sea levels farther north in Portland, Maine, rose only about half a foot. The reason is a phenomenon called "post-glacial rebound," explains Chris Piecuch, lead author of a study published on Dec. 20, 2018, in the journal Nature. Essentially, land areas in the Northern Hemisphere that once were covered by mammoth ice sheets during the last Ice Age--such as Canada and parts of the Northeast U.S.--were weighed down like a trampoline with a boulder on it. At the same time, land around the periphery of the ice sheets--along the U.S. mid-Atlantic coast, for example--rose up. As the ice sheets melted from their peak at the Last Glacial Maximum 26,500 years ago, the weighed-down areas gradually rebounded, while the peripheral lands started sinking, creating sort of a see-saw effect. Even though the ice sheets had disappeared by 7,000 years ago, the see-sawing of post-glacial rebound continues to this day. To explore why sea levels rose faster during the last century in areas such as Norfolk Naval Station in Virginia and the Outer Banks in North Carolina, Piecuch and colleagues gathered tidal gauge measurements of sea levels, GPS satellite data that show how much the land has moved up and down over time, and fossils in sediment from salt marshes, which record past coastal sea levels. They combined all of this observational data with complex geophysical models--something that has not been done before--to give a more complete view of sea level changes since 1900. The research team found that post-glacial rebound accounted for most of the variation in sea level rise along the East Coast. But, importantly, when that factor was stripped away, the researchers found that "sea level trends increased steadily from Maine all the way down to Florida," Piecuch said. "The cause for that could involve more recent melting of glaciers and ice sheets, groundwater extraction and damming over the last century", Piecuch says. "Those effects move ice and water mass around at Earth's surface, and can impact the planet's crust, gravity field and sea level." "Post-glacial rebound is definitely the most important process causing spatial differences in sea level rise on the U.S. East Coast over the last century. And since that process plays out over millennia, we're confident projecting its influence centuries into the future," Piecuch explains. "But regarding the mass redistribution piece of the puzzle, we're less certain how that's going to evolve into the future, which makes it much more difficult to predict sea level rise and its impact on coastal communities." ### The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is a private, non-profit organization on Cape Cod, Mass., dedicated to marine research, engineering, and higher education. Established in 1930 on a recommendation from the National Academy of Sciences, its primary mission is to understand the oceans and their interaction with the Earth as a whole, and to communicate a basic understanding of the oceans' role in the changing global environment. For more information, please visit http://www.whoi.edu. DETROIT - Declarative memory -- memories that can be consciously recalled -- is critical to everyday life. Throughout childhood and adolescence, declarative memory improves remarkably. However, until most recently, there was a critical gap in our understanding of how maturation of the prefrontal cortex drives memory development. A team of researchers led by Noa Ofen, Ph.D., associate professor of psychology in Wayne State University's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Institute of Gerontology, and Lisa Johnson, Ph.D., postdoctoral research scientist at the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California-Berkeley, are addressing this critical gap through the use of electrocorticographic (ECoG) data recorded directly from the prefrontal cortex in a cohort of 17 children and adolescents. These ECoG recordings were obtained from patients with surgically implanted subdural electrodes used for the clinical management of seizures. "In our study, we used an established task employed in numerous studies aimed at investigating memory development in this age group," said Ofen. "It provided our team with rare insight previously not obtainable." The team followed a two-tier, unbiased approach to ECoG data analysis by which data were first analyzed per trial on the individual level using non-parametric statistics, and then modeled on the group level. "The high spatiotemporal precision of these recordings allowed us to provide a unique demonstration of how the developing prefrontal cortex drives the formation of memories of events in our own lives," said Johnson. "Our research shows that earlier activity predicts greater memory accuracy, and sub-second deviations in activity flow between frontal subregions predict memory formation." This study is the first to demonstrate that the spatiotemporal propagation of frontal activity supports memory formation in children as young as 6 years of age, and show how adjacent frontal subregions follow dissociable developmental trajectories. ### The full article, "Direct brain recordings reveal prefrontal cortex dynamics of memory development," is available online in the Dec. 19, 2018 issue of Science Advances, advances.sciencemag.org/. Support for this study was received from the National Institute of Mental Health of the National Institutes of Health (MH107512), the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke of the National Institutes of Health (NS64033) and the Benoziyo Endowment Fund for the Advancement of Science. Wayne State University is one of the nation's pre-eminent public research universities in an urban setting. Through its multidisciplinary approach to research and education, and its ongoing collaboration with government, industry and other institutions, the university seeks to enhance economic growth and improve the quality of life in the city of Detroit, state of Michigan and throughout the world. For more information about research at Wayne State University, visit http://www.research.wayne.edu. The Prime Minister said that Metro has found to be an effective tool for providing good transport connectivity. Mumbai: In a boost to lakhs of commuters living in Dombivali and Vasai-Virar, they will soon be connected to Metro services. Chief minister Devendra Fadnavis on Tuesday formally announced that Thane-Bhiwandi-Kalyan and Dahisar East-Mira Bhayandar Metro corridors would be extended up to Dombivali-Taloja and Vasai-Virar respectively. The state government will soon prepare the DPR (Detailed Project Report) of both these projects and also sanction them, said Mr Fadnavis. He was speaking at a foundation stone laying ceremony of MMRDAs two Metro projects Metro-5 and Metro-9 at Phadke Maidan, Kalyan. Prime minister Narendra Modi laid the foundation stone of both the projects on the occasion. In addition to this, he also launched CIDCOs mass housing schemes for economically weaker section and lower income group sections in Navi Mumbai. Mr Fadnavis was respo-nding to a demand made by Ravindra Chavan, the BJP MLA from Dombivali, who said that the Thane-Bhiwandi-Kalyan Metro should be connected to Dombivali to ensure better transport connectivity. The CM said, People living in Thane-Bhiwa-ndi-Kalyan had dreamt of having their own Metro. With the Metro-5 project, Bhiwandi will now be directly connected to Mumbai. The Metro projects would be helpful for integrated connectivity to Mumbai. The Prime Minister said that Metro has found to be an effective tool for providing good transport connectivity. Since last four years, we have implemented several projects to expand the Metro network in Mum-bai. In next three years, the Metro network in the city would be further extended by 35 kms, he said. He also took a dig at the Congress for the delay in implementation of Me-tro projects. The Metro project started in Mum-bai in the year 2006. How-ever, in the next eight years only one Metro line, that too of just 11 kms, was completed by 2014. On the contrary, we intend to expand the Metro network by 275 kms in the state in near future, said Mr Modi. TORONTO, NEW YORK and LONDON, December 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Bentall Kennedy and GreenOak Real Estate ("GreenOak") announced today the signing of an agreement to merge the two firms into a leading global real estate investment platform. The combined entity will be named Bentall GreenOak. GreenOak Co-Founders, John Carrafiell and Sonny Kalsi, existing GreenOak senior management and GreenOak's strategic partner Tetragon Financial Group Limited will all continue to hold significant ownership stakes in Bentall GreenOak. Bentall Kennedy's senior management team will also acquire a meaningful ownership position in the combined firm. Bentall GreenOak will be majority-owned by Sun Life Financial ("Sun Life") and will operate under Sun Life Investment Management, the alternative asset management arm of Sun Life. Sun Life has committed significant co-investment capital to support the growth of Bentall GreenOak and to enhance the firm's alignment with its clients. Senior management of the combined firm will include leaders from both Bentall Kennedy and GreenOak, and will be led globally by Gary Whitelaw, as CEO, and Sonny Kalsi, as President. John Carrafiell will be Senior Managing Partner of the Bentall GreenOak UK/European business. Bentall GreenOak will provide its clients with a broad range of complementary real estate investment strategies that include Core, Core Plus and Value Add/Opportunistic equity, as well as senior and tactical real estate debt strategies. With investment professionals in 14 offices in North America, and 7 offices internationally, Bentall GreenOak will have deep local knowledge and strong, long-standing investment track records across the United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia. "This combination brings together two successful real estate platforms to create a world class investment manager, supported by the significant resources and long-term stability of Sun Life Investment Management. GreenOak and Bentall Kennedy are two highly complementary firms with virtually no overlap in investment strategies or offices," said Gary Whitelaw, CEO, Bentall Kennedy. "As members of the combined leadership team have worked together before, and given our extensive discussions over many months, we believe we share very similar investment practices, underwriting discipline, and client-centric cultures," Mr. Whitelaw continued. "The mission critical element in any combination is ensuring that the leadership team and the teams directly managing the investment programs and assets on the ground are able to remain focused on creating value and managing risk," added Messrs. Carrafiell and Kalsi, Co-Founders of GreenOak Real Estate. "This combination of like-minded and compatible firms uniquely allows us to do that - with our clients and fund investors working with the same local specialists with whom they have been working for many years." "Institutional real estate investment strategies increasingly benefit from a truly global framework. But being successful requires deep local knowledge, a rigorous underwriting culture and strong alignment between investors and the manager," said Steve Peacher, President, Sun Life Investment Management. "Bentall Kennedy and GreenOak each bring this knowledge, disciplined experience and a fiduciary culture to the new combined firm. Sun Life Investment Management is committed to deepening Bentall GreenOak's client/manager alignment by making strategic co-investments in future Bentall GreenOak funds and other initiatives in partnership with Bentall GreenOak's clients and partners," Mr. Peacher added. As of September 30, 2018, Bentall Kennedy and GreenOak have, in the aggregate, over 700 institutional clients with approximately $47 billion USD / $62 billion CAD in assets under management. Sun Life will have contractual rights to increase its ownership interest in Bentall GreenOak in 2026, though it is expected that a meaningful interest will continue to be held by the Bentall GreenOak management team on an ongoing basis. Bentall Kennedy and Sun Life Investment Management received financial advice on the transaction from Berkshire Global Advisors and legal advice from Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP. Evercore provided financial advice to GreenOak and Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP and Covington & Burling LLP provided legal advice to GreenOak and its owners. The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, including required regulatory approvals. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2019. About Bentall Kennedy Bentall Kennedy, a Sun Life Investment Management company, is a leading real estate investment advisor and one of North America's foremost providers of real estate services. Bentall Kennedy (which includes Bentall Kennedy (Canada) Limited Partnership, Bentall Kennedy (U.S.) Limited Partnership) serves the interests of more than 545 institutional clients with expertise in office, retail, industrial and multi-residential assets throughout Canada and the U.S. Bentall Kennedy's Investment Management group has approximately $36 billion USD / $48 billion CAD of assets under management (including approximately $18 billion USD / $24 billion CAD of Sun Life General Account Assets, of which $12.3 billion USD are commercial mortgages managed by certain affiliated Sun Life Investment Management entities outside the Bentall Kennedy group under the oversight of individuals who are officers both of Bentall Kennedy and those other affiliates, all as at September 30, 2018). We are one of the largest Real Estate Services providers in Canada, managing more than 60 million square feet on behalf of third-party and investment management clients (as of September 30, 2018). For more information, please visit http://www.bentallkennedy.com About GreenOak GreenOak Real Estate is a leading global real estate investment management firm with approximately US$11 billion of AUM, across discretionary closed-end funds for both equity and debt strategies in the US, Europe and Asia. Founded in 2010, GreenOak has acquired approximately 203 assets representing 40 million square feet and US$14.3 billion of real estate value within its target markets. GreenOak has offices in New York, Los Angeles, London, Madrid, Milan, Luxembourg, Tokyo, Seoul and Mumbai, with over 100 professionals in dedicated regional teams having deep, local knowledge, experience and extensive networks in each market. For more information, please visit http://www.greenoakrealestate.com About Sun Life Investment Management Sun Life Investment Management comprises Sun Life Institutional Investments (Canada) Inc. and Bentall Kennedy (Canada) Limited Partnership in Canada, and Prime Advisors Inc., Ryan Labs Asset Management and Bentall Kennedy (U.S.) Limited Partnership in the United States. These operations have combined third-party assets under management of $46 billion USD / $61 billion CAD (at $1.33 CAD/USD) as of September 30, 2018. Sun Life Investment Management is supported by the investment division of Sun Life Assurance Company of Canada that manages $109 billion USD / $146 billion CAD (at $1.33 CAD/USD) in assets under management for the Sun Life Financial group of companies as of September 30, 2018. For more information, please visit our website - http://www.sunlifeinvestmentmanagement.com About Tetragon (CONTINUA) Cine Asesinada Jonshel Alexander, una de las ninas de 'Bestias del sur salvaje', a los 22 anos FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Now that the Senate has overwhelmingly passed the criminal justice reform bill backed by President Trump, criminal justice expert Paul Brakke has hailed this effort, which he has long supported in his books and articles about prison sentencing reform. The Senate version of the bill will now go to the House, where it is expected to pass and then be signed by the President. Essentially the bill will allow thousands of prisoners to obtain an earlier release from prison and reduce many more prison sentences in the future, so it will contribute to reduced incarceration and recidivism. Among other things, the bill will protect first-time offenders from mandatory minimum sentences and ease the three strike rule, so people with three or more convictions, including for drug offenses, will get 25 years instead of life. Plus inmates can earn more good time credits by avoiding a disciplinary record, and they can get earned time credits by participating in more vocational and rehabilitative programs, so they can be released early to halfway houses or home confinement. Besides reducing prison overcrowding, the educational programs can provide ex-cons with new job skills, so they are less likely to commit new crimes and therefore the bill helps to reduce recidivism. Brakke has long favored such reforms as the publisher of American Leadership Books, which specializes in books on crime and criminal justice. These books have included The Costly U.S. Prison System, and a chapter on prisons in his latest book Crime in America: Conservatives' Approaches toward Criminals, Police, Criminal Justice, and the Opioid Crisis. In writing about the prisons, Brakke has recommended that sentencing laws be changed in exactly the way described in the bill to provide more rehabilitation efforts for prisoners and to enable judges to exercise more discretion in sentencing nonviolent offenders to reduced sentences, especially for drug offenses. As Brakke has emphasized in his books, reduced incarceration results in lower levels of recidivism, because shorter sentences helps to keep the families of ex-cons together, and ex-cons are better able to find jobs and become productive citizens, so they have less need to return to crime. According to Brakke, the passage of this bill is critical, because for decades, the sentencing laws have unfairly impacted minority communities and contributed to the high rate of poverty and crime in the inner cities. But now it seems Congress, along with the President, have finally come together in a spirit of bipartisanship to support this bill, which will make America safer. As Brakke notes, "This bill will contribute to a safer America, as well as reduce the unnecessary costs for imprisoning low-level offenders with long sentences." Brakke further emphasizes that "It makes sense to change our sentencing laws to create a win-win for prisoners, their families, and American society as a whole. The bill has wide support from virtually all social and economic groups in America. And once this bill is passed to change the sentencing for federal prisoners, this will serve as a model for the states to similarly change their sentencing laws." Brakke also considers the bill especially important because it appeals to both conservatives and liberals. As he observes, the bill incorporates the conservatives' concerns with creating a more effective cost-effective prison system and the liberals' concern with helping prisoners become reintegrated into the community, keep their family together, and get the necessary training to get a job. So it's "win-win" for both sides of the aisle. Brakke's books on The Costly U.S. Prison System and Crime in America are part of the series of books on crime, criminal justice, and American society from American Leadership Books. In Crime in America, which provide an overview of crime patterns and how the criminal justice system, including the prisons, works -- or doesn't, Brakke offers suggestions for improving the system. For instance, he has long advocated finding ways to reduce the prison population, since the U.S. has the highest percentage of its population in prison in the world with about 2.2 million people behind bars as of 2016 -- a nationwide incarceration rate of 860 prison or jail inmates for every 100,000 adults ages 18 and older, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. To learn more, you can now get a free review copy of Crime in America, which is available for preorder, too, on Amazon. Brakke is offering these books for free to anyone who wants to review and comment on the book -- just go to www.crimeinamericathebook.com to get a copy. Also, copies are available for government officials who might turn some of Brakke's other suggestions for reducing crime and fixing the criminal justice system into legislation. Members of the media are invited to request copies of the book, too. To help draw attention to the suggested fixes in the book, Brakke has additionally launched a video and social media campaign with five new videos each day. The first 10 are featured on his American Leadership Books' YouTube channel. Among the most recent videos is "Want to Know More about U.S. Crime and Prisons?" https://youtu.be/87fLsRId3Is Brakke next books -- Fractured America and Prisons in America -- will be out in the next few months. For media copies of the book, along with additional information on American Leadership Books and Paul Brakke and to set up interviews, please contact: Jana Collins Jones & O'Malley Toluca Lake, California jana@jonesomalley.com (818) 762-8353 MEXICO CITY - The United States and Mexico announced Tuesday a bilateral assistance program to curb migration from Central America, signaling an early vote of confidence from the Trump administration in the foreign policy of new Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. The United States announced a total contribution of $10.6 billion, most of which will be allocated from existing aid programs. Around $4.5 billion of that sum comes from new loans, loan guarantees and other private-sector support that could become available through the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC). The announcement appeared to be largely a symbolic gesture of cooperation between the two governments. After two tumultuous years in the bilateral relationship and several tense weeks during the arrival of several migrant caravans, the Mexican government said it considered the U.S. collaboration a positive sign. "The announcement reflects the importance that both countries grant to our bilateral relationship," said Marcelo Ebrard, Mexico's foreign minister. The State Department said in a statement that the program would "jointly address the shared challenges of migration, narcotics trafficking, and the activities of trans-national criminal organizations." The Mexican government said it would contribute $25 billion to development in southern Mexico over five years, which Lopez Obrador has suggested could serve as a source of employment to Central Americans who are granted work visas. Lopez Obrador "has to take advantage of this opportunity, this honeymoon with Trump and Mexico," said Rafael Fernandez de Castro, a former senior Mexican foreign affairs official and now director of the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California at San Diego. For years, the United States has allocated development assistance to Central America in the hope of preventing migrants from traveling to the United States. In 2016, in the wake of a surge in unaccompanied children arriving at the border, the Obama administration announced $750 million in funding to Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, dubbed the Alliance for Prosperity. The Trump administration has been conducting a review of U.S. aid to Central America, aiming to reform or eliminate many of the programs launched by the Obama administration. Those programs involved an overall commitment of approximately $2.6 billion in foreign assistance to Central American countries in fiscal 2015-2018. Those nations also promised to spend billions of dollars of their own money to tackle violence, joblessness, poor governance and other factors driving people to flee. But the Trump administration has concluded that the programs didn't work, according to senior U.S. officials who have studied the Obama-era funding package. In October, as a caravan of thousands of Central American migrants headed for the United States, President Donald Trump threatened to cut or sharply cut aid to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, saying in a tweet that "they were not able to do the job of stopping people from leaving their country and coming illegally to the U.S." It was not an idle threat: The State Department drew up plans for reductions of hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, according to U.S. officials. With many officials warning that such cuts could be deeply harmful, the Trump administration ultimately held back, those officials said. Of the $10.6 billion referenced in Tuesday's announcement, it appears the only new figure is the $4.5 billion in potential loans, loan guarantees and related services through OPIC. That money would facilitate private-sector activity and would be repaid, unlike traditional development assistance through USAID. The 2017 municipal election felt like a major aberration for San Antonio. After a decade in which 35 of 38 elected council incumbents won their races, three of seven incumbents were voted out last year, with another (District 1 Councilman Roberto Trevino) barely surviving a runoff. Also, for the first time in 20 years, San Antonio voters kicked out a sitting mayor, Ivy Taylor. Even before Taylor lost her runoff to then-Councilman Ron Nirenberg, the circumstances of the election were pretty remarkable. After all, council members in San Antonio dont challenge the mayor with whom they serve. It just doesnt happen. The last time it did occur, when Howard Peak took on embattled Mayor Bill Thornton, Peak had nothing to lose, because he was term-limited out of his council seat that year. That wasnt Nirenbergs situation. He had served two terms in District 8 and gave up the possibility of two additional council terms to challenge Taylor. Nirenbergs bold move might have been a one-time confluence of impatience, ambition and a general frustration with Taylors frequently passive brand of leadership, but it also can be seen as a harbinger of the new normal in San Antonio. Time will tell. For clues, we can look at the current cases of Rey Saldana and Greg Brockhouse, two council members who once worked together (Brockhouse was Saldanas first chief of staff, in 2011) but tend to be at odds these days. Both men want to be mayor someday. Saldana announced last Thursday at a Pearl fundraiser that he would not run for mayor in 2019, setting politics aside for a couple of years while focusing his energies on a new job with the Charles Butt-funded education nonprofit, Raise Your Hand Texas. Brockhouse wants to be mayor in the worst way. His detractors would argue thats exactly how hes getting himself there pummeling Nirenberg and Sheryl Sculley over the outgoing city managers $475,000 salary and aligning himself with the San Antonio Professional Firefighters Association in a charter-amendment campaign designed to defang the council. As Brockhouses first term on the council has played out, however, Ive often wondered if hell actually follow through on his long-anticipated 2019 challenge to Nirenberg. Brockhouse worked really hard to get his council seat. He ran a dogged campaign against District 6 incumbent Ray Lopez in 2013, giving Lopez a bigger scare than most observers thought possible. Four years later, with Lopez term-limited out of office, Brockhouse came back and won the far West Side seat in a close runoff race with local attorney Melissa Cabello Havrda. Giving up that hard-won seat after only one term and gambling everything on your ability to knock off an incumbent mayor seems to be a low-percentage move. The fact that were even talking about a second consecutive election with a council member challenging a sitting mayor reveals more than the fact that Nirenberg and Brockhouse are ambitious individuals. In 2008, when San Antonio voters approved a charter amendment that expanded mayoral and council term limits from four to eight years, they also unwittingly created the dais dynamic were looking at now. In the days when council members knew mayors could serve no more than two terms, those council members were willing to wait their turn. In 2003, some members of the business community urged then-Councilwoman Bonnie Conner to take on then-Mayor Ed Garza, but she bowed out. After Julian Castro lost the mayors race to Phil Hardberger in 2005, Castro resisted the temptation to seek a rematch two years later and instead planned for 2009. Under our current term limits, however, Nirenberg could stay in office until 2025. Thats a long time for other mayoral hopefuls to wait. If youre going to unseat a San Antonio mayor, you need to do it before they secure that crucial second term and cement their position. This side effect of the eight-year term limits wasnt felt until Taylors tenure. Castros political power was so undeniable that none of his council colleagues dared launch a campaign against him, although Elisa Chan, his North Side nemesis, thought about it. Nirenberg, like most mayors after a single term, would have to be graded with an Incomplete at this point. His transportation plan has yet to emerge and his attempt to close the housing affordability gap still is a work in progress. The 2019 election will determine whether or not he gets to establish an identifiable legacy. Meanwhile, theres the question of how long Saldana will wait. As a new father who could use a break from City Hall after eight tiring years, the outgoing Southwest Side councilman surely looks forward to sitting out the 2019 election cycle. But he could get itchy in 2021. The waiting, as a wise man once sang, is the hardest part. Gilbert Garcia is a columnist covering the San Antonio and Bexar County area. Read him on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | ggarcia@express-news.net | Twitter: @gilgamesh470 Australias Morrison never had much credibility to start with, and now, like Aesops misfortunate miller, hes also lost his ass. There is a fable attributed to Aesop and often titled The Miller, His Son & the Ass that tells the story of a father and son transporting their ass (as in donkey, just to be clear) to the market, to sell off the humble beast. All three are on foot, and when the father is mocked by passers-by for missing a free ride, he promptly places his son on the animal. When, shortly afterwards, the lad is berated for letting his old man walk, the father replaces his son on the donkeys back. Inevitably, that occasions further criticism, which leads to both father and son riding the animal. And when they are criticised for overburdening the beast, the father responds by deciding that he and his son must alight and carry the ass instead. Fellow pedestrians cant help laughing at the sight, which upsets the donkey, who starts kicking and braying and, in the process, falls off a bridge into the river below. The poor miller now set out sadly for home, the story concludes. By trying to please everybody, he had pleased nobody, and lost his ass besides. The moral of the story is: If you try to please all, you please none. I was reminded of it lately by the Australian Prime Ministers misadventures on the rocky road to Jerusalem, so to speak. A couple of months ago, on the eve of a crucial by-election in a well-heeled Sydney constituency, Scott Morrison declared that Australia would shift its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Morrisons stroke of genius was born of desperation. The seat of Wentworth had previously been held with a substantial majority by his predecessor as Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, who had quit in disgust upon being toppled from the top spot in August. The ruling Liberal Partys new candidate, a former ambassador to Israel, faced a tough challenge from an independent. The Liberals, in coalition with the National Party, had a one seat majority in the lower House of Parliament. The seats electorate has a Jewish component of more than 10 per cent. Morrison thought he was on to a winner, forgetting that since elections in Australia traditionally take place on Saturdays, quite a few Jews use the facility of early postal ballots so as avoid having to vote on the Sabbath, whereas others are not particularly drawn to Israels toxic politics. At any rate, the Liberal candidate lost. So, in addition to the loss of his parliamentary majority, the Prime Minister was left with a double dilemma. On the one hand, Israel would be mightily miffed if he didnt keep his word. On the other, Indonesia had made clear its displeasure over the unexpected initiative. Last Saturday, Morrison declared that Australia recognised West Jerusalem as Israels capital, and would extend recognition to East Jerusalem as Palestines capital once a two-state settlement came to pass, but would not for the time being shift its embassy. This had the unusual consequence of attracting a backlash from Palestinians and Israel alike. Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat accurately said: All of Jerusalem remains a final-status issue for negotiations, while East Jerusalem, under international law, is an integral part of the occupied Palestinian territory. Indonesia was relatively subdued in its response, appreciating Australias ambivalence while not mentioning the prospects for an FTA, but Malaysia another regional entity with which Australia is obliged to interact was more scathing in its assessment. At the time of writing, the only country to unequivocally back the Australian stance has been Bahrain a reminder that the Likud regime is cultivating friendships among authoritarian right-wing regimes from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf to Eastern Europe and the Americas, where the latest government to pledge its allegiance to the neo-fascist predilections of its Israeli counterpart is the incoming administration of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. Australias Morrison never had much credibility to start with, and now, like Aesops misfortunate miller, hes also lost his ass. At this point, he is also widely expected to lose the next election in May 2019. By arrangement with Dawn Good news for the incoming House Democratic majority! They have something President Trump really, really wants: money to build a border wall. Trump is desperate for this money. Mexico wont give it to him. Only congressional Democrats can. Without their consent, he cant deliver on one of the key campaign promises he made during the 2016 election. Theres a name for this in classic negotiating strategy. Its called leverage. Good negotiators use leverage (something they have, which their adversary wants) to obtain what are called concessions (something their adversary has, which they want). The result is what experts call compromise. This is how the civilized world gets things done. But in a fit of pique, Democrats are throwing away their leverage, insisting that they will never under any circumstances give Trump the wall he so desperately wants. The reason? Because he wants it and they despise him. There is a name for this in negotiating strategy as well. Its called insanity. It would be one thing if Trump was demanding that Democrats make some great moral compromise. But he is not. Democrats say they are for border security. They may think that a wall is a costly and inefficient way to secure the border, but there is nothing inherently wrong with a wall. In 2006, 26 Senate Democrats including Sens. Charles Schumer, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton voted for the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which required the Department of Homeland Security to build two layers of reinforced fencing along 700 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border. Is there some profound moral difference between a fence and a wall? No. So why not give Trump his wall in exchange for something they want? They could give Trump the $5 billion he is asking for to begin construction of the wall, in exchange for a path to citizenship for the nearly 2 million dreamers illegal immigrants who were brought to the United States as children through no fault of their own. Trump would negotiate on this basis in a heartbeat. Then, when Democrats take the majority next year, they could offer him the remaining $15 billion to $20 billion he needs to finish the wall, in exchange for legal status for the other 11 million people here in the country illegally. The wall could buy legal status for every illegal immigrant living in the shadows a longtime Democratic priority. Again, Trump would likely be willing to cut such a deal. He is on record repeatedly saying that he wants to find a way for the vast majority of illegal immigrants (the good ones, he calls them) to get right with the law and secure legal status, so long as we get rid of the rapists, murderers and drug dealers (aka the bad ones) and secure the border. That is what Democrats claim they want to do as well. So take him up on it. Or, if they dont want to use their leverage to solve the illegal immigration problem, then Democrats could use the wall as leverage to win concessions from Trump on something else. Democrats have laid out an ambitious agenda from shoring up Obamacare, lowering the cost of prescription drugs and Medicare-for-all to modifying Trumps tax cuts, increasing the minimum wage, strengthening environmental rules, tackling global climate change and enacting paid family leave. The possibilities are endless. If Democrats dont use the wall as leverage, they wont get any of this. In their Oval Office meeting, Schumer told Trump that elections have consequences echoing the infamous words spoken by Obama to congressional Republicans in 2009 when they presented him with their ideas for a stimulus package. Back then, however, Democrats controlled not just the House but the Senate and White House, too. Today, Republicans control the executive branch and have an expanded Senate majority. So if Democrats want to get anything done, they cant ram it through over GOP objections, because Trump has leverage, too in the form of a pen he can use to sign or veto legislation. To get anything done, Democrats have to negotiate and compromise. The answer for Democrats is simple: Dont refuse the wall; use the wall. @marcthiessen. Cleveland has written the latest chapter in the unfolding scandal of the American criminal justice system. A report by the U.S. Marshals Service details a series of failures and abuses in Clevelands jails: Overcrowding. Frequent lockdowns to make up for understaffing. Food denied as punishment. Pregnant inmates sleeping on the floor. Mice-infested food storage. Young offenders thrown into the adult prison population. Inmates with mental illness denied treatment and placed in isolation. A merger of Clevelands city and county systems was sold as a cost-saving measure. It resulted in a penal system in which there were 55 attempted suicides in one year. After the seventh inmate death from suicide or drug overdose, the reorganization was put on hold. The Marshals Service report found insufficient and unclear answers about recent inmate deaths. Im not saying it should be a hotel or a party, former inmate Cecil Fluker told the county council, but damn, can we come out alive? With no other group dependent on government care does the discourse begin, Well, who cares? And there is no doubt that among the more than 2 million incarcerated Americans are some vicious and violent characters who deserve to be right where they are. But there are several good reasons to care what happens in American jails and prisons. First, this is a social stress test of sorts, measuring our commitment to human dignity. Do we believe that every life has value? Or do we judge some men and women less than human and beneath our concern? I was instructed in these matters by the late Chuck Colson when I worked for him in the late 1980s. Colson had been a particularly ruthless and devious special counsel to President Richard Nixon. As a result of the Watergate scandal, he became prisoner 23226. While incarcerated, he found an extraordinary talent for relating to inmates across boundaries of class and race. And he accepted a Christian calling to speak to and for them, eventually visiting 800 prisons in 40 countries. Over time, a prison preacher became one of the most important social reformers of the 20th century, advocating for humane treatment of prisoners and alternatives to incarceration for non-violent offenders. I watched Colson demonstrate the most radical and challenging teaching of Christian faith a belief in absolute equality before God. He treated murderers and rapists as his equals in the need for grace, and his equals in their capacity to receive grace. And I watched people guilty of terrible crimes become models of moral maturity. If no one, in the end, is beyond Gods help, then no one should be beyond our concern. But even if you find all of this to be pious rubbish, there is another reason to care about prison conditions: Because most prisoners numbering more than 700,000 each year will come back to communities. And how we behave toward them during their imprisonment matters greatly in determining their level of bitterness and criminality upon their return. An inmate treated like a caged animal is expected to walk through a gate and become a productive citizen. It is insanity. A final reason to be concerned about conditions behind prison walls is because there are more lives and futures at stake than that of a prisoner. There are about 2.7 million children with an incarcerated mother or father. The children of prisoners are at high risk of future incarceration themselves. Writing off prisoners as worthless and hopeless has the effect of writing off many of their sons and daughters. It is moral malpractice with generational consequences. There are proper political responses to Americas criminal-justice crisis support for prison reform, for sentencing reform, for a general end to reliance on routine, mass incarceration. But there are also personal steps that can be taken. The prison outreach ministry Colson founded, Prison Fellowship, organizes an effort each year at Christmas called Angel Tree. It allows people to donate Christmas presents that are given on behalf of prisoners to their children, marked With love from Mom, or With love from Dad. It is often a chance for inmates to reconnect with their families. And it is often the highlight of a childs Christmas a sign they are still loved. The most effective social activism matches political vision and personal concern. Those seeking a more just society should also care about the quality of Christmas morning for an inmates child. michaelgerson@washpost.com DERBY A committee tasked with figuring out if merging the Ansonia and Derby School districts is a good idea met via video-conference with its paid consultant on Monday, mapping out a game plan and their respective roles. The Boston-based District Management Group was awarded a $137,000 contract to conduct what could be an 18-month or more project of data collection and interviews. As a quorum of the 10-member committee listened in the Derby Middle School all purpose room, DMG Senior Director Sam Ribnick and his colleagues walked the group through their credentials as well as the process for investigating what many consider a controversial idea. Combined, the two Naugatuck Valley School districts have about 3,700 students. Money is tight. Still, some members of the committee are concerned with whether the consultants will get the data it requests and all their questions answered. Are we confident that your central office will participate and provide us with all the data? Jim Gildea, the Derby co-chair of the Temporary Regional School Study Committee, asked. Fair question, responded John Izzo, the Ansonia co-chair. The short answer is I dont know. I hope so. The consultants plan to spend the next four months collecting data on staffing levels, finances, demographics and facilities. They will also hold a series of focus groups with school board members, community members and school employees, separate for each community. Committee members sought assurances that the focus groups would be balanced so that all voices are heard. Then from April to October 2019, the consultants will create and present a report to the committee, assessing the pros and cons of establishing a regional school district. Will it take a whole six months to write the report? asked George Kurtyka, a Derby committee member. A lot are anxious to see what is going on. If all goes like clockwork, it could be shorter, Ribnick told them. His firm has worked with several Connecticut school districts including Stamford, on special education, and Hamden, on finances. Once it submits a report, another nine months through June 2020 would be spent focusing on recommendations for such things as grade configurations, how buildings would be used and the size and representation of a regional board of education. They also would recommend a way to negotiate union contracts and figure out a name for the new district. If a merger is the ultimate recommendation, it would not occur without voters in both cities voting to approve regionalization. As part of their work, the committee, with the consultants help, will also create a five-year educational and budget plan projection on enrollment, staffing needs, transportation and special education needs for Derby and Ansonia. Norwalk Schools Superintendent Steven Adamowski, who is an Ansonia resident and member of the committee, said he hopes that the focus is not just on savings but on improving educational outcomes in both municipalities. As the process unfolds, Tara Hyder, a Derby parent, said she hoped committee members would keep their personal opinions in check and be as objective as possible. We need to be impartial, Izzo agreed. The committee also set meeting dates through 2019, in most cases the fourth Monday at the month, alternating between Ansonia High School and Derby Middle School. The next meeting will be held Jan. 28 at Ansonia High. MILFORD A Louisa County, Va., jury has convicted Gregory Veres, formerly of Milford, of first-degree murder in the death of his girlfriend, who grew up in Fairfield. According to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Veres, 31, was convicted in the Sept. 22, 2017, hit-and-run driving death of Dawn Marie Meade, 40. The Richmond Times-Dispatch reported that Veres had gotten into an argument with Meade over a restraining order that she filed against him in February 2017 when they were living together in Connecticut. Meade then got out of the car, driven by Veres, and began to walk home, the newspaper reported. The couple were living at Veres grandmothers home after moving to Virginia in May 2017. The jury convicted Veres of first-degree murder and felony hit and run while recommending the maximum sentence under the law, plus 10 years, according to Louisa Commonwealths Attorney Rusty E. McGuire. This is a tragic case where the defendant killed his girlfriend and treated her worse than a dog, McGuire said in a prepared statement. He killed her in the middle of the night and left her alone, cold and in the dark, on the side of the road. The defendant hunted her down and drove all four wheels of his grandmothers car off the road and struck the victim going 60 mph, McGuire continued. The defendant struck her so hard the cars grill left an imprint on her leg. Veres took the stand and testified it was an accident and suggested that he was too drunk to know what he was doing, according to McGuire. The defense also called Richard McGarry, an expert witness, who said the defendants blood alcohol concentration would have been too high to know what he was doing. The Commonwealth called Dr. Jim Hutchings, who works for the Department of Forensic Science, who refuted McGarrys claims, according to McGuire. In closing arguments, McGuire and co-counsel Robert Wood argued that the defendants changing of his clothes from a bright fluorescent shirt to a dark sweatshirt before he killed the victim, coupled with his aggressive driving, demonstrated a premeditated intent to kill. In a press release, Wood said, We are the thankful of the professional and thorough work of the Louisa County Sheriffs Office, the Virginia State Police, the Central Virginia Regional Jail, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner and the Department of Forensic Science for bringing justice in a Louisa courtroom. Veres is scheduled to be sentenced March 25. According to an obituary notice, Meade had lived in Norwalk, and was a graduate of Fairfield Warde High School. Dawn had a contagious laugh that could turn any frown. She loved acting silly with her friends and family, but mostly enjoyed spreading joy and warmth wherever she went, the notice reads. In lieu of flowers, memorial donations were requested for the Connecticut Coalition Against Domestic Violence. Last year, Meades son raised money on Gofundme to bring his mothers body from Virginia to be buried. I lost my mother unexpectedly to domestic violence, Joseph Muratori wrote on a Gofundme site in 2017. She was taken from this world tragically and way too soon. Dawn Meade was born on March 15, 1977, in Norwalk, CT and raised in Fairfield County with her parents. At 16 years old, she gave birth to her one and only son (me), Joseph Muratori. She dedicated herself to giving a better life to me. She had the most radiating smile and the biggest heart. STAMFORD A former day care owners guilty plea in the death of a 2-month-old baby has given a New Canaan family a sense of closure, but their attorney says the emotional scars are far from healed. The pain and heartbreak of losing this child so tragically will never subside, attorney Mark Sherman said Wednesday after Nydia Carrillo-Maldonado, 36, pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter and first-degree risk of injury to a child. Carrillo-Maldonado will be sentenced in February to 3 1/2 years in jail followed by five years of probation. Carrillo-Maldonado could be sent back to serve a 6 1/2-year suspended jail sentence if she violates her probation. Carrillo-Maldonado made the pleas under the Alford Doctrine, which means that while she disagreed with the states facts of the case, she acknowledged there was enough evidence for a conviction at trial. Carrillo-Maldonado faced up to 30 years in jail if convicted of both charges at trial. Stamford States Attorney Richard Colangelo said Carrillo-Maldonado was the sole caretaker of the baby, Bella Redondo, who died from blunt-force trauma to the skull in July 2016. Colangelo said the family was aware of the plea agreement and will attend the sentencing on Feb. 27. This case was a terrible tragedy, Judge John Blawie said. Carrillo-Maldonado, the owner and operator of Little Bears Beginnings Daycare, was charged in August 2016 and remains free on a $200,000 court appearance bond. Carrillo-Maldonado only answered the judges questions while making her plea and did not make any comments on the case while her husband watched the hearing from a third-row pew. Carrillo-Maldonado called 911 around 3 p.m. on July 12, 2016 when the baby had trouble breathing. The medics found evidence of head trauma in addition to the breathing issues, police said. The baby died several hours later at Stamford Hospital. The childs death was ruled a homicide caused by blunt-force trauma to the head. The parents told police the baby was in good health when she was dropped off at the day care located on the second floor of a multifamily home, between 7:30 and 8:30 a.m., police said. When his client was arrested, Christian Bujdud, an attorney representing Carrillo-Maldonado, said she did not harm the baby and had a long and personal relationship with the Redondo family. Bujdud declined to comment Wednesday, saying he will make a statement when his client is sentenced. The state Department of Children and Families and the state Office of Early Childhood investigated the facility in the days following the babys death and Carrillo-Maldonado surrendered her day care license. The Office of Early Childhood, which licenses and inspects the thousands of day cares in the state, found several health and safety violations during two visits to the East Side facility before the babys death. Among the violations found were a curling iron plugged in next to a sleeping child and fencing wood with nails sticking out in the backyard. The inspector during one of the unannounced visits also discovered the familys dog did not have a current rabies exam and a family member had moved in without completing background checks or medical tests. Carrillo-Maldonado eventually corrected the issues without receiving sanctions. jnickerson@stamfordadvocate.com STAMFORD A park closed when a temporary school opened on Elmcroft Road, and residents are asking why. Kosciuszko Park, which is beside an office building that was quickly converted to classrooms last month after Westover Magnet Elementary School was closed because of mold infestation, is gated off from 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. South End residents, many of whom live in apartments, and others who walk or exercise their dogs in the waterfront park want to know why it is closed during school hours when other city parks next to schools are not. Kosciuszko is surrounded by water. Its pretty there. A lot of people like to go, said Sue Halpern, who lives down the street. I walk there during the day. Its not unsafe, so I have to wonder why they closed it. Parks and Recreation Commission Chairman David Winston said the panel is working with the Board of Representatives Parks and Recreation Committee to determine why it has always been a safe park, according to the Stamford Police Department, and somehow not now that Westover kids are there. Winston said the commission is very concerned that no emergency was declared, which would have given anyone authority to take control of that park. The parks committee co-chair, city Rep. Marion McGarry, D-12, has been trying to get a discussion on the agenda. Several schools sit side-by-side with public parks that remain open during class time, McGarry said, including at least two elementary schools Springdale, where students use Drotar Park; and Stark, near Northrup Park. Others include Cloonan Middle School, where students use Scalzi Park, and Turn of River Middle School, which is beside the Vine Road Little League Field, McGarry said. It goes beyond that, she said the citys recreation department runs summer programs for kids at Barrett and Cove Island parks without closing them. The parks are there, safe or not, McGarry said. Constituents want to use Kosciuszko Park during the day, but theyre not allowed, even though its allowed at other parks. Director of Administration Michael Handler, who heads the citys Mold Task Force, said this week officials have to figure out whether Westover students and Kosciuszko park-goers can co-exist. The task force had less than a week to open a school in the office building, and the park shutdown was an unintended consequence, Handler said. I did not close the park. The people responsible for school security closed it, working with the Stamford Police Department, he said. In the interest of safety, its closed until we can assess security issues and then well decide. Assistant Chief Thomas Wuennemann said police did not close the park. I cant say who officially approved it, but if the parks commission says to open it up, well do that, Wuennemann said. Were not opposed to opening it if school officials feel it needs to be opened. The only reason he could think of for shutting Kosciuszko is that teachers have to lead young students across a driveway and parking lot to get to the playground a less safe endeavor if cars are entering the park, Wuennemann said. Stamford Public Schools spokeswoman Sharon Beadle could not be reached Tuesday for comment. Members of the parks commission said at their November meeting that they were not notified that Kosciuszko Park would be closed once Westover students moved into the office building. We understand these are extenuating circumstances, but I find the closing of the park to be a pretty extreme measure, Winston told Handler. We did not have a security assessment done and didnt know what the issues were, Handler said. You cant open a school unless you can assure safety. Parks and Facilities Manager Kevin Murray confirmed during the meeting that several city parks are on school property and the public has access when classes are in session. But the mold-prompted move from Westover to the South End office building posed special circumstances, Murray said. He thinks the park was closed to be sensitive to the move and the security of the children to make sure parents have peace of mind, Murray said. But I think when this all irons out, the park will remain open because we have a lot of parks that are open to the public. We dont close the parks. I think once this sensitive portion is by us a little bit, theyll figure this out. A woman who frequents Kosciuszko told commissioners she fears the park will be closed during the day for months because of the extent of repairs needed at Westover. Handler said during the meeting that a preliminary assessment indicates it could cost $16 million. It could be upwards of that, Handler said. Its a groundwater issue. The school was built on a stream. Wuennemann said officials have the winter to figure out what to do about Kosciuszko. Its cold now, but this clearly needs to get straightened out before the weather gets warm, Wuennemann said. People are going to be using that park. acarella@stamfordadvocate.com; 203-964-2296. Right about now I stand in shock that I am, in actual fact, Santa Claus again this year. Remember that concept of tip-toeing off to bed? Something about dancing sugar plums and a long winters nap? Theres a plate of cookies and milk left by the chimney with care ... and in sweet anticipation of a nutcracker-like slumber, you slip under the warm blankets until the miracle of Christmas arrives the next morning. Well, wake up sister, because its not happening unless you get your game on. And youll have to eat that whole plate of cookies. Mom, I know its all you and there is no Santa Claus, my 10-year-old daughter explained the other day, feigning ennui with the whole business. Yeah, well keep that up and well see where you end up Christmas morning, I warned her in a Grinch-like tone. And just like that, she popped back to a wide-eyed wonder of a Santa-loving child. We are still in the sweet spot of childhood, albeit with ominous teenage portents here and there. But what if Santa didnt arrive one year? Or more to the point, if some mother decided to stand down one Christmas Eve. Screw it! Santa, if youre so great YOU do it all this year, fat guy, she might say, bleary-eyed after assembling an awful mega toy with a zillion pieces, batteries not included. And then shed hustle off to bed with the wide-eyed wonder of a forty-something who never thought she could be this tired. Claire, Im actually sweating Im working so hard, my husband, Ian, complained on our first Christmas Eve as parents. For some reason we found it enormously important to overwhelm our then-9-month-old son Louie with a vast array of wrapped gifts even though he had no idea what was going on. Ian and I stayed up all night carefully setting up the spectacle of our first childs first Christmas and Louie couldnt walk, talk or play with most of the toys. He loved the wrapping paper, though. These days, three children in, Ian and I have it down to a science. Or a prison chain gang. We dont stop shopping and wrapping until the work is done, even if it means we sleep only one hour before the excruciatingly early Christmas morning wake-up frenzy. Isnt this supposed ... to be ... fun? Ian asked wearily one year. My mom has this great story of when my brothers and I were growing up in Brooklyn. Each year, we went to a family party where parents got inebriated and massacred Handels Hallelujah chorus, while children raced about high on sugar and Christmas anticipation. Returning home around midnight one Christmas Eve, my mom suddenly discovered disaster. Peter, all the decals are in the wrong places, she told my dad, who had spent two hours assembling a 1983 Big Wheel Deluxe. These decals will go wherever the hell I put them, Jean. my dad yelled back. Lets review all the hard work on Christmas Eve. First you have to get your kids asleep. But that requires reading Twas The Night Before Christmas, leaving cookies and milk for Santa, rehanging the stockings with care, etc. Just try skipping one step and your kids will stage the Nightmare Before Christmas. The whole tradition is tailor-made to not get your kids to bed. And once theyre finally tucked in, theres follow-up questions. Mommy, what exactly does it mean when they say Santa will see you when youre sleeping? Is he coming in here to watch me sleep? Can I sleep in your room? Thanks, Santa. Yet the fat guy in the red suit gets all the credit while I fall asleep in my mothers creamed spinach hours later at Christmas dinner. Theres one solace: You are not alone. OK, are we done here? my friend Sandra asked me impatiently after I called to chat. I hear what you are saying, but I have about 50 million things I need to do today. Christmas is six days away, Claire. Six days? Somehow between now and then I have to sort through everyones gifts, make sure every child has roughly the same amount of loot, go to Costco to buy a tenderloin, massive amounts of bacon and other necessary Christmas food, pack everything up and drive five hours to the Adirondacks. Six days. But heres the thing for mothers. There is always a moment, however small and fleeting, just before you head to bed on Christmas Eve. You have spent all night setting up and now you can gaze on your work: a perfect spectacle of tinseled Christmas wonder. The presents are piled high and you even left half the milk and part of a cookie to complete the illusion. You nailed it again, Santa Mom. And so as you turn off the last light and head up the stairs, you look back. The window pane rattles, as the wind roars past. The quiet of the house hums audibly. And you smile somewhere inside. Because after all, Santa is coming. Merry Christmas. Claire Tisne Haft is a former publishing and film executive, raising her family in Greenwich while working on a freelance basis on books and films. The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said it issued a final regulation streamlining the review process. The US auto safety regulator said on Tuesday it is speeding up the process for reviewing whether automakers can deploy self-driving vehicles without devices such as brakes and steering wheels. Automakers must currently meet nearly 75 auto safety standards, many of them written with the assumption that a licensed driver would be able to control the vehicle using traditional human controls. On Tuesday, the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said it issued a final regulation streamlining the review process. NHTSA eliminated a requirement that calls for the agency to determine a petition is complete before publishing a summary for public comment. Deputy NHTSA Administrator Heidi King said in a statement the rule improves both the efficiency and transparency of the process to focus on the safety review. Under the law, automakers can petition for an exemption for up to 2,500 vehicles for vehicle safety standards as long as they are at least as safe as existing vehicles. In January, General Motors Co filed a petition with NHTSA seeking an exemption to use fully automated vehicles as part of a ride-sharing fleet it plans to deploy in 2019. NHTSA has not yet declared the GM petition complete and the agency did not immediately say when it will publish a summary of the plan. Alphabet Incs Waymo unit launched a limited autonomous ride-hailing service in Arizona in December. Unlike GM, Waymos vehicles have human controls. NHTSA also said it was seeking comment on the use and integration of vehicle communications technologies. It said these technologies could improve motor vehicle safety and efficiency as well as support cooperative vehicle automation concepts. The US Transportation Department said it intends to maintain the priority use of 5.9Ghz spectrum for transportation safety communications even as some Federal Communications Commission members want to designate the spectrum for personal wireless communications. In December 2016, the Obama administration proposed requiring all new cars and trucks to be able to talk to one another using short-range wireless technology to potentially avoid tens of thousands of crashes annually. The Trump administration has not acted on the proposal. (Source) There is not enough analysis data for Naspers. 4.7 Community Rank Outperform Votes Naspers has received 149 outperform votes. (Add your outperform vote.) Underperform Votes Naspers has received 61 underperform votes. (Add your underperform vote.) Community Sentiment Naspers has received 70.95% outperform votes from our community. MarketBeat's community ratings are surveys of what our community members think about Naspers and other stocks. Vote Outperform if you believe NPSNY will outperform the S&P 500 over the long term. Vote Underperform if you believe NPSNY will underperform the S&P 500 over the long term. You may vote once every thirty days. Previous Next San Miguel Corp. engages in the manufacture and sale of beverage, food, and packaging products. It operates through the following segments: Food and Beverage; Packaging; Energy; Fuel and Oil; Infrastructure; and Cement, Real Estate and Others. The Food and Beverage segment consists of branded value-added refrigerated processed meats and canned meat products, manufacturing and marketing of butter, margarine, cheese, milk, ice cream, jelly-based snacks and desserts, specialty oils, salad aids, snacks and condiments, marketing of flour mixes and the importation and marketing of coffee and coffee related products; production and sale of feeds; poultry and livestock farming, processing and selling of poultry and fresh meats; and milling, production and marketing of flour and bakery ingredients. The Packaging segment comprises production and marketing of packaging products such as glass containers, glass molds, and polyethylene terephthalate bottles. The Energy segment sells, retail, and distributes power, through power supply agreements, retail supply agreements, concession agreement, and other power related service agreements. The Fuel and Oil segment includes refining and marketing of Read More Delta Galil Industries Ltd. engages in development, design, production, marketing and sale of underwear, socks, children's wear, leisure wear and Activewear as well as in development, design, marketing, distribution and sale of branded products in the category of men's and women's jeans and outerwear and related products. It operates through the following segments: Delta USA, Global Upper Market, Schiesser, Delta Israel, and Delta Premium Brands. The Delta USA Segment engages in the development, design and marketing of lingerie, socks and Activewear to Private Labels. The Global Upper Market segment develops, designs, manufactures and markets men's and women's underwear, socks and Activewear manufactured at the Company's plants and sold to retail chains and to brands in Europe and the United States. The Schiesser segment covers the development, design, manufacture and marketing of labeled women's, men's and children's underwear and Activewear under the Schiesser brand. The Delta Israel segment is involved in the development, design and marketing of labeled women's and men's underwear, socks and Activewear products, as well as children's wear under the Delta brand. The Delta Premium Brands segment engages in development, design, marketing, distribution and sale of premium products under the brands 7 For All Mankind, Splendid, Ella moss. The company was founded by Dov Lautman and Eliezer Peleg in 1975 and is headquartered in Caesarea, Israel. Read More The following companies are subsidiares of Pearson: AEL (S) PTE Limited, ATI Professional Development LLC, Addison Wesley Longman Inc., Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers Inc., Aldwych Finance Limited, Americas Choice Inc., Atkey Finance Limited, Author Solutions, Axis Finance Inc., CAMSAWUSA Inc., CTI Education Group (Pty) Limited, Camsaw Inc., Casapsi Livraria e Editora Ltda, Centro Cultural Americano Franquias e Comercio Ltda., Century Consultants Ltd., Certiport, Certiport China Co Ltd, Certiport China Holding LLC, Certiport Inc., Cogmed Systems AB, Connections Academy of Arkansas LLC, Connections Academy of Florida LLC, Connections Academy of Iowa LLC, Connections Academy of Maine LLC, Connections Academy of Maryland LLC, Connections Academy of Minnesota LLC, Connections Academy of Missouri LLC, Connections Academy of Nevada LLC, Connections Academy of New Jersey LLC, Connections Academy of New Mexico LLC, Connections Academy of New York LLC, Connections Academy of Oregon LLC, Connections Academy of Pennsylvania LLC, Connections Academy of Tennessee LLC, Connections Academy of Texas LLC, Connections Education Inc., Connections Education LLC, Connections Education of Florida LLC, Dominie Press Inc., Dorian Finance Limited, Dorling Kindersley Australasia Pty Limited, EBNT Canada Holdings ULC, EBNT Holdings Limited, EBNT USA Holdings Inc., Edexcel Limited, Edexcel South Africa Pty Ltd, Education Development International plc, Education Resources (Cyprus) Limited, Educational Management Group Inc., Educational Publishers LLP, Embanet ULC, Embanet-Compass Knowledge Group Inc., EmbanetCompass, Embankment Finance Limited, English Language Learning and Instruction System Inc., Escape Studios Limited, FBH Inc., Falstaff Holdco Inc., Falstaff Inc., GED Domains LLC, GED Testing Service LLC, George (Shanghai) Commercial Information Consulting Co. Ltd, Global Education, Global George I Limited, Global George II Limited, GlobalEnglish, Globe Fearon Inc., Guangzhou Crescent Software Co. Ltd, Heinemann Education Botswana (Publishers) (Proprietary) Limited, Heinemann Publishers (Pty) Ltd, INTELLIPRO INC., Icodeon Limited, IndiaCan Education Private Limited, Integral 7 Inc., Integrated Analytics LLC, J M Solucoes Exportacao e Importacao Ltda, K12 Learning Services LLC, Kagiso Education Pty Ltd, Knowledge Analysis Technologies LLC, LCCI International Qualifications (Malaysia) Sdn. Bhd., LCCIEB Training Consultancy. Ltd, Learning Catalytics, LessonLab Inc., Lignum Oil Company, Linx Brasil Distribuidora Ltda., Longman (Malawi) Limited, Longman Australasia Pty Ltd, Longman Group(Overseas Holdings)Limited, Longman Indochina Acquisition L.L.C., Longman Kenya Limited, Longman Mocambique Ltda, Longman Romania S.R.L., Longman Swaziland (Pty) Limited, Longman Tanzania Limited, Longman Zambia Educational Publishers Pty Ltd, Longman Zambia Limited, Longman Zimbabwe (Private) Ltd, Longmaned Ecuador S.A., Major123 Limited, Maskew Miller Longman (Pty) Limited, MeasureUp LLC, Modern Curriculum Inc., Multi Holding, Multi Treinamento e Editora Ltda, NCS Information Technology Services (Beijing) Co Ltd, NCS Pearson Inc., NCS Pearson Pty Ltd, NCS Pearson Puerto Rico Inc., National Computer Systems Japan Co. Ltd, Ordinate Corporation, PN Holdings Inc., PT Efficient English Services, Pearson (Beijing) Management Consulting Co. Ltd., Pearson (Guizhou) Education Technology Co. Ltd., Pearson Affordable Learning Fund Limited, Pearson America LLC, Pearson Amsterdam B.V., Pearson Australia Finance Unlimited, Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd, Pearson Australia Holdings Pty Ltd, Pearson Australia Pty Ltd, Pearson Benelux B.V., Pearson Books Limited, Pearson Brazil Finance Limited, Pearson Business Services Inc., Pearson Canada Assessment Inc., Pearson Canada Finance Unlimited, Pearson Canada Holdings Inc, Pearson Canada Inc., Pearson Central Europe Spoka z ograniczona odpowiedzialnoscia, Pearson College Limited, Pearson DBC Holdings Inc., Pearson Desarrollo y Capacitacion Profesional Chile Limitada, Pearson Deutschland GmbH, Pearson Digital Learning Puerto Rico Inc., Pearson Dollar Finance Two Limited, Pearson Dollar Finance plc, Pearson Educacion SA, Pearson Educacion de Chile Limitada, Pearson Educacion de Colombia S A S, Pearson Educacion de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Pearson Educacion de Panama SA, Pearson Educacion de Peru S.A., Pearson Education (Singapore) Pte Ltd, Pearson Education Achievement Solutions (RF) (Pty) Limited, Pearson Education Africa (Pty) Ltd, Pearson Education Asia Limited, Pearson Education Botswana (Proprietary) Limited, Pearson Education Hellas SA, Pearson Education Holdings Limited, Pearson Education Inc., Pearson Education Indochina Limited, Pearson Education Investments Limited, Pearson Education Korea Limited, Pearson Education Limited, Pearson Education Namibia (Pty) Limited, Pearson Education Publishing Limited, Pearson Education S.A., Pearson Education SA, Pearson Education South Africa (Pty) Ltd, Pearson Education South Asia Pte. Ltd., Pearson Education Taiwan Ltd, Pearson Education do Brasil S.A, Pearson Educational Measurement Canada Inc., Pearson Educational Publishers LLC, Pearson Egitim Cozumleri Tikaret Limited Sirketi, Pearson Falstaff (Holdings) Inc., Pearson Falstaff Holdco LLC, Pearson France, Pearson Funding Five plc, Pearson Funding Four plc, Pearson Funding Two Limited, Pearson Holdings Inc., Pearson Holdings Southern Africa (Pty) Limited, Pearson IOKI Spoka z ograniczona odpowiedzialnoscia, Pearson India Education Services Private Limited, Pearson India Support Services Private Limited, Pearson Institute of Higher Education, Pearson International Finance Limited, Pearson Investment Holdings Inc., Pearson Italia S.p.A, Pearson Japan KK, Pearson Lanka (Private) Limited, Pearson Learning China (HK) Limited, Pearson Lesotho (Pty) Ltd, Pearson Loan Finance No. 3 Limited, Pearson Loan Finance No. 4 Limited, Pearson Loan Finance No.2 Unlimited, Pearson Loan Finance Unlimited, Pearson Longman Uganda Limited, Pearson Malaysia Sdn. Bhd., Pearson Management Services Limited, Pearson Management Services Philippines Inc., Pearson Maryland Inc., Pearson Netherlands B.V., Pearson Netherlands Holdings B.V., Pearson Nominees Limited, Pearson Online Tutoring LLC, Pearson Overseas Holdings Limited, Pearson PEM P.R. Inc., Pearson PRH Holdings Limited, Pearson Pension Nominees Limited, Pearson Pension Property Fund Limited, Pearson Pension Trustee Limited, Pearson Pension Trustee Services Limited, Pearson Professional Assessments Limited, Pearson Real Estate Holdings Inc., Pearson Real Estate Holdings Limited, Pearson Schweiz AG, Pearson Services Limited, Pearson Shared Services Limited, Pearson South Africa (Pty) Ltd, Pearson Strand Finance Limited, Pearson Sweden AB, Pearson VUE Philippines Inc., Pearson in Practice Holdings Limited, Pearson in Practice Skills Based Learning Limited, Pearson in Practice Technology Limited, Penguin Capital LLC, Phumelela Publishers (Pty) Ltd, ProctorCam Inc., Reading Property Holdings LLC, Rebus Planning Associates Inc., Reston Publishing Company Inc., Rycade Capital Corporation, Shanghai AWL Education Software Ltd, Silver Burdett Ginn Inc., Skylight Training and Publishing Inc., Smarthinking Inc., Sound Holdings Inc., Spear Insurance Company Limited, Stark Verlag GmbH, Sunnykey International Holdings Limited (BVI), TQ Catalis Limited, TQ Clapham Limited, TQ Education and Training Limited, TQ Global Limited, TQ Group Limited, TQ Holdings Limited, The Financial Times (I) Pvt Ltd, The Learning Edge International pty Ltd, The Waite Group Inc, Trio Parent Holdings LLC, US Learning Services LLC, USLS Holdings LLC, Virtual Nerd, Vue Testing Services Israel Ltd, Vue Testing Services Korea Limited, Wall Street Institute Kft., Williams Education GmbH, eCollege.com, and Editions Du Renouveau Pedagogique Inc.. First Data Corporation provides commerce enabled technology and solutions for merchants, financial institutions, and card issuers in the United States, Canada, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and the Asia Pacific. The company operates through three segments: Global Business Solutions, Global Financial Solutions, and Network & Security Solutions. The Global Business Solutions segment provides solutions to merchants, such as retail point of sale merchant acquiring, e-commerce, and mobile payment services, as well as cloud based point of sale operating system that include a marketplace for proprietary and third party applications. The Global Finance Solutions segment provides technology solutions for bank and non-bank issuers, such as credit, retail private label, commercial card, and loan processing, as well as licensed financial software systems; suite of account services that include card personalization and embossing, customer communications, and professional services; and call center solutions and back office processing. The Network & Security Solutions segment offers EFT network, stored value network, and security and fraud solutions, as well as other value added solutions to its clients in GBS and GFS segments, smaller financial institutions, and other enterprise clients. First Data Corporation was founded in 1971 and is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. Read More There is not enough analysis data for Loncor Gold. 4.4 Community Rank Outperform Votes Loncor Gold has received 32 outperform votes. (Add your outperform vote.) Underperform Votes Loncor Gold has received 17 underperform votes. (Add your underperform vote.) Community Sentiment Loncor Gold has received 65.31% outperform votes from our community. MarketBeat's community ratings are surveys of what our community members think about Loncor Gold and other stocks. Vote Outperform if you believe LONCF will outperform the S&P 500 over the long term. Vote Underperform if you believe LONCF will underperform the S&P 500 over the long term. You may vote once every thirty days. Previous Next Small creature is blind and has ability to bury its head in ground. These features Bell said match US leaders opinion on climate change. Bell said Trumps worldview resembled a caecilians, whose eyes can only detect light and dark. (Photo: File) Washington: A newly-discovered blind amphibian will be named after Donald Trump in recognition of the US presidents stance on climate change, according to a media report. EnviroBuild, a UK-based sustainable building materials company, announced on Tuesday that it would be using Dermophis donaldtrumpi as the name for the amphibian with no legs and poor eyesight. The company says the name still will need to undergo peer review, but that other animals have been named after presidents in the past. The name was chosen by Aidan Bell, the boss of the firm which paid thousands at an auction for the right, The Guardian reported. The small creature is blind and has an ability to bury its head in the ground. These features Bell said match the US leaders opinion on climate change. The company said Trumps was the perfect name for the limbless animal. The Panamanian underground amphibians are particularly vulnerable to global warming. Dermophis donaldtrumpi, 10 centimetres in length and belonging to group of snakelike animals called caecilians, was recently found in Panama by a group of scientists. Its naming rights were auctioned off in a fundraiser for Rainforest Trust, a non-profit rainforest conservation organisation, the report said. The winning bid of USD 34,478 was made by Aidan Bell, the head of a UK-based sustainable building materials company called EnviroBuild. It is the perfect name, Bell said. Caecilian is taken from the Latin caecus, meaning blind, perfectly mirroring the strategic vision President Trump has consistently shown towards climate change, he said. Bell said Trumps worldview resembled a caecilians, whose eyes can only detect light and dark. Capable of seeing the world only in black and white. Donald Trump has claimed that climate change is a hoax by the Chinese, he added. The worlds leading scientists agree that climate change is primarily human-induced. But Trump, whose administration has pursued a pro-fossil fuels agenda, has accused those scientists of having a political agenda and cast doubt on whether humans were responsible for the Earths rising temperatures. I dont know that its manmade, he said in an interview with CBSs 60 Minutes in October. Im not denying climate change but [temperatures] could very well go back, he added, without offering evidence. Trump in June last year withdrew the US from the Paris climate change agreement, which commits countries to keeping a limit on rising global temperatures. He justified this decision by asserting that he had been elected to serve the citizens of Pittsburgh and not Paris and the deal disadvantaged US businesses and workers. Caecilians lost their limbs at least 60 million years ago to better burrow in the earth, and live almost entirely underground. Burrowing its head underground helps Donald Trump when avoiding scientific consensus on anthropomorphic climate change and also appointed several energy lobbyists to the Environment Agency, where their job is to regulate the energy industry, Bell said. Take your pick as to which is the strongest factor defining grain prices currently: Is it the continuing saga of the trade troubles with China, or the resultant dispute over whether Uncle Sugar is going to pass out a second soybean compensatory payment, or is it even the amount of the payment if it is paid? For whatever reason, the market is finding it hard to define what is going on, and that results in nervous traders and a directionless market. The good news is that the end of the week saw Chinese purchases of three million metric tons (mmt) of soybeans. This is part of what they promised in a vague agreement on the sidelines of the recent G20 meeting in Argentina. The U.S. agreed with them to spend three months defining a trade agreement. In the meantime they would buy significant quantities of US products. It remains to be seen what significant is. One analyst had earlier said we would see 10 mmt moved. Industry sources say the purchases are all by Chinese government agencies, not by private buyers. The privates seem to worry that the deal might change while products are in shipment, and they would be on the hook. They are letting the government agencies take responsibility for now. So, what exports of soybeans will we see? And, will they come in time to help, or will the Southern Hemisphere new crop replace our sales? Or, will the Chinese agree to a certain level of US imports even after the Brazilians fire up their exports? Market Facilitation Program payments Then, there is the matter of compensatory soybean payments by our government. In November, Uncle Sugar committed to paying $1.65 a bushel to soybean producers to compensate for the effects of the trade war on the American farmers. Other commodities were also supported, but at lower levels because the big export is soybeans, being the second largest export to China. Now comes Sonny Perdue, the Ag Secretary, saying he had promised the payment in early December, but he is fighting with the White House Office of Management and Budget to get it. One argument is that, given the G20 sidelines agreement, prices are improving and the whole amount should not be paid. On Monday Dec. 3, the first trading day after the temporary agreement, the price of January soybean futures did briefly trade 29 cents above the 8.94 3/4 previous close. However, most of our trading has been below that since. We had one spike to 9.28 on Dec. 12, but we are currently, on Tuesday morning (Dec. 18), trading 9.08, only 13 3/4 cents above the Friday close before the meeting with China. So much for the 60 cents we were going to gain out of this. The other argument coming from our government is that we dont have the money to pay the farmers. We are currently involved in a political struggle over funding part of The Wall, and may have a partial shutdown by the time this is published. If so, so much for your money until that is resolved! Be assured that, even though essential employees will still work and be paid, you will not. The trivia lover in me is fascinated that one result of the trade war is the creation of a new acronym to remember. The compensatory payments are known as the Market Facilitation Program, or MFP. Geezers will remember those cigarette commercials on TV in the 50s. LSMFT. Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco. Now it is LCMFP, otherwise known as, Last Chance for Market Facilitation Payment! The good news this week, probably, is that a bipartisan movement (how did that happen?) did pass the new farm bill. A bunch of proposed regulations in the House version about cleaning up the food stamp program, which should not be in the farm bill anyway, were left out in order to get it passed. Some of the loan rates were raised, but they are still laughably low. The trade is still passing around the rumor that any final deal with China will include corn, even though we have not been sending corn to China before this. This may be the support in the corn market right now. This Tuesday morning, we are trading 3.84 on the March futures. That is unchanged for the day so farm, but well above the pre-meeting low of 3.67 1/4 on Nov. 26. Since the agreement we have gapped higher, then traded a range between 3.80 and 3.88. Chicago wheat futures have been trading independently of the trade talk, but have also been positive. From the Nov. 27 recent low of 5.04, we have seen 5.38 1/2 on the 13th. Currently we are 5.33 1/2. Farmers can now get Market Facilitation Program payments for the second half of their 2018 production WASHINGTON The U.S. Department of Agriculture has launched the second and final round of trade mitigation payments aimed at helping farmers whose markets have been hit by ongoing trade disruptions. Producers of certain commodities will now be eligible to receive Market Facilitation Program (MFP) payments for the second half of their 2018 production. While there have been positive movements on the trade front, American farmers are continuing to experience losses due to unjustified trade retaliation by foreign nations, said U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue, in making the announcement Dec. 17. This assistance will help with short-term cash flow issues as we move into the new year. Perdue announced in July that USDA would aid farmers in response to trade damage from trade tariff retaliation. Market Facilitation Program USDAs Farm Service Agency (FSA) has been administering the Market Facilitation Program to provide the first payments to almond, corn, cotton, dairy, hog, sorghum, soybean, fresh sweet cherry, and wheat producers since September 2018 for the first 50 percent of their 2018 production. Producers need sign up only once for the MFP to be eligible for the first and second payments. The MFP sign-up period opened in September and runs through Jan. 15, 2019, with information and instructions provided at www.farmers.gov/mfp. Producers must complete an application by Jan. 15, 2019, but have until May 1, 2019, to certify their 2018 production. Payments will be issued once production is reported. For farmers who have already applied, completed harvest, and certified their 2018 production, a second payment will be issued on the remaining 50 percent of the producers total production, multiplied by the MFP rate for the specific commodity. MFP payments are limited to a combined $125,000 for corn, cotton, sorghum, soybeans, and wheat capped per person or legal entity. Payments are also limited to a combined $125,000 for dairy and hog producers, and a combined $125,000 for fresh sweet cherry and almond producers. Applicants must also have an average adjusted gross income for tax years 2014, 2015, and 2016 of less than $900,000. Applicants must also comply with the provisions of the Highly Erodible Land and Wetland Conservation regulations. For more further information or to locate and contact local FSA offices, interested producers can visit www.farmers.gov. Food distribution USDAs Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) is administering a food purchase and distribution program to purchase up to $1.2 billion in commodities targeted by retaliation. USDAs Food and Nutrition Service is distributing these commodities through nutrition assistance programs, such as The Emergency Food Assistance Program and child nutrition programs. So far, USDA has procured some portion of 16 of the 29 commodities included in the program, totaling more than 4,500 truckloads of food. The AMS will continue purchasing commodities for delivery throughout 2019. Through the Foreign Agricultural Services (FAS) Agricultural Trade Promotion program, $200 million is being made available to develop foreign markets for U.S. agricultural products. The program will help U.S. agricultural exporters identify and access new markets and help mitigate the adverse effects of other countries restrictions. The application period closed in November with more than $600 million in requested activities from more than 70 organizations. The awards will be announced in early January. The banning of metaldehyde is hugely disappointing and will have a major impact on British farmers and growers, the NFU said today. Defra has announced that a ban on the outdoor use of metaldehyde, a common pesticide used against slugs, is to be introduced across Britain from Spring 2020. Slugs are a significant pest for agricultural and horticultural crops like oilseed rape, cereals and potatoes which, if left unchecked, can cause considerable damage. However, products containing the chemical will still be authorised for use in other countries that export food to the UK. These products have been reauthorised for use in 21 EU member states, and the NFU says it will have an impact on UK food production. Guy Smith, NFU Deputy President, said: Todays announcement is very disappointing and will have a major impact on British farmers and growers. It simply gifts a competitive advantage to farmers abroad who will export into our markets using crop protection materials banned in the UK. Slug damage AHDB has estimated that a lack of slug control products could cost UK crop production 100 million a year. Metaldehyde products play a key role as part of an integrated approach to slug control. The NFU says that farmers are acutely aware of the need to use these products judiciously and to ensure their use has minimal impact on the environment. In autumn 2017, the Metaldehyde Stewardship Group introduced enhanced stewardship guidelines to help increase protection of watercourses and minimise the risk to other wildlife. Uptake of, and engagement with, these enhanced guidelines has been high and initial observations suggest that less metaldehyde was used in autumn 2017. Mr Smith added: Farmers and growers already use a holistic approach to slug control to keep the use of slug pellets to a minimum. While ferric phosphate can be used as an alternative slug control treatment it is possible that resistance could develop, as we have seen with other pesticide products when alternatives have been removed and farmers and growers have been left to rely on one active ingredient. 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. 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. Category Select Category Apparel/Garments Textiles Fashion Technical Textiles Information Technology E-commerce Retail Corporate Association Press Release SubCategory Select Sub-Category Sankalp Reddy The talented package kept his speech at a very crisp level stating that action should speak more than words. He requested fans to watch and asked them to share their comments and feedback than himself, speaking about his own product. Varun Tej Varun thanked the entire cast and crew of the flick as he mentioned that a movie of this genre would require the blood and sweat of every technician associated with. His pursuit of getting into the skin of challenging roles time and again was fulfilled by Sankalp in this movie and the Mega Prince assured fans and audience that this would stand as a pride of Telugu cinema. On a lighter note, he urged Sankalp to make a normal movie on ground as his debut flick was shot underwater and this being in space. Varun responded to fans persistent chant of "Powerstar" by stating that though his uncle wasn't present in the venue, the void was filled by his brother, Megapower Star Ram Charan. The tall and handsome actor thanked the Rangasthalam actor for gracing the event and filling in the shoes of Chiranjeevi and Pawan Kalyan. Ram Charan The happening actor whose movie is all set to hit screens this Sankranti, was the chief guest of the event. Charan took his time in mentioning every stakeholder involved in the movie and had some great words for them. The Mega successor opened up that it wasn't just Varun Tej who was the reason for his presence in the event, but the mind-boggling trailer which made him accept the invitation instantly. He also revealed that there have been a couple of instances where he was a bit jealous of his younger brother's movies and script selection. Charan too emphasized the fact that his "Baabai", Pawan Kalyan, is doing a great job in politics and it is just a matter of time for the youngsters to inculcate and follow his words. Akaal Pharma Pty Limited (Akaal Pharma) today announced that it has entered into a licensing agreement for Akaal Pharma's First-in-Class, topical Spingosine-1-Phosphate-1 (S1P 1 ) modulator, AKP-11, with Boston Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (Boston Pharmaceuticals). AKP-11 is a differentiated S1P 1 modulator, which potentially has clinical applications in a number of inflammatory, immune and vascular diseases. Akaal Pharma has demonstrated the clinical activity of AKP-11 in multiple Phase-1 clinical studies. Under the terms of the license, Boston Pharmaceuticals is responsible for the further clinical development and commercialisation of AKP-11 for the Americas and Europe. Akaal Pharma has the rights for the rest of the world. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed. "We continue to actively prioritize and expand our dermatology and pain programs to serve the wider global community suffering from these diseases and where there is need of safe and effective treatment," said Chairman of Akaal Pharma Mr B. S. Sandhu. "We are pleased to have executed this deal with Boston Pharmaceuticals and look forward to continuing to explore similar collaborations in the future. We are keen to bring innovative drugs to patients as quickly as possible, and we believe this agreement with an innovative U.S. partner will rapidly advance the development of this novel compound and potentially its availability to patients." About Akaal Pharma Pty Ltd Akaal Pharma is a private clinical-stage, Australian biotech company focused on advancing the clinical development of its internally discovered topical and oral small molecule drug candidates for treating inflammatory, immune and vascular diseases specifically atopic dermatitis, psoriasis, arthritis, pain, nephropathy, retinopathy, multiple sclerosis, ulcerative colitis and other diseases. For more information, please visit www.akaalpharma.com View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20181218005917/en/ Contacts: Akaal Pharma Pty Ltd Dr Gurmit S Gill Cofounder Vice President of Research Development P: +613 9479 2585 E: bd@akaalpharma.com by Paul Nguyen Hung Several ethnic minorities live in the Diocese of Lang Son-Cao Bang, amid poverty and social and geographical marginalisation. Believers, seminarians and nuns have responded to the vicar's call "to make sacrifices and meet the material and spiritual needs of the downtrodden". "We bring the warmth of the manger in Bethlehem," said Brother Joseph. Hanoi (AsiaNews) Despite harsh weather conditions and economic hardships, members of That Khe parish, Trang inh district, are preparing for Christmas by taking part in social and charitable initiatives for the poor, the disabled, seniors and children in the highlands. Some 600 strong, the remote Catholic community falls under to Diocese of Lang Son-Cao Bang, on the border between Vietnam and China. The district covers about 19,000 sq km, along 800 km of border, and is spread over three provinces: Lang Son, Cao Bang and Ha Giang. According to official statistics, some 1.7 million people live in the diocesan territory. Most of them earn a living from agriculture, livestock and traditional crafts. The region is home to several ethnic minorities, Nung and the Tay represent 85 per cent of the population. The other 15 per cent are Kinh, Dao, Chinese, San Chay and H'Mong. Tribal people are poor and socially and geographically marginalised. Nevertheless, for Advent, Fr Paul Nguyen Van Thao, vicar at the That Khe Church, and his deputy, Fr Peter Vu Van Hien, called on the community "to make sacrifices and meet the material and spiritual needs of the downtrodden." Some seminarians, Dominican nuns and many believers are thus involved in parish projects. "Christmas is an opportunity for us all to meet without religious discrimination, Brother John told AsiaNews. Despite the cold, priests, religious and lay people have visited and assisted the poor who live in very remote and mountainous areas in That Khe parish." "We have travelled along winding and dangerous mountain roads, Brother Joseph Tran Van Binh said. Priests and believers came here to visit poor families, both Catholic and non-Catholic who live in very hard circumstances. We come to them with a sincere heart full of love. At Christmas time, God calls upon us to bring them the warmth of the manger in Bethlehem." "Everyone, regardless of their religion, is helped or supported in various ways, said Maria Pham Thi Loan, a parishioner. Through social and charitable activities, we are able to visit many people. We share and listen to their thoughts. From them, we receive spiritual gifts, such as honesty and sincerity." For some of the volunteers, "Christmas brings us happiness and his message invites us to reach out to those who have a hard life. It is with these people that we want to share our joy." SINGAPORE / ACCESSWIRE / December 19, 2018 / Despite the recent stagnant crypto-currency market, AIDUS project (https://aidus.io) has become a hot topic in the industry, getting investment from CoinBene, one of the world's leading exchanges, which would be a paradigm-shifting event. AIDUS project (AISYS GLOBAL PTE.LTD.) is building the AIDUS Decentralized Fund Platform (ADFP), where users can only subscribe to funds via AIDUS coin. ADFP is the platform to connect investors and asset management companies with AIDUS coin without any barriers of borders, language, and currency. The most important part of the ADFP is the Smart QTS (Quant Trading System), which boasts an annual average return of 100% (as of December 1, 2018). Smart QTS is an automated trading program that has been validated through more than 15 years of development and over four years of operational performance. The weekly returns are confirmed by law firms and accounting firms. Although the value of AIDUS is well appreciated by various professional organizations and investors, CoinBene, one of the world's biggest crypto-currency exchanges, has been most interested in the AIDUS entailing an MOU for collaborating as a listed and trading currency onsite in the 2018 November, 9th AIDUS Meet up in Hong Kong. [AISYS GLOBAL Founder Ted Min & CoinBene CoFounder Cheng Yidong] Following up, CoinBene has decided to invest in AIDUS. This kind of direct investment is hard to find in the current crypto-currency market, representing CoinBene's confidence in AIDUS coin. Also, AIDUS coin's IEO is scheduled from December 14, 2018, to December 31, 2018 through CoinBene. AngelVest, one of the largest venture investment groups in Shanghai, China, currently generates about 120% of annual return on a pilot fund, which is operated by Smart QTS. With the current rate of return, the value of AIDUS coin is expected to rise steadily. Since there is no system that yields the same rate as Smart QTS in the current fund market, many investors have to buy AIDUS COIN to join the fund through ADFP. AIDUS releases weekly returns of Smart QTS, which will play a critical role in ADPF, with certification by law firms and accounting firms every week, confirming its transparent operating policy. [Investment contract ceremony between CoinBene and AISYS GLOBAL. Left: CoinBene CMO Daniel Lee. Right AISYS GLOBAL Founder Ted Min] Through these core technologies, AIDUS COIN would be evaluated as a coin with the world's best Fundamental, the world's first Non-Zero value coin, and the world's first coin traded in the real market. It is expected to become the new standard of crypto-currency. In addition, because asset management companies have to return profits with the initials to investors, the firms have to purchase AIDUS coin. As demand is expected to continually rise while supplies are in shortage, the price of AIDUS coin is expected to rise sharply. In fact, AIDUS has been in the market for a very short period of time. In just one month since their international debut in the Hong Kong Meet up on November 9th, the growth of interest in AIDUS is unprecedented. The differences between the business model of AIDUS COIN and other crypto-currencies are: 1. AIDUS coin can provide investors with the gates to high yield funds of asset management companies without border, time and foreign exchange barriers. 2. AIDUS provides Smart QTS to asset management companies and provides stable returns to investors at the highest level of return. 3. AIDUS coin value is expected to rise steadily as investors purchase more AIDUS coin due to stable profitability while asset management companies must purchase AIDUS coin to return profits to investors. Presently, AISYS GLOBAL PTE.LTD has held Meet ups for the AIDUS Project started from the Hong Kong Meet up on November 9th, 2018, followed by meet ups in Beijing, Tokyo, Manila and Seoul. US and Brazil meet ups are planned. Ted Min, Founder of AISYS GLOBAL PTE.LTD, stated, "Through the investment agreement with CoinBene, We believe that all participants who invested in AIDUS will be more confident in the AIDUS Project. More people will be informed about the AIDUS Project through strategic marketing and overseas meet ups." More information on AIDUS coin can be found in the White Paper on https://aidus.io. Media Contact : Person name: Dennis Lee Company Name: AISIS GLOBAL LTD Email address: hkmin@aidus.io Website: www.aidus.io SOURCE: AISIS GLOBAL LTD View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/530940/AIDUS-Coin-successfully-raises-investment-IEO-from-CoinBene-the-worlds-leading-exchange Press release Benefits to Steveco from the new high-capacity mobile broadband network in the Port of HaminaKotka include improved situational awareness of port logistics and security Private networks operator Ukkoverkot and Nokia have signed a strategic alliance agreement regarding private LTE and digital automation for Finnish enterprises 19 December, 2018 Espoo, Finland - Nokia and Ukkoverkot are providing a private LTE network to the Port of HaminaKotka, bringing the ability to embrace IoT and digitalize processes as well as providing mobile access to vital applications and information. Through the new connectivity the harbor operator has seen improvements across multiple areas, from improved situational awareness of container handling to warehouse logistics and port security. The dedicated low-latency network enables wirelessly connected cameras on cranes to provide real-time video streaming and analytics, as well as business-critical connectivity for trucks, sensors and workers. The deal with Steveco is the most recent result from the close partnership between Ukkoverkot, the leading provider of private LTE networks in Finland, and Nokia. The collaboration has already brought dedicated pervasive connectivity to Finavia (https://www.nokia.com/about-us/news/releases/2017/09/19/nokia-to-modernize-private-nationwide-lte-network-for-finlands-ukkoverkot-supporting-industrial-and-public-safety-services/), Konecranes (https://www.konecranes.com/press/releases/2018/konecranes-nokia-and-ukkoverkot-to-cooperate-smart-cranes-depart-on-the-5g-journey) and facilitated a Sandvik and Nokia deal (https://www.rocktechnology.sandvik/en/news-and-media/news-archive/2018/12/sandvik-and-nokia-collaborate-to-deliver-industrial-iot-to-mining-industry-over-lte-and-5g-networks) to deliver industrial IoT to mining, and the companies today announced a new strategic alliance to target more business among Finnish corporate customers. Large enterprises increasingly require highly reliable wireless connectivity as they execute on their digital transformation agenda based on analytical insight, for which they need connected sensors, machines, robots, vehicles and people. Nokia and Ukkoverkot bring proven, mission-critical wireless networks and cloud solutions for specific use cases in Finland. The aim is to help shape enterprise customer networks with state-of-the-art technology so that they can fully embrace IoT, digitalization and intelligence for greater business efficiency, safety and agility. Niko Arola, Terminal Manager, Steveco, said: "Previously it was not possible to prove the condition in which containers arrived to, and departed from, the harbor. Now we can, if needed, establish the status and state of incoming containers and insurance responsibility thanks to the cameras in the cranes. The connectivity also covers our terminals and the rest of the port area, enabling efficient communication for logistics and asset tracking." Jouko Tuppurainen, VP Sales, Ukkoverkot, said: "Private LTE provides the reliability, coverage, capacity, and security needed for industrial campuses, like ports, across a variety of industries. A dedicated network infrastructure connects people, vehicles, sensors, machines and robots with a guaranteed quality of service." Stephan Litjens, head of Nokia Digital Automation, said: "Ports involve many parties, each needing connectivity but requiring access only to certain information stemming from the different applications and devices. A dedicated digital automation platform can be sliced so that each party can access the needed information, and each slice can be assigned priorities. It also opens the window to advanced analytics and other digital automation building blocks to boost efficiency and productivity." Resources: Ukkoverkot (http://www.ukkoverkot.fi) Nokia Digital Automation Cloud (http://www.dac.nokia.com/) Images Nokia digitalization of the Port of HaminaKotka (https://www.nokia.com/about-us/news/media-library/nokia-for-industries/) Video: Digitalizing HaminaKotka port with private LTE (https://youtu.be/TDWX1XmBb7A), 2:55 Video: Private LTE for Port 4.0 case Steveco (https://youtu.be/h_fgiP__XZo), 0:30 Video: Private LTE for Port 4.0 digital transformation (https://youtu.be/_pwsWZNp79A), 2:55 Video: Unprecedented connectivity at Helsinki Airport with private LTE (https://youtu.be/tdBplOlVd-E) , 2:36 About Steveco Steveco Group produces and develops logistics services for a wide variety of needs. The company is the biggest producer of stevedoring services in Finland operating at the ports of Kotka, Hamina and Helsinki. We are driven by a strong sense of accountability in terms of the environment, our professional personnel or the customer's cargo. About Ukkoverkot Established in 2014, Ukkoverkot provides tailor-made connections on land, sea and air to support digitalization of industrial and security operators. The customers include Konecranes, the Finnish Defense Forces, Finavia, Steveco, the Border Guard, VR and Erillisverkot. A high-speed 2.6GHz frequency band and licenses for the 450 MHz band are assigned to Ukkoverkot in Finland. The 2.6GHz frequency band available to Ukkoverkot also enables services based on 5G technology. About Nokia We create the technology to connect the world. Powered by the research and innovation of Nokia Bell Labs, we serve communications service providers, governments, large enterprises and consumers, with the industry's most complete, end-to-end portfolio of products, services and licensing. We adhere to the highest ethical business standards as we create technology with social purpose, quality and integrity. Nokia is enabling the infrastructure for 5G and the Internet of Things to transform the human experience. www.nokia.com (http://www.nokia.com) Media Inquiries: Nokia Communications Phone: +358 10 448 4900 Email: press.services@nokia.com (mailto:press.services@nokia.com) Ukkoverkot Jouko Tuppurainen, VP sales +358 (0)40 138 8084 Steveco Port of HaminaKotka Elina Harjama, information manager +358 (0)40 835 5262 This announcement is distributed by West Corporation on behalf of West Corporation clients. The issuer of this announcement warrants that they are solely responsible for the content, accuracy and originality of the information contained therein. Source: NOKIA via Globenewswire CHONGQING, China, Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- On December 19, Hainan Airlines announced the formal launch of service between Chongqing and Paris. The service is the third non-stop flight fly from Chongqing to Europe after Hainan Airlines' Chongqing-Rome. The airline will operate a Boeing 787 Dreamliner on the new route with two round-trip flights per week. Hainan Airlines flight HU717, the inaugurate flight of the carrier's new Chongqing-Paris service, took off from Chongqing Jiangbei International Airport at 1:30 am on December 19 Beijing time, and successfully landed at Zurich Airport the same day, at 6:20 am local time. Hainan Airlines spokesman said, "The non-stop Chongqing-Paris service will bring more convenience to passengers traveling on business and for leisure, further promoting the development of the economies, cultures and tourism of the two countries, while offering more opportunities for collaboration between companies in European countries and in China." Up to now, Hainan Airlines has opened 17 European routes, covering Zurich, Vienna, Madrid, Brussels, Berlin, Edinburgh, Dublin, Prague, Manchester, Rome, London and Paris, forming a fast transit and intermodal flight network, providing a more convenient choice for traveler. The new service provides a brand new air bridge for passengers traveling between Europe and Oceania. Hainan Airlines' Chongqing-Paris Flight Timetable: Flight No. Aircraft Schedule Departure City Departure Time Arrival Time Arrival City HU717 B787 Wednesday/Saturday Chongqing 1:30 am 6:20 am Paris HU718 B787 Wednesday/Saturday Paris 13:00 am 6:30 am +1 Chongqing Note: Specific timetables can be confirmed on Hainan Airlines' official website. Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/721051/Hainan_Airlines_logo.jpg News release from Vestas Mediterranean Madrid, 19 December 2018 To offer its customers the most efficient and competitive wind energy solutions and to underline its commitment to the expansion of Brazil's wind market, Vestas earlier this year announced it will produce its leading onshore wind turbine, the V150-4.2 MW, in Brazil. Highlighting the V150-4.2 MW turbine's strong fit with Brazil's wind conditions, Vestas has received a 151 MW firm and unconditional order for the Folha Larga wind park in the State of Bahia, taking total order intake for the wind turbine in Brazil to 252 MW. The order includes 36 V150-4.2 MW wind turbines as well as an Active Output Management 5000 (AOM 5000) service agreement for the operation and maintenance of the wind park over the next 20 years, and is placed by Casa dos Ventos, one of the largest wind project developers in Brazil. "As wind power becomes more important and Casa dos Ventos increases its investments in the sector, we are honored to count on Vestas' support", says Lucas Araripe, director of Casa dos Ventos. "We intend to begin construction in 2019 and have the wind park fully operational by 2020, ahead of its regulatory schedule", he added. The 36 wind turbines will be locally manufactured under the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES) FINAME II rules, consolidating the 4 MW platform as the most competitive in the Brazilian market. More specifically, the turbines will be assembled in Vestas' factory in Aquiraz in the State of Ceara, which will generate hundreds of new jobs once complete, reinforcing the company's long-term commitment to the Brazilian market. "We believe the V150-4.2 MW's introduction can break new grounds for Vestas and the wind industry in the country. This deal is very special because it entails a long-term service agreement with Casa dos Ventos, one of the true pioneers and leading investors in the Brazilian wind energy market", highlights Rogerio S. Zampronha, Vestas' Managing Director for Brazil and Southern LATAM. Turbine delivery is planned for the first quarter of 2020, whilst commissioning is expected by the end of the second quarter of the same year. For updated Vestas photographs and videos, please visit our media images page on: https://www.vestas.com/en/media/images . For more information, please contact: Irene Rodriguez Alvarez Marketing Manager Vestas Mediterranean Tel.: +34 91 362 81 13 Email: IRRAL@vestas.com About Vestas Vestas is the energy industry's global partner on sustainable energy solutions. We design, manufacture, install, and service wind turbines across the globe, and with 97 GW of wind turbines in 79 countries, we have installed more wind power than anyone else. Through our industry-leading smart data capabilities and unparalleled 83 GW of wind turbines under service, we use data to interpret, forecast, and exploit wind resources and deliver best-in-class wind power solutions. Together with our customers, Vestas' more than 24,400 employees are bringing the world sustainable energy solutions to power a bright future. We invite you to learn more about Vestas by visiting our website at www.vestas.com and following us on our social media channels: www.twitter.com/vestas (http://www.twitter.com/vestas) (http://www.twitter.com/vestas) www.linkedin.com/company/vestas (http://www.linkedin.com/company/vestas) (http://www.linkedin.com/company/vestas) www.facebook.com/vestas (http://www.facebook.com/vestas) (http://www.facebook.com/vestas) www.instagram.com/vestas (http://www.instagram.com/vestas) (http://www.instagram.com/vestas) www.youtube.com/vestas (http://www.youtube.com/vestas) Attachment Beijing - Art Market: Artprice launches subscriptions via the Artron.net website in China on 1 January 2019 Beijing - following the mention of different dates by third parties, Artprice wishes to clarify today, December 18, that the official start date of marketing of Artprice subscriptions in China via our loyal institutional partner Artron (9 years of collaboration) is 1 January 2019 (not a holiday in China). As of that date, Artprice will appear on Artron.net's main home page, in next to the Artron logo, (see twitter image - source Artron): https://twitter.com/artpricedotcom/status/1074943649929138176 Artron.net is the world's leading art website with 5.4 billion visits per year. Artprice, which has its own Chinese WeChat account, notes that according to WeChat stats "immediate purchase' amounts debited to the accounts (QR Code) of WeChat users are credited in real time to Artprice's bank accounts. This is standard practice for the 988 million WeChat users in China. To fully meet the payment requirements of Chinese Internet users, Artprice also offers an Alipay platform that it has developed, enabling it to reach 1.2 billion users worldwide who generate 300 million transactions per day. (Source Alipay - Alibaba Group) Alipay is also a real-time payment system platform running on a QR Code system. The seller provides a Qrcode, which the buyer scans with his mobile to accept the transaction. The payment is made instantly and the invoice arrives by email or text message. On the basis of these payment systems and Artprice's historic new deal with Artron (with 10 agreements in principle that go way beyond the contract), combined with Artron's core stats (at December 2018, Artron - the world's leading art website and leading art book printer - had 3 million professional members with 5.4 billion visits per year), Artprice is anticipating a very substantial growth in sales as of 2019. As of end January 2019, Artprice will communicate a calculated projection of its sales turnover for 2019. Over nine years, Artprice has translated hundreds of millions of data from its data banks into Mandarin. The computer ergonomics developed by Artprice specifically for China and for smartphones is designed for mobile Internet (88% of Chinese Internet users). In June 2018, China already had no less than 1.1 billion 4G users (Source INA). According to thierry Ehrmann, Artprice's CEO/Founder, "As previously announced, Artron has produced several videos that highlight - beyond our financial and economic collaboration - the "cultural merger" of our two groups. This short video accurately reflects Artron's vision of Artprice" https://vimeo.com/305021641 Artprice's Chairman, thierry Ehrmann, and its senior executives recently returned from several days of intense work at Artron's headquarters in Beijing where discussions focused on accelerating and implementing, as quickly as possible, all the agreed strategic and commercial initiatives that will inevitably generate very positive results in terms of turnover and the expansion of Artprice's client base... not to mention shareholder value. Artron and its Chairman Wan Jie gave the Artprice team an exceptionally respectful, warm and loyal welcome and introduced Artprice to China's top-level institutional leaders, the country's principal Art Market players and all of Artron's 3,500 employees. These face-to-face introductions are an essential step in Artprice's bid to fructify the enormous potential of the Chinese market in a fast and optimal manner. In 2018, China accounted for 45% of global online transactions, generating 12 times more online transactions than the United States. China has a huge advantage over the West because it is building its market economy directly on the Internet (Source GEAB / LEAP 2020). Speaking in front of his senior executives and top management, Wan Jie - at the head his Artron empire and probably the most powerful player in China's Art Market - reiterated his unfailing personal friendship and loyalty vis-a-vis Artprice's founder-Chairman, thierry Ehrmann. This fact deserves emphasis as Chinese custom usually prohibits such "departures' from accepted business protocol. As China has become the global Art Market's leading marketplace over the past decade, it naturally represents a fascinating new market for Artprice. The development of mobile internet in China has been exceptionally fast and in June 2018 the country boasted 1.1 billion 4G users. Thanks to the Chinese government's Made in China plan, China is currently set to become the world leader in 5G technology (Source INA). In 2017, China's digital economy accounted for nearly 33% of national GDP. In this context, the role played by private companies as catalysts of innovation has been clearly identified as crucial to the development and growth of China's digital economy. In short, China's key economic and industrial actors are closely associated with the State in the transformation of China into an "information society'. Thus, in 2017, China's digital economy accounted for nearly 33% of national GDP. (source INA). copyright 2018 thierry Ehrmann About the Artron Group: "Artron Art Group (Artron), a comprehensive cultural industrial group founded in 1993, is committed to inheriting, enhancing and spreading art value. Based on abundant art data, Artron provides art industry and art fans with professional service and experience of quality products by integrated application of IT, advanced digital science and innovative crafts and materials. Having produced more than 60,000 books and auction catalogues, Artron is the world's largest art book printer with a total print volume of 300 million a year. It has more than 3 million professional members in the arts sector and an average of 15 million daily visits, making it the world's leading art website. Founded in 1993, the Artron Art Group is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. It is the first choice for art professionals, investors, collectors and art fans in general wishing to discover and/or participate in the art world or the art market. Founded in 1993, Artron Art Group is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year." According to the Artron Group and its founder-Chairman Mr. Wan Jie "After 7 years of cooperation, Artron and Artprice have optimised their cooperation regarding the Chinese and Western art markets. The founders and Chairmen of both companies, Mr. Wan Jie and Mr. Thierry Ehrmann, with their enthusiasm for art, will create a Silk Road linking the Chinese and Western art markets on the principle of respect and mutual cooperation. The two groups will build a global, diversified and professional exchange platform in the Art Market, which will ultimately promote the sustainable development of the Global Art Market. Artron's Web: www.artron.com.cn; www.artron.net . Contact: 400-6690-999 About Artprice: Founded by thierry Ehrmann (see Who's who certified Biography ) (c) https://imgpublic.artprice.com/img/wp/sites/11/2018/10/bio-2019-whos-who-thierry-ehrmann.pdf ). Artprice is listed on the Eurolist by Euronext Paris, SRD long only and Euroclear: 7478 - Bloomberg: PRC - Reuters: ARTF. Dicover Artprice in video: https://www.artprice.com/video Artprice is the global leader in art price and art index databanks. It has over 30 million indices and auction results covering more than 700,000 artists. Artprice Images gives unlimited access to the largest Art Market resource in the world: a library of 126 million images or prints of artworks from the year 1700 to the present day, along with comments by Artprice's art historians. 12 Oct. 2018: Artprice and Artron have just created an "Art Media Mogul": Video: https://vimeo.com/296010836 Artprice permanently enriches its databanks with information from 6,300 auctioneers and it publishes a constant flow of art market trends for the world's principal news agencies and approximately 7,200 international press publications. For its 4,500,000 members, Artprice gives access to the world's leading Standardised Marketplace for buying and selling art. Artprice is preparing its blockchain for the Art Market. It is BPI-labelled (scientific national French label)Artprice's Global Art Market Annual Report for 2017 published last March 2018: https://www.artprice.com/artprice-reports/the-art-market-in-2017 Artprice's Contemporary Art Market Annual Report for 2017 - free access at: https://www.artprice.com/artprice-reports/the-contemporary-art-market-report-2017 Artprice's press releases: http://serveur.serveur.com/Press_Release/pressreleaseen.htm https://twitter.com/artpricedotcom Artmarket News: https://twitter.com/artpricedotcom & https://twitter.com/artmarketdotcom https://www.facebook.com/artpricedotcom & https://plus.google.com/+artpricedotcom/posts http://artmarketinsight.wordpress.com/ Discover the Alchemy and the universe of Artprice http://web.artprice.com/video , which headquarters are the famous Museum of Contemporary Art, the Abode of Chaos: http://goo.gl/zJssd https://vimeo.com/124643720 The Contemporary Art Museum The Abode of Chaos on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/la.demeure.du.chaos.theabodeofchaos999 Contact: ir@artprice.com ------------------------ Copyright Actusnews Wire Receive by email the next press releases of the company by registering on www.actusnews.com, it's free Full and original release in PDF format:https://www.actusnews.com/documents_communiques/ACTUS-0-56362-artprice-artron-december-2018-en.pdf (Oslo, 19 December 2018) This morning, Kristin Skogen Lund, new CEO at Schibsted as of December 1st, announced her leadership team. "The new organization will reflect both Schibsted's three business areas and the Group's foundation which serves as an enabler of long-term business growth. Our goal is that our leading marketplaces, growth initiatives and digital publishing operations will increasingly realize synergies, which will help us further develop value-creation for society, customers and shareholders," says Kristin Skogen Lund. Skogen Lund has defined three business areas: Nordic Marketplaces; will be led by Anders Skoe , CEO of FINN and asset owner for Blocket (Sweden) and Tori (Finland). Publishing; will be led by Siv Juvik Tveitnes , previously Head of Publishing operations in the Media Division. Schibsted Next (Venture investments, Personal Finance, organic growth initiatives incl Distribution); will be led by Raoul Grunthal, previously CEO Schibsted Media. Grunthal will, in addition, have a functional role with the responsibility of boosting growth and entrepreneurship across the company. In addition to the business areas and functions, the company will establish an informal geographical structure in each of its main markets to ensure revenue synergies and the strengthening of Schibsted's market position in Sweden and Norway, respectively. Kristin Skogen Lund will act as country manager in Norway and Raoul Grunthal will be country manager in Sweden. To support the business cluster leaders, Skogen Lund has appointed functional leaders in three areas: Trond Berger continues in Skogen Lunds management team as Chief Financial Officer. Berger has been with Schibsted ASA almost 20 years, and thus represents valuable continuity. Mette Krogsrud , who has previously worked in Schibsted (2005-2010) joins the company from the position as Managing Director of Korn Ferry in Norway. As Chief People & Corporate Affairs Officer, she will take a driving role within HR, Communications and Public Policy, supporting and driving the culture building across business units. Krogsrud will be joining the company early spring 2019. In addition, a process for appointing a Chief Data & Technology Officer is currently being finalized. The role will be given responsibility and development on shared platforms, with a particular focus on data management. Schibsted will continue to deepen its customer relationships through leading consumer brands and leverage its ability to collect and process data to develop its consumer and advertising offerings. "Schibsted has a solid and rapidly growing portfolio of digital consumer offerings, that empower people in their daily lives. The Nordics is a digital front-runner region, and as such an optimal venture lab to test new digital and disruptive offerings. I am confident that our new leadership team will succeed in creating growth for Schibsted in the next decades," says Skogen Lund. Schibsted to spin off international marketplaces In September, the Board of Directors of Schibsted ASA announced that the company's Marketplaces operations outside of the Nordics will be spun off and established as an independent, listed company (preliminarily named Marketplaces International/MPI). Schibsted will continue to be a Nordic group of leading digital consumer brands, comprising our publishing operations and growth companies in Norway and Sweden as well as the marketplaces FINN, Blocket, and Tori. Rolv Erik Ryssdal, CEO of Schibsted Media Group since 2009, continues as CEO of the new company MPI, that will be a publicly listed stand-alone company. The first day of trading is targeted in April 2019. Schibsted will remain the largest owner of MPI and plans to retain a 60 per cent ownership at the time of the listing, after selling down up to five per cent in the market and distributing 35 per cent of the MPI shares to Schibsted's shareholders. Contact information: For media: Nathalie Kavin, Director of Communications. Schibsted Media Group, Tel: +47 934 01 363, e-mail: nathalie.kavin@schibsted.com (mailto:nathalie.kavin@schibsted.com) For investors/analysts: Jo Christian Steigedal, VP Head of IR. Tel: +47 415 08 733, email: jcs@schibsted.com (mailto:jcs@schibsted.com) About Schibsted Schibsted Media Group is an international media group with 8000 employees in 22 countries. 200 million people around the world interact with Schibsted's popular digital services through our media houses, our digital marketplaces and our growth companies. In 2019, our Marketplaces operations outside of the Nordics will be spun off and established as an independent, listed company. Schibsted will continue to be a company of leading digital consumer brands with footprint in the Nordics. For more information, check out our website www.schibsted.com (http://www.schibsted.com) This announcement is distributed by West Corporation on behalf of West Corporation clients. The issuer of this announcement warrants that they are solely responsible for the content, accuracy and originality of the information contained therein. Source: Schibsted via Globenewswire ALBANY, New York, December 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The global automotive intake manifold market is fragmented due the presence of large number of players operating in the market. Leading players are focusing on research and development activates and expanding their product line to strengthen their position in the global market. Over the coming years, competition in the market will intensify due to strict government regulations and growing use of advanced technologies. Key players are engaging in mergers and acquisitions, collaborations, and partnerships. This will not only firm their position in the global market but it will also help them in penetrating their business in various regions. Magneti Marelli S.p.A., MAHLE GmbH, Rochling Group, Mann+Hummel Group, and Aisin Seiki Co., Ltd. are some of the key players operating in the global automotive intake manifold market. (Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/664869/Transparency_Market_Research_Logo.jpg ) As per Transparency Market Research, the global automotive intake manifold market is likely to exhibit a growth of 3.6% over the projected period between 2016 and 2024. The market valuation is anticipated to touch US$58.7 bn by 2024. In 2015, the market earned at US$42.7 bn. Get PDF Brochure for Research Insights at:https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=16670 Depending upon material type, the aluminum is high in the market as compared to other materials. As aluminum does not add an additional weight to the final product and reduces the chance of getting rusted, making it a highly beneficial material to be used. Based on geography, the Asia Pacific held larger share in the global market. Rising investment in the automotive industry and rapid growth in technological innovation has staged the dominance of this region. Rapid Growth in Automotive Industry to Boost Market Performance Rapid growth in the automotive industry across the globe has boosted the demand for automotive intake manifolds. Strict government regulations and rising demand for variety of vehicles has further augmented the demand in this market. The rising economic development in emerging economies, growing GDPs, rising disposable income among the middle class, and changing lifestyle are some of the other key drivers pushing demand in the global automotive intake manifold market. Request a Sample of Report: https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=S&rep_id=16670 Changes in government policies to control emission of carbon dioxide and rising concerns related to fuel conservation are likely to drive growth in this market. Moreover, fuel conservation has forced the automotive OEMs to design advanced prototypes of intake manifolds. These advanced prototype will consume fuel efficiently and minimize the discharge exhausts during combustion. High Prices of Raw Material to Hamper Demand for Automotive Intake Manifold Even though the demand in the automotive intake manifold market is high, few restraining factors might challenge the growth of this market. High price of raw material is the key factors hampering the growth in this market. This factor will might refrain manufactures from investing heavily as it will increase the cost end product and reduce their profit margins. Moreover, the product replacement rate is also very low further limiting the market's growth. However, increasing government intervention by imposing strict regulations might benefit the market. Request For Discount On This Report:https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=D&rep_id=16670 The information presented in this review is based on a TMR report, titled "Automotive Intake Manifold Market (Material - Aluminum, Plastic, and Composites; Vehicle - Passenger Cars, Light Commercial Vehicles, and Heavy Commercial Vehicles) - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast 2016 - 2024." Browse Research Release athttps://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/pressrelease/automotive-intake-manifolds-market.htm The Global Automotive Intake Manifold Market has been segmented as presented below: Global Automotive Intake Manifold Market, by Material Type Aluminum Plastic Composites Global Automotive Intake Manifold Market, by Vehicle Type Passenger Cars Light Commercial Vehicles Heavy Commercial Vehicles Global Automotive Intake Manifold Market: Geography North America U.S. Canada Europe U.K. Italy Spain France Germany Rest of Europe Asia Pacific China India ASEAN Rest of Asia Pacific Japan Latin America Brazil Mexico Rest of South America Middle East & Africa (MEA) GCC South Africa Rest of MEA Browse MoreAutomotive & Transport Market Research Reports Popular Research Reports by TMR: Automotive LiDAR Market : https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/automotive-lidar-market.html https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/automotive-lidar-market.html Automotive Fuel Rail Market : https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/automotive-fuel-rail-market.html https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/automotive-fuel-rail-market.html Tiller Machine Market: https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/tiller-machine-market.html About Us Transparency Market Research is a next-generation market intelligence provider, offering fact-based solutions to business leaders, consultants, and strategy professionals. Our reports are single-point solutions for businesses to grow, evolve, and mature. Our real-time data collection methods along with ability to track more than one million high growth niche products are aligned with your aims. The detailed and proprietary statistical models used by our analysts offer insights for making right decision in the shortest span of time. For organizations that require specific but comprehensive information we offer customized solutions through adhoc reports. These requests are delivered with the perfect combination of right sense of fact-oriented problem solving methodologies and leveraging existing data repositories. TMR believes that unison of solutions for clients-specific problems with right methodology of research is the key to help enterprises reach right decision. Contact Mr. Rohit Bhisey Transparency Market Research State Tower, 90 State Street, Suite 700, Albany NY - 12207 United States Tel: +1-518-618-1030 USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453 Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.com Website: https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com Research Blog: https://tmrblog.com/ LONDON, December 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- First funding round pushes Vostok project's value up to $600 million, with a second round scheduled for early 2019 Waves Platform, the world's fastest public blockchain platform with offices in London and other European cities, has secured $120 million funding round to launch its private blockchain platform and system integrator Vostok . London-based financial services group Dolfin assisted the deal by structuring and coordinating its execution. (Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/800008/Vostok.jpg ) The Vostok project has been developed by the Waves Platform team specifically for large enterprises and public institutions to form the basis of their digital infrastructure. The launch of the first projects in Europe and Asia is expected at the beginning of 2019. Founder and CEO of the Waves Platform and the Vostok project, Sasha Ivanov said: "The Vostok project lies at the intersection of several disruptive technologies, including Blockchain, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and the Industrial Internet of Things. By implementing these in the IT infrastructures of corporations and government agencies, we lay the foundation for the digital economy. This is logic continuation of the work we have been doing over the past few years, advancing the Waves platform's technological achievements yet further." Investors in Vostok's key target markets were approached to participate in the first funding round. When selecting capital sources, it was important that the investors did not only contribute money. They also had to have the expertise and motivation to use their business resources to further the project, as well as a portfolio of projects for which Vostok technologies would be beneficial. Dolfin CEO, Denis Nagy commented: "London is becoming an increasingly important destination globally for DLT and other disruptive technology projects. We are proud that Waves and Vostok have selected London as one of their technology ?entres, as well as their trusted global hub for legal and financial expertise. Despite heightened investors' interest in digital technologies, attracting private funding is often problematic due to the lack of financial infrastructure to support and structure the deals in the DLT space. Together with the Vostok team we have developed a model familiar to private equity investors yet customised to enable the financing of the Vostok blockchain project." About Waves Platform Founded in 2016, Waves Platform is the world's fastest public blockchain platform. It offers easy-to-use, highly functional tools to create decentralised applications. It's an enterprise-ready platform that emphasises security, easy digital asset operations (including creation, transfer, exchange) and a straightforward user experience. It has also developed into one of the largest tech communities worldwide and formed partnerships with a variety of renowned international organisations. https://wavesplatform.com About Vostok project Vostok is a universal technological solution for scalable digital infrastructure developed by Waves Platform in 2018. It is comprised of two constituent elements: fundamental technological innovation (the Vostok digital platform) and facilitator of its maintenance, development and optimisation (the Vostok system integrator). The main purpose of the project is to form the basis of the digital infrastructure for certification, registration and data tracking, and to make new technologies easy-to-use in business and public administration. https://vostok.io About Dolfin Dolfin is an independent and agile wealth management platform that provides custody, brokerage and asset management to private clients, financial advisers and institutional investors. Dolfin opens investment accounts promptly, safeguards assets, provides access to capital markets worldwide and offers sophisticated investment expertise. Founded as a London-based wealth boutique in 2013, the company now offers diversified financial solutions, an international presence, and a bespoke technology. Today, Dolfin looks after more than $1.7bn of client assets and handles around $650m of brokerage flow every month. Headquartered in London, with offices in Malta and Amsterdam, the company is regulated by the UK's Financial Conduct Authority and the Malta Financial Services Authority. https://dolfin.com Price f(x), the global leader in cloud pricing software, has raised 25 million in Series B funding. Leading the round are Digital Partners, a leading European B2B technology growth investor, and Bain Company, one of the world's top management consulting firms. The Series A investors, Prague-based Credo Ventures and London-based Talis Capital, also participated in the round. Established in 2011 in Munich, Price f(x) provides a modular SaaS solution for Price Optimization, Management (PO&M) and Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) for enterprises of any size, based on the latest in native cloud architecture. The company currently serves over 80 global, blue-chip B2B and B2C customers across a variety of industries, including Robert Bosch, SchneiderElectric, Owens-Illinois, Iron Mountain and Sonoco. Price f(x) has also developed a strong partner ecosystem with leading global technology, consulting and integration providers-including Bain Company and SAP-enabling a best-in-class service offering, which helps customers realize a fast time-to-value on their pricing projects. "Price f(x) has become the leading SaaS pricing solution provider on the market through its customer centric approach and by offering a feature-rich, highly flexible pricing tool that is also risk free and fast to implement," said Marcin Cichon, CEO and co-Founder of Price f(x). "Our success is based on the continued satisfaction and loyalty of our customers. This new funding will allow us to help even more businesses to thrive by further expanding our existing platform capabilities and also introducing a new product offering for the SME market segment." "We have been very impressed by what Marcin and his team have achieved to date and see a huge growth opportunity ahead for Price f(x). They have built a world-class product, driven by a relentless customer focus, and we believe they are set to become the global market leader in pricing software. We are proud and excited to co-lead this round with Bain Company and support Price f(x) in this next stage of growth", said Axel Krieger, Founding Partner at Digital Partners. Earlier this year, Bain Company and Price f(x) announced a partnership to develop the Bain Pricing Navigator, offering Bain Company clients a powerful, industry-leading software tool. The solution enables customers to continuously assess and adjust pricing based on their company's performance by leveraging real-time dashboards, proprietary insights and templates, as well as integration with CRM and ERP systems. "For most companies, pricing is the single most effective lever to boost earnings," said Ron Kermisch, Bain Company's global pricing leader. "Yet many companies leave money on the table because they do not set the best price or ensure customers actually pay the price they have determined. Bain Company sees investing in Price f(x) as a great opportunity to help Price f(x) to become the de-facto standard in pricing and with that to be also the best-of-breed competitive weapon for Bain's clients, to stay at the cutting edge of pricing." Over the last decade, Bain Company has developed a deep understanding of pricing strategy and a proven track record of results, working with B2B and B2C companies globally across industries. A Bain Company survey of more than 1,700 pricing decision-makers found that 70 percent of companies believe pricing is a top management priority. However, more than half of respondents conclude that management has insufficient visibility into pricing decisions. Furthermore, fewer than 20 percent of the companies surveyed have appropriate tools and dashboards to improve pricing decisions. Ondrej Bartos, Co-Founder Managing Partner at Credo Ventures said, "Since investing in Price f(x) alongside Talis Capital in 2016, it's been exciting to see the company close in on their vision to become the leader in price optimization software solutions. The energy and resilience demonstrated by Marcin and his team is what makes truly successful companies and we are grateful to be part of their journey." Price f(x) is a member of the Bain Alliance Ecosystem a network of best-of-breed partnerships with complementary tool, technology, and service providers that accelerates delivery of breakthrough client results. Through the Bain Alliance Ecosystem, Bain Company clients have access to relevant new capabilities, enabling faster assimilation of new ideas, skills, and ways of working. About Price f(x) Established in 2011 in Germany, Price f(x) AG is the provider of a full suite of price management and CPQ SaaS solution based on latest native cloud architecture, offering broad and flexible support to the entire price management closed loop cycle of Price Strategy, Controlling, Setting and Realization. The solution is suitable for B2B and B2C as well as for any industry, any size of business and geographical location. Price f(x)'s vision is to remain the leading SaaS pricing and CPQ platform provider through offering easy to use, fast to implement, flexible to adapt, risk free and inexpensive, comprehensive solutions. Price f(x)'s business model is entirely based on the satisfaction and loyalty of its customers. For more information please visit: www.pricefx.com. About Digital Partners Digital Partners is a leading technology growth equity investor focused on European and US technology companies with 350 million assets under management. Digital aims to support ambitious entrepreneurs build global technology companies, providing them with strategic advice and long-term financial support to help them define and execute their growth plans. The fund focuses exclusively on B2B technology companies and leverages a deep corporate network to help portfolio companies access new markets and build new partnerships. For more information please visit: http://www.dplus.partners. About Bain Company, Inc. Bain Company is the management consulting firm that the world's business leaders come to when they want results. Bain advises clients on strategy, operations, information technology, organization, private equity, digital transformation and strategy, and mergers and acquisition, developing practical insights that clients act on and transferring skills that make change stick. The firm aligns its incentives with clients by linking its fees to their results. Bain clients have outperformed the stock market 4 to 1. Founded in 1973, Bain has 57 offices in 36 countries, and its deep expertise and client roster cross every industry and economic sector. For more information visit: www.bain.com. Follow us on Twitter @BainAlerts. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20181219005264/en/ Contacts: Price f(x) Marcin Cichon CEO +49 (0) 180 5-7742339 info@pricefx.eu NEWTOWN SQUARE, Pennsylvania, December 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- North American hospitality leader will now manage 16 properties and more than 4,000 rooms in Spain, and position Alua as its midscale brand Apple Leisure Group (ALG) today announced the signing of an agreement to purchase a majority share in Alua Hotels & Resorts. Following the deal's closing, the Spanish hotel chain, which was founded in 2015 and whose growth has been one of the fastest in the market over the past few years, will be integrated into ALG's European division. (Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/800497/Apple_Leisure_Group_ALG.jpg ) The transaction will provide ALG with the structure and capacity to manage hotel properties in Europe, and when combined with the strategic agreements the group has already signed, will translate into opportunities for additional growth. Likewise, and following its integration into ALG, Alua will become the American group's hotel brand of reference for the mid-market sector, both in Europe and globally. "The addition of Alua Hotels & Resorts to Apple Leisure Group's portfolio is a true testament to our strong commitment to growing our company footprint in Spain," said Alex Zozaya, CEO of Apple Leisure Group. "This acquisition is just the beginning of ALG's European expansion plans and future contributions to the market's burgeoning tourism sector." Under the agreement, ALG will now manage more than 4,000 rooms in Spain: a solid example of its resolute bet on growth in the European market. Thanks to this new contract and to its prior strategic agreements, ALG European division's strategic plan is aimed primarily at establishing a strong presence in highly popular tourist destinations across the Mediterranean. Javier Aguila, CEO of Alua Hotels & Resorts, will assume the role of President of Apple Leisure Group Europe and will join the Executive Committee of the U.S. based parent company, while Jordi de las Moras will continue as Managing Director of the European division. Javier Coll, Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer of Apple Leisure Group, who is responsible for the company's business operations in Europe, said: "With this agreement, we take another step in our international growth strategy. Acquiring Alua Hotels & Resorts allows us to expand on the strategic agreement that we already have with Hesperia by giving us the ability to offer not only sales and branding services, but also operations management to both owners and investors, as we already do in the Americas. At the same time, we are adding a brand in a strategic segment for us, which we will work to grow in both the Americas and Europe." In turn, Javier Aguila stated that "this transaction represents the best possible close to Alua's first chapter, and recognizes the excellent work done by our team, who have been a part of this journey since the brand was just an idea. We are tremendously enthusiastic about the opportunity to be part of a leading group in the sector, such as Apple Leisure Group, and become the platform to materialize their ambitious expansion plan in the European market. Without a doubt, the experience and leadership of ALG in the areas of distribution, brand development, and luxury resort brand management, together with the structure and work team of Alua, will give us a competitive advantage in reaching our strategic goals at both the national and global level." About Apple Leisure Group Apple Leisure Group (ALG) is the leading North American travel, hospitality and leisure management group with the only vertically-integrated business model, serving travelers and destinations worldwide. ALG consistently delivers exceptional value to travelers and strong performance to resort owners and partners by strategically leveraging the power of its portfolio of brands across five segments, comprising: the largest seller of vacation packages and charter flights in the U.S. for travel to Mexico and the Caribbean, moving approximately 3.2 million passengers annually through the well-established vacation brands Apple Vacations , BeachBound, Funway Holidays, Travel Impressions, CheapCaribbean.com[],, Blue Sky Tours, Southwest Vacations, Funjet Vacations, and United Vacations; brand management of 5-star and 4-star luxury resorts through AMResorts award-winning brand portfolio including Zoetry Wellness & Spas Resorts, Secrets Resorts & Spas, Breathless Resorts & Spas, Dreams Resorts & Spas, Now Resorts & Spas, Reflect Resorts & Spas, and Sunscape Resorts & Spas; best-in-class destination management services provided by Amstar DMC and Worldstar, the exclusive loyalty program Unlimited Vacation Club; and the innovative technology solutions provider Trisept Solutions, connecting over 88,000 travel agents with leading travel suppliers. To learn more about the Apple Leisure Group advantage, visit appleleisuregroup.com. by Mathias Hariyadi About 150 families, 147 Muslim and three Christian, live in Purbayan, including that of the deceased. Residents were in favour of his burial in the local cemetery but religious symbols are banned. The upper part of the cross was removed with the familys permission. For Catholic activist, the "uproar occurred on social media and outside the village. Locals have no issues. Jakarta (AsiaNews) Pictures of a Christian grave with a sawn-off cross has come to symbolise anti-Christian intolerance in Purbayan, in Kotagede, a sub-district of Yogyakarta (island of Java). Yesterday, outrage swept social media, but eventually what really happened emerged. Hans Supatman, a local activist for religious dialogue and member of the Kerukunan Forum Umat Beragama (FKUB) gave AsiaNews an account of the events. Albertus Slamet Sugihardi, a 63-years-old Catholic man, lived Purbayan, home to some 150 families, 147 Muslim and three Christian. He worked as an ambulance driver until his death from a heart attack, two days ago. His family wanted to bury him elsewhere, but because he lived near the Jambon public cemetery they decided to lay him to rest there. However, in 2000, the graveyard was reserved for Muslims. Still, neighbours told the Christian family they could bury him near where he had lived. However, based on local community standards, it is not possible "to place religious symbols in the cemetery". For this reason, the upper part of wooden cross on the grave was removed (picture 1). This was not an act of vandalism and was done in full agreement with the deceaseds family. The latter had already prepared the material for his burial before the heart attack. "There is no grudge between the family and neighbours, Supatman explained. Everything is fine and even the funeral service was done quietly." The ceremony took place in St Paul's Parish church in Pringgolayan "to make things easier". A few years ago, the activist said, a group of Islamic extremists from outside Kotagede came to the area and broke up choir rehearsals at a local Catholic home. The cemetery "uproar occurred on social media and outside the village, the activist noted. Everything is fine here and everyone is happy. Church authorities in Yogyakarta offered psychological assistance to deal with the emotional stress experienced by Albertus Slamet Sugihardis family. "Residents and the interfaith forum (FKUB) held meetings in Kotagede (picture 2) to discuss the issue and all participants agreed to counter the distorted information and comments, which are threatening local harmony." Dengvaxia vaccine approved for prevention of dengue in Europe Paris, France - December 19, 2018 - The European Commission has granted marketing authorization for Dengvaxia, Sanofi's dengue vaccine. The marketing authorization follows the October 18, 2018, recommendation by the European Medicines Agency's Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP) to approve use of the dengue vaccine in European endemic areas. Dengue fever is a mosquito-borne infection that people can get up to 4 times in a lifetime. Dengue is also known as 'break-bone fever' since it can cause debilitating disease marked by prolonged episodes of high fever and severe joint pain. An infection can progress unpredictably to a life-threatening form of the disease called dengue haemorrhagic fever that often requires hospitalized care. Today, there is no specific treatment available for dengue. Dengvaxia will be available in Europe to prevent dengue disease in individuals 9-45 years of age with a documented prior dengue infection and who are living in endemic areas. "In some of the European overseas territories where dengue recurs regularly, people who have had a dengue infection previously are at risk of being infected with the virus again," explains Dr. Su-Peing Ng, Global Medical Head at Sanofi Pasteur, the vaccine unit of Sanofi. "As the second infection with dengue tends to be more severe than the first, it is important to be able to offer these people a vaccine that could help protect them against subsequent dengue infections." According to the WHO, the global incidence of dengue has grown rapidly in recent decades and it now threatens half of the world's population living in 128 countries.[i] Dengue is endemic in several European territories located in tropical and sub-tropical climates prone to outbreaks of the disease particularly during the rainy season.[ii] Earlier this year, dengue outbreaks in La Reunion resulted in more than 6,000 people being made ill by the virus, which is spread by a day-biting mosquito that often lives in people's homes. During past outbreaks of dengue in Guadeloupe and Martinique, more than 40,000 people reportedly contracted the fever.[iii],[iv] The dengue vaccine has been evaluated in studies involving more than 40,000 people from 15 countries with up to six years of follow-up from large-scale clinical safety and efficacy investigations. Dengvaxia is approved for use in several endemic countries in Latin America and Asia where reducing the human and economic burden of dengue is critical. The vaccine is currently under priority review by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as it would be considered a significant medical advance in the prevention of dengue, which is considered an unmet medical need by the FDA. About Sanofi Sanofi is dedicated to supporting people through their health challenges. We are a global biopharmaceutical company focused on human health. We prevent illness with vaccines, provide innovative treatments to fight pain and ease suffering. We stand by the few who suffer from rare diseases and the millions with long-term chronic conditions. With more than 100,000 people in 100 countries, Sanofi is transforming scientific innovation into healthcare solutions around the globe. Sanofi, Empowering Life Media Relations Contact Laurence Bollack Tel.: +33 (0)1 53 77 46 46 mr @sanofi.com (mailto:mr@sanofi.com) Investor Relations Contact George Grofik Tel.: +33 (0)1 53 77 45 45 ir@sanofi.com (mailto:ir@sanofi.com) Sanofi Forward-Looking Statements This press release contains forward-looking statements as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, as amended. Forward-looking statements are statements that are not historical facts. These statements include projections and estimates and their underlying assumptions, statements regarding plans, objectives, intentions and expectations with respect to future financial results, events, operations, services, product development and potential, and statements regarding future performance. Forward-looking statements are generally identified by the words "expects", "anticipates", "believes", "intends", "estimates", "plans" and similar expressions. Although Sanofi's management believes that the expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements are reasonable, investors are cautioned that forward-looking information and statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties, many of which are difficult to predict and generally beyond the control of Sanofi, that could cause actual results and developments to differ materially from those expressed in, or implied or projected by, the forward-looking information and statements. These risks and uncertainties include among other things, expectations for the transfer of our American Depositary Shares (ADS) listing and the stock exchange on which our ADSs will be listed, as well as those risks and uncertainties discussed or identified in the public filings with the SEC and the AMF made by Sanofi, including those listed under "Risk Factors" and "Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-Looking Statements" in Sanofi's annual report on Form 20-F for the year ended December 31, 2017. Other than as required by applicable law, Sanofi does not undertake any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking information or statements [i] Brady OJ, Gething PW, Bhatt S, Messina JP, Brownstein JS, Hoen AG et al. Refining the global spatial limits of dengue virus transmission by evidence-based consensus. PLoS Negl Trop Dis. 2012;6:e1760. doi:10.1371/journal.pntd.0001760. [ii] San Martin JL et al. The Epidemiology of Dengue in the Americas Over the Last Three Decades: A Worrisome Reality. Am J Trop Med Hyg 2010; 82(1):128-35. [iii] L'Azou M et al. Dengue seroprevalence in the French West Indies: a prospective study in adult blood donors. Am J Trop Med Hyg, 2015; 92(6):1137-40 [iv] http://invs.santepubliquefrance.fr/Publications-et-outils/Points-epidemiologiques/Tous-les-numeros/Ocean-Indien/2018/Surveillance-de-la-dengue-a-la-Reunion.-Point-epidemiologique-au-30-octobre-2018 Press release (PDF) (http://hugin.info/152918/R/2229559/875910.pdf) This announcement is distributed by West Corporation on behalf of West Corporation clients. The issuer of this announcement warrants that they are solely responsible for the content, accuracy and originality of the information contained therein. Source: Sanofi via Globenewswire VAUGHAN, Ontario, December 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- CannTrust Holdings Inc. ("CannTrust" or the "Company") (TSX: TRST), one of Canada's leading, most trusted licensed producers of cannabis and the 2018 Canadian Cannabis Awards "Top Licensed Producer of the Year", is providing an update to highlight recent developments regarding the Company's expansion plans. Phase II Expansion The fully-permitted Phase II expansion remains on course to bring the Company's capacity to 50,000 kg per year. CannTrust expects first harvest from the expansion in Q1/19. Construction of the final range should be complete in January 2019. Phase III Expansion In addition to its Phase II expansion, the Company has proceeded to build a 35,000 sq. ft. greenhouse facility adjacent to its current greenhouse. This facility is also fully-permitted. On October 15, 2018, the Town of Pelham's City Council passed an interim control bylaw allowing it to review land use planning policies and regulations pertaining to cannabis operations. The bylaw restricts use of land for cannabis purposes for one year, for land that does not already have a Development Permit. CannTrust made its permitting applications for the Phase III expansion prior to the enactment of the interim control bylaw which includes expansion onto the adjacent 19.4 acres it purchased. While CannTrust has not yet received all the permits necessary to proceed with the Phase III expansion, the Company is in active discussions with the municipality to obtain the necessary approvals and is currently assessing several other options to reach its capacity targets. "We initially applied for 10 permits relating to the development of our Phase III expansion. We're still working with the municipality to have all those permits approved," said Michael Camplin, General Manager of CannTrust's Niagara operations. "We respect the Town of Pelham's process. We have multiple strategic alternatives available to us and we hope Pelham is one of them." Given the very high demand for the Company's medical and recreational products, CannTrust had been considering many alternatives to increase capacity beyond the Phase III expansion, prior to the enactment of this bylaw. Given the land use review by the Town of Pelham, these growth initiatives may be accelerated. CannTrust is in discussion with other greenhouse operators and is also considering advancing outdoor crop production on the same site as the Phase III expansion. Outdoor crop production requires permitting from Health Canada, is a very low-cost option and the crop can be used to formulate the Company's extract products. "While we work with the municipality, we are actively taking steps towards achieving our first harvest in the fall of 2019 and 100,000 kg of capacity by year end 2019," said Peter Aceto, CannTrust's CEO. "The use of other greenhouses and outdoor crop production are both viable options that can help us meet our production targets. If developments change our production targets, we plan to communicate that with investors." About CannTrust CannTrust is a federally regulated licensed producer of medical and recreational cannabis in Canada. Founded by pharmacists, CannTrust brings more than 40 years of pharmaceutical and healthcare experience to the medical cannabis industry and serves over 57,000 medical patients with its dried, extract and capsule products. The Company operates its 450,000 sq. ft. Niagara Perpetual Harvest Facility. CannTrust is developing nanotechnology to develop new products in the medical, recreational, beauty, wellness and pet markets. The Company has established its international footprint through a strategic partnership with Cannatrek Ltd. in Australia and a joint venture with STENOCARE in Denmark. The Company has also partnered with Breakthru Beverage Group through Kindred Canada, for recreational distribution in Canada. CannTrust is committed to research and innovation. Its partnerships with McMaster University in Ontario and Gold Coast University in Australia were designed to contribute to the growing body of evidence-based research regarding the use and efficacy of cannabis. CannTrust was proudly voted Top Licensed Producer of the Year at the 2018 Canadian Cannabis Awards. For more information, please visit www.canntrust.ca. Forward Looking Statements This press release contains "forward-looking information" and "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of applicable securities legislation which are based upon CannTrust's current internal expectations, estimates, projections, assumptions and beliefs and views of future events. Forward-looking information and forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "expect", "likely", "may", "will", "should", "intend", "anticipate", "potential", "proposed", "estimate" and other similar words, including negative and grammatical variations thereof, or statements that certain events or conditions "may", "would" or "will" happen, or by discussions of strategy. The forward-looking information and statements in this news release are based upon the expectations, estimates, projections, assumptions and views of future events which management believes to be reasonable in the circumstances. Forward-looking information and statements includes estimates, plans, expectations, opinions, forecasts, projections, targets, guidance or other statements that are not statements of fact. Forward-looking statements in this news release include, but are not limited to, statements with respect to internal expectations, expectations with respect to actual production volumes, expectations for future growing capacity, statements with respect to future product offering, expectations for future legalization in Canada of edible cannabis products, the completion of any capital project or expansions and the approval to list the Company's common shares on the NYSE. Forward-looking information and statements necessarily involve known and unknown risks, including, without limitation: risks associated with general economic conditions; adverse industry events; loss of markets; future legislative and regulatory developments; inability to access sufficient capital from internal and external sources, and/or inability to access sufficient capital on favourable terms; the cannabis industry in Canada generally; the ability of CannTrust to implement its business strategies; competition; crop failure; NYSE approval; and other risks. Any forward-looking information and statements speaks only as of the date on which they are made, and, except as required by law, CannTrust does not undertake any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking information or statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. New factors emerge from time to time, and it is not possible for CannTrust to predict all such factors. When considering these forward-looking information and statements, readers should keep in mind the risk factors and other cautionary statements in CannTrust's Annual Information Form dated March 29, 2018 (the "AIF") and filed with the applicable Canadian securities regulatory authorities on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. The risk factors and other factors noted in the AIF could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those described in any forward-looking information or statements. The TSX does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Copyright 2018 CannTrust Holdings Inc. Media Relations: Sybil Eastman Tel: +1-888-677-1477 media@canntrust.ca ; Investor Relations: Marc Charbin 416-519-2156 x2232 investor@canntrust.ca 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. BERLIN, December 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- A Franco-German agreement on battery cell production, signed off by Federal Minister for Economics and Energy Peter Altmaier and his French counterpart Bruno Le Maire on Tuesday, could pave the way for 1bn of EU funding for large-scale battery cell production in Germany. Germany's government has, according to the declaration, already reserved the amount for supporting the development of battery cell production in Germany, but it is hoping that project proposals within the sector qualify as an Important Project of Common European Interest (IPCEI), which would see them gain access to the 1bn IPCEI fund. " the Sides have come to the following understanding: The objective of a French-German Cooperation shall be focused on the support of cooperation between companies, research institutes and platforms in the field of battery cell production and across the value chain, from the raw materials suppliers to the car manufacturers, with clear commitments of the parties," read the declaration. "Specific fields of cooperation between Germany and France shall include, but are not limited to, industrial aspects of battery cell production and related technologies, European regulatory issues such as state aid policy (esp. with regard to IPCEI and cooperation within the European Battery Alliance)." "This technology is critical to the future strategy of Germany as a tech location," said Robert Herrmann, CEO of Germany's federal economic development agency Germany Trade & Invest (GTAI). "Synergy and investment between industrial nations is crucial to better technological advance, so to sign such a declaration with France under the EU umbrella is a great step forward." The IPCEI is already set to bestow 1bn on German R&D projects, after a decision by the European Commission for the funding of microelectronics, as a part of the IPCEI, has cleared the way for German companies to gain access to 1bn of funding from the German government for their R&D activities. On the back of a year in which the German semiconductor market grew 8 per cent - driven to a large extent by increasing activity in the automotive industry - the news is a welcome break for research institutes needing ever-increasing numbers of micro-components. Fields such as artificial intelligence, data security, Industry 4.0, the 5G network and continued advance in autonomous driving will all benefit from the additional funding. "Germany is particularly geared strategically towards future-oriented industries such as autonomous driving and artificial intelligence and extremely well-equipped in production of, and research into, automotive and industrial semiconductors," said Max Milbredt, Senior Manager Electronics at GTAI "Germany is already the most important European production location for semiconductors, so further investment and R&D funding in facilities such as Forschungsfabrik Mikroelektronik Deutschland (Research Lab Microelectronics Germany) show that Germany as a location will continue to be highly relevant for the industrial sector." Link to the declaration: https://www.bmwi.de/Redaktion/DE/Downloads/G/german-french-declaration-on-battery-cell-production.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=8 Germany Trade & Invest is the foreign trade and inward investment agency of the Federal Republic of Germany. The organization advises foreign companies looking to expand their business activities in the German market. It provides information on foreign trade to German companies that seek to enter into foreign markets. All inquiries relating to Germany as a business and investment location are treated confidentially. All investment services are available at no charge. Press contact:Daniel Stephens T. +49-(0)-30-200-099-170 F. +49-(0)-30-200-099-511 daniel.stephens@gtai.com http://www.gtai.com http://twitter.com/gtai_de http://youtube.com/gtai Clear Leisure plc (AIM: CLP) is an AIM listed investment company with a portfolio of companies primarily encompassing the leisure and real estate sectors mainly in Italy. The focus of management is to pursue the monetisation of all of the Company's existing assets, through selected realisations, court-led recoveries of misappropriated assets and substantial debt-recovery processes. The Company has recently launched a joint venture initiative in the cryptocurrency mining sector. For further information, please visit, www.clearleisure.co.uk Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann. Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - December 19, 2018) - Gunpowder Capital Corp. (CSE: GPC) (CSE: GPC.PR.A) (OTCQB: GNPWF) (FSE: YS6N) ("Gunpowder" or the "Corporation") announced today that it has closed the first and final tranche of its previously announced non-brokered private placement raise. In total Seven Hundred and Seventy Thousand Dollars ("$770,000.00") CDN was raised in via the sale of Fifteen Million, Four Hundred Thousand ("15,400,000") Units at a price of Five Cents ("$0.05") CDN per Unit. Each Unit is comprised of one Common Share of the Corporation, and one Common Share Purchase Warrant. Each whole Warrant entitles the holder of the Warrant to acquire one additional Common Share of the Corporation for Seven and a Half Cents ("$0.075") CDN for a period of 24 months from the closing date. All Common Shares issued in connection with this placement will be subject to a four month plus one day hold period under applicable Canadian securities laws. In connection with the closing of this private placement offering, the Corporation, paid finder's fees totaling Sixty-One Thousand, Six Hundred Dollars ("$61,600.00") CDN in connection with certain subscriptions for the Corporation's Units. This placement was previously announced, via press release, back on November 19th, 2018. The Corporation also announced today that the holders of the Corporation's Convertible Debenture which face value totaled Seven Hundred Fifty Thousand Dollars ("$750,000.00") CDN have elected to convert the Convertible Debenture into Common Shares of the Corporation at a conversion price of Five Cents ($0.05") CDN per Common Share. In total, Fifteen Million ("15,000,000") Common Shares of the Corporation have been issued to the Debenture Holders. Furthermore, the Corporation issued an additional Four Hundred and Sixteen Thousand, Six Hundred and Sixty-Six ("416,666") Common Shares to the former Debenture Holders to settle Eighteen Thousand, Seven Hundred and Fifty Dollars ("$18,750.00") CDN in interest which was due to the former Debenture Holders. The issuance of the Convertible Debenture, and the terms of the Convertible Debenture, was announced via press release, back on August 14th, 2018. As of the date of issuance of this press release, and with the issuances stated in this press release completed, the Corporation now has 65,911,750 Common Shares outstanding. As of the date of issuance of this press release no single shareholder controls over 9.99% of the Corporation's issued and outstanding Common Shares and therefore no change of control will occur due to the Common Share issuances announced in this press release. About Gunpowder Capital Corp. Gunpowder Capital Corp., is a merchant bank and advisory services firm based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Gunpowder invests in both publicly traded and private businesses that have successful management teams and attractive economic models. Gunpowder partners with these businesses to support their growth initiatives with its proven methodology of appropriate financing and structured exits. Gunpowder offers debt financing, including mezzanine and bridge loans, equity financing and advisory services. Gunpowder is also building a portfolio of companies in which it takes a long term position and view. For more information please visit www.gunpowdercapitalcorp.com For further information please contact: Mr. Frank Kordy CEO & Director Gunpowder Capital Corp. T: (647) 466-4037 E: frank.kordy@gunpowdercapitalcorp.com Mr. Paul Haber CFO Gunpowder Capital Corp. T: (416) 363-3833 E: paul.haber@gunpowdercapitalcorp.com Forward-Looking Statements Information set forth in this news release may involve forward-looking statements under applicable securities laws. The forward-looking statements contained herein are expressly qualified in their entirety by this cautionary statement. The forward-looking statements included in this document are made as of the date of this document and the Corporation disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as expressly required by applicable securities legislation. Although Management believes that the expectations represented in such forward-looking statements are reasonable, there can be no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. This news release does not constitute an offer to sell or solicitation of an offer to buy any of the securities described herein and accordingly undue reliance should not be put on such. Neither CSE nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the CSE) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. We seek safe harbor. - 30 - Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - December 19, 2018) -New Energy Metals Corp. (TSXV: ENRG) (OTC Pink: NEMCF) ("New Energy Metals" or the "Company") is pleased to announce the appointment of Ms. Kelly Earle to the board of directors of the Company. Ms. Earle replaces Charles Hethey, who has resigned as a director. A geologist with a CPIR (Certified Professional in Investor Relations) designation, Ms. Earle held a position from 2013 - 2015 as the Investor Relations Manager for Vancouver-based Aegean Metals Group. Ms. Earle's appointment to the board of directors follows the appointment of Cesar Lopez to the board to replace Gunther Roehlig upon his resignation earlier this month. Presently Vice President of Communications for Skeena Resources Ltd., a junior Canadian mining exploration company focused on the development of prospective precious and base metal properties in northwest BC, Ms. Earle has assisted with over $50M of capital raises since 2015. Prior to this, Ms. Earle founded K. Earle Consulting in 2013, a private firm specializing in investor relation and corporate development services for junior mining and technology companies. A former field geologist for Hunter Dickenson Inc., Ms. Earle served as the analyst and field geologist at the Gibraltar Mine outside Williams Lake, BC. An Advisory Board Chair for US-based CASERM (Centre for Advanced Subsurface Earth Resource Models), a new Industry-University Cooperative Research Centre between the Colorado School of Mines and Virginia Tech, Ms. Earle is also a founding member and Advisor of the BC RMA (British Columbia Regional Mining Alliance), a regional partnership between First Nations, industry, and provincial government representatives to promote mining investment in the Golden Triangle of northwest BC. Ms. Earle earned her Bachelor of Science from the University of British Columbia and her CPIR designation from Western University's Ivey School of Business. "I am delighted to welcome my long-time colleague Kelly Earle to the board of directors," commented Cesar Lopez, President & CEO. "In addition to being a highly talented geologist with a wealth of experience, Kelly understands how forming and maintaining healthy partnerships can help contribute to the overall success of a company." "Cesar and I have worked together on a number of occassions and I am excited to be on a board of directors that is focused on the emerging energy metals market. I feel that my years of work in investor relations will be a welcome and highly useful addition," added Ms. Earle. About the Company New Energy Metals is focused on the exploration and development of energy metals in Chile. The Company's assets include the Cristal copper project located in northern Chile and several prospective cobalt projects in Chile's past producing San Juan cobalt district. On behalf of New Energy Metals Corp. Cesar Lopez, President & CEO T: 604.484-1232 E: info@newenergymetals.ca W: www.newenergymetals.ca Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements This news release contains forward-looking statements and forward-looking information (collectively, "forward-looking statements") within the meaning of applicable Canadian and U.S. securities legislation, including the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.All statements, other than statements of historical fact, included herein including, without limitation, the Company's expectation that it will be successful in enacting its business plans and acquiring properties, the anticipated content, commencement, timing and cost of exploration programs in respect of the Company's projects and otherwise, anticipated results from exploration activities, the Company's expectation that it will be able to obtain the necessary permits to exploit, develop, produce and export copper or cobalt, and the anticipated business plans and timing of future activities of the Company, are forward-looking statements.Although the Company believes that such statements are reasonable, it can give no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct.Forward-looking statements are typically identified by words such as: "believes", "expects", "anticipates", "intends", "estimates", "plans", "may", "should", "potential", "scheduled", or variations of such words and phrases and similar expressions, which, by their nature, refer to future events or results that may, could, would, might or will occur or be taken or achieved. Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the Company to differ materially from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking information.Such risks and other factors include, among others, the ability of the Company to obtain sufficient financing to fund its business activities and plans, operating and technical difficulties in connection with mineral exploration and development and mine development activities for the Company's projects generally, actual results of exploration activities, the timing and amount of estimated future production, costs of production, capital expenditures, requirements for additional capital, future prices of precious metals, copper and lithium, changes in general economic conditions, changes in the financial markets and in the demand and market price for commodities, possible variations in ore grade or recovery rates, possible failures of plants or processes to operate as anticipated, other risks of the mining industry, the inability to obtain any necessary governmental and regulatory approvals (including of the TSX Venture Exchange), permits or financing or in the completion of development or construction activities, changes in laws, regulations and policies affecting mining operations, hedging practices, currency fluctuations, title disputes or claims limitations on insurance coverage, risks related to joint venture operations, and risks related to the integration of acquisitions, as well as those factors discussed under the heading "Risks and Uncertainties" in the Company's most recent management's discussion and analysis and other filings of the Company with the Canadian Securities Authorities, copies of which can be found under the Company's profile on the SEDAR website at www.sedar.com. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements.Except as otherwise required by law, the Company undertakes no obligation to update any of the forward-looking information in this news release or incorporated by reference herein. Regulatory News: Dassault Systemes (Euronext Paris: #13065, DSY.PA), "The 3DEXPERIENCE Company," announces its decision to increase, by 5,000,000 euros, the resources of the liquidity agreement entered into with Oddo BHF SCA1, therefore raising such resources from 15,000,000 euros to 20,000,000 euros. About Dassault Systemes Dassault Systemes, the 3DEXPERIENCE Company, provides business and people with virtual universes to imagine sustainable innovations. Its world-leading solutions transform the way products are designed, produced, and supported. Dassault Systemes' collaborative solutions foster social innovation, expanding possibilities for the virtual world to improve the real world. The group brings value to over 220,000 customers of all sizes, in all industries, in more than 140 countries. For more information, visit www.3ds.com. 3DEXPERIENCE, the Compass logo and the 3DS logo, CATIA, SOLIDWORKS, ENOVIA, DELMIA, SIMULIA, GEOVIA, EXALEAD, 3D VIA, BIOVIA, NETVIBES and 3DEXCITE are registered trademarks of Dassault Systemes or its subsidiaries in the US and/or other countries. ___________________________ 1 Liquidity agreement initially entered into with Oddo Corporate Finance and transferred by way of universal transfer of assets (transmission universelle de patrimoine) with effect as of March 1st, 2016, to Oddo et Cie. Oddo et Cie changed its name to Oddo BHF SCA on June 8, 2017. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20181219005050/en/ Contacts: Francois-Jose Bordonado/Beatrix Martinez +33 1 6162 6924 SINGAPORE, Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- SpaceChain, a community-based space platform, announces the addition of Eric C. Anderson as an advisor, advising the team on satellite launches, the development of SpaceChain's operating system, and other aerospace technology. Anderson is a well-known aerospace engineer and entrepreneur who pioneered the development of the space tourism industry. Since 2001, he has successfully arranged eight missions to the International Space Station (ISS) for privately-funded individuals. Anderson co-founded several organizations including Space Angels Network, Planetary Resources and Space Adventures, the only company to have provided commercial human spaceflight missions to the ISS. "SpaceChain is pleased to welcome Eric Anderson to the team as our newest advisor. He has rich aerospace experience and insights that will help deepen our collective knowledge and support our development of an open-source, blockchain-based satellite network," said Zee Zheng, co-founder and CEO of SpaceChain. Anderson joins current SpaceChain advisors Don Tapscott, Jeffrey Manber, Matthew Roszak and Tim Draper, and will work closely with Zheng and co-founder Jeff Garzik. "I fundamentally believe that more people should have the ability to come in contact with and explore space, which will deliver tremendous value back here on Earth," said Anderson. "This belief coincides with SpaceChain's vision of opening access to space and supporting sustainable commercial space programs, and I look forward to being part of the SpaceChain family." Anderson served as the CEO of Intentional Software Corporation, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2017. He is Chairman of Booster Fuels, the leading mobile refueling service, and is a Board Member of the XPRIZE Foundation and the Koshka Foundation. He is a Member of the World Economic Forum, and also Chairman Emeritus of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. In 2010, Anderson was selected as an Ernst & Young "Entrepreneur of the Year" award winner. # # # About SpaceChain: Founded in 2017, SpaceChain is a community-based space platform that combines space and blockchain technologies to build the world's first open-source blockchain-based satellite network, allowing users to develop and run decentralized applications in space. The SpaceChain operating system will be available to anyone, anywhere in the world, all while remaining secure and immutable through proven blockchain cryptography. In doing so, SpaceChain's vision is to remove barriers and allow a global community to access and collaborate in space. For more information, visit www.spacechain.com. Sprinklr's platform analyzes data and bridges data silos across resource management systems, helping brands optimize their digital experience management strategy in the social ecosystem SANTA CLARA, California, Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Based on its recent analysis of the North America social suites market, Frost & Sullivan recognizes Sprinklr , with the 2018 North America Customer Value Leadership Award for its full-spectrum social customer experience management platform, Experience Cloud. This social media suite supports brands and marketers to enhance the customer experience by creating one-to-one human connections at scale across 26 different social channels, such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. The platform helps brands consolidate public data from 350 million sources to improve their social engagement, social advertising, and social customer care. "Sprinklr parses huge volumes of data to offer companies a holistic, 360-degree perspective on the customer experience, aids with macro decisions using Big Data analysis, and eventually builds deeper relationships with consumers," said Aravindh Vanchesan, Industry Manager - Digital Media Practice.at Frost & Sullivan. "With a single platform and codebase, Sprinklr uses listening data to power insights across an organization. The company's solution provides solution clouds for marketing, customer care, research, commerce, and advertising teams with the same integrated view of the customer, thereby out-performing single-purpose solutions." Bridging data silos across resource management systems, Sprinklr's platform leverages insights across the spectrum of customer touch points, so that brands can deliver a consistent digital experience in the social ecosystem. By offering the only unified platform that provides a consistent user experience, Sprinklr enables coordinated action and transportable insights from one cloud to another. The company's platform uses deep integrations with 25 leading social platforms and all the major legacy customer relationship management systems, allowing brands to create targeted audiences for social marketing and create personalized social customer care at scale. Another significant innovation from Sprinklr is its Intuition artificial intelligence layer for social listening and customer care functions. Intuition automates workflows to process massive volumes of inbound messages, categorize the content, and route it according to priority and category. With machine learning training, Intuition can recognize customers' comments and sentiments to gain an understanding of their reactions to a brand or a particular location. Moreover, a smart alert feature detects anomalies in user content and messages, recognizing a crisis or peak in mentions based on historical trends. "In the challenging and rapidly changing social channel landscape, Sprinklr stands out with its dynamic stack built to leverage integrations and comb through petabytes of data daily," noted Vanchesan. "The company already has a presence in 13 countries and can identify and filter 65 languages and provision sentiment analysis in 22 languages. These capabilities, commitment to innovation, and high-speed growth position Sprinklr for further, future global expansion." Each year, Frost & Sullivan presents this award to the company that demonstrates excellence in implementing strategies that proactively create value for its customers, with a focus on improving the return on the investment that customers gain from its services or products. The award recognizes the company's unique focus on augmenting the value that its customers receive, beyond simply good customer service, leading to improved customer retention and customer base expansion. 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 Sprinklr, Inc. Sprinklr's mission is to help the world's most valuable brands create happy customers. We do this with the world's #1 social suite, which helps enterprises deliver memorable customer experiences with an integrated suite of Market Research, Customer Care, Social Media Management, and Social Advertising. Headquartered in New York City with 1,300 employees in 22 offices, Sprinklr works with more than 1,500 of the world's most valuable brands, including: Allstate, McDonald's, Lenovo, Microsoft, Nike, Signify, Procter & Gamble, Samsung, Santander, SAP, Shell, Verizon, and Visa. Sprinklr's partners include Accenture, Deloitte, IBM, Microsoft, and SAP. For more information, visit sprinklr.com or follow us at @sprinklr About Frost & Sullivan Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, collaborates 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, Frost & Sullivan has been developing growth strategies for the global 1000, emerging businesses, the public sector, and the investment community. Contact us: Start the discussion . Contact: Estefany Ariza P: 210.477.8469 F: 210.348.1003 E: estefany.ariza@frost.com Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/800144/Sprinklr_Award.jpg Wang has been in prison for three years. He is not allowed to have an attorney or visits from his wife. An open letter from over 20 lawyers around the world calling on Xi Jinping to respect "the rule of law". Hong Kong (AsiaNews / Agencies) - Two groups gathering Hong Kong lawyers and prosecutors, the Bar Association and the Law Society, have demanded that the human rights lawyer Wang Quanzhang, imprisoned in China for over three years on charges of having threatened national security, be released. Wang Quanzhang, one of the more than 300 human rights lawyers arrested in July 2015, the so-called "709" group (so called from the date when the campaign against them began, July 9, 2015). More than three years after his arrest, Wang has not yet gone to trial. Instead he has been forced into isolation: he has been denied the right of a legal representative and his wife, Li Wenzu is not allowed to see him. Many of the lawyers arrested - at least 50% - are Christians (Protestants and Catholics) who use the bottlenecks of Chinese law to defend communities, priests and pastors from the abuses of local authorities. Several of them defended the Zhejiang communities during the cross-destruction campaign. Wang Quanzhang, for example, in his career defended members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement, which is outlawed as well as peasants whose land was requisitioned. Last week, legal groups from all over the world - more than 20 groups - sent a joint letter to President Xi Jinping to request the release of Wang and other human rights lawyers, calling for an end to harassment for Li Wenzu, To be precise, the Hong Kong Law Society does not ask for the release of Wang, but asks China to respect the legal system. In the past, Beijing has often claimed to be a country where "the rule of law" applies. SpendEdge, a global procurement market intelligence firm, has announced the release of their Global Pharmaceutical Contract Manufacturing Service Category Procurement Market Intelligence Report. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20181219005305/en/ Global Pharmaceutical Contract Manufacturing Service Category Procurement Market Intelligence Report. (Graphic: Business Wire) Governments across the globe are increasing their focus on widening consumer's access to healthcare facilities. This, in turn, is driving the category spend momentum for pharmaceutical contract manufacturing services. The presence of low cost labor in APAC is attracting the maximum number of contracts for manufacturing drugs, which, in turn, is propelling the category spend momentum. Currently, North America claims the majority of market shares due to the adoption of well-developed novel technologies by service providers and high healthcare expenditure in the region. Read the Free Sample of this pharmaceutical contract manufacturing service procurement market intelligence report here! This pharmaceutical contract manufacturing service procurement research report offers critical supply market forecasts and cost drivers insights to help the buyers determine their total cost of ownership. This market intelligence report also offers a coverage of the sustainability practices and the risk management/mitigation strategies to improve category spend. Request a free customization of this pharmaceutical contract manufacturing service procurement research report if the information offered isn't what you are looking for. "Buyers should engage with service providers who allow innovator companies to design and validate manufacturing processes virtually using QbD. In-line process monitoring that employs PAT will produce data that can validate these models and secure regulatory approvals," says SpendEdge procurement expert Sumit Yadav. This market intelligence report has highlighted the following KPIs to play a key role in influencing spend. They include: Optimum plant utilization is one of the most important supplier KPIs, as it represents production capacity of service providers. Rationalization of the supply base provides increased spend visibility to buyers and reduced additional costs Buy the full market intelligence report to know more about the complete scope of this report 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 pharma and healthcarecategory offer information on critical cost drivers and category pricing strategies to help the buyers achieve significant cost-savings. The supply market forecasts offer information on supplier performance benchmarking criteria to help buyers reduce spend and establish better SLAs. Additionally, SpendEdge's reports offer category management insights and procurement best practices for the category. Report scope snapshot: Pharmaceutical contract manufacturing service Category ecosystem Market favorability index for suppliers Competitiveness index for suppliers Threat of new entrants Interested to know more about the scope of our market intelligence reports? Download a FREE sample Category management enablers Procurement organization Category enablers Want customized information from our pharmaceutical contract manufacturing service procurement research report? Get in touch Category definition Category hierarchy Category scope Category map To view this the complete table of contents for the market intelligence report, Download a FREE sample Do you purchase multiple reports in a year? Our subscription platform, SpendEdge Insights, provides ready-to-use procurement research reports for multiple categories. Now access latest supplier news, innovation landscape, markets insights, supplier tracking, and much more at the click of a button. Start your 7-day FREE trial now. Related Reports: Global Tablet Coatings Category Procurement Market Intelligence Report Disposable Syringes Sourcing and Procurement Market Intelligence Report About SpendEdge: SpendEdge shares your passion for driving sourcing and procurement excellence. We are the preferred procurement market intelligence partner for 120+ Fortune 500 firms and other leading companies across numerous industries. Our strength lies in delivering robust, real-time procurement market intelligence reports and solutions. To know more, https://www.spendedge.com/request-free-proposal View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20181219005305/en/ Contacts: SpendEdge Anirban Choudhury Marketing Manager US: +1 630 984 7340 UK: +44 148 459 9299 https://www.spendedge.com/contact-us - Action Being Taken Following CE Mark Expiration and Compulsory Recall Request by Agence Nationale de Securite du Medicament (ANSM) - DUBLIN, Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Allergan plc (NYSE: AGN), a leading global biopharmaceutical company, today announced that the company has suspended sales of textured breast implants and tissue expanders and is withdrawing any remaining supply in European markets. The withdrawal decision follows a compulsory recall request from Agence Nationale de Securite du Medicament (ANSM), the French regulatory authority. The suspension of sales stems from the expiration of the company's CE Mark for these products. Although Allergan disagrees with ANSM's request, the Company is fully cooperating with the authority. Allergan stands behind the benefit/risk profile of our breast implant products. The ANSM request, and this action, is not based on any new scientific evidence regarding these products. Furthermore, ANSM has not identified any immediate risk to the health of women with textured breast implants. "Breast implants play a vital role for patients' physical and psychological health. For many patients, textured breast implants provide a critical option for surgeons to provide the right solution for each individual need," said Michael Atlan, Associate Professor, Pierre et Marie Curie Faculty of Medicine, and a Plastic Surgeon at Tenon Hospital (Assistance Publique-Hopitaux de Paris). "Importantly, the safety profile of textured breast implants is known and surgical removal is not being recommended on this information alone, particularly given the known risks removal can have for patients." The Company looks forward to participating in the scientific forum that ANSM has scheduled for early February where the full set of data and scientific evidence for textured breast implants can be presented and thoroughly discussed by all stakeholders. "Patient safety and product quality are Allergan's highest priorities. Allergan takes this situation very seriously and is committed to engaging with all stakeholders to ensure they have the most up to date information," said Charles Hugh-Jones, Chief Medical Officer at Allergan. "We are committed to strict adherence to all regulatory requirements, to the most rigorous scientific evidence and to the highest industry standards for our products." Allergan will continue to work through the CE Mark renewal with GMED, and is planning an appeal to ensure that appropriate patients have access to the products that their surgeons recommend. Importantly, the CE Mark for Allergan's smooth implants has been renewed by GMED. Smooth implants are not affected and continue to be available for patients. It is also important to note that the United States does not require the CE Mark so it is unaffected by the action. About Allergan plc Allergan plc (NYSE: AGN), headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, is a bold, global pharmaceutical leader. Allergan is focused on developing, manufacturing and commercializing branded pharmaceutical, device, biologic, surgical and regenerative medicine products for patients around the world. Allergan markets a portfolio of leading brands and best-in-class products for the central nervous system, eye care, medical aesthetics and dermatology, gastroenterology, women's health, urology and anti-infective therapeutic categories. Allergan is an industry leader in Open Science, a model of research and development, which defines our approach to identifying and developing game-changing ideas and innovation for better patient care. With this approach, Allergan has built one of the broadest development pipelines in the pharmaceutical industry. Allergan's success is powered by our global colleagues' commitment to being Bold for Life. Together, we build bridges, power ideas, act fast and drive results for our customers and patients around the world by always doing what is right. With commercial operations in approximately 100 countries, Allergan is committed to working with physicians, healthcare providers and patients to deliver innovative and meaningful treatments that help people around the world live longer, healthier lives every day. For more information, visit Allergan's website at www.Allergan.com. Forward-Looking Statement Statements contained in this press release that refer to future events or other non-historical facts are forward-looking statements that reflect Allergan's current perspective on existing trends and information as of the date of this release. Actual results may differ materially from Allergan's current expectations depending upon a number of factors affecting Allergan's business. These factors include, among others, the difficulty of predicting the timing or outcome of FDA approvals or actions, if any; the impact of competitive products and pricing; market acceptance of and continued demand for Allergan's products; the impact of uncertainty around timing of generic entry related to key products, including RESTASIS, on our financial results; risks associated with divestitures, acquisitions, mergers and joint ventures; uncertainty associated with financial projections, projected cost reductions, projected debt reduction, projected synergies, restructurings, increased costs, and adverse tax consequences; difficulties or delays in manufacturing; and other risks and uncertainties detailed in Allergan's periodic public filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including but not limited to Allergan's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2017 and Allergan's Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the period ended June 30, 2018. Except as expressly required by law, Allergan disclaims any intent or obligation to update these forward-looking statements. CONTACTS: Allergan: Investors: Daphne Karydas (862) 261-8006 Karina Calzadilla (862) 261-7328 Media: Mark Marmur +44 7725 758677 Amy Rose (862) 289-3072 Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/697800/Allergan_Logo.jpg Thunder Bay, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - December 19, 2018) -White Metal Resources Corp. (TSXV: WHM) ("White Metal" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that the Company has entered into an option agreement (the "Option") with Sokoman Iron Corp. (TSX-V:SIC or Sokoman) to acquire by option a 100% interest in the Startrek Gold Property (the "Property") located in central Newfoundland. The Startrek Gold Property has seen limited exploration work to date, nonetheless greater than 50 gold occurrences have been discovered on the Property through previous trenching and grab samples. Previous operators Rubicon and Sokoman have performed mechanical trenching and drilling but many gold targets remain. As a first phase of work, White Metal plans to fly an airborne AEM (Airborne Electromagnetic) survey over the Property. Once the airborne survey is complete, all known gold occurrences and previous data will be compiled along with the airborne data, followed up by a detailed prospecting and geological mapping program. The terms of the Option, which remains subject to regulatory approval, are as follows: White Metal shall issue to Sokoman: i) upon regulatory approval, 500,000 common shares of the Company; ii) 500,000 common shares on or before December 18, 2019; iii) 500,000 common shares on or before December 18, 2020; and; iv) 500,000 common shares on or before December 18, 2021. The Startrek Gold Property is subject to a 2% Net Smelter Return Royalty in favour of the original owner; and, a 1% Net Smelter Return Royalty in favour of Sokoman, one-half of which can be purchased by the Company for $500,000. The Company also announces a proposed financing of up to $300,000 at $0.05 per unit, each unit consisting of one flow through common share plus one warrant, each warrant exercisable at $0.15 to acquire a common share of the Company for a period of 24 months, subject to the exercise period being accelerated by notice to holders of such warrants, at the option of the Company, if the common shares of the Company close above $0.30 for ten consecutive days on the Toronto Venture Exchange, subject to regulatory approval. Qualified Person Technical information in this news release has been reviewed and approved by Dr. Scott Jobin-Bevans (P.Geo.), Vice President Exploration and a Director of White Metal, who is a Qualified Person under the definitions established by the National Instrument 43-101. About White Metal Resources Corp. (TSXV: WHM) White Metal Resources Corp is a junior exploration company exploring in Canada. On behalf of the Board of Directors of White Metal Resources Corp. "Jean-Pierre Colin" Jean-Pierre Colin, President, CEO and Director For further information contact: Jean-Pierre Colin President, CEO & Director (416) 573-4300 jpcolin.whitemetal@gmail.com or Michael Stares Director 684 Squier Street Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada, P7B 4A8 Phone: (807) 628-7836 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. Companies Anticipate Another Precedential Ruling from the Federal Circuit Three Judge Panel Based on One Over-Arching Argument LOS ANGELES, CA / ACCESSWIRE / December 19, 2018 / Decision Diagnostics Corp. (OTC PINK: DECN) Decision Diagnostics Corp. is a 16 year old diabetes focused bio-technology R&D firm, manufacturer, quality plan administrator, FDA registered medical device customer support organization, and exclusive worldwide sales and regulatory process agent for a growing brand of glucose test strips and meters as highly accurate alternatives for legacy diabetic, proprietary, and pet testing glucose test strips. The company's current portfolio of test strips includes its GenUltimate!, GenChoice!, GenSure!, and GenUltimate! TBG test strips, its Avantage! and Precise! Glucometers, and its PetSure! and GenUltimate! 4Pets testing products for dogs, cats and horses. Decision Diagnostics through its subsidiary corporations PharmaTech Solutions, Inc. and Decision IT Corp. announces today that the companies have appealed the court decision in its case against Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) and two Lifescan divisions, Nevada U.S. District Court case 2:2016cv00564, to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, DC. The Federal Circuit Court hears all appeals involving U.S. Patents. In the companies' case the trial judge ruled incorrectly that the doctrine of prosecution history estoppel preclude us from arguing that LifeScan's OneTouch Ultra infringes the patents-in-suit by the doctrine of equivalence. According to the trial judge, during the prosecution of the patents, the original patent applicants amended their claims and made arguments to the examiner indicating that they were surrendering any way of comparing measurements taken by an analyte monitoring system other than the comparison of analyte measurements taken at different times with each other. Specifically, the trial judge wrongly concluded that to infringe, a device had to first convert a current measurement to an analyte measurement before any comparison would be made. The trial judge relied on erroneous claims made by Johnson & Johnson in their pleadings and oral arguments. Robert Jagunich, Chairman of the companies comments, 'The companies had several paths we could have followed during the drafting of this appeal. We could have listed all of the paragraphs in the trial judge's ruling where he erred, or we could have focused on the one over-arching issue that we chose to argue, the one issue that the Circuit Court judge panel will likely hone in on. Having been in front of this court twice previously we have learned that once the three judge panel sustains an appeal on one issue, all of the other claims are superfluous and considered mute. Therefore, we took the straight path. We strongly believe that our appeal will end with a positive conclusion, and another Precedential (new law) ruling from the Federal Circuit court. The companies argue in their appeal that the trial judge did not dig deep enough into the patent file and thus erred because 'the conversion element' had been disclosed in the prior art (other similar patents granted along the way). Instead, as the companies illustrate in their appeal, this element was highlighted in the prosecution history of the companies' patents to show how currents measured at different times could be meaningfully compared, and all of this discussion happened twenty years ago, not in the trial judge's courtroom in 2017 and 2018 as Johnson & Johnson misleadingly lead the trial judge to believe. Keith Berman. CEO of Decision Diagnostics, the companies CEO commented, 'Our application of the patent laws is spot on. In this case we strongly believe that we have a winner. And with a new Precedential ruling, there is potential for DECN to be a big winner. Johnson & Johnson sold infringing product, its popular OneTouch Ultra family of products, from 2010 through the expiration of our patents in February 2017. The courts have held that cases such as ours can 'look back' six years in infringement matters, and while J&J's OneTouch family is not as popular in the market as it once was, there was not a year from 2010 through February 2017 (the 'look-back' years) where J&J's Lifescan divisions did not earn less than an estimated $1.2 billion in annual revenues, or an estimated $300 million in annual profits.' The company's central argument is that the trial judge cannot arbitrarily apply prosecution history estoppel when the prior art already disclosed the claim language added. This is a novel, even brilliant argument, and is not one that has been made to the Federal Circuit previously. However, the existing precedent suggests that the reasoning of our appeal brief is more than solid. Mr. Berman concluded, 'Cases such as ours, where the technology rights held our companies are directly related to the method J&J took and used to determine glucose, the single purpose of this offending product, often create ill-gained profit damage awards that have been at the low end of 5% and the high end of 20% of profit. And in some similar cases, awards have resulted in a royalty penalty (revenue damage model) of up to 10% of revenues in the 6-year look-back period.' ABOUT DECISION DIAGNOSTICS CORP Decision Diagnostics Corp. is the leading manufacturer and worldwide distributor of diabetic test strips engineered to operate on legacy glucose meters. DECN's products are designed to operate efficiently and less expensively on certain glucose meters already in use by almost 7.5 million diabetics worldwide. With new inspired technology diabetic test strips already in the final stages of development, DECN products compete on a worldwide scale with legacy manufacturers currently selling to 71+ percent of a $12 billion at-home testing market. Forward-Looking Statements This release contains the company's forward-looking statements which are based on management's current expectations and assumptions as of December 18, 2018, regarding the company's business and performance, its prospects, current factors, the economy, and other future conditions and forecasts of future events, circumstances, and results. CONTACT INFORMATION: Decision Diagnostics Corp. Keith Berman (805) 446-2973 info@decisiondiagnostics.com www.genultimate.com www.genchoice.com www.petsureteststrips.com www.pharmatechdirect.com SOURCE: Decision Diagnostics Corp. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/530894/DECN-Subsidiaries-Appeal-Nevada-District-Court-Trial-Judges-Ruling-to-US-Court-of-Appeals-for-the-Federal-Circuit-The-Patent-Appeals-Court PALM BEACH, Florida, December 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- FinancialNewsMedia.com News Commentary The cannabis market is aiming to end 2018 on a high note after a year full of momentum from moments like Canada's full-legalization, the Farm Bill in the United States and overall growth on the consumer side as more and more people have access to both Cannabis and CBD-based products. In America, the Hemp Bill is a massive step toward the end of prohibition of cannabis as a whole, on track to being legal across the U.S. which is expected to generate massive growth opportunities in the cannabis industry. Tucked inside the Farm Bill are several provisions that clear the way to making industrial hemp a regular agricultural crop, fueling experts belief the hemp market itself could generate annual revenues north of $20 billion by 2020. From a business opportunity idea, with industrial hemp expected to be treated like any other agricultural product many anticipate several key roadblocks that have slowed growth to be removed, namely free access to the federal U.S. banking system, unrestricted interstate commerce as well as access to federally backed farm support programs. Active Companies from around the market with current developments this week include: Sugarmade, Inc. (OTC:SGMD), Medical Marijuana Inc. (OTC:MJNA), Hemp Inc. (OTC:HEMP), Marijuana Company of America Inc. (OTC:MCOA), Kali Inc. (OTC:KALY). Sugarmade, Inc. (OTCPK:SGMD) BREAKING NEWS: Sugarmade believes the passage of the U.S. Farm Bill, which includes specific hemp cultivation and legalization provisions creates additional revenue and investment opportunities for the Company as farmers across the country announce plans to begin or expand the cultivation of hemp. Sugarmade provides multiple products for the cultivators and processors and is in process of bringing additional products into this marketplace. The markets for industrial hemp, CBD oils and other hemp products are widely expected to explode upon implementation of the hemp provisions in the Farm Bill. Several analysts are now forecasting that the market for hemp and CBD will exceed even the size of the booming THC marijuana market. "Our vast experience in the supply of cultivation, harvesting and processing products places Sugarmade in a strong position to increase its revenue and profit outlooks as dozens of new operations prepare to come online," commented Jimmy Chan, CEO of Sugarmade. "Many of our current products apply directly to the industrial hemp market, which is now opening up. Additionally, we will be marketing other products directly to this emerging market, particularly relating to post-harvest processing. We see this an important market in which we plan to be involved." In addition to sales of hemp market related supplies, Sugarmade also holds an option to invest up to $1 million in Kentucky hemp operation, Hempistry, Inc., which recently successfully harvested its first 100 acre test crop. Plans are currently underway to significantly increase cultivation operations for the 2019 planting season. Mr. Chan continued, "We are especially pleased with the specific provisions in the Farm Bill that include legalization of cannabidiol products. We think the inclusion of CBD into foods, beverages and other consumer products will continue to grow, creating additional markets for participants in the North American hemp industrial complex. We believe Sugarmade is very well prepared to capitalize on these booming markets." Read this and more news for Sugarmadeat:http://www.financialnewsmedia.com/news-sgmd In other industry developments and happenings in the market this week include: Hemp Inc. (OTCPK:HEMP) recently commented on the 2018 Farm Bill. The measure easily passed the lower chamber of the House by a 369-47 vote. The legislation, which passed the Senate in an 87-13 vote on Tuesday, allows for farm subsidies and has language that federally legalizes industrial hemp production. "This is a historic decision for our nation," said Hemp, Inc. CEO Bruce Perlowin. "Our company had the foresight to begin research granted in the 2014 Farm Bill, and have been awaiting progress on the 2018 Farm Bill for quite some time. Since our company has been operational in multiple states over the years, providing the necessary infrastructure for farmers to maximize their output, we know that this legislation will benefit local economies tremendously." According to Perlowin, Hemp, Inc. has spent $25 million on building its industrial hemp infrastructure ($3 million over the course of 5 years building out the infrastructure in Arizona, $20 million building out the infrastructure in North Carolina, and $2 million in Oregon building out its infrastructure which only took 90 days). In Oregon, Hemp, Inc. employed over 200 locals at the height of this year's harvest. Medical Marijuana Inc. (OTCPK:MJNA) recently announced that its subsidiary Kannaway, the first hemp lifestyle network to offer cannabidiol (CBD) hemp botanical products, has been named one of the "10 Key Players to Watch in the Cannabis Industry" by Technology Headlines Magazine. "We are thrilled to be named as one of The Technology Headlines' 10 Key Players to Watch in the Cannabis Industry," said Kannaway CEO Blake Schroeder. "This kind of media coverage helps us showcase our continuing accomplishments and explain how much we care about expanding the CBD industry - continuing our mission of helping others around the world." Marijuana Company of America Inc. (OTCQB:MCOA) last week announced the launch of a new corporate hempSMART website and marketing platform for its associates. By implementing this new associate platform, hempSMART's customers now have the ability to subscribe monthly to our products creating a pathway to generate an annuity stream of monthly reoccurring revenue with minimal follow up. Since Q3, the Company has already seen an increase in associate signups with the new marketing platform and it is expected that Q4 of 2018 will feature the highest generated revenue of the Company's history. The new hempSMART platform is focused on incentivizing our current and future associates to take full advantage of our newly structured compensation plan. MCOA anticipates an increase in sales and a continuous influx of associate signups towards year end. Kali Inc. (OTCPK:KALY) and Puration, Inc. (OTCPK:PURA) recently announced a THC extraction partnership. The two companies will combine efforts and resources in the extraction of THC for respective products to be produced by the two companies. PURA requires THC extract for its new THCSavor Beverage and KALY plans to produce THC extract for vapes. KALY owns a patented cannabis extraction process which PURA has licensed for specific purposes to include PURA's primary business, the production of cannabis infused beverages. Together, PURA and KALY plan to contract licensed extraction facilities in Colorado and California to produce THC under KALY's patented process and supervision. PURA and KALY, through their partnership, expect to optimize economies of scale in the production of high-quality THC extract. DISCLAIMER: FN Media Group LLC (FNM), which owns and operates Financialnewsmedia.com and MarketNewsUpdates.com, is a third party publisher and news dissemination service provider, which disseminates electronic information through multiple online media channels. FNM is NOT affiliated in any manner with any company mentioned herein. FNM and its affiliated companies are a news dissemination solutions provider and are NOT a registered broker/dealer/analyst/adviser, holds no investment licenses and may NOT sell, offer to sell or offer to buy any security. FNM's market updates, news alerts and corporate profiles are NOT a solicitation or recommendation to buy, sell or hold securities. 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Contact Information: editor@financialnewsmedia.com +1(561)325-8757 Potsdam (ots) - Das Hasso-Plattner-Institut (HPI) weitet seine Forschung im Bereich Digital Health weiter aus und expandiert nach New York. Gemeinsam mit dem renommierten Universitatsklinikum Mount Sinai Health System (MSHS) grundet das HPI das Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Health at Mount Sinai (HPIMS) - der Kooperationsvertrag wird heute in New York unterzeichnet."Die Zusammenarbeit vereint zwei international renommierte Institutionen, deren Ausbildungs- und Forschungsprogramme sich hervorragend erganzen", sagt HPI-Direktor Professor Christoph Meinel. "Auerdem schafft der Vertrag optimale Voraussetzungen fur neue gemeinsame Forschungsprojekte im Bereich der digitalen Medizin." Ein Bereich, in dem Deutschland starken Nachholbedarf habe.Ziel des gemeinsamen Instituts ist es, die Forschung im Bereich der digitalen Medizin weiter auszubauen und die Entwicklung von Digital-Health-Anwendungen voranzutreiben. Die Echtzeitanalyse von Gesundheitsdaten und kunstliche Intelligenz sollen Patienten fruher uber mogliche Gesundheitsrisiken aufklaren und geeignete vorbeugende Manahmen ermoglichen.Das neu gegrundete Institut wird gemeinsam geleitet von HPI-Professor und Leiter des HPI Digital Health Centers, Erwin Bottinger, und Joel Dudley, PhD, Associate Professor of Genetics and Genomics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai und Director for Mount Sinai's Institute for Next Generation Healthcare. Die Hasso Plattner Stiftung stellt in den nachsten funf Jahren 15 Millionen US-Dollar fur das HPIMS bereit."Wir wissen, dass wir mit kunstlicher Intelligenz und der Echtzeitanalyse von umfassenden Gesundheitsdaten aus elektronischen Patientenakten, Sensortechnologien, und Genomanalysen, Leben retten, Krankheit verhindern, und die Gesundheit unserer Mitmenschen verbessern konnen. Mit dem zukunftsweisenden HPI-Mount Sinai Digital Health Projekt werden das Mount Sinai Health System und das Hasso Plattner Institute gemeinsam bahnbrechende digitale Gesundheitsdienste mit Burgern und Burgerinnen im Mittelpunkt schaffen", so HPI-Professor und Leiter des Digital Health Centers, Erwin Bottinger."Mit der Kooperation werden wir am Mount Sinai eine neue Digital-Health-Ara einleiten, die den Bereich der Prazisionsmedizin vorantreibt", sagt Dennis S. Charney, MD, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Dean, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and President for Academic Affairs, Mount Sinai Health System. "Wenn wir unser Fachwissen und unsere Expertise zusammenfuhren, sind Mount Sinai und HPI in der Lage, Losungen zu finden, die das Gesundheitswesen und die Wissenschaft revolutionieren und die Gesundheit auf nationaler und globaler Ebene verbessern.""Die Forscher der Icahn School of Medicine am Mount Sinai und des Hasso-Plattner-Instituts haben bahnbrechende Arbeiten in den Bereichen Genomdiagnostik, Prazisionsmedizin, digitale Gesundheit, biomedizinische Datenwissenschaft, kunstliche Intelligenz und Informationstechnologie veroffentlicht", so Dr. Joel Dudley, PhD, Associate Professor of Genetics and Genomics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Director for Mount Sinai's Institute for Next Generation Healthcare und Co-Director des neu gegrundeten HPIMS. "Im neuen Digital-Health-Institut konnen wir unsere Expertise bundeln und in einem der groten und sozial und wirtschaftlich vielfaltigsten Gesundheitssysteme des Landes umfassend einzusetzen. Wir sind uberzeugt, dass das HPIMS bei der Umsetzung der Versprechen der digitalen Medizin eine Vorreiterposition einnehmen wird."Kurzprofil Hasso-Plattner-InstitutDas Hasso-Plattner-Institut (HPI) in Potsdam ist Deutschlands universitares Exzellenz-Zentrum fur Digital Engineering (https://hpi.de). Mit dem Bachelorstudiengang "IT-Systems Engineering" bietet die gemeinsame Digital-Engineering-Fakultat des HPI und der Universitat Potsdam ein deutschlandweit einmaliges und besonders praxisnahes ingenieurwissenschaftliches Informatikstudium an, das von derzeit rund 500 Studierenden genutzt wird. In den drei Masterstudiengangen "IT-Systems Engineering", "Digital Health" und "Data Engineering" konnen darauf aufbauend eigene Forschungsschwerpunkte gesetzt werden. Bei den CHE-Hochschulrankings belegt das HPI stets Spitzenplatze. Die HPI School of Design Thinking, Europas erste Innovationsschule fur Studenten nach dem Vorbild der Stanforder d.school, bietet jahrlich 240 Platze fur ein Zusatzstudium an. Derzeit sind am HPI 14 Professoren und uber 50 weitere Gastprofessoren, Lehrbeauftragte und Dozenten tatig. Es betreibt exzellente universitare Forschung - in seinen IT-Fachgebieten, aber auch in der HPI Research School fur Doktoranden mit ihren Forschungsauenstellen in Kapstadt, Haifa und Nanjing. Schwerpunkt der HPI-Lehre und -Forschung sind die Grundlagen und Anwendungen groer, hoch komplexer und vernetzter IT-Systeme. Hinzu kommt das Entwickeln und Erforschen nutzerorientierter Innovationen fur alle Lebensbereiche.Kurzprofil Mount Sinai Health SystemDas Mount Sinai Health System ist der grote Anbieter einer integrierten Versorgung in New York City. Es umfasst acht Krankenhauser, eine fuhrende medizinische Hochschule und verfugt uber ein groes Netzwerk ambulanter OP-Praxen, das sich uber ganz New York erstreckt. Die Vision des Mount Sinai Health System ist es, landesweit die sicherste Pflege, hochste Qualitat, hochste Zufriedenheit, den besten Zugang und das beste Kosten-Nutzen-Verhaltnis anzubieten. Zum Mount Sinai Health System zahlen etwa 7.480 Haus- und Facharzte, 11 ambulante chirurgische Zentren, mehr als 410 ambulante OP-Praxen in den funf Bezirken New York City, Westchester, Long Island und Florida und 31 angeschlossene Community Health Centers. Die Icahn School of Medicine wurde mehrfach ausgezeichnet und belegt in fuhrenden Rankings regelmaig Spitzenplatze. Weitere Informationen unter: https://www.mountsinai.org/OTS: HPI Hasso-Plattner-Institut newsroom: http://www.presseportal.de/nr/22537 newsroom via RSS: http://www.presseportal.de/rss/pm_22537.rss2Pressekontakt: presse@hpi.de Christiane Rosenbach, Tel. 0331 5509-119, christiane.rosenbach@hpi.de und Friederike Treuer, Tel. 0331 5509-177, friederike.treuer@hpi.de VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / December 19, 2018 / PowerBand Solutions Inc. (TSXV: PBX) (OTCQB: PWWBF) (Frankfurt: 1ZVA) ("PowerBand" or the "Company"), announces that it has accepted the resignation of Robert Kiesman from the Company's Board of Directors, effective immediately. Mike Moen, President and COO, and Kelly Jennings, CEO, would like to acknowledge Mr. Kiesman for his contributions and wish him the best with his future endeavours. The Company would also like to announce that it will be appointing a representative from the Hunt Automotive Group to the Board of Directors in the New Year. ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF POWERBAND SOLUTIONS INC.: "Kelly Jennings" Chief Executive Officer 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 release. About PowerBand Solutions Inc. PowerBand Solutions Inc. is a technology provider listed on the TSX Venture Exchange that is developing solutions for automotive and other industries that drive efficiency and transparency in the marketplace. PowerBand has developed and commercialized a leading-edge online auction platform that increases revenues and profit margins for its automotive dealership, Original Equipment Manufacturer, commercial fleet and rental company customers. PowerBand's remarketing platform, the PowerBand Exchange, incorporates the industry's latest auction technologies, inventory management, market intelligence, and appraisal processes. For further information, please contact: Richard Goldman, VP Corporate Development 1-866-768-7653 rgoldman@powerbandsolutions.com FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS This news release contains forward-looking statements relating to the Company and other statements that are not historical facts. Forward-looking statements are often identified by terms such as "will", "may", "should", "anticipate", "expects" and similar expressions. All statements other than statements of historical fact, included in this release, including, without limitation, statements regarding future plans and objectives of the Company, are forward looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate and actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. The reader is cautioned that assumptions used in the preparation of any forward-looking information may prove to be incorrect. Events or circumstances may cause actual results to differ materially from those predicted, as a result of numerous known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors, many of which are beyond the control of the Company. As a result, we cannot guarantee that any forward-looking statement will materialize and the reader is cautioned not to place undue reliance on any forward-looking information. Such information, although considered reasonable by management at the time of preparation, may prove to be incorrect and actual results may differ materially from those anticipated. Forward-looking statements contained in this news release are expressly qualified by this cautionary statement. The forward-looking statements contained in this news release are made as at the date of this news release, and the Company does not undertake any obligation to update publicly or to revise any of the included forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as expressly required by Canadian securities law. 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 news release. SOURCE: PowerBand Solutions Inc. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/530941/PowerBand-Announces-Board-Resignation NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO THE UNITED STATES OR FOR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / December 19, 2018 / Midnight Sun Mining Corp. (the "Company" or "Midnight Sun") (TSX-V: MMA) has completed the final tranche of its previously announced non-brokered private placement by issuing 1,301,000 units (the "Units") at a price of $0.12 per Unit for gross proceeds of $156,120. Each Unit consists of one common share ("Common Share") in the capital of the Company and one Common Share purchase warrant ("Warrant"). Each Warrant entitles the holder to purchase one Common Share of the Company for a period of twelve months from closing, at an exercise price of $0.20. All securities issued pursuant to this tranche, including the Common Shares underlying the Warrants, are subject to a statutory hold period which expires on April 19, 2019. In total, the Company issued 8,334,000 Units for gross proceeds of $1,000,080. Finder's fees of $45,868.80 will be paid in cash and 382,240 Finder's Warrants will be issued in connection with the Private Placement. In total, Insiders of the Company purchased 1,826,000 Units for gross proceeds of $219,120. The net proceeds of this offering will be used by the Company to fund further exploration work on its Zambian mineral properties as well as general working capital. The completion of this private placement remains subject to final acceptance by the TSX Venture Exchange. ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF MIDNIGHT SUN MINING CORP. Brett A. Richards - President and Chief Executive Officer For Further Information Contact: Al Fabbro Lead Director Tel: +1 604 351 8850 NEITHER THE TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE NOR ITS REGULATION SERVICES PROVIDER (AS THAT TERM IS DEFINED IN THE POLICIES OF THE TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE) ACCEPTS RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ADEQUACY OR ACCURACY OF THIS NEW RELEASE. These securities being offered have not been, and 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 in the United States or to, or for the benefit of, U.S. persons (as defined in Regulation S under the U.S. Securities Act) absent U.S. registration or an applicable exemption from the U.S. registration requirements. This release does not constitute an offer for sale of securities in the United States. SOURCE: Midnight Sun Mining Corp. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/530935/Midnight-Sun-Mining-Completes-Private-Placement First results received from drilling on DOF Extension and Okanihova Lineament DOF Co-Cu mineralization confirmed at DOF East target in two parallel horizons with intercepts up to 0.14% Co and 0.59% Cu over 1.03 meters Significant vanadium mineralization associated with DOF Co-Cu mineralization, intercepts of 0.21% V2O5 over 2.76 meters and 0.15% V2O5 over 4.82 meters First drill fence in central Okanihova Lineament exhibits wide intersections of copper mineralization with 0.51% Cu over 15 meters and a peak intercept of 5.44% Cu over 1 meter Results from additional 17 holes from Okanihova Lineament, DOF West and three additional targets pending First phase drilling program continues mid-January 2019 New targets identified from recently conducted IP and soil surveys over Western Magnetic Anomaly HALIFAX, NS / ACCESSWIRE / December 19, 2018 / Namibia Critical Metals Inc. ("Namibia Critical Metals" or the "Company" or "NMI") (TSXV:NMI) today announced first results from drilling on the Kunene Cobalt-Copper Project in northern Namibia (Figure 1). Drill results are reported from two diamond core holes on the Dolomite Ore Formation ("DOF") Extension target (Table 1). These holes have confirmed the continuation of stratabound Co-Cu mineralization, similar to Celsius Resources' Opuwo Co-Cu-Zn deposit on to Namibia Critical Metals' land holdings. In addition to the Co-Cu horizons, two vanadium-enriched horizons have been intersected within the same stratigraphic sequence. Results from the first three reverse circulation holes on the Okanihova Central Target have confirmed widespread copper mineralization in the sedimentary strata in the hanging wall of the Okanihova lineament (Table 2). A total of six diamond drill holes and fifteen reverse circulation holes have been completed on various targets. Results from 17 holes remain pending. Drilling has been suspended for the Christmas break and will resume again mid-January once all results have been received and evaluated. Following evaluation of the SkyTEM airborne electromagnetic ("EM") survey, an induced polarization ("IP") survey was carried out over selected areas of the Western Magnetic This survey detected three chargeability anomalies which coincide with previously reported cobalt soil anomalies which extend for over seven kilometers. A fourth chargeability anomaly coincides with an EM target interpreted to be contact related. These new targets will be further evaluated for drilling in 2019. Don Burton, President of Namibia Critical Metals, stated, "Our objective in this first phase of drilling was to test as many accessible priority target areas as rapidly as possible. The results from the two holes on the DOF Extension have confirmed that the mineralizing system which hosts the Opuwo Co-Cu-Zn deposit extends on to Namibia Critical Metals' ground. Furthermore we have intersected two unexpected vanadium horizons and the DOF Extension has been interpreted over a strike length of 20 kilometers. The widespread copper and anomalous cobalt mineralization along the Okanihova Lineament are clearly related to a major structural feature which extends for over 15 kilometers and points to a very large mineralizing system which we are now focused on. The cobalt soil anomaly and associated IP targets within the Western Magnetic Anomaly represent a significant developing target over a strike length of seven kilometers." Figure 1 - Kunene Co-Cu Project Area showing drilling progress to date. Cobalt soil anomalies are shown on SkyTEM airborne EM conductivity layer (Con13 = approximately 70 vertical meter depth) and satellite topography image. (To view the full-size image, please click here) DOF Extension Target (DOF East) Holes DODD-002 and DODD-005 intersected the DOF on the same section at vertical depths of 15 meters and 100 meters respectively (Table 1). The intercept from Hole DODD-002 was heavily oxidized and leached whereas the deeper hole intersected fresh bedrock with two intercepts of higher grade Co-Cu. *Width is down-the-hole length in meters. True widths cannot yet be determined with the available information. The objective of these first holes on the DOF Extension target was to confirm the stratigraphic position of the DOF on a single section on Namibia Critical Metals' ground. The diamond drill was then deployed to other targets. All aspects of the stratigraphic position of the intercepts of Co-Cu mineralization are consistent with the DOF mineralization which hosts Celsius Resources' Opuwo Co-Cu-Zn deposit. Cobalt and copper grades are comparable, however zinc mineralization is not significant in the NMI drill holes. The high Cu/Zn and Co/Zn ratios compared to the DOF intersections at the Opuwo deposit are interpreted as an indication of proximity to the source(s) of the extensive mineralizing system. Further exploration will therefore focus on the identification of potential feeder systems on the property. The Co-Cu mineralized horizons at the DOF East target are also associated with overlying stratabound vanadium mineralization (V1 and V2 in Table 1). This significant vanadium mineralisation will be followed in 2019 with further mapping and drilling. Okanihova Central Target Three holes have been completed on a single drill fence which was designed to test the broad copper-cobalt soil anomaly which runs parallel to the Okanihova Lineament and to determine the attitude of the structural contact and its controls on mineralization. All three holes intersected widespread copper mineralization in the structural hanging wall with anomalous levels of cobalt (Table 2). Mineralization is believed to be related to a combination of metalliferous fluids that have channeled along the Okanihova Lineament and deposited in favourable reductant horizons, and with remobilization giving rise to higher grade vein-like structures. Cobalt mineralization occurs as two types: (1) wide halos of low grade cobalt anomalism associated with the main, broad-scale copper mineralisation, and (2) in confined shale-siltstone horizons as in-principle cobalt-only mineralisation. An intercept of the cobalt shale was noted in the foot wall of hole OKRC001 at a down-hole depth of 230 m (513 ppm Co over 3 meters). The potential continuation of the Co horizon and its controlling factors will be explored by systematic drill fences across the Okanihova Lineament. The Okanihova Lineament has a strike length of 15 kilometers and the Okanihova Central Target is characterized by strong Cu-Co soil anomalies over a strike length of seven kilometers trending northeast into Malachite Mountain. The primary target along this structure is to vector in on a higher grade source (i.e. stockwork or feeder zone) but there is now also potential for a low grade, high tonnage copper deposit. A number of widely spaced drill fences have been laid out to test the length of the target. *Width is down-the-hole length in meters. True widths cannot yet be determined with the available information. Western Magnetic Anomaly The Western Magnetic Anomaly is now believed to be related to a large intrusive body of unknown origin but which remains of interest due to its central position with respect to the various mineralized horizons and structures, and the large cobalt soil anomaly which covers much of its northern extent (Figure 2). The airborne EM survey failed to detect any significant conductors within the body and it was decided to carry out a reconnaissance induced polarization ("IP") survey along four lines covering the contacts and the cobalt soil anomaly. This survey has delineated four chargeability anomalies of interest. Of particular interest are the anomalies within the interpreted intrusive body that coincide with the boundaries of the cobalt anomaly. Geophysical interpretations have suggested these anomalies may be related to zones of disseminated sulphide. The southernmost chargeability anomaly coincides with an airborne EM anomaly and is interpreted to be sulphide-related along a contact or fault zone. These represent new target areas to be incorporated into the 2019 drill planning. In order to further evaluate the targets, detailed soil sampling at 25 m sample spacing has been conducted (ICP results pending) along the IP lines. Additional IP surveys may be considered to better define the extent of the chargeability anomalies. The Opuwo Deposit The Opuwo deposit is under development by Celsius Resources Ltd. ("Celsius") and is the first primary cobalt discovery in Namibia. It has demonstrated the potential for this part of northern Namibia to become a significant cobalt district. Celsius has reported that the Opuwo deposit hosts a maiden JORC compliant resource of 72.0 million tonnes at a grade of 0.11% cobalt, 0.42% copper and 0.41% zinc in the Indicated category, and a further 40.5 million tonnes at a grade of 0.12% cobalt, 0.41% copper and 0.46% zinc in the Inferred category. It is noted that the mineralization on the Celsius property may not be indicative of mineralization that may be found on the Kunene project area held by Namibia Critical Metals. Celsius reported that it has commenced a pre-feasibility study on Opuwo, scheduled for completion in Q3, 2019, including investigation of identified value engineering and process optimisation opportunities and the incorporation of an updated mineral resource estimate (Celsius press release November 5, 2018). Figure 2 - Western Magnetic Anomaly interpretation and IP anomalies. Colour coded cobalt in soil anomalies thresholds same as for Figure 1. Chargeability anomalies labelled C1, C2, C3 and C4 with interpreted trends in purple. Upper image has SkyTEM conductivity layer Con13 for background. Note absence of EM responses within the interpreted intrusion. Lower image has SkyTEM analytic signal from magnetics. Bar scale is 7 km. (To view the full-size image, please click here) All drill hole analyses were carried out under strict QAQC protocols including the insertion of standards, blanks and duplicates. Sample preparation was carried out by Activation Laboratories (Windhoek, Namibia) and ICP analyses with appropriate acid digestions were carried out by Activation Laboratories (Ancaster, Canada). Donald M. Burton, P.Geo. and President of Namibia Critical Metals Inc., is the Company's Qualified Person and has reviewed and approved this press release. About Namibia Critical Metals Inc. Namibia Critical Metals Inc. holds a diversified portfolio of exploration and advanced stage projects in the country of Namibia focused on the development of sustainable and ethical sources of metals for the battery, electric vehicle and associated industries. The common shares of Namibia Critical Metals Inc. trade on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol "NMI". Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. For more information please contact - Namibia Critical Metals Inc. Don Burton, President Tel: +01 (902) 835-8760 Fax: +01 (902) 835-8761 Email: Info@NamibiaCMI.com Web site: www.NamibiaCriticalMetals.com The foregoing information may contain forward-looking information relating to the future performance of Namibia Rare Earths Inc. Forward-looking information, specifically, that concerning future performance, is subject to certain risks and uncertainties, and actual results may differ materially. These risks and uncertainties are detailed from time to time in the Company's filings with the appropriate securities commissions. -30- SOURCE: Namibia Critical Metals Inc. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/530905/Namibia-Critical-Metals-Drilling-Confirms-Cobalt-and-Copper-Mineralization-in-First-Two-Targets-at-Kunene GURUGRAM, India, December 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- It has been analyzed that in the coming 5 years, the private K-12 market shall witness an increased CAGR of close to 3% in terms of number of schools, reaching to be almost 600 by the end of 2022E. It is expected that more number of private players would enter the space with increasing numbers of tie-ups between the government universities. This shall be an emerging trend in Kuwait's K-12, Higher Education and E-learning Market Kuwait Education Market is in the growth stage experiencing rising enrollments and an increasing demand for high quality education. The market will be driven by the rising number of schooling populace, increasing number of scholarships to study abroad resulting in higher test preparation enrollment and a growing entry of international players offering a variety of courses in higher education. Increasing scholarships are expected to encourage more number of students to attempt the competitive tests, thereby increasing the demand of the services provided at test preparation centers. Private players entering the space with increasing number of tie-ups between the government universities and global players are further anticipated to boost the industry revenues due to increased enrollments to colleges in Kuwait. (Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/661352/Ken_Research_Logo.jpg ) There is a continuous emphasis by the government to enhance much needed vocational skills in Kuwaitis to replace the expat workforce. This is anticipated to expand the training and technical institutions, affecting the industry in a positive manner. The Ministry of Education allocated nearly KWD 2 billion in the 2016 annual budget for Kuwait's K-12 education. This is in line with its Integrated Education Reform Program (2011-2019) and the School Education Quality Improvement Project which are geared towards developing curriculum, improving learning outcomes, encouraging efficient teaching and refining the efficiency of education. These policies and budget are projected to develop and expand the K-12 education system. Currently, private K-12 schools in Kuwait provide education to over 40% of its students. The nature of the market is fragmented with various types of schools offering all types of curricula & fee range. In majority, it has been noticed that private schools are individually owned, hence leaving more room for large scale operators to take over. Ken Research in its latest study, "Kuwait Education Market Outlook to 2022 - by K-12 Education, Higher Education, E-Learning, Vocational Training, Teacher Training, Private Tutor and Test-Preparation Education Market" suggests that the demand for education services would continue to grow, registering a five year CAGR of close to 5% during 2017-2022. Keywords Kuwait Education Market Kuwait Education Ecosystem Kuwait K12 Education Market K12 Education Market Kuwait Higher Education Market Kuwait Test Preparation Market Kuwait E-Learning Market Kuwait Teacher Training Market Kuwait Vocational Training Market Kuwait Private Tutors Market Kuwait Education Major Catchment Areas Kuwait Education Regulatory Body Kuwait K-12 Education Industry K-12 Private Education Market Kuwait K-12 Private Enrollments Kuwait K-12 Private Schools in Kuwait K-12 Private Education Growth Trends K-12 Education Kuwait Trends Test Preparation Kuwait Trends Higher Education Kuwait Trends E-Learning Kuwait Trends Teacher Training Kuwait Major Companies K-12 Private Education Market Major Companies Test Preparation Market Kuwait K-12 Education Market Investment Model Challenges Kuwait Education Market Kuwait K-12 Customer Pain Points Kuwait K-12 Decision Making Parameters SWOT Kuwait Education Future Outlook Kuwait Education Key Segments Covered: - Market Segmentation for Kuwait K-12 Private Education Market Segmentation By Level of Education ( Kindergarten, Primary, Intermediate, Secondary ) Kindergarten, Primary, Intermediate, Secondary Market Segmentation By Gender (Male & Female) (Male & Female) Market Segmentation By Nationality (Kuwaiti & Non-Kuwaiti) (Kuwaiti & Non-Kuwaiti) Market Segmentation By School Type (Foreign & Arabic) - Market Segmentation for Kuwait Test Preparation Market Segmentation By Revenue on the Basis of Type of Test Taken (IELTS, TOEFL, GMAT, GRE, SAT) For more information on the research report, refer to below link: https://kenresearch.com/education-and-recruitment/kuwait-education-market-174405.html Time Period Captured in the Report: 2012-2017 - Historical Period 2018-2022 - Future Forecast Key Target Audience Private K-12 Schools Government Organizations Test Preparation Institutes Private Vocational Training Institutes International Schools International Colleges/Universities Global E-learning Companies Investors Companies Cited in the Report Companies Covered Main Players New English School Kuwait Kuwait International English School The English Academy Kuwait English School Kuwait National English School American United School American Creative Academy American International School of Kuwait American Academy for Girls The American School of Kuwait Fahaheel Watanieh Indian Private School Indian Community School Indian Public School Indian Educational School Private Schools United Indian School Kuwait University Public Authority for Applied Education and Training Kuwait Institute for Medical Specialization Gulf University for Science and Technology Arab Open University American University of Kuwait Kuwait Maastricht Business School Australian College of Kuwait International University Of Science And Technology Box Hill College Kuwait American College of Middle East American University of Medical sciences Kuwait Technical College College of Aviation Technology Algonquin College Public and Private Universities/Colleges Kuwait College of Science and Technology Abbasiya, Al Farwaniyah Home Tuitions, Salmiya Home Tutoring, Bnied Al Gar City Training Institute, Hawalli Al Tawoon Institute, Salmiya Tutorware Solutions Inc, Bayan Private Tutors After School Center, Salmiya Track Learning Solutions (Content based) Panacea InfoTech Pvt Ltd British Council Global Learning Systems Kuwait e-Learning center New Horizons Computer learning center (Content and technology based) Can Translate AIMS (Arab Information Management services) Xpert Learning Black board Learn by Black Board Inc Codea Technology Edufic Global Learning E-learning Human Soft Public Authority of Applied Education and Training Teacher Training Kuwait University Apachia Amideast, British Council, ILM Prep, Center for Continuing Education (AUK) Test Preparation Ivy Education Center Public Authority of Applied Education and Training Higher Institute for Theatrical Arts Higher Institute for Music Arts City Institute Universal Institute ICSA Vocational Education Continuing Education (Arab Open University) Related Reports by Ken Research: Saudi Arabia Education Industry Outlook to 2022 - By Higher Education, K-12 Education, E-Learning, Vocational Training and Test-Preparation Education The research report provides a comprehensive analysis on education sector focusing on segments such as K-12 Education sector, Higher education, Vocational and technical training, E-Learning and Test Prep Sector. Detailed comparative analysis of major players in education industry has also been provided. Various marketing analysis factors such as trends and developments and SWOT analysis are also added in the study. The future analysis of the overall Saudi Arabia Education Industry has also been discussed along with recommendations from analyst view. UAE Education Market Outlook to 2018 - Rising Demand for Private Schools, E-learning and ICT The report provides a comprehensive analysis of the industry covering aspects including market size in terms of revenues, enrollments, establishments and faculty-student ratio. The report also entails a detailed analysis of the market segmentation on the basis of K-12, higher education, technical and vocational training, test preparation, e-learning and teacher training and education by different categories on the basis of revenues and enrollments. The report provides the company profiles of the major players operating in the test preparation, technical-vocational training, teacher training and education, K-12, higher education and e-learning market in UAE. The report also highlights the major trends and developments of all the segments in UAE education industry over the years. Future analysis of the industry along with its various market segments is provided on the basis of revenues over the next five years. Brazil Education Market Outlook to 2020 - Driven by Rising Preferences for Higher Education and Innovations in Classroom Teaching The report provides a comprehensive analysis of the various aspects such as market size of Brazil Education market, K-12 market, pre-school education market, higher education market, test preparation market, teacher training and education market, vocational and technical education market as well as youth and adult education market. The report also covers market shares of major private players in higher education market of Brazil. Australia Education Market Forecast to 2020- Expanding Higher Education Segment and International Enrollments to Drive the Market The report provides a comprehensive analysis of the K-12, VET, higher education, test preparation, e-learning and private tutoring industry in Australia. The report covers market size and segmentation of overall education industry which is further segmented into K-12, higher education, vocational education and technical training, tutoring, ELICOS and e-learning which are explained independently. The report covers profiles of leading players (institutes/service providers) in different spaces. The potential and future outlook for education industry has also been discussed in the publication. The report provides detailed analysis of segments and sub segments, SWOT Analysis, Trends & Developments and major restraints and challenges within the education industry of Australia. The report also serves as a benchmark for existing players and every new player who wish to capitalize the market potential and investors who are looking forward to venture into the education industry in Australia. US Executive Education Programs Market By Type (Open and Customized Programs), By Universities (Private and State), By Mode of Delivery (Business Schools, Online, Foreign Collaborations) - Outlook to 2022 The report provides a comprehensive analysis of executive education programs market in the US. The report provides information on US Executive Education Programs market size (by revenue, by number of enrollments, number of programs), market segments (by open & customized programs, by type of courses, by universities and by mode of deliveries), US online executive education market, and competitive landscape of major players in the US Executive Education Programs market. The report also provides trends and developments in the market, key issues and challenges in the market, government initiatives for executive education in the US, Entry barriers in US Executive Education Programs market, SWOT analysis of the market and covering competitive landscape of major institutions including Harvard Business School, The Wharton School, MIT Sloan School of Management, Stanford Graduate School of Business, UCLA Anderson School of Business, Columbia Business School, Kellogg School of Management, University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Stephen M. Ross School of Business and Baruch College. The report concludes with market projection for future and analyst recommendations highlighting the major opportunities and cautions. Contact Us: Ken Research Ankur Gupta, Head Marketing & Communications Ankur@kenresearch.com +91-9015378249 Rocket launches and mortar shelling overnight. The fighting involved the eastern sector of the city. This morning the ceasefire seems to hold. Today the UN special representative intends to relaunch the talks between Houthi and pro-Saudi governments. At least 85,000 children under the age of five died under bombs or from malnutrition. About 14 million people are at risk of being hungry. Sana'a (AsiaNews / Agencies) - Sporadic clashes, rocket attacks and a trade of accusations between the parties have bloodied the first day of ceasefire in the port city of Hudaydah, for weeks the epicenter of the conflict in Yemen, which is by now a humanitarian tragedy. The truce - mediated by the UN to prevent a large-scale siege on the city - between the government troops supported by Riyadh and the Shiite Houthi rebels close to Iran lasted for a few hours, then staggered under artillery strikes. According to some eyewitness reports, intense rocket and mortar shells were launched yesterday evening. The fighting lasted about an hour and involved the eastern and southern sectors of the city, which is of strategic importance for the supply of food, medicines and humanitarian aid to a population exhausted by the war. The Houthi-controlled al-Masirah TV accuses the Saudi Arabian coalition of violating the truce by bombarding some strategic locations, including the sector east of the airport. Instead the coalition, through Emirates Wam news agency blamed the Shiite rebels for firing mortar and rockets against the eastern neighborhoods. The violence came at the end of a day of relative calm, in which it seemed that the truce could stand. Local sources add that even this morning there are no clashes. The UN-mediated Hudaydah ceasefire is the first significant step in the context of a bloody conflict that, from March 2015 to today, has recorded over 10 thousand deaths and at least 55 thousand injured. In reality, some independent bodies set the toll (between January 2016 and end of July 2018) at around 50,000 deaths. Given that it only concerns the combatants in the field, not the so-called "indirect victims" (civilians) for malnutrition or cholera. Among the first victims there are the children, who died because of the bombs or a very serious malnutrition: at least 85 thousand children under the age of five, according to various international humanitarian agencies. Recently UN experts have said that at least 14 million people are at risk of starvation. Today the UN special representative intends to relaunch the peace talks between the parties, initiating online discussions between the two warring factions. The goal is a withdrawal of troops from the city and the three main ports of the country with a redeployment of troops on the field, according to the agreement reached last week in the context of peace talks - the first in two years - promoted in Sweden. A leading customer intelligence company, Infiniti Research, has announced the completion of their latest article on the best customer retention strategies to implement this season. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20181219005425/en/ Best customer retention strategies for businesses. (Graphic: Business Wire) Amidst the cut-throat competition, customers have become the deciding factor for businesses. Companies that can retain their customers better have higher chances of gaining success. Customer retention is much easier and economical than acquiring customers. Therefore, companies must incorporate the best customer retention strategies to prevent losing their valuable customers to the competition. "In the current market scenario, businesses need to tailor their approach towards each individual customer and determine the most appealing offer for them depending upon their purchase history to sustain themselves in the market," says a customer intelligence expert from Infiniti Research. Choosing the right customer intelligence company that meets your every requirement is a tumultuous task for companies. We at Infiniti Research, understand this conundrum and have made a name for ourselves when it comes to offering unique customer retention strategies that can meet the varied requirements of businesses. Request a free proposal today! Best customer retention strategies for businesses: Create customer delight experiences Companies need to experiment with their initiatives to retain their customers. Such initiatives can be simple and low cost, such as finding milestones in customer relationship and celebrating them with rewards. Such small gestures help in improving the customer relationship and offsetting the cost of the product many times over. Want to devise a few effective customer retention strategies for your business? Consult with our experts today! Follow up on customer interactions After sale services have become an integral part of customer retention strategies in recent times. Companies need to reach out to their customers even after the issue with the product/service is resolved. This makes customers' feel important to the business and helps in enhancing their loyalty towards the brand. Still wondering how to maintain conversations with customers after sales? Get in touch with us to access our portfolio of solutions. Educate the customers With the introduction of new innovations in the market, products and services might become a bit complicated for the customers to use. Therefore, it is in the benefit of companies to educate their customers regarding the products/services they are offering. This will not only increase the sales for businesses but will also help in retaining customers for the longer period of time as customers tend to value brands that give them helpful recommendations and information. To access the complete list of customer retention strategies, visit the full article here! About Infiniti Research Established in 2003, Infiniti Research is a leading market intelligence company providing smart solutions to address your business challenges. Infiniti Research studies markets in more than 100 countries to help analyze competitive activity, see beyond market disruptions, and develop intelligent business strategies. To know more, visit: https://www.infinitiresearch.com/about-us View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20181219005425/en/ Contacts: Infiniti Research Anirban Choudhury Marketing Manager US: +1 844 778 0600 UK: +44 203 893 3400 https://www.infinitiresearch.com/contact-us Founders of Home Invest - Nate Armstrong and Dragan Berger Aim to Motivate Students to Pursue Academic Excellence; They Believe a Post-secondary Education is Vital to Long-term Professional Success and is Instrumental to Personal Growth CHICAGO, IL / ACCESSWIRE / December 19, 2018 / Home Invest is proud to announce Emma Lipkowski, Carina Truong, and Adeline Sopha as the recipients of the $1,500 academic scholarships for post-secondary students. All three individuals wish to cultivate positive change in their community and utilize their knowledge and expertise to help others. Nate Armstrong believes that obtaining a higher education is often the first step in making a difference. The Home Invest Scholarship Program was implemented to help students achieve financial freedom. With the rising cost of tuition, obtaining formal education can be a difficult task. Both Nate Armstrong and Dragan Berger stress the importance of a post-secondary education to achieving future career objectives. They encourage students to take every experience as a learning opportunity and a source of motivation. To learn more about Nate Armstrong and Home Invest, please visit https://www.homeinvest.com/ About Home Invest Nate Armstrong is an experienced entrepreneur and co-founder of Home Invest - a real estate investment company based out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Both Nate Armstrong and Dragan Berger aim to simplify the investment process by helping their clients navigate the market. Home Invest is the first online platform that aids individuals in securing a passive income and allows one to run their next renovation from the comfort of their laptop. Ultimately, their experienced advisors help individuals develop a personalized investment strategy in order to reach their long-term financial objectives. For more information, please contact: Nate Armstrong Founder of Home Invest nate@homeinvest.com SOURCE: Home Invest View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/530974/Home-Invest-Announces-Academic-Scholarship-Recipients LONDON, Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Virgin Holidays launches online platform that gives holiday recommendations based on current trending social media posts The Trending Travel Guide updates daily with the most talked about bars, restaurants and attractions in top holiday destinations, making missing out on the hottest hang-outs a thing of the past Brits can check out the first of its kind platform from today to avoid relying on outdated guidebooks and dodgy reviews - https://trending.virginholidays.co.uk/ Virgin Holidays launches the Trending Travel Guide - a digital platform that updates daily to give real-time holiday recommendations. By analysing an astonishing 25 million social media interactions, the data-driven guide brings the most popular bars, restaurants and attractions to the top of its online hotlist. As the popularity of guidebooks wanes and social media increasingly dictates travel choices, the digital platform enables today's travellers to make the most of their holiday and visit the most-Insta-worthy hang-outs. The tool will enable travelers to get even more out of their holiday and avoid missing out on key experiences later. Tracking social media conversations for hundreds of the most popular attractions in New York City, Orlando and Las Vegas, the high-tech platform offers a multidimensional guide for forward thinking travellers. The Trending Travel Guide also features comprehensive blogs and reviews from local travel writers and influencers, written exclusively for Virgin Holidays. These expert contributors gather special insight and insider tips to help travellers squeeze the most out of their holiday experience. Joe Thompson, Managing Director at Virgin Holidays said: "The world is a playground full of countless new recipes to try, pools to dive into and adventures to be shared. We want our customers to have incredible new experiences every time they go on holiday. The Trending Travel Guide has been developed to help people discover new and exciting experiences, by harnessing the power of social media. At Virgin Holidays, we believe in living life to the full and the Trending Travel Guide is here to put the most-talked about itinerary items on travellers' radars - all in one place." Virgin Holidays' new digital platform harnesses the power of sophisticated social listening technology, Crimson Hexagon, to seamlessly analyse tens of thousands of social posts and deliver up-to-the-minute travel tips based on the most Instagram-worthy places. For more information, visit the Trending Travel Guide at https://trending.virginholidays.co.uk/ LONDON, December 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- But what is this Spanish festive favourite and how can UK players get involved? The world's richest lottery, El Gordo is celebrating a massive prize pool this year - 2.38 billion - and it's not just Spanish players that could be in with a chance of winning. (Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/750902/Lottoland_Logo.jpg ) At Lottoland this Christmas, Brits will have the opportunity to get in on the action by betting on the outcome of the Spanish Lottery, which has a 1 in 7 chance of taking home one of its life changing prizes. Nigel Birrell, CEO of Lottoland, said: "Every year at Christmas, friends and family from all over Spain gather together to play El Gordo - which is now one of the longest running lotteries in the world and a long-standing festive tradition. "This lottery is well known for bringing groups of people together as they join forces to buy tickets and gather to watch the draw unfold, looking out for those special numbers that will make it an unforgettable Christmas. We're so excited that Lottoland players will be able to share in the tradition this year." The top El Gordo prize on offer - also known as 'the fat one' - comes in at 680 million this year, and is shared between a group of winning numbers, rather than just one lucky ticket holder. Due to the amount of people taking part in the draw, numbers are repeated up to 170 times - that means if an individual does win El Gordo, they will be sharing their prize with at least 169 others. Friends and family therefore often play together so that if they win, they all share the prize pool as a group. Nigel added: "Prizes like this certainly don't come around very often but with 1800 numbers being picked and a 1-in-7 chance of winning, we really hope that one or more of our Lottoland players receive an extra special gift this Christmas." The Spanish El Gordo Lottery draw will take place on the 22nd December from 8am (GMT), and players wishing to take part can bet on the draw at http://www.lottoland.com. About Lottoland Lottoland has grown rapidly to become a world leader in online lotto. Innovation, coupled with the freedom to offer players a unique and enhanced lottery experience, has been key to the company's success. In June 2018, Lottoland paid out 90 million to one lucky winner in Germany - this win has been confirmed by Guinness World Records as the Largest online gambling payout. This is also the biggest payout for Lottoland to date. The Gibraltar-based business is active in 13 markets, has over 350 employees, and more than 8 million customers worldwide. Lottoland is licensed and regulated by the Government of Gibraltar, the UK Gambling Commission, the Republic of Ireland National Excise License Office, the Agenzia delle Dogane e dei Monopoli in Italy and the Northern Territory's Racing Commission in Australia. Electro-thermal energy storage system incubated at X, Alphabet's Moonshot Factory, collects and stores inexpensive and abundant energy from the grid and dispatches it as electricity on demand BOSTON, Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Malta Inc, a pioneer in electro-thermal energy storage, today announced it has raised $26M in a Series A round of funding led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures with participation from other investors including Concord New Energy Group and Alfa Laval. Malta, which started as "Project Malta" at X, Alphabet's Moonshot Factory , is now an independent company outside of Alphabet called "Malta Inc". "Our investors share our vision to create a scalable storage solution that will facilitate further expansion of renewable energy while improving grid stability and resilience across the globe. Beyond capital investment, they are truly partnering with us to build a first-of-a-kind product. We appreciate their confidence in our strategy and in our team's ability to execute on it," said Ramya Swaminathan, CEO of Malta Inc. The Malta energy storage system stores energy in the form of a thermal differential between hot and cold storage media. It is based on well-established principles in thermodynamics for a system that stores electricity as heat in high temperature molten salt and cold in a low temperature antifreeze liquid. While incubated at X, Alphabet's Moonshot Factory, the project underwent a rigorous evaluation and de-risking process. Malta Inc will work in collaboration with industry partners to turn the detailed designs developed and refined at X into industrial-grade machinery for its first pilot system. Malta's system can store electricity for days or even weeks, until it's needed. The electricity can come from any source (i.e. wind, sun, or fossil fuels) in any location. Malta has the potential to make existing capital investments in both fossil and renewable generation more productive while dramatically improving power grid stability and resilience. "A lack of affordable, reliable grid-scale energy storage is currently limiting the shift to renewable energy. Malta's technology gives us a shot at storing all the renewable energy we create cheaply and reliably. With X having done our part to bring Malta's technology as far as we can take it, we're excited to hand the baton to the Malta team for the next phase of product development and deployment," said Raj Apte, PhD, Science Adviser at X, the Moonshot Factory. "Solving the intermittency problem of renewable energy is a critical part of delivering inexpensive and reliable clean energy, which is why storage is an important area of investment for BEV," said Carmichael Roberts of Breakthrough Energy Ventures. "Malta's energy storage system is a different and promising approach from conventional batteries, using existing components and inexpensive resources to store energy as heat - and that makes the system cost-effective to scale. We're also excited about this investor syndicate, pooling our unique resources to bring this technology to market." "With the rise in electricity being generated from renewable resources, the demand for energy storage has become higher, and innovation in energy storage technology will become critical for using clean energy effectively. Malta's energy storage technology can be widely applied to various energy storage markets such as grid peak load shifting, auxiliary services, distributed energy resources, business and industrial parks, and more, with considerable development potential. Our investment in Malta Inc. has strategic significance for the further development of our energy project investment operations and technical services business line and benefits the interests of our company and shareholders as a whole," said Mr. Liu Shunxing, the Chairman of Concord New Energy Group. "We believe that Malta is a very interesting initiative, with great potential," says Susanne Pahlen Aklundh, President of Alfa Laval's Energy Division. "We will bring our unique expertise within heat transfer technology, including design and production of heat exchangers, to the invaluable knowledge and resources within the group of investors in Malta Inc. We are excited to partner with them to bring this innovative new approach in energy storage to the market." About Malta Inc Malta is a provider of industrial-grade, grid-scale energy storage solutions. The Malta system collects and stores inexpensive and abundant renewable and fossil energy, and dispatches it as needed to the grid to enable the affordable and reliable delivery of electricity on demand. Incubated at X, the Moonshot Factory (formerly Google [x]), and funded by leading venture capital and commercial power industry companies, Malta is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Visit www.maltainc.com . About Breakthrough Energy Ventures Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV) is a for-profit, investor-led fund created to accelerate the world's transition to clean energy. BEV has more than $1 billion in committed capital to fund scientific breakthroughs with the potential to deliver affordable, reliable clean energy. The fund prioritizes investments across the five grand challenges that contribute most to greenhouse gas emissions: electricity, transportation, agriculture, manufacturing and buildings. BEV was created by the Breakthrough Energy Coalition in 2016 and is backed by an investor group that includes many of the world's top business leaders. For more information visit www.b-t.energy/ventures/ About Concord New Energy Group Limited Concord New Energy Group Limited (CNE) is an integrated utility scale wind, solar, and energy storage project developer and operator. The company currently owns over 1,900 MW of operating capacity in China and the United States and is focused on developing, operating, and servicing energy projects that can help transition the world into a cleaner energy future. CNE was formerly known as China WindPower Group Limited and is listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange under stock symbol 0182. More information can be found at www.cnegroup.com/en Washington, D.C.--(Newsfile Corp. - December 19, 2018) - The Securities and Exchange Commission voted today to approve the 2019 budget of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) and the related annual accounting support fee. The 2019 PCAOB budget totals $273.7 million. The accounting support fee totals $262.9 million, of which $228.5 million will be assessed on public companies and $34.4 million will be assessed on broker-dealers. The accounting support fee approximates the PCAOB's annual budget, with any differences attributable to certain timing differences, adjustments to the working capital reserve, and the potential underspending from the prior year budget being carried forward into the accounting support fee calculation. "The PCAOB plays a key role in our capital markets through the oversight of the auditors of public companies and broker-dealers registered with the SEC," said SEC Chairman Jay Clayton. "We should all recognize that these important PCAOB responsibilities are a means to a fundamental end - reliable, consistent, and meaningful financial reporting and high audit quality. I am appreciative of the PCAOB's continued commitment to use their resources effectively, for enhancing the quality of audit services and evaluating whether any changes are needed to its program and operations." The PCAOB's 2019 budget represents an increase of approximately five percent from its 2018 budget of $259.9 million. The 2019 accounting support fee of $262.9 million is approximately 12 percent higher than the 2018 accounting support fee of $235.3 million. # # # FACT SHEET Public Company Accounting Oversight Board 2019 Budget and Accounting Support Fee Dec. 19, 2018 Highlights On Nov. 15, 2018, the PCAOB adopted its 2019 budget and its strategic plan for 2018-2022, including: A total budget of $273.7 million. An accounting support fee of $262.9 million, allocated as follows: $228.5 million to be assessed on issuers; and $34.4 million to be assessed on registered broker-dealers. The PCAOB's 2019 budget represents an increase of approximately five percent from its 2018 budget of $259.9 million. The 2019 budget will be funded primarily by the 2019 accounting support fee of $262.9 million, which is approximately 12 percent higher than the 2018 Commission-approved accounting support fee of $235.3 million. The increase in the accounting support fee relative to the increase in the budget primarily reflects the fact that there will be an increase to the working capital reserve for the first five months of 2020. The working capital reserve is established to cover the PCAOB's estimated expenditures in the first five months of its fiscal year due to the timing to complete the billings and collections of the accounting support fee. Background The PCAOB oversees the audits and auditors of the financial statements that are filed by issuers and registered broker-dealers. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which established the PCAOB, provides the Commission with oversight responsibility over the PCAOB. This includes reviewing and approving the PCAOB's budget and accounting support fee annually. Under Section 109 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the PCAOB is required to establish, with the approval of the Commission, a reasonable accounting support fee to fund its operations. The fee is assessed annually on issuers and registered broker-dealers. Consideration of the budget for approval is one of the many ways in which the Commission exercises its oversight responsibilities of the PCAOB. What's Next? The PCAOB will proceed with issuing invoices to issuers and registered broker-dealers using the allocation above in accordance with the PCAOB's funding rules. Disclosure made according to the requirements of Article 14 of the law of 2 May 2007 Regulatory News: Ontex Group NV ("Ontex") discloses the notification of significant shareholdings that it has received according to the Belgian Law of 2 May 2007 on the disclosure of significant shareholdings in listed companies. On 17 December 2018, Harris Associates L.P. notified Ontex that it had, as a result of sales of shares, crossed below the threshold of 3.00% of the total number of voting rights in Ontex. According to its obligation Ontex publishes the content of the notifications that it has received. Date of Notification: 17 December 2018 Date Threshold Crossed: 11 December 2018 Threshold Crossed: 3.00% Notification by: Harris Associates L.P. 1209 N Orange St, Wilmington, DE 19801, USA Denominator on the date of notification: 82,347,218 shares Voting rights and assimilated financial instruments: (A) Voting rights Previous notification After the transaction # voting rights # voting rights % of voting rights Holders of voting rights Linked to securities Not linked to securities Linked to securities Not linked to securities Harris Associates L.P. 4,116,500 2,456,560 2.98% Total 2,456,560 0 2.98% 0.00% (B) Equivalent financial instruments After the transaction Holders of equivalent financial instruments Type of financial instrument Expiration date Exercise period or date of voting rights that may be acquired if the instrument is exercised of voting rights Settlement TOTAL 0 0.00% # voting rights % of voting rights TOTAL (A B) 2,456,560 2.98% Chain of controlled entities through which the shareholding is effectively owned: Harris Associates L.P. ("Harris") is an indirect wholly-owned subsidiary of Natixis Investment Managers, L.P., which is an indirect subsidiary of Natixis Investment Managers, an international asset management group based in Paris, France. Natixis Investment Managers is owned by Natixis, a French investment banking and financial services firm. Natixis is principally owned by BPCE, France's second largest banking group. BPCE is owned by banks comprising two autonomous and complementary retail banking networks consisting of the Caisse d'Epargne regional savings banks and the Banque Populaire regional cooperative banks. Harris is an SEC registered investment adviser organized in the United States, which makes investments, including the Belgian holding at issue, on behalf of clients. Harris does not make investments in Belgian securities for its own account. Harris exercises voting rights for clients independently from its direct and indirect parent companies, including Natixis Investment Managers and its other subsidiaries. Additional information Harris Associates L.P. is the appointed investment manager to several accounts, which in aggregate hold the voting rights disclosed above. Harris Associates L.P. can exercise the voting rights at its discretion in the absence of specific instructions from the relevant undertaking of collective investments. Notifications of significant shareholdings to be made according to the Law of 2 May 2007 should be sent to: investorrelations@ontexglobal.com This notification will be posted on: http://www.ontexglobal.com/press-room About Ontex Ontex is a leading international provider of personal hygiene solutions, with expertise in baby care, feminine care and adult care. Ontex's innovative products are distributed in more than 110 countries through Ontex brands such as BBTips, BioBaby, Pompom, Bigfral, Canbebe, Canped, ID and Serenity, as well as leading retailer brands. Employing 11,000 passionate people all over the world, Ontex has a presence in 21 countries, with its headquarters in Aalst, Belgium. Ontex is part of the Bel20 and STOXX Europe 600. To keep up with the latest news, visit www.ontexglobal.com or follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20181219005464/en/ Contacts: PRESS ENQUIRIES Gaelle Vilatte +32 53 333 708 gaelle.vilatte@ontexglobal.com INVESTOR ENQUIRIES Philip Ludwig +32 53 333 730 investorrelations@ontexglobal.com Quantum Genomics (Euronext Growth - FR0011648971 - ALQGC), a biopharmaceutical company specializing in the development of a new drug class that directly targets the brain to treat resistant hypertension and heart failure, today announced that it will be presenting at the Biotech Showcase in San Francisco, CA, being held on January 7-9, 2019. Chief Executive Officer of Quantum Genomics, Jean-Philippe Milon, and the Management team, will be giving a presentation and meeting with investors and pharmaceutical companies. Event: Biotech Showcase Date Tuesday, January 8, 2019 Time: 3:30 pm PT Location: Hilton San Francisco Union Square, San Francisco, CA (Yosemite A) For investors attending the Biotech Showcase, please contact Quantum Genomics Investor Relations team to schedule a meeting with management at jgreen@edisongroup.com. About Quantum Genomics Quantum Genomics is a biopharmaceutical company specializing in the development of a new class of cardiovascular medications based on brain aminopeptidase A inhibition (BAPAI). Quantum Genomics is the only company in the world exploring this innovative approach that directly targets the brain. The company relies on its 20-plus years of basic and clinical research at some of the largest French laboratories: the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM), the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), the College de France, and Paris-Descartes University. The goal of Quantum Genomics is to develop innovative treatments for complicated, or even resistant, cases of hypertension (around 30% of patients have poor control of their condition or receive ineffective treatment) and for heart failure (one in two patients diagnosed with heart failure dies within five years). Based in Paris and New York, Quantum Genomics is listed on the Euronext Growth exchange in Paris (FR0011648971- ALQGC) and trades on the OTCQX Best Market in the United States (symbol: QNNTF). For more information, please visit www.quantum-genomics.com, or follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn Contact information Quantum Genomics Jean-Philippe Milon CEO +33 (0)1 85 34 77 70 | jean-philippe.milon@quantum-genomics.com Marc Karako CFO - Investor Relations +33 (0)1 85 34 77 70 | marc.karako@quantum-genomics.com So Bang (European Investor & Media Contact) Samuel Beaupain Media Relations and Scientific Communications +33 (0)6 88 48 48 02 | samuel@so-bang.fr Nathalie Boumendil Financial Communications +33 (0)6 85 82 41 95 | nathalie@so-bang.fr Edison Advisors (U.S. Investor Contact) LifeSci Public Relations (U.S. Media Contact) Joseph Green Investor Relations +1 (646) 653-7030 | jgreen@edisongroup.com Michael Tattory Media Relations and Scientific Communications +1 (646) 751-4362 | mtattory@lifescipublicrelations.com ------------------------ Copyright Actusnews Wire Receive by email the next press releases of the company by registering on www.actusnews.com, it's free Full and original release in PDF format:https://www.actusnews.com/documents_communiques/ACTUS-0-56367-qg-to-present-at-biotech-showcase-2019-ven.pdf The Global Mobility Risk Map, coupled with existing GardaWorld travel security services, provide organizations with additional tools to fulfill their duty of care MONTREAL, Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- GardaWorld, the largest privately-owned business solutions and security services company in the world, has launched the 2019 Global Mobility Risk Map, adding further depth to its global travel security services. Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/800595/Garda_World_Security_Corporation_GardaWorld_Enhances_Travel_Secu.jpg The development and launch of this new tool, which will assist organizations to fulfill their duty of care towards employees traveling abroad, was made possible in part by GardaWorld's Crisis24 analysts team, as well as its previously announced strategic alliance with IHS Markit, a global leader in country risk intelligence and forecasting. GardaWorld continues to strengthen its expertise in country risk assessments, crisis management and response to the benefit of its diverse clientele, while reinforcing its position as a global leader in the security sector. With the Global Mobility Risk Map, employers now have a comprehensive global view of all potential travel security risks at their fingertips, so that they can properly prepare and mitigate risks for their business travelers. This newest tool is part of GardaWorld's commitment and approach to duty of care-coined "Duty of Care 2.0". The company offers comprehensive travel security services that cover corporate travelers from the moment a trip is planned, to the moment they return home. "This Global Mobility Risk Map is backed by intelligence from our own Crisis24 team of analysts and IHS Markit. It is based on proven threat assessment, vetted and up-to-date incident data and geopolitical analysis," said Stephan Malvoisin, GardaWorld's Managing Director, Crisis24, Travel Security and Response. "Duty of care in today's complex world is a foremost priority for both private and public sector organizations whose people need to travel safely around the world. GardaWorld's objective is to provide organizations with the tools, services and support they need to fulfill that duty." GardaWorld 2019 Global Mobility Risk Map: garda.com/mobilityriskmap2019en The map highlights the key issues and most volatile areas to watch out for in 2019. It takes into account unrest in western countries due to widespread perceptions that politicians are failing to adequately address increasing economic and social inequalities; the continued threat of large-scale terrorist attacks worldwide and the rise of far-right incitement and violence in Europe and North America; the high risk of cyberattacks targeting both government and private sector services, such as health, telecommunication and transportation providers; an intensification of natural disasters as temperatures and sea levels continue to climb; and political unrest due to upcoming elections in Senegal, Ukraine, Afghanistan and India. GardaWorld's expertise in security-related intelligence, crisis management and response, as well as its comprehensive range of other security and protective services, make GardaWorld a true one-stop shop for securing people and assets across the globe. About GardaWorld GardaWorld is the world's largest privately-owned security services company, offering cash services, physical and specialized security solutions and, with the Crisis24 portal, the dissemination of vetted information related to international security. A partner of choice for private companies, governments, humanitarian organizations, and multinationals with personnel all over the world, GardaWorld employs more than 65,000 highly skilled, dedicated professionals who serve a diverse clientele in North America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East. In the complex world we live in, our reputation is based on the quality of our services, as well as the commitment and integrity of our people. For more information, visit www.garda.com. About GardaWorld's Crisis24 Crisis24 delivers reliable security information through a customizable dashboard, accessible at any time on garda.com. The portal provides security alerts and the latest news, as well as detailed country reports. Crisis24 also offers industry-specific security reports to help clients make better-informed decisions about the safety of their local workforce, their employees working abroad, and those on the move. For more information, visit www.garda.com/crisis24 GardaWorld Media Relations Team, +1 514 281-2811 x2700, media@garda.com by Anna Chiara Filice Ambrogio Bongiovanni teaches interreligious dialogue at the Urbaniana University and mission theology at the San Luigi campus of the Facolta Teologica dell'Italia Meridionale. In the last 30 years, Indias population almost doubled. Economic growth this year will be 7.7 per cent. The problem is that we cannot redistribute wealth because markets reduce people to the status of mere consumers. Rome (AsiaNews) - In India "the myth of open markets has not solved the problem of poverty," said Ambrogio Bongiovanni, a professor of interreligious and intercultural dialogue at the Pontifical Urban University (Urbaniana) in Rome and founder of the Saint Francis Xavier Movement, a lay association. Prof Bongiovanni lived in India for several years and been involved in South Asia for 25 years, doing research and working for the United Nations and the Industry Ministry. In that country he founded the Maitreya (friendship) Xaverian Charitable Society to help rescue vulnerable girls and victims of human trafficking and encourages dialogue between religions. Speaking to AsiaNews, he talked about the "market myth" which, in India as elsewhere, claims to have the magic recipe for reducing social divisions and underpinning societal democratisation. "I am not criticising the market per se, he said, but the market that turns into idolatry, making people serve the market rather than the market serve people. This is the real ethical dilemma: the market must serve human needs, not vice versa. As consumers we must keep the market afloat. We are people, related individuals, not mere consumers, or objects to be controlled by business. India has seen fast economic growth, driven above all by the service sector. At the same time, its population has almost doubled in about 30 years, from 700 million inhabitants in the 1990s to around 1.3 billion in 2018. At the end of this year, economic growth is expected to be 7.7. However, large segments of the population are not benefitting from development. At least 800 million people work in the agriculture, often employed by large landowners. Suicide has become a sad problem for debt-burdened farmers. For Prof Bongiovanni, "India is a great democracy, not only in terms of numbers but also conceptually. It defines itself as a 'secular country' in which secularism is not based not on the separation between state and religion, but views religions as the something that can contribute to society." However, the existence of a democracy "does not automatically mean that all problems are resolved, because there are obstacles to the process of democratisation that arise from the unique cultural complexity that characterises the country and which also represents its wealth." Indian society "has to deal with various forms of discrimination: caste, gender, patriarchy. The risk of communalism and inter-communal tensions, clashes between faith communities, has always existed." Moreover, the "gap between rich and poor is obvious, with a middle class in between that was once almost non-existent, but which today plays an important role, especially vis-a-vis the market." In 1991, "following a serious crisis, India was pushed to open up to international business. Previously, it was an almost self-sufficient state with stiff regulations and high tariffs. At that time, it was thought, under pressure from the IMF and the World Bank, that globalisation and free trade in goods would solve all the problems of poverty." Things turned out differently. "Certainly, open markets favoured the middle class, which has grown a lot in terms of income, and production has exploded. Since then growth is unremitting, as is the growth of large cities and expansion of infrastructures. However, environmental problems have also developed, and above all poverty has been radicalised." The reason, Prof Bongiovanni points out, "is that it fails to redistribute wealth. This is an ethical problem inherent in capitalism and liberalism, which leads to crises. Such a market treats people like objects and consumers, not as subjects. Unfortunately, consumers are king and the market is built around them." For this reason, it is no longer possible to claim that individual liberties come from the free market. "On the contrary, the free market is a system that in some ways dominates and controls democratic processes. It lacks an ethical focus. Take, for example, China, which has developed a free market under a Communist regime in which individual liberties are thwarted." In India these "differences are even more strident because it is a modernising country. On the one hand we see excellence in satellites, telecommunications, software, nuclear power, medicine"; on the other, more than 400 million people living below the poverty line. These problems are not the fault of the current government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. "They existed long before him and are found in all governments that buy into the market myth." We must not however "demonise the market as such. On the contrary, among Christians for example, we could ask ourselves how businesses can rethink the relationship with the economy, in light of what Pope Franciss says in Laudato si' in which he touches certain issues for the good of humanity as a whole." Ultimately, "I think we have to invest in ways to put capital to work for the good of the people." Commenting on the markets, Olivia Markham and Tom Holl, representing the Investment Manager noted: The Company's NAV decreased by 4.5% during the month of November (in GBP terms). November was a negative month for the mining and energy sectors as trade war concerns continued to weigh on global economic growth expectations. The US Treasury yield curve inverted during the month, with yields for some shorter-dated treasuries rising above those of some longer-dated ones. Importantly, however, the 10-year yield remained just above that of the 2-year. Inverting of the yield curve has been a reasonable predictor of an impending recession in the future. Market concerns also heightened around a potential faster-than-expected slowdown in China as economic indicators, such as manufacturing PMIs and loans data, continued to soften. Our base case is that China will successfully manage a gradual slowdown and it has been encouraging to see increased infrastructure spending coming through. Amidst this macroeconomic backdrop, mined commodity performance was relatively resilient. We believe this reflects supply and demand in the physical markets for mined commodities still being reasonably healthy. Base metals performed well, with copper, zinc and aluminium up by 3.2%, 4.1% and 1.2% respectively. The precious metals also performed positively, with gold rising by 0.3%, as broader equity market weakness in the first half of the month stoked 'safe-haven' buying. Having held up well so far in 2018, the bulk commodities were weak in November, with the iron ore (62% fe) price falling -13.9% for example. This appeared to reflect destocking by steel companies in response to declining margins and lower-than-expected winter production cuts. Whilst the move in iron ore was a sharp one, it's worth noting that the iron ore (62% fe) price has averaged $70/tonne this year which, for diversified miners with average costs of delivery of iron ore (62% fe) into China below $30/tonne still, indicates very strong margins. Within the energy market, the voracity of the oil price decline in October continued into November, with the price of Brent and West Texas Intermediate ('WTI') falling by 23.1% and 22.3% respectively, to finish the month at $58/bbl and $51/bbl respectively. The dramatic increase in oil market volatility was underlined by three days in which oil prices fell by over 6%, representing an unprecedented three standard deviation move. In terms of oil supply, despite Putin's comment at G20 that "an understanding for a cut" has been reached with Saudi Arabia, the market is awaiting the outcome of the OPEC meeting on 6th December, where a significant cut in output is required to rebalance the market in 2019. Elsewhere in the energy sector, merger & acquisition (M&A) activity continued to occur in November, with the announcement that Encana is acquiring Newfield Exploration in an all stock deal. In other news, voters in Colorado rejected a plan to force oil and gas development further away from residential and environmentally sensitive areas. This positive result is secured until 2020 when another vote will occur, although a long term sustainable solution may be agreed on before then. All data points in US dollar terms unless otherwise specified. Commodity price moves sourced from Thomson Reuters Datastream. Washington, D.C.--(Newsfile Corp. - December 19, 2018) - The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced charges against an additional 13 individuals and 10 companies for unlawfully selling securities of Woodbridge Group of Companies LLC to retail investors. Woodbridge collapsed into bankruptcy in December 2017 and the SEC previously charged the company, its owner and others with operating a $1.2 billion Ponzi scheme and charged five of the top Florida-based sales agents for securities and broker-dealer registration violations. The 13 individual defendants charged were among Woodbridge's top revenue producers, selling more than $350 million of its unregistered securities to more than 4,400 investors. According to the complaints, the defendants marketed Woodbridge's securities as a "safe" and "secure" investment and reaped millions of dollars in commissions on their sales even though they were not registered as, or associated with, registered broker-dealers. The SEC also alleges that defendant Jordan Goodman, a self-described "media influencer," touted Woodbridge without disclosing that he was paid to do so. "The SEC has now charged 18 of Woodbridge's highest-earning unregistered sales agents who sold more than $400 million of its securities to retail investors," said Eric I. Bustillo, Director of the SEC's Miami Regional Office. "Our continuing investigation of Woodbridge seeks to hold those who aided this massive fraud accountable and to return funds to harmed investors." In its latest actions, the SEC is seeking court-ordered injunctions, return of allegedly ill-gotten gains with interest, and financial penalties against Robert S. "Lute" Davis, Jr., Donald Anthony Mackenzie, Jordan E. Goodman, Aaron R. Andrew, Jeffrey L. Wendel, Alan H. New, David N. Knuth, Randy T. Rondberg, Richard Fritts, Marcus Bradford Bray, Gregory W. Anderson, Claude Steven Mosley, Gregory A. Koch, and their companies Old Security Financial Group Inc., Paramount Financial Services Inc. d/b/a Live Abundant, Wendel Financial Network LLC, Synergy Investment Services LLC, Trager LLC, Fritts Financial LLC, Bradford Solutions LLC, Balanced Financial Inc., Security Financial LLC, and Koch Insurance Brokers LLC. Goodman settled the SEC's charges without admitting or denying the allegations and agreed to disgorgement of $2.29 million plus prejudgment interest of $315,850 and a $100,000 penalty, and to be subject to an injunction and industry and penny stock bars. Synergy Investment Services, New, and Knuth settled the SEC's charges without admitting or denying the allegations with the court to determine disgorgement, interest, and penalties at a later date. The SEC also reached settlements in its previously filed action against Florida-based sales agents Barry M. Kornfeld, Ferne Kornfeld, and Albert D. Klager. Without admitting or denying the allegations, the three agreed to a permanent injunction and industry and penny-stock bars. The Kornfelds agreed to disgorgement of $3.69 million plus $690,497 in prejudgment interest. Additionally, Barry Kornfeld agreed to a $500,000 penalty and Ferne Kornfeld agreed to a $150,000 penalty. Klager agreed to $1.36 million in disgorgement, $278,908 in prejudgment interest, and a $100,000 penalty. The SEC's investigation has been conducted by Scott A. Lowry, Russell Koonin, Christine Nestor, and Mark Dee in the Miami Regional Office, and supervised by Jason R. Berkowitz and Fernando Torres. The litigation will be led by Ms. Nestor, Mr. Koonin, and Mr. Lowry under the supervision of Andrew O. Schiff. The SEC appreciates the assistance of the Texas State Securities Board, Florida Office of Financial Regulation, Arizona Corporation Commission - Securities Division, California Office of the Attorney General and the Department of Business Oversight, Colorado Division of Securities, Pennsylvania Department of Banking and Securities - Bureau of Securities Compliance and Examinations, Utah Department of Commerce - Division of Securities, and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. The SEC's Office of Investor Education and Advocacy has issued an Investor Alert to help seniors identify signs of investment fraud and, in conjunction with the Division of Enforcement's Retail Strategy Task Force, another Investor Alert about Ponzi schemes targeting seniors. The SEC strongly encourages investors to use the agency's Investor.gov website to check the backgrounds of people selling them investments to quickly identify whether they are registered professionals. Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - December 19, 2018) - Hydro66 Holdings Corp. (CSE: SIX) (the "Company" or "Hydro66") is pleased to announce that today it has entered into a secured convertible loan agreement with certain shareholders and directors of the Company (the "Loan Agreement"), including David Rowe and Robert Keith, who are both significant shareholders of the Company. The maximum amount of the loan will be C$4,000,000 (the "Loan") in the aggregate with the initial advance of C$1,706,895 to be advanced on or before January 4, 2019 (using a Bank of Canada exchange rate on December 17, 2018 for conversion of amounts advanced in USD to Canadian dollars) (the "Initial Advance"). The remaining amounts of the Loan may be requested by the Company, if necessary, on or before December 31, 2019, in the same amounts as advanced by such Lender under the Initial Advance. The Company will request that any amount advanced be made in Canadian dollars, however, the Company acknowledges that the lenders may make advances in either British Sterling or USD. David Rowe Chairman said "Hydro66 has made giant strides in expanding from 3.6MW to 19.2 MW of colocation during 2018 making it the largest such facility in the Nordics with space and power to expand significantly in the future. It is pleasing to see that funding of the business for working capital purposes is secured through 2019 (and beyond) enhancing the business capability to secure Enterprise colocation sales of its award winning ultra green colocation data center". The Loans will be evidenced by secured convertible promissory notes in favour of each lender for each advance under the Loan (the "Notes"). The maturity date of the principal amount, interest and any fees of the Loans is seven years from the date of the Initial Advance and the rate of interest is 10% per annum. The interest for the initial two (2) years of the Loan shall not be payable until such time as the Loan is repaid in full. The Loans will be secured by a general security interest over all of the assets of the Company, and through a guarantee of the Company's operating subsidiary in Sweden. Under the general security agreement, the Company will agree, among other things, to not pledge, sell, lease or otherwise dispose of its assets, other than in the normal course, without prior written consent of the Note holders. The Notes issued pursuant to the transaction and any Common Shares issued on conversion of the Notes will be subject to a statutory hold period in Canada of four months and one day following the issuance of the Notes in accordance with applicable securities laws. Additional resale restriction may be applicable under the laws of other jurisdictions. The transaction constituted a related party transaction within the meaning of Multilateral Instrument 61-101 ("MI 61-101") as certain insiders of the Company agreed to advance C$1,406,895 in connection with the Loans (using a Bank of Canada exchange rate on December 17, 2018 for conversion of amounts advanced in USD to Canadian dollars). The Company is relying on the exemptions from the valuation and minority shareholder approval requirements of MI 61-101 contained in sections 5.5(a) and 5.7(1)(a) of MI 61-101, as the fair market value of the participation in the transaction by the insiders does not exceed 25% of the market capitalization of the Company, as determined in accordance with MI 61-101. The Company did not file a material change report in respect of the related party transaction at least 21 days before the closing of the first advance of the Loans, which the Company deems reasonable in the circumstances in order to complete the transaction in an expeditious manner. Immediately prior to the execution of the Loan Agreement, David Rowe had ownership and control over a total of 49,915,450 common shares of the Company, representing 39.3% of the issued and outstanding common shares. Assuming a conversion by the Mr. Rowe of all of the amounts owing or potentially owing under the Loan Agreement, using a Bank of Canada exchange rate on December 17, 2018 and a conversion price for all amounts under the Loan Agreement of C$0.26 per share being the trading price of the common shares on close of business day immediately prior to the entering of the Loan Agreement, Mr. Rowe would acquire ownership and control over a total of 6,184,153 common shares of the Company, representing 4.9% of the issued and outstanding common shares. Immediately following such conversion, together with the common shares already owned by Mr. Rowe and assuming conversion of convertible securities of the Company held by Mr. Rowe, Mr. Rowe would have ownership and control over 69,178,466 common shares of the Company, representing 47.3% of the issued and outstanding common shares on a partially diluted basis. Immediately prior to the execution of the Loan Agreement, Robert Keith had ownership and control over a total of 36,934,254 common shares of the Company, representing 29.1% of the issued and outstanding common shares. Assuming a conversion by Mr. Keith of all of the amounts owing or potentially owing under the Loan Agreement, using a Bank of Canada noon rate on December 17, 2018 and a conversion price for all amounts under the Loan Agreement of C$0.26 per share being the trading price of the common shares on close of business day immediately prior to the entering of the Loan Agreement, Mr. Keith would acquire ownership and control over a total of 4,638,115 common shares of the Company, representing 3.7% of the issued and outstanding common shares. Immediately following such conversion, together with the common shares already owned by Mr. Keith and assuming conversion of the warrants of the Company held by Mr. Keith, Mr. Keith would have ownership and control over 50,805,932 common shares of the Company, representing 36.1% of the issued and outstanding common shares on a partially diluted basis. The Notes are intended to be acquired for investment purposes. Mr. Rowe and Mr. Keith have a long-term view of the investment and may acquire additional securities of the Company either on the open market or through private acquisitions or sell securities of the Company either on the open market or through private dispositions in the future depending on market conditions, reformulation of plans and/or other relevant factors. A copy of Mr. Rowe and Mr. Keith's early warning report will appear on the Company's profile on SEDAR within two days following the issuance of the Notes and may also be obtained at such time by calling (416) 361-2817 (365 Bay Street, Suite 400, Toronto, Ontario, M3J 1K4). About Hydro66 Hydro66 owns and operates a colocation data center in Sweden specializing in Enterprise and HPC hosting. The Company hosts third party IT infrastructure, utilizing 100% green power, at some of the EU's lowest power prices and within an ISO27001 accredited facility. The Company is continuing to expand its footprint, with plenty room for ongoing expansion at the existing location. Hydro66 is uniquely positioned to capitalize on opportunities in blockchain infrastructure as well as the traditional Enterprise colocation data center market. The Company provides truly green power at a leading price, purpose-built space and cooling, telecoms, IT support services and 24/7 physical security in their facility in Boden, Sweden. Revenues are generated from colocation data center services to hashrate service companies and traditional Enterprise companies as well as digital currency self-mining (GPU and/or ASIC). Combining the above provides steady, diversified revenue with strong margins. A flexible and rapid build-out schedule will allow Hydro66 to rebalance between business lines as market conditions evolve. Hydro66 is run by a team with decades of technical expertise in data center facility design, construction, operation, sales and marketing and more recently blockchain infrastructure and hashrate services. Please find us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Instagram. For more information please visit: www.hydro66.com FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT: Paul Morrison Chief Commercial Officer of Hydro66 UK Limited Tel: (+44) 7789 915 147 or Jason Atkinson Jason.atkinson@hydro66.com 647-938-5266 Neither the CSE nor its Regulation Services Provider accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. This news release contains certain "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities law. Forward looking information is frequently characterized by words such as "plan", "expect", "project", "intend", "believe", "anticipate", "estimate", "may", "will", "would", "potential", "proposed" and other similar words, or statements that certain events or conditions "may" or "will" occur. These statements are only predictions. Forward-looking information is based on the opinions and estimates of management at the date the information is provided, and is subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking information. For a description of the risks and uncertainties facing the Company and its business and affairs, readers should refer to the Company's Management's Discussion and Analysis. The Company undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking information if circumstances or management's estimates or opinions should change, unless required by law. The reader is cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking information. Not for distribution to U.S. Newswire Services or for dissemination in the United States. Any failure to comply with this restriction may constitute a violation of U.S. Securities laws. VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / December 19, 2018 / Auryn Resources Inc. (TSX: AUG, NYSE American: AUG, "Auryn" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that it has entered into a series of agreements with Corporacion Aceros Arequipa S.A. ("Aceros") to option three important mineral concessions located within the Company's Sombrero project located in Southern Peru. The option takes the form of a mining assignment agreement combined with a framework agreement, trust agreement, shareholders' agreement and a corporate guarantee (the "Option" or the "Agreements"). In the event that the Option is exercised, an 80% (Auyrn): 20% (Aceros) joint venture would be formed combining the 520 hectare Aceros concessions plus 4,600 hectares of Auryn's 120,000 hectare Sombrero land position (Figure 1). The Aceros concessions are considered important to create a cohesive land position over key target areas as Auryn's technical team advances the Sombrero Main area towards its initial drill program in 2019. A Message from Ivan Bebek, Executive Chairman & Director: "We are pleased to welcome Aceros Arequipa's involvement in our Sombrero Main project. Not only will these concessions help us to further consolidate the district into a comprehensive land package, their knowledge of the project and relationships with the local communities will be great assets as we move forward. "Sombrero is becoming one of the most impressive projects that we are aware of, with several discovery opportunities. The abundance of mineralization sampled on surface, coincident with large chargeability and magnetic targets, as well as the grades of both copper and gold mineralization are remarkable. "We are well underway with the permitting process and are looking forward to a maiden drill program, which we anticipate in Q2 of 2019." About the Aceros Concessions: The Aceros Concessions are comprised of two distinct blocks. El Fierrazo RV (200 hectares) is located on the eastern edge of Sombrero Main and Aceros HS 1 and Aceros HS 2 (320 hectares) are located on the northern edge of Sombrero Main (Figure 1). These concessions are characterized by localized magnetite bodies identified from surface and through magnetics. Figure 1: Terms of the Agreements: Under the terms of certain definitive agreements with Aceros, Auryn, through its wholly owned Peruvian subsidiary, Sombrero Minerales SAC ("SomMin"), will initially option the three concessions from Aceros through mining assignment and lease agreements using an internationally recognized bank trustee. Under these agreements, SomMin has a right to form an 80:20 corporate joint venture after completing a series of cash payments, work commitments and technical studies, which confirm certain minimum relative values of the two concession groups as detailed below. Option Terms: Due Date Cash Payment made to Aceros (US$) Work Commitments within the Aceros Concessions Upon execution of Definitive Agreement $140,000 - Within 12 months from Definitive Agreement $60,000 $ 150,000 Within 24 months from Definitive Agreement $ 250,000 $ 500,000 Within 36 months from Definitive Agreement $ 350,000 $ 1,500,000 Within 48 months from Definitive Agreement - $ 3,000,000 Total $ 800,000 $ 5,150,000 If the Option is exercised, SomMin will hire an independent engineer to complete two preliminary economic scoping studies (PEAs) over a period of two years. These PEAs will be a study of the existing magnetite deposits and of any identified non-ferrous (including Cu, Au, Ag, Mo) mineralization, respectively. If it can be shown that the net present value (NPV) of any non-ferrous deposit located within Sombrero Main or the Aceros Concessions is greater than five times the NPV of the existing magnetite deposits within the Aceros Concessions then the Option is considered fulfilled and an 80:20 (SomMin:Aceros) corporate joint venture will be established using a newly-formed, jointly-owned Peruvian corporation. In the event SomMin is unable to show that the net present value (NPV) of any non-ferrous deposit is greater than five times the NPV of the existing magnetite deposits, then it can attain an extension of up to three years if an NPV of at least $100 million was shown and SomMin must pay Aceros an additional $2 million for each year of extension. Once the joint venture is established, it will be governed by a customary shareholders' agreement with specific provisions allowing for the dilution of non-contributing parties and drag-along and first refusal rights. Formation of the joint venture also requires that SomMin first exercise its existing option rights with Alturas Minerales SAC to acquire a 100% interest in the underlying Sombrero concessions. No securities of Auryn are involved in the transaction but Auryn will provide a customary parent company guarantee of SomMin's obligations to Aceros. ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF AURYN RESOURCES INC. Ivan Bebek Executive Chairman For further information on Auryn Resources Inc., please go to www.aurynresources.com or contact Natasha Frakes, Manager of Corporate Communications at (778) 729-0600 or info@aurynresources.com. About Auryn Auryn Resources is a technologically driven junior mining exploration company focused on delivering shareholder value through acquisition and development of premier gold projects. The Company's management team is highly experienced with an impressive track record of success. It has assembled an extensive technical team as well as a quality gold exploration portfolio. Auryn is currently focused on scalable high-grade gold deposits in established mining jurisdictions, which include the Committee Bay and Gibson MacQuoid gold projects located in Nunavut, the Homestake Ridge gold project in British Columbia and a portfolio of gold projects in southern Peru, through Corisur Peru SAC. About the Sombrero Project This project consists of the North Sombrero and South Sombrero properties, comprising approximately 100,000 mineral claims owned or optioned by Auryn Resources. The copper-gold Sombrero mining concessions are located 340 kilometers SE of Lima in southern Peru and are hosted in the Andahuaylas-Yauri belt. This belt is interpreted to be on the north-western margins of this Eocene-Oligocene aged copper-gold porphyry and skarn belt that hosts the Las Bambas, Haquira, Los Chancas, Cotambambas, Constancia, Antapaccay and Tintaya deposits. The project is characterized by a strong structural control and significant copper and gold values from historical surface samples. The principal targets at Sombrero are copper-gold skarn and porphyry systems and precious metal epithermal deposits. Forward Looking Information and Additional Cautionary Language This release includes certain statements that may be deemed "forward-looking statements". Forward-looking information is information that includes implied future performance and/or forecast information including information relating to or associated with the acquisition and title to mineral concessions. These statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause actual results, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different (either positively or negatively) from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Readers should refer to the risks discussed in the Company's Annual Information Form and MD&A for the year ended December 31, 2017 and subsequent continuous disclosure filings with the Canadian Securities Administrators available at www.sedar.com and the Company's registration statement on Form 40-F filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission and available at www.sec.gov. No stock exchange or securities regulatory authority has reviewed or accepts any responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. SOURCE: Auryn Resources Inc. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/530987/Auryn-Options-Key-Concessions-at-Sombrero Weekly net asset value ("NAV") is calculated as of the close of business on each Tuesday and posted on the following business day. In the event that Tuesday is not a business day, the Company will calculate the close-of-business NAV as of the business day immediately preceding that Tuesday. The end-of-month NAV is calculated as of the close of business on the last day of the month and posted on the following business day. For weeks that include a month-end NAV report, PSH will provide only the month-end NAV and not report the Tuesday NAV. Monthly NAVs are published in accordance with the Decree on Conduct of Business Supervision of Financial Undertakings under the Wft (Besluit Gedragstoezicht financiele ondernemingen Wft). Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann. Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - December 19, 2018) - Jiminex Inc. ("Jiminex" or the "Company") announces that, effective immediately, Balu Gopalakrishnan and Harvey McKenzie have resigned as directors of the Company, and Balu Gopalakrishnan has also resigned as Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer. Binyomin Posen and Jack Wortzman have been appointed as directors of the Company to fill the vacancies created by the foregoing resignations. Binyomin Posen has also been appointed to the offices of Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer. The Company wishes to thank Messrs. Gopalakrishnan and McKenzie for their contributions and service. Mr. Posen is a Senior Analyst at Plaza Capital Limited, where he focuses on corporate finance, capital markets and helping companies to go public. After three and a half years of studies overseas, he returned to complete his baccalaureate degree in Toronto. Upon graduating (on the Dean's List) he began his career as an analyst at a Toronto boutique investment bank where his role consisted of raising funds for IPOs and RTOs, business development for portfolio companies and client relations. He is currently director and senior officer at Agau Resources Inc. and director of Senternet Phi Gamma Inc. and director and senior officer at Dixie Brands Inc. (formerly, Academy Explorations Inc.). Mr. Wortzman played an integral role within the Final Engineering components of the Industrial and manufacturing Engineer department of the Oakville Assembly Plant of Ford of Canada for a period of eighteen years. His achievement were the installation of robotic projects and efficiencies which resulted in savings in manpower reductions and higher quality product. He was also instrumental in designing and implementing a method for the distribution of daily workload and task costs in the installation and service of HVAC at Enbridge and Direct Energy for twelve years. He holds a degree at Ryerson University in Cost Accounting. About Jiminex Inc. Jiminex is a junior mineral exploration company. For more information, please contact: Jiminex Inc. Binyomin Posen, CEO and Director Telephone: (416) 481.2222 x 246 Email: bposen@plazacapital.ca Cautionary Statements Regarding Forward Looking Information This news release contains "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities laws. Any such forward-looking statements may be identified by words such as "expects", "anticipates", "believes", "projects", "plans" and similar expressions. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. These statements should not be read as guarantees of future performance or results. Such statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from those implied by such statements. THIS NEWS RELEASE IS INTENDED FOR DISTRIBUTION IN CANADA ONLY AND IS NOT INTENDED FOR DISTRIBUTION TO UNITED STATES NEWSWIRE SERVICES OR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES. Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - December 19, 2018) - Explorex Resources Inc. (CSE: EX) (the "Company" or "Explorex") is pleased to announce that it has closed the second and final tranche of its previously announced private placement financing (the "Financing"). The Company has issued a total 1,140,500 Non-Flow Through (the "NFT units") for a total of $285,125 (of which $151,250 was for the settlement of debt). The NFT units were offered at a price of $0.25. The Company has further completed its Flow Through Unit (the "FT Units") offering consisting of 335,000 Units for an aggregate total of $107,200. The FT Units were offered at a price of $0.32. Each Unit consisted of one common share in the Company and one half of a share purchase warrant. Each full warrant is exercisable to purchase one additional common share at $0.50 for two years from the date of issuance. In total the company issued 737,500 share purchase warrants. In connection with the closing of the second tranche of the Financing, the Company has no finders fees payable. The funds received for the FT Units will be applied to the drill program at Kagoot Brook and towards exploration for its other Canadian projects. The funds received from the NFT component of the offering will be used for general corporate purposes. About Explorex Resources Inc. Explorex is an exploration company focusing on Cobalt and metals critical to rechargeable battery technology with the support of a strong strategic partner and end user. Explorex has a developing portfolio of multi-stage projects including an LOI to acquire the Hautalampi Co-Cu-Ni deposit in Finland, is earning a 75% interest in the Kagoot Brook project in New Brunswick and has 100% interest in the early stage Handlebar Co-Cu-Ni Project northeast of Kamloops BC. On behalf of the Board, Gary Schellenberg, CEO For further information, please contact Gary Schellenberg - CEO or Mike Sieb - President; phone 604.681.0221 or Ron Birch at bircress@shaw.ca; phone 1-800-910-7711 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 press release. Except for historical information contained herein, this news release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially. Except as required pursuant to applicable securities laws, the Company will not update these forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date hereof. More detailed information about potential factors that could affect financial results is included in the documents filed from time to time with the Canadian securities regulatory authorities by the Company. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward looking statements. Passenger traffic up 3.8% YoY in Brazil and 6.9% in Italy, further supported by growth across most geographies Corporacion America Airports S.A. (NYSE: CAAP), ("CAAP" or the "Company") the largest private sector airport operator in the world by number of airports, reported today preliminary year-over-year passenger traffic growth of 1.9% in November 2018. Passenger Traffic, Cargo Volume and Aircraft Movements Highlights Statistics Nov'18 Nov'17 % Var. YTD'18 YTD'17 % Var Domestic Passengers (thousands) 3,750 3,595 4.3% 41,044 37,752 8.7% International Passengers (thousands) 1,954 2,006 -2.6% 25,319 24,803 2.1% Transit Passengers (thousands) 756 740 2.2% 8,133 7,589 7.2% Total Passengers (thousands) 6,460 6,341 1.9% 74,495 70,144 6.2% Cargo Volume (thousand tons) 39.4 39.0 1.0% 371.9 350.4 6.2% Total Aircraft Movements (thousands) 70.0 69.8 0.3% 806.5 779.5 3.5% Passenger Traffic Overview Total passenger traffic in November 2018 increased by 1.9% YoY, primarily reflecting growth of 3.8% in Brazil, 6.9% in Italy and 11.6% in Armenia. In Brazil, passenger traffic increased 3.8% YoY, driven by 3.7% growth in domestic traffic reflecting the addition of new frequencies to existing routes in several destinations at Brasilia Airport and easier comps at Natal Airport as traffic in 3Q17 in Natal was impacted by a reduction in frequencies while the runway was refurbished. International traffic at Brasilia Airport increased 0.6% impacted by the new traffic count methodology applied by ANAC since June 2018, which offset the traffic growth resulting from the launch of daily routes to Miami and Orlando by Gol Airlines. Based on the prior methodology, traffic would have increased 18.5% YoY at this airport. In Italy, passenger traffic increased 6.9%, mainly as a result of addition of frequencies and an increase in load factor. International traffic at Pisa Airport rose 12.8% mainly driven by increased frequencies by Ryanair and the continued good performance of routes to Russia, while international traffic at Florence Airport increased 8.0%, primarily due to positive performance of the route to Lisbon operated by TAP, the increase in frequencies and a higher load factor in the route to Barcelona, operated by Vueling. In Armenia, passenger traffic continued the positive trend seen in the last months, with an 11.6% increase YoY, although growth is expected to moderate in the coming months given the current situation in Russia, this airports' main market. In Argentina, despite the 4.7% growth in domestic traffic, total passenger traffic declined 1.0% YoY, mainly driven by declines of 10.2% and 11.9% in international and transit passengers, respectively, reflecting continued challenging macro conditions. Passenger traffic was also impacted by the closure of the Aeroparque, El Palomar and San Fernando airports in Buenos Aires, during the G20 event, which took place in the last two days of November. In addition, Edelweiss opened a new direct route to Zurich, Switzerland with two weekly flights and Norwegian Air Argentina continued to open new domestic routes in the period, with daily frequencies to Iguazu and Neuquen, while LASA suspended operations temporarily. JetSmart expects to initiate operations later in December with routes from Santiago de Chile. Moreover, FlyBondi and JetSmart have announced they are on track with their plans to open international routes from El Palomar to neighboring countries later this month. In Uruguay, passenger traffic continued to decline 2.2% mainly due to macro conditions experienced in Argentina, which resulted in a decrease in passengers. In Ecuador, passengers increased 7.3%, mainly to the continued good performance of Spirit Airlines, as well as an increase in general aviation during the period. Cargo Volume and Aircraft Movements Cargo volume increased 1.0% in November 2018 mainly as a result of the continued recovery in Brazil, partially offset by a 2.6% decline in Argentina, due to macro conditions and a reverse in the trend in Ecuador and Armenia, with declines of 3.0% and 6.7%, respectively. Aircraft movements remained relatively flat in November 2018, mainly as a result of a 1.7% decline in Argentina, partially offset by increases of 16.6% in Ecuador and 5.9% in Italy. Summary Passenger Traffic, Cargo Volume and Aircraft Movements Nov'18 Nov'17 % Var. YTD'18 YTD'17 % Var. Passenger Traffic (thousands) Argentina 3,239 3,271 -1.0% 36,362 34,044 6.8% Italy 486 454 6.9% 7,685 7,433 3.4% Brazil 1,699 1,637 3.8% 18,484 17,605 5.0% Uruguay 182 185 -2.0% 2,099 2,092 0.4% Ecuador 359 334 7.3% 4,056 3,796 6.8% Armenia 216 193 11.6% 2,632 2,347 12.1% Peru 280 266 5.2% 3,177 2,828 12.4% TOTAL 6,460 6,341 1.9% 74,495 70,144 6.2% Cargo Volume (tons) Argentina 23,315 23,936 -2.6% 217,885 208,065 4.7% Italy 1,132 1,083 4.5% 10,674 9,866 8.2% Brazil 6,343 5,092 24.6% 59,539 49,051 21.4% Uruguay 2,845 2,882 -1.3% 25,306 25,709 -1.6% Ecuador 3,793 3,909 -3.0% 37,708 32,681 15.4% Armenia 1,552 1,663 -6.7% 16,395 20,440 -19.8% Peru 414 428 -3.2% 4,433 4,544 -2.5% TOTAL 39,394 38,994 1.0% 371,939 350,356 6.2% Aircraft Movements Argentina 36,594 37,231 -1.7% 410,954 389,075 5.6% Italy 4,855 4,586 5.9% 72,725 72,905 -0.2% Brazil 14,921 15,193 -1.8% 168,607 169,165 -0.3% Uruguay 2,487 2,710 -8.2% 30,244 29,943 1.0% Ecuador 6,796 5,826 16.6% 72,641 72,169 0.7% Armenia 1,905 1,776 7.3% 22,044 20,113 9.6% Peru 2,444 2,455 -0.4% 29,291 26,107 12.2% TOTAL 70,002 69,777 0.3% 806,506 779,477 3.5% To obtain the full text of this press release, please click on the following link: http://investors.corporacionamericaairports.com About Corporacion America Airports Corporacion America Airports acquires, develops and operates airport concessions. The Company is the largest private airport operator in the world by the number of airports and the tenth largest based on passenger traffic. Currently, the Company operates 52 airports in 7 countries across Latin America and Europe (Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Peru, Ecuador, Armenia and Italy). In 2017, Corporacion America Airports served 76.6 million passengers. The Company is listed on the New York Stock Exchange where it trades under the ticker "CAAP". For more information, visit http://investors.corporacionamericaairports.com View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20181219005869/en/ Contacts: Investor Relations Contact Gimena Albanesi Email: gimena.albanesi@caairports.com Phone: +5411 4852-6411 Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - December 19, 2018) - Sniper Resources Ltd. ("Sniper" or the "Company") has announced that, effective immediately, Scott Baxter has resigned as director, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Company. The Company would like to thank Scott Baxter for his valuable contributions to the Company and to wish him every success in his future endeavors. The Company is pleased to announce that Michael Lerner has been appointed to serve as a director of Sniper to fill the vacancy created by the foregoing resignation. In addition, Balu Gopalakrishnan and Binyomin Posen have been appointed to join the board of directors. Michael Lerner has also been appointed to the offices of Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer of the Company. Mr. Lerner brings with him more than 20 years of experience in the natural resources market, starting as an institutional trader at CIBC and Wellington West, and then as a professional trader and financier focused on junior mining stocks at Dominick and Dominick. Since 2012, Mr. Lerner has become more involved in the operations of junior mining companies as an officer or director of public companies including Happy Creek Minerals, Jiminex Inc., Fairmont Resources Inc., Navasota Resources Inc. and Cresco Labs Inc. (formerly, Randsburg International Inc.) where he has helped to rehabilitate these companies. Mr. Gopalakrishnan is a Chartered Accountant with significant public company experience, including more than six years with XCEED Mortgage Corporation, where he gained significant experience preparing the company's annual and quarterly consolidated financial statements, Management Discussion and Analysis (MD&A) of for quarterly and annual regulatory filings in accordance with International Financial Reporting Standards. Currently, he is a director in Navasota Resources Inc. and Cresco Labs Inc. (formerly, Randsburg International Inc.). Mr. Binyomin Posen is a Senior Analyst at Plaza Capital Limited, where he focuses on corporate finance, capital markets and helping companies to go public. After three and a half years of studies overseas, he returned to complete his baccalaureate degree in Toronto. Upon graduating (on the Dean's List) he began his career as an analyst at a Toronto boutique investment bank where his role consisted of raising funds for IPOs and RTOs, business development for portfolio companies and client relations. He is currently director and senior officer at Agau Resources Inc. and director of Senternet Phi Gamma Inc. and director and senior officer at Dixie Brands Inc. (formerly Academy Explorations Inc.). About Sniper Resources Ltd. Sniper Resources Ltd. is a mineral exploration company with minimal current activities or operations and is not currently listed on a stock exchange. For additional information on Sniper Resources Ltd.: Michael Lerner CEO, CFO & Director Telephone: 416-710-4906 Email: mlerner10@gmail.com This press release includes certain statements that may be deemed "forward-looking statements". All statements in this release, other than statements of historical facts, that address future exploration drilling, exploration activities and events or developments that the Company expects, are forward-looking statements. Although the Company believes the expectations expressed in such forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, such statements are not guarantees of future performance and actual results or developments may differ materially from those in 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. Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - December 19, 2018) - Metals Creek Resources Corp. (TSXV: MEK) ("Metals Creek" or the "Company") announces that it intends to complete a non-brokered private placement of flow-through and non flow-through units (the "Private Placement"). The Private placement is expected to close on or before 31 December, 2018. The Company intends to issue up to 7,272,277 flow-through units at a price of $0.055 per unit (the "FT Units") for aggregate proceeds of up to $400,000. Each FT Unit will consist of one flow-through common share (the "FT Shares") and one-half of one non flow-through common share purchase warrant (the "FT Warrants"). Each whole FT Warrant will entitle the holder to purchase one additional non flow-through common share of the Company at an exercise price of $0.10 per common share for a period of 12 months from the date of issue. The FT Shares will entitle the holder to receive the tax benefits applicable to flow-through shares, in accordance with provisions of the Income Tax Act (Canada). The Company also intends to issue up to 2,00,000 non flow-through units at a price of $0.05 per unit (the "NFT Units") for aggregate proceeds of up to $100,000. Each NFT Unit will consist of one non flow-through common share and one non flow-through common share purchase warrant (the "NFT Warrants"). Each NFT Warrant will entitle the holder to purchase one additional non flow-through common share of the Company at an exercise price of $0.10 per common share for a period of 12 months from the date of issue. In connection with the private placement, the company may pay finders' fees in cash or securities or a combination of both, as permitted by the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange. All securities issued pursuant to the Private Placement will be subject to a four-month hold period. The Private Placement is subject to approval by the TSX Venture Exchange. The proceeds raised from the FT Units will be used for Canadian Exploration Expenses (within the meaning of the Income Tax Act (Canada)), with the Company using its best efforts to ensure that such Canadian Exploration Expenses qualify as a "flow-through mining expenditure" for purposes of the Income Tax Act (Canada), related to the exploration of the Company's exploration projects. About Metals Creek Resources Corp. Metals Creek Resources Corp. is a junior exploration company incorporated under the laws of the Province of Ontario, is a reporting issuer in Alberta, British Columbia and Ontario, and has its common shares listed for trading on the Exchange under the symbol "MEK". Metals Creek has earned a 50% interest in the Ogden Gold Property, including the former Naybob Gold mine, located 6 km south of Timmins, Ontario and has an 8 km strike length of the prolific Porcupine-Destor Fault (P-DF) that stretches between Timmins, Ontario and Val d'Or, Quebec. Metals Creek also has an option agreement with Quadro Resources on Metals Creeks and Benton Resources Staghorn Gold Project in Newfoundland as well as two option agreements with Anaconda Mining Inc. on Metals Creek's Jacksons Arm and Tilt Cove Properties also in Newfoundland. The company also has an option agreement on its Clarks Brook property with Sokoman Iron Corp. and is engaged in the identification, acquisition, exploration and development of other mineral resource properties, and presently has mining interests in Ontario, Yukon and Newfoundland and Labrador including the recently acquired Great Brehat project on the Great Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland. Additional information concerning the Corporation is contained in documents filed by the Corporation with securities regulators, available under its profile at www.sedar.com. For further information, please contact: Alexander (Sandy) Stares, President and CEO Metals Creek Resources Corp telephone: (709)-256-6060 fax: (709)-256-6061 email: astares@metalscreek.com MetalsCreek.com Twitter.com/MetalsCreekRes Facebook.com/Metals.CreekResources Mar Sako: in Jesus the example of humanity to be followed. Christians can make an essential contribution to the rebirth of the country. The unity between faith and different ethnic groups is the basis on which to build the future. Christmas Eve mass in Baghdad concelebrated by the Vatican Secretary of State. Is Parolin's visit to prepare for a future Papal trip to Iraq? Baghdad (AsiaNews) - The period of Advent that prepares for the coming of Christ is an occasion of "rebirth of huamnity", According to which man becomes human, not a predatory beast. In fact, the status of human in Christ has been elevated to a complete-perfect humanity [the term used in Chaldean-Syriac language is mithbarnashutha, which means humanization], writes the Chaldean primate, Card Louis Raphael Sako, in his Christmas message to Iraqi Christians and shared with AsiaNews. "Every human being - continues the cardinal - finds in Jesus a perfect example of humanity to follow and conforms to the image of God". In a nation recently devastated by wars, violence, still present jihadist threats, political instability and a slow path of democratization, the value of "unity" between citizens of different ethnic groups and religions is the foundation on which to build the future. A mission to which Christians are also called "through the witness of our faith, prayers, love of neighbor" and with "the contribution of each one to the rebirth of our country". The Iraqi cardinal will celebrate the Christmas Eve Mass together with the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin. For the first time in history, the closest collaborator of a pontiff will go on an official visit to Iraq, from December 24 to 28; he will visit the capital Baghdad, Erbil and some Christian towns on the Nineveh plain. AsiaNews's Catholic sources in Iraq stress that Parolin's trip could represent the premise for a visit, in the near future, of a Pope in the Arab country. Returning to the Chaldean patriarch's Christmas message, he emphasizes that in the birth and witness of the living Christ the suffering, death and resurrection are "completed". "Despite the many malice that dwell in man - he adds - the Christian has sufficient graces to complete the project of interior renewal". Through the Sacraments, such as baptism and the Eucharist, "we receive the grace of unity in Jesus Christ and come embraced by him". A call, emphasizes the cardinal, who calls for "a daily commitment, courage and hard work" and which is addressed "to all men of good will, who open themselves sincerely to the grace of God", from a common point of view of "brotherhood, love and peace" that concerns all mankind, without distinction. Addressing the faithful, the Chaldean primate recalls the "centrality" of faith in the life of every man and the importance of prayer and participation in the life of the community. Being Christian, he adds, requires a daily "witness of faith, prayer and service" to others. "Faith he warns - prepares the ground for a life lived according to the Word of God and helps us to be children of God, more than servants of the devil". "I hope that Christmas - concludes the cardinal - is an opportunity to strengthen faith and witness to the service of love and peace" as desired by Pope Francis. "And those who are the source of division, create chaos and confusion exasperating the precepts of religion, ethnicity or gender do not believe in God and have no title to call themselves men of faith". Niti said there are constraints due to lack of financial literacy amongst low-income households and small informal businesses and high cost of operations of traditional banking model New Delhi: Better compensation to banking correspondents, facilitating paperless banking and introducing financial literacy chapters in school curricula will spur financial inclusion, NITI Aayog said Wednesday. Lack of financial literacy, high cost of banking services and excessive regulatory requirements are the key constraints in the financial inclusion goal for India, the government think-tank said in its 'Strategy for New India @75' document. "The government has launched many flagship schemes to promote financial inclusion and provide financial security to empower the poor and unbanked in the country," it said. There are constraints due to lack of financial literacy amongst low-income households and small informal businesses and high cost of operations of traditional banking model, it noted. Excessive regulatory requirements on products and market entry, and conservative regulatory approach to new technologies are the other impediments, the report highlighted in a chapter on 'Financial Inclusion'. On the way forward, it said an 'Arthik Shiksha Abhiyan' will help improve financial literacy and may be integrated in the regular school curriculum. Efforts to improve financial literacy should be complemented by mass media campaigns to spread information on financial products and how they are used, NITI Aayog said. It also pitched for better incentives for banking correspondents. "Given the infeasibility of locating branches in every nook and corner of the country, bank correspondents are used to reach out to prospective clients. However, an inadequate compensation structure makes correspondent banking unattractive. "The issue of inadequate training is being addressed by the RBI which has developed a framework for certification for both basic and advanced levels. There is also a need to create better monetary incentives for banking correspondents as well as to provide them better training," the report said. The government will also facilitate growth of online and paperless banking, leverage technology to improve the assessment of credit-worthiness for households and informal businesses besides scaling up payment banks and other platforms to expand payments systems in under-served areas. Schemes such as Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana, Pradhan Mantri Mudra Yojana, Stand-Up India Scheme, Pradhan Mantri Jeevan Jyoti Bima Yojana and Atal Pension Yojana, among others, have led to significant progress in the direction of financial literacy. In addition, the promotion of Aadhaar and direct benefit transfer schemes facilitate financial inclusion, it said. The report noted that in 2014, 53 per cent of adults in the country had bank accounts, which jumped to 80 per cent by 2017 and has now become comparable to China. Also, the awareness and use of mobile payments in India had been low compared to peer nations such as Bangladesh, Pakistan and Kenya but it has increased substantially due to introduction of BHIM application post demonetisation, it said. In terms of credit access also, India needs to make up considerable ground compared to these countries. Similarly, bank credit to GDP ratio in India is 51 per cent, as compared to 98 per cent in China in 2016, the report noted. The final decision on transferring a part of the excess reserves to the government has to be that of the Reserve Bank (RBI) alone and any attempt to take away its autonomy could pose a risk to the economy, warns former chief economic advisor Kaushik Basu. Mumbai: The final decision on transferring a part of the excess reserves to the government has to be that of the Reserve Bank (RBI) alone and any attempt to take away its autonomy could pose a risk to the economy, warns former chief economic advisor Kaushik Basu. The comments come within two days of former RBI governor Raghuram Rajan cautioning that transfer of the reserves may bring down the rating of the central bank. "There is scope for transfer of excess reserves of the RBI to the government, but it has to be the RBI's decision...You can't do that by confiscation by the government. If the RBI says no, it understands why it is not saying so," Basu, the C Marks Professor of International Studies at Cornell University, US told PTI here on Wednesday. He said decision on such important matters has to be taken in consultation with RBI only. "I think this kind of thing has to be completely with the government talking to the RBI and the final say on this has to be that of RBI. "If you don't do that, and if you try to take away their autonomy, you are taking a huge long-term risk with the economy," Basu, who was also a past chief economist with the World Bank, said. The issue of parting with a portion of RBI reserves, which as of June stood at Rs 9.43 trillion, to the government has been a contentious issue between the government and the central bank for a long time, and one of the key reasons for the sudden resignation of Urjit Patel on 10 December. A major portion of the reserve comes from the currency and gold revaluation account (Rs 6.91 trillion) and the contingency fund (Rs 2.32 trillion). At the November 19 meeting, the central board of RBI had decided to constitute a committee of experts to examine an economic capital framework (ECF), the membership and terms of reference of which will be jointly determined by the government and the RBI. The committee, which is yet to be formed, as the past governor Urjit Patel had differences with the name of the chairman, will determine the appropriate levels of reserves the central bank ought to hold. In an interview to a news channel on Monday, when asked if the transfer of excess reserve could lead to downgrade in RBI rating, Rajan had said, "it could...it depends on how much. It may not be an issue now...may be an issue at some point of time. That's one concern". Rating downgrade of the RBI from 'AAA' would make borrowing costlier for the central bank and will have implication for the entire economy. Earlier in the day, addressing the 60th Labour Economic Conference, organised by the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR) here, Basu said as per the global standards the 7.4 percent growth rate is good and termed the 8 percent annual growth between 2003 and 2011 as "outstanding". "Growth has gone down now...there have been policy mistakes. One of the biggest ones is the demonetisation. It has hit the informal sector and the farming sector massively," Basu said. He rued that we are paying too little attention to better income distribution. "In the farm sector, the workers are doing very badly and we are not paying enough of attention to it. We are growing at 7.4 percent but the bottom segment is not growing at half that," he added. The expenditure on printing of notes during 2015-16 (the year prior to demonetisation) was Rs 34.21 billion, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said in a written reply to the Rajya Sabha. New Delhi: The cost of printing currency notes escalated to Rs 79.65 billion in 2016-17, the year when the government had banned the high-value 500 and 1,000 rupee bills, the government informed the Parliament on Tuesday. Also, the printing cost came down to a substantial Rs 49.12 billion in the following year 2017-18 when the RBI had sufficed the shortage of bank notes which was caused due to the government's demonetisation move. The expenditure on printing of notes during 2015-16 (the year prior to demonetisation) was Rs 34.21 billion, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said in a written reply to the Rajya Sabha. "Rs 79.65 billion and Rs 49.12 billion were spent on printing of banknotes in the year 2016-17 and 2017-18, respectively. In addition, Rs 1.09 billion, Rs 1.47 billion and Rs 1.15 billion were spent on remittance of currency in the year 2015-16, 2016-17 and 2017-18, respectively," Parliament was informed. The minister's reply was in regard to details sought on expenditure incurred by the Reserve Bank for calling back Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes and destroying them. He was also asked to give expenditure details for replenishing the currency withdrawn during demonetisation. "Expenditure on printing of new notes after demonetisation has not been shown separately by the Reserve Bank of India in its accounts," Jaitley said. The minister also informed the House that no public sector bank, expect for SBI, has reported incidence of casualty during the period of demonetisation. On casualty incidents at all public sector banks during the note ban period, Jaitley said only State Bank of India had reported that three staffers and one customer died during the demonetisation drive. A total compensation of Rs 4.407 million (including Rs 300,000 to customer) was paid to their family members, he said. On asked if any study has been conducted on the impact of demonetisation on industry and employment situation in the country, the finance minister said that "no specific study has been done by government". Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced the demonetisation of high-value notes on 8 November 2016, which wiped out nearly 86 percent of the total currency notes in circulation. In a separate question asked about the durability of new Rs 500 and Rs 2000 bank notes, Minister of State for Finance Pon Radhakrishnan said these notes are expected to have normal life as that of older currencies. He, however, said that some design elements have been changed in the new bank notes. The visible changes in the new banknotes are in form of size, color and inclusion of heritage motifs. He also said that there are no issues related to non-recognition of new Rs 500 and Rs 2,000 notes by the ATMs. DHFL currently holds 50% stake in DHFL Pramerica Asset Managers (DPAM), with 17.12% directly and 32.88% through subsidiary DHFL Advisory and Investments Mumbai: In the wake of a liquidity crunch in NBFC and HFC space, Dewan Housing Finance Corporation (DHFL) Tuesday said it will sell its entire stake in mutual fund business, DHFL Pramerica Asset Managers, to its joint venture partner Prudential Finance. DHFL currently holds 50 percent stake in DHFL Pramerica Asset Managers (DPAM), with 17.12 percent directly and 32.88 percent through subsidiary DHFL Advisory and Investments. "Pramerica Financial and DHFL have entered into a binding term sheet to acquire DHFL's stake in their 50:50 joint venture asset management company, DHFL Pramerica Asset Managers," an official statement said. The proposed transaction is subject to definitive documentation, applicable regulatory and other approvals and certain other conditions, it added. After the exit of DHFL, the mutual fund business will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of PGIM, the global asset management business of Prudential Finance, it said. Kapil Wadhawan, chairman and managing director, DHFL, said this is a strategic call by DHFL to focus more on its core business. "We firmly believe that this move is in the best interest of all parties and will have a positive outcome for all stakeholders," he added. Glen Baptist, chief executive officer, PGIM Global Partners, said the company sees tremendous opportunity in the asset management market in India. "The company strongly believes that when combined with the deep expertise and broad capabilities of PGIM, it is well-positioned to serve its clients and to strengthen our competitive position in India," he added. Baptist said the transaction will not change DPAM's scope of business. Pramerica and DHFL formed the joint venture in 2014 and immediately expanded its business through the acquisition of Deutsche Asset Management (India). The non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) and housing finance companies (HFCs) are facing a severe liquidity crunch after several defaults by the Infrastructure Leasing and Financial Services (IL&FS) in the past few months dampened the sentiments towards the sector. Farm loan waiver is an easy tool; a promise by the politician to the farmer that their loans will be written off in exchange of votes After Congress' win in three state-elections, the party wasted no time to announce farm loan waivers to fulfil the poll promises. In Madhya Pradesh, the new chief minister Kamal Nath has announced to waive loans up to Rs 2 lakhs, so did Chattisgarh chief minister Bhupesh Baghel while Rajasthan government will likely follow suit soon. By announcing the loan waivers in these states, Congress president Rahul Gandhi has fulfilled his election promise. So did BJP a while ago in some of the states it rules--Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh being the major ones. Also, there are few other states like Punjab, Assam and Karnataka which too have joined the loan waiver bandwagon. Arguably, the trend of loan waivers in this scale began with the mammoth Rs 70,000 crore loan waiver announced during the UPA regime. How do farm loan waivers work? Farm loan waiver is an easy tool; a promise by the politician to the farmer that their loans will be written off in exchange of votes; who wouldnt like the idea of freebies? The winning politician then uses taxpayers money to repay these loans to banks, thus straining fiscal positions of state governments. Since banks do not get money on time from governments, this puts them on a back foot, forcing to go slow on further lending to farmers. As a report from Kotak Institutional equities points out, agricultural loans saw a strong dip in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh two-three years post the announcement of the waiver. While the available data does not clearly substantiate our hypothesis given the other extraneous variables like monsoon, other government initiatives, etc. a back of the envelope calculation suggest a modest slowdown. Additionally, agriculture loan growth has been broadly strong in the years prior to the announcement of a loan waiver in most cases apart from Punjab. Additionally, the growth of agriculture loans in these states has been higher than the industry average or their regions prior to the announcement under most circumstances, the report says. As a result, state governments that announce such schemes see their debt-to-GDP ratios shooting up. Since a farmer is dependent highly on seasonal rains, sooner than later he walks into another round of distress, very likely within the next two years itself and, once again looks at banks for credit. But banks will be hesitant to lend aggressively. After a few years, on account of the continuing agrarian distress, the farmers' ability to repay their loans yet again takes a hit. At this stage, the farmer once again turns to the politician for another round of waiver. The politician agrees to this demand, in return of votes in the election. This cycle goes on. For a long time now, whether it is BJP or the Congress party, the common factor across poll manifestos has been farm loan waivers. To win elections, politicians do not hesitate to embrace bad economics. In the latest case, Rahul Gandhi not only implemented loan waivers in Congress-ruled states, but also set the stage for a nationwide waiver by saying he will not let Narendra Modi sleep till he announces waivers across the country and added that this will form part of Congress election manifesto in 2019. What happens to the farmer? Thats an important question. Data collected from various sources in the past one decade indicates that farm loan waivers have largely failed to effect any meaningful improvement in the lives of farmers on the field. Despite several rounds of loan waivers by different parties, there is no meaningful improvement in the agriculture distress in the country, nor the number of poor farmers who are committing suicides has come down. This is because the benefit of the farm loan waivers does not often reach the needy farmer. The small, landless farmer hardly relies on the formal banking system and often approaches unorganised moneylenders to secure credit. Several studies also point to the fact that the rich farmers with large landholdings often grab the benefit of farm loan waivers while those with tiny landholdings and no political clout get no real benefit. This is why the number of farmer suicides still continues to be at a high level. But remember these figures are only reported suicides. Banks will hesitate to lend further in areas where loan waivers were announced because credit culture takes a big hit. What happens to banks? Unfortunately, 70 percent of Indias banking system is dominated by public-sector banks. This, in turn, means they do not enjoy autonomy to take business decisions. Often they are forced to blindly follow the burden of politically-motivated populist schemes. Logically, the burden of the farm loan waivers announced so far have fallen on these lenders. How does bank NPAs shoot up on account of loan waivers? The moment a farm loan waiver is announced, even the honest taxpayers stop repayments in the hope that their liabilities too will be included in the waiver package. This causes a spike in the NPA levels. In the aftermath of every loan waiver announcement, this has been observed. Already, in states like Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh, the agriculture NPLs have begun to shoot up in the run-up to elections. As we saw in Karnataka, gross NPLs in MP have been rising in recent years. It was at 8% in FY2017 which increased to 11% prior to the elections, said Kotak Institutional Equities in its report. What happens to states? Inevitability, the state finances, especially those with a high level of debt, goes for a toss. State governments normally compensate banks through bonds over a period of time and this pushes their debt to GDP ratio and fiscal deficit figures. The impact of the recently announced farm loan waiver in Madhya Pradesh is likely to be huge. We dont know the exact figures yet but one report that quotes a government official says, the 4.1 million farmers in Madhya Pradesh have an outstanding loan of Rs 56,377 crore. Of this Rs 12,000 crore of loans are already bad and the last budget of the state (2018-19) was Rs 18,366 crore. A Report by India Ratings had shown that the farm debt waivers announced by the five large states--Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Karnataka--together will balloon the combined fiscal deficit of these states by Rs 1,07,700 crore or 0.65 percent of GDP this financial year. This sort of degradation in the states finances on account of populist policies has been cautioned by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in its recent annual report. In its report titled, State Finances: A Study of Budgets, the RBI revised estimate for GFD-GDP for FY18 to 3.1 percent as against earlier 2.6 percent earlier. With states continuing announcements and roll-out of farm loan waivers, the budgeted GFD could be at risk, and the additional borrowing requirement could produce a concomitant impact on the already elevated borrowing yields, the RBI said in its report. If not waiver, what is the solution? Politicians pitch loan waivers as a solution to the farmers' woes. The argument is that the farmer in distress needs an urgent solution and a long-term solution can be worked out later. But, this reasoning is flawed for several reasons. To begin with, there is no end to farm loan waivers once the spree kicks off. Ever since the UPA in 2008 announced farm loan waiver, at least a dozen loan waivers have been declared in different states as a key plank to win elections. But none of these worked to ease the pain of poor farmers, evident from empirical evidence so far. States struggle with the implementation part since finding the needy farmer and filtering out unworthy applicants is near impossible in a short period of time. All the farm loan waivers given so far by governments (whoever is in power) have only offered temporary relief to the farmer. At the time of the next agricultural season, he goes in for another debt trap if there are no rains. Naturally, loan waivers can be a recurring solution every year. There is no blueprint yet for major reforms in the agriculture sector and scant attention is given towards improving the efficiency of the land under cultivation. Problems run deeper There is a deeper malaise in the farm sector on account of multiple factors that call for a structural overhaul to repair damaged farm-infrastructure via a reforms-based approach. However, the governments are merely relying on temporary solutions in the form of hiking MSPs, offering waivers and giving growers hope of unrealistically good days ahead. For instance, promising a doubling of farm income by 2022 without doing any groundwork is nothing but a utopian idea especially when a majority of Indian farmers still depend on seasonal rains as the main source of irrigation. Also, remember that Indian farmer has the smallest landholdings the world-over. The global average of landholding size is 5.5 hectares. The per capita availability of land in India, from 1951 to 2011 declined by 70 percent, from 0.5 hectares to 0.15 hectares. Now, what is the problem with holding smaller pieces of land? It makes the life of the farmer a lot tougher as his costs escalate on all counts ---equipment, labour and crop treatment. Unlike rich farmers who own several hectares of land, these farmers will not have enough appeal among bankers as well. Besides the above, there are several other factors that have fueled the agrarian distress demonetisation triggered a cash crunch that put a freeze on the informal and rural economies for several months on end; higher costs of production; a lack of a competitive pricing mechanism; and the slow pace of migration from the conventional APMC system to technology-based E-Mandis. These are the areas politicians need to pay attention to beyond farm loan waiver announcements made before every election. If this is not done, politicians will be destroying the economy. (Data support from Kishor Kadam) While a GST rate cut on cement to 18 percent is likely to cost about Rs 20,000 crore annually to the exchequer, the council is still likely to go ahead. New Delhi: The GST Council is likely to slash tax rates on automobile tyres to 18 percent from 28 percent currently in its next meeting on Saturday, an official said. The move is part of the overall plan to rationalise the highest tax bracket of 28 percent after Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday said that 99 percent of over 1,200 goods and services will attract 18 percent or less Goods and Services Tax (GST). "A 28 percent tax on automobile tyre impacts common man because ultimately he has to shell out the tax. The overall focus on 22 December council meet will be to lessen the GST burden on common man," an official told PTI. Currently there are 34 goods left in the highest tax bracket of 28 percent. The list include commonly used items like 'new pneumatic tyre of rubber' (automobile tyre), digital camera, air conditioners, dish washing machine, set top box for TV, monitors and projectors as well as construction item like cement. The official said, while a GST rate cut on cement to 18 percent is likely to cost about Rs 20,000 crore annually to the exchequer, the council is still likely to go ahead. "Cement is an area where huge instances of evasion was taking place. If tax rates come down more people will buy it from the formal channel and would also boost housing sector as well," the official added. The other items which are likely to retained in the 28 percent slab include aerated drinks, cigarette, bidi, tobacco products, pan masala, smoking pipes, automobiles, aircrafts, yachts, revolvers and pistols, gambling lottery. GST has five tax slabs of 0 percent, 8, 12, 18 and 28 percent with daily essential items attracting nil tax rates and luxury, sin and some white goods at the highest tax slab. Modi on Tuesday indicated that the 28 percent slab of GST would only be restricted to a few select items, such as luxury and sin goods. "We are of the opinion of making GST as smooth as possible for the enterprises. In earlier days, the GST was framed according to the existing VAT or excise tax structures exercised in those respective states. (With) the discussions held from time to time, the tax system is getting improved," Modi had said. In the first eight months (April-November) of the current fiscal, the government has mopped up over Rs 7.76 lakh crore from GST. The 2018-19 budget had estimated annual GST collection at Rs 13.48 lakh crore, which means a monthly target of Rs 1.12 lakh crore. EY Tax Partner said, "The industry as well as consumers have been eagerly looking forward to pruning of the goods in the 28 percent category which today amongst others include cement, camera, two wheelers, tyres, etc. However, the government would need to analyse the same from the perspective of impact on GST revenue collections". Chidambaram's alleged role has come under the scanner of investigating agencies in connection with the Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) clearance of Rs 305 crore given to INX media - a venture promoted by former media baron Peter Mukerjea and his wife Indrani. Senior Congress leader P Chidambaram has been summoned on Weddnesday by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) for questioning in the INX Media case. The Delhi High Court has extended interim protection to former Union minister P Chidambaram in the INX media case. P Chidambaram has been summoned by ED to appear before it today in INX Media Case. (File Pic) pic.twitter.com/gAesy8SNKX ANI (@ANI) December 19, 2018 He has reached the office of the ED, according to media reports. Delhi: P Chidambaram has reached Enforcement Directorate (ED) headquarter. He was summoned by ED in INX Media Case. pic.twitter.com/2kapHlePic ANI (@ANI) December 19, 2018 Chidambaram's alleged role has come under the scanner of investigating agencies in connection with the Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) clearance of Rs 305 crore given to INX media - a venture promoted by former media baron Peter Mukerjea and his wife Indrani. Earlier, the ED had attached Karti, Chidambaram's son's properties collectively valued at Rs 54 crore. Besides his properties in India, properties in London, and Spain have been attached, too, media reports said. The central probe agency issued a provisional order under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) for attachment of Indian assets in Kodaikanal and Ooty in Tamil Nadu and a flat in Delhi's Jorbagh. Karti was arrested on 28 February by the CBI for allegedly taking money to facilitate the FIPB clearance to INX Media in 2007 when his father was the Union Finance Minister in the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government. Later, Karti was granted bail. Karti's chartered accountant S Bhaskararaman was arrested in the case by the ED and he was later granted bail. Both Karti and Chidambaram have denied all allegations made by CBI, as well as the Enforcement Directorate (ED). The CBI initially alleged that Karti received Rs 10 lakh as bribe for facilitating the FIPB clearance to INX Media. It later revised the figure to $1 million. The other accused in the case include then INX Media Director Indrani Mukerjea and then INX News Director Peter Mukerjea. The Enforcement Directorate (ED) had earlier attached assets worth Rs 54 crore of Karti Chidambaram in India, Spain and the UK in connection with a money laundering case related to INX Media, an action termed "bizarre and outlandish" by him. --With inputs from agencies The open offer has been made at a price of Rs 61.73 a share, which is in connection with LIC's acquisition of 51 percent controlling stake in IDBI Bank. New Delhi: State-owned IDBI Bank on Tuesday said it has received final letter from Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) for an open offer to acquire additional 26 percent in the lender. "This is to inform that IDBI Bank is in receipt of final letter of open offer from LIC vide letter dated 18 December 2018 for acquisition of 2,04,15,12,929 fully paid-up equity shares representing 26 percent of the fully diluted voting equity share capital of IDBI Bank from the equity shareholders of IDBI Bank," the lender said in a regulatory filing. The open offer has been made at a price of Rs 61.73 a share, which is in connection with LIC's acquisition of 51 percent controlling stake in IDBI Bank. "The acquirer (LIC) shall complete all procedures relating to the offer within 10 working days from the date of closure of the tendering period, including payment of consideration to those equity shareholders whose share certificates and/or other documents are found valid and in order and are accepted for acquisition by the acquirer," LIC said in the open offer which was enclosed in the regulatory filing by the bank. An open offer is mandatory pursuant to Sebi regulations as it gives an exit route to shareholders, including retailers, to monetise their holding in a company. "The acquirer is making the offer to acquire offer shares (2,04,15,12,929 equity shares constituting 26 per cent of the fully diluted voting share capital of the target company i.e., IDBI Bank) at the offer price (Rs 61.73) per offer share, which is equal to the price determined in accordance with offer consideration (Rs 1,26,02,25,93,107)," LIC said in the letter. However, IDBI Bank is in receipt of a letter dated 3 December 2018 issued by the government whereby it has confirmed that it (government) will not participate in the offer, LIC said. Reserve Bank governor Shaktikanta Das Wednesday met more state-run bankers to discuss the issues related to relaxing the prompt corrective action (PCA) framework, liquidity and credit flows to MSMEs, bankers said. Mumbai: Reserve Bank governor Shaktikanta Das on Wednesday met more state-run bankers to discuss the issues related to relaxing the prompt corrective action (PCA) framework, liquidity and credit flows to MSMEs, bankers said. This is the second meeting between public sector lenders and RBI since Das took charge last Tuesday, following the sudden resignation of Urjit Patel due to deep differences with the government on a host of issues, including calls for relaxing the PCA for some banks, autonomy and operational independence as well as parting at least one-third of its reserve capital to government among others. The lenders who attended the meeting included Bank of Baroda, Bank of Maharashtra, Allahabad Bank, Indian Overseas Bank, Indian Bank, Syndicate Bank, United Bank of India and Uco Bank among others. "It was a general feedback meeting. The RBI wants to know the state of individual banks. There were also discussions on the issues related to liquidity and credit flows to the MSME sector," a banker said. Das and the four deputy governors also deliberated on the prompt corrective action (PCA) framework with these lenders, said another banker. Of the 21 state-owned banks, as many as 11 are under the PCA framework, which imposes lending and other restrictions on weak lenders. These are Allahabad Bank, United Bank of India, Corporation Bank, IDBI Bank, Uco Bank, Bank of India, Central Bank of India, Indian Overseas Bank, Oriental Bank of Commerce, Dena Bank and Bank of Maharashtra. At the first meeting last Wednesday, the bankers had sought some easing in the one-day default norms announced by RBI through the 12 February circular, which nullified all other debt resolution mechanisms. At the November 19 board meeting, the RBI board decided to refer the issue of relaxing PCA framework to the board of financial supervision of the central bank. The meeting also decided many other steps including a loan restructuring scheme for MSMEs with credit up to Rs 25 crore outside the IBC framework, and giving banks some concession on capital adequacy norms. On farm exports, Niti Aayog suggested the government should come up with a coherent and stable agricultural export policy New Delhi: Asserting that raising MSP can only be a partial solution to boost farmers' income, government think tank Niti Aayog Wednesday pitched for setting up an agricultural tribunal and auctioning of farm produce in mandis by fixing minimum reserve price. In its 'Strategy for New India@75' document released by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, the Aayog suggested many reform measures to increase the farm sector growth and double farmers' income by 2022. "The government should consider replacing the Commission on Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP) by an agriculture tribunal in line with the provisions of Article 323B of the Constitution," it said. The CACP is a government's advisory body that suggests the minimum support price (MSP) for 22 kharif and rabi crops. The government generally agrees to the suggestion made by the CACP. The Niti Aayog should set up a group to examine "replacing the minimum support price (MSP) by a minimum reserve price (MRP), which could be the starting point for auctions at mandis", the document said. The group should also examine if MSP can be fixed based on the three different criteria -- surplus produce, products in deficit in domestic market but available globally and products that are in deficit both domestically and globally, the report added. The Aayog further suggested examining options for including private traders operating in markets to complement the minimum support price (MSP) regime through a system of incentives and commission payments. Stating that raising MSP or prices can only be a partial solution to the problem of assuring remunerative returns to farmers, it said, "A long-term solution lies in the creation of a competitive, stable and unified national market to enable better price discovery, and a long-term trade regime favourable to exports." The Niti Aayog also emphasised the need to encourage futures trade and removal of entry barriers to increase market depth should be considered. It also advocated contract farming. On farm exports, the think tank suggested the government should come up with a coherent and stable agricultural export policy, ideally with a five to ten-year time horizon and a built-in provision for a mid-term review. The strategy document also talked about modernising agriculture sector through improving irrigation facilities, marketing reforms, post harvesting management and better crop insurance products. The Aayog said that policy environment should facilitate income security to farmers, while maintaining the country's food security. According to Beijing, those drawn towards Islamist extremism and separatism have been sent vocational education centres. At least one million Uighurs and other minority Muslims are held at these sites, UN says. Bishkek (AsiaNews/Agencies) Kyrgyz and Kazakh Muslims have been detained along with Uyghurs in Chinas study camps" in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region, the Committee to Protect the Kyrgyz People in China (pictured) said in a statement. The group has called on the Kyrgyz government, which relies heavily on Chinese economic aid, to condemn Beijings "scorched earth" policy and put pressure on Chinese authorities to let their countrymen go. Asyla Alymkulova, the 33-year-old wife of Shairbek Doolotkhan, a Chinese-born Muslim, is one of the founders of the group. She has had no news about her husband since October when he went to Xinjiang on business. Two weeks after his disappearance, a representative of Doolotkhans company told her that her husband had been "sent away to study" in a camp. The study camp is believed to be one of the many extra-judicial detention centres set up in Xinjiang, holding as many as one million Uighurs and other Muslim minorities, according to estimates cited by a UN panel. Chinese officials have described the camps as vocational education centres for people who appear to be drawn towards Islamist extremism and separatism. But human rights activists say members of Chinas Muslim minorities are being held involuntarily for transgressions such as wearing long beards and face veils. The fate of 1.5 million Xinjiang-based Kazakhs has been a hot-button issue in Kazakhstan. In Kyrgyzstan, the plight of members of the smaller Chinese Kyrgyz community only recently emerged after reports that a Kyrgyz lawmakers brother had been detained. Kyrgyzstans foreign minister declined to comment when asked if Kyrgyz citizens had also been arrested. Chinas Foreign Ministry said that it had no information. Global benchmark Brent was up 0.85 percent, or 49 cents, at $56.75 per barrel Petrol and diesel prices remain unchanged on Wednesday following hikes for two consecutive days as US crude prices rose amid worries about oversupply and a slowing global economy that is keeping markets under pressure. Petrol was sold at Rs 70.63 per litre in Delhi, Rs 76.25 in Mumbai, Rs 73.29 in Chennai and at Rs 72.71 per litre in Kolkata, as per the data available on Indian Oil Corporation website. Diesel was being retailed at Rs 64.54 a litre in Delhi, Rs 67.55 in Mumbai, Rs 68.14 in Chennai and at Rs 66.30 per litre in Kolkata. Meanwhile, US crude oil had climbed 37 cents, or 0.8 percent, to $46.24 per barrel, after plunging 7.3 percent the day before in a session when it touched its lowest since August last year at $45.79. Global benchmark Brent was up 0.85 percent, or 49 cents, at $56.75 per barrel. It dropped 5.62 percent on Tuesday, at one point marking a 14-month low of $56.16 a barrel. The toxic combination of oversupply worries and global growth distress should see oil prices languish into year-end as negative momentum is leading price action, said Stephen Innes, head of trading for Asia-Pacific at OANDA. US crude stocks rose unexpectedly last week, while gasoline inventories increased, industry group the American Petroleum Institute said on Tuesday. If the build in crude stockpiles is confirmed by US government data on Wednesday, it will be the first increase in three weeks. Meanwhile, analysts said that upcoming output cuts led by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) had so far failed to stimulate the market as they were not due to kick in until next month. Output from de facto OPEC leader Saudi Arabia as well as the United States and Russia - leading producers outside the group - has been at or near record highs. The US government has said shale production is expected to climb to over 8 million barrels per day (bpd) for the first time on record by the end of December. Russian oil output hit a record 11.42 million bpd this month, an industry source told Reuters. However, there were some factors tightening supply, with Libyas state oil company declaring force majeure at the countrys largest oilfield. That came a week after the firm announced a contractual waiver on exports from the field following its seizure by protesters. The PMAY (U), launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in June 2015, aims to ensure 'Housing for all by 2022' by providing financial assistance to a beneficiary. New Delhi: The Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (Urban) is believed to have generated employment for over six crore people in the country, the government told Lok Sabha on December 18. Union Minister Hardeep Singh Puri said as per the 2014 study report of the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER), for every Rs 1 lakh invested in the housing sector, 2.65 new jobs are created in the economy. "On this basis, it is estimated that a total of 6.07 crore employment might have so far been generated through implementation of the PMAY (U) across the country," the housing and urban affairs minister said in a written response to a question. The ministry said it refers to the number of jobs created irrespective of duration. The PMAY (U), launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in June 2015, aims to ensure "Housing for all by 2022" by providing financial assistance to a beneficiary. The government has set a target of one crore houses to be constructed in urban areas across the country over a period of seven years -- 2015 to 2022. According to an official figure, till 12 December a total 65,43,970 houses have been approved for construction under the PMAY(U) across the country. Of these, 35,49,531 houses have been grounded for construction. 12,26,530 houses have been completed out of which 12,19,549 houses have been occupied by the beneficiaries. Johnson & Johnson in India did not have any immediate comment on the reports of sample seizures by Indian authorities. New Delhi: Indias federal drug regulator will on Wednesday seize samples of Johnson & Johnsons baby powder for testing, local media said, following a Reuters report that the company knew for decades that cancer-causing asbestos lurked in the product. The Times of India quoted an official source as saying that a team of 100 drug inspectors had been assigned to examine different manufacturing facilities, wholesalers and distributors, starting early Wednesday. Samples of all brands of the powder will be collected and sent for testing, the unnamed official told the paper. The Mint business daily also quoted an unnamed official as saying that the drug inspectors would visit J&Js manufacturing operations and draw samples for further investigation. On Tuesday, a spokeswoman for the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO) said the Reuters report was under consideration but that it was too early to say if a formal investigation would be launched into the baby powder that is ubiquitous in many Indian homes, a potential market of 1.3 billion people. The CDSCO spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday. An Indian health ministry spokeswoman declined to comment. J&J in India did not have any immediate comment on the reports of sample seizures by Indian authorities. On Tuesday the company said in a statement that the Reuters article, which was published on Friday, is one-sided, false and inflammatory. Johnson & Johnsons baby powder is safe and asbestos free, it added. Studies of more than 100,000 men and women show that talc does not cause cancer or asbestos-related disease. Thousands of independent tests by regulators and the worlds leading labs prove our baby powder has never contained asbestos, the company said. A Reuters examination of many company memos, internal reports and other confidential documents, as well as deposition and trial testimony, showed that from at least 1971 to the early 2000s, the companys raw talc and finished powders sometimes tested positive for small amounts of asbestos, and that company executives, mine managers, scientists, doctors and lawyers fretted over the problem and how to address it while failing to disclose it to regulators or the public. The documents also depicted successful efforts to influence US regulators plans to limit asbestos in cosmetic talc products and scientific research on the health effects of talc. J&J said on Monday it planned to buy back up to $5 billion of its stock, after the Reuters report wiped about $40 billion from its market value. By Foo Yun Chee BRUSSELS (Reuters) - U.S. search and advertising company Yelp has lost its bid to intervene in Google's challenge against a 2.4 billion euro ($2.7 billion) EU antitrust fine after an EU court said it had no direct interest in the case. The Luxembourg-based General Court also rejected an application by U.S.-based lobbying group Consumer Watchdog for the same reason, according to its Dec By Foo Yun Chee BRUSSELS (Reuters) - U.S. search and advertising company Yelp has lost its bid to intervene in Google's challenge against a 2.4 billion euro ($2.7 billion) EU antitrust fine after an EU court said it had no direct interest in the case. The Luxembourg-based General Court also rejected an application by U.S.-based lobbying group Consumer Watchdog for the same reason, according to its Dec. 7 ruling. The European Commission penalised Google, the world's most popular internet search engine, last year for favouring its own comparison shopping service in internet searches. The case had been triggered by British price comparison shopping site Foundem while other European and U.S. rivals also filed complaints. Yelp had bid to take part in the court proceedings so that its rights and interests would be covered by the final ruling in the case. The General Court, however, backed Google's argument against Yelp's intervention, saying that while Yelp took part as an interested third party in the EU investigation, it runs a different business from Google. "As Yelp does not operate a search service that specialises in comparison shopping results, it cannot be directly affected by the ruling regarding the contested act and thus does not satisfy the criterion laid down in the case-law," judges said. The court also dismissed lobbying group FairSearch's bid to intervene in the shopping case. Judges said FairSearch had failed to prove that it is a representative body. They also rejected intervention bids from Prestige Gifting, Connexity, Pricegrabber.com Ltd and lobbying group ICOMP. This is one of two Google challenges against EU antitrust rulings, with the other related to Android. (Reporting by Foo Yun Chee; Editing by Susan Fenton) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. A Gujarat High Court judge on Wednesday withdrew himself from the hearing of a bail application of former IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt, arrested in a 1996 case of alleged drug planting. Ahmedabad: A Gujarat High Court judge on Wednesday withdrew himself from the hearing of a bail application of former IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt, arrested in a 1996 case of alleged drug planting. Bhatt approached the high court after a court at Palanpur in Banaskantha district rejected his bail plea. When the case came up before Justice AY Kogje, he said "not before me," thus recusing himself form the matter. Bhatt was arrested in September this year. He was the superintendent of police in Banaskantha in 1996 when the local police arrested Sumersingh Rajpurohit, a lawyer, claiming to have seized drugs from his hotel room in Palanpur town. However, the Rajasthan police said later that Rajpurohit was falsely implicated by the Banaskantha Police to compel him to transfer a disputed property located at Pali in Rajasthan. In June this year the Gujarat High Court handed over the probe to the state CID. Bhatt was sacked by the Union home ministry in August 2015 on the grounds of "unauthorised absence" from service. Earlier, he had crossed swords with the then Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi on several occasions. The ED wants Michel's custody as it has been investigating financial irregularities in the procurement deal of 12 AgustaWestland VVIP choppers. New Delhi: The Enforcement Directorate is likely to move an application before a city court on Wednesday seeking custody of Christian Michel, the middleman who was extradited to India from the UAE earlier this month in the Rs 3,600-crore AgustaWestland VVIP chopper deal, said sources. The agency's move is expected as the 57-year-old British national's CBI custody ends on Wednesday, the day he is to be produced before special judge Arvind Kumar in Patiala House courts for further hearing. Michel's name surfaced in 2012 as one of the three middlemen for swinging the deal in favour of AgustaWestland and making illegal kickbacks to the Indian authorities. The other two middlemen are Ralph Guido Haschke and Carlo Gerosa. The special judge on 15 December allowed the Central Bureau of Investigation to quiz Michel till 19 December. The CBI is grilling Michel since 4 December when he was extradited from the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Sources said the CBI needs more examination of Michel who is being confronted with documents the agency has as evidence of the corrupt practice during the deal. The CBI has informed the court that voluminous documents have been received from five countries pursuant to the Letters of Request and a number of documents are yet to be confronted with the accused. According to the CBI, Rs 92.3 lakh was given to some Air Force officers and Michel, through his shell companies, to bear the air expense of two serving/retired Air Force officers during 2009-2013 which needs to be verified. Michel's custody is also required for the CBI as it wanted him to be confronted with witnesses to corroborate different versions. The CBI said that Michel was not cooperating in the probe and was evasive. Earlier on Wednesday, the court reserved its order on the bail plea of Christian Michel for 22 December. Christian Michel, the alleged midlleman in the AgustaWestland VVIP chopper case, was sent to 10-day judicial custody by a Delhi court on Wednesday, CNN-News18 reported. The 57-year-old British national will be produced before the court on 28 December. #NewsAlert -- AgustaWestland middleman Christian Michel sent to judicial custody till December 28 by Delhi Court | @mitrasouvik123 with more details pic.twitter.com/pw3ud4aCjX News18 (@CNNnews18) December 19, 2018 Earlier on Wednesday, the court reserved its order on the bail plea of Christian Michel for 22 December. The Enforcement Directorate had sought Michel's custody on Wednesday. Michel told Special Judge Arvind Kumar that he was not required for custodial interrogation and no purpose will be served by keeping him in further custody. "My handwriting has already been taken. There were no original documents with the CBI to match it with. I have volunteered to provide all the documents," he said. He was in the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) custody for 15 days. Michel was arrested in the UAE and extradited to India on 4 December. The next day, he was produced in the court, which allowed his five-day custodial interrogation by the CBI which was later extended by five more days. Michel is among the three alleged middlemen being probed in the case by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). The others are Guido Haschke and Carlo Gerosa. Both the agencies notified an Interpol red corner notice (RCN) against him after the court issued a non-bailable warrant against him. This open display of hostility towards one community and undermining of the process of justice are not only creating deep fissures in society but also demoralising honest police officers and jeopardising professionalism in the force. Bizarre. Absurd. Ridiculous. Embarrassing. Trump. That is what a headline in The Washington Post screamed last year when a doctored video clip was released by US president Donald Trump. What has happened in Uttar Pradesh in the past two weeks since the lynching of station house officer Subodh Kumar Singh by a mob in Bulandshahr on 3 December, over alleged cow slaughter, indeed evokes a similar outrage. Replace US president Donald Trump with Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath and his cops and the picture is complete. First, the state police went after the Muslim men for alleged cow slaughter and put them in jail for two weeks on the basis of a complaint filed by the main accused in the mob lynching incident, Bajrang Dal convenor Yogesh Raj. Then on Tuesday, the four were released after the SIT constituted to probe the violence found them innocent. The SIT arrested three more Muslim men for the alleged slaughter of cows with a bizarre narrative: They were part of a gang that hunted cows and shot them with a double-barrelled gun. They would slaughter the cows using sharp instruments like knives and share the meat. They were not named in the original FIR, nor their relations to the 3 December mob lynching incident is at all clear. For the first time, two others have also been arrested for mob violence, but the main accused Yogesh Raj and a local BJP Yuva Morcha leader Shikhar Agrawal are roaming free. There is no word yet on why they have not been arrested or what actions have been taken to arrest them. This reverses investigation of cow slaughter, rather than the mob lynching, was set into motion by none other than the chief minister. Two days after the incident, he held a review meeting and gave instructions for strict action against cow slaughter, which he described as a conspiracy, but said not a word on the SHOs killing. That was a signal for the Uttar Pradesh Police and the latter announced later that they will first go after the cow slaughter and then look at the mob lynching, even though the victim of this lynching was one of their officers. A couple of days later, Yogi went on to claim that No mob lynching happened in Uttar Pradesh, what happened in Bulandshahr is an accident. This was ridiculous, to say the least. There is enough video evidence to show that it indeed took place in broad daylight. Besides, mob lynching is no ordinary crime or just a murder and former Rajasthan chief minister Vasundhara Raje was rightly called out for saying a mob lynching as a murder in the same week. That is why the Supreme Court had asked, in July this year, the Centre and state governments to create a special law for mob lynching and provide adequate punishment to instil fear for the law among the people involved in vigilantism and lynching. Sadly, no government has shown any inclination to follow this. Nor the apex courts directive to give wide publicity to its direction that lynching and mob violence of any kind will invite serious consequence under the law. Had that been followed the SHOs killing could have been averted. This open display of hostility towards one community and undermining of the process of justice are not only creating deep fissures in society but also demoralising honest police officers and jeopardising professionalism in the force which has dangerous consequences. In fact, at least 83 former bureacrats have written an open letter criticising the Centre and the Uttar Pradesh government for failing to take action and demanded the resignation of Adityanath. The letter asked citizens to unite in a "crusade against the politics of hate and division a politics which aims to destroy the fundamental principles on which our Republic is founded". Both the chief minister and his police force are obliged to act fairly and impartially to ensure justice is done and peace and order is restored, not divide society on the basis of religion or intimidate a section of society. It is even more reprehensible when elected representatives join the bandwagon and celebrate the transfer of inconvenient police officers in company with fringe groups, instead of helping the cause of justice or law and order. Uttar Pradesh is not only known for high crime rates but also for poor governance and backwardness. It is the most populous state with the maximum number of poor 17 percent of Indias population and 22 percent of its total poor, as per Census 2011. It continues to remain a low-income state along with Bihar, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan and its GDP growth rate has remained below the national average. Its human development indicators also remain very poor. It was ranked 18th among the Indian states in the UNDPs India Human Development Report (2011) which measured long and healthy life, education and a decent standard of living. As per Census 2011, its literacy rate was 67.7 percent lower than the national average of 74 percent. With such credentials, the chief minister and his official machinery should have been more focussed on improving governance and indicators of economic and human development, rather than divisive majoritarian politics which unfortunately is the case. An economically stronger state with a better human capital will not only lift millions of its population out of poverty and backwardness but would also turn into an engine of growth for India. Unfortunately, all the energy is being dissipated in creating social disorder and disquiet. Uttar Pradesh chief Yogi Adityanath on Wednesday said that the state government should be thanked for the steps it took in the Bulandshahr case. Uttar Pradesh chief Yogi Adityanath on Wednesday said that the state government should be thanked for the steps it took in the Bulandshahr case. "Those who are giving unnecessary statements are doing it to hide their failures, instead they should applaud the government and should thank the government," NDTV quoted Adityanath as saying. Hitting back at the Opposition which stalled the proceedings of the Uttar Pradesh legislature over the issue of law and order, Adityanath further said that the Bulandshahr violence was a "political conspiracy" hatched by those who have lost political ground. "The 3 December (Bulandshahr) violence is a political conspiracy (hatched) by those who have lost political ground," he told reporters after the Assembly was adjourned for the day amid opposition ruckus. "It was a political conspiracy which has been exposed...peace and order will be maintained at all cost...the administration and government have repulsed the designs (of conspirators) sternly," Adityanath said. The chief minister had earlier termed the Bulandshahr incident an 'accident'. The Bulandshahr violence, which occurred over an incident of alleged cow slaughter, claimed two lives, including that of a police inspector. Responding to questions on the issue, Adityanath said those whose political ground has receded are embracing each other to hide their shortcomings. A group of former bureaucrats and diplomats have come down heavily on Adityanath over the Bulandshahr mob violence, which they said showed "perverted" fundamental principles of governance and constitutional ethics of the BJP government in the state and slammed the "stony silence" of Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the issue. "The mob violence in Bulandshahr in Uttar Pradesh on Dec 3, 2018, instigated and engineered with malicious intent, led to the cold-blooded murder of a police officer brave enough to step forward single-handedly to pacify the mob, marks the most dangerous turn yet in the direction taken by the politics of hate in recent times." "It shows that in India's most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, fundamental principles of governance, of constitutional ethics and of humane social conduct stand perverted. The Chief Minister of the state acts as high priest of the agenda of bigotry and majoritarian supremacy an agenda which now seems to take precedence over everything else," they said in an open letter. The 83 signatories to the letter including former foreign secretaries Shiv Shankar Menon (who was also national security advisor), Shyam Saran and Sujata Singh, former ambassador and DGP Julio Ribeiro, former special secretary Vappala Balakrishnan, former Delhi lieutenant-governor Najeeb Jung, Harsh Mander and Jawahar Sircar said in the letter that it was a measure of rapid erosion of constitutional values that they as a group had felt a compelling need to speak out about as many as nine times in the last 18 months. With inputs from agencies A case has been filed in a Muzaffarpur court against Madhya Pradesh chief minister Kamal Nath over his remarks on migrants from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar A case has been filed in a court in Uttar Pradesh's Muzaffarpur against Madhya Pradesh chief minister Kamal Nath over his remarks on migrants from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, ANI reported. The case was filed by one Tamanna Hashmi, the report added. Nath, a nine-time MP from Chhindwara in Madhya Pradesh, earlier said in Bhopal, "Lot of industries are set up in which people from other states, like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, come to work. I do not want to criticise them, but the youth of Madhya Pradesh are deprived (of jobs)." Nath was slammed by the BJP and its ally JD(U) with even Opposition parties such as the Samajwadi Party and the Congress ally RJD expressing their disapproval. As his remarks, made soon after Nath took oath as Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh on Monday, snowballed into a political row, Congress president Rahul Gandhi had told reporters he will look into the matter and offer a reply later. Highlighting Nath's own "outsider" background, BJP general secretary Kailash Vijaywargiya took a dig at him wondering whether whatever he has said should be implemented in politics, as well. The BJP leader said the Congress leader was born in Kanpur, studied in West Bengal and has now become the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, as he accused the new Madhya Pradesh chief minister of promoting divisive politics and regional chauvinism. "Such a statement does not behove a chief minister," he said. With inputs from PTI The government follows up on the promise to purchase more US military equipment. The five-year plan imposes a record spending of 27.47 trillion yen (244 billion euro) for Defense until March 2024. Critics defend the pacifist constitution. Tokyo (AsiaNews / Agencies) - The armed forces of Japan will receive the first aircraft carriers since World War II and dozens of fighter planes. Yesterday's approval of the new Defense plan is however the subject of criticism from the public. Intended to counter the growing Chinese military power, the five-year program is Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's latest move to strengthen the country's military apparatus. Abe argues that efforts are needed in light of the growing security challenges in the region, including tensions with North Korea and, above all, the "strong concerns" over the expansion of Beijing's military footprint. His critics, however, maintain that the move distances Tokyo from the principles that animated the pacifist constitution of the post-Second World War: it limits the country to possess armaments considered offensive. The five-year plan imposes a record expenditure of 27.47 trillion yen (244 billion euro) on Defense until March 2024. The ministry will upgrade two Izumo-class destroyers (low-end). The warships, currently used as helicopter holders, will be able to transport fighter jets with a short take-off capacity and vertical landing, such as the F-35B stealth fighter. In a separate plan, also approved by the government, Japan pledged to buy 42 F-35s over the next decade, with the F-35B variant widely considered the most likely candidate. During the same period, it expects to obtain 105 F-35A, a variant of the jet that performs conventional take-offs and landings and therefore can not be used on destroyers. The latest moves by the Japanese government follow promises to buy more US military equipment. US President Donald J. Trump had repeatedly complained about Washington's major trade deficit with Tokyo and urged Abe to expand the country's defensive capacity. The CBI questioned Sathish Sana to verify his 4 and 16 statements before a magistrate under Section 164 of Criminal Procedure Code about his meetings with various middlemen in New Delhi, as well as Dubai that led the agency to lodge an FIR. New Delhi: The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Tuesday examined Hyderabad-based businessman Sathish Babu Sana to verify and corroborate his statement on the basis of which the agency had filed a bribery case against its Special Director Rakesh Asthana in midst of his spat with Director Alok Verma. A new CBI team constituted by interim director M Nageswara Rao asked Sana to clarify "discrepancies" in his complaint against Asthana, sources said. The team was formed immediately after the government sent Verma and Asthana on forced leave on 23 October in the wake of a feud between them. Rao had reconstituted the team and transferred the members of the erstwhile team. The CBI questioned Sana to verify his 4 and 16 October statements before a magistrate under Section 164 of Criminal Procedure Code about his meetings with various middlemen in New Delhi as well as Dubai, that led the agency to lodge an FIR. The statement recorded before the magistrate is considered a confessional statement, and in case the complainant withdraws from it, the prosecuting agency can file a perjury case. An accused in the meat exporter Moin Qureshi case, Sana has sought relief from court from the repeated CBI summons issued against him. A CBI team probing a corruption case against Qureshi, which was headed by Asthana, claimed by Sana was issuing summons against him. Sana has alleged in a complaint to CBI, which is part of FIR, that investment banker Manoj Prasad had assured him of relief from CBI summons if he agreed to pay Rs 5 crore as a bribe. The Hyderabad businessman has also alleged that he was assured by Prasad that his brother Somesh manages Asthana's investments in London, and he is in touch with two other senior officers of various agencies. Prasad was arrested by the CBI on October 16 when he was returning from Dubai to allegedly collect a part of the bribe. As per the CBI, it has detected five alleged payments to middlemen by Sana Rs 1 crore on December 10, 2017, Rs 1.95 crore on December 13, 2017, Rs 25 lakh on October 10, 2018 and two tranche of 25,000 Dirham and 3,000 Dirham on October 14. The CBI claims that it has corroborated details of payment with phone intercepts, WhatsApp messages recovered from the phone of middleman Prasad, and tower locations to buttress its charges. AIKS called for 'Gramin Bharat Bandh' on 8 and 9 January, which has been supported by the Bhumi Adhikar Sabha, an outfit demanding land for poor farmers for agricultural purposes. New Delhi: The All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS) Tuesday called for 'Gramin Bharat Bandh' on January 8 and 9 to protest Prime Minister Narendra Modi's "non-committal" stand on farm loan waivers. In a two-day meeting, the Central Kisan Council has taken a resolution to call a two-day Gramin Bharat bandh on 8 and 9 January, 2019, Ashok Dhawale, AIKS president, said. The AIKS is a Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM) affiliated farmers' organisation. "The bandh is in protest against Prime Minister Narendra Modi's non-committal stand on farmers' loan waiver issue and rural distress the country has been facing in the last four and half years of the BJP rule," he said. Dhawale said the landlessness issue is another major problem in rural areas, and alleged that the Adivasis and Dalits have borne the brunt of the Modi government's anti-farmer policy. The AIKS's Gramin Bharat bandh has been supported by the Bhumi Adhikar Sabha, an outfit demanding land for poor farmers for agricultural purposes. "Not only farm loan waiver, but the government also has to address the landlessness issue of poor farmers. BAS has supported our bandh call", said Hannan Mollah, general secretary of AIKS. Mollah said the AIKS was able to bring the farmers' distress issue to the fore and all political parties have been realising the importance of the problem. On 8 and 9 January, 2019 several trade unions have also called for a general strike in the country to protest the Modi government's alleged pro-corporate policies, he said. "In urban areas, trade unions will go for general strike and farmers across the country will observe Gramin Bharat bandh on 8 and 9 January next year", Mollah added. A fire broke out in the basement of Mumbai's Trident Hotel at Nariman Point at around 11pm Wednesday night. No injuries have been reported. The first visuals from ANI show orange flames engulfing an entire room. A fire that broke out in the basement of Mumbai's 5-star Trident Hotel at Nariman Point at around 11pm Wednesday night is under control; no injuries have been reported so far. The Indian Express, quoting fire officer Prakash Nalawade, is reporting that a short circuit started the fire and "all electrical units are burnt". The first visuals from ANI showed orange flames beginning to engulf an entire room. Four fire engines, four water tankers and police teams reportedly rushed to the hotel. The Hindu is reporting that the fire broke out inside the Bottega Veneta showroom at the hotel. Preliminary reports suggest nobody was trapped in the blaze. Situated in the heart of downtown Mumbai, Trident, Nariman Point, is 35 storeys high with panoramic views of Marine Drive. The Trident fire marks the second fire scare on the same day in the country's financial capital. Two days after nine people were killed and 173 injured in a fire at the government-run Employees State Insurance Corporation (ESIC) Hospital in the city, another fire erupted in the same hospital on Wednesday. Every year on 19 December, Goa liberation day is celebrated in the state as Goa was liberated from Portuguese rule on that day in 1961. Goa was a Portuguese colony for 451 years. Every year on 19 December, Goa Liberation Day is celebrated in the state as Goa was liberated from Portuguese rule on that day in 1961. Goa was a Portuguese colony for 451 years. Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar on Wednesday extended his greetings to the Goans on this memorable day. In a tweet, the chief minister said, On this memorable day, let us recall the valiant efforts of our freedom fighters who fought against oppression, and the remarkable role played by the Indian Army in liberating Goa from Portuguese rule. On this day, let us resolve, rededicate ourselves and united to keep our state clean and tidy, and to achieve progress and development in all spheres. To celebrate the day, a workshop combining art, music and dance will be conducted in Dona Paula in Goa on Wednesday to commemorate the state's Liberation Day. The event, titled "Arttravel Workshop 2", will be held at the International Centre Goa and will see the participation of percussionist Carols Gonsalves, artist Gina Pegado and musician Rweff de Souza, said organiser Siddhi Naik. "The focus is on creative thinking and developing the mind in children by expressing one's ideas," she said. How Goa was liberated In the 19th Century, when there was a movement for Independence in India, the effects of which were felt on a smaller scale in Goa as well. Goans participated in Satyagraha in the late 1940s. After India got independence, the Portuguese refused to give up their hold over Goa. Finally, on 19 December, 1961, India conquered Goa from the Portuguese and Goa became a part of India. Goa was taken over by the Portuguese from the Maratha rule in 1641 and began the minor Bicholim conflict, which ended in a peace treaty between the Portuguese and Maratha Empire. The government of India under Jawaharlal Nehru in 1961 adopted a plan called Operation Vijay to free the Portuguese colonies in India. General JN Chaudhari was in charge of carrying out this plan. By 11 December, 1961, Indian forces were placed at Belgaum, Vapi and Una for attacks on Goa, Daman and Diu, respectively. Operations against Goa were directed by Major General KP Candeth. On 12 December, 1961, the two mainland routes connecting Goa and India were sealed for the civilian population. 18 December, 1961, was the day determined for the attack. All the three sections of the Indian armed forces participated in Operation Vijay. The Indian attack overpowered the Portuguese 3,000 member army with a force of almost 30,000. After numerous operations all over Goa, on 19 December, the Indian forces, which had successfully reached Betim the previous day, arrived at Panjim and hoisted the Indian flag. The Indian national flag was hoisted by Major General KP Candeth. All operations in Goa came to a halt at 6 pm on 19 December, 1961. Arrangements were made for receiving the formal surrender at the hands of the Portuguese governor General Salo E Silva. The document of surrender was signed at 7.30 pm. Major General Candeth was then appointed the military Governor of Goa. Within 40 hours of the start of the operation, the Indian Army had successfully carried out Operation Vijay and centuries of foreign domination in Goa came to an end. A War Memorial at Indian Naval Ship Gomantak was constructed in memory of seven sailors and other personnel who laid down their lives on 19 December 1961. Every year on this day, the officers of the Indian Navy pay their homage to the soldiers. A Guard is paraded and wreaths laid on the occasion at the war memorial. With inputs from agencies Despite thorough compliance laws in place, poor implementation ensures such incidents continue to recur at various government and private-run hospitals The National Human Rights Commission on Tuesday sought a report from the Maharashtra government on the death of ten people in a fire at a hospital in Mumbai's Andheri, while not ruling out negligence by the hospital administration. The commission is exploring whether or not the hospital authorities were at fault and if the building was fire safety compliant. The answers to these questions, we may find out, are not singular to the ESIC Kamgar Hospital in Mumbai's Andheri area. Even though a much detailed report on the exact cause of the fire, and whether or not it amounts to culpable negligence will be clarified later, the initial reports and firemen's accounts are all rife with telltale signs that authorities had little regard for safety arrangements. The fire seems to have started because of a short circuit in the ground floor storage room where highly inflammable material, including rubber rolls, were kept. In the absence of proper vents, extinguishers and sprinkler mechanism, the blaze soon engulfed four of the ground-plus-five storeyed building in Andehri's Marol area. The resultant smoke then spread to the upper floors through an open fire duct and was the cause behind most casualties, a fireman told PTI. The flames were so intense and the smoke so thick that firefighters reported difficulty in navigating through the structure. According to reports, their troubles were compounded by the glass facade of the building as it blocked air passage and firemen had to break the glasses on all the floors to evacuate those stranded inside. "Most of the deceased, including the six-month-old child, died due to suffocation," the fire official said. To add to this, the fire department revealed that the building had failed a safety audit just a fortnight before the tragedy struck. Milind Ogle, the deputy chief fire officer of the MIDC area, said the hospital didn't have the final no-objection certificate for fire compliance. An under-construction new wing of the hospital had applied for NOC. But fire authorities not only found irregularities in the new building but even unearthed problems with the hospitals old building, putting the latters NOC in the provisional category. "When our team visited the hospital to inspect the conditions for fire compliance, it found certain shortcomings in the installations and it was communicated to the hospital administration," Ogle said. While reviewing fire compliance norms for the new building, the team also noticed some lacunae in the old hospital building, he said. "So we refused to issue the full and final fire NOC to the old building also," Ogle was quoted as saying. The fact that the hospital authorities did little to rectify these shortcomings puts them in the grey even if the fire may have been caused by an unavoidable or unpredictable accident. The 325-bed hospital was constructed in the 1970s and has most likely been operating under stress with the sheer number of people it was handling than it was designed to admit. However, that said, the Mumbai hospital fire isn't the only incident that validates this sorry reality. Not a one-off incident The National Disaster Management Authority put out safety guidelines for hospitals in February 2016, yet fires break out in private and government hospitals as well as in laboratories and wards. In October 2018, a short-circuit caused a fire in the ground floor pharmacy of the Calcutta Medical College in Wes Bengal. Though the authorities managed to evacuate over 200 people without any major casualty, deaths were averted not because the infrastructure had adequate fire-fighting systems but because of the presence of mind of hospital staff and patients' relatives and sheer good luck. This time too, the fire compliance certificate had expired and because the medical supplies stored in the infirmary were highly combustible, the blaze quickly spread on to other floors. In the absence of stretchers and wheelchairs, relatives of panic-stricken patients, helped by hospital staff, carried them in their arms down the stairs, cradling saline bottles, a report in The Telegraph said. The fire safety norms were ignored despite the fact that West Bengal had seen a horrible tragedy in private-run AMRI Hospitals, Dhakuria, nearly seven years ago where 90 people were killed. This is how a news report from the time details the horror: "Majority of the patients were in such a critical condition that they could not even move their limbs. They helplessly saw smoke enter their cabins as they suffocated to death. Those administered sedatives died in sleep." Here too, the fire started with a small spark caused by a short circuit in the ageing electrical wiring system in the hospital's basement. It transformed into a blaze because a large number of flammable substances were kept in the basement of the building. The directors of the hospital were booked for culpable homicide not amounting to murder. The trial is still underway. A major fire at the Institute of Medical Sciences and SUM Hospital in Bhubaneswar, Odisha, killed 22 people in October 2016. The subsequent reports on the incident revealed that the fire was caused by a short circuit and the fire safety norms as per the 2013 guidelines were not followed by the hospital authorities. In January 2013, a fire caused by a faulty wiring system in Bikaner's PBM Hospital injured three infants and damaged property worth lakhs. The wires could not carry the load due to which the mishap occurred, the Outlook reported. Short circuits, non-compliance to safety norms common cause of fires in hospitals The common thread binding all the above examples, and many more cases, is that the fire often started with an electric short-circuit and was enraged by improper storage of highly inflammable medical supplies. In almost all the cases, non-compliance to safety norms was also found, indicating that not only the fire could have been avoided but losses could have been minimised had compliance to safety laws been up to the mark. Dr RK Dave, former senior specialist on policy and plans, National Disaster Management Authority, pins this trend on the increasing load on the threadbare infrastructure of state-run as well as privately-owned hospitals. "At any given time, hospital gadgets consume five to ten times of the allowed electricity usage, Dave told News18. He said that usually, these machines dont function at the same time so no one suspects they can cause a problem. However, on the occasion they all are pressed into service at once, the wiring fails to take the load and a short circuit occurs. "The electricity load on the day of commissioning a hospital almost doubles from the load estimated when the facility was designed," Dave explained. He estimated that this load goes up nearly 25 percent annually. "The loads in city hospitals are increasing due to rapid urbanisation," Dave explained, adding, "and urban hospitals are no longer as resilient as they were five years ago." Moreover, in event of a fire, what makes things worse is that many old hospitals do not have fire safety equipment like sprinklers. Even the roads inside big hospitals, which should be 6 metres wide according to the NDMA guidelines, are blocked with parked vehicles. If a fire breaks out, the fire tenders cannot even enter. What makes a hospital fire worst is that the victims are often restricted in movement, thereby slowing down the evacuation process. The nature of medical equipment, supplies and machinery, is also more often than not combustible. This, in turn, makes training the staff to deal with such disasters extremely crucial. An article in a healthcare journal states that if a small blaze broke out next to an MRI machine, firefighters wouldn't be able to use a traditional red metal extinguisher because powerful magnetism might yank it right out of their hands. Similarly, in many hospitals, more often than not the fire increases and smoke spreads because technicians unknowingly punch holes through firewalls to run new wires in hidden areas. Thus, until hospital authorities are held accountable for ensuring regular inspections, and the medical staff is made to have compulsory training in handling natural disasters and accidents, our critical care units will continue to function on sheer luck, waiting for another such disaster to strike. With inputs from PTI A team of the Inland Waterways Authority of India (IWAI) would visit Tripura to decide on the location for new India-Bangladesh waterway connecting Ashuganj river port in eastern Bangladesh and Sonamura in Sipahijala district of Tripura Agartala: A high-level team of the Inland Waterways Authority of India (IWAI) would visit Tripura on 26 December to conduct a survey and decide on the location for a jetty for a new waterway connecting India and Bangladesh, the state government said Wednesday. The new India-Bangladesh waterway has been proposed between Ashuganj river port in eastern Bangladesh and Sonamura in Sipahijala district of Tripura through rivers Gomati and Meghna. Tripura Chief Minister Biplab Kumar Deb met Union Minister Nitin Gadkari at New Delhi on the issue on Tuesday. "It was decided that a high ranking team from IWAI would visit Tripura on 26 and 27 December, 2018, and decide on the location of the jetty/finalize the location of land for the project of inland waters in Gomati river from Tripura to Bangladesh," a government statement said. Sources in the Chief Ministers Office (CMO) said, Sonamura, which is about 60 km from here, was initially chosen as the location for the jetty and a preliminary survey was also conducted by the state government. However, it was up to the IWAI officials to decide, they said. Last month, Chief Minister Biplab Kumar Deb had said a new waterway would come up within six months for movement of container ships between Sonamura and Ashuganj river port. Once it was completed, goods to the state would directly reach Sonamura town from Bangladesh easily, Deb had told reporters. The central government would soon start dredging Gomati river on the Indian side for the new waterway to connect Ashuganj port on Meghna river covering about 60 km, he said. The secretary to the department of shipping of the central government had recently visited the state and inspected the sites. The official had told the state government that dredging of Gomati river and construction of a small river port would be completed in less than six months. Tripura shares a 856-kilometre border with Bangladesh. Kolkata is 645 kilometres by road via Assam from Agartala and if the new waterway is built, it would ease transportation of goods and the distance would be reduced to half. India-Bangladesh connectivity would also considerably ease connectivity in the route. Hafiz Saeed is now a columnist. The mastermind of the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks has written a column for a leading Urdu newspaper, stirring a debate among journalists. Just a couple of months after Pakistan lifted the ban on Hafiz Saeed-led Jamaat-ud-Dawa and Falah-i-Insaniyat Foundation, this wanted terrorist in India has taken the Pakistani government's approval for his dark activities too seriously. Notching up his habit of regularly spewing venom against India in public meetings, Saeed has now emerged as a columnist adding another platform to spread his anti-India tirade. The mastermind of the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks has written a column for a leading Urdu newspaper, stirring a debate among journalists as to how the media house allowed the head of a banned terror group to write on the Kashmir issue and the creation of Bangladesh in 1971. Saeed was declared a global terrorist by the US and the UN after the 2008 Mumbai attack and was put under house arrest in November 2008 but freed by a court some months later. He carries a $10 million American bounty on his head for his role in terror activities. Daily Dunya (an Urdu publication of Dunya media group of Mian Amer Mahmood) published Illegal aggression of India on East Pakistan... Why Pakistan is avoiding advocating for Kashmiri people written by "Professor Hafiz Mohammad Saeed" which appeared in the paper on Sunday. The article carries a picture of former prime minister Indira Gandhi and some young men holding guns in Dhaka. Allowing the head of a banned terror group to contribute for a known media house has stirred debate with journalists questioning whether the company in question allowed Saeed to write due to some "direct links" with the owner or under "someone's pressure". A court has ordered the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority to ensure that the Pakistani media does not display Saeed's pictures. In his article, Saeed said, "Indira hatched a conspiracy to dismember Pakistan", lamenting the then Pakistani rulers for their failure. Saeed has extensively explained the role of India in the creation of Bangladesh and expressed his opinion as to why Kashmir is important for Pakistan. He said Pakistan should support the Kashmiri people. India has been demanding Pakistan not only to arrest the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) founder and try him in the Mumbai attack case but also to punish all those involved in this carnage. Saeed launched the Milli Muslim League (MML) party in August 2017 with a so-called mission to implement the ideology of Pakistan in accordance with the 1973 Constitution. In April this year, the US placed the MML on its list of foreign terror organisations for its links with the LeT. The government has said that the MML is an off-shoot of Saeed's Jamat-ud Dawah (JuD), which has been declared as a foreign terrorist organisation by the US in June 2014. The JuD is believed to be the front organisation for the LeT which is responsible for carrying out the 2008 Mumbai attack that killed 166 people, including few Americans. The ruling AIADMK is shown as having paid Rs six crore received on 15 June, 2017, months after Jayalalithaa's death on 5 December, 2016. Chennai: A Rs 6.85 crore bill of Apollo Hospitals for the 75-day treatment of late Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa in 2016, submitted recently to a panel probing the circumstances leading to her death, has gone viral in the social media. The one page summary shows Rs six crore and eighty five lakh as the total bill with a detailed break-up and an outstanding amount of Rs 44.56 lakh. The ruling AIADMK is shown as having paid Rs six crore received on 15 June, 2017, months after Jayalalithaa's death on 5 December, 2016. Though an amount of Rs 41.13 lakh is shown as being received by the hospital on 13 October, 2016, no mention is made of who made that payment. When contacted about the leak of the bill, both the Justice A Arumughaswamy Commission of Inquiry and a legal counsel for the hospital in the panel denied dissemination from their respective sides. The bill is, however, genuine and it was submitted in the panel on 27 November, 2018, the hospital counsel said. "The bill summary is not a complete factual reflection of all the details because the details were produced in more than 200 pages. We are surprised and shocked that a confidential document, which was submitted to the commission on 27 November, is out in the open," hospital counsel Maimoona Badsha told PTI. Under the head 'food and beverage services', which shows Rs 1,17,04,925, the counsel said it includes a whole lot of people like visitors. The break-up shows consultation fee as Rs 71 lakh. A UK based doctor Richard Beale was paid Rs 92 lakh and a Singapore based hospital Rs 1.29 crore for professional charges respectively and room rent was Rs 1.24 crore (which includes the cost of occupancy of several rooms by her attendants) during the late leader's hospital stay. Jayalalithaa had passed away on 5 December, 2016 after being treated in the hospital for 75 days from 22 September, 2016 for various ailments. In September 2017, the state government had constituted the probe panel under the Commissions of Inquiry Act,mandating it to inquire into the circumstances leading to Jayalalithaa's hospitalisation on 22 September, 2016, and treatment provided by the hospital till her demise. The samples were seized after a report by a London-based news agency, Reuters, claimed that Johnson & Johnson's raw talc and finished powders sometimes tested positive for small amounts of (cancer-causing) asbestos for the last few decades. Baddi (Himachal Pradesh): Days after India's central drug regulator Central Drugs Standard Control Organization (CDSCO) seized samples of Johnson & Johnson baby powder from the firm's plant in Himachal Pradesh's Baddi, state drug controller Navneet Marwaha said that appropriate action will be taken in the matter after the reports of the sample test are out. The samples were seized after a report by a London-based news agency, Reuters, claimed that Johnson & Johnson's raw talc and finished powders sometimes tested positive for small amounts of (cancer-causing) asbestos for the last few decades. Speaking to ANI, Marwaha said, "Johnson & Johnson was making baby products in association with VVF India Ltd in Baddi. On the basis of news reports, an inspection took place and samples were collected which will be sent for investigation. On the basis of the report, appropriate action will be taken." The company, which has a huge market in India, dismissed the reports, calling it "one-sided, false and inflammatory". "The Reuters article is one-sided, false and inflammatory. Johnson & Johnson's baby powder is safe and asbestos-free. Studies of more than 100,000 men and women show that talcdoes not cause cancer or asbestos-related disease. Thousands of independent tests by regulators and the world's leading labs prove our baby powder has never contained asbestos," the company's statement read. The statement further stated that Johnson & Johnson will continue to defend the safety of its product. On the day of the incident, nine people died due to poisoning, while six others lost their lives over the next four days. Twenty seven people are still in a critical state Bengaluru: Police arrested a local seer on Wednesday in connection with the poisoning of prasad at a temple in Karnataka's Chamarajanagar district that killed 15 people. Mahadeshwara Hill Saluru Math seer Pattada Immadi Mahadevaswamy was arrested and "he has a role" in the incident, Additional Superintendent of Police of Chamarajnagar district M S Geetha said. However, she declined to divulge any other details. Chamarajanagar SP Dharmendra Kumar Meena: 5 people dead and 72 hospitalised, including 12 in critical condition, after consuming prasad in Chamarajanagar district of #Karnataka pic.twitter.com/z1LIjLMBpu ANI (@ANI) December 14, 2018 Police sources said that at least five people, including the seer and a woman, have a direct role in the incident. Officials have so far quizzed 11 people about the 15 December incident, in which more than 120 people fell ill after consuming prasad distributed at Maramma temple in Sulavadi village of Hanur taluk in Chamarajnagar district. On the day of the incident, nine people died, while six others lost their lives over the next four days. Twenty seven people are still in a critical state. Laboratory test has found insecticide in the prasad. Police are suspecting a faction feud within the management of the temple over revenue sharing, which might have led to the poisoning. Uh-oh! It could be you, or it could be us, but there's no page here. The Holy See delegation issues final statement following the 24th Session of the United Nations Climate Change Conference, noting that the agreement falls short of what is needed and seems to downplay human rights. Vatican City (AsiaNews) Following the 24th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP24), the delegation of the Holy issued a final statement on the final agreement reached in Katowice I(Poland). Whilst acknowledging that the deal confirms the commitments taken in Paris, it does not reflect the urgency of the situation. The Vatican statement notes that in his encyclical Laudato si' Pope Francis stressed the importance of strengthening climate change policies. The problem is global with serious environmental social, economic, political and distributional implications. Global leaders gathered in Katowice for COP 24 struggled to find the will to set aside their short-term economic and political interests and work for the common good. After a long and complex debate, they have found a consensus on the rulebook for the implementation of the Paris Agreement adopted in 2015. We are grateful to the leaders from States and other stakeholders who contributed to this multilateral dialogue and the writing of the rulebook. The consensus on the final document, rather complex and technically detailed, represents a confirmation of the commitments made three years ago in Paris and of the significance of multilateralism. Unfortunately, we must also note that the rulebook does not adequately reflect the urgency necessary to tackle climate change, which represents one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day (LS, 25). Moreover, the rulebook seems to downplay human rights, critical in reflecting the human face of climate change, which affects the most vulnerable people on earth. Their cry and that of the earth demand more ambition and greater urgency. The Holy See Delegation, led by the Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin, explained that advancing the dignity of the human person, alleviating poverty by the promotion of integral human development, and easing the impact of climate change through responsible mitigation and adaptation measures go hand in hand. We need a just transition period with all parties assuming their respective responsibilities according to the principle of equity. As the IPCC Special Report issued in October 2018 distressingly indicated, we are called to limit responsibly the average global temperature increase to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. Therefore, we encourage much greater ambition in delivering Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and stronger mechanisms toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions, managing the decarbonisation of the current fossil fuel-based economy, transparently sharing the way each nation implements its commitments, addressing the issue of loss and damage, ensuring solid financial commitments, and promoting education in sustainability, responsible awareness, and lifestyle changes. Faith and reason must come together enabling us to make positive choices in our lifestyles, in how our economies are run, and in building a true global solidarity necessary to avert this climate crisis. A 39-year-old journalist who works for a local TV channel, on 27 November allegedly after he uploaded videos criticising the BJP-led governments in Manipur and the Centre for observing Rani Jhansi's birth anniversary. Imphal (Manipur): An Imphal-based journalist, who was detained in November under the stringent National Security Act (NSA), will remain in custody for 12 months, according to a Manipur government order which said his activities were "prejudicial to the security of the state and maintenance of public order". The District Magistrate of Imphal West had ordered detention of Kishorechand Wangkhem, a 39-year-old journalist who works for a local TV channel, on 27 November allegedly after he uploaded videos criticising the BJP-led governments in Manipur and the Centre for observing Rani Jhansi's birth anniversary. "The videos which he had uploaded on 19 November in both English and Meitei were not related to his official work," officials had said. According to a state home department statement issued on 14 December, the Advisory Board of the National Security Act (NSA), in its sitting held on 11 December, had examined the allegations levelled against Wangkhem. On 13 December, the board recommended that there were "sufficient grounds" to detain Wangkhem under the provisions of the NSA, the statement said, without elaborating on the allegations against him . Manipur Governor Najma Heptulla has approved the advisory board's recommendation on detention of the journalist under the NSA, according to the statement. "The Governor of Manipur after considering the proximate past activities of the detenu and potential danger of his activities which are prejudicial to the security of the State and maintenance of public order and there is apprehension of his continuing to act in similar prejudicial activities, the moment he is released from detention, ....the said person should be detained for the maximum period of 12 months as provided under Section 13 of the said Act," the statement said. In consonance with the opinion of the Board and exercise of power under Section 12 (1), the Governor has, therefore, ordered that his detention will be for a period of 12 months, it said. According to the provision, in any case where the Advisory Board has reported that there is, in its opinion, sufficient cause for the detention of a person, the government may confirm the detention order and continue the detention of the person concerned for such period as it thinks fit. Under section 13 of the Act, the maximum period of detention under the NSA is 12 months. In the video clips posted by him, Wangkhem had purportedly said he was saddened and shocked to learn that the present government in Manipur was observing the birth anniversary of Rani of Jhansi, according to media reports. He reportedly said Rani of Jhansi's deeds had nothing to do with Manipur and the state was observing her birth anniversary because the Centre had asked it to. In this context, he allegedly called chief minister Biren Singh a "puppet of the Centre" and a "puppet of Hindutva". The chief minister had said that the Rani of Jhansi had played a role in the unification of India. 19 November is the birth anniversary of Laxmibai, the Rani of Jhansi, who was one of the leading figures in the 1857 mutiny. Wangkhem's wife Ranjita Elangbam told PTI on Wednesday that she has appealed to the MHA to "cancel" the charges against him under the NSA but has not received any reply till now. At Bhima Koregaon, the tension had eased to some extent because of the meetings between Dalit and upper-caste members the police and administration arranged, but it has been escalating once again with January approaching. Dalits at Maharashtra's Bhima Koregoan village near Pune feel a sense of security only around the Buddha Vihar temple, which is the entrance to the neighbourhood where 20 Dalit families live, because of the police personnel stationed there. They make sure to not loiter in other parts of the village. These Dalits mostly work as sweepers or cleaners for the gram panchayat, but even then they prefer to work in groups with members from their community and return home together. Schoolchildren and college-goersalso play among themselves and go to their institutes in groups. The situation may look normal on the surface, but the uneasiness and insecurity among Dalits is palpable in their actions and ways of communication. It has been nearly 11 months since the riots at Bhima Koregoan broke out, in which one youth was killed and several were injured. The violence broke out when lakhs of Dalits, on 1 January, had gathered at Bhima Koregaon 40 kilometres from Pune to commemorate 200 years of the battle in which British Army, comprising mostly Mahars and other lower-caste members, defeated the oppressive upper-caste Peshwa rulers. Every New Year's Day, Dalits pay homage at the Vijay Stambh (war memorial) at Bhima Koregoan, but this January, when they visited the three villages in the region, they found all shops, restaurants, hotels and houses closed, because of which they struggled to get water, food and accommodation. By afternoon, they were attacked, and their buses were burnt. This worsened the caste divide and left Dalits feeling even more insecure. Even though police have been stationed at Dalit neighbourhoods in the Bhima Koregaon region since the day after the violence, Dalits find the situation far from normal. Most of them prefer to convey that all is well, but digging deeper reveals the rage still simmering among other communities. For seven families from these villages who lodged an FIR against local upper-caste men, staying here has been a nightmare. Although 28 FIRs were registered in connection with the riots, there are many against people from other parts of Maharashtra. "The accused in my complaints are from my village only. No Maratha or upper-caste families talk to us. They are of opinion that we should forget what happened and not lodge any FIRs," said Mangla Kambale, a resident of Bhima Koregoan's Perne Phata area, whose house and shop were set ablaze by an angry mob on 1 January. "Once, my daughter told me she was being stalked for a couple of days. Now we don't allow her to go out alone. Due to uneasiness and insecurity, we prefer to shop for groceries and other important items from Pune and avoid going to local shops." Mangla's FIR was registered on 3 December, a near 11 months after the violence. She said police at the Shikrapur Police Station didn't pay heed to her requests till after a media report emerged, compelling them to lodge an FIR. Fortunately, they is a video of a mob setting her house on fire, which further forced the police to take action. Rama Athawale's fabric workshop was completely burnt to the ground in the Bhima Koregaon violence, and the loss of the property cost her over Rs 50 lakh. "Although the government gave us a temporary house in Pune, we have to keep going to Perne Phata, where we used to stay, for official work and my son's school. Yesterday, I went to my son's old school, and two accused named in my FIR were standing at a nearby temple. They were looking at me so angrily. I am at least safe (in Pune) because of the security provided to us. But it's not easy to stay in the village anymore." The experience of Puja Sakat's family isn't very different. Puja had witnessed her house being set ablaze on 1 January and was found dead in a well near her house on 22 April. Jaidev, her brother, who often visits the Collector's Office in Pune to follow up on the case, said, "Two men, Navnath Darekar and Somnath Darekar, were arrested in the case after Puja's death, but they were released on bail within a week. I have seen driving around the village many times. Sometimes I even felt they were driving along the route I take intentionally to intimidate me, but I remain calm and continue walking to my destination." A resident of Sanaswadi, where, again, all Dalits live in one area, said they were not afraid of getting attacked because of the two police officers stationed there. "At Sanaswadi, most of the Dalits are workers at MIDC factories and don't want to create noise. All is going good as we have our jobs and our children go to school. Communication with members of other castes is not as normal as it used to be, but we are managing well and don't want more issues," he said. With 1 January now approaching, villagers mostly Dalits want a higher number of police personnel deployed. Local Dalit youth leader Rahul Dambale said, "The administration should arrange for enough water, food and security for Dalits who will come here from across the state. They should have makeshift arrangements for Dalit to stay at night." The tension had eased to some extent because of the meetings between Dalit and upper-caste members that the police and administration arranged. But it has been escalating once again with January approaching, and several organisations announcing programme to be held at Bhima Koregaon. A goods train travelling in Savarkundla range of Amreli, en route to Pipavav from Botad, ran over three lions, two males and a female, killing them on the spot. Gandhinagar: After losing as many as 23 Asiatic lions in a section of the Gir forest area in recent times, another set of three lions from a pride lost their lives as speeding goods train run them over in the wee hours of Tuesday. The Gujarat forest department has ordered an inquiry into the circumstances leading to the accident. A goods train travelling in Savarkundla range of Amreli, en route to Pipavav from Botad in the wee hours of Tuesday, ran over two males and a female lion, killing them on the spot, forest officials said. The three were moving along the tracks as part of a pride of six. One of the male lions was aged around 2 years, while the other male and the female were both aged around 1.5 years. "This unfortunate accident took place in revenue area near Barola village under Savarkundala range of the East Gir forest. We have ordered an inquiry into the accident. It will take some time to get the exact details about how the accident took place. We have also sought information from the railway authorities about the speed of the train," said DT Vasavada, the Chief Conservator of Forest, Junagadh and spokesperson for the forest department. "Our men from the forest are keeping a close eye over the rest of the three lions of the pride to ensure that they don't come near the railway tracks where their kin got killed," Vasavad told IANS. Prashant Chowdhary was charged under Section 302 of the Indian Penal Code for murder and Sandeep Kumar under section 323 (voluntarily causing hurt). The SIT also dismissed Chaudhary's statement that he opened fire in 'self-defence' after Tiwari tried to run him over in an attempt to flee. The SIT on Wednesday filed a chargesheet in the murder of Apple executive Vivek Tiwari in Lucknow. The chargesheet was filed against Prashant Chowdhary, the policeman who allegedly shot Tiwari and Sandeep Kumar, another policeman who was present at the scene. Chowdhary was charged under Section 302 of the Indian Penal Code for murder and Sandeep Kumar under section 323 (voluntarily causing hurt), reported Patrika. The SIT also dismissed Chaudhary's statement that he opened fire in 'self-defence' after Tiwari tried to run him over in an attempt to flee, the report stated. Chaudhary allegedly shot Tiwari after he refused to stop his car for inspection in Lucknow's Gomti Nagar neighbourhood. He was on his way to drop colleague Sana Khan home when the chase began. Kumar is believed to have tried to stop the car by using his cane on the vehicle. The two constables were later arrested and dismissed from duty. On 2 October, the postmortem report of Tiwari revealed that he died due to a gunshot injury on the left side of his chin. During the preliminary investigation, the cop who allegedly shot the Apple executive claimed that he fired at his car in self-defence as it tried to run over his motorbike. With inputs from agencies On the seventh day of Parliament, the Lok Sabha discussed the Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill 2016, and passed the landmark legislation. Meanwhile, Rajya Sabha did not get much done after the Congress, Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM), and Telegu Desam Party (TDP) caused chaos in the Upper House. On the seventh day of Parliament, the Lok Sabha discussed and passed the landmark Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill 2016 even as the Rajya Sabha did not get much done after the Congress, Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM), and Telegu Desam Party (TDP) created a ruckus in the Upper House. Lok Sabha The day began with the CPM and Congress giving adjournment motion notices handed in to stay the business of the House for the purpose of discussing a definite matter of urgent public importance, which can be moved with the consent of the Speaker in Lok Sabha over the Rafale deal and demonetisation respectively. Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan conducted the proceedings amid sloganeering and ruckus. The All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) was protesting against the construction of a dam across the Cauvery river. Congress MPs were demanding a joint parliamentary committee probe into the Rafale deal, and the TDP sought to raise issues related to Andhra Pradesh. When the Lower House convened for the day, more than 40 members from the three parties trooped into the Well, holding placards and shouting slogans. BJP MPs also sought to raise certain issues from their seats. As the day went on, Congress MPs demanded a joint parliamentary committee investigation into Rafale deal, which forced both Houses to adjourn. ANI quoted Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge as saying: "We want JPC as we will only get to know everything when Parliament members sit and look into the files. JPCs were formed in the Bofors and 2G cases as well. How can there be a typo? Had it been one word, it would've been understandable, an entire paragraph cant be a typo." Kharge added that there were "irregularities and corruption in the way the Rafale deal was signed." He pointed out the loss of technology transfer to HAL, as well as the loss to the national exchequer. He demanded a JPC probe to "fix accountability". "Kindly allow this and all details will come out. Every file will be checked by Parliament, not the Supreme Court," he said. Multiple BJP leaders rejected the need for a JPC probe into the Rafale deal, saying that the Supreme Court had made it clear that there were no irregularities. The saffron party then demanded an apology from Congress chief Rahul Gandhi. Health Minister JP Nadda then introduced the surrogacy bill to the Lok Sabha, saying it's a historic day and that all parties wanted commercial surrogacy to be stopped to prevent exploitation of women. Amid sloganeering and chaos, discussion on the bill ensued. BJD leader Bhartruhari Mahtab said that the surrogacy bill does not define the "close relative" who can become a surrogate mother. He also pointed out that the bill does not mention the legal recourse a couple can adopt if their plea for surrogacy is rejected. Adding to the discussion, NCP MP Supriya Sule noted that the five-year "cooling period" clause in the bill is not conducive as medical tests can be done to prove a couple's fertility or lack thereof. She also said: "Sometimes a fertile couple may not have children due to medical reasons, they should not be left out." She also noted that the provision of surrogacy only applies to married couples, and that other family structures are ignored. "If single parents are allowed to adopt, they should be allowed to have surrogates as well." She concluded by calling it a "good bill, but not modern enough." As the din got louder, the Lower House or Parliament finally passed the Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill 2016. Mahajan announced that the Consumer Protection Bill will be discussed in Thursday's session. Rajya Sabha The proceedings got underway peacefully in the Upper House. The Rajya Sabha was to discuss two important bills related to the education sector. Union Education Minister Prakash Javadekar was to move that the National Council for Teacher Education (Amendment) Bill, 2018 be passed. He was also to introduce the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (Amendment) Bill, 2018 for consideration and passing. The Rajya Sabha was disrupted consistently, causing Chairman Venkaiah Naidu saying that it was clear members were not ready to allow the House to run smoothly, and adjourned the session for the day. Both Houses will convene at 11 am Thursday. The Rajya Sabha will not function from 24 to 26 December, so that members can celebrate Christmas back home, Naidu said minutes before adjourning the House. "Let's utilise the time properly," he said, taking a jab at certain MPs. The Karnataka BJP unit on Wednesday accused the Congress of failing to keep up its poll manifesto promise of waiving farmers' loans. Bengaluru: The Karnataka BJP unit on Wednesday accused the Congress of failing to keep up its poll manifesto promise of waiving farmers' loans even after the lapse of six months since its coalition government with JDS was formed. "6 months on & loan waiver is not a reality in Karnataka. Eventually, farmers of MP, Rajasthan & Chhattisgarh will know about your lying skills." "Press statements & tweets don't really mean loans are waived off." "Btw @RahulGandhi waiving off loan isn't like getting gold from potato's," the state party unit tweeted. The remarks come in the wake of AICC president Rahul Gandhi's statement that the Congress had waived farmers'loan and would do so in Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan, where the party had won assembly elections. "CM, Madhya Pradesh, waives farm loans. 1 done. 2 to go," he had tweeted on 17 December. Soon after winning the elections in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, Chief Ministers Kamal Nath and Bhupesh Baghel announced waiving farmers' loans. Gandhi also said the prime minister is sleeping over the issue and the party would wake him up from his slumber. "The Congress party has managed to wake the CM's of Assam & Gujarat from their deep slumber. PM is still asleep. We will wake him up too," he had tweeted. In reply, the Karnataka BJP said in fact, the Congress should learn from Assam and Gujarat chief ministers and urged them to wake Karnataka Chief Minister HD Kumaraswamy to waive farmers' loans as promised. "Had your family not slept on the country's development for 60 years our farmers would have been self sustainable today." "BTW what is stopping you from waking up CM @hd_kumaraswamy towaive off farmers loan as promised." "In fact you should learnfrom CM's of Assam & Gujarat," it said. The viral clip shows Rahul Gandhi turning back to talk to people standing behind him before he gives an answer to the press A day after the BJP mocked DMK over its 'Rahul Gandhi for Prime Minister' pitch, the saffron party took another dig at the Congress president when its I-T Cell chief Amit Malviya, on Tuesday, posted a video targetting Rahul and said that "A man who cannot speak for two minutes without tuition wants to be India's Prime Minister". The viral clip shows Rahul turning back to talk to people standing behind him before he gives an answer to the press. Rahul along with Jyotiraditya Madhavrao Scindia and other Congress leaders addresses the media after the party announced farm loan waivers in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. Before Rahul speaks, Scindia gives him "advice" stating "you need to say what (Prime Minister Narendra) Modi (referring to waiving farmers loan) could not do....I have done." A man who cant speak for 2 minutes without tuition wants to be Indias Prime Minister... pic.twitter.com/WGyGYIxqc6 Amit Malviya (@amitmalviya) December 18, 2018 The video was simultaneously shared by Union Textiles Minister Smriti Irani who said that the Congress President takes tuition to dream, to learn to speak and what not. "Rahul takes tuition to dream and the current video shows that he does not trust his own words but relies on others who teach him what to speak. It is a warning for the people of this country to know that he is not eligible for any electoral post," said Irani to ANI. This is not the first time that Irani had taken a jibe at Rahul. Inaugurating a Job Mela in Amethi in November, the Union minister had said, "I have come to know that Rahul is getting foreign banana seeds distributed among farmers. But he does not know that poverty cannot be wiped out by planting a couple of banana saplings." In October, 2018 Rahul had again exposed himself to criticism when he referred to Mizoram as Manipur by mistake. Malviya had then taken to Twitter to saying "it is this ignorance about the Northeast that is so problematic." He then went on to write: "Rahul Gandhi go and write this a hundred times, Mizoram and Manipur are two different states in the North East of India..." Rahul Gandhi shares an article on Mizoram and writes Manipur. It is this ignorance about the Northeast that is so problematic! pic.twitter.com/ydq0vwfcse Amit Malviya (@amitmalviya) October 29, 2018 In October, 2018 again, Modi had compared Rahul a "stuck gramophone". In a video interaction with BJP leaders, Modi had said that Rahul keeps repeating things like a gramophone that is stuck but people would not accept his "childish claims and lies" against the government and that they make "fun of such remarks". As Congress Legislative Party (CLP) leader, Siddaramaiah discussed the cabinet expansion and appointment of chairmen of boards and corporations with about 70 legislators on short-listing some of them for approval by party president Rahul Gandhi in New Delhi on 21 December. Belagavi: Ahead of the cabinet expansion of the coalition government in the state on 22 December, several party legislators are lobbying for their inclusion with party's leader and former Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, said an official. "Many legislators, including senior leaders have urged Siddaramaiah to recommend them to the party high command for the six cabinet posts vacant from the party's quota in the 6-month-old JD(S)-Congress government," a party official told IANS here on Tuesday. As Congress Legislative Party (CLP) leader, Siddaramaiah discussed the cabinet expansion and appointment of chairmen of boards and corporations with about 70 legislators on short-listing some of them for approval by party president Rahul Gandhi in New Delhi on 21 December. "Siddaramaiah and Deputy Chief Minister G Parameshwara of the Congress will submit the list of names finalised at the CLP meeting to ensure regional balance and fair representation of them region and caste wise," said the official from the state's northwest city, about 500km northwest of Bengaluru. Among the senior legislators - HK Patil, MB Patil, Ramalinga Reddy and Roshan Baig were left out of the cabinet, formed in June after two parties forged an alliance following a hung verdict in the 12 May Assembly elections. In the 34-member ministry, the Congress made 15 of its 80 legislators cabinet ministers while the Janata Dal-Secular filled 9 out of 11 posts as part of its quota. "As all the legislators, including seniors cannot be accommodated in the ministry due to the 34-member limit, some of them have been shortlisted for posts of state-run boards and corporations. As per the worked-out formula, the Congress is entitled to 20 of the 30 state-run boards and corporations and JD(S) the remaining 10 posts. The cabinet expansion is slated to take place in Bengaluru after the 10-day winter session of the state legislature concludes on Friday. "Heads of boards and corporations will be named after the cabinet expansion," added the official. Nirupam had said he had sent a legal notice to Irani through his counsel, asking her to tender an 'unconditional public apology' for allegedly making defamatory comments, but she did not reply to it. New Delhi: The Delhi High Court on Wednesday quashed the summons issued against Union minister Smriti Irani in a defamation complaint filed against her by Congress leader Sanjay Nirupam. The court, however, dismissed a similar plea by Nirupam's seeking to set aside the summons issued against him in a cross-defamation complaint filed by Irani. The court said the case against Nirupam will continue. Justice RK Gauba passed two separate verdicts on the plea of the two leaders. In her plea, Irani had sought quashing of the summons issued to her by a trial court on June 6, 2014. She had also sought quashing of the complaint filed by Nirupam. Nirupam had challenged a magisterial court's 11 March, 2013 order summoning him in Irani's defamation complaint against him. He had also sought quashing of the 1 January, 2013 complaint filed by Irani. The court did not mention the actual names of Irani and Nirupam in the judgment and cause list. While Irani was referred as 'PQR' in the judgment, Nirupam was addressed as 'XYZ'. "The petitioner and the second respondent have been in public life for quite long, engaged in active politics and associated with the political parties that generally have been seen to be opposed to each other. In their interest, their names have been withheld from mention, including in the cause-title," the judge said in the opening paragraph of both the judgements. The high court had reserved its orders on 13 November. It had earlier advised both the leaders to arrive at a compromise with regard to the defamation cases they have filed against each other. Nirupam, a former Congress MP, had filed the complaint against Irani, alleging that on December 20, 2012, when the Gujarat Assembly poll results were announced, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader had made "defamatory and scurrilous comments" against him during a television debate "by making direct aspersions on the character of the complainant (Nirupam)". Nirupam had said he had sent a legal notice to Irani through his counsel, asking her to tender an "unconditional public apology" for allegedly making defamatory comments, but she did not reply to it. Earlier, Irani had filed a complaint against Nirupam for allegedly defaming her during the same debate on a private television news channel and the court had framed charges against the Congress leader for using derogatory and indecent language against the Union Textiles minister. On Irani's complaint, the court had put Nirupam on trial under Sections 500 -- defamation and 509 -- uttering any word or making any gesture intended to insult the modesty of a woman -- of the Indian Penal Code. Irani had alleged in her complaint that Nirupam had questioned her credentials to analyse poll results given her background as a television actress. Bukhari, a two-time MLA from Sangrama, is the elder brother of slain journalist Shujaat Bukhari, who was fatally shot along with two security officers by Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) terrorists in June. Srinagar: A day after being expelled from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), former ministers Basharat Bukhari and Peer Mohammad Hussain joined the National Conference (NC) in Srinagar on Wednesday. The two leaders were expelled by PDP president Mehbooba Mufti on Tuesday on the recommendation of a disciplinary committee headed by party vice-president Abdul Rehman Veeri. Bukhari and Hussain joined the National Conference at the simple function at party president Farooq Abdullah's residence, where vice-president Omar Abdullah was also present. Bukhari, a two-time MLA from Sangrama, is the elder brother of slain journalist Shujaat Bukhari, who was fatally shot along with two security officers by Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) terrorists in June. He was the law minister in the PDP-BJP coalition government, headed by the late Mufti Mohammad Sayeed. He became the revenue, relief and rehabilitation minister when the government was led by Mehbooba Mufti. Hussain, a former MLA from Shangus constituency, was a minister during the PDP-Congress coalition government in 2002. He did not contest elections after 2002 and was appointed as the vice-chairman of the waqf board by the PDP-BJP government. The five municipal corporations in Haryana where polling was held on 16 December were Hisar, Karnal, Panipat, Rohtak and Yamunanagar, and the two municipal committees were Jakhal Mandi in Fatehabad and Pundri in Kaithal. Counting of votes for the Haryana civic polls, which will bring in new members to five municipal corporations and two municipal committees, began on Wednesday. The five municipal corporations where polling was held on 16 December were Hisar, Karnal, Panipat, Rohtak and Yamunanagar, and the two municipal committees were Jakhal Mandi in Fatehabad and Pundri in Kaithal. In Panipat, BJP candidate Avneet, who maintained a lead since counting began, won the Panipat seat with a margin of 74,940 votes, The Indian Express reported. Congress backed Independent candidate Anshu Pahwa won 51,381 votes. In Karnal, BJP candidate Renu Bala Gupta won the mayoral election against Congress-backed INLD-BSP alliance candidate Asha Wadhwa with a margin of 9,348 votes, India Today reported. In Hisar, BJP mayoral candidate Gautam Sardana is leading against Rekha Aren with a margin of 20,028 votes, the news agency said. Results were declared for all the 13 wards of the Municipal Council in Pundri at 9.30 am. According to reports, nine women were among the winners, including OBC candidate Rama Rani in Ward 1, and Shailja Rani (General) in Ward 8. All BJP candidates lost in the Jakhal Mandi polls. BJP's margin of victory was also huge in the state, which is a big relief for Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar. PTI reported that 69.39 percent of voters exercised their franchise in the polls. Polling was held amid tight security and passed off peacefully. There was no report on any defective EVM, the state election commission said. The Election Commission also announced that heavy polling was recorded in the two municipal committees of Jakhal Mandi (89.5 percent) and Pundri (82.1 percent). In the municipal corporations, 62.7 percent polling was registered in Hisar, 61.8 percent in Karnal, 62 percent in Panipat, 62.4 percent in Rohtak and 65.2 percent in Yamuna Nagar, State Election Commissioner Dalip Singh said. However, the poll percentage in these corporations dropped slightly in comparison with the elections held last time. Singh said 59 candidates, including 40 men and 19 women, contested the election to the seats of mayor, and 592 candidates, 322 men and 270 women, contested the election to the municipal corporation. A total of 89 candidates, 35 men and 54 women, contested the election to the municipal committees in Jakhal Mandi and Pundri, he added. Ahead of the next year's Lok Sabha and Assembly polls, the civic polls are seen as a prestige issue for the ruling BJP. Khattar had campaigned extensively for party nominees in these polls. Opposition INLD-BSP, too, had fielded its candidates in the polls. While the Congress chose not to use party symbol to contest the polls, it lend support to some Independents. In Karnal, Khattar's home constituency, INLD-BSP and the Congress had thrown their weight behind Independent candidate Asha Wadhwa. In a first, the mayors of the five municipal corporations will be elected directly. Earlier, the councillors used to elect the mayor. In another significant move, the Haryana Election Commission had decided to treat 'none of the above' or NOTA option as a "fictional candidate" in the municipal polls, making it a must for winning candidates to secure more votes than those cast for NOTA. With inputs from PTI The Congress-led government in Rajasthan announced that it would bear a burden of Rs 18,000 crore in the farm loan waivers, fulfilling its promise to farmers ahead of the state Assembly polls After Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, the newly formed Congress government in Rajasthan announced farm loan waiver up to Rs 2 lakh on Wednesday as promised by Congress president Rahul Gandhi ahead of the state Assembly polls. The state government will bear a burden of Rs 18,000 crore, ANI reported. "We have delivered our pre-poll promise," said Rajasthan chief minister Ashok Gehlot. Shortly after the announcement, Rahul Gandhi tweeted, saying the Congress waived off farm loans within two days after the party came to power in the three states. It's done! Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh & Chhattisgarh have waived farm loans. We asked for 10 days. We did it in 2. Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) December 19, 2018 On Monday, Chhattisgarh chief minister Bhupesh Baghel had announced that his government will waive short-term agricultural loans of farmers. "Short-term agriculture loans to the tune of over Rs 6,100 crore for over 16.65 lakh farmers drawn from cooperative banks and Chhattisgarh Gramin Banks, as on 30 November, 2018, will be completely waived," he said. Similarly, hours after taking the oath of office on Monday, Madhya Pradesh chief minister Kamal Nath had cleared the proposal of waiving farm loans up to Rs 2 lakh. Earlier on Wednesday, Gehlot took charge at the Secretariat in Jaipur and held meetings with officials to discuss waiving farm loans. "The newly appointed chief minister held meetings in this regard with the chief secretary and officials of the finance, agriculture and cooperative departments," officials said. The Congress had promised in its election manifesto to waive off farm loans within 10 days of coming to power. It was Gehlot's first meeting with the governor after taking office. With inputs from PTI The BJP and its ally JD(U) slammed Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh Kamal Nath for his comments linking youth of his state being deprived of jobs to migrants coming from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, with even Opposition parties like the Samajwadi Party and the Congress ally RJD expressing their disapproval. New Delhi: The BJP and its ally JD(U) slammed Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh Kamal Nath for his comments linking youth of his state being deprived of jobs to migrants coming from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, with even Opposition parties like the Samajwadi Party and the Congress ally RJD expressing their disapproval. As his remarks made soon after he took oath of office Monday snowballed into a political row, Congress president Rahul Gandhi told reporters he will look into the matter and offer a reply later. Nath had said in Bhopal, "Lot of industries are set up in which people from other states, like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, come to work. I do not want to criticise them, but the youth of Madhya Pradesh are deprived (of jobs)." Highlighting Nath's own "outsider" background, BJP general secretary Kailash Vijaywargiya took a dig at him wondering whether whatever he has said should be implemented in politics, as well. The BJP leader said the Congress leader was born in Kanpur, studied in West Bengal and has now become the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, as he accused the new chief minister of promoting divisive politics and regional chauvinism. "Such a statement does not behove a chief minister," he said. Nath is a nine-time MP from Chhindwara in Madhya Pradesh. Union minister Narendra Singh Tomar, who like Vijaywargiya is also a leader from Madhya Pradesh, accused Nath of misleading people and said industries in a state always give primacy to locals in jobs. "He has also been a Union minister. He should be aware of these rules. What he is talking about is already in place... By making such a claim, he is misleading people," he told reporters. Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav, who was a Congress ally in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly polls last year, said Nath's comments were wrong. He said such statements targeting people from North India are often made by some leaders in Maharashtra and asserted it is the North Indians who decide who will rule the country. The Delhi BJP unit staged a protest outside Nath's residence in Delhi and painted his nameplate black. In Patna, Congress was isolated as its ally Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) criticised Nath with its spokesman Bhai Virendra saying such comments should be avoided as every citizen of the country is free to live and work anywhere. Joining the issue, Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar's Janata Dal (United), a BJP ally, hit out at the Congress. Its spokesperson Neeraj Kumar said it is ironical that Rahul Gandhi keeps talking about the Constitution being under threat from the Narendra Modi government, but a senior leader of his own party takes a stand that is nothing short of an assault on the country's federal structure. Bihar BJP chief Nityanand Rai alleged the Congress has started spewing the venom of parochialism no sooner than it won power in Madhya Pradesh. "It should apologise to the people of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, though this may be expecting too much from a party, which has yet to express regret over the role of its Gujarat MLA Alpesh Thakore in attacks on Biharis in the western state," he said. However, state Congress working president Kaukab Qadri defended Nath, saying he was not spreading hatred against people of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, or threatening to drive them out, something which was witnessed in the BJP-ruled Gujarat and has been a pet theme of Shiv Sena, the BJP's ally in Maharashtra. He said Nath's thrust was on giving incentives to employment-generating industries in the state, which he will be governing. CPI asked Nath not to "follow the ideals" of the Shiv Sena and as moving from one state to the other for employment is a common phenomenon. Speaking to reporters in Parliament complex in the national capital, Union minister and BJP leader Giriraj Singh lashed out at Nath and sought an apology from Rahul. "They (people from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar) contribute to the progress of the states (they work in) through their hard work. Kamal Nath should answer whether India is in a federal structure or not. Congress president Rahul Gandhi should apologise to the people of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh," he said. With the Jammu and Kashmir elections approaching, Mehbooba Mufti not only has to win back the trust of her disgruntled PDP MLAs, but also prove worth being re-elected. The troubles don't seem to end for the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Jammu and Kashmir. It's been a year of turmoil for not just the state (where the said turmoil extends to decades beyond just the past year), but the Mehbooba Mufti-led party, as well. Since she took over the reins of the PDP and subsequently the chief minister's chair after her father Mufti Mohammad Sayeed's death, it's been a turbulent journey for Mehbooba. She not only had to tackle the growing militancy and chaos in the state which went further downhill after Hizbul Mujahideen Burhan Wani's killing on 8 July, 2016 but also with infighting within the party as well as the dissatisfaction of PDP legislators with her leadership. On Tuesday, in the eighth such recent development for the PDP, three seniors leaders of the party including two former ministers in Mehbooba's cabinet quit the PDP, with two of them joining the National Conference, even as relations seemed to be improving between the rival parties. More on this later. Discord within party evident Factionalism has plagued the PDP since it came to power in Jammu and Kashmir in 2015 in alliance with the BJP. The cracks deepened even further in June, after Mehbooba sacked state finance minister Haseeb Drabu, who was instrumental in forging this alliance with the saffron party. It wasn't long after this that the BJP parted ways with the PDP in the state, citing misgovernance as the reason, and Mehbooba resigned as the chief minister. The disharmony in the PDP was made even more evident from the several faces that were missing from the recent meeting of senior leaders and former MLAs that Mehbooba had called. The former chief minister, however, is choosing to believe that defections ahead of elections the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly elections are scheduled for 2019 were a common occurrence and won't affect the party. But for the PDP to even contest the elections next year, it needs to ensure that it survives. "The PDP is a sinking ship. It has a very dark future," said Abid Ansari, who resigned from the party earlier in December. "More and more members are ready to leave the party." That the BJP and PDP would part ways was predicted much before the actual split earlier because of the regional party's dissatisfaction with the BJP-led Centre's refusal to extend the Ramzan ceasefire in Jammu and Kashmir. Club this with the Central government's refusal to hold talks with Kashmiri separatists and Pakistan in an attempt to end the bloodshed in the Valley, and the break-up was inevitable. The split with the BJP further worsened the political crisis for the floundering PDP as it gave rebel party leaders a platform to be vocal about their anger towards Mehbooba and pledge alliances. Party MLA Abdul Majeed Padde had said that as many as 18 PDP legislators were ready to join hands with the BJP to form government in Jammu and Kashmir. Add to this the emerging "third front" of the JKPC and BJP, the PDP is indeed looking at as Ansari put it a dark future. In the 87-member Jammu and Kashmir Assembly, the PDP was the single largest party with 28 MLAs. This was followed by 25 of the BJP, 15 of the National Conference and 12 of the Congress, along with three Independents, two JKPC MLAs, and one each of the Jammu and Kashmir Peoples Democratic Front and CPM. Change in leadership style need of the hour With the number of defections it has seen recently, the PDP's numbers have rapidly dropped, further necessitating the need to not only hold the flock together, but also to uphold ties with other parties. But upholding alliances is something Mehbooba can attempt only if she is left with a party, which appears to be a daunting task at the moment. It has been argued that by surrounding herself with "political sycophants", Mehbooba doomed her own leadership. PDP leaders who quit also accused the party high command of being unapproachable and disrespectful towards the more grassroots leaders. Others have described the party as one that has transformed into a Family Democratic Party and one that caters only to the interests of a small coterie, not for leaders who wanted to work for the state. She also made things worse for both herself and the PDP by asking those displeased with her leadership to leave the party. Furthermore, in November, when Mehbooba announced that the PDP had approached the governor to form the Jammu and Kashmir government in alliance with the National Conference and Congress, it appeared that she had finally played her political cards right. The three parties came together with the aim to both restore normalcy in the state as well as to keep the BJP out of power. But the cards have surely not been in favour of Mehbooba's party, as the Governor's Office claimed to have a "non-functional" fax machine and refused to acknowledge the alliance's claim to form government and dissolved the Assembly instead. Now, with its alliance partner National Conference inducting two PDP legislators, it could spell trouble even for this three-party tie-up. There is also the BJP factor to thwart. It is no secret in political circles that the saffron party poaches party leaders when it needs the numbers, especially in states where it's desperate to assert dominance. Jammu and Kashmir is one such state, and it is no wonder that Mehbooba has written to BJP chief Amit Shah, asking Delhi to not "use its influence to split her party". Now that President's Rule is set to come into force in Jammu and Kashmir on Thursday after the expiry of the six-month-long Governor's Rule, this gives the Centre in other words, the BJP full power in Jammu and Kashmir and its affairs. Mehbooba has her work cut out for her to fix the deepening cracks in the PDP. With the elections approaching, not only does she have to work doubly hard to prove to the public that she is worth being re-elected to try to improve the state of Jammu and Kashmir, she has to win back the trust of her disgruntled MLAs to even be considered a leader worth following in the troubled state. For now, holding the flock together and winning over the rebels needs precedence till the state comes out of the political crisis. The People's Democratic Party (PDP) on Tuesday expelled two senior leaders from the basic membership of the PDP for anti-party activities. Srinagar: The People's Democratic Party (PDP) on Tuesday expelled two senior leaders from the basic membership of the PDP for anti-party activities. Abdul Rehman Veeri, vice-president of the party, said the two senior leaders Peer Muhammad Hussain and former Minister Syed Basharat Bukhari have been expelled from the party's basic membership on charges of anti-party activities. For same reasons, the party also removed one of its general secretaries, Mehboob Iqbal, from the position. The expulsions came soon after reports suggested that they are planning to join the regional National Conference (NC) on Wednesday. Sources in the NC said the expelled senior leaders, Hussain and Bukhari, would formally join the party on Wednesday in the presence of NC vice-president Omar Abdullah in Srinagar. Kamal Nath said that his government will incentivise industries that give 70 percent jobs to locals in Madhya Pradesh. He also claimed that people from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar got employment in the state at the cost of the local population. On Wednesday, Madhya Pradesh chief minister Kamal Nath reiterated his 'locals first' pitch with regard to state industries, News18 reported. #NewsAlert -- Locals should get preference. It happens in Gujarat and every other state, says Madhya Pradesh CM @OfficeOfKNath. | #LocalVsMigrant pic.twitter.com/aXM0qETnyL News18 (@CNNnews18) December 19, 2018 Nath, who was criticised by the Opposition and even his allies on Tuesday for his comments on migrants from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, was addressing several senior police officials. "Locals should get preference. It happens in Gujarat and every other state," Nath said. He also spoke about the need for modernising the police force. A case was also filed against Nath in a Muzaffarpur court on Wednesday. After taking charge on 17 December, Nath told reporters his government will incentivise industries that give 70 percent jobs to locals in Madhya Pradesh. He also claimed that people from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar got employment in the state at the cost of the local population. The BJP and its ally JD(U) slammed Nath for his comments linking youth of his state being deprived of jobs to migrants coming from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, with even Opposition parties like the Samajwadi Party and the Congress ally RJD expressing their disapproval. Nath had said in Bhopal, "Lot of industries are set up in which people from other states, like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, come to work. I do not want to criticise them, but the youth of Madhya Pradesh are deprived (of jobs)." Highlighting Nath's own "outsider" background, BJP general secretary Kailash Vijaywargiya took a dig at him wondering whether whatever he had said should be implemented in politics, as well. The BJP leader said the Congress leader was born in Kanpur, studied in West Bengal and has now become the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, as he accused the new chief minister of promoting divisive politics and regional chauvinism. "Such a statement does not behove a chief minister," he said. Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav, who was a Congress ally in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly polls in 2017, said Nath's comments were wrong. He said such statements targeting people from North India are often made by some leaders in Maharashtra and asserted it is the North Indians who decide who will rule the country. In a protest over his statement against migrants, workers of Delhi BJP's Purvnachal Morcha Tuesday staged an agitation outside the chief minister's residence in Delhi. The protesters gathered outside Nath's residence on Tughlaq Road, Delhi and raised slogans demanding that he should apologise to people of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. The BJP leader said the Congress leader was born in Kanpur, studied in West Bengal and has now become the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, as he accused the new chief minister of promoting divisive politics and regional chauvinism. "Such a statement does not behove a chief minister," he said. "It seems Nath immediately forgot the Constitution of which he took oath as a chief minister," said Manish Singh, president of Delhi BJP's Purvanchal Morcha. "The Constitution allows people of the country to go and settle in any part of the country and take up any livelihood means of their choice," Singh said. With inputs from PTI Press Trust of India Aadhaar-issuing authority UIDAI is proposed to assume a regulatory role with enhanced power to take enforcement actions on misuse of the national biometric ID and impose stiff penalties for violations such as failure to obtain consent for authentication and in case of data breaches, a top source said. In the backdrop of the landmark Supreme Court verdict that imposed restrictions on use of Aadhaar by private companies, the Cabinet Monday evening approved amending the Aadhaar Act to enhance powers of Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), and ensure stringent safeguards against any violation of norms. The amendments proposed are in compliance of the recent order of the apex court, the source pointed out. Also, the Telegraph Act and Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) rules will be amended to provide for voluntary use of Aadhaar for obtaining SIMs and opening bank accounts. The amendments will go to Parliament for approval. The proposed amendments in Aadhaar Act are also in sync with the Srikrishna panel recommendations that had asserted that UIDAI should not only be autonomous in its decision-making, but also be vested with powers akin to traditional regulators for enforcement actions. The suggested amendments, which will be placed before Parliament, will give UIDAI more powers to crackdown on violation, the source said adding that the Section 57 of Aadhaar Act that previously allowed sharing of data with private entities and was subsequently struck down by the apex court is proposed to be removed altogether as part of the proposed changes. Against the UIDAI orders, there will be provision to file appeal before TDSAT (Telecom Disputes Settlement and Appellate Tribunal), and against the orders of TDSAT an appeal can be made in the SC, the source said citing the planned changes. The amendments talk about enhanced powers to UIDAI to issue directions, and also impose penalty if the directions are not followed. Entities that can request for authentication will primarily belong to two categories, those mandated by law made by Parliament, and those entities working in the interest of the State, for which the rules will be framed by the Centre in consultation with the UIDAI. Such authentication will be on a voluntary basis. Other proposed amendments include specific provision for allowing use of Virtual IDs, QR (Quick response) code, and offline verification modes, as well as giving option for opt out of Aadhaar database after a person attains the age of 18 years. The Aadhaar Act amendments suggested by the Srikrishna panel included penalty for failure to obtain consent for authentication or offline verification (up to three year imprisonment or fine of upto Rs 10,000); penalty for unauthorised use of core biometric information (imprisonment between 3-10 years and fine of up to Rs 10,000) amongst others. Reuters Elon Musk's rocket company SpaceX Corp is set to raise $500 million at a $30.5 billion valuation, the Wall Street Journal reported on 12 December, citing people familiar with the fundraising. The company is raising the capital from existing shareholders and new investor Baillie Gifford & Co, the third-largest shareholder in Musk-led electric carmaker Tesla Inc. SpaceX did not immediately responded to Reuters request for comment. SpaceX investors are paying $186 per share for new stock in the latest funding round, WSJ reported, adding that it is up about 10 percent from the $169-per-share paid during an April fundraising. In April, Reuters reported that SpaceX was raising $507 million in a new round of funding, valuing the company at around $26 billion. The Hawthorne, California-based company has outlined plans for a trip to Mars in 2022, to be followed by a manned mission to the red planet by 2024. Separately, SpaceX's launch of a long-delayed navigation satellite for the US military was halted on December 18, postponing for at least a day the space transportation company's first designated national security mission for the United States. By Victor Ing Special to The Post Immigration levels will continue to rise in Canada over the next three years Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada is expected to welcome as many as 350,000 new permanent residents per year by 2021. Most of these permanent residents will qualify as economic immigrants based on having a combination of valuable skills and work experience, and about 71,300 of them will be admitted under Provincial Nominee programs (PNPs). PNPs now represent one of the fastest growing pathways to immigrate to Canada but many people are not familiar with how they work. In this article we introduce you to immigration streams available under British Columbias PNP program (BCPNP). PNPs allow provinces and territories to select and nominate prospective applicants for permanent residence who intend to settle there and have the job skills and/or experience they value based on regional needs. Each of the provinces and territories that have PNPs have created unique immigration streams to attract candidates that will enhance the local economy and fill labour and skills shortages. Successful applicants to PNPs will be issued Nomination Certificates which allow them to apply for Canadian working permits and permanent residence. Below is a summary of the BC PNP immigration streams and how they are unique compared to other well-known economic immigration streams such as Canadas Canadian Experience Class (CEC) or the Federal Skilled Worker (FSW) Class. International Graduate Stream The International Graduate stream is designed for international students who have graduated in the past three years from public Canadian universities or colleges or private degree granting universities or colleges. To apply under this stream, the successful candidate must have completed full-time coursework in a program lasting at least eight months. Whats unique: New graduates frequently do not have as much or any work experience performing skilled work compared to other candidates who want to immigrate to Canada. This stream allows new graduates with BC job offers in skilled occupations to qualify for permanent residence even without prior work experience. International Post-Graduate Stream The International Post-Graduate stream is designed to attract international graduate students who have completed graduate studies in a prescribed field of study. Not all graduate students are eligible for this stream. The successful candidate must have graduated in the past three years with a masters or doctorate degree in the natural, applied or health sciences fields from a university in BC. Whats unique: Unlike other PNP streams, applicants under the International Post-Graduate stream do not require a job offer from a BC employer or work experience to qualify for permanent residence. Entry-Level and Semi-Skilled and Northeast Development Region (ELSS Stream) The ELSS stream was designed to create a pathway to permanent residence for candidates working in key BC sectors facing labour shortages. Applicants will qualify under this stream if they work in specified occupations in the tourism/hospitality, long-haul trucking or food processing industries and have worked for their employer for at least nine months, or if they work in entry level or semi-skilled occupations in the Northeast Development Region of BC. Examples of eligible occupations include hotel clerks and cleaners and restaurant servers and bartenders. Whats unique: Most of Canadas immigration programs for permanent residence require the successful candidate to have skilled work experience from either Canada or overseas. The ELSS stream creates a pathway for permanent residence for entry-level or semi-skilled workers. Skilled Worker Stream The Skilled Worker stream is designed to help workers qualify for Canadian permanent residence if they have a job offer from a BC employer in a skilled occupation and at least two years of directly related work experience in the occupation offered to them. Whats unique: Many of Canadas immigration programs require or favour applicants with skilled work experience obtained in Canada. The BC PNP Skilled Worker stream will consider foreign skilled work experience, including paid co-op work experiences abroad, as meeting the minimum experience requirements for a Nomination Certificate. This makes it easier for candidates who have never worked in Canada or have worked for less than one year to qualify for permanent residence if they have an offer of indefinite employment from a BC employer. Healthcare Professional The Healthcare Professional stream recognizes that health care workers, including doctors, nurses, and allied health professionals such as occupational therapists and physiotherapists are in demand in BC. Health care professionals with at least two years of directly related work experience in the occupation offered will be eligible to apply under this stream. Whats unique: With very few exceptions there is generally no preference shown nor any specific pathway available for prospective immigrants who work in specific occupations. However, due to the well documented shortage of health care professionals in British Columbia, the BC PNP offers a direct pathway to apply for a Nomination Certificate to obtain permanent residence in BC to perform health services. In summary, the BC PNP offers unique pathways to permanent residence that may be suitable for many prospective immigrants who may not be aware that these streams exist. BCs PNP program welcomes international graduates, healthcare professionals, skilled workers and even entry-level or semi-skilled workers who want to make British Columbia their home. The PNP program continues to be an ever increasing aspect of Canadas economic immigration strategy and prospective immigrants should familiarize themselves with the various streams available in BC. Victor Ing is a lawyer of Sas & Ing Immigration Law Centre. He provides a full range of immigration services. For more information go to canadian-visa-lawyer.com or email victor@sasanding.com. tech2 News Staff It looks like Facebook cannot catch a break, not that it deserves one. No sooner are we out from one controversy, than another issue is waiting to be unveiled. The latest PR disaster, highlighted by a New York Times investigation, yet again throws light on Facebooks opaque user data sharing policies. Even though CEO Mark Zuckerberg has told the US Congress that Facebook does not sell user data, documents examined by NYT and a glance through the email stash that was made public by the UK Parliament earlier this month point to the fact that Facebook does strike information sharing deals with the highest bidders. According to the NYT report, the Microsoft-owned Bing search engine could see the names of virtually all our Facebook friends without any consent, Netflix and Spotify were even allowed to read Facebook users private messages, Amazon was allowed to access users names and contacts through their friends and much more. The investigation, which involved going through over 270 pages of Facebook internal documents and interviewing over 50 former Facebook employees, shows that Facebook had shared data with around 150 companies. This user data was shared without telling the users themselves and irrespective of the users privacy settings. These 150 companies include businesses, automakers and media houses, among others. Facebook has obviously denied the allegations made in the NYT report. "None of these partnerships or features gave companies access to information without people's permission, nor did they violate our 2012 settlement with the FTC," Konstantinos Papamiltiadis, Facebook's director of developer platforms and programs, said in a blog post. While Microsoft, Yahoo and Amazon acknowledged to NYT that they used the shared data appropriately, they were not willing to come on record to discuss the data sharing deals they had struck with Facebook. Spokespeople for Spotify and Netflix claimed that these companies were not aware of the broad powers they were granted by Facebook. Even Russian site Yandex, which is alleged to have close ties with the Kremlin, was given unfettered access to user data till very recently. These data sharing deals also included around 60 smartphone makers. Facebook claimed that it did what it did to help users access their Facebook accounts or specific features on devices and platforms built by other companies like Apple, Amazon, Blackberry, and Yahoo, known as integration partners. The company claimed that these partners got access to messages but users had to explicitly sign in to Facebook first before using a partners messaging feature. As a result of these allegations, the stock prices of Facebook saw a drop. Top management has long been asking for the removal of Zuckerberg from the role of chairman. Thirty-one organisations including Muslim advocates, MoveOn, Southern Poverty Law Centre, the National LGBTQ Task Force, among others have co-signed a letter asking for the removal of CEO Mark Zuckerberg. You can read the complete NYT investigation here. Reuters Facebook Incs Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said on Tuesday the company needs to step up its efforts to curb misinformation after research revealed that Russia-backed organizations targeted African-Americans, who favored Hillary Clinton, to suppress voter turnout during the 2016 election. U.S. intelligence agencies had earlier concluded that Russia interfered in the election to help U.S. President Donald Trump by undermining Democratic candidate Clinton. "Two independent reports commissioned by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released Monday on the Russian Internet Research Agency's (IRA) use of technology around the 2016 election suggest that the IRA's efforts had a disproportionate impact on communities of color," Sandberg said in a blog post here. We know that we need to do more: to listen, look deeper and take action to respect fundamental rights, Sandberg said. Earlier Facebook's board backed Sandbergs request to probe whether George Soros had shorted the companys stock after the billionaire investor called the social network a menace to society. The letter was sent by Facebooks general counsel Colin Stretch to Patrick Gaspard, president of Soross Open Society Foundations. tech2 News Staff Huawei has become the latest smartphone maker to introduce the stable version of Android 9.0 Pie on its flagship smartphones. The phones, namely the Huawei P20 Pro, P20 and Mate 10 Pro had been running the beta version of EMUI 9.0 which is based on Android Pie and now will finally receive the stable version. European users of Huawei phones should see the new update notification pop-up soon enough while users in other regions should see an incremental roll-out after that. Android Pie will be bringing an all-new UI to the phone along with improved gesture navigation features and almost all the new features that are present on the Huawei Mate 20 Pro, which already is running the latest Android version. In more news regarding Huawei, the company said that it would spend $2 billion over the next 5 years to focus on cybersecurity by adding more people and upgrading lab facilities, as it battles global concerns about risks associated with its network gear. The secretive Chinese technology giant made the comments at one of its most in-depth press conferences at its Dongguan offices, after welcoming about two dozen international journalists into its new campus in the southern Chinese city. tech2 News Staff Like things couldnt get any worse with the number of data breach incidents weve seen this year, even NASA wasnt spared the US Space agency revealed on 18 December that it was hacked earlier this year. Personal data which belonged to both current and former employees at NASA were compromised earlier this year in October. As reported by the publication ZDNet, NASA sent an internal memo which was sent to all its employees explaining what had happened. The intimation wasnt prompt even after having discovered the data breach back in October, NASA only admitted now, two months later, in December. The people who carried out the hacking are unknown, says the space agency. The memo does say that none of the NASA missions were jeopardised due to the breach. Top officials are currently investigating the matter. Upon discovery of the incidents, NASA cybersecurity personnel took immediate action to secure the servers and the data contained within. NASA and its Federal cybersecurity partners are continuing to examine the servers to determine the scope of the potential data exfiltration and identify potentially affected individuals. This process will take time, says the memo. Employees who were working, or separated from it, or transferred between Centers, from the time period of July 2006 to October 2018 have been affected, and once NASA identifies the individual, it will send follow up information to them so that they can include identity protection services. This is not the first time that NASA has been hacked though as many as 13 separate major network security breaches took place in 2011 and a group of hackers were able to break into NASAs network attempting to bring down a drone worth $222 million. tech2 News Staff We have seen a lot of rumours about the Nokia 9 Pureview, which is expected to feature a penta-lens camera. Here's another case that has now leaked. HMD Global was expected to unveil the device alongside the Nokia 8.1 at an event in Dubai, but that didn't happen. (Read our full review of the Nokia 8.1 here) There were reports that the device was delayed due to issues with the camera. This is the third case render in a row and we're beginning to wonder if it a conspiracy to distract us from things that truly matter. GizmoChina released an image of a transparent case which it claims is for the Nokia 9 Pureview. Last month we saw a case listed on Amazon's UK website. Before that, we saw a Silicon case with seven cutouts at the back for lenses and a flash which is quite likely for the same device. Just like the previous case renders, we see seven cutouts here, which are placed in a hexagonal shape, six in a circle and one in the centre. Out of these, five will be cameras which are expected to come with Zeiss-branded optics. There is no fingerprint sensor at the back, it could either be in the front or be an in-display scanner. Hope that it is not completely reliant on facial unlock. There is no word on the total pixel count of this camera system, but they could pretty high. However, one report did mention that three out of the five rear cameras are rumoured to be 41 MP units, one a 20 MP unit and the fifth one a 9.7 MP unit. The alleged Nokia 9 PureView is expected to be powered by Snapdragon 845 SoC with 8 GB RAM and 256 GB internal storage and it might feature a 6-inch display. We do not know when the device will be launched, but here's hoping that it soon see the light of day. Reuters Uber Technologies Inc received approval from Pennsylvania to resume self-driving car testing on public roads this week, state records show, nine months after it suspended the programme following a deadly accident in Arizona. A company spokeswoman said on Tuesday Uber has not yet resumed testing. In November, Uber said it was seeking permission from Pennsylvania to resume testing more than seven months after a deadly self-driving crash in Arizona. Uber said last month that when it resumed testing it would do so with two employees in the front seat, enable an automatic braking system at all times, and more strictly monitor safety employees. Reuters reported earlier this month that after it received approval from Pennsylvania, Uber planned to begin driving a handful of cars on a mile loop between two company offices in Pittsburgh, where Uber first debuted its autonomous vehicles in 2016, company spokeswoman Sarah Abboud said. The relaunch is a dramatic downsize from Ubers previous operation. The company in the past unleashed its fleet in autonomous mode on public roads at high speeds, after dark, in areas crowded with pedestrians and with a single backup driver in the front seat. This time, the cars will not operate at night or in wet weather, and will not exceed speeds of 25 miles per hour, Abboud said. The company has no plans to resume picking up passengers in the robot cars, a service Uber launched in 2016. In March, authorities in Arizona suspended Ubers ability to test its self-driving cars after one of its cars hit and killed a woman crossing the street at night in the Phoenix suburb of Tempe, Ubers largest testing hub. Uber also voluntarily halted its entire autonomous car testing programme. tech2 News Staff Xiaomi is going to launch a new device called the Xiaomi Play which will be the company's first smartphone with a waterdrop notch, in China on 24 December. The company released a couple of teasers for the device which reveal a few specifications about the device. Besides the waterdrop display, we also see a dual camera set up at the back, a fingerprint sensor under it and single front camera housed in the notch. The phone apparently is the device which was listed on TENAA on 18 December and was being called the Redmi 7. The device listed on TENAA comes with a 5.84-inch LCD multi-touch display with 2280 x 1080 pixels resolution and 19:9 aspect ratio. It is powered by a 2.3 GHz octa-core processor sporting SoC and is expected to pack in 3 GB RAM with 32 GB storage, 4 GB RAM with 64 GB storage and 6 GB RAM with 128 GB storage. A microSD card can add up to 256 GB on the device. Coming to the camera, the listing reveals that the device will feature a dual camera set up at the back with a 12 MP primary rear camera along with a secondary rear lens, the details of which are not known yet. There is an LED Flash. On the front, we have an 8 MP sensor. The device will run on Android 8.1 Oreo OS with MIUI on top and is expected to be powered by a 2,900 mAh battery. It should support 4G VoLTE, Wi-Fi, Hotspot, Bluetooth and GPS. The listing also says that the device weighs 150 grams and there is a rear-facing fingerprint sensor. According to a report by MySmartPrice, it will apparently have 3 colour options Black, Dream Blue, and Dawn Gold. 24 December will reveal whether its the Play for the Redmi 7 or an entirely different phone altogether. Since the device is called 'Play,' rumours suggest that will be a competition to the Honor Play, which was launched earlier this year as a phone that was largely centered around gaming (read our full review of the Honor Play here). The Xiaomi Play could thus be marketed as a gaming device. Alternatively, a report by the publication Playfuldroid, suggests that the device is the rebranded version of the Poco F1 for the Chinese market. Read our full review of the Poco F1 here Recently, the Poco F1 received a permanent price cut of Rs 1,000 across all its variants. Pocofone offered the slash in prices because it has sold as many as 7,00,000 units of the device globally in just three months. Xiaomi's sub-brand Pocofone launched the Poco F1 on 22 August and it quickly became famous for being the most affordable smartphone with a flagship Qualcomm 845 SoC on board. The Poco F1 has a "LiquidCool Technology." The phone features a 5.99-inch full HD Plus display with a 1080 x 2248 pixels resolution. The screen has a 19:9 aspect ratio, and includes a notch. It is powered by a 4,000 mAh battery paired with support for Qualcomm's Quick Charge 3.0. tech2 News Staff The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has successfully launched the GSAT-7A military communication satellite on the GSLV-F11 rocket today at 4.10 pm IST. In a 20-minute launch sequence, the GSLV-F11 lifted off from its Sriharikota launchpad, and released the GSAT-7A into a geosynchronous transfer at an altitude of 270 kilometres. The satellite is expected to substantially boost the communication systems of the Indian Air Force (IAF). Built by ISRO, the satellite weighing roughly 2,250kg is designed to last a good eight years in orbit. It will provide communication capability to its final users in the Ku-band spectrum over India. The GSAT-7A will be solely operated by the Indian Air Force (IAF), much like the Navy's GSAT-7. It is designed to help interlink the Air Force's ground radar stations, bases and airborne early warning and control system (AWACS) aircrafts. It will also be used to operate the Indian Armys unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and drone operations. GSAT-7A also features a Gregorian antenna, which is expected to bring a big boost to the satellite's performance "There is increased demand for satellites from strategic sectors. About six/seven satellites are planned to be built," a senior official of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) told IANS, preferring anonymity. The power for the satellite over its 8-year lifespan will be generated by deployable solar panels, which opened wide, as planned exactly 100 seconds after the satellite separated from the GSLV launch vehicle. #WATCH: Communication satellite GSAT-7A on-board GSLV-F11 launched at Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota. pic.twitter.com/suR92wNBAL ANI (@ANI) December 19, 2018 There were celebrations in the mission control room for a lot more than just the satellite's successful release into orbit. The mission also tested some modifications made to the GSLV's cryogenic (third stage engine) and the second stage has been modified to test higher payload capacity of the launch vehicle. The GSLV can currently hold a maximum of 2500 kilograms in satellites. With a successful GSAT-7A/GSLV-F11 mission, ISRO has completed three successful launches in 35 days, ISRO Chairman Dr K Sivan said as he congratulated the mission team at the post-launch press briefing. The last remaining part of the mission orbit raising and final adjustments will be carried out starting 20 December by the tracing team in Bengaluru. Reuters Scientists have discovered the most distant object known in our solar system, so remote and unusual they chose the nickname Farout for the slow-moving, icy, pinkish dwarf planet about 120 to 130 times further from the sun than Earth. Astronomer Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington said on Tuesday the dwarf planet, officially designated as 2018 VG18, is estimated to have a diameter of 310 to 375 miles (500 to 600 km). There are roughly 50 dwarf planets in the solar system. The biggest are Pluto, with a diameter of about 1,470 miles (2,370 km), and Eris, with a diameter of about 1,445 miles (2,325 km). When I saw the object for the first time, it was moving so slowly, it was the slowest thing Ive ever seen. So I kind of muttered to myself, Far out, kind of like, Thats cool. But its also a very-far-out object in distance, so thats why I went with calling it Farout, Sheppard said. Its discovery was announced on Monday by the International Astronomical Unions Minor Planet Center. We dont know too much about it, Sheppard added. We only detected it last month. From its brightness, we can determine its size. We know its color. It has a pinkish, reddish hue to it. If you put ices out there and you irradiate them from the solar radiation over time, ices turn kind of a reddish, pinkish color. So we think its surface is probably ice-covered. Sheppard and other scientists spotted Farout during their search for extremely distant solar system objects including a potential Planet X that he said could be five to 10 times the size of Earth. In 2014, these researchers proposed the existence of a ninth major planet at the outer reaches of the solar system. They said Farout is moving so slowly that it might need more than 1,000 years for a single orbit of the sun. The second-most-distant observed Solar System object is Eris, which orbits at about 96 times the distance of the Sun to the Earth. Pluto orbits at about 34 times the distance of Earth from the Sun. Agence France-Presse Elon Musks SpaceX halted Tuesdays launch of a long-delayed navigation satellite for the US military, postponing for at least a day the space transportation companys first designated national security mission for the United States. SpaceXs Falcon 9 rocket, carrying a roughly $500 million global positioning system (GPS) satellite built by Lockheed Martin Corp, was due to take off from Floridas Cape Canaveral shortly after 9.30 am local time (8 pm IST), but was stopped minutes before takeoff. This abort was triggered by the onboard Falcon 9 flight computer, a SpaceX official narrating the launch sequence said, adding that SpaceX would attempt the launch on Wednesday morning. SpaceX later tweeted that the Falcon 9 and payload remain healthy and cited an out of family reading on the rockets first stage sensors for the delay. SpaceX team called a hold due to an out of family reading on first stage sensors. Vehicle and payload remain healthy; next launch attempt is tomorrow at 9:07 EST, 14:07 UTC. SpaceX (@SpaceX) December 18, 2018 US Vice President Mike Pence, who traveled to Florida to watch the launch, announced afterward that President Donald Trump would direct the Pentagon to establish a Combatant Command to oversee Americas activities in space. Incredible opportunity to see @SpaceX's Dragon 2 Capsule - an important part of the future of American human space exploration as we aim to return American astronauts to space on U.S. rockets from U.S. soil! pic.twitter.com/Pk5lkpOFEX Vice President Mike Pence (@VP) December 18, 2018 The Space Command, the 11th such Combatant Command in the US military, comes as the United States seeks to grow its military footprint in space. A successful launch would be a significant victory for Musk, a billionaire entrepreneur who spent years trying to break into the market for lucrative military space launches, long dominated by Lockheed and Boeing Co. SpaceX sued the US Air Force in 2014 in protest over the militarys award of a multibillion-dollar, non-compete contract for 36 rocket launches to United Launch Alliance, a partnership of Boeing and Lockheed. SpaceX dropped the lawsuit in 2015 after the Air Force agreed to open up the competition, according to SpaceXs website. The following year, SpaceX won an $83 million Air Force contract to launch the GPS III satellite, which will have a lifespan of 15 years, Air Force spokesman William Russell said by phone. Tuesdays launch of the GPS III satellite was to be the first of 32 satellites in production by Lockheed under contracts worth a combined $12.6 billion for the Air Forces GPS III program, Lockheed spokesman Chip Eschenfelder said. Once fully operational, this latest generation of GPS satellites will bring new capabilities to users, including three times greater accuracy and up to eight times the anti-jamming capabilities, said Russell. The GPS satellite launch was originally scheduled for 2014 but has been hobbled by production delays, the Air Force said. The next GPS III satellite will launch in mid-2019, Eschenfelder said, while subsequent satellites undergo testing in the companys Colorado processing facility. Fruity convention central to sex scandal demise for sugar daddy MP ONE of the worlds major fresh fruit and vegetable trade shows is at the centre of the sex scandal thats claimed the scalp of disgraced sugar daddy MP Andrew Broad. The Victorian federal Nationals MP will not contest the next election after reports emerged this week of him using a sugar baby dating website to meet at least one young woman during a visit to Hong Kong to attend the Asia Fruit Logistica convention. The married conservative morals campaigner according to one of his dates likened himself to James Bond and lied about his age in a series of sexual text messages sent to her after he complained to her about the cost of their dinner. Questions have since been asked about whether the movie character James B0nd would complain to a companion about the cost of their meal. You be the judge. The member for Mallee about the time of the ASIA Fruit Logistica convention in September issued a media release. Mr Broad said in the statement: The Mallee region and particularly Mildura was well represented at the Asia Fruit Logistica in Hong Kong last week. He said local groups including the Mildura Fruit Company, Fresh Fruit Connection and V.E Siciliano & Sons also attended the global event with local produce on display to the world. The demand for Australian horticulture products is growing rapidly with exports worth $412 million in 2017, Mr Broad said. What happens on tour Booking are now open for next years Asia Fruit Logistica convention. Its the place to meet top-quality buyers from across Asia, its the regions premier information hub covering all the latest trends and technologies, and its back in Hong Kong next September, a convenor statement says. Asia Fruit Logistica returns to Hong Kongs AsiaWorld-Expo on 4-6 September 2019, and exhibitors can register now to secure their stand. Applications are available to download from the official website. Also in Australian Food News Asia Fruit Logistica underlined its position as the premier continental trade show for Asias fresh fruit and vegetable business in 2018, attracting more than 13,000 high-quality visitors from over 70 different countries on 5-7 September. Asia Fruit Logistica 2018 drew high-quality buyers from some 20 different markets across the Asia-Pacific region, resulting in strong business outcomes for exhibitors. Some 826 companies representing 46 different countries and all continents were exhibiting their products and services, further enhancing the global profile of the event. Asia Fruit Logistica attracted more exhibitors from the logistics, machinery and technology sectors in 2018, reflecting the growing importance of such supply chain partners and service providers for the business moving forward. Better logistics Dutch ripening technology specialist Interko launched Optimo, a pre-assembled ripening room and entry-level option for operators looking to venture into the fruit ripening business for the first time. Leading packaging company Stepac showcased its resealable modified humidity lidding film for high-end produce items, while French shipping giant CMA CGM launched Climactive, its new technology for the transportation of highly sensitive fruit and vegetables by active controlled atmosphere. The innovations on show extended to consumer-facing systems, with Dole displaying its pineapple peeling machine, which uses Pinabars technology. Asia Fruit Logistica visitors were also able to access valuable information and takeaways on the show-floor at the range of Hall Forums. Asiafruit Business Forum featured daily sessions offering practical ideas and solutions for better fresh produce marketing and business management. Cool Logistics Asia offered a programme of workshops on perishable logistics and cold chain management, while Smart Horticulture Asia explored the latest disruptive technology and digitilisation throughout the fresh produce supply chain. The European Union has triggered contingency plans designed to cushion the economic bloc from some of the shock of a 'no-deal' Brexit Brussels: With British politics gridlocked and just 100 days until Brexit, the European Union on Wednesday triggered contingency plans designed to cushion some of the shock of a "no-deal" UK exit from the bloc. The EU measures, announced a day after Britain ramped up its own no-deal planning, are intended to alleviate "major disruption" to people and businesses in sectors including financial services, customs, air transport and climate policy. European Commission vice-president Valdis Dombrovskis told reporters that the plan was "an exercise in limiting damage." He said the aim was "to turn an abrupt exit into a more soft landing." Britain is due to leave the EU on March 29, but it remains unclear whether lawmakers will approve the divorce agreement Prime Minister Theresa May's government has negotiated with the bloc. Leaving without a deal risks plunging the British economy into recession and touching off chaos at the borders. The 14 EU actions include temporary one- to two-year measures to allow UK-EU financial services to continue and a 12-month provision to keep planes flying between Britain and the bloc. But Dombrovskis stressed that the measures "cannot replicate the benefits of the withdrawal agreement, and certainly it cannot replicate the benefits of EU membership." On Tuesday, the British government stepped up UK no-deal preparations, putting 3,500 soldiers on standby and warning thousands of businesses and millions of households to get ready for disruption. The government said the plans which include chartering boats and stockpiling medicines are a sensible precaution. But opposition politicians accuse the government of trying to scare lawmakers into supporting May's Brexit deal. Opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn on Wednesday accused May of "a cynical attempt to drive her deeply damaging deal through this House". "No-deal would be a disaster for our country and no responsible government would ever allow it," Corbyn said. Many businesses agree. Britain's five leading business groups said in a rare joint statement that businesses "have been watching in horror" as political infighting made the prospect of a disorderly Brexit more likely. Organizations including the British Chambers of Commerce and the Confederation of British Industry urged lawmakers to "return to their constituencies over Christmas and talk to their local business communities." "We hope that they will listen and remember that when they return to Parliament, the future course of our economy will be in their hands," the groups said. In a bid to regain some of its vanished political momentum, the British government was publishing long-awaited plans Wednesday for a post-Brexit immigration system that will end free movement of EU citizens to the UK. Home Secretary Sajid Javid said the proposals Britain's biggest immigration changes in more than 40 years would create a "skills-based immigration system built around the talent and expertise people can bring, rather than where they come from." At present, all EU nationals can live and work in Britain under the bloc's free-movement rules, but that will end after the U.K. leaves in March. The government is proposing no limit on the number of well-paid, skilled immigrants who can settle in Britain, but curbs on "low-skilled" workers. The rules will not apply to more than 3 million EU citizens currently living in Britain. The government has said they can stay, even if the U.K. leaves the bloc without an agreement on future relations. The EU, in its no-deal plans, urged member states to extend the same right to more than 1 million resident British nationals. Immigration was a major factor behind Britain's 2016 vote to leave the EU, and May has made "taking back control of our borders" her key Brexit goal. But that has put her at odds with many business leaders, and some members of her own Conservative government. Big chunks of Britain's economy, from agriculture to health care, have come to depend on European workers more than 1 million of whom have moved to Britain in the last 15 years. Businesses fear that choking off the flow of lower-skilled workers could lead to acute employee shortages. Saffron Cordery, deputy chief executive of NHS Providers an umbrella group for Britain's state-funded health care system said the health sector was "deeply concerned" about the planned changes. "High skills does not equal high pay," she told the BBC. The government plans suggest setting a salary threshold that immigrants will have to meet in order to be given the right to settle in Britain. A figure of 30,000 pounds ($38,000) a year, recommended by an independent report earlier this year, is more than the starting salary for nurses, paramedics, junior doctors and many other professions. Javid said the "exact threshold" would be decided after public consultation. He also said the plan would not commit to reducing net immigration below 100,000 people a year a longstanding goal of the Conservative government that it has never come close to meeting. Net immigration in the year to June was 273,000. Javid said the plans would seek to reduce migration to "more sustainable levels," but would not set a specific target. President Donald Trump appeared to back off his demand for $5 billion to build a border wall, signalling for the first time that he might be open to a deal that would avoid a partial government shutdown Washington: President Donald Trump appeared to back off his demand for $5 billion to build a border wall, signaling for the first time that he might be open to a deal that would avoid a partial government shutdown. The White House set the tone Tuesday when press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders indicated that Trump doesn't want to shut down the government, though just last week he said he'd be "proud" to do so. The president would consider other options and the administration was looking at ways to find the money elsewhere, Sanders said. It was a turnaround after days of impasse. Without a resolution, more than 800,000 government workers could be furloughed or sent to work without pay beginning at midnight Friday, disrupting government operations days before Christmas. One option that has been circulating on Capitol Hill would be to simply approve government funding at existing levels, without a boost for the border, as a stopgap measure to kick the issue into the new Congress next month. The chairman of the Appropriations Committee, Republican senator Richard Shelby, Alabama, confirmed late Tuesday his office was preparing legislation to keep government funded, likely into February. While Trump has not said that he would sign such a measure, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway signalled Wednesday that he may consider it. "He'll take a look at that certainly," said Conway. "This is all breaking news, in other words, what the Congress is going to put before him." Continuing to move away from his funding demand, Trump tweeted Wednesday: "One way or the other, we will win on the Wall!" Sander told reporters Tuesday that the White House wants "to know what can pass." "Once they make a decision and they put something on the table, we'll make a determination on whether we'll move forward," said Sanders. She also said the president "has asked every agency to look and see if they have money that can be used." The turn of events kick-started negotiations that had been almost nonexistent since last week's televised meeting at the White House, when Trump neither accepted nor rejected the Democrats' offer. They had proposed keeping funding at current levels of $1.3 billion for border security fencing and other improvements, but not for the wall. The Senate's top Republican and Democratic leaders began negotiating new proposals and talks were expected to continue. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he was confident there would not be a government shutdown. McConnell said a stopgap measure could be approved, though he suggested that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who is poised to become House speaker when the Democrats take control Jan. 3, would not want to saddle the new year with a budget brawl. "If I were in her shoes, I would rather not be dealing with this year's business next year," McConnell said. Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer have made it clear they are not interested in funding Trump's border wall. During a meeting earlier Tuesday on Capitol Hill, McConnell had proposed $1.6 billion for border fencing, as outlined in a bipartisan Senate bill, plus an additional $1 billion that Trump could use on the border, according to a senior Democratic aide unauthorized to speak about the private meeting. Democratic leaders immediately spurned the proposal. Schumer called McConnell to reject it. "We cannot accept the offer they made of a billion-dollar slush fund for the president to implement his very wrong immigration policies," Pelosi told reporters. "So that won't happen." Democrats also rejected the administration's idea of shifting money from other accounts to pay for Trump's wall. Schumer said there will be no wall money, "plain and simple." Pelosi will probably be able to quickly approve a longer-term measure to keep the government running in the new year. She called it a "good sign" that the White House appeared to be backing off its demands. The White House showed its willingness to budge as it became apparent the president does not have support in Congress for funding the wall at the $5 billion level. Sanders said Tuesday there are "other ways" to secure the funding. "At the end of the day, we don't want to shut down the government," Sanders said on Fox News Channel. "We want to shut down the border from illegal immigration." Sanders pointed to the Senate's bipartisan appropriation measure for the Department of Homeland Security, which provides $26 billion, including $1.6 billion for fencing and other barriers. It was approved by the committee in summer on a bipartisan vote. "That's something that we would be able to support," she said, as long as it's coupled with other funding. But House Democrats largely reject the Senate's bill because it includes 65 miles of additional fencing along the Rio Grande Valley in Texas. Trump had campaigned on the promise that Mexico would pay for the wall. Mexico has refused. It's unclear how many House Republicans, with just a few weeks left in the majority before relinquishing power to House Democrats, will even show up midweek for possible votes. Many Republicans say it's up to Trump and Democrats to cut a deal. The standoff dispute could affect nine of 15 Cabinet-level departments and dozens of agencies, including the departments of Homeland Security, Transportation, Interior, Agriculture, State and Justice, as well as national parks and forests. Shelby expected the stopgap measure, which would cover the seven appropriation bills for those departments, would pass. "Who would want to shut the government down?" he said. Congress did pass legislation to fund much of the government through the fiscal year, until Oct. 1. But a partial shutdown would occur at midnight Friday on the remaining one-fourth of the government. About half the workers would be forced to continue working without immediate pay. Others would be sent home. Congress often approves their pay retroactively, even if they were ordered to stay home. Many agencies, including the Pentagon and the departments of Veterans Affairs and Health and Human Services, are already funded for the year and will continue to operate as usual. The US Postal Service, busy delivering packages for the holiday season, wouldn't be affected by any government shutdown because it's an independent agency. Sergei Ryabkov said that the US publicly announced its plans to withdraw from the treaty (INF) in October, and that this decision was not an attempt to initiate dialogue with Russia. Moscow: The United States of America will pull out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, confirmed Russia's deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov. According to Russian television network RT, Ryabkov said, "Washington publicly announced its plans to withdraw from the treaty (INF) already in October. Through high-level bilateral channels, it was confirmed to us that this decision was final and wasn't an attempt to initiate dialogue." "We'll be forced to come up with effective compensating measures. I'd like to warn against pushing the situation towards the eruption of a new missile crisis. I am convinced that no sane country could be interested in something like this," he added. He further underlined that Moscow would take retaliatory measures if the US were to station missiles in Europe that threatened their security. "Russia isn't threatening anybody, but have the necessary strength and means to counter any aggressor," RT quoted Ryabkov as saying. US President Donald Trump, in October this year, had announced the US' decision to withdraw from the nuclear treaty. Signed by then Soviet Union Secretary General Mikhail Gorbachev and US President Ronald Reagan in 1987, the agreement is deterrent in nature and was largely designed to prevent prospects of a full-scale nuclear war in Europe. By Idrees Ali and Phil Stewart WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump has begun withdrawing U.S. troops from Syria, declaring on Wednesday they have succeeded in their mission to defeat Islamic State, and U.S. By Idrees Ali and Phil Stewart WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump has begun withdrawing U.S. troops from Syria, declaring on Wednesday they have succeeded in their mission to defeat Islamic State, and U.S. officials said Washington is considering removing all its forces from the country. A decision to pull out completely, if confirmed, would come as the roughly 2,000 U.S. troops wind up a campaign to retake territory once held by the militant group. But it would raise doubts about how to prevent a resurgence of the militant group, undercut U.S. leverage in the region and undermine diplomatic efforts to end the Syrian civil war, which is now in its eighth year. Reports of a full withdrawal drew immediate criticism from some of Trump's fellow Republicans, who said leaving strengthened the hand of Russia and Iran, which both support Syrian President Bashar al Assad. It may also leave exposed an alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, which has been among the most effective against Islamic State but is under threat as Turkey weighs a new offensive in Syria. U.S. commanders on the ground, who have developed strong ties to SDF leaders, had voiced concerns about what a fast withdrawal would mean for the U.S-backed forces and were surprised by the decision, said a U.S. official on condition of anonymity. "We have started returning United States troops home as we transition to the next phase of this campaign," White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said in a statement issued after President Donald Trump tweeted that "We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there." Trump's predecessor, Barack Obama, was slow to get involved in Syria's civil war, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced around half the country's pre-war 22 million population, fearing being dragged into another foreign war even as he sought to withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan. But in a campaign to defeat Islamic State in Syria, Obama ordered air strikes from September 2014 and then troops into the country the following year. It was not immediately clear from Sanders' statement whether all of the U.S. troops in the country would leave and if so, by when. Sanders suggested that the United States would remain engaged to some degree. "The United States and our allies stand ready to re-engage at all levels to defend American interests whenever necessary, and we will continue to work together to deny radical Islamist terrorists territory, funding, support," she said. One U.S. official said Washington aimed to withdraw troops within 60 to 100 days and said the U.S. State Department was evacuating all its personnel in Syria within 24 hours. A second official, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said the U.S. military was planning for a full withdrawal and could leave quicker than 60-100 days. Wednesday's tweet from Trump, who is generally wary of U.S. military involvement abroad, showed he saw no further grounds for remaining, even as some Republican lawmakers disagreed. Republican U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham, often a Trump ally but generally a foreign policy hawk, said a withdrawal would have "devastating consequences" for the United States in the region and throughout the world. "An American withdrawal at this time would be a big win for ISIS, Iran, Bashar al Assad of Syria, and Russia," Graham said in a statement, using the acronym ISIS for Islamic State. A British defence minister said he strongly disagreed with Trump that Islamic State had been defeated in Syria. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his country would study a U.S. decision to pull its forces from Syria and would ensure its own security. In Russia, TASS news agency quoted the Foreign Ministry as saying withdrawing U.S. troops from Syria created prospects for a political settlement of the crisis there. SPECIAL FORCES Many of the remaining U.S. troops in Syria are special operations forces working closely with the SDF. The partnership with the SDF has helped defeat of Islamic State in Syria but has outraged NATO ally Turkey, which views Kurdish YPG forces in the alliance as an extension of a separatist militant group fighting inside Turkey. The deliberations on U.S. troops come as Ankara threatens a new offensive in Syria. To date, U.S. forces in Syria have been seen as a stabilizing factor in the country and have somewhat restrained Turkey's actions against the SDF. A complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria would leave a sizeable U.S. military presence in the region, including about 5,200 troops across the border in Iraq. Much of the U.S. campaign in Syria has been waged by warplanes flying out of Qatar and other locations in the Middle East. Still, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and State Department officials have long fretted about leaving Syria before a peace agreement can be reached to end the brutal civil war. Islamic State is also widely expected to revert to guerilla tactics once it no longer holds territory. A U.S. withdrawal could open Trump up to criticism if Islamic State reemerged. Trump had lambasted Obama for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq that preceded an unravelling of the Iraqi armed forces. Iraqi forces collapsed in the face of Islamic State's advance into the country in 2014. LAST 1 PERCENT Islamic State declared its so-called "caliphate" in 2014 after seizing large swathes of Syria and Iraq. The hardline Islamist group established its de facto capital in the Syrian city of Raqqa, using it as a base to plot attacks in Europe. According to U.S. estimates, the group oversaw about 100,000 square kilometres (39,000 square miles) of territory, with about 8 million people under Islamic State control. It had estimated revenues of nearly one billion dollars a year. A senior U.S. official last week said the group was down to its last 1 percent of the territory it once held. It has no remaining territory in Iraq. Hajin, the group's last major stronghold in Syria, is close to being seized by U.S.-backed SDF forces. After losing Hajin, Islamic State will control a diminishing strip of territory along the eastern bank of the Euphrates River in the area where U.S.-backed operations are focused. Militants also control some desert terrain west of the river in territory otherwise controlled by the Damascus government and its allies. U.S. officials have warned that taking back the group's territory would not be the same as defeating it. "The Coalition has liberated the ISIS-held territory, but the campaign against ISIS is not over," Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White said in a statement. (Reporting by Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali; Additional reporting by Doina Chiacu, Steve Holland and Roberta Rampton in Washington and Sarah Dadouch in Istanbul; Writing by Arshad Mohammed; Editing by Frances Kerry) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. By Tom Hals (Reuters) - A U.S. By Tom Hals (Reuters) - A U.S. judge on Wednesday struck down Trump administration policies aimed at restricting asylum claims by people citing gang or domestic violence in their home countries and ordered the U.S. government to bring back six deported migrants to reconsider their cases. The ruling is the latest legal setback for the White House on immigration. Last month, a judge in San Francisco ordered a halt to a policy that prevented those entering illegally from Mexico from seeking asylum. The policy at the centre Wednesday's ruling sought to limit the ability of immigrants to fight expedited deportation by narrowing the grounds for claiming "credible fear" if they returned home, the first step in a long asylum process. The policy was challenged in a District of Columbia lawsuit brought by a dozen adults and children. U.S. Judge Emmet Sullivan said in a 107-page opinion the policy violated both immigration and administrative law. "And because it is the will of Congress - not the whims of the executive - that determines the standard for expedited removal, the court finds that those policies are unlawful," Sullivan wrote. In a statement, the Department of Justice said administration policies sought to follow Congress' requirement that asylum be limited to those with a fear of persecution based on their race, nationality, religion, political opinion or membership in a social group. The DOJ filed a request to stay the court's orders while the government appealed the ruling. Sullivan had not responded to that request. Sullivan, an appointee of U.S. President Bill Clinton, made headlines on Tuesday for his fierce criticism of Michael Flynn, President Donald Trump's former national security adviser, for lying to FBI agents. For the last three months of 2017, the most recent numbers, the government conducted about 6,000 credible fear interviews monthly. The vast majority passed those interviews, allowing them to make their case for asylum in front of a U.S. immigration judge. Jennifer Chang Newell, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney who represented the asylum seekers, said the ruling "is a defeat for the Trump administrations all-out assault on the rights of asylum seekers." The ruling clears the way for four mothers and two children to be returned to the United States, according to Newell. The administration has said that the asylum process is being abused by people who have frivolous claims but are able to stay in the country while their cases are being decided. At a separate hearing, U.S. District Judge John Tigar in San Francisco said he would likely rule on Wednesday whether to extend his previous order that blocked Trump's policy to bar those entering illegally from Mexico from seeking asylum. Tigar noted that his November order had been subsequently upheld by a federal appeals court and said he is now bound to follow that reasoning in deciding whether to extend it. On Tuesday, the United States committed billions of dollars towards development in Central America and Mexico as part of a plan to curb illegal immigration. (Reporting by Tom Hals in Wilmington, Delaware; Additional reporting by Dan Levine in San Francisco; Editing by Cynthia Osterman) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. By Timothy Gardner WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Lawmakers from both U.S. parties introduced legislation on Wednesday to give Congress more say in any deal on civil nuclear power cooperation between the United States and Saudi Arabia. By Timothy Gardner WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Lawmakers from both U.S. parties introduced legislation on Wednesday to give Congress more say in any deal on civil nuclear power cooperation between the United States and Saudi Arabia. The Trump administration is eager to strike a deal with Saudi Arabia to share nuclear power technology with the kingdom, as the domestic industry struggles to compete with lower-priced power sources such as natural gas. But the talks have come under scrutiny since the killing of columnist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October. Despite President Donald Trumps desire to maintain close ties to Saudi Arabia, several of his fellow Republicans have joined Democrats in blaming Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for Khashoggis death. The crown prince has denied knowledge of the operation that killed Khashoggi. The No Nuclear Weapons for Saudi Arabia Act would require the House of Representatives and the Senate to approve any so-called 123 agreement with the kingdom. Typically, such agreements go into effect unless majorities of Congress pass joint resolutions of disapproval. It is unlikely that the legislation will pass before the end of the current Congress in January, but the bill raises scrutiny of any deal. It also calls on Saudi Arabia to release details of Khashoggi's killing before a deal is approved. Concern about whether Saudi Arabia could use nuclear power to develop a weapons program mounted after the crown prince told CBS in an interview in March that his kingdom would develop nuclear weapons if its archrival Iran did. "This legislation would ensure that we put key checks in place to ensure that Saudi Arabia never ends up with the U.S. technology or materials to make a nuclear bomb, and that Congress is the final say," said Senator Edward Markey, a Democrat. Markey introduced the bill with Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican. Representatives Brad Sherman, a Democrat, and Luke Messer, a Republican, have introduced companion legislation in the House. The talks have slowed as Saudi pushed for relaxing nonproliferation guidelines, known as the "gold standard," that could allow it to enrich uranium or reprocess fuel waste. Those processes raise concerns because they have potential to create quantities of uranium and plutonium that could be used in nuclear bombs. Energy Secretary Rick Perry visited Saudi Arabia this month to talk about the potential deal. Perry has said he told the kingdom it is important for it to be perceived to be strong on nonproliferation. This year, the kingdom put the United States on a short list of countries for a deal. The winner will likely be selected next year. U.S. reactor builder Westinghouse, which and is owned by Brookfield Asset Management , would likely sell nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia in any deal. (Reporting by Timothy Gardner; Editing by Peter Cooney) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. LONDON (Reuters) - British Prime Minister Theresa May will urge the devolved nations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to 'listen to business' at a meeting on Wednesday and back her Brexit deal, which envisages continuing close ties with the EU. A day after her government said it would implement plans for a no-deal Brexit in full, May was due to stress how her deal works for all parts of Britain, her office said. 'I am confident that what we have agreed delivers for the whole of the UK,' she was due to say ahead of the meeting LONDON (Reuters) - British Prime Minister Theresa May will urge the devolved nations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to "listen to business" at a meeting on Wednesday and back her Brexit deal, which envisages continuing close ties with the EU. A day after her government said it would implement plans for a no-deal Brexit in full, May was due to stress how her deal works for all parts of Britain, her office said. "I am confident that what we have agreed delivers for the whole of the UK," she was due to say ahead of the meeting. "Thats why it is more important than ever that the devolved administrations get behind this deal and listen to businesses and industry bodies across all four nations who have been clear that it provides the certainty they need." May is due to meet the First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon, new First Minister of Wales Mark Drakeford and representatives of the Northern Ireland Civil Service at her Downing Street office. She will update them on plans being made for every eventuality including leaving the EU without any kind of a deal, plans that include setting aside space on ferries to ensure a regular flow of medical supplies and keeping 3,500 armed forces personnel on standby to support contingency plans. With just 100 days until Britain is due to leave the EU, May has yet to win the support of a deeply divided parliament for the deal she struck last month with Brussels. She has said a delayed vote on her deal will take place in mid-January, prompting some lawmakers to accuse her of trying to force parliament into backing her by running down the clock as the March 29 exit day approaches. Sturgeon, leader of the independence-minded Scottish National Party (SNP), has accused May of not listening to Scottish opinion and has likened her Brexit deal to taking a blindfolded leap off a cliff. The Welsh Assembly also rejected the deal in a symbolic vote earlier this month. Northern Ireland has been without an executive since January 2017 when the governing parties, Sinn Fein and May's allies at Westminster, the DUP, split after a fierce row. A so-called backstop plan to avoid the reintroduction of a hard border between the Irish republic and Northern Ireland remains one of the principal obstacles to parliamentary agreement on May's deal. "From the Scottish Fishermen's Federation and Diageo , to Airbus and Manufacturing Northern Ireland, business and industry right across the UK want to us to deliver this deal as it gives them the clarity and stability they need to protect jobs and living standards," May was due to say. (Reporting by Stephen Addison; editing by James Davey) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. The United States will withdraw its troops from Syria, a US official said on Wednesday, after President Donald Trump said America has defeated Islamic State in the war-ravaged country Washington: The United States will withdraw its troops from Syria, a US official said on Wednesday, after President Donald Trump said America has "defeated Islamic State" in the war-ravaged country. The move will have extraordinary geopolitical ramifications and throws into question the fate of US-backed Kurdish fighters who have been tackling Islamic State jihadists. "We have defeated Islamic State in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency," Trump tweeted. The US official said the decision was finalised Tuesday. "Full withdrawal, all means all," the official told AFP when asked if the troops would be pulled from all of Syria. The official would not provide a timeline. "We will ensure force protection is adequately maintained, but as quickly as possible," the official said. Currently, about 2,000 US forces are in Syria, most of them on a train-and-advise mission to support local forces fighting IS. A large contingent of the main fighting force, an alliance known as the Syrian Democratic forces (SDF), is Kurdish and is viewed by Turkey as a "terrorist" group. Ankara has said it plans to launch an operation against the Kurdish militia, known as the YPG (Kurdish People's Protection Units). The Pentagon would not confirm the US troop pull-out. "At this time, we continue to work by, with and through our partners in the region," Pentagon spokesman Colonel Rob Manning said. While the YPG has spearheaded Washington's fight against IS, US support has strained relations between the NATO allies. Ties have grown more fraught since the US set up observation posts in northern Syria close to the border with Turkey to prevent any altercation between Turkish forces and the YPG. IS swept across large swaths of Syria and neighbouring Iraq in 2014, implementing their brutal interpretation of Islamic law in areas they controlled. But they have since seen their dream of a state crumble, as they have lost most of that territory to various offensives. In Syria, IS fighters are holding out in what remains of the pocket that once included Hajin, including the villages of Al-Shaafa and Sousa. Most US forces are stationed in northern Syria, though a small contingent is based at a garrison in Al-Tanaf, near the Jordanian and Iraqi border. Stunning his country's entire military establishment, US President Donald Trump who has been pushed to a corner by the escalating political and legal dangers of 17 different investigations into his business and politics that may have gamed his election itself, has decided to pull out all of the 2000 and more American troops in Syria and took to his favorite social media platform Twitter to declare victory: 'We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency.' New York: Stunning his country's entire military establishment, US President Donald Trump who has been pushed to a corner by the escalating political and legal dangers of 17 different investigations into his business and politics that may have gamed his election itself, has decided to pull out all of the 2000 and more American troops in Syria and took to his favorite social media platform Twitter to declare victory: "We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency." Leverage the office while you can seems to be the message from Trump's decision today as bad news is breaking round the clock on his front porch. Wednesday's bombshell: Trump's "lie" about no truck with Russia was exposed today as news networks flashed copies of a letter of intent he signed for a Moscow deal he was pursuing while running for President. That's not all. Trump has caved on the wall; the Michael Flynn conspiracy theories have collapsed; his charity has been forced to shutter down, his favorite children may be the next dominos to fall so here's what he does: Blow up the US Mideast strategy, spun from thin air. Just another Wednesday in what Trump-scarred folks call Crazytown. The Syria announcement today left key details blank, in signature Trump style. There's no timetable for withdrawal and zero detailing on whether airstrikes would continue. Critics tore into Trump saying he leaves Syrias future in the hands of Moscow and Tehran. I found someone who is supportive of the decision to retreat from #Syria https://t.co/SlNs9hrXLG Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) December 19, 2018 Top military and defence analysts are calling this a "head scratching" and "wildly impulsive" move but the timing of the surprise announcement suggests it's a calculated political pivot ahead of the Christmas holidays and after a string of bruising weeks headlined by his implication in a criminal case involving hush money payments to two women in a bid to cover up damning information ahead of the 2016 US elections. Trump's former fixer Michael Cohen has been sentenced to three years in prison for his role in multiple cases, including the hush money payments where he made the payments to women "at the direction of and in co-ordination with Individual 1" - which is Donald Trump. For Trump, a man known to react with rage at negative news cycles, a distraction - a big one - was absolutely essential to get the news media to step off the gas on the Mueller probe and dig elsewhere. Bringing troops home plays not just to Trump's base but to the collective fatigue that Americans feel about dousing fires outside the homeland. It also feeds into the Christmas spirit and scrubs some of the flak Trump has been getting for despatching military men to the US Mexico border to stop the "migrant invasion". All this comes at a time when Trump plans to roll out an unprecedented structure and fundraising machine for his 2020 reelection campaign. In the recent past, strongman action in Syria has given Trump some of his most memorable moments. When he countered Syria's chemical attack with 59 Tomahawk missiles, political and public opinion rallied around him. He was universally praised for a quick and decisive response. For Trump, who watches and rails at news television all day, prime time means everything and bringing troops home is a political winner, no matter what the wonks may be saying. A good way to understand the thinking is from one of Trump's many gems, this one from an old interview to The New York Times: "I'm always moving. I'm moving in both directions". Apply that to the current White House in turmoil and a story begins to form: Trump knows he has been reduced to a bit role in the shutdown drama at the end of the year, nobody is giving him money for his border wall, he knows the joke is on his and his family after his charity was forced to shut down this week, Democrats are taking over the House in January and all this is just too much for him to bear. He wakes up the next morning, plays flamethrower and then watches the fun. This time though, is slightly different from his earlier action on Syria that won him praise but Trump is not backing down. Instead, he's leaving his deputy Mike Pence to face the flak. Republicans ripped Trumps surprise Syria withdrawal in a meeting with Pence, giving him a "earful" according to those present. Planning for the pullout has begun and troops will begin leaving as soon as possible, US officials said. Trump said American forces no longer were needed in a country torn apart by long-running civil war. Trump has argued for the withdrawal since he was a presidential candidate. But the decision underscores the division between him and his military advisers, who have said in recent weeks that pockets of IS militants remain and U.S. policy has been to keep troops in place until the extremists are eradicated. Trump's national security adviser, John Bolton, said in September that the U.S. would keep a military presence in Syria as long as Iran is active there. "We're not going to leave as long as Iranian troops are outside Iranian borders and that includes Iranian proxies and militias," he said. Leading Republican senators also reacted with displeasure to the news. Senator Lindsay Graham, typically a Trump backer, said he was "blindsided" by the report and called the decision "a disaster in the making." He said, "The biggest winners in this are ISIS and Iran." Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida said the withdrawal would be a "grave error with broader implications" beyond the fight against IS. Just last week, the U.S. special envoy to the anti-ISIS coalition, Brett McGurk, said U.S. troops would remain in Syria even after the Islamic State was driven from its strongholds. Just hours before the withdrawal decision became public, the State Department announced late Tuesday that it had approved the sale of a $3.5 billion Patriot missile defense system to Turkey. The Turks had complained that the U.S. was slow walking requests for air defenses and had signed a deal with Russia to buy a sophisticated system in a deal that Washington and Ankara's other NATO partners strongly opposed. The U.S. first launched airstrikes against IS fighters in Syria in 2014. In the years that followed, the U.S. began partnering with Syrian ground forces to fight the extremists. The Pentagon recently said that IS now controls just 1 percent of the territory it originally held. In less than two weeks, we'll close the book on what's been a history-making year for the marijuana industry. Leading that charge was Canada, which this past October became the first industrialized country in the world to legalize recreational marijuana. With nine decades of recreational weed prohibition now lifted, the legal Canadian pot industry is free to build what should be a multibillion-dollar market by the turn of the decade. We also witnessed plenty of game-changing moments in the United States. In 2018, a handful of new states legalized medical and recreational weed, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved its first cannabis-derived drug. Admit it: Marijuana stocks are completely fooling you Even more recently, marijuana stocks reported their first quarter of operating results since Canada legalized adult-use pot. Even though these quarterly reports incorporated little or no sales from the post-legalization period, quite a many pot stocks delivered significant sales growth and, in some cases, a quarterly profit. Though not an all-encompassing list, here's a snapshot of the adjusted net income for some of the biggest growers in the industry in their most recent quarter (all figures in Canadian dollars): Aurora Cannabis ACB -6.39% ) OrganiGram Holdings OGI -6.86% ) Auxly Cannabis Group CBWTF -7.98% ) Aphria APHA ) When investors saw these quarterly profits, they were probably wide-eyed. Of course, if they were to dig a bit deeper, they'd see that all marijuana stocks did was legally fool investors. Aurora Cannabis was able to turn its profit thanks to a combination of unrealized noncash gains from derivatives and the revaluation of its "influential" stake in The Green Organic Dutchman. Basically, some legal accounting adjustments led to Aurora's more than CA$105 million in net income. But, focus solely on the company's operating performance and you'd see an ugly loss of nearly CA$112 million. Likewise, the currently embattled Aphria generated its profit from an asset sale. Without this asset sale, Aphria would have recorded a marginal net loss. Investors had better familiarize themselves with IFRS accounting practices As for OrganiGram and Auxly Cannabis Group, they both benefited from International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). IFRS accounting is something that marijuana stock investors are going to have to familiarize themselves with, as it's likely to impact the bottom-line results for pot stocks in each and every quarter going forward. Under IFRS accounting, marijuana growers are classified as "agricultural" companies. As such, they need to estimate not only the value of the crop they're growing, but the cost to sell this crop (oftentimes well before the crop is even harvested). And it gets better. Marijuana growers are required to revalue their crops throughout the grow cycle, as cannabis plants bear different values based on whether or not they're flowering or if they've been harvested and/or processed. This constant revaluation is really nothing more than guesswork on the part of pot stocks and their management teams. But here's the "best" part: This fair-value adjustment to biological assets is taken as an above-the-line adjustment. That means it impacts gross profits before expenses are factored in. In some instances, we've witnessed cost of goods sold -- which is a number that would be subtracted from total sales -- become a positive number as a result of fair-value adjustments to biological assets. In OrganiGram's latest quarter, a nearly CA$31 million fair-value adjustment fueled its quarterly profit, while Auxly Cannabis recognized a CA$6.2 million unrealized and fair-value adjustment gain in the third quarter. Yet, what a lot of investors might be overlooking is the idea that the IFRS accounting door can swing both ways. At the moment, with capacity expansion underway, marijuana stocks are realizing a considerably higher value for their biological assets. Or, to put things more succinctly, they're planting a much larger crop and, as a result, expecting to see their shares of sales costs relative to this crop fall. But as this expansion period wanes within a few quarters, this fair-value adjustment door could reverse, leading to above-the-line reductions right as these pot stocks angle to produce recurring operating profits. In other words, the market giveth, and it taketh away. Investors will want to take fair-value adjustments, derivative gains, and asset sales with a grain of salt as they analyze the quarterly operating results of marijuana stocks in the future. Microsoft knows how to keep Xbox Community happy and one simple reason behind it is give them what they want before they ask for it, for example since the launch of Xbox One X, Microsoft has launched a dedicated page that gives a clear information on which games are enhanced, reach 4K, and have HDR support, and on top of that there is a separate list of games which have enhancements currently in development. Can we say this same thing for Sony and PlayStation 4 Pro? The answer is a big NO. There is no official list from Sony that provides all the above mention information for PlayStation 4 Pro. PS4 Pro Enhanced Games List What is the other way when you dont get what you want? Start asking for it. PlayStation fans have gone with this same approach, a thread has appeared on Reddit asking Sony to put up an official list of PlayStation 4 Pro enhanced titles. At the time of writing this, the thread has received close to 4.5K upvotes. The creator of the thread 824587 assumes that Sony didnt do it (official list of PS4 Pro Enhanced Games) because the number of games that reach 4K on the Pro would make it look bad against the X. Unofficial lists, like the one on Resetera, arent quite enough, because they dont have any info on titles that have enhancements currently in development. Also, PS Store filters only show games that are enhanced, but nothing about 4K or HDR. In addition to this, 824587 ask PS4 sub-Reddit members to take this campaign to Twitter and ask for the list to @AskPlayStation with a hashtag #PS4ProSupport. It would be interesting to see whether Sony will respond to the demand or not. Salome Zourabichvili officially becomes the fifth president of Georgia - GeorgianJournal Numbers of Georgians seeking asylum in Germany has significantly decreased - GeorgianJournal Georgian citizens can apply for temporary residency in France - GeorgianJournal Manila (CNN Philippines Life) Christmastime in the Philippines is its own kind of spectacle. Filipinos have managed to combine the gaudiness of mall sales and online shopping with the disciplined observation of religious traditions like the Simbang Gabi. During the Christmas season, not only are the airwaves filled with Jose Mari Chan crooning about the child in the manger; mass attendance also skyrockets as thousands still flock to churches, believing that completing the nine days of devotional masses will grant the devotee one special wish. But what's often missing from this narrative are the stories of non-Christian Filipinos who get swept up in the festivities. After all, in a country that is 87 percent Christian of which 70 percent are Catholics and 17 percent are Protestants many forget that there are still those among us who dont necessarily believe in Christmas being the birth of Jesus Christ. So putting aside Simbang Gabi, the Belen, and mass food like puto bumbong what does the complete picture of the Filipino Christmas actually look like? Kai Darul Salim, Muslim, 27 Christmas for me is just another ordinary holiday a chance to stay at home, chill, and be with my loved ones. On Christmas eve, when most of the Filipinos are awake and celebrating, eating and drinking, I am mostly in my bed sleeping. When I am in a Christian place like Metro Manila or Zamboanga City, I may be able to wake up due to the fireworks. But in a Muslim community, it is a peaceful night that will recharge us for another day. And since it is a holiday, it is a chance to be with family. And being with family means eating and catching up. Other than that, it is really just an ordinary day for us Muslims, just as our Eids are just a regular holiday for most Christians. But of course, we wish well for our Christian brothers and sisters. Kevin Mandrilla, agnostic, 26 I have been an agnostic since my late years in high school, when the contradictions between the faith given to me and my changing personal beliefs had become too heavy a burden. What I've realized over the years is that what makes events [like Christmas] special, even sacred, for me is not the solemn rites or the deeper religious meaning involved, but the simple fact that I am doing it as part of a community. I may not share the beliefs behind such events (in fact I question some of them), but I do recognize its importance for a community carrying its own history and identity. There's beauty in the sense of continuity, the idea that my grandparents and those before them did the same things. There's also beauty in the sense of impermanence, that these traditions will change and might even cease to exist with the passage of time. Aunell Ross Angcos, Jewish-Christian, 28 I grew up not celebrating Christmas since it is not part of our belief system. But free days are still free days. I used to travel during those non-working holidays. But ever since I got a job which requires me to travel extensively, whenever I have free time, I spend it at home, catch up with family, friends, books, and sleep. Yes, free time can always be meaningful regardless of the dictates of the occasion. "Some people ask me, 'Isnt it sad?' We didnt grow up with it, so we dont know what were losing. The only time I felt down was when nauso yung Instagram, when everyone was posting photos. But Ive never really felt the loss of [Christmas]." Miguel Reyes* Exan Sharief Jr., Muslim, 34 We dont really celebrate Christmas but its something anticipated by the family because of the long vacation. Hence, it is usually spent for family outings and bonding activities. Most of the time, we would go to the countryside or to our ancestral house to spend time together. We would gather everyone for a feast or at least a lunch or dinner together, sometimes with cousins coming over and bringing their own specialty dish. It has become a tradition already to do anything that will bond the family every end of the year during the holidays. I also remember how we would check out nearby towns and plazas to witness how well lit they are and how tall their Christmas trees are. Now that we have malls, we usually enjoy the musically synchronized lantern shows. While we dont celebrate the holidays, it is really heartwarming to see our Christian brothers and sisters express their love for Christmas. Krisha Binayao, Iglesia ni Cristo, 28 I was born and raised as an INC member even though my dads family [are] devoted Catholic members. Im exposed and aware of how Catholics celebrate Christmas, but it wasn't difficult for me to handle. Ever since naman sa bahay, we never had Christmas decors or did parties. So literally when it's Dec. 24, we just sleep through it, just like a normal day. When I was young, I remember participating in some school parties because of exchange gifts but as I grew up, I just learned to not join and skip those events. Luckily, people around me naman that celebrate Christmas respect my beliefs and religion, so they don't really push me to join and celebrate with them. Thankfully, I never had any issues or conflicts with others just because of this. Takao Fujiwara, Shinto follower, 44 I will spend my Christmas in Bohol alone because I have no driver. My [Filipino] driver asked for a day off during the Christmas break. And it's difficult to stay in Manila without a driver. I plan to read books and swim in the sea. Skilty Labastilla, agnostic, 39 I love Christmas! As an anthropologist, I have learned that celebrations have always been a part of human culture, even before the advent of monotheistic religions, so as a lapsed Catholic, I dont necessarily see hypocrisy in non-Christians embrace of Christmas. For my family, Christmas is a time for travel back to my parents place in Bohol. My daughters, 8 and 2 years old, look forward to going to the beach in Panglao, as well as to the animal farm that my parents tend to in Tubigon, and this year were excited to bring for the first time our 6-month old son to Bohol. Even though we no longer go to mass, we still celebrate Noche Buena on the evening of the 24th by preparing our different specialty dishes. We sing beloved Christmas songs and exchange gifts. The best part of Christmas is catching up with my parents and siblings. We used to be eight siblings, and now there are only six of us (I lost a younger brother and an older sister to illness), so we know that every Christmas we spend as a family is very precious. One does not get a two-week holiday any other time of the year so we maximize it by enjoying each others company and not worrying about deadlines and stuff that preoccupy our lives during the rest of the year. Usually on the 28th, I, my wife, and our kids fly back to Manila to spend New Year festivities with my wifes family in Gumaca, Quezon. Our parents are still very religious so we respect their religiosity during the Christmas season and I believe they have come to respect our own secular, but very family-oriented way of celebrating Christmas. "I may not share the beliefs behind such events (in fact I question some of them), but I do recognize its importance for a community carrying its own history and identity." Kevin Mandrilla Mohaymin Maulana Mamadsual, Muslim, 24 I [was] born and raised at Palimbang, Sultan Kudarat and am a full-blooded Muslim. [I'm] Muslim by heart but I'm passive doing the practices of Islam. Here, actually we don't celebrate Christmas though we believe in Jesus Christ. Muslims love Jesus Christ but as what Islamic Scholars said that Muslims, or in Islam, we don't celebrate special days except Eid'l adha and Eidl fitr. For us, Christmas day is just like a normal day. We also don't attend any invites because it's forbidden in Islam. But we respect our brothers and sisters in celebrating the day of Jesus Christ and personally, I don't have a problem with that. Miguel Reyes*, Iglesia ni Cristo, 22 The Iglesia ni Cristo is very Bible-based. Christmas for us is not rooted in the Bible; it doesnt say that Dec. 25 is the birthday of Jesus, thats why we dont celebrate Christmas nor Easter. For me, growing up in a Catholic school, most of my friends are Catholic. In our Catholic country, nobody is available during Christmas; lahat nasa family pag Noche Buena. So I just spend the day having a sleepover with my cousins, playing video games, watching Metro Manila Film Festival with my family. Its just like a regular day with no classes. Ive also never felt the holiday season. People are happy when they see Christmas lights, but Ive never noticed them. Its not innate in me. Some people ask me, Isnt it sad? We didnt grow up with it, so we dont know what were losing. The only time I felt down was when nauso yung Instagram, when everyone was posting photos. But Ive never really felt the loss of [Christmas]. *Name has been changed upon request Apple started rolling out iOS 12.1.2 to fix eSIM issues with the newly launched iPhones News oi-Karan Sharma Apple started rolling out iOS 12.1.2 to address some issues with the eSIM connectivity on the newly launched iPhones. All you need to know. Apple is rolling out a new version of iOS 12.1.2 for supported devices. The company is releasing the update to address some minor issues with e-SIM. The update is not that heavy and the size of the update is only 100MB. This update is not useful for you if you don't have an iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, or iPhone XR. Because the update is only for e-SIM support and it doesn't bring any new feature to the phone. The company has recently enabled the eSIM support for all three newly launched iPhones. But it was reported that some users are facing some issues with this new feature. However, no more issues are being reported with this function. IOS 12.1.2 will address an issue which is affecting cellular connectivity in Turkey for the all three newly launched iPhones. The update is already available to users via OTA (over-the-air). So if you haven't received the update then you can do it manually. All you need to do is to head towards the Setting app and select the General option. There you will get to see Software Update click on the option and it will start checking whether the update is arrived on your phone or not once it will show Download and Install, tap on the download option and it will start downloading the update. Make sure your phone has above 50 per cent battery. Once the download is completed the update will start installing and your phone will reboot automatically. Once the phone is on you are all set to use it. Best Mobiles in India Asus ZenFone 5 Max running on Android 9 Pie spotted on Geekbench with 4 GB RAM News oi-Vivek Asus ZenFone 5 Max is likely to offer a bigger battery Asus, the Taiwanese smartphone brand is known for offering affordable mobile phones with big batteries coupled with best-in-class specifications. A new Asus smartphone named Asus ZenFone 5 Max has been spotted on Geekbench, which is expected to launch at MWC 2019. The Geekbench listing of the Asus ZenFone 5 Max reveals some of the interesting features of the mobile phone, including the chipset that powers the device. The Geekbench listing According to the benchmarking platform listing, the Asus ZenFone 5 Max scores 1516 points on single core CPU performance and 5408 points on the multi-core CPU performance. These scores are similar to other smartphones with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 SoC. Going further in the Geekbench listing reveals that the Asus ZenFone 5 Max comes with 4 GB of RAM and offers the latest Android 9 Pie OS from Google. Considering the "Max" nomenclature, the Asus ZenFone 5 Max is expected to come with a big display with a beefier battery with at least 5000 mAh capacity. Similar to the Asus ZenFone Max Pro M2 The recently launched Asus ZenFone Max Pro M2 also shares a lot of characteristics with Asus ZenFone 5 Max. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 SoC also powers Asus ZenFone Max Pro M2 with 3/4/6 GB of RAM. The Asus ZenFone Max Pro M2 has a few tricks up its sleeves, including the Corning Gorilla Glass 6 protection and a massive 5000 mAh battery. In fact, the Asus Zenfone Max Pro M2 is the only smartphone under Rs 20,000 with Corning Gorilla Glass 6, which offers added protection to the smartphone display. As of now, there is no information on the pricing or the launch date of the Asus ZenFone 5 Max what so ever. The company is most likely to announce the ZenFone 5 Max at MWC and is expected to cost under $300 (Rs 20,000) at least for the base variant. Best Mobiles in India Facebook, To stay updated with latest technology news & gadget reviews, follow GizBot on Twitter YouTube and also subscribe to our notification. Allow Notifications Vodafone New Year Offer: Heres how you can get Rs. 30 Amazon Pay voucher News oi-Abhinaya Prabhu You can get an Amazon Pay voucher worth Rs. 30 on recharging your Vodafone prepaid number. There is an intense competition in the Indian telecom space of late. To be precise, it was started with the entry of Reliance Jio with its free and affordable unlimited plans with complimentary benefits. Since then, the telcos are striving hard to offer similar benefits for their subscribers, which is making them compromise the generated revenue. Recently, to continue earning the average revenue per user, the telcos introduced the minimum prepaid recharge plans starting from as low as Rs. 35. These plans will be valid for 28 days and will offer both data and talktime. With these minimum recharge plans, telcos hope to get more subscribers pay the monthly cost in order to make sure that their connection is active. In addition to this, Vodafone has come up with an interesting New Year Offer, which encourages subscribers to recharge monthly. This offer is valid till January 10, 2019. It offers Amazon Pay voucher worth Rs. 30 on a prepaid recharge. Vodafone New Year Offer On making a monthly recharge for the prepaid Vodafone number, the users will get a Rs. 30 worth Amazon Pay voucher. This Amazon Pay balance can be used to pay utility bills, recharge prepaid numbers and purchase products via the Amazon platform. In order to get this voucher, users will have to recharge their prepaid Vodafone number for Rs. 95 or above. On recharging for Rs. 95, users will get 500MB of 3G/4G data all throughout the validity of 28 days. The local and national outgoing calls will be charged at 30 paise per minute. There will not be any bundled free SMS along with this pack. Given that the users who recharge for Rs. 95 or above on their Vodafone prepaid number will get an Amazon Pay voucher worth Rs. 30, the effective value of the recharge will drop down to Rs. 65. This offer is aimed to entice the Vodafone subscribers to do the minimum monthly recharge and enjoy the benefits without having their numbers disconnected. So, are you going to recharge your number with any of these plans priced above Rs 95 to get this voucher? Best Mobiles in India Facebook, To stay updated with latest technology news & gadget reviews, follow GizBot on Twitter YouTube and also subscribe to our notification. Allow Notifications Back in 2010, she joined the Long Run Fire Department as a member, a firefighter. In 2013, she became one of three captains in the all-volunteer force. After a stint as a captain, she continued to keep Valley County safe as a deputy chief, and then as an assistant chief. And after nominations in November and a vote in December, Sara Johnson Bryan will be taking over as chief in January, 2019. As she looks forward to the future of the department, Bryan doesn't anticipate drastic changes, but instead points to past successes and plans to build on those. One of those successes was the acquisition of a used extrication truck from a department in Pennsylvania. "This was a big accomplishment," said Bryan. "The old one was dying on us. This is a much more reliable truck." She also expressed hope that a new grass rig would be put into service before the summer. Bryan further highlighted how past experiences with the department will help guide her leadership. She is actively pursuing additional funding for Long Run, giving credit to a GoFundMe effort spearheaded by Angela Austin to get new radios for the department. Bryan has already submitted a number of grant applications, including one from the Theo and Alyce Beck Foundation. In addition to obtaining funds for new equipment, Bryan also intends on volunteers receiving more training. "Oh yeah!" exclaimed Bryan when asked if she planned to make Glasgow her permanent home. Bryan is a life-time Valley Country resident, having gone to school in Nashua and Glasgow. She is now raising a one-year-old boy with her husband Kenny, who is also a volunteer member of LRFD. She works at the local State Farm office selling insurance. "I'm looking forward to it. If anyone has any concerns or questions, we are willing to answer. And of course, we could always use more people. That can be hard with an all-volunteer force," Bryan said, before concluding happily, "This is like a second family and that's nice." The City of Glasgow has secured rural development funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to proceed with a plan to upgrade the city's water infrastructure. According to City Manager Robert Kompel, the plan will provide resources on upgrading equipment inside the water treatment plant, at pumping stations throughout Glasgow and the water line and at the intake station along the Missouri River. "This is the culmination of five years of effort to get this project going," said Kompel discussing the amount of time and planning that has gone into the over $8 million project. Kompel said the focus was to upgrade an infrastructure that was first established in the early 1960s and had received few upgrades since. "It will make improvements to the pumping, distribution and treatment systems," said Kompel adding that the plan, once complete, will improve service to over 1,500 individuals throughout Glasgow. In detail, the entire project will cost $8,854,500 and the funding will come from a series of USDA rural development (RD) loans and grants, city funds and a Treasure State Endowment Program (TSEP) Grant. The breakdown will be: Two RD loans totaling $7,145,000; an RD grant for $813,600; the TSEP grant will cover $500,000; and the city will be on the hook for $395,900 of the remaining balance. Kompel stated the infrastructure has been in need of upgrading for sometime, but that the Water Department has worked diligently to keep the system working. "The staff have been great at keeping things running, but you reach a point where you can't find parts anymore," commented Kompel before discussing instances where manufacturers could not produce the parts needed to maintain the equipment, or cases in which they had been warned that once the stock runs out the parts would no longer be available. The city manager said that the only other major upgrade to the water system occurred in the late 1980s when the city switched from ground to surface water and began pumping water from the Missouri River. Much of that upgrade focused on installing new pipes and pumps, but left much of the original water treatment system untouched. As a result the current core of the water treatment infrastructure is over 55 years old. Many of the upgrades will be focused on replacing equipment inside the water treatment plant, with improvements also being made to the pump station near Irle School and along the water line. "We will also be replacing several blocks of water main and upgrading the two reservoirs," stated Kompel adding later that they will also be, "Upgrading tele-metrics that communicate with the intake and pumps systems." The city will start the process of ordering equipment this week, according to Kompel who stated, "The lead time on equipment will be 20 weeks, due to the state of the economy. So, actual construction should begin around February. Construction then should run for 12 months." Dr. Lawrence Palazzo sits in the new nursing chair and displays a plaque, both honoring his late wife, Rosalie Palazzo, for her years of service to the Hospital Guild and the nursery. Pictured along with the Doctor are starting back left to right: Shara Gibson and her son, Amy Beck, Tiffany Ross, Laura Barnes, Chelsea Sams, Connie Brunelle and Avis Needham. Front row left to right are Norma Guttenberg, Aurora Reyes and Brandi Knierim (kneeling). At their regular meeting Monday, Dec. 17, at Frances Mahon Deaconess Hospital, the Hospital Guild honored late member Rosalie Palazzo for her years of service to the guild and specifically for her initiation of the baby hat program. A.J. Etherington / The Courier Avis Needham shows Dr. Lawrence Palazzo a plaque honoring his wife, Rosalie Palazzo, at the Dec. 17 Hospital Guild Meeting. The plaque will be hung in the nursery waiting area to inform visitors of the contributions made by Rosalie to FMDH. To honor Palazzo, the Guild unveiled a plaque featuring her photograph and a knit baby hat to memorialize her contributions. The Guild also donated a nursing chair to be placed in the nursery for all new parents to use. According to Guild members, Rosalie had dedicated herself to the hospital since her arrival in Glasgow in the early 1980s, and had initiated the baby hat program early on. "She would teach the ladies on the Guild and the nurses how to make the hats," commented multiple Guild members. The nurse in charge of maternity, Brandi Knierim, echoed the sentiment saying that Rosalie, "[W]anted every baby to have a new knit hat." Rosalie Palazzo passed away last February. The plaque honoring her will hang in the nursery waiting area and the nursing chair will sit in the FMDH nursery. Senators Jon Tester and Steve Daines, both members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, played critical roles in advancing Savannas Act, named for murder victim Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind from North Dakota. The bill will improve tribal access to federal databases for tracking missing and unidentified persons, require the Department of Justice to consult with tribes while developing guidelines, mandate reporting statistics regarding missing and murdered Indians to Congress, and provide Indian tribes and law enforcement agencies with training and technical assistance in implementing guidelines of the act. Statistics from the National Institute of Justice show that more than 80 percent of native women experience violence. All of us must work together to end this epidemic. Savannas Act would ensure we all have access to the most comprehensive data regarding these crimes and make sure law enforcement agencies are on the same page as they investigate this unacceptable epidemic, said Tester. Both Senators called for a hearing on the issue of missing and murdered persons in Indian country, which took place Dec. 12. Daines stated, We face tragedies from across Montana where tribal citizens, particularly women and girls, go missing without a trace. We must do all in our power to curb the crisis of American Indians and Alaska Natives who disappear and whose cases never see justice. Im glad to see that the committee is treating this issue with the seriousness it deserves. Daines secured Kimberly Loring HeavyRunner as a witness at the hearing. Loring HeavyRunner, of Missoula, is the sister of Ashley Loring HeavyRunner, of the Blackfeet Tribe, who disappeared June 8, 2017. K. Loring HeavyRunner said, Im here today to stress to you that I believe law enforcement did not take Ashleys case seriously, as well as others girls that have gone missing and been murdered in Indian Country. Daines demanded answers from the Bureau of Indian Affairs as to why it took so long to launch an investigation. Does it seem like protocol is being followed when there was a two-month lag time between when Ashley went missing and when the case began as a missing person?, pressed Daines. Tester questioned where the system was failing, Wheres the problem? Is it with BIA, is it with the FBI, is it with tribal law enforcement? Why are we not finding these people? We have got to find a solution to this. We have to, said the senator. The bill has now moved to the House for consideration but House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-VA, has blocked the measure. Goodlatte has not commented on his reasons for doing so. Outgoing North Dakota Senator Heidi Heitkamp, D, sponsor of the bill, has warned that if the House does not pass the bill before the end of the session, the bill would need to be reintroduced in the next Congress. The Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 3107 of Glasgow honored students from Opheim, Hinsdale and Glasgow for their winning submissions to the Patriot's Pen and Voice of Democracy essay contests at a Christmas dinner last Thursday, Dec. 13 at the VFW Hall on Highway 2. The winner of the Patriot's Pen contest was Kodi Boone, of Hinsdale, and the runner-up finalists were Ellie Stone, of Glasgow, and Carrie Taylor, of Opheim. The Patriot's Pen essay focuses on service to democracy. On their website the VFW states, "The essay contest encourages young minds to examine America's history, along with their own experiences in modern American society, by drafting a 300- to 400-word essay, expressing their views based on a patriotic theme chosen by the VFW Commander-in-Chief." According to the VFW, "Each year more than 132,000 students in grades six to eight enter the VFW's Patriot's Pen youth essay contest. The national first-place winner wins $5,000 and an all-expense-paid trip to Washington, D.C." Also awarded were the winners of the high school-based contest Voice of Democracy. The winner was Tyler Fitzsimmons, of Glasgow, whose winning essay is published to the left of this article. The runners-up were Taylor Nelson, of Opheim, and John McColly, of Hinsdale. On their website the VFW states the following, "Established in 1947, our Voice of Democracy audio-essay program provides high school students with the unique opportunity to express themselves in regards to a democratic and patriotic-themed recorded essay. Each year, nearly 40,000 nine through twelve-grade students from across the country enter to win their share of $2.1 million in educational scholarships and incentives awarded through the program." On Nov. 23, 2018, our mother, grandmother and great-grandmother, Marilyn Lee (Hughes) Dykstra, joined her Heavenly Family. She died peacefully in her sleep just short of her 89th birthday at her apartment in the Missoula Manor with her daughter, Carol, and granddaughter, Jana, by her side. A celebration of life was held Friday, Dec. 7, at Grizzly Peak and a memorial service will be held in the spring of 2019 at the First United Methodist Church with burial of her cremains at the Highland Cemetery. Marilyn was born Dec. 23, 1929, in Litchville, N.D., as the second of five children to Hugh and Emma (Tweit) Hughes. In 1942, the family moved to Richland, Mont., where her father and mother managed the Farmers Union Store. She was a big help for her mother who was the community seamstress, while her father also hauled grain with the first semi-truck in the county, which turned into a lifelong trucking career for him. After graduating eighth-grade in Richland, with no high school available for her freshman year; she commuted by riding the mail train to Peerless, Mont., and lived there in the dorm during the week. She moved to Glasgow, Mont., for her sophomore year of high school to live with her sister, Darlene Nichols, and her children while Harold (Darlene's husband) was in the Navy overseas in WWII. The move to Glasgow resulted in meeting two of her best friends for life, Dorothy Dolson Eayrs and Nell Collins McIntosh. In addition, she met the boy next door, Cecil Dykstra, who later became the love of her life. It was during her junior year at Glasgow High that she met a young WWII Navy sailor, Kenneth M. Butts on leave and visiting his brother. They were married on April 1, 1947, during her senior year. Upon graduating with the GHS class of 1947, they moved to Kalispell, Mont., where their first of four children, Frank Daniel (1948) was born. The family moved to the West Coast while Ken was receiving treatment from the VA; settling in Salem, Ore., where their second child, Suzette (1950) was born. The family moved to Bellingham, Wash., where their third and fourth children were born, Marie (1952) and Carol (1958). In 1962, the family moved to Nashua, Mont., where they bought the Home Cafe and made it the family business, as well as having the mail route north of Nashua. In 1966, after selling the Home Cafe; they moved to Glasgow, and owned and managed Brad's Place (night club north of Glasgow) and the Skylark Club (now the Sunnyside Country Club). After 24 years of marriage, Marilyn and Ken divorced. Marilyn continued her 20-plus year career as a bookkeeper for United Building Center, Newton Motors, Econo Lumber and Econo Glass in Glasgow and later at a car dealership and construction company in Plentywood, Mont., and Winona, Minn., while her daughter, Carol, finished high school. Marilyn loved all the places she lived, always making lifelong friends everywhere she went and later would always stay in touch with them through letters and phone calls. While she was in Washington, she would design and sew matching outfits for Sue and Marie and canned the fruits from their many trees. She would make buttermilk and butter from their milk cow. Her love for living was fueled by her natural curiosity of life and what was yet to come... The wonder of the future and her passion to learn more... Marilyn eventually became reacquainted with the "boy next door," Cecil Dykstra, who was working as a railroad conductor. Their renewed relationship blossomed and on Aug. 14, 1977, they were married. Having so much in common, life took on a whole new meaning for both of them. They became avid rock hounds traveling throughout Montana hunting for sapphires, agates and fossils. They enjoyed hunting and fishing, and she canned and smoked deer jerky and filled their freezer with all the wild meat. She continued with her activities in Glasgow's Methodist Church. Her faith was very important to her. She was a dedicated member, volunteering countless hours baking or making her famous caramels, fudge, and sour cream raisin pies to raise money for the church. She also was an essential part of getting the Methodist Hand-Bell Choir started and served as its director. Marilyn took great pride in the beautiful performances the choir gave at the church and for public gatherings. In 1989, Cec and Marilyn retired to St. Marie, Mont. They enjoyed their life in the rural community where they made many new friends. Marilyn looked forward to the weekly gatherings where they played cards or dominos and shared a potluck meal, which she always liked to bring more than one dish. During this time, Marilyn became a breast cancer survivor, and added the annual cancer Relay for Life to the many local events she never missed. Cec and Marilyn truly enjoyed their lives together; sharing 26 years of love, music and laughter until Cecil's passing in 2003. Her youngest daughter Carol moved to be with her while Marilyn continued with her church and volunteer work and helping put together care packages for soldiers serving abroad. She and Carol enjoyed their favorite pastimes, garage sales and traveled for visits with family and friends. In 2013, she moved to the Grizzly Peak Retirement Home in Missoula, Mont., for better health care and to be near her granddaughter and family. For five years she thoroughly enjoyed making new friends and participating in the activities there. She again started and directed a hand-bell choir; fulfilling and sharing her love for the sound of the bells. She moved to the Missoula Manor this May where she enjoyed the company of new friends and was known for her pinochle skills. Marilyn was under the care of her daughter Carol and Hospice of Missoula. Her apartment, with the beautiful views of the mountains, was to be the final earthly home for this truly gracious woman who loved life and her family so very much. Our mom was such a loving and compassionate lady, who always found the best in everyone. When she wasn't busy baking or other activities; she loved reading books and writing poetry. She would cut out articles about her grand and great-grandchildren's accomplishments to compile scrapbooks. Mom never missed sending birthday and Christmas cards which always had a warm, uplifting message. We will miss her beautiful smile and her loving talks. She was a member of the United Methodist Women's Club, Al-Anon, Rebekah's Club, Degree of Honor and St. Marie Women's Club. She was preceded in death by her parents, Hugh and Emma Hughes; her husband Cecil; two brothers, Donald (Bud) Hughes and William (infant); two sisters, Darlene Nichols and Jacqueline Alsberg Hughes; one son-in-law, Daniel Lasar; one brother-in-law, Harold Nichols; and Mrs. Mary Butts (mother-in-law and friend). She is survived by her son Frank (Dan) Butts, of Missoula; three daughters, Suzette (Rick) Kinzell, of Glasgow, Marie (Robert) Rundle, of Hamilton, and Carol Butts, of St. Marie; one brother, Murray "Mike" (Kim) Hughes, of Joliet; one sister-in-law, Mrs. Jean Hughes, of Glasgow; seven grandsons, Daniel Butts, Kenneth Butts, Teage (Kristie) Kinzell, Trent (Deb) Kinzell, Chris Partridge, Jason Partridge and Josh (Natalie) Partridge; one granddaughter, Jana (Duncan) Crawford; 17 great-grandchildren; extended family members, Wayne (Liz) Dykstra, Debbie Walston, Connie St. John and Greg (JoAnn) Dykstra; and many loved nieces and nephews and their families. Dear Editor, The Valley County Commissioners are seeking public opinion on a possible county ordinance dealing with medical marijuana dispensaries. The county had ordinances in effect in 2011 and 2012, but when the state tightened the requirements; the ordinance was allowed to lapse. Currently there is one dispensary in operation in Valley County; this business is seeking to expand, as described in the Courier article in this issue. Under the state law, cities and counties can adopt ordinances or resolutions prohibiting providers from operating dispensaries or as storefront businesses within their jurisdictional boundaries or, provide for regulations such as inspection of premises and labs. The City of Glasgow currently has an ordinance prohibiting dispensaries in the city limits. The options available to the county under the state law range from no ordinance to prohibiting all dispensaries. Medical marijuana is regulated by the Montana Department of Health and Human Services (DPHHS). For information on the regulatory requirements currently in effect visit dphhs.mt.gov/marijuana. We encourage concerned citizens to do some serious research on medical marijuana and the regulations in place, as there are valid points, both pro and con. Public hearings, the first and second readings of ordinances, are scheduled for Jan. 14 and Jan. 28, at 6:30 p.m., in the county courtroom. We would appreciate hearing from you prior to the first hearing. You may call the commissioner's office at 228-6219, e-mail us at [email protected], or just drop by the office. We want to hear from you. Thank you, Valley County Commissioners Russia rejects new US reports on 'election meddling' Iran Press TV Tue Dec 18, 2018 11:06AM The Kremlin has rejected two new US reports on purported Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election, saying they lacked details and evidence to prove the allegation. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Tuesday that the reports "cannot cause anything but confusion," adding that the accusation were general and lacked details "and some of them we don't understand completely." "They place the blame for someone being critical about the situation in certain social areas in the US on us. But it is not specified what Russia has to do with it," he said, apparently referring to the allegation that racial issues were exploited to cause division in the 2016 election. "I can only repeat that we do not agree with these allegations; we believe they are groundless. The state of Russia... the Russian government had and has nothing to do with any kind of meddling, let alone this vaguely described interference," Peskov added. The new reports, prepared by private experts and released by bipartisan senators on Monday, claimed that Moscow's election meddling on social media had been more widespread than previously thought and included attempts to deepen division in the US society. Moscow has repeatedly rejected US allegations that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election in favor of President Donald Trump, saying the allegations are part of a politically-motivated anti-Russian campaign. US Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating the allegations. Trump has also repeatedly dismissed the accusations of any collusion with Moscow and has called for an end to the federal probe. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Russia Rejects Reports Alleging Extensive US Election Meddling By Jeff Seldin December 18, 2018 The size and scope of Russia's efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election was far more extensive and thorough than previously understood, according to two newly released reports. The reports that emerged this week support conclusions by the U.S. intelligence community and published in an unclassified January 2017 report that the goal of all of Russia's meddling in the months leading up to the 2016 elections was to get their preferred candidate elected president of the United States. "What is clear is that all of the messaging clearly sought to benefit the Republican Party and specifically Donald Trump," according to the report by Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Project and network analysis firm Graphika. Russia on Tuesday rejected the allegations in the two reports. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the accusations baseless. The findings, as first reported by The Washington Post, said Russians working for a group called the Internet Research Agency (IRA) began experimenting with social media to influence local elections in 2009 and expanded its operations to U.S. elections in 2013 using Twitter. It gradually added other popular social media sites to its campaign, including YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, using race and social issues such as gun rights, immigration and police brutality, to sow division and discontent. "Conservative and right-wing voters were actively encouraged to get behind Trump's campaign," according to the report by Oxford and Graphika. "Other voters were encouraged to boycott the election, abstain from voting for Clinton, or to spread cynicism about participating in the election in general." Russia's IRA activity also sought out African-American voters in particular with advertising on Facebook and Instagram and with video content on YouTube. "Most of the interest-based targeting focused on African-American communities and interests," the second report by the cybersecurity firm New Knowledge showed. "Messaging to African-Americans sought to divert their political energy away from established political institutions by preying on anger with structural inequalities faced by African-Americans, including police violence, poverty and disproportionate levels of incarceration," the Oxford University-Graphika report added. "These campaigns pushed a message that the best way to advance the cause of the African-American community was to boycott the election and focus on other issues instead." Other groups such as liberals, women, Muslims, Latinos and veterans were also targeted with similar messages either appealing to their politics or trying to discourage them from voting. This newly released data demonstrates how aggressively Russia sought to divide Americans by race, religion and ideology, and how the IRA actively worked to erode trust in our democratic institutions," Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr, a Republican, said in a statement Monday. "Most troublingly, it shows that these activities have not stopped." "This should stand as a wake-up call," added Senate Intelligence Committee vice chair, Democrat Mark Warner, who has been critical of social media companies and the way they have handled Russia's online influence campaigns. "It is time to get serious in addressing this challenge," Warner said. "That is going to require some much-needed and long-overdue guardrails when it comes to social media." The Oxford-Graphika report said it is clear the response by social media companies has been lacking. "We clearly observe a belated and uncoordinated response from the platforms that provided the data," the report said. "In some cases, activity on one platform was detected and suspended months before similar action was taken against related activity on another platform." In a statement Monday, Facebook said it continues to "fully cooperate with officials investigating the IRA's activity on Facebook and Instagram around the 2016 election." "We've made progress in helping prevent interference on our platforms during elections, strengthened our policies against voter suppression ahead of the 2018 midterms, and funded independent research on the impact of social media on democracy," the statement said, adding the company believes Congress and intelligence officials "are best placed to use the information we and others provide." "Our singular focus is to improve the health of the public conversation on our platform," Twitter said in a statement of its own. "We've made significant strides since 2016 to counter manipulation of our service, including our release of additional data in October related to previously disclosed activities to enable further independent academic research and investigation." Google reactions The reports, though, indicate the measures that have been taken may not be enough, as Russia and others continue to make use of social media platforms. The Oxford-Graphika report said Russia's use of social media did not peak until after the election, with the IRA buying the most ad volume on Facebook in April 2017, shortly after the U.S. airstrikes against chemical weapon sites in Syria. And U.S. intelligence and military officials have told VOA that Russia continued to target segments of U.S. society, including ongoing efforts to influence U.S. military personnel and their families in the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections. The United States has already leveled criminal charges against IRA for interfering in the 2016 campaign. Current and former intelligence officials also warn that it would be a mistake to focus only on Russia's use of social media, pointing to last week's guilty plea by Russian spy Maria Butina, who admitted to using the National Rifle Association to get close to key conservative politicians. "It illustrates the astute understanding the Russians have of our political ecosystem," James Clapper, former director of National Intelligence, told VOA. Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 election and whether the president has tried to obstruct justice by trying to undermine the probe. Trump denies there was any collusion and calls the Mueller probe a "witch hunt." NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Afghanistan sends team to join US-Taliban talks in Abu Dhabi Iran Press TV Tue Dec 18, 2018 03:33PM A peace negotiations team of the Kabul government has arrived in Abu Dhabi, a day after representatives of the Taliban and Washington held talks in order to end a 17-year war in Afghanistan. The Afghan presidential spokesman Haroon Chakhansuri said in a post on Twitter on Tuesday that the team "arrived in Abu Dhabi to begin proximity dialogue with the Taliban delegation and to prepare for a face-to-face meeting between the two sides." In a new message released Tuesday the Taliban also confirmed they had held "preliminary talks" with the US State Department's special envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, on Monday. Washington said meetings were ongoing in Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates, "to promote an intra-Afghan dialogue toward ending the conflict." Khalilzad "has in the past met, and will continue to meet with all interested parties, including the Taliban, to support a negotiated settlement to the conflict," it said. Taliban issued a statement on Monday reiterating that they had also held "extensive" meetings with officials from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, repeating demands for international forces to be withdrawn from Afghanistan. Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Pakistan were the only three countries to recognize the Taliban rule during its five-year rule from 1996-2001. The meetings are the latest in a flurry of diplomatic efforts as Washington seeks a way out of the long-drawn war. The head of the UN mission in Afghanistan, Tadamichi Yamamoto, during a recent briefing to the UN Security Council in New York voiced optimistic about the possibility of talks. "The possibility of a negotiated end to the conflict has never been more real in the past 17 years than it is now". In November, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani announced the formation of a team for prospective peace talks with the Taliban. At an international conference on Afghanistan in Geneva, Ghani said the 12-person negotiating team includes both men and women and will be led by Abdul Salam Rahimi, his chief of staff. The Kabul government has stepped up efforts to convince the Taliban to end the 17-year militancy amid Washington's failures on the battleground. Contacts have already started between US special envoy Khalilzad and Taliban representatives to build a favorable position in advance of any talks. At the request of the US, a Taliban office was established in Doha in 2013 to facilitate peace talks. In recent months, Taliban representatives and Khalilzad have discussed their conditions to end the war in Afghanistan. US forces have been bogged down in Afghanistan through the presidencies of George W. Bush, Barack Obama and now Donald Trump, with militants now launching attacks on both Pakistan and Afghanistan. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Yemen's Hudaydah calm as rival parties begin to observe truce Iran Press TV Tue Dec 18, 2018 10:58AM Fighting has subsided in Yemen's Hudaydah, hours after a United Nations (UN)-brokered ceasefire between warring sides took effect in the flashpoint port city. The truce was reached last week in Sweden during peace talks between delegations from Yemen's Houthi movement and the former, Saudi-allied regime, on whose behalf a Saudi-led coalition has been pounding Yemen since March 2015. The ceasefire took force at midnight on Monday. And while sporadic clashes and Saudi-led airstrikes continued to hit Hudaydah for several hours after midnight, they subsequently died down. On Tuesday, a military source loyal to Yemen's former Saudi-backed regime said that the situation was calm in the Red Sea port city. "There has been complete calm since 03:00 a.m. Yemen time (1200 GMT) in the city of Hudaydah," he said. Hudaydah residents also confirmed a halt in fighting between pro-Saudi militants and Houthi fighters. The truce is expected to be followed by the withdrawal of forces from both sides and the deployment of UN monitors to the port as well as a mass prisoner exchange. On Sunday, UN Special Envoy for Yemen Martin Griffiths said that the world body was working with Yemen's warring parties to ensure that the ceasefire was "implemented timely and properly." UN considering draft resolution to back truce Separately, diplomats said that the UN Security Council was considering a draft resolution that would ask Secretary General Antonio Guterres to put forward proposals by the end of the month on how to monitor the Hudaydah ceasefire. Britain circulated the motion among the Security Council's 15 members on Monday, but it was not clear when it would be put to a vote. The draft, seen by Reuters, asks Guterres to submit proposals on "how the United Nations will support the Stockholm Agreement as requested by the parties, including, but not limited to, monitoring operations for the ceasefire and mutual redeployment of forces from the city of Hudaydah and the ports of Hudaydah, Salif and Ras Issa." The draft resolution further "calls on all parties to the conflict to take further steps to facilitate the unhindered flow of commercial and humanitarian supplies including food, fuel, medicine and other essential imports and humanitarian personnel into and across the country." Hudaydah, a lifeline for millions of Yemeni people, is the entry point for most of the country's commercial goods and vital aid. The port has seen some of the heaviest fighting in the Saudi-led war on Yemen. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) launched an offensive against Hudaydah in June but have faced strong resistance from Yemeni armed forces led by the Houthis as well as the city's residents. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Maduro vows 'to arm civil militia to the teeth' Iran Press TV Tue Dec 18, 2018 06:05AM Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro has vowed to arm a civil militia group in the country "to the teeth," as their number, according to the Venezuelan president, grows to 1.6 million, more than triple in size since the beginning of the year. "We will arm the Bolivarian militia to the teeth," Maduro told the militia members during a speech broadcast on Monday, without detailing how many of the forces were armed. "An invading imperialist force may enter a part of our fatherland, but the imperialists should know that they will not leave here alive." The so-called National Bolivarian Militia functions as a reserve force composed of civilian volunteers, which was founded by former president Hugo Chavez in 2008 to assist the Latin American country's armed forces. Maduro said in his address that he had given an order in April to boost the size of the reserve force to one million members. At the time, he said the militia had "nearly 400,000" members. Maduro's speech to militia members came less than a week after the socialist leader accused the United States of plotting to invade his country. US President Donald Trump has formerly asked his aides whether a military invasion of Venezuela is possible. He has also talked of a "military option" to remove Maduro from power. But there is no clear indication that the US is preparing to invade Venezuela. Washington has targeted Caracas with harsh economic and political sanctions since 2014 under the pretext of alleged human rights abuses and threats to US national security. Last year, Venezuela plunged into political unrest amid opposition protests, which left at least 125 dead from both the government and opposition camps. In August, Maduro survived an assassination attempt during a military parade in Caracas. He was unharmed while seven Venezuelan soldiers sustained injuries in the incident. The Venezuelan president accused the US and Colombia of having had a role in the attack. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Comey: Trump lying about FBI, undermining the rule of law Iran Press TV Tue Dec 18, 2018 01:57AM Former FBI Director James Comey has railed against US President Donald Trump, saying he is undermining the rule of law in the United States by lying about the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Comey made the remarks on Monday after his second appearance this month before two House of Representatives committees. He was fired by Trump in May 2017 while he was leading an investigation into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 US election. Comey slammed Republican lawmakers for remaining silent and urged them to "stand up and speak the truth" about the president's behavior. He said lawmakers had interviewed him about former secretary of state Hillary Clinton's emails and a dossier that the FBI allegedly used to conduct clandestine surveillance of a Trump presidential campaign aide. "So another day of Hillary Clinton's emails and the Steele dossier," Comey told reporters after he was grilled for about six hours behind closed doors by the House Judiciary and House Oversight committees. "This while the president of the United States is lying about the FBI, attacking the FBI and attacking the rule of law in this country. How does that make any sense at all?" he asked. Comey suggested Republican lawmakers are too weak to stand up for the FBI for fear of political backlash. "Republicans used to understand that the actions of a president matter, the words of a president matter, the rule of law matters and the truth matters. Where are those Republicans today?" he asked. "At some point, someone has to stand up and in the fear of Fox News and fear of their base, and fear of mean tweets, stand up for the values of this country and not slink away into retirement." He also slammed Trump for calling his former personal lawyer Michael Cohen a "rat." "This is the president of the United States calling a witness who is cooperating with his own Justice Department a 'rat,' " he said, suggesting people at home reflect on "where we have ended up." Trump has called the Russia investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller a "witch hunt" and condemned Cohen as a "rat" for cooperating with federal investigators. Trump repeatedly accused Comey of lying to Congress during his testimony last year when he detailed meetings in which the president asked for his loyalty and demanded he stop investigating former national security adviser Michael Flynn over his alleged contacts with Russian officials. When Comey was fired last year, the former FBI chief quickly became the chief prosecution witness for Mueller investigating the Russian meddling in the 2016 US election. His written records of several troubling encounters with the president are at the heart of Mueller's investigation into whether Trump sought to obstruct justice in his attempts to shut down the inquiry. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address UN Envoy: Prospect For Peace In Afghanistan 'Has Never Been More Real' December 18, 2018 The United Nations envoy for Afghanistan says the prospect of negotiated end to the war in Afghanistan is closer than it has ever been. The comments by Tadamichi Yamamoto on December 17 came as the Afghan Taliban said its representatives met with U.S. officials in the United Arab Emirates. The preliminary talks were seen as an important step to launch formal peace negotiations with the Taliban. Speaking at the UN Security Council, Yamamoto called on countries in the region "to contribute" in supporting the peace talks. A negotiated peace "has never been more real...than it is now," he said "The key next step would be for representatives of the government and the Taliban to meet, or at least to formally initiate what in mediation is referred to as talks about talks," he said. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid offered few details of the December 17 meeting except to say that "discussions were held with the American side over the end to the invasion of Afghanistan." The Taliban has long refused to hold formal talks with the Afghan government, insisting on first brokering an agreement with the United States. While Washington has neither denied nor confirmed previous meetings with the Taliban, U.S. special peace envoy Zalmay Khalilzad has previously held at least two rounds of talks with Taliban officials. The Taliban controls or contests nearly half of Afghanistan, where it is waging a deadly insurgency against the Western-backed Kabul government and government security forces. The country has been at war on and off for more than 20 years. Based on reporting by dpa and AP Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/un-envoy-afghanistan-peace-talks/29662151.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. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address As Peace Treaty Talk Heats Up, Russian Lawmakers Want Clarification On Kurile Islands By RFE/RL December 18, 2018 Russian lawmakers have asked for an explanation following media reports quoting Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov as saying that Moscow could potentially hand over two islands in the disputed Southern Kuriles chain to Japan. Communist Party lawmaker Nikolai Kharitonov raised the issue on December 18, asking State Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin to invite Lavrov to come to the lower parliament house and clarify the government's position. After a brief debate, Volodin instructed deputy speaker Aleksandr Zhukov to work on an invitation for Lavrov. The Soviet Union seized four islands off Hokkaido in the closing days of World War II, and the territorial dispute has prevented Moscow and Tokyo from concluding a peace treaty. Russia calls the islands the Southern Kuriles, while Japan calls them the Northern Territories. In an interview published on December 17, Lavrov told the tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda that Moscow could hand Japan the two smaller islands, Shikotan and a group of islets called Habomai, if Tokyo "recognizes the results" of World War II -- something he said Tokyo was "not ready for yet." Recognition of the results, in Russia's eyes, means that Japan would have to accept Russian possession of the disputed islands as legal, potentially ruling out any further dispute or claims by Tokyo on the two larger, more populated islands, Iturup and Kunashir. Media reports in Russia in recent weeks have said that Moscow might hand some parts of the disputed islands over to Japan following a November 14 meeting in Singapore between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who agreed to step up negotiations on concluding a peace treaty. Russian politicians tend to publicly oppose ceding any Russian territory to neighbors, and President Vladimir Putin's ratings got a boost when Russia seized control of the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. The calls for a clarification could reflect concerns among lawmakers that Moscow might hand over the islands, and the desire of Communists or other politicians outside of the ruling United Russia party to score points with constituents could also be a factor. But if Putin's government is considering ceding the two smaller islands to Japan as part of a peace treaty, having Lavrov appear before the Duma could be a chance for the Kremlin to explain the move to the populace in advance. Some Russian media reports suggested that the Kremlin might be seeking to resolve the long-standing dispute with Japan in the near future in hopes that it would draw global attention away from its actions in Ukraine, where it holds Crimea and supports separatists who control parts of two provinces in the eastern region known as the Donbas, and potentially lead to an easing of the sanctions imposed as a result. Amid increased talk about the possibility of a treaty, the Kremlin said recently that Abe may visit Moscow on January 21. But tensions were raised on December 17, when the Russian Defense Ministry said it planned to shift troops next week into four housing complexes it has built on Iturup and Kunashir. Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono told a regular news conference later the same day that Tokyo would lodge a protest over the military move. Japan said in July that it asked Russia to reduce its military activity on the islands but Moscow seemed to dismiss the idea, accusing Japan of negotiation through the media and public statements. With reporting by Reuters, TASS, Interfax, and Komsomolskaya Pravda Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/as-peace -treaty-talk-heats-up-russian -lawmakers-want-clarification- on-kurile-islands/29662876.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. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Sentencing Of Ex-Trump Security Adviser Postponed By RFE/RL December 18, 2018 A federal judge has delayed sentencing for U.S. President Donald Trump's first national security adviser, who had pleaded guilty to lying to federal agents about his conversations with Russia's ambassador. Lawyers for Michael Flynn asked on December 18 for a continuance that would allow him to continue cooperating in the investigation led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller into possible collusion between Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and Russia. A new sentencing date was not scheduled. Flynn admitted to lying to FBI agents during a January 2017 meeting at the White House, just four days after Trump was inaugurated into office. Three weeks after that White House meeting, Flynn was fired when more details emerged as to timing and content of his conversations with the then-Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergei Kislyak. Mueller's investigators have praised Flynn for cooperating with the Russia probe and even recommended no prison time for him. During the December 18 hearing, Judge Emmet Sullivan lashed out at Flynn, saying: "I can't hide my disgust, my disdain" at his crime of lying to the FBI. "Arguably you sold your country out," Sullivan told Flynn. Several of the people who have been prosecuted by Mueller have been charged with lying to federal agents, including Trump's former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, who will be sentenced in March. Flynn also faced questions about lobbying and involvement with Turkish-government connected businessmen. Two of them, including one who was Flynn's business partner, were indicted by a federal jury on December 17 with charges including conspiracy to act as an agent of a foreign government. Based on reporting by AP and Reuters Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/flynn-sentenced-lying- russian-diplomat/29662144.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. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address US Envoy Haley Says Trump's Peace Plan Will Be Beneficial for Palestine Sputnik News 23:04 18.12.2018 UNITED NATIONS (Sputnik) - Both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would experience advantages from the forthcoming Trump administration's peace plan, but Israel would risk more, US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley told the Security Council on Tuesday. "Both sides would benefit greatly from a peace agreement, but the Palestinians would benefit more, and the Israelis would risk more," Haley said. "What awaits the Palestinian people with a peace agreement are the prospects of a massive improvement in the quality of their lives and far greater control over their political future." Haley also said the Trump administration's peace plan takes advantage of modern technology, recognizes realities on the ground have changed and embraces the fact things can be accomplished that were previously unthinkable. In her speech, Haley also encouraged Arab nations to prove that the Palestinian people are their priority by supporting US President Donald Trump's peace agreement. In September, Haley said the Trump administration's long-awaited peace plan for Israel and Palestine, which is being put together by White House Senior Adviser Jared Kushner and Special Envoy Jason Greenblatt, will be completed soon. The Middle East settlement process took a hit last December when the United States decided to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The move was condemned by Arab states and has been rejected by European nations. Palestine responded by refusing to accept the United States as the primary mediator in peace talks with Israel. Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Russia Refutes Reports on 'Army of Mercenaries' in CAR as Speculations - Moscow Sputnik News 10:57 18.12.2018(updated 11:07 18.12.2018) MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Recent rumors on Russia's alleged large mercenary presence in the Central African Republic (CAR) are speculations, Andrei Kemarsky, the director of the Russian Foreign Ministry's Department of Africa, told Sputnik. "This can be called on of the speculations recently actively disseminated against our country," the diplomat said in an interview. According to the official, Russian experts are tasked with strengthening the military capacities of the CAR in order to protect the country's sovereignty and territorial integrity. The Western states prevent the government of the CAR to resume control of the country by blocking in the UN Security Council the deliveries of the second batch of the Russian arms to the republic, Andrei Kemarsky said. "A good example is the story with the UN Security Council's sanctions committee addressing the issue of sending the second batch of Russian weapons to the CAR. There is an agreement that it is necessary to strengthen the CAR national security sector, but now we are being told that the CAR does not have proper conditions for storing [the weapons]," Kemarsky said in an interview. However, the storage facilities for the delivery of 1,400 French rifles, seized from smugglers, were "suddenly" found, the diplomat added. "Thus, guided by their selfish considerations, Western countries are hindering the reestablishment of the combat-ready power structures in the CAR and the restoration of the authority of a legitimate government across the country," Kemarsky concluded. There are no discussions currently underway on creating Russian military bases in African states, Kemarsky said. "Armies of many African states were created according to Soviet standards and equipped with Russian weapons. Naturally, they are interested in maintaining such cooperation," the diplomat explained. The Central African Republic has been destabilized by a violent conflict between Christian anti-Balaka militia, Seleka faction and the government since 2012. Since 2014, the country has been divided between the three groups. In late August, Seleka and anti-Balaka militia signed a Declaration of Understanding after a Russia-brokered peace meeting in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum. Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address The U.S. Strategy for Central America and Southern Mexico Media Note Office of the Spokesperson Washington, DC December 18, 2018 The United States, in partnership with the government of Mexico, is committed to promoting a safer and more prosperous Central America by enhancing security, governance, and economic prosperity that can create greater opportunities and benefits for the people of the region and help us jointly address the shared challenges of migration, narcotics trafficking, and the activities of trans-national criminal organizations. The United States also recognizes that success in achieving these objectives requires an inclusive approach to the wider region. The United States therefore welcomes the historic commitment by the government of Mexico to development in southern Mexico and to promote our shared goals with the countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Furthermore, the United States also wishes to recognize Mexico's willingness to develop a framework to ensure migration occurs in a legal, orderly, and safe manner. As Vice President Pence stated at the October 11 Conference on Prosperity and Security in Central America, "the United States of America has never been more committed to strengthening our partnership with the nations in the Northern Triangle to help tackle the problems facing our shared neighborhood." Today, the United States reaffirms that commitment, and sets out our strategy for engagement in 2019, which will include a Ministerial Summit with Mexican counterparts early in the new year; an intensified dialogue with Central American governments with a view to producing results and a roadmap to meeting our shared objectives; and wider dialogue and cooperation with other international actors, as well as international development and financial institutions. Engagement with El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras The United States is committing $5.8 billion through public and private investment to promote institutional reforms and development in the Northern Triangle. Recognizing the importance of promoting economic growth and opportunities for the people of the region, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) has already invested and mobilized more than $1 billion in the Northern Triangle since 2017 focused on infrastructure, energy, economic growth, and job creation. OPIC could invest and mobilize up to $2.5 billion more in this region if commercially viable projects are identified. The Millennium Challenge Corporation is providing over $320 million in funding for infrastructure, education and governance projects El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. At least $1.8 billion in Department of State, U.S. Agency for International Development, and regional funding for Fiscal Years 2015 to 2018 has been allocated to the Northern Triangle governments of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. The Administration is requesting an additional $180 million in bilateral assistance for the region in our FY 2019 request. The U.S. strategy complements the Northern Triangle governments' Alliance for Prosperity reform initiative, which seeks to foster the productive sector, develop human capital, improve citizen security and access to justice, strengthen institutions, and improve transparency. More specifically, the United States' efforts are organized around three overarching lines of action: Security: U.S. programs combat transnational criminal organizations, stem drug trafficking, enhance citizen security, reduce gang violence, strengthen borders, and deter human smuggling and trafficking by focusing on professionalizing security institutions. U.S. programs combat transnational criminal organizations, stem drug trafficking, enhance citizen security, reduce gang violence, strengthen borders, and deter human smuggling and trafficking by focusing on professionalizing security institutions. Governance: U.S. assistance supports anti-corruption efforts that improve the ease of doing business, strengthen the rule of law, promote strong institutions and government accountability, reduce impunity, and improve fiscal management by promoting efficient tax collection, civil society engagement, and institutional reform. U.S. assistance supports anti-corruption efforts that improve the ease of doing business, strengthen the rule of law, promote strong institutions and government accountability, reduce impunity, and improve fiscal management by promoting efficient tax collection, civil society engagement, and institutional reform. Prosperity: U.S. programs promote economic growth, energy and food security, poverty reduction, workforce development, education and training, and greater regional integration to increase jobs for Central Americans, improve opportunities for U.S. and other businesses and reduce illegal migration. The United States will also continue to work closely with Mexico, international partners, international financial institutions such as the Inter-American Development Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank, the private sector, and civil society to maximize the impact of U.S. taxpayer investment in the region. The United States and Mexico co-hosted Conferences on Prosperity and Security in Central America in June 2017 and October 2018 and, in consultation with the Northern Triangle governments, identified areas of joint economic and security cooperation for implementation in the region. That cooperation will intensify in 2019 with the appointment of a High-Level Task Force to lead our efforts and produce results. Southern Mexico The United States recognizes that a strong, stable, and prosperous Mexico benefits the entire region. The United States is also committed to using all appropriate U.S. government trade and investment promotion and policy tools to support development in Southern Mexico, and to working with the initiative of the Administration of President Lopez Obrador for the development of the region and Northern Triangle countries. The United States takes note of the ambitious plans to promote economic growth, new infrastructure, stronger institutions, and opportunities for the people of southern Mexico as integral components of addressing our shared challenges in the region. The United States in particular will actively support the goal of leveraging public and private investment in southern Mexico to include dialogue with the Government of Mexico in early 2019. The United States will bolster support for U.S. investment in infrastructure projects that advance the Government of Mexico's agenda of creating opportunity and economic prosperity in southern Mexico. OPIC is prepared to support this initiative through finance, insurance and investment funds to develop projects that create quality jobs and foster additional economic opportunity. OPIC is prepared to invest and mobilize $2 billion in additional funds for projects in southern Mexico that are viable and attract private sector investment. This amount is in addition to the $2.8 billion in projects for Mexico through OPIC's current investment pipeline. The United States is also committed to providing technical assistance to facilitate project design and implementation for southern Mexico. The United States will consider assistance through the U.S. Trade and Development Agency, U.S. Department of State, and the U.S. Export-Import Bank. A High-Level Taskforce which is to be created in early 2019 will help identify opportunities and how U.S. government agencies can be supportive. Both countries will also open a focused dialogue with other governments assisting the region to urge support for the Government of Mexico's development projects in southern Mexico. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Public Designation of Goran Radosavljevic Under Section 7031(c) of the FY 2018 Department of State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Appropriations Act Media Note Office of the Spokesperson Washington, DC December 18, 2018 The Department is publicly designating Goran Radosavljevic of Serbia under Section 7031(c) of the FY 2018 Department of State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Act, due to his involvement in gross violations of human rights. Section 7031(c) provides that, in cases where the Secretary of State has credible information that foreign officials have been involved in significant corruption or a gross violation of human rights, those individuals and their immediate family members are ineligible for entry into the United States. Radsosavljevic was credibly implicated in the 1999 murder of the Bytyqi brothers, three Albanian-American brothers killed in Serbia after the Kosovo War. The law also requires the Secretary of State to publicly or privately designate such officials and their family members. In addition to the designation of Mr. Radosavljevic, the Department is also publicly designating Mr. Radosavljevic's spouse, Svetlana Radosavljevic, and his daughter, Ana Radosavljevic. For more information, please contact DRL-Press@state.gov. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address 'We are nowhere closer' to Israeli-Palestinian peace deal, than a year ago, Security Council hears 18 December 2018 - Recent violence and rising tensions in the West Bank are fuelling a climate of hatred and fear, "driving both Israelis and Palestinians further away" from a resolution to the conflict, the United Nations envoy for the Middle East Peace Process has said. Briefing the Security Council on Tuesday, UN Special Coordinator Nikolay Mladenov, underscored that there can be "no justification" for brutal acts, such as the "heart-breaking" death of an Israeli baby last week, reportedly killed following a drive-by attack; or the killing of a Palestinian woman in October, who was reportedly stoned to death, while driving. "They feed mistrust and hatred," he added, calling on all stakeholders to "join the UN in condemning them unequivocally." Mr. Mladenov also cautioned against continuing instances of inflammatory rhetoric and provocation, noting that such "highly dangerous" incitements threatened to push an "already volatile situation past the boiling point." "Such rhetoric, particularly if it denies the right of existence of one of the sides, or their right to statehood, or glorifies terror, is dangerous and plays into the hands of extremists beyond Israel and Palestine," he warned. On the humanitarian side, efforts to provide essential support to vulnerable Palestinians are severely hampered by rising needs, severe funding cuts, restrictions in operating space and attempts to "delegitimize" reputable relief organizations, informed Mr. Mladenov, urging the international community to support the Humanitarian Response Plan for the region into 2019. Situation in Gaza Turning to Gaza where the situation deteriorated significantly this year the senior UN official reiterated that the only way to ensure long-term peace in the enclave was through the reunification of Hamas-controlled Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, under a single, legitimate and democratic Authority, as well as through the end of Israeli occupation. It is "critical", he added, that the Egyptian-led intra-Palestinian reconciliation process continue, even though there has been no progress of late. "The UN stands firmly in support of Egypt's efforts in this regard and urges the parties to make serious efforts to ensure the return of the legitimate Palestinian Government to Gaza", Mr. Mladenov said, underscoring that "Gaza is, and must remain, an integral part of a future Palestinian state as part of a two-State solution." Strengthen international consensus Concluding his briefing, the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process voiced concern over an "absence of collective efforts" to achieve an end to the occupation and the realization, of a negotiated two-State resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in line with relevant United Nations resolutions and previous agreements. "I believe that I speak on behalf of all of us today when I say that we all share a concern that at the end of 2018 we are nowhere closer to reviving efforts for a negotiated solution," he said. "It is only by realizing the vision of two States living side-by-side in peace, security and mutual recognition, with Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and Palestine, and all final status issues resolved permanently through negotiations, that the legitimate aspirations of both peoples will be achieved." NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Haley Urges Palestinians to Accept a Peace Deal with Israel By Margaret Besheer December 18, 2018 Outgoing U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley is urging the Palestinians to accept a peace deal, saying they have more to gain than Israel. "It is time we faced a hard truth: both sides would benefit greatly from a peace agreement, but the Palestinians would benefit more, and the Israelis would risk more," Haley said Tuesday at her final appearance at the monthly Security Council meeting on the Middle East issue. "Israel is a thriving, strong, prosperous country," Haley told fellow ambassadors. "It has always wanted peace with its neighbors. It has clearly demonstrated its willingness to make big sacrifices for peace, including giving up large areas of land, but Israel will not make a peace agreement at any price, and it shouldn't," she said. Haley, an outspoken advocate for Israel said of the Palestinians: "Given my record, some may mistakenly conclude that I am unsympathetic to the Palestinian people nothing could be further from the truth." The U.S. envoy described the Palestinians as a proud people, and like the Israelis, do not need to accept a peace agreement at any price. "But the condition of the Palestinian people is very different," she added. Haley noted the poor state of the Palestinian economy, the lack of basic services, including health care and electricity, and the de facto rule of Hamas over the Gaza Strip. "Terrorists rule much of the territory, undermining the safety of all civilians," Haley said. "The Palestinian people are suffering terribly, while their leadership clings to 50-year old demands that have only become less and less realistic." A peace agreement, she said, would offer the Palestinians the possibility of a "massive improvement" in their living conditions and greater control over their political future. US plan The Trump administration has repeatedly delayed unveiling its much anticipated plan for Israeli-Palestinian peace and in the meantime has taken unilateral steps, including moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and dramatically cutting its funding to the U.N. agency that assists Palestinian refugees. Both moves have infuriated the Palestinian leadership and severely strained their relationship with Washington as an impartial peace broker. President Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, and his Special Envoy on the peace process, Jason Greenblatt, are tasked with putting a plan together to end one of the world's most intractable conflicts. Haley, who is also a member of President Donald Trump's Cabinet, told council members she has seen the proposed plan and that it is "not just a few pages, containing unspecific and unimaginative guidelines," but is longer with "much more thoughtful detail." But she did not elaborate on any of those details, only saying it would be different from all previous proposals. "There are things in the plan that every party will like, and there are things that every party will not like," she added. She urged both sides to focus on what they do like and push negotiations forward. "Ultimately, as always, the final decisions can only be made by the parties themselves, she said, noting it will be up to the Israelis and Palestinians to decide their own futures and what sacrifices they are willing to make. International effort Tensions have been high in recent days, with an increase in terrorist attacks, clashes and violence in the West Bank, and security measures and search operations in response from the Israeli side. There have been casualties on both sides. The U.N. Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, Nickolay Mladenov, lamented to the council in his briefing that the international community is nowhere closer to reviving efforts for a negotiated solution. "Without a political horizon, all our collective and individual efforts merely contribute to managing the conflict rather than resolving it," he said. Meanwhile, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas met with Jordan's King Abdullah Tuesday in Amman. The Jordanian news agency Petra reported the king stressed the need to break the stalemate in the peace process and launch serious and effective talks between the two sides. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Sentencing of Former Trump National Security Chief Flynn Delayed By Ken Bredemeier December 18, 2018 A U.S. judge in Washington on Tuesday sternly rebuked President Donald Trump's first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, for lying to investigators about his contacts with Russia in the weeks before Trump assumed power in early 2017, but delayed his sentencing. "I can't hide my disgust, my disdain," U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan said of Flynn's behavior, before later acceding to a request by Flynn's lawyers to postpone his sentencing. Flynn acknowledged to Sullivan, "I was aware," that it was a crime to lie to interrogators when they asked him about his discussions with Russia's then-ambassador to Washington, Sergey Kislyak. The judge told Flynn that his offense was "very serious" and that "arguably, you sold your country out." Special counsel Robert Mueller had recommended the 60-year-old Flynn, a retired Army general and once head of the country's Defense Intelligence Agency, not be sentenced to any prison time because he had provided "substantial" cooperation with prosecutors in their ongoing 19-month investigation of Trump 2016 campaign links with Russia and whether, as president, Trump obstructed justice by trying to thwart the probe. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. But Sullivan said he could not guarantee that Flynn will avoid a prison term when he is eventually sentenced, sometime in the months to come. Flynn was set to be the first Trump administration official to be sentenced in the Mueller probe. Last week, Trump's former attorney, New York lawyer Michael Cohen, was sentenced to three years in prison, in part for his role, in what he said was at Trump's direction, of making $280,000 in payments shortly before the election to buy the silence of two women who allegedly had affairs with the future president a decade before he entered politics. Others in Trump's orbit are awaiting sentencing for various other offenses. Hours before Flynn headed to court, Trump, in a Twitter remark, wished his former aide "good luck." Later, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said, "We wish General Flynn well." Flynn served as Trump's national security adviser at the outset of his administration, but was fired after less than a month on the job. Evidence surfaced that Flynn had lied to Vice President Mike Pence and others about his contacts with Kislyak in the period between Trump's election in November 2016 and becoming president on January 20, 2017. Flynn was a fixture at Trump's political rallies during the 2016 campaign, often mocking the Democratic challenger, former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. At the Republican national convention that formally nominated Trump as the party's 2016 candidate, Flynn led thousands of Trump supporters in chanting against Clinton, "Lock her up! Lock her up!" for her usage of a private email server during her tenure as the country's top diplomat. Flynn met 19 times with Mueller's investigators since pleading guilty a year ago, talks that drew the interest of Trump just ahead of the sentencing as to what he might reveal about the inner workings of the 2016 campaign. A Mueller prosecutor told Judge Sullivan it was possible Flynn would continue to cooperate with investigators. Jimmy Gurule, a former federal prosecutor now a law professor at Notre Dame University, told VOA that Flynn's continued cooperation with the special counsel and other prosecutors may help him avoid a prison sentence. "If he hasn't provided all that he knows now to assist the special counsel, this is the time to do it if he wants to avoid spending any time in jail," Gurule said. But Gurule added that after the numerous interviews with Flynn over the past year, Mueller may already have elicited from him "all of the relevant information that they think would be helpful to their criminal investigations." Flynn had drawn investigators' scrutiny before he ran afoul of the FBI investigation in January 2017. While serving as an adviser to the Trump campaign in 2016, he lobbied for a Dutch company linked to the Turkish government without registering as a foreign agent. On Monday, the United States charged two of Flynn's former business associates with illegally carrying out a Turkish lobbying campaign. The government said the scheme was an effort to push American officials to expel a Muslim cleric, Fethullah Gulen, alleged by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to have orchestrated the failed 2016 coup against Erdogan's government. Flynn began cooperating with the special counsel after pleading guilty to lying to federal agents about his conversations with Kislyak. He became the first of five former Trump associates who have entered guilty pleas with the special counsel's office. Trump has for months derided Mueller's probe, tweeting several more broadsides against it after wishing Flynn well. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address $2.7 Billion Appeal Launched for South Sudanese Refugees By Lisa Schlein December 18, 2018 The U.N. refugee agency is appealing for $2.7 billion to assist more than two million refugees from South Sudan. The refugees are living in bare-bones conditions in six neighboring countries, and funds to provide for their basic needs are running short. South Sudan is Africa's largest refugee crisis and one of its most seriously under-funded. The U.N. refugee agency reports its last appeal for $1.4 billion was only 38 percent funded. It is urging donors to be more generous in supporting the current two-year appeal. It says the money will provide desperately needed assistance to the refugees and the largely impoverished communities hosting them. The UNHCR notes the level of violence in South Sudan has gone down since the peace deal was signed in September after five years of brutal civil war. Agency spokesman Charlie Yaxley tells VOA since then, there has been a significant decrease in the number of refugees fleeing South Sudan. "Currently, the numbers are around three to four thousand per month. But when we compare that to last year, that is less than half of what we were seeing before," Yaxley said. "So, we have seen areas where people are fleeing from stabilizing to an extent. There is still a long way to go with that. UNHCR does not yet consider the situation in South Sudan to be conducive for people to start returning." Yaxley says lack of funds has forced aid agencies to make severe cuts in their humanitarian operations. For instance, he says half of South Sudan's refugee children are unable to go to school because of a shortage of teachers, classrooms, and educational material. He says there are not enough doctors, nurses, and medication to treat the ill. He says lack of money has led to cuts in food rations for refugees in Ethiopia. One of his agency's primary concerns, he says, is to provide psycho-social counseling to women and children who have been raped and victimized by other forms of sexual and gender-based violence. Because of the stigma attached to sexual assault, he says the extent of this abuse is hugely under-reported. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Trump Directs Pentagon To Create U.S. Space Command December 18, 2018 U.S. President Donald Trump has ordered the establishment of a space command that will oversee the country's military operations in space. Trump signed the one-page memorandum on December 18 directing the Department of Defense to create the new command to oversee and organize space operations, accelerate technical advances, and find more effective ways to defend U.S. assets in space, including satellites. The move comes amid growing concerns that China and Russia are working on ways to disrupt, disable, or even destroy satellites on which U.S. forces rely for navigation, communications, and surveillance. The new command is separate from Trump's goal to create an independent space force, but could be a step in that direction. Speaking at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Vice President Mike Pence said: "A new era of American national security in space begins today." Space Command will integrate space capabilities across all branches of the military, Pence said, adding that it will "develop the space doctrine, tactics, techniques, and procedures that will enable our war fighters to defend our nation in this new era." It will be the Pentagon's 11th combatant command, along with well-known commands such as Central Command and Europe Command. Space Command will pull about 600 staff from existing military space offices, and then add at least another 1,000 over the coming years, the Associated Press quoted an unidentified U.S. official as saying. Its funding will be included in the budget for fiscal year 2020. Based on reporting by AP and AFP Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/trump-directs-pentagon- to-create-u-s-space-command-/29663343.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. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Trump Orders Pentagon to Create a Special Command for Military Space Ops Sputnik News 18:47 18.12.2018(updated 19:10 18.12.2018) Earlier on Tuesday, Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said the US has created a new kind of armed forces - space troops intended to ensure American military leadership in space. US President Donald Trump on Tuesday ordered the establishment of "Space Command," which would become a new branch within the Pentagon and would receive absolute control over military space operations. "Pursuant to my authority as the Commander in Chief and under section 161 of title 10, United States Code, and in consultation with the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I direct the establishment, consistent with United States law, of United States Space Command as a functional unified combatant command," Trump said in a memo to Defense Secretary Defense Jim Mattis. Trump also directed the US defense chief to recommend officers for his nomination and Senate confirmation as Commander and Deputy Commander of the new Space Command. The creation of the new command is seen as a step towards developing a US military division, "Space Force," separate from the Unified Combatant Command. The move comes after Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu stated earlier in the day that the US has developed a space armed forces which sought to ensure American military leadership in space. Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address China to continue on path of reform: President Xi Iran Press TV Tue Dec 18, 2018 07:41AM Chinese President Xi Jinping says his country will "stay the course" on its current path of reform and opening up. Addressing the nation in a speech on Tuesday, Xi called for support for the state economy while also developing the private sector, but offered no new specific measures. "We must, unswervingly, reinforce the development of the state economy while, unswervingly, encouraging, supporting, and guiding the development of the non-state economy," Xi said at Beijing's Great Hall of the People. "What to reform and how to go about the reform must be consistent with the overarching goal of improving and developing the system of socialism with Chinese characteristics and modernizing China's system and capacity for governance," said the Chinese leader. 'No one can dictate to China how to reform' "We will resolutely reform what should and can be reformed, and make no change where there should and cannot be any reform," President Xi said. "No one is in a position to dictate to the Chinese people what should or should not be done." Xi was speaking on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the start of late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping's campaign of "reform and opening up." China, the world's second-largest economy, is in a bitter trade war with the United States, which complains that America imports more from China than China buys from the US, which causes a trade imbalance. US President Donald Trump initiated the trade dispute with China in April, when he first imposed unusually heavy tariffs on imports from China. Beijing retaliated with duties of its own and dropped Chinese imports of American products. Trump and Xi reached an agreement over dinner on the sidelines of the G20 summit in the Argentinean capital, Buenos Aires, earlier this month, which halted the threatened escalation of punitive tariffs while the two sides continue negotiations. But the 90-day halt in the trade war does not seem to have resolved much of the two sides' deep trade differences. It has left US tariffs in place on 250 billion dollars' worth of Chinese goods but for now removed the prospect of another 200 billion in tariffs or to impose tariffs on all imports from China. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Beijing: Tokyo's New Defence Guidelines Jeopardize Regional Stability Sputnik News 14:39 18.12.2018 BEIJING (Sputnik) - China opposes Japan's criticism of its military development as well as incitement of a so-called Chinese security threat in Tokyo's recently approved defense guidelines, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday. "The content of the Japanese government's document regarding China again repeats old [content]. There are irresponsible remarks about the normal military development of China, inappropriate criticism, incitement of the so-called Chinese threat The Chinese side expresses its extreme discontent and strong protest, and we have already made a harsh representation to Japan," the ministry's spokeswoman, Hua Chunying, said at a briefing. Japan's actions are not going to improve relations with China, and are jeopardizing regional stability, the spokeswoman noted. The Japanese government has also approved a new Medium Term Defense Program, under which a record 27 trillion yen (over $240 billion) will be spent on defence over five years. The comments come after earlier in the day, the Japanese government approved the national defence guidelines for the next decade. They envisage the creation of space and cyberdefense units but also express concern over China's military activities, labeling the neighboring country "a strategic rival." Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Sharara Oil Field in Libya Press Statement Robert Palladino Deputy Spokesperson Washington, DC December 18, 2018 The United States continues to monitor the situation at the Sharara oil field and echoes the UN Support Mission for Libya's call for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of armed elements in the area, which is crucial to allow oil production for the benefit of all Libyans to resume. We call on all parties to resolve issues through constructive dialogue and peaceful means in the spirit of compromise, rather than through threats of violence. Libyan oil facilities, production, and revenues belong to the Libyan people. The National Oil Corporation and all sovereign state institutions must be allowed to work on behalf of all Libyans, free of threat and intimidation. Libya's oil resources must remain under the exclusive control of the legitimate National Oil Corporation and the sole oversight of the Government of National Accord, as outlined in UN Security Council Resolutions 2259 (2015), 2278 (2016), and 2362 (2017). We understand the economic challenges facing many citizens, particularly in the southern region. The United States stands in solidarity with Libyan leaders and urges their continued effort to improve fiscal transparency, strengthen economic institutions, enhance security, and ensure just distribution of the country's resources, within the framework of the Libyan Political Agreement and the Plan of Action formulated by UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General Ghassan Salame. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Russia's Northern Fleet Resumed Air Patrols of Arctic - Commander Sputnik News 17:39 18.12.2018 MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Russia's Northern Fleet this year resumed regular air patrols of the Arctic, the fleet's commander, Admiral Nikolay Yevmenov, told reporters Tuesday. "This year we resumed regular air patrols by long-range anti-submarine aircraft in the Arctic and other areas," Yevmenov said after a meeting of the extended board of the Russian Defense Ministry with President Vladimir Putin's participation. The admiral's statement follows Russian Defense Minister's Sergei Shoigu statement made earlier on Tuesday that the United States intended to expand its Navy's presence in the Arctic. Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Moscow Will Take Steps to Boost Security When US Leaves INF Treaty - Putin Sputnik News 13:44 18.12.2018(updated 18:38 18.12.2018) Russian President Vladimir Putin has pointed out that the country's new weapons significantly increase the potential of Russia's army and navy, also adding to the balance of forces and global stability. The strengthening of defence capabilities and protection from external threats remain Russia's key challenges, according to President Vladimir Putin. "Strengthening defence capabilities and Russian security, and [building] reliable protection from exterior threats have been and remain our priority, key tasks. I emphasize that our political and governmental leaders, the society, and all the citizens of our country understand perfectly well the exclusive, vital importance of these tasks", Putin told a Russian Defence Ministry gathering on Tuesday. He also touted the country's new weapon systems, which Putin said "increase manifold" the potential of the Russian army and navy. "It reliably and unconditionally ensures Russia's security for the coming decades, strengthening the balance of forces and therefore stability in the world", Putin underscored. He expressed hope that the new Russian weapon systems will make those who "got used to militaristic and aggressive rhetoric" think twice. He also said that Russia will focus on equipping the army with weapons capable of effectively overcoming missile defence, such as the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle. "We need to intensify efforts so that we could switch to modern weapons which have advanced capabilities for tackling missile defence systems", Putin said, referring to the upcoming serial production of the Avangard gliders. Russia May Take More Security Steps if US Exits From INF Treaty Putin Separately, Putin pledged that Russia would take more measures to strengthen its security if the US decides to withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. He emphasized that Russia remains committed to the document. "In case of the breakdown of the treaty by the US I have already said it publicly and I deem it necessary to state once again directly we will have to take additional measures to strengthen our security", Putin stressed. He also made it plain that nothing stands in the way of negotiations for other countries to join the INF Treaty, and that Russia could easily create land-based intermediate range missiles in response to Washington possibly scrapping the document. He noted that Russia's new rockets do not violate the INF Treaty, suggesting that the US' exit could be caused by fears that Russia has an array of sea-based and air-based missiles. According to Putin, Washington's potential pull-out of the INF Treaty could give impetus to an arms race and cannot be seen as "aspirations of a peace-loving nature". Putin also noted that it remains unclear why the Soviet Union's leadership decided to disarm unilaterally upon concluding the INF Treaty with the US in 1987. "Only God knows why did the leadership of the Soviet Union agree to this one-sided disarmament, but this was done, and our partners continued to develop such systems, I repeat, sea- and air-based," Putin said. In early December, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that the United States would suspend its adherence to the INF Treaty within 60 days unless Russia returned to full compliance with the agreement. Moscow has repeatedly rejected US allegations that Russia has violated the INF treaty. In turn, Moscow has complained that launchers on US defence systems in Europe could fire cruise missiles at ranges that violate the INF's terms Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address US Senators Brush Off Saudi Anger Over Resolutions on Yemen, Khashoggi Death By Michael Bowman December 18, 2018 Members of the U.S. Senate are brushing off Saudi Arabia's anger over resolutions the chamber approved pertaining to the war in Yemen and the killing of dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Earlier this week, the Saudi Foreign Ministry criticized the resolutions as "undermining the kingdom's regional and international role" and "based on unsubstantiated claims and allegations." Speaking with VOA, Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut indicated he is focused on Saudi actions, not words. "I care that Saudi Arabia change its vicious and brutal policies toward Yemen and killing innocent civilians and murdering children there," Blumenthal said. " Alabama Republican Richard Shelby said the Senate could not remain silent after the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a U.S. resident, at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey in October. "That was reprehensible conduct," Shelby said. "That's something we spoke as a body on. They [Saudis] have been good allies, but sometimes you can't look the other way on something like that." Last week, the Senate voted to end U.S. backing for the Saudi-led military campaign in Yemen's civil war and unanimously named Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman responsible for Khashoggi's death. The kingdom said it "rejects any interference in its internal affairs" and is working to achieve a political solution in Yemen. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Nikki Haley: Saudi crown prince must stop 'thuggish' behavior Iran Press TV Wed Dec 19, 2018 01:20AM US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley has said that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) must stop the "thuggish nature in which he has been acting," in the wake of the murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi. In an interview with The Washington Examiner on Tuesday, Haley praised the Saudi crown prince for having "a lot of good ideas," but added that he has been "careless at times." She said that how bin Salman deals with the aftermath of the killing of Khashoggi will prove his ability to lead the Saudi kingdom moving forward. "First and foremost, [the crown prince] owes us some accountability for what happened to Khashoggi. Without question," Haley said. Commenting on this international lawyer and political analyst Barry Grossman said that the real point that needs to be made is that after her token and hypocritical reference to thugishness, she also praised the crown prince for having "a lot of good ideas," but added that he has been "careless at times." "Only she can explain what she meant in saying he has been 'careless' but, peeling away the diplomatic niceties, it certainly sounds like she meant he has been a little too 'sloppy' - as in less than competent - in overseeing the 'wet work' he has ordered," Grossman added. "In Dumbshitistan, they expect their friends to be both effective and professional when committing murder," the commentator noted. Haley's boss, US President Donald Trump, had sought to argue that the United States had economic and national security interests in supporting Saudi leadership despite the widespread belief that the crown prince ordered the killing of Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in the Turkish city of Istanbul on October 2. Turkish intelligence intercepts reportedly show that Khashoggi was murdered on a direct order from the crown prince. Trump, who has signed a $110 billion arms deal with the monarchy, has said he would not listen to the audio of Khashoggi's killing provided to the CIA by the Turkish intelligence. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address UN envoy discusses new Syria constitution body with Iran, Turkey, Russia FMs Iran Press TV Tue Dec 18, 2018 02:16PM The foreign ministers of Iran, Russia and Turkey have held talks with the United Nations Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura on the composition of a Syrian constitutional committee. Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and his Russian and Turkish counterparts Sergei Lavrov and Mevlut Cavusoglu, respectively, met in the Swiss city of Geneva with the outgoing UN envoy for Syria in Geneva on Tuesday. The meeting between the foreign ministers of the three countries, as guarantors of the Syria peace process, and the UN diplomat could pave the way for the drafting of a new constitution and for elections after a nearly eight-year-old devastating war in Syria. Speaking to reporters upon his arrival in Geneva, the Iranian foreign minister said he hoped to reach an agreement with Russia and Turkey on the setting up of the new constitutional committee in Syria. When asked whether he expected a deal to be reached, Zarif said, "I hope so." De Mistura, who is due to step down on December 31, has been making efforts since January to clinch an agreement on the identity of 150 members of a new constitutional committee to revitalize a stalled peace process in Syria. The United Nations said in a statement on Friday that the Geneva talks will focus on setting up a "credible, balanced, and inclusive" committee to draft a new constitution for Syria and usher in elections. It added that the meeting will take place ahead of de Mistura's monthly presentation to the UN Security Council set for December 20. The committee is expected to include 150 members: 50 chosen by Damascus, 50 by the opposition and the final 50 by the UN envoy. It will also include civil society representatives, religious and tribal leaders, experts and women. The UN-prepared list has already been rejected by Damascus, which is to draw up its own list, along with Russia, Iran and Turkey.The Syrian government has repeatedly said that it would only agree with some alteration to the current constitution, whereas the opposition is pushing for an entirely new constitution. Even if the committee is finally established, analysts say the task of discussing a post-war constitution will be difficult. Syria has been gripped by foreign-backed militancy since March 2011. The Syrian government says the Israeli regime and its Western and regional allies are aiding Takfiri terrorist groups wreaking havoc in the country. So far, 11 rounds of Syria peace talks, mediated by Iran, Russia and Turkey, have been held in Astana. The 10th round of the discussions took place in the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi back in July 30-31 Late in November, the guarantor states of the Astana peace process ended their 11th round of talks in the Kazakh capital, reiterating their strong commitment to Syria's sovereignty and territorial integrity. Iran, Russia and Turkey also rejected "all desperate attempts" by foreign-backed militant groups to undermine the sovereignty of the Syrian nation. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address US envoy: We're no longer seeking regime change in Syria Iran Press TV Tue Dec 18, 2018 07:24AM The United States says it is no longer seeking to unseat Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, backtracking on the once strict regime change policy that Washington insisted on, but which has evidently failed to put into effect. Speaking on Monday at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank, the US Special Representative for Syria Engagement James Jeffrey said Washington is not looking for a "regime change" in Syria, but rather a "different" government. "We want to see a regime that is fundamentally different. It's not regime change we're not trying to get rid of Assad," he said. Jeffrey further estimated that Syria needs $300-400 billion for reconstruction, saying Western countries and international financial institutions would not commit funds to rebuild the war-torn state unless there is a compromise on the part of the Damascus government. "There is a strong readiness on the part of Western nations not to ante up money for that disaster unless we have some kind of idea that the government is ready to compromise," he said. He also acknowledged that Washington may not find an ally anytime soon in Syria, saying, "It doesn't have to be a regime that we Americans would embrace as, say, qualifying to join the European Union if the European Union would take Middle Eastern countries." The US has long been accused of providing safe passage and logistical support to the Takfiri terrorists, who have been fighting to topple the Assad government since early 2011. Washington has on many occasions argued with vehemence that peace in the country was inconceivable as long as Assad remained in power. Currently, American military forces maintain a significant presence in Syria's north, where they openly support the anti-Damascus Kurdish militants. The US and its allies have also been running an illegal bombing campaign against what is claimed to be Daesh positions. Those raids have done little to uproot terrorism and, instead, hampered Syrian army advances against Takfiri militants on numerous occasions. Russia said last month that the US views Daesh as an ally to push for regime change in Syria. On the other side, the Damascus government backed by its allies Russia and Iran has succeeded in defeating terrorists on almost all fronts countrywide. Idlib Province remains the last major terrorist stronghold in the country. The Syrian army has suspended a liberation operation in that area, giving room to peace efforts on the diplomatic stage mediated by Iran, Russia and Turkey aimed at working out a non-military solution to the Syria crisis. Assad said in May that the US "is losing its cards" as the militant groups it supports have lost significant ground on the battlefield against the army, emphasizing that the Americans "should leave" the Syrian soil. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Turkish US Tensions Deepen Over Syrian Kurds By Dorian Jones December 18, 2018 Diplomatic efforts are continuing to avert a crisis between Ankara and Washington over a threatened Turkish offensive against U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish forces. But analysts warn mixed messages between the two NATO allies is complicating de-escalation efforts. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, speaking to supporters Monday, declared U.S. President Donald Trump had responded positively to the launch of an offensive against the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia. Ankara accuses the YPG of being affiliated with the Kurdish rebel group PKK that has been waging a decades-long insurgency in Turkey. On Monday, U.S. Ambassador on Syrian Affairs Jim Jeffrey appeared to contradict Erdogan. "We think that any offensive into northeast Syria by anyone is a bad idea, and that was a position that I conveyed when I was in Ankara, that everybody from the president on down has conveyed," said Jeffrey. The YPG is a crucial ally in Washington's war against the Islamic State. Around 2,000 U.S. soldiers are deployed with the militia in the region that is targeted by Ankara. Erdogan said the Kurdish militia would be ousted from the Euphrates River to the Iraqi frontier. Stoking tensions, Turkish Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu dismissed U.S. warnings. "The United States tried to hamper us in northern Iraq, and in Afrin and Syria," Soylu said Monday while visiting Pakistan. "And now, they will try to hamper us in the east of the Euphrates. Turkey did not let it happen back then, and we will not let it happen this time," Soylu said. "I cannot say whether it's blackmail or a bluff," said international relations professor Huseyin Bagci of Ankara's Middle East Technical University, "Turkey could undertake the military operation, the capability is there, and the fighting morale is there. The question is when and how it will carry out this military operation." "Probably the Kurdish forces they will be withdrawn from the area," he added, "probably the Americans will negotiate till the last minute to satisfy Turkish expectations, or we will see for the first time a clash between two NATO countries, two strategic allies, everything is open." In an initiative backed by Washington a delegation of Iraqi-Kurdish supported Rojava peshmerga forces met Sunday with representatives of the YPG and its political wing the PYD. Washington is touting the peshmerga force as a potential buffer between the YPG and the Turkish frontier. "One somewhat related thing is the Rojava Peshmerga deployment across the (Syrian) border. That was done with our understanding," said Ambassador Jeffrey. But the PYD and YPG reportedly rejected the offer. Observers say deep mistrust exists between the Iraqi and Syrian Kurdish forces. Such a move would also have been likely to be rejected by Ankara. "Why should Turkey trust the peshmergas of northern Iraq?" said Bagci, "No more Kurds would be allowed to be part of this game. "The peshmerga Kurds if they tried to be a buffer zone, would be treated equally (by Ankara) as terrorists as the YPG," he added. Turkish domestic politics could also be a complicating factor in de-escalation efforts, with critical local elections due in March. Turkey is facing economic recession, and opinion polls indicate Erdogan's ruling AKP Party is hemorrhaging votes. "The timing of this military campaign in Syria, smacks of populism," said analyst Atilla Yesilada of Global Source Partners. "Do we need to do this in the middle of winter and when relations with America are shaky. The timing suggests the AKP may be back to its old methods of garnering votes by appealing to nationalists and Turkish ethnic sentiments, and it's a dangerous game." Turkish-U.S. relations are still recovering from a crisis earlier this year when the Trump administration hit Ankara with financial sanctions that resulted in a collapse in the Turkish currency. Washington has lifted its sanctions, but the Turkish economy remains fragile. The repercussions of a Turkish military operation into Syria could be severe. "That would be a very significant threat," said economist Inan Demir of Nomura Securities. "If we see an accidental clash in Northern Syria (between U.S. and Turkish forces)," he added, "if that leads to the U.S. again considering sanctions on Turkey, which might be due to various issues, and there is no shortage of outstanding issues between the two countries. I would think the markets then again go back to price in a very negative situation for Turkey and lira." Given the high stakes, analysts predict bilateral diplomatic efforts are likely to intensify. "Until the last minute both sides will try to avoid any confrontation and reduce the risk at the moment," said Bagci, "the tension is getting high at least from the Turkish side, and we will see how the Americans will respond." NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address China's military actions around Taiwan 'irresponsible' ROC Central News Agency 2018/12/18 21:35:33 Taipei, Dec. 18 (CNA) The Presidential Office said Tuesday that any military actions that escalate tension in the region and damage relations between Taiwan and China are irresponsible and are not welcomed by the international community. Presidential Office spokesman Alex Huang () made the statement after the Ministry of National Defense (MND) confirmed that a number of Chinese aircraft and military vessels were operating near Taiwan that day. As a member of the international community, it is irresponsible to launch any military actions that can disturb security and stability in the region and negatively impact cross-Taiwan Strait relations, Huang said in the statement. Such actions are not welcomed by the international community either, Huang continued, adding that it is a shared responsibility and objective for all parties, including both sides of the strait, to maintain peace and stability in the region. According to the MND, People's Liberation Army (PLA) aircraft, including Xian H-6 bombers, Shaanxi Y-8 transport aircraft and Sukhoi-30 fighter jets, departed from the PLA's Huiyang air base in Guangdong Province earlier Tuesday. The aircraft flew over the Bashi Channel, the waterway south of Taiwan, on their way to the West Pacific Ocean for routine distant-sea exercises, the MND said. Two PLA combat ships were also been detected traveling outside Taiwan's Air Defense Identification Zone (AIDZ) in the West Pacific off Taiwan's southeastern coast, the MND said. The two vessels were thought to be taking part in the same routine distant-sea exercises as the Chinese aircraft, according to the ministry. The MND said that it was closely monitoring the PLA's movements. Huang said that the PLA's maneuvers near Taiwan are under the MND's close surveillance and that the ministry has a thorough preparedness plan and every necessary response measure in place to ensure national security. (By Shih Hsiu-chuan) Enditem/J NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Military aware of PLA aircraft, vessel operations near Taiwan ROC Central News Agency 2018/12/18 17:23:32 Taipei, Dec. 18 (CNA) Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense (MND) said Tuesday it was aware that a number of Chinese aircraft and military vessels were operating near Taiwan during the day and that it was closely monitoring their movements. Without naming exactly how many, a MND statement said a certain number of People's Liberation Army aircraft, including Xian H-6 (-6) bombers, Shaanxi Y-8 (-8) transport aircraft, and Sukhoi-30 fighter jets, departed from PLA's Huiyang air base in Guangdong Province earlier Tuesday. The aircraft flew over the Bashi Channel, the waterway south of Taiwan, on their way to the West Pacific Ocean for routine distant-sea exercises. They were watched closely by Taiwanese jets until the aircraft returned to their base, the MND said. Two PLA combat ships were also been detected traveling outside Taiwan's Air Defense Identification Zone (AIDZ) in the West Pacific off Taiwan's southeastern coast, the MND said. The two vessels were thought to be taking part in the same routine distant-sea exercises as the Chinese aircraft, according to the ministry. The military continues to closely monitor the country's surrounding waters and airspace to ensure Taiwan's security, the MND said. (By Joseph Yeh) Enditem/ls NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Taiwan thanks U.S. Congress for passing Asia policy bill ROC Central News Agency 2018/12/18 11:59:30 Taipei, Dec. 18 (CNA) The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) on Tuesday thanked the U.S. Congress for passing the Asia Reassurance Initiative Act, which is aimed at enhancing U.S. leadership in Asia and strengthening cooperation with regional partners, Taiwan included. The bill, which passed the Senate on Dec. 4 and cleared the floor of the House of Representatives on Dec. 12, seeks to enshrine a long-term strategic vision and comprehensive, multifaceted and principled U.S. policy for the Indo-Pacific that includes checking China's growing influence. Section 209 of the bill reiterated the U.S.'s commitment to Taiwan, including backing regular U.S. arms sales to Taiwan and encouraging diplomatic and defense contacts between the two sides in line with the Taiwan Relations Act and Six Assurances. The MOFA said the bill represents further bipartisan support for enhanced Taiwan-U.S. relations following the congressional passage of the Taiwan Travel Act earlier this year, which called for high-level officials from Taiwan to visit the U.S. and high-level U.S. officials to visit Taiwan. The Asia Reassurance Initiative Act of 2018 still has to be sent to President Donald Trump for review. He can sign the bill into law, veto it, which would put it back in the hands of the House of Representatives, or do nothing. If he does nothing, known as a pocket veto, the bill would become law 10 days after it is sent to the president if Congress is in session for the full 10 days. (By Joseph Yeh) Enditem/ls NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Turkish courts give life sentences to some 2,000 over 2016 botched putsch Iran Press TV Tue Dec 18, 2018 01:45PM Courts in Turkey have sentenced nearly 2,000 people to life in prison since the failed July 2016 coup attempt, which the Ankara government asserts to have been masterminded by US-based opposition cleric Fethullah Gulen. Turkey's official Anadolu news agency reported on Tuesday that some 1,934 suspects have been told by the courts that they will spend the rest of their life in jail. Of these, 978 people were jailed for life, while 956 were sentenced to aggravated life imprisonment, which has replaced the death penalty in Turkey and carries harsher conditions than normal life imprisonment convictions. The report further noted that a total of 239 cases out of 289, which were opened after the failed coup have been closed. The remaining 50 ones, include 18 in the capital Ankara and nine in the country's largest city of Istanbul. More than 3,050 people in all have been convicted over links to Gulen, with 1,123 given different jail sentences ranging from over a year to 20 years in prison. Gulen's nephew sentenced to seven-and-a-half years behind bars Separately, Gulen's nephew Selman Gulen was sentenced to seven years and six months in jail on Tuesday on charges of being a "member of an armed terrorist organization." Kutbettin Gulen, brother of the Turkish Muslim preacher now living in Pennsylvania in the United States, was jailed for 10 years and six months on the same charge in October. During the 2016 botched putsch, a faction of the Turkish military declared that it had seized control of the country and the government of Erdogan was no more in charge. The attempt was, however, suppressed a few hours later. Ankara has since accused Gulen of having orchestrated the coup. The opposition figure is also accused of being behind a long-running campaign to topple the government via infiltrating the country's institutions, particularly the army, police and the judiciary. Gulen has denounced the "despicable putsch" and reiterated that he had no role in it. "Accusations against me related to the coup attempt are baseless and politically-motivated slanders," he said in a statement. The 77-year-old cleric has also called on Ankara to end its "witch hunt" of his followers, a move he says is aimed at "weeding out anyone it deems disloyal to President Erdogan and his regime." Turkish officials have frequently called on their US counterparts to extradite Gulen, but their demands have not been taken heed of. Turkey, which remains in a state of emergency since the coup, has been engaged in suppressing the media and opposition groups suspected to have played a role in the failed coup. Tens of thousands of people have been arrested in Turkey on suspicion of having links to Gulen and the failed coup. More than 110,000 others, including military staff, civil servants and journalists, have been sacked or suspended from work over the same accusations. The international community and rights groups have been highly critical of the Turkish president over the massive dismissals and the crackdown. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address US Confirms Its Commitment to Withdrawing From INF Treaty - Russian FM Sputnik News 22:10 18.12.2018(updated 23:50 18.12.2018) MOSCOW (Sputnik) - The United States has not shown any specific evidence of Russia's violation of provisions of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said in an interview with the Kommersant newspaper. "We strongly reject the US accusations of treaty violations by Russia. These accusations continue to remain completely ungrounded. For the five years of discussing this problem, the United States has not presented any concrete evidence of our guilt," Ryabkov said. Moreover, Washington, through bilateral channels at a high political level, confirmed to Russia that the decision to withdraw from the INF Treaty was final, Sergey Ryabkov said. "Washington stated publicly in October that it would withdraw from the treaty. Through bilateral channels, we received a confirmation at a high political level that this decision was final and was not an invitation to dialogue," Ryabkov said. "We are forced to proceed from the fact that regardless of the opinion and actions of Russia, the other participants of the INF Treaty and third countries, the United States will purposefully move towards its denunciation," he said. He said Russia would respond to US deployment of intermediate- and shorter-range missiles threatening the country in case the United States quit the INF. Meanwhile, Moscow has not received a response from Washington to the proposal to discuss disagreements on the terms of compliance with the INF Treaty at the level of military, Ryabkov stressed. Russia does not believe demonstration of the 9M729 missile to alleviate the US concerns would be justified from the political and technical viewpoints, Sergey Ryabkov said. "As for the missile's demonstration, the INF Treaty does not demand this from us.. Thus, the demonstration of the missile to the Americans would be a manifestation on our part of increased transparency beyond the treaty framework. At this stage, we did not have the feeling that such a step would be justified from both the political and technical points of view," Ryabkov said. Ryabkov also emphasized that the demonstration of the missile would be an undesirable precedent amid US insistent attempts to get information about Russian missile developments. The Russian Foreign Ministry has said that the 9M729 missiles correspond to Russia's obligations under the INF Treaty and have not been upgraded and tested for the prohibited range. Moscow has repeatedly pointed out that the United States provided no proof that Russia in fact violated the treaty by deploying the missiles. The INF Treaty was signed in 1987 by former President of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev and then-US President Ronald Reagan, who agreed to destroy all cruise or ground-launched ballistic missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers (310 and 3,400 miles). The INF treaty has an unlimited duration and each side can terminate it by providing compelling evidence to substantiate its decision. Russia and the United States have repeatedly accused each other of violating the treaty. Moscow, in particular, stated that the United States was deploying launchers for Tomahawk missiles in Romania and Poland, which is prohibited under the agreement. Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Manila (CNN Philippines Life) Its not even 2019 yet were only a few days close but pundits and publications are already listing down the perfect places to travel to in the coming year. Jetsetters, frequent travelers, and even first-timers are already looking forward to spending the coming year in different destinations far and wide whether its a familiar sight or an exciting locale thats so far off from where youre from. In travel, they say its the journey that matters and this is something that Etihad keeps in mind as it celebrates its 15th year as one of the leading companies in the aviation industry. In that short amount of time, Etihad has upheld the best aspects of Arabian hospitality, delivered with flair and sophistication that has become synonymous with the airline. In the last 15 years, Etihad has grown to fly to 84 destinations 55 countries with over 100 aircrafts bearing 18 million passengers annually each year. It has operated over 840,000 flights and carried 139 million guests who are served by a workforce of over 22,000 talented individuals from 150 countries. Thats a whole lot of people moving to and from vacations, business trips, reuniting with loved ones, or just simply enjoying the zen of travel. The world has rapidly become more connected since Etihad started in Nov. 5, 2003 with a symbolic trip to the historic city of Al Ain in Abu Dhabi. Customers are more discerning, more demanding, and have higher expectations of what an airline should be. Etihad's First Apartment which has a large leather armchair and separate bed of 6 feet and 10 inches. Photo from ETIHAD AIRWAYS Etihad flies to as many as 85 destinations in 55 countries around the world. Photo courtesy of ETIHAD AIRWAYS Today, customers call the shots and they only respect the brands and business that recognize this and serve them accordingly, said the airlines Philippines Country Manager Yarub Mohd Obaidalla at the celebration of Etihads 15th birthday. Technology has also created a new era of customer strength, control, expectation and demand. To mark their 15th year, Etihad has launched their Choose Well brand platform which enables passengers to choose how they want to fly and get the Etihad experience that they want. Whether youre in First Class, Business, or Economy, you can customize your flight however you want, from smart seats with a shoulder to lean on; the First Apartment at First Class which has a large leather armchair and separate bed of 6 feet and 10 inches; the recently introduced Neighbour-Free seating option; or a new range of buy-on-board products. One of the new highlights of Etihad is the Economy Space option which is retrofitted for its 10 Airbus A380s and features an increased seat pitch of up to 36 inches for that wide extra legroom. This is especially beneficial for families with small children, the elderly, or those requiring wheelchair assistance. While many airlines have been squeezing more seats into economy class, we continue to focus on providing our guests with exceptional products and services that meet and exceed the demands and budgets of different types of travellers, said Jamal Ahmed Al Awadhi, Etihad Airways Head of Guest Experience. Celebrated fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg also created limited edition scarves and ties for the flight crew which match the airlines colorways: bold yellow for cabin managers, purple for the cabin crew, and white for food and beverage managers. The new design also coincides with Etihads 10-year partnership with the Formula 1 Etihad Airways Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. The airline has also added a new service to Barcelona, Spain which starts five times a week via two-class Airbus A330-200 before it becomes daily starting March 31, 2019. So whether passengers are bound for New York or coming home to Abu Dhabi, Etihad has made it their mission to tailor experiences that suit every passengers needs. While traditionally airlines look to provide all their guests with the same products and services, Etihad is empowering its guests by enabling them to design their entire travel experience, said Obaidalla. We passionately believe that if you choose Etihad, youve chosen well. Toyota Motor Corporation (Toyota) is introducing total-care service, a pioneering set of mobility services specially designed for ride-hailing companies. Working with ride-hailing companies, Total-care Service will enable Toyota to leverage onboard telematics data through a shared information platform and provide services such as fleet management, automotive insurance, and vehicle maintenance packages, aiming to expand the use of ride-hailing vehicles and enhance the driving experience for end users. Through this Total-care Service, ride-hailing companies can provide their driver-partners with more cost-efficient and timely maintenance services. Singapore will see the first service roll-out, with Toyota Motor Asia Pacific Pte Ltd. (TMAP)the sales & marketing regional headquarters of Toyota Motor Corporation (TMC) in Asiaoffering the Total-care Service for 1,500 Toyota vehicles owned by Grab Holdings, Inc. (Grab) through its subsidiary GrabRentals. TMAP and Grab will sequentially offer this service to Grab-owned Toyota vehicles across Southeast Asia. In addition, both companies will work to increase the share of Toyota vehicles in Grabs fleet in the region by 25% by 2020. In the future, Grab will also seek to implement the Toyota Production System (TPS), a system based on a philosophy of eliminating waste, to improve Grabs business operational efficiency. Ride-hailing vehicles tend to accrue five times more mileage than privately-owned vehicles. To keep vehicles in safe, good working condition, it is essential to provide proper vehicle maintenance based on the vehicles condition. Driver-partner and passenger safety is a top priority for Grab, and by ensuring that driver-partners are driving vehicles that receive timely maintenance, Grab aims to provide the highest level of safety on its platform. Through the Total-care Service, driving data is collected by Toyotas in-vehicle data-transmission device, TransLog, and sent to the Mobility Services Platform (MSPF), an information infrastructure developed by Toyota for vehicle connectivity. Grab, Toyota, and local dealers will use such vehicle data collaboratively to achieve a safer and more secure ride-hailing platform in Southeast Asia. For example, using vehicle data, Grab will be able to provide its driver-partners with support and safety advice as needed. In addition, Toyota dealers will apply TPS to vehicle maintenance for Grab-owned vehicles. Aioi Nissay Dowa Insurance, a Toyota affiliated insurance company, will offer telematics-based automotive insurance to GrabRentals, allowing for safer driving and lower-cost insurance premiums. Maintenance schedules for each vehicle will be fully optimized, based on driving and vehicle condition data. Intensive Care Stall (ICS) has been implemented at Borneo Motors (Singapore) (BMS), the authorized Toyota dealer in Singapore. Making use of TPS know-how, ICS achieves ultra-efficient maintenance services, reducing vehicle downtime and maintenance costs. Grab is one of the most frequently used online-to-offline (O2O) mobile platforms in Southeast Asia, providing the everyday services that matter most to consumers. Commute, eat, deliver shoppingand pay with one e-wallet. Grab believes that every Southeast Asian should benefit from the digital economy, and the company provides access to safe and affordable transport, food and package delivery, mobile payments and financial services. Grab currently offers services in Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Myanmar and Cambodia. GREENWICH Zoning commissioners continue to focus on parking or the lack thereof for a proposed new synagogue in central Greenwich. They again raised concerns this week that the congregation does not have enough spots reserved in an existing parking garage to handle members. There are intrinsic limiting factors that make it less functional for the congregation, acting commission Chair Margarita Alban said at a meeting of the Planning and Zoning Commission Tuesday. The commission closed testimony on the proposal, but members put off voting on the matter until a later date. Under the current proposal, a 20,913-square-foot building would be built on three lots at 226 and 230 Mason St. and 16 Havemeyer Place. It would include a synagogue and a preschool for Chabad Lubavitch of Greenwich. The new structure would utilize 5,600 square feet of the existing site of the Greenwich Armory, which is currently used as office space, and would share a parking garage with nearby tenants. Chabad currently operates out of 75 Mason St., but the space has become too small for the congregation and preschool. The parking garage has a total of 123 spaces, with 32 reserved for Chabad and 91 for other tenants. However, Thomas Heagney, the attorney representing Chabad, said they have an agreement that would allow for all of the spaces to be used after 5 p.m. on weekdays and throughout the weekend, which is when evening and Saturday services would be taking place at the synagogue. Bernard Adler, a traffic engineer retained by Chabad, said a study had been done showing that at most 31 of the 32 spaces would be used daily for drop-off and pick-up at the preschool. During the high holidays, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Heagney said an arrangement has been made with the Greenwich Public Schools for people to use the nearby Julian Curtiss School parking lot because school would not be in session. When pressed by the commission, Heagney said the arrangement with the district was not in writing, but similar agreements between religious institutions and schools have worked before without any issue. Chabad has insisted available parking will be enough to handle its needs, but it was unclear this week whether the commission was convinced enough to support the project. Commissioner Dennis Yeskey inquired what would happen if there were a weekday wedding or funeral. Chabad officials said weddings typically do not happen on weekdays and funerals would likely happen off-site, but no actual plan was introduced to address his concerns. Alban said if all the parking spaces in the lot were available for Chabad this would work perfectly, but felt it was a problem that 91 of the spaces are designated for others to use during weekdays. You tell us you want it to work perfectly and it will work perfectly because we will make it work perfectly, pledged Rabbi Yossi Deren, Chabad of Greenwichs executive director. We have to make it work perfectly. We have the very intense regulations of the beautiful town of Greenwich to fit into and were going to plain and simple. Deren also promised to continue to work closely with the commission but did express frustration that he felt Chabad was being held to a different standard than others have been in the past. He cited difficulties with the towns Historic District Commission and ongoing public opposition despite changes the congregation has made to the plan, including comments in an online petition that Deren and others at Chabad have taken exception to. The line keeps on getting moved and the nature of these things that keep popping up whenever we comply with earlier objections are of a standard that others are not held to and thats unfair, Deren said. Its called discriminatory. Members of the public in attendance reacted angrily to the claim. Alban and town Director of Planning and Zoning Katie DeLuca rejected it, saying they were simply following the law and town zoning regulations and applying a fair standard to questions theyve had about the project. We know its hard for an applicant but we try our best to be consistent, Alban said. Deren said he did feel the love from the commission, to which Alban joked it was tough love. Neighbors have voiced opposition to the project, including complaints about parking and traffic downtown and potential changes to neighborhood character. I am not a Jew but I am a man of faith and I believe in the word of the psalmist who said, I was glad when they said unto me let us go into the house of the lord, said James Fulton, an attorney representing the residents of the Virginia Court Condominium at 169 Mason Street. But this site is too small for this growing spiritual community. The parking, 31 or 32 available spaces during the weekdays is not going to be adequate and traffic is going to be a nightmare resulting from a nomadic search for non-existent spaces at the busiest rush hour time of the week. The commission will next meet on Jan. 8. Several members of the public spoke during a lengthy hearing on the proposed project Tuesday, including neighbors and other residents who voiced concerns and members of the Chabad congregation who strongly backed the plan. Use of the armory had been criticized due to its historic value. The towns Veterans Appreciation Council recently met with Chabad and came together on ways to honor veterans if the new synagogue is approved. No more public testimony about the proposal will be heard now that the item has been closed. As one of the final speakers of the night, town resident Dean Gamanos, a member of the Veterans Appreciation Council, offered hope that the matter would lead to a positive outcome. I think if we just keep working together, listening and sticking to the rules that well all end up with a happy situation, Gamanos said. kborsuk@greenwichtime.com GREENWICH The towns legal staff is defending the decision to fire the director of parking services late last year. In a lawsuit filed in state Superior Court, Rita Azrelyant says the town acted with reckless disregard of her rights. But the towns lawyers are now saying otherwise. The controversy at the Greenwich Department of Parking Service began when an employee, Michael Gordon, was arrested and charged with financial crimes in April 2017. He entered guilty pleas to felony counts of first- and second-degree larceny in September after making restitution of about $4,000. He avoided probation and jail time. Azrelyant said she attempted to initiate new procedures in the parking services department, which would have improved internal security, before Gordon was arrested. In court papers, she said her efforts were frustrated and blocked by First Selectman Peter Tesei and Town Administrator Ben Branyan. She maintained that she was attempting to improve internal operations, but she was punished for her efforts to address important issues regarding the public finances of the town, and malfeasance by town employees. Her lawsuit maintains that she was made a scapegoat for the embarrassing public revelations of the problems in the parking services department. Tesei and Branyan have called Azrelyants court claims unsubstantiated allegations and patently false. In court papers filed last week, the towns lawyers also denied her contentions. The towns legal defense maintains that Azrelyants employment was terminated because the administration was legitimately dissatisfied with (her) job performance. The motion says Azrelyants position was ended for lawful reasons that would have caused the termination regardless of any other motivation. It did not provide specifics. The town administration earlier said the position of parking services director was being phased out, as part of a larger process to improve the delivery of services. Azrelyant is suing for damages for lost employment and lost wages, as well as for emotional distress. The towns legal defense also says she has failed to make reasonable efforts to obtain successor employment since the termination of her employment. If there is no settlement in Azrelyants lawsuit, a trial date has been tentatively scheduled for August 2019, according to court records. rmarchant@greenwichtime.com A nurse at Avon Old Farms School was fined $5,000 Wednesday by the state Board of Examiners for Nursing for inappropriately prescribing controlled substances to herself, family members and friends 42 times. Lenore Leone of Avon, an advanced practice registered nurse, who works at the private school under her married name, Lenore Severni, prescribed the drugs for herself and seven friends and relatives from 2014 to 2017, a consent order she agreed to said. The board also reprimanded her license. In August, the board had rejected a $2,500 fine against Leone, with some members saying the fine was too low. In separate action with the state Department of Consumer Protection in 2017, Leone agreed not to prescribe controlled substances for herself, her family or friends except in an emergency, the order said. In signing the order, Leone admitted no wrongdoing but chose not to contest the allegations. The board also revoked the registered nurse license of Amanda Alarcon of Shelton because she violated an earlier four-year probation the board had imposed in 2017. At the time, it placed her license on probation for four years because she had abused heroin between 2011 and 2014, state records show. The board found Wednesday that she had failed to attend therapy sessions and failed to submit to random drug tests, records show. Other actions included placing the registered nurse license of Charlene Zikaras of Milford on probation for four years and ordered her to undergo random drug and alcohol tests, a consent order she agreed to said. The order said that Zikaras abused alcohol to excess in January and February but her urine tests have been negative for alcohol since March. The board also ordered a four-year probation for Christine DeFusco, a licensed practical nurse, of Rocky Hill, after finding that in 2016, she abused alcohol to excess, a memorandum of decision said. That year, she was arrested in Rocky Hill, admitted to drinking vodka in her car and was charged with her third DUI, the memorandum states. At the time, she was on a court-ordered probation for a 2013 DUI conviction, it states. In 2016, she pleaded guilty to the third DUI charge and had a breathalyzer device attached to the ignition of her car, records show. DeFusco has undergone treatment for alcohol use disorder, records show. While her license is on probation, she must undergo random drug and alcohol attests and continue therapy, the memorandum states. This story was reported under a partnership with the Connecticut Health I-Team, a nonprofit news organization dedicated to health reporting. (c-hit.org). If you are hankering to be one among millions this holiday, do not bother with the shopping malls, just head to the airport, where nearly 46 million people will mix travel anxiety with Christmas anxiety and a tad of family-get-together anxiety to create a merry little stew of emotions. The projected number of people who plan to fly between Thursday and Jan. 6 is up more than 5 percent from last year. "That's an increase of about 126,000 passengers a day," said Nick Calio, CEO of the trade group Airlines for America. With a daily average of more than 2.5 million people flying, those with the very most holiday spirit may enjoy travel on Thursday, Friday and Dec. 26, which figure to be the busiest days during the holiday period. (The lightest travel days are Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Jan. 5.) After the busiest Thanksgiving air travel period on record, airlines have promised to work with the Transportation Security Administration to get people to their flights on schedule. "This holiday season, we are expecting passenger volumes at airports to again be at record highs," TSA Administrator David Pekoske said. "We ask passengers to arrive earlier than usual, don't overpack carry-ons, be prepared to divest items at security checkpoints, listen to advisements from our officers, and most importantly - patience and understanding go a long way." With those sentiments in mind, the group AirHelp, which bills itself as the world's leading flight compensation company, provided a list of protections that are available to passengers in the United States and other countries. AirHelp, a for-profit organization that collects 25 percent of the compensation when its customers win claims, says globally, 2018 has been among the worst years when it comes to disrupted flights. Some of that is due to the weather, and some is the result of airline issues. The company says one reason Americans suffer is that 90 percent of them do not know their rights well enough to complain effectively. "You can always complain when an airline doesn't fulfill the service they've promised. Some might even take your feedback seriously and try to improve their service," AirHelp says in its "10 Commandments of Air Travel." AirHelp also outlines the rights you have when your flight is overbooked. "Selling more tickets for a flight than seats available is a common practice in the airline industry," the company says. "The airline cannot get away with offering you a food voucher as consolation. If you're bumped, and you don't volunteer to deplane or take another flight, you can be eligible for compensation of up to $1,350, depending on the value of your ticket fare and ultimate delay in arrival to your final destination." AirHelp says that on domestic flights, passengers may be entitled to up to twice the cost of a one-way ticket if a flight arrives two hours late and up to $1,350 if it is more than two hours late. Luggage is less likely to get lost in this era of automatic scanners, but should that happen, AirHelp points to a regulation called the Montreal Convention that says passengers are entitled to compensation if a bag goes astray or is damaged or delayed. "If your luggage is damaged, make sure to file a report within seven days, and complaints for delayed luggage should be filed within 21 days," AirHelp says. "Make sure to always hold onto your receipts, because you can be reimbursed for anything that was lost or damaged that you needed for your trip. For example, if you have to buy a suit for an important meeting, you can get reimbursed for the suit so you can replace it." AirHelp says fliers don't need to leave their pets behind, but they should check with their airline so they know exactly what the current rules are, and they vary from one airline to the next. "For example, some airlines only allow assistance or guide dogs to travel in the cabin," AirHelp says. "Others base their fees on your pet's size and weight, plus their carrier's measurements. When making the decision of whether to bring your pet along, you should consider: the size of your pet; the pet carrier; pet/dog carrier fees; the temperament of your four-legged friend; and the airline's overhead bin space availability." Haiti - Politic : The MHAVE signs an agreement to list the skills of the Diaspora throughout the world At the beginning of the week, on the sidelines of the talk "Breakfast Entre Nous" https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-26439-haiti-politic-the-minister-of-mhave-talks-about-his-plans-for-the-diaspora.html Marnatha Irene Ternier, the Minister of Haitians Living Abroad (MHAVE) and Firmin Baker the President of the "Haiti Renewal Alliance" (HRA), in the presence of Guissepe Lopette, Head of Mission of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), of Deputy Jerry Tardieu, some representatives of organizations of the Haitian Diaspora as well as MHAVE executives, have signed a memorandum of understanding so that the HRA conducts an inventory of all Haitians in the Diaspora worldwide. "This Memorandum of Understanding comes to materialize an idea of President Jovenel Moise, who believes it necessary to list all the sons and daughters of the country living in foreign lands, in order to have information on their host country, their areas of expertise or profession and their willingness to return to Haiti or to help the country in well-defined circumstances," said Minister Ternier emphasizing that this information will allow to build a reliable database of resources that represent the members of the Haitian Diaspora "This initiative is of paramount importance to all our Diaspora compatriots who want to reintegrate into the social, economic, cultural and professional life of the country. It is also an opportunity for the Government to benefit from the expertise and availability of its sons and daughters living outside the country." The Minister says she is relying on the participation of all members of the Diaspora to ensure its full success. Firmin Backer, promised to work hard to deliver the results of this survey "We will work very closely with the MHAVE to provide the necessary answers and help trace the compatriots of the Diaspora who can serve Haiti in time and place". Deputy Jerry Tardieu, President of the Commission on the proposed amendment to the Constitution, stressed that regardless of the steps taken to standardize the rights of compatriots living abroad, it is up to legislators to work on their legalization. HL/ HaitiLibre Haiti - Education : President Moise pays tribute to the laureates of State exams Tuesday at the Cine Triomphe President Jovenel Moise, accompanied by Prime Minister Jean Henry Ceant and Pierre Josue Agenor Cadet, the Minister of National Education, in the presence of Joseph Lambert, the President of the Senate and the National Assembly and several senior officials of the Public Administration, during a ceremony, paid a vibrant tribute to the 34 laureates of the 2018 State Examinations (Baccalaureate, 9th Year Fundamental, Normal Schools of Teachers and Family Education Centers), testimony of his desire to encourage excellence. President Moise reminded the importance of education considered as the base on which rests the future of the country, also greeted the commitment of the parents daily to mentor their children and to direct them towards the way of the Excellency. Emphasizing that these young people are an example for all students who want to make the study the compass of their success. The Minister Cadet sees in the presence of the highest dignitaries of the Nation at this ceremony, the manifestation of a particular interest for the educational sector, welcoming the direct funding granted by the Executive to educational institutions, including the presbyteral schools, those of Protestant denomination, as well as the communal schools, in order to allow the needy pupils to have access to the classrooms and to a quality education. Scholarships, laptops, lots of books, support funds, support for women's entrepreneurship are the bonuses offered to the winners of state exams according to their category, in addition to a flat-rate support of 50,000 gourdes each laureate on the day of the ceremony. Among the 34 laureates, 13 are from the renovated secondary, 9 from the traditional high school, 3 from the 9th grade, 6 from the teacher training colleges (ENI) and 3 from the Family Education Centers (CEF). HL/ HaitiLibre Haiti - Port-au-Prince : Mayor Chevry wants to significantly increase the rate of recovery of taxes Although the tax revenues of the Commune of Port-au-Prince have more than doubled in one year, since the installation of the new Municipal Council led by the Mayor Youri Chevry, to amount to 397 million Gourdes (2017) against 180 million the previous year, Mayor Chevry is far from satisfied, while only 35% of some 20,000 taxpayers in the commune assume their civic duty and pay their rental tax. That is why the mayor has taken the initiative to revitalize its tax resources through a private-public partnership with a consortium of American firms (GenGlobe consultants, Greenfield Advisors and GSA Corporation) led by Greenfield Advisors, aiming among other things to identify built properties in the commune and provide the City of Port-au-Prince with financial and technical means to make it autonomous. Mayor Chevry recalls that the principle of communal autonomy is enshrined in several legal provisions (decree and laws) notably in the Constitution in Article 66 which states "The Commune has the administrative and financial autonomy [...]" However, as Mayor Chevry points out, in order to achieve this financial autonomy and provide quality local services to the population of the commune, it is not only necessary to have their own financial resources but also new sources of funding, which will imply on the one hand, a very significant increase in the rate of collection of taxes by the use of new technologies and, on the other hand, by broadening the tax base. Youri Chevry invites international donors to work with communities, reminding them that Haiti's future lies in the development of cities. S/ HaitiLibre Haiti - Politic : Unfulfilled promises of President Moise to Haitian migrants Following the adoption on December 10 in Marrakech of the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, the Support Group for Repatriated and Refugees (GARR), while welcoming the Haitian position, believes that the country needs to go more far from mere discourse, by implementing clear and adapted mechanisms that support this adhesion. GARR wants to draw the Government's attention to several of the Pacts' objectives, without neglecting the importance of others : Objective 2 of the Covenant calls for "Minimize the adverse drivers and structural factors that compel people to leave their country of origin " whereas "since coming to power, the Government of Moise has been slow to put forward genuine actions to improve the living conditions of people in poor communities, especially those who are potential migrants." Objective 4 of the Covenant calls for "Ensure that all migrants have proof of legal identity and adequate documentation : We commit ourselves to guarantee the right of every individual to a legal identity by providing each of our citizens with evidence of nationality and all the necessary documents enabling national and local authorities to ascertain the legal identity of a migrant when it enters the territory [...]" So far this aspect has remained a succession of promises not held by President Jovenel Moise who does not seem to be concerned by the fate of several hundred thousand compatriots including the Dominican Republic, who wait in vain for their documents in order to regularize to avoid deportation https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-20521-haiti-politics-deliveries-of-passports-numbers-game.html https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-19860-haiti-politics-jovenel-moise-promises-documents-to-illegal-haitians-in-dr.html Objective 10 calls for "revent, combat and eradicate trafficking in persons in the context of international migration" appears to be badly engaged in Haiti, while Fils-Lien Ely Thelot, the President of the National Committee for the Fight Against Trafficking in Persons (CNLTP) resigned last December 10 due to the lack of resources that it faces, 3 years after its appointment https://www.icihaiti.com/en/news-26429-icihaiti-politic-government-indifferent-to-the-fight-against-human-trafficking.html "The GARR hopes that Haiti's accession to the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration will not be taken lightly, as it has been for other previous agreements and treaties. It should rather be a clear sign of the Haitian Government's commitment to manage migration more responsibly. For the country has become since the last century a territory of emigrants." Download the Global Compact on Migration (PDF in French) : https://www.haitilibre.com/docs/Pacte-Mondial-pour-des-Migrations-Sures.pdf See also : https://www.icihaiti.com/en/news-26429-icihaiti-politic-government-indifferent-to-the-fight-against-human-trafficking.html https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-25236-haiti-social-nearly-200-000-haitians-risk-being-expelled-from-dr.html https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-20752-haiti-flash-distribution-of-passports-and-other-documents-in-dr.html https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-20521-haiti-politics-deliveries-of-passports-numbers-game.html https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-19860-haiti-politics-jovenel-moise-promises-documents-to-illegal-haitians-in-dr.html TB/ HaitiLibre Published on 2018/12/18 | Source Park Hye-jin (Lee Ju-young) was given community service on the latest episode of the KBS 2TV drama "Just Dance". Advertisement Han Dong-hee (Jang Sung-bum) wanted to keep the promise he made to Lee Kyoo-ho (Kim Kap-soo) to convince Park Hye-jin to return to school. He waited in front of her house and managed to get a letter of apology from her. However, his world collapsed when he read it. Park Hye-jin had suffered sexual harassment from boys since she was in elementary school for the reason that she developed faster than other girls her age. She suffered terrible things and no one believed her. Therefore, she'd gone around taking revenge on those kids who'd mistreated her. Han Dong-hee was furious about what she did. In the end, Park Hye-jin's step-mother canceled all charges. Montana State Rep. Jacob Bachmeier, D-Havre, talked during a Hill County Democratic Central Committee meeting Tuesday about a few of the bills that he will be bringing to the Legislature for the next legislative session. "I think next session is going to be tough and difficult," Bachmeier said in an interview after the meeting. "I am optimistic that we will get Medicaid expansion renewed, the big question is in what form it will come out. I think we'll have something pretty similar to what we have, but there could be some new requirements and hoops to jump through. Hopefully it will be a good bipartisan bill again." Bachmeier said during the meeting he is excited for all of the bills that he plans to bring to the floor of the Legislature next session, but there are a few bills that he is particularly looking forward to. He said he plans to bring back a bill about increasing fines for blocking public roads. The bill died in the last session. This is a big deal, he said, because there are public lands that are gated off. Bachmeier added that the bill was voted on pretty close to party lines and hopefully, next session, they will be able to get something through. Bachmeier said he also plans on proposing a bill to revise laws related to state funding of higher education. "Currently in Montana, we have unfunded tuition waiver mandates, so people with certain classes get to qualify for waived tuitions," he said. "It's great. It helps certain types of people get higher education and make differences in their community." He said Montana State University-Northern has approximately 20 to 25 percent of students who qualify for these tuition waivers. This is easily a million dollars, Bachmeier said, and impacts the small university in a major way. With this bill, he said, the Legislature will create an account outside of the Montana University System to reimburse schools individually for their unfunded tuition waivers, bringing a couple million dollars back to Northern. Another one of his bills he is proposing will revise laws on the transportation of people with mental illness. People who are being involuntarily transported to the state hospital have to be transported by county sheriff in ankle shackles and belly locks, Bachmeier said. He added that this is an inhumane way to transport people with mental illness. "I think our county sheriff agrees with that," Bachmeier said, "and many county sheriffs across the state don't really feel that it is an appropriate way to transport them." He said his bill would allow the state hospital to obtain ambulances that can travel around the state and pick people up. He added that these ambulances will have people who are qualified to work with people with mental illness. Bachmeier is also working on a bill that he said is specifically for Havre's own Keely Wilson, who has Williams Syndrome. This bill will revise laws related to selling and manufacturing of pet food, he said. Wilson makes gourmet pet food. It is something she does to better herself and be a part of the community, Bachmeier said, and she has been doing it for a while. He said she has recently found out there are requirements she has to pass in order to continue selling her products. These requirements could result in thousands of dollars in fees and cost of testing. "In my opinion, someone who is operating such a small, local, specialized market shouldn't have to jump through those loopholes," Bachmeier said. "So (this bill) is cutting the red tape and, hopefully, we can help Keeley out." He added that he also hopes to adopt a vacant property registration act relating to property owners, like Sunrise Financial Group LLC. Sunrise Financial has purchased tax liens on property in communities including several properties in Havre and then does nothing with most of the properties, letting them sit vacant. Bachmeier said he is also planning to propose making the Montana's state rock 'n' roll song "Hippy Hippy Shake," which was written and first performed by Billings native Chan Romero and made famous by The Beatles. Bachmeier said he thinks five to 10 of his bills will pass next session. "A lot of these are not going to pass because of the budget," he said. "Money is tight. But a lot of the bills that (I am proposing that spend money) are centered around our community, so I'm going to be really pushing to make our local tax dollars work." Havre Daily News/Ryan Berry A gathering of Hill County Democrats listen to Rep. Jacob Bachmeier Tuesday, December 18, 2018 at the Eagles Club in Havre, Mont. The people at the party meeting also discussed Referendum 129, a law passed by the voters in November that prevents people from handing in other people's absentee ballots unless the person transporting the ballot is a family member or a person working for a government agency such as postal workers. Bachmeier said this referendum is unconstitutional because it limits people's abilities to vote. Bachmeier said the passage of the referendum was led by a fear campaign that was based on the fear of voting fraud, although there has never been a single case of fraud proven in Montana. He added that there was no information advertised about the referendum and people may have been unsure what they voted for. While the attendees of Tuesday's meeting did not say they wanted action in the next legislative session, they did discuss trying to repeal the referendum in the future. A state district judge recommended Casey O. Mummey be placed in a treatment program when he sentenced Mummey to three years for violating conditions of his release for failing to register as a violent offender in 2015. Judge Jon Oldenburg of Lewistown said Mummey has been in the system for 16 years, with all offenses likely drug-related, and while he wanted to put Mummey in a treatment program community-based treatment has not worked previously. Mummey also had convictions in 2002 on a charge of assault with a weapon in Hill County, in 2006 in Toole County on rioting, in 2013 in Hill County for failing to register as a violent offender. Dec. 5 in District Court in Hill County, he admitted violating conditions of his release on a three-year suspended sentence on the 2015 offense, including being discharged from a treatment center and testing positive for methamphetamine and THC, the active ingredient in marijuana. Oldenburg recommended Montana Department of Corrections place Mummey in the Nexus Treatment Program outside of Lewistown. He sentenced Mummey to three years with credit for time served in jail but no credit for street time. Press release The Montana Cattlemens Association hosted a discussion on Montana Country of Origin Labeling at its annual meeting Dec. 8 in Lewistown Montana. MCA Vice President Wally Congdon moderated the panel and said MCA shall be advocating for the passage of MT-COOL. He said MT-COOL was first adopted in 2005 but that bill had a sunset clause for when a National COOL was adopted, which happened in 2008. However, Congress rescinded COOL in 2015, leaving Montana without a labeling law. Consumers and cattle producers overwhelmingly support COOL, a release about the meeting said, so MCA along with the Montana Farmers Union and the Northern Plains Resource Council shall be advocating for restoration of MT-COOL. Congdon said the current draft of MT-COOL is very closely modeled on the 2005 law. The main addition is a clause defining what can be marketed as meat, beef, pork, lamb and poultry to prevent fake meat from using those terms. Northern Plains spokesperson Gilles Stockton said that the organization was formed in 1972 by farmers and ranchers whose property was threatened by the North Central Power Study that called for massive strip mining and multiple coal fired power plants situated throughout southeastern Montana. The issue was compounded by the fact that many property owners in that part of Montana owned the surface rights but the mineral rights had been reserved by the Northern Pacific Railroad. Montana law favors mineral owners who can legally condemn the surface for their mining purposes. Northern Plains was founded on the principles of protecting property rights along with the cultural and economic integrity of Montanas rural communities. The organization was part of the coalition advocating for MT-COOL in 2005 and will also be advocating for MT-COOL in this coming Legislative session. MFUs Chris Christiaens said both the National Farmers Union and the MFU has long supported COOL both on the Montana and national level. MFU was part of the supporting coalition in 2005 and is anxious to lend their influence for the restoration of MT-COOL, he said. He said all imported products and foods, except for beef and pork, are required to have a country of origin label, so it makes no sense that local products dont. The third panel member, Barnett Sporkin-Morrison representing the Food and Ag Development Center, said he is skeptical about MT-COOL actually performing as livestock producers believe it would. He based his argument on three main points: the lack of a National Livestock Identification System; the conviction that beef producers should not be opposing other aspects of agriculture such as pulse growers; and market research that shows that consumers may be in favor of labeling but will not pay more for U.S.-produced beef. A debate from the packed crowd and panel members followed his presentation. The sense of the discussion was: NAIS: Members said people should not confuse animal identification for marketing purposes with identification for veterinary surveillance. It is true that some consumers would like information about the farm or ranch of origin of their beef purchase, but meeting that preference should be a marketing option by producers engaged in a branded beef program, they said, adding that no reason exists for the U.S. government to require all producers provide farm of origin information for no compensation. It was further noted that COOL was working very well without NAIS until it was rescinded in 2015. It was simply a matter of tracking the 20 percent of beef that was being imported rather than the 80 percent that was domestically produced. Others said that, apparently, pulse growers are very concerned about the wording of policies meant to define what is meat and what are meat-like substitutes derived from vegetable proteins. The pulse growers were vocal at the MFU annual meeting, saying the MFU policy was not discriminatory to the pulse growers. Someone in the audience pointed out that cattle producers are not telling anyone to not eat foods derived from beans, but they should not be allowed to call it meat or beef. Other discussion was about the Country of Origin Label that was required starting in 2011 and stopped in 2015. In that short time, it looked as though COOL was having a positive influence on the market, people at the meeting said. Cattle prices certainly crashed after COOL was rescinded in 2015. Congdon said a small market preference study in Nebraska showed that consumer preference went up for beef originating in the U.S., Canada and Australia while beef from Central America and South America went down. People at the meeting also discussed why the meat packers and their captive organizations, the National Cattlemens Beef Association and the National Pork Producers Council, were so opposed to COOL. They fought it from its first inception in 2002 until they were finally successful in killing COOL in 2015. Someone from the audience quipped, Follow the money. State Sen. Al Olszewski of Kalispell has requested the Montana Legislative Services Division review the MT-COOL draft. It is expected that both Republican and Democrat Legislators will sponsor the bill. The release said that MCA, MFU and Northern Plains all encourage their members, concerned producers and beef consumers contact their local legislator and insist that they vote for this bill. Warren L. Brown, 43, passed away due to natural causes on Sunday, December 16, 2018, at Fort Belknap HIS. Wake services will begin at 5:00 p.m. today, Wednesday, December 19, 2018, and will continue until his funeral, which will be at 11:00 a.m. on Thursday, December 20, 2018, all at the Fort Belknap New Community Center. Burial will follow in the Brown Family Cemetery at Three Buttes. Holland & Bonine Funeral Home has been entrusted with services and arrangements. Please visit Warren's online memorial page and leave a message of condolence for his family at http://www.hollandbonine.com. Warren was born on September 28, 1975, in Fort Belknap to William and Eleanor (Brockie) Brown. The family moved to Great Falls when Warren was very young, and he began school there. While in elementary school, the family returned to Blaine County to live in Harlem, where Warren attended school. While in junior high, the family relocated once again, this time to the Brown ranch at Three Buttes. He attended the Hays-Lodgepole schools and Flandreau High School, where he participated in rodeos. During his high school rodeo career, Warren rode rough stock, winning district and placing 11th overall in the state of Montana in saddle bronc riding. After school, Warren returned home, where he worked for Fort Belknap Housing for a short time. He then became a ranch hand working for various ranches, which he excelled at and continued to do throughout his working life, where he rode rough string. Warren married Myrna "Minnow" Cochran in 2009, and the couple had a daughter in 2010. They remained committed to each other until Minnow's death in 2014. He was a fun-loving man who loved to tease, especially the love of his life, his daughter, Marlee. Spending time with her was his favorite pastime, and he was very supportive of her, both in her education and her sports. He and Marlee attended the Set Free Church in Harlem nearly every Sunday. He also loved to ride and break horses. Warren was preceded in death by his parents, William and Eleanor Brown, and his wife, Minnow Cochran. He is survived by his beloved daughter, Marlee Brown of Harlem; sister, Ella Rose Brown of Fort Belknap; brothers, Doug J. (Shannon) Brown of Fort Belknap and Jeffrey J. (Lloydine) Brown of Ashland, MT; and numerous aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, nephews, and other extended family and friends. I met President George H. W. Bush, our 41st President, when he was a former President campaigning in Great Falls in 2000 for his son, then Presidential candidate George W. Bush. I introduced myself to the former President at the event at the Heritage Inn. While we posed for a photograph I told him I knew his son, Neil, from Bushs 1988 campaign. Bush asked about my family. We chatted about Glacier Park and our service in the Navy. Ive met and conversed with several Presidents over the course of my life. From my brief but memorable encounter with Bush, his uniqueness among them was his naturally gracious amiability. Tall and genteel in bearing, he radiated good will and kindness that immediately put me at ease. When I first learned of his passing it brought a tear to my eye. Former Vice President Dick Cheney described him as a gentlemans gentleman, you cant be around and not be a better person for it. I understand that. The passing of President Bush 41 brought a detailed review of his many accomplishments beginning with his record in World War II. He could have postponed, and perhaps even avoided military service, but instead enlisted at age 18, and became a combat pilot while still a teenager. His 58th mission was cut short when he was shot down, parachuting only after bombing his target. He went on to successfully complete a remarkable succession of high level responsibilities and missions that well qualified him to be Americas President, and respected leader of the free world. While there are ardent advocates for President James K. Polk, it is increasingly the view of historians that George Herbert Walker Bush will emerge as our nations greatest one term President. Certainly his accomplishments as both a war and peacetime President were great, but I think the greater greatness of our 41st President was his characteristic for doing what he believed to be the responsible thing, regardless of the consequences to himself. Bushs character projected kindness and gentleness of spirit, but also integrity and steely courage when either the actual or political guns were going off. Bush was self effacing and unselfish to the point to purposely avoiding talking about himself. Like his recently departed fellow traditional Republican John McCain, duty to country was not about himself, but causes and purposes greater than himself. In keeping with this, our system of government has functioned best when, as Thomas Jefferson observed, it involves give and take among opposing factions. Compromise for a greater good seems almost quaint today, but Bush understood that simple requirement of a functional democracy, and acted accordingly. Bush rose competently through the ranks at a time when both political parties were big tents consisting of liberals, conservatives and moderates, before we sorted into warring cultural and ideological camps. His goal was never to disrupt the institutions of government. It was, with thoughtfulness and care, to improve them. Today we are a better country because of his example. Bob Brown is a former MT Secretary of State and State Senate President. Bio sketch revisions remove reference to a four-year degree for Meadows U.S. Rep. Mark Meadows U.S. Rep. Mark Meadows, the House Freedom Caucus who had been prominently mentioned as a possible choice as President Trump's chief of staff, has had an update of his official congressional biography and Wikipedia biography. The biographical sketches no longer say that he earned a bachelor's degree from the University of South Florida. That's because he didn't, the Tampa Bay Times reported Tuesday. Meadows official biographical sketch on a U.S. House website listed his education as "B.A., University of South Florida, Tampa," said the story by the Tampa Bay Times, which also included a screenshot of the House bio. Instead of a four-year degree, Meadows earned an "associate of arts" from USF in December 1980, USF spokesman Adam Freeman told the Florida newspaper. That degree is "similar to a degree an individual might earn after completing two years at a community college," Freeman told reporter Steve Contorno. The House historian corrected Meadows' biography Monday after the Tampa Bay Times inquired about the discrepancy. Meadows spokesman Ben Williamson told the Hendersonville Lightning on Wednesday that no one in Meadows' office had made the Wikipedia revisions on Dec. 11 and that Meadows and his aides had never been the source of the references to a four-year degree from USF. The Washington press corps and newspapers that cover the 11th Congressional District, including the Hendersonville Lightning, have routinely repeated the reference to Meadows as a graduate of USF, sometimes reporting that his B.A. was in "business management." There's no business management degree for two-year students, Freeman told the Florida newspaper. The Tampa Bay Times was apparently looking into Meadows' upbringing and early adult years in the Tampa Bay area as the possibility increased that he would become Trump's third chief of staff. While several other possible candidates publicly took their names out of consideration, Meadows, one of the Trump's earliest and strongest supporters in Congress, made his interest clear. He told a reporter on Monday, Dec. 10, that it would be "an incredible honor" to serve in the White House. The next day, the Wikipedia page was changed. One day later, on Dec. 12, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders announced that Trump had eliminated Meadows from consideration. Congressman Mark Meadows is a great friend to President Trump and is doing an incredible job in Congress," she said. "The President told him we need him in Congress so he can continue the great work he is doing there. Not every reference to his college education has been changed to describe an associates degree. "He graduated from the University of South Florida with a degree in business management," Meadows' bio on the election news site Ballotpedia says, citing the National Journal as the source of the information. Although references to a B.A. or a degree in business management are common in stories about Meadows, the Tampa Bay Times report noted that "none of these stories directly quote Meadows claiming (to have) such a degree from USF. It also does not appear that Meadows has ever professed a four-year degree from USF on his Congressional website, according to a review of archived web pages." The person who tweaked the Meadows' Wikipedia bio made two other changes, removing a claim that he had "joined Sigma Chi Fraternity" at USF and that he previously had attended Florida State University. An FSU spokesman confirmed to the Florida newspaper that Meadows attended the university in 1977-78. On Wednesday the Wikipedia page had been updated yet again to reflect the facts the Tampa Bay Times uncovered. A serving garda has been convicted of careless driving causing the death of an elderly pedestrian four years ago. Warren Farrell (35), a garda serving in Clondalkin, Co Dublin, was on duty as the driver of a marked patrol car that was responding to a panic button call at a Topaz garage when the car struck Elizabeth Core. He had pleaded not guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to dangerous driving causing the death of the 75-year-old as she crossed Fonthill Road South, Dublin, on August 28, 2014. On Monday Judge Cormac Quinn advised jurors that they could convict Gda Farrell on a charge of dangerous driving causing death or of careless driving causing death. Guilty Yesterday afternoon, after around four hours of deliberations, the jury of six men and six women returned a majority verdict, finding him guilty of careless driving. Earlier, Judge Quinn told the jury that careless driving could be described as driving that falls below the standard of care and attention expected of a reasonably competent driver, creating a risk of harm to others. The defendant exhaled heavily and hung his head briefly after hearing the verdict. Judge Quinn remanded him in continuing bail to February 22 for sentence. James Dwyer SC, prosecuting, had asked the court to give the prosecution time to prepare victim impact statements. Members of the Core family, who were present in court throughout the trial, nodded that this date suited. Judge Quinn thanked the jurors for their service in what he said was a difficult case. He extended his sympathy to the Core family for their tragic loss. In his closing speech on Monday Mr Dwyer told the jury that Gda Farrell made an assumption that Ms Core was aware of the garda patrol car which the State contends was travelling at around 56-58kph at the point of impact on a road with a 50kph speed limit. He said this was an assumption he couldn't make, citing that the garda's "response driving course manual" states: "It must never be assumed that the sounding instrument will be heard by other road users and pedestrians." The jury heard there was conflict in the witness accounts as to whether the siren was active when the patrol car was on the Fonthill Road. Mr Dwyer said that Gda Farrell had a clear view of the pedestrian from 200m before the point of collision but that heavy braking only began at 10 to 13m before this point. "Having seen her he decided to continue to drive at the same speed. We have 187m to 190m of driving before hard braking takes place. Dangerous "Having seen her in the road, he didn't decide to ease off. His failure to slow down, or to stop, or to drive at a speed which allowed him to react, is dangerous driving by any standard," he said. Closing the defence case, Patrick McGrath SC told the jury that this was a terrible tragedy but that no crime was committed. "There are many situations where a tragedy occurs and no one is at fault," he said. He said this was a case where someone made an honest and what they believed at the time to be a reasonable decision which turned out to have consequences which they never intended and never foresaw. He urged the jurors to look at the decision-making process of a man who was being asked to respond to an incident as quickly as possible. Two Dublin women were pushing the boat out too far with compensation claims for injuries on a wobbling bus, a judge said yesterday. Circuit Court President Mr Justice Raymond Groarke told Jennifer Byrne (36) and her friend Michelle Dwyer (31) that there had been no negligence by Dublin Bus - but said they were entitled to recover damages from Dublin City Council. Judge Groarke told Dublin Bus solicitor Gerard O'Herlihy that a manhole cover had not been properly replaced following street works and this, in all probability, had been responsible for the bus "wobble". Damages Ms Byrne, of The Grove, Belgard Heights, Tallaght, Dublin 24, and Ms Dwyer, of Raheen Close, Tallaght, had each sued Dublin Bus and Dublin City Council for damages of up to 60,000 for injuries they suffered when the bus hit the open manhole. Both told the court that on July 25, 2013, they were passengers on the 56A when it hit the manhole on Cookstown Road, near Springfield, west Dublin. They said the bus lifted them up off their seats and they received whiplash injuries which lasted until their very recent recovery. Mr O'Herlihy had closely cross-examined both women on the extent of the injuries they claimed to have suffered in what, on CCTV, appeared to have been a very minor mishap. Judge Groarke dismissed the case against Dublin Bus and made an order for costs against the city council, who he held responsible, awarding Ms Byrne 5,836 and Ms Dwyer 7,915. He felt the medical evidence had been confusing as they were still complaining five-and-a-half years later while having received little or no treatment. He said both were intelligent ladies but he was entirely unimpressed because their injuries were relatively minor, and they were pushing the boat out far, too hard over their injuries. Murder victim Jastine Valdez died of asphyxia, an inquest confirmed before it was adjourned until next year. No members of the Valdez family were present for the opening of an inquest at Dublin Coroner's Court into the accountancy student's tragic death. Clearer A family liaison officer has been appointed, and Detective Inspector Frank Keenaghan applied to the court for a three-month adjournment of the case. "The family will be back in the jurisdiction at that stage and we will have a clearer picture," Det Insp Keenaghan said. The 24-year-old Filipino died of asphyxia, the inquest heard, following her abduction in Enniskerry, Co Wicklow, on Saturday, May 19. Depraved killer Mark Hennessy forced her into the boot of a black Nissan Qashqai in broad daylight on a busy road at 6.20pm, but a witness rang 999. Her body was discovered shortly before 3pm on May 21 in dense woodland near Puck's Castle in Rathmichael, South Dublin. The inquest heard that Ms Valdez's parents, Danny and Tess, travelled to the city morgue the following day to identify their tragic daughter's remains. The coroner's court heard a statement from Mr Valdez, saying how he travelled to the morgue with Garda Patrick Mackey of Bray Garda Station. "There I saw my daughter Jastine and I identified her as my daughter," he said in his statement. A post-mortem examination conducted by Deputy State Pathologist Dr Linda Mulligan gave the cause of death as asphyxia. Coroner Dr Myra Cullinane adjourned the inquest for further mention to March 14, and extended the condolences of the court to the Valdez family. Killer Hennessy (40) died from wounds to his arm and chest after he was shot by a garda at Cherrywood Business Park, Co Dublin, the day before Jastine's body was found. The Herald previously revealed that the kidnapper was leading a shocking secret life in the weeks before the murder. Gardai were investigating if the father-of-two was using a dating app to search for women with whom he could have extramarital affairs. His secret life - kept hidden from his wife - included abusing cocaine, drinking heavily and apparently using Tinder to meet women. For Subscribers Gangs: a 'four-letter word' some in the community won't acknowledge Gangs remain a way of life in Washington County and some are trying to find ways to address it The Agency Opens Puerto Vallarta Real Estate Office Beverly Hills-based, billion-dollar real estate brokerage and lifestyle company, The Agency has announced the opening of a new office in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. The new locale brings the tally of offices in Mexico to three, including Cabo San Lucas, and Punta de Mita. The office will be led by distinguished real estate veterans Alejandro Aldrete and Warren Brander. Together they will spearhead the growth of the new office and work in partnership with The Agency's network of brokers throughout the U.S., Mexico, Canada, and the Caribbean "Mexico is a country where we continue to see strong demand for luxury second homes from our international buyers, in addition to an increased appetite for branded residences and new development product," said Mauricio Umansky, CEO and Founder of The Agency. "We are very proud to represent the first One&Only branded residences in the world, located just a short drive from Puerto Vallarta, and we are looking forward to further expanding our portfolio and serving the community." Since launching The Agency in 2011, the firm has grown from a small group of agents to now 25 offices in major cities across the U.S., Mexico, Canada and the Caribbean, with close to 500 top-producing agents. The Agency continuously ranks among the top luxury firms and its agents are among the highest producers in the country, with Umansky named as the number 3 broker in U.S. by The Wall Street Journal Real Trends. "We have been fortunate to expand so rapidly since our inception due to the partnerships we have created with professionals like Warren and Alejandro," said Billy Rose, President and Founder of The Agency. "Both have deep roots in the Puerto Vallarta community and are noted amongst the best in the business. We look forward to further expanding our footprint in the region as well as throughout Mexico in due course." "Puerto Vallarta is a magical destination and I have had the honor to previously live and work in the region," Bartholomew said. "The expansion of The Agency in Puerto Vallarta signals an exciting new chapter for the market and we are looking forward to further serving buyers, sellers and renters." Alejandro began his career working closely with Mauricio 15 years ago. He has sold more than $500 million of real estate and works alongside some of the most preeminent developers in the U.S. and Mexico. In addition to his role at The Agency Puerto Vallarta, Alejandro also spearheads operations at the firm's Punta de Mita office. "Since launching The Agency in Punta de Mita two years ago, we have fast become one of the most sought-after and respected real estate companies in the area," Aldrete said. "I am looking forward to the exciting developments the opening of the second office will bring." Warren moved from Toronto with his family to Puerto Vallarta seven years ago. Prior to entering the real estate industry, he worked in banking and information technology in Canada. His expert knowledge of the market and excellent negotiation skills have allowed him to rise to be in the top 5 percent of sales agents in Puerto Vallarta. The Agency's Puerto Vallarta office will be located at Loft 268, Venustiano Carranza 268 Locale 1, Emiliano Zapata, Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, Mexico. Tel: +52 1 322-688-6922. About The Agency The Agency is a full-service, luxury real estate brokerage and lifestyle company representing clients in a spectrum of classes, including residential, new development, resort real estate, residential leasing and luxury vacation rentals. Since its inception in 2011, The Agency has modernized and advanced the real estate industry by fostering a culture of partnership in which all clients and listings are represented in a collaborative environment. Shunning the traditional brokerage model, agents share knowledge, spheres of influence, contacts and expertise, ensuring clients better representation and a true competitive edge.The Agency has closed more than $12 billion in real estate transactions since its inception and has more than 450 agents across offices in Beverly Hills, Boca Raton, Brentwood, Calabasas, Danville, DTLA, Los Cabos, Malibu, Nanaimo, BC, Noe Valley, Venice, Orange County, Pacific Palisades, Palm Springs, Pasadena, Palm Desert, Park City, Park City, Scottsdale, Sherman Oaks, Turks and Caicos, Punta de Mita, Puerto Vallarta, Palo Alto and Victoria, BC. The Agency has a full-service creative department, "The Agency Creates," which supports agents and new development clients with marketing and public relations efforts. The Agency assists developers in all aspects of a development life-cycle via The Agency Development Group. Xem them ... Tin bai cuoi cung Khong con du lieu e load Departmental leaders are among the most qualified public servants in the Federal Government. They are dedicated to ensuring the guidance and management necessary to support the health and well-being of the nation. Learn more about the Department's leadership: Secretary and Deputy Secretary Priyanka Chopra and Nick Jonas hosted their second wedding reception on Wednesday, in Mumbai. The newlyweds had previously hosted a reception in New Delhi on December 4, and will host another in Mumbai on Thursday. First pictures and videos from the reception have been shared online. Wednesdays party was held at the JW Marriott in Juhu, which was decked up with Nick and Priyankas signature NP logo. The party is being held for the media and close friends and family - similar to the kind held by Deepika Padukone and Ranveer Singh - while Thursdays reception will see Priyankas industry friends in attendance. Nick was spotted arriving in Mumbai earlier in the day. Priyanka wore an off-shoulder Sabyasachi anarkali, while Nick wore a dark suit at the party. Priyankas mother, Dr Madhu Chopra, wore a shimmery saree. Priyanka and Nick were married in accordance with Christian and Hindu traditions on December 1, at Jodhpurs Umaid Bhawan Palace hotel, wearing Ralph Lauren and Sabyasachi ensembles. New pictures from their wedding were being shared online as recently as Tuesday. Nick recently shared his plans to start a family with Priyanka, saying, I definitely want to be a father someday. After their wedding, the couple jetted off for a quick vacation in Oman. They will reportedly be spending their honeymoon over New Years in Switzerland. Follow @htshowbiz for more The year 2018 has been a year of love and new beginnings. While Alia Kapoor Ranbir Kapoor and Ali Fazal Richa Chadha paint the town red with their love, the world is still waiting for rumoured lovebirds Arjun Kapoor Malaika Arora to come out in the open about their link-up. On the other hand, Arjun Rampal also seems to have found love again as he is rumoured to be dating international model Gabriella Demetriades. And so is Arbaaz Khan who has already confessed his relationship with model Giorgia Andriani. Here are the couples who made headlines this year Alia Bhatt and Ranbir Kapoor are going strong on the personal front. Alia Bhatt Ranbir Kapoor Alia Bhatt and Ranbir Kapoor have been the most talked about couple this year. After dropping hints of a brewing relationship, Ranbir had confirmed in a GQ interview, Its really new right now, and I dont want to over speak. It needs time to breathe and it needs space. As an actor, as a person, Alia is whats the right word? flowing right now. When I see her work, when I see her act, even in life, what she gives is something that Im aspiring to for myself. Its new for us, so let it cook a bit. Not only this, the two also have the approval of their respective parents. On being asked about the same, Rishi Kapoor had said, Neetu likes her, I like her, Ranbir likes her. Get it? while Mahesh Bhatt also stood in unison and told The Telegraph of course theyre in love. You dont need to be a genius to get that! Alia had attended Ranbirs grandmother Krishna Rajs funeral in Mumbai, and FaceTimed with Ranbir as he had left for his father Rishi Kapoors treatment a day before. Alia even visited the family in New York. Arjun Kapoor and Malaika Arora at a party. (Instagram) Malaika Arora - Arjun Kapoor A lot continues to be written about Malaika Arora and Arjun Kapoors alleged relationship while the two refrain from clearing the air. On being asked about it by host Karan Johar, Arjun confessed on chat show Koffee with Karan that he is not single. Rumoured ladylove Malaika said about the episode, It was hot, honest and I loved every bit of it. According to a Pinkvilla report, the two have also taken a joint property in a posh locality in Lokhandwala, Mumbai. Apart from being spotted together on frequent lunch and dinner dates, the two were seen hanging out at Amrita Aroras house and partying at Karan Johars residence. Arbaaz Khan and Giorgia Andriani. (Instagram) Arbaaz Khan Giorgia Andriani Arbaaz and Malaika called it quits in March, 2016 and seem to moved on. While Malaika is rumoured to be dating Arjun, Arbaaz has made his relationship public with his girlfriend Giorgia Andriani. Confessing the same, he told Zoom, At this point of time yes, I am dating and I dont know where its gonna go but people think they know. The Italian model often shares romantic captions along with their pictures and expresses her love for India in her Instagram posts. She continues to accompany him for public events on a regular basis. Giorgia also seems to have been accepted by his family as she is now a regular at all their functions. The two are reportedly planning to get married next year. Arjun Rampal with Gabriella Demetriades. (Viral Bhayani) Arjun Rampal Gabriella Demetriades Arjun Rampal announced his separation from wife of 20 years, Mehr Jessia, in May, 2018 and was soon linked up with South African model and actor Gabriella Demetriades. The rumours of their relationship gained momentum as the two continued to be spotted together by the paparazzi. They were seen together post a lunch date at Hakim Aalim and a dinner date at Pali Bhuvan. The two seemingly confirmed their relationship on social media by sharing the same picture from a snowcapped tourist destination. While Gabriella shared a picture with her back to the camera with a love emoji, Arjun shared the same picture with the caption, Endless love. Farhan Akhtar withShibani Dandekar. (Instagram) Farhan Akhtar Shibani Dandekar Farhan Akhtar and Shibani Dandekar seem to be the latest couple to have indirectly confirmed their relationship. Farhan had shocked his fans by announcing his separation from wife Adhuna Bhabani in January, 2016. While he was linked up with his earlier co-stars Shraddha Kapoor and Aditi Rao Hydari, Shibani and Farhan seemed to have confirmed their relationship with a picture on Instagram. After Shibani shared a picture from one of their vacations, she left many wondering about the mystery man in the picture. Farhan later shared the same picture a month later, confirming his identity with only a love emoji as the caption. Harshvardhan Rane with Kim Sharma. (Instagram) Kim Sharma Harshvardhan Rane Mohabbatein actor Kim Sharma and Paltan actor Harshvardhan Rane were rumoured to be dating for quite some time as they continued to be spotted together. Their vacation pictures on social media also spoke volumes about their love for each other. On being asked about the same, Harshvardhan recently confirmed to Hindustan Times, Of course I am in a relationship. He added, Theres nothing to deny obviously, we are seen everywhere. We havent kept anything hidden till now. Since this is not work-related, I dont know how to talk about it much, or what to discuss about it. Ali Fazal and Richa Chadha Ali Fazal and Richa Chadha keep sharing their feelings on social media along with fun-loving pictures that set them apart from other celebrity couples. Recently, Ali Fazal gave a surprise to his ladylove and took her to the Maldives on her birthday. Richa couldnt be happier and praised Ali on Instagram. The two went on to share their romantic pictures from the beach destination with love written all over them. Both of them are doing well in their respective careers and continue to go strong on the personal front. Ali had earlied told Times Now, I like to keep these moments to myself. I keep it close. I dont like discussing it, Richa is too close to my heart. I dont know what more to say but I keep my friends and her close. Follow @htshowbiz for more Actor Ranveer Singhs Simmba will hit the theatres soon and he could not be more excited about it. The actor has looked forward to working with film director Rohit Shetty and venture into the mass-entertainer variety of movies. In a recent interview with DNA, Ranveer talked about working with Rohit, getting married to actor Deepika Padukone and also her reaction to the film. Ranveer said that marrying Deepika was the highlight of his life this year and that she has seen bits from the movie and loved his look in the film. On my birthday, my family and Deepika visited me on the sets in Hyderabad and Rohit sir was kind enough to show them some portions, which she loved. Usually, she is extremely critical of my work, but she liked what she saw of Simmba. She said, This is masala done really well, he said. In real life, she wasnt sure whether this moustache with its twirled edges would work for me, but she knew it worked wonderfully for the character of Simmba. She thought I was looking fit and hot. And I was happy to hear that, he added. Ranveer recently won the Star Screen Award in the best actor category for his work in Padmaavat as Alauddin Khilji. He thanked his wife and family for their support in his speech.In the film, may be I didnt get my queen but in real life, I have got my queen. Baby, I love you. In the past six years, if I have achieved anything, it is because you have kept me grounded and centred. So thank you for everything and I love you, he said on stage and brought tears to Deepikas eyes. Ranveer tied the knot with Deepika in an intimate twin wedding ceremony in Italy last month. She said in an interview to PTI, Being best friends with each other is truly the dynamic. We are deeply in love with each other but above all we are best friends. We are each others support system, companions. We have a lot of fun together. Being each others best friend is truly paramount, where you can share silences, laughter and light moments. To have somebody who makes the passing of the lifetime a pleasant experience everyday is very rare and precious. Simmba also stars Sara Ali Khan and will release on December 28. Follow @htshowbiz for more From Richard Nixon to Barack Obama, successive US presidents, as a matter of policy, aided Chinas rise in the naive hope that a more prosperous China would liberalise economically and politically. But now a fundamental shift in Americas China policy is under way, opening the path to greater Indo-US collaboration. The evolving paradigm shift, with its broad bipartisan support, is set to outlast Donald Trumps presidency. China, a trade cheat that has also employed non-tariff tools to punish countries as diverse as South Korea, Mongolia, Japan and the Philippines, is getting a taste of its own medicine. By scripting the Canadian arrest of the Huawei founders daughter, the US has shown it has more powerful non-tariff weapons. The action has rattled Chinas elites: They are angry but also fearful that any one of them could meet a similar fate while travelling to the West. The arrest was significant for another reason. As former US defence secretary Ash Carter says in a recent essay published by Harvard University, Beijing has a history of staging provocations that coincide with high-level diplomacy. For example, the start of President Xi Jinpings 2014 state visit to India coincided with a deep Chinese military incursion into Ladakh. The fact that the Huawei arrest coincided with the December 1 Trump-Xi dinner meeting in Buenos Aires signalled to Beijing that others can pay it back in the same coin. Americas ongoing policy shift, however, should not obscure how its China fantasy, as a book title describes it, called it, facilitated the assertive rise of its main challenger. Such was the fantasy that President Bill Clinton got China into the WTO by citing Woodrow Wilsons vision of free markets, free elections, and free peoples and claiming the admission would herald a future of greater openness and freedom for the people of China. Instead, China has become more autocratic and repressive, building an Orwellian surveillance state. The end of the 45-year-old US conciliatory approach to China does not necessarily signify the advent of an overtly confrontational policy or even a new cold war. China, for example, still gets a free pass on human-rights abuses. The US has slapped no sanctions on China for detaining more than a million of its Muslims in internment camps. Imagine the US response had Russia set up such camps. The policy shift appears more about finding economic levers to blunt Chinas strategy of global expansion and ascendancy. In Asia, for example, China is seeking to displace the US as the leading power and contain its peer rivals, Japan and India, by seeking to enforce a 21st-century version of the Monroe Doctrine, including through geo-economic tools and territorial and maritime revisionism. It has gained de facto control of much of the South China Sea. A key question is whether the US policy shift is occurring too late to stop Chinas global rise or even compel it to respect international norms and rules. Having become strong through assorted trade barriers, quotas, currency manipulation, forced technology transfer, intellectual property theft, and industrial and export subsidies, China is unlikely to fundamentally change its behaviour in response to the new American pressure. Xi, Chinas new self-crowned emperor, would undermine his position and his strategy to build a Sino-centric Asia by yielding to American demands. Xis regime will seek to bear the US pressure at some cost to Chinas economic growth but without materially altering its policies or global ambitions. The 90-day truce in the trade war that Xi negotiated with Trump in Buenos Aires meshes with Beijings two steps forward, one step back strategy to progressively advance its ambitions. Nevertheless, the US, by embracing a more realistic and clear-eyed approach, is signalling that Chinas economic and strategic aggression will no longer go unchallenged. Even if the US fails to compel Beijing to respect international rules, its policy change signifies that the free ride that China has long enjoyed is ending a free ride that has brought the security of its neighbours, including India, under pressure. Indeed, Trump has shown how active pressure on China, as opposed to Indian-style imploration, can yield concessions. Whereas deference to China usually invites bullying, standing up to it generates respect and compromise. In Buenos Aires, while the spotlight was on the Trump-Xi talks, the US presidents joint meeting with prime ministers Shinzo Abe and Narendra Modi the first ever such trilateral underscored the centrality of Japan and India to the American goal to build a stable balance of power in Asia. Indeed, the entente between Asias richest democracy and its biggest is a principal pillar of Washingtons newly unveiled free and open Indo-Pacific strategy. Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist The views expressed are personal A court in Jharkhands Latehar district on Wednesday held eight men guilty of thrashing two cattle herders to death in March 2016. Mazlum Ansari, 32, and Imteyaz Khan, 13, were hanged from a tree after they were beaten up. Their lynching triggered nationwide protests. A spate of lynchings across the country, including in Jharkhand, followed and prompted the Supreme Court in July to urge the government to enact separate laws to prevent such mob violence. First class judicial magistrate Rishikesh Kumar sent the eight convicts, Mithilesh Prasad Sahu, Pramod Kumar Sahu, Manoj Kumar Sahu, Awadhesh Sahu, Manoj Sahu, Arun Sao, Vishal Tiwary, and Shahdev Soni, to jail until the quantum of punishment is pronounced later this week. The families of Ansari and Khan said the two were taking their cattle for sale to a nearby village fair when cow vigilantes lynched them Five of the accused were arrested within 24 hours. Three absconding accused later surrendered to a local court. They were later released on bail. Read More | Jharkhand mob lynching shows colonial forms of violence flourish in modern India The Latehar lynching was among a series of hate crimes in Jharkhand. In May 2017, a mob lynched four cattle traders at a village in Saraikela Kharswan district. A month later, a dairy owner, Usman Ansari, was attacked and his house was set ablaze after a headless cow carcass was found near his house. In June 2017, a mob lynched a trader accused of transporting beef in Ramgarh district. A local court awarded life imprisonment to 11 accused involved in the case this year. Ten of them were later granted bail. A mob set ablaze three houses belonging to a man, who allegedly slaughtered cows on Eid in Giridh district in September 2017. In June 2018, a mob lynched two Muslim cattle traders in Godda district. Also read | Maoists attack road project, burn earthmovers, tractors Another fire broke out at Mumbais ESIC Kamgar Hospital on Wednesday. No report of casualties yet. The fire broke out at 7:54 pm. Fire tenders were rushed to the spot and the situation was brought under control. The pidder piller (electric box) situated in the ESIC hospitals premises was set ablaze which led to the accident. This is the second incident of fire that took place in the same hospital in one week. On Monday, the first incident of fire was reported on the ground floor of the state-run Employees State Insurance Corporation (ESIC) Kamgar Hospital in Mumbais Andheri. The level three fire was reported at 4:20 pm from the fourth floor of the ESIC Hospital, which shot up to level four at 4:54 pm, fire department officials had said. The fire had killed eight people, including a two-month-old infant, while 147, mostly patients and staff, were injured. The ruling Bharatiya Janata Partys (BJP) youth wing will launch a two-month campaign to mobilise support for Prime Minister Narendra Modis re-election in 2019, two leaders familiar with the matter said. The Nation with NaMo and Vijay Lakshya [victory target] 2019 campaign is expected to be launched from Delhi on January 12. The launch will coincide with the birth anniversary of 19th century spiritual leader Swami Vivekananda, whom Modi has described one of the people he has drawn inspiration from. The campaign follows a national convention titled Vijay Lakshya 2019 the Bharatiya Janta Yuva (BJYM) Morcha organised in November. The theme has been adopted as the BJPs campaign slogan for the parliamentary election due next year. The BJYM will hold 14 programmes as part of the campaign that will conclude with a bike rally on March 2. The campaign will cover all 29 states. The aim is to build a positive sentiment for Modi before the election, one of the BJP leaders said. BJP chief Amit Shah addressed BJYM workers in Delhi last week and asked them to lead the 2019 election campaign. The BJP wants BJYM activists to reach out especially to the young voters in the 18-35 age group. About 150 million people in this group would be eligible to vote in the 2019 parliamentary elections. It is a significant number given that 814.5 million people were eligible to vote in the last national polls. The activists plan to reach out to the young voters through campus ambassadors in universities and colleges across the country. These ambassadors will then engage with larger audiences on their campuses to showcase Modis firm policies. They will tell them how he has dealt with issues such as so-called Urban Naxals, a term used for Left-wing intellectuals with alleged Maoist links, and cross-border terrorism from Pakistan with an iron fist. A book on Urban Naxals. too, will be launched in the coming months. Fellows at the Bharatiya Janta Yuva Morcha Study Circle have are working on the book. The circle is BJYM chief and Parliament member Poonam Mahajans a brainchild. She has roped in students and young leaders with interest in research on various subjects for the circle. We are sure of a two-thirds majority in the next election, Mahajan said. People across the country have overwhelming faith in the prime minister and through the Vijay Lakshya 2019 campaign, we will act as a medium to repose that faith. Another outreach programme will be launched through about 100 legal aid centres that the BJYM plans to set up to provide assistance to victims such as that of the practice of instant divorce among a section of Muslims. The government tabled a fresh bill to criminalise the practice in Lok Sabha on Monday after failing to have the legislation passed in December last year. The BJP has projected its campaign against the practice as part of its attempts to ensure Muslim women empowerment. We are trying to touch base with as many people as we can, said another BJP leader. The leader added the outreach is aimed at capitalising on the goodwill Modi enjoys and to convert it into support for him. The BJYM, too, will form teams of young workers for every polling station on the lines of the booth management system Shah has successfully implemented to win elections. They will ensure a good turnout in Modis favour, the second leader said. The first leader said youth voted overwhelmingly for Modi in 2014. We are aiming to increase this support base. The second part of the BJPs youth outreach strategy relates to increasing the partys presence on social media. This will be done through enrolment of online volunteers, the second leader said. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has filed a chargesheet against 21 persons including prime accused Brajesh Thakur, the man who was managing NGO Seva Sankalp Evam Vikash Samiti, in connection with the Muzaffarpur home abuse case. The chargesheet, in a sealed envelope, was filed in the special POCSO court of ADJ-1 RP Tiwari. Defence lawyer Annu Babu said, Since the chargesheet was filed in a sealed envelop, we couldnt get any information on its contents, especially the relevant sections, invoked against the accused. The case pertains to sexual exploitation of 44 girls at the shelter home. The social welfare department had given a contract to the NGO to run the shelter home in Muzaffarpur town in 2013. Thakurs NGO was selected over other NGOs in the bid as he was said to have close connections with senior politicians of the ruling party and some bureaucrats. Medical tests had found that as many as 34 of the 44 girls lodged at the government-funded-shelter home were sexually assaulted. The Supreme Court had described Thakur as a very influential man and recommended shifting him to Punjab jail from Bihars central jail. The Muzaffarpur municipal corporation has now begun dismantling the four-storeyed shelter home building after they found it was constructed in utter violation of building laws. The sensational case had first come to limelight in April this year following a social audit report prepared by TISS on the status of all state-funded shelter homes in Bihar. The TISS, in its report, had found that inmates had been sexually exploited in the shelter home. Following the report, the Muzaffarpur police lodged an FIR against 11 persons, in which nine accused, including seven women, were arrested and forwarded to judicial custody on June 2. A chargesheet was filed in July by the police and the case was later transferred to the CBI. On December 12, the CBI informed the apex court that the chargesheet in the Muzaffarpur case was ready but the agency was discussing whether to file a consolidated final report or have a separate one on each victim. The CBI told a bench headed by Justice Madan B Lokur that the issue was being discussed as there were independent victims and witnesses in the case. Initially, the CBI was entrusted with investigation of the Muzaffarpur shelter home case, but last month, the apex court asked the agency to probe cases of 16 other shelter homes in the state. The Patna branch of Enforcement Directorate, which is also probing the case, has summoned Thakurs wife Asha and son Rahul Anand for questioning on December 24 and 26 respectively. The Centre will be sending professional divers and equipment to Meghalaya to help trace and retrieve miners trapped inside a coal mine in Ksan village of the states East Jaintia Hills district. Speaking to HT over phone from Tura, chief minister Conrad K Sangma expressed gratitude to the Centre for the help, but said that water level was not receding and the pressure was still very powerful, hampering efforts by divers and personnel on the seventh day in their bid to rescue at least 13 people, who are feared dead. But we are doing all we can and will leave no stone unturned. I assure you, he said. Sangma also revealed that ace diver Jaswant Singh Gill, who hails from Amritsar and had saved 65 miners from the flooded Mahabir mine in Rani Ganj area of West Bengal in 1989 and was subsequently awarded with the Sarvottam Jeevan Raksha Padak in 1991, was coming to the states aid. Jaswant Singh Gill is not from any government agency but has voluntarily offered to lend his expertise in the rescue efforts and were very grateful for that, Sangma said. On Tuesday, pumping operations were severely impeded due to inclement weather involving heavy rain and on Wednesday the water level has increased by 26 inches, rescuers said. According to Satish Kumar Sastri, commandant of the 1st NDRF Battalion, it is strongly suspected that the inflow of the water is not only from the adjacent abandoned coal mine, which was believed to have been breached by the coal miners, but perhaps also from the Lytein river, whose water level, according to sources, is higher than the coal mine and had risen similarly by 26 inches. Analytical tests on water samples collected from the accident site, the adjacent coal mine and the river which were elaborately tested at the district laboratory of the Jowai division of the state public health engineering department have revealed that the pH level is 6.5 for all 3. So we are now strongly suspecting that water is also flowing in from the river. Besides yesterdays heavy rain is not making it better, Sastri told HT. East Jaintia Hills superintendent of police (SP), Silvester Nongtnger said with the weather becoming better, rescue efforts are back on track since early morning, but due to Tuesdays heavy rain, the water level has risen again. The SP said it was difficult to ascertain for sure how many people are trapped inside. As per our information, we initially had 13 names of miners which include three from Lumthari village in the area, six from West Garo Hills and four from neighbouring Assam. But yesterday we have information of one more person was missing, after his family filed a missing person report. He is Abdul Kalam SK from Magurmari village in West Garo Hills, Nongtnger elaborated. East Jaintia Hills deputy commissioner (DC) FM Dopth has requested the state government for more powerful pumps as advised by the director of mine safety from the Directorate General of Mines Safety who visited the site. Ashok Kumar, the mine safety director based in Guwahati, has suggested to the district administration to procure 100 hp submersible pumps with head of 400 feet and capacity of 500 gallons per minute as the present ones (50 hp) being used will not suffice. He has also suggested the use of heavy duty girders to hold the weight of the pumps which can be used in only 3-4 shafts as all interconnected. Meanwhile, the Meghalaya Human Rights Commission (MHRC) has filed a suo moto case against the state government asking it to pay compensation to the families of trapped miners, now feared dead. The notice was served to Meghalaya chief secretary. Given the gravity of the case, the State Commission is of the firm opinion to grant interim relief to the next of kin of those unfortunate miners and such action of passing interim order shall be considered on the next date fixed herein and necessary order(s) will be passed accordingly, read a statement signed by the Commission secretary Aldous Mawlong. Directing the Meghalaya chief secretary to conduct an enquiry, Commission secretary Aldous Mawlong asked him to submit a detailed report within 30 days. Expressing concern over the matter, the MHRC noted that the illegal mining continued despite the ban imposed by the National Green Tribunal (NGT). More than a month after cyclone Gaja ravaged the coastal districts of Tamil Nadu, the Centre is yet to release funds for relief and restoration works, the state government told the Madurai Bench of Madras high court on Wednesday. The Centre is yet to release Tamil Nadus due share of Rs 1,000 crore from the disaster management fund. The state has also submitted additional inputs sought by the Centre on the disaster, the states counsel submitted. The Division Bench of Justices KK Sasidharan and PD Audikesavulu then asked the counsel for the Centre whether details provided by the state was sufficient and when would funds be released. The counsel representing the Centre submitted that the team of central officials which visited the cyclone-ravaged areas will submit its report on the calamity on Thursday. The quantum of relief assistance would be decided based on that and released accordingly, he said. The Bench, hearing a batch of petitions, seeking higher compensation for losses suffered by farmers and the general public in the cyclone and pleading for a direction to declare the tragedy as a national disaster, posted the matter to January 4. Meanwhile, a team of officials from Tamil Nadu, led by chief secretary Girija Vaidhyanathan is in Delhi to submit additional details on the cyclone havoc and press for release of funds. Cyclone Gaja made its landfall near the coastal Vedaranyam district, ruining life and property in Nagapattinam, Tiruvarur, Thanjavur and Pudukoittai districts. It had claimed 63 lives and Tamil Nadu has demanded Rs 15,000 crore for long-term restoration and rehabilitation programmes, besides Rs 1,500 crore for speeding up relief work. Chief minister Edappadi K Palaniswami met the Prime Minister on November 22, and presented a memorandum pressing for liberal financial assistance. But, this is not the first time that the state has complained about the Centre not releasing funds for cyclone relief. Earlier, Tamil Nadu revenue minister RB Udayakumar and cooperation minister Sellur K Raju have blamed the Centre on this count. Not even a paisa has been sanctioned by the Centre towards Gaja cyclone relief. The Rs 354 crore released by the Union Home Ministry was Tamil Nadus share of the Disaster Management Fund, due for June and December. Even if Gaja had not hit the state, it should have been released, Udayakumar had said. The Centres delay in releasing funds has given a handle for the opposition with DMK president MK Stalin accusing the Centre of discrimination against the state. Delhi court, while reserving its order on the bail application of Christian Michel the alleged middleman in AgustaWestland case for December 22, sent him to judicial custody till December 28. There Central Bureau of Investigation produced Michel, a British national, at the end of his four-day custody and sought 14-day judicial custody for him stating that it does not need to interrogate him further. Appearing for Michel, his counsel Aljo K Joseph said his client has been cooperating with CBI since 2016 and has already been in custody for 14 days. Michel, who suffers from dyslexia, is physically and mentally weak, he added. Joseph argued that Michel has voluntarily given all required documents to the investigating agency, and that these same facts were produced before an Italian court which acquitted him. His reference is to a case launched by Italian authorities alleging wrongdoing in deal, which involved the purchase of 12 AgustaWestland helicopters by the Indian air force. Appearing for CBI, special public prosecutor DP Singh said: He has high links in ministries, with people in politics, bureaucracy, many of whom are witnesses in the case. We brought him with so much difficulty. Some new facts have emerged and we need to have follow ups on those. He has not been a cooperative witness. A lot more has to be unearthed. He has no roots in India here. He has property here but he may sell these and go away, Singh said. Michel was extradited to India from Dubai on December 4. Central assistance for key women-centric schemes has seen a decline in 2018-19, largely because of poor implementation by the states. However, Prime Minister Narendra Modis pet project, Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao (BBBP), saw nearly a 100% increase in allocation of funds, parliament was informed last week. Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao (BBBP) was launched by Modi in January, 2015, in Panipat, Haryana, as one of the flagship programmes of the Government, to address the skewed gender ratio in many parts of the country and to also empower young women. According to information provided by the women and child development ministry in the Lok Sabha on 14 December, funds released for BBBP by the central government increased from 3,318.42 lakh in 2017-18 to 6,876.67 lakh thus far this year. Schemes such as Swadhar Greh Scheme, which is aimed at providing relief and rehabilitation to destitute women and women in distress, saw a decline in funds released by the Centre. The funds released for the scheme declined from 5,717.1 lakh in the previous financial year to 755.43 lakh so far this year. Swadhar Greh Scheme has become a centrally sponsored scheme and funds are released to the state governments/Union Territories for further disbursement to the implementing agencies w.e.f. 01.04.2016. Subsequent instalments are released only after receipt of Utilization Certificate and Statement of Expenditure of previous grants. Due to non receipt of requisite documents/information, funds were not released for second instalment for 2016-17, 2017-18 and first instalment for the year 2018-19, an official from WCD ministry said. An inquiry committee appointed by the National Commission for Women (NCW) recently found physically challenged women in Swadhar Grehs (shelter homes) living in terrible conditions. Across 26 Swadhar Grehs in West Bengal, Odisha and Uttar Pradesh, the committee found that women were physically tortured and that facilities to treat mentally challenged women were absent. There are 559 such homes across India. Based on the inquiry report submitted by NCW, the WCD ministry has directed all state governments to initiate swift measures to ensure that Swadhar Greh home residents lead their life with dignity, the ministry said on Monday. Another scheme known as Ujjawala, for prevention of trafficking and for rescue, rehabilitation, reintegration and repatriation of victims of trafficking for commercial sexual exploitation saw a decline in funding too from 2,450.54 lakh the previous financial year to 523.72 lakh thus far in 2018-19. Officials attributed this too to delays by state governments. As per revised Ujjawala Scheme guidelines w.e.f. 01.04.2016, the scheme is to be implemented through the state governments. The grant could not be released to the State Governments due to pending Statement of expenditure, Utilization Certification along with Physical Progress Report from state governments to release the grant for year 2018-19 despite multiple letters, DO letters and reminders sent by this ministry, the official cited in the first instance added. Most states have not been able to utilise the amount already released and did not request for a second instalment of the grant, the official said. States are requesting this ministry to revalidate the unspent amount to utilise the same in current financial year 2018-19 and this amount is not reflected in the release amount. This Ministry will release the funds under Swadhar Greh and Ujjawala schemes as soon as requisite documents are received from the States, the official added. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, December 19) Two days after the coronation of Philippines' pride Catriona Gray at the 67th Miss Universe, Filipinos are still gushing about Miss Vietnam H'Hen Nie, who landed in Top 5 of the prestigious beauty pageant. Netizens are stanning the 26-year-old H'Hen for breaking typical beauty standards by wearing pants, embracing her golden tan skin, and rocking her pixie cut hair during the coronation on Monday. But beyond her fierce look lies the struggle and the success of a woman who worked her way to the top using her influence to help educate girls around the world. H'Hen belongs to an ethnic minority called Rade, which only makes up five percent of Vietnam's population of 95 million. She and her six siblings were raised by her parents, who were farmers. She moved from ak Lak province to Ho Chi Minh to pursue her dreams instead of marrying in her early teens, which is the custom in their culture. But her solo life in the city was far from easy. She had to work as a maid, a nanny, a tutor, and a leaflet deliverer to help pay for her studies and life in the city. She also succeeded in modeling in a country where women with fair skin were the ones deemed beautiful. The beauty queen is a global ambassador of Room to Read, a nonprofit organization that seeks to transform the lives of millions of children, particularly young girls in developing communities, by focusing on literary and gender equality in education. "Growing up as an ethnic minority in Vietnam, I have seen firsthand that education is the only way to break the cycle of poverty. I want children everywhere to flourish, dream big and have the resilience to overcome obstacles," she wrote on her official Instagram page. Netizens can't help but marvel at her inspiring story. During the Top 5 Q&A, H'Hen was asked if she thought the "Me Too" movement has gone too far. Some noted that her translator did not do her answer justice. A viral tweet posted by a netizen who claims to be a Vietnam native speaker translated her answer. "Protecting women's well-being/health and protecting women from sexual abuse is the right that every woman needs. Everyone of us needs to be protected and we need freedom. Thank you." Some noted that the fight for the Miss Universe crown would have been more exciting if Miss Vietnam made it to the Top 3 alongside Gray. The Delhi High Court Wednesday quashed the summons issued against Union minister Smriti Irani in a defamation complaint filed against her by Congress Leader Sanjay Nirupam. The court, however, dismissed a similar plea by Nirupams seeking to set aside the summons issued against him in a cross-defamation complaint filed by Irani. The court said the case against Nirupam will continue. Justice R K Gauba passed two separate verdicts on the two leaders plea. In her plea, Irani had sought quashing of the summons issued to her by a trial court on June 6, 2014. She had also sought quashing of the complaint filed by Nirupam. Nirupam had challenged a magisterial courts March 11, 2013 order summoning him in Iranis defamation complaint against him. He had also sought quashing of the January 1, 2013 complaint filed by Irani. Hamid Ansari, who spent years in jail on charges of spying and was released by Pakistan on Tuesday, has reached New Delhi, reports news agency ANI. I feel really good coming back home. I am very emotional right now, Ansari said, according to ANI. Ansari had entered Pakistan on November 12, 2012, to meet a woman whom he had befriended on social media. The 33-year-old was arrested in November 2012 and handed a three-year sentence in 2015 for possessing a fake Pakistani identity card. Ansari, a resident of Mumbai, had been lodged in Peshawars central jail after being sentenced by the military court. His jail term ended on December 15 and he was repatriated after the Peshawar high court gave the Pakistani government a months deadline to complete the process on Thursday. He was brought to the Attari-Wagah border where he crossed over to the Indian side on Tuesday evening. As soon as Ansari crossed over to India, he bowed down and kissed Indian soil. His mother broke down. His mother Fauzia, father Nehal and brother met him at the border and was hugged by them as he crossed over into India. A Border Security Force (BSF) official present there said Ansari was examined by his mother. She embraced him and then examined him thoroughly to see whether he has any torture marks, he said. For us, it is like Hamid has taken a new birth. We did not celebrate any festival since my son went missing, but this is the day of celebration, his father said before receiving his son. He said that his son had not entered Pakistani with an intention to harm someone, he had gone there for a noble cause only, and that is why their prayer has been addressed by the god. Haryana governments advertisements across the state on the occasion of Gita Jayanti state that the state has witnessed an increase in its sex ratio. As per the advertisement, the state has recorded 922 female births per 1,000 males in 2018 while health department figures tell a different tale. However, as earlier reported in Hindustan Times on December 12, health department records state that the state recorded 910 female births per 1,000 males from January 1-October 31, 2018. Furthermore, according to the health department records, the state witnessed 922 female births per 1,000 males only till May 2018 and after that the ratio declined to 911 till October 31. The government hoardings are showing the figures from January to May only. A health official said that Haryana observed sex ratio of 922 female births from January 1 to May 31 this year, after which there was a steady decline. This year, the state cant reach the figures close to 922 female births per 1,000 male births. We can hardly reach the last years figures, not above that. The state reported a decline in sex ratio between May 1 to October 31 but we are getting reports that sex ratio has increased in November and in starting weeks of December, the officer added. According to Haryana health department figures, the state had recorded 876 female births in 2015, 900 female births in 2016 and 914 female births in 2017, per 1,000 male births. In 2018, the state recorded 910 female births per 1,000 male births from January 1 to October 31, while in 2017, the state recorded 911 female births per 1,000 male births for the same period. Despite repeated attempts, neither the health minister Anil Vij nor the director of health services Dr Satish Aggarwal could be reached for a comment on the issue.. Less than a week after the government had asked the Supreme Court for a correction in its order on the Rafale jet fighter deal, the Congress has continued to keep up the pressure on the government. We want a JPC as well only get to know everything when Parliament members sit and look into the files. A JPC was formed in Bofors and 2G cases also. How can there be a typo? Had it been one word it wouldve been understandable, entire paragraph cant be a typo, Congress Lok Sabha floor leader Mallikarjun Kharge told ANI on Wednesday. Last Saturday, the defence ministry had filed an application before the Supreme Court for the correction of a paragraph in its order on the Rafale jet fighter deal. Though the courts ruling effectively vindicated the governments stand that due process had been followed in reaching the 59,000 crore deal, and had said that there was no reason to order a probe by the CBI. However, the Congress pointed out that the judgment had referred to the governments stand that the pricing details had been shared with the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India, and that the government auditor had submitted a redacted report to parliament. It also indicated that parliaments Public Accounts Committee (PAC) had examined the report. That error had been picked up by the petitioners and the opposition which had claimed that the government had misled the court with its original submission. How does the Supreme Court judgment have this line that Rafale pricing has been examined by the PAC. Now, we have to ask the government, where is this CAG report? Congress president Rahul Gandhi had said at that time. The original paragraph in the order (paragraph 25) said: The pricing details have, however, been shared with the Comptroller and Auditor General (hereinafter referred to as CAG), and the report of the CAG has been examined by the Public Accounts Committee Only a redacted portion ...was placed before the Parliament and is in public domain. In its submission asking for a correction, the defence ministry had said that the court seems to have misunderstood it, which was, it added, in the form of bullet points. According to the ministry, the second bullet point read: The Government has already shared the pricing details with the CAG. The report of the CAG is examined by the PAC. Only a redacted version of the report is placed before the Parliament and in public domain. The petition had argued that the use of the word is was a description of the procedure usually followed and asked the court to replace has been in paragraph 25, which seems to suggest that the act has already taken place, with is. Ideally, of course, the governments original submission should have used will be instead of is to make things clear. They have given wrong information to the court and on the basis of that information, the court has given its verdict. Now, I will request all the PAC panel members to fix a meeting to summon the attorney general and the Comptroller and Auditor General. We want to ask them when did they submit the Rafale report to the House and when did it come to the PAC, when did they come to give evidence, and when did we present the PAC report to Parliament? Kharge had said on Saturday. Responding to Congress allegations of misleading the court and over which the party has been stalling the functioning of Parliament, Union law minister Ravi Shankar Prasad had said at that time that the error was a technicality. He is going into technicality, I am going on substance. The court verdict is in 34 para(graph)s. It has dealt with all the issues (raised by Rahul). If he (Rahul) wants to find faults to do politics, I have nothing to say, Prasad had said. Arun Jaitley had earlier too responded to the Congress demands for a JPC saying that the Supreme Court judgement was clear and that the demand for a JPC probe was intended to prevent a discussion in Parliament. The creators of falsehood will still persist with falsehood even at the cost of their own credibility. Only their captive constituencies will clap, he had written in a blog post on his site. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Wednesday again questioned Hyderabad-based businessman Sana Satish Babu in connection with its controversial first information report (FIR) against the agencys special director Rakesh Asthana, said an official familiar with the development. Sana Satish Babu was called for questioning again on Wednesday. It was the third consecutive day that he was questioned in the case, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Before he was called for questioning, Satish Babu had moved the Delhi high court seeking protection from arrest in the case. His petition is pending in the high court. CBI officials say he has been questioned to verify contents of his complaint in the case. Three cancer patients were registered in the out-patient department (OPD) of Indias largest cancer institute, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) at Haryanas Jhajjar area, after its soft launch on Tuesday. The 710-bed hospital opened its OPD services around five years after its foundation stone was laid by the then prime minister Manmohan Singh in 2014. The hospital is expected to be fully operational by December 2020. A soft launch is important to check whether things are functioning smoothly. Today our doctors conducted a combined OPD and registered three patients. We will start in a phased manner, with the laboratory starting by next week, said Dr GK Rath, head, NCI. X-ray facilities at the hospital will start by end of December, CT scans by early January and radio therapy equipment in next three-four months, officials said. Finalised at a cost of 2,035 crore, the project was approved by the cabinet committee on December 26, 2013, and the hospitals foundation stone was laid on January 3, 2014. The aim was to strengthen research and also bring down the patient load at All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) cancer centre. We will start admissions by January 14, 2019, and the hospital will be fully functional by December 2020. In the initial few weeks we will have five or six doctors running the 17 OPDs. Of the 2,705 total sanctioned staff strength, the first phase recruitment is for 636 staffers, of which 100 have already been appointed, said Dr Rath. The state-of-art cancer centre is a part of the AIIMS-II campus at Jhajjar, for which the Haryana government gave 300 acres of land to AIIMS. The NCI has come up in 35 acres. After the NDA government took over, a bhoomi pooja was held on December 12, 2015, by newly-appointed health minister JP Nadda, who labelled the project as independent Indias largest government-funded hospital. The institute has been modelled after United States National Cancer Institute (NCI). It is developed as the premier institute for all activities related to cancer in the country and will have the linkages with all regional cancer centres. To increase the tertiary care facilities in cancer, the government is supporting the establishment of 20 State Cancer Institutes (SCIs) and 50 Tertiary Care Cancer Centres (TCCCs) in different parts of the country, to mentor cancer-related activities in their respective areas. The NCI will act as an apex body for the network of the SCIs and TCCCs and shall develop and mentor Cancer related activities. Apart from treatment, the centres main focus will be translational research in India-specific cancers. We dont have enough India-specific research at the moment, especially with new cancer drugs coming almost every other day. We are blindly following the west, so this institute will help strengthen our research, said Dr PK Julka, former dean, AIIMS, Delhi. Bharatiya Janata Party chief Amit Shah on Wednesday said the party has accepted the results of the recently-concluded assembly elections in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan. But it is imperative and in the countrys best interests, he said, that his party wins the next elections in the Hindi heartland and other areas. He also downplayed the connection being made between the state elections and the impending 2019 Lok Sabha elections. The results in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh are definitely not favourable for the BJP, but it is not right to link them with the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. State polls cant be linked to Lok Sabha poll results; both elections are fought on separate issues. We accept the peoples mandate (in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh); we will introspect on the poll results, Amit Shah said at Republic Summit in Mumbai. It is imperative not only for the BJP but also for the country that the BJP wins the next elections in the Hindi heartland and other areas, he said. The BJP has suffered a massive blow with the loss of the three main Hindi heartland states of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh to the Congress in a very closely-contested election. In Rajasthan, the Congress won 99 seats out of the 199 that went to poll, while in Madhya Pradesh, the BJP managed to win 109 seats against the Congresss 114. The Congress formed the government in both states with the help of Mayawatis Bahujan Samaj Party, Akhilesh Yadavs Samajwadi Party and Independents. Amit Shah also spoke about the looming threat of a mahagathbandan (grand alliance) and said that the reality of the oppositions alliance was different. It doesnt exist and is a bhranti (an illusion), he said. On December 17, led by Congress president Rahul Gandhi, the opposition had put up a show of unity with the top leaders of the grand alliance attending the swearing in ceremonies of Ashok Gehlot in Rajasthan, Kamal Nath in Madhya Pradesh and Bhupesh Baghel in Chhattisgarh. Conspicuous by their absence at all three ceremonies were the two big guns of Uttar Pradesh politics Mayawati and Akhilesh Yadav. Both of them had opted to stay away from the swearing in ceremonies without giving any reason for their decision. A day after the election results were announced, BSP supremo Mayawati had offered her partys support to the Congress with the objective of keeping the BJP out. However, while announcing her support for the Congress, she had also let in a taunt saying that her party was supporting the Congress even though their ideologies were different. Congress president Rahul Gandhi patted himself on the back on Wednesday over the farm loan waivers announced by his partys governments in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. Its done! Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh & Chhattisgarh have waived farm loans. We asked for 10 days. We did it in 2, he tweeted, hours after Ashok Geholot government in Rajasthan announced waiver of farm loans up to Rs 2 lakh. Madhya Pradesh chief minister Kamal Nath and his Chhattisgarh counterpart Bhupesh Baghel had announced the same a day earlier. The three chief ministers had taken charge on Monday. The move was part of a Congress promise before the elections to waive off farm loans within 10 days of coming to power. Gandhi had on Tuesday tweeted that his party had managed to wake up chief ministers of Assam and Gujarat who have waived farm loans and unpaid rural power bills, respectively, in their states, and said it was now time for sleeping Prime Minister Narendra Modi to wake up. The Congress party has managed to wake the CMs of Assam & Gujarat from their deep slumber. PM is still asleep. We will wake him up too, he said. A 40-year-old Maoist leader, jailed for killing dozens of state police personnel, has launched a fast-unto-death protest after he was not allowed to sit for the National Eligibility Test (NET) as he reached the examination venue late. Arnab Dam, a dropout from Indian Institute of Engineering (IIT) Kharagpur, was arrested in 2012 and has been in jail since. He headed the 34-member guerrilla platoon of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist) in West Bengals Purulia district during 2009-2011. He was ready for the exam centre well ahead of time but jail officials took him out for the venue late and he reached the venue at 9.25 am, which was five minutes before the exam was to start. The gate was closed by that time and he was not allowed entry, alleged his lawyer Ajoy Ghosh. He is deeply aggrieved and alleged that the jail authorities intentionally took him to the venue late, Ghosh said. Examinees were to enter the venue by 9am. Dam alleged he had informed authorities of Kolkatas Presidency Jail 12 days in advance about his exam schedule but they told him on Tuesday morning that no arrangement was made for escorting him to the venue. He recently obtained court orders for appearing in the State Eligibility Test (SET) and NET, passing which would make him eligible for a lectureship. NET is conducted by National Testing Agency to select candidates for assistant professor and junior research fellows or both in Indian universities and colleges. He has acquired bachelors and masters degrees in history from jail, securing first division in both, and applied to various universities for enrolling in a PhD programme. On December 2, he appeared for SET as the first jailed person to appear for the test that makes one eligible for teaching jobs. After returning to the jail, he launched the fast-unto-death. In a letter addressed to the jail super, he has placed three demands the correctional services minister and the director general of police (prison) will have to meet him and promise in writing of taking the responsibility of his PhD and appearance in other exams. Also, jail officials responsible for Tuesdays incident must be punished, human rights activist Ranjit Sur said. Sur alleged the authorities delayed Dams arrival at the exam venue because the administration feared the demand for his release would get stronger once he cleared the test. The jail superintendent could not be reached for comments. I have ordered a high-level inquiry on why he could not appear for the examination. It has to be found out whether it was due to any fault of the jail superintendent or because of any lapse on the prisoners part, correctional services minister Ujjwal Biswas said. The son of a retired judicial magistrate, Dam studied mechanical engineering at IIT-Kharagpur for three semesters but dropped out in 1998 to join the Maoists. Dam was linked, among others, to the Maoist attack in February 2010 on a camp of Eastern Frontier Rifles (EFR) in Silda in which 24 personnel were killed. When he was arrested in July 2012, an AK-47 rifle, two magazines and some cartridges were found on him, the police had claimed. Dam had 31 cases against him. He was either acquitted or granted bail in all except the Silda attack, for which sections of the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) were slapped on him. The Kerala High Court on Wednesday rejected a plea by Malayalam actor Dileep, one of the accused in a case related to the sexual assault of a woman actor, for an investigation by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and said he cannot demand which agency should probe charges against him. Dileep had moved the high court six months ago, saying some officers probing the case had implicated him based on the statement of the first accused, a notorious criminal, and that the probe was conducted in a pre-planned manner. But the state government opposed his petition, saying he was trying to delay the trial and that he had no right to demand which agency should conduct the probe. The court accepted the states view and said the probe was going in the right direction. The attack on 33-year-old woman actor took place in February 2017 in Kochi. She was allegedly abducted and assaulted by a gang led by Pulsar Suni in a moving car. They set her free after three hours but threatened to circulate a video of the assault if she approached the police. However, she filed a complaint the same day and Dileep was arrested five months later on charges of hiring a criminal gang to settle personal scores with her. He is the eighth accused in the case, which has witnessed many twists and turns. In judicial custody for 85 days, Dileep was granted bail under strict provisions. He moved different petitions as the trial was set to begin in a court in Angamally in Ernakulam district. In a different plea, he had moved the Supreme Court seeking a copy of the memory card containing visuals of the sexual crime on women actor. However, the state government opposed it and said it should not be regarded a document and that there could be possibilities it could be leaked to embarrass the victim further. However, senior counsel Mukul Rohtagi who appeared for Dileep argued that visuals were doctored. The top court will consider this plea on January 23. The Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation (MIDC) police on Wednesday registered a first information report (FIR) against four employees of the construction company working at the Employees State Insurance Corporation (ESIC) Kamgar Hospital in Andheri, including site supervisor Nilesh Mehta and his assistant Nitin Kamble. Police have arrested Mehta and his assistant Nitin Kamble. The other two accused are welders working at the hospital. After two days of investigation, the police have concluded that the fire that broke out at the ESIC Kamgar Hospital on Monday was caused by sparks generated from welding work. The old wing was being renovated by the contractor. The sparks turned into a blaze because there were strips of rubber lying around, which caught fire. We have arrested Mehta and Kamble and will soon arrest the two welders. They have been booked under section 304 A (punishment for causing death by negligence), 337 (causing hurt by act endangering life or personal safety of others), 338 (causing grievous hurt by act endangering life or personal safety of others) and Maharashtra Fire Protection and life safety measures act 2006, said Navinchandra Reddy, deputy commissioner of police, zone 10. A police officer on the condition of anonymity said that the company received its tender from Delhi. We kept asking for the no objection certificate from the fire department from them, but they were not able to show it to us. It was negligence on their part to keep the flammable object and do welding at a place which led to the rubber catching fire, said another officer. The National Investigation Agency (NIA) on Wednesday carried out an early morning raid on the houses of seven persons in various parts of Tamil Nadu for their alleged links with the terrorist group ISIS. The raids were conducted at Otteri in Chennai, Tindivanam near Villupuram, Kuniyamuthur, Ukkadam, and Variety Hall Road in Coimbatore district between 6.45 am to 8.30 am. Last September, the NIA had arrested the seven accused: Ismail, Ashiq, Salaudin, Samsudeen, Jaffer Siddique, Anwar and Faizal on charges of conspiring to murder Hindu outfit leaders like Arjun Sampath (of Hindu Makkal Katchi) and Anbu Mari (of Shakti Sena). During enquiry, the Special Investigation Division (SID) of the Tamil Nadu CB-CID found out that they had connections with the ISIS movement. Following this, the Union home ministry has ordered the NIA to probe the case. From inputs collected from the accused, the NIA suspects that the seven could have conspired to target more Hindu outfit leaders in the state. Hence, they conducted the searches, said an official familiar with the development. According to sources, the NIA sleuths have seized CDs, bank transaction documents and books spreading fundamentalist ideology. NIA is also probing the murder of C Sasikumar, a Coimbatore-based spokesperson of Hindu Munnani, an organisation that has been lobbying for the rights of Hindus and fighting against alleged forced conversions. Terming the farm loan waiver a one time relief, the Gujarat government on Wednesday hinted that there is no immediate plans to waive off farm loans. Gujarat deputy chief minister Nitin Patel said the government would instead continue to meet the fundamental requirements for farmers. Patels statement came in the wake of the Congress party writing off farmers debts in the three states of Madhya Pradesh, Chhatishgrah and Rajasthan, fulfilling a promise made by the party ahead of the Assembly polls. Our style is different. We aim at overall development of agriculture and make it sustainable. We want to make farmers happy, and not just through loan waiver , said the minister adding, Not 8, but the Gujarat government provides 10 hours electricity to farmers and recently we have provided new 1 lakh farm electricity connections. Gujarat is leading in providing drip irrigation infrastructure and irrigation supply has been maintained in Narmada canal command area. All these at the cost of 900 crore. Loan waiver is one time relief. Gujarat government has been meeting all the requirements to offer a permanent solution to the farmers. Earlier in the day, chief minister Vijay Rupani, replying to a tweet by Congress president Rahul Gandhi, said, Under the leadership of PM Narendra Modi, Gujarat has always taken steps in favour of farmers. For the same reason, Gujarat farmers for one more time gave the BJP a chance to serve them. Farmers have rejected the Congress for the seventh consecutive time. The tweet by Gandhi read, The Congress party has managed to wake the CMs of Assam and Gujarat from their deep slumber. PM is still asleep. We will wake him up too(sic) The Congress party has managed to wake the CM's of Assam & Gujarat from their deep slumber. PM is still asleep. We will wake him up too. Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) December 19, 2018 Rupani was referring to the BJP victory in 2017 assembly elections. Lok Sabha adjourned for the day Lok Sabha adjourned for the day amid din after passing Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill. Lok Sabha passes Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill The Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill, 2016 passed in Lok Sabha LS witnesses uproar;Cong demands JPC, govt rejects it again Lok Sabha was adjourned for the second time on Wednesday amid uproar after the government rejected the opposition demand for a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) probe into the Rafale deal. As the House re-convened for the second time in the noon, members from the Congress, AIADMK and TDP trooped into the Well, holding placards and shouting slogans Lok Sabha adjourned till noon Lok Sabha adjourned till noon amid protests by AIADMK, Congress and TDP members over various issues Rajya Sabha adjourned Rajya Sabha adjourned for the day following uproar over Rafale deal and Cauvery issues. No Rajya Sabha session on Dec 24, 26 Rajya Sabha wont be in session on December 24 and 26 because of Christmas. TDP MPs protest in front of Gandhi statue Delhi: TDP MPs protest in front of Gandhi statue in the Parliament premises over their demands for #AndhraPradesh. pic.twitter.com/aYTzb92SEo ANI (@ANI) December 19, 2018 AIADMK MPs protest over dam construction across Cauvery AIADMK MPs protest in front of Gandhi statue in the Parliament premises against the construction of dam across Cauvery river. CPI(M) and Congress give adjournment motion notices CPI(M) and Congress give adjournment motion notices in Lok Sabha over Rafale and demonetisation respectively, reports ANI. The Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) of union minister Ram Vilas Paswan has put the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on notice over seat sharing talks, asking it on Wednesday to finalise the agreement for Bihar by December 31. We want the seat sharing issue be resolved by December 31, as elections have come closer and a lot of preparation has to be done, Bihars animal husbandry minister and LJP leader Pashupati Kumar Paras said in Patna. The BJP president should immediately call a meeting of NDA leaders and hold joint discussions, added Paras, Paswans younger brother. Another senior LJP leader in Delhi said the dispute between the two parties was not restricted to just seat sharing. We flagged a number of issues; such as farm unrest, impact of demonetisation, jobs and many more, to BJP leadership, but, they have not taken note of it, the second LJP leader said. The outcome of the recent elections has proved that these challenges are real and we cant ignore them. LJP leaders, this person claimed, raised this matter with their BJP counterparts and senior ministers on at least five or six occasion in the last several months, but the latter did not respond. We asked them to share details of how many jobs have been created in the last four years... We have not received any answers, the LJP leader said, adding that the matter will be flagged again to the BJPs top leadership this week. Interestingly, Paras ultimatum came a day after Paswans MP son Chirag Paswan sent out two tweets, cautioning the BJP that it should treat its remaining allies with respect and that any delay in talks would hurt the NDA. BJP president Amit Shah announced last month that his party and the Janata Dal (United) of Nitish Kumar would contest an equal number of seats, leaving the rest for other allies. The Rashtriya Lok Samta Party of OBC leader Upendra Kushwaha was part of the NDA when the announcement was made. Kushwaha exited the NDA on December 12. A broad agreement has been made that the BJP and the JD(U) will contest 17 seats each, and six will go the LJP. But we are waiting for a formal announcement, a second LJP leader said. Shah said in September that an announcement would be made in four weeks...Then we were asked to wait till Kushwahas decision. Then we were asked to wait till the results of the elections are out. It is already a week after that, this person added. A senior BJP functionary said the announcement was expected soon.This BJP leader confirmed requesting anonymity that the broad agreement was to share 17 seats between the two bigger partners and leave the rest for Paswan. The BJP contested 30 seats and won 21 in 2014. The LJP fielded candidates in 7 and won 6, while Kushwaha won all 3 where he put up a candidate. The JD(U) contested separately and could win just two seats. Nitish Kumar returned to the NDA fold last year, necessitating readjustment of seats between the alliance partners. Paswan said last month that his party will seek a honourable share, and Kushwahas exit prompted the LJP to ask for at least six seats and a Rajya Sabha berth for Ram Vilas Paswan. Bihar has about 16% SC population, and Paswans alone accounts for 4-5% of States total population. The LJP has a strong following among Paswans and its transferable votes makes it a key player in the state. In one of his tweets, Chirag Paswan pointed out that the NDA has seen the exit of its two major allies, Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and the RLSP. JD(U) spokesman Rajiv Ranjan Prasad said the tuning between all three constituents of the NDA in Bihar is perfect and that the tweets are not any cause for alarm. A BJP national general secretary in New Delhi dismissed any threat to the alliance. LJP is not going the RLSP way. We are in constant touch and the alliance is intact. Bihar BJPs spokesperson Nikhil Anand added that there is a strong bonding between NDA leaders. Its just a matter of time and we need to keep patience. LJP is our trusted ally, he said. Kushwaha said the LJP should leave the NDA. Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, ridiculed for his silence by his political opponents for years, had taken an unusual dig at Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the release of his book, Changing India, on Tuesday. Dr Manmohan Singh said he wasnt the PM who was afraid of talking to the Press. The day after, Union minister for minority affairs Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi hit back at the ex-PM. He is a senior leader and a former PM. When he was PM he used to talk on someones order and script, even now he is doing the same. He should realise that PM Modi doesnt need prompter, script or a director, Naqvi said on Manmohan Singhs statement. Former prime minister Manmohan Singh had made the statement at the launch of his book Changing India, a compilation of his speeches and papers in six volumes on Tuesday in New Delhi. People say I was a silent Prime Minister. I think these (six) volumes (of his book) speak for themselves. I wasnt the PM who was afraid of talking to the press. I met press regularly and on every foreign trip I undertook, I had a press conference on board or immediately on return, he had said. Watch: PM Modi doesnt need script: BJPs comeback to Manmohan Singh on swipe at Modi Manmohan Singhs statement was an obvious dig at Prime Minister Narendra Modi who is yet to host a press conference since taking charge. However, this was not the first time that the former PM has taken a swipe at PM Modi. In November, at the book launch of Congress leader Manish Tewari, he had said, My advice to the prime minister is that he should exercise due restraint becoming of the office of the Prime Minister. Earlier this month, immediately after the campaigning for the assembly elections in five states had come to an end on December 5, Congress president Rahul Gandhi too had criticised PM Modi for never addressing a press conference in his tenure and had said that he should try addressing reporters as it was fun to be asked questions. Rahul Gandhi had also tweeted Btw its been 1,654 days since u became PM. Still no press conference (sic)?. Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday urged the BJP workers not to remain passive and effectively counter the Congress partys propaganda on the Rafale deal. The Prime Ministers interaction with the party workers of South Chennai and Villupuram district in Tamil Nadu besides Puducherry via the Namo app, turned into an offensive against the Congress. During the nearly 40-minute interaction through video conferencing, a party worker from Villupuram, Sundar, drew the attention of Modi to the Congress belligerence over the Rafale deal and asked how to counter it. To this, the Prime Minister appealed to the cadre to reach out to the people and expose the claims being made by Congress party and its president Rahul Gandhi. Congress is threatening every institution of democracy. Now, it has started threatening the Supreme Court, as it had not got a favourabble verdict in the Rafale case, he told the audience. Since the days of Emergency, the Congress has been like that. Even now, it is behaving the same way. It has turned more cunning, Modi said. According to him, reaching out to the people is the best way to blunt the Congress propaganda. People are the force in preserving and protecting democracy. Party workers should reach out to them, he said. Investigators have found an Uttar Pradesh Police constable guilty of unprovoked firing that left a 38-year-old executive with an American multinational tech firm dead in Lucknow on September 29. Apple executive Vivek Tiwari was shot dead after two police constables on motorcycle patrol stopped him while he was driving back home. The killing provoked outrage as it followed a spate of alleged extra-judicial killings of suspected criminals in Uttar Pradesh. Chief minister Yogi Adityanath had announced a zero-tolerance fight against criminals after taking office in March 2017. A seven-member special investigation team, which was constituted to probe the killing, has concluded that constable Prashant Chowdhary shot Tiwari dead without any immediate threat to his life. Chowdhary has been found guilty of murdering Tiwari without any provocation. The probe has revealed that the second constable had no common intention to kill Tiwari, said inspector general Sujeet Pandey, who headed the SIT. He underlined the killing was not a result of a planned conspiracy but happened on the spur of the moment. In its 16-page report submitted to police chief Om Prakash Singh on Wednesday, the SIT exonerated Chowdharys colleague, constable Sandip Kumar, who was with him when Tewari was shot dead, from the murder. Kumar has been charged under IPC section 323 for voluntarily causing hurt to Tiwaris ex-colleague, Sana Khan, who was with him when he was killed. Chowdhary has been charged under IPCs section 302 (murder). A group of legislators from Punjab will soon visit the Andaman and Nicobar islands to find out why the role of freedom fighters from the state, who were lodged in Port Blairs Cellular Jail used by the British to exile political prisoners, was being overlooked. A special committee of House members is slated to set off for the Andamans under MLA Harpartap Ajnala. The date of the visit is yet to be decided. Two committees of the Punjab assembly have already visited the islands in the last two months. The first committee went in October this year to study its local government model and the second went to study the welfare of the Dalits. An eight-member entourage of local bodies committee of Punjab assembly went on a weeklong trip in October to the Andamans and raised a bill of 3 lakh. Led by Ajnala, it also comprised jails minister Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa and AAP MLAs, Baljinder Kaur and Jagtar Singh. In November, four MLAs comprising the Dalit welfare committee headed by Nathu Ram visited the Andamans for which the state footed a bill of 2.5 lakh. Punjab assembly speaker Rana KP Singh said the Ajnala committee will prepare a report on inmates from Punjab in the colonial prison and how their contribution to the countrys freedom struggle was being overlooked. The light and sound show held every evening near the Cellular Jail highlights the role of Bengali revolutionaries (such as Batukeshwar Dutt, Subodh Roy and Barindra Ghose) but does not mention freedom fighters from Punjab. The national museum too has pictures of freedom fighters from Bengal while those of Punjab martyrs have been removed. The Port Blair airport is named after Veer Savarkar (a Marathi), Singh said. Based on the committees report, the Punjab assembly will pass a resolution asking the Centre to give due recognition to Punjabs heroes, he said. In May last year, a delegation of the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) had also submitted an inquiry report, saying the contribution of Sikhs to the freedom struggle is being undermined in the Andamans. The report had claimed that names of Sikh martyrs and Punjabis imprinted on stones were lower than the actual number and pictures of Sikh freedom fighters were removed in the name of repair and not hanged again. It had also met the then lieutenant governor Jagdish Mukhi to request that three roads in Port Blair should be named after Bhagat Singh, Dr Diwan Singh Kalepani and Madan Lal Dhingra. The SGPC also said the number of Sikh revolutionaries sent to the gallows or imprisoned in Cellular Jail was more than the Bengalis. Akali Dal MP Prem Singh Chandumajra had also raised the issue in Parliament, asking the Centre to revisit the light and sound show. Union commerce and industry minister Suresh Prabhu said on Tuesday that the Supreme Courts ruling on the Rafale fighter jet deal has exposed the lies being peddled by the Congress. Addressing a press conference at the BJP headquarters in Jaipur, Prabhu said the Congress has insulted the people of the country and the army by lying on the Rafael issue. After the SC verdict, the BJP has launched a nationwide attack on the Congress in a bid to expose its lies on Rafale. We are ready to discuss the issue in parliament but Congress is running away from a debate. If there is a debate in parliament, then the entire country will know how the Congress has misled the people by its lies, said Prabhu. Prabhu said the people want to know why there was no government-to-government deal during the UPA tenure. The Congress kept matters related to defence pending and compromised on the security of the country. He said the Congress has raised questions on the decision-making process, the pricing of the aircraft and offset partner. But the Supreme Court has given its ruling on the three issues and held Congress allegations baseless; the apex court said there is no need for a probe into the Rafale deal. Denying that the government had misled the Supreme Court, Prabhu said it had sought to correct a typo in the court ruling. The government is well within its rights to get a correction done. It has not given any false statement in the court. Also watch | India to become $5 trillion economy in next eight years: Suresh Prabhu Despite the BJP losing assembly elections in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, Prahbu said the BJP would win the 2019 Lok Sabha elections in all three states. He said Prime Minister Narendra Modi remains the most popular leader in the country. People think differently on the assembly and Lok Sabha elections. They vote on different issues. In Lok Sabha polls people will vote on the basis of the work done by the government of prime minister Narendra Modi in the last five years for all sections of the society. Prime minister Narendra Modi will once again be PM in 2019. Congress spokesperson Archana Sharma said the BJP had made a false submission and tried to mislead the Supreme Court. They made a false submission on the CAG report being placed before the Public Accounts Committee. They erred and are now trying to cover up, Sharma said. Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chief Amit Shah on Wednesday said he was confident that his party would be able to forge an alliance with the Shiv Sena for the national and Maharashtra assembly elections due next year. They [the Shiv Sena] will be with us. [Maharashtra chief minister] Devendra Fadnavis has held talks at his level. Until it [the alliance] is sorted, I would not speak, but at both my level and Devendra jis level, we have held talks with [Shiv Sena chief] Uddhav [Thackeray] ji, Shah said at an event in Mumbai. He referred to the BJPs loss in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Chhattisgarh assembly elections and added it would not be right to link it to the 2019 national polls. Shah said the proposed grand alliance of opposition parties would not be at the national level. He said it would be at the level of states and hence would not have an impact on the 2019 national polls. Shiv Sena leaders maintained Thackeray was in no mood to go back on the partys plans to contest the polls alone. If he [Shah] is confident about the alliance, then my best wishes are with him There are no discussions about an alliance, said Shiv Sena leader Sanjay Raut. The Shiv Sena had boycotted Prime Minister Narendra Modis foundation stone laying ceremony for metro corridors in Kalyan and Pune on Tuesday. On Wednesday, the Shiv Sena mouthpiece, Saamna, reported about empty chairs at the function and said the Modi wave has waned, and the crowd has reduced. The BJP has been making overtures to the Shiv Sena. But it has continued its attacks on the BJP. Shah had in April said he sincerely wishes that Shiv Sena aligns with the BJP. He met Thackeray in June. The ties between the two parties, which share power at the Centre and in Maharashtra, have been strained for a few years now. Another Shiv Sena leader said the BJP is warming up to its allies after the poor poll performance. After they lost three states, they have realised that they cannot go without the Sena in Maharashtra, said a Shiv Sena functionary on condition of anonymity. The Shiv Sena is expected to continue its aggressive stand against the BJP. It is unlikely to contest alone but will try to put pressure on the BJP to get a better deal in the seat sharing for the assembly elections. Transgender activists called on Tuesday for an overhaul of the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill, saying the draft legislation criminalised the community, denied them constitutionally guaranteed rights, and was silent on the key demand of reservation. Transgender activists and groups held protests across India against the bill, which was passed in the Lok Sabha on Monday. We reject the bill in its present form which upholds the criminalisation of transpersons and denies opportunities in education and employment by being silent on issues of reservation. We would urge the Rajya Sabha to redirect the bill to a Select Committee, said Anindya Hajra, an activist. They said a provision that mandates a screening committee to issue identity certificates violates the right to self-identify ones gender, which was confirmed by the Supreme Court in a 2014 judgment. The bill is to be introduced in the Rajya Sabha this session. Another objection was the criminalisation of traditional community occupations such as begging and sex work, which are punishable by imprisonment for up to two years under the bill. No doors are opened for employment, no definition of discrimination is offered and the bill doesnt ask what kind of barriers transpeople face. It makes things worse, said Karthik Bittu Kondaiah, an assistant professor at Ashoka University. Other objections included the low quantum of punishment for violence against transgender people two years in the bill as opposed to seven to life under the IPC for sexual assault, for instance, and the absence of reservation, another provision in the apex courts 2014 judgment. I have a problem with the words genderqueer in the definition of transgender. Moreover, transpeople should get reservation on socio-economic condition, said activist Laxmi Narayan Tripathi. The transgender rights bill was first passed in the Rajya Sabha as a private members bill by DMK MP Tiruchi Siva in 2015. The next year, the government introduced its version of the bill in the Lok Sabha, which was sent to a standing committee. After deliberations for almost a year, the committee made several recommendations, some of which were incorporated in the draft of the bill Union social justice minister Thaawar Chand Gehlot tabled in the Lok Sabha Monday. Among the big changes were the definition of transgender, which was expanded, medical insurance for sex reassignment surgery, and introduction of persons with intersex variations as a separate category. The government ruled out any further changes. The bill is complete and there is no need for more discussion, Gehlot said. SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON The quality of Indias air needs to be addressed as a pan-India public health emergency. Air pollution was responsible for 12.5% of the total deaths in 2017, as per the most recent iteration of India State Level Burden Assessment. The World Health Organization reports nearly 100,000 deaths in infants to be attributable annually to air pollution in India. But deaths form only a part of the story there is growing evidence of how it causes illnesses in nearly every organ of our body. It affects the elderly and babies still in their mothers wombs newborns show traces of particulates in their blood stream. It affects all of us. This article is the first of a four-part series by researchers at the Centre for Policy Research written in collaboration with leading air pollution researchers. We take stock of what we know about air pollution, and what we could do to improve the air quality in India. In this series, we focus on fine particulate matter (or PM2.5), a useful proxy indicator for air pollution. These particles a complex mixture of solid and liquid particles, originating from different sources and comprising multiple chemical substances are the most damaging, as they can penetrate the lung barrier and enter the systemic circulation. In this article, we will lay out four foundational facts about when, how much, and where we should worry about air pollution. In short, the answers are: most of the time, a lot, and all over India. First, air pollution is a near yearround problem, even though we notice pollution much more during periodic spikes especially in winter (see figure). Many parts of India, especially in the Indo-Gangetic belt record poor air quality levels across the year. In 2018 (so far), PM2.5 levels were poor, very poor or severe 56% of the time in Delhi (RK Puram), 49% in Patna and 32% in Kanpur. Conversely, it was good for six days in Delhi, one day in Patna and 37 days in Kanpur. While it is understandable that we focus on the visible peaks, adverse health outcomes result primarily to high long-term exposure, not just pollution spikes. To understand the severity of the problem, we have to look at annual average levels of emissions. Second, annual average emission levels in much of India are multiple times safe levels (see figure). Three quarters of Indias population lives in areas where levels of PM 2.5 exceed the Indian national standard of an annual mean of 40 microgram/m3. These norms themselves are four times the far lower levels recommended by the WHO (see figure). Big western cities such as London, New York City and Paris have air quality nearly at these levels, and make the news when some of their neighbourhoods exceed the WHO norms by a few microgram/m3. Our levels are not just somewhat higher but many multiples higher: 72 of 640 districts in India, primarily in Delhi, UP, Bihar, and Punjab, have annual averages 10 times the WHO levels. Even Beijing, infamous for its air pollution, had PM2.5 levels about half of Delhis in 2016. We often hear that India suffers from inadequate data and knowledge of air pollution. While India does indeed need much better data and more sensors much of the data reported here is from satellite data this uncertainty should not be a reason for inaction, since new monitors will only tell us what multiple above safe standards we are. Third, air pollution is not just a city or industrial area problem but a regional problem. Satellite data shows that air pollution levels are especially poor across the entire Indo-Gangetic Belt stretching from Punjab and parts of Rajasthan in the west to Bihar in the east. To an extent, this is a curse of geography. Sandwiched between the Himalayas in the north, and the Vindhyas in the south, this belt becomes a virtual valley where outward dispersion is difficult. Thus, while cities contribute to their own air pollution through traffic, industry, and waste burning, they are also affected by emissions from the broader regional airshed. As a result, rural areas are frequently also polluted. In addition, emissions from cookstoves using solid fuels not only lead to high levels of indoor air pollution, but also account for an estimated quarter to a third of outdoor pollution. India is dealing with both modern sources of pollution such as industries and vehicles, as well as pollution from traditional practices such as cooking with firewood, and we need to tackle both. Finally, PM2.5 levels have been growing. Across Punjab, pollution levels nearly doubled between 1998 and 2016. It is sobering that Indias air quality is worse than Chinas even while its GDP (PPP) per capita is less than half that of China. Clearly, the environmental quality of Indias growth is not sustainable. Any serious plan to mitigate air pollution has to be long-term in nature, target multiple sources, operate year-round, and focus on regions rather than cities. In subsequent articles, we describe the impact of air pollution on health, explore the different sources of air pollution and conclude with a reflection on an approach to air pollution across India. Santosh Harish is a Fellow, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi. Navroz K Dubash is a Professor, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi The US would like to see progress in combating terror financing and more cooperation on Afghanistan as conditions attached to the bailout package Pakistan has sought from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), along with transparency about its debts to China. Terror financing and money laundering under the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) is a multilateral concern aligned with IMFs mandate and Pakistans compliance is critical for the IMF bailout it has sought, a senior US official said on condition of anonymity. In June, the FATF, a secretive watchdog, put Pakistan on its grey list of countries it monitors closely and works with to counter terror financing and money laundering. Transparency about money Pakistan owes China will be a key condition too, the official said, reiterating the US position on the issue. Other US officials have also made clear the centrality of this issue, vowing to prevent Pakistan from using the bailout to pay off Chinese debt. Another official sought to link the bailout to more cooperation from Pakistan in the Afghan peace process, something President Donald Trump personally pitched for in a letter to Prime Minister Imran Khan. This official also spoke on background. The list of proposed US conditions is long, reflecting wariness about Pakistan, which was once an ally against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan but has been hurtling from crisis to crisis for years. Most tellingly, for the Americans, it has become a near-rogue state that has typically not taken responsibility for its actions. They have had 18 IMF bailouts thus far, said one of the two officials cited above, expressing exasperation. Pakistan has sought an IMF bailout of an estimated $8 billion to $12 billion and a decision is expected in January as negotiations are underway. The US accounts for 17% of the IMF kitty of $475 billion, from which the Pakistan bailout will come if agreed on by all parties. As the top contributor, it can dictate terms and conditions, experts agree. US secretary of state Mike Pompeo, for instance, made it clear in July when he said Pakistan wont be allowed to use the bailout to pay off Chinese loans. This was reiterated by David Malpass, a senior treasury official, at a congressional hearing this past week. Islamabad has accumulated a publicly undisclosed amount of loans from Beijing under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), part of the controversial Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This has come in for increased criticism around the world for predatory loans that have forced nations to cede territorial sovereignty in return for impossible debt servicing or repayment terms. The US wants to know how deep the China debt hole is for Pakistan, and is determined to prevent it from using the IMF bailout to pay off loans. Malpass told lawmakers the US is keen to change Pakistans economic programme - and not just offer it a rescue package - to make sure it does not fail again. Thus the multi-pronged approach. Asked if Pakistans debts, FATF and Afghanistan could be the other conditions, a spokesperson for the US state department, which will be working with IMF on determining the bailout, said in a statement, We have nothing to add on this, beyond what has already been said on the topic by USG officials. FATF compliance is a key issue for the Trump administration, which has taken a tough approach towards Pakistans reluctance to act decisively against terrorists operating from its soil, especially those battling US-led international forces in Afghanistan and those targeting India. The administration has suspended $1.6 billion in security aid to Pakistani in 2018, following a stinging denouncement by Trump in a New Year tweet. The US joined hands with European allies a few weeks later to push Paris-based FATF to grey list Pakistan, overcoming opposition from China and Turkey. According to officials, Beijings support was acquired in return for the vice-presidency of the 38-member body. US treasury official Marshall Billingslea took over as president of the FATF in July for a one-year term, with Xiangmin Liu, a senior official of the Chinese central bank, as his deputy. There have been reports in the Pakistani media that FATF is unhappy with progress in addressing concerns that led to the grey listing. FATF did not respond to a to a request for comment. According to FATF reports about its last two plenary meetings, in June and October, Pakistan has given a high-level commitment to work on an action plan to address its strategic counter-terrorist financing-related deficiencies. Pakistan has committed itself to a 10-point action plan that will demonstrate terror financing risks are properly identified, assessed, and that supervision is applied on a risk-sensitive basis, That will demonstrate that remedial actions and sanctions are applied in cases of money laundering and terror financing violations, and will demonstrate that competent authorities are cooperating and taking action to identify and take enforcement action against illegal money or value transfer services. Demonstrate that authorities are identifying cash couriers and enforcing controls on illicit movement of currency; improve inter-agency coordination on terror financing, demonstrate that law enforcement agencies are identifying and investigating the widest range of terror financing activities, and prosecutions target designated persons and entities; demonstrate that terror financing prosecutions result in effective, proportionate and dissuasive sanctions, and demonstrate effective implementation of targeted financial sanctions against all terrorists designated under UN Security Council resolutions 1267 and 1373. There was no reaction from officials in New Delhi. However, people familiar with the developments said India and other Western countries were preparing to highlight Pakistans failure to crackdown on terror financing at an FATF review meeting next year. An emotional Hamid Ansari and his mother met external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj in New Delhi on Wednesday, a day after he was released from a Pakistan jail, and thanked her for securing his release. The Mumbai resident crossed over to the Indian side at Punjabs Attari-Wagah border on Tuesday after spending six years in Peshawars central jail on charges of espionage. Mera Bharat mahaan, meri madam mahaan, sab madam ne hi kiya hai (My India is great, my madam is great. You did everything), Ansaris mother Fauzia was heard telling the minister in a video of the meeting released by news agency ANI. Swaraj hugged Fauzia as she comforted the sobbing mother and told Ansari he had faced a difficult time. Ansari had entered Pakistan on November 12, 2012, to meet a woman whom he had befriended on social media. The 33-year-old was arrested in November 2012 and handed a three-year sentence in 2015 for possessing a fake Pakistani identity card. Ansari had been lodged in Peshawars central jail after being sentenced by the military court. His jail term ended on December 15 and he was repatriated after the Peshawar high court gave the Pakistani government a months deadline to complete the process on Thursday. I feel really good coming back home. I am very emotional right now, Ansari said earlier after reaching the national capital, according to ANI. His mother Fauzia, father Nehal and brother met him at the border as he crossed over into India. For us, it is like Hamid has taken a new birth. We did not celebrate any festival since my son went missing, but this is the day of celebration, his father said before receiving his son. To connect with young India in the run-up to the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the Youth Congress has kicked off a march from Kanyakumari to Kashmir to highlight issues such as agrarian distress, unemployment, corruption, Rafale fighter jet deal, rising prices and increase in crimes against women. Called the Yuva Kranti Yatra, the march that began on Tuesday will proceed across the country and culminate in Delhi on January 30 on Martyrs Day, which marks the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. The march is a revolution for transformation, to fight unemployment, corruption, social inequality and to save the Constitution, said Youth Congress president Keshav Chand Yadav. The march is being seen as an attempt by the Youth Congress to lend a helping hand to its parent party in preparing for the 2019 elections. The Youth Congress had come under severe criticism for its failure to connect with aspirational India in the run-up to the 2014 Lok Sabha polls in which the Congress suffered its worst electoral drubbing. Questions were also raised over outreach capabilities. Through this march, we urge the nation to fight for our future. We want to highlight rising corruption under the BJP government, be it Rafale or bank frauds, increasing unemployment, price rise, agrarian distress and rising incidents of violence against women, Youth Congress vice-president BV Srinivas said. Three persons, including two school teachers, were injured outside a school in Dinhata of Cooch Behar district in north Bengal on Wednesday as the supporters of the youth wing of ruling Trinamool Congress allegedly attacked other supporters of the mother party. Those who sustained bullet injuries were Majnu Hussain, Manowar Hussain and Mofazzul Hossain, said North Bengal development minister Rabindranath Ghosh, who, however, did not admit that it was a factional fight. The incident took place at around 11-11:30 am in Gitaldaha in Dinhata subdivision about 704 km away from Kolkata. While one was beaten with sticks, another was beaten with the butt of a gun. The third person was injured when a bullet grazed his head. None of our party members was involved in the attack, said Ghosh, who pinned the blame on supporters of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Foward Bloc and the Communist Party of India (Marxist). The injured -- all Trinamool supporters -- were initially rushed to Dinhata subdivisional hospital. Police refused to comment on the incident. Since the panchayat elections in May, three Trinamool Congress supporters have been killed allegedly in factional feuds in Dinhata subdivision of Cooch Behar district. Malati Rava, Cooch Behar district president in Cooch Behar said, this incident is another of the many factional fights of the Trinamool Congress. Locals alleged that the assaulters, who came in an SUV, were supporters of Yuva, the youth wing of the ruling party. Abu al Azad, who is the pradhan of Gitaldah gram panchayat , said that that the assaulters had won the rural polls as independent candidates, despite the ruling party not issuing tickets to them. Since then they (read Trinamool leaders) are conspiring against me. Wednesdays incident was one of those they tried to blame on me, said Azad, 63., who is a supporter of Yuva. Azads boys are unleashing terror, but the police are mute spectators, alleged Rafi Ahmed, the general secretary of Trinamool block committee. Incidentally, chief minister Mamata Banerjee has repeatedly said at public meetings that she will not tolerate factional fights in the party and will take action against elements found stoking factionalism. Newly elected Madhya Pradesh chief minister Kamal Naths statement that jobs offered to people from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh have increased unemployment in the state and that 70 % of the jobs in the state should be reserved for local population has kicked off a controversy, with political parties in Bihar attacking Congress for promoting regionalism. Kamal Nath, soon after taking charge of CM, put a condition before the investing companies wishing to take incentives of providing at least 70% of the jobs available with them to the local population. His reference to Biharis occupying jobs has not gone down well with the ruling NDA in Bihar, which targeted him for promoting regionalism. He is spreading poison in the minds of people. Congress has again sown the seed of hatred in the name of region , caste, community and religion, said union minister Ashwini Kumar Chowbey. The statement is highly condemnable. Barely in two days, the party has shown its arrogance and its real character, tweeted Bihar BJP president Nityanad Rai. BJPs alliance partner JD (U) too condemned Kamal Naths statement. Instead of blaming Biharis, we will request you to provide better opportunities to your states youth. The dirty politics of regionalism raises question marks on Congresss patriotism, said party spokesperson Sanjay Singh. The Congress and the RJD played it safe. We did not hear his comment, said Congress spokesperson Rajesh Rathore. Maybe he intended referring to something else and his statement got misconstrued, he said. RJD spokesperson Mritunjay Tiwari just said that people from Bihar and UP can live anywhere. However, former union minister and RLSP chief Upendra Kushwaha, who recently left NDA and is likely to join the UPA, called the statement highly unacceptable. Biharis are not a burden on anybody, still they are insulted wherever they go. But the fact is that they contribute to the progress of that region, said Kushwaha. This is not the first time that people from Bihari living in different parts of the country have been targeted. Only recently, more than 50,000 migrant workers from north India fled Gujarat following targeted attack on them after a native of Bihar allegedly raped a 14-month-old girl on September 28 in Sabarkantha. In 2012, the central government had to intervene and ask the Maharashtra government to stop Shiv Sena and Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) from targeting people on the basis of their regional identities. The Thackerays, Udhav and cousin Raj, had made controversial statements, attacking the migrants from Bihar, Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh. MNS chief Raj Thackeray, calling Biharis infiltrators, had threatened to force them out of Maharashtra if authorities in Bihar took legal action against Mumbai policemen who had picked up a teenager on charges of vandalising the martyrs memorial during Azad Maidan protest on August 11, 2012. RJDs national vice-president Shivanad Tiwary said the trend of targeting Biharis was not a good sign in democracy. IT had happened in Maharashtra, it happened in Gujarat. The centre should intervene and discuss the issue at national level, he said. SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON The number of journalists killed worldwide in retaliation for their work nearly doubled this year, according to an annual report by the Committee to Protect Journalists. The New York-based organization found that 34 journalists were killed in retaliation for their work as of December 14, while at least 53 were killed overall. That compares to 18 retaliation killings among the 47 deaths documented by the committee in 2017. The report issued Wednesday includes the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, a native of Saudi Arabia fiercely critical of its royal regime. His October 2 death inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul has led to tremors on the global political scene around allegations that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was involved. Khashoggi lived in self-imposed exile in the United States, and had gone to the Saudi consulate to formalize his divorce, but was instead strangled and dismembered allegedly by Saudi agents. Asked whether he believed the crown prince had ordered Khashoggis murder, President Donald Trump said last month, Maybe he did and maybe he didnt. While the president condemned the violence against journalists, the committee noted that he has called them enemies of the people. In addition to retaliation killings, journalists have died in combat or crossfire, or on other dangerous assignments. The deadliest country for journalists this year has been Afghanistan, where 13 journalists were killed, some in back-to-back blasts staged by suicide bombers and claimed by the militant group Islamic State, according to the report. Read: I cant breathe were Jamal Khashoggis final words, says report Media freedom group Reporters Without Borders said Tuesday that the U.S. made it into the top five deadliest countries for journalists this year for the first time, with six dying, including four who were among five people killed by a gunman who opened fire in the offices of Maryland newspaper Capital Gazette on June 28. The shooting was the deadliest single attack on the media in recent US history. A sales associate was also killed. The man had threatened the newspaper after losing a defamation lawsuit. Another two died while covering extreme weather. In addition, the committee said the imprisonment of journalists has been on the rise. The context for the crisis is varied and complex, and closely tied to changes in technology that have allowed more people to practice journalism even as it has made journalists expendable to the political and criminal groups who once needed the news media to spread their message, the committee said in its report. Also read: Shujaat Bukhari gunned down by militants on orders from Pakistan, says J-K Police Time magazine last week recognized jailed and killed journalists as its person of the year, including Khashoggi, Maria Ressa imprisoned in the Philippines, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo imprisoned in Myanmar, and staff at the Capital Gazette. Journalists also have died this year in Slovakia, where 27-year-old investigative reporter Jan Kuciak was fatally shot while probing alleged corruption. Last year in Malta, Daphne Caruana Galizia, on a similar mission, was killed by a bomb placed in her car. At least four journalists were murdered in Mexico, two in Brazil, and two Palestinian journalists were shot and killed by Israeli soldiers during protests in the Gaza Strip, according to the report. In Syria and Yemen, two of the worst civil-war decimated countries, the fewest journalists were killed since 2011. Three died in Yemen, and in Syria, the committee recorded nine deaths compared to a high of 31 in 2012. However, the drop may be due to limited access or extreme risks that discourage media visits, the committee said. A US federal judge on Tuesday told former national security adviser Michael Flynn at a sentencing hearing that he had sold your country out and asked prosecutors if his actions rose to thelevel of treasonous activity. The sentencing was postponed, but not before judge Emmet Sullivan made the stinging rebuke. Arguably, this undermines everything this flag over here stands for! Arguably, you sold your country out!, he told the former aide of President Donald Trump, referring to his stint as a lobbyist for the government of Turkey. You were an unregistered agent of a foreign country while serving as the national security adviser to the president. The judge corrected that later, saying Flynn was an agent for a foreign government as part of the Trump campaign and not the administration. He also sought to walk back his comments on treason. Flynn has pleaded guilty in a deal with Special Counsel Robert Mueller to working as an unregistered agent for the Turkish government and lying to the FBI. He had cooperated extensively with Muellers probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 elections. Just hours ahead of the hearing, Trump defended Flynn publicly and wished him good luck in a tweet. In an unrelated case, the president agreed on Tuesday to shut down a charity foundation he had run along with his three elder children amid allegations of impropriety. Muellers team has recommended low to no jail term for Flynn citing extensive cooperation by him, including sitting for 19 separate interviews. But the case turned contentious in recent days after Flynn suggested in court filings he was tricked into lying. A bipartisan Senate effort to avert a government shutdown is gaining steam, even as US President Donald Trump vowed that hed get his border wall built -- eventually. One way or the other, we will win on the Wall! Trump said in a Wednesday morning Tweet, in which he also accused Democrats of fighting Republicans like cats and dogs when it comes to spending on Boarder Security (including a Wall) and the Military. Underlying Trumps declaration of confidence in ultimate victory was an acknowledgment that the White House has retreated from an immediate confrontation over the presidents demand for $5 billion in wall money. White House senior aide Kellyanne Conway told reporters Wednesday that Trump could be open to the stopgap spending bill under discussion in the Senate, which a person familiar with the negotiations said would finance the government until Feb. 8,. Hell take a look at it certainly, Conway said. Trump is still working the phones with lawmakers to see what kind of a deal can be reached, she said. Democrats also are agreeable to that date, said a Democratic leadership aide. Both people were granted anonymity to talk about the proceedings. In a further sign of retreat, Trump said Tuesday night on Twitter that Democrats dont want a concrete wall, but we are not building a Concrete Wall, we are building artistically designed steel slats, so that you can easily see through it. He said it would give our Country the security that our citizens deserve. Senate Appropriations Chairman Richard Shelby of Alabama said Tuesday night hes coordinating with Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who will decide if and when to seek a vote. Shelby said he began work on the bill after concluding that a long-term resolution probably wouldnt be found before a shutdown would begin on Friday night. Earlier Tuesday, White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders urged the Senate to pass something, and said the White House would decide its next step after that. The window for a larger year-end deal resolving the standoff is closing, although talks between Senate leaders in both parties havent halted altogether, a person familiar with the talks said Tuesday night. Nine of 15 government departments would shut down after Friday if Congress doesnt provide new funds. Others, including the Defense Department, have already been financed through next September. McConnell said earlier Tuesday that all sides want to avoid a shutdown, and Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York said his party would seriously consider a short-term spending bill into early next year. Trump said earlier at the White House that it was too early to say whether a shutdown could be avoided. Shelby said he believed the president would sign a short-term spending bill, but he didnt have any direct assurances that Trump would do so. Schumer rejected a Republican proposal to move about $1 billion into what he called a slush fund for the presidents immigration priorities. Let me be clear: the Republican offer would not clear either chamber, he said. The fuller battle over the wall funding may become more difficult early next year with Democrats in control of the House. Trump said last week he would be proud to shut the government if it would force Democrats to provide the $5 billion hes seeking for the wall. Six of 15 government departments -- representing about three-quarters of discretionary spending -- are funded through next Sept. 30, under legislation passed and signed by Trump earlier this year. A partial shutdown would hit agencies including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the departments of Homeland Security, Treasury, Justice and Interior. More than 420,000 federal employees would work without pay and more than 380,000 workers would be sent home. Sanders said Tuesday the administration was looking into whether funds from various agencies could be used to fund a wall, though it was unclear whether the administration had authority to do it. We are looking at existing funding through other agencies right now that we can draw on to do that immediately, she said at a briefing. She also repeated Trumps unexplained assertion that additional revenue resulting from the revamped trade deal with Mexico and Canada would provide more than enough revenue to pay for the wall. Democratic leaders this month offered Trump $1.3 billion for border fencing after earlier this year backing $1.6 billion. McConnell on Tuesday proposed to Schumer a plan that would provide $1.6 billion for border security in addition to $1 billion for Trumps immigration priorities. The additional funding couldnt be used for a wall, according to a person familiar with the matter. John Cornyn of Texas, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, called Sanderss remarks a hopeful sign that a partial shutdown could be avoided before government funding expires for nine government departments and various independent agencies. Trump has previously suggested he might turn to the military to build a wall on the southern US border. When Sanders was asked during an interview on Fox News on Tuesday morning whether the administration would seek to use defense funds, she didnt rule it out. There are certainly a number of different funding sources that weve identified that we can use, that we can couple with the money that would be given through congressional appropriations that would help us get to that $5 billion that the president needs in order to protect our border, she said. Cornyn said it was unclear what authority could be used to shift money to border security from other government accounts. House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California objected. The wall isnt about money, she said. The wall is about morality. Its the wrong thing to do. It doesnt work. Its not effective. Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena says his reappointing of Ranil Wickremesinghe as the prime minister of the country is the characteristic of a democratic society and one that values democratic practices. He spoke to Hindustan Times in an exclusive interview. Q. Just days ago, you said you would choose a new Parliament and prime minister but not work with Wickremesinghe. You sacked him but he was sworn in as PM again this week by none other than you. Was your chat with him before his swearing-in a reconciliation? A. Yes, I did say that I will not reappoint Mr Ranil Wickremesinghe as prime minister even if he receives the consent of 225 parliamentarians. That is my personal political view and I still maintain that view as a person. But, I respect the parliamentary tradition and decided that the post of prime minister should be given to Mr Wickremesinghe. I see this as a characteristic of a democratic society as well as of a society that values democratic practices. Q. In October, you swore in former president and erstwhile rival Mahinda Rajapaksa as prime minister in Wickremesinghes place. The latter refused to step down and a court decision broke the deadlock. Rajapaksa resigned. Will your relationship with Rajapaksa go back to rivalry? He is a strong contender for the next elections in 2019-2020. A. We will continue to work as partners of a democratic, socialist political force. We plan to form a broad alliance and parties will join that front. Q. In the past turbulent weeks, you accused Wickremesinghes United National Party of buying MPs to ensure Rajapaksa loses the two votes of no-confidence. Since the world community watches Sri Lanka closely, how do you explain such a trend to other countries? How is it legally possible to allow such votes allegedly bought with money? A. I will continue my crusade against such corrupt practices. My desire is to establish a new political culture where corruption, bribery, political intimidation and violence and such evil practices are either eliminated or at least minimised. Q. Tourist arrivals are down, people fear instability. Are you certain your partnership with Wickremesinghe will last its full course till the election? A. I cannot describe it as a partnership. I, as executive President, will exercise my powers in the interest of the people and the country and I will continue to do so during the entire tenure of my presidency. However, I must clarify few issues. There is no instability. Although there were few cancellations, there is no major drop in tourist arrivals. In fact there was a 16% increase in tourist arrivals in November. I am confident that the growth will continue. Q. You have come under considerable criticism for the turbulence of the past months. Youve been accused of a soft coup. How can you explain all these recent moves? A. I have a clear conscience. All my decisions were in the best interest of the country and the people. All what I did was done with utmost good faith. I didnt do any of those acts with malice or with an intention of violating the constitution. The country was in huge political turmoil. The best solution to solve the problem was to go for an election. Hence, I consulted constitution experts and issued the dissolution notification. A. What role do you hope the Tamil National Alliance will play in the re-born Parliament convened on Monday? The TNA supported Wickremesinghe through this crisis. Will not the pressure from the TNA on the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe coalition to fulfil long-standing demands, including greater autonomy for Tamil-majority areas, intensify now? A. We always worked to strengthen reconciliation. My government has taken a number of measures to remove grievances and hardships of the people in the north and east. We have implemented projects to improve infrastructure facilities, roads, schools, hospitals etc. More than 90% of the land acquired by the military during the conflict has been given back to original owners. Before the end of this month, another 2,500 acres of land will be released. Our aim is to ensure that all the regions in the country are developed without neglecting any part. We urge the Tamil and Muslim political parties also to extend fullest cooperation to these Development efforts in the north and east. A British court on Tuesday sentenced a fanatical neo-Nazi couple who named their baby son after Adolf Hitler to prison for belonging to a group banned under anti-terror laws. Adam Thomas was sentenced to six and a half years in prison and his Portuguese partner Claudia Patatas to five years in prison by judge Melbourne Inman at Birmingham Crown Court. Thomas, 22, and Patatas, 38, were among six people sentenced for membership of National Action, which in 2016 became the first right-wing group to be banned under anti-terror laws. In his sentencing, Inman said the group had horrific goals. National Action wanted the overthrow of democracy in this country by serious violence and murder, and the imposition of a Nazi-style state which would eradicate whole sections of society by such violence and mass-murder, Inman said. The judge said the couple, who gave their child the middle name Adolf, had a long history of violent racist beliefs. You acted together in all you thought, said and did, in the naming of your son and the disturbing photographs of your child by symbols of Nazism and the Ku Klux Klan. Photographs recovered from their house showed Thomas cradling his newborn son while wearing the Ku Klux Klan white robe. The couples close friend, Darren Fletcher, who admitted National Action membership before trial, was also jailed on Tuesday for five years for the same crime. Fletcher, 28, had taught his daughter to give a Nazi salute. Daniel Bogunovic, 27, a leading member of National Actions Midlands chapter, was sentenced to six years and four months. Two other men, cyber security worker Joel Wilmore, 24, and van driver Nathan Pryke, 26, were also sent to prison. SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON Pakistans renowned social activist Asma Jahangir was posthumously honoured by the UN with a prestigious human rights award. Jahangir, an outspoken critic of Pakistans powerful military establishment, fought against religious extremism and for the rights of oppressed minorities in Pakistan. She died of cardiac arrest at the age of 66 in February. She was honoured with the 2018 United Nations Human Rights Prize, an award given every five years since 1968. Jahangirs daughter Munizae Jahangir received the award on her behalf from President of the UN General Assembly Maria Fernanda Espinosa at a special ceremony at the United Nations Tuesday. Among others who won the award include girls education rights activist Rebeca Gyumi of Tanzania, Brazils first indigenous woman lawyer Joenia Batista de Carvalho and Front Line Defenders from Ireland, working to protect human rights defenders at risk. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said that the work of the honourees and that of other human rights defenders around the world is essential for the collective efforts to sustain peace and ensure inclusive sustainable development and respect for human rights for all. Often their work is dangerous. We regularly hear of abuses against human rights defenders murder, disappearances, torture, arbitrary imprisonment and other attempts to silence them. Yet, these courageous individuals and groups remain committed to shining a light on the dark corners of the globe, wherever human rights violations occur, he said in his remarks to the General Assemblys United Nations Prize in the Field of Human Rights award ceremony. The event commemorated the 70th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, marked annually on December 10. Guterres said human rights defenders give voice to the voiceless and shield the powerless against injustice. They stand for all rights economic, civil, political, social and cultural. They support the rule of law or work peacefully to change laws so women and girls, indigenous communities, minorities and other marginalised groups may exercise their rights, he said. Guterres said they work to empower people through education, and help to protect other human rights defenders from harassment, intimidation or arrest. As part of the UNs activities in observance of Human Rights Day, which coincided with the Declarations anniversary, the champions in the field from across the world, convened at the General Assembly Hall to be recognised for their outstanding contributions. Every five years, the United Nations Prize in the Field of Human Rights is awarded to organisations and individuals which embody excellent activism in defending human rights. The four winners join a notable group who have been recognised since the Prize was established by the General Assembly in 1966, including prominent figures such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Jimmy Carter, Malala Yusafzai and this years Nobel Peace Prize winners, Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad, as well as organisations such as the Amnesty International and the International Committee of the Red Cross. Marking the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Espinosa said it was one of the most important contributions that the world body has made to mankind, reflecting the collective aspirations of an international order founded on human dignity and with a view to making the world a better place. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said upholding all peoples human rights is the only possible path to peace. South African regulators on Tuesday banned a television advert that showed a black man discovering a foreign land and naming it Europe, ruling that colonisation was not open for humorous exploitation. The advert, for a chicken restaurant chain, tells a spoof story how the man leaves South Africa in 1650, sails overseas and, after many adventures, comes ashore and meets white local people wearing three-pointed hats and waistcoats. Hola MaNgamla (Hello white folk). I like this place, I think I will call it... Europe, the man says, sticking his spear into the ground. The Advertising Regulatory Board ruled that the commercial trivialises an issue that is... upsetting for many South African people. Turning the usual colonisation story around might be perceived as having a certain element of humour... The reality though is that colonisation of Africa and her people was traumatic, it said. The legacy of colonisation, which is a sensitive and divisive topic, is one that is not open for humorous exploitation. It added that Africans did not leave voluntarily due to colonisation and often starved to death en route suffering inhuman conditions. The fast-food chain, Chicken Licken, said its advert was a tongue-in-cheek tale about how of its Big John burger got its name. The advert in no way, shape or form seeks to make a mockery of the struggles of colonisation, the company added, saying it was designed to boost pride and patriotism amongst South Africans. SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON Last week (and maybe every week into an uncertain future) we were forced to confront some un Pipeline 19 December 2018 Marriott Vacation Club, a global leader in vacation ownership and brand segment of Marriott Vacations Worldwide (NYSE: VAC), announced today the proposed spring 2019 rebranding of The Pier 2620 Hotel in San Francisco as Marriott Vacation Club Pulse, San Francisco. The anticipated addition of Marriott Vacation Club Pulse, San Francisco continues the company's growth strategy of delivering highly desired resorts and important sales distributions. Sharing with Owners and guests the local experiences found near its properties in Boston, New York City, South Beach, San Diego, Washington, D.C. and soon, San Francisco, is what makes Marriott Vacation Club Pulsethe citycentric brand extension of Marriott Vacation Clubunique. Close to a city's attractions and interests, each property's style reflects the spirit and culture of its urban surroundings, creating for every guest a genuine sense of place. Marriott Vacation Club Pulse, San Francisco will welcome Owners and guests into the heart of all the action found in the famed "City by the Bay." The propertyinspired by the quintessential California outdoor lifestyle, complete with an outdoor courtyard, fitness center and Marketplace Expressis expected to have up to 240 guestrooms. Its prime location in the historic Fisherman's Wharf district puts Owners and guests within walking distance of many of San Francisco'smost popular attractions, shops and restaurants. Close by are PIER 39, Ghirardelli Square, Anchorage Square, the National Maritime Museum, historic Hyde Street Pier and countless boutiques, galleries and world-class dining. Owners can now make reservations for epic family vacations, romantic getaways or fun-filled weekends at Marriott Vacation Club Pulse, San Francisco for arrivals beginning May 21, 2019, through the Marriott Vacation Club Destinations Exchange Program as an anticipated exchange option. This affiliation and occupancy are subject to the rebranding of The Pier 2620 Hotel to Marriott Vacation Club Pulse, San Francisco. Now Open 19 December 2018 Opened on 19 December 2018, meanwhile, dusitD2 Yarkay Thimphu, Bhutan serves as the first and largest internationally-branded hotel in the enchanting kingdom. Drawing inspiration from the Four Harmonious Friends, a beloved national folktale about four animals working together to harvest fruit from a magical tree, each guest floor of the hotel is dedicated to a different animal from the tale. Colourful and contemporary motifs of the creatures adorn the walls of each of the 83 well-appointed guest rooms and suites. Alongside a beautiful lobby showcasing local artworks, current hotel offerings include a Thai spa, a fully equipped gym and an international all-day-dining restaurant. A vibrant bar and the first authentic Thai restaurant in Bhutan will follow soon. Now Open 19 December 2018 Deutsche Hospitality is continuing its policy of internationalisation and will be welcoming guests in Saudi Arabia from 20 December 2019. The IntercityHotel Riyadh Malaz, which is located in the Kingdom's capital city, starts operations tomorrow. This means that the brand's portfolio currently includes ten countries. "The IntercityHotel Riyadh Malaz will allow us to strengthen our international presence and pursue strategic growth," said Thomas Willms, CEO, Deutsche Hospitality. "Saudi Arabia and Riyadh in particular are seeing a constantly increasing demand for hotel capacities. This latest new opening is taking place at the right time and in the right place." The IntercityHotel Riyadh Malaz is a new build which offers 82 rooms and four suites as well as boasting a lounge and a cafe. The main restaurant is situated on the roof, from where impressive views out over the old quarter of Riyadh can be enjoyed. A roof top swimming pool with an adjoining bar is a further highlight. Gym facilities are being planned to meet the needs of exercise enthusiasts. Like in all properties forming part of the new IntercityHotel generation, the Italian architect Matteo Thun has been the creative force behind the interior design concept. The hotel's location in the well known commercial quarter of Al Malaz makes it attractive to leisure and business travellers alike. The Prince Faisal bin Fahd Stadium, Riyadh Zoo and the King Abdullah Park are all to be found within the immediate vicinity. Riyadh is the capital city and administrative centre of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The increase in business and economic activity that has taken place has turned the metropolis into a major commercial hub. It is also home to a host of educational, financial, agricultural and cultural organisations and social institutions. The Middle East is one of the main focuses of Deutsche Hospitality's expansion activities. The group is already represented on the Arabian Peninsula in the shape of the Steigenberger Hotel Business Bay in Dubai and the IntercityHotel Salalah in Oman. The opening of the IntercityHotel Riyadh Malaz in Saudi Arabia increases the brand's presence in the region to three countries. And growth is set to continue apace. Two further hotels are currently at the development stage in Oman. These are the IntercityHotel Nizwa (scheduled to open in November 2019) and the IntercityHotel Muscat (to launch in the 1st quarter of 2020). The IntercityHotel Jaddaf Waterfront is also under construction in Dubai, and the plan is that this will be ready to receive its first guests before the end of the first quarter of 2019. Appointment 19 December 2018 The American Hotel & Lodging Association (AHLA) announced that William "Chip" Rogers will succeed Katherine Lugar as president and CEO, effective in the new year. Rogers comes to AHLA with more than 20 years of experience and a proven track record of success. Rogers has served as the president and CEO of the Asian American Hotel Owners Association (AAHOA), the largest U.S. hotel owner's association, since 2014. In this role, he led a team of more than 30 staff members with an annual budget of $15 million, bringing an unprecedented amount of success to the organization. Under his leadership, the AAHOA has grown overall membership by 30 percent and revenue by 62 percent. In addition to leading the AAHOA, Rogers sits on the board of directors for the United States Travel Association, Community Leaders of America, and the California Hotel & Lodging Association. Prior to joining AAHOA, Rogers served in the Georgia General Assembly for 10 years and was unanimously elected as Senate majority leader in 2008 and 2010. Rogers was selected after a thorough and comprehensive search conducted over the last several months. An AHLA search Advisory Groupcomprised of the leading CEOs and executives of the major brands, owners, and management companies representing a cross-range of the association's membersconducted numerous in-depth interviews of each candidate. Ultimately, Rogers' appointment was unanimously approved by the Nominating Committee and Board of Directors. Coming from AAHOA, Rogers is no stranger to AHLA, as the two organizations have worked hand-in-glove for many years, advocating on behalf of the entire hotel and lodging industry. Both organizations have held joint advocacy days, each year for the past several years and AAHOA's incoming chairwoman currently sits on AHLA's board. Rogers will join an existing AHLA team with a wealth of experience, including Kevin Carey, executive vice president and chief operating officer; Brian Crawford, executive vice president of government affairs; and Rosanna Maietta, president of the American Hotel & Lodging Educational Foundation (AHELF), and executive vice president of communications and public relations. The appointment of Crawford and Maietta to executive vice president was announced earlier this week. Opinion Article 19 December 2018 Food for thought. Advertisements Can corporate travel become available to all? The most lucrative segment of hotel bookings is undoubtedly corporate travel. The guests who have money to spend, who come late, leave early and are more likely to come back. But reaching that market hasn't been very easy for non-chain hotels who can't negotiate tens of thousands of rooms a year. On theory, marketing to this segment shouldn't be that hard. The selection of hotels is almost binary, it fits the requirements or it doesn't. The emotional aspect (pre-booking) is much smaller than for leisure travel. Yet it remains quite elusive for hotels to build strong direct relations at scale. It could be that attribute-based distribution (ABS) that I covered last week will help that. But at this stage, that's just speculation. GOING BACK FROM DIRECT A smaller percent of a small percent Changing loyalty systems to make it harder to achieve the higher status doesn't seem to bother the loyalty member elites. And it makes sense, those who spend more want that elite status. But that's not loyalty, that's exclusivity. The majority of the world's population is loyal to Google's search engine. Maybe that's where the whole loyalty scheme breaks down. It might be much more effectively managed as membership than a loyalty. The way EasyJet set-up their rewards system was with a membership, it doesn't discriminate on complex status and points systems. One pays, and one is a member. But how could hotels do something similar, that really works? RAISING THE BAR FOR ELITE TRAVELERS Big names make bigger waves PhocusWire's list of newsmakers is interesting. I'm curious if it will hold up in the same sequence for the What Was Hot in Hotel Marketing review I'll be doing before the end of the year. But what is clear is that the bigger names make bigger waves. It is common media knowledge that the minute you include a big name in a title you're going to get more clicks (sorry, readers). That Google and Airbnb are way above Booking and Expedia is telling though. They've been adding new products and features more publicly and more daringly than the OTAs who are defending their turf. While Airbnb is growing to become an interesting third option in the OTA space (and hopefully more than a mere copy of the others), Google's ads are discretely at multiple points of almost every single hotel booking, direct or indirect. THE NEWSMAKER OF 2018 A look at Search Optimizing in 2019 Talking about SEO as a marketing strategy feels really old. In reality, I think (and hope) that most people have gotten off that crazy trend of trying to capture long-tail keywords through ridiculous "optimization" of websites. Build a brand! The rest is worse than sugar-rush marketing, it's like a drug addiction. And the minute search engine's change things one is running around looking for a new dealer. But some of the changes are of interest. Ensuring the basics are covered on non-Google search engines, for example, is a valid (and welcome) change. Another interesting problem to solve is ensuring one's brand appears through voice search which is a whole different style of searching. So even though I'm all about building a brand and not getting carried away with the over-optimizing - it doesn't mean one should ignore upcoming changes. SEO TRENDS FOR 2019 Tell Trends: Pre-orders are open! In case you missed the intro at the start of the email. Here's to announce that pre-orders are open and you don't want to miss this. SECURE YOUR COPY TODAY Opinion Article 19 December 2018 Great news came out of the Annual Conference of the Leading Hotels of the World held in Shanghai earlier this month: a distinguished hotelman was picked by the membership and the board to be given the 2018 Leading Legends Award. Congratulations PAUL ZUEST. Advertisements Four words best characterize him: expertise, integrity, generosity and humor. He is also what I refer to as an "owner whisperer". While less calm operators cannot deal with angry (or offensive) owners, Paul can listen with a half-smile, implying that things could be a lot worse without him. And indeed, they could. There are so many ways to describe Paul Zuest and his career: He takes personal interest in his employees' welfare He is the consummate front of the house man: the Lausanne alumnus with the double-breasted suit and the discreet cufflinks. You often find him in the kitchen, tasting sauces or even in the walk-in refrigerator, checking on the freshness of ingredients. Who would not envy his resume? A graduate of the Ecole Hoteliere de Lausanne, he spent 9 years as Managing Director of the Chatham Bars Inn, 7 years as Managing Director of Campton Place, 3 years as President of the super-exclusive Jumby Bay, and no less than 10 years with Rosewood, including 5 years as Managing Director of the Hotel Bel-Air. Ever heard of Daniel Humm? As Chef-Partner of New York's Eleven Madison Park, he is universally considered one of the top chefs in the world. How did he get there? Paul Zuest naturally. A gourmet and a gourmand (an incredible cook himself with a weakness for wild game) Zuest was the Managing Director of Campton Place when he was confronted with the delicate task of finding a successor to his Chef Laurent Manrique (whose predecessors included Brad Ogden, Todd Humphries and the late Jan Birnbaum). He could have had his pick of San Francisco's many outstanding chefs. Instead, he traveled to his native Switzerland and extensively tasted the food of a very young and shy Sous Chef at the award-winning Gasthaus zum Gumpf in the Swiss Alps. No matter which way you choose to look at it, Zuest "made" Humm who he is today. And he did so with more successful chefs and hoteliers I can think of. There ought to be a plaque on his desk, reading 'MENTOR" Zuest, however, did not go it alone: he has been married for 43 years to his delightful and supportive British wife Jacki. They recently relocated to England, the land of meat pies. He enjoys a good Cuban cigar after walking their Golden Retriever. By the way, should you need someone to come into your operation or your pre-opening for some well-directed advice, management-team motivation or to sharpen the overall attitude toward guests, Paul still accepts interim assignments, providing they do not exceed 90 days. And certainly no more than 30 days without Jacki. Congratulations Paul Zuest. JavaScript is disabled. For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding. You should upgrade or use an You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly.You should upgrade or use an alternative browser To manage 16 properties and more than 4,000 rooms in Spain, and position Alua as its midscale brand Apple Leisure Group (ALG) today announced the signing of an agreement to purchase a majority share in Alua Hotels & Resorts. Following the deal's closing, the Spanish hotel chain, which was founded in 2015 and whose growth has been one of the fastest in the market over the past few years, will be integrated into ALG's European division. The transaction will provide ALG with the structure and capacity to manage hotel properties in Europe, and when combined with the strategic agreements the group has already signed, will translate into opportunities for additional growth. Likewise, and following its integration into ALG, Alua will become the American group's hotel brand of reference for the mid-market sector, both in Europe and globally. "The addition of Alua Hotels & Resorts to Apple Leisure Group's portfolio is a true testament to our strong commitment to growing our company footprint in Spain," said Alex Zozaya, CEO of Apple Leisure Group. "This acquisition is just the beginning of ALG's European expansion plans and future contributions to the market's burgeoning tourism sector." Under the agreement, ALG will now manage more than 4,000 rooms in Spain: a solid example of its resolute bet on growth in the European market. Thanks to this new contract and to its prior strategic agreements, ALG European division's strategic plan is aimed primarily at establishing a strong presence in highly popular tourist destinations across the Mediterranean. Javier Aguila, CEO of Alua Hotels & Resorts, will assume the role of President of Apple Leisure Group Europe and will join the Executive Committee of the U.S. based parent company, while Jordi de las Moras will continue as Managing Director of the European division. Javier Coll, Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer of Apple Leisure Group, who is responsible for the company's business operations in Europe, said: "With this agreement, we take another step in our international growth strategy. Acquiring Alua Hotels & Resorts allows us to expand on the strategic agreement that we already have with Hesperia by giving us the ability to offer not only sales and branding services, but also operations management to both owners and investors, as we already do in the Americas. At the same time, we are adding a brand in a strategic segment for us, which we will work to grow in both the Americas and Europe." In turn, Javier Aguila stated that "this transaction represents the best possible close to Alua's first chapter, and recognizes the excellent work done by our team, who have been a part of this journey since the brand was just an idea. We are tremendously enthusiastic about the opportunity to be part of a leading group in the sector, such as Apple Leisure Group, and become the platform to materialize their ambitious expansion plan in the European market. Without a doubt, the experience and leadership of ALG in the areas of distribution, brand development, and luxury resort brand management, together with the structure and work team of Alua, will give us a competitive advantage in reaching our strategic goals at both the national and global level." Daily News Delivery Join your colleagues and stay up to date on the latest Hotel industry news and trends. Subscribe 2021 Hotel News Resource Next in the series of Interviews with Leaders is Mr. Carlos Khneisser, VP of Development, Middle East and North Africa & Turkey -Hilton Worldwide. 1. What is Hiltons current brand portfolio, market presence and pipeline across the Middle East? What were the major developments for Hilton in 2018? We have 46 hotels in the Middle East, operating across eight brands. This is a figure we expect to almost triple in the next 3-5 years with 80 properties in the pipeline at the moment and more coming. Every one in five rooms under construction in the region is under the Hilton brand so we have a significant market share and a good track record of working with owners who are able to get projects built. 2018 highlight include the conversion of the Al Habtoor City complex in Dubai and a dual branded property in Heliopolis, Cairo which between them have added near to 2,500 rooms to our portfolio. We also marked our return to the Moroccan capital of Rabat with the signing of a flagship Hilton property and furthered our market leading position in Ras al Khaimah with a new Conrad and DoubleTree. 2. How would you describe Hiltons development and growth strategy in the Middle East? Which new markets will drive Hiltons pipeline growth over the next 5 years? Historically we have been one of the pioneers of the industry in the Middle East, having been the first international operator to locate in many markets like Cairo, Abu Dhabi and Istanbul which are now well-established destinations. More recently we have adopted the same approach when you look at a place like Ras al Khaimah you see this Hilton Effect in action where we come into new markets and stimulate growth. Looking forward we see a lot of untapped potential in Saudi Arabia, which is already our biggest pipeline market in the region. 3. As an organization, what sets apart Hilton from other large international hotel operators such as Marriott, AccorHotels and IHG? I believe it is our 100 years of experience in the market and the expertise and trusting relationships with our owners we have built over this time. This is something we pride ourselves on as developers, I encourage all of my team to put the interests of our owners first and the plans of owners at the heart of ours. You see the results of this because nearly two thirds of our pipeline projects are in partnership with existing owners who know us, trust us and have seen themselves the returns we can generate. 4. What are the main barriers for growth in MENA at present? Do you consider oversupply to be a potential threat for the hospitality industry in the region? This is something that is spoken about quite a lot in the media and I think it is not as simplistic as it is often described. Yes, it is true that as the market matures, owners need to be more selective about the projects they get involved with, but there is plenty of room for growth. We are quite focused on the midscale segment where new hotels entering the market in the last couple of years have been generating extremely good returns. This part of the market is actually quite undersupplied if you compare a city like Dubai, which has close to 20 million annual visitors, with other major destinations globally. So, owners need to make sure they are undertaking the right type of projects and working with brands which have the commercial know-how to maximise their investment. 5. What are your strategies to grow Hiltons presence in the lifestyle segment? We have our new Canopy by Hilton brand which we are looking to introduce to the Middle East. We launched this as an upscale lifestyle concept in response to demand from both guests and our owners. Each property is custom designed as a natural extension of its neighbourhood, with local design, food & drink, and culture. The first Canopy hotel opened in 2016 in Iceland and it has been very well received by our guests and now open also in Zagreb, so it is something we are actively looking at for a number of markets here. 6. How do you see the market for branded residences (rental pools) evolving in the region? What I typically say to owners is that the best opportunity for such projects comes within the luxury segment. Associating with a world class luxury brand is really where you can add a premium to your offering as customers are going to be willing to pay more for the levels of service, design concepts and prestige that comes with this. Who wouldnt want to tell their friends I live at the Waldorf Astoria or the Conrad? It is not quite the same effect for an upscale brand. In terms of rental pools, we prefer to keep within a more direct ownership structure where possible so it is not a focus but we do consider opportunities on their individual merits. 7. What is your experience with HVS and how would you describe its value proposition and the contribution of its consultancy services to your development initiatives? HVS has been a partner for us on a number of projects, we know as developers that when we receive a proposal from them it is going to have been well thought through and deserving of our close attention. The value of any third party consultancy is transparency in their dealings with owners and operators to provide an objective viewpoint, having the confidence and ability to do this comes down to experience of the market and respect within its client base to provide open and honest advice. www.hvs.com Daily News Delivery Join your colleagues and stay up to date on the latest Hotel industry news and trends. Subscribe 2021 Hotel News Resource Making A Murderer has been one of the most successful docu-series on Netflix, and it created a worldwide demand for more real crime drama series. The story of Steven Avery and Teresa Halbach was irresistible to watch. Avery was locked away for an assault he didn't commit in 1985. After DNA evidence freed him from prison, he was arrested in 2005 for the murder of Teresa Halbach. Netflix's docu-series dove into the case, and made sure to present the evidence in a way that made the viewer question the justice system. Now, once detective on the case is suing Netflix for defamation. According to Engadget, detective Andrew Colborn is suing the streaming giant for making him look like he tampered with evidence. The lawsuit names Netflix, its executives Lisa Nishimura and Adam Del Deo, documentary directors Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos, and editor Mary Manhardt as defendants. The suit points out specific scenes in the docu-series, such as the close-up shot of a blood vial with a hole in the top that Colborn says was a result of standard testing and storage. The show made it seem like tampering had taken place. This isn't the first time Netflix has been accused of presenting limited facts for the series, but now it has become a legal issue. As reported, Pusha-T was a guest on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah where he spoke about his "colleague" Kanye West among other topics. In his past two appearances on The Daily Show candidly spoke about the potential for difficulty Kanye's MAGA stance elicited while they were in the midst of finalizing the Daytona project. But in his latest interview with Trevor Noah, Pusha-T insists that Kanye's MAGA hat-wearing days are all but over. When asked about his employer/fellow rapper Kanye West, Pusha told his host, "He (Kanye) doesn't anymore" on the topic of the modded MAGA red cap. "He stopped. He stopped, though," he added at the nine-minute mark of the segment. Pusha-T offered even more insight into the situation, particularly his method for separating business, friendship, and personal politics. "Can you imagine having those conversations while he's trying to make my album?" he asked rhetorically. "He basically has my life in his palm and I have to tell him that I hate something. We always have real conversations, though. Always. I think that's why me and him connect so well and I think that's why DAYTONA came out so well. It's a give and take. If I don't like something, I say it and he tries to correct it, and so on and so forth." Trevor Noah capped things off by suggesting that Kanye West was a "genius who is tormented by his mental health issues," giving way to a broader conversation about mental illness awareness. The above video containing the interview is available to American audiences only - check it out. Tekashi 6ix9ine's troubles are only multiplying. Last month, shocking footage of Tekashi apparently ordering a hit on Chief Keef's cousin Tadoe was leaked to TMZ. "I'ma just get your address. I know where you at," stated the "Gummo" rapper in the video. "You gonna be in your crib, or Sosa hotel?" After hanging up, Tekashi happily brags to his friends, "Yo, I gotta thirty pack on him right now. Swear to God I gotta thirty pack. Thirty thou cash." Whoever recorded that video put the nail in the coffin for Tekashi. Although he's been a menace on social media for the last year, Tekashi was never caught on camera admitting to having a hand in the shooting until that footage leaked. Now, TMZ reports that the Feds are using that footage as key evidence. Sources within law enforcement told TMZ that the unsolved case of the New York shooting involving Chief Keef has now been handed to the Feds. They will be using the leaked video to connect the dots and add even more charges to Tekashi's growing list of offenses. Contract killing or conspiracy to commit murder can be rolled into the overall RICO case, and comes with a possible fifteen-year addition to Tekashi's sentence. Read more about the beef between 6ix9ine and Chief Keef in our extensive feature here. Nicki Minajs comeback this year came with plenty of controversies. There was that feud with Cardi B. There was the ill-fated Future/Nicki "NICKIHNDRXX" tour, which was eventually cancelled in North America. There were some questionable collab choices. There were even more questionable dating choices. There was flying to China for a festival that didnt happen. Then there was Queen, an album that had the unlucky fortunes to come out the same week as Travis Scotts Astroworld, coming in at number two. The missteps seemed to have clouded the highs for Nicki in 2018. Amidst all this drama, Nicki Minaj returned from her hiatus stronger than ever. It wasn't all bad. We're taking a look at a few things that the self-proclaimed Queen did right this year. 1. Became a Villain Nicki Minaj at Marc Jacobs runway show - Nicholas Hunt/Getty Images Heel turns can be magical. Rap thrives on out-of-this-world characters and drama. 50 Cent threatened to rob all of New York and later transformed himself into a superhuman willing to declare war upon anyone. MF Doom wore a mask and sent imposters to shows. Nicki dyed her hair bright colours and crowned herself Queen. Its not exactly new; shes played around with titles of royalty since her Monster verse. But villains need an origin and have to break away from their past persona to be taken seriously. Cardi Bs ascent did the trick for Nicki. After years of little challenge to her throne, the idea of another female rapper encroaching upon her kingdom was enough to leave Nicki rattled, who spent 2017 denying any sort of bad blood between her and Cardi. These are men in our culture who simply refuse to let it go, Nicki would tweet. They dont do this to male M.C.s. But as the two rappers went from throwing shots to eventually throwing down during New York Fashion Week, Nicki dug her heels in deep. She weaponized her fanbase, the Barbz, and sicced them upon those who wronged her, like Wanna Thompson, the journalist who tweeted a critical thought about the rapper, or Travis Scott, whom she alleged rigged the charting system to allow Astroworld to get a number one over Queen. She brokered a truce with Cardi B, only to hire two women currently preparing a lawsuit against Cardi and feature them in her Good Form video. She struggled to clear a Tracy Chapman sample for a song and when clearance wasn't granted, released it anyway. When pressed on shaming sex workers in an Elle cover story or collaborating with Tekashi 6ix9ine, her response was to double down. Villains arent apologetic and it seems the Nicki Minaj of 2018 isnt either. 2. Queen Radio Nicki Minaj at the MTV EMAs - Carlos Alvarez/Getty Images In recent years, a Beats 1 show has become valuable to artists looking to extend the life of their album rollout. Its a way for fans to stay connected with the artist and people love tuning in for new music and new moments. With plenty of the latter, Queen Radio became something more. It turned out Nicki had just enough classic NYC rap radio flair to turn a simple radio gig into something dramatic and engaging. Conducting live Q&As with friends and industry professionals, presenting giveaways to fans and premiering new music, it was meant to show a more relaxed Nicki. What we got was the high stakes of reality TV. Nicki dropped bombs and asked for all the smoke. She gave out awards like Cocksucker of the Day and Dickrider of the Year to those who dared cross her or speak negatively of the queen. It worked; Queen Radio went viral, with clips frequently hitting social media spawning waves of reactions and dismissals. It didnt matter if the information she had was accurate, as long as it kept her name in the conversation. Plenty of casual fans tuned in if only to keep up with Nickis rotating case of enemies and haters. 3. Plenty of Music Nicki Minaj and the all-girl group Little Mix - Ian Gavan/Getty Images for MTV Drama and antics need quality music to keep them going. Prior to Queen, the last Nicki Minaj album was The Pinkprint which came out four years ago. In that time, Nicki worked on business ventures, all the while recording guest features and one-off releases. A major point she held over Remy Ma during their war of words was that she was an accomplished rapper in the pop realm with the hits to prove it. Numbers dont lie, she said. But when the singles she released in 2017 (No Frauds, Changed It, and Regret In Your Tears) failed to make a significant impression, the narrative that Nicki Minaj may have lost the Midas touch began to settle in. I cant remember the last time Ive seen a superstar of Nickis caliber put out three records at the same time, said Charlamagne Tha God when discussing hype and trash moments of the year with Joe Budden. And by the way, the No Frauds record had the iHeart radio stimulus package, meaning youre going to play it every hour on the hour on every urban station throughout the country. She mightve even been on some of the pop stations. She had Wayne and Drake on the record and that record didnt go, bruh. Her untrammelled focus on her fan support, and on her position on the charts, seems increasingly like a way of compensating for a lack of substancea way of grasping for a kind of relevance that she is struggling to tap into organically. wrote Carrie Battan in the New Yorker. Her relentless boasts feel less like the prideful expressions of an artist than like those of, say, a historically unpopular President distributing printouts of electoral maps to Oval Office visitors. Thankfully Chun-Li, her highest charting solo hit in recent years, and the platinum-certified Queen is beginning to rewrite that narrative. Motorsport seemed to kick off a reversal of Nickis fortunes where she began to release some of her most engaging music in years. Poke It Out, found on Playboi Cartis album Die Lit, showcased a Nicki Minaj that seemed to be having fun. Barbie Dreams continued the streak as the Queens rapper made a tongue-in-cheek homage to Biggies Just Playing (Dreams) and promo single Barbie Tingz found its energy in its cold-cocking 80s NYC chrome sound. On top of releasing a 19-track album, Nicki Minaj has been more than generous with the mounting number of guests spots she's done this year, making sure her voice was heard across radio, clubs and playlists alike. Collabs with artists like Tekashi 6ix9ine, UK girl group Little Mix, pop star ZAYN, K-Pop group BTS, on top of the usual suspects like Lil Wayne, Tyga and Mike WiLL Made It ensured she was a formidable force on the airwaves this year. It was supposed to lie dormant. At least, such was the implication after Tory Lanez deleted his Tweets disrespecting Royce Da 5'9" earlier this morning. After Nickel claimed Tory did not, in fact, catch a win in his tilt with Joyner Lucas, Tory Lanez decided to clap back with utter scorn. "That's why you rappidy ass n***as always had the wrong conception of a W," wrote Tory, in a since-deleted tweet. "Shows why y'all careers look how they look now."Royce decided to play diplomatic, keeping his threat underlying: "No need to get upset Lil homie. I thought yours was dope too. Somebody like you disrespecting somebody like me is ridiculous tho. Ima let slide because youre new." https://twitter.com/_/status/1074907317047447553 Unfortunately for Lanez, it would appear that the ongoing narrative got the better of him; after all, many were quick to point to a "poked-bear" line of reasoning, implying that Tory was simply asking to be mauled. It would appear that such a victim narrative proved too irritating for Tory to abide, and he lashed out accordingly. "Aint nobody scared of rolls 57 lyrically," writes Tory, doubling down on his Royce disrespect. "I deleted my comment cuz Im not gone keep acting like my n***a Joyner didnt do his thing . the old n***a kinda had a point .. what i said came off like some hating shit . People are aloud to think anybody won ... simple." https://twitter.com/_/status/1075109955387228161 Naturally, such flippant disrespect irked Royce, no stranger to rap beef; in fact, he once went 1vs6 with D12 (including close friend Eminem) and emerged on the winning side. Nickel took to Twitter to issue yet another warning: "If you tryna get yo mufhkin ass beat, you doing everything right... Im giving you the benefit of the doubt because you Canadian. Now go play somewhere before I get upset." https://twitter.com/_/status/1075111296054390784 Tory clapped back, dubbing Royce "Mr. Muscle Milk" and laying the disrespect on thick: "dont let ur gym workout and the fumes in the air start confusing your mind . old ass n***a talking bout he before i get upset on Twitter . Fuck u finna do ? Fight me through emojis and text .. n**** SUCK MY DICK" https://twitter.com/_/status/1075117699271979011 Royce seemed to accept the challenge with a sad sense of inevitability, as if he could smell the upcoming carnage. Even Joe Budden couldn't resist sliding in, clearly feeling the call of competitive spirit. After all, despite the differences they may have had, Royce and Joe are still bonded by Slaughterhouse, and will ride for one another accordingly. In the meantime, it seems as if both Tory and Royce are ready for war, and it wouldn't be surprising to see a pair of diss tracks emerge in the near future. https://twitter.com/_/status/1075114318612426752 https://twitter.com/_/status/1075121040777453568 United Airlines will spend more than $300 million on a new baggage system at Bush Intercontinental Airport to speed up bag delivery and handle an increasing number of travelers. The current system for Terminals C and E moves an average of 26,000 bags each day. During peak flying times, such as the holidays, the system can handle 40,000 to 45,000 bags a day. This volume is straining the system and, with more people flying every year, United is investing in an upgrade that can handled an average of 77,000 bags day. For departing passengers, the new system could mean the luggage of someone arriving a little too close to takeoff has a better chance of making the plane. For arriving passengers, the system can also sort bags staying in Houston and those headed to connecting flights, reducing the time it takes for a suitcase to arrive in baggage claim. At HoustonChronicle.com: United chief says IAH flights bouncing back with energy recovery Construction is slated to begin in the second quarter of 2019 and wrap up during the third quarter of 2022. Were replacing a 20-plus-year system thats really inefficient, said Rodney Cox, Uniteds vice president of operations for Bush Intercontinental. The current system has two loops, one inside the other, that move departing bags in Terminal C. And then there are two separate loops doing the same in Terminal E. The systems were built separately and later stitched togetheras Uniteds operations grew. The new system will replace the separate two-loop systems with one, four-loop system that spans both Terminals C and E. The four loops will be interlaid inside one another like a dart boards bulls-eye. And if one loop goes down, the impact isnt as severe as when there are just two loops. The new system will have more cameras at various angles, making it easier to scan bag tags denoting the suitcases destination. The luggage will move on conveyor belts with a robotic arm that pushes bags down the proper ramp. The new system will automate some other functions, too, such as storing bags that arrive more than two hours before a flight and rerouting a passengers bags if they chooses to change flights. Holiday travel: Houston airports expect more than 3.7M holiday travelers "Airlines and airports are definitely investing in new technology for baggage because technology has really evolved," said Mark Ahasic, founder and president of Ahasic Aviation Advisors, a Connecticut consulting firm for airports, airlines and other aviation companies. And if United is planning for 77,000 bags a day, Ahasic said, then its likely going to bring larger planes and more flights to Houston. It means United is looking to really ratchet up volume in Houston over the long term, he said. During construction and installation of the new system, United will shut down one terminal baggage handling system at a time, requiring employees to manually take bags to a covered area on the tarmac, sort them and then deliver them to the planes. Cox said United would find ways to make sure the construction doesnt delay baggage delivery or affect the airlines performance. Uniteds ratio of bags accidentally sent to the wrong destination is 2.53 for every 1,000 bags, a 14 percent year-over-year improvement. Our customers are counting on us to do that, he said. At HoustonChronicle.com: For United's Oscar Munoz, the turnaround is a journey Construction of Uniteds new baggage system will somewhat coincide with the Houston Airport Systems plans to redevelop its international terminal. The Airport Systems $1.2 billion project will essentially combine Terminals D and E by 2024. Cox said the projects are separate, but United will work with the Airport System to make sure construction doesnt happen at the same time and same spot. They will also work together to make sure the two projects complement one another to improve traveling in and out of Houston. United wants to invest in the future experience of our customers, he said, and the growth of our hub. andrea.leinfelder@chron.com twitter.com/andrearumbaugh A federal judges order to end the Affordable Care Act offers an opportunity to reconsider what we expect from American health care, because if we were building a system from scratch, I doubt it would look anything like what we have today. What business owner or manager truly wants responsibility for financing his or her employees care? Companies paid on average $14,069 per employee for coverage this year, 5 percent more than last year, according to the Kaiser Family Foundations 2018 Employer Health Benefits Survey. To control costs, employers are monitoring workers for smoking and obesity. About 20 percent buy wearable devices that monitor their workers activity, a clear case of mission creep when your business is selling widgets. On HoustonChronicle.com: Drug company graft not only driver of health care costs Employers are also pushing a larger share of health care costs onto employees, with deductibles rising 212 percent since 2008. Co-payments are also higher, with the employees share of health care costs rising 10 times faster than wages. Nearly 152 million Americans rely on employer-sponsored health insurance. But why would anyone want their employer to decide what gets covered, how much it costs and whether family members are included? Opponents of a single-payer system say they do not want their government overseeing their health care, but why they are so comfortable with their employer choosing their insurance plans? After all, the U.S. Supreme Court has given employers the power to decide what benefits to cover, including birth control. Our current system also creates a perverse triangle where those who pay the bills are not the same people who receive services from providers trying to make money. Anyone who has asked their doctor how much the insurance company will pay for a procedure understands the dilemma. The patients interest is in getting the maximum amount of care, and because they are paying the small portion of the bill, he or she is less worried about cost. Providers want a happy patient and maximum earnings from charging what the market will bear. Doctors and hospitals often go overboard to minimize the risk of litigation, running up unnecessary charges. The payer, whether an insurance company or a self-insured company, wants a happy patient, but also wants to pay the minimum amount necessary. The payer has a fiduciary duty to minimize waste and abuse. Which brings us to the no-good, lousy, most dagnabbit contrivance of American health care: the provider network. Insurance companies contract with providers to gain discounts and lower costs. In return, insurance companies send patients their way. If a patient goes out of network, the insurance company pays either much less or nothing at all. The vast majority of billing disputes revolve around network issues, with patients caught between providers demanding more money and insurance companies refusing to pay. On HoustonChronicle.com: U.S. health care system costs too much, fails too often Why would anyone want an insurance company to choose which doctors he or she is allowed to see? Obamacare may not have allowed you to keep your doctor, but neither does any other kind of coverage. Another perverse incentive is the governments guarantee of emergency care, whether you have insurance or not. Many people chose to gamble and not buy insurance because they know there is a safety net. Insurance only works, though, when a large number of healthy people pay into the system, so there is money for the few sick people. The government should require everyone to have insurance. Yet 45,000 people a year die from preventable heart problems, cancers, organ failures and other curable diseases because they dont have insurance, according to researchers at Harvard University Medical School. The uninsured have a higher risk of death when compared to the privately insured, even after taking into account socioeconomics, health behaviors and baseline health, lead author Dr. Andrew Wilper, told the Harvard Gazette. We doctors have many new ways to prevent deaths from hypertension, diabetes, and heart diseasebut only if patients can get into our offices and afford their medications. Polling shows that the vast majority of Americans want a system where a persons chances for survival does not depend on their pocketbook. Americans want to choose their providers, access affordable care, hold the system accountable and fairly reward those who make it all possible. We should expect nothing less. The American people, though, have little power to demand anything in our current system. Any reboot should put the patient in charge of who they see and what they pay, forcing insurers and providers to compete for their business. Chris Tomlinson writes commentary about business, economics and policy. chris.tomlinson@chron.com twitter.com/cltomlinson Last month at the Hobby Center, during intermission for the traveling Broadway production of Phantom of the Opera, two people were overheard debating whether Andrew Lloyd Webbers blockbuster is, in fact, the greatest love story ever told, as the posters proclaimed. A consensus was quickly reached: its not. That a smart young woman would fall in love with a brooding captor is simply not believable not the way this story unfolds. The man sitting behind me flipped through the pages of his playbill, remarking on how Stockholm syndrome love stories havent aged very well. Then he smirked. Look, Beauty and the Beast, he said, pointing at an ad in his program. Thats the same story! Theatre Under the Stars did not plan for its remount of the Disney musical which the company helped debut in 1993 to follow another story about a misunderstood monster who captures a girl and convinces her to fall in love with him while in captivity. But here this musical is, arriving right after Phantom, challenging us to believe that our Beast is, after all these years and unlike the masked Phantom still worthy of love. For much of the 20th century, Disneys films were famous for turning the most gruesome stories in the canon, like Cinderella, into magic for children. Beauty and the Beast was the first to lay claim to cinematic greatness, featuring the romantic sweep of a live-action drama. It was the first full-length animated feature nominated for a best picture Oscar. Beauty and the Beast When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday, 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. Saturday, 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Sunday through Dec. 23 Where: Hobby Center, 800 Bagby Details: $30 - $135; 713-558-8887, tuts.com See More Collapse Beauty and the Beast was also Disneys first dive into Broadway. The 1993 musical ran for 13 years. Unlike the film, however, the stage adaptation couldnt feature tiny talking teapots, nor grand libraries, nor glowing rose petals, nor a beast whose wet hair puffed out like a dog after a pre-dinner bath. An animated beast can look cute, therefore lovable, while a man in a suit looks silly and emotionally inaccessible. Not all the magic translated to the stage. Some of the extra musical numbers in the stage version feel like fluff. Human Again, which didnt make the film, is well-composed but doesnt tell us anything about the story or its characters we dont already know. The cringe-inducing Me features a physically aggressive Gaston pushing and pulling at an unwilling Belle. As such, the current production at TUTS at the Hobby Center through Dec. 23 is a reflection of the past. Magic mirror, show me what theater was like two decades ago! And yet. Look at all those children. And marvel at how show-stopping Be Our Guest remains. The production, in other words, cant live up to your nostalgia for the film, yet its filled to the brim with human beings whose presence feel very much alive. Michael Burrell, as Beast, manages to sing beautifully through his furry mane and mask. If I Cant Love Her? ends the first act, giving the Beast a gloomily relatable interiority the film didnt have. His performance is the most important, as that discerning audience member from Phantom would likely point out, because the musical doesnt work if you dont fall in love with the Beast. But Burrell pulls it off. It takes broad physical comedy swinging arms and big gestures of cutesy frustration to convince us the Beast is a good guy despite jailing Belles father, then Belle. In the film, the ticking bomb was the image of the rose withering over time. On the stage, we see Lumiere (an effervescent James Patterson), Cogsworth (Price Waldman) and the rest of the servants slowly turn into inanimate objects giving the urgency of Belle and Beasts romance a more communal sense of stake. And dont forget the Beasts best trait unlike the Phantom, hes funny. The enchanting Delphi Borich is Belle. She never seems afraid of the Beast, which comes across as naive in the beginning but then translates into a role of authority and mentorship in this version, Belle teaches the Beast to read King Arthur. We slowly interpret her to be motivated by curiosity, by kindness and by her boredom with her small French village. There are moments you cant recreate on the silver screen, like seeing the delightful Brennan Quarles Emeka, as Chip, pop his head out from a table. Director Chris Bailey keeps the bodies onstage moving in deliberate, dramatic patterns that circumvent the large gaps carved out for the pit orchestra. As Belle and Beast fall in love, your eye wanders from dancer to dancer. The expectation that comes with something named Beauty and the Beast will always be astronomical. That doesnt mean it still cant surprise, please and delight. Then, when you finally hear the lyrics tale as old as time, your mind is no longer in the past. Instead, you are focused entirely on the present moment a luxurious, candlelit few seconds that feel close to magic. wchen@chron.com When he wrote about the joys and history of punch in 2010, spirits authority David Wondrich also suggested a slightly subversive attack on the primacy of the single-serving cocktail. We have to, for a brief moment, dethrone the cocktail, expel it from our thinking, Wondrich wrote in Punch: The Delights (and Dangers) of the Flowing Bowl. Of course, that never happened. But Punch did its part to put the trend of big-batch cocktails in context. And like most things in the spirits world, everything-old-is-new-again is in play: Punch bowls the communal enjoyment of boozy cheer, for which Wondrich made a stirring case are showing signs of life again. Bars across the country are breaking out the punch bowl as a novelty, conversation starter and as an effective way to jigger up multiple servings of a cocktail at one time. When chef Chris Shepherds UB Preserv opened this year, it did so with a cocktail list that included drinks meant to be shared by small groups. Bowl options include the Jackalope (gin, lime, pineapple, mint, curacao, aquavit) and Wild Man of Navidad (anejo rum, bourbon, lemon, lime, ginger, bitters) for up to six sippers. When Montrose honky-tonk Goodnight Charlies launched its Brunch at High Noon recently, the service included Cowboy Punch, featuring variations on a Planters Punch. Ive always loved punch, Goodnight Charlies co-founder David Keck said. It doesnt really matter where I am; if I see punch on the menu I usually try it. Other Houston bars and restaurants have put punch bowls on their bar, too, including Third Coast in the Medical Center, Alice Blue in the Heights, Brasserie du Parc downtown and Stones Throw in Montrose. One of the most outrageous punch-bowl drinks is being offered at the new Bisou at River Oaks District. The pretty young things at this clubby restaurant have been ordering the Mint to be Melon made with Grey Goose Melon, elderflower liqueur, lemon juice, simple syrup, watermelon juice and mint. The large bowl serves more than four people and is priced at a staggering $350; the smaller, $175, is meant to entertain two to four guests. The line between large-format cocktails and punch bowls seems to be blurred these days, but the effect is the same: spirits and juices in a large vessel that is usually heavily garnished to invite conviviality. Russell Thoede of Lei Low tiki bar in Houston thinks that the large-format cocktail and punch-bowl trend may be making a comeback because tiki culture is on the rise and because of economics. With a large-format drink you are guaranteed four drink orders right off the bat, he said. Maybe itll become a standard to do punches. Thoede added that punch and bowl drinks might be hot now because they are, quite simply, fun. If you can get a table of people drinking punch, theyre happy, Wondrich said. Punch is a communal experience. Its meant to be shared. Its part of the fun to be clustered in front of the punch bowl with your friends. Which brings us to holiday parties. Dipping into a big bowl of punch is appropriate for the all the days leading up to New Years Eve. We asked Houston spirits experts to share with us some of their holiday-punch recipes. Recipe: Apple Spiced Island Tea from David Cook of Third Coast Recipe: MacColl Bowl from Westin Galleymore, spirits director Underbelly Hospitality Recipe: Chut, Cest un Secret (Shush, Its a Secret) from Kimberly Paul of Brasserie du Parc greg.morago@chron.com twitter.com/gregmorago Interfaith Ministries of Greater Houston is changing the way we talk about faith and the diverse religious communities that make up the city. The Dialogue Project, which launches in August, will offer Houstonians new opportunities to engage in a conversation about faith, celebrate differences and connect over common ground. Rev. Greg Han, director of interfaith relations, said the project has been in the works for a while. Weve been doing interfaith dialogue in various shapes and forms forever, he said. For instance, the Dinner Dialogue program, founded in 2007, has been bringing people from various faith traditions together for discussion over dinner in hosts homes. Originally called the Amazing Faiths Dinners, the project was presented by Interfaith, the Boniuk Center (now the Boniuk Institute) at Rice University and the city of Houston. Bethany Boucher, program coordinator for interfaith relations and community partnerships, said feedback from past dinner dialogues suggested a desire for follow-up events. People always wanted more, she said. Its so powerful and so unique. They get so much out of it. But there was always a sense of, Whats next? Recent events, like offensive fliers at the Congregation Shaar Hashalom in Clear Lake in July, vandalism at the Rothko Chapel in May and arson at the Victoria Islamic Center last year, drove home the need to create more opportunities for greater understanding about diverse faiths. The Dialogue Project was born as an effort to expand programs that encourage discussion and exposure to various religions by simply creating more platforms to talk and learn. Theres a lot that can be solved by just talking to other people, Boucher said. We dont all have to be the same to get along, love each other and work together. The Dinner Dialogues will continue as part of the greater Dialogue Project. Now there also will be monthly Faith in Our City programs, which includes Lunch and Learn sessions, as well as guided tours of houses of worship. Each month, a different religion will be featured. The lunchtime discussions are hosted at the Hines Center for Spirituality and Prayer, 500 Fannin. Tickets, which include a meal, can be purchased online at imgh.org/faith-in-our-city. More Information For information on Interfaith Ministries of Greater Houston's Dialogue Project, visit www.imgh.org/faith-in-our-city. See More Collapse Han will lead the sessions. We do a basic overview, he said. I do my best to be a translator between a religion and people who might be familiar with it. It will be an outline and time for conversation. House of worship tours will follow, elaborating on the lunch session. The series begins Aug. 7 with Lunch and Learn: Hinduism. The first guided tour is scheduled for Aug. 13. Guests will visit the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, 1320 W. 34th St. Parthasarathy Krishnaswamy, board president for the Hindus of Greater Houston, is looking forward to the new Interfaith series. He has attended the Dinner Dialogues and feels that by visiting the houses of worship, guests will learn even more. The more you are aware, the more you accept, he said. This is the right way to approach understanding each other. And when you understand each other, theres more peace. No experience can match a firsthand visit, Krishnaswamy added. When you go to a temple and see whats going on, how they are praying, its very different, he said. You automatically learn once you come to a place. If you really want to know about cultures, then you need to go to its headquarters. He explained that Hindus of Greater Houston works to promote community unity through its youth, leaders and public programs, and the organization appreciates Interfaiths efforts to promote further understanding of the Hindu culture. The Faith in Our City series continues in September with Bahai, then Jainism in October, Judaism in November and Roman Catholicism in December. Then the program will delve into Unitarian Universalism, Zoroastrianism, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Islam, Sikhism, Eastern Orthodoxy and Buddhism. Boucher moved to Houston in 2005 and has been impressed with the citys rich cultural scene. She pointed to a PEW Research Center study from 2014 that stated about 80 percent of all Houstonians identified themselves as actively religious. Thats huge, Boucher said. And its really diverse too. Even within each faith tradition, there are an array of interpretations and groups to explore, Han added. As more and more people move to Houston, he hopes to keep the city connected by building interfaith dialogue. We want to keep that social thread woven together, he said. The most important element for most people is faith. Boucher is convinced that residents want to come together and learn more about each other but said sometimes the path of discovery can be difficult to find. Its hard to connect but here are so many ways that we can, she said. And people are thirsty for that. Were in a prime spot to help people truly connect. Even when its hard questions and hard topics, we can find similarities. The key is making educational experiences as accessible as possible, Han said. He is called to increase religious literacy, that greater understanding of various faiths. People are still unaware of religions, he said. This is about wanting to share this really rich, interesting and cool facet of Houston with a wider audience. Boucher said she personally has benefited from learning more about faith traditions and hopes to share what she has gained with others. Its become a really important part of my life, she said. Getting to know religions different from mine changed my life. It gives you a better perspective of the world. It shapes who you are and how you treat others. Boucher said there is room for the Dialogue Project to grow and evolve. There are lots of opportunities to provide space for people to talk about their beliefs and how faith shapes who they are, she said. In the meantime, she hopes those interested in learning more about Houstons range of religions come out to a Lunch and Learn session, house of worship tour or Dinner Dialogue program. Its really important and really interesting and a whole lot of fun, she said. Lindsay Peyton is a writer in Houston. A series of loud thuds interrupted 93-year-old Joe Rhodes as he spoke to two visitors in his cluttered living room. Relatives were tossing logs onto the front porch fuel for the wood stove that warms the house where Rhodes lives with his wife of 71 years, Ollie Mae. Rhodes built the small, wood-frame house with his own hands. The ancient stove, the horse standing in a ramshackle enclosure in the muddy front yard, the dense woods behind the property these details suggest an isolated country dwelling, perhaps in Appalachia or deep East Texas. But Rhodes lives in Tamina, a small, unincorporated community in southern Montgomery County, about 35 miles north of downtown Houston. Its narrow, rutted streets and crumbling houses stand in jarring contrast to the stately homes, well-groomed lawns and thriving shops and restaurants in surrounding suburbs such as The Woodlands, Shenandoah and Oak Ridge North. The conditions in this predominantly African-American enclave, founded by emancipated slaves in 1871, reflect decades of inadequate public services water pressure too low for fire hydrants, no sidewalks, poor drainage. Its most urgent need, residents and area officials agree, is public sewage service to replace the aging, individual septic systems now used by most residents. Three times in the past 20 years, community leaders have negotiated with neighboring jurisdictions to treat sewage from the roughly 200 homes in Tamina. And three times, deals have collapsed just as success seemed within reach. "We were right there," said James Leveston, 75, the longtime leader of the nonprofit Old Tamina Water Supply Corp. Unless a solution can be found, community leaders say, one of the nation's last remaining "freedmen's towns" faces a slow death by attrition as older residents die and the lack of essential infrastructure discourages new investment. Tamina's efforts to upgrade its services have been hampered by structural problems in the governance of unincorporated areas in Texas, along with bad luck and some questionable decisions on the part of community leaders, according to interviews with longtime residents, public officials and others, as well as a review of public records and correspondence. Underlying these factors, however, lies a more pervasive theme: a deep suspicion among many residents that powerful interests want Tamina to shrink into oblivion opening up potentially valuable real estate for more profitable redevelopment. This concern was expressed in a March 2018 grant application from the water nonprofit. "I think that even our President would agree that this is unimaginable . . . that we would have to clear so many hurdles just to improve our living conditions, unless there is a conspiracy to drive us out of Tamina." Distrust nurtured by neglect has led Tamina to shy away, at crucial moments, from potential solutions that seemed to threaten its independence. Leaders of the neighboring town of Shenandoah, for example, have discussed annexing all or part of Tamina, which would solve the utility problems. But many residents are wary of this option, a sentiment rooted in concern that joining another community would cost Tamina its distinct identity. That identity is closely tied to Tamina's role as one of the last surviving settlements founded by the roughly 2 percent of former slaves who managed to purchase property after their emancipation. Hundreds of these communities emerged between 1870 and 1890, historians say, but few still stand. Some descendants of Tamina's founders still live in the community, creating a powerful sense of obligation to honor their ancestors' sacrifice. "Developers often approach us, asking us to sell our land," Tamina resident Annette Hardin told Houston photographer Marti Corn in an oral history included in Corn's 2016 book of photographs of the community. "What they don't understand is that it's not just property it's our legacy. The land represents the blood, heart and soul of our African-American heritage." Last place to get services The community's continued inability to obtain sewage treatment service, a task routinely achieved on a much larger scale by Houston-area developers, fits a historical pattern of neglect. Longtime residents say Tamina was the last place in Montgomery County to get paved streets or a park. Electricity didn't arrive until the early 1960s. Until a few streetlights were installed some 15 years ago, cars regularly struck people walking on dark roads without sidewalks, residents said. After it rains, poor drainage leaves pools of water in ditches and low-lying areas for months. At least a foot of water covers the graves of more than 250 people, including members of some of Tamina's earliest families, in the Sweet Rest Cemetery on the east side of the community. Read more: Tamina community hopes to save submerged Sweet Rest Cemetery Water began flowing from taps in Tamina around 1970. Before that, residents used a communal artesian well. "They had the neighborhood water man who would put barrels on his truck or wagon and take it to people's homes," recalled Leveston, who grew up in Tamina. News reports by the late television journalist Marvin Zindler were credited with creating pressure for a pact with a neighboring community, Chateau Woods, to sell water to Tamina. The water is stored in tanks and pumped to homes. The nonprofit run by Leveston administers the system and handles billing. This arrangement is still in place, but it's never been expanded to include sewage treatment service one of the stated goals of the nonprofit when it registered with the state in 1971. "If we don't get that, we can't have any growth," said Ranson Grimes, 73, who has lived in Tamina for 40 years. 'It was deplorable' The absence of a sewage treatment system has had immediate and long-term consequences. More than 18 years ago, a memo written by Montgomery County's public health director warned that Tamina's "outdated individual septic systems" posed a "potential health hazard." Paul Mendes, who was the city manager of Oak Ridge North when that city developed plans to provide utility service to Tamina in the early 2000s, said the need was urgent at the time. "You had people flushing their toilets directly into the yard, and kids playing with their toy boats in the ditch where you could see toilet paper," recalled Mendes, now the Magnolia city administrator. "It was deplorable." Scott Nichols, Montgomery County's environmental health director, said such conditions no longer exist "to my knowledge." The department investigates potentially malfunctioning sewer systems only in response to complaints, Nichols said. The string of failed sewer-system initiatives also has affected Montgomery County taxpayers. In 2016, the county repaid $112,000 to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for projects that obtained HUD grants but never materialized. Today, the absence of a public sewer system, coupled with a Montgomery County rule requiring minimum one-acre lots for new septic systems, inhibits new development in Tamina even as the population dwindles and the housing stock deteriorates. The utility issues forced Christina Thomas to stop construction on the house she recently started building in Tamina, where she grew up. The unfinished house sits empty, the insulation in its walls exposed. Lumber and decorative stones are piled out front. "As you can see, it's pretty much just a shell right now," said Thomas, who decided after a divorce to relocate from the Conroe area to Tamina, where her mother and other relatives live. Thomas said she was told she needed to install an aerobic sewage treatment system, more expensive than a conventional septic system. And she'll have to pay for lines to connect her house to the community water supply network, which doesn't extend to her property. She said she is working to resolve these problems and hopes to finish the house and move in by next spring. But the utility issues have been more challenging than she expected, she said. This issue isn't particularly problematic for Joe Rhodes; his septic system works fine, he said. He has an opinion, however, about the reason for the long history of poor public services in Tamina. "It's just black folks here," he said. "I reckon that's why." Local officials say race has never been a factor in their decisions. Joanne Callahan Ducharme, Montgomery County's community development director, made this point in a June 18, 2018, letter informing Tamina leaders that the department was withdrawing its offer of a $331,646 federal grant to help with a sewer system project. "Nowhere above has anything been stated or hinted at that has to do with race, or with income level, or with residents of Tamina personally," Ducharme wrote. "Many persons in many entities have attempted to assist Tamina with this project in the past . . . None of these entities has had an obligation to assist you. Those who have withdrawn have done so for a variety of reasons, none of which have anything to do with race, income, or personal animosity toward anyone in Tamina." No one's job Ducharme's observation that none of the surrounding jurisdictions had an "obligation" to help Tamina was correct. Because of the way local governments are organized in Texas, solving this problem is not officially the responsibility of any elected official. Tamina is an example of a structural service gap cited in a recent report on area governance by Rice University's Kinder Institute for Urban Research. The report found that about 400,000 Harris County residents are not part of a city or of a municipal utility district (MUD) special districts created at the outset of a new development and thus receive few services. "Creating a MUD over the top of an existing neighborhood is not feasible," the report noted. It did not examine Montgomery County, but the same issues apply there. County governments are not set up to provide utility service, a fact frequently mentioned by Montgomery County officials when they are asked about how they might help Tamina. One potential solution is annexation. A city that annexed Tamina would be required to provide water, sewer and other municipal services. Tamina lies mostly within the extraterritorial jurisdiction a buffer zone in which cities have annexation authority of Shenandoah, but the town's annexation powers are limited because it has not reached the 5,000-population threshold required to be a "home rule" city in Texas. In planning for future home-rule status, Shenandoah officials have discussed the likely annexation of the portion of Tamina west of a railroad line that runs through the community, said William Ferebee, the city attorney. Most of Tamina, however, is east of the tracks; Ferebee said property-title questions and other issues have created uncertainty about potential annexation there. "There were just a lot of issues there that were unknowns for the city," Ferebee said. A state law passed in 2017 requires cities to obtain voter approval before annexing populated areas. Whether an annexation referendum in Tamina would pass is unclear. Restricted: Houston suburbs look for ways to grow after Texas law curbed annexations When Shenandoah's city administrator announced annexation plans during a 2007 meeting in Tamina, reaction among those in attendance was mixed. Some said they would welcome services from the more affluent, predominantly white city, but others feared they would lose control over their community. "It seems to me like a form of enslavement," community activist Rita Wiltz said during the 2007 meeting. A mostly rural history For much of its history, Tamina was a rural community in a largely rural county. It began as a slave settlement in the early 19th century; in 1871, emancipated African-Americans secured work on the railroad or in the logging industry and purchased land in Tamina originally known, for obscure reasons, as "Tammany," a pronunciation some residents still use. The community was once far larger than it is now. Subdivisions and shopping centers now stand on ground where Joe Rhodes and his neighbors hunted for rabbits and squirrels until the mid-20th century. Rhodes recalled making a bit of extra money by serving barbecued armadillo meat to visitors from Conroe. Over the years, Tamina's informal boundaries shrank as developments popped up and sections of the original area incorporated as towns. As recently as 1970, Montgomery County had about 51,000 residents less than a tenth of its current population scattered among small towns and unincorporated areas. Conroe, the largest town, had a population of about 12,000. The Woodlands, where about 105,000 people live today, was an undeveloped forest. Houston's sprawl seemed a safe distance away. A surge of development, however, pushed the county's population to almost 200,000 by 1990. Shenandoah and Oak Ridge North became small towns full of well-kept homes and flourishing businesses. By the time the new millennium began, much of the land between Houston and Conroe was fully urbanized, with each shopping center and housing development resembling the next. Tamina, though, was bypassed. Construction cranes stretched skyward in communities to its north, south and west, but new development was rare in Tamina. Much of its housing stock aged and deteriorated. The population shrank as older residents died; there are no official figures, but Leveston said the number of homes connected to the water system has declined from about 235 to about 175 in the past decade or so. Leveston lives on the same property in Tamina where he grew up, although he lived for a time in Houston. He moved back for good in the late 1970s. A deal falls through Organized efforts to provide sewer service in Tamina began in 1989, when the Old Tamina Water Supply Corp. obtained a "certificate of convenience and necessity" essentially, a license to provide utility service from the Texas Water Commission. Little progress was made for the next decade, but in 1999, county commissioners hired a Houston engineering firm to explore ways to bring sewer service to Tamina and to improve the water service. By the following year, discussions were under way about a deal with the adjacent city of Oak Ridge North. This municipality, with about 3,000 residents at the time, had enough spare sewage treatment capacity to handle the 200 or so households in Tamina, and federal grants or loans were available to pay for the necessary pipes, lift stations and other infrastructure. In September 2001, Oak Ridge North Mayor Joe Michels presented a detailed plan for providing water and sewer service to Tamina. But more than two years would pass before the City Council, on Feb. 2, 2004, approved a resolution endorsing the plan. Then, an agreement that had taken four years to put together fell apart within months. Setback: Plans for water, sewer system in Tamina run dry According to correspondence among the people and jurisdictions involved, Leveston, in his role as president of the Old Tamina Water Supply Corp., refused to transfer the certificate of convenience and necessity to Oak Ridge North. This prompted the city to withdraw from the agreement in October 2004. 'They were pretty much divided' Nancy Mikeska, who headed the county community development department at the time, said Tamina residents never united in support of the project. "As we moved forward over the years, the community itself had issues with the way the county was trying to proceed," recalled Mikeska. "They were pretty much divided on whether they should get government involvement in their service." Leveston, in a recent interview, noted that the nonprofit water company is owned by its members every Tamina resident connected to the service. And these residents, he said, balked at the idea of turning over the state-issued certificate to Oak Ridge North a requirement of a federal loan for the project seeing such a move as a potential loss of autonomy. The main sticking point, Leveston said, was the unwillingness by Oak Ridge North officials to agree in writing to transfer ownership of the utility system back to the nonprofit when the loan was repaid in 40 years. "They told us to rely on good faith," Leveston said. In Tamina, faith in local institutions is scarce. The Rev. Warzell Booty, who lived in Tamina for 50 years and was active in the efforts to obtain a sewer system, expressed his skepticism in an oral history interview recorded in 2016 and archived by the University of North Texas. County officials "never intended for (the deal) to come through not with our name on it," said Booty, who died in 2017. About a year after the deal fell through, Leveston approached Oak Ridge North again about a possible sewer service arrangement. In response, he got a letter stating that the city had reallocated its available capacity. "We wish you the best of luck in your endeavors to provide water and sewer service to the Tamina community," the letter stated. Dispute leads to deal In 2006, Tamina leaders alleged that Shenandoah had encroached on its water-service territory during a road expansion project. The community filed a "cease and desist" order against Shenandoah, ultimately leading to settlement talks that produced a September 2007 agreement calling for the city to provide water and sewer service to Tamina. Planning for the project continued for years. In 2015, however, Shenandoah backed out of the deal after learning that the terms of a federal loan required the city to forgo annexation of Tamina until the loan was paid off, which could take 40 years. "No responsible City Council would agree to that," said Ferebee, the Shenandoah city attorney, In addition to the annexation issue, Ferebee said, Shenandoah officials were concerned that Tamina's mostly low-income residents would be unable to pay the needed rates to cover the service. If that happened, he said, Shenandoah could become liable for repaying the federal loan. "We were concerned it was not economically feasible," he said. Most recently, Tamina leaders negotiated with the South Montgomery County Municipal Utility District for a sewage-treatment arrangement. The county's community development department tentatively agreed to provide a $331,646 grant to assist with this project. Numerous Tamina residents signed letters of support, and it appeared that the community's long struggle was almost over. "Tamina community could have public sewer services by 2019," a local news organization, Community Impact, reported on June 13. Five days later, Ducharme informed Tamina leaders that the department was withdrawing its grant offer. Ducharme's letter cited numerous problems with the nonprofit's application and supporting documents including a request for a U.S. Department of Agriculture grant that, according to Ducharme, duplicated funds the county planned to provide through a different federal program. Ducharme wrote that she convened a meeting of interested parties to try to resolve these issues, but more confusion resulted, including a lack of clarity about how the nonprofit would deal with issues such as client defaults and repairs and maintenance. " 'We always figure out a way,' is not a business plan," she wrote. Now, Leveston says, Tamina's leaders are trying to develop a community-owned sewage system, including a treatment plant, rather than attempt to tie in to another locality's system. This effort is just beginning. Mike Snyder has been a Houston Chronicle journalist since January 1979, with alternating stints as a reporter and editor. His reporting assignments have included city government, transportation, housing and growth and development issues. Prior to joining the Chronicle he worked as a reporter for the Conroe Courier and the Galveston Daily News. Follow him on Twitter or reach him by email at mike.snyder@chron.com. Marie D. De Jesus is a staff photojournalist for the Houston Chronicle where she has concentrated on developing relationships with Houston's diverse immigrant and marginalized communities. Prior to the Chronicle, De Jesus worked for the Democrat and Chronicle located in Rochester, New York and the Victoria Advocate in Texas. Follow her on Instagram and Twitter, or reach her by email at marie.dejesus@chron.com. Design by Jordan Rubio *** Archaeologists have discovered a well-preserved, 4,400-year-old tomb of a royal priest and his family in Egypt, in a one of a kind find, Egyptian authorities announced Saturday. The tomb was unearthed in Saqqara, a city south of Cairo and a vast necropolis from ancient Egypt. The discovery dates from the rule of Neferirkare Kakai, the third king of the fifth dynasty of ancient Egypt, according to Khaled al-Anani, Egypts minister of antiquities. The fifth dynasty governed for less than two centuries, from 2,500 B.C. to about 2,350 B.C., according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The tomb had remained untouched, said Mostafa Waziri, secretary-general of Egypts supreme council of antiquities, according to Reuters. Its near-perfect condition makes it one of a kind in the last decade, Waziri said. Nearly 9 feet tall and 32 feet wide, the tomb has been under excavation since November. The walls are decorated with colorful hieroglyphs and statues of pharaohs, while sculptures of the buried priest and his family were placed in the tomb. In all, there were 45 statues in the grave. Authorities suggested that more objects of archaeological significance would be discovered once the excavation of five shafts begins including the coffin or a sarcophagus of the priest. The work is expected to start in January. More for you Wooed by Saudis, Kushner Became Influential Friend Egypt has had no shortage of archaeological discoveries lately: Among other finds, a 2,000-year-old, perfectly sealed sarcophagus was unearthed in July; the tomb of a prominent priestess was found in February; and the grave of a royal goldsmith was discovered in September 2017. Thousands of years ago, Saqqara, where the latest tomb was found and which is home to the celebrated Step Pyramid, was the cemetery for Memphis, the capital of the Old Kingdom a necropolis. In modern times, as archaeologists started to bring the citys dead back to light, it became a tourist attraction, with big crowds admiring its famed pyramids and the remnants of an astonishing ancient civilization. But visitors have not been flocking there in the same numbers since the 2011 uprising against former President Hosni Mubarak. Political problems, and the bombings and terrorist attacks that followed, have made the country an unattractive destination for vacationers. Authorities hope that the discoveries will help rebrand Egypts image as a tourist destination. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has never been convicted of any felonies. But he was charged with several shortly after being sworn into statewide office in 2015, and, barring any surprises, still will be under indictment when he begins his second term next month. Thats among the resons Ive never considered the Texas attorney general to be among our states better lawyers. Surely hes at least heard of the separation of powers. Or the Constitution, which is the document that separates them. I was, therefore, surprised to see Paxton release a statement explaining that he would like to use the Supreme Court to usurp the power of Congress, even though he must have been feeling frisky, given the context. Like most Republicans, Paxton is a longtime critic of the Affordable Care Act. And on Friday, he received the news that a Texas-led coalition of states had struck a blow against it. Read more: ACA still law of the land but consumers confused and worried after judges ruling A lawsuit the coalition filed earlier this year argues that Obamacare is unconstitutional. On Friday a federal judge in the northern district of Texas, Reed OConnor, released his ruling on the case. In OConnors opinion, the Texas-led coalition is correct. As Texas attorney general, Paxton probably was excited by that news, and keen to take credit for it. The Affordable Care Act remains in place for the time being, however. OConnors reasoning is tendentious, if nothing else. Legal observers are skeptical the Supreme Court would come to the same conclusion, if asked to weigh in on the lawsuit that came to OConnors docket. And in his statement heralding OConnors ruling, the Texas attorney general clumsily announced that this is an effort to topple Obamacare via judicial activism, which Republicans usually denounce. Our lawsuit seeks to effectively repeal Obamacare, which will give President Trump and Congress the opportunity to replace the failed social experiment, Paxton said, in a statement. Grieder: Democrat Justin Nelson should be the clear choice for Texas attorney general The Texas-led coalition filed suit after Congress zeroed out the tax penalty associated with the Affordable Care Acts individual mandate. The plaintiffs argue that as a result of the change, the mandate no longer can be considered a tax, and that if the mandate no longer passes constitutional muster, the entire law has to go. The lawsuit appears to be ideologically motivated. And in the absence of an alternative plan, a Supreme Court ruling striking down Obamacare would have adverse implications for millions of Americans who rely on the laws key legal protections. That would have adverse implications for Republicans who happen to be on the ballot in the 2020 general election, presumably. So for many conservatives, OConnors ruling isnt exactly something to celebrate, even if they were opposed to the Affordable Care Act in the first place. Paxton, however, doesnt have that problem. He was re-elected last month albeit by a margin of just 3.5 points, after a challenge from Democrat Justin Nelson, a highly accomplished lawyer who isnt under indictment. And his characterization of the Texas-led coalitions goal is outrageous, in itself. The Supreme Court can strike down legislation, of course. But that doesnt mean its appropriate to try to use the Supreme Court to effectively repeal legislation. Grieder: Texas business community has the right perspective on Dreamers Congress has the power to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and it has had that power all along. Congress is the legislative branch of the federal government. And for the past two years, Republicans have had the opportunity to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with a plan of their preference, by passing legislation to that effect, which would be signed by the president. Republicans have been insisting that they would like to repeal and replace Obamacare since the law was passed in 2010. And they actually made several attempts to act on their promises after retaking the White House in 2016, and both chambers of Congress. But none of the alternative plans they presented could muster the support to pass. I understand that some conservatives are frustrated by the fact that those efforts were thwarted by Democrats. Still, Democrats arent responsible for the ineptitude of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan. And Republicans can hardly expect Americans to agree that the ineptitude of Congressional Republican leaders gives Republican state attorneys general an excuse to stage a blatant assault on the rule of law. According to Paxton, the lawsuit seeks to effectively repeal Obamacare, in order to give the president and Congress an opportunity to do something he wants. In the Texas attorney generals telling, in other words, the Texas-led coalition of states is hoping to use the judicial branch of the federal government to usurp the power of the legislative branch. The Constitution makes it very clear that you cant do things like that--even if you hate Obamacare, and have managed to bumble your way into the Texas attorney-generals office. Five employees at a South Houston bar have been charged with serving alcohol to an underage patron who authorities said then drove the wrong way and crashed into an SUV, killing a 23-year-old mother and injuring her child and mother. The five, employees at Servi-Car el 3 on Houston Boulevard, are all accused of serving 19-year-old Erick Hernandez at least a dozen alcoholic drinks over six hours Sunday night. On Sunday night, based on seized surveillance video, a visibly intoxicated Hernandez left the bar at 10:49 p.m., according to the Harris County district attorneys office. At 10:51 p.m., authorities said his pickup swerved across three lanes of College Avenue and crashed into a car driven by Taylor Phillips who died at the scene. This family should be celebrating the holiday, but is instead planning a funeral, said Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg in a statement. This tragedy should never have happened. Now Playing: Erick Hernandez is accused of being drunk when he crashed head-on into an SUV driven by 23-year-old Taylor Phillips on Sunday night in the 1500 block of College Avenue near Hobby Airport. Phillips died on impact, prosecutors said in court. Video: Jay Jordan EXCLUSIVE AT HOUSTONCHRONICLE.COM: An in-depth look at Houston's dangerous roads and drunk drivers. In the case, Mildred Garcia, 21, Anna Evelyn Lule, 19, Jaquin Guadalupe Gonzalez, 19, and Jazely Marie Barrera, 21, are charged with misdemeanors associated with serving Hernandez. Gustavo Tejada-Garcia, 28, the manager of the bar, is charged with misdemeanor possession of an unauthorized beverage charge, namely tequila. Hernandez is accused of being drunk when he crashed head-on into an SUV driven by near Hobby Airport. Phillips died on impact, prosecutors said in court. Her 1-year-old son and 48-year-old mother were injured in the crash. Prosecutors with the Harris County District Attorneys office said none of the bar employees who served Hernandez ever asked for his ID. Hernandez was charged with second-degree felony intoxication manslaughter in Phillips death. He was released on a $30,000 bond Tuesday night, court records show. On Wednesday, a judge ordered that Hernandez cannot drive as a condition of his bond while the charge is pending. He was also issued a 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew and will be required to wear an alcohol-detecting ankle monitor. Hernandez, as well as his attorney, David Garza, declined to comment. Based on video, Hernandez had spent six hours drinking inside the Frontera Events Venue in the 1000 block of Houston Boulevard, ultimately downing a dozen alcoholic beverages including at least three tequila shots, according to Sean Teare, chief of the Vehicular Crimes Division at the Harris County District Attorneys Office. Servi-Car el 3 is a part of Frontera Events Venue, authorities said. Hernandez was drinking with another person inside the bar, Teare said. This is a 19-year-old kid at a bar, Teare told reporters Wednesday morning. The bar is like any other bar. They had live music. They were dancing. They were there for six hours, and they never stopped drinking during the six hours. Surveillance video indicates that Sunday not was not the first time Hernandez had been in the bar, Teare said. He eventually left the bar that night and hopped in his Ford F-150. Less than a minute later, Phillips was dead. Firefighters had to free Hernandez from his truck after the crash, Teare said in court. Hernandez was given a test to determine his blood-alcohol concentration and Teare expects it to be pretty high based on the amount of drinks surveillance video shows him drinking before the crash. As for the bar, the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission is investigating the circumstances leading up to the crash. If convicted, Hernandez is facing up to 20 years in prison. The Houston metro area is the deadliest in the nation for fatal crashes related to alcohol and drugs, according to a Houston Chronicle analysis of federal data. The dubious distinction has drawn the attention of prosecutors. Ogg, since taking office in 2017, has worked with the Texas Alcohol Beverage Commission on education campaigns aimed at establishments that sell or serve alcohol, and focused on prosecutions of people who sell alcohol to minors who later are suspected of causing deadly crashes. Charges have followed some of the regions most high-profile fatalities involving alcohol and underage drivers. In April, Clear Lake bartender Amy Allen, 40, was charged with two counts of selling liquor to a minor, both misdemeanors, following a Feb. 28 crash. Gumaro Munoz Campos, 29, was charged Aug, 6 with a liquor violation following a horrific crash in Atascocita that killed Salma Gomez and Chloe Robison, both 16. Campos, via his lawyer, denied in court selling Jaggar Clayton Smith, 17, the liquor purchased prior to the July 25 wreck that split Smiths car in two when he slammed into a tree in the median of Timber Forest Drive. Still, courts and prosecutors have been mixed on imposing penalties. Allen received deferred adjudication in September, meaning she will spend no time behind bars and the charges could disappear if she avoids other crimes. The bar owner's son, Devin Jackson, 24, and another man, John C. Medina, 23, pleaded guilty to one count of furnishing alcohol to a minor and both also received deferred adjudication. Dug Begley contributed to this report jay.jordan@chron.com NEWS WHEN YOU NEED IT: Text CHRON to 77453 to receive breaking news alerts by text message | Sign up for breaking news alerts delivered to your email here. The final Harris County Commissioners Court meeting for Ed Emmett and Jack Morman went much as the others did: Members approved additional flood control projects, debated the future of the flood-damaged downtown courthouse and for an hour listened to residents comment on a number of issues. Emmett, leading his final meeting after 11 years as county judge, a period in which he lead the county through several hurricanes and even more flood-producing storms, made no farewell speech. We are adjourned, he said simply at 12:10 p.m., after the court reached the end of the agenda. Only in speaking to reporters afterwards did he reflect on stepping down. Emmett, 69, said he was proud of his tenure, and cited his work toward providing better access to mental health care and improving the Office of Emergency Management. He said he would miss being the face of the county during storms, where he was a consistent, calm presence for Harris County residents. Im sure Ill be like the old war horse the next time a storm comes, he said. Ill be oh, no. Thats not me anymore. Emmett joined the court in 2007, and Morman won the Precinct 2 commissioner seat four years later. Both were defeated for re-election in November. GRIEDER: Lina Hidalgo earned the right to serve as Harris County judge Neither man was eager for a fanfare over his departure, but both welcomed the well-wishes from a number of speakers, including District Attorney Kim Ogg, Sheriff Ed Gonzalez and State Rep. Mary Ann Perez. Perez read a proclamation commending Emmett and Morman for their service, to be approved by the Legislature. Court members ribbed each other as usual, and there was nothing somber about the occasion. When Precinct 4 Commissioner Jack Cagle complained he was being excluded from photographs county employees had asked to take with the outgoing judge, Emmett showed that in defeat, he had not lost his sense of humor. If youd had lost, youd be up here, too, Emmett deadpanned to uproarious laughter. Morman, characteristic of the low profile the 40-year-old kept on the court, left the chamber at the conclusion of the meeting, disappeared into his office and was unavailable for comment. Morman has accepted an offer from Cagle to work in Precinct 4s capital projects department. Emmett in January will begin teaching public policy at Rice University and also join the schools Kinder Institute for Urban Research. Democrats Lina Hidalgo and Adrian Garcia will become county judge and Precinct 2 commissioner in January, giving the court a Democratic majority for the first time in decades.. zach.despart@chron.com First it was the restaurant industry, then it was Facebook. Now, Generation Z, the demographic born after 1996, appears to be dissolving the traditional structure of Texas gangs. The Texas Department of Public Safety's new gang threat assessment, published last week, identifies several gang-related trends across the state in 2018. One of those trends has to do with younger members "relinquishing traditional gang structure and rules, opting for less organizational oversight and the freedom to serve in self-interested roles," the report said. RELATED: Barrio Azteca makes resurgence as top gang threat in Texas That description sounds similar to a long-used media trope to describe the millennial generation, the group born between 1981 and 1996. A deluge of think-pieces have said the demographic is "obsessed" with self-care and eschewing organized religion. Millennials have been accused of killing everything from home ownership to beer to napkins. But more recently, Generation Z has been stealing that industry-killing thunder, claiming malls and print magazines as possible victims of their digital world, according to a recent Bloomberg article. They wield more economic power and social media clout. Also, Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State, told Bloomberg that Gen Z'ers prioritize personal wealth and material goods more than previous generations. "In psychological terms, it's a shift toward extrinsic valuesmoney, fame and richesrather than toward intrinsic values, like relationships and community feeling," Twenge said in the article. Texas Department of Public Safety spokesman Richard Standifer said the agency doesn't define the age of a "young" gang member. But according to the DPS report, gangs tend to recruit juveniles in schools and neighborhoods with promises of money, popularity, protection and family. Nowadays, newer members prefer a free enterprise approach with little oversight, similar to members of the Tango Blast gang, the report said. Young members have also tended to relinquish the traditional mandate to stay within the gang for life. RELATED: 14 top gangs operating in Houston and throughout southeast Texas For the Texas Mexican Mafia, young members have been dismantling the organization from within, causing internal strife and increased separation between the old and new members, the report said. Young members of Barrio Azteca, which has returned as a top threat in the state, have also been known to ignore rivalries and work with other gangs and drug cartels, the report said. "Young gang members are committing crimes to enjoy the profits for themselves, without first receiving permission from gang leadership," the report said. 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 | Text CHRON to 77453 to receive breaking news alerts by text message A Houston man has been accused of killing an elderly woman by forcing her to ingest a chemical agent, sometime before she was found dead after a fire at her home in May. Jose Gonzalez, 49, is charged with murder in the May 8 death of 82-year-old Delores Hawkins. Arson investigators found Hawkins in her home after HFD extinguished a fire that night at 8706 Pagewood Lane, which is also listed in court records as Gonzalezs residence. An autopsy found that Hawkins died of ingesting isopropanol, which is often used as an antiseptic or cleaning agent. Gonzalez was already in Harris County Jail on an arson charge, but unrelated to the May 8 incident. Authorities said he started a fire at 6111 Willowbend on May 9, according to court documents. It's unclear how Hawkins and Gonzalez knew each other, but they both lived at the house where she died, according to the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences. Hawkins, who was originally from Baltimore, was known nationally for her work in the community. After retiring from Exxon in 1982, she owned and operated Dees Halfway House, which had several locations, according to her obituary. During former President George H.W. Bush's term, Hawkins met with him and First Lady Barbara Bush at the White House to discuss her work, her obituary states. Title Multiple criminals got the chance to smile for the camera this year as surveillance videos and dashcam footage captured extreme crimes in the Houston area. A violent robbery triggered by a local bank teller, police chases that ended in shootings and brazen employees defending themselves all made up some of the most notable incidents. AUSTIN On his way out of office, House Speaker Joe Straus says he will leave Texas with a proposed budget that boosts education funding by $5 billion over the next two years for prekindergarten and special education, thanks to a strong economy. Were going to recommend a $5 billion increase in public education funding, thats above enrollment growth, and should also be able to accomplish the governors goal for property tax relief, said Straus, R-San Antonio, on Tuesday. The bump would be roughly 13 percent above current state funding, which amounted to $18.8 billion in the 2018 fiscal year. Straus, who didnt run for re-election this year after five terms as House Speaker, wont oversee the states next budget. Its not clear whether Rep. Dennis Bonnen, an Angleton Republican whos expected to succeed Straus, will endorse the spending plan. His office declined comment. After lawmakers failed to increase the state share of education funding last session, Straus said he expects the Texas Legislature to tackle school finance when it reconvenes in 2019. I am predicting a good, positive session that finally does address long overdue and needed support for our public education system, he said. The budget document you will see right after the first of the year is sort of my last statement of where I think we ought to go, Straus added. Details of the blueprint which is still in the works have not been released yet. But Straus said funding can come from an improving Texas economy that is driving up state revenue. On ExpressNews.com: Its shameful. Lawmakers panel sounds alarm on Texas schools School finance is expected to be a priority for lawmakers next year, along with property tax reform. The two go hand-in-hand because public education is funded largely with property tax revenue in Texas, as well as state aid and federal dollars. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott is floating a plan to cap what local school districts can raise through property taxes each year, with the state filling the gap. Some educators have been skeptical, however, and worry the plan places too much focus on tax reform and not enough on improving public education. A 13-member school finance commission thats been studying the issue for months is expected to present its own recommendations Wednesday. Any plan will take a significant investment from the state and more than 1,200 Texas school districts. A number of costly proposals are on the table, including raising teacher pay and boosting school security. On ExpressNews.com: Texas expects thousands more special education students. But where are the teachers? In addition, the state faces growing expenses for special education to cover thousands more children who have been wrongly denied services in the past. Following a Houston Chronicle investigation in 2016, federal officials have ordered the state to make the services available to more children, which is expected to cost several billion dollars a year in the near future. Straus said the state can afford the substantial increase in public education funding and still offer property tax reform. Its really not for me to do more than just leave this final document as a marker and then let the new Legislature work its will, he said. If they dont agree with what we leave them, they will change it. The legislative session begins January 8. amorris@express-news.net Did I hear that word bipartisan? Did I hear that word? President Donald Trump said at a news conference last month. Thats a nice word. Yes, it is. The president was praising the work of Republicans and Democrats who came together to support a controversial and ambitious effort to restore sanity and fairness to our nations sentencing laws. Now that the bill appears to be on its way to passage in the U.S. Senate, we have to ask: Why doesnt Congress do this more often? The bill, which has been the subject of furious debate this week and of prodigious backroom labors in both the House and Senate for more than five years, also addresses desperately needed prison reforms that will change the way we treat inmates once they are incarcerated. It aims to help those who are released from prison to avoid returning to prison. More than 80 senators voted Monday to prevent a filibuster by opponents and move to a vote. All day Tuesday, senators jousted back and forth over a handful of amendments intended to weaken or derail it. The ultimate fate of those amendments and of the full bill wasnt expected to be known until late Tuesday or Wednesday morning. But for a change, the momentum in Washington behind this bill has been flowing toward common sense and fairness. Even Trump and some of the more conservative lifers in the Senate, including judiciary committee chairman Chuck Grassley of Iowa, are on its side. Trumps son-in-law Jared Kushner was a major advocate of the legislation. It also may have helped that the Fox Broadcasting Company threw its support behind the measure. For its part, the House has already signaled its willingness to accept this improved bill once the Senate votes. We write today to celebrate the rare example of bipartisan cooperation that has buoyed this bill. What a welcome antidote to the fierce partisanship displayed this fall during the confirmation fight over Justice Brett Kavanaugh. When this bill passes, its reforms will make the First Step Act the most important criminal justice reform in a generation. Its the first comprehensive effort in years that squarely confronts Americas crippling crisis of mass incarceration. Its passage will count as a major victory for Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn, who has been championing criminal justice reform for years, drawing deeply on his experience as both a former Texas attorney general and state Supreme Court justice. And while fellow Republican Sen. Ted Cruz has opposed the bill for years, his announcement this month that hed consider supporting it played a key role in bringing the bill to a vote. His willingness to consider the bill provided a ready rebuttal to the holdout conservative opponents like Tom Cotton of Arkansas. Why is the bill needed so badly? Because Americas criminal justice system is fundamentally flawed. America has the highest incarceration rate in the world, just above El Salvador. We send too many people to jail and keep them there for too many years often even if their offense was nonviolent and if experts have judged them at low risk of reoffending. Such squandering of human capital is as savage as it is stupid. Our prisons ought to be more than warehouses for individuals, Cornyn told his Senate colleagues, before pledging to vote for the bill. The First Step Act redresses these inefficiencies and injustices. On the sentencing side, it will relax some of the most outrageous requirements for mandatory minimum sentences. It will retroactively address crack cocaine sentences that are wildly disproportionate to sentences handed down for powder cocaine. On the prison reform side, it will provide training, employment counseling and drug-addiction recovery help for inmates if they want it, so they can be better prepared for life outside of prison. It will keep inmates closer to their families. And it will end the outrageous practice of shackling pregnant inmates. The bill is far from perfect, as Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said Tuesday. This legislation doesnt go as far as I would like. Far from it. But I believe its a historic bill. We owe it to them and to the communities where they will live to ensure they can lead productive lives. This compromise represents the best of the Senate. Its an important lesson: We dont have to settle for a Washington that is perpetually mired in partisan stalemate another kind of prison. Congress members can do better. Congress members can shake off the shackles of partisanship and do whats best for the country. This is one example. We should relish it. And demand it happen more often. United Nations Regarding Indelible sins in Yemen (Editorial, Sunday): I am reasonably knowledgeable about world geography, but I had to check my atlas just to see exactly where Yemen is located. The editorial tends to blame the United States for some of the problems in Yemen because of its support of Saudi Arabia in its attempts to quell the actions of the Iran-back Houthis rebels, a group of rebels who take actions against the people of Yemen and seem to have no respect for civility. Though the Saudis may be waging an indiscriminate war in the country, it seems like it would be in the best interests of Yemen if the Houthis would at least come to the bargaining table, as they cannot win a war against the rich and powerful Saudis, with or without the aid from the U.S. It seems that the Houthis don't like the legitimate government of Yemen and have tried to overthrow it for years, which has only resulted in a lot of death and destruction. Perhaps it is time for the always vaunted forces of the United Nations to step in and do what its charter says it should do. Lawrence Keen, Pearland Indifference Near the end of her life, the great actress Audrey Hepburn traveled to war-stricken areas as a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF, the United Nations Childrens Fund. Seeing the starving, ravaged children of war, she asked, How is it that governments spend so much money on warfare and bypass the needs of their children, their greatest capital, their only hope for peace? Viewing the emaciated 7-year-old Amal Hussain, now dead of acute starvation, I thought of those words. Later, Hepburn said: I am filled with a rage at ourselves. I dont believe in collective guilt, but I do believe in collective responsibility. Is it asking too much to demand that the worlds greatest democracy use its power not to wage war, but to work equally hard to bring justice, peace, and prosperity? No child should die because of our indifference. Nancy Perich Daly, Houston Next generation Regarding Texas pride? (Editorial, Dec. 6): The future of any society rests in its children. No matter how prosperous a society is, unless that society prioritizes the care of its' children, it will eventually begin to decay. The care of children can be summed up in three words: health, education, and welfare. In the first two categories the record of the GOP dominated state Legislature is abysmal. Texas has the highest number of children without health insurance and according to the paper is ranked 46th in education among the states. Under the welfare category, that depends on if you see the glass as half empty or half full. Those with means will no doubt say the welfare of Texas children is good and for those with little means will no doubt say the welfare of Texas children is not so good. We as a society have shown that we value the health and education of our children below the interests of business. Keep taxes low and all will be well. In low-tax Texas we are getting what we are willing to pay for. Gonzalo Martinez, La Porte Julian Castro really wants to be president. That much was clear Thursday when I sat down with him and his identical twin brother, Joaquin, for an interview over dinner in a midtown Manhattan steakhouse. Julian, a self-described progressive, is the former secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the former mayor of San Antonio, who last week announced the formation of a presidential exploratory committee. Joaquin is a congressman in Texas who would be Julians campaign chairman. When we begin the interview, Castro is careful with his answers nearly to the point of being cagey. You can see him doing the calculations in his head, trying not to overstate a position or appear too absolute on a topic that he has not fully considered. Can a sitting president be indicted? Well, I think were going to find that out. Later he adds, I know what I hope. I hope we can bring anybody to justice. Do you believe that Trump should be indicted? I believe the walls are closing in on him. If you were president and prosecutors attempted to prosecute a then former President Donald Trump, would you pardon him as Gerald Ford did for Richard Nixon? That is a tough decision. My inclination is to say no, that I would not, but I think some of that also depends on where were at as a country. But, as the dinner wears on, he loosens and his quickness to laugh emerges. He dispenses with the knife and fork he has been using to negotiate his roast chicken and, in a move that would have made Emily Post squirm but makes me smile, he hoists it with his hands. He is comfortable now, and this man I like: imperfect but not impertinent. Human. Relatable. We discuss Castros rather standard Democratic stances on major issues: in favor of common-sense gun regulations, wants to roll back the Trump tax cut, and wants to take a multinational approach to the issues driving Trumps tariffs. Hes in favor of universal pre-K, free public college across the board, and Medicare for all. Im listening for something enlightening, something arresting, a vision and a vocabulary that will rally and inspire. It never fully manifests. He talks of summoning a common sense of purpose, of common national identity. He chides Donald Trumps divisiveness and churlishness. But somehow, it all flattens for me. Im too familiar with the framing. And yet, there is something genuine about Castro, a nice guy who made it. Hes not straining to impress, and that, in and of itself, is impressive. Because Castros relative youth is so apparent in his appearance and comportment, it occurs to me that if elected, Castro, who is now 44, would become one of Americas youngest presidents. And this gives me pause. There is a young mans ease and airiness about Castro, a disarming charm that arrests the attention because of its counterintuitiveness, but I struggle to imagine it in the Oval Office. Thinking about the campaign, too, it is hard to imagine Castro in a bare-knuckled brawl with Trump and the Republicans. For instance, how would he respond when confronted with what he told The New York Times Magazine in 2010? Joaquin and I got into Stanford because of affirmative action, Castro told the magazine. I scored 1210 on my SATs, which was lower than the median matriculating student. But I did fine in college and in law school. So did Joaquin. Im a strong supporter of affirmative action because Ive seen it work in my own life. Trump would have a field day with this. It is important to note here that Castro is unlikely to be the only young candidate this cycle. Indeed, there may be a whole raft of hopefuls in their 40s, and even 30s, who throw their hats into the ring. But youth has a way of making itself known, of peeking through the curtain of the mature persona one tries to craft. Castros first task is to secure the nomination. One could see a scenario in which this Southern Hispanic would have particular advantages on the primary calendar, but it remains to be seen how an incredibly diverse party will respond to an incredibly diverse slate of candidates. Will people hew to tribalism and regionalism in their choices, or will those things be of little consequence in the end? Castro has been talked about for years as a rising star in the Democratic Party, one who could someday become this countrys first Hispanic president. One question for me is whether this is that moment for Julian, or if interest in him peaked before his opening appeared. There are now other stories and educational pedigrees just as compelling as Castros and they are attached to people with higher profiles, access to more donors and, quite frankly, more of a craven desire to rise to power. This nice guy may not always finish last, but can he come close enough to the top in Iowa and New Hampshire to confirm his viability? Blow is a New York Times columnist. The Most Extensive and Reliable Source of Information Related to the Mexican Drugs Cartels. You will not find this level of coverage anywhere else, join us! Send information, pictures or videos, you remain 100% anonymous. Envia fotos, videos, notas, enlaces o informacion todo 100% Anonimo. Borderland Beat? We love to have you in our team, send Sol Prendido or HEARST an email! Want to be a contributor or citizen reporter forBorderland Beat?We love to have you in our team, sendoran email! WARNING: Posts may contain strong violent material, discretion is advised. COMMENTS: We do not publish all comments, and we do not publish comments immediately. Plans to close schools are often explored when school districts face low enrollment and financial deficits. Closing schools might seem like a logical solution to fiscal shortcomings, but it can be more complicated and costlier in reality. Take, for example, the Austin Independent School District. The district just recently proposed to close 12 schools by the 2021-22 school year to address its declining enrollment and financial challenges. The Houston Independent School District has also recently considered closing at least 10 schools over their poor academic performance. I certainly understand why the school districts are considering this route, but there are unforeseen, non-fiscal costs to closing schools that districts often miss in the process. I have studied this topic for the past six years, and there are three issues that school district leaders across the state should pay close attention to while they consider closing schools. First, districts often underestimate the costly effects of school closures on the academic outcomes of displaced students. Second, they underestimate the costly impacts of school closures on local communities. Finally, any fiscal savings that occur are often only short-term. Students academic outcomes will always be essential to school districts. But the truth is the academic outcomes for students after their schools have been closed are neutral at best, and negative in some cases. Research indicates that some students whose schools are closed experience long-term negative impacts on their reading and math scores. Also, students whose schools have been closed are absent more often and have weaker relationships with adults and other students at their new schools. These experiences have been shown to occur even when students are able to attend schools with higher academic ratings. So, closing one school and sending students to another school is not a simple fix and can possibly undermine the positive student outcomes that school districts want. Schools that mainly serve African-American and Latino students are closed at higher rates even when predominantly white schools have similar academic standings. In these communities, schools often represent a place of hope, pride and dreams. So, when schools are closed, it not only affects students, families, teachers and staff members, it also reverberates through the entire community. Schools are commonly a central community institution in neighborhoods. Therefore, when schools are closed, it can leave a gaping hole, erase racial and cultural histories, and create transportation issues for students and families because some students will ultimately have to travel longer distances outside of their neighborhoods just to attend a school. The savings after school closures are also often short term. Due to gentrification, housing unaffordability, growing competition from charter schools and many other factors, some schools continue to lose enrollment. When schools in Texas consistently lose enrollment, it typically creates funding shortfalls for districts, especially for districts that are considered property rich. So, cutting costs is one of the main reasons that school districts cite for closing schools. However, research shows that closing schools actually does not result in significant savings in big-city school district budgets unless combined with massive layoffs. The research is not clear on whether school closures result in long-term savings for districts. Despite shrinking budgets and enrollments, it is imperative that school administrators focus on racial and educational equity to ensure that students who are commonly underserved by schools, because of their race, income, gender, native language or perceived ability, are at the center of any decision to close schools. Equity work requires districts to be creative in their approaches to ever-changing education contexts. We know district administrators do not take closing schools lightly. But they should pay close attention to these commonly unforeseen, nonfiscal costs as they consider options to address their enrollment and fiscal challenges because research tells us that closing schools may not be the best option in the long run. Green is an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy at The University of Texas at Austin. Subscribing to our services is a three step process. First you have to create an account and then you have to pick if you want to subscribe to digital and or print. Some people only want to be a digital subscriber to get access online and others want to also receive the print edition. If you are already a print subscriber and want online access, it is free, you simply have to create an online account and then attach your print subscription account number to the online account you create. As an existing print subscriber it is easy to get FREE access to all our online content. 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Sometimes the account number has extra zero's in front of it, just ignore those. 10 Musical Charities To Donate To This Holiday Season As always, one of the best gifts you can give this holiday season is a donation to charity, but with so many options out there, it can be difficult to know where to begin. Here Angela Mastrogiacomo looks at ten outstanding charities centered in and around the music industry that could benefit from you help. _______________________ Guest post by Angela Mastrogiacomo from Soundfly's Flypaper If youre reading this, it probably means youre at least thinking about donating some of your hard-earned money to a deserving charity this holiday season. Let me be the first to say: Thank you. There are so many incredible charities out there, both in the musical sphere and outside of it, which can make choosing difficult, but no less rewarding. Here, weve outlined ten great picks, organizations with missions ranging from musical education to environmental stewardship, mental health awareness to resources sharing, and much more. Music for Relief Dedicated to providing aid to the survivors of devastating natural disasters, Music for Relief was founded in 2005 by the band Linkin Park, and has gone on to raise over $9 million for over 30 natural disasters across four continents, including Hurricane Katrina, and earthquakes/tsunamis in Indonesia, Haiti, and Japan. Music for Relief also supports Energy for All through Power the World, in partnership with the UN and UN Foundation to bring sustainable, clean energy solutions to families. Reverb Combining their passions for music and the environment, Reverb was founded in 2004 by environmentalist Lauren Sullivan and musician Adam Gardner of Guster. Their mission is simple: to spread the world about environmental concerns by partnering with large operations such as tours and festivals to reduce unnecessary waste. They work with touring artists, festivals, venues, non-profits, brands, and fans, to reduce landfill waste, and help create a more sustainable environment. They do this through eliminating single-use plastic bottles at events, raising money for a variety of causes, and diverting compost from landfills. Theyve worked with Dave Matthews, Maroon 5, Pink, John Mayer, Ben & Jerrys, Levitate Music and Arts Festival, the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and many more. Inner-City Arts Focused on Los Angeles, Inner-City Arts helps over 5,000 elementary school students yearly receive high-quality immersive arts practice education at the Inner-City Arts campus. The program is also available to middle and high school students and is widely regarded as one of the nations most effective arts education providers. + Related on Flypaper: Our 8 Favorite High School Music Programs in the US Right Now. Music Saves Lives Music Saves Lives operates with the mission of educating people about life-saving activities that we can all participate in such as donating blood, organizing blood drives, and registering for the national marrow program. These blood-donation programs help save people with blood disorders such as leukemia every day via simple acts of kindness. Imagine that multiplied by several sponsored national tours worth of audiences and youll get a sense of how important this work truly is. HeartSupport Founded by Jake Luhrs of August Burns Red, and now supported by tons more bands on the circuit, HeartSupports mission is to let people know their stories matter, and that they arent alone. They provide online support for those struggling via an online forum, support wall, and even a live stream with staff and artists. HeadCount Voting is important, and yet so many never make it out to the polls. HeadCount aims to change that by getting out to concerts and getting online where music fans already spend so much of their time and registering voters. Theyve already registered about 500,000 voters since 2004 and accumulated over 20,000 volunteers nationwide. In addition to in-person sponsored events, they run Participation Row social action villages on major tours and festivals, creating an interactive experience around important causes and raising money for other organizations. The Roots of Music New Orleans is rich with musical history. Serving children ages 9-14 from low-income homes, The Roots of Music provides their students with round trip transportation and hot meals, all while educating them on music history and theory, as well as instrumental instruction. They operate five days a week throughout the year, and have delivered over 2,500 hours of music education, 30,400 hot meals, 1,400 bus journeys, and supplies such as 150 different instruments for students to use. Hungry for Music Hungry for Music is on a mission to provide eager students with musical instruments and help them learn, grow, and thrive in a more musical environment. By offering their students instruments and musical experiences, they provide children with a wealth of opportunities they might not have otherwise had. To date, theyve delivered 11,000 instruments to children in 49 states and 25 countries. Make Yourself Foundation Founded by the band Incubus, the Make Yourself Foundation funds a variety of environmental causes and charities around the world. To date, theyve raised over $2 million and awarded grant funding to over 60 nonprofit organizations, helping to promote sustainability and respond to natural disasters. Playing for Change A global nonprofit offering creative opportunities for at-risk youth, specifically in the developing world, Playing for Change believes that music has the power to connect us, and that through that connection we can truly change the world for the better. To date theyve created 15 music programs in Bangladesh, Brazil, Ghana, Mali, Nepal, Rwanda, South Africa, Morocco, Mexico, Argentina, and Thailand. Each week, over 2,000 people attend the free classes in dance, instruments, music theory, and language. Angela Mastrogiacomo is the founder and CEO of Muddy Paw PR, where her artists have seen placement on Alternative Press, Noisey, Substream, and more, as well as the Director of Community and Events for Music Launch Co. Shes also the owner of music blog Infectious Magazine.She loves baked goods, a good book, and hanging with her dog Sawyer. Share on: Page Content Montreal and Shenzhen, 18 December 2018 Strategies to ensure that sufficient numbers of competent aviation professionals are available to operate, manage and maintain the global air transport system in the coming decades received a major boost last week, with new agreements and initiatives being forged during ICAOs Second Next General of Aviation Professionals (NGAP/2) Global Summit, hosted by the Shenzhen Municipal People's Government of Guangdong Province, the Chinese Society of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and Beihang University. ICAOs numbers have revealed that no less than 620,000 pilots will be needed by 2036 to fly the worlds 100-seat-and-larger aircraft, declared ICAO Secretary General Dr. Fang Liu in her opening remarks to the more than 1000 Summit participants and high-level officials present, but even more important than this figure is the fact that 80 percent of these future aviators will be new entrants to this profession who are not yet flying today. Recognizing that a similar story is playing out with respect to the future air traffic controllers, maintenance personnel and other technicians needed, Dr. Liu stressed that these are just some of the literally hundreds of direct and indirect aviation career categories which will potentially be impacted. The Secretary General further noted that nearly 55 percent of the worlds 1.3 billion international travellers arrive at their destinations in aircraft today, a crucial contribution which when combined with aviations many other socio-economic benefits illustrates why air transport is regarded as a veritable lifeline for States economic growth and development. Of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals now being pursued by governments as part of Agenda 2030, focused on poverty reduction, environmental stewardship, gender parity, educational access, and many other noble socio-economic aims, fully 15 are directly and positively impacted by these States dependable access to ICAO-compliant international aviation, Dr. Liu emphasized. Participants to the NGAP/2 Summit hailed from 32 countries and were comprised primarily of professionals and leaders representing industry, governmental and non-governmental organizations, and academia. Also in attendance were almost 200 students to take part in the Model ICAO Forum held in parallel. Highlighting the progress being achieved toward previous calls to action raised at last years inaugural NGAP Summit, ICAO announced the expansion of its NGAP Programme and a new initiative to support young researchers and innovators. It is very important that ICAO maintains this NGAP momentum, and just as important that we elevate the scope of these challenges to the global level, the Secretary General underscored. The Model ICAO Forum conducted by ICAO adjacent to the Summit saw some 180 students participating in discussions on pre-agreed civil aviation topics prepared by ICAO technical experts. Co-hosted by the main Summit support partners, the Forum provided a unique opportunity to raise university-level awareness on the role of ICAO on the international stage, and the challenges associated with forging global consensus on critical air transport issues. On the sidelines of the 2018 NGAP Summit, a range of agreements were also forged between ICAO and some key partners present. These included a new intent to cooperate with Airbus more meaningfully toward both NGAP-related but also other objectives, a Training Services Agreement with the Shenzhen Airport Group, an MOU with Turkey regarding future cooperation on analytics and data visualization for aviation, and lastly a project agreed with Beihang University focused on NGAP capacity-building, aviation data, and cyber safety and security. A further agreement was also forged in Shenzhen among Summit participants, with several attending universities agreeing to encourage the sustainable establishment of a new International Association of Aviation and Aerospace Education (Alicanto). In concluding her keynote Summit remarks, Dr. Liu thanked the hosts for their very generous contributions to the success of the event, noting as well that their significant support highlighted how aviations workforce challenges can serve as key opportunities for universities and the best and brightest now being prepared in them for future careers. This is such a very exciting time in the history of aviation, and a just-as-exciting moment for those of us involved in finding new ways to assure a dedicated and qualified Next Generation of Aviation Professionals, she said. While in China, Dr Liu was pleased to meet with the Shenzhen municipal authorities. Also on hand for these meetings were Ms. Lydia Chikunga, Deputy Minister of Transport for South Africa; Ms. Poppy Khoza, Director of Civil Aviation, CAA, South Africa; H.M.C. Nimalsiri, Director General of Civil Aviation for Sri Lanka; Mr. Sergey Gudkov, Representative of The Russian Federation to the ICAO Council; and Mr. Martin Vidal, Representative of Uruguay to the ICAO Council and Uruguay Ambassador to Canada. She also held a series of bilateral meetings on current ICAO and air transport sector priorities with Mr. Jian Li, Deputy Administrator of the Civil Aviation Administration of China, who was accompanied by his Directors for Foreign Affairs and Human Resources. Dr. Liu also had an opportunity to meet officials from Beihang University, including Ms. Shumin Cao, Chairman of the University Council, and Mr. Huang Haijun, the schools Vice-President. She later toured some local Shenzhen manufacturers and shippers, meeting at the same time with senior officials from Huawei, Tencent, DJI, and SF Express. ICAO officials accompanying Dr. Liu in Shenzhen included Mr. Arun Mishra, ICAO Regional Director, Asia-Pacific; Mr. Jiefang Huang, Director of ICAOs Legal Affairs and External Relations Bureau; Mr. Henry Gourdji, ICAO Head for Strategic Planning, Coordination and Partnerships; Ms. Jiarong Yan, Director of the Office of the Secretary General; Mr. Catalin Radu, ICAO Deputy Director for Aviation Safety; and Mr. James Wan, ICAO Deputy Director, Information Management and General Administration. Resources for Editors About ICAO A specialized agency of the United Nations, ICAO was created in 1944 to promote the safe and orderly development of international civil aviation throughout the world. It sets standards and regulations necessary for aviation safety, security, efficiency, capacity and environmental protection, amongst many other priorities. The Organization serves as the forum for cooperation in all fields of civil aviation among its 192 Member States. ICAO's Next Generation of Aviation Professionals Global Summit ICAO's Next Generation of Aviation Professionals (NGAP) initiative ICAOs Global Aviation Training Activities Aviation and the UN SDGs Contacts Anthony Philbin Chief, Communications aphilbin@icao.int +1 514-954-8220 +1 438-402-8886 (mobile) Twitter: @ICAO William Raillant-Clark Communications Officer wraillantclark@icao.int +1 514-954-6705 +1 514-409-0705 (mobile) Twitter: @wraillantclark LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/raillantclark/ UK deepens climate change partnership with Pacific Islands Energy and Clean Growth Minister Claire Perry has emphasised the UKs commitment to support the Pacific Islands in combating climate change. Opening the UK/New Zealand Wilton Park Forum on Climate Change and Resilience in the Pacific yesterday (16 December 2018), Claire Perry championed climate vulnerable nations and reminded governments, businesses, and international organisations everywhere of their absolute duty to tackle the biggest threat of our time. The event, jointly hosted by the UK, New Zealand and the Pacific Island Forum, turned discussions and recommendations into practical solutions in areas including multilateral negotiations, oceans, plastics, finance, risk assessment and migration, deepened engagement between the UK and Pacific Island leaders and promoted new stakeholder partnerships to enhance future collaboration. The UK has a longstanding relationship with the Pacific Islands and a shared agenda on Climate Change. During the COP24 summit in Poland last week, Claire Perry launched the UKs new Capacity Building for international negotiations Programme (CaBIN). The 15.6 million technical assistance programme will increase the capacity of low income and climate vulnerable countries to become leading voices in international climate negotiations. In addition, the government is providing 1.2 million in funding to support a Pacific Regional Nationally Determined Contributions Hub to support these countries in implementing their Paris Agreement commitments. Crown copyright Theme(s): Others. Finally, UN General Assembly adopts Peasant Rights declaration! Now focus is on its implementation December 17,2018 | Source: La Via Campesina Today, 17 December 2018, the 73 Session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA 73) in New York adopted the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas. Now that the declaration is an international legal instrument, La Via Campesina (LVC) and its allies will mobilise to support regional and national implementation processes. The final vote of today represents the culmination of a historic process for rural communities. With 121 votes in favour, 8 votes against and 54 abstentions, the forum of UNGA representing 193 Member States, ushered in a new promising chapter in the struggle for the rights of peasants and other rural communities throughout the world. The 17-year long process, initiated by the international peasant movement La Via Campesina, supported by numerous social movements and allied organizations, such as FIAN and CETIM, has been a great source of inspiration and has strengthened the peasant communities in all regions of the globe. 2018 was decisive for the process of the Declaration: -- Geneva: in April, after 6 years of negotiations, the 5th Open-ended Intergovernmental Working Group of the Human Rights Council (HRC) concluded the debates on the content, finalizing the text. In September, the HRC (39th Session) adopted the Declaration by a majority vote. -- Rome: in October, during the 45th Forum of the Global Committee for Food Security, La Via Campesina together with the Civil Society Mechanism and with the support of several countries and UN institutions, organized a political event promoting the Declaration under the framework of the Decade for Family Farming. -- New York: in November the Declaration reached the process of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). On November 19th, the Declaration was voted and approved with a large majority by the Third Committee of UNGA, responsible for social, humanitarian and cultural matters. Lastly, UNGAs plenary vote from today concluded the adoption process. A new stage will follow, a stage of implementation, transforming the aspirations of La Via Campesina into solutions for daily struggles of the rural society! This declaration is an important tool which should guarantee and realize the rights of the peasants and other working people in rural areas. We urge all states to implement the declaration in a conscientiousness and transparent manner, guaranteeing peasants and rural communities the access to and control over land, peasants seeds, water and other natural resources. As peasants we need the protection and the respect for our values and our role in society to achieve food sovereignty, said Elizabeth Mpofu, a peasant farmer from Zimbabwe and La Via Campesina General Coordinator. As peasants all over the world, we are going to mobilize and we will join hands in our respective countries to lobby for the establishment of policies and strategies that contribute towards recognition, enforcement and accountability. Violations of our rights through land grabbing, forced evictions, gender discrimination, lack of social protection, failing rural development policies and criminalization can now, with the formal international recognition of this Declaration, be addressed with increased legal and political weight. Theme(s): Communities and Organisations. Coastal flooding forecasts strengthened in Caribbean December 18,2018 | Source: reliefweb An operational system has been developed on the island of Hispaniola to produce and disseminate new early warning information on coastal flooding, which will help save lives and protect property in low-lying, populated coastal areas. There is potential to enhance this early warning platform in the future and to extend it to other Caribbean nations. The Dominican Republic and Haiti, which together comprise Hispaniola, face the threat of tropical cyclones each hurricane season, with high storm surges, flooding, and large waves. The growing tourism industry in the Dominican Republic has increased the number of people exposed to this hazard, whilst Haiti has suffered devastating impacts with far-reaching humanitarian consequences from hurricanes including Maria (2017) and Matthew (2016). Thanks to the World Meteorological Organizations Coastal Inundation Forecast Demonstration Project (CIFDP), both the Dominican Republic and Haiti will now receive reliable and accessible storm surge forecasts provided by WMOs Regional Specialized Meteorological Center (RSMC) Miami operated by the US National Hurricane Center. The USAID-funded CIFDP-Caribbean demonstration project was successfully completed in December 2018, with the main beneficiaries being the Dominican Republic, Haiti and other small islands. It was implemented by WMO and the Dominican Republics national meteorological service, ONAMET, ensuring the maximum synergies of regional and national efforts. "Through this multi-year partnership with USAID and the World Meteorological Organization, were able to bring the same life-saving technology used in the United States to Haiti and the Dominican Republic, said Jamie Rhome, a U.S. National Hurricane Center storm surge specialist. The National Hurricane Center uses the Sea, Lake, and Overland Surges from Hurricanes (SLOSH) hydrodynamic model to simulate storm surge along hurricane-prone portions of the U.S. coastline and has made an effort to do the same along some international coastlines within the Caribbean region. For the purposes of CIFDP-Caribbean, NHC developed a new, specialized, version of SLOSH to include the physics of nearshore breaking waves. Based on climatology, over 16,000 hypothetical hurricanes were simulated and the potential storm surges were calculated. Composites of the resulting storm surges were then used to create high-resolution inundation maps using local topography. In locations that have a steep and narrow continental shelf, such as islands, waves can be a substantial contributor to the total water level rise observed during a tropical cyclone. For these areas, SLOSH has been coupled with a wave model to enable a more complete and accurate analysis of flood risk. From December 3 to 7, 2018, the training on the pre-operational system for CIFDP-Caribbean was held in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Members of NHC Storm Surge Unit and emergency management experts from the United States convened a 1-week implementation workshop to train the staff at the ONAMET and Civil Defense to use the new early warning products. The new vulnerability maps and forecasting system will enable people living in hurricane-prone coastal areas to evaluate their risk flooding due to storm surge. The user-friendly design allows the host countries to utilize the systems independent of the system developer. The CIFDP was initiated by WMO in 2009, with support from the Joint WMO-IOC Technical Commission for Oceanography and Marine Meteorology and the WMO Commission for Hydrology, in order to improve safety-related services for coastal communities through the development of coastal inundation forecasting and warning systems at the regional scale. The unique factor in this demonstration project was the consideration of all sources of inundation (from both ocean and river sources), to provide the most comprehensive information for an early warning to coastal communities. To date, CIFDP has been carried out in 4 locations: Bangladesh (completed 2017), Caribbean, Fiji and Indonesia. The CIFDP-Caribbean contributes to the Caribbean Early Warning System (CARIBE-EWS), which is the regional arm of the IOCs tsunami and other coastal hazards working group. It covers 48 countries and territories, of which 70% are Small Island Developing States (SIDS). Theme(s): Communities and Organisations. Journalists in Brazil are under attack from a government which sees independent journalism as a threat and which has said it will crush its opponents. The government's labour reforms have also cut off vital sources of funding for unions. Despite the threats FENAJ, the IFJ's affiliate in Brazil, has been actively fighting back, standing up for journalists and quality journalism. But now the union faces a new threat. The tax authorities have targeted FENAJ, unjustly claiming it owes property taxes on land gifted to the union in 1980 but which was never used by them. Despite legal challenges the authorities are pressing ahead with the threatened seizure of the FENAJ headquarters. The IFJ is backing FENAJ's urgent appeal to help save its HQ and calling on any members and unions who can afford it to show solidarity with our Brazilian sisters and brothers. To make a donation send payment to: Brazil: Beneficiary: Federacao Nacional dos Jornalistas CNPJ: 34078576/0001-93 Address: SCLRN 704 Bloco F Loja 20 Asa Norte CEP: 70730-536. Brasilia/DF. Brasil Reason for shipment: International donation Bank: Banco do Brasil Agency: 0452-9 Current Account: 186112-3 IBAN : BR8400000000004520001861123C1 SWIFT code: BRASBRRJCTA Related Agency: 0452 EMPRESA CENTRAL(DF) Related account: 186112-3 Via IFJ: Beneficiary: Federation Internationale des Journalistes IBAN: BE95 2100 3092 4258 SWIFT/BIC: GEBABEBB Bank: BNP PARIBAS FORTIS Address of the branch: Rond-Point Robert Schuman 10, 1040 Bruxelles, Belgium Imperial Valley News Center President Trump Announces Presidential Delegation to Switzerland to attend the World Economic Forum Washington, DC - President Donald J. Trump today announced the Presidential Delegation that will attend the World Economic Forum in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland, from January 22 to January 25, 2019. The Honorable Steven Mnuchin, Secretary of the Treasury, will lead the delegation. Members of the Presidential Delegation: Imperial Valley News Center NIST Summer Internship Program Makes It Easier for Students to Apply Boulder, Colorado - The U.S. Department of Commerces National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has made it more straightforward for students to apply to the agencys prestigious Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Program. Students can now apply for a paid fellowship directly through USAjobs.gov, without the assistance of their college or university. Since 1993, SURF students from across the country have had the opportunity to gain valuable, hands-on experience, working with cutting edge technology in one of the world's leading research organizations. The SURF Program is designed to inspire undergraduate students to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, said Brandi Toliver, NIST SURF Program director. A research summer internship like this can give students the experience, skills and confidence to succeed in their research field after college. Over the course of 11 weeks, SURF students contribute to the ongoing research of one of six NIST laboratories or facilities at either its Boulder, Colorado, or Gaithersburg, Maryland, campus. Students work side-by-side with NIST scientists or engineers in the Communications Technology Laboratory, Engineering Laboratory, Information Technology Laboratory, Material Measurement Laboratory, NIST Center for Neutron Research, or Physical Measurement Laboratory (which includes the Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology). This program offers a unique research experience that supports the NIST mission to promote U.S. innovation and industrial competitiveness, said Toliver. Prospective applicants can register to attend two webinars on the 2019 SURF Program and application process: Dec. 19, 2018, at 1:30 p.m. Eastern and Jan. 10, 2019, at noon Eastern. Applications must be submitted through USAJOBS no later than February 3, 2019 at 11:59 PM Eastern time. For more information about the program, visit the SURF pages on the NIST website. Imperial Valley News Center Establishment of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine Washington, DC - The United States congratulates Metropolitan Epifaniy on his election as head of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine. The establishment of the Church was a historic moment for Ukraine. The United States maintains unwavering support for Ukraine and respects the freedom to worship unhindered by outside interference. The right to religious freedom extends to all Ukrainians, including those choosing to join or not to join the new Orthodox Church. Governor Brown Announces Appointments Sacramento, California - Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. today announced the following appointments: Tony Hobson, 51, of Paradise, has been appointed to the Council on Criminal Justice and Behavioral Health. Hobson has been director of behavioral health at the Plumas County Department of Behavioral Health since 2018 and contributing faculty at Walden University since 2006. He was behavioral health director of the Sutter-Yuba Mental Health and Substance Use Disorder Services Department from 2014 to 2018. Hobson held several positions at the Butte County Department of Behavioral Health from 2010 to 2014 and from 2007 to 2008, including senior program manager, program manager and psychologist. He was a psychologist at the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation from 2008 to 2010 and served in the U.S. Navy from 1989 to 1993. Hobson earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree in clinical psychology from Walden University and a Master of Arts degree in multicultural counseling from San Diego State University. This position does not require Senate confirmation and there is no compensation. Hobson is a Republican. Janet Henson, 42, of Hesperia, has been appointed to the California Private Investigator Disciplinary Review Committee. Henson has been owner and president at Ideal Investigations Inc. since 2011. She was a contracted workers compensation analyst with the U.S. Postal Service, Office of Inspector General from 2012 to 2016, a field supervisor at Enlightened Investigations from 2008 to 2011 and a supervisor and lead investigator at Titan Professional Investigations from 2007 to 2011. She is a member of the California Association of Private Investigations and Private Investigators of California. This position does not require Senate confirmation and the compensation is $100 per diem. Henson is a Republican. Armando Lopez, 68, of Los Angeles, has been appointed to the California Private Investigator Disciplinary Review Committee. Lopez has been a contracted private investigator for the Los Angeles County Superior Court and owner of Enterprise Evaluation Services since 1987. He was a public defender investigator for the County of Ventura in 1999, security director at Miramar Sheraton Hotel from 1987 to 1999 and retired as a police detective from the City of Santa Monica from in 1986. Lopez is a member of the Criminal Courts Bar Association of Los Angeles. This position does not require Senate confirmation and the compensation is $100 per diem. Lopez is registered without party preference. Mario Campos, 57, of Santa Clarita, has been reappointed to the California Private Security Disciplinary Review Committee, South, where he has served since 2013. Campos has been president of Patriot Security Services Group Inc. since 2017, a security services officer for Tiffany & Co. since 1998 and qualified manager for A-Team Security since 2010. He was president, chief executive officer and qualified manager at Specialized Protective Group from 2000 to 2009, director of security and safety with Mondrian Hotel from 1993 to 1997 and security supervisor for the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel from 1991 to 1995. Campos was director of security and safety at Le Parc Suite Hotel from 1984 to 1991 and assistant director of public security and safety at Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel from 1989 to 1991. This position does not require Senate confirmation and the compensation is $100 per diem. Campos is a Republican. Nancy Silliman, 54, of Lakewood, has been appointed to the California Private Security Disciplinary Review Committee, South. Silliman has been owner and president of Enforcement Trainers Inc. since 1988. She is a member of the National Rifle Association. This position does not require Senate confirmation and the compensation is $100 per diem. Silliman is a Republican. Secretary of State Pompeo's Meeting With New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters Washington, DC - Secretary Michael R. Pompeo met yesterday with New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters at the Department of State. Secretary Pompeo thanked Foreign Minister Peters for New Zealands continued support in working towards the final, fully verified denuclearization of North Korea as agreed to by Chairman Kim Jong Un and for New Zealands assistance in countering terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan. They discussed the strategic relationship between the United States and New Zealand, our strong trade and commercial ties, cooperation in the Indo-Pacific region in partnership with Pacific Island countries, and joint efforts to strengthen the international rules-based order. United States-Mexico Declaration of Principles on Economic Development and Cooperation in Southern Mexico and Central America Washington, DC - The United States and Mexico seek to continue modernizing our bilateral engagement to reflect changes in the world and to ensure our citizens directly benefit. We are committed to promoting strong regional economic growth, good jobs, and expanded opportunity for all of our citizens. This declaration reflects the importance both countries attach to our bilateral relationship. The spirit of cooperation between our countries is strong with institutional, economic, familial, and cultural bonds that link the United States and Mexico and are the foundation of our bilateral relationship. The United States and Mexico today commit to strengthen and expand our bilateral cooperation to foster development and increase investment in southern Mexico and in Central America to create a zone of prosperity. Both countries recognize the strong links between promoting development and economic growth in southern Mexico and the success of promoting prosperity, good governance, and security in Central America. The United States welcomes the Comprehensive Development Plan launched by the Government of Mexico in concert with the governments of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras to promote these goals. The United States and Mexico will lead in working with regional and international partners to build a more prosperous and secure Central America to address the underlying causes of migration, and so that citizens of the region can build better lives for themselves and their families at home. Promoting Prosperity, Good Governance, and Security in Central America: The United States and Mexico will continue government cooperation and coordination to enhance security, governance, and economic prosperity in Central America, complementing the Northern Triangle countries Plan of the Alliance for Prosperity. The United States is committing a total of $5.8 billion in support of institutional reforms, development, and economic growth in the Northern Triangle from public and private sources. The United States and Mexico will also work with the U.S. and Mexican private sector and multilateral development banks to promote investment and economic development in the Northern Triangle. We will leverage the resources of U.S. and Mexican international development finance capabilities to better target investments in the region. Cabinet-level Meeting and High Level Taskforce: The Governments of the United States and Mexico will convoke a cabinet-level meeting in late January 2019 to agree on a strategic framework for our cooperation in Central America to address root causes of migration. The United States and Mexico will establish a high-level taskforce to facilitate design and implementation of cooperation and monitor progress on advancing our common objectives. Investment in Southern Mexico: The United States and Mexico will strengthen coordination with the private sector and development institutions to expand infrastructure and generate employment opportunities in southern Mexico. The government of Mexico has announced the largest development commitment in decades in southern Mexico to include $25 billion over 5 years. The United States, for its part, through the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, is focused on private and public investment in Mexico totaling 4.8 billion, to include committing $2 billion for suitable projects in southern Mexico. The United States will seek to leverage public and private investment in Mexico and is exploring options of further investment in dialogue with the government of Mexico. Bilateral Business Summit: The United States and Mexico will convoke a business summit in the first quarter of 2019 with participation by a broad range of U.S., Mexican, and international private sector representatives to increase investment and business opportunities in Mexico with a special focus on southern Mexico and the Northern Triangle. As our Christmas campaign continues to raise funds for the Elton John AIDS Foundation, a man whose former partner died due to Aids has spoken of his loss. Greg Olsen was 29 when he died of an Aids-related illness in 1989. He only found out he was HIV positive six months earlier. He just became weaker and weaker and was losing a lot of weight, said Leigh Barss, his partner at the time. Olsen spent his last days in the Broderip Ward, the countrys first Aids ward at Middlesex Hospital, which was opened by Princess Diana in 1987. I was in denial, said Mr Barss, 61. On the day of his death, I bought him a jumper ready for his discharge. That evening I got a phone call from the hospital. It finally hit me he wasnt going to survive. He died that night. Elton John launches The Independent's AIDSfree campaign Olsen was American and was in the US air force when the pair met. I met him in Greece where he was stationed, Mr Barss said. Olsen moved to the UK after finishing his service and worked as a data input clerk. He married a female friend in 1986 so that he could remain in the country. We were madly in love. We had two wonderful, incredible years and then we found out he was positive, said Mr Barss, a retired property developer from Hackney. The couple, who lived in Marylebone at the time, travelled to Olsens hometown in Idaho a few months before his death and he was tested there. In those days you didnt want anyone to know about your status, so we gave false names and false addresses when we went to the clinic, said Mr Barss, who was also later diagnosed HIV positive. We came back to the UK and he was becoming weaker by the day and we didnt know what to expect. Fighting back tears, he added: He was always so happy, so cheerful, always laughing, everybody loved him. He was such a beautiful person. International graffiti artist of mystery Banksy has struck again. An artwork depicting a child playing in snow has appeared on a garage wall overnight in Port Talbot, Wales. But the second half of the mural, around the corner of the wall, shows that the snow is in fact falling ash from a fire. The piece, in the Taibach area, appears to be a comment on the towns industrial heritage. The secretive street artist believed to be based in Bristol confirmed on social media he was behind the piece. Alongside a video of the artwork, Banksy wrote: Seasons greetings. Its amazing, an incredible addition to Port Talbot, said Rachel Honey-Jones, 33, who lives on the other side of Swansea Bay. Everything about it is political messaging, the way the boy has been drawn, the positioning near the steelworks, the fact it was done just after the [Severn Bridge] tolls went down. In July, black dust from the towns steelworks covered houses, cars and pets, possibly providing inspiration for the piece. The nearby toll on the Severn Bridge has also recently been dropped, which will lead to more traffic and pollution. Best of Banksy Show all 68 1 /68 Best of Banksy Best of Banksy Westwood, California A Banksy piece in California depicting a child wielding a machine gun, in black and white surrounded by colored flowers AFP/Getty Best of Banksy Manhattan, New York A rat on the clock of an old bank building Getty Best of Banksy Camden Town, north London Near the Oval Bridge PA Best of Banksy 'Sweeping It Under The Carpet' The piece, commissioned by this newspaper, is intended to represent a metaphor for the west's reluctance to tackle issues such as Aids in Africa Getty Images Best of Banksy 'Di Faced Tenners' In 2004, Banksy printed one million pounds worth of his 'Tenners' PA Best of Banksy 'Love is in the Bin' During Sotheby's Contemporary Art Sale on 5th October the Banksy artwork 'Girl with Balloon' shredded through the bottom of the frame as it was sold. Getty Images Best of Banksy 'Urban decay' Seen on the side of building on Wilder Street in Bristol PA Best of Banksy 'Glory' Previously on view at Sotheby's New Bond Street, London PA Best of Banksy 'Balloon Debate' Banksy headed to Palestinian territories and created images on Israel's highly controversial West Bank barrier Getty Best of Banksy 'Kissing Coppers' Pictured on display in Lazinc Gallery in London in 2018 AFP/Getty Images Best of Banksy 'Spy Booth' On the side of a house in Cheltenham. PA Best of Banksy 'Escape' A Banksy artwork piece on Israel's highly controversial West Bank barrier in Abu Dis Getty Images Best of Banksy 'The Son of a Migrant from Syria' Artwork representing Steve Jobs, founder and late CEO of Apple, at the migrant camp known as the "Jungle" in Calais, northern France AFP/Getty Images Best of Banksy Artwork in 'Walled Off Hotel' Banksy launched a hotel in Bethlehem. The rooms of the hotel were filled with the artist's work, much of which being about the conflict Getty Images Best of Banksy 'One Nation Under CCTV' In the yard of a Royal Mail depot in Newman Street, central London PA Archive/PA Images Best of Banksy 'Brexit' A painted mural depicting a workman chipping away at one of the stars on a European Union flag in Dover Getty Best of Banksy 'Art Attack' Seen on Israel's highly controversial West Bank barrier Getty Best of Banksy Artwork in 'Walled Off Hotel' A piece of artwork in Banksy's 'Walled Off Hote'l in the Israeli occupied West Bank town of Bethlehem Getty Best of Banksy 'Let Them Eat Crack' A large mural of a rat wearing a tie and carrying a briefcase on a wall on Howard St and Broadway in New York PA Best of Banksy Artwork in 'Walled Off Hotel' An installation hanging inside one of the rooms Banksy's 'Walled Off hotel' AFP/Getty Best of Banksy Paris Napoleon Bonaparte wearing a headscarf inspired by the original painting by Jacques-Louis David AFP/Getty Best of Banksy 'Burning Tyre' A Banksy mural which was painted on the side of one of the classrooms at Bridge Farm Primary in Bristol during a half-term PA Best of Banksy 'Les Miserables' Artwork depicting the girl from Les Miserables affected by tear gas, opposite the French embassy in Knightsbridge, London PA Best of Banksy Zehra Dogan Banksy's 70-foot-long mural in New York, made to draw attention to the imprisonment of Zehra Dogan, a Kurdish painter from Turkey AFP/Getty Images Best of Banksy Paris A girl painting over a swastika cross AFP/Getty Best of Banksy 'Girl with Balloon' Originally on the stairs to Waterloo Bridge on the South Bank, London AFP/Getty Images Best of Banksy 'Cardinal Sin' On display at the Walker Art Gallery in 2012 Getty Best of Banksy Rage, Flower Thrower Painted on a wall of a gas station in the West Bank city of Bethlehem AFP/Getty Images Best of Banksy "Madonna with a pistol" In Naples AFP/Getty Best of Banksy 'No Ball Games' In Tottenham, North London PA Archive/PA Images Best of Banksy 'Cash Machine Girl' In Finsbury, North London PA Best of Banksy 'Peckham Rock' Installation of Banksy's at the British Museum in London. The artist secretly placed the mock historical piece in a gallery at the museum in 2005 and it went unnoticed for three days PA Best of Banksy Stained Window' A collaboration between Banksy and the City of Angels public school in Los Angeles AFP/Getty Best of Banksy Barbican Centre, London One of two murals near the Barbican Centre in London PA Best of Banksy Clerkenwell Green, London Described by its creator as "a monument to liars, thieves and bullies" Getty Images Best of Banksy 'Civilian Drone Strike' Capstan House in East London PA Best of Banksy 'Armoured Dove' In West Bank town of Bethlehem AFP/Getty Best of Banksy 'The Painter' Portobello Road, West London PA Best of Banksy 'Yellow Lines Flower Painter' Pollard Street, London Getty Best of Banksy "Kids on Guns" AFP/Getty Best of Banksy Barbican Centre, London The second of the two murals painted by on the Barbican Centre, London PA Best of Banksy "Cans" London AFP/Getty Best of Banksy 'Sorry' East London AFP/Getty Best of Banksy 'Napalm, (Can't Beat That Feeling)' Displayed in an unauthorised 2006 retrospective in London Getty Images Best of Banksy Calais, France A child with a suitcase looking through a telescope with a vulture perched on it, in tribute to migrants and refugees on a beach in Calais AFP/Getty Best of Banksy 'Banksus Militus Vandalus' Displayed in an unauthorised 2006 retrospective in London Getty Images Best of Banksy London Artwork depicting former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill AFP/Getty Best of Banksy 'Donkey Documents' Moved from Jerusalem PA Best of Banksy 'A Girl with a Pierced Eardrum' A defaced piece of art on a wall in the city of Bristol, at Hanover Place PA Best of Banksy 'Sperm Alarm' Banksy's name is reflected in the glass covering his piece. One of seven initially stolen works by the artist. Getty Best of Banksy 'Art Buff' In Folkestone, Kent PA Best of Banksy 'The Mild, Mild West' Stokes Croft, Bristol PA Best of Banksy Paris A man holding a handsaw behind his back and offering a bone to a dog which leg has been cut off AFP/Getty Best of Banksy Peeing Dog Los Angeles PA Best of Banksy Bethlehem Painting on a wall in Bethlehem in the West Bank Getty Best of Banksy 'Slave Labout' A poor child making Union Jack flags on a sewing machine, located on the wall of a Poundland discount shop in the Wood Green area of north London Getty Best of Banksy Lower East Side, New York Painted during Banksy's month in New York Getty Images Best of Banksy 'Jay Zeavis' Glastonbury, Somerset PA Best of Banksy Paris Banksy said that he "blitzed" Paris with up to a dozen murals as a tribute to the May 1968 uprising and even took aim at the French government's hard line on migrants AFP/Getty Best of Banksy "I Love New York" A large mural of a rat wearing on Wooster and Grand Street in New York PA Best of Banksy Camden Town, north London A piece under Camden Street Bridge, almost directly behind the British Transport Police building in Camden Town PA Best of Banksy 'Very Little Helps' A child raising a Tesco's plastic bag as a flag in London Getty Best of Banksy 'I Don't Believe in Global Warming' Camden Town, north London PA Best of Banksy Camden Town, north London PA Best of Banksy Bataclan concert hall, Paris Artwork on a side street to the Bataclan concert hall where a terrorist attack killed 90 people in 2015 AFP/Getty Best of Banksy New Orleans, Louisiana Getty Best of Banksy 'Christ with Shopping Bags' Lazinc Gallery in London AFP/Getty Images Best of Banksy "Stop and Search" Shown at Artcurial French auction house sale in Paris AFP/Getty Images The garage owner said he had not slept over fears it might be vandalised. Ian Lewis added that he found out about the artwork via Facebook. A spokesperson for Neath Port Talbot Council said: The council is sending officers to liaise with the property holder to assist in protecting this artwork. A Christmas Carol, which celebrated its 175th birthday in 2018, is the most perennially popular festive tale of all. The story first sprung to life in the imagination of Charles Dickens in October 1843, as he wandered for 20 miles or so around the black streets of London, laughing and weeping while devising the plot for his seasonal novella. It took only four weeks to finish the tale of the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge, a name similar to one he had spotted on a tombstone, and when it came out in December, his tale of Christmas redemption sold 6,000 copies in three days. The character of the cold-hearted, tight-fisted, selfish Scrooge still mesmerises the public and on Sunday, the BBC will be screening a new adaptation starring Guy Pearce as the greatest Christmas villain-hero of all. Here we pick the best five Scrooges to have appeared on stage, screen and radio. Charles Dickens, who performed A Christmas Carol many times (AFP/Getty) Best stage Scrooge: Charles Dickens In December 1853, Dickens gave the first of what would be more than 150 public readings, across the UK and America, of his famous Christmas tale. The performances were reportedly sensational. Dickens narrated the tale and acted out the parts of the leading characters, wearing full evening dress, with a bright buttonhole, a purple waistcoat and a glittering watch chain. His stage equipment consisted of a reading desk, carpet, gas lights and a pair of large curtains behind him to help prevent echoes. Dickens used special editions of his story, with extra-wide margins on which he had written stage directions. His announcement of the arrival of Scrooge always caused a sensation. Dickens, who used to practise his facial expressions in the mirror, would transform into an old miser, speaking with a slow, gruff voice, as he drew his face according to one review into his collar like an ageing turtle. Dickens had his own pre-performance routine. He would take two tablespoons of rum with fresh cream for breakfast, a pint of champagne for supper, and 30 minutes before the start of his performance would drink a raw egg beaten into a tumbler of sherry. During the five-minute interval, he drank a cup of beef tea. The crowds went wild at his theatrics, especially when he uttered the famous catchphrase Bah, humbug! Demand for his shows was so high that speculators modern-day ticket touts made a fortune re-selling tickets, even for venues that held more than 2,000 people. Dickens had always wanted to be an actor and finally now had the chance to do it by reading A Christmas Carol, said Simon Callow in 2012. The actor, who is reprising his own one-man version of the tale at the Arts Theatre (until 12 January), added: Dickens had a huge, huge success with his stage version. His reading tours were like rock concerts. One person was even killed trying to get a ticket. The greatest actors of the day said Dickens had he not wanted to write novels would have been a genius of an actor. Access unlimited streaming of movies and TV shows with Amazon Prime Video Sign up now for a 30-day free trial Sign up He made people scream with laughter and he made them sob with tears. People fainted, it was an absolute phenomenon. I mean neither as a novelist nor as an actor had there ever been anything like it before. Only one person seems to have been disappointed by Dickenss performance of A Christmas Carol and that was the famous American author Mark Twain, who said Dickens was a little Englishy in his speech. The readings lasted more than three hours and took their toll on Dickens, who even performed one a day after suffering a stroke in 1869. His last ever public reading, which included A Christmas Carol, took place at Londons St Jamess Hall on 15 March 1870. From these garish lights, I vanish now for evermore, Dickens said as he left the stage in tears. He died three months later, aged 58. American actor Lionel Barrymore would play Scrooge on the radio in 1939 (Getty) Best radio Scrooge: Lionel Barrymore Among the famous radio portrayals of Scrooge are those by Basil Rathbone, Alec Guinness and Laurence Olivier. But the finest came in 1939, when Lionel Barrymore played him in a brilliant version that was later released as an album, and which is still available on Spotify and YouTube. Barrymore, who memorably played one of the worlds most famous Christmas film villains as Mr Potter in the 1946 classic Its a Wonderful Life, took on Scrooge three years later, in a version produced and narrated by Orson Welles. Lionel Barrymore is the best loved actor of our time in the best loved Christmas story of all, Welles told the audience of a show which was sponsored by Campbells Soup, and broadcast on Christmas Eve. The adaptation is a masterpiece of live radio drama and Barrymores mean-spirited voice captures the hollowness of the miserly businessman. Barrymore said he believed that most people had their own ghosts haunting them, adding that it was important to understand the psychological motifs of the story. He said that the Ghost of Christmas Past was Scrooges memory, the Ghost of Christmas Present his intuition, and the Ghost of Christmas Future his imagination. Seven decades on, Welless adapted version remains relevant: I wonder you dont go into parliament you talk enough nonsense, Barrymores Scrooge says to his nephew. Alastair Sim brought out the authors poetry in the 1951 film Best film Scrooge: Alastair Sim There are plenty of big-screen Scrooges to pick from, with lots of good comedy portrayals of Scrooge (including Bill Murray as a selfish TV executive in 1988s Scrooged, and Sid James as a cackling cheapskate in Carry On Christmas), and dozens of heavyweight representations (Reginald Owen, George C Scott, Derek Jacobi, Ernest Borgnine, Buddy Hackett, Patrick Stewart, James Earl Jones and Henry Winkler among others). In 2000, Ross Kemp played him as tough guy loan shark Eddie Scrooge, in a film set on a Holborn housing estate. There was even an adult adaptation of Dickenss famous tale: in 1975s The Passions of Carol, Mary Stuart starred as Carol Scrooge, the owner of a pornographic magazine who is shown a sleazy version of Christmas to come. She utters the rather un-Dickensian line Spirit, I dont understand any of this. Its just a cheap hooker picking up some creep. The outstanding movie version, however, features Alastair Sims 1951 portrayal of Scrooge. The Scottish actor was a master of elocution and brings out the poetry in Dickenss words, while his hangdog face and sinister gestures capture the wretchedness of Scrooges soul. The cold within Scrooge froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice, wrote Dickens. Sims, who was 50 when he played the role and went on to star in An Inspector Calls, is a flawless Scrooge. Michael Caine and Meredith Braun in 1992s The Muppet Christmas Carol Best Scrooge with puppets: Michael Caine There have been plenty of animated Scrooges including those drawn for the characters Mr Magoo, Fred Flintstone and Scrooge McDuck but one of Britains most famous actors faced the unique challenge of acting as a real-life Ebenezer alongside the Muppets. In 1992s The Muppet Christmas Carol, Michael Caine told director Brian Henson that he would be playing the role totally seriously because otherwise it would not be funny. Im going to play this movie like Im working with the Royal Shakespeare Company, Caine told Henson. I will never wink; I will never do anything Muppety. I am going to play Scrooge as if it is an utterly dramatic role and there are no puppets around me. The actor says he is still proud of the role and reminds his grandchildren that he got to sing with Kermit the Frog, who plays Scrooges beleaguered clerk Bob Cratchit. Albert Finney was both young and old in the 1970 musical film version (Getty) (GETTY IMAGES) Best singing Scrooge: Albert Finney Long before expensive CGI de-aging visual effects techniques became the norm in Hollywood, Albert Finney, at 34, was brilliant as both the young and old version of Scrooge. I did a film, a musical of Scrooge in 1970, and the tricks were done by flat clothes and mirrors, Finney joked. I hope that the day will come when we dont have to turn up at all. A musical follow-up to 1968s Oliver!, the film had impressive sets, including fully reconstructed Victorian streets. The posters for the movie included the tagline What the dickens have they done to Scrooge?, designed to head off any criticism of an all-singing, all-dancing old skinflint. The music was first class, with composer Leslie Bricusse (the man who wrote What Kind of Fool Am I?, My Old Mans a Dustman, and Goldfinger) ably supported by Ian Fraser, who earned an Oscar nomination as conductor, orchestrator and musical supervisor. Fraser, who went on to arrange the later Bing Crosby-David Bowie duet and to be the musical director for Bill Clintons two presidential inauguration galas, helped draw a fine vocal performance from Finney. His vibrant performance included a droll version of the caustic song I Hate People, and he went on to win a Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture Actor in a Musical/Comedy. Finney said he wanted to play Scrooge in his own way. Scrooges eyes dart about continually looking for where he can make a few shillings, he explained. I have tried to make him strong. He is not decrepit, he is a rather tough old man. Alec Guinness also appears as Jacob Marley, while Edith Evans plays the Ghost of Christmas Past. The film received four Academy Award nominations in all, including for best original song for Thank You Very Much. Incidentally, Finney was not the only 20th-century acting maestro to sing as Scrooge. In 1978, Walter Matthau voiced Scrooge in the animated film The Stingiest Man in Town. Matthau sings lines such as What does that fool want? in a voice of pure curmudgeonliness. A Christmas Carol begins on BBC One at 9pm on 22 December Sandra Bullock can charm her way out of even the most disastrous roles. When stalker romcom All About Steve earned her a Worst Actress Razzie in 2009 (the same year she won an Oscar for The Blind Side), she turned up to accept the award with a wheelbarrow of DVDs. Everyone gets a copy, she announced. Watch the movie, and consider if it was really and truly the worst performance. And then I will come back next year, and I will give back the Razzie. Actually, the film really wasnt very good, and I suspect Bullock knew it but it was hardly the first critical calamity from which she emerged unscathed. For every brilliant, beloved film she has starred in Speed, Miss Congeniality, While You Were Sleeping, The Heat, Gravity there has been a Speed 2, a Miss Congeniality 2, or an All About Steve. Even in those, though, Bullocks intense likeability renders her bulletproof. Equal parts goofy and glamorous, the 54-year-old is a proto-Jennifer Lawrence, a Hollywood star we could never possibly emulate, but who somehow convinces us we could. She likes to be self-deprecating, she tells me, as she settles into the sofa of a hotel room in Berlin. Shes here to promote her new film, Bird Box, but made sure to take her kids to the Christmas market this morning. If youre not, things will get to you in a way that will just take your spirit away. I like my spirit, I dont want my spirit to go anywhere. But work, she says, she takes very seriously. In fact, she has hardly stopped working since 1994 sleeper hit Speed an action thriller in which she played a passenger on a bus packed with explosives made her a household name. From there, she has played an FBI agent posing as a beauty pageant contestant in action comedy Miss Congeniality (2000), a racist housewife in controversial Oscar-winning drama Crash (2004), a Canadian executive facing deportation in romantic comedy The Proposal (2009), and a stranded astronaut fighting for her life in sci-fi thriller Gravity (2013). Now, having decided that before I die I wanna do every genre, just so I can say I did it, shes turned her hand to post-apocalyptic horror. Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock in 'Speed' (Moviestore/REX) In Bird Box, directed by The Night Managers Susanne Bier, Bullock plays Malorie, a woman in the late stages of pregnancy. Its just me, she says when someone asks where the father is and no more is said of it. When Malorie leaves a check-up to find a mysterious force has gripped the country, prompting everyone who sees it to kill themselves, she finds herself holed up with a ragtag group (the truly bizarre ensemble includes Jacki Weaver, John Malkovich, Lil Rel Howery, Moonlights Trevante Rhodes and rapper Machine Gun Kelly), only able to venture outside if she wears a blindfold. The film doesnt exactly hold up to much close scrutiny, and tonally, stumbles as often as Malorie does, but it is an exhilarating, viscerally tense film in the same vein as this years A Quiet Place. The strange force, Bullock explains, causes peoples greatest fear to materialise in front of their eyes. When her eight-year-old son Louis found this out, he went up to everyone on set and asked them to tell him theirs. Everyone went, huhhhh, she says, drawing a deep, comic breath in. But he was very intent on knowing. He knew what mine was. Mine is something happening to my kids. Its a prospect that sometimes consumes her. I live in such a fearful place, she says. Im so afraid all the time. I think becoming a mother has made me that much more fearful. Sandra Bullock and Susanne Bier on the set of 'Bird Box' (Merrick Morton) The film isnt getting a wide cinematic release and is being made available almost simultaneously on Netflix but Bullock is confident that cinema is not going anywhere. I know it struggled, she concedes, but the streaming world has elevated the bar for cinema. [Before], if you were a superhero, you were able to get a movie made; anything else was not getting made. Now, with streaming, we have all kinds of work available, so we can act again. This wonderful business is changing, and providing so many more opportunities for women, and people of colour. Theres a great change happening. There are plenty of people, though, who resist that change. In 2015, it was announced that Bullock would star alongside the likes of Cate Blanchett, Rihanna, Mindy Kaling and Anne Hathaway in the all-female Oceans trilogy spin-off Oceans 8, directed by Gary Ross. The news wasnt met with the levels of vitriol the all-female Ghostbusters reboot was subjected to, but it didnt escape the trolls entirely. We got some backlash, said Bullock when the film premiered earlier this year, but boy, Ill tell you, weve got some feisty women that will fight back. Access unlimited streaming of movies and TV shows with Amazon Prime Video Sign up now for a 30-day free trial Sign up We started Oceans 8 before the #MeToo movement, says Bullock now, and ended during. I saw a noticeable difference. On Bird Box, she noticed the difference too one that was exacerbated by the presence of a female director. (Bier, incidentally, recently suggested that Oceans 8 should have been directed by a woman: Its so obviously wrong. I dont know why they made that decision.) Because the boss was a woman, says Bullock of Bird Box, I did see a lot of fear in our crew members. The men were walking on eggshells. So I said: Guys, youre allowed to joke, well tell you when youve gone too far. I dont doubt Bullocks willingness to do so. During a press conference later, a male journalist asks how old her character is supposed to be. Does it matter how old she is? she shoots back. I would look at that as a sexist question. Theres an interminable pause. Sexist and ageist. Stay on her right side, though, and Bullock exudes the same charm she does on screen. Its the sort of charm, in fact, that might be paralysing if she didnt take such careful steps to cut through her own star power. Wearing a black, polka dot dress with one billowing sleeve, she is poised but playful veering off into comedy bits, lamenting the fact that she will never have the talent of anyone in Hamilton, and rejecting any suggestion that what she does is particularly important. I dont feel that what I do is life-saving in any way, shape or form, she laughs. Im an entertainer. Bird Box trailer But she has bursts of disarming earnestness, too. Particularly when shes talking about her children. She brings up a line in Bird Box that would make her break down in tears every take. You have to love them, even though you might lose them, says Trevante Rhodess Tom, referring to the children Malorie has named Boy and Girl in a futile effort to stay detached. If you really think about that, says Bullock, its saying you have to let go, and be so deeply in love with your children, even though they could die. She starts to tear up. I cant. I cant. Though Bullock believes that had her own mother not been so strict, she would have been a mother at 17, with a loooottttt of kids, it wasnt until she was 46 that she actually became one. Even then, her plans were nearly scuppered. My life took a trajectory that wasnt very pleasant, she says calmly, but I feel like it had to happen in order for me to fully understand what family was about. That unpleasant trajectory was splashed across the tabloid press in 2010, when Bullocks then-husband, motorcyclist and TV host Jesse James, was accused of having multiple affairs. There is only one person to blame for this whole situation, James said in a statement at the time, and that is me. Its because of my poor judgement that I deserve everything bad that is coming my way. Bullock filed for divorce, but decided to go ahead with the adoption process she and James had begun years earlier. The result was her son, Louis, and five years later, a daughter, Laila. Sandra Bullock in 2013's 'Gravity' (Moviestore/REX) For a while, it scared Bullock that her life didnt fit the nuclear family mould. Societys hard, she says. Society still, as open-minded as weve become, has these rules that quietly say: This is the way it goes. Theyre saying: Its a man and a woman, and then you have a baby, and thats the family. I go: Oh my god, Im a single parent. With a child. How am I I felt less than. I felt: Im not the complete package. And then I realised this is the complete package. Now, its her mission to tell others the same. It breaks my heart when I see people saying: I cant have that. Why not? Why cant you have it? Though her life didnt go the way she imagined it would at 17, Bullock wouldnt change a thing. My life went the way it went because it was supposed to be that way, she says. Sometimes you have to open up your mind and wait. I can say that, because I see the bigger picture, but when youre in it, youre like: When is my family coming? I was there. I know what that feels like. And at some point you almost let go of the idea, and when you do, all of a sudden the universe goes: Oh, you finally let go? Here you go. This is it. She leans forward. And you go: Oh my god, thats more beautiful than anything I ever imagined. Bird Box launches on Netflix on 21 December An invasion of flightless, biteless midges have arrived uninvited in Antarctica where their rapid proliferation represents a major threat to the fragile ecosystem, scientists have warned. Eretmoptera murphyi are endemic on Signy Island which sits between South Georgia - a British overseas territory just over 1,000 miles east of southern Argentina - and the Antarctic mainland. It is thought to have been inadvertently brought there during a 1960s plant transplant experiment from South Georgia. With no natural predators or competitors it has been allowed to establish a stronghold. Rapid regional warming and increased levels of human activity in the Antarctic are believed to have been key drivers of the insects success. A research team from the University of Birmingham, along with the British Antarctic Survey, is studying how the midge is able to survive in extreme polar conditions and the impacts it could have on the region. The insect a decomposer species feeds on dead organic matter, releasing large volumes of nitrogen as well as nutrients into the soil, which has had an effect on peat decomposition and soil structure. It is basically doing the job of an earthworm, but in an ecosystem that has never had earthworms, said Jesamine Bartlett, a PhD candidate at the University of Birmingham, who will be presenting the research teams findings at the British Ecological Societys annual meeting. Antarctic ecosystems are characterised by having a very low nutrient level. Partly because its not very biodiverse, theres not a lot of turnover there. But this midge is the biggest organism on the island and there arent any other insects in this ecosystem at all. Its really basic. Any input of nutrients in an ecosystem that is already adapted to very low nutrient levels and very extreme conditions will have an impact. What those might be and whether theyre going to be good or bad, we dont quite know yet. The findings suggest that this single species can lead to the release of as much nitrogen as is introduced in areas frequented by seals. Glacier collapse shows climate impact Show all 20 1 /20 Glacier collapse shows climate impact Glacier collapse shows climate impact An iceberg floats in a fjord near the town of Tasiilaq Reuters Glacier collapse shows climate impact Meltwater pools on top of the Helheim glacier near Tasiilaq Reuters Glacier collapse shows climate impact Safety officer Brian Rougeux works with student Febin Magar to assemble a radar dome while working in a science camp on the side of the Helheim glacier Reuters Glacier collapse shows climate impact Airplane Mechanic, David Fuller, left, works with a local worker to move a Nasa Gulfstream III during a pre-flight inspection before a flight to support the Oceans Melting Greenland research mission Reuters Glacier collapse shows climate impact Meltwater pools on top of the Helheim glacier Reuters Glacier collapse shows climate impact Earth Science Flight Programs Director at Nasa, Eric Ianson, looks out at the Greenland ice sheet Reuters Glacier collapse shows climate impact Glacial ice is seen from the window during the Nasa flight Reuters Glacier collapse shows climate impact Oceanographer David Holland's science camp on the side of the Helheim glacier Reuters Glacier collapse shows climate impact An iceberg floats in a fjord near the town of Tasiilaq Reuters Glacier collapse shows climate impact A large crevasse forms near the calving front of the Helheim glacier Reuters Glacier collapse shows climate impact Safety officer Brian Rougeux uses a drill to install antennas for scientific instruments that will be left on top of the Helheim glacier Reuters Glacier collapse shows climate impact Tabular icebergs float in the Sermilik Fjord after a large calving event at the Helheim glacier Reuters Glacier collapse shows climate impact Radar Engineer, Ron Muellerschoen, monitors data collection inside a NASA Gulfstream III flying above Greenland to measure loss to the country's ice sheet Reuters Glacier collapse shows climate impact GPS tracking equipment is left on top of the Helheim glacier REUTERS Glacier collapse shows climate impact Sunshine lights up the Helheim glacier Reuters Glacier collapse shows climate impact A glacial terminus above the east coast of Greenland REUTERS Glacier collapse shows climate impact Student Febin Magar watches as leftover wood burns in a research camp Reuters Glacier collapse shows climate impact Tabular icebergs float in the Sermilik Fjord after a large calving event Reuters Glacier collapse shows climate impact Oceanographer David Holland repairs a broken GPS module at his research camp Reuters Glacier collapse shows climate impact An iceberg floats in a fjord near the town of Tasiilaq Reuters This is an alarming starting point, Ms Bartlett said. The form of nitrogen its introducing is rich in nitrates which plants prefer its ideal plant fertiliser, but its not what mosses adapted to a low-nutrient environment need. Moss in Antarctica is the equivalent of our forests. To assess the ecological impacts of E murphyi, the team collected information on its abundance and those of other invertebrates and microbes as well as environmental variables such as water content, organic carbon, soil nitrogen content and substrate composition. These were then compared to locations on the island where the midge did not occur. More soil and shallower moss banks were present at sites where the midge was most abundant, suggesting that the midge is eating its way through the peat in the moss banks and turning it into soil. Ms Bartlett said: This is concerning as Signy Island hosts some of the best examples of moss banks in the Antarctic region. It is also home to Antarcticas only two flowering plant species, the hair grass and pearlwort. She added: Recent studies looked at how existing Antarctic plants might respond to an increase in nitrogen and found they would probably out-compete all of the moss. So then you start looking at a complete change in how the ecosystem functions. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events Antarctica is believed to be at growing risk from invasive species due to global warming. Visitors to Antarctica are subject to increasingly strict biosecurity measures but accidental introductions continue to occur, said Professor Peter Convey of the British Antarctic Survey. Midge larvae, for instance, are tiny and cannot be seen easily with the naked eye. Tourists and researchers may be bringing them in from their stopovers in the sub-Antarctic and moving them around the continent in the mud on their boots. The growing impacts of warming temperatures have seen numerous warnings from climate scientists in recent months, as levels of sea ice have fallen and colossal glaciers holding immense quantities of water, previously believed to be stable, are showing new signs of rapid melting. Tinsel, presents, mince pies Christmas Day is great, so long as you celebrate it. If you dont, the whole thing can feel like one massive endurance test for your propensity for FOMO. Luckily, its not all jingle bells and open sleighs. Though not as widely advertised as the yuletide frivolities, there are options for those who, for whatever reason, choose not to engage with the festivities. Whether you decide to help one of the many charities working to support people in need or choose to simply take a long walk, theres something to suit all tastes. Browse our top picks of ways to spend Christmas Day if you dont celebrate it below. Volunteer Christmas Day is one of the best days of the year to give back. Recommended Christmas and New Year opening times for all the major supermarkets With homelessness on the rise housing charity Shelter estimates there are at least 320,000 homeless people in the UK and many people struggling to get from day to day without food or shelter, your support can make a huge difference, even if its just for 24 hours. Crisis, the national charity for homeless people at Christmas, operates support centres across the country, meaning its never been easier to get involved. Sign up now and you could be assigned one of a number of tasks to carry out in the lead up to Christmas or on the day itself. These could include cooking and serving meals, leading exercise workshops or using your skills as a healthcare professional or a hairdresser. Click here to find out where your nearest centre is. Elsewhere, the charity Community Christmas specialises in providing support and companionship to older people who may be spending the holiday season alone. They run a number of community events across the country, including lunches, afternoon teas and movie screenings. Visit their website to find one near you. Here are some other charities running special initiatives over Christmas: Age Concern, The Whitechapel Mission, Salvation Army. Go for a dip The weather outside might be frightful, but sometimes an outdoor swim is truly delightful. Come rain or shine, brave members of the Serpentine Swimming Club take to the icy waters in the Serpentine Lake in Kensington, London every year to compete in the Peter Pan Cub Christmas Morning Race. So, clearly its doable. If youd like to try your hands at this rather unconventional Christmas Day activity, why not call up your local pool and see if theyre open? Or, if you're lucky enough to live near the beach, you could go for a frosty seaside swim. Here are some pools and beaches in the UK you could check out (some even host special Christmas Day races): For a comprehensive list, visit Wildswim.com here. Go out for a slap-up meal Thanks to seductive supermarket adverts and tantalising food campaigns, Christmas Day has become synonymous with gluttony. So its no wonder you find yourself waking up feeling particularly peckish on the big day, regardless of whether youre celebrating it or not. But if cooking up a feast doesnt tickle your pickle maybe you use your oven to store utility bills there are lots of restaurants that stay open for the duration of the holiday season. Some even offer special deals on three-course meals while for others, its business as normal. So, eat and be merry, or just eat. Take a scenic walk A long walk is always a good idea, especially on Christmas Day, when most people will be indoors, probably eating, meaning the streets are empty and prime for perusing. Recommended How to survive Christmas if you hate this time of year Its particularly nice to do this in big cities, such as London, Manchester and Leeds, that are usually teeming with people. On Christmas Day however, the hustle and bustle subsides for just 24 hours. Make the most of the peace and quiet and take yourself, or whoever youre with, on a pleasant stroll. Go to the cinema Sometimes theres nothing better than spending an afternoon snuggled up in a warm cinema, catching up on the latest films you mightve missed. Its a good time of year to go too, given that the Oscars are fast-approaching, meaning the best films will be showing. As for which cinemas are likely to be open, selected Odeon branches (check if your local one is open here) across the UK will be open throughout the day, as will a number of Cineworlds, see the full list below: Cineworld Leicester Square Cineworld Ilford Cineworld Feltham Cineworld Wembley Cineworld Birmingham Broad Street Cineworld Bradford Have a self-care day It might sound cliche, but theres no better opportunity to indulge in some me time than on a national holiday and Christmas Day should be no different. Self-care, as it has been dubbed, will mean something different for everyone. It could be as simple as reading a book or catching up on your latest box set obsession. Or you might want to give yourself the full at-home spa treatment (think bubble baths, face masks and pedicures). If this sounds like you're cup of tea, check out our guides to the best DIY beauty products and the best at-home peels. However you choose to treat yourself, take pleasure in the comfort of knowing that you have a unique opportunity on Christmas Day to spend 24 hours to relax and drown out the sound of incessant jingle bells. A London restaurant that recently opened in New York City is being denounced by food critics - including one zero-star review in which it was compared to Brexit. Bluebird Londons New York output opened in the Time Warner Centre in September - and has since been met with a less-than-positive reception. Whereas the upscale London restaurant is relatively successful in England, boasting three-and-a-half stars on Yelp, the American interpretation has earned itself zero stars in a new New York Times review by Pete Wells. In the review titled: What if Brexit was a restaurant, Wells hypothesises that the people in charge of D&D Londons Bluebird NYC outpost have been influenced by Prime Minister Theresa Mays first-grader approach to Brexit - or that the flailing restaurant is simply the result of the mess back home. Starting with the venue itself, Wells details his objections to the restaurant, before finally getting to the menu - which he compares to doing a word search because it is organised so randomly. When you have finished the puzzle, please savour the warm feeling of accomplishment for a moment, because it goes away once the food arrives, he wrote. As for the food, according to Wells, everything from the crispy shrimp to the lobster Cobb salad is disappointing - with even the English food options failing to impress. In addition to condemning the fish and chips, Wells also explains the issues that arise when ordering menu items that come with a pastry crust - such as the Cornish chicken pie or the $95 beef Wellington, which is encased in a crust that he described as a mass of wet, gluey dough. The only course that receives some praise is the dessert course, with options that Wells describes as likeable. Wells concludes the scathing review by sharing an anecdote from his dining experience, in which he recalls being informed that nearly everything he ordered was unavailable. And the zero-star review is not alone - as the New York Bluebird also found itself named the worst new restaurant in NYC this year by Eater critic Ryan Sutton. In Suttons review, which describes the restaurant as soulless and overpriced, he criticises the abominable steak tartare and the burger patty that was so undercooked it almost takes on the texture of warm fondue. The most outrageously expensive food on the planet Show all 8 1 /8 The most outrageously expensive food on the planet The most outrageously expensive food on the planet The 15 cappuccino Emirates Palace Hotel The most outrageously expensive food on the planet The $2000 pizza Industry Kitchen The most outrageously expensive food on the planet The 1500 cronut Dum Dum Donutterie The most outrageously expensive food on the planet One false move and it's 1500 down the drain Dum Dum Donutterie The most outrageously expensive food on the planet The $1000 ice cream Serendipity 3 The most outrageously expensive food on the planet The $169 hot dog Tokyo Dog The most outrageously expensive food on the planet The $777 burger Burger Brasserie The most outrageously expensive food on the planet The $25k taco Grand Velas Los Cabos Resort As expected, the Eater review, which details the complex awfulness of Bluebird London, also granted the restaurant zero stars. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events Despite the negative reviews, the New York City location of Bluebird has a three-and-a-half-star rating on Yelp like its London counterpart. Cryptocurrencies have experienced a sudden and unexpected price surge, following months of market decline. Bitcoin, the world's most valuable, shot up in value by almost a quarter in the space of 48 hours, reaching as high as $3,950 (3,120) on Wednesday before losing $100 and slipping back to $3,850 (3049). Other leading cryptocurrencies experienced even larger gains, with bitcoin spin-off bitcoin cash rising by 64 per cent since the weekend. Cyber security pioneer John McAfee, who is now one of the most prominent figures in the cryptocurrency space, said the price gains could suggest a more significant market shift. "Bitcoin at $3850. Tide may be turning. Altcoins accelerating even faster," Mr McAfee tweeted. "Today's winner is Skycoin: up 45 per cent. My Skycoin tattoo was prophetic. It takes time, but the coins I choose, eventually, tend to win. Keep your fingers crossed folks. Last week may have been the time to buy." 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 Cryptocurrency analyst Mati Greenspan said there was a simple explanation for the dramatic price reversal. "For those wondering what's causing crypto's impressive push from the floor this morning, look no further than short covering," the senior market analyst at online trading platform eToro, told The Independent. "People are looking to reduce their exposure and closing out high risk sell positions before the holidays and this is creating upward pressure on market prices, which is ultimately resulting in a rally." The price of bitcoin shot up by more than $500 in just two days (CoinMarketCap) The dramatic price gains come at the end of a disappointing year for Bitcoin, having traded at close to $20,000 (15,850) in December 2017. The wildly fluctuating price is not unusual for the notoriously volatile cryptocurrency, with five previous cycles seeing bitcoin fall by an average of 85 per cent each time. Before the latest recovery, the price of bitcoin was around 83 per cent down on its 2017 high. Is bitcoin's bleak mid winter about to turn into a Christmas miracle? (iStock) Opinion is divided over whether bitcoin will return to its previous highs, with some analysts suggesting that bitcoin will eventually become worthless. Others are more positive in their forecasts, including Mr McAfee, who famously predicted that one bitcoin will be worth $500,000 (396,000) in 2020. "If not, I will eat my d**k on national television," he tweeted in July 2017. At the time, one bitcoin was worth around $1,800 (1425). Great British Bake Off winner Nadiya Hussain has renewed her wedding vows with her husband, almost 14 years after the couple tied the knot with an arranged marriage. In the summer of 2005, Hussain married her husband, Abdal, in a traditional Muslim ceremony in Bangladesh at the age of 19. She had only met him once before earlier that year. She opened up about her marriage in a 2016 interview with Good Housekeeping magazine, saying: "I didn't know my husband, and then we had two children, and then I fell in love with him." More than a decade after their first wedding, the couple have exchanged their vows once more and have shared a series of photos of the festivities on Instagram. "Nothing fancy just love," Hussain wrote in the caption. Nadiya Hussain and her husband Abdal signing a wedding certificate (PA) "No frills. Just us. We did it again. "I do. I always will. I would do it all over again." Her husband responded to her message, writing: "You can't run away from me now. I love you to infinity and beyond." The couple's colourful wedding cake was decorated with macarons and mini cupcakes (PA) The couple have three children together: a daughter called Maryam and two sons called Musa and Dawud. They celebrated their special day by signing a wedding certificate and enjoying a colourful wedding cake adorned with macarons and mini cupcakes. The 2015 Bake Off winner wore a silver and rose gold double-finger Swarovski ring to mark the occasion. Nadiya's Swarovski wedding ring (PA) Fans of the Bake Off winner have been sending the couple messages of congratulations on social media. "That's a beautiful thing. All the love you two special ones," radio presenter Zoe Ball wrote on Instagram. "OMG this is beautiful! I love the idea of renewing your vows. The marriage evolves with you - celebrate it," fashion designer Amena Khan commented. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events Hussain has previously stated that she doesn't think her three children will "need" her to help them find spouses in future. The baker recently revealed she often feels as though she has additional pressure to prove herself due to the fact she's a dark-skinned Muslim woman. Speaking with Jonathan Ross on his talk show in November 2018, she explained that it's "really hard for me to be where I am and do what I do". "Everything that could go wrong, can go wrong for me because I'm brown, and I'm a woman, and I'm a Muslim, so every time I try and do something there is always that element of, 'You have to prove yourself'," she said. Tess Holliday has spoken about the backlash she faced over her Cosmopolitan cover in a candid new interview with Amanda Knox. The size 26 model was vehemently criticised after gracing the cover, with many, including Good Morning Britain host Piers Morgan, shaming her for her weight and accusing the magazine of promoting an unhealthy body image. But speaking to Knox as part of Broadlys The Scarlet Letter Reports video series, which profiles famous women who have been demonized by the media, Holliday explains how shes become accustomed to such comments. I can never celebrate a success in my career without it being picked apart because of my size or my health, she says. The mother-of-two went on to explain how many of her critics assume she is in poor health due to her weight, calling it an imagined health, not an actual health. At the time of publication, Holliday was accused of advocating obesity, with Morgan describing the cover as dangerous and misguided. People dont actually care if Im healthy, she tells Knox of the criticisms, its just them using it as a blanket to be an a**hole. Holliday added that she received endless vitriol when she was pregnant with her second child, a process that she documented to her 1.8m followers on Instagram. People would say that I was going to kill my baby because of my size, she remembers. As for how she copes with such comments, Holliday explained that she crumbles sometimes but that thinking of all she has achieved thus far keeps her motivated. I have created a life for myself that I only thought was literally a dream, she says. At the end of the day, Im not doing this for people who dont get what Im doing. Im doing this for the folks that need to see some kind of representation or maybe feel a little less alone. Pharmaceuticals giants GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer will merge their healthcare businesses to create the worlds biggest supplier of over-the-counter medicines, including brands such as Panadol, Anadin and Voltarol. The new joint venture will have revenues of around 9.8bn. It also paves the way for GSK to split into two businesses; one selling over-the-counter medicines, the other researching new pharmaceuticals and vaccines. The news pleased investors, sending GSKs share price up 7 per cent on Wednesday morning. Shareholders have pressed the company to split for years, believing there are greater benefits to having two companies, each focused on one area, than a diversified group. However, the split will impact jobs, Glaxo chief executive Emma Walmsley conceded, without giving details. Obviously theres going to be some impact on people, Ms Walmsley said. Recommended Progress as GSK appoints its first female boss Emma Walmsley Thats something we are working through and we will certainly be talking to our employees before we start talking about that in any way publicly. British-based Glaxo will own 68 per cent of the joint venture, while US-based Pfizer will own the remaining 32 per cent. The companies plan to list the new joint venture within three years. George Salmon, equity analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, said the decision to split had come as a surprise. He said: The separation will take away the steady cash flows of the consumer business, meaning theres more pressure on the men and women in white coats to deliver the next generation of blockbusters. However, the potential to shift significant amounts of debt onto the cash-generative consumer business should take the strain off the balance sheet, and thus buy valuable time for the pipeline to deliver. He added: Theres also the fact that as a specialist pharma group, investors can be more confident GSK can get better results from the labs. Both Pfizer and GSK are battling against the surging cost of researching new drugs as healthcare providers demand lower prices. Santander has been fined 32.8m for serious failings in passing on the accounts of deceased customers to relatives. The Financial Conduct Authority said the bank did not transfer funds worth more than 183m belonging to around 40,000 to beneficiaries. In some cases money was kept by Santander for years, the FCA said. Mark Steward, executive director of enforcement at the FCA said: To the firms credit, once these problems were notified to the board and senior management, they were fixed properly and promptly. But recognition of the problem took too long. Firms must be able to identify and respond to problems more quickly especially when they are causing harm to customers. Recommended Banks face crackdown on rip off overdrafts as FCA brings hammer down Between 1 January 2013 and 11 July 2016 Santander failed to properly organise and control its probate and bereavement process. Therefore the lender failed to fairly treat its customers and those who represented them after they died. Weaknesses in the banks processes meant it did not always identify all of a deceased customers funds. As a result, it did not effectively follow up on a number of cases, which increased the likelihood that they were left open. Santander said relatives can now notify the bank of a death in branch, via post, over the phone or via an online tool. It has set up a dedicated bereavement team who have received specialist training which manages all cases from beginning to end. The banks UK chief executive Nathan Bostock said the company was very sorry for the effect of its failings on those involved. He added: We have now transferred the majority of customer funds and made significant improvements to our whole probate and bereavement process, ensuring we provide both a sensitive and efficient service to our bereaved customer representatives and those who are managing the estates of people who have passed away. The Court of Appeal has upheld a ruling that Uber drivers are workers, in the latest round of a landmark gig economy legal battle that has implications for hundreds of thousands of precarious workers in the UK. Judges agreed with two lower tribunals that Uber was wrong to classify its drivers as independent contractors. Under the ruling, drivers will be entitled to basic rights, such as holiday pay and the minimum wage. The ride-hailing firm had argued that it merely acts as an agent, linking drivers with customers via its app. But in a case brought by two drivers, the Court of Appeal on Wednesday rejected Ubers argument and upheld the Employment Appeals Tribunals earlier decision. Uber said it will appeal to the Supreme Court, adding that the decision did not reflect the reason why the vast majority of drivers use its app. It is the latest employment rights judgment to side with a worker against their employer and comes after the Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that a contractor for Pimlico Plumbers was entitled to workers rights. Recommended Uber is about to get more expensive for New Yorkers Rachel Farr, an employment lawyer at Taylor Wessing, said Ubers latest defeat in the courts would impact both the gig economy and more traditional sectors, giving encouragement to other claimants. Uber has up to 50,000 drivers in the UK and the costs that go with worker status (such as holiday pay and the national minimum wage) will have a huge impact on the viability of its business model and pricing, Ms Farr said. Ubers competitors and businesses in the gig economy will also be considering what this means for them, while the decision will have given hope to those who believe they are workers who deserve a better deal. However, she cautioned against assuming the decision applies to all gig economy-type employment. Each case will be considered on its specific facts, including the contractual terms between the parties and what actually happens in practice. The judgment comes days after the government published its Good Work Plan, in which it promised to review and clarify the tests around employment status. Uber argues that it should be treated no differently to taxi and private hire companies, whose drivers have been self-employed for decades, long before its app was invented. Drivers who use the Uber app make more than the London Living Wage and want to keep the freedom to choose if, when and where they drive, a spokesperson said. If drivers were classified as workers they would inevitably lose some freedom and flexibility, Uber added. But critics, including unions and MPs, have pushed for equal rights for the growing number of people in flexible or insecure work. Rachel Reeves, chair of the Commons Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee, said: Time and time again, the courts have found that Uber drivers are workers and that they are due the rights that many of us take for granted: sick pay, holiday pay and certainty that they will earn at least the minimum wage. Uber needs now to accept this ruling and treat their drivers fairly. Last week, the prime minister said again she wants a country that truly works for everyone. If businesses and tribunals wont act, then she must bring forward the long overdue legislation to make it clear that workers in the gig economy must have the same rights as those in traditional jobs. Under changes announced by the government on Monday, agency workers will have to be paid the same as permanent staff, while all employees will be able to request a statement outlining their rights from their first day of work. New laws will be introduced to ensure workers in seasonal employment get the holiday pay they are entitled to and companies that breach rules on employee rights will face tougher new penalties. The maximum fines for bosses who are found to have shown malice, spite or gross oversight will quadruple, from 5,000 to 20,000. A giant honey mushroom considered a contender for the largest organism on the planet is both much larger and much older than previously thought. Scientists first studied the enormous fungus, which lives deep underground in a Michigan forest, in 1992. Then they estimated it was 1,500 years old, and the extensive mass of underground fibres and mushrooms that formed it weighed 100,000kg and stretched 15 hectares. Returning to the site, the same team used more rigorous testing to estimate the fungus was in fact closer to 2,500 years old. They also discovered that it weighed 400,000kg and stretched over 70 hectares. 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 This makes the enormous honey mushroom, which mostly consists of an underground network of tendrils wrapped around tree roots, heavier than three blue whales. I view these estimates as the lower bound The fungus could actually be much older, said Professor James Anderson, a biologist at the University of Toronto who undertook both studies. Their findings were published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. While the Michigan fungus is large, it is outclassed by another honey mushroom from Oregon that is even larger. There is also the Pando aspen in Utah, a forest originating from a single underground parent clone that is thought to weigh up to 6 million kg. A rabbit gene has been inserted into common houseplants, giving them the power to filter toxic pollution from the air. Scientists hijacked a process that breaks down alcohol in the liver to create plants they say could make ordinary households safer. Homes often accumulate small pollutants known as volatile organic compounds, produced by everyday activities and items ranging from smoking to furniture. These substances tend to be overlooked as contributors to air pollution, but some, such as benzene and chloroform, have been linked with cancer. To remove these pollutants, a team of scientists harnessed the power of genetic engineering and the ability of mammals to eradicate harmful substances using a naturally occurring protein. Recommended US military to develop genetically modified plants to use as spies This substance is able to break down benzene and chloroform into harmless byproducts. Known as 2E1, the protein is present in all mammals, including humans, but as it is found inside the liver and is switched on when processing alcohol, it does not protect them from air pollution. We decided we should have this reaction occur outside of the body in a plant, explained project leader Professor Stuart Strand, from the University of Washington. To achieve this, the scientists made a copy of the gene that codes for 2E1 protein in rabbits, and inserted it into the popular houseplant pothos ivy. 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 Each cell of the resulting plants was therefore turned into a miniature factory for 2E1, or a green liver. To test how well their plants performed as living air filters, they placed them in glass tubes filled with potentially harmful household pollutants. They found that within just six days chloroform was virtually undetectable, while benzene levels had dropped by three-quarters after eight. As a comparison, the scientists repeated the experiments with unmodified plants and found the concentration of these gases did not change at all over this period. The results were published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events Though the experimental conditions used higher levels of pollutants than typically found in homes, the scientists suggested their plants could be used to clean up household air. They now intend to target formaldehyde, another dangerous chemical found in cigarette smoke and laminate flooring. These are all stable compounds, so its really hard to get rid of them, explained Professor Strand. Without proteins to break down these molecules, wed have to use high-energy processes to do it. Its so much simpler and more sustainable to put these proteins all together in a houseplant. As pothos ivy does not flower in temperate climates, the researchers reasoned that there was a low risk of their genetically modified creations spreading their pollen into wild populations. Even unmodified plants can play a vital role in cutting other forms of air pollution, and living walls have been recommended for polluted schools in London to protect children. A shark tooth wedged in the neck of a fossilised flying reptile has opened a window onto a dramatic attack that unfolded millions of years ago. The well-preserved pteranodon a type of pterosaur that sported an elaborate crest had the tooth embedded between its neck vertebrae, providing clear evidence of a shark bite. These fossils offer a rare glimpse into an interaction between predators and prey playing out in the ancient oceans of North America. Researchers came across the fossil in the collection of the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum, where it had lain unstudied since the 1960s. Intrigued by the shark tooth, they first wanted to establish for certain it had not simply ended up fossilised next to the pterosaur bones. Recommended Dinosaur footprints revealed after storms destroy Sussex cliffs They concluded the way it was lodged between the vertebrae ridges was evidence of a swift, violent bite by an 8ft shark species known as Cretoxyrhina mantelli. This unique fossil reveals a long history of sharks attacking airborne animals that continues today, with modern species hunting birds. Understanding the ecology of these animals is important to understanding life on Earth through time, said the studys senior author Professor Michael Habib, from the University of Southern California. We now know sharks were hunting flying animals as long ago as 80 million years. 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 While the scientists said they could not rule out scavenging, the researchers said it was possible the shark had plucked the reptile from the sky or grabbed it after it landed on the water. Based on fossil evidence, palaeontologists have been able to surmise that pterosaurs ate fish and were able to take off and land from water, although this would have left them vulnerable to attack. We know big sharks ate pterosaurs, so we could say a big fast predatory species could very well have eaten this pteranodon when it entered the water, but well probably never know exactly, said Professor Habib. The discovery was published in the journal PeerJ. A former prisoner turned penal reform campaigner who was set to be deported has been released from detention after The Independent highlighted his plight. Hilary Ineomo-Marcus, 34, who has two British children under the age of four, said he was smiling from ear to ear after being able to return home to his family in London after a month in Harmondsworth removal centre. But the Nigerian national, who has lived in the UK since the age of 10, said he was still on edge because the Home Office is yet to make a decision about his right to remain in the UK. Mr Ineomo-Marcus was granted leave to remain in the early 2000s but immigration officials revoked his status after he served a 15-month prison sentence in 2013 for a tax offence. During his time in prison, Mr Ineomo-Marcus worked as a presenter on National Prison Radio, where he was commended as being the best prisoner-producer ever to have worked on the station. He continued doing radio work after his release, presenting a number of programmes about prison and rehabilitation on national radio. He also volunteered for charities that seek to deter young people from offending. Alongside his voluntary work, the 34-year-old is primary carer for his two sons, aged three and one; his wife Stacey, whom he married five years ago, works in the civil service. But Mr Ineomo-Marcus was served a deportation notice on 19 November this year while signing on with the Home Office, and was then detained, meaning his wife had to take four weeks off work to care for their sons. He was due to be deported several days later, but the removal was halted because he was suffering from high blood pressure. The 34-year-old was released from detention on Tuesday afternoon but was given no reason as to why told only that he must continue to sign on with the Home Office on a weekly basis. Mr Ineono-Marcus has always been primary carer for his two sons, aged three and one, while his wife Stacey, who he married five years ago, works in the civil service ( (Hilary Ineomo-Marcus) Speaking to The Independent the day after he was released, he said: Im in good spirits. Im smiling from ear to ear. I was able to take my son to school this morning and have my youngest in my arms right now. But Im still coming to terms with what happened, and Im liable to be detained again. On his time in detention, Mr Ineomo-Marcus said: Each day that passed it got harder and harder to cope. Youre seeing things, constantly having conversations with people who are in the same situations than you or worse. I started taking anti-depressants and sleeping tablets around two weeks into being there. It was exhaustion, the environment, the anxiety, missing my family, thoughts of despair, anguish, not being able to see any light in the end of the tunnel. His wife, Stacey Ineomo-Marcus, said she was so relieved that her husband had been released after an extremely stressful few weeks. He just knocked on the door I nearly had a heart attack. The kids were so emotional about seeing him. Our eldest one was so happy that Daddy could take him to school this morning. Its such a relief to have him back at home, said the 31-year-old. Recommended Man who has lived in UK since age 10 facing deportation Its been extremely stressful. Especially with the kids; they were always asking when is Daddy coming and why cant Daddy watch my school play? I just kept telling them he was away at the moment and he would be home soon. Im so relieved and happy, but its not over yet. Were just hoping and praying he will be able to stay. The familys solicitors from Coram Childrens Legal Centre said they were awaiting a decision from the Home Office after lodging further submissions, including an independent social work report stating that the childrens best interests can only be met by their father remaining with them in the UK. Mr Ineomo-Marcus described the crime he committed in 2013 as a lapse of judgement, saying he had invested 4,500 into a business set up his cousin, which unbeknownst to him was claiming back taxes it was not entitled to. A crime is a crime I am in no way trying to justify it. I did my time. But this is a form of double punishment. Prison did what it is supposed to do, he continued. I havent reoffended, Ive given back to society. The probation service itself has assessed me as being low-risk of reoffending, he said. (Stacey Ineomo-Marcus (Stacey Ineomo-Marcus) Reflecting on the impact his removal would have on his sons, he said: Theres a massive crisis in our society right now where young boys are stabbing each other. A lot of them are young black boys from disadvantaged backgrounds. And when Ive had conversations with young offenders in prisons there is a common theme and that is an absence of a father figure in their lives. That is worrying for me, because these boys are potentially my sons. That scares me. The Home Office has been approached for comment. Late last year the European Court of Justice ruled that Britain had the power to revoke Article 50 and cancel Brexit. Heres everything you need to know about the ruling and how revocation would work in practice. Theresa May has clashed with her home secretary over targets to reduce net migration to the tens of thousands, as the cabinet row over Britains post-Brexit borders spilled into public. Sajid Javid confirmed his new immigration plan would not include the numerical target championed by the prime minister during her time at the Home Office. But just hours later in the House of Commons, Ms May was asked if hitting the target remained her intention to which she replied: Yes. Recommended What you need to know about stopping Brexit and revoking Article 50 It follows a dispute behind closed doors over how the new immigration plans should be framed, with Downing Street determined to present them as a crackdown on low-skilled workers from overseas. The Independent which has run the Drop the Target campaign for over two years first revealed the shift away from the target earlier this week, with Mr Javid confirming its absence from his white paper on Wednesday. As officials prepared to publish the full immigration bill to be put before parliament, it also emerged that key details of the new policy including the salary threshold for migrants will not be known until 2020, with cabinet infighting said to be at the root of the delay. During an interview on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, Mr Javid said his white paper set out plans to reduce immigration to sustainable levels but did not include a specific target. He repeatedly declined to restate the commitment first made by David Cameron in the 2010 Tory manifesto to lower annual net migration down below 100,000. Theresa May apologies for previously saying EU citizens had 'jumped the queue' under current immigration rules He said: There is no specific target. It will be a system that will bring net migration down to more sustainable levels. If you look at the current level of migration, the latest stats show 273,000. Most people agree that is very high, certainly by historical standards. In the last two decades it has been in the hundreds of thousands. If you go back further than that, it was much lower. There is no specific target. It will be a system that will bring net migration down to more sustainable levels Home secretary Sajid Javid What we want to do is bring it to a level where it is sustainable in the sense that it meets first our economic need and at the same time it is not too high, a burden on our communities or on our infrastructure. Mr Javid has also been reticent to repeat the target in previous interviews and had signalled an intent in the Commons to move away from the hostile environment policies Ms May promoted while doing his job. Ms May has strongly resisted pressure to abandon the target from senior ministers over many years, including from George Osborne when he was chancellor. But as news of the targets absence from the white paper spread, Ms May was asked by Labour MP Chris Elmore whether it was still the governments intention to reduce immigration to the tens of thousands, and replied that it was. "Brexit betrayal" march in London Show all 43 1 /43 "Brexit betrayal" march in London "Brexit betrayal" march in London A protester holds an anti-BBC sign Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London A pro-brexit demonstrator holds a sign in the picket line Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London A protester carrying a noose at the "Brexit betrayal" march. The man carrying it told a reporter: "That's what the traitor May deserves." AP "Brexit betrayal" march in London Pro-brexit supporters hold a sign opposed to Nigel Farage Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London Protesters carry a defaced British flag on the march Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London Tommy Robinson addresses a rally after taking part in a Brexit 'betrayal' march in central London PA "Brexit betrayal" march in London Police officers attempts to keep rival protesters from clashing at the Brexit 'betrayal' march in London Victoria Jones/PA "Brexit betrayal" march in London A protester holds an anti-Theresa May sign Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London A pro-brexit demonstrator and his dog Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London A pro-brexit demonstrator at the protest Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London A pro-brexit sign at the rally Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London Pro-brexit demonstrators endorse UKIP Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London A Brexit 'betrayal' march protester wearing a Make Britain Great Again hat in London on 9 December 2018 Chris J Ratcliffe/Getty "Brexit betrayal" march in London Brexit 'betrayal' marchers gathering on Park Lane ahead of a protest Angela Christofilou/ The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London The "Brexit Betrayal" march passes through Central London Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London Tommy Robinson tells protesters to join Ukip via their mobile phones on stage next to leader Gerard Batten (right) at the Brexit 'betrayal' march Gareth Fuller/PA "Brexit betrayal" march in London A protester speaks thorugh a megaphone on the march Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London A pro-brexit demonstrator walks in the picket line Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London A pro-brexit anti-May sign at the rally Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London A protester carries a Union Jack on the march Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London A pro-brexit demonstrator wrapped in the Union Jack Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London A pro-brexit anti-May sign at the rally Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London Pro brexit demonstrators move through Central London Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London A pro-brexit demonstrator marches with sign Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London A pro-brexit demonstrator holds a rude sign in the rally Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London The march passes down Victoria Street near Parliament Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London A festive protester marches near Parliament Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London A protester holds a mock noose as the march passes down Victoria Street towards Parliament Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London A protester wrapped in the Union Jack marches down Victoria Street towards Parliament Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London A protester makes some noise on the march Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London A protester dressed as a dinosaur holds a sign rallying against "Davocracy" - in reference to the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London A protester holds a pro-brexit sign on the march Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London The march approaches parliament Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London A protester distributes pro-brexit lapel badges Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London A demonstrator wears an anti-EU poster and holds an anti-BBC sign Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London A smoke bomb is deployed in Parliament Square as the march comes across the counter-demonstration Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London A flag bearing the Arms of Plantagenet flies in theprot Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London Protesters on the Brexit 'betrayal' march in London on 9 December 2018 Angela Christofilou/ The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London Protesters on the Brexit 'betrayal' march in London on 9 December 2018 Angela Christofilou/ The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London Brexit 'betrayal' marchers gathering on Park Lane ahead of a protest on 9 December 2018 Angela Christofilou/ The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London Brexit 'betrayal' marchers gathering on Park Lane ahead of a protest on 9 December 2018 Angela Christofilou/ The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London Angela Christofilou/The Independent Downing Street pointed out that the target was still a manifesto commitment, and also highlighted a section of the white paper which referenced the manifesto, though it still made no specific mention of the tens of thousands target. The white paper had also been due to set out the minimum salary requirement for workers to obtain a long-term visa which had been expected to be set at 30,000. But after a revolt led by Philip Hammond, the chancellor, and Greg Clark, the business secretary, no figure will be announced until 2020 just months before the post-Brexit immigration system is due to start in January 2021. An extensive 12-month programme of engagement is planned with businesses, the NHS and local government leaders. Ms May also dismissed suggestions she had been forced by the cabinet to backtrack over the 30,000 minimum salary threshold for higher skilled workers applying for five-year visas. The figure was originally recommended by the Migration Advisory Committee, but the white paper said there would be further consultations before it was finalised. During the EU referendum campaign Nigel Farage predicted a domino effect of other countries leaving the EU if Britain departed the bloc. To be blunt, there is no sign of that happening. On Tuesday, the Netherlands produced a nice example of the way Brexit has gone down in other European countries. Prime minister Mark Rutte, usually thought of as a friend of the UK, took out a full-page newspaper advert warning his people to pay attention to the chaos over the North Sea in Britain. Far from setting an example for other breakaway states to follow, Britains withdrawal is a cautionary tale to the continent where the narrative is one of a once-respected nation making a fool of itself. Even the most rebellious EU member states, led by right-wing populists, are not planning to leave. When the Hungarian foreign minister was asked on British radio recently whether his country would consider leaving the EU given its constant skirmishes with Brussels he simply said no. Neither is the issue on the agenda in Italy, where far-right interior minister Matteo Salvini is, if anything, driving EU policy on migrants, rather than retreating from the union. The NHS will face a staffing crisis if the government presses ahead with its harsh post-Brexit immigration clampdown, Theresa May was warned today. The body representing NHS trusts hit out at an expected minimum salary requirement of about 30,000 for all migrants, including those from the EU to be confirmed in a long-delayed white paper today. Ministers believe the threshold for new five-year working visas will cut low-skilled migration in line with what the public demanded in voting for EU withdrawal. But the prime minister is believed to have had to personally intervene to defeat ministers who fear the move will damage the economy and hit key sectors such as health and tech. This morning, Sajid Javid, the home secretary, hinted at deep cabinet divisions, revealing the government would consult further on the 30,000 figure. We are not setting the exact threshold today, he told BBC Radio 4s Today programme, adding: We will consult further on whether its 30,000 or thereabouts. The Home Office would go away and listen to what businesses have to say after heavy criticism from business leaders about the likely economic damage. Mr Javid also confirmed the document left out the discredited pledge to bring down net migration to tens of thousands, saying: There is no specific target. The target will still exist as a manifesto pledge, but its absence is a clear sign policy has now moved away from the numbers-based approach backed by Ms May. The news is a victory for The Independents Drop the Target campaign launched last year to see the policy thrown out. Newspapers react to Theresa May pulling the vote on her Brexit deal Show all 11 1 /11 Newspapers react to Theresa May pulling the vote on her Brexit deal Newspapers react to Theresa May pulling the vote on her Brexit deal The Independent Newspapers react to Theresa May pulling the vote on her Brexit deal The Daily Mirror Newspapers react to Theresa May pulling the vote on her Brexit deal The Times Newspapers react to Theresa May pulling the vote on her Brexit deal The Daily Express Newspapers react to Theresa May pulling the vote on her Brexit deal The Financial Times Newspapers react to Theresa May pulling the vote on her Brexit deal The Daily Telegraph Newspapers react to Theresa May pulling the vote on her Brexit deal The i Newspapers react to Theresa May pulling the vote on her Brexit deal The Guardian Newspapers react to Theresa May pulling the vote on her Brexit deal The Scotsman Newspapers react to Theresa May pulling the vote on her Brexit deal The Daily Mail Newspapers react to Theresa May pulling the vote on her Brexit deal The Metro Saffron Cordery, the deputy chief executive of NHS Providers, said NHS trusts were also deeply concerned about the proposals in the immigration white paper. We are deeply concerned about what is going to happen. High skills does not equal high pay, she told the BBC Radio 4s Today programme. You have got starting salaries for nurses at 23,000 - also for paramedics, midwives. Junior doctors starting salaries at 27,000, healthcare assistants at 17,000, all coming in way below that 30,000 cap. It is not just health workers, it is social care as well. We have to remember where the skills lay. They lay in those staff under 30,000. Pro-immigration cabinet ministers are believed to have only given way on the threshold after securing a pledge that the issue will be put out to consultation. That is certain to prompt criticism that the proposals already delayed by over a year, with no chance of legislation passing before Brexit day remain a fudge. Ministers have already acknowledged they may need to soften the impact on EU migrants in order to win a beneficial future trade deal with the EU There are also suggestions that the new system will be phased in from 2021, the end of the planned post-Brexit transition period. And EU workers will need to be in the UK for five years before they start to receive full benefits, a condition which could come under fire in Brussels. Key details of the UKs post-Brexit immigration policy including the salary threshold for migrants will not be known until 2020 after cabinet infighting, it has been revealed. Ministers will publish a long-awaited immigration bill on Thursday, to end free movement of EU citizens, but rows have delayed decisions until long after the UK leaves the EU. It means businesses, the NHS and other employers will be in the dark about the minimum salary requirement for workers to obtain a long-term visa which had been expected to be set at 30,000. After a revolt led by Philip Hammond, the chancellor, and Greg Clark, the business secretary, no figure will be announced until 2020 just months before the post-Brexit immigration system is due to start, in January 2021. An extensive 12-month programme of engagement is planned with worried businesses, the NHS and local government leaders, who have already criticised the immigration clampdown. Other deferred decisions include what benefits EU citizens will be entitled to, whether the pensions of British expats will be uprated and new rules for students. The Home Office is also conceding that similar numbers of low-skilled EU workers could still come to the UK, despite a requirement for them to secure temporary visas of no more than 12 months. They would be required to leave after a year and be barred from claiming benefits, bringing in family members or taking out a second visa until after a 12-month cooling-off period. However, The Independent understands Home Office officials believe that until employers have had time to reduce their reliance on migrant labour, with a review after five years the numbers of migrants may remain at a similar level. They would also be able to switch to other visas, such as study or tourism, and it is unclear whether they would have to leave the country to do so. Earlier on Wednesday, Sajid Javid, the home secretary, confirmed his white paper, being published on Wednesday, omitted the discredited pledge to bring down net migration to tens of thousands, saying: There is no specific target. People's Vote march demanding vote on final Brexit deal Show all 30 1 /30 People's Vote march demanding vote on final Brexit deal People's Vote march demanding vote on final Brexit deal Rex People's Vote march demanding vote on final Brexit deal AFP/Getty Images People's Vote march demanding vote on final Brexit deal A young protestor shouts as she takes part in the People's Vote demonstration against Brexit Getty Images People's Vote march demanding vote on final Brexit deal Reuters People's Vote march demanding vote on final Brexit deal EPA People's Vote march demanding vote on final Brexit deal A protester's pro-EU t-shirt EPA People's Vote march demanding vote on final Brexit deal EPA People's Vote march demanding vote on final Brexit deal AFP/Getty Images People's Vote march demanding vote on final Brexit deal EPA People's Vote march demanding vote on final Brexit deal AFP/Getty People's Vote march demanding vote on final Brexit deal EPA People's Vote march demanding vote on final Brexit deal Gina Miller and Caroline Lucas EPA People's Vote march demanding vote on final Brexit deal EPA People's Vote march demanding vote on final Brexit deal EPA People's Vote march demanding vote on final Brexit deal Tens of thousands of people march through London EPA People's Vote march demanding vote on final Brexit deal EPA People's Vote march demanding vote on final Brexit deal Demonstrators at the People's Vote March Getty People's Vote march demanding vote on final Brexit deal 'Two months too young to decide on my future' REUTERS People's Vote march demanding vote on final Brexit deal PA People's Vote march demanding vote on final Brexit deal A young girl joins in the march PA People's Vote march demanding vote on final Brexit deal An EU flag is draped across the statue of Winston Chruchill in Parliament Square REUTERS People's Vote march demanding vote on final Brexit deal AFP/Getty Images People's Vote march demanding vote on final Brexit deal Vince Cable MP, Pro-EU campaigner Gina Miller, Tony Robinson and Caroline Lucas MP join with crowds PA People's Vote march demanding vote on final Brexit deal PA People's Vote march demanding vote on final Brexit deal Crowds gather on Pall Mall PA People's Vote march demanding vote on final Brexit deal A man resembling Britain's Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, joins EU supporters Reuters People's Vote march demanding vote on final Brexit deal Reuters People's Vote march demanding vote on final Brexit deal People gather in Trafalgar Square REUTERS People's Vote march demanding vote on final Brexit deal Pro-EU campaigner Gina Miller and Tony Robinson PA People's Vote march demanding vote on final Brexit deal EU supporters, calling on the government to give Britons a vote on the final Brexit deal, participate in the 'People's Vote' march REUTERS Mr Javid said he go away and listen to what businesses have to say a process which, his white paper reveals, will take 12 months, starting early in 2019. We are not setting the exact threshold today, he told BBC Radio 4s Today programme, adding: We will consult further on whether its 30,000 or thereabouts. The NHS has pointed out that doctors and nurses routinely earn less than a limit of 30,000, fearing such a regime could trigger a staffing crisis. Saffron Cordery, the deputy chief executive of NHS Providers, which represents NHS trusts: We are deeply concerned about what is going to happen. High skills does not equal high pay. You have got starting salaries for nurses at 23,000 also for paramedics, midwives. Junior doctors starting salaries at 27,000, healthcare assistants at 17,000, all coming in way below that 30,000 cap. It is not just health workers, it is social care as well. We have to remember where the skills lay. They lay in those staff under 30,000. The EU has unveiled a raft of measures to protect its vital interests in the event of a no-deal Brexit. The European Commission on Wednesday recommended 14 measures in a number of areas, including financial services, air transport, customs and climate policy. Among the plans are emergency policies to avoid full interruption of air traffic between the EU and the UK in the event of no deal. But the bloc warned that the last-minute plan will only ensure basic connectivity, signalling that there could still be significant disruption to flights. Notably absent from the package was a blanket bail-out for British citizens living in the EU who will instead be dealt with on a case-by-case basis by member states, adding to their uncertainty. The Commission invites member states to take a generous approach to the rights of UK citizens in the EU, provided that this approach is reciprocated by the UK but stopped short of ordering safeguards to ensure they can keep living and working abroad. On trade, the bloc confirmed that every consignment of animal products and live animals would have to be checked at border posts on entry to the EU from Britain likely leading to huge queues and causing massive disruption to Britains agricultural industry even with the contingency plans in place. The plans include a nine-month grace period during which UK-based lorries and hauliers would still be allowed to take goods between the UK and EU. The Commission has also advised financial services firms they should consider relocating to the EU if they want to continue selling products there, because they will no longer be allowed to provide services in the EU on the basis of their current authorisations. Financial institutions that wish to provide banking or insurance services in the European Union should take all necessary steps to be properly authorised on withdrawal date, including by establishing presence in the EU27, it said in an explanatory note. Gibraltar will notably be excluded from the no-deal contingency measures, a move likely to cause consternation in London. The bloc says, however, it will continue to fund peace process schemes in Northern Ireland in all scenarios even in the event of a no-deal Brexit. Valdis Dombrovskis, Europe Commission vice president, said the measures were aimed at creating a soft landing in the event of a no-deal scenario, but that they were ultimately an exercise in limiting damage. He told reporters in Brussels that the contingencies cannot replicate the benefits of the EU withdrawal agreement and certainly cannot replicate the benefits of EU membership. The measures unveiled by the European Commission are all short-term and it says they should in principle not go beyond the end of 2019. A no-deal Brexit will happen if Theresa May is unable to get her Brexit deal through parliament, and then decides to go ahead with Brexit anyway. The government has the power to stop a no-deal Brexit if it wants to by revoking Article 50, though it might have to seek the consent of parliament. British citizens groups criticised the lack of provision to protect them and said they had been abandoned by both the EU and UK government. A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Show all 65 1 /65 A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit An estimated 700,000 people marched through London to demand a final say on the withdrawal agreement Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Red smoke from a canister hangs in the air as around 100,000 demonstrators march through London during a People's Vote anti-brexit demonstration savings banners and placards Anti-Brexit People's Vote March for the Future in London Rex A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Mayor of London Sadiq Khan takes part in the People's Vote March for the Future in London, a march and rally in support of a second EU referendum. PA A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Final Say campaigners take part in the peoples vote march for the future in London 20/10/2018 Protesters wearing final Say shirts and holding placards Angela Christofilou A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit MP Chuka Umunna (left) and MP Vince Cable (right) as MP Anna Soubry (centre) addresses Anti-Brexit campaigners at a rally after the People's Vote March for the Future in London, a march and rally in support of a second EU referendum. PA A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit A Peoples Vote march attendee calls for a Final Say Angela Christofilou A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Demonstrators with banners 'We're with EU' during the People's Vote March for the Future in London, Britain, 20 October 2018. Reports state that the 'March for the Future' is to be led by a column of young people and call for a Peopleas Vote on the Brexit deal. After marching through central London, there will be a rally on stage in Parliament Square, including speeches from Mayor of London Sadiq Khan. EPA A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Protesters at Londons march for the future in October The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Editor of The Independent Christian Broughton speaks to demonstrators in Parliament Sqaure after they take part in a march calling for a People's Vote on the final Brexit deal, in central London on October 20, 2018. - Britons dreading life outside Europe gathered from all corners of the UK to London on Saturday to try to stop their country's looming breakup with the EU. AFP/Getty A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit A poster at the March for the Future in October The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Anti-Brexit campaigners take part in the People's Vote March for the Future in London, a march and rally in support of a second EU referendum. PA A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Final Say campaigners take part in the peoples vote march for the future in London 20/10/2018 Angela Christofilou A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Anti-Brexit campaigners take part in the People's Vote March for the Future in London, a march and rally in support of a second EU referendum. PA A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Demonstrators hold placards as they take part in a march calling for a People's Vote on the final Brexit deal, in central London on October 20, 2018. - Britons dreading life outside Europe gathered from all corners of the UK to London on Saturday to try to stop their country's looming breakup with the EU. AFP/Getty A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Final Say campaigners take part in the peoples vote march for the future in London 20/10/2018 campaigner wrapped in EU flag Angela Christofilou A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Angela Christofilou/The Independent A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Final Say campaigners take part in the peoples vote march for the future in London 20/10/2018 Angela Christofilou A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Demonstrators pass Trafalgar Square as they take part in a march calling for a People's Vote on the final Brexit deal, in central London on October 20, 2018. - Britons dreading life outside Europe gathered from all corners of the UK to London on Saturday to try to stop their country's looming breakup with the EU. AFP/Getty A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Demonstrators wave Union and European flags and hold up placards as they pass Trafalgar Square, taking part in a march calling for a People's Vote on the final Brexit deal, in central London on October 20, 2018. - Britons dreading life outside Europe gathered from all corners of the UK to London on Saturday to try to stop their country's looming breakup with the EU. AFP/Getty A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Demonstrators hold placards as they take part in a march calling for a People's Vote on the final Brexit deal, in central London on October 20, 2018. - Britons dreading life outside Europe gathered from all corners of the UK to London on Saturday to try to stop their country's looming breakup with the EU. AFP/Getty A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit A demonstrator holds a message during a march calling for a People's Vote on the final Brexit deal, in central London on October 20, 2018. - Britons dreading life outside Europe gathered from all corners of the UK to London on Saturday to try to stop their country's looming breakup with the EU. AFP/Getty A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Anti-Brexit campaigners take part in the People's Vote March for the Future in London, a march and rally in support of a second EU referendum. PA A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Demonstrators take part in the 'People's Vote March for the Future,' in central London, Britain, 20 October 2018. Reports state that the 'March for the Future' is to be led by a column of young people and call for a Peopleas Vote on the Brexit deal. After marching through central London, there will be a rally on stage in Parliament Square, including speeches from Mayor of London Sadiq Khan EPA A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit A protester brandishes an Independent t-shirt during the Brexit March Angela Christofilou A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Anti-Brexit campaigners take part in the People's Vote March for the Future in London, a march and rally in support of a second EU referendum PA A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Tens of thousands of people take part in People's Vote March for the Future in central London. The march organised by the People's Vote campaign is led by young people calling for a People's Vote on the Brexit deal Rex A historic moment: thousands march to demand Final Say on Brexit Anti-Brexit campaigners take part in the People's Vote March for the Future in London, a march and rally in support of a second EU referendum PA We are appalled to learn that, while aviation and financial services merit an extension of current agreements in the case of no deal, people do not, said Jane Golding, co-chair of British In Europe. With the spectre of no deal rising again, so are peoples anxiety levels and it is wrong that citizens rights were not guaranteed at the outset. Now British citizens have a been given a clear message that if there is no deal they are on their own, abandoned by the UK government and the EU. This is a far cry from the negotiators promises that we would be able to live our lives as before. And it is an even further one from the blithe but false promises that were made by Vote Leave that the Vienna Convention would protect us come what may. She added: Above all, at a time when EU citizens across the EU are questioning whether the European project is relevant to their lives, is this the legacy that the European parliament and other institutions want to take into the European parliament elections and beyond, as a warning to future mobile citizens? UK businesses are watching in horror as bickering politicians bring the country ever closer to no-deal Brexit, Britains five major industry groups have warned. Companies are holding back investments intended to create jobs or raise pay and productivity in favour of contingency planning, the associations told the government, but they made clear they believed time had run out to mitigate the severe dislocation crashing out of the EU would bring. The British Chambers of Commerce, EEF, CBI, Federation of Small Businesses and the Institute of Directors are fed up of politicians internecine squabbles, they said in a joint statement after Theresa May announced she would significantly ramp up preparations for a situation in which the UK crashed out of the EU without an agreement in place. It read: Businesses have been watching in horror as politicians have focused on factional disputes rather than practical steps that business needs to move forward. The lack of progress in Westminster means that the risk of a no-deal Brexit is rising. With just 100 days to go, the suggestion that no deal can be managed is not a credible proposition. Some Brexiteers, including international development secretary Penny Mordaunt, have advanced the idea of a managed no-deal exit but her cabinet colleagues described it as a unicorn plan. Guy Verhofstadt, the European Parliaments Brexit coordinator, tweeted on Tuesday that there is no such thing as a managed no-deal. The business groups statement, released overnight, came as ministers stepped up their 2bn contingency plans for a no-deal scenario including placing 3,500 military personnel on standby to support the government. After Ms May was forced to delay the meaningful vote on her withdrawal agreement until mid-January her cabinet agreed on Tuesday that no-deal planning should proceed in full. Officials will now implement previously-announced policies like medicine and food stockpiling, and attempt to communicate with six million British businesses to urge them to make their own contingency arrangements. UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 26 November 2021 A shopper browses Christmas trees for sale at Pines and Needles in Dulwich, London Reuters UK news in pictures 25 November 2021 A murmuration of hundreds of thousands of starlings fly over a field at dusk in Cumbria, close to the Scottish border PA UK news in pictures 24 November 2021 Migrants are helped ashore from a RNLI (Royal National Lifeboat Institution) lifeboat at a beach in Dungeness, on the south-east coast of England, on November 24, 2021, after being rescued while crossing the English Channel. AFP via Getty Images UK news in pictures 23 November 2021 The coffin of Sir David Amess is carried past politicians, including former Prime Ministers Sir John Major, David Cameron and Theresa May, Speaker of the House of Commons Sir Lindsay Hoyle, Home Secretary Priti Patel and Prime Minister Boris Johnson during the requiem mass for the MP at Westminster Cathedral, central London PA UK news in pictures 22 November 2021 The scene in Dragon Rise, Norton Fitzwarren, Somerset where police have launched a murder probe after two people were found dead Tom Wren/SWNS UK news in pictures 21 November 2021 London-based midwife Sarah Muggleton, 27, takes part in a 'March with Midwives' in central London to highlight the crisis in maternity services PA UK news in pictures 20 November 2021 Police officers monitor as climate change activists sit down and block traffic during a protest action in solidarity with activists from the Insulate Britain group who received prison terms for blocking roads, on Lambeth Bridge in central London AFP via Getty Images UK news in pictures 19 November 2021 A giant installation of Prime Minister Boris Johnson made from recycled clothing goes on display at Manchester Central, as part of Manchester Art Fair, in a 'wake-up call for the Prime Minister to tackle textile waste' PA UK news in pictures 18 November 2021 The scene at a recycling centre in Stert, near Devizes in Wiltshire after a large blaze was brought under control. The fire broke out on Wednesday night the fire service has said and local residents were advised to keep windows and doors shut due to large amounts of smoke PA UK news in pictures 17 November 2021 The sun rises over South Shields Lighthouse, on the North East coast of England PA UK news in pictures 16 November 2021 ancer Maithili Vijayakumar at the launch of 2021 Diwali celebrations at St Andrew Square in Edinburgh PA UK news in pictures 15 November 2021 Forensic officers work outside Liverpool Women's Hospital, following a car blast, in Liverpool Reuters UK news in pictures 14 November 2021 Wreaths by the Cenotaph after the Remembrance Sunday service in Whitehall, London PA UK news in pictures 13 November 2021 Richard Ratcliffe, the husband of detainee Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, is ending his hunger strike in central London after almost three weeks. Ratcliffe has spent 21 days camped outside the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office in London without food. He began his demonstration on 24 October after his wife lost her latest appeal in Iran, saying his family was caught in a dispute between two states PA UK news in pictures 12 November 2021 Peter Green protesting outside the Cop26 gates during the official final day of the Cop26 summit in Glasgow. PA UK news in pictures 11 November 2021 Seagulls fly around the statue entitled 'Tommy', a first World War soldier by artist Ray Lonsdale at dawn in Seaham, Britain Reuters UK news in pictures 10 November 2021 Climate activists dressed as characters inspired by the Netflix series Squid Game protest as they ask Samsung to go 100% renewable energy, outside the venue for COP26 in Glasgow Reuters UK news in pictures 9 November 2021 A deer statue silhouetted at Loch Faskally in Pitlochry, Scotland Reuters UK news in pictures 8 November 2021 Sunrise over St Mary's Lighthouse at Whitley Bay on the North East coast of England PA UK news in pictures 7 November 2021 Activists from Friends of the Earth during a demonstration calling for an end to all new oil and gas projects in the North Sea outside the UK Government's Cop26 hub during the Cop26 summit in Glasgow PA UK news in pictures 6 November 2021 Protesters take part in a rally organised by the Cop26 Coalition in Glasgow demanding global climate justice PA UK news in pictures 5 November 2021 Final touches are made to a life sized Sir David Attenborough cake surrounded by animals as part of a display created by a group of cake artists during Cake International at NEC Birmingham PA UK news in pictures 4 November 2021 A spectacular display of the Northern Lights seen over Derwentwater, near Keswick in the Lake District PA UK news in pictures 3 November 2021 Police and demonstrators at a Extinction Rebellion protest on Buchanan Street, during the Cop26 summit in Glasgow PA UK news in pictures 2 November 2021 A person walks along the Basingstoke canal near to Dogmersfield in Hampshire PA UK news in pictures 1 November 2021 Sir David Attenborough delivers a speech during Cop26 in Glasgow Reuters UK news in pictures 31 October 2021 Extinction Rebellion activists protest in Edinburgh as the Cop26 conference begins in Glasgow Getty UK news in pictures 30 October 2021 First Minister Nicola Sturgeon with Mapuche leader and Minga Indigena Lead Coordinator Claflin Lafkenche (right) alongside indigenous delegates at a ceremonial gathering at the Tramway in Glasgow in a symbolic gesture to mark a unified demand for climate justice PA UK news in pictures 29 October 2021 Ocean Rebellion put on a display of puking oil heads ahead of climate change conference COP26 in Glasgow EPA UK news in pictures 28 October 2021 A man dressed as Santa Claus outside Selfridges in London as the department store unveils its Christmas windows on Oxford Street PA UK news in pictures 27 October 2021 Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak during a visit to Fourpure Brewery in Bermondsey, London, after the chancellor announced a cut to beer taxes in his budget PA UK news in pictures 26 October 2021 Activist Steve Bray demonstrates with a toilet outside the gates of Downing Street, after MPs voted in Parliament against the Environment Bill, allowing companies to pump raw sewage into UK rivers and seas, in London Reuters UK news in pictures 25 October 2021 Second World War veteran James White, 96, at the opening of the Edinburgh Garden of Remembrance, marking the start of the remembrance period PA UK news in pictures 24 October 2021 Richard Ratcliffe holds up a photo of his wife Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe as he protests outside the Foreign Office while on hunger strike, part of an effort to lobby the UK foreign secretary to bring his wife home from detention in Iran Getty UK news in pictures 23 October 2021 Partner of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, Stella Morris and Editor in Chief of WikiLeaks Kristinn Hrafnsson attend a protest ahead of the appeal hearing over Assange's extradition, in London Reuters UK news in pictures 22 October 2021 Palace Gardener Justine Howlett adds the finishing touches to pumpkins bearing the face of Henry VIII and his wives, at Hampton Court Palace. PA UK news in pictures 21 October 2021 Flooded fields near Lingfield in Surrey, after southern England was hit overnight by heavy rain and strong winds from Storm Aurore moving in from France PA UK news in pictures 20 October 2021 A wing surfer enjoys the strong winds as they surf in the sea off of Hayling Island in Hampshire PA UK news in pictures 19 October 2021 Actor Jude Law holds hands with Little Amal, a 3.5-metre-tall puppet of a nine-year-old Syrian girl, as it arrives in Folkestone, Kent, as part of the Handspring Puppet Company's 'The Walk' PA UK news in pictures 18 October 2021 A view over Southend-on-Sea in Essex, which is set to become a city in tribute to Sir David Amess MP, who spent years campaigning for the change Getty UK news in pictures 17 October 2021 Members of the Essex Bangladeshi Welfare Association pay their respects by floral tributes laid at the scene where Sir David Amess MP was killed at Belfairs Methodist Church, in Leigh-on-Sea Reuters UK news in pictures 16 October 2021 Boris Johnson, Sir Keir Starmer, Priti Patel and Lindsay Hoyle pay respects to Sir David Amess at Belfairs Methodist Church, in Leigh-on-Sea, the site of his death EPA UK news in pictures 15 October 2021 A person lays flowers at the scene near the Belfairs Methodist Church in Eastwood Road North, Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, where Conservative MP Sir David Amess has died after he was stabbed several times at a constituency surgery. A man has been arrested and officers are not looking for anyone else PA UK news in pictures 14 October 2021 A red deer stag during rutting season in Bushy Park, Richmond, south west London, which is home to over 300 red and fallow deer PA UK news in pictures 13 October 2021 Police officers detain a man as Insulate Britain activists block a roundabout at a junction on the M25 motorway during a protest in Thurrock Reuters UK news in pictures 12 October 2021 The aerial climate installation by Swiss artivist Dan Acher 'We Are Watching' is unveiled at Our Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh PA UK news in pictures 10 October 2021 A young girl is helped by a Border Force officer as a group of people thought to be migrants are brought in to Dover, Kent, following a small boat incident in the Channel. PA UK news in pictures 9 October 2021 People walk past a life-size sculpture of British singer John Lennon entitled "Imagine", by sculptor Lawrence Holofcener, displayed to mark what would have been the 81st birthday for the former member of the Beatles in Carnaby Street Reuters UK news in pictures 8 October 2021 WW II veteran, 96-year-old Lorna Cockayne, who served in the Women's Royal Naval Service (WRNS), popularly and officially known as the Wrens, as a Bletchley Park codebreaker, poses for a photograph with the Legion d'honneur after receiving it during a ceremony at the Pear at Parley in Ferndown, Bournemouth PA UK news in pictures 7 October 2021 British comedian Jo Brand poses with cut-out silhouettes representing women outside the Metropolitan Police headquarters New Scotland Yard, to highlight violence against women by male police officers or former police officers AFP via Getty But the five groups added in their joint statement: Businesses would face massive new customs costs and tariffs [under no deal]. Disruption at ports could destroy carefully built supply chains. From broadcasters, to insurance brokers, to our financial services, the UKs world-leading services sector will be needlessly disadvantaged, and many professional qualifications will be unrecognised across the EU. UK and EU nationals working abroad will be left in deep uncertainty about their future. As a result of the lack of progress, the government is understandably now in a place where it must step up no-deal planning, but it is clear there is simply not enough time to prevent severe dislocation and disruption in just 100 days. Approached for comment, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy referred The Independent to the words of Ms Mays spokesman yesterday. He said the government continued to believe that Brexit under the terms of the deal struck by Ms May in Brussels remained the most likely scenario and that cabinet had agreed it was our best no-deal mitigation. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events However, he added: We will now set in motion the remaining elements of our no-deal plans. Cabinet also agreed to recommend to businesses and ensure they are similarly prepared, enacting their own no-deal plans as they judge necessary. Citizens should also prepare in line with the technical notices issued in the summer and in line with further more detailed advice that will now be issued over coming weeks. Additional reporting by PA James Brokenshire, the secretary of state for housing, has indicated social issues including use of drugs and alcohol, rather than government policy are behind soaring levels of homelessness across the UK. Levels of rough sleeping in the UK have doubled in five years rising by 20 per cent in just 12 months, according to housing charity Crisis The charity estimates more than 24,000 people are currently homeless with an increase of 120 per cent across England over five years, while another charity, Shelter, last month put the overall figure at 320,000, which includes those people living in temporary accommodation. Official government figures say there are just 4,750 homeless people in the UK. Mr Brokenshire admitted the numbers have gone up. This is not the type of country I want to see, where weve got people living out on the streets." Speaking to the BBC he said: Its why we are taking action, working with the different organisations, to help some of the most vulnerable people and taking action on a number of different fronts, including for example, in relation to the health service with drugs and alcohol being so relevant. But Mr Brokenshire defended the governments record on the issue as he announced 5m for 11 rough sleeping hubs which will be running in cities including Brighton, Bristol, Liverpool and Derby by spring 2019. The shelters are part of 130m the government is spending on the issue. We have a 100m rough sleeping strategy being backed by the agencies and charities on the front line, 30m that is going to councils this year that is delivering around 1,750 additional beds, 500 additional people working to support those most vulnerable, most in need, Mr Brokenshire said. James Brokenshire (PA) Absolutely I recognise the pressures that are there and I am determined to deal with this issue of rough sleeping and eradicate it for good. But Labours shadow housing secretary John Healey derided the small funds the government had made available as hardly scratching the surface, and said the new homeless hubs were an emergency scheme necessary because the problem had become so bad. Nothing the government is doing is tackling the root causes of homelessness, he told the Radio 4 Today programme. He accused the government of failing to build the homes we need, failing to give private renters the protections and security they need and cutting back on benefit and funding support for homeless hostels. It beggars belief that we have parts of the country where there is little or no shelter in an emergency, in extreme cold weather. People are dying on the streets, not just in big cities, but in Maidstone, Peterborough, Chelmsford, last winter. More than one homeless person died every day in the UK in the 12 months to October, including 14 in one week alone, according to a recent study by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Milton Keynes youth homelessness Show all 9 1 /9 Milton Keynes youth homelessness Milton Keynes youth homelessness Milton Keynes youth homelessness Alex Sturrock Milton Keynes youth homelessness Alex Sturrock Milton Keynes youth homelessness Alex Sturrock Milton Keynes youth homelessness Alex Sturrock Milton Keynes youth homelessness Alex Sturrock Milton Keynes youth homelessness Alex Sturrock Milton Keynes youth homelessness Alex Sturrock Milton Keynes youth homelessness Alex Sturrock Milton Keynes youth homelessness Alex Sturrock The charity Crisis said some government policies are driving homelessness up while other parts are left to pick up the pieces. This is in part down to government decisions on housing benefit, making housing unaffordable for those in greatest need, while councils struggle to rehouse people. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events The charitys director of policy Matthew Downie said: The government has made important strides to tackle homelessness recently, including its rough sleeping strategy and practical commitments to help those off the streets. "However without commitments to tackle the root causes of the issue, it will continue to treat the symptoms of homelessness without finding a cure. A British Medical Journal report in January argued the government's programme of austerity "lies at the heart" of soaring homelessness. After the row in the House of Commons on Wednesday about whether Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn called Theresa May a stupid woman, here is a list of all the offences and claimed sexism against senior politicians. Jeremy Corbyn (stupid woman, allegedly) The Labour leader was filmed on the frontbench apparently saying the words stupid woman after Theresa May had responded whimsically to one of his questions. His spokesman later denied that he had said it, saying instead that he had uttered stupid people. Famous percussionist Evelyn Glennie, who is deaf and can lip read, saw footage and said she was certain it was stupid woman. MPs in furious row in Commons after Jeremy Corbyn appears to call Theresa May stupid woman David Cameron (calm down, dear) In 2011, Labour demanded an apology from the former prime minister David Cameron after he told the MP Angela Eagle to calm down, dear in a heated exchange in the Commons. His use of the word dear, another MP claimed, was to put women down. A No 10 spokesperson later told journalists that it was intended to be a humorous remark. Nicholas Soames (barking) Last year, Nicholas Soames, the Conservative MP and grandson of Winston Churchill, apologised to then-SNP MP Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh for making a woof noise at her in the chamber in a bizarre outburst. He referred to the sound as a friendly canine salute as he made his apology. William Hague (stupid, stupid woman) In 2013, then-foreign secretary William Hague was on the front bench when Labour MP and shadow Treasury minister Cathy Jamieson, questioned why he had personally intervened in a 200m tax dispute in Uganda involving the company of a major Tory donor. As erstwhile prime minister David Cameron rose to assure her donations to the Tories do not buy influence, Hague could be seen muttering angrily, stupid, stupid woman. He was later forced to apologise. Gordon Brown meets Gillian Duffy in 2010 (Reuters) Gordon Brown (bigoted woman) In 2010, the then-Labour leader was in full election campaign mode when he came across Gillian Duffy, a 65-year-old former council worker and lifelong Labour voter who had bumped into him in Rochdale as she was out buying a loaf of bread. She made some comments about immigration and in turn he called her a bigoted woman, to an aide as he was being whisked away in his Jaguar. Boris Johnson (Lady Nugee) Boris Johnson was branded sexist by Commons speaker John Bercow after calling shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry by her husbands name to ridicule her. Johnson referred to her as Lady Nugee a reference to her marriage to High Court judge Sir Christopher Nugee. We dont name call in this chamber, Bercow told Johnson in a stern telling off. After Bercows intervention, Johnson apologised for inadvertent sexism or discourtesy. Bercow: It's 'inappropriate and frankly, sexist' for Boris Johnson to refer to Emily Thornberry by the title of her spouse in the chamber John Bercow (stupid woman) In May this year, John Bercow was heard by some MPs calling Andrea Leadsom, the leader of the Commons, a stupid woman. It allegedly came after Labour protested that the government was repeatedly breaching convention that time reserved for opposition debates should not be taken up with statements on government business. A few weeks later, the speaker escaped investigation by the standards watchdog because, under parliamentary rules, it is the speakers responsibility to rule on behaviour in the chamber. Mr Bercow had admitted using the word stupid during a disagreement with Ms Leadsom, but denied insulting her personally. Andrea Leadsom brings up John Bercow's previous 'stupid woman' comment during PMQs Philip Hammond (stupid woman) Philip Hammond was accused of calling hardline pro-Brexit campaigner Andrea Jenkyns a stupid woman in July this year, after she asked Theresa May a barbed question in the Commons. The Tory MP for Morley and Outwood took aim at the prime ministers Chequers plan on Brexit and asked her: At what point was it decided Brexit meant Remain? After Mr Hammond muttered the alleged two-words, fellow Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg fumed: I cannot believe that the chancellor would say something so rude not only to Andrea but effectively to all Brexit voters. But the controversy evaporated when Ms Jenkyns brushed it off, saying the remark was part of the cut and thrust of politics. Home Secretary Sajid Javid has admitted there will be no specific target for reducing the numbers of immigrants coming into the country in his new post-Brexit migration plan. Instead the white paper published today talks only about reducing net migration to sustainable levels, apparently marking the end of the tens of thousands target championed by Theresa May. The Independent which has run the Drop the Target campaign for over two years first revealed the shift earlier this week, with Mr Javid confirming its absence from his new plan on Wednesday. Downing Street argued that the target is still a manifesto commitment, but with Ms May unlikely to take the party into the next election, the chances of it remaining so in the future appear dead. There has been a heated row over the white paper for the UKs new immigration system, with Ms Mays team wishing to frame it as a crackdown on low-skilled migration and Mr Javid and others seeking to present it as move to a more intelligent approach. Interviewed on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, Mr Javid denied the government was abandoning commitments in the Conservative manifesto to cut immigration the tens of thousands target has appeared in every one since 2010. But he refused several times to repeat the target first set by David Cameron to get annual net migration down below 100,000 something successive administrations have failed to meet. He said: There is no specific target. It will be a system that will bring net migration down to more sustainable levels. Brexit secretary Stephen Barclay: UK is readying businesses for no-deal scerario If you look at the current level of migration, the latest stats show 273,000. Most people agree that is very high, certainly by historical standards. In the last two decades it has been in the hundreds of thousands. If you go back further than that it was much lower. What we want to do is bring it to a level where it is sustainable in the sense that it meets first our economic need and at the same time though it is not too high a burden on our communities or on our infrastructure. Mr Javid is publishing a long-awaited white paper setting out the governments plans for a post-Brexit immigration system, ending freedom of movement. Under the blueprint, there will be a new visa route for skilled workers and no cap on high-skilled professions such as doctors and engineers. He confirmed the government intended to set a minimum salary requirement for higher-skilled workers applying for five-year visas. "Brexit betrayal" march in London Show all 43 1 /43 "Brexit betrayal" march in London "Brexit betrayal" march in London A protester holds an anti-BBC sign Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London A pro-brexit demonstrator holds a sign in the picket line Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London A protester carrying a noose at the "Brexit betrayal" march. The man carrying it told a reporter: "That's what the traitor May deserves." AP "Brexit betrayal" march in London Pro-brexit supporters hold a sign opposed to Nigel Farage Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London Protesters carry a defaced British flag on the march Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London Tommy Robinson addresses a rally after taking part in a Brexit 'betrayal' march in central London PA "Brexit betrayal" march in London Police officers attempts to keep rival protesters from clashing at the Brexit 'betrayal' march in London Victoria Jones/PA "Brexit betrayal" march in London A protester holds an anti-Theresa May sign Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London A pro-brexit demonstrator and his dog Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London A pro-brexit demonstrator at the protest Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London A pro-brexit sign at the rally Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London Pro-brexit demonstrators endorse UKIP Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London A Brexit 'betrayal' march protester wearing a Make Britain Great Again hat in London on 9 December 2018 Chris J Ratcliffe/Getty "Brexit betrayal" march in London Brexit 'betrayal' marchers gathering on Park Lane ahead of a protest Angela Christofilou/ The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London The "Brexit Betrayal" march passes through Central London Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London Tommy Robinson tells protesters to join Ukip via their mobile phones on stage next to leader Gerard Batten (right) at the Brexit 'betrayal' march Gareth Fuller/PA "Brexit betrayal" march in London A protester speaks thorugh a megaphone on the march Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London A pro-brexit demonstrator walks in the picket line Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London A pro-brexit anti-May sign at the rally Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London A protester carries a Union Jack on the march Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London A pro-brexit demonstrator wrapped in the Union Jack Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London A pro-brexit anti-May sign at the rally Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London Pro brexit demonstrators move through Central London Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London A pro-brexit demonstrator marches with sign Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London A pro-brexit demonstrator holds a rude sign in the rally Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London The march passes down Victoria Street near Parliament Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London A festive protester marches near Parliament Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London A protester holds a mock noose as the march passes down Victoria Street towards Parliament Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London A protester wrapped in the Union Jack marches down Victoria Street towards Parliament Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London A protester makes some noise on the march Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London A protester dressed as a dinosaur holds a sign rallying against "Davocracy" - in reference to the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London A protester holds a pro-brexit sign on the march Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London The march approaches parliament Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London A protester distributes pro-brexit lapel badges Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London A demonstrator wears an anti-EU poster and holds an anti-BBC sign Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London A smoke bomb is deployed in Parliament Square as the march comes across the counter-demonstration Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London A flag bearing the Arms of Plantagenet flies in theprot Angela Christofilou/The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London Protesters on the Brexit 'betrayal' march in London on 9 December 2018 Angela Christofilou/ The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London Protesters on the Brexit 'betrayal' march in London on 9 December 2018 Angela Christofilou/ The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London Brexit 'betrayal' marchers gathering on Park Lane ahead of a protest on 9 December 2018 Angela Christofilou/ The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London Brexit 'betrayal' marchers gathering on Park Lane ahead of a protest on 9 December 2018 Angela Christofilou/ The Independent "Brexit betrayal" march in London Angela Christofilou/The Independent However, after the independent Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) recommended a 30,000 threshold, he said they would be consulting further on what the level should be. We are not setting the exact threshold today. There will be a threshold. The MAC suggested it should be 30,000, he said. That is their view and it is based on their evidence and it is very important for us to listen to that. It is equally important to listen to business to find the right threshold. We will consult further on whether it is 30,000 or thereabouts. What is important is that it is the principle that the MAC set out, which is absolutely right, where we want to focus on high skills. The decision to consult further follows a bitter Cabinet battle over what the threshold should be amid warnings from employers that they will struggle to recruit staff they need if it is set too high. Saffron Cordery, deputy chief executive of NHS Providers representing NHS trusts, said the organisation was deeply concerned about the impact on the health services. High skills does not equal high pay, she told the Today programme. You have got starting salaries for nurses at 23,000 also for paramedics, midwives. Junior doctors starting salaries at 27,000, healthcare assistants at 17,000, all coming in way below that 30,000 cap. It is not just health workers, it is social care as well. We have to remember where the skills lay. They lay in those staff under 30,000. Close 'El Chapo' Guzman's legal team arrives at court The trial of notorious drug lord Joaquin El Chapo Guzman continues in Brooklyn, New York, and is expected to last into early 2019. This is the first time a major Mexican drug lord has been tried in a US court and pleaded not guilty. The trial has become increasingly tense in recent days, as Guzmans attorney seeks to undermine testimonies from major drug traffickers. Guzman, 61, faces a 17 count indictment that covers nearly three decades of alleged criminal activities. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges. Follow updates form the trial as they happened Agencies contributed to this report The Trump administration has announced it plans to ease onerous security requirements for sponsors of migrant children, meaning thousands who have been parked in shelters for months could soon be released and reunited with family members. In a major policy reversal, the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the care of migrant children through its Office of Refugee Resettlement, said it would no longer require all members of a household where a child is to live be fingerprinted. Instead, fingerprints will be required only of the adult who is sponsoring the minor, typically a parent or another relative. Sponsors of migrant children who cross the border and are taken into custody of US officials must still pass criminal and extensive background checks, the agency said in a statement. However, others in the same home will not be subjected to that extra vetting, which was introduced by the administration in June. As a result, it will take significantly less time to place children with their families, and their stays in the shelters will be much shorter. The agency said in its statement that it was in the best interest of the unaccompanied children for it to modify the policy. Some 15,000 migrant children, including adolescents who crossed the border alone and young children who were separated from their parents, are warehoused in more than 100 shelters in the United States. In an interview broadcast on National Public Radio on Tuesday, the assistant secretary at Health and Human Services, Lynn Johnson, put it bluntly: The children should be home with their parents. The government makes lousy parents. She added that the extra screening is not adding anything to the protection or the safety of children. Ms Johnson said about 2,000 children in shelters are to be released in the next four or five days to parents who have already been screened. The lengthy warehousing of minors had come under attack from immigrant advocates, Democratic lawmakers and medical professionals, who had expressed concern about its detrimental effect on the mental health of the children. Studies have shown that the institutionalisation of children in general, and away from their families, has serious deleterious effects on their psychological and physical health, as well as their growth and development, said Amy J Cohen, a child psychiatrist who is an expert on trauma. Its a tremendous relief to hear that the government is finally going to enable these children to be reunited with family so that they can start the healing process, said Ms Cohen, who has interviewed migrant children in shelters. Undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border Show all 14 1 /14 Undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border Undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border Immigrant children, many of whom are separated form their parents, are housed in Texas' tent city Reuters Undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border A two-year-old Honduran asylum seeker cries as her mother is searched and detained near the US-Mexico border Getty Undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border Undocumented migrants ride on the top of a freight train referred to as the beast, or La Bestia Getty Undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border A cage inside a US Customs and Border Protection detention facility in Texas Reuters Undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border US Border Patrol Academy All new agents must complete a months-long training course at the New Mexico facility before assuming their posts at Border Patrol stations, mostly along the US-Mexico border Getty Undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border US-Mexico border fence A group of young men walk along the Mexican side of the US-Mexico border fence in a remote area of the Sonoran Desert Getty Undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border US-Mexico border fence in the US Man looks through US-Mexico border fence into the US in Tijuana, Mexico Getty Undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border US-Mexico border fence US Border Patrol agent Sal De Leon stands near a section of the US-Mexico border fence while stopping on patrol on in La Joya, Texas Getty Undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border US Border Patrol Academy US Border Patrol instructor yells at trainees after their initial arrival to the academy Getty Undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border Memorial service in Guatemala Families attend a memorial service for two boys who were kidnapped and killed in San Juan Sacatepequez, Guatemala. Crime drives emigration from Guatemala to the United States, as families seek refuge from the danger Getty Undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border Arrests on the border Undocumented immigrants comfort each other after being caught by Border Patrol agents near the US-Mexico border Getty Undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border Detention holding facility A boy from Honduras watches a movie at a detention facility run by the US Border Patrol Getty Undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border Mexican farm workers Mexican migrant workers harvest organic parsley at Grant Family Farms in Wellington, Colorado Getty Undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border Mexican family in Arizona A Mexican immigrant family sits in the living room of their rented home in Tuscon, Arizona. The family that Arizona's new tough immigrant law had created a climate of fear in the immigrant community. Getty The influx of migrant youth reaching the border alone, along with the Trump administrations months-long practice of separating children from their families and the stringent security screening of potential sponsors, had stretched the shelters to nearly full capacity. In June, the federal government erected a tent city on federal land in Tornillo, Texas, about 35 miles southeast of El Paso, as a temporary home for a few hundred migrant children. Several months later, it had expanded the camp to house about 2,800 minors, most of whom were transferred there from traditional brick-and-mortar shelters that were overflowing. The creation and expansion of the desert shelter showed the degree to which the Trump administration had taken a disaster-oriented, militaristic approach to the housing of migrant youths who entered the country illegally, often fleeing gangs or poverty in their home countries. Most of the children at Tornillo have been waiting for the results of FBI checks on their potential sponsors. On Tuesday, staff members at a large facility in Texas operated by BCFS, a non-profit network of shelters, received notice they should prepare to release nearly half the children there in the coming days. A worker at the shelter, who asked to remain anonymous because he was not authorised to speak to the media, said staff members had also been advised to attend a meeting on Wednesday to learn the details of the new government policy. The worker said many children at the shelter, which has a capacity of about 240, had shown signs of psychological duress as their stay there dragged on. The worker said some migrant youth had been at the facility for close to a year. The longer they are here, the more they act up with incidents of aggression towards staff and other minors, the worker said. The worker attributed the protracted stay to the burdensome fingerprinting and screening process, which took months to complete. The process also inhibited some relatives from collecting the children of others in their household, especially if they were unauthorised immigrants and refused to be fingerprinted out of concern they could be deported. The number of Central American migrants who began leaving their countries and heading to the south-west border surged in 2014, and included many unaccompanied minors, typically adolescents, and parents with children. The wave ebbed in the first year President Donald Trump was in office but has since strengthened. The New York Times Less than three seconds into an ad for Donald Trump's 2020 re-election campaign, Brad Parscale repeats a claim his boss makes regularly: "President Trump has achieved more during his time in office than any president in history." Visuals flash on screen of Mr Trump signing legislation in the Oval Office and applauding during the swearing-in ceremony for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Then Mr Parscale, the president's 2020 campaign manager, asks Trump supporters to call their commander-in-chief to give thanks for all the work he has done, according to a video of a TV ad shared on Monday night. "That is why I need every Trump supporter to pick up a phone right now and deliver a personal thank you to your president," says Mr Parscale, wearing an electric blue suit with a matching tie and "Thin Blue Line" flag lapel pin in support of the "Blue Lives Matter" movement. "We need to let President Trump know that we appreciate what he's doing for America," he says later in the ad. "I need you to call the number on your screen and deliver a thank you to President Trump." The video of the ad was first shared by journalist Yashar Ali shortly before 9pm on Monday. As of early Tuesday, the video has been viewed on Twitter more than 127,000 times. Recommended Trump agrees to shut down his charity amid corruption claims Mr Ali tweeted that the ad ran on CNN, though it is unclear whether the campaign spot was seen on its national broadcast or if it ran locally. Mr Ali told The Washington Post he saw the ad in the Southern California area towards the end of Anderson Cooper 360. Mr Parscale and CNN did not immediately return requests for comment. The campaign spot is one of the first indications of what the president's re-election campaign might look like against whomever emerges from the Democratic field to challenge him in 2020. The timing of the ad comes less than two years into his presidency, and also during a stretch in which almost every organisation Mr Trump has led in the last 10 years is under investigation. In a one-minute ad littered with visuals of factory workers, campaign events and the American flag, Mr Parscale, 42, touts "a booming economy" and "historic low unemployment." When he adds that the jobs situation under Mr Trump includes "the lowest unemployment rate for minorities in history," an image of a black female factory employee hard at work pops up on the screen. Towards the end of the ad, which shows an excited Mr Trump gazing at falling confetti from a Christmas-themed rally in Florida last year, a trio of supporters each offer an enthusiastic, "Thank you, President Trump!" "President Trump needs to hear from his supporters," a narrator says in a booming voice. As is customary for campaign ads, Mr Trump's voice comes on at the end to say he approves the message, with text underneath that reads, "Paid for by Donald J Trump for President, Inc." Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Show all 23 1 /23 Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Joe Biden The former vice president - poised to be a frontrunner - has announced his run. He recently faced scrutiny for inappropriate touching of women, but was thought to deal with the criticism well AFP/Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Bernie Sanders The 2016 runner-up has announced that he will be running again in 2020 Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Hillary Clinton The 2016 Democratic presidential candidate and former Secretary of State says she is still considering whether she will run again. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Pete Buttigieg The Indiana mayor and war veteran will be running for president. If elected, he would be the first openly LGBT+ president in American history. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Kamala Harris The former California attorney general will be running for president in 2020. Introduced to the national stage during Jeff Sessions testimony, she has endorsed Medicare-for-all and proposed a major tax-credit for the middle class. AP Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Elizabeth Warren The Massachusetts Senator has formally launched her bid for president in 2020. A progressive Democrat, she is a major supporter of regulating Wall Street. AP Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Beto ORourke The former Texas congressman told Oprah Winfrey that he has been thinking about running for presidency, but stopped short of formally announcing his bid to run in 2020. AFP/Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Wayne Messam Mayor of the city of Miramar in the Miami metropolitan area, Wayne Messam has announced his bid. He intends to run on a progressive platform against the "broken" federal government. He favours gun regulations and was a signatory to a letter from some 400 mayors condemning President Trump's withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord. Vice News Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Kirsten Gillibrand The New York Senator formally announced her presidential bid in January, saying that healthcare should be a right, not a privilege. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Cory Booker The New Jersey Senator has announced that he will be running for the presidency in 2020. If he secures the nomination he said finding a female vice president would be a priority. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? John Delaney The Maryland congressman was the first to launch his bid for presidency, making the announcement in 2017. AP Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Julian Castro The former San Antonio mayor announced his candidacy in January and said that his running has a special meaning for the Latino community in the US. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Tulsi Gabbard The Hawaii congresswoman announced her candidacy in January, but is likely to face tough questions on her past comments on LGBT+ rights and her stance on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Andrew Yang The entrepreneur has announced his presidential candidacy, and has pledged that he would introduce a universal basic income of $1,000 a month to every American over the age of 18. AFP/Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Marianne Williamson The author and spiritual advisor has announced her intention to run for president. She had previously run for congress as an independent in 2014 but was unsuccessful. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? John Kerry The former secretary of state has said he is still thinking about whether to run. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Michael Bloomberg The entrepreneur and former New York mayor with a net worth of around $50bn has said he will decide by the end of February whether to seek the presidency. AFP Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Howard Schultz Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz has not yet ruled out running for president in 2020, despite criticism that his bid could help re-elect Mr Trump by dividing the Democrat vote. AP Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Eric Holder The former attorney general has said he will decide in the next month or so whether to run as a 2020 presidential candidate. AP Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Eric Swalwell The California congressman said he is ready to do this and will decide before April whether to run. MSNBC Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Terry McAuliffe The former Virginia governor, who worked to elect Democratic governors during 2018 midterms, said there was a 50 per cent chance he would run. AP Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Sherrod Brown The Ohio senator is still undecided about whether to run for president in 2020. Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Mitch Landrieu The former New Orleans mayor said he doesnt think he will run for president, but never say never. AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin What happens if you call the number listed in the ad? A prompt urges you to state your name and leave a brief message for the president, thanking him for his work. Then Mr Parscale appeals for donations to Mr Trump's campaign. He again praises the strength of the economy, citing "lower regulations, massive tax cuts and renegotiated trade deals that put America first." After talking about how "enforcing our immigration laws are making Americans safer," Mr Parscale takes another page out of Mr Trump's playbook and points his attention towards the media and Democrats. "But President Trump is under vicious, daily attacks from the fake news media and far-left Democrats who want to implement the radical socialist agenda," Mr Parscale continues in the recording. "They will stop at nothing to overturn the election and remove your president from office." Callers are given a prompt that allows them to choose to donate (press 1) or continue (press 2). If they choose to continue instead of donating, Mr Parscale comes back on the line and pleads his case one more time. "I understand a contribution is a lot to ask for, but President Trump is asking for your support now, before it's too late," he urges. "We must protect the Trump presidency for the American people." While it is rare for an incumbent or candidate, let alone a sitting president, to prominently feature a member of their campaign staff in a political ad, it is not totally unprecedented. When it happened in 2011, in fact, the TV spot went viral. Mark Block, the chief of staff for Herman Cain's 2012 presidential campaign, made his case for his candidate's place as the Republican nominee in an impassioned address that ended with a close-up shot of him smoking a cigarette. The ad concluded with another tight shot of a grinning Mr Cain with "I Am America", an anti-establishment anthem popular with the Tea Party at the time, playing as the screen faded to black. Even before Mr Cain's failed attempt to win the 2012 GOP nomination, Mr Block's smoking shot would become one of the most bizarre, and viral, ads in the history of presidential campaigns. "Never thought twice about the fact that I smoke," Mr Block told The Sacramento Bee in 2012, calling the ad "historic." The Washington Post Donald Trump has had quite the week and its only Wednesday. The president faces a slate of newly-reported investigations, into everything from his charity to his inaugural committee. The Republican party appears to be disavowing his circle of indicted former lawyers and White House appointees including ex-deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee, Michael Cohen, and former national security advisor Michael Flynn. With startling news arriving out of the White House, or courthouses, at such a rapid pace, it has become almost impossible for even the most veteran of Washington journalists to keep track of every new development. What follows are five of the newest controversies facing Mr Trump. Trumps border wall demands triggered a possible government shutdown Republicans appear to have narrowly avoided a government shutdown as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the Senate will take up a short-term measure Wednesday to fund the federal government until 8 February. But controversy remains for Mr Trump, who secured the White House during the 2016 election in part due to his campaign promise of building a wall spanning the entirety of the US-Mexico border. The president was forced to back away from his demands for $5bn for the wall in the upcoming funding bill due to a lack of support for the measure in Congress. He now faces criticism from supporters having said last week he would be "proud to shut the government down over the wall. The new legislation will mot include the $5bn Mr Trump asked for. He appeared to respond to criticism Wednesday that he was backing down, insisting on Twitter: One way or the other, we will win on the Wall! Trumps ex-national security adviser faces legal jeopardy after contentious court hearing A federal judge Tuesday abruptly postponed the sentencing of Mr Trumps first national security adviser, Michael Flynn on Tuesday - declaring himself disgusted and disdainful of Flynns crime of lying to the FBI. US District Judge Emmet Sullivan also raised the unexpected prospect of sending the retired Army lieutenant general to prison. Flynn has admitted lying to the FBI in 2017 as part of what has become Special Counsel Robert Mueller's probe into Russian election meddling and possible collusion with Trump campaign officials. Lawyers for Flynn, who admitted lying about his Russian contacts, requested the delay during the stunning hearing in which Judge Sullivan told the former Trump aide in a blistering rebuke that arguably you sold your country out. Michael Flynn leaves court after sentencing is postponed allowing him to finish cooperation with Mueller probe I cant make any guarantees, but Im not hiding my disgust, my disdain for this criminal offence, the judge said. The postponement gives Flynn a chance to continue cooperating with the government in hopes of staving off prison and proving his value as a witness, including in a foreign lobbying prosecution unsealed this week. The possibility of prison had seemed remote for Flynn, who was smiling and upbeat as he entered the courtroom, since prosecutors had praised his extensive cooperation and did not recommend any time behind bars. Trumps Inaugural committee faces federal probe Federal prosecutors are reportedly investigating the finances of President Donald Trumps inaugural committee and whether foreigners contributed to its events using straw donors. ProPublica and the New York public radio station WNYC also reported new details Friday on how Trump profited from the inauguration, with the committee paying for rooms and event space at his Washington DC Hotel. Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Show all 23 1 /23 Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Joe Biden The former vice president - poised to be a frontrunner - has announced his run. He recently faced scrutiny for inappropriate touching of women, but was thought to deal with the criticism well AFP/Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Bernie Sanders The 2016 runner-up has announced that he will be running again in 2020 Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Hillary Clinton The 2016 Democratic presidential candidate and former Secretary of State says she is still considering whether she will run again. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Pete Buttigieg The Indiana mayor and war veteran will be running for president. If elected, he would be the first openly LGBT+ president in American history. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Kamala Harris The former California attorney general will be running for president in 2020. Introduced to the national stage during Jeff Sessions testimony, she has endorsed Medicare-for-all and proposed a major tax-credit for the middle class. AP Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Elizabeth Warren The Massachusetts Senator has formally launched her bid for president in 2020. A progressive Democrat, she is a major supporter of regulating Wall Street. AP Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Beto ORourke The former Texas congressman told Oprah Winfrey that he has been thinking about running for presidency, but stopped short of formally announcing his bid to run in 2020. AFP/Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Wayne Messam Mayor of the city of Miramar in the Miami metropolitan area, Wayne Messam has announced his bid. He intends to run on a progressive platform against the "broken" federal government. He favours gun regulations and was a signatory to a letter from some 400 mayors condemning President Trump's withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord. Vice News Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Kirsten Gillibrand The New York Senator formally announced her presidential bid in January, saying that healthcare should be a right, not a privilege. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Cory Booker The New Jersey Senator has announced that he will be running for the presidency in 2020. If he secures the nomination he said finding a female vice president would be a priority. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? John Delaney The Maryland congressman was the first to launch his bid for presidency, making the announcement in 2017. AP Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Julian Castro The former San Antonio mayor announced his candidacy in January and said that his running has a special meaning for the Latino community in the US. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Tulsi Gabbard The Hawaii congresswoman announced her candidacy in January, but is likely to face tough questions on her past comments on LGBT+ rights and her stance on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Andrew Yang The entrepreneur has announced his presidential candidacy, and has pledged that he would introduce a universal basic income of $1,000 a month to every American over the age of 18. AFP/Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Marianne Williamson The author and spiritual advisor has announced her intention to run for president. She had previously run for congress as an independent in 2014 but was unsuccessful. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? John Kerry The former secretary of state has said he is still thinking about whether to run. Getty Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Michael Bloomberg The entrepreneur and former New York mayor with a net worth of around $50bn has said he will decide by the end of February whether to seek the presidency. AFP Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Howard Schultz Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz has not yet ruled out running for president in 2020, despite criticism that his bid could help re-elect Mr Trump by dividing the Democrat vote. AP Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Eric Holder The former attorney general has said he will decide in the next month or so whether to run as a 2020 presidential candidate. AP Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Eric Swalwell The California congressman said he is ready to do this and will decide before April whether to run. MSNBC Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Terry McAuliffe The former Virginia governor, who worked to elect Democratic governors during 2018 midterms, said there was a 50 per cent chance he would run. AP Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Sherrod Brown The Ohio senator is still undecided about whether to run for president in 2020. Who could be running against Trump in 2020? Mitch Landrieu The former New Orleans mayor said he doesnt think he will run for president, but never say never. AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin The news organisations obtained emails showing that Ivanka Trump, the presidents eldest daughter, was involved in negotiating the hotels prices. The probe reportedly stemmed in part from materials the FBI seized earlier this year while probing the business dealings of Michael Cohen, Trumps longtime fixer and personal attorney. Cohen was sentenced to three years in federal prison this week for tax evasion and campaign-finance violations. Mr Trump and the White House has denied any wrongdoing, saying they were not involved with the inauguration committee's decisions. Trump Foundation shutters amid investigations Mr Trumps charitable foundation reached a deal on Tuesday to go out of business, even as the president continues to fight allegations he misused its assets to resolve business disputes and boost his run for the White House. New York Attorney General Barbara Underwoods lawsuit alleging he and his family illegally operated the foundation as an extension of his businesses and his presidential campaign will continue. The lawsuit, filed last spring, seeks $2.8m in restitution and a 10-year ban on Mr Trump and his three eldest children Donald Jr., Eric and Ivanka from running any charities in New York. In a statement Tuesday, Ms Underwood cited a shocking pattern of illegality involving the Trump Foundation including unlawful coordination with the Trump presidential campaign, repeated and willful self-dealing, and much more. The foundation operated as little more than a check book to serve Mr Trumps business and political interests, she said. The Trump Foundation has done great work and given away lots of money, both mine and others, to great charities over the years with me taking NO fees, rent, salaries etc, Mr Trump wrote in a tweet on Wednesday. Now, as usual, I am getting slammed by Cuomo and the Dems in a long running civil lawsuit started by sleazebag AG Eric Schneiderman, who has since resigned over horrific women abuse, when I wanted to close the Foundation so as not to be in conflict with politics. Shady Eric was head of New Yorkers for Clinton, and refused to even look at the corrupt Clinton Foundation. He added, In any event, it goes on and on & the new AG, who is now being replaced by yet another AG (who openly campaigned on a GET TRUMP agenda), does little else but rant, rave & politic against me. Will never be treated fairly by these people a total double standard of justice. Republicans say Trump is making an Obama-like mistake in Syria Mr Trump has ordered a rapid withdrawal of US troops from Syria after the president announced ISIS was defeated in the region. The news quickly faced backlash from key Republicans, including Senator Lindsey Graham, who said An American withdrawal at this time would be a big win for ISIS, Iran, Bashar al Assad of Syria, and Russia. He added, I fear it will lead to devastating consequences for our nation, the region and throughout the world, describing the sudden withdrawal as an Obama-like mistake. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events Just last week, officials said troops would remain in Syria for an unknown period to ensure terrorist groups were permanently eradicated from the region. I think its fair to say Americans will remain on the ground after the physical defeat of the caliphate, until we have the pieces in place to ensure that that defeat is enduring, Brett McGurk, special presidential envoy for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, told USA Today. Additional reporting by AP Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko is hardly known for soft diplomacy but his most recent comments on the state of relations with Russia were surprisingly blunt. I can read between the lines and I understand the hints, he said in a meeting with Russian press on Friday. You should just say it out loud: destroy the country and become part of Russia. Russia and Belarus have notionally been a union state since 1997, but the reality is one of only limited integration. Wars in Georgia and Ukraine, and the annexation of Crimea, moreover, have raised serious questions about Russias brotherliness and its future intentions. President Lukashenkos specific complaint centred on a new tax regime for oil, which Russia is planning to introduce in the new year. The manoeuvre, which switches tax from exports to source, will likely cost the Belarusian economy billions of dollars it cant afford to lose. The changes were not only deliberate, Lukashenko seemed to be saying, but designed to undermine his countrys sovereignty and push the country further into Moscows embrace. At the weekend, a local independent news outlet reported that the Belarusian leader had summoned a secret meeting with his top officials, and had resolved to defend independence to the hilt. The reports were later denied by the presidents press secretary. But that didnt seem to matter. They spoke to long-standing rumours that Vladimir Putin had something planned for Belarus. Perhaps, even, as a way out of his succession conundrum. As it stands, the Russian constitution only allows for two consecutive terms as president. In other words, if Vladimir Putin wants to stay on past 2024, or to enjoy a veto on policy, or obtain widespread guarantees on security, wealth and power, he has a big decision to make. Some dream of integrating their closest ally just as they dreamed of integrating Crimea Konstantin Kalachyov, head of the Political Expert Group He could change the constitutional term limit and stay on as president. Or he could enter into an arrangement as he did in 2008, when he swapped jobs with the prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev. According to sources close to the Kremlin, neither option is considered ideal. The Russian president has no desire to join the ranks of dictators ridiculed for clinging on to power, one of the sources told The Independent. They needed a more beautiful solution. A simple castling move as exercised in 2008-2011 wouldnt do either. That experience was painful for Putin. He didnt agree with much of the liberalisation agenda that Medvedev pushed (and he reversed most of the laws later.) More importantly, the trick wasnt well received by Russians either, who took to the streets to protest. The idea of Vladimir Putin heading a new union state of Belarus and Russia would, on one level, solve the conundrum. The president could instal a successor then watch over strategic decisions of security and direction from a new perch. Recommended Russia looks to prospect of future without Vladimir Putin Of course, the scheme wouldnt be easy to implement, and it isn't entirely clear how it would serve either country in the long term. Creating a real union state as opposed to the notional one that exists on paper alone would require much closer integration between Russia and Belarus. Most probably of the involuntary kind. But the prospect doesnt need to be particularly realistic to make President Lukashenko nervous, says Tatyana Stanovaya, founder and CEO of political analysis firm R.Politik. The problem for Lukashenko is he seems to have as limited a picture as the rest of us. No one will tell Lukashenko directly that Putin wants to create a union state, says Stanovaya. He only sees the top of the iceberg and doesnt know how far Putin is ready to go. Thats obviously worrying for him. The Belarusian leader had apparently decided to go public after receiving certain danger signals, says Gleb Pavlovsky, a former Kremlin advisor and head of the Foundation for Effective Politics. That said, it was far from the first time that Lukashenko had reverted to such public diplomacy ahead of a new financial year. Lukashenko is manoeuvring as ever, Pavlovsky told The Independent. He wants to trade, but doesnt want to sell. As long as he continues to trade, hes safe enough. For the Kremlin, however, the dangers are clear. It desperately does not want its closest partner to disappear into a western orbit like Ukraine. But the Russian political elite has long been split on what to do about it. Some dream of integrating their closest ally just as they dreamed of integrating Crimea, says Konstantin Kalachyov, head of the Political Expert Group and an occasional Kremlin advisor. These same people do not consider Belarus to be an entirely separate nation. It would seem such views persist at the top too. The president is worried about what will come after Lukashenko and already there are big problems, Kalachyov told The Independent. The economic relationship is no longer satisfactory for Russia, and ever since Crimea, Moscow has sensed Minsk no longer has its back politically. Several sources suggested that the Kremlin had stepped up scenario planning around Belarus in recent months. Of course, geopolitics rather than the succession issue are likely to be the main drivers behind this work. But Putin traditionally keeps his cards close to his chest, and apparently not even close colleagues are sure what his real intentions are. Rightly or wrongly, everything is now being analysed through the problem of the succession and 2024, says Tatyana Stanovaya. As unlikely as it may seem now, even the political elite won't rule the possibility of Putin becoming head of a unified state. Emmanuel Macron has enlisted the help of Frances former president Nicolas Sarkozy in the midst of a month of protests by yellow vest demonstrators. Mr Macron and Mr Sarkozy met for lunch at the Elysee Palace on 7 December and reportedly discussed public order as well as the tax exemption for overtime work Mr Macron announced last week, Le Figaro reported. The tax measure was a key part of Mr Sarkozys own programme when he was president from 2007 to 2012. Their meeting took place on the eve of the most violent weekend of demonstrations by yellow vest protesters and suggests the former right-wing leaders influence on Mr Macron is rising. Last Sunday, Mr Macron sent Mr Sarkozy to Tbilisi to represent France at the swearing-in of Georgia's new president, a move that caused a stir in French political circles. An Elysee official said Mr Macron and Mr Sarkozy had a cordial, and respectful relationship, adding that the former presidents role during the 2008 Georgian crisis when he mediated between Russia and Georgia justified the honour. Yellow Vests protest in France against rising costs of living Show all 25 1 /25 Yellow Vests protest in France against rising costs of living Yellow Vests protest in France against rising costs of living A Gendarmerie armored vehicles (VBRG) drives past fire near the Champs Elysees avenue during a protest of "yellow vests" (gilets jaunes) against rising costs of living they blame on high taxes iN paris. - Paris was on high alert with major security measures in place ahead of fresh "yellow vest" protests which authorities fear could turn violent for a second weekend in a row. AFP/Getty Yellow Vests protest in France against rising costs of living Protestors wearing "Yellow vests" (Gilets jaunes) demonstrate amid smoke during a protest of against rising oil prices and living costs in Paris. - Paris was on high alert with major security measures in place ahead of fresh "yellow vest" protests which authorities fear could turn violent for a second weekend in a row. AFP/Getty Yellow Vests protest in France against rising costs of living A man lies on the ground near riot police on the Champs Elysees avenue in Paris during a protest of "yellow vests" (gilets jaunes) against rising costs of living they blame on high taxes. - Paris was on high alert with major security measures in place ahead of fresh "yellow vest" protests which authorities fear could turn violent for a second weekend in a row. AFP/Getty Yellow Vests protest in France against rising costs of living Yellow vest (Gilet Jaune) protestors stand next to items set on fire on the Champs-Elysees avenue in Paris during a "yellow vest" (gilet jaune) protest against rising costs of living they blame on high taxes. - Paris was on high alert with major security measures in place ahead of fresh "yellow vest" protests which authorities fear could turn violent for a second weekend in a row. AFP/Getty Yellow Vests protest in France against rising costs of living A protestor holds a sign reading "Macron stop hiding" near the Champs Elysees avenue in Pari during a "yellow vests" (gilets jaunes) mobilisation protesting against rising costs of living they blame on high taxes. - Paris was on high alertwith major security measures in place ahead of fresh "yellow vest" protests which authorities fear could turn violent for a second weekend in a row. AFP/Getty Yellow Vests protest in France against rising costs of living Riot police stand near the Champs Elysees avenue in Paris during a "yellow vests" (gilets jaunes) mobilisation protesting against rising costs of living they blame on high taxes. - Paris was on high alert with major security measures in place ahead of fresh "yellow vest" protests which authorities fear could turn violent for a second weekend in a row. AFP/Getty Yellow Vests protest in France against rising costs of living Protestors wearing "yellow vests" (gilets jaunes) hold a French flag with yellow stars near the Arc de Triomphe in Paris on December 8, 2018 during a protest against rising costs of living they blame on high taxes. - Paris was on high alert on December 8 with major security measures in place ahead of fresh "yellow vest" protests which authorities fear could turn violent for a second weekend in a row. AFP/Getty Yellow Vests protest in France against rising costs of living A protestor holds a sign reading "Macron stop hiding" near the Champs Elysees avenue in Paris during a "yellow vests" (gilets jaunes) mobilisation protesting against rising costs of living they blame on high taxes. - Paris was on high alert on December 8 with major security measures in place ahead of fresh "yellow vest" protests which authorities fear could turn violent for a second weekend in a row. AFP/Getty Yellow Vests protest in France against rising costs of living Riot police stand near the Champs Elysees avenue in Paris on December during a "yellow vests" (gilets jaunes) mobilisation protesting against rising costs of living they blame on high taxes. - Paris was on high alert with major security measures in place ahead of fresh "yellow vest" protests which authorities fear could turn violent for a second weekend in a row AFP/Getty Yellow Vests protest in France against rising costs of living Riot police officers walk as protestors wearing "yellow vests" (gilets jaunes) demonstrate against rising costs of living in front of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris on. Paris was on high alert with major security measures in place ahead of fresh "yellow vest" protests which authorities fear could turn violent for a second weekend in a row. AFP/Getty Yellow Vests protest in France against rising costs of living Yellow vest (Gilet Jaune) protestors stand next to items set on fire on the Champs-Elysees avenue in Paris during a "yellow vest" (gilet jaune) protest against rising costs of living they blame on high taxes. - Paris was on high alert with major security measures in place ahead of fresh "yellow vest" protests which authorities fear could turn violent for a second weekend in a row. AFP/Getty Yellow Vests protest in France against rising costs of living Protestors wrapped in French flags lie on the ground near riot police on the Champs Elysees avenue in Paris during a protest of "yellow vests" (gilets jaunes) against rising costs of living they blame on high taxes. - Paris was on high alert with major security measures in place ahead of fresh "yellow vest" protests which authorities fear could turn violent for a second weekend in a row. AFP/Getty Yellow Vests protest in France against rising costs of living Riot police clash with men wearing "yellow vests" (gilets jaunes) protestors on December 8, 2018 near the Arc de Triomphe in Paris during a protest against rising costs of living they blame on high taxes. - Paris was on high alert with major security measures in place ahead of fresh "yellow vest" protests which authorities fear could turn violent for a second weekend in a row. AFP/Getty Yellow Vests protest in France against rising costs of living A Gendarmerie armored vehicles (VBRG) drives past fire near the Champs Elysees avenue in Paris during a protest of "yellow vests" (gilets jaunes) against rising costs of living they blame on high taxes. - Paris was on high alert with major security measures in place ahead of fresh "yellow vest" protests which authorities fear could turn violent for a second weekend in a row. AFP/Getty Yellow Vests protest in France against rising costs of living Riot police prepares to shoot a tear gas canister on the Champs Elysees avenue in Paris during a protest of "yellow vests" (gilets jaunes) against rising costs of living they blame on high taxes. - Paris was on high alert with major security measures in place ahead of fresh "yellow vest" protests which authorities fear could turn violent for a second weekend in a row AFP/Getty Yellow Vests protest in France against rising costs of living Policemen stand as tear gas fills during a protest of Yellow vests (Gilets jaunes) against rising oil prices and living costs on the Champs Elysees, near the Eiffel tour, in Paris. - Paris was on high alert with major security measures in place ahead of fresh "yellow vest" protests which authorities fear could turn violent for a second weekend in a row. AFP/Getty Yellow Vests protest in France against rising costs of living Police forces detain a protestor wearing a "yellow vest" near the Champs Elysees avenue in Paris during a protest against rising costs of living they blame on high taxes. - Paris was on high alert with major security measures in place ahead of fresh "yellow vest" protests which authorities fear could turn violent for a second weekend in a row. AFP/Getty Yellow Vests protest in France against rising costs of living A protestor wearing a "Yellow vest" (gilet jaune) gestures during clash with riot police amid tear gas near the Champs Elysees in Paris during a protest of against rising costs of living they blame on high taxes. - Paris was on high alert with major security measures in place ahead of fresh "yellow vest" protests which authorities fear could turn violent for a second weekend in a row. AFP/Getty Yellow Vests protest in France against rising costs of living Riot police officers smile next to protestors wearing "yellow vests" (gilets jaunes) demonstrating against rising costs of living in the Champ Elysees in Paris. Paris was on high alert with major security measures in place ahead of fresh "yellow vest" protests which authorities fear could turn violent for a second weekend in a row. AFP/Getty Yellow Vests protest in France against rising costs of living Protesters wearing French flags and yellow vests lie on the Champs-Elysees Avenue near the Arc de Triomphe during a national day of protest by the "yellow vests" movement in Paris Reuters Yellow Vests protest in France against rising costs of living Protesters wearing yellow vests kneel along the Champs-Elysees Avenue near the Arc de Triomphe during a national day of protest by the "yellow vests" movement in Paris, France. Reuters Yellow Vests protest in France against rising costs of living Mounted Police officers on their horses take their positions during clashes with yellow-vested protesters, in Paris, France, Saturday. Crowds of protesters angry at President Emmanuel Macron and France's high taxes tried to converge on the presidential palace Saturday, some scuffling with police firing tear gas, amid exceptional security measures aimed at preventing a repeat of last week's rioting. AP Yellow Vests protest in France against rising costs of living Protestors wearing "yellow vests" (gilets jaunes) and a flag of Normandy demonstrate amid smoke against rising costs of living in the Champ Elysees in Paris. Paris was on high alert with major security measures in place ahead of fresh "yellow vest" protests which authorities fear could turn violent for a second weekend in a row AFP/Getty Yellow Vests protest in France against rising costs of living Police forces stand in front of protestors near the Champs Elysees avenue in Paris during a protest of "yellow vests" (gilets jaunes) against rising costs of living they blame on high taxes. - Paris was on high alert with major security measures in place ahead of fresh "yellow vest" protests which authorities fear could turn violent for a second weekend in a row. AFP/Getty Yellow Vests protest in France against rising costs of living Police forces stand in front of protestors at the Champs Elysees avenue in Paris on during a protest of "yellow vests" (gilets jaunes) against rising costs of living they blame on high taxes. - Paris was on high alert on with major security measures in place ahead of fresh "yellow vest" protests which authorities fear could turn violent for a second weekend in a row. AFP/Getty On Tuesday, yellow vest protesters occupied motorway toll booths and set a number on fire, causing transport chaos in parts of the country days before the Christmas holidays. Around 20 people were arrested on Tuesday following the blazes, while four others remain in custody following fires on Saturday. Several people have died in roadside accidents at yellow vest roadblocks in recent weeks, mostly at the many roundabouts blocked by groups of demonstrators. Emmanuel Macron (R) and his wife Brigitte greet former French president Nicolas Sarkozy (file image) (REUTERS/Charles Platiau) The yellow vest protesters, named after the fluorescent jackets French motorists are required to have in their cars, have blocked roads and roundabouts across France since mid-November. Initially a protest against fuel tax increases, the movement has transformed into a wider outcry over Mr Macrons liberal economic policies. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events Protesters took to the streets of Paris and other cities on Saturday for a fifth weekend of demonstrations, though they were noticeably smaller than in previous weeks after Mr Macron announced tax and salary concessions. Protesters angry about high fuel costs and new speed limits have also damaged or torched hundreds of traffic radars. Additional reporting by agencies Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has accused the Lebanese government of colluding with Hezbollah and urged the United Nations to press for greater sanctions against the militant group, as the Israeli army said they were poised to unearth more tunnels dug under the border between the two countries. Israel launched an operation earlier this month to thwart and neutralise Hezbollah's passageways, which it said the militants intended to use to launch an attack on civilians and isolate areas of the Galilee. The discovery of at least four tunnels has raised tensions over the border, which has not seen much violence since the last devastating flare-up in 2006. Ahead of a UN Security Council meeting to address the tunnels on Wednesday, Mr Netanyahu said the Lebanese government is doing nothing at best, it is colluding at worse. He told the Israeli parliament, the Knesset: The people of Lebanon have to understand that Hezbollah is putting them in jeopardy. And we expect Lebanon to take action to protest against this, and not to give into this. Recommended Inside the Hezbollah tunnel that Israel never found The Israeli army said it had so far discovered four tunnels running from Lebanon into Israel, and has begun destroying those on its side of the border. On Wednesday, at the site of the first tunnel discovered, in the border town of Metula, a senior army official said the operation "had no time limit" and they believed there were "several more" passageways which would soon be unearthed. "This has set Hezbollah back several years, the impact on them is big," said the commander, in front of soldiers who were busy at work drilling dozens of holes and using radar to look for further passages. "This operation does not have a time limit. We are going to find each and every tunnel which is a risk to civilians in the northern area," he added. The UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon, known as UNIFIL, said it had inspected the sites and confirmed that two of the tunnels cross the Blue Line, the demarcation that separates the two countries. It said the tunnels were a matter of serious concern and constituted a breach of the UN resolution that ended the 2006 war. Israeli soldiers at the site of a tunnel near Metula on the Israel-Lebanon border (Bel Trew) In his most forceful statement yet on the matter, Mr Netanyahu said: We are holding Lebanon accountable. He continued: We think the international community should hold Iran, Hezbollah and Lebanon accountable and should act accordingly. Because what you are seeing is not merely a grave violation of our security but a grave violation of any nations security. He added that Hezbollah was using every third house in villages in southern Lebanon for aggressive purposes. He urged the UN security council to designate Hezbollah as a terrorist organisation "in its entirety" and press for heightened sanctions. At the Israeli border with Lebanon, Lt. Col, Jonathan Conricus, a spokesman for the Israeli army, echoed Mr Netanyahus words that the Lebanese authorities had effectively colluded with Hezbollah, which he said also had an influence on UNIFIL. Israel says they have discovered at least four cross-border tunnels but believe there are 'several' more (Bel Trew) What we see on [an] intelligence level is Hezbollah has a profound influence on Lebanese armed forces. They effectively control south Lebanon. The landlord in southern Lebanon is Hezbollah, he told The Independent. Hezbollah also has a direct influence on UNIFIL. Every time UNIFIL want to patrol [the area] they have to coordinate with the Lebanese armed forces who then ask Hezbollah. If there is anything sensitive in the area, Hezbollah is able to block further investigations, he claimed. The administration of US president Donald Trump has taken a tough stance against Hezbollah and its main backer, Iran. But it continues to provide support to the Lebanese army, which it sees as a bulwark against Hezbollahs domination of the country. The US has provided some $1.7bn of aid and equipment to the Lebanese military since 2007. Israeli soldiers work to discover more cross-border tunnels they say have been built by Hezbollah (Bel Trew) Lebanon has long complained of almost daily flights over the country by Israeli jets. It says this is also a breach of the UN resolution. The Lebanese president, Michel Aoun, said last week that he took this issue seriously. He said: We also do not have aggressive intentions. We are ready to remove the causes of the dispute, but after we obtain a final report and we set out the matters that need to be dealt with. Mr Netanyahu dismissed the concerns, saying there was a "very big difference" between Israel's actions and the threat from the border tunnels. He later addressed reports that the US would withdraw its troops from Syria after President Trump said that Isis had been defeated there. Mr Netanyahu said he would "study" Washington's decision and its implications for Israel, which is concerned about both Iranian and Hezbollah presence in war-ravaged Syria. "In any case, we will make sure to maintain Israel's security and protect ourselves from this arena," the premier added. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events Spokesman Lt. Col. Conricus said that security concerns across Israel's "northern front" were behind the decision to launch the tunnel operation this month, and had also deterred the army from launching a full-scale operation to the south in Gaza. At the site of the Hezbollah tunnels, Israeli army officials said their operation began four years ago, when Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah vowed to invade the Galilee and they started noticing unusual behaviour in areas near the border. Commanders said the tunnel at Metula stretched 40 metres into Israel and originated in a nearby cement factory in the Lebanese town of Kafr Kela, which had ceased operations in 2014. Israel has threatened to take military action against Hezbollah several times since the last devastating round of conflict in 2006. That battle was sparked by a cross-border raid by Hezbollah to kidnap two Israeli soldiers. The group hoped to use them as bargaining chips in order to pressure Israel to release Lebanese prisoners. Metula on the border between Israel and Lebanon where Israeli forces are working to unearth more passageways (Bel Trew) Instead, the Israelis responded with an attack that led to the deaths of more than 1,000 Lebanese civilians. Forty-four Israeli civilians were also killed by Hezbollah rockets. Hezbollah was founded in the early 1980s with the support of Iran, and spent much of its early existence fighting Israeli troops occupying southern Lebanon. Israel invaded Lebanon several times during the countrys 1975-1990 civil war, and occupied much of the south of the country for 22 years. During the occupation, Hezbollah dug extensive tunnel networks across the south of the country. It used them to launch ambushes and move around without being seen by Israeli jets. The number of journalists murdered for their reporting almost doubled in 2018, contributing to another deadly year for the profession after a period of declining casualties. The rising toll, together with the record numbers of journalists jailed around the world over past three years, amounts to a global crisis of press freedom, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Wednesday. The brutal murder of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi captured the worlds attention this year. But he was just one of 34 journalists murdered because of their work in 2018, up from 18 the year before. A total of 53 journalists were killed around the world. More journalists were killed in reprisal for their work than died covering war, as places such as Syria and Yemen became less accessible. The press rights group said the rise in killings was partly due to changes in technology that have meant more people can practice journalism. But it also singled out a lack of international leadership on the safety and rights of journalists, particularly from the administration of US president Donald Trump. Recommended US anger over Jamal Khashoggi has finally led to progress in Yemen The White House, traditionally a strong defender of global press freedom, has equivocated on the blame for Khashoggis murder, the CPJ said in its end-of-year report. Essentially, Trump signaled that countries that do enough business with the United States are free to murder journalists without consequence, it added. The report noted Mr Trumps frequent attacks on the media in the US. Those attacks continued even in the aftermath of the deadliest attack on journalists in recent US history, in which a gunman entered the offices of the Capital Gazette in the city of Annapolis in Maryland and murdered five people. Essentially, Trump signaled that countries that do enough business with the United States are free to murder journalists without consequence Committee to Protect Journalists Within days, he had resumed his characteristic attacks on the press, calling the media fake news and journalists enemies of the people on social media and at rallies. Europe was not immune to targeted killings of journalists, either. In February, 27-year-old journalist Jan Kuciak, a reporter investigating corruption in Slovakia, was shot dead. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events The deadliest country in the world for journalists was Afghanistan, which saw the highest number of deaths in a year since the CPJ started keeping track in 1992. The 11 journalists killed there were were mostly caused by double bomb blasts which had the express aim of killing killing journalists and first responders. Nine journalists were killed in Syria, three in Yemen, and two Palestinian journalists were shot and killed by Israeli soldiers while covering protests in the Gaza strip. For the first time since 2012, the CPJ did not confirm any journalists were killed because of their work in Iraq. The CPJs findings come hot on the heels of a yearly round-up by Reporters Without Borders, another press freedom group. It found that 80 journalists were killed this year, and 60 more are being held hostage. It said the findings reveal an unprecedented level of hostility towards media personnel. RSF's figure includes professional journalists, non-professional journalists, and media workers. Donald Trump has ordered a full withdrawal of American forces from Syria, a dramatic turnaround in US policy that could potentially destabilise large parts of the country. The US has more than 2,000 troops in Syria to support local Kurdish forces in the battle against Isis. But as the extremist group has lost most of its territory, Mr Trump was said to be eager to declare victory. US officials said on Wednesday that a full withdrawal had been requested by Mr Trump. One official told Reuters that the pullout could take up to 100 days. Shortly after news of the plans emerged, the president appeared to tweet confirmation. We have defeated Isis in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency, he wrote. The White House said the extremist groups territorial caliphate has been defeated, and that some troops have already begun to leave Syria. Recommended Turkey threatens attack as Kurdish fighters close in on last Isis town These victories over Isis in Syria do not signal the end of the global coalition or its campaign. We have started returning United States troops home as we transition to the next phase of this campaign, said White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders. A withdrawal of US troops from Syria could have a potentially destabilising effect in the north and east of the country, where Kurdish forces have beaten back Isis and maintained a degree of order with US backing. US officials have long warned that the recapture of Isis territory does not mean the group has been defeated. Last month, James Jeffrey, the US special representative for Syria, said that the enduring defeat means not simply smashing the last of Isiss conventional military units holding terrain, but ensuring that Isis doesnt immediately come back in sleeper cells, come back as an insurgent movement. The withdrawal now is likely to be viewed as a betrayal by Americas Kurdish allies. The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces has been the wests main ally in the fight against Isis in the country. With the backing of the US and UK, it has forced the extremists from swathes of the countrys north and east to this small pocket in Deir Ezzor. But that alliance has angered Turkey, a Nato ally, which views the Kurdish forces that fight in the SDF as terrorists. Turkeys President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed last week to launch a military operation into Syria against the group. The presence of US forces alongside the Kurdish fighters was seen as a bulwark against an attack. The Independent has learned that SDF officials were caught off guard by Trumps announcement, and have requested a meeting with their US counterparts to ask for clarity on the plans. The Pentagon has refused to confirm or deny the withdrawal, but spokesman Colonel Rob Manning said in a statement: At this time, we continue to work by, with and through our partners in the region. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a Trump ally and a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the withdrawal of US troops would be a mistake. An American withdrawal at this time would be a big win for Isis, Iran, Bashar al-Assad of Syria, and Russia. I fear it will lead to devastating consequences for our nation, the region, and throughout the world, he said in a statement. It will make it more difficult to recruit future partners willing to confront radical Islam. It will also be seen by Iran and other bad actors as a sign of American weakness in the efforts to contain Iranian expansion. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events The US-led coalition has focused almost exclusively on the defeat of Isis over the past four years, but in recent months its attention has broadened to include efforts to counter Iranian influence in Syria. Britain's Foreign Office said Isis remained a threat even though it held no territory. "Much remains to be done and we must not lose sight of the threat they pose. Even without territory, Daesh (Isis) will remain a threat," it said in a statement after the United States began withdrawing troops from Syria. "As the United States has made clear, these developments in Syria do not signal the end of the Global Coalition or its campaign. We will continue to work with members of the Coalition on achieving this." Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute and author of The Syrian Jihad: Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and the Evolution of an Insurgency, called Trump's decision "short-sighted and naive". "This is the greatest gift and insurance policy that Isis could have wished for at this point. Two years ago, one of Trumps most vociferous foreign policy positions in his Presidential campaign was his accusation that Obama had 'created' Isis by withdrawing prematurely from Iraq. He could well dramatically eclipse that with this decision today. We may well be back in Syria fighting terrorism in a year or two," he said. The US withdrawal comes as Kurdish-led forces are still fighting for the last piece of territory under the control of Isis. The town of Hajin, on the banks of the Euphrates river in eastern Syria, is Isiss last major holdout in the country. After three months of intense fighting, the SDF announced on Friday that it had taken most of the town. Beyond Hajin lies a string of smaller villages. The SDF estimates that some 5,000 Isis fighters remain in that last pocket, which it will capture in the coming weeks, according to SDF commander Lilwa al-Abdullah. The operation has been one of the toughest battles faced by the SDF. Whereas in previous battles Isis has made deals to retreat to other areas, there is nowhere else to escape to from Hajin. And because it is its last holdout, the battle is being led by its most experienced fighters. There have been significant casualties on both sides. The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that some 793 Isis fighters have been killed since the beginning of the operation to take Hajin in mid-September, while 464 SDF fighters have died. The US-led coalition to defeat Isis did not respond to a request for comment. A State Department spokesperson said: "For operational security reasons we have no comment on the movement of State Department personnel." A flight had to make an emergency landing in Belgrade after a woman became critically ill then died onboard. The passenger fell unwell not long after Wizz Air flight W6 6411 from Kutaisi, Georgia, departed for Milan, Italy on Monday. The crew gave what assistance they could before the flight diverted to the Serbian capital so the unnamed woman could receive further medical assistance on the ground, before she was ultimately pronounced dead. Wizz Air said in a statement: On 17 December 2018 Wizz Airs W6 6411 Kutaisi-Milano Malpensa was diverted to Belgrade after a passenger experienced a medical emergency. Due to privacy concerns, no information about the passenger is available. Our flight crew provided emergency care for the passenger on board and medical assistance was arranged by the crew to be waiting for the aircraft in Belgrade. Recommended Man travelling with wife jailed for groping woman on flight Wizz Air regrets to confirm that, despite the instant and professional medical assistance provided by its crew on the flight and after landing, by the medical staff that met the airplane in Belgrade, the passengers life could not be saved. Wizz Air expresses its deep condolences to the passengers family. The flight departed at 3.50pm and was due to arrive in Italy at 5.15pm local time. After the A320 aircraft made the emergency landing, the flight departed Belgrade at 6.50pm and arrived in Milan an hour and 25 minutes later at 8.15pm. In June, a British man died after needing medical attention on a Jet2 flight from Manchester to Ibiza. The indiscriminate use of chemical weapons by Frances security state on its own citizens has long been viewed as an acceptable part of everyday life. While police forces in countries such as Britain will only deploy noxious substances very occasionally, and in tiny measure, regular usage in France has become institutionalised. Those of us who were out on the streets of Paris last Saturday were covered in vast white clouds of tear gas, from Place de lOpera to the Champs-Elysees itself. It was Act V of anti-government protests by the gilets jaunes movement and tear gas, designed to inflict harm on the human body, was once again seen as the best way of controlling the protesters. Never mind that tear gas is banned in warzones by international treaties: in France there is apparently nothing to prohibit officers of the law pouring it into crowds of men, women and children. I saw plenty of distressed boys and girls coughing and wheezing as they struggled to breathe, and their lungs and eyes burned. It was the same for others who also had absolutely nothing to do with the demonstrations from asthmatic pensioners watching from balconies to terrified diners in the few restaurants that remained open during the disturbances. What was particularly sinister about the freezing Paris streets on what should have been the penultimate shopping Saturday before Christmas was the presence of armoured vehicles containing huge quantities of a highly concentrated chemical powder. The Marianne news outlet revealed that this largely undefined compound could be spread across some 40,000 square metres in 10 seconds, neutralising anybody in the vicinity, whether rioters or innocent bystanders. Richard Carminache, a gendarme colonel, said it was as powerful as 200 grenades and would be a last resort if secure areas around the Elysee Palace and National Assembly were overrun. There were already 8,000 armed security personnel searching and herding everybody in Paris, meaning the yellow vests were outnumbered by at least four to one. In which case, what was the point in adding motorised military hardwear and state-of-the-art chemical weapon dischargers to historic squares and boulevards? Veteran journalists who had worked in Eastern Europe during the Cold War suggested that the atmosphere was far more like that found in unruly satellite states under Soviet dictatorship than the normally glamorous capital of France in 2018. Recommended The yellow vest demands cannot be met within our current system The yellow vests started out campaigning against green taxes, which Macron wanted to add to petrol and diesel prices. In line with the Paris Agreement on climate change, the president said such policies were essential to reduce carbon emissions, so leading to an ecologically cleaner world. How hollow such pledges now sound, as he not only scraps the extra charges on fuel, but also authorises the escalating use of poisonous fumes in his own capital, and indeed other major cities such as Bordeaux and Marseille. It was actually the French who first implemented tear gas as a chemical weapon on the battlefield, hurling 22mm grenades full of the lachrymator ethyl bromoacetate into German positions at the very start of the First World War in August 1914. By 1915, chlorine gas and worse was in artillery shells, causing the most horrifying massacres imaginable. The International Committee of the Red Cross first banned chemical and biological weapons after the First World War, but still warns of a slippery slope that could see them reintroduced. The ban has almost inexplicably failed to extend to domestic riot control chemical agents such as tear gas. This raises the ongoing fear that the sort of compounds in Macrons armoured cars could easily become stronger, to the point of causing fatalities. There is still much scientific debate about the deaths of at least 200 civilians by gassing during the Moscow theatre crisis of 2002, when still unidentified chemicals were distributed by Russian special forces to end a siege by Chechen terrorists. One of the principal reasons for outlawing all chemical weapons would be to prevent security states developing ever more damaging products that are extremely difficult to analyse, let alone regulate. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events France is actually a member of the Hague-based Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), but displays little enthusiasm for this type of control. On the contrary, establishment figures see few problems with high-density substances they know nothing about. When I discussed Pariss chemical powder-launching devices on Twitter, I was immediately reprimanded by a French diplomat. Aurelie Bonal, a press officer at the French Embassy in London, said it was inaccurate to describe teargas as a chemical weapon, and even rubbished this factual definition as unethical. I believe Bonal was disturbingly wrong, as are all those who underplay the increasingly desperate measures that the Macron administration is taking to subdue dissenting French citizens, as well as those unlucky enough to be caught up in their protests. A tribunal to deal with claims arising from the CervicalCheck controversy is to be established, Simon Harris said (Niall Carson/PA) A tribunal to deal with claims arising from the CervicalCheck controversy is to be established, the Government said. Irelands cervical smear services have been in the spotlight since it emerged that at least 208 women diagnosed with cancer should have received earlier intervention. The Cabinet has approved the appointment of Justice Mary Irvine as chair of the tribunal, Health Minister Simon Harris said. It will be established next year. The tribunal will allow women to progress their cases in a timely and sensitive, less adversarial manner, while equally respecting the constitutional entitlement of all parties to a fair hearingSimon Harris The minister said he was examining the early establishment of a scheme to provide ex-gratia payments for women affected by the non-disclosure of the audit. He said: The tribunal will allow women to progress their cases in a timely and sensitive, less adversarial manner, while equally respecting the constitutional entitlement of all parties to a fair hearing. The voluntary body will be established based on the recommendations set out by Mr Justice Charles Meenan in his recent report on an alternative system for dealing with cases arising from CervicalCheck. Hearings will be held in private and will be less adversarial than the current court process due to the adoption of pre-hearing protocols and case management procedures, the Government said. Mr Harris added: This will take time to establish but all arms of government are working to progress as a matter of urgency. I will also consider the establishment of an ex-gratia compensatory scheme to deal with any accepted non-disclosure to the 221 women and their families, and I hope to progress this in the new year. Earlier this year, Emma Mhic Mhathuna died after being given a terminal diagnosis. Mrs Mhic Mhathuna said she had been given a clear smear test in 2013 but was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 2016. Mattie McGrath is one of three TDs holding a protest outside a bank (PA) Three independent TDs have held a protest at a bank in Dublin after the Roscommon evictions. Mattie McGrath, Carol Nolan and Michael Collins said they were demonstrating against how KBC deals with people in mortgage arrears. Mr McGrath told RTE he was seeking meaningful engagement with its management about debt collection and resolution. He added: We want a meaningful debt resolution process put in place and proper meaningful engagement, and give people a chance about restructuring. They said they would not leave until they received written assurances that the banks management will meet them soon. A NUMBER of TDS and Land League members are holding a protest at a city centre KBC Bank following the a controversial eviction and subsequent violence in Roscommon last week. The Independent TDs, including Mattie McGrath, peacefully entered the Baggot Street bank and spoke to reporters about their anger at what they said is a persistent lack of engagement by the bank with customers experiencing mortgage difficulties. Deputy McGrath, along with Deputy Michael Collins and Deputy Carol Nolan have said they will not leave until they have received written assurances from the CEO, Wim Verbraeken, that he will meet with them to discuss their concerns. The occupation got underway shortly after 2pm with the three politicians, Land League representatives and members of the public involved. Around ten people joined the protest initially, some holding placards saying Ireland, not for sale. Speaking to reporters inside the building, Mr McGrath said he has written to the Garda Commissioner about the eviction in Strokestown and labelled the Taoiseachs comments in relation to the eviction as a disgrace. "I condemn violence from any side, were peaceful and were here today because KBC Bank cannot treat Irish people like this. "I have written to the new Commissioner Drew Harris seeking for a meeting with the Land League and myself after that incident. "Because the gardai clearly either dont know, or do know and arent acting on what their job is, Deputy McGrath said, referring to the eviction of farmer Anthony McGann last Tuesday. "The Gardai standing idly while terrorists, former terrorists, mercenaries down from Northern Ireland are getting huge money, blood money I call it. "That is like the Black and Tans, all they didnt do was burn their house. They dragged them our mercilessly. "The Taoiseachs feeble reply is a disgrace. We need legislation passed urgently," Mr McGrath added. Speaking in the Dail this evening, Justice Minister Charlie Flanagan said there is a very clear difference between people employed to execute court orders and vigilante groups carrying out acts of organised and serious violence. Addressing recent events in Roscommon, the minister said Gardai must be the sole legitimate guardians of the peace in this State. He told the Dail that the violence at Falsk, outside Strokestown should be condemned in the strongest terms. Mr Flangan was facing questions from Fianna Fail and Sinn Fein TDs about the role played by gardai in the eviction of farmer Anthony McGann, and the lack of regulation for private security firms used by banks. Sinn Feins Kathleen Funchion claimed were starting to see people standing up for themselves and warned that this is just the start of it. But Fianna Fails Eugene Murphy, who lives close to the McGann household outside Strokestown, appealed for calm. Video footage of people being removed from the property last week shows gardai keeping a watching brief as people struggle with agents hired by the KBC bank. The Irish Independent revealed today that there were no fewer than seven communications between the local sheriff or the sheriffs messenger and Mr McGann over several months in the lead-up to the repossession. It has also emerged Mr McGann (50) has a long history of financial difficulties and been convicted of two counts of failing to file tax returns. Mr Flanagan has committed to reviewing the legal situation regarding private security firms hired by banks to carry out evictions. But he repeatedly sought to draw a distinction between what occurred at the original eviction and reports of up to 20 people arriving with baseball bats in the early hours of Sunday morning. Three men were hospitalised and a dog put down following the vigilante attack. The minister said anybody who takes issue with the actions of Gardai can complain to GSOC. While I do not wish to comment on any individual case, I wish to stress that violence is never justified. An Garda Siochana are the sole legitimate guardians of the peace in this State, charged with upholding the law in the interests of the whole community. It is never appropriate for vigilante groups to take the law into their own hands and commit acts of serious violence against people, animals or property, as was the case on Sunday, he said. Mr Flanagan described himself as deeply disturbed by the thinly veiled references to vigilantism that have been made in recent days in social media and elsewhere. This is a very dangerous road to go down and vigilantism cannot and will not be tolerated in this State. The British government has put 3,500 troops on standby to help deal with potential disruption caused by a no-deal Brexit. With 100 days until Brexit, ministers in Theresa May's government have ramped up preparations for the country leaving the EU without a divorce deal. Soldiers are on standby while thousands of businesses and millions of households have been warned to get ready for the worst. The UK cabinet agreed to activate all its no-deal plans and advised the public to prepare for disruptions. The contingency plans outline how the public will be urged to prepare themselves and their families over the Christmas holidays. Television advertisement and social media are expected to be used to for public service announcements. Some 3,500 troops will be on standby to help deal with any disruptions, ranging from emergency engineering work to shortage of supplies such as medicines. UK government sources insisted they were not being put in place to deal with public disorder. Expand Close Wide-eyed: Britains International Trade Secretary Liam Fox arrives for the weekly UK cabinet meeting yesterday. Photo: Getty Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Wide-eyed: Britains International Trade Secretary Liam Fox arrives for the weekly UK cabinet meeting yesterday. Photo: Getty Images Businesses will receive a 100-plus page online package to help them get ready. Emails to 80,000 of the most likely to be affected companies will be sent over the next few days. "Just because you put a seatbelt on doesn't mean that you should crash the car," Work and Pensions Secretary Amber Rudd said. Health Secretary Matt Hancock told the BBC that "I've become the largest buyer of fridges in the world" in order to stockpile medicines. However, opposition politicians said no amount of 'keep calm and carry on' preparation could sugarcoat the impact of a chaotic Brexit. Mrs May was accused by Liberal Democrat leader Vince Cable of "psychological warfare" in a bid to persuade MPs to support her Brexit deal in Parliament this January. It comes as the Irish Government prepares to publish its own no-deal contingency plans, which include proposals to have dozens of pieces of legislation passed by TDs in just 29 days. Their plan could see all Dail business set aside in order to facilitate the passage of legislation to ensure the continued payment of pensions and recognition of cross-border healthcare arrangements. The Dail breaks for almost a month today, returning on the same week that the British prime minister intends to finally put her Brexit deal to a vote in Westminster. However, there is growing concern among Opposition parties here that there will not be enough time to adequately debate the ramifications of a no-deal scenario. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar continues to insist Ireland is ready, but Labour Party leader Brendan Howlin questioned the level of detail made public. "Is it envisaged we would pass 45 pieces of legislation in 29 days that are sight unseen at this stage?" he asked. Mr Howlin demanded the Taoiseach provide a "comprehensive briefing" in advance of the recess so that TDs will be in a position to "scrutinise measures that might be necessary" over the holidays. "I heard the British secretary of state for health say that he had become the biggest purchaser of fridges in the world as they stockpile medicines. That is how absurd things have become. "We need to know specifically what we must do here to be ready for it and not be inundated by legislation we have not had time to reflect upon when we come back after the recess," Mr Howlin said. Fianna Fail's Lisa Chambers demanded a debate, saying all projections for Budget 2019 were based on an assumption that there would be a deal. Mr Varadkar said there are "45 items" that will need to be dealt with - but they are not all primary legislation that will need Dail approval. "Some regulation, some statutory instrument and some primary legislation of it but also the non-legislative aspects of it," he told the Dail, adding he will ensure a full briefing is provided as soon as possible. British Prime Minister Theresa May, left, is greeted by European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker at EU headquarters in Brussels, Tuesday, Dec. 11 2018. Top European Union officials on Tuesday ruled out any renegotiation of the divorce agreement with Britain, as Prime Minister Theresa May fought to save her Brexit deal by lobbying leaders in Europe's capitals. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco) The European Commission has triggered an action plan to protect EU citizens and businesses from "major disruption" if the UK crashes out without a deal on March 29. With just 100 days to go the scheduled date of Brexit, and the UK Parliament apparently far from ratifying Theresa May's Withdrawal Agreement, the commission said it was "essential and urgent" to act. Plans cover 14 areas most likely to be affected, ranging from financial services to aviation, customs and carbon emissions trading, and are designed to "protect the vital interests of the EU". The move came a day after the Cabinet agreed to implement in full the UK's own preparations for a possible no-deal Brexit. In a statement issued in Brussels, the commission stressed that the ratification of the November Withdrawal Agreement continues to be its "objective and priority". It said: "Irrespective of the scenario envisaged, the United Kingdom's choice to leave the European Union will cause significant disruption." Measures being put in place would "limit the most significant damage" caused by a potential no-deal scenario but could not mitigate in full the impact of the UK leaving without an agreement, it said. Read More It warned they would not "in any way compensate for the lack of stakeholder preparedness or replicate the full benefits of EU membership or the terms of any transition period, as provided for in the Withdrawal Agreement". Measures being undertaken now are "limited to specific areas where it is absolutely necessary to protect the vital interests of the EU" and will be "temporary in nature, limited in scope and adopted unilaterally by the EU". The commission urged EU27 states to take a "generous" approach to the rights of UK citizens in the EU following a no-deal Brexit, "provided that this approach is reciprocated by the UK". EU27 states should ensure UK citizens legally residing in the EU on the date of withdrawal will continue to be considered legal residents and should take a "pragmatic" approach to granting temporary residence status, it said. UK nationals should be exempted from visa requirements, provided that all EU citizens are equally exempt from UK visas. Expand Close Hapless: British PM Theresa May has battled furiously amid splits in her own part. Photo: PA / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Hapless: British PM Theresa May has battled furiously amid splits in her own part. Photo: PA Remaining EU states should take "all possible steps" to protect social security rights of UK expats who have settled in their countries as well as their nationals living in Britain. The commission announced "a limited number of contingency measures" to safeguard financial stability in the EU27 following a no-deal Brexit. These include: A 12-month equivalence decision ensuring there will be no immediate disruption in the central clearing of derivatives A 24-month equivalence decision to avoid disruption in central depositaries services for EU operators currently using UK operators Two 12-month regulations allowing the renewal of certain over-the-counter derivatives contracts Temporary measures were adopted to avoid "full interruption" of air traffic between the EU and UK. But the commission warned they will only ensure "basic connectivity" and "in no means replicate the significant advantages of membership of the Single European Sky". The statement said it was "essential" for EU27 states to make preparations to apply customs controls in relation to the UK in the case of a no-deal Brexit. It said that from January 1, the UK's involvement in elements of the carbon emissions trading system will be temporarily suspended, to ensure that an eventual no-deal Brexit does not disrupt its smooth functioning. The commission proposed a regulation to allow the continuation of the EU's Peace programme in Northern Ireland until the end of 2020 in the event of no deal. 3,500 troops on standby Meanwhile, the British government has put 3,500 troops on standby to help deal with potential disruption caused by a no-deal Brexit. Read More The UK cabinet agreed to activate all its no-deal plans and advised the public to prepare for disruptions. The contingency plans outline how the public will be urged to prepare themselves and their families over the Christmas holidays. Television advertisement and social media are expected to be used to for public service announcements. Some 3,500 troops will be on standby to help deal with any disruptions, ranging from emergency engineering work to shortage of supplies such as medicines. UK government sources insisted they were not being put in place to deal with public disorder. Expand Close Taoiseach Leo Varadkar. AP Photo / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Taoiseach Leo Varadkar. AP Photo Businesses will receive a 100-plus page online package to help them get ready. Emails to 80,000 of the most likely to be affected companies will be sent over the next few days. Leo Varadkar's own proposals include '45 items' of fast-track legislation It comes as the Irish Government prepares to publish its own no-deal contingency plans, which include proposals to have dozens of pieces of legislation passed by TDs in just 29 days. Their plan could see all Dail business set aside in order to facilitate the passage of legislation to ensure the continued payment of pensions and recognition of cross-border healthcare arrangements. The Dail breaks for almost a month today, returning on the same week that the British prime minister intends to finally put her Brexit deal to a vote in Westminster. However, there is growing concern among Opposition parties here that there will not be enough time to adequately debate the ramifications of a no-deal scenario. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar continues to insist Ireland is ready, but Labour Party leader Brendan Howlin questioned the level of detail made public. "Is it envisaged we would pass 45 pieces of legislation in 29 days that are sight unseen at this stage?" he asked. Mr Howlin demanded the Taoiseach provide a "comprehensive briefing" in advance of the recess so that TDs will be in a position to "scrutinise measures that might be necessary" over the holidays. "I heard the British secretary of state for health say that he had become the biggest purchaser of fridges in the world as they stockpile medicines. That is how absurd things have become. "We need to know specifically what we must do here to be ready for it and not be inundated by legislation we have not had time to reflect upon when we come back after the recess," Mr Howlin said. Fianna Fail's Lisa Chambers demanded a debate, saying all projections for Budget 2019 were based on an assumption that there would be a deal. Mr Varadkar said there are "45 items" that will need to be dealt with - but they are not all primary legislation that will need Dail approval. "Some regulation, some statutory instrument and some primary legislation of it but also the non-legislative aspects of it," he told the Dail, adding he will ensure a full briefing is provided as soon as possible. Speaking this morning, Mr Varadkar rejected charges by Fianna Fail leader, Micheal Martin, that the Government was being unduly secretive about preparations for a no-deal Brexit. Mr Martin insisted that he was by-passing the democratically elected parliament which he would soon be asking to put through special Brexit legislation. There was also a question of the Budget for next year having to be revised to take account of the need for extra investment. Do you have any respect for the Dail at all? the Fianna Fail leader asked. He added that the Dail Christmas break began today, and there would only be 29 Dail sitting days next year before the Brexit deadline. The Taoiseach said that he wanted to await the EU Commission's plans for a no-deal Brexit. He said Irelands plans must dovetail with these EU plans, and Irish plans would emerge tomorrow after a meeting with business and other groups concerned by Brexit. But Mr Varadkar also repeated his statement of last Friday that even a no-deal Brexit would not cause a mini-Budget in spring 2019. He also again stressed that he believed a no-deal Brexit was unlikely. The Taoiseach said the Budget presented on October 9 last was framed with Brexit economic fallout in mind. He said there would be a small budget surplus this year and a larger one next year, a Rainy Day Fund will set up next year, and there will be 25pc extra investment in transport, housing and other infrastructure projects. It is not intended that we would re-visit the Budget or introduce a mini-Budget, Mr Varadkar insisted. Farmers Peter Hynes his daughter Georgie Hynes, Helen Carroll (Ear To The Ground presenter and journalist ) and Former Rugby International John The Bull Hayes pictured at the Rearing To Go launch. Rearing To Go, a campaign to raise awareness of mental health and mental wellbeing launched today in Cork at Corrin Mart, Fermoy. The campaign will hold a special sale at Corrin Mart on March 2, 2019 to raise funds for the Teac Tom, which is an initiative started to provide counselling and support services to individuals and their families affected by suicide or contemplating suicide. Rearing To Go is being organised by Angela Hayes, of The Thomas Hayes Trust, David Corkery, Paula Hynes and Peter Hynes. They are asking farmers to kindly donate a dairy bred heifer calf to the sale next March. The organisers are also welcoming any dairy/beef cross calves generously donated to the sale. Each farmer who donates a calf will be given a free bag of Volac Heiferlac and a free bag of Dairygold Calf Pride nuts. There will also be a prize for the highest genetic merit calf donated, and there will be a prize for highest bidder on the day. The sale promises to be a great day out for a family and plant to have celebrity auctioneers on the day. Rearing To Go is very generously being supported by Volac, Dairygold Co-op and Cork Marts We chose to launch this week is to get the message out before Chirstmas, as it can be an extremely lonely time for many people. We want people to know that if someone is feeling under pressure there is so much help available, always someone willing to chat. It's so important we look out for others, Peter Hynes told the crowd at the event. It would be fantastic to see the whole farming community in Ireland unite to tackle mental health and share the message of how we need to work on our mental wellbeing, this has proven very successful in other countries in the farm sector. Not just in times of a fodder crisis or extreme weather event, it's a conversation we need to have all year round to make a difference, he said. The campaign aims to raise funds for the Teac Tom which is an initiative started by the Hayes family to support individuals and their families affected by suicide or contemplating suicide. Please see www.thethomashayestrust.com for more info. The scene at the residential farm at Falsk outside Strokestown, Co Roscommon. Photo: Brian Farrell The vigilante gang that stormed the Roscommon farm at the centre of a controversial eviction may have been helped by local criminals heavily involved in cattle smuggling. Between 20 and 30 men attacked eight security guards at the farm in Falsk, near Strokestown, early on Sunday morning. A guard dog injured in the brutal attack had to be put down, while several vehicles were burnt out. The security workers were stationed at the property after the eviction of three people last Thursday. It has now emerged that the vigilante mob made up of some dissident republicans was also joined by well-known criminals, gardai believe. Republican elements may have exploited the anger surrounding the eviction and became involved in Sundays violence. Expand Close The McGann family home at Falsk, near Strokestown, Co Roscommon Photo: Frank McGrath / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp The McGann family home at Falsk, near Strokestown, Co Roscommon Photo: Frank McGrath Officers believe their involvement may have been sanctioned by local crime groups heavily involved in cattle smuggling. Dissidents from the North and Dublin are suspected of involvement, said a source. They reached a deal with local crime groups allowing them to carry out the attacks on their turf. In exchange, gardai now fear these cattle smugglers will be allowed to target farmers in republican strong-holds for a small tax. Those cheering on the actions on Sunday could well find themselves the victims of these criminals in the new year. NOTORIOUS These criminals include a CAB target who is originally from Sligo, as well as a notorious crime family operating in north Roscommon. Anti-eviction groups are also believed to have been involved in the storming of the property. Expand Close A pickaxe handle lies on the mud near the house / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp A pickaxe handle lies on the mud near the house It is understood that the men gathered on Saturday evening before heading to the Falsk property. An incident room has been established by gardai to investigate the violent incident, which left three of the eight security workers hospitalised. Gardai are also probing the eviction at the same property last Thursday where two minor assaults were reported. It is understood a former garda and a 60-year-old man were assaulted during the eviction. The farmer whose home was at the centre of the repossession, Anthony McGann, is not suspected of having any involvement in the violence. Expand Close Spark: Still images from a video of the eviction of the occupants of the house last Tuesday / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Spark: Still images from a video of the eviction of the occupants of the house last Tuesday Donal Hanley, a family friend, confirmed that two members of the McGann family have moved back into the house. Theyre asking to be left alone and in peace, said Mr Hanley. Theyre seriously traumatised by what happened. This family have been thrust into the media spotlight. Theyre not used to this. The family dont condone violence in any shape or manner whatsoever. Anthony McGann has financial difficulties which stretch back almost a decade and include a more than 400,000 settlement secured by the Revenue Commissioners against him in 2015 for the under-declaration of VAT. Land Registry records for the Falsk property also show that more than 18,000 was secured in a judgment in December 2008, which was subsequently registered against his property. That judgment was obtained by a local company which operated a quarry at the time. In 2015, the Revenue Commissioners secured a settlement of 429,500 against the evicted man as a tax defaulter for the under-declaration of VAT. This included 177,000 in tax owed, almost 75,000 in interest, and more than 177,000 in penalties. Most recently, in January this year, a judgment mortgage was secured against the Mr McGann in the Midland Circuit Court by Cabot Asset Purchases (Ireland). That judgment was registered against his property in February this year. In 2004, Mr McGann secured a mortgage from IIB Homeloans, the Belgian-owned lender that rebranded as KBC in 2009. In 2017, it emerged that KBC Bank Ireland sold a chunk of loans to credit-servicing and debt-collection firm Cabot Financial Ireland, a unit of the US-based Cabot group. European Union leaders have given themselves nearly a year to agree a new long-term budget for the bloc last week, confirming that hopes of an accord before elections to the EU parliament in May are not realistic. May had long seemed an improbable target to resolve intense disputes, with Britain, one of the major contributors, due to leave in March, and other rich western members irritated by hostility to EU policies on human rights and immigration among some ex-communist countries, which receive hefty EU subsidies. In a statement following a debate at a summit in Brussels, the leaders call for more work in the coming months, with a view to achieving an agreement in the European Council in autumn 2019. The Multiannual Financial Framework, or MFF, runs for seven years and will need to be in place in time to replace the current budget programme, which ends in December 2020. The EU budget accounts for about 1pc of the blocs economic output. Some governments and the EU executive favour expanding it but that faces resistance, especially from wealthy states in the north and west which are the main contributors. As the CAP regulations contain financial references, agreement on the overall EU budget, which is a matter for unanimous agreement by Heads of State and Government, must also take place to allow final conclusion on the CAP regulations. The CAP draft legislative proposals are intrinsically linked to the recent proposals for the next European Multi-annual Financial Framework 2021-2027. The MFF proposes a 5pc cut to the overall CAP budget. The CAP Regulations cannot be agreed in the absence of agreement on the budget as the Regulations contain financial envelopes. CIRCLE-K owner, the Canadian Alimentation Couche- Tard, which in 2016 completed the acquisition of the Topaz forecourt business in Ireland, has agreed to sell 192 US company-operated convenience and retail fuel stores to US firm CrossAmerica. CrossAmerica has previously done forecourt deals in the United States with Ireland's stock market-listed Applegreen. Couche-Tard is also buying 73 outlets from CrossAmerica which said it has already approached operators to take on the outlets it's buying from the Canadian company. The 192 stores being sold to CrossAmerica have an aggregate value of approximately $184.5m (162.2m), with the assets being sold by it to Couche-Tard having the same value. The 73 CrossAmerica stores being sold to Couche-Tard include 56 forecourts that are currently leased and operated by the Canadian company, and 17 that are owned and operated by CrossAmerica in the US upper Midwest. The asset swap will take place over the next 24 months. CrossAmerica said it has been in discussions with several dozen potential operators for the 192 outlets it is buying from Couche-Tard. The majority of the outlets are in CrossAmerica's existing geographies. Most recently, Applegreen signed a deal with CrossAmerica to lease 43 filling stations in Florida, expanding the Irish group's US presence. Applegreen has outlets in South Carolina, Massachusetts and New York's Long Island. Applegreen has just completed its biggest ever acquisition, acquiring UK-based Welcome Break in a 440m deal. Ireland's largest hotel group, Dalata, has seen no negative impact from the looming spectre of Brexit in either Ireland or the UK, according to its deputy chief executive, Dermot Crowley. In a trading update, the group added that the Dublin market - the single biggest part of Dalata's business - had remained "very strong" in the second half of 2018. It noted that on a like-for-like basis, revenue per available room at its hotels in the capital jumped 8.8pc in the 11 months to the end of November, compared to market growth of 7.4pc. The like-for-like figure excludes hotels opened in 2018, extensions added to existing properties, and the Tara Towers hotel, which closed in September. The Tara Towers site is set for 51m re-development that will include a 140-bedroom, four star Maldron hotel, as well as 69 residential units. Dalata acquired the 1.4-acre site and hotel in 2016 for 13.1m. Last month, Dalata opened the 189-bedroom Clayton Hotel Charlemont in Dublin - a 40m investment. Dublin accounted for 58pc of Dalata's 348.5m revenue, and 61pc of its 102.6m in earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) last year. The company said that its regional hotels in Ireland also performed well in the 11 months to the end of November, and that its UK properties had performed "very well". Maldron Hotel Newcastle opened earlier this month, and an extension at Maldron Hotel Parnell Square in Dublin has been substantially completed, said Dalata. Maldron Hotel South Mall in Cork will open later this week, it added. The hotel group has also been active in the UK, where it has ambitions be a major player in the UK's three- and four-star hotel sector. Aiming to build a presence in major cities, Dalata is targeting a 10pc to 15pc share of the three- and four-star market in each of those cities. In August, the company said it had agreed to pay 100m for a 212-bedroom hotel being built at Aldgate in east London. The property is being built by a private equity group. Last month, Dalata agreed a new 525m debt facility to support continued growth and reduce financing costs. "We note the ongoing uncertainty surrounding the final outcome of Brexit," said Mr Crowley. "To date, we have seen no negative impact on trading in any of our hotels in the UK or Ireland." He added: "We did deem it prudent to complete our refinancing package earlier than originally planned and are now happy to have debt funding in place until at least late 2023, on improved terms." The company's update added that trading in the final four months of the year had been as expected and that EBITDA for 2018 will also be in line with expectations. HUNDREDS of jobs at Aughinish Alumina are set to be saved, ending months of uncertainty about the future of the Limerick refinery which supplies up to a third of all aluminium in Europe and is one of the most important employers in the mid West. Yesterday the U.S. Department of the Treasurys Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) notified Congress of its intention to terminate the sanctions imposed on a series of companies controlled by Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. Limerick Alumina Refining Ltd (LARL), which continued to operate at full capacity while managing the impact of supplies owing to a series of rolling reprieves, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of United Company Rusal, one of three entities controlled by Mr Deripaska. The fate of Aughinsh was one of the top priorities for US-Ireland relations this year, resulting in a series of high profile meetings in Dublin and Washington. Last night OFAC said that Mr Deripaska will remain on its List of Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons (SDN List) and his property will remain blocked. But the powerful Treasury agency determined that the significant restructuring and corporate governance changes to Rusal, EN+ and ESE companies that were sanctioned by OFAC last April because of their ownership and control by Mr Deripaska - will enable them to meet the criteria for delisting. Treasury sanctioned these companies because of their ownership and control by sanctioned Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, not for the conduct of the companies themselves, said Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin. These companies have committed to significantly diminish Deripaskas ownership and sever his control. The companies will be subject to ongoing compliance and will face severe consequences if they fail to comply. OFAC maintains the ability under the terms of the agreement to have unprecedented levels of transparency into operations. Earlier this year, the directors of Aughinish Alumina, which directly employs some 450 people, warned that its status as a sanctioned entity constitutes a material uncertainty that may cast significant doubt on the company's ability to continue as a going concern. However the company recorded pre-tax profits of $50.6m (44m) last year, in large part owing to the increase in the price of aluminium created by the sanctions crisis. Ryanair passengers are entitled to compensation after their flights were cancelled or delayed due to strikes, the Irish regulator has decided. The Commission for Aviation Regulation has written to the airline about five separate complaints. They relate to flight cancellations and long delays during last March, July and August. Based on information received to date, in each case, the commission has taken the view that Ryanair should pay compensation, said a spokesperson for the regulator. We await Ryanairs response. Ryanair has been adamant that it is not liable to pay compensation, which can be sought even if the affected passenger gets a refund or was accommodated on an alternative flight. The low fares airline had to cancel hundreds of flights during the busy summer season in Ireland and across Europe due to strikes by pilots and cabin crew. Some 170,000 customers were hit by the industrial action across Europe. An estimated 17,500 of these were booked on flights between Ireland and Britain. It suffered the effects of industrial action after recognising unions for the first time last year. The UK aviation authority is taking action to force the airline to pay compensation to customers. The Civil Aviation Authority found that the strikes were not exempt from EU rules. It said it has begun enforcement action against the airline. Ryanair previously said courts in Germany, Spain and Italy have already ruled that strikes are an extraordinary circumstance and EU261 compensation does not apply. We expect the UK CAA and courts will follow this precedent, it said. A request for a comment was sent to Ryanair yesterday evening but it had not responded at the time of going to press last night. New accounts filed by Roche Products (Ireland) Ltd show that the companys pre-tax profits last year declined by 7pc to 5m. Photo: Bloomberg The main Irish arm of Roche, the Swiss pharma giant, has blamed a new pricing agreement with the Government for "a significant decline in revenues" at the company in 2017. That is according to new accounts filed by Roche Products (Ireland) Ltd which show that the company's pre-tax profits last year declined by 7pc to 5m. This followed revenues declining by 6pc from 108.96m to 101.69m during 2017. The firm paid a dividend of 2.5m in 2017. According to the directors' report "2017 proved to be a difficult trading year for the company with a significant decline in revenues". On the factors leading to the decline in revenues, the directors state the company "felt the full-year impact of the new pricing agreement between the Irish Pharmaceutical Healthcare Association (IPHA) and the Department of Health which was signed in July 2016". They add that the impacts "were a combination of lower list prices and increased rebates to the State". The directors state "like other IPHA members, the company continued to experience significant delays in the re-imbursement of medicines". The directors also stated that one of the firm's cancer drugs, Mabthera, became subject to biosimilar competition. They said: "Under the pricing agreement, the company had to reduce the price to the State of Mabthera to 70pc of its original price. On top of this, we also lost volume share to the biosimilar." The directors state that the continued delay in the re-imbursement of innovative new medicines "is a cause of concern for the company, both in terms of planning and the ability to deliver life-changing medicines to patients in Ireland". They say that, despite these challenges, the directors remain cautiously optimistic for the future with a strong pipeline of new medicines for the treatment of haemophilia, lung cancer and multiple sclerosis among others. They state: "However, revenue is expected to drop further in 2018 due to further price cuts and increased competition from biosimilars." The number of family homes being repossessed has fallen, with the improving economy helping to cut the number of mortgages in arrears. New Central Bank figures show 191 homes were repossessed in July to September, down from 292 in April to June. The vast bulk of the repossessions are carried out by banks, the figures show. Of the 191 homes taken in July to September, just 30 were done by non-bank entities - and not all of those are vulture funds. It looks like the total number of repossessions this year will be well behind last year. A Central Bank spokesman said 1,417 family homes were repossessed last year. For the first 9 months of this year, the number was 847. The data showed the number of mortgages in arrears has continued to fall. At the end of September, 64,510 family home mortgages were in arrears, down 2.9pc compared to the end of June. Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe said the figures showed progress was being made in dealing with a tremendously difficult issue for families across the country. However, he admitted that more progress needs to be made especially at a time when the economy is stable. The Minister said householders in trouble need to work with the Insolvency Service of Ireland. Through engagement with that organisation the majority of citizens who reach those arrangements end up staying their homes, Mr Donohoe said. The banks and those in difficulty must continue to engage together. Despite the drop in arrears the number of mortgages in arrears for more than 720 days remained stubbornly high. Almost 28,000 family home mortgages are in that category, and they constitute around 90pc of all the arrears owed. Rapid house price inflation and traffic congestion are the warning signs of a loss of competitiveness that were ignored prior to the economic crisis, the National Competitiveness Council (NCC) has warned. Ireland is facing a "significant" loss of competitiveness as the economy heats up and prices and living costs rise. Unsustainable growth will ultimately lead to a return to boom and bust, the council said in its latest report. The severe shortage of available and affordable accommodation is a substantial threat to Ireland's competitiveness, the Council cautioned. That view echoes those from industry. The NCC is the Government's independent advisor on competitiveness in the Irish economy. Its latest report found Ireland's overall economic performance and competitiveness position remains strong, but masks significant weaknesses - including over reliance in the indigenous sectors on a small number of firms that export limited products to a small number of destinations. "The narrow base of enterprises in high-value-added sectors, and within sectors, disguises many underperforming firms where productivity growth is stagnant or falling," the NCC said. Chairman of the NCC Professor Peter Clinch said: "The loss of competitiveness in the run up to the global financial crisis left Ireland particularly vulnerable. That must not happen again.' Costs have been rising here as Ireland faces threats including Brexit - which would damage the Irish economy regardless of the form it takes - as well as changing attitudes to international taxation and a rise in protectionist trade policies. Load time: Shoppers will leave sites if they dont load fast enough Irish businesses have been warned their mobile websites are too slow, potentially costing them smartphone shoppers' money. A new report said pages on the average mobile e-commerce site here took 10.35 seconds to load - much longer than the 3 seconds which is seen as the industry standard. The report was compiled by Agent Digital, an agency which provides web design and search engine optimisation services to companies. Managing director Kevin Meaney said companies could be missing out on business because shoppers will leave a website if it takes too long to load. "Google has for years aimed to load its pages in under half a second, and regards two seconds as the e-commerce threshold. As long ago as 2012, Google was describing loading times of five seconds as an eternity in a world where fractions of seconds count," he said. The report surveyed 1,000 Irish mobile websites - pages loaded in an internet browser on a smartphone rather than a dedicated app. It used a Google tool designed to measure website speed specifically, meaning the results weren't distorted by the speed of the internet connection itself. "It was important for us to create this speed report to highlight the issue to Irish businesses. Many Irish brands are simply not aware their websites are too slow. "Once the issue is highlighted, it can be quickly addressed through effective website speed optimisation techniques," Mr Meaney said. He said some of the things companies can do to make websites load more quickly include making sure pictures aren't any bigger than necessary and removing any superfluous lines of code used in the website's design. The research found Irish mobile websites in the professional services sector had the fastest average page-loading time at 4.95 seconds. Websites in the energy sector were second on 6.08 seconds while financial services came in at 6.45 seconds. The Big Four accounting firms have avoided forced break-ups but may have to split their UK operations into separate business units as part of a sweeping overhaul of the industry proposed by regulators. Deloitte, EY, KPMG and Britain's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said audit work should be split from the much-larger consulting business at an operational level, but held off on recommending a full structural break-up or a cap on auditor's market share. A further report said the UK needed a tough new watchdog to prevent a re-run of the failings of the past. The reports "represent a meaningful effort to address long-standing weaknesses in the audit market by addressing insidious conflicts of interest," said Natasha Landell-Mills, head of corporate governance at asset manager Sarasin & Partners. "There is now an urgent need to make clear what exactly the audit is for." Stung by a string of scandals at prominent British firms including Carillion, the UK government demanded regulators set out reforms to roll back the dominance of the largest accounting firms, known as the Big Four. The industry has had a turbulent year, with record fines and reprimands issued. "These intractable problems may take some years to sort out," CMA chairman Andrew Tyrie said. "If it turns out proposals are not far-reaching enough, the CMA will persist until the problems are addressed." Separately, the UK government said it agreed with a new report that the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) should be abolished and replaced with a new accounting regulator. The new watchdog, the Audit, Reporting and Governance Authority, will have powers to investigate companies, their accounts and governance. The FRC was accused of being too close to the firms it oversaw, especially Deloitte, KPMG, EY and PricewaterhouseCoopers. "I have sympathy with the view that the FRC has tended overall to take too consensual an approach to its work," said John Kingman, the chairman of Legal & General, who led a review of the regulator. KPMG said the reports contained "constructive suggestions" while David Sproul, Deloitte's UK CEO, acknowledged that many had lost faith in auditors. "It's clear that trust and confidence in the role of the profession is not where it should be and we are supportive of change that enhances audit quality," he said. PwC and EY also issued statements pledging support for measures that boost public trust in the audit sector. The operational split envisaged by the CMA would allow for separate profit pools within the firms, ensuring that auditors are only paid for the audit work they do. The Big Four avoided a full break-up of accounting and consulting into separate companies as the CMA said such proposals would be "protracted and complex" because of the reach of the firms' large international networks. Will Ferrell and John C Reilly star together in Holmes and Watson (Willy Sanjuan/Invision/AP) John C Reilly has said the first time he met comedy partner Will Ferrell he realised working together was, why we were put on this Earth. The duo are one of Hollywoods best loved double-acts, having appeared together in Talladega Nights: The Ballad Of Ricky Bobby, Step Brothers and Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues. Their latest joint effort, Holmes & Watson, is an irreverent take on Sir Arthur Conan Doyles best-known character, with Ferrell playing famed detective Sherlock Holmes and Reilly in the role of his trusted sidekick Dr John H Watson. Reilly and Ferrell first met more than a decade ago and Reilly said he knew from the beginning they had a special chemistry. Expand Close Will Ferrell and John C Reilly star alongside each other in Holmes and Watson (Willy Sanjuan/Invision/AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Will Ferrell and John C Reilly star alongside each other in Holmes and Watson (Willy Sanjuan/Invision/AP) He told the Press Association: The first time Will and I met, we knew we had something in common, and it wasnt until we actually got together to work we thought, oh, this is why we were put on this Earth, to make hijinks together. Set in Victorian London, Holmes & Watson also stars Ralph Fiennes as villain Professor James Moriarty and sees Reilly and Ferrell trying to prevent the murder of Queen Victoria. The lead actors don comedy British accents for the film and Reilly said he enjoyed upsetting the English crew members while filming scenes where the queen played by Pam Ferris was knocked unconscious. He said: We are very irreverent, in fact we touch the queen, we accidentally knock out the queen, we try to dispose of the queens body. Expand Close Lauren Lapkus, Will Ferrell, John C Reilly and Rebecca Hall appear in Holmes and Watson, a comic reimagining of the famous detective (Willy Sanjuan/Invision/AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Lauren Lapkus, Will Ferrell, John C Reilly and Rebecca Hall appear in Holmes and Watson, a comic reimagining of the famous detective (Willy Sanjuan/Invision/AP) Video of the Day The idea that someone, another human being, is somehow untouchable, literally youre not allowed to touch them, or theyre thought of as some sort of god, is absurd to Americans, absurd. So we took great pleasure in freaking out the English people on the crew by being so deeply disrespectful to Queen Victoria. Ferrell added: We have a bit of fun with everything that is British. Holmes is the most portrayed movie character in history, according to the Guinness World Records. Previous actors to don the famous deerstalker hat include Benedict Cumberbatch in the BBC television series Sherlock and Robert Downey Jr in the 2009 film Sherlock Holmes. Expand Close Will Ferrell and John C Reilly appeared together in comedy movie Talladega Nights: The Ballad Of Ricky Bobby (Anthony Harvey/PA) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Will Ferrell and John C Reilly appeared together in comedy movie Talladega Nights: The Ballad Of Ricky Bobby (Anthony Harvey/PA) Ferrell said it was extremely engaging to explore the Sherlock universe through the characters of Holmes and Watson. He said: There are so many things that are iconic in the Sherlock Holmes landscape that was fun to just pick through all that and have fun with it. And thats kind of the magic of those two characters. Holmes & Watson also stars British actress Rebecca Hall as Reillys on-screen love interest while US actress Lauren Lapkus plays Ferrells. Hall, who appeared alongside Christian Bale in The Prestige, discussed watching Ferrell and Reilly in action. She said: They really enjoy each other, it was really lovely to watch. Part of the reason why it works is because they really love each others humour. Youd see them make each other laugh all the time and I think thats why it works, theyre truly having lots of fun. Lapkus added: It was great to watch them, they have such good chemistry and they have so much fun together. There are certain scenes were were watching them from afar and those scenes were very funny. Holmes & Watson will be released in UK cinemas on December 26. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, December 19) The government's Mining Industry Coordinating Council (MICC) -- the inter-agency organization overseeing the operation of mines in the country -- decided to keep its moratorium on new mining projects, the Department of Finance (DOF) said Tuesday. In a statement, DOF said that during the 33rd MICC meeting on December 12, the council "deferred a recommendation on the lifting of the moratorium on the issuance of new mineral agreements." The Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) asked whether the excise tax increases on mineral products under the Tax Reform for Acceleration and Inclusion (TRAIN) Law are enough to meet the requirements for lifting the moratorium. Executive Order (EO) 79, signed in 2012, imposed the moratorium on new mineral agreements "until a legislation rationalizing existing revenue sharing schemes and mechanisms shall have taken effect". The DOF however said TRAIN only increased the excise taxes and did not cover implementing a new fiscal regime for mining. The MICC then agreed that the new revenue-sharing schemes and mechanisms for mining will be included in the second package of the Comprehensive Tax Reform Program, under House Bill 8500. DOF's proposal of the second tranche would cover other taxes and fees, such as royalty, windfall, and profit taxes. However, the DOF clarified that TRAIN only increased the excise taxes and did not cover the implementation of a new fiscal regime for mining. The new fiscal regime proposed by the DOF covers other taxes and fees, such as royalty, windfall, profit, and incentives. The House of Representatives approved House Bill No. 8400 on third and final reading, and transmitted it to the Senate on November 13. The interagency group also agreed to conduct the second review of mining operations in 2019, to cover the 15 mining firms initially part of the 41 companies under audit during the term of DENR Secretary Regina Lopez in 2016. The MICC started the first round of review in February 2017, which covered the first 26 mines ordered closed or suspended by Lopez. The council is chaired by Finance Secretary Sonny Dominguez and Environment Chief Roy Cimatu. DUBLIN animator Louise Bagnall is one step closer to realising her Oscar dreams after her film made the initial shortlist for an Oscar nomination. The 10-minute animation is one of ten films up for consideration for a nomination at the 2019 Academy Awards in the Best Animated Award category. The film, Late Afternoon, tells the story of a lady who has dementia and drifts back through her memories which helps connect the past with the present. It explores the idea of the inner experience that goes on in our minds that we don't always express. Expand Close Louise bagnall / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Louise bagnall Louise (33), who attended Alexandra College and went on to study animation at IADT, told the Diary that winning big at the Tribeca film festival in New York meant she knew her film would be among those considered for the short-list. "It was mad - we knew they were going to be announced on Monday but because it was LA time it didn't get announced until around 11pm," she said. "People were asking how did you sleep afterwards. "With animation it is a big team and to get this far, it's great everyone can enjoy the success - but we still have another voting round to go." Louise first started getting an interest in animation when she was in secondary school. "I didn't realise it was a job 'til 5th year. I always liked drawing and I really wanted to get better and develop. At first it was about art and now it's about the storytelling," she said. Video of the Day Irish animation has a history at the Oscars, with Brown Bag Films previously nominated for Give Up Yer Auld Sins and Granny O'Grimm's Sleeping Beauty. "I think it comes down to storytelling, it captures emotion or a feeling - it's part of our culture to be good at telling stories," said Louise. She thanked Screen Ireland, Cartoon Saloon, producer Nuria Blanco and RTE for their support. Samantha Ring, of Ridgewood Avenue, Forest Road, Swords, Co. Dublin, mother of Zachary and Harvey Ring - pictured leaving the Four Courts yesterday(Wed) after the Circuit Civil Court approved settlement offers of 25,300 and 48,775 respectively for Zachary and Harvey Pic: Collins Courts Two children who were sprayed with petrol and fumes at a faulty fuel pump, when they were aged only four years and 21 months respectively, have been awarded almost 75,000 damages against Tesco Ireland Limited. Barrister Hugh B Byrne told the Circuit Civil Court that Harvey Ring, now aged 11, and his brother, Zachary, now aged eight, were with their mother at the Tesco Filling Station, Clarehall, Malahide Road, Malahide, as she attempted to put petrol in the family car. Mr Byrne, who appeared with Kiera OReilly of Keans Solicitors, said that on March 27, 2012, Harvey had been splashed and sprayed with petrol from the faulty pump as he watched his mum, Samantha, pour the fuel. The boys sued Tesco Ireland Limited through their mother, Ms Samantha Ring, of Ridgewood Avenue, Forest Road, Swords, Co Dublin, who also told Circuit Court President, Mr Justice Raymond Groarke in a sworn statement, that her son Zachary, who had been asleep in the back of her car, had also been doused with petrol through an open window. The court heard that in 2014 Harvey had been offered a settlement of 10,000 and Zachary a figure of 8,500 but Keans Solicitors, of Upper Pembroke Street, Dublin, legal representatives for the Ring family, had successfully brought an application to the court seeking rejection of those offers. Mr Byrne told Judge Groake that Tesco Ireland, which has its registered office at Marine Road, Dun Laoghaire, Co Dublin, had now offered Harvey a settlement of 48,775 and his brother, Zachary, 25,300 and he was asking the court to accept the proposed settlements. The court heard that the Tesco service station concerned had been aware of a potential fault in the particular pump, which Ms Ring had engaged, for some time but had not closed it off to the public. In medical reports furnished to the court it was stated that both children had suffered shock and subsequent anxiety symptoms following the accident and had attended a number of therapy treatments. Judge Groarke said he considered the settlements to be good ones and appropriate in the circumstances and approved both. The media has been warned that reporting restrictions are in place preventing the identification of a teacher accused of engaging in a sex act with a teenage boy. The 24-year-old female teacher made her second appearance before Swords District Court this morning. She was remanded on continuing bail to a date in February for DPP's direction on the charges. She was charged with defilement in October after she was arrested by investigating gardai at Dublin Airport when she returned to Ireland on a flight. Judge Dermot Dempsey further remanded the young woman on bail to February 13 for DPP directions on the charges. Judge Dempsey re-iterated that reporting restrictions are in place preventing the identification of the accused. The young teacher is charged with engaging in a sex act with a child under the age of 17 on February 1 and February 13 this year. The offences are contrary to Section 3(1) of the Criminal Sexual Offences Act 2006. Garda Stephen Hughes requested a six week adjournment, saying that directions remained outstanding. Defence solicitor Emer O'Sullivan said that there was consent to that adjournment. The accused, who was accompanied to court by her father, did not address the court during the short hearing. She was previously granted bail, subject to a number of conditions, including a cash lodgment of 2,000 and that she surrender her passport and not apply for new documentation. She was also ordered to provide gardai with a phone number and be contactable at all time. The woman has also been ordered not to have any contact, either directly or indirectly, with the alleged victim or any witnesses for the duration of the case. Legal aid was previously granted after the court heard that the accused had lost her job. A Croatian man attempted to rob two post offices after he found himself homeless from getting his work hours cut, a court has heard. Garda Patrick Dunne said former cafe worker Mario Hanzic Broz (44) had been unable to pay his rent after his job hours had been reduced. The garda told Diana Stuart BL, prosecuting, that Broz went into two post offices with a 6mm caliber air pistol but turned around and left without any money. He agreed with Oisin Clarke BL, defending, that Broz had had second thoughts during the brief incidents and was extremely remorseful when arrested. Gda Dunne told Mr Clarke that Broz's car had been taken from him for having no insurance, which meant he couldn't get to work on time and his cafe hours were reduced. Broz, of no fixed abode, pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to attempted robbery and possession of an air pistol with intent at Botanic Road Post Office, Dublin 9, on May 8, 2018. He also pleaded guilty to attempted robbery and possession of an air pistol at Berkeley Road Post Office, Phibsborough, Dublin 7, on May 10, 2018. He has no previous convictions in this jurisdiction. Gda Dunne told Ms Stuart that the elderly postmaster in the first attempted robbery had been carrying out general duties when he saw a male in front of him shouting money, money money. The postmaster knew about firearms from being victim to previous robberies, but wasn't certain if Broz's gun was real. He told Broz he was going to a back area to get money. While he was there he looked at the CCTV but couldn't see Broz. He returned to the post office public area, saw that Broz was gone and rang gardai. Two days later Broz approached a woman working at the cash desk at Berkeley Road Post Office and took the gun out of a white plastic bag. He told the woman to give him all the money, but then turned around after a few seconds and left the post office. The woman hit the panic button and gardai arrived a short time later. Gda Dunne said Broz was arrested at Blessington Street Basin in Dublin about an hour after this second incident. He agreed with Mr Clarke that Broz had retrieved the gun from a bin and handed it to gardai at the scene, revealing he'd bought it at a toy shop. Gda Dunne said Broz mentioned he suffered from PTSD due to his service in the army during the Balkans War. He said he tracked down Broz's former cafe boss, who had described him as a very good worker and was surprised about the offending. Mr Clarke submitted to Judge Melanie Greally that his client had joined the army when he was 18 years old and had witnessed varying levels of atrocities during the Balkans War. Counsel said his client numbed himself against the incidents he had witnessed by using LSD, cocaine, heroin and cannabis. He said this was common place among soldiers and that Broz left the army with a heroin addiction. Mr Clarke submitted that though Broz had held down jobs in Croatia, he got into trouble because of his heroin addition. He said Broz got clean of drugs before coming to Ireland 18 months ago to join friends here and make a clean sweep of his life. Mr Clarke said the attempted robberies were two desperate situations that his client regrets. Judge Greally remanded Broz in continuing custody pending a probation report and prison governor's report. She also asked for clarification on Broz's previous convictions in Croatia. She adjourned the sentence to March of next year. Declan O Callaghan of Ballaghaderreen, Co. Roscommon pictured at the Four Courts Pic:Collins Courts A suspended solicitor has consented to High Court orders freezing his accounts below 1.062m, plus orders effectively aimed at winding up his former practice at Ballaghderreen, Co Roscommon. Declan OCallaghan will be entitled to vouched monthly living expenses of 11,600, the president of the High Court, Mr Justice Peter Kelly also directed. That sum was agreed between the solicitor and the Law Society and includes mortgage repayments. The consent orders also provide Mr OCallaghan will remain suspended from practice and must provide a sworn statement of his assets. They also provide for steps to achieve sale of three properties his family home in Ballaghderreen, a townhouse in Portugal and a property at Arran Quay, Dublin - with the proceeds going towards clearing the deficit on the account of the Kilraine OCallaghan practice at Pound Street, Ballaghderreen. A sum of 107,816 is also to be paid out on Thursday to a law firm related to certain litigation and the orders provide for handover on Friday of files of the practice to the Society and for it to have access to the practice from then. In making the orders, Mr Justice Kelly noted the Society alleges dishonesty against Mr OCallaghan while he has consistently denied any dishonesty. That issue will be adjudicated on in due course by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal and is not before the court in this application, he said. The Society, he noted, has made two referrals to the SDT of issues concerning Mr OCallaghans practice and it seemed a third referral is likely arising from further investigation reports. It was "important" the court makes clear Mr OCallaghan has asserted at all times he has conducted himself honestly, had at all times sought to act in the best interests of the clients of his firm and intends to personally make good any shortfalls which may be found in the practice and to ensure no client of the practice is at a loss. It was also important to say the Society is not alleging any dishonesty against Mr O'Callaghan's daughters Aoife and Eimear O'Callaghan, both solicitors, who were made partners in the practice last month for the purposes of ensuring it remains insured, the judge said. Earlier on Wednesday, the judge was told the Society wanted the freezing and other orders as it is very concerned the deficit on the practice account may be almost 1m and is increasing and increasing. That 1m sum excluded refund by Mr OCallaghan earlier this year of 344,000 in alleged "exorbitant" fees and costs taken from the estate of a bereaved child, plus his refund to some 80,000 to a widowed mother of three in alleged excessive fees, Nessa Bird BL for the Society said. The Society is very concerned some of the refunded monies appear to have come from the accounts of other clients, she added. The Society understood special damages were to be paid out of the settlement but a sum of 118,000 to the National Rehabilitation Hospital remained unpaid. There was a further complaint regarding a sum of 16,000 for another client which the client understood had been retained for two years but was no longer held to that client's account. Mr O'Callaghan has said the hospital and the 16,000 would be paid, the court was told. Other concerns were the solicitor drew fees of some 74,000 from a man's estate "way in excess" of a three per cent charge referred to as well as in excess of his solicitor's attendance note estimating costs at 40,000. Ms Bird said the Alzheimer Society, the sole beneficiary of a deceased woman's estate, was told by the solicitor the residuary estate amounted to 35,000 but was not told he had taken costs of 34,000. The Alzheimer Society has been reimbursed 24,600, counsel said. After talks between the sides, the judge was told Mr OCallaghan and his daughters were consenting to various orders. His counsel Gabriel Gavigan SC said Mr OCallaghan had paid a further 144,000 towards clearing the deficit, bringing to some 671,000 paid by him to date. Mr O'Callaghan is determined to honour his undertaking to ensure no client of the practice will be at a loss, counsel said. Sean Sexton, solicitor for the daughters, reiterated there is no allegations of dishonesty against them and they are fully co-operating with the Society. A judge has described an incident in west Clare - when two men stopped a car driving out of Doonbeg - as "vigilantism at its worst". Judge Patrick Durcan made his comment at Kilrush District Court after hearing one person lost a prosthetic finger in the incident when a car containing four people was stopped from leaving the village. Judge Durcan said: "We have a situation where a bunch of blaggards think they can take the law into their own hands in any part of Co Clare and I can't have that." In the case, Judge Durcan has ordered Patrick Hurley (31), of Lu Na Si, Miltown Malbay, to pay the un-named injured party 1,000 for the loss of the prosthetic finger. When first given an outline of the facts, Judge Durcan said the owner of the arm didn't suffer any pain in losing the prosthetic finger "and required a bit of glue". However, Insp Paul Slattery told Judge Durcan that the damage done to the person's prosthetic arm was quite extensive, costing around 2,000 to repair. Judge Durcan said: "I have to put a value on the finger and I am going to put Hurley's responsibility on the finger at 1,000. "It has to be replaced. Somebody lost a finger." In the case, Hurley pleaded guilty to wilfully preventing the free passage of a car at Doonbeg village on January 11, 2018. The defendant also pleaded guilty to interfering with the same car and assaulting his ex-girlfriend, who was a passenger in the backseat of the car. Insp Slattery said that a guitar worth 700 was taken from the car and later found damaged beyond use. There is a co-accused with Hurley in the case who has left the country and Judge Durcan ordered Hurley pay half the compensation owed, totalling 1,350 - 1,000 towards the lost finger and 350 towards the guitar. Insp Slattery said that it had been accepted by the State that Hurley had not directly damaged the prosthetic arm or finger. Insp Slattery said that Hurley tried to remove the woman - his ex-girlfriend - from the back of the car and punched another male in the car in the face. In the case, Judge Durcan said that Hurley was one of a "bunch of vigilantes". Insp Slattery added that Hurley had no previous convictions. He said that the car was prevented from leaving the village and in reply, Judge Durcan said: "That was vigilantism as its worst." Solicitor for Mr Hurley, Daragh Hassett said that what occurred was a one-off for his client. Judge Durcan gave Mr Hurley until May to pay the 1,350 in compensation and said that if the money wasn't paid up, he would be facing a prison sentence. The father of a six-year-old boy who was killed after being struck by a van breaking a red light at a pedestrian crossing has told the driver his family forgives him. James O'Brien (37) of Kilbogget Grove, Cabinteely, Dublin was jailed for four years after he pleaded guilty to dangerous driving causing the death of Cian Marren. It happened at Shanganagh Road, Shankill, Dublin, on July 28, 2017. At a sentence hearing last week, the victim's father Liam read from his victim impact statement and told O'Brien that despite "the unbearable pain, hurt, suffering and anguish, and the life sentence of loss we are living, the one emotion we don't have is bitterness". "We want James O'Brien to know that our son Cian forgives you," he said, before adding the rest of the family forgave him also. He described seeing his son in a neck brace, unconscious but still breathing at the scene. He said paramedics told him his child was "very, very ill" and 20 minutes later a hospital consultant broke it to the family that there was nothing that could be done to save him. Expand Close Grief: Liam and Lisa Marren follow the hearse carring the remains of son Cian in 2017. / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Grief: Liam and Lisa Marren follow the hearse carring the remains of son Cian in 2017. "The shock and the terror was unbearable. Even though we were told there was no hope, we prayed for a miracle," Mr Marren said. Garda Barry Cormack told Karl Finnegan BL, prosecuting, that the child, his two sisters, then aged eight and 11 years old, and his aunt had been returning home to their granny's after a day out at the cinema and McDonalds. He said the little boy had been anxious to press the pedestrian crossing button for the green man. Once the green man came up, he stepped out onto the road and was immediately struck by O'Brien's van. O'Brien stopped his vehicle up the road and returned to the scene. He later met with Mr Marren there and apologised for the accident, saying he didn't see the red light. Gda Cormack told Mr Finnegan that drink, drugs and mobile phone use were ruled out as contributory factors in the investigation. He said the weather had been bright and dry on the day. In his victim impact statement Mr Marren said: "The person who suffered and lost most is our six-year-old son. "He is the ultimate victim. He lost his life, his future, he lost his hopes and his dreams." Judge Melanie Greally thanked him and extended her condolences. O'Brien has 32 previous convictions at District Court level, including drink driving and a three-year ban from 2012. Sentencing O'Brien yesterday at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court, Judge Greally noted that Cian was struck within moments of stepping off the footpath and was left with fatal head injuries. "He carried out to the letter all he had been taught to do before crossing the road," Judge Greally said before she noted Cian didn't leave the pavement until the green man illuminated. The judge noted that the lights were red for three seconds before the accident and amber for three seconds prior to that, it was a straight stretch of road with which O'Brien was familiar, it was daylight and the driving conditions were good. "It is impossible to say what passed through his mind in those three seconds," Judge Greally said before she noted that O'Brien was driving at 10km above the speed limit. She said this speeding was an aggravating factor. She accepted he remained at the scene until both gardai and emergency services arrived and expressed immediate concern for Cian. Judge Greally accepted O'Brien is racked with remorse but said he had "unheeded a red light during which pedestrians have an expectation of being safe". A notorious Crumlin criminal has been arrested in relation to the savage rape of a young woman in Dublins south inner city. The man, who is linked to multiple serious gangland offences, was taken out of Cloverhill Prison and questioned before being released without charge and sent back to jail. His arrest is part of a massive investigation by Kevin Street gardai who are now preparing a file for the DPP in the case. His alleged victim jumped from a balcony in a flats complex in a highly agitated state in the Cork Street area of the capitals south inner city. The apparent attack is thought to have been witnessed by a number of other people. There can be no doubt that gardai believe that this womans claims are completely credible. That is why a suspect was arrested and the allegations were put to him, a senior source explained. He is a man who is no stranger to gangland violence and he is known to the alleged victim. This is not what one could call an open-and-shut case but it is certainly a very credible case involving multiple witnesses, the source added. The chief suspect was previously reported on earlier this year, when the Herald exclusively revealed he was in fact on the run, having escaped from prison when the incident occurred. He spent 13 days on the run before being captured on June 25 last and returned to prison. On the night of June 18, gardai were called to an apartment in Cork Street, Dublin 8, after receiving reports of a sexual attack. The victim has given a detailed statement to investigators, and was taken to the Sexual Assault Treatment Unit at the Rotunda Hospital. The woman is reported to have suffered extensive injuries to her ribs during the attack, and it is understood that she had to leap from a balcony in a bid to escape her attacker. Gardai also believe that a knife was used to threaten her. The incident occurred at about 10.50pm, and is currently being investigated by detectives at Kevin Street Garda Station. All pregnant women will be able to avail of 20-week anomaly scans across the south and south-west region. The routine availability of the scan - which can detect fatal foetal abnormalities - was previously denied to thousands of women. However, it will now be on offer in the four maternity units of the South and South-West Hospital Group, including Cork University Maternity Hospital (CUMH), alongside the maternity units in University Hospital Waterford (UHW), University Hospital Kerry (UHK) and South Tipperary General Hospital (STGH). The upcoming abortion law is to allow for a termination of pregnancy in cases where a woman seeks the procedure after receiving a fatal foetal abnormality diagnosis. A number of other hospitals across the country are still failing to provide the scan on a routine basis. Professor John Higgins, clinical director, said: "Equal access to maternity services across CUMH, UHW, UHK and STGH is key for us in the Maternity Directorate. Together we deliver one in five babies nationally." A spokesperson added: "This is significant progress for the South and South-West Hospital Group as not all maternity unit locations had the required number of trained sonographers available. "It has taken considerable time to train and recruit sonographers to ensure an equal service is in place across the region. "It takes two years for a midwife to complete the required Masters in ultra sonography. The Maternity Directorate is committed to an ongoing training and development programme to ensure sustainable service provision." Meanwhile, preparations are continuing for the rollout of abortion services from January once the legislation is signed into law by President Michael D Higgins. A number of training meetings for doctors are continuing, but some GPs are critical of a training session being held on Friday in Dublin, which they will find difficult to attend. Companies which indemnify the GPs are insisting they be trained in order to get cover. The Government is expected to proceed with plans for a tribunal for the victims of the CervicalCheck controversy, the Irish Independent understands. Health Minister Simon Harris updated Cabinet colleagues on the Government's response to recommendations outlined by High Court Judge Charles Meenan. Justice Meenan was tasked with examining alternative routes for women affected by the scandal to avoid adversarial court proceedings. He recommended a tribunal be set up to hear and determine claims arising out of the controversy. Hearings would be held in private and be less formal than court proceedings, under the recommendations from the judge. Mr Harris is expected to outline details of the plans for a tribunal once the women and families of those affected by the scandal are fully updated. A "sophisticated" hoax bomb was left outside the home of an innocent Hutch family member - leading to a city centre apartment block being evacuated. Gardai were called to the complex near Upper Dorset Street, Dublin, on Monday night after a brick was thrown through the window of a ground-floor apartment. Officers arrived at the scene and discovered a suspect device which they believed to be a pipe bomb. The Army's explosive ordnance disposal unit was dispatched to the apartment block. Members of the Special Detective Unit were also called to the scene because of the serious nature of the incident. The woman targeted is a Hutch family member in her 30s who has no involvement in crime. However, because she is related to the Hutch family she is considered under threat as part of the feud which has claimed up to 18 lives. She is a close relative of Gareth Hutch (35), who was shot dead in May 2016. A car belonging to her was previously set alight outside a north city apartment block. Abused children may be re-victimised and evidence could be undermined due to interviewing practices used by Tusla to assess the credibility of complainants. The stark warning came in a report submitted to the Government by the country's leading child protection expert. In the report, special rapporteur on child protection Professor Geoffrey Shannon also highlighted a number of cases where there were deficits in Tusla's handling of retrospective abuse allegations. These are allegations made some time after the alleged abuse occurred. He recommended the setting up of a specialist team of forensic investigators to assess such complaints. Prof Shannon identified the interviewing of children and adult victims as "a key area of concern". Under the Children First Guidelines, joint specialist interviews are supposed to take place where it is deemed necessary by both gardai and Tusla. However, one case examined by Prof Shannon demonstrated such joint co-operation may not take place in practice and that the protocol does not work effectively at all times. He said co-operation between gardai and Tusla in respect of the interviewing of child victims of sexual abuse "may not be functioning sufficiently". "It appears Tusla sometimes insists on a credibility test in respect of allegation of child abuse [made] by a child and it seems that children are being unnecessarily interviewed," he found. "This may have the effect of re-victimising the child victim and may also potentially undermine the evidential value of the evidence of a child abuse victim." Prof Shannon found there was a specific problem when it came to the investigation of retrospective allegations of abuse. The role of Tusla in the protection of unidentified children from the potential risk associated with on-going contact with a person who is alleged to have abused a child in the past was unclear, he said. Prof Shannon reported that the agency had said there was a lack of clarity as to its express powers in this area under the 1991 Child Care Act. He identified one case where investigations into retrospective allegations were ongoing after three-and-a-half years, yet no steps had been taken to mitigate the risk of further abuse by the suspected abuser. The report recommended that the assessment of whether or not a retrospective complaint is substantiated should be carried out by dedicated specialist teams of forensic investigators. They would have a separate role and function to Tusla social workers. The report recommended that child care law cases should always take place on a different day to other proceedings in light of the highly sensitive matters being litigated. He also called for the assignment of judges with comprehensive training in relation to child care law. The report also calls for the abolition of the direct provision system of accommodating asylum seekers. Prof Shannon recommended a time limit of between six and nine months be introduced after which an individual who has not yet received a first instance decision on their status should be able to leave the direct provision system, live independently and access social welfare payments. New penalties for speeding could be dramatically reduced after an intervention by Fine Gael Cabinet ministers. Transport Minister Shane Ross committed to reviewing his proposed speeding laws after he clashed with Fine Gael ministers. A Cabinet sub-committee will now review the strict penalty point regime for speeding, which could see motorists receive severe penalties based on how fast they are travelling beyond the speed limit. Every Fine Gael minister from rural Ireland is understood to have raised concerns with elements of the new speeding laws at Cabinet. However, Rural Affairs Minister Michael Ring was the most vocal. Last night, Mr Ross hailed the Cabinet decision to back the drafting of the new laws and welcomed a review of the contentious elements of the proposed legislation. "I think it is time we focused particularly on the penalties for speeding, and made sure that those penalties increase according to how much people exceed the speed limit," he said. "The more people exceed the speed limit, the greater the danger," he added. The minister intends to introduce speeding penalties based on how much over the limit a motorist is driving. He also wants automatic fines for not carrying a driving licence. Mr Ross's proposal is that motorists driving faster than 10kmh above the speed limit would get an 80 fine and between three and five penalty points. Motorists driving 20kmh over the speed limit would be given a 150 fine and between four and six points.If you are caught travelling between 20kmh and 30kmh over the speed limit, the fine would hit 200 and up to seven penalty points. And anyone driving in excess of 30kmh above the speed limits will be charged with dangerous driving. Sources described the mood within Fine Gael over the clampdown as "close to revolt". The Irish Independent has also learned that Mr Ross's Independent Alliance colleague Kevin 'Boxer' Moran is "going ballistic" about what he viewed as an attack on rural Ireland. A number of Fine Gael backbenchers also voiced opposition at a meeting with Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, and ministers echoed those concerns during a pre-Cabinet gathering yesterday. Their anger was then directed at Mr Ross when the full Cabinet met, although sources say he "kept his cool". "Ring really went out on a limb. He was very angry and wanted the whole thing scrapped," said one minister. Ultimately, Mr Ross proposed having a Cabinet sub-committee before he moves on to the next stage of the legislative process. Fine Gael sources interpreted this as an acceptance that the proposed penalties "will never be heard of again". However, other Government figures said that while tweaks are possible "the idea of graduated penalties is accepted". Quite a few claims and predictions were made in the course of previewing five new Toyota hybrid models in Dublin recently. The cars include the new RAV4 hybrid (here January 7), the Corolla hatch (Jan 16), Corolla saloon and Touring Sport (mid-Feb) and the Camry (April 4). There is no doubt that hybrids, including plug-ins, will account for a higher percentage of buyers in 2019 as they are seen as the immediate step from diesel. Which is where the claims began. We were told that diesel's rapid decline will accelerate. Toyota, of course, are contributing to that by no longer selling new diesel passenger cars. Executives also said the 1pc surcharge on new diesels was "only the tip of the iceberg". And they forecast that Dublin would not escape city bans on cars in the medium term, especially those with high emissions. Contrary to perception, they claim that rural Ireland is driving the swing to hybrid. And they give Offaly as an example. It has recorded the biggest percentage increase (142pc) in hybrid buying (from a small base, admittedly) this year. Reflecting the swing to hybrid generally, the company said it has 800 orders, even though people have not seen the cars in the flesh yet. And there are a reported 6,000 people waiting to drive the cars when they arrive. Half the Camrys have been pre-sold. Toyota is also saying it is beginning to see people turning back towards saloons from SUVs - that would be a real reversal if it continues. Significantly, the firm also believes hybrids and plug-ins will run well after the current deadline of 2030. But the company itself will launch 10 new EVs by the early 2020s. Meantime, it is further forecasting that 80pc of all cars it sells next year will be a hybrid. Virtually everything else will be petrol. Not having a diesel won't affect their market share either, Toyota reckons. Comparisons are odious, but how much more will buyers have to pay for a new Corolla hybrid than for an outgoing model? The simple answer is around 1,200, but that is comparing with a 1.4-litre diesel, which, for obvious reasons, is not like for like. Certainly not on looks and styling, which have improved significantly. The main event, given that I've driven the Corolla hatch and estate, was the saloon (world's best-selling car: 40m since 1966). It's big, roomy and looks the part. There was heavy emphasis on spec levels - again something that obviates comparisons. Prices start around the 27,700 mark. The saloon with the 1.8-litre hybrid has a 2,700mm wheelbase, which is the same as the Avensis and Corolla estate. The 470-litre boot is slightly up despite the larger battery pack. Rear legroom is improved and it's got a different front than the hatchback. Meanwhile, Toyota expects the RAV4's Luna grade to be most popular trim. The SUV has a new 2.5-litre hybrid powertrain (Dynamic Force) and it develops 218bhp (v 197bhp for old one). It has a 30mm longer wheelbase, bigger boot and more passenger room. The Camry has a 218bhp 2.5-litre hybrid powertrain too (4.2l/100km) and a 524-litre boot. Apart from the steering wheel, nothing else is shared with the other models. The firm sees a lot of premium drivers taking a look at it. All cars come with three years' free servicing. Service sinks: Irish Ferries claims passengers prefer to sail to France from Dublin instead of Rosslare. PA Photo Irish Ferries is unlikely to operate a service between Rosslare and France next year, in a major blow to the south-east region. Irish Continental Group (ICG), which is behind the ferry firm, claimed passengers had expressed a preference for travelling from Dublin. "Irish Ferries wish to inform our customers that we're unlikely to operate a service between Rosslare and France in 2019," it said in a statement yesterday. "We continue to keep this situation under review. "Our new WB Yeats ship will operate from Dublin to Cherbourg," it added. Verona Murphy, president of the Irish Road Haulage Association, hit out at the announcement and said it made no sense. "There's absolutely no reason why the WB Yeats can't operate from Rosslare," she said. Irish Ferries wish to inform our customers that we're unlikely to operate a service between Rosslare & France in 2019. We continue to keep this situation under review. Our new W.B. Yeats ship will operate from Dublin to Cherbourg & is available to book on https://t.co/1rjF6XTLpL Irish Ferries (@Irish_Ferries) December 18, 2018 Ms Murphy said hauliers would now look at using a different operator. Significantly more traffic would be forced on to the M50, she said, and she asked how the network would cope with this. "You're sending families on the way to their holidays to an industrialised port and into the congestion of the M50." Brendan Howlin, the Labour leader and Co Wexford TD, also criticised the plan. He said the decision to abandon the shortest sea route to France just as Brexit kicks in was "inexplicable". The ferry company claimed a majority of its customers have a "clear preference" for the more central location and easy access of Dublin. Junior Transport Minister Brendan Griffin last night said that, given the importance of the service for the South East region, he has asked his officials to "engage with the company". "From a tourism perspective, while it mainly facilitates Irish tourists holidaying in France, it also brings French and other European tourists to the South East region," he added. Last year, up to 19,000 passengers had their holiday plans thrown into disarray after the company announced delays to the arrival of the WB Yeats ferry. The 154m ship was due to start sailing between Ireland and France and the UK from July 30 last year, but all sailings up to September 13 were later cancelled. The company has said it will finally arrive in Dublin this week. In recent months, customers had taken to social media to express fear for their holidays as the company delayed publishing its French schedules for 2019. Last month, ICG said the lack of clarity around the UK's exit of the EU "may have a negative impact on consumer sentiment". The company's Rosslare-Pembroke route will operate as normal, it says. Read more: Passengers on their way to Dublin Airport's Terminal 2. There may still be several sleeps 'til Christmas, but Tourism Ireland is calling it. 2018 was the "best ever year" for tourism to this island. By the end of the year, a record 11.2 million visitors will have come to Ireland north and south, the marketing organisation says, spending 6.1 billion in the process. Those figures represent a rise of over 500,000 visitors and a 10pc jump in spending as compared to 2017, driven by growth across North American, Mainland European, Australian and several emerging markets. In other news yesterday, Dublin Airport announced that it had broken the 30 million passenger milestone for the first time in its 78-year history. Passengers are up 6pc this year, with a busy Christmas yet to come. Several factors have driven Ireland's tourism boom, including increased air access and a general economic upswing, as well as exposure from events like Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's royal visit and a blockbuster role in Star Wars and Game of Thrones. However, despite heading into 2019 "in a position of some strength", as Tourism Ireland CEO Niall Gibbons puts it, there are also causes for concern. A higher VAT rate kicks in for Irish hospitality businesses from January 1, for example, and Dublin is looking like an increasingly expensive destination. Then, of course, there is Brexit. Revenue in the tourism industry could be hit by as much as 390m in the event of a 'no deal' Brexit, Failte Ireland CEO Paul Kelly told an Oireachtas committee last month. The tourism sector supports approximately 260,000 jobs in communities all across the country," according to Minister of State for Tourism and Sport, Brendan Griffin, who has said Ireland's tourism budget will increase by 26pc next year. "Our focus going forward is to ensure that we continue to grow in a sustainable way and to further build on the success that the regions have experienced through initiatives such as the Wonders of the Wild Atlantic Way and The Call of the Wild." Tourism Ireland's budget has been increased by 10 million to 45 million for 2019, and it hopes to grow overseas revenue by a further 6pc next year. A new global marketing campaign, 'Fill your heart with Ireland', will shortly be rolled out over 20 countries on TV, print, cinema, outdoor ads and online. Echoing Failte Ireland's growing focus on 'regionality' and 'seasonality' to encourage tourism outside of peak times and destinations, the campaign will feature less-visited locations and aims to attract visitors year-round. A Tourism Action Plan 2019 to 2021 will also be published shortly. Read more: With the Tories fighting like rats in a sack over how to deliver Brexit, what the British people need is a political Pied Piper to chase them from government. Regrettably, what they are stuck with is a tone-deaf Jeremy Corbyn who prefers to stick his foot, and not a pipe, in his gob. British politics is undergoing one of its biggest crises in generations but, instead of heroically rising to the occasion, its politicians are undergoing a collective meltdown. Relations between different factions of the Tory party are so poisonous that last week two of its MPs, Brexiteer Andrew Bridgen and Theresa May loyalist James Cleverly, refused to stand beside each other during an interview. They loathe each other so much they can't even share the same oxygen. There are toddlers in preschools all over the country who comport themselves with more dignity and decorum during playground spats. As the Tories continue to scrap and brawl, having lost any semblance of reason and rationality, it is long past time the opposition stepped in to save the country from their bickering and indecision. But, look across the chamber in the House of Commons and what you see is a Labour Party that is equally riven with rancour and led by a man so plodding and inarticulate that he has been unable to land a single punch on an almost fatally wounded prime minister. The Labour Party has been invisible throughout this Brexit debacle - arguably, the biggest threat to Britain's economy and democracy since World War II. Other than a few notable rebels, the party has added almost nothing to the debate and has no ideas on how to extricate the country from the quicksand it is submerging into. The strategy of the Labour Party, as far as there is one, seems to be to sit back and watch the Tories eat themselves - and then, when they are done gorging and no one is left standing, to take over. The only problem with this is that the Tories are also devouring the country's prospects and prosperity in their internecine war. Already, Brexit is costing the British people 500m (556m) a week, with the economy estimated to be up to 2.5pc smaller than it would have been if the referendum result had been different. Yesterday, we heard the UK government was finally pulling the trigger on its no-deal planning by splashing 2bn in contingency funding among different departments. A large chunk of this money is being spent, according to Health Secretary Matt Hancock, by his department - not on the NHS or on homecare for elderly people, but on fridges. The UK's department of health is now the largest buyer of fridges in the world because they are urgently needed to stockpile medicines in the event of a no-deal calamity. While cash is being spent with wild abandon on the folly that is Brexit, the UK is currently dealing with the biggest homelessness and housing crisis in its history. There are at least 320,000 homeless people in Britain, including a staggering 170,000 in London alone. What do these people think about hundreds of thousands of pounds being spent on fridges instead of houses? This is madness. Utter madness - and the Tories deserve to be hounded from office for at least 10 decades for overseeing this self-inflicted catastrophe. But, compounding this tragedy, there is nobody in a leadership position within the Labour Party who is willing to shout that the emperor has no clothes - that Brexit is a disaster that will deliver only chaos and poverty. On Monday, in the House of Commons, Mr Corbyn put in one of his more woeful appearances when he finally decided enough was enough - and opted to put down a motion of no confidence in Theresa May instead of the government. He couldn't even get that right, as the government had the power to refuse to give time to his motion, which it duly did. So, his bold move ended up being another damp squib, resulting in egg being sprayed all over his face and Theresa May emerging unblemished. Now deceased Labour MP Denis Healey famously quipped that debating with Tory MP Geoffrey Howe was like "being savaged by a dead sheep". Mr Corbyn's embarrassingly awful oratorical skills don't even reach that 'dead sheep' threshold. The perceived wisdom is that Mr Corbyn has been unable to take a definitive stance on Brexit because there are many Labour strongholds, especially in the north of the country, where large majorities voted for Brexit. But how can Labour expect to change anyone's mind if the party is not willing to be honest, about the dangers that Brexit poses, with those who support it? Instead of telling Labour-voting Brexiteers that leaving the EU will make them poorer - to the tune of between 100bn to 140bn over the next 10 years - the party leadership is still propagating delusions of achieving a "Lexit", a socialist Brexit, in which Corbynites sock it to the neoliberals running Europe and create a leftist nirvana. Of course, absent from this rose-tinted analysis is any explanation of where Mr Corbyn will find the billions he wants to inject into services, infrastructure and housing when everything has been gobbled up by the insatiable money-monster that is Brexit. In recent interviews, Mr Corbyn has insisted that if he were prime minister he would be able to march over to Brussels and demand a better deal than the one Mrs May managed to negotiate - one in which Britain was able to retain all of the benefits of EU membership and jettison all of the responsibilities, like free movement. And he would do all of this before the March 29 deadline. Clearly, this is a complete fantasy - but being unhinged from reality is now the norm, and not the exception, in British politics. Depressingly, free movement, in which UK citizens have the right to live and work wherever they want in the EU, is still being depicted by those on the left in the Labour Party as a burden and not a benefit of EU membership. While people like Jacob Rees-Mogg and Mr Corbyn desire Brexit for different reasons, it should alarm members of the Labour Party that they are on the same side of the argument as an aristocratic disaster capitalist. With just three months left to go before Britain crashes out of the EU, real leadership is required to halt the death spiral that Labour and the Tories are both trapped in. There is nothing to suggest Mr Corbyn can deliver it. The free movement of citizens within the EU is a fundamental right. Within the Schengen Area, this freedom is enhanced and once a person is within one member state of Schengen, he/she can travel anywhere within the other member states without further internal border checks. This freedom applies to 400 million EU citizens, as well as visitors admitted to any one Schengen country. For external visitors to a Schengen country, the border check is at the first country of entrance. The Schengen Area encompasses most EU states (though not Ireland or Britain) and non-EU states such as Norway, Switzerland, Iceland and Liechtenstein. There are 26 countries in Schengen, including 22 EU states, with others waiting to join. At present, citizens of Liechtenstein or Iceland, though they are not EU citizens, have greater freedom of travel within these 26 countries than Irish citizens do. This is because we opted to remain part of the common travel area with Britain. The UK opted out of Schengen, we did the same. However, Ireland obtained the right to opt in to Schengen at a future date. Things have changed. Britain is leaving the EU. If we were to join Schengen now it would elevate our EU commitment, bring us closer to the European core and out from under one of the last remaining Irish/British common arrangements. To do so would, of course, cause some disruption, for travel between the islands of Ireland and Britain. For the Republic, this would be relatively painless. Airlines demand passport identity already. Coming into the Republic at present, Irish citizens go through immigration control. The porous Border with Northern Ireland would present problems for travel between there and Britain. Any traveller from the 26 Schengen states visiting the Republic could easily enter Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK. Official Britain rails against immigration so much that such an arrangement would surely lead to a border in the Irish Sea. Passport control between the North and Britain would likely be introduced. Out of consideration for the sensitivities of the Northern unionist majority, we stayed in the common travel area. Because of this, the Republic's citizens continue to have lesser travel rights within the EU/Schengen than some non-EU citizens, such as Norwegians. The tantrum-throwing DUP seems to take our accommodation with the UK for granted. In a November 2017 report for the Constitutional Affairs Committee of the European Parliament, Dr David Phinnemore and Dr Katy Hayward, of Queen's University Belfast, provided an overview of the Good Friday Agreement and an assessment of the potential challenges posed to its implementation by Brexit. They also considered "flexible and imaginative solutions" by which the agreement can continue to be effective. To minimise the threat Brexit poses to the agreement, minimal disruption is imperative. "This means maintaining as much of the status quo as possible in terms, for example, of the free movement of goods, services, capital and people, and ensuring every effort is made to avoid any hardening of the Border," they say. The total trade between the Republic and the North in 1993 was IR1,127m. Within a dozen years this had doubled to 2,988m. In 1993, Britain was the main market for Northern Irish outbound goods, 54.5pc as against 10.6pc to the Republic. In 2015, the Republic accounted for 61pc of Northern Ireland's exports to the EU and 34pc of its total exports, which by then had also grown exponentially. The trend continues upwards, because both Northern Ireland and the Republic are within the single market, with an established regulatory environment. The active interest of the EU, through programmes for economic and regional development, has been a central driver and facilitator of Ireland's economic integration. The EU single market has been the most powerful element. Lord Kilclooney (former Unionist MP John Taylor) has openly boasted about the 12.1bn (13.5bn) block transfer Northern Ireland receives from Britain annually. It received block transfers in all of the years prior to EU membership too. This did little for Northern Ireland's place in the world. Joining the EU with Britain and Ireland did. In doing so, Northern Ireland was given three permanent seats in the European Parliament, the only international political forum of real importance in which it has direct representation. In addition, the Republic's taxpayers funded road development in Northern Ireland to help keep the two-way flow of trade fluid. Against this backdrop, the adolescent behaviour of some DUP politicians beggars belief. They continue to be chauffeur-driven, paid salaries and expenses, and even ennobled. All the trappings of power and none of the responsibility. The notion of some DUP politicians that the "slippery slope" to Dublin will follow because of some regulatory harmonisation, or that the "slope" is even available to them, is a sign they have lost the plot. The new Article 3 of the Constitution of Ireland requires any future agreement on Irish unity to be put to the people in the Republic. There would also be a Border poll in Northern Ireland. Whatever prospects there are for a majority in favour in the North, the prospects of a majority in the Republic favouring taking on the estate of the DUP while it remains pampered, truculent, underemployed and oversubsidised is remote. Certainly not at a cost of 14bn per year. The DUP should stop flattering itself and start earning its living. So we mark 100 days to "B-Day" March 29, 2019, today. The noise and indecision continues in London and no-deal Brexit preparations are now being more publicly ramped up. Amid the noise in Britain there is a continuing attack on Ireland, with large sections of the UK's viscerally anti-EU media personalising these attacks to Taoiseach Leo Varadkar. In recent days, we have seen media reports that UK Prime Minister Theresa May "loathes" Mr Varadkar. There have been several weeks during which sections of the UK media - which have already made the European Union the most vilified entity in this media's varied history - have now turned their ire on Ireland. It reflects a section of the uber-Brexiteers, who have been blaming Brussels and other key capitals for its own self-inflicted injuries, feeling the need to vary its attack targets. So, Dublin and the Taoiseach are in these ultra-Europhobes' crosshairs. They really should have a better memory if they are to succeed in such spurious lines of argument. The reality is that it has taken way more than a year for the Irish Border issue to get on to the Brexit agenda in Britain. Both politicians, and key media commentators, for a long time seemed infuriatingly blind to the Brexit implications for the Irish Border. They were oblivious to the threats to a fragile peace in the North, as voiced by key British figures like former PSNI chief constable Hugh Orde. They also were either culpably ignorant, or blissfully unaware, of the implications of that stretch of ground between Dundalk and Derry becoming an international EU-UK frontier. But to listen only to the UK discourse for the past month, you would struggle to grasp that reality. Just 10 months ago, the Brexit convert of 2016 Boris Johnson was, as UK foreign minister, comparing the Irish Border to the London borough boundaries between Camden and Westminster. Now he is singing a very different tune. It is exasperating and sometimes makes one reflect that little has changed since the stage-Irish racism in Britain of past centuries. But let's not succumb to this time-wasting bilge - let's look to comments by former UK prime minister John Major, and others on all sides of the political spectrum on these islands. We note the piece this past weekend in the Conservative Party-supporting magazine 'The Spectator'. It is written by Brendan O'Neill, who yesterday burnished his Irish-UK credentials on RTE's excellent 'Today With Sean O'Rourke'. Commenting on the Taoiseach's Brexit stances, the writer asks a surely rhetorical question about Mr Varadkar: "Who does he think he is?" Such treatment may do An Taoiseach no harm at home. But let's not get distracted. The Irish Government still has a big job to do. Ireland, with fewer than five million people, must stay in tow with the 500 million people of the European Union. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex arriving for the Queen's Christmas lunch at Buckingham Palace, London The Duke and Duchess of Sussex arriving for the Queen's Christmas lunch at Buckingham Palace, London The Duke and Duchess of Sussex arriving for the Queen's Christmas lunch at Buckingham Palace, London The Duke and Duchess of Sussex arriving for the Queen's Christmas lunch at Buckingham Palace, London The Duke of Cambridge, Prince George and the Duchess of Cambridge arriving for the Queen's Christmas lunch at Buckingham Palace, London The Duke of Cambridge and the Duchess of Cambridge arriving for the Queen's Christmas lunch at Buckingham Palace, London The Duke of Cambridge, Prince George and the Duchess of Cambridge arriving for the Queen's Christmas lunch at Buckingham Palace, London The Countess of Wessex and her daughter Lady Louise Windsor arriving for the Queen's Christmas lunch at Buckingham Palace, London The Countess of Wessex and her daughter Lady Louise Windsor arriving for the Queen's Christmas lunch at Buckingham Palace, London The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge arriving for the Queen's Christmas lunch at Buckingham Palace, London It's not every week you get two Kate Middleton-casually-driving-in-her-Range-Rover-shots into Buckingham Palace, but it is Christmas week and miracles clearly do happen. Britain's highest ranking royals made their way to Buckingham Palace today for Queen Elizabeth's annual Christmas lunch, a scene from which we get very little insight except for a quick glance at the duchesses and co making their way through the gates. It will also be the first time (that we know of) Meghan Markle and Kate Middleton will be at the same family event since rumours of a rift between them became so public. The Duchess of Sussex, who made her first appearance in some time yesterday, beamed in black lace, wearing a pair of diamond earrings, while her husband drove. Similarly, Kate hopped into the passenger seat in a pink dress, while William took the wheel and five-year-old son Prince George appeared in the backseat next to his sister Princess Charlotte (three) and their nanny Maria Teresa Turrion Borrallo. Princess Beatrice was snapped in a check coat from River Island and Sophie, Countess of Wessex adopted a more casual approach as she and her daughter Lady Louise Windsor also made their way to the event. Expand Close The Duchess of Cambridge arriving for the Queen's Christmas lunch at Buckingham Palace, London / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp The Duchess of Cambridge arriving for the Queen's Christmas lunch at Buckingham Palace, London Meanwhile, a new report in PEOPLE magazine includes quotes from an insider who says that Meghan and Harry's 2019 move to Frogmore House will be the best thing to allow any tensions to heal. [The move] will be the best thing for all of them, a family friend told the magazine. Like Meghan and Kate, Harry and William have totally different roles. But the brothers will always come together because they are Dianas sons. Expand Close The Duke of Cambridge, Prince George and the Duchess of Cambridge arriving for the Queen's Christmas lunch at Buckingham Palace, London / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp The Duke of Cambridge, Prince George and the Duchess of Cambridge arriving for the Queen's Christmas lunch at Buckingham Palace, London Wives do change the dynamic, and they both have very strong wives," another source said. "If you bring two independent-minded women from the real world into the royal world, they are going to want to have an impact. An ordinary woman is not going to get to become a princess, says the palace insider. There is a necessary strength of character and ambition and single-mindedness. It takes someone really strong. That is Kate and Meghan. Expand Close The Duke and Duchess of Sussex arriving for the Queen's Christmas lunch at Buckingham Palace, London / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp The Duke and Duchess of Sussex arriving for the Queen's Christmas lunch at Buckingham Palace, London (L-R) Prince Charles, Prince of Wales, Prince Andrew, Duke of York, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, Queen Elizabeth II, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, Prince William, Duke of Cambridge and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge watch the RAF flypast on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, as members of the Royal Family attend events to mark the centenary of the RAF on July 10, 2018 in London, England. (Photo by Chris Jackson/Getty Images) The new series will document how The Queen passes on her knowledge to her younger family members (John Stillwell/PA) Kate is considered a good girl, while Meghan could rebel against royal rules. But even though Meghan and Harrys move to Frogmore cottage was ostensibly to avoid the stifling atmosphere at Kensington Palace, the newest member of the royal soap opera is said to have annoyed Queen Elizabeth a definite no-no in the straitened world of the Windsors This photograph taken by Chris Allerton of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex at their Wedding Reception at Frogmore House Queen Elizabeth II with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex during a group photo at the Queen's Young Leaders Awards Ceremony at Buckingham Palace, London (L-R) Queen Elizabeth II, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex watch the RAF flypast on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, as members of the Royal Family attend events to mark the centenary of the RAF on July 10, 2018 in London, England. (Photo by Chris Jackson/Getty Images) Thomas Markle's hopes for an intervention by Britain's Queen Elizabeth and his relationship with daughter Meghan Markle are a pipe dream, according to royal insiders. In yet another interview, Thomas (73) spoke to Piers Morgan on Good Morning Britain about his relationship with his daughter, from whom he is now estranged, saying he texts her every day and she does not reply. He pleads publicly through interviews and previously claimed he contacted his ex-wife Doria Ragland for guidance. Despite the fact that his tactic of obsessive text messages and sharing private photos and correspondence only seems to be driving his daughter further away, he still insists on speaking out at every chance. "Im not sure why its happening and Im waiting, Im reaching out," he told GMB, before pleading for her grandmother-in-law to get involved and help heal the family rift. "I would appreciate anything she could do. I would think she would want to resolve family problems. All families, royal or otherwise, are the same and they should all be together, certainly around the holidays. Expand Close Thomas Markle on Good Morning Britain / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Thomas Markle on Good Morning Britain Markle cut off contact with her father after it was revealed he was working with paparazzi in setting up favourable pictures and coverage of him at home in Mexico in the run up to the royal wedding. He pulled out of walking her up the aisle just days before the ceremony claiming he had a heart attack. Since, he has given a number of interviews on British television, TMZ and with the Mail on Sunday. His plea for the monarch's involvement attracted even more attention than usual with more traditional news outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post picking up on the story over the last 24 hours. Read More "The Queen is a dignified woman," a source told The Mirror. "Even if she disagreed with the way her grandsons wife or indeed her staff were dealing with the matter, she would certainly not become involved on this level." Earlier this month, Mr Markle shared private correspondence between him and his daughter with a Sunday newspaper, including Valentine's Day letters she sent him over the years and a copy of her wedding invitiation. He is pleading for contact with her while simultaneously calling her "controlling". "I know we had differences at the beginning, some question about my heart attack and so forth," he said. "The unfortunate thing about my daughter and Harry is that they believe what they read in the papers. For the first year, they were telling me, 'Never believe those things.' But now they [think] I'm saying things I'm not saying," he said. "I think that might be one of the problems, but...I don't have the answer yet." Expand Close Meghan, The Duchess of Sussex, arrives to visit the Royal Variety Charitys residential nursing and care home Brinsworth House, in west London, Britain, December 18, 2018. REUTERS/Toby Melville / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Meghan, The Duchess of Sussex, arrives to visit the Royal Variety Charitys residential nursing and care home Brinsworth House, in west London, Britain, December 18, 2018. REUTERS/Toby Melville Video of the Day Morgan tweeted afterwards that Mr Markle was not paid for the interview. Vogue Williams and Spencer Matthews with their new baby on the cover of Hello! (Hello magazine) Spencer Matthews and Vogue Williams attend the Pride of Britain Awards 2018 at The Grosvenor House Hotel on October 29, 2018 in London, England. (Photo by Jeff Spicer/Getty Images) Someone pass me the baby wipes. Perhaps its because it has been 10 years since Ive had a full nights sleep, but I am fighting the urge to wipe the beatific, new parent glow from the faces of Vogue Williams and Spencer Matthews. In a recent interview Matthews, God bless him, said parenthood isn't as tough as everyone says albeit crediting that to his wife Vogues organisation skills, which allow their home to run smoothly. Vogue concurs: post-baby, it only takes her ten minutes to do her makeup - with one hand! Follow Vogue on Instagram, and you can see just how organised she is. Too busy to go to the hairdressers? No problem they can come to her! Too busy to head to the gym? No problem she has weights at home! Not since Melania Trump decorated the White House with grammatically incorrect slogan-bearing pencils has womanhood been blessed with such exemplary prepping. Theres nothing here that speaks to the high wire balancing act the rest of us mere mortal parents tread each day. Nothing here that explains how Vogue gets the dinner on the table in a cramped rented apartment while taking an important work call as third child dumps the contents of second childs potty on top of first childs head. Extracting herself from that situation without getting the rotavirus or sacked - now that would be organised. Pillory me for rich-shaming (is that a thing yet?) the happy couple if you must, but there is something about this parenting is a walk in the park, people! narrative that grates, because it comes from a couple who havent the humility to recognise why. And that why is cash. Isnt everything easier when you have cash, and no need to 9-to-5 it to put food on the table? Matthews is the reality-tv-star son of Laird and Lady Glen Affric. Vogue is a model, TV presenter and DJ who gets paid for showing off her life in glossy magazines. And Im happy for that little bit of sparkle they sprinkle on my life as they go about their business, but I shant go so far as to imbibe parenting advice from a man wearing velvet slippers. If your child is screaming his head off, he's either too hot, too cold, tired or hungry. People make it sound like rocket science and it's not," Williams told Hello! Magazine. With their baby all of three months old, Matthews would be better to hold his wheesht. For all of the parents out there struggling to comfort babies with chronic reflux, or sensory processing difficulties, or lactose intolerance, or autism, or bronchiolitis or any one of the hundreds of childhood conditions that cant be soothed away with our without cash - rocket science sounds easy. Experience teaches us that it doesnt, and a little bit of we know were lucky from these newbies wouldnt have gone astray. Expand Close Spencer Matthews and Vogue Williams attend the Pride of Britain Awards 2018 at The Grosvenor House Hotel on October 29, 2018 in London, England. (Photo by Jeff Spicer/Getty Images) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Spencer Matthews and Vogue Williams attend the Pride of Britain Awards 2018 at The Grosvenor House Hotel on October 29, 2018 in London, England. (Photo by Jeff Spicer/Getty Images) With a new E4 reality series, Spencer and Vogue Adult(ish), primed to follow the couple as they adjust to the realities of new parenthood, maybe that humility is coming. Until then, hold the baby wipes. A bit of spit on a hankie will do just fine. Be honest: when was the last time you posted a picture on social media without giving it the full FaceTune treatment first? Or even just a precursory nip/tuck, then a crop of the 'bingo wing' here, a filter on root regrowth there? Whether it's pictures of our food, our kids, our holidays or our new haircuts, it's a rare and hardy soul that decides to do away with the array of filters at our fingertips. Yet a bizarre irony is afoot. While putting our best (and possibly fake) foot forward has become the norm in real life, the traditional arena of the fantastical and the escapist is coming increasingly under fire for doing what it's done for decades. Magazine covers, model shoots and megabucks ad campaigns have long had aspiration, not to mention a severe reality tweak, as their very cornerstones. Yet thanks to the actions of a handful of body positivity campaigners, celebrities and industry heavyweights, airbrushing has taken on a sinister, seamy reputation. Things have become politicised. People are speaking up about how excessive media airbrushing has shifted the goalposts for every woman, changing the world's already unrealistic beauty standards. 'Aspirational' and 'fantasy' are no longer the beauty biz's buzzwords: 'healthy', 'inclusivity', 'transparency' and 'authenticity' are. We have, say campaigners, guzzled the lie of perfection for too long. The big question, of course, is this: in a world where filters and FaceTuning are less the exception and more the norm at the hands of mere civilians, is the beauty and fashion industry about to take trailblazing steps into a post-airbrushing world? Or rather, can they? Those who have ostensibly built careers on the fantastical qualities that airbrushing affords have been first past the post with their protestations. Presenter-turned-actress Jameela Jamil has become something of a powerhouse in the battle against the airbrush, which she calls a 'crime against women'. Now, Jamil - who is open about her body image struggles as a teenager - goes so far as to invoke a 'no retouching' caveat when posing for magazine photoshoots (joining models such as Iskra Lawrence, Robyn Lawley and Ashley Graham). "Please explain to me how this isn't bad for young/all people to see these doctored images that they don't know have been doctored," she tweeted earlier this week. Even more recently, Nigella Lawson has wandered into the fray, revealing that she is now requesting that TV companies leave her appearance well alone: "I've had to tell American TV stations not to airbrush my sticking-out stomach," she tweeted. "The hatred of fat, and assumption that we'd all be grateful to be airbrushed thinner, is pernicious." The latest arrival into the BoPo, anti-Photoshop camp is Emily Atack, fresh from an appearance on I'm A Celebrity. Recalling how she found it hard to find work as a 'curvier' girl, Atack revealed earlier this week that she had deleted her many in-phone photo-editing apps, and is happy to embrace her unvarnished, authentic beauty. The retail giants sniff a seismic trend when they sense one, and Aerie, H&M and ASOS have implemented no-editing policies in their campaigns. "We have a moral obligation to ban the airbrush," said Debenhams, adding they "want to help customers feel confident about their figures" (surely the resulting publicity boost was a mere bonus). Expand Close Nigella Lawson outside The Late Late Show studios at RTE / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Nigella Lawson outside The Late Late Show studios at RTE The airbrushing debate has cracked open a great many truisms about the media's shortcomings, specifically its contribution to our frankly preposterous physical standards. The links between mental health challenges, eating disorders, media images and the ensuing selfie culture are calcifying with every passing day. But will making airbrushing - formerly the bedrock of the vast chasm between celebrity and mere mortal - illegal really change anything? Video of the Day Read More It's likely that being drawn to the glossy, the dreamy and the impossibly beautiful will remain in our nature. However, a wider representation of different facial features, bodies, skin types and colours would, in theory, make a consumer more 'media literate', and able to pinpoint the join where real ends and unattainably beautiful begins. Even before the picture editing tool Photoshop was invented in 1987, women have been held to beauty standards that have felt just beyond reach. It's the very foundation on which we consume media in all its forms: make a person feel just about bad enough about her appearance to spur her into action, but not bad enough that she can't envisage a miracle cream/dress/handbag elevating her from the realm of the ordinary. Airbrushing is certainly having a moment, but other factors should be running in tandem to these sea changes. Carrying a few extra pounds shouldn't be seen as 'letting oneself go'. Bad skin shouldn't be synonymous with a bad lifestyle. Wrinkles and ageing shouldn't be considered a defeat at the hands of nature. Cellulite shouldn't be the preserve of women who just don't take enough care of themselves. Only then will we truly embrace the 'authentic'. Re-education is sorely needed to break down the beauty standards that seem to hold so many women hostage but knowing a Snapchat filter from a Photoshop tweak is the tip of the iceberg. Whatever about the encouraging battle cries of Jameela, H&M et al, most of us are not quite ready to give up on that tweaked, new and improved version of ourselves just yet. A blind amphibian that buries its head below ground level has been named after US President Donald Trump. The caecilian, a type of Panamanian amphibian, was given the new title Demorphis donaldtrumpi after an environmental construction company bought the rights to name it for 25,000 dollars (20,000) at a Rainforest Trust auction. Envirobuild said it made the decision because of President Trumps views on climate change. We bought the naming rights for a caecilian that can only see light and dark at @RainforestTrust's charity auction. @RealDonaldTrump must see the world in black & white to think climate change is a hoax; hes a perfect namesake! #COP24 #charitytuesday https://t.co/497929Dklk pic.twitter.com/xD2YXxBJ3W EnviroBuild (@ENVIROBUILDcom) December 18, 2018 Founder Aidan Bell said the name caecilians is taken from the Latin Caecus, meaning blind', pointing out that the creatures have rudimentary eyes which can only detect light or dark. Capable of seeing the world only in black and white, Donald Trump has claimed that climate change is a hoax by the Chinese, Mr Bell added. That referred to a tweet sent by Mr Trump in 2012, reading: The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive. More recently Mr Trump said he was joking, stating in an interview with CBS: I dont think its a hoax. I think theres probably a difference. But I dont know that its man-made. I will say this: I dont want to give trillions and trillions of dollars (to fight climate change). I dont want to lose millions and millions of jobs. Leading scientists around the world agree that climate change has been primarily brought about by human activity, and UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres recently described it as the single most important issue we face as world leaders met for a summit in Poland. Last year, Mr Trump withdrew the US from the 2015 Paris climate agreement, and his administration has supported the continued use of fossil fuels in industry. Expand Close Protests outside the American Embassy in London as Donald Trump announced he was withdrawing from the Paris agreement (David Mizoeff/PA) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Protests outside the American Embassy in London as Donald Trump announced he was withdrawing from the Paris agreement (David Mizoeff/PA) On his companys website, Mr Bell said: As Demorphus donaldtrumpi is an amphibian, it is particularly susceptible to the impacts of climate change and is therefore in danger of becoming extinct as a direct result of its namesakes climate policies. According to University College London, caecilians are a group of limbless, burrowing amphibians which resemble earthworms or slick snakes. They mostly inhabit moist tropical and subtropical regions of the world such as South and Central America and sub-Saharan Africa, and spend the majority of their lives below the earths surface. Envirobuild said it was not an overtly political organisation, but added: We do feel very strongly that everyone should do everything they can to leave the world in a better way than they found it. In a 2009 report, the UN health agency urged India to ban the pesticide, as the US, European Union and various other Asian nations have done (stock picture) A toxic pesticide that a UN agency wanted India to ban a decade ago contaminated food that killed at least 15 people at a temple last week, police said yesterday. More than 100 people also had to go to hospital after devotees consumed portions of tomato rice blessed at the Hindu temple in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. A senior police officer told Reuters laboratory tests showed the presence of monocrotophos - a pesticide which attacks the nerves - in food and vomit samples. "We are trying to find out how the food got contaminated and not ruling out foul play. We have detained a few people and are enquiring further," said Chamrajnagar district police superintendent Dharmender Kumar Meena, without specifying the number of arrests. The same pesticide was responsible for the death of 23 schoolchildren in the eastern state of Bihar in 2013, one of India's worst mass poisonings. That was caused by cooking oil kept in a container previously used to store monocrotophos. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), swallowing just 120mg of monocrotophos - the weight of about five grains of rice - can be fatal. In a 2009 report, the UN health agency urged India to ban the pesticide, as the US, European Union and various other Asian nations have done. But India plans to continue allowing its use in non-vegetable crops because it is effective and cheaper than alternatives, said a senior government official. He cuddles puppies, cycles nonchalantly in shades and lowers his near-naked torso into icy waters. But perhaps less conventionally, Japan's latest calendar pin-up is no fresh-faced pop star: it's Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia. Loft, a Japanese chain of lifestyle stores, has reported that calendars featuring the rugged, blue-eyed Russian president are flying off the shelves and eclipsing even its most popular domestic celebrities. Sales of official 2019 Putin calendars containing a stream of testosterone-fuelled images of the 66-year-old president were reportedly in Loft's number one sales spot. Following closely behind the unlikely political pin-up were calendars devoted to the thirty-something Japanese actor Kei Tanaka and, in third place, 24-year-old Olympic skating champion Yuzuru Hanyu. The popularity of the ageing Russian president's calendars was reportedly fuelled by a surge in self-proclaimed "Putin fans" - mainly young Japanese women apparently seduced by his rugged charms. One person who is perhaps unlikely to rush out to buy a calendar featuring Mr Putin in all his manly glory is Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Tensions continue to simmer between Japan and Russia thanks to a decades-long territorial dispute over a chain of islands, which is why the two nations have never signed a World War II peace treaty. Donald Trump said last week he would be proud to have a shutdown (Evan Vucci/AP) President Donald Trump has appeared to back off his demand for five billion dollars to build a border wall, signalling for the first time that he might be open to a deal that would avoid a partial government shutdown. The White House set the tone when press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders indicated that Mr Trump does not want to shut down the government, though just last week he said he would be "proud" to do so. The president would consider other options and the administration was looking at ways to find the money elsewhere, Ms Sanders said. It was a turnaround after days of impasse. Without a resolution, more than 800,000 government workers could be furloughed or sent to work without pay beginning at midnight on Friday, disrupting government operations days before Christmas. One option that has been circulating on Capitol Hill would be to simply approve government funding at existing levels, without a boost for the border, as a stopgap measure to kick the issue into the new Congress next month. The chairman of the Appropriations Committee, Senator Richard Shelby, confirmed late on Tuesday his office was preparing legislation to keep government funded, likely into February. The White House preference was for a longer-term package, although the conversation remained fluid and Mr Trump has been known to quickly change course, said a person familiar with the negotiations. "We want to know what can pass," Ms Sanders said at a press briefing. "Once they make a decision and they put something on the table, we'll make a determination on whether we'll move forward." She also said the president "has asked every agency to look and see if they have money that can be used". The turn of events kick-started negotiations that had been almost nonexistent since last week's televised meeting at the White House, when Mr Trump neither accepted nor rejected the Democrats' offer. They had proposed keeping funding at current levels of 1.3 billion dollars (1.03 billion) for border security fencing and other improvements, but not for the wall. The Senate's top Republican and Democratic leaders began negotiating new proposals and talks were expected to continue. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he was confident there would not be a government shutdown. Mr McConnell said a stopgap measure could be approved, though he suggested that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who is poised to become House speaker when the Democrats take control on January 3, would not want to saddle the new year with a budget brawl. "If I were in her shoes, I would rather not be dealing with this year's business next year," Mr McConnell said. Ms Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer have made it clear they are not interested in funding Mr Trump's border wall. During a meeting earlier Tuesday on Capitol Hill, Mr McConnell had proposed 1.6 billion dollars (1.12 billion)for border fencing, as outlined in a bipartisan Senate bill, plus an additional one billion dollars that Mr Trump could use on the border, according to a senior Democratic aide. Democratic leaders immediately spurned the proposal. Mr Schumer called Mr McConnell to reject it. "We cannot accept the offer they made of a billion-dollar slush fund for the president to implement his very wrong immigration policies," Ms Pelosi told reporters. "So that won't happen." Democrats also rejected the administration's idea of shifting money from other accounts to pay for Mr Trump's wall. Mr Schumer said there will be no wall money, "plain and simple". Ms Pelosi will probably be able to quickly approve a longer-term measure to keep government running in the new year. She called it a "good sign" that the White House appeared to be backing off its demands. The White House showed its willingness to budge as it became apparent the president does not have support in Congress for funding the wall at the five billion dollar (3.95 billion) level. Ms Sanders said on Tuesday there are "other ways" to secure the funding. "At the end of the day, we don't want to shut down the government," Ms Sanders said on Fox News Channel. "We want to shut down the border from illegal immigration." Ms Sanders pointed to the Senate's bipartisan appropriation measure for the Department of Homeland Security, which provides 26 billion dollars (20.5 billion), including 1.6 billion dollars for fencing and other barriers. It was approved by the committee in summer on a bipartisan vote. "That's something that we would be able to support," she said, as long as it is coupled with other funding. But House Democrats largely reject the Senate's bill because it includes 65 miles of additional fencing along the Rio Grande Valley in Texas. Mr Trump had campaigned on the promise that Mexico would pay for the wall. Mexico has refused. It is unclear how many House Republicans, with just a few weeks left in the majority before relinquishing power to House Democrats, will even show up midweek for possible votes. Many Republicans say it is up to Trump and Democrats to cut a deal. The standoff dispute could affect nine of 15 Cabinet-level departments and dozens of agencies, including the departments of Homeland Security, Transportation, Interior, Agriculture, State and Justice, as well as national parks and forests. Mr Shelby expected the stopgap measure, which would cover the seven appropriation bills for those departments, would pass. "Who would want to shut the government down?" he said. Congress did pass legislation to fund much of the government through the fiscal year, until October 1. But a partial shutdown would occur at midnight on Friday on the remaining one-fourth of the government. Charles Michel resigned as prime minister of Belgium last night after his coalition government collapsed in the face of virulent opposition to his signing of a UN migration pact from his erstwhile partners. Mr Michel, a French-speaking liberal, lost the support of the right-wing Flemish N-VA, the largest party in his coalition, over the UN pact, which opponents claimed would open the door to greater migration. Belgium is now bracing itself for a snap election as early as next month. Mr Michel told lawmakers that he was going to see the king to offer his resignation after socialists and greens pushed for a motion of no-confidence in his now minority government or for a snap election. His agreement to the pact had prompted violent protests in Brussels at the weekend. King Philippe is now expected to consult with the political parties in preparation for a January election. Last night, Mr Michel refused to submit to a no-confidence vote and told lawmakers that a snap vote would lead to "stagnation for the whole of 2019". The next election had been due in May. Instead, he said: "I am taking the decision to offer my resignation. I am now going to see the king." Amid applause, he picked up his briefcase, shook the hands of a number of government ministers, and left. The Flemish N-VA's withdrawal had left Mr Michel's liberal MR supported only by two smaller Flemish parties. The UN migration pact was agreed in July by all 193 members except the US, but only 164 formally signed it at a meeting in Marrakesh on December 10. Some European politicians say the accord, aimed at fostering global co-operation on the issue, could increase immigration. But supporters of the deal accuse them of fearmongering. On Sunday, about 5,500 turned out in Brussels for a rally called by Flemish right-wing parties to protest against the pact. Police deployed tear gas and water cannon after scuffles broke out at the rally. Riot police stepped in after projectiles and firecrackers were thrown, and about 90 people were detained. Daily Telegraph London Telegraph Media Group Limited [2021] The sentencing judge said both had a long history of violent racist beliefs (stock photo) A fanatical Neo Nazi couple who named their baby son after Adolf Hitler have been jailed for membership of a terrorist group that wants to use "serious violence and murder" to "overthrow democracy" in the UK, a judge warned. Adam Thomas (22) and Claudia Patatas (38) were found guilty of being members of the extreme right-wing organisation National Action, which was banned in 2016. The jury was told that Thomas and Patatas gave their child the middle name "Adolf", which Thomas said was in "admiration" of Hitler, and the couple had Swastika cushions in their home. Thomas and Patatas were jailed at Birmingham Crown Court for six years and six months, and five years, respectively. The sentencing judge said both had "a long history of violent racist beliefs". The owners of a Russian cargo ship which ran aground in Cornwall before being rescued by the British coastguard have blamed "unsafe" UK shipping conditions and threatened legal action. The ship had more than 100 faults at its latest inspection and was held in the Netherlands for seven months before sailing to the UK. However, the company has blamed unsafe conditions and said it could bring legal action to recoup the cost of damage to the ship. The Russian Embassy has launched an investigation. The 16,000-tonne, 590ft ship was grounded in the early hours of yesterday morning and the Falmouth coastguard and the RNLI undertook a day-long mission to rescue it and its 18 crew members near Falmouth, Cornwall. Volunteers battled through gale force 9 winds to get the Kuzma Minin, which had sailed from Holland to the UK some days previously, safely afloat. There were worries if it could not be refloated at high tide, around 1.15pm, they would have to wait until the tide came back in at around 1am, leaving the crew members stuck on board. Luckily, they managed to tug it out to sea at around 2.30pm. Dramatic footage showed a coastguard pilot being winched on to the ship from a helicopter to help those on board. However, the deputy director of the Murmansk Shipping Company, which owns the Kuzma Minin, said the ship had become stuck due to "unsafe shipping conditions" off the British coast. Murmansk is one of the primary shipping companies operating in northern Europe and Arctic Russia. "The ship got caught on some sort of chain that was on the bottom of the strait," Ildar Neverov told state news agency RIA Novosti. "There were unsafe shipping conditions in the place where the ship was located. As a result, it passed some distance out of control and ran aground. " He said he may bring legal action: "We will definitely look at recovery of damages." Theship was reported to have a list of five degrees. Gales The Falmouth coastguard declined to comment. It was thought the weather conditions contributed to the accident with gales recorded at up to 74mph in Cornwall. Former Falmouth senior pilot captain David Barnicoat told BBC Radio Cornwall: "It's a classic grounding in bad weather and strong winds. "The wind overnight was pretty horrendous. It sounds as if she dragged anchor and the engines may not have been ready or she may have had some other problem." The RNLI added: "The lifeboat has been standing by the vessel since to ensure everyone's safety. "The volunteers have missed a day at work and have re-arranged their plans for the day to help the situation, illustrating their dedication and commitment to saving lives at sea." Daily Telegraph London Telegraph Media Group Limited [2021] A 16-year-old girl was shot dead in front of fellow pupils in her school's bicycle shed, Dutch police said. Police said a 31-year-old man was arrested shortly after the shooting at the school on Tuesday. The school was identified by local media as Rotterdam Design College. Police said the victim and the man, who was arrested about a mile and a half away, knew one another but did not reveal details of their relationship or a possible motive. A number of people, including fellow pupils, witnessed the attack, police spokeswoman Yvette de Rave told national broadcaster NOS. The shooting happened less than a week after an American psychology student at Rotterdam's Erasmus University was fatally stabbed in her flat. A suspect in her killing was arrested last week. Gun ownership is tightly restricted in the Netherlands and most shootings that happen in the country are linked to power struggles between criminal gangs. A judge has ordered a poacher to repeatedly watch the film 'Bambi' after hundreds of deer were illegally killed and beheaded. David Berry Jr (29) was told he must view the animated Disney classic at least once each month during a jail sentence of one year. The movie includes an iconic scene in which a hunter shoots the fawn Bambi's mother. Berry's first viewing of the film in a Missouri prison must be before December 23, Judge Robert George ordered. Conservation agents called the poaching case one of the biggest in the history of the state. The deer were killed for their heads, and their bodies were left to rot. Berry was convicted of illegally taking wildlife in south-west Missouri's Lawrence County. A federal judge abruptly postponed the sentencing hearing yesterday for Michael Flynn, US President Donald Trump's first national security adviser, after a stunning hearing in which the judge accused Flynn of selling out his country. The delay allows Flynn to continue co-operating with the special counsel's Russia probe and get credit for it in his punishment. Flynn pleaded guilty last year to lying to the FBI about his Russia contacts, just days after Mr Trump was inaugurated. "Arguably, you sold your country out," US District Judge Emmet Sullivan told Flynn in a tongue-lashing that raised the prospect that the judge could send the retired army lieutenant general to prison, even though prosecutors have recommended against prison time, citing his co-operation in the Russia probe. Judge Sullivan told Flynn: "I can't hide my disgust, my disdain" at the crime. After a prosecutor raised the prospect of Flynn's continued co-operation with other investigations in the future, Judge Sullivan warned Flynn that he might not get the full credit for his assistance to the government if he were sentenced as scheduled yesterday. Typically, judges like to sentence co-operating defendants after their co-operation is done so they can fully evaluate the help they gave to the government. He gave Flynn a chance to talk it over with his lawyers, and the court went into a brief recess. When they returned, Flynn lawyer Rob Kelner defended Flynn's co-operation, but he requested a postponement to allow for him to keep co-operating. Flynn, who served as national security adviser for only a few weeks, was to be the first White House official sentenced in special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into possible co-ordination between Russia and the Trump campaign. Nearly half a dozen former aides and advisers - including Flynn - have pleaded guilty or agreed to co-operate with prosecutors. Mr Trump signalled his intense interest in the case by tweeting "good luck" to Flynn hours before the sentencing hearing. He added: "Will be interesting to see what he has to say, despite tremendous pressure being put on him, about Russian Collusion in our great and, obviously, highly successful political campaign. There was no Collusion!" At the hearing, Judge Sullivan told Flynn that he would take into account his extensive co-operation with the government, which includes 19 meetings with investigators as well as a 33-year military career that included service in Iraq and Afghanistan. But he also said he was forced to weigh other factors, too, including Flynn's decision as national security adviser to lie to the FBI on the premises of the White House about contacts he had with the Russian ambassador to the US. Earlier in the hearing, the judge asked Flynn a series of questions to make sure he wanted to move forward with his sentencing in light of a memo his attorneys submitted last week that took aim at the FBI's conduct during agents' January 2017 interview of Flynn. Flynn said that memo notwithstanding, he was ready to proceed with sentencing. The run-up to the sentencing hearing has exposed raw tensions over an FBI interview in which he lied about his Russian contacts. Flynn's lawyers have suggested investigators discouraged him from having an attorney present during the interview and never informed him it was a crime to lie. Prosecutors shot back, "He does not need to be warned it is a crime to lie to federal agents, to know the importance of telling them the truth." On Monday evening, the dispute - and a judge's intervention - led prosecutors to publicly file a redacted copy of the notes from Flynn's FBI interview that largely bolster the case, showing he told agents things he later said were false. Still, the mere insinuation of underhanded tactics has been startling given the seemingly productive relationship between the two sides, and it was especially striking since prosecutors with Mr Mueller's office have praised Flynn's co-operation and recommended against prison time. The defence arguments spurred speculation that Flynn may be trying to get sympathy from Mr Trump or may be playing to a judge known for a zero-tolerance view of government misconduct. "It's an attempt, I think, to perhaps characterise Flynn as a victim or perhaps to make him look sympathetic in the eyes of a judge - and, at the same time, to portray the special counsel in a negative light," said former federal prosecutor Jimmy Gurule, a University of Notre Dame law school professor. The United States is considering a total withdrawal of US forces from Syria as it nears the end of its campaign to retake all of the territory once held by Islamic State, US officials told Reuters. Such a decision, if confirmed, would upend assumptions about a longer-term U.S. military presence in Syria, which U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and other senior US officials had advocated to help ensure Islamic State cannot reemerge. President Donald Trump has said that US troops do not need to remain in Syria. The president tweeted on Wednesday: "We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency." His tweet followed a series of news reports that the US is preparing to withdraw its troops from Syria. A US defence official told CNN that planning is underway for a "full and rapid" withdrawal of US troops. Still, President Donald Trump has previously expressed a strong desire to bring troops home from Syria when possible. The timing of the withdrawal was not immediately clear and US officials who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity did not disclose details about the deliberations, including who was involved. It was unclear how soon a decision could be announced. The Pentagon and White House declined to comment. The United States still has about 2,000 troops in Syria, many of them special operations forces working closely with an alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF. The partnership with the SDF over the past several years has led to the defeat of Islamic State in Syria but outraged NATO ally Turkey, which views Kurdish YPG forces in the alliance as an extension of a militant group fighting inside Turkey. The deliberations on US troops come as Ankara threatens a new offensive in Syria. To date, U.S. forces in Syria have been seen as a stabilizing factor in the country and have somewhat restrained Turkey's actions against the SDF. A complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria would still leave a sizeable US military presence in the region, including about 5,200 troops across the border in Iraq. Much of the US campaign in Syria has been waged by warplanes flying out of Qatar and other locations in the Middle East. Still, Mattis and US State Department officials have long fretted about leaving Syria before a peace agreement can be reached to end that country's brutal civil war, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced around half of Syrias pre-war population of about 22 million. In April, Mattis said: "We do not want to simply pull out before the diplomats have won the peace. You win the fight and then you win the peace." Islamic State is also widely expected to revert to guerilla tactics once it no longer holds territory. A US withdrawal could open Trump up to criticism if Islamic State reemerged. Trump has previously lambasted his predecessor, Barack Obama, for the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq that preceded an unraveling of the Iraqi armed forces. Iraqi forces collapsed in the face of Islamic State's advance into the country in 2014. Donald Trump said last week he would be proud to have a shutdown (Evan Vucci/AP) President Donald Trump has appeared to back off his demand for five billion dollars to build a border wall, signalling for the first time that he might be open to a deal that would avoid a partial government shutdown. The White House set the tone when press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders indicated that Mr Trump does not want to shut down the government, though just last week he said he would be proud to do so. The president would consider other options and the administration was looking at ways to find the money elsewhere, Ms Sanders said. It was a turnaround after days of impasse. Without a resolution, more than 800,000 government workers could be furloughed or sent to work without pay beginning at midnight on Friday, disrupting government operations days before Christmas. One option that has been circulating on Capitol Hill would be to simply approve government funding at existing levels, without a boost for the border, as a stopgap measure to kick the issue into the new Congress next month. Expand Close Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer speaks to reporters about the possibility of a partial government shutdown (J Scott Applewhite/AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer speaks to reporters about the possibility of a partial government shutdown (J Scott Applewhite/AP) The chairman of the Appropriations Committee, Senator Richard Shelby, confirmed late on Tuesday his office was preparing legislation to keep government funded, likely into February. The White House preference was for a longer-term package, although the conversation remained fluid and Mr Trump has been known to quickly change course, said a person familiar with the negotiations. We want to know what can pass, Ms Sanders said at a press briefing. Once they make a decision and they put something on the table, well make a determination on whether well move forward. She also said the president has asked every agency to look and see if they have money that can be used. The turn of events kick-started negotiations that had been almost nonexistent since last weeks televised meeting at the White House, when Mr Trump neither accepted nor rejected the Democrats offer. THEN: Who is going to pay for the wall? Mexico. Mexico. Mexico. NOW: Who is going to pay for the wall? American taxpayers. And if I dont get $5 billion from them, Im going to shut down the government. President @realDonaldTrump, no temper tantrum is going to get you the wall. pic.twitter.com/pK7pXcYwzk Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) December 18, 2018 They had proposed keeping funding at current levels of 1.3 billion dollars (1.03 billion) for border security fencing and other improvements, but not for the wall. The Senates top Republican and Democratic leaders began negotiating new proposals and talks were expected to continue. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he was confident there would not be a government shutdown. Mr McConnell said a stopgap measure could be approved, though he suggested that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who is poised to become House speaker when the Democrats take control on January 3, would not want to saddle the new year with a budget brawl. If I were in her shoes, I would rather not be dealing with this years business next year, Mr McConnell said. Ms Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer have made it clear they are not interested in funding Mr Trumps border wall. During a meeting earlier Tuesday on Capitol Hill, Mr McConnell had proposed 1.6 billion dollars (1.12 billion)for border fencing, as outlined in a bipartisan Senate bill, plus an additional one billion dollars that Mr Trump could use on the border, according to a senior Democratic aide. Democratic leaders immediately spurned the proposal. Mr Schumer called Mr McConnell to reject it. We cannot accept the offer they made of a billion-dollar slush fund for the president to implement his very wrong immigration policies, Ms Pelosi told reporters. So that wont happen. Democrats also rejected the administrations idea of shifting money from other accounts to pay for Mr Trumps wall. Mr Schumer said there will be no wall money, plain and simple. Ms Pelosi will probably be able to quickly approve a longer-term measure to keep government running in the new year. She called it a good sign that the White House appeared to be backing off its demands. The White House showed its willingness to budge as it became apparent the president does not have support in Congress for funding the wall at the five billion dollar (3.95 billion) level. Ms Sanders said on Tuesday there are other ways to secure the funding. At the end of the day, we dont want to shut down the government, Ms Sanders said on Fox News Channel. We want to shut down the border from illegal immigration. Ms Sanders pointed to the Senates bipartisan appropriation measure for the Department of Homeland Security, which provides 26 billion dollars (20.5 billion), including 1.6 billion dollars for fencing and other barriers. It was approved by the committee in summer on a bipartisan vote. Thats something that we would be able to support, she said, as long as it is coupled with other funding. Who would want to shut the government down?Richard Shelby But House Democrats largely reject the Senates bill because it includes 65 miles of additional fencing along the Rio Grande Valley in Texas. Mr Trump had campaigned on the promise that Mexico would pay for the wall. Mexico has refused. It is unclear how many House Republicans, with just a few weeks left in the majority before relinquishing power to House Democrats, will even show up midweek for possible votes. Many Republicans say it is up to Trump and Democrats to cut a deal. The standoff dispute could affect nine of 15 Cabinet-level departments and dozens of agencies, including the departments of Homeland Security, Transportation, Interior, Agriculture, State and Justice, as well as national parks and forests. Mr Shelby expected the stopgap measure, which would cover the seven appropriation bills for those departments, would pass. Who would want to shut the government down? he said. Congress did pass legislation to fund much of the government through the fiscal year, until October 1. But a partial shutdown would occur at midnight on Friday on the remaining one-fourth of the government. Ali Hassan with his two-year-old son Abdullah in a Sacramento hospital (Council on American-Islamic Relations/AP) A Yemeni mother blocked by the Donald Trump administrations travel ban has won her fight for a waiver that would allow her to travel to California to see her dying two-year-old son. Basim Elkarra of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Sacramento said Shaima Swileh had been granted a visa and will be flying to San Francisco on Wednesday. She has been living in Egypt but is from Yemen, whose citizens are restricted from travelling to the US under the Trump administrations travel ban. Mr Elkarra said the boys father, Ali Hassan, is a US citizen who brought their son to California in the autumn for treatment for a genetic brain condition. He is on life support at an Oakland hospital. The visa came after the council filed a lawsuit. Expand Close Ali Hassan with his two-year-old son Abdullah (Council on American-Islamic Relations/AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Ali Hassan with his two-year-old son Abdullah (Council on American-Islamic Relations/AP) Ms Swileh and the boy had been living in Egypt and she had hoped to accompany them but was not given a visa to enter the United States. As Ms Swileh and her husband fought for a waiver, their sons health declined. Last week, doctors at UCSF Benioff Childrens Hospital in Oakland put him on life support. Mr Hassan was losing hope his wife would ever be allowed into the US and was considering pulling his son off life support to end his suffering, but then a social worker at the hospital reached out to the council, whose lawyers sued, Mr Elkarra said. Every avenue was going to be exhausted to get this young woman to see her son, Mr Elkarra said. He said Ms Swileh lost months with her child over what amounted to unnecessary delays and red tape. The boys father was visiting his son at the hospital on Tuesday and was not immediately available for comment. This is the happiest day of my life, Mr Hassan said in a statement provided by the council. This will allow us to mourn with dignity. State Department spokesman Robert Palladino called it a very sad case, adding: Our thoughts go out to this family at this time, at this trying time. He said he could not comment on the familys situation but that generally cases are handled individually and officials try to facilitate legitimate travel to the United States while protecting national security. These are not easy questions, he said. Weve got a lot of foreign service officers deployed all over the world that are making these decisions on a daily basis, and they are trying very hard to do the right thing at all times. HERSHEY >> The Council Rock North Marching Band capped a triumphant return to the competition circuit by winning the Silver Finalist award at the Cavalcade of Bands championship in Hershey recently. The remarkable comeback, after a break from competing last year due to the pandemic, also earned the 59-member ensemble the High Visual Performance award in the Liberty Conference A... Ranveer Singh is on cloud nine. He is the happiest man on earth at the moment. The Padmaavat actor has achieved everything that he desired right from being a reigning actor of Bollywood to becoming the millenial husband to Deepika Padukone. Twitter 2018 surely has been amazing for Ranveer personally and professionally. In an interaction with the media, Ranveer spoke about his upcoming release Simmba, dream wedding with wife Deepika and everything in between. Instagram Wanted To Do Masala Film Only With Rohit Shetty Because He Is The Best "It is my biggest film so far, it has me as in and as, it is a film that has mounted me as a solo hero. This time its me as Rohit Shettys leading man and thats a big deal for me. This film was offered to me as Bajirao Mastani, I always wanted to do masala films, but I didnt want to do masala films if it wasnt with Rohit Shetty. To me there is nobody who gets it right other than him. I really only wanted to do this genre with him because he is the king to me in this genre." Was Ready To Play Lakhan But Nobody Offered Me The actor expressed how he desired to play Lakhan for Rohit and KJo's Ram Lakhan, " I was never offered Ram Lakhan. I was ready to do Lakhan but I dont know what happened about that, that was a film that Karan and Rohit sir was supposed to make it together, but today we are here and Simmba is backed by these two massive filmmakers." Masala Film Does Not Get The Credit That It Deserves Ranveer stated that playing Ballerao was the most difficult task for him in Simmba, "I am not the one who decides if this character is award-worthy or not but all I can say is that I have given my best and this is my best character that I have done because there is one character who has portrayed all the emotions together in the film right form romance, action, comedy and drama. The drama is intense, from a performer's point of view, it was painstaking to make a masala film, because not enough credit is given to this genre." Indiatimes It Was His Dream To Kiss Deepika And Go On Stage To Receive The Best Actor Award The man surely wins the best husband title after sharing this dream with Deepika," Yesterday was a magical moment, I didnt get emotional Deepika got emotional for various reasons. I dont prepare my speeches before getting awards. I am very superstitious in that way. I dont want to jinx it. So I just show up at the award ceremony, and then go at the stage and get lost about what to say, and once you are there with the mic and everyone is waiting for you to speak, you have no filter you just speak your mind. I was just speaking my heart, I always had this dream, Deepika will be sitting next to me and I will be announced as the best actor, I will kiss Deepika and then go up on stage and receive my award, and that happened and it was magical. She is a large part of my growth, she is the large part of my evolution, she kept me grounded and centered. She was my support, especially when I was doing Khilji, she helped me a lot, it was something very difficult for both of us. It was a difficult year for both of us, the year we shot Padmavaat, we were being tested, I guess for her to witness that and then witness this it was magical for her too." I Would Be Burn To Crisp If Any Other Would Do Gully Boy Other Than Me Twitter Ranveer talks about how he would be supremely jealous if anyone else would play his character in Gully Boy, "After Padmaavat, I did Gully Boy and completed it and then did Simmba. In Gully Boy I had to be this quiet boy who deals with a lot of inner emotions. In fact after shooting for a scene, I used to not even see the monitor, we shot the entire film and I didnt even see one scene of mine, I had no clue about it, after the shooting Zoya went to New York for 6 months for the edit of the film, and just yesterday she showed me the teaser of the film and I was like F***K. It is that crazy, I swear if there would be an actor other than me in this teaser I would be burnt to crisp, I would be damn jealous of that actor. Its Mumbai, its Hip hop, Its ME". 2018 Has Been Amazing Undoubtedly this year is an amazing year for Ranveer and he agrees, " This is year has been amazing to me, I started with Padmavaat, than I did this creatively, enriching and fulfilling film like Gully Boy - a story of this Mumbai boy with hip-hop. Its so special, then I also had a sad phase, I lost my Nani. But my family bonded at that time, if there was any silver lining at such a time it was just this that my family bonded well. After that was Simmba where I had a ball, being a masala hero, then comes the highlight of the year which is my marriage, my wife curated such a beautiful wedding. I keep on telling her, I didnt have the vision of this which she created in our wedding, even I would have never dreamt of it, so full credit to her. It was a fairytale, every time was just BEAUTIFUL, then I see December and I see all this heat surrounding Simmba. The trailer goes to the roof, Aankh Maare has become this rage party anthem, Tere Bin is doing extremely well, then I won the best actor award. Its like I couldnt have asked for more, it cant get better than this." Excited To Welcome 2019 He is optimistically looking forward to 2019, "Creatively I am very excited for 2019. In January I am going to start for 1983 film, where I am going to play Kapil Dev and then I will be doing Takht with Karan Johar. I am really looking forward to 2019." Instagram I Am Not An Insecure Actor To Not Do A Two-Hero Film The actor was asked if would be okay to do a two-hero film as KJo once said it's difficult to get two big actors together for a film, he said, " I am not one who shies away from two heroes or ensemble cast film and I have shown that in my film choices. I have no insecurities on taking on these films I have no greed to have everything, I am happy to collaborate with other artists that creates cinematic magic. I think I dont want to judge anyone but if you ask my opinion, it would be rather foolish to pass on the opportunity of a great script which has two heroes or ensemble cast if you are a secure actor, there is no reason one shouldnt do it. Also today things are changing, the power has gone to audience's hands, they will not watch anything that you will throw to them. They now want the best content, and this time the actors will opt for stories and not look at the star cast of the film. The time will soon come where two heroes will be working together because the story of the film is great like it used to happen." Instagram Open To Do Web Series But Right Now My Focus Is Only Big Screen Ranveer doesn't mind doing web series but not now, " I am open to it, I am close to it, I never say never, I am very open minded like that. Good Content is good content, I loved Sacred Games, I am so proud of what Vikramaditya has achieved in his own precedent. After Sacred Games people have really taken this platform very seriously. I think its great and I would love to be a part of it. But my focus right now is big screen experiences because in my opinion what has happened in past few years, screens have been getting smaller and smaller, nowadays foot halls are suffering and its fair enough because halls have become freaking expensive. Nowadays, if you take a family package for gold class its 7000 bucks, and then you have to accommodate all of them in a car and if you live in a metro city like Mumbai or Delhi you have to face this traffic and after all that you have to fight for a parking, then stand in a line for popcorn. Fighting all this, I am brain fried by now and if you are not going to give me good content then why would I come there, so better we make worth it for them. So when you make something you should make sure that it is worth for big screen." Instagram Ranveer Singh is clearly at the top of his game right now. The family of Sumit Kumar, a youth from Bulandshahr, who was killed during the recent mob violence over alleged cow slaughter has met Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath. They have demanded that Sumit, who is also an accused in the case should be declared a martyr and the family should receive same financial help as Inspector Subodh Kumar, who died in violence. ANI Speaking to media after the meeting the family said that the CM has assured that injustice won't be done. Meanwhile, the UP Police have admitted that all the four men who were initially arrested on charges of cow slaughter were innocent. The four men, all of them Muslims, Sarfuddin, Sajid, Asif and Nanhe were arrested by police after Yogesh Raj, the district Bajrang Dal convenor filed a police complaint naming two, accusing them of slaughtering the cow. PTI Yogesh, the prime accused in the murder of the police inspector is on the run in the case. In his complaint Yogesh had claimed that seven persons had slaughtered the cows. According to NDTV police sources have told that here is also no evidence against four others initially arrested in the cow slaughter case. The Indian Express added that the Uttar Pradesh Police will move court soon for their release. Meanwhile, three others have been picked up the cops in connection with the cow slaughter. They have been identified as Nadeem, Raees and Kala. Police have recovered a gun and knives allegedly used by the group to kill cows. PTI "They were part of a gang that hunted cows and shot them with a double-barreled gun. They would slaughter the cows using sharp instruments like knives and share the meat," senior police officer Atul Srivastav told NDTV. The Indian Express reported that, one of the men, Kaala was arrested two years ago in a cow slaughter case and is currently out on bail. Significantly, neither of the three were named by Yogesh in his complaint. An Indian man who was was released from a Pakistani prison met External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj to thank her for securing his return. "Mera Bharat mahan, meri madam mahan, sab madam ne hi kiya hai," Hamid Ansari who met the minister along with his mother Fauzia Nehal Ahmed Ansari said. #WATCH Indian National Hamid Ansari who came to India after being released from a Pakistan jail yesterday, meets External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj in Delhi. His mother tells EAM "Mera Bharat mahaan, meri madam mahaan, sab madam ne hi kiya hai." pic.twitter.com/FQEzz99Ohm ANI (@ANI) December 19, 2018 33-year-old Ansari was arrested in Pakistan six years ago after he went to the country to meet a woman he had befriended through social media. The Mumbai-resident was arrested by Pakistani intelligence agencies from near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border in 2012 for possessing a fake Pakistani ID card. REUTERS Ansari was awarded three-year imprisonment by a military court in December 2015 after being slapped with charges of espionage and involvement in anti-state activities on him. He was released from prison after the completion of the jail term and returned to India on Tuesday. His mother, Fauzia Nehal Ahmed Ansari, who called her son's release "a victory of humanity", said that he had no "bad intentions". PTI "My son went with noble intentions. Hamid had no bad intentions, but initially went missing and was later caught and framed. He shouldn't have gone without a visa. His release is a victory for humanity," Hamid's mother told ANI. Kishorchandra Wangkhem, an Imphal-based journalist and anchor with a local news channel, who was arrested earlier this month for allegedly criticising Chief Minister N Biren Singh has been sent to a year in jail under the National Security Act. Kishorchandra, who was first arrested on November 27, after he posted a video on social media criticising Biren Singh and PM Narendra Modi. In the video, he reportedly criticised the state organizing an event to mark the birth anniversary of Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi, who had nothing to do with the region. He was initially arrested on November 27 and five days later he was produced in the court which granted him bail stating that his words were a mere expression of opinion against the public conduct of a public figure in a street language. But he was taken into custody once again by the cops who, this time charged him under NSA. Speaking from Imphal, Kishorchandra's wife Elangbam Ranjita told Indiatimes that her husband was taken into detention by the cops and only after days they were allowed to meet him and got to know that he was detained under NSA. "Even about the 12 months sentence which was given to him, we only got to know if from the local newspaper. There was no hearing in the case," she claimed. Since Kishorchandra was sentenced under NSA, his family has appealed to the state government, the central government and the union ministry to release him. They have also filed an appeal in the Manipur High Court against the conviction. "We are filing an appeal in the Manipur High Court today itself. Hopefully, it will come up for hearing by tomorrow," Kishorechandra's lawyer, Victor Chongtham told Indiatimes. Explaining about the arrest, Victor said Kishorechandra was charged under section 124 A of the IPC which deals with sedition. "The magistrate court had granted him bail after they failed to establish the case. The next day he was arrested again by slapping the NSA. Since then he has been languished in the jail," Victor explained. Kishorchandra's wife Ranjita added that since he posted the video on Facebook, ISTV, the local news channel which he was working with has sacked him from the job. She also alleged that Brojendro Ningombam, the editor of the channel and the president of the Manipur Working Journalists Union has distanced himself from case and refused to help. She also alleged that this is not the first time Kishorchandra has landed in trouble with the authorities for criticising the government and BJP. In August he was arrested after he allegedly used derogatory words to describe the abbreviation BJP. Ningombam who had met the CM to seek Kishorchandra's release reportedly apologised to him. "Maybe because of what happened in August, the channel is not at all supportive. All they told us is that they have fired him even before he had uploaded the video on Facebook. But he has not given any resignation letter so far. Even my husband had told me that the channel was not going to support him," Ranjita said. Meanwhile, various groups in Imphal and Delhi have stepped up their demand to release him. Members of the Manipur Students Association, Delhi and Manipur Muslim Students Union staged a protest in front of the Manipur Bhavan in Delhi. A travel ban enforced by President Donald Trump is proving to be detrimental for numerous people. A mother from Yemen had to fight tooth and nail to meet her two-year-old son who is probably counting his last few days. International news agency AP reported that a Yemeni woman Shaima Swileh was fighting for the past one year so that she could meet her son in California. After much hue and cry, Swileh has been successful in winning the fight for a waiver from the Trump administration. Two-year-old Abdullah was flown to the US by his father, Ali Hassan who is a US citizen and lives in Stockton for a genetic brain disorder. Hassan and Swileh got married in war-torn Yemen in 2016 and then moved to Egypt. The family had been struggling to get a visa for Swileh so that the entire family could move to California. Photo: AP/ Hassan with his two year old son Abdullah who is on life support However, due to a travel ban enacted by Donald Trump restricting natives from Yemen, Iran, Libya, Syria, Somalia and even North Korea and Venezuela. Citizens of the banned countries can apply for waivers on a case-by-case basis, such as seeking to travel to the US for medical treatment, to visit a close family member or for business obligations, the Guardian reported. After lawyers from the Council on American-Islamic Relations sued the U.S state department, Swileh was granted the waiver on Tuesday. All Shaima Swileh wants is to give her son one more kiss before he dies. Abdullah is on life support. She is planning to fly to San Francisco on Wednesday to see Abdullah at UCSF Benioff Childrens Hospital in Oakland. The boys father was quoted as saying that the waiver will allow the family to mourn with dignity. Photo: AP A day before the government granted Swileh visa, Hassan choked up in front of a news conference on Monday. I am emailing them, crying, and telling them that my son is dying, Hassan said in an interview with The Sacramento Bee newspaper. Hassan even thought of taking his son off life support to end his suffering. Basim Elkarra of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Sacramento said that the mother lost precious time with her son due to unnecessary delays. State Department spokesman Robert Palladino told AP, a very sad case, and our thoughts go out to this family at this time, at this trying time. While he said that he cannot speak about the familys situation but such cases are dealt individually by the US department keeping in mind national security as well. Weve got a lot of foreign service officers deployed all over the world that are making these decisions on a daily basis, and they are trying very hard to do the right thing at all times. he further added. Though under Trumps travel ban, waivers can be issued under prolonged medical cases and other exceptional situations, however a lawsuit filed in San Francisco says otherwise. The 36 plaintiffs include people who have had waiver applications denied or stalled despite chronic medical conditions, prolonged family separations or significant business interests. The travel ban is also prominently known as the Muslim ban for its hostile immigration policies specifically towards Muslim dominated nations. ISRO has successfully launched its 7th satellite for the year 2018 today from its launch base at Sriharikota at 4:10 pm. Named GSAT-7A, the communication satellite was launched atop GSLV Mk-II rocket and carries a particular significance for the Indian Air Force. What? Read on to find out. The previous launch of ISRO saw its heaviest rocket to date (GSLV Mk III D2) carrying the GSAT 29, which was aimed to provide an enhanced connectivity in Jammu and Kashmir, as well as the North-eastern states of India. The GSAT-7A though, has a different mission altogether and is an effort to improve the connectivity among Indias defense forces. GSAT-7A atop GSLV Mk-II (ISRO) So, what will it do? Once in the orbit, the GSAT-7A will allow the Indian Air Force (IAF) to interconnect its ground stations as well as Airborne Warning And Control System (AWACS) aircraft. This, in turn will result in better network-centric capabilities for the IAF. Direct results of this will come in the form of: - Detection of aircraft, vessels etc from a long range. - Real-time air-to-air communication between aircrafts, as well as with the ground. - Enable surveillance through long range drones by simultaneously transmitting the information to ground bases. - Also enhance the range and endurance of the UAVs/ drones, enable strikes from long distances at enemy targets through satellite control. The Cumulative Effect In laymans terms, the GSAT-7A will prove to be the long range eyes and ears of the IAF and even a long range remote control for that matter. The multi-part advantage will see improved connectivity within the IAF ground bases, highly improved surveillance capabilities through remote monitoring and controlling of UAVs and an enhanced communication channel for airborne aircrafts. In short, the IAF is set to get a whole lot tougher! Wide view of GSAT-7A atop GSLV Mk-II (ISRO) A Look At The Satellite The GSAT-7A cost around Rs 500-800 Crore and weighs 2250 Kg. It has been configured on the 1-2K Bus with bi-propellant chemical propulsion system. The satellite constitutes of four solar panels which cumulatively generate 3.3 kilowatts of electrical power. The GSAT-7A features a KU-Band technology as a payload that allows the radio signals to be captured through smaller antennas and provides wide beam coverage as compared to other bands. It is also less prone to damage through atmospheric disturbances. The GSAT-7A will be injected into a Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit (GTO) post which, it will be placed in its final Geostationary Orbit (GEO). The expected life-span of the satellite is 8 years. The Military Satellite Count With the GSAT-7A, the total military satellite count of India has risen up to 14. Before this, ISRO had launched GSAT-7, also called Rukmini, to help the Indian Navy monitor the Indian Ocean Region (IOR). Some other notable military satellites include the Cartosat-series and the Risat-series for scanning the Earth and some other satellites on the geo orbit for communication, surveillance and navigation. The search for other life in the universe is taking us all over it. Not only are we looking at moons in our own solar system, we're also eyeing planets around nearby stars. Our primary search is for oxygen and water, but new research says that priority might be baseless. ALSO READ: After 10 Years Of Amazing Planet Hunting, NASA's Kepler Space Telescope Is Permanently Retired Johns Hopkins University Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences recently conducted a study, simulating atmospheres of exoplanets in a lab and seeing if they were capable of supporting life. Their findings suggest we need to change our search criteria somewhat. "Our experiments produced oxygen and organic molecules that could serve as the building blocks of life in the lab," says Chao He, the study's first author. However they saw no life develop in their simulations, proof they say that the presence of both doesn't guarantee the presence of life. "Researchers need to more carefully consider how these molecules are produced," he adds. So a little backstory is needed here. Billions of years ago, the Earth didn't have the oxygen content is does today, yet there is evidence there was life on Earth. This was in the form of cyanobacteria, populating the oceanic areas around geothermal vents. These were the first lifeforms to anaerobically produce oxygen through photosynthesis. The first few billion years saw that oxygen being absorbed first by the seabed, and then by landmasses. Eventually though, it bubbled up out of the ocean to fill up our atmosphere. ALSO READ: NASA's Planet-Hunting Tess Satellite Sends Back Its First Stunning Images Of Deep Space It's that Great Oxidation event that allowed other kinds of life to develop on Earth. That's why oxygen is considered a biomarker, meaning it's presence indicates life (like the cyanobacteria) has already developed. That's what this latest study says is wrong. Chao He and the rest of team performed their simulation experiments in a specially designed Planetary HAZE (PHAZER) chamber, courtesy co-author Sarah Horst's lab. They filled the chambers with nine different gas mixtures, including the likes of carbon dioxide, ammonia, methane, and water, and heating them at various temperatures between 26 to 371 degrees Celsius. These mixtures were consistent with what scientists expect Earth-like exoplanets we've discovered started out with. The team also exposed the chambers to two types of energy, plasma and UV light, naturally occurring energy that would mimic the trigger of a chemical reaction to create life. But after running the chamber for three continuous days, corresponding to the amount of time gas would be exposed to energy sources in space, they analysed the results. They found that they'd created both oxygen and organic molecules, capable of acting as raw materials for life, in multiple chambers. ALSO READ: NASA Scientist Claims Aliens May Have Visited Earth, And We Are Just Too Dumb For Our Own Good Basically oxygen here was created without the presence of microbes, as well as organic materials. That means searching for planets with oxygen might one day give us another home to migrate to. But it doesn't mean we'll find anything alive there, even microscopic. "People used to suggest that oxygen and organics being present together indicates life, but we produced them abiotically in multiple simulations," He says. "This suggests that even the co-presence of commonly accepted bio-signatures could be a false positive for life." A video of a woman using sings language to help her father enjoy a rock concert in Canada is winning hearts online. ALSO READ: Hearing Impaired Bengaluru Woman Biker Smashes Stereotypes, Covers 8,300Km On Bike Three Days Grace, the band playing at the concert, also tweeted the video along with the story of Carberry and her father. This teen didnt miss a beat as she signed song lyrics for her dad at a concert in Canada. A video showing Kari Carberry, 19, signing the lyrics of Just Like You for her dad Darrin Carberry, 53, at the Three Days Grace show, the band tweeted. We were in the crowd having a good time and it just started happening, it just started flowing, Carberry told CTV News. Just making eye contact, it was all about that moment. It even got the attention of the band, which tweeted out the video along with the caption this is amazing. The video now has over 20 million views and has left people teary-eyed. ALSO READ: For The Welfare Of Speech And Hearing Impaired Children, J&K Football Association Organises A Special Camp She had even inspected the saw that would eventually cut up her body. In a first, a woman from Denver volunteered to donate her body and become a 'digital cadaver'. My last will is to leave something behind that would have an impact on the whole human race" said Sue Potter, a woman who lived for 84 years before succumbing to pneumonia. National Geographic Potter, a mother-of-two, died of pneumonia in 2015. In the 15 years between pledging her body and her death, Sue documented everything about her life. Her entire journey has been documented by National Geographic and published in the January 2019 issue. ALSO READ: 7 Bizarre Facts About The Human Body That Are So Gross, It Will Make You Say 'Yuck' According to reports, Potter drew inspiration from an article about the University of Colorados Human Simulation Project and their Visible human project and decided to donate her body for the cause. National Geographic Sue became the first living person to donate her body to become an 'immortal corpse'. Dr Vic Spitzer rejected her at first as she had diabetes, melanoma and various surgeries. Shed also had a double mastectomy for breast cancer. But he agreed on the condition that she record everything for the rest of her life. Before dying, she asked to see the saw that would slice her and the fridge she will be stored in. Sue also asked that her body be surrounded by roses and that classical music play in the background while she was being cut up, Daily Mirror reports. ALSO READ: 82-Year-Old Man Becomes Mumbai's Oldest Cadaver Organ Donor When Potter signed on to Spitzers project, she thought she would die within a year. But she lived for 15 years more and interacted with medical students. By the time Sue died, they had a saw that could automatically slice hair-thin strips for 24 hours a day at astounding speed. Teenager Tyrone McAllister, who brutally attacked a 71-year-old Indian American man, Sahib Singh Natt (pictured), in Manteca, Calif., last August during the course of a robbery, was sentenced to one year in county jail. (sikh24.com photo) The SQL database dates back to the 1970s and has been an ANSI standard since the 1980s, but that doesnt mean the technology sits still. It is still changing, and one of those ways as GPU-accelerated databases. Relational databases have grown in size to data sets that measure in the petabytes and beyond. Even with the advent of 64-bit computing and terabytes of memory for increased processing, thats still a lot of data to chew throughand CPUs can only manage so much. Thats where GPUs have come in. GPUs have morphed from their original mission of accelerating gaming to accelerating almost everything. Nvidia has pivoted masterfully to become synonymous with artificial intelligence, a process that requires vast amounts of data processed in parallel and other tasks that can be parallelized well. AMD is starting to play catchup, but Nvidia has a long lead. When it comes to cores, its not even close. Xeon CPUs have a maximum of 22 cores. AMD Epyc has 32 cores. The Nvidia Volta architecture has 5,120 cores. Now imagine more than 5,000 cores running in parallel on data and its clear why GPUs have become so popular for massive compute projects. So a new class of databases has emerged, written from the ground up to support and embrace GPUs and their massive parallel processing capabilities. These databases are enabling new levels of data processing, analytics and real-time Big Data as they can handle data sets that regular CPU-powered databases simply cannot. The GPU database defined Cattle Futures Hold Firm, Awaiting More Cash Direction Barchart - 32 minutes ago Live cattle futures were off their intraday highs, but closed $.12 to $1.12 in the black on Wednesday. Central Stockyards is hosting a bonus Thursday auction as the FCE online auction resulted in no sales... LEZ21 : 136.000s (+0.09%) LEJ22 : 141.775s (+0.50%) GFF22 : 165.825s (+0.59%) GFH22 : 167.900s (+0.84%) Hogs Mixed, Bull Hope Higher Base Hogs Are a Trend Barchart - 32 minutes ago Hog futures closed mixed on Wednesday with 15 to 25 cent gains in the Dec and Feb contracts, The back month futures closed 7 to 37 cents weaker on the day. USDAs National Average Base hog price for... HEZ21 : 73.625s (+0.34%) HEJ22 : 85.075s (-0.21%) KMZ21 : 87.900s (-0.54%) GOLD & Silver Elliott Wave Analysis: Look For Recovery EW-Forecast.com - 1 hour ago Gold is coming sharply down from the upper side of a triangle range, so it appears that wave D is finished and that market is already in wave E. But even wave E should be made by three sub waves ^XAUUSD : 1,775.53 (-0.35%) ^XAGUSD : 22.351 (+0.17%) China clears Boeing 737 Max to fly again AP - 1 hour ago BEIJING (AP) Chinas aviation regulator cleared the Boeing 737 Max on Thursday to return to flying with technical upgrades more than two years after the plane was grounded worldwide following two... $SPX : 4,513.04 (-1.18%) $DOWI : 34,022.04 (-1.34%) $IUXX : 15,877.72 (-1.60%) BA : 198.54 (+5.50%) EU court advisor wants scrapping of Hungary-Poland challenge AP - 1 hour ago BRUSSELS (AP) The top adviser to the European Unions highest court on Thursday said that the principle of linking the blocs budget disbursements to respect for rule of law is compatible with... $SPX : 4,513.04 (-1.18%) $DOWI : 34,022.04 (-1.34%) $IUXX : 15,877.72 (-1.60%) Fed Comments Doesn't Move Markets Market Tea Leaves - Thu Dec 2, 5:36AM CST Yesterday the Fed comments didn't move markets, to the Upside at least. What will we see today? Omicron and delta spell return of unpopular restrictions AP - Thu Dec 2, 5:10AM CST PARIS (AP) Greeks who are over age 60 and refuse vaccinations could be hit with monthly fines of more than one-quarter of their pensions a get-tough policy that the country's politicians say will... $SPX : 4,513.04 (-1.18%) $DOWI : 34,022.04 (-1.34%) $IUXX : 15,877.72 (-1.60%) In light of the changing demographics in Hong Kong, there is a strong business case to be made for enhancement of the life insurance industry, Li said. Hong Kong must strive to be the regional hub for multinational and mainland life insurance companies so as to maintain and enhance its competitive advantages. According to the report, Hong Kongs insurance industry must implement seven key action points. These are (i) implement fit for purpose economic capital requirements; (ii) encourage the issuance of long-term assets appropriate for matching long-term liabilities; and (iii) leverage Hong Kongs advantageous connection with the mainland by creating a Life Insurance Connect to widen insurance distribution within the mainland and capture the opportunities in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area and the Belt and Road Initiative. Furthermore, the report advised the industry and government to work together to (iv) extend the international tax treaty network and provide tax incentives to insurance groups that establish and maintain regional headquarters in Hong Kong; (v) create a shared value environment where people live healthier for longer by providing better healthcare and financial support in retirement; (vi) facilitate the local development and deployment of insurtech; and (vii) attract and develop insurance talent. These changes are a reflection of our deep bench of talented senior executives as Argo, Watson said. Jose has led the continued transformation of our international business and brought on board a number of key executives. I am pleased we will now have the benefit of his insight and expertise applied across the company. Matts vast experience in both international operations and distribution makes him uniquely suited to move into his broader leadership role. In addition to his new role as CAO, Rehnberg will continue to serve as head of Argos insurance business for the US and Latin America. We have made great strides in creating a more efficient organisation and enhancing customer service, Watson said. Our progress is evident in the companys quarterly results, with both increased written premium and lower expenses. In order to accelerate these efforts, we have repositioned the executive committee to focus more of our time and energy evaluating strategic priorities and directing resources to the best opportunities while at the same time relying more heavily on our talented group of leaders to continue to improve our operations. It is with this in mind that I have decided to move more of the companys operations under Kevins leadership, which should give me more time to focus on our digital businesses and our investment portfolio. Kevin has transformed the US business, demonstrating a persistent drive for results and continuous improvement. Im certain he will take on these responsibilities with the same vigorous approach. ANAO is a specialist public-sector practice that makes specific recommendations to Parliament to help public-sector entities improve performance. ANAO proposes to examine if ARPC has processes in place that support the effective management of the scheme, and if its governance arrangements enable effective oversight and management of the scheme. I am very pleased to welcome the ANAO terms of reference and look forward to supporting it in undertaking this important work, said Christopher Wallace, ARPC chief executive. The final report on ARPC is set to be submitted to Parliament in June. Melbourne-based Farrell brings a wealth of experience to the firm, having held senior roles within several of Australias leading insurers and underwriters. She joins the Berkley team having most recently been with IAG, where she spent nine months as a portfolio specialist for professional risks. Prior to the stint at IAG, Farrell spent seven years as national underwriting manager for Chubb. Shes also held senior spots at IBL and ACE. Leanne brings excellent knowledge and expertise to our Victorian office, said Berkley CEO Tony Wheatley. We believe that brokers need local underwriters who are empowered to underwrite and make sensible underwriting decisions, he added. We welcome Leanne to our team. Speaking to Insurance Business, Farrell said changes in the global market were driving more brokers to seek out local underwriting options. We are seeing capacity reductions as Lloyds realigns and brokers are calling for underwriters that are empowered to make decisions locally, she said. Local decision-making means faster and better underwriting solutions can be offered to brokers and their clients. Looking ahead, Farrell also said shes excited to work for a company which truly values customers and strives to provide an exceptional service. BIA is highly respected in the market and renowned for providing prompt service backed by experienced and technical underwriting and these are only some of the qualities that make BIA an outstanding company, she said. An Australian insurance giant has thrown its support behind a major renovation project in the Solomon Islands, as part of the companys social corporate responsibility to give back to the local community. QBE Insurance Groups Mypana Isaac said the insurers Solomon Islands team has helped renovate the Pikinini clinic at Mataniko in China Town and done partition work inside the clinic to allow most departments to do their private diagnosing, treatment, and counselling. AXA XL has added to its broker and client management team with the appointment of Josh Harwood, who joined the insurer after 17 years at Telephone & Data Systems (TDS), a Chicago-based Fortune 500 company, where he was director of risk management. Harwood will be based in Chicago as AXA XLs client distribution leader for the US north central region and will report to Todd Sutherland, US north central regional leader. Harwood will be one of AXA XLs key points of contact for brokers and clients throughout the region, helping them address their multi-line property, casualty, and specialty insurance needs. Currently, McIntosh works as a commercial insurance producer at Energy Insurance Agency. Insurance Business caught up with McIntosh to learn more about his organization. IB: What do you like the most about your current organization? What makes it different from other firms in the same space? The people, my support staff, make all the difference. I spend more of my waking hours in a day at my office than I do with my family. A huge chunk of my life is spent with the people I work with. Im fortunate to be surrounded by talented people whom I like and work well with. Since Ive spent the last 29 years with the same agency, I really dont know what other firms are like. IB: What do you think are the most challenging issues facing the insurance industry and your line of work today? Two things, first I think our industry needs to move forward. We seem to cling to policy forms and ideas that are just out-of-date. Most insurance companies have spent a lot of money on technology, but still cling to old underwriting ideas. It seems carriers are afraid to present new policy form ideas unless they come from ISO. Second, technology has made rating and policy issuance faster, but at the same time has handcuffed underwriters - they cant do one thing or another that makes sense because their system wont let them. The industry has gone too far with technology; a blessing is turning into a curse. People rely too much on tech and forget how to do their job. It seems they can only do what the computer lets them do. Dont get me wrong, I love the abilities the internet gives me, but its a tool and only a tool, it doesnt replace good judgment. I have seen insurance companies basically held hostage by their technology. They were not able to react and change their business plan until they first updated their operating systems which can take years and millions of dollars. The biggest challenge I see is for insurance companies to rein in their tech - it should be a tool to aid their employees not an inflexible master that dictates their ability. Its never a good idea to let someone or something else do your thinking for you. IB: What are some of the most important qualities for someone to thrive in the insurance industry? Patience and persistence. It takes time to understand insurance policies. The agents job is to protect their clients and you cant do that if you dont know what the policies say and mean. An agent must always be learning, reading and asking questions. At times, it seems an almost impossible task to not only understand the policies, but then have the client give you the time to explain it to them. That takes a lot of patience and persistence, but thats the job. IB: How do you think your background in psychology and sociology helps you in your career? It helped me to understand people. I like people and I like to talk to people. Mostly I learned to be patient with others, to consider them and their needs. Basically, we are all pretty much the same, just sometimes we have a bad day and need a minute. Also, after a day at the office I need to have a group session with myself some days, so I dont lose my mind. IB: What are some effective solutions youve seen in getting young people to enter and stay in insurance? I really havent, not as agents. This is a big struggle on the agent side. Being an agent is demanding. Far too many young people seem to be trained to sell, sell, sell when they need to learn, learn, learn first. As I said before, you cant take care of your customer if you dont know what the policy says or does. Price is always important, but only as a component of value. Things that dont cost much or are free in the insurance world dont have any value. When I work with a customer the first thing I try to do is get their coverages correct, then find the best price. It seems most young people entering the agent field are trained to get the low price and nothing else. Its just a flash in the pan. The pressure is on young producers to write numbers and they just arent given the time to develop into competent agents. On the insurance company side I have defiantly seen rays of hope. But there are two major differences - new underwriters are not put under the same pressure as new agents and insurance carriers seem to do a better job training. I know many people today think young people have no attention span. Thats just not true, the problem is we dont train them, we arent teaching them, we perhaps dont have the patience of our older generation. Yes, they seem to always have their phones in their faces, but give them something better to do and hide their phone during work hours. IB: Whats the best piece of advice youve received in your career? I was told by my dad when I first started, price is not everything, its what you have to offer at that price, value. Dad taught me to give true value to my clients, to do more than my competitors and value my clients. Thanks Dad, you were right. IB: If you were not working in the insurance space, what would you be doing now? I dont know, I feel like a fish in water as an agent, I like helping people with hard confusing things. IB: What are your passions or hobbies outside insurance? I like to play golf. Im not sure what it says about me - I like to do something for fun that drives me crazy, but there it is. I like to be challenged, golf, at least for me is something I can never master, but that doesnt keep me from trying! Maybe thats why I like insurance so much, I think maybe I just like being aggravated. RenaissanceRe Holdings Ltd. and Dutch pension fund manager PGGM announced they have launched Vermeer Reinsurance Ltd. to provide capacity focused on risk remote layers in the U.S. property catastrophe market. PGGM is a Dutch pension fund service provider with 215 billion ($244.3 billion) of assets under management. It has a 13-year track record of investing in insurance and is currently one of the largest end-investors in the insurance linked securities (ILS) asset class. Zeist, Netherlands-headquartered PGGM is the sole investor in Vermeer. Vermeer will be initially capitalized with $600 million of equity from PGGM, with up to a further $400 million available to pursue growth opportunities in 2019, for a total of $1 billion of capital. The company has received an A financial strength rating from A.M. Best and has obtained approval in principle to be licensed and regulated by the Bermuda Monetary Authority as a Class 3B reinsurer. Vermeer will be managed by Renaissance Underwriting Manager Ltd. and is expected to be consolidated into RenaissanceRes financial statements. Since 2014, we have focused on building strategic partnerships with top tier reinsurance companies to improve access to and selection of risk. We seek efficient implementation of our investments as we believe this leads to superior returns, said Eveline Takken-Somers, senior director, Credit and Insurance Linked Investments of PGGM. RenaissanceRe is a world leader in both reinsurance and the creation of joint venture vehicles and we look forward to the opportunities Vermeer will provide as PGGM continues to grow its insurance portfolio, added Takken-Somers. Source: RenaissanceRe Topics Catastrophe USA Reinsurance Global insurance broker Marsh announced the appointments of key leaders for its regional, specialty and placement teams worldwide that will be effective upon closing of the pending acquisition by Marshs parent company, Marsh & McLennan Cos., of JLT. The acquisition with a price tag of about 4.3 billion pounds ($5.7 billion) will expand Marshs global offering of reinsurance and consulting services. It is still in the process of certain regulatory approvals. The combination of Marshs and JLTs capabilities and colleagues is an exciting opportunity to deliver greater value to clients, said John Doyle, president and CEO of Marsh. These roles are being filled by experienced and talented leaders who will have a positive impact on our business. Marsh International All international regional leaders will report to Flavio Piccolomini, president of Marsh International. Chris Lay will continue as CEO of the UK & Ireland. Adrian Girling, currently chairman UK, Europe and South Africa for JLT, will become chairman of UK & Ireland Corporate and Risk Management for Marsh and report to Lay. Nick Harris, CEO of Australia and New Zealand for JLT, will become CEO of Pacific for Marsh. Scott Leney, currently Marsh Pacific CEO, will become CEO for Australia and report to Harris. Andre Louw, currently chairman of Australia and New Zealand for JLT, will become Chairman of Pacific for Marsh. Christos Adamantiadis will continue as CEO of Middle East & Africa (MEA). Peregrine Towneley, currently CEO of MEA for JLT, will become chairman of Middle East for Marsh. Robert Makhoul, currently Marsh & McLennan Companies chief client officer and chairman of Middle East for Marsh, will continue as MMC chief client officer for the Middle East. David Jacob will continue as CEO of Asia. Alan Cheah will continue as chairman of Asia. James Addington-Smith, currently Asia Specialty leader for Marsh, will become CEO of ASEAN, a sub-region of Asia, reporting to Jacob. Siegmund Fahrig will continue as CEO of Continental Europe. Ricardo Brockmann will continue as CEO of Latin America. Marsh US and Canada As previously announced, Martin South, president of Marsh US and Canada, will continue to lead the region. Sarah Robson will continue as CEO of Canada, reporting to South. Marsh-JLT Specialty As previously announced, Dominic Burke, CEO of JLT Group, in addition to becoming vice chairman of Marsh & McLennan Companies and a member of the MMC Executive Committee, will become chairman of the newly-formed Marsh-JLT Specialty. Lucy Clarke will become president of Marsh-JLT Specialty reporting to Doyle. Global specialty leaders will report to Clarke. Regional specialty leaders will report both to Clarke and their respective regional leader. Global Specialty Leaders Simon Harker, currently global Aviation and Space leader for Marsh, will become global head of Aviation. Richard Gurney, currently global head of Construction for JLT, will become global head of Construction. Nick Robson, currently global head of Credit, Political and Security Risk for JLT, will become global head of Credit Specialty. Evan Freely, currently global Credit Specialty leader for Marsh, will become deputy global head of Credit Specialty, reporting to Robson. Andrew George, currently global Industry Specialty leader for Marsh, will become global head of Energy & Power. Jim Pierce, currently global head of Energy, Power & Mining for JLT, will become chairman of Global Energy & Power. Mark Wood, currently global head of Financial Lines for JLT, will become head of Financial and Professional Lines (FINPRO) International. Devin Beresheim, currently US FINPRO Practice head for Marsh, will become head of FINPRO US and Canada. Marcus Baker, currently global Marine leader for Marsh, will become global head of Marine. Karen Beldy Torborg, currently Marshs global Private Equity and Mergers and Acquisitions (PEMA) and Infrastructure leader, will become global head of PEMA and Infrastructure. Regional Specialty Leaders Pat Donnelly, currently CEO of the US for JLT Specialty, will become head of Marsh-JLT Specialty for US and Canada. Paul Moody, currently Marsh UK & Ireland Specialty leader, will become head of Marsh-JLT Specialty for the UK & Ireland. Roy White, currently chairman of UK Specialty for Marsh, will become chairman of Marsh-JLT Specialty for the UK & Ireland. Paul Knowles, currently CEO of UK, Europe and South Africa for JLT, will become head of Marsh-JLT Specialty in Continental Europe. Josh Roach, currently Marsh Specialty leader for Pacific, will become head of Marsh-JLT Specialty for Pacific. Dominic Samengo-Turner, currently CEO of Asia for JLT, will become head of Marsh-JLT Specialty in Asia. Peter Foley, currently Marsh Retail Placement & Specialty leader in Latin America, will become head of Marsh-JLT Specialty for Latin America. Gaurav Bhatnagar, currently Marsh Retail Placement & Specialty leader in Middle East & Africa, will become head of Marsh-JLT Specialty in MEA. Marsh Global Placement As previously announced, Dean Klisura will become president, Marsh Global Placement responsible for placement protocols and standards across all lines within Marsh, and he will lead non-specialty placement operations including Bowring Marsh and existing multi-line placement hubs. Regional placement leaders will continue in their current positions reporting to Klisura and to their respective regional leader, including: John Donnelly, global placement leader for Asia and Pacific; Nick Holmes, global placement leader for Continental Europe and Middle East & Africa; Carlos Rivera, global placement leader for Latin America; Andrew Chester, global placement leader for the UK & Ireland; and Chris Lang global placement leader for US and Canada. Tom Davies, global wholesale placement leader for Marsh, will continue in that role leading Bowring Marsh and reporting to Klisura. Related: Topics Mergers USA Excess Surplus Europe Leadership Canada Australia Federal and state agencies are investigating the cause of a train derailment in southeastern Oklahoma. Authorities say 16 railroad cars and a locomotive of a Union Pacific freight train derailed about 6:30 a.m. Sunday in a rural area north of Kiowa, about 105 miles (314 kilometers) southeast of Oklahoma City. No injuries were reported and no hazardous materials were released. Union Pacific spokeswoman Hannah Bolte says Monday that nine of the railroad cars were empty. Officials say the others carried steel, grain and beer. Union Pacific says the train originated in San Antonio and was headed for Kansas City, Missouri. Bolte says the Federal Railroad Administration is leading the investigation into the cause. Railroad crews are working to remove the damaged rail cars and repair the tracks. Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Topics Oklahoma Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin and the Cherokee Nation are asking the U.S. Small Business Administration for a disaster declaration to residents of Cherokee County affected by tornadoes, severe storms and strong winds on Nov. 30. If approved, the request filed Monday would provide low-interest loans for homeowners, renters, and business owners in the county to repair or replace uninsured property that was damaged. Fallin says damage assessments found more than 90 Cherokee County homes and businesses affected by the storm. Approval of the request would also make residents in the contiguous counties of Adair, Delaware, and Sequoyah eligible for the assistance. The storms were part of a system that also produced tornadoes in Illinois and Missouri. Fallin previously declared a state of emergency for 12 counties in the area. Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Topics Windstorm Oklahoma Insurors of Tennessee named Ashley Gold as CEO of the organization, effective Jan. 1, 2019. Gold currently serves as general counsel for the trade association which represents independent insurance agents in the state a position she has held since 2008. She has been employed as a lobbyist with the association for over 17 years and is its first female CEO, according to Chris Allison, 2018 Insurors president. Gold, a Nashville native, currently serves on the Tennessee Bureau of Workers Compensation Employee Misclassification Advisory Committee, and is a member of IA Action Partners, a group of Big I state association executives working toward common solutions to association issues. Prior to joining the association, she was a practicing attorney in Birmingham and Nashville for more than 13 years, ultimately serving as the managing partner for Schulman, LeRoy & Bennett, P.C., where she represented clients in corporate law, real estate law, and workers compensation and insurance defense law. Gold succeeds Charles T. Chuck Bidek who is retiring from his position as CEO of Insurors of Tennessee on Jan. 1, 2019. Bidek led the organization for over 32 years and has been employed with the group for 43 years. In 2002, he was honored by the associations members with their highest award, the Insuror of the Year. In 2013, he was inducted into the Robert E. Musto Tennessee Insurance Hall of Fame at Middle Tennessee State University. Over his time with Insurors, Bidek developed many programs for its members, including a marketing partnership with the Tennessee Titans that made Insurors and its partners the second largest advertiser on the Titans Radio Network. He has also worked on the Insurors annual convention, and overseen and actively taught continuing education courses to thousands of insurance agents throughout the state. Insurors of Tennessee is a trade association that was founded in 1893 and currently represents almost 500 independent insurance agencies in Tennessee. Topics Carriers Tennessee Mississippi is suing three opioid distributors, saying it failed to prevent the diversion of those drugs into the state and contributed to the opioid crisis. The complaint was filed in Hinds County Circuit Court against Cardinal Health, McKesson Corp. and AmerisourceBergen Corp., Attorney General Jim Hood said in a news release Dec. 6. It alleges the companies breached their legal duties to monitor, detect, investigate, refuse, and report suspicious orders of opioids. Hood said that is a violation of the Mississippi Consumer Protection Act and as a result, Mississippi has been flooded with opioids and is suffering an ongoing public health crisis. The complaint alleges that if the companies had done what they were legally obligated to do, the opioid epidemic would not be what it is today. In 2017 alone, Hood said Mississippi had enough opioids supplied to provide 61 pills for every man, woman and child in the state. If these distributors were attending to their supply rates, they would realize that amount of pills is way too large for a state the size of Mississippi, Hood said. These companies must own up to their contribution to this deadly crisis, and I intend on holding them fully accountable. AmerisourceBergen Corp. is based in Chesterbrook, Pennsylvania; McKesson Corp is located in San Francisco, California and Cardinal Health is in Dublin, Ohio. The companies have said they have reformed their reporting and monitoring practices in recent years and will work with regulators and law enforcement to combat opioid misuse and addiction. In December 2015, Hood filed the first lawsuit on behalf of a state against multiple drug manufacturing companies for falsely marketing opioids as rarely addictive. That lawsuit was filed in Hinds County Chancery Court against five of the largest opioid manufacturers. One of the companies in that suit, Purdue Pharma along with three of its executives pleaded guilty in 2007 to federal charges and paid more than $600 million in fines related to intentional misrepresentations as to the addictiveness of OxyContin. That lawsuits current status was not immediately available. Topics Lawsuits Mississippi California Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones on Wednesday imposed a $4.3 million penalty on American Labor Alliance and CompOne USA for selling workers compensation and liability policies to employers of farmworkers without being properly licensed with the California Department of Insurance. The penalty follows a cease and desist order issued by CDI 2016 against the Agricultural Contracting Services Association Inc. and its affiliates, the American Labor Alliance and CompOne USA, and Board Chair Marcus Asay, and an order issued by Jones in 2017 them to refrain from selling insurance policies in California. Despite the orders the company continued to transact insurance without a license. The company has argued it isnt required to register with the department because it is selling benefits and not insurance. An executive for the company in the past has argued that the company is an IRS exempt 501(c)(5) labor organization and has always filed as an entity claiming exception with the Department of Labor under the Multiple Employer Welfare Arrangement section of the federal Employee Retirement Income Security Act. Jones on Wednesday encouraged employers doing business with Agricultural Contracting Services Association Inc., American Labor Alliance, or affiliate CompOne USA, to contact the CDI at (661) 253-7500 for assistance in determining the validity of their workers comp coverage. Insurance companies not properly licensed to transact insurance in California place policyholders at risk because the insurers have not met the standards required under state law, Jones said in a statement. In this case the health and wellbeing of the farmworkers was put at risk by the unlicensed insurers who sold workers compensation insurance illegally to the employers of farmworkers. Related: Topics California Workers' Compensation Agribusiness December 19, 2018 (Investorideas.com Newswire) Ron Struthers of Struthers Resource Stock Report profiles an innovative medical firm in Canada that just announced the acquisition of a medical technology firm, a move that will expand its reach across Canada. Canada's healthcare system is the envy of many places around the world but it has some serious issues. Free healthcare is great but in many cases you have to be a patient who is very patient. It is very difficult to find a family doctor if you do not have one and if you do, waiting times for appointments is normally lengthy. Many people end up going to emergency rooms or clinics if they need same day care and wait day to all day in most cases. Simply put, our healthcare system is severely overburdened. When an associate of mine told me about a company that had a solution for this, I became very interested both personally and as an investor. I was planning to feature the company in January, but with news out today, you need to be aware now. Premier Health Group Inc. (PHGI:CSE; PHGRF:OTCQB; 6PH:FSE), Recent Price $0.95 Shares outstanding 61.1 million, Fully diluted 65.1 million. Innovative healthcare approaches that combine human skill based expertise with emerging technologies. Premier Health's subsidiary, HealthVue, is focused on developing proprietary technology to deliver quality healthcare through the combination of connected primary care clinics with telemedicine and artificial intelligence (AI). HealthVue currently has an ecosystem of over 100,000 active patients and plans to rapidly increase that number both domestically and internationally. The market for this enormous, projected at $10 trillion by Accenture. The management team has deep clinical, financial and operational expertise and a passion for improving healthcare for all patients. The company is headed up by its CEO and COO: Dr. Essam Hamza, MD CEO, completed his MD and Family Practice degree at the University of Alberta. He founded Premier Health in 2005 and has since grown the business to include four interconnected high-tech clinics serving over 100,000 patients. Kanchan Thindal, MBA COO, left a position at Scotiabank's Head Office to join the Premier Health team. She has previously worked with startups in the healthcare and technology spaces. Kanchan holds an MBA from the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. This slide from Premier's presentation gives a great overview of its HealthVue solution. Patient charts are available online so any clinic could access your most recent information. Patients would have their own primary care doctor but can get care from any HealthVue clinic. There is also 24/7 online booking. PHGI started in British Columbia with the acquisition of HealthVue Ventures in August of this year. Currently it has 4 clinics, 22 Health Care professionals and about 125,000 patients. On average each appointment is billed $50 and in B.C. this is covered under the Canadian health system. Since the acquisition there is only one quarter of revenue under Premier's belt and the annual run rate is currently about $1.7 million in revenue. This is poised to rise dramatically. In November, PHGI announced plans to expand into the Cannabis space. Its platform is a perfect fit here. Last week, as part of its growth strategy to cover the major verticals associated with primary care, Premier Health Group Inc. has signed a binding letter of intent (LOI) to acquire a pharmacy based in Vancouver, B.C. The company expects the acquisition to close in or about Q1 2019. "We are excited for this opportunity to acquire our first pharmacy, and thereafter being able to prepare and deliver prescription and non-prescription pharmaceuticals and other health products to patients. In doing so, the pharmacist will play an integral role in our team-based patient centric model," said Dr. Essam Hamza, chief executive officer of Premier. "Premier has engaged with patients, pharmacies and technology providers to not only introduce pharmacy services as a component of our comprehensive telemedicine app, but also to explore and implement efficiencies in fill and fulfillment." Under the terms of the LOI, the total consideration payable by Premier is $1.35 million, which will be paid as follows: (i) $200,000 deposit paid on signing of the LOI, (ii) $350,000 due on signing of a definitive agreement, (iii) $650,000 due on closing, (iii) $150,000 due six months after closing. Pharmacy prescriptions will become another revenue source for PHGI and I can tell you that pharmacies are a profitable business. What I call the granddaddy announcement was made this morning. PHGI announced that as a part of its technology platform, it has signed an agreement to acquire Cloud Practice. Premier shall acquire all of the issued and outstanding securities of Cloud Practice from their shareholders. "We are ecstatic at the opportunity to build on our patient centric technology platform through the integration of Cloud Practice's proprietary software. They have a strong team of developers whom are just as enthusiastic as our team about the future of healthcare. This partnership will facilitate our vision of integrating Telemedicine, online booking and other premium services with our EMR. Furthermore, Cloud Practice already has a tremendous standalone and growing business serving thousands of clinicians and millions of patients," said Dr. Hamza. "The collective ecosystem of over 3,000,000 patients creates an opportunity to become a key player in the telehealth space in Canada," added Dr. Hamza. HIGHLIGHTS Cloud Practice is an EBITA 1 positive company offering cloud-based SAAS (software as a service) electronic medical records software applications for physicians in British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario and Saskatchewan positive company offering cloud-based SAAS (software as a service) electronic medical records software applications for physicians in British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario and Saskatchewan Products include: Juno EMR, a cloud based EMR solution; ClinicAid, a medical billing software; and MyHealthAccess, an online patient portal Juno EMR system is currently used by 287 clinics, over 3,000 licensed practitioners, 1,500 staff and 2,870,000 registered patients ClinicAid processes upwards of $30,000,000 in payments to over 3000 health providers on a monthly basis Cloud Practice's founders and entire team, comprised of several software developers and sales staff led by Jordan Visco, to join Premier's technology team on closing We simply cannot extrapolate potential revenues because at this time PHGI's HealthVue System can only be billed through Canadian Health Insurance in B.C. There are pilot projects in other Canadian provinces and it is coming, but the exact timeline is unknown. However, significant revenue from Cloud Practive will be accredited to PHGI and this positions PGHI extremely well in three other Canadian provinces and importantly the largest one: Ontario. In consideration for the purchase of all of the issued and outstanding Cloud Practice securities, Premier shall pay to the Cloud Practice shareholders (pro-rata) aggregate consideration of up to $5.0 million as follows: (i) $500,000 in cash upon execution of the agreement, (ii) $500,000 in cash payable on closing, (iii) $500,000 in cash payable 90 days following closing, (iv) $500,000 in cash payable within six months subject to the completion of a milestone, and (v) an aggregate of $3.0 million in commons shares of Premier at a deemed price per share of $0.76. This acquisition is going to vault PHGI into a major player in Canada's healthcare. The company also has plans to expand internationally. Last financials at September 30, reveal $2.1 million in cash so the company is in good shape, but I expect it will boost the treasury sometime in 2019. This is a new company with not a lot of trading history. It made its first acquisition and really just got started this past August, but the uptrend in the stock is quite obvious. There has been two break-away gaps and consolidation and I would not be surprised if we see another break-away gap with this news. That said, nobody knows for sure and I am hoping with the XMAS holiday season approaching, that this will not get too much notice and we can buy around $1.00. The stock is also trading good volume on the OTC, but the listing is just 6 weeks old. Ron Struthers founded Struthers' Resource Stock Report 23 years ago. The report covers senior and junior companies with ample trading liquidity. He started his Millennium Index of dividend stocks in 2003 - $1,000 invested then was worth over $4,000 end of 2014 and the index returned 26.8% in 2016. He retired from IBM after 30 years in customer service, systems and business analyst, also developing his own charting software. He has expertise in junior start-ups and was a co-founder of Paramount Gold and Silver. Disclosure: 1) Ron Struthers: I, or members of my immediate household or family, own shares of the following companies mentioned in this article: None. I personally am, or members of my immediate household or family are, paid by the following companies mentioned in this article: None. My company currently has a financial relationship with the following companies mentioned in this article: None. Additional disclosures below. I determined which companies would be included in this article based on my research and understanding of the sector. 2) The following companies mentioned in this article are sponsors of Streetwise Reports: None. Click here for important disclosures about sponsor fees. As of the date of this article, an affiliate of Streetwise Reports has a consulting relationship with Premier Health Group Inc. Please click here for more information. 3) Statements and opinions expressed are the opinions of the author and not of Streetwise Reports or its officers. The author is wholly responsible for the validity of the statements. The author was not paid by Streetwise Reports for this article. Streetwise Reports was not paid by the author to publish or syndicate this article. The information provided above is for informational purposes only and is not a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Streetwise Reports requires contributing authors to disclose any shareholdings in, or economic relationships with, companies that they write about. Streetwise Reports relies upon the authors to accurately provide this information and Streetwise Reports has no means of verifying its accuracy. 4) This article does not constitute investment advice. Each reader is encouraged to consult with his or her individual financial professional and any action a reader takes as a result of information presented here is his or her own responsibility. By opening this page, each reader accepts and agrees to Streetwise Reports' terms of use and full legal disclaimer. This article is not a solicitation for investment. Streetwise Reports does not render general or specific investment advice and the information on Streetwise Reports should not be considered a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Streetwise Reports does not endorse or recommend the business, products, services or securities of any company mentioned on Streetwise Reports. 5) From time to time, Streetwise Reports LLC and its directors, officers, employees or members of their families, as well as persons interviewed for articles and interviews on the site, may have a long or short position in securities mentioned. Directors, officers, employees or members of their immediate families are prohibited from making purchases and/or sales of those securities in the open market or otherwise from the time of the interview or the decision to write an article until three business days after the publication of the interview or article. The foregoing prohibition does not apply to articles that in substance only restate previously published company releases. As of the date of this article, officers and/or employees of Streetwise Reports LLC (including members of their household) own securities of Premier Health Group Inc., a company mentioned in this article. Charts and images provided by the author. Struther's Resource Stock Report: All forecasts and recommendations are based on opinion. Markets change direction with consensus beliefs, which may change at any time and without notice. The author/publisher of this publication has taken every precaution to provide the most accurate information possible. The information & data were obtained from sources believed to be reliable, but because the information & data source are beyond the author's control, no representation or guarantee is made that it is complete or accurate. The reader accepts information on the condition that errors or omissions shall not be made the basis for any claim, demand or cause for action. Because of the ever-changing nature of information & statistics the author/publisher strongly encourages the reader to communicate directly with the company and/or with their personal investment adviser to obtain up to date information. Past results are not necessarily indicative of future results. Any statements non-factual in nature constitute only current opinions, which are subject to change. The author/publisher may or may not have a position in the securities and/or options relating thereto, & may make purchases and/or sales of these securities relating thereto from time to time in the open market or otherwise. Neither the information, nor opinions expressed, shall be construed as a solicitation to buy or sell any stock, futures or options contract mentioned herein. The author/publisher of this letter is not a qualified financial adviser & is not acting as such in this publication. (c) Copyright 2018, Struther's Resource Stock Report More Info: This news is published on the Investorideas.com Newswire - a global digital news source for investors and business leaders Disclaimer/Disclosure: Investorideas.com is a digital publisher of third party sourced news, articles and equity research as well as creates original content, including video, interviews and articles. Original content created by investorideas is protected by copyright laws other than syndication rights. Our site does not make recommendations for purchases or sale of stocks, services or products. Nothing on our sites should be construed as an offer or solicitation to buy or sell products or securities. All investing involves risk and possible losses. This site is currently compensated for news publication and distribution, social media and marketing, content creation and more. Disclosure is posted for each compensated news release, content published /created if required but otherwise the news was not compensated for and was published for the sole interest of our readers and followers. Contact management and IR of each company directly regarding specific questions. More disclaimer info: https://www.investorideas.com/About/Disclaimer.asp Learn more about publishing your news release and our other news services on the Investorideas.com newswire https://www.investorideas.com/News-Upload/ and tickertagstocknews.com Global investors must adhere to regulations of each country. Please read Investorideas.com privacy policy: https://www.investorideas.com/About/Private_Policy.asp VANCOUVER, British Columbia - December 19, 2018 (Investorideas.com Newswire) Investor Idea cannabis and cosmetics : Yield Growth Corp. (CSE:BOSS, C.BOSS) announced it has appointed Mr. Thomas Bond to the Yield Growth Board of Directors and appointed him as Chairman of the Board of Urban Juve Provisions Inc., which is 100% owned by Yield Growth. Thomas Bond has over 35 years experience partnering with entrepreneur businesses to build and deliver the operational and financial infrastructure to support annual double-digit revenue growth. During that time, he has held C-level financial and operational positions with companies engaged in cosmetics, apparel, and construction including M.A.C Cosmetics, Cover FX Skin Care and Tridel. Thomas was with M.A.C Cosmetics from 1993 until its sale to Estee Lauder in 1999. He started as the CFO and in 1994 the COO role was added to his portfolio. From 1993 to 1999, annual revenues at M.A.C Cosmetics grew from $12 million to over $300 million. His achievements included building an executive team that could support the growth objectives, opening M.A.C owned retail stores, diversifying the business geographically by expanding into the U.K., France, Italy and Hong Kong, and mitigating the retailer concentration risk in the U.S. by adding distribution agreements with a number of major department stores. He was personally responsible for leading the discussions with Estee Lauder and negotiating the final sale agreement. After the acquisition, he continued to provide full time consultant services to M.A.C Cosmetics until 2002. M.A.C Cosmetics is named one of the top three global makeup brands, with an annual turnover of over $1 billion and 500 independent stores. M.A.C Cosmetics is headquartered in New York City and became part of the Estee Lauder Companies in 1998. The Estee Lauder Companies reported net sales of $13.68 billion for fiscal year 2018. After M.A.C Cosmetics, Thomas joined Cover FX Skin Care Inc., a startup cosmetics company based in Toronto, as a shareholder and the CFO and COO. During his tenure, Cover FX expanded rapidly by entering into agreements with Shoppers Drug Mart, Sephora in the U.S., and Harvey Nichols in the U.K. In order to accelerate the rate of growth additional capital was required, so in 2011 a controlling interest was sold to L. Catterton, the largest and most experienced consumer-focused private equity company in the world. Today, Cover FX products are being distributed in 1875 stores in Canada, the U.S., U.K., the Middle East, Australia, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand and Latin America. From April 2013 to the present, Thomas has consulted with the CFO Centre Canada and for four of those years provided CFO/COO consulting to a company in the apparel industry owned by Birch Hill Equity Partners. Thomas holds an MBA from the Rotman School of Business at the University of Toronto and is a CPA. C.A. In addition to his appointment as a Director of Yield Growth, he has also been appointed to its Audit Committee and Compensation Committee effective today. "Thomas is an excellent addition to what is already an exceptional team with big company depth," says Penny Green, CEO of the Yield Growth Corp. "Thomas brings extensive financial, operational, and strategic experience. This, combined with his deep knowledge of the cosmetics industry and experience scaling high-growth companies, will be a huge asset to both Yield Growth and Urban Juve." About The Yield Growth Corp. & Urban Juve The Yield Growth Corp. is a diverse team of business executives dedicated to rapid, sustainable financial growth for businesses with viable models for success. The teams experience spans across venture capital, international investor relations, licensing, intellectual property strategies, and corporate governance best practices in North America. Its directors and officers have experience at multi-billion dollar international companies including M.A.C Cosmetics, Aritzia, Skechers, Pepsi and Coca-Cola. Yield Growth owns 100% of Urban Juve Provisions Inc., which has a catalogue of over 50 wellness formulas. Urban Juve is the organic synthesis of ancient knowledge and modern techniques. Ayurvedic knowledge delineates three general categories or skin types, which Urban Juve has translated as Vitalize, Balance and Align, each with its own dedicated range of skin and body care formulations. Urban Juve has registered for sale with Health Canada 26 products containing cannabis sativa hemp oil and has filed 11 provisional patent applications in the United States. Urban Juves products are sold in Canada, with distribution agreements signed for the United States and Italy. For more information about Yield Growth, please visit www.yieldgrowth.com or follow on Instagram @yieldgrowth. Visit www.urbanjuve.com and #findyourjuve to learn, engage and shop. A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/a59aa647-0e70-4840-ae15-4f4c3a83fc43 Investor Relations Contact Kristina Pillon invest@yieldgrowth.com 1-833-514-BOSS 1-833-514-2677 1-833-515-BOSS 1-833-515-2677 The Canadian Securities Exchange has not reviewed, approved or disapproved the content of this news release. Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-Looking Statements This press release includes forward-looking information and statements (collectively, "forward looking statements") under applicable Canadian securities legislation. Forward-looking statements are necessarily based upon a number of estimates, forecasts, beliefs and assumptions that, while considered reasonable, are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors which may cause the actual results and future events to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such risks, uncertainties and factors include, but are not limited to: risks related to the development, testing, licensing, intellectual property protection, and sale of, and demand for, Urban Juve products, general business, economic, competitive, political and social uncertainties, delay or failure to receive board or regulatory approvals where applicable, and the state of the capital markets. Yield Growth cautions readers not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements provided by Yield Growth, as such forward-looking statements are not a guarantee of future results or performance and actual results may differ materially. The forward-looking statements contained in this press release are made as of the date of this press release, and Yield Growth expressly disclaims any obligation to update or alter statements containing any forward-looking information, or the factors or assumptions underlying them, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law. This news is published on the Investorideas.com Newswire News that Inspires big ideas Disclaimer/Disclosure: Investorideas.com is a digital publisher of third party sourced news, articles and equity research as well as creates original content, including video, interviews and articles. Original content created by investorideas is protected by copyright laws other than syndication rights. Our site does not make recommendations for purchases or sale of stocks, services or products. Nothing on our sites should be construed as an offer or solicitation to buy or sell products or securities. All investment involves risk and possible loss of investment. This site is currently compensated for news publication and distribution, social media and marketing, content creation and more. Contact each company directly regarding content and press release questions. Disclosure is posted for each compensated news release, content published /created if required but otherwise the news was not compensated for and was published for the sole interest of our readers and followers. More disclaimer info: http://www.investorideas.com/About/Disclaimer.asp. Disclosure this Yield Growth news release is paid for news distribution on the Investorideas.com newswire. Learn more about costs and our newswire service http://www.investorideas.com/News-Upload/ Additional info regarding BC Residents and global Investors: Effective September 15 2008 - all BC investors should review all OTC and Pink sheet listed companies for adherence in new disclosure filings and filing appropriate documents with Sedar. Read for more info: http://www.bcsc.bc.ca/release.aspx?id=6894. Global investors must adhere to regulations of each country. Please read Investorideas.com privacy policy: http://www.investorideas.com/About/Private_Policy.asp December 19, 2018 (Investorideas.com Newswire) Money manager Adrian Day explains why he believes this stock should be sold now. Sell Nevsun Resources Ltd. (NSU, NY, US$4.46-4.47) with a limit of US$4.50. Zijin announced earlier in the month that it had received its third and final approval from Chinese authorities to proceed with its friendly takeover of Nevsun. There is little chance the takeover will not proceed. We are now going to sell Nevsun officially from our "Current Positions" list. Why sell, why wait? The possibility of another bid for Nevsun is remote indeed, as is the possibility that Zijin will back out, though there is a risk that the company will not achieve the minimum number of votes required. More certain is currency fluctuation; since the offer is priced in Canadian dollars (C$6 cash per Nevsun share), the amount received by a U.S. or other non-Canadian shareholder will vary with changes in the currency value. While we think the Canadian dollar is undervalued nowit's declined from 1.28 to 1.338 versus the U.S. dollar, within spitting distance of the annual lowthere is no certainty what will happen over the next six weeks. Also, if you do not sell the shares in the market, you will receive payment at the Canadian exchange rate on the day of payment, outside your control. The reason to wait The main reason to wait is to push the sale date into next year, for tax purposes. See previous discussion. Although the closing date is set at December 28, there is a 10-day mandatory extension, and payment will come in the new year. If you tender, it is uncertain if that will count as a sale next year. We are not tax professionals and are not offering tax advice; you should discuss with your tax professional. So not tendering, but waiting to be subject to compulsory acquisition next year, would make certain the sale date (next year). The risk here is that Zijin gains control of Nevsun but decides not to purchase the shares not tendered. So all choicessell in market, tender, or waithave possible advantages and risks. If you are not concerned with taxes, then let's place a sell. The stock has been volatile; if it does not hit our limit over the next week, we will change the limit to ensure a sale. We had two positions in Reservoir Minerals, which was acquired in 2016 by Nevsun. One position we sold at the end of that year for a gain of 1,387%. This second position, if sold at $4.50, will generate a return (including dividends) of 105% in little over four years. With this sale, the average return on all closed positions inches up to 97.4%. Adrian Day, London-born and a graduate of the London School of Economics, heads the money management firm Adrian Day Asset Management, where he manages discretionary accounts in both global and resource areas. Day is also sub-adviser to the EuroPacific Gold Fund (EPGFX). His latest book is "Investing in Resources: How to Profit from the Outsized Potential and Avoid the Risks." Disclosure: 1) Adrian Day: I, or members of my immediate household or family, own shares of the following companies mentioned in this article: Nevsun Resources. I personally am, or members of my immediate household or family are, paid by the following companies mentioned in this article: None. My company has a financial relationship with the following companies mentioned in this article: None. Funds controlled by Adrian Day Asset Management hold shares of the following companies mentioned in this article: Nevsun Resources. I determined which companies would be included in this article based on my research and understanding of the sector. 2) The following companies mentioned in this article are billboard sponsors of Streetwise Reports: None. Click here for important disclosures about sponsor fees. The information provided above is for informational purposes only and is not a recommendation to buy or sell any security. 3) Statements and opinions expressed are the opinions of the author and not of Streetwise Reports or its officers. The author is wholly responsible for the validity of the statements. The author was not paid by Streetwise Reports for this article. Streetwise Reports was not paid by the author to publish or syndicate this article. 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Please read Investorideas.com privacy policy: https://www.investorideas.com/About/Private_Policy.asp Shaft 1's continuing advance has intersected 29 metres of high-grade mineralization from underground mine development, beginning at a depth of 780 metres Platreef's long-term processed wastewater agreement finalized to supply most of the bulk water needed for the first phase of production Platreef is positioned to become a major producer of palladium, which recently became more valuable than gold Platreef's Indicated Mineral Resources contain an estimated 26.8 million ounces of palladium, 25.6 million ounces of platinum, 4.5 million ounces of gold, and 1.8 million ounces of rhodium (a combined 58.7 million ounces of PGMs plus gold), plus 4.1 billion pounds of nickel and 2.1 billion pounds of copper, at a cut-off grade of 1 gram per tonne Platreef's Inferred Mineral Resources contain an additional 43.0 million ounces of palladium, 40.4 million ounces of platinum, 7.8 million ounces of gold, and 3.1 million ounces of rhodium (a combined 94.3 million ounces PGMs plus gold), plus 7.7 billion pounds of nickel and 4.1 billion pounds of copper, also at a cut-off grade of 1 gram per tonne At the base-case cut-off grade of 2 grams per tonne, Indicated Mineral Resources contain an estimated 42.0 million ounces of PGMs plus gold, plus 2.4 billion pounds of nickel and 1.2 billion pounds of copper, with an additional 52.8 million ounces of PGMs plus gold, 3.4 billion pounds of nickel and 1.8 billion pounds of copper in Inferred Resources Platreef's T1 and T2 high-grade mineralized zones interpreted as much thicker versions of the high-grade mineralized reefs found on the Western and Eastern limbs of South Africa's Bushveld Complex Mokopane, South Africa - December 18, 2018 (Newsfile Corp.) (Investorideas.com Newswire) Ivanhoe Mines' (TSX: IVN) (OTCQX: IVPAF) Co-Chairmen Robert Friedland and Yufeng "Miles" Sun, and Ivanplats' Managing Director Dr. Patricia Makhesha, announced today that Platreef's Shaft 1 has reached a depth of 850 metres below surface and development work has begun on the 850-metre station - the second of three horizontal mining access stations planned for Shaft 1. The first mining access station has been constructed at the 750-metre level, following earlier development of a water-pumping station at the 450-metre level. The third mining access station will be developed at a mine-working depth of 950 metres. Shaft 1 is expected to reach its projected, final depth of approximately 980 metres below surface, complete with all four of the stations, in early 2020. The Platreef mining team delivered the first high-grade mineralization from underground mine development to surface stockpiles for metallurgical sampling three months ago. The high-grade mineralization intersected in Shaft 1 is contained within two mineralized zones (T1 and T2) totalling 29 metres of the Turfspruit Cyclic Unit (TCU). A total of fifty grab samples from individual 3.2-metre-blast stockpiles yielded an average grab sample grade of 6.35 grams per tonne (g/t) platinum, palladium and rhodium plus gold (3PE+Au), ranging up to 9.6 g/t 3PE+Au, as well as significant quantities of nickel and copper. The 29-metre mineralized intersection in Shaft 1 yielded approximately 3,500 tonnes of ore that will be used for bulk-scale metallurgical test work. Based on the estimated resource grade of the pilot hole for Shaft 1 (GT008), the 3,500 tonnes are expected to contain more than 400 ounces of platinum-group metals (PGMs). Ivanhoe Mines indirectly owns 64% of the Platreef Project through its subsidiary, Ivanplats, and is directing all mine development work. The South African beneficiaries of the approved broad-based, black economic empowerment structure have a 26% stake in the Platreef Project. The remaining 10% is owned by a Japanese consortium of ITOCHU Corporation; Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation; and Japan Gas Corporation. Photo: Stockpiles of Flatreef ore from the sinking of Shaft 1, with Shaft 1 headframe in the background. Long-term wastewater agreement finalized to supply most of the bulk water needed for the first phase of production at Platreef Ivanplats, led by Dr. Makhesha, announced that it has finalized a long-term agreement with the Mogalakwena Local Municipality for the supply of local, treated wastewater to supply most of the bulk water needed for the first phase of production at the Platreef platinum-group metals, nickel, copper and gold mine now being constructed in South Africa. Ivanplats signed a memorandum of agreement earlier this year with the Mogalakwena Local Municipality for the supply of a minimum of five million litres of treated water a day for 32 years, beginning in 2022, from the town of Mokopane's new Masodi Treatment Works. Last week, the agreement was officially approved in a signing ceremony in Mokopane. Ivanplats expects to begin receiving a small quantity of processed wastewater early next year after the Masodi plant has been commissioned. Further treatment will be conducted at the Platreef Mine's on-site filtration plant to ensure compliance with Ivanplats' quality standards. The initial supply will be used in Platreef's ongoing underground mine development and surface infrastructure construction. Ivanplats estimates that it will require approximately 7.5 million litres per day (Ml/day) of bulk water during the first-phase of steady-state production. A water-balance model developed for the mine calls for the bulk water for the first phase of production to consist of five Ml/day from the Masodi treatment plant, with the balance provided from ground water from local, licenced boreholes, and rainwater collected in storage ponds at the mine. Photo: Platreef's long-term wastewater agreement finalized between Dr. Patricia Makhesha, Ivanplats' Managing Director (left), and Kenneth Maluleke, Mogalakwena Acting Municipality Manager. In July 2017, Ivanhoe issued an independent, definitive feasibility study (DFS) for Platreef covering the first phase of production at an initial mining rate of four million tonnes per annum (Mtpa). The DFS estimated that Platreef's initial, average annual production rate will be approximately 219,000 ounces of palladium, 214,000 ounces of platinum, 30,000 ounces of gold and 14,000 ounces of rhodium (combined 477,000 ounces of 3PE+Au), plus 21 million pounds of nickel and 13 million pounds of copper. The Platreef DFS was based on the development of a large, mechanized, underground mine with an initial, four Mtpa concentrator and associated infrastructure. Platreef would rank at the bottom of the cash-cost curve, at an estimated US$351 per ounce of 3PE+Au produced, net of by-products and including sustaining capital costs, and US$326 per ounce before sustaining capital costs. The thick Flatreef orebody at the Platreef Project is ideal for bulk-scale, mechanized mining. As underground development progresses, the mine plan calls for the addition of large, mechanized mining equipment, such as 14- and 17-tonne load-haul-dump machines and 50-tonne haul trucks to support the planned long-hole mining method. The mineral resources used as the basis of the Platreef DFS were those amenable to underground selective mining. Detailed information about assay methods and data verification measures used to support the scientific and technical information is set out in the Platreef 2017 Feasibility Study NI 43-101 Technical Report dated September 2017, available under Technical Reports at www.ivanhoemines.com and on Ivanhoe Mines SEDAR profile at www.sedar.com. Key features of the 2016 Platreef Mineral Resource estimate include: Indicated Mineral Resources contain an estimated 41.9 million ounces of platinum, palladium, rhodium and gold with an additional 52.8 million ounces of platinum, palladium, rhodium and gold in Inferred Resources (using a cut-off grade of 2.0 g/t 3PE+Au). Indicated Mineral Resources contain an estimated 2.44 billion pounds of nickel and 1.23 billion pounds of copper, with an additional 3.44 billion pounds of nickel and 1.78 billion pounds of copper in Inferred Mineral Resources (using a cut-off grade of 2.0 g/t 3PE+Au). Indicated Mineral Resources totalling 346 million tonnes, at an average grade of 3.77 g/t 3PE+Au, 0.32% nickel and 0.16% copper, at a cut-off grade of 2.0 g/t 3PE+Au. Inferred Mineral Resources totalling an additional 506 million tonnes, at a grade of 3.24 g/t 3PE+Au, 0.31% nickel and 0.16% copper, at a cut-off grade of 2.0 g/t 3PE+Au. The 2016 Mineral Resource estimate was prepared by Ivanhoe Mines under the direction of Dr. Harry Parker, RM SME, of Wood Group (formerly Amec Foster Wheeler E&C Services Inc.). Dr. Parker and Timothy Kuhl RM SME, also of Wood Group, have independently confirmed the Mineral Resource estimate and are the Qualified Persons for the estimate, which has an effective date of April 22, 2016. The platinum-to-palladium ratio at the Platreef Mine is approximately 1:1. Palladium and rhodium are used as catalysts to control exhaust emissions in gasoline-fuelled vehicles, while diesel vehicles mostly use platinum. Platinum also is used as the catalyst in zero-emission, hydrogen-powered, fuel-cell electric vehicles now being developed by leading, global automakers including Honda, Toyota, Hyundai, BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Hyundai. A sustained palladium-supply deficit, coupled with robust demand from automakers, has seen palladium prices increase by approximately 50% during the past four months, making it more valuable than gold for the first time since 2002. Chart: Palladium's price increase since August 2018 (in blue) compared to gold (in white). Flatreef's T1 and T2 mineralized zones are 29 metres thick at Shaft 1 intersection The mineralized zones (reefs) at Ivanhoe's Platreef Project are the thickest (Platreef's T2MZ averages 24.7 metres at a 1 g/t 3PE+Au cut-off) among the known reefs in South Africa's Bushveld Igneous Complex. Although substantially thicker on Ivanhoe's Platreef Project, Flatreef's exceptional T1 and T2 reefs have been correlated with the Bushveld Complex's Bastard and Merensky reefs by Dr. Danie Grobler, Ivanplats' Head of Exploration and Geology, and other Ivanplats geologists (Grobler et al., published in the international journal, Mineralium Deposita, 2018). The Turfspruit Cyclic Unit (TCU), which hosts the majority of the Platreef's selectively mineable Mineral Resources, has two mineralized zones that are laterally continuous across the Platreef Project. The T1 mineralized zone (T1MZ) occurs within cyclical magmatic units and feldspathic pyroxenite (ultramafic igneous rock) immediately below the Main Zone. The T2 mineralized zone (T2MZ) is hosted within a mineralized, PGM-enriched, very coarse-grained pegmatoidal pyroxenite distinct from the feldspathic pyroxenite above it and bound by a top chromite stringer. The T2MZ occurs at a stratigraphic position similar to the world-renowned Merensky Reef. The T2MZ can be subdivided into an upper pegmatoidal orthopyroxenite, referred to as the T2 Upper, and a lower, less continuous pegmatoidal harzburgite, referred to as the T2 Lower. Recognition of the TCU and the pegmatoidal pyroxenite in 2012 was a key interpretive breakthrough for the Platreef Project. Shaft 1 intersected the TCU below the Main Zone of the Bushveld Complex in September 2018. The upper T1 mineralized reef was intersected at a depth of 780.11 metres below the shaft bank (Figure 1). Shaft sinking proceeded to intersect the main T2 mineralized reef at a depth of 798 metres, beneath the upper chromitite stringer. The T2 mineralization gradually decreases over a vertical interval of 11 metres to the footwall norite contact at a depth of 809 metres. The total TCU width intersected within the shaft is 28.9 metres. Photo: Dr. Danie Grobler, Ivanplats' Head of Exploration and Geology (left), Jan Mapeka, Ivanplats Geologist (centre), and Gerick Mouton, Ivanplats' Vice President and Project Director (right), at the intersection of the T1 mineralized reef in Shaft 1 at a depth of approximately 780 metres. Figure 1: Schematic section of the Platreef Mine, showing Flatreef's T1 and T2 thick, high-grade mineralized zones (red and dark orange), underground development work completed to date in shafts 1 and 2 (white), and planned development work (gray). Figure 2: Flatreef cross section showing T1 and T2 mineralized zones (T1MZ and T2MZ) and the significant top loading of high-grade PGMs mineralization in the T2 mineralized zone. Photo: Members of the Platreef Project team and its South African sinking contractor, Aveng Mining, in Shaft 1 at its intersection of the 29-metre Flatreef Deposit in September. Photo: Platreef's underground mine development team includes three members from local communities (from left): Nkone Madubana, Learner Sinker; Katlego Nkwana, Learner Sinker; and Caroline Dzivhani, Geologist - who recently became fully certified underground miners. Photo: Members of Platreef's underground mining team using a 'cactus grab' mucker to excavate broken rock from the bottom of Shaft 1. Grab sample assay results for Shaft 1 TCU intersection Mineralized material from the Flatreef Deposit was extracted during the sinking of Shaft 1 through the TCU mineralized zones and then stockpiled on surface for individual 3.2-metre blasts. A total of 50 grab samples were collected for the T1 and T2 reefs, at surveyed shaft depths ranging from 780.11 to 808.9 metres. The individual stockpile assay grades from the T1 feldspathic pyroxenite zone vary from 2.47 to 9.65 g/t 4E (platinum, palladium, rhodium and gold), with significant nickel and copper. A composite of individual grab samples for the different T1 stockpiles yielded an average grade of 6.04 g/t 4E and 0.40% nickel plus 0.19% copper (Table 2). The T2 pegmatoidal pyroxenite composite grab sample assay grades are 6.72 g/t 4E, 0.50% nickel and 0.24% copper. The average grade of all of the stockpile grab samples for the T1 and T2 mineralized zones is 6.35 g/t 4E, 0.45% nickel and 0.21% copper (Table 2). The grab sample results reported above and listed in Table 2 are included for indicative purposes only as they were not subject to Ivanhoe's normal rigorous internal QA/QC procedures applied to diamond drilling for Mineral Resources estimation. No standards, blanks or duplicates were included in the sample submissions, although internal QC was undertaken by Set Point laboratories (a division of Torre Analytical Services) in Mokopane, South Africa. The sampling methods employed to collect the grab samples, while thorough, are not considered adequate to produce an unbiased grade estimate of either the individual stockpiles or the shaft intersection as a whole. There also is considerable uncertainty as to the amount of cross contamination of each stockpile due to the degree of re-handling of material from shaft bottom to final stockpile position. Platreef's shafts 1 and 2 are located in an area of the project's Indicated Resources that has lower grade and thickness than the adjoining mining areas; it will form part of the shaft pillar a solid block of rock left around the shafts to protect the shafts and the surface buildings. Figure 3 below is a grade-thickness plot (3PGE grade [g/t] multiplied by the thickness [m], which gives a metre-grams-per-tonne [mg/t]) of the Platreef Indicated Resources, showing the position of Shaft 1 (identified by the black star in the centre of Figure 3). The blue colours represent the lowest grade thickness, which are clustered around the yellow star marking the location of Shaft 1. Ivanhoe's initial mining plan at Platreef will focus on the thick, high-grade Indicated Resources (identified by the brown, orange and red zones) in close proximity to shafts 1 and 2. Drill intercepts in the thick, high-grade zones include hole TMT006, which intersected 90.64 metres (297 feet) with an average grade of 4.51 g/t 4E, plus 0.37% nickel and 0.20% copper. TMT006 was drilled approximately 360 metres south of Shaft 1. Figure 3: Grade-thickness plot of the T2 mineralized zone surrounding Shaft 1 (yellow star). Geology and mineralogy of the Shaft 1 Flatreef intersection The dominant sulphide species in the T1MZ and T2MZ are represented by pentlandite (a nickel-rich sulphide mineral) and chalcopyrite (a copper-rich sulphide mineral), with lesser amounts of pyrrhotite and pyrite (iron sulphide minerals) in both reefs. Sulphide abundance is variable, but visually estimated in the shaft at an average of 5% for the T1MZ and up to 10% in the T2U, with large composite blebs (bubble-like inclusions of one mineral within a larger mineral) very common. Photo: T1 mineralization within weakly-altered (chloritized) feldspathic pyroxenite at a depth of 784 metres. Sulphide mineralization is pentlandite (nickel sulphide) dominant, with lesser chalcopyrite (copper sulphide), and occurs as interstitial, disseminated to net-textured in the specimen shown. Photo: The T2 (Merensky) pegmatoidal orthopyroxenite, with large composite sulphide blebs consisting of pentlandite (nickel sulphide)-chalcopyrite (nickel sulphide)-pyrrhotite (iron sulphide).. Scientific collaboration and academic studies In September 2015, Ivanhoe Mines, Laurentian University (Sudbury, Canada) and the University of Limpopo (Turfloop, South Africa) forged an educational partnership. The principal goal was to develop and equip the University of Limpopo's geology department to become a centre of excellence in geosciences. Since then, several Limpopo University students commenced postgraduate MSc and PhD studies at Laurentian University. Several of these studies are focused on the Platreef Project. In April 2018, Ivanhoe geologists, together with Professor Wolfgang Maier, of Cardiff University, published a scientific paper detailing the first stratigraphic system for Ivanhoe's Flatreef PGE deposit. The paper, titled "Litho- and chemostratigraphy of the Flatreef PGE deposit, northern Bushveld Complex", was published in the prestigious, international, scientific journal Mineralium Deposita. The paper documents the down-dip and along-strike litho- and chemostratigraphy of the Flatreef Discovery, and its footwall and hanging-wall rocks. Based on stratigraphic, lithological and compositional comparisons to the layered rocks in the western Bushveld Complex, the layered sequence of the Flatreef Discovery, with its chromite-bearing footwall rocks, is unequivocally correlated with the interval between the UG2 chromitite, the Merensky and the Bastard Reef. Shaft 1's 750-metre, 850-metre and 950-metre stations will provide lateral underground mining access to the Flatreef orebody The 750-metre and 850-metres stations on Shaft 1 will provide initial, underground mining access to the high-grade orebody, enabling lateral mine development to proceed during the construction of Shaft 2, which will become the mine's main production shaft. As shaft-sinking advances, a third shaft station will be developed at a mine-working depth of 950 metres. The mining zones in the current Platreef Mine plan occur at depths ranging from approximately 700 metres to 1,200 metres below surface. Shaft 1's 750-metre station also will allow access for the first raise-bore shaft, which will have an internal diameter of six metres, to provide ventilation to the underground workings during the mine's ramp-up phase. Photo: Miners on the Shaft 1's 750-metre level. The 750-metre and 850-metre stations will provide initial, underground access to the high-grade orebody. Excavation complete at Shaft 2 surface box cut; construction of concrete hitch (foundation) now underway Excavation of the Shaft 2 box cut to a depth of approximately 29 metres below surface has been completed and construction now is underway of the concrete hitch (foundation). The hitch will provide the foundation for the 103-metre-tall concrete headgear (headframe) that will house the Shaft 2's permanent hoisting facilities and support the shaft collar. Shaft 2, to be located approximately 100 metres northeast of Shaft 1, will have an internal diameter of 10 metres, will be lined with concrete and sunk to a planned, final depth of 1,104 metres below surface. It will be equipped with two 40-tonne rock-hoisting skips with a capacity to hoist a total of six million tonnes of ore per year - the single largest hoisting capacity at any mine in Africa. Headgear for the permanent hoisting facility was designed by South Africa-based Murray & Roberts Cementation. Photo: Platreef's Shaft 2 box cut (now completed to a depth of 29 metres) alongside Shaft 1 headframe. Construction of the concrete hitch (foundation) for Shaft 2 now is underway. Photo: Platreef's geotechnical engineers inspecting the 29-metre-high walls of Shaft 2's box cut. Development focused on construction of a highly-mechanized underground mine The Platreef Project is located on the Northern Limb of the Bushveld Complex, adjacent to Anglo Platinum's Mogalakwena Mine. The Platreef Project, which contains the Flatreef Deposit, is a tier-one discovery by Ivanhoe Mines geologists. Based on the findings of the July 2017 independent DFS, Ivanhoe plans to develop the Platreef Mine as a major underground mining operation in three phases to achieve: 1) An initial rate of four million tonnes per annum (Mtpa) to establish an operating platform to support future expansions; 2) a doubling of production to eight Mtpa; and 3) expansion to a steady-state 12 Mtpa. Mining zones in the current Platreef mine plan occur at depths ranging from approximately 700 metres to 1,200 metres below surface. Primary access to the mine will be by way of a 1,104-metre-deep, 10-metre-diameter production shaft (Shaft 2). Secondary access to the mine will be via a 980-metre-deep, 7.25-metre-diameter ventilation shaft (Shaft 1), which is under construction. During mine production, both shafts also will serve as ventilation intakes. Three additional ventilation exhaust raises (Ventilation Raise 1, 2, and 3) are planned to achieve steady-state production. Mining will be performed using highly productive mechanized methods, including long-hole stoping and drift-and-fill. Each method will utilize cemented backfill for maximum ore extraction. Qualified person The scientific and technical information in this news release has been reviewed and approved by Stephen Torr, P.Geo., Ivanhoe Mines' Vice President, Project Geology and Evaluation, a Qualified Person under the terms of National Instrument (NI) 43-101. Mr. Torr is not independent of Ivanhoe Mines. Mr. Torr has verified the technical data disclosed in this news release. Detailed information about assay methods and data verification measures used to support the scientific and technical information is set out in the Platreef 2017 Feasibility Study NI 43-101 Technical Report dated September 2017, available under Technical Reports at www.ivanhoemines.com and on Ivanhoe Mines' SEDAR profile at www.sedar.com. About Ivanhoe Mines Ivanhoe Mines is a Canadian mining company focused on advancing its three principal projects in Southern Africa: the development of new mines at the Kamoa-Kakula copper discovery in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the Platreef palladium-platinum-nickel-copper-gold discovery in South Africa; and the extensive redevelopment and upgrading of the historic Kipushi zinc-copper-germanium-silver mine, also in the DRC. Information contacts Investors Bill Trenaman +1.604.331.9834 Media North America: Bob Williamson +1.604.512.4856 South Africa: Jeremy Michaels +27.82.772.1122 Forward-looking statements Certain statements in this news release constitute "forward-looking statements" or "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities laws. Such statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, which may cause actual results , performance or achievements of the company, the Platreef Project, or industry results, to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements or information. Such statements can be identified by the use of words such as "may", "would", "could", "will", "intend", "expect", "believe", "plan", "anticipate", "estimate", "scheduled", "forecast", "predict" and other similar terminology, or state that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will" be taken, occur or be achieved. These statements reflect the company's current expectations regarding future events, performance and results, and speak only as of the date of this news release. The forward-looking statements and forward-looking information in this news release include without limitation, (i) statements regarding the 29-metre intersection of the Flatreef Deposit at Shaft 1 is expected to contain more than 400 ounces of platinum-group metals (PGMs); (ii) statements regarding Ivanplats expects to begin receiving a small quantity of grey water from the Masodi water treatment plant early next year; (iii) statements regarding the expectation that Shaft 1 will reach its projected, final depth of 980 metres below surface, complete with the stations, in 2020; (iv) statements regarding Ivanhoe's plans to develop the Platreef Mine as a major underground mining operation in three phases to achieve: 1) An initial rate of four million tonnes per annum (Mtpa) to establish an operating platform to support future expansions; 2) a doubling of production to eight Mtpa; and 3) expansion to a steady-state 12 Mtpa; and (v) statements regarding Platreef would rank at the bottom of the cash-cost curve, at an estimated US$351 per ounce of 3PE+Au produced, net of by-products and including sustaining capital costs, and US$326 per ounce before sustaining capital costs. In addition, all of the results of the Platreef DFS constitute forward-looking statements and forward-looking information. The forward-looking statements include metal price assumptions, cash flow forecasts, projected capital and operating costs, metal recoveries, mine life and production rates, and the financial results of the Platreef DFS. Readers are cautioned that actual results may vary from those presented. All such forward-looking information and statements are based on certain assumptions and analyses made by Ivanhoe Mines' management in light of their experience and perception of historical trends, current conditions and expected future developments, as well as other factors management believe are appropriate in the circumstances. These statements, however, are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking information or statements including, but not limited to, unexpected changes in laws, rules or regulations, or their enforcement by applicable authorities; the failure of parties to contracts to perform as agreed; social or labour unrest; changes in commodity prices; unexpected failure or inadequacy of infrastructure, industrial accidents or machinery failure (including of shaft sinking equipment), or delays in the development of infrastructure; and the failure of exploration programs or other studies to deliver anticipated results or results that would justify and support continued studies, development or operations. Other important factors that could cause actual results to differ from these forward-looking statements also include those described under the heading "Risk Factors" in the company's most recently filed MD&A, as well as in the most recent Annual Information Form filed by Ivanhoe Mines. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking information or statements. Certain of the factors and assumptions used to develop the forward-looking information and statements, and certain of the risks that could cause the actual results to differ materially are presented in the "Platreef 2017 Feasibility Study, September 2017" available on SEDAR at www.sedar.com and on the Ivanhoe Mines website at www.ivanhoemines.com. Although the forward-looking statements contained in this news release are based upon what management of the company believes are reasonable assumptions, the company cannot assure investors that actual results will be consistent with these forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this news release and are expressly qualified in their entirety by this cautionary statement. Subject to applicable securities laws, the company does not assume any obligation to update or revise the forward-looking statements contained herein to reflect events or circumstances occurring after the date of this news release. More Info: This news is published on the Investorideas.com Newswire - a global digital news source for investors and business leaders Disclaimer/Disclosure: Investorideas.com is a digital publisher of third party sourced news, articles and equity research as well as creates original content, including video, interviews and articles. Original content created by investorideas is protected by copyright laws other than syndication rights. Our site does not make recommendations for purchases or sale of stocks, services or products. Nothing on our sites should be construed as an offer or solicitation to buy or sell products or securities. All investing involves risk and possible losses. This site is currently compensated for news publication and distribution, social media and marketing, content creation and more. Disclosure is posted for each compensated news release, content published /created if required but otherwise the news was not compensated for and was published for the sole interest of our readers and followers. Contact management and IR of each company directly regarding specific questions. More disclaimer info: https://www.investorideas.com/About/Disclaimer.asp Learn more about publishing your news release and our other news services on the Investorideas.com newswire https://www.investorideas.com/News-Upload/ and tickertagstocknews.com Global investors must adhere to regulations of each country. Please read Investorideas.com privacy policy: https://www.investorideas.com/About/Private_Policy.asp December 19, 2018 (Investorideas.com Newswire) A BMO Capital Markets note highlighted potential upside for investment in this Australian company. In a Dec. 7 research note, analyst Andrew Kaip reported that BMO Capital Markets initiated coverage on AngloGold Ashanti Ltd. (AU:NYSE; ANG:JSE; AGG:ASX; AGD:LSE) with a Market Perform rating and an $11 per share target price. "We like the improving outlook," he added. Over the past four months, the stock has risen steadily to where it now is trading in-line with peers. Kaip highlighted two developments by AngloGold Ashanti that improve its profile as an investment. The first, which reduces corporate risk, is its having reduced its total South Africa exposure to less than 15% through a complete restructuring of assets in that country. The second is the new CEO Kelvin Dushnisky's decision to approve redevelopment at Obuasi, "a move that stabilizes AngloGold production in the 3.3 million ounces range into the mid-2020s," Kaip indicated. He noted that BMO, however, has concerns about the company. Over the next two years, AngloGold Ashanti will retire its Morila and Sadiola mines, and production will decrease at Geita and Siguiri. The full value of Obuasi likely will not be attributed until after a successful ramp-up, estimated for 2021. Further, the miner having reduced its jurisdictional risk related to South Africa may result in a "cyclical decline in gold production," Kaip pointed out. With this potential scenario and the status of the company's assets looking forward, Kaip posed the question: "How much more is there left to be sweated out of the company's aging operating base?" To remedy the issue, he noted, AngloGold Ashanti must provide increased visibility and/or consider new opportunities, which BMO would like to see from CEO Dushnisky. It also would like to see solid execution at Obuasi. Disclosure: 1) Doresa Banning compiled this article for Streetwise Reports LLC and provides services to Streetwise reports as an independent contractor. She or members of her household own securities of the following companies mentioned in the article: None. She or members of her household are paid by the following companies mentioned in this article: None. 2) The following companies mentioned in this article are sponsors of Streetwise Reports: None. Click here for important disclosures about sponsor fees. 3) Comments and opinions expressed are those of the specific experts and not of Streetwise Reports or its officers. The information provided above is for informational purposes only and is not a recommendation to buy or sell any security. 4) The article does not constitute investment advice. Each reader is encouraged to consult with his or her individual financial professional and any action a reader takes as a result of information presented here is his or her own responsibility. By opening this page, each reader accepts and agrees to Streetwise Reports' terms of use and full legal disclaimer. This article is not a solicitation for investment. Streetwise Reports does not render general or specific investment advice and the information on Streetwise Reports should not be considered a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Streetwise Reports does not endorse or recommend the business, products, services or securities of any company mentioned on Streetwise Reports. 5) From time to time, Streetwise Reports LLC and its directors, officers, employees or members of their families, as well as persons interviewed for articles and interviews on the site, may have a long or short position in securities mentioned. Directors, officers, employees or members of their immediate families are prohibited from making purchases and/or sales of those securities in the open market or otherwise from the time of the interview or the decision to write an article until three business days after the publication of the interview or article. The foregoing prohibition does not apply to articles that in substance only restate previously published company releases. Disclosures from BMO Capital Markets, AngloGold Ashanti, December 7, 2018 IMPORTANT DISCLOSURES Analyst's Certification I, Andrew Kaip, hereby certify that the views expressed in this report accurately reflect my personal views about the subject securities or issuers. I also certify that no part of my compensation was, is, or will be, directly or indirectly, related to the specific recommendations or views expressed in this report. Analysts who prepared this report are compensated based upon (among other factors) the overall profitability of BMO Capital Markets and their affiliates, which includes the overall profitability of investment banking services. Compensation for research is based on effectiveness in generating new ideas and in communication of ideas to clients, performance of recommendations, accuracy of earnings estimates, and service to clients. Analysts employed by BMO Nesbitt Burns Inc. and/or BMO Capital Markets Limited are not registered as research analysts with FINRA. These analysts may not be associated persons of BMO Capital Markets Corp. and therefore may not be subject to the FINRA Rule 2241 restrictions on communications with a subject company, public appearances and trading securities held by a research analyst account. Company Specific Disclosures Disclosure 9B: BMO Capital Markets makes a market in AngloGold Ashanti in United States. For Important Disclosures on the stocks discussed in this report, please click here". More Info: This news is published on the Investorideas.com Newswire - a global digital news source for investors and business leaders Disclaimer/Disclosure: Investorideas.com is a digital publisher of third party sourced news, articles and equity research as well as creates original content, including video, interviews and articles. Original content created by investorideas is protected by copyright laws other than syndication rights. Our site does not make recommendations for purchases or sale of stocks, services or products. Nothing on our sites should be construed as an offer or solicitation to buy or sell products or securities. All investing involves risk and possible losses. This site is currently compensated for news publication and distribution, social media and marketing, content creation and more. Disclosure is posted for each compensated news release, content published /created if required but otherwise the news was not compensated for and was published for the sole interest of our readers and followers. Contact management and IR of each company directly regarding specific questions. More disclaimer info: https://www.investorideas.com/About/Disclaimer.asp Learn more about publishing your news release and our other news services on the Investorideas.com newswire https://www.investorideas.com/News-Upload/ and tickertagstocknews.com Global investors must adhere to regulations of each country. Please read Investorideas.com privacy policy: https://www.investorideas.com/About/Private_Policy.asp Vancouver, British Columbia - December 18, 2018 (Newsfile Corp.) (Investorideas.com Newswire) Nano One (TSXV: NNO) (OTC Pink: NNOMF) (FSE: LBMB) CEO, Mr. Dan Blondal, is pleased to announce that the company has entered into a Joint Development Agreement with Saint-Gobain. The goal of the collaboration is to enhance high temperature processing of Nano One's lithium ion battery materials. Saint-Gobain is a multi-billion euro French multinational corporation, founded in 1665 and producing a wide variety of construction and high-performance materials for applications in automotive, aerospace, health and energy. This agreement formalizes innovative efforts that began earlier this year and commercial terms remain confidential. "Saint-Gobain has a rich history in innovation and collaboration," explained Ms. Ben Bassat, Nano One's VP of Business Development, "and we are delighted to be working with a global leader in materials and sustainable solutions. Their materials are complementary to our processing technology and this agreement adds to our current efforts with other strategic interests in the lithium ion battery supply chain." Nano One's lithium ion powders are made using a patented process that blends lithium and other metals such as manganese, nickel, cobalt, aluminum and iron, prior to high temperature processing in a furnace. The two companies will work in collaboration, under the joint development agreement, to enhance the performance of their respective materials. Saint-Gobain will also be joining Nano One's demonstration pilot project, as a consortium member with the support of the Government of Canada through Sustainable Development Technology Canada. Mr. Natesh Krishnan, Worldwide Commercial Director, said, "Innovation for a sustainable future is at the core of both companies and our combined know-how has the potential to put us at the forefront of transformative energy storage solutions. We look forward to working in close collaboration with Nano One." 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 Saint-Gobain Saint-Gobain designs, manufactures and distributes materials and solutions which are key ingredients in the wellbeing of each of us and the future of all. They can be found everywhere in our living places and our daily life: in buildings, transportation, infrastructure and in many industrial applications. They provide comfort, performance and safety while addressing the challenges of sustainable construction, resource efficiency and climate change. Saint-Gobain had 40.8 billion in sales in 2017, operates in 67 countries and has more than 179,000 employees. www.saint-gobain.com About Nano One Nano One Materials Corp ("Nano One" or "the Company") has developed patented technology for the low-cost production of high performance lithium ion battery cathode 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 the full range of cathode materials and has the flexibility to shift with emerging and future battery market trends. 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 battery materials. 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 NanotechnologyInvestment.com - investing ideas in nanotechnology stocks Like Nanotechnology Stocks? View our Nanotechnology Stocks Directory More Info: This news is published on the Investorideas.com Newswire - a global digital news source for investors and business leaders Disclaimer/Disclosure: Investorideas.com is a digital publisher of third party sourced news, articles and equity research as well as creates original content, including video, interviews and articles. Original content created by investorideas is protected by copyright laws other than syndication rights. Our site does not make recommendations for purchases or sale of stocks, services or products. Nothing on our sites should be construed as an offer or solicitation to buy or sell products or securities. All investing involves risk and possible losses. This site is currently compensated for news publication and distribution, social media and marketing, content creation and more. Disclosure is posted for each compensated news release, content published /created if required but otherwise the news was not compensated for and was published for the sole interest of our readers and followers. Contact management and IR of each company directly regarding specific questions. More disclaimer info: https://www.investorideas.com/About/Disclaimer.asp Learn more about publishing your news release and our other news services on the Investorideas.com newswire https://www.investorideas.com/News-Upload/ and tickertagstocknews.com Global investors must adhere to regulations of each country. Please read Investorideas.com privacy policy: https://www.investorideas.com/About/Private_Policy.asp WASHINGTON, D.C. - December 18, 2018 (Investorideas.com Newswire) Today, the Washington D.C. Council unanimously approved the "Clean Energy D.C. Omnibus Act of 2018," a bold climate bill that includes a commitment to achieve 100 percent renewable electricity supply across the district by 2032. The legislation establishes a goal to use 100 percent renewable electricity across the district, meaning all municipal operations, residences, and businesses within D.C. will be powered entirely by renewable sources including the White House. The Sierra Club D.C. Chapter worked with the D.C. Climate Coalition to gain support for ambitious climate action from lawmakers, build a diverse coalition of local community groups, and demonstrate broad public support for this bill. The coalition gathered over 10,000 petition signatures over the course of this three-year campaign. In addition to the requirement for electric utilities to source their supply from 100 percent renewable sources, the bill also: Increases fees on energy from dirty sources like coal and gas and uses the revenue to fund energy efficiency and renewable energy programs Sets up one of the nation's strongest energy performance standards for existing buildings to maximize energy efficiency Encourages drivers to purchase electric vehicles, expands electric vehicle charging stations and requires buses and other large fleets to transition away from fossil fuels and toward renewable electric power D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, who has previously pledged to make D.C. carbon neutral by 2050, has ten days to take action and sign the bill. In response, Mark Rodeffer, Chair of the Sierra Club D.C. Chapter, released the following statement: "The nation's capital is a model for the rest of the nation on climate action, leading the way to reducing greenhouse emissions through smart investments in renewable energy and energy efficiency. The Sierra Club and our environmental allies have spent incalculable time and energy working on this bill and we could not be more gratified by its passage today. D.C. has ambitious carbon reduction and climate targets, which we were not on track to meet before passage of this bill. But we'll be on the path to substantial reductions of climate pollution once Mayor Bowser signs this bill." Mary Anne Hitt, Director of the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal Campaign, issued the following: "The District is leading where the federal government has failed us, and we applaud D.C. for passing this historic clean energy legislation today. This bill is among the most ambitious pieces of climate legislation in the country, and today it became law because the D.C. community demanded it. The decisions made and policies discussed within the nation's capital affect the country, and the world. The fact that our nation's capital -- including the White House -- will be powered by 100 percent renewable sources of electricity shows what the future looks like in a way that the Trump Administration's policies do not. Today, D.C. delivered the winning vision our country needs, where local action drives us forward to 100 percent clean, renewable energy for everyone." Councilmember Mary Cheh issued the following: "We are on the threshold of passing legislation that will put us at the forefront of the nation in the effort to combat climate change. Even though by ourselves we are a small jurisdiction, we can serve and have served as a model for other jurisdictions. More importantly, we are in a loose association with other local and state jurisdictions so that even though the federal government is in default of international climate accords, we will meet them." Washington D.C. joins the states of California and Hawaii, as well as 102 cities across the United States, to establish a 100 percent renewable energy goal. The full list of commitments can be viewed here. About the Sierra Club The Sierra Club is America's largest and most influential grassroots environmental organization, with more than 3.5 million members and supporters nationwide. In addition to creating opportunities for people of all ages, levels and locations to have meaningful outdoor experiences, the Sierra Club works to safeguard the health of our communities, protect wildlife, and preserve our remaining wild places through grassroots activism, public education, lobbying, and litigation. For more information, visit http://www.sierraclub.org. More Info: This news is published on the Investorideas.com Newswire - a global digital news source for investors and business leaders Disclaimer/Disclosure: Investorideas.com is a digital publisher of third party sourced news, articles and equity research as well as creates original content, including video, interviews and articles. Original content created by investorideas is protected by copyright laws other than syndication rights. Our site does not make recommendations for purchases or sale of stocks, services or products. Nothing on our sites should be construed as an offer or solicitation to buy or sell products or securities. All investing involves risk and possible losses. This site is currently compensated for news publication and distribution, social media and marketing, content creation and more. Disclosure is posted for each compensated news release, content published /created if required but otherwise the news was not compensated for and was published for the sole interest of our readers and followers. Contact management and IR of each company directly regarding specific questions. More disclaimer info: https://www.investorideas.com/About/Disclaimer.asp Learn more about publishing your news release and our other news services on the Investorideas.com newswire https://www.investorideas.com/News-Upload/ and tickertagstocknews.com Global investors must adhere to regulations of each country. Please read Investorideas.com privacy policy: https://www.investorideas.com/About/Private_Policy.asp The governments announcement that the UK will remain in the Common Transit Convention has been welcomed by the Freight Transport Association. The CTC is used for moving goods between the EU member states, the EFTA countries, which are Iceland, Norway, Liechtenstein and Switzerland, as well as Turkey, Macedonia and Serbia. In an official statement on the gov.uk website on Monday, Financial Secretary Mel Stride said that the continued membership of the convention would ensure simplified cross-border trade for UK businesses exporting their goods. The statement said: It will provide cashflow benefits to traders and aid trade flow at key points of entry into the UK, as traders will only have to make customs declarations and pay import duties when they arrive at their final destination. This has been welcomed by Pauline Bastidon, Head of European Policy and Brexit, at the FTA. She said: In the event of no deal, traders making use of the CTC would be able to temporarily suspend the payment of duties and taxes, and to postpone customs clearance formalities until the goods reach their destination, rather than at the point of entry into the customs territory. This will be particularly attractive for UK businesses exporting into the EU. While it would not remove the need for border checks of a regulatory nature, such as sanitary phytosanitary checks on agri-food products, the CTC has the potential to reduce checks of a fiscal nature upon entry into the EU. She added that it was vital UK businesses now ensure all necessary arrangements for use of the convention are made so traders can fully benefit from the facilities offered by the CTC following Brexit. The main Irish arm of Swiss drugs giant Roche has blamed a new pricing agreement with the Government for a significant decline in revenues in 2017. That is according to new accounts filed by Roche Products (Ireland) Ltd which show that pre-tax profits fell 7% to 5m, as revenues declined 6% 101.7m. The Dutch arent done with regulating banker pay in a country that already has one of the strictest remuneration laws in the EU. In a letter to parliament, Finance Minister Wopke Hoekstra proposed making bankers hold on to shares and similar financial instruments in their fixed salary for five years. They would also be compelled to explain how their pay relates to their role in society. Minister Hoekstra also said he is investigating the legality of possibly clawing back part of a bank executives salary when a lender receives state aid. The move may come too late for an Irish report commissioned by the Finance Minister into the pay at bailed-out Irish banks. The Department said last week the report was being drafted and would be ready in the new year. It was commissioned after Minister Donohoe vetoed a bid in April by AIB to usher in a long-term incentive plan for top executives. The bank had argued the pay cap of 500,000 for the bank was restricting it recruiting top talent. The views of new AIB CEO designate Colin Hunt on pay are not known. Shares in AIB have slumped 36% this year, which could mean that its executives would gain from any new scheme pegged at current levels should the shares rally in the coming years. In the Netherlands, existing clawback legislation is limited to the variable part of a pay package. They limited bonuses in the banking sector to 20% of base salary, much stricter than the European norm of 100%. Public anger over bankers was on display in the Netherlands this year after the countrys largest bank, ING proposed raising the pay of its CEO by about half to 3m. - Bloomberg and Irish Examiner The economys impressive headline growth figures are masking serious threats to the countrys competitiveness, it has been warned. In its latest annual report, the National Competitiveness Council (NCC) has warned that while Irelands economic performance and competitiveness has remained strong in the face of Brexit uncertainty, concerns over the global economy, and international tax changes, the outlook is less positive. A breakthrough UK agreement that will allow Irish trucks carrying goods to the Continent pass freely on British roads is not a panacea for all the ills of a hard Brexit. The assessment comes from the main business group that represents Irish truck owners, Freight Transport Association Ireland after the UK unexpectedly said it would sign up to the Common Transit Convention that currently helps EU and other non-EU trucks pass relatively unhindered. There were fears Irish trucks bound for the Continent through English ports would face long delays using British motorways or the landbridge if the UK were to crash out of the EU. A team at the University of Limerick (UL) is to lead a 8m EU-funded research project to help improve the performance of electric cars. Researchers at ULs Bernal Institute will head up the Si-Drive project and will focus on how to get more out of lithium batteries to improve driving range, cost and recharge times. Leader of the project, Professor Kevin Ryan said: This project will tackle the major barriers to EV uptake, which relate to driving range, cost and recharge times by completely re-imagining the lithium ion battery using innovative anode, cathode and electrolyte materials. There has been a huge continent-wide push towards electric vehicles in recent years, amplified by the Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal. However, despite incentives made by various governments to encourage take-up, as well as the promise of a crackdown on diesel emissions in leading European city centres, the uptake has been slower than anticipated. Just 2% of European vehicles are currently electric, despite an EU target of 40% by 2030. Irish car owners have consistently voiced their concerns over expense, range and charging points. There are around 6,000 electric vehicles on Irish roads at present. The UL project will focus heavily on the sustainability of the system, with rare and expensive materials such as cobalt targeted for removal, researchers said. It will also focus on the development of the high-performance silicon-based anodes materials, with reducing the overall weight of the final batteries a key target. The Bernal Institute team will lead 16 academic and industrial partners from seven European countries. Researcher Dr Hugh Geaney said: The Si-DRIVE project will bring together leading experts from across Europe to deliver the sustainable and cost-effective battery technology required for environmentally friendly EVs of the future. The Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) annual Energy in Ireland report released earlier this week said there was a 0.5% increase in energy demand as the economy grew. It said the Republic continues to face a challenge in reducing reliance on fossil fuels for transport, heating and electricity production, with over 90% of all energy used in 2017 from fossil fuels. The report said: Transport represents the single largest sector of energy use, half of which is private cars. We need a rapid transition from diesel and petrol to electric vehicles. The countrys geography makes it well suited to electric cars and should form the majority of new car purchases from now on, the SEAI said. Autism charity, AsIAm, has condemned the Association of Second Level Teachers of Ireland (ASTI) for its advice to members to refuse to provide Individual Education Plans (IEP) for students with special needs. The ASTI issued the advice yesterday because it is extremely concerned that there is "insufficient resourcing" and a lack of planning for the Education for Persons with Special Education Needs Act, 2004. The Minister for Education and Skills, Joe McHugh, recently told the Dail: There is currently not a statutory requirement for schools to provide a mandatory Individual Education Plan for children with special needs Individual Education Plans are supposed to support students with disabilities in schools and they bring together teachers, the student and their parents/guardians, in agreeing goals and approaches to meeting the needs of students with special educational needs. Adam Harris, founder and CEO of the autism advocacy group AsIAm, said: For a teachers trade union to suggest discrimination in the classroom against students with disabilities is truly shocking. He said, however, that this does not remove the obligation of a school to provide an appropriate education. The vast majority of schools put in place some form of IEP for students and, from January, all schools must have Student Support Files in place for any student receiving additional support such as a Special Needs Assistant or additional teaching hours. Mr Harris said: We are quite shocked that the ASTI would see IEPs / SSF as additionality or an add-on to their role. All teachers are meant to differentiate their teaching to meet the needs of the students in their class. "You dont get to choose what student needs you meet it is a core part of your role. As an organisation, we will support any call for additional resources to enable schools and their teachers to meet the needs of students with additional needs. However, we will not allow our students to be used as some kind of bargaining chip. The group is to launch a petition today on its website calling on the ASTI to revise its advice and for individual teachers to refuse to heed it. Mr Harris said: To suggest that a teacher knowingly should refuse to implement measures which a child requires to learn is grossly unethical. IEPs often include recommendations such as permitting movement breaks, using clear communication or providing visual supports. These small changes can be the difference between a child remaining in school or otherwise. "The right to attend your local school is not the gift of the ASTI." "It is a principle enshrined in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities and provided for under EPSEN. To see a trade union target a minority group in this fashion certainly seems out of step with the values of the Trade Union Movement which was founded against a backdrop of solidarity and supporting the most vulnerable people in society. What we need to ask ourselves as a society now is that if we permit a Trade Union to decide to refuse to appropriately educate one minority group where does this stop? In the advice it issued to members, the ASTI said: "Despite recent advances and improvements, schools and teachers remain grossly unsupported. For example, the new Resource Allocation Model, which is in place since September 2017, has not been accompanied by training for all teachers. "Classroom teachers are extremely concerned that without the proper training, they do not have the skills to prepare and implement complex Individual Education Plans/ Student Support Files. "The ASTI advice to its members - that they do not prepare and implement Individual Education Plans/ Student Support Files - seeks to ensure that the Government delivers on its responsibilities to students with special education needs by equipping schools and teachers with the training and supports needed to deliver a fully inclusive education service. The ASTI believes that forcing teachers to engage in the preparation of extensive planning documentation without the necessary training and resources is unworkable. "Moreover it has the potential to undermine much of the excellent work going on in the classroom with students with special education needs. "We note that the other second-level teachers union (TUI) has the same concerns and has issued similar advice to its members. "Parents and students can be assured that teachers and schools will continue to provide a quality education to students with special education needs including differentiated teaching, feedback and assessment, assistance with communication, visual supports etc." Irish campaigners are accusing EU fisheries ministers of being "blind" to the "destruction caused by 30 years of overfishing". However, Minister for Agriculture Michael Creed has described some of the commentary on EU negotiations on fish quotas as "misinformed". The annual AGRIFISH December Council meeting closed this morning in Brussels. Minister Creed told RTEs Morning Ireland that some commentators would appear to prefer to see rusting fishing trawlers tied up in ports. The proposed cuts are 50% cod, 14% haddock, 32% prawns and 20% mackerel. None of the concessions agreed was outside scientific advice, he added. However, the policy officer of Bird Watch Ireland, Fintan Kelly claimed that the scientists involved were paid by the EU to supply information to the questions asked. Mr Kelly said that the deadline to end overfishing in 2020 is being ignored. It has been known for five years, but no efforts had been made to introduce measures progressively or incrementally. He also expressed concern about a new measure to end the discarding of dead fish. This will mean that all fish caught at sea will have to be landed and processed irrespective of size. Traditionally smaller fish have been discarded at sea. This is a deeply disappointing result, said Mr Kelly. Juvenile fish will be processed into fish meal for use in agriculture. It is not entirely clear the impact this is going to have. Mr Kelly also expressed concern that monitoring and control levels will not be maintained. The head of the National Centre of Pharmaeconomics thinks the Minister for Health Simon Harris should stick with the system when it comes to approving access to expensive drugs. Professor Michael Barry was commenting on the decision to make the cervical cancer drug Pembrol available to all women with cervical cancer, not just the 221 affected by the CervicalCheck controversy. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, December 19) It's "he said, she said" on who would benefit the most from the tax money that falls under the purview of the Road Board. In a press briefing in Malacanang Wednesday morning, Budget Secretary Benjamin Diokno said that House of Representatives leaders Rolando Andaya and Danilo Suarez had asked him about releasing the funds in the Road Board. "Alam naman ninyo election time eh, di ba? Inaasahan nila yun, na ma-release yun para naman siguro magamit nila sa kampanya," Diokno said. [Translation: It's election time. They're relying on it, that the funds be released so that they might be able to use it to campaign.] Diokno, who is an ex officio member of the Board because of his Cabinet position, said that he would not release the funds. "I tell you, we will not release," he said. The Road Board, which is headed by the secretaries of the Department of Public Works and Highways, Department of Transportation, Department of Budget and Management, Department of Finance, and two representatives from the private sector, is in charge of around P45 billion worth of tax money collected by the government from road users. The fund can only be used for road improvement projects upon approval of the Road Board. Senate had already passed a bill to abolish the Road Board, which Malacanang is set to pass once the House of Representatives passes its own version of the measure. However, the House version of the bill is still pending after it was rescinded at the third and final reading. Both Andaya and Suarez are against the abolition of the Board. READ: Palace: Duterte ordered Diokno to skip House probe on 'insertions' Andaya, on the other hand, denied having spoken to Diokno about the funds and claimed that President Rodrigo Duterte had approved of the move to withdraw the bill abolishing the Road Board. "I don't talk to him (Diokno) Wala naman akong karapatang mag-follow up sa kanya dahil wala naman akong hinihingi," Andaya said. [Translation: I have no right to follow up with him because I'm not asking for anything.] He added that he and House Speaker Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo had talked to Duterte about the Board, and claimed that Duterte wanted the road user's tax to be released. "Tinanong po namin siya kung ano ba talaga ang nais pong mangyari ng ating mahal na Pangulo sa Road Board. He said na ipatuloy na ang pag-release. Ibig sabihin, ipagpatuloy na yung operation ng Road Board," Andaya said. [Translation: We asked him what our beloved President wants to happen to the Road Board. He said that the funds should be released. This means the Road Board should continue its operations.] CNN Philippines' Ina Andolong and Xianne Arcangel contributed to this report. On October 15, Afghan and Pakistani security forces exchanged fire. Such incidents, which have claimed the lives of hundreds of border security personnel and others on both sides, have grown in frequency in recent years. The clashes are over Pakistans unilateral construction of a fence along the Durand Line. Pakistan says the fence will check armed militants moving between the two countries. Afghanistan, which has not accepted the Durand Line as its border with Pakistan, disagrees. The controversial fence is adding tension to an already fraught bilateral relationship. BACKGROUND: The roughly 2,640-kilometer-long Durand Line which separates Pakistan from Afghanistan is a legacy of British colonial rule. Since 1947, successive Afghan governments have rejected the Durand Line as the International Border, arguing that it was imposed on Afghan rulers by the colonial government. While the border has roiled bilateral relations for decades, it was when Pakistan began fencing the border in April 2007 that the dispute got a new lease of life. The Durand Line runs through Pashtun towns and villages and essentially divides a community with a shared language, religion and cultural traditions. Pashtuns living on the Pakistani side of the Durand Line have kinship and economic ties with those across the border. They have crossed the border with ease in the past as it is irrelevant to them. The Durand Line runs through regions where the writ of the two governments barely runs and over the decades, armed insurgents, narcotics and weapons have flowed across with ease. This worsened with the U.S. arming and training Afghan mujahideen in Pakistan and sending them into Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. With the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001, the leaders and the fighters crossed the border and took sanctuary on the Pakistani side and have since then waged their war from Pakistan against the U.S.-led troops and the Afghan government. Likewise, anti-Pakistan militant groups like the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan have taken sanctuary on the Afghan side of the border. In 2006, Pakistans President General Pervez Musharraf proposed fencing the border to prevent militants, narcotics and gun runners from slipping between the two countries. Work on the fence began in 2007 and has since then progressed in fits and starts. Since 2017, work is said to have gathered momentum. The fence consists of a pair of 3-meter chain link fences, with a 2-meter gap topped with coils of sharp concertina wire. Watchtowers have been built too. Given its high cost, the fence is being erected only in areas where crossings are high. IMPLICATIONS: All Afghan governments and parties, including the Taliban, which are close to Pakistan, perceive the Durand Line as a colonial imposition and hence unacceptable to them. They perceive Pakistans construction of the fence as an attempt to permanent a boundary that benefits Pakistan and is unacceptable to Afghanistan. Pashtun and Baluch nationalists see the fence as an affront to their nationhood and are strongly opposed to it. The Pashtun and Baluch nations, which were torn apart by the Durand Line during colonial rule, are being kept permanently divided by Pakistans border fence, drawing attention to the fences division of families and villages. Afghanistan rejects Pakistans claims that the fence will prevent militants and smugglers from slipping across. The experience of India, which has constructed fences along its international border with Pakistan and the Line of Control in Kashmir to tackle Pakistans infiltration of militants into India, is instructive in this regard. The Indian fence, like the one being constructed by the Pakistanis, runs through rugged terrain and during winter avalanches have brought down these structures. Repair and maintenance is required and this entails regular funding. Despite the fencing of the LoC, hundreds of militants are able to slip into India each year from Pakistan and Pakistan Occupied Kashmir. If blocked by the fence, they simply dig underground tunnels to enter India. Indeed, no fence is strong enough to keep out a determined militant, especially one who has the support of security forces and intelligence agencies which are sending them across the border. Typically militants entering India from Pakistan are helped by handlers in the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistans external intelligence agency. To distract the Indian forces patrolling the border, Pakistani troops fire at Indian border posts, enabling militants to slip into Indian territory. Pakistan has opposed the Indian fence. Thus, so long as the Pakistani state supports the Taliban and the Haqqani Network, fighters and leaders of these groups will be able to cross the Durand Line with ease whether or not there is a fence. Afghanistan is therefore right. The security fence will likely be largely ineffective in dealing with cross-border movement of militants and criminals. There are border crossing points along the Durand Line as well. These are to allow legal crossing by ordinary civilians on either side of the border to cross over to the other side if they wish to. While militants typically have the financial resources to procure fake papers or bribe border guards to cross over, ordinary civilians often lack the contacts or the money to bribe their way across to the other side. Building security fences and barriers make governments look like they are taking robust steps to keep the country and its people safe. It is likely that Pakistan expects its fence and mining of the surrounding areas to impress the international community that it is committed to fighting terrorists. At best the fence can slow the flow of militants but it cannot stop it, especially if there is state support for that flow into another country. CONCLUSIONS: Afghan-Pakistani relations are already tense and Pakistans unilateral fencing of the Durand Line is worsening this strained relationship. Clashes between their security forces are growing in frequency and intensity. This would encourage the two governments to support terror outfits targeting the other. Far from reducing militant attacks, the fence could fuel terrorist activities in the region. AUTHORS BIO: Dr. Sudha Ramachandran is an independent researcher and journalist based in India. She writes on South Asian political and security issues. Her articles have been published in Asia Times Online, The Diplomat, China Brief, etc. She can be contacted at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. . Image Source: Public Domain via Wikimedia accessed on 12.18.2018 Fine Gael ministers were accused by a Cabinet colleague yesterday of egging on a belief that Transport Minister Shane Ross is anti-rural Ireland in a heated discussion on proposed new road traffic measures. Mr Ross had his wings clipped by several rural Fine Gael ministers in Cabinet over his plans to increase penalty points for driving offences. Mr Ross bore the brunt of attacks from rural ministers Michael Ring, Heather Humphreys, and Paul Kehoe. As tempers increased, Mr Ring at one stage demanded the entire memo be withdrawn from Cabinet but Mr Ross and Independent Alliance colleague Finian McGrath refused to back down. Eventually, it was agreed that a Cabinet sub-committee chaired by Taoiseach Leo Varadkar would hammer out the more contentious elements of the bill. At an earlier meeting of Fine Gael ministers, Mr Ring told his colleagues he would rather have an election than pass the measures, which include significant increases in offences which would attract penalty points. At Cabinet, Mr Ross was strongly defended by Mr McGrath and Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe. It is believed that Mr McGrath accused Fine Gael ministers of feeding a belief that Mr Ross is hostile to the sensitivities of rural Ireland. Finian defended Shane, said a source. He said: Bottom line, speed kills and we need to accept that reality. He told them straight out that there is an impression being egged on by Fine Gael ministers and backbenchers that Shane is anti-rural Ireland. Mr Donohoe is said to have acted as peacemaker, backing Mr Rosss bill and saying road safety must be taken seriously. Paschal weighed in at the end and backed Shane up, to the surprise of some there, said one minister. Mr Varadkar met with Mr Ross before the Cabinet meeting where the suggestion of the sub-committee was raised and agreed. It will see two elements removing the Garda discretion and graduated speed fines referred to the sub-committee, while the general scheme of the remainder of the Road Traffic Bill was approved. Precise penalties appropriate to each speeding band have yet to be determined and will be discussed in the sub-committee, the drafting process, and at the Oireachtas transport committee. Mr Ross said there has never been a proposal to impose penalty points on people who fail to produce a driving licence, and the fixed charge for this offence has yet to be determined. Eleven people have been arrested in West Cork in what Gardai have labelled a 'Day of Action'. As part of Operation Thor yesterday, those arrested were charged in relation to a number of recent incidents including robbery, sale and supply of drugs and criminal damage. The Leaving Certificate will run into a fourth week for up to 4,000 students from next year under plans to avoid dozens of teenagers having to sit three exams in a single day. In a new longer timetable published by the State Examinations Commission (SEC) yesterday, students of eight subjects will have to return to schools in the final week of June for their last exams. According to the SEC, an average of 78 Leaving Certificate students have had to take three exams in a single day over the past five years. Education Minister Joe McHugh said the new arrangements are designed to minimise such clashes and promote the wellbeing of students doing exams. The subjects being pushed into the last week of June have a wide range of student numbers, from Latin - which was taken by just 59 students this year - to technology which had 1,534 Leaving Certificate entrants last June. The final exams next summer will now be on the morning of Tuesday, June 25, when Arabic, Japanese and politics & society will be taken. The following subjects will be examined on Monday, June 24: Italian, Russian (both in the morning), classical studies, Latin, and technology (all in the afternoon). From 2020, when physical education and computer studies are examined for the first time, exams may also be scheduled on the Tuesday afternoon but subjects involved will be decided nearer the time. Under SEC rules, students forced by timetable clashes to sit three exams in a day get only a half-hour break in late afternoon after their second paper is completed. Such breaks are supervised to ensure no information about their delayed exam paper can be obtained from other students, social media or other sources. There may still be some clashes that require smaller numbers of students to take three exams in a single day. But Mr McHugh said he is confident the number will be significantly reduced, and the SEC will continue to be mindful of changes in students subject choices and ways of setting the timetable that minimises clashes and limit unnecessary stress. From talking to Leaving Cert students, I hear how the exams play on their minds and any changes that we can make to ease that are really welcome, the minister said. To facilitate the longer spread of the exams across two additional days, other subjects are also being moved from slots in which they typically appeared in previous years on the Leaving Certificate timetable. Agricultural science will move from a Monday morning to an afternoon, but accounting, design and communication graphics, economics and agricultural economics will all be held a day or two days later than usual. The Department of Education said additional costs of an extra two days of exams have yet to be finalised, but they will be incurred by the SEC and by areas of the department, such as school transport. However, schools are also likely to seek extra funding for additional costs such as cleaning or caretaking work associated with operating exam centres longer. The National Association of Principals and Deputy Principals (NAPD) welcomed the changes, on which it said it has worked extensively with the department to try and reduce the unncessary burden and stress on students facing three exams in one day. By Stephen Maguire A man accused of the sexual assault of an underage girl has been allowed to change his bail conditions to spend Christmas living close to his alleged victim, despite having already breached previous bail conditions. The accused man, who cannot be named to protect the identity of his alleged victim, lives in a remote part of Co Donegal. He had been ordered to live in Letterkenny in recent months until his trial at Letterkenny Circuit Court and ordered not to live near the alleged victim or have any contact with her. However, the man applied to have his bail conditions varied so he can visit and stay with his family from Christmas Eve until St Stephen's Day. Having considered the matter, Judge John Aylmer said he was "going to take a chance on him for a very short period of time." He said he hoped he had learned his lesson from the last time he breached his bail conditions. The court did not hear any details of the previous breach. Gardai told the court that they were objecting to the man's application on a number of grounds. A Garda Sgt said he had fears the man would try to contact the alleged victim if allowed to return home. He also said there was an allegation that the accused man tried to contact his alleged young victim to ask her to persuade her mother to drop the case against him. He is also alleged to have contacted his victim by Snapchat. The Garda added: "I would have a fear that he would contact her and put her under pressure that she would withdraw the allegations." Barrister for the accused Peter Nolan asked his client if he understood all the conditions of the bail and he said he did. "You know the ramifications of breaching your bail?" asked Mr Nolan and the accused replied he did. Mr Nolan added that it would be suicidal if the man was seen trying to contact the girl saying that everybody in the locality knew him. Judge Aylmer set down a number of conditions on which the man could return to his local area and spend the Christmas holidays. They include that he refrain from socialising and not to have any contact with his alleged victim. If he breaks any of these conditions he will be at risk of losing his bail, added Judge Aylmer. A manhunt is underway after a man was stabbed in his home on the northside of Cork city by an attacker who forced his way into the house and demanded cash. Alert neighbours in an estate off Cathedral Road in Gurranabraher raised the alarm around 6.30pm after calling to the mans house to investigate suspicious sounds. It is believed the suspect answered the door to them and claimed to be a visiting relative. They pressed him for answers before they spotted the homeowner inside in a distressed state. It was clear that he was bleeding from the legs and face. The suspect again tried to dismiss the neighbours by claiming the man had had an accident in the house. But the neighbours knew something was wrong and they retreated to raise the alarm. Locals said gardai, including members of the armed regional response unit, arrived on the scene within minutes but the suspect had fled the scene on foot. Gardai are searching the area this evening for the suspect who is believed to be in his early 30s. Gardai have confirmed that they are investigating an assault incident in the area. Gardai said a man in his 60s has been taken to Cork University Hospital after suffering an apparent stab wound. His injuries are not believed to be life threatening. No arrests have been made and the investigation is ongoing. The incident has shocked locals who remember the killing of Gussie Hornibrook nearby just over 11 years ago. Mr Hornibrook, a vulnerable pensioner who lived alone, was found dead in his home on Templeacre Avenue in Gurranabraher in November 2007. An inquest later returned a verdict of unlawful killing. The killing remains unsolved. The garda investigation remains open. Third-level colleges have not yet agreed a shortened timeline for offering places to Leaving Certificate students, seven weeks after it was hastily announced by two Government ministers. Education Minister Joe McHugh and Higher Education Minister of State Mary Mitchell OConnor said on November 1 that the State Examinations Commission would get exam results out a day earlier than usual next August. They also said the Central Applications Office would make its main round of offers for college places on Friday, August 16, three days before it would ordinarily do so, as part of a plan to enable Leaving Certificate appeals to be lodged and marked quicker. But the revised timeline has still not been approved by the CAO which runs the application-and-offer process on behalf of 38 colleges. At a CAO board meeting on December 7, no decision was made to adopt the new calendar which includes what CAO described to the Irish Examiner as the proposed 2019 schedule for its offers and acceptances process. Some colleges are understood to have difficulty being able to provide weekend helplines or other supports to prospective students or their families seeking information in the days after the planned Round 1 offers on a Friday. One education source said that technical details are being worked out, with some colleges believed to be pushing for the offers to be made on a Thursday, instead of a Friday, to facilitate such supports and advice for students before the weekend. But the time needed by college admissions officers and CAO staff to generate offers based on applicants Leaving Certificate grades would then require finalising Leaving Certificate results a day earlier again. This might also mean changes to SEC logistics to get results to students on Monday, August 12 instead of the next day as currently planned. The CAO said its operations group which includes a representative from each college usually determines the schedule of offers and acceptances. But if a significant change is proposed, it is normally brought to the attention of the CAO board. The proposed changes were discussed by the operations group on November 15 and the board discussed the proposal on December 7, the spokesperson said. There are no current plans for a meeting of the CAO board on the subject, and the agenda for its next meeting has not yet been set. CAO and [higher education institutions] are working through the details and information, and the offer schedule will be provided well in advance of the offers season for the coming year, the CAO said. The ministers announcement on November 1 coincided with their lodging of appeal papers in relation to aspects of a High Court ruling in September in the case of Wexford student Rebecca Carter. Mr Justice Richard Humphreys had directed that next years Leaving Certificate students should get appeal results before third-level courses begin. He found that Ms Carter was treated unfairly by being expected to wait until mid-October for her appeal to be decided by the SEC. She was subsequently offered and accepted a place on the veterinary medicine degree at University College Dublin after the High Court ruled that the SEC must fast-track the remarking of her business exam. Under the arrangements announced seven weeks ago, students would still not have appeal results until after most college courses start in 2019. But universities and institutes of technology have agreed to delay beginning any programmes until at least the second week of September, meaning the most tuition time that could be lost by any student offered a place arising from an upgrade should be two weeks, compared to a possible six weeks up to and including this year. The health service faces severe disruption in the new year after nurses voted overwhelmingly for strike action in a dispute over pay and staff shortages. The public health out-of-hours system is also at risk after specialists in public health medicine voted for a work-to-rule, beginning on January 14, with potential escalation to full withdrawal from out-of-hours work. The Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO) is planning a 24-hour national work stoppage, providing just emergency and lifesaving care, with dates to be decided in January. It is only the second time in the unions 100-year history that members will take part in a national strike. The INMO vote, 95% in favour of industrial action, mirrors that of the Psychiatric Nurses Association (PNA) vote earlier this week. Both unions have rejected proposals put forward in September by the Public Service Pay Commission which they say fail to address ongoing challenges of recruitment and retention. The INMOs executive council will meet on January 7 and 8 to determine dates for a 24-hour national strike. The PNA will present a plan for industrial action to a meeting of its board, which meets on January 10. Nurses and midwives last engaged in strike action in 1999. INMO general secretary Phil Ni Sheaghdha said its members are the lowest paid graduate professionals in the health service. According to the INMO, a staff nurse is on 36,383 after five years, while occupational therapists and speech and language therapists earn 42,965 five years in. This vote reflects a deep frustration in our professions, which the Government cannot continue to ignore, she said. A spokesperson for Health Minister Simon Harris said it was his belief industrial action should be avoided and parties should work together to avert such action. Ina Kelly, Irish Medical Organisation (IMO) Public Health chairwoman, said specialists in public health medicine want the same recognition as their consultant colleagues, as they also undergo higher specialist training, but have lower remuneration rates. The IMO is calling on the Department of Health to share the Crowe Howarth Review of Public Health Medicine with the union and agree a plan of engagement on the overdue report. Specialists in public health medicine look after population health, including immunisation programmes and screening. | BY Lynchy | The Royals has announced a significant expansion of the companys creative and strategic offering. The Melbourne-based agency is bringing Nick Cummins, Steve OFarrell and Andrew Siwka together with Royals founder Dave King (near left), in a move that they claim will bring an unrivalled combination of creative, digital and product development capability to the Australian marketplace. Nick Cummins (second from right) joins from Tribal DDB Melbourne where he was group creative director working with a team of digital specialists and the broader DDB group. Steve OFarrell (second from left) joins from Sputnik Agency where he was national managing director from 2008 until his resignation earlier this year. Previously OFarrell was co-managing director of The Furnace Melbourne. Andrew Siwka (far left) also hails from Sputnik where he was general manager. Prior to that posting he held various regional and global positions within the JWT network. The partners are now tasked with growing an agency that has historically delivered innovative brand thinking and executions, together with well-crafted creative technology solutions. Additionally, The Royals will be investing in a range of R&D, incubation and digital product development initiatives. Part of the genesis of The Royals expansion is the recognition that digital is now everywhere. Consumers dont see the internet as separate to their everyday lives. With this in mind, contemporary agencies that live and breath digital are able to address any communications challenge. The Royals are creating products, experiences, gaming environments and tools as well as ads. The new Royals structure will see creative director, Cummins, and innovation director, King, brought together to form a new type of creative team. By pairing a creative director with a digital media & product innovation expert at the most senior level, The Royals believe that the agency will maximise its ability to deliver the best possible ideas across all manner of communications channels. And in OFarrell and Siwka, The Royals inherit two seasoned agency executives that understand the demands of the contemporary marketing landscape, plus how to fully exploit digital as part of an integrated approach. This is all part of rapidly taking the company from being a digital outfit to a creative agency that is custom-built for a modern, connected world. The Royals clients already include Sensis, Mercedes Benz, News Limited, Teach For Australia and Lode but there will be more announcements in the near future. Says Siwka: To create an agency unencumbered by legacy structures and thinking was an exciting enough proposition but to partner with this calibre of talent was an opportunity too big to pass up. Adds OFarrell: All four partners have worked together under various guises in the past and I cant wait to see whats possible when we put our collective, bald, heads together. Politicians have described as bewildering and inexplicable the decision by Irish Ferries to pull the plug on its service between Rosslare and France, the shortest sea route to continental Europe for passengers and goods. The company, a subsidiary of Irish Continental Group, said in a statement it was unlikely that it will operate a service between Rosslare and France in 2019. The ferry had operated between Rosslare/Cherbourg and Rosslare/Roscoff. It said it will keep the situation under review. The Irish Ferries Rosslare/Pembroke route remains in operation. The company said a majority of customers have a clear preference for the more central location and easy access of Dublin. It said its new WB Yeats ship will operate from Dublin to Cherbourg, with 20% greater passenger capacity, up to four days per week. A spokesperson said no passengers would be at a financial loss as a result of the decision to end the service as bookings for the 2019 season had not commenced. Irish Ferries wish to inform our customers that we're unlikely to operate a service between Rosslare & France in 2019. We continue to keep this situation under review. Our new W.B. Yeats ship will operate from Dublin to Cherbourg & is available to book on https://t.co/1rjF6XTLpL Irish Ferries (@Irish_Ferries) December 18, 2018 Labour leader and Wexford TD Brendan Howlin called on Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and Transport Minister Shane Ross to respond to the development. Sinn Fein Brexit spokesman David Cullinane told RTE that the decision was truly baffling with Brexit just over the horizon. For the south-east region to lose one of its main ferry routes to Europe would be an absolute disaster, he said. Separately a breakthrough UK agreement that will allow Irish trucks carrying goods to the continent to pass freely on British roads is not a panacea for all the ills of a hard Brexit, said Freight Transport Association Ireland. A revolution in delivering the next generation of high-speed electronic devices is to be led by the return to University College Cork of one of the worlds leading quantum mechanics scientists. Seamus Davis is to lead a joint research programme at UCC and Oxford University in England on the quantum technology that is due to replace the silicon chips as the power behind computing. A 1983 physics graduate of UCC, he has been working in the US for most of his career and was professor of physical sciences at Cornell University in New York for the past decade. While the quantum mechanical properties of materials like silicon are crucial to the operation of computers and smartphones, advances in the technology of quantum mechanics is expected to drive advances in faster, more capable devices. Prof Davis, a native of Skibbereen in West Cork, said he looks forward to returning home and working with colleagues at UCC. The rapidly-accelerating second quantum revolution promises truly transformative advances in science, industry, economy, and society, he said. In Ireland, a spectacularly sophisticated research ecosystem has been nurtured and has rapidly grown. It was already announced three weeks ago that Prof Davis will be joining the quantum materials group at Oxford in January, under a European Research Council advanced grant award. It is understood that, while he will be officially based in Cork, his time will be divided between UCC and Oxford. UCC did not state how much Prof Davis would be paid, or how his remuneration might be shared between the university and Oxford. However, it told the Irish Examiner that it is not outside the Government-approved pay rates. The role is being funded by a Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) research professorship programme, one of 10 posts approved for the higher education sector under the programme. UCC said it has also been approved by the Higher Education Authority (HEA), Department of Education, and Department of Public Expenditure and Reform. As limits in the computing power of the silicon generation technology are reached, the big focus is on quantum mechanics, which deals with the behaviour of matter at atomic and sub-atomic scales, and how matter interacts with energy at these levels. The focus of the research programme at UCCs physics department will be on an atomic-scale, as Prof Davis works with researchers at existing SFI centres such as the Irish Photonics Integration Centre at the Tyndall National Institute. The joint research programme at UCC and Oxford will also benefit the training and experience of early-career researchers here. SFI director general Mark Ferguson said the joint appointment of Prof Davis will have a positive impact on scientific research here and further enhance Irelands international reputation for excellence in research and innovation. Two men are due in court after Gardai found a suspected explosive device in a van in Co. Meath late on Monday night. They have been charged following the discovery at about 12.05am on Monday after Gardai stopped a van at Brewshill, Navan, Co. Meath. If youre off for Christmas, spare a thought for those who work over the festive season. Donal OKeeffe spoke to a few people for whom Christmas is just another, albeit very special, working day John Creedon As a boy, I loved Christmas Day for the first few hours. The toys, my mothers cooking, dinner with lemonade and dessert! Then, by late afternoon, a sort of ennui set in, as darkness descended on the deserted streets of Cork City centre. Despite weeks of anticipation and one sleepless night... Its over. These days, I approach Christmas with far less expectation, so Im rarely disappointed. Im up and trading by 7.30am. I work on Christmas day, presenting a show live on RTE Radio 1 from our Cork City studios to the Irish all over the world. Although its an early start, its a labour of love and theres a certain romance about picking my way through the very same deserted streets of Childhood Christmases... crows pecking at last nights take-aways on McCurtain Street... a solitary figure throwing bread to a plume of gulls tumbling in the darkness over Brian Boru Bridge... a man shuffling around the corner from the Simon Community Shelter Although my music playlist is compiled in the days leading up to the programme, its never quite finished. The menu is varied, and right up to 11am, constantly changing, as an avalanche of emails and tweets flows down the screen in front of me. The diaspora connects from different time zones around the planet. Oz and New Zealand are in early, sending love from Geelong to Mallow. At 1pm, Im out the gap, and home to my partner Mairead, whos full-tilt prepping Christmas brunch. Bang on cue my daughters and crews descend. Well girls, how did ye get on? The smallies are sleepy-eyed but bursting to give me the inventory. By the time theyve all drifted away again, and Mairead is plonked on the couch, I find myself alone in the kitchen with two thoughts. Gratitude that this year they are all safe and in great form and secondly, I note to self that Id better put that little tiny plastic frying pan someplace safe where my granddaughter Rosie will see it when she visits later in the week. - John Creedon presents Creedons Christmas, 11am Christmas Day, on RTE Radio 1. Charmaine Murphy Im a home help, and, for a change, Im not working this Christmas Day but Ive worked the past 12 Christmases. I love getting up early on Christmas morning and going to work. You can never really be sure, but its usually only the people who dont have families and who really need help Id see on Christmas Day. Ill help any of my clients who need assistance getting out of bed, washing, getting set up for the day, and Ill be sure to leave out the Christmas dinner. The afternoon is usually my own, and Ill get my own Christmas dinner. Then its back to work to make sure everyone is okay for supper, and getting to bed. It might be the same job, but its not the same day. We always try to build up Christmas, while being cognisant of people having lost loved ones during the year. It can be a long day for some people, and the only person they might see is the home help. Usually its a happy day, and people are always delighted to see you. Everyone should get up early on Christmas morning and make it their job to visit someone! - Charmaine Murphy is a HSE Health Care Support Assistant in Listowel. She works for Cork Kerry Community Healthcare. Father Peter McVerry We have about 20 hostels, and each one will provide a Christmas dinner for the residents. Our Dublin city centre hostel will provide a Christmas dinner for people we know to be living on the streets, or living between hostels. Theres no transport on Christmas Day, but we provide a free taxi service to our residents. Some of our residents will go home for Christmas Day to see family, and they wouldnt want to go home without a Christmas present. Dignity is a fundamental part of our identity, and that should not change if a person is homeless. For me, the best two weeks of the year are the two weeks after Christmas, because the pressure is over. Christmas can be a horrendous time for homeless people. Homeless people can find themselves especially lonely and alone. - Peter McVerry Trust is a charity that tries to reduce homelessness and the harm caused by drug misuse and social disadvantage. Stewart Philpott Christmas Day in An Garda Siochana is another day on the rostered shift, albeit a special one. Christmas Day holidays are allocated usually to those with small children. You know well in advance what your Christmas duty will be, so you have plenty of time to prepare. Theres an air of acceptance if youre on. We run a 24/7 service, so we know what we signed up for. I recall one Christmas Day when we had a call from distraught parents who had been visiting relatives. They returned home in a taxi, only to discover that their son had left a toy in the back of the taxi. Following a trawl of local taxi companies the child and the toy were reunited, much to delight of all concerned. I get huge satisfaction and pride being in a position to help people in need and this can be especially true on Christmas Day. Its the colleagues we work with and the public we serve that keep us going at difficult times. Those, and of course those at home who support us all year round. Christmas Day is a day away from family, but we make the very most of it with colleagues and look forward to spending quality time at home at the end of the shift. - Sergeant Stewart Philpott is a Community Garda at Anglesea Garda Station. Paula Hynes Christmas Day normally begins for us on the 24th as we get as much work done to lighten the load for a few days. Pete and I run a 180-cow dairy farm with our three girls, Chloe, Becky and Georgie, helping out. Things always get a little festive around the yard, and the girls usually organise a little Christmas dinner for their Jersey calves and favourite cows, a lovely concoction of silage, carrots, apples and maize munch with a few Christmas carols thrown in. Santa arrives early in our house and then its a quick cup of coffee and down to the farm yard. Although we dry off the milking herd prior to Christmas Day, animals still need to be fed, with all stock being checked to make sure everyone is happy and healthy. We usually have the Christmas dinner about 5 or 6pm as we have a few jobs to get through again in the afternoon; our girls have ponies too so they all need evening feeds but theres always a great atmosphere in the afternoon, partly due to a well-earned G&T in early afternoon. The joys of having animals means having to do some work on Christmas, but when we are so used to being out working seven days a week, I suppose wed get itchy feet if we were inside for the full day. We spend the rest of the holiday period taking turns and keeping the workload simple so there are a few lie-ins, plenty of Christmas films, and trips out and about enjoying the festivities. - Paula Hynes is a full-time dairy farmer. She runs her Co Cork farm with her husband Peter, and their daughters, Chloe (15), Becky (11) and Georgie (5). Paul Colton The last time I had Christmas Day off I was 14-years-old. The following year I was Church organist in Glanmire and so, every Christmas since, Ive had responsibilities in relation to the worship that is at the heart of the Christmas celebrations for Christians. Christmas follows a familiar pattern of pastoral care, religious Services, and preaching the Christmas message. More people come to Church at Christmas than at any other time of the year. Approximately 87% of the Church of Ireland people in Cork, Cloyne and Ross come to Church at Christmas, whereas, on Sundays during the rest of the year it is about 27%. Woven through it all, of course, is family reunion and get-together and all the usual Christmas traditions, including cards, gifts, meeting friends, sporting fixtures, and an extra effort to support charities. We have always invited visitors to our home at Christmas as well from outside our immediate family. Illness and tragedy are no respecters of holidays so, in the nature of priestly vocation, its often the case that in the midst of Christmas celebrations one has to go out to offer solidarity to those for whom the holy day has gone badly wrong. This mixture of celebration, family life, and religious duty, is a way of life, a vocation, really. As I say, at this stage, I have known and experienced Christmas no other way. - Paul Colton is Church of Ireland Bishop of Cork. Ciaran Lynch My Christmas begins in St Marys Cathedral, Killarney. Im a member of the Gleneagle Concert Band and every year we perform at midday Mass. Ill go straight to the Brehon, where well have around 150 guests staying with us. Staff and guests alike are in good spirits and theres a lovely relaxed vibe all around the hotel. We go all out for breakfast, lunch and dinner the food is really fantastic. We will have all the traditional dishes and trimmings and lots of surprises as well. The team at The Brehon is made up of people from around the world and so we work our rosters to try and accommodate everyones different cultures and traditions. - Ciaran Lynch is duty manager at The Brehon, Killarney Caitriona Twomey In 2011, Cork Penny Dinners served approximately 100 meals a week. In 2018, we serve over 2,000 meals a week. Founded in Famine times, we have a simple policy: no one is ever turned away. Theres an open door and a warm welcome. We never judge. We serve. Christmas dinner is given to anyone who needs it on Christmas Day. Staff from the River Lee Hotel, and Penny Dinners volunteers, are there before dawn to put those dinners on the tables. Theres always a party on Christmas Day, with a concert featuring the High Hopes Choir, and a special guest appearance by Santa, with gifts for all. We are very grateful to everyone who helps us through the year, and its thanks to them we can help so many people. - Caitriona Twomey is co-ordinator of Cork Penny Dinners The management committee of the Galway County Board has been criticised for failing to complete an internal finance review midway through 2017 amid ongoing rancour over the finances of the GAA in the county. Galway hurling board chairman Michael Larkin told delegates at Mondays convention that allegations of financial mismanagement, the full scale of which were laid bare by county board treasurer Mike Burke at the beginning of the meeting, and included the use of the Galway GAA credit card for the payment of personal expenses, was first brought to his attention by two people in February of 2017. Larkin relayed their concerns to county board chairman Pat Kearney and there followed discussions with Croke Park in April of that year as to how the Galway executive should deal with this issue. Croke Park, according to Pat Kearney, recommended an internal audit be conducted. The boards auditors DHKN, however, were unable to carry out this mid-year review. That [internal audit] wasnt completed because sufficient information wasnt forthcoming from the office at the time to DHKN, Kearney revealed. A spokesman for DHKN, present at convention, backed up Kearneys recount of events. There was to be a mid-year review done, we looked to get it done and was told there were no accounts. So you cant do a review if there is nothing ready. We were subject to get in and were told there was nothing for us to review, said the DHKN spokesman. The proper financial controls, conceded Larkin, were sorely lacking. The simple fact is there are no procedures, no rules, no regulations. There are no systems of authorisation. So, basically, we have accounts that operate outside of the system. At the end of the day, it is almost impossible to produce the set of accounts [that were required]. Pearses delegate Paul Bellew castigated the board for not demanding the relevant information and allowing the misuse of Galway GAA funds to go unchecked throughout 2017. It was left alone because the information was not produced. That is scandalous, he remarked. Bellew was a member of the internal audit committee established earlier this year by county board treasurer Mike Burke, the latter appointed to the position of treasurer in December 2017. Burke told convention he found it impossible to get information during the first nine months of this year. Unlike 2017, however, he refused to be deterred, uncovering the serious abuse of the Galway GAA credit card for the payment of personal expenses, officer expenses totalling 45k in 2016 and the payment of bonuses without proper authorisation. With delegates critical of DHKN for failing in recent years to highlight the poor financial practices which were in operation within Galway GAA, Burke was adamant no blame was to be laid at the doorstep of their auditors. I never produced a three-month or six-month financial report [this year] because I could not get any factual information from Pearse Stadium, the treasurer alleged. For the last couple of weeks, I got nothing but help from DHKN. I felt sorry for them with regard to the lack of information that was coming. It is a mess. It is still a mess. It will take months and months to straighten out. It is not DHKNs fault. It is our fault. I paid for my own All-Ireland tickets in late July [of this year]. I was amazed to find that my cheque, which was fairly substantial, was not cashed until mid-September. How do you run a business that way? If we were a private business, we would be in receivership. Burkes internal report, which has not been published for legal reasons, contains a number of recommendations, while the independent audit carried out by Mazars, on behalf of Croke Park, carries 39 findings and recommendations. Pearses delegate Bellew questioned the ability of the top-table to bring about the necessary change and implement these recommendations. He also described as a farce that the minutes of the 2017 convention could not be located. Only for you Mike Burke, who went through this, pulled it out and showed it to people who wanted to sweep it under the carpet, we wouldnt be in the good position that we are going forward. I understand Pat [Kearney] that you inherited a mess and didnt create it, but you havent dealt with it enough. And I am not confident the management committee is fit for purpose and will implement this. You can have a great product, but if you dont have the right culture, you have nothing. Kearney, responding to Mike Burkes claim that he was impeded in trying to uncover the extent of the financial mismanagement, stressed that he blocked nothing. The county board treasurer informed delegates the board was very lucky to sell the ill-fated Mountain South site outside Athenry. The loan provided by Central Council in relation to this site stands at just over 2.5m. Kearney informed delegates there are historical costs associated with this purchase, including 17k outstanding in solicitors fees. GAA President John Horan and Cork County Board chairperson Tracey Kennedy issued a brief joint statement last night regarding Pairc Ui Chaoimhs redevelopment and expressed optimism about the future of the stadium. Last weekend, the Irish Examiner exclusively revealed the project was subject to huge cost overruns and that the pitch would need replacement, as well as pointing out chaotic governance and a need for Croke Park to take the entire enterprise in-hand for up to 15 years. The board of directors of Pairc Ui Chaoimh met on Monday and yesterday evening a statement was issued on their behalf. A scheduled meeting of the Board of Directors of Pairc Ui Chaoimh took place on Monday evening chaired by GAA President John Horan, who was nominated to chair the board at its first meeting in November. Michael OFlynn and Tom Gray, both board directors, have been asked by the board to examine figures and clarify the costs relating to the stadium redevelopment. The meeting also confirmed that remedial work will take place on the playing surface to ensure that it will be capable of hosting games fixed for Pairc Ui Chaoimh in 2019. This work will be completed ahead of the commencement of the Allianz Leagues and it is not expected that a replacement of the pitch will be needed in the short-term. GAA President John Horan said: I am delighted that the GAA has such a positive asset in Cork and I am optimistic about the future of what is a state of the art facility. Tracey Kennedy added: It is fantastic for us to be able to call on the experience and expertise of Croke Park to work with us in the operation of our stadium, and I know this will be a huge positive for Pairc Ui Chaoimh. As always, the devil is in the detail. Sources close to the board told the Irish Examiner that the meeting on Monday evening was a constructive one perhaps more than would have been expected given the distance between the final building cost cited by Croke Parks Peter McKenna and that circulated by Cork County Board chair Tracey Kennedy. Its not surprising that that should be the focus of the statement, given that so much depends on clarity with the final building cost (though the statement was careful not to contradict either McKenna or Kennedys figures). Any serious business plan in other words, one that would be acceptable to the banks needs to begin with certainty on that final cost so the main takeaway for observers will be directors Michael OFlynn and Tom Gray focusing on that area. The fact that Cork native OFlynn is involved will be viewed with approval on Leeside, where last weeks revelations in the Irish Examiner about the extent of Pairc Ui Chaoimhs travails are still reverberating. (Dubliner Gray, it should be noted, also has a very strong business background.) However, Cork chair Kennedys reference to working with Croke Park may not entirely assuage doubts on Leeside that Cork officials are in charge of their own stadium. Moreover, there is an implicit acknowledgement that the playing surface will need to be replaced in the medium-term. This is a more significant issue than might be first thought, given it directly influences Corks ability to host high-profile games which may draw big crowds and generate revenue. There has been some discussion of the implications of Croke Park taking a hand in the Pairc Ui Chaoimh situation for other GAA capital projects such as the redevelopment of Walsh Park, but in the shorter term the allocation of lucrative games such as the All-Ireland hurling quarter-finals will be vital to the Paircs financial health. The implications for venues such as Semple Stadium in Thurles, however, in missing out on such paydays is yet another headache spinning out of this situation. Having gardai respond appropriately to intellectually disabled complainants is a major factor in shaping their experience of the criminal justice system, writes Alan Cusack Last month, in a landmark report, the Commission on the Future of Policing in Ireland published its central findings following an extensive review of Irelands modern policing culture. Prepared over the course of 16 months by a team of independent, government-appointed experts, the report sets out a vision for a reformed and reinvigorated police service. This vision, it must be said, is not one which will be entirely unfamiliar to those who have been engaged in the provision of policing services in Ireland over the course of the past decade. In echoing the contributions of the Dean Lyons Commission of Investigation (2006), as well as those raised more recently by the Morris Tribunal (2008), the report contains no fewer than 50 recommendations aimed at addressing systemic problems [within An Garda Siochana] related to structures, accountability mechanisms, management processes and culture. Policing outcomes in Ireland, we are told, will not improve simply by adding more police or appointing new police leaders. There is an urgent need for comprehensive, fundamental change. This should be a first-order national priority Given the commissions incarnation against a backdrop of growing public concern with the operational transparency of An Garda Siochana manifest, most notably, by the establishment of the Disclosures Tribunal (2017) the reports central finding of the urgent need for comprehensive, fundamental change is hardly surprising. However, what is surprising and, indeed welcome, about the report is its recognition of the increasing demands that are being placed on An Garda Siochana: In reality, police in Ireland and elsewhere spend a lot of time dealing with social issues. They are often on the front line supporting the more vulnerable members of society people with mental health conditions or substance misuse problems, homeless people, children and elderly people at risk, and those left behind in poverty or social exclusion a great proportion of frontline police time and resource is taken up with activities not directly related to crime. In recognising that attending to these wider social issues poses a risk of straining the operational effectiveness of An Garda Siochana, the report makes a number of important recommendations for structural reform. One such recommendation is for An Garda Siochana to form mutually respectful partnerships with other public agencies both nationally and locally. However, while it is difficult to dispute the benefits of inculcating such a multi-disciplinary approach to tacking national social issues, the practical introduction of such an ambitious, reformative proposal will not be without significant structural challenges. Indeed, even by the reports own admission, the realisation of these strategic partnerships will require buy-in across government at a high level, not only by departments that are part of the criminal justice system, but by all departments serving people at risk. It will also, moreover, require information sharing of a kind which does not currently take place between public agencies. For these reasons, it is difficult to envisage this strategic reform as an immediate solution to the operational challenges faced by An Garda Siochana. A less radical, and perhaps more immediately-realisable, reformative proposal can, however, be found in Chapter 20 of the report where the commission observes as follows: Police are often first on the scene in situations where the key problem is mental illness or drug abuse. It is vital that they know how to recognise such problems when they encounter them that they are knowledgeable about such problems, if not expert and that they know how to access the right kind of expert assistance quickly. We, therefore, recommend enhanced training in mental health and substance misuse awareness, at least part of it jointly with members of the relevant expert services. Recommendations of this nature, it should be said, are by no means new. As far back as 1996, the Commission on the Status of People with Disabilities suggested that Disability awareness training should be provided to all gardai and other persons working in this area as part of their general training. And yet, while some positive steps have undoubtedly been taken over the course of the past two decades in the direction of promoting greater disability awareness training with An Garda Siochana most notably in the form of the launch of Diversity Works training scheme in 2006 as well as the introduction of a Policing with Communities module on the BA in Applied Policing Degree in the Garda Training College there remains considerable scope for further improvements in this area. To take just one example, the undisclosed award of damages in 2016 to a man who had a severe form of autism and profound intellectual disabilities, following his arrest and detention by An Garda Siochana, suggests that there remains a lack of standardisation in practice amongst members of the force. It would seem that while disability-awareness training may well be a constituent element of the modern Garda College curriculum, not all members of the force have shared equally in the benefits of such tuition. Nor, would it seem, have all members of the gardai familiarised themselves equally with the best practice forensic standards which have been set down by Garda management with respect to interviewing vulnerable witnesses. As a result of this plurality in the level of disability awareness within the force, the response which will greet, for instance, a crime victim with an intellectual disability upon reporting an incident of criminal victimisation at a Garda station cannot be predicted. As one victim support organisation intimated as part of a recent Irish study, Victims of crimes experience depends on the individual Garda that they meet some are terrific, some are fantastic, and some are not, and there are huge barriers when you meet up with them. As the primary gatekeepers of Irelands criminal justice system, members of An Garda Siochana enjoy unparalleled influence over the trajectory of a complaint. Moreover, as first responders to alleged incidents of victimisation, they are uniquely placed to shape a victims initial impression of the criminal justice process. For these reasons, the capacity of members of An Garda Siochana to respond appropriately, sympathetically and respectfully to the concerns of intellectually disabled complainants at the initial, often traumatic, reporting stage is a major factor in shaping their overall experience of the criminal justice system. The adoption of a presumptively dismissive attitude towards victims with intellectual disabilities, or the application of inappropriate interviewing techniques which are blind to the cognitive dimensions of intellectual impairment, not only risks prejudicing the quality of evidence that they will uncover in their inquiries, but it also risks reinforcing traditional constructions of incapacity. With Drew Harris recent appointment as the new commissioner of the force, An Garda Siochana has a unique opportunity to re-tailor its policies and training programmes in order to better respond to the individuated needs of all consumers of Irelands criminal justice process. While, in the short term, the realisation of the enhanced training programme advocated by the commission will undoubtedly represent a further operational strain on a police service that is already operating at its limit, in the longer term, this development promises to yield a more inclusionary justice system, not only in terms of setting a best practice example for other criminal justice agencies, but also in the sense of empowering and incentivising some of the most vulnerable members of Irish society to actively report incidents of criminal wrongdoing. - Alan Cusack is a lecturer in law at the University of Limerick. In 2017, he completed a PhD in the School of Law at University College Cork in the area of access to justice for victims of crime with intellectual disabilities News Analysis: Deft Diplomacy Required as China, Japan Court Myanmar State Counselor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and Chinese President Xi Jinping wait for Myanmar delegates to arrive at a meeting at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing in August 2016. / REUTERS YANGONWhile the West abandons Myanmar over the human rights crisis in Rakhine, China and Japan, understanding the value of the countrys strategic location in Southeast Asia, have done the opposite, accelerating their collaboration in a bid to get the upper hand and further their own grand plans. Beijing and Tokyos strategies to connect continents and oceans with sea lanes and inland highways that will improve Myanmars infrastructure have the potential to revive the countrys slowing economy and position the country as a regional trade and supply hub. Key Chinese figures have been traveling back and forth between the two countries this year to pursue Beijings dream of implementing the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor (CMEC), part of its region-wide Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). A week after signing the Kyaukphyu SEZ, the vice chairman of Chinas top economic planning agency pushed Myanmars State Counselorwho also serves as chair of Myanmars BRI steering committee, to move forward with projects on the ground. Myanmars BRI steering committee comprises 25 members including 18 Union ministers (from ministries ranging from Home Affairs to Hotels and Tourism); five chief ministers (from Kachin, Mandalay, Rakhine, Yangon and Shan); the foreign affairs permanent secretary; and the chairman of the Naypyitaw Council. Last month, Beijing secured a long-awaited agreement to build the Kyaukphyu deep-water port in northern Rakhine State, which already serves as the terminus for twin cross-border oil and gas pipelines between the two countries. Kyaukphyu is a crucial phase in the CMEC. According to U Set Aung, deputy minister for planning and finance, the Kyaukphyu project will contribute to the sustainable development of both countries and will also be crucial to enhancing Myanmars regional connectivity. Japan has accelerated its plans for Myanmars first special economic zone (SEZ) in Thilawa, which received more than $1.3 million in investment from 2014-18. It is also planning to upgrade roads and bridges through two states via the East-West Economic Corridor, one of the cross-border transport infrastructure projects that form part of Tokyos Greater Mekong Region economic integration scheme. After nearly six decades of isolation under military dictatorship, the government led by State Counselor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi has been implementing economic reforms to complete Myanmars democratic transition. The government has drawn up the Myanmar Sustainable Development Plan (MSDP), the aim of which is to align the countrys numerous policies and institutions to achieve genuine, inclusive and transformational economic growth. The MSDP also aims to improve the countrys connectivity with neighboring countries and prioritizes economic corridors under both the GMS and BRI. Under the BRI, Kyaukphyu is seen as a potential hub for China, giving it direct access to the Indian Ocean and allowing its oil imports to bypass the Strait of Malacca. It also serves Beijings goal of developing Chinas land-locked Yunnan province. At a recent Union-ministerial-level planning and finance meeting, it was disclosed that the CMEC will pass through Yangon, Mandalay, Shan, Irrawaddy and Rakhine (to the Kyaukphyu SEZ). China has proposed a total of 40 projects, but the two sides have only agreed to implement nine so far. However, the meeting didnt issue details of the projects, other than construction plans for three economic cooperation zones along the Myanmar-China border in Shan and Kachin states. In Yangon, the multi-billion-dollar New Yangon City project is a part of the CMEC plan. A framework agreement was recently signed for the project, which is envisioned as a complex of new towns, industrial parks and urban development projects. Myanmar has also signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with China to begin studying a proposed railway line from Muse, in northern Shan State, to Mandalay. The Muse-Mandalay line is part of Beijings plan to build a parallel expressway and railway line from Ruili (across the border from Muse in Chinas Yunnan province) to Kyaukphyu, with a separate road running through northern Myanmar, the northeast states of India, and Bangladesh under the Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar Economic Corridor (BCIM-EC). Within the competition between China and Japan in the Mekong Region, vertical integration has been driven by China, while horizontal integration has been driven by Japan, as Myanmar exists in the heart of Asia with China to the north and east, India to the west and ASEAN to the east and south. While Myanmar has come under severe pressure from the international community, Japan has shown its full support, helping to solve the Rakhine crisis and also showing strong disagreement with the EUs consideration to withdraw trade preferences, which would hurt ordinary people in the country. In recent months, Japan announced its Tokyo Strategy 2018, aimed at promoting quality infrastructure development in countries along the Mekong River to counterbalance Chinas growing influence in the region via the BRI. However, Japans quality infrastructure projects in the Mekong Region date back to the early 2000s, initiated by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). JICA has spent trillions of yen to improve economic integration in the Greater Mekong Region with a network of land and sea infrastructure routes between the countries. It emphasizes regional connectivity, which is focused on both industrial and physical infrastructure such as roads, telecommunications and power transmission lines. The rapid rise of China is one major factor in JICAs decision to increase infrastructure development assistance in the Mekong Region, said Tetsuji Iida, an adviser to the Planning and ASEAN Partnership Division of JICAs Southeast Asia and Pacific Department. Since the 2010s, Myanmar has opened up to the world and also joined in the full scope of GMS cooperation that has opened a new front in China and Japans rivalry in economic diplomacy. Within Japans grand plan, Myanmar sits on two major economic corridors: the East-West Economic Corridor connecting Vietnams Dong Ha City with Yangons Thilawa Special Economic Zone (SEZ) via Cambodia and Thailand, and the Southern Economic Corridor connecting central Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand to the Dawei SEZ in southeastern Myanmar. State Counselor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi has claimed that Myanmar will benefit from over 16 bilateral projects and 100 multilateral projects as part of the Mekong-Japan cooperation. Japans grand plan aims to improve connectivity between Bangkok and Yangon along the East West Corridor. The corridor will help businesses based in Bangkok extend their supply chains to Yangon (at the Thilawa SEZ). JICA is looking to build an inland highway as a transport shortcut from Thilawa to Bangkok. Transportation routes from Singapore currently runt to a combined length of 4,000 km and take 21 days to negotiate. On the East-West Corridor, the Myanmar section does not function as an international highway due to bottlenecks such as one-way traffic, a lack of paved roads, traffic difficulties in the rainy season and weight limitations. JICA plans to shorten transport time by constructing three bridges in Karen and Mon statesthe Gyaing-Kawkareik Bridge, the Gyaing-Zathabyin Bridge and the Atran Bridgeas a part of the East-West Economic Corridor. It expects to take one-and-a-half days to transport goods over 870 km from Thilawa to Bangkok. JICA expects loans for the project to amount to about 33.8 billion yen and that the project will be complete by 2023. Japan pledged about 800 billion yen (US$7.03 billion) in 2016 in public and private support over five years, including for urban development in Yangon, and roughly 260 billion yen for the Mandalay-Yangon rail modernization project. JICA agreed to provide 6 billion yen in grants to develop a major port in Mandalay that will connect the two cities by river. The plan includes the construction of a new pier and cranes to handle freight. According to Japans Free and Open Indo-Pacific strategy, Tokyo also plans to construct the Hanthawaddy International Airport near Bago city around 80 kilometers north of Yangon. In May, Transport and Communications Minister U Thant Sin Maung said that although Japan wants to start the project as soon as possible, Myanmar is considering the investment amount. However, according to a Japanese newspaper report in June, both sides agreed to go ahead with the project, which has a total estimated cost of $1.5 billion and is slated to be completed in 2020. On the Southern Economic Corridor, the Dawei Special Economic Zone (SEZ) is crucial for Japans GMS connectivity, which will link central Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand to southeastern Myanmar. The Dawei SEZ is an $8-billion project in Tanintharyi Region that includes a deep seaport, set to be Southeast Asias largest industrial complex. In November, Myanmar and Thailand signed an agreement to upgrade a highway linking their border with the Dawei SEZ. According to Dawei SEZ Management Committee Chairman U Tun Naing, JICA has been conducting a full phase master plan for the deep seaport project, including setting up an electrical grid, basic infrastructure and buildings. The primary stage of the project will jointly be implemented by Myanmar, Thailand and Japan, according to Ministry of Commerce. Prof. Manabu Fujimura of the College of Economics at Tokyos Aoyama Gakuin University, an expert on economic corridors in GMS, told The Irrawaddy that Myanmars economic landscape is basically divided into two partsChinese economic influence in Myanmar will continue to extend from Muse (in Shan State on Myanmars border with Chinas Yunnan province) to Mandalay and upper Myanmar, while Japanese and Thai economic influence would extend from Myawaddy (in Kayin State, on the border with Thailands Tak province) to Yangon and lower Myanmar. Naypyitaw believes foreign direct investment (FDI) offers a shortcut by which Myanmar can catch up to its neighbors and the rest of the global economy, but experts suggest the country needs to make efforts to improve the business environment by engaging in continuous reformwhile also making an effort to balance two giants while not pitting one power directly against the other. Experts said the evidence showed that Japan wants to counter Chinas economic and political forays into Myanmar, and that Japans role has become increasingly important as the West turns its back on Myanmar due to the crisis in Rakhine State and human-rights abuses in the country. Longtime Myanmar observer Bertil Lintner told The Irrawaddy, Myanmar would need some very skilled diplomats to deal with this issue, because the country is rapidly becoming a pawn in a geopolitical game that goes far beyond ports and economic zones. Its about power games in the region where countries such as Japan and India are trying their utmost to contain Chinas growing influence in Myanmar. Accepting aid from Japan is less risky than taking Chinese assistance, which usually comes in the form of loans and credits, which can turn into whats known as a debt trap. If the loans cant be repaid, China seizes the asset, as it has done in Hambantota in Sri Lanka. Japanese aid comes with fewer strings attached. But given the rivalry between Japan and China, Myanmar should expect a lot of Chinese pressure (political, economic, support for armed groups) if it accepts aid and assistance from Japan, Lintner added. Members of his ruling United National Party and at least six opposition lawmakers want to oust Sirisena through an impeachment, though that needs a two-thirds majority in Parliament. On Thursday Sri Lankas Supreme Court ruled that Sirisenas decision to dissolve parliament before the end of its term was unconstitutional, a judgment that eventually led to the return of Wickremesinghe as prime minister. With the latest defections, Wickremesinghe has the backing of 120 legislators in the 225-member Parliament. We joined the government as the party and the country have been dragged into a difficult position, Vijith Wijayamuni Soysa, one of the three lawmakers, told Parliament. Wickremesinghe was then sworn in as prime minister for the fifth time in a remarkable comeback. Rajapaksa, best known for crushing a long-running insurgency in the north of the country and drawing Sri Lanka closer to China, failed to win a parliamentary majority and resigned on Saturday as a government shutdown loomed. The island nation was plunged into crisis in October after Sirisena replaced Wickremesinghe with ex-president Mahinda Rajapaksa without the backing of Parliament, leading to protests and downgrades of Sri Lankas debt. COLOMBO Three lawmakers from Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisenas party defected to the government of Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe on Tuesday after a dispute between the two leaders. Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena waves at his supporters, together with his party members, during a special party convention in Colombo, Sri Lanka, on Dec. 4. / Reuters Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena waves at his supporters, together with his party members, during a special party convention in Colombo, Sri Lanka, on Dec. 4. / Reuters Credit Bureau to Be Up and Running Next Year Shan Armed Group Kills At Least Four Ethnic Pa-O in Shooting Activists Demand Release of Two Reuters Reporters on Anniversary of Arrests In Fear of the State: Bangladeshi Journalists Self-Censor as Election Approaches Number of Journalists Jailed For Doing Job Near Record High: Report China Says Second Canadian Being Probed For Harming State Security Army Captain Accused of Killing Man over Missing ID Card Goes on Trial Youth Activists Speak Up on Lost Idols and Freedom of Expression Can Myanmar Profit From the Trade and Currency Wars? Ten Things to do in Yangon This Week Peace Process Will Remain in Deadlock if Single Army Issue Cannot Be Resolved We do not encourage viewing this site in this width. Please increase the size of your window. Asia Violence Against Journalists Hits Unprecedented Levels: RSF A demonstrator holds a poster with a picture of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi outside the Saudi Arabia consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, on Oct. 25. / Reuters PARIS The murder of Saudi columnist Jamal Khashoggi in a year when more than half of all journalists killed were targeted deliberately reflects a hatred of the media in many areas of society, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said on Tuesday. At least 63 professional journalists around the world were killed doing their jobs in 2018, RSF said, a 15 percent increase on last year. The number of fatalities rises to 80 when including all media workers and citizen journalists. The hatred of journalists that is voiced by unscrupulous politicians, religious leaders and businessmen has tragic consequences on the ground, and has been reflected in this disturbing increase in violations against journalists, RSF Secretary-General Christophe Deloire said in a statement. Khashoggi, a royal insider who became a critic of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and began writing for the Washington Post after moving to the United States last year, was killed inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October. Khashoggis death sparked global outrage. Saudi officials have rejected accusations that the crown prince ordered his death. The Paris-based body said that the three most dangerous countries for journalists to work in were Afghanistan, Syria and Mexico. Meanwhile, the shooting of five employees of the Capital Gazette newspaper propelled the United States into the ranks of the most dangerous countries. The media freedom organization said 348 journalists are being detained worldwide, compared with 326 at this time in 2017. China, Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt hold more than half the worlds imprisoned journalists. Burma Daw Aung San Suu Kyis Brother Refuses to Concede Legal Fight over Inheritance Then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, left, and then Myanmar opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi walk through the garden at the latters residence in Yangon on Dec. 2, 2011. / Reuters NAYPYITAWU Aung San Oo, the elder brother of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, said that the rejection of his appeal against a court decision involving the residence of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi at No. 54 University Avenue, is unfair. I will lodge an appeal to Chief Justice U Tun Tun Oo. I dont know whether he will accept it or not, but he might not. Three judges under him seemed to be afraid to handle the case. I think they are worried about the case as it involves the State Counselor, U Aung San Oo told the Irrawaddy. The special appeal was filed by U Aung San Oo himself to the Union Supreme Court on Oct. 17 this year and rejected by the court on Dec. 12. A spokesperson for the public relations branch of the Union Supreme Court said, The appeal lodged by U Aung San Oo was rejected by the court on December 12. Official documents of the court and other pieces of evidence will be sought in order to lodge an appeal to the chief justice as soon as possible. U Aung San Oo said that he would make it clear in his appeal that the sharing of the inheritance with defendant U Khin Maung Aye, who he believes was not entitled to it, was never mentioned in the case. His name was never mentioned when Daw Aung San Suu Kyi lodged an appeal three times. According to the law, he is not eligible to be a defendant when the inheritance is shared under a commissioner. But Daw Aung San Suu Kyi said that he was eligible. It was her influence above the law. She used it and said that the inheritance must also be shared with U Khin Maung Aye so I lost that case at the court, he added. The case involving the State Counselors residence was opened in 2011 and a final verdict was given by Yangon West District Court in November 2016. The court decided that a two-story house and half of the two-acre plot owned by Daw Khin Kyi, their mother, would be given to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, while a one-story house plus the other half of the plot would be given to her brother, U Aung San Oo. However, he was not satisfied with the courts decision and demanded that the residence be auctioned off and the proceeds of the sale shared equally between them. During her ill health in 1988, Daw Khin Kyi told her son and daughter, who were then living abroad, to come back to Myanmar. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi returned to Yangon to nurse her sick mother but U Aung San Oo failed to follow his mothers request. Before her death, Daw Khin Kyi decided to give her nephew U Khin Maung Aye a plot in the compound measuring 21.3 by 30.5 meters (70 by 100 feet) as inheritance. U Khin Maung Aye died in August this year. U Aung San Oo said, They said my demands were too much and they could not be negotiated. If I am demanding too much, they can auction off the plot and they will know whether I am demanding too much or not. Why cant they auction it off? However, he did not elaborate on exactly how much money he was demanding. U Myo Nyunt, spokesperson for the National League for Democracy, said, It is not true. The court will decide independently. We will not intervene in the case. We will not even make a remark as a political party. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi will not make a remark as an individual. The court has the right to decide on the case independently. The house and plot at No. 54 University Avenue was given to Daw Khin Kyi by former prime minister U Nu. U Nu invited Daw Khin Kyi to move to the residence on University Avenue from their residence at Tower Lane (now General Aung San Museum), in order to help the family to overcome their grief after one of the sons drowned there. Burma Three Fined for Demanding Release of Jailed Kachin Antiwar Activists From left: Brang Mai, Sut Seng Htoi, Seng Hkum Awng. / KYM Facebook YANGONA court in Myitkyina, Kachin State has fined three activists who led a rally calling for the release of three imprisoned anti-war protesters. On Dec. 11, Sut Seng Htoi, Brang Mai and Seng Hkum Awng led a demonstration against the imprisonment of three activists who were convicted earlier this month of defaming the Army after leading an antiwar protest in April. Around 5,000 local residents took part in the Dec. 11 demonstration. Myitkyina Township police charged the three under Article 19 of the Peaceful Assembly and Procession Law. Sut Seng Htoi was fined 100,000 kyats, and the other two were fined 300,000 kyats each, Maran Seng Htwal, a member of the protests organizing committee, told The Irrawaddy. According to township police, demonstrators used the Kachin State flag without permission and held up placards reading Failed democracy? and Failed law, as well as pictures of the three imprisoned anti-war demonstrators. They were protesting the Dec. 7 sentencing by Myitkyina Township Court of Lum Zawng, Nang Pu and Zau Jat to six months in prison and fines of 500,000 kyats each for defaming the Myanmar Army during the anti-war protests in April. The plaintiff in that case, a military officer of the Myanmar Armys Northern Command, took the three to court over the protests, which called for the rescue of 2,000 locals displaced and trapped by fighting between the Myanmar Army and the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) near the village of Awng Lawt in Tanai Township. Activists said they would continue their campaign, including lodging an appeal for the release of the anti-war demonstrators. We will also seek their unconditional release [through activities] outside the court, Maran Seng Htwal said. Demonstrations calling for the rescue of innocent civilians are not defamatory. They were simply calling on the parties involved to rescue innocent civilians, Maran Seng Htwal, who is also the manager of the Yangon branch of the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners told The Irrawaddy. June 9 marked the seventh anniversary of renewed clashes between the Myanmar Army, or Tatmadaw, and the KIA after a 17-year truce between the Tatmadaw and the KIA collapsed in 2011. More than 100,000 locals have been forced from their homes into camps across Kachin State since then. | BY Kim Shaw | The Royals, Melbourne founder and strategy partner Dave King has stepped back from day-to-day involvement in the agency to focus on his AI start-up, Move 37. King, who will remain as non-executive director, founded The Royals in 2010. The following year he was joined by creative partner Nick Cummins and managing partners Stephen OFarrell and Andrew Siwka. Says Cummins: Dave has played a big part in The Royals success to date. Thankfully, hes not leaving us completely but will focus the majority of his time on another business opportunity Move 37. News Doctor Says Facebook Comedian Died From Blows to Head The three suspects in the murder of Aung Yell Htwe (in foreground in white shirts) arrive at Thingangyun Township Court in Yangon on Jan. 18. / The Irrawaddy Wednesday, December 19th, 2018 (9:05 am) - Score 1,246 The Competition and Markets Authority has concluded its super-complaint probe into how UK consumers who remain loyal to a broadband ISP or mobile operator often end up paying significantly more than new customers. In response theyve called for urgent action to tackle related issues and protect vulnerable users. The investigation began in September 2018 after Citizens Advice, which tabled the complaint, claimed customers who stay loyal to their providers were losing out on over 4 billion a year. It beggars belief that companies in regulated markets can get away with routinely punishing their customers simply for being loyal. The CMA should come up with concrete measures to end this systematic scam, said the organisations CEO, Gillian Guy. Many of these issues occur because providers often offer big discounts to new customers, which can last as long as the first contract term (up to 24 months) before coming to an end. Once the discount is over then the price returns to its normal post-contract level and this tends to be significantly more expensive. This is a fairly normal practice for any aggressively competitive market. The problems often begin when customers discover that they often cannot simply re-contract with their provider in order benefit from the same discounts as new subscribers, instead youre stuck paying a much higher price. A savvy consumer may contact their provider in an attempt to haggle for a lower price (Retentions Tips) or switch to a different ISP, but only around 10%+ of broadband users actually do this each year. Andrea Coscelli, CEO of the CMA, said: Our work has uncovered a range of problems which leave people feeling ripped off, let down and frustrated. They shouldnt have to be constantly on guard, spending hours searching for or negotiating a good deal, to avoid being trapped into bad value contracts or falling victim to stealth price rises. Millions of loyal or vulnerable customers are being taken advantage of each year by firms and end up paying much more than they should do. This must come to an end. Thats why we have today recommended a robust package of reforms. There must be a step change to protect the people being hardest hit, including targeted price caps where necessary. Together the CMA, regulators and government must act more promptly and powerfully to hold firms to account, stop them exploiting their customers and restore peoples trust in markets. The CMA found that vulnerable people, including the elderly and those on a low income, may be more at risk of paying the loyalty penalty. It also highlights a number of damaging practices that they found are used to exploit unsuspecting customers. Examples of Damaging Practices * Stealth price rises. Imposing stealth increases in price on renewal year after year, which can lead to very significant price increases without customers being aware of it. * Costly exit fees. * Time-consuming and difficult processes to cancel contracts or switch to new providers (i.e. making it more difficult to leave a contract than it is to sign up). * Requiring customers to auto-renew or not giving sufficient warning their contract will be rolled over. The CMA said in most markets there should be a choice. In response the CMA has made a number of general recommendations to tackle these problem areas, as well as several specific ones for the different markets (i.e. cash savings, mortgages, household insurance, mobile phone contracts and broadband). The recommendations aim to help stop loyal consumers being ripped off and are being made both to the UK government and regulators (e.g. Ofcom). CMA General Recommendations * Using enforcement and regulatory powers to clamp down on harmful practices that stop people getting better deals. The CMA has today opened a consumer law enforcement investigation in the anti-virus software sector. This is a first step and further action may be taken by the CMA and regulators against other companies. * Setting out clearly the principles businesses across all markets should follow, such as people being able to leave a contract as easily as they enter it. The CMA will also be looking at whether consumer law should also be reinforced. * Firms should be publicly held to account for charging existing customers much more; regulators should publish the size of the loyalty penalty in key markets and for each supplier on a yearly basis. * Targeted price caps to protect the people worst hit by the loyalty penalty, such as the vulnerable, where needed. Recommendations for the Mobile Sector * We do not consider that providers should continue to charge customers the same rate once they have effectively paid off their handsets at the end of the minimum contract period. This is unfair and must be stopped. We support a requirement on mobile providers to move customers on bundled handset and airtime contracts onto a fairer tariff when their minimum contract period ends. [Recommendation: Ofcom]. * In addition, Ofcom should seek to increase the engagement and awareness of consumers by pushing forward with implementing smart data, supporting the development of innovative intermediaries, and tackling low levels of awareness of SIM-only deals. [Recommendation: Ofcom]. Recommendations for the Broadband Sector * Loyalty penalty problems in this market must be thoroughly investigated. Ofcom should consider a number of possible pricing interventions including tackling broadband legacy pricing and targeted safeguard caps to protect vulnerable consumers, alongside measures to increase engagement such as the use of smart data and exploring the feasibility of collective switching. [Recommendation: Ofcom]. Ofcom has of course already moved to propose several solutions to the above problem with certain Mobile contracts (here) and on the broadband side theyre preparing to require that ISPs should give customers End of Contract Notifications, which among other things will now also include information on the best deals available to them from their provider. Both measures will be introduced later in 2019. On top of that the telecoms regulator has just launched a new review of broadband pricing to examine whether loyal (existing) and vulnerable ISP customers are being ripped-off (here), which it said would examine why some customers pay more than others, and whether vulnerable customers need extra protections to ensure they get a good deal. Broadly speaking, Ofcom is already doing what the CMA wants. Lindsey Fussell, Ofcoms Consumer Group Director, said: We welcome the CMAs report, which supports our existing work to protect customers, including our reviews of mobile handset charges and broadband prices, and our plans to require companies to tell people about the best tariffs available when their deal is ending. At this point we should highlight that most of the problems come from some of the biggest mobile and broadband providers, but that not all ISPs adopt the same model and many smaller providers, which may also offer advanced features (static IP etc.) and better service quality, simply charge a set monthly fee that rarely ever changes. A few providers, such as TalkTalk, also enable existing customers to re-contract on to a lower price point. Meanwhile one of the simplest changes, which Ofcom will hopefully recommend, is to require that ISPs also place their post-contract prices alongside any discounts. At present there are still a few providers that try to conceal this in the small print. If consumers are made aware of the post-contract pricing then they will be in a better position to compare the longer term costs (we already do this for you in our own ISP Listings). However the CMAs work doesnt stop at todays conclusion. The competition regulator plans to undertake further work on the loyalty penalty, such as by launching enforcement cases, exploring the feasibility of matching price and survey data and launching a review of the case for changing consumer law in addressing the loyalty penalty. The CMA said they will provide an update on their progress to the newly established joint government-regulator Consumer Forum, led by the UK Minister for Consumer Affairs, in 6 months time (late spring 2019). Wednesday, December 19th, 2018 (4:59 pm) - Score 2,927 Rural fibre optic broadband ISP Gigaclear, which is currently still in the process of trying to tackle some significant civil engineering delays, has upgraded their core transport network to make use of Cienas 6500 Packet Optical platform. The move supports the provision of 100G channels across the UK. The upgrade means that rural regions being served by Gigaclear, including Devon, Somerset, Herefordshire and Gloucestershire, should benefit from greater access to high-speed service with rapid backhaul connections from London to Bristol and Northants. As part of this upgrade the provider has also adopted Cienas Blue Planet Manage, Control and Plan (MCP) domain controller software, which will automate network and service management, as well as providing real-time visibility into their network operations. Charl Tintinger, Technical Director, Gigaclear Networks, said: This investment reinforces Gigaclears commitment to bring reliable future-proof, ultrafast connectivity to both Broadband Delivery UK and commercial customers using its network. We should point out that a good number of other network operators, such as O2 and Openreach (BT), also make use of the Ciena 6500 platform. T-Mobile US and Sprint have been given permission to go ahead with their proposed merger after national security reviews cleared the deal, which is now expected to be finalised in the first half of 2019. The US Committee on Foreign Investment, the Justice Department, Department of Homeland Security and Defence Department all gave the green light for the two companies to merge, a statement from T-Mobile said. The four agencies are together known as Team Telecom. John Legere, chief executive of T-Mobile US, said: "We are pleased to achieve both of these important milestones in the journey to build the New T-Mobile. "We are a step closer to offering customers a supercharged disruptor that will create jobs from day one and deliver a real alternative to fixed broadband while delivering the first broad and deep nationwide 5G network for the United States. These approvals assure the strong partnership both companies have with the US Government will continue with the New T-Mobile. "We look forward to continuing our discussions with the remaining regulatory agencies reviewing our transaction to share our story and subsequently achieve similar positive results. The go-ahead for the merger of the third and fourth biggest mobile networks in the US was expected after reports that both Deutsche Telekom, the majority owner of T-Mobile, and Sprint's majority owner, Japanese firm SoftBank, had agreed to exclude Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei as a supplier. The US has banned the use of Huawei equipment in its 5G networks, claiming that the company can be a conduit for spying by Beijing. Huawei has repeatedly denied that it can be forced to indulge in espionage. Australia and New Zealand have both followed the US lead and banned Huawei from roles in their respective 5G rollouts. The Australian Government has unveiled a new strategy which it says is aimed at developing the countrys digital skills and ensuring the benefits of technology flow to all Australians. Released on Wednesday, the strategy Australias Tech Future details how the government says Australians can work together to deliver a strong, safe and inclusive economy, boosted by digital technology. Industry, Science and Technology Minister Karen Andrews says the strategy highlights the trillions of dollars in potential economic benefits as well as social opportunities that digital technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, the Internet of Things and quantum computing will bring to benefit all Australians including farmers, teachers, patients and small business owners. Embracing digital technologies will ensure Australia can continue our strong record of 27 years of uninterrupted economic growth, improve our quality of life and ensure benefit to all Australians, she said. Andrews says the report examines 150 existing programs, policies and strategies that contribute to achieving the vision, and details how Australia can lead and shape the global digital economy. We are already well on the way Australian businesses are improving productivity by adopting and adapting new technologies, such as autonomous systems, robotics and remote sensors. As new industries are created, for all sorts of new products and services, both for the Australian market and for the increasingly accessible global market, the government will work to ensure the adoption of new technologies brings even more quality jobs for people of all qualifications, as well as improvements in quality of life, increased connectedness and consumer benefits. The Liberal National Governments record on job creation speaks for itself over 300,000 jobs have been created over the last 12 months, most of which are full-time. We need to maximise opportunities from digital technology across Australia and this report identifies key areas to focus on. First and foremost, the government is focusing on people getting digital skills and infrastructure right allows us to connect people and places, and to improve productivity, sustainability and adopt new technologies. "The Liberal National Government is committed to providing Australians with access to government services that are simple, clear and fast. In this way, the report is complemented by the Digital Transformation Strategy." Andrews says sectors that are particularly likely to benefit from digital development include agriculture, manufacturing, mining, services, tourism and small business. For the Australian community, this will also bring benefits to health, emergency services, education, transport and digital services. We are also making sure we have the right enabling environment by reviewing our regulatory systems and maintaining our cyber security, to ensure that Australia can not only meet its own security needs but can become a leading exporter of cyber security services. The government will continue to work with stakeholders to drive change and assess Australias digital performance, including being involved in developing research infrastructure, data science, Smart Cities plans and space-based technologies. Much in the tradition of man bites dog, on Tuesday we had a genuine news story when one Western country, Germany, asked a question which is rarely asked: where is the evidence that the Chinese telecommunications equipment maker Huawei is using its products to spy on behalf of Beijing? Given the hysteria that the US has generated around Huawei, that is the equivalent of questioning the law of gravity. It is a given that Huawei is up to no good and Uncle Sam wants to help the rest of its right-thinking folks to hold out against nasty Chinese designs. Journalists are happy to lend credence to this fable, swallowing tales from "official sources" with glee and regurgitating them verbatim in the publications for which they work. Just a few days back, Australians Chris Uhlmann and Angus Grigg had a dramatic yarn about how spies from the Five Eyes the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand hatched a plot to prevent Huawei from selling equipment to anyone who would listen. Buried within that tale was a reference that Huawei had copied in Australian Signals Directorate chief Mike Burgess on a tweet that it had demonstrated that separation between the 5G radio access network and its core was possible something Burgess has claimed is not possible and the main reason why Huawei has been banned by Australia. But then Uhlmann and Grigg are not concerned with anything that comes from a Western spy chief is acceptable. Burgess was quoted as replying with a tweet saying that he had yet to see such isolation in 5G technology. He obviously knows more than, the organisation that is actually deciding the standards for 5G. Anything that paints Huawei in a good light is Communist propaganda in the eyes of journalists such as these. For all the talk of spying by Huawei, one has yet to see any evidence of such activity. There have, however, been backdoors disclosed in equipment from global networking vendor Cisco, one which the company buried therein. Yet there has never been any talk of banning Cisco equipment from the Internet. There has also been a verified account of the American NSA spy agency planting backdoors in Cisco equipment when it was en route to certain customers. But then Cisco is an American company. It ain't got no truck with those Communists. So too the NSA, which is as American as apple pie. And you know that anything American cannot be involved in anything shady. The argument one hears often is that under Chinese law, Beijing can ask any Chinese company to assist in the task of espionage. But then nobody mentions that the situation in the US is the same and, in fact, the NSA has already used the good offices of Messrs Google Verizon, Apple, Microsoft et al to spy on all and sundry. The agency has paid companies to obtain data on their customers. After the Snowden revelations, this is no figment of one's imagination. To digress a bit, Australian journalists are also prone to work themselves into a lather whenever they mention the fact that China has developed islands in the South China Sea as a military base. But there is never a mention of the equally indisputable fact that the US has about 40 military bases in the Pacific, completely ring-fencing China. Nope, American spying good. Chinese spying bad. This morning, I was struck by some posts on an American website known as Slashdot; responding to a post about Huawei asking for proof to justify the US and other countries' claims that it is involved in spying, several people responded by saying that they would prefer to buy Huawei phones. Crazy? No, their argument was that China could do nothing to them even if it were spying on them, whereas if they were spied on by the NSA and the CIA through American devices then they were indeed in danger. The level of espionage carried out by the NSA and the CIA is far in excess of anything indulged in by China, Russia, Iran or North Korea the four countries that are most often blamed for cyber intrusions. But one never hears of any American cyber activity at all; when it comes to that, American journalists, for all their talk of democracy and a free press, become fiercely patriotic. So I guess the mud being thrown at Huawei will continue, until the US is satisfied that it has saved its allies from the danger of Chinese spying. People who look for logic in this nakedly political exercise are searching for pearls in mud. France will begin taxing Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon in the new year, with the country's Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire telling the media on Tuesday that 500 million (US$570 million) would be raised through this measure in 2019. The move comes after an EU-wide move, proposed in March, was voted down by some countries. including Ireland which hosts the European headquarters of Apple and Google. The OECD has also been trying to reach a consensus among its 36 member countries on a similar tax. The Guardian reported that a joint French-German move to begin levying tax on big technology companies had not made much progress either. The tax will be introduced whatever happens on 1 January and it will be for the whole of 2019 for an amount that we estimate at 500 million, Le Maire told the media in Paris. In October, British Chancellor Phillip Hammond introduced a digital services tax which would come in from April 2020. Hammond said established technology companies, rather than start-ups, would have to to pay the tax. And Australia's Treasury has floated the idea of a minimum rate of tax which the Federal Government is said to be considering. Spain, Italy, Singapore and India are also said to be drafting their own versions of a digital tax. Ken Hu: "Security concerns can only be addressed through technical discussions. Security discussions need to involve all stakeholders." Australia's ban on the use of 5G equipment from Chinese telecommunications equipment vendor Huawei Technologies will result in the cost of deploying wireless base stations being higher by anything from 15% to 40%, Huawei chairman Ken Hu says. Hu, who is the rotating chairman of the company at the moment, told a media event in Dongguan, where Huawei has opened a new campus, that his figures were taken from a study titled The Value of Competition on 5G Network Deployment carried out by a company known as Frontier Economics. Journalists from AP, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, CNN, CNBC, Reuters, Fortune and Nikkei were among those present at the media event on Tuesday. The cost of building an entire 5G network in Australia would be higher by several billion dollars, said Hu, adding that was what even worse was that the time for people to adopt and use 5G technology would be delayed. In response to a question, Hu said that neither the US nor Australia had given any specific reasons for the ban that both countries have imposed on Huawei equipment. However, countries like the UK, Canada, Germany and France had engaged with the company to sort out any potential issues. The US has banned the use of Huawei equipment in its 5G networks, claiming that the company can be a conduit for spying by Beijing. Australia and New Zealand have both followed the US lead and banned the company from roles in their respective 5G rollouts. Last month there were reports that the US was stepping up the pressure on its allies to give the cold shoulder to the Chinese firm which is the world's biggest supplier of telecommunications equipment. Ken Hu answering questions from the world'd media in Dongguan on Tuesday. Photo: courtesy Huawei "Its a pity that we havent got any clear message from the Australian Government, saying what exactly the problem is, and what is the evidence for them to come to their conclusion," Hu said. "And we did not have the opportunity to clarify this doubt with the Australian Government. "Our opinion [on labelling Huawei as a security risk] is that any conclusion, any speculation should be based on real evidence. Either you have evidence to show that Huaweis solution or Huaweis equipment is not secure. "Over the past 30 years, hundreds of telecom operators have used Huaweis equipment. There have been no major cyber security incidents. And there has been almost zero Huawei equipment being used in the United States, so what is the evidence here to say that Huawei is not secure?" The head of German IT watchdog Arne Schoenbohm echoed a similar line to Der Spiegel on Monday, saying: "For such serious decisions like a ban, you need proof." Hu also pointed out that while there were allegations made in the US that Huawei's behaviour was a problem, over the past 30 years the company had grown to become a US$100-billion firm with business in 170 countries. "So the question I want to ask is, for a company with US$100 billion in revenue, with businesses in 170 countries, with the fact that weve provided leading products to most telecom operators around the world, we serve hundreds of Fortune 500 companies, we also serve hundreds of millions of consumers around the world you say Huawei is a cyber security risk without any proof. On what grounds?" Hu said Huawei had secured 25 contracts for rolling out 5G networks and was in the process of shipping more than 10,000 base stations. The company has undertaken a five-year program to upgrade its cyber security at a cost of about US$2 billion, he said. The integrated product development program included improvements in software engineering. Hu said the Oversight Board in the UK had pointed out that the company needed to improve its software engineering capabilities and practices. "This is help from the UK Government and we feel very appreciative about it. Therefore, as part of the overall IPD 2.0 transformation, we included software engineering capabilities as a very important component. In terms of how we arrived at this number [US$2 billion], it is based on our technology mix and also based on our own cost estimations," he said. Asked about the arrest of the company's chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou in Vancouver on 1 December, Hu said: "Currently, our business operations are not impacted by the case in Canada. Our business operations as a company and operations in the financial system are still business as usual." He offered no comment when asked about two Canadians who have been arrested in China after Wanzhou was taken into custody, reportedly on grounds of espionage. Ransomware definition Ransomware is a form of malware that encrypts a victim's files. The attacker then demands a ransom from the victim to restore access to the data upon payment. Users are shown instructions for how to pay a fee to get the decryption key. The costs can range from a few hundred dollars to thousands, payable to cybercriminals in Bitcoin. How ransomware works There are a number of vectors ransomware can take to access a computer. One of the most common delivery systems is phishing spam attachments that come to the victim in an email, masquerading as a file they should trust. Once they're downloaded and opened, they can take over the victim's computer, especially if they have built-in social engineering tools that trick users into allowing administrative access. Some other, more aggressive forms of ransomware, like NotPetya, exploit security holes to infect computers without needing to trick users. There are several things the malware might do once its taken over the victim's computer, but by far the most common action is to encrypt some or all of the user's files. If you want the technical details, the Infosec Institute has a great in-depth look at how several flavors of ransomware encrypt files. But the most important thing to know is that at the end of the process, the files cannot be decrypted without a mathematical key known only by the attacker. The user is presented with a message explaining that their files are now are now inaccessible and will only be decrypted if the victim sends an untraceable Bitcoin payment to the attacker. In some forms of malware, the attacker might claim to be a law enforcement agency shutting down the victim's computer due to the presence of pornography or pirated software on it, and demanding the payment of a "fine," perhaps to make victims less likely to report the attack to authorities. But most attacks don't bother with this pretense. There is also a variation, called leakware or doxware, in which the attacker threatens to publicize sensitive data on the victim's hard drive unless a ransom is paid. But because finding and extracting such information is a very tricky proposition for attackers, encryption ransomware is by far the most common type. Who is a target for ransomware? There are several different ways attackers choose the organizations they target with ransomware. Sometimes it's a matter of opportunity: for instance, attackers might target universities because they tend to have smaller security teams and a disparate user base that does a lot of file sharing, making it easier to penetrate their defenses. On the other hand, some organizations are tempting targets because they seem more likely to pay a ransom quickly. For instance, government agencies or medical facilities often need immediate access to their files. Law firms and other organizations with sensitive data may be willing to pay to keep news of a compromise quiet and these organizations may be uniquely sensitive to leakware attacks. But don't feel like you're safe if you don't fit these categories: as we noted, some ransomware spreads automatically and indiscriminately across the internet. How to prevent ransomware There are a number of defensive steps you can take to prevent ransomware infection. These steps are a of course good security practices in general, so following them improves your defenses from all sorts of attacks: Keep your operating system patched and up-to-date to ensure you have fewer vulnerabilities to exploit. to ensure you have fewer vulnerabilities to exploit. Don't install software or give it administrative privileges unless you know exactly what it is and what it does. unless you know exactly what it is and what it does. Install antivirus software , which detects malicious programs like ransomware as they arrive, and whitelisting software , which prevents unauthorized applications from executing in the first place. , which detects malicious programs like ransomware as they arrive, and which prevents unauthorized applications from executing in the first place. And, of course, back up your files, frequently and automatically! That won't stop a malware attack, but it can make the damage caused by one much less significant. Ransomware removal If your computer has been infected with ransomware, you'll need to regain control of your machine. CSO's Steve Ragan has a great video demonstrating how to do this on a Windows 10 machine: The video has all the details, but the important steps are to: Reboot Windows 10 to safe mode Install antimalware software Scan the system to find the ransomware program to find the ransomware program Restore the computer to a previous state But here's the important thing to keep in mind: while walking through these steps can remove the malware from your computer and restore it to your control, it won't decrypt your files. Their transformation into unreadability has already happened, and if the malware is at all sophisticated, it will be mathematically impossible for anyone to decrypt them without access to the key that the attacker holds. In fact, by removing the malware, you've precluded the possibility of restoring your files by paying the attackers the ransom they've asked for. Ransomware facts and figures Ransomware is big business. There's a lot of money in ransomware, and the market expanded rapidly from the beginning of the decade. In 2017, ransomware resulted in $5 billion in losses, both in terms of ransoms paid and spending and lost time in recovering from attacks. That's up 15 times from 2015. In the first quarter of 2018, just one kind of ransomware software, SamSam, collected a $1 million in ransom money. Some markets are particularly prone to ransomwareand to paying the ransom. Many high-profile ransomware attacks have occurred in hospitals or other medical organizations, which make tempting targets: attackers know that, with lives literally in the balance, these enterprises are more likely to simply pay a relatively low ransom to make a problem go away. It's estimated that 45 percent of ransomware attacks target healthcare orgs, and, conversely, that 85 percent of malware infections at healthcare orgs are ransomware. Another tempting industry? The financial services sector, which is, as Willie Sutton famously remarked, where the money is. It's estimated that 90 percent of financial institutions were targeted by a ransomware attack in 2017. Your anti-malware software won't necessarily protect you. Ransomware is constantly being written and tweaked by its developers, and so its signatures are often not caught by typical anti-virus programs. In fact, as many as 75 percent of companies that fall victim to ransomware were running up-to-date endpoint protection on the infected machines. Ransomware isn't as prevalent as it used to be. If you want a bit of good news, it's this: the number of ransomware attacks, after exploding in the mid '10s, has gone into a decline, though the initial numbers were high enough that it's still. But in the first quarter of 2017, ransomware attacks made up 60 percent of malware payloads; now it's down to 5 percent. Ransomware on the decline? What's behind this big dip? In many ways it's an economic decision based on the cybercriminal's currency of choice: bitcoin. Extracting a ransom from a victim has always been hit or miss; they might not decide to pay, or even if they want to, they might not be familiar enough with bitcoin to figure out how to actually do so. As Kaspersky points out, the decline in ransomware has been matched by a rise in so-called cryptomining malware, which infects the victim computer and uses its computing power to create (or mine, in cryptocurrency parlance) bitcoin without the owner knowing. This is a neat route to using someone else's resources to get bitcoin that bypasses most of the difficulties in scoring a ransom, and it has only gotten more attractive as a cyberattack as the price of bitcoin spiked in late 2017. That doesn't mean the threat is over, however. There are two different kinds of ransomware attackers: "commodity" attacks that try to infect computers indiscriminately by sheer volume and include so-called "ransomware as a service" platforms that criminals can rent; and targeted groups that focus on particularly vulnerable market segments and organizations. You should be on guard if you're in the latter category, no matter if the big ransomware boom has passed. With the price of bitcoin dropping over the course of 2018, the cost-benefit analysis for attackers might shift back. Ultimately, using ransomware or cryptomining malware is a business decision for attackers, says Steve Grobman, chief technology officer at McAfee. As cryptocurrency prices drop, its natural to see a shift back [to ransomware]." Should you pay the ransom? If your system has been infected with malware, and you've lost vital data that you can't restore from backup, should you pay the ransom? When speaking theoretically, most law enforcement agencies urge you not to pay ransomware attackers, on the logic that doing so only encourages hackers to create more ransomware. That said, many organizations that find themselves afflicted by malware quickly stop thinking in terms of the "greater good" and start doing a cost-benefit analysis, weighing the price of the ransom against the value of the encrypted data. According to research from Trend Micro, while 66 percent of companies say they would never pay a ransom as a point of principle, in practice 65 percent actually do pay the ransom when they get hit. Ransomware attackers keep prices relatively low usually between $700 and $1,300, an amount companies can usually afford to pay on short notice. Some particularly sophisticated malware will detect the country where the infected computer is running and adjust the ransom to match that nation's economy, demanding more from companies in rich countries and less from those in poor regions. There are often discounts offered for acting fast, so as to encourage victims to pay quickly before thinking too much about it. In general, the price point is set so that it's high enough to be worth the criminal's while, but low enough that it's often cheaper than what the victim would have to pay to restore their computer or reconstruct the lost data. With that in mind, some companies are beginning to build the potential need to pay ransom into their security plans: for instance, some large UK companies who are otherwise uninvolved with cryptocurrency are holding some Bitcoin in reserve specifically for ransom payments. There are a couple of tricky things to remember here, keeping in mind that the people you're dealing with are, of course, criminals. First, what looks like ransomware may not have actually encrypted your data at all; make sure you aren't dealing with so-called "scareware" before you send any money to anybody. And second, paying the attackers doesn't guarantee that you'll get your files back. Sometimes the criminals just take the money and run, and may not have even built decryption functionality into the malware. But any such malware will quickly get a reputation and won't generate revenue, so in most cases Gary Sockrider, principal security technologist at Arbor Networks, estimates around 65 to 70 percent of the time the crooks come through and your data is restored. Ransomware examples While ransomware has technically been around since the '90s, it's only taken off in the past five years or so, largely because of the availability of untraceable payment methods like Bitcoin. Some of the worst offenders have been: CryptoLocker , a 2013 attack, launched the modern ransomware age and infected up to 500,000 machines at its height. , a 2013 attack, launched the modern ransomware age and infected up to 500,000 machines at its height. TeslaCrypt targeted gaming files and saw constant improvement during its reign of terror. targeted gaming files and saw constant improvement during its reign of terror. SimpleLocker was the first widespread ransomware attack that focused on mobile devices was the first widespread ransomware attack that focused on mobile devices WannaCry spread autonomously from computer to computer using EternalBlue, an exploit developed by the NSA and then stolen by hackers. spread autonomously from computer to computer using EternalBlue, an exploit developed by the NSA and then stolen by hackers. NotPetya also used EternalBlue and may have been part of a Russian-directed cyberattack against Ukraine. also used EternalBlue and may have been part of a Russian-directed cyberattack against Ukraine. Locky started spreading in 2016 and was "similar in its mode of attack to the notorious banking software Dridex." A variant, Osiris , was spread through phishing campaigns. started spreading in 2016 and was "similar in its mode of attack to the notorious banking software Dridex." A variant, , was spread through phishing campaigns. Leatherlocker was first discovered in 2017 in two Android applications: Booster & Cleaner and Wallpaper Blur HD. Rather than encrypt files, it locks the home screen to prevent access to data. was first discovered in 2017 in two Android applications: Booster & Cleaner and Wallpaper Blur HD. Rather than encrypt files, it locks the home screen to prevent access to data. Wysiwye, also discovered in 2017, scans the web for open Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) servers. It then tries to steal RDP credentials to spread across the network. also discovered in 2017, scans the web for open Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) servers. It then tries to steal RDP credentials to spread across the network. Cerber proved very effective when it first appeared in 2016, netting attackers $200,000 in July of that year. It took advantage of a Microsoft vulnerability to infect networks. proved very effective when it first appeared in 2016, netting attackers $200,000 in July of that year. It took advantage of a Microsoft vulnerability to infect networks. BadRabbit spread across media companies in Eastern Europe and Asia in 2017. spread across media companies in Eastern Europe and Asia in 2017. SamSam has been around since 2015 and targeted primarily healthcare organizations. has been around since 2015 and targeted primarily healthcare organizations. Ryuk first appeared in 2018 and is used in targeted attacks against vulnerable organizations such as hospitals. It is often used in combination with other malware like TrickBot. first appeared in 2018 and is used in targeted attacks against vulnerable organizations such as hospitals. It is often used in combination with other malware like TrickBot. Maze is a relatively new ransomware group known for releasing stolen data to the public if the victim does not pay to decrypt it. is a relatively new ransomware group known for releasing stolen data to the public if the victim does not pay to decrypt it. RobbinHood is another EternalBlue variant that brought the city of Baltimore, Maryland, to its knees in 2019. is another EternalBlue variant that brought the city of Baltimore, Maryland, to its knees in 2019. GandCrab might be the most lucrative ransomware ever. Its developers, which sold the program to cybercriminals, claim more then $2 billion in victim payouts as of July 2019. might be the most lucrative ransomware ever. Its developers, which sold the program to cybercriminals, claim more then $2 billion in victim payouts as of July 2019. Sodinokibi targets Microsoft Windows systems and encrypts all files except configuration files. It is related to GandCrab targets Microsoft Windows systems and encrypts all files except configuration files. It is related to GandCrab Thanos is the newest ransomware on this list, discovered in January 2020. It is sold as ransomware as a service, It is the first to use the RIPlace technique, which can bypass most anti-ransomware methods. This list is just going to get longer. Follow the tips listed here to protect yourself. Related video: Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, December 19) President Rodrigo Duterte was not serious with his earlier claim that former Interior Secretary Mar Roxas planned the failed ambush of a Cebu government official, his spokesman said Wednesday. In a media briefing, Panelo told Malacanang reporters that Duterte's remark on Roxas' alleged plot against Daanbantayan, Cebu Mayor Vicente Loot was, again, just a joke. "If it's a joke then it's a not an accusation. And as the President said, you can't stop me from making jokes," Panelo said. The spokesman added the comment was done as an "expression of displeasure" against the retired police general Loot, who Duterte had claimed was involved in illegal drugs. "It appears to me that it was said in jest, given the fact that then General Loot is a pet peeve of the President because he's involved in drugs," he said. "If you notice in some of his speeches, when drugs (are) the subject matter of his discourse, he always named Loot." Speaking to Lumad leaders and barangay captains in Davao City Tuesday night, Duterte claimed it was Roxas who had ordered the killing of the former police general. "Tan-awa, pila ka generals ang involved? Asta si Loot ug si Garbo. Si Loot kaduha na na-ambush, dili mapatay-patay. Dili ako nagpa-ambush ato ha, si Roxas. Katong ordera na to kang Roxas to, dili ako," the President said in Bisaya. [Translation: Look, how many generals are involved. There's Loot and Garbo. Loot was ambushed twice, he couldn't die. I wasn't the one who had him ambushed, okay, it was Roxas. That order came from Roxas, not me.] "Kay gi-ingnan man na siya, kanang imong Garbo, imong senior police aide, naa na sa droga. Mao tong galagot si Roxas, sulti niya patayin na lang ninyo para hindi tayo mapahiya. Naabtan sa akong panahon mao na... sulti ni Roxas ambusha daw na si kuwan-- kinsa pa ba ang mu-ambush ug police general," Duterte added. [Translation: So he was told, your Garbo, your senior police aide, he is involved with drugs. That's why Roxas was mad, he said just kill them so we will be saved from shame. It just happened in my time duterteasdasfdsfnoises Roxas said ambush that person-- who else would order the ambush of a police general?] Panelo also countered detractors who said it was improper for the chief executive to crack such jokes. "People make jokes, it doesn't mean bullying someone. If it's a joke, it doesn't involve the reputation of someone, because you're joking about it," the spokesman refuted. "Whether it's necessary or not, that is his style. And thay style has been factored when he was running for the President and was voted into office overwhelmingly given that input on his style." Loot-- together with some family members-- survived an ambush by unidentified men in his hometown in Maya Port, Daanbantayan, Cebu last May. CNN Philippines Digital Producers Alyssa Rola and Luchi de Guzman contributed to this report. In August, Daniel Smith was found dead on the train tracks in Jedburg. His family wants answers. Moi-meme-Moitie and Mana continue their overseas promotional activities at conventions in 2019. This time, Mana will travel to Hawaii to attend Kawaii Kon! Kawaii Kon will be held on April 5-7, 2019, at Hawaii Convention Center in Honolulu. Kawaii Kon is a three-day annual convention that celebrates Japanese anime, manga, and all facets of Japanese culture. They offer a variety of events and activities throughout the weekend, be it video games, tabletop games, costume contests, thousands of manga to read, a talent-filled Artist Alley, an expansive Dealers Room, a formal ball, and much more. To learn more, head over to Kawaii Kons website! As Hawaii often gets portrayed as the stereotypical summer vacation destination, the image of Mana there, the dark and mysterious goth and visual kei icon, might seem a little bit bizarre although Mana himself admits that he likes summer and the sea. From his Twitter, Mana seems to be looking forward to his first time in a tropical place! The last time Mana has represented Moi-meme-Moitie in the United States was at Sakura-Con in Seattle in Spring 2018. Mana has also appeared at the Finnish Eternal Twilight convention in Helsinki in September of the same year. Moi-meme-Moitie is currently looking for models for their fashion show at Kawaii Konif you are interested in applying, check out Moi-meme-Moitie Facebook post, or the application form directly, which you may find right here. Are you excited about the news? Do you live in Hawaii or will you be traveling to Hawaii to meet Mana there? Let us know! Moi-meme-Moitie: Official Website Facebook Twitter Twitter Kawaii Kon: Official Website SASKATOON, Saskatchewan, Dec. 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- UEX Corporation (UEX:TSX) (UEX or the Company), is pleased to announce the maiden mineral resource statement for the Christie Lake Uranium Project (the Project). The Mineral Resource Statement was prepared by Dr. Aleksandr Mitrofanov, P.Geo., supported by Dr. David Machuca, P.Eng., and Mr. Glen Cole, P.Geo. of SRK Consulting (Canada) Inc. in accordance with Canadian Securities Administrators National Instrument 43-101 Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects. Dr. Mitrofanov, Dr. Machuca and Mr. Cole are independent Qualified Persons as this term is defined in National Instrument 43-101. The effective date of the Mineral Resource Statement for the Christie Lake Project is December 13th, 2018. The Mineral Resource Statement for the Project is presented in the table below. Considering the early stage of the Project, the general widely spaced drill pattern and the overall uncertainty in the spatial distribution of grades, SRK consider all the reported mineral resources to be classified as Inferred Mineral Resources. After review of similar underground projects and discussions with UEX, SRK considers that it is appropriate to report the mineral resources for the Project at a cut-off grade of 0.2 percent of uranium. Mineral resources are not mineral reserves and have not demonstrated economic viability. There is no certainty that all or any part of the mineral resources will be converted into mineral reserves. SRK is unaware of any environmental, permitting, legal, title, taxation, socio-economic, marketing, political, or other relevant issues that may materially affect the mineral resources. The construction of the mineral resource was a collaborative effort between UEX and SRK staff. Mr. Trevor Perkins and Mr. Chris Hamel, from UEX, provided technical input to particularly the domain modeling process. Dr. Mitrofanov, P.Geo. performed the data review and constructed the low and high-grade wireframes with the input of UEX personnel. Dr. Machuca, P.Eng. undertook the mineral resource estimation, sensitivity analysis and validation checks. Mr. Cole conducted the site visit and provided overall guidance. The overall process was senior reviewed by Mr. Cliff Revering, P.Geo. All samples and specific gravity determinations used to calculate the resource estimate were assayed at the Saskatchewan Research Councils Geoanalytical Laboratories and umpire sample assayed at Saskatchewan Research Councils Environmental Laboratories. The database used to estimate the Christie Lake mineral resources was validated by SRK. They are of the opinion the current drilling information is sufficiently reliable to interpret with confidence the boundaries for uranium mineralization and the assay data is sufficiently reliable to support mineral resource estimation. A technical report authored by SRK will be filed on SEDAR within 45 days of this news release. 2019 Exploration Program Approved The Christie Lake Management Committee approved a $2 million 2019 exploration program and budget for the Project. Exploration activities will include a property-wide 120 line-km DC resistivity survey and a 4,800 m 8-10 hole diamond drilling program that will target along strike to the southwest of the Paul Bay Deposit and following up historic mineralization on the B Conductor where hole CB94-48 encountered 0.25% U 3 O 8 over 1.5 m approximately 20 m below the unconformity which has never been followed up (See Figure 1). Christie Lake Joint Venture Initiated UEX announces that the Christie Lake Joint Venture was initiated on December 14, 2018, with an effective date of November 13, 2018. As announced in UEXs News Release dated November 29, 2018, UEX has vested a 60% interest in the Project. As the Joint Venture has been initiated, the Christie Lake Option Agreement has been terminated. JCU (Canada) Exploration Company Limited (JCU) has indicated that they will not be contributing their share of the 2019 Exploration Program expenditures and will be diluting their interest in the Project. UEX will be assuming JCUs cost share in 2019 and will increase its equity stake in the Project accordingly. Qualified Persons and Data Acquisition The mineral resource estimation work was completed by Dr. Aleksandr Mitrofanov, P.Geo., Dr. David Machuca, P.Eng., Mr. Glen Cole, P.Geo. and Mr. Cliff Revering P.Geo. of SRK Consulting (Canada) Inc., who are each considered to be an appropriate independent Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101. Mr. Trevor Perkins, P.Geo., Exploration Manager of UEX Corporation and Mr. Chris Hamel, P.Geo., Chief Geologist of UEX Corporation, are each considered to be a Qualified Person for the purposes of NI 43-101, both of whom verified the sampling, analytical, and test data underlying the information or opinions contained herein by reviewing original data certificates and monitoring all of the data collection protocols. Additionally, the technical information in this news release has been approved by Mr. Roger Lemaitre, P.Geo., P.Eng., President & CEO of UEX Corporation, and Mr. Trevor Perkins, P.Geo., UEXs Exploration Manager, who are each considered to be a Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101. About UEX UEX (TSX:UEX, OTC:UEXCF.PK, UXO.F) is a Canadian uranium exploration and development company involved in eighteen uranium projects, including seven that are 100% owned and operated by UEX, one joint venture with Orano Canada Inc. (Orano) and ALX Uranium Corp. (ALX) that is 50.1% owned by UEX and is under option to and operated by ALX, as well as eight joint ventures with Orano, one joint venture with Orano and JCU (Canada) Exploration Company Limited, which are operated by Orano, and one joint venture (Christie Lake), that is 60% owned by UEX with JCU (Canada) Exploration Company Limited which is operated by UEX. The company is also involved in one cobalt-nickel exploration project located in the Athabasca Basin of northern Saskatchewan. The West Bear Project was formerly part of UEXs Hidden Bay Project and contains the West Bear Cobalt-Nickel Deposit and the West Bear Uranium Deposit. The eighteen projects are located in the eastern, western and northern perimeters of the Athabasca Basin, the world's richest uranium belt, which in 2017 accounted for approximately 22% of the global primary uranium production. UEX is currently advancing several uranium deposits in the Athabasca Basin which include the Christie Lake Deposits, the Kianna, Anne, Colette and 58B Deposits at its currently 49.1%-owned Shea Creek Project (located 50 km north of Fissions Triple R Deposit and Patterson Lake South Project, and NexGens Arrow Deposit) the Horseshoe and Raven Deposits located on its 100%-owned Horseshoe-Raven Development Project and the West Bear Uranium Deposit located at its 100%-owned West Bear Project. About JCU JCU is a private company that is actively engaged in the exploration and development in Canada. JCU is owned by three Japanese companies. Amongst these, Overseas Uranium Resources Development Co., Ltd. (OURD) acts as the manager of JCU. JCU has partnerships with UEX, Orano, Cameco, Denison and others on uranium exploration and development projects in the Athabasca Basin of Northern Saskatchewan including Millennium and Wheeler River and the Kiggavik project in the Thelon Basin in Nunavut. FOR FURTHER INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT Roger Lemaitre President & CEO (306) 713-1401 Forward-Looking Information This news release contains statements that constitute "forward-looking information" for the purposes of Canadian securities laws. Such statements are based on UEX's current expectations, estimates, forecasts and projections. Such forward-looking information includes statements regarding the West Bear Co-Ni Deposit drill program, UEX's drill hole results, uranium, cobalt and nickel prices, outlook for our future operations, plans and timing for exploration activities, and other expectations, intentions and plans that are not historical fact. Such forward-looking information is based on certain factors and assumptions and is subject to risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from future results expressed or implied by such forward-looking information. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from UEX's expectations include uncertainties relating to the, interpretation of drill results and geology, assay confirmation, additional drilling results, continuity and grade of deposits, fluctuations in uranium, cobalt and nickel prices and currency exchange rates, changes in environmental and other laws affecting uranium, cobalt and nickel exploration and mining, and other risks and uncertainties disclosed in UEX's Annual Information Form and other filings with the applicable Canadian securities commissions on SEDAR. Many of these factors are beyond the control of UEX. Consequently, all forward-looking information contained in this news release is qualified by this cautionary statement and there can be no assurance that actual results or developments anticipated by UEX will be realized. For the reasons set forth above, investors should not place undue reliance on such forward-looking information. Except as required by applicable law, UEX disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. TORONTO, Dec. 18, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Osisko Mining Inc. (OSK:TSX. "Osisko" or the "Corporation") is pleased to provide preliminary results from Zone 27 bulk sampling. The Zone 27 bulk sample is the first of three planned 5,000 tonne samples in the ongoing evaluation work at the Windfall project. Results below represent 2,078 tonnes mined from Zone 27 wireframe 115. The balance of 2,922 tonnes will be processed in the new year, with reconciled results from the full 5,000 tonne sample expected to be available by March 2019. The average head grade obtained from the 2,078 tonnes is 9.7 g/t Au and 5.5 g/t Ag. These initial results successfully confirm prior drill hole information and the visible mineralization along the mined portion of Zone 27. The average head grade from the sample is 39% higher than indicated in the resource block model for this area of Zone 27 (7.0 g/t Au). Results are presented in the table below: Zone 27 Preliminary Bulk Sample Results Tonnes Milled (Dry) Mill Head Grade g/t Au Mill Head Grade g/t Ag Total Contained Gold Oz. Total Contained Silver Oz. 2,078 9.7 5.5 650 366 Osisko President and CEO John Burzynski commented: We are very pleased to deliver an early Christmas gift to our shareholders with these great preliminary results from the Zone 27 bulk sample. Having the grade come in 39% higher than anticipated is a strong result, and it is particularly encouraging given the recent increase in grades shown in the Lynx Zone resource update (see Osisko news release dated November 27, 2018). The infill drilling program, recent resource update and now the initial bulk sampling results have all been demonstrating that the more detailed work we do at Windfall, the better it gets. Mill feed tonnages were provided by the custom mill used in the sample processing (Northern Sun Mining, operator of the Redstone mill in Timmins region, Ontario). Daily composite samples collected during the processing of the bulk sample were assayed by ALS Laboratories in Val dOr. Processing and Resource Block Model Reconciliation Processing of the bulk sample produced gold/silver gravity and flotation concentrates. The first 2,078 tonnes has been processed at an average throughput of approximately 350 dry tonnes per day. The total amount of gold and silver contained and produced from the full 5,000-tonne bulk sample, incorporating all underground data, will be used to reconcile the representative area in the Zone 27 resource block model once the full sample has been processed. The resource block model was upgraded in this part of the deposit using recent 12.5 metre infill drilling and PEA block modelling parameters, and an average of grade of 7.0 g/t Au was estimated in the area mined. The preliminary results returned 9.7 g/t Au head grade from the first 2,078 tonnes test milled. PEA metallurgical testwork indicated recovery of 92.5% for Zone 27 (communition, gravity and whole ore leach) which is most appropriate given the nature of ore. Test mill availability dictated using a mill with a different process flowsheet consisting of communition, gravity and flotation. Final recoveries will be determined in the new year based on the concentrate volumes and reconciliation upon the completion of processing of the full 5,000 tonne sample. Osiskos current mill design work anticipates using communition, gravity and whole ore leach as noted in the PEA and the Corporation anticipates ultimate recoveries to be within the parameters outlined (92.5%) from the metallurgically simple ore at Windfall. Qualified Person The scientific and technical content in this news release has been reviewed, prepared and approved by Kim-Quyen Nguyen, MBA., P.Eng. (OIQ 146014), Project Manager (Technical Studies) of the Windfall Lake gold project, who is a qualified person as defined by National Instrument 43-101 Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects (NI 43-101). The actual estimation of the excavation from the Bulk Sample Resource Block Model from Zone 27 of the Windfall Lake Deposit, with an effective date of December 6, 2018, was prepared by Judith St-Laurent, P.Geo (OGQ #1023), B.Sc., of Osisko Mining, who is a qualified person as defined by NI 43-101. The scientific and technical content in this news release has been reviewed and approved by Mathieu Savard, P.Geo (OGQ #510), Vice President Exploration (Quebec) of Osisko, who is a "qualified person" within the meaning of NI 43-101. About the Windfall Lake Gold Deposit The Windfall Lake gold deposit is located between Val-d'Or and Chibougamau in the Abitibi region of Quebec, Canada. The mineral resource defined by Osisko, as disclosed in the Windfall Lake Technical Report (as defined below) and November 27, 2018 Lynx resource update, comprises 2,874,000 tonnes at 8.17 g/t Au (754,000 ounces) in the indicated mineral resource category and 10,352,000 tonnes at 7.11 g/t Au (2,366,000 ounces) in the inferred mineral resource category. For details regarding the key assumptions, parameters and methods used to estimate the mineral resources presented in respect of the Windfall Lake gold project, please see the technical report entitled "Technical Report and Mineral Resource Estimate for the Windfall Lake Project, Windfall Lake and Urban-Barry Properties" and dated June 12, 2018 (effective date of May 14, 2018), which has been prepared by InnovExplo Inc. from Val-d'Or, Quebec (the "Windfall Lake Technical Report") and the news release Osisko Releases Mineral Resource Update for Lynx dated November 27, 2018, which has been prepared by Osisko and reviewed and approved by Micon International, Ltd. from Toronto, Ontario. The Windfall Lake Technical Report and news release are available on Osisko's website at www.osiskomining.com and on SEDAR under Osisko's issuer profile at www.sedar.com. The Windfall Lake gold deposit is currently one of the highest grade resource-stage gold projects in Canada. Mineralization occurs in four principal zones: Lynx, Zone 27, Caribou and Underdog. All zones comprise sub-vertical lenses following intrusive porphyry contacts plunging to the northeast. The deposit is well defined from surface to a depth of 900 metres and remains open along strike and at depth. Mineralization has been identified 30 metres from surface in some areas and as deep as 2,000 metres in others, with significant potential to extend mineralization down-plunge and at depth. About Osisko Mining Inc. Osisko is a mineral exploration company focused on the acquisition, exploration, and development of precious metal resource properties in Canada. Osisko holds a 100% interest in the high-grade Windfall Lake gold deposit located between Val-d'Or and Chibougamau in Quebec and holds a 100% undivided interest in a large area of claims in the surrounding Urban Barry area and nearby Quevillon area (over 3,300 square kilometres), a 100% interest in the Marban project located in the heart of Quebec's prolific Abitibi gold mining district, and properties in the Larder Lake Mining Division in northeast Ontario, including the Garrison property. The Corporation also holds interests and options in a number of additional properties in northern Quebec and Ontario. Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Information This news release contains "forward-looking information" within the meaning of the applicable Canadian securities legislation that is based on expectations, estimates, projections and interpretations as at the date of this news release. The information in this news release about the Windfall Lake gold deposit being one of the highest grade resource-stage gold projects in Canada; the significance of preliminary results from Zone 27 bulk sampling presented in this news release; plans to complete three 5,000 tonne samples, as well as other ongoing evaluation work at the Windfall project; the veracity of initial bulk sample results to confirm prior drill information; actual mineralization based on the visual nature of mineralization; shareholders considering a gift given before Christmas to be an early Christmas gift; timing to process the balance of 2,918 tonnes; reconciled results from the 5,000 tonne sample being available by early March 2019, if at all; the presentation of final recoveries; Osisko's current mil design, including the use of communition, gravity and whole ore leached; the parameters of ultimate recoveries; the deposit remaining open along strike and at depth; potential depth extensions of the mineralized zones down-plunge and at depth; the type of drilling included in the drill program; potential mineralization; the potential to extend mineralization up and down-plunge and at depth at the Windfall Lake gold deposit; the ability to realize upon any mineralization in a manner that is economic; the ability to complete any proposed exploration activities and the results of such activities, including the continuity or extension of any mineralization; and any other information herein that is not a historical fact may be "forward-looking information". Any statement that involves discussions with respect to predictions, expectations, interpretations, beliefs, plans, projections, objectives, assumptions, future events or performance (often but not always using phrases such as "expects", or "does not expect", "is expected", "interpreted", "management's view", "anticipates" or "does not anticipate", "plans", "budget", "scheduled", "forecasts", "estimates", "believes" or "intends" or variations of such words and phrases or stating that certain actions, events or results "may" or "could", "would", "might" or "will" be taken to occur or be achieved) are not statements of historical fact and may be forward-looking information and are intended to identify forward-looking information. This forward-looking information is based on reasonable assumptions and estimates of management of the Corporation at the time such assumptions and estimates were made, and involves known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of Osisko to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking information. Such factors include, among others, risks relating to the ability of exploration activities (including bulk sampling and drill results) to accurately predict mineralization; errors in management's geological modelling; the ability of Osisko to complete further exploration activities, including drilling and bulk sampling; property interests in the Windfall Lake gold project; the ability of the Corporation to obtain required approvals and complete transactions on terms announced; the results of exploration activities; risks relating to mining activities; the global economic climate; metal prices; dilution; environmental risks; and community and non-governmental actions. Although the forward-looking information contained in this news release is based upon what management believes, or believed at the time, to be reasonable assumptions. Osisko cannot assure shareholders and prospective purchasers of securities of the Corporation that actual results will be consistent with such forward-looking information, as there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended, and neither Osisko nor any other person assumes responsibility for the accuracy and completeness of any such forward-looking information, Osisko does not undertake, and assumes no obligation, to update or revise any such forward-looking statements or forward-looking information contained herein to reflect new events or circumstances, except as may be required by law. For further information please contact: John Burzynski President and Chief Executive Officer Telephone: (416) 363-8653 First results received from drilling on DOF Extension and Okanihova Lineament DOF Co-Cu mineralization confirmed at DOF East target in two parallel horizons with intercepts up to 0.14% Co and 0.59% Cu over 1.03 meters Significant vanadium mineralization associated with DOF Co-Cu mineralization, intercepts of 0.21% V2O5 over 2.76 meters and 0.15% V2O5 over 4.82 meters First drill fence in central Okanihova Lineament exhibits wide intersections of copper mineralization with 0.51% Cu over 15 meters and a peak intercept of 5.44% Cu over 1 meter Results from additional 17 holes from Okanihova Lineament, DOF West and three additional targets pending First phase drilling program continues mid-January 2019 New targets identified from recently conducted IP and soil surveys over Western Magnetic Anomaly HALIFAX, NS / ACCESSWIRE / December 19, 2018 / Namibia Critical Metals Inc. ("Namibia Critical Metals" or the "Company" or "NMI") (TSXV:NMI) today announced first results from drilling on the Kunene Cobalt-Copper Project in northern Namibia (Figure 1). Drill results are reported from two diamond core holes on the Dolomite Ore Formation ("DOF") Extension target (Table 1). These holes have confirmed the continuation of stratabound Co-Cu mineralization, similar to Celsius Resources' Opuwo Co-Cu-Zn deposit on to Namibia Critical Metals' land holdings. In addition to the Co-Cu horizons, two vanadium-enriched horizons have been intersected within the same stratigraphic sequence. Results from the first three reverse circulation holes on the Okanihova Central Target have confirmed widespread copper mineralization in the sedimentary strata in the hanging wall of the Okanihova lineament (Table 2). A total of six diamond drill holes and fifteen reverse circulation holes have been completed on various targets. Results from 17 holes remain pending. Drilling has been suspended for the Christmas break and will resume again mid-January once all results have been received and evaluated. Following evaluation of the SkyTEM airborne electromagnetic ("EM") survey, an induced polarization ("IP") survey was carried out over selected areas of the Western Magnetic This survey detected three chargeability anomalies which coincide with previously reported cobalt soil anomalies which extend for over seven kilometers. A fourth chargeability anomaly coincides with an EM target interpreted to be contact related. These new targets will be further evaluated for drilling in 2019. Don Burton, President of Namibia Critical Metals, stated, "Our objective in this first phase of drilling was to test as many accessible priority target areas as rapidly as possible. The results from the two holes on the DOF Extension have confirmed that the mineralizing system which hosts the Opuwo Co-Cu-Zn deposit extends on to Namibia Critical Metals' ground. Furthermore we have intersected two unexpected vanadium horizons and the DOF Extension has been interpreted over a strike length of 20 kilometers. The widespread copper and anomalous cobalt mineralization along the Okanihova Lineament are clearly related to a major structural feature which extends for over 15 kilometers and points to a very large mineralizing system which we are now focused on. The cobalt soil anomaly and associated IP targets within the Western Magnetic Anomaly represent a significant developing target over a strike length of seven kilometers." Figure 1 - Kunene Co-Cu Project Area showing drilling progress to date. Cobalt soil anomalies are shown on SkyTEM airborne EM conductivity layer (Con13 = approximately 70 vertical meter depth) and satellite topography image. (To view the full-size image, please click here) DOF Extension Target (DOF East) Holes DODD-002 and DODD-005 intersected the DOF on the same section at vertical depths of 15 meters and 100 meters respectively (Table 1). The intercept from Hole DODD-002 was heavily oxidized and leached whereas the deeper hole intersected fresh bedrock with two intercepts of higher grade Co-Cu. *Width is down-the-hole length in meters. True widths cannot yet be determined with the available information. The objective of these first holes on the DOF Extension target was to confirm the stratigraphic position of the DOF on a single section on Namibia Critical Metals' ground. The diamond drill was then deployed to other targets. All aspects of the stratigraphic position of the intercepts of Co-Cu mineralization are consistent with the DOF mineralization which hosts Celsius Resources' Opuwo Co-Cu-Zn deposit. Cobalt and copper grades are comparable, however zinc mineralization is not significant in the NMI drill holes. The high Cu/Zn and Co/Zn ratios compared to the DOF intersections at the Opuwo deposit are interpreted as an indication of proximity to the source(s) of the extensive mineralizing system. Further exploration will therefore focus on the identification of potential feeder systems on the property. The Co-Cu mineralized horizons at the DOF East target are also associated with overlying stratabound vanadium mineralization (V1 and V2 in Table 1). This significant vanadium mineralisation will be followed in 2019 with further mapping and drilling. Okanihova Central Target Three holes have been completed on a single drill fence which was designed to test the broad copper-cobalt soil anomaly which runs parallel to the Okanihova Lineament and to determine the attitude of the structural contact and its controls on mineralization. All three holes intersected widespread copper mineralization in the structural hanging wall with anomalous levels of cobalt (Table 2). Mineralization is believed to be related to a combination of metalliferous fluids that have channeled along the Okanihova Lineament and deposited in favourable reductant horizons, and with remobilization giving rise to higher grade vein-like structures. Cobalt mineralization occurs as two types: (1) wide halos of low grade cobalt anomalism associated with the main, broad-scale copper mineralisation, and (2) in confined shale-siltstone horizons as in-principle cobalt-only mineralisation. An intercept of the cobalt shale was noted in the foot wall of hole OKRC001 at a down-hole depth of 230 m (513 ppm Co over 3 meters). The potential continuation of the Co horizon and its controlling factors will be explored by systematic drill fences across the Okanihova Lineament. The Okanihova Lineament has a strike length of 15 kilometers and the Okanihova Central Target is characterized by strong Cu-Co soil anomalies over a strike length of seven kilometers trending northeast into Malachite Mountain. The primary target along this structure is to vector in on a higher grade source (i.e. stockwork or feeder zone) but there is now also potential for a low grade, high tonnage copper deposit. A number of widely spaced drill fences have been laid out to test the length of the target. *Width is down-the-hole length in meters. True widths cannot yet be determined with the available information. Western Magnetic Anomaly The Western Magnetic Anomaly is now believed to be related to a large intrusive body of unknown origin but which remains of interest due to its central position with respect to the various mineralized horizons and structures, and the large cobalt soil anomaly which covers much of its northern extent (Figure 2). The airborne EM survey failed to detect any significant conductors within the body and it was decided to carry out a reconnaissance induced polarization ("IP") survey along four lines covering the contacts and the cobalt soil anomaly. This survey has delineated four chargeability anomalies of interest. Of particular interest are the anomalies within the interpreted intrusive body that coincide with the boundaries of the cobalt anomaly. Geophysical interpretations have suggested these anomalies may be related to zones of disseminated sulphide. The southernmost chargeability anomaly coincides with an airborne EM anomaly and is interpreted to be sulphide-related along a contact or fault zone. These represent new target areas to be incorporated into the 2019 drill planning. In order to further evaluate the targets, detailed soil sampling at 25 m sample spacing has been conducted (ICP results pending) along the IP lines. Additional IP surveys may be considered to better define the extent of the chargeability anomalies. The Opuwo Deposit The Opuwo deposit is under development by Celsius Resources Ltd. ("Celsius") and is the first primary cobalt discovery in Namibia. It has demonstrated the potential for this part of northern Namibia to become a significant cobalt district. Celsius has reported that the Opuwo deposit hosts a maiden JORC compliant resource of 72.0 million tonnes at a grade of 0.11% cobalt, 0.42% copper and 0.41% zinc in the Indicated category, and a further 40.5 million tonnes at a grade of 0.12% cobalt, 0.41% copper and 0.46% zinc in the Inferred category. It is noted that the mineralization on the Celsius property may not be indicative of mineralization that may be found on the Kunene project area held by Namibia Critical Metals. Celsius reported that it has commenced a pre-feasibility study on Opuwo, scheduled for completion in Q3, 2019, including investigation of identified value engineering and process optimisation opportunities and the incorporation of an updated mineral resource estimate (Celsius press release November 5, 2018). Figure 2 - Western Magnetic Anomaly interpretation and IP anomalies. Colour coded cobalt in soil anomalies thresholds same as for Figure 1. Chargeability anomalies labelled C1, C2, C3 and C4 with interpreted trends in purple. Upper image has SkyTEM conductivity layer Con13 for background. Note absence of EM responses within the interpreted intrusion. Lower image has SkyTEM analytic signal from magnetics. Bar scale is 7 km. (To view the full-size image, please click here) All drill hole analyses were carried out under strict QAQC protocols including the insertion of standards, blanks and duplicates. Sample preparation was carried out by Activation Laboratories (Windhoek, Namibia) and ICP analyses with appropriate acid digestions were carried out by Activation Laboratories (Ancaster, Canada). Donald M. Burton, P.Geo. and President of Namibia Critical Metals Inc., is the Company's Qualified Person and has reviewed and approved this press release. About Namibia Critical Metals Inc. Namibia Critical Metals Inc. holds a diversified portfolio of exploration and advanced stage projects in the country of Namibia focused on the development of sustainable and ethical sources of metals for the battery, electric vehicle and associated industries. The common shares of Namibia Critical Metals Inc. trade on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol "NMI". Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. For more information please contact - Namibia Critical Metals Inc. Don Burton, President Tel: +01 (902) 835-8760 Fax: +01 (902) 835-8761 Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Web site: www.NamibiaCriticalMetals.com The foregoing information may contain forward-looking information relating to the future performance of Namibia Rare Earths Inc. Forward-looking information, specifically, that concerning future performance, is subject to certain risks and uncertainties, and actual results may differ materially. These risks and uncertainties are detailed from time to time in the Company's filings with the appropriate securities commissions. A retired Bosnian general on Wednesday pleaded not guilty to charges of crimes against humanity over his alleged role in the murder of more than 300 Serbs, mostly civilians, during the 1990s war. Atif Dudakovic, who commanded a unit of the Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak) army during the intercommunal conflict, is facing trial alongside 16 others from his corps. I am not guilty of any charges, the 65-year-old said in court. The other defendants present entered the same plea. According to prosecutors, the men carried out the killings from 1994-95 in the northwest region of Bihac, which was at the time surrounded by Serb forces. The victims were mostly elderly civilians, as well as prisoners of war who either surrendered or were arrested, a statement from the prosecutors offices said. Some of the bodies have been exhumed from mass graves, while others are still missing, it added. The suspects were also charged with destroying 38 Orthodox churches and other religious targets. They are part of a growing number of men from Bosnian Muslim forces to face trials in the countrys local war crimes courts, who are carrying on after an international tribunal that tried high-profile defendants in the Hague ended its remit last year. Bosnias 1992-95 war, which saw Muslim, Serb and Croat forces clash, claimed some 100,000 lives. Burlington Christmas Walk is Saturday The 14th annual Burlington Christmas Walk will be Saturday from 4 to 7:30 p.m. in the Lilly Building at Burlington... Message board helps Camden get the word out This electronic message board was installed last week in downtown Camden with funding secured from the American Rescue Plan. Clerk-Treasurer... 74 Shares Share Life is full of potential worries. Personal, professional, and other stresses can make us anxious and reduce our happiness and quality-of-life. A major source of anxiety in our lives can be financial. A recent survey found that 85% of Americans are at least sometimes stressed about money and 30% of Americans state they are constantly stressed about it. In order for physicians to reduce their financial anxiety, they first have to identify its causes. In this post, Ill outline seven possible sources of financial anxiety. Maintaining job or salary level Physicians spend over a decade in training, either in school or in relatively modest-paying residency. However, when they finally complete training, they enjoy some of the highest average salaries in any profession. And while job security in medicine is higher than in other professions, theres no guarantee that salaries will not drop in the future. The government, insurance companies, and other healthcare industry stakeholders are poised to put downward pressure on physician salaries. Physicians in private practice always had the financial stresses of running a business. While more physicians are being employed by hospitals or other entities, their pay is often tied to productivity metrics such as RVUs. A possible source of stress among employed physicians is the pressure of meeting productivity or quality metrics demanded by their bosses. Not saving enough for retirement Retirement can feel far off for physicians who just finished residency, or be just around the corner for physicians approaching the end of their careers. Even if it can be easy to set your target retirement number, it is harder to know whether you are on pace to hit that number, especially because future stock market returns are uncertain. Even when you make it to retirement, there is always the worries that you may run out of money in retirement. What if there is a big bear market right after you begin retirement? What if you have a health scare that requires you to spend an outsize amount of your retirement on healthcare? Paying for childs college The cost of higher education has been rising for decades. According to statistics from the College Board, the annual tuition cost for a private non-profit four-year college in 2017-2018 was $34,740, more than double what it was in 1987-1988. For a public four-year college, the average annual tuition in 2017-2018 was $9,970, more than triple what it was 30 years earlier. This doesnt even include room, board, and other costs associated with college education. The cost of attending Harvard, after accounting for tuition, room, board, and fees, is $67,890 for the 2018-2019 academic year. Its feasible for the cost of attendance at some private colleges to exceed $100,000 in the next 15-20 years. Meeting monthly bills Even though physicians make a lot of money compared to the average American, they can sometimes still feel that money is tight. Physicians and other high-income professionals often get mocked when they are featured in articles talking about how they dont feel rich on a $300,000 salary. But physicians, especially those who live in a high cost-of-living region, often feel societal pressure to live the high life. This leads to either feelings of inadequacy or a struggle to meet monthly bills in order to maintain their lifestyle. Estate planning Estate planning is certainly rich people problems. But there are important decisions to be made regarding how your assets are split after you die. There can often be difficult and emotional family dynamics that make these decisions very stressful and challenging. Some physicians who have saved all their life may end up with a net worth that might be subject to estate taxes. Many people want to give Uncle Sam as little of their money as possible, and some plan for years to minimize their eventual estate tax bill. Liability / fear of getting sued Doctors can feel like they always have a target on their back. In their professional lives, many physicians feel compelled to practice defensive medicine in order to limit malpractice liability. Outside the hospital, many doctors feel that individuals (or their lawyers) may more aggressively target them when there are possibilities for litigation, such as after a car accident or a slip on the sidewalk. Stock market volatility One of the biggest determinants of your final retirement nest egg is the stock market return during your lifetime. The difference in the size of your retirement portfolio with a 4% stock market return versus an 8% stock market return can be millions of dollars. When the stock market falls, hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars can vanish from your investment accounts. Its no surprise that many investors become more conservative as their portfolio value rises. Conclusion Physicians face many of the same sources of financial anxiety as other Americans, such as saving adequately for retirement, meeting monthly bills, and paying for childrens college educations. But some causes of financial anxiety are unique to high-income professionals, such as the need for estate planning or asset protection. Identifying the causes of your financial anxiety is the first step in the path to reducing the money stresses in your life. Wall Street Physician, a former Wall Street derivatives trader , is a physician who blogs at his self-titled site, the Wall Street Physician. Image credit: Shutterstock.com 29 Shares Share Weve all heard about credit card points and miles by nowput enough of your expenses on plastic and youll be flying first class airlines all the time, right? We are actually fortunate in American (sorry for those of you residing in, lets say Japan, who still are stuck in a mostly cash-based society) to be able to have incredible amount of credit card options to squeeze out every penny. While the discussion of credit card hacking is reserved for another day, the goal of using credit cards to purchase goods and services is to redeem a certain amount of cash back (maybe 1% to 5%) or other means for travel that would otherwise be significantly more expensive than paid for using cash. The beauty of this system rewards potentially high spenders such as doctors. Many credit cards also offer sign-on bonuses that can translate into several hundred to a thousand dollars of reward credit upon meeting a minimum spend. Doctors can use this to our advantage for purchases that we otherwise would have made anyway. The amount that doctors are able to put onto credit cards also depends on whether we are employees of a hospital or owners of our own business. Business owners have the luxury of making purchases that are considered business expenses, so typically have more spending power than employed doctors. This can be thousands of dollars of business expenses that can be paid for using plastic in order to arbitrate a return. How do credit card companies afford to offer free money? There is no free lunch. All businesses that accept credit cards have to pay the issuing company a processing fee, or interchange fee, for each transaction. These fees actually vary depending upon the benefits that the credit card confers. For instance, a business will pay the credit card company a higher fee if a customer uses a 2% rebate credit card versus a 1% card. Interesting eh? This is relatively clear for doctors who run their own offices and accept credit cards of their own. Someone is paying the price, so you might as well find a way to get the most out of it. Personal expenses that doctors can use on credit cards Aside from normal household spending, all doctors should be able to place a few big-ticket items on credit cards. The following are a few examples: Property taxes. we purchase a home, we have the option to place our mortgage insurance into an escrow account for the lender to pay. If you can prepay it using a credit card, do it. This amounts to many thousands (tens of thousands) of dollars of expenses. we purchase a home, we have the option to place our mortgage insurance into an escrow account for the lender to pay. If you can prepay it using a credit card, do it. This amounts to many thousands (tens of thousands) of dollars of expenses. Auto insurance, property insurance, and umbrella insurance. These expenses typically all go to the same company. Prepay using plastic and get some green back. These expenses typically all go to the same company. Prepay using plastic and get some green back. Down payments on cars. If you end up purchasing a vehicle from a dealer or large sales company, you can often place the amount on plastic. Ive done it before, twice. If you end up purchasing a vehicle from a dealer or large sales company, you can often place the amount on plastic. Ive done it before, twice. Meeting expenses. If your employer provides you with CME monies, you can pay for using credit cards and submit the receipts for reimbursement. If there is a significant amount to be reimbursed, consider timing your credit card application to the purchases. If your employer provides you with CME monies, you can pay for using credit cards and submit the receipts for reimbursement. If there is a significant amount to be reimbursed, consider timing your credit card application to the purchases. Utilities. Typically utility companies do not accept credit cards, although you can squeeze in your Internet and cable bills. Business expenses for doctors When you own a business, the sky is the limit for expenses. Make sure that you squeeze every penny to put your expenses on plastic: Malpractice insurance. Some carriers will not accept credit cards, but many will. Some carriers will not accept credit cards, but many will. Medications and supplies. These are big-ticket items. Some specialties that use high dollar medications can truly rack up millions of points for these purchases. Dont let this slip away! These are big-ticket items. Some specialties that use high dollar medications can truly rack up millions of points for these purchases. Dont let this slip away! Prepayment of business taxes. Most processors for taxes will have a surcharge for credit cards, but sometimes you can find a credit card that does have a higher return than the upfront cost of the transaction. Most processors for taxes will have a surcharge for credit cards, but sometimes you can find a credit card that does have a higher return than the upfront cost of the transaction. Utilities. Online advertisement, internet, cable, and shipping from your business can typically be placed on credit. This can also add up over time. The skinny on credit cards It is important to remember that playing the credit card game will by no means save you from poor financial decisions or help you reach financial independence sooner. The amount that you will arbitrage will be no more than a few thousand dollars a year, which will hardly accelerate your retirement goal. However, if you have to incur these expenses regardless of how you pay for them, you might as well take advantage of this opportunity. Smart Money, MD is an ophthalmologist who blogs at the self-titled site, Smart Money MD. Image credit: Shutterstock.com Physicians have an obligation and an opportunity to reach out and speak out about guns 292 Shares Share Many of us working in the Gun Sense field that is, finding a middle ground position to advance firearm safety and reduce preventable injury in our patients had an a-ha moment that led us to toil in these fields. Mine was on Nov. 2, 1981, when my friend and co-resident Dr. John C. Wood II was shot right in front of our hospital emergency room at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in Washington Heights, New York City. I have taken care of many gunshot wound victims since then, but none so difficult emotionally as this one. I participated in cracking my friends chest to start open cardiac massage and saw his heart devoid of blood from a through-and-through gunshot wound into his heart with a Saturday night special. The survivability of a cardiac gunshot wound like this is close to zero, even though he was minutes away from the ER. He was in the OR and placed on cardiac bypass within 10 minutes of arrival. But his pupils were fixed and dilated and he had exsanguinated, or bled out, into his chest cavity. He did not survive despite our best efforts. It was an event that rocked Columbia and all who knew John, a fully boarded pediatrics-turned-surgical resident, a world-class Juilliard-trained French horn player and former Columbia rugby team captain. The urgency of the firearm violence issue facing our country was heightened this past week when nine people were killed in three separate mass shootings over an 18-hour period in the U.S. In the past month, there have been attacks at places of worship, yoga studios and hospitals. Add these to the shootings in schools and in movie theaters and the tremendous sense of unease our citizenry is experiencing is completely understandable. As physicians and surgeons on the front lines, many of my colleagues and I feel that it is no longer acceptable to treat this problem like our trauma team is a MASH unit. We have an obligation and an opportunity to reach out and speak out, and my hope is the country is listening. Because this is indeed our lane. Watching the violence grow My training took me to other cities, and everywhere the tragedy of firearm injury seemed to follow. I knew after that night in November 81 I could no longer practice in New York City, but I could not escape the parade of firearm tragedies. Children shot accidentally. Teens shot in gang wars. Teens and elders shooting themselves in impulsive moments of despair, yielding nearly 100 percent completion of their suicide task. Gun violence increasingly became my focus when I heard Sarah Brady explain the concept of limiting access to lethal means. Sarah is the wife of Jim Brady, Ronald Reagans press secretary shot in the 1981 presidential assassination attempt. Brady spent the rest of his life partially paralyzed. He died in 2014, and the medical examiner ruled his death a homicide. The Brady approach to gun control is limiting access. It is based on the premise that we might not be able to deal with the root causes of the violence racism, poverty, mental illness but that we could perhaps deal with the vector of violence that elevates all these factors into lethality access to firearms. This is the philosophy behind the Brady Campaign, which aims to limit gun violence in the U.S. I began to wonder what I as an individual trauma surgeon could do to make a difference. Looking for answers In the 1990s, I was working in Pittsburgh as a pediatric trauma surgeon. A gang turf war over control of the crack cocaine trade broke out between the Bloods and the Crips. Both sides were heavily armed. As the body count rose on the north side of Pittsburgh where I was working, legislators tried to help by establishing a mandatory sentence for anyone in possession of a firearm when arrested for drug trafficking. This caused the dealers to push the age of the drug runners to preteens and young teens, and they were equally armed. Our pediatric gunshot-wound patient victim numbers soared. When an 11-year-old was shot with an AK-47 in front of the mayors house, suddenly the city responded. Pittsburgh held community meetings. As director of a Robert Wood Johnson Injury Prevention Program, I was selected to represent the Allegheny General Hospital. The community disparaged our hospital as being insensitive and uncaring. Many believed we were profiting from the carnage and just sending the patients back out into the street to face more mayhem even if they had survived. Our hospital encouraged my practice partner, Dr. Matt Masiello, and me to do something. We were both transplanted New Yorkers in the Burgh, and we had heard about a new kind of gun buyback program in Washington Heights where a carpet store owner, Fernando Mateo, had emptied his inventory in exchange for locals bringing in their firearms. Previously, gun buybacks had only offered cash for the weapons. We decided to build a version of the program exchanging the guns for gift certificates to local merchants rather than actual merchandise. We collected 1,400 weapons that first year in 1994 and about 10,000 since then. The buyback program has become much more than just a way to give the patrons the ability to rid their homes of unwanted or unsecured weapons. We built a public information blitz about the responsibility that goes along with the right to own a firearm, and we built awareness of the increased risk of suicide, homicide, femicide, accidental shooting, or breaking and entering for the purpose of stealing a firearm. We have now reproduced the program in a number of cities across the U.S. In my hometown of Worcester, Massachusetts, working out of the UMass Medical Center, our multi-pronged approach to gun safety education coupled with the gun buyback has given us the distinction of having the lowest-penetrating trauma rate in New England. In calendar year 2017, we had zero firearm fatalities, down from five the year before. This was an astounding number, in view of national stats showing a rise from 33,000 deaths in 2010 to 38,000 in 2018. We faculty at the University of Massachusetts have built a curriculum for students at our medical school to empower doctors to ask the right questions in the proper way. I am truly excited about the response my fellow physicians have demonstrated in their reaction to the National Rifle Associations stay in your lane comments. The NRA has already tried and failed to gag doctors in Florida from talking with their patients about gun safety. In 2011, it backed a bill ultimately passed by the Florida legislature that would have forbidden doctors from asking patients about gun ownership or gun storage unless the doctor had a specific reason to do so. Doctors in violation could have been punished by loss of license and up to a US$10,000 fine. Physicians interrogating and lecturing parents and children about guns is not about gun safety, read a letter from the NRA in support of the bill. It is a political agenda to ban guns. Parents do not take their children to physicians for a political lecture against the ownership of firearms, they go there for medical care. Though it took six years to do so, the parts of the law that gagged doctors were overturned by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in February 2017. And now, even more than in previous years, doctors are saying they have seen enough actually, way too much. Now the awakening of the MDs gives me a sense of encouragement and hope that we as a profession can lead our country away from the intransigent position in which nothing gets done. Gun buyback is a middle-ground Gun Sense position that can rally a community around the cause that I have been fighting for since that dark day in November 1981. I hope other municipalities will join us, as these programs do work. Michael Hirsh is a pediatric trauma surgeon. This article originally appeared in the Conversation. Image credit: Shutterstock.com Shattered glass lay on Richter Street Tuesday afternoon after two SUVs collided near Lawrence Avenue. The crash between a silver Honda Pilot and a white Chevrolet Blazer occurred just before 12:30 p.m., near the downtown Safeway. No one involved in the crash appeared seriously hurt, but the crash shattered the passenger side window of the Blazer, and damaged the front end of the Pilot. Police, firefighters and paramedics attended the scene, closing one lane of Lawrence Avenue. It's unclear how the crash occurred. JUNCTION CITY, Ore. -- Democrats in the Oregon Legislature plan to introduce a bill in January that would require people to store their guns using locks. Sen. James Manning and some other Democrats are pushing for the proposed bill. Manning said the bill is still in the early stages, but it would essentially require gun owners to store their guns in a secure location like a safe or have a trigger lock on them when they're not in use. He said the reason behind the bill is to prevent children or someone unauthorized from accessing or using the guns. Manning said gun owners who don't comply could be fined $500, or up to $2,000, if a child gets ahold of the gun. KEZI 9 News spoke with Adam Bryce, the owner of GunRunner Arms in Junction City. He said he has multiple safes for his guns but said he does have some that are out for immediate use and for protection, which is why he's frustrated with the proposed bill. "Somebody breaks into my house, why would I be responsible for what they did with it?" Bryce said. "If someone stole my car and went over and ran into a crowd of people in downtown, would I be responsible for that because they did a criminal act? No, I don't think so. Same thing goes for firearms." Bryce said if there are children in your home, people should lock up their firearms. He said gun safety is vital, so much so he gives away child locks for firearms for free. Democrats in the state Legislature plan on introducing the bill in January. NORTH BEND, Ore. -- A bar in North Bend has had its liquor license canceled after a manager was accused of drugging and sexually assaulting an employee. The Copa Cabana nightclub is also accused of serving alcohol to minors. In a report by the Oregon Liquor Control Commission, an employee said Marcelino Garcia made her a few drinks after her shift, and she felt very dizzy. She said he then assaulted her and she passed out. Garcia has denied this, and investigators said they didnt have enough evidence to charge him. But the OLCC said employees drinking at work and other violations led to the liquor license being canceled. Photo: The Canadian Press The restoration of delivery service guarantees by Canada Post three weeks after striking postal workers were forced back to work proves the shipment backlogs Ottawa used to justify legislating an end to rotating walkouts were "fiction," says the Canadian Union of Postal Workers. The Crown agency announced Tuesday it had caught up on most parcel delivery backlogs that had been created by the sporadic labour disruptions that began Oct. 22. As a result, the corporation said its normal holiday service commitments were being restored across most of Canada, except the West Coast. "With continued progress, we are now in a position to restore our normal holiday delivery service guarantees for much of the country," Canada Post said in a statement. "This means Canadians can expect normal holiday delivery timelines for parcels. The exception remains items headed to or departing Vancouver as backlogs there continue to cause additional delays." The announcement came as the mediation process aimed at bridging the impasse between the post office and its unionized employees came to an abrupt end. The federal government legislated an end to job action by postal workers on Nov. 27 after Canada Post complained that a backlog of parcels had reached historic levels ahead of the crucial holiday shopping period. At the time, Canada Post warned the backlog could take until the end of January to clear up. The fact that service delivery guarantees are being restored just three weeks after back-to-work legislation was passed proves the parcel backlogs being claimed by Canada Post were an illusion, said CUPW national president Mike Palecek. "The reports that we've been getting, and are still getting, is that our plants are not even operating at capacity," Palecek said in an interview. "We have places where (Canada Post) is offering members leave without pay to go home because they don't have work. So I wouldn't just question the backlog, I would say it was total fiction." Canada Post said it delivered about four million packages between last Friday and Monday of this week, and will likely be able to deliver items ordered online in time for Christmas. It credited a lack of incoming packages rather than a non-existent backlog for the faster-than-expected pace of deliveries. "Incoming holiday parcel volumes continue to be down over 2017, and significantly below projections for this year," the agency said. Still, the corporation warned, whether packages arrive before Christmas will also depend on where the parcels are coming from. Some shipments from outside Canada might only be delivered in early January. During the walkouts, Canada Post requested that its foreign partners halt deliveries to Canada while job action was underway. That request was lifted after postal workers were legislated back to their jobs. Under the back-to-work bill, a mediator-arbitrator was appointed to attempt reaching new collective agreements at Canada Post. But a week of talks aided by former Canada Industrial Relations Board chair Elizabeth MacPherson were halted Tuesday with both sides too far apart to extend the negotiations for another seven days, as was an option under the legislation. Palecek said there was no movement on the union's key demands, which include health and safety concerns and calls for equality measures, during the talks. With Christmas only six days away, many of you, fretting over presents and what to get those dear to you, will be unaware of the intrisic link between the greatest gift giver of them all and County Kilkenny. According to Kilkenny historians and not disputed by experts the world over, the saint who inspired the spirit of Christmas is buried at Newtown, Jerpoint, close to Mount Juliet. In something akin to a chapter from a Dan Brown novel, it appears that the remains of St Nicholas of Myra well known for his secret gift giving in the 4th century, were moved to a little church three miles from Thomastown some 800 years ago. It is well documented that during his life, St Nicholas left anonymous gifts for the poor and his well-known philantrophy and generosity of spirit led to him being made a saint shortly after his death in 346 AD, inspiring the legend of Father Christmas, Santa Claus or Kris Kindle-call him what you will. Whether Santa was already in the world or was conjured up by St Nicholas is hard to say but for most Christians, Santa Claus is very much alive and at the centre of their pans for the holiday season, while the man himself is preparing for his big night. One story attributed to St Nicholas was that of a poor man with three daughters who didn't have the money to buy their dowries and thus save his children from slavery. As the girls came of age and the man's anxiety increased, bags of gold were tossed through a window or down a chimney of his home over three nights - providing him with the funds he needed to save his girls and marry them odd to well-off husbands. It is thought that the man who inspired the tradition of leaving presents under a Christmas tree, St Nicholas came from a wealthy Byzantine family and he is believed to have given much of his fortune away. Early pilgrims visited the cathedral in Myra to pay their respects to the bishop. He was originally buried at a local church in Myra, in modern day Turkey, when he died. Historians now believe his body was later moved to the church in Ireland by early Crusaders who were repsonsible for taking many valuable artefects from Turkey and neighbouring Greece Chairman of Callan Heritage Society Philip Lynch said that the remains were twice transferred across Europe in the 12th century. The colourful farmer claims a French family called the de Frainets moved the saint's remains from Myra to Italy in 1169 and that a relative called Nicholas de Frainet then took the remains to Ireland when his family relocated there and built a little church to the saint at Jerpoint. "St Nicholas Church is still standing and there is a slab on the ground which marks St Nicholas's grave," he said. Few locals know of the much-loved figure's link with Kilkenny. "It is an amazing story and yet very few people in Ireland know about St Nicholas's connection with this country," he said. "Every year now we get a few visitors to the site, " Mr Lynch said. Just about now, the Santa Claus loved by children everywhere is busy wrapping up presents at his home in the North Pole. But if some historians are correct, the figure who inspired everyone's favorite portly gift-giver lies buried in a moss-covered Irish graveyard. Like his more famous successor, the true St. Nicholas was renowned for his generosity. Born into a wealthy merchant family in the Mediterranean city of Myra, he dedicated his life to serving God and following Jesus' instruction to "sell what you own and give the money to the poor." He left anonymous gifts for the sick and destitute bags of gold were a favorite and later earned a reputation as a miracle worker with the ability to resurrect murdered children. Following his death in A.D. 346, his tomb at Myra cathedral became a site of pilgrimage for early Christians, who believed it possessed mystical healing powers. Byzantine empire So how did a Turkish saint end up on buried here? It's long been known that St. Nicholas didn't stay in his initial tomb for long. In the 11th century, the city of Myra, part of the Byzantine Empire, which inspirted WB Yeats, was besieged by Seljuk Turks. So the remains were removed in case they would get into the hands of the invading Muslims and it is thought that the casket was removed by a crew of enterprising Italian sailors and were spirited across the Mediterranean to their home port of Bari. Today, Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox Christians flock to that city on the Adriatic to pray at the grand Basilica di San Nicola, where his relics are rumoured to be kept but backing up Kilkenny historiasns theory that the remaisn never asctually stayed in italy. Philip Lynch has claimed that the daring raid was carried out by Itlaian sailors but at the behest and organsied by a family of French crusaders, who were known to be major collectors of relics. "The de Frainets, who are now known as the Freaneys, had land near Thomastown in Kilkenny," Philly Lynch, said. "They also had lands in France. They went on the Crusades to the Holy Land to take on the Saracens." Lynch said the crusaders grabbed the remains as they were retreating from a Saracen army and took them to Bari in southern Italy, which was then part of the French Norman empire. As Lynch tells it, the odyssey of the holy remains wasn't over yet. After the Normans were forced out of Bari by the Genoese, the de Frainets shifted the relics to their home in Nice. But soon the balance of power turned against the Normans in France as well, so the family packed up St. Ni cholas 's bones and headed to Ireland, adding that the remains were finally buried at the church in Jerpoint in 1200. The church now lies in ruins, but Lynch said one impressive tomb still stands out: a slab of rock into which the image of a bishop and two other heads have been chiseled. The heads are believed to be the two Crusaders who brought Nicholas to Ireland. And the bishop, believed to be Nicholas of Myra is surrounded by three gold bags which were destined for others. 212 forever homes have been found in 2018 through Petmania Kilkennys partner adoption centre, Protecting Pound Dogs. Petmania believe that all pets deserve a secure, safe and caring home. They provide support, treatments and gifts through their aftercare service to rescue pet owners to help them settle into their forever home. Christmas time sees an increase in the adopting and purchasing of pets with many people choosing a cute cat or dog as a gift. With the usual message being adopt dont shop, Petmania have taken it a step further and are asking people to stop and think before committing to a pet this festive season along with considering the alternative option of fostering a pet during the holidays. Fostering a dog during Christmas provides a great amount of relief for rescue centres. Emily Miller, Marketing Manager with Petmania says, We urge people to steer away from last minute decisions when adopting or buying pets. Rescue centres nationwide do need temporary housing for pets during Christmas/ Fostering is an option that many people do not think about and it is a great way for people to discover if a dog fits their lifestyle. Rescue pet owners become a part of the Petmania adoptive family network receiving support and special offers to make the process as enjoyable as possible. Petmania run in-store adoption days to provide information for people before they make the big move to rescue a pet. Petmania Kilkenny will hold an instore adoption day with Protecting Pound Dogs in their store on Saturday 15th December. Through Petmanias work with Protecting Pound Dogs in Kilkenny, they have seen the ongoing trend of impulse decision making and a lack of full consideration of the many demands a pet can bring. Petmania ask potential pet owners to consider: Christmas plans, will they be travelling to visit family and friends or going on day-trips, if so, how does the new furry member of the family fit into these plans. Holidays planned for the coming year, is there a family member or friend who will look after the pet when the owner goes away. The expense that a pet brings with food, maintenance and veterinary costs. In relation to dogs, the extra time needed to walk them daily. Efficient outdoor space and a sheltered area for the pet to sleep along with the extra task of cleaning up after the pet. Petmania will continue to work closely with Protecting Pound Dogs in Kilkenny and other partner animal rescue centres across Ireland during 2019 and they are looking forward to extending the adoption programme even further in the new year. To find out more call the store on (056) 779 7960 or drop in. Petmania Kilkenny is located in the Kilkenny Retail and Business Park, Ring Road, Loughboy, Kilkenny City. For a full list of their animal adoption centre partners or to find out more about the Petmania Adoptive Family network visit www.petmania.ie/adoption. Photo: Contributed A judge has sentenced a caregiver who built a close relationship with an elderly couple in Port Coquitlam to 12 months in jail for stealing $260,000 from them. Antonette Dizon was sentenced in provincial court on Dec. 13 after pleading guilty to one count of fraud over $5,000. She admitted to almost daily withdrawals of up to $1,000 from the accounts of Henry and Helen Abfalter between January 2015 and April 2016 as she helped them with their daily needs, including banking. The thefts continued for months after Henry Abfalter died in September 2015 and Dizon had stopped working for the couple, who were in their late 80s. Court heard that Dizon, who is 50 years old, used the money to buy a new car, paid tuition for her daughter and sent money to family in the Philippines. The Crown had asked for up to 18 months in jail, but Judge Robin McQuillan said her guilty plea, remorse and lack of a criminal record warranted a year in jail and 18 months' probation. McQuillan wrote in his judgment that the woman's actions may not have been pre-meditated, but they weren't impulsive because the withdrawals continued over a 15-month period. "She had unlimited opportunities to reflect on what she was doing and to correct or at least stop her conduct. She did not do so." The judge said he was also mindful that Dizon had suffered humiliation arising from media attention on the case. Helen Abfalter has also since passed away and Dizon has been ordered to pay the remaining money owed, $105,000, to the Abfalter estate. WINNEBAGO COUNTY, Iowa Two men are accused of driving other peoples tractors, resulting in major damage to one. Joshua Lynn Mathahs, 22 of Rake, and Jesse Allan Boehm, 21 of Rake, are charged with 1st degree criminal mischief, 3rd degree burglary, and operating a vehicle without the owners consent. Theyre accused of stealing a tractor on December 8, driving it through a ditch, onto the road, back into the ditch, and then leaving it in the middle of a picked corn field. Authorities say the right front wheel separated from the rest of the tractor, doing $50,000 to $60,000 in damage. Mathahs and Boehm are also accused of taking another tractor from a farm near Buffalo Center on December 8, using it to pull Mathahs truck out of the ditch, then putting the tractor back. NEW HAMPTON, Iowa A house fire has led to child endangerment charges against a Nashua couple. Olngellel Camacho, 32, and Heather Susan Brymer, 29, are charged with felony child endangerment and two counts of aggravated misdemeanor child endangerment. Camacho and Brymer are both pleading not guilty. Camacho is scheduled to stand trial beginning on April 24, 2019 in Chickasaw County District Court. No trial date is set for Brymer Olngellel Camacho Olngellel Camacho They were arrested after emergency crews responded to a fire at Brymers home in Nashua on October 10. Brymers three children were in the home at the time of the fire. A seven-year-old required CPR and had to be transported by helicopter to Iowa City for treatment related to serious smoke inhalation. A six-year-old and a two-year-old were treated at Mercy Medical Center in New Hampton for minor smoke inhalation. Authorities say tests on hair samples from the seven-year-old and six-year-old came back positive for methamphetamine. Court documents state Camacho was the live-in boyfriend of Brymer and they both also tested positive for meth. Law enforcement says all three minor children were placed at risk of extreme danger and harm during the house fire due to lack of supervision and dangerous substances were detected in the home and likely ingested by two of the children. GARNER, Iowa- It was business as usually Tuesday at Tammys Pharmacy in Garner, but Monday turned deadly at the crossroads when Andrea Young, of Garner, died in a 3-vehicle crash outside of the store on Highway 18 near the intersection of Highway 69. The deadly event struck close to home for owner Tammy Abbas. My sons were very good friends with her son, she said holding back tears. They were over at their house often and shes a wonderful person and now theres a family without her. According to the Iowa Department of Transportations Annual Daily Traffic records, this stretch of road sees around 6,000 drivers each day. That number has steadily decreased over the last 15 years. But Abbas is less concerned about the numbers than she is about the layout of the troublesome stretch of road. Because of the driveways people are going in and out all the time, she said. There are times when you cant see. The Iowa DOT has to give permission to businesses like Abbas to connect their driveway to the highway. According to the DOT, the driveway where the intersection occurred is a legal access point. But the city is looking at ways to make this portion of Highway 18 a little safer. Additional pavement markings, road signs, changing the speeds or even making this area a three-way intersection, said City Administrator Randy Lansing. Lansing said he started the conversation with the DOT about these changes in November. With the clinic being built, there is going to be additional conflict points near that intersection, he said. We really want to take a look at what possibilities could be done. The traffic numbers dont justify a stop light in that area, but is there something that we can do? But Tammy has lost a friend and wonders aloud why something couldnt have been done sooner. We lost a very good person, she said wiping her tears. She was well liked, she was young, has a family ... we need to do something. This cant keep happening. Lansing said the city will continue to work with the DOT to figure out a solution for the section of road as well as how to fund the project. FLOYD COUNTY, Iowa - The Iowa State Patrol said a 40-year-old Greene man died in a crash Wednesday morning. Troy Reams was identified by State Patrol as the person killed when a car hit a semi driven by 58-year-old Stasys Sabaliauskis at around 5:30 a.m. Wednesday. The Iowa State Patrol said Reams was driving a 2017 Ford Fusion and was traveling eastbound on Highway 18 when it rear-ended a 2012 Volvo semi-tractor/trailer. The crash happened at the intersection of the Avenue of the Saints and Highway 218. The Iowa State Patrol was assisted by the Floyd County Sheriffs Office, Floyd County Fire and Rescue, AMR Ambulance and the Iowa DOT. MASON CITY, Iowa A not guilty plea is entered in a case of Mason City gunfire. Manuel Alexander Zamorano, 18 of Mason City, is charged with intimidation with a dangerous weapon, two counts of assault on persons in certain occupations, and possession of marijuana-1st offense. Hes accused of firing multiple shots at a vehicle in the area of 8th Street on S. Kentucky Avenue the morning of November 24. No one was injured. Police say when Zamorano was arrested, he resisted arrest and spit bloody bodily fluids at a uniformed officer. A trial is set to begin on February 26. OSAGE, Iowa A St. Ansgar woman accused of assaulting law enforcement is pleading not guilty. Brandie Renee Rogers, 36, was arrested after authorities were called to the Mitchell County Regional Health Center on October 3. Rogers had reportedly been drinking alcohol in the emergency room and pushed a deputy when told she couldnt do that. Law enforcement says Rogers resisted arrest and once she was put inside a squad car, she smashed her head into a side door, kicked a deputy in the knee, and began grinding her false teeth together until she lost several of them. Rogers pleaded not guilty Tuesday to interference with official acts and assault on a peace officer. Her trial is set to begin on March 27, 2019. MASON CITY, Iowa A woman accused of insurance fraud is pleading not guilty. Amber Marie Griffin, 34 of Mason City, is charged with four counts of fraudulent insurance claim and one count of 2nd degree theft. Court documents state Griffin submitted phony medical insurance claims and received payouts totaling $9,075 which she did not deserve. Her trial is due to begin on March 12, 2019. MASON CITY, Iowa An accused truck thief is pleading not guilty. James Grant Dulude, 30 of Mason City, is charged with operating a vehicle without the owners consent. He was arrested the morning of November 26 after a traffic stop. Authorities say Dulude tried to run away but was quickly caught. Officers say the truck he had been driving was reported stolen that day from River City Fence Co. Dulude is scheduled to stand trial starting January 29, 2019. MASON CITY, Iowa A man accused of forging checks in North Iowa is pleading not guilty. Taylor Gordon Maricle, 23, formerly of Austin and now living in Clear Lake, is charged with ongoing criminal conduct, check forgery, possession of meth, and possession of Viagra without a prescription. He was arrested after Mason City police were called to Shopko on November 27 for a shoplifting complaint. Authorities say Maricle was found with meth, a Viagra pill, and someone elses checkbook. Police say they believe he used it to write several checks over a two-week period. Maricle is set to stand trial starting January 29. OSAGE, Iowa A former Riceville man is pleading not guilty to smashing into a church while high. Nathan Dean Hamel-Snapp, 21 and now living in St. Paul, has entered not guilty pleas to prohibited acts and OWI-1st offense. The Osage Police Department says Hamel-Snapp drove a vehicle into the side of Our Saviors Lutheran Church on September 17. When officers arrived, they say Hamel-Snapp was putting items into a duffel bag and a safe inside the vehicle contained multiple baggies of methamphetamine. Osage police say Hamel-Snapps urine tested positive for amphetamines and opiates. He was arrested in St. Paul on December 5 and is now set to stand trial on March 27 in Mitchell County District Court. Photo: Colin Dacre Supt. Ted De Jager before Penticton city council Tuesday South Okanagan RCMP regional commander Supt. Ted De Jager was in the hot seat Tuesday, dealing with Penticton's new city council for the first time. De Jagers assurances that Penticton is a safe city came under attack from Mayor John Vassilaki, who said residents hes heard from dont feel the same way. I can assure you sir, people are terrified in the downtown area and the surrounding residential area as well, Vassilaki said, asking for police to be more visible in the area. What they are really asking for is boots on the ground for all that money that the city is putting forward, the taxpayers of Penticton, they need to feel that they are protected and dont need to fear anything. Coun. Katie Robinson was also critical of De Jagers characterization of the community as safe. What are you basing that on? Because as someone thats lived here for 30 years I can tell you that its not as safe as it used to be by a long stretch, she said. She referred to rankings conducted by Macleans that listed Penticton this year as Canadas 17th most dangerous city. There are a lot of people in this town that have grave concerns about their safety now, elderly people who wont go out after 7 p.m., she continued. De Jager dismissed the Macleans crime rankings, which relies on the crime severity index, as deeply flawed a view widely shared in the policing community. He said comparing a city under 50,000 people to one of more than a million where people are literally having gun fights on the street is absurd, stating crime simply does not scale proportionally with population. De Jager pointed to local statistics that showed just two per cent of calls were violent in nature, with the vast majority of those attributed to domestic violence or a high-risk lifestyle. He spoke about a recent interaction with an elderly woman that wanted to buy a handgun or weapon to defend herself against a hypothetical random home invasion. Thats never happened, that didn't happen last year or the year before it happens to drug dealers who get other drug dealers kicking in their door and doing a home invasion, he said. But the notion that weve somehow come to this perplexing conclusion that that will happen in this community, because of whether its social media, or whether its certain people that have an agenda to play out is troubling, because it's simply not true. In 2018 through to Nov. 30, violent crime in Penticton has grown 20 per cent driven in part by 11 per cent growth in domestic violence files, something De Jager called disconcerting. He said, however, that the detachment has seen huge success pushing down property crime with rates of auto theft (down 28 per cent) and residential break and enter (down 26 per cent) falling significantly. In response to concerns about visibility or downtown patrols, De Jager pointed to the five-member Community Support and Enforcement Team, which started rolling in January and has been spending most of its time downtown. I can drive police cars up and down downtown all day long, but I will ask council what you dont want me to do, because thats the fact it's a resourcing issue. De Jager said he welcomes future talks with the new council about expectations on the visibility issue downtown. ROCHESTER, Minn.- Many families inside Saint Marys hospital will spend the holidays in the hospital bed but some local bluecoats are doing their best jolly old St. Nicks in the wards at the hospital, thanks to a grant from Target. Becky Friedrichs is spending her holiday with her six year old daughter who is battling seizures. There might be a possibility of surgery we're not really sure at this point. Nothing has been working to manage them effectively so trying to figure out what's going, said the mother. While they spend their time at the hospital they received a surprise from officers bearing gifts. Being able to spend time with them and know that not all of them get to go home for Christmas it's great to bring Christmas to them, said officer Julie Claymon. This the first annual Miracles and Heroes Holiday party. MASON CITY, Iowa - Throughout the holiday season, KIMT and our Giving Your Best partners Diamond Jo Casino and First Citizens Bank, alongside the North Iowa Marine Corps League collected toys for the annual Toys for Tots Campaign, and Tuesday marked distribution day. Throughout Tuesday and Wednesday, over 1,000 families from Cerro Gordo, Butler, Floyd, Franklin, Hancock, Winnebago, Worth, Wright, Mitchell and Howard Counties are picking up toys, clothes, games, books and even groceries at the Mason City Salvation Army Activity Center. The families who are showing up explained that there are a lot of different reasons why they're reaching out for help this holiday season. "We've had flooding over the summer and we had a hard year. It's kinda nice to know that there's people out there that actually do care and want to help," Sarah Reese said. "I'm going through a divorce and finding stuff can get expensive when you do that," Brittnee Puckett said. Both Reese and Puckett appreciate the giving spirit this season, and want to give back themselves. "I try to give back as much as I can since the community really helps out and supports everybody," Reese said. "I just love helping people and usually I give back after Christmas," Puckett said. According to coordinator Ernie Martinez, distribution day will continue Wednesday from 9 a.m.-Noon at the Mason City Salvation Army Activity Center. For those who did not sign up, you can come by at 1 p.m.. Please bring identification, proof of residence, Title 19 card, and free lunch proof for check in. However, the Salvation Army will still accept donations and people can still get toys after the fact if need be. There will be one other distribution day in Algona on Friday from 10 a.m.-6 p.m. at the Algona First United Methodist Church for those living in Upper Kossuth County. MASON CITY, Iowa A Cerro Gordo County man accused of a hammer attack is pleading not guilty. Eric Allen Young, 38 of Ventura, is charged with domestic abuse assault. He was arrested after an incident on November 15 in the 2300 block of 220th Street. Law enforcement says Young choked a woman until she passed out, then hit her with a hammer. Youngs trial is scheduled to start on January 29. MASON CITY, Iowa A Worth County woman is pleading not guilty to drug possession. Taylor Kelli Pohar, 22 of Northwood, was arrested October 23 for shoplifting at Mills Fleet Farm in Mason City. Law enforcement says 1.7 grams of methamphetamine were found in her coat pocket. Pohars trial is due to begin on February 5, 2019. Pohar is facing additional drug charges in Worth County. Read that story by clicking here. ROCHESTER, Minn. A Pine Island woman gets probation for having methamphetamine near her child. Carrie Lynn Friese, 36 was found guilty by a jury of 5th degree drug possession, storage of meth paraphernalia in the presence of a child, and child endangerment. She was arrested on October 19, 2017, after Rochester police say they found meth in her purse, which was near Frieses nine-year-old child. On Wednesday, she was sentenced to five years of supervised probation and 100 hours of community work service. HOUSTON (Reuters) - Exxon Mobil Corp (XOM.N) sent a letter to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in support of methane gas emission rules put in place under the Obama administration, according to a copy of the letter seen by Reuters. The administration of President Donald Trump in September proposed weakening requirements for repairing leaks of the greenhouse gas in drilling operations in a step toward rolling back an Obama-era policy that was intended to combat climate change. We support maintaining the key elements of the underlying regulation, such as leak detection and repair programs, Exxon Vice President Gantt Walton said in the letter dated on Monday. The company believes reasonable regulations help reduce emissions and support the use of cleaner-burning natural gas, the letter said. Methane, the primary component of natural gas, leaks from oil and gas wells during drilling. It accounts for 10 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions but has more than 80 times the heat-trapping potential of carbon dioxide in the first 20 years after it escapes into the atmosphere. The oil and gas industry is the largest single source of U.S. methane emissions, according to EPA data. LONDON (Reuters) - The British government has held talks with shipping firms to secure back-up vessels in case Britain exits the European Union with no trade deal but it is unlikely to make progress as most ships are booked for other business, industry sources say. One source told Reuters that, as well as talking to commercial shipping firms, the government was also seeking to put specialist transport ships controlled by Britains defence ministry on stand-by to keep cross-Channel trade flowing, although those vessels are now involved in operations elsewhere. If Britain leaves the EU on March 29 without a trade deal, extra ships will be needed to work new routes across the Channel in case the main French terminal of Calais and Britains Dover and Folkestone are clogged up by customs checks. If there is major chaos at Dover, it is vital to ensure that trucks dont get backed up and the government is exploring the use of commercial ships, an industry source said. The trouble is many of these carriers will have agreed to charters already, he said, adding that about 85 percent of capacity on roll-on, roll-off (RORO) ships was booked several months ahead. The sources did not say how many more ships Britain would be need. The government said it was preparing for all eventualities to ensure trade flowed smoothly. About 16,000 trucks pass between Dover and Calais a day, transporting everything from perishable food to medicines and industrial goods needed to keep factories running. In the EUs single market, trucks drive smoothly through border checks. But in a no deal Brexit, even a few minutes delay at customs for each truck would likely see vehicles backed up at ports and queued up on feeder roads both sides of the Channel. POTENTIAL OUTCOMES The government, which has warned of up to six months of disruption under a no deal scenario, has been seeking to secure space on RORO ships to serve different ports on mainland Europe and Britain, according to the industry sources, who declined to be named citing confidentiality agreements. They said the government had made approaches in recent weeks to companies that included Britains P&O, Denmarks DFDS (DFDS.CO) and Swedens Stena. Those three firms already operate services to British ports, data showed. The companies declined to comment. When asked about the matter, the transport ministry said as a responsible government we continue to prepare for a range of potential outcomes to ensure that trade continues to move as freely as possible. A spokesman for British Prime Minister Theresa May said ministers had discussed ensuring ships set aside space to keep medical supplies flowing but said this was not quite the same as chartering ships. Britain requisitioned and chartered merchant ships during the 1982 war over the Falkland Islands with Argentina. But shipping experts say Britains fleet of UK-flagged vessels is now smaller and the expansion of global trade also means they may be too far away to be called in at short notice. P&O said on Tuesday it was reviewing its UK-registered fleet and was already re-flagging two vessels to keep EU tax arrangements ahead of Brexit. Bob Sanguinetti, chief executive of Britains Chamber of Shipping trade association which represents 200 shipping companies, said vessels might not be available to charter or might not be able to serve different terminals. Many ships are specialized, they are often adapted for individual routes and cannot necessarily just be sent to different ports on a whim, he said. ALTERNATIVE PORTS One of the industry sources said the government had explored using four RORO vessels controlled by the defence ministry. Foreland Shipping, which owns and operates the four Britain-flagged RORO vessels, said the ships were employed on other operations and will remain so for the foreseeable future. The defence ministry said it routinely works with other government departments on planning for a range of contingency scenarios. It did not provide further comment. Refinitiv Eikon ship tracking data showed on Tuesday that two vessels were in the Mediterranean, one of them moored in the British territory of Gibraltar and another heading to Limassol in Cyprus, close to a British military base. A third ship was anchored in the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic, while the fourth was sailing to North America. Britain is also making preparations at ports capable of handling RORO vessels in the southeast, such as Ramsgate and Dartford, to ease any congestion at the main terminals. Across the Channel, the Dutch port of Rotterdam said this year that its Brexit contingency plans included looking at hiring more customs agents and fresh produce inspectors. French ports have also been looking to draft in more customs officials. Yet some investors see shifting trade routes as an opportunity. Seaborne Freight has been working over the past 18 months to offer a new service between Ramsgate and Belgiums Ostend, reopening a route that another operator had used until suspending the service in 2013. The company planned to offer its service in the first quarter of 2019 with ships carrying up to 100 trucks each, Chief Operating Officer Glenn Dudley said. For us, the harder the Brexit the better, Dudley said. If Dover and the Channel Tunnel are encumbered, our space will go quite quickly. He declined to comment when asked if the government had been in touch about bookings. WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States and China are planning to hold meetings in January to document an agreement on trade, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told Bloomberg in an interview on Tuesday. Mnuchin was quoted as saying the two sides had held several phone conversations in recent weeks, and were planning further formal talks. Trump administration officials had not disclosed plans for face-to-face meetings since a Dec. 1 trade truce reached between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping led to a delay in planned U.S. tariff increase until March 2. Were in the process of confirming the logistics of several meetings and were determined to make sure that we use the time wisely, to try to resolve this, Mnuchin told Bloomberg. Both sides are now focused on trying to document an agreement by the deadline. We expect there will be meetings in January, Mnuchin added. A person familiar with the talks had told Reuters over the weekend that formal U.S.-China meetings were likely early in January. Mnuchin said neither he nor Trump were aware of the arrest of a senior Huawei Technologies executive when they met with Xi in Buenos Aires, and said China understands that the trade talks and Huawei issues are separate tracks, Mnuchin said. The Treasury chief said reducing the U.S. trade deficit with China was still a major priority for Trump but added that this would take time and that the United States was also focused on securing structural changes in Chinas economy to help rebalance trade. Mnuchin also told Bloomberg that he plans to remain Treasury secretary through the 2020 presidential election and perhaps longer if asked. The Wall Street Journal reported in November that Mnuchin might become a casualty of Trumps cabinet shake-ups. I foresee myself here at least through the first term and if the president wants me here for a second term when hes re-elected, I would seriously entertain that, Mnuchin said. Reporting by David Lawder; Editing by Phil Berlowitz WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House said on Tuesday it has found a way to build President Donald Trumps promised border wall without new funding from Congress, stepping away from the presidents threat to shut down the U.S. government over border security disputes. We have other ways that we can get to that $5 billion, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said on Fox News. At the end of the day, we dont want to shut down the government, we want to shut down the border. Trump and Congress, embroiled in a feud over his proposed U.S.-Mexico border wall, have four days to reach a deal before a partial government shutdown could leave about a quarter of the federal workforce without paychecks. Last week, in a heated exchange at the White House with Democratic leaders in Congress, Trump declared he would be proud to shut down the government if he did not get his demand for $5 billion to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Since then, after days with no apparent progress, the senior Republican and Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee huddled with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell just steps from the Senate chamber. Following that meeting, Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Richard Shelby told reporters, Were talking seriously about how to reach our goal of keeping the government funded beyond Friday. He said they were working with the president, working with the Democrats. There are a lot of variables here. A senior Democratic aide, who asked not to be identified, said Trump and Republicans in Congress have floated the idea of lawmakers providing the president $1 billion in new funds to be used for any of his immigration priorities - an idea that Democrats will not accept. Trump has demanded $5 billion as a down payment on construction of a wall that he argues is needed to keep illegal immigrants and drugs from entering the United States. Building the wall was a key pledge of his 2016 presidential campaign. Trump had originally said Mexico would pay for the wall, but leaders of the United States southern neighbor have repeatedly said it would not. Democrats and some Republicans argue there are less costly, more effective border controls than a wall. Sanders indicated the White House was backing down from Trumps threat to shut down the federal government if Congress refused to provide money for his wall. Theres certainly a number of different funding sources that weve identified that we can use, that we can couple with the money that would be given through congressional appropriations, that would help us get to that $5 billion that the president needs in order to protect our borders, Sanders said on Fox. Asked whether the White House was exploring the use of funds, including from the Defense Department, for building the wall and whether that would be legal, Sanders said, Absolutely. But Shelby was less certain. In response to a reporters question on whether Trump could order the Pentagon to shift some of its funds to wall construction, Shelby said: I dont know about that. He added, however, that Trump does have the power to defend the country and the power to protect the border. The money Trump wants is a fraction of the roughly $450 billion Congress was poised to approve - before the latest battle over the proposed wall - to fund several agencies which will otherwise run out of money at midnight on Friday. The galleries were packed for the valedictory of Chris Finlayson. People were no doubt hoping for his normal mix of charm, eloquence and verbal assault and they were not disappointed. I recommend people read the whole transcript or view the video. Some extracts: I want first to acknowledge my opponents. The Labour opponents that I had in Mana and Rongotai, Winnie Laban, Annette King, and Paul Eagle and their spouses, are very, very nice people. I really enjoyed their company. The campaigns were pleasant and issues-focused. I especially acknowledge Annettes husband Ray, who would sit through campaign meetings in Island Bay with a beatific smile on his face as Paul Tolich, Ken Findlay, and the rest of the Island Bay Labour gang yelled at me. I once told Ken Findlay in 2014 to sit down and shut upI always had a special rapport with constituents. Heh. I know my colleagues very well. By now, my colleagues will be whispering to one another that Ive gone troppo. Well, fear not, because I now turn to talk about New Zealand First. The most I can say to them is: thank you very much for not choosing the National Party in 2017. As is well-known, I think we dodged a bullet. So true. I had a ministerial suite in Bowen House for about eight years. I did not want to move to the Beehive, but Mr Brownlee offered me Murray McCullys seat if I agreed to speak to my colleagues from time to time. It was my staff who made me move. I tried to organise an exorcism of the suite, given that McCully had been there for eight years, but was told the incense would set off smoke alarms. I think Murray would have enjoyed the exorcism. Ive almost forgiven Guyon Espiner, who taught me a very good lesson: do not appear on Morning Report just after youve woken up. I remember very well the morning he interviewed me and put a proposition to me from Metiria Turei, and I said, Oh, well thats what happens when one is dealing with a left-wing loon. And he put another proposition to me, and I said, Well, thats what happens when one is dealing with a right-wing loon., and he said, Well that commentator was John Key. The message came down from the ninth floor that if I wanted to be Minister for Consumer Affairs I was on the right track. Ouch. People have said some nice things about me in recent days but these people are the ones who made the settlements happen. I also acknowledge John Key and Bill English, without whose active support nothing would have been achieved. I say to Andrew Little that this is the best job in Government. Dont worry about setbacks. Just when it seems a negotiation has gone all wrong something very good can and invariably does happen. I mean who knows, Sonny Tau could decide to go and live in Iceland! Now that was biting. So very harsh, but funny. But I do want to say something about two MPs I greatly admire. First, Gerry Brownlee: when the history of the Key Government is written, his work rebuilding a shattered city will be regarded as that Governments greatest achievement. I witnessed in Cabinet his absolute commitment to and compassion for his fellow Cantabrians. Sometimes I felt that his contribution has been taken for grantedwell, not by me, because I think hes a great New Zealander. And secondly I want to acknowledge Nikki Kaye, who won Auckland Central in 2008 and has held it since then. Auckland Central is very like Rongotai, except Nikki wins Auckland Central. She was a Minister with a brilliant future and, as we know, was very unwell last year, but she fought that cancer and is doing a tremendous job in Opposition. I strongly support her bill on teaching foreign languages. Shes an example to all of us of grit, of courage, and of determination. Very nice and moving tributes to Gerry and Nikki. Members probably know the old wisecrack, Some people please wherever they go; other people please whenever they go., and Im sure many will be thinking the second part applies to mealthough, I understand, not Mr Robertson. I have it on excellent authority that hes distraught and is currently undergoing counselling. Heh. In 2005, Michael Cullen said in the Address in Reply debate that he wasnt convinced of this sort of Latinate habit of everyone kissing each other after every maiden speech, and I agree. Its a dreadful habit. I think the same principle applies to valedictories, so Mr Speaker, fellow members of the House, thats all from me. If anyone needs a lawyer in the future, dont bother me. All the best. Goodbye. And on that note Chris walked out of the door behind him, avoiding the usual several minutes of hugs and handshakes and the sustained standing ovation. Parliament has lost a very fine MP, but the legal profession has regained an even finer lawyer. Share this: Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Reddit WhatsApp More Pinterest Print Tumblr Photo: Contributed John Kot, left, is no stranger to giving money to charity. Kot Auto Group had so much success with its pay-it-forward campaign last year that it decided to do it again. Just like last year, the bosses announced at the company Christmas party that each employee was going to receive a $500 voucher to donate to a charity of their choice. Since there are 80 employees in the organization, that means $40,000 is going to be going to charity this holiday season. The response was overwhelming last year, and the individual stories from the employees about why they picked the charities has been our favourite, Kot Auto Group operations co-ordinator Jessica Vallee said in a press release. Some of these organizations have touched and affected some of them very personally, and its exciting to be able to watch them all give back. Just a few of the charities that have received money this month are JoeAnnas House, Kelownas Womans Shelter, Canucks Place Childrens Hospice, Canadian Red Cross Fund, BC Cancer Foundation and MS Society Canada. Photo: Compass Cannabis Clinics A computer-generated image of the proposed Starbuds cannabis retail store. An application that could see the opening of the Okanagan's first legal recreational cannabis retail store is back before Lake Country council tonight. On Dec. 4, council voted 4-3 to deny a variance application, which would allow a Starbuds cannabis store to open in the Turtle Bay Crossing development, within the 400-metre buffer zone from a nearby daycare. Following the vote, Mayor James Baker, who voted against the application, decided to bring back the application for reconsideration, as the applicants didn't speak to council before the first vote. Council has received letters in support of the application from community members, including from the owner of the nearby daycare. Lake Country staff also supported the application. Dave Martyn, president of Starbuds and Compass Cannabis Clinics, a Lake Country resident, said Coun. Penny Gambell was "highly concerned that edible gummy bears were going to end up in the daycare two blocks from the retail site, but those don't exist in the Cannabis Act, they're not a legal product to sell." Edibles are expected to be legalized in the fall of 2019. Personally, I am very concerned about any business of this type, of cannabis, because it's a new product being legalized, so I am concerned as far as children go, said Gambell. It never hurts to err on the side of caution when we're dealing with children, and that's what the bylaw states. Gambell said she's going into tonight's meeting with an open mind, however. Starbuds, meanwhile, has three other proposed cannabis retail stores in Revelstoke, Fernie and Dawson Creek, along with more than 30 others proposed across Canada. Martyn says they are in the final stage of getting provincial approval for the Lake Country location, but they'll need a stamp of approval from the municipality first. Photo: RCMP Surveillance footage released by police of alleged counterfeiters A man believed to be connected to a group responsible for circulating counterfeit U.S. bills has been arrested by Princeton RCMP after fighting to evade arrest. On Dec. 12, police located a suspect vehicle in Coalmont who was believed to be involved with passing on fake $50 U.S. bills in the area. The vehicle fled into the mountains, where Princeton and Merritt RCMP members and a dog service team contained the area. The driver attempted to evade police, ramming a police vehicle with his own and fleeing on foot. He hid along a river bank until he was apprehended by the dog task force. The 49-year-old male was arrested and charged with assaulting a police officer and flight from the police. A search warrant was prepared and executed for a travel trailer that belonged to the accused, which may be further evidence in the counterfeit case against this man. He is believed to be one of four people involved in the group from Vancouver Island, and was released on a recognizance with conditions after a court appearance Dec. 14. Photo: Colin Dacre Penticton Indian Band members have voted down a super park proposed for the First Nations main reserve. A referendum was held Tuesday that saw members vote 149 to 93 to reject the proposal, which would have used about two per cent of PIB land to construct a vast 940-acre amusement park. The initial proposal would have included ziplines, a mountain coaster, a waterpark, mountain biking, chairlift, amphitheatre and more. Although the ambitious plans were rejected, Chief Chad Eneas is happy with how referendum was handled. This referendum process was a success, as it was the second fastest land designation voting process in Canada, he said. I would like to express my gratitude for the unanimous support from the council to bring this to the membership to include in the decision-making process, thank the staff for the dedication and efforts for the hard work they do and to the private investors for bringing this idea forward. We continue to review project proposals on new and old concepts for building a stronger economy that can be supported by the Penticton Indian Band membership, he added. Between 25 and 30 per cent of the band population participated in the referendum. The project would have been a joint venture between the PIB and Avion Developments. Avion is fronted by Trevor Seibert, one of four original founders of the Area 27 Speedway in Oliver, although the PIB project was completely unaffiliated with the racetrack. Chief Eneas said it appears the sheer size of the development appeared to provoke concern for members. We will move forward with similar engagement formats through the family systems, building upon and enhancing the process to consider a further set of land use designations in the new year. With the referendum results, the PIB also announced it has renamed the PIB Development Corporation to the KuL Group. Kul is a Syilx word, meaning, to work to make to create. It manages PIB firms such as Westhills Aggregates, Coyote Cruises and Snpinktn Forestry. Photo: The Canadian Press This courtroom sketch depicts former President Donald Trump's former national security adviser Michael Flynn, standing center, flanked by his lawyers, listening to U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan, right, as he addresses Flynn and points to the American flag inside the federal court in Washington, Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. Sullivan agreed to postpone Flynn's sentencing so he can continue cooperating with the Russia probe A federal judge Tuesday abruptly postponed the sentencing of President Donald Trump's first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, declaring himself disgusted and disdainful of Flynn's crime of lying to the FBI and raising the unexpected prospect of sending the retired Army lieutenant general to prison. Lawyers for Flynn, who admitted lying to the FBI about his Russian contacts, requested the delay during the stunning hearing in which U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan told the former Trump aide in a blistering rebuke that "arguably you sold your country out." "I can't make any guarantees, but I'm not hiding my disgust, my disdain for this criminal offence," Sullivan said. The postponement gives Flynn a chance to continue co-operating with the government in hopes of staving off prison and proving his value as a witness, including in a foreign lobbying prosecution unsealed this week. The possibility of prison had seemed remote for Flynn, who was smiling and upbeat as he entered the courtroom, since prosecutors had praised his extensive co-operation and didn't recommend any time behind bars. But the judge's upbraiding suggested otherwise and made clear that even defendants like Flynn who have co-operated in special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation may nonetheless be shadowed by the crimes that brought them into court in the first place. The hearing upset what had been a carefully crafted agreement and pushed months into the future a resolution of one of Mueller's signature prosecutions. "This is a very serious offence. A high-ranking senior official of the government making false statements to the Federal Bureau of Investigation while on the physical premises of the White House," Sullivan said. He later softened his tone, apologizing for suggesting that Flynn had worked as a foreign agent, "undermining everything this flag over here stands for" while in the White House when that other work had actually already ended. He also backpedaled on an earlier question on whether Flynn's transgressions amounted to treason, saying he didn't mean to suggest they did. Flynn was to have been the first White House official sentenced in Mueller's ongoing investigation into possible co-ordination between the Trump presidential campaign and Russia. The hearing, though incomplete, marked a remarkable fall after a three-decade military career that included Flynn's tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and oversight of the Defence Intelligence Agency during the Obama administration. Though he served only briefly in Trump's White House, he campaigned vigorously before the election and attracted attention for memorably leading a Republican National Convention crowd in a "Lock Her Up" chant about Hillary Clinton. It all comes amid escalating legal peril for Trump, who was implicated by federal prosecutors in New York this month in hush-money payments involving his former lawyer to cover up extramarital affairs. Nearly a half-dozen former aides and advisers have pleaded guilty or agreed to co-operate with prosecutors. Some, like Flynn, have been tripped up by concealing Russian contacts. Flynn's help in the probes, including 19 meetings with investigators, has been especially notable. Yet he's nonetheless enjoyed Trump's continued sympathy, thanks in part to a sentencing memo last week that tapped into the president's suspicion of law enforcement and took aim at the FBI's conduct during the investigation. Trump tweeted "good luck" to his first national security adviser hours before the sentencing and said: "Will be interesting to see what he has to say, despite tremendous pressure being put on him, about Russian Collusion in our great and, obviously, highly successful political campaign. There was no Collusion!" At the White House afterward, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked if the administration had changed its stance on Flynn or the FBI after his admissions and guilty plea. "Maybe he did do those things, but it doesn't have anything to do with the president," she said. "It's perfectly acceptable for the president to make a positive comment about somebody while we wait to see what the court's determination is." Sanders repeated her allegation that the FBI "ambushed" Flynn in an interview in which he lied. Of Trump's earlier FBI criticism, she said, "We don't have any reason to want to walk that back." Flynn's legal woes stem from transition-period calls with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak that raised intelligence community alarms even before Trump took office. During those conversations, Flynn urged against a strong Russian response to Obama administration sanctions for Russian election interference and also encouraged Russia's opposition to a U.N. resolution on Israeli settlements. But when FBI agents approached him in the White House on Jan. 24, 2017, Flynn lied about those conversations, prosecutors said. Flynn has never said why he lied, but Sullivan nonetheless castigated him for a deception that was then parroted by other senior administration officials. The tone of Tuesday's hearing startled Flynn supporters who hoped his lawyers' arguments about the FBI's conduct they suggested he was discouraged from having a lawyer present during the interview and wasn't informed it was a crime to lie to resonate more than it did with Sullivan, who a decade ago tossed out the prosecution of a U.S. senator over government misconduct. But while Sullivan tested those arguments, he was ultimately unmoved and Flynn mostly walked them back. He acknowledged that he indeed knew that lying to the FBI was a crime. Neither he nor his lawyers disputed that he'd lied to agents. Photo: The Canadian Press Protesters gather outside Nova Scotia Supreme Court in Halifax on Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018 to show their opposition to plans to dump effluent from a mill into the Northumberland Strait. Lawyers for the Northern Pulp mill are due in court to seek an injunction that would prevent fishermen from blocking survey boats hired to examine a route for an effluent pipeline. A Nova Scotia judge has ordered fishermen to stop blocking survey vessels hired by a pulp mill, in a decision that came after protesters chanted their opposition to the firm's plans to pump effluent into the Northumberland Strait. The temporary injunction, granted by Justice Denise Boudreau in the Nova Scotia Supreme Court, was the latest round in an increasingly tense conflict over a proposal by Northern Pulp to dump over 62 million litres per day of treated waste into the rich fishing grounds. The company, a subsidiary of Paper Excellence, has said the effluent will meet federal regulations for emissions, but opponents counter there's a lack of firm scientific evidence of how the waste will affect the long-term health of the lucrative lobster and crab fisheries. Northern Pulp plans to return to court Jan. 29 to seek a long-term injunction. Allan MacCarthy, one of the fishermen ordered to cease blocking the company's seismic vessel, said outside court that he'll abide by the order. However, he referred to the decision as merely "a skirmish" in his industry's long-term battle with Northern Pulp. Hours earlier, protesters chanted outside the courthouse: "All I want for Christmas is no pipeline." Fishermen and members of Pictou Landing First Nation said they'll renew their efforts to stop the pipeline from proceeding. Warren Francis, a 49-year-old fisherman and member of the Pictou Landing First Nation, said other protests are coming. "I don't think it will stop us. My First Nation will have to step it up. There's others willing to do the same thing these guys have done," said Francis, referring to the three fishermen appearing in court. When a small group of pro-pipeline protesters arrived at the scene, police had to intervene as the two sides faced off in a yard in front of the courthouse. Ben Chisholm, a 65-year-old business agent for the Pipefitters Union, said he came to support the mill's actions because millions of dollars in economic activity could be lost if the mill closed. "There's more support for keeping the mill open and cleaning it up than there is for closing it," he said in an interview. In her decision, Boudreau said that while the fishermen have the right to "lawful protest," they don't have the right to prevent the survey vessels from doing their work. "Lawful protest doesn't include the description of what has been put forward in the evidence," she said during her decision. She also agreed with the company that the issue is an increasingly urgent matter, as the survey vessels need to do their work before winter ice creates a delay that would last until the spring. The Nova Scotia government has committed to stopping the flow of effluent to the heavily polluted Boat Harbour lagoon by Jan. 31, 2020. The lagoon is next to Pictou Landing First Nation. The lagoon has been referred to by a Liberal cabinet minister as one of Canada's worst examples of "environmental racism." Boudreau cited evidence presented by Northern Pulp's lawyer, Harvey Morrison, of video footage showing blockades of the seismic vessels. "They have described events as harassment," Boudreau told the court. "In October and November of 2018, the difficulties were accentuated, the difficulties became more aggressive." She also noted evidence of threats made both on the water and in social media. One of the affidavits from Northern Pulp claims the fishermen at one point shouted at the survey vessel that "20 boats were coming to kill," the seismic boat's employees. The allegations haven't been proven in court. The judge also said she accepted that stopping the blockade was "urgent," and there was evidence of a serious economic impact if the plant were to eventually close because of the fishermen's actions. "I accept, at least on an interim basis ... there could be harm here that would be irreparable," she said. An affidavit submitted by mill manager Bruce Chapman says if the mill closed it would mean the layoff of 277 employee, while 40 nursery and woodlands employees with affiliated companies would lose their jobs. Chapman said there would be no work for the approximately 600 employees of contractors who harvest wood for the mill. In addition, the affidavit said the mill supplies about 40 per cent of the logs used by major sawmills in central and eastern Nova Scotia. As well, the mill purchases almost all of the wood chips produced by the major sawmills in the province. Photo: CTV News The BC Nurses Union says Metro Vancouver has become so unaffordable, 10 nurses at BC Children's Hospital recently quit their jobs because they can't afford to live in the city. "We're stretched really thin," union president Christine Sorensen told CTV News. "Nurses are compensated fairly and recognized for the work that they do, but it concerns me if nurses can't afford to live and work here," she said. "It's difficult to provide safe patient care when we're not fully staffed." Nurses earn an average of about $70,000 a year, but even that isn't enough to buy a home in Vancouver's inflated housing market. There is currently a 30 per cent vacancy in the ER at the hospital. Meanwhile, the hospital is actively recruiting. "We've recruited a number of positions, and we have a new group of nurses starting in early January," chief operating officer Linda Lemke told CTV. with files from CTV Vancouver Photo: The Canadian Press Afghan residents light candles to pay tribute to journalists killed in a suicide attack in Kabul. The number of journalists killed worldwide in retaliation for their work nearly doubled this year, according to an annual report by the Committee to Protect Journalists. The New York-based organization found that 34 journalists were killed in retaliation for their work as of Dec. 14, while at least 53 were killed overall. That compares to 18 retaliation killings among the 47 deaths documented by the committee in 2017. The report issued Wednesday includes the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, a native of Saudi Arabia fiercely critical of its royal regime. His Oct. 2 death inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul has led to tremors on the global political scene around allegations that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was involved. Khashoggi lived in self-imposed exile in the United States, and had gone to the Saudi consulate to formalize his divorce, but was instead strangled and dismembered allegedly by Saudi agents. Asked whether he believed the crown prince had ordered Khashoggi's murder, President Donald Trump said last month, "Maybe he did and maybe he didn't." While the president condemned the violence against journalists, the committee noted that he has called them "enemies of the people." In addition to retaliation killings, journalists have died in combat or crossfire, or on other dangerous assignments. The deadliest country for journalists this year has been Afghanistan, where 13 journalists were killed, some in back-to-back blasts staged by suicide bombers and claimed by the militant group Islamic State, according to the report. Media freedom group Reporters Without Borders said Tuesday that the U.S. made it into the top five deadliest countries for journalists this year for the first time, with six dying, including four who were among five people killed by a gunman who opened fire in the offices of Maryland newspaper Capital Gazette on June 28. The shooting was the deadliest single attack on the media in recent U.S. history. A sales associate was also killed. The man had threatened the newspaper after losing a defamation lawsuit. Another two died while covering extreme weather. In addition, the committee said the imprisonment of journalists has been on the rise. "The context for the crisis is varied and complex, and closely tied to changes in technology that have allowed more people to practice journalism even as it has made journalists expendable to the political and criminal groups who once needed the news media to spread their message," the committee said in its report. Time magazine last week recognized jailed and killed journalists as its "person of the year," including Khashoggi, Maria Ressa imprisoned in the Philippines, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo imprisoned in Myanmar, and staff at the Capital Gazette. Journalists also have died this year in Slovakia, where 27-year-old investigative reporter Jan Kuciak was fatally shot while probing alleged corruption. Last year in Malta, Daphne Caruana Galizia, on a similar mission, was killed by a bomb placed in her car. At least four journalists were murdered in Mexico, two in Brazil, and two Palestinian journalists were shot and killed by Israeli soldiers during protests in the Gaza Strip, according to the report. In Syria and Yemen, two of the worst civil-war decimated countries, the fewest journalists were killed since 2011. Three died in Yemen, and in Syria, the committee recorded nine deaths compared to a high of 31 in 2012. However, the drop may be due to limited access or extreme risks that discourage media visits, the committee said. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, December 19) Government troops are on full force this holiday season for the upcoming founding anniversary of the communist movement. Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana on Tuesday said the police and military are bracing for the 50th anniversary of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) on December 26 and the attacks that may come along with it. "Nagbabalak sila ng malaking selebrasyon sa iba't ibang parte ng bansa. Lalong lalo na sa mga areas na marami sila katulad ng Bicol, Samar at saka Negros saka Mindanao," Lorenzana told reporters at the yearend meeting of the Bicol Regional Peace and Order Council. [Translation: "They are planning a big celebration in different parts of the country, especially in areas where they have many members including Bicol, Samar, Negros, and Mindanao."] Lorenzana stands by his recommendation not to reciprocate the unilateral ceasefire earlier declared by the CPP for its anniversary and the holidays. The truce will take effect 12:01 a.m. of December 24 to 11:59 p.m. of December 26. Another ceasefire is at 12:01 a.m. of December 31 to 11:59 p.m. of January 1, 2019. READ: No holiday truce with Reds Lorenzana "Kasi 'pag nag back to barracks ang mga tropa natin sila naman galaw nang galaw. Patuloy ang mga pagpapaklakas ng kanilang pwersa at pananakop sa mga barangay," Lorenzana said. [Translation: "Because whenever our troops go back to barracks, the soldiers take action. They strengthen their forces and attack barangays."] In the past, the government and the rebels accused each other of violating ceasefires, prompting President Rodrigo Duterte to terminate peace talks in November 2017. The government also seeks to tag the CPP and its armed wing New People's Army (NPA) as a terrorist group, but this bid is still pending in court. Meanwhile, Malacanang on Wednesday slammed the rebels for a number of attacks in the Bicol region Tuesday night. "If you're going to have a truce you might as well show your sincerity by not doing anything contrary to what your intention is," Presidential Spokesperson Salvador Panelo said in a Palace press briefing. "The President is always open to end bloodshed in this country, he doesn't want any killing among Filipinos but for as long as they violate the terms of a peace talk then the President will never allow it to happen," he added. Three policemen were hurt when armed men attacked the Magallanes Police Station in Sorsogon, while another cop was wounded in supposed rebel attack in Bula, Camarines Sur. A full alert status has since been declared by the police and military. Lorenzana said the series of harassments were in line with the CPP's order to step up attacks against government forces nationwide following the extension of martial law in Mindanao. He said the police and military are ready for any possible attack. READ: CPP to NPA: Launch more attacks vs. gov't forces nationwide Albay-based journalist Rosas Olarte contributed to this report. Photo: Instagram A Thai social media influencer who criticized a gown worn by her country's Miss Universe contestant could end up in court after another online personality filed a complaint with police charging that her thumbs-down fashion comment defamed the royal family. Kitjanut Chaiyosburana, a businessman and politician, said Wednesday that he filed his complaint after seeing a Facebook post by Wanchaleom Jamneanphol, who disparaged a blue dress designed by Princess Srivannavari Nariratana, a daughter of King Maha Vajiralongkorn. Miss Universe Thailand, Sophida Kancharin, wore the gown during a Dec. 5 promotional event that was part of the pageant, won in Bangkok on Monday by the Philippines' Catriona Gray. Police Col. Siriwat Deepor, spokesman for the Technology Crime Suppression Bureau, said the defamation complaint had been received and would be investigated. Wanchaleom has deleted the critical post and apologized Monday to Princess Srivannavari in another Facebook post. "Your Royal Highness Sirivannavari Nariratana, I, Wanchaleom Jamneanphol, did not have any intention to insult or disrespect the high institution," Wanchaleom wrote, employing language used exclusively to address Thai royalty. "I feel deeply guilty and sorry for what had happened." Police could forward the complaint to prosecutors as a violation of the Computer Crime Act, which carries a punishment of five years in prison and fines for spreading false information and damaging national security. Similar cases have also been treated as lese majeste, or insulting the monarchy, punishable by three to 15 years' imprisonment. Photo: RCMP Lawyers are asking a court to certify a class-action lawsuit that alleges RCMP members in the three northern territories regularly assault and abuse Indigenous people. The statement of claim, which hasn't been tested in court, cites the case of David Nasogaluak of Tuktoyaktuk, N.W.T. The claim alleges Nasogaluak, then 15, was stopped and questioned by officers in November 2017 as he was riding his snowmobile outside of town with friends. The statement claims the youth was beaten, choked, punched, Tasered and subjected to racial insults before being released without being charged. Police misconduct has been an issue in the North. The Nunavut legislature commissioned a report on it in 2015 that was never released. Earlier this fall, the legislature discussed forming an independent body to review complaints against the Mounties. Kelowna's mayor and council should be ashamed of themselves, trying to set up a wet facility in a seniors neighbourhood. When did it become OK to do illegal drugs in public anywhere? Now, all we are doing is saying that it is OK to be a drug addict and do your drugs wherever you feel like doing them. I thought Canada just made cannabis legal, dont recall hearing they passed a new law saying that heroin, cocaine, meth, and fentanyl are legal. I guess all Canadians are supposed to just suck it up and let all these drug addicts take over our streets and neighbourhoods. It's not fair that it is all acceptable to be a drug addict and we should pay taxes towards helping them stay drug addicts. As the acceptability comes, so do more drug addicts. When I was growing up, it was not acceptable and you hid it from people you cared about and the public. Maybe if it wasnt so acceptable, the population of drug addicted people would be a lot less. Canada has become way too soft. We dont know when to say enough is enough. Drug addicts, illegal immigrants, terrorists, just let them do whatever they want. Oh, and not to mention some twit in Victoria stating that Christmas trees are offensive to people who dont celebrate. Next thing you know, we will have to ask government permission to name our babies as not to offend anyone. Shelley Matotek Photo: The Canadian Press Ali Hassan kisses his dying son Abdullah in a Sacramento hospital. All Shaima Swileh wants is to give her son one more kiss before he dies. The Yemeni woman is about to get her wish after winning her fight for a waiver from the Trump administration's travel ban so she can fly to California where her two-year-old son is on life support. The State Department granted Swileh the waiver on Tuesday after lawyers with the Council on American-Islamic Relations sued this week, ending a year-long battle for the family. Swileh is planning to fly to San Francisco on Wednesday to see Abdullah at UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital in Oakland. "This will allow us to mourn with dignity," the boy's father, Ali Hassan, said in a statement provided by the Sacramento chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Hassan, who is a U.S. citizen and lives in Stockton, brought Abdullah to California in the fall to get treatment for a genetic brain disorder. "My wife is calling me every day wanting to kiss and hold her son for the one last time," Hassan said, choking up as he made a public plea at a news conference Monday, a day before the government granted the visa. The couple moved to Egypt after marrying in war-torn Yemen in 2016 and had been trying to get a visa for Swileh since 2017 so they could all move to California. Citizens from Yemen and four other mostly Muslim countries, along with North Korea and Venezuela, are restricted from coming to the United States under the travel ban enacted under President Donald Trump. When the boy's health worsened, the father decided to go ahead to California in October to get their son help. As Swileh and her husband fought for a waiver, doctors put Abdullah on life support. "I am emailing them, crying, and telling them that my son is dying," Hassan said in an interview with The Sacramento Bee newspaper. After getting electronic responses, Hassan started losing hope and was considering pulling his son off life support to end his suffering. But then a hospital social worker reached out to the council, which sued Monday, said Basim Elkarra of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Sacramento. Swileh lost months with her child over what amounted to unnecessary delays and red tape, Elkarra said. State Department spokesman Robert Palladino called it "a very sad case, and our thoughts go out to this family at this time, at this trying time." New Delhi, December 19: Former Union minister P Chidambaram arrived at the Enforcement Directorate (ED) office for questioning in the INX Media money laundering case on Wednesday, official sources said. They said the senior Congress leader was asked to depose before the investigating officer (IO) of the case to record his statement under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA). He arrived around 11:30 am along with his lawyer. The central probe agency has earlier grilled Chidambaram's son Karti Chidambaram in this case and has also attached his assets worth an estimated Rs 54 crore, located in India and abroad. INX Media Case: Delhi High Court Extends Interim Protection from Arrest to P Chidambaram Till November 29. Delhi: P Chidambaram has reached Enforcement Directorate (ED) headquarter. He was summoned by ED in INX Media Case. pic.twitter.com/2kapHlePic ANI (@ANI) December 19, 2018 The ED had registered a PMLA case in this deal case on the basis of a CBI FIR and had alleged that irregularities took place in the FIPB clearance to INX Media for receiving overseas funds to the tune of Rs 305 crore in 2007 when P Chidambaram was the Union finance minister. It had registered an Enforcement Case Information Report (ECIR), the ED's equivalent of a police FIR, against the accused named in a CBI complaint, including Karti, INX Media and its directors Peter and Indrani Mukerjea. Karti Chidambaram was also arrested on February 28 by the CBI for allegedly taking money to facilitate the FIPB clearance to INX Media in 2007 . He was later granted bail. Are you searching how to use Dropbox for US visa renewal? In this article, you will find the answer. Read on to know the requirements and needed documents. You will also find there a full guide for the renewal process. Photo: campleaders.com Source: UGC US visa renewal in Nigeria with the help of Dropbox It is possible to renew your US Visa with the help of Dropbox USA Visa renewal service. This is the method of American Visa renewal online, and you even dont need to attend the interview if you use this service. But note that the method is available only for citizens of Nigeria who already have the visa. So, how can you do the renewal? Go to the nearest GTB bank and pay the fees of applicable Machine Readable Visa for your type of visa. The important point is to save your receipt after the payment, because it is a proof of your payment. The next step is to fill US visa renewal form, to do this one should visit the website of USA embassy, fill there DS160 application form, and download it. Note that there is also a need to print the form. Then, you should visit the appointment website of CGI for the US mission in Nigeria. At the main page click the button apply now. Then, answer several questions and if the application is successful, you will receive confirmation of the application, after that print the confirmation sheet. READ ALSO: US visa renewal in Nigeria 2018: documents and requirements And now you should provide the following documents to DHL Drop box in one of the service centers: Valid Nigerian passport; Application confirmation; Passport size pictures; Visa fee receipt; International passport with the previous visa; Completed renewal visa form. It is very important to make sure that all the provided details are correct, including passport number, email, and the phone number. After the successful application, you will get the renewed visa in 7 or 10 days. See also: US visa requirements for Nigerian citizens The addresses of US Visa Dropbox locations: Abuja DHL Office 63 Adetokubbo Ademola Crescent Wuse 11 Photo: travelvisabookings.com Source: UGC Lagos Isolo office DHL house Ne Airport road junction Apapa Oshodi Expres way Victoria Island Office DHL Office Plot 230 Muri Onunola Street Kaduna location DHL Office 16 Ahmadu Bello Way, Kaduna Rivers State DHL Office GSS Document Collection Center 82 Trans Amadi - Ellah Estate, by Bewac Junction Port Harcourt Photo: secure-recruitment.com Source: UGC Edo state DHL office 62 Airport road Benin City Requirements for US visa renewal in Nigeria The renewal process is quite easy if you follow the steps of the guide: You should bring all the needed documents to DHL Document Drop-Off office within a year of expiration date of your previous visa. See also: USA visa application in Nigeria: form, fee, status checking & requirements Note that US visa renewal Drop box service is available only for the owners of non-immigrant visas (B1, B2 , L, M, F, H and J types); You can apply for renewal only if you succeed in previous visa interview; Photo: industry.nsw.gov.au Source: UGC The renewal is possible if the applicant was older than 14 years when he or she was issued the previous visa of USA; The applicants should not have any arrests at the territory of the USA and any problems with American laws; Your previous US visa should not be canceled. American visa is the document that allows you to enter the USA. The renewal process is much faster and easier than the first application for a visa. READ ALSO: USA student visa interview questions and answers in Nigeria Source: USA visa renewal in Nigeria Source: Legit - A German lady identified as Nicole Chilaka-Ukpo is heating up the internet with stories of her Nigerian experience - The young mother who is happily married to a Nigerian man is currently in the east of the country for the Christmas holidays and is loving it - She revealed that she feels at home in a foreign land and is teaching her children the Naija way A German lady identified as Nicole Chilaka-Ukpo has captured the attention of many Nigerians with interesting details of her time in the country. The young mother who is happily married to a Nigerian man is spending the Christmas holidays in the east with her kids and is loving every second of it. In a recent post shared on Facebook, she revealed that she does not bother trying to live a foreign lifestyle when she is around but instead adapts to the true African woman life and enjoys it completely. The dedicated wife shared that when they are spending the holidays with their Nigerian family in the east, they live the eastern way. She revealed that there is no 24 hour electricity and they survive. She also stated that she goes to the market with her kids, buys and cook local food because she wants them to get accustomed to their roots. READ ALSO: If anything happens to me hold my ex-husband responsible - Actress Etinosa cries out Many Nigerian social media users have found her very amusing and some admire and respect her for being a true African wife despite coming from a foreign land. Photos of her in the local market, of her carrying her kids on her back as well as preparing local delicacies has gained the attention of the internet and many people have fallen completely in love with the woman. Read her post below: Here are more photos of the German-African lady. Nicole Chilaka-Ukpo with her kids in local market in the east (Picture/Facebook) Source: Facebook READ ALSO: Incredible view from inside AY Comedian's second mansion Nicole carrying goods on her head as a true African lady (Picture/Facebook) Source: Facebook Really adorable! Meanwhile, an oyinbo man recently surprised his Nigerian sweetheart with a special proposal at Jos airport. Photos from their beautiful wedding ceremony had the internet in awe. Did you know? NAIJ.com (naija.ng) is now-> Legit.ng We have updated to serve you better. PAY ATTENTION: Read best news on Nigeria's #1 news app Top 3 Worst Blunders In Africa on Legit TV: Source: Legit.ng - The call for the disclosure of the budget implementation reports of the Nigeria Army has been condemned - According to a civil society organisation, the demand for budget implementation reports is not only an act of ignorance, but an attempt to cause distraction - The group said the call is against national interest and must be resisted by well-meaning Nigerians A civil society organisation has condemned the call for a disclosure of the Nigerian Army budget for various operations and its implementation in the last three years. The Centre for Social Justice, Equity and Transparency (CESJET) said the call by Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP) and other CSOs to the disclosure is questionable. CESJET said these groups have no moral right to inquire into the militarys activities and advised the groups to visit the Theatre of Operations to get the needed information. Speaking to journalists on Tuesday, December 18, the executive director of CESJET, Gbemisola Osaloni, said the organisation, "condemns in its totality the questionable call for the 2015, 2016 and 2017 budget implementation reports of the Nigeria Army by the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP), Enough is Enough (EiE), and BudgIT, Gbemisola queried." READ ALSO: PDP reveals reason it accepted Buhari's proposed 2019 budget presentation The organisation in the past years civil society organisations crisscrossed Northeast Nigeria to demand better welfare for troops and as well as demand for transparency in the operations of the Nigeria Army but, SERAP, EiE and BudgIT distanced themselves from such activities. Osaloni said: CESJET rejects the destabilizing moves by these organisations that know little or nothing about military operations in warfare. So to demand for budget implementation reports is not only an act of ignorance, but an attempt to cause a distraction which is most uncharitable in timing and intent." The likes of SERAP and BudgIT get their funding from organisations based outside the shores of the country and as such, it would not be far-fetched if part of the payback would be to cause a distraction such as this in an attempt to create unnecessary tension in the polity," Osaloni said. CESJET also views the call as against National interest and must be resisted by well-meaning Nigerians. Nigeria must question such a request that is capable of jeopardising the efforts of the Nigeria Army in its ongoing operations across the country. READ ALSO: NAIJ.com upgrades to Legit.ng: a letter from our Editor-in-Chief Bayo Olupohunda Furthermore, the information requested would not serve the national interest, public welfare, public interest and peace, human rights, good governance, transparency and accountability. But instead, it would advance the interest of their paymasters that are hell-bent on destabilizing Nigeria." Osaloni added that the gains recorded by the Nigeria Army in the past three years are there for all to see especially in its operations in North East Nigeria and other parts of the country. He added that it is appalling and a national disgrace on how SERAP, EiE, and BudgIT have allowed itself to be used against the interest of the country. Meanwhile, Legit.ng previously reported that the chief of army Staff, Lt. General Tukur Buratai has been urged to account for details of the money spent on Operation Lafiya Dole and Operation Crocodile smile. PAY ATTENTION: Install our latest app for Android, read best news on Nigerias #1 news app The Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP), Enough is Enough (EiE), and BudgIT disclosed this in a joint statement signed by Bamisope Adeyanju for SERAP, Seun Akinyemi for EiE Nigeria, and Atiku Samuel for BudgIT on Sunday, December 16. Leveraging on Freedom of Information act, the groups specifically wanted General Buratai to urgently provide information on the 2015, 2016 and 2017 budget implementation reports of the Nigerian Army. NAIJ.com (naija.ng) -> Legit.ng. We have updated to serve you better. Nigerian Air Force Operations Against Boko Haram | Legit TV Source: Legit Nigeria Most male entertainers, due to the nature of their job, have a bevy of ladies around them and this leads to them also having a number of children. Actively being in the life of their kids can be a bit challenging. Celebrities all over the world no doubt have a very busy schedule but they make time for important occasions that matter to them. Nigerian music star, David Davido Adeleke, is no doubt a caring father. Despite having several engagements to take up his time, he still manages to be very present in the lives of his kids. Recently his first daughter, Imade Adelekes school celebrated their end of the year party and the star made sure not to miss the occasion. He put aside the differences he might have had in the past with her mother, Sophia Momodu, as they both showed up to make their daughter happy. PAY ATTENTION: Install our latest app for Android and read the best news about Nigeria Legit.ng gathered adorable photos of Davido and Imade at the Christmas party. READ ALSO: Personal letter from the Editor-in-Chief of Legit.ng (formerly NAIJ.com) Davido might be known for his sometimes immature antics but he has proved time and again that when it comes to family, he knows the right things to do. The star who recently clocked 26, flew out to Atlanta to spend his birthday with his second daughter, Hailey. He shared their photo on his Instagram page, where he thanked his baby girl for throwing daddy the best birthday dinner. HELLO! NAIJ.com (naija.ng) upgrades to Legit.ng We keep evolving to serve our readers better. Would Davido Make a Good Nigerian President? - Nigeria Street Gist | Legit TV Source: Legit - Top military officers witness the pulling out ceremony of two major generals and three brigadier generals at the Nigerian Army medical corps in Lagos - One of the generals, Abimbola Amusu, attributes her success to hard work, dedication, commitment to service and divine help - Amusu admonishes serving military personnel to remain focused and resolute, and exhibit total loyalty to constituted authorities The Nigerian Army on Tuesday, December 18, pulled out two major generals and three brigadier generals out of service at the Nigerian Army medical corps in Lagos. The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the generals that were pulled out are Maj Gen. Abimbola Amusu, Maj Gen Patrick Falola, Brig Gen Folorunsho Jegede, Brig Gen Akinyode and Brig Gen Robbinson. READ ALSO: Breaking: Air Chief Marshal Alex Badeh, former chief of defence staff shot dead The pulling out parade of the five generals was witnessed by top military officers, both serving and retired. Amusu, in her valedictory remarks, attributed her success to hard work, dedication, commitment to service and divine help. She admonished serving military personnel to remain focused and resolute, and exhibit total loyalty to constituted authorities. Your loyalty to the Federal Republic of Nigeria can best be given through vigilant security consciousness, she said. READ ALSO: NAIJ.com upgrades to Legit.ng: a letter from our Editor-in-Chief Bayo Olupohunda The chief of army staff, Lt Gen Tukur Buratai, was represented at the event by the Corps Commander Ordinance, Maj Gen Joel Unnigbe Meanwhile, the general officer commanding, 2 Division, Nigerian Army, Major-General Okwudili Azinta, has inaugurated a General Court Martial (GCM) to try erring personnel in the division. This was disclosed in a statement issued on Monday, December 17, in Ibadan by Colonel Hassan Mohammed, the deputy director of Army public relations in the division, the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports. Azinta, according to the statement, said the inauguration of the court-martial was in line with the importance of discipline in the success of any organisation, particularly the military officers. NAIJ.com (naija.ng) -> Legit.ng: We have updated to serve you better! Soldier shares battleground experience, dedicates song to colleagues | Legit TV Source: Legit - A Nigerian returnee, Iwoche Endurance, narrates the suffering he went through during his stay in Libya - Endurance says he travelled to Libya on September 22, 2016, on credit and was detained for illegally entering the country - The returnee advises youths wishing to travel through illegal means in search for greener pasture to shelve the idea and seek better means of livelihood in Nigeria A 26- year-old man who was deported from Libya, Iwoche Endurance, has advised Nigerians desiring to travel abroad through the desert in search of greener pastures to have a rethink. Endurance, a Senior Secondary Certificate Examination (SSCE) holder, told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Wednesday, December 19, in Warri, saying we went through hell in Libya and prayed for death but did not find death". Endurance, who hails from the south-south region of the country, said that he entered Libya on credit in 2016 having been swindled in Nigeria by his travelling agent. READ ALSO: LIVE UPDATES: Buhari presenting 2019 budget to National Assembly joint session The returnee said that he was rescued back into Nigeria in September by the federal government. He said he sold all his property to raise money for the adventure, adding that unknown to him that his agent did not channel the money properly. He said:I made the decision to travel to Libya myself based on what my friends posted on the social media. So I traveled to Libya on September 22, 2016 on credit, the agent I gave money did not remit it to the driver, so he put me on credit. When I got to Libya, I was imprisoned, they call it Track A its like I was kidnapped, a local prison." They held me to ransom for entering Libya illegally, I have to pay double of the amount that supposed to convey me into the country." There are many Nigerians inside the Track A, they maltreat us in the morning, afternoon, evening and night and when the money is delayed, no food." READ ALSO: NAIJ.com upgrades to Legit.ng: a letter from our Editor-in-Chief Bayo Olupohunda We went through hell, people prayed that God should keep them alive but in our case, it was not so, we were praying for death, that God should take our life peacefully. Endurance, who was a supplier of stationery in Warri before he travelled, said that people are still falling prey because those who had experienced the agony do not like to tell others. He advised youths wishing to travel through illegal means, in search for greener pasture to shelve the idea and seek better means of livelihood in Nigeria. If you are not educated, learn a trade. The returnee also blames the upsurge of people rushing out of the country through illegal means on the government at all levels. Nigerians are hardworking people but government should create more enabling business atmosphere for people to access loans to do business. Endurance commended the various NGOs involved in the enlightenment and cautioning people on the dangers inherent in migrating through the desert, particularly the PHEW Foundation International. Meanwhile, the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), on Wednesday, December 19, said a total of 4,123 Nigerians voluntarily returned from Libya between January 6, and December 18. The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the Acting Zonal Coordinator, NEMA, South West Zone, Segun Afolayan, made the disclosure while receiving a fresh batch of 140 Nigerians who arrived from Libya. Afolayan lauded the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) and the European Union (EU) for facilitating the return of Nigerians stranded in the volatile North African country. NAIJ.com (naija.ng) -> Legit.ng: We have updated to serve you better! Mass deportation: Tales of woes from Libya Legit TV Source: Legit Nigeria Bethlehem police were investigating inappropriate contact involving a child in the city on Monday, the second consecutive school day such an incident was reported. This latest incident occurred Monday morning in front of Donegan Elementary School on South Side, police said in a post on their Facebook page. A man of Hispanic descent, 30 to 40 years old with a goatee made inappropriate contact with a child, according to police. That followed two incidents between 3:15 and 3:30 p.m. Friday in which a man exposed himself to students walking home from Northeast Middle School, according to a school district alert to parents. Those incidents occurred near the intersections of Maple and Jennings streets and Maple and Frankford streets and involved a man described as white, 30 to 50 years old with a medium build and light-colored hair, police said. Police asked community members to immediately report anyone suspicious or any suspicious activity to police, and asked anyone with information on the incidents Friday or Monday to call Detective Lt. Benjamin Hackett at 610-997-7677. Kurt Bresswein may be reached at kbresswein@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @KurtBresswein and Facebook. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook. Bethlehem police said a city home raided Tuesday for cockfighting complaints had 26 birds in deplorable conditions and videos of the fowl being used in fights on the property. Police said complaints about the alleged bird fights led them to 532 Ontario St. this week, but back in October officers raided the home and said they found cocaine, marijuana, handguns and $33,000 in cash. Ruben Rosado, 42, was charged following the October raid and was free after posting $150,000 bail. Police said the October raid led to evidence of the cockfighting at the home, and to the warrant served on Wednesday. Now Rosado has new charges following Tuesdays search, and was free after posting an additional $150,000 bail in the cockfighting case. Rosados attorney in the drug case, Eric Dowdle, was not immediately available to comment about the new charges. When officers arrived at Rosados home on Tuesday, detectives said they found makeshift coops both inside the detached garage and attached to the outside of the building; the temperature outside at the time of the raid was around 38 degrees. Police said they seized 26 birds, nine of them red roosters, and at least two had significant injuries," including injuries on their heads and necks, as well as broken wings and legs. Detectives also recovered significant quantities of vitamins and chemical additives for the birds; metal clips marked Rubencito Rosado; and a stuffed fabric training tool that police say was used to condition the birds to be aggressive. Officers also found crack and $2,000 in cash, police said. Rosado reportedly told police he did not fight the roosters in Bethlehem, but rather ships them to Puerto Rico to fight there, where it is legal. Rosado said the two injured roosters were from when the birds accidentally fought each other, according to police. On Rosados new cellphone, police said they found a video from Nov. 27 of two roosters fighting in the homes back yard. Rosado was charged with two counts of aggravated animal cruelty and animal fighting, as well as possession of animal fighting paraphernalia and possession of cocaine. The Lehigh and Northampton County Humane Society took custody of the roosters, which were immediately taken to be examined/assessed by veterinarians. On Oct. 26, detectives said they found 94 grams of cocaine, 14 grams of pot, two .45-caliber handguns, a loaded Glock model 30 and ammunition in the home. The cocaine had a street value of more than $5,500, according to police. Police said they found evidence of drug distribution including a digital scale, packaging material, a significant amount of cutting agent and more than $33,000 in cash. Rosado was charged with possession with intent to deliver cocaine, possession of a controlled substance and possession of drug paraphernalia. During the October raid, detectives saw only 10 roosters in coops in the detached garage. They also found photos of Rosado holding roosters with their combs, wattles and spurs removed, and their breast feathers removed, signs the SPCA said that the fowl were prepared for fighting. The SPCA told Bethlehem police there is no cultural purpose behind that specific grooming. But it was Rosados cellphone, seized in the October raid, that provided more, specific evidence, according to police. Officers said they found several videos of roosters fighting to the death in 2017 and 2018. One video shows roosters fighting in Rosados garage, and a hand in the video has the same tattoo as Rosados, police said. Text messages on the phone reveal Rosado talking about conditioning the birds, increasing their strength and stamina to fight, according to police. Police asked anyone with information on drug activity or other crimes to call the department tip line at 610-691-6660 or the Bethlehem Police Department 911 Center non-emergency line at 610-865-7187. Calls can remain anonymous. Sarah Cassi may be reached at scassi@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow her on Twitter @SarahCassi. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook. Federal prosecutors know the identity of the man who games online under the screen name Neuroscientist, and who is allegedly behind a swatting incident at Lafayette College, but they arent saying who he is. U.S. Attorney William McSwain released more details Wednesday in the case of an argument during an online game that ended with a Lafayette College student being framed for a bomb threat at the Easton school. If you make threats like those involved here, no matter who you are or where you go, even if you are in Alaska, we will figure out what you did, we will hunt you down and we will hold you accountable, McSwain said. Prosecutors previously said it all began when the Lafayette student, who they have not identified, was playing the online game Counter-Strike on May 5 and communicating with fellow players via Discord, a free voice and text program. The student got into an argument with a person with the handle Neuroscientist, a gamer known for doxing -- the practice of broadcasting private or identifiable information about others, the FBI said. Asked if investigators have identified Neuroscientist, McSwain said his office identified individuals and interviewed them, and the interviews led them to Gavin Casdorph, of Anchorage, Alaska. The incident is still under investigation. Its possible other people could be charged ... and were also investigating all the activities of the defendant, McSwain said. The FBI said after the argument, Neuroscientist asked Casdorph to send in an anonymous threat to Lafayette College." Casdorph used a phone number he bought off a Russian website to set up accounts he used and TOR software to shield his identity, according to the FBI. Casdorph registered a Twitter account in the Lafayette students name and then created a second account with the name BdanJafarSaleem to send the actual threats, the FBI said. Casdorph also created a Yahoo email account to send the threats to several college officials, an FBI special agent added. Casdorph said it was a generic threat that had something to do with ISIS, the FBI said. The threats, which indicated numerous explosive devices were planted on the campus and indicated an allegiance to ISIS, caused the college to take steps to protect students, including moving the location of its graduation ceremony, the FBI said. After hours of searching, it was determined the threats were unfounded, authorities said. A person working with the Russian website linked the fake accounts set up in the students name to the eventual Twitter account used in the threats, the FBI said. The student was contacted Dec. 6 by law enforcement at his home in Middleburg, Virginia, court papers say. In his interview with the FBI, Casdoprh allegedly boasted to agents they wouldnt have been able to link him to the crime unless he admitted it. We want to send a clear message to those who engage in stunts like Mr. Casdorphs. You are not smarter than us," McSwain said. Whether these sort of threats are made on social media, scrawled on a bathroom wall or shared in conversation between students, we will find out about it. We will treat every one of these threats seriously. This is not a game and this is not a joke. Casdorph was arrested Dec. 12 after his interview with the FBI in Alaska. He has been detained in Alaska and was ordered held following a detention hearing on Tuesday in federal court. He will be brought to Philadelphia in the near future, McSwain said. The threat raised questions of how the colleges students and staff were kept abreast of what was happening, while neighbors to the campus were not. Lafayette College President Alison Byerly said the college has a targeted messaging system for its campus, and it informs Easton police immediately of threats or problems so the department can notify the local community. After the threat last May, Byerly said the college has made a habit of posting relevant college announcements to local Facebook pages, as well as the colleges social media accounts. Sarah Cassi may be reached at scassi@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow her on Twitter @SarahCassi. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook. A federal investigative report calls into question government claims about the safety of biosolids -- fertilizer made from processed human sewage sludge. The report issued last month by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Office of Inspector General describes inadequate science behind the approved use of biosolids for land application. Under the question "Are biosolids safe?" on the EPA website, "this constraint is not disclosed," the report states. EPA officials dispute some of the findings of the agency's own inspector general, and an industry group calls the report's tone "unnecessarily alarmist." The OIG report makes 13 recommendations, but says the EPA provided acceptable corrective actions and milestone dates in response to only eight. The remaining five remained unresolved at the time the report was issued Nov. 15. Biosolids have been used on as many as dozens of farms in the Lehigh Valley, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. The DEP is aware of the report and reviewing it, spokeswoman Colleen Connolly said this week. Nationwide, about 47 percent of biosolids generated by "major publicly operated" wastewater treatment plants "are applied to land to improve and maintain productive soils and stimulate plant growth," the report states. In the Slate Belt, Plainfield Township is home to the proposal from Synagro Technologies Inc. to build the Slate Belt Heat Recovery Center -- a plant for processing sewage sludge into biosolids, which can also be used for industrial fuel. "According to the EPA and other stakeholders interviewed, there have been no reports of cases of significant health or environmental damage resulting from the land application of biosolids," the report states. "Nevertheless, many of the same stakeholders we spoke with told us that more research is needed to determine whether currently unregulated and emerging pollutants found in biosolids are harmful and should be regulated." Sewage contains four major types of pathogens: bacteria, viruses, protozoa and parasitic worms called helminths, the report states, citing the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. To create Class A biosolids, which receive more thorough treatment than sludge used to form Class B biosolids, the EPA has approved six pathogen reduction alternatives, according to the report. The EPA also oversees testing in biosolids for nine heavy metals to ensure they are within acceptable concentrations: arsenic, cadmium, copper, lead, mercury, molybdenum, nickel, selenium and zinc. But beyond those nine, "the EPA identified 352 pollutants in biosolids. The EPA does not have complete risk assessment information on these pollutants; therefore the agency cannot say, whether the pollutants are safe or unsafe when found in biosolids," the Office of Inspector General report states. The OIG further says it compared those 352 pollutants to three federally maintained lists of hazardous substances and found 61 of the pollutants cross-listed. Of those 61 biosolids pollutants, according to the report: 32 are hazardous wastes under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, including four described as acutely hazardous. 35 are EPA priority pollutants. 16 are on the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Healths list of hazardous drugs. Signage warns of the use of biosolids Jan. 29, 2015, on fields off Tatamy Road near Van Buren Road in Palmer Township.EXT The report raises "unanswered questions with respect to the long-term effects" of trace pharmaceuticals and chemicals and "concerns that biosolids may be creating antimicrobial-resistant strains of pathogens that can adversely impact human health." Federal regulations for biosolids do not require the EPA to obtain the data necessary to complete risk assessments on these 352 pollutants, according to the report. Even if assessments were required, the EPA in 2013 under President Barack Obama consolidated its oversight of biosolids compliance monitoring and enforcement into the Biosolids Center of Excellence, the report states: "At the time of our review, there were two staff at the center." By reducing staff and resources, the EPA is "creating barriers" in biosolids enforcement, the report asserts. "Without such data, the agency cannot determine whether biosolids pollutants with incomplete risk assessments are safe," the Office of Inspector General found. "The EPAs website, public documents and biosolids labels do not explain the full spectrum of pollutants in biosolids and the uncertainty regarding their safety. Consequently, the biosolids program is at risk of not achieving its goal to protect public health and the environment." Biosolids are something residents across the Lehigh Valley have had to adjust to. Most biosolids are applied to fields in the fall and early spring when standing crops are not present, though not when fields are covered with snow or frozen, the Penn State Extension says on its website. Offensive odors in biosolids are most often caused by sulfur, mercaptans, ammonia, amines and organic fatty acids, according to the EPA. The beauty of biosolids is that (it) is an abundant source of food for microorganisms including proteins, amino acids and carbohydrates. These beasts in biosolids degrade these energy sources and odorous compounds are formed, states an EPA Biosolids and Residuals Management Fact Sheet. In its response to the inspector generals report, EPA administrators blast a lack of any attempt to make it clear to the reader that the occurrence of pollutants in biosolids does not necessarily mean that those pollutants pose a risk to public health and the environment. "We are particularly concerned about how the science is presented in the OIG report," wrote the administrators in the agency's Offices of Water and Enforcement/Compliance Assurance. "It is biased and raises alarm due to the use of narrowly selected studies and examples, and information that is taken out of context or that is not relevant to the Clean Water Act (CWA) statutory requirements. Also, the subject is presented in a scientifically debatable manner." Bill Toffey, executive director of the Mid-Atlantic Biosolids Association, disputes that science has not kept up with the use of biosolids. He argues there has been substantial research, including by private groups and state agencies. Its not like the science hasnt continued, the biosolids industry group representative told lehighvalleylive.com. Its just that the EPA hasnt folded it into their mechanism of regulatory assessments. We feel that the tone of the OIG report was unnecessarily alarmist. Converting sewage sludge to biosolids is a beneficial way to reuse something every human creates every day, he said, with the alternatives being landfilling or incinerating it. "The reason we have land application of biosolids is because it works for the farmer, is because it actually does provide an extra kick in soil fertility and crop production above and beyond what you can achieve with chemical fertilizers," said Toffey, whose association is based in Philadelphia. Kurt Bresswein may be reached at kbresswein@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @KurtBresswein and Facebook. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook. Had Paul Serrano III waited three weeks to carry out his assassination orders, hed never have the opportunity for parole. But because he was three weeks shy of his 18th birthday when he killed 15-year-old Kevin Muzila, he was granted the possibility of parole on Wednesday. Northampton County Judge Stephen Baratta sentenced Serrano on Wednesday to 45 years to life in prison. Serrano pleaded guilty in 2007 to the murder of Muzila in Bethlehem and was sentenced to life without parole. But the state Supreme Court has ruled that life isnt an automatic sentence for juvenile killers and should only be reserved for the most extreme cases. That decision led to Wednesdays re-sentencing hearing. Serrano, now 29, was a member of the Bloods gang when he was carrying out orders to kill someone on Dec. 18, 2006. He knocked on the wrong door and killed the 15-year-old Northeast Middle School student by mistake. "I just remember hearing 5 or 6 shots. Pure panic just came over me, said Muzilas sister, Rachel, in court on Wednesday. She was 17 when her brother was killed. "It tore apart my family. Things were just never the same after that, she said. Nancy Muzila testified she needs medication to get through life after the loss of her son. She would rather ignore the winter holidays, she said. I dont do them. Im trying because I have grandchildren now. I dont have it in me, she said. Baratta acknowledged Serranos horrific childhood, which prompted him to join a gang for a sense of belonging. He was beaten by his father and likely suffers some sort of brain damage. District Attorney John Morganelli said that doesnt mitigate Serranos responsibility for his actions. There are thousands of people who have bad lives, millions of people who have bad lives. They dont join a gang. They dont go kill somebody. Its not an explanation. Its an excuse, Morganelli said. Morganelli said Serrano has had 12 years to prove hes reformed since his conviction. During that time hes racked up 38 misconducts in prison, including 22 requiring him to be removed from the general prison population. In one incident, he slashed an inmates face, Morganelli said. Defense attorney Tyree Blair said Serrano acted the way he did because he had no hope of release. But Baratta said Serranos claims that hes a changed man now arent backed up by any positive actions. I look at his record and theres nothing that hes done over the last 10 years to speak to me about rehabilitation. Its a lost 10 years, Baratta said. Morganelli asked for a sentence of 50 years to life in prison. A law passed in Pennsylvania in 2012 for murders committed by juveniles carries a mandatory sentence of 35 years to life. Although that law didnt apply in this case, Baratta used it as a benchmark while fashioning his sentence. Serrano will get credit for the 12 years he has served, which means hell be eligible for parole after 33 more years. Baratta said Serrano doesnt deserve credit for those 12 years, which is why he imposed a 45-year minimum rather than a 35-year minimum sentence. I dont know that he really deserves to be released into the community but hell have the opportunity to do so in his early 60s, Baratta said. The better he behaves, the more likely hell be released some day. If he doesnt behave, then this will really be a life sentence. Rudy Miller may be reached at rmiller@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @RudyMillerLV. Find Easton area news on Facebook. Allentown police investigating package thefts from front porches throughout the city are trying to identify a man seen on surveillance footage. If you recognize the man, you are asked to call the Detective Pedro Cruz at the Criminal Investigations Division at 610-437-7721 ext. 2354. Callers can remain anonymous. The flyer can be seen on the city website. Tony Rhodin may be reached at arhodin@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @TonyRhodin. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook. A 25-year-old man delivering packages for Amazon in New Jersey decided to help himself to deliveries left by other carriers at homes in Keansburg and Metuchen last week, authorities said. William Tindall III, of Jersey City was arrested in Metuchen on Saturday and charged with theft, Keansburg police said in a statement Monday. Metuchen police charged Tindall with two counts of theft after officers pulled him over on Oakland Avenue for a motor vehicle violation, Chief Dave Irizarry said. Employed by Last Mile Delivery, an Elizabeth company subcontracted to deliver for Amazon, Tindall was recorded by a surveillance camera at a home in Keansburg on Friday, according to police. He dropped a package on the porch, returned to his car and then moments later went back to the house and took packages delivered by UPS and the U.S. Postal Service, according to police. While police were investigating the next day, a borough worker found opened packages in a trash can. Police then spoke with another Last Mile Delivery Driver as well as the companys owner, who helped them identify Tindall. The owner also found additional stolen packages in the delivery vehicle Tindall used and turned the over to Metuchen police. Tindall has since been fired. This behavior is unacceptable and does not reflect the high standards we have for delivery service partners, Amazon spokesman Ernesto Apreza said in an emailed statement. This individual is no longer delivering Amazon packages. Jeff Goldman may be reached at jeff_goldman@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JeffSGoldman. Find NJ.com on Facebook. Christopher Baj did more than damage a door when he fired a gun through it. He damaged his sons and his wife, Mia Darling-Baj, who said she was lucky not to be struck by the bullets. Darling-Baj said her husbands abusive behavior started long before the date of the gunfire and the subsequent nine-hour police standoff. And its effects continue to linger, she said. Chris tried to kill me that night because I caused him pain and embarrassment, Darling-Baj told Northampton County Judge Stephen Baratta on Wednesday. Baratta sentenced Baj to six to 17 years in prison. Hours prior to the shooting and standoff, Darling-Baj served her husband with divorce papers at the home they shared on Toursdale Drive in Bethlehem Township. Baj fired the shots while his sons were in the home Jan. 30. Police eventually got the boys out safely and stormed the house. Baj apologized in court for the incident. It was the biggest mistake I ever made. I will forever regret that, Baj said. The judge found Bajs apology baseless. His inability to control his wife and control the divorce brought this about, Baratta said. A jury convicted Baj of aggravated assault but couldnt reach a verdict on whether Baj attempted to kill his wife. Baj said he brought the divorce papers to the bedroom to discuss them with his wife. Darling-Baj said shes convinced he didnt want to talk. He wanted me dead, but before I was to die he wanted me to know it was my fault, she said. She said she has looked him in the eyes during court proceedings and found no forgiveness in his return gaze. There is no remorse on his face. There is only the look of death, she said. Darling-Baj said the couples sons remain traumatized. They wont sleep in their bedrooms and wont go to sleep without her present in the room. One of her sons kept repeating that he doesnt want to die long after the incident. The older boy confessed his father hid guns around the house and shared his secret but told him not to discuss it with his mother. Darling-Baj said her son told her, It could have been worse. Daddy could have used the automatic gun he has in the office and youd be dead for sure. The judge acknowledged Baj had the opportunity to kill his wife when she ran from the bedroom but didnt. He was only tough enough to shoot at his wife behind the door. He didnt have to look at his dirty deed, the judge said. Darling-Baj begged for the maximum sentence allowed by law for her safety and the safety of her sons. Please do what you can under the law to keep him away from me so we can be safe and figure out what comes next for us, Darling-Baj told Baratta. Defense attorney Eric Dowdle said the five- to 10-year mandatory minimum sentence for the aggravated assault was enough for someone with no prior criminal record. Baratta determined Baj needed more time. For a 60-year-old, a 17-year maximum sentence is significant, Baratta said. I think the requirement that he serve at least six years in jail is an adequate start with regard to his incarceration. If he can successfully compete treatment, he should get the benefit of parole. Thats up to them (the parole board). Otherwise its going to amount to a life sentence. Rudy Miller may be reached at rmiller@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @RudyMillerLV. Find Easton area news on Facebook. A 27-year-old Florida man who was shot Tuesday evening by a municipal police officer after a 17-mile chase through Carbon County died soon after, Pennsylvania State Police and the Lehigh County Coroners Office report. The wounded man taken to St. Lukes University Hospital in Fountain Hill and was pronounced dead at 7:09 p.m., authorities said. He was identified as Danny Washington, of Fort Lauderdale. An autopsy was performed Wednesday under the authority of the Lehigh County Coroners Office, police said. Washington died from a gunshot wound to the body and the manner of death is homicide, because someone else killed him, Coroner Scott Grim ruled. The pursuit by municipal officers, which began about 5 p.m. after a traffic stop by Beaver Meadows police, ended about 15 minutes later in front of 350 Interchange Road, also known as Route 209, about 200 yards north of Court Street in Franklin Township, Carbon County, police and the coroners office said. Spike strips helped stop the white minivan with New Jersey plates, police said. The people inside wouldnt get out so municipal officers approached the minivan and tried to take them into custody, police said. A municipal officer and Washington got into a struggle about 5:25 pm. and the officers weapon fired, mortally wounding the man, police and the coroners office said. The investigation is continuing, police said. Tony Rhodin may be reached at arhodin@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @TonyRhodin. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook. UPDATE: Man shot by officer after 17-mile chase died soon after, authorities say INITIAL POST: A 15-minute police pursuit on Tuesday evening that covered 17 miles in Carbon County ended with a person being shot by an officer, according to Pennsylvania State Police. The chase began about 5 p.m. when Beaver Meadows police pulled over a white minivan with New Jersey plates, but the vehicle fled the stop, according to police and an online report from WFMZ-TV. Beaver Meadows is a borough about 25 miles northwest of Walnutport. Spike strips were put down late in the chase, WFMZ said. The van eventually stopped on Route 209 about 200 yards north of Court Street in Franklin Township, Carbon County, police said. At the end of the pursuit a single gunshot was fired and an occupant of the vehicle was struck, according to state police. The state police Major Case Team from the Hazleton barracks was brought in to investigate the shooting, which was in the purview of the Lehighton barracks. The chase went through Nesquehoning, Jim Thorpe and Lehighton, WFMZ said. The Morning Call reported speeds hit up to 80 mph during the pursuit, but toward the end the chase slowed down, according to a witness interviewed by WFMZ. With 15 police vehicles driving by, you would think of a high-speed chase but it wasnt a high-speed chase, they were driving about 25 miles per hour, Tyler Balliet told the TV station. All four tires were blown out on the van and sparks were flying from the wheels, Balliet told WFMZ. State police didnt immediately say how many people were take into custody, but WFMZ said it was four. The wounded person was taken to a St. Lukes Hospital for treatment, police said. The road was shut until just before 10 p.m., WFMZ said. A trooper on Wednesday morning at the Lehighton barracks said there was no additional information to release at the moment and she couldnt answer further questions. This post will be updated if a state police public information officer responds to several questions. Tony Rhodin may be reached at arhodin@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter@TonyRhodin. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook. 26-year-old Alpha man with two warrants for his arrest out of New Jersey took a taxi to the Best Buy in Bethlehem Township to steal laptops, police report. Brody Bodine Crowley, of the first block of John Street, was wanted on a burglary charge out of Hunterdon County and a probation violation out of Somerset County in a drug case, court papers say. Hes being held without bail in Northampton County Prison pending extradition proceedings. A township officer was called Tuesday after Crowley, wearing the same clothes he had on the day before when he stole three laptops and other gear worth $927.97 from the store, was again seen at the Best Buy at 4413 Birkland Place, police said. The officer detained Crowley, a former Lebanon Township, Hunterdon County, resident, and then watched surveillance video from Monday, police said. It is without a doubt that Crowley was the actor removing all above items from the Best Buy, the officer wrote in court papers. Crowley told the officer he took a taxi to the store and the officer then found a gray minivan parked in a handicapped spot near the store, police said. The driver said she is employed by a taxi service and drove Crowley on Monday to the Walmart in Lower Nazareth Township and Monday and Tuesday to the Best Buy, police said. Once Crowley finished shopping on Monday, the driver took him to Twin Rivers Trading Post pawn shop in Downtown Easton, police said. The driver also gave the officer a plaid shopping bag that Crowley left in the minivan, police said. The bag contained a new Lenovo tablet with a charger and cord, but it wasnt from Best Buy, police said. The store continues to look through surveillance video to see if Crowley stole anything else, police said. Crowley was arraigned Wednesday morning before District Judge on charges of retail theft and receiving stolen property. His bail on those charges was set at $10,000, records show. His preliminary hearing is tentatively scheduled 9 a.m. Dec. 31 in District Judge Patricia Broscius' court in Bethlehem Township. Tony Rhodin may be reached at arhodin@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @TonyRhodin. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook. An Easton hair salon beat out competitors from across the nation to become the 2018 Independent Small Business of the Year, according to a news release. Suddenly Samantha was selected from among the 10 finalists for the charitable efforts of salon owner Stephen Flowers. It made the finals by accumulating online votes. The contest is run by the small business organization Independent We Stand. I am absolutely humbled and overwhelmed, to say the least," Flowers said in the news release. The prize comes with a branding, advertising and public relations makeover from the independent advertising agency The Meridian Group worth $25,000. Flowers gets a $1,000 STIHL equipment certificate, a plaque, and public relations and social media recognition. Suddenly Samantha was among the top 10 online vote getters, which lifted him into the finals. A panel of judges named Suddenly Samantha the winner due to events such as his annual offer of free haircuts and a hot meal to the homeless. He auctions off skateboard decks to raise money for Safe Harbor shelter in Easton and recruited men to shave their beards to raise money for the Lehigh Valley Cancer Support Community. His No Child Left Behind initiative provides more than 150 free haircuts, more than 300 backpacks and school supplies to disadvantaged Easton children. Heres the list of finalists: Advantage Industries, a full-service computer technology firm, Columbia, Md. Armstrong Mobile Blasting, a dustless sandblasting business, Logansport, Ind. Common Ground Grocery, a natural products grocer, Bloomington, Ill. H&H Supply, a plumbing, electrical and home supply store, Marion, Ky. Indian Trail Hardware, a hardware store, Indian Trail, N.C. K&K True Value Hardware, a hardware store, Bettendorf, Iowa Lakeland General Store, a hardware store, Pelican Rapids, Minn. Suddenly Samantha Salon, a hair salon in Easton, Pa. The Cross Eyed Owl Gift Shop, a gift and home decor shop, Valatie, N.Y. The Lili Pad, a baby and childrens clothing store, Birmingham, Ala. Rudy Miller may be reached at rmiller@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @RudyMillerLV. Find Easton area news on Facebook. A farmer has agreed to comply with High Court orders to vacate 50 acres of land he owns. The High Court heard on Tuesday that Tom Morrin will to surrender vacant possession, remove all machinery and livestock from 50 acres of land at Caragh, Naas, owned by Mr Morrin, to a bank-appointed receiver appointed over the property. He has also agreed to cease interfering with agents of the receiver, Mr Tom Kavanagh of Deloitte Ireland, from carrying out their duties in respect of the property. Mr Morrin appeared before the Court after Ms Justice Leonie Reynolds ruled last week that she was "satisfied beyond reasonable doubt" Mr Morrin is in breach of orders made against him by the High Court in July 2017. The judge in her judgement also dismissed applications by Mr Morrin of Poplar Square, Naas, to have the receiver's case thrown out, on the grounds it was frivolous, vexatious and an abuse of process. The Judge further dismissed Mr Morrin's bid for an order preventing Mr Kavanagh's and his agents from trespassing on his property. On Tuesday Ms Justice Reynolds was informed that Mr Morrin had agreed to orders including that he would remove all machinery and livestock from the lands, and not interfere with the receivership. He also undertook not to appeal last week's decision and withdraw his appeal against the orders made against him in 2017. It was also agreed that a stay is to be placed on those orders until February. Previously the court heard that Mr Kavanagh was appointed as receiver over the lands in 2013 by Bank of Scotland Ireland arising out of a mortgage agreement alleged entered into between it and Mr Morrin in 2006. The loan was subsequently acquired by a financial fund Pentire DAC. The receiver then brought proceedings against Mr Morrin for his ongoing contempt seeking orders including that the farmer be attached and brought before the court for his alleged ongoing contempt of the 2017 orders. Mr Kavanagh, represented by Stephen Byrne Bl, claimed the defendant had flouted the order, on which no stay has been placed. Mr Morrin had remained in occupation of the property and continued to farm the lands, it repossession. It was also claimed that on a number of occasions security firm personnel engaged by the receiver had engaged difficulties. On certain days cattle were seen on the lands and agents the receiver had employed were told to leave the property by a person purporting to be an employee of the defendant. The matter will return before the court in February. Twenty young jobseekers who participated in the recent Defence Forces Employment Support Scheme at the Defence Forces Training Centre in the Curragh graduated from the scheme last week. This voluntary scheme is targeted at 18-24 year olds who are on the Live Register. It aims to provide participants with the knowledge and skills that will assist them to participate fully in society, and enhance their capacity to pursue employment, work experience or further educational opportunities. A central element throughout the programme is to enhance the self-confidence and personal drive of the participants by building their training and physical capability. The 20 participants were presented with their graduation certificates at a ceremony held last Thursday which was presided over by Col. Brendan Delaney. The Minister with Responsibility for Defence, Mr Paul Kehoe, T.D., also welcomed the graduates on the day. The scheme is described as an innovative joint initiative between the Department of Defence, the Defence Forces, the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection and the Education and Training Boards Ireland. Minister Kehoe extended his warmest congratulations to all of the participants for the commitment they have made. He stated that they have all been on a fantastic journey of learning and self-discovery. They, together with their families and friends can be justifiably proud of their learning, training and physical achievements. In recognising the role of the Defence Forces, Minister Kehoe said The Defence Forces has an exceptional record in creating leaders and decision makers. The Employment Support Scheme has provided the benefit of that experience; this, coupled with the education component, will set the participants apart from other jobseekers. Col. Delaney congratulated each participant on their achievement in successfully completing the programme and stated that it is a milestone in their professional and personal development. Two Kildare business people are among the first in the country to achieve a new accolade as thought leaders in their industries. Justin J Smal of Clane-based Monread CRM, a Zoho partner, has been honoured as a thought leader for his work in Customer Relationship Management software. And Aileen OBrien of OBrien PR, Newbridge has been similarly recognised for her work in public relations. Naas-based N&C Enterprises, which specialises in the aggregates and building products sector has been awarded the coveted All-Ireland Business All-Star accreditation an independently verified standard mark for indigenous businesses, based on rigorous selection criteria. The awards and accreditation are overseen by the All-Ireland Business Foundation, whose adjudication panel is chaired by Dr Briga Hynes of the Kemmy Business School at the University of Limerick and Kieran Ring, CEO of the Global Institute of Logistics. Dr Hynes said the accreditation, which is now held by 200 firms, is needed by the thousands of small and medium businesses out there who operate to their own standards, but have nothing to measure them by. It provides very important credible and transparent benchmarking that hasnt been available up to now, allowing companies to very clearly understand where they are versus their competitors, she said. We evaluate a companys background, trustworthiness and performance, and we speak to customers, employees and vendors. We also anonymously approach the company as a customer and report back on the experience. The business goes through at least two interviews and is scored on every part of the process against set metrics. Internally, this process gives confidence to the organisation, allows them to leverage their advantages and identify areas that they need to improve in, particularly in innovation and product development. The All-Ireland Business Foundation will be responsible for identifying and accrediting best-in-class Irish businesses, overseeing both the awards and ongoing accreditation, promoting peer dialogue, in addition to hosting the All-Ireland Business Summit on May 1 and 2 next year. It will also create an active community of progressive businesses and ambitious business leaders who work together and openly share knowledge. At a Croke Park presentation event last week, Minister of State for Trade, Employment and Business, Pat Breen, said the commitment to quality of the small to medium enterprise sector was critical to the Irish economy. Ireland has the fastest growing economy in Europe and one of the fastest rates of business start-ups, said Minister Breen. Small to medium enterprises make up 99% of Irish businesses and their importance to the Irish economy can never be understated. I am very proud of all the businesses here today, their commitment to quality, as evidenced by gaining coveted All-Ireland Business All-Star accreditation, will ensure Irish SMEs continue to grow. Members of Ballinamore Business and Community groups met with Leitrim County Council representatives and Gardai this week to decide that no bye-laws are needed in the town. The meeting was facilitated in Ballinamore's Tourist Office on Monday, December 17. The possibility of new bye-laws was proposed by Cllr John McCartin last month at Ballinamore Municipal District Meeting. He felt parking laws could help avoid traffic disruption caused by recreational vehicles parking in the towns thoroughfare. He asked could a bye-law be passed that prior consent be needed from Leitrim County Council for parking large vehicles in the town. He explained this would allow for such vehicles if the town had a festival or large event planned. Cllr McCartin brought up the issue after the majority of businesses in Ballinamore closed early on November 15 and 16 due to a large party in town. Gardai said there were no reports of any incidents arising from both nights. Senior Engineer Darragh OBoyle had stated at the November meeting that we cannot have an a la carte system explaining all vehicles would be subject to any new bye-laws. Chairperson of the Ballinamore District, Caillian Ellis who attended the meeting in Ballinamore on Monday said, locals were afraid of bye-laws being introduced and the effect it might have on the town and local drivers. It was agreed by community members, the council and Superintendent Kevin English that the incident in November had been a once off and no new parking bye -laws were needed. According to Cllr Ellis the meeting was short and to the point and the matter is now closed. Read the previous story: Call for new bye-law to be passed in Ballinamore As part of an ongoing investigations into an incident at Falsk, Strokestown on Sunday 16th December, 2018 a number of planned searches were carried out this morning across Co. Roscommon. During the operation four separate locations, including houses and out-houses were searched. One firearm was recovered and a number of vehicles including a lorry and teleporter were seized. Two men aged in their 50s and 60s were arrested and are currently detained under Section 30 of the Offences against the State Act,1939 at Castlerea Garda Station. This mornings operation follows a number of searches carried out in counties Dublin and Meath on Monday, where members of the Special Detective Unit recovered a number of items including documentation and phones as part of the investigation. Speaking today at Castlerea Garda Station Chief Superintendent Tony Healy said, We would again like to thank the community for their continued support following recent events in Strokestown and would again appeal to anyone with information to come forward and contact us here at Castlerea Garda Station on 094 9621630 or the Garda Confidential Line 1800 666 111. The investigation is ongoing and further updates will follow. AN ELDERLY farmer who shot and injured another farmer in a long-running dispute over a right of way has been sentenced to 12 months imprisonment. Ted ODonoghue, aged 74, of Kilmoreen, Kildimo, had pleaded guilty to a number of charges, including recklessly discharging a firearm, at Ballycasey, Kildimo on June 16, 2017. Imposing sentence this Wednesday, Judge Tom ODonnell said despite the age and poor health of the defendant a custodial sentence had to be imposed given the seriousness of the offence. During an earlier sentencing hearing, Detective Garda Jason Mitchell told Limerick Circuit Court the incident was connected with a long-running dispute. He said a laneway which passes through Mr ODonoghues lands is used by a number of other farmers to access their lands. However, the defendant has taken issue with how the laneway is used and does not believe tractors and heavy vehicles should be driven on the laneway. They are tearing it asunder, he told gardai following his arrest adding the right of way dates back to the era of horses and carts. Det Garda Mitchell said a major investigation was launched after John Hayes (67) sustained wounds to his shoulder after Mr ODonoghue discharged his legally-held shotgun at him at around 10.30am. Mr Hayes sheepdog, Lassie, who was in the cab of his John Deere tractor died after being struck by multiple pellets. The court heard Mr Hayes was confronted Mr ODonoghue as he arrived to carry out work on his farm. The defendant, who was inside the gate, told him you are not coming in here, you are never again coming in here. He then retrieved his shotgun from his van and discharged a shot in the direction of Mr Hayes and his tractor. Mr Hayes told gardai he heard his dog screaching but did not immediately realise he had been shot. Following his arrest later in the day, Mr ODonoghue told gardai he had blazed Mr Hayes but insisted he did not intend to hurt him and did not realise he had hit him. He added he did not know his sheepdog was in the tractor which was struck by pellets. Det Garda Mitchell said the defendants shotgun was seized when he was located in Patrickswell a number of hours later and that he has not sought to have it returned or to renew his firearms licence. Anthony Sammon SC said land disputes such as the one outlined in court can become an obsession and have a way of turning right-minded people into obsessive fools. He said his client had gotten worked up in a way he should not have and had become frustrated as efforts to resolve the dispute had failed. Imposing sentence, Judge ODonnell noted Mr Hayes thought he was going to be killed and that there has been a substantial psychological fallout as a result of the incident. He commented that the right-of-way has been an enormous source of conflct but that this did not justify what happened. The judge accepted Mr ODonoghue is deeply attached to the land and has been involved in farming all his life. He said there were a number of mitigating factors in the case including the defendants age, guilty plea, his compliance with his bail conditions and his previous good record. However, he said given the circumstances of the incident and the injuries sustained, a custodial sentence was warranted., He imposed a two and-a-half year prison sentence, suspending the final 18 months. He agreed to a put a stay on his order until midday on January 7, 2019. AN elderly Limerick man has been given additional time to remove thousands of used tyres which are being stored illegally on lands he owns. Limerick City and County Council has initiated legal proceedings against Thomas Galvin over his failure to comply with a notice under the Waste Management Act requiring him to remove the tyres and other waste materials from the lands at Ashby Stud Lisnagry. Previously, Limerick District Court was told the notice was served on him in March after an inspection of the lands was carried out by the local authority. In September, Mr Galvin told the court the tyres related to a business he had which went bust and that he had intended using them to build walls within the lands. The 65-year-old said he is in receipt of disability allowance and that he could not afford to have the tyres removed given the costs involved. During a review of the case last Friday, solicitor Tom Kiely confirmed that his client contacted a waste contractor following the last court hearing and that he is making an effort to comply with the terms of the notice. He said around 200 tyres have been removed to date along with other materials such as old kitchen cabinets and waste timber. Hes doing something which is better than nothing, he said accepting it will take a number of years to clear the site at the current pace. While noting that some progress has been made, Judge Marian OLeary expressed some concern that not enough is being done by the defendant. She adjourned the matter, for review, to January 3, 2019. LIMERICK secondary school Crescent College Comprehensive has launched a campaign to stop using single-use plastics. Students ranging from first to fourth year gathered for a recent workshop organised by sustainability expert Susan Adams accompanied by construction studies teacher Bill Sheehan. The lecture informed the students of the damage caused by single-use plastics in recent years such as making up to 60 to 90% of all marine debris. They then learnt what the future may hold if the poor disposal of plastics continues, and what can be done to rectify the mistakes for a cleaner future. Following those talks, the students were divided into groups to come up with an action plan for their school on how to implement a single-use plastics ban coinciding with the EUs ban on the harmful material which will be enacted in three years. Mr Sheehan believes his students are more capable for the job than teachers and staff to provide an effective environmentally-friendly school for their fellow peers. Mr Sheehan commented: Its such a big project, Im only one voice, I cant be telling them what to do, theyll all listen to their friends before they listen to me. There was a group of first years in a group, and within twenty minutes they wanted to organise a petition to handout to all the other students in the school. They wanted to inform them of what they wanted to do and also get some feedback for the best course of action, he explained. TRIBUTES have been paid to a much-respected principal of Limerick primary school, a gentle giant that knew every child by name, who passed away this week. Donal Ryan, formerly of Pery Square and former principal of An Mhodhscoil on OConnell Avenue, passed away on December 18 peacefully at Milford Care Centre. Trained in St Patricks, Mr Ryan began his teaching career in St Johns in Limerick before he joined staff at An Mhodhscoil Boys School in the eighties. He became principal of the newly amalgamated school in 1986, retiring in 1992. Donie was a Limerick man, out and out, said Seamus Hynes, who taught at An Mhodhscoil while Mr Ryan was principal. Everybody called him a gentle giant. He knew every child by name, he was very respectful of everybody and very respectful of every child. If you ever met him after you left, he would know the names of people and how they got on. He was great to talk to people. There was huge respect for him in the school, all of his colleagues. He was very interested in people, interested in every pupil. He is much missed and it is with sadness weve learned of his loss. Newly appointed principal of An Mhodhscoil Eibhear O Deaghaidh extended sympathies on behalf of the school community to Mr Ryans family. All members of the community are thinking of his family at this time and remembering Mr Ryan with great fondness, Mr O Deaghaidh said. Limerick city TD Willie ODea also extended his sympathies. He was a very successful principal, very innovative, Deputy ODea said. Mr Ryan was highly regarded and he played a significant part in the development of education in Limerick city. Beloved husband of the late Maureen, Mr Ryan is survived by his children John, Conor and Micil, and sadly missed by his daughter-in-law Majella, son-in-law Ralph, grandchildren Adam, Donal, Lucia, Andrew and Sena, sister Getta, sisters-in-law Mary and Ginny, family friend Eve nephews, nieces, extended family and friends. Reposing at Milford Care Centre this Thursday evening from 6pm to 7.30pm, followed by removal to Our Lady Help of Christians Church, Castletroy. Requiem Mass on Friday at 11am with burial afterwards in Kilmurry Cemetery. Family flowers only. Donations if desired to St Vincent de Paul. LIMERICKS only community first responders urgently need to raise funds for essential lifesaving equipment. The Ennis Road Community First Responders are volunteers, linked to the National Ambulance Service, who are dispatched by that office to cardiac emergencies within their communities. The group was founded last April given the aging profile of the population in the surrounding estates between the Strand Hotel to the Greenhills Hotel, according to volunteer Noel Kerley. Currently, cardiovascular disease is the most common cause of death in Ireland, accounting for 33% of all deaths, early response is essential in helping to save some of those lives, Mr Kerley said. With all of its members trained in CPR and other live-saving measures, the Ennis Road Community First Responders are typically the first on the scene, working on call 24/7 to respond to cardiac arrests, chest pains and suspected heart attacks, strokes and choking emergencies. While the Ennis Road CFR group is supported by the HSE and the National Ambulance Service, they do not get any funding to buy their own equipment, including AEDs (Automated External Defibrillators) or to provide accredited training and purchase training equipment. A major fundraiser for this equipment is to take place this Thursday, December 20, in Dunnes Stores at the Jetland Shopping Centre, Ennis Road. We are appealing to the people living in the area to support our fundraising next Thursday because we need this money to help us buy this essential equipment and also to provide ongoing accredited training for our volunteers, Mr Kerley said. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, December 19) The military said two Army soldiers and 12 members of the Civilian Armed Forces Geographical Unit (CAFGU) were taken hostage by the New People's Army (NPA) in Agusan del Sur Wednesday. Fourth Infantry Division Commander Major General Ronald Villanueva confirmed the abduction, adding members of the NPA also took two dozen firearms with them. A report said around 50 NPA members attacked the New Tubigon Patrol Base in Sibagat, Agusan del Sur at around 3 a.m. The military said the 3rd Special Forces Battalion is pursuing the perpetrators, and soldiers went to the area to investigate the incident. Government forces are on heightened alert as the NPA previously said it would overthrow the administration when it celebrates its 50th anniversary this month. Earlier this month, Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana told CNN Philippines he would not suggest a holiday truce with the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). Meanwhile, the CPP has called on the NPA its armed wing to "mount tactical offensives across the country" as response to the extension of martial law in Mindanao for another year. "All NPA units must exert all possible effort to punish the worst fascist units and officers of the AFP (Armed Forces of the Philippines) who have committed grave crimes against the people," a statement from CPP said hours after Congress approved President Rodrigo Duterte's request for the extension. CNN Philippines senior digital producers Pia Garcia and Eimor Santos contributed to this report. That's the conclusion of a new investigation into a phenomenon called "ring rain," which pulls water out of Saturn's rings and into the planet's midlatitude regions. Combined with earlier research this year using Cassini data to look at a different type of inflow from the rings to the planet, that find means the stunning structures could be gone in as little as 100 million years. "We are lucky to be around to see Saturn's ring system, which appears to be in the middle of its lifetime," lead author James O'Donoghue, a space physicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a statement. "However, if rings are temporary, perhaps we just missed out on seeing giant ring systems of Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune, which have only thin ringlets today!" [Saturn's Glorious Rings in Pictures] See more The new research relies on ground-based observations gathered over a couple of hours in 2011 from Hawaii of a special form of hydrogen that glows in infrared light. That specific form of hydrogen makes up "ring rain," a phenomenon scientists have been working to pin down for decades. The Cassini spacecraft captured this stunning view of Saturn and its rings on April 25, 2016. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute) And the results were stark: If the sheer volume of ring rain the scientists spotted during those few hours is typical for Saturn's weather forecast, that rain would eat up a huge amount of the icy rings, between 925 and 6,000 lbs. (420 to 2,800 kilograms) every second. That rate, combined with the current mass of Saturn's rings, is what lets scientists calculate that 300-million-year life expectancy, although the large range on the infall calculation means there's quite a bit of uncertainty about the rings' lifetime. The fate of the rings looks even grimmer considering research published earlier this year using Cassini data, which looked at a different, still-more-voluminous, type of infall from Saturn's rings that's descending into the planet. O'Donoghue and his co-authors didn't include that infall in the estimates presented in their paper, but suggested in an accompanying statement that the two phenomena combined could gorge through the rings in more like 100 million years. The research is described in a paper published Dec. 17 in the journal Icarus. Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her @meghanbartels. Follow us @Spacedotcom and Facebook. Original article on Space.com. Paleontologists have excavated a mighty meat-eating, four-fingered dinosaur from an unexpected spot: the Italian Alps. The newly identified beast dubbed Saltriovenator zanellai lived about 200 million years ago, and it's the first-known Jurassic dinosaur discovered in Italy, the researchers said. It's also the oldest-known ceratosaurian, as well as the largest (it weighed 1 ton), predatory dinosaur known from the earliest part of the Jurassic. S. zanellai's journey to fossilization and discovery thrilled scientists, who deduced that the dinosaur's body ended up in the sea, where marine critters nibbled on its bones before it was buried. Then, it was lifted up toward the heavens as the Alps began forming about 30 million years ago. [See images of the four-fingered Italian dinosaur] "It is a miracle that it survived such a long chain of events: drifting away to the sea, then floating, sinking, being scavenged by marine animals, reworked by sea bottom currents, buried, uplifted within a mountain chain, and eventually blown up by human explosives," study lead researcher Cristiano Dal Sasso, a curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Milan Natural History Museum, told Live Science. (The excavation was difficult because, previously, industrial workers had used dynamite to blow up the quarry, which broke the fossils into hundreds of pieces, the researchers said.) Angelo Zanella, an amateur fossil hunter, discovered the bones in 1996 in a marble quarry near Saltrio, less than 50 miles (80 kilometers) northeast of Milan. Dal Sasso and his colleagues then scouted out the site, digging up more bones, many of which had feeding marks from ancient marine invertebrates (sea animals without a backbone). These chew marks make S. zanellai one of the few dinosaur specimens showing signs of marine invertebrate scavenging. Another was the armored ankylosaur Aletopelta, whose remains were likely nibbled on by scavenging marine invertebrates that lived off the coast of what is now Southern California, according to a 1996 study in the Journal of Paleontology. Four-finger salute Many of the 132 S. zanellai bones were fragmented, but there was enough evidence to indicate that the dinosaur had four fingers. The oldest dinosaurs, such as Herrerasaurus, had five fingers. But all known ceratosaurs, including the newfound Saltriovenator, Limusaurus, Ceratosaurus and Eoabelisaurus, had four fingers. "Somewhere on the evolutionary line to ceratosaurs, the fifth (outermost) digit (the "pinky") was lost, resulting in the four-fingered hand of ceratosaurs," Matthew Lamanna, an assistant curator of vertebrate paleontology at Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, who wasn't involved with the study, told Live Science in an email. Later, theropods (mostly carnivorous, bipedal dinosaurs, such as Tyrannosaurus rex) took this trend a step further by losing their fourth (or "ring") finger, leading to the three-fingered hands seen in theropods such as Allosaurus, Oviraptor and Velociraptor. Later, these three fingers gave rise to the bird wing, Lamanna said. There was some debate over which finger these three-fingered theropods "lost," but "Saltriovenator helps to show that the three-fingered hand of these theropods was produced through loss of the fourth finger rather than the first (thumb)," Lamanna noted. Huge carnivore S. zanellai was large about 26 feet (8 meters) long but the subadult wasn't done growing yet, study co-researcher Simone Maganuco, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Milan Natural History Museum, said in a statement. [Photos: Newfound Dinosaur Had Tiny Arms, Just Like T. rex] "The evolutionary 'arms race' between stockier predatory and giant herbivorous dinosaurs, involving progressively larger species, had already begun 200 million of years ago," Maganuco said. Three of S. zanellai's four fingers had powerful claws, which likely served as a terrible "weapon of war" during the dinosaur age, Dal Sasso added. The dinosaur's scientific name (Saltriovenator zanellai) means "Zanella's Saltrio hunter." (In Latin, "venator" means hunter.) The study was published online today (Dec. 19) in the journal PeerJ. Originally published on Live Science. Recreational marijuana use is becoming increasingly legal across the U.S., but that doesn't mean that it's safe. As with alcohol and tobacco, the drug comes with risks. And a new study finds regular marijuana may similar to alcohol and tobacco affect a man's sperm count and vitality. While the study was small just 24 participants researchers found, for the first time, that higher concentrations of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) in urine corresponded to a lower sperm count. (THC is the compound in marijuana responsible for the drug's high.) The study also found that pot smokers had changes in their sperm genetic profile that, in other studies, have been associated with abnormal growth and cancer. The study, which was published today (Dec. 19) in the journal Epigenetics, could not determine whether these changes in sperm quantity and quality could affect the fertilization process and the health of the offspring, but the researchers advise caution nonetheless. [25 Odd Facts About Marijuana] "In the absence of a larger, definitive study, the best advice would be to assume these changes are going to be there [in sperm]," said lead author Susan Murphy, the chief of the Division of Reproductive Sciences in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina. "I would say, as a precaution, stop using cannabis for at least six months before trying to conceive." Previous studies have hinted that smoking marijuana can lower sperm count, that is, the number of sperm in semen when ejaculated. The new study, however, is the first to show a strong correlation between THC concentrations in urine and the number of viable sperm. On average, the sperm concentration in the semen of the 12 non-smokers in the study was about twice as high as it was in the 12 smokers, the study revealed. More worrisome for the researchers was the degree of epigenetic changes among pot smokers. Epigenetics refers to the suite of small chemical "tags" that are added to the DNA structure and regulate gene expression. While this is a normal process, it can be altered by environmental exposures. The researchers found that the men who smoked marijuana had epigenetic changes in their sperm DNA involving hundreds of genes and two important regulatory pathways: one for helping bodily organs reach their full size; the other for basic growth during development. Several kinds of cancer are associated with the interference of these pathways, though this study did not find a specific link between marijuana use and cancer. As with sperm count, the higher the concentration of THC in the men's urine, the more pronounced the epigenetic changes to their sperm were. The research group's corresponding study on rats revealed a similar pattern in the same group of genes. "We don't yet know what that means, but the fact that more and more young males of child-bearing age have legal access to cannabis is something we should be thinking about," senior study author Scott Kollins, a professor in psychiatry and behavioral sciences, also at Duke, said in a statement. Changes in sperm quantity and quality induced by marijuana smoking might not be permanent, Murphy told Live Science. Men generate new sperm daily. Sperm take about 70 days to mature and then, if not ejaculated, will die shortly after that and be reabsorbed into the body. "The sperm DNA is not mutated in the traditional sense" by marijuana, Murphy said. "By definition, epigenetic alterations can affect gene regulation without changing the DNA sequence. This means that, in the absence of marijuana use, new sperm may be able to develop normally. Nevertheless, damaged sperm from marijuana use could theoretically adversely affect the offspring, "assuming that said sperm is viable, capable of fertilization and results in a viable embryo," Murphy added. Tim Jenkins, an epigenetics and male fertility expert at the University of Utah School of Medicine, who was not involved in the study, told Live Science that "despite the limited sample size in this study, a real strength are the animal data which comport remarkably well with the human data," which "makes the results significantly more convincing." However, Jenkins stressed the importance of addition research. "It is imperative that additional work is performed in this realm to identify the real risk of cannabis use on sperm function but most importantly, on offspring health," he said. "This study represents a great first step in that effort, but there is still a great deal of work that is required. For their next study, Murphy said they'd like to at least double the sample size to improve the statistical significance of the results. Follow Christopher Wanjek @wanjek for daily tweets on health and science with a humorous edge. Wanjek is the author of "Food at Work" and "Bad Medicine." His column, Bad Medicine, appears regularly on Live Science. It's blind and slimy, and its head is indistinguishable from its rear. Sound like anyone you know? A blind, ground-burrowing, worm-like amphibian has a new and presidential name, after its physical features and habits drew comparisons to Donald Trump. Meet Dermophis donaldtrumpi, a member of the group called caecilians (seh-SILL-yens), which are limbless amphibians found in the tropics. The creature was one of 12 unnamed species from Latin America; naming rights for each of them were offered at auction on Dec. 8, as part of a fundraiser for conservation organization Rainforest Trust, according to a statement. EnviroBuild, a U.K. supply company of sustainable building materials, won the right to name the new-to-science caecilian from Panama. The company paid $25,000 for the privilege, the highest bid at the auction. EnviroBuild's choice acknowledged Trump's "commitment to environmental issues," EnviroBuild representatives said in a statement. [11 Animals Named After US Presidents] It may not seem like a worm-like, sightless creature that buries itself in the dirt has anything in common with a U.S. president. However, closer examination of Trump and his new namesake reveals that they share many similarities, EnviroBuild said. Caecilians' rudimentary eyes can distinguish only light and dark; their name comes from the Latin word "caecus," which means "blind." While Trump is not blind, his views on climate change demonstrate blindness to the evidence of a warming world, EnviroBuild representatives said. In 2012, Trump tweeted that climate change was a hoax perpetrated by China, to make the U.S. less competitive. And though Trump recently admitted on the CBS program "60 Minutes" that climate change is really happening, he questioned whether humans were responsible (we are). The amphibian Dermophis donaldtrumpi is native to Panamanian rainforests and measures about 4 inches (10 centimeters) long. (Image credit: Abel Batista/Rainforest Trust U.K.) Limbless D. donaldtrumpi lives underground, burrowing deep in the dirt; Trump, too, metaphorically buries his head in the sand by rejecting the scientific consensus on climate change and by approving policies that harm the environment, the EnviroBuild statement said. And caecilians in the Dermophis genus have a high-stakes strategy for helping their young to survive; in this practice, called dermatrophy, the parents grow an extra layer of skin for their babies to eat. Trump's children likely do not feed on his skin, but he does provide for his young by giving them high-stakes rewards: positions in the White House, EnviroBuild representatives said. Another species was named for Trump in January 2017: Neopalpa donaldtrumpi, a small moth whose head is topped with yellow and white scales resembling the president's hairstyle, the namer said. That moth's habitat extends from Southern California into Mexico and would be bisected by Trump's proposed border wall. By naming the moth after Trump, evolutionary biologist Vazrick Nazari, a researcher from Ottawa, Canada, hoped to draw attention to vulnerable species and ecosystems, she said. And EnviroBuild is reaching for a similar goal with its Trump-inspired name. "While the story itself is lighthearted, EnviroBuild are really aiming to push forward an important message: With climate change only accelerating, legislation still isn't doing enough to apply the brakes. This means the only option is to create new avenues ourselves," company representatives wrote. Original article on Live Science. For more than a year, Ali Hassan has been refreshing the website for his wifes visa application. Every time, he received the same generic response: undergoing administrative processing. Hassans wife, Shaima Swileh, had been pleading with the U.S. State Department to allow her into the country to see their 2-year-old son, Abdullah Hassan, who is dying from a rare brain condition in an Oakland hospital. Swileh, a Yemeni citizen, has had her visa application repeatedly denied because of the Trump administrations 2017 ban for citizens of certain Muslim-majority countries coming to the U.S., the family said. But on Tuesday, Swileh received a call to report to the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, where she has been living since shortly after Abdullah was born. When she arrived, embassy officials handed her a presidential proclamation waiver and a visa, clearing the way for her to travel to the U.S., her lawyer said. Thousands of miles away on Tuesday, Hassan refreshed the webpage for his wifes visa application and saw the stunning news. A few minutes later, his phone received a photo of the document with a message from Swileh in Arabic: We got it! She is very relieved, very thankful, and she just cannot wait to come and see her son, said Saad Sweilem, Swilehs lawyer. Abdullah has been hospitalized at UCSF Benioff Childrens Hospital Oakland for five months after being diagnosed with hypomyelination, a rare brain disease that prevents the formation of fatty tissue that surrounds nerve cells and helps them communicate with one another. His case is severe enough that he cant breathe on his own, and the toddler has been on a ventilator for about a month, Hassan said. He is not expected to live much longer, and Abdullahs parents have been petitioning the State Department to grant Swileh a waiver so she can hold Abdullah one more time before he is taken off life support. We are extremely happy and my son already bought a ticket for her, said Fawzi Hassan, Abdullahs grandfather. Shes going to fly (Wednesday) and shell arrive in the evening. Abdullah was born in Yemen in December 2016 during the countrys ongoing civil war. Though his parents didnt immediately notice anything wrong with the boy, Abdullah started missing developmental milestones and wasnt gaining a proper amount of weight. His father, Ali Hassan, is a U.S. citizen. He said the family had always planned to move to Stockton, where the boys grandparents have been living since the 1980s. But Abdullahs worsening medical condition made the move even more urgent. In August 2017, Swileh and Ali Hassan went to Cairo with then-8-month-old Abdullah and immediately started work to get the documents needed to move to the U.S. Months passed without word from the U.S. Embassy on the status of Swilehs visa application, and Abdullahs condition deteriorated. Meanwhile, the Trump administrations ban went into effect, restricting citizens from several Muslim-majority countries, including Yemen, from traveling to the U.S. When the family finally heard from the U.S. Embassy, Swileh was told she would not be granted a visa because of the travel ban restrictions. Trumps travel ban has faced multiple legal challenges before the most recent version was upheld this summer by the Supreme Court. The current ban forbids travel to the U.S. by citizens of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, North Korea and Venezuela. While Swilehs waiver application process continued, the parents realized Abdullah would have to go to the U.S. without his mother for medical care. In August, Ali Hassan moved to California and checked their boy into Childrens Hospital in Oakland. Only then did the family learn Abdullahs condition is fatal. More than a year after the family started working to get Swileh approved to come to the States and less than a week after the story became national news she was able to walk into the U.S. Embassy in Cairo to receive her waiver and visa. They apologized for what theyve put her through, and they apologized for how long this took, said Sweilem, a civil rights attorney for the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Sweilem credits recent media attention for the U.S. Embassys sudden response on the waiver application. He noted that State Department officials have had the same information about Abdullahs medical condition for months. Even Abdullahs doctors had reached out to the U.S. Embassy, attempting to persuade officials of the graveness of his condition, he said. Only about 2 percent of travelers from the countries listed in the travel ban have been able to obtain the waivers, Sweilem said, adding that this is the first case he has worked on where a client has been able to obtain a waiver. The fact that a case with this fact pattern a child on his deathbed, a U.S. citizen, American child if that wasnt going to get a waiver before we stepped in, you have to ask yourself: How legitimate is this waiver process? he said. The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Ashley McBride is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: ashley.mcbride@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ashleynmcb A lawsuit filed in state district court in Harris County blames two emergency releases of natural gas along a major interstate pipeline for the deaths of nearly 40 trophy deer at a breeding facility near the Sam Houston National Forest. The lawsuit, led by Liberty County landowners Monty Mullenix and Greg Buford, alleges that Tennessee Gas Pipeline Co, a subsidiary of Houston pipeline company Kinder Morgan, flooded their properties with clouds of methane and other toxic gases during emergency shutdowns along the natural gas pipeline route near Cleveland. Buford, who owns the Grande Whitetails breeding facility, claims that the white-tailed deer each with an estimated worth in the tens of thousands of dollars began to die shortly after the incidents But Kinder Morgan said there is no evidence that the emergency releases killed the deer and blamed the deaths on a virus. Lab results on the deer tested to date confirmed that those deer died from epizootic hemorrhagic disease, or EHD, a virus transmitted by small insects, Kinder Morgan said in statement. The company has worked, and continues to work, with the nearby landowners to remediate any impacts to their property. Tennessee Gas Pipeline has also offered to conduct additional testing at locations designated by the landowners. The releases occurred Nov. 14 and Dec. 10, according to the lawsuit. Cleanup crews dressed in hazmat suits used detergents such as liquid Dawn and Simple Green to remove an oily mist that had settled on homes, cars, vegetation and swimming pools, according to court documents. Concerned about the animal deaths and the potential exposure of local residents to the gases, Mullenix and Buford enlisted two lawyers, Patrick Zummo of Houston and Micah Dortch, who is with Potts Law Firm in Dallas. The suit is seeking class-action status to represent residents in the area. While this has been an awful tragedy for the animal population, whats truly concerning are the potential health risks to people living in the area, Dortch said in a statement. We dont know what those risks might be, and Kinder Morgan isnt saying. Financial Performance: Kinder Morgan ups 2019 expectations Kinder Morgan said the Nov. 14 incident was caused by line sensor failure at a compressor station near Cleveland. The sensor failure activated the pipelines emergency shutdown system, which triggered a four-minute blowdown in which natural gas and other products are vented to prevent a pipeline from becoming overpressurized and blowing up. A Tennessee Gas Pipeline Co. document shows that 565,000 cubic feet of natural gas and other similar compounds were released in the form of a light mist during the incident. The company notified seven landowners and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, even though the incident was below the state threshold for reporting to the state agency, according to Kinder Morgan. Kinder Morgan said the residue removed by crews was tested and was determined to have no short-term or long-term impacts on people or livestock. The Dec. 10 incident, the company said, was related to scheduled maintenance at the compressor station. Although that work required another blowdown, Kinder Morgan said that the controlled venting ended without the release of any gas clouds. Breeding of deer, antelope and exotic game has become a $1 billion industry in Texas, where the majority of animals are sold to hunting ranches. Regulated by the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department, deer-breeding facilities have come under scrutiny the past few years in the effort to control diseases such as chronic wasting disease and EHD. Several of the deer bodies from Grande Whitetails were preserved and examined by a veterinarian at Texas A&M University in College Station. Kinder Morgan received full access, both sides said, and was allowed to use its own veterinarian, who, the company said, determined the deaths were caused by EHD virus. Buford said Wednesday he received a report from Texas A&M that the deer appear to have died from a secondary diseases associated with EHD. Buford, however, said in an interview he regularly sprays for the biting midge, the insect that causes the disease. Buford said his pen-raised deer were not eating normally, and were coughing and sneezing with mucous around their noses after natural gas was released from the pipeline. Most of the animals died within a week of the Nov. 14 incident, he said. Ive never had deaths like this before, Buford said. It makes me mad that something happened that I have no control over and cant fix. Dortch insisted the release was primarily responsible for the deer deaths. They may have died from EHD, but they never would've gotten it but for the release suppressing their immune system, Dortch said. The timing is just remarkable. We had none die and then we had 40 die. The only thing in the middle was the release. sergio.chapa@chron.com twitter.com/sergiochapa When the bot adventure "Transformers" came out in 2007, it quickly became shorthand for everything that's loud, dumb and wrong about CGI-saturated action movies. Luckily, "Bumblebee," the new prequel about a plucky little (well, relatively) Volkswagen-robot tones down everything that made its predecessors weak, while adding humor, emotion and a surprising amount of heart. As the film begins, a war between the Decepticons (bad guys) and the Autobots (good guys) is raging on the planet Cybertron. Eventually, the Decepticons are victorious and the Autobots scatter across the universe, with the titular bot - officially known as B-127 and voiced by Dylan O'Brien - heading to Earth to hide out and scope it out as a possible base. He ends up crashing into California, right into the laps of a Special Forces team led by Agent Burns (John Cena). They start shooting, just in time for a Decepticon to arrive with a mission to send Bumblebee to the great junkyard in the sky. After an impressive battle that convinces Burns that all Transformers are bent on destruction, Bumblebee finds himself with a broken voice box and a failing memory. He powers down, hiding out in the form of a cheerful yellow VW Beetle. Fast-forward to 1987, when Bumblebee is discovered in a junkyard and brought back to life by Charlie (Hailee Steinfeld), an 18-year-old with a knack for machines who is still grieving the death of her father some years ago. After she starts him up, the two become fast (if unlikely) friends: One, a sullen teen with a fondness for the Smiths, and the other an innocent bot with baby-blue eyes. She dubs him "Bumblebee" in a nod to the electric buzzing noise that's replaced his voice. While the plot of "Bumblebee" technically centers on Charlie and Bumblebee's efforts to avoid two Decepticon bounty hunters (Justin Theroux and Angela Bassett), the movie is really about their relationship. In the beginning, they're both a bit timid; she's an offbeat teenager, he's a giant metal child. Without a voice, Bumblebee communicates his emotions through physicality; eventually Charlie installs a radio he uses to land on songs that convey what's on his mind. In addition to an expressive face, his body language and movements are adorable. At one point, he sits with his legs straight out, his huge feet making him look like a 5-year-old trying on his dad's shoes. It's easy for both Charlie and the audience to want to protect him. Although Bumblebee gets the movie's title, the story belongs just as much to Charlie, and Steinfeld is as sharp and funny and awkward as any other '80s teen-movie protagonist. The only two other characters that really matter are her next-door neighbor (Jorge Lendeborg Jr.) and Agent Burns. While Lendeborg adeptly fills the role of the nerd who pines from afar, Cena only shines when he's allowed to show off the comedic gifts we saw in "Trainwreck" and "Sisters." Alas, his attempts to glower and growl are largely unsuccessful. Those who come for the punching will also come away pleased. After the one melee at the beginning, most of the fighting is hand-to-hand (axle to axle?) and in close quarters. The robots flip and clang with impressive speed and clarity, and the excellent sound design illustrates what's going on, rather than simply assaulting the audience's ears. There are, of course, some weaknesses, including the expected amount of clunky dialogue, predictable passages and plot holes. (Great cinema this is not.) But those are easily shrugged off in favor of watching Bumblebee and Charlie's relationship change them both for the better. In the end, "Bumblebee" is less a movie about giant robot aliens punching each other than it is a story about friendship. Charlie finds a way to cope with her grief. And Bumblebee finds a way to grow into someone who learns to cope with a world where he's not welcome. Underneath the metal veneer, there is a genuinely touching story of two friends who help one another along a road that, in the beginning, neither of them thought they could walk. Or drive. - - - Three stars. Rated PG-13. Contains mild rude language and sequences of sci-fi action violence. 113 minutes. Ratings Guide: Four stars masterpiece, three stars very good, two stars OK, one star poor, no stars waste of time. Do you drench your tamales in ketchup? While some argue pairing the condiment with the masa mainstay of the holiday season is about as sinful as pineapples on pizza, others defend ketchup as part of the tamal tradition. Some members of Team Ketchup on Tamales even go a step further by adding another San Antonio favorite -- Whataburger Spicy ketchup, according to responses from mySA.com readers who answered the question, "how do you eat your tamales?" The fanciful foodies didn't stop there some shared recipes which call for wrapping tamales in prosciutto. RELATED: Everything you need to know about ordering tamales in San Antonio this holiday season More recalled a no-fuss childhood classic: sandwiching a tamal in sliced bread. However they dice, fry or pair 'em, most San Antonians agree the holidays would not taste the same without seeing a pile of wrapped up goodies on the table. And because there is never a shortage of tamales in the city, San Antonians have plenty of opportunities to try out all the suggestions from their fellow residents. Unwrap some of the ideas in the gallery above. Madalyn Mendoza is a breaking news and general assignment writer. Read her on our breaking news site, mySA.com and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com | mmendoza@mysa.com |@MaddySkye Two people died Tuesday morning in separate crashes in rural Webb County, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety. State police said the first crash occurred at about 6 a.m. near mile marker 476 on Texas Highway 359, less than a mile from the Duval County line. A preliminary investigation revealed that a Ford pickup was traveling west on the highway and attempted to pass a vehicle. READ ALSO: TX deputies accused of threatening to "shoot up" bar While passing the vehicle, the Ford struck a motorcycle traveling east on the highway, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety. DPS said the motorcycle sustained major damage and caught fire. DPS said the motorcycle rider was identified as Charlton Franklin Clayton, 34, of College Station. Clayton was pronounced dead at the scene. The driver of the pickup was taken to a hospital in Laredo. Second crash A second crash was reported about three hours later at about 9 a.m. near mile marker 25 on Interstate 35. A preliminary investigation showed that a truck-tractor semitrailer was traveling south on I-35 in the right lane. When the vehicle moved to the left lane, a Honda Civic rear-ended the trailer, DPS said. READ ALSO: Man accused of fatally beating former teacher, 25, in S.A. area A Ford F-250 then rear-ended the Honda, causing more damage to the car, state police said. The Ford rolled over several times following the impact, according to DPS. The driver of the Ford was taken to a Laredo hospital for treatment. DPS said the driver of the Honda was pronounced dead at the scene. He was identified as Sean Christopher Markey, 45, of San Antonio. The driver of the tractor was not injured. DPS continues to investigate both crashes. Three Laredo police officers have been temporarily suspended without pay after being indicted on aggravated assault charges, LPD said Tuesday. LPD identified the personnel as Investigator Pedro Escamilla and Officer Juan A. Leal Jr., both seven-year veterans, and Officer Julio Cesar Solis, a six-year veteran. On Thursday, a grand jury in Travis County charged Escamilla and Leal with one count of aggravated assault. Solis was charged with two counts of aggravated assault, which is a second-degree felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison and a $10,000 fine. READ ALSO: 30 S.A. shows you could see for free LPD said the indictment stems from a criminal complaint filed on July 15. The alleged assault occurred in Austin on Feb. 25 while the officers were off duty, according to police. Details of the allegations against them were unclear as of Tuesday. The Austin Police Department did not return requests for comment. And the Travis County District Attorney's Office, which presented the case to a grand jury, declined to comment. LPD noted that the officers were not arrested in connection with the alleged assault or indictment. "Any questions regarding the status of this case will be deferred to the Austin Police Department public information office or the Travis County District Attorney's Office," LPD said in a statement. RELATED: Police: Former Laredo mayoral candidate in trouble again Escamilla, Leal and Solis had been placed on administrative duties until the indictment was handed down. "They have now been placed on temporary suspension without pay, pending the final disposition of the felony indictment," LPD said. "This temporary suspension is not intended to reflect an opinion on the merits of the indictment." LPD declined to comment further. A man has been arrested for allegedly not paying about $4,000 for a set of tires, according to LPD. Nicolas Salinas, 40, was charged with theft Monday. On Aug. 24, police officers were dispatched to a theft of service report in the 2600 block of Comales Drive. READ ALSO: Judge in Baylor rape case that caused uproar has 3 degrees from the school Police said Salinas had agreed to pay $4,070 for a set of four wheels of 20-inch rims with four Patriot tires. Investigators presented their case to an assistant district attorney, who approved the issuance of a warrant for Salinas' arrest. A state commission is seeking to revoke the operating permit of a Galveston children's shelter after two boys in its care drowned in October. The Texas Health and Human Services Commission is pursuing revocation of the permit for the Galveston Multicultural Institute, saying the program "poses an immediate threat or danger to the health and safety of children." On Oct. 14, two boys, Nicholas Garner, 16, and Noah Authement, 11, drowned during a beach field trip supervised by the institute. "After the Oct. 14 drowning incident, our inspectors found numerous and repeated deficiencies in meeting state standards in many areas including training and hiring staff, conducting background checks and maintaining records," said John Reynolds, a spokesman for the commission. The institute is a program developed by the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services and run by The Children's Center, a Galveston nonprofit, that provides emergency shelter to children and youth who are in the custody of Child Protective Services and need temporary care while waiting to return home or be placed permanently. The multicultural institute serves boys and girls ages 5 to 17. The institute has asked for an administrative review of the state agency's decision. The Department of Family and Protective Services' residential child care licensing division is also investigating the incident. The Children's Center will remain operational regardless of whether the multicultural institute is ultimately shut down. Vivian Putney, the chief financial officer for human resources at the Children's Center, declined to say whether the Galveston Multicultural Institute is still operational, saying the nonprofit has been barred by the state from making any public comments. "The only thing I can say at this time is that the investigation has not been completed and we have filed for an administrative review and we've not received our date for that as of yet," Putney said. Garner and Authement were on a field trip when they drowned in the Gulf of Mexico on Oct. 14 close to a beach near 17th Street and Seawall Boulevard. After Authement got caught in the choppy surf, Garner dived in to try to rescue him. A bystander called police that evening to report that Authement and a friend were caught in the rip current, authorities said. The friend managed to swim ashore. Garner and Authement were not wearing bathing suits when they entered the water. Authement was wearing grey sweatpants with no shirt, while Garner had on blue jeans and no shirt. On Oct. 16 Authement's body was recovered two miles offshore from 9 Mile Road and FM 3005 near Galveston's West End. Garner's body has not been recovered. Authement was in state custody at the time of his death. A letter written by Amber Krause, director of residential licensing for the state Health and Human Services Commission, to Vivian Putney, the chief financial officer for human resources at the Children's Center, details alleged oversights by those charged with supervising the children at the beach. According to Krause, institute staff "failed to determine if a water activity was safe that day," and either ignored or were ignorant of the "red flag warnings" that indicated dangerous tides and currents. Institute staff divided the group of children into one group with boys and another with girls, with each group swimming at different locations. While the girls were swimming in the Gulf, a large wave came in and pulled multiple girls underwater. The HHCSC said the girls were at "serious medical risk" following near-drowning experiences and did not receive timely medical care until they exhibited severe symptoms of "dry drowning." At around the same time, at the other location, Authement was swept into the Gulf current, prompting Garner to swim after him. Both later drowned. The drowning and near-drowning incidents were grounds for revoking the multicultural institute's operating permit, the agency said. Krause also detailed previous incidents in which the multicultural institute was cited "for issues related to training and hiring staff, background checks, and maintaining records" that could have prevented the drowning. An October inspection found that multiple staffers were not trained for water safety. A September inspection also noted that the institute did not practice "severe weather drills" despite living in a hurricane zone. "In short, a properly managed and trained staff would not have made the decisions that contributed to the recent tragic incident," Krause wrote. "The cascade of poor decisions culminated in the deaths of two boys in the operation's care. Nick Powell covers Galveston County for the Chronicle. Follow him on Twitter and send him tips at nick.powell@chron.com Parents engaged in battle with a West Virginia school system that for decades allowed Bible classes in elementary and middle schools won a round in a federal appeals court this week, setting the stage for a renewed legal tussle. The ruling means that the case will be sent back to a district court and that the fate of the suspended Bible in the Schools program in the public system of Mercer County could be resolved. "These families can get justice," said Patrick Elliott, co-counsel with the Freedom From Religion Foundation, a national nonprofit organization that joined parents in the lawsuit and works on issues concerning the separation of church and state. "They can get these classes stopped for once and for all. To finally get the school district to comply with the law would be a resounding victory." In a unanimous decision, a three-judge panel said Senior Judge David Faber of the federal Southern District of West Virginia had erred in dismissing the challenge to the Bible in the Schools program brought by two parents and their children. In their suit against the school system, the parents argued that the classes violated the establishment clause of the Constitution, which restricts the government from favoring any religion. Faber ruled in November 2017 that because the school district had suspended the Bible class while it re-evaluated the program, the lawsuit was no longer "ripe," or ready to be litigated. He also ruled that one of the parents and her child did not have standing to sue because the child was no longer enrolled in county schools. In its 16-page ruling Monday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit rejected those positions. Judge Diana Gribbon Motz wrote that the district court was incorrect in treating the suspension of the Bible program as a reason the case could not be heard. The parents, Gribbon Motz wrote, were challenging the program "as it existed at the time the suit was filed." Gribbon Motz was joined in the opinion by Judges Allyson Kay Duncan and Marvin Quattlebaum. Jeremy Dys, an attorney with the First Liberty Institute, a nonprofit law firm in Texas that represents the school system and specializes in religious freedom cases, said in a statement that "while the court's decision did not address, in any way, the merits of the case, we are disappointed by it." Asked if the school system would appeal the decision or consider permanently ending the Bible in the Schools program, Dys said: "We're considering all our options. As we said at the oral argument, the program as it existed once is never coming back." Before it was suspended last year, the Bible in the Schools program had been part of the curriculum in Mercer schools for decades. The weekly classes - 30 minutes for elementary school and 45 minutes for middle school - were not required but were part of the school day and the majority of the district's 6,600 elementary and middle school students attended. Fundraising in schools and the community covered the cost of the classes - about $500,000 a year. Supporters described it as an elective that was not meant to promote or inculcate religious belief. Plaintiffs in the lawsuit argued that Supreme Court rulings such as McCollum v. Board of Education in 1948 ban public schools from initiating or sponsoring religious activity. The Bible class, they said in the suit, "advances and endorses one religion, improperly entangles public schools in religious affairs and violates the personal consciences of nonreligious and non-Christian parents and students." The suit cited examples from one of the Bible in the Schools lessons: "If all of the Israelites had chosen to follow the Ten Commandments, think of how safe and happy they would have been." Another lesson asked students to imagine that humans and dinosaurs existed at the same time. "So picture Adam being able to crawl up on the back of a dinosaur!" it read. "He and Eve could have their own personal waterslide! Wouldn't that be so wild!" One of the plaintiffs, Elizabeth Deal, who describes herself as agnostic, told The Washington Post last year that she had removed her daughter from the county schools because no alternative classes were offered during the Bible session and that her daughter was told to sit alone in a computer lab. She also said that her daughter was harassed by some students who told her she was going to hell and that she needed to read the Bible. Deal enrolled her daughter in a neighboring county's public schools, opting to pay out-of-county fees rather than keep her in Mercer schools. In its ruling Monday, the appeals court said that if the school system committed to ending the Bible class program permanently, Deal would no longer feel compelled to send her daughter to a neighboring school district. And, the court wrote, "an injunction would also alleviate appellants' ongoing feelings of marginalization." - - - The Post's Ann E. Marimow contributed to this report. A small but growing election movement is pushing to give Montgomery County, Maryland, lawmakers the power to create a new voting system in the state's most populous jurisdiction. "Ranked-choice voting," also known as instant-runoff voting, would give voters more power, advocates say, by allowing them to rank their candidates in order of preference. It also could lessen voter frustration in extremely crowded races, such as this year's at-large council contest in Montgomery, in which 33 candidates competed for four spots during the June Democratic primary. But researchers say the ranked-choice system can be confusing and increases ballot errors, leading to a higher number of votes being discounted. Studies show low-information voters and marginalized groups are at a disadvantage with ranked-choice voting, which can suppress turnout among specific racial groups. Four states and more than 18 cities across the country - including Takoma Park, Maryland, in southeastern Montgomery - have adopted ranked-choice voting in their elections. Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich and Council President Nancy Navarro, both Democrats, support a proposed bill in Annapolis that would allow the council to decide whether to implement some form of the system for local elections in the county of 1.1 million residents. "Ranked-choice voting is simple and intuitive," Sen. Cheryl Kagan, D-Mongtomery, one of the bill sponsors, said at a public hearing Monday night, noting that people select their second choice when their first choice is unavailable in many other decisions. "We all do it every day." Here's how ranked-choice works: Instead of marking their ballots only with their top choice for a given office, voters also note their second, third or possibly fourth choice for that same position. To win outright, a candidate must garner more than 50 percent of the vote. If the first-place finisher falls short, the election goes to a second round. In the second round, the last-place finisher is eliminated and anyone who voted for that candidate has the second- and third-choice votes redistributed to the other finishers. This process continues until one candidate has a clear majority of votes. Montgomery County activists say the system is better than what happened in this year's Democratic primary, in which the sheer number of candidates allowed at-large council hopefuls to win the nomination with as little as 7.4 percent of the vote. "We started realizing that there has to be something better. This isn't working," said Michelle Whittaker of FairVote, a lobbying group. She also managed a campaign for one of the 33 at-large candidates. Advocates say ranked-choice voting guarantees that the winning candidate is supported by a majority of voters - even if they weren't the first choice for all of them. As a result, the elected leader has a clear mandate, they say. The system is popular among good-government advocates, progressives and members of smaller political parties, who say exit polling shows it increases voter turnout. Ranked-choice voting also encourages candidates to run civilized campaigns and appeal to broader constituencies, and it means voters don't have to choose "between the lesser of two evils," said Takoma Park Mayor Kate Stewart, whose city adopted the system in 2007. FairVote, which is promoting the system nationwide, is based in Takoma Park. Bill sponsor Del. Eric Luedtke, D-Montgomery, said a ranked system would help the county avoid getting stuck with candidates who win with a small fraction of the vote and may have been less popular than other candidates, once second, third and fourth choices were taken into account. But researchers studying the system in San Francisco, where ranked-choice voting has existed for more than 20 years, and in Maine, which has used ranked-choice voting for some local contests since 2010 and tried it for a congressional race for the first time this year, say the benefits of ranked-choice voting are limited. "Changing the rules isn't going to necessarily change the outcomes," said Jason McDaniel, a political science professor at San Francisco State University. "People should be aware of the limits and weigh those with the possible negative consequences." Ohio State University professor Vladimir Kogan studied four races in which the system was used, including the 2010 Oakland, California, mayoral race. He found that candidates struggled to win majorities and that huge numbers of ballots had to be discarded in the redistribution process. In a few other races, the first-place finisher won a plurality of votes and was defeated because the next runner-up collected more votes in the runoff rounds, causing voters to question the election's legitimacy, experts said. In Maine, Republican congressional candidate Bruce Poliquin won the popular vote but lost to Democrat Jared Golden after second-choice votes were counted. Poliquin challenged the voting rules in court as unconstitutional, but the judge tossed the case. Poliquin is appealing. University of Maryland professor James Gimpel, who testified on Poliquin's behalf, said voter dissatisfaction is why the citizens of Burlington, Vermont, repealed ranked-choice voting in 2010. "They wound up with a result where the candidate with the most first-choice votes didn't win," he said. "They felt like the wrong person had won." Advocates such as Navarro, the council president, said that she thinks the system can fit Montgomery's needs well, but that a long conversation lies ahead on how best to tailor it to the benefit of every voter. "It's always about the details," Navarro said. "It's important to examine every possible best practice to make sure outcomes reflect voter desires." WASHINGTON - After months of cooperation and more than a dozen meetings, special counsel Robert Mueller argued this month that Michael Flynn should receive no prison time for his substantial assistance in the Russia investigation. A veteran judge saw things differently. U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan upended the former national security adviser's hopes of avoiding jail at the sentencing hearing Tuesday, assuring courtroom spectators that he - and only he - would be the final arbiter. "I'm not hiding my disgust, my disdain for this criminal offense," Sullivan said as he laid into Flynn, before opting to deviate from Mueller's recommendation of no jail time. Flynn resigned from his White House position in February 2017, amid accusations that he misled Cabinet members about his contacts with Russia. He was the first of five aides to President Donald Trump to plead guilty in the special counsel investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign. After admitting in December 2017 that he lied to federal agents, Flynn began cooperating with the investigation. The judge also said he saw through last-minute suggestions by Flynn's attorneys alleging the former general was duped into lying by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. To Sullivan, that seemed like a misfired attempt to minimize or distract from the underlying conduct. "All along you were an unregistered agent of a foreign country, while serving as the national security adviser to the president of the United States!" he said. "Arguably, that undermines everything this flag over here stands for. Arguably, you sold your country out!" Sullivan's statements Tuesday sent several severe messages: Flynn, once the national security adviser to the president of the United States and a double agent, now stands at the mercy of the court. In Sullivan's courtroom, lying to federal agents, which Flynn's supporters have dismissed as a minor "process crime," constitutes a serious offense. Several former prosecutors said that it's uncommon for a judge to deviate from the government's sentencing recommendation. It's particularly unusual where the federal sentencing guideline range is zero to six months, as it was for Flynn, a first-time offender. The guidelines were a 1984 effort by Congress to make the process more equitable. The concern was that there were years-long disparities at sentencing for similar crimes. The new rules created levels of offense seriousness - the more serious the crime, the higher a mandatory minimum and maximum length of imprisonment. The judiciary was bound by these guidelines until 2005, when the Supreme Court ruled they were advisory. Today, judges are not required to follow them, though they often do. When negotiating plea deals, prosecutors' recommended sentences also fall within the guideline framework. Abusing a position of power could justify an increase. Substantial assistance, meaning that the offender accepted responsibility and cooperated with the government (often helping them build other cases) could lower a sentence. Many believed that was the arrangement between the Mueller team and Flynn: By assisting the Russia investigation, Mueller recommended a non-jail sentence. Still, Sullivan suggested Tuesday he would likely deviate from Mueller's position. "I cannot assure you, if you proceed today, you will not receive a sentence of incarceration," he said, setting up the possibility he will sentence Flynn to jail. Former federal prosecutor and Georgetown law professor Paul Butler told The Washington Post in an interview that plea bargains are all-or-nothing operations and "concern about equal justice under the law is in Sullivan's DNA." "A typical defendant who pled guilty and then tried to backtrack, like Flynn, would lose credit for cooperation because he's failed to accept responsibility," Butler said. Another former prosecutor, Kenneth White, echoed Butler, calling Sullivan's outbursts "not that surprising." Earlier this year, Sullivan threatened to hold former attorney general Jeff Sessions and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen in contempt of court while presiding over an immigration case. "This is exactly why it's so hazardous for any defendant to try to shift blame after pleading guilty. Judges are looking for sincere acceptance of responsibility and attrition," he said. "Part of the judge's anger is that Flynn's showing the opposite of acceptance of responsibility and he already got a sweet deal by pleading to one count. The prosecutor asked for a straight-up walk." On Monday, prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia charged two of Flynn's business associates with acting as agents of a foreign government; Flynn confirmed his possible criminal liability in court. Knowing this, Mueller's team nevertheless allowed him to plead to one count and recommended a sentencing range that could have been a significantly higher. In the federal system, judges must consider all relevant conduct and circumstances, said Republican former Utah U.S. attorney Brett L. Tollman, adding that judges can deviate from the guidelines where warranted. "You can be charged with 50 crimes, acquitted of 49, and then sentenced on all 50." Often the government is the gatekeeper of a defendant's underlying conduct, but the Russia probe and Flynn's prosecution are highly public and uniquely political, and Sullivan is receiving information from multiple sources. Lying to a federal agent carries a sentence of zero to six months in jail, but, Tollman explained, if Sullivan believes Flynn's actions were egregious, the statute permits him to send Flynn to prison for up to five years, the statutory maximum. Flynn held a position of enormous responsibility, yet he pursued his own interest over those of the United States, Butler said. The judge made clear that was a serious crime. Sullivan even asked special counsel prosecutors if Flynn could be charged with "treason" - though, he cautioned the crowd to not read too much into his questioning. Still, he clearly was thinking along those lines. Flynn's sentencing hearing was adjourned Tuesday, with Sullivan requesting a status report in 90 days. Flynn's attorney asked that he be given "every modicum of consideration." Sullivan said he was "not making any promises" his position would change. In context of the current administration and the allegations surrounding Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, Flynn's crimes may seem less serious, but, attorney Paul Butler said, to many judges this would be a big deal. Sullivan, who Butler called a strong believer in the judiciary as a coequal branch of government, knew his remarks would send a message about the gravity of Flynn's conduct. He said, "Sullivan has the last word." --- Video Embed Code Video: The Fix's Aaron Blake breaks down what the sentencing delay for former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn means.(JM Rieger/The Washington Post) Embed code: BETHALTO Six people from outside the area were charged Monday with forgery after they allegedly presented fraudulent documents at the Illinois Secretary of State Drivers License Examination Station. Charged were Martin Vargas-Avalos, 29; Jose M. Barrados-Geron, 48; Cristobal Vargas-Avalos, 27; Sandy F. Hernandez-Potillo, 39; Juan M. Vargas-Avalos, 30; and Omar F. Ortiz-Grandados, 24. Each was charged with felony forgery, a Class 3 felony, and bond was set at $30,000 on each. The Trump administration's surprise decision Wednesday to pull all U.S. troops from Syria "as quickly as possible" sent ripples far beyond the battlefield. It was a dramatic about-face that will have long-term implications for the country, the region and international relations. Here are some of the biggest winners and losers: Winners - Bashar al-Assad Once, the Syrian president seemed doomed by a grinding civil war and international isolation. Then came help from the Russian military in 2015. Now, nearly eight years after the conflict started, Assad will almost certainly remain in power in his tattered country. The United States has made no secret of its distaste for the dictator, who killed and wounded hundreds of thousands of his own people, sometimes with banned chemical weapons. When evidence emerged that Assad's forces had used sarin nerve agent on civilians in a rebel-held town, President Donald Trump authorized an airstrike that inflicted limited damage on Assad's air force. It wasn't much, but it showed willingness to push back against the regime's worst abuses. Now the White House has signaled that Syria no longer remains a military priority. To be fair, the U.S. forces in Syria were far from the battles between Assad's military and rebel factions, including some that were once backed by Washington. The U.S. intervention was mostly about pushing back the Islamic State from strongholds including the militant group's self-declared capital, Raqqa. Still, the end of a U.S. military presence should give further confidence to Assad and his key allies - Russia and Iran - to team up with Syrian troops to crush the remnants of the rebels and opposition, handing Assad more complete control of Syria. - Iran Just months ago, the Trump administration said it was keeping U.S. troops in Syria indefinitely to act as a bulwark against Iran. The United States has de facto control of about a third of the country and has worked to disrupt Iranian activities. Without the United States, Iran and its ally Russia will be the most powerful foreign forces in Syria. And because they are allied with Assad, they are likely to have free rein. In the past, Iran has used Syria as a pathway to transport troops and weapons to allies around the Middle East, including Hezbollah in Lebanon. - Russia Russia has positioned itself as one of Assad's major allies. Its military has been active in Syria since 2015. Without the U.S. troop presence, Moscow will be able to expand its role in Syria and its sphere of influence across the Middle East. - Islamic State In his tweet about the withdrawal, Trump bragged that the Islamic State has been defeated. Many experts say the opposite is true. There are about 15,000 Islamic State militants in Syria, according to best estimates. In recent months, the group has been regaining a foothold in the country. Violent attacks have increased. (As Charles Lister of the Middle East Institute pointed out, the Islamic State - just 10 minutes before Trump's tweet - claimed responsibility for an attack on Raqqa.) As The Washington Post reporter Liz Sly wrote, there are "signs that the Islamic State is starting to regroup, and rumblings of discontent within the Arab community point to the threat of an insurgency." The only thing slowing that result, she wrote, is the presence of the United States. U.S. troops "have to stay," said Ilham Ahmed, a senior official with the Self-Administration of North and East Syria, as the self-styled government of the area is called. "If they leave and there isn't a solution for Syria, it will be catastrophic," he told Sly. The U.S. withdrawal could lead to a rejuvenated and emboldened Islamic State, a terrorist threat in Syria and beyond. Losers - The Kurds For months, Turkey has threatened to invade the Kurdish-controlled portion of Syria. Although the Turks have launched a handful of directed offensives, they have so far refrained from doing too much damage. When U.S. troops leave, that will almost certainly change. One of the major roles of U.S. troops in Syria has been to protect the country's Kurds. They now occupy about a third of Syrian territory, which they run as if it were a semiautonomous region. A U.S. exit will leave the ethnic minority vulnerable to attack from Turkey. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has all but promised just that. Days ago, Ankara threatened to launch a military offensive against Syria's Kurds. For decades, Turkish forces have battled Kurdish separatists in Turkey's southeast. Erdogan and others worry that any strengthening of Kurdish power in the region, including Syria, could pose further threats to Turkey. Erdogan has become increasingly frustrated that the Kurds have managed to take control of such a large swath of Syria, including portions on the Turkish border. - Israel Israel's main mission in Syria isn't really about Syria at all: It has been working to weaken Iran. Israeli forces have launched some airstrikes. Without the United States, Israel has few allies left inside Syria. University of Mary Washington officials could have done more to protect students from online harassment, a federal appeals court said Wednesday in a ruling with implications for free speech and anonymous social media messages on college campuses. In a 2-to-1 decision, the court said it could not "conclude that UMW could turn a blind eye to the sexual harassment that pervaded and disrupted its campus solely because the offending conduct took place through cyberspace." The case reached the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit after members of a student-run feminist group sued the public liberal arts university in Virginia for fostering a hostile environment and failing to protect them from threatening, sexist posts on the now-defunct messaging app Yik Yak. The case attracted national attention from a diverse group of organizations that raised concerns in court filings about censorship of campus speech on the one hand and the duty of colleges to respond to cyberbullying of students on the other. Mary Washington officials had argued that blocking access to a private social media app risked violating the free speech rights of other students at the Fredericksburg school, which has about 4,400 undergraduates and 400 graduate students. The initial complaint was filed with the U.S. Department of Education in 2015 by members of the student group Feminists United. The students were subjected to threats of sexual assault and cyberstalking, they said, after they spoke out on campus about Greek life and against a lewd chant by the rugby team. They felt threatened and unsafe and pressed university officials to take steps to disable the app on campus. A U.S. district court judge last fall dismissed the lawsuit, finding that the university had not violated Title IX's ban on sex discrimination on college campuses, and the students appealed. The appeals court ruling sends the case back to the lower court. But the court said Wednesday that school officials, including President Richard Hurley, did not take meaningful action to deal with the threats. "Rather than seeking to end the online harassment and threats, Dr. Cox - as UMW's Title IX coordinator - simply advised the Feminists United members that the University was powerless to address the offending conduct," according to the majority opinion written by Judge Robert King and joined by Judge Pamela Harris. "President Hurley likewise declined to take any meaningful action to curtail the online harassment and publicly downplayed the seriousness of the threats aimed at the Feminists United members," the court said. Hurley retired in 2016. Attorney Debra Katz, representing the students who sued, called the ruling "a huge decision" with national significance. Too often, Katz said, college students suffer harassment from peers and others who hide in the anonymity of cyberspace. "If you think about it, it's sort of the coward's way out to harass," Katz said. Universities must now update their enforcement practices, she said, "to deal with the realities of how students are being harassed and mistreated on campus today." University of Mary Washington President Troy D. Paino, who took office in July 2016, said he and other senior officials have not yet had a chance to review the ruling. "At this point in time, we really don't have any comment," Paino said when reached by telephone Wednesday afternoon. Writing in dissent, Judge Steven Agee faulted the majority for reaching a decision without evidence of exactly who harassed the plaintiffs. Agee wrote that it was not clear that the perpetrators were students at the university. "The Complaint does not identify the harassers or provide a factual basis for inferring whether they were students or nonstudents," he wrote. "And even if assumed to be a University student, the Complaint also fails to identify who - of the over 5,000 University students - they were." Agee said the ruling could wreak havoc among colleges and universities. "Make no mistake, the majority's novel and unsupported decision will have a profound effect, particularly on institutions of higher education," he wrote, unless the Supreme Court intervenes. He wrote that institutions like the university "will be compelled to venture into an ethereal world of non-university forums at great cost and significant liability, in order to avoid the Catch-22 Title IX liability the majority now proclaims." For the past four years, the nation's capital has undergone its worst public-health crisis since the arrival of AIDS: an explosion of fatal drug overdoses among African Americans. The rate of death, caused by heroin cut with the lethal synthetic opioid fentanyl, is comparable to the opioid epidemic's worst ravages in rural and suburban parts of the United States. More people died of opioid overdoses than homicides last year in the District. But the city's overdose victims are different from those in areas of the country more commonly associated with opioid abuse. Many are black men who have been addicted to heroin for decades. And unlike drug users elsewhere, they have often been left by their government without basic help. The District has consistently fallen short in its response to mounting opioid casualties, misspending millions of federal grant dollars and ignoring lifesaving strategies that have been widely adopted elsewhere, a Washington Post investigation found. D.C. officials distributed naloxone - an overdose antidote that laypeople can use to prevent deaths - at a far lower rate than other cities with comparable opioid problems. As fatal overdoses peaked last year, Baltimore handed out more than four times as many naloxone kits per capita as the District; and Philadelphia, more than three times as many, according to city data. Officials at the nonprofit groups that collaborated with the District on its naloxone campaign called it "woefully inadequate" and "disastrous." The city has also faltered in carrying out a federally sponsored initiative to connect long-term heroin users with treatment. Although D.C. officials in 2017 began receiving what will ultimately total $4 million over two years from the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), many programs the city said it would launch never materialized. Officials at the clinic contracted by the District with most of its federal funds said not a single patient has been referred to them for addiction treatment. "It's just pure incompetence," said Larry Gourdine of Medical Home Development Group (MHDG), which received nearly $1.5 million of the city's grant money. "This is not that difficult. I mean, this is straight-up health-care delivery." In a city where growing prosperity conceals profound divides of race and class, the damage done by heroin and fentanyl has fallen squarely on African Americans. Of the 860 people known to have died of opioid overdoses since 2014, 4 in 5 were black, according to the chief medical examiner. In 2017 - the most recent year of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention - the rate of fatal drug overdoses among African Americans in the District was higher than that of whites in West Virginia, Ohio or New Hampshire. Yet those deaths, concentrated in the historically black neighborhoods of Southeast and Northeast Washington, have been unnoticed by many residents of the nation's capital. Few elected officials have taken prompt action to address the crisis. Frustrated advocates and medical professionals say the District's lackluster response would never have been tolerated in whiter and more affluent neighborhoods. "People discount the severity of our opioid epidemic because it's mainly older, African American men who have used heroin long-term who are dying," said Kaitlyn Boecker, who works in the D.C. office of the Drug Policy Alliance, a national organization that works to change drug laws. "There just seems to be no urgency in addressing the crisis." D.C. officials defended their response to surging opioid deaths, saying the past several years have been a learning period. Looking ahead, they said they are planning a comprehensive response to the epidemic, with the help of $21 million in new funding for opioid programs that the District is scheduled to receive from the federal government. Mayor Muriel Bowser, D, declined repeated requests for an interview for this article. In a written statement, Bowser said the District's strategies "are working and saving lives." She noted that more than 700 overdose reversals have been reported using naloxone distributed by the city. "We will remain relentless in seeking the best possible tools and data to stop preventable overdose and death," Bowser said in the statement. There are bright spots in the city's opioid response. Beginning late last year, the District gave out $1.7 million in local grants to increase the number of doctors and nurses trained to treat addiction. But there has been no corresponding spike in the number of patients signing up for treatment, according to city and federal data. After three straight years of increases, opioid deaths are on track to drop this year - although the number of projected fatalities will still be twice as many as in 2014, according to the District's chief medical examiner. Some city officials say the decline results from their prevention efforts. But some medical experts think the trend - which mirrors a decline in fatal opioid overdoses seen in other cities and states - could have other causes. One theory holds that chronic users are beginning to adapt to fentanyl-tainted heroin, using it more carefully and in smaller doses. Another is that four years into the District's opioid crisis, many of the addicts most at risk are already dead. - - - Maurice Abbey-Bey stepped out of a minivan at the D.C. General shelter for homeless families, opened the trunk and announced his wares - free syringes, condoms and Narcan, a brand of naloxone nasal inhaler - in a hoarse shout. Among the dozens who lined up was Renee Jones-Collins, a resident of Southeast Washington. Jones-Collins said she no longer uses heroin but has friends who do. The previous month, she said, she had used Narcan to revive one who had "fallen out," or overdosed. She said that while fentanyl-laced heroin was "all over the place" in the District, naloxone was comparably scarce. "It's not enough," she said. Abbey-Bey was selective with his 30 Narcan kits but quickly ran out. Soon he was driving back to the nonprofit Helping Individual Prostitutes Survive (HIPS), where naloxone provided by the city was carefully rationed. "I don't want to hold on to this stuff like it's dear life," he said. "But that's what I'm doing." The D.C. Department of Health began its campaign to saturate overdose-heavy neighborhoods with Narcan in the spring of 2016. The department partnered with HIPS and Family and Medical Counseling Service (FMCS), another nonprofit that provides needle-exchange services, giving the organizations city-purchased Narcan to distribute. The city's management of the program has been "disastrous," said Diane Jones, a social worker who oversaw the initiative at FMCS. In an interview in May, she estimated that the approximately 150 kits FMCS was receiving from the city each month were half of what was needed. She said her organization routinely faced agonizing decisions about which clients are most deserving of the medicine. "These, at this point, are the only tools we have in this crisis," Jones said. "And we're having to ration them out." Similar complaints date to the earliest days of the city's naloxone initiative. On July 12, 2016 - approximately two months after the program got underway - then-HIPS employee Andrew Bell warned top health department officials that the group's Narcan supply was exhausted and it was unable to meet demand for the medicine. "Not a day goes by that we don't have clients asking for naloxone," Bell said in an email. The health department ultimately increased HIPS's Narcan supply. But the nonprofit organization continued to face shortages. In May of this year, HIPS launched an online donation drive when it was on the verge of running out of Narcan and the city refused to allow it to restock nine days early. "We're tired of the city's woefully inadequate response to fatal overdoses in D.C.," the group wrote in its appeal. "Please donate today and help HIPS purchase our OWN supplies so we can do the city's job for them." HIPS Executive Director Cyndee Clay said other local governments were more aggressive in making sure naloxone reached drug users. "There are places where this is done well," she said. "D.C. is just not one of them." Other municipalities have launched far more robust Narcan distribution campaigns, according to a Post analysis of data provided by those cities. In 2017, Baltimore distributed an average 178 kits per month per 100,000 residents, and Philadelphia 141. Boston distributed 87 kits per month per 100,000 people, San Francisco 86 and New York City 59. D.C.'s figure: 38. - - - D.C. Department of Health Director LaQuandra Nesbitt said complaints about naloxone shortages had been valuable feedback in what she described as a two-year test run. "I want to emphasize it was a pilot, and so we wanted to hear from them what was working and what wasn't working," Nesbitt said. She said the health department was overhauling the program so that HIPS and FMCS would receive funding to buy their own naloxone instead of relying on the city, a move she said should resolve disputes. Nesbitt said it was wrong to judge the effectiveness of the District's program based on the number of Narcan kits that had been handed out without tracking other measures, such as whether overdose victims were offered medical care or long-term addiction treatment after their lives were saved. "It's not just about whether or not naloxone was given - did you spray something in the nostrils. It's what happened as a result of that, and those things are critically important for us to understand," Nesbitt said. She added, "I don't determine the success of a program based merely on the number of kits that have been distributed." That view goes against best practices for naloxone distribution, according to Eliza Wheeler, national overdose response strategist for the Harm Reduction Coalition. "Measuring the success of a naloxone program has to be based on how much naloxone gets into the hands of people who freely use drugs," Wheeler said. "The analogy that we use is thinking about a flu shot drive in the community." Such efforts are judged based on how many people at risk of flu get vaccinated, she said, not what happens to them afterward. The District has also been an outlier when it comes to another means of increasing naloxone's availability: a government policy that allows anyone to buy the medication in a pharmacy without a doctor's prescription. As of January 2018, such policies existed in more than two dozen states, including neighboring Maryland and Virginia, according to the National Alliance of State Pharmacy Associations. The D.C. Council passed a law that would have allowed District residents access to the medication in pharmacies in 2016. But Nesbitt refused to implement it, saying the legislation gave too much authority to pharmacists and did not protect pharmacists who chose not to dispense naloxone from legal liability. She did not take action to make naloxone available until this month, when the council approved changes she requested to the policy. - - - Victor Williams, a 56-year-old heroin user, was discharged the morning of Sept. 28 from United Medical Center (UMC), the District's public hospital, where he had been treated for an overdose. Close to midnight on the same day, his younger brother, Phillip Williams, got a call he had long dreaded. Victor had gone into the bathroom at Phillip Williams's house, according to a friend, and wasn't responding to knocks. The friend called 911. Phillip arrived home in time to see his brother - with whom he still stayed up late playing dominoes and pinochle, despite the damage heroin had done to their relationship - carried out the door in a body bag. A syringe was found in the bathroom. The medical examiner's office later determined that fentanyl killed Victor Williams. Phillip Williams, himself a recovering heroin user, said he thinks his brother could have been persuaded to enter treatment with professional outreach. "When people that need help, that you should offer help, they can't get no help - they go back to what they used to know," he said, explaining his brother's relapses. What Phillip Williams didn't know until recently was that an outreach program for overdose victims like Victor should have been in place at UMC more than a year ago - one of several federally funded initiatives that D.C. officials failed to carry out. Along with every state and four U.S. territories, the District was awarded money to combat the opioid epidemic under the 21st Century Cures Act, signed by then-President Barack Obama in December 2016. The city's eligibility for the grant - $2 million a year, for two years - gave it an advantage over municipalities with no direct access to federal money for anti-opioid campaigns. That advantage has led to few results.Outreach initiatives to heroin users the grant was supposed to fund never materialized. At the height of the epidemic last year, District officials failed to spend $620,000 of their federal money, or about a third of the amount allotted to the city in the grant's first year. The grant was overseen by the D.C. Department of Behavioral Health, which along with the Department of Health manages the District's opioid strategies. In its application, the agency described an extensive street outreach effort, with a group of 10 peer counselors - former drug users trained to counsel others about treatment options - visiting spots where heroin users gather. However, in an August 2017 strategic plan the department submitted to the federal government, agency officials said they were having trouble recruiting outreach workers. An initial training session in May hadn't drawn enough participants to launch the peer outreach program as originally planned, they wrote. Instead, the agency said it would launch a more focused outreach campaign at a location where peer counselors could be sure to encounter drug users: a hospital emergency room. Two counselors would be stationed at UMC, city officials said, shepherding recent overdose victims to on-site treatment with buprenorphine, a medication that diminishes opioid cravings. Similar programs have been launched in multiple cities, based on a 2015 study at Yale-New Haven Hospital that showed users who begin buprenorphine treatment during visits to the emergency room often have more success in recovery. "We really have an opportunity to see a lot of these patients in that wake-up moment," said Ali Raja, a physician who oversaw the introduction of a buprenorphine program at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston last year. UMC was an ideal site. Last year, it saw 400 opioid overdose patients, far more than any other hospital in the nation's capital, according to city data. Medical Home Development Group, the city's contracted buprenorphine treatment provider, leased an office two floors above the hospital's emergency room in anticipation of the program. But the city's promised outreach workers never showed up. The office, rather than treating overdose victims from the emergency room, is now used for other patients, said Edwin Chapman, MHDG's chief medical officer. Chapman, who treats Phillip Williams at his practice on Benning Road NE, said Victor Williams was just one of many patients whose lives could have been saved if the city had followed through. "It just fell apart," Chapman said. "They reneged on everything." Tanya Royster, who until two weeks ago was the director of the D.C. Department of Behavioral Health, said in an interview that she was unable to provide any information about why the city never carried out the program at UMC. "I can't answer that," she said. In a later email, department spokeswoman Jasmine Gossett denied the program had ever been planned. After she was shown the plan submitted by the department to the federal government, Gossett acknowledged the proposed UMC project but said it was part of an interim plan and not "an official proposal." Other initiatives outlined as part of the city's grant documents likewise made little progress. An effort to persuade 125 older patients at the city's methadone clinics to switch to buprenorphine treatment - which, unlike methadone, is fully covered by Medicare - went nowhere. As time passed with no action or direction from the city on the grant programs, MHDG used the federal money it had been paid to offer primary care to patients at the Foundation for Contemporary Mental Health, a methadone clinic in Foggy Bottom. The attention was welcomed by men and women who often have grave health problems after decades of addiction, but it was not treatment for drug abuse. Although MHDG received $1.46 million of the city's $4 million in total grant funds, it ultimately did not treat a single patient for opioid addiction in connection with the grant. Department of Behavioral Health officials acknowledged problems with the grant in a July report to the federal government. They said the District had spent $1.38 million of the $2 million awarded in the grant's first year, citing "a lack of clarity in communicating to the sub-grantees their roles and responsibilities" and "unexpected turnover" in the department staff overseeing opioid programs. Royster had a more positive appraisal. She told The Post it was normal to leave federal grant money unspent in the first year, and pointed to a use of the funds that she said had been successful: Some $200,000 spent on posters that warned drug users of fentanyl and promoted naloxone. She acknowledged her agency was not using tried-and-true strategies other governments have adopted but said this was a strength rather than a weakness. The city's approach has been tailored to its distinctive population of older, African American heroin users, she said. "We're not behind the curve. We're actually, I would say, ahead of the curve," Royster said. "And one of the ways that you can be confident of that is that we're not just doing what everyone else is doing. We're doing what's important for D.C." In response to questions from The Post about the District's use of its grant money, SAMHSA spokesman Brian Dominguez said grant recipients "have flexibility to design their systems and plans." On Nov. 30, after her interview with The Post and before this article was published, Royster was removed from her job by the mayor. A Bowser administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a personnel matter, said the mayor had grown frustrated with the slowness of the agency's responses to various issues, including drug overdoses. Bowser chose as a replacement Nesbitt, who will continue leading the Department of Health while overseeing the Department of Behavioral Health on a temporary basis. - - - There is at least one precedent for a more successful opioid program managed by city officials. Last year, the Department of Health began giving out $1.7 million to help clinics hire and train medical staff for buprenorphine programs. Five clinics, along with Howard University Hospital, obtained funding. The money has been one factor in a rapid expansion of addiction treatment providers in the District. The federal government has certified at least 150 new buprenorphine prescribers - with a capacity to treat 5,550 patients - over the past two years, SAMHSA data show. But the rate at which patients most at risk are entering treatment has not kept up. Since 2016, the number of Medicaid beneficiaries receiving buprenorphine has increased by 132 people, according to data from the D.C. Department of Health Care Finance. After training new buprenorphine prescribers with city funding, the addiction clinic at Mary's Center in Adams Morgan is now able to treat roughly 500 people, said Daniel Smith, the doctor who oversees the program. It currently has about 135 patients, he said. "We're growing, and we grow every month by 5 or 10 percent," Smith said. "But we're not close to our capacity." The District will have ample opportunity to close its treatment gap over the next two years, as it begins receiving $21 million annually in new federal funding for local governments to combat the opioid crisis. The Department of Behavioral Health, which will oversee the grant, outlined dozens of new programs in its grant application, some of which expand on unfulfilled initiatives from the past two years. The city is planning to launch outreach programs for overdose patients in multiple hospitals, with both the new federal money and unused funds left over from its earlier grant. Four years into the District's opioid crisis, city officials are beginning to adopt other measures long urged by advocates. D.C. health officials say they are finalizing a comprehensive plan for responding to the opioid epidemic, created by a task force of government workers, treatment providers and advocates. In August, the health department began distributing naloxone through homeless shelters. This month, the D.C. Council approved a package of changes sought by treatment providers to the District's opioid policies, including the removal of restrictions on Medicaid reimbursement for addiction treatment. The bill was originally introduced in 2017, and took almost 15 months to come to a vote. Some on the front lines of the epidemic say these developments are welcome but come after inexcusable delays. "They could have saved a lot of lives," said Robert Keisling, a physician who runs one of the city's most active addiction medicine practices. "It's way late. But late is better than never." In Marvin Gaye Park, a notorious hangout for heroin users in Northeast Washington, a small group gathered on Aug. 31 - International Overdose Awareness Day - to remember those for whom help did not come soon enough. Lewis Blakeney, a 62-year-old recovering heroin user who has survived two overdoses, estimated that a dozen older black men who had once nodded off alongside him on the park benches were now dead. Durrell Gray, 55, recalled his cousin, found dead of a heroin overdose in the park. Alvin Wynn, 62, remembered his ex-girlfriend, who died several years ago, and a friend he had tried unsuccessfully to revive with Narcan. Since fentanyl-tainted heroin hit the District. in 2014, Wynn said, "I went to 50 funerals." In Baltimore, 35 miles to the north, a mayor, a congressman and the city's health commissioner were holding a news conference at city hall, pledging their resolve to reduce the city's drug deaths. But the vigil in the District was informal, organized by recovering heroin users and needle-exchange workers. The mayor didn't show up, and D.C. health agencies hosted no events. For most of the nation's capital, International Overdose Awareness Day was just another day. - - - The Washington Post's Kate Rabinowitz and Chris Alcantara contributed to this report. A yard sign displaying two of President Donald Trumps oft-used phrases, Fake News, and #MAGA with an arrow pointing to the marquee of the Holocaust Memorial Museum of San Antonio was removed Tuesday morning from the Campus of the San Antonio Jewish Community, officials said. The sign was placed so its arrow pointed to the museums freestanding marquee. It was discovered by groundskeepers at about 7 a.m. Tuesday. Its clearly a statement of Holocaust denial, said Ronit Sherwin, CEO of the Jewish Federation of San Antonio, which operates the museum. She said the federation does not know who put up the sign but reported the incident to authorities. Though obscured by the mornings dense fog, the sign was in view long enough for word to spread, upsetting members of a community already shaken by national anti-Semitic incidents and the October mass shooting of a Pittsburg synagogue that claimed 11 lives. In a statement, the federations board chair Harry Levy called it an act of vandalism against the Jewish community, doubly harmful in that it laughs at the memory of all the millions of Jews who died in the Holocaust and is harmful to the precious few Holocaust survivors who witnessed the horrors of the Shoah first hand. The ignorance expressed by the perpetrators can only be countered by shining the light of truth upon our shared history, Levy said. The museum often showcases the personal testimonies of several Holocaust survivors who live in San Antonio. Busloads of local students have heard them speak. The San Antonio Police Department said officers were called to the campus at Wurzbach Parkway and Northwest Military Highway at 7:45 a.m. for what was described as threats. A report was not available. Besides the Jewish Federation, the campus contains the Jewish Community Center and Jewish Family Services. In a statement Tuesday, the Muslim Children Education and Civic Center condemned the signs placement at the Jewish campus in the strongest terms, calling it an insulting, demeaning, and dehumanizing incident. Trumps catch phrases, including MAGA for Make America Great Again, have been popularized by his supporters at rallies and on social media. Using the slogans to deny that the Holocaust happened should disturb even his most ardent supporters, said Aaron Delwiche, a professor of communication at Trinity University. The term fake news originally referred to completely fabricated news stories appearing in phony publications that dont actually exist, he said via email. During the past two years, President Trump has used this phrase as a name-calling device designed to discredit news coverage that he considers to be unfairly critical of his administration. This anti-Semitic incident is a reminder that this sort of rhetoric has consequences, Delwiche added. The Holocaust was not fake news. It is time for all of us, on all sides of the political spectrum, to insist on facts, evidence, and logic when talking about politics. In 2015, several incidents of anti-Semitic graffiti targeted the Jewish community in San Antonio. They included spray-painted swastikas and racial slurs that vandalized homes, cars and other items in a Jewish neighborhood surrounding a synagogue on the citys Northwest Side. Elaine Ayala covers religion and minority affairs in the San Antonio and Bexar County area. Read her on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | eayala@express-news.net | Twitter: @ElaineAyala A suspended Homeland Security agent pleaded guilty Wednesday to child pornography charges just as a judge had prepared to hear his trial. Richard Nikolai Gratkowski, 40, who spent 10 years with Immigration and Customs Enforcements Homeland Security Investigations, tried to take a plea deal in November but with conditions aimed at preserving some appellate rights. Senior U.S. District Judge David Ezra initially rejected the plea deal because he normally does not accept conditional plea agreements, and had set the case for a bench trial that was supposed to start today. But after Ezra made some rulings on pre-trial motions and heard from Gratkowskis lawyer, assistant federal public defender Marina Thais-Douenat, and the prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Attorney Tracy Thompson, the judge allowed the conditional plea to go forward. FIND OUT FIRST: Get San Antonio breaking news directly to your inbox The judge denied some of Gratkowskis pre-trial motions, but granted one that suppresses incriminating statements Gratkowski made to internal investigators with his agency, though prosecutors werent relying solely on those statements. As part of his plea agreement, Gratkowski can appeal any motion he lost to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans. After the kinks were ironed out, Gratkowski appeared before U.S. Magistrate Judge Henry Bemporad and pleaded guilty to two charges. Gratkowski faces five to 20 years on the charge of receiving child porn images and up to 20 years on a count of accessing child porn with intent to view it, when Ezra sentences him in March. OnExpressNews.com: Federal agent to plead guilty to child porn charges Gratkowski was assigned to a squad that investigates gangs in San Antonio. He also had worked in Eagle Pass. An FBI agent previously testified that Gratkowskis employer put him on paid leave and was working to fire him. All Department of Homeland Security employees are held to the highest standards of behavior and ethics, ICE said in a statement. While ICE does not comment on personnel matters, the agency is fully cooperating with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Securitys Office of Inspector General (OIG) regarding this issue. Gratkowski was arrested Jan. 4 after his case was referred to the FBI by his own agencys internal affairs branch and the Internal Revenue Services criminal investigators, FBI special agent Larry Baker testified at a hearing in February. RELATED: Feds investigate child porn and arrest two of their own Baker testified that Gratkowskis arrest arose out of an investigation into a child porn website on The Onion Router, or TOR network, which seeks to keep users anonymous by using thousands of relays or servers, much like the layers of an onion. The same investigation also ensnared then-Border Patrol agent Paul Casey Whipple, 35, of Hondo in mid-December. According to Baker, the website in question provided access to more than 117,000 graphic child porn videos. Gratkowski and Whipple were both identified as users. Whipple is now scheduled for trial in March. 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 Margaret Wheeler Wright known to her friends as Peggy left us to be with her husband, Bill, on Thursday, December 13, 2018, at the age of 92. Born in the small port town of Callao outside of Lima, Peru, she spent her childhood in the Andes Mountains with her father, a mining engineer. She joined the U.S. State Department and was transferred to the consulate in Nuevo Laredo where she met her husband William Wright, an Asst. District Attorney in Laredo, Texas. In 1963 the family moved out to the family ranch north of Laredo, where she would spend the next 40 years ranching, raising a family, and hosting nieces, nephews, and friends who all called the ranch their home at some point in their lives. In her later years she moved to Laredo and enjoyed her role as hostess for family parties. She will be missed by all. A cross party delegation from Longford County Council is to meet Housing Minister Eoghan Murphy in a bid to ensure the increased rollout of affordable housing schemes across Co Longford. Director of Services John Brannigan told last weeks December meeting that despite ongoing discussions with Department of Housing officials, the current programme doesnt fit the Longford scenario. Mr Brannigan also revealed the council had more than lived up to its obligations, delivering 65 units countywide this year and carried out over 900 repairs to its 2,000 strong housing stock. But it was details surrounding the apparent reluctance of Department chiefs to finance local authorities like Longford into delivering more affordable housing schemes which sparked an angry volley from local politicians. We need housing for workers, its as simple as that, said an indignant Cllr Gerry Warnock. We need to target the forgotten groups of low to middle income earners that are earning too much marginally to qualify for housing supports under the existing thresholds and probably not earning enough to ever be in a position to avail of conventional mortgage through financial institutions. The Independent councillor, who serves as the councils chairperson of its Housing Strategic Policy Committee, led calls for Mr Murphy to introduce a special dispensation for rural counties to deliver more cost effective housing developments. He said the fact Longford, according to the 2016 Census, boasted 55 per cent more social housing units than the national average, was symptomatic of the need facing housing officials locally. That (figure) is massive and yet you have Department officials that cannot get the guys off their arse to build houses in Dublin where they are needed, he said. Also read: Property sales in Longford reach 40 million They are skewing their numbers so local authorities like Longford are given a one size fits all policy so theyre stats look good in the national media. They didnt engage with this local authority or any other local authority in terms of an overall plan and yet they can come out and say Longford County Council cannot provide affordable housing schemes aimed at workers who have been thrown to the wolves for the last number of years. Cllr Martin Mulleady, himself a local builder, sang the praises of Longford County Councils unfinished estates team in mending the past legacies of the Celtic Tiger era and hit out at the ongoing difficulties young couples are facing in terms of accessing finance from Irelands financial institutions. The banks arent lending to these people, he said. And there are families that will be in hotels this Christmas which just shouldnt be happening. Fine Gael group leader Cllr Micheal Carrigy said he had held talks with Mr Murphy over the issue only recently and expressed his confidence progress in advancing Longfords cause was just around the corner. His north Longford running mate said there was a need for a greater mix of housing, including private, affordable and social across the county. And, in a further move, he hailed the part played by Cllr Mulleady and the firm he co-directs with his brother Michael, in delivering social housing units to the county in such a prompt and efficient fashion. If we have builders here who can deliver these housing developments in six to seven months, then why cant it be done in Dublin? Cllr Brady asked. Read next: Center Parcs employees from the UK are already buying property in Ballymahon, says local auctioneer Local News, Crime, Press Releases By Long Island News & PR Published: December 19 2018 Mendez Allegedly Stole Over $50,000 from Bronx Non-Profit and Falsified Business Records to Conceal the Theft. New York, NY - December 18, 2018 - Attorney General Barbara D. Underwood, Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli, and New York City Department of Investigation Commissioner Margaret Garnett today announced the indictment of former Tremont Crotona Day Care Center Program Director Anna Mendez on one count of Grand Larceny in the Second Degree, a class C felony, and ten counts of Falsifying Business Records in the First Degree, a class D felony, in Bronx County Supreme Court. As we allege, the defendant stole tens of thousands of dollars that was intended to help children and then used those funds to serve herself and local politicians through illegal straw donations, said Attorney General Underwood. Non-profit directors have a fundamental responsibility to their organizations and the people they serve. We will hold accountable anyone who tries to exploit New Yorkers. For years, Ms. Mendez allegedly exploited her position to steal money meant to help children and families and used it for her own personal use, said State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli. Now, thanks to my partnership with Attorney General Underwood and the New York City Department of Investigation, she will face the consequences of her actions. I thank the Attorney General and Department of Investigation for their continued collaboration in combating fraud. DOI Commissioner Margaret Garnett said, This defendant embezzled tens of thousands of dollars from a day care in the Bronx, using the proceeds of her crime for personal use and for straw donations to local politicians, according to the charges. Fraud at nonprofits can hurt some of the most vulnerable in our City, in this case working families in the Bronx who struggle to find childcare. DOI was gratified to perform financial analysis on this investigation and work with the state Attorney Generals Office and the state Comptrollers Office on this important case. Mendez allegedly collected money from the parents of families using the day care services at the 1984 Daly Avenue location of Tremont Crotona, Inc., which were stored in a safe in her office. Mendez is charged with taking at least $50,000 from the safe over an approximately three-year period for her personal use and to make straw donations to New York politicians. She is also charged with keeping the records of the stolen parent fees separate from the rest of the parent fee money that was collected, and of failing to report the receipt of that money to Tremont Crotona, Inc. so management would not notice her theft. The charges are merely accusations and the defendant is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in a court of law. Since 2011, the Attorney General and State Comptroller have worked together to fight corruption through their Joint Task Force on Public Integrity. They have brought charges against dozens of individuals implicated in public corruption schemes around the state resulting in the return of over $11 million in restitution to taxpayers through these convictions. This case is being prosecuted by Assistant Attorney General Kevin B. Frankel of the Attorney Generals Public Integrity Bureau, under the supervision of Deputy Bureau Chief Stacy Aronowitz. The Criminal Justice Division is led by Executive Deputy Attorney General Alvin Bragg. The investigation was led by Investigator Steven Broomer of the Attorney Generals Investigations Bureau, under the supervision of Supervising Investigator Michael Leahy and Deputy Chief Investigator John McManus. Legal Support Analyst Rachel Demma of the Public Integrity Bureau also assisted in the investigation. Local News, Business & Finance, Press Releases By Long Island News & PR Published: December 19 2018 Hauppauge Pharmaceutical Company Among Most Recent Additions to Suffolk Program. Suffolk County, NY - December 18, 2018 - Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone today announced that the number of companies participating in Suffolk Countys Foreign Trade Zone #52 (FTZ) have doubled from three to six in 2018. The addition of LNK International, a multi-million dollar pharmaceutical company that employs more than one thousand workers on Long Island, is the third company looking to benefit from Suffolks Foreign Trade Zone designation this year. Our trade zone is a crown jewel in Suffolk County for local companies who do business internationally, said Suffolk County Executive Bellone. Reductions, deferment or elimination of tariffs through Foreign Trade Zone designation can significantly impact their bottom lines which creates a positive benefit to the entire regions economy. Its a win for Suffolk businesses, a win for the County and a win for all of Long Island. Theresa Ward, Suffolk County Commissioner of the Department of Economic Development and Planning, said: FTZ #52, serves as a valuable business development tool for the County that helps retain existing companies, and encourages business to relocate here. It allows state-side companies to remain competitive in the global marketplace. The Economic Development and Planning Department is responsible for the administration and management of the FTZ #52 program. The Foreign Trade Zone is a program regulated by the U.S. Department of Commerce whose companies operate in a FTZ function under the supervision of U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The inclusion primarily allows companies regularly engaged in import/export activities located in, or looking to relocate to, Suffolk County the opportunity to defer, reduce or eliminate tariffs on merchandise located within an FTZ. Suffolk County does not charge any fees associated with participation in FTZ #52. The types of activities allowed in a FTZ include assembling, exhibiting, manufacturing, warehousing and more, however retail trade is prohibited. Foreign Trade Zone #52, established in 1979, is the only FTZ on Long Island, and one of more than 200 across the United States. The Town of Islip Foreign Trade Zone Authority located at Long Island MacArthur Airport, which acts as a magnet site, was established in 1981. Changes in the federal program in 2013 allow Suffolk County to bring the trade zone to a company at their location. A new subzone has been formed for LNK, Inc. that includes eight buildings in the Hauppauge Industrial Park. School & Education, Local News, Press Releases By Long Island News & PR Published: December 19 2018 The lessons were designed to help prepare the soon-to-be middle school students for what to expect when they transition to their new school next year. Moriches, NY - December 18, 2018 - A group of seventh-grade students from William Floyd Middle School recently paid a visit to the fifth graders at Moriches Elementary School to present interactive lessons on exploration. The lessons, crafted by the students themselves, were designed to help prepare the soon-to-be middle school students for what to expect when they transition to their new school next year. The visit was also an opportunity for the seventh grade students to visit their former teachers and demonstrate to them what they have learned during their middle school tenure. One of our goals this year was to increase the collaboration between William Floyd Middle School and Moriches Elementary School, said Deirdre Redding, principal, Moriches Elementary School. We want to provide opportunities for our middle school students to exhibit leadership skills and have our elementary school students be able to experience what they will be learning and have the opportunity to be a part of it once they go to the middle school. Local News, Business & Finance, Press Releases, Politics By Long Island News & PR Published: December 19 2018 New Equal Employment Opportunity Policy ensures equality. Mineola, NY - December 18, 2018 - Nassau County Executive Laura Curran today joined Legislator Arnold Drucker, Legislator Ellen Birnbaum, Legislator Debra Mule, Dr. David Kilmnick President/CEO of the LGBT Network and Aiden Jay Kaplan LGBTQ Youth Services Manager at Pride for Youth to announce an updated and improved Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) Policy that addresses gender identity, transgender, gender dysphoria discrimination and sexual harassment. The County's outdated EEO policy did not support full diversity and tolerance," said Curran. We are working to eradicate all forms of discrimination in the workplace and to ensure equal employment opportunity for all members of our team. This new policy will do more to protect the civil rights of our employees than has ever been done before. Currans policy improvements include substantial enhancements in provisions relating to sexual harassment prevention. Nassau County will now have a separate complaint form for sexual harassment and prompt investigations into allegations of discrimination or harassment. The policy also protects employees who report harassment and/or discrimination from retaliation. And for the first time in Nassau Countys history, it is explicitly stated in the EEO policy that the protected classification of sex protects employees against discrimination based on gender identity, transgender persons and gender dysphoria. The Countys commitment to safe-guarding its employees also includes an interactive training plan to educate all employees in identifying and reporting instances of discrimination and/or sexual harassment. This interactive training plan will enhance the Countys established EEO and Anti-Harassment training. We need to ensure a safe and respectful workplace, said Curran. Its our job to protect the civil rights of our employees. That is responsible, ethical government. Earlier this year, I was proud to champion and secure passage of sweeping reforms to Nassau Countys sexual harassment policies. Today, we take another important step toward eradicating the scourge of sexual harassment and gender-based discrimination, Legislator Drucker said. I applaud the County Executive for her commitment to safety and fairness in the workplace and am hopeful that we can parlay this momentum into enshrining protections for transgender residents into Nassau Countys human rights law. Under the bold leadership of County Executive Curran, Nassau County has made many important strides towards becoming a safer, more inclusive place to live and work. This long-overdue policy change for Nassaus transgender people and families sends a clear message that all county employees are entitled to work in an environment that is safe, and free from harassment and discrimination, said Dr. Kilmnick. Nassau County has an obligation to its residents to ensure people of all gender identities have the same equal protections under the law, said Kaplan. This policy is the first in Nassau Countys history to explicitly protect transgender people and it is hopefully the first of many policies that will be introduced to end discrimination against this vulnerable population. These advancements conform to the new State Department of Labor Model Sexual Harassment Prevention Policy issued earlier this year. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, December 19) The U.S. would defend the Philippines in case of a foreign invasion, its ambassador said Wednesday. "Our commitment to this alliance is absolute, is ironclad. And I fully expect that we will come to the defense of the Philippines if any foreign nation were to attack the Philippines," U.S. Ambassador to the Philippines Sung Kim told CNN Philippines' The Source. Kim said this in reaction to a recently released poll by the Social Weather Stations showing that 61 percent of Filipinos believe that the U.S. would aid the Philippines should it be invaded by a foreign country. The survey conducted from June 27 to 30 also found that 30 percent of Filipinos are undecided whether the U.S. would come to the defense of the Philippines, while nine percent believe it would not aid its longtime ally. Kim thinks that those who said they are undecided are leaning towards the belief that the U.S. would help the Philippines in case of an invasion. The U.S. and the Philippines inked a Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT) in 1951 which provides that both countries would assist each other when either of them is attacked by a foreign force. Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana and US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo reaffirmed the countries' commitment to the agreement in September. Supreme Court Senior Associate Justice Antonio Carpio was among those who called on the government to ask the U.S. to declare Scarborough Shoal as part of Philippine territory so it can invoke the MDT to get military aid from the Western power amid China's reported rampant militarization of the West Philippine Sea. But asked if the U.S. could help the Philippines in its maritime row with China, Kim said, "I think our position on the whole South China Sea situation has been quite consistent, and you've heard it before many times. We call on all claimants to refrain from any aggressive unilateral actions. We call on all countries to refrain from militarization of those features." The U.S. has been conducting freedom of navigation exercises in the South China Sea and has also conducted joint exercises with Philippine troops. China has repeatedly expressed opposition against these operations and tensions still remain high in the contested region. READ: China concerned with U.S. navy exercises during Xi visit to PH Palace Last month, a Filipino TV crew was reportedly barred from filming in the Scarborough Shoal, a feature within the exclusive economic zone of the Philippines, prompting calls from some senators to call on the government to lodge a diplomatic protest against China. "Freedom of navigation and overflight are international rights for everybody. It does not belong to any set of countries. And this is why we continue to conduct freedom of navigation operations because it is a way to protect those rights and principles," Kim said. He added that joint exercises "in the hundreds" between U.S. and Philippine troops would continue next year. The Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague, in a 2016 decision on a case filed by the Philippines against China, voided Beijing's sweeping claims over virtually the entire South China Sea. It also found that none of the features claimed by China was capable of generating an exclusive economic zone, affirming the Philippines' sovereign rights in waters within its exclusive economic zone. China did not participate in the proceedings and refuses to recognize the historic ruling. The U.S. is among the eight countries which has called for the arbitral ruling to be respected, according to the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative. Here we are, another 525,600 minutes gone by, and its time for an annual look into the crystal ball to try and catch a glimpse of the things Id like to see from Apple in 2019. But before we unpack a nice, fresh crystal ball, its time to take this grimy old crystal ball and smash it into a million pieces. Or to put it another way, this is my annual opportunity to review my hopes and dreams for the Mac and the iPhone and iPad in 2017 and see which ones came true in 2018and which ones were crushed flat by the steamroller of fate. The year in Mac How soon we forget. 2016 was the Macs annus horribilis, with no desktop Macs released the entire year and a new line of MacBook Pros released to a tepid response. 2017 was betterso much better that I might have gotten a little too enthusiastic with my predictions for 2018. Take the Mac Pro. In 2017 Apple promised that one was coming, and as I pointed out in this space last year, at no point did the company promise to release that Mac Pro in 2018. Still, ever the optimist, I put it at the top of my wish list. In the intervening 12 months weve learned that the Mac Pro will arrive in 2019 and that it will be modular. Can you believe Apple pre-announced the Mac Pro by a couple of years? Yeah, neither can I. Apple 2017 MacBook Also crushing my spirit in 2018: An utter lack of a generational update to the 12-inch MacBook. Its still the same one-port device it was when it was introduced. However, my desires on this front were satisfied by the release of the new MacBook Air, which checks off the items on my MacBook wish list, namely the addition of a second port and Thunderbolt 3 support. I was also deeply satisfied by Apples embrace of the Mac mini in 2018. I got hung up on its size, wishing that it would shrink down with a new design that didnt have to take optical drives or spinning hard drives into account. Turns out I wasnt wrong about that, but Apple chose to keep the aluminum case the same and instead redesign the devices cooling system so that it could handle much more powerful processors. As much as I like the idea of a Mac mini that could fit in my jacket pocket, the potential power of the high-end Mac mini models is a lot more practical. Apple 2018 MacBook Pro On the MacBook Pro side, I had hoped for a MacBook Pro update, to show that Apples committed to updating these systems on a roughly annual basis, and we got one. However, all the laptops Apple released this year rely on the same controversial butterfly keyboard design, slightly modified. And the Touch Bar still existswithout a whole lot of evidence that Apple is truly committed to the concept for the long term. Its still not very customizable outside of a few apps, unless you install a utility like BetterTouchTooland realize that maybe theres a lot of potential here if Apple would push in that direction. Instead, the Touch Bar merely abides. And finally, I struck out in my hopes that new Macs would add support for Face ID. The MacBook Air getting Touch ID is great, but for iMacs (and pro Macs connected to Apples forthcoming external displays), Face ID is the better approach for biometric authentication. I guess Im kicking this particular can down the road into my hopes for 2019. The year in iPad I got everything I wanted out of iPad hardware in 2018. New iPad Pro models with reduced bezels and Face ID? Check! UCB-C port? Check! A new Apple Pencil? Yesand with the inductive charging I asked for. (I also asked for a side button but Apple outwitted me with its touch-sensitive double-tap gesture.) Apple 2018 iPad Pro Where I got let down on the iPad isand youve heard this song beforeon the software side. iOS 12 didnt add much for iPad users, and the new iPad Pros dont take advantage of that USB-C port to do things like connect to USB-C storage devices. I was a bit disappointed with iPad Pro keyboards, too: You still cant control media playback or screen brightness from the Smart Keyboard, and Apple isnt making a more laptop-like external keyboard in the style of the ones from Brydge. I didnt see the new, low-cost iPad comingor the fact that it was launched in an event in Chicago. But I did profess hope that the iPad mini might not be dead, and while we didnt get that product in 2018, we got a rumor that the iPad mini might get an update in 2019. Quite frankly, thats better than I expected. The year in iPhone The headline says it all: More iPhones. We got em. This year we got the iPhone XS, XS Max, and XR. The iPhone XR isnt quite the iPhone 9 I was looking for, but its closein that it supports Face ID but is cheaper because it lacks an OLED screen. Alas, the iPhone SE didnt get an updateand it might be headed for the graveyard. But hope springs eternal for 2019. Apple iPhone XR In terms of iOS, Apple managed to sync up all its devices in terms of gestures, so iPads and iPhones are now consistent. Even though Im not a fan of the top-right-corner hiding place for Control Center, and I had hoped it would be re-thought, I am a fan of consistency. Unfortunately, Apple has also continued to be consistent in its ridiculous 5GB free storage policy per Apple ID. I know the company wants to grow Services revenue, but I feel like a larger amount of iCloud space would get more people to rely on iCloud, leading to more of them converting to paid iCloud storage customers. Oh well. It still hasnt happened. Finally, Id like to declare victory on a small detail that you may not have even noticed, thats buried within the Photos app. Members of a family cant automatically set Photos to share all the photos they take with the rest of the family, but this year Apple introduced a new sharing feature on iOS that lets you share photos with someone else via an iCloud link. This weekend, as we prepared a custom 2018 calendar full of family photos from 2017, I needed to get photos off my wifes phone. Rather than import them via a USB cable, she simply selected all her 2018 photos and shared the iCloud link with me via Messages. With one click, all her photos were importedat full resolutioninto my iCloud Photo Library. Its not quite what I wished for, but its good enough to declare victory. With the exception of the Mac Pro still being in a holding pattern, this was a pretty good year in terms of fulfilling my hopes and dreams. A new iPad Pro, Mac mini, MacBook Air, and a whole host of iPhones will do that for a year. This is not to say that Im not dreaming of more stuff for Apple to do in 2019, of course. But thats another column. SPRINGFIELD CRRC MA and its Page Boulevard factory that has just begun making subway cars for the MBTA is a win for Springfield, a win for Boston and a win for China, said ambassador Huang Ping, the Chinese consul general for New York. But continued wins for both countries will require cooperation and a successful end to the trade dispute roiling between them, he said. CRRC hosted an event Tuesday attended by Gov. Charlie Baker, Mayor Domenic Sarno, Huang and others celebrating the completion of the first Orange Line cars for the MBTA. The cars will run on the T in early 2019. Speaking from the rostrum in front of hundreds gathered at the CRRC factory, Huang, former Chinese ambassador to Zimbabwe, referenced recent talks between Chinese leaders and the Trump Administration following an international summit in Argentina. "The U.S. should see China as a valued partner not only in our economic growth but in solving problems around the world," he said. But President Donald Trump followed up that Argentina meeting by tweeting his support for tariffs and a protectionist trade policy that could imperil CRRCs success here at its $95 million factory. This summer, the Trump administration imposed a 25 percent tariff on rail cars and rail equipment. The tariffs apply to the rail car shells and other equipment CRRC imports here for the cars. Some components are made in the United States and everything is assembled in Springfield. Its especially a big concern for us and something we are going to monitor very carefully, Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker said in a post-tour news conference. Its not going to change our commitment to the project. The T's contract with CRRC makes the agency, not CRRC, responsible for paying any increased import taxes. "But no one has been really clear with us about the impact and over what length of time," Baker said. CRRC has filed for tariff exemptions and is waiting to hear back from the federal government. Those requests went with the written support of local officials including U.S. Rep. Richard E. Neal, D-Springfield, Mayor Dominec Sarno and state Sen. Eric Lesser, D-Longmeadow. Neal's help will be especially valuable to CRRC. He's due to be elected chairman of the powerful House Ways & Means Committee in the next Congress. That committee has jurisdiction over import duties like the new China tariffs. Neal was not at Tuesdays event because he had other commitments in Washington. Lesser said if the tariffs stand, itll be taxpayers who will suffer. Baker said that the CRRC project is worth it because itll increase the reliability of the Red and Orange Lines and allow the T to run trains closer together. Gov. Charlie Baker peered out the window of CRRCs massive factory here Tuesday as the first of the Springfield-built MBTA Orange Line cars zipped by. That is pretty cool, he said as his hosts directed his attention to the employees gathered around. It was a trip of a few seconds on CRRCs quarter-mile test track. But it was also a momentous step forward for Chinese-owned CRRC, for its customer the MBTA and for Springfield, which won the statewide competition to host the $95-million factory with 126 employees. This is about bringing the T into the 21st Century, Baker said. MBTA spokesman Joe Pesaturo said the new Orange Line cars will start operating in early 2019, at least as a pilot train. The new cars will replace ones that are about 40 years old, some with more than 2 million miles of service. The new cars will allow for more passenger capacity, as they can be operated closer together and thus more frequently. Tuesday was also, as Springfield Mayor Domenic J. Sarno said, a bit of back-to-the future. We are bringing manufacturing back to Springfield, he said. Wason Manufacturing was a leading maker of rail cars in the city until the Great Depression. The CRRC plant is on the site of what was a Westinghouse Electric plant. In 2014, CRRC received a $566 million contract from the MBTA to build 152 Orange Line cars and 252 Red Line cars at the Page Boulevard site. In December 2016, the state upped the order with another 120 new Red Line cars, with production set to begin in June 2022 at a cost of $277 million. Massachusetts went without federal funding on the cars so that it could mandate that they be assembled in Massachusetts. The idea was to foster an industry of making rail cars in Massachusetts. Production began on the first Orange Line Cars in April, and will begin making Red Line cars in 2019. When the factory is fully ramped up in 2021, itll be making four distinct cars for three cities: the Red and Orange lines in Boston, SEPTA in Philadelphia and the transit system in Los Angeles. Officials from Los Angeles and Philadelphia were at Tuesdays event. Los Angeles has ordered 64 new subway cars at a cost of $178.4 million, with an option for 218 more beginning in 2021. CRRC will build 45 double-decker train cars for SEPTA, Greater Philadelphias transit system, for $137.5 million. SEPTA has an option to purchase 10 additional cars after that. The cars come to Springfield is steel shells. Workers here install all the wiring, motors, wheels, assemblies and interiors. Completing each car takes 23 working days. When it ramps up to full production here, CRRC expects to have about 200 production workers in Springfield. CRRC said production jobs will pay $55,000 to $60,000 a year. By AMANDA JERMYN Special to The Republican In 2009, NASA's Kepler spacecraft was launched to search for planets outside our solar system. Its space telescope scanned a small patch of our Milky Way galaxy for stars that experience dips in brightness, the result of one or more planets passing in front of them. Since its launch, Kepler has observed more than 530,000 stars, detected just under 6,000 possible planets, and discovered over 2,600 confirmed planets orbiting other stars. We can infer from Kepler's data that our galaxy alone should contain billions of planets, of which about 10 billion could potentially be habitable, and we now know that there are far more planets than there are stars. We've come a long way since the first exoplanet was discovered a mere 30 years ago. Now, NASA's first planet-hunting mission is being retired because it has run out of fuel for conducting scientific observations. It will, however, continue to drift through space in a safe orbit around the sun. While it is sad when any mission comes to an end, Kepler's extraordinary discoveries are cause for celebration. Thanks to Kepler we now know that our own galaxy contains a dazzling array of planets, including water worlds and planets with multiple suns. This mission has also shown us that planetary systems can look very different from our own, in some cases with many planets orbiting very close to their host star. Recent analysis of Kepler's discoveries indicates that between 20 and 50 percent of stars are likely to have small, possibly rocky planets about the size of Earth located within the habitable zone of their host stars. This means these planets would be located at just the right distance from their star where temperatures allow for water to exist in liquid form. And liquid water is a presumed requirement for life as we know it. Natalie Batalha, a Kepler mission scientist now at the University of California, Santa Cruz, noted, "The search for planets is the search for life. These results will form the basis for future searches for life." According to Jessie Dotson, Kepler's project scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in California, the mission's retirement isn't the end of its revelations. There are still discoveries to be made from the existing data, and future missions will be able to build on Kepler's discoveries. One such mission is NASA's new planet hunter, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, which launched in April. In addition, giant space and ground-based telescopes are being developed to detect and observe exoplanets. A space telescope currently under development, the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, or WFIRST, has advanced optics that will allow it to directly detect non-transiting Jupiter-type planets around nearby stars. It should also be able to survey exoplanets with long orbital periods by detecting the gravitational lenses those planets form as they pass in front of background stars. What this means is that the gravitational force exerted by the planet bends the light from the background stars, and it is this distortion of light that allows you to detect the planet. Detecting planets with long orbital periods is otherwise difficult using the transiting method because there could be a very long wait until the next time the planet passes in front of its star. The Kepler mission has far exceeded expectations and has paved the way for new planet-hunting missions. Isaac Newton once said, "If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants." Planet hunters of the future will see further by standing on the shoulders of Kepler. While there is no public Stars Club meeting in December, on Jan. 4 at 7:30 p.m., the Stars Club and the Springfield Science Museum will host "Stars over Springfield," an astronomy adventure for the whole family. Richard Sanderson, retired curator of physical science at the Springfield Science Museum, will give a talk on the upcoming Jan. 21 lunar eclipse and other eclipses. A fee of $3 for adults and $2 for children under 18 will be charged. Amanda Jermyn, of Longmeadow, is vice president of the Springfield Stars Club. For details, visit the club's website, reflector.org, like them on Facebook or call 800-336-9054. SPRINGFIELD -- Sturdy shovels and snowblowers are winter staples in New England but consumers -- or shoppers of holiday gifts for loved ones -- might want to research winter boots not only for warmth but traction and stability on snow and ice. Two years ago, Canadian researchers tested the slip resistance in laboratory winterized conditions of some 98 winter boots on level surfaces with both dry and wet ice that gradually became steeper as participants with safety harnesses walked on them and published their results. It has been estimated that such winter conditions contribute to two-thirds of outdoor pedestrian injuries with some ending up in trauma centers like Baystate Medical Center here where neurosurgeons are said to treat many patients for ice-related spinal injuries each winter. General recommendations for such conditions include the purchase of boots made of non-slip rubber or neoprene, a synthetic rubber, with grooved soles over boots with smooth plastic or leather soles and heels and to watch out for wet, dark areas on pavement that could actually be frozen water vapor or what is commonly referred to as "black ice." Some consumer might want to improve existing boots by adding traction cleats, and in doing so consider their weight in picking such non-slip devices. Wearing a bulky coat or jacket can help cushion a fall. One insurer of businesses for worker compensation cases said that slips and falls are among the most frequent types of injuries it sees, especially in winters. Besides shoes or boots with good traction, winter walkers are advised to keep their center of gravity directly over their feet as much as possible with hands not pocketed and arms slightly out to the side and to proceed slowly and carefully. CHICOPEE - A city man accused of driving more than 50 mph over the speed limit and then fighting with police was arrested on a variety of offenses including drunken driving. Mark A. Maldonado, 24, of 617 Front St., was arrested at about 10:34 p.m., Monday, and charged with drunken driving, reckless operation of a vehicle, possession of an open container of alcohol in a vehicle, resisting arrest, speeding, vehicle identification number not displayed and not having an inspection sticker, said Michael Wilk, police public information officer. Officer Eric Laflamme was driving a marked cruiser when he saw Maldonado speeding toward him on Front Street and at one point witnessed him swerving toward the curb, he said. Laflamme turned his cruiser around and started following the vehicle with K9 Officer Sean Livingstone, who was behind him since the two were returning from an investigation. He activated the cruisers radar unit and clocked the vehicle at 78 mph, Wilk said. The speed limit on Front Street is 25 mph, he said. After pulling over Maldonado, Laflamme said the driver had red, glossy eyes and smelled of alcohol. When asked to exit the vehicle, Maldonado refused and grabbed the steering wheel. The officers were able to handcuff him and remove him from the car but once outside the vehicle he refused to move, yelled at officers and refused to get into the cruiser, Wilk said. During a search of Maldonados vehicle, police found an empty liter of Captain Morgan Long Island Ice Tea which was tagged as evidence, Wilk said. In Great Barrington, a marijuana business is renting a storefront between two toy stores. Edward Abrahams, vice chairman of the Great Barrington Board of Selectmen and its point person on marijuana, said he has heard some backlash from people who think thats a bad idea. But Abrahams said residents wont see marijuana in the window, children wont be allowed inside, and the store cant give away products. That is stricter than the regulations for liquor stores or for drug stores that sell opioids. The towns voted not to be worried about it, Abrahams said. Several communities in Western Massachusetts are rolling out the red carpet for marijuana businesses. The way they are doing that, city leaders said Tuesday, is by treating marijuana companies just like any other business. It was really important for us not to be an obstacle, Abrahams said. We look at them like any other business. A group of municipal officials whose towns have been leaders in allowing recreational marijuana businesses spoke as part of two panel discussions at an event run by the Massachusetts Municipal Association and the Cannabis Control Commission held at the Social Law Library in Bostons John Adams Courthouse. Participants from Western Massachusetts included Abrahams, Northampton Mayor David Narkewicz, Holyoke Mayor Alex Morse, Holyoke planning director Marcos Marrero and Amherst economic development director Geoff Kravitz. As the states first legal recreational marijuana stores are opening, there is a disparity among how municipalities are treating the industry. Some cities and towns have banned marijuana businesses altogether, while others are actively encouraging them. Zoning varies in how restrictive it is. The municipal officials who spoke at the event, which was called Moving Ahead with Marijuana: Municipal Perspectives from Marijuana-Forward Communities, tended to have looser restrictions for marijuana companies than many other communities. In Amherst, Kravitz said the city is coming from a perspective where voters overwhelmingly supported legalizing marijuana. People were consuming cannabis in Amherst anyway, Kravitz said. If we didnt allow retail shops and cultivation and other types of marijuana businesses, it would happen elsewhere, and wed still be dealing with the same issues without any of the income through host community agreements or a tax on products. Northampton is home to one of the first two recreational marijuana stores in Massachusetts, and Narkewicz was the stores first commercial customer. Narkewicz said the city does not require a special permit or special licensing process for marijuana businesses, other than what is required by state law. If youre in a zone that allows retail and you want to open a coffee shop or dry cleaners or cannabis retail shop, youll go through the same process, Narkewicz said. Northampton has signed 14 host agreements with marijuana businesses, including seven for retail shops. Narkewicz opposes caps on the number of marijuana businesses, which are allowed by law at the discretion of municipalities. Narkewicz said existing caps on liquor licenses, which he also opposes, are a throwback to the post-prohibition era and harm economic development. Narkewicz said Northampton does not weigh the merits of companies, as long as they meet local zoning rules and state requirements. Were not doing a beauty pageant, he said. Were trusting the license process the (Cannabis Control Commission) will put people through will be very rigorous in background security. Holyoke has 21 marijuana businesses with options on property, and 30 businesses that have expressed interest, Morse said. Holyoke has approved five special permits for retail and cultivation facilities. We want to go from the Paper City to the rolling paper city, Morse said, referring to the citys nickname as a former center for paper mills. One general theme among municipalities that are friendly to marijuana establishments is their host agreements tend to be relatively standard, rather than intensely negotiated with each company. Morse said Holyoke uses a one-size-fits-all host agreement. Marrero said the goal is to have a uniform, transparent process, which does not take time to negotiate. Some cities and towns have negotiated things like supplemental fees and mandatory donations to nonprofits. Morse said Holyoke chose not to. That pressure, arm-twisting is inappropriate, Morse said. Morse said mandatory donations open up conflicts of interest, for example if a city councilor has a tie to a nonprofit and is voting whether to allow marijuana business. It feels yucky when you have conversations with the private sector and say you have to give X dollars to X nonprofit, Morse said. Other panelists defended the contributions. Narkewicz said host community agreements in Northampton include a requirement to donate some money to organizations that prevent youth substance abuse. The marijuana companies, he said, want to be good stewards. Abrahams said Great Barrington requires a $10,000 donation to a nonprofit of a companys choice. But Abrahams acknowledged that the contribution is probably not defensible. He said to him, adding fees and donations above a 3 percent community impact fee written into state law seemed like extortion. Calling it a possible matter of life and death, the Boston-based Massachusetts Association for Community Action is asking Gov. Charlie Baker for an additional $30 million to help pay for heating assistance. In the letter, Joseph P. Diamond, executive director of the agency that represents 23 members from across the state, said federal funding for the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program has decreased over time and the state is facing a further $11 million cut in federal fuel assistance allocation. This decrease in funding, combined with prolonged bitterly cold weather and steadily rising heating oil prices, are making staying warm this winter a nightmare for tens of thousands of vulnerable households who heat with oil, Diamond wrote. He is asking Baker to include the additional money in his 2019 supplemental budget that he will submit to the Legislature. Heating oil is 30 cents more per gallon over last years prices, he wrote. According to the state, the average gallon of heating oil as of Dec. 18 was $3.11 a gallon, up from $2.84 last year. Diamond said that children, seniors and veterans are particularly at risk, and not having money to buy oil could become a matter of life and death for some. The (current) fuel assistance benefit will allow oil heat households to cover the cost of 1 and 3/4 tanks of oil a real and dangerous problem when it takes 3-4 tanks to get a typical household through tough New England winters, he wrote. He said most of the 48,000 customers who receive heating oil assistance will have exhausted their fuel assistance benefit by the middle to end of January, leaving them in a perilous position for the rest of the winter. He said people might also use (dangerous) alternative heating approaches such as space heaters, kitchen stoves and fire places, leading to the threat of fire danger and carbon monoxide poisoning. Lisa Clay, a spokeswoman for the Massachusetts Association for Community Action, said in an email that the agency does not routinely ask for additional funding. (This year), the combination of the federal funding cut, the cold weather and the high price of oil make it really hard, she said. (Member agencies have) seen an initial uptick in new applications since this start of the program compared to this time last year," she said. There really are not other pockets of money to help," she said. "Agencies will do what they can and will work closely with utility companies, but if we run out of money, theres not much we can do. The Cannabis Control Commission on Wednesday will start accepting applications for its social equity program, which will provide training and technical assistance for people who want to enter the marijuana industry from communities that were disproportionately affected by marijuana enforcement. The Massachusetts law legalizing recreational marijuana requires the commission to promote full participation in the industry by people disproportionately harmed by marijuana prohibition and enforcement. While the commission gave priority in licensing to some economic empowerment applicants who fit that category, many of those applicants have struggled to open shops. The Cannabis Control Commission is crafting its social equity program as a way to help minorities and people convicted of drug offenses find ways to work successfully in the legal marijuana industry. There will be four tracks in the program: for owners/entrepreneurs; management and executive level careers; entry level jobs or people looking to re-enter society after incarceration; and people with existing skills who can be transferred to the cannabis business, like accountants, plumbers or drivers. It will be open to Massachusetts residents who live in a community disproportionately affected by drugs or who have either had a drug conviction themselves or have a spouse or parent with a drug conviction. The Cannabis Control Commission has identified seven vendors who applied to develop a curriculum for applicants. It is still in the process of developing a curriculum, and the commission will then have to enter contracts with the vendors. Topics likely to be included are fundraising, creating a business plan, tax compliance, accounting, legal compliance, employee training and best practices in the marijuana industry. The application will be available through the same online portal that companies use to apply for marijuana licenses. There is no deadline to apply. Once applicants are in the system, the commission will be able to tailor the program to meet their needs. ENFIELD, Conn. -- MassMutual has put its 66-acre, half-million-square-foot office campus here on the market with an asking price it will disclose only to a serious potential buyer. The property is listed by CBRE New England. The site, which MassMutual calls its Bright Meadow Campus, is assessed at $48.4 million, making it Enfields highest-value property. It overlooks Interstate 91 just south of the state line. MassMutual announced in February that it will close the Enfield office between now and the year 2021 and consolidate its local operations at its headquarters on State Street in Springfield, Massachusetts. The consolidation is part of a $300 million expansion deal MassMutual and the state of Massachusetts announced 10 months ago. The deal promises to bring 2,000 jobs to Massachusetts over the next four years, including 1,500 jobs coming to the State Street headquarters MassMutual refers to as its home office." MassMutual also plans to add 500 jobs at a new Boston campus on Fan Pier, which the company plans to build. The Boston office is designed to attract the type of young, urban talent MassMutual feels it needs in order to grow. In February MassMutual said it plans to close offices in Enfield as well as Memphis, Tennessee, Charlotte, North Carolina, Somerset, New Jersey, and Johnstown, Pennsylvania. The state of Massachusetts provided $46 million in tax incentives to MassMutual in order to get the company to consolidate there. According to documents provided to The Republican as a result of a public information request, MassMutual told Massachusetts it had already decided to leave Connecticut before receiving the $46 million package. Massachusetts competed with North Carolina and Tennessee. MassMutal doesnt yet have a date for when the Enfield campus will close, said spokesman Michael McNamara. He said MassMutual began marketing the property recently." The propertys page on the real estate website Loopnet went live Nov. 28. According to marketing materials, the Bright Meadows Campus has enough space for 2,200 employees in its three buildings, and the infrastructure would support a fourth building. The 5,000-square-foot data center could be expanded to 20,000 square feet to accommodate high-tech uses, the sales brochure said. The campus has its own parking garage, helipad and child care center, along with redundant power supplies. Its got a fitness center, an executive client service center and a cafe. It has an entrance right off highway Exit 49 and is seven miles from Springfield, 12 miles from Bradley International Airport and 15 miles from downtown Hartford. Real estate agents say it would be an ideal spot for medical offices. A buyer could split it among several tenants. In 2014, MassMutual unveiled more than $38 million in renovations at the Enfield campus. At the time, it was the primary location for the companys retirement services and workplace insurance businesses. MassMutual took over the Enfield complex from The Phoenix Companies Inc. in 2004. Its not the first time Enfield has received economic bad news. Hallmark closed a greeting card distribution center in town in 2015, costing 570 jobs. Lego Systems has scaled back its operations in town over the years. And the MassMutual campus isnt the first high-profile piece of property to hit the market. Enfield Square Mall sold at auction last week to an unknown buyer for $10.85 million. MassMutual was founded in Springfield on May 15, 1851, and is owned by policy holders. It is number 93 on the Fortune 500 list of the United States' largest corporations. The Hampden District Attorneys Office has notified defense attorneys of potentially exculpatory information linked to five members of the Springfield Police Department narcotics unit, jeopardizing the results of an unknown number of drug cases. Officers Luke Cournoyer, Edward Kalish and Jose Robles, Lt. Alberto Ayala and Capt. Steven Kent are named in the notification, which DA Anthony Gulluni sent to Springfields public defender agency and other attorneys on Tuesday. The Hampden District Attorneys Office is presently working to identify all cases in which this information is relevant in order to affirmatively provide this notice and the specific discovery to counsel for those defendants," Gulluni wrote. In the meantime, I thought it prudent to author this letter to give your office and its attorneys immediate notice to ensure there is no prejudice to anyone. The DAs office is compelled to notify defense attorneys of any information it receives that could exonerate their clients, under the landmark 1970 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brady v. Maryland. That includes information that calls into question the credibility of individual police officers, including records of dishonesty or filing false reports. Upon receipt last Thursday of potentially exculpatory material the Hampden District Attorneys Office has since provided it to defense counsel," Hampden DA spokesman James Leydon wrote in a statement. "Our obligation is to provide such material and to uphold the integrity of the justice system. Leydon confirmed to MassLive that the information on the officers stems from testimony before a federal grand jury. Neither the DAs office nor the Springfield Police Department would give additional information about the contents of that testimony, or what specific information prompted the DA to issue his letter. Leydon also would not speculate on how heavily the disclosures would affect pending cases involving the officers, saying the courts would make those determinations. In a statement, Police Commissioner John Barbieri said his department forwarded the potentially exculpatory information to the DA and has launched its own investigation of the matter. The Springfield Police Department recently became aware of fresh information that gave rise to an internal investigation. This information was discovered by the City Solicitor. The Springfield Police Department provided the District Attorney with this information," Barbieri said. "The Springfield Police Department will be cooperating with the District Attorneys Office, labor relations and the law department in regards to following up on this matter and conducting a thorough review. The DAs Office said it was still reviewing the material and could not reveal which federal case generated the grand jury minutes in question. But all five officers named in the letter were called to testify before a federal grand jury investigating an off-the-books interrogation of juvenile suspects by fellow narcotics officers Gregg Bigda and Steven Vigneault. Both Bigda and Vigneault were indicted on civil rights charges in October, following years of recriminations over the incident and the loss of multiple drug cases due to questions raised about Bigdas credibility. In February of 2016, Vigneault left the keys in his unmarked cruiser while picking up an order from a Worthington Street pizza shop. A group of teens then allegedly stole the car, taking it for a joy ride that ended in a Palmer Police lockup. Vigneault, Bigda and other plainclothes narcotics officers -- including Cournoyer, Bigdas partner -- raced to the scene while off-duty after hearing about the car chase from a police scanner. At the Palmer police station, and in full view of surveillance cameras, Bigda began hurling violent invective at the teenage suspects, threatening to kill them or plant evidence on them. One of the teens, who is Latino, alleged in a lawsuit that Bigda spat on him and told the juvenile suspects Welcome to white town, motherf-----s Im not hampered by the f---ing truth because I dont give a f---. People like you belong in jail," Bigda said, in security videos obtained by The Republican. "Ill f---ing charge you with whatever I -- Ill stick a f---ing kilo of coke in your pocket and put you away for f---ing 15 years. One of the suspects alleged that Vigneault had kicked him in the face, which Vigneault has denied. Bigda was charged in an indictment unsealed on Oct. 31 with one count of deprivation of rights - excessive force, two counts of deprivation of rights - abusive interrogation, and one count of obstructing justice by writing a false report. Vigneault was charged with one count of deprivation of rights - excessive force. In Bigdas case, the videos of the interrogation became a loosely held secret within Springfields legal community after Gullunis office notified defense lawyers of their existence in compliance with their Brady disclosure obligations. Attorneys representing clients in cases relying on Bigdas testimony quickly filed motions to suppress his testimony as unreliable, leading to the dismissal of multiple narcotics prosecutions. It is not clear how many cases will be affected by the possible exculpatory material referenced in Gullunis new letter. The DAs office is still reviewing the material and identifying potentially affected cases, Leydon told MassLive. Secretary of the Commonwealth William Galvin has fined insurance company MetLife $1 million for not paying pension checks to retirees it wrongly presumed were dead. Galvin announced in June that his offices securities division filed a complaint against the company, charging MetLife with fraud for failing to make the payments. MetLife announced in December 2017 that it lost track of tens of thousands of pensioners and stopped making payments to them. According to Galvins office, his office was able to locate a majority of the approximately 500 Massachusetts pensioners within two months. Around half were still living at the same address MetLife had on file for them. Some said they had trouble reaching MetLife regarding paperwork. Galvin also said MetLife made insufficient efforts to contact retirees when their former employers went out of business and transferred their pension obligations to MetLife. Under a consent order that Galvins office reached with MetLife, the company will pay a $1 million fine and will provide payments, with interest, to hundreds of Massachusetts retirees who MetLife falsely assumed were dead. Many of the people affected are elderly and are surviving on a fixed income, Galvin said. While the payments may have seemed small or insignificant to MetLife, these checks could have made a big difference for the people who never received them. SPRINGFIELD Area families and dignitaries gathered at American International College on Wednesday to welcome 244 new U.S. citizens hailing from countries ranging from Belarus to Vietnam. We are thrilled to have you as citizens, absolutely thrilled, said US. District Court Judge Mark G. Mastroianni, who presided over the naturalization proceedings. Can you imagine a better holiday gift for all of you and your families? Mastroianni said there has been much discussion and controversy about people coming to the country legally and illegally. I want you to know that we want you here, Mastroianni said. We appreciate you here. We respect you and we respect the paths you have taken to come to this country. We respect your desire to become citizens of this country and we welcome you. Also speaking was Springfield Mayor Domenic J. Sarno who praised the new citizens for bringing their traditions to become part of the American traditions. The new citizens bring many talents and also bring fortitude and perseverance, he said. The new citizens have gone through trials and triumphs and Wednesday was a huge triumph, Sarno said. As a son of Italian immigrants, I am happy to be with each of these individuals as they officially become citizens of the United States of America, Sarno said prior to the ceremony. "Our country is a melting pot and the traditions brought from their home countries are an important piece of the fabric of our nation. On Tuesday, Sarno vetoed an ordinance passed by the City Council that sought to establish Springfield as a welcoming community to all immigrants regardless of their legal status. Sarno, in defending his veto, said he supports legal immigration, and praised the new citizens Wednesday for taking the right path. Maria Sobral of Worcester, who is from Brazil, said she was very excited about becoming a new U.S. citizen. She said it was also a special day to honor her son, who died approximately two years ago. Im here to honor him, and by becoming a U.S. citizen Im sure that Im fulfilling his dreams even though he is not with me today, but (I) feel happy that I accomplished this," she said. "I love America and I love to be here today. Sobral came to the country about 25 years ago and became a nurse. Part of the delay in citizenship was her choice and part of it was the process itself, she said. Baris Kuru of Agawam, who came from Turkey, was also among the new citizens. He came to the United States 14 years ago. Im so happy, Kuru said. It was a dream for me but now Im going to be a U.S. citizen. He added that he was happy for everybody here" and that he would register to vote. Mastroianni urged all new citizens to register to vote and to have their voices heard whether they agree or disagree with their elected representatives on the issues. Realize you make a difference, Mastroianni said. Dilli Ram Chamlagai, of West Springfield, who came from Bhutan, shared his feelings about being a new citizen with the help of his son, Lila, 23, who served as an interpreter. Im very happy to be a citizen of this great nation, Dilli Chamlagai said, as relayed by his son. The 244 new citizens originate from the following 67 countries: Belarus, Bhutan, Brazil, Burma, Cabo Verde, Cambodia, Canada, Central African Republic, Peoples Republic of China, Colombia, Cote DIvoire, Croatia, Cuba Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, India, Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Liberia, Lithuania, Malaysia, Mali, Mexico, Moldova, Morocco, Nepal Netherlands, Netherlands Antilles, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sudan, Tanzania, The Gambia, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Uruguay, Uzbekistan and Vietnam. SPRINGFIELD -- A 21-year-old city resident accused of shooting and injuring a man six weeks ago was arrested on Tuesday. Ronald Ingram, of 111 Oakland St, was arrested at about 8:15 a.m., on a warrant charging him with assault and battery with a dangerous weapon and discharging a firearm within 500 feet of a building. He was also arrested on a default warrant charging him with operating a motor vehicle with a suspended license and having no inspection sticker, said Ryan Walsh, police spokesman. Ingram is being accused of shooting a man at about 1 a.m., Nov. 1, in the area of Kenwood Park. Police responded to an audio ShotSpotter activation that recorded the shooting and found the victim on Belmont Avenue, he said. The victim was brought to Baystate Medical Center by ambulance. His wounds were not life-threatening, Walsh said. The department's Major Crimes Unit, under the direction of Capt. Trent Duda, investigated the crime, identified Ingram as a suspect and received a warrant for his arrest. Ingram was arrested at 109 Oakland St. by the departments Warrant Apprehension Unit, the U.S. Marshal Task Force, Massachusetts State Police Violent Fugitive Apprehension Section and the FBI Gang Task Force, Walsh said. WESTFIELD -- About 16 hours before Jordyn Brown walked out of Baystate Noble Medical Center on Saturday, prompting an intensive search, she escaped a fire in her home and ran from those trying to help her, police said. Police continue to hunt for for Brown, 28, five days after she left the hospital wearing a hospital gown, leggings and socks. She is believed to have taken a purple sweatshirt or jacket from an unlocked car, Westfield police Sgt. Scott Phelon said. Brown was taken to the hospital after her home at 57 Bristol St. caught fire at about 7:30 p.m., Friday. She lived there alone, but her father and step-mother were visiting when it started, Phelon said. "She was not injured in the fire, but she was not appropriately dressed and she briefly disappeared," he said, explaining why Brown was brought to the hospital. During the chaos of the fire, Brown disappeared from the immediate area. Police, including a K-9 officer with his dog, searched the area, found her and had her transported for medical treatment, Phelon said. Westfield firefighters extinguished the flames quickly and it caused limited property damage, Phelon said. Westfield fire officials referred all questions to police because of the ongoing investigation. The cause of the fire was determined to be intentionally set. There is a suspect and the investigation is continuing, said Jennifer Mieth, spokeswoman for the state Department of Fire Services, which investigated the fire. Neither she nor Phelon identified the suspect in the fire. Brown walked out of the hospital at about 11:45 a.m., Saturday. Police were notified and unsuccessfully searched the area for about two hours with the help of a K-9 officer with his dog and a drone, Phelon said. "We believe she is a danger to herself at this point," he said. Later in the afternoon, police used a signal from her cellphone to try to pinpoint her location and resumed the search using patrol officers, the K-9 officer and the drone. The Massachusetts State Police Air Wing assisted with its helicopter, Phelon said. The cellphone data did not identify a specific location but gave police a wide area where she might be. Later, officers learned she had not had the phone with her at the time of the fire. Police are still trying to find her phone. Police continue to ask the public for assistance to find Brown. She was last seen heading east on Court Street toward the center of Westfield and may have been trying to get to Springfield or Holyoke by bus. Anyone who has seen her since Saturday morning or has any information about her disappearance is asked to call police at at 413-562-5411 as soon as possible. Update: A suspect in the fatal shooting has been taken into custody, NBC Boston reports. Police responded to Everett Wednesday morning for a fatal shooting after a woman was shot, according to authorities. The Middlesex District Attorneys Office confirmed investigators responded to Central Avenue for a report of a fatal shooting. The investigation into the death is ongoing. This morning our office responded to Central Ave. in Everett for a report of a fatal shooting. This is an open and active investigation being conducted w/ @everettpolicema and @MassStatePolice assigned to our office. We will provide additional updates as they become available. DA Marian Ryan (@DAMarianRyan) December 19, 2018 WCVB reports the female victim was found in a car. Everett High School was in lockdown after the shooting, according to the television station. WESTFIELD - Bo Sullivan, executive director of the Irish Cultural Center of Western Massachusetts, will complete the remaining year of his late brother's term on the School Committee. Kevin Sullivan, who died in September, had one year remaining of his four-year term. Bo Sullivan was voted in during a joint meeting of the City Council and School Committee on Monday, beating out candidate Jeffrey Gosselin by a vote of 13-4. Gosselin is a former School Committee member who was unseated in the last municipal election in 2017. Bo Sullivan, also the brother of Mayor Brian P. Sullivan and former Mayor Richard K. Sullivan Jr., says he felt compelled to carry on his brother's work on the School Committee. "Kevin was the hardest working member of the School Committee," he said. "I guarantee I will continue that." He hopes to continue to make decisions in the same way his brother did: "(Kevin) said 'If it's good for the kids, let's do it'." And, he also said he plans to be a champion for special education, programming which held a special place in Kevin Sullivan's heart. "We have family and friends who have gone through special education, and it was important to Kevin and it's important to me," Bo Sullivan said. The condition of Westfield High School is something Bo Sullivan said is also important to him, and he plans to push for improvements. Bo Sullivan said he was thrilled to receive the majority of votes. He thanked the council and committee members for the opportunity, adding that he wished the opportunity had not arisen. "It's bittersweet," he said, adding he is unsure if he will seek reelection when the term ends. "We'll see how it goes." Mayor Sullivan said it was a difficult night for him. He also excused himself from the vote after Councilor Andrew K. Surprise started the meeting by saying he contacted state ethics officials and believed the mayor should not participate in the meeting. Brian Sullivan said he had also contacted the state and was told he was within his rights to participate. Still, the mayor stepped aside, turning the meeting over to School Committee vice chair Cindy Sullivan. "I am happy Bo was elected by our friends and colleagues," Mayor Sullivan said. "You don't fill shoes like Kevin's with anyone, but having Bo step in to finish some of what Kevin started is special. Bo has already committed to do all he can for the students of Westfield." Before being named head of the Irish cultural center almost a year ago, Bo Sullivan worked as a development officer at Westfield State University and was a morning radio personality in the region for more than 20 years. Both Bo Sullivan and Gosselin are Westfield natives who went through the public schools here. Gosselin is a public school teacher. Sullivan received votes from School Committee members Ramon Diaz Jr., Heather Sullivan, Cindy Sullivan, Diane Mayhew and Timothy O'Connor. Council members Cindy Harris, William Onyski, Nicholas J. Morganelli Jr., Robert A. Paul, John J. Beltrandi, Brent B. Bean II, Ralph J. Figy and Michael Burns all endorsed his candidacy. Gosselin received votes from councilors Daniel Allie, Mary Ann Babinski, Matt Emmershy and Surprise. SPRINGFIELD -- When he smiles, makes gurgling sounds, bends his back or flails his arms, Dylan Montes-Peralta's parents, nurse and the Center for Human Development's Early Intervention team always celebrate these small, but significant victories. At 18 months old, Dylan has lived through more surgeries than many adults. Diagnosed with the rare disease MECP2 duplication syndrome, which can cause severe intellectual disabilities and motor function impairment, Dylan has serious mobility issues and respiratory problems and requires a feeding tube and constant care. "Many children with his condition will never say a word or even make a sound, but he makes a lot of sounds and he tries to interact with us," said Dylan's mother Christina Montes-Peralta, of Springfield. Montes-Peralta, her wife Roselin Peralta and their older son Noah Peralta, 10, have become knowledgeable about Dylan's condition in the past year and are working with the staff at CHD to give him the best possible quality of life and extend his life. There are very few cases of children with this condition making it into their teens or adulthood, Montes-Peralta said. It all started with Dylan's moms noticing that his head was misshapen. They also noticed he got sick a lot. "Our other son Noah never had any issues like that, so we were concerned," Peralta said. Many visits to different doctors led to few results. "We kept being told that he would grow out of it, but we knew something was wrong," Montes-Peralta said. "Having Noah, who was very healthy growing up, we knew that Dylan was not developing properly." It was after meeting Cindy Napoli, an occupational therapist and program supervisor for CHD's Early Intervention team, that the family felt validated in their concerns. The Early Intervention team serves around 300 children from birth to age 3 from Greater Springfield who have various developmental delays. "In Dylan's case, he was referred by his pediatrician because as his moms put it, he had a 'lumpy head,'" Napoli said, explaining that the condition is common in many children and can be caused by a muscular disorder. Napoli gave his parents some suggestions about changing his sleeping positions and his head began to develop a more traditional shape. Napoli was not as concerned about his head as she was about his development. "I was very concerned about his muscle tone. He had lower than average muscle tone for a 4-month-old, he wasn't doing the things that a 4-month-old should be doing, and things just didn't add up," she said. Naploi was also concerned about his feeding because he was not swallowing food properly, but still specialists kept telling his moms he would be fine. She encouraged the family to get a second opinion and even went with them to one of the appointments in Boston, where a specialist was finally able to diagnose Dylan with MECP2 duplication syndrome, which was discovered in 2005 and affects only 1 in 10,000 babies, almost always males. "It was hard to hear, but at the same time we were relieved that he had been diagnosed and that Cindy believed us when we said something was wrong," Peralta said. Since his diagnosis, Dylan has flourished. "His condition can be very debilitating, but we don't look at that when we are working with Dylan," Napoli said. "We are here to ensure that he is a happy 18-month-old child, doing the typical things that a child his age would do. Developmentally he might not be there, but we don't treat him like he has a developmental delay." Dylan may not be able to eat, but he still gets the opportunity to play with his food just like other children, in case one day he can have his feeding tube removed. He may not be able to walk or run, but his teachers carry him and delicately toss him around just like his classmates. Napoli hopes to teach him to sign if possible so that he can communicate with his moms and his brother. Noah Peralta is an honor student and a proud big brother. He has learned as much as he can about how to care for his little brother, Montes-Peralta said. "He loves him so much and he is really good with him," she said. "He watches what we do or what the nurse does, and he wants to learn so that he knows how to safely play with him." Both moms said they have the same dreams for their children, that they are happy and safe and can live the best possible life, even if Dylan's may not be quite as long. "It's scary to think about him getting sicker. We just focus on the day to day making sure both of them have what they need," Montes-Peralta said. "It's a lot." Dylan's at-home nurse, Noelle DesLauriers, is with him three days a week, making it possible for his moms to do basic things like go to the laundromat, buy groceries or go to school events for their older child. "They are really engaged parents," she said. "It is very hard to navigate the system when it comes to Social Security and equipment for his care, but they do the best they can to advocate for him." The future may be uncertain for Dylan, but the quality of his life since his diagnosis has improved every day, Napoli said. "He is defying his diagnosis," she said. "We don't look at him and think, 'Let's maintain his skills.' No, we think, 'What can we push him to do next?' "By exposing kids with different abilities to each other, you are treating them with dignity and respect, like any child ... and that's what we want for Dylan," Napoli said. HOLYOKE - In a first, the City Council on Tuesday night approved a special permit for home delivery of medical marijuana for upstart Solurge. The council also passed a special permit for the Boston Bud Factory. During a recent Ordinance Committee meeting, representatives from Solurge, which plans to renovate and open the facility at 650 Beaulieu St., pushed for home delivery. Until Tuesday's meeting, the council had not granted home delivery rights to any cannabis-based business. Massachusetts regulations allow for home delivery for medicinal marijuana but under strict security and exacting standards. Councilor Linda Vacon, who chairs the Ordinance Committee, said Solurge was an "untested" entity in Holyoke, and she opposed home delivery. She asked the council "to respect the work of the committee." Vacon opposed altering the order to suit Solurge's needs. Ward 3 Councilor David K. Bartley said while he supported most of Solurge's application, he disagreed with the home delivery condition. Bartley wanted more time to examine the issue and its ramifications. He asked his colleagues to refrain from voting on the special permit and return the matter to the committee. Councilors Rebecca Lisi and Juan Anderson-Burgos, members on the Ordinance Committee, supported Solurge's request. Lisi said Solurge represented the most "complete and comprehensive" application to date for a cannabis facility. She said state law and city ordinances allow for the additional service. Lisa said the Holyoke Police Department reviewed and approved Solurge's security plan, including home delivery. The council voted 10-2 for Solurge's special permit and struck down the ban on home delivery of medicinal marijuana. Vacon and Bartley maintained their opposition, voting no. David Kotler, Solurge's chief compliance officer, thanked the council for approving the special permit. He said Solurge would move ahead with a multimillion-dollar renovation of the Beaulieu Street site. "Better decisions are based on better facts," after the council granted home delivery to Solurge. "Ultimately the right thing happened. I don't think there's a downside for the people of Holyoke or the city," Kotler said. "It's honestly based on the law and based on the facts. The City Council made the right decision and moved passed parliamentary politics to do what's best in the interest of the city. I applaud that." Kotler said Solurge would continue with buildout plans and complying with ongoing state inspections and licensing requirements. "We have a lot of work ahead of us," he said. The company will focus primarily on medicinal marijuana products, which requires time to grow the plants. Kotler expects the facility will open in early summer. At the same Ordinance Committee meeting, The Boston Bud Factory, founded by Carlo Sarno and Frank Dailey, drew the attention of commercial property owners and businesses near the proposed 73 Sargeant St., location. Executives from nearby the Hazen Paper Company worried about increased traffic, especially at the exit or entrance to Interstate 391. Vacon said the applicant would comply with traffic recommendations made by City Engineer Robert Parent. Boston Bud Factory wants to operate a registered marijuana retail establishment and registered marijuana manufacturing establishment. Vacon asked the council to change the "Retail" language to "Recreational." Like Solurge approval, the council attached special conditions onto Boston Bud Factory's special permit: Boston Bud Factory must pay all commercial property taxes allowed under local, state and federal law for the permit's duration. Retain a minimum of 30 percent Holyoke residents for non-security positions. Hire retired Holyoke police officers or retired officers from nearby communities for security jobs. No consumption of marijuana products on-site. No home delivery of recreational or medical marijuana to home, businesses or individuals. Also, Boston Bud Factory must submit an updated photometric plan showing the correct lighting scale and that "the applicant shall provide traffic patrol should customer traffic impede flow or regular traffic as recommended by the Holyoke Police Department." Except for the photometric plan and ban on home delivery, the council imposed similar conditions to Solurge's special permit. Beginning Dec. 23, the Massachusetts Cannabis Commission will oversee the medical marijuana industry, which previously fell under the purview of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. It's official -- the Easthampton medical marijuana dispensary known as INSA will open its doors to adult-use cannabis sales on Saturday, becoming the second in Western Massachusetts to open. INSA CEO Mark Zatyrka made the announcement on Tuesday, and said recreational sales will take place for the first time on Dec. 22 from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. at the dispensary's 122 Pleasant St. location. Zatyrka said that INSA's goal will be "to provide the highest quality product available on the market today, while making sure the opening goes as smoothly as possible." A shuttle service from off-site parking could be made available if necessary, the CEO added. On Monday, INSA Inc. was approved by the Massachusetts Cannabis Control Commission to open for adult use sales after a standard three-day wait. While the store could have opened Friday, Zatyrka chose Saturday as the opening day. Zatyrka said the company has been communicating with Mayor Nicole LaChapelle, Police Chief Robert Alberti and neighbors to ensure a smooth opening. Alberti said Tuesday he had scheduled his officers to manage a high volume of vehicle traffic and parking concerns over the weekend. When the NETA dispensary in nearby Northampton opened for recreational sales in November, hundreds of people waited in line for hours for their first opportunity to purchase legal weed in the Bay State. WARE - The town's three-person state legislative delegation, invited to Tuesday's selectmen meeting to brainstorm how to reduce the inordinate number of Level 3 sex offenders living in town, were told by one resident to pass a law to keep them in jail permanently. State Rep. Todd Smola, R-Warren, thanked Ware resident David Kopacz, who made the suggestion. The state classifies sex offenders as Level 1, 2 or 3, with Level 3 being the most dangerous and most likely to re-offend. There are 19 Level 3 sex offenders who live in Ware, according to the Massachusetts Sex Offender Registry Board. "The Level 3s don't belong on the street," Kopacz said. "These people are all over the place. We will build more jails ... stack 'em up like cord wood in jail." "We have been conditioned to accept Level 3s -- they don't belong here," he said. "Dave, thank you for your comments," Smola said. "I respect everything you have to say." Selectman Alan Whitney said Ware is "becoming the go-to spot" for sex offenders. "It feels like us bearing the whole burden," Selectman Keith Kruckas said. "We have a great number on one small street, Pulaski Street," Selectman Tracy Opalinski said. Tensions in Ware rose in August when a Level 3 sex offender, David Joseph Sinclair, who had served his jail time from a previous sex crime conviction, was charged with child rape. He was released from jail without having to post bail on the condition he wear a GPS tracking bracelet. State Sen. Anne M. Gobi, D-Spencer, told selectmen and residents attending the meeting that reform at the statewide level is needed. Gobi discussed efforts she and others in the Legislature have been working on that could change the way the state Department of Corrections evaluates sex offenders who are being released from jail. State Rep. Donald Berthiaume, R-Spencer, told selectmen he would assist them in any way possible. LONGMEADOW -- A special Town Meeting will be held Jan. 17 with at least two citizen petitions on the warrant, including one to recall elected School Committee members before their term expires and another transferring control of $2 million from the school department to the Select Board. The first petition from resident Pat O'Shea was received by the town Dec. 7, starting the clock and prompting the town to set a meeting date within 45 days. If passed, the article would allow for recall elections for officials specified in section 3-3 of the town charter: members of the School Committee. Since it's a home rule petition, it would also have to be approved by the state Legislature before it could be enacted in the town. The second petition, by resident Marc Haber, transfers the control of $2 million (or another amount agreed on by Town Meeting voters) from the school department's fiscal 2019 operations budget to the Select Board, under a reserve or school expenditures fund. The School Committee would then have to request by majority vote to transfer the money from the Select Board, and the transfer would also have to be approved by majority Select Board vote. Town Manager Stephen Crane said he estimates the school department's general fund budget to be about $34 million from local property taxes. "I think this will be a well-attended Town Meeting," Crane told the Select Board Monday night. There has been growing tension between the School Committee and members of the community after a controversial split vote for nonrenewal of Superintendent Martin O'Shea's contract last month. Citizens petitions must receive more than 200 signatures to appear on the warrant. Residents have until the Select Board's Jan. 2 meeting, when the final warrant will be adopted, to submit articles for the warrant. The special Town Meeting will be held in the Longmeadow High School gymnasium at 7 p.m. The 45-day deadline gives the town until Jan. 21 to hold the meeting. If a snowstorm falls on the 17th, as long as a quorum of 50 people is reached, voters can agree to continue the meeting to another day past the 21st. BOSTON -- Massachusetts on Tuesday joined eight Northeast states and the District of Columbia in pledging to develop a framework for reducing regional emissions from the transportation sector. The framework is expected to be market-based and modeled on the successful Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI, the regional cap-and-trade system that has reduced emissions from the power sector. Cutting emissions from vehicles and other forms of transit "is imperative to combating the causes of climate change and meeting Massachusetts' aggressive greenhouse gas reduction targets," said Gov. Charlie Baker in a statement. The idea of creating a "RGGI for transportation" is not new, and was recommended by the Massachusetts Commission on the Future of Transportation in its recent comprehensive planning report. The study estimated that a cap-and-trade program for gasoline would cost the average Massachusetts driver $7 a month and generate $500 million in annual revenue for the state. At Tuesday's announcement, a national trade group that represents small businesses lashed out at the prospect of any potential new gasoline fees. "Thousands of businesses and commuters in the Commonwealth will incur higher expenses -- not only directly at the pump but also indirectly for a wide array of goods and services as the impact of new gas fees ripples through the economy," said Christopher Carlozzi, state director for NFIB. "This is a fiscally dangerous and regressive proposal that will harm Massachusetts consumers and our state economy." However, scientists and environmental advocates focused on the potential benefits of such a framework. "These nine states and the District of Columbia inspire us all with this ambitious, regional, bipartisan plan to tackle one of the biggest challenges," said Ken Kimmell, president of Union of Concerned Scientists. "Were these states a country, it would be the world's fifth-largest economy, just behind Germany, so this plan is at a scale to make a meaningful difference." "On behalf of our more than 70 transportation, environmental, and planning organizations, we applaud (Baker's) leadership in advancing the Transportation Climate Initiative as part of his strategy to aggressively move Massachusetts away from the use of carbon fuels," said Chris Dempsey, director of Transportation for Massachusetts. The Transportation Climate Initiative at Georgetown Climate Center will work with the states over 2019 to study the feasibility of a potential program. At the end of discussions, the states will decide whether to adopt the policy. Tuesday's announcement followed extensive stakeholder engagement, including a set of listening sessions held around the state, the Baker administration said. Massachusetts, under its 2008 Global Warming Solutions Act, has pledged to reduce emissions by 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. In an alliance, New England's power generators have joined the scientists and climate advocates in calling for a new focus on transportation when it comes to cutting the region's total emissions. Dan Dolan, president of the New England Power Generators Association, has previously said that emissions from electricity plants are down significantly, and that it's time for the transportation sector to do its share. Kimmell and Dolan, who co-wrote a 2017 op-ed, noted that they "don't agree on everything," but "do agree on this: it's time to focus on clean and affordable transportation." Electric cars connected to the New England grid have the emissions of a 100 mpg internal combustion car -- a car that does not exist in the marketplace, the two wrote. Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont in 2017 first announced interest in a regional program to reduce vehicle emissions. BOSTON -- The clean energy sector in Massachusetts continues to grow, according to a new report that cites 1,500 new jobs added in 2017, and a "clean energy gross state product" that now tops $13.8 billion. The Massachusetts Clean Energy Center released its 2018 Clean Energy Industry Report on Wednesday. The public-private organization has been tracking figures related to the state's clean tech economy since 2010. Some takeaways: Massachusetts now has over 110,700 clean energy workers, around 3.1 percent of the state's workforce. That number has grown 84 percent since 2014. Installation continues as the largest clean energy job segment, followed by engineering and research, then sales and distribution. The solar industry shed nearly 1,000 jobs in 2017, as larger solar projects, requiring fewer workers, took precedence over smaller installations. Nonetheless, Massachusetts remains the state with the second-most solar employees. Alternative transportation employment remains a growth segment, as the number of electric vehicles sold in Massachusetts increased by 52 percent. "This is our eighth straight year of economic growth in the clean energy sector," said Stephen Pike, CEO of MassCEC. "And the growth took place across the state." In a telephone interview, Pike said the 2017 economic data was collected in part from federal labor statistics, but that the national consulting firm BW Research was instrumental in gathering company information directly from Massachusetts employers. The report looks at the economic impact of technologies such as solar and wind generation, energy storage, advanced building materials, high-efficiency heating and cooling, energy-efficient appliances, LED lighting, water conservation technologies, woody biomass, combined heat and power, smart grid deployment and more. Asked about the loss in solar jobs, Pike said it occurred even as capacity grew. He said while a general trend from small to larger projects meant fewer workers per installed unit, that market uncertainty was a factor in 2017 because of a shifting landscape in solar incentives. The state is now moving forward with its new SMART tariffs, designed to spur another 1,600 megawatts of photovoltaic capacity. Pike said one area where he expects growth in the next decade is in the offshore wind industry. Last May, the state chose Vineyard Wind to build an 800-megawatt project south of Martha's Vineyard. The company has agreed to stage operations at the New Bedford Marine Commerce Terminal. The lease starts in 2020, to coincide with the company's planned construction schedule. "Massachusetts is well-positioned to be the hub of offshore wind deployment," said Pike, who noted plans by Massachusetts and other states along the Eastern seaboard to build turbines on the Outer Continental Shelf. "The supply chain will congregate along the coast, and be anchored by port facilities," the CEO added. Pike said the New Bedford pier, owned by MassCEC, is the only marine terminal in the U.S. that was purpose-built to support offshore wind staging. As such, he said Massachusetts "has a strong head start" when it comes to competing for market share. MassCEC also owns and runs a state-of-the-art wind technology testing center for turbine blades up to 90 meters in length. The annual MassCEC reports provide energy sector data required by the 1998 law that deregulated the state's electric utilities. MassCEC receives its funding from the Renewable Energy Trust Fund. The average household pays 32 cents a month to the fund through a small electric bill surcharge, the organization states on its website. The mission of MassCEC is to grow the clean energy economy while helping to meet the state's clean energy, climate and economic development goals. The Salvation Army is hoping for a last-minute rush of donations as well as some volunteers to help out in the Christmas kettle drive as collections are down at about half of its sites in Massachusetts. Donations to the annual kettle drive are down about 20 percent, state spokeswoman Heather MacFarlane said. Bell ringers will be out until Dec. 24, she said. Maj. Dave Moore, of the Springfield Corps Community Center, said he has even more kettle tenders than in the past, but donations are down. He said the kettle drive is one of the Salvation Army's biggest fundraisers with a $65,000 goal. The money pays for programs including providing families with toys at Christmas time, a food pantry and an after-school program. The number of people ringing bells in the Northampton area, meanwhile, is down, said Wil Leslie, state service extension director who oversees the bell ringers. He said the organization relies heavily on volunteers. He is hoping the last week will end strong. Overall, Leslie said, the Salvation Army employs about 300 bell ringers across the state and has between 2,000 and 2,500 volunteers for what he said "is our most visible fundraiser of the year." "(Seeing bell ringers) encourages people to be generous," he said. The Salvation Army can still use volunteers for the final days of the kettle drive, he said. Those in Greater Springfield can call Moore at 413-733-1518. In the Northampton area, email redkettles01060@gmail.com. For other sites, visit the Salvation Army's Massachusetts website at massachusetts.salvationarmy.org. SPRINGFIELD -- A Springfield man is being held without right to bail following his arraignment in connection with a shooting that killed one person and injured another at the Knox St. Market last month. Duryl Hale, 22, pleaded not guilty Wednesday in Springfield District Court to one count of murder. By agreement of the defense and prosecution, Judge John McKenna ordered Hale held without right to bail and continued the case for a pretrial hearing on Jan. 11. The arraignment came two weeks after Hale pleaded not guilty to a series of other charges related to the shooting, including armed assault with intent to rob, assault and battery by discharging a firearm, being a felon in possession of a firearm, and others. Hale was one of three men who attempted to rob the store at gunpoint around 6:30 p.m. on Nov. 30, according to police. Virginia Rodriguez-Veras, 34, wife of the market's owner, and another unarmed person were shot during the ensuing gun battle, police said. Two other suspects are being sought in connection with the shooting. Assistant District Attorney Max Bennett is prosecuting the case, and Springfield defense attorney William O'Neil is representing Hale. Every year around the holidays, we usually put an extra tip in the jar or search out charitable causes in which to donate some time or money. Over the last year Ive had the opportunity to work with some of these organizations, and I wanted to take the opportunity to shed some light on their important work. Ricks Place Founded in memory of Rick Thorpe, who died in Tower Two of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, Ricks Place in Wilbraham provides free grief support to children and their families. In addition to creating a community and a support system for those who are grieving, Ricks Place is also an important educational resource about how children deal with loss. Food Bank of Western Mass. Since 1982, the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts has been the leading distributor of food to an array of agencies across Western Mass. The Food Bank is supported by the Mass Emergency Food Assistance Program (MEFAP), which purchases fresh produce from our local farms to deliver to partners including St. Francis Parish in Belchertown; Lorraines Soup Kitchen in Chicopee; the Gandara Center, St. John's Congregational Church, the Gray House and a number of open pantries in Springfield. Im glad that this year we were able to increase state funding to MEFAP, which will allow these organizations to provide thousands more meals to our neighbors in need. Rachels Table Six days a week, more than 200 volunteers collect food from local supermarkets, restaurants, caterers and bakeries, and deliver it to more than 40 soup kitchens, food pantries and shelters across Western Mass. These volunteers are the best of Western Mass: selfless citizens, committed to the cause of helping others. They criss-cross the Greater Springfield region, delivering food to those who need it in Springfield, Longmeadow, West Springfield, Feeding Hills, Chicopee and Holyoke. Boys and Girls Clubs Another organization near and dear to me is our local Boys and Girls Clubs. I am particularly proud that this year, we were able to increase funding for our Boys and Girls Clubs across the state, including those close to home here in Springfield, Chicopee, Holyoke, Ludlow and Westfield. Our Clubs provide a safe and supportive space for young people to learn and grow. Not only do they go on to succeed, but they give back to our community as well. Nearly half of teen members volunteer at least once a month, and nearly all of them graduate high school and go on to post-secondary education. We should be proud of the work all of these organizations do for our communities. And we should support them every month of the year, not just in the giving season. How to Get Involved Submit an application to volunteer at Ricks Place here: https://ricksplacema.org/content/get-involved To help deliver food to the elderly with the Food Banks Brown Bag programs in Belchertown, Granby, Chicopee, Springfield and Wilbraham, call 413-247-9738 or find out more here: https://www.foodbankwma.org/get-involved/volunteer/ To help deliver food with Rachels Table, call Lissa at 413-733-0084. There are a variety of ways to help our Boys and Girls Clubs. To volunteer in Chicopee, contact clarisam@bgcchicopee.org. For Ludlow, contact Sheri Santos at ssantos@ludlowbgc.org. For Springfield, contact the main office at 413-732-7201 or at info@sbgc.org. Eric P. Lesser, of Longmeadow, is senator for the First Hampden & Hampshire District, serves as co-chair of the Joint Committee on Economic Development & Emerging Technologies. U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, urged federal lawmakers this week to take action against rising prescription drug costs by investigating alleged price fixing among generic drug manufacturers and supporting her proposal to increase competition in the generic pharmaceutical market. The Massachusetts Democrat, who is considering a 2020 presidential run, revealed Tuesday that she has called on Republican leaders from three Senate committees to look into allegations that generic drug manufacturers engaged in price fixing. She further unveiled legislation that would allow the Department of Health and Human Services to manufacture and sell select generic drugs -- something which she argued would address rising prescription drug costs by increasing competition and ensuring affordable patient access. Warren sent letters to Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander, R-Tennessee; Finance Committee Chairman-designate Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa; and Judiciary Committee Chairman-designate Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, urging that the GOP leaders investigate alleged drug price fixing -- an issue raised in recent reports -- when the new Congress convenes in January. If true, she argued, such allegations could help explain the growing and increasingly troubling claims of rapid and unexplained price increases for generic drugs. The senator pointed to 2016 findings from the Government Accountability Office, which suggested that more than 300 generic drugs sold under Medicare Part D had at seen at least one extraordinary price spike over 100 percent between 2010 and 2015. Warren further argued that generic drug markets are further plagued by anti-consumer behavior and anti-competitive features that go far beyond high-profile price hikes of individual products," with consolidation leading many generic drugs to be made by just one or two companies. If the allegations of price-fixing are true, they affect millions of Americans who purchase prescription drugs. The investigation should include the impact of such behavior on the Medicare and Medicaid programs, the Affordable Care Act and the private health insurance market, as well as potential shortcomings in antitrust law and antitrust enforcement, and in the laws governing generic and biosimilar drug competition," she wrote. All of these issues are within your committees' jurisdiction, and Congress has a responsibility to investigate these concerns and legislate if necessary. Beyond calling on Congress to investigate alleged price fixing, Warren announced legislation in a Washington Post Op-Ed that she argued could also help rein in rising generic drug costs. The senator touted her Affordable Drug Manufacturing Act proposal, which would create an Office of Drug Manufacturing at HHS to manufacture select generic drugs and offer them to consumers at a fair price that guarantees affordable patient access. Arguing that competition is dying as giant companies look to rig the rules, insulate themselves from accountability and line their pockets at the expense of American families Warren said her proposal seeks to fix the market -- not replace it. The Affordable Drug Manufacturing Act will introduce more competition into the prescription drug market, and bring down prices for consumers, she said in a statement. The bill, which Warren introduced in conjunction with U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Illinois, would specifically allow HHS to manufacture generic drugs under certain conditions where competition is lacking, including: When no company manufactures the drug; only one or two companies produce the drug and there is a shortage or price spike; the price is a barrier to patient access and the drug is listed as an essential medicine by the World Health Organization. It would further require the new office to begin production of generic insulin within a year of enactment, and direct HHS to offer to sell its manufacturing rights to any company that commits to keeping the product on the market at a fair price, among other things. The proposal and letter mark the senators latest effort to tackle the rising costs of prescription drugs. Warren previously offered legislation that called for limiting copayment amounts for prescription drugs to $250 per month for individuals and $500 per month for families. That bill has sat in committee since its July introduction. Although U.S. Sen. Elizabeth has yet to announce whether she will pursue a 2020 White House run, a new poll suggests that voters like former Vice President Joe Biden and other possible Democratic candidates better than the Massachusetts Democrat. A Quinnipiac University national poll released Wednesday found that American voters see Biden as the most favorable 2020 contender, with 53 to 33 percent of respondents saying they have positive views of the former vice president -- higher than President Donald Trumps 40 to 56 percent favorability rating. Bidens popularity was even stronger among Democrats, with 84 percent offering that they see him favorably compared to 7 percent who do not, the poll found. By contrast, more than a third of all voters surveyed -- 37 percent -- said they do not have favorable views of Warren. Three in 10, meanwhile, said they see the senator positively and a similar amount said they havent heard enough about her to form an opinion, according to the poll. Warren, who is considering a 2020 presidential run, was more popular among Democrats surveyed, securing a 60 to 12 percent favorability rating, the poll found. She, however, still trailed U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, when it came to popularity among voters in her own party. About three-quarters of Democrats, or 74 percent, said they had positive views of the 2016 Democratic presidential contender, compared to 13 percent who did not. American voters as whole, meanwhile, gave Sanders a 44 to 42 percent favorability ranking, according to survey results. U.S. Rep. Beto ORourke, a Texas Democrat who lost his 2018 Senate bid, also saw largely spilt favorability with 24 to 20 percent of voters saying they saw him in a positive light. More than half of voters -- 55 percent -- meanwhile, said they hadnt heard enough about him to form an opinion. Democrats were less divided, giving him a 45 to 4 percent favorability score. Five in 10, however, said they didnt know enough about the rumored 2020 Democratic contender to weigh in. Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll, said the findings suggest that for Democrats gearing up for 2020, its Biden and Bernie, with Beto looking for a foothold. The poll, which surveyed more than 1,100 voters nationwide from Dec. 12 to 17, has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points. It marked the latest poll to raise questions about Warrens chances if she runs in 2020. A survey, which Harvards Center for American Political Studies and The Harris Poll conducted late last month, found that just 4 percent of voters would support Warren in a hypothetical Democratic primary contest, compared to a quarter who said theyd back Biden, 15 percent who would support Sanders and 9 percent would back ORourke. The White House announced Wednesday that it has begun withdrawing U.S. troops from from Syria as military officials transition to the next phase of the Middle East conflict. Contending that the United States has defeated the so-called Islamic State, or ISIS, territorial caliphate, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said the Trump administration has started returning United States troops home as we transition to the next phase of this campaign. She, however, stressed that these victories over ISIS in Syria do not signal the end of the Global Coalition or its campaign, and offered that the United States and its allies stand ready to re-engage at all levels to defend American interests whenever necessary. We will continue to work together to deny radical Islamist terrorists territory, funding, support and any means of infiltrating our borders, she added in a statement. President Donald Trump, meanwhile, hinted at the troop withdrawal on Twitter. We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency, he posted. We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency. Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 19, 2018 Trump and Sanders' comments came shortly after several news outlets reported that the White House had ordered the Pentagon to remove all 2,000 American troops from Syria and to end its ISIS ground campaign. Despite the presidents assertion, defense officials suggested their work in Syria may not be over yet, according to reports. Pentagon spokesman Col. Rob Manning told CBS News that at this time, we continue to work by, with and through our partners in the region." U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a U.S. Air Force veteran and member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, meanwhile, rejected Trumps claim that ISIS has been defeated in Syria. This is simply not true, he tweeted in response to the president. This is simply not true. https://t.co/Jvie2NxgWz Adam Kinzinger (@RepKinzinger) December 19, 2018 This is a breaking news story and will be updated. SPRINGFIELD When a Palmer home invasion turned deadly for Benny Flores, alleged to be one of the home invaders, police said Samuel Comstock may have been an accomplice of Flores. Comstock was never charged in relation to the home invasion, but was charged with possession of a firearm without a firearms identification card. Comstock was a neighbor of Flores in Springfield, and police went to Comstocks home after the Feb. 11 home invasion to speak to him, Hampden Assistant District Attorney James M. Forsyth said. They found a rifle on his bed. Comstock pleaded guilty Tuesday to the gun charge and was sentenced to a year of probation by Hampden Superior Court Judge Mark D. Mason. Police found video that showed Flores talking to Comstock and another man outside Flores' home before the home invasion, Forsyth said. The video shows two people getting into a car, which went to Palmer, and Comstock staying behind. Comstock told police Flores told him about the plan to rob Dimitri Bryant in Palmer. He (Comstock) did not like the plan and did not want to participate in it, Forsyth said was what Comstock told police. Comstock let police search his home and told them Flores who owned the gun told him to clean it, Forsyth said. Defense lawyer Meredith Ryan said Comstock admits he had the gun in his home that night, but disagrees with what police say he told them about Flores' robbery plans. She said Comstock, who has a very long work history and is close to his family, takes full responsibility for the gun charge. Bryant, who fatally shot Flores and was then charged with possession of marijuana with intent to distribute, has filed a motion asking that evidence in the drug case against him be thrown out. Bryant, 22, of 1180 Calkins Road, Palmer, faces no charges for the shooting of the 48-year-old Flores. Freddy Rosario, alleged to have participated in the home invasion with Flores, faces charges for that and other crimes in connection with the incident. A federal investigation into the line-of-duty death of Worcester Firefighter Christopher Roy is slated to begin in the new year, officials said. Roy, a 36-year-old who had been with the Worcester Fire Department for 2 and a half years, died Dec. 9 after becoming trapped on the second floor of 7 Lowell St. while firefighters battled a five-alarm blaze. A spokeswoman for the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health confirmed that the agency would begin investigating the incident in January, starting with an initial examination. The agency cannot comment on specific factors of the investigation, said Nura Sadeghpour, the agency spokeswoman. Worcester Fire Department spokesman Deputy Chief Martin Dyer said the investigation would include testing of Roys fire gear, as is customary with line-of-duty death investigations. Fire Fighter Fatality Investigation and Prevention Program reports by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health are intended to help provide information to prevent future fatalities, Sadeghpour wrote in an email. It is important to emphasize that the NIOSH program is intended to identify factors that contributed to fire fighter deaths in an incident, as well as to provide findings and recommendations in public reports to prevent future tragedies, the email read. NIOSH does not enforce compliance with regulations or assess culpability. It is unclear how long it will take the agency to complete the investigation and publish a report. Dyer said on Tuesday that the cause of the fire remains under investigation. He could not say whether or not the blaze appears to be suspicious. Roy was a Shrewsbury resident and leaves his 9-year-old daughter, his parents and a brother. A memorial fund has been established in the name of Roys daughter, Ava. Donations to the fund can be made online or by check. Anyone who wishes to contribute can make checks payable to the AVA ROY FUND and can mail them directly to the Worcester Fire Department Credit Union at 34 Glennie St., Worcester, Mass., 01605. Biological safety cabinets (BSC) Market: Overview Biological safety cabinets (BSC) are majorly utilized by the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors for various quality control processes, R&D practices, and others where some hazardous research materials may produce aerosols which can contain, such as infectious agents that laboratory workers could inhale. Biological safety cabinets facilitate laboratory techniques for safe handling the potentially infectious research materials in order to prevent exposure of laboratory personnel and the contamination of the general environment. Some biological safety cabinets also provide a clean work environment to protect cell cultures or sterile apparatus. GET PREMIUM SAMPLE REPORT @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/6064 Biological safety cabinets (BSC) Market: Key Players Labconco (U.S.) Thermo Fisher Scientific (U.S.) Esco Micro (Singapore) Kewaunee Scientific (U.S.) The Baker Company (U.S.) NuAire (U.K) Cruma (Spain) Germfree Laboratories (U.S.) Air Science (U.S.) BIOBASE (China) Berner International (U.S.) Azbil Telstar (Spain) Biological safety cabinets (BSC) Market: Segments MRFR has segmented the analysis into four key dynamics for better understanding: By Type : Class I, Class II, and Class III. By Application : Industrial, R&D, and Academic among others. By End-users : Pharmaceutical & Biotechnology Companies, Diagnostic & Testing Laboratories, and others. By Regions : North America, Europe, APAC and the Rest-of-the-World. Biological safety cabinets (BSC) Market: Growth and Analysis The global biological safety cabinet market is growing rapidly mainly due to the growing biotechnology and pharmaceutical sector. Increasing research activities in the Biotechnology led by the burgeoning pharmaceutical sector provide favorable backgrounds for the market to grow exponentially, increasing the demand for biological safety cabinets. Moreover, the rising investments in the medical sector and life sciences are escalating the market on the global platform. Acknowledging the rapid expansions, the market perceives currently, Market Research Future (MRFR) in its recently published study report asserts that the global biological safety cabinet market will reach significant growth heights by 2023 registering 7.4% CAGR during the review period (2018 2023). Advances in technology majorly drive the market growth, improving such safety equipments. The increasing demand for effective and advance technology-based products is anticipated to boost the market size of the global biological safety cabinet market. The global biological safety cabinet market has been evaluated as a swiftly growing market in the coming years, and it is expected that the market will have high demand globally. The global biological safety cabinet market is undergoing a rapid change. Ongoing discussions and proceedings have brought into examinations competence of existing regulatory frameworks for medical equipments in well-developed as well as in developing regions guaranteeing the performance, quality, and safety. Biological safety cabinets (BSC) Market: Geographical Analysis The North American region leads the global biological safety cabinet market. The US among other North American countries, backed by the expanded healthcare industry in the country accounts for the significant market share in the regional market. Moreover, the presence of a well-developed healthcare sector and major market players positively impacts the market growth in the region. Factors substantiating the market growth include the growing research activities in the Pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies backed by the well-established healthcare sector. The expanding pharmaceutical sector in the region provides suitable backgrounds for the market to grow by increasing the usages of biosafety cabinets in R&D and quality control processes, besides others. Europe is the second-largest market for biological safety cabinet, which is led by the presence of promising players mainly the UK, and Germany. Other factors contributing to the regional market growth include a well-developed healthcare sector, huge demand for drug discoveries, increasing healthcare expenditures, and funding for research activities by public & private sectors. Western Europe holds the significant market share owing to the major contributions from the UK, Germany, France, and Italy. Eastern Europe, on the other hand, accounts for the fastest growing region owing to the huge opportunities from the untapped market. The Asia Pacific region is rapidly emerging as a promising market for biological safety cabinet. Substantial investments by Asian pharma companies are resultantly sufficing the exponential progress. Besides, the governmental support for the research in biotechnology led by the continually improving economic conditions is providing impetus to the market growth. The biological safety cabinet market in the MEA region is expected to witness impeding growth due to the political conditions and poor economy in the African region. On the other hand, the market in the Middle Eastern region is poised to witness phenomenal growth due well-developed healthcare sector backed by the governments initiatives and funding. Countries such as Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Dubai, and Qatar are majorly contributing to the market growth, which in turn, is transforming the market, facilitating it to reach the global space. Cost competitive product development is undoubtedly the key factor driving the regional market growth. OBTAIN COMPLETE 100 PAGES PREMIUM RESEARCH REPORT DETAILS ENABLED WITH RESPECTIVE 40+ TABLES AND FIGURES @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/biological-safety-cabinet-market-6064 Competitive Analysis Characterized by the presence of numerous big and small-scale players, the global of biological safety cabinet market appears fiercely competitive and fragmented. Well-established players incorporate acquisition, collaboration, partnership, expansion, and product launch in order to gain a competitive advantage and to maintain their positions in this market. The Key players operating in the market compete based on pricing, product launch, technology launch, and reputation. Manufacturers adopt modern manufacturing process to ensure safety and convenience. Marketers employ a continuous improvement strategy to analyze and update products, implementing improvements and launching new solutions to meet the changing needs of end-users. Manufacturers strive to fulfill the most restrictive hygienic and sterility standards while ensuring that ergonomics, simplicity, and reliability define the design of their products. Industry/ Innovation/ Related News November 27, 2018 Equashield, LLC (US), a leading global provider of Closed System Transfer Devices (CSTDs) for hazardous drugs, announced that it will launch a new version of its CSTD-enabled Equashield Pro Robot at the upcoming ASHP Meeting. Approximately the size of a standard Biological Safety Cabinet, the Equashield Pro is an Automated Pharmacy Compounding System that is used for the safe and efficient preparation of injectable drugs, including hazardous drugs. Moreover, the Equashield Pro facilitates the simple and cost-effective adoption of robotics in hospital pharmacies without the need for costly renovations and maintenance. Major Points form TOC for Biological Safety Cabinet Market Research Report Forecast to 2023 Chapter 1. Report Prologue Chapter 2. Market Introduction Chapter 3. Research Methodology Chapter 4. Market Dynamics Chapter 5. Market Factor Analysis Chapter 6. Global Biological Safety Cabinet Market, By Type Chapter 7. Global Biological Safety Cabinet Market, By Treatment Chapter 8 Global Biological Safety Cabinet Market, By End User Chapter 9. Global Biological Safety Cabinet Market, By Region Chapter 10 Company Landscape Chapter 11 Company Profiles Chapter 12 MRFR Conclusion Chapter 13 Appendix About Us: Market Research Future (MRFR), enable customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services. Contact Us: Market Research Future Office No. 528, Amanora Chambers Magarpatta Road, Hadapsar, Pune 411028 Maharashtra, India Phone: +1 646 845 9312 Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com Key Players for Global Sterilization Equipment Market Market Research Future (MRFR) recognizes the following companies as the key players in Sterilization Equipment Market: There are plenty of large and small market players which operate in this market all over the globe. Some of the key players in the global sterilization equipment market are 3M, STERIS plc., Getinge AB, Sotera Health, Advanced Sterilization Products (Division of Ethicon), Belimed, Anderson Products, Boekel Scientific, Celitron Medical, Technologies Kft., Fedegari Autoclavi S.p.A., Cantel Medical., LTE Scientific, Merck & Co., Inc, Midmark Corporation, MMM Group, TSO3 INC., and SAKURA SI CO., LTD. To Get Sample Report visit https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/6397 Sterilization Equipment Market Overview Sterilization equipment are necessary to maintain the sterile conditions during research activities, manufacturing of pharmaceuticals and during medical procedures. The increasing geriatric population, a growing number of surgical procedures and increasing research and development activities in the healthcare sector are the major factors driving the growth of the global sterilization equipment market. Additionally, increasing R&D spending and aggressive strategies adopted by the top players, such as new product launches, are contributing to the growth of the market. For instance, in August 2018, Cantel Medical announced the acquisition of Stericycles Controlled Environmental Solutions Business for USD 17 million, it is a leading provider of testing and certification, environmental monitoring and decontamination services for clean rooms, and other services related to regulatory compliance and quality control The high costs associated with surgeries, stringent regulatory environment for product approval, and lack of awareness about sterilization methods are likely to hinder the market growth during the forecast period. The Global Sterilization Equipment Market is expected to grow during the forecast period (20182023) at a CAGR ~7.0%. Segments for Global Sterilization Equipment Market The global sterilization equipment market has been segmented on the basis of product, technology, and end-user. On the basis of product, the market has been classified as heat sterilization, low-temperature sterilization, filtration sterilization, ionizing radiation sterilization. The heat sterilization segment has been further divided into dry heat sterilization and moist heat sterilization. The Low-temperature sterilization segment has been further divided into ethylene oxide sterilization, hydrogen peroxide sterilization, and others. The ionizing radiation sterilization segment has been classified as electron beams and gamma rays. The technology segment has been divided into steam, forced convention, vacuum, gravity, and natural convection. The market, by enduser, has been segmented into hospitals & clinics, research institutes, pharmaceutical companies, food & beverage industry, medical device companies, and other endusers. Regional Analysis for Global Sterilization Equipment Market The market in the Americas is expected to dominate the global sterilization equipment market during the forecast period owing to the increasingly strict sterility guidelines, increase in the number of surgical procedures due to rising geriatric population, the presence of a well-established healthcare system and adoption of highly advanced technology. The European market is expected to be the second-largest due to the increasing government expenditure on healthcare and increasing research activities in the life sciences sector, and the growing number of road accidents in Europe. Moreover, the market in Asia-Pacific is anticipated to be the fastest-growing during the forecast period owing to the increasing geriatric population in the region, increasing number of hospitals in Asia, and favorable government initiatives for healthcare facilities. The market in the Middle East & Africa is likely to account for the smallest share of the global sterilization equipment market. Browse Complete Report @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/sterilization-equipment-market-6397 Some Brief Table of Contents of Report 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 4.1 Drivers 4.2 Restrains 4.3 Opportunities 4.4 Challenges 4.5 Macroeconomic Indicators 4.6 Technology Trends & Assessment Chapter 5. Market Factor Analysis 5.1 Porters Five Forces Analysis 5.1.1 Bargaining Power Of Suppliers TOC Continued Do You Have Specific Requirement? Ask To Our Experts https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/enquiry/6397 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), Statistical Report, Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services. Contact Us: Market Research Future Hadapsar, Pune 411028 Maharashtra, India Phone: +1 646 845 9312 Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com by Larissa Faw , December 18, 2018 In the final week before Christmas, more agencies are issuing seasons greetings in eclectic forms. Dailey is celebrating the agency's 50th anniversary in Los Angeles by printing 50 bits of trivia directly on 50 individual cookies, which are being dispensed as gifts. Cookie number seven, for instance, reads, number of years we worked with Jeff Bridges after landing him his first VO job. GSD&Ms holiday card is going to the dogs (and cats). The Omnicom creative agency decided to focus its efforts on an advocacy drive for its neighborhood no-kill animal shelter Austin Pets Alive! The GSD&M website homepage has been made over as a hub where visitors can donate to the shelter and view some of the pets (dressed in holiday season finery) available for adoption. Clients and others are receiving printed holiday cards that feature over a dozen adoptable shelter dogs and cats. advertisement advertisement Baru's Tree of Life holiday card is recognizing multicultural differences. Clients will receive four multicultural holiday ornaments, including a Day of the Dead skull from Mexico, a stuffed elephant from Laos, an Ashanti fertility doll from Rwanda and a Peruvian alpaca. Empower is embracing its feminine roots with a three-part podcast series that introduces Mrs. Jessica Jingle-Claus' back story, including her romance with Santa and her marketing background. Confessions of Mrs. Claus is available for download on iTunes or Google Play. Highfield is honoring its New York roots with an online store it has dubbed "Canal Street Mystery Box" that serves as a fundraiser for the New York-based charity Womankind. The agency has filled boxes priced at $25, $50, and $100 with a random assortment of items found on NYC's Canal Street, which is well-known for its eclectic array of knock-off goods and tacky products. (Think curiously inexpensive watches, expletive-laden T-shirts, and overpriced squishy toys.) Without knowing the contents, Highfield is sending these mystery boxes to purchasers with a warning: like all good Canal Street purchases, there are no returns. The Gate I New York's ugly sweater contest first sent recipients an open invitation to design the ugliest creation with bad taste as your guide. The project received more than 75 submissions, with the agency producing the winning ugly sweater with The Gates president Beau Fraser and Chief Creative Officer David Bernstein wearing them at the holiday party. Pittsburgh-based agency Where Eagles Dare spent its holidays crafting a multifaceted experience/prank that plays off opportunities to fly to space. Quirk Creative is sidestepping the traditional holiday gift exchange in favor of a New Years present. This year, clients are receiving desk succulents with a personalized, punny name, such as Succulbury Finn, and David Ogilvine. More than 3,000 recipients are receiving WHITE64's email that includes a link to the short Paper Thin video that follows an adventurous Gingerbread Man and a cold-hearted Snowman. Remember, most of our differences are only paper thin, and easily ripped away," states the clip. Traction's holiday card leverages the digital agency's dark humor to underscore the overwhelming amount of global negativity and anger. This year, in addition to a holiday gift for their clients, Summerjax created toiletry bags for a group of teens who are currently incarcerated at the Orange County Juvenile Hall. The bags, purchased from Summerjax client Hollister, are filled with self-care products often in demand, such as soap, shampoo and conditioner. Summerjax will be wrapping the presents and delivering them in-person to the juvenile detention facility on Wednesday, December 19. While other agencies are spending energy formulating holiday cards and gifts, Barbarian is encouraging donations to nonprofit organizations by making fun of Russian president Vladimir Putin. The Shirts For Putin interactive site opens with the message, "waiting for Putin to wax his chest" before showing the shirtless leader alongside an array of potential messages, like World Peace. Users are asked to donate money to The Committee to Protect Journalists, The Human Rights Campaign, and Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Organization. by Alex Weprin , December 18, 2018 CEO of NBCUniversal Steve Burke sent an email to staff on Tuesday wishing warm holiday greetings while also joking about the companys long-rumored foray into over-the-top video. Burkes email was written in a Grinch shade of green, with an image of the Dr. Seuss character (and Universal Pictures movie star) at the top. The email, written in a Seussian rhyme, praised individual business units and made light of some of the newsworthy events in 2018. For example, he weighed in on parent company Comcasts unsuccessful bid for 21st Century Fox: During 2018, our businesses mostly rocked. But it did not feel at all good when Disney got Fox. On the companys Olympics measurement plan: We started the year with the Olympics and a metric called TAD. Either a genius invention, or a sign that we have gone mad!" advertisement advertisement But it was his line about NBCUniversals OTT plans that raised eyebrows in media circles. "And while you all go off to relax, swim or ski maybe, just maybe, next year we will announce our plan for OTT! While competitors like Disney and WarnerMedia have announced major OTT launches for 2019, and CBS has already launched a suite of OTT networks, NBCUniversal has so far only dipped its toes in the water. NBC News is launching a streaming network called Signal next year, meant to compete with CBSN, and the company launched an app called WatchBack that provides some limited content. Beyond those products, NBCUs OTT plan is something of a mystery. Burkes email was written in jest, of course, but with every major media company exploring their streaming options, the line about OTT may end up being prescient. by Sara Guaglione , December 19, 2018 Twitter cofounder Ev Williams may expand his media interests next year, with an eye on New York magazine. This isnt Williams' first foray into media; he is also the founder-CEO of publishing platform Medium. Williams interest in New York was first reported by Bloomberg. He is said to have talked with Pam Wasserstein, CEO of the magazine's parent company, New York Media. However, there has been no word on the status of the discussion. In August, an internal email from Wasserstein reported by CNBC revealed she was open to an acquisition. In November, New York Media rolled out a dynamic metered paywall across all of its sites, including nymag.com and its standalone verticals Vulture, the Cut, Intelligencer, the Strategist and Grub Street. advertisement advertisement New York joins a growing number of publishers erecting paywalls to expand consumer-driven revenue and lessen reliance on advertising. Earlier this month, New York staffers moved to unionize, complaining of increasing corporate pressures and stagnant wages and benefits. Williams isnt the first tech billionaire to invest in legacy publishers. Salesforce Inc. CEO Marc Benioff and wife Lynne recently bought Time magazine from Meredith Corp. for $190 million in cash. Amazons CEO Jeff Bezos acquired The Washington Post in 2013 for $250 million. Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs, bought majority ownership of The Atlantic last year through her firm, Emerson Collective LLC. (Emerson Collective also recently acquired Pop-Up Magazine Productions, the publisher of live magazine show Pop-Up Magazine and The California Sunday Magazine.) by Larissa Faw , December 19, 2018 Return on investment is the top concern for 55% of social marketers, beating out concerns like understanding cross-channel social success (42%), developing strategies to support business goals (39%) and determining what content to post (39%), according to Sprout Social's 2018 Social Index report. However, only 14% are able to quantify the revenue generated from social media. Instead, marketers look at these platforms in non-financial terms, specifically increasing brand awareness (80%), increasing community engagement (65%) upping web traffic (54%), and generating sales/leads (41%). But true ROI isn't based on marketers' goals, it is met when brands deliver consumers' expectations, defined as content that "aids in awareness and consideration, not the end sale," according to the report. advertisement advertisement When it comes to creating videos for social, a key takeaway for advertisers is that people are looking for content that feels authentic to the brand and is not just an ad to push product," says Kristin Johnson, director, content & communications, at Sprout Social, adding that its research shows that 40% of people indicate that whether they watch a social video or not is in part influenced on whether think its basically an ad. Social marketers appear misaligned with consumer preferences based on the reports findings. Marketers, to that end, seek content that educates (61%), tells a story (58%) and inspires (53%), whereas consumers are looking for discount/sales (73%), showcasing of new products/services (60%), and videos that teach them something (59%). Brands can produce all the video content they want, but the top factors that entice consumers to watch this content are length (61%), caption or description of video (51%) and whether the video is an ad (40%). If consumers feel like they are being directly sold to, they are less likely to watch that content, per the report. "It is clear people are already weary of advertisements, so it is imperative that brands have a firm grasp on the story they are looking to tell," says Johnson. "A social video shouldnt be self-serving or laced with sales jargon, but offer real stories, people and situations. If people connect to the content brands are producing, theyre more likely to not only watch the video, but further engage with it as well. Employee advocacy is the new influencer marketing with 71% of marketers using their workers as influencers, while only 19% continue to use influencer programs. Nearly half of consumer respondents (45%) say they have reached out to companies on social media. Their top reasons for doing so are questions (57%), complaints (45%), and praise (34%). Nearly six in 10 marketers (58%) receive between 1 and 50 requests a week, with 78% responding within 12 hours. Facebook remains the dominant channel with 97% listing the platform as their most used and useful social network, though 83% now use Instagram as well with a mere 13% using Snapchat. Half of consumers (51%) use Instagram and 30% use Snapchat. The report is based on 1,253 consumer respondents and 2,060 marketer respondents conducted in April and May, 2018. Bollywood is more than just good looks and dancing around the trees. Over the last few decades, Bollywood has time and again proved that it has much more to offer when it comes to creating a visual history. Bollywood hasn't just given us the stars that the entire world has come to recognise and appreciate, but we have also witnessed some of the best stories and experiences getting translated into frames which thread together as a marvellous visual feast. However, it isn't just a good story or a great star-cast that creates magic on the silver screen, there is much more to it. There exist such memorable actor pairings which make for such a great viewing that people often head to the theatres simply to catch them in action! We picked out 6 such super talented and super popular actor pairings from Bollywood with the most number of films together, whom we have admired, and would like to see more of in the future too (Bollywood are you listening?)! 1. Paresh Rawal & Akshay Kumar Grazing Goat Pictures The 'Hera Pheri' hangover doesn't seem to subside at all when it comes to these two. What started as a laughter riot with this pairing in the film, its popularity forced filmmakers to keep bringing them together more often. The duo has done 22 films together which includes the 'Hera Pheri' series, 'Oh My God', 'Awara Pagal Deewana', 'Garam Masala', 'Welcome' besides many others. 2. Shah Rukh Khan & Anupam Kher YRF How can one forget Anupam Kher's role as daddy cool Dharamvir Malhotra in DDLJ? SRK and Kher made the most fun father-son duo on-screen in this movie, and the charm seems to have worked in 13 such movies in all such as 'Kuch Kuch Hota Hai', 'Happy New Year', 'Darr', 'Jab Tak Hai Jaan' and others, where they acted together and set the silver screen on fire. 3. Govinda & Johnny Lever Geetha Arts Another such much-loved pairing is that of Govinda and Johnny Lever! The laughing spree their jodi kickstarted in every film was truly amazing, and thankfully we have been blessed with 29 such films where the pair has come together to entertain us, which include names like 'Dulhe Raja', 'Hadh Kar Di Aapne', 'Anari No.1', 'Kunwara', 'Joru Ka Ghulam' and so on. 4. Anil Kapoor & Jackie Shroff YouTube 'Ram Lakhan' might be one of their most memorable pairing on-screen because it allowed the two of them to leave a mark in our hearts. In all, they went on to do 12 films together such as 'Parinda', 'Karma', 'Kabhi Na Kabhi' and more! 5. Amitabh Bachchan & Shah Rukh Khan Dharma Productions What can we say about these two? Two tremendously talented and celebrated actors in their own accord, but the kind of magic they create together is excellent! This awesome pair has done 8 films together such as, 'Mohabbatien, 'K3G', 'Veer-Zara', 'Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna', 'Bhootnath' and more. 6. Govinda & Kader Khan Harmesh Malhotra Another pair that rocked the 90s to no end was that of Kader Khan and Govinda. No wonder they were a total hit with the audience because they ended up starring in 41 films together such as 'Dulhe Raja', 'Coolie No. 1', 'Hero No. 1' 'Raja Babu' and the likes. Life is not a bed of roses for someone in love, and while people are ready to walk the extra mile for their lover, the gripping and tragic tale of Hamid Ansari's love story will give you an incredible perspective on just how much a human can possibly suffer in love. You have heard and probably read about the man who spent the last few years in Pakistan's jail, but what is his life story though? Twitter Hamid was leading a normal life in India with his family when he met a girl on the internet. They connected and in no time, love blossomed between the two. They wanted to get married and Hamid was ready to commit with all his heart. His lover was from Pakistan and that did not deter his plans of uniting with her. Hamid then applied for a Visa to visit the country but while the wait took longer, his lover was being forced to marry someone else back home. Hamid met another guy online, became friends and then the guy promised to help him meet the girl and advised him to enter Pakistan from Afghanistan. Yes, that was illegal and a way paved with dangers unknown, but that did not stop Hamid. However, luck had other plans and it turned out that the 'friend' was not helping him but instead, got him arrested and thus began Hamid's nightmare. Twitter He tried to explain to the authorities that his intentions were not malicious and that he was not a spy but things were already in motion against him. Hamid thought he was being swallowed into oblivion and while he longed to meet his parents, regret took over and he almost gave up on hope. In a recent interview, he revealed that he couldn't bathe for days, he was barely given food and the torture he endured was beyond the measures of what he could possible express. Years later, a string of lawyers and the determination of Sushma Swaraj ensured that justice was delayed but not denied to Hamid. Today, he was released and he entered his homeland after more than six years. He obviously cannot stop thanking Sushma Swaraj for her efforts and has a heart full of gratitude. #WATCH Indian National Hamid Ansari who came to India after being released from a Pakistan jail yesterday, meets External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj in Delhi. His mother tells EAM "Mera Bharat mahaan, meri madam mahaan, sab madam ne hi kiya hai." pic.twitter.com/FQEzz99Ohm ANI (@ANI) December 19, 2018 Hamid lost many years from his life but he is not going take this second lease of life for granted. Hamid now wants to find a job, get married and a have a family of his own. He's home! Delighted that #HamidAnsari has returned to his family this evening after six agonising years in Pakistani jails. @IndiainPakistan pic.twitter.com/KvvWTLM5Ao Ajay Bisaria (@Ajaybis) December 18, 2018 Normalcy is what was lacking from his life and that is exactly what he wants now. When asked if he ever wondered what happened to the woman for whom he took this major step for, Hamid said that he found out that she was married and was well settled, and that is exactly what he craves for himself as well. Let's hope his life is full of light and hope from now onwards. A. SPANOU: We have the honour of hosting the Alternate Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr Giorgos Katrougalos, who has just returned from his trip to the United States, which he will tell us about. Lets welcome Mr Giorgos Katrougalos. V. SKOURIS: Good morning and a good start to a new week. G. KATROUGALOS: Good morning to you and your listeners. Wishing us all a good week. A. SPANOU: You have just returned from America. G. KATROUGALOS: Indeed. The commencement of Strategic Dialogue with the US was a great success. Not only is the leading role of our country recognised - I am referring to the Joint Communique - with regard to stabilisation of the region, but it has now become clear that our country is considered to be playing a leading role precisely in ensuring security, not only in the Balkan region but also in the wider region, including the Eastern Mediterranean. V. SKOURIS: Minister, what does upgrading of the countrys role mean in practice? G. KATROUGALOS: The United States invites only a few countries to engage in Strategic Dialogue: those which they feel can play, as I said earlier, a stabilising role, and with which they share interests. I want to clarify something because, in the past, things werent always such: the fact that our relations with the United States are totally balanced, and this upgrading precisely exists in our cooperation because we believe that we have coinciding interests in the region. What does this entail? Ensuring peace and stabilising the situation. Our interest is self-evident. There is a corresponding interest on the part of the United States, given that major changes have taken place in the region, which are not limited to the extreme tension in Syria, in Libya, but also related to the generally volatile political landscape of relations. Countries that once represented a given for the West no longer represent a given to the same extent. All of this portrays the special importance that our country possesses. V. SKOURIS: Does this also mean upgrading of Greek forces in American missions in the region? In military missions? G. KATROUGALOS: No. V. SKOURIS: Because the head of the General Staff was also in the United States. G. KATROUGALOS: He was. When we referred to upgrading of relations, this means on all levels. We are holding talks along six axes that cover a range of issues from geopolitics, defence, issues of the Rule of Law, and tackling terrorism. The General of the Hellenic Police was with us, and of course, issues related to the economy were discussed, and energy, which are dual in nature, both economic and geopolitical. But also issues of commerce, investment, and those issues which we refer to as People to People, which pertain to cultural relations, educational issues, artist exchanges etc. So that I may come back to your question, despite the fact the head of the General Staff discussed issues related to upgrading of the military material that we receive from the United States, the Dialogue was not geared towards a military plane, but a political one. We firmly consider dialogue and diplomacy to be the main method of resolving political differences, and talks were clearly centred around this. A. SPANOU: Is there an issue with Souda Bay? G. KATROUGALOS: No, there is no issue with Souda Bay. In other words, it depends on what you mean. Souda Bay was already there; it has always served the broader needs... A. SPANOU: A change in the Agreement, lets say. A revision towards upgrading the cooperation. G. KATROUGALOS: No, there shall be no change in the agreement that will go before Parliament. On a technical level, changes in the method of cooperation are always taking place, but these are technical issues. These are not issues that can be elevated to a major political plane. V. SKOURIS: Minister, how will this Dialogue continue? Will it be repeated? Because sources tell us that it will be repeated in Athens. And a second question, before we proceed with other issues, does the possibility exist of the Greek Prime Minister being invited to the United States? G. KATROUGALOS: Let me begin with the latter. That possibility always exists. Do you know that never in the past have so many meetings ever taken place with the heads of international politics? But that was not one of the topics discussed in the context of the dialogue. On the contrary what you asked was indeed discussed, how this initiative will become systematic and how it will be continued, because we did not wish for it to be only a transient recognition of the important role we play in the region. We wish for it to have a specific, structured continuation. Therefore, it was decided that there will be committees for each Ministry, similar to those we had there, on the mission - because all the Ministries involved were represented - so that its continuation can be ensured through follow-up and continuous communication. And it was also agreed upon that this Dialogue shall take place on an annual basis. Next time, since you were quite right in mentioning it, as it will occur on an alternating basis, it shall take place here in our country. And precisely within this context, one could say that a programme was created which includes everything, and not just the strategic issues and the issues related to investment. We wish to keep the momentum alive that was created by the very successful Thessaloniki International Fair, with the presence of the large American companies that attended. A. SPANOU: Recognition, on the part of Washington, of our countrys role in stabilising the wider region is clearly related to the Prespa Agreement. Isnt that right? G. KATROUGALOS: The Prespa Agreement is one of the pivotal points of our broader policy in this area. We must not single it out. We could perhaps highlight it as the most striking example of this policy. A. SPANOU: But are you certain, Minister, that a 151 plus majority exists for ratification of the Agreement. G. KATROUGALOS: I have reiterated numerous times that I consider this majority a given, precisely because I have faith in the sense of national duty of Greek MPs. And precisely because that is an issue that surpasses the responsibility of political parties and relates to the individual conscience of the MPs. Of course, it is also an issue of reliability for those political parties which had initially stated that they see the Agreement in a positive light. V. SKOURIS: With less than 151 votes, 151 MPs, will you ratify the Agreement or not? G. KATROUGALOS: Constitutionally, no issue exists with regard to its ratification with less than 151 also, but politically, such a major event will require greater political commitment than a simple majority. V. SKOURIS: That leaves the possibility open for it to be passed with less than 151, if Ive understood correctly. G. KATROUGALOS: No. On the contrary, that is your interpretation. My interpretation is that, precisely because such a major objective exists, and precisely because this will be felt in Parliament, a majority will exist which will be much greater than 151. A. SPANOU: Will you link ratification with a vote of confidence for the government? Does such a thought exist? G. KATROUGALOS: Such thoughts can clearly circulate and take on flesh and bones only following an initiative on the part of the Prime Minister. And this always takes place in light of the circumstances. This is not something I can tell you from now. A. SPANOU: When the procedures have been concluded in Skopje, and the constitutional revision has been completed, will the Agreement immediately come to the Hellenic Parliament, or will an interim period exist during which other things will take place? G. KATROUGALOS: Our obligation that stems from the Prespa Agreement is to bring it before Parliament as soon as possible. V. SKOURIS: Minister, can a Council of Party Leaders under the President of the Republic exist, as was requested by Panos Kammenos yesterday, which would indeed block the agreement? G. KATROUGALOS: But the reason for the meeting of a Council of Party Leaders is to shape a view, a position on a national issue. It is not to block parliamentary procedures. This is clearly a violation of the separation of powers. That would be something unconstitutional. Indeed, we are always in favour of dialogue, but dialogue, especially with regard to the Prespa Agreement, has begun from the motion of no confidence that New Democracy submitted six months ago. No one can say that this Agreement has not been discussed sufficiently in terms of its full amplitude. V. SKOURIS: Will the opposition be updated on the developments? G. KATROUGALOS: We have always been committed to generally updating the opposition. And contrary to the accusations of secret diplomacy, our policy has always been open. For example, I have invited the opposition parties this Friday, in the context of the National Council on Foreign Policy, the NCFP, to both update them on what took place in the US, as well as to discuss the two current major issues of the upcoming period which include the Cyprus issue, because new initiatives are commencing related to its negotiation, as well as Greek-Turkish relations. A. SPANOU: Any thoughts about an interpretative statement, or for any additional protocol, as has been suggested by Potami? G. KATROUGALOS: The Prespa Agreement is clear on its own. Beyond that, anything required to further and more clearly lay down its issues is a subject we can look at as regards the manner in which this will occur. In no case, though, does such a requirement exist for it to be passed. Thank you Nikos, Together with Ayman (Safadi), I would like first of all to express my gratitude for your warm hospitality and for your insight, and also for the possibility we had to discuss, also with President Anastasiadis, all the important problems of our area. All three of our countries are committed to Peace. We are not just pillars of Stability; we want to export Stability in the area. And we share the same values, respect for International Law, the resolutions of United Nations and through this angle, we discussed the Cyprus issue, the Palestinian conflict and all the other very important conflicts in our region, Syria above all. As you know, Greece and Cyprus are promoting many trilateral schemes of cooperation in the area. We in Greece have also tried to establish a regional system of stability and cooperation, the Rhodes Conference. But we especially value Jordans role in this endeavour, exactly for its role not just in promoting peace and security in the area, but also by accepting in a very humane way the burden of hundreds of thousands of refugees, both historically and during the present conflicts. Finally, its not just about stability and security. We have a common interest in promoting prosperity, and we have discussed how to be more productive and more concrete in this effort to promote the joint efforts of our economies. We have agreed to build tripartite committees in the areas of Energy, Tourism, Trade and Commerce, not to limit ourselves to Government-to-Government discussions, but to schedule also a private sector Forum because we fully recognize the fact that private sector is producing wealth. And above all we have decided to have a more concrete and a more structured follow-up. We have agreed and we have accepted the proposal of Nikos (Christodoulidis) to have a Permanent Secretariat here in Nicosia. So, I think that we have taken a progressive step forward and we have prepared the road of our leaders to meet in the first semester of next year and to take another step forward to this mutually beneficial for all three parties endeavour. Thank you. Joint Statement of the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Cyprus, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and the Hellenic Republic at the Trilateral Ministerial Meeting (Nicosia, 19 December 2018) The watchdog agency has been known as the CFPB since opening its doors in 2011, but its former acting director, Mick Mulvaney, a Trump appointee, believed it should instead be called the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection, or BCFP. The letters of the bureau's name were shuffled on the walls of its headquarters in Washington to reflect the change, and Mulvaney started using the new acronym BCFP in public. Even the bureau's seal and flag were changed. Southwest has seasonal flights between Chicago and Northwest Florida Beaches International Airport in Panama City Beach, Fla., but United appears to be the only airline with direct flights between Chicago and Grand Junction, Halifax, Eugene and Redmond, according to those cities airport websites. Knowing how to slice cheese can help you build a better cheese board, whether your budget is high or low. While I lived in Paris down the boulevard from Marie-Anne Cantin, the queen of cheese, I could only afford to window-shop, salivating at her displays. But even cheese presentation styles change. Do the old rules of including one cows milk, one goats milk and one sheeps milk cheese even apply anymore? I visited Lydia Burns, senior manager of procurement at Pastoral Artisan Cheese, Bread & Wine, for a lesson at the flagship shop in Lakeview to find out. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, December 19) The United States on Wednesday urged the Philippines to be cautious in the joint oil deal it is trying to pursue with China. "I would expect they (Filipinos and the Philippine government) would be cautious in how they would approach this initiative given the dynamics in play, including the fact that both Philippines and China are claimants in the South China Sea dispute," U.S. Ambassador to the Philippines Sung Kim told CNN Philippines' The Source. Kim said the proposed joint oil exploration should not affect U.S. freedom of navigation and overflight in the South China Sea. "Freedom of navigation and overflight are international rights for everybody. It does not belong to any set of countries. And this is why we continue to conduct freedom of navigation operations because it is a way to protect those rights and principles," he said. The Philippines and China inked last month an agreement which lays the groundwork for future talks on oil exploration in Manila's waters. Critics have raised concerns that this would make Manila let go of its territorial claims and that it is unconstitutional. READ: Hilbay: PH discarding Hague win with China oil deal However, Senior Associate Justice Antonio Carpio has said that the memorandum of understanding signed during Chinese President Xi Jinping's visit to Manila could eventually make China concede that the Philippines has sovereign rights over features in the West Philippine Sea, if it enters into a service contract for an oil exploration. The Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague ruled in 2016 that the Philippines has sovereign rights over sea features within its exclusive economic zone and voided China's sweeping claims over virtually the entire South China Sea. China did not participate in the proceedings and refuses to recognize the historic ruling. The U.S. is among the eight countries which has called for the arbitral ruling to be respected, according to the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative. Warmer ties not a concern Kim added that he is not concerned with the warming ties between the Philippines and China, as Washington can still maintain strong relations with Manila. "The fact that Philippines is interested in improving relations with China is also not surprising and is not by itself a cause for concern. I think all of the countries in the region want to have a productive, constructive relationship with China, especially on trade and investment," he said. The Philippines under President Rodrigo Duterte has pivoted towards China and has often turned to the Asian giant for assistance in infrastructure projects and military equipment. China and the U.S. have been engaged in a trade war which has seen the global superpowers impose tariffs on billions of dollars of goods imported from each other. With the U.S. under President Donald Trump focusing on keeping "America first," China has moved to fill in the gap the Western power has left, particularly in assistance to developing countries. But the U.S. is not completely backing down as it recently passed the Better Utilization of Investment Leading to Development (BUILD) Act, which its proponents tout as America's response to China's lending to developing countries to finance their infrastructure projects. The BUILD Act created a $60 billion United States International Development Finance Corporation which consolidates the Overseas Private Investment Corporation with other development-finance programs. The law could pour in billions of dollars for infrastructure projects in developing nations, including the Philippines. 12 Remove the final 1/2 tablespoon of butter from the refrigerator, and place it in the center of the cross. The butter will help set the shape of the cross and keep the top of the panettone from drying out. Carefully slide the panettone, still on its sheet pan, into the oven; bake, 5 minutes. Without opening the oven door, turn the temperature down to 350; bake, 25 minutes. At this point, take a peek into the oven to check for browning. If the top is well-browned, tent a piece of foil over the panettone. If a large portion of the center is still pale, leave it uncovered, and check again in 5 minutes. Bake the panettone another 25 minutes, checking once or twice more to see if it needs a foil tent. Baking time is 55 to 60 minutes total. When its done, the bread will have risen well above the panettone mold and the top will be a beautiful burnished mahogany. A cake tester inserted down into the center of the panettone should come out clean. Zemeckis has long been a technical wizard: In 2004, his mo-cap version of The Polar Express (which I find hard to watch, for a lot of reasons) planted a flag for revolutionary technology. Hes in love with what digital filmmaking can mean, and the tools it affords the clever filmmaker. But he can get lost in all that stuff, and in Welcome to Marwen, the toggling between Marwen and Hogancamps real world becomes a source of aggravation a long way from the triumph of the human spirit promised by Universals marketing campaign. Not long ago Zemeckis made The Walk (2015), another unsteady dramatization of events inspired by an excellent documentary. The last thing an idiosyncratic loner of an artist needs, especially from a first-rate director, is a movie desperate to make the mans story as comforting as possible. BAD AXE The city of Bad Axe is in the first stage of prohibiting marijuana-related businesses within city limits, council members decided this week. During Mondays meeting, council members were presented, and unanimously approved, an ordinance prohibiting marijuana establishments within the city of Bad Axe. Councilman Richard Peterson was absent from the meeting. The ordinance will now be sent to the ordinance committee, which will then review it, explained Bad Axe City Manager Dale VanDeVusse. If theyre going to recommend it to council, then well have a public hearing, he said. Its the first step in the process. This doesnt mean the ordinance is official, VanDeVusse said. Prior to the council approving to send the ordinance to a committee, officials heard from Colfax Township resident Shar Mohr, who asked the council to allow marijuana businesses in Bad Axe. The prohibition of marijuana is over, she read from a statement. Licensed marijuana facilities, such as dispensaries, provide communities with responsible, respectable, regulated and revenue-producing business. Mohr told the council that without the facilities, communities will lose out on a portion of the $520 million in tax revenue that is anticipated within the next five years because of marijuana legalization. Local businesses will also lose money as more people travel to communities that have dispensaries, she explained. They will go there to shop, eat, etc. Welcome to a marijuana-friendly Michigan, she said in her closing statement. Lets work together and try to make the most of it. A member of a business in the local industrial sector also addressed the council in regard to a potentially available, secured and regulated warehouse being used as a marijuana grow facility. In related news, the council also presented, and unanimously approved, an ordinance to amend Section 8-48 pertaining to certain controlled substances. Bad Axe Police Chief David Rothe told the council the citys ordinance states possession of marijuana is a misdemeanor, but by law, its now going to be a civil infraction, he said. We need to change our ordinance to match the state law, Rothe said. In other news, the council approved: The citys fire department contribution for 2019 in the amount of $54,354. The Blue Cross Blue Shield renewal package with a decrease in premiums of 3.29 percent, effective Feb. 1. The payment of bills in the amount of $97,114. Each year, the Shoreline Times looks forward to working on the Best of Shoreline special edition. Sure, some businesses win year after year, but it doesn't get old. It's like seeing a friendly face when we revisit these oh-so familiar people and places. We are reminded why they are so beloved by customers. And, there are plenty of brand new winners wildcards and an upset or two. Read about some of the boutiques and fashion retail shops that got top honors, and click through the slideshow to see the full list of finalists in the Shopping category. _________________ Possessions, Branford Walk into Possessions on Main Street in Branford. Behold, under the soft lighting, the selections of pieces distinguished by their simple elegance, their timeless style, their uptown and downtown, chic. You might well wonder if this upscale clothing store got lost on its way to Madison Avenue, Newbury Street or Rodeo Drive. It didn't. Owner and buyer Elaine Parisi has been trafficking in designer duds since September 1987. That was around the time of the stock market crash. Some 31 years later, the Branford institution that is Possessions is still going strong. Among the reasons: Parisi's seemingly impeccable taste cultivated by her mother Florence, a custom seamstress who also made clothes. Watching her cut patterns and fabrics, "I loved the precision," Parisi said, "and the latitude for creativity." Through high school, she worked afternoons at iconic fashion designer Ann Taylor. Years in wholesale in Los Angeles and New York further honed her fashion chops. "Whatever your size, whatever your age, we want to send you away happy with your purchase, with the experience you had, and with the person you see in the mirror," Parisi said. _________________ J. Horton, Madison Joan Horton has spent a career creating beautiful interiors and stylish looks. Before she moved to Madison, she was vice-president of special events for Revlon in addition to dressing celebrities in the finest jewels. She brings that same fashion forward eye to her namesake shop, J. Horton, winning both Best Artisan and Best Traditional Jewelry by our readers. Horton's chic, relaxed space invites you to linger and try on unique pieces such as the bold and colorful Angela Caputi from Florence, Italy. In her 80s, Caputi designs pieces that have been collected internationally for years and worn by style icons such as Iris Apfel. Horton's latest find is GoGo Jewelry. "Love GoGo. I found her on my trip this summer to Martha's Vineyard. She is from Martha's Vineyard and Cumberland Island. She had an exhibit a few years ago at the High Museum in Atlanta, and is known for making John and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy's wedding rings." More traditional, LULUdk. Is a line created by a designer from Greenwich, Connecticut. She creates empowering jewels made with enamel and are gold plated. Asked how she chooses the various lines of jewelry in the shop, Horton said, "I need to relate and feel a connection to the designers as well as the product. "I also try to vary different styles for different types of people as well as price range. I need to always love what I sell and be excited about sharing." _________________ SARAH's Cupboard, Branford For some of us, secondhand stores may conjure up images of musty rooms with haphazard stacks of worn clothes in random piles. According to the National Association of Resale and Thrift Shops, though, the resale and thrift shop industry is thriving and continues to be one of the fastest growing segments of retail. Take SARAH's Cupboard Thrift Shop, which readers voted Best Consignment Shop on the Shoreline. The Meadow Street mainstay, whose proceeds support activities and services for intellectually or otherwise disabled SARAH Foundation clients not covered by state and federal funds, is, for customers like Guilford's Martha Cavanaugh, "like a boutique." At least since 2005, with manager Joe Vidal and co-manager Mary Lou Markham, along with an army of part-time volunteers and SARAH Foundation clients, transforming the 2,400 square-foot space into eye-catching displays of housewares, accessories and dramatically discounted clothing and shoes. "This is a testament to all the hard work and time that our volunteers have put in," said Markham, noting Vidal's policy of offering freshly baked chocolate chip cookies everyday and the cookout on Saturdays. "This is a community store," Vidal said. "Without the community, we wouldn't be here, not for 42 years. I want people to feel as though it's their store." _________________ Everthine Bridal Boutique, Madison Just like no bride is alike, no bridal gown should be either. It is with this in mind that Everthine Bridal Boutique owner Chelsea Tyler McNamara only offers one of a kind, unique gowns at her downtown Madison boutique. "We work really hard to make sure that our designers and our specific dresses don't compete with each other, so they (brides) feel very individual," says McNamara. It is this personal attention to each and every bride that has earned the Madison boutique the Shoreline's Best Bridal Shop in the 2018 ShoreLine Times Reader's Poll "I would say the bride we cater to is the non-traditional bride," says McNamara. "She's not looking for your average wedding dress, something that she would see on every page of a magazine. Even the 1789 red house that is home to Everthine, with its low ceilings, small doorways and uneven floors, is unique. With designers including Rue de Seine of New Zealand; Laudae, Vancouver, Canada; Sarah Seven, Portland, Ore.; Jane Hill, Australia and the newest addition, Unbridaled by Dan Jones, of California, the boutique carries globally created collections. While some brides come into Everthine with very specific ideas of what they want, others rely on the years of experience McNamara and her stylists have honed since opening the boutique seven years ago. In addition to the Madison location, two years ago McNamara opened a second boutique in Burlington, Vt. "It's a pure adrenaline rush," McNamara said of seeing a bride find her dress. "It's one of the most gratifying feelings ever, really, for all of our stylists. You really just feel very satisfied knowing that you made someone's dream come true." _________________ DSW, various locations If Cinderella lived on the Shoreline, DSW would be her oasis. With thousands of shoes in every style, this footwear emporium provides the ultimate shoe shopping experience. This is why readers voted DSW Best Shoe Store on the Shoreline. Celebrating almost 50 years in business, this Columbus, Ohio-based chain boasts over 500 stores worldwide with 11 shops in Connecticut. Asked why they love to shop at DSW, customers at the Guilford location all agreed that the expansive inventory is the true draw. One shopper said, "I shop here for the huge selection, reasonable prices, and you can also try on shoes at your own pace. You don't have to chat with a person who wants to sell to you and wait for them to get a few pairs from the back. I guess I just like the DYI of DSW." WASHINGTON Scarlett Lewis, whose son Jesse was one of the 20 children killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting, won recognition of her campaign for social and emotional learning in the Trump administrations much-anticipated school safety report released Tuesday. I want to thank you for your courage, Lewis told the president at a meeting in the Roosevelt Room at the White House on Tuesday. You really listened. Lewis was among five family members at the meeting who lost loved ones either at Sandy Hook or earlier this year at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. JT Lewis, 18, a UConn freshman and older brother of Jesse, also attended. We are profoundly grateful to all of the families that are working with us to help prevent others from suffering the same terrible heartache and tragedy, Trump told the families, plus Parkland survivor Carson Abt. The group gathered to mark release of the 180-page report of Trumps Federal Commission on School Safety, headed by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. The report included a list of remedies for school violence from The Jesse Lewis Choose Love Movement to rolling back some Obama-era rules to banning so-called bumpstocks to arming teachers. Some of the recommendations were hailed, others panned. Connecticut lawmakers and most gun-violence-prevention advocates have questioned the wisdom of arming teachers as a solution to school attacks. Teachers dont want this, parents dont want this, said Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., in a statement after the meeting. Only Betsy DeVos, President Trump and the gun industry think the best way to stop a school shooting is to load schools up with guns. Civil rights guidelines that protect children of color from discrimination dont cause school shootings, said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., in a statement. Guns do. Forcing educators to carry firearms wont save lives. Keeping guns out of the hands of dangerous people will. The report incorporated virtually all of the recommendations put forward by Lewis and the project she started in the aftermath of the Newtown shooting: The Jesse Lewis Choose Love Movement. Lewis has been a tireless promoter nationwide of the movements no-cost enrichment program, which aims to help students become connected, resilient and empowered individuals. It essentially incorporates emotional mental health awareness into the school curriculum, Lewis said. She cited research that is incorporated into the report: SEL, as its known, can lead to improved outcomes for educational attainment, employment and earnings. Emotional training at an early age can also lead to a significant decrease in the likelihood of crime and delinquency, substance use, antisocial behavioral conditions, aggression and violent behavior, the report said. I thought it was a good meeting, Scarlett Lewis said afterward. It was a great first step. The next step is implementation, which is equally important. The report endorsed the concept of risk-prevention orders, a form of which Connecticut has had on the books since 1999. The orders enable family members and others to petition courts and obtain warrants that temporarily take firearms away from individuals when there is evidence they present a danger to themselves or others. Separately, Trump announced the Justice Department had promulgated a final rule banning so-called Bumpstocks devices that turn semi-automatic single-trigger-pull rifles into rapid-fire machine guns. The mass-killing in Las Vegas last year resulting in 58 deaths involved a shooter using a bumpstock device. Tuesdays report also contained several controversial items, including a proposed rollback of President Obamas school disciplinary guidelines based on disparate impact seemingly neutral rules that impact minorities disproportionately more than whites. Where well-meaning but flawed policies endanger student safety, they must be changed, the report said. Its most controversial recommendation, however, was arming teachers in schools provided they have training or are willing to undergo it. This is critical to the hardening of our schools against attacks, Trump said at the meeting. They truly love their students. Scarlett Lewis said her focus has been on emotional training, not the gun issue. But, she added, it should be up to individual teachers and what theyre comfortable with. And, she added, I think its important to provide a safe haven for students. dan@hearstdc.com But then Cameron Mackintosh joined with Disney Theatricals to turn Mary Poppins into a stage musical in 2009. Travers had told Mackintosh (who told the Tribune) that she wanted the show to be much darker and less chirpy than the movie. Mackintosh hired the brilliant British writer Julian Fellowes (now of Downton Abbey fame) who wrote a book to the musical wherein Mary Poppins rehabilitated the Banks family in progressive fashion, teaching Mr. Banks to pay more attention to his family and spent a lot less time in the office. The musical was every bit as moralistic and progressive as Mary Poppins Returns, but the nanny pointed her umbrella at an individual family and, most significantly, its patriarchal leader. Be a better husband and father, she kept saying. And thats exactly what Fellowes has continued to write in Downton Abbey, where his pen is always pointed at Hugh Bonnevilles Lord of the Manor. Chungs play follows two North Korean sisters, Minhee (Helen Joo Lee) and Junhee (Jin Park) as they attempt to flee their country. The latter makes it across the border and to a new life in New York, while Minhee falls in a well and enters a world a bit like the upside down in the Netflix series Stranger Things. As Minhee negotiates the menacing absurdity and horrific memories of life under the North Korean regime, Junhee tries to find her place in a country overflowing with consumer choices and celebrity culture. A narrative monkey wrench Chung throws into the works makes us question what we think is happening. But whats clear in this fever-dream world is the fierce love the sisters have for each other. WASHINGTON A commission established by President Donald Trump in the aftermath of the February school shooting in Parkland, Fla., issued its final recommendations to improve school safety Tuesday, including arming teachers as one of 93 best practices and policy recommendations. The controversial proposal that Trump himself suggested months ago drew criticism from Connecticut Senators Chris Murphy and Richard Blumenthal, who complained that the 177-page report offered little in the way of serious recommendations to protect children from gun violence. Trump established the Federal Commission on School Safety after the February 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School to study and recommend ways to make schools more secure. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who headed the commission, said there is no single solution to making schools safe, so the report provides a wide-ranging menu of best practices and resources that all state, community, and school leaders should consider while developing school safety plans and procedures that will work for their students and teachers. Among the key proposals in the report, DeVos said: It encourages better access to mental health services so people can receive the treatment they need. Endorses states adoption of extreme risk protection orders, which temporarily restrict access to firearms by individuals found to be a danger to themselves or others. Calls on journalists to be more responsible in their coverage of school shootings by focusing on the facts and victims without mentioning the names or publishing photographs of the perpetrators. Urges schools, districts, and states to seriously consider the option of partnering with local law enforcement in the training and arming of school personnel, as well as consider ways to encourage more veterans and retired law enforcement officers to pursue careers in education. Murphy was particularly enraged that the report includes a recommendation to arm teachers in response to the school shooting in Parkland. Teachers dont want this. Parents dont want this. Only Betsy DeVos, President Trump, and the gun industry think the best way to stop a school shooting is to load schools up with guns. Arming teachers and rolling back school discipline reforms wont make our kids any safer. Its nonsensical and dangerous, Murphy said. Rather than use taxpayer funds to purchase weapons for teachers, Murphy said schools should be given resources to support teachers and provide meaningful help to struggling students. He also said that federal gun laws need to be tightened to ensure that a weapon of war cannot be carried into a school. Murphy supports a prohibition on assault-style weapons, stricter limits on how many bullets can be loaded in a magazine or clip, and stricter background checks for gun purchases. Blumenthal called the report a low grade scam that offers no meaningful gun violence reform measures but instead recommends arming school personnel and rescinding Obama-era civil rights guidance as ways to improve school safety. While student survivors of gun violence were marching in the streets to call for change, Secretary DeVos and the Trump Administration closed their ears and produced a report that focuses on anything but meaningful reform, he said. Civil rights guidelines that protect children of color from discrimination dont cause school shootings. Guns do. Forcing educators to carry firearms wont save lives. Keeping guns out of the hands of dangerous people will. The report did call for expanding extreme risk protection orders such as the red flag law in Connecticut. Blumenthal has proposed legislation with Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., for a federal law that has yet to pass Congress. Blumenthal said that with the Trump administration supporting the proposal, there should be no impediment to getting a law on the federal books. Congresswoman Elizabeth Esty, D-5th District, added that the report caters to the National Rifle Association and its opposition to any restrictions on guns. The long-awaited Trump Administration School Safety Commission Report does the bidding of the NRA and scapegoats civil rights protections as a cause of mass shootings, she said on Twitter. Representative Rosa DeLauro, D-3rd District, said the report failed to deliver on President Trumps pledge to survivors of the Parkland shooting that he would take action to reduce gun violence in schools. Instead, his commission chaired by Secretary DeVos sidesteps the issue of guns, fails to advance real solutions to keep our students safe, blames the media, and serves as a Trojan horse for rollbacks that would hurt students, she said. Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar said that improving mental health is an urgent challenge and a priority for the Trump administration. We know that rates of mental illness continue to be of great concern, and the Commissions findings show an urgent need to identify youth at risk for mental illness and connect them with needed treatment and services. Making these connections to treatment within schools can be an important step toward improved mental health for our children and increased safety in our schools, he said. The Pentagon has delayed release of the 2019 military pay charts until Congress and the White House resolve a standoff on the budgets for several federal agencies and border wall funding that threatens a partial government shutdown at midnight Friday. The 2.6 percent pay raise for military personnel of all ranks is still guaranteed, but the release of the military pay charts, normally distributed in mid-December by the Defense Finance and Accounting Agency (DFAS), has been put on hold because of a wrinkle in the law that could possibly affect four-star ranks. Top paygrades in the military are capped by law to align with those of the highest federal government civilian pay rate. However, the top civilian pay rates can't be determined until the budgets for a number of departments and agencies are approved, said a U.S. official who has knowledge of the issue but spoke on the condition of anonymity with Military.com on Tuesday. Once the budgets are approved, DFAS will need to gauge whether the 2.6 percent pay raise would put the four-star ranks above the highest civilian pay rate. If that ends up the case, "they've got to be lowered to the cap amount," the official said. Only after these comparisons occur can DFAS release fully accurate military pay charts for 2019, the official said, adding that other paygrades would not be affected by the stipulation. DFAS' pay chart release issues stem from Congress' failure to pass spending bills for the Departments of Homeland Security, State, Commerce, Justice, Interior, Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and several smaller agencies. As part of any deal to fund those departments, President Donald Trump has demanded $5 billion for construction of the southern border wall. House and Senate Democrats have offered $1.6 billion for border security measures that would not include wall construction. The Associated Press reported Tuesday that Senate Republican and Democratic leaders have restarted negotiations after the White House signaled that Trump did not want a shutdown. Unless an agreement is reached by midnight Friday, the unfunded departments will face a shutdown that would affect about 800,000 federal workers. Those whose jobs are considered to affect national security would be asked to work without pay, while others would be furloughed. In previous shutdowns, all federal workers have been reimbursed when the shutdown ended. The Defense Department and the Department of Veterans Affairs would not be affected by the threatened shutdown. Both departments are fully funded through this fiscal year. It was not immediately clear what would happen to the more than 40,000 active-duty Coast Guard personnel, who are part of the Department of Homeland Security and would be affected by a shutdown. Homeland Security and the Coast Guard referred questions on whether service members would get paid to the White House Office of Management and Budget, which did not immediately respond. In previous shutdowns, Coast Guard personnel were ordered to work without pay. -- Executive Editor Amy Bushatz contributed to this story. -- Richard Sisk can be reached at Richard.Sisk@Military.com. The Navy established Fleet Logistics Multimission Squadron 30 (VRM-30) on Dec. 14, the first squadron that will receive the CMV-22B aircraft, expected to arrive at the unit in 2020. In a ceremony at Naval Base Coronado, California, Cmdr. Trevor Hermann, the squadron commander, introduced the new logo for the VRM-30 Titans, established as part of the Navy's transition from the C-2A Greyhound to the CMV-22B for ship-board logistics support. "This platform is our future and, when you look at the nature of the future fight, we need that versatility, that flexibility that's going to be provided in every subsequent squadron that transitions," said Vice Adm. DeWolfe Miller, commander of Naval Air Forces, according to a Navy release. The Navy version of the V-22 Osprey, the CMV-22B, will provide delivery capability and logistics support for aircraft carriers. The service announced in October that it has accelerated the effort to replace the C-2A, which has served as its primary carrier onboard delivery, or COD, aircraft for more than 40 years. According to the release, while the Navy won't receive the aircraft for another couple years, its pilots and maintenance crews will train with the Marine Corps, which has fielded the MV-22 Osprey for more than a decade. The final C-2A squadron is expected to decommission in 2024. The Navy plans to procure 44 CMV-22Bs. -- Patricia Kime can be reached at patriciankime@gmail.com. Follow her on Twitter @patriciakime. Nearly 9,000 Marines Didn't Get Vaccinated By the Deadline. Many Risk Getting Kicked Out of the Corps. The Marine Corps reported that 5% of the force had not gotten even one shot before the deadline passed. The "fog and friction" of an active-shooter drill, mixed with a mass casualty response exercise nearby at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, led a security forces airman to erroneously fire his M4 carbine through a locked hospital door last summer, according to an Air Force investigation. There were communication lapses throughout both drills, especially when a real-world medical incident caused members involved in the casualty drill to report to the base hospital's emergency room, according to a command-directed investigation released Wednesday. "There should have been a knowledge of the events that were taking place," said Col. Thomas P. Sherman, 88th Air Base Wing and base commander, in a follow-up phone call with reporters Wednesday. The active shooter exercise was planned for noon Aug. 2 and executed by the 88th Air Base Wing Inspector General (88 ABW/IG), which also produced a master scenario events list, officials said. The drill was conducted at the base's Kittyhawk Chapel, located about a mile from the hospital, with role players simulating casualties. Related content: According to the report, the 88th IG was aware of the nearby mass casualty exercise, held by the 88th Medical Group (88 MDG) at the WPAFB Medical Center to test their mass casualty response procedures. But it was not incorporated into master scenario events list for the day. As the exercises progressed, things began to go wrong when a jogger -- an 88th MDG employee -- called another 88th MDG member "who was screaming and crying due to an injury received while running" on base, the report said. "This was the beginning of bleedover from exercise to real-world events," as the jogger was located and brought to the hospital's ER, the report said. "Simulated casualties for the 88 MDG exercise were reporting at the same time as the real-world injured jogger and at the same time first responders were responding to the active shooter exercise at the chapel," officials said. Those acting as patients of the mass casualty exercise -- wearing painted blood and other mock injuries -- converged with the screaming jogger in the emergency room, Sherman said. It "was a convergence of multiple events that were taking place at the exact same time," he added during the phone call, calling the events "poorly planned." "There became a belief, and a sincere belief, that this was an actual active-shooter event," Sherman said of the two simultaneous exercises, plus the injured jogger. "That began the cascading effect of 9-11 calls." Because of the additional confusion and crossover of personnel, someone at the medical facility called in a real-world shooter incident. The hospital staff also issued a "code silver" over the intercom, a code informing hospital personnel that an active shooter situation is in progress and initiating a facility lockdown, investigators said. "After hearing the 'code silver,' an 88 MDG employee in the hospital Red Clinic called 9-11 via cell phone, which sends the call off-base to the 9-11 Call Center," the report said. "This led to a 'code 99,' or officer in distress call, among civilian law enforcement agencies. The 'code 99' resulted in notification and activation of mutual aid responders from the Dayton area, the state of Ohio, and at the national level (FBI, ATF)." Security forces on base also responded to the hospital where the real-world shooter incident was reported. Members of the 88th Security Forces Squadron (88 SFS) came upon a locked door in the hospital center. An SFS airman fired "rounds from an M4 through the window of the door, causing additional 9-11 calls to be made from the hospital reporting a real-world active shooter," the report said. "An M4 was used to breach a locked door that could not be opened with a key card," the investigation said. In the follow-up interview with reporters, officials would not comment on whether anyone had been trying to barricade themselves behind the door the airman fired at. Sherman said that finding is part of a separate investigation headed by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, and that those findings were referred to the member's commander to take appropriate action. Sherman said five rounds were fired because five shell casings were found, disputing previous reports that three rounds had been fired. The airman successfully breached the door -- the entrance to the Red Clinic -- after firing his M4, Sherman confirmed. "The hospital was in operation," he said, without confirming whether there were people directly behind the Red Clinic door. The investigation also found lapses in communication protocols. "Mutual aid responders had challenges communicating with the incident commander (IC)" heading the active-shooter drill, the investigation stated. In addition to incompatible radio connections between the Air Force and local law enforcement systems, the IC "was not immediately and readily identifiable," the report said. "This added to the confusion for mutual aid responders who did try to check in" with officials when they arrived on base. Once the airman fired his M4, the IC attempted to explain the situation and otherwise stop the security forces team. But because the IC wasn't properly identified, "approximately 50 area mutual responders bypassed the IC, breached the locked front door of the hospital and entered with weapons drawn," officials said. The active-shooter drill occurring at the Kittyhawk Chapel was known base-wide, Sherman said. But the unit-level mass casualty drill at the hospital center was not. Effective base-wide communication must happen before simultaneous events like this occur, especially an active-shooter drill, Sherman said, agreeing with the report's recommendations. "While realism is important in training exercises, all personnel must always be fully aware of exercise vs. real-world situations," investigators said in their final recommendation. "Coordinating with all concerned organizations and then sticking with the agreed-upon plan is essential to keeping everyone fully aware." That also goes for first responders working the scene, the report said. "There needs to be a better process for security forces to identify themselves to personnel taking shelter," it said. "Air Force personnel are trained to 'Run, Hide, Fight' while in shelter. If personnel follow this training, it is imperative they know how to identify friendly forces and when the 'all clear' is given." -- Oriana Pawlyk can be reached at oriana.pawlyk@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @Oriana0214. White House and Pentagon officials sent out mixed signals Wednesday on the future of U.S. military forces in Syria. President Donald Trump sent out a tweet at 6:29 a.m. Eastern Time saying, "We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency." The Wall Street Journal then published a story that quoted a U.S. official as saying the Pentagon has an order to "move troops out of Syria as quickly as possible." The Pentagon, however, sent out a statement at 9:29 a.m. that indicated a withdrawal of the approximately 2,000 U.S. troops in Syria may not be imminent. "At this time, we continue to work by, with and through our partners in the region," Army Col. Rob Manning said in a statement, using the same language the Pentagon has used throughout the mission to support Syrian Democratic Forces fighting Islamic State forces in the war-torn country. Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan was asked by reporters outside the Pentagon to comment on the possibility of U.S. troops withdrawing from Syria. "I'm not going to make any comments," he replied, according to a pool report from Stars and Stripes. Vice President Mike Pence also was asked the same question when he arrived at the Pentagon on Wednesday but also gave no response, according to the pool report. Then at 12:03 p.m. Eastern, Dana White, the chief Defense Department spokesperson, sent out a stronger message. "The Coalition has liberated the ISIS-held territory, but the campaign against ISIS is not over," White wrote. "We have started the process of returning U.S. troops home from Syria as we transition to the next phase of the campaign. "For force protection and operational security reasons, we will not provide further details. We will continue working with our partners and allies to defeat ISIS wherever it operates," she added. U.S. officials previously have telegraphed mixed messages on Syria. In late September, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said the U.S. would remain in Syria until ISIS is defeated and unable to re-emerge once American forces leave. But White House National Security Adviser John Bolton used a stronger tone Sept. 25 when speaking about the U.S. presence in Syria to reporters in New York while appearing at the United Nations General Assembly sessions. Bolton said U.S. troops are not leaving Syria while Iranian troops and Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia remain in the country supporting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. -- Military.com's Richard Sisk contributed to this report. -- Matthew Cox can be reached at matthew.cox@military.com. U.S. Army modernization officials defended the rapid prototyping strategy for the service's Mobile Protected Firepower (MPF) system, even though infantry units won't receive the new light tank until 2025. The Army announced Monday that it awarded contracts to General Dynamics Land Systems Inc. and BAE Systems, worth up to $376 million each, to produce prototypes of the MPF. The two companies will each build 12 prototypes so the Army can begin testing them in early 2020. The goal is to down-select to a winner by fiscal 2022. "We are excited about this opportunity," Maj. Gen. Brian Cummings, head of Program Executive Office Ground Combat Systems, told reporters at the Pentagon. "We have an aggressive schedule to take a look at these two companies as they build the prototypes." GDLS and BAE beat out SAIC and its partner, ST Engineering Land Systems Ltd., but Army officials would not comment on the reason the winners were chosen. Service officials lauded the contract awards as a major step forward in streamlining Army acquisition and said they plan to use the rapid prototyping approach as a model for future programs. But even if the Army in 2022 selects one of the companies to build production MPF systems, it likely will take another three years before the service will field the first of 504 of these lightweight tanks to infantry brigade combat teams. Army officials said it would take longer to field the MPF if they hadn't used what's known as "Middle Tier Acquisition Rapid Prototyping (Section 804)" contracts, an acquisition tool designed to streamline testing and development of prototypes. The process is quicker than other acquisition procedures in that the MPF program will not use time-consuming preliminary and critical design reviews to ensure that platforms meet requirements, Army officials explained. "For a new system, [going through that process] could add as much as a year-and-a-half to two years onto the whole cycle," said David Dopp, Mobile Protected Firepower program manager, adding that the Army is pleased it will take just 14 months for GDLS and BAE to produce the 12 prototypes each. "Fourteen months is very challenging. I don't think you can find another program that ever got prototypes in 14 months," he said. "When you build these vehicles and you put them together, [sometimes] they don't work, or if they do work, we take them out and test them, and there are things that happen, and we need that time to prove it out." Brig. Gen. Ross Coffman, director of the Next Generation Combat Vehicle Cross Functional Team, said the Army will use the 14 months to get a headstart on figuring out how infantry units will utilize the MPF to destroy enemy bunkers and other hardened battlefield positions. "Right now, we are doing experiments and tactical training at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, with vehicles that have a similar profile of the Mobile Protective Firepower to develop tactics, techniques and procedures for the light forces to work with mechanized vehicles in the close fight," he said. The MPF concept emerged several years ago when maneuver leaders started calling for a lightweight, armored platform for light infantry forces equipped with a cannon powerful enough to destroy hardened targets. Since then, the MPF program has been placed into the Next Generation Combat Vehicle, or NGCV, portfolio, the second of the Army's six modernization priorities that fall under the responsibility of the new Army Futures Command. Coffman said he was pleased with the MPF's progress, calling it the "first NGCV major decision that's come out, as far as procurement actions." "If anything needs to be changed, we are not afraid to do it," he said. "We want what is best for our soldiers as fast as we can get it." -- Matthew Cox can be reached at matthew.cox@military.com. In theory, little connects my life to that of Kieslings protagonist, Daphne a mother of an 18-month-old in the midst of an emotional crisis over a Turkish-born husband having been exiled from the United States by a visa snafu and a job she can no longer bear but Kieslings rendering of the moment-to-moment existence of Daphne as a caregiver to a young child is almost hypnotic in its strength. I still dont understand how this book worked its spell on me. The U.S. Army is stepping up efforts to develop soldier-worn exoskeletons designed to relieve some of the burdensome weight that combat troops carry into battle. In mid-December, Army researchers and soldier equipment officials held a three-day exoskeleton event at Fort Drum, New York, known as a User Touch Point event, that allowed technology vendors, requirement developers and engineers to gain soldier insights on current exoskeleton technology, such as Lockheed Martin's ONYX system. The event came on the heels of a $6.9 million Army contract to Lockheed Martin to improve OYNX, a powered, lower-body exoskeleton designed to increase a soldier's strength and endurance. OYNX uses electro-mechanical knee actuators, special sensors and an artificial intelligence computer to become familiar with the user's movements and apply the right torque at the right time to assist with walking up steep inclines and lifting or dragging heavy loads, according to a Nov. 29 Lockheed press release announcing the contract award. The three-day User Touch Point event helped vendors that are developing future technology understand, from a soldiers perspective, how exoskeletons can be used in a tactical environment, James Mingo, a senior military analyst at Training and Doctrine Command, said in an Army press release. The event provided an opportunity to gather soldier feedback to advance the Army's exoskeleton program, said Raul Esteras-Palos, who works in the Robotics Requirements Division of the Capabilities Development and Integration Directorate at Fort Benning, Georgia. "It provided [hands-on] experience to the movement and maneuver soldiers of some of the top seven combat [military occupational specialties]," Esteras-Palos said. The service's Research, Development and Engineering Command is working on future soldier touch point events with the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions, said David Audet, chief of Mission Equipment and Systems at the RDECOM Soldier Center. "This was a unique opportunity for developers and engineers," he said. "We are indebted to the troops for their selfless service and owe them the opportunity to listen to their concerns and take action." The Army also is trying to ensure that these hard exoskeletons will be designed to comfortably fit soldiers wearing them in combat, according to a recent service request for information. Special Operations Command launched an ambitious endeavor in 2014 to develop the Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit, or TALOS, an Iron Man ensemble that would provide operators with full-body ballistics protection and increased physical performance. Four years later, the program has produced several prototypes but still faces many challenges. -- Matthew Cox can be reached at matthew.cox@military.com. The Rangers have reached a minor-league deal with right-hander Jeanmar Gomez, according to Evan Grant of the Dallas Morning News. The signing includes an invitation to MLB spring camp. Also joining the Texas organization on minors deals are a trio of other hurlers. Ariel Hernandez, Phillips Valdez, and Miguel Del Pozo are all slated to join Gomez on the big league side in Surprise, Arizona. Gomez, 30, is still looking to fully reestablish himself after three tough seasons. He averaged 9.7 K/9 in 25 innings last year with the White Sox, but struggled to a 4.68 ERA in that span. He has now coughed up 5.28 earned per nine since the start of the 2016 season. Unsurprisingly, the Rangers seem to be bringing in quite a few arms for spring trials. The club has mostly filled out its rotation, at least barring ensuing trades, but has quite a lot of bullpen positions up for grabs. Of the other hurlers, only Hernandez has reached the big leagues. The high-powered, control-challenged pitcher struggled in a brief 2017 stint with the Reds. He bounced around last year, ultimately throwing 55 1/3 innings of 2.93 ERA ball in the upper minors but recording 8.8 K/9 against 6.5 BB/9 in the proceess. Fire departments, police stations and hospitals in Michigan could install a baby box where parents could anonymously surrender their newborns with no legal repercussions under legislation that passed the state Senate Tuesday evening. The four bills in the package - House Bills 5750, 5751, 5953 and 5954 - would collectively allow emergency service providers to set up baby boxes at hospitals or police or fire stations. Senate amendments to House Bill 5751 stipulate the provider must be a hospital or have 24-hour staffing to set up a box, referred to as a newborn safety device in the bills, and that the boxs manufacturer is liable for any injury or death that might result from a malfunction of the device. Senators passed the main bill in the package, 5750, with a 30-8 vote. 5751 and 5953 passed 32-6, and 5954 passed 31-7. State law currently allows for newborns to be left with in person with emergency service providers without legal repercussion, except in situations of suspected child abuse or neglect. The legislation would give an anonymous option for parents to drop off newborns in a locked device that would trigger a 911 call within 30 seconds of a baby being placed in it. A parent surrendering a child would have the option to include information about the newborns family and medical history to ultimately share with the child or prospective adoptive parent. Newborns left in the devices would come under court supervision after being taken in by first responders. To become law, the amended bill package needs to be approved by the House and get a signature from Gov. Rick Snyder. Other states, including Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania, have adopted the idea of baby boxes as a last-resort option for parents to prevent them from unsafely abandoning their babies. The box concept has been championed by the group Safe Haven Baby Boxes, a nonprofit organization that has installed four boxes in Indiana and one in Ohio, according to the groups website. TRAVERSE CITY, MI - A crew from U.S. Coast Guard Air Station Traverse City responded to their first ice rescue of the winter on Lake Michigan this week, heading out across the ice to help 14 stranded fishermen near Green Bay, Wisc. Local authorities in Wisconsins Brown County ended up using an air boat to rescue the anglers off Edgewater Beach Road, where a 50-foot crack in the ice near shore ended up opening to a half mile wide, station WBAY reported. No injuries were reported. Local first responders were able to rescue all the fishermen and bring them safely back to shore, the Coast Guard said. Our crew arrived on scene to ensure that no one else was in a similar predicament and to provide information about the current ice conditions in the area. This is a great reminder that as ice begins to fill in the bays and lakes, always remember to take the right safety precautions before venturing onto the ice. Since 2017, Coast Guard crews from Traverse City have been flying MH-60T Jayhawk helicopters. These all-weather choppers are similar to the Navy MH-60S Seahawk and the Army H-60 Blackhawk. The Jayhawks are billed as modern workhorse helicopters. They can fly twice as long as the older models before needing to refuel - a great capability to have when search-and-rescue efforts over the Great Lakes can last for hours, or even days. These helicopters are bigger than the stations old Dolphin choppers. The Coast Guard says the Jayhawks can evacuate up to 15 people at a time if needed. As we get deeper into winter, the Coast Guard asks that people venturing onto or near ice take these precautions: - Check the Weather and Ice Thickness - Wear Bright Colors, Insulated Clothing - Bring a Radio or Personal Locator Beacon - Always File a Float Plan, even for the ice Tuesday, Dec. 18 was an eventful day at the Selfridge Air National Guard Base in suburban Detroit as an airman was charged with threatening co-workers at the base and then a driver unintentionally crashed into its security barrier. The Associated Press reports that the driver crashed into the security barrier at the base after suffering a medical emergency. Authorities at Michigans 127th wing told the news organization that the driver bypassed security at the entrance and struck a barrier. A man and a woman were reportedly taken to a nearby medical facility for evaluation. The accident has been cleared and the Selfridge Main Gate is open for all traffic. 127th Wing (@127Wing) December 18, 2018 This all happened less than 24 hours after authorities at the base said an airman assigned to the 127th wing was arrested by Michigan State Police after threatening to shoot co-workers. The base reports in a Tuesday news release that Master Sgt. Roque E. Diegel was the airman arrested, and that he had been working at the suburban Detroit U.S. Military base since 2002. Officials at the base are cooperating with state and local law enforcement agencies as they investigate, the 127th wing reports in the release. A.P. reports that Diegel, who most recently worked as an Air Terminal Craftsman, is charged with making a false report or threat of terrorism. Michigan State Police reportedly found more than 70 firearms at the mans home, and that he called the allegations baffling during a Tuesday court appearance. He also said during the court appearance that he was three weeks from retirement. A.P. reports that the judge set Diegels bong for $250,000. HIALEAH, FL -- A 55-year-old man faces burglary and misdemeanor theft charges after he allegedly stole a wreath from a neighbor and hung it outside his door, according to the Associated Press. Police say Angel Hugo Soles Romaguera was allegedly captured on a Ring doorbell system taking the wreath from the door of a home. Police were notified of the theft and investigators eventually spotted the wreath hanging from Romagueras door about four miles away from the victims house. Romaguera turned himself into police Tuesday after learning police were looking for him. He is being held on a $10,500 bond. LANSING, MI The Michigan House of Representatives on Tuesday approved a bill to stop state agencies from requiring nonprofits disclose their donors. The bill met with strong opposition from Democrats, who said it decreased transparency. This bill is literally the opposite of the direction that we need to be going, said Rep. Jon Hoadley, D-Kalamazoo, who noted it would also have a negative impact on a local fund in his district. Lame duck bill would shield identity of Foundation for Excellence donors Senate Bill 1176 would prohibit a public agency from requiring disclosures from 501(c) nonprofits, which some lawmakers use for things like charitable giving and community events. Nonprofits are not currently required to disclose donors, but the bill would prevent state agencies like the Attorney General or Secretary of State's office from requiring that in the future. It would also prevent public agencies from releasing any information about a nonprofit without permission from the organization's members and donors. Michigan Senate votes to shield nonprofits from disclosure The House passed the bill 58-51. Republican Reps. Gary Howell, R-North Branch; Martin Howrylak, R-Troy; David Maturen, R-Vicksburg; Dave Pagel, R-Oronoko Township and Jeff Yaroch, R-Richmond Twp., joined Democrats in voting against it. Rep. Abdullah Hammoud, D-Dearborn; Rep. David LaGrand, D-Grand Rapids; Rep. Erika Geiss, D-Taylor; and Rep. Jeremy Moss, D-Southfield all spoke against the bill. No representatives spoke in favor of the bill on the House floor. In the House Michigan Competitiveness Committee Tuesday morning, sponsor Sen. Mike Shirkey, R-Clark Lake, said the bill codified the current practice of not demanding nonprofits disclose their donors. This is a very simple piece of legislation that protects the entire breadth of nonprofits, Shirkey said. The issue is close to home for some lawmakers, who use political nonprofits, typically organized as 501(c)4 organizations, for things such as charitable giving and community events. And 501(c)4 groups also spend on advertising in districts and races across Michigan. Secretive funds allow Michigan lawmakers to accept corporate cash A representative from the Mackinac Center for Public Policy testified in support of the bill, saying such disclosures could result in threats to supporters of a nonprofit organization. Craig Mauger, executive director of the Michigan Campaign Finance Network, testified against the bill. He said if lawmakers were truly trying to stop that from happening, they could limit the laws scope to 501(c)3 groups, the typical designation for churches and local charities, but leave open the option of requiring disclosures from 501(c)4 groups, like those that run dark money advertisements in political races. As passed, the bill prevents agencies from requiring disclosure from any nonprofit, including those that are politically-oriented. The bill volleyed back to the Senate, which needs to complete a procedural step to send it to Gov. Rick Snyder for signature. I see that the same people that did this to my family, the same people that secretly taped us, and twisted the facts and perverted the law, that ended up my husband in jail these same people are trying to do the same thing they did to my husband just on a much larger scale, they were emboldened, they took down a governor, and now theyve got their sights much higher. A new state law and the U.S. Farm Bill sitting on President Donald Trump's desk could bring a gold rush on hemp farming in Michigan. "The sky's the limit at the moment," said John Kran, national legislative counsel for the Michigan Farm Bureau. "There's a lot more questions than answers right now." Industrial hemp farming in Michigan is legal as a result of the Michigan Regulation and Taxation of Marihuana Act, which voters passed in November as Proposal 1 to legalize marijuana. The $867 billion Farm Bill passed by Congress also removes hemp for the list of federally controlled substances. The bill awaits Trumps signature. Hemp has been labeled as a controlled substance -- rendering it federally illegal -- since 1970. Changing that designation allows farmers across the country to apply for the same kinds of insurance and financing assistance that they use to cover more traditional crops. "It's a positive thing that will empower small farms and will give them an alternative crop between corn and soybeans," said Joe Brown, a hemp farmer in Saranac. Brown has been farming hemp in Michigan under a research grant made possible by a 2014 program. He uses it to make a topical CBD and hemp wellness products for his company, Brown Farmacy. CBD -- cannabidiol -- is a component in marijuana and hemp that does not produce the psychoactive effects of THC but can relieve stress, anxiety and pain. The market for CBD is fast-growing, and could reach more than $20 billion by 2022, according to the research firm Brightfield Group. It's one of the reasons interest is high in Michigan in hemp farming. Brown said he's personally consulting with eight people who want to learn how to grow hemp. Kran said industrial hemp in Michigan could be similar to the hops boom the state saw several years ago -- a crop that drew interest from first-time farmers. Once the Farm Bill is signed, the U.S. Department of Agriculture in charge of regulating the industrial hemp program. There's plenty to figure out. A spokeswoman for the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development said the agency doesn't have much information on how the industrial hemp program would work in the state. "There is a lot of interest to grow hemp but there is not processing capacity in the state for hemp," said Jennifer Holton, spokeswoman for MDARD. "That's where the rubber meets the road." Brown said there will be an initial issue for prospective hemp farmers as they look to find a source for their seeds. "Just like corn or soybeans, you have to have permission to grow hemp," Brown said. "You'll have to have certified seeds. there will be a hard time for farmers to find clones or seed this year." Hemp is related to marijuana, but is genetically different and contains 0.3 percent THC or less. From plastics to toilet paper, industrial hemp can be used to manufacture a variety of products -- and it also has therapeutic benefits. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, advocated for the hemp provision in the Farm Bill as a way to help Kentucky farmers. Brown also farms hemp in Kentucky, where the crop has proven to be lucrative. "Last year in Kentucky, the price was $5,000 per acre for hemp," Brown said. "Corn was getting $2,100 (per acre) and soy beans was getting $800 (per acre)." Prices like that wont last long should the federal Farm Bill be signed, Brown said. It will bring the price down for products that are currently being produced, and will increase the amount of products that are being produced overall, Brown said. -- Amy Biolchini is the marijuana beat reporter for MLive. Contact her with questions, tips or comments at abiolch1@mlive.com. Read more from MLive about recreational marijuana. GRAND RAPIDS, MI -- Wolverine World Wide has filed a lawsuit in federal court alleging that manufacturing giant 3M concealed information about toxic PFAS chemicals the shoemaker used at its former Rockford tannery and then dumped into Kent County groundwater. Wolverine filed against 3M, its co-defendant in numerous cases involving PFAS contamination in Michigan, on Wednesday, Dec. 19, in Grand Rapids federal district court. In a news release, Wolverine CEO Blake Krueger alleged that 3M is shirking responsibility for PFAS contamination. The company invented PFAS chemistry, which it supplied to Wolverine in the form of Scotchgard, a fabric protector that Wolverine applied to shoe leather in Rockford. Wolverine dumped waste from that manufacturing process into unlined landfills and gravel pits in the Rockford and Belmont area. The chemicals leached through the landfill over time and contaminated local drinking water supplies. 3M made it, 3M sold it at a profit to thousands of companies and millions of consumers for decades, and 3M can no longer run from its responsibilities to Wolverine, the community, and the state of Michigan for the impacts of Scotchgard, said Krueger. Wolverine filed the third-party complaint as part of an existing federal case brought against the company by the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality in January. Wolverine also filed a notice Wednesday urging the state to add 3M as a defendant in the case. The filing asks Judge Janet Neff to put 3M on the hook for liability and damages related to the local contamination, participate in local cleanup work and payment and pay its equitable percentage of the past response costs that Wolverine has incurred... plus interest. The suit follows what local officials termed an about-face in negotiations between Wolverine, the state and the townships of Plainfield and Algoma related to extending water mains to neighborhoods where the groundwater is poisoned by PFAS from tannery waste dumping. Plainfield Township announced on Dec. 11 that negotiations ended because Wolverine wont voluntarily pay to extend municipal water mains unless 3M Corp. contributes to the cost. Township attorney Doug Van Essen called the 3M lawsuit a stall tactic" and said that under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, Wolverine, not 3M, is the responsible party for local contamination. Wolverine Worldwide may try to run but it cannot hide from its responsibilities to the residents of Plainfield and Algoma townships whose wells are contaminated. Suing 3M is a stall tactic the shoemaker is using to try and dodge responsibility for the environmental mess it created. It should not be slowing down the remedy, Van Essen said. Whether Wolverine intended or expected this contamination, or was misled by 3M or wants 3M to pay, is not relevant to our lawsuit, he said. We again call on Wolverine to step up and meet its obligations to its neighbors by extending municipal water to the 500 homeowners who have wells tainted with PFAS. Wolverine claims that water filters it installed in homes around the area last fall have virtually eliminated PFAS from tap water, although testing data posted on the DEQ website shows that filters do not eliminate all contamination. State regulators say in-home filters are not a viable long-term solution for homes with toxic water because they require ongoing maintenance. Ingestion of PFAS has been linked in human studies to some cancers, thyroid disorders, elevated cholesterol and other diseases. Wolverine has already demonstrated its commitment to helping our friends, family and neighbors address groundwater concerns by conducting extensive water testing and providing highly effective water filters. Now, we are taking necessary steps to ensure that 3M is held accountable for its conduct and participates in the remediation efforts we have been leading for more than 18 months," Krueger said. Wolverine has sought to drag 3M into the Michigan contamination problem at every step since a plume was discovered leaving Wolverines former tannery dump at 1855 House Street NE in Belmont. Wolverine also recently sued its insurers in Kent County Circuit Court. In a statement, the company said its insurers have refused to honor their policies and participate in the defense and remediation efforts that Wolverine has been leading for over 18 months. In June, Kent County Circuit Judge George J. Quist ruled that Wolverine could argue 3M was at fault in individual lawsuit cases filed by hundreds of local residents. Those plaintiffs, represented by the Varnum law firm, subsequently filed against 3M in August. According to those filings, Wolverine bought more than half the Scotchgard 3M sold to tanneries around the world starting in 1958, the year Wolverine debuted the Hush Puppies shoe line, which were treated with Scotchgard. Aaron Phelps, a Varnum attorney representing local residents who are suing both Wolverine and 3M, said roping 3M into the federal case is not a prerequisite for Wolverine to do the right thing for homeowners affected by contamination. At the end of the day, Wolverine dumped the waste, said Phelps. Wolverine needs to accept responsibility and fix it. Wolverines filing claims 3M convinced the company to begin using Scotchgard as it developed a market for the chemistry, and then hid knowledge that PFAS posed environmental risks. Wolverine alleges that it relied on 3M recommendations and practices when disposing of tannery waste. The shoe company said 3M publicly announced a change in its formula in 2000 to eliminate PFOA and PFOS from Scotchgard, but then continued to sell the old formula for two more years, and maintained that the chemicals posed no environmental or health risks. YPSILANTI, MI -- An Eastern Michigan University history professor is suing on claims that his free speech was infringed upon after he used a racist acronym in a 2017 Facebook post critical of the administration. Mark Higbee, whos taught at EMU since 1994, made the comments on an EMU-focused Facebook group page criticizing the universitys reaction in the aftermath of a rash of racist graffiti found on the campus in the fall of 2016. The post also referred to EMU administrators as a small group of well-paid white guys in suits. Eastern Michigan University Mark Higbee lawsuit excerpt containing Facebook post that led to his suspension. The university says the rules violation lies with Higbees use of HN in C," an acronym that stands for head n***** in charge. The administration suspended Higbee without pay for one semester in December 2017, but the disciplinary ruling was reversed in arbitration the following summer. Despite the reversal, the university firmly stands behind its decision to suspend the professor, and plans to defend itself vigorously in regard to Higbees civil lawsuit, according to a statement issued Dec. 6. Professor Higbees statements represent an egregious violation of university employment standards and core values, which serve to uphold important ideals and principles such as excellence, respect, inclusiveness, responsibility and integrity, EMU says. Higbee is now asking for greater than $75,000 in compensation for violation of his First Amendment rights and other claims. Eddie Curlin, a black former EMU student, was arrested, convicted and sentenced to a minimum of two years in prison for the graffiti that contained the N-word and Ku Klux Klan messages. The sentence runs consecutive to other ID theft charges Curlin was convicted of. Police believe Curlin committed the vandalism with hopes of acting as an informant, and leveraging a dismissal in the unrelated ID theft case that was pending against him at the time. ANN ARBOR, MI - A man who robbed an undercover narcotics officer was sentenced on Tuesday to at least 21 years in prison. Scott Michael Allen, 29, pleaded guilty on Friday, Dec. 7, to charges of armed robbery, unlawful imprisonment, four counts of assaulting, resisting or obstructing police and four weapons charges, court records show. Allen was originally scheduled to be imprisoned for 11 years, but Washtenaw County Trial Judge Carol Kuhnke revoked the deal during his sentencing on Tuesday, Sept. 25, after finding the deal fell below sentencing guidelines. The life of this case became the fact that the victim in this case was a police officer, Allens attorney David Goldstein said. When my client did what he did he was just another man to him. Thats not to suggest what my client did was excusable or acceptable. It seems like the stakes in this case have been raised considerably because of the emphasis on the fact that (he) was a police officer. Goldstein added that people often do things for reasons we dont understand." He had a very serious drug problem," Goldstein said. Ahead of his sentencing, Allens sister tearfully pleaded the court to better understand her brother. Our childhood is not what you would call normal," she said. Our mother passed away in 2005 due to heroin overdose. Scotts father was an alcoholic. (Scott had) no one to make him dinner after school, make sure our homework was done. No one to tuck him in at night and let him know hes loved. Poor decisions stemmed from the use of drugs. I miss the brother who called me to come over with kids for dinner. I miss sharing laughs and watching him be the caring and loving father he is. I know life is not fair; we must pay the consequences to the actions that we make. Although hes covered in tattoos, that does not define the person he is." Kuhnke sentenced Allen on Thursday to 19 to 50 years with the Michigan Department of Corrections, consecutive to two years for the felony firearm charge, for a minimum of 21 years. He was given no credit for time served. We respect the judges decision, Lt. Darren Green of the Michigan State Police First District said. He got eight more years than the original plea agreement. As long as he can be locked up and not be on the streets (he) wont be able to wreak havoc." Allen was accused of arranging to sell heroin and cocaine to the undercover officer on May 8, 2017, in the 9400 block of MacArthur Boulevard in Superior Township. Without warning, Allen jumped into the back seat and threatened the officer, police previously said. The undercover officer identified himself and chased Allen out of the vehicle and he was later captured. ANN ARBOR, MI - Gratzi has welcomed a new head chef to its downtown Ann Arbor restaurant. Chef John Somerville took the helm in November. Hes planning to gradually introduce some of his own recipes while making sure Gratzi continues to offer high-quality versions of the classic dishes people have grown to love in the restaurants 32-year history. A chef with a great arsenal of recipes could be tempted to try to introduce a lot of them too quickly, Somerville said. Really what you need to do at a place like Gratzi that is nationally known and recognized name of great Italian cuisine, youve got really to work on getting those dishes back to a level of greatness. Somerville, a two-time James Beard Award finalist, is known for his Genghis Khan rack of lamb and duck, and he said hes modifying those dishes to work with Gratzis menu. An Ohio native, Somerville, 51, graduated from high school in Grand Rapids and earned an engineering degree from the University of Michigan. He spent a few years working at an engineering firm in Ann Arbor before the research and development department was laid off. He always enjoyed cooking, so Somerville said he took the opportunity to pursue culinary arts. He was hired at The Lark in West Bloomfield in 1994, worked his way up to chef de cuisine in 2006 and continued as the executive chef there until the restaurant closed in 2015. Most recently, he worked as executive chef at Steven Lellis Inn on the Green in Farmington Hills. Somerville has cooked at the James Beard House, was featured on the James Beard Foundations Celebrity Chef Tour in 2011, was a contestant on Bravo TVs Top Chef cooking competition and has appeared on PBS Great Lakes Great Chefs programs. There has been a real culture change in our kitchen, Gratzi General Manager Andy Jacobs said in a press release. The staff really respects him and is working harder than ever to make him proud. Dan Gawura spent the past 18 months as head chef at Gratzi, 326 S. Main St. Owned by Mainstreet Ventures, Gratzi opened a second location in Midland in April. Somerville plans to start offering cooking classes and demonstrations at Gratzi in May, and hes preparing a special farm-to-table menu for Ann Arbors Restaurant Week in January, he said. Gratzi is open from 4 to 10 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 4 to 11 p.m. Friday, noon to 11 p.m. Saturday and noon to 9 p.m. Sunday. Starting Dec. 28, the restaurant is open for lunch from noon to 4 p.m. on Friday. FLINT, MI -- The incoming chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is renewing his request for documents related to the Flint water crisis and giving outgoing Gov. Rick Snyder until Jan. 11 to comply. U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Maryland, made the request of Snyder in a letter Wednesday, Dec. 19, saying he intends to continue this investigation in the next Congress. MLive-The Flint Journal could not immediately reach a representative of the governor for comment Wednesday, but he has said previously that he fully complied with document requests from Congress for information related to Flint water. Congressional Republicans quietly closed a year-long investigation into the water crisis in December 2016, but Cummings has continued to push Snyder to fully comply with previous requests by the committee for records, accusing the governor of having stonewalled the committee. In October 2017, Cummings and other Democrats on the Oversight Committee specifically asked for additional information about when Snyder first learned of a Legionnaires' disease outbreak in Genesee County. The outbreak coincided with the citys use of the Flint River for drinking water. The request came after a member of Snyders cabinet contradicted the governors previous comments on the subject. On March 17, 2016, Snyder testified before the Oversight Committee that he didnt learn of a surge in Legionnaires' cases and deaths until 2016," but Harvey Hollins, director of the states Office of Urban and Metropolitan Initiatives, contradicted that timeline when he testified under oath that he told the governor about Legionnaires' problems and the potential connection to Flint water in December 2015 -- weeks before the governor has said he was first made aware of the outbreak. Hollins' testimony came during a preliminary examination in Genesee District Court for Nick Lyon, director of the state Department of Health and Human Services. Snyder has said previously that he informed the public what he knew the day after he was informed of the outbreak. With Democrats in the majority in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2019, Cummings will become chairman of the Oversight Committee, and the letter to Snyder about Flint water was one of 51 issued by the Maryland Democrat Wednesday, requesting full compliance with previous requests for documents. These are documents that even the Republicans on the Oversight Committee -- at least at some point in time -- believed we needed to conduct effective oversight, but when the Trump Administration refused to comply fully, the Republicans would not issue a single subpoena, Cummings said in a statement issued by his office. "Many of those requests were bipartisan, and some are now more than a year old. As Democrats prepare to take the reins in Congress, we are insisting -- as a basic first step -- that the Trump Administration and others comply with these Republican requests. GRAND RAPIDS, MI -- Kent County will potentially pull the plug on its land bank amid concerns the entity has veered off course from its original mission and is no longer needed. Some, though, worry the move would stifle affordable housing and neighborhood revitalization efforts and could halt some projects already underway. A resolution to dissolve the Kent County Land Bank will go before the Kent County Board of Commissioners at their last meeting of the year on Thursday, Dec. 20. If passed, the land bank would have until Dec. 31, 2019 to settle obligations, cease operations and then transfer all assets and revenue streams back to the county. The resolution was put to the board by Kent County Administrator Wayman Britts office, which recently conducted a review of land bank operations, real estate market conditions and adherence to commissioner recommendations. Britts office presented that review, and the recommendation to dissolve the land bank, to the county boards Finance and Physical Resources Committee on Tuesday, Dec. 18. A number of representatives from affordable housing non-profits, including LINC UP and Dwelling Place, and some real-estate professionals advocated Tuesday for the land bank. This is just one resource, one tool that we can use to help those low and moderate income members of our community to have ... (homes), said Ryan Schmidt with the affordable housing non-profit Inner City Christian Federation (ICCF). Seven of the last eight single-family homes that ICCF has renovated have been connected in some way to the Kent County Land Bank, either a purchase from or a quiet title action. The committee approved the proposal by a 5-4 vote largely along party lines, with Harold Mast as the only Republican to vote against the measure. In addition to Mast, the commissioners who voted against the proposal were Democrats Betsy Melton, Carol Hennessy and David Bulkowski. Broadly, their opposition questioned the hurried vote and called for more time to review the proposal and potential unintended consequences. Britt said Board Chair Jim Saalfeld wanted a vote on the resolution before Jan. 1, as the current board has the information and history related to the issue." Two Republicans will be replaced by Democrats on the board come Jan. 1. Bulkowski motioned to postpone a vote until early February. It failed 4-5, with those in favor of moving the proposal forward voting no. There are significant issues with the land bank. That Im not disagreeing with, Bulkowski said. The baby does not need to be tossed out. We need to determine whats the baby and whats the bathwater." After talks with Grand Rapids officials, the proposed deadline for dissolving the land bank was pushed from six months to 12 months to ease the transition and avoid unintended consequences, Britt said. The city uses the Kent County Land Bank to clear property titles and then return them to Grand Rapids for sale to non-profit developers, according to the review. The countys review was prompted after the land bank undertook a controversial rebranding over the summer. In June, the Kent County Land Bank announced it was rebranding itself as InnovaLaB and expanding operations into brokering modular homes both in and outside of Kent County. The modular homes -- sold at cost for vacant public lands and with fee to realtors and developers on other parcels -- were billed as a solution to provide workforce housing, or homes for income earners who are out-priced by their areas housing market. Land bank officials said in October they were planning for nearly 200 modular homes in the coming year across a number of potential communities including Flint, Muskegon, Newaygo, Marquette and others. Some county leaders questioned if the modular initiative was aligned with the land banks original mission and whether it competed with private industry and non-profits. There were further concerns that it could be utilizing captured county tax dollars for out-of-county work. The land bank was created in 2009 to efficiently acquire, hold, manage, spur economic development and/or sell tax-foreclosure and other properties in Kent County. Its creation came in the wake of the housing market crash and increase in foreclosed blighted properties. Britts office concluded the land bank, for the most part, hadnt followed recommendations laid out by commissioners in 2017. Among them was a recommendation against mission creep into areas that impact home ownership and housing affordability." Concerns regarding mission creep have been validated as exemplified by a name change/rebranding to InnovaLaB, eliminating all references to Kent County, entering into a contract with Champion homes to build InnovaHomes statewide and by performing land bank consultation services to other counties, including, Newaygo, Ottawa and Muskegon, the review states. The report additionally states the land bank had completed its original mission and that the real estate market in Kent County has mostly bounced back to pre-Great Recession foreclosures rates. When the Kent County Land Bank was originally created, it was a valuable tool in returning tax foreclosed properties that often create blight to use and taxable status quickly and efficiently, Britt said in a statement. However, the improved real estate market and increasing concerns that the work currently being done by the Kent County Land Bank is outside the scope of its original purpose compelled us to take a hard look at the need for this authority in our current environment. Kent County Treasurer Ken Parrish, who chairs the land banks board of directors, took issue that the review didnt look at all that the land bank does. He rejected the rebranding as mission creep. Many people have a very single-minded view that the only reason we were formed is to deal with blight, and that is not the case, he said. Our original mission statement was to get properties back into productive use, and we have continued to do that. Parrish pointed to the modular home initiative, as well as work with affordable housing non-profits, as proof of that adapted role to meet that goal in a time of less foreclosures. Parrish said the land bank isnt competing with private industry, because the modular projects and others are happening in areas where for-profit developers arent interested but a housing need exists. Additionally, Parrish said the amount of county tax money captured by the land bank is minor, with most of its revenue coming from land sales. After the land bank sells a property, it collects 50 percent of taxes for five years. Of the land banks $2.9 million income so far in 2018, $2.4 million has come from sale of assets and roughly $338,000 from tax captures, according to financials through November. Britt said the modular initiative and affordable housing drive constitute something beyond what commissioners established. The boards intent is not to undermine the work that the city of Grand Rapids has attempted to do to deal with this issue around housing stock and affordability," he said. The County Board of Commissioners simply established the land bank, with the help of the treasurer, to deal with blighted properties in the community. It did not intend for it to move to a different model ... Theyre dealing with affordable housing, as opposed to blighted properties, which is what the intent was. Several projects, such as a 36-unit apartment building for low-income residents near the corner on Burton Street SE and Division Avenue, could be jeopardized by dissolution of the land bank, Parrish said. The land bank helps affordable housing non-profits through quickly and cheaply clearing property titles, as well as supporting them in getting financial assistance from the state, he said. This is an extremely complicated issue with multiple layers, multiple partners and theyre treating it as if we were closing down a lemonade stand, Parrish said. Its just mind boggling to me that weve not had a work session, or an opportunity to answer their questions." The county could recreate a land bank, should the housing market hit another downturn and there be a need for an entity to deal with blighted property, Britt said. GRAND RAPIDS, MI A Holland-area man and woman have been indicted by a federal grand jury for allegedly stealing 22 guns from a hardware store in Allegan County. Matteo Adam Marroquin, 22, and his girlfriend, Lacy Lynn Zimmerman, 22, were indicted on Tuesday, Dec. 18 in Grand Rapids federal district court. Theyre accused of stealing the firearms earlier this month from Graafschap Hardware Store in Holland. The stolen guns included 18 shotguns and four semiautomatic rifles. All of the stolen guns have been recovered, according to police. Marroquin and Zimmerman were arrested on Dec. 10. They have been charged with theft of firearms from a federal firearms licensee, as well as possession of stolen firearms and illegal possession of firearms as felons. Each charge carries a penalty of up to 10 years in prison, if convicted. Additionally, a third individual, Andrew Leenheer, 23, was arrested and charged with possession of a stolen firearm and being a felon in possession of a firearm. All three defendants are being held on unrelated outstanding warrants in Ottawa County. They will be arraigned in U.S. District Court in Grand Rapids when taken into federal custody. The case is being investigated by the Allegan County Sheriffs Office, Michigan State Police, WEMET, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Assistant U.S. Attorney Sally J. Berens is prosecuting the case. LOWELL, MI -- Police are asking for the publics help to locate three guitars believed stolen from Impact Church in the Lowell area. Two electric guitars were taken Sunday or Monday from the church, 1070 N. Hudson St. SE, while a third acoustic guitar went missing about two weeks ago. The guitars are described as follows: -Acoustic Guitar: Taylor 410 CE Black Taylor Leather Case with silver locks - Electric Guitars: Reverend Reeves Gabrels Signature ModelBlue Flame Maple Finish Reverend Two Tone Teardrop Black and White hard case; 2006 Fender Koa Telecaster (made in Korea)Koa Wood Burst finish Black Roadrunner hard shell case with silver locks Police ask that anyone with information about the guitars to call Lowell police at 616-897-7123, Silent Observe at 616-774-2345 or email Detective Lauren at glauren@ci.lowell.mi.us. GRAND RAPIDS, MI J.D. Collins is the new director of Michigans Small Business Development Center (SBDC), located in the Seidman College of Business at Grand Valley State University. Collins, who has served in senior level strategic leadership roles for a number of Michigan-based businesses, took the reins Monday, Dec. 17. "As a Michigander, it brings me a great sense of pride knowing that the SBDC's work drives statewide economic impact and furthers our reputation as a preeminent place to start and grow a business," said Collins, about the 90-person organization that serves more than 5,500 companies. "I'm eager to serve the small business community and continue our innovative approach to assisting business owners and entrepreneurs." The Small Business Development Center provides consulting, training, and market research for new ventures, existing small businesses and advanced technology companies. Collins said it speaks volumes that the SBDC generated approximately $229 million in capital formation in 2017. He also said the organizations actions resulted in 4,787 jobs being created or retained and that it helped those with an idea establish 423 new businesses. Diana Lawson, dean of the Seidman College of Business, said the SBDC network has significant impact on the growth and sustainability of small businesses throughout Michigan. J.D.'s leadership and vision will enhance our focus on innovation and doing what is best for small businesses, she said. During his 10-year career at Amway Corporation, Collins served in various leadership roles including with the digital innovation team. He also ran Spectrum Healths digital innovation group. He earned a bachelors degree in economics and management from Albion College and an MBA from Notre Dame. Collins replaces former director Keith Brophy, who had been at the helm since 2015 but departed earlier this year to pursue a passion for tech entrepreneurship. Ed Garner, regional director of the West Michigan SBDC, has served as the interim director. With its headquarters at Grand Valley in downtown Grand Rapids, 11 regional offices and more than 20 satellite offices, the center provides entrepreneurs and business owners with convenient access to counseling and training throughout Michigan. The SBDC provides advice and counsel to anyone who walks through our doors for free, Collins said. We want to be as inclusive as possible. Last year, he said SBDC provided individual consultation to 5,280 businesses. In 2017, the West Michigan Region SBDC achieved the following: Villegas described the ride on Tuesday night as a little bumpy since Musks team had not yet smoothed out the surface of the tunnel. The top speed reached was about 34 mph, Villegas said, much slower than Musks promised future speed of 150 mph. Villegas said he believed the ride would have been twice as fast if the tunnel had been smooth. CAMBRIDGE TWP., MI An attraction at an extinct Michigan amusement park needs to be torn down or fixed, Cambridge Township officials say. A large drive-through mountain at the now defunct Prehistoric Forest on U.S. 12 in the Irish Hills is crumbling, Township Clerk Rick Richardson said. The structure has exposed wiring and the lack of fencing has led to trespassing. "It's dangerous because it's fallen down inside and of course there's not much security to keep people out of there," Richardson said. Prehistoric Forest was built in 1963, as one of many roadside attractions in the Irish Hills. Visitors drove through the giant, man-made mountain before approaching 35 life-sized fiberglass dinosaurs many of which are still on the private property. A 37-foot-high waterfall, the 400-foot Jungle Rapids Water Slide and a safari train added to the experience. Prehistoric Forest closed in 2002 and Sandra Crabb bought the property about a decade later. She believes the mountain is worth preserving. "It has a mystique, as if you found a Mayan ruin," Crabb said. Cambridge Township has ruled the mountain as a "dangerous structure" and is giving Crabb until Dec. 31 to tear it down or present a plan to fix it. If the deadline is missed, the township board will host a hearing to discuss the issue, Richardson said. Bids to tear down the structure range from $36,000 to $68,000, Richardson said. Crabb recently moved back to Michigan from California and said she is developing a plan to save the space that hopefully will involve the University of Michigan architectural school. Details should emerge in early 2019, Crabb said. Its a Michigan treasure. Its a landmark, Crabb said. Suffice to say, people will be very happy with what were going to do. BROOKLYN, MI About 100 people showed up at a meeting to discuss dissolving the village of Brooklyn, but residents arent passing out petitions just yet. Tom Knutson, whose family owns Knutsons Sporting Goods and the Super 8 in the village, organized the Dec. 4 meeting. He hopes the large attendance and variety of complaints sent a message to village council members many of whom attended. "There is a group that definitely sees the benefit of not having the village," Knutson, a Napoleon Township resident, said. "There were some very angry people." Residents must gather about 150 signatures of village voters to put the issue on the ballot, according to state law. A disincorporation vote would happen during the next general or special election which right now, isnt until 2020. Two-thirds of voters in the village and surrounding Columbia Township would need to approve the dissolution. Knutson said he will wait a year to see if change is sparked before ramping up dissolution efforts. "Things could change drastically in that time period," Knutson said. "Maybe they wake up and back off." The meeting lasted more than two hours, Knutson said, with complaints ranging from village spending on a Department of Public Works garage and roads to issues with strict ordinance enforcement. Village President J.B DeJeu spoke at the meeting to clarify facts and urge residents to participate more. Many village council meetings conducted at 6 p.m. the second and fourth Tuesdays most months have no public members attending, he said. "To completely dissolve the village proper is an extreme solution," DeJeu said. "Once it's done it's done. And then it's gone." Residents would lose out on services like leaf pickup, street lighting, parades, timely snow plowing and more if the village goes away, DeJeu said. Instead of dissolving, DeJeu said people should run for office or recall officials. Knutson said if he's going to go through the work of gathering signatures, he prefers dissolution to a recall. The southeast Jackson County village of 1,188 residents was founded in 1832. State law allows villages to dissolve, but its never been done in Michigan history. The most recent attempt was when voters in the village of Richland - near Kalamazoo - voted down disincorporation in 2016. KALAMAZOO, MI -- Around 50 people who work at the AT&T call center in downtown Kalamazoo will be forced to find a new job by March 2019. According to AT&T spokesperson Teresa Mask, the company is ending positions at the Kalamazoo building in part due to declining call volume and also to increase efficiency. Positions are being consolidated into other Michigan facilities in Southfield and Dayton, Ohio. Mask said affected employees can take a relocation allowance to move to those facilities. Theres another job for all affected employees and we hope as many as possible elect to work in Southfield or Dayton and stay with us, Mast said through email. For those who choose not to do so and dont otherwise find another job with the company, the last day on payroll is in late March. Mask did not reveal the number of people affected by the consolidation when asked by MLive/Kalamazoo Gazette. She said AT&T will not provide that information, or the number of technical associates, service representatives and sales consultants who work at the Kalamazoo facility. Mask said Kalamazoo AT&T building, located at the corner of Rose and Lovell streets, is not closing and other employees will continue to work there. Charles Daniels, president of the Communications Workers of America Local 4123, said around 50 positions making $50,000 to $70,000 a year will be affected. Daniels said it represents the overwhelming majority of Kalamazoo employees. The call center is effectively being closed, he said. (Employees) are absolutely devastated, Daniels said. You have people there that have 20-25 years of service with the company where theyve shown loyalty to the company and the companys' response to that is to eliminate them. Daniels said the situation is made worse because employees were told on Dec. 14, weeks before Christmas. Last year, workers at an AT&T call center in Detroit were notified 10 days before Christmas 2017 that their center was going to close, Many followed AT&T jobs to Kalamazoo after experiencing similar consolidation of call centers in Saginaw, Lansing or Detroit, Daniels said. It can be difficult for employees with children in local schools to move to another call center, Daniel said. Employees who cant move will be able to take a buyout, he said. When they consolidate these jobs, many are unable to follow and the company knows that, Daniels said. (AT&T) can say they have the opportunity to, but they dont have the ability to. The union representative said AT&T broke its promises by eliminating jobs after experiencing a $20.3 billion increase in reported fourth-quarter net income from the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. AT&T closed 44 call centers and ended 16,000 call center jobs across the country since 2011, according to a CWA report. In Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Illinois, the company laid off 2,300 workers in the last three years. A relocation allowance is included as part of a collective bargaining agreement and may vary depending on the circumstances, Mask said. Mask said AT&T hired more than 200 employees in Michigan in last year and more than 150 so far this year. AT&T is trying to fill 20 positions across the state, Mask said. Like most companies, we work to ensure our workforce is aligned with the needs of the business and needs of our customers, Mask said. Were adding people in many areas where were seeing increased customer demand for products and services. At the same time, technology improvements are driving higher efficiencies and there are some areas where demand continues to decline, and we sometimes must adjust our workforce in some of those areas. In a Dec. 15 Facebook post, State Rep. Jon Hoadley, D-Kalamazo, said large companies are obligated to invest in communities when they receive tax breaks. I join in solidarity to express my anger and frustration over these closures. Yet again, working people are on the... Posted by Jon Hoadley on Saturday, December 15, 2018 Union workers in Kalamazoo and across the state walked out of their jobs in May, arguing AT&T was attempting to influence them to accept a new labor contract without going through the proper bargaining process. Kalamazoo Deputy City Manager Jeff Chamberlain and Assistant City Manager Jerome Kisscorni said they saw Facebook posts regarding the layoffs but did not have additional information. CARBONDALE, ILLINOIS -- Western Michigan Universitys former President John Dunn was appointed as a top administrator at a university in Illinois. Dunn, who retired from Western in June 2017, was named as interim chancellor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, according to a press release from the university. Dunns appointment will end Dec. 31, 2020, or upon the start of a new chancellor, whichever is sooner, the release said. Dr. Dunn will bring to his interim role significant higher education leadership experience as well as knowledge of SIU," Interim President J. Kevin Dorsey said in the release. I am grateful that he has accepted the opportunity to lead our continued progress as we enter our 150th year. Dunn was the interim chancellor in Illinois from 2006 to 2007. Prior, he worked four years with the university as provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs, the release said. During his 10-year stint at Western, Dunn helped create the Western Michigan University Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine and the affiliation that created WMU Cooley Law School. Other legacies of his presidency included a focus on sustainability and the establishment of programs for veterans and former foster care youth. The announcement of his retirement came about a year before he left the post, though he stayed on campus to serve as president emeritus through the new presidents first year. Edward Montgomery was named as WMUs newest president in 2017. COMSTOCK TOWNSHIP, MI Citizens are concerned about a greenhouses plans to house migrant workers in Comstock Township and wonder what the project could mean for the safety and property values in their rural community. Wenke Greenhouses is planning to bring 34 migrant workers in January to live in four houses the business owns adjacent to its greenhouse facilities at 2525 N. 30th St., Wenke Greenhouses co-owner Lisa Ambrosio said. The business intention is to bring in another 50 workers in March who will be housed in other locations provided by a contract company, she said. The business has plans to build another four cabins behind the existing houses, Ambrosio said, where they would like to house an additional workers there in the future. Those plans have to be approved by the local government before they can move forward, she said. Wenke Greenhouses needs the workers to transplant plants, process them for shipping and moving and spacing work. She said the jobs start at $13.54, and the company hires both migrant workers and local people at the same starting rate. We are having very serious challenges getting people to work here, she said, noting the positions are seasonal labor positions. Talking to any business around here, with the unemployment rate, there arent very many people who want to come and do this work. Its hard physical work, she said. Wenke Greenhouses is using a federal H-2A program to bring in guest workers seasonally, and the company is required to provide housing, she said. Wenke Greenhouses in Comstock Township. Resident Mary Ann LaClair said she and her husband live across North 30th Street from Wenke Greenhouses, and they have lived there since before the greenhouses were built. She has heard the time clock beep and the intercom of the greenhouses for years. The companys latest plans took her by surprise, she said, and she complained neither the business nor government notified residents in the area. LaClair said the migrant workers will not benefit Comstock, and they will send money they make back to their families. Without their own transportation, LaClair said she thinks they will be walking the streets. Ambrosio said the company will provide transportation to and from the housing to stores and other needed amenities. LaClair said the male workers will require babysitting, and wonders who will intervene if something happens. Who takes responsibility for these people?" she said. "What if they break in and I go in my garage and they shoot me? She believes property values could be negatively impacted. My property value is going to decrease substantially, she said. Thats our retirement supposedly. LaClair and others spoke at a Comstock Township meeting on Dec. 17 to give opinions about the greenhouse business' plans. Ambrosio said the people who will live in the migrant housing have to be vetted as part of the federal program, and they are sent home if they do something wrong. Alcohol is not allowed at the migrant housing, she said, and a supervisor will live on site. I think its a lot of fear people have of the unknown, she said, noting the company will know soon if there are any impacts or increased calls to law enforcement when migrant workers arrive. If we start seeing that sort of thing we have every reason to respond to that, too, she said. That would not be a good thing for us. Jack Schermerhorn, General Manager at Kalamazoo Flower Group, a shipper and distributor of southwest Michigan greenhouse grown products to big box retailers in the Midwest, said it is tough for seasonal businesses like greenhouses to find the amount of labor needed in a short window of time. Whether youre three acres or 30 acres, everyone is struggling to find labor, especially seasonal labor, he said. Kalamazoo Flower Group is owned by multiple interests including Wenke family members and ships products from Wekne Greenhouses and other businesses, Schermerhorn said. Labor is simply not available, or the people who will do the work are not available in the current population base we have in Southwest Michigan, he said. After hearing from community members about the plans, Wenke Greenhouses is now planning to hold a community meeting, tentatively scheduled for approximately 6 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 16, at 2525 N. 30th Street in Comstock Township, she said. In 2013-17, Kalamazoo County had average of 2,623 residents born in Latin America, of which 1,848 were born in Mexico. That compares to 2,142 and 1,696 in 2006-10. Total Hispanic population was about 12,227 in 2017. MUSKEGON COUNTY, MI A recall effort against Muskegon County Drain Commissioner Brenda Moore is moving forward following a Michigan Court of Appeals ruling. Moore had appealed a recall petition, saying its wording wasnt factual, but the appeals court panel rejected her claim. Critics believe that Moore overstepped her bounds when she approved more than $2 million in tax assessments for improvements to the Kuis Drain district. The drain project aims to find a better way to move groundwater away from neighborhoods in parts of Fruitport and Sullivan townships and into Black Creek. Several homeowners have complained about the project, and refused to pay for the work that they claim wasnt needed. One of those residents is Jeremy Hooker, who filed a recall petition against Moore in January. In that petition, Hooker wrote that Moore elected to take the broadest scope of work and most expensive options proposed by her engineers for each project assessed during her current term of office, when less expensive alternatives were proposed to her. But the petition was rejected by the countys Election Commission. At the time, Muskegon County Clerk Nancy Waters, who sits on the commission, said the petition lacked the necessary clarity and didnt indicate any wrongdoing on the part of Moore. Hooker filed the same petition seeking Moores recall with the Michigan Board of State Canvassers in March, but the canvassers didnt rule on its wording. The inaction resulted in a default judgment in favor of Hooker. Moore subsequently appealed the decision with the Michigan Court of Appeals, stating that the petition did not have factual clarity because it misrepresents her record as drain commissioner and the bid process involved with the Kuis Drain project. The court ultimately ruled in Hookers favor, which means he and his cohorts can begin circulating their petition unfettered. According to an opinion written by Appeals Court Judge John Gadola, court reviews of recall petitions are often lenient or very lenient. Gadola quotes a previous opinion from 2001, which states a meticulous detailed statement of the charges against an officeholder is not required. Gadola also states that regardless of whether (Hookers assertion) is true or false, (the petition language) is a clearly-stated factual assertion. Hooker said he hopes the petition is successful. (Moore) thinks everyone has an unlimited amount of money for extravagant projects and she is taxing people out of their homes, Hooker said. Moore said she was shocked that the court did not speak to the petition in terms of accuracy. According to this decision, it seems that recall language need only be clear, not accurate, she said. "The recall language is neither fair nor accurate ... In short, the people passing judgment and pushing the recall know nothing of the decision process for numerous other projects this office is involved in. Since this is a published Court of Appeals case, all elected officials should take note that they may also be subject to recall petitions that are only clearly worded. The accurate or truthful aspect apparently doesnt count. I would not rule out another appeal based on this fact. Moore added that the recall language refers to other options offered to her, but she claims the other option was a request from Hooker to take his street out of the project. BAY CITY, MI A former manager and operator of the Prime Event Center in downtown Bay City, who sued city officials alleging racial discrimination, has received a six-figure payout. On Dec. 4, U.S. District Judge Gershwin A. Drain signed a dismissal order in the federal lawsuit of Choice L. Causey against former Bay City Department of Public Safety Deputy Director Thomas L. Pletzke. The cases dismissal came after attorneys agreed to an out-of-court settlement. The agreement, obtained from Bay City through MLive and The Bay City Times filing a Freedom of Information Act request, states Causey received a sum of $265,000. Were happy and Mr. Causey is finally able to put this chapter behind him, said his attorney, Saginaw-based Victor J. Mastromarco Jr. Pletzke, who retired from the department in September 2016, was the only named defendant in the suit and was sued in his official and individual capacity. The settlement was paid by Bay Citys insurance company, Michigan Municipal Risk Management Authority. However, the city is responsible for the first $500,000 of any payout, said City Manager Dana L. Muscott. That amount was on deposit with the insurance provider, Muscott said. Causey in July 2016 filed a lawsuit naming Pletzke, Public Safety Director Michael J. Cecchini, and then-City Manager Rick Finn as defendants. That suit was dismissed on Feb. 6, 2018, with Causey and Mastromarco filing the Pletzke-specific suit on Feb. 22. The suit alleged Causey on March 1, 2016, entered into a lease agreement with Dore Real Estate LLC to manage and operate the Prime Event Center, 1201 Washington Ave., a venue known for hosting professional fights and concerts. According to the suit, Causey had secured "a number of rental agreements." After signing the lease agreement, Causey alleges Bay City police officials began to administer pressure on the owners of Dore Real Estate to terminate its contract with him. Dore Real Estate is owned by longtime Bay City businessman Art Dore. Specifically, Causey alleged Pletzke told him that it was "his intention to run (Causey) out of town" and brought up a 2002 lawsuit that Causey filed against the city and several police officers, including Pletzke, alleging similar discrimination. In March 2016, Dore notified Causey that his contract to run the Prime was being terminated. According to the lawsuit, Dore told Causey that Bay City's manager and its police department were "on his ass" to terminate his contract because they believed he was having gangs promote upcoming events. Dore previously told MLive that Bay City police officials approached him with concerns about Causey, but that his contract was terminated because Causey wasnt paying his rent. CLARE, MI Michigan hunters recently donated a half ton of venison to state food banks. The donations were the result of a joint effort of the Food Bank Council of Michigan, Michigan Department of Natural Resources and Michigan Sportsmen Against Hunger. In total, hunters brought 25 deer to Jays Sporting Goods in Clare during the Nov. 16-18 collection. Carson Village Market in Carson City volunteered to process the 1,116 pounds of venison, which the Food Bank of Eastern Michigan in Flint now has. The meat will be shared with the Food Bank Councils network of regional food banks for distribution to Michiganders in need, according to a news release. I am overwhelmed at the generosity and inspired by the efforts of our friends to create a food secure Michigan, Food Bank Council Executive Director Phil Knight said in a statement. Keith Creagh, director of the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, added in a statement, The DNR welcomes the opportunity to work with partners at the Food Bank Council of Michigan and Michigan Sportsmen Against Hunger on this important effort. Michigan Sportsmen Against Hunger raises money throughout the year to pay for the processing of donated deer. Hunters can donate deer throughout the firearm, bow and muzzle loading seasons. Learn more at www.sportsmenagainsthunger.com. Much of the argument throughout the lengthy post-trial hearings centered on Reeds medical history. A doctor took an X-ray of Reeds leg in 2016 and concluded that the bone had been broken twice once from the gunshot wound and then from a direct blow, Reeds attorneys said in closing arguments last month. The shots touched off an alert from a ShotSpotter sensor, and Officers Eduardo Marmolejo and Conrad Gary were sent to an area near 103rd Street and Dauphin Avenue to investigate around 6:20 p.m. Monday, police said. The officers saw Brown, got out of their car and scrambled up to the tracks, according to police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi. At a hearing this week, U.S. Magistrate Judge Susan Cox said she was inclined to grant bond so Gomez could travel to New York on his own to face the charges. She scheduled a hearing for Thursday to review the property that would be posted and question the friend who agreed to ensure that Gomez complied with the conditions of his release. (CNN) Scientists have long thought that animals in Antarctica were isolated from harmful human-linked bacteria, but a new study provides evidence that this is no longer the case. Previous studies had found scattered instances of transmission of bacteria from humans to animals, known as reverse zoonosis, in the region, but research remained fragmented. Now, however, researchers have found widespread evidence of human-linked pathogens among Antarctic seabirds for the first time -- which they say could have devastating consequences for the continent's wildlife. "This is the first time that such a wide-ranging study, in terms of geography and bird species, has been carried out in the Southern Ocean, which shows reasonably solid evidence of reverse zoonosis in the Antarctic," study author Jacob Gonzalez-Solis, a researcher in the Department of Zoology and Biological Anthropology at the University of Barcelona, wrote in an email. Birds including penguins, brown skuas, southern giant petrels and kelp gulls were found to have picked up bacteria such as campylobacter and salmonella, according to the study, published in the journal Science of the Total Environment. The team took samples of feces from more than 600 adult seabirds in four locations -- Livingston Island, Marion Island, Gough Island and the Falkland Islands -- between 2008 and 2011, with three findings suggesting reverse zoonosis. Samples showed campylobacter jejuni, a common cause of food poisoning in the United States and Europe, including genotypes that had rarely or never been found in wild birds before. Others contained campylobacter lari, common in skuas and gulls. However, the team found that these strains were resistant to commonly used human and veterinary antibiotics ciprofloxacin and enrofloxacin, which suggests contamination from humans or domestic animals. Researchers also found a strain of salmonella usually detected in scavenging birds that live in urban areas. Although these bacteria are not associated with high death rates in animals, their presence shows that other, more dangerous pathogens could arrive on the continent, said study author Marta Cerda-Cuellar, a researcher at the Institute of Agrifood Research and Technology in Barcelona. "If these pathogens were able to arrive, so will others," Cerda-Cuellar wrote in an email. "We can say that any [Antarctic] bird or mammal could be affected by a zoonotic agent." And that could have devastating consequences. "This means that sooner or later human activity will introduce pathogens to Antarctic fauna that could cause mass deaths and even local extinctions," Gonzalez-Solis said. Although the study says evidence of reverse zoonosis is fairly solid, the authors are not sure how the birds came into contact with the bacteria. "There are various possibilities, the most likely is contact between Antarctic and sub-Antarctic fauna with domestic birds in sub-Antarctic communities such as the Falklands, but they could also be the legacy of old whaling missions, Antarctic research stations and the growth in Antarctic tourism," Gonzalez-Solis said. With increasing numbers of tourists potentially to blame, the authors recommend tighter controls on visitors. "To prevent the arrival of pathogens, stricter biosecurity measures will be necessary in order to limit the impact of humans in Antarctica," Cerda-Cuellar said. According to Jonas Bonnedahl, lecturer in clinical sciences in the Department of Clinical and Experimental Medicine at Sweden's Linkoping University, humans have spread pathogens in the Antarctic that have, on rare occasions, spread to wildlife. "I also think it is fair to say that it is the permanent research bases that have to be blamed here, rather than the tourism industry," Bonnedahl, who has researched human-linked bacteria in the Antarctic and was not involved in the study, wrote in an email. "Much has happened in the last years and I think that most nations now put more effort in biosecurity concerning sewage from research bases." However, he agrees that the rise in tourist numbers is a concern. The number of visitors to Antarctica has been steadily creeping up in recent years, with 44,367 tourists traveling there during the 2016-17 season. These revelations about the potential impact of tourism in Antarctica add to growing concern over visitor numbers in other parts of the world. The Galapagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador are arguably the most famous natural habitat in the world, and visitors are limited to specific sites and marked trails only, and a guide is required at all times. The Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan is another destination that attempts to control visitor numbers, with a "high value, low impact" tourism policy that sees visitors charged $200 or $250 per day, depending on the time of year. Locals have cited concerns about the environmental impact on its fragile ecosystem, as well as an over-reliance on foreign visitors. And South Africa's famous Otter Trail coastal hiking route has such a limited number of places available that hikers have to book up to a year in advance. This story was first published on CNN.com. "Antarctic penguins in danger from human diseases, researchers say" Look, someone is going to give you the number of the guy that is in Chicago. They are going to give it to you now, Guzman could be heard to say. He then told Flores to say hello to his brother, a twin who was helping run the Sinaloa cartels business in the city, bringing in tons of cocaine for movement around the country. The now-infamous dashcam video released more than a year after McDonalds October 2014 shooting showed the white officer opening fire within seconds of exiting his squad car as the black teen walked away from police with a knife in his hand. The video contradicted reports from officers at the scene that McDonald had threatened officers with the weapon. A man has been charged with attempted murder after police say he pushed another man onto the CTA Blue Line tracks at a Loop subway station over the weekend. During former Mayor Richard M. Daleys tenure, Vanecko and the mayors son Patrick Daley acquired a 4 percent stake in a sewer inspection company that held a city contract. The sewer company got caught up in a federal investigation that found that it and others used a minority-owned business as a front to win city business. Vanecko and the mayors son were not accused of wrongdoing, but it created plenty of political embarrassment for the mayor, who fought off tears at the time while saying his son was guilty of a lapse in judgment. Saint Jean Carbon Inc., a junior resource company, acquires, explores for, and develops mineral properties in Canada. It operates in two segments, Mineral Exploration and Development, and Research and Development. The company holds 100% interest in the Mount Copeland property; and 25% undivided interest the Red Bird property for the exploration of molybdenum deposits in British Columbia. Further, it focuses on the scientific study and technology applications for graphite and graphene. The company was formerly known as Torch River Resources Ltd. and changed its name to Saint Jean Carbon Inc. in October 2013. Saint Jean Carbon Inc. was incorporated in 1997 and is based in Calgary, Canada. Read More live bse live nse live Volume Todays L/H More The countrys third-largest general insurer ICICI Lombard General Insurance has begun initial discussions with Reliance General Insurance for buying a majority stake in the latter, a source has told Moneycontrol. This is not the first time when ICICI Lombard has started a discussion with Reliance General Insurance for buying a stake. A year back also, these companies had started discussion but then they were not able to proceed, the source said. For the transaction, global professional services firm EY has been appointed as the consultant, another source said. The consultant has started due diligence this week. ICICI Lombard General Insurance did not respond to a query sent last week by Moneycontrol. In response to a query by Moneycontrol, Arijit De, Chief Communications Officer, Reliance Capital termed the news as "complete rubbish." Reliance General Insurance is a 100 percent subsidiary of Reliance Capital (a company belonging to Anil Ambani's Reliance Group). ICICI Lombard is promoted by ICICI Bank. Earlier, Reliance General Insurance had tried to rope in a foreign partner for the company but did not succeed. Later, Reliance had also filed draft papers with markets regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) for an IPO in October 2017 and had received a go-ahead for the same in November 2017. However, the Sebi approval for the IPO expired in November 2018. Two non-life insurance companies have been listed on the exchanges: ICICI Lombard and New India Assurance. How the entities stack up As of March 2018, Reliance General's book value stood at Rs 1,250 crore. Reliance General Insurances gross written premium saw a 20 percent YoY increase in the September quarter to Rs 2,025 crore. The profit after tax rose to Rs 56 crore, a YoY increase of 20 percent. It is among the few companies in the market that does not have a foreign joint venture partner. The insurers combined ratio (a measure of claims paid versus premiums collected) improved from 109 percent in Q2FY18 to 106 percent in Q2FY19. This reflected an improvement in their underwriting performance. Earlier this year, Reliance carved out its health insurance business into a separate company called Reliance Health Insurance. ICICI Lombard General Insurance had earlier looked for an acquisition opportunity in the health insurance space. It was among the frontrunners for the acquisition of Star Health and Allied Insurance. However, a consortium of WestBridge Capital and billionaire investor Rakesh Jhunjhunwala was selected as the final buyer. ICICI Lombards net profit for Q2 FY19 grew 43.6 percent year-on-year to Rs 293.1 crore. Its gross direct premium income (GDPI) increased to Rs 7,305 crore in the first half of the fiscal, a growth of 12.5 percent. The combined ratio improved to 101.1 percent in Q2FY19 from 102.9 percent a year ago. Second merger? If initiated, this will be the second such merger in the general insurance space. In 2017, L&T General Insurance was merged with HDFC ERGO General Insurance. China recently celebrated 40 years of economic reforms, which transformed it into the worlds manufacturer and lifted millions from poverty. The progress is evident from its share of world output, in purchasing power parity terms--up from 2.3% in 1980 to 18.2% in 2017. In contrast, Indias share was higher than Chinas till 1984, but its less than half now. The silver lining is that the heydays of the Chinese model of export-led growth may be past. Indias domestic consumer-led model is a steadier, if slower alternative. Provided, we get our act together. Preckwinkle challenged Mendozas petitions Dec. 3, arguing that more than 14,000 of the roughly 25,000 names she turned in to get on the ballot were no good. That would take Mendoza down to only around 10,400 names of unique valid voters on her petitions, below the 12,500 she needed to be a mayoral candidate in the Feb. 26 election, the Preckwinkle campaign said. The final decision on transferring a part of the excess reserves to the government has to be that of the Reserve Bank (RBI) alone and any attempt to take away its autonomy could pose a risks to the economy, warns former chief economic advisor Kaushik Basu. The comments come within two days of former RBI governor Raghuram Rajan cautioning that transfer of the reserves may bring down the rating of the central bank. "There is scope for transfer of excess reserves of the RBI to the government, but it has to be the RBI's decision...You can't do that by confiscation by the government. If the RBI says no, it understands why it is not saying so," Basu, the C Marks Professor of International Studies at Cornell University, US told PTI here Wednesday. He said decision on such important matters has to be taken in consultation with RBI only. "I think this kind of thing has to be completely with the government talking to the RBI and the final say on this has to be that of RBI. "If you don't do that, and if you try to take away their autonomy, you are taking a huge long-term risk with the economy," Basu, who was also a past chief economist with the World Bank, said. The issue of parting with a portion of RBI reserves, which as of June stood at Rs 9.43 trillion, to the government has been a contentious issue between the government and the central bank for a long time, and one of the key reasons for the sudden resignation of Urjit Patel on December 10. A major portion of the reserve comes from the currency and gold revaluation account (Rs 6.91 trillion) and the contingency fund (Rs 2.32 trillion). At the November 19 meeting, the central board of RBI had decided to constitute a committee of experts to examine an economic capital framework (ECF), the membership and terms of reference of which will be jointly determined by the government and the RBI. The committee, which is yet to be formed, as the past governor Urjit Patel had differences with the name of the chairman, will determine the appropriate levels of reserves the central bank ought to hold. In an interview to a news channel on Monday, when asked if the transfer of excess reserve could lead to downgrade in RBI rating, Rajan had said, "it could...it depends on how much. It may not be an issue now...may be an issue at some point of time. That's one concern". Rating downgrade of the RBI from 'AAA' would make borrowing costlier for the central bank and will have implication for the entire economy. Earlier in the day, addressing the 60th Labour Economic Conference, organised by the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR) here, Basu said as per the global standards the 7.4 percent growth rate is good and termed the 8 percent annual growth between 2003 and 2011 as "outstanding". "Growth has gone down now...there have been policy mistakes. One of the biggest ones is the demonetisation. It has hit the informal sector and the farming sector massively," Basu said. He rued that we are paying too little attention to better income distribution. "In the farm sector, the workers are doing very badly and we are not paying enough of attention to it. We are growing at 7.4 percent but the bottom segment is not growing at half that," he added. Shaktikanta Das Reserve Bank governor Shaktikanta Das on Wednesday met more state-run bankers to discuss the issues related to relaxing the prompt corrective action (PCA) framework, liquidity and credit flows to MSMEs, bankers said. This is the second meeting between public sector lenders and RBI since Das took charge last Tuesday, following the sudden resignation of Urjit Patel due to deep differences with the government on a host of issues, including calls for relaxing the PCA for some banks, autonomy and operational independence as well as parting at least one-third of its reserve capital to government among others. The lenders who attended the meeting included Bank of Baroda, Bank of Maharashtra, Allahabad Bank, Indian Overseas Bank, Indian Bank, Syndicate Bank, United Bank of India and Uco Bank among others. "It was a general feedback meeting. The RBI wants to know the state of individual banks. There were also discussions on the issues related to liquidity and credit flows to the MSME sector," a banker said. Das and the four deputy governors also deliberated on the prompt correction action (PCA) framework with these lenders, said another banker. Of the 21 state-owned banks, as many as 11 are under the PCA framework, which imposes lending and other restrictions on weak lenders. These are Allahabad Bank, United Bank of India, Corporation Bank, IDBI Bank, Uco Bank, Bank of India, Central Bank of India, Indian Overseas Bank, Oriental Bank of Commerce, Dena Bank and Bank of Maharashtra. At the first meeting last Wednesday, the bankers had sought some easing in the one-day default norms announced by RBI through the February 12 circular, which nullified all other debt resolution mechanisms. At the November 19 board meeting, the RBI board decided to refer the issue of relaxing PCA framework to the board of financial supervision of the central bank. The meeting also decided many other steps including a loan restructuring scheme for MSMEs with credit up to Rs 25 crore outside the IBC framework, and giving banks some concession on capital adequacy norms. GSK Pharma | Company reported lower profit at Rs 76.5 crore in Q2FY21 compared to Rs 502.7 crore, revenue fell to Rs 879 crore from Rs 882 crore YoY. Pharmaceutical giants GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer on Wednesday announced a merger of their consumer healthcare units that produce over-the-counter medicines. GSK said it would have a 68-percent controlling equity interest in the GSK Consumer Healthcare joint venture that will have combined sales of about 9.8 billion pounds ($12.7 billion, 10.9 billion euros). The tie-up of over-the-counter (OTC) brands including GSK's Sensodyne toothpaste with Pfizer's Centrum multivitamins paves the way for British group GSK to have two UK-listed companies, one specialised in the development of drugs and the other in consumer healthcare. US-based Pfizer's erectile-dysfunction drug Viagra does not form part of the tie-up, a GSK spokesman told AFP. The merger meanwhile comes as the pharmaceutical industry's biggest players seek out new blockbuster treatments following expiry of patents for some of their major drugs that has enabled rivals to offer cheaper alternatives. GSK's share price surged 7.4 per cent to 15.54 pounds on news of the deal, topping London's benchmark FTSE 100 index, which was up 0.4 percent overall in early deals. "This announcement seems to be the next brick in the wall of CEO Emma Walmsley's plan to cement Glaxo's position in this particular (OTC) space, having already bought out Novartis stake in a similar venture earlier this year, while also offloading its Horlicks (drink) business," noted Michael Hewson, chief market analyst at CMC Markets UK. "The pharmaceutical sector is likely to face enormous challenges in the years ahead with respect to margin compression and the prospect of increased competition... particularly since companies like Amazon have helped push prices lower," he added in a client note. GSK said annual cost savings should reach 500 million pounds by 2022 and predicted that the joint venture would be the global leader in OTC products with a market share of 7.3 per cent. "Within three years of the closing of the transaction, GSK intends to separate the joint venture via a demerger of its equity interest and a listing of GSK Consumer Healthcare on the UK equity market," a statement said. "Over this period, GSK will substantially complete the integration and expects to make continued progress in strengthening its Pharmaceuticals business and R&D pipeline." Earlier this month, GSK struck deals to buy US cancer-treatment specialist Tesaro for $5.1 billion and sell the night-time hot drink brand Horlicks to Unilever for 3.3 billion euros. In a separate statement, US giant Pfizer said the joint venture "will be a category leader in pain relief, respiratory, vitamin and mineral supplements, digestive health, skin health and therapeutic oral health and will be the largest global consumer healthcare business". GSK chief executive Walmsley said "the transaction also presents a clear pathway forward for GSK to create a new global Pharmaceuticals/Vaccines company... focused on science related to the immune system, use of genetics and advanced technologies". She added: "Ultimately, our goal is to create two exceptional, UK-based global companies, with appropriate capital structures, that are each well positioned to deliver improving returns to shareholders and significant benefits to patients and consumers." It is meanwhile a final act for Pfizer CEO Ian Read, who leaves his post at the end of the year, handing the reins over to the company's chief operating officer Albert Bourla. "We are pleased to announce this new joint venture for Pfizer Consumer Healthcare, delivering on our commitment to complete the strategic review for this business in 2018," Read said. "Pfizer and GSK have an excellent track record of creating successful collaborations, and we look forward to working together again to unlock the potential of our combined consumer healthcare businesses," he added. Earlier this year, Swiss group Novartis sold its stake its in its consumer healthcare joint venture to GSK for $13 billion. Meanwhile on Wednesday, Japanese company Taisho Pharmaceutical said it had offered $1.6 billion for UPSA, a French OTC drugs company owned by US giant Bristol-Myers. Bottles of Johnson & Johnson baby powder line a drugstore shelf in New York October 15, 2015. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson - RTS4S6Q India's drug regulator has decided to test Johnson & Johnson's Baby Powder for traces of asbestos, according to a report in Mint reported. The move by the Central Drugs Standard Control Organization (CDSCO) comes after a Reuters' report said that Johnson and Johnson's knew for decades about the presence of cancer-causing asbestos in the product. The central drug licensing inspectors are said to draw samples of raw material used for Johnson and Johnson's Baby Powder as well as the finished product from retail stores across the country and start its probe. "The inspectors will visit J&Js manufacturing facility, draw samples for further investigation," a senior government official told the paper. "They will be tested at the central drug laboratory," another official told the paper. Read J&J moves to limit impact of Reuters report on asbestos in Baby Powder Reuters' investigation found that while most tests in past decades found no asbestos in J&J talc and talc products, tests on Baby Powder conducted by scientists at Mount Sinai Medical Center in 1971 and Rutgers University in 1991, as well as by labs for plaintiffs in cancer lawsuits, found small amounts of asbestos. In 1972, a University of Minnesota scientist found what he called incontrovertible asbestos in a sample of Shower to Shower. Other tests by J&J's own contract labs and others periodically found small amounts of asbestos in talc from mines that supplied the mineral for Baby Powder and other cosmetic products into the early 2000s. The company did not report to the FDA three tests by three different labs from 1972 to 1975 that found asbestos in the company's talc. In response to the report, J&J said that its Baby Powder is safe and asbestos-free. It said that "any suggestion that Johnson & Johnson knew or hid information about the safety of talc is false." The company said the Reuters' report "ignores thousands of tests by J&J, regulators, leading independent labs, and academic institutions have repeatedly shown that our talc does not contain asbestos". 'The article ignores that Johnson and Johnson has cooperated fully and openly with the US Food and Drug Administration and other global regulators, providing them with all the information they requested over decades. We have also made our cosmetic talc mines and processed talc available to regulators for testing. Regulators have tested both, and they have always found our talc to be asbestos-free," the company spokesperson said. This is, however, not the first time that the product has come under the scanner. In July, the drug regulator had asked Johnson and Johnson to reveal the composition of its talcum powder following a report that the US parent was ordered to pay $4.7 billion to 22 women who claimed asbestos in its talc had caused them ovarian cancer. On July 12, a Missouri court had ordered the pharmaceutical giant to pay compensation and damages in the asbestos case. Back home in 2013, the Maharashtra Food and Drug Administration cancelled the licence of Johnson and Johnson's facility at Mulund in Mumbai after it found that 1.6 lakh packets of baby talcum powder were sterilized at another plant using ethylene oxide a chemical that is widely believed to cause cancer. "It was found that J&J deviated from their normal practice of sterilising its Baby Powder. In our investigations, we found that J&J sent batches of its talcum powder to another plant in Thane to sterilize the powder. The powder was sterilized with ethylene oxide, which is carcinogenic. The facility where they sent the powder was not licensed to treat powder. The company was charged for multiple violations and their licence was cancelled, facility shut for three months after which they went to the court and got the relief," Mahesh Zagade, former FDA commissioner, Maharashtra said. While Johnson and Johnson has dominated the talc powder market for more than 100 years, the products contributed less than 0.5 percent of the company's $76.5 billion in revenue last year. Reliance Jio continues to lead in 4G speed download chart published by telecom regulator Trai for November, despite witnessing a slight dip in its network performance at average speed of 20.3 megabit per second (Mbps). The Mukesh Ambani-led firm was fastest 4G operator with its average peak download speed in October at 22.3 Mbps. Performance of Bharti Airtel's 4G network slightly improved in November to 9.7 mbps from 9.5 mbps in October, according to the data published by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) on MySpeed Portal. Though Vodafone and Idea Cellular have merged their businesses and now operate as Vodafone Idea, Trai published their network performance separately. 4G download speed on Vodafone network too improved marginally to 6.8 mbps in November from 6.6 mbps in October, while that of Idea dipped to 6.2 mbps from 6.4 mbps. Idea, however, continued to top the chart in terms of 4G upload speed with a speed of 5.6 Mbps during the month despite decline in performance. The company had registered average upload speed of 5.9 mbps in October. The download speed plays an important role when a user watches any video, browse the Internet, access emails; and a good upload speed is required when a user wants to share data like images, videos and any other files through email or social media applications. Vodafone regained second spot in November with improvement in 4G upload speed at 4.9 mbps, while Jio slipped to third with decline in upload speed to 4.5 mbps. Airtel network registered slight improvement in average upload speed at 4 mbps in November. Both Jio and Idea have continued to maintain their leadership in their respective segments since last several months. live bse live nse live Volume Todays L/H More The year 2018 will go down in history as the year of highs and lows. Nifty and Sensex hit fresh record highs in August 2018. But since then, the ride has been bumpy Nifty50 has fallen a little over 7.4 percent while Sensex witnessed a decline of nearly 7 percent. Most technical experts feel that the trend for the market still remains to be on the upside, however, volatility could not be ruled out entirely as we step into the election year. Most experts feel that Sensex or Nifty are likely to trade in a range till the elections are over and some clarity emerges in terms of which party will form the Centre government. Market may continue to remain volatile in the first 4-6 months partly due to elections and partly due to technical breakdowns on the long-term charts. Based on our long-term trend studies, as of now, 10,280 is looking like a strong support on monthly charts, Mazhar Mohammad, Chief Strategist Technical Research & Trading Advisory, Chartviewindia.in told Moneycontrol. Violation of 10,280 shall lead to a breach of 10,000 with initial downside targets placed in the zone of 9,9859,851 whereas upsides in the first 6 months appear to be capped with no new highs but in the best case for next 6 months, a target of 11,400 can be projected, he said. Once the election uncertainty is out and we have a stable government at the Centre, an attempt towards 40,000 on the Sensex is possible, suggest experts. But, gains can only be sustained if we see a recovery in earnings growth. We expect earnings growth to drive markets to post the election results. Earnings growth is expected to rebound strongly from Q3FY19 led by corporate banks. We feel that volatility in the run-up to the general elections would provide a good entry point, Jyoti Roy, Deputy Vice President, Angel Broking told Moneycontrol. We expect the Sensex to trade in a range of 40,000-45,000 by the end of 2019 depending upon the outcome of the general elections, added Roy. For Nifty, the index after testing its all-time highs at 11,760 levels witnessed a vertical fall towards 10,000 mark in mid-2018 and took support at the psychological level of a five-figure mark. We might witness some consolidation in the first half of the year with stock-specific action but in later part once again sharp upside till 12,000 levels cant be ruled out, Shitij Gandhi, Senior Research Analyst, SMC Global Securities told Moneycontrol. On the contrary, any decisive move below 9,900 mark will open the gates for bears which can take the index towards 9,400 level as well, he said. Here is a list of top 15 stocks, based on technical charts, that could give 13-40% return in 2019: Analysts: Mazhar Mohammad, Chief Strategist Technical Research & Trading Advisory, Chartviewindia.in Siemens: Buy| LTP: Rs 970| Target: Rs 1,230| Stop Loss: Rs 850| Return 26% This counter topped out 3 years back after hitting a lifetime high of 1559 in August 2015. Since then, it was in a strong downtrend and carved out a descending channel in this process. In October 2018, it appears to have bottomed out after taking support on the demand line of the said channel with a low of 850. Hence, it can be an opportunity for investors to look into this counter and accumulate between 950 900 levels. In case if it resumes its up move after the consolidation, the next big target could be placed at Rs 1,230 as it can retrace 62% of its last leg of the fall from the highs of Rs 1,471 850. Bank of Baroda: Buy| LTP: Rs 111.70| Target: Rs 150| Stop Loss: Rs 80| Return 34% Unfortunately, PSU banks have become untouchables to many and hence they can be a better contrarian bet at this point in time as some of the bigger banks are trading less than one time to book and with single-digit earnings multiple. Technically speaking, this counter appears to be moving roughly in a broader range of 210 85 on the long-term charts and appears to have bottomed out at a recent low of 91. But, in any case, strong support is visible around 85 levels. Hence, investors should accumulate this counter between 110 90 kind of levels. In case it stabilizes and rallies eventually it should test its interim top placed at 150 levels. A stop suggested for the trade is a close below Rs 80. Mahindra & Mahindra: Buy| LTP: Rs 758| Target: Rs 933| Stop Loss: Rs 685| Return 23% Since 2013 this counter is moving in a well-defined ascending channel with multiple touch points and appears to be having a strong support around 700 levels as it bounced back on a couple of occasions from the demand line of the said channel. Hence, if the stock sustains above Rs 700 levels, a decent target of Rs 933 cant be ruled out in this counter over a period of time. Hence, investors should accumulate this counter between 730 700 kind of levels. A stop suggested for the trade is a close below Rs 685. Analyst: Shitij Gandhi, Senior Research Analyst, SMC Global Securities. Federal Bank: Buy| LTP: Rs 92.75| Target: Rs 114| Stop Loss: Rs 70| Return 23% The stock has been an underperformer throughout 2018 and was trading in a sloping channel with lower high and lower lows pattern on the weekly charts. However, for the past few weeks, the stock price has managed to hold above its 200-DEMA and has given a breakout above the falling trend line. The positive divergence on the secondary indicators on the long-term charts also suggest that prices may move further up in the coming weeks. One can accumulate the stocks in a range of 85-90 for an upside target of 114 and a stop loss below 70. Colgate Palmolive India: Buy| LTP: Rs 1301| Target: Rs 1,500| Stop Loss: Rs 1,050| Return 15% The stock is maintaining its uptrend on the long-term charts and is trading well above its short and long-term moving averages. The fresh breakout above the previous high has also been observed this month which can trigger follow up buying into the stock. At the current juncture, the stock has also given a breakout after making a rounding bottom pattern which is a bullish signal for the prices moving forward. One can accumulate the stock in a range of 1250-1300 for an upside target of 1500 and a stop loss below 1050. Berger Paints (I): Buy| LTP: Rs 323| Target: 390| Stop Loss: Rs 270| Return 20% After marking a 52-week high of 349.90, in mid-2018, the stock witnessed a hefty profit booking from higher levels and once again fell towards its 100-DEMA on the weekly interval charts. However, the stock witnessed a V shaped recovery in prices and reclaimed 300 mark on local bourses. At the current juncture, the stock has formed bullish flag pattern on medium-term charts and is on verge of a breakout above the same. So, one can accumulate the stocks in a range of 315-325 for the upside target of Rs 390 and a stop loss below 270. Cummins India: Buy| LTP: Rs 834| Target: Rs 945| Stop Loss: Rs 705| Return 13% On the weekly charts, the stock has been trading well below its short and long term since the beginning of the year but some lower level buying emerge in later half as once again stock surpassed above its 200-DEMA. On the technical front, the stock made a Double Bottom pattern around 635 levels and bounce back. Additionally, the stock has also formed a W-pattern on the weekly interval which is a bullish sign for the prices moving forward. One can accumulate the stocks in the range of Rs 790-805 for an upside target of Rs 945 and a stop loss below Rs 705. TVS Motor Company: Buy| LTP: Rs 575| Target: Rs 656| Stop Loss: 500| Return 14% Till date, the stock has fallen approximately 25 percent from its 52-week high of Rs 794 levels. However, on technical ground, the stock has been maintaining well above its 200-DEMA on weekly charts and seen consolidating in range of 515-570 from last more than eight weeks. At the current juncture, the stock has formed a symmetrical triangle pattern on the medium term interval and has also managed to give a breakout above the same this week. The hefty volumes with the rise in prices also suggest that there is more potential in the stock moving forward. So, one can accumulate the stocks in a range of 560-570 for the upside target of 656 and a stop loss below 500. Analyst: Mustafa Nadeem, CEO, Epic Research UPL: Buy| LTP: Rs 767| Target: Rs 950| Stop Loss: Rs 700| Return 23% The stock has ended its short-term correction on higher timeframe while prices are now coming out of the recent correction phase which is a positive sign for the bulls. A positive crossover in long-term moving averages (MA) indicates the strength in trend and we believe it is an opportune moment to create long side position in the stock, Raymond: Buy| LTP: Rs 856| Target: Rs 1,140| Stop Loss: Rs 720| Return 33% A breakout from a declining channel which was almost seen for a year makes the stock a healthy buy even at current levels. Given its overall formation of higher highs and lows establishes recent trough which is now acting as a viable support and gives an indication for higher targets of 1140 - 1150. Yes Bank: Buy| LTP: Rs 181| Target: Rs 254| Stop Loss: Rs 144| Return 40% The stock has corrected a lot from its all-time peaks and has seen the worst correction in the last 8 years since the financial crisis. A long-term established support line coincides with our support level established placed at 150 levels while a range-bound consolidation in the last few weeks indicates a bottoming out formation. The stock can be accumulated with the defined risk of 144 and a target of 254. Power Finance Corporation: Buy| LTP: 91.65| Target: Rs 135| Stop Loss: Rs 65| Return 47% The stock is in a sideways range since the last 10 years establishing a lower range of around 70 and a higher range of around 160. A cyclic analysis makes this stock an investment bet for a year with lower support placed at 65 which is acting as a risk and range of 70 - 80 can be a good buying opportunity for a target of 135. Analyst: Amit Gupta, Head of Derivatives at ICICIdirect Asian Paints: Buy| LTP: Rs 1,334| Target: Rs 1,635| Stop Loss: Rs 1,110 | Return 22% Asian Paints has continuously found support near its long-term mean levels. Recently, after testing these levels, the stock recovered on the back of a surge in delivery. We believe that with lower crude prices and expected higher FII flows, fresh upsides are likely to be seen in the stock. Nestle India: Buy| LTP: Rs 11,181 | Target: Rs 13,550 | Stop Loss: Rs 9,075 | Return 21% After a long consolidation since 2015, Nestle India surpassed its mean+2 sigma in 2017. Since then, all major declines were limited towards these levels. We expect the positive bias to remain intact in the stock above these levels. United Spirits: Buy| LTP: Rs 636| Target: Rs 775| Stop Loss: Rs 520| Return 21% United Spirits tends to find directional move once it surpasses its long-term mean in either direction. Currently, long-term mean for the stock is near Rs 520 above which the stock remains a buying opportunity. The views and investment tips expressed by investment experts on moneycontrol.com are their own and not that of the website or its management. Moneycontrol.com advises users to check with certified experts before taking any investment decisions. Shares of Indiabulls Real Estate (IBREL) jumped 7 percent after the board approved a scheme of arrangement to facilitate divestment of assets in Chennai to the US-based Blackstone Group. IBRE had earlier this year agreed to sell its commercial project One Indiabulls Park in Chennai to Blackstone Group. The stock gained as much as 10.02 percent, quoting at Rs 91.65. After the demerger, the company's Chennai assets, currently owned by India Land and Properties Limited (ILPL), will be demerged into Indiabulls Infrastructure Limited (IIL). IIL is an indirect subsidiary of Indiabulls Real Estate, while ILPL is a direct subsidiary. The residual businesses of ILPL will merge into IBREL. The new scheme is pending approval from market regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) and National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT). At 13:16 hours Indiabulls Real Estate was quoting at Rs 89.30, up 7.14 percent. live bse live nse live Volume Todays L/H More Lemon Tree Hotels shares gained 3 percent in morning on Wednesday as the company added new hotel property in Pune, Maharashtra. The hotel chain company informed exchanges that it has signed a License Agreement for a 69 room property located at Viman Nagar, Pune, Maharashtra under its brand Lemon Tree Hotel. The hotel is expected to be operational by March, 2019, it said. It will third hotel besides other 2 hotels owned by the company in Pune. Carnation Hotels Private Limited, the hotel management arm of the company will be operating and marketing this hotel, Lemon Tree said. At 10:29 hours IST, the stock was quoting at Rs 71.00, up Rs 0.55, or 0.78 percent on the BSE. The Nifty50 is likely to open higher on Wednesday following positive trend seen in other Asian markets. The index rose 20 points higher at 10,908 on Tuesday. Trends on SGX Nifty indicate a positive opening for the broader index in India, a rise of 32.5 points or 0.3 percent. Nifty futures were trading around 10,987-level on the Singaporean Exchange. The benchmark S&P 500 stock index ended little changed in a choppy trading session on Tuesday as the possibility of a partial US government shutdown raised investor jitters ahead of a highly anticipated meeting of the Federal Reserve. Asian share markets played second fiddle to bonds on Wednesday as a spectacular fall in the price of oil fanned speculation the US Federal Reserve might be done with tightening after its policy meeting later in the day. Oil prices tumbled more than 5 percent on Tuesday in heavy trade due to fears of oversupply and deteriorating demand, extending a selloff that has taken major crude benchmarks down more than 30 percent from an October peak. Stocks in news: New generation private sector IDFC Bank and non-banking financial company Capital First announced the completion of their merger on December 18, creating a combined loan asset book of Rs 1.03 lakh crore for the merged entity IDFC First Bank. State-owned IDBI Bank said it has received the final letter from Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) for an open offer to acquire additional 26 percent in the lender. Private sector lender Yes Bank on December 18 sold more than 2 percent stake of Fortis Healthcare in open market transactions. Note that the stock has lost 15 percent year-to-date basis. PVR: Board said it was considering raising funds on December 21. Lemon Tree Hotels: Company signed license agreement for 69 room property in Pune. This hotel is expected to be operational by March next year. Dr Reddy's Labs: Gets Tentative US FDA Nod For Sapropterin Dihydrochloride Technical Recommendations: We spoke to SMC Global Securities and heres what they have to recommend: Capital First: Buy| Target: Rs 612| Stop Loss: Rs 520| Return 10% United Spirits: Buy| Target: Rs 710| Stop Loss: Rs 600| Return 10% Exide Industries: Buy| Target: Rs 281| Stop Loss: Rs 240| Return 10% The views and investment tips expressed by investment expert on moneycontrol.com are his own and not that of the website or its management. Moneycontrol.com advises users to check with certified experts before taking any investment decisions. Later Tuesday night, the Senate in a rare bipartisan act approved a prison reform bill that would give judges more discretion when sentencing some drug offenders and boosting prisoner rehabilitation efforts, according to The Associated Press. It also would reduce the life sentences for some drug offenders with three convictions, or three strikes, to 25 years, according to the AP. The changes would only apply to federal prisoners. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., lead the charge on the prison reform measure, offering in a prepared statement: It was supported by an amazing coalition of unlikely partners progressive Democrats and conservative Republicans, law enforcement groups and civil rights groups, business leaders and faith-based organizations. By passing this legislation, we will now begin to relieve our overcrowded prisons, redirect funding to our most pressing crime prevention efforts, make our communities safer, and ensure the integrity of our justice system. Read more here. business Technical Views | Top buy & sell ideas by Ashwani Gujral, Sudarshan Sukhani, Mitessh Thakkar for short term Mitessh Thakkar of mitesshthakkar.com recommends buying Bajaj Finance with a stop loss of Rs 2508 and target of Rs 2585, Berger Paints with a stop loss of Rs 322.5 and target of Rs 340 and Indian Bank with a stop loss of Rs 238.5 and target of Rs 255. After spending months searching for a buyer, IDFC Financial Holding Company - a part of IDFC - has decided to retain its fund management business. IDFC Asset Management (AMC) will not be sold. Moneycontrol reached out to IDFC AMC but the fund house refused to comment or confirm the news. Two sources in the know of the development, including a senior executive, confirmed to Moneycontrol that IDFC has shelved plans to sell the asset management company. The board of the group company felt that it makes sense to hold the fund house and grow it over time rather than sell it, said one of the two people who spoke to us on condition of anonymity. The other person said IDFC has now decided to focus on making its underlying businesses more retail-focused. On December 18, IDFC Bank and Capital First, a retail-focused non-banking financial company, merged to form IDFC First Bank which is said to focus mainly on building its retail loan book. Industry officials said the fund house failed to elicit the kind of valuation it sought. The first person said that the recent spate of regulations by the capital market regulator, Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) may have also impacted the fund houses valuations, something that IDFC AMC did not accept. Throughout the year of 2018, SEBI took a string of measures to reduce the fees that mutual fund schemes collect from investors that, many industry officials say, will impact a fund houses future earnings. Industry officials had earlier told us while the fund house expected around Rs 5,000 crore, it got bids in the range of Rs 3,500 4,000 crore. According to investment bankers who did not wish to be named, Avendus Capital, Reliance Nippon Life Asset Management, IndusInd Bank, BlackRock Inc were among the firms that expressed interest in buying. Of the above bidders, its talks with Avendus were in the final stages. However, the deal did not go through. Established in the year 2000, IDFC AMC is Indias 12th largest fund house. In early 2017, IDFC had bought out Natixis Global Asset Management Asias 25 per cent stake in the AMC. In 2010, Natixis is a French-based fund house. Realty portal Magicbricks has over 10 lakh property listings and claims to have increased its reach to over 16,000 localities across the country. Out of the 10 lakh active properties listed on its platform, 58 percent are for sale and 42 percent for rent. A total of 2.1 lakh listings are posted by individual property owners from across 700 towns and cities. Around 55 percent of the properties on its platform are from the affordable and the mid-segment range of Rs 20 lakh, Rs 20-40 lakh and Rs 50-70 lakh. In an interview with Moneycontrol, Sudhir Pai, CEO, Magicbricks.com, shares details of new platforms launched by the company, impact of regulatory mechanisms and future plans. Q: Has the online space for real estate transactions evolved? A: Our portal has now been around for more than a decade. As many as 70 percent of homebuyers are searching for properties online and we have more or less crossed the bridge of creating awareness and getting more people online. Having said that, where portals do well is in the search and discovery process. We want to go beyond that. At some point, we see ourselves becoming a full solutions provider, handhold the buyer till he/she buys and stay with the buyer well beyond the purchase. Globally too, there is no such thing as people buying online. A house is a big buy and involves a significant amount of investment. People will always deeply research online but the actual transaction will happen offline, it does not necessarily happen online. Except perhaps in case of an auction platform where properties are bid online. It is akin to a matrimonial website where a customer may find the partner online but before getting into a relationship, he would certainly want to get to know a person better. Q: Which cities are driving numbers on your online platform? A: We have over 800 people spread across 35 cities and our reach is beyond tier 1 and tier 2 cities. More recently we have chased some specific segments. We have been chasing listings from banks that sit on a fair bunch of repossessed properties and most retail customers do not have access to them. We now have a few thousand properties in this segment. We also have supply coming from co-living partners. Our commercial listings also showcase co-working spaces. If you have built up over a million listings that are available on the site at this point of time, all of that has come through these categories. Our recent focus is on going deeper into the top six cities. Q: Has there been a significant impact on property purchase and sale post regulatory mechanisms such as RERA and GST being put in place? A: The impact of regulations such as RERA has been significant. Its jurisdiction is limited to primary properties. We have posted RERA numbers for most of the projects on our site and clearly, there is consumer preference for properties that are RERA registered. In terms of regulation, the number of transactions in India are quite small. Both primary and secondary market put together, we do less than a million units a year for a country of our size. In Australia, which has a population equal to Delhi NCR, they do 600,000 units a year. While we have a regulation right now, more needs to be done in this direction. Also, transaction costs in India are huge. The country needs at least 5X number of transactions at least on the purchase side. Q: Are buyers preferring to buy from the secondary market as there are more ready-to-move-in units available in this segment? A: Buyers search across segments. They pick up what is probably the best house for them but clearly there is an inclination to pick up ready-to-move-in homes. The secondary market in that sense has a bit of an edge because the risk of transactions going bad is really low. Data suggests that the secondary market is 2X or 2.5X bigger than the primary market and that ratio has not necessarily changed over time and will remain so. The rental market in India is also big. There is a bit of seasonality as people change jobs during April-May period. Q: How do people arrive at a decision? Do they give priority to location or to infrastructure available in an area? A: Consumers typically go through the following stages first stage is how much can you afford, the second stage involves zeroing in on two or three localities. Once these stages are crossed, they typically visit properties, negotiate pricing and then finally decide on what property they would want to buy. This is followed by the transaction phase the legal, paperwork, home finance, mortgage and finally closure of the deal. Today, all information on project prices, localities, even project comparison is available online. The site visit phase is offline and will remain so. Online portals do not necessarily play a role there and going ahead we want to play a role in assisting people when they make site visits. The rest of the process, once you have selected a property, is generally face-to-face. Q: Has the nature of queries changed over the years? A: Sellers when they post their properties often post functional attributes such as location and the budget. Now owners are open to providing additional information such as whether their house is open to both people who are vegetarian and non-vegetarian, whether the house supports people on a wheelchair etc. We have also allowed buyers to ask owners specific questions. We now want to take it to the next level. In the US agents work with owners and actually stage a house, dress up a house. We would like to help owners do all of that. Q: Will your website be a one-stop shop for co-working spaces? A: From a one-stop shop perspective, we will prioritise the residential segment. Some of the new segments we have entered are co-living, commercial, PG etc. We see ourselves as a website that will address all segments of real estate. As for commercial, we are focusing on three segments office, shops and organised retail, but there are also commercial listings for warehouses and co-working. Q: How has the bank auctions segment performed? A: We have tied up with about 10 banks so far and have put up over 700 listings on our site for auctions. We have also conducted live auctions for some banks. We hand hold buyers through the entire process. The value of 729 properties auctioned so far is Rs 766 crore. The number of properties sold through e-auction was 128 and the value of properties sold was Rs 112 crore. Q: How have luxury projects performed on your portal? A: There is definitely higher traction in the affordable housing segment. Problem with the affordable segment is that there is limited supply and excessive demand whereas in the case of the luxury segment there is no shortage of supply and the demand is limited. The spike in growth is actually from the affordable and mid-market segment. While the luxury market has been a bit sluggish, bottom segments affordable and mid- have seen a huge spike. Vandana.ramnani@nw18.com The Madras High Court on December 18 directed former chief minister J Jayalalithaa's niece J Deepa and nephew J Deepak to verify their aunt's property details. The court had earlier impleaded the duo as respondents in an appeal filed by two persons in a case related to the administration of the late leader's properties. The plea was filed by K Pugazhenthi and P Janakiraman both claiming themselves to be members of the AIADMK party. When the plea came up, a division bench of Justice N Kirubakaran and Justice Abdul Quddhose directed Deepa and Deepak to find out and verify whether any of the properties were left out from the list filed before the court. The court has asked Deepa and Deepak to verify as to whether the properties disclosed by Jayalalthaa in her affidavits before the Election Commission and those shown in the Supreme Court judgment in the disproportionate assets case, were correct or not. "If it is so, give the list of the properties which have not been disclosed either in the affidavit filed before the Election Commission or in the judgment of the Supreme Court in the disproportionate wealth case," the bench said. The court posted the matter for further hearing to January 2. Jayalalithaa died on December 5, 2016. According to Pugazhenthi and Janakiraman, since the value of the properties left behind by the deceased runs to hundred crores of rupees, a proper administration is required by the order of this court. A single judge has rejected the claim for suppression of facts and hence, the present appeal. The petitioners said the value of the assets recorded in the judgment of the criminal court in Bengaluru during the hearing of the disproportionate assets case was put at more than Rs 55 crore. According to their estimate, the assets were now valued at Rs 913 crore. Apprehending that some third parties were in illegal custody of the properties left behind by the late leader, the petitioners prayed that "the valuables and properties are to be secured, preserved and administered by granting appropriate letter of administration by the court." The court has said appropriate orders have to be passed to safeguard the vast properties left by the late leader. At the same time, the "Class II legal heirs" (Deepa and Deepak) have to be made as parties to the proceedings, it said. Edtech startup Toppr has raised $35 million in Series C funding round led by Eight Road Ventures, Helion Ventures, Kaizen PE and SAIF Partners. The startup has now raised a cumulative $85 million and is using these funds to fuel their adaptive platform that has over 6 million registered students. Toppr is utilising artificial intelligence based machine learning algorithms on top of this strong infrastructure, to personalise learning paths for every student. This capital will be used to create brand awareness, accelerate user acquisition, increase our geographical footprint and invest in training and development, said Zishaan Hayath, CEO and founder, Toppr. Kaizen PE, has joined hands with Topprs existing investors. A robust pedagogical approach that keeps students engaged and delivers outcomes, thoughtful use of artificial intelligence, and a strong management team are aspects that convinced us about the companys ability to continue making a significantly positive difference to the way children learn, said Sandeep Aneja, Managing Partner, Kaizen PE . The company is pursuing aggressive expansion plans to reach out to students across the country and to increase its geographical presence. Toppr projects its revenue to be over $500 million in the next three years. live bse live nse live Volume Todays L/H More This is the verbatim transcript of Sun Pharmaceutical Industries management call with analysts. Moderator: Ladies and gentlemen, good day, and welcome to the Sun Pharmaceutical Industries Limited Q2 FY '19 Earnings Conference Call. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I now hand the conference over to Mr. Nimish Desai. Thank you. Hand over to you, sir. Nimish Desai: Thank you. Good evening, and a warm welcome to our Second Quarter Fiscal '19 Earnings Call. I'm Nimish from the Sun Pharma Investor Relations team. We hope you received the Q2 financials and the press release that were sent out earlier in the day. These are also available on our website. We have with us Mr. Dilip Shanghvi, Managing Director; and Mr. Sudhir Valia, Whole Time Director; Mr. Kal Sundaram, Whole Time Director and CEO of India Imaging Markets and Consumer Healthcare Business; and Mr. Abhay Gandhi, CEO of North America. Together, team will discuss performance highlights, update on strategies and respond to any questions that you may have. As is usual, for the ease of discussion, we'll look at consolidated financials. Just as a reminder, this call is being recorded and the replay will be available for the next few days. The call transcript will also be put up on our website shortly. The discussion today might include certain forward-looking statements, and this must be viewed in conjunction with the risks that our business faces. You're requested to ask 2 questions in the initial round. If you have more questions, you are requested to rejoin the queue. I also request all of you to kindly send in your questions that may remain unanswered today. I'll now hand over the call to Mr. Shanghvi. Dilip Shanghvi: Welcome, and thank you for joining us for this earnings call after the announcement of financial results for the second quarter of FY '19. Let me discuss some of the key highlights. Our overall sales for the quarter were INR 6,846 crores, a growth of 4% over the same quarter last year. Our soft Q2 performance does not reflect the actual health of the underlying business. We continue to focus on strengthening our core operations and enhancing our overall efficiencies, and we are certainly positive on our performance for the rest of the year. We continue to progress further our speciality initiatives. Abhay will discuss more details on our speciality initiatives later. We also continue with our efforts to control costs and improving efficiencies. These steps are necessary to ensure that we continue to earn reasonable returns in the current competitive state of the U.S. generic market. Post the clearance of Halol facility by the FDA in June, we've started receiving approvals from Halol for the U.S. As indicated earlier, we expect a gradual increase in new approvals from Halol for the U.S. I will now hand over the call to Mr. Valia for discussion of the Q2 performance. Sudhir Valia: Thank you, Mr. Shanghvi. Good evening, everyone, and welcome to all of you. Our Q2 financials are already with you, and we will look at the key consolidated financials. Overall, Q2 sales INR 6,846 crores, up by 4% over Q2 last year. Material cost as a percentage of the sales was 25.7%, lower than Q2 last year. Staff cost was at 21.5% of the sales, higher than Q2 last year. This -- the increase is slightly due to the expenses of our speciality team in the U.S. The other expenditure was at 31.8% of the sales same as Q2 last year. As a result of the above, the EBITDA for Q2 was at INR 1,440 crores, with EBITDA margin at 21%. Adjusted net profit for Q2 for the 2019 was at INR 996 crores, with resulting adjusted net profit margin of 14.5%. After accounting for a provision of INR 1,214 crores for the estimated settlement amount to be able to all remaining plaintiff related to the Modafinil antitrust litigation in the U.S., the net loss for the quarter was at INR 2,019 crores (sic) [INR 219 crores]. Adjusted EPS for the quarter is INR 4.10 crores. Let me now discuss the quarter-on-quarter movement. Material cost at 25.7% of the sales was lower than June quarter, mainly due to the lower cost of goods for Taro and write-back of certain provisions made in the past. Other expenses were higher than June quarter, mainly due to the build-out of the speciality business in the U.S. Now we will discuss the half-year performance for first half. The net sales were at INR 13,985 crores, a growth of 10% over first half last year. Material cost, as a percentage of the net sales, was 27.6%, which is slightly lower than H1 last year. The staff cost for the first half was 20.8%, same as H1 last year, while other expenses were 13.4% lower than H1 last year. As a result of the above, the EBITDA for the first half was at INR 2,961 crores, a growth of 25% over first half last year. The resulting EBITDA margin is at 21.2%. The adjusted net profit H1 2019 was at INR 1,978 crores, up by 38% over H1 last year, with the resulting adjusted net profit margin of 14%. The reported net profit for H1 at INR 764 crores was after providing an amount of INR 1,214 crores for estimated settlement amount payable to all the remaining plaintiff related to the Modafinil antitrust litigations in the U.S. Let me now briefly discuss Taro's performance. Taro posted for Q2 '19 sales of $159 million, down 6% over Q2 last year. For the first half, the sales were $314 million, down 5% first half last year. The Taro net profit at Q2 was $63 million, up by 19% over Q2 last year. Net profit for first half '19 was $130 million, up by 21% over last half last year. I now hand over to Kal Sundaram, who will share the performance of our India and emerging market business. Kalyanasundaram Subramanian: Thank you, Mr. Valia. First, let me take you to the performance of our India business. For quarter 2, sales of branded formulation in India were INR 1,860 crores, a degrowth of 16% over Q2 last year and accounting for approximately 27% of our total sales. The decline was mainly on (inaudible) a planned inventory reduction in supply chain, coupled with higher base of Q2 last year, which had witnessed post-GST destocking. Year-to-date, the secondary sales to stockists is tracking to plan and is growing at low teens year-on-year. Sun Pharma is the largest pharmaceutical company in India and holds approximately 8.3% market share in over INR 126,000 crore pharmaceutical market as per September 2018 AIOCD-AWACS report, as per latest SMSRC report, Sun Pharma is ranked #1 based, on share of prescriptions with the 22 classes -- 12 classes of doctors. For Q2, 13 new products were launched in the Indian market. Let me now discuss our performance in emerging markets. Our sales in emerging markets were USD 195 million for Q2 and accounting for 20% of total sales. While we continue to grow the business in local currency terms, many emerging market currencies have depreciated, thus impacting our reported growth for emerging markets. Key markets which contributed the growth were Romania, Eastern Europe, Brazil and Mexico and Latam markets. Now I'll hand over the call to Abhay. Abhay? Abhay Gandhi: Thank you, Mr. Kal. I will briefly discuss the performance highlights of our U.S. business. For quarter 2, our overall sales in the U.S. were up by 11% at USD 342 million, accounting for approximately 35% of overall sales. Let me update you on the developments on our speciality business. We are recently commercialized Ilumya in U.S., and we are excited with the initial response to the launch. With this launch, we have already commercialized 2 speciality products in the U.S. in the first half. We have also received U.S. FDA approval for Cequa and plan to launch it in the U.S. during the course of this year. Although we have built the front-end infrastructure for the speciality business in the U.S., there would be specific marketing and other costs at the time of launch of these products. They will entail high upfront investments. I will now hand over the call to Mr. Shanghvi. Dilip Shanghvi: Thank you, Abhay. I will briefly discuss the performance highlights of our other business as well as give you an update on our R&D initiatives. Formulation sales in the Rest of the World market, excluding U.S. and emerging markets were USD 108 million in Q2, a degrowth of 2% over last year. Rest of the markets accounted for approximately 11% of quarter 1 revenue. We continue to focus on developing and utilizing APIs for our captive consumption for the benefits of vertical integration. For Q2, our external sales for our API business was INR 426 crores, up by 10% over Q2 last year. We continue to invest in R&D for enhancing our pipeline. Consolidated R&D investments for Q2 was INR 452 crores, accounting for 6.6% of sales. Our current generic pipeline for the U.S. market includes 134 ANDAs and 6 NDAs awaiting for approval for the U.S. -- from the U.S. FDA. We continue to invest in R&D for enhancing our pipeline. Consolidated R&D investments for Q2 was INR 452 crores, accounting for 6.6% of sales. Our current generic pipeline for the U.S. market includes 134 ANDAs and 6 NDAs awaiting for approval for the U.S. -- from the U.S. FDA. With this, I would like to leave the floor open for questions. Moderator: The first question is from the line of Chirag Dagli from HDFC Asset Management. Chirag Dagli: Sir, can you indicate the magnitude of increase in the speciality operating expenditure that we've seen in the first half of FY'19? A ballpark should help, sir. Abhay Gandhi: I think the most significant expense we have incurred the quarter is on the expansion of the field force for the impending launch of Cequa. That is the biggest expense. And then on the marketing-related activities geared up towards the launch of all the 3 products actually, Ilumya, Cequa and XELPROS. So that's a very big ramp-up that we have had in the quarter 2. As we get closer to market, I mean, some of these expenses are already in your base and some will get target when we are close to launch. Chirag Dagli: So this is spread across both the line items, the staff costs as well as other related expenses. Dilip Shanghvi: Yes. Abhay Gandhi: Yes. Chirag Dagli: Fair point, sir. And sir, in your initial comments you said you were evaluating generic R&D, does this mean that there's a chance that on an absolute basis the generic R&D spend can come down? Dilip Shanghvi: I don't know whether we will be able to quantify the total value. But many products that we use to look at for the development in the past, we are now not looking at as important product for us to focus on and develop. So to that extent, I think the relative attractiveness of products have changed. Chirag Dagli: Okay, sir. And sir, just one more question if I can squeeze. In terms of what you've paid for Odomzo and what you've spent on tildrakizumab, ballpark, do you think that you've spent about 2x what you've paid for Odomzo for tildrakizumab? Is the payoff period expected to be dramatically different? Or payout profile, payback profile, whichever way you think about this IRR or NPV, is it expected to be dramatically different for tildrakizumab versus Odomzo? Dilip Shanghvi: So Abhay, would you like to answer this? Abhay Gandhi: Actually, I don't have the comparative numbers with me right now. But all I will say at this point is that, internally, we have a certain way of looking at things. And we have known there's no dramatic difference between products. But I'm just saying at the top of my mind, specific cases of Odomzo and Ilumya I don't have the figures in front of me. Dilip Shanghvi: Yes. But generally, my sense I think is that the ramp-up in the [items] of business is not as a rapid as originally we had said that we will be able to achieve. That is something that we're working to fix. And I think if I look at the initial uptake of Ilumya, I think the initial uptake, specially factoring in all of the competitive scenario, I think it's quite exciting. Would you agree with that assessment, Abhay? Abhay Gandhi: Yes, sure. Sure. Moderator: The next question is from the line of Prakash Agarwal from Axis Capital. Prakash Agarwal: Sir, just a question on the U.S. business on the Q-on-Q decline, especially ex Taro, if you could help us explain what are the key parts which is leading to that kind of decline. Abhay Gandhi: I think primarily have been the -- first quarter had a larger component of the Yonsa sales. In the second quarter, that same quantum of sales we have not seen until the primary (inaudible). Otherwise, all other parts of the business are trending as per plan. Prakash Agarwal: Sir, but delta is quite large, it's more than $40 million. So there'll be more elements of some AG sales of Welchol or which continued in Q2 also, or Halol or some gains on Halol or whatever. I mean, because Yonsa, $40 million not able to get the numbers. Abhay Gandhi: The biggest one is Yonsa, and the generic business is more or less having a similar kind of numbers month-on-month that I see. And so, as Mr. Shanghvi also mentioned, there hasn't been a growth on Odomzo and there has been no fall either. So the way I look at the numbers, I think the biggest contributor is Yonsa. Prakash Agarwal: Okay. And there's no major Q-on-Q decline in the base portfolio is what you're saying. Abhay Gandhi: Yes. When I look at the base portfolio, I don't find a big decline. Prakash Agarwal: Okay. Fair enough. And secondly, on the gross margin side, there was mention about write-back of certain provisions. So I understand this is onetime, but what could be the quantum? Would we normalize Q1 gross margin as a base or how should we look at it? Dilip Shanghvi: I say it's difficult for us to respond to that question. Yes, H1 I think is a better indicator. Prakash Agarwal: But could you -- is it possible to quantify the... Dilip Shanghvi: It's difficult, yes? Because we can't say which product will sell more. Difficult to -- and we have very different product margins. If we sell a product with higher margin, then it will have some impact on the overall margin. So difficult for us to quantify but I think H1 is a reasonable number. Moderator: The next question is from the line of Abhishek Sharma from IIFL. Abhishek Sharma: Sir, I had a question around India market decline. Last year, when we had this GST event, that also would have given you an opportunity to do destocking. In fact, it was forced upon you. So I was just wondering, why this onetime inventory reduction after such a drastic event last year. Did we aggressively restock in the market post event? Or was there some structural way of doing things that we are now trying to change? Kalyanasundaram Subramanian: I think if you go back to last year, Q1 was weak for rest in the industry. Q2 was quite strong. And I sort of said close to normal inventory levels reached at that point. The other thing I'll mention will be this is what I've -- my recollection of what I've seen in our actual report is, [Sankyo] average inventory level at the sort of stockist level is some of the lowest in the industry. So pretty much what I'll say will be inventory levels are sort of fairly very well monitored and we focus on prescription generation. Much about sort of internal measurement is based on, the stock is to uptake and not necessarily under primary sales. So where I'm concluding is last year, it was not that first half was in totality weak. The first quarter was weak, compensated by second quarter. Compared to that coming into this year, overall as a company and sort of looking at our [billables] also here, our efforts are to optimize working capital, improve ROCE, et cetera, is part of that initiative. We are doing a planned destocking, it's a onetime event. We are not planning to repeat to through the year. And I'm fairly confident the underlying business is in good shape. Like I mentioned, it's in sort of low teens is the first half growth. And I'm confident we'll maintain the momentum going into the second half. Abhishek Sharma: And just like the destocking quarter, GST destocking quarter last year, there was a bounce back across the industry. Would see a similar kind of a bounce back for you in the second half? Kalyanasundaram Subramanian: No, no, no. What I'm saying is the underlying demand will be sort of quite robust, and we are not planning for a destocking at this stage. Moderator: The next question is from the line Anubhav Aggarwal from Credit Suisse. Anubhav Aggarwal: Continuing from the last question, can you please indicate the quantum of this inventory reduction? And did it -- particular to any -- corresponding to any particular therapy? Because it can't happen that, across therapies, you just take inventory reduction. Kalyanasundaram Subramanian: I don't quite remember the sort of rupees and crores. What I remember is without the destocking, the degrowth would have been low single digits. And it was not across particular therapy area, it's more broad based. Anubhav Aggarwal: Sir, can you explain this? I don't understand this -- your comment that it's a broad-based inventory reduction. How would that happen in general? So you're saying that it's a ROCE improvement initiative. So in general, the inventory -- even if it could happen, the inventory levels were significantly higher that you wanted to reduce now across the therapies. Sorry, I just don't get this. Kalyanasundaram Subramanian: Anyway, Anubhav, as you are may be aware, we have a distributor to basically sell the stockist -- what I would say is sell inventory into stockists in the country. So the inventory reduction is not at stockist level, which I mentioned is probably some of the lowest in the industry. This sort of fell into the super distributor, super stockist or distributor of our company. Understood? Anubhav Aggarwal: Yes, that's helpful. Second question is on the balance sheet. We have seen tangibles increasing by almost INR 2,000 crores in the first half. Can you help? Because I don't remember you guys made any acquisitions this year. Sudhir Valia: Yes. So this is regarding the capitalization of the speciality products in the current year. So related only to that. Anubhav Aggarwal: But which item is this bucket is coming from? So where were these items -- because I see tangibles under development also going from INR 1,000 crores to INR 600 crores. So where were these items earlier present in the balance sheet? Sudhir Valia: So the overall milestones for the speciality products paid to date is also included in this. So the -- post the approvals, the launch of these have been capitalized accordingly, the intangibles have increased. Dilip Shanghvi: So we -- there were also many approval events. So many what you call milestones would have been triggered based on the approvals. So depending on how the agreements have been signed, you will have milestone events also linked with those approvals. So some of these are back-ended and some of these are front-ended. So I think that is what [merely] he's trying to explain to you. Anubhav Aggarwal: But just the quantum delivery was $300 million is a large quantum, that's why I was thinking the milestones can't be so large, that's why my question was there. Dilip Shanghvi: But I think it's only milestones. Moderator: The next question is from the line of Nitin Agarwal of IDFC Securities. Nitin Agarwal: Sir, on the R&D cost, we've had a reasonably muted H1, how's -- versus what our guidance of 8% to 9% R&D spend for the year. I mean, do we see a meaningful ramp-up in the second half of the year? Or are we going to be much lower than our initial guidance on R&D, sir? Dilip Shanghvi: So we will be actually much higher than what we are. I think I also said that in my [readout] that some of the speciality business related R&D and some of the initiatives of clinical studies, those costs are likely to be in the second half. Also I think in our internal calculations, we also calculate the, what you call, product-related milestones also as an R&D cost. It's not reflected in the financial, but when we look at it ultimately, it's linked to the approval of the product. Nitin Agarwal: And sir, on that metric -- including that metric that you have -- that you had mentioned around the milestones, are we tracking the 8% to 9%, or it's -- even with the milestones at this point of time? Dilip Shanghvi: No, no. With milestones, we've actually gone significantly higher. Nitin Agarwal: Okay. Fair enough. And secondly, likewise, on the other thing that you've been guiding to fairly regularly is on the other on the SG&A sort of the higher because of speciality spends. Now you've had some increase in H1, so is bulk of the increase that'll happen already in the base or we have some more increase to come through? Dilip Shanghvi: So Abhay, maybe you can respond. Abhay Gandhi: I did not get the question. Can you please repeat the question. Dilip Shanghvi: His question is whether all the costs related to speciality business are in the base, or you will see some additional cost. Abhay Gandhi: There will be. I mean, I think especially in quarter 4, there will be an increase. Plus when you launch your 2, 3, 4 products almost [primarily], there will be a lot of backdoor group meetings that we will conduct in what it is that we will initiate. So there will be -- I mean, I would not say all of the cost is in the base. So probably, there'll be some which are things which we will have to do in the first few months of launch as part of what activities and strategies to make the product successful. Moderator: The next question is from the line of Saion Mukherjee from Nomura Securities. Saion Mukherjee: Sir, just continuing on that point on SG&A spend. We have seen some increase of around INR 100 crores Q-on-Q, but there would have been some impact on rupee depreciation also. So I mean, you had earlier mentioned there will be significance. So you would say the large part of the increase has already come and what you are going to see in Q4 will be relatively lower. Abhay Gandhi: What we are seeing that you'd -- sorry, Dilip, you were saying something? Dilip Shanghvi: I was saying I didn't fully understand the question. Saion Mukherjee: Sir, what increase we have seen around $14 million on a sequential basis, because I was expecting because of the tildra launch this quarter, it would've come, right? And that happened towards the end of it. So I was wondering whether this increase sort of captures the kind of expense you would need for tildra or more of it will come? And on top of that, there will be expenses related to Cequa. Exactly trying to understand the quantum of increase that we could see, let's say, when we enter Q4 -- or in Q4, rather, when Cequa and tildra both are marketed. Abhay Gandhi: That is what I'm trying to explain repeatedly. That I think in the next 2 quarters, the marketing-related costs will actually lower because we'll be working towards making the product successful. So while we feel who's first, it will be now into base almost like a constant going ahead. And then the marketing spend in the first few months of launch will be higher. Saion Mukherjee: Okay. Okay. Sir, my second question would -- is on Yonsa. You mentioned that was a big delta quarter-on-quarter. So I mean, how do you see this going forward? I mean, is it all but related to some kind of inventory fill that happened led to that increase? And how do you see our outlook going forward for this product? Abhay Gandhi: I will not call it an inventory buildup. But clearly, out of the gate, the product moored out pretty fast. In the latter half of the year, I mean, we will have -- we may not be able to see that kind of an outgo of the product from the warehouses. So to the extent, I mean, the quarter was a little slower for Yonsa as compared to the first quarters'. Saion Mukherjee: Okay. Okay, sir. And the final one question if I can, on this Modafinil litigation. You still have one more settlement to go, right, sir, and is it possible to quantify it? Because you have a settlement earlier, now there's still one more left. Any color that you can give. And is there any other settlement of any other product... Dilip Shanghvi: I think that we have explained that this reflects our estimation of the total liability. Saion Mukherjee: Okay. Okay. Okay. And sir, you -- there is no recourse to Daiichi for this as part of your... Sailesh T. Desai: And this Nimish, can you rejoin the queue, please. Moderator: The next question is from the line of Sameer Baisiwala from Morgan Stanley. Sameer Baisiwala: I have just one on Ilumya. Can you give some quantitative benchmark or some color when you say that the initial uptake has been good. I mean, that would be great. And second is, given that it's a competitive market, so which -- do you have a customer or a patient segmentation which is really taking up Ilumya? Abhay Gandhi: Sameer, the latter question, obviously, I cannot answer [after] my customers in the segmentation. I mean, it's competitive, so I cannot really give you any color on that. On the core, well, let me say that we are pretty clear of who are the customers we want to reach. And so far, and I see the first month -- I mean, last [year], we -- first month we completed of having Ilumya in the market, and I see a large number of the customers whom we had targeted in the first quarter, those customers which would at least try the product and see what will happen. On the access side again, the [theories] that we have seen is more or less as part of the expectation. Of course, it's an ongoing discussion with different [case] one by one. And since we are more on the medical side, then we have to lean with the larger number of customer, because the medical formularies are run by individual payers. So we have a very large number of customers that we need to go to. But overall, coverage has not proved to be a barrier to the customer getting the product getting the product indication that's in the product, and that is very heartening. A long way to go, it's only a month into the business. We are learning along the way and we are improvising along the way. But the team and I feel very confident about this product. Sameer Baisiwala: Abhay, I just want to point, should we take the previous 2 IL launches as a benchmark as to how they did in first 3, 6, 9 months? Is that the right way to look at it? And second is, given the fact the recent other launches were also... Abhay Gandhi: In terms of trajectory, Sameer, yes. But in terms of actual, you've got to remember that when you had in the first, second, third, fourth in the market, and then you have the sixth or seventh, you will not be able to match the units. But in terms of trajectory, I mean, that is how I would also look at it. What kind of access did the other IL 23 get in the first few months, what is it that we have, how many customers were they able to get -- to prescribe and how many do we have. So I would also benchmark. Sure. Dilip Shanghvi: I think what, Abhay, he's trying to ask whether he can estimate the sales which they have announced at the quarterly update, as a part of his future projection. So Sameer, I think you have to be clear on one issue, is that even if your product is an equally good, second product in the same class, generally in sub (inaudible), a relatively smaller share of the total market. And this is true for... Abhay Gandhi: Which is what I said, the subsequent products will have a lower share. Dilip Shanghvi: No, I don't want Sameer to start to think, what you call -- actually like Cosentyx did in the first quarter or what -- as a part of the future projections. So I think -- but considering that we are a new player, considering the what you call relative lack of familiarity that we have in the biological side, we are quite excited with the update that we think and acceptance that we are seeing. Sameer Baisiwala: So just to complete this point with your permission, a follow-on, on ILUMYA, sir, the fact that the previous couple of launches were auto injectors versus us being a vial or injection, does that make a difference? And that's one. And second is the next IL, risankizumab, which is going to come from AbbVie, I think it would be middle of next year. So does that change anything from -- for you? I mean, does AbbVie get into contracting well ahead of time and that is sort of an impediment with you as you approach for coverage now? Abhay Gandhi: For the new product, I mean, you cannot readily start contracting well ahead of time. But nowadays, I mean, it now has become a little bit more lenient on that. So I think a few months ahead of launch, yes, you can start talking into payers, not contracting. But you can start talking, you can make your medical presentations and so on. So naturally, the market will get more competitive as risan also coming in. And AbbVie, of course, has as far more experience than we have, thanks to the HUMIRA. So we will become competitive. And it was always known and factored into our thinking and planning. But yes, we have to maximize the time that we have before the next competitor comes in (inaudible) the reason why we are working on a speedy execution. Sameer Baisiwala: The auto injector, sir? Abhay Gandhi: Auto injector for us, I mean, when I speak to customers, the fact that the product is used the way it is and it's a medical benefit, I mean, if I look at it holistically, it is not actually organic to us. Moderator: The next question is from the line of Manish Jain from SageOne Investment Advisors. Manish Jain: Just wanted to look at the specialty side, that before March '19, we will have 3 more launches. And that is CEQUA, XELPROS and Elepsia. Or will we have some more? Abhay Gandhi: I'm factoring in CEQUA and XELPROS. Manish Jain: Yes, I'm glad you said that because that, sir, I had a follow-on, where typically given that Elepsia falls in a different segment altogether, how much time one should budget for the sales team buildup and the other because it's a new segment altogether for you all? Abhay Gandhi: So as of now, I really haven't made up my mind in how I would like to go about the marketing of Elepsia. So I really don't have an answer for you. But I'm grappling in the same question that, can we take on one more segment? And can we take on another 3, 4 and do a new segment launch with all that we have? So it's a strategic decision that we need to internally discuss and agree upon. Moderator: The next question is from the line of Surya Patra from PhillipCapital. Surya Narayan Patra: Just on the spend and the launch-related expenses for the specialty portfolio, which is like due to come up in the subsequent quarter. So how sticky or how sustaining that expenses would be? And that is one hand. Secondly, is there any sense on the break-even timeline that you would be having internally? Like for the specialty portfolio, what would be the break-even time that you'll be estimating? Abhay Gandhi: Some of the expenses will be sticky, of course. You can't have a point-setting kind of expense on marketing. Of course, the initial ramp-up will always be on the higher side. And then to that extent, up to some point, it will taper down and then remain almost like a (inaudible). We haven't done detailed budgeting in all item buys for the next few years. So it's difficult for me to give you a sense on that exactly. Surya Patra: Okay. On the break-even side, any sense for the -- this entire specialty portfolio project? Abhay Gandhi: It's not a moving part. And each product is in a different stage. I mean, something has been launched a year ago, something has been launch now, something will be coming 2 years later. But broadly, I think at least 2 to 3 years for the product, if I do a period, for at least 2 to 3 years, there will be investment going into businesses. Surya Narayan Patra: Okay, that's helpful, sir. And just extending the same question, on the overall margin front for the consolidated business, since we are sure of the view that you talk on the R&D spend that is likely to move up in the subsequent quarter or second half rather and the expenses on the specialty front also is that is likely to move up. So is it right to believe the kind of margin profile, what we are having currently for the first half, is relatively better than what it could be in the second half or in the near future? Dilip Shanghvi: No, I think we will also get some additional new business. So generally, we don't guide for the overall margin. But I'm only helping you look at -- you're only looking at the expense side of the cost. But we have now ability to start selling the product and generating income. Surya Narayan Patra: Okay. So the quality of portfolio that should be improving sequentially. So that should one point once we'll have it in mind. Dilip Shanghvi: That's correct. Moderator: The next question is from the line of Neha Manpuria from JPMorgan. Neha Manpuria: Just one question. Sir, on the last call, you'd mentioned that we are talking with customers on contracting for YONSA. Given the unfavorable litigation for ZYTIGA, has that slowed that process in terms of our ability to get adequate coverage for YONSA? Abhay Gandhi: It has. And well, I mean, the payers are looking at scenarios of when the generic would come. And we are now dealing in the what-if situations and trying to modulate our contracting strategies accordingly. So to that extent, it has slowed down. Neha Manpuria: Okay. So this would probably be the main fluid for some time until we get some clarity on the generic competition? Abhay Gandhi: That's correct. Neha Manpuria: And the second question is on ABSORICA. Now after the copay, the change in the copay there, we haven't really seen a recovery in prescriptions so far. Do you think -- will the prescription stay at this level and it's unlikely to go back to what we were doing before with ABSORICA? I understand it's a more profitable product for us now. Abhay Gandhi: The peak that you saw with the liberal copay, we will never reach, that is for sure. But if you see the last 3 months, then there has been a steady increase in prescription, not significant up, but there has been a steady increase in prescription. And we are also now utilizing the strategy where we are ensuring that the (inaudible) of the product can go through seamlessly. And that is working out quite well for us. So the fill rate is much better now than what we had at some point in time. Moderator: The next question is from the line of Nimish Mehta from ResearchDelta Advisors. Nimish Mehta: Sir, on ILUMYA, you mentioned that there had been a good amount of ramp-up or it has been exciting. So will you ascribe the performance of ILUMYA to a general shifting biologic? Or is it more IL inhibitor-specific? Or is it more ILUMYA-specific? Or if you were kind of rank order that, that would be very helpful. Abhay Gandhi: I mean, in 1-month experience, I mean, none of these 3 questions I would have a clear answer to because the kind of granular data that you need to be able to make those assessments, I don't have that 1 month for. And no external data, so even what kind of patients we have received, which kind of patients doctors have used the product on, I don't know myself because it's too soon. Nimish Mehta: I see, but -- okay, I mean, data is one thing. But some kind of intuition or some kind of -- something which is matching your expectations... Abhay Gandhi: Intuition will not help me answer those very broad questions or what has been issued, whether it's a class or a product. Doctors clearly were -- overall had liked the profile of the product. And therefore, I think they were eager to give it a try. But what kind of patient they have tried it on and to answer that question in (inaudible) is too soon. Nimish Mehta: Okay, fair point. The next one is actually on the India business, sir. With the (inaudible) exercise, I mean, is there any chance that -- I mean, is it basically because of the GST-led structural change, which is why a lot of the reports that we might have established to capture some tax benefit is no more important and (inaudible) kind of consolidating EBIT, something like that? Or I'm just trying to understand. Kalyanasundaram Subramanian: No, I think this is fundamentally, how do you say it, it's our effort to improve business efficiency. I don't have any idea whether (inaudible) tax benefit or anything like that. If it is, it's a bonus to us. This is a drive to improve the working capital efficiency, particularly for the inventory levels to the supply chain. Moderator: The next question is from the line of Kunal Dhamesha from SBICAP Securities Limited. Kunal Dhamesha: So the question I had is on ILUMYA. So you said that trajectory that you are seeing is similar to some other molecules. So I just want to understand why your market share will be lower as compared to big molecules. Abhay Gandhi: We never said that. I said if I have to look at the performance of ILUMYA internally, I would benchmark myself against the competitors. I mean, with 1-month performance, how can we say that the trajectory is similar or (inaudible) like that? It's just 1 month. So I think -- I don't want to jump to any conclusions. And I wouldn't want you to come to that conclusion. It's too soon. The initial response is good. That's what we said both on the HCP side as well as the payer side. But beyond that, I mean, I haven't said anything on this call. Kunal Dhamesha: Okay. And just on a similar line, how do you view the difficulty level of switching from one biologic to another biologic? Or is it only the new patients that starts with a newer entrant? Abhay Gandhi: I think I've answered this question again earlier when I said that it's just 1 month. Kunal Dhamesha: No, I'm not talking about ILUMYA. Abhay Gandhi: I think the failure rate of some of the products is quite high. So after getting initial response, after a few months, maybe even a year or so, doctors do see failures. And when they see a failure, the doctor is inclined to switch from one biologic to another. Kunal Dhamesha: Okay. And second question is on the API business. So this business has been going strong in the first half. So any particular reason? Or is it because of the China supply issue? And how do we view this business for the rest of the year and going beyond? Abhay Gandhi: I have some background noise coming on my line. Is everybody hearing that or it's just me? Moderator: Sir, that is from the line of Kunal Dhamesha. Kunal Dhamesh: So the question is on the API business. So that business has been doing well in the first half. So any outlook on that business? And what is driving that business in FY '19? Dilip Shanghvi: It's a relatively small part of our business, right? Why give so much attention? But the business is doing well and it's expected to continue to do well. Moderator: The next question is from the line of Surajit Pal from Prabhudas Lilladher. Surajit Pal: My question is on domestic formulation. See, in Q2 FY '18, your growth is 11%. So if that's considered as a higher base for this quarter's number, along with -- if I had just my destocking things, is it a matter of (inaudible) of 11% growth? Or are we settling for a kind of a growth of around 7%, 8% year-on-year on a normalized basis? Abhay Gandhi: We didn't understand... Dilip Shanghvi: Can you repeat the question? Surajit Pal: See, if I add just your inventory destocking with this quarter's sales and if I consider -- or as you say it, the Q3 FY '18 was a higher base. But growth was only 11%. So 11% growth, does it imply for Sun Pharma is a matter of (inaudible), so we have more of a settling of 7% or 8% year-on-year growth in domestic formulation on a normalized basis? Dilip Shanghvi: Kal, you didn't say 11%? Kalyanasundaram Subramanian: No. And that's what I'm saying. All I'm saying is the underlying growth is tracking low-teens and is tracking to plan. And my expectation is that the momentum will continue. All the indecisions that you can see are steadily healthy. I am not saying everything is working 100% to our expectation. But all overall health of the business is good. And through the year, I would expect us to maintain a demand level in low-teens. Surajit Pal: Okay. Another point is that adjusted EPS reached, I think, you said is around INR 4.1 crores, adjusting that extraordinary items. This extraordinary items is post tax? Sudhir Valia: There is no tax on that. Surajit Pal: There is no tax benefit for that? Sudhir Valia: Yes, there is no tax benefit on that. Moderator: The next question is from the line of Ashish Thavkar from Motilal Oswal Asset Management. Ashish Thavkar: Sir, I have a question on working capital. So if I compare this first half with last year, have you seen a substantial change or pressure on our working capital, especially because now Halol is also ramping up and there's a specialty basket that you are promoting? Sudhir Valia: There is no pressure on working capital. Dilip Shanghvi: What do you mean actually by pressure on working capital? Ashish Thavkar: Sir, in terms of, say, what we were seeing last year, so if I go to see where your net current asset as a percentage of sales, so is there a substantial change in that number? Dilip Shanghvi: I don't think... Sudhir Valia: No major -- no material change. Ashish Thavkar: So even though Halol is like regularly ramping up, you feel -- it would be a normalized number that we should be working on? Dilip Shanghvi: Yes. Ashish Thavkar: Okay, that's helpful. Then broadly in FY '18, if I go to see the return ratios, ROCs and ROEs, they are appearing very depressed in nature. I understand there could be various of factors. But if you could help us understand how should we look at our core business ROEs and ROCs going ahead. Dilip Shanghvi: So I think what you need to factor is that we are building a new business. And that business requires a lot of investment, both in terms of working capital or allocation of capital and also creating infrastructure and creating cost structures. So while all of this is happening, the existing business is funding all the future engines of growth. And this engine of growth will start generating profitability and value addition. Then we will see through overall profitability because clearly the current EBITDA numbers don't reflect the underlying businesses through profitability. Ashish Thavkar: So for a while, you meant to say that the (inaudible) which is sub-10% currently, they would continue to remain so? Or we could, in the next 2 to 3 years, you are looking at something, ballpark -- and I'm not asking for a number, but just ballpark mid-teens kind of number we should be comfortable working with? Dilip Shanghvi: No. I think what I am saying is that the current cost structure is for creating a future business. So I'm not giving you any guidance. But I am explaining to you that the current profitability is not the profitability of the producing business. It's also paying for building the future business. Ashish Thavkar: Okay. So just last question, if I may squeeze in, there's an increase in receivables compared to like March quarter. So anything -- like INR 1,200 crores increase in receivables. Sudhir Valia: Particularly, it's the translation of the currency receivables, which reflects that increase. Ashish Thavkar: But that could normalize as we approach FY '19 end? Sudhir Valia: It depends upon if all the currency also moves. Moderator: The next question is from the line of Shyam Srinivasan from Goldman Sachs. Shyam Srinivasan: Just first one on the U.S. generic business. And you can even talk about the industry as well. Ex of Taro, how has the base business actually behaved? Have you seen Q-on-Q increase ex of YONSA? Have you seen increase in our base business sequentially? And just related question on the kind of conversations you're having today with the channel, the distributors, has it actually improved over the year in terms of the conversations you're having? That's my first question. Abhay Gandhi: So the business is doing as per expectations. I can't say that quarter-on-quarter, there has been a big jump. We also haven't launched any major product in the second quarter. So it's in line with our expectations for the year. So when you say conversations with customers, I mean, we always have good conversations with customers. So what were you alluding to? Shyam Srinivasan: So Abhay, I was just talking about is, is there an insistence on price discounts versus, say, a surety of supply? Have you seen this kind of narratives change? That's the key point I'm trying to see. Abhay Gandhi: No, I think in the last 1 year, I don't think the narrative has really changed. I mean, there is pressure product-specific, we keep seeing that. And I haven't changed -- I mean, I haven't seen them changing. Shyam Srinivasan: Got it. And my second question is on the tildrakizumab for Europe. Has it been commercialized? And how should we look at these 2 markets, Europe versus the U.S.? Anything that you can share in terms of qualitative color will be helpful. Dilip Shanghvi: I think tildra should be commercialized hopefully with this quarter-end. And it will be launched gradually country-by-country in Europe, so based on reimbursement and various other things, which are required for Europe. So once we launch the product, I think we will get a greater clarity on how the product is doing. Moderator: The next question is from the line of from Charulata Gaidhani from Dalal & Broacha. Charulata Gaidhani: Are there any specialty generic launches? Or how many specialty generic launches do you plan in the second half? Abhay Gandhi: Generally, we don't give these numbers. But there are some interesting products which are coming in the second half of the year. Moderator: The next question is from the line of Anubhav Aggarwal from Credit Suisse. Anubhav Aggarwal: Yes, I just have one question for ILUMYA. I have this question on the formulary access. I just want to understand, what does it take for us to get first or second line access in that therapy? I understand one is a time factor, second is the price. Is there any other determinant other than that? Dilip Shanghvi: I don't know whether, Abhay, you're still on the call. Abhay Gandhi: I am still on the call. But can I -- because you spoke a little fast, can you just repeat the question, please? Anubhav Aggarwal: Yes, so I was asking that for the formulary access for ILUMYA, what will it take for us to get first or second line formulary access there? I understand that right now, we have constraint of (inaudible) most of the formulary access that we got. When can, let's say, a year after or 2 years after or after a certain point of time, what would it take for us to get a better access in the formulary coverage? Abhay Gandhi: So there are 2 ways at looking at this. And both are different if you ask me. Now what will it take to be a first line therapy? That's one part of the question. And the other is what does it take to be the preferred product? Now I don't think we are even aiming for being the preferred as long as we have the chance to be the first line. And then the HCP makes a choice of what the doctor considers to be his first line. We are comfortable with that. And there's a question on how much do we need to discount to have a certain position? So the aim is to get yourself at parity with your competition as (inaudible) based on the merits of the product and the profile of the patient of what it is that they would like to use as their first line in each individual case. Anubhav Aggarwal: That's helpful, Abhay. I was just asking, is price -- like can a company use price as a bigger factor and therefore better advantage over competition if you are... Abhay Gandhi: More than price, it will be rebates and discounts, so not price per se. Anubhav Aggarwal: Yes, I'm taking rebates and discount as part of price basically, net effective price (inaudible). Abhay Gandhi: Sure. But the question is how much would you like to discount and (inaudible) the product? And what do you gain at the end of it? So there's a very complex modeling that for each and every contract that we would go through. And contractors themselves will also look at their own way and data. And we will come to a point which is comfortable for both the company as well as for the payer. Moderator: The next question is from the line of Saion Mukerjee from Nomura Securities. Saion Mukherjee: Sir, can you update us on the status on the field clinical trials for the InSite Vision products? And when do you expect NDA filing for those? Dilip Shanghvi: So both the clinical trials for InSite products are ongoing. I think I don't have exact -- I mean, I don't recollect the exact line for filing the product. But it's also not expected to be, I think, Abhay, filed this year. Correct? Abhay Gandhi: Yes, that's correct. Dilip Shanghvi: So sometime next year, it will be filed. Saion Mukherjee: Okay. And on emerging market and ROW, I mean, any color you can-- we don't have much clarity or transparency on these 2 markets. I'm just wondering, is there any element of volatility that you see in terms of like components of kind of business (inaudible) that we should be aware of? Or do you think we should more or less expect fairly cyclical in constant currency terms? Sudhir Valia: I think the underlying business, I'll probably sort of predict the continuity of the momentum for the rest of the year. So we didn't have any on our business, which is unlikely to either not continue or not -- we are not also anticipating any one of business to occur in the next 6 months. Moderator: The next question is from the line of Sameer Baisiwala from Morgan Stanley. Sameer Baisiwala: Just for ILUMYA, for tildra for both U.S. and Europe, can you give us a holistic picture of the accounting treatment for both milestone and royalty? And the fact that for Europe, you will get approval in September. So therefore, would that not have maintained milestone (inaudible)? Or is the intangible a net number? Sudhir Valia: Can you please repeat the question, Sameer? Sameer Baisiwala: I am talking about tildrakizumab. For example, maybe you took a $300 million milestone payment out of Merck and therefore the build-out of intangible in the balance sheet, so took it directly to balance sheet. So for Europe, for Almirall, would it be the same treatment that you would take it through the balance sheet? And did you not get an inflow because in September, you got the EC approval? Sudhir Valia: So as far as the tildrakizumab, the milestone payments, as we spoke in the past previous questions, we have capitalized that as part of intangibles. That is capitalized. It is part of the intangibles and the balance sheet. Dilip Shanghvi: Sameer, you're presuming that the $300 million is all linked with ILUMYA. Because it's not. It's also linked with CEQUA. Sameer Baisiwala: Okay, got it. But the fundamental question remains that when you get the inflow from Almirall, would you also again take it through balance sheet and they do not receive it because you've got the approval from EC in September? They did not trigger inflow milestone. Sudhir Valia: So the other component, what you're talking about, it's a deferred revenue occurring over a period of time. Sameer Baisiwala: Sorry? Sudhir Valia: The other conference, Sameer, talked about in terms of Almirall, licensing income. These are deferred revenue that actually accrue over a period of time. Dilip Shanghvi: So like we are amortizing the expenses, we will also amortize the income. Sameer Baisiwala: Okay, I'll take it offline. I'm not sure I fully understood that. And just a second question, sir, on the U.S. market. When you say that the relative attractiveness of a few products is not as good and you may take it out of your pipeline, I'm just wondering then if you take it out of your pipeline, then who will service the U.S. market for those volumes in the sense that India and yourselves have probably the best cost structure? So if this is an obstacle point and a sector-wide point, then who does this business go to? Dilip Shanghvi: No, I understand. I think that it's a challenge that we struggle with every day, is that if everybody drops out, then what appears to be a very unattractive product may become a very attractive product. But at some point, you have to trade off against the probability. But your question is correct is that -- and that is what I think is the challenge for both the trade as well as the industry, is that if your current squeeze on pricing will take already initiative and the interest of the manufacturers both in investing for manufacturing, facility expansion and R&D, all of that will potentially lead to future disruption in supply and future shortages, which will increase their longer-term cost. Sameer Baisiwala: And so how does one break the cycle? Dilip Shanghvi: I think the only way by which the cycle gets broken is that on all the commodity products, when there is what you call business becomes less attractive, the supply becomes scarce because marginal producers stop producing. And then that leads to increase in profitability, bringing your suppliers back to market. I mean, that's what will happen here also. Moderator: Due to time constraint, this was the last question. I now hand the conference over to Mr. Nimish Desai for closing comments. Over to you, sir. Sailesh T. Desai: Thank you, everybody, for being on the call today. If you have any questions that have remained unanswered, do send them across and we'll have them answered. Thanks, and have a good day. Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of Sun Pharmaceutical Industries Limited, that concludes this conference call. Thank you for joining us. And you may now disconnect your lines. RC Bhargava1 live bse live nse live Volume Todays L/H More Imposing cess on conventional vehicles to promote electric cars will not serve the purpose as only the rich would end up receiving subsidies, Maruti Suzuki Chairman R C Bhargava said on Wednesday. Insisting that only cars should not be levied cess to promote electric vehicles (EVs), he also said two-wheelers, which consume two-thirds of petrol in the country, must not be left out in the electrification drive as these are much easier to be charged at homes. "The biggest problem in India is the large number of small cars. Around 70 per cent of these cars could not be parked at homes and thus cannot be charged. I don't think that small car electrification can happen on the basis of subsidies. We need technology for that," Bhargava told reporters here. The chairman of the country's largest car maker was commenting on a report of a proposal to impose cess of Rs 500-Rs 25,000 on conventional vehicles to promote clean energy vehicles in the country. Bhargava said all around the globe, including the US and Europe, electrification of cars has met with little success so far. He said if a cess has to be there then two-wheelers also need to be taxed. "If the principle is that a polluter pays then two-wheelers are also polluters. Why not a cess on two-wheelers also, so that the cess of petrol two-wheelers is utilised to subsidise electric two-wheelers," Bhargava said. Two-thirds of petrol in the country is consumed by two-wheelers, and electrification of two-wheelers becomes, so far, more practical in terms of infrastructure than electrification of cars, he added. Bhargava stated that with 85-87 per cent car parc in India between now and 2030 set to be non electric cars, it is important to look at the problem in a holistic manner. Parc refers to the total number of registered vehicles plying in the country. "By then (2030), if you like to reduce oil import and pollution, what are your options? Your options are CNG, hybrid and biofuels. All these three technologies are required," Bhargava said. He said the better way to achieve target of having a lower fuel import bill and reduction in air pollution is by supporting CNG vehicles. "If at all there is a cess on internal combustion vehicles, why not use this fund to build CNG infrastructure? It will happen quickly and give results quickly as well...even with infrastructure shortage, sales of CNG cars have been going up," Bhargava noted. Bhargava also sought a lower goods and services tax for a hybrid vehicle which is a "very eco-friendly technology". "EV is not the only technology. It is a means to an end and not an end in itself," he said urging policymakers to consider other technologies as well. Commenting on the company's plans, he said Maruti Suzuki India is looking to introduce a strong hybrid technology in its petrol cars that would help increase fuel efficiency by as much as 30 per cent. The company would get the technology as part of the Toyota-Suzuki collaboration. New Delhi: BJP National President Amit Shah addresses a press conference, in New Delhi, Friday, Dec. 07, 2018. (PTI Photo/Arun Sharma) (PTI12_7_2018_000032B) In the wake of the BJP's defeat in the three Hindi heartland states, party chief Amit Shah held a closed-door meeting with select leaders from Maharashtra on Tuesday night, party sources said. Shah, who arrived in Mumbai late in the evening is scheduled to stay at Sahyadri guest house in south Mumbai and discuss the situation in the state. Maharashtra has 48 Lok Sabha seats. In the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, the BJP had won 23 seats, while the Shiv Sena had bagged 18 constituencies. Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray has already announced that his party would contest the elections solo, which has left the BJP all the more anxious as it does not want division of votes. "It is not the Shiv Sena alone that has indicated to stay away from the BJP, but other alliance partner such as Raju Shetti, an influential farmer leader from Maharashtra, has already snapped the ties," a BJP leader said. "BJP's loss in Bhandara Gondia Lok Sabha bypoll also dented the party's image and appeal as well as that of the state leadership. The loss has added to the party's woes," the leader said. "We have to come up with some better strategy to stay ahead. We are hopeful that Shah would show us the path," the leader said. Christian-Michael British national and middleman Christian Michel sent "monthly reports" to AgustaWestland that detailed the political and military situation in India for more than 20 years during his time as a lobbyist in the country, former UK Defence Secretary Geoffrey William Hoon was quoted as saying by The Times of India. Hoon later joined AgustaWestland as its Managing Director. Michel also sent reports on businesses and individuals with influence who could be tapped, the news daily reported. Hoon had provided details of the nature of work Michel had done for AgustaWestland, in his testimony before an Italian court in 2004. Michel "supplied a monthly statement, a monthly report in which he described the political events in progress in India and indicated the subject matter or topics that might be important for trade and business opportunities," Hoon told the court. "During my visits to India, I met him [Michel] for an hour to discuss a bit about what was happening and to get an update on the current situation," Hoon added while appearing as a defence witness. "Let me add that we have similar consultants in most markets we operate," he said. In his function as advisor, as a consultant, he basically expressed his impressions about the market and market opportunities, that is, he observed the military and the political situation, he pointed out who was, shall we say in, that is, who was more and who was less important at the moment, who had more and who had less influence, Hoon had told the court. However, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probe found that the information and documents Michel shared with AgustaWestland were classified in nature and included decisions by the Cabinet Committee on Security, the newspaper reported. The central investigative agency is currently examining Michel in the Rs 3,600-crore AgustaWestland VVIP chopper deal case in light of documents and statements of his Delhi-based associate RK Nanda. Delhi High Court The Delhi High Court on December 19 quashed the summons issued against Union minister Smriti Irani in a defamation complaint filed against her by Congress Leader Sanjay Nirupam. The court, however, dismissed a similar plea by Nirupam's seeking to set aside the summons issued against him in a cross-defamation complaint filed by Irani. The court said the case against Nirupam will continue. Justice R K Gauba passed two separate verdicts on the two leaders plea. In her plea, Irani had sought quashing of the summons issued to her by a trial court on June 6, 2014. She had also sought quashing of the complaint filed by Nirupam. Nirupam had challenged a magisterial court's March 11, 2013 order summoning him in Irani's defamation complaint against him. He had also sought quashing of the January 1, 2013 complaint filed by Irani. Tucker Carlson is seen in the studio on the set of his show on FOX News in Manhattan, NY in 2018. (Jennifer S. Altman / For The Times) New Delhi: Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley addresses the media at his office, in New Delhi, Monday, Dec. 10, 2 018. (PTI Photo/Kamal Kishore) (PTI12_10_2018_000062B) The government will consider both the need as well as constitutionality while taking a call on what stance it takes on the Ayodhya issue, Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said Tuesday. The senior BJP leader dubbed the Congress' arguments on the Rafale issue as one reduced to being contested on a "dictational ambiguity" in the Supreme Court judgment. "What steps the government should take in the matter (Ayodhya temple issue) are steps the government will consider and reflect on. "It will reflect on the need, it will reflect on the legal propriety, it will reflect on constitutionality before it takes a conclusion," Jaitley said while speaking at an event organised by Republic TV. Jaitley said he would have wanted for an early resolution to the temple issue, considering the anxiety and tensions that it causes, but also understands the court's difficulties. He said the resilience that rests within India, beyond the voices on the extreme, will ensure that a solution is found to the issue. One need not be extraordinarily worried over how the solution is found --- whether through the judicial process or through the political process, the minister said. In a different context, Jaitley said he is concerned about the quality of public discourse in the country and pitched for a shift to rationality driven positions on certain subjects. The minister, however, hit out at existing "double standards", saying it is not acceptable when one labels demands for constructing the temple in Ayodhya as "communal" and demands for not constructing it as "secular". The remarks come at a time when there are growing calls, especially from the Hindu right, including BJP's parent Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and allies like the Shiv Sena, to adopt the ordinance route to build the Ram temple in Ayodhya. On the Rafale row, he suggested there has been a "dictational ambiguity" which the Supreme Court judgment vindicating government's stand rests on, and it gives him the "satisfaction" to know that the opposition Congress' case is based on this and nothing else. "Old case of pricing, procedures, favouritism is now a case of ambiguity," he said, adding that now the ambiguity has been pointed out to the court, it will correct the same. He said 74 meetings of the committees related to price and contract negotiations were held before signing the final agreement for procurement of 36 Rafale jets from France. Terming the campaign mounted by the opposition on the multi-crore jet deal as "juvenile and illiterate", he said the final price negotiated in 2015 by the NDA government was nine per cent lower than the one in 2007 for the standalone aircraft and 20 per cent if one includes the weapon systems. Jaitley said the January 1 violence at Koregaon-Bhima near Pune was fuelled by "Maoists", who were trying to misuse the Dalits, and stressed that such an agitation cannot be called as an uprising against the government. The next election will be about the governance under Prime Minister Narendra Modi and a coalition of rivals where the voters will have to take a risk, he said, stressing farmer marches are not a widespread movement. Stressing on the need to continue with the reform process, he said the Railways Ministry has not "reformed really". The extradition of AugustaWestland VVIP chopper scam accused Christian Michel from the UAE shows that India's ability to put pressure on other governments has increased, Jaitley said. He also hoped for an early extradition of fugitive liquor baron Vijay Mallya from the UK. A woman walks past a portrait of J Jayalalithaa in Chennai. (Image: Reuters) A Rs 6.85 crore bill of Apollo Hospitals for the 75-day treatment of late Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa in 2016, submitted recently to a panel probing the circumstances leading to her death, has gone viral in the social media. The one page summary shows Rs 6.85 crore as the total bill with a detailed break-up and an outstanding amount of Rs 44.56 lakh. The ruling AIADMK is shown as having paid Rs 6 crore received on June 15, 2017, months after Jayalalithaa's death on December 5, 2016. Though an amount of Rs 41.13 lakh is shown as being received by the hospital on October 13, 2016, no mention is made of who made that payment. When contacted about the leak of the bill, both the Justice A Arumughaswamy Commission of Inquiry and a legal counsel for the hospital in the panel denied dissemination from their respective sides. The bill is, however, genuine and it was submitted in the panel on November 27, 2018, the hospital counsel said. "The bill summary is not a complete factual reflection of all the details because the details were produced in more than 200 pages. We are surprised and shocked that a confidential document, which was submitted to the commission on November 27, is out in the open," hospital counsel Maimoona Badsha told PTI. Under the head 'food and beverage services', which shows Rs 1,17,04,925, the counsel said it includes a whole lot of people like visitors. The break-up shows consultation fee as Rs 71 lakh. A UK based doctor Richard Beale was paid Rs 92 lakh and a Singapore based hospital Rs 1.29 crore for professional charges respectively and room rent was Rs 1.24 crore (which includes the cost of occupancy of several rooms by her attendants) during the late leader's hospital stay. Jayalalithaa had passed away on December 5, 2016 after being treated in the hospital for 75 days from September 22, 2016 for various ailments. In September 2017, the state government had constituted the probe panel under the Commissions of Inquiry Act, mandating it to inquire into the circumstances leading to Jayalalithaa's hospitalisation on September 22, 2016, and treatment provided by the hospital till her demise. Mike Pompeo US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo held a rare meeting with Nepal's Foreign Minister Pradeep Gyawali as part of the Trump administration's effort to thwart increasing Chinese influence in the Himalayan nation. Pompeo described his meeting on December 18 with Gyawali as historic and said this demonstrates America's commitment to its strong partnership with Nepal. He emphasised the great potential for further development of the US-Nepal ties, State Department deputy spokesperson Robert Palladino said. During the meeting, Pompeo highlighted the enduring strength of the US-Nepal partnership and the close people-to-people ties that form the foundation of the relationship. "The two leaders discussed Nepal's USD 500 million Millennium Challenge Corporation compact, Nepal's central role in a free, open, and prosperous Indo-Pacific, and global issues, including North Korea," Palladino said. The meeting came amidst China's foray into the land-locked Himalayan nation where Beijing has been investing heavily for the last few years to enhance connectivity and infrastructure. The US is concerned about Chinese investments in the Indo-Pacific and stepped up its efforts to expand its engagements with the countries in the region, including India and Nepal. It fears that Chinese investments and activities are undermining sovereignty and economic stability in the region and will also be a threat to America's vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific. American officials believe that said China's Belt and Road Initiative for infrastructure development and investments in countries in Europe, Asia and Africa lacked transparency and was aimed at fulfilling China's own security and strategic interests rather than promoting economic development. The Congress stormed to power in Madhya Pradesh after 15 years, while violent protests over dilution of the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act kept the Hindi heartland state on tenterhooks during 2018. The state witnessed hectic political activity before the Assembly polls which concluded with a nail-biting finish when Congress, after a see-saw battle with the BJP, emerged as the single largest party, with five seats more than the BJP. Nine-time Lok Sabha member Kamal Nath became the chief minister and hours after taking charge, announced a farm loan waiver, a poll promise of Congress president Rahul Gandhi, expected to cost Rs 50,000 crore to the state exchequer. Nath faces the challenge of putting the state economy, having borrowings of around Rs 1.60 lakh crore, back on track. The year saw a setback for the BJP as its longest serving chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan was unseated. In pre-poll surveys, Chouhan emerged more popular than Nath and Congress leader Jyotiraditya Scindia but this did not help the BJP retain power despite it getting 41.02 per cent votes as against Congress' 40.89 per cent in the state polls. Till now, a party securing less vote share than its rival never came to power in the state. In the run-up the the polls, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Congress chief Rahul Gandhi addressed 10 public meetings in MP between November 15 and 25, while BJP president Amit Shah addressed 15 public meetings and held road shows. On November 25, Shah stumbled and fell while alighting from a vehicle during his road show in Ashok Nagar district, but escaped unhurt. The state witnessed violent protests in April after the Supreme Court on March 20 "diluted" provisions of the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, ruling that government servants should not be arrested without prior sanction and private citizens too, can be arrested only after an inquiry under the law. Opposing the verdict, several Dalit bodies called for a nationwide strike in which violent incidents and blockades of roads and rail tracks were reported from several states. Six people were killed in Madhya Pradesh during the bandh which witnessed clashes between police and protesters and incidents of arson. It led to the birth of anewpolitical party called 'SAPAKS'(Samanya Alpsankhyak Pichda Adivasi Varg Kalyan Samaj), which pocketed 0.4 per cent votes in the state polls, affecting prospects of other parties' candidates. A few months before the polls, Chouhan's move to accord Minister of State (MoS) status to five seers drew sharp criticism from the Congress. Chouhan tried to justify his action, saying it was aimedatroping in all sections of society for public good. The seers had earlier announced that they would take out a 'Narmada scam yatra' to expose corruption in the river cleanliness drive. Later, Swami Namdeo Tyagi, the self-styled godman popularly known as Computer Baba, resigned as MoS, accusing Chouhan of not fulfilling his promises. In January, former Gujarat chief minister Anandiben Patel was appointedthe state governor. February brought good news for the Congress when it retained both Mungaoli and Kolaras Assembly seats in bypolls. In June, farmers came out on streets in some parts of the state seeking remunerative price for their produce. Former Union Minister Arjun Singh's wife Saroj Kumari (83) petitioned a local court in June seeking action against her son and then Leader of the Opposition Ajay Singh, who lost his traditional Churhat seat in the November assembly polls. Vyapam scam, a multi-crore recruitment and admission racket, also kept the state in news. Congress leader Digvijay Singh filed a complaint in a court alleging that prosecuting agencies CBI and others were protecting then chief minister Chouhan, Union minister Uma Bharti and police officers in the scam. Mumbai: Firefighters conduct rescue after a major fire broke out at ESIC Kamgar Hospital, in Mumbai, Monday, Dec. 17, 2018. At least 6 persons were killed and many patients and visitors suffered injuries in the fire. (PTI Photo) (PTI12_17_2018_000243B) Opposition Congress and NCP on December 18 targeted the BJP-led government in Maharashtra over the massive fire in a city-based hospital in which eight people were killed and over 170 injured. The two parties demanded strict action against those responsible for the tragedy at the ESIC Kamgar Hospital in suburban Andheri. NCP spokesman Nawab Malik said a case under IPC section (culpable homicide not amounting to murder) should be filed against the director general of ESIC Corporation and he must be immediately arrest. There was no need for an inquiry as assured by Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and direct action should be taken against officials concerned, Malik said. Mumbai Congress president Sanjay Nirupam visited the fire-ravaged hospital. He said the quality of material used in constructing the hospital building was not up to the mark which has caused this accident. "Such contractors must be blacklisted and action must be taken against them. The government must fix responsibility and book the culprits," Nirupam said. The hospital was handed over to the Central government in 2009 when the Congress was in power in Maharashtra, he said. "The Central government wanted to demolish the hospital in order to construct a new building with a medical college. National Projects Construction Corporation (NPCC), a government firm, was given this job by the Central government. "But the fact that the hospital building has been left untouched since the past 10 years is extremely shameful," he said. Nirupam said the number of fire-related accidents across Mumbai has increased dramatically in the past 5-7 years. "The main reason behind this rise is the fact that fire rules, regulations and norms are not followed and implemented properly," the Congress leader said. "Chief Minister Fadnavis has announced a probe into the matter. However, this entire case smells of a racket," he said. NEW DELHI, INDIA - APRIL 4: Delhi BJP President Manoj Tiwari (C) with other leader Rajeev Babbar (L) addresses media persons on the issue of Delhi MCD election at Delhi BJP Office on April 4, 2017 in New Delhi, India. (Photo by Sonu Mehta/Hindustan Times via Getty Images) Leaders and workers of the BJP's Delhi unit, along with its president Manoj Tiwari, were detained near the Congress headquarters on December 19 for protesting against Rahul Gandhi, who they said was spreading "lies" on the Rafale deal. The protesters had assembled at the Vigyan Bhawan here and raised slogans against the Congress and its president, who has been instrumental in mounting a scathing attack on the Modi government over an alleged "scam" in the deal for the French fighter jets. "We are here to expose the lies of Congress and its president Rahul Gandhi who is spreading lies on the Rafale deal on a regular basis," Tiwari said at the protest. The protesters then tried to move closer to the Congress headquarters at Akbar Road but were stopped at a police barricade. They were later detained and taken to the Parliament Street police station. The district presidents of the Delhi BJP had on December 18 submitted a memorandum, addressed to the President of India, to respective district magistrates in the city. "Even after the dismissal of petitions challenging the Rafale deal by the Supreme Court, Congress president Rahul Gandhi continues his propaganda, not only insulting the prime minister but also demoralising the defence forces of the country," the Delhi BJP chief said. Amit Shah_BJP Despite cold vibes from the Shiv Sena, which had publicly announced to go solo in elections, BJP chief Amit Shah on Wednesday said the Uddhav Thackeray-led party would continue its alliance with BJP for the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. Speaking at the Republic Summit here, Shah also indicated that the BJP would gain more partners ahead of 2019 polls than it had before 2014 elections. "Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis is frequently in touch with the Shiv Sena leadership at the state level. The Shiv Sena is already a part of the Central and state governments and it would continue its alliance with the BJP ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections", he said. The Sena, which is the oldest constituent of the NDA, had contested the 2014 Lok Sabha polls in alliance with the BJP, but severed the ties ahead of the Maharashtra assembly elections held in October that year. The Sena later joined the BJP-led governments in Maharashtra and Centre, though grudgingly, as it was averse to play second fiddle to BJP, which emerged as the single largest party in the polls. Interestingly, Sena Tuesday stayed away from the inauguration of various infra projects by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Mumbai metropolitan region and Pune claiming that Thackeray was not invited to the programmes. Shah also sought to play down the Sena fielding its nominees against the BJP in assembly elections held in various states including Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. "They (Sena) have been fielding their candidates in those states even before we came to power. It is their local issue", he said. Commenting on a tweet by Chirag Paswan of the Lok Janshakti Party on differences between the NDA ally and the BJP over seat allotment, Shah said, "Every party wants to grow. They pitch for their leader. Such things are common ahead of every elections". Chirag had tweeted that the NDA was at a crossroads after the Telugu Desam Party and RLSP quit the alliance. "At this juncture and with time still at hand, it is important for the BJP to respect and allay the concerns of the remaining allies," he had said. Shah said the BJP had 25 allies before the 2014 Lok Sabha polls. "Today, we have 31 partners among which six are bigger ones. We are still in talks with some more parties. In the North-East region, we have joined hands with several local non-Congress parties", he said. He described BJP as NDA's nucleus. "We are going ahead for 2019 (polls) as NDA and not only as BJP. BJP will be the nucleus of NDA and Narendra Modi will be the leader of this alliance," he said. Thackeray had earlier this year announced that his party would contest future elections on its own. Thackeray has also taken up the agenda of construction of Ram temple on the disputed site in Ayodhya and had visited the temple town last month. In 2014 polls, the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance had won 42 out of the 48 seats in Maharashtra, with BJP winning 23 seats and Sena 18. The Raju Shetti-led Swabhimani Paksha, which was an NDA ally, had won a seat. Shetti left the NDA in 2017 citing dissatisfaction with the Modi government over handling of agrarian issues. New Delhi: BJP National President Amit Shah addresses a press conference, in New Delhi, Friday, Dec. 07, 2018. (PTI Photo/Arun Sharma) (PTI12_7_2018_000032B) Targeting the Congress, BJP chief Amit Shah on December 19 said judicial procedure was 'influenced', which led to no convictions for so long in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots. The Delhi High Court on December 17 sentenced Congress leader Sajjan Kumar to imprisonment for life, the first conviction of a politician in the 1984 riots in which over 2,700 people were killed. "The judicial procedure was influenced which led to no convictions in the anti-Sikh riots of 1984. It made people furious over the issue even after 34 years of the incident," Shah said at the Republic Summit here. He said the NDA government set up another Special Investigation Team (SIT) after coming to power in 2014 and the convictions are taking place as per this body's findings. "This (Sajjan Kumar) is the fourth judgement that has come out," Shah pointed out. Despite there being the Misra Commission followed by Nanavati Commission, police did not carry out investigations properly in any case, Shah said. Referring to allegations of a journalist that he had seen Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Kamal Nath leading a march against Sikhs (during riots), Shah said, "It has been seen by many people. The SIT is looking into all cases related to 1984 anti-Sikh riots." "I believe the SIT we have set up will take the cases of 1984 anti-Sikh riots to their logical end. And we have made all provisions to equip the SIT," the BJP leader said. Asked about the time required for the legal battle over the Ram temple issue to get over, Shah said, "If the Supreme Court conducts daily hearings of the Babri demolition case, it will not take more than 10 days to get a verdict." "Ayodhya is a title issue. The BJP clearly states that we want to build a temple on the same site. The case was pending before the SC much before 2014. We have requested the court to clear the case and complete its hearings at the earliest," Shah said. Countering senior Congress leader and lawyer Kapil Sibal's demand for conducting the case hearing after the 2019 elections, he said, "I feel the case should be cleared at the earliest. Whatever decision SC wants to take, they should take it at the earliest." On not following the Supreme Court's verdict in the Sabarimala temple case, he said Sabarimala is related to religious faith and that "in some cases, there is no need for a judicial review." When one goes to a gurudwara (a religious place of Sikhs), one has to cover the head with a cloth, he said. "The god (Lord Ayyappa) is believed to be unmarried. It is the belief of locals. Why do you need a judicial review here. Here it is not about equal rights of men and women," Shah said. He said there are 12 temples in the country where men are not allowed inside. "Does it mean it is an injustice to men," he said. "If you are talking about equal rights for men and women, Hindus in this country have carried out so many social reforms on their own and without any order," he said. "The entire country rejected the 'Sati' pratha (a Hindu practice whereby a widow immolates herself on the funeral pyre of her husband) and child marriage while it accepted the Dowry Prohibition Act and the Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act. No one ever raised voice against it," he said. All these decisions were taken in order to protect women's dignity, Shah added. "There are many court decisions which cannot be followed, like ban on putting up loudspeakers on mosque or ban on Jallikattu; who is following it? In such decisions, let people decide about their beliefs. This should not be brought in judicial review, is my personal opinion," he said. Terming the triple talaq bill as a "social reform and not a religious issue," he said even Pakistan does not allow triple talaq to women. There are many Islamic countries where triple talaq is banned, he said. "We have brought the bill in Parliament and we will go ahead with it. It is up to the opposition to show whether they want to support Muslim women or oppose it," Shah said. The Maharashtra government on December 19 told the Bombay High Court it would not make appointments in any of its departments under the new legislation providing quota to the Maratha community till January 23, when the court will hear petitions against the reservation. The high court had earlier this month chided the government for issuing an advertisement for job recruitment even as petitions challenging the legislation are pending. Government counsel V A Thorat on December 19 assured a division bench of Chief Justice N H Patil and Justice M S Karnik that the state will not make any appointments till the next date of hearing (January 23). "The state's General Administration Department shall issue necessary directions to all local bodies and institutions under its control asking them not to make any appointments under the new legislation till then," he said. The court had on December 10 asked the government if it was willing to make public the report submitted by the State Backward Class Commission, on whose recommendations the government introduced the legislation. To this, Thorat and state Advocate General Ashutosh Kumbhakoni said while the government was duty-bound to submit a copy of the report to the court, it had some apprehensions about giving the report to lawyers, who have filed petitions, and making it public. "There are some portions which are not relevant to the recommendations but pertain to the history of the Maratha community... This we feel may create social unrest. Some wounds, though healed, if opened may create unrest," Kumbhakoni said. Thorat said those portions are "volatile" in nature. The bench then suggested the government to consider giving the lawyers a truncated version with the said portion deleted. "Submit a copy of the report to us (court) within a week. By then decide if a truncated version of the report could be given to the lawyers appearing for the petitioners' who have challenged the reservation," the court told the government. The bench was hearing a bunch of petitions on the Maratha quota issue. While a few of the petitions challenged the government's decision to provide 16 per cent reservation in government jobs and educational institutions to the Maratha community, several others were filed in support of it. On the last hearing, advocate Gunaratan Sadavarte, appearing in a petition challenging the legislation, pointed out to the court an advertisement issued by the Maharashtra Public Service Commission inviting applications for jobs. He had sought that the recruitment process pertaining to Maratha quota be stayed pending hearing of the petitions. Thorat on Wednesday told the court that the entire process of recruitment will take over a year to complete. "The selection of applications for the jobs is common. The reservation issue comes only at the fag end of the process when appointments are made. Even if the government fast tracks the process, it would still take a couple of months," he said. The government in an affidavit submitted on December 19 said it would not be proper for the court to stay the entire recruitment process, considering large number of vacancies in state departments and the issue of unemployment in society. The bench on December 19 accepted the contentions of the government and its assurance that no appointments would be made till the next date of hearing. The court directed the government to file its detailed affidavit to the petitions and posted the matter for further hearing on January 23. Maharashtra Governor C Vidyasagar Rao had last month approved and signed the Maratha Reservation Bill after the state Assembly unanimously passed it. Narendra Modi Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be on a two-day visit to Gujarat on December 21 and 22 to take part in an annual conference of state police chiefs and to address BJP women's wing workers, officials said Wednesday. The all-India conference of Directors General/ Inspectors General of Police is scheduled to be held near the Statue of Unity located in Narmada district from December 20, an official said. The three-day event would begin on December 20 in the presence of Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh. Modi would attend the meet on December 21, according to a release issued by the state government. The venue for the meet is a 'tent-city' set up near the 182-metre tall Statue of Unity, a government official said. The grand monument, dedicated to India's first Home Minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, was inaugurated by Modi on October 31. A Union Home Ministry official had earlier said that militancy in Jammu and Kashmir, cross-border terrorism and attempts to radicalise youth will top the agenda of the annual conference. Issues like clashes due to communal tension, circulation of communally sensitive news and pornographic material through social media are also expected to be discussed at the three-day meeting, he had said. On December 22, Modi will address the BJP women's wing workers during the last day of a national convention of the party's Mahila Morcha at Trimandir, a temple complex near Adalaj village in Gandhinagar, a BJP release said. Rafale jet Air Chief Marshal B S Dhanoa on Wednesday called Rafale a game changer and said the Supreme Court has given a fine judgment on petitions against the deal with France on the military aircraft. He also cautioned against politicisation of defence purchases, suggesting that this had earlier led to the delay in the Army acquiring the Bofors gun. I am not going to comment on the judgment but the Supreme Court has given a very fine judgment. It has also said that this plane is badly needed, he told reporters here. Dhanoa said as far as the technology is concerned, there is no argument against the Rafale aircraft . His remarks on the sidelines of a joint military exercise with Russia come days after the Supreme Court dismissed petitions seeking a probe into the Rafale deal. The Congress has alleged irregularities in the deal for 36 aircraft and claimed that the Narendra Modi government is buying them at a price much higher than the one that was being negotiated by the previous government. Dhanoa said the Indian Air Force has made sure that the aircraft has the best systems onboard. He said the planned procurement had already taken a long time and during this period India's neighbours have upgraded their own defence arsenal. We need it, given our strategic scenario, he said. He appeared to back the government's assertion that revealing details on the price of the fully-loaded aircraft would lead to rivals getting to know its capabilities. He said the taxpayers had the right to know where their money goes, but the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) was there to ensure that it was being well spent. Referring to the shortfall in the number of aircraft, Dhanoa said the IAF is trying to optimise its resources. He watched Aviaindra 2018, a joint exercise by the Indian Air Force and the Russian Federation Aerospace Force (RFSAF) going on at the IAF station in Jodhpur from December 10 to 21. This edition of Aviaindra is meant to expose the two forces to a counter-terrorism scenario. Former Uttar Pradesh chief minister and Samajwadi Party (SP) chief Akhilesh Yadav Congress leader Pramod Tiwari on Wednesday termed as "rumours" the reports of the BSP and the SP joining hands for the 2019 polls. He said Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) chief Mayawati and Samajwadi Party (SP) president Akhilesh Yadav had not officially announced their alliance so far. Responding to a query, the former Rajya Sabha member added that the Congress did not want division of votes against the BJP in the upcoming general elections. "As per my information, neither Mayawati ji nor Akhilesh ji have officially announced about it (alliance). I think these are all rumours...I want to thank Mayawati ji and Akhilesh ji for supporting Congress in forming governments in Rajasthan and Madya Pradesh," he told reporters here. "As far as Congress is concerned, it does not want division of votes against the BJP," he added. Tiwari also hit back at Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who had Sunday termed the previous defence deals by the Congress government as "tainted" and dubbed Italian businessman Ottavio Quattrochi and alleged middleman Christian Michel as "uncles" (of Congress). Speaking in Rae Bareli on December 16, Modi had said, "I want to know from the Congress as to why it is agitated and speaking lies repeatedly. Is it because there is no Quattrochi mama or Christian Michel in the defence deals done by the BJP government." On a query over the allegation that the Congress delayed the Rafale deal by over a decade, Tiwari said there was no delay. "The actual process of open bidding started in 2009 and the deal was about to get completed...We pursued for better fighter planes, better price and a better deal," he said. A US envoy on North Korea is to visit South Korea, officials said on December 19, as Washington and Pyongyang struggle to find a breakthrough in their stalled talks aimed at ending the North's nuclear programme. Stephen Biegun, the US special representative for North Korea, is scheduled to arrive in the South Korean capital, Seoul, on December 19 afternoon for a four-day stay, a diplomatic source told Reuters. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un vowed to work towards denuclearisation at his landmark summit with US President Donald Trump in Singapore in June but the two sides have since made little progress. They have yet to reschedule talks between US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and senior North Korean official Kim Yong Chol after abruptly cancelling a meeting in November. North Korean state media has credited Trump for his "willingness" to continue dialogue but has also slammed Washington for stepping up sanctions, accusing the State Department of being "bent on bringing the DPRK-US relations back to the status of last year which was marked by exchanges of fire". The report referred to the North's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). The State Department said communication between both sides was "ongoing" but sanctions relief would come after they achieved the goal of a "final, fully verified denuclearisation". "The sooner North Korea denuclearises, the sooner sanctions can be lifted," deputy spokesman Robert Palladino told a news briefing on Tuesday. The stalled negotiations also had an impact on inter-Korean ties, with the North remaining aloof towards the South's plan to host Kim Jong Un in Seoul this month as agreed at his summit with President Moon Jae-in in Pyongyang in September. Kim's trip was unlikely to take place this year, Moon's secretary said last week. Biegun is expected to explore ways to maintain the momentum for nuclear talks during his stay, officials in Seoul said. He was scheduled to hold talks on Thursday with his South Korean counterpart, Lee Do-hoon, ahead of their session on Friday of a working group launched last month to boost coordination on North Korean policy. Biegun will also meet Unification Minister Cho Myoung-gyon on Friday amid US concerns that Seoul may be moving too quickly with Pyongyang relative to the lacklustre progress on denuclearisation. The two Koreas plan to hold a ground-breaking ceremony next Wednesday for their project to reconnect rail and road links, which would need U.S. sanctions exemptions. 2018 | Mahindra Treo | Mahindra & Mahindra launched its first lithium-ion powered passenger three-wheeler starting at Rs 1.36 lakh. The vehicle has a range of 130 km and takes around 4 hours to charge completely. (Image: Mahindra) 2018 | Okinawa Ridge+ | Electric two-wheeler maker Okinawa launched the Ridge+ in October priced at Rs 64,998 (ex-showroom, India). The motor scooter that comes with a detachable battery feature, has a range of 120 km and a top speed of 55 km/hr. (Image: Okinawa) 2018 | Ather 450 & 340 | Bengaluru-based Ather Energy launched the Ather 450 at Rs 1.25 lakh and the Ather 340 at Rs 1.10 lakh, earlier this year in June. The Ather 450 has a range of 75 km with a top speed of 80km/hr. The Ather 340 has a top speed of 70km/hr with a range of 60km. (Image: Ather) 2019 | Mahindra e-KUV 100 | SUV-specialist Mahindra & Mahindra will launch its third battery-powered passenger vehicle in the middle of next year. This will be the electric version of the KUV 100. While specifications are yet unknown, the vehicle is expected to have a range of 150-180 km and would take around 3-4 hours for a complete charge. Reports suggest that e-KUV 100 would be priced around Rs 10 lakh. (Image: Mahindra) 2019 | Hyundai Kona | Hyundai will kick-start its EV campaign in India with the launch of Kona in the second half of 2019. The stylish SUV will be a CBU unit. With a driving range of 482 km and a top speed of 167 km/hr the Kona Electric will take nine hours to charge fully. Prices for the SUV are expected to be around Rs 25 lakh. (Image: Hyundai) 2019 | Nissan Leaf | Japanese auto major Nissan Motors will launch the Leaf in India through the imported route. The fully electric car is expected to be priced at around Rs 35 lakh. With a range of 400 km, the car takes about 8 hours to charge completely. (Image: Nissan) 2019 | Bajaj Three-wheeler | Indian auto giant Bajaj Auto will launch an electric three-wheeler next year. The company is already the market leader in petrol powered three wheelers. It may also launch an electric Qute later in the year. The Qute is already on sale in a few states (Image: Bajaj Auto). 2019 | Tork T6X | The Pune-based company is ready to roll out T6X, touted to be amongst the fastest elctric motorcycles ever built. T6X boasts of a top speed of 100 km/hr and has a range of 100 km. The electric bike is expected to launch with an estimated price of Rs. 1.25 lakh. (Image: Tork) 2019 | Twenty Two Motors | The Haryana-based company is ready to launch at least two electric scooters in the market next year. Twenty Two Motors first came to the forefront after Taiwanese automaker Kymco invested $65 million in the company. The first scooter to be launched by the nascent company is reported called Flow. (Image: Twenty Two Motors) 2019 | Audi e-tron | E-Tron is the first all-electric car by the German auto giant and will debut in India next year. The car has a range of 400 km and takes about 30 mins to charge 80 percent of the battery. E-tron will be imported to India; thus it will come with a hefty price tag. (Image: Audi) 2019 | Ultraviolette | The Indian electric bike start-up Ultraviolette Automotive is set to launch the radical-looking electric superbike next year. The bike which looks straight out of a sci-fi movie can attain a top speed of 150 km/hr, making it one of the fastest bikes to ever launch on Indian roads. (Image: Ultraviolette) 1. Apollo Micro Systems | Return: -54.18% | Issue size: Rs 113 crore | Listing date: January 22, 2018 | Subscription ratio: 248.51 | Apollo Micro Systems caters primarily to the defence and aerospace sectors. (Image: Reuters) Bharat Karnad The Indian armed forces, by habit, prepare to fight yesterdays wars. Not one of the services has a forward-looking plan for capability build-up for conflicts of the future, which will feature proactive and defensive cyber warfare wherewithal and Artificial Intelligence-driven robotic systems cued to assigned tasks by a multitude of space- air-, land- and sea-based sensors passing real-time intelligence on the enemy force disposition that are able to assess operational situations and even concert with other friendly warbots in the field to attack the target(s). Most such systems have progressed beyond the testing stage and are on the brink of deployment in the more advanced militaries. In India, theres not a hint of any thinking about robotic warfare, and even less of robotic warfare systems being designed and developed. A basic rover to handle/disarm live munitions/improvised explosive devices is about the extent of our achievement in the military robotics field. Rather, the Indian military remains committed to World War II-era genus of weapons platforms tanks, artillery, combat aircraft, aircraft carriers, in the main and then they are nowhere near cutting-edge, technology-wise. This is evident in the force modernisation plans. The army has the replacement of the venerable T-72 tank with the newer Russian T-90 tank as priority; the air force wishes to induct the French Rafale multi-role combat aircraft in large numbers. Except, 36 of these aircraft that have actually been bought are too valuable to commit to action and too few to muster operational clout; and the navy is so besotted by aircraft carriers that to afford them the country is compelled to make do with fewer, smaller, fighting ships (frigates and destroyers) and a thinned out presence in the Indian Ocean (unless the naval budget is increased manifold, whichs not on the cards). Most such backward-looking schemes are deemed adequate because the political class and the military brass, quixotically, cannot think of danger beyond Pakistan, this even though China the only credible threat looms spectre-like. Thus, Pakistan is the adversary the Indian Air Force mentions to justify the Rafale buy and bungs in a nuclear bombing role for it to overawe the media and the people. Likewise, the Indian naval chief assures the country in a Navy Day newspaper supplement that his force is superior to its Pakistani counterpart. The army chief on his part, when not advising Pakistan to become more secular if it wants to live in amity with India, warns of more surgical strikes. With the Pakistan bogey so much on the militarys mind, who has time for the real world? Meanwhile, the Narendra Modi government, in lieu of any actual expenditure of scarce funds, gives the impression of buttressing the countrys defence effort with the periodic announcements of the Defence Acquisitions Council (DAC) approving purchases of major armaments costing thousands of crores. However, because the DACs approval is about the first step in an onerous process that involves a lot of bureaucratic grind, little that is announced comes down the arms pipeline quickly, and military modernisation schemes, such as they are, mark time. Consider this: In the period October 2017 and October 2018, total capital buys worth Rs 86,030 crore were cleared by the DAC, but no contract was signed. This is part of the pattern from when the erstwhile defence minister Manohar Parrikar boasted of the DAC clearing Rs 3 lakh crore worth of military procurement in the first three years, with only a small fraction of the sum actually translating into weaponry with the forces. Of course, the tortuous defence procurement system is to blame but no government has sought to simplify and streamline it perhaps, because it serves the purposes of the vested interests that continue to grow fat on arms deals or through Make in India schemes of screwdrivering hardware from imported kits. This essentially leaves India exposed in the basic binary areas nuclear and conventional. Nuclear security has traditionally been the Indian governments blindspot, with nothing being done to resume underground tests and augment capabilities. This even as established nuclear powers induct new thermonuclear weapons and delivery systems, a trend likely to accelerate now that the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty banning nuclear missiles of 500-5,000 mile range from being deployed in Europe is defunct. Meanwhile, the Indian military doggedly acquires short-legged aircraft, like the Rafale, not strategic bombers such as the advanced Backfire Tu-22M3M or the more lethal Blackjack Tu-160M2, invests in tank forces long after they are of any real use, opts for aircraft carriers vulnerable to supersonic cruise and hypersonic guided missiles, and struggles to raise its first offensive warfare-capable mountain corps to take the fight to China on the Tibetan Plateau and spurns light tanks as its main equipment. Bharat Karnad is professor, Centre for Policy Research, and author. Views are personal. Entry for women of all age groups in Sabarimala temple | Date of verdict: September 28 | The Supreme Court granted women of all ages the right to enter the Sabarimala temple dedicated to Lord Ayyappa, reversing the Kerala shrines tradition of barring girls and women of menstruating age10-50 years from entering the premises. (Image: Reuters) Decriminalisation of adultery | Date of verdict: September 27 | The Supreme Court in a landmark ruling, struck down Section 497 that criminalised adultery and said that women must be treated at par with men. CJI Justice Dipak Misra said that there can't be a social license to destroy the institution of marriage, and added that the law violates the right to privacy to some extent. (Image: PTI) Constitutional validity of Aadhaar | Date of verdict: September 26 | The Supreme Court upheld the Constitutional validity of Aadhaar, but limited the scope of the controversial biometric identity project. It ruled that the submission of Aadhaar will not be mandatory for creating bank accounts, mobile connections or school admissions. (Image: Reuters) Live streaming of court proceedings | Date of verdict: September 26 | The Supreme Court pushed for greater transparency in the judicial system by allowing live-streaming and video recording of court proceedings of cases of constitutional importance. (Image: Reuters) No SC/ST quota for promotions | Date of verdict: September 26 | The Supreme Court ruled that there will be no reservation in promotion for Scheduled Caste (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST) in government jobs. The court held that the presumption of backwardness of SC and ST employees vanishes once they join government service. (Image: Reuters) Pride without prejudice | Date of verdict: September 6 | After taking into account a clutch of petitions challenging the criminalisation of homosexuality, the Supreme Court deemed Article 377 of the Indian Penal Code unconstitutional. The five-judge constitutional bench decriminalised gay sex between consenting adults, further declaring that victimising homosexuals is unconstitutional, and henceforth, a criminal act. (Image: Reuters) Stay on Bombay HC order in Bhima- Koregaon violence case | Date of verdict : October 29 | The Supreme Court stayed the Bombay High Court order refusing the Maharashtra police a 90-day extension to complete its investigation against a clutch of activists who were accused of Maoist links in the aftermath of caste-related violence in Koregaon Bhima village, Pune district. Centre's draft Cauvery Management Scheme approved | Date of verdict: May 18 | The Supreme Court approved the Centres draft Cauvery Management Scheme for smooth distribution of water among the four southern riparian states. (Image: Reuters) Legal sanction to passive euthanasia | Date of verdict: March 9 | The Supreme Court of India declared that the right to die with dignity is a fundamental right. The bench headed by Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra upheld the legal validity of passive euthanasia, albeit under strict guidelines. The judgement stated that withdrawal of life support will only be permitted through a "living will" and the patient must either be terminally ill or in a vegetative state. (Image: Reuters) Donald Trump US President Donald Trump took a swipe Tuesday at tech giants Facebook, Twitter and Google, accusing them of being biased in favor of opposition Democrats. "Facebook, Twitter and Google are so biased toward the Dems it is ridiculous!" Trump tweeted. "Twitter, in fact, has made it much more difficult for people to join @realDonaldTrump. Representational picture Pakistan's renowned social activist Asma Jahangir was posthumously honoured by the UN with a prestigious human rights award. Jahangir, an outspoken critic of Pakistan's powerful military establishment, fought against religious extremism and for the rights of oppressed minorities in Pakistan. She died of cardiac arrest at the age of 66 in February. She was honoured with the 2018 United Nations Human Rights Prize, an award given every five years since 1968. Jahangir's daughter Munizae Jahangir received the award on her behalf from President of the UN General Assembly Maria Fernanda Espinosa at a special ceremony here Tuesday. Among others who won the award include girls' education rights activist Rebeca Gyumi of Tanzania, Brazil's first indigenous woman lawyer Joenia Batista de Carvalho and Front Line Defenders from Ireland, working to protect human rights defenders at risk. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said that the work of the honourees and that of other human rights defenders around the world is essential for the collective efforts to sustain peace and ensure inclusive sustainable development and respect for human rights for all. "Often their work is dangerous. We regularly hear of abuses against human rights defenders murder, disappearances, torture, arbitrary imprisonment and other attempts to silence them. "Yet, these courageous individuals and groups remain committed to shining a light on the dark corners of the globe, wherever human rights violations occur," he said in his remarks to the General Assembly's United Nations Prize in the Field of Human Rights award ceremony. The event commemorated the 70th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, marked annually on December 10. Guterres said human rights defenders give voice to the voiceless and shield the powerless against injustice. "They stand for all rights economic, civil, political, social and cultural. They support the rule of law or work peacefully to change laws so women and girls, indigenous communities, minorities and other marginalised groups may exercise their rights," he said. Guterres said they they work to empower people through education, and help to protect other human rights defenders from harassment, intimidation or arrest. As part of the UN's activities in observance of Human Rights Day, which coincided with the Declaration's anniversary, the champions in the field from across the world, convened at the General Assembly Hall to be recognised for their outstanding contributions. Every five years, the United Nations Prize in the Field of Human Rights is awarded to organisations and individuals which embody excellent activism in defending human rights. The four winners join a notable group who have been recognised since the Prize was established by the General Assembly in 1966, including prominent figures such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Jimmy Carter, Malala Yusafzai and this year's Nobel Peace Prize winners, Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad, as well as organisations such as the Amnesty International and the International Committee of the Red Cross. Marking the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Espinosa said it was one of the most important contributions that the world body has made to mankind, reflecting the collective aspirations of an international order founded on human dignity and with a view to making the world a better place. Former Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari (Image: Reuters) The Pakistan government plans to file a case before the Election Commission against former President Asif Ali Zardari, seeking his disqualification over concealment of assets in the US, Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry said on Wednesday. Chaudhry accused Zardari of failing to mention an apartment he allegedly owns in the US in a declaration submitted to the Election Commission of Pakistan. He said the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) government will soon file a reference against Zardari for not declaring the property in his nomination papers. "He [Zardari] was required to declare that property under Articles 62 and 63, which he didn't. He is therefore not eligible to be a lawmaker," he was quoted as saying by the Dawn newspaper. Chaudhry said the investigative agencies were given a "free hand" to investigate any politician regardless of the party they belonged to whose activities are found to be suspicious. Zardari, 63, served as the 11th President of Pakistan from 2008 to 2013. In this file image taken from a video recording, Omar Khalid Khorasani (C), a top Pakistan Taliban commander, gives an interview in Pakistan's Mohmand tribal region on June 2, 2011. General Asim Bajwa, director general of the Pakistani army's media division, reported the death of Umar Narai, also known as Khalifa Umar Mansoor or Khalid Khurasani, in a message on Twitter on July 13, 2016. REUTERS/Handout/File Photo The United Arab Emirates said on Wednesday that reconciliation talks it hosted between the United States and Taliban officials from Afghanistan produced tangible and positive results. The two days of meetings aimed at ending Afghanistan's 17-year conflict were held in Abu Dhabi, with the attendance of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. The "US-Taliban reconciliation talks" produced "tangible results that are positive for all parties concerned", state-run WAM news agency said. A new round of talks would be held in Abu Dhabi "to complete the Afghanistan reconciliation process," WAM said without providing further details. The meetings are the latest in a flurry of diplomatic efforts as Washington seeks a way out of the Afghan conflict, which began with the US invasion in 2001. US envoy Zalmay Khalilzad said he had "productive" meetings in the UAE with Afghan and international partners "to promote intra-Afghan dialogue towards ending the conflict". Khalilzad tweeted that he met with Pakistani officials on Wednesday to brief them, before plans to travel onwards to meet Afghan leaders in Kabul. An Afghan negotiating team travelled to Abu Dhabi for "proximity dialogue" with the Taliban in preparation for face-to-face meetings, presidential spokesman Haroon Chakhansuri said Tuesday. The Taliban has not confirmed meeting Afghan officials, saying Tuesday they had held "preliminary talks" with the US envoy. They also said they had held "extensive" meetings with officials from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and the UAE, repeating demands for international forces to be withdrawn from Afghanistan. Those three countries were the only ones to recognise the Taliban government during its five-year rule from 1996. Initially, the talks between the Taliban emissaries and a team led by U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, as well as officials from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, were expected to last one day, but Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid confirmed that the meetings would continue through Tuesday. The United States is considering a total withdrawal of US forces from Syria as it nears the end of its campaign to retake all of the territory once held by Islamic State, U.S. officials told Reuters on Wednesday. The decision, if confirmed, would upend assumptions about a longer-term U.S. military presence in Syria, which U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and other senior US officials had advocated to help ensure Islamic State cannot reemerge. The Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill, 2016 that ensures effective regulation of surrogacy, prohibits commercial surrogacy and allows altruistic surrogacy to the needy Indian infertile couples was passed by the Lok Sabha on Wednesday by a voice vote. Initiating the debate on the provisions of the Bill, Union Health Minister J. P. Nadda said that the Bill was brought after the Law Commission recommended prohibiting the practice of commercial surrogacy. "Even NGOs and the civil society were of the opinion that commercial surrogacy must be stopped. Exploitation of surrogate mothers was also an issue. The government decided to come out with the Bill keeping the Indian ethos in mind so that exploitation of surrogate mothers could be stopped," he said. Calling it a historical Bill, Nadda sought support from all parties to help in passing the Bill. Although TMC's Kakoli Ghosh supported the Bill, she said it was hastily drafted and demanded its ambit be widened by allowing options for transgenders and same sex couples. She also demanded to stop surrogacy for those who use it in order to keep their bodies in shape. "We must vehemently stop fashion surrogacy that is taking place in our country. I don't want to take names, but there are film stars and relatives of film stars who are using surrogate mothers only because they don't want their figure to be destroyed. This type of fashion surrogacy must be stopped," she said. Ghosh, a doctor by profession, also sought that the 56 days embryonic period that counts from the day of fertilisation be replaced by any number of days that the baby is given in the mother's womb. She also demanded a public debate on the Bill on the lines of the ART (Assisted Reproduction Technologies) draft Bill and said that the Surrogacy Bill should have come along with the ART Bill. "Without having an IVF laboratory, without having a test tube baby, we cannot have a surrogate. Therefore, these two Bills should have been brought together," she said. Supporting the Bill, NCP's Supriya Sule demanded that there should also be provisions for single parents and they should be incorporated in the law. During the discussion, many of the participants including Bhratruhari Mahtab of the Biju Janata Dal, raised objections that the Bill does not define the term "close relative" as mentioned in the Bill for the surrogate mother. The Bill permits surrogacy only for couples who cannot conceive. The surrogate mother and the intending couple need eligibility certificates from the appropriate authority. The surrogate mother must be a 'close relative' of the intending couple. The Bill also provides for the constitution of a National Surrogacy Board, State Surrogacy Boards and appointment of appropriate authorities for regulation of the practice and process of surrogacy. The Bill was introduced in the Lok Sabha on November 21, 2016 and was then referred to a parliamentary standing committee on January 12, 2017. Surrogacy is an arrangement whereby an intending couple commissions a surrogate mother to carry their child. Recently, the Maharashtra government took an important step towards transparency through a government resolution (GR) which directs every public authority in the state to provide two hours, once a week, for citizens to walk into the government offices, for inspection of files under Section 4 of the RTI Act. However, even though citizens can demand to see documents under this provision, not many know how to go about it. In order that such a useful and citizen-friendly initiative is not lost due to citizens inhibition or ignorance, here are some tips on how to be on top of the board. Just to reiterate, inspection of files was pioneered in Pune way back in 2005 and followed thereafter by the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) in 2009, directing its public authorities to keep every Monday, between 3pm and 5pm, open for citizens to inspect files. At that time, even public information officers (PIOs) or heads of public authorities were not aware that it is not necessary for a citizen to write an application for inspection of files under Section 4 of the RTI Act. In fact, I remember when I met the secretary, environment in the Mantralaya to inspect files regarding Dow Chemicals in 2010, despite my having sent him an email and an SMS (as I was coming to Mumbai from Pune), he asked me to write an application. I convinced him that I was not required to do so and the following note made by the late Prakash Kardaley and Vijay Kumbhar came in handy for me. (The secretary, environment then spoke to his legal cell about this provision in front of me and then asked his executive director to show me all the files pertaining to Dow Chemicals and directed him to give me any photo copies that I wanted). Thus, when any citizen goes for file inspection, I would suggest you carry the following note which will be an eye-opener to the PIO, besides arming you with the required ammunition. Here it is: 1. Your kind attention is drawn to Section 4 of the Right to Information Act, 2005 under Chapter II on `Right to Information and Obligation of Public Authorities. 2. As per the provision, it is obligatory for every public authority (including xxxxxx name the office you would be visiting) to publish certain categories of documents so as to make voluntary disclosure of information so that citizens have minimum resort to the use of this Act to obtain information. 3. Information covered by Section 4, in fact, should have been published on May 12, 2005 and disseminated widely in such form and manner which is easily accessible to the public and should have been updated at regular intervals later. 4. It is further explained in the provision that 'disseminated' means making known or communicated the information to the public through notice boards, newspapers, public announcements, media broadcasts, the internet or any other means, including inspection of offices of any public authority. " I am enclosing here the full text of Section 4 as adopted by the Parliament of India for your reference. 5. I regret to bring to your notice that no information covered under this Section 4 has been disseminated yet by you, a public authority under the state government, through notice boards, newspapers, public announcements, media broadcasts and Internet. 6. Nevertheless, citizens have a right to inspect these documents in the office of the public authority, including the (xxxx name the office), as explicitly mentioned in the provision under Section 4. 7. It may be noticed that a citizen desiring to inspect the documents containing information covered under Section 4 of the Right to Information Act, 2005, need not make any formal requisition under Section 6 of the Act because these documents should have already been published by the public authority (including xxx name the office) so that citizens have minimum resort to the use of this Act to obtain information. 8. Implementation of this provision of the Act (under Section 4) is the direct responsibility of the head of the public authority. In this specific instance, it is your direct responsibility as the municipal commissioner and the administrative head of the Pune Municipal Corporation. Hence this letter is addressed to you and not to any public information officer (PIO) since no formal requisition is needed to be filed, please note. In case the public authority insists on a formal letter, then write it this way, says RTI activist Vijay Kumbhar: VERY IMPORTANT NOTE: Intimation of inspection under Section 4 should be addressed to the top authority of the government department (meaning the municipal commissioner, if it is a municipal corporation) unlike an application under Section 6 which is addressed to the public information officer (PIO). Draft of intimation To The Head of the Department Subject Intimation for inspection of files related to xxxxxxxxxx Dear Mr. Head of the Department As per the circular sankirn2018/ pra.kra. 45/ karya 6, dated 26/11/2018, the government of Maharashtra has allowed inspection of files in every department. Please note that as per section 4 of the RTI act and as per the said circular there is no need to give any intimation for inspection of files in any public authority. However, being responsible citizens, we thought it preferable to intimate you beforehand. I intend to exercise my right as a citizen to inspect documents related to xxxxxx. I will visit your office on Monday xx/xx/2018. Thanking you With Regards Citizens must remember they are the custodian of most government files, except the ones under Section 8 of the RTI Act, says Kumbhar and, therefore: As these files belongs to citizens and citizens are owners of these files they should not to feel awkward, guilty or hesitate to demand a file for inspection Remember, once a citizen gives them the intimation, the citizen should not have to wait for a reply from the officer, simply because a citizen has the right to inspect files during the designated working hours of the public authority. The intimation is just for the purpose of convenience and to avoid excuses by officials. Once citizens have gone through the documents they can ask for the copies of the inspected documents. To obtain such copies, under section 6 of the RTI Act, one need not give an application. Merely giving a list of document on plain paper is enough. However, they need to pay the fees required for photocopying. Text of Section 4 of the Right to Information Act, 2005 4. (1) Every public authority shall (a) maintain all its records duly catalogued and indexed in a manner and form which facilitates the right to information under this Act and ensure that all records that are appropriate to be computerised are, within a reasonable time and subject to availability of resources, computerised and connected through a network all over the country on different systems so that access to such records is facilitated; (b) publish within one hundred and twenty days from the enactment of this Act,- (i) the particulars of its organisation, functions and duties; (ii) the powers and duties of its officers and employees; (iii) the procedure followed in the decision making process, including channels of supervision and accountability; (iv) the norms set by it for the discharge of its functions; (v) the rules, regulations, instructions, manuals and records, held by it or under its control or used by its employees for discharging its functions; (vi) a statement of the categories of documents that are held by it or under its control; (vii) the particulars of any arrangement that exists for consultation with, or representation by, the members of the public in relation to the formulation of its policy or implementation thereof; (viii) a statement of the boards, councils, committees and other bodies consisting of two or more persons constituted as its part or for the purpose of its advise, and as to whether meetings of those boards, councils, committees and other bodies are open to the public, or the minutes 'of such meetings are accessible for public; (ix) a directory of its officers and employees; (x) the monthly remuneration received by each of its officers and employees, including the system of compensation as provided in its regulations; (xi) the budget allocated to each of its agency, indicating the particulars of all plans, proposed expenditures and reports on disbursements made; (xii) the manner of execution of subsidy programmes, including the amounts allocated and the details of beneficiaries of such programmes; (xiii) particulars of recipients of concessions, permits or authorisations granted by it; (xiv) details in respect of the information, available to or held by it, reduced in an electronic form; (xv) the particulars of facilities available to citizens for obtaining information, including the working hours of a library or reading room, if maintained for public use; (xvi) the names, designations and other particulars of the public information officers; , (xvii) such other information as may be prescribed; and thereafter update these publications every year; (c) publish all relevant facts while formulating important policies or announcing the decisions which affect public; (d) provide reasons for its administrative or quasi judicial decisions to affected persons; (2) It shall be a constant endeavour of every public authority to take steps in accordance with the requirements of clause (b) of sub-section (1) to provide as much information suo motu to the public at regular intervals through various means of communications, including the internet, so that the public have minimum resort to the use of this Act to obtain information. (3) For the purpose of sub-section (1), every piece of information shall be disseminated widely and in such form and manner which is easily accessible to the public. (4) All materials shall be disseminated taking into consideration the cost, effectiveness, local language and the most effective method of communication in that local area and the information should be easily accessible, to the extent possible in electronic format with the central public information officer, or state public information officer, as the case may be, available fee or at such cost of the medium or the print cost price as may be prescribed. Explanation: For the purposes of sub-sections (3) and (4), "disseminated" means making known or communicated the information to the public through notice boards, newspapers, public announcements, media broadcasts, the internet or any other means, including inspection of offices of any public authority. The Supreme Court (SC) has directed the Centre to publish names, criteria and other details of search committees work so far for appointments to the Central Information Commission, under the Right to Information (RTI) Act. The case pertained to the inordinate delay in filling up the vacancies of crucial posts of Central Information Commissioners (CICs) and Information Commissioners (ICs), The SC order is a big boost for activists, who have campaigned tirelessly for transparency in selection of information commissioners. The SC directive follows an affidavit submitted by the central government in court today. The Government had earlier committed to decide on vacancies even before a public interest litigation (PIL) for appointment of Commissioners was filed. It told the SC today that it had received 65 applications for the post of the Chief Central Information Commissioner and 280 applications for the four posts of Information Commissioners. The affidavit states that the government has shortlisted names for the post of CIC. However, after the latest SC directive, the government will have to publish these names on its website, before selects the chief information commissioner. As for the eight other States that were also asked to file an affidavit, the Telangana government has said that it was busy with elections so the SC has given it two more weeks to file its affidavit. The petitioners bought it to the notice of the court that there were 10,000 second appeals pending with this State Commission. The Odisha governments affidavit states that a selection committee has been formed to fill up four vacancies for ICs. It may be recalled that a writ petition was filed by activists Anjali Bharadwaj, Amrita Johri and Commodore Lokesh Batra (retd). The reason for this petition was that under the Right to Information (RTI) Act, the Central Information Commission (CIC) and State Information Commissions (SIC) have been created as statutory bodies to decide appeals and complaints against public authorities, for non-compliance with the RTI law. The proper functioning of these institutions is essential for effective implementation of the RTI Act. The RTI law provides that the CIC must consist of a Chief Information Commissioner and ten information commissioners. In an earlier hearing on 27 July 2018, the SC had directed the central government to file an affidavit stating how many posts it proposed to fill, based on the advertisement issued, the time schedule for filling the posts, why appointments were not made subsequent to a 2016 advertisement and measures to ensure transparency in the process of appointment all this was highlighted in the PIL. In addition, eight state governments, who are respondents in the case, were also directed to file affidavits enumerating the steps they are taking for filling up vacancies, the time frame within which these will be filled and the procedure of appointment. Incidentally, Chief Information Commissioner Radha Krishna Mathur, and three Central Information Commissioners Prof M Sridhar Acharyulu, Yashovardhan Azad and A Bhattacharyya, retired in the last week of November 2018. That makes for eight vacancies in the Commission. Besides the legal intervention sought, former Central Information Commissioner, Prof Acharyulu too kept up the pressure on government by writing a letter to the President of India, Ram Nath Kovind, last week regarding the inordinate delay in appointing information commissioners. Prof Acharyulu in his letter stated: the Government of India should have completed process of appointing the Chief Information Commissioner before the retirement of Shri Radha Krishna Mathur, to be ready to take over the administration of the Commission without any gap, because the RTI Act has not envisaged any vacancy in that high position at any point of the time. The Commission has experienced absence of administration for several months as the Government did not appoint Chief Information Commissioner, three years ago, after retirement of the then Chief. Unfortunately now also that position is left vacant since 22nd November 2018. Similarly leaving seven positions of CICs also will lead to increase in the pendency of second appeals/complaints. The delay in information amounts to denial of information and delay in information justice also means its denial. During the hearing on the 3rd December, the petitioners had pointed out that at present there were vacancies in the Central Information Commission, including that of the Chief and the backlog of appeals/complaints had risen to more than 26,000. They also pointed out that the advertisement issued by the central government for the posts of information commissioners and the chief information commissioner did not specify the salary and tenure, even though these are specifically defined in the RTI Act & therefore, the advertisements were not in keeping with the RTI law. All previous advertisements for the posts specified the salary and tenure. Upon being questioned about the anomaly in the advertisements, the counsel for the central government stated that the government was intending to amend the RTI Act. Prof Acharyulu, former central information commissioner has appealed to President of India for appointment of eminent persons from fields other than Administration to the CIC. His letter says: I would like produce the text of Section 12(5) of RTI Act 2005 for ready reference, at this juncture: The Chief Information Commissioner and Information Commissioners shall be persons of eminence in public life with wide knowledge and experience in law, science and technology, social service, management, journalism, mass media or administration and governance. In this context, as a person who worked as Central Information Commissioner for five years till recently, I request your Excellency to consider following suggestions: 1. As the Chief Information Commissioner in all these 13 years was selected from the field of Administration only, at least, this time an eminent person from the field other than Administration may be selected; and if for any reason, the Government decides to select a retired bureaucrat once again, it should ensure that he had credentials of integrity, commitment towards transparency and has never supported or promoted any kind of secrecy in administration. The people have a right to know this kind of background of the Chief and other Commissioners. The Government should also commit itself to appoint next Chief Information Commission from other than bureaucrats. 2. As mandated by section 12(5) of the RTI Act, the Government of India has a statutory duty to select at least one person of eminence each in public life with wide knowledge and experience from the fields of (1) law, (2) science, (3) technology, (4) social service, (5) management, (6) journalism, and (7) mass media. As the Government has already appointed three eminent persons with experience in administration, who are working now, the Committee, as a principle, should not consider the persons from this field for this time. 3. Whenever the Selection Committee convenes, from now onwards, it shall select one eminent person of experience each from these fields necessarily for making the Central Information Commission representative of multiple fields of public activity and truly democratic. With experts from various fields, there will be no scope for bureaucratic majority or domination in its administration besides accommodating different view-points. If the Government selects more number of former bureaucrats for these posts, it will in breach of letter and spirit of transparency law and more particularly that of Section 12(5) of RTI Act, which may not stand the scrutiny by the Judiciary. 4. The Selection Committee should also ensure that the new Commissioners appointed shall have the complete independence with regard to the term, status and salary as provided by the RTI Act. Their term, status and salary shall not be as prescribed by the Central Government as contemplated by the present Government in the proposed Amendment to RTI Act. 5. The Government shall ensure that it will not interfere in the functioning of Central Information Commission and also to insulate the office of Chief Information Commissioner or individual commissioner from direct or indirect pressures or interferences from any of its offices such as PMO or the Ministry of DoPT. 6. The Government shall not introduce the RTI (Amendment) Bill, 2018 and shelve it permanently, in the interest of transparency of administration and good governance. 7. Hereafter, the Government shall fill every vacancy promptly so that a new Chief/Commissioner takes over the charge from the retiring Commissioner without any gap. December 19, 2018 Report: U.S. To Leave Syria Immediately - Updated Updated below --- The Wall Street Journal just reported that U.S. troops prepare to leave northeast Syria: WASHINGTONIn an abrupt reversal, the U.S. military is preparing to withdraw its forces from northeastern Syria, people familiar with the matter said Wednesday, a move that throws the American strategy in the Middle East into turmoil. U.S. officials began informing partners in northeastern Syria of their plans to begin immediately pulling American forces out of the region where they have been trying to wrap up the campaign against Islamic State, the people said. The move follows a call last week between President Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has threatened to launch an assault on Americas Kurdish partners in Syria. Turkey had threatened over several week to invade and occupy an at least 10 miles deep strip of northeast Syria. The Turkish army brought heavy weapons to its adjacent borders areas. Some 15,000 foreign and Syrian 'rebels', paid by Turkey, are supposed to be on the forefront of the invasion. These were over the last month transferred from Idleb and other Turkish controlled areas of northwest Syria to the Turkish side of the eastern border. The U.S. military and the neoconservatives elements in Trump's administration wanted to hold onto the northeast of Syria for an unlimited time. They planned to establish a Kurdish entity and finance it with the Syrian oil fields they occupied. They had plans to arm and train some 40,000 Kurdish troops. For over a year the U.S. claimed to fight the Islamic State remands which still holds some grounds on the northern side of the Euphrates near the Iraqi border. But the front lines moved little. Only during the last week did the U.S. supported troops finally take the town of Hajin. For Turkey the perspective of 40,000 armed and U.S. protected YPK Kurds on its border, while the YPG's sister organization PKK is fighting a separatist guerilla war against the Turkish army north of it, was a real and existential threat. It seems that Erdogan made a deal with Trump, which is now turned into practical moves. Yesterday Turkey was suddenly offered to buy advanced Patriot missile defense systems. It had earlier decided to buy the Russian S-400 system. Now we learn the U.S. troops move out. What other surprises are in this deal? What does Trump get out of it? How does this change Turkey's relation with Russia? And what about the U.S. occupied border station al-Tanf between Iraq and Syria. Will those troops leave too? With the U.S. moving out there will be a race to take those parts of Syria that the U.S. leaves. Turkey is likely to stick to its invasion plan. The Syrian government must now race to take back the Raqqa dam, the rich agricultural land north of the Euphrates and, most important, the oil and gas field near the Iraqi border which are needed to finance the country. It must also move parts of its army to the northeast Euphrates area to isolate and finally defeat the rest of ISIS that the U.S. seemingly leaves behind. Update 14:45 utc The New York Times(and Trump) confirm the move: President Trump is considering pulling 2,000 United States ground troops out of Syria in a move that would seek to describe the four-year American-led war against the Islamic State as largely won, officials said Wednesday. We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency, the president said in a Twitter post on Wednesday morning. He offered no details on his plans for the military mission in Syria. A formal withdrawal announcement could come as early as Wednesday, administration officials said. But Pentagon officials were still trying to talk the president out of it, arguing that such a move would betray Kurdish allies who have fought alongside American troops in Syria and who could find themselves under attack in a military offensive now threatened by Turkey. ... That the U.S. betrays the Kurds is almost a tradition. The Kurds had been warned about this over and over again. But they did not listen. Like in Afrin canton, which Turkey occupied after the Kurds rejected to come back under Syrian government control, they will now likely have to pay a huge price. Mattis and the neocons want Trump to stay in Syria but it seems that for once Trump is not falling for their stupid plans. Posted by b on December 19, 2018 at 14:21 UTC | Permalink Comments next page We see a lot of tourists around our country over this period - but these tourists are using their time on our shores for something a little different. The American couple have paid for an ad in a newspaper, asking for "nice NZ daughters" to date their sons. "Hello Parents. We are from the States (Oregon), visiting your beautiful country." the ad began. "My wife and I have 3 wonderful, successful, handsome, alas unmarried, sons between the ages of 28-32," the advert reads. "We are not expecting, just hoping, to introduce our sons to nice NZ daughters." (CNN) Japan is poised to put its first aircraft carriers to sea since World War II, refitting its Izumo-class warships to carry U.S.-designed F-35B fighter jets, the government announced Tuesday. In its 10-year Defense Program Guidelines, Tokyo said it will buy 42 of the stealthy F-35Bs, which are designed for short-run take offs and vertical landings. Those planes will be available for deployment aboard two flat-top ships, the JS Izumo and JS Kaga, which at more than 800 feet long and displacing 27,000 tons are the largest ships in the Japanese fleet. "Under the drastically changing security environment around Japan, the government will take all possible measures to protect the lives and assets of Japanese people," Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said Tuesday in announcing the plan. "The review of the new defense guideline is extremely meaningful to show the Japanese people and the world what is truly necessary in our defense to protect the people and to serve as the cornerstone of the future (for the Japan Self-Defense Forces)." The new guidelines listed China, North Korea and Russia, as well as the United States and NATO, as entities with massive military capabilities with which Japan must concern itself. The Izumo and Kaga have been carrying helicopters designed for anti-submarine warfare since entering service over the past three years. They will need to have their decks reinforced to accommodate the heavier F-35Bs, as well as the heat and force from the jets' thrusters when they land vertically. Japan will also increase its order for F-35A jets, which take off and land on conventional runways, to 105, the government said. Forty-two of those jets are in service or were part of earlier Japanese orders. Those planes will replace the Japan Air Self-Defense Force's aging F-15J fighters. The purchases will be spread over 10 years, with 27 of the F-35As and 18 of the F-35Bs to be acquired, as well as the two warships to be refitted, in the first five years. Total spending over the first five years is pegged at $282.4 billion and will include creating cyber defense and naval transportation units that operate across Japan's three military branches, the Ground, Air and Maritime Self-Defense Forces. An eye on China Carl Schuster, a former director of operations at the US Pacific Command's Joint Intelligence Center, said the new aircraft carriers would give Tokyo the ability to mount territory defenses farther out from its main islands. It comes after a Japanese defense white paper in August highlighted concerns about China. "China's rapid modernization of the People's Liberation Army, enhancement of operational capabilities, and unilateral escalation of activities in areas close to Japan are generating strong security concerns in the region and international community, including Japan," the paper said. Analysts said Beijing would be forced to pay attention to the carrier capability. "It further complicates the projection of Chinese military power into the southwestern maritime domain around Japan's Ryukyu islands," said Corey Wallace, an Asia security analyst at Freie University in Berlin. However Wallace and Schuster both cautioned that the Japanese carriers are small and cannot carry many aircraft -- especially compared to the U.S. Navy's massive 90,000-ton Nimitz-class carriers or even China's 58,000-ton Liaoning carrier. When rumors of the Japan's carrier plans surfaced last month, China urged Tokyo to be cautious. An article in the state-run Global Times newspaper said the refit of the Izumo-class ships, and the purchase of the F-35Bs, "essentially changes the warships' nature from a defensive to offensive one." "Japan must not forget its infamous history of invading countries and regions in the Asia-Pacific region during WWII," it added. At the outset of World War II, Japan fielded one of the world's largest and best fleets of aircraft carriers. It was from those that the attack on Pearl Harbor was launched. But the fleet was decimated in the war, and the post-war constitution put strict limits on Tokyo's forces that allows them to act only in a defensive role. A defensive plan In announcing the spending plan Tuesday, Japan stressed it is designed to buttress those defenses. The plan realizes the need to drastically strengthen Japan's defense and expand its role while the security environment around the country changes rapidly, the Defense Ministry said. Choosing an expanded F-35 fleet enmeshes the Japanese Self-Defense Force with US and allied militaries around Asia, experts say. The US, South Korea and Australia also are part of the F-35 program. The planes come with software suites which in theory allow them to communicate in real time in battle. The U.S. Marine Corps also operates F-35Bs off the U.S. Navy's amphibious assault ships. Wallace said the future could conceivably see U.S. F-35s operating from Japanese ships and/or Japanese F-35s flying off American ones. Buying more F-35s also helps Japan curry favor with U.S. President Donald Trump. Trump has publicly touted international sales of the aircraft as a victory for his administration and praised foreign leaders who have purchased them. The main assembly point for the F-35 is Fort Worth, Texas, but the jets are also put together in Nagoya, Japan, and Italy. Japanese government officials said all the planes in the new order will be imported. This story was first published on CNN.com, "Japan to have first aircraft carriers since World War II." Ottawas avowed strategy to stem the growing number of its citizens suffering from chronic homelessness is predicated upon the assumption that it would be more cost-efficient to help them pay rent rather than maintain shelters. Just one major problem: Supply is nowhere near enough to fulfill the needs of this population. Even if we can identify people who are ready to go into housing, there's not enough housing in the city, Shepherds of Good Hope CEO Deirdre Freiheit told CBC News. Houston-based Cheniere Energy has signed a 20-year liquefied natural gas supply deal with a subsidiary of Petronas, Malaysia's state-owned oil and natural gas company. Under the deal, Cheniere's Sabine Pass LNG facility will supply 1.1 million tonnes of LNG per year to Petronas LNG. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed but Cheniere reported that the purchase price of the LNG is indexed to the monthly Henry Hub price, plus a a fee. Under the deal, the point of sale is at loading and Petronas is responsible for arranging the shipping. In a statement, Cheniere Energy CEO Jack Fusco said Petronas will be a foundation customer for the sixth production unit planned at the company's Sabine Pass LNG facility in Louisiana. "This 20-year agreement with Sabine Pass Liquefaction continues our momentum on Train 6, where early engineering, procurement, and site preparation activities have recently commenced ahead of a final investment decision," We expect this (sale and purchase agreement) to support our continued progress toward a final investment decision in 2019." The announcement comes less than a week after Cheniere shipped its first cargo to Greece. The Houston-based company has shipped nearly 500 LNG cargoes to 30 nations. Malaysia promises to be the 31st nation and a large customer. Petronas entered the liquefied natural gas production business with the launch of Malaysia LNG in 1978. The state-owned oil and natural gas company launched Petronas LNG as its global trading and shipping arm in 2003. In addition to producing LNG from a large facility in the state of Sarawak, Petronas also owns the the world's first floating LNG and is building the second. "With the addition of this new volume, it will enhance Petronas' supply portfolio and further strengthen our position as a reliable global LNG portfolio player," Petronas Vice President of LNG Marketing & Trading, Ahmad Adly Alias said in a statement. Port Arthur LNG has signed a 20-year supply deal with Poland's state-owned natural gas company. The Sempra Energy-owned facility and Polish Oil & Gas Company, or PGNiG, announced the liquefied natural gas deal early Wednesday morning. Financial terms were not disclosed but Sempra Energy confirmed that the agreement is for the sale and purchase of 2 million metric tons of LNG per year, an amount that will meet about 15 percent of Poland's daily needs. The deal makes Poland a foundation customer for Port Arthur LNG, a proposed Jefferson County facility that is still waiting on a final investment decision from Sempra Energy. In a statement, Sempra Energy CEO Jeffrey Martin said the deal with Poland helps the company achieve its long-term goal of exporting 45 million tonnes of LNG per year. "Last month, we began the commissioning phase of our Cameron LNG liquefaction-export facility in Louisiana," Martin said. "This agreement, along with the great progress on Cameron LNG, continue to validate our growth strategy as we advance our vision to become North America's premier energy infrastructure company." Supply Deal: Cheniere signs 20-year deal with Malaysia's Petronas Port Arthur LNG's deal with Poland follows a recent visit by U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry to the East European nation where energy security was a topic of concern. "This agreement marks an important step toward Poland's energy independence and security," Perry said in a statement. Like other European nations, Poland has relied on a natural gas supplied via pipeline Russia. Shipments from Port Arthur LNG "Our activities show that we consistently implement our strategy," PGNiG Management Board President Piotr Wozniak said in a statement. "Another long-term contract not only allows us to develop LNG portfolio with a view to delivering to Poland, but it gives us, in the near future, the possibility of trading in LNG purchased on a global scale. I am glad that Sempra Energy is among our American partners. I am convinced that we will have good long-term cooperation." Rising Exports: Corpus Christi LNG's first shipment headed to new market in Europe Some analysts say Saudi Arabias 2019 revenue forecast is surprising because they estimate it to be based on a relatively high price of oil. The plan defies the laws of arithmetic, said Ziad Daoud, the Dubai-based chief Middle East economist at Bloomberg Economics. The governments projections may be based on a crude price as high as $80 a barrel in 2019, and it would have to climb to $95 a barrel to balance the budget, he said. Brent crude traded near $56 a barrel on Wednesday. A Texas mother whose two young children died in a hot car while she partied inside a shed was sentenced to 40 years in prison Wednesday. Police say that June 7, 2017, Amanda Hawkins, then 19, drove her 1- and 2-year-old daughters to the hospital. The girls were in dire condition and their mother claimed they'd collapsed after smelling flowers at a nearby lake, Kerr County Sheriff Rusty Hierholzer told The Washington Post last year. But police quickly determined that flowers weren't the culprit. Instead, the girls' mother intentionally left them in her car overnight while she partied with friends, according to Hill Country Breaking News. The children - Brynn Hawkins, 1, and Addyson Overgard-Eddy, 2 - were trapped in the car for 15 to 18 hours as temperatures in Hill Country reached close to 90 degrees. That evening, someone heard the girls crying in the car and asked Hawkins to bring them inside. "She said: 'No, it's fine. They'll cry themselves to sleep,' " Hierholzer said. Prosecutors said that Hawkins woke up around noon the next day and had sex before going out and finding the girls, Hill Country Breaking News reported. "She knew those kids were back there. She left them in that car," Hierholzer said. Hawkins pleaded guilty in September to two felony counts of abandoning or endangering a child causing imminent danger or death, bodily injury or physical or mental impairment, and two counts of injury to a child, according to People. In a statement, police said Hawkins was initially reluctant to drive the children to the hospital because "she did not want to get in trouble." Prosecutors said that Hawkins Googled how to revive someone from heat exhaustion while running cold water on the girls in a futile attempt to save them, the Hill Country Breaking News reported. Her attorney did not immediately respond to a phone call and email requesting comment. "Those precious little girls would still be here today if this had not happened," Judge Keith Williams told Hawkins during the trial. "People in our community take better care of their pets than you took care of your kids." Williams imposed four sentences of 20 years each, with two sets running concurrently, bringing her total sentence to 40 years. A second case in these deaths involves then-16-year-old Kevin Franke, who was also at the party. Franke entered the car to sleep because there was not enough room inside the shed, according to his attorney. Upon leaving the car, prosecutors say, Franke turned off the engine and rolled up the windows, subjecting the children to the intense heat. His attorney, Richard Ellison, claims he knocked on Hawkins's door to wake her up the next morning, but she apparently did not answer. When asked whether Franke knew that there were children in the car with him, Ellison replied: "That's unclear, and I'm still trying to sort that all out." Ellison said it's unclear from the evidence whether the engine was on or off before Franke slept in the car. "He hardly knew Amanda and was in the wrong place at the wrong time," Ellison said. Franke was charged as an adult in July with two counts of felony murder in the deaths of the children. More for you Man convicted of wounding SF cop in Halloween gunfight (SFC) When Brynn and Addyson were taken to the hospital, physician John Gebhart stayed up for more than 40 hours trying to save their lives, he later testified. Hawkins was giggling and texting at times while defending her flower-sniffing story to doctors, Gebhart testified, according to the Hill Country Breaking News. "She kept saying, 'This is what happened,' over and over," Gebhart said. He added that the two girls died slowly and probably painfully. Judge Williams reprimanded Hawkins for lying and casting blame on others. Hawkins made a statement before her sentencing, stating, "I will accept whatever the punishment may be," and that "there are no excuses for what I did." She added, "I do love them and care about them." Deaths of children in hot vehicles have fluctuated in recent years. On average, 38 children die in such cases each year, according to kidsandcars.org, although these tragic cases are oftentimes unintentional, as Hierholzer said last year. "This is by far the most horrific case of child endangerment that I have seen in the 37 years that I have been in law enforcement," Hierholzer said. With talk Tuesday of a partial federal government shutdown, U.S. Rep. Mike Conaway thinks the situation can go either way. The Midland Republican also considered the weight of a recent federal court ruling as the next congressional term comes on the horizon. The one wild card got handed to everybody last week when a federal judge nullified the Obamacare Act, Conaway said. That means that the Democrats will have to deal with something that the president would sign and that would need to be bipartisan. Conaways discussion with the Reporter-Telegram came after a federal judge ruled Friday that the Affordable Care Act was unconstitutional and cant stand on its own. The ruling was related to the individual mandate and doesnt currently impact U.S. health care coverage. RELATED: After judge's ruling against 'Obamacare,' what happens now? While Conaway hasnt had much time to discuss the ruling with others, he thinks the judges decision will elevate the issue. Also in the news this week was the potential for a government shutdown, which could leave thousands of federal workers without pay. The topic came up last week during a discussion between President Donald Trump and Sen. Minority Leader Charles Schumer, among other government leaders. Both of them are saying things, Conaway said about the meeting. Can you really hold either one of them to the strict interpretation of what theyre saying? There may be some New York City code going on there thats involved, he said referencing that both men are from New York. The funding impasse revolved about $5 billion in funding for a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border. This really was between Schumer and the president to work this out if at all, Conaway said. I still think its a 50-50 chance that it doesnt happen. But I think whatever the president agrees to, we can pass in the House. The White House on Tuesday said the administration has found other ways to get border wall funding, but Democratic leaders were against that proposal. The deadline to come up with a solution is Friday. For immigration reform, Conaway said theres opportunity for language to move away from a border wall and toward operational control of the border. He thinks people should be in favor of that concept, which relates to resources and infrastructure. Fencing or the wall in itself is not a panacea, Conaway said. You still have to patrol the wall. You have to watch it to make sure people arent trying to break through. More information from Conaways discussion will appear in a future Reporter-Telegram story. A man was arrested Dec. 10 after allegedly sexually assaulting a teenager, according to court documents. Ramiro Estaban Guzman-Pecina, 30, was being held Tuesday on a $150,000 bond for a second-degree felony charge of sexual assault. Midland County deputies were dispatched Dec. 10 to a Midland ISD school in reference to a sexual assault. LOCAL CRIME: Man charged with aggravated assault A staff member told deputies a student had disclosed sexual abuse, according to Guzman-Pecinas affidavit. The teen was transported to the Child Advocacy Center where she was interviewed. If convicted of a second-degree felony charge, Guzman-Pecina could face up to 20 years imprisonment. A Houston man was arrested Saturday after he allegedly drove a vehicle toward a Midland police officer, according to court documents. Anthony Avila, 22, was released Tuesday on a $75,000 bond for a first-degree felony charge of aggravated assault against a public servant and a $10,000 bond for a third-degree felony charge of evading arrest or detention with a vehicle. The Illinois Department of Human Services has backed the original mental health evaluation of a Meredosia man facing first-degree murder charges. Dustin A. Finlaw, 18, of Meredosia was found unfit to stand trial after an evaluation showed he would be unable to aid in his own defense. He is facing first-degree murder charges in the May death of Robert L. Utter. After he was deemed unfit, Finlaw was taken to the Department of Human Services for treatment and evaluation, and he continues to receive treatment in a DHS facility. States Attorney Gray Noll said DHS provided an updated report that agreed with the original report. He is still unfit to stand trial, but it is believed he is making progress, Noll said. It is believed that he will be fit within one year. Utter, 42, of Rushville was found just before 7:30 a.m. May 24 in a car on Montgomery Street in Meredosia. He had suffered multiple stab wounds. During the investigation into the homicide, Finlaw was accused of assaulting two police officers, lying to investigators and destroying a cell phone that might have contained information about the death. He was arrested on charges of aggravated assault of two police officers, resisting arrest and lying about his whereabouts during the homicide. Those charges are separate from the first-degree murder charges. Finlaws progress will be updated during a status hearing at 2:30 p.m. March 5. The status of Glenn C. Van Avery, 25, of South Jacksonville, who also is facing a murder charge and an attempted murder charge, also was mentioned Tuesday in court. Van Avery recently was transferred to a DHS facility and an updated report on his fitness was not yet available. An updated report will be requested from DHS prior to Van Averys next status update at 1:30 p.m. Jan. 22, Noll said. Van Avery is charged with first-degree murder and attempted murder in the stabbing death of Ruth Van Avery, who was found dead on June 13 in her South Jacksonville home, and the stabbing of Garrick Van Avery that same day. Samantha McDaniel-Ogletree can be reached at 217-245-6121, ext. 1233, or on Twitter @JCNews_samantha. Months after Illinois began complying with President Barack Obamas regulations on waterways, President Donald Trumps administration has overhauled the rules. The Waters of the United States regulations set in place in 2015 had been locked up in court battles until August, when a judge lifted the stay on them. The most contentious part of Obamas changes was that nearly every body of water, no matter how small, was given the same rules as major rivers. Illinois is one of the 26 states where there was no court challenge to the regulations, meaning the rules are in effect locally. The Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers have proposed rule changes that loosen restrictions on smaller bodies of water. Lauren Lurkins with the Illinois Farm Bureau said the changes will provide clarity for farmers on what they can do with their own land. This new proposal could really start to look at the issue in a way that makes sense to the normal public, she said. A farmer should be able to stand in his backyard on their farm field and look at the landscape and be able to determine, without a team of lawyers, whether the federal government has jurisdiction or not. The proposal will be open for public comment before the agencies then announce a final action. That, Lurkins said, is when court challenges would likely hold up the changes for a considerable amount of time, similar to what happened with Obamas change. Opponents of the change say its going to allow for pollutants to get into public water supplies. Without the protections provided by the current Clean Water Rule, commercial developers could pave over or build on wetlands without any oversight, oil spills or pipeline breaks into these waters would no longer be considered CWA violations, and manure from factory farms could overflow into streams without fear of federal consequences, said Kim Knowles, staff attorney with the Prairie Rivers Network. Morgan County Jacksonville Police ARRESTS, CITATIONS Lisa R. Sprague, 40, of 227 Worcester St., White Hall, was booked into the Morgan County jail at 3:40 p.m. Sunday on charges of driving while license is revoked or suspended and leaving the scene of an accident. Adrian D. Raymond, 43, of 133 E. Wolcott St. was booked into the Morgan County jail at 5:16 p.m. Sunday on a charge of violating an order of protection. Ryan L. Patton, 22, homeless, was booked into the Morgan County jail at 12:17 a.m. Monday on charges of burglary to a motor vehicle, possession of drug paraphernalia and possession of a resembling substance after police said he was found to be in possession of a substance that looked like methamphetamine. Police say he also took a bottle of prescription medication, an auxiliary cord and an USB charger from vehicles parked on Beecher and South Prairie streets. A 15-year-old boy was arrested at 10:52 a.m. Monday on a charge of aggravated battery after police say he hit a teacher at Garrison Alternative School. Alexander C. Ruggles, 28, of 602 Gaskill St., Meredosia, was booked into the Morgan County jail at 12:25 a.m. Tuesday on a theft charge after police say he possessed a stolen vehicle and stolen license plates. Cheston L. Sledd, 31, of 331 W. Douglas Ave. was booked into the Morgan County jail at 3:57 a.m. Tuesday on a retail theft charge. Johnathon J. Jackson, 18, of 428 S. East St. was booked into the Morgan County jail at 10:08 a.m. Tuesday on charges of domestic battery and battery. Denver H. Nelson, 25, of 428 S. East St. was booked into the Morgan County jail at 11:12 a.m. Tuesday on charges of domestic battery and battery Jeremy C. Stucker, 40, of 111 Meadow Ridge Lane was booked into the Morgan County jail at 2:55 p.m. on a charge of criminal trespassing. ACCIDENTS Troy L. Taylor, 42, of 409 E. Superior Ave. and Lisa J. Montgomery, 32, of Hannibal, Missouri, were booked into the Morgan County jail at 12:35 p.m. Sunday on charges of driving while license is revoked or suspended and leaving the scene of an accident after police say Montgomery was driving in the 200 block of North Church Street at 11:15 a.m. Sunday when the vehicle she was driving hit an unoccupied vehicle. Both Montgomery and Taylor fled on foot, according to police. Edward E. Baldwin, 27, of Jacksonville was cited on a charge of failure to yield after police say he was turning north on South Diamond Street from West Morton Avenue when the vehicle he was driving hit the rear drivers side of a trailer being pulled by a vehicle being driven by Charles R. Booker, 58, of Tremont at 8:22 p.m. Sunday. BURGLARIES, THEFTS Phone chargers were stolen from a vehicle parked in the 600 block of South Prairie Street, according to a report filed at 7:36 a.m. Monday. South Jacksonville Police ARRESTS, CITATIONS Shawn M. Zigler, 23, of Moberly, Missouri, was booked into the Morgan County jail at 3:37 a.m. Monday on a charge of driving while license is revoked or suspended. Compiled by Samantha McDaniel-Ogletree The Fourth Estate a term I first heard in AP Government my senior year in high school is the unofficial fourth branch of government, like Billy Preston is the fifth Beatle. The media is the Fourth Estate, traditionally television, radio and print, while in the age of social media, bloggers and other social media outlets are of the Fourth Estate, as well. The Fourth Estate exists to keep the three branches of government honest. It holds our elected officials and bureaucracies accountable to We the People. When something is array in our government, it is the charge of the Fourth Estate to honestly report on the matter so that the Great American Public is informed, aware and capable of taking action when necessary. The Fourth Estate is supposed to speak up for the Great American Public to be that voice for the voiceless and call out wrongs when the powerless have no means to do so. The three branches of government do not intimidate the Fourth Estate or at least they are not supposed to. Since President Trump assumed office, his administration has bombarded We the People with countless streams of lies, racist attacks and moronic inaccuracies about how our government functions. Most noticeably, the Trump administration regularly refers to the media as an Enemy of the State, which, if I were of the Fourth Estate, would consider those fighting words. Now, do I expect to see a fist fight between a member of the press and the White House press secretary? No. I expect civility among professional adults at all times. However, I also expect professional adults to fully defend themselves when attacked, especially when the attacks are detrimental to their work product in this case the quality and validity of the information and news that they, the media, present to the Great American Public. I have friends and a cousin who are news reporters and analysts, so here are my suggestions to them and their colleagues. These suggestions are free, so of course, do with them as you please. First of all, it is common knowledge that President Trump loves flattery and attention, so stop giving it to him. When every word he puts on Twitter becomes a focal point for the news, it only fuels his ego, prompting him to keep treating his tweets like campaign slogans and cheerleader chants to keep his base motivated. Considering that Trump is not responsible with his words, it is incumbent on the media to be responsible for his. When he tweets irresponsibly, do not report about it. Do not give it any attention. In fact, I challenge the media to dedicate one day to ignoring Trumps tweets. The worst that can happen is that he counters with a negative tweet. Wait! He would have done that anyway. Furthermore, while I know that being a member of the White House press corps is an extreme honor, they must take action. When is the press corps going to say, enough is enough? Some have suggested, and I agree, that because of the constant lying and attacks from all of the White House press secretaries since Trump took office, the senior established members of the press corps ought to boycott their seats and have interns or junior reporters stand in for them for a few days. Would the White House be upset? Yes. Will President Trump or the White House press secretary say something negative about their action? Yes. But then again, they would act and speak negatively of them anyway. I also believe that it is the medias duty to remind the three branches of government as to their particular duties call them out when they step out of bounds. When an elected or appointed official intentionally lies, call him a liar. When they are caught cheating, call him a thief. Watergate taught us the importance of not placing our elected officials on pedestals. That means holding them accountable just as we would our next-door neighbor or work colleague. We the People have so much access to information that is imperative for the media to be the first to call out an elected official when caught in a lie or double talk. Not doing so erodes the faith and trust that We the People have in the media, a sentiment that is detrimental to the foundation of our society. For the first time in our nations history, the Fourth Estate truly finds itself in a position where it may be the last defender of our American way of life. It needs to accept this reality and embrace the glory of the leadership challenge. Terron Sims is the chair of the Democratic Party of Virginias veterans and military families caucus and a former captain with the Army. He is a security fellow with Truman National Security Project. He wrote this for InsideSources.com. The small tubes were first used in industrial products but soon became low-cost elements in point-of-sale displays. Tubes of the correct diameter, for example, could fit over the necks of bottles to support sale signs and other displays. The company has shifted its focus and its products over the years and now makes retail displays and environments for many top brands. Paper tubes have given way to metal and plastic. Our presence in Syria no doubt helped damage the Islamic State, which has lost almost all the territory it once held and is besieged by more powerful enemies. Its chances of making a significant resurgence are now remote enough that this is a good time for us to take our leave. Any danger the group poses can be handled by Syria, Turkey, Russia, Israel, Jordan and Iraq. That said, there are legitimate questions about the actual viability of the administrations Syria strategy. By itself, keeping 2,000 U.S. troops in Syria for the long term is no guarantee of future success regarding any of its stated goals. Islamic State has morphed into a terrorist threat that extends to many parts of the globe, and the singular focus on Syria and Iraq may have contributed to that. Our ability to train and equip regional forces to sustain and stabilize post-conflict regions has been found wanting, as the decade-old effort in Afghanistan shows. And while Irans influence in Syria is no doubt strong, its not clear how keeping a small number of U.S. troops would actually undermine that influence. District 2 Supervisor Randy Hanvelt with retiring CAO Craig Pedro (Left to right) View Photos Sonora, CA There were plenty of warm wishes, laughter and tears as today was the last regular Tuolumne County Supervisors meeting for two members. District 2 Supervisor Randy Hanvelt and District 3 Supervisor Evan Royce said their final farewells. The latter decided not to run for a third term and Hanvelt lost in a very close race in the midterm election to challenger Ryan Campbell. Both served eight years on the board. During his two terms on the board, Hanvelt, a retired nuclear engineer and executive for General Electric, represented District 2; encompassing Phoenix Lake and the Soulsbyville areas. When the Rim Fire struck the county he was Board Chair and it left a lasting impression on him and the issues he championed. He was an advocate for fire safety, community resiliency, forest management and stewardship of lands. He also became a key collaborator involved on the local and state Tree Mortality Task Force, focusing on problem solving through coordinated partnerships. A tireless networker who expanded the countys ties at the state and federal levels, he served as the Rural County Representatives of California (RCRC) first and second Vice President and Chair of the National Association of Counties Public Lands Steering Committee during his tenure. He also testified at the House Federal Lands Subcommittee in Washington D.C. as one of five witnesses on forest health issues. Pointing to those accomplishments, District 5 Supervisor Karl Rodefer noted, Im not sure if the county will ever know how much were losing with Supervisor Hanvelt leaving the board. His exceptional and extensive network of people that he has developed and his leadership in so many state and federal advocacy programs; we wouldnt be where we are as a county if we didnt have those. In his closing remarks, Hanvelt noted one of his mottos, You cant just complain about a problem. You have to have a solution. And I implore you all to be part of the solution and not just part of the problem. He went on to thank his peers, staff and the public for all their kind words. Elected eight years ago at the age of 27, Evan Royce, a local construction business owner with deep local family ties, joined the board at the same time as Hanvelt. A leader on multiple local and regional committees and commissions, he was an individual rights and pursuit of happiness defender, known for advocating more creative and innovative solutions. It is Royces straight to the point attitude that District 1 Supervisor Sherri Brennan says will be missed, stating, He doesnt get lost in some of the super frivolous stuff out here. Hes always thinking about the constituents of Tuolumne County. Evan bleeds Tuolumne County and we hear it all the time.he could cut right to the message. Declining a reelection bid to dedicate more time to his family and business Royce will cede his seat to recently elected District 3 Supervisor-elect Anaiah Kirk. With his voice quivering, Royce acknowledged, The eight years that Ive served here have been a tremendous honor for me and I want to thank the constituents for voting for me and giving me this opportunity because it does mean a tremendous amount. Fighting back tears he continued, I have many shortcomings in my life; this is an example of something that I am extremely proud of achieving. There were very few dry eyes in the house during their speeches, but laughter erupted later as staff told funny stories and many wonderful memories of how the two supervisors touched and enriched the lives of many through their public service. You can hear both supervisors farewell speeches here: Evan Farewell-speech Hanvelt farewell-speech This reference to Satan in the context of a holiday-season dig at Judeo-Christian theology has some people riled. The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property, a Catholic organization, protested the sculpture by holding a prayer vigil outside the Capitol on Sunday. The groups website calls the display a parody of the incarnation that redeemed mankind from original sin, and argues that the placing of Satanic symbols next to and equal to those of Christians seeks to deny Christs victory. HOUSTON A child sex trafficker has been sentenced to three decades in prison Tuesday, according to a press release from U.S. Attorney Ryan Patrick's office. Jason Gandy, of Houston, was convicted by a federal jury in July after a three-day trial for attempting to traffic children during the 2012 Olympics. He was charged with four counts of sex trafficking of minors, and one count each of transportation of minors, sexual exploitation of a child and transportation of child pornography. When Cinder the bear was found beneath a horse trailer in Washington state, paws injured by third-degree burns, pulling herself along on her elbows, the cub became a limping symbol of a region's recovery. The July 2014 fire that injured Cinder also destroyed 300 homes and burned 400 square miles - a charred section of north-central Washington almost as big as the city of Los Angeles. No one could find Cinder's mother or siblings. All rescuers knew was that the 37-pound brown bear cub wouldn't survive in the wild for much longer. She recovered at several rehabilitation centers, doubling her weight within months and becoming an international celebrity for what she symbolized, The Associated Press reported. If a tiny burned bear could beat the odds, so could this section of Washington devastated by the most destructive wildfire in state history. Months later, CBS News cameras captured a no-longer-limping Cinder sprinting into the forest of the Cascade Mountains. But that happy ending was short-lived. A radio-tracking collar officials put on Cinder stopped transmitting in October 2017, the AP reported. Officials hoped it was because she was in her den, hunkered down for the winter, possibly with cubs. But when a crew ventured into the mountains, they found the skeletal remains of what used to be Cinder, the collar sliced off and lying nearby. They believe a hunter shot the bear and cut off the collar, which rendered it inoperable. In the past week, experts conceded that setting Cinder free wasn't the end of the story, but a beginning. Once the bear bolted into the trees, she would again have to face all the dangers of the wild on her own. "We realize that once the animals are set free, they're open to what's out there, whether it's humans or other animals," Tom Millham, the founder of the California center where she recovered, told the Methow Valley News. "All we're giving them is a second chance at life." Animal lovers closely followed the fight for Cinder's life. Those earliest photos showed a pitiable sight: an emaciated cub lying on her side, fur missing or singed, all four paws wrapped in bandages. But despite all she had endured, she was still breathing. "It was the worst burns I've ever seen," veterinarian Randy Hein told "CBS This Morning." "My gut feeling was that the bear would live, but I didn't know if she'd ever be able to be released into the wild because of how badly damaged and burned her paws were." Still, she was on the mend, and so was the region of Washington where she came from. ALSO How fish helped heal cats and dogs burned in the Camp Fire "She inspired them to rebuild and move on from the devastating Carlton Complex Fire," Rich Beausoleil, a Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife specialist who helped nurse the bear back to health, told CBS News. "I'll always remember someone saying, 'If Cinder can do it, then we can do it.' That inspired me, too." She also inspired a children's book, "Cinder the Bear," an interactive "true story of how people came together to save a little bear cub that was badly burned in the devastating 2014 wildfires in Washington State." Benefits from the book went to Lake Tahoe Wildlife Care and Idaho Black Bear Rehabilitation, the two facilities that nursed cinder back to health. One character in the book was another cub injured by fire, a male named Kaulana. They met in Idaho, and for years they wouldn't leave each other's side. In fact, the only thing that separated them was their recovery. Kaulana was released in 2015; Cinder went into the wild two years later. In the end, they met the same fate. Kaulana was also killed by a hunter. - - - Link to CBS video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGbHv62i-Uo&feature=youtu.be Four people are in custody after reports that a woman and her two children were being held against their will Tuesday on the East Side. Special Victims Unit Sgt. Michael Davis said a tip about three captives led police to a home in the 700 block of South New Braunfels. "It was a family member who called and asked us to get involved," Davis said. "Through an investigation, we were able to find out where the house was." Investigators began surveilling the home at about 8 a.m. After a short time, they saw the woman leaving the home with her two children, 8 and 11 years old. "They were found leaving the house in company with some people," Davis said. RELATED: Deputies approach serial DWI offender's home, make arrest The woman, her children and two suspects were taken to police headquarters to sort out details of the aggravated kidnapping. Detectives continued surveilling the home until about 5 p.m. when a SWAT team surrounded the home. A third suspect walked outside and told police that one more man was inside. Police occupied the intersection of New Braunfels and Iowa as they fired tear gas at the home and tried communicating with the fourth suspect in Spanish. "There's a lot of canisters of gas that were shot in there," Davis said. After two hours, officers spotted the suspect in the attic and pulled him from the home. No one was seriously injured in the standoff, police said. None of the people involved were identified Tuesday evening. Davis said they are are still investigating the incident. Leon Valley Police Chief Joe Salvaggio said the red light cameras the city installed along Bandera Road have been "huge" for the city, bringing in revenue and reducing the number of accidents. The program's been so effective, in fact, that the city will be putting up three new traffic cameras in January, Salvaggio said. FIND OUT FIRST: Get San Antonio breaking news directly to your inbox Building on the 11 cameras that were installed in January, police will add two to the intersection of Evers and Huebner roads and another one on the Wurzbach Road and Exchange Parkway. Leon Valley police have issued roughly 50,000 citations since February, when the grace period for the red light cameras expired. The citations netted the city $900,000, half of which goes to the state to help cover indigent medical expenses, Salvaggio said. With the remaining money, Salvaggio said, the department has been able to staff four additional traffic officers. "When we used to have an accident on Bandera Road, normally not by one of our own citizens, it would take every officer we have," Salvaggio said. "Now that we have traffic officers to deal with that, our regular officers can be out in the neighborhood stopping burglaries and responding to calls for service." Police have also invested some of the money in improvements to traffic lights and signage, which also helps prevent wrecks. So far, accidents have reduced by about 25 percent, Salvaggio said. FROM OUR SUBSCRIBER SITE: Red light cameras called success in Leon Valley "This isn't only about Leon Valley," Salvaggio said. "San Antonio residents come through here. Helotes residents come through here. It's for the safety of everyone." The cameras have led to secondary improvements to traffic flow as well. Cars no longer block intersections or crosswalks as often as they used to, Salvaggio said. Most offenders, 95 percent, have only gotten the red-light citation once. Only four percent have received two, and less than one percent have received more than two. Police say the goal isn't about raising funds, but about preventing wrecks from happening in a busy part of town. The red light cameras have helped do that, Salvaggio said. "We're trying to be as fair as we can to everybody," Salvaggio said. "There's nothing we want more than for people to stop running those red lights." Fares Sabawi covers crime in San Antonio and Bexar County. Read him on our breaking news site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com | fsabawi@mysa.com|@FaresInSA A GoFundMe page was created Tuesday for the 25-year-old English teacher who police said died after being beaten by her boyfriend last week in San Antonio. The fundraiser for Dorinda Ma had raised more than $20,000 by 8:30 a.m. Wednesday. The money will be used to pay her medical bills, funeral expenses and travel arrangements, so that her body can be transported to her home city of Philadelphia, according to the page. RELATED: Man accused of beating 25-year-old former English teacher to death in San Antonio-area "Dorinda's life was (tragically) taken at 25 years young while in San Antonio, Texas. She was a beautiful, free spirited and kind-hearted soul," writes the page's creator, Danielle Ma. Police investigators said they believe Ma was beaten by her boyfriend, 28-year-old Ryan Stanush, on Friday at a home in Converse. Stanush rushed Ma to Northeast Baptist Hospital after the alleged assault, and doctors put her on life support. She was taken off life support on Sunday and died, officials said. Stanush told police Ma's injuries had resulted from "rough sex," but doctors disputed that claim, saying her trauma was not consistent with such an explanation. Stanush was arrested Friday and booked into jail on an aggravated assault causing serious bodily injury charge. Police will determine whether to upgrade his charges based on a ruling from the Bexar County Medical Examiner's Office, which officials there said will be pending for the next 12 weeks. FIND OUT FIRST: Get San Antonio breaking news directly to your inbox Ma taught English at Mercedes High School in the Rio Grande Valley through the Teach For America program until November, when she resigned citing personal reasons. Several parents of her former students have posted on the GoFundMe page to celebrate her teaching skills and ability to connect with their children. "She was greatly loved and respected by her students and peers. There will be a tremendous void in the Mercedes High School staff as we struggle with this tragic news," said Daniel Trevino, the Mercedes ISD superintendent, on Tuesday. Text "NEWS" to 77453 for breaking news alerts from mySA.com Caleb Downs covers crime in San Antonio and Bexar County. Read him on our breaking news site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com | cdowns@mysa.com | @calebjdowns (CNN) U.S. President Donald Trump's personal charitable foundation has agreed to dissolve under judicial supervision amid an ongoing lawsuit concerning its finances, according to a document filed Tuesday in Manhattan Supreme Court by the New York state Attorney General's office. The dissolution of the Donald J. Trump Foundation resolves one element of the attorney general's civil lawsuit against the foundation, which includes claims that the President and his three eldest children -- Don Jr., Ivanka and Eric -- violated campaign-finance laws and abused its tax-exempt status. Rather than operating it as a genuine charity, the lawsuit alleges, they instead allowed it to be used "as little more than a checkbook to serve Mr. Trump's business and political interests." The agreement to dissolve, signed by both an attorney for the foundation and Attorney General Barbara Underwood's office, also allows the attorney general's office to review the recipients of the charity's assets. The foundation's most recent tax return listed its net assets at slightly more than $1.7 million. The closure of Trump's nonprofit comes amid an escalation in the litany of criminal and other investigations touching almost every corner of Trump's business and political operations, including his presidential campaign, his inauguration committee and his family real estate business. The lawsuit against the charity is one of two cases in which the President himself is accused of wrongdoing after federal prosecutors said in court filings earlier this month that Trump directed his former attorney, Michael Cohen, to make or orchestrate payments during the 2016 election to silence women who claimed sexual encounters with Trump. Trump has denied those claims. The agreement filed Tuesday won't end the state's lawsuit against Trump's charity, which also seeks two other outcomes: $2.8 million in restitution, plus penalties, and a ban on Trump and his children serving on the board of any other New York nonprofit. The office had objected to the charity's prior attempts to disband before the New York lawsuit was filed, saying it couldn't shut down while under investigation. Tuesday's agreement largely reflects a victory for the attorney general's office, including a requirement that the parties must jointly submit to the court a list of nonprofits that will receive the charity's remaining funds. Underwood said Tuesday that the agreement "accomplishes a key piece of the relief sought in our lawsuit earlier this year." "This is an important victory for the rule of law, making clear that there is one set of rules for everyone," she said in a statement. "We'll continue to move our suit forward to ensure that the Trump Foundation and its directors are held to account for their clear and repeated violations of state and federal law." An attorney for the charity, Alan Futerfas, called the attorney general's statement "misleading," saying the foundation had been seeking to dissolve since Trump's election in 2016. "Unfortunately, the NYAG sought to prevent dissolution for almost two years, thereby depriving those most in need of nearly $1.7 million," Futerfas said. He added that the foundation had distributed millions over the past decade, including "$8.25 million of the President's personal money," though The Washington Post and others have reported that Trump contributed little of his own wealth to the nonprofit after 2006. "The NYAG's inaccurate statement of this morning is a further attempt to politicize this matter," Futerfas said. In response, a spokeswoman for the attorney general's office, Amy Spitalnick, said the charity had been attempting to "dissolve without any oversight or accountability." During a White House briefing Tuesday, press secretary Sarah Sanders declined to comment on the agreement concerning the charity. The suit, filed in June, alleges that Trump and his children violated federal and state charities law with a "persistent" pattern of conduct that included unlawful coordination with the 2016 Trump presidential campaign. Central to the lawsuit is a nationally televised charity fundraiser for military veterans that Trump held in Des Moines, Iowa, on January 28, 2016, just ahead of the Republican caucus vote there. The foundation received $2.8 million as a result of that event. According to the New York suit, Trump campaign staff then directed the disbursement of those funds for Trump's political benefit. The lawsuit also alleges that Trump mined his charity for "personal enrichment," including using $100,000 from the nonprofit to settle legal claims against his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. The judge overseeing the lawsuit must approve the stipulation in order for it to go into effect. The agreement comes after a November ruling by Justice Saliann Scarpulla that allowed the lawsuit to move forward, denying a motion by the foundation to dismiss the case. As the lawsuit progresses into the new year, however, Underwood won't be overseeing it. The attorney general's office is set to change leadership in January, with Letitia James replacing Underwood as the state's top law-enforcement official. James has vowed to pursue violations of state law by Trump and those connected to him, including continuing the case against his charity. This story was first published on CNN.com, "Trump Foundation agrees to dissolve under court supervision." A 44-year-old man was hospitalized early Wednesday after he was shot in the ankle on the East Side. Police said the victim was walking in the street at about 3:20 a.m. when the suspect pulled up to him and asked if he wanted to buy anything. A man who was hired to paint a home stole three credit cards from it instead, according to San Antonio police. Anthony Martinez, 35, was arrested Tuesday on one charge of burglary of a habitation and three charges of credit card abuse, according to jail records. Its been estimated that nearly 80,000 young Texans are ensnared in sex trafficking. People like Amber the subject of a heartbreaking story by Express-News reporter Melissa Fletcher Stoeltje who are forced into the sex trade as teenagers. Amber isnt her real name. Its the name her pimp, Isaac Lynn Williams, gave her when he began selling her for sex on the website Backpage.com. She was 16. Williams, who was 28, would post ad after ad for Amber and another young woman on Backpage, a blatant online conduit for the sex trade. She was forced to have sex up to 15 times a day to meet her quota. This hell lasted eight months until undercover state investigators rescued Amber and arrested Williams. These are the broad strokes of Ambers story. She has moved on with her life, relocating to another state. Williams was sentenced to 50 years in prison for trafficking (he has appealed). The website Backpage has been shut down. But underage sex trafficking still thrives across Texas. Remember, 80,000 young people in the sex trade is tantamount to a city. Texas law rightfully views underage sex workers as victims of trafficking, not prostitutes who have committed crimes. But it can be incredibly difficult to compel victims to come forward because they often move from city to city, and because, like Amber, they face the prospect of threats. Many minors who are ensnared in the sex trade will lie about their ages and use aliases. But they also often have histories of sexual abuse and drug abuse. They desperately need to be reached, but that is often so difficult even as they live among us. Because of these factors, it makes sense to also view adults ensnared in the sex trade as victims. Many adults working as prostitutes were likely once working as such when they were underage, just like Amber. And they too often have histories of sexual and physical abuse, as well as addiction. To help break this cycle, Bexar County offers Restore Court, a voluntary program for juvenile victims of sex trafficking. It includes counseling, drug treatment and other services. On the other end of the spectrum, Bexar also offers Esperanza Court, which serves those charged with felony prostitution. These are people who have been arrested multiple times for prostitution (and often many other charges). The program is intense. Survivors of sex crimes must commit to counseling five days a week for a year. They often spend months in treatment. They perform community service and do regular drug and alcohol tests. But in the end, the system still treats them as felons. There is also an obvious gap: No such court exists at the misdemeanor level. It only stands to reason that if there are specialty courts at the youth and felony levels, there should be a specialty court to serve victims of sex trafficking at the misdemeanor level. Why wait until the felony level to restore someones life? What if that person had been ensnared as a youth, and the system simply missed an opportunity for change? This is a complex issue. Most agree that those who do the trafficking pimps and others should feel the full brunt of the law, but what about the prostitutes, trafficked or not? On one side are those who would decriminalize prostitution entirely, and on the other are the strict law-and-order types. We believe there has to be a middle ground that recognizes that those who sell their bodies for sex have complex underlying issues that require complex responses. They are victims, and thats what the public debate should weigh most heavily. One other point about Ambers story screams for reform. Her pimp, Williams, initially received a $75,000 bond, which he made. He then continued to run into Amber and her mother in Killeen, even blocking her mothers car at a McDonalds drive-thru as he demanded Amber drop the charges. A gunman broke into Ambers apartment the day before she was supposed to testify, spraying the place with bullets. And Williams later absconded only to be found in the Dominican Republic. All this speaks to the need for bail reform. Bail should be based on a persons risk to the public or a potential for flight rather than a persons ability to pay. That rationale applies to nonviolent offenders who shouldnt be languishing in jail, but it also holds to someone who profited from the repeated rape of a teenager and clearly was a threat to her if released. Ambers story is jarring, but its especially heartbreaking because it is so common. Dont just think about Amber. Think about those 80,000 victims in Texas. Re: Bilingualism requirement racist, Another View, by Barbara M. Kaler, Friday: Barbara Kaler refers to an employers Bilingual English/Spanish highly preferred qualification for hiring as racist. She was born in Hidalgo County but apparently did not socialize or commiserate with the predominant Mexican-American culture of our Lower Rio Grande Valley. Otherwise she would be fluent in our hybrid in-between Tex-Mex language. She cannot wish away an entire culture, and should make an earnest endeavor to learn and accept the fact that we are all neighbors and must live in a diverse culture instead of willfully isolating oneself from society. Spanish was spoken in Texas for three centuries before English was introduced. Recognizing who their consumers are, employers seek bilingual workers and hire accordingly. Their bilingual requirement is far from racist. These employers know our diverse Texan culture and are realistically inclusive. Ironically, Kalers stab at the migrating Central Americans sadly evinced a lifeview. Carlos Valle Jr., Laredo Called racist When a city consistently refers to diversity as one of its shining accomplishments yet allows businesses to require a bilingual employee, that is not diversity but discrimination. As the writer of Bilingualism requirement racist, states, an Anglo kid will be taught Spanish only in high school, which by then is usually too late to become proficient in a language. The writer is correct that there are far too many businesses in San Antonio that require bilingualism in positions that do not require frequent contact with the public. If we are to be fair and truly diverse, then more scrutiny should be involved regarding the bilingual requirement for employment. It can and has too often become a means of employment discrimination. The bilingual requirement should apply only if the individual will have constant contact with the public. Way too many times it has been revealed that its simply a case of a company wishing to keep their staff all Hispanic, or a way to get back at perceived injustice over the years from non-Hispanics. Something many of us here in South Texas call NANA: No Anglo Need Apply. No single race has a monopoly on racism. Teri Frey SOLDIERS and police who were deployed to quell post-election protests which rocked Harare on August 1 killed six people and injured 35 others, while their use of live bullets was unjustified and disproportionate, a commission of inquiry set up by President Emmerson Mnangagwa said in its report, which was made public yesterday. The commission, which was led by former South Africa President Kgalema Motlanthe, challenged the Mnangagwa administration to be accountable by taking action against members of the army and the police who had violated their professional code of conduct and also wants the State to compensate victims of the violence. In its 113-page report, the commission said the deaths and injuries were a direct result of the actions of the army, which was under the command of Major-General Anselem Nhamo Sanyatwe, then brigadier general of the Presidential Guard and tactical commander of the National Reactional Force. It is undisputed that six people died as a result of gunshot wounds, and according to the evidence from the two major hospitals, 23 people were injured as a result of gunshots, and one person of assault, the report read. The commissions findings on a balance of probabilities from all the evidence received is that the deaths of these six people and injuries sustained by the 35 others arose from the actions of the military and the police. Mnangagwa told journalists yesterday that the commission said the force used by the army and the police in dispersing the protestors was disproportionate. The use of live ammunition, directed at people, especially as they were fleeing, was clearly unjustified and disproportionate. The use of sjamboks, baton sticks and butts of the gun to assault members of the public indiscriminately was also disproportionate, part of the statement on the report read. It is imperative for the police to urgently complete their investigations to enable the prosecution of those persons responsible of all alleged crimes committed on August 1, 2018. Those particular members of the military and of the police found to be in breach of their professional duties and discipline should be identified as soon as possible for internal investigations and appropriate sanction, which should include hearing from the victims and their families for impact assessment and provide appropriate compensation, the commission recommended. Government escaped censure over the manner in which the army was deployed, with the commission saying it was legal and in line with the Constitution, although corners were cut. The fact that the police were severely depleted because of duties at polling stations throughout the country and that they were ill-equipped did not help the situation, as the demonstrations degenerated into a riot, the police were overwhelmed, the commission said. The evidence showed that the government deployed the military in accordance with the Constitution and the applicable law. The commission also considered that while the deployment of the military was lawful, the operational framework was not fully complied with in that the deployed troops were not placed under the command of the Harare Regulating Authority (police). The commission berated the police, saying if it were adequately experienced, better equipped, sufficient in numbers and more suitably organised, the deployment of the military could have been avoided. It also placed some blame on the MDC for the protests, saying the statements made by the opposition before and after the elections agitated people to protest. Having considered all the evidence, the commission found on a balance of probabilities that speeches made by political leaders, mostly the MDC Alliance, before and after the elections, heightened tensions and played a part in inciting some members of the public to protest, the report read. The commission said the MDC Alliance had taken a position that if their presidential candidate, Nelson Chamisa, did not win the election, they would protest. It concluded that the protests were a result of implementing the threat. The Motlanthe-led commission said the protests were unlawful, violent and could have ended in chaos had the military not intervened. The demonstrations were unsanctioned in terms of section 25 of the Public Order and Security Act as the police had not been notified. According to evidence received by the commission, police orders to disperse the protestors were not effectively carried out. Evidence showed that the demonstrators employed a tactic of appearing, dispersing and regrouping at different locations, thereby making it very difficult for the police to disperse them, the report read. Government was also urged to compensate the victims of the military shooting, including ensuring that dependents of school-going age are sent to school. The payment of compensation is recommended to all victims of the violence and dependents of the deceased, where the deceased had young children be urgently assisted with school fees and their general welfare. The government should put in place a special committee to ascertain and determine the quantum of damages and compensation to be awarded to victims on a case by vase bases, the report said. The commission called on the introspection of the action by the army and to make their findings public to ensure no such action happens again. The military should conduct an immediate full audit of its standing orders and procedures for engaging in law and order enforcement operations, including riot control, in order to identify in an appropriate public report the lessons learnt and tailored safeguards to be undertaken to prevent any indiscipline that could lead to the loss of life and injury in the future, the commission said. It also called for dialogue to end deep-seated political polarisation in the country. The commission recommends the establishment of national multi-party reconciliation initiative, including youth representatives with national and international mediation to address the root causes of the post-election violence, the report read. NewsDay Breaking News via Email Loading... Related Zimbabwe Latest News To identify the companies that pay no tax, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed the July 29, 2021, report " Corporate Tax Avoidance Under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act " from Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. Companies are ranked by their effective tax rate. Market values and year-to-date stock price gains are as of the first week of November. For similar lists visit 24/7 Wall St. The death toll in an accident involving two commuter omnibuses that occurred along the Harare-Nyamapanda highway on Sunday near Juru Growth Point has risen to 17 after three more people died at Parirenyatwa Group of Hospitals yesterday. Twelve people died on spot when the vehicles collided head on. Two more people died same day on admission at Parirenyatwa Group of Hospitals. Yesterday police confirmed the death of three more people from injuries sustained in the accident. Out of the 17, police managed to release names of 14 victims. In a statement, Chief police spokesperson Senior Assistant Commissioner Charity Charamba said bodies of a toddler, and two male and female adults were yet to be identified. Those identified are Godknows Chitate (24) of Sunningdale 2 in Harare Febby Mugamanyadzi (55) of Murewa, Welldone Njerere (7) of Juru, Spencer Hwedenga (36) of Zengeza 5 in Chitungwiza, Medread Ruka (66) of Juru, Leeny Makusha (4)of Murewa and Violet Manuel (20) of Zengeza 2 also in Chitungwiza. Others are Ellis Makaza (30) of Jonasi Village, Chief Chitsungo (Pfungwe), Edison Madziva (32) of Gokwe, Bianca Nadzo (18) of Murewa, Wiriranayi Kawerenga (37) of Murewa, Sara Makusha (13) of Goromonzi and Lisa Makusha (14) of Murewa. Snr Asst Comm Charamba said the three unidentified bodies were at Murewa Hospital mortuary. She urged people missing their relatives to visit Murewa Police Station. The Zimbabwe Republic Police urges public service vehicle operators to ensure that their vehicles are checked regularly before embarking on journeys for fitness, which include tyres, brakes, lights and other essential components. Drivers should not speed in order to safeguard lives this festive season and only carry passengers stipulated under the respective vehicles registration permits, she said. Meanwhile, the Passenger Association of Zimbabwe is urging Government to ban use of second hand tyres by public service vehicles. In a statement yesterday, PAZ president Mr Tafadzwa Goliati also extended his condolences to the bereaved families. President Mnangagwa on Monday extended his condolences to families who lost relatives in the accident. He said Government would extend assistance towards meeting funeral expenses to the affected families. Chronicle Breaking News via Email Loading... Related Zimbabwe Latest News AN Airforce of Zimbabwe pilot, based at Josiah Tungamirai Airbase in Gweru, who allegedly murdered his girlfriend, but was given free bail by a Gweru magistrate, has been remanded in custody to January 28 next year. Tashinga Musonza (29) on November 25 allegedly fatally assaulted Lucy Duve (32) a Gweru-based lawyer accusing her of cheating on him with his colleague. However, when he was brought before the courts for initial remand, magistrate Thomas Gurajena did not ask him to apply for bail to the High Court, but instead freed him, citing the violation of his rights through over-detention. Gurajena ruled that Musonza had been kept in custody for 53 hours, instead of the stipulated 48 hours. The ruling sparked outrage among members of the public and his late girlfriends family, which reportedly sought audience of senior judicial officials in Harare. Last week, the Womens Coalition of Zimbabwe held a march in Gweru, demanding justice for the slain lawyer. Musonza was subsequently arrested over the weekend and brought before regional magistrate Phathekile Msipa yesterday. Representing the State, prosecutor Ndamukanei Chikuni read out the indictment application, and it was acceded to by Msipa, who remanded the pilot to January 28 for trial when the High Court opens its first session of 2019. NewsDay Breaking News via Email Loading... Related Zimbabwe Latest News AfriForum says a warrant of arrest has been issued for former Zimbabwean first lady, Grace Mugabe. This is related to the alleged assault of South African model Gabriella Engels in a Sandton hotel room in 2017. Minority rights group AfriForum announced this during a press conference on Wednesday in Centurion. We can report that the warrant of arrest has been issued for Grace Mugabe, said AfriForum CEO Kallie Kriel. It seems that justice is going to take place and we are looking forward to this matter going forward. The Sunday Times reported in August that the South African government accepted a court ruling declaring the diplomatic immunity granted to Mugabe as invalid. The matter was then referred back to the NPA. The conferment of diplomatic immunity on [Mugabe] is null and void, as the court has decided. We leave it to the NPA to see the way forward international relations and cooperation minister Lindiwe Sisulu said in August. The DA and AfriForum applied to have Mugabes diplomatic immunity revoked after she allegedly assaulted South African model Gabriella Engels at a hotel in Johannesburg in 2017. Mugabe allegedly assaulted Engels after she found the model partying with her two sons at a Sandton hotel. Engels suffered serious injuries including a gash on her forehead. While charges were laid Mugabe was controversially allowed to leave the country after the government granted her diplomatic immunity. Well give you more updates on this story as soon as they become available. eNCA Breaking News via Email Loading... Related Zimbabwe Latest News Harare East MP Tendai Biti (MDC Alliance) yesterday tore into the 2019 National Budget presented by Finance minister Mthuli Ncube, saying it violated the Constitution for charging duty on vehicles in foreign currency and incorporating the military in the enforcement of traffic fines. Contributing to debate on the Finance Bill in the National Assembly, Biti, a Finance minister during the government of national unity, which ran the country between 2009 and 2013, said Ncubes budget statement failed to address the structural problems affecting the country. He challenged Ncube to be courageous and declare that the bond note was not at par with the United States dollar and also to demonetise the surrogate currency. Firstly, the Finance minister suggested that duty for imported vehicles and other selected commodities must be paid in United States dollars, which is legal tender, but the bond note is also legal tender, and it is unfortunate for the budget to suggest that for certain commodities, duty should be in US dollars. It is illegal, Biti said. Another illegality is that the budget statement says by-elections should be held after every one year or two years, but the Electoral Act is clear that by elections must be within 90 days of a vacancy. On traffic fines, Biti said it was illegal for the Executive to interfere with the Judiciary in terms of sentencing of traffic offenders. Previously, the fines were a maximum $100, but Ncube imposed deterrent penalties of up to $700. For the Finance minister to also say that traffic fines must be enforced by the military is also unconstitutional and illegal because the law and order maintenance function is vested on the Zimbabwe Republic Police, he said. He also suggested that many people were using their houses as business premises and that the Department of Customs and Excise and Zimra [Zimbabwe Revenue Authority] must be empowered to carry out searches. The Constitution is clear that there should be privacy of persons and, therefore, Zimra has no power to do the searches. Biti also said giving the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) power to retain foreign currency from exporters such as Zimplats was unlawful. The former Finance minister said the RBZ could not take peoples money and then allocate it. He said allocation of funds were the duties of Parliament and it was illegal for the RBZ to do so. On the budget deficit projected at $1,56 billion, Biti said it was grossly understated, given that there were plans by government to increase civil servants salaries by 10%. He said the only solution was to pay salaries in US dollar and re-dollarise the economy. NewsDay Breaking News via Email Loading... Related Zimbabwe Latest News The Report of the Kgalema Motlanthe Commission is poorly written, badly reasoned and self-contradictory. Its the worst published Report by a Commission of Inquiry since 1980, Exiled Former G40 Kingpin Professor Jonathan Moyo has said. Responding to the report that was released yesterday, Moyo said the Motlanthe Commision had produced a Public Relations report that sought to save the face of President Emmerson Mnangagwa and ZANU PF. We publish Moyos full statement below: Its notable that the Motlanthe Commission Report does not extricate the Commission from the antecedent toxicity, arising from its flawed composition and terms of reference, that exposed it upfront as a compromised Zanu PF Public Relations scheme. In fact, the report confirms these flaws. The fact that the Commission did nothing to liberate itself from its founding prejudices, especially with regards to its flawed composition and terms of reference, means its report cannot be expected to meet legitimate public expectations. Something never comes from nothing. Theres something instructive from the old-age Shona adage that rine manyanga hariputirwi. This is particularly true where atrocities are involved. It is impossible to use a Commission or anything else for that matter, to hide or escape from gross crimes against humanity. The smoke and mirrors in Motlanthe Commissions Report cannot obfuscate the fact that everyone knows why the Commission was setup in the first place. On 1 August, civilians were gunned down by soldiers and some were killed in cold blood and others brutally injured in broad daylight! What happened was self-evident to the eye. What was not obvious and needed to be established for purposes of accountability was the identity, names, of the soldiers on rampage and crucially, the authority that deployed them with lethal ammunition in a civilian situation! Mnangagwa publicly told the nation and the world that he did not know who deployed the soldiers; meaning that it was not him. That he did not know was the only reason why Zimbabweans and the international community demanded an independent international commission to investigate! Notwithstanding the antics by Motlanthes Commission to dance in the dark with smoke and mirrors; and not withstanding its convulted terms of reference, only two key questions needed factual answers: (a) who are the soldiers that killed civilians and(b) who deployed them? Who deployed the soldiers? The Commission had no stomach to bluntly say it was Mnangagwa. It confirms the fact by claiming the deployment was lawful, a matter of law for a court, and by attaching on page 100 Obert Mpofus and Chiwengas letters which say it was Mnangagwa. The finding that Mnangagwa deployed the soldiers is significant in two respects: (a) Clearly Mnangagwa lied in August that he did not know who had deployed the soldiers. This is egregious. (b) Responsibility and accountability for what the soldiers did is with Mnangagwa! Who killed and injured civilians? The Commissions finding on a balance of probabilities from all the evidence is that the deaths of six (6) people and the injuries sustained by thirty five (35) others arose from the actions of the Military and Police. Regarding the causes of death and injury of civilians on 1 Aug, the Report says on page 40: The Commission has NOT RECEIVED ANY CONCRETE EVIDENCE THAT ANY PERSON other than the Army and Police used guns during the protests on 1 August 2018. This puts paid to Vanguard crap! Whereas the Report clearly says the six civilians who died were killed by the Army or Police and the 35 civilians were injured by the Army, the Commission fails to name the soldiers and police officers who committed specific atrocities. This renders the Report a big cover up! The Commissions failure to name the culpable soldiers and police officers is a dereliction of duty against its mandate. Even worse is its recommendation that the Police should investigate the 1 August crimes and the Army should identify and sanction its culpable soldiers. The Report says the Army or Police killed the six dead and the Army injured the 35 injured, and that no one else but the Army and Police used guns; and that Mnangagwa deployed the soldiers yet the Commission assigns no accountability to him, his VP, ministers, Army and Police bosses. The Commissions position that only soldiers and police officers should be held accountable after further investigations and that no political and legal accountability should attach to Mnangagwa, his VP, ministers, Army and Police bosses is contrary to domestic and international law. The Commission belabours the point that it was a fact-finding process, and not a court of law. Yet its Report makes findings of law, notably that the military deployment was lawful. The Commission had no basis or competence whatsoever to draw such a scandalous conclusion. The Commission alleges that the 1 August demonstrations, which it acknowledges kicked off peacefully, had been incited, pre-planned and well organized by the MDC-Alliance. But the Report does not have any evidence that shows or proves any PRE-PLANNING by the MDC-Alliance. Pre-planning means organising in advance. It is revealing that the only pre-planning about 1 Aug that is proved in the Report was done by the Army and the Police on 29 July BEFORE even voting started on 30 July. The Reports Appendix 7 has police letters that prove this! Nothing in the Report explains why the Police and Army were planning about 1 August protests on 29 July. All of their 1 August letters refer to 29 July. Is this not the smoking gun that points to who planned and orchestrated the 1 August protests? Why was this not investigated? The Army and Police pre-planning on 29 July is damaging given the Reports finding that the Army deployment COULD HAVE BEEN AVOIDED IF THE POLICE WERE ADEQUATELY EXPERIENCED, better equipped and more suitably organized. This is damming. Why blame the MDC-Alliance for this! The Report of the Motlanthe Commission is poorly written, badly reasoned and self-contradictory. Its the worst published Report by a Commission of Inquiry since 1980. Its saving grace is that it puts paid to the lie that Mnangagwa did not know who deployed the Army on 1 Aug. Bulawayo24 Breaking News via Email Loading... Related Zimbabwe Latest News Yves here. By virtue of synchronicity, reader Wukchumni recommended the Cold War classic The Bedford Incident and highlighted this segment: By Michael T. Klare, the five-college professor emeritus of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and a senior visiting fellow at the Arms Control Association. His most recent book is The Race for Whats Left. His next book, All Hell Breaking Loose: Climate Change, Global Chaos, and American National Security, will be published in 2019. Originally published at TomDispatch There could be no more consequential decision than launching atomic weapons and possibly triggering a nuclear holocaust. President John F. Kennedy faced just such a moment during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and, after envisioning the catastrophic outcome of a U.S.-Soviet nuclear exchange, he came to the conclusion that the atomic powers should impose tough barriers on the precipitous use of such weaponry. Among the measures he and other global leaders adopted were guidelines requiring that senior officials, not just military personnel, have a role in any nuclear-launch decision. That was then, of course, and this is now. And what a now it is! With artificial intelligence, or AI, soon to play an ever-increasing role in military affairs, as in virtually everything else in our lives, the role of humans, even in nuclear decision-making, is likely to be progressively diminished. In fact, in some future AI-saturated world, it could disappear entirely, leaving machines to determine humanitys fate. This isnt idle conjecture based on science fiction movies or dystopian novels. Its all too real, all too here and now, or at least here and soon to be. As the Pentagon and the military commands of the other great powers look to the future, what they see is a highly contested battlefield some have called it a hyperwar environment where vast swarms of AI-guided robotic weapons will fight each other at speeds far exceeding the ability of human commanders to follow the course of a battle. At such a time, it is thought, commanders might increasingly be forced to rely on ever more intelligent machines to make decisions on what weaponry to employ when and where. At first, this may not extend to nuclear weapons, but as the speed of battle increases and the firebreak between them and conventional weaponry shrinks, it may prove impossible to prevent the creeping automatization of even nuclear-launch decision-making. Such an outcome can only grow more likely as the U.S. military completes a top-to-bottom realignment intended to transform it from a fundamentally small-war, counter-terrorist organization back into one focused on peer-against-peer combat with China and Russia. This shift was mandated by the Department of Defense in its December 2017 National Security Strategy. Rather than focusing mainly on weaponry and tactics aimed at combating poorly armed insurgents in never-ending small-scale conflicts, the American military is now being redesigned to fight increasingly well-equipped Chinese and Russian forces in multi-dimensional (air, sea, land, space, cyberspace) engagements involving multiple attack systems (tanks, planes, missiles, rockets) operating with minimal human oversight. The major effect/result of all these capabilities coming together will be an innovation warfare has never seen before: the minimization of human decision-making in the vast majority of processes traditionally required to wage war, observed retired Marine General John Allen and AI entrepreneur Amir Hussain. In this coming age of hyperwar, we will see humans providing broad, high-level inputs while machines do the planning, executing, and adapting to the reality of the mission and take on the burden of thousands of individual decisions with no additional input. That minimization of human decision-making will have profound implications for the future of combat. Ordinarily, national leaders seek to control the pace and direction of battle to ensure the best possible outcome, even if that means halting the fighting to avoid greater losses or prevent humanitarian disaster. Machines, even very smart machines, are unlikely to be capable of assessing the social and political context of combat, so activating them might well lead to situations of uncontrolled escalation. It may be years, possibly decades, before machines replace humans in critical military decision-making roles, but that time is on the horizon. When it comes to controlling AI-enabled weapons systems, as Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis put it in a recent interview, For the near future, theres going to be a significant human element. Maybe for 10 years, maybe for 15. But not for 100. Why AI? Even five years ago, there were few in the military establishment who gave much thought to the role of AI or robotics when it came to major combat operations. Yes, remotely piloted aircraft (RPA), or drones, have been widely used in Africa and the Greater Middle East to hunt down enemy combatants, but those are largely ancillary (and sometimes CIA) operations, intended to relieve pressure on U.S. commandos and allied forces facing scattered bands of violent extremists. In addition, todays RPAs are still controlled by human operators, even if from remote locations, and make little use, as yet, of AI-powered target-identification and attack systems. In the future, however, such systems are expected to populate much of any battlespace, replacing humans in many or even most combat functions. To speed this transformation, the Department of Defense is already spending hundreds of millions of dollars on AI-related research. We cannot expect success fighting tomorrows conflicts with yesterdays thinking, weapons, or equipment, Mattis told Congress in April. To ensure continued military supremacy, he added, the Pentagon would have to focus more investment in technological innovation to increase lethality, including research into advanced autonomous systems, artificial intelligence, and hypersonics. Why the sudden emphasis on AI and robotics? It begins, of course, with the astonishing progress made by the tech community much of it based in Silicon Valley, California in enhancing AI and applying it to a multitude of functions, including image identification and voice recognition. One of those applications, Alexa Voice Services, is the computer system behind Amazons smart speaker that not only can use the Internet to do your bidding but interpret your commands. (Alexa, play classical music. Alexa, tell me todays weather. Alexa, turn the lights on.) Another is the kind of self-driving vehicle technology that is expected to revolutionize transportation. Artificial Intelligence is an omni-use technology, explain analysts at the Congressional Research Service, a non-partisan information agency, as it has the potential to be integrated into virtually everything. Its also a dual-use technology in that it can be applied as aptly to military as civilian purposes. Self-driving cars, for instance, rely on specialized algorithms to process data from an array of sensors monitoring traffic conditions and so decide which routes to take, when to change lanes, and so on. The same technology and reconfigured versions of the same algorithms will one day be applied to self-driving tanks set loose on future battlefields. Similarly, someday drone aircraft without human operators in distant locales will be capable of scouring a battlefield for designated targets (tanks, radar systems, combatants), determining that something it sees is indeed on its target list, and deciding to launch a missile at it. It doesnt take a particularly nimble brain to realize why Pentagon officials would seek to harness such technology: they think it will give them a significant advantage in future wars. Any full-scale conflict between the U.S. and China or Russia (or both) would, to say the least, be extraordinarily violent, with possibly hundreds of warships and many thousands of aircraft and armored vehicles all focused in densely packed battlespaces. In such an environment, speed in decision-making, deployment, and engagement will undoubtedly prove a critical asset. Given future super-smart, precision-guided weaponry, whoever fires first will have a better chance of success, or even survival, than a slower-firing adversary. Humans can move swiftly in such situations when forced to do so, but future machines will act far more swiftly, while keeping track of more battlefield variables. As General Paul Selva, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress in 2017, It is very compelling when one looks at the capabilities that artificial intelligence can bring to the speed and accuracy of command and control and the capabilities that advanced robotics might bring to a complex battlespace, particularly machine-to-machine interaction in space and cyberspace, where speed is of the essence. Aside from aiming to exploit AI in the development of its own weaponry, U.S. military officials are intensely aware that their principal adversaries are also pushing ahead in the weaponization of AI and robotics, seeking novel ways to overcome Americas advantages in conventional weaponry. According to the Congressional Research Service, for instance, China is investing heavily in the development of artificial intelligence and its application to military purposes. Though lacking the tech base of either China or the United States, Russia is similarly rushing the development of AI and robotics. Any significant Chinese or Russian lead in such emerging technologies that might threaten this countrys military superiority would be intolerable to the Pentagon. Not surprisingly then, in the fashion of past arms races (from the pre-World War I development of battleships to Cold War nuclear weaponry), an arms race in AI is now underway, with the U.S., China, Russia, and other nations (including Britain, Israel, and South Korea) seeking to gain a critical advantage in the weaponization of artificial intelligence and robotics. Pentagon officials regularly cite Chinese advances in AI when seeking congressional funding for their projects, just as Chinese and Russian military officials undoubtedly cite American ones to fund their own pet projects. In true arms race fashion, this dynamic is already accelerating the pace of development and deployment of AI-empowered systems and ensuring their future prominence in warfare. Command and Control As this arms race unfolds, artificial intelligence will be applied to every aspect of warfare, from logistics and surveillance to target identification and battle management. Robotic vehicles will accompany troops on the battlefield, carrying supplies and firing on enemy positions; swarms of armed drones will attack enemy tanks, radars, and command centers; unmanned undersea vehicles, or UUVs, will pursue both enemy submarines and surface ships. At the outset of combat, all these instruments of war will undoubtedly be controlled by humans. As the fighting intensifies, however, communications between headquarters and the front lines may well be lost and such systems will, according to military scenarios already being written, be on their own, empowered to take lethal action without further human intervention. Most of the debate over the application of AI and its future battlefield autonomy has been focused on the morality of empowering fully autonomous weapons sometimes called killer robots with a capacity to make life-and-death decisions on their own, or on whether the use of such systems would violate the laws of war and international humanitarian law. Such statutes require that war-makers be able to distinguish between combatants and civilians on the battlefield and spare the latter from harm to the greatest extent possible. Advocates of the new technology claim that machines will indeed become smart enough to sort out such distinctions for themselves, while opponents insist that they will never prove capable of making critical distinctions of that sort in the heat of battle and would be unable to show compassion when appropriate. A number of human rights and humanitarian organizations have even launched the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots with the goal of adopting an international ban on the development and deployment of fully autonomous weapons systems. In the meantime, a perhaps even more consequential debate is emerging in the military realm over the application of AI to command-and-control (C2) systems that is, to ways senior officers will communicate key orders to their troops. Generals and admirals always seek to maximize the reliability of C2 systems to ensure that their strategic intentions will be fulfilled as thoroughly as possible. In the current era, such systems are deeply reliant on secure radio and satellite communications systems that extend from headquarters to the front lines. However, strategists worry that, in a future hyperwar environment, such systems could be jammed or degraded just as the speed of the fighting begins to exceed the ability of commanders to receive battlefield reports, process the data, and dispatch timely orders. Consider this a functional definition of the infamous fog of war multiplied by artificial intelligence with defeat a likely outcome. The answer to such a dilemma for many military officials: let the machines take over these systems, too. As a report from the Congressional Research Service puts it, in the future AI algorithms may provide commanders with viable courses of action based on real-time analysis of the battle-space, which would enable faster adaptation to unfolding events. And someday, of course, its possible to imagine that the minds behind such decision-making would cease to be human ones. Incoming data from battlefield information systems would instead be channeled to AI processors focused on assessing imminent threats and, given the time constraints involved, executing what they deemed the best options without human instructions. Pentagon officials deny that any of this is the intent of their AI-related research. They acknowledge, however, that they can at least imagine a future in which other countries delegate decision-making to machines and the U.S. sees no choice but to follow suit, lest it lose the strategic high ground. We will not delegate lethal authority for a machine to make a decision, then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work told Paul Scharre of the Center for a New American Security in a 2016 interview. But he added the usual caveat: in the future, we might be going up against a competitor that is more willing to delegate authority to machines than we are and as that competition unfolds, well have to make decisions about how to compete. The Doomsday Decision The assumption in most of these scenarios is that the U.S. and its allies will be engaged in a conventional war with China and/or Russia. Keep in mind, then, that the very nature of such a future AI-driven hyperwar will only increase the risk that conventional conflicts could cross a threshold thats never been crossed before: an actual nuclear war between two nuclear states. And should that happen, those AI-empowered C2 systems could, sooner or later, find themselves in a position to launch atomic weapons. Such a danger arises from the convergence of multiple advances in technology: not just AI and robotics, but the development of conventional strike capabilities like hypersonic missiles capable of flying at five or more times the speed of sound, electromagnetic rail guns, and high-energy lasers. Such weaponry, though non-nuclear, when combined with AI surveillance and target-identification systems, could even attack an enemys mobile retaliatory weapons and so threaten to eliminate its ability to launch a response to any nuclear attack. Given such a use em or lose em scenario, any power might be inclined not to wait but to launch its nukes at the first sign of possible attack, or even, fearing loss of control in an uncertain, fast-paced engagement, delegate launch authority to its machines. And once that occurred, it could prove almost impossible to prevent further escalation. The question then arises: Would machines make better decisions than humans in such a situation? They certainly are capable of processing vast amounts of information over brief periods of time and weighing the pros and cons of alternative actions in a thoroughly unemotional manner. But machines also make military mistakes and, above all, they lack the ability to reflect on a situation and conclude: Stop this madness. No battle advantage is worth global human annihilation. As Paul Scharre put it in Army of None, a new book on AI and warfare, Humans are not perfect, but they can empathize with their opponents and see the bigger picture. Unlike humans, autonomous weapons would have no ability to understand the consequences of their actions, no ability to step back from the brink of war. So maybe we should think twice about giving some future militarized version of Alexa the power to launch a machine-made Armageddon. CalPERS as an institution is either unable to curb its poor impulses or so lacking in self-awareness as to not even recognize them. And more than ever, these pathologies start at the top of the organization. One case study is laffaire burgundy, in which CEO Marcie Frost asked the CalPERS senior leadership team to wear burgundy to show their support for her. This is obviously inappropriate since a request made by a CEO is effectively an order. CalPERS executives and employees are civil servants, not Frosts personal retainers. As an expert on managerial and political conduct reacted: I dont even know what category to put this in. A scandal-plagued boss orchestrating support by inventing gang colors and pressuring employees to wear them? What happens to the employees who dont perform this ritual of fealty? Should they be polishing their resumes and practicing their swimming skills? These incidents smack of underlying panic. Frost is working overtime to shore up her position as CEO in the face of fully deserved questions regarding her long history of misrepresentations about her background, which include committing perjury in Washington on a gubernatorial questionnaire. Not only is Frost pushing her subordinates far too hard to back her up, since they can only do so much for her and coercing them will diminish their good will, she is also showing a lack of a sense of professional boundaries. As well show, Frosts burgundy campaign may well have crossed the line into creating a hostile work environment. One senior staff member who came to the office and saw the dress burgundy request too late to comply issued a written apology. Similarly, when asked to wear burgundy to an offsite, one employees who wears only black and white felt compelled to buy a burgundy outfit to comply. We managed to catch this sorry affair as it devolved into cultism, when the pressure to sport burgundy went beyond senior staff to the rank and file. In case you missed it, we learned about this abuse from a CalPERS employee who sent a short e-mall and a photo: Now executives are making employees wear badges to show if they support Marcie or not!!! These are in every break room at CalPERS!!! They say participation isnt mandatory but you know theyre making note of who is wearing them and who isnt. At least the -m is not Marcie Frost, but Michele Nix, who used the -m signature in records produced in the response to our Public Records Act request #4075 and CalPERS confirmed that Nix produced the document above in response to Public Records Act request #4134. More on our forensics on this pathetic episode in due course. Let us step back and point out the obvious: A show of support for a boss is nothing o the kind. Like the Big Lies that have become routine at CalPERS, it is a mislabeling. Frost has orchestrated a required demonstration of loyalty. Not participating would be seen as opposition and insubordination. This clip is a reminder that refusing to show allegiance is hazardous: Recall that Frost has a reputation for vindictiveness that goes back to Washington. Just because she cant roast people alive doesnt mean she would not resort to other forms of punishment. Two sources in Washington State who had worked for Frost said that other former subordinates who had serious reservations about her leadership were unwilling to speak about Frost even now, years later, out of fear that Frost would find a way to retaliate. This show of support is toadying. Giving such priority to the personal needs of the CEO is corrosive. It puts employees in a position of worrying that they have to out-do each other in displays of sycophancy to maintain their good standing with the boss. A show of support for someone in a senior position is an admission of weakness. As we wrote: This childish effort is a sign that Frost is desperate and needs positive reinforcement from her immediate environment to maintain what looks to be a tenuous hold on authority. The fact that this push for employees to wear ribbon more than two months after the scandal broke, on the first day of the monthly two and a half day board meetings, also suggests that she or her key staffers suspect that Frost is still in a rocky position with the board. And the note pumping for the ribbon show is a diss to State Treasurer John Chiang, by pretending that his request for an independent investigation of Frosts claims before and after she was hired didnt exist. Pushing ribbons on the rank and file was a big backfire. High profile uses of ribbons include showing support for the fight against AIDS, and more recently, breast cancer. From Disabled World: What are Awareness Ribbons? The use of various colored ribbons is designed to create public awareness to health, medical conditions, disability, and other issues. Today, awareness ribbons are now considered as a universal symbol for social or disease awareness, and a formidable path to cures. So CalPERS employees chose a symbol says that Marcie is a disease or social problem that needs to be fought vigorously. Well done! From the section on Burgundy Awareness Ribbons Causes and Meanings: And staff also appears not to have considered that individuals who have suffered from serious medical problems would take offense at Marcies boosters misappropriating their symbol. As one CalPERS retiree wrote: As a breast cancer survivor, I am appalled to see CalPERS staff using colored ribbons to try to defend CEO Marcie Frost. I was already troubled by the evidence of her resume misrepresentations, which says she is untrustworthy and not fit for office. The fact that she did not support calls for an investigation is an admission of guilt. But this is a slap in the face of breast cancer survivors, the relatives of women who died of breast cancer, and campaigners against serious ailments generally. These ribbons are badges of dedication to serious causes. For Frost to use them as a tools of her careerism shows her ego is beyond bounds. Lets work back from what we learned about the ribbon episode, to how the burgundy campaign got rolling. What Did We Learn About the Ribbons? Someone at CalPERS who was not in the PR department saw our post on laffaire ribbons and e-mailed about it a mere seven minutes after the article went live. This says CalPERS is overstaffed, since people have time to surf the web during the day rather than do their work. This was one of the responses to that e-mail: The fact that the presence of the ribbons in breakout rooms was no surprise meant that many, presumably most, people at CalPERS had seen them by mid-PM. A couple of hours later, by the time the top brass had found out about our post, the ribbons appear to have been removed. Recall that Matt Jacobs is the General Counsel: Its rich for Hoffner to feign ignorance, since as well see shortly, he was a major instigator of the burgundy campaign. And this is cute. Notice that this is time -stamped the day after Jacobs ordered the discreet sweep of the break rooms. Apparently word had not gotten out that the ribbons were now a dodgy idea. Further notice that a relatively new employee had one presented to her in person: General Counsel Jacobs e-mailed back, Please do not. Thanks. Mind you, this is what the General Counsel role has now become, cleaning up after what we will see was a Marcie-Frost-originated mess. What Did We Learn About How the Burgundy Campaign Got Started? Marcie Frost was the instigator. Recall that our series on her hiring and later misrepresentations launched on August 27. Many business press outlets picked it up, with the most important from Frosts perspective being the article by Pulitzer Prize winner Mike Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times, CalPERS needs to come clean about its CEOs educational background, on September 19. The September board meetings were starting on Monday the 24th, with Frosts annual review on the 25th. Frost solicited senior employees to wear burgundy on the day of her CEO review on Tuesday the 25th: Frosts close confidante Kelly Fox quickly moved to institutionalize the color-as-loyalty-show late that Tuesday, as you can see from this message on the 25th. SLC refers to the CalPERS senior leadership team, although I do not know who uses that address: Frost was obviously in on this, since these screenshots from Wednesday the 26th show her wearing burgundy a second day. And staff compliance was high, with departing Chief Investment Officer Ted Eliopoulos the only person I could identify who did not fall in line:1 The word clearly got around quickly, including the notion that non-compliance was risky.2 A woman who didnt get word in time to make the right wardrobe choice felt she had to splain herself: This shows that participation could not be considered to be voluntary: Hoffner was not writing to make sure that Justin was attending the meeting, since he makes clear he was fully aware that Justin was joining. The follow up was obviously to enforce the burgundy display. More proof that everyone understood that they needed to participate: Donna Luma wears only black and white, so she was forced to abandon her well-known personal signature or else brand herself as an apostate to the Church of Marcie. And Luma was not the only woman forced to shop to please Marcie: Kelly Fox was also pushing for high compliance, um, participation. Recall that Brad Pacheco is the head of the Communications and Stakeholders Relations department, meaning PR. DEOs are Deputy Executive Officers. For instance, CalPERS has DEOs for Benefit Programs Policy and Planning and for Customer Services & Support. Aa an aside why did CalPERS refuse to comply fully our the Public Records Act request? The request was to send all records with the word burgundy, ribbon, or ribbons in it from September 1, 2018, shortly after we published our series on Marcie Frosts resume misrepresentations, to November 17, 2018. See the first embedded document at the end of this post, where the response shows the title of our November 13 post, and apparently reproduced it in full, yet redacted that. What sort of nonsense is that? The post contained all the words sought in the PRA and hence was required to be disclosed. Or is CalPERS tying to pretend that is it not still abusing copyright by reproducing and circulating copyrighted material without having obtained the legal right to do so? And in a final bit of irony, the Public Records Act request also turned up a document from one of the boards consultants which gives apple pie and motherhood advice which the board is ignoring as far as Frost is concerned, letting her get away with misconduct and compounding the damage with junior-high-school level antics. Key section: * * * For a CEO who appears to be exceptionally PR oriented, Frost is making a hash of it. The point of the burgundy dress and later ribbons was to be noticed at stakeholder events and by the board at board meetings which are videotaped and posted on YouTube. It apparently never occurred to Frost that this display would be recognized for what it was, a show of narcissism and insecurity. Even if an employee had naively dreamed up this idea, a competent leader would have squashed it immediately. In addition, Frost appears not to grasp a fundamental rule of marketing: never misrepresent the product. Embellish, yes. Deceive, no. But Frost has repeatedly and consistently misrepresented herself via her whoppers before and after her hiring, and now the painfully amateurish efforts to shore herself up as CEO. Notice neither Frost nor her staff have offered a credible explanation. Frost clearly pressured one of the members of the Stakeholder Relations department, Wayne Davis, to tell the howler that was the source of the resume fabrications, when they predate Frosts hiring. Both the Financial Times and the Los Angeles Times pours cold water on that tall tale. Frost then claimed she was misunderstood, which is obviously inconsistent with her embellishments of her history appearing on multiple CalPERS documents. Because she has no defense, Frost is willing to fall back on an emotional appeal, that her subordinates appear to back her. But so too did every army led by its generals into slaughter, like Napoleons march on Moscow. The display is merely an exhibition of an ugly aspect of a superior-subordinate relationship, and no proof of the caliber of the person in charge. And in this case, it is clearly a negative indicator. ____ 1 Forest Grimes did indicate he was not going along, but I am not sure whether he knuckled under and wore a wine-colored tie that day, since he would have seen the e-mails all showing assent: His Wednesday early AM message: Sorry but burgundy is not in my fall collection this year! I will be thinking burgundy thoughts however since bringing red wine to the meetings is frowned upon. And he had decided to comply by the October meeting. From an October 8 e-mail: Melissa and I will be arriving on Tuesday afternoon to present on Wednesday. While burgundy is limited in my fall collection this year I will find something and pass the word along. 2 If you think Frost enjoys the genuine support of most of her employees, I have a bridge Id like to sell you. I have been following CalPERS intensely, and often critically, since early 2014. I did not have any current employees sending me inside information when Anne Stausboll was CEO. I now have a meaningful and growing number of sources who are currently at CalPERS, including ones who were said they and many others were distraught and demoralized by the boards failure to take any action regarding clearly documented fabrications by Frost. And I have never had anything even remotely like this happen at any other organization I have covered intensively, including mortgage servicers (the Bank of America whistleblower series is not an apt comparison since our sources were all temps who were no longer assigned there when they spoke to me). NATO Allies have agreed the civil and military budgets for 2019. At a meeting of the North Atlantic Council on Tuesday (18 December 2018), Allies agreed a civil budget of 250.5 million and a military budget of 1.395 billion for 2019. All member countries contribute to these budgets, according to an agreed cost-sharing formula based on Gross National Income. In the face of a more demanding security environment, NATO continues to adapt including through the modernization of the NATO Command Structure, and a functional review of the Alliances Headquarters in Brussels. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg welcomed the agreement of the budgets, saying: The world is changing, and NATO is adapting. Allies are investing in NATO to address the challenges of our time, including cyber and hybrid threats, a more assertive Russia, and instability across the Middle East and North Africa. NATO is committed to ensuring that we continue to keep our people safe, in a way that is both effective and financially responsible. The civil budget provides funds for personnel, operating costs, and programme expenditures at NATO Headquarters in Brussels. The 2019 civil budget is 1.9% above the 2018 level, and includes funding to implement the functional review of NATO Headquarters. This includes measures to strengthen NATOs intelligence capabilities; anticipate and plan for cyber and hybrid challenges; improve the way the Alliance handles data as a strategic asset; increase defence cooperation with partners; and strengthen focus on the Women, Peace and Security agenda. To implement these measures, NATO will create thirty new posts in 2019. The military budget covers the operating costs of NATO Command Structure headquarters and programmes, missions and operations around the world. The 2019 military budget is 7.2% above the 2018 level. This includes funding for the Command Structure, which is currently being adapted including with a new Command for the Atlantic in Norfolk, Virginia, to ensure free sea lines of communication between Europe and North America; and a new Command in Ulm, Germany to improve the movement of troops and equipment in Europe. In July, Allied leaders agreed to increase the size of the command structure by around 1,200 people a process that will take approximately three years. In 2019, 273.2 million of the military budget will go toward funding NATOs missions and operations, including the Resolute Support Mission in Afghanistan; the KFOR peace support operation in Kosovo; and NATOs new training mission in Iraq, launched at the Brussels Summit in July 2018. Separately, NATOs AWACS surveillance aircraft whose missions include flights over eastern Europe and support for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS will receive 262 million in operations and support funding. In addition to the civil and military budgets, the Alliances third principal common funded element is the NATO Security Investment Programme (NSIP). Covering major construction and command and control system investments, the 2019 ceiling for the NSIP is 700 million. (Natural News) American Leftists are loathe to admit it because they are busy doing all they can to destroy our heritage and culture, but the United States was founded by followers of the Christian religion. Thats not even debatable. Whats also not debatable is that those same Christian founders were well aware that not all humans believed in the same set of theological principles or the same god, and that is reflected in the First Amendment, which specifically prohibits local, state, and federal governments from establishing a monolithic official religion. But that constitutional prohibition doesnt seem to be registering with the big tech, retail, and media platforms including Amazon, Google, and Twitter probably because they are wholly owned and operated by the American Left. While Christianity is downplayed and Christians themselves either discriminated against openly or otherwise discouraged from openly practicing and embracing their faith, adherents to other religions like, say, Islam face no such pressures. The big tech and retail firms have bent over backward to accommodate Muslim followers, but even that hasnt been enough: They want more. As reported by Agence France Presse, Muslim workers at an Amazon facility in Minnesota are demanding demanding more time to pray while they are on the job. A group of Somali refugees who were resettled in the upper Midwestern state say that they are being abused by Amazon because the company dares to require them to actually be productive while theyre drawing a paycheck. We dont have rights in the company, complained Abdulkadir Ahmad, 30, in an interview with AFP, which noted further: The workers, many of whom are practicing Muslims, say the required productivity rate is too high, the company is unconcerned about worker injuries and that the conditions dont allow practicing Muslims to pray as they otherwise would. We do not have enough time to pray. There is a lot of pressure. They say your rate is too low, Ahmed whined. Mind you, there is one element of Christianity (and Judaism, for that matter) at play here: The workers made sure to time their protest over the holidays the busiest time of the year for Amazon to ensure their message was heard. This is a great way to get yourself replaced by a machine Its not as if Amazon has been completely deaf to their complaints and demands. AFP notes that the company, says it has offered accommodations such as providing prayer mats for workers, converting a conference room into prayer space during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan and approving shift transfers for fasting workers. Also, weve continued to hire and develop East African employees, Amazon spokeswoman Shevaun Brown told the newswire service in an email. Were a leader in this space and we feel really good about our record here. Not good enough, said activist Abdi Muse, the executive director of the Awood Center, a Leftist non-profit group responsible for organizing the protests. Do you know what they dont have in Somalia? Amazon. Jobs. Income opportunities. They have a lot of unemployed Muslims who do have plenty of time to pray every day, however. You know what Amazon doesnt have in the United States? Facilities with spaces established for followers of the Christian faith, that weve heard of anyway. Most of the warehouse employees dont work on Christmas Day, but thats a perk available to every employee, not just Christians. As much as this may boggle the mind of many, perhaps it isnt Amazons fault. After all, you can bet there is some Left-wing legal group out there just waiting to file a massive discrimination lawsuit against the online retail behemoth for violating the religious rights of Muslim employees (similar suits involving Christian complainants may also be forthcoming). As for the Muslim workers dissatisfied with Amazons employment conditions, we have one word they should become intimately familiar with robots. Read more about religious freedoms in America at Freedom.news. Sources include: Phys.org Liberty.news TheFederalist.com (Natural News) You can improve your recent memory through a short session of light exercise. An article in Psychology Today reported that people performed better in short-term memory tests after spending 10 minutes on an exercise bike at a steady but unhurried pace. The findings came from an experiment conducted by Japanese and American researchers. They employed a bicycle ergometer, a type of stationary bike that is usually used to measure the amount of work exerted by the user. Overseen by researchers from the University of California at Irvine (UCI) and the University of Tsukuba (Tsukuba), the experimental group consisted of 36 young adult volunteers. Each participant underwent a test of their episodic memory. Participants would be shown pictures of ordinary everyday objects, one after another. They would try to figure out if there were any similarities between the current object and the ones shown just earlier. They found that participants who took the 10-minute-long exercise before the test demonstrated better episodic memory. The volunteers were able to quickly and accurately remember previous objects, as well as any possible connections between the earlier ones and the current object. (Related: Yes, you can exercise your brain to dramatically improve cognitive performance.) Short sessions of moderate exercise can sharpen short-term memory The UCI and Tsukuba researchers explained that the 10-minute time limit of the non-stressful exercise is short enough to be practical for most people. At the same time, it is long and intense enough to induce memory benefits. They noted that the exercise raised the activity levels of the hippocampus, the part of the brain that is closely linked with recent memory. Earlier studies have shown that a person who sustained injuries to his or her hippocampus will keep long-term memories while being unable to create new memories. Furthermore, the dentate gyrus/CA3 regions of the hippocampus increased their physical connections with some areas of the cerebral cortex. These parts are where the brain keeps newer memories. The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imagery (fMRI) to evaluate the increased activity in the hippocampus. They also measured the density of the nerve fiber connections between the hippocampus and cerebral cortex. Higher densities of nerve fiber connections increase the number of signals traded between nerve cells during a specific amount of time. The resulting higher connectivity was connected with improved performance in the episodic memory test. Energize your episodic memory with daily doses of moderate physical exercise Based on the results of their experiment, the researchers theorized that the activity and the connectivity levels of the hippocampus played important roles when it came to saving episodic memories. Therefore, anything that can spur the hippocampus into higher levels of activity will improve ones grasp of those short-term memories. The hippocampus is critical for the creation of new memories; its one of the first regions of the brain to deteriorate as we get older and much more severely in Alzheimers disease, explained UCI researcher and lead author Michael Yassa. Improving the function of the hippocampus holds much promise for improving memory in everyday settings. For comparison, the nearby amygdala region of the brain is responsible for storing threatening or traumatic memories that have emotions invested in them. There may be ways to stimulate this part of the brain in a similar way that moderate exercises do for the hippocampus. In the meantime, considering spending a few minutes pedaling on your stationary bike every day. Then see for yourself if your episodic memory has improved by playing memory games. Learn about the best ways to keep your brain, and your body fit, at MensFitnessFocus.com. Sources include: PsychologyToday.com PNAS.org According to Westmans complaint, the college said she was placed on leave because her claims were untimely and unsubstantiated and her conduct was unprofessional and false, misleading, misrepresentative and lacking in integrity. The college also said she committed misconduct by permitting or encouraging the discussion of sexual harassment or sexual abuse in her classrooms. (Natural News) Anyone who doesnt yet realize the U.S. government is gearing up to defend America against a major land invasion of foreign nationals needs to look at this press release from December 10, 2018: U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Awards Federal Premium a .223 Remington Ammunition Contract. The press release describes a 5-year, $75 million contract to provide the organizations agents and officers with .223 Rem duty and training ammunition. For those who arent familiar with firearms, .223 Remington ammo is used in AR-15 rifles. Its not technically identical to 5.56 NATO, but rifles that can fire 5.56 NATO can also fire .223 Remington. These arent pistol rounds, in other words, and they can be used by soldiers in military rifles. In government quantities, these rounds cost roughly $0.20 each. This means that $75 million will acquire about 375 million rounds of ammunition. Thats 18,750 rounds of ammunition per ICE employee ICE currently employs 20,000 people. If the 375 million rounds of ammunition were equally distributed across all 20,000 ICE employees, that would give each employee 18,750 rounds of ammunition. Thats a massive amount of ammunition. The average county sheriffs deputy is allotted approximately 50 rounds per month of duty ammo in order to maintain some minimum level of firearms proficiency. Thatt 600 rounds per year. SWAT team members, the elite firearms squads of police departments, will often fire 1,000 2,000 rounds of ammunition per month in training. Active duty soldiers may go through several thousand rounds a month during certain periods of their training, and soldiers in hot war zones can, of course, burn through thousands of rounds a month, too. But distributing 18,750 rounds of ammunition to each of the 20,000 ICE employees is so far off the scale of whats routinely required that its scary. It begs the question: What does Homeland Security know that they arent telling us? 375 million rounds of ammunition is more in line with what youd need for a full-scale military operation, not merely protecting the border from people who flee when theyre bombed by pepper spray. Federal Tactical ammunition is very good quality ammunition Notably, Federal is a well respected quality brand of ammunition. Its not junk ammo for plinking or low-end training. This is battle-ready ammunition that gets the job done when you need to stop targets cold. As the president of Federal Ammunition explains, Officers in the field require the highest quality ammunition at their disposal, in their vigilant fight to protect our freedoms. Federal Tactical ammunition ensures the highest performance threshold, and absolute officer confidence in terminal performance. The phrase terminal performance, for those of you who arent experienced shooters, means the ammunition can be reliably expected to accomplish two things when it strikes an intended target: Penetration and expansion. Or, put medically, making deep holes and big holes in your intended target. Thats the purpose of ammunition, of course: to physically stop someone whose actions are threatening your person, your family or perhaps even your nation. Big holes achieve that goal, and the ammunition design and composition determines the ballistic effects on the target. This isnt just normal ammunition, by the way: Its branded tactical ammunition. As the press release states: Federal Tactical is a trusted partner for some of the most intense conditions encountered by law enforcement. It achieves accuracy and terminal performance that defeats tough barriers with minimal deviation. The ammunition utilizes the highest quality Federal brass, projectiles and primers. Defeats tough barriers with minimal deviation means you can shoot targets in vehicles, right through window glass, and still expect to get good hits. This .223 Remington ammunition will also go right through car doors, normal house doors, residential walls and building windows. This is the class of ammunition you use when youre serious about achieving tactical superiority over an enemy threat. Again, this does not appear to be training ammo, although it can of course be used for training. But that isnt its ultimate purpose. This is tactical engagement ammunition to be used in a large-scale shooting war. I support ICE, secure borders and law enforcement and I still have questions about this quantity of ammo For the record, I support the mission of ICE to defend Americas borders, and I support building a wall. My wife is a legal immigrant, so Im very familiar with the process of immigration and naturalization. Like most Americans, I welcome legal immigrants but demand an end to illegal invasions by foreign nationals who arrogantly walk across the border then demand voting rights and welfare benefits. Im also a longtime supporter of law enforcement, and Ive personally trained with a long list of former military, special forces and law enforcement veterans. Their mission is extremely difficult, and these people are under-paid and under-appreciated. Most of them are good Americans who love their country and are performing honest work to try to keep America safe. Even with that stance, I still question why ICE needs 375 million rounds of .223 ammunition. This is clearly much more than whats needed for proficiency training over the time period of the contract. Theres little question this is a stockpiling effort by ICE to put away a few hundred million rounds for some significant, anticipated event. Like, say, a coordinated invasion of the U.S. southern border by enemy combatants looking to overrun and occupy the United States of America. It only takes one high-altitude EMP detonation to soften up U.S. defenses and leave the border largely vulnerable to a coordinated mass invasion. Notably, firearms still work after an EMP weapon detonation, since firearm cartridges operate solely on the laws of chemistry and physics rather than relying on electronics (which is why smart people are buying rifles, not Bitcoin). When SHTF and your iPhone stops working because its made out of complex electronics, your rifle and pistol will still function. If you learn how to use iron sights and scope reticles, you can still be effective even without complex electronics. If ICE is arming up, maybe you should, too Regardless of your interpretation of all this, its clear that somebody at DHS wants ICE employees to be extremely well armed. I wouldnt be surprised if an internet researcher dug up another contract that awarded a rifle manufacturer another $20 million for 10,000 battle-ready firearms. After all, what good is all the premium ammo if you dont have premium rifles to use it with? Somebody with the power to spend huge dollars is obviously anticipating a major land assault on the United States almost certainly from the U.S. southern border. Notably, anti-gun Democrats are demanding that citizens turn in all their guns and be left entirely disarmed and helpless as events unfold. (See Guns.news for daily coverage.) Thats exactly why you should take this news as a cue to buy more guns and ammo while you still can. The Trump administration just outlawed bump stocks, by the way tactically useless devices of zero interest to real operators. But its an indication that even Trump may incrementally outlaw rifles and the equipment that goes with them (such as gun magazines, lower receivers and of course 3D printers). My advice is to do what ICE is doing and start stocking up on gear youll probably need in the near future. Find the best prices on ammunition at AmmoSeek.com, and if youre looking for high-quality rifles or pistols, my current top recommendation is SigSauer.com, which sells the MCX rifle platform that has proven to be ultra-reliable. Keep it legal, get good training and keep your damn finger off the trigger unless youre on target and ready to fire, okay? The most annoying thing in the world about newbie gun owners is how they pick up a pistol and immediately put their finger on the trigger. Guns dont kill people, but stupid people with guns do accidentally kill other people if theyre not careful. (Natural News) Silkworms eat the leaves of mulberry trees to spin the cocoons that become precious silk. Likewise, humans can consume an extract made from the fruit of the white mulberry (Morus alba) to attenuate symptoms of diabetes. A Korean study asserts that the fruit supplement will improve the bodys sensitivity to insulin and reduce the effects of glycemia. White mulberry is one of the many members of the mulberry family. Native to China, it is mainly cultivated to provide food for highly-valuable silkworms. The fruit of the tree is safe, edible, and tasty. It can even be eaten raw, although of course, it is best when cooked. Mulberry fruit is packed with nutrients such as vitamin C, iron, magnesium, and potassium. It contains enough vitamin C to serve as a ready source of antioxidants. Traditional Chinese medicine prescribes the fruit for numerous purposes. It reputedly reverses the premature graying of hair, cleanses the blood and restores its balance, and treats diseases such as constipation and diabetes. The medicinal use of white mulberry fruit inspired researchers from Silla University (SU) to evaluate its potential as an antidiabetic. They believe that a fruit-based extract could serve as a health supplement for people with diabetes. Turning the fruit of the mulberry tree into an insulin supplement The researchers constructed an animal model with a strain of mice that simulated the symptoms of diabetes in humans. The lab animals were divided into three groups according to the treatment they received. One group served as diabetic control to provide a baseline of comparison. The second group was given rosiglitazone, an antidiabetic drug that works by increasing the bodys sensitivity to insulin. The last group of mice was administered an extract made from mulberry fruit. Various tests were performed to determine the levels of blood sugar, plasma insulin, and glucose in the peritoneum that lines the walls of the abdominal cavity. The mice supplemented with the mulberry fruit extract were also tested for their tolerance towards insulin. Finally, the SU researchers performed western blotting tests. These tests measured the number of proteins that were targeted by insulin signals. The complete study can be found in the Journal of Medicinal Food. (Related: Eucalyptus essential oil found to help manage diabetes.) Increasing insulin sensitivity The test results showed that the blood glucose and average blood glucose levels of the mice given rosiglitazone or the mulberry fruit extract were much lower than the readings for the untreated control group. The extract appeared to achieve similar effects to the antidiabetic drug. The glucose and insulin tolerance tests on the extract-supplemented mice confirmed that the insulin sensitivity of the animals had improved. A comparison of their homeostatic index with that of untreated mice showed that the supplemented animals enjoyed reduced resistance to insulin. The supplementation greatly stimulated the concentration of phosphorylated (p)-AMP-activated protein kinase (pAMPK) and p-Akt substrate of 160 kDa (pAS160). These are connected with the AMPK enzyme and AS160 protein that converted glucose into usable energy. The mulberry extract improved the concentration of plasma membrane-glucose transporter 4. This is a molecule that hauls glucose through the plasma membrane and into the skeletal muscles that need them as fuel. In addition to boosting the amount of pAMPK, the supplement also reduced the levels of glucose 6-phosphatase and phosphoenolpyruvate carboxykinase in the liver. These two substances are responsible for gluconeogenesis, the conversion of non-carbohydrate carbons into glucose. The SU researchers concluded that the fruit of the white mulberry tree could be used to alleviate hyperglycemia and increase insulin sensitivity in patients with Type 2 diabetes. To read more about the antidiabetic properties of fruits like the mulberry, visit DiabetesCure.news. Sources include: Science.news Journals.PLOS.org LiebertPub.com Ketogenic-diet-resource.com (Natural News) If youre tired of seeing all the tacky pink hats and mindless protest placards littering your citys streets year after year as part of the infamous Womens March against President Donald Trump, you could be in for an early Christmas present this year. A lengthy expose published by Tablet Magazine reveals incredible turmoil within the ranks of the Womens March, including what some accusers say are deeply-rooted anti-Semitic sentiments throughout the organization. According to reports, Tamika Mallory and Carmen Perez, the two heads of the Womens March, both made anti-Semitic remarks at one of the organizations first meetings back in 2016. While supposedly all women are welcome to join the Womens March, Mallory and Perez specifically excluded Jewish women from their core unity principles. Instead, the Womens March chose to elicit support exclusively from Black women, Native women, poor women, immigrant women, Muslim women, and queer and trans women. From its very founding, in other words, the Womens March appears to have been specifically anti-Jewish. Both Perez and Mallory had specified at the organizations founding that Jewish people bore a special collective responsibility as exploiters of black and brown people, pointing to claims that Jews were proven to have been leaders of the American slave trade. There are no Jewish women on the Womens March board In addition to aligning itself against Jewish women, the Womens March apparently also made it a policy not to hire any Jewish women to its board. Tablet Magazine used the word refused to describe how the Womens March has allegedly rejected, at a systematic level, any acceptance of Jewish women to its ranks. There are no Jewish women on the board, stated Mercy Morganfield, a feminist activist, when asked whether or not the Womens March co-chairs are truly anti-Semitic. They refused to put any on. Most of the Jewish people resigned and left. They refused to even put anti-Semitism in the unity principles. One of the Womens March co-chairs, Linda Sarsour, recently issued an apology to Jews over the accusations, stating that the organization is deeply sorry for any harm it may have caused to Jewish women. She also reiterated the organizations commitment to fighting anti-Semitism. Tamika Mallory closely aligned with anti-Jewish leader Louis Farrakhan But this may not be enough, considering lingering accusations that Mallory is closely aligned with Nation of Islam founder Louis Farrakhan. Farrakhan doesnt beat around the bush in condemning Jewish people, and a photo exists of Mallory and Farrakhan smiling for the camera with Farrakhans arm around Mallory. This, say accusers, just goes to show that the Womens March is anti-Jewish, and could even be receiving funding from the Nation of Islam. Womens March leaders, however, say that this isnt the case at all. Womens March has no relationship with or financial ties to the Nation of Islam, the organization reportedly told Tablet Magazine via email. We denounce anti-semitism, and there should be no confusion about that. We attack the forces of evil, not the people doing evil. We understand our failure to clearly articulate this difference early fighting anti-semitism vs. denouncing Farrakhan has caused pain, and for that we are deeply sorry. We thank our critics for highlighting this lack of clarity so that we can do the work to undo the harm caused. Womens March emails slew of news outlets demanding corrections and fact-checks The controversy has sparked a whole lot of reporting across the internet about what the Womens March may truly be about so much so that the Womens March has reportedly been contacting news outlets left and right with demands that corrections be made to align with fact-checks. The Federalists Sean Davis, for instance, received what reports are describing as bizarre correspondences from a Womens March public relations firm asking that corrections be made to the papers reporting. Tablet is in the process of making several corrections to this story, the email reads. We have a list of fact checks we submitted to Tablet with corrections including screenshots that challenge the accuracy of the sources and the timeline included in the story, it adds. But as a caveat to these fact-checks, the same email demanded answers to a slew of questions, including a demand that correspondences be done off the record. The Womens March is also demanding that an agreement first be secure[d] before proceeding. These are strange requests, especially considering many of the people who received them merely shared the Tablet Magazine article through social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and didnt necessarily write any of their own fresh content about the controversy. LOL at this ham-fisted, amateur PF response to @tabletmags expose on the anti-Semitism that forms the foundation of the Womens March, tweeted Davis after receiving this bizarre email correspondence. Promise to delete your tweet about an article we dont like, and we might send you facts youre not allowed to publish because of journalism,' he added in jest, joking about what the Womens March email basically implied. This is very unusual, commented Stephen Gutowski, a staff writer at Free Beacon who was similarly perplexed by the unusual correspondences by the Womens March PR group. I dont understand why they want me to go off the record if they have some sort of contradicting information. Heck, I didnt even write the piece. I didnt even tweet about it. I retweeted others who tweeted about it, he added. For more bizarre leftist news, be sure to check out LiberalMob.com and Libtards.news. Sources for this article include: TabletMag.com ZeroHedge.com NaturalNews.com (Natural News) Are you worried that your friends have an unhealthy obsession with taking too many selfies every day? It looks like researchers are also thinking the same thing. According to a study, the excessive use of social media, especially the posting of images and selfies, is linked to a subsequent increase in narcissism. The study was published in The Open Psychology Journal. Narcissism, selfies, and social media Narcissism is defined as a personality characteristic which may involve beliefs of entitlement, grandiose exhibitionism, and taking advantage of others. The study, which involved a collaboration between researchers from the Abertawe Bro Morgannwg University Health Board, Milan University and Swansea University, examined the personality changes of 74 volunteers, who were aged 18 to 34, for four months. During the four-month study period, the researchers studied the participants usage of social media such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter. The researchers identified the participants who used social media excessively by assessing their visual postings. Based on the assessment, those who were always on social media had an average 25 percent increase in narcissistic traits during the four-month study. Based on the measurement scale used, the increase pushed a lot of the participants above the clinical cut-off for narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). The results of the study also revealed that people who mostly used social media for verbal postings, like Twitter, didnt display these qualities. But the researchers noted that for the group who preferred verbal postings, their initial levels of narcissism predicted a growth in this form of social media usage over time. The more narcissistic this group was to begin with, the more verbal postings they shared later. Except for one individual, the rest of the participants used social media for an average of about three hours daily, excluding usage for work. Several volunteers also reported that they used social media for over eight hours every day for non-work related purposes. At least 60 percent of the sample used Facebook, 25 percent used Instagram, and 13 percent used Twitter and Snapchat each. More than two-thirds of the volunteers preferred to use social media for posting images. Professor Phil Reed, the leader of the study from the Department of Psychology at Swansea University, explained that there are those who believed that there was a link between narcissism and the use of visual postings on social media (e.g., Facebook). However, until the study, it was unknown if narcissists use this form of social media more, or if using the platforms was connected with the following growth in narcissistic tendencies. He added that based on the study results, both may occur. But the results also imply that posting selfies may increase narcissism. If the sample accurately represents the population, the study shows that at least 20 percent of people could be at risk of developing the narcissistic traits linked to their overuse of visual social media. Professor Reed warned that if the predominant usage of social media for the participants was visual, mainly through Facebook, its possible that the growth of this personality problem could be seen even more often, at least until experts determine the possible dangers social media overuse. (Related: If you enjoy taking selfies, you could be a psychopath.) Professor Roberto Truzoli from Milan University said that the use of visual social media could highlight the perception of narcissistic individuals that they are the center of attention. Professor Truzoli concluded, The lack of immediate direct social censure, may offer them the opportunity to inflict aspects of their narcissistic personality, present themselves in a grandiose manner, and [realize] fantasies of omnipotence. What is Narcissistic personality disorder? A person with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) may have an inflated opinion of themselves. Individuals with NPD have an intense need to be admired and be the center of attention. They may feel disappointed or unhappy if theyre not praised or give special favors they think they deserve. Individuals with NPD may have the following traits: Arrogant Demanding Self-centered Narcissistic individuals may have high self-esteem and they tend to believe that they are special or superior, unlike other people. They also tend to have a ceaseless need for admiration and praise while reacting poorly to what they believe is criticism. Take note that while some NPD traits seem similar to confidence, healthy confidence and NPD arent two different things. Confident people are often humble, while those with NPD rarely are. Individuals with NPD often put themselves on a pedestal and think that theyre better than everyone else. If youre worried that youre taking too many selfies or that youre spending too much time online on social media, visit Addiction.news for tips on how to manage social media addiction. Sources include: AlphaGalileo.org Healthline.com (Natural News) Sometimes its hard to tell if the powers that be are completely tone deaf to the desires of most Americans or if they do things purposely to thumb their noses at us, and this is one of those occasions where it could go either way. As readers are likely aware, POTUS Donald Trump has been using the full weight of the Executive Branch to cajole, threaten, or otherwise convince lawmakers to provide funds for his oft-promised border wall. Its necessary not because America is a racist country but because our open southwestern border has been a conduit for deadly drugs, criminals, and endless caravans of mostly poor migrants. For two years the Republican-controlled Congress failed to provide the presidents requested funds (which, he says, will be reimbursed if the legislative bodies of the U.S., Canada, and Mexico approve a renegotiated trade agreement the president also promised during his 2016 campaign). Now its too late: Open borders Democrats will be taking over the House in January, where all funding bills must originate. Worse that that, however, is the fact that the U.S. is set to pay out more than double the amount POTUS Trump wants for border wall construction in the next fiscal year to Mexico and countries in Central America: $10.6 billion. Some of this money will come from private-sector investment and the objective to create opportunities for chronically poor residents of southern Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras in their home countries so they dont want or need to risk life and limb traveling to the United States is admirable. But for lawmakers to approve funding for projects and economic development somewhere other than the United States while flat-out refusing to provide security for their own people is going to outrage tens of millions of Americans. (Related: Democrats angry over death of migrant girl in CBP custody should blame THEIR open borders policies.) Americans will see this as a slap in the face The Associated Press reported on the amounts of money involved, as well as what it will be used for: The United States pledged $5.8 billion in aid and investment Tuesday for strengthening government and economic development in Central America, and another $4.8 billion in development aid for southern Mexico. The U.S aid aims to promote better security conditions and job opportunities as part of a regional plan to allow Central Americans and Mexicans to remain in their countries and not have to emigrate. The combination of public and private investment for the stay-at-home effort doesnt require congressional approval, unlike Trumps signature project to stem illegal immigration a border wall. The funding will come from the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, or OPIC, a government entity created in 1971 by President Richard Nixon for the purpose of helping American businesses invest in development in emerging markets, according to its website. The agency is reportedly self-sustaining, meaning it does not receive any taxpayer funding. OPIC operates on a self-sustaining basis as no net cost to American taxpayers and has generated money for the U.S. Treasury for 39 straight years, the website notes. But heres what Americans angered by this will see: Guatemalans, Salvadorans, and Mexicans will get security but Americanswont. No border wall. And economic development that could be better spent on American workers. And theyll see that the Deep State/open borders/corporate wing of government is getting its way, again: Since the funding comes from OPIC, a federal agency, the American people, through their elected representatives, will have no say over any of this. If that isnt a massive slap to the faces of the nearly 64 million Americans who put POTUS Trump in the Oval Office, nothing is. Its almost as if the D.C. elites are trying to spark a revolution of the kind were currently seeing in France with the yellow vest protesters. Because this kind of callous disregard for the will of the people will surely become intolerable at some point. Read more about our Leftist open borders policies at OpenBorders.news. Sources include: OPIC.gov APNews.com InvasionUSA.news Madison Police Chief Mike Koval spoke out Tuesday against an amendment made to a potential contract with Madison schools. The contract would keep officers in four Madison high schools, and was voted for 4-2 at the school board meeting Monday night. However, the amendment added by the board would allow for the district to remove officers from schools for "cause." The amendment discussed at the meeting would ultimately mean that if MMSD requested MPD to assign a replacement for an officer, a replacement would be assigned. Chief Koval is opposed to the amendment. He said the district and police had already negotiated before the Monday night meeting and said he had made clear he would not support language that would allow the district to decide the removal of officers for cause because of state statutes. "I need to see some language that might ultimately achieve what it is that theyre seeking, short of removing what is already in place as a statutory process for dealing with punishment and removal and discipline of police officers," he said. "Thats not in their purview. In his blog, Chief Koval said that "the City cannot discipline an officer without complying with these statutory requirements," referencing Wisconsin Statute 62.13 (3m). "I'm hot under the collar under this item," Chief Koval said. "If they didn't get it, I think it should be manifestly clear, this is non-negotiable." The school board was reminded during their Monday meeting that they had tried to use this sort of language to enable the removal of officers previously, but that had been rejected by MPD. Chief Koval said that he hopes to move past this amendment and forward with the partnership, as long as the language is dropped. "I want MPD to be an integrated partner to the school environment and to promote public safety and expounding the achievements of all of our students," he said. "But I'm not going to do this at the risk of again circumventing established legal processes that are in place for dealing with these very matters. The district should have known, they were told, and shame on them for not listening." A series of NBC Bay Area investigations expose the risks of riding alone and underage in an Uber and Lyft, and uncover a black market scheme that could allow criminals and unlicensed drivers behind the wheel. The Investigative Units undercover reports reveal that Uber and Lyft drivers are picking up unaccompanied minors, despite company policies prohibiting it, and show how underground markets are allowing people to rent rideshare accounts and drive without going through background checks or car inspections. ANOTHER SCHEME EXPOSED An NBC Bay Area investigation has exposed that drivers continue to create accounts with stolen information and rent them out to anyone willing to pay. Full Story An NBC Bay Area investigation has exposed that drivers continue to create accounts with stolen information and rent them out to anyone willing to pay. It started with a Lyft account and recently NBC Bay Area was able to rent several Uber accounts. The app history on one account shows cars logged more than 200 trips in just a few weeks. Now Uber is taking what NBC Bay Area uncovered straight to law enforcement. Investigative Reporter Liz Wagner reports in a story that aired on Feb. 12, 2019. FAKE RIDESHARE DRIVERS An NBC Bay Area investigation uncovered a new scheme that allows anyone to circumvent background checks and vehicle inspections and pose as a rideshare driver, leaving passengers with virtually no way to spot a phony. Full Story When you get into an Uber or Lyft, how do you know whos really behind the wheel? The NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit has uncovered an underground market that allows people to rent rideshare accounts and drive without going through background checks or car inspections. Investigative Reporter Liz Wagner reports in a story that aired on September 17, 2018. MINORS AT RISK Rideshare apps have policies that prohibit drivers from picking up underage riders traveling alone, but an NBC Bay Area investigation found that those rules are being ignored. Full Story From day care providers to school bus drivers, California regulations require fingerprints and extensive criminal background checks for almost any worker who may be left alone with kids. But those same requirements do not apply to ride-hailing apps like Uber and Lyft, which have become popular with teens. But company policies say they arent supposed to be transporting kids riding alone. As the NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit uncovered, its happening anyway, and it could be putting thousands of kids at risk. Investigative reporter Liz Wagner reports on a story that first aired on Feb. 4, 2018. From day care providers to school bus drivers, California regulations require fingerprints and extensive criminal background checks for almost any worker who may be left alone with kids. But those same requirements do not apply to ride-hailing apps like Uber and Lyft, which have become popular with teens. But company policies say they arent supposed to be transporting kids riding alone. As the NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit uncovered, its happening anyway, and it could be putting thousands of kids at risk. Investigative reporter Liz Wagner reports on a story that first aired on Feb. 4, 2018. INTERACTIVE: SPOTTING A FAKE Popular apps offer safety tips for riders that explain how to avoid getting into a car with a phony driver, but an NBC Bay Area investigation revealed some of those tips will not work if your driver is using a rented account. Full Story Getty Images WEB EXTRA: ONE TEEN'S STORY A Peninsula teen discusses how she learned about the risks of riding Uber alone and underage. A Peninsula teen discusses how she learned about the risks of riding Uber alone and underage. Meanwhile, our Investigative Unit Producer Kevin Nious shows how often underrage passengers requests rides during a recent job working as an Uber driver. WEB EXTRA: UBER RIDE-ALONG The NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit went undercover near schools and malls across the Bay Area to record more than a dozen ride-hailing drivers willing to take underage riders. The NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit went undercover near schools and malls across the Bay Area. They recorded more than a dozen ride-hailing drivers willing to take underage riders. An Uber and Lyft driver also discusses how often he has to reject requests from underage passengers. The Trump administration is changing the way it reviews sponsors who want to care for migrant children in government custody backing off a requirement that all people in the house are fingerprinted. The fingerprint requirement began in June amid the zero-tolerance policy at the border that led to the separation of some 2,400 children from their parents. The children taken from parents were placed in shelters until a sponsor, often a parent or other family member, could be found and evaluated before releasing the children to that sponsor. But the addition of fingerprinting has slowed the process and clogged the shelters. Some potential sponsors have said they couldn't get people in their homes to be fingerprinted because they were afraid. The information is shared with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and officers have arrested some 170 sponsors and others on immigration violations using the fingerprint data. More than 49,000 children crossed the border alone during the 2018 budget year. While overall number of children coming to the U.S. is down from a high in 2016, minors are staying in shelters longer and the total number of children detained at once is at an all-time high. The average length of time that children spend in shelters has increased from 40 days in fiscal year 2016 to 59 in fiscal year 2018, according to federal data. There are currently more than 14,000 children in 137 government shelters around the country. Austin, Texas-based Southwest Key Programs operates facilities to hold immigrant children in Arizona, California, and Texas, including one facility in an old Walmart. It has greatly expanded its operations this year as more children have been held for longer periods. "We are greatly encouraged by this," Juan Sanchez, the agency's chief executive officer, said of the change. "This will help all care givers reduce the time these children stay in shelters and give them the foundation they need to thrive and prosper." U.S. Health and Human Services officials say fingerprints will still be required for sponsors and will be cross-checked with the FBI databases and U.S. Department of Homeland Security arrest records. The Office of Refugee Resettlement, the agency that manages the children, will do public-records checks on all adult household members. Fingerprints for those adults will still be required in certain circumstances, including if the records check uncovers disqualifying factors, like a history of child abuse, a documented safety risk for the child or the child is especially vulnerable. The requirement change could result in the release of many more children from the centers. A series of tents that opened in June to house older children in Tornillo, Texas, was to close later this month. The space originally had 400 beds, but it expanded twice and now holds roughly 2,700 minors. A spokesman for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Mark Weber, said on Tuesday afternoon that the agency had yet to make a decision about whether Tornillo will close by year's end. Health and Human Services officials say their focus is the health and safety and best interest of the child, and they treat that responsibility with care. But Rep. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., was unmoved by the policy shift. "Rather than prioritizing the well-being and safety of children, the Trump administration continues to use them as bait to round up and deport their family members," he said in a statement. The New York Civil Liberties Union and other firms sued over the fingerprint policy last month, arguing it had slowed the process for releasing migrant children. During the zero-tolerance policy over the summer, Health and Human Services was not accustomed to managing families with children who came to the border and had no system in place to track families together. The parents were criminally charged with illegal entry. Because children can't go into criminal custody with their parents, they were separated at U.S. Border Patrol facilities. The Border Patrol must transfer children to Health and Human Services custody within 72 hours, and if parents returned before then, they were reunited with their children. If not, they became unaccompanied minors who stay in shelters are given access to education, food and health care and exercise. The summertime separations resulted in worldwide outrage, and President Donald Trump stopped the separations. A federal judge required the government to reunite the families. A suspect of a shooting in Fremont that left one person dead and another hospitalized earlier this month has been arrested in Texas, according to police. Fremont resident Christian Kelling, 21, was taken into custody last Wednesday in Pflugerville, Texas, where he escaped to two days after he alledgely shot two people while they were driving in Fremont on Dec. 4 in the 34000 block of Torrington Court, Fremont police said Wednesday. The shooting occured during a marijuana sale, police investigation found. Police said some sort of dispute took place, prompting Kelling to fire several rounds at the victims' vehicle as it fled. After reviewing the Citys Community Cameras, police found a 2013 Honda Civic linked to Kelling traveling on "most direct route from the scene of the shooting to the nearest freeway," police said. Officers arrived and found a male victim with multiple gunshot wounds in the passenger seat of the vehicle, which had crashed into the home at the corner of Chaucer Drive and Torrington Court, according to police. One of the victims was pronounced dead at the scene and his name has not yet being released. Witnesses reported a second male running away from the scene and he was located nearby with gunshot wounds, but they were not life-threatening, police said. Based on police investigation, officers discovered that Kelling had fled to Texas to avoid capture. The Lone Star U.S. Marshal Fugitive Apprehension Unit searched the home in Texas where Kelling took refuge and discovered a loaded semi-automatic firearm, additional magazines, a sound suppressor, ammunition, a large quantity of cash and suspected marijuana. Kelling was charged in Alameda County on one count of homicide and one count of attempted homicide, according to Fremont police. Bay City News contributed to this report. Nearly two dozen consumer, privacy and public health groups are urging U.S. regulators to investigate whether children are being endangered by deceptive apps in Google's app store for smartphones running on its Android software. The 102-page complaint filed Wednesday with the Federal Trade Commission alleges Google's Play store is harming kids by allowing apps that break privacy laws, contain adult content or include manipulative advertising in a section of its Play store designed for children. The call for FTC action is being led by two groups, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and the Center for Digital Democracy, that have previously attacked Google's approach to kids. In April, they asked the FTC to crack down on Google's YouTube video site for alleged violations of children's online privacy. Twenty other groups, including Consumer Action, Public Citizen and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, joined in the latest complaint. Google issued a statement emphasizing its commitment to protecting children while they are online one of the reasons the company says it prohibits targeted advertising at children under 13. "We take these issues very seriously and continue to work hard to remove any content that is inappropriately aimed at children from our platform," Google said. More than 2 billion devices worldwide are powered by Google software, with a significant number of those being used by minors. The complaint focuses on alleged misconduct under U.S. laws and regulations. The attempt to pressure the FTC to open an investigation comes amid an intensifying backlash against Google, Facebook and other companies that make most of their money by using their free services to track people's interests and whereabouts and then mining that information to sell ads targeted at them. The angst has raised the specter of Congress drawing up tougher regulations to curb the tech industry's power and restrict its ability to compile digital dossiers about the people who have become increasingly dependent on its services. Rep. David Cicilline, a Democrat from Rhode Island who has been critical of Google, issued a statement supporting the groups seeking an FTC investigation as did Sen. Tom Udall, a Democrat from New Mexico. "It is past time for the Federal Trade Commission to crack down to protect children's privacy," Udall said in a statement. Although the FTC doesn't typically comment on whether it will investigate issues raised in complaints, it has punished both Google and Apple for what it deemed to be child exploitation in the past. In 2014, it reached a settlement requiring Google to refund $19 million for allowing apps distributed through its store to charge children for purchases made without parents' consent. That came after a similar agreement required Apple to refund $32.5 million for in-app purchases made on iPhones, iPads and other devices without parents' permission. A federal judge in San Francisco on Wednesday issued a preliminary injunction blocking President Donald Trump's partial ban on asylum seekers who enter at the United States' southern border. The restriction, issued by Trump in a proclamation on Nov. 9, would allow asylum applications only from immigrants who enter the United States at official entry points along the Mexican border. U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar ruled in a lawsuit filed by four refugee assistance organizations led by the Berkeley-based East Bay Sanctuary Covenant. The judge wrote, "Plaintiffs have established an overwhelming likelihood that the new rule barring asylum is invalid." Tigar had issued a temporary restraining order on Nov. 19, which halted the ban, and that order expired Wednesday. Unless the government successfully appeals or obtains a stay, the preliminary injunction will remain in effect for at least several months until the case is resolved through either a full trial or a summary judgment ruling. Tigar scheduled a hearing on March 19 to discuss the next steps in the case. Tigar said Trump's rule violates "the will of Congress" in a four-decades-old federal law that allows asylum applications from people who have entered the United States at any point, "whether or not at a designated port of entry." The judge wrote that the arguments by both sides are nearly identical to those made last month, but said, "If anything, the inconsistency between the new regulation and the immigration laws has been stated more clearly. "The harms to those seeking asylum are also even clearer, and correspondingly the public interest more plainly supports injunctive relief," the judge said. On another track in the case, the U.S. Department of Justice last week asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stay the temporary restraining order while the case proceeds. The department filed that request after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco declined to grant a stay. The high court had not acted as of this evening. Spokespersons for the Justice Department were not immediately available for comment. San Francisco Mayor London Breed has written a letter asking for outgoing Gov. Jerry Browns help to free her brother, who is not eligible for parole for another 15 years in a notorious homicide case. Back in 2000, he pushed a young mother out of a car and into Golden Gate Bridge traffic. Napoleon Brown, 46, is now serving a 44-year term in Solano State Prison for manslaughter, robbery and other crimes tied to the death of Lenties White. Both Whites family and legal experts question Breeds letter, which was obtained by NBC Bay Areas Investigative Unit. Breed wrote to the governor as part of an official application in October that while she did not think the four-decade sentence against her brother was fair, I make no excuses for him. His decisions, his actions led him to the place he finds himself now. She says her brother has been through addiction, parenting and other programs in state prison. Outside, she assured, he would have strong family support. I guarantee we can secure him access to a job, to a good home, to the counselling and services he and every other addict need for the rest of their lives. His freedom, she says, is whats best for both Napoleon and society overall. But Sandra McNeil, the mother of the 25-year-old victim, disagrees. I dont think it would be justice, she said. Shes the mayor, so shes got a little power, so she thinks she can get her brother out. Veteran prosecutor turned defense attorney, Chuck Smith, said the mayors letter raises all sorts of ethical questions. The timing of it is troublesome, Smith said. She could have written this letter six months ago, when she wasnt mayor -- and she didnt. The governor obviously is leaving office soon. In writing the governor, Breed left out that just last year, according to court records, her brother was caught with heroin in prison. As a result, he had another two years tacked onto the sentence he was already serving for manslaughter, robbery and other crimes. Brown had a prior robbery on his record when he was originally convicted of murder and robbery and sentenced to 44 years in prison back in 2005. While the murder verdict was overturned by a judge for technical reasons, Brown ultimately agreed to plead to involuntary manslaughter. He was eventually resentenced to 42 years. The extra time for the drug offense brings his term back to 44 years. He is eligible for parole in 2032. McNeil says another thing Breed left out in that letter was that Breed herself tried to provide her brother with an alibi, testifying in the trial that Napoleon Brown was sleeping on their couch at midnight. That was when prosecutors said Brown robbed a Marina District restaurant and later pushed White from the getaway vehicle. The jury heard evidence that Whites dying words implicated Napoleon Brown as her killer. The governors office declined to comment, citing a policy of not discussing such pending requests. Breed issued a statement, stressing that she was joining in her familys request to reduce her brothers term, given that he has already served nearly 20 years. I do believe that people need to face consequences when they have broken the law, but I also believe that we should allow for the rehabilitation and re-entry of people into society after they have served an amount of time that reflects the crimes committed, she said in a statement issued Tuesday. Too many people, particularly young black men like my brother was when he was convicted, are not given an opportunity to become contributing members of society after they have served time in prison. I believe my brother deserves that opportunity. I am not asking for my brother to be pardoned or for his conviction to be wiped away, but simply for the Governor to consider initiating the commutation of his sentence. This would only be the first step in a long process that involves a thorough investigation by the Parole Board and a decision by the California Supreme Court. My family and our community is ready and willing to help support my brother, and we will take this responsibility seriously if his sentence is commuted. I believe he will better serve society, the community, his family, and his children outside of prison. Ultimately this determination is up to the Governor and the courts, but I join my family in making this request. But attorney Smith said he is troubled by the fact that the letter leaves out key information, like the heroin possession and Breeds role as an alibi witness. If there are negative facts, he said, it is the obligation of the office holder to bring forth those negative facts and address them. Rather than just try to sweep them under the rug. It smacks of ethics which are not exactly up to par in my opinion. McNeil said the clemency effort, and the mayors letter, is reopening old wounds. I thought it was done and over, she said, Justice was served and that was the end of it -- I never knew there was going to be another beginning of it. San Jose State Universitys Student Homeless Alliance held a candle light vigil Tuesday to push for a solution after a California State University report showed 13 percent of SJSU students are homeless. The alliance is asking the school for extra beds in the doors and extra parking spots on campus. One professor at the vigil said he sympathizes with the students and feels their demands are reasonable. "Heartbreaking, these are my students," sociology professor Scott Myers-Lipton said. "I've had three students every few years come up to be and say 'professor I'm homeless, I'm sleeping in my car or 'Im sleeping at Martin Luther King Library.'" Myers-Lipton also mentioned that many students are staying at nearby shelters, but they can only stay for so long before getting kicked out. This is the last week of the semester and the group is only expecting the number of homeless students to rise. The District of Columbia sued Facebook on Wednesday for allowing data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica to improperly access data from as many as 87 million users. D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine's suit alleges that Facebook misled users about the security of their data and failed to properly monitor third-party apps. In 2013, a researcher launched a Facebook app, promoted as a personality quiz, which claimed to generate a personality profile. The app also collected the personal information of users' Facebook friends and the information was eventually sold to Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm. After the revelations about Cambridge Analytica, congressional hearings were held and Facebook changed what sorts of data it lets outside developers access. "We're seeking to hold Facebook accountable for jeopardizing and exposing the personal information of tens of millions of its users," Rancine said on a conference call with reporters. "We hope this lawsuit will ensure Facebook takes better care with its data." The lawsuit alleges that Facebook told users that it would protect their personal information, but allowed the app developer to collect and sell the data of users who hadn't downloaded or used the app. It also alleges that Facebook was aware in 2014 that the developer wanted to download the information about users' friends but "failed to monitor or audit the app." The information of more than 340,000 District of Columbia residents was exposed but only 860 downloaded the quiz, Racine said. Facebook has already produced "reams of documents" in response to the attorney general's investigation, officials said. After the suit was filed Wednesday, Facebook said in a statement: "We're reviewing the complaint and look forward to continuing our discussions with attorneys general in DC and elsewhere." It was revealed this week that Facebook's privacy controls had broken down yet again. In that case, a software flaw affected nearly 7 million users, leading to their photos being exposed to a much wider audience than they had intended. Officials at the attorney general's office said they would consider adding additional allegations as more information is uncovered. Stephanie Izard is taking her Chicago reign to new heights literally. The Iron Chef known for her goat-themed restaurants around the city, most notably Girl & the Goat, will soon open a rooftop restaurant dishing out Peruvian food in the Fulton market neighborhood, Eater Chicago reports. Cabra, which also means goat in Spanish, is set to open this spring on the roof of the Hoxton Hotel on Green Street. Eater reports Izard plans to travel to Peru in January for research and development, but the cuisine will likely feature Japanese, Chinese, Spanish and Italian flavors. Call to Win Cirque du Soleil Luzia Giveaway Official Rules December 19, 2018December 19, 2018 PRELIMINARY INFORMATION: NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. A PURCHASE WILL NOT IMPROVE YOUR CHANCES OF WINNING. Void outside the WVIT Terrestrial Geographic Viewing Area (described below) and where prohibited. The Call to Win Giveaway (Sweepstakes) will begin on December 19, 2018 at 11:30 A.M. ET and end on December 19, 2018 at 12:00 P.M. ET (Sweepstakes Period). All times in the Sweepstakes refer to Eastern Time (ET). Odds of winning depend upon the number of eligible Entries (defined below) received. Sweepstakes is subject to all applicable federal, state, and local laws. ELIGIBILITY: Open only to permanent, legal United States (U.S.) residents who are physically located and residing in the WVIT Terrestrial Geographic Viewing Area in the counties of Hartford, New Haven, New London, Windham, Tolland, Middlesex, Litchfield, and Fairfield in the state of Connecticut (WVIT Terrestrial Geographic Viewing Area), and who are eighteen (18) years of age or older as of the start of the Sweepstakes Period. Officers, directors, and employees of Sweepstakes Entities (defined below), members of these persons immediate families (spouses and/or parents, children, and siblings, and their spouses, regardless of where they reside), and/or persons living in the same households as these persons (whether or not related thereto) are not eligible to enter or win the Sweepstakes. Sweepstakes Entities, as referenced herein, shall include WVIT, 1422 New Britain Avenue, West Hartford, CT 06110, and NBCUniversal Media, LLC, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY 10112 (collectively, Sponsors), and their respective parent, subsidiary, and affiliate companies, their administrative, advertising, and promotion agencies, and any other entity involved in the development, administration, promotion, or implementation of the Sweepstakes. TO ENTER: To enter, watch NBC Connecticuts local newscasts during the Sweepstakes Period and listen for the cue to call (Cue). The Cue will be announced any time between 11:30 A.M. ET and 12:00 P.M. ET during the 11:30 A.M. ET local newscast on NBC Connecticut (Entry). To win, you must be the tenth (10th) caller, as determined by Sponsors in their sole discretion (Winner). In the event that the designated numbered caller becomes disconnected or is found to be ineligible, the next eligible caller who successfully makes it through on the line and completes his or her Entry, as determined by Sponsors in their sole discretion, will be the potential Winner. All Entries become the property of Sponsors and will not be acknowledged. There will be one (1) Winner during the Sweepstakes Period. Entries must be received before December 19, 2018 at 12:00 P.M. ET to be eligible for the Sweepstakes. Sponsors computer shall be the official timekeeper for all matters related to this Sweepstakes. You may enter one (1) during the Sweepstakes Period. Multiple Entries received from any person or email address beyond this limit will void all such additional entries. Entries generated by a script, macro, or other automated means will be disqualified. Entries that are incomplete, garbled, corrupted, or unintelligible for any reason, including, but not limited to, computer or network malfunction or congestion, are void and will not be accepted. In case of a dispute over the identity of an entrant who made a potentially winning Entry, Sponsors reserve the right to deem that the entry was made by the registered subscriber of the email address submitted at the time of entry. Entry constitutes permission (except where prohibited by law) to use entrants name, city, state, likeness, image, and/or voice for purposes of advertising, promotion, and publicity in any and all media now or hereafter known, throughout the world in perpetuity, without additional compensation, notification, permission, or approval. PRIZE: There will be one prize (1) (Prize) awarded. Prize will consist of two (2) tickets for Winner and one (1) guest (Guest) to see Cirque du Soleil Luzia, scheduled to take place between June 19, 2019 to July 7, 2019 at Under The Big Top at Market Street, located at 302-408 Market Street, Hartford, CT 06103 (Event). If Guest is a minor, Winner must be such minors parent or legal guardian. Total Estimated Retail Value (ERV) of all Prizes is two hundred dollars ($200). Actual retail value (ARV) of Prizes may vary. Any difference between ARV and stated ERV will not be awarded. Prizes are subject to certain terms and conditions as specified thereupon by the issuer. If Prize awarded exceeds six hundred dollars ($600), Sponsors will furnish an Internal Revenue Service Form 1099 to Winners of such Prizes for the ARV of their Prize for the tax year in which Prize was awarded. All details of the Prize will be determined by Sponsors in their sole discretion. Sponsors reserve the right to substitute a similar Prize (or Prize element) of comparable or greater value. All taxes and other expenses, costs, or fees associated with the acceptance and/or use of the Prize are the sole responsibility of Winner. Prize cannot be transferred by Winner or redeemed for cash and are valid only for the items detailed above, with no substitution of Prize by Winner. If the Prize is unclaimed within a reasonable time after notification from Sponsors, as determined by Sponsors in their sole discretion, it will be forfeited, and time permitting, an alternate Winner may be selected from the remaining eligible Entries at Sponsors sole discretion. Winner agrees to comply with all applicable regulations in connection with the Prize. Winner must be able to attend Event between June 19, 2019 to July 7, 2019 on a date to be determined by Sponsors in their sole discretion or Prize will be forfeited. Sponsors shall have no responsibility or liability for cancellations, delays, or any other change by any company or person providing any element of Prize, and are not responsible or liable for any expenses incurred as a consequence thereof. Date and/or time of Event is subject to change. Event are subject to cancellation. Location of seats at Event, if any, will be determined by any company or person providing any element of Prize, and are not responsible or liable for any expenses incurred as a consequence thereof. If Winner chooses to redeem Prize (if applicable) with fewer than no Guests, the remaining elements of Prize shall constitute full satisfaction of Sponsors Prize obligation to that Winner and no additional compensation will be awarded. All taxes and other expenses, costs, or fees associated with the acceptance and/or use of Prizes are the sole responsibility of Winners. Winners and Guests, if any, must comply with all applicable rules and regulations in connection with Prizes, and failure to do so may result in forfeiture of Prizes. If a Prize element is not available for any reason, as determined by Sponsors in their sole discretion, the remaining elements of Prize shall be awarded and shall constitute full satisfaction of Sponsors Prize obligation to Winners and no additional compensation will be awarded. All details of Prizes will be determined by Sponsors in their sole discretion. Guests, if any, may be required to execute and return releases of liability and, except where prohibited, publicity releases (collectively, Guest Documents), which must be returned with the Sweepstakes Documents, or Guest portion of Prizes will be forfeited. If any Guest is a minor, Winner must be such minors parent or legal guardian and must execute and return the Guest Documents on such minors behalf. CONDITIONS: By entering the Sweepstakes, each entrant agrees for entrant and for entrants heirs, executors, and administrators (a) to release and hold harmless Sweepstakes Entities, Facebook, and their respective officers, directors, and employees (collectively, Released Parties) from any liability, illness, injury, death, loss, litigation, or damage that may occur, directly or indirectly, whether caused by negligence or not, from such entrants participation in the Sweepstakes and/or his/her acceptance, possession, use, or misuse of Prize or any portion thereof (including any travel related thereto); (b) to indemnify Released Parties from any and all liability resulting or arising from the Sweepstakes and to hereby acknowledge that Released Parties have neither made nor are in any manner responsible or liable for any warranty, representation, or guarantee, express or implied, in fact or in law, relative to Prize, including express warranties provided exclusively by Prize supplier that are sent along with Prize; (c) if selected as a Winner, to the posting of such entrants name on www.NBCConnecticut.com and/or www.Facebook.com/NBCConnecticut and the use by Released Parties of such name, voice, image, and/or likeness for publicity, promotional, and advertising purposes in any and all media now or hereafter known, throughout the world in perpetuity, without additional compensation, notification, permission, or approval, and, upon request, to the giving of consent, in writing, to such use; and (d) to be bound by these Official Rules and to waive any right to claim any ambiguity or error therein or in the Sweepstakes itself, and to be bound by all decisions of the Sponsors, which are binding and final. Failure to comply with these conditions may result in disqualification from the Sweepstakes at Sponsors sole discretion. ADDITIONAL TERMS: Sponsors reserve the right to permanently disqualify from any promotion any person they believe has intentionally violated these Official Rules. Any attempt to deliberately damage the Sweepstakes or the operation thereof is unlawful and subject to legal action by Sponsors, who may seek damages to the fullest extent permitted by law. The failure of Sponsors to comply with any provision of these Official Rules due to an act of God, hurricane, war, fire, riot, earthquake, terrorism, act of public enemies, actions of governmental authorities outside of the control of Sponsors (excepting compliance with applicable codes and regulations), or other force majeure event will not be considered a breach of these Official Rules. Released Parties assume no responsibility for any injury or damage to entrants or to any other persons computer relating to or resulting from entering or downloading materials or software in connection with the Sweepstakes. Released Parties are not responsible for telecommunications, network, electronic, technical, or computer failures of any kind; for inaccurate transcription of entry information; for errors in any promotional or marketing materials or in these Official Rules; for any human or electronic error; or for entries that are stolen, misdirected, garbled, delayed, lost, late, damaged, or returned. Sponsors reserve the right to cancel, modify, or suspend the Sweepstakes or any element thereof (including, without limitation, these Official Rules) without notice in any manner and for any reason (including, without limitation, in the event of any unanticipated occurrence that is not fully addressed in these Official Rules). In the event of cancellation, modification, or suspension, Sponsors reserve the right to select Winners in a random drawing from among all eligible, non-suspect entries received prior to the time of the event warranting such cancellation, modification, or suspension. Notice of such cancellation, modification, or suspension will be posted at www.NBCConnecticut.com. Sponsors may prohibit any entrant or potential entrant from participating in the Sweepstakes, if such entrant or potential entrant shows a disregard for these Official Rules; acts with an intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass any other entrant, Sponsors, or Sponsors agents or representatives; or behaves in any other disruptive manner (as determined by Sponsors in their sole discretion). DISPUTES: THE SWEEPSTAKES IS GOVERNED BY, AND WILL BE CONSTRUED IN ACCORDANCE WITH, THE LAWS OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK, AND THE FORUM AND VENUE FOR ANY DISPUTE SHALL BE IN NEW YORK, NEW YORK. IF THE CONTROVERSY OR CLAIM IS NOT OTHERWISE RESOLVED THROUGH DIRECT DISCUSSIONS OR MEDIATION, IT SHALL THEN BE RESOLVED BY FINAL AND BINDING ARBITRATION ADMINISTERED BY JUDICIAL ARBITRATION AND MEDIATION SERVICES, INC., IN ACCORDANCE WITH ITS STREAMLINED ARBITRATION RULES AND PROCEDURES OR SUBSEQUENT VERSIONS THEREOF (JAMS RULES). THE JAMS RULES FOR SELECTION OF AN ARBITRATOR SHALL BE FOLLOWED, EXCEPT THAT THE ARBITRATOR SHALL BE EXPERIENCED AND LICENSED TO PRACTICE LAW IN NEW YORK. ALL PROCEEDINGS BROUGHT PURSUANT TO THIS PARAGRAPH WILL BE CONDUCTED IN THE COUNTY OF NEW YORK. THE REMEDY FOR ANY CLAIM SHALL BE LIMITED TO ACTUAL DAMAGES, AND IN NO EVENT SHALL ANY PARTY BE ENTITLED TO RECOVER PUNITIVE, EXEMPLARY, CONSEQUENTIAL, OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, INCLUDING ATTORNEYS FEES OR OTHER SUCH RELATED COSTS OF BRINGING A CLAIM, OR TO RESCIND THIS AGREEMENT OR SEEK INJUNCTIVE OR ANY OTHER EQUITABLE RELIEF. WINNER ANNOUNCEMENT: For the names of Winners, available after December 30, 2018, visit www.NBCConnecticut.com, or send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to be received by February 6, 2018 to: Call to Win Giveaway, 1422 New Britain Avenue, West Hartford, CT 06110 attn: Dhurata Lluhani There will be an increased police presence at Southington High School on Wednesday after a rumor of a threat against the school. Superintendent Timothy Connellan sent an email to parents Wednesday morning about the rumor. He said some parents reached out to him about the possible threat and he turned the information over to police. After investigating, police determined the rumor was started after student discussions at school about an incident last week involving a racist video that was posted online, according to Connellan. Police continue to investigate that incident, in which a Southington High School student was recorded making racist statements. Connellan urged parents to assure their children that there is no credible threat to Southington High School and there is no evidence that a threat ever existed. Out of an abundance of caution, police will have an extra officer patrolling the school to provide an extra measure of security, police said. New Britain Police have arrested a second man for his involvement in a robbery scheme that ended in a stabbing in October. On Wednesday, police served an arrest warrant on 19-year-old William Benjamin Torrales, of New Britain, charging him with robbery, conspiracy to commit robbery, assault, and conspiracy to commit assault for his participation in the robbery scheme. On October 16, 2018, police investigated a stabbing complaint that was reported by the Hospital of Central Connecticut. Officials said the 22-year-old male victim was transported to the hospital by a friend with several stab wounds. Detectives said they later learned that the victim was lured to Washington Street to meet up with two men, later identified as Torrales and 18-year-old Darien Marrero, of New Britain. According to investigators, Torales and Marrero planned to rob the victim during an illegal drug transaction. During the robbery, the victim was stabbed multiple times and suffered non life-threatening injuries. About a week after the robbery, police said Marrero was arrested for his involvement in the incident. Torrales is being held at New Britain Police Department on $150,000 bond. He is expected to be arraigned in court on Thursday. Republicans in the Connecticut, fresh off a beating at the polls in November that saw them lose five seats, want to work on the issue of health care as a way to start 2019 on the right foot. I think Connecticut has gone a long way in a bipartisan manner to make sure that theyre going to have the best coverage at the best price and I think this new session were going to be able to bring that to a different degree, said Sen. Len Fasano, (RNorth Haven), who will assume the role as Minority Leader in 2019. He says the state has the chance to, Offer more products for less price to more people. Fasano wrote to top Democrats and Governor-Elect Ned Lamont asking them to form a committee tasked with coming up with actionable solutions to lower the costs of premiums and provide better health care for residents. He proposes having different branches and caucuses make appointments in addition to having people like Connecticuts Health Care Advocate and CEO of Access Health Connecticut sit on the panel. Colleen Brunetti in West Hartford advocates for better health care and more affordable plans on a regular basis. She also lives with a life-threatening pre-existing condition, pulmonary hypertension, which could lead to heart failure. She says she likes the idea of a panel specifically tasked with addressing the cost of health insurance. Absolutely, if we can come to the table in a bipartisan way that can meet everyones needs, thats fantastic. The problem is when patients get stuck in the middle of everyones firing squads. Brunetti has pharmaceutical bills that cost $7,000 per month, and says she knows of many families around the state who could the kind of relief Fasano is looking to accomplish. She said, I worry that the cost of health care will balloon to the point where even though we are well-employed and doing the best we can to be responsible that we simply can no longer afford it. I worry that the fights between high drug prices and insurance companies get too big and the patients become the casualty. The announcement from Fasano comes less than a week after a federal judge in Texas ruled the individual mandate under the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional. Senate Democrats would not comment on the idea, and a message left for the Lamont transition was not returned. Only one member of the Senate Republican Caucus voted to allow Access Health Connecticut, the states health care marketplace, to be created at the start of the decade. Fast forward to this year when almost the entire caucus voted to protect essential health coverage for things like prenatal and maternal care, as well as emergency room visits. Fasano says he thinks there an opportunity to focus on Connecticut residents with the new panel. We have to say, look, forget Washington, weve got to make our own policy in the state of Connecticut and drive premiums down. The Federal Commission on School Safety released a 177 page report Tuesday with more than 90 practices and policies for school districts to adopt to keep kids safe. It's meant to serve as a framework for keeping schools safe, though it acknowledged there's no one-size-fits-all solution. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos said the committee identified options policymakers should review. It's in some ways similar to a framework Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) released this spring, which four North Texas superintendents discussed at a roundtable several months later. Today, two of them released statements in response to this latest federal plan. "Lewisville ISD (and many other Texas school districts) already have a comprehensive safety plan as the new federal School Safety Report recommends. We are grateful that our federal government has contributed additional information and research to pair with what the State of Texas and local school districts have already done. All experts agree that a major component of school safety must focus on the mental health of students, which is also a focus of Lewisville ISD. While we have a plan in place, we are always looking to investigate new ways to advance security measures. We will certainly study this recently released report and determine what recommendations can be implemented and when. I am hopeful that both the State of Texas and the U.S. Government provide the funding necessary to implement the recommendations that reflect each local communitys needs and values," Lewisville Superintendent Kevin Rogers said. Dallas ISD Superintendent Michael Hinojosa also addressed the new plan saying, "There is not an easy solution to making schools around the nation safer, but there are steps that can be taken. In order to provide safer school communities, strategies must be well thought out, must fit the needs of diverse populations and should include input from stakeholders." He added that Dallas ISD continues to increase the presence of law enforcement on campus, identify ways to provide mental health first aid training, identify potential threats and encourage the community to anonymously report threats. A former U.S. prosecutor hired by the University of Texas says a state senator accused of sending sexually explicit text messages to a graduate student blamed them on someone else and didn't fully cooperate with investigators. The report released Tuesday concluded that Republican state Sen. Charles Schwertner didn't violate university policies based on "available evidence." The report was signed by former U.S. attorney Johnny Sutton. The university hired him after a student this fall accused Schwertner of sending inappropriate text messages that included a nude photo with the face cropped out. The report says Schwertner's lawyers claimed another person sent the messages but wouldn't identify who. Investigators say the messages were sent using an app called Hushed. Attorneys for Schwertner didn't immediately return messages Tuesday. Schwertner was re-elected in November. Starting next year recreational marijuana will be available everywhere in California via licensed delivery operations, even in places that have banned pot businesses. The Bureau for Cannabis Control has decided voters approved Proposition 64, legalizing recreational marijuana statewide, and if cities do not want businesses to operate in their jurisdictions, citizens are still entitled to access. Del Mar was one of the cities in San Diego County that has banned recreational marijuana businesses within city limits. Some people in Del Mar were happy to hear marijuana deliveries will not be banned in their city while others said they worry marijuana deliveries will bring more crime such as robberies and driving under the influence. The California Police Chiefs Association shares that concern and believes marijuana deliveries will increase costs for local law enforcement. Torrey Holistics, a legal and licensed marijuana dispensary located in Sorrento Valley, is the northern-most dispensary but has been unable to deliver to other communities in the North County. Kyle Dukes, Delivery Operations Manager at Torrey Holistics said up until now, the regulations were vague as to where they could deliver. "Most folks took the conservative interpretation that we should not go into those communities until the state explicitly says 'You may go there' which is what they've done now," said Dukes. He said if and when the new regulations take effect on Jan. 16, the dispensary will expand their service to approximately 20 additional deliveries per day. All customers will receive a compliant product from a legal service, said Ruthie Edelson, Marketing Director and Educator at Torrey Holistics. Its really a safety issue more than anything for the customer and for the products they are receiving. Edelson added the dispensary's drivers will be background checked. All delivery vehicles are required by the state to be tracked by a GPS locator, the inventory should be a reasonable amount and locked inside a safe within the vehicle. The delivery issue was included in regulations drafted by the Bureau of Cannabis Control, which issues most retail permits. Two people were arrested and nearly 130 pounds of meth was seized after El Centro Sector Border Patrol agents spotted an ultralight aircraft fly over the border Monday. Agents noticed the ultralight flying without any lights just after midnight and were able to track its route just north of Calexico. Ultralights are typically a one- or two-seated aircraft that cannot weigh more than 254 pounds and cannot travel more than 63 miles per hour, according to the Experimental Aircraft Association. In the U.S., ultralight pilots do not need a license. The aircraft reportedly dropped off a package before flying back toward Mexico, according to El Centro Sector Border. Ultralight aircraft not only pose a threat to legitimate air traffic in the vicinity, but also to national security, said Chief Patrol Agent Gloria Chavez. These aircraft are able to carry small payloads of dangerous cargo. When agents arrived at the scene, they found two bags containing 60 duct-taped bundles of meth lying under heavy brush, totaling 129.33 pounds, El Centro Sector Border Patrol said. The agency estimated the packages value at $1,422,553. Agents also found a metal cage and a bicycle at the scene. El Centro Sector Border Patrol interviewed two people in the area and later arrested them on suspicion of trying to receive the dropped narcotics. The Drug Enforcement Administration will continue to investigate. Sheriff Alex Villanueva Tuesday reiterated a promise to remove federal immigration agents from county jails, drawing both boos and applause from a crowd at a Truth Act Community Forum convened by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. "We are going to physically remove ICE from the county jails," Villanueva said, adding that he also planned to cut down the list of roughly 150 misdemeanor offenses that trigger department cooperation with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. "We're going to pare that list down substantially" and reduce it to reflect only the most serious charges, the newly-elected sheriff told the board, saying he planned on "honoring the spirit and the letter of SB 54," sometimes called the "sanctuary state" law. The Sheriff's Department transferred 1,223 individuals to the custody of ICE agents in 2017, according to statistics released under the Truth Act. That amounts to less than half the number of inmates who were released with an outstanding request for detention by federal immigration authorities, according to LASD data. Roughly a quarter of the people transferred in 2017 had been convicted of health and safety violations, which include drug crimes. Crimes against persons and property crimes made up about 20 percent each. Four percent of those released to ICE agents had been convicted of vehicle code violations. Advocates for immigrant communities say the vast majority of individuals deported by ICE after release from county jail served their time for low-level, non-violent crimes. "Are we saying that they should not have a second chance?" asked Andres Kwon of the American Civil Liberties Union. "Crimes should be dealt with by the criminal justice system, not the immigration system." Phal Sok said he was an example of someone who was given a second chance, in his case by a pardon from Gov. Jerry Brown. Sok served 15 years in prison for an armed robbery he committed when he was 17 and was ordered deported to Cambodia, though he had lived in the U.S. as a lawful permanent resident for 37 years. "Not everyone that comes out is going to go on to reoffend," Sok told the board. Sheriff's Cmdr. Elier Morejon said Villanueva hoped to make promised changes over the next couple of weeks, before the year is out. Immigration advocates characterized Villanueva's election as a message from voters to end cooperation with ICE. "The people have spoken and ousted the sheriff who sided with Trump, ICE and deportations and against the values that make this country great," said George Chacon of the UCLA Labor Center. More than a dozen victims' rights advocates, many wearing T-shirts memorializing victims of crime, urged the sheriff and the board to strictly enforce federal immigration laws. "Criminal aliens should be turned over to ICE ... for the safety of the public," said Robin Hvidston of the Remembrance Project. Hvidston wore a shirt bearing the name of De Andre Mitchell, who was killed along with four other victims in a fire deliberately set in a vacant commercial building near MacArthur Park in 2016. Johnny Josue Sanchez, a Honduran man in the U.S. illegally, was convicted of the crime in November. He is expected to be sentenced in January to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Villanueva's commitment to keep ICE agents out of county jails is not a commitment to end all transfers, Morejon said. "Just because (the agents are) out of the jail doesn't mean we're going to stop turning over individuals," the commander told the board, saying transfers required by federal law would continue. Villanueva and other department personnel are still working out how to accommodate those transfers while banning ICE agents from the jails. Many said they want the sheriff to go further and agree not to offer any assistance to federal immigration agents. "There must be no involvement with ICE," said Emi MacLean of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. "In a period of learning, the sheriff mistakenly suggested that walking people to ICE would be better than the status quo. It would not and it would be inconsistent with the strong statements he made that he would kick ICE out of the jails in order to defend immigrants." Morejon stressed that the department does not ask anyone coming into jail for their immigration status and "never performs federal immigration enforcement as part of its patrol operations." Other moves by the sheriff could include changing public access to inmate release dates, which is required under law in order to share that data with ICE. Supervisor Kathryn Barger expressed concern that victims' families rely on that data, asking sheriff's personnel to seek input from various stakeholders before finalizing any decisions. Separately, the Probation Department reported that it received ICE requests for information on 25 individuals in 2017 and provided contact information for eight men on probation for crimes ranging from petty theft to assault with a deadly weapon. A young woman passenger was injured, and authorities temporarily closed a major freeway connector Tuesday, after gunfire struck the window of an inter-city bus on the 10 Freeway west of downtown Los Angeles. The shooting was reported at 12:35 p.m. shortly after a green FlixBus with 34 aboard had departed downtown Los Angeles for Oakland. The bus was passing near Fairfax Avenue when a shot went through a passenger window on the driver's side, according to Officer Vance Perreira of the California Highway Patrol. The bus continued a short distance before pulling onto the shoulder on the transition road onto the 405 Freeway northbound from the 10 Freeway. The woman was transported to be treated for cuts on her face, believed to have been caused by particles of the shattered glass, Perreira said. Her shoulder may been have been grazed by the bullet. The bullet was found inside the coach. Investigators determined the shot was fired from outside the bus, but it was not immediately clear if it came from another vehicle or from a shooter at a fixed position along the freeway. No other shots were reported. CHP temporarily closed westbound lanes between Fairfax Avenue and National Boulevard to allow officers to examine the freeway for evidence of a shell casing, but none was found. A second FlixBus arrived at the transition road to pick up the passengers, and after they were interviewed by investigators, they were able to resume their journey to Oakland. After the on-scene investigation was completed, the bus that had been struck was towed, and shortly before 4 p.m., the transition road reopened. Flixbus, based in Germany, began service in the United States earlier this year. "The safety of our passengers and drivers is of highest priority to Flixbus. All efforts are now going towards assessing the situation," a portion of the statement issued by the company read. No arrests were reported as CHP investigators attempted to identify the shooter and determine the circumstances. President Donald Trump is pulling all 2,000 U.S. troops out of Syria, officials announced Wednesday as the president suddenly declared victory over the Islamic State, contradicting his own experts' assessments and sparking surprise and outrage from his party's lawmakers who called his action rash and dangerous. The U.S. began airstrikes in Syria in 2014, and ground troops moved in the following year to battle the Islamic State, or ISIS, and train Syrian rebels in a country torn apart by civil war. Trump abruptly declared their mission accomplished in a tweet. "We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency," he said as Vice President Mike Pence met with top leaders at the Pentagon. U.S. officials said many details of the troop withdrawal had not yet been finalized, but they expect American forces to be out by mid-January. Later Wednesday, Trump posted a video on Twitter in which he said it is "heartbreaking" to have to write letters and make calls to the loved ones of those killed in battle. "Now it's time for our troops to come back home," he said. A senior administration official, speaking to reporters on condition of anonymity, said Trump made the decision based on his belief that U.S. troops have no role in Syria beyond combatting Islamic State, whose fighters are now believed to hold about 1 percent of the territory they did at the peak of their power. The president informed Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of his decision in a telephone call, the official said. Turkey has recently warned that it would launch combat operations across its southern border into northeastern Syria against Kurdish forces who have been allied with the U.S. in the fight against the Islamic State. Trump's declaration of victory was far from unanimous, and officials said U.S. defense and military leaders were trying to dissuade him from ordering the withdrawal right up until the last minute. His decision immediately triggered demands from Congress including leading Republicans for more information and a formal briefing on the matter. Sen. Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, just returned from Afghanistan, said he was meeting with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis late in the day. Graham, typically a Trump backer, said he was "blindsided" by the report and called the decision "a disaster in the making." He said, "The biggest winners in this are ISIS and Iran." The decision will fulfill Trump's long-stated goal of bringing troops home from Syria, but military leaders have pushed back for months, arguing that the IS group remains a threat and could regroup in Syria's long-running civil war. U.S. policy has been to keep troops in place until the extremists are eradicated. The senior administration official said American forces would still work with allies to fight the Islamic State or other extremists in the country but gave no details on what that might entail. Another official said it still is not clear to defense leaders whether U.S. airstrikes against IS insurgents will continue in Syria after the American troops leave. U.S. military officials worry that American-backed Kurdish troops will be targeted by Turkey and the Syrian government, leaving no ally on the ground to help direct the strikes. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who remains concerned about Iranian efforts in the area, reacted in noncommittal fashion after talking with Trump by telephone. "This is, of course, an American decision," he said. No matter what, he said, "we will safeguard the security of Israel and protect ourselves from this arena." Leading Republican senators reacted with displeasure to the news. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida said the withdrawal would be a "grave error" and that Kurdish fighters will stop fighting the Islamic State when they must confront Turkish troops crossing the border into Syria. "This is a bad idea because it goes against the fight against ISIS and potentially helps ISIS," he said, warning it could trigger a broader conflict in the region. Just last week, the U.S. special envoy to the anti-ISIS coalition, Brett McGurk, said U.S. troops would remain in Syria even after the Islamic State was driven from its strongholds. "I think it's fair to say Americans will remain on the ground after the physical defeat of the caliphate, until we have the pieces in place to ensure that that defeat is enduring," McGurk told reporters on Dec. 11. "Nobody is declaring a mission accomplished. Defeating a physical caliphate is one phase of a much longer-term campaign." And two weeks ago Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the U.S. still has a long way to go in training local Syrian forces to prevent a resurgence of IS and stabilize the country. He said it will take 35,000 to 40,000 local troops in northeastern Syria to maintain security over the long term, but only about 20 percent of that number have been trained. Trump's national security adviser, John Bolton, said in September that the U.S. would keep a military presence in Syria as long as Iran was active there. "We're not going to leave as long as Iranian troops are outside Iranian borders and that includes Iranian proxies and militias," he said. James Stavridis, a former Navy admiral who served as top NATO commander, tweeted Wednesday that "Pulling troops out of Syria in an ongoing fight is a big mistake. Like walking away from a forest fire that is still smoldering underfoot. Big winner is Iran, then Russia, then Assad. Wrong move." The withdrawal decision, however, is likely to be viewed positively by Turkey, and comes following several conversations between Trump and Erdogan over the past several weeks. The two spoke at the G-20 summit in Argentina and in a phone call last Friday. Erdogan said Monday he had gotten "positive answers" from Trump on the situation in northeast Syria where he has been threatening a new operation against the American-backed Syrian Kurdish fighters. Just hours before the withdrawal decision became public, the State Department announced late Tuesday that it had approved the sale of a $3.5 billion Patriot missile defense system to Turkey. The Turks had complained that the U.S. was slow walking requests for air defenses, and they had signed a deal with Russia to buy a sophisticated system in a deal that Washington and Ankara's other NATO partners strongly opposed. Completion of that deal with Russia for the S-400 system would have opened up Turkey to possible U.S. sanctions and driven a major wedge between the allies. It was not immediately clear if there was a connection between the Patriot sale and the decision on U.S. troops. Although the withdrawal decision doesn't signal an end to the American-led coalition's fight against the Islamic State, it will likely erode U.S. leadership of that 31-nation effort. The administration had been preparing to host a meeting of coalition foreign ministers early next year. "The bottom line is that the American withdrawal from eastern Syria will create a power vacuum that will lead to a new phase of international conflict in Syria," said Jennifer Cafarella, a Syria expert at the Institute for the Study of War. She predicted that the Russians, the Iranians, Syrian President Bashar Assad and the Turks will compete for the terrain and resources previously under U.S. control "at the expense of" the Syrian Kurds who have partnered with U.S. forces against IS. A Canadian court granted bail Tuesday to a top Chinese executive arrested at the United States' request in a case that has set off a diplomatic furor among the three countries and complicated high-stakes U.S.-China trade talks. Hours before the bail hearing in Vancouver, China detained a former Canadian diplomat in Beijing in apparent retaliation for the Dec. 1 arrest of Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei and daughter of the company's founder. After three days of hearings, a British Columbia justice granted bail of $10 million Canadian (US$7.5 million) to Meng, but required her to wear an ankle bracelet, surrender her passports, stay in Vancouver and its suburbs and confine herself to one of her two Vancouver homes from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. The decision was met with applause in the packed courtroom, where members of Vancouver's Chinese community had turned out to show support for Meng. She left the courthouse late Tuesday surrounded by a security detail and was driven away in a black SUV without responding to questions from reporters. Amid rising tension between China and Canada, Canadian Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale confirmed earlier that a former Canadian diplomat had been detained in Beijing. The detention came after China warned Canada of consequences for Meng's arrest. "We're deeply concerned," Goodale said. "A Canadian is obviously in difficulty in China. ... We are sparing no effort to do everything we possibly can to look after his safety." Michael Kovrig, who previously worked as a diplomat in China and elsewhere, was taken into custody by the Beijing Bureau of Chinese State Security on Monday night during one of his regular visits to Beijing, said the International Crisis Group, for which Kovrig works as North East Asia adviser. Rob Malley, head of the Brussels-based non-governmental group, said Canadian consular officers had not been given access to Kovrig. He thinks Kovrig was in Beijing on personal matters and was definitely not there for any reason that would undermine Chinese national security. Canada had been bracing for retaliation for Meng' arrest. The Canadian province of British Columbia canceled a trade mission to China amid fears China could detain Canadians to put pressure on Ottawa over Meng's detention. "In China there is no coincidence," Guy Saint-Jacques, a former Canadian ambassador to China, said of Kovrig's detention. "Unfortunately Canada is caught in the middle of this dispute between the U.S and China. Because China cannot kick the U.S. they turn to the next target." Earlier in the day, China vowed to "spare no effort" to protect against "any bullying that infringes the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese citizens." Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi didn't mention Meng by name. But ministry spokesman Lu Kang said Wang was referring to cases of all Chinese abroad, including Meng's. Washington accuses Huawei of using a Hong Kong shell company to sell equipment to Iran in violation of U.S. sanctions. It says Meng and Huawei misled banks about the company's business dealings in Iran. On Tuesday, U.S. State Department spokesman Robert Palladino told reporters in Washington "the charges against Meng pertain to alleged lies to United States financial institutions" about Huawei's business dealings in Iran. "It is clear from the filings that were unsealed in Canada, Meng and others are alleged to have put financial institutions at risk of criminal and civil liability in the United States by deceiving those institutions as to the nature and extent of Huawei's business in Iran," Palladino said. Meng has denied the U.S. allegations through her lawyer in court, promising to fight them if she is extradited to face charges in the United States. "We have every confidence that the Canadian and U.S. legal systems will reach a just conclusion in the following proceedings," Huawei said in a statement. "As we have stressed all along, Huawei complies with all applicable laws and regulations in the countries and regions where we operate, including export control and sanction laws of the UN, US, and EU. We look forward to a timely resolution to this matter." Huawei, the biggest global supplier of network gear for phone and internet companies, is the target of U.S. security concerns. Washington has pressured other countries to limit use of its technology, warning they could be opening themselves up to surveillance and theft of information. The U.S. and China have tried to keep Meng's case separate from their wider trade dispute and suggested Tuesday that talks to resolve their differences may resume. But President Donald Trump undercut efforts to distinguish between trade talks and the Huawei case. In an interview with Reuters, he said Tuesday that he would consider intervening in the Justice Department's case against Meng if it would be in the interest of U.S. national security or help forge a trade deal with Beijing. Roland Paris, a former foreign policy adviser to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, called Trump's comments troubling. "Canada is acting in good faith, according to the law, in response to a U.S. extradition request," Paris tweeted. The Chinese government said its economy czar had discussed plans with U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Trade Rep. Robert Lighthizer for talks aimed at settling the two countries' differences. Lighthizer's office confirmed he had spoken by phone with Chinese Vice Premier Liu He. The news that trade negotiations may resume lifted stock markets around the world. The United States has slapped tariffs on $250 billion in Chinese imports in response to complaints Beijing steals American technology and forces U.S. companies to turn over trade secrets. Tariffs on $200 billion of those imports were scheduled to rise from 10 percent to 25 percent on Jan. 1. But Trump agreed to postpone those by 90 days while the two sides negotiate. AP writers Matthew Lee and Joe McDonald contributed to this report. What to Know Sen. Marco Rubio said what happened to the four men was a "horrifying injustice" and still haunts Florida to this day. U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio is calling on Florida officials to formally pardon four young African-American men who were wrongly accused of raping a white woman nearly 70 years ago. The Florida Republican made the request Tuesday on the floor of the Senate. The move is significant because GOP Florida Gov. Rick Scott and other Republicans on the state clemency board have refused to take up the pardon request. Scott was elected last month to the U.S. Senate and will soon join Rubio in Washington, D.C. Florida's incoming agriculture commissioner, Democrat Nikki Fried, has already pledged to push for a posthumous pardon of Earnest Thomas, Charles Greenlee, Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin. Rubio said what happened to the four men was a "horrifying injustice" and still haunts Florida to this day. What to Know Donald Howard Conkright of Big Pine Key was arrested Dec. 13 and charged with wire fraud. Federal court records show a Florida man duped a Texas school district into transferring him nearly $2 million and then used the money to purchase a BMW and Rolex watches. Records show 61-year-old Donald Howard Conkright was arrested last week and charged with wire fraud. He's currently in the custody of U.S. marshals pending his transfer to Texas. A manager for the Crowley school district near Fort Worth, Texas, received an email in October saying a construction company that works as a vendor for the district needed to provide updated banking information. The district owed money to the company and later sent more than $500,000 to a new account. The next day it sent a $1.4 million payment. The district says it contacted authorities after discovering the fraud and began an internal review. Court records don't list an attorney for Conkright. What to Know Authorities say Gerhard Hojan and Jimmy Mickel robbed the Davie restaurant in March 2002. A man convicted of killing two Waffle House employees in Broward County will remain on death row. The South Florida Sun-Sentinel reports Gerhard Hojan was sentenced to death for a second time on Tuesday. Hojan was previously sentenced in 2003 following a 9-3 jury recommendation. Recent changes in state law require a unanimous jury recommendation for the death penalty, and that's what a new jury decided after being empaneled in October. Authorities say Hojan and Jimmy Mickel robbed the Davie restaurant in March 2002. Hojan was a regular customer, and Mickel worked there. Hojan fatally shot two employees, Christina Delarosa and Willy Absolu, as they kneeled on a freezer floor. A third employee was shot but survived. Mickel was convicted of armed kidnapping. He's serving multiple life sentences for his role in the crime. It was a night of horror for Julie Saint-Fleur on July 21, 2016. The 20-year-old was running for her life as shots rang out at the now-defunct BAM nightclub when the unthinkable happened. Boiling cooking oil splashed on Saint-Fleur as she dodged flying bullets. A dispute between two people at the nightclub set off the chaotic scene. It was one of many shootings that occurred at the nightclub located on Broward Boulevard near Fort Lauderdale. The club had been the scene of several deadly shootings before that summer night that forever changed Saint-Fleurs life. My beautiful skin is ruined, Saint-Fleur, now 23 years old, says she remembered thinking when she realized what happened to her. I thought for sure it was over for me. Saint-Fleur was working her way through college at a food concession at BAM nightclub when the gun violence erupted. During the chaos, one of the fryers flipped over and she was scalded with the boiling oil. Thirty percent of Saint-Fleurs body had second-to-third-degree burns. Most of her legs and back were severely injured. I was in the hospital for a while. I had to undergo four surgeries, the 23-year-old recalled. When I was released from the hospital, I had to use a walker. The aspiring elementary school teacher experienced excruciating pain. Her confidence was crushed. I was depressed and didnt want to leave the house, Saint-Fleur said. She felt like the life around her was unraveling further. I lost friends and family because of my injuries, Saint-Fleur said. She sat in anguish for months. I even put my dreams of being a school teacher on the side because I couldnt imagine standing in front of a classroom full of children staring at my scars, she said. As time went by, Saint-Fleur began to embrace her new life and her new purpose. You have to become a whole new person this fire has created, the 23-year-old said. She took to social media to connect with other burn victims. She shared her journey, no longer hiding behind her scars. Thats when she realized her strength. I didnt know how resilient I was until this whole ordeal came about, Saint-Fleur said. What brings her more joy these days is the healing of her scars. Shes not afraid to show off her legs anymore thanks to unconventional treatment shes received at Siperstein Dermatology Group in Boynton Beach. Saint-Fleur said her skin is improving because of the Cutera Secrets sessions shes had. Dr. Robyn Siperstein had been using the micro-needling device on other clients to reduce the signs of aging skin. But she then realized the device could treat burn scars. Sometimes we use it in acne scars so thats what made me think perhaps in this case, it would really help her, said Dr. Siperstein. Were essentially able to remodel the skin and slowly diminish the appearance of scars. For Saint-Fleur, the Cutera Secrets treatment gives her hope. I feel like the world is mine and I can do almost anything, she said. Saint-Fleur and Dr. Siperstein have built a friendship since the treatments started. It has made a real difference in our lives knowing that were able to change her life, said Dr. Siperstein. The doctor recently surprised Julie with one year of free Cutera Secrets treatments. Saint-Fleur now wants to use her story to help other burn survivors like her to heal. To see that I went through something so traumatic and Im still able to want to give back and smile and live a full life its amazing. The 23-year-old recently published a childrens book about a young burn victim. The book, Lillian is Alright! is available for sale on Amazon. She says proceeds from the sale of her book will go to South Florida burn survivors. For over a century, the Bells of Balangiga have not rung in the Philippines, a silence that the president last year called "painful." Now, the revered bells will once again be heard in the country. Hundreds of Filipino villagers in 1901, armed with bolos and disguised as women, used one of Balangiga town's church bells to signal the start of a massive attack that wrought one of the bloodiest single-battle losses of American occupation forces in the Philippines. The U.S. Army brutally retaliated, reportedly killing thousands of villagers, as the Philippine-American War raged. After the violence, the Americans took three church bells as spoils of war that Filipinos would demand for decades to be handed back. On Tuesday, a giant U.S. Air Force cargo aircraft brought the Bells of Balangiga back to the Philippine capital in a poignant ceremony that saw U.S. defense officials and the American ambassador to Manila return the war relics 117 years after they were seized. A military brass band played the Philippine national anthem, followed by "The Star Spangled Banner." The treaty allies then swept aside a dark episode in their long relationship with joint photographs and handshakes. "It is my great honor to be here at this closing of a painful chapter in our history," U.S. Ambassador Sung Kim said. "Our relationship has withstood the tests of history and flourishes today." U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis has said the handover is an important gesture of friendship and is in America's national security interest. Some U.S. veterans and officials had opposed the return of the bells, calling them memorials to American war dead. At Tuesday's handover ceremony at a Philippine air force base, the bronze bells stood atop a red platform like silent symbols of a bygone era of hostilities, as American and Philippine flags flapped in the wind. Officials from both sides called for a minute of silence for the war dead. The bells are revered by Filipinos as symbols of national pride, and their arrival on a U.S. C-130 plane and the ceremony were shown live on national TV. Two of the bells had been displayed for decades at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and the third was with the U.S. Army in South Korea. After being colonized by Spain for more than three centuries, the Philippines became a U.S. possession in 1898 in a new colonial era that began with the outbreak of the Philippine-American War. American occupation troops seized the bells from a Catholic church following an attack by machete-wielding Filipino villagers, who killed 48 U.S. soldiers in Balangiga, on central Samar island off Leyte Gulf, according to Filipino historian Rolando Borrinaga. The Americans retaliated, with a general, Jacob Smith, ordering troops to shoot villagers older than 10 and turn the island into a "howling wilderness," Borrinaga said. Thousands of villagers were reported to have been killed. Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who has had an antagonistic attitude toward the U.S. and has revitalized ties with China and Russia, asked Washington in his state of the nation address last year to "return them to us, this is painful for us." "Give us back those Balangiga bells. ... They are part of our national heritage," Duterte said in the speech, attended by the U.S. ambassador and other diplomats. Philippine Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana said at Tuesday's ceremony that with the resolution of the issue, "It's time for healing, it is time for closure, it is time to look ahead as two nations should with a shared history as allies." Duterte has referred to violence by Americans in Balangiga and on southern Jolo island in the early 1900s in public criticism of the U.S. government after it raised concerns about his brutal crackdown on illegal drugs in which thousands have died. A breakthrough on the bells issue came with an amendment to a U.S. law banning the return of war relics and memorials to foreign countries. That allowed the homecoming of the Balanggiga bells, said Lorenzana, who saw the bells last year in Wyoming, where he was notified by Mattis of the U.S. decision. Philippine officials led by Duterte are to turn over the bells on Saturday to officials and the church in Balangiga, a small coastal town where villagers, some in tears, applauded while watching troops on TV screens pry open the wooden crates containing the bells. "The Bells of Balangiga will once again peal, it will still remind the people of Balangiga of what happened in the town square more than a century ago," Lorenzana said. "But we would also look at that history with more understanding and acceptance." ___ Associated Press journalists Bullit Marquez and Cecilia Forbes contributed to this report. Facebook denied Tuesday night that its dozens of "partners" companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, Spotify and Yahoo were able to misuse Facebook users' personal data, NBC News reported. The company, however, didn't address explosive new allegations that it gave those companies far broader access to private data than it has previously acknowledged. The New York Times reported Tuesday that Facebook for many years gave more than 150 companies extensive access to personal data, including private messages and contact information for users' friends, than was previously known and without users' explicit consent. The Times said it based its reporting on more than 270 pages of internal Facebook documents and interviews with more than 50 former employees of Facebook and its so-called integration partners, as well as other former government officials and privacy advocates. Facebook has said it is ending the "integration partnerships," some of which the Times reported extend as far back as 2010 and some of which were still in effect this year. What to Know A young boy was shot and killed in front of a home in Connecticut Tuesday night, authorities say Police said they do not believe the 12-year-old was the intended target; family identified him as Clinton Howell Anyone with information on the shooting is asked to call the Bridgeport Police Department at 203-581-5227 A 12-year-old boy was shot and killed as he walked home from a corner store in Connecticut Tuesday night, authorities say. The child, identified by family as Clinton Howell, was hit at least twice in front of his own home on Willow Street in Bridgeport just after 9 p.m., according to police. His shocked sister described the moment her baby brother died in her arms:"I look and then my brother was bleeding on the floor, he was just laying there, and I told him to wake up. I told him to stay with me." Police said they do not believe the boy was the intended target. "Why my son? He don't trouble nobody," his father said. "He's a good kid." Detectives are working on several leads, including a vehicle possibly involved in the shooting, according to police. The police chief said Wednesday, "I can't bring him back. But I'm sure gonna get justice for him and his family." His family said Howell was a lovable seventh-grader who loved video games and never got into trouble. Howell's death marks Bridgeport's 11th homicide this year. Anyone with information on the shooting is asked to call the Bridgeport Police Department at 203-581-5227 or the Bridgeport Police Tips Line at 203-576-TIPS. What to Know A NY judge has sentenced a Canadian citizen to 40 years in prison for plotting a Times Square subway attack in 2016 that never occurred The judge rejected a prosecutor's arguments for a life sentence, citing Abdulrahman El Bahnasawy's mental illness and addiction issues U.S. District Judge Richard Berman said he was not opposed to El Bahnasawy serving his sentence in Canada. A New York judge has sentenced a Canadian citizen to 40 years in prison for plotting a Times Square subway attack that never occurred. Abdulrahman El Bahnasawy, 20, was sentenced to decades in prison Wednesday for plotting to carry out terrorist attacks in the name of ISIS in New York City during the summer of 2016, prosecutors say. El Bahnasawy plead guilty in October, 2016 in federal court in Manhattan to the terror charges. El Bahnasawy, a Canadian citizen, plotted with Talha Haroon, a 20-year-old U.S. citizen living in Pakistan, and Russell Salic, a 38-year-old Philippines citizen and resident, to commit bombings and shootings in heavily populated areas of New York City during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan in 2016. El Bahnasawy had acquired bomb making materials and a cabin within driving range of New York City to be used to assemble the bombs, court papers say. Haroon planned to travel to New York to help carry out the attacks and Salic wired money from the Philippines to fund the operation, the court papers say. El Bahnasawy was arrested after he traveled from Canada to New York after an undercover FBI agent infiltrated the plot posing as an ISIS supporter. Haroon was later arrested in Pakistan and Salic was arrested in the Philippines, prosecutors say. Bahnasawy planned to detonate bombs in Times Square and the New York City subway system, and to shoot civilians at concert venues, U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman said. El Bahnasawy aspired, in his words , to create the next 9/11. U.S. District Judge Richard Berman rejected a prosecutor's arguments for a life sentence, citing Abdulrahman El Bahnasawy's mental illness and addiction issues. The mother of the Kuwaiti-born defendant arrested in 2016 interrupted the announcement of the sentence, shouting "This is not justice!" as she left the courtroom. Earlier, her son had asked the judge for a "second chance," saying he was "nowhere near the mentality" he was when he became radicalized online. Berman said he was not opposed to El Bahnasawy serving his sentence in Canada. What to Know A New Jersey lawyer is accused of stealing about $100,000 from his client, prosecutors say Alfredo Ramos allegedly failed to disburse to a client about $100,000 he received in trust as the result of a real estate property sale Ramos, 38, from Garfield, was arrested Tuesday as he reentered the United States from Colombia at John F. Kennedy International Airport A New Jersey lawyer is accused of stealing about $100,000 from his client, prosecutors say. Alfredo Ramos, 38, from Garfield, was charged with misapplication of entrusted funds with the amount being greater than $75,000 following an investigation conducted by the Bergen County Prosecutors Office. According to the prosecutors office, in July, its Financial Crime Unit received a complaint from a client of Ramos regarding his failure to disburse to the client about $100,000 he received in trust as the result of a real estate property sale. A subsequent investigation allegedly revealed that Ramos received the funds into his attorney trust account, but instead of forwarding them to the client he used them for his personal purposes. Ramos was arrested Tuesday as he reentered the United States from Colombia at John F. Kennedy International Airport. Federal agents and Port Authority police arrested Ramos after his plane landed and he is expected to be extradited to New Jersey. It is not immediately clear if Ramos has retained an attorney. Both coasts are expected to be hit by wet and windy weather just in time for the busiest travel days of the holidays, NBC News reported. Heavy rains and wind gusts up to 60 mph are expected from Northern California to Washington state Wednesday night and into Thursday. On the East Coast, Central and Southern Florida are anticipating heavy winds, hail and possible tornadoes, forecasters said. The North Carolina coast is facing the same as the storm marches north. By Thursday, the nation's worst day to travel, the storm will start affecting the Northeast, according to the National Weather Service. Travel hubs Washington, D.C., New York City and Boston could all see up to 4 inches of rain and possible flooding between Thursday night and Friday night. Before the forecast, holiday travelers were warned that they could see traffic that would multiply their travel time by four. A record-breaking 112.5 million Americans are expected to take to the roads, skies and rails this holiday weekend, starting Wednesday, according to AAA. North Carolina officials sought criminal charges after the 2016 election against the man now at the center of absentee ballot fraud allegations, but prosecutors didn't indict him before the now disputed 2018 congressional race, according to documents released Wednesday. The documents detail a two year investigation by the North Carolina State Board of Elections into Leslie McCrae Dowless Jr. Authorities informed the 62-year-old convicted felon from rural Bladen County earlier this month that he is the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation into irregularities in the Nov. 6 vote in the state's 9th Congressional District. In a January 2018 memo referring Dowless and others for criminal charges, state elections investigators detailed interviews in which people who had worked for Dowless in the 2016 election cycle described collecting absentee ballots from voters. Because of the potential for mischief, it is against North Carolina law for anyone other than a voter or immediate relative to handle someone's absentee ballot before it is sealed and mailed. Investigators also alleged Dowless attempted to interfere with their investigation by calling witnesses and warning them before they could be interviewed. The referral to state and federal prosecutors came well before a May GOP primary and November general election in which Republican Mark Harris eked out narrow victories. Harris now leads Democrat Dan McCready by 905 votes in the year's only still unresolved congressional election, according to unofficial results. The state elections board has refused to certify the tally, and leaders in both parties now concede a do-over election might eventually be needed. The state elections board plans to review the evidence at a Jan. 11 public hearing. Investigators are looking into whether Dowless and others working on the GOP candidate's behalf ran an illegal operation to collect large numbers of absentee ballots from voters in at least two counties. Dowless didn't respond Wednesday to a voicemail or text message seeking comment. His lawyer, Cynthia Adams Singletary, said in a statement Tuesday that any speculation regarding her client and the 9th District election is premature and unwarranted. Through his attorney, Dowless has declined to be interviewed by state investigators. Harris, the Republican candidate, said in an interview last week that it was his decision to hire Dowless, though he denied knowledge of any potential wrongdoing. The extent of the state's prior investigation into Dowless' tactics had not previously been publicly known. In their January memo, investigators for the state board said they had uncovered evidence that Dowless employed workers to encourage people to ask for absentee ballots and then collect them, as well as push for certain candidates. The 2016 probe appears to have been triggered when three voters registered formal complaints with county elections officials saying that people subsequently identified as working for Dowless had come to their houses to encourage them to request absentee ballots. One woman, Linda Baldwin, said a man told her he was paid to collect absentee ballot request forms and "that when the ballots arrived by mail at her house, and she completed them, he would return to pick them up to take and show his 'boss' so that he could get paid," according to the document. A second person, Brenda Register, said a young woman came to her house and tried to convince her to request an absentee ballot, but she declined and reported it to elections officials. A third person who complained, Heather Register, said the same man and woman told her they were getting paid to encourage people to request ballots, though she and relatives never received or voted those ballots. Yet when Heather Register attempted to vote in person on Election Day, poll workers told her she had already voted, according to the documents. The man and woman the witnesses described, Matthew Matthis and Caitlyn Croom, later acknowledged to investigators that they had been paid by Dowless, according to the documents. Neither Croom nor Matthis responded to messages Wednesday seeking comment. The documents say state elections investigators decided in December 2016 to present their findings to federal prosecutors in Raleigh. Don Connelly, spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's office for the Eastern District of North Carolina, declined to comment Wednesday about why they didn't pursue charges. In January 2018, the case was referred to Jon David, the state prosecutor for the district that includes Bladen County. David, who didn't return a phone call seeking comment Wednesday, determined he had a conflict of interest because Dowless had previously worked for his opponent. He then asked Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman in Raleigh to take over the case. Freeman said Wednesday that her investigation expanded when they became aware of "additional fraudulent activity" during the 2018 primary and general election, requiring investigators to track down more leads. Some of the evidence only surfaced in the last several weeks, she said. Freeman was also mindful that the investigation was going on during heights of the election season and that she didn't want to create public concerns that might make voters fearful. It's general practice to let investigations run until they are complete, she said. "Our standard of proof is beyond a reasonable doubt," Freeman said. "We had to have a case that would stand up in court." What to Know The first 100 or so active duty troops arrived at the border on Thursday, making initial assessment at the McAllen, Texas, crossing The head of "Operation Faithful Patriot," has argued that the caravan is a potential threat, although he has not fully defined that AP journalists traveling with the largest group say it includes many families, including hundreds of children, and it has been orderly President Donald Trump ordered troops to the border in response to a caravan of migrants slowly making its way through Mexico toward the United States and still about 900 miles away, with many dropping out. Here's what we know so far about the military's mission: WHAT TROOPS ARE INVOLVED? More than 7,000 active duty troops have been told to deploy to Texas, Arizona and California. They are a mix of forces, including military police, an assault helicopter battalion, various communications, medical and headquarters units, combat engineers, planners and public affairs units. As of Friday, one week after the Pentagon acknowledged that Defense Secretary Jim Mattis had approved a Department of Homeland Security request for military support at the border, the troop deployment was still unfolding, with about 3,500 at staging bases in the Southwest. Of those, about 2,250 active duty troops are at staging bases in Texas, about 1,100 Marines are at Camp Pendleton in California and fewer than 200 are in Arizona. About 100 troops are actually on the border, at the port crossing near McAllen, Texas. Most of the troops are being used to facilitate the movement of border patrol agents, house them, feed them and provide some of their protection. WHAT IS THEIR ROLE ON THE BORDER? The Pentagon is adamant that active duty troops will not do law enforcement, which they are forbidden from doing under the Posse Comitatus Act in the Constitution. Troops can't arrest people at the border. Their main job will be to support the Border Patrol. This means the military will transport border patrol agents to and along the border, help them erect additional vehicle barriers and fencing along the border, assist them with communications and provide some security for border agent camps. The military also will provide the border patrol agents with medical care, pre-packaged meals, and temporary housing. WILL TROOPS BE ARMED? Yes, many of them will be, mainly for self-protection. Military police at the border will be armed, although they will have non-lethal options for dealing with unexpected conflict. Pentagon officials say they are planning for a worst-case scenario of violence that could force soldiers to rely on their training to make split-second decisions to defend themselves or civilians. MPs might, for example, be dispatched to provide armed security for military engineers placing barricades at locations where there are no border patrol agents to provide protection. One day after Trump suggested soldiers on the southwest border may open fire if migrants throw rocks at them, he insisted Friday that he meant that rock-throwers would be arrested. "I didn't say 'shoot,'" he told reporters at the White House. Either way, his scenario of violence captures in a nutshell the risk of using active duty troops for domestic security: Their mission does not include confronting migrants, but some may be unable to avoid it. The commander in charge of the military operation, Air Force Gen. Terrence O'Shaughnessy, head of U.S. Northern Command, said earlier this week that handling migrants will be primarily the job of the Customs and Border Protection agency. But he acknowledged "there could be incidental interaction" between migrants and soldiers. In light of that possibility, the soldiers "are going to be fully trained in how to do that," he said. Lt. Col. Jamie Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, said the military will not disclose details of its rules on the use of force. DOES CONGRESS SUPPORT THIS MISSION? With members of Congress focused mainly on Tuesday's midterm elections, reaction has been mild. A group of senior House Democrats wrote a letter to Mattis on Thursday expressing opposition to the military mission and demanding answers on its cost. The deployment of active duty troops, they wrote, "only exacerbates the potential to unnecessarily escalate the situation." Chuck Hagel, a former Republican senator and Army combat veteran who served as defense secretary under President Barack Obama, told CNN the mission is "folly" because there is "no need, no threat." Retired Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, who preceded Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, took double-barreled aim at the border mission. Writing on Twitter Thursday, he called the military mission a "wasteful deployment of over-stretched Soldiers and Marines" that would be "made much worse" if they used force disproportional to the threat they face on the border. What to Know Toll rates for the Delaware Memorial Bridge are going up to $5 per passenger car. The last general toll increase took place in July 2011. The revenue will be used to fund more than $440 million worth of infrastructure projects over the next five years. It will cost more to cross the Delaware Memorial Bridge next year. The Delaware River and Bay Authority adopted a new toll schedule on Tuesday. The price to cross between New Jersey and Delaware will increase from $4 to $5 for cars and small trucks, beginning March 1. Commercial vehicles will pay $2 more per axle. Motorists who participate in the agency's discount programs can save money. Discount rates are being adjusted for the second time in more than 30 years from 25 to 22 trips over 30 days. The last general toll increase took place in July 2011. The agency says the higher tolls are needed to help fund about $34 million in annual revenue that will go toward the DRBA's $440-million Capitol Improvement Program. The proposed toll structure protects cash reserves, debt coverage allowances and credit ratings that together are the hallmarks of appropriate fiscal management, Chief Financial Officer Victor Ferzetti said. The toll increase is not needed to fund the Authoritys operating budget. All of the additional revenue will be used to fund an appropriate and essential Capital Improvement Program. The agency says about 36 million vehicles travel the twin spans annually. Whether its traveling home from a family visit, commuting to work or transporting goods to the marketplace, millions of people rely on the Delaware Memorial Bridge every day, DRBA Chairman James Hogan said. Civil and structural engineers inspect the Twin Spans on a regular basis and recommend projects, upgrades and improvements to maintain this vital transportation link. Over the next five years, the DRBA will need to make significant infrastructure investments at the bridge that are both expensive and necessary to ensure public safety and uninterrupted traffic flow. The new toll rates are available by clicking here. An Alaska video gamer faces up to 10 years in prison after allegedly making false bomb threats against Lafayette College in eastern Pennsylvania just days before graduation, officials announced Wednesday. Gavin Lee Casdorph, 30, was arrested in Anchorage on Dec. 12 after a six-month investigation. He has been charged with willfully making threats and maliciously conveying false information, according to U.S. Attorney Bill McSwain. Casdorph faces a maximum prison sentence of 10 years plus a $250,000 fine. According to investigators, Casdorph made the threats in May while posing as a Lafayette student with allegiance to the Islamic State group Isis. On social media posts disseminated in the spring, Casdorph claimed to have been radicalized after his grandfather died and girlfriend broke up with him. He tweeted that he had placed bombs all over campus and found faith in Allah, investigators said. As a result of the threats, school officials were forced to reschedule finals and change the location of graduation ceremonies. All of the threats were false, however. In reality, Casdorph was embroiled in a bitter online argument with fellow video gamers who were all playing the game Counter Strike, McSwain said. Casdorph allegedly created an anonymous Twitter account using the handle BdanJafarSaleem to make the threats against Lafayette and covered his tracks by buying a fake number from a Russia website, McSwain said. Bomb threats emailed to school officials, threatening statements posted on social media, these are the symptoms of a nationwide epidemic of violent school threats that breed fear, anxiety and frustration, McSwain said. We as a nation as have too often grieved the loss of life due to school violence. Casdorph is being held in Anchorage and will be transferred to Philadelphia in the near future, McSwain said. Officials did not disclose why Casdorph targeted Lafayette. Other gamers have been identified, however, and could also face charges, McSwain said. What to Know The tunnel stretches from SpaceX's Hawthorne property near Crenshaw Boulevard and 120th Street and runs west Elon Musk has touted his proposed system of tunnels as a novel way of avoiding traffic The company recently scrapped plans for a tunnel beneath Sepulveda Boulevard in West Los Angeles amid a legal challenge Elon Musk unveiled his underground transportation tunnel on Tuesday, allowing reporters and invited guests to take some of the first rides in the revolutionary albeit bumpy subterranean tube the tech entrepreneur's answer to what he calls "soul-destroying traffic." Guests boarded Musk's Tesla Model S and rode along Los Angeles-area surface streets about a mile away to what's known as O'Leary Station. The station, smack dab in the middle of a residential neighborhood "basically in someone's backyard," Musk says consists of a wall-less elevator that slowly took the car down a wide shaft, roughly 30 feet (9 meters) below the surface. The sky slowly fell away and the surprisingly narrow tunnel emerged. "We're clear," said the driver, who sped up and zipped into the tunnel when a red track light turned green, making the tube look like something from space or a dance club. The car jostled significantly during the ride, which was bumpy enough to give one reporter motion sickness while another yelled, "Woo!" Musk described his first ride as "epic." "For me it was a eureka moment," he told a room full of reporters. "I was like, 'This thing is going to damn well work.'" He said the rides are bumpy now because "we kind of ran out of time" and there were some problems with the speed of his paving machine. "It'll be smooth as glass," he said of future systems. "This is just a prototype. That's why it's a little rough around the edges." The demo rides were also considerably slower 40 mph (64 kph) than what Musk says the future system will run at: 150 mph (241 kph). Still, it took only three minutes to go just over a mile from the beginning to the end of the tunnel, the same amount of time it took to accomplish a right-hand turn out of the parking lot and onto a surface street even before the height of Los Angeles' notorious rush-hour traffic. The tunnel is just a test to prove the technology works and could one day cure traffic. Tuesday's reveal comes almost two years to the day since Musk announced on Twitter that "traffic is driving me nuts" and he was "going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging." "I am actually going to do this," he added in response to initial skepticism, a Tweet that was blown up and posted near the entrance to the tunnel for Tuesday's event, along with other Musk tweets like, "Defeating traffic is the ultimate boss battle." The tweets were a nod to Musk's sense of humor. Just after announcing he was creating a tunnel, he began The Boring Company, tongue in cheek intentional. Since his announcement, Musk has only revealed a handful of photos and videos of the tunnel's progress. On Tuesday, he explained for the first time in minute detail just how the system, which he simply calls "loop," could work on a larger scale beneath cities across the globe. Autonomous, electric vehicles could be lowered into the system on wall-less elevators the size of two cars. Such elevators could be placed almost anywhere cars can go. A number of autonomous cars would remain inside the system just for pedestrians and bicyclists. Once on the main arteries of the system, every car could run at top speed except when entering and exiting. "It's much more like an underground highway than it is a subway," he said. "It's not like you're going through a whole series of stops. Nope, the main arteries will be going super fast, and it's only when you want to get off the loop system that you slow down." Musk said he scrapped his previous plan to run the cars on platforms called skates. Instead, the cars would have to be fitted with specially designed side wheels that pop out perpendicular to the car's regular tires and run along the tunnel's track. The cost for such wheels would be about $200 or $300 a car, Musk said. He said tunnels are the safest place to be in earthquakes sort of like a submarine during a hurricane is safest beneath the surface and addressed other concerns such as the noise and disruption of building the tunnels, which he completely dismissed. When workers bored through the end of the test tunnel, for instance, the people in the home 20 feet (6 meters) away "didn't even stop watching TV." "The footsteps of someone walking past your house will be more noticeable than a tunnel being dug under your house," he said, Musk said it took about $10 million to build the test tunnel, a far cry from the $1 billion per mile his company says most tunnels take to build. Musk explained just how he's cutting costs. Measures include improving the speed of construction with smarter tools, eliminating middlemen, building more powerful boring machines, and instead of hauling out all the dirt being excavated, Musk is turning them into bricks and selling them for 10 cents. He reiterated the simplicity of all his ideas. "No Nobel Prize is needed here," he said. "It's very simple." And he's not doing it for the money, he said, adding that it's for the greater good. "Traffic is a blight on everyone's life in all cities," he said. "I really think this is incredibly profound. Hopefully that is coming across." Steve Davis, head of The Boring Company, said the interest in the tunnel systems has been significant anywhere from five to 20 calls a week from various municipalities and stakeholders. One project Musk is planning on, known as the Dugout Loop, would take Los Angeles baseball fans to Dodger Stadium from one of three subway stations. Another would take travelers from downtown Chicago to O'Hare International Airport. Both projects are in the environmental review phase. The Boring Company canceled its plans for another test tunnel on Los Angeles' west side last month after a neighborhood coalition filed a lawsuit expressing concerns about traffic and disruptions from trucks hauling out dirt during the boring process. For the privately funded test tunnel, Musk acquired a tunnel-boring machine that had been used in a San Francisco Bay Area project and put it down a shaft in a parking lot at the SpaceX headquarters. Already on Tuesday, Musk's representatives unveiled a new tunnel-boring machine they say they hope to have online soon, one that can bore four times faster than the one they've been using. Musk's vision for the underground tunnels is not the same as another of his transportation concepts known as hyperloop. That would involve a network of nearly airless tubes that would speed special capsules over long distances at up to 750 mph (1,200) kph), using a thin cushion of air, magnetism and solar power. The loop system is designed for shorter routes that wouldn't require the elimination of air friction, according to The Boring Company. Three people were detained in the killing of two young Honduran migrants in Tijuana, authorities said Wednesday, and Mexican media reported the victims had come to the border city across from San Diego as part of the caravan of more than 6,000 people that arrived last month. Baja California state prosecutors said in a statement that the victims were slain in an apparent attempted robbery Saturday after leaving a shelter for underage migrants. Their bodies were later found in an alley in central Tijuana with stab wounds and signs of strangulation. The statement said the victims were apparently around 16 or 17 years old, and another youth with them was able to escape. Authorities arrested two men and a woman Tuesday on suspicion of murder and other charges. Honduras' Foreign Ministry said in a statement that the Honduran minor who survived had suffered "serious injuries," and expressed concern for his safety. It offered condolences to the families of the victims and urged Hondurans not to risk the migratory route "where they are exposed to becoming victims of trafficking gangs." With U.S. authorities processing only about 60 to 100 asylum claims per day at the San Diego border, and some 3,000 people already in line to make claims before the caravan arrived, the migrants are facing wait times of months. That has raised concerns about Tijuana's ability to handle the large number of people in overflowing shelters, as well as security concerns amid rising violence. Baja California state currently has one of Mexico's highest homicide rates 63.57 per 100,000 inhabitants, according to preliminary Interior Department figures for 2018 with data tabulated through late November. That's up from 58.11 per 100,000 inhabitants last year and 23.56 in 2015. Police also reported that two unknown people launched a tear gas canister into a Tijuana event venue that had been turned into a temporary shelter for migrants on Tuesday night. There were no injuries or damage to the facility. Nearly two months after the shooting death of a U.S. sailor who stopped to help what appeared to be a stranded motorist on a San Diego highway, investigators booked a second suspect in jail on a first-degree murder charge. SW3 Curtis Fitzherbert Adams, 21, was killed on Oct. 27 after he and his girlfriend pulled over on Interstate 15 to help the driver of a car along the side of the road. Two men will face first-degree murder charges in connection with the shooting. Brandon Acuna was taken into custody immediately but Edson Acuna, 24, was arrested just Tuesday by authorities in Mexico. As the sailor approached the car, he was shot. NBC 7's Ramon Galindo has the details. Edson Acuna was booked into jail Tuesday on charges of first-degree murder, robbery, burglary, shooting at an inhabited dwelling or vehicle and possession of a firearm. All five charges are felonies. He is slated to be arraigned in court on Wednesday. Brandon Javier Acuna was arrested on Oct. 27 and pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder, robbery, burglary and shooting at an inhabited dwelling or vehicle when he appeared in court on Oct. 31. Officers later discovered Brandon, 21, was allegedly involved in another shooting just minutes before Adams' death. Recent tragic incidents on local freeways have motorists thinking twice about stopping. NBC 7's Steven Luke on how to stay safe while helping stranded motorists. Adams was born in New York and enlisted in the Navy in March 2016, according to the Navy Times. He reported to Amphibious Construction Battalion 1 in San Diego on Sept. 30, 2016, the site reported, where he worked as a steelworker constructionman. Two men have been convicted in the shooting death of a Maryland lawmaker's grandson. House Majority Whip Talmadge Branch's grandson, 22-year-old Tyrone Ray Jr., was shot to death in September 2017. Baltimore state's attorney's office spokeswoman Melba Saunders tells The Baltimore Sun 20-year-old Raekwon Thornton and 22-year-old Lamont Kyler were found guilty of murder Friday. Prosecutors said surveillance video showed two men circling the block and approaching Ray, who was shot two dozen times. Thornton's attorney, Tyler Mann, said he was disappointed, believing the defense team had "raised reasonable doubt that a sole video without any corroborating evidence was enough to convict." He says he's talking to his client about appealing. Kyler's attorney couldn't be immediately reached. Branch has called for more state money to curb violence in Baltimore. Authorities say a Maryland man has spent nearly three decades in prison for a murder he didn't commit. The Baltimore Sun reports 47-year-old Clarence Shipley Jr. was exonerated and released Tuesday after being imprisoned for 27 years. Baltimore State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby says the justice system erred when it sent Shipley to prison for the 1991 death of 29-year-old Kevin Smith. Shipley was convicted on false witness testimony. Family and friends of Shipley hired a retired detective to review the case several years ago. The detective uncovered mistakes, and prosecutors say new witnesses identified the killer as a man who died in 2005. Shipley now is the fourth man exonerated through the work of innocence nonprofit projects headed by Mosby, the University of Baltimore and George Washington University. The U.S. government said Tuesday that it is reviewing reports of forced labor at a Chinese internment camp where ethnic minorities are sewing clothes that have been shipped to the U.S. market. U.S. Customs and Border Protection said in a statement that reporting by The Associated Press and other media "for the first time appears to link the internment camps identified in Western China to the importation of goods produced by forced labor by a U.S. company." The AP tracked shipments from a factory in a camp in China's far western Xinjiang region to Badger Sportswear in North Carolina. The company ships clothing to universities, colleges and schools around the United States. Experts and a human rights organization say that possibly as many as 1 million Uighurs, Kazakhs and others from predominantly Muslim groups are arbitrarily detained in such camps, whose functions range from political indoctrination to forced labor. Following the recent news media reports, Badger said that it had suspended business with Chinese supplier Hetian Taida Apparel and was investigating. A statement on its website says "one percent or less" of Badger products was sourced from Hetian Taida. The Washington-based Workers Rights Consortium (WRC), which has agreements with many educational institutions to make sure the products they sell on campus are ethically manufactured, said that "forced labor of any kind is a severe violation of university codes of conduct." The group's executive director, Scott Nova, said in a message to affiliate universities that, building off the AP's report, WRC had gathered additional evidence indicating the factory that supplied Badger with collegiate apparel was "one and the same" as the factory inside the highly-guarded internment compound seen by AP reporters. The factory was featured on a Chinese state television segment in October that characterized the camp as a vocational training center that helps minorities steer clear of religious extremism and gain employable skills. The state-run China Daily published an article on Tuesday which profiled ethnic minorities in Xinjiang who have been recruited to work in garment factories. The story featured a 23-year-old woman named Burebgul Ali who was described as being "reluctant to work at the factory." "But after skills training and learning Mandarin," the story said, "Burebgul found her job quite comfortable and could make at least 3,000 yuan ($435) per month." The AP spoke to a dozen former detainees and individuals who had friends or family in similar centers in Xinjiang who said they were given no choice but to work at factories on site. The Uighurs and Kazakhs, who were interviewed in exile in Kazakhstan, said that even professionals were trained to do factory work. It's against U.S. law to import products of forced labor. Customs and Border Protection said it is part of its mission to enforce "both laws to protect individuals from forced labor and our Nation's economy from businesses profiting from this form of modern slavery." With only the United States and Hungary voting no, the U.N. General Assembly overwhelmingly approved a non-binding compact Monday that provides more robust support for countries where most of the world's more than 25 million refugees live. The Global Compact on Refugees also sets out measures to share responsibility to help those who are forced to flee their countries because of conflict or persecution, and ease the burden on the small number of nations that host the majority of refugees. U.N. refugee chief Filippo Grandi called the compact "historic" in a tweet, adding: "It is the biggest effort to broadly share refugee responsibilities that I have witnessed in 34 years of work with refugees." The vote in the 193-member assembly was 181-2, with the Dominican Republic, Eritrea and Libya abstaining. U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed said the Global Compact is very important because "in recent years, we have seen a contagion of closed borders, contrary to international refugee and human rights law." "Millions of refugees are facing years in exile, or risking their lives on dangerous journeys to an uncertain future," she told an event marking the adoption. "Refugees are among those furthest behind. Persecuted, isolated and marginalized in their home countries, and too often in their countries of destination, they have struggled to be counted and to count." U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Grandi stressed that the compact is not just "a U.N. document that stays in a drawer." The rollout of the compact in 15 countries so far has mobilized $6.5 billion that wouldn't have been accessible otherwise, he said. And it has already created "new momentum" and spurred "extraordinary projects," including in Ethiopia, Kenya and Jordan, in such areas as energy, connectivity, communications and technology. The agreement is separate from another non-binding compact to ensure safe, orderly and humane migration that was approved Dec. 10 by nearly 85 percent of the U.N. member states over fierce opposition from the United States. The Global Compact for Migration is expected to be endorsed by the General Assembly on Wednesday. The Global Compact on Refugees was adopted at a time when a record-high 68.5 million people have been forced to flee their homes. This includes 25.4 million who have crossed borders to become refugees, 40 million who are displaced within their home countries and 3.1 million who are seeking asylum. According to the U.N. refugee agency, nine out of 10 refugees live in developing countries, where basic services like health or education are already strained. Grandi stressed that it's "a tough world" for refugees and migrants who are often stigmatized and politicized as threats. "One message is that these people not only deserve compassion and protection and solidarity, but when given the opportunity, they can make a formidable contribution to society," he said. He called the refugee compact "a powerful expression of how we work together in today's fragmented world" and stressed that "no country should be left alone to respond to a huge influx of refugees." The compact aims to provide more investment from governments and the private sector for infrastructure and services to benefit both refugees and host communities, including access to education. It also aims to address the environmental impact of hosting refugees, promotes the use of alternative energy, and envisions more resettlement opportunities through family reunification, student scholarships, or humanitarian visas so that refugees can travel safely. The compact builds on the 1951 Refugee Convention in addition to human rights and humanitarian law and makes way for a follow-up Global Refugee Forum every four years. Despite the Trump administration's opposition to the compact, Grandi said the United States has voiced support for refugees. And his office is "about to close the year with the highest-ever contribution from the U.S. to the UNHCR," he said. Hungarian Ambassador Katalin Annamaria Bogyay, whose government since 2015 has adopted increasingly strict anti-immigration policies, said existing international laws "adequately address refugee and asylum matters" and the compact was not needed. "The government is also concerned that the differentiation between refugees and migrants as well as the voluntary nature of responsibility sharing is not adequately reflected in the document, she said. Law enforcement officers used explosives to get inside a Rhode Island home where four family members were arrested on drug charges. Police in Woonsocket say 59-year-old Diane Martini, 55-year-old Ernest Brochu, and their children, 23-year-old Bazel Brochu and 21-year-old Jordan Brochu, were all arrested at their High Street home. Local police and the Rhode Island Fire Marshal's Office arrived around 6 a.m. Tuesday to serve search and arrest warrants. Officials say the door to the home was barricaded when they arrived, and that a small explosive charge was used to dislodge it. According to police, more than an ounce of fentanyl was found in the pocket of a pair of jeans in Bazel Brochu's room. Six ounces of marijuana and $34,730 cash were also seized from the home. All four suspects were charged with maintaining a narcotics nuisance, a felony. Bazel Brochu was charged with five other felony counts related to manufacturing and/or distributing drugs. Jordan Brochu faces two more felony drug distribution charges, as well as a misdemeanor bench warrant. It was not immediately clear if the suspects had attorneys. A Massachusetts man is accused of gunning down his estranged wife as she was heading to her job at a church Wednesday morning. Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryan said Everett officers responded to a home at 90 Central Ave. after receiving a call around 8:40 a.m. for a report of shots fired, where they found 50-year-old Ersilia Matarazzo dead from multiple gunshot wounds inside a car in the home's driveway. "Then after the four gunshots, I heard screaming. A woman screaming," one woman recalled. Authorities spoke Wednesday morning on their ongoing investigation into a fatal shooting in an Everett, Massachusetts driveway. Ersilia Matarazzo's estranged husband, 55-year-old Emilio Matarazzo of Peabody, walked into Everett Police Department headquarters around 10:30 a.m. to turn himself in for the shooting, Ryan said. The couple was in the process of getting divorced, and Emilio Matarazzo was licensed to carry a firearm, according to Ryan. There was neither a previous court history nor a restraining order filed between the two, Ryan added. Ersilia Cataldo Matarazzo appeared to have been on her way to work at St. Anthony's Church, where she had worked for about 20 years, according to Everett police. She had a large extended family in the city of Everett and was the mayor's second cousin. Crews respond to the scene of a shooting in Everett, Massachusetts. Nearby Everett High School was locked down and all other schools ordered to shelter in place at the recommendation of police. Those orders have since been lifted. NBC10 Boston's crew at the scene witnessed a man yelling "I've got to see my mother," as he was stopped by Everett police detectives. Family and friends also gathered to mourn at the scene Wednesday morning. Emotional Images From Scene of Fatal Everett Shooting Those who knew Ersilia Matarazzo are at a loss for words. "I don't even know what to think. I just..." said one woman who was in the Everett High School band with Ersilia. "[Ersilia was] quiet, nice. Just a nice, nice person." Ersilia Matarazzo's family is stunned and saddened to know she was shot and killed inside a car outside her parents home just before 9 a.m. Wednesday morning. She is well known in the neighborhood, and the mother of three is highly regarded throughout Everett. "She seemed like a very nice lady," one man said. Shes well known, well liked, well respected. Large extended family," Everett Police Chief Steven Mazzie said. "Just sad to see something like this happen. Shes an angel now but she was taken far too soon, Ersilia Matarazzo's former high school classmate said. Emilio Matarazzo will be arraigned Thursday in Malden District Court, and remains in police custody. It's unclear if he has an attorney. The investigation into the deadly shooting is ongoing. The mystery surrounding an 11-year-old Massachusetts girls death remains as authorities continue their investigation into the cause. The Essex County District Attorney's office says it is now testing for the possibility of fentanyl exposure in Precious Wallaces' death. On a GoFundMe page, Cathie Rivera says her niece was "loved by many" and "just starting to live life." First responders were called to a rooming house on Jackson Street in Lawrence around 3:30 a.m. Saturday, where they found Wallaces, the district attorney said. She was rushed to Lawrence Hospital and later flown by helicopter to Tufts Medical Center in Boston, where she died Tuesday after several days on life support. Rivera says her niece "fought her battle until the end." The family is now trying to raise enough money for a proper burial and is requesting privacy at this time. Wallaces was visiting a family member, according to authorities, and was apparently a frequent visitor to the two-floor apartment where she was found Saturday. Building residents tell NBC10 Boston they believe the relative is her uncle. "I heard the ambulances and I looked out the window. All I saw was three ambulances out here," Sherman Martinez, a resident of the building, told NBC10 Boston. "She was a beautiful kid. I've seen her around here for the last four years." Authorities have not said what led to Precious being hospitalized, but are looking at exposure to a toxic substance as a possible cause of death. On the 911 call that came in early Saturday morning, a dispatcher can be heard saying, Medic assist... Baby ate a bunch of candy and is now bleeding from the nose and mouth having a hard time breathing. On a GoFundMe page, Cathie Rivera says her niece was "loved by many" and "just starting to live life." Wallaces was a sixth grader at Consentino Middle School in Haverhill, where they will have grief counselors for the rest of the week. "Sadness has once again gripped our school community. Precious Wallaces, a beautiful and well-loved girl that attended the Consentino School, passed this afternoon after an accident over the weekend left her on life supports," Haverhill Superintendent Margaret Marotta said in a letter to the school community. "Our condolences and thoughts go out to the family and friends of Precious." "The city of Haverhill sends its condolences to the family of Precious Wallaces... who tragically passed away today," Haverhill Mayor James Fiorentini said on Facebook Tuesday night. "Our thoughts are with the family during this Christmas season." The Department of Children and Families is investigating this tragic situation in collaboration with law enforcement, a DCF spokesperson said Wednesday night. The district attorneys office is also investigating the young girls death. The district attorney's office said it investigates all sudden and unexpected deaths, and its involvment does not mean that foul play is suspected. "At this point in time, all possible causes are being considered including possible exposure to a toxic substance," the district attorney's office said. "However, we cannot confirm any specific cause at this time as that is the purpose of our investigation. As with all death investigations, it takes time to obtain toxicology reports and other information needed to determine the facts and circumstances of her death." It's unclear if anyone will be charged in Wallaces' death. A congresswoman from Massachusetts is celebrating the expected passage of a bill granting new protections to the victims of domestic violence and their pets. Rep. Katherine Clark (D-MA5) introduced the PAWS Act, which would expand federal domestic violence protections to include the pets of domestic violence victims. President Donald Trump is expected to sign the bill into law Thursday. Stephanie Deeley says when her late sister, Kim Boleza Parker, was being abused by her husband, it was her two golden retrievers, Bruschi and Brady, who stood by her. "In 2011, Kim's husband, her abuser, held her in her house against her will, threatening to kill her as he threw knives at her," Deeley said. "Kim's husband threatened to kill both of her dogs if she tried to get out of the house. And she would not leave without them." Clark says Boleza Parker's experience is not unique. "As many as 25 percent of domestic violence survivors have reported returning to an abusive partner out of concern for their pet," Clark said. Clark explained how the new law would bring financial repercussions to attackers. "If abuse does occur, the law requires the abusers pay for the medical expenses to care for the pet family member," she said. In a room full of advocates and animals waiting to be adopted, the collective hope was to increase, significantly, the number of shelters that accommodate pets. Currently, there are 73 nationwide. Belizo Parker was found dead on her front lawn in 2013. While the PAWS Act comes too late to help her, Deeley explained just how much her sister's dogs meant to her. "Both Bruschi and Brady were lying there with her, protecting her from the cold and licking her face to try and wake her up," she said. President Donald Trump and Democratic lawmakers are in a standoff over funding the government, and the main sticking point is Trump's demand for $5 billion to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Trump said during the campaign he was going to make Mexico pay for the barrier but now he's asking U.S. taxpayers to fund construction. If there's no agreement, a partial government shutdown begins at midnight Friday. Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders signaled on Tuesday that Trump may be willing to work with Congress to avert a shutdown. Here's a look at the status of wall. IS IT A WALL OR A FENCE? In Washington, it depends on who you ask. The president, seeking to show progress on one of his signature campaign promises, has repeatedly said he's begun construction on the wall with smaller amounts of money that Congress approved for border security. The Democrats, seeking to prove they haven't caved to Trump, say they would only fund improvements to border security that include fencing. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan called it a "border wall system" with Mexico that would include natural barriers and steel fencing that agents can see through. Trump tweeted late Tuesday that his administration was building "artistically designed steel slats, so that you can easily see through it." The March funding bill, passed with support from both parties, funded construction that greatly resembles some form of wall. It included $641 million for 33 miles of construction in South Texas' Rio Grande Valley, the busiest area for illegal crossings. In one section, U.S. Customs and Border Protection wants to install 18-foot-tall bollards with narrow spacing between each post. According to an online solicitation, the agency plans to install the bollards atop "a concrete wall to the approximate height of the levee crest." In some places, the wall and the bollards would exceed 30 feet. Contracts have been awarded to build some 33 miles (53 kilometers) of wall in the Rio Grande Valley. Construction is scheduled to start in February. A federal judge last week ordered two hold-out landowners to allow surveyors onto their property after the government took them to court. WHAT IS ALREADY CONSTRUCTED? Overall some type of barrier runs along about 685 miles (1,046 kilometers) of the 1,954-mile (3,126-kilometer) border. But 654 miles (1,052 kilometers) came before Trump took office, constructed under the Secure Fence Act during the Bush administration. As Republicans have since pointed out, a majority of Democrats in the Senate voted for the act, including then-Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. In budget year 2017, Congress provided $292 million to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to build a steel-bollard wall to replace "ineffective" barrier in Southern California, New Mexico and far West Texas. More than 31 of 40 miles have been constructed, and nine remaining miles are scheduled to be completed by 2019. Construction began on 4 miles (6 kilometers) in far West Texas and New Mexico, and 14 miles (22.4 kilometers) of replacement in San Diego should be done by May 2019. ECOLOGY CONCERNS Several groups have filed lawsuits challenging the administration's waivers of environmental laws to build more quickly. The Department of Homeland Security has used authority received in 2005 to bypass reviews and regulations of border wall construction under the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, and two dozen other laws. In several places, planned construction would cut through protected areas or habitat for endangered species. One conservation-related legal challenge was heard on Tuesday in federal court in Washington. The groups argue the project in New Mexico would displace rare wildlife, including the aplomado falcon and Mexican gray wolf. In South Texas, almost 70 percent of the land at the National Butterfly Center, which provides habitat to migrating species, including monarchs, would be cut off by the planned barrier. The nonprofit that operates the butterfly center has also sued. So far, no judge has stopped the government from moving forward. WHAT WOULD THE GOVERNMENT DO WITH THAT $5 BILLION? Homeland Security officials said they would combine previous funding to construct 330 miles of a "border-wall system" along the Mexican border, including 104 miles in the Rio Grande Valley. Sanders said on Fox News on Tuesday there are "other ways that we can get to that $5 billion," including one bill she says would provide $26 billion in border security, including $1.6 billion for the wall. Sanders did not deny that the White House was exploring a way to use Defense Department funds for the remaining cost of the wall. She said there were "a number of different funding sources" that could be used, and she expected they could find a legal way to use defense money. Trump administration officials have been discussing the possibility of using Defense Department funding as a way around a shut down, but there are legal and congressional hurdles. She said: "At the end of the day, we don't want to shut down the government. We want to shut down the border from illegal immigration." When I think of restaurant technology, I think of stoves and dishwashers and maybe fancy molecular gastronomy gadgets like the stuff that former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myrhvold likes to talk about. Apparently, however, even this kind of Modernist Cuisine is now old school when it comes to restaurant tech. The new, new thing is combining the Internet of Things (IoT) with artificial intelligence (AI) to revolutionize the front-of-the-house systems in order to predict demand, track inventory, and improve order and billing accuracy. Overall, IoT promises to help restaurants leverage IoT and AI to streamline operations, boost employee happiness, and innovate in areas beyond creating delicious new dishes. At least, thats what I learned via an email conversation with Aman Narang, president and co-founder of restaurant technology vendor Toast . (I have to admit, I love that name.) [ Read also: 6 ways IoT is transforming retail ] According to Narang, within the next five years, restaurants will use AI and IoT to integrate all electronic systems and predict demand based on past history, weather forecasts, and local events schedules. While diners may not always notice them, large restaurant chains already rely heavily on these systems for everything from ordering ingredients to pricing and creating menu specials. In addition, IoT devices will also begin to implement voice technology to enhance server and cashier accuracy. Restaurant IoT devices: not internet spatulas I wanted to know what kinds of IoT devices restaurants are likely to use over the next five years. Narang replied that the most common candidates will come in the area of payments. This includes mobile-pay tablets for restaurant staff, he says, as well as supporting mobile-pay capabilities on the smartphones and wearables that diners bring into the establishments. Surprisingly, this seems to be a fairly major change. You might think that restaurants would already be working hard to make it easy for customers to pay. But according to Toasts Restaurant Success in 2018 Report , only 38 percent of restaurants have online ordering, just 17 percent offer mobile wallet options, and a paltry 16 percent have a mobile app. Sure, thats probably because many restaurants remain mom-and-pop operations with limited resources, but even many larger establishments and chains have been slow to adopt these technologies. Heck, while theres been a lot of debate lately about the effects of restaurants going cashless, plenty of neighborhood bars and eateries remain cash-only, which doesnt leave a lot of room for IoT payment solutions. Still, Narang remains optimistic. We can already authenticate our mobile phones using our faces on the latest smartphone devices, he says. At Toast, we see a future where we can use our faces to pay on the go via connected devices, creating a new standard for contactless payments for restaurants. AI and IoT go together like bacon and eggs According to Narang, AI delivered via the cloud will be an essential complement to connected IoT devices for restaurants. While this may not be a novel concept in many industries, he says its a relatively new concept for the many restaurants still running their businesses on standalone desktop computers, or even with pen and paper. The computing power of mobile phones, Narang says, will make it easier for restaurants to use the power of AI to predict future events and track trends that may not be immediately obvious, such as when staffing patterns do not match predicted demand. We can see a future where staff may wear a connected device to see when he/she gets the most tips, for example, to optimize both revenues for the restaurant and cash flow for the employee," he says. Thats only the next phase, of course. In addition to the IoT technologies already mentioned, such as contactless payment, Narang expects to see restaurants experimenting with bolder innovations, such as employing augmented reality technology in kitchens to help cooks reduce food waste and improve kitchen efficiency, food safety, and quality. Despite these promised benefits, though, Narang acknowledges the transition may not be easy. Getting restaurants comfortable with futuristic concepts like IoT is an obvious challenge, Narang saysespecially when your idea of innovation is hand-made truffle Spaghetti-Os or pig-ear Pad Thai. The three flyers, one with a digitally altered image of Tirio wearing a burglars mask, were circulated to thousands of McHenry County addresses last spring during the primary. They called Tirio, who ultimately won the election, a crook and accused him of stealing from a private slush fund, hiring cronies and acquainting himself with an alleged child predator and racists. Each referred to Tirio as Crooked Joe. (CNN) China's economy will produce "miracles that will impress the world" in the coming years, President Xi Jinping promised in a high-profile speech Tuesday marking four decades since the country embarked on its earthshaking economic transformation. But Xi's speech was short on specifics, with no concrete policies or plans to tackle China's increasingly complex economic problems, which include weakening growth, rising debt and an ongoing trade war with the United States. In a speech lasting more than 80 minutes in Beijing's Great Hall of the People, Xi praised his country's "hard work, wisdom and courage" and listed its achievements since former leader Deng Xiaoping launched the era of "Reform and Opening" in 1978. Xi pledged to continue liberalizing the economy and boosting private companies, while also strengthening state-owned enterprises. There will be "no turning back" to the policies of the past, he said. But Chinese stock markets fell slightly over the course of Xi's address as it became apparent he wasn't going to reveal how he planned to deal with the country's slowing economy. Xi's speech will have "disappointed" both international and local investors, said Tom Rafferty, a China expert at the Economist Intelligence Unit. "There's a lot of anxiety about near-term economic growth and trade talks with the United States ... it was a bit of a missed opportunity for (Xi) to at least offer something in that direction," he said. One thing Xi made crystal clear that Beijing alone will decide China's future direction. "No one is in a position to dictate to the Chinese people what should or should not be done," he told the audience. 'A new era' "Reform and Opening" is the phrase used to describe the dramatic policy shift that led to China's slow opening to the world under Deng, after decades of famine and chaos under Chairman Mao Zedong. For the first time since the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949, Dengs reforms allowed private businesses to open and farmers to sell excess produce on the market. When Deng addressed the Communist Party leadership on December 18, 1978, in a speech widely considered to be the beginning of the reform era, China's gross domestic product was just under $150 billion. Forty years later, it has surged to more than $12 trillion, trailing only the United States. "'Reform and Opening' is a great revolution in the history of the Chinese people and the Chinese nation ... Four decades on, China has entered a new era," Xi said on Tuesday. On Friday, Xi hosted a large gala in Beijing, with more than 3,000 people, featuring songs and poetry recitals in honor of the anniversary. Before Xi spoke on Tuesday, the Communist Party honored 100 people for their special contribution to "Reform and Opening" including prominent technology entrepreneurs like Alibaba's Jack Ma and Tencent's Ma Huateng. "We have met (difficulties) head on, and gone from strength to strength -- just as a mighty river casts through mountains and surges ahead by gathering the force of hundreds of streams," Xi said. But Rafferty said there were indications Xi was preparing his domestic audience for tougher times ahead in the coming year. "There was a bit of messaging there suggesting things may get a little bit difficult in the near term," he said. China won't stand for 'bullying' One such difficulty is the ongoing trade war with the United States, sparked by US President Donald Trump over concerns at the growing trade imbalance between the two countries and what he says are unfair practices China uses to get hold of American technology. Trump has demanded further reforms to the Chinese economy, including greater access for US companies and a clampdown on intellectual property theft. Xi's speech comes during a 90-day truce between Washington and Beijing while the two sides try to reach a compromise. The Chinese President made no reference to Trump or the ongoing trade negotiations in his speech but said "international fairness and justice" must be upheld going forward. "(We must) oppose the practices of imposing one's will upon others, interfering in others' internal affairs or the strong bullying the weak," he said. Xi may not have telegraphed any specific changes going forward but he made it clear that China would continue to play a large role in the global economy going forward. "China cannot develop itself in isolation of the world but the world also needs China for global prosperity," Xi said. This story was first published on CNN.com, "Xi Jinping promises miracles, but fails to deliver specifics." Courtesy of Rob Dempster The staff of the Greater New Milford Spectrum and its sister paper, The News-Times, as well as those at Hearst Connecticut Media, wish residents of the Greater New Milford area very happy holidays and an enjoyable, healthy and fulfilling New Year. On the Village Green during a recent snow shower are, from the left, vice president of news and digital content Matt DeRienzo, media consultant Frankie Caouette, senior account manager Louann Hutchby, reporter Katrina Koerting and writer/photographer Deborah Rose. Missing is assistant managing editor Keila Torres Ocasio, advertising director Stephen Spinosa and publisher and president Paul Barbetta. NEW MILFORD Residents and the public works department are at odds over whether to keep the bridge on Cherniske Road one lane or upgrade it to two. Replacing the bridge would cost about $600,000. Residents argue changing it to two lanes will make it more dangerous because its the only check that slows down drivers right now. They also worry it will change the rural nature of the scenic road and promote more traffic in the area, including 18-wheelers. Director of Public Works Mike Zarba said not changing it to two lanes is a liability to the town and town engineer Dan Stanton said making it two lanes to match the rest of the road will make the bridge safer. Zarba said the bridge was built in 1930 and probably wont be replaced again until 2100 after this. This is our chance to replace it, he said. We can choose to leave it the same as a one-lane, functionally obsolete bridge but structurally sound. You could upgrade it to a two-lane structure that the rest of the roadway exists as. Because its a scenic road, an advisory committee will be appointed at the next council meeting. It will include two homeowners along the road, a public works department employee, a town council member, a member of the planning commission and someone with planning or economic development. The issue will also be referred to the planning commission at the next meeting. The current bridge has concrete abutments. There also are wooden posts and a steel railing along the road. Its now 17.3 feet wide, several feet less than the road on either side. Its a structurally deficient bridge and a functionally obsolete bridge, Zarba said. The public works department is recommending replacing it with a double box culvert thats 27.5 inches wide. Its a typical design that we do, Stanton said. Its expected to cost $600,000 and will be paid for using town money. The bridge was included in the towns capital plan in 2010. A firm was selected from bids in fall 2017 and the preliminary engineering work began that winter. Since then, there have been a few meetings with residents, including one last month where the preliminary designs were presented. Some of the residents who live on Cherniske spoke out against the project during the public comment portion of the meeting. Tim Latta said he wont let his children play in his side yard because of how cars drive down the road. He said three cars have already come off the road, crashing through their mail box, plantings and landing in the stone wall. For me, its a safety issue, he said, adding the bridge is a buffer. We like that its a scenic road and that 18 wheelers arent coming through on a regular basis. Adrienne Aurichio, another Cherniske Road resident, said shes starting to see those 18 wheelers though and got stuck behind one for 15 minutes as it tried to turn around. She said the bridge keeps the trucks from racing though. She also said she reached out to the state and officials there who said there was no reason it couldnt remain a one-lane bridge. Several council members wondered why the town could not replace the bridge with another one-lane style based on the residents concerns. Youre inherently going to spend public money to not improve what is to be a known problematic safety issue, which is the narrowing of a road at a bridge, Zarba said. Francis said the aesthetics also need to be considered, especially because there are similar bridges in other parts of town. We are a rural town and we like to stay that way, she said. Its the beauty of our town. Councilman Tom Esposito said he understands both sides of the argument but he said keeping the bridge one lane isnt the way to prevent people from speeding and keeping that a quiet part of town. To replace a bridge as a speed control, or traffic control, makes no sense to me, he said, adding there are enforcement methods they should use instead. In Afghanistan's most underdeveloped regions, attitudes towards education and child marriage appear to have changed significantly since the overthrow of the Taliban government in 2002, according to a study led by researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The study, published online November 22 in the Journal of Adolescent Health, included interviews with nearly 1,400 Afghans aged 12-15 and their parents, in relatively poor rural districts of the country. The responses indicated that in just one generation, getting married and leaving school in childhood have become much less favored options. Virtually all of the adolescent respondents were unmarried, and about 75 percent were still in school--in contrast to their parents, who commonly married in their mid-teens and usually had no formal education. "This study was conducted in some of the most educationally and socially disadvantaged provinces in Afghanistan, and yet we found that there have been remarkably positive shifts in attitudes among boys and girls and their parents," says study senior author Robert Blum, MD, PhD, professor in the Department of Population, Family and Reproductive Health and director of the Johns Hopkins Urban Health Institute. At the time of the Taliban's defeat in 2002, early marriage and minimal formal education were the norms in rural Afghanistan. The United Nations Development Program estimated a mean educational attainment of just 6.5 years of school. Girls in particular were discouraged from pursuing much formal education, and frequently ended their brief education by getting married. The fall of the Taliban allowed modern, liberalizing influences into Afghanistan, from television and the internet to global nongovernmental organizations. Blum and colleagues undertook the study to get a better picture of how cultural attitudes have been reshaped in the least developed parts of the country, particularly with regard to education and child marriage. For the study, surveys were conducted by a team of experienced Afghan social researchers in Kandahar and five other rural provinces--some of which still simmer with Taliban insurgent activity; insurgents in Badghis province twice tried unsuccessfully to capture the research team. The final sample used for analysis included 910 Afghans aged 12-15 and 454 parents. The findings generally suggested that a liberalizing shift has been underway. Most boys and girls indicated that they consider education valuable, not just for themselves but also for the opposite sex. The parents, though they mostly had no formal education themselves (66 percent of the men, 93 percent of the women), were also virtually unanimous in indicating that they expect their children--both boys and girls--to at least complete high school. As for child marriage, about 38 percent of parents indicated that daughters should postpone marriage until after high school, while about 32 percent replied that they would be supportive of earlier marriage. Fathers were more likely to advocate postponement (51 percent) than mothers (28 percent). These current parental attitudes appeared to indicate a shift from the time when the parents were teens themselves--their average age at marriage was just 16 for the women and 20 for the men. Among the young people interviewed, only six in the entire sample--all girls--were already married, and there seemed to be widespread awareness of the drawbacks of early marriage, including the limiting of future educational opportunities and increases in the risk of domestic violence for girls. "Behaviors tend to change more slowly than attitudes, but attitudes are the precursors of behavioral change and I think there is a lot here to inspire optimism," Blum says. Somewhat less positive results were found in the conclusions of a second study examining attitudes towards interpersonal violence, which to some extent has long been embedded in Afghan culture. Based on the same interviews by the same research team, the study was published online in the American Journal of Public Health on October 25. Although large majorities of the interviewed adolescents and their parents indicated that violent behaviors were unacceptable when they were simply listed by the researchers, most did find them justifiable when specific circumstances were mentioned. About 71 percent of the adolescents considered it acceptable for a husband to hit his wife--if she went out without her husband, for example, or refused to have sex with him--though far fewer (48 percent) endorsed a wife's hitting her husband. Here again, parents' responses closely matched their children's: About 68 percent found acceptable, for at least one scenario, a husband beating his wife, and most also accepted parents hitting sons or daughters (71 percent) and teachers beating students (58 percent). Curiously, wives were more likely than their husbands to find justification for wife-beating (75 percent vs. 59 percent), while husbands were more likely than wives to justify husband-beating (44 percent vs. 35 percent). To the researchers, the findings suggest a continuing need for programs starting in childhood to make Afghans less tolerant of interpersonal violence and less likely to resort to it. In five-year-old children, the risk for overweight is almost twice as high if they at 12 months had consumed milk cereal drinks every day, a study in the journal Acta Paediatrica shows. "Milk cereal drinks are not bad as such; how it's used is the problem. That is, when it's seen not as a meal but as an extra, to supplement other food," says Bernt Alm. Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. The researchers behind the study have previously linked consumption of milk cereal drinks at age six months to high body mass index (BMI) at ages one year and one and a half years. The study now presented is of the same group of children, several years later. Various risk factors The follow-up study comprised 1,870 children in Halland County, Sweden, whose particulars were taken from the Halland Health and Growth Study. Height and weight data have been recorded by the child health services, while the information on their food and beverage intake comes from the parents. Among the five-year-olds, 11.6 percent were overweight and 2.3 percent had obesity. The risk for overweight or obesity proved to be almost double (factor 1.94) if the children had formerly, at age 12 months, been daily consumers of milk cereal drinks. This risk elevation was independent of other factors. Examples of other conditions found to make overweight more likely were if the parents had low educational attainment, if they smoked, and if there was a history of obesity in the family. Heredity was the strongest single factor. Reasons not to use milk cereal drink In Sweden, children commonly drink milk cereal drinks once to five times a day from age six months. In the study in question, 85 percent of the children had been daily consumers at 12 months of age. The Swedish milk cereal drinks consists of milk and flour, and is nutritionally close to porridge, and usually enriched with vitamins and minerals. Similar products exist elsewhere in the world, but are not as common. "Milk cereal drinks are nutritious and good, and has been used for hundreds of years in Sweden. Getting rid of it isn't a panacea. But if, for example, the child has other risk factors for overweight, such as heredity, perhaps not using milk cereal drinks should be considered," Alm says. A network of carbohydrate binding proteins - so-called galectins - plays an important role in the degeneration of cartilage in osteoarthritis. A research group at the MedUni Vienna was able to demonstrate this correlation, in cooperation with international study partners. In osteoarthritis, certain galectins are produced by the cartilage cells themselves and accelerate the degeneration process of the cartilage matrix. Whilst galectins do play a role in cartilage development during childhood growth, they essentially do not occur in healthy adult cartilage. The researchers working with Stefan Togel from the Department of Orthopedics and Trauma Surgery at the MedUni Vienna/Vienna General Hospital have now discovered that the quantity of galectin-8 found in the cell samples was correspondingly greater with an increasing severity of cartilage degeneration. After its production, this protein is released by the cartilage cells and connects with the cell surfaces, where it causes inflammatory processes and accelerates the matrix degradation of the cartilage tissue. Other galectins, which are otherwise able to perform various functions in the cell, apparently also play an accelerating role here. Research in the field of glycobiology In previous studies, Stefan Togel's research group has succeeded in demonstrating for the first time the functional significance of glycobiology for the pathogenesis of osteoarthritis, and has identified galectin-1 and galectin-3 as being inflammation accelerators. Glycobiology essentially describes the structure and function of glycans (sugar chains), which are able to influence a broad spectrum of biological processes through interaction with carbohydrate binding proteins (e.g. galectins). "Our approach in researching the role of glycobiology in osteoarthritis and other degenerative cartilage diseases is very new", explains Stefan Togel. "We are essentially treading new ground with our studies." The aim is new therapy approaches in the treatment of osteoarthritis, which will halt its advancement. Because once cartilage tissue is lost, it can no longer be regenerated. For this purpose, it could be possible to develop antagonists for the respective galectins, which will prevent them from attaching to the cell surfaces. "Galectins may also be suitable as biomarkers, which will enable an early diagnosis through a blood test or with a sample of the synovial fluid", explains Togel. Osteoarthritis - a widespread disease Osteoarthritis is a degenerative joint disease, which leads to a change in the structure of cartilage and bone, and can even result in joint deformity. It usually results from many years of over-straining. Joint diseases are among the leading causes of chronic pain and immobility in old age, and constitute a serious socio-economic factor in the health sector due to the increasing life expectancy of the population. No treatment has been available to date, which could halt the progressive loss of cartilage tissue in an osteoarthritic joint, or even reverse this. When people seek help at a drug treatment center for an opioid addiction, concerns about having contracted hepatitis C are generally low on their list. They've often reached a crisis point in their lives, said Marie Sutton, the CEO of Imagine Hope, a consulting group that provides staff training and technical assistance to facilitate testing for the liver-damaging virus at more than 30 drug treatment centers in Georgia. "They just want to handle [their drug problem]," she said. "Sometimes they don't have the bandwidth to take on too many other things." Even though health care facilities that serve people who use drugs are well-positioned to initiate screening, too often that is not happening, recent studies have shown. Not testing these patients for hepatitis C is an enormous missed opportunity, public health experts agree. "It's a disease that can be cured the moment we identify somebody," said Tom Nealon, president and CEO of the American Liver Foundation. "Not testing is incomprehensible when you look at what hepatitis C does to their bodies and their livers." As the number of people who inject drugs has soared, the rate of hepatitis C infection, frequently tied to sharing needles, has climbed steeply, too. People who are infected with hepatitis C can go for years without symptoms, so they may not have any inkling that they're sick. That delayed onset makes screening important, advocates say, since people may unwittingly infect others. Screening people who misuse drugs for the deadly virus is a commonsense strategy to get people cured and break the cycle of transmission. But there are obstacles sometimes a lack of money, staff or other resources. "Reimbursement rates for hepatitis C testing often don't match the cost," said Andrew Reynolds, hepatitis C and harm reduction manager at Project Inform, an advocacy group. If patients test positive, they need to be linked to treatment, and financial support for staffing to do that is often limited, he said. Only 27.5 percent of 12,166 substance abuse facilities reported offering testing for hepatitis C in 2017, according to research published on the blog for the journal Health Affairs in October. It is one of the first studies to look at this issue since the federal government began reporting on testing for HIV and hepatitis C in its national survey of substance abuse and treatment services in 2016. When researchers narrowed their analysis to the much smaller number of opioid treatment programs that are federally certified to use methadone and other drugs in treatment, a higher, but still not overwhelming, proportion just over 63 percent said they offered screening for hepatitis C. "We certainly thought the numbers would be higher," said Asal Sayas, a co-author of the analysis and director of government affairs at amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research. "Testing is one of the most fundamental forms of prevention." In primary care settings, the situation sometimes isn't much better, even when patients have a diagnosed "opioid-use disorder." An analysis by Boston Medical Center researchers of nearly 270,000 medical records of people aged 13 to 21 who visited federally qualified health centers from 2012 to 2017 found that 36 percent of the 875 patients with that diagnosis were tested for hepatitis C. "Even in a setting with an identified risk factor in opioid-use disorder, too few youths are being screened for hepatitis C," said Dr. Rachel Epstein, a postdoctoral research fellow in infectious diseases at Boston Medical Center and a co-author of the study, which was presented at the annual meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society of America in early October. Hepatitis C is a virus that causes inflammation to the liver, in some cases leading to scarring, liver cancer and death. It is transmitted through blood, including contaminated needles that people share when they inject drugs. The initial test for hepatitis C is an inexpensive blood test to check for antibodies in the blood that indicate exposure to the virus. If that antibody test is positive, a second test is necessary to find out if the virus is circulating in the bloodstream, which would mean someone is infected with the virus. The secondtest can cost several hundred dollars, experts say. To be sure, some federally qualified health centers have made testing for hepatitis C a priority. Clinicians at two community health centers run by Philadelphia FIGHT which was established as an AIDS service organization test many of their patients who are at high risk because of injection drug use or unsafe sexual practices, such as having sex with an infected partner. The screenings are often done on an annual basis, with a reminder to the medical personnel in the patient's electronic medical record. "That's something pretty basic that we've done in our community health centers to make sure we're testing people and providing a cure," said Dr. Stacey Trooskin, director of viral hepatitis programs at the FIGHT centers and clinical assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. Among at least 3.5 million people who have the disease, most are baby boomers who were infected before routine screening of donated blood began in the early 1990s. In recent years, as the drug epidemic has taken hold, new infections have been concentrated among young people who inject drugs, in particular those between ages 18 and 29, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Complicating the effort to get people screened is the fact that many of the people who enroll in drug treatment programs are uninsured, said Imagine Hope's Sutton. In states that have expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, the program generally picks up the tab for hepatitis C testing and treatment, though often with restrictions. But 14 states, including Georgia, haven't expanded that coverage for adults with incomes up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level ($16,753 for one person). Insurance coverage isn't the only challenge. If people have to come back to a clinic for the second test, chances are they may fall through the cracks and not get that follow-up. When a patient tests positive, a nurse or counselor at the drug treatment center, who is likely overbooked working with patients to address their addiction, must carve out time to explain this new diagnosis and talk through treatment options. "There's a whole system of care that needs to be built for these people and, unlike HIV, it doesn't exist for hepatitis C at this time," Sutton said. Like many other clinics around the country, hepatitis C testing at Georgia drug treatment centers is supported with funding from the Focus program, sponsored by drugmaker Gilead the first company to offer a new class of highly effective drugs that generally cure hepatitis C in three months or less with few side effects. Gilead didn't respond to requests for comment. Finding resources to pay for treatment is also difficult. The high costs of the new drugs when they were introduced led some public and private insurers to strictly limit access. But, in recent years, drug prices have come down as more drugs hit the market and many states have loosened Medicaid restrictions. For example, New Mexico's Medicaid program doesn't require that people be sick or abstain from using illicit drugs or alcohol for a time before starting treatment. Still, "hepatitis C testing remains out of reach for many because their providers aren't aware that their patients can get treated," said Kimberly Page, an epidemiologist and professor of internal medicine at the University of New Mexico who focuses on hepatitis C. Kindred Healthcare, LLC ("Kindred") and Netsmart today announced a partnership to create a unique, technology-driven clinical platform that surpasses the traditional boundaries of electronic medical records ("EMRs") and aligns with the needs of the evolving value-based care environment. Through this partnership, the companies expect to build and support integrated post-acute solutions, improve care outcomes and address gaps in patient care. Kindred and Netsmart will combine teams from both organizations and utilize the Netsmart portfolio of enterprise solutions. Leveraging these solutions and Kindred's longstanding experience in long-term acute care ("LTAC") hospitals, rehabilitation and care management, the partnership will create a clinical platform that meets the distinct requirements of aging services and post-acute care. Together, Kindred and Netsmart expect to rapidly expand the functionality of Kindred's existing proprietary medical records solutions to address needs in information exchange and care coordination at Kindred's LTAC hospitals, inpatient rehabilitation hospitals and Lacuna Health, a leading nationwide provider of registered nurse-led care engagement solutions. The combination of teams will begin immediately and expect to start deploying the solutions over the next several months. "As a leader in the use of EMRs in LTAC hospitals, we recognize the need to adapt as the healthcare industry quickly moves to a value-based care model," said Benjamin A. Breier, Kindred's President and Chief Executive Officer. "Netsmart has a proven track record of innovation, experience connecting major acute care hospitals with post-acute services and a shared vision of future healthcare needs. Together, we will have more than 2,500 years of post-acute and software development experience and be well positioned to create a next generation, fully integrated post-acute platform." Charlie Wardrip, Kindred's Chief Information Officer, said, "Kindred is committed to developing clinical, rehabilitation and care management innovations and solutions for the most medically-complex patients. As we combine the resources and expertise of our two organizations, our collaboration with Netsmart will strengthen our ability to provide coordinated, quality-driven patient care across the continuum. We look forward to working with Netsmart to capitalize on this unique opportunity." "This partnership advances our objective of developing a clinical platform for providers that are integrated with post-acute care," said Netsmart CEO Mike Valentine. "These provider organizations require comprehensive platforms built to meet their unique needs, and we look forward to addressing that market opportunity by collaborating with Kindred. This partnership has the potential to advance the entire market and we couldn't be more excited about the opportunity to work with Kindred in this effort." Stay-at-home dads might find their spirit animal in the smooth guardian frog of Borneo. A new pair of research papers authored by an investigator at the University of Kansas shows the male of the smooth guardian frog species (Limnonectes palavanensis) is a kind of amphibian "Mr. Mom" -- an exemplar of male parental care in the animal kingdom. "Sex-role reversal is basically when a male takes the role that you usually see with females in other species," said Johana Goyes Vallejos, a postdoctoral research associate with the Herpetology Division at KU's Biodiversity Institute, who led both studies. "The male provides care for the offspring. The females do the displaying part -- like a peacock that has beautiful feathers -- the female has those ornaments or behaviors you usually see with males." The papers reflect three years' worth of fieldwork in Borneo, a vast island in the southwestern Pacific Ocean split among the nations of Malaysia, Brunei and Indonesia. Goyes Vallejos observed the frogs both in the wild and in outdoor enclosures at a field station. In one of the papers, published in the Journal of Natural History, Goyes Vallejos offers new details about the prolonged parental duties of the male smooth guardian frog, behavior that had been studied very little until now. "In frogs, male parenting is more common," said Goyes Vallejos. "But in other frog species, males take care of eggs and offspring, but they continue to call to attract other females -- they aren't missing opportunities to mate with females just because they have a clutch of eggs. So, sometimes they have two or three clutches of eggs from different females. But in the case of the smooth guardian frog, they only take care of one clutch and they don't call at that time -- they aren't interested in attracting other females; they're very faithful fathers. That's unusual. Clearly, other frog species can do it, so why don't they? There's some reversal in the sex roles where the father becomes a very devoted parent while the female can go on to mate multiple times." According to the KU researcher, the smooth guardian frogs are primarily terrestrial, living in the leaf litter on the floor of the tropical rainforest where they're most active at night, feeding on insects and other arthropods. "Males produce advertisement calls to attract females to their location," said Goyes Vallejos. "When females approach, if they like each other, they have a mating ritual. The female lays 15 to 20 eggs on the ground, then the male is the one that stays with the clutch of eggs and the female takes off -- possibly to mate with other males. The males stay with the eggs for 11 days on average, and when they hatch the tadpoles scramble on the back of the male. The male takes them throughout the forest to find small pools to be deposited where they can finish their development." In the second paper, published in the journal Ethology, Goyes Vallejos wanted to know more about the kinds of strategies males used for depositing the tadpoles in these pools. "They can be small puddles left by the rain, a fallen log or a tree stump filled with water -- really any small body of water," she said. "We don't know for sure, but it generally takes between three to four weeks for tadpoles to become frogs." For the first half of the study, Goyes Vallejos observed male frogs in the study area as they searched for naturally available pools where their piggybacking tadpoles could develop into fully fledged frogs. "I found they were very sparse and they couldn't find places where they could deposit tadpoles," she said. "This told me these tadpole pools are very rare and the frogs had to travel a long time. They can't put them anywhere -- it needs to have a lot of food; they feed on the little algae that grow on the fallen leaves in the bottom of the water. And it must be permanent enough so the tadpoles have time to develop. These places are scarce. The males are on a mission -- they need to find these pools." For the second half of the study, the KU researcher created artificial pools in the forest floor that each was a few inches deep and about the diameter of a dinner plate -- perfect nurseries for tadpoles. She wanted to see if, given identical pools, other factors might influence the male guardian frogs' pool-selection process. "I measured different variables like how much leaf litter was around, how steep was the terrain, and how much coverage from the forest did it have?" said Goyes Vallejos. "I found it was more probable for a male to deposit his tadpoles on flatter rather than steep terrain. My explanation was that possibly males were looking for places that would hold water -- you wouldn't go places where pools empty out because the terrain is too steep and the tadpoles would be washed out under heavy rains, which are very common in the rainforest. Instead, they looked for places permanent enough for tadpoles to develop to completion." Using the artificial pools for choice experiments, the KU researcher sought to find out if the presence of other organisms --predators or competitors -- affected frogs' selection of tadpole pools. "In most of the literature on frogs, you find that parents avoid competitors, and especially predators, at all costs, so that was my prediction," Goyes Vallejos said. "In my case, the predator was dragonfly larvae -- quintessential tadpole predators. The experiment consisted of having two artificial pools, one next to the other. One had predators, and one didn't. I looked to see if the male would avoid predators, and I expected males would deposit tadpoles in the empty pools without the predator. I was very surprised when I found they actually split the number of tadpoles between two pools. Say he had 14 tadpoles -- then he would put seven in one and seven in the other. That was the most common strategy. In 12 deposition events I recorded, five out of 12 times they deposited the tadpoles split the number of tadpoles in both pools." In the other experiment, Goyes Vallejos wanted to see if tadpoles of the same species already in one pool would affect deposition of new tadpoles. "Maybe they'd see them as competitors or maybe see them as a sign they were safe there," she said. "In this case as well, the males split the tadpoles in the two pools -- it didn't matter if there were tadpoles of same species or predators present in the pool-- they split them between the pools. Goyes Vallejos said the experiments showed "the splitting behavior is the same as not putting all your tadpoles in one basket." "If these pools aren't very common, and if you find them, you need to take advantage of this resource," she said. "Presumably, the males divide the number of tadpoles in different pools and hope that at least one pool will be permanent enough for the tadpoles to develop into frogs. It doesn't matter if a predator is in there -- try to avoid it. It's better to have someplace for your tadpoles than no place at all. Tadpoles don't move a lot, so maybe they're relying on that behavior not to be affected by predators. The alternative is the males weren't aware there was a predator, but typically, frogs are good at detecting predators in the water. Those are a matter for further study, but in general, they're trying to find as many places as possible to deposit tadpoles." Goyes Vallejos, who grew up in the mountains of southwest Colombia, became interested in frog research after earning her undergraduate degree in her home country when she had an opportunity to study frog signaling at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. "I fell in love with them," she said. "I was blown away by the diversity of frogs, how they vocalize and all the different strategies they have to find each other and mate. One thing led to another, I moved to Connecticut to earn my Ph.D. at the University of Connecticut, and during that time I spent several years in the jungles of Borneo looking for frogs." In cell biology, men and women are unequal: men have an X chromosome, while women have two. How can we get around this difference? Geneticists from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, turned to some historic research dating from the 1960s to sequence skin and blood cells one by one. They observed how the second X chromosome in females gradually becomes inactive in order to avoid an overdose of genes encoded by the X. They also found that several genes bypassed this inactivation, which varied according to the tissue and life phases of the cell. The UNIGE research explains the inequalities noted between men and women regarding genetic diseases. You can read all about the results in the journal PNAS. DNA is made up of genes that are then expressed by RNA before ultimately being translated into proteins. RNA, therefore, is the intermediate product of the proteins present in our cells. "Our laboratory has designed a pioneering technique, called single-cell allele specific RNA sequencing, which means RNA molecules can be sequenced cell by cell for the first time and not by tissue in its entirety," explains Christelle Borel, a researcher in the Department of Genetics and Development in UNIGE's Faculty of Medicine. This detailed analysis can be used to quantify what happens in each cell individually and, it follows, gene by gene. The team headed by Stylianos Antonarakis, emeritus professor in the Faculty of Medicine, investigated the random inactivation of one of the two X chromosomes in women, which was discovered back in 1960 by Mary F. Lyon. The British researcher was the first person to demonstrate that women have two X chromosomes, unlike men, and that one of them stays silent through a mechanism for correcting the gene dosage, compensating for the presence in women of an extra copy of the genes located on the X chromosome. In the 1990s, however, scientists found that some genes in the inactivated X chromosome avoided this inactivation. But how? Gradual cell-by-cell inactivation The UNIGE researchers sequenced 935 skin cells and 48 blood cells from five different women so they could analyse the phenomenon in more detail. "We first individualized the cells and ascertained the genes expressed in each cell," says Federico Santoni, former researcher in the Department of Genetics and Development of the Faculty of Medicine of the UNIGE and now researcher at the CHUV in Lausanne. "Then we sequenced the genome of the five women and with bioinformatics, we were able to identify which X chromosome in each cell was activated and which was silent." Until recently, experimental techniques did not have the sensitivity needed to precisely measure the gene expression rates that escape inactivation. Now, however, thanks to the experimental and bioinformatic approach developed by UNIGE, the geneticists have identified 55 of these genes, including five that were still unknown. "Our main discovery was that no X chromosome in all the cells analysed is 100% inactive; the rate varies from cell to cell", continues professor Antonarakis. The inactivation of the X chromosome is initiated by the expression of the XIST gene. "This gene produces small RNA molecules that surround one of the two X chromosomes, forcing the genes on this chromosome to stay silent. We've shown that the more XIST RNA molecules there are on this inactivated chromosome, the more silent its genes are and vice-versa. The expression of this gene explains the variable level of inactivation between the cells". XIST is, therefore, the key gene for the inactivation of one of the two X chromosomes in women's cells. But it isn't the only one. "For the first time, we uncovered five other genes that play an important role in the X chromosome inactivation mechanism," says Borel. "This will help us understand what happens at the molecular level during inactivation. Even more importantly, it means we can expand our investigations to learn more about the differences between men and women across a range of diseases." X inactivation: a new understanding for genetic diseases? There are many diseases that are caused by genes located on the X chromosome, such as haemophilia, intellectual disability syndromes and developmental disorders. "During our research, we also discovered that X chromosome inactivation varied according to the different life phases of a cell and according to cell type," adds professor Antonarakis. "This could account for the differences seen in the severity of certain diseases between patients, the age of onset of and why some tissues are targeted by diseases". Based on these results, the researchers will be able to highlight the mechanisms behind the heterogeneity of genetic diseases. Zero TB in Tibetan Kids outreach program aims to eliminate the disease in an entire population in India In a tuberculosis screening and treatment initiative covering the entire population of Tibetan refugee schoolchildren in northern India, a team directed by researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine and the University of Wisconsin says it has found not only a startlingly high prevalence of TB disease and infection, but also a potentially workable strategy to eliminate the disease in a large, high-risk group. "Our innovative initiative includes population-level implementation of TB preventive therapy as part of a multipronged strategy to control and eliminate TB in an at-risk population in India," says lead study author Kunchok Dorjee, Ph.D., M.B.B.S. Dorjee is a research associate at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and director of the Zero TB in Tibetan Kids project--an initiative implemented locally by the Delek Hospital in Dharamsala and the Central Tibetan Administration health and education departments. "With the support of local leadership and community mobilization, including support from His Holiness the Dalai Lama, we have demonstrated that TB control can be achieved on a population level. The findings provide a benchmark to measure and compare progress toward elimination in the future." Findings from the first year of the initiative were published in the December issue of the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. Tibetan refugees in India have high rates of TB, and many children live in congregate settings such as boarding schools, say the researchers. For the study, program staff members first met with parents, educators and home mothers at boarding schools to gain their support. Then, they screened children in Tibetan schools class by class. Using the schools' administrative records, the researchers ensured that every student and staff member was screened--they were screened for TB symptoms such as cough, fever and night sweats, and were interviewed about TB exposure history. Those presenting with TB symptoms were further evaluated using chest X-ray and laboratory testing. People with no prior history of TB also underwent tuberculin skin testing, a field-friendly screening tool that allows clinicians to diagnose TB infection by measuring immune response. Between April 2017 and March 2018, the Zero TB in Tibetan Kids project conducted school-based screening for TB disease and infection among a total of 5,391 children and 786 staff members in seven boarding schools and four day schools in the state of Himachal Pradesh. Children ranged in age from 5 to 19. Active TB disease was found in 46 children and one staff member, for a prevalence in children of 853 per 100,000. An active TB case-finding campaign by the Johns Hopkins Center for Tuberculosis Research and the Delek Hospital in Dharamsala from 2011 to 2013 identified a prevalence of 394 cases per 100,000 among Tibetan schoolchildren in India, much lower than the current findings. For the current study, the researchers say that nearly one in five children in this population has TB infection. Worldwide, an estimated one in 28 children has TB infection according to a 2014 Lancet Global Health study. TB infection without disease was detected in 930 of 5,234 schoolchildren (18 percent) and 334 of 634 staff members (53 percent). TB rates among children in the boarding schools in Dharamsala (which is in Himachal Pradesh) are about five to eight times higher than the average for India, China or globally. The rates are higher for a variety of reasons, says Dorjee, who was born and raised in the Tibetan refugee community. About 26 percent of students reported exposure to someone with active TB in the previous two years at school. All those found to have active TB were treated with a standard six-month course of antibiotics, while those with drug-resistant TB received a prolonged course of combination drugs. A three-month course of daily preventive therapy (isoniazid and rifampicin) was provided to 799 of 930 (86 percent) schoolchildren and 101 of 334 (30 percent) staff members with TB infection. The Zero TB program paid for the study drugs, with support from the Johns Hopkins Center for Tuberculosis Research. While treatment adherence tends to be a challenge in many populations impacted by TB, most participants in this study (nearly 95 percent, or 857) successfully completed their drug regimen for TB prevention. Less than 2 percent of the participants (12 people) were unable to complete the full recommended therapy, mostly due to side effects. Therapy was ongoing for 3 percent of the participants at the time of the study's publication. The program staff is now conducting follow-up examinations of schoolchildren and staff members every six months, Dorjee says. In 2018, the program was expanded to screen Tibetan refugees living in monasteries and nunneries in the region. "Through comprehensive approaches that include TB case-finding, treatment and preventive therapy, TB control in high-burden settings is achievable," says the project's principal investigator Richard Chaisson, M.D., professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Tuberculosis Research. After China invaded Tibet in the 1950s, many Tibetans fled to India and settled in exile in Dharamsala, now home to the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan central government, Dorjee explains. It is unknown whether the community previously had any immunity to TB, but exposure to the new environment in India, plus communal living in refugee areas and schools, and cold winter weather discouraging ventilation, provided a means for the infection to spread easily. Approximately 1 million children worldwide develop tuberculosis and 250,000 die of the disease annually, the authors note. The average cost to treat the condition for a patient in the U.S. is $19,000 for drug-susceptible TB and $164,000 for multidrug-resistant TB. Globally, the average treatment cost is $1,224 for drug-susceptible TB and $7,141 for drug-resistant TB. At the 2018 iGEM Gaint Jamboree, the team of the University of Marburg won the Grand Prize in the overgraduate section with their project VibriGens Accelerating SynBio. At the end of October the team received its award in Boston, USA. In response to the great demand, the students presented again their project on Tuesday 27th of November in front of a selected audience at Campus Marburg. The company BMG LABTECH supported the team by providing a CLARIOstar microplate reader. Dr Silke Angersbach overhanding the CLARIOstar in summer 2018 Over 200 interested participants attended the public lecture at the magnificent auditorium of the Philipps-University. Surrounded by ancient paintings and chandeliers, the team presented its award-winning work. Dr. Silke Angersbach, who acted as contact person from BMG LABTECH and introduced the device to the students, attended the talk as well. We are very pleased that we were able to support such a successful team. The students achieved fantastic results. Sincere congratulations." Dr. Silke Angersbach, BMG LABTECH The young scientists focused on the bacteria Vibrio natriegens as an alternative to E. coli bacteria. In their project, the team developed three different cell lines: VibriClone, VibriExpress, and VibriInteract. The main advantage of these organisms is their rapid growth. Since Vibrio natriegens duplicate every seven minutes, experimental times can potentially be shortened, hence reducing lab costs. By awarding the team, the jury honours the project as forward-looking. The CLARIOstar was the key to the success of our project. We were able to generate foundational characterization data for genetic parts in V. natriegens, which is a crucial part for establishing V. natriegens as the next workhorse for synthetic biology. By characterizing all the different parts, we were able to win the special prize categorie "best part collection" and in the end the Grand Prize of the iGEM competition." Rene Inckemann from Philipps-University Marburg Source: https://www.bmglabtech.com/team-marburg-celebrates-victory-at-igem-giant-jamboree-2018-competition-in-the-overgraduate-section/ The healthcare industry collects and generates enormous amounts of data that has to be analyzed, processed and interpreted to provide insights that will shape intelligent decisions. Biostatistics, the application of statistics to life sciences data, plays a key role in this process, helping to test hypotheses, perform statistical analyses and make accurate inferences. Biostatistics experts are usually well-versed in statistical programs, tools and techniques such as R, STATA, SPSS, SAS and Excel. They help design clinical trials, assess the impact of public health programs, measure the efficacy of drugs, and develop evidence-based healthcare. Image credit: pattarawat/Shutterstock Here are six ways biostatistics is changing healthcare research, policy and delivery: 1. Clinical Trials The medical industry is continuously innovating, and new treatments are being developed at top speed. Before a treatment is offered to the public, it first undergoes a series of tests and trials that validate its safety and efficiency. These studies involve data collection, analysis and interpretation. A biostatistician helps design the study, optimize the sample size, choose appropriate data collection methods, eliminate coincidences and remove misleading information from data. Biostatistics specialists draw accurate conclusions in comparison studies, which test if a new or alternative drug is better than the existing ones in the market. 2. Public Health Programs Biostatistics experts use statistical techniques to assess the impact of public health programs and initiatives being undertaken by governments, nonprofits and hospitals. They develop robust studies and sampling techniques that help researchers understand how well an initiative is performing and whether that model can be replicated in other areas. Recently, Jessica Adams, a healthcare social worker, used Kolabtree to hire a experienced scientist who designed a statistical model that helped her assess the impact of an HIV-awareness festival in Uganda. 3. Epidemiological Studies There are various factors that influence the cause, outbreak and distribution of a disease. Epidemiological studies aim to identify these factors by collecting various data related to the disease, and deriving the link between the cause and effect. Based on the outcome, public health policies and preventive healthcare measures are developed. Understanding the correlation between the variables requires the skill of a biostatistics specialist, who can extract the most meaningful information from the data. Historically, statistical evidence has always filled in the missing link: for example, the 1954 publication of the results of a study led by Richard Doll and Austin Bradford Hill lent very strong statistical support to the link between smoking and lung cancer. Data analysts and statisticians also played a key role in understanding the Ebola epidemic in West Africa through statistical analyses and visualization techniques. 4. Estimating the Severity of a Disease and Survival Rates Survival statistics help estimate how long a terminally ill patient will live and guides treatment accordingly. For patients affected with cancer, these statistics (typically given as five-year relative rates) help understand the best treatment option, chances of remission, chances of survival post-remission and the chances of living a disease-free life after treatment. Biostatistics experts are able to put forth numbers drawn from the careful examination of previous studies, providing both doctor and patient with reference data. 5. Meta-Analysis and Evidence-Based Medicine Biostatistics also plays a huge role in systematic reviews and meta-analysis of medical data, which can in turn be useful in developing evidence-based healthcare. Meta-analysis is a structured study design which evaluates all the previous medical research published on a specific topic. Drawing conclusions from these studies require integration of individual results and outcomes into reliable findings that will guide further research. For example, meta-analysis can be used to determine if an individual has a risk factor for a disease, what kind of environmental and genetic factors play a role in a disease, and what kind of treatment should be given to the patient. Having a biostatistics expert study the literature and provide a rigorous, quantitative review of it helps healthcare providers improve their chances of delivering successful, data-driven treatment. 6. Genome Sequencing Data Analysis Genome sequencing generates large amounts of data that can help scientists understand complex traits. Sophisticated tools and software help sequence entire genomes quickly, providing insights into identifying variants that cause disease. Data from the variant genome is typically compared to the reference genome of the individual or a control group. Biostatistics experts study variant frequencies in populations according to specific parameters such as blood type, ethnicity, etc. and draw conclusions as to how the genetic make-up of an individual or subpopulation can affect if theyre at-risk or prone to specific conditions. In analyzing genomic data, R is widely used, as is Matlab. Biostatistics finds application in almost every branch of healthcare, providing a strong base on which evaluation, assessment and treatment models can be built. It helps hospitals improve efficiency, pharma companies improve quality and safety of goods and services, and governments improve public health policies and programs. It also helps develop cost-effective treatment and implement preventive healthcare measures. Hiring a freelance biostatistician can help organizations access specialized expertise at short notice. Easy access to such expertise enables healthcare professionals to take data-driven decisions and deliver effective evidence-based healthcare. Kolabtree Kolabtree is the leading online marketplace for freelance scientists and researchers. Their global pool of 5,500+ freelance experts are typically PhD-qualified and are from institutions like MIT and Harvard University. Services offered include statistical analysis, scientific consulting, data analytics, scientific writing and literature search. Kolabtree has helped businesses around the world, including Volkswagen and Sage Publishing, access scientific expertise quickly and easily. The platform lets you choose a budget of your choice, and interact with freelancers before making a hire. It's free to post your requirement on the project and receive quotes from experts. Kolabtrees freelancers have helped businesses develop a product, write a technical report, perform a data analysis, and more. Kolabtree is a one-stop resource for entrepreneurs, businesses and research organizations to get quick help from experts at short notice. Original piece written by Maya Raghunandan. Maya Raghunandan obtained her Ph.D in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of Minnesota, USA. Currently, she is a cancer biology scientist at Universite Catholique de Louvain, Brussels, Belgium. Sponsored Content Policy: News-Medical.net publishes articles and related content that may be derived from sources where we have existing commercial relationships, provided such content adds value to the core editorial ethos of News-Medical.Net which is to educate and inform site visitors interested in medical research, science, medical devices and treatments. The school board for the Elgin-area school district will have at least one new board member as only three of the four board members whose terms are up are seeking re-election. Eight candidates total filed to run for the four open seats in the spring race. The uberization of the healthcare industry has seen an increase in the number of freelance biostatisticians, who are offering their services on platforms like Kolabtree. The gig economy has transformed not just industries and businesses but has also revolutionised science and research. As an increasing number of scientists turn to freelancing, industries have a rich pool of expertise readily available to them, on demand. Data from Kolabtree reveals how companies can overcome research and business challenges with the help of PhD-level experts. Image Credit: Motortion Films/Shutterstock Easy and Quick Access to Resources The interdisciplinary healthcare industry, in particular, benefits from easy access to resources at short notice. A varied workforce, ranging from data scientists to biotechnologists, participates in the development and delivery of effective healthcare to global populations. Over the last few years, biostatisticians, or statisticians who work with life sciences data, have been finding an important place in the industry. Biostatistics is a specialized mathematical branch which uses advanced statistical methods for analyzing data in the medical and pharmaceutical industries. Biostatisticians help make accurate inferences from complex data, playing a key role in several areas of healthcare, including drug development, public health, population genetics, epidemiology and genome sequencing. In 2017, CNN Money listed biostatistics as the 48th best career in the US. While biostatisticians are slowly becoming indispensable in hospitals, pharma companies and research labs, hiring a full-time, in-house biostatisticians is an expensive affair. The average salary of a biostatistician is $91,800 per year, with the top-paying jobs in the federal government and pharmaceutical manufacturing sector. The job demand for these experts is expected to grow 34% over the next ten years. Recognizing this demand, biostatisticians are starting to offer their services on a freelance and/or contract basis. Since 2015, over 100 biostatisticians -- from institutions like Imperial College London and John Hopkins University -- have registered themselves as freelancers on Kolabtree. Their skills range from designing effective clinical trials to reviewing and validating the statistical power of studies being prepared to be published. Kolabtrees Freelance Biostatisticians Kolabtrees freelance biostatisticians have worked on a wide variety of projects, which include recommending statistical methodologies for studies and performing advanced statistical analyses. Dlorah Jenkins, an experienced researcher and public health expert, helped Jessica Adams assess the impact of an HIV-awareness initiative in Uganda. She designed a statistical model for the study, which helped Adams and her team apply for several research grants. Dr. Sukant Khurana, an interdisciplinary scientist, helped Robert Goldberg, co-founder of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, estimate the value of medical innovation in specific disease areas. Goldberg said that posting his project on Kolabtree was the single best professional decision he had made in quite a while. In yet another example, an Indian statistician designed a clinical trial for a California-based breast cancer surgeon to measure the effectiveness of his treatment. Kolabtree also helped Robert Pretlow, MD of e-Health International, hire a statistician for a complex analysis of the results of his study on treating childhood obesity. In addition to performing the analysis, the freelancer also helped him draft a letter of intent for the publication of the study in a reputable journal. Effective, Evidence-Based Healthcare The fee for these projects ranged from $400 to $2400, and the turnaround times ranged from a few days to a few weeks. Both the accessibility and affordability of the freelancers allowed for quick and easy cross-border collaboration with the clients. With the help of freelance biostatisticians, small research startups, government bodies and nonprofits, health advocacies and public health organizations will be able to take data-driven decisions on demand and deliver effective, evidence-based healthcare to those who need it most. Kolabtree Kolabtree is the leading online marketplace for freelance scientists and researchers. Their global pool of 5,500+ freelance experts are typically PhD-qualified and are from institutions like MIT and Harvard University. Services offered include statistical analysis, scientific consulting, data analytics, scientific writing and literature search. Kolabtree has helped businesses around the world, including Volkswagen and Sage Publishing, access scientific expertise quickly and easily. The platform lets you choose a budget of your choice, and interact with freelancers before making a hire. It's free to post your requirement on the project and receive quotes from experts. Kolabtrees freelancers have helped businesses develop a product, write a technical report, perform a data analysis, and more. Kolabtree is a one-stop resource for entrepreneurs, businesses and research organizations to get quick help from experts at short notice. Original piece written by Maya Raghunandan. Maya Raghunandan obtained her Ph.D in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of Minnesota, USA. Currently, she is a cancer biology scientist at Universite Catholique de Louvain, Brussels, Belgium. Sponsored Content Policy: News-Medical.net publishes articles and related content that may be derived from sources where we have existing commercial relationships, provided such content adds value to the core editorial ethos of News-Medical.Net which is to educate and inform site visitors interested in medical research, science, medical devices and treatments. The Amazing Spider-Man: Ultimate Edition review Months after the film left theaters, the Amazing Spider-Man game makes its way to the Wii U. Is it any better after all that extra time... Marvel Comics may have just confirmed the new Iron Fist is exactly who we think it is It seems a lot like Marvel Comics has just confirmed the identity of the new Iron Fist - and it's exactly who we think Sorry! This content is not available in your region A: Our town home in Brookfield sold in three days for the asking price. We were looking for a house in Brookfield or Oak Park, but we had just bought a big sectional sofa and the living rooms werent big enough. We thought Hinsdale was probably out of our budget, but we found a house on Fuller Road with a large open main floor and the couch fit. New Delhi: The Jawaharlal Nehru University administration on Tuesday said that the varsity will be taking disciplinary proceedings" against teachers who participated in a hunger strike last month. The teachers violated the High Court orders, according to the varsity. However, the JNU Teachers' Association (JNUTA) said their protests were within the constitutional framework. Earlier, JNUTA office bearers called for a 24-hour-long protest in front of the Administration Block despite repeated objections by the administrations. "Disciplinary proceeding, in fact, is in the pipeline against a few teacher protesters who defied the Delhi High Court order as well as the university rules. As per the decision of the High Court, protest of any kind is prohibited within 100 meters of the Administration Building," varsity said. The varsity said the JNU rule also prohibits all kinds of protests in an area within 100 metres of the academic complexes, including the Dr BR Ambedkar Library. It expressed concern about the JNUTA "inciting the students to indulge in illegal activities of the kind" they have indulged in. "Such activities, particularly staging protests in prohibited areas of the campus in clear violation of university rules and court rulings, have adversely affected peace and stability in a campus that is known for its intellectual works," varsity's registrar Pramod Kumar said. On Monday, the students' association held a public meeting outside the Dr BR Ambedkar Library over library fund cuts. "A large number of students, faculty and even other stakeholders of the university seem to have been fed up with a handful of teacher and student activists who take up even trivial issues and twisted facts to disrupt peace just for their narrow political games," Kumar said. The JNU administration is always prepared to hold dialogue on any issue in a peaceful atmosphere at all appropriate levels of the administrative structure, he added. (With PTI inputs) New Delhi: The University Grants Commission (UGC) has invited applications for the Maulana Azad National Fellowship (MANF) for minority students for the year 2018-19. The last date to apply for the fellowship is December 31. This scheme is for communities like Muslim, Sikh, Parsi, Buddhist, and Christian. These communities can pursue higher studies such as regular and full-time research degrees in Sciences, Humanities, Social Sciences, and Engineering and Technology. The reservation for differently abled students shall be made as per provision laid down by the Government of India. After the gap of two years, the government has announced 1,000 scholarships for minorities. Read More | Telangana Panchayat Secretary Exam 2018-19 | Check results here How to apply: Log on to the official website, https://ugc.ac.in/manf/ Click on the link, 'UGC Public Notice reg: Maulana Azad National Fellowship for Minority Students for the Year 2018-19' under 'Notice' Click on Maulana Azad National Fellowship' link Click on Apply Now Enter all the required information in the space provided Click on submit Changes in minority scholarship criteria: As per the latest circular, the UGC has now allowed all the candidates belonging to one of the minority communities who are enrolled for full time research programmes with UGC NET or CSIR-NET to apply for the scholarships. "All candidates who belong to one of the minority communities i.e. Muslim, Sikh, Parsi, Buddhist, Christian and Jain and who are enrolled for full time MPhil / Ph.D degree in Indian Universities/ Institutions/ Colleges recognized under Section 2(f) and Section 3 of UGC Act, 1956 and CBSE/NTA-UGC-NET/JRF or CSIR-NET/JRF may apply," said the latest notice issued by UGC. "Decision of the Commission with regard to selection of candidates for the award of fellowship shall be final," it added. Also Read | NDMC is hiring professors, attend walk-in interview on December 27 About the fellowship: The objective of the scheme is to provide integrated five-year fellowships in the form of financial assistance to students from minority communities, as notified by the Central Government to pursue higher studies such as M.Phil. and Ph.D. at Indian Universities/Institutions/Colleges as indicated below: A) Universities/Institutions/Colleges included under section 2(f) of UGC Act. B) Deemed to be Universities included under Section 3 of the UGC Act, 1956 and eligible to receive grants-in-aid from UGC New Delhi: Everyone has different ways to relax and Kriti Sanons therapy is listening to music. The actresss playlist has old Bollywood retro songs. Whenever the actress is traveling or in between the shoots she gets time, her favourite is to listen to Bollywood retro songs, according to sources close to her. Kriti has continously been shooting this year and hardly had any time to spend with family so the actress took out a couple of days to spend quality time with the family and is holidaying in the Maldives. The actress took to her Instagram and shared a video relaxing with family while she listens to the old songs. Kriti Sanon has had a hectic schedule this year with the actress shooting multiple projects simultaneously hopping from one set to another.The actress has been hopping from the sets of one film to another this year. The actress recently finished the shoot for the first schedule of her upcoming period drama Panipat. Also Read | Star Screen Awards 2018: Full list of winners Panipat, in which she stars alongside Sanjay Dutt and Arjun Kapoor, will be her first proper period film as she plays a Maratha princess. The actress has also taken Marathi classes in order to ace the requirement for the character of the film. Housefull 4 will reunite the actress with her mentor Sajid Nadiadwala after her debut film Heropanti. Over the years, Kriti is known to portray characters that have resonated with her audience. The actress last outing Bareilly Ki Barfi garnered a lot of critical acclaim and love from her viewers. Also Read | Star, Zee, Sony come out with channel pricing under TRAI's new tariff regime Only 4 films old, actress Kriti Sanon has an exciting film line up to look forward to with projects like Housefull 4, Luka Chuppi, Panipat and Arjun Patiala. The young actress is leaving no stone unturned to treat her fans with her versatile performances in varied genres of films. For all the Latest Entertainment News, Bollywood News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. Dallas said the number of filers was very unusual, and added that the events of the past year have shown that this is a time when female and young adults appear to be running as candidates more than they had in the past. Mumbai: Veteran actor Saira Banu has reached out to Prime Minister Narendra Modi begging him for help in tackling the land mafia and protecting her husband and legendary star Dilip Kumars only house. Tweeting from Kumars official Twitter account on Tuesday night, she said Modi was her last hope in the case because repeated entreaties to Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis had been futile. She named builder Samir Bhojwani, who has allegedly falsely claimed ownership of two plots in Pali Hill on which Dilip Kumars bungalow is built.To the honourable @PMOIndia Shri @narendramodi. Awaiting for appointment. Im tired of repeated assurances from CM @Dev_Fadnavis I Am Trying. Sir you are the last hope of protecting Dilip Sahabs only house from land mafia Samir Bhojwani. I beg (sic). Modi was in Mumbai on Tuesday for a day and met producers and actors to discuss issues related to the Hindi film industry but Saira Banu could not meet him. She said she plans to follow up with the PM on the matter. I did not meet the prime minister here as he has been busy. But I have learnt that his office has asked people here to look into the matter. I have tweeted about it. I will meet him in Delhi if needed. I have no idea how I will follow this up. But I will follow it up, the 74-year-old told PTI on Tuesday. Fadnavis said on Monday that he will speak to Kumar, 96, and his family to allay their fears over the property issue involving Bhojwani. Kumars bungalow is located in the upscale Pali Hill area of Bandra. Earlier this year, Saira Banu had approached police and lodged a complaint against Bhojwani. In January, the Economic Offences Wing (EOW) of Mumbai Police registered a case of cheating against the builder for allegedly trying to grab the veteran actors bungalow. After the offence was registered, a team of EOW sleuths raided Bhojwanis residence in Bandra from where they seized weapons, including knives and daggers, officials said. Bhojwani was arrested by EOW in April and has since been released from jail. For all the Latest Entertainment News, Bollywood News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi : Deepika Padukone is all geared up for her next project that is based on the biopic of acid attack survivor Laxmi Agarwal. Helmed by Raazi director Meghna Gulzar, the movie will mark as Deepikas debut production. The movie is titled Chhapaak and according to a media report, Mirzapur fame Vikrant Massey has bagged the role opposite the Piku star. Also Read | Deepika Padukone remembers her first special encounter with Ranveer Singh In a report published in Mumbai Mirror confirms that Vikrant of Balika Vadhu will be seen portraying the part of Laxmis former partner Alok Dixit opposite Deepika. Talking about Vikrants role, Meghna told the daily, The cast is slowly coming together. Vikrant is somebody Ive wanted to work with since Raazi, after seeing him in A Death in the Gunj. In the film, he plays a North Indian boy who used to be a professional before he decided to become an actor, then, started a campaign against acid violence which is how he came to meet Laxmi in real life. I speak for both Deepika and myself when I say that we are both really excited to have Vikrant play this part. Hailing from a television background, Vikrant has established his charm in many Bollywood movies. He became popular for his work in several films such as Dil Dhadakne Do, Lootera, Lipstick Under My Burkha, Half Girlfriend and is currently working in a web series Broken But Beautiful. His work in Mirzapur was widely applauded by the critics as well as the audiences across the country. The leading lady will be seen donning different looks for the film owing to the several reconstruction surgeries of the character. Laxmi was studying in a school when she was attacked by a man who had proposed her for marriage. Going by several media reports, the movie is expected to go on the floors in March 2019. Also Read | Sonu Nigam is at it again! Says, Wish I were from Pakistan In an interview to HT, Laxmi had said, I believe art is art. I am so happy that Deepika is playing the role. I have no right to judge her. How can I judge someone for something which I cant do! She has played wonderful characters on screen and I believe she will give her best. I want to thank Deepika ji, Meghna ji and the entire team who will be working together on the film. I am glad that the movie will spread awareness and will help people who are victims of such incidents to come out of it. They will get inspired that if she can do it than why not us. Chhapaak, along with being Deepikas debut in the field of production, will also be her first film, post her marriage to Bollywood actor Ranveer Singh. The couple has been at the centre of the limelight since they tied the knot on November 14 and 15 at Lake Como, Italy, in presence of close friends and family. For all the Latest Entertainment News, Bollywood News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: Christian Michel, the alleged middleman in theA AgustaWestland case, has been sent to judicial custody till December 28 by a Delhi Court on Wednesday. Earlier in the day, theA Delhi court reserved for December 22 its order on bail plea of Michel arrested in the AgustaWestland VVIP chopper case. The counsel for 57-year-old British national told Special Judge Arvind Kumar that he was not required for custodial interrogation and no purpose will be served by keeping him in further custody. "My handwriting has already already been taken. There were no original documents with the CBI to match it with. I have volunteered to provide all the documents," Michel's counsel Aljo K Joseph told the court. Alleged middleman Christian Michel sent to judicial custody till December 28 by Delhi Court #AgustaWestland (file pic) pic.twitter.com/dtJ0jAJW57 a ANI (@ANI) December 19, 2018 He was in CBI custody for 15 days. Michel was arrested in the UAE and extradited to India on December 4. The next day, he was produced in the court, which allowed his five-day custodial interrogation by the CBI which was later extended by five more days. Michel is among the three alleged middlemen being probed in the case by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). The others are Guido Haschke and Carlo Gerosa. Both the agencies notified an Interpol red corner notice (RCN) against him after the court issued a non-bailable warrant against him. A The CBI opposed the bail application, saying Michel might flee as he had already tried to escape from Dubai just before his extradition. The probe agency said that Michel was an influential person having links with people from the ministry and other bureaucrats and politicians, many of who are its witnesses in the case. "We brought him with so much difficulty. Some new facts have emerged and we need to have follow ups on those. He has not been a cooperative witness. A lot more to be unearthed of out own. He has no roots in India here. He has property etc but he may sell them and go away," the probe agency said. The court had earlier extended by four days the CBI custody of Michel on the ground that he needed to be confronted with various documents in the case. The CBI had said that he was required to be taken to the premises of Pawan Hans India Ltd in Mumbai to verify his version of his alleged attempted negotiations to buy back WG-30 helicopters, to identify the shipper and to confront the officials of Pawan Hans India.A (With PTI inputs) For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: Another fire broke out at ESIC Kamgar Hospital in Mumbais Andheri on Wednesday where at least nine people, including a six-month-old baby, were killed at a fire incident on Monday. According to news agency ANI, no casualties were reported yet in the latest incident. More than 175 people, mostly patients and visitors, were rescued in the Monday tragedy. On Wednesday, the death toll in the Mumbai hospital fire rose to nine with a 65-year-old woman succumbing to her injuries, a civic official said. More than 170 people, including some children, are currently undergoing treatment at various hospitals across the city. Shila Murvekar died at Seven Hills hospital this afternoon and with this the death toll reached nine, a Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation official said. Nearly 375 people, including patients and visitors, were in the five-floor hospital when the fire broke out on Monday. The blaze appeared to have erupted after a short-circuit near the rubber rolls stored on the ground floor, he said. Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis on Tuesday ordered a probe and the union labour ministry had announced compensation for the victims. (With PTI inputs) For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: After Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, the Ashok Gehlot government in Rajasthan on Wednesday waived short-term crop loans from cooperative banks and loans of up to Rs 2 lakh taken by farmers from other banks. The state government will bear a burden of Rs 18,000 crore. The Congress, which won the recent assembly elections, had promised in its manifesto to waive farm loans. Congress president Rahul Gandhi had said this would be done within 10 days of the pary coming to power in the state. Ashok Gehlot told reporters the scheme will apply to farmers in debt till November 30. It's done! Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh & Chhattisgarh have waived farm loans. We asked for 10 days. We did it in 2. Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) December 19, 2018 A roadmap has been prepared so that the officers face no problem in following the decision, Gehlot said. Gehlot attended office the first time on Wednesday but has held meetings with officials at his home after being sworn in on Monday. Farmers' short-term crop loans from cooperative banks will be waived. Along with this, farmers' loans of up to Rs 2 lakh from nationalised and other banks will also be waived, he said. Targeting the previous government, Gehlot said it had waived short-term crop loan of only up to Rs 50,000 taken from cooperative banks. Now the Rs 50,000-limit has been removed, Gehlot said referring to the scheme the BJP government had announced earlier this year. He said the Vasundhara Raje government's scheme would have cost Rs 8,000 crore, but only Rs 2,000 were actually spent in writing off the loans. The remaining burden has been passed on to the new Congress government, he claimed. Gehlot said farmers unable to pay back their loans were committing suicide in the state. The chief minister took charge of his office in the morning after offering flowers at an idol of Mahatma Gandhi and praying at a Ganesh temple on the secretariat premises. After meetings with officials, he visited Governor Kalyan Singh and then returned to his office for another round of meetings. Chief Secretary D B Gupta, Principal Secretary to CM Kuldeep Ranka and officials from finance, cooperative and other departments attended the meetings. On Tuesday, Rahul Gandhi had said the opposition will not rest till the Narendra Modi government waives farm loans across the country. In similar moves, Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Kamal Nath and his Chhattisgarh counterpart Bhupesh Baghel on Monday, the day they took oaths. The Baghel government waived off farm loans of up to Rs 6,100 crore and increased the Minimum Support Price (MSP) for paddy from Rs 1700 to Rs 2500 per quintal. "Congress President Rahul Gandhi had announced that farm loans will be waived within 10 days and that Minimum Support Price (MSP) for maize will be increased to Rs 2500 from Rs 1700 per quintal. These two decisions have been taken today," Baghel had said. Earlier in the day, Kamal Nath cleared the proposal of waiving farm loans up to Rs 2 lakh as promised by Congress president Rahul Gandhi ahead of assembly polls. Briefing the media at the state secretariat after taking charge as new chief minister, Nath said, "After taking the oath, I have cleared the first file related to writing off loans up to Rs two lakh". Nath was sworn in as the 18th chief minister of Madhya Pradesh. It is widely believed the promise of farm loan waiver made by Rahul Gandhi helped the Congress to sweep both the heartland states where it was out of power for 15 long years. In a nerve-wracking see-saw battle with the BJP, Congress on December 11 bagged 114 assembly seats and secured the support of seven more MLAs, Samajwadi Party (SP) and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and four independent MLAs, to cross the simple majority mark of 116 in the 230- member Madhya Pradesh Assembly. In Chhattisgarh, it was a clean sweep for the Congress with wins in 68 out of the 90 assembly constituencies. (With PTI inputs) For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president Amit Shah on Wednesday called the Opposition 'mahagathbandhan' (grand alliance) an illusion and said that BJP will retain power after the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. Speaking at the Republic Summit in Mumbai, Amit Shah also said that he was sure that the Shiv Sena will be with the BJP in the next Lok Sabha elections. Talks are on (with them), he added. "The reality of the Opposition 'mahagathbandhan' is different. It (the Opposition alliance) doesn't exist and is a 'bhranti' (illusion)," Amit Shah said. He said that he is confident that the BJP will gain in West Bengal, North-East and Odisha in 2019. ALSO READ | Congress dumped from grand alliance in Uttar Pradesh, SP, BSP finalise seat-sharing pact: Sources "The mahagathbandhan does not exist anywhere. We have fought against all of them in 2014 and defeated them to form the government. They are all regional leaders, they can't help each other," the BJP president said. Amit Shah said that he is confident that the BJP will gain in West Bengal, North-East and Odisha in 2019. "The issues of elections are: in five years how have we ensured national security and defeated corruption. We have provided toilets in eight crore homes and electricity in 2.5 crore homes," Shah said as quoted by PTI. "Not only for the BJP, but it is also necessary for the country that a strong govt comes to power," the BJP president said. The election results in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh were definitely not favourable for BJP, but it is not right to link them with the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, he said. The Assembly elections can't be linked to the Lok Sabha poll results as both elections are fought on separate issues, Shah said. "It is our duty to work for the people and convince them, but if the mandate is against us we accept that too," he said. "I am not against analysis, but the elections are fought on different issues. The issues on the ground are different," he added. "In 2014, BJP had government in six states, now we have it in 16 states. So tell me who will win the 2019 elections," the BJP president said. "We accept the people's mandate (in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh). We will introspect on the poll results," he said. ALSO READ | Dont let Ram Temple dominate actual issues, Chirag Paswan lessons BJP The BJP chief said that it does not matter who is pitted against Narendra Modi in the 2019 polls (as prime ministerial aspirant). "We are going ahead on the basis of our strength and not on the basis of someone's weakness," he added. Earlier, DMK president MK Stalin made a strong pitch for Congress chief Rahul Gandhi as the prime ministerial candidate of the Opposition, saying that the Gandhi scion had the ability to defeat the "fascist" Narendra Modi government. However, the Trinamool Congress leadership distanced itself from Stalins proposal saying any such announcement would be premature. For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) will launch the military communication satellite GSAT-7A from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Andhra Pradesh this evening. GSAT-7A satellite will be the space agency's last mission for this year and is expected to add a new space-based dimension to the way the Indian Air Force interlinks, operates and communicates with its aircraft as they fly and with command centres on ground, according to multiple sources. This along with the earlier launched GSAT-7 and GSAT-6 will form the band of a communications satellite for use of the security forces. The GSLV-F11 will inject the GSAT-7A into a Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit (GTO), according to ISRO. GSLV-F11 is ISRO's fourth generation launch vehicle with three stages. GSAT-7A is the first communication satellite built primarily for the Airforce and will unify its assets and improve combined, common intelligence during operations. It will also enhance the forces global operations and its network-centric welfare capabilities. It will also support aerial activities of the Army and the Navy where required, according to some reports. Read More | ISRO to launch GSAT-7A communication satellite on-board GSLV-F11 today, 5 things to know about it Weighing as much as 2,250 kg, the GSAT-7A will be launched using the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle Mk II. The GSAT-7A is expected to have the Ku-band transponders that will enable superior real-time aircraft-to-aircraft communication and two deployable solar arrays onboard. Update #2#GSAT7A#GSLVF11 The countdown for the launch of communication satellite GSAT-7A on-board GSLV-F11 will begin at Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota tomorrow. Launch scheduled on 19 December. Updates to follow. #ISROMissions pic.twitter.com/BEIs9EUfXC ISRO (@isro) December 17, 2018 The GSAT-7A will also help Navy in the drone operations and will help them reduce the reliance on on-ground control stations and take satellite-control of military unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). It would also enhance by many times the coverage now provided by ground communication systems such as radars and stations of the Army. It will be a very important step or jump towards what we call network-centric operations or warfare. It will enable communication and data linking at forward places and air defence centres. Pilots can communicate much better with headquarters while they fly. Headquarters can receive data in real time, the Hindu quoted a military veteran as saying. Also Read | ISRO launches Indias heaviest satellite GSAT-11, expected to boost Internet speed "GSLV F11 is Isro's fourth generation launch vehicle with three stages. The four-liquid strap-ons and a solid rocket motor at the core form the first stage. The second stage is equipped with a high thrust engine using liquid fuel. The Cryogenic Upper Stage forms the third and final stage of the vehicle," the space agency said on its website. This year, Isro launched GSAT-11 on December 5 on a European vehicle from French Guineas Kourou, GSAT-29 on November 14 on its GSLV-MkIII vehicle and the ill-fated GSAT-6A on March 29 from Sriharikota. The launch of Chandrayaan-2 and the PSLV-C44 remote-sensing satellite launch are among the seven missions lined up in 2019. For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi : Rashtriya Lok Samta Party (RLSP) chief Upendra Kushwaha, who recently quit as Union minister and pulled out of the BJP-led alliance, has warned Ram Vilas Paswan's Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) and other allies to quit the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) or face the same arrogance he and his party did. Citing arrogance of the BJP and Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar one of the reasons for pulling out of the alliance with the BJP, Kushwaha accused the saffron party of trying to destroy smaller parties. "The arrogance of BJP and Nitish Kumar was one of the reasons why we left NDA, others will also face the same arrogance. Lok Janshakti Party should also leave NDA as soon as possible. Otherwise, they've (BJP) made their mind to destroy the smaller parties," ANI quoted Kushwaha as saying. Also Read | Dont let Ram Temple dominate actual issues, Chirag Paswan lessons BJP The RLSP chief had recently quit as Union minister in Narendra Modi Cabinet and pulled out of the NDA over seat sharing issues in Bihar for the next year's general elections. After quitting, he had said that his options were open, and he will decide whether his party will go alone in 2019 or join the proposed anti-BJP alliance. Kushwaha's claims of ill-treatment at the hands of the BJP came a day after Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) leader Chirag Paswan advised the saffron party to go for course correction and not let its Hindutva agenda dominate the actual issues of common people. "After TDP and RLSP's exit from NDA... the alliance is going through a vulnerable phase. At this time the BJP should sort out issues of the remaining alliance partners timely and respectfully," the Paswan junior wrote on Twitter. Paswan's party has been at the loggerheads with the BJP over the issue of seat sharing for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections in Bihar. The BJP has reportedly offered 17 seats to Nitish Kumar's JD-U and the LJP has got only six seats. Paswan, however, said the alliance was strong and the NDA will win the 2019 polls. Also Read | These 11 parties left PM Narendra Modi since 2014 Lok Sabha elections Last week, Naresh Gujral, a leader of Shiromani Akali Dal, another BJP ally had also warned the saffron party, saying he didn't see any single political party getting over 200 seats in 2019 Lok Sabha elections. He said that the BJP will have to quickly resolve issues with its allies, including the Shiv Sena, if the party wanted to emerge victorious. For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: Amid sloganeering and protests by the AIADMK, Congress and TDP members over various issues, the Lok Sabha on Wednesday passed the Surrogacy Regulation Bill tabled by Union Health Minister JP Nadda. Introducing the bill in the lower house, Nadda said that those who would wish to opt for surrogacy will be required to submit their certificate of infertility within 90 days. However, Dr Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar from AITC pointed at a significant problem in the Surrogacy Regulation Bill, 2016. In response to Nadda's presentation in the lower house, Dastidar said despite the Supreme Court's path-breaking judgement on section 377 of Indian Penal Code (IPC), there is no mention about the same-sex couples in this Bill. "The doctors also know the demands from the transgender, same-sex couple. Two male couples require a surrogate mother; two female couples do not need it necessarily but we still have to include them in the bill," Dastidar claimed further. Read | Section 377 abolished: History owes an apology to LGBT people, says Supreme Court In September, the Supreme Court had decriminalised gay sex in its much-awaited verdict on a batch of pleas challenging a 158-year-old British-era law under Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), which criminalised consensual gay sex. Though the Surrogacy Bill says 'only close relative would be a surrogate mother', it does not clarify the kind of relatives. Surrogacy, which has always been a debatable topic, is banned in many countries across the world. The Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill, 2016 passed in Lok Sabha, reports ANI pic.twitter.com/b0Oca0rQ5P News Nation (@NewsNationTV) December 19, 2018 Read | Parliamentary panel invites suggestions on the bill to ban commercial surrogacy In 2009, the Law Commission recommended drafting a Bill to put checks on commercial surrogacy. However, the then Congress government could not pass it for 5 years at that time. What is Surrogacy? Surrogacy refers to the process of giving birth as a surrogate mother, often supported by a legal agreement, where a woman agrees to become pregnant and give birth to a child or children for an infertile couple, who will ultimately become the parents of the new-born. For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday came out all guns blazing at the Congress and said that the Rahul Gandhi-led party has humiliated every institution of democracy, be it the Indian Army or the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG). In an apparent reference to the Rafale deal, PM Modi said the Congress has even questioned the Supreme Court verdict just because they did not like it. Last week, in a big relief to the Centre, the Supreme Court dismissed all the petitions seeking a court-monitored investigation into the Rafale deal. Addressing the booth level workers via video conferencing from New Delhi, PM Modi also asked them to expand their outreach and create awareness about the BJP government's welfare schemes across the country. "The Congress party has become more cunning since the days of Emergency," the prime minister added, hitting out at the Congress. Earlier in the day, Congress leader Anand Sharma criticised the Supreme Court's verdict on Rafale deal, alleging that the government has misled the court and dented its credibility. Read | I wasn't the prime minister who was afraid of press: Manmohan Singh takes dig at PM Modi "The government has not only misled the court but also insulted it with a curative petition saying the court had misinterpreted (the information submitted by the government)...It is up to the Supreme Court to correct the situation by recalling the self-contradictory verdict. It is up to the court to take action," Sharma said. "What is the BJP celebrating? The judgement has dented the dignity and credibility of the apex court which needs to be restored," the Congress leader reiterated. On Sunday, Congress president Rahul Gandhi lashed out at the Modi government, saying he will not let the "destruction" of institutions like the Supreme Court and the Reserve Bank of India happen. Addressing a DMK rally in Chennai, Gandhi said that the BJP government believes "only one idea should run India". In a fresh round of attack Modi further accused the Congress of being double standards, with regard to Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs). Read | Army carried out surgical strike thrice during UPA rule but never politicised like Modi: Rahul Gandhi "Before every election they begin to make noise about EVMs, trying to create an atmosphere of doubt. After elections, however, if Congress performs well, they seem to accept the results that have come out of the same EVM," the prime minister said. Giving a clarion call to strengthen democracy, Modi said, "Information and awareness are important for democracy. We should keep people informed about Congress and its dangerous games". For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. Sydney posed a heart of gold, and was a very sweet and loving soul ... She always did good in giving to others, especially to the homeless people on the streets of Chicago. Sydney was the light of her mother's life and will forever be loved and cherished, the obituary continued. New Delhi : The Uttar Pradesh police has arrested three people in connection with the alleged cow slaughter in Bulandshahr and two for inciting violence, but the killers of inspector Subodh Kumar Singh were still at large. On December 3, the mob violence over cow slaughter had led to the killing of a Uttar Pradesh police inspector. Singh was fatally shot at a point-blank range above his left eye and the police are yet to capture his killers. "Three persons - Nadeem, Raees and Kala - who were registered as the main accused after collection of technical evidence, have been arrested. They used to shoot cows with a gun first and then cut them in pieces and divide among themselves," ANI quoted senior police officer Atul Srivastav as saying. Also Read | Bulandshahr violence: My father wanted us to be secular citizens, says son of murdered UP cop The police claimed that Nadeem, Raees and Kala were part of a gang that used to kill cows with a gun. The weapons a double barrel gun and knives used to hunt the cows have also been recovered. The Special Task Force (STF) of UP police also arrested two people 21-year-old Sachin Singh alias Cobra, and 19-year-old Johnny Chaudhary for instigating the violence. "Working on a tip-off, the two men, whose identity had been ascertained after the violence, were picked up at 4.15 pm from a bus stand at Gathiya Badshahpur in Bulandshahr," news agency PTI quoted STF member Raj Kumar Mishra as saying. So far, the police have arrested 19 people, including an army man Jitendra Malik alias Jeetu Fauji, in connection with the case. The police had named 27 people in the FIR while cases were registered against over 50 unidentified persons. Also Read | Bulandshahr violence: Yogi Adityanath orders strict action against cow slaughter However, the investigators are yet to arrest the main accused behind inspector Singhs murder and explain the conspiracy theory behind the alleged cow slaughter. For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: Indian Air Force Chief Marshal BS Dhanoa on Wednesday once again defended the government's decision to procure Rafale fighter jets from France, saying the IAF, which is reeling under a severe shortage of jets, needs the aircraft as it could be a "game changer". "Who says we don't need Rafale? The government says we need Rafale, we are saying we need Rafale. The Supreme Court has given a fine judgmentit took us so long (to procure) that our adversaries have already upgraded their system. The Rafale is a game changer," ANI quoted Dhanoa as saying. The Congress has been alleging massive irregularities in the deal and attacking the government for procuring just 36 jets when IAF required 126 jets. On December 14, the Supreme Court said it had found nothing wrong with a deal the Narendra Modi government signed with France to purchase 36 Rafale fighter jets. A bench headed by Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi said it had studied the matter "extensively" and that it was "satisfied that there is no occasion to doubt the process [of signing the Rafale deal]." The ruling came on four petitions that had asked the Supreme Court to set up a court-monitored probe into the signing of the Rafale deal. The petitions had alleged that the Modi government not only overpaid for the Rafale jets but also promoted crony capitalism. In his address, the IAF Chief said the 36 Rafale will add teeth to India's firepower, suggesting that the political slugfest surrounding the Rafale deal was unfortunate. Justifying the government's decision to go for only two Rafale squadrons, Dhanoa had earlier said India procured two squadrons of MiG 23 MF jets after Pakistan received the first lot of F-16 aircraft in 1983. The IAF chief said, "By providing the Rafale and S-400, the government is strengthening the IAF to counter the shortfalls of our depleting numbers." (With PTI inputs) For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi : Amid the speculations of a possible alliance between the Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in Delhi for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, former Delhi chief minister Sheila Dikshit has said that she will accept whatever the Congress president Rahul Gandhi decides. Whatever the High Command decides, we will accept it, Dikshit, a staunch critic of AAP national convenor Arvind Kejriwal, was quoted as saying by ANI. According to sources, sworn enemies AAP and Congress are in touch to explore possibilities of a pre-poll alliance in the national capital for the seven Lok Sabha constituencies. Although there were no official words from any of the party leaders, sources claimed behind the door talks are on between the bitter rivals. Both, the Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party shared an intense rivalry at least until August this year when Arvind Kejriwal said that voting for the Grand Old Party was like voting for the BJP. The AAP had also boycotted the election of Rajya Sabha deputy chairman in August this year, saying that the Congress party had not asked for its support for the joint Opposition candidate. Also Read | SP, BSP dump Congress from Grand Alliance in Uttar Pradesh, finalise seat-sharing pact: Sources However, the talks of the possible alliance between the parties got traction after the AAP attended a meeting of Opposition parties last week where the Congress was also in attendance. Also, the AAP was invited to attend the oath-taking ceremony of three Congress chief ministers in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. Although local Congress leadership in the national capital is not too keen to join hands with Arvind Kejriwals party, Congress president Rahul Gandhi is ready to go to any extent to stop the BJP from coming in power. In 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP had decimated that the Congress and the AAP by winning all the seven constituencies - Chandani Chowk, North East Delhi, East Delhi, New Delhi, North West Delhi, West Delhi, South Delhi. The vote share of the BJP 46.40 pe cent but the combined vote share of the Congress and the AAP was 48 per cent, 1.60 per cent more than what the saffron party had got in 2014. Also Read | Kejriwal hits out at PM Modi over CBI charge sheet against AAP minister Satyendra Jain Now given the sharp decline in Prime Minister Narendra Modis popularity and his governments failure to deliver on its promises, if the Congress and AAP join hands, it is likely to wrest most of the seats from the BJP. For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: Former Union minister Upendra Kushwaha, who had recently broken ties with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is likely to join the Congress-led grand alliance in the national capital on Thursday, according to sources. On December 10, Kushwaha resigned from the BJP-led led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and the Union council of ministers, accusing Prime Minister Narendra Modi of reducing the cabinet to a "rubber stamp". Speaking to news agency PTI, senior Rashtriya Lok Samta Party (RLSP) leader said that talks between his party and the alliance partners are almost final and an official announcement is likely to be made at a press conference on Thursday. RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav, Hindustani Awam Morcha (Secular) founder Jitan Ram Manjhi and a Congress representative are likely to be present during the announcement. Opposition leader Sharad Yadav is also expected to attend the event. Read | BJP ally RLSP chief Upendra Kushwaha resigns from Cabinet, hits out at PM Narendra Modi There are also reports that Congress president Rahul Gandhi who went for a vacation to Himachal Pradesh, may return to Delhi by Thursday afternoon and take part in the joint press conference at about 4 pm. "Right now, I cant confirm about Rahul Gandhis presence, but many senior Congress leaders will be there," Congress in-charge for Bihar Shaktisinh Gohil told Times of India. Giving a further boost to the speculations of Kushwaha joining the grand alliance, Congress leader Ahmed Patel on Sunday met him in Delhi. The UPA believes that Kushwaha's decision to join it will help it build momentum against the NDA in Bihar. Read | Upendra Kushwahas supporters protest against Nitish Kumar's 'neech' remark; lathi-charged Also, Kushwaha on Sunday dropped a hint about his decision to join the grand alliance, saying that it was "one of the many options" after quitting the NDA before him. Besides BJP, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar's JD-U and Union minister Ram Vilas Paswan's LJP are other constituents of the NDA. The saffron alliance had swept the Lok Sabha elections in 2014, winning 31 of the state's 40 seats. For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. Marib: The number etched on the bracelet around Mohammeds wrist gave the 13-year-old soldier comfort as missiles fired from enemy warplanes shook the earth beneath him. For two years Mohammed fought with Yemens Houthi rebels against a military coalition led by Saudi Arabia and backed by the United States. He says he tortured and killed people and didnt care whether he lived or died. But if he died, the bracelet would guarantee his body made it home. When I become a martyr, they enter my number in the computer, retrieve my picture and my name, then print them with the name Martyr underneath, Mohammed said. It would be pasted to the lid of his coffin for the return to his family. Mohammed was among 18 former child soldiers interviewed by The Associated Press who described the Houthis unrelenting efficiency when it comes to the recruitment, deployment and even battlefield deaths of boys as young as 10. While both sides in the four-year civil war have sent children into combat in violation of international human rights conventions, the Houthis are believed to have recruited many more than the coalition? often forcibly. The Houthis have inducted 18,000 child soldiers into their rebel army since the beginning of the war in 2014, a senior Houthi military official acknowledged to the AP. He spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the information. Also Read | Saudi military leaders replaced amid stalemated war in Yemen That figure is higher than any number previously reported. The United Nations was able to verify 2,721 children recruited to fight for all sides in the conflict, the large majority for the Houthis, but officials say that count is likely low, because many families will not speak about the issue out of fear of reprisals from Houthi militiamen. The Houthis say officially that they dont recruit children and send away those who try to enlist. Some of the children told the AP they joined the rebels willingly, mainly because of promises of money or the chance to carry a weapon. But others described being forced into the service of the Houthis? abducted from schools or homes or coerced into joining in exchange for a family members release from detention. Many can be seen manning checkpoints along main roads across northern and western Yemen, AK-47s dangling from their narrow shoulders. Others are sent to the front lines as foot soldiers. A 13-year-old named Riyadh said half of the fighters he served with on the front lines in Yemens mountainous Sirwah district were children. Rebel officers ordered them to push forward during battles, even as coalition jets zoomed overhead, he said. He said he pleaded with his commander to let the young fighters take cover during airstrikes: Sir, the planes are bombing. The reply, he said, was always: Followers of God, you must attack! An unknown number of child soldiers have been sent home in coffins. More than 6,000 children have died or been maimed in Yemen since the beginning of the war, UNICEF reported in October. But the U.N. agency has not been able to determine how many of those minors were combatants and the Houthi-run Defense Ministry does not release its records for casualties. A former teacher from the city of Dhamar said that at least 14 pupils from his school were recruited and then died in battle. Their pictures were placed on empty classroom seats in 2016 during the Week of the Martyr, which the Houthis celebrate each year in February. Most of them were fifth and sixth graders, he said. An education official from Dhamar confirmed his account. The two spoke on condition of anonymity because of fear of retribution. Also Read | Shock and outrage as Saudi-led air strike kills 140 during funeral in Yemen The teacher said some of the dead childrens parents were Houthi leaders who willingly sent their sons to the front lines. Its painful because this is a child and they are all my children because I was their teacher, he said. They were taken from the school and returned in coffins. The Houthis and the coalition forces began peace talks in Sweden two weeks ago, but an end to the war appears far off. Many worry about what will become of the children who fought in the Middle Easts poorest country once a peace treaty is signed. Naguib al-Saadi, a Yemeni human rights activist who founded a Saudi-funded counseling center in Marib for child warriors, said the real problem with Houthi recruitment of the children will be felt in 10 years? when a generation that has been brainwashed with hatred and enmity toward the West comes of age. For all the Latest World News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: The United States has defeated the Islamic State group in Syria, US President Donald Trump claimed on Wednesday, adding that it was the only reason he kept troops in the country. Earlier there were reports that the US military, in a stunning reversal of policy, was considering a total withdrawal of its some 2,000 troops from the Middle Eastern country. Taking to Twitter, Trump confirmed the news, upending the assumptions about a longer-term US military presence in Syria. Earlier, US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and other senior officials had pitched for a long-term US military presence to ensure Islamic State cannot reemerge in the country. "We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency," Trump wrote on Twitter. We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency. Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 19, 2018 Read | Amid rift with United States, Iran President Hassan Rouhani threatens to cut off Gulf oil It's been a quite long time that Trump has been expressing a strong desire to bring troops home from Syria, while the US State Department officials have fretted about leaving Syria, keeping in mind the countrys brutal civil war, which has claimed thousands of innocent lives in the past. The deliberations came at a time when Ankara has threatened to launch an operation against the Kurdish militia, known as the YPG (Kurdish People's Protection Units) in Syria. In a situation like this, the Pentagon, however, has not confirmed the US troop pullout from the country and promised to continue its work in the region. "At this time, we continue to work by, with and through our partners in the region," Pentagon spokesman Colonel Rob Manning said. Read | Donald Trump's new spelling mistake is making Twitter sing with memes again! In Syria, IS fighters are holding out in what remains of the pocket that once included Hajin, including the villages of Al-Shaafa and Sousa. Most US forces are stationed in northern Syria, though a small contingent is based at a garrison in Al-Tanaf, near the Jordanian and Iraqi border. For all the Latest World News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. The driver said the light turned green and he started to accelerate when his truck was struck from behind by a 2005 Chrysler 300 that witnesses said was traveling at a high rate of speed before the collision. The driver of the vehicle was pronounced dead at the scene, according to the release. H John Voorhees III / Hearst Connecticut Media New Milford Mayor Pete Bass is looking to fill vacancies on several boards and commissions. Regular or alternate positions are available on the Alarm Appeals Board, the Arts Commission, the Housing Partnership, the Inland Wetlands Commission, Lake Lillinonah Authority, the Library Board of Trustees, the Municipal Roads Committee and the Northville One-room Schoolhouse Committee. REDDING Personnel and contractual salary increases are the largest drivers behind the town and schools budget. A large portion of the schools budget will be earmarked for special education and transportation. On the town side, the selectmen are expecting more money for maintenance, tree removal and capital purchases. The budget process is still early and so hard numbers havent been announced yet, but a general overview was discussed Monday at a joint meeting between the boards of selectmen, finance and education. Superintendent of Schools Thomas McMorran said about half of the budget is made up of personnel costs and contracts requiring pay raises. He said its higher because about 80 of the 100 or so teachers are on the top pay step. He said the board changed the pay scales from 12 to 16 steps to better reflect models across the state and help save money. The board encouraged early retirement to generate savings. Its generally people who cost you the most, McMorran said. The second biggest component of the school budget is special education about 27 percent. It is immensely important that we dont find ourselves falling into special education vs. general education, McMorran said. McMorran said more students require special services because the identification of disabilities has improved over time. He said taxpayers will see more special services teachers at the earlier grades because teaching the skills to cope with the disability early means the students might no longer need services as they get older. He said Redding usually is unable receive money from the state for special education because its smaller and struggles to meet the formulas threshold. Theres an economics of scale you dont just benefit from, McMorran said. Transportation is expected to cost about $1.3 million. McMorran said because these items are required, it most likely leaves financial flexibility in class sizes and programs as items the board will have to consider during the budget process. He said theyve been able to eliminate classes based on declining enrollment, but those numbers are expected to level out in the mid 800s for the next four years and then increase annually so thats no longer an option. Some residents and finance board members said the schools are already lean. Were cutting meat now, not fat, said Robert Dean, a finance board member. Reddings Board of Education has authority over the towns kindergarten through eighth-grade. Region 9 oversees Joel Barlow High School with representatives from Redding and Easton, and acts as its own finance board. On the town side, First Selectwoman Julia Pemberton said in addition to the salary increases for the police and highway unions, the largest increases are for maintenance items. This includes another $100,000 for tree work, bringing the line item to $150,000, so that the town can start to tend to the dead and dying ash trees. It generally costs about $500 to remove a tree and about 900 trees are slated to be removed. Some of the capital items include a Station Road bridge, possibly a new dump truck and a new emergency communications system, which will cost the town $1.3 million. The fire districts are contributing for radios. Pemberton suggested creating a facilities director position that would oversee the maintenance of the two schools and the town buildings. The library is asking for the towns contribution to be increased 5 percent, bringing the total request to $29,000. Pemberton said the town has created savings, including $20,000 no longer needed for revaluation, $50,000 less for legal as big cases wrap up and $95,000 for salaries based on new hires and departures. A listening session is scheduled for the school board at Mark Twain Library on Jan. 3. The selectmens all day budget workshop is Jan. 11 where all of the department heads will make presentations. DANBURY A city man scheduled to be sentenced for his role in a human trafficking ring suffered a broken nose and orbital socket at the hands of convicted serial killer William Devin Howell, the Hartford Courant reports. The assault happened on Dec. 3 at Cheshire Correction Institution. The prison houses Howell in one of the few protective-custody units in the state. For the assault, the Courant reports, Howell was charged with third-degree assault and disorderly conduct for hitting Robert King Jr. in the face. TOKYO - A significant decrease in Japanese respondents who called current Japan-U.S. relations "good" or "very good" can be seen in a recent joint survey by The Yomiuri Shimbun and the U.S. survey firm Gallup. In the survey, Japanese respondents who said relations are "good" or "very good" stood at 39 percent, down by 17 points from the 56 percent in the previous survey last year. The 17-point drop is the largest decline since the method of the poll was changed to a telephone-based survey in 2000. Those who said relations are "poor" or "very poor" also stood at 39 percent. That figure is up from 23 percent last year. The joint telephone survey was conducted from Nov. 30 to Dec. 2 in Japan and from Nov. 26 to Dec. 3 in the United States. In Japan, 1,036 randomly selected people responded to the survey, and 1,000 did so in the United States. In the same question, 50 percent of U.S. respondents said relations are "good" or "very good," unchanged from the previous poll a year ago. Those who said "poor" or "very poor" in the United States stood at 11 percent, down slightly from 12 percent last year. When Japanese respondents were asked how much they trust the United States, 30 percent of them said "some" or "very much," down from 39 percent a year ago. The figure is the lowest since 2000. For the corresponding question in the United States, 70 percent responded that they trust Japan "some" or "very much," with the level remaining high from the previous survey. The decline in positive evaluations from Japanese respondents over Japan-U.S. relations appears to reflect critical views of U.S. President Donald Trump's administration, which has been calling for Japan to lower its trade surplus with the United States. Japanese respondents who said they "disapprove" of U.S. pressure on Japan to lower the surplus stood at 75 percent. On the other hand, asked whether the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty contributes the security of the Asia-Pacific region, 64 percent in Japan and 70 percent in the United States said "somewhat" or "greatly." The high figures in both nations remained almost unchanged from the previous survey. In response to a multiple-choice question on which countries or regions will become a military threat, those who picked China stood at 75 percent of Japanese respondents and 60 percent of U.S. pollees, up from 67 percent in Japan and 51 percent in the United States in the previous survey. Asked about relations between their own country and China, 28 percent of U.S. respondents said "poor" or "very poor," up from 16 percent in the previous survey. The figure surpassed the percentage of those who said "good" or "very good," which declined to 22 percent from 29 percent in the previous poll. In Japan, those who said "poor" or "very poor" remained high at 67 percent, unchanged from a year ago. As to the new tariffs that the Trump administration recently imposed on Chinese goods imported into the United States, 50 percent of U.S. respondents approved the U.S. sanctions, compared to 42 percent who disapproved. Among Japanese respondents, 47 percent disapproved the U.S. trade sanctions on China while 35 percent approved them. As to Trump's diplomacy with North Korea, opinions are divided. Asked about Trump's handling of relations with North Korea, 49 percent in Japan approved it while 38 disapproved. Among U.S. respondents, 48 percent approved while 46 percent disapproved. 'America First' trade policy alienates Japanese Evaluations of the Japan-U.S. relationship have drastically deteriorated among pollees on the Japanese side, according to a recent survey jointly conducted by The Yomiuri Shimbun and the U.S. survey firm Gallup. The views of Japanese respondents are notable for a sense of distrust against U.S. President Donald Trump, who proclaims his "America First" policy, such as by demanding that Japan reduce its trade surplus with the United States. Meanwhile, expectations remain strong for the United States to play a leading role in international society. With many people seeing China and North Korea as military threats, more than 60 percent on the Japanese side supported the role of the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty, just as in the results of last year's survey, and their perception of the importance of the alliance seems to have remained unchanged. Thirty-nine percent of pollees in Japan said the current bilateral relationship is "good" or "very good," a 17-point decline from the 56 percent who said so in the previous survey in 2017. In the past three surveys from 2015 to 2017, from 56 percent to 58 percent had said it was "good" or "very good," the highest levels since 2000, when the survey began to be conducted by phone. The result this time shows a drastic change. By political party, 56 percent of Liberal Democratic Party supporters said the relationship was "good" or "very good." However, only 30 percent of respondents with no party affiliation and 26 percent of opposition party supporters said the relationship was "good" or "very good." In the 2016 survey conducted right after Trump won the U.S. presidential election, 40 percent of pollees on both the Japanese and U.S. sides showed a pessimistic view that the bilateral relationship will get worse in the future. This anxiety has apparently cast a shadow on the results of the current poll. Thirty percent of the pollees in Japan said they trust the United States "some" or "very much," down from 39 percent in the previous survey. Looking at the Japan-U.S. relationship in the future, 71 percent - down from 77 percent - of respondents in Japan said it would "stay the same," while 12 percent - up from 6 percent - said it would "get much worse" or "get somewhat worse." Trump's words and actions apparently are largely responsible for the deterioration of Japan's sentiment against the United States. Trump has insisted that the United States' huge trade deficit with Japan represents "unfair trade practices" and has repeatedly demanded that Japan fix it. Seventy-five percent of the respondents on the Japanese side disapproved of his remarks, while 10 percent approved. In the United States, 50 percent approved while 39 percent disapproved. On the Japanese side, the percentage who disapproved of Trump's remarks was high even among those who rated the current bilateral relationship positively or said they trust the United States, at 69 percent and 65 percent, respectively. The results show that many Japanese respondents are unsatisfied with Trump's demands regardless of how they evaluate bilateral relations. Asked how trade should be, 47 percent of respondents on the Japanese side and 49 percent of those on the U.S. side supported protectionism, while 33 percent in Japan and 43 percent in the United States supported free trade, indicating pollees in both countries mostly favored protectionism. - - - The first-ever U.S.-North Korea summit meeting, between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, was held in Singapore in June. They agreed to the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula in the summit, but the negotiations between the two countries have become tangled. Even if there is a possibility of holding a second summit at the beginning of next year, future prospects remain uncertain. In a recent survey jointly conducted by The Yomiuri Shimbun and U.S. survey firm Gallup, 49 percent of respondents in Japan approved of Trump's handling of relations with North Korea, while 38 percent did not. Breaking respondents down by political party, 59 percent of Liberal Democratic Party supporters approved of Trump's handling of North Korea, as did 52 percent of those who support opposition parties. However, among respondents with no party affiliation, 41 percent approved of Trump's handling while 40 percent did not. In the United States, opinion was split, with 48 percent approving and 46 percent disapproving. By political party support, however, responses diverged drastically. Among Republican supporters, Trump's support base, 87 percent approved of his handling of North Korea, while 82 percent of Democrat supporters, who are critical of Trump, disapproved. Perceptions of respondents in Japan and the United States greatly differed in regard to the possibility of realizing the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. In Japan, nearly 90 percent of respondents said it would be impossible to completely denuclearize in the near future and only 7 percent saw it as possible. In contrast, about 40 percent of U.S. respondents thought it was possible, while about 50 percent believed it was impossible. By political affiliation, there was little difference in Japan. In the United States, however, 53 percent of Republican supporters thought it was possible, and 42 percent did not think it was possible. Among Democrat supporters, 62 percent said it was impossible, while 31 percent said it was possible. Trump has emphasized achieving North Korea's halting of military provocations since the summit meeting, but a concrete road map for denuclearization has not been presented. Not a few respondents from both the Japanese and U.S. sides apparently have skeptical views on the possibility of a path toward Pyongyang's denuclearization being paved. As for views of Kim Jong Un, there was little difference between the United States and Japan, with 92 percent of Japanese respondents and 86 percent of U.S. respondents saying they did not have a lot of confidence in him. - - - Following are excerpts from an interview with Sheila Smith, a senior fellow for Japan studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Q: The percentage of Japanese respondents who said the Japan-U.S. relationship is "good" or "very good" decreased considerably. A: I suspect there's two things. One is the unpredictability of our decision-making. I think the Trump factor plays in across the board. Not so much because the U.S.-Japan relationship is bad. I think Prime Minister [Shinzo] Abe has tried to steady his relationship with Mr. Trump. But there's a lot of ambivalence about American leadership on a lot of issues ranging from Iran to Russia to China. [Second,] trade clearly plays a factor. Unpredictability is particularly obvious on the trade side of things. Q: In regard to Trump's economic sanctions on China, 50 percent of Americans approved, while 42 percent disapproved. A: I think tariffs are a step back in free trade. Imposing tariffs is protectionism, and there's a discomfort with that. That's the 42 [percent]. They may not be upset about the tough position on China for its economic behavior. They may approve of that. But they may not approve of the instrument of tariffs. Q: Eighty-nine percent of Japanese say it's impossible to realize total denuclearization of North Korea in the near future. In the United States, 42 percent say it's possible. It's a big gap. A: Here's what I thought was interesting about the U.S. response. Forty-eight percent approve of President Trump's handling, and 42 percent think it's possible to realize total denuclearization. [These are] very high. However, the experts are very negative. Inside Washington, the expert community doesn't like Trump's handling, whereas the "ippanjin," the public, are much more optimistic than I would have thought, because 48 percent say the president is doing OK. Two things could be going on. One is just general Japanese skepticism about Pyongyang. The second is, if you look at Northeast Asia, you kind of understand there's not much incentive for North Korea to give up those weapons. Americans, however, might think that if anybody can persuade the North, the United States can. They might have that blinder that Americans can do it. Whereas overall geopolitics might be [at work in] the Japanese response. Foresters spent about $2 million for the addition to Pine Dunes Forest Preserve off Hunt Club Road, just south of the Wisconsin state line. With the purchase, Pine Dunes one of several forest preserves in Newport Township if you include the far north branch of the Des Plaines River Trail now is a 956-acre preserve of some ecological and environmental import. The township also is home to the countys first forest preserve, Van Patten, which also includes Sterling Lake. VANCOUVER, Dec. 14, 2018 /CNW/ - BLOCKStrain Technology Corp. ( TSX:V.DNAX , OTC:BKKSF ) ("BLOCKStrain" or the "Company") announced its second quarter results for the three and six months ended October 31, 2018. Prior to completion of its reverse takeover transaction on May 17, 2018, BLOCKStrain had only been incorporated since November 22, 2017. As such, there are no prior quarters for financial comparison. "The core technology of BLOCKStrain was created to address some of the primary issues facing licensed producers and growers in the market with respect to strain verification and quality assurance. By combining genomic science with big data and implementing the security of blockchain to document and certify each step of the cannabis cultivation process, from Genome to Sale, we are working to transform the industry with a fully-integrated, closed-loop solution," said CEO Robert Galarza. "We are working with licensed producers and micro cultivators alike as they enter the newly legalized ecosystem," stated Mr. Galarza. "By adopting our technology, our clients can easily and inexpensively move their products through testing procedures. Our first commercial client, WeedMD, recently launched our solution and has genetically registered 40 proprietary strains developed in-house, allowing them to truly stand behind their product. We anticipate gaining considerable traction in the marketplace as suppliers and distributors recognize the strong value our solution provides." Financial and Operational Highlights: The Company's comprehensive loss was $2.3 million and $11.3 million , respectively, for the three and six months ended October 31, 2018 . $2.3 million of non-recurring listing charges related to the reverse takeover were incurred in Q1. and , respectively, for the three and six months ended . of non-recurring listing charges related to the reverse takeover were incurred in Q1. For the three and six months ended October 31, 2018 , adjusted EBITDA was $1.6 million and $5.8 million , respectively , adjusted EBITDA was and , respectively Operating expenses for the three and six months ended October 31, 2018 were $2.3 million and $9.0 million , respectively. were and , respectively. The Company's funds used in operations were $1.6 million and $6.2 million for the three and six months ended October 31, 2018 , which were primarily deployed for marketing campaigns and product development. and for the three and six months ended , which were primarily deployed for marketing campaigns and product development. Cash on hand as of October 31, 2018 was $4.0 million , compared to $5.6 million at the beginning of Q2. was , compared to at the beginning of Q2. In Q2, WeedMD, BLOCKStrain's first commercial client, launched the Company's genome registration and tracking software following the collection and registration of WeedMD's cannabis plant DNA. Q2 2019 Q1 2019 Q4 2018 Q3 2018 Revenue - - - - Adjusted EBITDA(1) (1,587,355) (4,167,857) (220) (304) EBITDA(1) (2,292,559) (8,995,890) (224) (304) Net Loss (2,295,244) (2,739,983) (224) (304) Comprehensive loss (2,295,244) (8,998,361) (224) (304) (1) EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) and Adjusted EBITDA are not measures of financial performance under IFRS. The definition for Adjusted EBITDA can be found in the Company's management's discussion and analysis ("MD&A") for the period ended October 31, 2018 at www.sedar.com More detailed financial information and analysis with respect to BLOCKStrain's results of operations are available in its unaudited interim financial statements and MD&A for the period ended October 31, 2018, both of which can be found on SEDAR at www.sedar.com BLOCKStrain also announced that it has retained Bullseye Corporate for strategic investor relations and capital markets communications services. Under the terms of the agreement, BLOCKStrain wil pay Bullseye Corporate a monthly fee of CAD $3,210 + HST for ongoing strategic communication services. The agreement may be terminated by either party with 30 days' written notice. Neither Bullseye Corporate, nor any of its executives have an ownership interest, directly or indirectly, in BLOCKStrain or its securities, and BLOCKStrain has not granted Bullseye Corporate or its executives any right to acquire any such interests. About BLOCKStrain: BLOCKStrain has developed the first integrated blockchain platform to register and track intellectual property in the cannabis industry. BLOCKStrain's technology allows cannabis growers and breeders to identify and secure rights to their intellectual property and also streamlines the administrative process and reduces the costs of genetic and mandatory quality-control testing for legal cannabis. BLOCKStrain's technology is proprietary, immutable and cryptographically secure, thereby establishing a single-source, accurate, validated and permanent account for cannabis strains from ownership to market. 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 Disclaimer for Forward-Looking Information Certain statements in this release are forward-looking statements, which reflect the expectations of management regarding the Company's future business plans. Forward-looking statements consist of statements that are not purely historical, including any statements regarding beliefs, plans, expectations or intentions regarding the future. Forward looking statements in this news release include statements relating to: the expected benefits of, and impact on, the cannabis industry as a result of BLOCKStrain's technology; and the Company's anticipation of gaining considerable traction in the market. Such statements are based on management's current assumptions with respect to the regulatory environment for cannabis, the expected applications of its technology and other factors, and are subject to various risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results, performance or developments to differ materially from those contained in the statements, including that: BLOCKStrain's platform may not operate as expected; the cannabis industry may not adopt the BLOCKStrain platform to the level expected; legislative changes may occur that negatively impact BLOCKStrain's business; BLOCKStrain's platform may not adequately protect users' intellectual property; and other factors beyond the Company's control. No assurance can be given that any of the events anticipated by the forward-looking statements will occur or, if they do occur, what benefits the Company will obtain from them. Readers are urged to consider these factors carefully in evaluating the forward-looking statements contained in this news release and are cautioned not to place undue reliance on such forward-looking statements, which are qualified in their entirety by these cautionary statements. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date hereof and the Company disclaims any intent or obligation to update publicly any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or results or otherwise, except as required by applicable securities laws. SOURCE BLOCKStrain Technology Corp. For further information: Crystal Quast, Bullseye Corporate, +1-647-529-6364, [email protected] According to the results of the most recent ADP Canada Sentiment Survey, more than three-in-five working Canadians say they put in extra time before (63%) and after (64%) their vacation to make up for being away from the office. While that represents a nearly ten per cent decrease in the total number of individuals putting in that extra time, these same employees say they'll now be putting in more of those added hours than what they did a year ago. In total, working Canadians say they are expecting to pay a "Time Off Tax" of about 23 hours total or nearly three full eight-hour workdays in extra preparation and catch-up time worked before and/or after a week of holidays. That's more than double the expectation from last year (11.4 hours), and slightly above 2016's survey results (21 hours). Younger workers those between the ages of 18-34 seem to bear the burden the most, saying they expect to work an additional 32.1 hours before and after a one-week vacation. "It appears that the Time Off Tax is alive and well across Canada. While its encouraging to see fewer working Canadians feeling the need to put in those extra hours, to make up for their time away, it's concerning to see that for many, vacation time can be as much a curse as it is a blessing," said Hendrik Steenkamp, Director, HR Advisory at ADP Canada. "Employees should not be penalized with late nights and early mornings for taking their earned vacation. It's the responsibility of managers to ensure their teams are able to make the best use of their downtime, which means not only providing coverage for when they're away, but additional workload support before and after their holidays." Use it or Lose It Time away from work has been shown to increase productivity and employee satisfaction, helping them to recharge and remain engaged when they are on site which has a noteworthy impact on their performance, along with their contribution to a positive corporate culture. While more than half (53.8%) of those polled said they are entitled to four weeks of vacation or less this year, only 48.5% of respondents indicated they will use all off their allotted vacation time during an average year with five per cent admitting they most commonly take none. Better Vacation Equals Better Retention Almost half (47.3%) of working Canadians say they would switch employers for an increase in vacation time, even if all other considerations remained the same. In fact, three-in-five (60.6%) workers between 18-34, and more than half (52.6%) of workers between 35-44 the two most coveted and challenging to recruit age groups - agreed that increased vacation time alone could convince them to leave their current employer. The Disconnection Dilemma With so much extra time dedicated before and after vacation, disconnecting during those days off should be easy but Canadians say they have a difficult time leaving their work at the office. Nearly half (44.6%) say they will check work email or reach out to the office while they are on vacation, with an additional 13.8 per cent at the ready to jump in should an issue arise. Younger workers (18-34) were the most likely to keep a close eye on their in-box, with more than half (56.5%) saying they always check in, and 47% admitting they check in multiple times. "The calendar change represents the perfect opportunity for both employees and managers to recommit making the most of their valuable time off," added Steenkamp. "Organizations can look to update vacation policies, like adopting unlimited or flex vacation, and give managers the tools they need to help make it easier for their staff to get away, without paying for it elsewhere. Fostering a culture that proactively supports its employees' wellbeing not only helps to increase on-the-job productivity and engagement, but to improve retention and help keep top talent." Other highlights of the ADP Canada Time Off Tax Sentiment Study: Workers in Quebec seem less affected by the Time Off Tax than those in other markets. Roughly 41 per cent say they work extra time before or after a vacation (20% below the national average), and when they do, they spend an average of only 17.2 hours of extra work. Quebecers are also the least likely to leave their job for more vacation time, with only 33.8 per cent saying they would do so. seem less affected by the Time Off Tax than those in other markets. Roughly 41 per cent say they work extra time before or after a vacation (20% below the national average), and when they do, they spend an average of only 17.2 hours of extra work. Quebecers are also the least likely to leave their job for more vacation time, with only 33.8 per cent saying they would do so. While workers in BC are the most likely to put in extra time before vacation (72.7%), they also work the least amount of extra overall hours (13.8 hours) before or after a one-week vacation. Women (6.6%) are nearly twice as likely as men (3.4%) to say they take none of their allotted vacation time during the year but when they do, they are substantially more likely (46%) to completely disconnect and not check in with work than their male counterparts (32.8%). Men also say they work substantially more extra hours (27 hours) than women (19.3 hours) before and after a vacation. Workers in Atlantic Canada work the most overall extra hours (31.5), followed closely by Ontario (27.7). Additionally, nearly one-in-ten workers in Atlantic Canada say they take no vacation time in an average year double the national average. work the most overall extra hours (31.5), followed closely by (27.7). Additionally, nearly one-in-ten workers in say they take no vacation time in an average year double the national average. Seven per cent of Canadians polled say they have unlimited vacation time each year, with workers in the Prairies ( Manitoba and Saskatchewan 10.6%) and BC (10.3%) being most likely to say they have this option. Survey methodology An online survey of 1562 Canadians was completed between November 16 to 19, 2018, using Leger's online panel. The margin of error for this study was +/-2.5%, 19 times out of 20. Please note that throughout the report, only those who work full-time, part-time or are self employed / freelance (872 Canadians) are reported. About ADP Canada ADP Canada gives organizations of every size the tools to help their people thrive. From basic payroll to complex people management systems and analytics, we help business leaders make better decisions. Our clients trust ADP to provide strategic insights and expertise to build and inspire the workforce they need. Visit us at ADP.ca or follow us on Twitter @ADP_CDA. SOURCE ADP Canada For further information: Erin Griffin, Kaiser Lachance Communications, 647-725-2520 ex. 221, [email protected] Related Links http://www.adp.ca Lets skip over the details and just marvel for 43 seconds at this video of a very good boy earning a diploma and carrying that diploma, in his mouth, across a stage. Go ahead, watch it a second time. This is Griffin Hawley. Griffin is a Golden Retriever and a service animal for Brittany L. Hawley, and by all accounts, hes great at his job. Griffin has helped Brittany earn her masters degree in occupational therapy from Clarkson University by doing good things, like bringing Brittanys phone to her, opening doors and even assisting her patients. Griffin was such a good boy for Brittany, he even got an honorary degree all to himself, which he proudly displayed and carried at a special ceremony over the weekend, while wearing a doggie cap and gown. The board of trustees of the Potsdam, New York, school honored the 4-year-old golden retriever at a recognition ceremony Saturday, saying he demonstrated extraordinary effort, steadfast commitment and diligent dedication to the well-being and student success of Hawley. Syracuse, N.Y. -- A storm will drench the eastern U.S., including Upstate New York, with heavy rain as the Christmas travel season gets underway. Rain is expected to fall Thursday into Friday, with up to 2 inches in the Southern Tier and Hudson Valley. "This will create a travel nightmare from the Gulf through the Ohio River Valley into the Northeast starting Thursday morning south and then Thursday evening north," said Mark Wysocki, New York state climatologist and a meteorology professor at Cornell University. The National Weather Service has issued a hazardous weather outlook, the lowest level of alert, for Central and eastern New York for Thursday into Friday. The weather service said minor flooding is possible. Up to 2 inches of rain is expected Thursday and Friday in parts of Upstate New York. "Rainfall totals of 1 to 2 inches, with locally higher amounts are expected," said the weather service office in Binghamton. "This will combine with melting snow to push headwater points to at least near flood stage." There is little snow on the ground across most of Upstate, although parts of the North Country and the Adirondacks have 6 inches or more. Temperatures will rise into the mid-50s on Friday, the first full day of winter. That's about 20 degrees warmer than normal. Winter weather returns Saturday, as the low pressure system that brought warm temperatures will pull in cold air from Canada. There will be snow flurries and strong winds across Upstate over the weekend. Contact Glenn Coin: Email | Twitter | Google + | (315) 470-3251 Unity Temple is one of the crown jewels of our community, Abu-Taleb wrote in a letter. We need to ensure that any development on this site addresses the concerns of this monument, but at the same time acknowledge that the existing bank drive-thru is not the highest and best use of that property. I am therefore supportive of mixed-use, transit-oriented development on this site, so long as the development has the buy-in and support of Unity Temple. NEW BRITAIN Connecticut utility regulators have absolved the states three natural gas utilities of any wrongdoing after an environmental group claimed last year the companies manipulated space on transmission lines, driving up the price of the fuel as well as the cost of electricity in New England. Investigators with Connecticuts Public Utilities Regulatory Authority found no evidence the companies failed to manage their gas supply portfolios on the peak demand days for these winter periods using prudent strategies. The PURA ruling comes 14 months after officials with the regulatory agency announced they were launching an investigation into claims made in an Environmental Defense Fund report ,in October 2017. The reports findings alleged that Southern Connecticut Natural Gas, Connecticut Natural Gas and Yankee Gas engaged in scheduling practices that deliberately manipulated the market to create shortage conditions that raised electricity prices by $3.6 billion during the past three years. Officials with Eversource Energy, which owns Yankee Gas, and Orange-based Avangrid, which operates Southern Connecticut Gas and Connecticut Natural Gas, said they welcomed PURAs ruling. PURAs decision essentially reaffirms what we and other regulatory agencies and experts have been stating all along that the claims made by the EDF were patently false and misleading, said Tricia Taskey Modifica, a spokeswoman with Eversource. While it is unfortunate that the Authority and other agencies had to spend extensive time and resources to review these erroneous claims, we appreciate PURAs careful examination of this matter and its ultimate conclusion that we acted properly and in the best interest of our customers. Ed Crowder, an Avangrid spokesman, said PURAs final decision confirms what we've said all along: that SCG and CNGs management of their natural gas portfolios was consistent with their obligation to provide reliable service to customers under all weather and service conditions. Officials with the Environmental Defense Fund were not immediately available for comment Wednesday regarding PURAs ruling. The ruling by PURA represents a second victory for the natural gas companies in debunking EDFs claims. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission cleared the companies of any wrongdoing in February of this year. luther.turmelle@hearstmediact.com David Hochschild is a commissioner with the California Energy Commission, where his work focuses on advancing renewable energy in California. Hochschild grew up in San Francisco but now lives in Berkeley with his wife, Cynthia, their daughters, Rosa and Sonia, and their dog, Pepper. My first automotive love was a sleek, green 1978 MGB convertible that I got in my late 20s. It was a beautiful, curvy, temperamental car with equal supplies of character and electrical problems. Now I am in my late 40s and I have fallen in love again, this time with an electric car the Chevy Bolt. I had never aspired to own a Chevy, but I had been waiting for a mainstream electric car to hit the market and loved the idea of charging a car with solar panels on my roof instead of having to go to a gas station. So I got on the waiting list for the Tesla Model 3, but by the time I signed up, I was ranked number 300,000. It appeared that it would be a few years before a Tesla would be available, so when the Chevy Bolt debuted a year and a half ago, I took my daughter down to the dealership to try it out. At the Chevy dealership, they didnt know much about the car, besides letting me take it for a spin. My expectations were low, but when I got in I suddenly felt right at home. I am 6 feet 3 inches tall and was surprised that I fit nicely with plenty of room to spare. That the car manages to feel roomy while being compact is a tribute to the design team and it was easy to park. The Bolt is slightly shorter than a Toyota Prius, which is a valuable feature as I am often trying to squeeze into increasingly scarce parking spaces downtown. Back during the pre-kids period of my life, I was fully content zipping around the Bay Area in a two-seater convertible. These days my wife and I are ferrying our daughters and their friends around non-stop, so I was happy to see that the Bolts back seats were plenty big, as was the trunk. But lets be clear as much as I love my Bolt, it does not look like a Tesla. The Bolt may be modern, well crafted and comfortable, but it is not sleek. However, when stepping on the accelerator, it becomes clear that the name is nonetheless deserved. This car has real punch, and while sitting inside the Bolts quiet interior with only the whisper of the electric motor, it is easy to suddenly find yourself hitting 90 mph on the freeway before you realize it. Aesthetics aside, my principal concern about buying an electric car was range, so I smiled when I read a Wall Street Journal review that referred to the Chevy Bolt as Prozac for range anxiety. With its 238-mile range, the Bolt gets me where I need to go. I live in Berkeley and work in Sacramento, and I can do that 150-mile roundtrip without charging up. And when you do need to charge, the handy PlugShare app shows where all the closest electric vehicle chargers are around you. Today I can say that the longer Ive had the car, the more I enjoy it. Twenty years ago, just after I bought my beloved green MGB, I was at a stoplight on Stanyan Street at Golden Gate Park, when a beautiful woman on the street saw the car and asked to get in and take a ride around the block. Attention Bay Area drivers We are looking for My Ride submissions. We want to know what you drive and why. Send story ideas to cars@sfchronicle.com with the subject line My Ride See More Collapse I recognize this is unlikely to happen to me in the Bolt or if it does happen, it is more likely to be a group of electrical engineers. But driving my family around in the Bolt, especially as we pass the lines at the gas station, I have never been happier. BRIDGEPORT A week before Christmas and a month before his birthday, bullets ended 12-year-old Clinton Howells life outside his Willow Street home. But less than 24 hours after his murder, police said they have identified a person of interest. Police said Howell was shot around 9 p.m. outside his familys light green duplex in the 200 block of Willow Street. Capt. Brian Fitzgerald said the boy was rushed to Bridgeport Hospital, where he was pronounced dead a short time after, becoming the citys 11th homicide of 2018. He was shot once to the chest, a wound that Fitzgerald called unsurvivable at a press conference in Bridgeport Police Chief Armando Perezs office on Wednesday, which brought out Mayor Joe Ganim and two city council members. Initially, hospital personnel told police that Howell was shot twice. The drive-by shooting was likely sparked by an ongoing dispute by the suspect or suspects and the intended target or targets, Fitzgerald said. But he said Howell was not a part of the ongoing dispute and was not the intended target Tuesday night. At the time of the shooting, Fitzgerald said, Howell was outside his home with two other people one of them over the age of 18. Detectives are looking into the possibility that one, or both, of those people might have been the intended target, Fitzgerald said. Police are still working to determine whether the suspects drove the Howells home intentionally because of the ongoing dispute, or if it was a chance meeting on Willow Street. Detectives already have strong leads in the case, Fitzgerald and Perez said at the press conference. Somebodys going to be in custody very soon, Perez said. A strong person of interest was identified by police through physical evidence and interviews with witnesses, Fitzgerald said. He declined to speak further about the person of interest, but did confirm that it is someone that Bridgeport police are familiar with. He said the department is looking at several suspects, who police believe were all in a small sport utility vehicle during the drive-by shooting. There is a lot of video evidence, which the department is not releasing at this time, Fitzgerald said. He said detectives also gathered a lot of witness statements and physical evidence. Loved by all Howells family gathered at the home on Willow Street, to console one another and plan a brief memorial for Wednesday evening. Wednesday morning, Elaine Wells, Howells aunt, stood in the front doorway of the home. Wells, who helped raise Howell and his siblings, said the boys mother was too distraught to speak with a reporter. He was a great kid; everybody loved him, Well said, adding that he was a whiz when it came to video games. Howells older brother, Gamel Dawkins, set up a GoFundMe to raise funds to cover funeral costs. I loved by little brother so much and I didnt get to say goodbye to him, Dawkins said on Facebook. He looked up to me being his older brother and he loved my son so much. Im just lost right now. Howell was a seventh-grader at The Bridge Academy charter school in the city. He had previously attended Hall Elementary down the street. Neighbors said they already knew Howell couldnt have been the intended target of Tuesday nights fatal drive-by shooting. It was somebody else. It wasnt meant for him, said area resident Chad Dwayne. I wish he had just stayed in the house and played Fortnite like he always do(es), Dawkins said on Facebook, referring to a video game. Gregory May, another brother of Howells, called the shooting a senseless act of violence on Facebook. My brother wouldnt bother anybody and loved to laugh and have fun and play Fortnite, May wrote. Im sick to my stomach, numb, confused angry and hurt. He did not deserve to be taken away so soon, but I know God dont make mistakes. I ask for prayers for my family and especially my mom through this difficult time. Bodega trips Family and friends said Howell would have turned 13 in January. He was a baby. A good kid, said Lorena Mejia, who with her husband owns the La Bodega grocery that Howell frequented on the corner of Willow Street and Barnum Avenue. He was a regular kid. Liked to ride bikes, mopeds. Smart, sweet. Always snacking. Mejia said Howell and a cousin came into the store just before Tuesdays fatal shooting. She said Howell bought his favorites a single package of honey buns pastries and a juice. He just goes to the store, buys snacks, comes home, said Dwayne. You only see him when he goes off to school or the corner store. Colin Morgan, who also lives in the area, said no one had any reason to target Howell. They gonna shoot him over a video game? Morgan said. A young woman who did not wish to be identified, said, Its so sad. I seen him walking up and down the street since he was a kid. Hes still just a kid. Sophia Holness' mother has lived across the street from Howell since he was born. Holness, who had stopped by her mothers house Wednesday, said her mom heard the shots the night before but thought they were fireworks. Nothing happens on this street, Holness said. Im shocked. I cant believe it. Mourning a student The Bridge Academy, a grade 7 to 12 school, was grappling Wednesday with Howells sudden death. Principal Tim Dutton said Superintendent of Schools Aresta Johnson assigned extra counselors and we are doing our very best to help heal our community. Dutton added, The state Department of Education has reached out several times to make sure we have the support we need. Denise Moller, Howells first-period teacher, said it may sound cliche but Clinton was a friend to everyone. He greeted all of us with a smile and either a high-five, handshake or side hug each morning, Moller said. His optimism, good spirits, and love of life were infectious. He often found ways to make even the angriest amongst us smile. Clinton truly inspired all of us to treat each other with respect, kindness, and understanding. Jermaine Paige, Howells reading teacher, said the boy was very bright and a joy to be around. I looked forward to seeing him each and every day and was nothing short of heartbroken when I heard the news of his death, Paige said. He was more like a younger sibling or relative than a student to me. Howell was also remembered for the years he spent as a student at Hall School by Turnaround Arts, a national nonprofit focused on bringing arts to various schools around the country. Turnaround Arts was involved at Hall and noted on Facebook that Howell participated in a special young architect program there. We are deeply saddened, read the Facebook post. We thank the Hall School staff and Turnaround Arts family for the time you spent pouring into this young man in the hopes that the arts would leave an impact so deep that it would forever influence the man he was to become. ... We will work each day in Clintons memory. Teachers at Hall, where Clinton attended from kindergarten through sixth grade, said he had near perfect attendance, was a great book buddy and had the combination of bold personality and soft heart that made him unforgettable. Unintended targets Tuesday nights homicide was the second in December and the 11th reported so far in 2018. And the timing and circumstances were also tragically familiar. On Christmas Eve in 2015, another boy, Luis Colon, 14, was killed by gunfire. Like Howell, Colon was not the intended target. More recently, on Halloween this year, another innocent bystander was killed by bullets. Myoshi Bagley, a 41-year-old mother of two, was killed when gunfire erupted on the citys West End. David Belle, 28, of Bridgeport was also killed in that shooting. Any person with information about this incident is asked to call Detective Cintron at 203-581-5227, or the Bridgeport Police Tips Line at 203-576-TIPS (8477). Staff writers Tara ONeill, Daniel Tepfer Jim Shay, Linda Conner Lambeck and Brian Lockhart contributed to this report. He calls himself "John of God" and dwells in the Brazilian village of Abadiania, an otherwise unremarkable countryside transformed into a fanciful spiritual tourist mecca for his believers, where everybody wears white and waits in line for a moment with the celebrity healer they've all come to see. Zahira Lieneke Mous was among them. The Dutch dance choreographer made the pilgrimage four years ago, seeking to heal sexual trauma she said she had suffered in the past. She had read books about "John of God" and watched YouTube videos about his alleged powers and saw his 2010 interview with Oprah Winfrey, an episode that brought the faith healer newfound international fame. The series, since wiped from Oprah's website, was titled, "Do You Believe In Miracles?" Mous believed she did. She went by herself to see "John of God," whose real name is Joao Teixeira de Faria and who claims to have treated millions of followers since the 1970s. She recounted in an interview with Brazil's Globo TV last week how she waited in line twice to experience his healing. On the first visit, he scribbled a prescription for an herb she was told would help her. The second time, he offered a private consultation - a "spiritual cleansing." Mous agreed. "You're made to feel special somehow," she told Globo TV. ACCUSED: Women name spiritual leader as #MeToo arrives in Brazil She waited until everyone else had their turns in line, until finally she was alone, and "John of God" invited her into his office. And then into his bathroom. That's where Mous said "John of God" raped her - all while leading her to believe it was part of her healing. She is among hundreds of women who have recently come forward with sexual abuse allegations that have razed Faria's image as saintly miracle-worker and replaced it with one of a suspected fraudster who exploited his celebrity to take advantage of female believers. On Sunday, Faria turned himself in to Brazil's Civil Police on suspicion of sexual abuse, the State Delegation of Criminal Investigation in Goiania, Brazil, confirmed to The Washington Post. More than 300 women from around the world have contacted prosecutors to accuse him of abuse, largely after Globo TV aired the stories of numerous women in Brazil's first major #MeToo scandal, the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo reported. But prosecutors told Estadao newspaper that investigators have so far focused their attention on 15 cases. Faria has denied all of the allegations. "I really hope to help other women to come out of their shadow, because we don't have to feel ashamed," Mous told Globo TV Dec. 6. "He has to feel ashamed, and all the people that protect him to continue doing what he's doing." Faria's phenomenon dates back to the 1970s. Since then, he's claimed to have treated millions of people and is either seen as the best healer since Jesus Christ or a total hoax, depending on who you ask. Faria, a second-grade dropout and son of a tailor, claims that he's performed life-altering surgeries on his followers while the spirits of doctors or biblical figures are channeled through him, such as King Solomon, the biblical king of Israel. He routinely stresses that God, not he, is the one performing the operations. These surgeries include forcefully shoving a pair of forceps up people's noses to the point that it is nearly poking their brains, as his followers have described it, or slicing people open without anesthesia. Alternatively, he is perhaps best known for performing "psychic surgeries," supernatural invisible procedures involving no scalpels or forceps whatsoever, only using the power of what he calls the "Entity." By channeling these spirits, he has claimed to treat the blind, the paraplegic, those ill with cancer and leprosy and any number of diseases. He has no medical license and has previously been jailed for practicing medicine anyway. The sexual abuse allegations have been percolating for years, but until now have done little to deter the thousands of visitors in white in the small town of Abadiania. Journalists have attempted to address the allegations several times for more than a decade. In a 2005 ABC News "Primetime Live" segment titled, "Is 'John of God' a Healer or a Charlatan?" he was asked about accusations that he had taken advantage of an unnamed woman who came to be healed. "There is a lot of jealousy. People talk," Faria said. "What dictates is the conscience toward God." In 2014, a reporter from the Sydney Morning Herald traveled to the Casa de Dom Inacio, the name of his spiritual compound, to interview him, squeezing in just a few questions before Faria got angry and stormed off while shouting. One question was about sexual abuse allegations. "I thought you came to talk about me," Faria said. "Not other people." His most famous media segment was with Oprah. In addition to her 2010 "Do You Believe in Miracles?" segment, featuring interviews with both skeptics and believers, Oprah traveled to Abadiania in 2012 to witness the works and controversial methods of John of God herself in an interview that again boosted his profile. In a statement to Reuters Sunday, she acknowledged the segment and said, "I empathize with the women now coming forward and hope justice is served." A spokesperson for Faria maintained his innocence in light of the accusations in a statement to O Globo newspaper last week, saying the faith healer "vehemently rejects any improper practice in his care" and calling the accusations "false and fanciful." Likewise, an attorney for Faria told Globo G1 Sunday, "We continue to vehemently contest all the charges," citing a "total lack of evidence." The women who have come forward publicly to accuse Faria, many anonymously, have told similar stories of alleged abuse. First, he told them they were special, they say. Then, he pulled them into a bathroom, where Faria allegedly would grope them, place their hands on his penis, or, as Mous claimed, penetrate them. Mous has claimed the abuse happened on two separate occasions during her 2014 trip. On the first, she said when she entered his private office, he asked her, "So what are you here for again?" "And to myself I was thinking, 'Didn't the Entity already know?'" Mous told Globo TV. "Didn't you scan my energy so you know exactly why I'm here? I said, 'I'm here to heal my sexual trauma.'" He then told her to stand in front of him, with his back to her, Mous said. He hovered around her like he was smelling her, she said, and then moments later he ushered her into the bathroom. He instructed her to sit in front of the mirror, "and he stood behind me," Mous said, "and then he asked me, 'What do you see?'" She wasn't sure what he wanted her to say. A woman? Her reflection? But as she searched for meaning, he grabbed her hand. She said he placed it on his penis. She froze. But he kept talking, about her family, her life, as though all of it were just part of the process, Mous said. "So you're being like manipulating into believing, he's scanning me, or he's doing something. And then he says, 'You should smile,'" Mous recalled. "'You should feel joy.'" Mous said Faria told her she may have the skills to become a medium for healing others herself. Still shaken from the alleged abuse, she said she tried to put it behind her, even to see if perhaps it really was supposed to be part of the healing, so that she could spend time learning the mysterious trade. She told Globo TV that she still saw herself as a believer. But the second time Faria invited her into his private quarters, she said he raped her in the bathroom. "There has been criticism of me," she told Globo TV. "[People have said], 'why are you coming out with your story? He's healing so many people.' That's also part of the reason I never said anything. If it's just me," she thought, "let me suck it up, because he's healing so many people, right?" She said she knows now she was wrong. - - - The Washington Post's Drea Cornejo contributed to this report. --- Video Embed Code Video: Joao Teixeira de Faria, a 76-year-old faith healer accused of sexually abusing more than 300 women, turned himself in to Brazil's Civil Police on Dec. 16.(Drea Cornejo/The Washington Post) Embed code: NEW HAVEN Mayor Toni Harp has hired an investigator to look into complaints made by Superintendent of Schools Carol Birks against Board of Education President Darnell Goldson. Attorney Andrew Crumbie was hired in November to look into concerns raised by Birks about her relationship with Goldson. (Crumbie) is looking into concerns relayed by Dr. Birks about working conditions and her working relationship with a supervisor, said city spokesman Laurence Grotheer. The concerns raised by Dr. Birks are being investigated by an independent party, and thats a function of the mayors responsibility to all city employees. Attorney John Williams confirmed to the Register on Nov. 27 that he had been hired to represent Goldson in connection with an internal dispute involving the superintendent but would not discuss it further. Goldson, who rejected the description of his decision to retain Williams as related to a dispute when asked on Dec. 3, said Tuesday that he is still unclear what complaint Birks made. Im going to do the job that is statutorily given to me and my fellow board members, Goldson said. He said he retained Williams because hiring a lawyer is the proper response when someone tells you theyre getting ready to investigate you. Goldson said he believes the complaints are related to the school boards decision to impose oversight on Birks management, something he announced would happen after more than 1,000 part-time employees received layoff notices, which Goldson said was done without prior knowledge of the school board. Most recently, the school board declined a contract Birks negotiated with the Weiss Institute to do a free audit of the districts finances because of a request for access to student data. The contract, some members of the board argued, was out of compliance with a state law on data privacy. Goldson said he disagrees with Harps assessment that it is her job to investigate the relationship between board members and the superintendent. One day after Goldson suggested the school board hire an investigator to look into ethical concerns brought against school board members by an anonymous email, Harp said in a Sept. 21 press release that the entire school board should investigate complaints, not its leadership nor that of any school board member. Goldson said he does not believe the mayor should have the authority over the school board to commission an investigation. A call for comment to Birks Tuesday was not returned before press time. brian.zahn@hearstmediact.com CROMWELL Outgoing Gov. Dannel P. Malloy Wednesday delivered a vigorous defense of his eight years in office, saying the facts belie charges the state is spiraling downward. Speaking during an early-morning appearance before the Middlesex County Chamber of Commerce, Malloy said he had just sat through a campaign where Republican and Democratic candidates alike said were bleeding jobs. That is simply not the case, Malloy said, arguing We have more private sector jobs in the state of Connecticut now than we have ever had before. If the hundreds of attendees at the Red Lion Inn thought they were going to get a wistful walk down memory lane from Malloy about his two terms in office, they thought wrong. What they got instead was a full and passionate defense of his tenure as the states 88th governor. I had to hear my obituary on a regular basis, Malloy said. There was not a day that I went to bed popular. But there was not a day that I couldnt sleep. Calling upon politicians on both sides of the political divide to stop telling lies about the states economic viability, Malloy also said it is not true to suggest the states population is shrinking. Our population is higher now than it has ever been! he said. When he took office the state was home to 11 Fortune 500 companies. Today, that number is 17, Malloy said. When he took office, Malloy said any number of people warned him the state was in danger of losing Electric Boat, the Groton-based submarine builder. And if EB moved from its location of the eastern bank of the Thames River, the Naval Submarine Base would be sure to follow, it was thought. But now, flush with new contracts to build the successor for the Los Angeles-class fast attack submarines as well as the follow-on design to replace the Navys aging fleet of Trident missile-firing submarines, Electric Boat and the 700 companies it does business with are protected for the next 35 years, Malloy said. The same is true of Pratt & Whitney, which many people warned could move their operations out of the state. Instead, having modernized its facilities and with contracts for Sikorsky to build the Marine Corps new heavy-lift helicopter and P&W building and maintaining new jet engines, Weve secured those jobs for arguably the next 35 to 40 years, Malloy said. What is needed is a cheerleader to make the positive story about the state better known, Malloy said again and again throughout his address to less-than-full house. One of the areas of which he was particularly proud of is education. With University of Connecticut President Susan Herbst sitting on the dais, Malloy talked about the high rate of retention of recent UConn graduates. There has also been a dramatic increase in job incubators from two when he took, office in 2011 to 22 today. Our higher education system, both public and private, has risen to the challenge, he said. But, he warned, Lets not initiate more cuts for UConn. This is exactly the wrong time to cut back on education, Throughout the recent campaign, he said, there was a steady drumbeat of bad news: that Connecticut was losing our best talent or that large companies were fleeing this state, as any number of politicians argued when General Electric de-camped to Boston. But by doing the right things, Malloy said he has laid a foundation so Connecticut will be better still in four or eight or 12 years. There is more that still must be done, Malloy acknowledged. While he said he has dealt with the state employees pension issue, the burgeoning teacher pension issue must be addressed and sooner rather than later. Transportation, too, needs improvements. But in the effort to make something great here in Connecticutlets not go back to the old bad times of lying to the people, he said. Like St. John Township before it, the North Township Board said its no vote hinged on not having enough time to study the numbers of adding 17,000 new people to it as well as residents in other North Township communities expressing concern that North Townships services would be weakened. St. John Townships Board also felt the levy amount of $70,000 Griffith would bring to it in 2019 was too low, especially when numbers would probably be reassessed and different in a year or two. ALBANY The state Department of Health announced on Wednesday the publication and distribution of a New York State Caregiver Guide, a 140-page book designed to help people who are not medical professionals care for a loved one. The department is distributing free copies of the book to seven organizations across the state that will hand them out to nonprofessional caregivers. These include St. Peter's Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Albany and Eddy Alzheimer's Services in Cohoes. "People who take the responsibility to care for loved ones with serious or limiting health conditions may often feel overwhelmed by the management of day to day activities," said state Health Commissioner Howard Zucker. "The Caregiver Guide is my gift to caregivers to make their lives easier and acknowledge them for all that they do year round." State officials estimate that more than 4 million New Yorkers provide upwards of 2.6 billion hours of hands-on care to loved ones at any given time a year. Many of them are not trained in medical care, but help manage health care appointments, medication and provide assistance with tasks like grocery shopping, recreation, grooming and laundry. The guide is designed to help these individuals navigate the health care system with or on behalf of a loved one who either needs help or is not able to participate themselves. It covers topics such as communicating with healthcare professionals, legal and financial planning and creating a care team, and describes the various types of care available in New York. It also reminds caregivers to take time to care for themselves, and encourages a team approach to caregiver tasks. The book comes in a custom box that includes a pen, notepad, sticky notes, a pocket for storing important papers and a shoulder strap for carrying to medical appointments. It was developed by caregiving experts at the state Department of Health and Office for the Aging, and was published with support from the NYS Health Foundation and AARP Foundation. In the first pilot run, 1,000 copies have been printed for distribution. A survey asking for feedback and a self-addressed stamped envelope is included. When we get a new president in 2024 no matter if he is a Democrat or a Republican are we going to tie him down with legal witch hunts like we did Trump? Is this the new wave of the future? This drastically affects the accomplishments of whomever gets elected to office. It is like having to pull a ball and chain around with you every hour of every day. Given the sentencing of his former attorney, it looks like Donald Trumps criminal liabilities may be eclipsing his political ones. But thats not the only turning point coming into clearer view. USA Today Tuesday released the results of a new public opinion survey finding that a majority of Americans do not believe Trump when he says (frequently) that his campaign did not collude with the Russians in 2016. While a third of respondents said they have some trust in the president, six in 10 said they have little or none. That poll comes just days after the Washington Post released the results of its own survey measuring how much Americans believe the president on a range of issues. The outcome was similar to the USA Today poll. Three in 10, including four in 10 Republicans, believe what Trump has to say about tariffs and other matters. It seems to me that we can expect more polling like this in which a majority of Americans comes around to seeing what a lot of us already saw: that Trump is a sham president. Indeed, these poll numbers are very likely to worsen, as federal prosecutors continue circling him, as the special counsels office prepares its report, and as the House Democrats ramp up their own multi-front investigations into the presidents alleged lies, corruption and foreign (i.e., Russian) entanglements. (New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood announced that Trump will shutter his charitable foundation after she accused Trump of using it for personal and political reasons. Put another way: we may be seeing the beginning of a vicious cycle. Remember, Trump wont concede to political reality. His party lost badly last month, but he acts as if a majority backs him. For this reason, the more things worsen for him, the more hell stay the same, which will make things much worse. Trump has never been a popular president. Were going to find out how unpopular a president can be. All of which is to say that the American people have got this presidents number, increasingly so. Thats a huge leap from where we started. In the aftermath of the 2016 election, it seemed that Walter Lippmanns nightmare had come true: the very thing making democracy great (popular consent by the governed) is the very thing imperiling it. It was difficult, in those early months, to think otherwise. After all, Hillary Clinton was the clearest and best choice. Yet, the electorate instead chose an obvious con man. This dread was compounded by many well-intended voices on the left and right warning us about Trumps fascism. Im talking about thinkers and writers, channeling Lippmanns cynicism whether they knew it or not, who claimed that the erosion of democratic norms and the attrition of republican values would pave the way to something sinister. Demagoguery is resurging around the world. No one is quite sure why. Whats certain is that demagogues are turning the people against the people. They are using the means and methods of liberal democracy for tyrannical ends. That could still happen in the U.S. in myriad different ways, but it would be hard to argue, at this point, that it will happen under this president. Indeed, the last two years have witnessed something remarkable. In a real sense, we have lived through John Deweys response to Lippmanns indictment of democracy. In May, I wrote that Dewey believed the people can make mistakes truly awful mistakes but given enough time, and given the strength of our founding documents, institutions and abiding democratic faith, the American people can change course. I think we are seeing that now. Does this mean we have learned from our mistakes? I wouldnt say that. Its one thing to turn away from fascism. Its another to turn toward fully equal democracy. And as much as I love Dewey, I believe, as he did, that Lippmann was right about human nature. As long as people are around, magical thinking will live on. But just as the Russians used our values against us free speech being chief among them those same values are protecting us, for now, from fascism. Will that be enough the next time a demagogue comes around? I dont know. No one does. You just gotta have faith. John Stoehr is the publisher of the Editorial Board, a daily newsletter about politics. He lives in Westville. DERBY Who knew a few years ago that a 109-year old former factory could be transformed into the thriving brewery and tap room that has since become the Valleys Bad Sons Beer Co. The Connecticut Economic Resource Center certainly knows that the work to turn the contaminated Brownfield site at 251 Roosevelt Drive into the popular brewery was no small feat. And for that, CERC recently presented Bad Sons with a Celebrate CT! award for its success in repurposing a former industrial property. Bad Sons co-owner John Walsh recently accepted the award during CERCs annual Celebrate CT! ceremony at Infinity Hall in Hartford. CERC President/CEO Robert Santy presented Walsh with the award. The ceremony, annually held since 2010, honors economic development successes throughout the state. Santy was not available for comment Wednesday. It is great to be recognized for revitalizing a vacant industrial building and turning it into a thriving destination in Derby, Walsh said Wednesday. It also validates that the program the state offers to help turn around Brownfield sites is a successful program. Valley-born and raised brothers Mark and Bill DaSilva drew inspiration for naming the brewery and tasting room from the history and true grit of the location, using the first letters of Valley towns: Beacon Falls, Ansonia, Derby, Seymour, Oxford, Naugatuck and Shelton. Bad Sons opened its doors in July 2017 in a renovated factory that formerly housed the Manger Die Casting Co. The interior was gutted, keeping the historic red brick walls and exposed wood-beam ceiling. The brothers added a large rectangular polished-wood bar and matching tables and stools, as well as the stainless-steel brewing system. The outside area boasts a grass patio area with additional seating and a fire pit. Renovations were given a boost with an $85,000 grant from the state Department of Economic and Community Development. Walsh and his partners had their eyes on the property for some time and knew it was the right location to realize their dreams. We have always said that this building that was built in 1909 had to be a brewery, but we just didnt know it at the time, said Walsh. Mayor Richard Dziekan, a fan of the local brewery, couldnt be happier for Bad Sons being recognized at the state level, and its owners for all they accomplished. Its absolutely beautiful in there, Dziekan said. They did a fabulous job. The fact that the land is completely clean is amazing. They could sell the property with no restrictions. I'm glad to see programs like the Brownfield program actually work. I wish them the best and continued success. jean.sos@snet.net A family law attorney from Bergen County was arrested Monday on a charge he kept $100,000 he received on behalf of a client from a real estate sale and spent the money on himself, authorities said. Alfredo Ramos, 38, of Garfield, is charged with second-degree misapplication of entrusted funds, acting Bergen County Prosecutor Dennis Calo said Tuesday. The prosecutors office began investigating Ramos in July when they received a complaint from the client, Calo said in a statement. An investigation revealed that (Ramos) had received the funds into his attorney trust account but, instead of forwarding them to the client, he used them for his own purposes, Calo said. An arrest warrant was issued Nov. 16, but Ramos was out of the country. He was arrested Tuesday after taking a flight from Columbia to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. Federal agents and Port Authority police arrested Ramos after his plane landed, Calo said. Ramos was held pending extradition to New Jersey, Calo said. Anthony G. Attrino may be reached at tattrino@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @TonyAttrino. Find NJ.com on Facebook. Every day for six years, an average of two people who live or work at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital have been assaulted seriously enough to require medical attention something executives concealed by keeping false records and retaliating against whistleblowers who tried to reveal the astronomical rate of violence inside the state facility, according to an explosive lawsuit obtained by NJ Advance Media. Patients live in a constant state of fear, knowing that staff cant protect them from other patients who are routinely allowed to continue their violent rampages because there arent enough employees who can stop them, according to the 60-page federal civil rights lawsuit filed Monday by the New Jersey Office of the Public Defender and co-counsel, the Wolf Law Firm in North Brunswick. Virtually every doctor at Greystone has been assaulted, including one doctor in February who lay unconscious, his face covered with blood, the lawsuit said. Just as alarming was the indifference shown by Medical Director Evaristo Akerele, who declined to check on the hurt doctor, and who often disregards calls for help when a patient becomes violent, the lawsuit alleges. Violence and staff shortages have violated patients civil rights because they are not getting the treatment they need, which has kept them committed longer than medically necessary, the lawsuit said. Chronic administrative failures, the increased daily patient census, the inability of the doctors to spent sufficient time with the patients and overall insufficient staffing levels...have resulted resulted in a drastic increase in assaults, suicide attempts, drug overdoses and fatal medication mismanagement, according to the lawsuit. This is the second time legal advocates have sued to change dangerous conditions at Greystone, located in Parsippany. The first case resulted in a 1977 settlement that installed a court-ordered monitoring panel until 2009 a year a new Greystone hospital opened to replace crumbling buildings and reduce overcrowding. Despite the physical transformation of Greystone, history is now repeating itself as the prior tragic circumstances have since resurfaced, the lawsuit said. The lawsuit names Gov. Phil Murphy and three top officials in his cabinet, state Health Commissioner Shereef Elnahal, Human Services Commissioner Carole Johnson and Attorney General Gurbir Grewal. Past and present Greystone officials, including Akerele, and senior members of Gov. Chris Christies administration are also named defendants. The plaintiffs are four patients identified by their initials, including one 69-year-old woman who was discharged in March. But their attorneys intend to seek class-action status for all past, current and future Greystone patients, whose constitutional and statutory rights continue to be violated on a daily basis, the lawsuit said. Overcrowding became a pressing concern as demand for the 450-bed main campus grew after the Christie administration closed Hagedorn Psychiatric Hospital in Glen Gardner five years ago. In 2014, Christie also oversaw the closing of the North Jersey Developmental Center in Totowa and the Woodbridge Developmental Center, two public institutions serving people with developmental disabilities. Disability advocates, families and employees said many were transferred to Greystone although the Christie administration at the time denied it. In 2014, 11 patients with were denied services relating to their developmental disabilities and were involuntarily committed for an average of 505 days longer than medically necessary, the lawsuit said. The patient census climbed from 460 in 2009 to 570 in 2014, the lawsuit said. In March 2017, the census was 560, according to NJ Advance Media reports last year examining the crowded conditions and rise in assaults. The lawsuits depiction of Greystone conflicts with the one the Murphy administration has described. On Dec. 7, state Health Commissioner Shereef Elnahal announced a national accrediting organization, the Joint Commission, determined Greystone to be in full compliance with safety and treatment requirements an approval that would last for three years. An unannounced visit by commission staff in October also found that fixtures in the hospital that could be used for patients trying to kill themselves had been removed, the commissioners announcement said. In August, Elnahal released an 18-month, $33.4 million turnaround plan for all four public psychiatric hospitals which includes reducing patient census, hiring more psychiatrists, and making building repairs. The plan was based on the findings contained in a consultant report that described a palpable sense of futility that permeates all the institutions that is not compatible with a culture of recovery, hopefulness or empowerment for patients." At that time, there were 486 patients at Greystone, 62 fewer patients than the previous August, the health department said. According to the lawsuit, only six full-time psychiatrists are working at Greystone, far short of the optimal 29. More will leave by the end of the year, the lawsuit said. Greystones top executives have created an atmosphere of terror and retaliation to intimidate doctors and staff who dared to speak out against its grossly negligent conduct, according to the lawsuit. Rather than try to save lives, (the) defendants exacerbated these harmful, life-threatening conditions, and also engaged in fraudulent and reckless conduct, much of which was hidden from their staff, the courts and the public. From 2012 to 2016, the annual number of patients and employees injured in an assault has ranged from 530 to 674. By August 2017, the hospital had documented 322 injured victims and was on track to surpass the highest number of assaults and injuries since the new Greystone hospital opened in 2009. The director who kept track of the data was suspended for threatening to disclose the information, the lawsuit said. Data from the current year was not contained in the lawsuit. But Donna Leusner, spokeswoman for the Department of Health, said assaults with injuries was on the decline, with 499 in 2017 and 403 so far this year. Likewise, the hospital census dropped by 20 percent from August 2017 to the current 441 patients. Since the Murphy administration began in mid-January, the department has hired a CEO, a medical director, a director of quality management, a chief nursing officer, and 40 other employees including a psychiatrist starting in March 2019, Leusner said. Another staff psychiatrist has decided to stay and rescinded a resignation. Asked about Greystone psychiatrist shortages on Nov. 30, Leusner said one unit had been closed temporarily for physician staffing reasons. We have taken multiple actions to attract and retain physicians including recently receiving approval to raise psychiatrists salaries, Leusner told NJ Advance Media. We have contracted with an agency to bring on additional psychiatrists and in the next month two additional psychiatrists will be in place. Carrier Clinic, a private psychiatric facility in Belle Mead, is also accepting up to 14 patients to alleviate crowding, she said. A spokesman for the Attorney Generals Office, which represents state agencies when they are sued, declined to comment as the office typically does on pending litigation. This story has been updated to include a response from the Department of Health on Wednesday. Susan K. Livio may be reached at slivio@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @SusanKLivio. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook. A. Yes. This week has been too busy for me. Monday was my birthday so that was fun. Im wrapping gifts for my whole family. There are nine of us in the house and I give a gift to everyone. We have a big party on Christmas with family and friends. Everyone is there. Were also planning a New Years Eve party and another party the first Saturday in January. And tomorrow were having a potluck at school. JERSEY CITY A new special improvement district on Jersey Citys West Side is expected to be heard for final adoption at Wednesdays council meeting. The SID, which would tack an extra tax onto commercial property owners in the district to pay for increased cleaning, extra lighting, marketing and more, has faced vocal opposition from some West Side business owners who say they are taxed enough. Proponents say the district would create extra attention for an area that business owners and residents say is neglected by the city. It would be the citys seventh SID. Residential properties would not be included. The West Side Ave commercial corridor has been struggling for many years, and (a) SID will give the businesses the support they need, including facade upgrades and a cleaner, managed presence on the street, said Ward B Councilwoman Mira Prinz-Arey, who represents the area. "I understand there are skeptics, however, there is strong support for the SID to be a catalyst for economic growth on West Side. Council President Rolando Lavarro said he will vote against the plan. Lavarro, who lives on the West Side, said he spoke to nearly 100 property and business owners and the vast majority of them are opposed or did not know about the plan. The district would include about 300 property owners. I just dont know how you have a SID thats supposed to represent their interests if theyre not interested or dont want to be a part of it, he said. Prinz-Arey said a committee has held multiple meetings over the last year to inform property owners about the proposed SID. The council is also expected to give final adoption to a measure that would put an end to the nearly yearlong controversy over the potential relocation the Exchange Place Katyn statue. The measure up for adoption would order that the monument, which commemorates the 1940 massacre of over 20,000 Polish people by the Soviet Union, remain at Exchange Place in perpetuity. The city had considered moving it one block south but backed down after months of protest. The council introduced the measure last month after a judge voided the June 13 ordinance that approved relocating the statue. The meeting starts at 6 p.m. on Wednesday at City Hall, 280 Grove St. Terrence T. McDonald may be reached at tmcdonald@jjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @terrencemcd. Find The Jersey Journal on Facebook. The driver in the fatal crash that killed four young children, including two of his own, has been slapped with a slew of charges and faces more than 100 years in prison, the Greenville (South Carolina) News reported. Arnez Yaron Jamison, 27, who moved south from Jersey City a few years ago, was driving his car in Travelers Rest, South Carolina, just after midnight on Dec. 7, when he veered off the road and struck several trees. Arnez Yaron Jamison Jr., 4, Robbiana Evans, 6, and Jamire Halley, 8, all died at the scene. The fourth child, Ar'mani Jamison, 2, was taken from the scene in critical condition, but succumbed to her injuries later that weekend. The elder Jamison, biological father of Arnez Jr. and Ar'Mani, was hospitalized after the crash. The mother of the children, Jackie Brown, also a former Jersey City resident, could not be reached for comment yesterday, but she said in a Facebook post that her children "taught me how to live, but never taught me how to live without them. This dream is so unreal." "Mommy love ya'll always and forever don't forget it," said Brown, who lived in Travelers Rest with Jamison and the four children. Jamison, who was in a relationship with Brown, was charged with four counts of felony DUI resulting in death, driving under suspension, driving an uninsured motor vehicle and child endangerment. Each of the felony DUI charges carries a sentence of up to 25 years in prison. His family described him as "the sweetest, most generous boy that really screwed up." "I want the community to know that he's a good kid," Carol McNeil, who said she raised Jamison, told The Greenville News. "I understand they're upset and mad, but he's not a monster. He loved his kids. If he can sacrifice his own life for them, he would." Visitation for the children is set for today from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. at St. John's Baptist Church at 525 Bramhall Ave. in Jersey City. The funeral service will follow. The arrangements are being handled by West Funeral and Cremation Services in Bayonne. EDITORS NOTE: Interested in the marijuana business industry? NJ Cannabis Insider is a new premium intelligence briefing that features exclusive weekly content geared toward entrepreneurs, lawyers and realtors. View a sample issue. WASHINGTON A U.S. senator from Colorado, where cannabis is legal, is using the debate on criminal justice legislation to try to prevent the federal government from enforcing its ban on marijuana in states that have legalized the drug for medical or personal use. Republican U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner proposed an amendment to the criminal justice bill that would leave it up to the states rather than the federal government to decide whether to legalize or ban cannabis. I am all for helping those that have paid their debt to society, but there are many for whom there should be no debt, Gardner said Tuesday on the Senate floor. This amendment at this time recognizes that you shouldnt go to federal prison for following state law. That, in its essence, is sentencing reform." New Jersey is considering legalizing marijuana for personal use, though the state Legislature wont vote on the issue until next year. Medical marijuana was legalized in New Jersey in 2010. Gardner is one of the sponsors of the Strengthening the Tenth Amendment Through Entrusting States, or STATES Act, which was introduced in June. President Donald Trump indicated that he would support such a measure. It remains to be seen whether the Gardner amendment will come up for a vote on the Senate floor as lawmakers race to pass the criminal justice measure before going home for the holidays. This is a moving target, said U.S. Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., a co-sponsor of the criminal justice legislation. Literally, every 10 minutes Im hearing a different version, Theres deals being worked out right now. Gardner said he amendment would pass if permitted a vote. I know that this amendment has the support from this body on both sides of the aisle to fix this conflict and allow the states to make their own decisions without the heavy hand of Washington telling them what to do, Gardner said. Morgan Fox, a spokesman for the National Cannabis Industry Association, welcomed the debate over the amendment. Ending cannabis prohibition is a key facet of meaningful long-term criminal justice reform, so it is certainly appropriate in this context, he said. Im not sure this the right vehicle for it politically, but I hope the amendment is at least discussed, and of course it would be great to have it included in the final language given the level of support for the bill in Congress and the administration. Are you interested in the N.J. cannabis industry? Subscribe here for exclusive insider information from NJ Cannabis Insider. Jonathan D. Salant may be reached at jsalant@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JDSalant or on Facebook. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook. For the second time in three months, drug charges stemming from a motor vehicle stop were dismissed against an embattled elected official in Monmouth County, he and his lawyer said Tuesday. Charges of possession of a controlled dangerous substance and possession of drug paraphernalia against Spring Lake Heights Borough Councilman Robert Merriken were dismissed in Brielle Municipal Court on Tuesday, Merriken and his lawyer, Charles Shaw, said late Tuesday afternoon. They were all ridiculous, Merriken said of the charges. He and Shaw said the charges were based on officers discovery of a syringe in Merrikens vehicle after stopping him on Aug. 8 for having a lapsed inspection sticker, a moving violation Merriken admitted and paid a fine to satisfy. But Shaw said Brielle Municipal Court Judge Paul Capotorto dismissed the paraphernalia and possession charges at the recommendation of Municipal Prosecutor Ronald Deligny. Shaw said there were no drugs in the vehicle or residue on the syringe, and Deligny, and then Capotorto, agreed to drop the charges after being shown a prescription for syringes that Merriken had been using to inject his dying wife with the morphine she had been prescribed for pain. Merriken said the unused syringe was left in his SUV after his wife, former Spring Lake Heights Emergency Management Coordinator Rita Murphy, died on May 24. Neither Capotorto nor Deligny immediately responded to requests for comment on Tuesday. The case was similar in some ways to one in Neptune Township, where Merriken was charged in April with drug and paraphernalia possession after police pulled him over for making an illegal turn, and then found a syringe and a small amount of marijuana in his vehicle. The charges were dropped in that case last September, when the Neptune prosecutor said police had no probable cause to search Merrikens vehicle other than a hunch that they might find something illegal. For example, there was no odor of marijuana, the Neptune prosecutor, James Butler, said at the time. Still, the earlier charges prompted a majority of Merrikens colleagues on the Spring Lake Heights Borough Council to approve a resolution in May demanding he resign. Council President Chris Campion and council members Rich Diver, Joe Tompey and Jim Shuler voted in favor of the resolution, while Sara King voted no. Merriken has refused to resign, though he will leave the council when his term expires on Dec. 31, after failing to win the endorsement of county Republican leaders, and then losing the June GOP primary. Merriken, 69, an avid sailor who runs Bay Head Marine, a boat sales and services business in Point Pleasant Beach, was first elected to the Spring Lake Heights council in November 2015. Spring Lake Heights is a southern Monmouth County borough of just over a square mile and just under 5,000 residents, separated from the Atlantic coast by the Borough of Spring Lake. He said he was not certain whether he will retire from public life for good after his council seat expires. Honestly, Im not 100 percent because of the death of my wife, so Im really not sure, he said, his voice breaking with emotion. She was the most amazing woman. She was smart and beautiful. And she knew how much I loved boats. Her death came five years after the couples son died in 2013, when he was struck by a train several months after Hurricane Sandy had wrecked the family house he had been living in on the Jersey Shore. Merriken said his son had been walking along the tracks with a set of headphones on in the early morning hours, when he was taken by surprise. Steve Strunsky may be reached at sstrunsky@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @SteveStrunsky. Find NJ.com on Facebook. A federal judge ruled Tuesday that Newark does not need to hand out more water filters, denying an emergency motion that had tried to expand the program. In a hearing at the federal courthouse in Newark today, Judge Esther Salas told the Natural Resources Defense Council, a nonprofit group suing the city over elevated lead levels, that she would deny all of the requests in the emergency motion. The NRDC filed the emergency motion on Dec. 8, and had sought to force the city to expand its filter handout program to apply to residents in all parts of the city. Currently, residents living in the East Ward are not eligible to receive the filters. The East Ward gets its water from the Wanaque treatment plant, which does not have the same corrosion control problems that plague operations at the Pequannock treatment plant which serves the rest of the city. We are pleased that the court agreed with Newark that the NRDC has not proven the need for an emergency injunction and has not presented credible evidence that a problem exists with corrosion control in our Wanaque water system, said Kenyatta Stewart, a corporation counsel for the city. The corrosion control treatment process at the Pequannock plant has contributed to elevated levels of lead in taps around Newark. When proper corrosion controls are not in place, water that flows through lead pipes and fixtures can eat away at the infrastructure, in turn causing lead to leach into the water. The city is currently working under an Administrative Consent Order from the state to replace private lead service lines. Newark is still rolling out a $75 million program to replace 18,000 lead service lines. Contracts for the first round of construction have not been finalized; construction is expected to start next year. Newarks water department has been handing out water filters to affected residents as the work is being done. Since October, the city has distributed nearly 21,000 filters to residents. Newark spent $1.6 million to purchase 20,000 filters; an additional 20,000 were donated. In filing the emergency motion and asking for the filter handout program to be expanded, the NRDC argued that mixing of water between the Pequannock and Wanaque systems had placed homes with lead pipes and fixtures in the East Ward at risk. We went to court today to call attention to the citywide problem of lead exposure in Newark, said Claire Woods, an attorney with the NRDC. "Our purpose is to ensure that everyone has access to safe drinking water and that the City of Newark prioritizes the health and well-being of its residents. Well continue to fight for safe water. The city has not yet applied for a state permit to begin a new method of corrosion control at the Pequannock plant. The application is being prepared and approval is expected in January so the new treatment site will be operational in March, according to Kareem Adeem, the acting director of Newarks Department of Water and Sewer Utilities. The new corrosion treatment is expected to take 6 to 8 months to take effect. Read More: Staff reporter Karen Yi contributed to this story. Michael Sol Warren may be reached at mwarren@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MSolDub. Find NJ.com on Facebook. A lucky diner says he happened upon a pearl while eating an oyster dish at a famous New York City restaurant. Rick Antosh was out to lunch with a friend and ordered his usual at the Grand Central Oyster Bar on Dec. 5 the $14.75 pan roast, a stew-like dish that includes six oysters. The 66-year-old tells the New York Post that he felt a small object rolling around his mouth after diving into the dish. "For a fraction of a second, there was terror," Antosh told the Post. "Is it a tooth? Is it a filling?" The Edgewater resident says it turned out to be a pea-sized pearl. He has not had the prize appraised. Ive been here 28 years, said Sandy Ingber, the restaurants executive chef. This is only the second time Ive seen this happen. And we sell over 5,000 oysters on the half shell every day. The occurrence of natural pearls in oysters is not well understood, but anecdotally it has been estimated at one in 10,000, according to Matthew W. Gray, an oyster physiologist at the University of Maryland. Antosh said he's not yet sure what he'll do with the find. I will definitely come back and try to find more pearls, he said. You never know. The Force Report is a continuing investigation of police use of force in New Jersey. Read more from the series or search your local police department and officers in the full the database. Black residents in New Jersey have long complained that they bear the brunt of unequal policing practices. Now, a new trove of data backs up the complaint. But the racial disparities in police use of restraints, punches, kicks and other types of force vary widely depending on your local police department. Statewide, a black person in New Jersey is three times more likely to be subjected to force than a white person, according to an analysis of five years of police use-of-force reports, which are required to be filed any time an officer uses any kind of force. Even when you account for the fact that black people are arrested at a greater rate than white people, they are still 38 percent more likely to be subjected to police force. To see the racial disparity in your town, we calculated the percent a black person is more or less likely to face force compared to someone who is white, based on reports filed by local police departments from 2012 through 2016. The map can be viewed based on population, or more narrowly based only on those who were arrested. Cant see the map below? Click here. Read more from The Force Report: We are continuing to make this dataset better. The numbers in this story were last updated Jan. 8, 2019. See the changes weve made here. FBI agents Wednesday arrested a Paterson police officer on allegations he made unjustified traffic stops to steal cash from motorists, federal prosecutors said. Officer Matthew Torres, 30, is the fifth city police officer snared in a federal probe that has already resulted in three guilty pleas to charges that have included civil rights violations and drug offenses. Torres' arrest came just a day after another officer, Jonathan Bustios, pleaded guilty to extortion and conspiracy charges in the illegal seizure of a handgun from a driver in exchange for a reduced charge. Torres, of Paterson, faces a charge of conspiring to deprive individuals of their civil rights under cover of law, according to the U.S. Attorneys Office for the District of New Jersey. Investigators allege Torres was one of a number of officers who conducted traffic stops to steal cash and other items from motorists. In one such traffic stop, an FBI agent wrote in a criminal complaint, Torres and Officer Eudy Ramos took $1,000 from a driver, whom they tricked into believing the seizure was legitimate. When interviewed by FBI agents this month, the complaint says, Torres admitted the seizure was one of a number of illegal seizures he and Ramos had made. Ramos and Bustios were arrested by the FBI in April as a result of an investigation Paterson Police Director Jerry Speziale said was originally launched by the departments internal affairs unit. Two other Paterson officers, Ruben McAusland and Roger Then, have since accepted plea deals in connection with the March beating of a suicidal hospital patient. McAusland, 26, also admitted selling heroin and marijuana to an FBI informant, and having stolen heroin and crack cocaine from a crime scene. McAusland, Then and Bustios are all awaiting sentencing, while the charges against Ramos remain pending. The complaint against Torres reveals his arrest came after another officer involved in the traffic stops began cooperating with the FBI in the hopes of obtaining a more favorable outcome with respect to pending charges. Prosecutors said Torres is scheduled to make his first appearance in front of a federal magistrate in Newark Wednesday afternoon. It was not immediately clear whether he had an attorney who could comment on the allegations. Thomas Moriarty may be reached at tmoriarty@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @ThomasDMoriarty. Find NJ.com on Facebook. A federal judge has sentenced Passaic County rapper LaRon James to more than two years in prison for trying to bring a loaded handgun on a plane at Newark Liberty International Airport James, who lives in Totowa and performs under the name Juelz Santana, pleaded guilty in August to possessing a firearm as a convicted felon and carrying a weapon on an aircraft. U.S. District Judge Stanley R. Chesler on Wednesday sentenced James, a 36-year-old Totowa resident, to 27 months in prison and one year of supervised release, according to the U.S. Attorneys Office for the District of New Jersey. James, who was represented by defense attorney Brian Neary, is best known for the hit single There It Go (The Whistle Song)," and has in recent years appeared on the VH1 reality show Love & Hip Hop. He has worked with Chris Brown Hes also had his share of legal troubles, including a 2012 felony conviction in Bergen County for drug distribution. Port Authority police detectives arrested James in March after Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents discovered a loaded .38-caliber derringer handgun in the rappers bag as he tried to board a flight to San Francisco. James appeared nervous at the security checkpoint and had asked TSA agents to screen his bag quickly so he wouldnt miss his flight, according to a criminal complaint filed with the court. Authorities said he later fled the airport in a taxi cab, but was arrested less than three days later. Thomas Moriarty may be reached at tmoriarty@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @ThomasDMoriarty. Find NJ.com on Facebook. The Arthur M. Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology at Peking University is known for its updated displays of recent discoveries by scholars and students from the university's archaeology department. [Photo by Wang Kaihao/China Daily] More than 30 higher education institutions have banded together in a bid to improve and develop the cultural repositories of the nation's universities. Shortly after the China Design Museum was inaugurated on the Xiangshan Campus of the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, the capital of East China's Zhejiang province, locals and fans of fine art from further afield have all had to endure long queues to enter the institution. The scenario is not common for a museum of a Chinese college, and it has received more than 200,000 visits since it opened its doors in April. Described by Xu Jiang, president of the CAA, as "China's first museum with a systematic collection of original Western modern design work", the museum houses more than 7,000 exhibits reflecting modern Western designincluding 350 original design pieces from the Bauhaus, the world-famous German design school which was active from 1919 to 1933which were bought by Hangzhou city government in 2011. It is also home to myriad samples of Western fashion design and numerous film posters. However, it seems that, only a few months later, the popularity of this extraordinary museum has abated somewhat: Most of its galleries look empty, except for some scattered visitorsmostly art students and teachers. It's not just the chilly December weather that's to blame, and it has prompted the question from many Chinese universities: How do they make their museums more appealing to the public over the long term? Earlier this month, delegates from more than 30 higher education institutions from all over the country gathered at the CAA to attend the annual conference for development of university museums in China. According to Luo Jing, a department director in charge of museum development under the National Cultural Heritage Administration, there are over 400 museums in China's universities which have their own museum, and each one, on average, attracts less than 50,000 visits a year. In comparison, China has about 5,100 registered non-university based museums nationwide, that, in 2017, held over 20,000 exhibitions which attracted over 900 million visits according to the administration's statistics. "There's huge potential to make full use of the resources in the university museums," says Luo. "However, much more work needs to be done." Luo cites a survey which reported the embarrassing statistic that about 70 percent of the country's university museums hold just three exhibitions, or fewer, a year. "I've seen an extreme case where one museum didn't change its exhibition for 15 years," says Luo. "A college museum should serve as a place to display its most recent research achievements," Luo says. "It should be mixed into the general development of the university." WASHINGTON This was U.S. Sen. Cory Bookers big priority when he first came to Washington in 2013. Even President Donald Trump was on the same side as the New Jersey Democrat. On Tuesday night, the U.S. Senate also agreed, voting 87-12, to make major changes to the nations criminal justice laws. Under the measure, judges could hand out lighter sentences to those convicted of nonviolent drug crimes, a third offense no longer would be a guaranteed ticket to life imprisonment, and most juveniles would no longer face solitary confinement. One of the top reasons I wanted to run for the United States Senate was to get legislation like this done, Booker told reporters at the Capitol. Our criminal justice system is a cancer on the soul of this country. Booker was one of the six original Senate sponsors of the First Step Act, which is designed to reduce the number of nonviolent offenders behind bars. They are disproportionately minority and often there due to non-violent drug crimes. The measure put Booker, D-N.J., on the same side as Trump, who he is considering running against in 2020; and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, with whom he clashed repeatedly during the confirmation hearings for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. One provision would allow prisoners convicted of crack cocaine offenses before the 2010 law that imposed similar penalties for both powder cocaine and crack cocaine use to petition for lighter sentences. That section alone would affect as many as 3,000 people, 90 percent of them black, Booker said.. Booker has sought to overhaul the criminal justice system since coming to Washington, and his efforts led him to cross party lines and form coalitions with libertarian-minded Republicans such as U.S. Sens. Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Rand Paul, R-Ky., as well as billionaire energy executives Charles and David Koch. The bill still needs House approval before going to the White House, where Trump said he would sign it. The House returns Wednesday evening, and AshLee Strong, a spokeswoman for House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said she expected quick approval. The junior senator from New Jersey has been relentless in his efforts to bring moral urgency to this issue, U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., said on the Senate floor. President Barack Obama backed such changes, and in November 2015 went to Newark, where Booker formerly served as mayor, to talk about efforts to help former inmates get education, training and jobs. That was after a bipartisan group of senators including Booker, Grassley, Lee and Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois crafted criminal justice legislation, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., refused to bring it up for a vote. This has been five years of work, Booker said. We almost got there last Congress. Some of my best moments as a senator have been the negotiations and the working with colleagues across the aisle and seeing that you can get things done. This is really an exciting moment for me. This time, with Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner making this a priority, and the majority leader facing pressure from both the president and members of his own conference, McConnell, relented. In New Jersey. Gov. Chris Christie took a similar tack, signing legislation requiring that some nonviolent offenders undergo drug treatment rather than being sentenced to prison. He expanded a system of drug courts to handle those cases instead of sending those arrested through the criminal court system. This is a great first step. We did similar reform in NJ while I was Governor & crime is down & so is the prison population. A great win for .@realDonaldTrump & for the folks in Congress. The effort couldnt have been successful w/o the relentless work of Jared Kushner. Big win. https://t.co/rIqRVAtrhh Governor Christie (@GovChristie) December 19, 2018 Criminal justice is a topic that has transcended ideological and party lines, giving all sides benefits they could point to. The current system disproportionately affects minority and low-income residents, while reducing the prison population helps states and municipalities save money and shrinks government. Offering job training and drug treatment to inmates allows them to find jobs when they leave prison, reducing the chances that they will commit another crime and pumping money from their wages into the communities they live in. This issue touches almost every other issue in American prosperity, said John Koufos, a former Brick resident who now serves as national director of re-entry initiatives for Right on Crime, a conservative advocacy group that supported the legislation. When youre talking about economic opportunity, when youre talking about family reunification, when youre talking about health care, many of those things run through the criminal justice system. Booker said that the measure was a first step toward undoing the 1994 crime act, enacted under President Bill Clinton as Democratic elected officials sought to deflect Republican attacks that they were soft on crime. To see us starting to reverse course and try to undo a lot of that egregious damage really is encouraging to me, Booker said. Booker said the bill was only a start. Among the legislation he said he wanted to work on next was a so-called ban the box measure, which prevents prospective employers from asking applicants about any criminal record until later in the hiring process. New Jersey has such a law on the books. Menendez, who supported the legislation, also acknowledged that the bill was a beginning, not an end. The First Step Act does not address structural racism and racial disparities in our criminal justice system, nor does it completely alleviate some of the draconian sentences still in place for drug offenses, Menendez said. What this legislation will do is make a positive difference in the lives of thousands of federal inmates working to turn their lives around and earn a second chance. Before passing the bill, the Senate did not vote on an amendment offered by U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., that would prevent the federal government from enforcing its marijuana ban in states that have legalized the drug, effectively killing the proposal. Jonathan D. Salant may be reached at jsalant@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JDSalant or on Facebook. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook. Gov. Phil Murphys chief of staff, Pete Cammarano, testified Tuesday that he personally asked the top Murphy staffer accused of raping Katie Brennan to make arrangements to leave state government employment in March, though the official, Albert J. Alvarez, would not resign until October. Cammaranos testimony before a committee of state lawmakers reveals the Murphy administration tried to push Alvarez out of his job months earlier than what was previously disclosed. Alvarez was also asked to make plans to leave in June. Cammarano said that while he did not fire Alvarez outright in March, he made it clear he was to leave. What I was saying to him was very clear, Cammarano told the lawmakers at the Statehouse in Trenton. Those of us who have been in Trenton for a long time do understand that when the chief of staff tells you you need to look for employment outside of state government, the message is clear." But he didnt leave. Alvarez remained in his job until he was contacted by the Wall Street Journal in October. Cammarano was the third state official to testify Tuesday before a special legislative committee investigating the Murphy administrations handling of Brennans rape allegation against Alvarez. Hes also the highest ranking. The committee will resume Cammaranos testimony at its next meeting on Jan. 8. In his prepared remarks, Cammarano told lawmakers that he has followed the advice of Murphys transition counsel and administration counsel since he first learned of Brennans allegations in December 2017. He kept the allegations confidential, limited Alvarezs hiring ability, and finally asked Alvarez to find another job, all as he was advised by Murphys top lawyers. Cammarano also said he was also advised not to tell the governor, and that Murphy and First Lady Tammy Murphy didnt know until October and were blindsided and completely shocked. On Dec. 1, 2017, Cammarano said that Justin Braz, the deputy chief of staff for legislative affairs who testified earlier Tuesday, informed him someone had accused of Alvarez of rape during the 2017 campaign and believed criminal charges were forthcoming. Braz shared the allegations but not Brennans name. Cammarano said he believed at the time that Brennan had not authorized Braz to bring the allegations to him and transition counsel Raj Parikh. Braz testified earlier that he did so with Brennans permission. Braz soon updated him that the Hudson County Prosecutors Office had, in fact, declined to press charges. Parikh conducted a background check that came back clean and advised Cammarano to take action to ensure that Mr. Alvarez was not in a position to retaliate against the alleged victim ... by limiting his hiring responsibilities and his ability to reject any resume submitted to the transition by anyone who could be the alleged victim," he said. Alvarez served as deputy director of personnel for the transition team before he was hired as chief of staff to the New Jersey Schools Development Authority. Cammarano also said he was advised to not discuss the allegation with Alvarez and to keep it confidential. Then in March, Cammarano said, he learned Brennans identity from Murphys chief counsel, Matt Platkin, whom Brennan told personally. He said Platkin, too, recommended he not discuss Brennans allegations with anyone, including the governor. On March 26, on Platkins counsel, Cammarano said he brought Alvarez into his office, let him know he was accused of sexual assault and that he should make arrangements to leave his state employment at the Schools Development Authority. Mr. Alvarez adamantly denied the allegations and became teary-eyed and emotional, but I believed that he understood my instruction that he was to leave state service, Cammarano said. That was the last time I ever interacted with Mr. Alvarez. Cammarano told the committee that he at no point told Murphy about the allegations and he believed the governor and First Lady Tammy Murphy did not learn of them until the Wall Street Journal started asking questions. They both were blindsided and completely shocked," he said. During questioning from lawmakers, Cammarano said that while he was advised against it, there were times he thought he should loop in the governor. Charlie McKenna, Alvarezs boss at the Schools Development Authority until McKenna resigned in August, testified earlier Tuesday that in June he also told Alvarez to begin looking for another job, at Platkins request. McKenna, the former chief counsel to then-Gov. Chris Christie, described Alvarez as a political hire who landed on his doorstep. He said he received a text message from Jose Lazano, Murphys transition chair, letting him know Alvarez would be his chief of staff. McKenna described Alvarez as a good employee. McKenna told the investigating committee that he was called to the front office, where Platkin asked him to encourage Alvarez to make his way out. This came days after Brennan emailed the Murphys asking for a chance to discuss a sensitive matter," without disclosing more detail. McKenna said he was never told about the rape allegation. He was calm. He seemed to understand the situation, McKenna said of Alvarez. He basically said I didnt do anything wrong, but I understand the situation and I dont want to embarrass the governor. McKenna said he wasnt alarmed that months went by and Alvarez had not left state government. Alvarez has not been charged with a crime and has, through his attorney, denied the allegations. NJ Advance Media staff writer Brent Johnson contributed to this report. Samantha Marcus may be reached at smarcus@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @samanthamarcus. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook. Paolo Laudisa, "Vacation" (Photo by Jay Birbeck/China.org.cn) Ever since the 12th century, when explorer Marco Polo described the marvels of ancient Chinese civilization to European readers, a long and rich history of cultural exchange has developed between China and Italy. Many writers, artists and travelers today continue to foster a mutual understanding between the peoples of both countries. A temporary exhibit, open through Dec. 23 at the China Millennium Monument in Beijing, is now continuing this tradition of cultural exchange. "Beyond the Horizon -- Contemporary Art from Italy," curated by Zhang Yidan, presents a diverse and exciting collection of recent works by 25 contemporary Italian artists. Unlike well-known Renaissance classics, such as "Sistine Madonna" by Raphael Sanzio and Michelangelo Buonarroti's David sculpture, many of the works on display here will be unfamiliar to Chinese audiences. However, this wide-ranging collection, which includes forays into expressionism, abstract art and surrealism, is a refreshing twist on the centuries-old exchange. Giorgio Distefano, "Luxor" (Photo by Jay Birbeck/China.org.cn) The variation creates a memorable contrast between each piece and allows each of the 25 artists ample space to showcase their work. One minute, visitors may find themselves gazing into the abyss of Paolo Laudisa's imposing "Vacation," and the next, examining the slightest details of Giorgio Distefano's photorealistic landscape paintings. Jiang Songping, an art professor of Jiangsu University, reiterated Italy's dominance as a cultural center of the world: "The country is so beautiful the landscapes and the aging castles built with stone. The country fosters this kind of strong artistic atmosphere wherever you go." "Different from the classical paintings, the contemporary art on display here reflects the lives of modern people. Italy ranks at the forefront of contemporary art, with its unique blend of the old and new," Jiang continued. Wang Shulin, a retired science teacher and painting enthusiast, said, "These Italian paintings are unfamiliar and obscure to me because they look so different from our [Chinese] paintings. I think that might result from different inner worlds between our two peoples." Giuseppe Modica, "The Impression of Catania" (Photo by Jay Birbeck/China.org.cn) According to Jiang, the modern arts starting from Claude Monet, and on display here, mirror industrialized society. Due to this, he explained, modern Chinese painting shares many commonalities with the art on display here. "However, the difference might be that the Chinese artists are able to draw a fish without water, but the western artists must show the water when they are trying to portray the fish," Jiang said. Ultimately, "Beyond the Horizon -- Contemporary Art from Italy," stands as not only a fitting tribute to centuries of cross-cultural transfusion between Italy and China, but also a refreshing collection of original work. E-commerce and internet behemoth Alibaba Group Holding Ltd aims to register 2 billion individual users around the world by 2036. By the end of June, the group had 576 million active consumers on its two major retail marketplacesTaobao, China's largest mobile commerce destination, and Tmall, the country's largest third-party platform for brands and retailers. With its technology in core commerce, cloud computing, cross-border e-commerce and mobile payments, the group said it is committed to helping domestic and foreign consumers to buy products from all over the world, and to make mobile payments global. Altogether, brands and consumers from 230 countries and regions participated in this year's annual Singles Day shopping festival on Nov 11, which has become the world's largest online shopping spree. Gross merchandise value hit 213.5 billion yuan ($30.9 billion) during this year's festival. Alibaba, founded in 1999 by Jack Ma, now claims to be the world's largest retail commerce business in terms of GMV. The company launched with an international vision from the very beginning, said Zheng Guangming from the group's public relations department. One of the reasons that Alibaba gained its name is because it is pronounced the same by people speaking all kinds of different languages, he explained. Tmall International, a cross-border e-commerce platform initiated five years ago, has imported products from 19,000 brands from 75 countries and regions for Chinese consumers, as a result of consumption upgrading trends, said Wei Chen, deputy general manager of Tmall International. "A rising number of niche brands have entered the Chinese market through the channel, which is favored by many overseas brands, as it would bring phenomenal growth if only 1 percent of Chinese consumers like it," he said. Alipay, Alibaba's financial arm, has established a presence in nine countries and regions in East Asia, Southeast Asia and South Asia, including South Korea, Hong Kong, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia. "For example, since its cooperation with an Indian partner in 2015, the number of mobile payment users in the country has reached 250 million now," Zheng said. Alibaba is also using its cloud computing technology to improve people's quality of life. Its intelligent system monitors and calculates passenger and automobile flow on roads in real-time. It can even adjust traffic lights accordingly, to help alleviate traffic congestion and achieve more efficient traffic management. The system now covers the main urban areas of Hangzhou, Zhejiang province. Traffic delays during peak hours have dropped by 3.5 percent, the company said. "If an ambulance is out responding to a call, the system will ensure green lights all the way," Zheng said. You are here: Business Lenovo, China's biggest personal computer maker, plans to expand into the smartphone market with high-end models in pipeline in 2019. "Most Chinese people know Lenovo as a leading computer brand now. They will soon find it also offers a reliable smartphone brand," said Chang Cheng, president of Lenovo's smartphone business. The company is rapidly expanding thanks to a price-aggressive strategy, the company said yesterday in Beijing. Lenovo's smartphone sales jumped 50 percent annually between August and October, compared with an average about 10 percent growth in China's smartphone market. The high growth mainly came from price-aggressive models such as theZ5 Pro and a more affordable model Z5s released yesterday in Beijing. The phones, which feature triple-camera technology, Qualcomm's AI-optimized processor with optimized AI functions, cost between 1,000 and 2,000 yuan. Comparatively, other brands with triple-camera and AI features from Huawei, Oppo and Samsung, cost at least 3,000 yuan. Lenovo will also launch its flagship model with Qualcomm's premium Snapdragon 855 processor next year. It will be the first brand to kick off a flagship model with the premium processor, which supports 5G networks. Lenovo will aims to the first-tier position in the domestic market next year, Chang added. In 2013, Lenovo was the top brand in China after its US$2.9 billion acquisition of of Motorola Mobility. But it's now behind top players like Huawei, Oppo and Vivo. In its fiscal report of the second quarter, Lenovo posted revenue of US$11.9 billion, a 19 percent growth year on year. The mobile business contributed revenue of US$1.65 billion as it becomes a key earner besides PCs. Fossils unearthed in China belonging to two ancient reptiles with bat-like wings known as pterosaurs may provide proof that the first feathers evolved before dinosaurs and birds. A team of paleontologists from the United Kingdom, Ireland and China analyzed the fossils of two pterosaurs that lived 160 million years ago and were surprised to find evidence of feathers. The first feathered dinosaurs appear in the fossil record around 170 million years ago. While closely related, pterosaurs were not actually dinosaurs, so the discovery led the researchers to a startling realization. Either dinosaurs and pterosaurs evolved feathers independently, or they both inherited the ability to grow feathers from a common ancestor that lived 250 million years ago - before the first dinosaurs and birds. "This discovery has amazing implications for our understanding of the origin of feathers, and also for a major time of revolution of life on land," said Mike Benton, a paleontologist from the University of Bristol who worked on the study published in Nature. Pterosaurs were winged reptiles that lived alongside the dinosaurs between 233 million and 66 million years ago. They were the first vertebrates capable of powered flight. Their wings were formed of a membrane of skin stretched along an elongated finger bone. Both pterodactyls and pteranodons - made famous by the movie Jurassic Park 3 - were types of pterosaur. Previous fossil samples have shown the creatures were covered with hair-like insulation known as "pycnofibres", which were thought to be fundamentally different to the feathers found in dinosaurs. However, after analyzing the two fossils found in Northern China, the research team discovered evidence of four types of insulation: simple filaments, bundles of filaments, filaments with a tuft halfway down, and down feathers. "We went to Inner Mongolia to do fieldwork in the Daohugou Formation," said Baoyu Jiang, a paleontologist from Nanjing University, who led the research. "We already knew that the sites had produced excellent specimens of pterosaurs with their pycnofibres preserved and I was sure we could learn more by careful study." Maria McNamara, a paleontologist from University College Cork in Ireland who worked on the study, said that she was able to view the remnants of feathers in great detail as the fossils are so well preserved. "We focused on clear areas where the feathers did not overlap and where we could see their structure clearly," said McNamara. "They even show fine details of melanosomes, which may have given the fluffy feathers a ginger color." Benton said that while it is possible that different of dinosaurs and their relatives evolved feathers independently of one another, the more probable explanation is that the ability to grow feathers was passed down to by a common ancestor. He said that the pterosaur feathers were no different anatomically from the feathers of birds and dinosaurs. "Therefore, because they are the same, they must share an evolutionary origin, and that was about 250 million years ago, long before the origin of birds," Benton said. "The hunt for feathers in fossils is heating up and finding their functions in such early forms is imperative," he added. "It can rewrite our understanding of a major revolution in life on earth during the Triassic, and also our understanding of the genomic regulation of feathers, scales, and hairs in the skin." A former senior official in northeast China's Liaoning Province has been expelled from the Communist Party of China and dismissed from public office over serious violations of discipline and laws, according to a statement by the top anti-graft body Tuesday. Yang Xihuai, former deputy secretary of the Liaoning provincial discipline inspection commission and vice director of the provincial supervisory commission, is being investigated by the CPC Central Commission for Discipline Inspection and the National Supervisory Commission, said the CCDI statement. The probe found that Yang failed to perform his duty correctly, leaked work-related secrets, accepted banquet invitations that might have resulted in unfairness in the fulfillment of duties, and interfered in judicial activities, the statement said. "Yang lost his commitment to Party principles, took advantage of his posts to do favors for others and sought personal benefits. He showed no sign of restraint even after the 18th CPC National Congress. Yang should be harshly punished," the statement said. Since Yang reported his violations to authorities, returned his illicit gains and showed remorse, the CCDI proposed a lenient punishment. HAWTHORNE, Calif. Fed up with Southern California vehicle snarls, Elon Musk set out to solve the persistent urban irritant: the traffic. But rather than build atop the highway system, where his Tesla cars travel, or in the sky, home to his SpaceX rockets, he sought an answer under his feet: tunnels. I said, What if we go down instead of up? Mr. Musk told Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles during a recent public discussion. Ive lived in L.A. now since 2002. Traffic has gone from bad to horrific back to bad. On Tuesday, Mr. Musk unveiled the first mile-long stretch of his underground vision of a transit system in Hawthorne, a suburb of 90,000 people about 15 miles southwest of Los Angeles. It is the home of both SpaceX and his tunneling enterprise, called the Boring Company. But the promotional event, which attracted hundreds of people who lined up to see the tunnel, fell short of earlier promises of a system that could transport up to 16 people at a time in electric-powered pods. Mr. Musk said he had abandoned that concept in favor of a system using more conventional passenger vehicles. Editors Note: January 11, 2019 An earlier version of this column included remarks from an interview published in December in Agenda, an industry publication, that were attributed to Leslie Moonves. The validity of the Agenda interview has since been called into question. On Thursday, Agenda removed Mr. Moonvess comments and published an editors note which stated, in part, that a spokesperson for Mr. Moonves issued a statement denying that Mr. Moonves spoke with reporters from Agenda. The thrust of this column that CBS is obliged to pay Mr. Moonvess legal bills should he decide to sue the company is accurate, but the excerpted comments from the Agenda article have been removed. The retracted comments were also cited in a picture caption. CBSs board was emphatic this week that the ousted chief executive Leslie Moonves will not receive any severance payment, slamming the door on his quest to collect $120 million. Case closed? Hardly. In the arcane world of chief executive contracts and compensation policies, this legal battle may only be beginning. Mr. Moonves has the right to challenge the boards decision in a confidential arbitration proceeding, and he could also sue for breach of contract. HOUSTON Oil prices tumbled more than 7 percent on Tuesday, falling to their lowest levels in more than a year, after investors learned that Russia and the United States were pumping a lot more oil than had been expected. The American benchmark fell below $47 a barrel for the first time in 15 months, capping a slide that has brought prices down by more than a third since early October. Bountiful, cheap oil supplies are an unanticipated holiday bonus for American consumers. The average price of regular gasoline has fallen to $2.37 a gallon, according to the AAA motor club, 26 cents lower than a month ago. For most of the year gasoline prices were rising, but the recent decline in oil prices has driven gasoline down by about a nickel a gallon compared with a year ago. Oil prices had stabilized earlier this month when the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and Russia agreed to slash production by 1.2 million barrels a day. But Russia announced on Monday that its output had increased to more than 11.4 million barrels a day, a record, putting in doubt its commitment to coordinate policies with Saudi Arabia and other oil producers. Beijing launched a new website on Dec. 17 to provide historical, cultural and geographical information of the old sites and relics in the capital. By visiting www.inbeijing.cn, people can learn about Beijing at different times in history, appreciate the intangible cultural heritages, and access the memories of the city's well-known people. The InBeijing website currently collects more than 30,000 information items featured in 18 major categories and 73 minor categories. The main sections include "Integrated Conservation of the Old City," "Historical Sites of the Old City," "Witnessing the History by Maps," "Intangible Cultural Heritages," and "Guide for Tourism and Culture." A mobile app and other media platforms based on the website will be launch at a later date. Initiated by the Beijing Municipal Commission of Planning and Natural Resources, the InBeijing website is jointly supported by Beijing Institute of Surveying and Mapping and Beijing Tsinghua Tong Heng Planning and Design Institute. The site gathers a large amount of Beijing's historical, cultural and geographical information, and presents it to the public by digital, multimedia and other modern technological means. The establishment of the site also provides an important way for the public to understand Beijing's historical and cultural information comprehensively, systematically and conveniently. Besides, the site provides important support for Beijing to build itself into the cultural center of China. Zhang Wei, director of the Beijing Municipal Commission of Planning and Natural Resources, said that history has left Beijing a rich cultural heritage, and it has also left the present generation with the mission of guarding these heritages. He said that in practical work the government should mobilize the entire society to actively participate in the protection of Beijing's historical and cultural heritages. Qiu Yue, an expert of Beijing Historic and Cultural City Protection Committee and director of Beijing Urban Planning Society, said he hopes the InBeijing website could further tell the story of Beijing, pass on historical culture, display the style and features of this era, and help Beijing to build itself into a famous historical and cultural city. Smile Direct Club is another company that has moved away from Tucker Carlson Tonight, but a spokeswoman said it had decided to cease advertising on all political opinion shows. Several other advertisers, including Bayer, Mitsubishi Motors North America and Farmers Insurance, said they would not change their spending. Mr. Carlson is not the first Fox News host to face an advertiser backlash. In March, a group of companies pulled their ads from Laura Ingrahams show after she taunted a survivor of the high school shooting in Parkland, Fla. She subsequently apologized. Last year, more than 50 brands stopped advertising on The OReilly Factor after The New York Times reported on settlements that its host, Bill OReilly, had made with women who had accused him of sexual harassment or other inappropriate behavior. That contributed to his ouster; Mr. Carlson now holds down Mr. OReillys old time slot. Just over a year ago, several brands said they would stop advertising on the show hosted by Sean Hannity, the highest-rated Fox News host, after comments he made about Roy S. Moore, who was then Alabamas Republican candidate for Senate. The companies later backed away from those statements, and Hannity was relatively unaffected. Those leading calls for a boycott of Mr. Carlsons show included the filmmaker Judd Apatow and the Twitter account Sleeping Giants, which was created to notify brands if they were appearing on Breitbart News, the hard-edge, nationalist news site. Fox News said in a statement that Mr. Carlson was the focus of agenda-driven intimidation efforts and that he was being threatened via Twitter by far-left activist groups with deeply political motives. It added, While we do not advocate boycotts, these same groups never target other broadcasters and operate under a grossly hypocritical double standard given their intolerance to all opposing points of view. Breast implants made by Allergan that have been linked to an uncommon form of cancer are being taken off the market in Europe, French authorities announced on Tuesday. The implants, which have a textured or slightly roughened surface, rather than a smooth covering, cannot be manufactured or sold in Europe for the time being, and the ones kept on hand at health centers are being recalled. In a statement issued on Tuesday, Frances National Agency for the Safety of Medicines and Health Products said it had not identified any immediate risk for the health of women carrying the implants concerned, and it did not mention the unusual cancer. But the products, particularly the textured ones, have been linked to a disease called breast implant-associated anaplastic large-cell lymphoma. The lymphoma is not breast cancer, but is a malignancy of the immune system that develops years after the implant surgery, often seven or eight years later. WASHINGTON A federal judge on Tuesday doubled down on his hesitation to approve the merger settlement between CVS Health and Aetna, asking the combined companies to take steps to keep some operations distinct while he completes his review. Judge Richard J. Leon, of the United States District Court in the District of Columbia, stopped short of an attempt to block the $69 billion merger, but he reiterated his concerns over the Justice Departments approval of the combination. He went on to scold the governments lawyers for being hostile to the role of the federal courts in looking after the publics interest, telling them they would do well to re-evaluate the tone with which you address this court. Judge Leon proposed assigning a government monitor to ensure the two companies remain separate, and he urged them to take steps to preserve the ability to unwind CVS acquisition of Aetna in the event an unwinding is necessary. CVS Health, one of the nations largest pharmacy benefit managers, has pitched its acquisition of Aetna, the giant health insurance company, as a way to offer patients better coordinated and more efficient care. But consumer groups and others have criticized the deal, saying it would create a powerful entity that would stifle competition and harm consumers. Its been more than a week since Kevin Hart was announced as host of the 91st Oscars ceremony and then stepped down in response to criticism over homophobic Twitter posts. The Motion Picture Academy still hasnt found a replacement. Thats because its a thankless job. As a recent Saturday Night Live skit put it: Who will risk everything for the chance to gain nothing? No wonder many celebrities would rather not put their reputations on the line when the gig draws so much criticism. While theres a chance the academy will go on with no one at all, the world hasnt given up just yet. Many stars have suggested names. Some have even nominated themselves. If the academy had to choose a host, here are the brave people who would be happy to take up the challenge. ALBANY Well, that escalated quickly. Senator Kevin S. Parker, a Brooklyn Democrat with a colorful reputation, casually tweeted at a Republican spokeswoman on Tuesday and told her to commit suicide. He then deleted the Twitter post and apologized only to come back at the spokeswoman less than an hour later, drawing calls for disciplinary action. Given that it was Albany, of course, there were more than a few layers of back story, complete with barely buried feelings of party betrayal, memories of disastrous legislative sessions and the real possibility of parking placard impropriety. It seemed to all begin on Tuesday with a Twitter post from Candice Giove, who works for the outgoing Republican majority leader, John J. Flanagan. Ms. Giove called attention to the possibly inappropriate use of Mr. Parkers state-issued parking placard. TRENTON Members of Gov. Philip D. Murphys inner circle testified on Tuesday that they knew for months about accusations of sexual assault against a top administration official, but did not take steps to force the mans removal. It was the first time that high-ranking members of the administration, including Pete Cammarano, the governors chief of staff, were called to testify under oath in front of a panel as part of an investigation into the incident, which has cast a pall over Mr. Murphys first year in office and threatens to impede his progressive agenda. The hearing comes two weeks after Katie Brennan, in her first public comments since her allegations were made public in October, described in wrenching testimony in a separate hearing her allegations against Albert J. Alvarez, who she accused of sexually assaulting her following a campaign event last year. Ms. Brennan told the panel that administration officials ignored her requests for action and continued to employ Mr. Alvarez for nearly nine months after her allegations were first reported to several of Mr. Murphys senior aides. In his testimony on Tuesday, Mr. Cammarano said he told Mr. Alvarez that he needed to leave state government during a private meeting in his office on March 26. He called the meeting after learning that Ms. Brennan took her allegations directly to Mr. Murphys chief counsel, Matthew Platkin. The meeting had not been previously disclosed. Galt MacDermot, who composed the score for Hair, the tribal rock musical that shocked mainstream theatergoers as it celebrated the drug-crazed, free-love, antiwar rebellious energy of hippies in the 1960s, died on Monday at his home in Staten Island. He was 89. His daughter Molly MacDermot confirmed the death. In 1968, when Hair opened on Broadway, Mr. MacDermot, a Canadian, cut an unlikely figure as its composer. His hair was short, he wore a shirt and tie, he didnt smoke marijuana or drink alcohol, and he was approaching 40 putting him on the far side of the generation gap. John Lennon once invited him to a party, Ms. MacDermot said, but he didnt go, preferring to head home to Staten Island, where he was raising his family. I never even heard of a hippie, Mr. MacDermot told Playbill when he was asked to score Hair, whose book and lyrics had been written by James Rado and Gerome Ragni. Need I remind anyone how that fearsome five fared? We political junkies got far ahead of ourselves then, and were getting ahead of ourselves now. Almost 23 months before the 2020 election, were handicapping contenders, edging toward prophecies and setting ourselves up to look every bit as foolish as we deserve to. We dont learn. That would get in the way of a guessing game that we relish too much. Polls are being done at an accelerating pace. CNN released one late last week. It surveyed Democratic voters nationwide, among whom Joe Biden ranked first; Bernie Sanders, second; and Beto ORourke, third. So theyre the Bush, Christie and Carson analogues. If 2014 is any guide, they should spare themselves a lot of travel and a world of heartache and pack it in now. Of course, 2014 isnt a guide, but its a caveat. A reality check. Assessments of candidates at this early stage have limited bearing on how well theyll be doing more than a year down the road, when the Iowa caucuses kick off the primary season. Too little has happened so far. Too much will happen in fairly short order. At this juncture back then, Trumps candidacy wasnt even anticipated. Pollsters didnt present his name to Republican voters as an option. That remained true in February 2015, when someone new did challenge Bush for front-runner status and then briefly wrest it from him: Scott Walker. If you forgot about his supposedly big promise, no wonder. His campaign wouldnt last until the end of that year. Trump finally came onto the radar and earned inclusion in polls around May 2015 five months further into the process than where we are now. But he didnt take the lead even then. In a Quinnipiac poll of Republican voters released on May 28, 2015, he placed eighth, just behind Ted Cruz. Cruz would be the only one, in the end, to give him any competition for the nomination. Its not just Israels adversaries who find the movement appealing. Many devoted supporters of Israel, including many American Jews, oppose the occupation of the West Bank and refuse to buy products of the settlements in occupied territories. Their right to protest in this way must be vigorously defended. The same is true of Palestinians. They are criticized when they resort to violence, and rightly so. Should they be deprived of nonviolent economic protest as well? The United States frequently employs sanctions as a political tool, including against North Korea, Iran and Russia. Mr. Cardin and Mr. Portman say their legislation merely builds on an existing law, the Export Control Reform Act, which bars participation in the Arab League boycott of Israel, and is needed to protect American companies from unsanctioned foreign boycotts. They are especially concerned that the United Nations Human Rights Council is compiling a database of companies doing business in the occupied territories and East Jerusalem, a tactic Senate aides say parallels the Arab League boycott. But there are problems with their arguments, critics say. The existing law aimed to protect American companies from the Arab League boycott because it was coercive, requiring companies to boycott Israel as a condition of doing business with Arab League member states. A companys motivation for engaging in that boycott was economic continued trade relations not exercising free speech rights. By contrast, the Cardin-Portman legislation would extend the existing prohibition to cover boycotts against Israel and other countries friendly to the United States when the boycotts are called for by an international government organization, like the United Nations or the European Union. Neither of those organizations has called for a boycott, but supporters of Israel apparently fear that the Human Rights Council database is a step in that direction. A bit of common sense and common decency intruded on Tuesday into the crazy world of Donald Trump. In New York, the state attorney general announced that the president had agreed that the charity he used as a piggy bank has no reason to exist. In Washington, a federal judge let a former top presidential aide know that you can parrot political spin or you can tell the truth, but you cant do both to someone who can send you to prison. Michael Flynn, Mr. Trumps former national security adviser, appeared before Judge Emmet Sullivan to be sentenced to what he expected would be a term of probation, after pleading guilty to lying to federal investigators about conversations with the Russian ambassador. The office of the special counsel, Robert Mueller, had earlier filed a memo that said it would be right for Mr. Flynn to avoid prison after his extensive cooperation in the investigation of Trump ties to Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign and after. Then last week, in a memo about their clients sentencing, Mr. Flynns lawyers implied that he had been tricked into lying and that the F.B.I. acted improperly in interviewing him points raised by pro-Trump commentators elaborating on the presidents claims of being victimized by a witch hunt. More than 3,000 passengers were stranded in Gonggar Airport Tuesday due to heavy snow in Lhasa, the capital city of southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region, according to local authorities. The snow has reduced visibility on the runways and landing fields at the airport. As of 6:15 p.m., 47 flights were canceled, said airport officials. According to local meteorological authorities, the snow will last until early Wednesday morning. The airport is unlikely to operate until the snow stops, according to the Tibet office of the Civil Aviation Administration of China. The first snow this winter hit Lhasa around 6:40 a.m. Tuesday. The city has seen 3 centimeters of snow so far, according to the regional meteorological bureau. There was Bruno Binelli, 66, a retired carpenter from Lyon, reacting to Macrons raising the taxes on diesel to combat climate change, leading to fuel costs that hit people in the countryside particularly hard because they have only cars to get around: I have a little diesel van and I dont have the money to buy a new one, especially as Im about to retire. We have the feeling those from the countryside are forgotten. And there was Marie Lemoine, 62, a schoolteacher from Provins, who said she was neither right or left, explaining: Im here for my children and grandchildren and all those people left crying by the 15th of the month because theyve gone into the red. Macron is our Louis XVI, and we know what happened to him. He ended up at the guillotine. It is going to take extraordinary leadership for the U.S., Britain and the E.U. to come up with a strategy for these grievances. It has to balance the need for economic growth and redistribution , the need to take care of those who have been left behind without burdening future generations, the need for free-flowing borders to attract new talent and ideas, and the need to prevent people from feeling like strangers in their own homes. But that leadership is not present. I get why a slim majority of U.K. citizens voted for Brexit as it was sold to them. They were told they could curb all the stuff they didnt like such as a flood of 2.2 million foreign E.U. workers and still keep all the stuff they liked mainly Britains free access to the E.U. market and give up nothing. But it was all a lie. TUCSON The desert borderlands of the Southwest are a death trap for migrants. In the summer, the temperature can rise past 115 degrees, and in the winter it can drop below freezing. Water is scarce; shade is almost nonexistent. Some 8,000 people attempting to enter the United States have died in this region since the 1990s. Their shoes, empty water jugs and abandoned rosaries litter the landscape. Volunteers from our organization, No More Deaths/No Mas Muertes, hike year-round along remote trails in the Arizona section of the Sonoran Desert, which spans Arizona, California and northwestern Mexico. We leave water, food, blankets and other basic necessities along the deserts migration corridors. But the federal government is trying to make our humanitarian aid criminal. Eleven months ago, a longtime volunteer with us, Scott Warren, was arrested in the small border town of Ajo, Ariz., for having provided food, water and shelter to two undocumented people. He was charged with two federal counts of harboring and one count of conspiracy to harbor. If convicted at his trial, which begins next month in Federal District Court in Tucson, he will face up to 20 years in prison. INTERNATIONAL An article on Thursday about extreme weather misstated the findings of a report by Munich Re, a reinsurance company, on damages caused by tropical storms in 2018. The company reported that tropical cyclones had caused $51 billion in losses worldwide, not that the hurricane season caused $51 billion in losses in the United States. Additionally, the long-term annual average of $34 billion in losses, as calculated by the company, is for tropical cyclones worldwide, not hurricanes in the United States. NATIONAL An article on Tuesday about a new birth control program referred incorrectly to a change in the estimated rate of unintended pregnancy among low-income women in the Title X family program in Delaware. The rate is estimated to have dropped 24 percent between 2014 and 2017; it is not expected to result in a 24 percent decline this year. Because of an editing error, an article on Tuesday about legislation aimed at protecting Israel from boycotts referred imprecisely to the status of Gaza. Israel withdrew from Gaza and does not consider it occupied. Hamas, which governs Gaza, does consider it occupied because Israel still controls most of its borders. BUSINESS An article on Saturday about withdrawing money from retirement accounts referred imprecisely to the tax benefits of qualified charitable distributions. The distributions are excluded from taxable income, but taxpayers cannot also take a deduction for the same gift on their tax return. The Trump administration announced on Tuesday that it planned to ease onerous security requirements for sponsors of migrant children, meaning that thousands who have been parked in shelters for months could soon be released and reunited with family members. In a major policy reversal, the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the care of migrant children through its Office of Refugee Resettlement, said that it would no longer require that all members of a household where a child is to live be fingerprinted. Instead, fingerprints will be required only of the adult who is sponsoring the minor, typically a parent or another relative. Sponsors of migrant children who cross the border and are taken into custody of the United States authorities must still pass criminal and extensive background checks, the agency said in a statement. However, others in the same home will not be subjected to that extra vetting, which was introduced by the administration in June. As a result, it will take significantly less time to place children with their families, and their stays in the shelters will be much shorter. The school district and sheriffs office in the Florida county that is home to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School had no constitutional duty to protect the students there during the deadly February massacre, a federal judge has said in a ruling. The decision was made in a lawsuit filed by 15 students who said they suffered trauma during the Feb. 14 attack in Parkland, Fla. A total of 17 students and staff members lost their lives; 17 others were injured. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for Nikolas Cruz, 20, the former Stoneman Douglas student who is accused of opening fire at the school on Valentines Day. He has pleaded not guilty, but his lawyers have said he would plead guilty in exchange for a life sentence. The Dec. 12 ruling, by Judge Beth Bloom, came on the same day that a county judge, Patti Englander Henning, came to the opposite conclusion. Judge Henning found that Scot Peterson, the armed sheriffs deputy who heard the gunfire but did not run in and try to stop the attack, did have an obligation to confront Mr. Cruz. You are the product: That is the deal many Silicon Valley companies offer to consumers. The users get free search engines, social media accounts and smartphone apps, and the companies use the personal data they collect your searches, likes, phone numbers and friends to target and sell advertising. But an investigation by The New York Times, based on hundreds of pages of internal Facebook documents and interviews with about 50 former employees of Facebook and its partners, reveals that the marketplace for that data is even bigger than many consumers suspected. And Facebook, which collects more information on more people than almost any other private corporation in history, is a central player. Here are five takeaways from our investigation. Facebook deals in data We dont sell data to anyone, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebooks founder, told Congress during a hearing in April. His pledge that the torrent of data Facebook collects from its 2.2 billion users will always remain safely in Facebooks hands has been a cornerstone of the companys defensive strategy this year, as lawmakers, regulators and activists have pummeled the social network over a series of privacy breaches and public relations blunders. While it is true that Facebook hasn't sold users data, for years it has struck deals to share the information with dozens of Silicon Valley companies. These partners were given more intrusive access to user data than Facebook has ever disclosed. In turn, the deals helped Facebook bring in new users, encourage them to use the social network more often, and drive up advertising revenue. WASHINGTON A mystery witness fighting a secret fight over a sealed subpoena with a prosecutor who may be Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating the Trump-Russia affair, turns out to be a corporation owned by a foreign government, according to a federal appeals court ruling on Tuesday. The three-page ruling by a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit described the unnamed witness in those terms, but it did not identify it any further, nor did it confirm whether the prosecutor is the special counsel, as has been widely speculated. During closed-door oral arguments before the panel last week, court security officers took the unusual step not only of closing the courtroom, but also of clearing the entire floor of the courthouse so that reporters could not see who the lawyers were as they went in and exited. [Read the judgment.] But the new details about the witnesss identity offered some tantalizing clues to a mystery that has riveted Washington journalists and legal insiders who are closely watching Mr. Muellers investigation, eliminating some theories about whom it may be while opening the door to new a new round of guessing. Even as both sides acknowledged concessions, Tuesdays vote was an important first step for the unlikely coalition of liberals and conservatives including the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Conservative Union, Koch brothers and the liberal Center for American Progress who locked arms in recent years and pushed lawmakers to reconsider the way the federal government administers justice three decades after the war on crime peaked. In one of this Congresss final acts, every Democrat and all but 12 Republicans voted in favor of the legislation an outcome that looked highly unlikely this month amid skepticism from Republican leaders. For Republicans preparing to relinquish total control of Washington next month, the bills passage offered one final victory on their own terms and handed Mr. Trump a bipartisan policy achievement that he can tout as he seeks re-election. Liberals saw reason to celebrate, as well, even as they called for more aggressive changes: In gaining the support of Mr. Trump and so many Senate Republicans, they believe they have shifted the terms of policy debates around criminal justice in a way that could set the stage for additional changes on the federal level and in the states. This bill in its entirety has been endorsed by the political spectrum of America, said Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, who has led the push for changes along with two Republicans, Senators Charles E. Grassley of Iowa and Mike Lee of Utah. I cant remember any bill that has this kind of support, left and right, liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican. Mr. Trump quickly touted the vote on Twitter, saying that the changes would keep our communities safer, and provide hope and a second chance, to those who earn it. WASHINGTON The United States, joining an effort by Mexico, will commit to investing billions in Central America in hopes of ending the poverty, violence and drug-trafficking that are driving thousands of people in the region to undertake the difficult trek to the United States, the State Department announced on Tuesday. Mexicos new president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, introduced what he called a Marshall Plan last week to address the root causes of Central American migration: a $30 billion initiative to invest in the region and welcome migrants into Mexico with visas, health care and employment. On Tuesday, the Trump administration signaled its support for the plan, saying it was committing $5.8 billion in private and public investments in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. Much of that amount, however, was previously committed or contingent on the identification of commercially viable projects. The promise comes amid tensions between the administration and Mexico over a caravan of migrants traveling from Central America, with President Trump pushing Mexico to allow those seeking asylum in the United States to remain in Mexico while they wait. Since 2012, the office had been regularly airing public service announcements meant to promote gun safety and reduce the stigma around seeking help. But the report found that as of August, none had been broadcast for more than a year. Dr. Thompson, now with the Cohen Veterans Network, a nonprofit group, said she was dismayed at the falloff. This is such an important issue, we need to be throwing everything we can at it, she said. Its so ludicrous that money would be sitting on the table. Outreach is one of the first ways to engage with veterans and families about ways to get help. If we dont have that, what do we have? As the offices outreach efforts dwindled, nationwide monitoring showed a steady increase in the suicide rate among veterans age 18 to 34, which is now about 45 deaths a year for every 100,000 people, more than three times the overall national average. The suicide prevention paralysis is one of a number of recent stumbles at an agency that has seen significant turnover of experienced staff and top leadership in the last 18 months. Mistakes in managing the G.I. Bill program led to late or incorrect housing allowance payments for more than 80,000 veterans enrolled in college. A sweeping $16 billion overhaul of the V.A.s electronic health care records system has hit a number of obstacles, and the expert who was brought in over the summer to lead the project quit within a month. Curt Cashour, the departments spokesman, said the responsibility for the problems in the suicide prevention program lay with Dr. David J. Shulkin, Mr. Trumps first secretary of veterans affairs, who was fired in March. He said Dr. Shulkins successor, Robert L. Wilkie, had taken steps to address the issue. Within weeks of his arrival at V.A., then-Acting Secretary Wilkie appointed Dr. Keita Franklin as V.A.s new suicide prevention director, and she is reviewing the spending for this important program, Mr. Cashour said in a statement. British science journal Nature has ranked a young Chinese scientist among its top-10 people for 2018. The scientist received the award for his work on how the properties of two-layer graphene stacks change in certain conditions. Cao Yuan, 22, graduated from the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, Anhui province, at the age of 18, and joined Pablo Jarillo-Herrero's group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, United States. Cao has discovered that a rotation between parallel graphene sheets of around 1.1 degrees make the stack an insulator, while the stack is exposed to a small electric field and cooled to 1.7 C above absolute zero. The twisted sheets became a superconductor, in which electricity flowed without resistance, when a slight tweak was made to the field, according to his discovery. Nature in March published two papers from Cao and his colleagues on the unusual behaviors of the atom-thick carbon layers. His discovery is considered a major breakthrough that could act as a catalyst for a new field of physics. More than 50 police officers who patrolled the same area in Sao Paulo, Brazil, were arrested on Tuesday, accused by state prosecutors of taking bribes from the countrys largest drug gang to allow its members to sell narcotics, the authorities said. The Sao Paulo state polices internal investigations unit, working with state prosecutors who focus on combating the powerful First Capital Command drug gang, known as the P.C.C., gathered what prosecutors said in a statement was proof of collaboration between officers and the cartel. The P.C.C. has rapidly grown in strength in recent years, investigators say, and now largely controls cocaine and gun shipments into Brazil, as well as the flow of drugs grown in neighboring countries and shipped to Africa and Europe through Brazilian ports. By late afternoon, 53 members of the 22nd Battalion of the Sao Paulo state police were under arrest nearly 10 percent of that battalions entire force, according to state prosecutors. Three people suspected of being P.C.C. members were also in custody. The Constitution would instead be silent on the issue, leaving open the possibility of a future legalization without specifically promoting it. The commission is headed by Raul Castro, the Communist Partys head and former president. His daughter, Mariela Castro, is a lawmaker known as Cubas highest-profile advocate for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual rights. Her advocacy has helped rehabilitate the image of L.G.B.T. rights in Cuba, where the Castro-led government sent gay men to work camps in the 1960s, and where widespread persecution continued through the 1970s. While Havana and some other Cuban cities have flourishing gay communities, anti-homosexual attitudes remain deeply rooted among much of the population. Cubans who ordinarily shy from open criticism of the government spoke out in large numbers against the proposed language promoting gay marriage during public consultations on the draft. Cubas rapidly growing evangelical churches also staked out positions against the article, increasing pressure on a government unused to public criticism. The new charter is expected to be offered for approval at a public referendum in early 2019. The dropping of the gay marriage language is the third dramatic reversal this month for a government that for decades has issued most laws and regulations with little open debate or insight into the working of the ruling Communist Party. SAN ANTONIO SECORTEZ, Guatemala Claudia Maquin said goodbye to her 7-year-old daughter a few weeks ago, when the girl and her father left their small village with the dream of making a new life in the United States. Now she is waiting to say goodbye to her again. Ms. Maquins husband and daughter, Jakelin, did make it across the border but just over a day later, on Dec. 8, the girl died in the custody of the United States Border Patrol. For Ms. Maquin, 27, there is nothing to do now but wait for her childs body to come home as she burrows into the protective embrace of her extended family in a village of thatched-roof homes in the rolling hills of the Guatemalan lowlands. Ms. Maquin has a simple explanation for why her husband joined a growing number of villagers and made the dangerous journey north: the absolute lack of alternatives in this lush but remote part of the country. Indigenous communities like theirs have endured centuries of poverty, exclusion and repression by economic and political elites. Yasumasa Morimura Through Jan. 13. Japan Society, 333 East 47th Street, Manhattan; 212-832-1155, japansociety.org. In 1988, at the pinnacle of the Japanese bubble economy, as sneering westerners watched Japanese corporations snap up van Goghs and Monets, a young photographer flabbergasted the Venice Biennale with self-portraits that drew on the imagery of western art history, disrupted and re-evaluated by the artists own face. For three decades now, Yasumasa Morimura has scrutinized the premises of Japanese identity through photographic restagings of European paintings, performances as western and Japanese figures and, most recently, the opening of a museum in his hometown, Osaka. Sometimes he gets too jokey, too direct. But his best work, as proved by a surprising exhibition at Japan Society, reveals the self as a rickety thing, and national identity as even more fragile. (A related survey of Mr. Morimuras photographs is on view at the Bushwick location of Luhring Augustine through Dec. 22.) In the exhibitions nearly two dozen photographs, Mr. Morimura restages self-portraits by van Eyck, Durer, van Gogh (a longtime fixation of the artist, thanks to the Dutchmans Japanese influence), as well as female painters like Elisabeth-Louise Vigee le Brun and Frida Kahlo. In some he wears little makeup, while in others he appears in whiteface, which only heightens the incongruence of his own body in these historical and geographical flights. The novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the musician Laurie Anderson, the photographer JR and a puppet representing Noam Chomsky will be among the luminaries present as the American version of the worldwide Night of Ideas festival expands beyond New York to four additional cities. The free philosophy event, held in dozens of cities around the world, first came to New York in 2015, under the auspices of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy. In 2019, it will be held at the Brooklyn Public Library on Feb. 2, as well as at venues in Los Angeles (Feb. 1), San Francisco (Feb. 2), Washington (Jan. 31) and Houston (Jan. 26). Brooklyn, where events will run from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., is the only place where philosophy, like the subway, runs all night. The sunset-to-sunrise lineup features some 50 speakers and performers, including Todd May, the philosophy consultant for the television show The Good Place. There will also be a performance of Manufacturing Mischief, a puppet show featuring the miniature Chomsky, and a stealth appearance by Souffleurs Commandos Poetiques, a strike force of 13 artists who will circulate through the crowd, whispering poetry into visitors ears. 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. Do Not Steal Cough Medicine A sentencing hearing for Michael Flynn, the presidents former national security adviser, went south on Tuesday after a judge berated him and suggested that Flynns efforts to mislead federal investigators warranted prison. The judge, Emmet G. Sullivan, encouraged Flynn to accept his offer to postpone the sentencing, so that he could have extra time to prove the value of his cooperation with prosecutors. Sullivan held Flynns feet to the fire, even floating the question of whether his crimes amounted to treason (although prosecutors never charged him with that). On The Late Show, Stephen Colbert was happy to review some of the hearings most squirm-inducing moments. A new comics publisher, TKO Studios, burst onto Twitter last week with an unusual mission statement: Well be doing things a bit differently. In an industry where buying monthly, serialized stories is the norm, TKO is presenting an alternative: binge releasing its mini-series; simultaneously selling collected editions of those stories; and offering the first issue of each comic free. TKO is also selling directly to readers and retailers from its website, not through normal distribution channels. TKOs comics are also slightly taller and wider than usual and their six-issue bundle for $14.99 works out to about $2.50 per issue, which is less than the $3.99 price per issue of most comic book series today. I understand why they want to try something different because it is very tough for a new comics publisher, Milton Griepp, the chief executive of ICv2, an online trade publication that covers the comic-book industry, said of the move by TKO. COME WITH ME By Helen Schulman 307 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $26.99. Its entirely possible that there are happy, well-adjusted people who never traffic in regret or ponder what their lives would be like if theyd accepted a certain job offer years ago, had married A instead of B or had planned their financial futures differently. If they exist, these living-in-the-moment individuals are not to be found in the Palo Alto of Come With Me, Helen Schulmans strikingly original, compelling and beautifully written sixth novel. In this Palo Alto, youll find people who not only wonder about the other paths they might be following, but have access to technology that helps them explore those alternative lives. This is, dont forget, Silicon Valley. Using algorithms and the accouterments of virtual reality (headphones and special glasses, for starters), one resident entrepreneur has crafted a way to visit the life that might have been. Math can tell you what would happen if you altered history? hes asked. His reply: Math plus info, sure. At least a fairly good approximation. (Info refers here to the indelible fingerprints left by social media posts and internet searches.) Welcome to your multiverse. This perhaps suggests that Schulman has left behind the hyper-realism of her two most recent novels for the realms of speculative fiction. Fortunately, thats true only in a small way. Multiverse theory functions primarily as a thematic framework here, and the headphones and glasses make only a few appearances. In Come With Me, Schulmans central preoccupations continue to be the endless complexities of marriage, midlife and family and the ever-pressing need for people, even in Silicon Valley, to connect. Her writing in this new novel has the humor and wit, the careful eye for social detail and astute character development, that made her previous novel, 2011s This Beautiful Life, a best seller. Amy and Dan have been married for 20-plus years. They have three sons Jack, a love-struck teenager, and 8-year-old twins, Miles and Theo, fondly and hilariously referred to as Thing One and Thing Two, or The Things. Dan is an idealistic print journalist, which is to say hes unemployed and lacking viable options for re-entering the work force. Amy has abandoned her hopes for a benefits-stuffed job at Google and is supporting the family doing P.R. for Invisible E-nk, a start-up founded by Donny, her best friends 21-year-old son. Donny is a genius, a Mark Zuckerberg wannabe whos seen The Social Network (a generational call to arms) at least a dozen times. He has the audacity of a first-world dictator and an aversion to deodorant, and hes one of several vivid secondary characters who steal scenes from the sympathetic but less colorful leads. BRINGING DOWN THE COLONEL A Sex Scandal of the Gilded Age and the Powerless Woman Who Took On Washington By Patricia Miller Illustrated. 368 pp. Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $28. It was on a fateful train ride in 1884 that Col. William Breckinridge, a Kentucky congressional candidate described by his supporters as a silver-tongued orator with presidential prospects, met Madeline Pollard, a student with literary ambitions. She asked for his help in a personal matter. He visited her at school. They went on a carriage ride. Then stuff happened, including the birth of two children, and a breach of promise suit that made headlines in 1893. In her history of the Breckinridge-Pollard affair, Bringing Down the Colonel, Patricia Miller revisits a mostly forgotten saga that changed the way many Americans felt about women and sex. What better time for a story about a prominent man taken totally aback when he discovers that the rules about what he can get away with have changed? During Breckinridges trial for breach of promise a legal concept until the early 20th century enabling a woman to sue a man for breaking his engagement to marry her one of his lawyers warned the jury that giving Pollard a victory would encourage every strumpet to push her little mass of filth into court. Flash-forward to President Trump announcing, during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, that all this talk about sexual assault was making it a very scary time for young men in America since you can be guilty of something you may not be guilty of. When Breckinridge and Pollard first met, he was a middle-aged married man. She was younger. How much younger would be one of the many subjects of dispute in a trial that riveted Gilded Age America. Was she an experienced woman of nearly 21 or a confused girl of 17? The social network let Amazon obtain users names and contact information through their friends, and allowed Spotify and Netflix to read, write and delete users private messages. Facebook shared data with more than 150 companies, including The Times. A 2011 agreement with the Federal Trade Commission banned the social network from sharing user data without explicit permission. Here are the five main takeaways from our investigation. How we know: The Times interviewed more than 60 people, including former employees of Facebook and its partners, former government officials and privacy advocates. It also reviewed more than 270 pages of internal Facebook documents and performed technical tests and analysis to monitor the information being passed between Facebook and its partners. Response: Steve Satterfield, Facebooks director of privacy and public policy, said none of the partnerships violated users privacy or the F.T.C. agreement. We know weve got work to do to regain peoples trust, he said. In part, prosecutors methods are aimed at wresting confessions from suspects. About 90 percent of indicted suspects in Japan confess to a crime before trial. I think it reflects differences in the societies and cultures and the views of criminal justice, said David Litt, an American professor of law at Keio University in Tokyo. We have a view in the United States and Anglo-American systems where we have the greatest respect for the autonomy of individuals. In Japan, Mr. Litt said, there is a deference to the authorities and to what they say. Mr. Ghosns arrest has been the talk of expatriates who see a possible chilling effect on foreigners willing to work in Japan. If you start throwing people in jail for doing something in the gray area, said Stephen Givens, an American corporate lawyer here who has been following the case, everybody lays awake at night worrying that theyre next to hear the police knock on the door. Critics who say the Japanese system is biased against defendants have focused on its high conviction rates, but even in the United States, 90 percent of defendants indicted on a charge of a white-collar crime in federal court were found guilty in 2017, according to the most recent Justice Department figures. Japan also is not the only democracy that restricts a defendants access to counsel or holds suspects for weeks or months without charges. German law allows suspects to be held for months if a judge rules that they might flee, obstruct justice or pose a danger to society. Rupert Stadler, the chief executive of Volkswagens Audi division, was held for almost five months without bail this year after he was heard on a wiretap making statements that prosecutors interpreted as an attempt to obstruct an investigation into emissions cheating. The right to have a lawyer present during questioning is not sacrosanct across democratic countries. In France, defendants can have a lawyer present during interrogations, but the lawyer is not allowed to interrupt although in practice, they sometimes do, and they are allowed to ask questions when investigators are finished. Get the DealBook newsletter to make sense of major business and policy headlines and the power-brokers who shape them. __________ Should corporations be charged for crimes their employees commit? That nettlesome question has come back to the fore as law enforcement authorities take aim at Goldman Sachs for its involvement in a vast scandal at a Malaysian investment fund. The Malaysian government on Monday filed criminal charges against Goldman, accusing the bank of making false and misleading statements when it raised money for the fund, called 1Malaysia Development Berhad, or 1MDB. The immediate consequences of the Malaysian charges against Goldman subsidiaries are likely to be limited, but the action will stir up discussion about how United States prosecutors should proceed and whether they should bring criminal charges against Goldman. Where the investigations stand So far, American prosecutors have secured a guilty plea from a former senior Goldman investment banker and filed money laundering and bribery charges against another former employee. Its not clear what sort of action, if any, the Department of Justice will take against Goldman as a firm. Brideside, based in Chicago, is trying to solve for a different problem: outfitting bridesmaids. The company started in 2014 as an online-only resource for those dresses that are notoriously hard to find in styles that satisfy groups of women of differing tastes and sizes. Several newer entrants in the industry like J. Crew and Gap Inc., which had acquired the start-up Weddington Way, had already closed their wedding lines. (Neither company disclosed a reason for the closures.) But Brideside co-founders Sonali Lamba and Nicole Staple, while students at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, thought they had a way to make it work and devised a business plan and began running focus groups. They opened shortly after graduation. We developed the brand with best friends in mind, knowing that they had different budgets, different tastes and different sizes, Ms. Staple said. Ms. Staple and Ms. Lamba knew, from experience, that brides wanted help in the planning process. But getting women together could be difficult since theyre often not in the same city, so they developed an online site to allow them, with stylists, to choose. Bridesides founders realized, however, that women still wanted to shop together. Like the mens apparel brand Bonobos and the eyeglass purveyor Warby Parker, they chose to create a physical footprint by opening a few locations where bridal parties could try on the dresses. In November, Brideside opened its third location, this one in Manhattan. While rents can be high, Ms. Staple says that by employing stylists who advise customers both online and in person, they avoid paying employees who might be idle when no customers are present. As a result of this approach, the physical locations have been a boon, not a drag, on earnings, she said, although she declined to disclose any financial results. The company, she said, plans on expanding in 2019 to offer bridal gowns as well. Even when I lived hours away, Manhattans Chinatown was my familys destination for groceries. Decades back, you couldnt find the same variety and quality of Chinese produce, meats and dried goods in most of the Mid-Atlantic. But thats changed. Cheaper options in Flushing, Queens; Sunset Park, Brooklyn; and elsewhere in the city have drawn working-class Chinese immigrants away from this neighborhood bordered by trendy SoHo and TriBeCa. As Chinatowns population changes, what will happen to the grocers and specialty food stores that feed the community? One of the reasons Chinese in our neighborhood have been able to sustain our community nutritionally is because these vendors exist, said Jan Lee, a Chinatown resident and property owner in the neighborhood. For gentrification, people think itll be $8 coffee, but before that happens youll displace a fishmonger or a fruit seller who is providing inexpensive food. This shows that Juul is all about maximizing sales and profit, said Eric N. Lindblom, director for tobacco control and food and drug law at the ONeill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University. You dont team up with a company that has an incredible vested interest in customers smoking and in maintaining that market share as long as they can. Public health officials also say they worry that Altria could use its investment to learn how Juul operates and to strengthen the startups growing lobbying efforts: Altria, itself still a potent lobbying force in Washington, could also dampen the role Juul might have played in pushing for regulatory measures to promote e-cigarettes over their deadlier combustible cousins. Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, has floated a proposal to reduce the nicotine levels in cigarettes to make e-cigarettes a more compelling alternative to smokers. But Altria has been involved in a plan to discourage Dr. Gottliebs nicotine-cutting proposal. Publicly, Altria says it supports an eventual reduction in nicotine levels, but it has quietly engineered a campaign to kill the effort by having thousands of form letters sent to the F.D.A. in protest. If you combine the resources of Juul and Altria, together you create one of the wealthiest, most powerful corporations we have seen one whose interests are directly linked to preventing or delaying legislative or regulatory action which discourages use of their products, said Matthew Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. Juuls behavior has already called into question its credibility as a company that cares about the health of the public, he said, adding that the deal would dramatically alter the perception that this was a company whose goal was to reduce, if not eliminate, the use of cigarettes. In an effort to staunch the soaring rates of vaping among teenagers, the F.D.A. has been cracking down on Juul and other companies, demanding that they not sell most flavored products in retail outlets where they could be accessible to youths. Before reading the article: Earlier this year, the Senate Intelligence Committee began a bipartisan investigation into Russias interference in the 2016 presidential election and beyond. On Dec. 17, it released two new reports that it commissioned about the Russian campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social media platforms. The reports found, among other things, that the Russian influence campaign in 2016 was run by a St. Petersburg company called the Internet Research Agency, owned by a businessman, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, who is a close ally of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. They also stress that the I.R.A. created social media accounts under fake names designed to pass as belonging to Americans on virtually every available platform. The reports identify some of the most popular of the images and themes created by the I.R.A. Take a look at some of their posts in this article. Then, based on what you see, respond to the following questions: What are some of the main themes you see represented in these posts? Who do they seem to be targeting? How do you know? Taken together, what seems to be the purpose of these posts? What might the Russians have been trying to do? Why? They drown or freeze to death the river is ice-cold in the winter and their bodies decompose quickly in the fresh water. Or they make it to land only to be killed by trains that run along the riverbanks, or land mines left over from the 1974 conflict over Cyprus between Greece and Turkey. Their clothes are shredded and their belongings are lost to the river. Whatever proof they once walked the earth can fit in your hand, with room to spare: a bracelet, a cigarette lighter, a chewing gum wrapper. In Traces of Identity , Mr. Rorandelli, who specializes in global social and environmental issues, documented approximately 150 items people who perished in the Evros left behind. The project recognizes those who paid the ultimate price for a shot at a better life and reminds an indifferent world of the profound risks fellow human beings take every day to escape crushing violence, oppression and poverty. As he photographed objects stored in plastic sandwich bags at a hospital morgue , Mr. Rorandelli was struck by the significance of what the migrants and refugees had left behind. Unraveling those material memories of dead ones was a ceremonious moment, he recalled. There are a few objects that I felt were particularly alive in their immobility. A rubber bracelet with the text I BELIEVE was one of them. It was the only object found on the body of the victim. Nothing else but this pledge to life. Or a white lighter coated with rust, giving it a sort of vitality. Or dental prostheses, which made me think of the dedication of those who try to give a name to these people. The seeds of the current denaturalization campaign were sown as early as 2008, when a Customs and Border Protection officer discovered 206 cases of people from special-interest countries like Afghanistan and Iraq, and countries that border them, who appeared to have once been ordered deported, but had gone on to obtain green cards or become citizens. The Department of Homeland Security began looking into those cases, only to discover thousands of other old immigration files that had never been uploaded to digital immigration databases. In September 2016, near the end of the Obama administration, the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security reported a total of 315,000 previously undigitized sets of fingerprints associated with immigrants whose files raised possible concerns. Just over half of those prints had been uploaded since the problem was discovered in 2008. More than 850 people from special-interest countries, or countries that bordered them, who were apparently ordered out of the country and whose fingerprints were not in the digital system had still gone on to become citizens. Just a few appear to have raised serious concerns, and they were referred to the Justice Department or to Joint Terrorism task forces for further review. Another 953 cases had also been flagged for possible review. The inspector general recommended the government to finish uploading the remaining files, a process that the report said had stalled for lack of funding. It also recommended that ICE determine how to proceed with the remaining files. Former Obama officials told me that they believed that few of the flagged cases would rise to the level of major priorities for federal agencies. We wanted to know who had become a citizen and to see if there was anyone who raised real concerns about security, says Ur Jaddou, the former U.S.C.I.S. official. For example, she noted that the inspector general had flagged a handful of cases that involved people who had obtained security clearances or government jobs after naturalizing. By March 2015, with the case-file reviews well underway, Obamas D.H.S. had referred several dozen cases to the offices of the United States attorneys, which in turn decided to prosecute only two. By the time the inspector generals office released its report in September 2016, the Department of Homeland Security had referred a total of 120 cases to the Justice Department to consider for prosecution. Several former Obama officials told me that the spike in court cases by the Trump administration may be explained by Operation Janus, adding that the numbers for 2017 and 2018 might look similar under a Democratic administration. U.S.C.I.S. also characterizes the growing number of cases under review as the natural expansion of the Janus process. It is an open question how much the number of people charged will grow under the Trump Administration, as the Justice Department prioritizes denaturalization efforts and the scope of the files under review expand. In my conversations with immigration advocates in recent months, nobody has been more awake to the threat of denaturalization cases than Abdulhakem Alsadah, who spends his days dashing between meetings with members of the Yemeni community near Detroit and working with people already in the court system who need counseling. Alsadah, a social worker, is president of the National Association of Yemeni-Americans, a community organization that operates out of a second-floor office next to a small Yemeni restaurant in Dearborn. Starting in 2013, he began to hear from Yemeni-Americans who had traveled to Yemen that the United States government had confiscated their passports at the embassy in Sana, the countrys capital. Alsadah called these passport confiscations unofficial denaturalizations. United States citizens were stuck in Yemen for months; in some cases their passports were never returned, and they were only able to return to their families in Michigan on provisional passports. Other Yemeni-Americans found themselves grounded in the United States, unable to travel. They are just stranded, Alsadah says. They are United States citizens. But they were not treated that way. State Department officials in Sana, and then later in the United States, he explains, were telling these suddenly paperless Yemeni-Americans that their passports would not be returned or renewed until they could prove that they were indeed who they said they were. The problem for Yemenis is that documentation to prove identity often doesnt exist in the country, which didnt have a civil department that recorded births and deaths until the mid-1980s. The United States has for years treated this lack of strong documentation as a harbinger of fraud. The U.S.C.I.S. manual issued during the Obama administration notes that because civil documents concerning marriage, birth, death, etc., are often issued in Yemen based solely on information furnished by an interested party, often the petitioner or beneficiary of the petition, they are usually not considered conclusive to establish claimed relationships. (The Trump administration used a lack of strong documentation to justify its travel ban on individuals from five Muslim-majority countries, arguing that the Yemeni government and other banned countries couldnt provide the United States with the information it needs to verify the identity of a potential immigrant.) In October of this year, the State Departments inspector general released a report that found these Obama-era passport seizures had not followed any discernible process and were not backed by clear rationale. Nonetheless, those passport seizures appear now to have created yet another pool of people like those from Janus and Second Look who can be targeted with denaturalization. For years, Alsadah was worried about exactly this possibility, and under the Trump administration it has begun. [What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.] In 2016, when the governor of Ohio was asked why he had signed a bill to limit early voting, he had a simple retort: He pointed to another state that had no early voting at all. When North Carolinas governor was sued for cutting early voting in his own state, his lawyers cited that same state as rebuttal. In each case, the state in question was New York. Deep blue, liberal-ideal New York. Despite its reputation for sterling progressivism, New York has some of the most restrictive election laws in the nation. It is one of just 12 states without early voting. No other state holds its federal and state primary elections on different days. Voters who want to change their party affiliation must do so more than a year before the election, a rule that famously left Ivanka Trump unable to vote for her father in the 2016 Republican primary. New Yorkers would be aghast if anyone accused New York of voter suppression, said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. But, she said, the antiquated nature of our laws and the failure to enact any common-sense reforms for years puts us kind of in voter suppression land. So when Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced on Monday that he wanted the states byzantine election laws revamped and (gasp!) made more voter-friendly, there was applause and apprehension. [Heres an in-depth look at the proposed changes.] In his speech, Mr. Cuomo called for automatic voter registration, an ease on the restrictions to voting by mail, and an expansion in the number of days when people can vote. Thirty-eight other states already allow early voting. He even wants to make Election Day a state holiday. Were very pleased, Susan Lerner, executive director of the good-government group Common Cause, told The Times. But the devils in the details, she said. Early voting needed to include a minimum of two weekends, and some evening hours, she said. This would allow the most people to be able to get to the polls, she said: Seniors, the young, communities that are often economically challenged, where people are working three or four jobs. Mr. Cuomo and his fellow Democrats will control the State Legislature starting next month, so something is likely to come of this, though some changes will require approval from voters. That was the first time Mr. Maloney, who had trained himself to use nunchucks after years spent studying martial arts, learned about the ban. The charge, which was easily resolved, planted the seeds for the legal case to come. By the time he graduated from law school in 1995, Mr. Maloney had already formulated the basic outline of a challenge to the nunchucks ban. His reasons for first learning to use nunchucks went back to his childhood, he said. When Mr. Maloney was 6, he said, his father was fatally stabbed, so Mr. Maloney was well aware of the danger that edged weapons like knives could cause. Because nunchucks allowed their wielder to maintain distance from his or her attacker, Mr. Maloney thought they would make an exceptional tool for self-defense. In the 70s, martial arts movies were a huge cultural phenomenon that brought centuries-old nunchucks closer to the center of modern popular culture. Impressed and inspired, droves of young people were twirling the weapons in their backyards and trying to avoid whacking themselves in the face. But New York lawmakers worried that some young people might be using the device nefariously. Officials were especially worried about muggers and street gangs who might use nunchucks to cause serious harm, according to Judge Chens decision. Out of concern for public safety, they passed a law to keep nunchucks off the streets. All the while, public enthusiasm for nunchucks never diminished. They showed up in video games like Mortal Kombat, comics like Daredevil and in cartoons like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, in which an anthropomorphic adolescent reptile named Michelangelo wielded a set of nunchucks in each hand. Mr. Maloneys affection for the weapon did not wane either. He developed his own martial arts technique. Nunchucks, he said, were an integral part of that style, which he called Shafan Ha Lavan the Hebrew translation of white rabbit. My kids dont stop getting sick, she said in Spanish. She has been waiting for Nycha to send someone to fix her living room heater since last December, according to work orders reviewed by The Times. She submitted three heat-related work orders this year, but workers showed up only once and then left without fixing the heater, she said. On a recent evening, Mr. Badia wrapped a purple blanket around his feet and lounged on a red couch in his living room. Heat radiated from the $90 electric space heater he had purchased. Imagine, I work in the cold all day and then I come home to the same cold, said Mr. Badia, 44, who works delivering pizza late nights into the early morning. Ms. Badia has reported the lack of heat to Nycha six times since Oct. 26 through a mobile app residents use to request repairs, according to records reviewed by The Times. Nycha closed five of the work orders within 24 hours without having anyone show up, Ms. Badia said. Robin Levine, a spokeswoman for Nycha, wrote in an email last week that on one occasion a resident in Ms Badias apartment did not allow workers to enter the apartment, a claim Ms. Badia disputed. Ms. Levine did not elaborate on the circumstances behind the other closed work orders. Ms. Levine said, in general, heat in the apartments was escaping through windows and doors in need of additional insulation. She said the heaters were working and recommended that residents move furniture away from the heater to increase heat circulation. But during a recent visit by a reporter, only a small trickle of tepid air emanated from the heaters in several apartments. Ms. Badia said her daughters were sleeping with an electric space heater at night because of the cold. How am I going to tell my children to not turn them on? Ms. Badia said. If I have to spend all of my income in electricity, Ill do it. Im not going to let my children suffer. [What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.] In a move that caught many employees by surprise, Laura R. Walker, the longtime but recently embattled president and chief executive officer of New York Public Radio, announced Wednesday that she would leave her job in March. Ms. Walker has been a towering figure in public radio and the arts for more than two decades. But accusations last year of harassment and discrimination by hosts cast a harsh glare on her management style, prompting Ms. Walker to acknowledge that she had prioritized growth, and content and programming, over investment in some of the processes and people. In her departure memo to staffers, Ms. Walker did not shy away from mentioning what employees have named The Troubles, saying its no secret that this past year has been stressful for the organization. She wrote that she and the stations board of trustees agreed that the time has come for me to move on. Still, she said, she was proud of the progress we have made so far in transforming our culture. And she chronicled a long list of accomplishments since becoming president 23 years ago, including a bevy of journalism awards, key acquisitions like the news site Gothamist and four capital campaigns that have raised more than $160 million. Since 1851, obituaries in The New York Times have been dominated by white men. With Overlooked, were adding the stories of remarkable people whose deaths went unreported in The Times. Gertrude Beasley begins her 1925 scathing memoir of growing up in rural Texas like this: Thirty years ago, I lay in the womb of a woman, conceived in a sexual act of rape, being carried during the prenatal period by an unwilling and rebellious mother, finally bursting from the womb only to be tormented in a family whose members I despised or pitied, and brought into association with people whom I should never have chosen. The book, My First Thirty Years, goes on: Sometimes I wish that, as I lay in the womb, a pink soft embryo, I had somehow thought, breathed or moved and wrought destruction to the woman who bore me, and her eight miserable children who preceded me, and the four round-faced mediocrities who came after me, and her husband, a monstrously cruel, Christ-like, and handsome man with an animals appetite for begetting children. On the second page, Beasley says that when she was between the ages of 4 and 9, each of her five older brothers tried to have sex with her. She also recounts the time one of her brothers was caught doing something indecent with the family cow. And it was misleading the board that denied him the $120 million payout promised in his contract if he wasnt fired for cause. His willful and material misfeasance, violation of company policies and breach of his employment contract, as well as his willful failure to cooperate fully with the companys investigation, allowed the company to withhold the money, the CBS board said in a statement. Thats because his most recent contract stipulated that cause means only a felony conviction, fraud, failure to cooperate fully with an investigation, or a violation of company policies. Allegations of sexual harassment which is, to repeat, illegal, although it may not be a felony did not count. It would have been even harder to hold him to account if the acts happened before he joined the company, even if they had gone unpunished by a former employer. So while the companys investigation did find that Mr. Moonves engaged in multiple acts of serious nonconsensual sexual misconduct in and outside of the workplace, that wasnt enough to oust him without a huge payoff. It was only after he was also found to have deleted texts in which he tried to silence one of his accusers and lied to the companys investigators that they were able to withhold it. Had he played by the rules, Mr. Moonves may very well have walked away with his loot. (The fight isnt over; Mr. Moonves could still challenge the boards decision, and if he does, his termination deal requires CBS to foot his legal costs.) Mr. Moonves has denied all the allegations and said that any sexual acts he engaged in were consensual. To the Editor: Re Flynn Was Looking for Leniency; Judge Gave Him a Stern Rebuke (front page, Dec. 19): Judge Emmet Sullivan injected a dose of sanity into the Michael Flynn matter with an appropriately sharp rebuke of this criminal. Up till then the civics message seemed to be: the greater your crime, the less your time ... as long as you cooperate with prosecutors. What, like cooperation is some kind of selfless gesture when youre caught raiding the cookie jar? The judge even brought up the T word when he asked prosecutors if Mr. Flynn had possibly committed treason. Geez, I hope not, insofar as the reverse logic of the prosecutors would have probably awarded this miscreant with a Trump penthouse for his generous cooperation. Confessing to crimes youve already been indicted for should never constitute a get out of jail free card. Just as the failure of the Obama Justice Department to punish the worst offenders in the 2008 financial crisis has emboldened this shameless crowd to pursue their old tricks yet again, the soft-on-slime prosecution of the most corrupt among us will not deter bad behavior. Richard Gonci Cambridge, Mass. To the Editor: Judge Emmet Sullivan is a straight shooter with a deep moral core. He spoke truth to Michael Flynn, and in doing so he reminded us what justice is all about. Years ago as a young attorney, I spent many hours in Judge Sullivans courtroom at the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, Probate Division . In a July 21, 2017, memo, the secretary of defense, James Mattis, made promising comments about his ambitions to end wasteful spending at the Pentagon. He wrote that he expected leaders at all levels in the department to exercise the utmost degree of stewardship over every penny spent and that only by instilling budget discipline, by establishing a culture of cost awareness, and by holding ourselves accountable, can we earn the trust and confidence of the Congress and the American people that we are the best possible stewards of taxpayer dollars. Ive spent more than three decades reviewing egregious spending at the Defense Department. The sentiments expressed in the memo were encouraging, so much so that I sent Secretary Mattis a letter of support. Since then, however, it seems the department has done very little to change its ways. Over the past few months alone, the Defense Department has had to explain why its been paying $14,000 for individual 3-D printed toilet seat lids and purchasing cups for $1,280 each. These are just the latest examples on a long list of unacceptable purchases made by the department, including $436 for hammers in the 1980s, and $117 soap dish covers and $999 pliers in the 1990s. These wasteful expenditures reflect major underlying financial problems at the department, whose 2019 budget is more than $700 billion . If it had its financial house in order, overpriced parts and contracts might have been detected before ever being approved. Effective internal controls to catch and deter fraud, waste, abuse and theft serve as a firewall that would help prevent misuses of taxpayer dollars. So, as we look to 2019, its important to stay focused on landing a body blow against the Islamic States remnants in Iraq and Syria. That includes eradicating the last vestiges of the groups network of fighters, supporting resurgent governance in the areas the group once held, developing sustainable intelligence sources and law enforcement options for the groups terrorist network, and increasing the pressure against the group in what remains a virtual safe haven: the internet. Defeating the Islamic State, at least in Iraq and Syria, begins with eradicating the groups remaining fighters. (Its fighters elsewhere, such as in Libya and West Africa, will pose a considerable challenge for the foreseeable future, even as important American counterterrorism efforts against them continue.) Finding and targeting the Islamic States fighters is a considerable challenge, as theyve largely been driven into an area of Syria where United States intelligence collection may have fewer inroads, where our main partners on the ground the Syrian Kurds have chosen not to follow, and where some local refuge may be available. The areas successfully cleared of the Islamic State demand continued attention, too. Its the absence and inadequacies of local governance that often allow terrorists to carve out a foothold in the first place; and the deadly civil war consuming Syria threatens to leave large swaths of the country effectively ungoverned. Working with international partners to provide the resources, training and diplomatic support needed for at least a bare minimum of governance to take root a Sunni alternative to the horrific brand of governance offered by the Islamic State is an urgent priority not just for counterterrorism but also for humanitarian reasons. And cutting such resources at this juncture is a dangerous recipe for a resurgent terrorist threat that plays into the Islamic States own narratives that only it is capable of governing, as the group indeed tried to do for a time. The Islamic State has already adapted to its shrinking territorial control by putting in place an underground network that, from the shadows, can inflict destabilizing violence in Syria and Iraq, and potentially throughout the region. This is the same retreat from terrorist insurgency to terrorist network that we saw from Al Qaeda in Iraq; and it demands building U.S., Iraqi, and other partners intelligence capabilities to penetrate this network by disrupting its attacks, seizing funds, and detaining those sustaining the network. Even with diminished territorial holdings, the Islamic State will still be able to radicalize and mobilize followers so long as the group retains a virtual safe haven online. Leading technology companies have stepped up their efforts to contest terrorists presence on their platforms, but terrorist groups have adapted, altering their content and regenerating accounts in ways that challenge the companies approaches and that connect with would-be followers just long enough to shift those followers into end-to-end encrypted chats to avoid detection. The United States must lead the way by sharing, to the maximum extent classification permits, the latest information on terrorist trends and tactics online with companies so they can use new and emerging tools to contest terrorists online foothold. I traveled with a local photographer, Karolina Jonderko, to the Nikiszowiec neighborhood of Katowice, which was built in 1908 to house local coal miners. After the fall of Communism in the 1990s, many of the nearby mines went out of business. The neighborhood was soon racked by joblessness and crime. But local leaders banded together to revitalize the area. Today, we found, Nikiszowiecs charming cobbled streets have become a popular tourist stop; its brick buildings now house artist workshops and young families. Theres a strong community here, said Grzegorz Chudy, 46, a local artist who moved here ten years ago. Inside the United Nations climate conference a few miles away, politicians and climate experts were talking of the need for a just transition away from polluting energy sources, in which workers who lost their jobs were able to find new livelihoods. Nikiszowiec seemed like a plausible demonstration of how that might work in practice. Yet there was still more to the story. Even as Katowice was installing long arrays of solar panels around town, the city was still getting most of its electricity from a giant coal-fired plant nearby that coated the air with a thick smog on many days. The city ranks as one of Europes 50 most polluted, and a recent study found that the fouled air is decreasing life spans here by 1.5 years. Despite having given a good description, and having a security guard witness the crime and try to stop the cyclist (who was a teenage boy), the Met didnt send an officer out. Instead, they took my call, and then sent me an email FIVE days later. The email stated: We are sorry to hear that you have been the victim of crime. An investigator from the Metropolitan Police has looked carefully at your case and we are sorry to say that, with the evidence and leads available, it is unlikely that it will be possible to identify those responsible. We have therefore closed this case. Nice to know that they are willing to do ABSOLUTELY nothing. I was insured, but so many are not. Shameful. Jessica ONeill, Dalston The victim was treated with total contempt Waiting outside a Catholic primary school at lunchtime to collect my 4-year-old in South Kensington, I saw a father physically and verbally assaulted by a man who objected to him waiting on the street outside his mews house (value 5M). Thrown to the ground, shirt ripped, mobile broken. I waited until the police arrived (one and a half hours later). The victim was treated with total contempt by two policemen who felt it was a non-crime. They spent 40 minutes inside the violent wealthy residents house. When I said the assaulted father wants to press charges for assault and criminal damage, they got very defensive and said the desk sergeant would decide. They didnt want to give a crime number. When I took their badge numbers, as is our right in the U.K., they became even more short tempered, saying that they have more serious crime than dealing with this. Its no wonder the criminals are winning. We need a zero tolerance approach to halt the slide. Jason Piers, Kensington David H Rosen, a lifelong New Yorker, left the city for only four years, to attend Cornell University in Ithaca. After returning for a Ph.D. in psychology at New York University, he scored a rent-stabilized two-bedroom in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. He brought in the occasional roommate, but mostly kept the place for himself and a cat or two. Always interested in buying, Mr. Rosen checked out plenty of apartments over the years, often in small walk-up buildings. One place in Park Slope was a two-bedroom with a roof terrace and an attic. It was a standard beautiful brownstone old on the outside, new on the inside, Mr. Rosen said. A spiral staircase led to the tiny attic, with skylights. I thought that was the coolest thing, this attic, he said. I couldnt afford it at the time, but every place I went into, I compared it to that in my brain. In the 1800s, thousands of Aboriginal Australians were the victims of a terrible trade in the name of science. Anatomists opened their graves and stole their skeletons. After massacres of Aboriginal Australians, police officers sold body parts to museums. Today, many of these bones lie far from home. Our old peoples remains have been stolen from this country, and theyre global, whether they be in London, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland even in America, said Gudju Gudju Fourmile, an elder of the Yidniji and Gimuy Walubara people in northern Australia. For decades Aboriginal Australians have been pressing for the return of the bones. Our old peoples spirits wont rest until theyre back on their own country, said Mr. Fourmile. In recent years, museums have tried to comply. But progress has been slow, partly because the institutions have little information about where many of the bones came from. Scientists and engineers have been building and programming piano-playing robots for decades. But theres something different about a new robotic hand that tickles the ivories with techniques usually reserved for humans. Rather than relying on a maze of motors, as decades of piano bots have, the hand introduced Wednesday in a paper in Science Robotics operates passively, meaning its fingers are not individually connected to any motors. Instead, a simple mechanical arm controls only the wrist, and the rest of the hand follows in a design inspired by human anatomy. Our aim is to move away from the traditional approach in robotics, where one motor gives one behavior, because that doesnt scale, said Josie Hughes, a researcher in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge who led the development of the hand. I bloom indoors in the winter like a forced forsythia, the author and naturalist Annie Dillard wrote in 1973. I come in to come out. Winter, as a season, is all about being inside physically and metaphorically. It is about regrouping, hunkering down, searching internally for inspiration. Fragrance is all about bottling our deepest desires and selling them right back to us; and this season, people very much want to smell like timber and bonfires. They want perfumes that not only bloom indoors but smell like the inside of a cozy wooden house. Log Cabin Perfumes, as I have taken to calling the growing category of scents that evoke a cold snap all year round, are fairly new to the market. A decade ago, only a few niche fragrances prominently featured notes like Scotch pine, birch tar, gunpowder, palo santo and wood smoke. In 2009, Serge Lutens released Fille en Aiguilles, a cult hit that smells like a Christmas tree farm, and slowly the hibernal trend began to trickle through the indie perfume world. Now, the demand for wearable wintry mixes has exploded. These scents are experiencing a renewal and will be with us for some time, said John Biebel, the perfumer behind the indie fragrance house January Scent Project. Its a bit of escapism, but actually to many it may be a desire to return to real life, full of unfiltered smells of the forest, the mountains, the freshly cracked wood branch and pine cones underfoot. Nonetheless, the celebrities were kvelling about the play. If you liked the novel, its as good as having an audiobook with moving pictures, Samuel L. Jackson said. His wife, LaTanya Richardson Jackson, stars in the production alongside Jeff Daniels as Atticus Finch. Ms. Jackson praised the decision by Aaron Sorkin, who wrote the adaptation, to enhance the role of her character, the Finch familys maid. Its important that these African-American characters are not always seen as scenery, or the backdrop to somebody elses life, she said. Mr. Sorkin, too, seemed satisfied with his work. My fear was that this would be a suicide mission, that I was going to make it less than what it was originally and reduce the book, he said, standing beside an enormous vase of plastic flowers. I dont think that happened. Mr. Daniels, surrounded by his family, recalled his reaction when Mr. Sorkin first mentioned the project two years ago. It was: Dont make me read the book if Im not going to be playing Atticus, he said, before adding with a smirk, Which is like, stupid. Gym Dandies A far less button-down crowd turned out Friday night for a toy drive organized by Susanne Bartsch and David Barton, reviving a two-decades-old tradition that took a hiatus. It was held at Mr. Bartons new Greenwich Village branch of his gym, TMPL. When its dark and chilly in her hometown, Geneva, the fragrance entrepreneur Clara Molloy pours herself a cup of fresh hot chocolate, curls up with a book and applies a tonka-bean-laced fragrance. It makes me feel warm, she says of the wintry ritual. As the creative director and co-founder of a trio of stylish perfume brands Memo Paris, Floraiku and Hermetica Molloy finds herself gravitating toward cozy elixirs during the frigid months, fragrances that conjure the feeling of coming in from the cold, warming up by the fire and inhaling something delicious. A handful of other perfumes, both new and old, bottle such forms of atmospheric escape. The French perfume creator Frederic Malle, for example, crafted Dries Van Noten par Frederic Malle ($225) as an antidote to the biting winters in Van Notens native Belgium. The blend of vanilla, nutmeg and sacrasol a note that has a sugary, buttery smell, Malle says recalls the aroma of speculoos biscuits, tea and Indian spices. Similarly refined dessert notes can be found in Louis Vuittons Attrape-Reves ($250), which pairs rich cocoa with airy Turkish rose, and Bond No. 9s New Bond Street ($280), a concoction layered with coffee beans, milky chestnut and vanilla. For those who prefer calming tea tinctures, Molloy suggests Floraikus The Moon and I ($350), a perfume made from a concentrated essence of matcha, thats almost spiritual, as all very good green teas are. Sophie Labbe, the perfumer behind the Paris-based brand, captured the stillness of the steam-filled moment with a contrast between the bitter and creamy notes that you really feel when drinking a matcha. For food-infused scents, piping in the right background ingredients rounds out the formulas so nothing feels too heavy-handed or literal: LArtisan Parfumeurs Venenum ($210) balances whiffs of masala chai tea with a hint of sandalwood. Storie Venezianes Gaggia Medio ($420) softens the sharpness of cardamom with smooth amber and Ojai Wilds Chamomile Flowers ($110) perks up the mellow plant with grapefruit and cognac. The reports prompted concerns among lawmakers and regulators in Europe and the United States about whether Facebook had a proper handle on the data of its more than 2.2 billion users worldwide. The revelations have spawned months of crisis for the Silicon Valley company, on top of other issues that the social network has faced, such as how it was manipulated by Russians to interfere in elections. Facebooks top executives, including its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, have vowed to improve the site. Even so, it will likely take many more months to resolve the fallout from Cambridge Analytica. In some places, regulators and lawmakers have moved swiftly. In Britain, Facebook was hit in July with the maximum possible fine of 500,000 pounds, or about $660,000, for the improper harvesting of its users data. At the time, the Information Commissioners Office in Britain said that its inquiry had determined that Facebook contravened the law by failing to safeguard peoples information. It also found that the company failed to be transparent about how peoples data was harvested by others. In the United States, legal and regulatory action has been slower. Earlier this year, the Justice Department and the F.B.I. began investigating Cambridge Analytica, which is now defunct. In July, Facebook said it faced an expansion of federal investigations into its sharing of user data with Cambridge Analytica. Several state attorney general offices have also announced investigations into Facebook because of Cambridge Analytica. In the lawsuit brought by Mr. Racine on Wednesday, he said the Facebook data of roughly half of the District of Columbias residents had been exposed by Cambridge Analyticas harvesting. Mr. Racine also said the social media company misled people about the security of their data, and made it difficult to control privacy settings on the platform. Google has come under mounting scrutiny for its promotion of childrens apps in its Play store. In April, cybersecurity researchers reported that more than half of about 6,000 free Android childrens apps they tested shared personal data in ways that may violate the childrens privacy law. In September, the attorney general of New Mexico filed a lawsuit against Google and other companies over childrens apps. The complaint said that Google had violated a state law on unfair practices by marketing certain childrens apps as family-friendly even when the company knew the apps failed to comply with its own policies on childrens apps. Image In an app called New Girl in High School for children ages 6-12, researchers found an ad for a game involving beer, the complaint said. Credit... Brent Lewis for The New York Times Image Beer in the ads for New Girl at School. Credit... Brent Lewis for The New York Times In early October, two Democratic senators called for a federal investigation to examine how app stores like Google Play vet the apps they categorize as child-friendly and ensure they comply with the privacy law. And on Wednesday morning those senators Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Ed Markey of Massachusetts along with Senator Tom Udall, Democrat of New Mexico, sent another letter to the chairman of the F.T.C. pressing for a comprehensive investigation into the Google Play store and its compliance with childrens privacy and advertising rules. There are massive, at-scale problems with Android apps for children, said Josh Golin, executive director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, a childrens advocacy group in Boston that led the latest complaint along with the Center for Digital Democracy, a nonprofit in Washington. Google is failing to do the proper vetting of apps in the family section, he said. Google said that it removed thousands of apps from its Designed for Families program this year when it found policy violations, and had begun to take action on the apps cited in the consumer groups complaint. Also, the platforms simply have to do a better job of identifying and eradicating bots whose sole mission appears to be to inflame and harass. Yes, they target all sorts of users, but in some cases (and in the parochial terms of my beat) theyre aimed at journalists either to sway them or to just attack them, in another affront on democracys fourth estate. Dont get me started on misinformation. I have too many columns ahead to fill on the topic. What tech product are you personally obsessed with? Im going to cheat and talk about two. And it wont be pretty. Lets start with Nest. The device at least ours, which we got two years ago has a mind of its own. At times, it makes me feel as if Im in the Jetsons reboot episode in which the robots all turn against George. My wife and I are often away from our house for long periods, so we keep the heat low. The Nest allows us to warm it from afar hours ahead of time so we dont come home to an icebox. But then, for no apparent reason, the Nest will set the heat back to low when were in the house so it is suddenly freezing again. This has happened in exceedingly cold weather when there are pipes to worry about. The device is running on an algorithm that we can turn off I get that (theoretically, at least; my m.o. with tech is to figure out the minimum that will serve my needs and leave it at that). And Im sure there are other ways to fix it. The other day I hit up against a new and unforeseen problem it went totally dead on me just as a cold snap kicked in. I forgot to pay the internet bill. I know one thing: My old thermostat was immune to my own idiocy, didnt play games with me or jeopardize my plumbing and I didnt need to pore through a manual to figure it out. We are giving it one more chance before we ditch it. Last month, Madrid restricted private vehicle access for nonresidents in its city center. A few weeks earlier, London introduced a plan to bar cars from many of the roads in its financial center, continuing its yearslong plan to combat pollution. And Paris, Athens and Mexico City are attempting to ban diesel cars in their city centers by 2025. (In 2016, when Paris banned cars for the day, the city saw a 25 percent decrease in nitrogen dioxide and a 20 percent drop in noise.) In Oslo, the plan to remove cars from the city began in 2015 when a coalition of progressive political parties called for a city center free from vehicles. Similar plans have been met with resistance in places like Dublin, where local officials have proposed expanding that citys pedestrian zone, and Barcelona. Even in ecologically minded Oslo, it wasnt easy. Theres been quite a bit of public debate, and theres been quite a lot of controversy, and its been quite difficult to do this in a way that businesses and citizens can accept, Ms. Marcussen said. The strongest opposition came from local business owners who were worried that fewer cars would mean fewer customers. So the city came up with a compromise: Instead of an outright ban, they would enact regulations that would allow as few vehicles as possible in the city center. The city designated certain streets for pedestrians or public transit only, restricted the ability of nonresidents to drive through the center, and removed hundreds of parking spots from city streets while creating designated parking spots for disabled citizens and businesses that require a car. Oslo hopes to be a model for other cities looking to restrict cars in densely populated areas, Ms. Marcussen said, adding that soon enough, the policy will seem obvious. Its also a time when wildlife is awake. Theres so much activity happening all around you, said Robyn Mundy, one of the assistant expedition leaders on Aurora Expeditions. Penguins are feeding their brand-new chicks while predatory birds, raising their own small chicks, are trying to snatch tiny chicks from unsuspecting parents. Humpback whales start arriving in larger numbers. Beaches are bustling with fur seals being weaned. And then theres the sentiment behind the holiday. For many people, New Years Eve is a time for reflection and setting intentions for a fresh start. I think travel, no matter what time of year, is good for escape, said Joan Watson, a retired accountant who visited Antarctica last year with Wild Earth Travel, a travel company with some ships that also function as research facilities. But you truly do head into a new year with a bang if its spent in Antarctica. What to know before you go With a few exceptions, the only people allowed to spend the night on land work at government research bases. There are a few companies that will fly you there for a few hours, but flights can be unreliable. The minute theres a threat of bad weather, planes are grounded. Cruise ships are your best bet. All lines that go to Antarctica (most leaving from southern ports in Chile or Argentina) require passengers to submit medical forms proving they are in good health, mostly because the medical infrastructure can be limited and hard to reach. The closest hospitals can be hours away by plane. Theres no cellular service on Antarctica and internet access can be spotty. That means you may not be able to make midnight calls to family members or loved ones when the calendar moves to January 1. The only downside is being away from family, said Mr. Ward . Well try and stay in touch and send photos when we can. How New Years works at the bottom of the Earth It can be unsettling to watch the clock in a continent that doesnt really have an official time zone. (For convenience, McMurdo Station, a United States Antarctic research center, follows New Zealands because it is due south of that country.) Its also strange for some visitors to perform the traditional countdown in broad daylight. Its a little funny, said Jeffrey Donenfeld, who works for a venture capital fund and has spent two New Years on Antarctica, but everything you do here is kind of funny because youre like, Where the hell are we? What is happening here? Since New Years Eve in any part of the world wouldnt be complete without a party, many ships stage extravagant galas. Ponant opts to have part of its celebration on the ships deck, despite the freezing temperatures , so guests can focus on the breathtaking views. On Princess Cruises, travelers party inside with clackers, hats, streamers, Champagne and a balloon drop at midnight. Good morning. (Heres the sign-up, if you dont already receive California Today by email.) Today, weve got a potent story from San Francisco bureau chief Thomas Fuller: A decade ago Marie and Surinder Uppal fulfilled what they considered their American dream: the construction of a two-story home next to vineyards in Sonoma County. But earlier this year, besieged by a mysterious, pungent odor, they wondered if they had made the right decision. We said, What the heck is that smell? Ms. Uppal said. We couldnt figure out what it was. The stench was very bad, stronger than a skunk. The Uppals are among hundreds of people across California who have showed up at town hall meetings, petitioned city councils and hired lawyers to fight an unanticipated consequence of marijuana legalization: the stink from pot farms across the state. As a single mother, Beatrice Duran never imagined that she would get involved in politics. When she moved to Las Vegas in 1985, her focus was on keeping a solid job as a food server to provide for her young daughter and, later, her son. Opportunities to become involved in public life felt out of reach. Now, her appointment on Tuesday to the Nevada State Assembly, along with that of another woman, will make female lawmakers the majority in the state capital the first time that has happened in the nations history. Ms. Duran and Rochelle Thuy Nguyen, both Democrats, were selected by the Clark County Board of County Commissioners to fill recently vacated seats. This is going to show more women that we can do it, Ms. Duran, 55, said. With Ms. Duran and Ms. Nguyens arrival, women will hold 32 of 63 seats in the Nevada Legislature when the next session begins in February, about 51 percent. No state house in history had ever crossed the 50 percent mark, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. New Hampshire previously had majority women representation in the state Senate, but women were not the overall majority in the Capitol. WASHINGTON A federal jury on Wednesday found a former Blackwater security contractor, Nicholas A. Slatten, guilty in the deadly 2007 shooting of dozens of unarmed Iraqis in Nisour Square in Baghdad, long considered one of the lowest points of the Iraq war and an indelible symbol of Americas protracted and unpopular involvement. The verdict was the second time a federal jury had found Mr. Slatten, a former sniper, guilty in the high-profile episode that outraged Americans over what many saw as a military mission with no clear strategy. For a decade, the case against Mr. Slatten and several other contractors has been winding its way through the federal justice system, drawn out across three administrations as American officials sought to make good on their promise to Iraqis that they would bring the men responsible for the killings to justice. After the shooting, the United States implored its Iraqi allies to trust the American justice system, which, over 10 years, has delivered guilty verdicts, retracted them and on Wednesday delivered one again. The bill would not only maintain funding for the departments and agencies covered by seven spending bills that have not passed, but it would also extend a number of programs set to expire, including the Violence Against Women Act, the National Flood Insurance Program and critical Medicaid provisions. Avoiding a partial government shutdown was a welcome prospect for lawmakers, particularly given the holiday timing and the number of lawmakers who await retirement at the end of the session or have quietly left after their November defeats. More than 70 members from both parties were missing from votes in the House on Wednesday night. Some lawmakers, anticipating quick consideration of the measure amid a year-end rush to get out of Washington before Christmas, feverishly tried to use the measures momentum to push through long-held goals, including disaster relief for farmers in the Southeast after a series of storms this year. A bipartisan group of Western senators were further aggrieved when, after a delay, a vote on a lands package was blocked, prompting a fiery round of speeches on the floor. The package carried a handful of bills that include the permanent reauthorization of the Land and Water Conservation Fund and put in place protections for the gateway to at Yellowstone National Park and the headwaters of the Yellowstone River. Time to get it done, said Senator Maria Cantwell, Democrat of Washington and a sponsor of a bill that would permanently reauthorize the conservation fund. The West wants to be heard. Senate leadership later told the group which includes Montanas senators, Jon Tester and Steve Daines, a Democrat and a Republican that a vote on the package would be one of the first on the floor in January, Mr. Schumer and Mr. Tester confirmed. And even though a path to funding had been made clear for the first time in days and did not include billions of dollars in wall funding, Democrats were also dissatisfied with the likely outcome and the prospect of having to confront the funding issue again only two months into their majority. With ninety percent of their personnel considered essential, the Department of Homeland Security will be hit the hardest. Nearly 54,000 Customs and Border Protection agents and 42,000 Coast Guard employees are projected to work without pay, and as travelers flood the nations airports and train stations, 53,000 T.S.A. agents will keep working, as will air traffic controllers and aviation and railroad safety inspectors. Law enforcement officers at the Justice Department will also be expected to continue working over the holidays without pay, including nearly 17,000 correctional officers, 14,000 F.B.I. agents, and 4,000 Drug Enforcement Administration agents. And after a long year battling ferocious wildfires, about 5,000 firefighters with the U.S. Forest Service will also remain on duty. Congress passed five spending bills earlier this year totaling nearly $900 billion of the $1.2 trillion in federal agency operating expenses. Those bills funded the departments of Labor, Energy, Defense, Health and Human Services, Education, Veterans Affairs and the legislative branch so they will remain unaffected. Mandatory spending programs like Social Security and Medicare also will continue. The status of National Parks will be up in the air. With funding for the Department of the Interior slated to expire, guidance issued by department officials states that services at all of the countrys 58 national parks would shutter over the holidays, including the parkss visitor centers and restrooms. Park staff would be furloughed, although the parks themselves would remain accessible. However, some parks, including the Grand Canyon, are planning to stay open. Arizona Governor Doug Ducey announced on Friday morning he would invoke a plan developed after the January 2018 shutdown that uses state funds to keep the park accessible. We have a legal name but will be using our colloquial name and the branded acronym 'CFPB,' Ms. Kraninger said in the email, which was provided to The New York Times by a bureau spokesman. Many of us have legal names but use nicknames without much confusion. She added: I believe this decision is most efficient and effective for our continued work together. The consumer bureau was created during the Obama administration under the Dodd-Frank Act and many Republicans have accused it of regulatory overreach. When Mr. Mulvaney took over as acting director from Richard Cordray last year, he put a freeze on much of the agencys enforcement activity and, to the chagrin of much of its career staff, decided to rebrand it. We changed the name because its the name in the statute, Mr. Mulvaney told reporters at the agencys offices last June. If your whole theme is going to be to follow the statute, I thought it was a good, small way, but a very visible way, to send a message. As part of Mr. Mulvaneys directive, the letters on the bureaus offices were reshuffled to read B.C.F.P. and he was in the process of reformatting stationery and other materials to make the change official. According to an internal analysis, which was first reported by The Hill, the costs of these changes to the companies regulated by the bureau could reach $300 million. Good Wednesday morning. Here are some of the stories making news in Washington and politics today. _____________________ The Donald J. Trump Foundation, once billed as the charitable arm of the presidents financial empire, has agreed to dissolve and give away its assets under court supervision. New Yorks attorney general accused it of a shocking pattern of illegality, including coordination with Mr. Trumps 2016 campaign. The sentencing of Michael T. Flynn, President Trumps former national security adviser, was postponed after the judge expressed disgust at Mr. Flynns efforts to mislead federal investigators. In a rare display of bipartisanship, the Senate approved the most substantial changes in a generation to federal prison and sentencing laws. House leaders have promised to pass the legislation this week, and President Trump is expected to sign it. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and other top national security officials argued that a withdrawal would, essentially, surrender Western influence in Syria to Russia and Iran. The Trump administrations national security policy calls for challenging both countries, which are the chief benefactors of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria and have provided him with years of financial and military support. Abandoning the Kurdish allies, the officials argued, also would cripple future American efforts to gain the trust of local fighters for counterterrorism operations, including in Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia. The Russian Foreign Ministry welcomed the move, according to the TASS news agency, saying that a withdrawal created prospects for a political settlement in Syrias civil war. It also said an initiative to form a Syrian constitutional committee would have a bright future once American troops were gone. While Mr. Trump has long cast American military involvement in Syria as narrowly focused on defeating the Islamic State, his generals and diplomats argue that the United States has broader, more complex interests there. Gen. Joseph Votel, the commander of United States Central Command, and Brett H. McGurk, the American envoy to the coalition fighting the Islamic State, fiercely protested the military withdrawal, administration officials said. Both argued that the Islamic State would never have been defeated without the Kurdish fighters, whom General Votel said suffered many casualties and always lived up to their word. Officials said General Votel argued that withdrawing American troops would leave the Kurds vulnerable to attack from Turkey, which has warned it will soon launch an offensive against them. It would also cement the survival of Mr. Assad, whose ouster had long been an article of faith in Washington. WASHINGTON The Trump administration is considering an international challenge to Perus deforestation of the Amazon, the first time the United States has prepared to act against a trading partner for violating environmental standards in a trade agreement, according to people with knowledge of the proposed action. In a signal to Democrats that he is willing to act aggressively on issues they consider important, the United States trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, is considering challenging Perus decision to dismantle an agency created to stop the illegal harvesting of trees in the Amazon rain forest under the 2007 United States-Peru Trade Promotion Agreement. The United States could request the convening of an independent tribunal as soon as Friday to decide the case, officials said, but cautioned that the timeline could shift. The potential action, which comes as President Trump systematically scales back protections of wilderness areas in the United States, could have significant consequences for the new North American trade agreement under scrutiny by the incoming Democratic majority in the House. You are here: China's reform and opening up Ten foreigners received China Reform Friendship Medals on Tuesday for their outstanding contributions to the country's reform and opening-up over the past 40 years. Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum Klaus Schwab was given a medal by President Xi Jinping, together with other recipients at a grand gathering in Beijing to celebrate the 40th anniversary of China's reform and opening-up. President Xi Jinping reaffirmed China's commitment to opening up wider to the world during the gathering. "The practice of reform and opening-up over the past 40 years has shown that openness brings progress, while seclusion leads to backwardness," Xi said. The president pledged to support the building of an open, transparent, inclusive and non-discriminatory multilateral trading system, facilitate trade and investment, and promote more openness amid ongoing economic globalization. The high-profile conference was attended by Xi and the six other members of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee as well as Vice-President Wang Qishan. Premier Li Keqiang presided over the meeting. Over the past 40 years, China has recorded an average annual GDP growth rate of around 9.5 percent, contributed over 30 percent to global economic growth and lifted more than 740 million people out of poverty, Xi said, calling the four decades "a glorious process". The country will focus on jointly building the Belt and Road with other countries and establish a new platform for international cooperation, Xi said, and will continue measures to boost opening-up. China will never seek self-development at the cost of other countries' interests, nor will it give up its justified interests, Xi said, adding that China's development will pose no threat to any other nation, and it will never seek hegemony no matter how developed it becomes. China's development provides successful experience and offers bright prospects for other developing countries as they strive for modernization, and it represents China's great contribution to the progress of human civilization, Xi said. Wang Huning, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, lauded the medal recipients as "old friends of the Chinese people" while reading a statement from the CPC Central Committee and the State Council. Wang said the 10 foreigners significantly helped promote exchanges and cooperation between China and the rest of the world and were deeply involved in China's reform and opening-up process. "They have made outstanding contributions to the country's reform and opening-up," he said. Among the medal winners, Panasonic founder Konosuke Matsushita made great contributions to China's modernization in electronics through trade and investment. Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore's first prime minister and one of the most influential Asian politicians, made contributions by sharing Singapore's successful governance experience with China. Juan Antonio Samaranch, former president of the International Olympic Committee, was remembered by many Chinese for his great contributions to China's return to the IOC. In the foreword to The Sleeping Giant Awakes, a book compiled by China Watch China Daily's think tank Schwab said the World Economic Forum has witnessed China's great development process. "The change brought about by reform and opening-up has been incredible," he said in the foreword. "In 40 years, China has shifted from a largely agricultural nation with a planned economy to one that is poised to be a leader in the Fourth Industrial Revolution." Kuhn, a leading Chinese expert and chairman of the Kuhn Foundation, said it's a great honor to receive the medal. "As I look at my participation among the 10 foreigners who have received the China Reform Friendship Medal, I see my role as representing the importance of international communication. It's not so much personal as it is representing the importance that China places on communication with the world so as to learn about the world and tell the world the true story of China," Kuhn said in a live report by China Global Television Network. Conferring the China Reform Friendship Medal on foreigners demonstrates again that China's reform and opening-up are closely connected with the international community, Ruan Zongze, executive vice-president and senior fellow at the China Institute of International Studies, said in an interview with China Daily. China's reform and opening-up drive has won support from the international community, and in the meantime, global peace and development have benefitted from China's growth, Ruan said. Ruan added that the 10 medal winners are only a representative sampling of millions of foreigners who have made contributions to the country's reform and opening-up. In Arizona, the A.C.L.U. represented a lawyer who had a state contract to work with incarcerated people, and who did not want his purchases to support companies linked to Israel. In September, a federal court blocked the enforcement of that states law, too. A parallel debate is happening at the federal level, where congressional lawmakers from both sides of the aisle are considering legislation that would keep American companies from participating in boycotts primarily against Israel that are being carried out by international organizations. In the meantime, the state-level battles continue. This month, another lawsuit was filed in Arkansas, where the A.C.L.U. is representing The Arkansas Times, a newspaper that says the states anti-B.D.S. law is unconstitutional. And on Tuesday, the A.C.L.U. filed a lawsuit in Texas (separate from Ms. Amawis) on behalf of four people who were affected by the law there. I hope the courts are going to continue standing up for Americans First Amendment rights, but I also hope legislators will start standing up for those rights as well, Mr. Hauss said. It takes a lot of resources to bring these lawsuits in every state, and I think the principles are pretty clearly established at this point. Joel Schwitzer, the regional director of the American Jewish Committee in Dallas, which supported the bills passage in Texas last year, said the law was appropriate because the B.D.S. movement threatens the very existence of Israel, and because the law does not violate the United States Constitution. You absolutely have a First Amendment right to free speech, but there is no absolute right to do business with the State of Texas, he said. If a company chooses to boycott Israel, then the State of Texas chooses not to do business with you. But he added that the law was misapplied in the case of Ms. Amawi because she is an individual who can avoid Israeli products without affecting her work. If her choice is to boycott Israel, thats her right and it doesnt have any bearing on her ability to provide speech pathology, he said. HONG KONG No Santa. No trees. No stockings. No lights. The authorities in Langfang, a city in Chinas Hebei Province, have issued a ban on all Christmas displays on streets and in stores, according to a notice from city officials. Christmas may be a Western holiday, but it has been co-opted in China as a marketing opportunity, with glittering trees towering in malls to draw in shoppers. In Langfang, however, city authorities have vowed to clear out all Christmas lights and decorations from its streets, stores and schools. The notice ordered employees to do a sweep of shopping malls and streets on Dec. 23, 24 and 25 to make sure there are no Christmas decorations. The three days are not public holidays in China, and the order comes amid an intensifying crackdown on foreign-influenced religious activity. SEOUL, South Korea The United States plans to review its ban on American travel to North Korea to help facilitate humanitarian aid shipments to the isolated country, Washingtons top envoy to the North said on Wednesday. The remarks from Stephen Biegun, the State Departments special representative for North Korea, indicated that Washington was easing some of its maximum pressure on North Korea to break a prolonged stalemate in talks on denuclearizing the North. North Korea has insisted that its negotiations with the United States will make no headway unless Washington first eases sanctions. It remained unclear whether the lifting of the travel ban and humanitarian aid deliveries will be enough for the North to make a major concession toward denuclearization. Ill be sitting down with American aid groups early in the new year to discuss how we can better ensure the delivery of appropriate assistance, Mr. Biegun told reporters at Incheon International Airport outside Seoul, according to Reuters. Mr. Biegun made the remarks after he arrived for four days of meetings with South Korean officials. ISLAMABAD, Pakistan When President Trump started the new year by suspending billions of dollars of security aid to Pakistan, one theory was that it would scare the Pakistani military into cooperating better with its American allies. The reality was that Pakistan already had a replacement sponsor lined up. Just two weeks later, the Pakistani Air Force and Chinese officials were putting the final touches on a secret proposal to expand Pakistans building of Chinese military jets, weaponry and other hardware. The confidential plan, reviewed by The New York Times, would also deepen the cooperation between China and Pakistan in space, a frontier the Pentagon recently said Beijing was trying to militarize after decades of playing catch-up. All those military projects were designated as part of Chinas Belt and Road Initiative, a $1 trillion chain of infrastructure development programs stretching across some 70 countries, built and financed by Beijing. Chinese officials have repeatedly said the Belt and Road is purely an economic project with peaceful intent. But with its plan for Pakistan, China is for the first time explicitly tying a Belt and Road proposal to its military ambitions and confirming the concerns of a host of nations who suspect the infrastructure initiative is really about helping China project armed might. LONDON As he prepares to become Switzerlands economics minister, Guy Parmelin is facing widespread criticism of his skills in speaking English. The Federal Council, the Swiss executive body, announced last week that Mr. Parmelin would be the next leader of the Department of Economic Affairs, Education and Research, a job that involves negotiating accords with other countries and with bodies like the European Union. The news prompted a wave of commentary from news outlets and on social media, much of it mocking a reflection of how thoroughly English has become the language of international diplomacy and business. Among world leaders, a command of English is often taken for granted, even when translators are present. Critics recalled what Mr. Parmelin, a former grower of wine grapes, told reporters before he joined the Federal Council in 2015. I can English understand but he said in English, before switching to his native tongue to add, I prefer responding in French to be more precise. Officials in Europe, who are eager to prevent more chaos in what many consider the soft southern underbelly of the European Union, characterized the deal as Italys recommitment to the bloc and to the euro. The Italians tried, with some difficulty, to claim they had gotten what they wanted. In an address to the Italian Parliament, which will have to approve the budget by the end of the year to avoid another round of negotiations with Brussels, Italys prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, said that the determined negotiations had paid off. He said the government never did anything to betray the trust of its voters. Instead, speaking over heckles from opposition senators, Mr. Conte, who once said there was no Plan B to the original budget proposal, said that the technicians in Brussels had shown how the government actually needed less money than initially foreseen. Contrary to the official statement in Brussels, he said, plans for a universal income and lowering the retirement age would not be delayed, a claim helped by the fact that no official start date for the programs had ever been offered. We never backed down on content, he insisted, adding, that the government never retreated. It sure seemed like they had. Matteo Salvini, Italys powerful deputy prime minister and leader of the League party, had earlier said that he would not budge from the 2.4 percent spending figure, not even if baby Jesus arrives. He insisted that he would not allow even one comma of the budget to be changed. Italians come first, he said at another point. Italy no longer wants to be a servant to silly rules. On Wednesday, he sounded like he suddenly took those rules more seriously. To have avoided the infringement procedure is the victory of common sense for the good of Italian citizens, he said. LONDON Amateur lip readers pored over the video clip almost as soon as the British Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, shook his head and muttered a few words in disgust. Had he really called Prime Minister Theresa May a stupid woman in the House of Commons? Yes, they agreed, it appeared he had. The clip quickly bounced around Twitter and onto elected leaders phones in Parliament, where members were once again debating Mrs. Mays draft deal for leaving the European Union. Suddenly, Mrs. Mays Conservative Party, which for months has been torn apart by disagreements over the prime ministers Brexit plan, was united behind a common cause: forcing Mr. Corbyn to say he was sorry. ROME The construction of a new bridge to replace the viaduct that collapsed in Genoa last summer, killing 43 people, will be overseen by a native son of the city. The authorities announced on Tuesday that they had chosen a design by the architect Renzo Piano for the bridge, which connects the western and eastern sections of the city and provides a critical link in the route to southern France. Mr. Piano, who said he was deeply affected by the collapse of the Morandi Bridge, began working on a design for its replacement shortly after it fell in August. He said that he was donating his services as an act of civic duty and that he would also supervise the project. Resembling the shape of a ships bow, the 202-million-euro ($230-million) bridge will be a joint venture by three Italian companies. The state railway subsidiary, Italferr, will handle the engineering, with construction done by a major Italian company, Salini Impregilo, and the infrastructure subsidiary of the state-run shipbuilder Fincantieri. ROME Pope Francis has accepted the resignation of an auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles, the Vatican announced on Wednesday, after an investigation into an accusation of misconduct with a minor. On its own, the announcement that the pope had accepted Bishop Alexander Salazars resignation, made in the daily Bulletin issued by the Holy See Press Office, would have been unlikely to attract much attention. But a surprising follow-up open letter by Archbishop Jose H. Gomez of Los Angeles explained what had pushed Bishop Salazar to step down. Archbishop Gomez, who took over in Los Angeles in 2011, acknowledged that the archdiocese had known of the accusation against Bishop Salazar since 2005, a year after he had been ordained a bishop, but had allowed him to keep working. After learning of the reported misconduct, the archdiocese referred the allegation to the Vaticans Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which is tasked with looking into claims of sexual misconduct. The body conducted an investigation and imposed certain precautionary measures on the ministry of Bishop Salazar, the archbishop wrote in his letter, but he did not specify what these measures had been. JERUSALEM Hezbollah has committed an act of war by digging tunnels under Israels border with Lebanon, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Wednesday, calling on the United Nations to halt what he called a grave violation of Israels sovereignty. Speaking at a news conference ahead of a United Nations Security Council discussion about the tunnels, Mr. Netanyahu demanded that Lebanon take action and called on the council to order the United Nations peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon to deepen its operations. The Security Council discussion pushed by Israel and the United States and the news conference were both part of a campaign by Mr. Netanyahus government to attract international attention to the issue. For more than two weeks, an Israeli military operation has exposed and blocked tunnels dug by Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militia that is backed by Iran. Israel has portrayed this as part of a broader regional effort to curb Irans influence. This is not merely an act of aggression. Its an act of war, Mr. Netanyahu told reporters at Israels Parliament. It is part of a war plan, I would say, he added, referring to Hezbollahs suggestions that its fighters would try to infiltrate Israel in a future conflict. After more than 17 years of bloodshed in Afghanistan, there is a glimmer of hope on the horizon that peace may finally return to the war-torn country. This optimism is borne out of the recent direct talks to end the conflict between representatives of the Taliban and the U.S. The latest round of talks was held in the United Arab Emirates and aside from the Taliban and the U.S., officials from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE were also present. Afghan representatives were not part of the talks as the Taliban wanted to talk directly with the Americans first about the future of the country without involving the Kabul government. U.S. special representative for Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, who is leading the drive to restore peace, has already held at least two rounds of talks with the Taliban in Qatar. The talks are being facilitated by Pakistan, which has been brought on board by the U.S. administration to help its peace and reconciliation process in Afghanistan. Donald Trump wrote a formal letter to Prime Minister Imran Khan earlier this month asking for help to arrange talks. This is the second time that Americans have been brought into direct contact with the Taliban in an open setting. The stakeholders, including the Taliban, acknowledged that the talks were taking place. The first round of talks was in July 2015 when Pakistan sponsored a similar huddle at the hill resort of Murree near its capital Islamabad. The Murree initiative fell apart in no time due to the sudden surfacing of the death of the Taliban's founding chief, Mullah Omar. The rebel leader had died well before the start of dialogue, but the news was relayed in a way that quickly derailed the process. Officials in Islamabad later pointed fingers at rogue elements within the Kabul intelligence community for revealing that Omar was dead, which wrecked the entire initiative. Omar's successor Mullah Akhtar Mansoor was also killed in 2016 in a U.S. drone attack in Pakistan's south-western Balochistan region. Secretary of State John Kerry said he was a "threat to peace." His death complicated the search for peace, delaying the process for reconciliation and also further strained Pak-U.S. relations. Fighting and bombings went on, ordinary Afghans paid a high price for it and the Afghan government lost control of more areas to the Taliban. This does not mean that the Taliban are anywhere close to toppling the government in Kabul. Nevertheless, the Taliban still holds some sway in the country and I think this should be the strongest stimulus for the Taliban to sit with the Americans and try to work out a deal. They have a better chance of success when they are still strong and still a force to be reckoned with. The latest round of talks is also a product of a strong desire on the part of the U.S. to end the conflict sooner and on a good note. Donald Trump is currently not in a position to go away with the scars of defeat. The administration has come to the somber realization that a military victory in Afghanistan is a wild goose chase, and as a first step towards restoring peace, the U.S. has asked Pakistan to lend a helping hand. Pakistan, due to its historical involvement in the Afghan imbroglio, holds some degree of sway over the Taliban. Its influence, however, has dwindled over time as the Taliban has found safe areas within Afghanistan to operate from and no longer needs to establish its cells in safe havens in Pakistan. Another reason for the decrease in Pakistan's influence over the Taliban rebels is that the latter have established good contacts with Russia, Iran and other countries. This can be seen by the participation of the Taliban in Russian-sponsored talks in November and the participation of the UAE and Saudi officials in the latest parleys. Hence, it's clear that the Taliban are not dependent on any single nation. To bring peace amidst the chaos is an art which depends on multiple factors. Afghanistan is a classic example of complexity where different players and stakeholders are trying to push forward agendas with their own vested interests. The Afghans, at times, become part of these agendas and on other occasions are forced to look at "The Great Game" from afar. It is important that any peace process should be led and owned by the people and the government of Afghanistan. Otherwise long-term stability will remain a futile search. Sajjad Malik is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit: http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/SajjadMalik.htm Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors, not necessarily those of China.org.cn. Reprisal killings of journalists because of their work nearly doubled in 2018, bringing the total number of journalists killed on the job to the highest point in three years, a press advocacy group reported on Wednesday. The October killing of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi by a Saudi hit squad in Turkey may have been the most prominent case, but journalists were targeted for death all over the world this year including in the United States, where a gunman killed five people in a Maryland newsroom. At least 53 journalists were killed worldwide, according to a database compiled by the Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based organization that keeps detailed records of deaths and imprisonments in the news profession. Of those journalists, the database showed that at least 34 had been killed because of their work, compared with 18 in 2017. The database covered killings between Jan. 1 and Dec. 14. DOHA, Qatar For signs of how Qatar has adapted to the blockade imposed by its neighbors, you need to go no further than the Al Meera grocery in a strip mall across from a mosque, in a residential part of the capital. Shelves where local products were once rare now hold Qatari milk, Qatari tissues and Qatari cucumbers. This is Qatari. This is Qatari. This is all Qatari, a supervisor said, pointing out Qatari-made laundry detergent, dish soap and disinfectant. Producing such products at home may be business as usual for many countries, but for Qatar it was one of many defensive shifts made to survive a political and economic assault by its neighbors. Eighteen months after Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt imposed a land and sea blockade aimed at bringing Qatar to heel, this tiny, gas-rich strip of sand jutting into the Persian Gulf is still refusing to capitulate. In the meantime, it has adapted, retooling its economy and foreign relations in ways that could reshape the strategic layout of the Persian Gulf. Flash Chinese President Xi Jinping received the credentials presented by new ambassadors of seven countries to China at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing Tuesday. The ambassadors are Rafael Dezcallar from Spain, Awale Ali Kullane from Somalia, Patty Chen from Surinam, Archil Kalandia from Georgia, Paulo Estivallet from Brazil, Eric Razafimandimby from Madagascar and Mohammad Keshavarz Zadeh from Iran. Xi welcomed the ambassadors to China and asked them to convey his sincere greetings and good wishes to the leaders and people of their countries. While stressing this year marks the 40th anniversary of China's reform and opening-up, Xi said China will stay committed to advancing reform and opening-up. China will strengthen cooperation with all countries, jointly undertake the Belt and Road Initiative, elevate bilateral ties to a new height and make greater contributions to world peace and common development of humanity, Xi said. He said the Chinese government will provide convenience and support to the new ambassadors' work and expressed his hope that they will help facilitate bilateral relations between China and their respective countries, and the friendship between the Chinese people and the people of their countries. The ambassadors conveyed cordial greetings from the leaders of their respective countries to Xi, and spoke highly of Xi's remarks made during a grand gathering Tuesday morning celebrating the 40th anniversary of China's reform and opening-up. The ambassadors said their countries will continue to support and participate in China's reform and opening-up process, which has provided the world with huge opportunities, and jointly promote international cooperation under the Belt and Road Initiative. The ambassadors pledged to commit themselves to enhancing exchanges and cooperation between their countries and China during their tenure in China. Billy Warden The sweet sound of a successful music festival is irresistible to cities and towns across the country. And with good reason. A successful music festival can galvanize a community as its signature event, bringing visitors and amplifying a citys reputation as a worthwhile destination. And it can play matchmaker to lifelong attachments between acts and fans. To that end, Raleigh, NC has turned up the volume on a template that might guide others. In the great tradition of mix tapes, call it the Infinite Mix model. The massive success of Raleighs festival suggests that key considerations should be not only the music, but the levels of involvement and intimacy a festival offers its audience. Every fall for the past six years, Raleighs World of Bluegrass hosts a series of events tied to the annual gathering of the International Bluegrass Music Association. While bluegrass is enduring and entertaining, its not the worlds best-selling music genre. And Raleigh, a prosperous mid-sized city in the midst of a growth boom, has, in some quarters, leaned into branding itself as a tech hub, which may cue the sounds of club bangers more than banjos. Yet, the bluegrass festival has flourished in North Carolinas capital since it moved in 2013 from Nashville, where it maintained a lower profile. This year, the event drew a record 223,000 people and scored a direct economic impact of $12.7 million. Raleighs News & Observer summed it up by noting the festival has become a signature event for the area and the largest event of the year. So, whats the secret? How did the bluegrass festival jump out of the gates to make such an impact? And what does that mean for other cities coveting their own version of a SXSW? In his 2016 book, Music/City, Jonathan R. Wynn proposed three categories for urban music festivals. The Citadel model concentrates its events in one major venue; a coliseum, for example. The Core model mixes large and small venues; from arenas to clubs hosting both free and paid events. And the Confetti model spreads happenings throughout a city, including spaces like galleries and parks. A Citadel festival can feel impersonal but produce a massive media bang. A dispersed Confetti model is potentially more personally engaging, but, as Wynn noted, might lack the large media impression of a more focused event. Raleighs bluegrass festival is a Confettied happening that also manages to make a huge media and community impression. And thats where the Infinite Mix comes into play. The festival is an extravaganza of experiences, the sum total of which is positively explosive. Contained within a six-block footprint, the festival includes a vast array of opportunities to engage: Out of town and local bluegrass fans can buy tickets to star-studded events such as IBMAs annual awards show. Fans can attend seminars and take in industry exhibits at the convention center. A series of showcase gigs plays out over several days at downtown clubs. A barbecue cook-off invites festival-goers to sample the talents of the regions best pit masters. And a bustling two-day street festival known as Wide Open Bluegrass on downtowns main street hosts stages programmed with free live performances and a parade of vendors, from craft beer to craft jewelry. This variety is stunning in its quantity. But just as important is the quality of engagement opportunities. The Infinite Mix isnt just about the wealth of events, but about the rich emotional connections that further fuel the festivals success. The World of Bluegrass, a one-of-a-kind urban bluegrass festival held annually in downtown Raleigh, NC. In a Forbes column on the new rules of the experience economy, Daniel Newman wrote: What (people) want, it turns out, is an experience something memorable, something they can connect with, something that makes them feel like less of a checkbook and more of a participant. And boy, does Raleighs World of Bluegrass offer a wide variety of ways to participate. At the awards ceremony, fans can relish in the pageantry of an industry gathering and the excitement of witnessing performers accepting career-making prizes. Later, at the street festival, they can casually mingle with many of those same musicians. The fans rave to the musicians about their songs and shows. And the musicians delighted by the community welcome rave to the fans about the vibrancy of their city. As Martin Coppo of the veteran bluegrass band Red Wine put it: Great street atmosphere, wonderful crowd, excellent organization, nice venues, lots of great jamming and a warm welcoming feel from the whole city and the community. And there it is! Whether you listen to bluegrass or Top Forty, everyone loves to hear they live in a special place. And very near everyone wants to be part of making it even better. Thats participation! This phenomenon the engagement of both audience and performers in a virtuous circle of mutual reinforcement is best illustrated in the jaw-dropping scene at a hotel situated smack in the middle of the festival. Here, the halls fill with musicians, both famous and obscure, as well as fans. No red ropes or security guards separate them. Here, everyone rubs shoulders and trades quips. A local, amateur banjo player can jam with Grammy nominees. Its no wonder that festival-goers flood social media platforms with photos of the hotel shenanigans. And in a way, the expectations of social media which have come to define our age are a handy way to summarize the power of the Infinite Mix. On social, you can choose the platform you like best, the raw rat-a-tat-tat of Twitter, for example, or Instagrams smooth parade of images. You can choose to be completely passive, or you can participate in every conversation. Raleighs bluegrass festival offers a similar array of options. Whatever your preference for participation, it provides an entry point. And thats the hook. The optimal music festival doesnt just invite the community to buy a ticket. Rather, the event from the stars to the fans, from the bars to the hotels is a community, all wrapped in an Infinite Mix of participation possibilities. *** Billy Warden is a founder of GBW Strategies in Raleigh. Flash Russia will have to take additional measures to boost its security if the United States withdraws from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday. A U.S. withdrawal from the INF Treaty may ruin the entire arms control system, said the Russian president. "Such a step will have the most negative consequences, and will noticeably weaken regional and global security," Putin said speaking at an extended meeting of the Russian Defense Ministry board. "In fact, in the long term, the talk is about the degradation and even collapse of the entire arms control architecture and the non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction," he added. For a long time, the United States has been using unsubstantiated accusations that Russia had violated its obligations under the treaty as a pretext to withdraw from it unilaterally, thus violating the treaty itself, Putin said. He agreed that the INF Treaty did not involve other countries which have medium and shorter range missiles. "But what prevents us from starting negotiations on their accession to the current agreement, or starting to discuss the parameters of a new treaty?" Putin said. The treaty, in modern conditions, plays the role of a stabilizing factor, which allows maintaining a certain level of predictability and restraint in the military sphere, he said. He recalled that the INF Treaty signed in 1987 involved the elimination of medium-range and shorter-range (500-5,000 km) ground-based missiles. At the time, the USSR had no other missiles, while the United States had sea-based and air-launched missiles. Russia, since the signing of the treaty, has developed sea-based and air-launched missiles, which was the cause for Washington's concern, Putin said. According to Putin, it will not be difficult for Russia, if necessary, to create appropriate land-based systems as a response to the U.S. withdrawal from the INF. However, Russia is always open to any proposals and initiatives that lead to the strengthening of universal security including the prevention of a new arms race in the interests not only of Russia, but of the United States and the whole world, Putin said. Omnicom is teaming up with Virgin Media in a partnership with #valuable, a campaign working to ensure businesses recognize the value of the one billion people around the world living with a disability. Omnicom will work to spread the message of disability inclusion in business, as well as helping to start up a global discussion centered around the idea of a world in which everyone is valued equally. Virgin Media will encourage UK business leaders to join its push to create workplaces where disabled people can thrive. Virgin has also joined forces with Scope, an organization with the goal of permanently integrating a million people living with disabilities into the job market by the end of 2020. Omnicom is committed to elevating this issue to a priority place on its agenda and remaining an ally of this important movement, said Janet Riccio, EVP of Omnicom Group and dean of Omnicom University, the companys management development program. #valuable is also working with the World Economic Forum, which announced that disability inclusion would be part of the agenda at its annual meeting from Jan. 22-25 in Davos, Switzerland. Caroline Casey The organization notes that one in seven people15 percent of the worlds populationlive with some form of disability. It also says that the current employment rate for those people is only half that of the general population. In addition, the economic power of those with disabilities (a disposable annual income of $8 trillion) makes them a market that the business community cannot afford to ignore. "Disability inclusion is an issue that has been pushed to the sidelines of business for far too long, said #valuable founder Caroline Casey. Momentum is now building, and we have reached a tipping point. Ken Toombs PA Consulting is bringing on Ken Toombs to lead its Americas team. Toombs comes to PA from Infosys, where he led its global consulting team of around 3,000 consultants in 20 countries. Prior to Infosys, Ken was with Capgemini, where he was CEO of its US consulting business. Starting in early January, Toombs will oversee PAs team of experts in Boston, New York, Princeton, Denver, Los Angeles and Mexico City. As well as leading PA in the Americas, he will have global responsibility for PAs healthcare, life sciences, and energy and utilities sectors, and will join the companys board. Heather Lombardini Lansing, MI-based GOP fundraising, issue management and political consulting firm Sterling Corporation has named Heather Lombardini president and partner. Lombardini, previously on the leadership team at Sterling and head of its fundraising unit, becomes Sterlings first female president and shareholder. Before coming to Sterling she led fundraising for the Michigan House Republicans and other winning candidates and causes over the past two decades. Lombardini replaces Mark Pischea, who will be Of Counsel and continue to advise Sterlings political and public affairs clients while expanding his leadership in the national conservative energy movement. Sean Williams Nashville-based DVL Seigenthaler/FINN Partners has promoted Sean Williams to associate creative director and brought Rebecca Warren back to the firm as vice president of account services, focusing primarily on strategic counsel to the firms healthcare clients. Williams has been with DVL Siegenthaler since 2009, and has created award-winning marketing and advertising for Jack Daniels, Nashville Electric Service, and AmSurg. He previously served as the deputy press secretary to the governor of Tennessee and assistant to the press secretary for the governor of Colorado. In his new post, he conceptualizes and implements marketing and advertising concepts. A senior account executive with DVL Seigenthaler from 2013-14, Warren was most recently director of communications at Battle Ground Academy in Franklin, Tennessee. She has also served as senior director, worldwide at Burson-Marsteller in New York, managing Bursons presence at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in Cannes, France. Gemma Bakx nvestor relations research and advisory firm Corbin Advisors has brought on Gemma Bakx as vice president and director of IR, Doug Cooper as vice president and Evan Honeyman as director of business development. Bakx was previously investor relations consultant at KPMG Makinson Cowell. She has been instrumental in executing all facets of investor perception studies and brings deep institutional investor knowledge and business consulting expertise. Cooper previously worked in equity research for Deutsche Bank, and has also held positions at Sidoti & Company and UBS. His areas of expertise include investor communication strategies, investment thesis development and investor marketing. Honeyman comes to Corbin Advisors from TicketNetwork, where he most recent served as director of business development. Mentally Ill Grandmother Dies In Jail After Being Held There For Five Months On $300 Bond Elijah C. Watson Elijah Watson serves as Okayplayer's News & Culture Editor. When Janice Dotson-Stephens only needed $30 to be released on bond. A 61-year-old died in jail after being held there for six months following her arrest on a misdemeanor charge. READ: NYC Police Officer Arrested For Fatally Shooting Mentally Ill Black Woman Janice Dotson-Stephens was arrested July 17 for trespassing on private property in Bexar County, Texas. According to court records via KSAT, Dotson-Stephens refused to be interviewed about her case the day after she was arrested, as well as several times after in late July. She also refused to make a court appearance in August and was ordered to go through a psychological evaluation that same month. Dotson-Stephens ended up dying in the custody of the Bexar County Sheriffs Office Friday. Officials at the office said she appeared to have died from natural causes. She was being held there on a $300 bond. Since most bail bond companies require a 10 percent payment to bail someone out, Dotson-Stephens could have been released for $30. Family members told KSAT that they werent aware Dotson-Stephens was in jail and thought she was being treated at a state hospital. We just felt that she shouldnt have died as a criminal in the jailhouse, Leticia Dotson, Dotson-Stephens daughter-in-law, said. She wasnt a criminal. She had mental health illness. Dotson said that her mother-in-law had been in previous encounters with the police but she was evaluated and transferred to the state hospital. She also said that none of Dotson-Stephens family members were contacted. If it changed and we had to bail her out before the process of getting her to the state hospital, we would have done that, Dotson said. She had people who loved her and family who would have easily paid the $30 to get her out of jail if thats what we had to do to take the next step. Officials for Bexar County said that they couldnt confirm if Dotson-Stephens was diagnosed with a mental health condition and that a next of kin was not listed for her. In a separate report with Refinery 29, Dotson-Stephens father said he called the Bexar County Jail looking for her in August, but was told she was not in their custody. The Sheriffs Office Criminal Investigations Division and the Bexar County Medical Examiner are investigating the death alongside the Converse Police Department, which is involved in the investigation because of the Sandra Bland Act. The act states that the Department of Public Safety has to appoint a law enforcement agency other than the one operating the jail where an incarcerated persons death occurred to investigate the death. Source: KSAT Flash Japan on Tuesday approved new defense guidelines, part of which includes the controversial upgrading and deployment of aircraft carriers in a move unprecedented since the end of World War II. Japan's new National Defense Program Guidelines, which also spans issues of cyberspace, outer space and electronic warfare as part of its plans to create what it describes as a "multidimensional joint defense force," has already drawn criticism from defense experts, the public and constitutional scholars. They have maintained that the bolstering of a multidimensional and integrated defense force is a major step away from Japan's "defense only" posture, which is enshrined in its pacifist constitution. At the heart of recent controversies and now outlined in the defense guidelines, covering a period from fiscal 2019, is the planned upgrading of the Izumo-class helicopter carrier to enable it to transport and launch F-35Bs multirole stealth fighters. "We will refit Maritime Self-Defense Force multipurpose helicopter destroyers so fighter jets capable of short takeoffs and vertical landings can be deployed when necessary," the government said in its mid-term defense program, adopted at a Cabinet meeting Tuesday and endorsed by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. The defense guidelines, to appease a concerned public, maintain that the retrofitting of the Izumo helicopter carrier to be able to carry and launch F-35Bs, among other aircraft, is not so Japan can posses an attack aircraft carry and is not in breach of the constitution. Defense analysts, however, have pointed out that under the current interpretation of the Constitution, Article 9 of which reads "land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained," the upgrading of Izumo into a contemporary "de facto" aircraft carrier, whether it permanently carries next-generation fighter jets or not, is in contradiction of Japan's pacifist charter. Along with Cabinet ministers approving the purchase of 42 F-35Bs and 63 F-35As, the Pentagon's most sophisticated 5th generation multirole stealth fighters and most expensive weapons system, 18 of which will be allocated to the Izumo. Opposition parties have also taken aim at the guidelines for being in excess of Japan's defensive needs. The Medium Term Defense Program comes with a price tag of 27.47 trillion yen (US$243 billion) and compounds concerns from the international community about Japan's constantly rising defense costs since Abe took office in 2012. Japan's defense ministry, as the country is mired in the highest public debt in the industrialized world at more than twice the size of its economy, has requested another record-high budget of some 5.3 trillion yen (US$47 billion) for the next fiscal year. This includes around 235 billion yen (US$2 billion) to cover costs related to the installation of two Aegis Ashore missile systems, another military acquisition that has caused public uproar and major concerns from Japan's neighbors. Flash A federal judge agreed Tuesday to postpone the sentencing of Michael Flynn, U.S. President Donald Trump's former national security adviser, until he has finished assisting the ongoing Russia probe. The turn of event came as U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan gave harsh words to Flynn at the hearing. "Arguably, you sold your country out. The court's going to consider all that," he said. Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents about his conversations with former Russian ambassador in Washington during the presidential transition. "I'm going to be frank with you -- this crime is very serious," Sullivan told Flynn. The postponement, asked by Flynn's legal team, will give him opportunity to further cooperate with the ongoing investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election. Flynn, also a senior adviser to Trump's presidential campaign team and a retired lieutenant general, admitted in December 2017 that he lied to the FBI about his discussion, including of U.S. sanctions against Russia, with then Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. "This is a very serious offense - a high-ranking senior official of the government, making false statements to the Federal Bureau of Investigation while on the physical premises of the White House," Sullivan said. Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who has been leading the Russia investigation, suggested that Flynn serve no prison time given his "substantial" cooperation during the legal process "The court will also consider (Flynn's) substantial assistance in several investigations," Sullivan said. The judge didn't give a schedule for the sentencing but asked both the Mueller team and Flynn's attorney to provide update on his case by March 13. On Monday, a business associate of Flynn from Turkey and a Turkish businessman were indicted in a separate case of illegally lobbying for the Turkish government in the United States, violating the U.S. Foreign Agent Registration Act. The two Turks were accused of illegally helping Ankara urge the deportation of cleric Fethullah Gulen, who is now living in exile in the United States, and who the Turkish government said orchestrated the failed coup attempt in 2016 to overthrow President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. "All along you were an unregistered agent of a foreign country while serving as the national security adviser," Sullivan told Flynn. "I cannot assure that if you proceed today you will not receive a sentence of incarceration," he added. Flynn's lawyers had asked leniency for their client, arguing that the FBI had not warned Flynn that it was a crime to lie to the FBI, and that the interview was conducted without White House counsel present. Prosecutors dismissed the above claims and said Flynn -- as high-ranking White House official and the former director of Defense Intelligence Agency, and as someone who has served 33 years of military duty -- was well aware that it is a crime to lie to federal authorities. Lying to the FBI, the criminal nature of which Flynn said at the hearing he was aware of, carries a statutory maximum sentence of five years. However, Flynn's plea agreement stated that he could face between zero to six months in prison. Federal prosecutors have recommended a lenient sentence for Flynn, including the possibility of probation, on the ground that he has provided "substantial help" to multiple criminal inquiries. Flynn is the highest-ranking Trump aide so far to face sentencing in the Russia probe. Flash White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said on Tuesday that U.S. President Donald Trump would attend the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland in January. Trump would attend the WEF as he did this year, said Sanders at a press briefing, adding that a delegation led by U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin would travel with the president to Davos. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, and Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen are among the members of the delegation. The WEF Annual Meeting will take place in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland from January 22 to 25 in 2019, according to the official website of the WEF. Trump surprised the global business elite by preaching "America First" doctrine in his speech in the WEF Annual Meeting January this year, arguing that the United States would support free trade under the precondition of "fair and reciprocal." Right to be forgotten: HC asks Centre, Google to reply to plea for removing verdict from search engine Delhi HC asks Centre, Google to respond to mans plea to remove articles on his conviction in criminal case Who is Saurabh Kirpal? Indias likely to get its first openly gay judge of Delhi high court Delhi HC dismisses plea to stop publication, sale of Salman Khurshid's book : 'Ask people not to buy it' 1984 anti-Sikh riots case: Delhi court adjourns petition seeking bail of Yashpal Singh to Jan 29 India oi-Madhuri Adnal New Delhi, Dec 19: A Delhi High Court adjourned for January 29 the petition seeking bail and suspension of death sentence of Yashpal Singh in 1984 anti-Sikh riots. Earlier, the Delhi Patiala House Court had pronounced death sentence for convict Yashpal Singh and announced life imprisonment for another convict Naresh Sherawat in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots case. The two were convicted on November 15 for killing two young Sikhs in Delhi's Mahipalpur area after the assassination of erstwhile Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. This is the first sentencing in the case after the Special Investigation Team (SIT) took over the probe in 2015. Sajjan Kumar resigns from primary membership of Congress; victims not to appeal in the SC The two convicts, Naresh Sherawat, and Yashpal Singh were held guilty of killing Hardev Singh and Avtar Singh. The complaint against the two was filed by Hardev Singh's brother, Santokh Singh. Even though the Delhi Police had closed the case in 1994 for lack of evidence. However, it was further investigated by a Special Investigation Team (SIT). Several police officers and others, including the paramilitary forces and the DCP reserved forces were also present outside the Patiala House Court to avoid any kind of untoward incident. Only two people from each side, the convict and victim, were allowed to go inside the courtroom. As per official records, over 28,00 Sikhs were killed across India while 2,100 of them in Delhi after Indira Gandhi was assassinated by a Sikh bodyguard. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, December 19, 2018, 13:32 [IST] Till when does a father have to take responsibility of his child: SC clarifies 2018: The year of the judiciary, from landmark verdicts to an unprecedented presser India oi-Vicky Nanjappa New Delhi, Dec 19: For a legal correspondent, 2018 was probably one of the busiest years. Not a day passed without the Supreme Court being in the news. Be it the landmark verdicts or that controversial press conference addressed by the four senior-most judges, the Supreme Court was in the news every single day of the year. Let us go down memory lane and find out all that took place in the Supreme Court of India in the year 2018. 10 major judgments by Supreme Court in 2018 The judge's presser: An unprecedented press conference by the four senior-most judges of the Supreme Court hit the headlines. Breaking convention, the four judges spoke about the manner in which matters being allocated before the various Benches. It did stir up a huge debate and the functioning of the Supreme Court came under question. The verdicts: Justice Dipak Misra, who retired as the Chief Justice of India a few months back had reserved several orders of national importance. During his last week in office, he delivered several crucial judgments that included the validity of Aadhaar, decriminalisation of Section 377 among others. We can take a look at the major verdicts that the Supreme Court delivered this year. Decriminalisation of section 377 In September the Supreme Court decriminalised Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code which made gay sex a punishable crime. Validity of Aadhaar: This was a mixed bag judgment by the SC. While on one hand, it upheld the validity of Aadhaar, on the other it made it clear that it would not be mandatory for all services. It went on to state that private companies such as telecom firms cannot insist on Aadhaar. Ayodhya: The question was whether a Mosque was essential to Islam. Before the court was a challenge to an earlier verdict on the same question. The court said in a 2:1 verdict that it would not interfere with its earlier order. Verdict on adultery: In this verdict, the court underlined that Section 497 of the Indian Penal Code treats women as properties of their husbands. The court went on to strike down adultery as a criminal offence. The Sabarimala verdict: In one of the most controversial verdicts, the SC lifted the bar on women of all ages while allowing them to enter the Sabarimala temple. However the lone women judge on the Bench, Justice Indu Malhotra said that the practise of not allowing women in the age group of 10 and 50 should continue. However, her views were overruled by the majority verdict. Live streaming: A long-standing demand to live stream court proceedings was finally allowed by the Supreme Court. The court, however, decided to put this to test, by saying that it would start with the live streaming of constitutional matters in the Supreme Court. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, December 19, 2018, 9:37 [IST] Rape victim dies in Delhi hospital after being 'set afire' by kin of accused in UP's Bulandshahr 3 arrested for Bulandshahr cow slaughter that led to UP cop's killing India oi-PTI Noida, Dec 19: Five persons were arrested on Tuesday for their alleged roles in the mob violence and the cow slaughtering cases in Bulandshahr. Two people including a police officer were shot dead during the violence in the Uttar Pradesh city. Three of them have been arrested by the Bulandshahr police for their alleged involvement in the cow slaughtering case, while two accused were arrested by the Uttar Pradesh Special Task Force (STF) for the subsequent violence on December 3, the officials said. "Three men - Nadeem, Raees and Kaala - have been arrested for their role in the cow slaughtering incident. A vehicle and a licensed weapon have also been recovered from their possession," Bulandshahr Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Prabhakar Chaudhary said. He said the trio was not named in the initial complaint, which had seven accused including two minors of Nayabans village, but during probe their names emerged in the case. Bulandshahr violence: 'It's a political conspiracy, says UP CM Yogi Adityanath "The police are investigating the matter and these three men have emerged for their actual role in the cow slaughter. Further probe is on," Mr Chaudhary told PTI. Sachin Singh alias Cobra, 21, and Johnny Chaudhary, 19, were arrested on Tuesday evening by the Noida unit of STF, which had also joined the probe in the adjoining district, for their role in the violence on December 3, a senior official said. "Working on a tip-off, the two men, whose identity had been ascertained post the violence, were picked up at 4.15 pm from a bus stand in Gathiya Badshahpur in Siyana tehsil of Bulandshahr," Deputy Superintendent of Police, STF, Raj Kumar Mishra said. With the arrest of these two men, the number of those held for the violence has gone up to 19 so far, Mr Chaudhary said. An FIR against 27 named people and 50-60 unidentified people was registered at the Siyana police station for the violence that was witnessed at Chingrawathi police post after cattle carcasses were found strewn outside nearby Mahaw village of the district. Police inspector Subodh Kumar Singh and civilian Sumit Kumar, 20, were killed of bullet shots during the mob violence on December 3. One of the main suspects among the 27 named in the FIR, local Bajrang Dal leader Yogesh Raj, is still missing, while an Army jawan, Jitendra Malik, has been arrested and remanded in custody. PTI For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, December 19, 2018, 16:47 [IST] Can you spot the Tiger in this picture? Image from Dampa Tiger Reserve goes viral 95 tiger deaths recorded in 2018; 41 outside reserves India oi-Deepika S New Delhi, Dec 19: India lost 95 tigers this year, says official website of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA). Of this, 41 cases of tiger deaths outside tiger reserves have been reported. As per statistics on tigernet.nic.in, 14 of them occurred in Maharashtra, which accounted for over 34% of all deaths outside tiger reserves in the country. A total of 19 tiger deaths were recorded in Maharashtra in 2018, so deaths outside tiger reserves comprise more than 70% of all tiger deaths in the State. Reasons for the death of India's national animal have ranged from electrocution, poaching, poisoning, infighting, natural deaths, human-tiger conflict to rail/road accidents. Ninety-eight tiger bodies were recovered in 2017 while 17 were presumed dead on the basis of body parts seized. In 2016, the tiger mortality figure was 122, which was over 50% more than that in the previous year when the total tiger deaths were 80. Leopard deaths in India at five-year high, Uttarakhand tops the list To check the dwindling population of tigers, the Indian government launched Project Tiger in 1973. India now has 50 tiger reserves that cover 2.12% of the country's total geographical area. According to the tiger census of 2014, India was home to 2,226 tigers, or about 60% of the world's wild tiger population of about 3,890. Pressure on their habitat and poaching had seen their population decline to a low of 1,411 in 2006. Tiger conservation has been high on the Indian government's agenda. India and its neighbours Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh recently decided to conduct a joint census of their tiger population. Even though the tiger conservation efforts have been trying the level best to protect the endangered species but what the RTI has reported is surely going to make us stunned. Yes, RTI in response to the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau reveals that 384 tigers have been killed in the past 10 years in almost every 3 months. Flash The synergy between the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and Indonesia's Global Maritime Fulcrum strategy will boost the cooperation between the two countries and bring more benefits to both peoples, Chinese Ambassador to Indonesia Xiao Qian said in an interview with China.org.cn in Jakarta on Dec. 13. Xiao said the memorandum of understanding signed by China and Indonesia on the BRI and the Global Maritime Fulcrum strategy last October took their integration of the two development strategies to a new high. Guided by the principles of extensive consultation, joint development and shared benefits, as well as openness, transparency and inclusiveness, the two countries have achieved notable progress in broad-ranging cooperation, he said. According to the ambassador, the Jakarta-Bandung high-speed railway, a landmark in China-Indonesia cooperation under the BRI is undergoing comprehensive implementation, while joint building of a regional economic corridor represented a new milestone in achieving synergy between the two countries' development strategies. He said that China and Indonesia, both major developing countries with huge markets and development potential, face a great development opportunity. China has been Indonesia's biggest trading partner for seven years, and also among its largest investors. Last year, two-way trade reached US$63.3 billion, a growth of 18.3 percent year on year. In particular, Indonesia's exports to China increased by 33 percent, achieving greater trade balance. According to Xiao, 43 Indonesian companies attended the first China International Import Expo (CIIE) held in Shanghai last month, signing deals worth US$720 million, and some of the participants have already registered for the second CIIE next year. He said that China, currently possessing the largest middle-income population in the world, can offer enormous business opportunities for Indonesian companies as it opens wider to the outside world. In the coming 15 years, China is expected to import over US$30 trillion in goods and over US$10 trillion in services. Xiao also noted that, with the rapid development of information technology, Indonesia is well on its way to becoming a competitive and appealing destination for foreign investment in e-commerce, big data, artificial intelligence and other fields, offering greater space for the cooperation between the two countries. Speaking of the second Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation scheduled for next year, the ambassador said that China welcomes Indonesian representation to promote further growth of the bilateral relations. Actress abduction case: Kerala HC rejects Dileep's plea seeking CBI probe India oi-Chennabasaveshwar P Thiruvananthapuram, Dec 19: The Kerala High Court on Wednesday rejected actor Dileep's plea seeking CBI enquiry in Malayalam actress molestation case. The actor moved the Kerala High Court in June , seeking a CBI investigation into the case. In his petition, he alleged that the Special Investigation Team of Kerala Police had carried out a 'unfair and biased investigation' in the case. Dileep is eighth among the 12 accused in the case. He secured bail nearly three months after his arrest on July 10 last year. The Kerala High Court had granted him bail with stringent conditions. The key accused in the case, Pulsar Suni, has been in jail since his arrest early last year. Prohibitory orders extended in Sabarimala temple till 22nd Dec midnight The actress, who has worked in Tamil and Telugu films, was abducted and allegedly molested inside her car for two hours by Suni and his accomplices, who had forced their way into the vehicle on the night of February 17 last year and later escaped. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, December 19, 2018, 13:51 [IST] Members of farmers' body detained in Lucknow for trying to burn effigies of PM Modi, Shah Bulandshahr violence: 'It's a political conspiracy, says UP CM Yogi Adityanath India oi-Madhuri Adnal Lucknow, Dec 19: Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on Wednesday described Bulandshahr violence, in which two people including a Police Inspector were killed, as a political conspiracy. Speaking to reporters in Lucknow, Adityanath warned of strict against those trying to disturb peace in the state and said the law will deal with them accordingly. "The incident in Bulandshahr was a conspiracy. It was planned by same people who were behind the incident in which several people were killed by consuming spurious liquor. No one will be spared," CM Adityanath said. Cops ask people to take pledge against cow slaughter in Meerut He also believes that his government should be praised and thanked for whatever steps it has taken in the Bulandshahr case. The chief minister was responding to criticism of his administration's response to the killing - three persons were arrested on Tuesday, all for cow slaughter. Two more were arrested for the mob violence but the main accused in inspector Subodh Kumar Singh's killing is still missing. The inspector's wife and son have questioned why alleging that the killers are being spared because of political connections. One of the main suspects among the 27 named in the FIR, local Bajrang Dal leader Yogesh Raj, is still absconding, while an Army jawan, Jitendra Malik, has been arrested and remanded in custody. The police arrested five persons on Tuesday for their alleged roles in the mob violence. While three of them were arrested by the Bulandshahr police for their involvement in the cow slaughtering case, two accused were nabbed by the Uttar Pradesh Special Task Force (STF) for the subsequent violence on December 3. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, December 19, 2018, 15:22 [IST] Bulandshahr violence victim's family to meet Yogi Adityanath today India oi-Chennabasaveshwar P Lucknow, Dec 19: Father of Sumit (a civilian who died during violence in Bulandshahr and is an accused in the case) will meet Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on Wednesday. "Chief Minister has called us to meet him at the Vidhan Sabha. We're going there. We will talk about it there (demand for martyr status for Sumit), " Sumit's father Amarjit was quoted as saying by news agency ANI. Twenty-year-old Sumit killed by a gunshot was part of the violent mob and a named accused in the police FIR. His family has been awarded a compensation for Rs 10 lakh by Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath. Sumit, son of Amarjit of Chigrawati village under Syana Police station of Bulandshahr, is listed as accused number 16 in the second FIR (FIR no. 0583) registered by sub-inspector Subhash Chand on December 4. Sumit's postmortem report confirms that he was hit by a bullet from a 0.32 bore weapon, the same bore, which killed Inspector Subodh Kumar Singh. Cops ask people to take pledge against cow slaughter in Meerut An FIR against 27 named people and 50-60 unidentified people was registered at the Siyana police station for the violence that was witnessed at Chingrawathi police post after cattle carcasses were found strewn outside nearby Mahaw village of the district. Police inspector Subodh Kumar Singh and civilian Sumit Kumar, 20, were killed of bullet shots during the mob violence on December 3. One of the main suspects among the 27 named in the FIR, local Bajrang Dal leader Yogesh Raj, is still missing, while an Army jawan, Jitendra Malik, has been arrested and remanded in custody. A matter of immense pride says PM Modi on BJP getting first RS seat from Puducherry Congress has humiliated CAG, Army and every democratic institution: PM Modi India oi-Deepika S New Delhi, Dec 19: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday attacked the Congress for a making a hue and cry about EVMs before elections, but suggested that that the party seems agreeable every time the results turn in their favour. "Before every election they begin to make noise about EVMs, trying to create an atmosphere of doubt. However, after elections, if the Congress performs well they seem to accept results that have come out of the same EVM," PM Modi told BJP karyakartas of Tamil Nadu and Puducherry. Modi urged the workers to spread information and awareness about Congress' "undemocratic behaviour" in order to strengthen democracy. "The perfect answer to undemocratic behavior of the Congress is to strengthen democracy. Information and awareness are important for democracy. We should keep people informed about the Congress and its dangerous games," said PM Modi. Reacting to Congress' stand on the Supreme Court's verdict on Rafale, Modi said they questioned it because they didn't like it. "They've humiliated the Army, CAG & every institution imp to our democracy. Recently they questioned an SC verdict just because they didn't like the decision. Earlier, just because they couldn't threaten the court into doing what they wanted they tried to even impeach the CJI," said Modi. Modi's remark came days after Congress president Rahul Gandhi lashed out at the Centre, saying he will not allow the "destruction" of institutions like the Supreme Court and the Reserve Bank of India. Honours are even today, which way will wind blow in 2022: P Chidambaram on bypoll results INX Media Case: Enforcement Directorate summons Chidambaram for questioning India oi-Madhuri Adnal New Delhi, Dec 19: P Chidambaram has been summoned by Enforcement Directorate to appear before it on Wednesday in INX Media Case, official sources said. They said the senior Congress leader was asked to depose before the investigating officer (IO) of the case to record his statement under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA). He arrived around 11:30 am along with his lawyer. Last month, the Delhi High Court had extended the temporary protection from arrest to Chidambaram till January 15. The central probe agency has earlier grilled Chidambaram's son Karti Chidambaram in this case and has also attached his assets worth an estimated Rs 54 crore, located in India and abroad. The senior Congress leader's role has come under the scanner of investigating agencies in the Rs 3,500-crore Aircel-Maxis deal and the INX Media case involving Rs 305 crore. The Enforcement Directorate (ED) had earlier attached assets worth Rs 54 crore of Karti, Chidambaram's son, in India, Spain and the UK in connection with a money laundering case related to INX Media, an action termed "bizarre and outlandish" by him. Islamic State finds new methods to increase spread in Kerala India oi-Vicky Nanjappa New Delhi, Dec 19: Amidst fears of the returnees of the Islamic State making their way back into Kerala, the Intelligence Bureau has stepped up vigil. A close watch is being kept on all activity and many who are returning to Kerala are high on the scanner. The cyber wings of the agencies are keeping a close watch on chat groups that have been created on Telegram and also Wickr. There is more activity on Wickr these days when compared to Telegram, an officer with the Intelligence Bureau informed OneIndia. Kerala's ticking time bomb: The silent returnees of the Islamic State are back The Telegram was replaced with Wickr as tracking chats on it are difficult. This application works without having to enter a phone number of email address. IB officials say that on one hand several recruits are attempting to return to Kerala, while on the other there is hectic activity online to rope in more persons into the outfit. The IB says that they have found a pattern behind this recruitment process. A team keeps a close watch on those who are commenting on jihadi related content. Many share or re-post the messages. Such persons are being tapped into by the recruiters, the officer also says. There is a two pronged strategy that the agencies have found now especially in Kerala. Islamic State fighters increase rapidly in Philippines; a new caliphate might come up, say experts They want the recruits who are returning from countries such as Afghanistan, UAE, Syria and Turkey to stage lone wolf attacks. The other is to recruit as many persons as possible and spread the propaganda online. Kerala has been a friendly place for such activities. The involvement of several local groups from Kerala has also been found. They help in carrying forward the ISIS ideology further. The returnees: However the prime focus is now on the returnees. This was the big plan says an IB official. He says that the intention of leaving the country was not continue fighting in Afghanistan or Syria. It was largely with an intent of undergoing training and then returning to India, with an intention of carrying out attacks, brainwashing locals and also setting up modules. Kerala Muslims find Islamic State most attractive in India says a Pakistan study The Indian agencies, apart from Syria are also focusing on those persons returning to Kerala from UAE and other West Asian countries. The task on hand is humongous. The problem is that they do not come in batches. They come in as individuals and then go about their business. The other problem is keeping a track on those who have left from other states. The focus so far has been extensively on those who have joined the ISIS from Kerala. The possibility of those who have left from other states coming to Kerala is also high. This poses a different level of threat all together as monitoring such persons is hard, says the officer. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, December 19, 2018, 7:05 [IST] It is composed Congress verses jittery BJP for now as countdown begins for 2019 India oi-Vinod Kumar Shukla New Delhi, Dec 19: There was just one leader for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) during the 2014 Lok Sabha elections and the Congress leadership was running for cover on the onslaughts of Modi but at present attacks made by Congress president Rahul Gandhi is making the BJP leadership uncomfortable to the hilt. New equations and combinations are emerging with the Lok Sabha elections in sight. With the Assembly elections in five states getting over and elections for the Lok Sabha coming closure, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is faced with multiple in-house challenges, unlike the Congress which has decided to target Prime Minister Narendra Modi to puncture his no-nonsense image on discipline and corruption. Will every Indian get Rs 15 lakh as Modi promised? Yes, but slowly says this union minister The Rashtriya Lok Samata Party (RLSP) has already deserted the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) led by PM Modi. Now the Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) has started telling the NDA leadership that allies must be given proper hearing and must be adequately accommodated. The leader of another NDA ally in Uttar Pradesh is constantly criticizing policies of the BJP in the state. Dealing with all these issues is becoming difficult for the BJP leadership. Besides allies including Shiv Sena, the party leaders and some elected MPs are also not happy with the shabby treatment meted out to them that they have been given all these years. They are not becoming vocal against the leadership. One such leader and Lok Sabha MP Savitri Bai Phule has not only criticised the party but also resigned from all party posts including her Lok Sabha seat. Ghoshi Lok Sabha MP Ravindra Kushwaha and Salempur Lok Sabha MP Hari Kewal Prasad have raised the issue of Ram Temple in the parliamentary party which is also the sign of unrest in the party leaders. Sakshi Maharaj has constantly been speaking for the Ram Temple however party president Amit Shah time and again made it clear that no decision has been taken on the issue so far. PM to meet all BJP MPs in 11 days from Dec 20 to get their feedback on LS polls Despite the BJP getting the ST/ST Act passed in Parliament, it is targeted on the issue not only by the community on its intent for Dalits getting killed but the anger of upper caste is also reflected in many ways. The BJP is well aware of the fact that anger of upper caste has played a very important role in the defeat of the BJP in Madhya Pradesh. GST is still a vexed factor for the BJP. The party that was planning to take a southern sojourn and was very hopeful that it will emerge as the kingmaker in Telangana but it did not happen. The party has to look for a new strategy in the state. Telugu Desam Party, which was the BJP's ally in 2014, is one of the most bitter critiques of the party down south. A political analyst said that there is also a need for the party to make its communication skill sets in the media better as some of its spokespersons have become loose cannon and authority on to themselves. This is sending a very wrong signal especially among the core vote bank of the party that is middle class and upper middle class. There are some other senior politicians and BJP leaders like Yashwant Sinha, Arun Shourie and Shatrughan Sinha who have been critical to the government on any issue. The party has failed to reach out to them as yet. On the other hand, the principal opposition Congress appears to more composed and focused in its attack against the BJP by targeting its most celebrated Prime Minister. When the elections are coming closure, the BJP is trying to keep its house in order while the Congress is reaching out to such elements that are adding value to the prospects of the larger opposition. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, December 19, 2018, 18:01 [IST] Rahul Gandhi's old tweet goes viral: 'Mark my words, govt will take back anti-farm laws' As Mamata Banerjee takes swipe at Rahul Gandhi, Cong says such posturing for personal ambition will help BJP It's done, tweets Rahul after Rajasthan becomes third state to announce farm loan waiver India oi-Deepika S New Delhi, Dec 19: The Ashok Gehlot government in Rajasthan announced waiver of farm loans up to Rs 2 lakh on Wednesday, two days after assuming power. Hailing the farm loan waiver, Rahul Gandhi took to twitter to announce that even though the Congress asked for 10 days, it was done in just two. The Congress which won the recent assembly elections had promised in its manifesto to waive farm loans. Congress president Rahul Gandhi had said this would be done within 10 days of the pary coming to power in the state. Ashok Gehlot told reporters the scheme will apply to farmers in debt till November 30. Now, Rajasthan waives off farm loans upto Rs 2 lakh Immediately after taking oath as CM of Madhya Pradesh, Kamal Nath cleared the farmers' loan waiver file. The loans of farmers up to Rs 2 lakh will be waived off, the order stated, adding that loans extended by all the nationalised and cooperative banks would be covered in the announcement, the order further said. Within hours of being sworn-in as Chhattisgarh Chief Minister, Bhupesh Baghel too announced the farm loan waiver amounting to Rs 61 billion. The new government has also decided to raise minimum support price of paddy to Rs 2,500 per quintal. Following suit, the BJP government in Assam approved Rs 600 crore farm loan waiver, while the Vijay Rupani government in Gujarat announced a decision to waive electricity bills of connection holders in rural areas to the tune of Rs 650 crore. Claiming that Congress had 'managed to awaken' chief ministers of Assam and Gujarat, Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday reiterated that he will not let Prime Minister Narendra Modi sleep until all farm loans are waived. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, December 19, 2018, 22:19 [IST] Puneeth Rajkumars last rites to take place tomorrow: Many yet to pay last respects says CM Bommai 12 hours before death, Puneeth Rajkumar had great time with celebs at Gurukirans birthday party [Viral video] Last rites of actor Puneeth Rajkumar held with full state honours at Kanteerava studio in Bengaluru Final goodbye to 'Appu': Family bid tearful farewell; Puneeth Rajkumar laid to rest beside his father's grave Gone too soon: From Puneeth Rajkumar to Sidharth Shukla, untimely deaths leave family and fans stunned J&K: 3-year-old mauled to death by leopard; decapitated body found India oi-Madhuri Adnal Jammu, Dec 19: The headless body of a 3-year-old boy was found on Tuesday after the child was snatched from his home and dragged into the woods by a leopard, officials said. The child, identified as Wasim Akram, was at home with his mother when the animal snuck inside, pounced on him and dragged him away, local officials told. The child's headless body was handed over to his parents after the grisly discovery was made. Leopard deaths in India at five-year high, Uttarakhand tops the list Official estimates suggest there are between 12,000 and 14,000 leopards in India. An estimated 431 leopards were killed in 2017, according to government figures. Most were killed by poachers for their hides and body parts. Last week a Buddhist monk was killed by a leopard while meditating in a forest in the western state of Maharashtra, the fifth such attack in the area this month. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, December 19, 2018, 11:50 [IST] Will there be a lockdown in Karnataka again? New restrictions to fight Omicron might come to effect Karnataka registers highest number of Congress workers on SHAKTI App India oi-Chennabasaveshwar P Bengaluru, Dec 19: Karnataka Congress registered the highest number of members on the intra-party communication platform Shakti app. The app is a project by Data and Analytics department of All India Congress Committee (AICC). INC Shakti is conceived to collate data and engage with the workers of the party. So far 7.8 lakhs have enrolled on Shakti platform and the deadline for enrollment has been extended till 31st December. 'I wasn't the PM afraid to talk to Press': Manmohan Singh hits back at Modi Suraj Hegde, KPCC Co-ordinator SHAKTI, said, "Karnataka has done commendable work in registering party workers on the app. The state has bought the highest numbers of workers followed by Rajasthan, Telangana Gujarat, Jharkhand." "This is not a target-driven exercise. We want to enrol Congress workers, like-minded people and sympathisers. Actually, the target is to reach every booth in Karnataka. We have covered around 73 per cent till now, a quite commendable achievement, " Hegde said. Started two months back in Karnataka, the party has organised programmes in every assembly. The registration follows the party structure from PCC and blocks to ward level. UP coalition: SP, BSP come together minus Congress, won't field candidates at Amethi, Raebareli As a state coordinator, Suraj Hegde monitors registration every day. He keeps a tab on the number of enrollment in each assembly, block, ward and booth. Hegde said, " For instance in Yashwantpura constituency has 1,05,000. We need at least 5 to 10 members in each booth and 2000 in assembly constituency." He went on say that the concept of Shakti is to build communication between workers and leaders and disseminate information on daily basis, however, it is not a one-way communication, for example, it can be used in the selection of candidate also. Nirav Modi says PNB 'scam' has been blown out of proportion Muzaffarpur Shelter Home Case: CBI files chargesheet in special POCSO court India oi-Chennabasaveshwar P New Delhi, Dec 19: CBI has filed a chargesheet in special POCSO court against all the accused in Muzaffarpur Shelter Home Case. Meanwhile, Enforcement Directorate (ED) Patna has summoned Brajesh Thakur's son Rahul Anand on 24th Dec and Thakur's wife Asha Thakur on 26th December. The CBI had informed the Supreme Court that charge sheet in the Muzaffarpur shelter home sexual abuse case was ready but the agency was discussing whether to file a consolidated final report or have a separate one on each victim. Muzaffarpur shelter home: SC rejects plea claiming prime accused was tortured in jail CBI told a bench headed by Justice Madan B Lokur that the issue was being discussed as there were independent victims and witnesses in the case. Several girls were allegedly raped and sexually abused at an NGO-run shelter home in Muzaffarpur and the issue had come to light following a report by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS). Initially, the CBI was entrusted with investigation of Muzaffarpur shelter home case but last month, the top court had asked the agency to probe cases of 16 other shelter homes in the state. (With PTI inputs) For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, December 19, 2018, 17:18 [IST] Amazon Great Indian Festival 2021: Use 'diamonds' to get cashback offer on your orders, here is how Now, online shopping to get costlier: Here's why India oi-Madhuri Adnal New Delhi, Dec 19: Shopping through online portals like Amazon, Flipkart and Myntra would now be costlier as the government is planning some major amendments in e-commerce policy of the country. Major e-tail giants, over the past, have adopted deep discounts and cashback offers to lure customers and boost their sales, which highly affects the business model of tradition brick-and-mortar retails. These offline retailers, on several occasions, have complained about the huge discounts offered by e-commerce majors on the back of massive investment they raise in order to fund their losses. Online shopping may not be cheap anymore as govt looks to regulate deep discounts According to the report, the e-commerce policy draft is likely to propose restrictions on deep discounting policy and pricing strategy used by online retailers including Amazon, Flipkart, Paytm and others. "The formulation of e-commerce policy in under consideration of the government for which no timeline has been fixed," Commerce and Industry Minister Suresh Prabhu told Lok Sabha on Monday, in response to a question around when the draft e-commerce policy is expected to be out. In September this year, the government appointed a group of secretaries to overview the concerns pertaining to the draft e-commerce policy and issues raised by various trade organisations. The group of secretaries was headed by Department of Industrial Policy and Promotions (DIPP) secretary Ramesh Abhishek. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, December 19, 2018, 15:02 [IST] PM Modi says 99% of items to be under GST rate of 18% or less India oi-Deepika S New Delhi, Dec 19: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday said the government hopes to bring 99 per cent of the items now subjected to the Goods and Services Tax (GST) to be in the low end of the tax bracket. Speaking at a function in Mumbai on Tuesday, PM Modi indicated that 28 per cent slab of GST would only be restricted to a few select items, such as luxury goods. He said: "Today the GST system has been established to a large extent and we are working towards a position where 99 per cent will attract the sub-18 per cent GST slab". "All things related to common man will be 18% or below that... 99% articles will be 18% or below 18% rate," he said, adding that GST should be made as simple and as convenient as possible. That could mean cement, marble, air conditioners, dishwashers and other items becoming cheaper. Will every Indian get Rs 15 lakh as Modi promised? Yes, but slowly says this union minister The proposal may be put up at the GST Council meeting on December 22. "I have already given my suggestion to the upcoming GST Council because that (rate) is decided by all the states together," Modi said in his address at a function in Mumbai. Only 1% or 0.5% of luxury items will remain outside the 18% slab, PM said, flagging planes, expensive cars and cigarettes that will likely continue to be levied at 28%. There are about 40 broad categories of goods that are in the top GST slab. They include cement, marble, tyres, air conditioners, digital and video cameras, monitors and projectors and video games consoles. Modi said the GST system had by and large settled into place but the government will continue to make changes as required in the interests of the common man. "We have reached a point where 99% articles can be brought in the 18% or less than 18% bracket and we are progressing in that direction," Modi said. Prior to the implementation of GST in July last year, registered enterprises numbered 6.6 million. That has risen to 12 million, Modi said. "Even developed countries find it difficult to implement small tax reforms," he said, acknowledging the contribution of everyone in making the reform a success. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, December 19, 2018, 20:39 [IST] 'There is no UPA now': Mamata Banerjee takes swipe at Cong, calls for unity of regional parties against BJP Rahul Gandhi as PM candidate? Mamata Banerjee remains non-committal India oi-Deepika S New Delhi, Dec 19: TMC supremo West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Wednesday said the issue of opposition prime ministerial candidate could be discussed after the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. Her comments came in the backdrop of Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) president M K Stalin's proposal to announce Congress chief Rahul Gandhi as the opposition's prime ministerial candidate. "It could be discussed only after the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, once the opposition alliance emerged winners. All (opposition) parties will meet and decide on the issue. We will accept that," Banerjee told reporters at the state secretariat. Asked whether she was one of the contenders for the job, the Trinamool Congress supremo said, "This is not the time to discuss this issue. And I am not alone. We are working together. We are solidly together," she said. 'Not necessary that alliance has the same opinion': Akhilesh on Stalin's pitch for Rahul as PM The TMC earlier said announcing prime ministerial candidate now would be premature would as it would divide the Opposition camp. On reports of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and the Samajwadi Party (SP) coming together for the 2019 Lok Sabha polls without the Congress, Banerjee said, "This is very good. It is local compulsion. We appreciate that. Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav on Tuesday said that it was solely Stalin's opinion and not the opinion of the alliance members. "People are unhappy with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrashekhar Rao, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) president Sharad Pawar had attempted to bring together all leaders to form an alliance. If someone is giving his opinion, isn't necessary that the alliance has the same opinion." For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, December 19, 2018, 22:37 [IST] India will have whole of Kashmir someday, says Western Air Command chief In pics: Light Combat Helicopters that PM will hand over to IAF Rafale to S-400 air defence systems all set to add more firepower to Indian Air Force Record: IAF airlifts 463 tonnes of load in 6 hours to airfields,drop zones in Ladakh India oi-Madhuri Adnal New Delhi, Dec 19: To evaluate its own 'Rapid Airlift Capability' and to enhance crew currency in the role, the Western Air Command of the IAF on Tuesday in a single wave airlifted a record 463 tonnes of load from its airbase at Chandigarh to airfields and drop zones in Ladakh, a statement said. The effort was accomplished with the aid of a fleet of 16 fixed wing transport aircraft comprising C-17 Globemaster, the Ilyushin-76 Gajraj and the Medium lift Tactical aircraft Antonov-32. IAF squadron leader completes 101 sorties in single day! All aircraft were loaded and took off from Chandigarh airbase early in the morning. The entire wave was accomplished in little less than six hours, the statement said. "Airlift of approximately 500 tonnes, in the achieved time frame, in a single wave, happens to be a record which enhances the assessment of the Command's capability towards rapid and heavy airlift." A view of the IAFs Globe Master C-17, lined up, post a record airlift of approx. 500 tones of load. Magnificent Machines against a Mesmerising Background.@DefenceMinIndia @SpokespersonMoD @DrSubhashMoS@BoeingDefense@PIB_India pic.twitter.com/IA0L7apF0E Indian Air Force (@IAF_MCC) December 18, 2018 "The command is entrusted with the air maintenance of the entire northern region of the country and under normal operating circumstances airlifts close to 3000 tonnes of load per month," the statement said. Air Marshall NJS Dhillon, the Senior Air Staff Officer (SASO) of the Western Air Command, said the rapid air mobility is a key component of modern warfare and this assumes greater significance in short and intense wars. "This is very true in India's context, especially when related to air mobility to airfields in the Ladakh region. With a wide spectrum of military transport aircraft in its inventory, the IAF today has a credible airlift capability which has provided succour on numerous occasions when the nation was struck with natural calamities," the statement quoting Dhillion said. How India is preparing to fight the wars of the future In 2013, in a subtle show of strength to China, the IAF landed its C-130J Super Hercules transport plane at the world's highest Daulat Beg Oldie airstrip in Ladakh near the Line of Actual Control (LAC). The achievement enabled the armed forces to use the heavy-lift aircraft to induct troops, supplies, improve communication network and also served as a morale booster for maintenance of troops positioned there, said the statement. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, December 19, 2018, 7:23 [IST] UP coalition: SP, BSP come together minus Congress, wont field candidates at Amethi, Raebareli India oi-Vinod Kumar Shukla New Delhi, Dec 19: The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and the Samajwadi Party (SP) have decided not to take the Congress along in the alliance in Uttar Pradesh despite the fact that the party has got a huge success in Assembly elections in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan. These two political parties along with Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) will open front against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the Lok Sabha elections. Seat sharing formula has been decided among these political parties. As per the arrangement made by them, the BSP will contest on 38 seats, the SP will contest on 37 seats while the RLD will get Mathura, Baghpat and Kairana Lok Sabha seats. They will give only this much relaxation to the Congress that the alliance will not field its candidate in Amethi and Raebareli constituencies from where Rahul Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi are sitting MPs respectively. BSP and SP not joining the swearing-in of Congress CMs a warning signal to the party in UP It was being said that all the political parties will be united to take the BJP on in Uttar Pradesh where there are 80 seats at stake. But sources said that the SP and BSP have decided not to include the Congress in the alliance for the time being. Both the political parties feel that with the resounding victory of the Congress in three states, the Congress will demand more seats in UP. Sources said that old experiences also suggest that there is no benefit of the Congress taking along because their votes don't get transferred to the SP and the BSP. Sources said that the SP might give a few seats to individuals or smaller political parties. Which party will contest from where will be decided on the basis of performance in the last elections. Political strength of the BSP appears increased after the result of Assembly elections The SP and RLD will retain their seats but where these political parties have been runner-up they will be considered looking after the priorities. The BJP along with Apna Dal had won 73 seats in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections while the SP got five seats while the Congress got two seats. The BSP failed to get any seat in the state however in the by-election the SP managed to snatch two seats and RLD one seat from the BJP. Statue of Unity: Tribals in Kevadiya village lock up engineer in protest against lack of jobs India oi-Madhuri Adnal Kevadiya, Dec 19: Police rushed to Kevadiya, the closest district to the statue of Unity on Monday after angry tribals locked the office of executive engineer of Sardar Sarovar Punarvasvat Agency to protest against lack of jobs for local villagers at the site. The protestors claim that the local people are left without jobs and even the people who were displaced because of the development of the Sardar Sarovar Dam, did not receive proper rehabilitation facilities by the government. They also complained of lack of facilities for those displaced by the project. Statue of Unity: Why are visitors returning disappointed? The world's tallest statue at 182-meters built at the cost of Rs 3000 crore to pay tribute to India's first Home Minister, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, has been in controversies since the announcement of the statue was made. The tribal belt around the Sardar Sarovar Dam in Narmada district has been in a ferment since the inauguration of Statue of Unity on October 31 - stemming from the central issue of loss of land, compensation, jobs and access to water from Narmada Canal. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, December 19, 2018, 15:12 [IST] If normalcy to be brought in Kashmir, Article 370 has to be reinstated: Farooq Abdullah The Kashmir Pheran and why it is making news India oi-Vicky Nanjappa Srinagar, Dec 19: A fresh controversy has erupted in Jammu and Kashmir. This time it is the traditional Kashmiri pheran, which is a loose gown worn during the winters. The controversy erupted after the education department in Langate banned the dress in its offices. "All officials visiting the office are advised to visit in proper dress code during any official visit. It is recommended that no official will visit this office wearing pheran, traditional trousers and sleeper/plastic shoes," the circular read. Centre recommends President's rule in J&K after Dec 19 This snowballed into a major controversy, with people taking to the social media to register their protest. "My father and I have worn pherans to official functions many times over the years and will continue to do so, silly government orders notwithstanding," Omar tweeted, with hashtags #dontbanourpheran and #revokepheranban. Amidst all the controversy, the education department withdrew the order. Officials however said that the circular was issued to maintain office decorum and not hurt the sentiments of the people. This is not the first time that the Pheran has been mired in controversy. In 2014, the Indian Army had to withdraw its advisory urging journalists not to wear the Pheran while visiting its Corps Headquarters. J&K 2018: 240 terrorists killed, 130 recruited, sniper squad busted 86 security personnel martyred A Pheran is a traditional Kashmir dress that is worn by both men and women. While women don it almost all through the year, the men wear it mostly in the winter to stay warm. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, December 19, 2018, 10:08 [IST] The new Chhattisgarh government likely to frame a new Naxal policy to help tribals India oi-Vinod Kumar Shukla New Delhi, Dec 19: The newly-appointed Chhattisgarh government under Congress chief minister Bhupesh Baghel has indicated to make new policy on Naxalism to solve the vexed problem of the state. The CM has made it very clear that the policy of bullet for bullet will be changed. Both the police and Naxals are firing bullets at each other but who is the victim. The Congress will talk to tribal victims to make a policy on Naxalism. This decision of the government has made the human right activists happy. Chhattisgarh CM Bhupesh Baghel waives farm loans, orders SIT probe into Bastar massacre The CM is also saying that Naxalism is not a law and order problem but this is a social, economic and political problem and it must be solved looking into account all the aspects of it. This has made the social activists involved in helping to save the human right of the victims of Naxalism happy. Human right organisations are saying that earlier just by favouring tribals they were declared urban Naxals. First Information Report (FIR) of murder has been registered against Professor of Delhi University Nandini Sunder and Archana Prashad in Bastar. Dr Vinayak Sen had been in jail on treason charges. Human right activists say that Sudha Bharadwaj is in jail, Himanshu Kumar had to leave Chhattisgarh and Soni Sori has several cases registered against her. She was sent to jail by registering several cases against her. Working in Bastar to provide legal aid to needy people, Shalini Gera and Isha Khandelwal have been forced to leave the state. Organisations like the International Red Cross Society and Doctors Without Border have been declared Naxal organisations and have been asked to leave the state. With the new government showing some positive approach, some ray of hope seems to be visible for human right organisations to see the issue of Naxalism get solved. Meanwhile, social worker Himanshu Kumar, who has the experience of working in Chhattisgarh, said that human right activists would very soon hold a meeting in the state in which a solid proposal to bring about peace in Bastar may be prepared. Who is Bhupesh Baghel? the new Chief Minister of Chhattisgarh If the government takes initiative, social activists are ready to meet with the government as well. Himanshu said, "We are ready to help the government, give time to the government and serve the government. But the government has to take the decision." Social activists feel that the condition of tribals in Bastar will improve which had deteriorated in the past 15 years during the BJP rule in the state. Two weeks and James Michel hasnt sung as yet: Game still on says CBI India oi-Vicky Nanjappa New Delhi, Dec 19: He was expected to sing in custody and put out the big names in public domain. However for the Central Bureau of Investigation, which has James Christian Michel the alleged middleman in the AugustaWestland case, the case is tougher than it may have appeared to be. It has been almost two weeks since he was extradited to India. The CBI has managed to get his custody on two occasions, but till date, nothing concrete has come up. Lodged in the CBI's guesthouse at its headquarters, Michel has remain mum most of the time. In AgustaWestland case, a 12 million Euro payout to Italian political party under scanner A volley of questions regarding the alleged pay offs and his political contacts in India have so far yielded no results. He denied any wrongdoing and when asked about the payments that were made to swing the chopper deal, he said it was the company and not he who had made it. The CBI has been trying to crack some of the coded language that were used in a letter said to be written by Michel. In the letter written to Peter Hulet, the then India region sales and liaison head of AgustaWestland, there are references made to Pol, AP and Fam. The letter suggests that kickbacks were paid for 'Pol,' 'AP' and 'Fam.' This speaks about a total kickback of 16 million Euros that was paid. Further the note also says that bureaucrats in the government be allowed 8.4 million Euros and for the Air Force officials 6 million Euros be given. Michel when asked about this denied knowledge of the same. He said that the CBI should instead ask Guido Haschke about it. The more interesting question is about the code word Fam, which investigators say refer to family. There are two arguments about the word Fam in public domain. While the first one is that it stands for the Gandhi family, the other is that it refers to the Tyagi family. Jaguar, Mirage, AgustaWestland: How the Michels ruled India's arms market since 1978 A CBI official part of the investigation when contacted by OneIndia confirmed that Michel indeed is a hard nut to crack. He does not give straight answers and looks to dodge questions or misguide us. This is an old tactic that has been used by many. The idea is to either not say anything or try and divert the investigation. He made references to the other middleman Haschke on several occasions in a bid to divert attention. He has remained tight lipped about the alleged dealings and claims that he did no wrong. The official also said that his intention is to drag in several other names so as to reduce the focus on him. He would want to continue doing so until he is either sent to judicial custody or granted bail. When asked if this is the end of the road for the probe, the officer said that there are other ways to build up the case. Many high profile accused often take advantage of their status and do not speak. In such cases, we tell the court that the person is not cooperating and seek further custody. If he continues to dodge questions, then the case is built up on circumstantial evidence. The Italian court judgment speaks clearly about the role Michel played in the deal. We can club that and the findings from our own investigation and build up the case. Following this, we will file a chargesheet against him and put him for trial, the officer further added. AgustaWestland: Why did UPA go to Italy, when it could have shopped in Hyderabad While opposing his bail application today, the CBI said that Michel's reach is so wide and he is so influential that he could try and tamper with the evidence. He was making efforts to run away from Dubai, just before his extradition, the CBI also contended. Michel's counsel on the other hand said that the CBI has questioned him five times in Dubai and for 15 days in Delhi. He is suffering from Dyslexia and he has been asked to write in cursive writing, the counsel also submitted. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, December 19, 2018, 12:10 [IST] How a jail meeting is giving shape to the Grand Alliance in Bihar Bihar: Opposition calls for bandh to protest police action against Upendra Kushwaha, Security up Get ready for another Nitish dhoka says RLD chief warns BJP Kushwaha merges RLSP with JD(U), gets rewarded with top party post by Nitish Kumar Upendra Kushwaha likely to join UPA today India pti-PTI New Delhi, Dec 19: Former Union minister Upendra Kushwaha's RLSP, which had recently broken ties with the BJP, may join the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) on Thursday, sources said Wednesday. A senior Rashtriya Lok Samta Party (RLSP) leader said talks between his party and the UPA constituents are almost final and an announcement by Kushwaha on joining it is likely to be made at a press conference on Thursday. RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav, Hindustani Awam Morcha (Secular) founder Jitan Ram Manjhi and a Congress representative are likely to be present during the announcement. Opposition leader Sharad Yadav may also attend the event. BJP wants to destroy smaller parties, says Upendra Kushwaha Senior Congress leader Ahmed Patel had met Kushwaha after the latter quit the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance. The UPA believes that Kushwaha's decision to join it will help it build a momentum against the NDA in Bihar. Besides BJP, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar's JD(U) and Union minister Ram Vilas Paswan's LJP are other constituents of the NDA. The saffron alliance had swept the Lok Sabha elections in 2014, winning 31 of the state's 40 seats. PTI What the ISI is doing in Punjab is carbon copy Kashmir: Is SJF the new Hurriyat? India oi-Vicky Nanjappa New Delhi, Dec 19: The imprint of the ISI is clear and the agenda has been set. The ISI has nurtured for long terrorists part of pro-Khalistan groups. They have been aided with funds, arms and training. However, there appears to be a strategy shift at the moment and the pro-Khalistan forces want to make this movement a political one. The first signs were seen when the Sikhs for Justice called on Pakistan Prime Minister, Imran Khan to support their movement. The SJF which would organise the next Referendum 2020 in Pakistan had called on Imran Khan seeking political support for the movement. Officials in India are closely watching the developments. An official in New Delhi informed OneIndia that the ISI wants to take the Kashmir route in Punjab. This has always been the plan, but by getting the politics into it, it is clear that they want to take the Kashmir route. SJF trying to legitimise Khalistan movement by calling on Pak political leadership It is carbon copy Kashmir says the officer. On one hand, they are training the terrorists and helping them stage attacks in Punjab. There has been a sudden surge in activity in Punjab, which includes terror attacks, propaganda and also setting up of modules. While the ISI would allow this to continue on one hand, on the other it would want the political leadership to take a stand on the issue, the officer explained. The SJF has been told clearly to take the political route so that the movement gets political legitimacy. Once the stamp is given, then the intention is to get the Pakistan leadership to raise the issue on international forums, the UN, just the way it does in the case of Kashmir. The ISI-SJF meet at Nankana Sahib: Why India should be worried Close on the heels of these developments, the Intelligence Bureau has information about how the ISI would try and brainwash the Sikhs. This would be done to give the cause further legitimacy. The ISI would want the locals to speak up in favour of a separate Punjab nation. Once there is local support for such a cause, it makes the job of causing panic even more easier. The locals would be expected to provide support to the terrorists who claim that they are fighting for a separate Punjab nation. The SJF in a recent letter stated that several 100s of its campaigners have reached Pakistan to coordinate the Referendum 2020 campaign in the Nankana Sahib during the ongoing 549th birth anniversary of Sri Guru Nanak Devji. The letter further said Referendum 2020 banners and Khalistan flags with the life-size portrait of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale have been placed throughout the Nankana Sahib complex. Islamic State finds new methods to increase spread in Kerala "SJF will initiate the registration of votes of Referendum 2020 during the next years scheduled 550th birth celebrations at Kartarpur Sahib. A permanent office of the SJF will be established in Lahore to coordinate the registration of Referendum votes. The worry for the agencies is that the ISI would try and propagate among the pilgrims the need for a pro-Khalistan movement. Bhagwad Gita, PM Modis photo to be carried to space by new satellite Earth Observation Satellite 03 launch on August 12: All you need to know Why ISRO's GSAT 7A is built exclusively for the Indian Air Force? India oi-Madhuri Adnal New Delhi, Dec 19: The Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) will launch the country's newest satellite GSAT-7A, which will give a boost to the defence forces' communication capabilities, from Andhra Pradesh's Sriharikota on Wednesday. In the third mission in just over a month, the space agency will launch the 2,250 kg operational communication satellite from the second launch pad of Satish Dhawan Space Centre at 4.10pm on Wednesday. The satellite will be carried by the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle-F11 (GSLV-F11), Isro's 35th communication satellite and the 13th flight of the GSLV rocket to orbit. ISRO to launch GSAT-7A today, satellite to add more heft to Air Force According to reports, GSAT-7A has been built exclusively for the Indian Air Force (IAF) and the Indian Army and will add to the forces' communication capabilities. The satellite will allow IAF to interlink its ground radar stations, airbases and airborne early warning and control (AWACS) aircraft, and reduce the reliance on on-ground control stations for drones, they said. It will also boost the air force's network-dependent warfare capabilities, enhancing its abilities to operate globally. The GSAT 7 series was launched in 2013 as a dedicated communications satellite for the Indian Navy, which made the Navy completely independent of relying on foreign satellites. GSAT-7A: All you need to know: GSAT-7A would be placed in the geostationary orbit and this communication satellite is expected to help the IAF to interlink different ground radar stations, airbases and AWACS (Airborne Warning And Control System) aircraft. The idea is to improve the IAF's network-centric warfare capabilities. The total cost of the GSAT-7A is estimated to be in the region of Rs 500 to Rs 800 crore and it is rated for a nine-year lifetime. The satellite will weigh 2.2 tonnes and will be launched by the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV Mk II) rocket. The satellite will be placed in the geostationary orbit and this communication satellite is expected to help the IAF interlink different ground radar stations, airbases and AWACS (Airborne Warning And Control System) aircraft. GSAT-7A is the 35th Indian Communication satellite built by Isro. The GSAT-7A spacecraft is configured on Isro's standard I-2,000 Kg (I-2K) bus. The satellite is built to provide communication capability to the users in Ku-band over the Indian region. Total cost of the GSAT-7A is estimated to be in the region of Rs 6-8 billion and its life is estimated to be around nine years, according to Isro sources. Flashback 2018: Earthquake, floods and wildfire devastate human lives International oi-Chennabasaveshwar P Bengaluru, Dec 18: Natural disasters around the world caused alarming damage to human lives and properties in 2018. Notably tsunami and floods in Indonesia, flood in India's Kerala, and wildfires in California left caused enormous damage. The impact of these events inevitably causes political, social, and economic problems, escalating the tragedy and creating a vulnerable climate. Indonesia: A 7.5 magnitude earthquake and subsequent 20-foot tsunami brought widespread devastation to Sulawesi island in Indonesia in late September, erased entire cities. According to World Vision, a global humanitarian nonprofit, more than 330,000 people rendered homeless and the death toll reached 2,783. Indonesia: In August, a 6.9 magnitude earthquake struck the Indonesian island of Lombok and neighbouring Bali. The earthquake was preceded with a 6.4 magnitude quake in late July, and the areas also were hit with a number of aftershocks. Approximately, 468 people were killed. Guatemala: According to The New York Times, 425 people were killed when Guatemala's Fuego volcano erupted in early June. Surrounding areas were soon engulfed in a deadly pyroclastic flow, a mixture of hot gas and volcanic rock that can move at speeds up to 90 miles per hour. Flashback 2018: PM Modi visited 22 countries India: In the worst flood recorded in 100 years, more than 300 people were killed due to floods in the southern Indian state of Kerala. The Kerala government said many victims died after being crushed by debris after landslides, the BBC reported. Japan: Heavy rains and landslides impacted large areas of Japan in July, killing more than 200 people. Officials said the flooding was particularly bad because much of the rain fell in mountainous areas and funneled down into cities, CNN reported. Nigeria: According to FloodList, more than half a million people were displaced and more than 13,000 homes destroyed due to floods in September. The floods struck one-third of Nigeria's 36 states, affecting nearly 2 million people. Pakistan: Temperatures in the Pakistani city of Karachi stayed above 104 degrees Fahrenheit for several days in May, according to news reports. The heat wave coincided with power cuts and Ramadan, a month when many Muslims refrain from eating or drinking during the daytime. Most of those who died were from poor areas, and included children and elderly people, the reports said. North Korea: Heavy rains at the end of August and in early September caused dangerous flooding and landslides in North Korea, which destroyed more than 800 buildings, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies reported. Papua New Guinea: A 7.5 magnitude earthquake struck the Southern Highlands province of Papua New Guinea in February. According to ReliefWeb, nearly half a million people were affected by quake. Greece: Fierce wildfires tore through a coastal area of Greece in late July. While most victims died in the fire, some drowned in the sea as they attempted to flee the flames, according to news reports. California's deadliest wildfire: California's deadliest wildfire claimed 85 lives and 11 people went missing. Three separate wildfires broke out in early November 2018: the Camp fire in Paradise; the Hill fire in the Santa Rosa Valley, and the Woolsey Fire in Los Angeles and Ventura counties. The worst of the three, the Camp fire, completely devastated the town of Paradise, causing all 27,000 residents to evacuate their homes and taking the lives of 88-in addition to scorching over 150,000 acres. Those in southern California were heavily affected by the Santa Ana winds, which caused the fires to spread quickly. The death toll in the Camp fire alone made it the deadliest (and most destructive) fire in California history. In total, over 15,000 structures (including homes) and 230,000 acres were scorched by the fires. Earthquake in Indonesia Houses damaged by an earthquake are seen in North Lombok, Indonesia, Monday, Aug. 6, 2018. The powerful earthquake struck the Indonesian tourist island of Lombok, killing a number of people and shaking neighboring Bali, as authorities on Monday said thousands of houses were damaged and the death toll could climb. AP/PTI Photo Volcano fire Forensic workers carry a plastic tarp that contains the remains of a victim of the Volcan de Fuego, or Volcano of Fire, eruption, at a makeshift morgue in a warehouse in Escuintla, Guatemala, Friday, Jan. 8, 2018. Forensic workers are trying to identify victims of this week's deadly volcanic explosion. The death toll currently stands at 109 but is expected to rise. AP/PTI Photo Kerala floods Chengannur: Flood affected areas of Chengannur seen from a Indian Navy helicopter, at Alappuzha district of the Kerala, on Sunday August 19, 2018. (PTI Photo) Japan floods In this July 7, 2018 photo, a resident is rescued in a flooded area in Kurashiki, Okayama prefecture, following heavy rain. Heavy rainfall hammered southern Japan for the third day, prompting new disaster warnings on Kyushu and Shikoku islands Sunday. AP/PTI Heatwave in Pakistan A zookeeper sprays water to cool off an elephant at Margazar Zoo during a heat wave, in Islamabad, Pakistan, Wednesday, May 30, 2018. According to Pakistan's state-run Meteorological Department, the highest temperature 49 C (120.2 F) was recorded in Moenjodaro, Sibbi and Bhakkar. AP/PTI N Korea yet to be tamed but South Koreas trade with China improves significantly International oi-Shubham Ghosh Seoul, Dec 19: Although the two countries have had their share of tussles, China's trade volume with South Korea was worth over $247 billion in the first 11 months of 2018, equalling the level which was prevalent before the diplomatic row that broke out over the deployment of an anti-missile system, The Korea Herald cited government data as showing on Wednesday, December 19. China has been South Korea's top export and import market since the two countries' trade pact was signed in December 2015, accounting for nearly 25 per cent of Seoul's trade turnover and about two times the volume with the US, its long-term ally, South Korea's Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy said. US bombers halt flying over Korean Peninsula to help peace process South Korea's exports to China recorded $150.3 billion and grew over 17 per cent year-on between January and November this year, the ministry added. The rise in the exports to China was caused by semiconductors, petroleum goods and computers which is largely because of Beijing's push for bettering its information technology and high-tech manufacturing business, The Korea Herald added. North Korea tests 'hi-tech weapon'; it's back on collision course, fears experts "South Korea is seeing an increase in trade volume with China and Vietnam. Trade with China that had dropped to the lowest in 2016 and rose last year has almost recovered to before China's retaliation over THAAD deployment," the ministry was quoted as saying. THAAD or Terminal High Altitude Area Defense is a missile defence system of the US that South Korea had agreed to deploy on its land despite China's strong objection. The missile system was aimed at strengthening the defence against North Korea's nuclear ambitions by the US. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, December 19, 2018, 14:35 [IST] North Korea denuclearisation process not fully on track, says South Korea unification minister International oi-Shubham Ghosh Seoul, Dec 19: The year 2018 has seen world politics intensifying around peace in the Korean Peninsula with US President Donald Trump meeting North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in a historical first meeting in Singapore in June. However, the top-level meetings (Kim also met Chinese President Xi Jinping and South Korean President Moon Jae-in a number of times while Trump met Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe time and again) have not necessarily ensured that the process of denuclearisation of North Korea has been on track. On Wednesday, December 19, South Korea's Unification Minister Cho Myoung-gyon said that the much anticipated process was yet to get "fully on track", indicating that Seoul is still not convinced the US and North Korea have come with a robust time table to discuss and deliberate on corresponding measures towards the goal, the Korea Herald reported. N Korea yet to be tamed but South Korea's trade with China improves significantly "Regarding the issue of North Korea's denuclearization, it would be an accurate assessment to say that the process (of talks between the US and the North) is not fully on track at the moment," Cho told the media. "There have been a US-North Korea summit and interactions between ranking officials from both sides, but we remain at a stage where both sides are struggling to be on the same page regarding practical and corresponding measures on denuclearization." Collapse of Kabul will go down as one of the greatest defeats in American history: Donald Trump United States is considering a total withdrawal of its forces from Syria International pti-PTI Washington, Dec 19: The United States has started to withdraw its troops from Syria, the White House said Wednesday, asserting that it has been able to defeat the Islamic State in the strife-torn country. "We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency," Trump tweeted soon after which the White House announced that its troops have started returning from Syria. "Five years ago, ISIS was a very powerful and dangerous force in the Middle East, and now the United States has defeated the territorial caliphate. These victories over ISIS in Syria do not signal the end of the Global Coalition or its campaign," White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said in a statement. She said the United States troops have started returning home. "The US and our allies stand ready to re-engage at all levels to defend American interests whenever necessary, and we will continue to work together to deny radical Islamist terrorists territory, funding, support, and any means of infiltrating our borders," she said. The Pentagon declined to give any comment immediately. "At this time, we continue to work by, with and through our partners in the region," Pentagon spokesman Col Rob Manning said when asked whether the US military is preparing for a full withdrawal of forces in northeast Syria. The Wall Street Journal described it as a abrupt decision by the Trump Administration. "US officials began informing partners in northeastern Syria of their plans to begin immediately pulling American forces out of the region, where they have been trying to wrap up the campaign against Islamic State," the daily said, quoting unnamed official. Several US lawmakers warned the Trump Administration that this was a grave error. Republican Senator Marco Rubio said that the full and rapid withdrawal from Syria is a grave error with broader implications beyond just the fight against ISIS. "The President's tweet is dangerous, premature and wholly inconsistent with the facts on the ground in Syria and our military's advice. I have travelled to Syria to review our mission, and our military has performed well beyond expectations," said Senator Jeanne Shaheen. Shaheen said he is very concerned that "an ill-informed and hasty withdrawal" of troops will "breathe new life into ISIS" and other terrorist groups and cede America's leadership role to Russia, Iran and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. PTI We cannot wait longer now: SC to hear Vijay Mallyas contempt case in January for final disposal Vijay Mallya intends to appeal against UK court's extradition verdict International oi-PTI London, Dec 19: Vijay Mallya plans to file an application to appeal against a British court's verdict in favour of his extradition to India, the embattled liquor baron's legal team confirmed on Wednesday. The 63-year-old businessman told reporters soon after the ruling by Westminster Magistrates' Court Chief Magistrate Emma Arbuthnot last week that he would consider the verdict in detail and decide his next course of action. "Mallya has now been able to consider the court's decision and intends to file an application for permission to appeal at the appropriate time," said Anand Doobay, Partner at UK-based Boutique Law LLP, who has been Mallya's solicitor through the extradition trial process. Mallya faces bankruptcy proceedings in UK court Under the Extradition Treaty procedures, the Chief Magistrate's verdict has been sent to UK Home Secretary Sajid Javid because it is the minister who is authorised to order Mallya's extradition and has two months within which to make that decision. The Home Secretary's order rarely goes against the court's conclusions as he has to consider only some very narrow bars to extradition which are unlikely to apply in this case, including the possible imposition of a death penalty in a particular case. "Whatever that decision (by the Home Secretary), the losing side has up to 14 days within which to approach the High Court and seek leave to appeal. Any appeal - if granted - will be heard at the Administrative Court [High Court]," noted a statement by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), which represents the Indian government in the extradition case. Mallya is wanted in India for alleged fraud and money laundering charges amounting to an estimated Rs 9,000 crores. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, December 19, 2018, 18:27 [IST] How to Prepare for MHT CET 2019? This is one of the usually asked questions by students from Maharashtra who have to appear for the state engineering entrance exam to avail admissions to the B.Tech programmes in the state. So what does MHT CET preparation involve? What syllabus to cover, which books to read? What is the exam pattern? Which topics are more covered in the MHT CET exam? How to score so and so rank? How many marks will fetch admissions? Preparation for MHT CET will involve all these aspects and more. Edumate Plus has gathered tips and guidelines for toppers and experts on how to crack MHT CET 2019. Candidates can go through the article below to know how to prepare for MHT CET 2019.Before moving into the plans for preparation, it is essential to know the time frame available for preparation. To know how to prepare for MHT CET will also include knowing how much time is at disposal to prepare for the same. Candidates can use the same to keep track of the timelines for each step of the exam starting from application to the declaration of the result. How to Prepare For MHT CET 2019? A good plan always won half the battle. So it is important to see all factors that play a significant role, tackle them one by one. One important thing to do is to look at the previous year exam analysis, understand the exam with the help of insights from toppers and experts and then strategize gripping in mind the MHT CET 2019 syllabus, exam pattern, books to read from and practice sessions. Candidates who are preparing for JEE Main andMHT CET must differentiate in the exam pattern and see if there are changes in the syllabus. It is generally understood that no separate preparation for MHTCET 2019 will be required if a candidate is preparing for JEE Main 2019. Some of the tips given are: Make sticky notes for the formulae and important points. Understand and learn the requisite equations. Note them down as well for revision. Ensure all subjects are given equal time for learning and equal weighting. Dont neglect any subject just because you are not strong in it and dont study one subject because you are good at it. Practice is important. So test yourself at the end of each chapter. Once the syllabus is completed, start with compete test papers, mock tests, and previous year papers. Try and time each test so that you get used to the actual exam scenario. Ensure you adhere to the exam guidelines every time you write a mock test. Since there is no negative marking, candidates can attempt all questions without fear of being penalized. Online Test Series portal for JEE & NEET 1308, Rupa Solitaire, Millenium Business Park, Mahape, Navi Mumbai. 1308, Rupa Solitaire, Millenium Business Park, Mahape, Navi Mumbai. This release was published on openPR. Permanent link to this press release: Copy Please set a link in the press area of your homepage to this press release on openPR. openPR disclaims liability for any content contained in this release. Biometrics Market Advancement Analysis to 2024 With Top Industry Players Lockheed Martin, IDEMIA, NEC Corporation, PRADOTEC Corporation, 3M Cogent Biometrics Market https://bit.ly/2fY80Dr https://bit.ly/2sufPDi https://bit.ly/28NU5bp www.gminsights.com North America biometrics market is expected to account for more than 30% share till 2024. Rising demand from government & security sector in U.S. coupled with the presence of major industry participants will escalate the industry growth. Moreover, favorable regulatory landscape in the U.S will help in fostering the industry demand. Asia Pacific is poised to grow at the highest CAGR owing to various government initiatives in the countries including China and India. National enrollment program (UIDAI Aadhar) in India, and China Resident Identity Card (CRIC) are among the implementation examples across the region.Get More Details on This Report by Requesting A Sample Copy @The Major Players Operating in the Market-1. 3M Cogent2. BIO-key International, Inc.3. CMI - Communications & Management Institute4. David-Link Fingerprint USA Corp.5. EyeVerify6. FaceFirst, Inc.7. Green Bit Spa8. Iris ID Systems9. Lockheed Martin10. IDEMIA11. NEC Corporation12. PRADOTEC Corporation13. Smartmatic14. VIRDI15. ZKTeco IncIndustry players focus on technological advancements and new product launches to cater to the customer requirements. Benefits offered including provision of precise and accurate validation as compared to traditional validation methods such as PINs and ID cards, are anticipated to increase the industry penetration across the globe till 2024.Make an Inquiry About this Report @Increased smartphone penetration coupled with expansion of consumer electronics will favor the biometrics market share over the forecast timeframe. In addition, rising investment in military & defense due to authentication concerns is anticipated to offer high growth potential. Multimodal biometrics system is an emerging trend in public and private work space for stringent attendance recording purposes. However, high implementation cost and stored data uncertainty may hamper industry growth over the forecast timeframe.Biometrics Market by Application: -1. Government2. Defense services3. Banking & finance4. Consumer electronics5. Healthcare6. Transport/Visa/LogisticsNon-AFIS will account for the highest biometrics market share, surpassing USD 18 billion till 2024. This can be attributed to its high usage in various applications which include cashless vending and workforce management. Moreover, it finds use in various public areas that assure keyless entry and efficient security. Iris recognition will exhibit over 20% CAGR owing to wide integration of iris scanners mainly in smartphones.Browse Full Report:Benefits such as unauthorized vehicle use detection, reduction of overtime expenses, and identification of billing anomalies will support the transportation & logistics segment growth from 2017 to 2024. Banking & finance applications will benefit from the rising demand from various financial institutions for precise authentication and streamlining of operations.News: - In July 2017, Iris ID partnered with a Chinese medicine producer, Tongrentang. This partnership will escalate the utilization of the companys iris scanners by all the employees of Tongrentang. In November 2016, Bio Key International signed an agreement with Shinden Hightex Corporation for selling the companys Compact fingerprint readers product line in Asia to serve the demand for convenient online security in Asia Pacific.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: Blow Molding Machinery Market Analysis Report, Regional Outlook - Europe, North America, Central America, South America, Asia Pacific and Middle East & Africa Blow Molding Machinery https://www.adroitmarketresearch.com/contacts/request-sample/401 https://www.adroitmarketresearch.com/contacts/enquiry-before-buying/401 Adroit Market Research has announced the addition of the Global Blow Molding Machinery Market Size Status and Forecast 2025, The report classifies the global Blow Molding Machinery 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 Blow Molding Machinery Speaker market, analyzes and researches the Blow Molding Machinery Speaker development status and forecast in Europe, North America, Central America, South America, Asia Pacific and Middle East & Africa.Industry of blow molding machinery manufacturing the equipment used for making hollow products of plastic involves automotive parts and plastic bottles. The factors that are responsible for the growth of blow molding machinery market are investment in the industrial machinery, and value for the downstream due to the improvement in financial conditions. Growth of the blow molding machine market is restricted because of increase in investment for the industrial machinery and equipment and downstream which is increasing the capacity.Request a sample copy:Drivers that are playing major role in the growth of blow molding machine market are increase in the industry of e-commerce worldwide. Increase in the companies of e-commerce, requirement for the packaging is increasing which is fueling the growth of packaging machinery. E-retail is anticipated to be the best channel for sales of the pharmaceutical and goods for customer are increasing the blow molding machine market over the forecast period. In addition, it is projected that the value for packaging of micro-flute and white-top corrugated board will rise over the forecast period because of high durability and flexural strength. Increase in the requirement of consumer for the fast delivery has fueled the value for efficient materials of packaging, which will enhance the growth of blow molding machine market globally in the coming years.The global blow molding machinery market trends that are getting popularity is on using the 3D printers in blow molding. This step mostly separates the procedures of fusing and printing the structure for making the procedure of blow molding easier and energy efficient. These techniques uses liquid ink which is obtained from the metal powder. Using 3D printer in the plastic molding offers manufacturer a prototype on comparing the actual product molding which may hamper the growth of global blow molding machinery market over the forecast period.Use of components of plastic for constructing the bridges, pipelines and buildings widely will boost in increasing the value of global blow molding machinery market in the coming years. Increase in the projects of construction in the developed and developing regions to develop the infrastructure of dams, bridges and roads which needs large amount of parts of plastic like piping systems of polyvinyl chloride will drive the demand for blow molding machinery market. Enlargement of industry of construction in the Asian countries in terms of revenue will help in surging the global blow molding machinery market.Global blow molding machinery market is segmented into product, technology, application and region. On the basis of product, blow molding machine market is divided into PVC, polypropylene, polyethylene, acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, polystyrene, PET and more. Based on technology, market is divided into extrusion blow molding, compound blow molding, injection blow molding and stretch blow molding. On considering the application, blow molding machine market is divided into construction & building, transport & automotive, packaging, medical, electronics & consumables and more.Key Segments in the Global Blow Molding Machinery Market are-By Product, market is segmented into:PVCPolypropylenePolyethyleneAcrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene (ABS)PolystyrenePETOthersBy Technology, market is segmented into:Extrusion Blow MoldingCompound Blow MoldingInjection Blow MoldingStretch Blow MoldingBy Application, market is segmented into:Construction & BuildingTransport & AutomotivePackagingMedicalElectronics & ConsumablesOthersGeographically, regions involved in the development of blow molding machine market size are Europe, North America, Central America, South America, Asia Pacific and Middle East & Africa. Asia Pacific is the region which holds largest blow molding machinery market share and is propelled to increase in the coming years.What to expect from the Global Blow Molding Machinery Market report?- Predictions of future made for this market during the forecast period.- Information on the current technologies, trends, devices, procedures, and products in the industry.- Detailed analysis of the market segmentation, depending on the types, devices, and products.- Government regulations and economic factors affecting the growth of the market.- An insight into the leading manufacturers.- Regional demographics of the market.Who should buy this report?- Venture capitalists, Investors, financial institutions, Analysts, Government organizations, regulatory authorities, policymakers ,researchers, strategy managers, and academic institutions looking for insights into the market to determine future strategiesElse place an Inquire before Purchase Blow Molding Machinery Market Size, Status and Forecast 2025:About Adroit Market Research:Adroit Market Research provide quantified B2B research on numerous opportunistic markets, and offer customized research reports, consulting services, and syndicate research reports. We assist our clients to strategize business decisions and attain sustainable growth in their respective domain. Additionally, we support them with their revenue planning, marketing strategies, and assist them to make decisions before the competition so that they remain ahead of the curve.Ryan JohnsonAdroit Market Research3131 McKinney Ave #600Dallas, TX 75204Tel: +1-214-884-6068Email: sales@adroitmarketresearch.com Medical Bionics Market Research Report by Leading Key Players - Medtronic, Edwards Lifesciences, Ekso Bionics Holdings, Otto Bock Holdings GmbH & Co. KG https://www.psmarketresearch.com/market-analysis/medical-bionics-market https://www.psmarketresearch.com/market-analysis/medical-bionics-market/report-sample https://www.psmarketresearch.com/send-enquiry?enquiry-url=medical-bionics-market https://www.psmarketresearch.com Global medical bionics market is forecasted to generate a revenue of $28.1 billion by 2023, according to P&S Market Research.The market is mainly driven by increasing pool of geriatric population and associated organ failures, rising number of accidents and injuries leading to amputations, and increasing number of people opting for organ transplants.Access Detailed Report Summary:The different types of products available in the medical bionics market are heart, neural/brain, ear, orthopedic, vision/eye and other bionics. Among these, heart bionics are expected to attain the largest share in the market, with more than 40.0% contribution in 2017. This leading position of the category is attributed to increasing cardiac problems globally. For instance, an estimated 17.7 million people died from cardiovascular diseases in 2015, representing 31% of all global deaths. Of these deaths, an estimated 7.4 million were due to coronary heart disease and 6.7 million were due to stroke.Request to Get the Sample Pages at:Diabetes is one of the major causes of cardiac problems, resulting in the growth of the medical bionics industry in the region. According to Asian Diabetes Prevention Initiative (ADPI), an education website on diabetes, 60% of diabetics in the world live in Asia. It is also expected that without intervention, both China and India together will have almost half a billion of population suffering from diabetes, by 2030.Make Enquiry Before Buying the Report:In September 2017, Orthofix International N.V. received United States Food and Drug Administration (USFDA) and European Conformite Europeene (CE) Mark approval for next generation CervicalStim and SpinalStim bone growth stimulators. These devices are used for the natural body-healing process and provide non-invasive treatment for post-operative spinal fusion.Also, in the same month, Cochlear Ltd. launched Baha SoundArc, a new hearing solution for people who live with conductive hearing loss, mixed hearing loss, or single-sided sensorineural deafness (SSD). It is a non-surgical behind-the-head band that works together with all of Cochlears Baha 5 sound processors.Some of the other key players operating in the medical bionics market are Medtronic plc, Edwards Lifesciences Corporation, Ekso Bionics Holdings Inc., Retina Implant AG, and Otto Bock Holdings GmbH & Co. KG.GLOBAL MEDICAL BIONICS MARKET SEGMENTATIONMarket Segmentation by Product Hearto Pacemaker Implantable cardiac pacemaker External pacemakero Ventricular assist device (VAD) Left VAD Right VADo Artificial heart valves Mechanical heart valves Tissue heart valveso Total artificial heart Neural/Braino Spinal cord stimulators (SCSs)o Deep brain stimulators (DBSs)o Transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS)o Sacral nerve stimulators (SNSs)o Vagus nerve stimulators (VNSs)o Others (Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and transcranial electrical stimulation (TES)) Earo Cochlear implantso Bone anchored hearing systemso Auditory brainstem implants Orthopedico Lower limb Bionic foot Bionic Kneeo Upper limbo Exoskeleton Vision/Eye Others (Artificial kidneys, bio-lungs, and artificial pancreas)Market Segmentation by Fixation Type Implantable Non-implantableMarket Segmentation by Geography North America Medical Bionics Marketo By Producto By Fixation Typeo By Country U.S. and Canada Europe Medical Bionics Marketo By Producto By Fixation Typeo By Country Germany, U.K., France, Italy, Spain, and Rest of Europe Asia-Pacific (APAC) Medical Bionics Marketo By Producto By Fixation Typeo By Country Japan, China, India, and Rest of APAC Rest of World (RoW) Medical Bionics Marketo By Producto By Fixation Typeo By Country Brazil, Mexico, and Rest of RoWAbout P&S IntelligenceP&S Intelligence, a brand of P&S Market Research, is a provider of market research and consulting services catering to the market information needs of burgeoning industries across the world. Providing the plinth of market intelligence, P&S as an enterprising research and consulting company, believes in providing thorough landscape analyses on the ever-changing market scenario, to empower companies to make informed decisions and base their business strategies with astuteness.Contact:P&S IntelligenceToll-free: +1-888-778-7886 (USA/Canada)International: +1-347-960-6455Email: enquiry@psmarketresearch.comWeb: Insurance Technology Global Market 2018 Top Key Players Xchanging, Insurance Technology Services, Patriot Technology Solutions, TechInsurance, TIA Technology and Forecast to 2025 Insurance Technology Market https://www.wiseguyreports.com/sample-request/3608503-global-insurance-technology-market-size-status-and-forecast-2018-2025 https://www.wiseguyreports.com/reports/3608503-global-insurance-technology-market-size-status-and-forecast-2018-2025 www.wiseguyreports.com Global Insurance Technology MarketWiseGuyRerports.com Presents Global Insurance Technology Market Size, Status and Forecast 2018-2025 New Document to its Studies Database. The Report Contain 97 Pages With Detailed Analysis.DescriptionThis report focuses on the global Insurance Technology status, future forecast, growth opportunity, key market and key players. The study objectives are to present the Insurance Technology development in United States, Europe and China.The key players covered in this studyXchangingInsurance Technology ServicesPatriot Technology SolutionsTechInsuranceTIA TechnologySeibelsDXC TechnologyMarias Technologymsg lifeHubioVentivMajescoGet sample Report @Market segment by Type, the product can be split intoOn-PremiseCloudMarket segment by Application, split intoAuto InsuranceHealth InsuranceLife InsuranceOthersMarket segment by Regions/Countries, this report coversUnited StatesEuropeChinaJapanSoutheast AsiaIndiaCentral & South AmericaComplete Report Details @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 Insurance Technology Market Size Growth Rate by Type (2013-2025)1.4.2 On-Premise1.4.3 Cloud1.5 Market by Application1.5.1 Global Insurance Technology Market Share by Application (2013-2025)1.5.2 Auto Insurance1.5.3 Health Insurance1.5.4 Life Insurance1.5.5 Others1.6 Study Objectives1.7 Years Considered..12 International Players Profiles12.1 Xchanging12.1.1 Xchanging Company Details12.1.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.1.3 Insurance Technology Introduction12.1.4 Xchanging Revenue in Insurance Technology Business (2013-2018)12.1.5 Xchanging Recent Development12.2 Insurance Technology Services12.2.1 Insurance Technology Services Company Details12.2.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.2.3 Insurance Technology Introduction12.2.4 Insurance Technology Services Revenue in Insurance Technology Business (2013-2018)12.2.5 Insurance Technology Services Recent Development12.3 Patriot Technology Solutions12.3.1 Patriot Technology Solutions Company Details12.3.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.3.3 Insurance Technology Introduction12.3.4 Patriot Technology Solutions Revenue in Insurance Technology Business (2013-2018)12.3.5 Patriot Technology Solutions Recent Development12.4 TechInsurance12.4.1 TechInsurance Company Details12.4.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.4.3 Insurance Technology Introduction12.4.4 TechInsurance Revenue in Insurance Technology Business (2013-2018)12.4.5 TechInsurance Recent Development12.5 TIA Technology12.5.1 TIA Technology Company Details12.5.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.5.3 Insurance Technology Introduction12.5.4 TIA Technology Revenue in Insurance Technology Business (2013-2018)12.5.5 TIA Technology Recent Development12.6 Seibels12.6.1 Seibels Company Details12.6.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.6.3 Insurance Technology Introduction12.6.4 Seibels Revenue in Insurance Technology Business (2013-2018)12.6.5 Seibels Recent Development12.7 DXC Technology12.7.1 DXC Technology Company Details12.7.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.7.3 Insurance Technology Introduction12.7.4 DXC Technology Revenue in Insurance Technology Business (2013-2018)12.7.5 DXC Technology Recent Development12.8 Marias Technology12.8.1 Marias Technology Company Details12.8.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.8.3 Insurance Technology Introduction12.8.4 Marias Technology Revenue in Insurance Technology Business (2013-2018)12.8.5 Marias Technology Recent Development..CONTINUEDAbout UsWise Guy Reports is part of the Wise Guy Consultants Pvt. Ltd. and offers premium progressive statistical surveying, Industry 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.NORAH TRENTPartner Relations & Marketing Managersales@wiseguyreports.comPh: +1-646-845-9349 (US)Ph: +44 208 133 9349 (UK) Global Retail E-Commerce Packaging Market to 2026| DS Smith, Pregis, Georgia-Pacific, International Paper Company, Mondi, Sealed Air Corporation, 3M Co https://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=1834646 https://www.researchmoz.us/retail-e-commerce-packaging-market-global-industry-analysis-2012-2016-and-opportunity-assessment-2017-2026-report.html/toc https://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=E&repid=1834646 https://marketinfo247.wordpress.com/ Albany, NY, 19th December : Recent research and the current scenario as well as future market potential of "Retail E-Commerce Packaging Market: Global Industry Analysis (2012-2016) and Opportunity Assessment (2017-2026)" globally.Retail e-Commerce packaging involves packaging products such as protective packaging (bubble wraps, air pillows, and loose fill peanuts), boxes (corrugated and folding cartons), labels, tapes etc. These products are typically used as secondary packaging to protect the packaged contents from damage during transportation activities.Get PDF for more Professional and Technical insights @E-commerce sector has been expanding at an alarming rate. The latest trend of cross border online shopping particularly in emerging regional markets, availability of various products, increasing demand for specialized and novel products have boosted the cross border online shopping and hence the overall e-commerce market which in turn has pushed the demand for retail e-commerce packaging. New packaging designs have been developed with a view to cater individual demands of the population keeping in mind various environmental concerns. This has contributed to the growth of the global retail e-commerce packaging market.The analytical research study on global retail e-commerce packaging market by Future Market Insights has covered various market scenarios adhering to retail e-commerce packaging adoption and growth. The research study includes analysis on various parameters and their changing dynamics across key regions in the globe thus presenting a holistic view of the global retail e-commerce packaging market. According to Future Market Insights, the global retail e-commerce packaging market is projected to expand at a steady CAGR. In 2017, the global market is valued at more than US$ 13 Bn is estimated to reach a valuation of around US$ 21.4 Bn by the end of the year of assessment (2026).Boxes Reflected Higher Market Value in 2017; However, Protective Packaging to Gain High Traction in the Years to FollowBoxes segment in the product type category is valued at a higher estimation than other product type segments. This segment dominated the global market since past years. However, protective packaging segment is anticipated to grow at a higher rate and is poised to lead the global market in the years to come. The protective packaging segment is expected to reach a valuation higher than boxes segment by the end of the year of assessment growing at a high CAGR of 6.3% throughout the period of forecast. The labels segment has also showcased higher adoption and is projected to rise at a significant growth rate during the said period.View Complete TOC with tables & Figures @Third Party Fulfilment and Logistics Companies to be Favourable for the Growth of the Retail E-Commerce Packaging MarketThird party fulfilment and logistics companies segment is highly lucrative and the largest segment. It is predicted to grow at a moderate growth rate during the period of assessment and is estimated to reach a market valuation of more than US$ 14 Bn by the end of the year of assessment (2026). The third party fulfilment and logistics companies segment led the global market in 2017 and is likely to continue with this trend throughout the forecast period. On the other hand, the specialty retailers is the fastest growing segment reflecting a high CAGR of 6.6% throughout the period of assessment.Competitor AnalysisThe research report on global retail e-commerce packaging market covers intelligence on various companies participating in the market. Their facts such as company overview, key strategies, SWOT analysis and key financials is included in this section. Major companies such as DS Smith Plc., Pregis Corporation, Georgia-Pacific LLC, International Paper Company, Mondi plc., Sealed Air Corporation, 3M Co., WestRock Company, Intertape Polymer Group and Dynaflex Private Limited are profiled in this research report.Table Of Content1. Global Outlook2. Global Retail e-Commerce Packaging Market - Executive Summary3. Global Retail e-Commerce Packaging Market Overview3.1. Introduction3.1.1. Global Retail e-Commerce Packaging Market Taxonomy3.1.2. Global Retail e-Commerce Packaging Market Definition3.2. Global Retail e-Commerce Packaging Market Size (US$ Mn) and Forecast, 2012-20263.2.1. Global Retail e-Commerce Packaging Market Y-o-Y Growth3.3. Global Retail e-Commerce Packaging Market Dynamics3.4. Supply ChainMake An Enquiry @3.5. Cost Structure3.6. Pricing Analysis3.7. Raw Material Sourcing Strategy and Analysis3.8. Service Provider List3.9. Key Participants Market Presence (Intensity Map) By RegionResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.Mr. Nachiket Ghumare,ResearchMoz,90 State Street, Albany NY, United States,Tel: +1-518-621-2074,USA-Canada Toll Free: 866-997-4948,Email: sales@researchmoz.us,Follow me on : Forage Seed Market Growth by Top Key Players - DowDuPont Inc., Monsanto Company, Land O Lakes Inc., Advanta Seed Ltd., BrettYoung Seeds Ltd., Royal Barenbrug Group, Imperial Seed Ltd. Forage Seed https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/insight/request-pdf/1462 https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/insight/request-customization/1462 The global forage seed market is anticipated to grow over the forecast period, owing to increasing demand for forage seeds from agriculture and animal rearing industries. Rising poultry, swine, and cattle population for meat production is expected to be a major factor contributing to market growth. According to data published by UN, in 2017, meat production was pegged at 262 million metric tons, which was an increase of 4 million metric tons over the previous year.Download PDF Brochure :Forage is relatively cheaper than most grain crops and therefore, farmers are increasingly focusing on adopting these. Forage is also used as a rotation crop, due to benefits associated with the use of these. The advantages include less disease in subsequent cereal crops, increased yields in subsequent crops, aid in improving soil quality, and reduces weed population thereby reducing the need for additional pesticide, fertilizers, and herbicide inputs in subsequent crop cycle.Market Dynamics:The quantity and quality of meat, eggs, and milk from livestock is directly dependent upon the nutrition provided to the animals. With increasing awareness regarding nutrient intake of animals in animal rearing, high quality forage is gaining popularity in livestock rearing. These factors coupled with a growing global population, changes in food consumption habits such as increasing consumption of meat products in emerging economies such as India, China and Indonesia are some of the key factors driving growth of the forage seed market.Market Outlook:- North America held the largest market share of the forage seed market, in terms of value in 2016. Market growth of this region is attributed to increasing demand for forage products, which is fuelled by the increasing livestock population for meat. According to the Department for Environment Food & Rural Affairs, animal feed production in the U.S. increased by 10% for sheep, 6.6% for cattle, and 3.7% for pigs in December 2017 compared to December 2016.- Asia Pacific is the fastest-growing region in the forage seeds market. China and India are the leading countries in the region, owing to increasing demand for meat products in the region. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), China is the major producer of pork meat with around 31.3 kg/capita pork meat produced in 2016, followed by poultry and beef.Key Market Players:Major players in the global forage seeds market include DowDuPont Inc., Monsanto Company, Land O Lakes Inc., Advanta Seed Ltd., BrettYoung Seeds Ltd., Royal Barenbrug Group, Imperial Seed Ltd., Allied Seed LLC, and Ampac Seed Company.Forage Seed Market - Market Taxonomy:On the basis of product type, forage seed market is segmented into:AlfalfaCloverChicoryRyegrassOthersOn the basis of livestock, forage seed market is segmented into:PoultryRuminantsSwineOthersRequest For Customization of Research Report: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 At 6% CAGR Vinyl Ester Market Forecasts $1.7bn by 2025 | Growth Opportunities By Major Key players Interplastic Corporation, Ashland, Showa Denko America, Hexion Inc., Scott Bader Co. Ltd Vinyl Ester Market https://www.gminsights.com/request-sample/detail/2992 https://www.gminsights.com/inquiry-before-buying/2992 https://www.gminsights.com/industry-analysis/vinyl-ester-market https://www.gminsights.com/industry-analysis/ethyleneamines-market https://www.gminsights.com http://technologymagazine.org Vinyl ester market will have a range of applications in the wind energy sector by 2025. Wind energy has been an essential source of renewable energy. As per the WindEurope estimates, the wind power share in the EUs total installed power capacity has augmented to 18% in 2017 from 6% in 2005. Wind energy has overtaken coal as the second largest form of power generation capacity in the EU in 2016. An upward trend in wind energy industry will encourage the overall market during the forecast span.Request for a sample of this research report @As compared to polyester, vinyl ester resins excel on various parameters; for instance, higher durability, superior heat resistance, low maintenance and high performance for extremely challenging environment. However, the overall market growth will be subjected to some restrains including high cost of production, lower shelf life of the product and regulations to lessen the VOC content of product, in the coming years.Company profiled in this report based on Business overview, Financial data, Product landscape, Strategic outlook & SWOT analysis:1. Swancor Renewable Energy Co., Ltd.2. Mechemco Industries - India3. Nivitex Fibreglass & Resins4. Polynt-Reichhold Group5. Aliancys6. Interplastic Corporation7. Ashland8. Sino Polymer Co., Ltd.9. Showa Denko America10. Hexion Inc.11. Scott Bader Co. Ltd12. DIC India LimitedVinyl Ester Market size will surpass USD 1.7 billion by 2025; according to a new research report by Global Market Insights, Inc. Growth trends in the shipbuilding sector will support the vinyl ester market growth in the next seven years. The product has a higher resistance to corrosive environments and chemicals than the unsaturated polyesters. Thus, vinyl ester resins and vinyl ester blended with polyester have been extensively used in the marine applications for producing efficient water-resistant barrier for boat hulls and other parts. The increasing mega-ship building projects present brighter outlook for the product demand in marine applications.Make an inquiry for purchasing this report @Novolac based product involves higher crosslinking density as compared to bisphenol A based resins. With this feature, the resin exhibits superior resistance to liquid environment and provides high resistance to penetration of chemicals into the matrix. Novolac vinyl ester segment is estimated to grow with a CAGR above 6% during the forecast span.Product By Applicationo Bisphenol A Pipes & Tanks Marine Wind Energy FGD & Precipitators Pulp & Paper Otherso Novolac Pipes & Tanks Marine Wind Energy FGD & Precipitators Pulp & Paper Otherso Brominated Fire Retardant Pipes & Tanks Marine Wind Energy FGD & Precipitators Pulp & Paper Otherso Others Pipes & Tanks Marine Wind Energy FGD & Precipitators Pulp & Paper OthersBy Application Pipes & Tanks Marine Wind Energy FGD & Precipitators Pulp & Paper OthersThe pipes & tanks was the largest area of applications in vinyl ester market in year 2017, with a share over 40%. The product has been highly demanded in high temperature formulations, including: chemical reactors and storage vessels. The product has also been used as topcoats for metal containers and in electro-refining tanks. The rising demand from corrosion-resistant pipes & tanks is projected to drive global market during the forecast span.Browse key industry insights from the report, Vinyl Ester Market Forecast, 2018 2025 in detail along with the table of contents:Asia Pacific led the overall vinyl ester market in 2017 and is expected to follow the similar trend by 2025. North America will observe growth with a CAGR close to 6%. Increasing disposable income on existing rich class individuals and increasing number of High Net Worth Individual (HNWI) will positively influence the demand for luxury goods in the region. Moreover, the recreational boating culture in the North American region is comparatively high which, in turn will drive the market demand for these marine applications in the region by 2025.Leading manufacturers in market have been: Swancor Holding, Ashland, Sino Polymer Co., Ltd., ALIANCYS AG, Showa Denko, Interplastic Corporation, etc. The industry has marked several price hikes in the recent decade on account of increase in the raw materials costs. For instance, AOC Aliancys declared a price hike of EUR 100 (or USD 113.98) per ton for its product range sold in Europe, India and The Middle East which was effective from September 2018.Browse Related Report :About Global Market Insights:Global Market Insights, Inc., headquartered in Delaware, U.S., is a global market research and consulting service provider; offering syndicated and custom research reports along with growth consulting services. Our business intelligence and industry research reports offer clients with penetrative insights and actionable market data specially designed and presented to aid strategic decision making. These exhaustive reports are designed via a proprietary research methodology and are available for key industries such as chemicals, advanced materials, technology, renewable energy and biotechnology.Contact Us:Arun HegdeCorporate Sales, USAGlobal Market Insights, Inc.Phone: 1-302-846-7766Toll Free: 1-888-689-0688Email: sales@gminsights.comWeb:Blog: Global Mobile Phone Accessories Packaging Market Size & Trends 2018:Sonoco Products Company, Dordan Manufacturing Co., Hip Lik Packaging Products Corp India Private Limited, Panic Plastics, Inc. https://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=1834649 https://www.researchmoz.us/mobile-phone-accessories-packaging-market-global-industry-analysis-2012-2016-and-opportunity-assessment-2017-2027-report.html/toc https://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=E&repid=1834649 http://bit.ly/1TBmnVG https://studyanalyst.blogspot.in ResearchMoz include new market research report "Mobile Phone Accessories Packaging Market: Global Industry Analysis (2012-2016) and Opportunity Assessment (2017-2027)" to its huge collection of research reports.The global market for mobile phone accessories was valued at more than US$ 66 Bn in 2016. APEJ and North America market are characterised by a strong demand for mobile phone accessories, wherein consumers are demanding high end and exclusive range of innovative products. Among application types, chargers hold the highest market share in the global mobile phone accessories market followed by protective covers and batteries. The boom in the smartphone industry and a growing trend of online shopping is supporting the rising demand for mobile phone accessories. APEJ is the dominating regional market for mobile phone accessories packaging, accounting for an estimated market share of more than 50% in 2017 and is expected to witness an impressive gain of 600 BPS in 2027 over 2017.To Download Sample Report With TOC:Cost-effective packaging of mobile phone accessories and increasing smartphone adoption are the main factors fuelling the growth of the global mobile phone accessories packaging marketMobile phone accessories are typically packed in folding cartons and clear view boxes due to their characteristics to facilitate small volumes and customised printing. Thermoformed blisters and clamshells are also in trend due to their attractive and effective packaging. Manufacturers are inclining towards designing and delivering plastic thermoformed products. In the recent years it has been observed that there is a high adoption of smartphones across various regions owing to the proliferation of mid-range and low-range smartphones. Increasing demand for smartphones is positively impacting the demand for accessories as well. Newer and smarter accessories are currently trending the global market this is likely to continue in the coming years. This will directly boost the demand for mobile phone accessories packaging.Consumers are constantly inclining towards multi-brand stores that offer products from multiple brands at one place. Multi-brand stores make it convenient for consumers as it becomes easy to compare products appearance, features and pricing on the spot.Purchasing mobile accessories from organised multi-brand stores is an emerging trend, especially for purchasing power banks and headphones. E-commerce is further enhancing the demand for electronic accessories in the global market. Increase in the market demand for mobile phone accessories is expected to fuel revenue growth of the packaging of mobile phone accessories.Complete table of content is available at:The penetration of e-commerce is rising rapidly. The sales through e-commerce has increased in recent years due to a growing preference for this channel among consumers. Online shopping of products have increased across the globe due to attractive offers provided by e-commerce retailers and the convenience offered by the online platform. Online purchasing of mobile phones and accessories have been increased manifold in the recent past. Some of the mobile phone companies are selling their products through their website or mobile applications. E-commerce has augmented the sales of mobile phones and mobile phone accessories to a significant extent, thereby boosting global market demand for mobile phone accessories packaging.mobile phone accessories packaging marketBlister packs segment is estimated to represent highest incremental growth opportunity over the forecast periodBlister packs segment is anticipated to account for nearly 30% market value share in 2017, and is anticipated to rise further by 190 BPS in 2027. In terms of CAGR, the blister packs segment is expected to be the most attractive packaging type segment during the forecast period.Make An Enquiry @About ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.For More Information Kindly Contact:ResearchMozMr. Nachiket Ghumare,Tel: +1-518-621-2074USA-Canada Toll Free: 866-997-4948Email: sales@researchmoz.usFollow us on LinkedIn @Blog: Car Lube Container Market size, Analytical Overview, Growth factors, Demand and trends forecast to 2027 https://www.marketresearchreports.biz/sample/sample/13552 https://www.marketresearchreports.biz/sample/toc/13552 https://www.marketresearchreports.biz/checkout?rep_id=13552&licType=S http://www.marketresearchreports.biz/ The study of the "Car Lube Container Market: Global Industry Analysis 2012-2016 and Opportunity Assessment 2017-2027" provides the market size information and market trends along with the factors and parameters impacting it in both short and long term.The objectives of this study are as follows: To define, describe, and forecast the " Car Lube Container " market by type, application, component, delivery model, end user, and region To provide detailed information regarding major factors influencing market growth (drivers, restraints, opportunities, and industry-specific challenges) To analyze micromarkets with respect to individual growth trends, prospects, and contributions to the overall market To analyze opportunities in the market for stakeholders and provide details of the competitive landscape for market leaders To forecast the market size of market segments with respect to the four key regions: North America, Europe, Asia, and the Rest of the World (RoW) To strategically profile the key players and comprehensively analyze their product portfolios, market positions, and core competenciesGet Sample Copy Of This Report @The automobile industry plays a crucial role in the overall business cycle development of industrial growth. The automobile industry to some extent is highly correlated with the supply of lubricant. Of it, one such form of lubricant packaging which is predominantly used to suffice the demand of lubes are containers which are commonly known as cans. Traditionally metal cans were mostly used as a form of packaging which over the last decade have been replaced by plastic, containers, pails, drums, totes, etc. As lubricant market is witnessing a steady year on year growth of more than 5%, the need for a smart and efficient form of packaging is warranted. Also, advancements which are technological in nature are related to development and innovation and have led to change in design to make it more cost effective for plastic packaging of car lube container. HDPE and PET are primarily used for car lube containers owing to higher durability and cost- efficiency as compared to other plastic materials. With the rising purchasing power capacity of middle-income household, the number of new car purchased have increased which has directly pushed the demand of lubricant, subsequently the need for lubricant packaging. In terms of consumption, the car lube container market in Asia- Pacific excluding Japan region is projected to register a comparatively higher volume than the other regions, while in terms of production North America and Western Europe market are expected to dominant the global car lube container market over the forecast period.Car Lube Container Market - Market Dynamics:Companies such as RPC Promens, Industrial Plenmeller and other leading car lube manufacturers have enhanced the convenience of its lube container by adding a flexible spout that is used as a dispensing mechanism. This has created a mass awareness among the car lube container manufacturer, who are able to provide ease to the user, driving product penetration into the untapped market.Some of the factors expected to fuel the demand for car lube container markets include growing demand in the steel industry which is an important component for automobile industry. Secondly, technological advancement in production of automobile industry results in cost- efficiency, ultimately triggering a high demand for lubricant packaging products. The emerging economies such as India, China, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, and Argentina are anticipated to be the key contributing region in car lube container packaging. Apart from this the factors which are expected to hamper the production of car lube container are stringent legislative regulation with regards to the use of plastic material for packaging.Request For TOC @Car Lube Container Market - Market Segmentation:Global Car Lube Container market is segmented on the basis of material type and lubricant type.On the basis of material type, the global car lube container market is segmented into, metal and plastic. The metal segment is further sub-segmented into tins and aluminum, and the plastic segment is sub-segmented into polyethylene terephthalate (PET), high-density polyethylene (HDPE), polyvinylchloride (PVC), polypropylene (PP) and polystyrene (PS).On the basis of lubricant type, the global car lube container market is segmented into process oils, transmission & hydraulic fluids, general industrial oil, gear oil, greases, etc.Car Lube Container Market - Regional Outlook: North America Latin America Eastern Europe Western Europe Asia Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ) Middle East & Africa (MEA) JapanDeveloping regions such as Asia Pacific and the Middle East are expected to witness a higher CAGR compared to other regions across the globe. Countries such as India, China, U.A.E., and Saudi Arabia are the key contributions for car lube container. On the other hand region of North America are among the leading regions for consumption of car lube container. Moreover, the demand for car lube packaging are anticipated to witness a strong growth in all seven regions, over the forecast period.Global Car Lube Container Market - key Players:Some of the players operating in the global car lube container market include Balmier Lawrie & Co. Ltd., Mold Tek Packaging, RPS Promens, Komal Packaging, and Bright Containers.MRR.BIZ has been compiled in-depth market research data in the report after exhaustive primary and secondary research. Our team of able, experienced in-house analysts has collated the information through personal interviews and study of industry databases, journals, and reputable paid sources.The report provides the following information: Tailwinds and headwinds molding the markets trajectory Market segments based on products, technology, and applications Prospects of each segment Overall current and possible future size of the market Growth pace of the market Competitive landscape and key players strategiesThe main aim of the report is to: Enable key stakeholders in the market bet right on it Understand the opportunities and pitfalls awaiting them Assess the overall growth scope in the near term Strategize effectively with respect to production and distributionMRR.BIZ is a leading provider of strategic market research. Our vast repository consists research reports, data books, company profiles, and regional market data sheets. We regularly update the data and analysis of a wide-ranging products and services around the world. As readers, you will have access to the latest information on almost 300 industries and their sub-segments. Both large Fortune 500 companies and SMEs have found those useful. This is because we customize our offerings keeping in mind the specific requirements of our clients.Pre Book Report @About UsMarketResearchReports.biz is the most comprehensive collection of market research reports. MarketResearchReports.Biz services are specially designed to save time and money for our clients. We are a one stop solution for all your research needs, our main offerings are syndicated research reports, custom research, subscription access and consulting services. We serve all sizes and types of companies spanning across various industries.Contact UsMr. NachiketState Tower90 Sate Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-621-2074Website:E: sales@marketresearchreports.biz Global Purging Compound Market growth Opportunities $600mn By Top Key Vendors Chem-Trend, DuPont, 3M, The Dow Chemical Company Chem-Trend, DuPont, 3M, The Dow Chemical Company, Clariant, Ultra Clean Technology to 2018-2024 Purging Compound https://www.gminsights.com/request-sample/detail/2145 https://www.gminsights.com/inquiry-before-buying/2145 https://www.gminsights.com/industry-analysis/purging-compound-market https://www.gminsights.com http://technologymagazine.org Purging Compound Market in North America will register a grow over 7.5% up to 2024. This growth is mainly accredited to the large base of plastic processing units in the region. Growing demand for plastics processing equipment will support product penetration.Request for a sample of this research report @Automotive industry accounts for over 20% of the industry share in 2016. Automotive industry expansion along with rapidly increasing polymer usage across the various products has positively influenced demand.Automotive will generate more than USD 120 million in revenue by 2024. Widespread adoption of lightweight and sustainable plastic materials in the form of equipment, films and fasteners components will propel global purging compound market growth. Numerous automakers are undertaking steps to accommodate increasing senior driver population by including safety features. These safety features include enhanced safety belt designs using plastics and reduced package space.Global Purging Compound Market, By Process Extrusion Injection molding Blow moldingGlobal Purging Compound Market, By Product Mechanical purging Chemical purging/ foaming purgingGlobal Purging Compound Market, By Form Liquid Powder GranulesGlobal Purging Compound Market, By End-Use Automotive Healthcare Consumer goods Electronics Packaging Custom moldingGlobal Purging Compound Market size is estimated to exceed USD 600 million by 2024; according to a new research report by Global Market Insights, Inc. Potential applications in custom molding, packaging, consumer goods and automotive industry will propel global purging compound market growth. Reduced machine downtime, lower raw material wastage along with low cleaning cost are the key properties driving industry demand.Company profiled in this report based on Business overview, Financial data, Product landscape, Strategic outlook & SWOT analysis:1. Asahi Kasei Plastics North America, Inc.2. VELOX, An IMCD company3. Dyna-Purge4. Chem-Trend5. DuPont6. 3M7. Purgex Purging Compounds | Neutrex, Inc.8. Magna.9. RapidPurge10. REEDY Chemical Foam & Specialty Additives11. Calsak Plastics12. Formosa Plastics Group13. The Dow Chemical Company14. Daicel America Holdings, Inc.15. Kuraray America, Inc.16. Clariant17. Ultra Clean Technology18. Polyplast19. Slide Products Inc.Make an inquiry for purchasing this report @Purging compound are extensively used in injection molding process due to increasing demand for manufacturing of bulk quantities of plastic components. High usage of injection molding boosts production processes and assures high accuracy in the development of engineering components.Effective plastic resin & contamination removal particularly in complicated machinery parts coupled with improved quality & safety are among key factors driving product penetration. Optimum machinery maintenance along with prevention from material mixture during feedstock replacement will support industry demand.Electronics segment accounted nearly 10% of the global demand in 2016. Increasing R&D spending along with technological advancements to improve machinery efficiency will drive industry growth. Growing number of manufacturing facilities in China, India and Brazil are key factors stimulating demand.Increasing preference for cost-effective scrap removal solutions to regulate carbon deposition and prevent corrosion has positively driven product penetration. However, raw material price volatility due to changing crude oil prices are key factors impacting purging compound market price trend globally.Browse key industry insights report, Global Purging Compound Market in detail along with the table of contents:Mechanical purging was valued over USD 210 million in 2016 owing to rising demand for plastic processing units. These compounds are highly competent and safe to use for polymer deposit removal by using high viscosity plastics to mechanically scrub the contaminants.Extensive usage of liquid form for thermoplastics removal will boost the global purging compound market. The form is very effective for resin-to-resin and colour-to-colour transformations to provide easy, quick, safe and cost-effective processing of purges.Global purging compound market is fragmented with large presence of manufacturers and distributors across the globe. These companies have implemented numerous growth strategies including product launches, mergers & acquisitions, partnerships, joint ventures, innovation and technological developments to strengthen market foothold. Some of the key players are VELOX GmbH, Asahi Kasei Corporation, Dyna-Purge, E. I. Du Pont de Nemours and Chem-Trend LP.About Global Market Insights:Global Market Insights, Inc., headquartered in Delaware, U.S., is a global market research and consulting service provider; offering syndicated and custom research reports along with growth consulting services. Our business intelligence and industry research reports offer clients with penetrative insights and actionable market data specially designed and presented to aid strategic decision making. These exhaustive reports are designed via a proprietary research methodology and are available for key industries such as chemicals, advanced materials, technology, renewable energy and biotechnology.Contact Us:Arun HegdeCorporate Sales, USAGlobal Market Insights, Inc.Phone: 1-302-846-7766Toll Free: 1-888-689-0688Email: sales@gminsights.comWeb:Blog: Food Technology Market Increasing Demand with leading players, Revenue Growth, Industry Share, Forecast 2028 https://www.marketresearchreports.biz/sample/sample/12533 https://www.marketresearchreports.biz/sample/toc/12533 https://www.marketresearchreports.biz/checkout?rep_id=12533&licType=S http://www.marketresearchreports.biz/ The study of the "Food Technology Market - Global Industry Trend Analysis 2013 to 2017 and Forecast 2018 - 2028" provides the market size information and market trends along with the factors and parameters impacting it in both short and long term.The objectives of this study are as follows: To define, describe, and forecast the " Food Technology " market by type, application, component, delivery model, end user, and region To provide detailed information regarding major factors influencing market growth (drivers, restraints, opportunities, and industry-specific challenges) To analyze micromarkets with respect to individual growth trends, prospects, and contributions to the overall market To analyze opportunities in the market for stakeholders and provide details of the competitive landscape for market leaders To forecast the market size of market segments with respect to the four key regions: North America, Europe, Asia, and the Rest of the World (RoW) To strategically profile the key players and comprehensively analyze their product portfolios, market positions, and core competenciesGet Sample Copy Of This Report @Food Technology Market: OverviewEmerging food technology is innovating the way local restaurant food is sourced and distributed and creating growth opportunities for food technology or online delivery platforms as well internet kitchen in the market. This advancement in food technology or online delivery platforms is generating lots of opportunities for restaurants in the food ordering industry. Consumers nowadays prefer ordering their favorite meal through online platforms, with unlimited access to the number of restaurants. Consumers also have the convenience of selection, customization and can order food from the restaurants based on ratings and reviews. Due to the superior ease of accessibility of online food delivering platforms, the food technology market is growing at a faster pace. The food technology web platforms are highly adopted by consumers and are proliferating due to the increase in usage of smartphones and the internet. These food technology platforms help restaurants in achieving customer reach and to earn additional revenue as well as improve their resource utilization. Food technology is the listing platform that helps restaurants in increasing the awareness about the business. With the changing lifestyle and high standard of living, consumers are mainly dependent on services that help them in saving time and offer convenience simultaneously. The trends of food delivery have transformed profoundly, particularly in the ways many restaurants and food chains are generating revenue. The advertisement for food technology apps such as online food ordering and online grocery apps is an upcoming method of generating revenue. The food technology companies are offering restaurants with a large customer traffic and in exchange of that the food technology companies take the transactional fee on ordering food online through the restaurants on their application, which helps them to increase their revenue.Food Technology Market: DynamicsThe increasing penetration of the internet and usage of the smartphones are the primary factors driving the growth of the food technology market. Also, these food technologies are used as online food delivery platforms that help restaurants in increasing their customer reach and generate additional income. This is one of the factors driving the growth of the food technology market.Many restaurants who have collaborated with food applications for delivering their services are unable to reach customers because of factors such as low ratings over the application and user reviews that may not be true.Request For TOC @Global Food Technology Market: SegmentationSegmentation OverviewThe food technology market can be segmented on the basis of service type, technology type, and region.By Service Type, the food technology market can be segmented as: Online Grocery Delivery Online Food Aggregator OTT & Convenience ServicesBy Technology Type, the food technology market can be segmented as: Websites Mobile AppsGlobal Food Technology Market: Competition LandscapeExamples of some of the key players operating in the global food technology market are Food Panda, Deliveroo, Uber, Zomato, Tesco PLC, Sainsbury, Grub Hub Inc., Dominos Pizza Inc., Delivery Hero Holding GmbH, Eat24, McDonald's Corporation, Panera Bread Company, Pizza Hut International, Doordash Inc., and Papa John's International, etc.Food Technology Market: Regional OutlookThe food technology market is dominated by Western Europe followed by North America and Asia Pacific. The market in Western Europe is expected to witness higher growth due to increase in online delivery penetration in the U.K. and other countries of Western Europe. The demand for the food technology in North America is increasing and is expected to contribute to the market growth owing to the presence of food technology giants. The primary growth factor is the introduction of multiple online delivery platforms to increase customer traffic in the Asia Pacific region. Latin America and MEA markets are projected to contribute a significant share in the global market over the forecast period.The report covers exhaustive analysis on: Global Food Technology Market Segments Global Food Technology Market Dynamics Historical Actual Market Size, 2013-2017 Global Food Technology Market Size & Forecast 2017 to 2028 Supply & Demand Value Chain for Food Technology Market Global Food Technology Market Current Trends/Issues/Challenges Competition & Companies involved in Food Technology Market Food Technology Technologies Value Chain of Food Technology Global Food Technology Market Drivers and RestraintsRegional analysis of Global Food Technology Market includes North America Food Technology Market U.S. & Canada Latin America Food Technology Market Brazil, Argentina & Others Eastern Europe Food Technology Market Poland Russia Rest of Eastern Europe Western Europe Food Technology Market Germany Italy France UK Spain Nordic BENELUX Rest of Western Europe Asia Pacific Food Technology Market Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) Greater China India ASEAN Rest of Asia Pacific Japan Food Technology Market Middle East and Africa Food Technology Market GCC Countries Other Middle East North Africa South Africa Other AfricaThe report is a compilation of first-hand information, qualitative and quantitative assessment by industry analysts, inputs from industry experts and industry participants across the value chain. The report provides in-depth analysis of parent market trends, macroeconomic indicators and governing factors along with market attractiveness as per segments. The report also maps the qualitative impact of various market factors on market segments and geographies.Report Highlights: Detailed overview of parent market Changing market dynamics of the industry In-depth market segmentation Historical, current and projected market size in terms of volume and value Recent industry trends and developments Competitive landscape Strategies of key players and product offerings Potential and niche segments/regions exhibiting promising growth A neutral perspective towards market performance Must-have information for market players to sustain and enhance their market footprintPre Book Report @About UsMarketResearchReports.biz is the most comprehensive collection of market research reports. MarketResearchReports.Biz services are specially designed to save time and money for our clients. We are a one stop solution for all your research needs, our main offerings are syndicated research reports, custom research, subscription access and consulting services. We serve all sizes and types of companies spanning across various industries.Contact UsMr. NachiketState Tower90 Sate Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-621-2074Website:E: sales@marketresearchreports.biz Acupuncture Market Scenario by Top Industry Players - Wuxi Jiajian Medical Instruments Co., Ltd, Schwa-medico GmbH, 3B Scientific GmbH, SEIRIN Corporation, Zepter International, etc Acupuncture Market https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/6139 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/acupuncture-market-6139 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/check-discount/6139 Acupuncture Market - OverviewAcupuncture Market is expected to expand with a CAGR of 14.50 percent while earning revenues worth USD 55323.8 million in the duration of the forecast period from 2018 to 2023. Acupuncture is an alternative medicine approach which uses needles that are inserted into the skin at acupuncture points to treat several diseases. Acupuncture has notably emerged from China as a component of their health care system. The overall working of acupuncture is based on the foundation that there are patterns of energy flow, Qi, through the body which are important for health, and acupuncture corrects the imbalances of flow at identifiable points close to the skin.Request Sample copy atThe market growth is fuelled by factors such as the growing incidence of gynecological disorders such as menstrual issues, PMS, PCOS, pregnancy complaints, menopause, infertility, and chronic pain disorders which are encouraging the development of the acupuncture market globally. Additionally, the rising occurrence of chronic diseases such as fibromyalgia and migraines which lead to health complications such as insomnia, body pain, and psychological illness will boost the progress of the acupuncture market globally. The escalating demand for non-invasive and painless acupuncture has led to an increase in the level of advancements in acupuncture therapy. The advent of technically advanced acupuncture treatments such as the usage of laser devices and electro acupuncture is projected to improve the development of the acupuncture market internationally for the duration of the forecast period. Moreover, many notable competitors are getting involved in the development and manufacturing of laser and electro acupuncture devices.Increasing health complications in the elderly population such as sleep disturbances, body pain, and emotional disorders have also powered the development of the market. The mounting geriatric population worldwide is anticipated to influence the acupuncture market in the forecast period. The intensifying demand for alternative and complementary medicine like acupuncture has enhanced the funding scenario for the market which can be a vast opportunity for the expansion of the market through the forecast period. The funding from market contenders and new entrants in the market is likely to add to the markets growth in the forecast period.Competitive Analysis:Several competitors are functioning in the acupuncture market globally. Many organizations, particularly in the European and Asia Pacific regions, have their manufacturing units, while some organizations are also involved in import from other regions. As the Asia Pacific is one of the most rapidly rising markets, firms are grasping the chances that are available and are keenly expanding their units in this region. However, the acupuncture market is presently controlled by a few players. The major competitors outlined in the report comprises of Zepter International, schwa-medico GmbH, MKW Lasersystem GmbH, Wuxi Jiajian Medical Instruments Co., Ltd, Cymedics GmbH & Co. KG, 3B Scientific GmbH, Kanson, SEIRIN Corporation, Asia med GmbH, Qingdao Great Fortune Co. Ltd, and AcuMedic Ltd.Browse Complete 157 Pages Premium Research Report Enabled with 30+ Respective Tables and Figures atRegional Analysis:The regional analysis of the market observes that the European region is expected to control the prime market share in the acupuncture market globally and is projected to develop at a CAGR of 13.53 percent during the forecast period. The market development is accredited to the intensifying occurrences of chronic diseases and growing preference for acupuncture therapies amongst the European population. Furthermore, the existence of major market contenders significantly adds to the market growth in the region. Additionally, the escalating insurance coverage in nations like France, Austria, Spain, and others, by other private companies will offer a promising backdrop for the market growth in the European region.The Asia Pacific region is likely to be the most swiftly increasing region in the acupuncture market globally and is anticipated to develop at a CAGR of 15.02 percent for the duration of the assessment period. The growth of the Asia Pacific acupuncture market is credited to the existence of nations such as Korea, China, and Japan which has a high adoption rate for acupuncture therapies. Additionally, the growing number of companies manufacturing the acupuncture products and the rising prevalence of chronic diseases is powering the market growth in this region.Segmental Analysis:The acupuncture market is segmented on the basis of application, end user, product & services. The segmentation of the market on the basis of product & services comprises of services and products. The service segment is further segmented into Japanese acupuncture, traditional Chinese medicine, auricular, Korean hand acupuncture, and scalp acupuncture, moxibustion, non-insertion acupuncture, cupping, and others. The product segment is additionally segmented into suction cups, needles, rod lasers, laser needle, and laser pens, electro-acupuncture device, and others. The needles are additionally sub segmented into modern needles and traditional needles. The service segment controls the acupuncture market by product & services due to the growing preference given to traditional acupuncture therapies. By application, the market is segmented into gynecological disorders, pain syndrome illnesses, psychological illnesses, and others. Pain syndrome illnesses controls the major market share of 33.5 percent over the forecast period, and it is also projected to develop at a CAGR of 14.04 percent through the forecast period. The end user segment of the market is segmented into hospitals & specialty clinics, wellness center, and research & academic institutes. Wellness Centre will possibly control the global acupuncture market due to a huge number of wellness center involved in acupuncture therapies and the rising preference for acupuncture as alternative medicine.Check Discount atSome Posits from TOC of Acupuncture Market Research Report - Forecast to 20231 Report Prologue2 Executive Summary3 Market Introduction4 Research Methodology5 Market Dynamics6 Market Factor Analysis7 Global Acupuncture Market, By Product & ServicesTOC CONTINUEDAbout Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.ContactMarket Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com In-vitro Diagnostic Services Market outlook with Top Players | BioRad, DexCom, Nova Biomedical, OraSure, Pearl Pathways, Phenomenex, Qiagene, Roche Diagnostics, Siemens, Sysmex, Thermo Fisher In-vitro Diagnostic Services Market https://www.gminsights.com/request-sample/detail/2889 https://www.gminsights.com/inquiry-before-buying/2889 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.Request sample copy of 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.IVD 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:IVD Services Market, By Service Type (USD Million) Softwareo Standalone Softwareo Software Updateo Others Testing Serviceso Infectious Testingo Diabetes Testingo Molecular Testingo Tissue Testingo OthersIVD Services Market, By End-user (USD million) Hospitals Point-Of-Care Testing Laboratories Academic Institutes OthersMake Inquiry about this report @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.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.Data TablesTABLE 1. In-vitro diagnostic services industry 360 0 synopsis, 2013 2024TABLE 2. In-vitro diagnostic services market, 2013-2017 (USD Million)TABLE 3. In-vitro diagnostic services market, 2018-2024 (USD Million)TABLE 4. In-vitro diagnostic services market, by service type, 2013-2017 (USD Million)TABLE 5. In-vitro diagnostic services market, by service type, 2018-2024 (USD Million)TABLE 6. In-vitro diagnostic services market, by end-user, 2013-2017 (USD Million)TABLE 7. In-vitro diagnostic services market, by end-user, 2018-2024 (USD Million)TABLE 8. In-vitro diagnostic services market, by region, 2013-2017 (USD Million)TABLE 9. In-vitro diagnostic services market, by region, 2018-2024 (USD Million)TABLE 10. Industry impact forcesGlobal 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 Chromoblastomycosis Treatment Market 2023 Top Key Players are Abbott Laboratories, Bayer AG, Sanofi, F. Hoffman La Roche, Cadila Pharmaceuticals Limited, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer Inc., Novartis AG, and others Chromoblastomycosis Treatment Market https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/5685 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/chromoblastomycosis-treatment-market-5685 Market Research Future has added a report titled Chromoblastomycosis Treatment Market Research Report -Forecast to 2023 to its offering. The report provides an in-depth analysis of regional data and an accurate projection of the market size and share of the Top 10 market players across the globe.The Global Chromoblastomycosis Treatment Market is expected to grow at a CAGR of approximately 6.3% during the forecast period, 2017-2023.Market Scenario:Chromoblastomycosis is a fungal infection caused by species such as Fonsecaea pedrosoi, Cladophialophora carrionii, Phialophora verrucosa, Fonsecaea compacta, Rhinocladiella aquaspersa, Chaetomium funicola and others. This disease mostly affects the skin and the subcutaneous tissues. Globally, there is about a million type of fungal species, yet nearly 300 are capable of causing infections or disease in humans. Most of these cases are seen in people with compromised immune systems and can occur almost in any part of the body.Get Sample Copy @A type of fungal infection known as systemic mycosis is affecting the internal organs of the body. During this, fungal infection can spread and affect other organs of the body. The rising cases of immunological diseases is a reason for increased probability of systemic mycosis. Thus, the developing novel treatment for chromoblastomycosis with fewer side effects is the primary objective of manufacturing companies.The newly launched azoles such as voriconazole and itraconazole, are the gold standard drugs for antifungal therapy. Chromoblastomycosis infections need to be treated with antifungal medication such as itraconazole, terbinafine, posaconazole, amphotericin B. Often, the treatment for chromoblastomycosis requires surgery to scrape off the infected tissue. The growth of the market is primarily driven by increasing incidents of fungal infections, rising prevalence of immunological diseases, availability of wide range of products, and increasing awareness about the fungal infections. However, the existence of misbranded drugs and their side effects may slow the growth of the market. The treatment of fungal infections is available in multiple dosage forms such as oral and intravenous medicines. Furthermore, the medications are also available in the form of sprays, creams, solutions, and shampoos.Key Players:Top Key Players of global chromoblastomycosis treatment market are Astellas Pharma (Japan), Biocon Limited (India), Abbott Laboratories (U.S.), Merck Sharp and Dohme (U.S.), Gilead Sciences (U.S.), Mylan Labs (U.S.), Bristol Myers Squibb (U.S.), Bayer AG (Germany), Lonza Group (Switzerland), Sanofi (France), F. Hoffman La Roche (Switerzland), Cadila Pharmaceuticals Limited (India), Johnson & Johnson (U.S.), Pfizer Inc. (U.S.), Novartis AG (Switerzland), and othersSegmentation:The global chromoblastomycosis treatment market is segmented on the basis of species, types, diagnosis, treatment, and end-users.On the basis of the species, the global chromoblastomycosis treatment market is segmented into Fonsecaea pedrosoi, Cladophialophora carrionii, Phialophora verrucosa, Fonsecaea compacta, Rhinocladiella aquaspersa, Chaetomium funicola, and others.On the basis of the disease type, the global chromoblastomycosis treatment market is segmented into nodular type, tumoral type, verrucous type, plaque type, and others.On the basis of the diagnosis, the global chromoblastomycosis treatment market is segmented into blood test, immunodiagnosis, histopathology and mycological examination, tissue biopsy, and others. The immunodiagnosis is classified into enzyme-linked immune sorbent assay (ELISA), and immunodiffusion, and others.On the basis of the treatment, the global chromoblastomycosis treatment market is segmented into surgery, antifungal drugs, amphotericin B therapy, thermotherapy, laser therapy, photodynamic therapy, adjuvant therapy, and others. The surgery is classified into cryosurgery, curettage, electrodesiccation, surgical excisions, and others. Furthermore, the antifungal drugs are categorized into oral itraconazole, oral terbinafine, posaconazole, isavuconazole, and others.On the basis of the end-user, the market is segmented into hospitals & clinics, medical institutes, research organization, and others.Regional Analysis:The global chromoblastomycosis treatment market consists of countries namely the Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East & Africa.The Americas dominate the global chromoblastomycosis treatment market owing to a huge patient population for chromoblastomycosis and well-developed healthcare sector. This disease commonly affects the agricultural workers in rural regions of South America, Central America, and North America.The European region is the second largest market for the global chromoblastomycosis treatment owing to the rising occurrence of fungal infections among the patients, and advancements in the surgeries procedure and the use of surgical devices. It was estimated that about 20% of these cases were found in countries such as the Czech Republic, Romania, and Finland.Asia Pacific is the fastest growing region for chromoblastomycosis treatment market due to increasing prevalence of fungal infections, and regional expansion for the development of this market. Japan is considered to exhibit the highest prevalence rate for chromoblastomycosis in the Asia Pacific region.The Middle East & Africa region contributed the lowest share of the global chromoblastomycosis treatment market, in 2016. Several different Latin American and the African countries, such as Colombia, Gabon, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba, have high prevalence rates for this condition.Browse Full reports @TABLE OF CONTENTChapter 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 Treatment Trends & AssessmentChapter 5. Market Factor AnalysisContinued!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.Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, IndiaPhone: +1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com Global Basmati Rice Market to Report 11.0% CAGR between 2017 and 2022 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=S&rep_id=31745 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/basmati-rice-market.html http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com The global basmati rice market is a choc-o-bloc with companies both large and small that features a fragmented vendor landscape, as per a report by Transparency Market Research (TMR). Leading players such as McCormick & Co., Hain Celestial, Rice n Spice, REI Agro, LT Foods, East End Foods, and Amira Nature Foods serve local as well as global consumers, which is reflected in the growth of basmati rice market. Penetration into regional markets as rice is the staple food of more than half of the worlds population is likely to provide ample growth opportunities for leading players in the market. These players are penetrating regional markets through strategic partnerships, which is likely to make the market somewhat consolidated albeit more competitive, states the report.Request to view Sample Report:The worldwide basmati rice market stood at a valuation of US$10.51 bn in 2017. Proliferating at a robust CAGR of 11.0% between 2017 and 2022, the market is anticipated to be worth US$17.74 bn by the end of 2022. By type, the demand for raw basmati surpasses than that for parboiled and steam, mainly because of superior taste and aromatic property of the former. Among the various sales channel, traditional grocery stores remain the key sales channel, with convenience stores following closely. Among the key regional markets for basmati rice, Asia Pacific excluding Japan acquires the leading position in the overall market thanks to high production of rice in the region.Increasing Spending on Superior Grains across Consumer Groups Benefits MarketAmong the various types of rice, basmati rice enjoys a premium position thanks to its superior taste and aromatic quality, says a TMR analyst. Almost 90% of production and consumption of basmati rice is centered in Asia, mainly because of its origin from the Indian subcontinent. The growth of the basmati rice market in Asia is powered by high production and export of this type of rice from India and Pakistan. As per records of the Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority, India accounted for 59% exports to the overseas basmati rice in 2014, with the remainder exported from Pakistan.Read Report Overview @The emergence of local varieties of basmati rice is also aiding the growth of basmati rice market. Several countries are increasingly producing domestic variety of basmati rice at relatively low prices. This is to prevent complete dependence on import which is subject to climatic and trade uncertainties as well as to promote consumption of local varieties.Across several parts of the world, rising disposable income has benefitted the basmati rice market. Consumers are increasingly spending liberally on premium quality grains, lentils, and spices for a fulfilling eating experience. Basmati rice is increasingly becoming the choice across consumer groups mainly because of its superior taste and aroma that is highly pleasing to the senses.Rising Awareness of Health Ill-effects of Prolonged Consumption of Polished Rice Crimps GrowthOn the flip side, high price of basmati rice over other rice variants is a key challenge to the markets growth. Basmati rice remains a premium grain not affordable by the average consumer. In addition, increasing awareness about health ill-effects of consuming polished rice on an everyday basis is leading consumers to switch to unpolished rice varieties. This is challenging the growth of basmati rice market to some extent.About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRas experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information. Our business offerings represent the latest and the most reliable information indispensable for businesses to sustain a competitive edge.ContactTransparency Market Research90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite: Insomnia Market Trend in in Asia Pacific 2018 to 2023 | Highest CAGR of 11.8% with Topmost Players Pfizer, Inc., GlaxoSmithKline Plc., Consumer Healthcare Inc., Takeda Pharmaceutical Company and More Insomnia Market https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/619 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/asia-pacific-insomnia-market-619 Asia Pacific Insomnia Market Research Report, By Types of Therapy Pharmacological Therapy and Non-Pharmacological Therapy, By Drug Formulation Capsules, Tablet and Others, By Type of Diseases Poor Quality of Sleep, Sleep Maintenance and Other - Forecast Till 2023Asia Pacific Insomnia Market Key PlayersTakeda Pharmaceutical Company (Japan), Pfizer, Inc. (US), Eisai, Co. (Japan), Merck & Co Inc (US), Sanofi (France), GlaxoSmithKline Plc. (UK), Meda Consumer Healthcare Inc (US), Care Fusion Corporation (US), Pernix Therapeutics (US), Purdue Pharma L.P. (US), Consumer Healthcare Inc. (Canada), Dainippon Sumitomo (Japan), ECR Pharmaceuticals (US), Johnson & Johnson (US), Astellas (UK), Biocodex S A (France), Neurim (Switzerland), Flynn Pharma (UK).Asia Pacific Insomnia Market - ScenarioInsomnia is the most common sleep disorder. It involves disturbance in the sleep or trouble in falling asleep or waking up too early in the morning. The exact cause is still a mystery. Insomnia can be exist alone or conjugated with the other psychiatric problems.It is most common is women and mostly occur in young age. Conditions like pregnancy, postpartum and menopause can increase the severity of insomnia in the patients. Asia Pacific insomnia market is driven by increasing number of the number of patients suffering from sleep disorders due to adoption of alcohol, caffeine and tobacco by a huge number of population.Request Sample Report @Many research has explain that psychological and behavioural factor are responsible for causing insomnia. Increasing workload and stressful modern life has increase the demand for the sleeping pills.Asia Pacific Insomnia Market - SegmentationAsia Pacific insomnia market has been segmented on the basis of types of therapy which comprises pharmacological therapy and non-pharmacological therapy. Pharmacological therapy is further segmented into benzodiazepines, non-benzodiazepines, melatonin receptor agonists and other. Non pharmacological treatment are further segmented into relaxation therapy, cognitive behavioural therapy, sleep hygiene education, stimulus control, paradoxical intention and other. By drug formulation they are segmented as capsules, tablet and others. On the basis of type of disease they are poor quality of sleep, sleep maintenance and other.Asia Pacific Insomnia Market - Study ObjectivesTo provide the detail overview of market.To provide In-depth market segmentation and sub segmentationsTo provide insights about factors affecting the market growthTo provide country level analysis of the market with respect to the current market size and future prospectiveTo track and analyze competitive developments such as joint ventures, strategic alliances, mergers and acquisitions, new product developments, and research and developments in the Asia Pacific insomnia market.Asia Pacific Insomnia Market - Regional AnalysisOn regional basis, Japan accounts the largest share in the Asia Pacific insomnia market. 1 in every 5 people in japan is suffering from acute or chronic symptoms of insomnia. In Japan insomnia is the major problem than anxiety and depression. India and China are also contribute major share in the market. Approximately 5% of total Indias population is suffering from insomnia. This increasing number of people suffering from insomnia is the major driving factor for the market in Asia Pacific region.Browse Complete 50 Pages Premium Research Report Enabled with 121 Respective Tables and Figures atTABLE OF CONTENTS1 INTRODUCTION1.1 DEFINITION1.2 SCOPE OF STUDY1.2.1 RESEARCH OBJECTIVE1.2.2 ASSUMPTIONS & LIMITATIONS1.2.2.1 ASSUMPTIONS1.2.2.2 LIMITATIONS1.3 MARKET STRUCTURE:2 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY2.1 RESEARCH PROCESS:2.2 PRIMARY RESEARCH2.3 SECONDARY RESEARCH:3 MARKET DYNAMICS3.1 DRIVERS3.2 RESTRAINTS3.3 OPPORTUNITIES3.4 MACROECONOMIC INDICATORS4 MARKET FACTOR ANALYSIS4.1 PORTERS FIVE FORCES MODEL4.2 BARGAINING POWER OF SUPPLIERS4.3 BARGAINING POWER OF BUYERS4.4 THREAT OF NEW ENTRANTSMajor TOC Continued!About US:Market Research Future (MRFR), enable customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.Contact Us:Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, IndiaPhone: +1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com Explanations to select Python programming as a profession https://www.htsindia.com/Courses/Business-Analytics/python.aspx I am certain you should be anxious to find out about Python programming dialect to pick it as a lifelong choice. We generally wind up in a quandary while looking for answers for vocation related inquiries that what we ought to select to secure better open door future. Particularly, understudies who have recently gone out of building school and needs to open worthwhile entryways in IT industry to begin their profession and may experience addresses like which space to pick and what will be the degree in future. To work with IT industry one must ace the learning of programming and programming. This blog will give you a knowledge on Python and what scope it holds in future.Python, planned by Guido Van Rossum, a Dutch software engineer in the year 1991 is an all-around utilized abnormal state and universally useful programming dialect which underlines code clarity, quite utilizing noteworthy whitespace. Python is one of the languages which is straightforward and amazing from a software engineer's recognition. It is additionally a progressively composed dialect since it completes mistake checking at runtime.Python is one of the quickest developing programming dialect in contrast with other programming languages since it has encountered achievement in a limited ability to focus time the extent that its selection is concerned. Truth be told, it has been helping as the best programming dialect for application improvement, web advancement, GIS, Mapping, scripting, amusement advancement, framework organization, logical and numeric processing and so forth. Study says it's the second most well-known dialect this year after Java.Why Python over different languages?The explanation for the titanic prominence of Python programming dialect over the world is a result of the component it offers. Software engineer or designer thinks that its truly adaptable, protest situated, basic, procedural, and utilitarian and so on.It's an open source dialect which implies it is effectively accessible on the web and you require not purchase the exorbitant permit. As it is anything but difficult to learn, it makes investigating bugs quiet for software engineers on a substantial scale.Python is efficient as it offers less lines of code and does not require variable revelation. Furthermore, factors in python programming are reusable. It likewise gives solace to the software engineers while coding as a result of its broad standard libraries and its device that improves the general usefulness.It has an immense emotionally supportive network which gives an answer for the developers and you may likewise discover new thoughts with respect to Python technology or change in its variant.Big brands and industry mammoths like Google, Spotify and Netflix to create bits of knowledge and construct items additionally use it to tackle their intricate issue. In contrast with other programming languages, python does not characterize the extent of capacities or circles inside bracket rather it utilizes space for characterizing degree.Unlike Java, it has easier grammar and various lines of code reframed to a solitary line of code like swapping of factors. Here is a guide to clarify you better;Utilization of Python in various DomainsIOT: Internet of thingsIn uncomplicated terms, IOT i.e. web of things is the idea of associating any gadget to the web and to other associated gadgets. Gadgets and articles with implicit sensors are associated with an Internet of Things, which joins information from various gadgets and applies examination to impart the essential data to the gadgets which have worked in sensors to address the explicit needs. The data grabbed by associated gadgets empowers an individual to settle on a superior choice further. Presently you should think how Python dialect functions in IoT does. Python is truly adaptable than some other programming languages like Java, C or C++ and has turned into a useful asset for web improvement. It helps IoT extends as it underpins dug in programming and has rolled out critical improvements in IoT designers. As an engineer or software engineer, you will discover Python as a decent choice for information escalated applications, particularly for the mind boggling information. IoT is the same as some other application we use, it just it expects you to perform everything on the double. For any site or application improvement, a great deal of coding happens in the back end. In this way, Python as a programming dialect emerges best among the rest since it improves even complex information.Information AnalyticsInformation investigation is the way toward analyzing any information to derive about the data they contain. Information examination apparatuses and procedures are comprehensively utilized by corporates or IT ventures to engage association for better-educated basic leadership. What's more, information investigation resourceful activities can assist any business with increasing their income and in development in the market.There are a few mistakes which are found before an information is totally prepared and settling those blunders and cleaning any bugs is called information robbing. The information expert with center learning of Python and informational collections and information structure are capable in any information expository occupation.Information researcherAn information researcher is an individual utilized to dissect, gather and translate the monster measure of information to help business or association to pick up a competing edge over adversaries with development. The interest for information science ability has developed extensively lately as organizations hoping to accumulate data that substantial undertakings create called enormous information. Python helps in information researcher as it's a multi-worldview programming dialect which aid question arranged programming, organized programming and utilitarian programming among different languages. The undeniable programming nature of python makes it a perfect fit to effectuate calculations. To Know More Information here-High Technologies Solutions is One of best Institute in Delhi, india for Computer and Software Courses.N-18, Kalkaji, New Delhi - 110019 Global Coiled Tubing (CT) Market to 2023: Schlumberger, Baker Hughes, Halliburton, Weatherford International Inc, Archer Limited, Calfrac Well Services Ltd, Cudd Energy Services, Superior Energy Services Inc https://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=1866943 https://www.researchmoz.us/global-coiled-tubing-ct-market-report.html/toc https://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=E&repid=1866943 http://bit.ly/1TBmnVG https://marketsizeinfo.blogspot.in/ Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Global Coiled Tubing (CT) Market: Analysis By Active CT Fleet, Application (Well Intervention, Drilling, Completion), Location(Onshore, Offshore), By Region, By Country (2018 Edition) - Forecast to 2023 - By Country (U.S, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, Norway, Russia, UK, China, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Nigeria)" to its huge collection of research reports.A comprehensive research report created through extensive primary research (inputs from industry experts, companies, stakeholders) and secondary research, the report aims to present the analysis of Global Coiled Tubing Market. The report analyses the global coiled tubing market by application type (Well Intervention, Drilling and Completion), By Location (Onshore and Offshore), By Region (North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, South America and Middle East) and By Country (U.S, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, Norway, Russia, UK, China, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Nigeria).To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @According to Azoth Analytics research report Global Coiled Tubing (CT) Market: Analysis By Active CT Fleet, Application (Well Intervention, Drilling, Completion), Location(Onshore, Offshore), By Region, By Country (2018 Edition) Forecast to 2023 global market is projected to display a modest growth represented by a CAGR of 3.58% during 2018 2023.Over the recent years, global coiled tubing market has been witnessing a decline, on account of several factors including falling crude oil prices, sluggish growth in investment, declining production of oil and gas. Moreover, ongoing demographic shift towards renewable energy sources, increase production in developing regions, rising investment in shale oil and revival in the prices of crude oil, is expected to propel the market for coiled tubing market during the forecast period. In this research report, the market is segmented on the basis of application type as well as location. By application type, the segment of Well intervention is predicted to hold its dominant position in the market. Amongst the regions, North America accounts for the largest regional share in the global coiled tubing market in 2018.The report titled Global Coiled Tubing (CT) Market: Analysis By Active CT Fleet, Application (Well Intervention, Drilling, Completion), Location (Onshore, Offshore), By Region, By Country (2018 Edition) Forecast to 2023 has covered and analyzed the potential of global coiled tubing market and provides statistics and information on market size, shares and growth factors. The report intends to provide cutting-edge market intelligence and help decision makers take sound investment evaluation. Besides, the report also identifies and analyses the emerging trends along with major drivers, challenges and opportunities in the global coiled tubing market. Additionally, the report also highlights market entry strategies for various companies across the globe.Scope of the ReportGlobal Coiled Tubing Market(Actual Period: 2013-2017, Forecast Period: 2018-2023)Coiled Tubing Market Size and Growth By Value, By Active CT UnitsBy Application Type - Well Intervention, Drilling and Completion: By ValueBy Location Offshore and Onshore: By ValueGet Complete TOC With Tables and Figures @Regional Markets North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, South America and Middle East (Actual Period: 2013-2017, Forecast Period: 2018-2023)Coiled Tubing Market Size and Growth: By Value, By Active CT UnitsBy Application Type - Well Intervention, Drilling and Completion: By ValueBy Location Offshore and Onshore: By ValueCountry Analysis U.S, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, Norway, Russia, UK, China, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Nigeria.(Actual Period: 2013-2017, Forecast Period: 2018-2023)Coiled Tubing Market Size and Growth: By ValueBy Active CT UnitsOther Report HighlightsMarket Dynamics Drivers and RestraintsMarket TrendsCompany Share AnalysisSWOT AnalysisPorter Five Force AnalysisSupply Chain AnalysisPolicy and Regulatory LandscapeCompany Analysis Schlumberger, Baker Hughes, Halliburton, Weatherford International Inc, Archer Limited, Calfrac Well Services Ltd, Cudd Energy Services, Superior Energy Services Inc., Trican Well Service Ltd., and C&J Energy Services, Inc..Make An Enquiry @About ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.For More Information Kindly Contact:ResearchMozMr. Nachiket Ghumare,Tel: +1-518-621-2074USA-Canada Toll Free: 866-997-4948Email: sales@researchmoz.usFollow us on LinkedIn @Follow me on @ Moebius Syndrome Market 2018-2023 | Recommendations to Primary Players | Becton, Dickinson and Company, Boston Scientific Co, Johnson & Johnson Services, Inc., Medtronic Etc. Moebius Syndrome Market https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/5407 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/moebius-syndrome-market-5407 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/enquiry/5407 A number of factors such as growing awareness, technological advancements, unmet medical needs, increasing government assistance, rising healthcare expenditure in the developed countries, improving regulatory framework, increasing adoption rate, and rising funding and reimbursement policies are propelling the growth of the global Moebius syndrome market.However, infections and injuries caused by surgical devices, complications associated with the treatments and poor healthcare system in low and middle-income countries may hamper the growth of the market over the review period.Moebius Syndrome is a rare congenital condition that is associated with abnormalities of the facial nerves. The major symptoms of Moebius syndrome are dental problems, difficulties with speech and frequent drooling, high palate, Polands syndrome, irritated and dry eyes, strabismus, and others.It is estimated that the Moebius Syndrome Market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 6.5% during the forecast period of 2017-2023.Get Sample Report @Moebius Syndrome Market - Key PlayersSome of key the players in the global Moebius syndrome market are Alcon Laboratories, Inc, All Vascular, Pty Ltd., Aspen Surgical Products, Inc., B. Braun Melsungen AG, Becton, Dickinson and Company, Boston Scientific Corporation, Conmed Corporation, Gray Surgical, Johnson & Johnson Services, Inc., Medtronic, Olympus Corporation, Smith & Nephew plc, TransEnterix Surgical, Inc., Zimmer Biomet Holdings, Inc. and others.Moebius Syndrome Market - SegmentationThe Global Moebius Syndrome Market is segmented on the basis of type, treatment, and end user.On the basis of the type, the market is classified as Group I, Group II, Group III, and Group IV.On the basis of the treatment, the market is classified as surgery, temporalis transfer, parotidectomy, physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, splints, prosthesis, braces, and others. The surgery segment is further classified into eyelid surgery, ponseti method, hand surgery, tracheotomy, and others.On the basis of the end user, the market is segmented into medical device companies, hospitals & clinics, academic & research institutes, and others.Moebius Syndrome Market - Regional AnalysisThe Americas dominate the Moebius syndrome market owing to the rising awareness among people, and high healthcare expenditure. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention in 2015, the total health expenditure in the United States was reported to be USD 3.2 trillion and the hospital care accounted for a share of 32.3%.Browse Complete 80 Pages Premium Research Report Enabled with 30+ Respective Tables and Figures @Europe holds the second position in the Moebius syndrome market. It is expected that the support provided by the government authorities for research & development and initiatives taken to improve the reimbursement policies in healthcare is likely to drive the European market.Asia Pacific is the fastest growing Moebius syndrome market owing to a huge patient pool and developing healthcare technology. Healthcare expenditure is also improving in various Asia Pacific countries. According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, in the years 2015-2016, the total health expenditure in Australia was USD 170.4 billion, which is recorded to be 3.6% higher than the expenditure of 2014-2015.The Middle East & Africa holds the lowest share of the global market due to lack of technical knowledge and poor medical facilities.Major Table of ContentChapter 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 DynamicsContinued.To Know More Enquire @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.Contact:Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: salesteam@marketresearchfuture.com Krabbe Disease Treatment Market Current Trend with Abbott Laboratories, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd., GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, UCB Pharmaceuticals by 2023 Krabbe Disease Treatment Market https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/1833 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/krabbe-disease-treatment-market-1833 Market Research Future Present Research Report on Global Krabbe Disease Treatment Market Research Report - Forecast to 2022 Report covered In a Segregated way like Segmentation with sub segments, Growth Barrier, Scope, Major Drivers, Renowned Players strategies and Mega Trends. Outlet till 2023Krabbe Disease Treatment Market - Competitive LandscapeThe global Krabbe disease treatment market is highly competitive with the presence of various large and small vendors. The notable players of the market include Abbott Laboratories, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis AG, Sanofi-Aventis SA, UCB Pharmaceuticals, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd., Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, and Shire. The key players are investing heavily in clinical trials and development of new drugs and therapies to gain a competitive edge over the market.Krabbe Disease Treatment Market - OverviewKrabbe disease is an incurable medical condition where the protective coating of nerve cells around the brain are destroyed which causing nerve damage. The global Krabbe disease treatment market can reach a significant valuation, exhibiting a steady CAGR over the forecast period of 2016 to 2022, as per a research report published by Market Research Future (MRFR).Request Sample Copy atThe market has been growing continuously on account of increasing incidence of Krabbe disease across the globe. Classification of Krabbe disease under orphan disease has propelled the growth of the market. Pharmaceutical companies receive incentives to develop medicine for rare disease along with reduced fees in protocol assistance and protection from competition after the medicine is marketed. Increased government funding for drug development and easy approvals, tax credits on clinical research, reduction in the amount of registration fees also aid the growth of the market.These factors also promote research and development activities which further boosts the market growth. Increasing awareness about the disease coupled with the development of tests for screening patients is a crucial market driver. Regulations aimed at free screening of patients irrespective of health insurance cover and government aid for treatment has been a significant driver of the market. Increasing insurance penetration and better reimbursement policies favor the growth of the market and provide future growth opportunities. Approval of various drugs aimed at the treatment of Krabbe disease by FDA too is a vital growth factor.Advancements in the therapeutics such as the introduction of gene technology in the treatment of Krabbe disease are expected to drive the market significantly in the coming years. A significant trend which has been pushing the market growth is the emergence of pharmacological chaperone therapy. Pharmacological chaperone is a promising therapeutic approach which uses drugs to stabilize and guide Chaperone, an ineffective enzyme to help it perform normally. However, the growth of the market might be hindered by the limited patient pool for clinical trials. High costs of treatment for Krabbe diseases such as bone marrow transplantation, cord blood transplantation, and others are major restraints. Lack of effective treatment and high costs of development of new drugs and therapies are other restricting factors.Krabbe Disease Treatment Market - SegmentationThe global Krabbe disease treatment market has been segmented based on type of treatments and end users. By type of treatments, the market has been segmented into anticonvulsant medication, physical therapy, muscle relaxer drugs, bone marrow transplantation and others. By end users, the market has been segmented into hospitals and clinics, research centers, laboratories and others.Krabbe Disease Treatment Market - Regional AnalysisThe key markets of the global Krabbe disease treatment market include North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and the Middle East & Africa. North America leads the market for global Krabbe treatment owing to rise in the screening of the disease and government support for the diagnosis and treatment. Europe follows North America closely and is led by the Scandinavian nations such as Finland and Norway. Asia Pacific is poised to grow at the fastest rate due to large unmet needs and growing awareness about the disease in the developing economies of the region. Asia Pacific market is expected to be led by Japan, China, and India. The Middle East and Africa market are expected to exhibit steady growth and led by Israel. However, the African continent is foreseen to yield weak growth due to poor socio-economic conditions and lack of healthcare penetration in the less developed regions of Africa. South Africa and Egypt are likely to be the key contributors.Browse Complete 80 Pages Premium Research Report Enabled with Respective Tables and Figures at1 Report Prologue2 Market Introduction3 Research Methodology4 Market Dynamics5 Market Factor Analysis6 Global Krabbe Disease Treatment Market, By Treatment Types (USD Million)7 Global Krabbe Disease Treatment Market, By End Users (USD Million)8 Global Krabbe Disease Treatment Market, By Region9 Company Landscape10 Company Profiles11 Conclusion12 AppendixAbout US:Market Research Future (MRFR), enable customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.Contact Us:Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, IndiaPhone: +1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com Rheumatoid Arthritis Market Analysis 2023 by Leading Key Insights - AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb Company, Eli Lilly and Company, F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd, Novartis AG, Pfizer Inc https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/1658 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/rheumatoid-arthritis-market-1658 The Industry report for Global Rheumatoid Arthritis market by Market Research Future comprises of extensive primary research along with the detailed analysis of qualitative as well as quantitative aspects by various industry experts, key opinion leaders to gain a deeper insight of the industry performance.Global Rheumatoid Arthritis Market - OverviewThe Global Rheumatoid Arthritis Market is expected to grow at a healthy CAGR of ~4% during the forecast period 2017-2022.Rheumatoid arthritis is a chronic inflammatory condition that possible can distress more than just the joints. It is found that in some individuals, the disorder also can damage a various parts of body system, including the lungs, skin, eyes, heart and blood vessels.The market is forecast to demonstrate a steady growth by 2022, surpassing its previous growth records in terms of value with a striking CAGR during the anticipated period 20172022.GET PREMIUM SAMPLE REPORT @Global Rheumatoid Arthritis Market - Key PlayersPfizer Inc (U.S),Eli Lilly and company (U.S),Bristol-Myers Squibb Company (U.S),F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd (switzerland),Novartis AG (switzerland),Vertex Pharmaceuticals Incorporated (U.S),Sanofi (France),AstraZeneca (U.K) and many others.The major factors influencing the growth of the market include high number of individuals suffering from the autoimmune disease, it has been observed that this disease is found three times more in women than as men.According to Health Union, LLC is one of the common chronic disease that affects approximately 1.3 million Americans and as much as 1% of the global population.Global Rheumatoid Arthritis Market - SegmentsGlobal rheumatoid arthritis market has been segmented on the basis of drug type which comprises of Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug type (NSAID), Steroids, and Disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drug type (DMARDs) and Biologic agents.On the basis of treatment include Synovectomy, Tendon repair, Joint fusion and Total joint replacement. Furthermore on the basis of diagnosis includes C - reactive protein (CRP) Test, CCP, ESR (Erythrocyte Sedimentation Rate) Test and Synovial Fluid Analysis.Global Rheumatoid Arthritis Market - Regional AnalysisGlobally North America is the largest market for rheumatoid arthritis. The North American market for rheumatoid arthritis is expected to grow at a CAGR of and is expected to reach at USD Million by the end of the forecasted period.Europe is the second-largest market for rheumatoid arthritis which is expected to grow at a healthy CAGR of. Furthermore Asia pacific market is expected to be the fastest growing market for rheumatoidOBTAIN COMPLETE 85 PAGES PREMIUM RESEARCH REPORT DETAILS ENABLED WITH RESPECTIVE 40+ TABLES AND FIGURES @Major Points form TOC for Rheumatoid Arthritis Market Research Report Forecast to 2022Chapter 1. Report PrologueChapter 2. Market IntroductionChapter 3. Research MethodologyChapter 4. Market DynamicsChapter 5. Market Factor AnalysisChapter 6. Global Rheumatoid Arthritis Market, By TypeChapter 7. Global Rheumatoid Arthritis Market, By TreatmentChapter 8 Global Rheumatoid Arthritis Market, By End UserChapter 9. Global Rheumatoid Arthritis Market, By RegionChapter 10 Company LandscapeChapter 11 Company ProfilesChapter 12 MRFR ConclusionChapter 13 AppendixAbout 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.Office No. 528, Amanora ChambersPune - 411028Maharashtra, India Machine Translation (MT) Market by Key Players Google Inc, SYSTRAN, International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), Microsoft Corporation, Honyaku Center Inc, Venga Global, SDL BeGlobal, PROMT Ltd Machine Translation (MT) Market https://www.theresearchinsights.com/request_sample.php?id=1658 https://www.theresearchinsights.com/enquiry_before_buying.php?id=1658 https://www.theresearchinsights.com/ask_for_discount.php?id=1658 www.theresearchinsights.com The market research report helps analyze the Machine Translation (MT) market on a global basis and also offers forecast and statistics in terms of revenue for the anticipated forecast period 2018 to 2023. Machine translation (MT) alludes to completely computerized programming that can make an interpretation of source content into target dialects. People may utilize MT to enable them to render content and discourse into another dialect, or the MT programming may work without human intercession. MT devices are frequently used to decipher huge measures of data including a huge number of words that couldn't in any way, shape or form be interpreted the customary way. The nature of MT yield can change extensively. MT frameworks require "preparing" in the ideal area and dialect combine to build quality.Global Machine Translation (MT) market is expected to grow at a CAGR of +14% during the forecast period 2018-2023.The Research Insights newly added a report, titled as Machine Translation (MT) market, industry, analysis, research, share, growth, sales & trends and forecasted to market. The influence of predominant economic and directing scenario athwart the leading markets has been scrutinized in detail. Apart from this, the report also revives about the competitive landscape of the market. This report provides a complete synopsis of the market, presenting acumens into the key factors driving and limiting its growth.Request for Sample Copy of this report:Top Key Vendors:SYSTRAN Enterprise Server, SDL BeGlobal, Microsoft Bing Translator, Google Translate, International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), Lionbridge Technologies Inc, SDL Plc, Google Inc, TransPerfect Translations International Inc, PROMT Ltd, Microsoft Corporation, Honyaku Center Inc, and Venga GlobalThe overview of the market includes the applications of the global market along with the regional outlook and industry policies. It also summarizes about various provisions and descriptions from it. The report scrutinizes the production index of the Machine Translation (MT) market in terms of region, technology, types, end-users and materials. Along with this, it also comprises of an opening that is dedicated to analyze the new items in the market. Apart from the global perspective the various regions that are emphasized are North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and the Middle East & Africa and each region is considered on the basis of cost of production, revenues, price of raw materials and capacity.Enquiry before Buying:The report also gives detailed information on the global market in terms of its competitors, public growth, mergers & acquisitions and new product launches. The manufacturers in the Machine Translation (MT) market are defined in terms of their product and shares in the annual volume of the market between 2018 and 2023. This passage also includes details on the revenue generation capacity of key manufacturers.Table of Content:Chapter 1 Overview of Machine Translation (MT) MarketChapter 2 Manufacturing Cost Structure AnalysisChapter 3 Global Machine Translation (MT) Market OverviewChapter 4 Technical Data and Manufacturing Plants AnalysisChapter 5 Machine Translation (MT) Market Regional AnalysisChapter 6 Major Manufacturers AnalysisChapter 7 Development Trend of Analysis of MarketChapter 8 Machine Translation (MT) Industry Type AnalysisChapter 9 Conclusion of the Global Machine Translation (MT) Market Professional Survey Report 2018Ask For Discount:About usThe Research Insights A global leader in analytics, research and advisory that can assist you to renovate your business and modify your approach. With us, you will learn to take decisions intrepidly. We make sense of drawbacks, opportunities, circumstances, estimations and information using our experienced skills and verified methodologies. Our research reports will give you an exceptional experience of innovative solutions and outcomes. We have effectively steered businesses all over the world with our market research reports and are outstandingly positioned to lead digital transformations. Thus, we craft greater value for clients by presenting advanced opportunities in the global market.Contact usRobinSales manager+91-996-067-0000sales@theresearchinsights.com Wireless Microphone Market is blooming worldwide; Samson Technologies, Shure, AKG Acoustics, Yamaha Corporation, Rode Microphones, Sony Electronics Inc, Blue, Sennheiser, Audio-Technica Corporation | asserts CMR Wireless Microphone Market https://www.crystalmarketresearch.com/report-sample/SE04669 https://www.crystalmarketresearch.com/send-an-enquiry/SE04669 https://www.crystalmarketresearch.com/check-discount/SE04669 This study provides insights about the Wireless Microphone Market in regards to its uses and benefits. We at Crystal Market Research (CMR) provide updated information that is beneficial in decision making regarding business investments.Top Most Leaders:The leading players in the market are Samson Technologies, Shure, AKG Acoustics, Yamaha Corporation, Rode Microphones, Sony Electronics Inc, Blue, Sennheiser, Audio-Technica Corporation and LEWITT GmbH.Crystal Market Research offers a range of ways to access our research data and business insights to meet your business needs. We at Crystal provide valued commercial intelligence at global level with our extensive research and analysis capabilities. Our market research services are based on proven scientific research models to deliver high quality analysis.Book Your Sample Copy of the Report here @The Wireless Microphone Market is segmented as follows-By Type:Clip-onHandheldOthersBy Technology:Radio Frequency Channel -Dual ChannelSingle ChannelMulti-ChannelWi-Fi Band-2.4 GHz3.6 GHz5 GHzRadio Frequency Band-540 MHz - 680 MHz721 MHz - 750 MHz823 MHz - 865 MHzBy End User:EducationHospitalityCorporateSporting EventsOthersRegional Outlook and Trend Analysis: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)Industry Outlook:The Wireless Microphone Market was worth USD 1.95 billion in 2014 and is expected to reach approximately USD 3.25 billion by 2023, while registering itself at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5.86% during the forecast period.The developing usage of these products in public speaking, television broadcasting, podcasting, and entertainment is anticipated to encourage the interest for wireless devices throughout the following years. Furthermore, increment in sports events crosswise over different regions has additionally empowered the worldwide business development. The expansion in sponsorships investments in sports exercises is foreseen to boost the demand for wireless microphones. Amid 2016, the assessed sponsorship investment in sports was more than 40 billion consequently driving the market development.Asks Any Questions about Report @Table of Contents:1.Introduction2.Executive Summary3.Market Overview4.Market Analysis by Regions5.Wireless Microphone Market, By Type5.1.Introduction5.2.Global Wireless Microphone Sales, Revenue and Market Share by Type (2014-2018)5.3.Handheld5.4.Clip-on5.5.Other TypesTo be Continued...Key Finding Factors of Market:Highlights key business priorities in order to assist companies to realign their business strategies.The key findings and recommendations highlight crucial progressive industry trends in the Wireless Microphone Market, thereby allowing players to develop effective long term strategies.Develop/modify business expansion plans by using substantial growth offering developed and emerging markets.Scrutinize in-depth Global Wireless Microphone Market trends and outlook coupled with the factors driving the market, as well as those hindering it.Enhance the decision-making process by understanding the strategies that underpin commercial interest with respect to products, segmentation and industry verticals.The Wireless Microphone Market report based on our unique research methodology delivers thorough analytical scrutiny of the Market dispersed across several segments. The report also consists of current size and summary of the market of this industry coupled with outlook prospects. Moreover, key market manufacturers of Wireless Microphone are studied on many aspects such as company overview, product portfolio, revenue details during the forecasted year. Also, the complete potential of the market is briefed in the full report.For More Discounts Offers on Report @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 1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war. 2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war. 3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament of the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength. 4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war. 5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites. 6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination. 7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N. 8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev's promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N. 9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress. 10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N. 11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.) 12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party. 13. Do away with all loyalty oaths. 14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office. 15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States. 16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights. 17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks. 18. Gain control of all student newspapers. 19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack. 20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions. 21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures. 22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms." 23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. "Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art." 24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them "censorship" and a violation of free speech and free press. 25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV. 26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as "normal, natural, healthy." 27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a "religious crutch." 28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of "separation of church and state." 29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis. 30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man." 31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the "big picture." Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over. 32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc. 33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus. 34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities. 35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI. 36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions. 37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business. 38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand. 39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals. 40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce. 41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents. 42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use united force to solve economic, political or social problems. 43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government. 44. Internationalize the Panama Canal. 45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction over nations and individuals alike. Medical Aesthetics Market Analysis and Forecast 2018-2023 with Key Players Allergan, Merz Aesthetics, Solta Medical, Galderma S.A., Cynosure, Syneron Medical Ltd. https://www.qurateresearch.com/report/sample/HnM/QBI-MR-HnM-1163 https://www.qurateresearch.com/report/buy/HnM/QBI-MR-HnM-1163/ https://www.qurateresearch.com/report/enquiry/HnM/QBI-MR-HnM-1163 https://www.qurateresearch.com/ A report added to the rich database of Qurate Business Intelligence, titled Medical Aesthetics Market: Global Market Estimation, Dynamics, Regional Share, Trends, Competitor Analysis and Forecast 2018 to 2023, provides a 360-degree overview of the Global market. Approximations associated with the market values over the forecast period are based on empirical research and data collected through both primary and secondary sources. The authentic processes followed to exhibit various aspects of the market makes the data reliable in context to particular time period and industry.Get Free Sample Copy of This Report@This report is highly informative document with inclusion of comprehensive market data associated with the significant elements and subdivision of the Global Medical Aesthetics Market that may impact the growth scenarios of the industry. The report may commendably help trades and decision makers to address the challenges and to gain benefits from highly competitive Global Medical Aesthetics Market.The major players profiled in this report include: Allergan, Inc., Merz Aesthetics, Inc., Solta Medical, Inc., Galderma S.A., Cynosure Inc., Syneron Medical Ltd.Global Medical Aesthetics Market is research report of comprehensive nature which entails information in relation with major regional markets, current scenarios. This includes key regional areas such as North America, Global, Asia-Pacific, etc. and the foremost countries such as Global, Germany, United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, Global and China.Purchase Report@The Global Medical Aesthetics Market report attempts to build familiarity of the market through sharing basic information associated with the aspects such as definitions, classifications, applications and market overview, product specifications, manufacturing processes, cost structures, raw materials and more. Furthermore, it strives to analyze the crucial regional markets, including the product price, profit, capacity, production, supply, demand and market growth rate. It also discusses forecast for the same. The report concludes with new project SWOT analysis, investment feasibility analysis, and investment return analysis.In addition, this report identifies pin-point analysis of competitive dashboard and helps readers to develop competitive edge over others. It delivers a noteworthy data and insights associated with factors driving or preventing the growth of the market. It brings a nine-year forecast evaluated on the basis of how the market is expected to perform.It assists readers in understanding the key product sections and their future. Its counsels in taking well-versed business decisions by giving complete intuitions of the market and by forming a comprehensive analysis of market subdivisions. To sum up, it also provides confident graphics and personalized SWOT analysis of foremost market subdivisions.Enquiry about Report@This statistical surveying report presents comprehensive assessment of the Global market for Medical Aesthetics Market, discussing several market verticals such as the production capacity, product pricing, the dynamics of demand and supply, sales volume, revenue, growth rate and more.Table of Content:Global Medical Aesthetics Market Research Report 2018-2023Chapter 1: Industry OverviewChapter 2: Global Medical Aesthetics Market International Market AnalysisChapter 3: Environment Analysis of Global Medical Aesthetics MarketChapter 4: Analysis of Revenue by ClassificationsChapter 5: Analysis of Revenue by Regions and ApplicationsChapter 6: Analysis of Global Medical Aesthetics Market Revenue Market Status.Chapter 7: Analysis of Global Medical Aesthetics Market Industry Key ManufacturersChapter 8: Sales Price and Gross Margin AnalysisChapter 9: Marketing Trader or Distributor Analysis of Medical Aesthetics MarketChapter 10: Development Trend of Medical Aesthetics Market Industry 2018-2023Chapter 11: Industry Chain Suppliers of Medical Aesthetics Market with Contact InformationChapter 12: New Project Investment Feasibility Analysis of Medical Aesthetics MarketChapter 13: Conclusion of the Global Medical Aesthetics Market Research ReportAbout Us:Qurate Business Intelligence delivers unique market research solutions to its customers and help them to get equipped with refined information and market insights derived from reports. We are committed to providing best business services and easy processes to get the same. Qurate Business Intelligence considers themselves as strategic partners of their customers and always shows the keen level of interest to deliver quality.Runwal Platinum,Ramnagar Colony, Bavdhan,Pune, Maharashtra, India-411021IN +919881074592info@qurateresearch.com Emerging Trends of IoT Platforms Market Analysis with top key player like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple, ATT, Box, Citrix, Dell, Dropbox, Flexiant, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle, Rackspace, Red Hat, Sales Force, Sprint, Verizon. IoT Platforms Market https://www.theresearchinsights.com/request_sample.php?id=1581 https://www.theresearchinsights.com/enquiry_before_buying.php?id=1581 https://www.theresearchinsights.com/ask_for_discount.php?id=1581 www.theresearchinsights.com The worldwide IoT Platforms Market is foretold to bank on the developing penetration of smartphones, tablets, and different linked and faraway gadgets. Need to improve decision-making, emergency dealing with, and decrease manufacturing expenses in organizations might be any other powerful factor pushing the boom of the global IoT platform marketplace. Smooth integration of facts communication, statistics garage, and hardware design with the assist of IoT platform is expected to create profitable opportunities inside the worldwide market. The numbers inferred from subordinate research is merged into the research report after validation of the market data approximations through various conferences and analyses conducted and collected from the industry and market specialists.Global IoT Platforms Market is expected to grow with a CAGR of +22% during forecast period 2018 to 2025. These marketplace is bifurcated into stock, human capital, customer support, business enterprise performance, deliver chain, infrastructure, and security and asset performance management on the idea of application. Amongst those packages, supply chain management is foreseen to become prominent inside the international IoT platform market. Improvement of asset tracking is one of the essential applications of supply chain control, which permits producers to keep money and time and allows to make knowledgeable enterprise choices.Request for Sample Copy of This Report@-Top Key Player:Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple, ATT, Box, Citrix, Dell, Dropbox, Flexiant, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle, Rackspace, Red Hat, Sales Force, Sprint, Verizon.The market outline segment of the report investigates market progression, for example, drivers, limitations, and opportunities that, at present, strongly affect the Global IoT Platforms Market and could impact the market in future also. Market share analysis has been given in the report with a specific end goal to clarify the intensity of rivalry between driving market players working over the globe.Enquiry for More Information@-On the geographical the front, the worldwide IoT Platforms Market is prophesied to witness the dominance of North America in the foreseeable destiny. Growing adoption of advanced technology and number of corporations offering IoT answers ought to create a surge within the growth of the IoT platform market in the vicinity. However, north the United States is estimated to tread upon the heels of Europe in terms of growth price. Anticipated to show a better growth rate, Europe should boost up its increase inside the worldwide IoT platform market because of the growing uptake of industry 4.0 and favorable government initiatives. Europe is forecast to benefit from the growth in call for IoT platform in France, the U.K., and GermanyA few other analytical viewpoints, for example, Porter's Five Forces Analysis and value chain analysis have been portrayed to give an in-depth analysis of the IoT Platforms Market. Competitive landscape area in the report specifies about driving players for each of the product section and surgical technique that rules the market or anticipated to rise in expected years.Early buyers will receive up to 40% Discount on this report@-The main points which are answered and covered in this Report are-What will be the total Industrial IoT Platforms Market in the coming years till 2023?What will be the key factors which will be overall affecting the industry?What are the various Future Scope and Trends?Which are the major companies included?Table of Content:-Chapter 1 Industry Overview of IoT Platforms MarketChapter 2 Manufacturing Cost Structure AnalysisChapter 3 Technical Data and Manufacturing Plants AnalysisChapter 4 Global IoT Platforms Market OverviewChapter 5 Overview of Regional Market AnalysisChapter 6 Major Manufacturers IoT Platforms MarketChapter 7 Development, Trend, Analysis of MarketChapter 8 Segmentation Analysis by Marketing TypeChapter 9 Application Analysis by Marketing TypeChapter 10 Conclusion of IoT Platforms Market Professional Survey Report 2018.About usThe Research Insights A global leader in analytics, research and advisory that can assist you to renovate your business and modify your approach. With us, you will learn to take decisions intrepidly. We make sense of drawbacks, opportunities, circumstances, estimations and information using our experienced skills and verified methodologies. Our research reports will give you an exceptional experience of innovative solutions and outcomes. We have effectively steered businesses all over the world with our market research reports and are outstandingly positioned to lead digital transformations. Thus, we craft greater value for clients by presenting advanced opportunities in the global market.Contact usRobinSales managerContact number: +91-996-067-0000sales@theresearchinsights.com Hand Tools Market 2027 | Apex Tools Group, Snap-On, Klein Tools, Akbar Tools Ltd., Wera Tools, Channellock, Inc. https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/sample/110114717/Cosmetic-Ingredients-Market https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/discount/110114717/Cosmetic-Ingredients-Market https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/rd/110114717/Cosmetic-Ingredients-Market https://www.researchreportinsights.com/ Research Report Insights (RRI) delivers key insights on the global hand tools market in its latest report titled Hand Tools Market by 2027. The long-term outlook on the global hand tools market remains positive, with market value expected to increase at a CAGR of 3.9% by 2027. Among application, the household & DIY segment is expected to expand at a significant CAGR in terms of value over the forecast period. Among product type, the metal cutting tools segment is anticipated to witness higher CAGR in terms of value over the forecast period. Global sales offhand tools is estimated to be valued at US$ 15,642.8 Mn by the end of 2017, witnessing a Y-o-Y growth of 3.9% over the year 2016. North America is estimated to account for a value share of 33.3% in the global hand tools market by 2017 end and it is anticipated to retain its dominance throughout the forecast period.Hand Tools has been identified as one of the most profitable and consistently performing industry despite being low profile. Use of hand tools is largely affected by the demographic conditions with majority of consumers utilizing hand tools for several DIY (do it yourself) and remodeling activities. On the other hand, in industries use of hand tools has been largely characterized by companies looking for state of art technology to produce high quality products. To respond to the needs of industries, producers are aggressively focusing towards product innovation to satisfy the needs of different customers. One of the several areas of product innovation where companies are primarily focusing is ergonomic design of hand tools to make it more precise and comfortable to operate. Industrial expansion worldwide is primarily driving the demand for hand tools since adoption of hand tools for several maintenance purpose is continuously increasing. Further, emerging demand of hand tools from automotive repair and maintenance industry has also witnessed the growth of high precision hand tools.Request For Report Sample:However, the global hand tools market is expected to face certain challenges. Consumer shifting preference towards power tools mainly due to fast and easy operating feature is primarily restricting the growth of the market. Moreover, raw material price rise is also identified as the challenge for the companies to maintain price quality ratio of hand tools primarily during shifting trend toward adoption of power tools. The segment is anticipated to account for a market value of more than US$ 9,000 Mn in 2017 and is anticipated to be valued in excess of US$ 12 Bn by 2027 end, expanding at a CAGR of 3.9% during the projected period.Segmentation analysisOn the basis of product type, the general purpose tools segment is anticipated to continue to dominate the market in terms of value over the forecast periodOn the basis of application, the industrial segment is anticipated to dominate the market in terms of value. This segment accounted for 59.9% value share in 2015On the basis of sales channel, the online sales segment is expected to be the most attractive in terms of CAGR index. The growth of this segment is due to rising penetration of e-commerce and increasing demand for cross border products among consumers.In terms of sales channel, retail segment is expected to dominate the market throughout the forecast period. Mass merchant retailers selling product at price below industry average in order to drive their sales is primarily fuelling the growth of this segment.Request Report Discount:Regional analysisNorth America and Western Europe are estimated to collectively account for 63.8% value share in the global hand tools market by the end of 2017. The North America hand tools market is expected to remain dominant over the forecast period. Although power tools are continuously replacing hand tools in North America and Western Europe, increasing product innovations and companies aggressive expenditure in R & D is expected to propel the growth of the market. Mexico is expected to hold dominant revenue share in the Latin America hand tools market over the forecast period. This is primarily due to higher per capita consumption of hand tools. Sales of hand tools in APEJ is expected to increase to US$ 3,916.8 Mn by 2027 end from US$ 2,186.0 in 2017.Vendor insightsThe report highlights and presents the market value share of some of the top companies operating in the global hand tools market such as Stanley Black Decker, Apex Tools Group, Snap-On, Klein Tools, Akbar Tools Ltd., Wera Tools, Channellock, Inc., JK Files (India) Limited and Kennametal Inc.Report Analysis:About Us:Research Report Insights (RRI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver a host of services including custom research reports, syndicated research reports, and consulting services which are personalised in nature. RRI delivers a complete packaged solution to clients; this combines current market intelligence, technology inputs, statistical anecdotes, valuable growth insights, 360-degree view of the competitive framework, and anticipated market trends.Contact Us:Research Report Insights (RRI)42 Joseph StreetPort carling P0B 1J0Muskoka, Ontario1Phone - +1-631-721-4201Website:Email: sales@researchreportinsights.com G.fast Technology Investment and Adoption Market Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2018 - 2026 https://www.marketresearchreports.biz/sample/sample/7967 https://www.marketresearchreports.biz/sample/toc/7967 https://www.marketresearchreports.biz/it-and-telecommunication/7967/g-fast-technology-investment-and-market-research-reports https://www.marketresearchreports.biz/checkout?rep_id=7967&licType=S Recent research and the current scenario as well as future market potential of "G.fast Technology Investment and Adoption Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2018 - 2026" globally.G.fast Technology Investment and Adoption Market OverviewThe ongoing trend of digitization across the world is significantly driving the telecommunication industry. The number of mobile subscribers and internet users is increasing exponentially. Smart city initiatives leveraging platforms for IoT applications and IoT penetration in daily life is creating the need for high speed internet or ultrafast broadband services. There are two major technologies for Ultrafast broadband services, namely fiber to the premise (FTTP) and G.fast.G.fast is a protocol standard of digital subscriber line (DSL) technology. Using G.fast technology, telecom operators provide digital communication platforms and services to their customers. G.fast is suitable for local loops shorter than 500 meters. The letter G in G.fast is the abbreviation for International Telecommunication Union (ITU) G series of recommendations, and fast stands for fast broadband access. G.fast technology features gigabit and multi-gigabit speeds over conventional copper telephone lines. G.fast technology gives service providers an advanced and economical way to complement and accelerate fiber to the home (FTTH) deployments.Request to Get Sample Copy of This Report @G.fast Technology Investment and Adoption Market Drivers and RestraintsCompanies in the telecommunications industry are deploying superfast technology since the last decade. Leading players are preparing themselves for the next phase of speed requirements. Need for high speed broadband is significantly increasing yearly; it is witnessing a growth of over 30%-40% each year. Market leaders of G.fast technology are remarkably investing in G.fast technology to penetrate the end user markets. For instance, in October 2016, Switzerland based major telecommunications services provider Swisscom launched G.fast in Switzerland. Moreover, Swisscom has partnered with Huawei for G.fast micro-nodes digital supplier line access multiplexers (DSLAMs) installation. In 2016, CenturyLink, Inc, a U.S. based telecommunication company deployed G.fast technology in over 800 apartments. Since late 2017, Nokia Corporation and Frontier Communications are looking to deploy G.fast technology to provide ultra-speed broadband services to residential apartments and customers living in other multi-dwelling units (MDUs) in the U.S. state of Connecticut. Moreover, since 2017, M-net Telekommunikations GmbH, a German operator is launching G.fast services in Munich. AT&T is expected to launch G.fast services in 22 metros in the U.S. market. The popular G.fast deployment model used by market leaders includes customer premises equipment (CPE) and distribution point unit (DPU). Companies are majorly focusing on commercial and residential use cases for G.fast technology.Request to Get Complete Report List Of Tables and Figures @Spending and investment for G.fast technology is expected to increase over the forecast period. Competitive environment among broadband service providers and efforts to provide advanced and effective solutions in end use markets is anticipated to boost G.fast technology adoption in the near future. Furthermore, growing need for ultrafast internet and broadband services are driving G.fast Technology Investment and Adoption Market. However, lack of awareness and absence of required infrastructure is expected to slow down G.fast technology adoption. Greater cost-effectiveness and scalability of the technology is anticipated to create ample opportunities during 2018 2026. Till 2016, globally, G.fast technology is well penetrated in the U.S. Presence of major internet service providers such as Verizon and AT&T across North America is significantly contributing to G.fast technology deployment. These players are testing G.fast technology to augment the broadband speed up to 1 Gbps with the help of existing copper infrastructure. Across the geographic regions, North America is estimated to experience higher adoption of G.fast technology.G.fast Technology Investment and Adoption Market Key PlayersCompanies operating in the G.fast Technology Investment and Adoption Market are leveraging on cost-effective and advanced G.fast solutions. Some of these significantly active players in the market include Chunghwa Telecom Co., Ltd., Marvell Technology Group Ltd., Mediatek, Inc., BT Group PLC, Broadcom Ltd., Centurylink, Inc., Sckipio Technologies SI Ltd., Metanoia Communications, Inc., Swisscom AG, Qualcomm, Inc., EXFO Inc., Comtrend, and ARRIS International plc.View Full Report @The report offers a comprehensive evaluation of the G.fast Technology Investment and Adoption Market. It does so via in-depth qualitative insights, historical data, and verifiable projections about G.fast Technology Investment and Adoption Market size. The projections featured in the report have been derived using proven research methodologies and assumptions. By doing so, the research report serves as a repository of analysis and information for every facet of the G.fast Technology Investment and Adoption Market, including but not limited to: Regional markets, technology, types, and applications.MRR.BIZ has been compiled in-depth market research data in the report after exhaustive primary and secondary research. Our team of able, experienced in-house analysts has collated the information through personal interviews and study of industry databases, journals, and reputable paid sources.The report provides the following information:Tailwinds and headwinds molding the markets trajectoryMarket segments based on products, technology, and applicationsProspects of each segmentOverall current and possible future size of the marketGrowth pace of the marketCompetitive landscape and key players strategiesThe main aim of the report is to:Enable key stakeholders in the market bet right on itUnderstand the opportunities and pitfalls awaiting themAssess the overall growth scope in the near termStrategize effectively with respect to production and distributionRequest to Buy This Premium Report From Here @MRR.BIZ is a leading provider of strategic market research. Our vast repository consists research reports, data books, company profiles, and regional market data sheets. We regularly update the data and analysis of a wide-ranging products and services around the world. As readers, you will have access to the latest information on almost 300 industries and their sub-segments. Both large Fortune 500 companies and SMEs have found those useful. This is because we customize our offerings keeping in mind the specific requirements of our clients.MarketResearchReports.biz is a seller of syndicated market studies, featuring an exhaustive collection of research reports from leading international publishers. Our repositoryis diverse, spanningvirtually every industrial sector and even more every category and sub-category within the industry. We also provide consulting services to enable our clients have adynamicbusiness perspective.State Tower 90 State Street, Suite 700 Albany, NY 12207 United StatesState Tower90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207United StatesToll Free: 866-997-4948(USA-Canada)Tel: +1-518-621-2074E: sales@marketresearchreports.biz Indian Aerospace Composites Market Worth US$ 302.5 million in 2023 https://www.stratviewresearch.com/388/Indian-Aerospace-Composites-Market.html https://www.stratviewresearch.com/toc/388/Indian-Aerospace-Composites-Market.html https://www.stratviewresearch.com/Request-Sample/388/Indian-Aerospace-Composites-Market.html https://www.stratviewresearch.com/market/report/Aerospace-Defense.html Stratview Research announces the launch of a new research report on Indian Aerospace Composites Market. This 200-page extensive report from Stratview Research, studies the Indian Aerospace Composites Market over the trend period of 2012 to 2017 and forecast period of 2018 to 2023. The report provides detailed insights on the market dynamics to enable informed business decision making and growth strategy formulation based on the opportunities present in the market.Click here to read the detailed description:This Indian Aerospace Composites Market analysis has been segmented in Six ways, keeping in mind the interest of all the stakeholders across the value chain. by Opportunity Type (Indigenous Opportunities, Export opportunities, and Others) by Aircraft Type (Civil Aviation, Military Aviation, and Others) Civil aviation and military aviation are likely to remain the growth engines of the market. by Application Type (Aerospace Exterior Composites, Aerospace Interior Composites) Exterior segment is likely to remain dominant in the market. by Resin Type (Epoxy Composites, Phenolic Composites, and others) by Fiber Type (Carbon Fiber Composite, Glass Fiber Composites, and Others) Carbon fiber composites will remain the dominant and fastest-growing fiber type segment of the market. and by Process Type (Hand Layup, Other Processes)Go through the detailed TOC:Indian Aerospace Composites Market InsightsThe next five years for the Indian aerospace composites market are going to be extremely vigorous with significant growth opportunities in both indigenous as well as export market. It is estimated that the market for aerospace composites in India including export potential is likely to reach a value of US$ 302.5 million in 2023. Currently, the market is relatively very small with the presence of a few local players, which possess good composite capabilities. However, it is expected that the Indian market is likely to evolve rapidly in terms of both demand as well as technology in order to cater to the huge indigenous demand for commercial as well as military aircraft.Request a free Sample here:Increasing defense budget coupled with the offset policy, increasing penetration of composites in the next-generation aircraft programs, increasing production rate of Light Combat Aircraft (LCA), increasing export opportunities for aerospace composites, make in India campaign, and availability of low-cost skilled manpower in India are some of the major factors proliferating the demand for composites in the Indian aerospace industry.Increasing defense budget coupled with strong procurement plans of military and commercial aircraft are stimulating the global players to either open their branches or form JVs or partnerships with local companies in order to fulfill the offset obligation imposed by the Indian government. Major Indian conglomerates are eyeing this market and are forming strategic alliances with the global companies to develop defense capabilities targeting the growing indeginous market as well as export potential. On contrary, the excellent growth of the Indian aerospace industry is catching the interest of many global players.Various leading global players are targeting India as their new revenuepocket and are eagerly eyeing various defense projects in the country. For instance, Airbus Group, which is sourcing composites from more than 45 Indian suppliers, has sourced about US$ 550 million of parts in the year 2017 and is actively looking for tie-ups with Indian companies to set-up base for composite parts manufacturing in India. Adani Group is one of the leading companies that has announced to set-up carbon composites aerostructure facility in India to cater to the OEMs, like Airbus Group.As per Airbus Outlook 2018-2037, India may demand nearly 1,750 commercial aircraft worth US$ 255 billion from 2018-2037. In terms of air passenger traffic, India is one of the fastest-growing markets worldwide and is likely to mark more than 8% annual growth rate in the coming years. This, in turn, will make India the 3rd largest aviation market by 2019-2020.Composite materials have a proven journey in the aerospace industry and are gradually becoming the materials of choice for the construction of critical aircraft components globally.The penetration of composites would not cede here and is likely to increase further with the development of new composite products to address changing customer demands with evolving trends, rapid transformations in technologies, and intense market competition. This will correspond to an attractive growth opportunity for both existing as well as new players. Another factor contributing to the growth of the market is the initiatives taken by the Indian government, such as Make in India, to promote the manufacturing industry by attracting investments from the global companies.However, the road for growth is not as lucrative as it seems. The industry stakeholders have to efficiently eliminate the existing bottlenecks in order to reap the benefits in a profitable manner. For instance, the Indian aerospace industry currently lacks the presence of a large number of composite part molders that have the good capabilities to fabricate composite parts using advanced manufacturing processes. There is an immense requirement of such players that bring good composite technological capability in India and augment the overall composite capabilities for the Indian aerospace industry.The Indian aerospace composites market is segmented based on the aircraft type as civil aviation, military aviation, and spacecraft. Civil aviation and military aviation are likely to remain the growth engines of the market in the foreseeable future. Majority of the demand for composite parts for the commercial aviation segment is mainly coming from the global market, whereas there is an impressive indigenous demand for composite parts in the military aviation segment.Based on the application type, the Indian aerospace composites market is segmented into exterior and interior. The exterior segment is likely to remain dominant in the market during the forecast period. Composites are increasingly used in aircraft exterior with the purpose to leverage the potential of composites including lightweight, corrosion resistance, and abrasion resistance.Based on the resin type, the market is also segmented into epoxy composites, phenolic composites, and other composites. Most of the aerospace composite components are fabricated using epoxy resin not only in India but also in the global market. Phenolic composites are well known for their excellent FST-resistant properties and are preferred choice for interior applications.Based on the fiber type, the market is segmented into carbon fiber composites, glass fiber composites, and aramid fiber composites. Carbon fiber composites are likely to remain the most dominant and fastest-growing fiber type segment of the market during the forecast period. Lightweight coupled with high-performance benefits over rivalry materials has led to a massive adoption of carbon fiber composites in the aerospace industry.The Indian aerospace composites market is fiercely competitive with the presence of a few active players at present. It is anticipated that the excellent growth of the market may attract global players to enter the Indian market in the near future to capture a larger chunk of the growing market. Furthermore, it is also expected that the existing players may develop better technological capabilities in the coming time to remain competitive in the long run.Some of the key players in the aerospace composites market in India are Tata Group, Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd. (HAL), Kineco Kaman Composites - India Private Ltd., Valeth High Tech Composites Pvt Ltd, Taneja Aerospace and Aviation Limited, and Adani Defense and Aerospace Group. Execution of joint ventures and partnership and development of new composite applications are the key strategies adopted by the major players in the Indian aerospace composites market.Report FeaturesThis report provides market intelligence in the most comprehensive way. The report structure has been kept such that it offers maximum business value. It provides critical insights into the market dynamics and will enable strategic decision making for the existing market players as well as those willing to enter the market. The following are the key features of the report: Market structure: Overview, industry life cycle analysis, supply chain analysis Market environment analysis: Growth drivers and constraints, Porters five forces analysis, SWOT analysis Market export and indigenous opportunities and forecast analysis Competitive landscape and dynamics: Market share, product portfolio, product launches, etc. Attractive market segments and associated growth opportunities Emerging trends Strategic growth opportunities for the existing and new players Key success factorsClick Here for Other Reports from Stratview Research in the Aerospace & Defence Industry:Stratview Research is a global market intelligence firm offering a wide range of services including syndicated market reports, consulting, sourcing intelligence, and customer research.400 Renaissance Center,Suite 2600,Detroit, Michigan, MI 48243United States of AmericaPhone No. +1-313-307-4176Email-sales@stratviewresearch.com Solid State Drive Market worth 60.22 Billion USD by 2023, Samsung and Western Digital Corporation are the Leading players in the Market. https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/solid-state-drives-market-75076578.html https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Enquiry_Before_BuyingNew.asp?id=75076578&utm_source=OpenPR https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/requestCustomizationNew.asp?id=75076578&utm_source=OpenPR According to the new research report "Solid State Drive (SSD) Market by Form Factor (2.5", 3.5", M.2, U.2/SFF 8639, FHHL/HHHL), Interface (SATA, SAS, PCIe), Technology (SLC, MLC, TLC), End-user (Enterprise, Client, Industrial, Automotive), and Geography - Global Forecast to 2023", the solid state drive market is expected to be worth USD 26.47 Billion in 2017 and USD 60.22 Billion by 2023, at a CAGR of 14.68% between 2017 and 2023.The growth of this market is mainly driven by the increasing penetration of high-end cloud computing, growing adoption of SSDs in data centers, and advantages of SSDs over HDDs.Browse 67 Market Data Tables and 46 Figures spread through 160 Pages and in-depth TOC on "Solid State Drive (SSD) Market - Global Forecast to 2023"Report Scope:By Interface: SATA SAS PCIeBy Form Factor: 1.8/2.5 3.5 M.2 U.2 (SFF 8639) FHHL and HHHLBy Technology: SLC MLC Planar MLC 3D TLC Planar TLC 3DBy End-User: Enterpriseo Server attachedo Storage attached Cliento Desktop PCo Notebooko Tableto Others Industrial AutomotiveGeography: North America Europe APAC RoWINQUIRY BEFORE BUYING @Market for SATA interface solid state drive held the largest size in 2016The large market of SATA interface solid state drive is mainly attributed to the low price of SSDs compared to SSDs with SAS and PCIe interfaces. In addition, old desktop PCs support only SATA interface for the upgrade of storage from HDDs to SSDs. This is driving the demand for SSDs with SATA interface during the forecast period.Market for half height, half length (HHHL); or; even bigger form factor; full height, half length (FHHL) form factorbased solid state drive is expected to grow at the highest rate during the forecast periodMost of the PCIe SSDs are manufactured in form factors such as half height, half length (HHHL); or; even bigger form factor; full height, half length (FHHL). The market for PCIe interface is expected to dominate the use of all other available interfaces owing to high speed and enhanced performance scaling. Therefore, the market for FHHL and HHHL is expected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast periodSolid state drive market in enterprise held the largest size in 2016An increasing number of enterprise applications require high performance storage, constant uptime, high throughput, power efficiency, and high reliability; SSDs meet all these requirements of enterprise applications, thereby creating enterprise data centers more dynamic. SSDs for data centers offer high speed, mass volume, and energy-efficient hierarchical storage. SSDs based on the non-volatile memory technology are widely used for mass storage and high-functionality storage. Also, the PCIe interface used in SSDs is a high-speed bus interface that provides enterprise systems with a high data-transfer speed, which helps companies manage heavy workloads with high reliability and efficiency.North America accounted for the largest share of the solid state drive market in 2016North America is a key market for notebooks, laptops, and tablets. With more emphasis on speeding up data transfer, the dynamics of computing has changed for notebook, tablet, and laptop developers in this region; hence, there has been a strong push for using SSDs in these devices to save time, speed up data transfer, and achieve high-performance level. In addition, the replacement rate of traditional hard disk drives with SSDs is high in North America.Samsung (South Korea), Intel (US), Western Digital (US), Micron (US), and Toshiba (Japan) are the major players included in the report with market share analysis. The report also covers various innovators involved in the solid state drive market. Viking (US), Adata (Taiwan), Foremay (US), BiTMICRO Networks (US), and Crossbar (US) are a few innovators in the solid state drive market that offer disruptive products. Also, Diablo Technologies (Canada) and Violin Memory (US) are a few emerging companies in the market.Get Free 10% Customization @About MarketsandMarketsMarketsandMarkets provides quantified B2B research on 30,000 high growth niche opportunities/threats which will impact 70% to 80% of worldwide companies revenues. Currently servicing 7500 customers worldwide including 80% of global Fortune 1000 companies as clients. Almost 75,000 top officers across eight industries worldwide approach MarketsandMarkets for their painpoints around revenues decisions.Our 850 fulltime analyst and SMEs at MarketsandMarkets are tracking global high growth markets following the "Growth Engagement Model GEM". The GEM aims at proactive collaboration with the clients to identify new opportunities, identify most important customers, write "Attack, avoid and defend" strategies, identify sources of incremental revenues for both the company and its competitors. MarketsandMarkets now coming up with 1,500 MicroQuadrants (Positioning top players across leaders, emerging companies, innovators, strategic players) annually in high growth emerging segments. MarketsandMarkets is determined to benefit more than 10,000 companies this year for their revenue planning and help them take their innovations/disruptions early to the market by providing them research ahead of the curve.MarketsandMarketss flagship competitive intelligence and market research platform, "Knowledgestore" connects over 200,000 markets and entire value chains for deeper understanding of the unmet insights along with market sizing and forecasts of niche markets.Mr. Shelly SinghMarketsandMarkets INC.630 Dundee RoadSuite 430Northbrook, IL 60062USA: 1-888-600-6441sales@marketsandmarkets.com Global Marine Big Data Market Segmentation, Parameters and Prospects 2018 to 2025 Market Research Report https://www.wiseguyreports.com/sample-request/3399634-global-marine-big-data-market-size-status-and-forecast-2018-2025 https://www.wiseguyreports.com/reports/3399634-global-marine-big-data-market-size-status-and-forecast-2018-2025 Global Marine Big Data IndustryNew Study On 2018-2025 Marine Big Data Market Global Key Player, Demand, Growth, Opportunities and Analysis Forecast Added to Wise Guy Reports DatabaseThis report focuses on the global Marine Big Data status, future forecast, growth opportunity, key market and key players. The study objectives are to present the Marine Big Data development in United States, Europe and China.Try Sample Report @Marine big data can be described as large amount of data collected by aerial remote sensing, ships, stations, buoys and satellites. In recent years, the data generated and collected by various devices is growing at an overwhelming speed all over the world. In terms of marine sector, countries across the globe have launched observing projects such as Argo, NEPTUNE, GOOS etc. and number of marine observation satellites.As multiple observing techniques and various marine observation systems are deployed into the service, data volume increases, data format becomes diversified which forms marine big data. Only that marine data is valuable which contain specific temporal and spatial information. Factors such as high dimension and periodical data acquisition by various marine observation projects around the world leads to huge volume of marine big data.In 2017, the global Marine Big Data market size was xx million US$ and it is expected to reach xx million US$ by the end of 2025, with a CAGR of xx% during 2018-2025.The key players covered in this studyTeradataSplunkAIMS-SinayOceanwiseIntertrust Technologies CorporationMarineFINDBigOceanDataAvenca LimitedBMT GroupDatameerDatabricksNautical Control SolutionsOcean Networks CanadaSmart OceanMarket segment by Type, the product can be split intoSoftwareServicesMarket segment by Application, split intoRenewable EnergyOil and GasFisheryWhale WatchingMarine Protected AreaMarine TrafficDredgingHarborOffshore ConstructionOthersMarket segment by Regions/Countries, this report coversUnited StatesEuropeChinaJapanSoutheast AsiaIndiaCentral & South AmericaThe study objectives of this report are:To analyze global Marine Big Data status, future forecast, growth opportunity, key market and key players.To present the Marine Big Data 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.For Detailed Reading Please visit WiseGuy Reports @Some Major Points from Table of content:1 Report Overview1.1 Study Scope1.2 Key Market Segments1.3 Players Covered1.4 Market Analysis by Type1.4.1 Global Marine Big Data Market Size Growth Rate by Type (2013-2025)1.4.2 Software1.4.3 Services1.5 Market by Application1.5.1 Global Marine Big Data Market Share by Application (2013-2025)1.5.2 Renewable Energy1.5.3 Oil and Gas1.5.4 Fishery1.5.5 Whale Watching1.5.6 Marine Protected Area1.5.7 Marine Traffic1.5.8 Dredging1.5.9 Harbor1.5.10 Offshore Construction1.5.11 Others1.6 Study Objectives1.7 Years Considered2 Global Growth Trends2.1 Marine Big Data Market Size2.2 Marine Big Data Growth Trends by Regions2.2.1 Marine Big Data Market Size by Regions (2013-2025)2.2.2 Marine Big Data Market Share by Regions (2013-2018)2.3 Industry Trends2.3.1 Market Top Trends2.3.2 Market Drivers2.3.3 Market Opportunities12 International Players Profiles12.1 Teradata12.1.1 Teradata Company Details12.1.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.1.3 Marine Big Data Introduction12.1.4 Teradata Revenue in Marine Big Data Business (2013-2018)12.1.5 Teradata Recent Development12.2 Splunk12.2.1 Splunk Company Details12.2.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.2.3 Marine Big Data Introduction12.2.4 Splunk Revenue in Marine Big Data Business (2013-2018)12.2.5 Splunk Recent Development12.3 AIMS-Sinay12.3.1 AIMS-Sinay Company Details12.3.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.3.3 Marine Big Data Introduction12.3.4 AIMS-Sinay Revenue in Marine Big Data Business (2013-2018)12.3.5 AIMS-Sinay Recent Development12.4 Oceanwise12.4.1 Oceanwise Company Details12.4.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.4.3 Marine Big Data Introduction12.4.4 Oceanwise Revenue in Marine Big Data Business (2013-2018)12.4.5 Oceanwise Recent Development12.5 Intertrust Technologies Corporation12.5.1 Intertrust Technologies Corporation Company Details12.5.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.5.3 Marine Big Data Introduction12.5.4 Intertrust Technologies Corporation Revenue in Marine Big Data Business (2013-2018)12.5.5 Intertrust Technologies Corporation Recent Development12.6 MarineFIND12.6.1 MarineFIND Company Details12.6.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.6.3 Marine Big Data Introduction12.6.4 MarineFIND Revenue in Marine Big Data Business (2013-2018)12.6.5 MarineFIND Recent Development12.7 BigOceanData12.7.1 BigOceanData Company Details12.7.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.7.3 Marine Big Data Introduction12.7.4 BigOceanData Revenue in Marine Big Data Business (2013-2018)12.7.5 BigOceanData Recent Development12.8 Avenca Limited12.8.1 Avenca Limited Company Details12.8.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.8.3 Marine Big Data Introduction12.8.4 Avenca Limited Revenue in Marine Big Data Business (2013-2018)12.8.5 Avenca Limited Recent Development12.9 BMT Group12.9.1 BMT Group Company Details12.9.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.9.3 Marine Big Data Introduction12.9.4 BMT Group Revenue in Marine Big Data Business (2013-2018)12.9.5 BMT Group Recent Development12.10 Datameer12.10.1 Datameer Company Details12.10.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.10.3 Marine Big Data Introduction12.10.4 Datameer Revenue in Marine Big Data Business (2013-2018)12.10.5 Datameer Recent Development12.11 Databricks12.12 Nautical Control Solutions12.13 Ocean Networks Canada12.14 Smart OceanContinued..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 Virtual Memory Management Market To Hold a High Potential for Growth by 2026 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=47004 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/virtual-memory-management-market.html https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com Virtual memory is the ability of an operating system (such as MAC, Linux, and Windows) to manage the memory in case of shortage of the physical memory, by temporarily transferring the data to the disk storage from the random access memory (RAM), with the help of hardware and software solutions.Request a PDF Brochure with Future Analysis @Virtual memory allows the end-user to run and store more number of applications than the physical memory can support. Computers have a finite amount of memory. Hence, the space is more likely to run out when the customer tries to run multiple programs at the same time. A system having virtual memory can load multiple programs at a time, without any need for purchasing more RAM. In order to access virtual memory, the operating system first divides the memory into swap files or page files. These files have their own fixed addresses. Every page file is stored on the disk and whenever the particular page is required, the operating system copies it from the disk to the physical memory and translates its virtual address into a real address.The global virtual memory management market can be segmented based on component, software type, enterprise size, and region. Based on component, the market has been bifurcated into software and services. The services segment has been sub-divided into implementation & integration, consulting, and maintenance. In terms of software type, the market has been divided into on-premise and cloud. The cloud segment is anticipated to expand at a substantial rate during the forecast period. Based on enterprise size, the market has been segmented into large-sized enterprises and small- & medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The large-sized enterprises segment is expected to hold a major share of the virtual memory management market from 2018 to 2026, due to rising awareness about quality of processes and cost-cutting.In terms of region, the global virtual memory management market has been segregated into North America, South America, Europe, Asia Pacific (APAC), and Middle East & Africa (MEA). North America is estimated to hold the leading share of the global virtual memory management market from 2018 to 2026, followed by Europe. Canada and the U.S. contribute significantly toward growth of the market in North America. This is attributable to presence of leading players in these countries. Increasing investments in the research and development and rising adoption of advanced solutions by leading players in Canada and the U.S. are driving the virtual memory management market in North America.Browse Market Research Report @However, among all regions, Asia Pacific is expected to offer significant growth opportunities to key players operating in the global virtual memory management market between 2018 and 2026, due to significant growth in industrialization in this region. Within the region, countries such as Japan, South Korea, India, China, and Singapore are contributing to the growth of the virtual memory management market in the region. This is primarily due to initiatives taken by governments of these countries to support the growth of small- & medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).About TMRTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a global market intelligence company providing business information reports and services. The companys exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trend analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.Contact TMR90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite: Hospital-Acquired Infections (HAIs) Control Market Research Report 2023: Segmentation by- STERIS Corporation, Advanced Sterilization Products Division, Hoffmann-La Roche, Pfizer, Becton Dickinson https://www.bigmarketresearch.com/request-sample/2847775/?utm_source=OPR-SL https://www.bigmarketresearch.com/purchase-enquiry/2847775/?utm_source=OPR-SL https://www.bigmarketresearch.com/global-hospital-acquired-infections-hais-control-market-research-report-2012-2023-market/?utm_source=OPR&utm_medium=SL https://www.bigmarketresearch.com/world-luxury-hotels-market-research-report-2023-covering-usa-europe-china-japan-india-south-east-asia-and-etc-market/?utm_source=OPR&utm_medium=SL The global Hospital-acquired infections (HAIs) Control market will reach xxx Million USD in 2017 with CAGR xx% 2018-2023. The objective of report is to define, segment, and project the market on the basis of product type, application, and region, and to describe the content about the factors influencing market dynamics, policy, economic, technology and market entry etc.Based on products type, the report describes major products type share of regional market. Products mentioned as follows:Diagnostic techniquesDleaning and sterilizationTreatmentRequest a sample this report:The Competitive landscape of the Hospital-Acquired Infections (HAIs) Control Market profiles the key players participating in the global STERIS Corporation, Advanced Sterilization Products Division, Hoffmann-La Roche, Pfizer, Becton Dickinson. The report also details the market positioning, strategies, and revenue procured by each of these manufacturers.Based on Application, the report describes major application share of regional market. Application mentioned as follows:General HospitalInfectious Disease HospitalBased on region, the report describes major regions market by products and application. Regions mentioned as follows:Asia-PacificNorth AmericaEuropeSouth AmericaMiddle East & AfricaEnquire about this report @Table of Contents :Global Hospital-Acquired Infections (HAIs) Control Market Research Report 20121 Market Overview1.1 Objectives of Research1.1.1 Definition1.1.2 Specifications1.2 Market Segment1.2.1 by Type1.2.1.1 Diagnostic techniques1.2.1.2 Dleaning and sterilization1.2.1.3 Treatment1.2.2 by Application1.2.2.1 General Hospital1.2.2.2 Infectious Disease Hospital1.2.3 by Regions2 Industry Chain2.1 Industry Chain Structure2.2 Upstream2.3 Market2.3.1 SWOT2.3.2 Dynamics3 Environmental Analysis3.1 Policy3.2 Economic3.3 Technology3.4 Market Entry4 Market Segmentation by Type4.1 Market Size4.1.1 Diagnostic techniques Market, 2012-20174.1.2 Dleaning and sterilization Market, 2012-20174.1.3 Treatment Market, 2012-20174.2 Market Forecast4.2.1 Diagnostic techniques Market Forecast, 2018-20234.2.2 Dleaning and sterilization Market Forecast, 2018-20234.2.3 Treatment Market Forecast, 2018-2023More report about of this report:Related Reports: -World Luxury Hotels Market Research Report 2023 (covering USA, Europe, China, Japan, India, South East Asia and etc)Luxury Hotels market research report provides the newest industry data and industry future trends, allowing you to identify the products and end users driving Revenue growth and profitability. The industry report lists the leading competitors and provides the insights strategic industry Analysis of the key factors influencing the market. The ...About Us:Industry executives tend to keep a tab on their business competitors. This keeps them updated on strategic business activities and investment trends. Company profiles are crucial to participating players of interconnected verticals.Contact Us:5933 NE Win Sivers Drive, #205, Portland,OR 97220 United Statescall answer Direct:+1-971-202-1575call answer Toll Free:+1-800-910-6452email help@bigmarketresearch.com Fraud Detection and Prevention Market Analysis 2019 On: IBM, ACI Worldwide, Fiserv, Experian, Dell EMC ,DXC Technology, Equifax, FICO, Vox Telecom, BAE Systems, Oracle, SAP Consultores, SAS, Cisco, Singtel, Microsoft, Fraud Detection and Prevention https://databridgemarketresearch.com/request-a-sample/?dbmr=global-fraud-detection-and-prevention-market https://databridgemarketresearch.com/speak-to-analyst/?dbmr=global-fraud-detection-and-prevention-market https://databridgemarketresearch.com/toc/?dbmr=global-fraud-detection-and-prevention-market https://databridgemarketresearch.com/inquire-before-buying/?dbmr=global-fraud-detection-and-prevention-market This report aims to examine the developments of Fraud Detection and Prevention Market including its market improvement, development, position and others. This report on the market offers explanatory knowledge on the market parts like dominating players, drivers and restraints, production, revenue, consumption, import and export, and the most effective development within the organization size, deployment type, inside, segmentation comprised throughout this analysis, also major the 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 in order to sustain in long run, additionally to the present the clear view point of market.For In-Depth Review | Get Sample Copy@Global Fraud Detection and Prevention Market is expected to reach USD 71.01 billion by 2025 from USD 16.51 million in 2017 and is projected to grow at a CAGR of 20.01% in the forecast period of 2018 to 2025. The upcoming market report contains data for historic year 2016, the base year of calculation is 2017 and the forecast period is 2018 to 2025.Market Key Competitors: SAP SE, SAS Institute Inc., Cisco Systems, Singtel, Mitel Networks Corporation, Microsoft Corporation, IBM Corporation, ACI Worldwide Inc., Fiserv Inc., Experian PLC, Dell EMC, DXC Technology Company, Equifax Inc., Vox Telecom, Easy Solutions Inc., BAE Systems PLC, Fair Isaac Corporation, Oracle Corporation, NTT Communications , Bosch Software Innovations GmbH, LexisNexis Group among other.Competitive Analysis:The global circuit breaker market is 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 in order to sustain in long run. The report includes market shares of fraud detection and prevention market for global, Europe, North America, Asia Pacific and South America.In 2017 Easy Solution launched a new early phishing detection capability and prevention to increase to data error. It also provide 100% protection to the user in reduce time frame.Speak To Industry Experts, Request For Details Report@Table of Content1. Executive Summary2. Scope of the Report Market Definition Scope of the Study Definition Research Objective Assumptions Limitations Research Process Primary Research Secondary Research Market Size Estimation Forecast Model3. Market Landscape Porters Five Forces Analysis Threat of New Entrants Bargaining Power of Buyers Bargaining Power of Suppliers Threat of Substitutes Segment Rivalry Value Chain/supply Chain Analysis4 Major Application Analysis: Major Application Market Share Major Down Stream Customers Analysis Others Global5 Industry Chain Analysis: Up Stream Industries Analysis Manufacturing Analysis Industry Chain Structure Analysis6 Major Manufacturers Analysis: Company Introduction Product Specification and Major Types Analysis Production Market Performance7 New Project Investment Feasibility Analysis: New Project SWOT Analysis New Project Investment Feasibility Analysis8 Market Driving Factors: Market Upcoming Challenges 2019-2025 Market Upcoming Opportunist 2019-2025 Related ReportsContinued..........For Full Toc Visit@Market Drivers and Restraints: Growth in the emergence of e-banking and e-commerce Increasing adoption of IP-based services Rising online transactions through mobile and web applications Lack of integration capabilities.Market Segmentation:Based on solution type, the market is segmented into: fraud analytics, authentication, governance, risk, compliance solutions and other.Based on service, the market is segmented into: professional services, managed servicesBased on application area, the market is segmented into: insurance claim, money laundering, electronic payment, mobile payment, others.Based on deployment mode, the market is segmented into: cloud, on-premises.Based on Organization Size, the market is segmented into: small medium-sized enterprises, large enterprises.Based on Vertical, the market is segmented into: banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI), retail, telecommunication, government sector, healthcare, real estate, energy and power, manufacturing, other.Based on geography: North America, South America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Middle East & Africa.Note: If you have any special requirements, please let us know and we will offer you the report as you want.Make an Inquiry for Discount On this Report@About Us: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: +1-888-387-281Email: sopan.gedam@databridgemarketresearch.com Automated Breast Ultrasound System Market Estimated to Exhibit US$ 212.4 Mn CAGR by 2025 https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-606 https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/askus/rep-gb-606 https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/automated-breast-ultrasound-system-market https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/ 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.Read Comprehensive Overview: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.comWeb: Biogen Inc., Novo Nordisk A/S, Bayer Healthcare AG, CSL Behring LLC, Pfizer Inc., PRA Health Sciences, Celgene Corporation, Alexion Pharmaceuticals Are Some Key Player in Global Rare Hematology Market Market Research Report Search Engine https://www.mrrse.com/sample/3970 https://www.mrrse.com/rare-hematology-market https://www.mrrse.com/enquiry/3970 https://www.mrrse.com/ Market Research Report Search Engine (MRRSE) recently announced the addition of a new research study to its comprehensive collection of research reports. The research report, titled Rare Hematology Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2017 - 2022 offers a detailed analysis of the market providing insights into the market dynamics that are expected to influence the overall market positively in the next few years. Furthermore, the product segmentation, drivers, barriers, key geographical segments, and the competitive scenario of the Global Oil & Gas Data Management Market have been elaborated upon in the research report.Request Free Sample Report @Growing prevalence of various blood diseases such as anemia, myeloma, leukemia and sickle cell anemia has led the hematologists to focus on various detection processes. As demand for comparatively conducting comparatively short diagnosis process is becoming the need of the hour, hematologists are looking for better treatment processes through accurate diagnosis process. With the growing need to detect various blood conditions has further propelled hematologists to focus on enhancing their diagnostic skills. In order to develop successful treatment techniques, hematologist are significantly focusing on early diagnosis of the various hematologist diseases. Bound to these factors, growth of the global hematologist disease treatment market will continue to gain momentum during the forecast period.According to Market Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE), the global rare hematology market is expected to represent a value of over US$ 16,000 Mn by the end of 2022.Increasing number of Clinical Trials to Encourage ProgressHematologists are conducting extensive research for genetics and molecular biology in order to gain a better understanding of various rare hematology diseases. The research work is mainly conducted in order to identify the potential biological targets that help in addressing the diseases on the molecular level. The extensive research work has enabled the hematologists to develop the new treatment techniques that enable faster recovery. Hundreds of the final stage clinical trials are stuck in the FDA pipeline to be evaluated and approved. Treatment procedures related to rare hematology diseases include recombinant coagulation Factor VIIa, Eculizumab: hemoglobinuria, Poloxamer 188: sickle cell disease and nonacog beta pegol: hemophilia A & B. Advocacy groups such as International National Hemophilia Foundation, Myeloma Foundation and American Society of Hematology further continue to offer resources and support for the caregivers, patients and clinicians. Bound to these factors, demand for the rare hematology will continue to increase globally.Inadequate Hematology Data to Inhibit Market GrowthLack of support from disease-specific foundations for the purpose of research has continued to inhibit growth of the global rare hematology market during the forecast period. According to Kakkis EverLife foundations, majority of the drugs finalized for the treatment of the various rare hematology disorders did not clear the FDA pipeline for treatment. Increasing demand for approved drugs for the treatment of the rare hematology disorders has led to increasing investments in research and development to develop better treatment process. Bound to various factors including the political, social and economic situations, majority of the patient population have been subject to improper management of treatment and their conditions.Browse Full Report with TOC @Advocacy groups, patients, caregivers and researchers are coming together in order to spread awareness regarding various blood related diseases. Moreover, the drug developers are increasingly benefitting by pool of specific patients as it enabled the identified patient group to register into the clinical trials. Research related to various rare hematology diseases continues to gain momentum in developed countries such as the U.S. The House of Representatives in the U.S passed the 21st Century Cures Act in 2016, which is focused towards integrating the opinions of the patients that would help in designing the clinical trials related to these diseases. Such factors are expected to contribute towards growth of the global rare hematology market.Adult Age to Represent a Leading SegmentWith growing prevalence of blood disorders and bleeding, demand for the recombinant factors continue to increase. On the basis of treatment type, the recombinant factors segment is expected to generate significant revenues, accounting for a value of over US$ 4,000 Mn by the end of 2022. On the other hand, the plasma derived factors treatment type segment is expected to register a robust CAGR throughout the forecast period. Based on age, the adults segment is expected to represent the highest growth in terms of revenue, recording a value of over US$ 3,000 Mn by the end 2017. However, the pediatric age segment is expected to represent the highest CAGR in the global market through 2022.Enquiry about this Report @About UsMarket Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE) is an industry-leading database of market intelligence reports. MRRSE is driven by a stellar team of research experts and advisors trained to offer objective advice. Our sophisticated search algorithm returns results based on the report title, geographical region, publisher, or other keywords.MRRSE partners exclusively with leading global publishers to provide clients single-point access to top-of-the-line market research. MRRSEs repository is updated every day to keep its clients ahead of the next new trend in market research, be it competitive intelligence, product or service trends or strategic consulting.ContactState Tower90, State StreetSuite 700Albany, NY - 12207United StatesTelephone: +1-518-730-0559Email: sales@mrrse.comWebsite : Function-as-a-Service Global Market SWOT Analysis and Opportunities To 2023 | Key Players : IBM, Google, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, SAP, Dynatrace, Infosys Function-as-a-Service Industry https://www.wiseguyreports.com/sample-request/3471483-global-function-as-a-service-market-2018-by https://www.wiseguyreports.com/enquiry/3471483-global-function-as-a-service-market-2018-by https://www.wiseguyreports.com/checkout?currency=one_user-USD&report_id=3471483 WiseGuyReports.Com Publish a New Market Research Report On Function-as-a-Service Global Market SWOT Analysis and Opportunities To 2023 | Key Players : IBM, Google, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, SAP, Dynatrace, Infosys.Description:-The major drivers of this market include agility & scalability, maturity of hosted services, and shift from DevOps to serverless computing.Scope of the Report:This report studies the Function-as-a-Service 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 Function-as-a-Service market by product type and applications/end industries.The automation and integration service type is anticipated to hold the largest market share whereas the microservice monitoring and management service is anticipated to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period.The global Function-as-a-Service market is valued at xx million USD in 2017 and is expected to reach xx million USD by the end of 2023, growing at a CAGR of xx% 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.Get a Sample Report @For more information or any query mail at sales@wiseguyreports.comNorth 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 Function-as-a-Service.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 coversIBM (US)Google (US)Microsoft (US)Amazon Web Services(US)SAP (Germany)Dynatrace (US)Infosys (India)Rogue Wave Software (US)TIBCO Software (US)Fiorano Software and Affiliates (US)Market Segment by Regions, regional analysis coversNorth America (United States, Canada and Mexico)Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy)Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia)South America (Brazil, Argentina, Colombia)Middle East and Africa (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa)Market Segment by Type, coversDeveloper-CentricOperator-CentricMarket Segment by Applications, can be divided intoWeb & Mobile BasedResearch & AcademicEnquiry About Report @Table Of Contents Major Key Points1 Function-as-a-Service Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Function-as-a-Service1.2 Classification of Function-as-a-Service by Types1.2.1 Global Function-as-a-Service Revenue Comparison by Types (2017-2023)1.2.2 Global Function-as-a-Service Revenue Market Share by Types in 20171.2.3 Developer-Centric1.2.4 Operator-Centric1.3 Global Function-as-a-Service Market by Application1.3.1 Global Function-as-a-Service Market Size and Market Share Comparison by Applications (2013-2023)1.3.2 Web & Mobile Based1.3.3 Research & Academic1.4 Global Function-as-a-Service Market by Regions1.4.1 Global Function-as-a-Service Market Size (Million USD) Comparison by Regions (2013-2023)1.4.1 North America (USA, Canada and Mexico) Function-as-a-Service Status and Prospect (2013-2023)1.4.2 Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy) Function-as-a-Service Status and Prospect (2013-2023)1.4.3 Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia) Function-as-a-Service Status and Prospect (2013-2023)1.4.4 South America (Brazil, Argentina, Colombia) Function-as-a-Service Status and Prospect (2013-2023)1.4.5 Middle East and Africa (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa) Function-as-a-Service Status and Prospect (2013-2023)1.5 Global Market Size of Function-as-a-Service (2013-2023)2 Manufacturers Profiles2.1 IBM (US)2.1.1 Business Overview2.1.2 Function-as-a-Service Type and Applications2.1.2.1 Product A2.1.2.2 Product B2.1.3 IBM (US) Function-as-a-Service Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.2 Google (US)2.2.1 Business Overview2.2.2 Function-as-a-Service Type and Applications2.2.2.1 Product A2.2.2.2 Product B2.2.3 Google (US) Function-as-a-Service Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.3 Microsoft (US)2.3.1 Business Overview2.3.2 Function-as-a-Service Type and Applications2.3.2.1 Product A2.3.2.2 Product B2.3.3 Microsoft (US) Function-as-a-Service Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.4 Amazon Web Services(US)2.4.1 Business Overview2.4.2 Function-as-a-Service Type and Applications2.4.2.1 Product A2.4.2.2 Product B2.4.3 Amazon Web Services(US) Function-as-a-Service Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.5 SAP (Germany)2.5.1 Business Overview2.5.2 Function-as-a-Service Type and Applications2.5.2.1 Product A2.5.2.2 Product B2.5.3 SAP (Germany) Function-as-a-Service Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.6 Dynatrace (US)2.6.1 Business Overview2.6.2 Function-as-a-Service Type and Applications2.6.2.1 Product A2.6.2.2 Product B2.6.3 Dynatrace (US) Function-as-a-Service Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.7 Infosys (India)2.7.1 Business Overview2.7.2 Function-as-a-Service Type and Applications2.7.2.1 Product A2.7.2.2 Product B2.7.3 Infosys (India) Function-as-a-Service Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)ContinuedBuy 1-user PDF @For more information or any query mail at sales@wiseguyreports.comABOUT US:Wise Guy Reports is part of the Wise Guy Consultants Pvt. Ltd. and offers premium progressive statistical surveying, market research reports, analysis & forecast data for industries and governments around the globe. Wise Guy Reports features an exhaustive list of market research reports from hundreds of publishers worldwide. We boast a database spanning virtually every market category and an even more comprehensive collection of market research reports under these categories and sub-categories.Office No.528,Amanora Chambers,Magarpatta Road,Hadapsar,Pune-411028. Global Seed Drill Machines Market Expected to Deliver Dynamic Progression 2017-2026 | Market Key Players are CLAAS KGaA mbH, Agrowplow PTY LTD., Bobcat Company, KUNH Machineries, etc. https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=S&rep_id=523 https://www.factmr.com/report/523/seed-drill-machines-market https://www.factmr.com/checkout/523/S https://www.factmr.com/ https://factmrblog.com/ This research report titled Global Seed Drill Machines Market Expected to Deliver Dynamic Progression 2017-2026 focuses on the Seed Drill Machines Market, published to the vast repository managed by FactMR. The analysis focuses on the prime geographical regions based on their market size, revenue and attractiveness factors. Furthermore, the research discusses various segments from the Seed Drill Machines Market to examine future lucrativeness and spot growth prospects during 2017-2026. Readers can even access information such as key developments, technologies, innovations, etc., concerned to the Seed Drill Machines Market.To Get Sample Copy of Current Report, Visit Here -Global demand for seed drill machines is projected to grow at a moderate rate during the assessment period 2017-2026. The growth is likely to mimic broader developments in the global farm machinery market. The industry has been impacted by poor crop prices, and although there has been slight recovery, the projections are not overly encouraging. In addition to demand in developed markets, the adoption of seed drill machines in developing regions is growing on account of a slew of factors. A significant percentage of population is migrating to non-farming jobs, which has posed challenges in terms of availability of labor. Further, growing awareness on the benefits of using seed drill for sowing seeds vis-a-vis manual sowing is also leading to increased adoption.Although demand for seed drill machines has remained steady over the years, broader challenges in the agriculture sector have led to a slowdown in sales. Seed drill machines have long replacement cycles, and the advances in drill machines havent been so revolutionary so as to induce an upgrade. It is on the back of a hangover of the slowdown in broader agriculture sector that the demand for seed drill machines is likely to grow at a moderate pace.The concept of leasing seed drillers is gaining ground among farm owners, with new rental businesses springing up to cater to the growing demand. Leasing is likely to gain further momentum in the near future, owing to the waning perception towards equipment ownership. The emphasis on lowering operational costs is also likely to provide an impetus to used seed drillers.Demand for seed drill machines continues to grow at a brisk pace in Asia Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ). The demand is especially higher in China and India, as a significant percentage of the population is engaged agriculture as a means of livelihood. The agriculture sector in both China and India is witnessing a transformation, as farm owners have to adapt to the changes in the workforce availability. According to estimates, over 10 million farm workers have shifted to non-agriculture based jobs in India over a decade.Read Complete Factors about Global Market Report from Here -The limitation in terms of lack of labor is influencing farm owners to invest in farm machinery and equipment. The scenario is not starkly different in China, where a steady adoption of seed drill machines has been witnessed in the last decade or so.In many countries of Asia Pacific, mechanization was limited to the use of tractors and harvesters. The use of machines for sowing remained an afterthought for many years, however, investment has witnessed a steady increase in the recent past. Although the adoption rate is impressive, there is lot of scope for further penetration of seed drill machines.Sensing the unique opportunities in agrarian societies such as China and India, manufacturers are focusing on raising awareness on the benefits of seed drill machines. The high input and low output challenge associated with manual sowing can be countered with the use of seed drill machines, and manufacturers are positioning their products on these lines. The rising seed and fertilizer costs are putting pressures on farm owners to increase productivity, and seed drill machines have emerged as a prudent option. Overall, the outlook on the global seed drill machines market remains positive, however, it is highly likely that growth will be sluggish over the forecast period.Buy online this Report from Here -About 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 400, Rockville, MD 20852United StatesEmail: sales@factmr.comWeb:Blog: Future Trends in Hospital Healthcare Information Technology Market 2018-2023: McKesson Corporation (U.S.), United Healthcare Group(U.S.), Allscripts Healthcare Solutions Inc. (U.S.) Hospital Healthcare Information Technology Market https://www.theresearchinsights.com/request_sample.php?id=1774 https://www.theresearchinsights.com/ask_for_discount.php?id=1774 https://www.theresearchinsights.com/enquiry_before_buying.php?id=1774 Hospital Healthcare information technology is the area of IT concerning the design, development, formation, use and conservation of information systems for the healthcare industry. Computerized and interoperable healthcare information systems will endure to advance medical care and public health, lower costs, intensification efficiency, decrease errors and progress patient satisfaction, while also elevating recompense for ambulatory and inpatient healthcare providers. Superior use of health information technology is seen by several key decision makers as critical to this transformation procedure and significant investments are made in Hospital Healthcare Information Technology Market.The report offers a multi-step view of the Global Hospital Healthcare Information Technology Market. The first approach focuses through an impression of the market. This passage includes several arrangements, definitions, the chain assembly of the industry in one piece, and the various uses for the global market. This section also integrates an all-inclusive analysis of the different enlargement plans and government strategies that influence the market, its cost assemblies and industrialized processes. The second subdivision of the report includes analytics on the Market based on its size in terms of value and volume.Top Key Players:McKesson Corporation (U.S.), United Healthcare Group(U.S.), Allscripts Healthcare Solutions Inc. (U.S.), Athenahealth Inc. (U.S.), Epic Systems Corporation (U.S.), GE Healthcare (UK), Cerner Corporation (U.S.), Oracle Corporation (U.S.), Koninklijke Philips N.V. (The Netherlands), Infor Inc. (U.S.)Request a Sample Copy of this Report @:The Global Hospital Healthcare Information Technology Market is also analyzed in terms of production rates according to the various regions. The report sticks to a time frame of 2018 to 2025 for the same. Further descriptions of the market in terms of the global and major region market size are also available. In this section, the various segmentations are applied to the market in order to gain a separated view of the statistics involved. The radical examination is managed. Information gathered is from reliable sources, all of which is affirmed and double checked to ensure that the outcomes are successful and well-supported.The report also contains exact details on the Hospital Healthcare Information Technology Market size of the markets from Japan, China, North America, Europe, Southeast Asia, and India. The report uses similar categorizations of types, applications, and key players, all of which are further segregated under volume and value, along with the sale pricings. Hospital Healthcare Information Technology is consolidated with the extensive use of capable subordinate sources like organization information bases and resources. At that point, functional disciplines like financial organization and coordination are explored to advance statistical surveying.Ask for Upto 40% Discount:Table of Content:Global Hospital Healthcare Information Technology Market Research Report 2018-2025Chapter 1: Industry OverviewChapter 2: Hospital Healthcare Information Technology Market International and China Market AnalysisChapter 3: Environment Analysis of Market.Chapter 4: Analysis of Revenue by ClassificationsChapter 5: Analysis of Revenue by Regions and ApplicationsChapter 6: Analysis of Hospital Healthcare Information Technology Market Revenue Market Status.Chapter 7: Analysis of Industry Key ManufacturersChapter 8: Sales Price and Gross Margin Analysis of Market.Chapter 9: Marketing Trader or Distributor Analysis of Market.Chapter 10: Development Trend of Hospital Healthcare Information Technology Market 2018-2025.Chapter 11: Industry Chain Suppliers of Market with Contact Information.Chapter 12: New Project Investment Feasibility Analysis of Market.Chapter 13: Conclusion of the Hospital Healthcare Information Technology Market Industry 2025 Market Research Report.To Get More Information, Enquiry @:About usThe Research Insights A global leader in analytics, research and advisory that can assist you to renovate your business and modify your approach. With us, you will learn to take decisions intrepidly. We make sense of drawbacks, opportunities, circumstances, estimations and information using our experienced skills and verified methodologies. Our research reports will give you an exceptional experience of innovative solutions and outcomes. We have effectively steered businesses all over the world with our market research reports and are outstandingly positioned to lead digital transformations. Thus, we craft greater value for clients by presenting advanced opportunities in the global market.Contact usRobinSales managerContact number: +91-996-067-0000sales@theresearchinsights.com Cancer Biomarkers Market Outlook to 2027 - QIAGEN, Illumina, GENERAL ELECTRIC COMPANY, bioMerieux, Creative Diagnostics, Hologic The Insight Partners https://www.theinsightpartners.com/sample/TIPBT00002663 https://www.theinsightpartners.com/reports/cancer-biomarkers-market https://www.theinsightpartners.com/buy/TIPBT00002663/ The newest research report global Cancer Biomarkers Market illustrates pin point sharp market insights includes detailed Cancer Biomarkers industry aspects forecast over a period from 2018 to 2027. It conducts a fervent study of business positions to offer in detail knowledge of Cancer Biomarkers business habits of past, present, and future.Rise in the number of cancer cases as well as increasing research and development activities is anticipated to drive the growth of the cancer biomarkers market. Rising awareness regarding personalized medicine is expected to offer significant growth opportunities in the market in the coming years.Cancer biomarkers are the molecules that help in the diagnosis as well as the treatment of various forms of cancer. These molecules are produced by the cancer tissue or by other cells in the body in response to cancer. These molecules can be monitored by obtaining samples such as, blood, stool, urine, tumor tissue, or other tissues or bodily fluids.Key Players operating in the cancer biomarkers market include, Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd, Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc., QIAGEN, Illumina, Inc., GENERAL ELECTRIC COMPANY, bioMerieux, Inc., Creative Diagnostics, Hologic Inc., and Quest Diagnostics among others.Get Sample Copy atThe "Global Cancer biomarkers Market Analysis to 2027" is a specialized and in-depth study of the medical device industry with a focus on the global market trend. The report aims to provide an overview of global market with detailed market segmentation by product, application, end user, and geography. The global cancer biomarkers market is expected to witness high growth during the forecast period. The report provides key statistics on the market status of the leading market players and offers key trends and opportunities in the market.The global cancer biomarkers market is segmented on the basis of biomarker type, profiling technology, cancer type, and application. on the basis of biomarker type, the cancer biomarkers market is segmented as, genetic biomarkers, protein biomarkers and other cancer biomarkers. The segment of genetic biomarkers is further classified as, leukemia, lung cancer, breast cancer, and prostate cancer. On the basis of profiling technology, the market is segmented as, omics technologies, imaging technologies, immunoassays, cytogenetics, and bioinformatics.The omics technologies is further categorized as, proteomics and genomics. Imaging technologies are classified as, ultrasound, computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), positron emission tomography (PET), and mammography. The cancer biomarkers market is classified based on cancer types such as, breast cancer, lung cancer, prostate cancer, leukemia, bladder cancer, and other cancer types. On the basis of application, the market is segmented as, diagnostics, research and development, prognostics, and other applications.Browse Complete Report atThe report provides a detailed overview of the industry including both qualitative and quantitative information. It provides overview and forecast of the global cancer biomarkers market based on biomarker type, profiling technology, cancer type, and application. It also provides market size and forecast till 2027 for overall market with respect to five major regions, namely; North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific (APAC), Middle East and Africa (MEA) and South & Central America. The cancer biomarkers market by each region is later sub-segmented by respective countries and segments. The report covers analysis and forecast of 13 counties globally along with current trend and opportunities prevailing in the region.North America is expected to contribute to the largest share in the cancer biomarkers market in the coming years, owing to rising incidence of cancer. Asia Pacific is expected to witness significant growth during the forecast period, due to increase in the number of R&D activities being conducted in the field of cancer therapy.The report analyzes factors affecting cancer biomarkers market from both demand and supply side and further evaluates market dynamics effecting the market during the forecast period i.e., drivers, restraints, opportunities, and future trend. The report also provides exhaustive PEST analysis for all five regions namely; North America, Europe, APAC, MEA and South & Central America after evaluating political, economic, social and technological factors effecting the Cancer biomarkers market in these regions.Get 20% Discount on Purchase Till 10 Jan 2019 -About Us - The Insight Partners is a one stop industry research provider of actionable intelligence. We help our clients in getting solutions to their research requirements through our syndicated and consulting research services. We are a specialist in Healthcare IT, Biotechnology and Medical Device industries.Contact us -Contact Person : Sameer JoshiPhone : +1-646-491-9876Email Id : sam@theinsightpartners.com Global Talc Market Size, Potential Growth Opportunities, Trends and Forecast 2018-2025: Key players include Imerys, Mondo Minerals, IMI Fabi , Minerals Technologies, Golcha Minerals, and Nippon Talc and many others. Global Talc Market Size https://www.adroitmarketresearch.com/contacts/request-sample/371 https://www.adroitmarketresearch.com/contacts/enquiry-before-buying/371 https://www.adroitmarketresearch.com/industry-reports/talc-market The Global Talc Market Size is projected to grow from USD XXX billion to USD XXX billion, at a CAGR of XX% during the forecast year. Talc is made of magnesium, water and silica and is soft in structure.Get Sample Copy Of This Report @Talc is widely used in automotive industry and growing industrialization is one of the reasons for growth in talc market size. Also, the increased spending capacity of middle class population in developing countries and increased Research and Development activities for producing of new types of talc have opened new business opportunities for the growth of talc market size.Talc-reinforced polypropylene reduce the weight of vehicles. Use of Talc in industrial coating provides protection from corrosion, reduction of solvent and good adhesion. Talc helps increase the solid content with pigment volume concentration for coatings reducing the VOC content and cost of formulation. In Europe, has strict rules and regulations for adoption of VOC usage. Global talc market has usage as main ingredient in roofing materials, paints, ceramics, rubber, insecticides and talcum powder. In cosmetic industry talcum powder market has maximum share and is popular among the growing countries of Asia-Pacific region.Talc is used in pulp and paper industry and food industry. Furthermore, talc is used to develop countertops for laboratory and switchboards used for electrical usage. The cosmetic industry is another segment that has wide use of talc as lubricant and a filler by the pulp and paper industry, owing to its high resistance to acids and electricity. Talcum powder market is growing owing to extensive use of talc in making of baby powders. The talcum powder is used to prevent rashes in babies, due to use of diapers.Enquire Before Buying @Talc is in pharmaceutical industry as a powder to improve its flow known as glidant and as a pluerodesis agent that prevents pneumothorax. In food industry it is used as an additive and as a fertilizer in the agricultural industry. Global talc market is dominated by paper and pulp industry followed by automotive industry, paint and coating industry, ceramic industry and many other. Indian talcum powder market is another rising industry that is contributing to the growth of talc market.The global talc market is segmented on the basis of Deposit, Applications and Region. By deposit it is divided into Talc Chlorite, Talc Carbonate and others. By Application it is divided as Ceramics, Paper and Pulp, Paints and coating, pharmaceuticals, plastics and others. The Ceramics segment is predicted to grow at a fast pace during the forecast period. Ceramics is followed by Plastic as it uses talc as the main raw material which is an effective filler for automotive parts, domestic applications and food packaging industry. Based on region, division is based on Asia Pacific, Europe, North America and Rest of World. Asia-Pacific is growing at a great speed and contributes the most share in talc market, mainly owing to the growing population and spending capacity of the people.Browse Complete Report @Key players of global talc market include Imerys, Mondo Minerals, IMI Fabi , Minerals Technologies, Golcha Minerals, and Nippon Talc and many others.Segmentation:By Deposit Talc Chlorite Talc Carbonate OthersBy Application Ceramics Paper and Pulp Paints and coating Pharmaceuticals Plastics OthersBy Region APAC Europe North America ROWWhat to expect from the upcoming report on Global Talc Market:- Future prospects and current trends of the global talc market by the end of forecast period- Information regarding technological progressions as well as innovations across the world- Supportive initiatives by government likely to influence the market dynamics.- In-depth analysis of different market segmentations including regional segmentations, applications and types.- Deep analysis about the competitive landscape of the market and the initiatives by them to improve this market.- Trends, drivers, opportunities, restraints, challenges and key developments in the marketWho should buy this report?Venture capitalists, Investors, financial institutions, Analysts, Government organizations, regulatory authorities, policymakers ,researchers, strategy managers, and academic institutions looking for insights into the market to determine future strategies.About Us:Adroit Market Research is an India-based business analytics and consulting company incorporated in 2018. Our target audience is a wide range of corporations, manufacturing companies, product/technology development institutions and industry associations that require understanding of a markets size, key trends, participants and future outlook of an industry. We intend to become our clients knowledge partner and provide them with valuable market insights to help create opportunities that increase their revenues. We follow a code Explore, Learn and Transform. At our core, we are curious people who love to identify and understand industry patterns, create an insightful study around our findings and churn out money-making roadmaps.Contact Information:Ryan JohnsonAccount Manager Global3131 McKinney Ave Ste 600, Dallas,TX75204, U.S.A.Phone No.: USA: +1 (214) 884-6068 / +91 9665341414 Air Care Industry 2018 Global Market 10 Company Profiles and 2023 Future Market Analysis | Procter & Gamble Co. Reckitt Benckiser Group, Plc., S.C. Johnson & Son, Inc, Godrej Consumer Products Air Care Market, Air Care Market size, Air Care Market share, Air Care Market trends, Air Care Market status, Air Care Market https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/4638 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/air-care-market-4638 Air Care market 2018 Industry Report provides detailed market segment level data on the international market. This market report addresses forecast and growth patterns by company, regions and type or application from 2018 to 2023. Besides this, report also consists of development trends, competitive landscape analysis, and development in key regions status.Air Care Market Outlook:Air care products are used to eliminate bad odor at indoor level. Various types of air care products are available in the market such as air fresheners, electric air fresheners, car air fresheners, gel air fresheners, candle air fresheners, and liquid air fresheners. Air care products provide an option to the user to get rid of bad odor and have a desired room fragrance.Get Sample Copy of this Report @Air Care Major Key Players Analysis:Procter & Gamble CoReckitt Benckiser GroupJohnson & Son, Inc.Godrej Consumer ProductsHenkel AG & Company, KGaChurch & Dwight Co.Farcent Enterprise Co.Air Care Market Overview:Air care products are used to eliminate the bad odor and to keep the surrounding fresh. These products are available in various forms including sprays, oils, candles, blends, and others. Different fragrances in this product has given an opportunity to the consumers to choose with the desired fragrance according to their need. Air care product helps to keep the indoor environment clean and odor free.Rising disposable income has affected the consumers spending behavior. Consumers are found to hold more priority for quality products, which keeps their surrounding clean and fresh. Owning to these major factors, the demand for air care products is experiencing a surge in the global market. Escalating demand has encouraged the manufacturers to bring in innovations in their product line to expand their consumer base.Innovations in the existing product line and new product launch helps the manufacturers in creating brand identity and product differentiation. Keen focus on R & D sector to develop new product has further resulted in development of unique air care products such as Electric Air Fresheners and gel air fresheners and others. Consumers have shown more inclination towards natural air cares in air care products which has directly influenced the positive growth of the air fresheners market. Owing to rising health awareness, consumers are found to have high demand for chemical-free air fresheners. Rising health concerns among the consumers about the demerits of inhaling chemicals released from the air fresheners have a positive impact on the natural air care in air care market. The rising consumers preference for natural air cares will be considered one of the major drivers for air care products market.Air Care Major Findings:Asia Pacific is estimated to retain its dominance throughout the forecast period at a CAGR of 3.06%. Among the Asia Pacific countries, China is projected to witness a substantial growth at a CAGR of 3.19% during the forecast period of 2017-2023Global air care manufacturers find massive opportunities in Germany owing to the huge demand for air care products, especially, home and cars.Air Care Regional Analysis:The global air care market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and rest of the world (ROW). Among these, Asia Pacific region is expected to lead the market over the forecast period. The market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 3.06% during the review period. This is attributed to the high usage of home and cars based air care products. Among the Asia Pacific countries, India is estimated to hold 19% share in the year 2017.Air Care Downstream Analysis:Among the product type, spray air fresheners segment is anticipated to retain its dominance throughout the forecast period. Also, the segment is projected to register a healthy CAGR of 2.56% during the given period due to increased use of spray air fresheners in room and cars. Furthermore, the demand for natural fragrances in air care products segment is increasing the growth of the air care products.Among the distribution channel, retail is accounting for 92% of the global air care market and the segment is estimated to retain its dominance throughout the forecast period of 2017-2023. The segment is projected to register a healthy CAGR of 2.51% during the forecast period 2017-2023.Get Full report on Air Care Market @Air Care Segmentaion -The global air care market has been segmented on the basis of product type, which includes spray air fresheners, electric air fresheners, car sir fresheners, gel air fresheners, candle air fresheners, liquid air fresheners, and others. The spray air fresheners segment is projected to account for maximum market proportion at a CAGR of 2.56% during the forecast period. On the basis of distribution channel, the global air care market is segmented into retail and business to business. Among both, the retail market segment is estimated to witness the highest growth at a CAGR of 2.51% during the forecast period 2017-2023.Target Audience:Global air care product manufacturersEnd usersRetailers and wholesalersE-commerce companiesTraders, importers and exportersMRFR team have supreme objective to provide the optimum quality market research and intelligence services to our clients. Our market research studies by products, services, technologies, applications, end users, and market players for global, regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help to answer all their most important questions.Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@Market research future.com Global Bug Killer Light Market Insights, Industry Player (Flowtron, KAZ, Cistwin, GREENYELLOW), Key County Analysis (North America, United States, Europe, China, Japan, India), Segmentation, Analysis and Forecast till 2018-2025 Market Research Hub https://www.marketresearchhub.com/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=1971913 https://www.marketresearchhub.com/report/global-bug-killer-light-market-insights-forecast-to-2025-report.html This research report titled Global Bug Killer Light Market Insights, Forecast to 2025 has been added to the wide online database managed by Market Research Hub (MRH). The study discusses the prime market growth factors along with future projections expected to impact the Bug Killer Light Market during the period between 2018 and 2025. The concerned sector is analyzed based on different market factors including drivers, restraints and opportunities in order to enlighten the readers about the actual scenario prevailing in the Bug Killer Light Market.Get Sample Copy of This Report @The Bug Killer Light market was valued at Million US$ in 2018 and is projected to reach Million US$ by 2025, at a CAGR of during the forecast period. In this study, 2018 has been considered as the base year and 2019 to 2025 as the forecast period to estimate the market size for Bug Killer Light.This report presents the worldwide Bug Killer Light market size (value, production and consumption), splits the breakdown (data status 2014-2019 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 Porter's Five Forces Analysis.The following manufacturers are covered in this report:FlowtronAGPtEKFlowtronKAZCistwinGREENYELLOWTONMASGOLDVISSBug Killer Light Breakdown Data by TypeType IType IIBug Killer Light Breakdown Data by ApplicationApplication 1Application 2Bug Killer Light Production by RegionUnited StatesEuropeChinaJapanOther RegionsBug Killer Light Consumption by RegionNorth AmericaUnited StatesCanadaMexicoAsia-PacificChinaIndiaJapanSouth KoreaAustraliaIndonesiaMalaysiaPhilippinesThailandVietnamEuropeGermanyFranceUKItalyRussiaRest of EuropeCentral & South AmericaBrazilRest of South AmericaMiddle East & AfricaGCC CountriesTurkeyEgyptSouth AfricaRest of Middle East & AfricaBROWSE Full Report NOW @Table of Contents1 Study Coverage1.1 Bug Killer Light Product1.2 Key Market Segments in This Study1.3 Key Manufacturers Covered1.4 Market by Type1.4.1 Global Bug Killer Light Market Size Growth Rate by Type1.4.2 Type I1.4.3 Type II1.5 Market by Application1.5.1 Global Bug Killer Light Market Size Growth Rate by Application1.5.2 Application 11.5.3 Application 21.6 Study Objectives1.7 Years Considered2 Executive Summary2.1 Global Bug Killer Light Market Size2.1.1 Global Bug Killer Light Revenue 2014-20252.1.2 Global Bug Killer Light Production 2014-20252.2 Bug Killer Light Growth Rate (CAGR) 2019-20252.3 Analysis of Competitive Landscape2.3.1 Manufacturers Market Concentration Ratio (CR5 and HHI)2.3.2 Key Bug Killer Light Manufacturers2.3.2.1 Bug Killer Light Manufacturing Base Distribution, Headquarters2.3.2.2 Manufacturers Bug Killer Light Product Offered2.3.2.3 Date of Manufacturers Enter into Bug Killer Light Market2.4 Key Trends for Bug Killer Light Markets & Products3 Market Size by Manufacturers3.1 Bug Killer Light Production by Manufacturers3.1.1 Bug Killer Light Production by Manufacturers3.1.2 Bug Killer Light Production Market Share by Manufacturers3.2 Bug Killer Light Revenue by Manufacturers3.2.1 Bug Killer Light Revenue by Manufacturers (2014-2019)3.2.2 Bug Killer Light Revenue Share by Manufacturers (2014-2019)3.3 Bug Killer Light Price by Manufacturers3.4 Mergers & Acquisitions, Expansion PlansMore Information@@@About Market Research HubMarket Research Hub (MRH) is a next-generation reseller of research reports of different sector like machinery market research and analysis. MRHs expansive collection of industry reports has been carefully curated to help key personnel and decision makers across industry verticals to clearly visualize their operating environment and take strategic steps.MRH functions as an integrated platform for the following products and services: Objective and sound market forecasts, qualitative and quantitative analysis, incisive insight into defining industry trends, and market share estimates. Our reputation lies in delivering value and world-class capabilities to our clients.Contact Us90 State Street,Albany, NY 12207,United StatesToll Free: 800-998-4852 (US-Canada)Email: press@marketresearchhub.com Growth Dynamics Precision Medicine Market 2018| Key Players are Teva Pharmaceuticals, Pfizer, Quest Diagnostics, Eagle Genomics Ltd. Precision Medicine Market https://www.gminsights.com/request-sample/detail/671 https://www.gminsights.com/inquiry-before-buying/671 https://www.gminsights.com/industry-analysis/precision-medicine-market The rising emphasis on targeted therapeutics has undoubtedly taken precision medicine market to brew a storm in the healthcare sector. Several healthcare experts are expecting precision medicine to completely bridge the gap between the potential and reality of delivering healthcare. For the record, precision medicine aims to treat diseases with special consideration for the individuals biological variability.Request for a sample of this research report @Industry analysts further state the increasing rate of cancer, tumors, and other chronic diseases to be pivotal factors demanding for more personalized treatments and practices that can be tailored according to individual variability in genes, lifestyles, and environment. Precision medicine industry has been touted to be one of the paramount pillars of the future of healthcare, and stands to gain substantial remuneration in the ensuing years. A report compiled by Global Market Insights, Inc., state the worldwide precision medicine market to attain a valuation of USD 96 billion in coming seven years, expanding at a CAGR of 10.5% over 2017-2024.Oncology segment will experience 11.1% CAGR during the forecast timeframe. High segmental growth can be attributed to the increasing prevalence of cancer globally. According to Globocan 2018, the number of new cancer cases are estimated to be 18.1 million cases. Development of target novel therapies and precision medicines has drastically reduced the mortality rates and hence, high demand for precision medicine in cancer treatment will drive the segmental growth in foreseeable future.With favorable regulatory scenario in the country, it is quite overt that U.S. will be lucrative growth ground for precision medicine industry expansion. In fact, reports claim that in 2016, U.S. accounted for largest share in global precision medicine industry. Reports claim that, several U.S. based industry leaders are betting big on precision medicine as the future of healthcare. Recently in July, renowned social media tycoon Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Dr. Priscilla Chan donated USD 10 million to the University of California-San Franciscos precision medicine laboratory. With such growing support toward development of new technologies across the region, U.S. precision medicine industry is expected to witness remarkable gains in the coming years.Prominent Players are: Teva Pharmaceuticals Biocrates Life Sciences AG Menarini Silicon Biosystems Tepnel Pharma Services Eagle Genomics Ltd. Ferrer inCode Novartis Pfizer NanoString Technologies, Inc. QIAGEN Quest DiagnosticsMake an inquiry for purchasing this report @Underpinning the shift to value-based and patient-centric care in the healthcare sector, precision medicine is thriving as a novel treatment method that has gained a massive government and public backing. Citing an instance, back in January 2015, the former U.S. President Barack Obama, launched the Precision medicine initiative (PMI) to extend precision medicine approach for all diseases by building a research unit of nearly 1 million Americans.Now called as the All of Us program, the PMI was initiated to collect genetic and environmental information to create precision medicines. Reportedly, the initiative received a government funding of USD 215 million, of which, USD 130 million was allocated to the National Institutes of Health for building national research unit and USD 70 million to National Cancer Institute to support the studies related to cancer genomics. According to a recent update on the PMI bulletin, the government is handing out over 10,000 Fitbits to the research institute to gain more insight into daily activities. Industry analysts predict such favorable government initiatives and funding to significantly propel precision medicine market size, especially in the United States.Browse Full Report Details @Precision Medicine Market by Technologyo Big data analyticso Bioinformaticso Gene sequencingo Drug discoveryo Companion diagnosticsPrecision Medicine Market by Applicationo Oncologyo Respiratoryo CNSo ImmunologyGlobal Market Insights Inc. is a global market research and management consulting company catering to leading corporations, non-profit organizations, universities and government institutions. Our main goal is to assist and partner organizations to make lasting strategic improvements and realize growth targets. Our industry research reports are designed to provide granular quantitative information, combined with key industry insights, aimed at assisting sustainable organizational development.Global Market Insights, Inc.4 North Main StreetSelbyville, Delaware 19975 USAPhone: 1-302-846-7766Toll Free: 1-888-689-0688Email:sales@gminsights.com Global Insulated Lunch Box Market 2013 | Major Key Players THERMOS, Tiger Corporation, Zojirushi, Pacific Market International, LOCK&LOCK, Gipfel, Asvel, Zebra, Bentology Analysis And Forecast : MI Reports Global Insulated Lunch Box Market 2023 https://www.wiseguyreports.com/sample-request/2424421-insulated-lunch-box-global-market-status-and-trend-report-2013-2023 https://www.wiseguyreports.com/reports/2424421-insulated-lunch-box-global-market-status-and-trend-report-2013-2023 http://www.wiseguyreports.com WiseGuyReports.Com adds Insulated Lunch Box Market 2023 research to its databaseDescription :Insulated Lunch Box-Global Market Status and Trend Report 2013-2023 offers a comprehensive analysis on Insulated Lunch Box industry, standing on the readers perspective, delivering detailed market data and penetrating insights. No matter the client is industry insider, potential entrant or investor, the report will provides useful data and information. Key questions answered by this report include:Worldwide and Regional Market Size of Insulated Lunch Box 2013-2017, and development forecast 2018-2023Main manufacturers/suppliers of Insulated Lunch Box worldwide, with company and product introduction, position in the Insulated Lunch Box marketMarket status and development trend of Insulated Lunch Box by types and applicationsCost and profit status of Insulated Lunch Box, and marketing statusMarket growth drivers and challengesFor Sample Report @The report segments the global Insulated Lunch Box market as:Global Insulated Lunch Box Market: Regional Segment Analysis (Regional Production Volume, Consumption Volume, Revenue and Growth Rate 2013-2023):North AmericaEuropeChinaJapanRest APACLatin AmericaGlobal Insulated Lunch Box Market: Type Segment Analysis (Consumption Volume, Average Price, Revenue, Market Share and Trend 2013-2023):Stainless Steel Insulated Lunch BoxPlastic Insulated Lunch BoxGlobal Insulated Lunch Box Market: Application Segment Analysis (Consumption Volume and Market Share 2013-2023; Downstream Customers and Market Analysis)ChildrenAdultThe AgedGlobal Insulated Lunch Box Market: Manufacturers Segment Analysis (Company and Product introduction, Insulated Lunch Box Sales Volume, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin):THERMOSTiger CorporationZojirushiPacific Market InternationalLOCK&LOCKGipfelAsvelZebraBentologyKitchen ArtHaersTAFUCOSUPORASDJieyang Xingcai MaterialGuangdong ShunfaKing BossGuangzhou Zhenxing IndustrialGuangdong DongchengShanghai HongchenXiamen GuanhuaComplete Report Details @Table of ContentsChapter 1 Overview of Insulated Lunch Box1.1 Definition of Insulated Lunch Box in This Report1.2 Commercial Types of Insulated Lunch Box1.2.1 Stainless Steel Insulated Lunch Box1.2.2 Plastic Insulated Lunch Box1.3 Downstream Application of Insulated Lunch Box1.3.1 Children1.3.2 Adult1.3.3 The Aged1.4 Development History of Insulated Lunch Box1.5 Market Status and Trend of Insulated Lunch Box 2013-20231.5.1 Global Insulated Lunch Box Market Status and Trend 2013-20231.5.2 Regional Insulated Lunch Box Market Status and Trend 2013-2023Chapter 2 Global Market Status and Forecast by Regions2.1 Market Development of Insulated Lunch Box 2013-20172.2 Production Market of Insulated Lunch Box by Regions2.2.1 Production Volume of Insulated Lunch Box by Regions2.2.2 Production Value of Insulated Lunch Box by Regions2.3 Demand Market of Insulated Lunch Box by Regions2.4 Production and Demand Status of Insulated Lunch Box by Regions2.4.1 Production and Demand Status of Insulated Lunch Box by Regions 2013-20172.4.2 Import and Export Status of Insulated Lunch Box by Regions 2013-2017Chapter 3 Global Market Status and Forecast by Types3.1 Production Volume of Insulated Lunch Box by Types3.2 Production Value of Insulated Lunch Box by Types3.3 Market Forecast of Insulated Lunch Box by TypesChapter 4 Global Market Status and Forecast by Downstream Industry4.1 Demand Volume of Insulated Lunch Box by Downstream Industry4.2 Market Forecast of Insulated Lunch Box by Downstream IndustryChapter 5 Market Driving Factor Analysis of Insulated Lunch Box5.1 Global Economy Situation and Trend Overview5.2 Insulated Lunch Box Downstream Industry Situation and Trend OverviewChapter 6 Insulated Lunch Box Market Competition Status by Major Manufacturers6.1 Production Volume of Insulated Lunch Box by Major Manufacturers6.2 Production Value of Insulated Lunch Box by Major Manufacturers6.3 Basic Information of Insulated Lunch Box by Major Manufacturers6.3.1 Headquarters Location and Established Time of Insulated Lunch Box Major Manufacturer6.3.2 Employees and Revenue Level of Insulated Lunch Box Major Manufacturer6.4 Market Competition News and Trend6.4.1 Merger, Consolidation or Acquisition News6.4.2 Investment or Disinvestment News6.4.3 New Product Development and LaunchChapter 7 Insulated Lunch Box Major Manufacturers Introduction and Market Data7.1 THERMOS7.1.1 Company profile7.1.2 Representative Insulated Lunch Box Product7.1.3 Insulated Lunch Box Sales, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin of THERMOS7.2 Tiger Corporation7.2.1 Company profile7.2.2 Representative Insulated Lunch Box Product7.2.3 Insulated Lunch Box Sales, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin of Tiger Corporation7.3 Zojirushi7.3.1 Company profile7.3.2 Representative Insulated Lunch Box Product7.3.3 Insulated Lunch Box Sales, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin of Zojirushi7.4 Pacific Market International7.4.1 Company profile7.4.2 Representative Insulated Lunch Box Product7.4.3 Insulated Lunch Box Sales, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin of Pacific Market International7.5 LOCK&LOCK7.5.1 Company profile7.5.2 Representative Insulated Lunch Box Product7.5.3 Insulated Lunch Box Sales, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin of LOCK&LOCKContinued.About Us:Wise Guy Reports Is Part Of The Wise Guy Consultants Pvt. Ltd. And Offers Premium Progressive Statistical Surveying, Market Research Reports, Analysis & Forecast Data For Industries And Governments Around The Globe. Wise Guy Reports Features An Exhaustive List Of Market Research Reports From Hundreds Of Publishers Worldwide. We Boast A Database Spanning Virtually Every Market Category And An Even More Comprehensive Collection Of Market Research Reports Under These Categories And Sub-Categories.CONTACT US:NORAH TRENTPartner Relations & Marketing Managersales@wiseguyreports.comPh: +1-646-845-9349 (US)Ph: +44 208 133 9349 (UK)Wise Guy Reports is part of the Wise Guy Research Consultants Pvt. Ltd. and offers premium progressive statistical surveying, market research reports, analysis & forecast data for industries and governments around the globe.Office No.528,Amanora Chambers,Magarpatta Road,Hadapsar,Pune-411028. Pope Francis' Words To Gay Priests Do Not Address The Real Problem Says Dan Corner, Author Of 'Is This The Mary Of The Bible' In a recent article on the National Catholic Reporter site by Thomas Reese entitled, "Pope to gay priests: Be celibate or get out," Pope Francis said to gay priests what he also has said to heterosexual priests - observe celibacy or get out. Here he is not only addressing gay priests, but all priests. Author Dan Corner does not believe the real issue is being addressed. He had this to say: "For Pope Francis to address gay priests the way he does isn't going to address the root problem, the spiritual one, that exists among so many Catholic priests worldwide. All homosexuals Catholic priests or otherwise need to be freed and forgiven from their sin addictions, which happens at true salvation (Jn. 8:34-36; Rom. 6:16-18; 6:22; Rev. 1:5; etc.). To be freed from his sin addictions a homosexual, alcoholic, thief, swindler and the like must sincerely and humbly repent and submissively commit to follow Jesus, as shown throughout scripture (Lk. 9:23; Acts 20:21; 26:17,18; 26:20; 2 Pet. 3:9; etc.). "There is certain and absolute forgiveness and liberation from sin's slavery for the repentant unrighteous through Jesus Christ. 1 Cor. 6:9-11 is especially very clear on that salvation truth. The seriousness of ignoring or rejecting God's truth is shown in scripture: 'In a similar way, Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding towns gave themselves up to sexual immorality and perversion. They serve as an example of those who suffer the punishment of eternal fire.' (Jude 1:7). "Also, there is absolutely no scriptural need for a true spiritual leader to be celibate. The Apostle Peter himself was a married man (Mt. 8:14), as were other chief servants of the Lord Jesus Christ (1 Cor. 9:5). In fact, spiritual leaders are to be husbands of one wife (1 Tim. 3:2; 3:12; Titus 1:6). It is doctrines of demons, which forbid marriage and to abstain from certain foods (1 Tim. 4:1-3). Dan Corner is the author of a number of books including 'The Believer's Conditional Security: Eternal Security Refuted', 'The Myth of Eternal Security' and 'Is this the Mary of the Bible?'. He also provides a massive amount of information on his websites. Dan Corner is available for media interviews and can be reached using the information below or by email at eternallifeblog@gmail.com or by phone at 724-632-3210. His books are available at his website. After graduating from college, Dan Corner got saved by reading the Bible. For over four decades, he has diligently served the Lord Jesus. Dan Corner's pastoral, apologetic, counter cult and street evangelism experiences have equipped him to contend for the faith and win souls to Jesus from many backgrounds. He is an ordained minister who pastored for almost seven years and has authored hundreds of Christian articles, answered thousands of emails and letters and has written several books of vital importance in our day. PO Box 1613 Shallotte, NC, 28459 http://EvangelicalOutreach.org This release was published on openPR. Permanent link to this press release: Copy Please set a link in the press area of your homepage to this press release on openPR. openPR disclaims liability for any content contained in this release. Moulded Fibre Pulp Packaging Market 2027 | Guangxi Qiaowang Pulp Packing Products Co, Ltd., Guangzhou NANYA Pulp Molding Equipment Co., Ltd., Pactiv LLC (Reynolds Group Holdings Ltd.), https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/sample/110114825/Moulded-Fibre-Pulp-Packaging-Market https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/discount/110114825/Moulded-Fibre-Pulp-Packaging-Market https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/rd/110114825/Moulded-Fibre-Pulp-Packaging-Market https://www.researchreportinsights.com/ In this report, Research Report Insights (RRI) delivers key insights on the global molded fiber pulp packaging market in its published report, titled Moulded Fibre Pulp Packaging Market by 2027. In terms of revenue, the global molded fiber pulp packaging market is estimated to expand at a CAGR of 5.8% over the forecast by 2027, owing to numerous factors, about which RRI offers thorough insights and forecasts in this report.The market is segmented based on molded pulp type, product type, end use and region. Based on molded pulp type, the market is sub-segmented into thick wall, transfer molded, thermoformed fiber, and processed pulp. Among all the molded pulp type segment, transfer molded segment is expected to account for the highest market share, followed by thermoformed fiber segment over the forecast period. The transfer molded type segment is expected to register a significant CAGR of 6.5% during the forecast period in terms of value. The thermoformed fiber segment is projected to register the second highest CAGR of 5.5% over the forecast period. The factors fuelling demand for molded fiber pulp packaging are adoption of environment friendly & biodegradable packaging which ensures packaging excellence and ecological development along with cost effective medium for packaging due to its low disposal cost, minimum inventory and warehousing costs, and easy packaging process.Request For Report Sample:To provide in-depth insights on the pattern of demand for molded fiber pulp packaging, the market is segmented on the basis of product type such as tray, clamshell & container, boxes, end caps, and others (cups, and bowls). The tray product type segment is projected to grow at a significant CAGR of 6.2% over the forecast period in terms of value. The market has also been segmented by end use which includes consumer durables & electronics goods packaging, food & beverage packaging, cosmetic & beauty products packaging, healthcare product packaging, automotive parts packaging, transportation & logistics, and others (candles, flower packaging). Consumer durables & electronics goods packaging segment is further sub-segmented into tube light & bulbs, mobile phones, and others (DVDs, Modems, and TV). Food & beverage packaging segment is further sub-segmented into egg packaging, wine packaging, fruit packaging, and others (vegetables, and frozen food).Development of Recycled and Reusable Packaging to Drive Growth of the Global Molded Fiber Pulp Packaging Market: RRIFood & beverage packaging end use segment is anticipated to be most attractive segment in terms of CAGR over the forecast period. Food & beverage packaging segment occupied 69% share in 2016. The threat of substitutes such as EPS, plastics materials in the industry coupled with raw materials such as paper or newsprint which contains the large percentage of short fibers and has been recycled many times produce the final product with short shelf life, weak, rigid and has low tensile strength are some of the factors which is expected to obstruct the growth of global molded fiber pulp packaging market.Request Report Discount:A key trend defining the market is the reimagining of molded pulp packaging for various end use other than eggs packaging, and market consolidation through mergers & acquisitions. Moreover, technological advancements, and introduction of novel fibers such as sugarcane, bamboo fibers, and palm to improve the product efficiency and packaging quality in the molded fiber manufacturing industry.This report assesses trends driving growth of each segment on the global level and offers potential takeaways that could prove substantially useful to molded fiber pulp packaging manufacturers looking to enter the market. The Western Europe market dominated the molded fiber pulp packaging market, accounting for maximum revenue share of the market till 2016 end. Collectively, North America and APEJ markets accounted for 43.3% revenue share of the global molded fiber pulp packaging market in 2016. Among the emerging markets, Asia Pacific excluding Japan is estimated to exhibit a significant CAGR of 6.6% over the forecast period, followed by Latin America and Eastern Europe market, due to the demand for eco-friendly packaging products.Key PlayersSome of the key players in the global molded fiber pulp packaging market include UFP Technologies, Inc., ESCO Technologies Inc., Huhtamaki Oyj, Brodrene Hartmann A/S, Henry Molded Products, Inc., ProtoPak Engineering Corporation, EnviroPAK Corporation, Pacific Pulp Molding, LLC, Keiding, Inc., FiberCel Packaging, LLC, Guangxi Qiaowang Pulp Packing Products Co, Ltd., Guangzhou NANYA Pulp Molding Equipment Co., Ltd., Pactiv LLC (Reynolds Group Holdings Ltd.), OrCon Industries Corporation, Celluloses De La Loire, Spectrum Lithograph, Inc., Dynamic Fibre Moulding (PTY) Ltd., Primapack SAE, Jiangyin Greenpacking Trade Co., Ltd., and Dongguan City Luheng Papers Company Ltd. In this report, we have discussed individual strategies followed by these companies in terms of enhancing their product portfolio, creating new marketing techniques, mergers and acquisitions. The Competitive Landscape is included to provide report audiences with a dashboard view and company share collectively.Report Analysis:About Us:Research Report Insights (RRI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver a host of services including custom research reports, syndicated research reports, and consulting services which are personalised in nature. RRI delivers a complete packaged solution to clients; this combines current market intelligence, technology inputs, statistical anecdotes, valuable growth insights, 360-degree view of the competitive framework, and anticipated market trends.Contact Us:Research Report Insights (RRI)42 Joseph StreetPort carling P0B 1J0Muskoka, Ontario1Phone - +1-631-721-4201Website:Email: sales@researchreportinsights.com eXact learning solutions has again successfully made the Training Industry Top20 Award for its Authoring functionality in 2019. Valerio Torda, CEO, eXact learning solutions, comments that we are delighted to be recognized, not only for our innovative technology, but also importantly, for the benefits to clients of using our scalable technology. We are thrilled to have having won this award last year too. We will be showcasing this authoring functionality Here we go again. One week after Oregon and Washington lawmakers shared a table for the first time in years to discuss replacing the Interstate Bridge, Evergreen State politicians are at loggerheads in public over one of the key issues that torpedoed the Columbia River Crossing project years ago: Light rail. Washington Gov. Jay Inslee says a new Interstate Bridge will include a light rail extension from North Portland, a position he held in 2013 before funding for the Columbia River Crossing project died in his states Legislature, and which he reiterated Friday in an interview with The Columbian. Inslees office confirmed Wednesday that his $17.5 million budget request for the 2019-21 biennium to reopen a project office starts with the position that a new bridge will include light rail and may be partially funded with tolls. The Democratic governor has consistently advocated for replacing the existing bridge and supported light rail from the beginning, a spokeswoman confirmed Wednesday. On Wednesday, eight Southwest Washington Republicans issued a joint statement saying they were dismayed by Inslees comments while noting those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. The voters of Clark County have had three opportunities to weigh in on light rail, most recently in 2013, the lawmakers, which included US. Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, R-Battle Ground, said in a statement. Each time, the pro-light rail side of the issue was soundly defeated. We owe it to those we serve to represent their preferences in negotiations over any future I-5 bridge project. The Republican elected leaders say practical politics dictate the governor should keep transit alternatives other than light rail on the table as bridge talks are expected to heat up in 2019. Four of the Washington state legislators who signed the letter sit on the bi-state committee which met last week with Oregon officials in attendance for the first time. That meeting, which lasted for more than two hours, included some tense moments between Oregon and Washington officials. Some Clark County lawmakers struck a conciliatory tone as they tried to assuage Oregon elected officials that they are ready to discuss a new project in earnest. There was much talk about process and not agreeing on key facets of the project before the dialogue began in earnest. Sen. Lee Beyer, D-Springfield, said process was never the sticking point during the failed nearly $3 billion Columbia River Crossing project. We havent had a lack of process, Beyer said at the meeting in North Portland last week, weve had a lack of agreement on what to do, he said. That lack of agreement still exists in Southwest Washington circles. Vancouver Mayor Anne McEnerny-Ogle, who has been a vocal proponent of restarting bridge talks, has suggested the new bridge should be light rail ready, meaning it would have a separated guideway which could be converted to light rail down the line. She suggests the bridge start with high capacity bus service first. Gov. Kate Brown has said light rail must be part of any new project. Inslees $17.5 million budget proposal stipulates the reinvigorated Interstate Bridge project office would take a look at previous permits on the CRC project, develop a finance plan and reevaluate the scope, schedule and budget for the two-state effort. When reevaluating the finance plan for the project, the department shall assume that some costs of the new facility may be covered by tolls, Inslees budget note says. the department shall assume any plan for a new bridge will include light rail. Washingtons Legislature, which is controlled by Democrats in both chambers, will release its own budget proposals starting next month. Under Inslees plan, the state would provide an updated progress report on the bridge plan by September 30, 2019. Oregon and Washington must show the federal government progress toward revived bridge discussions by that same month or pay back $139 million in planning costs accrued through the failed CRC project. -- Andrew Theen atheen@oregonian.com 503-294-4026 @andrewtheen A 28-year-old Portland man was sentenced Tuesday to five years in prison for distributing child pornography using a BitTorrent file-sharing network. Jordan Thomas Prentice was identified after an undercover Vancouver police investigator downloaded multiple files depicting infants, toddlers and other prepubescent children being sexually abused from a BitTorrent file-sharing network, according to federal prosecutors. Investigators traced the IP address associated with the files to Prentices Portland home. On Jan. 27, 2016, agents from Homeland Security Investigations executed a search warrant at his home. Agents seized multiple devices from the home, and later located more than 600 images and 126 video files of child sexual abuse, according to investigators. Prentice admitted to having viewed child pornography since age 15, and having downloaded the illicit files for years using uTorrent software, according to the U.S. attorneys office. Prentice pleaded guilty to one count of distribution of child pornography. Hes agreed to pay restitution to his victims and forfeit personal property that was used in the crime. --The Oregonian/OregonLive Union workers loading grain for international shipping at the Port of Portlands Terminal 5 inflated their own time cards and those of colleagues for more than four years, costing their employer, Columbia Export Terminal, more than $5 million, a federal lawsuit alleges. The suit filed by Columbia Export Terminal claims members of International Longshore and Warehouse Unions Local 8 and Local 92 engaged in racketeering by conspiring to over bill their employer. According to the suit, some workers submitted time sheets for employees who didnt work and werent even at Terminal 5. Others split shifts, with one person working half a shift and another the other half but both submitting time sheets falsely indicating they had worked full shifts. Others didnt show up at all but their co-workers submitted time sheets showing the absent employee worked a full shift. Columbia Export Terminal relied on the time sheets and submitted them to Pacific Maritime Association in California for payment. The association processed the payroll payments to the individual checking or savings accounts of union workers and charged the terminal for all the payments. Further assessments were charged to the terminal, which contributed to the unions funds, meaning the union benefited from the overpayments in the form of members dues, the suit alleges. The defendants coordinated and systematic practice of submitting inflated time sheets over a period of more than four years is their regular way of conducting the business of Local 8 and Local 92 and is ongoing and continuing, the suit alleges. Columbia Export Terminal has put the total loss discovered so far at $5,311,627 and is seeking to recover three times that amount in damages, or $15,934,881, as well as punitive damages from both the unions and more than 150 individual workers. Craig Merrilees, communications director for the San Francisco-based International Longshore and Warehouse Union, said it borders on the bizarre for a corporation to file a federal lawsuit when they havent even filed a grievance, or raised the slightest concern during ongoing contract negotiations about these alleged payroll or contract infractions. It also seems suspicious that Columbia Grain, owned by Japans largest grain corporation is filing a lawsuit the day before negotiations are scheduled to resume with workers, Merrilees said, in an emailed response. That kind of timing naturally raises questions about the corporations true motives, and whether they filed this lawsuit as some sort of gimmick or negotiating tactic. Pat McCormick, a spokesman for Columbia Export Terminal, said the suit isnt tied to contract negotiations with the union. "The lawsuit speaks for itself, alleging persistent, pervasive and rampant time card fraud involving at least 150 individuals who sought pay and benefits they did not earn for work they did not perform, McCormick said. The suit was filed Monday afternoon in U.S. District Court in Portland. -- Maxine Bernstein Email at mbernstein@oregonian.com Follow on Twitter @maxoregonian The Oregon Ducks are having a good first day of the early signing period, securing all five of its East Coast commits and adding consensus three-star defensive end Brandon Dorlus before most of the fanbase had even begun their day. But the haul got even better Wednesday morning when 247Sports three-star linebacker Dru Mathis, the nations No. 3 junior college inside linebacker, announced his commitment to the Oregon Ducks over offers from Baylor and UCLA, as well as a late push from USC: IM A DUCK! pic.twitter.com/gLhCsfmQkm Reece Dru Mathis the Vth (@DruMathis22) December 19, 2018 The 6-foot-3, 240-pound 'backer, out of Moorpark College (Ventura, California), joins Under Armour All-American GeMon Eaford and coveted four-star prospect Mase Funa to make up one of, if not the best, linebacker class in program history. Mathis gives Oregon 22 commitments in the class of 2019, a group that ranks No. 5 nationally. The Mater Dei quartet is officially a trio. After decommitting from Oregon recently, 247Sports four-star safety Jeremiah Criddell took a visit to Eugene this past weekend and it seemed he was a lock to re-join the flock. However, by Tuesday evening Criddells recruitment appeared to turn in Oklahomas favor. On Wednesday morning on ESPN, the 5-foot-11, 188-pound defensive back, out of Santa Ana, California, made it official, committing to the Sooners over the Ducks. Oregon will look to address its safety need later Wednesday with the decision of Quandre Mosely, the nations No. 2 junior college safety, who is down to Kentucky, Oregon and Utah. Lance Wilhoite Commitment date: June 28, 2018 School: Franklin Road Academy (Nashville, Tennessee) Position: Wide receiver Height/weight: 6-foot-2, 180 pounds Top scholarship offers: Auburn, Clemson, Florida, Florida State, LSU, Ohio State, Penn State, Tennessee, Virginia Tech and others Rankings: Rivals 4-star prospect, nations No. 55 prospect overall (No. 10 wide receiver); 247Sports 3-star prospect, nations No. 489 prospect overall (No. 64 wide receiver); ESPN 4-star prospect, nations No. 96 prospect overall (No. 13 wide receiver) How he fits: Oregon entered the 2019 recruiting cycle close to full at the wide receiver position, but havent gotten anywhere near the production it anticipated outside of Dillon Mitchell. That left pass-catchers as a glaring need this year. The Ducks addressed it with four quality receivers, including Wilhoite. Recruiting services are split on his ranking. If he plays the way Rivals and ESPN expect, he will earn playing time sooner rather than later. Projection: Frankly, it depends on who you believe. Rivals and ESPN consider him a future all-conference-caliber talent, while 247Sports lists him as a future rotational piece at receiver. When healthy, Wilhoite has flashed high upside potential. Sean Dollars Commitment date: May 20, 2018 School: Mater Dei High School (Santa Ana, California) Position: All-purpose back/Running back Height/weight: 5-foot-10, 185 pounds Top scholarship offers: Arizona, Arizona State, California, Colorado, Florida, Florida State, Georgia, LSU, Nebraska, Oregon, TCU, USC, Utah, Washington, Washington State and others Rankings: Rivals 4-star prospect, nations No. 72 prospect overall (No. 2 all-purpose back), No. 9 prospect in California; 247Sports 4-star prospect, composite No. 1 all-purpose back nationally, nations No. 301 prospect overall (No. 4 all-purpose back), No. 42 prospect in California; ESPN 4-star prospect, nations No. 164 prospect overall (No. 9 running back) How he fits: Oregon loses little-used Tony Brooks-James to graduation, but returns a talented freshman trio of C.J. Verdell, Travis Dye and Cyrus Habibi-Likio. The Ducks want to keep a stable of running backs, blending speedy, shifty ball-carriers with powerful bruisers. Dollars, who is set to enroll early, should develop into the lightning of the thunder/lightning rushing combo and will try to earn carries in his first season in Eugene. Projection: Dollars has a chance to develop into an elusive back who can make plays as a receiver on third down. However, hell have to change the recent history of highly-rated all-purpose backs at Oregon, which includes Taj Griffin, Malik Lovette, Kirk Merritt and Brooks-James. What weve written about him: - Sean Dollars, Oregon Ducks 4-star RB commit, puts on a show on ESPNU (August 24) - Sean Dollars on silent commitments: We have more (June 18) - Sean Dollars, Oregon RB pledge, named best of 2018 Rivals 3 Stripe Camp Series (May 29) - Sean Dollars, nations No. 1 all-purpose back, commits to Oregon Ducks (May 20) - Sean Dollars, top all-purpose back, has Oregon Ducks in top 6 (April 18) - Sean Dollars, nations No. 1 all-purpose back, says Oregon Ducks on top, sets visit (March 2) Treven Maae Commitment date: August 30, 2018 School: Bishop Gorman High School (Las Vegas, Nevada) Position: DE/OLB Height/weight: 6-foot-4, 240 pounds Top scholarship offers: Arizona State, Boise State, California, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Oregon, TCU, USC, Utah and others Rankings: Rivals 3-star prospect, nations No. 48 defensive end; 247Sports 3-star prospect, nations No. 51 defensive end; ESPN 4-star prospect, nations No. 50 defensive end How he fits: Oregon has worked to upgrade its front seven and it shows in the 2019 recruiting class. Bishop Gorman defensive end Treven Maae is one of three edge rushers in the group, highlighted by five-star defensive end Kayvon Thibodeaux. Adding even more value, Maaes high school program is one of the nations best, so he could help the Ducks build an intriguing pipeline to Las Vegas. Projection: Maae has worked extremely hard to maximize his body and talents, which is not only commendable, but a welcomed addition for Oregon. Hell bring intensity and tireless work ethic to the group. Maae said Oregon projects him at outside linebacker more than defensive end, despite his rankings, but will have positional fluidity. Trikweze Bridges Commitment date: July 23, 2018 School: Lanett High School (Lanett, Alabama) Position: Safety Height/weight: 6-foot-3, 175 pounds Top scholarship offers: Alabama, Florida, Florida State, Georgia, LSU, Nebraska, Ohio State, Oklahoma, Oregon, Penn State, Tennessee, UCF and others Rankings: Rivals 4-star prospect, nations No. 25 safety, No. 9 prospect in Alabama; 247Sports 3-star prospect, nations No. 64 safety, No. 30 prospect in Alabama; ESPN 4-star prospect, nations No. 22 safety, No. 13 prospect in Alabama How he fits: Oregon is losing starter Ugochukwu Amadi and reserve Martrell McGraw to graduation, but returns promising soon-to-be sophomore Jevon Holland and next years juniors Nick Pickett and Brady Breeze. Bridges wont be expected to play immediately, but fills a pressing need for at least one safety in the 2019 recruiting class. He has prototypical length for a modern safety. Projection: With Holland and Pickett coming back, Bridges is a redshirt candidate next season. The former Portland teacher whose ability to escape multiple allegations of sexual abuse caused Oregon's largest school district to pledge massive reform wants a judge to erase his only criminal conviction. The Mitch Whitehurst case forced a reckoning in Portland Public Schools after The Oregonian/OregonLive investigation "Benefit of the Doubt" showed how the school district helped the educator dodge allegations of sexual misconduct with students for decades. Legislators are now trying to learn from his case how best to protect students from abuse. Even as Whitehurst has become a cautionary tale heard round the state, Whitehurst himself could potentially have a clean record come February. Whitehurst's questionable behavior with female students at multiple Portland schools drew serious police scrutiny only after he invasively touched an adult male colleague in 2014. That instance led to a criminal conviction for misdemeanor harassment. It also prompted the school district to fire him and the state teacher licensing agency to look deeper at allegations of student abuse that school district officials had downplayed for decades. Whitehurst's coworker reported that Whitehurst came up behind him while he was talking to a teacher and poked him in the anus. Whitehurst pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor harassment charge that didn't result in him being labeled a sex offender. Because the charge is minor, Whitehurst was able to ask that it be removed from his record once three years had passed and that's exactly what he's done. A hearing is scheduled for Feb. 6. Whitehurst's attorney did not respond to a text message asking for comment. Whitehurst can't teach at a public school in Oregon again. His criminal case caught the attention of the state licensing agency, which stumbled on the allegations from students during its investigation. It concluded he'd been sexually inappropriate with students, and Whitehurst stipulated that the agency had evidence he had done so. The agency permanently revoked his license. The victim's attorney, Matthew Ellis, said the victim will oppose Whitehurst's effort to wipe his criminal record clean. The district attorney's office also opposes Whitehurst's effort, according to prosecutors' court filings. The district attorney's office said he deceptively downplayed the poking to a teacher licensing investigator after he pleaded guilty to it. And it asked the court to consider the revelations about Whitehurst's conduct with students that surfaced after his conviction. A team of outside investigators hired by Portland Public Schools to study the Whitehurst matter were critical of the prosecutor on the case, noting she treated the matter "almost dismissively" and that she didn't follow protocol that specifies cases involving licensed educators must be run by the highest levels of the DA's office. "Had such notifications occurred our investigation concluded that the matter would have been handled in a much more serious fashion," the investigators' report said. Christine Mascal, who prosecuted the case and has since left the district attorney's office, doesn't agree with that analysis of her work and questioned the conclusion that she didn't follow protocol. She argued the facts were not that Whitehurst poked the victim in the anus but that he'd hit him on the backside with a clipboard. Police records make clear that the victim told police he felt he'd been penetrated with something when Whitehurst approached him out of the blue while he was fully clothed and speaking with another coworker. The police report about the incident indicates Whitehurst repeatedly said that he held some pieces of paper in one hand. The report makes no mention of a clipboard. But Mascal said Tuesday, "What we were left with at the end of the day is, 'He comes up and smacks the coworker on the backside with a clipboard, in public...If I would do it all again there is nothing I could do again to get this guy. And believe me, I hate sex offenders." Mascal said at the time of the poking case, she wasn't aware of the allegations of past abuse with students. In fact, the detective's report she was given noted several employees told him Whitehurst had skated by on those kinds of allegations in the past. Mascal wrote that off Tuesday, saying that particular detective always writes long reports. Mascal said she can't remember whether she consulted with her supervisor before settling on the misdemeanor harassment charge, but she said she "most likely" did. She said given the facts which she said boiled down to a public slap on the backside it was hard to prove criminal intent and they were hard pressed to prove harassment. In 2016, Portland Public Schools settled a lawsuit the victim brought about the matter for $250,000. Board member Julia Brim-Edwards, who chaired the board when the district launched its investigation into Whitehurst, said Whitehurst shouldn't be allowed to remove the conviction. "This is part of his larger record that should remain unaltered and should exist," she said, noting it is important that the community and future employers be aware of his full pattern of misconduct. In 2015, when the state was weighing whether to revoke Whitehurst's license, Whitehurst reported he worked as a longshoreman and as an Uber driver. It is unclear whether he is currently employed. An 11th child in Washington is suspected of having acute flaccid myelitis, a rare polio-like disease that has seen a spike this year. Clark County Public Health identified another child on Wednesday. The child, who is younger than 6, was hospitalized after one of the childs arms became paralyzed. The child had previously shown symptoms of respiratory problems and a fever, according to the public health department. This child joins two other children who have suspected cases of acute flaccid myelitis. The Washington Department of Health is investigating those cases and lab specimens and diagnostic images have been sent to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for a confirmed diagnosis. Nine other children in Washington already received positive diagnoses. While few people die from acute flaccid myelitis, problems breathing can require ventilator machines or the condition can trigger other neurological problems. Last year, three children in Washington had the disease, and nine did in 2016 during a national peak in the disease. That year, Oregon had at least three cases and three in 2014. The Oregon Health Authority has not reported any cases so far this year. Doctors have been unable to pinpoint a common cause for acute flaccid myelitis. In many cases, no one is able to name a cause, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The disease is similar to polio and West Nile Virus, and the Centers of Disease Control said that those two viruses, as well as non-polio enteroviruses and mosquito-born illnesses like Zika, could also cause acute flaccid myelitis. Acute flaccid myelitis causes a sudden weakness in one or both arms or legs. People with the condition also lose muscle tone and reflexes, experience facial and eyelid drooping, difficulty moving their eyes, difficulty swallowing or speaking. Health authorities say they don't know what the long-term consequences of acute flaccid myelitis are or who is most at risk of contracting it. Since there is no determined cause, there is no sure-fire treatment or prevention. The federal government recommends people wash their hands with soap and water, disinfect surfaces and avoid contact with sick people. Health authorities also recommend staying up to date on vaccines, especially for polio, and avoiding mosquito bites whenever possible. A former employee of a Portland Banana Republic store said Tuesday that Johnny Tuck Chee Chan -- the 34-year-old ex-pharmacist accused of video recording her and as many as 26 other women using the employee bathroom -- was quiet and kept to himself while working the registers. He was very awkward and very shy, said the 22-year-old who quit her job in June. He kind of lacked social skills. ... He was very quiet. He didnt talk a lot. She said she and others had no idea Chan had worked as a pharmacist for Kaiser Permanente and that hed lost his job as authorities launched a more than yearlong investigation into allegations that hed recorded colleagues using employee restrooms at a Kaiser facility in Northeast Portland. The young woman said she was shocked when she learned in recent weeks that Chan is accused of recording her. For the first few days I cried like nonstop over this, she said, moments after stepping out of a brief court hearing where Chan appeared. Chan has now been charged in Multnomah County Circuit Court with more than 100 counts of invasion of personal privacy or encouraging child sexual abuse. The encouraging child sexual abuse charges -- which are essentially child pornography charges -- stem from allegations that Chan recorded minors partially naked while in the restroom. Chan was arraigned Tuesday on 34 charges for allegedly video recording colleagues at the Banana Republic Factory Store at 9959 N.E. Cascades Parkway, near Portland International Airport. Police discovered a camera hidden in a box with a small hole in it, with a running camera pointed knee-level toward the toilet. Police searched Chans Southeast Portland home, which he shares with his parents and an older sister. They said they found memory cards that showed Chan setting up the camera in the stores bathroom in addition to finding 25 of the 27 female victims on the video in a state of nudity. Last month, Chan was arraigned on 71 similar charges for allegedly recording 51 men and women using the employee unisex bathrooms and changing rooms at the Kaiser Permanente facility in the 5700 block of Northeast 138th Avenue. A Kaiser employee found a camera in one of the rooms in November 2017, and Chan was fired, authorities said. He then got a job at Banana Republic and allegedly recorded his co-workers there from April 11 to Nov. 26, the day he was arrested while on the job for the Kaiser Permanente allegations. Chan also is charged with attaching a tiny camera to his shoe and walking around shopping malls and grocery stores and taking photos up womens skirts while standing next to them, according to papers filed by the prosecution. In addition, hes charged with recording upskirting photos of female colleagues with a camera placed under their desks. After Chan was first arrested, he was held in lieu of $280,000. One of his attorneys, Mark Cogan, said that with the help of his family Chan was able to post the necessary 10 percent -- $28,000 -- to get out pending trial. But he was arrested again Dec. 7 based on the Banana Republic allegations. His bail was set at $2 million, meaning hed have to post another $200,000 to get out. Chans attorneys have asked Judge Karin Immergut to lower the bail amount to $205,000, meaning he would have to post $20,500 to be released again. Cogan said in court papers thats all Chan and his family can afford. Immergut will hear arguments on his bail at a hearing in January. More than half-dozen Banana Republic employees attended Tuesdays brief hearing. Chan made no statements. Afterward, the 22-year-old former employee said she was disappointed she didnt get to make a victim impact statement in court. She isnt looking forward to returning to the same courtroom next month and seeing Chan again. She said shes had to seek counseling after learning she was video-recorded. Now, after this, Im paranoid to use a public restroom, she said. Something as simple as that. ...Im scared someone is looking at me while Im using the restroom or someones filming. The woman said although she hasnt personally spoken to a civil attorney about a possible lawsuit, some of her former co-workers have because theyre upset that Banana Republic hired Chan. Chan has no history of criminal convictions. If he is convicted of the charges against him, its unclear what kind of sentence he could receive. Oregon sentencing guidelines appear to allow for a wide range -- from probation to years of prison time. -- Aimee Green agreen@oregonian.com o_aimee COLLEGE PARK, Md. An internet troll who harassed a black college student with racist messages on social media has agreed to a court settlement requiring him to get anti-hate training, apologize in writing and on video and publicly renounce white supremacy. Tuesday's settlement agreement would resolve Taylor Dumpson's claims against one of the defendants she sued in April over an online harassment campaign orchestrated by a neo-Nazi website publisher. Her lawsuit says The Daily Stormer publisher Andrew Anglin directed his site's readers to cyberbully her after she became the first black woman to serve as American University's student government president. Dumpson sued Anglin and two people who harassed her online. Her settlement agreement is with Oregon resident Evan James McCarty, who posted on Twitter under the pseudonym "Byron de la Vandal," an apparent reference to Byron De La Beckwith, who assassinated civil rights leader Medgar Evers in 1963. Dumpson's attorneys previously asked the federal court in Washington, D.C., to enter default judgments against Anglin and another defendant, Brian Andrew Ade, for their failure to respond to the suit. Anglin and Ade aren't involved in the settlement. Dumpson's ordeal began a day after her May 2017 inauguration as student government president, when someone hung bananas with hateful messages from nooses on the university's campus. Authorities investigated but didn't identify any suspects. Anglin posted an article about the incident, including links to Dumpson's Facebook page and the American University Student Government's Twitter page. In response to an announcement about Dumpson's whereabouts, McCarty tweeted a picture of bananas captioned, "READY THE TROOPS," and wrote, "OOGA BOOGA," in another tweet directed at her, her suit says. Dumpson, now a 22-year-old law school student, said she wants her lawsuit to "hold people accountable for their bigoted actions." She believes the partial settlement "could raise awareness of issues of racial justice, while also providing for educational benefits." "I guess I was open to the idea that even the perpetrator of a racially motivated act of bias could still be more or less reformed," she told The Associated Press. Her lawyers hope the settlement agreement could become a model for encouraging others to abandon white supremacy. McCarty agreed to apologize directly to Dumpson in a video conference that she can record for advocacy and educational purposes. He also agreed to attend at least one year of anti-hate training sessions with a licensed therapist or a qualified counselor, and to complete at least four academic courses on race and gender issues. In addition, McCarty must complete at least 200 hours of community service promoting "racial justice and civil rights" and publicly advocate against hate. "This advocacy could take many forms, such as direct outreach to other white supremacists to attempt de-radicalization," the agreement says. Dumpson is represented by attorneys from the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. Kristen Clarke, the Washington-based group's president and executive director, said the agreement should have a "chilling effect" on those who anonymously spew hate online. "At the end of the day, our settlement should send a strong message to white supremacists and neo-Nazis all across the country that they will be held accountable for their conduct," she said. Anglin's site takes its name from Der Sturmer, a newspaper that published Nazi propaganda in Nazi-era Germany, and includes sections called "Jewish Problem" and "Race War." Domain name registration companies Google and GoDaddy yanked the site's web address after Anglin published a post mocking the woman killed by a man who plowed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. Dumpson's case is one of three federal lawsuits filed against Anglin by targets of his racist and anti-Semitic trolling campaigns. Montana real estate agent Tanya Gersh sued Anglin in April 2017, claiming anonymous internet trolls bombarded her family with hateful and threatening messages after Anglin published their personal information. Muslim-American radio host Dean Obeidallah sued Anglin in his native Ohio in August 2017. Obeidallah's federal suit says Anglin falsely labeled him as the "mastermind" behind a deadly bombing at a concert in England. Dumpson's suit says she was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and "feels constantly afraid and on edge," terrified to leave her home at night. "It's one of the first things I think about in the morning and one of the last things I think about when I go to sleep," she said. Her suit asks the court to rule that the defendants violated the District of Columbia Human Rights Act of 1977 and the D.C. Bias-Related Crimes Act of 1989. The court hasnt ruled yet. The Associated Press Correction appended Slower population growth pushed Oregon out of the top 10 fastest growing states last year, new census numbers show. Oregon gained just over 44,000 residents over 12 months ending in July, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, a 1.1 percent increase that brings the states population to 4.19 million. Its now the 11th fastest-growing state in the U.S. on a percentage basis, nearly tied with No. 10 South Carolina and No. 12 Delaware, each that also saw its population grow by about 1.1 percent. The fastest-growing states were Nevada (2.1 percent increase), Idaho (2.1 percent) and Utah (1.9 percent). Nine states lost population, with West Virginia shrinking the fastest. That state lost 0.6 percent of its population last year. Population growth was expected to slow with the states economy. The rapid expansion in recent years appears to be running out of steam. That means the economy wont be churning out as many new jobs, drawing fewer people from out-of-state. Oregon is heavily dependent on migration for its population growth. In 2018, 79 percent of the population increase came from people moving into the state, while only 21 percent was attributed to natural growth from births minus deaths. Still, the increase appears to continue the trend that has Oregon poised to gain a congressional seat during the 2020 reapportionment. Forecasters have expected Oregon to add one seat, bringing its total to six. But the apportionment of congressional seats is based on the response to the 2020 census, which is intended to count every U.S. resident through a legally mandated survey. Estimates released in between the decennial censuses are based on sample surveys and other data, including permits for new housing, birth records, death records and tax returns. -- Elliot Njus enjus@oregonian.com; 503-294-5034; @enjus This post has been edited to reflect the following correction: Oregon gained 44,121 new residents in the 12 months ending in July, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. An earlier version of this post reflected two years of growth. BY MICHAEL GERSON The Washington Post The American Correctional Association assess conditions in the Cuyahoga County Jail.The Plain Dealer WASHINGTON -- Cleveland has written the latest chapter in the unfolding scandal of the American criminal justice system. A report by the U.S. Marshals Service details a series of failures and abuses in the Cuyahoga County Jail: Overcrowding. Frequent lockdowns to make up for understaffing. Food denied as punishment. Pregnant inmates sleeping on the floor. Mice-infested food storage. Young offenders thrown into the adult prison population. Inmates with mental illness denied treatment and placed in isolation. A merger of Cleveland's city and county systems was sold as a cost-saving measure. It resulted in a penal system in which there were 55 attempted suicides at the county jail in one year. After the seventh inmate death from suicide or drug overdose, the reorganization was put on hold. The Marshals Service report found "insufficient and unclear answers" about recent inmate deaths. "I'm not saying it should be a hotel or a party," former inmate Cecil Fluker told the county council, "but damn, can we come out alive?" With no other group dependent on government care does the discourse begin, "Well, who cares?" And there is no doubt that among the more than 2 million incarcerated Americans are some vicious and violent characters who deserve to be right where they are. But there are several good reasons to care what happens in American jails and prisons. First, this is a social stress test of sorts, measuring our commitment to human dignity. Do we believe that every life has value? Or do we judge some men and women less than human and beneath our concern? I was instructed in these matters by the late Chuck Colson when I worked for him in the late 1980s. Colson had been a particularly ruthless and devious special counsel to President Richard Nixon. As a result of the Watergate scandal, he became prisoner 23226. While incarcerated, he found an extraordinary talent for relating to inmates across boundaries of class and race. And he accepted a Christian calling to speak to and for them, eventually visiting 800 prisons in 40 countries. Over time, a prison preacher became one of the most important social reformers of the 20th century, advocating for humane treatment of prisoners and alternatives to incarceration for non-violent offenders. I watched Colson demonstrate the most radical and challenging teaching of Christian faith -- a belief in absolute equality before God. He treated murderers and rapists as his equals in the need for grace, and his equals in their capacity to receive grace. And I watched people guilty of terrible crimes become models of moral maturity. If no one, in the end, is beyond God's help, then no one should be beyond our concern. But even if you find all of this to be pious rubbish, there is another reason to care about prison conditions: Because most prisoners -- numbering more than 700,000 each year -- will come back to communities. And how we behave toward them during their imprisonment matters greatly in determining their level of bitterness and criminality upon their return. An inmate treated like a caged animal is expected to walk through a gate and become a productive citizen. It is insanity. A final reason to be concerned about conditions behind prison walls is because there are more lives and futures at stake than that of a prisoner. There are about 2.7 million children with an incarcerated mother or father. The children of prisoners are at high risk of future incarceration themselves. Writing off prisoners as worthless and hopeless has the effect of writing off many of their sons and daughters. It is moral malpractice with generational consequences. There are proper political responses to America's criminal-justice crisis -- support for prison reform, for sentencing reform, for a general end to reliance on routine, mass incarceration. But there are also personal steps that can be taken. The prison outreach ministry Colson founded, Prison Fellowship, organizes an effort each year at Christmas called Angel Tree. It allows people to donate Christmas presents that are given on behalf of prisoners to their children, marked "With love from Mom," or "With love from Dad." It is often a chance for inmates to reconnect with their families. And it is often the highlight of a child's Christmas -- a sign they are still loved. The most effective social activism matches political vision and personal concern. Those seeking a more just society should also care about the quality of Christmas morning for an inmate's child. -- Michael Gersons email address is michaelgerson@washpost.com. According to Gary L. Hollens Nov. 26 letter What exactly is Trump building?", President Trump is building nothing important, has an evil spirit and fancies himself an Emperor Napoleon, Joseph Stalin or Hitler. Wow! We have a democracy, Mr. Hollen, a Greek word meaning rule of the people. It is cumbersome, costly, and requires a strong understanding of English and our history. Although Hillary Clinton outvoted him, she implied that those who might vote against her were deplorables thereby losing the flyover states and the vote of the Electoral College, the one that really matters. Mr. Trump may be a boor and a braggart, but he is not stupid. Thomas J. Adams, Newport SALEM Oregon Gov. Kate Brown has been cleared of an ethics complaint. The Statesman Journal reports that the Oregon Government Ethics Commission has dismissed a complaint filed by Bill Currier, chair of the Oregon Republican Party, on Oct. 10. Currier alleged that Brown, a Democrat, may have tried to use her official position to avoid personal and campaign expenses. The commission concluded that the travel expenses Currier questioned were made by Brown's Oregon State Police security detail, which protects her whatever she's doing. It also said there was nothing wrong with her attending campaign events while on official government trips. Furthermore, the committee said Brown promptly reimbursed the state for two personal purchase made with her state-issued credit card, so there was no wrongdoing there, either. The commission dismissed the complaint last week after its staff recommended in November that it should be dismissed in its entirety. AP SALEM Oregons secretary of state, who is battling brain cancer, attended a state land board meeting by speakerphone, a day after he reversed his decision to temporarily leave. Dennis Richardson earlier announced he was leaving the three-member board during his medical treatment and assigned his deputy the role. He reversed his decision Monday on the advice of the state attorney general. Richardson said he didn't want to waste taxpayer resources on a legal fight. Richardson's voice was strong but halting as he participated in the meeting Tuesday with board members Gov. Kate Brown and Treasurer Tobias Read, who were physically present. The Democratic governor, who in the past clashed with Richardson, thanked him for participating. Richardson, a Republican, is Oregons second-highest state official, after the governor. The Associated Press Oregon lawmakers will try again to repeal the states gigabit tax break, a four-year-old incentive now widely considered a mistake by members of both parties. Legislators unanimously created the tax break in 2015 in hopes of luring Google Fiber to bring its super-fast internet service to Portland. When Google jilted Portland a year later, Comcast and Frontier Communications moved to capitalize and claim the tax savings for themselves. Efforts to repeal the tax break stalled at the finish line during the short legislative session last winter, but lawmakers think they have a better shot this time out. I feel like our chances of passing this are a lot, lot better, said Rob Nosse, D-Portland, who has filed one of two bills for the 2019 session to repeal the tax break. I feel like my peers understand and know its not necessary. The tax break exempts internet providers from an unusual Oregon tax methodology, which includes some nontangible assets like a companys brand in calculating their property tax valuations. The exemption was potentially worth $15 million a year to Comcast, and another $2.5 million to Frontier. When lawmakers drew up the tax break almost four years ago, they restricted it to internet providers offering speeds of at least 1 gigabit per second, 1,000 megabits per second. At the time, Google Fiber was among just a few internet providers promising those speeds to residential customers. Technology advanced, though, and now gigabit speeds are available to the vast majority of homes in the Portland area and in many other parts of Oregon. That made tax break widely available, too. Oregon cities and counties feared it would cost them significant revenue, and lawmakers came to agree. An Oregon House committee unanimously approved a repeal during last years short session. The bill overwhelmingly passed the House. Amid furious lobbying from Comcast, though, the repeal stalled in the Senate. That gave Comcast leverage in negotiations over an unrelated tax dispute with the state. In June, Comcast agreed never to claim the gigabit tax break and, in exchange, Oregon agreed to accept just $155 million from the company in the separate tax dispute. Thats $45 million less than the state had claimed Comcast owed. The gigabit tax break is still on the books, though, so other internet providers could conceivably capitalize. With Comcast sidelined by its tax deal, though, Nosse doesnt expect anyone will put up a fright. Given that I dont think Comcast is going to be pushing it, he said. I think it is going to be easier. -- Mike Rogoway | twitter: @rogoway | 503-294-7699 Seven years of data collection, committee meetings and bureaucratic curveballs later, Oregon finally has a new American Viticultural Area: the Van Duzer Corridor. An American Viticultural Area commonly referred to as an AVA - is a grape-growing region recognized by the federal Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) for its unique combination of climate, soils and other geographical characteristics such as elevation. There are currently 242 AVAs in 26 states, with California topping the list at 139. The TTB announced in a Dec. 14 press release several more, including the Van Duzer Corridor, will be officially added Jan. 19. In addition to becoming the 19th AVA in Oregon, the Van Duzer Corridor joins Yamhill-Carlton, McMinnville, Ribbon Ridge, Eola-Amity Hills, Dundee Hills and the Chehalem Mountains as the seventh sub-appellation of the larger Willamette Valley AVA. The Van Duzer Corridor AVA covers 59,871 acres 20 miles northwest of Salem. The area includes 18 commercial vineyards and six commercially bonded wineries: Andante Vineyard, Chateau Bianca Winery, Firesteed, Johan Vineyards, Left Coast Cellars and Van Duzer Vineyards. Attaining AVA status requires winegrowers in a region not only to prove their soils and climate are unique in some way, but they also have to demonstrate their geographical boundaries are legitimate and prove the area is known locally or nationally by the proposed name of the AVA. The AVA process typically takes 3-4 years to complete, but there was nothing typical about this application. In the spring of 2011Jeff Havlin, the owner of Fenders Rest Vineyard, organized a meeting of nearby winery and vineyard owners to explore their AVA options. They knew their soils - marine sedimentary with a bit of basalt resting on top of siltstone bedrock were unique to the area, but the real ace in the hole was the wind. Courtesy Oregon Wine Press The Van Duzer Corridor AVA is blessed by a cut in the Coast Range that allows cool Pacific Ocean winds to barrel into its vineyards in the late afternoon. Those powerful winds, which can gust to 30-50 miles per hour, help reduce mildew pressure and other diseases by drying out the vines and grapes. Havlin also credits the Van Duzer winds with dropping overnight temperatures to the point where they add acidity and thicken the skins of the fruit. Grapes develop thicker skins in response to the high winds, and the skins are where all the good stuff is, Havlin said. The thicker skins are why we can make darker, richer pinot noir here. The only problem with the application they submitted to the TTB in 2012 was the proposed AVA name: Perrydale Hills. It turns out Havlins group couldnt find a shred of historical evidence to support their claim the area is known as the Perrydale Hills. We even looked for inscriptions in old family Bibles, Havlin said. The group submitted a new proposal with the Van Duzer Corridor name. The process moved along in usual fashion until January 2017. When President Donald Trump took office he immediately placed a freeze on new regulations, which included signing off on new AVAs. The moratorium was finally lifted and the process took its course. Now, nearly eight years after the process began, the Van Duzer Corridor AVA can appear on wine labels. When asked if he had any advice for wine colleagues who are thinking about applying for AVA status, Havlin said: Have patience and a sense of humor. Michael Alberty writes about wine for The Oregonian/OregonLive. He can be reached at malberty0@gmail.com. To read more of his coverage, go to oregonlive.com/wine. A junior at H.H. Dow High School will have the phone app he created recognized on a national level. The winner of the Congressional App Challenge for Michigan's 4th Congressional District, Ashwin Saxena, 16, is invited to visit Washington D.C. in March to meet other winners from across the nation. Winning apps are eligible to be displayed in the U.S. Capitol Building and featured on the House of Representatives' website. Winners also receive $250 in Amazon Web Services credits. Saxena created an app named TrackBus to inform students of a school bus' precise location, so they know exactly when to leave their home. Saxena said he came up with the idea for the app last winter, when he grew tired of waiting out in the snow for his bus to arrive. The app uses GPS and the internet to track the location of a bus driver. Now in its third year, the challenge is hosted by 220 members of the U.S. House of Representatives across 47 states and territories. During the last four months, more than 5,000 students coded original apps as part of districtwide competitions hosted by their local members of Congress. U.S. Rep. John Moolenaar appeared at Dow High on Tuesday to present Saxena with a Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition. "(The app) shows tremendous ingenuity, and it shows what a great tradition we have (in Michigan) of someone who can see a problem, and can use technology to address that problem," Moolenaar said. "This is all part of the STEM education that is so important for our economy and for the future of our society. What I also like is that (Saxena) is already thinking about how he would like to improve if he had to do it again, so that shows me he's a real entrepreneur." Saxena developed the app over the course of two months, working mostly on weekends so he could focus on schoolwork. He learned how to use JavaScript programming software through his school's AP computer science program, though he also looked up programming tutorials on Google to help him create the app. "I was really excited that my efforts finally paid off," Saxena said. "I'm really grateful for (Moolenaar) awarding me." Saxena is not the only member of his family with a talent for computer science. His father, Saurabh Saxena, is a principal consultant at Tata Consultancy Services, a software firm in India. His brother, Kartik Saxena, studies mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan. Saxena's mother, Mukta Saxena, an architect, was present when her son received the award from Moolenaar. "I know (Saxena is) a very hard-working child, and he has always strived to do something," Mukta Saxena said. "I'm happy that this competition is being offered for young children like him because it inspires the new kids to look into these aspects and to bring in something of their new ideas to help the community." Saxena is unsure if he will officially publish the app, citing the complicated finances and logistics of going through that process. The American Association of University Women-Midland Branch is offering scholarship assistance for two college women to attend the 2019 National Conference of College Women Student Leaders, scheduled for May 29-June 1, 2019, at the University of Maryland campus in College Park, Maryland. Two $1,500 scholarships will be offered. Scholarship applicants should have at least a 3.0 grade point average, either be attending a local college or university, or be from the area and attending college elsewhere. A budget change to help the Midland Police Department allot for the addition of two school resource officers was approved during Monday night's city council meeting. The amended budget was approved 3-0. Absent from the meeting was Councilman Marty Wazbinski and Councilwoman Diane Brown Wilhelm. MPD Deputy Chief Marc Goulette said the amended budget would help to hire two new officers in 2019 and allot for an increase of expenditures to $210,500 and a revenue of $370,000. This budget adjustment would fully cover the costs of the two SROs and all additional costs. Councilman Steve Arnosky said it would be a "net neutral" for the city, and it was only natural for the council to follow through with what residents voted for in November. Funds became available Dec. 1 of this year and will be through Dec. 1, 2021. The additional money would be divvied up in three ways: $152,000 for additional labor expenses, $20,000 for uniform and duty gear -- money which will go toward outfitting two new SROs and two new full time officers -- and $38,500 for vehicles. The vehicle cost would also cover equipment within the cruisers, accounting for vehicles ready for rotation out of the current fleet and maintenance as necessary. Midland County Commissioners approved placing 0.4 mill (40 cents per $1,000 of taxable value) on the Nov. 6 ballot back in August. This money would be used to fund seven school resource officers and is anticipated to raise $1,343,531 in the first year. Funds from the mill would cover start-up costs along with one SRO each for Dow, Midland, Bullock Creek, Coleman and Meridian high schools along with one SRO each for Jefferson and Northeast middle schools. Prior to the millage, SRO costs at Dow and Midland high schools were funded out of pocket by the Midland Police Department, while other schools did not have SROs. This was the final Midland City Council meeting of the year. The council will reconvene in January. Saginaw Valley State University students are defying stereotypes. At the end of the fall semester, many college students return home to sleep in, binge watch Netflix and generally unwind. But for Alina Devoogd, Chantel Poquette and nearly 100 SVSU students, they are dedicating their winter break from school to volunteer at locations across the country, helping a number of organizations in need. Alternative Breaks is a student-led program organized through SVSU's Student Life Center. The program offers college students an "alternative" to the traditional university break to learn about different social issues across the U.S. Poquette departed for Lexington, Kentucky on Sunday, Dec. 16 to a crisis center called The Nest. The Nest offers a safe place for education, healing, counseling and support to women, children and families in crisis. The social work major from Holly said she is passionate about her topic because it relates to her personal life. "I want to be able to give back to people," she said. "I am going into a career that focuses on serving others and this trip not only helps me achieve my own goals but to help others." Devoogd, a political science and Spanish double major from Algonac, and her Alternative Breaks team are focused on the topic of incarcerated youth. The SVSU students traveled to Colombia, South Carolina to work with youth in the juvenile justice system. There, they are engaging with the youth in positive ways, as well as celebrate the holidays. "I chose to do an alternative break trip because my life calling is to use my privileges to help someone who needs a hand," she said. "Sometimes we all need someone to believe in us and help us." Alternative Break destinations and topics for SVSU students this December include: Twelve students are volunteering at The Nest Center for Women, Children and Families in Lexington, Kentucky. Twelve students traveled to Memphis to work alongside Serve 901 to focus on community development. Eleven students headed to Asheville, North Carolina to work with Habitat for Humanity. Three students are dedicating their time to health and wellness of the LGBTQ+ community at the Lifelong in Seattle. Twelve students will work on rural cultural sensitivity and animal rescue at Visit Appalachia LLC in Harlan, Kentucky. Twelve students will aid in resettling refugees into their communities in Atlanta with the International Rescue Committee. Twelve students will focus on poverty and structural racism while in Washington, D.C. working at the Steinbruck Center. Twelve students will work with Champion Athletes of the Ozarks to help Individuals with special needs and disabilities in Springfield, Missouri. Twelve students traveled to the South Carolina Department of Juvenile Justice in Columbia, South Carolina to work with the incarcerated youth. After returning from their trips, many of the SVSU students engage in volunteer service for a nonprofit organization in the Great Lakes Bay Region or their home communities devoted to a cause similar to what they experienced on their Alternative Break, SVSU reported. For more information about the Alternative Breaks program at SVSU, visit www.svsu.edu/officeofstudentlife/serve/. It was reported this week in the Business Korea publication that Samsung Electronics Co.s share price helplessly fell even below the 40,000 won (US$35.26) level, which was the psychological supporting line, hitting the lowest point in 22 months. A negative outlook for market conditions and the companys performance made securities firms lower the target stock price and it led to the decrease in stock price again. With weaker demand than expected causing supply excess, foreign and institutional investors are also going on a selling spree. Beyond "Samsung Electronics," a second Korean report pointed to other Samsung divisions that are declining sharply as well. The Korea Times reports that "Samsung Electro-Mechanics, Samsung SDI and Samsung SDS have all suffered a sharp drop in their stock prices amid a slowdown in demand for IT devices in addition to a recession owing to the U.S.-China trade conflict, analysts said Sunday." The downdraft in Samsung Electronics stock, as seen in our cover graphic, shows that their problems are many and that the fall in their stock price didn't start with the US-China trade-war at all. Reality is that Chinese consumers are now buying Chinese made smartphones and switching away from Samsung to a large extent and Apple to lessor extent. The company has fallen from being the number one smartphone vendor in China years back to now struggling to hold on to a measly 1% of China's market. Throughout Asia, and India in particular, China's Xiaomi has overtaken Samsung as the leading vendor in a surprising surge. In 2019 other Chinese smartphone makers will be pushing harder into India that could further hurt Samsung. Samsung is hoping that their new 5G ready Galaxy S10 smartphones will do well in the U.S. next year as they are working with Verizon to launch the first 5G smartphone in the U.S. for March or April 2019. They're also likely to introduce a hybrid phone/tablet (folding phone) in Q2 to spark interest and give their brand some needed shine. In the interim, while Samsung's stock is in free-fall, the Korean press is back at smearing Apple in any way it can so as to boost sales for local Samsung and LG brands. In a new Korean report published today they state that "An increasing number of Korean consumers are turning their backs on Apple based on the notion that iPhones offer a limited scope of functions in addition to the inconvenience of the iOS operating system, while Apple continues to maintain its high price policy. According to Gallup Korea surveys, 22 percent of Korean consumers said they were willing to buy iPhones as their next smartphones in February 2017, but the figure fell to 17 percent in July this year. This was attributed to the failure of new iPhones to feature significant improvements over their predecessors, while a technological gap among competitors has been reduced offering more alternatives to consumers." The Korean report relies on "personal testimonies" to prove Koreans were turning away from the iPhone for Samsung phones. Personal testimonies are a form of pure propaganda. Here are a few of their examples: An office worker in central Seoul said he used to be a big fan of iPhones, but began to think their functions were limited for their high prices. He was a user of the iPhone 6, but now uses Galaxy Note 8. Personal Testimony #1: "For example, iPhones do not offer a voice call recording feature, which is widely used in Korea. Plus, I sometimes felt inconvenienced when using Apple's iOS." He added that Korean customers are unable to use several functions of iPhones that are used in the United States, Japan and China, such as Apple Pay and other near field communication (NFC)-based services. While Apple Pay has been unavailable in Korea, Samsung Pay, a mobile payment service launched by Samsung Electronics, has dominated the Korean market, with Samsung's smartphones securing more customers. An owner of a nail care shop in southern Seoul expressed complaints that it has been difficult to receive good quality after-sales repair service when she was using the iPhone. Personal Testimony #2: "I had to wait for days to have my iPhone repaired at Apple's official service center. I heard many users visited private companies for the repairs as it was difficult to use the official service centers." The Korean Times added that "In addition to the dissatisfaction of Korean consumers, Apple has been also facing protests from smartphone retailers in Korea for what they called "unfair" policies, which have pressed them to buy in-store iPhones used only for display and other promotional purposes. The full session of the FTC, which corresponds to a court trial, took place on Dec. 12, while the second session is scheduled for Jan. 16. If the corporate regulator rules the allegations true, Apple Korea could face a fine of tens of billions of won." Even though the report was supposed to be focused on South Koreans madly switching form iPhones to those from Samsung, the report just could help throwing in unrelated but negative news of their FTC investing Apple for their evil ways. It's pure propaganda smear. Prior to the full FTC session that began on December 12th, The Korea Times was out on December 7th preaching that Apple would be punished. They were so convinced that this would be the outcome on December 12th, they posted a report with their biased byline of: "Korea set to fine Apple for unfair practices." Of course December 12th has come and gone and the FTC has delayed their final decision until January 16th. While the actual Korean report hedged its bet, it still relied on "personal testimonies" as proof of Apple doing something "illegal" against Korean wireless carriers. If Samsung has been offering these carriers a better deal, their corporate standard doesn't make Apple's contracts with the wireless carriers illegal. Apple is an international company that sets policies for all telecom carriers, not just for South Korea. The Korean press makes it very personal and definitely whiny. The testimonies of unnamed sources over the last few months have sounded more like a set script given to them by Samsung's marketing team. The second part of the FTC session is set to take place on January 16th. With Samsung being the country's largest employer, I wouldn't be surprised if the FTC decides to hand down some kind of penalty to appease the locals. However, I'd like to think that FTC fully understands that favoring locals could have larger ramifications in terms of losing future investments in their country by other foreign companies and raise the ire of the U.S. President that could strike back at South Korea if the ruling is out of proportion. In the end, when Korea's FTC makes their final decision, we'll be back to report on this case that has Samsung's fingerprints all over it. The HP Chromebook x2 is the best detachable Chrome tablet you can buy, but you might be better off buying a straight Chrome laptop instead. Eight months later (after shipping in the early fall), the HP Chromebook x2 makes more sense. With the arrival of the Google Pixel Slate , Chrome OS has transformed into a full-on hybrid system, switching between a touch-based tablet interface and a PC-like keyboard-based one depending on how youre using it. The Chromebook x2 is uniquely suited to take advantage of both formats, with a bundled keyboard and stylus. When the detachable HP Chromebook x2 was announced in April, it was ahead of its time. Android app support was still a fledgling ambition, Chromebook tablets werent really a thing yet, and its $600 price tag seemed astronomical for a heaping portion of uncertainty. But just because the Chromebook x2 is ready for the future doesnt mean its right for your workflow. While it definitely has a few advantages over the Pixel Slate (including a lower price), it ultimately suffers from many of the same problems, mainly that Chrome OS still isnt very good on a tablet. If you simply want a Chromebook there are better options, but if youre in the market for a 2-in-1 Chrome tablet, the Chromebook x2 is easily your better option over the Pixel Slate. HP Chromebook x2 specs and features The Chromebook x2s specs are not quite as fancy as the Pixel Slates, but as youll see later in the performance section, they keep up impressively well with Googles pricier offerings. Here are the highlights: CPU: Intel 7th-gen Core m3-7Y30 Intel 7th-gen Core m3-7Y30 Memory: 4GB LPDDR3-1600 4GB LPDDR3-1600 Display: 12.3-inch 24001600 IPS WLED backlit 12.3-inch 24001600 IPS WLED backlit Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 615 Intel HD Graphics 615 Storage: 32GB eMMC 32GB eMMC Ports: Two USB 3.0 Gen 1 (5Gbps) Type C Two USB 3.0 Gen 1 (5Gbps) Type C Wireless: 802.11b/g/n/ac 22 MIMO, Bluetooth 4.2 802.11b/g/n/ac 22 MIMO, Bluetooth 4.2 Cameras: Front 5MP, rear 13MP Front 5MP, rear 13MP Battery: 4-cell, 48Whr lasts up to 10 hours 4-cell, 48Whr lasts up to 10 hours Dimensions and weight: 11.5 x 8.32 x 0.33 inches, or 0.6-inch thick with keyboard Clunky and chunky with lots of logos Despite offering a similar screen size as the Pixel Slates, the HP Chromebook x2 is quite different from Googles tablet. For one, the bezels around the screen are noticeably wider, so the device is a bit larger all around. HP has used the extra room to put its logo on the front, which detracts from its orientation-agnostic aesthetic. The Chromebook x2 is about a millimeter thicker than the Pixel Slate, but its flat sides make it feel even thicker. While that apparently wasnt enough room to include a fingerprint sensor, we appreciate the headphone jack (missing on the Pixel Slate). The pair of Bang & Olufsen speakers that visibly jut into the left and right sides of the bezels sound fantastic. Christopher Hebert/IDG A hefty hinge on the keyboard ensures the Chromebook x2 wont topple over. The nicest part of the Chromebook x2 is the tablets back, which is made of white matte ceramic and feels smooth and polished when held. Detracting from the minimalism, however, is, you guessed it, another giant HP logo. But while it might look good, the Chromebook x2 isnt very comfortable to use as a tablet. Weighing 1.62 pounds means doing anything with the tablet that takes more than a few minutes would definitely cause some arm strain, as would raising it to use the cameras. A bundled keyboard that doesnt match Realistically, most of your work on the Chromebook x2 will be done using the keyboard base, which is kind of a mixed bag. On the one hand, HP has built a fantastic hinge that lets you use the Chromebook x2 like a bona-fide laptop, much like the Brydge keyboard for the Pixel Slate. Attaching it is super-easy, with pogo pins and a pair of support tabs. It feels sturdy when locked into place, and it works well on a table or a lap. Christopher Hebert/IDG The Chromebook x2 is a little too big to use comfortably as a tablet for very long. The trackpad is nice and large (though a bit too clicky for my tastes). While I wish the keys were backlighted, they have good responsiveness despite just 0.6mm of travel. But even though its nearly as heavy (about 1.5 pounds) as the tablet it accompanies, HPs keyboard feels somewhat flimsy. When the tablet extends steeply, the attached keyboard feels less stable. It also looks cheap, with a textured faux black-leather finish thats somewhat reminiscent of a car dashboard. Finally, users may be aesthetically conflicted about the keyboards underside, painted Oxford Blue (as HP calls it), because it introduces a third major color to the design. Christopher Hebert/IDG The Chromebook x2s bundled keyboard has two tabs that hold the screen in place. HPs keyboard is certainly a step up from most third-party options for tablets, not to mention Googles and Apples pricey folio cases. But the proprietary nature of the design pretty much ensures it will be the only way to type properly with your Chromebook x2. A Bluetooth keyboard would work in theory, but without a dock or something to prop the screen at an angle, it wouldnt be very ergonomically friendly. Christopher Hebert/IDG That loop isnt for carryingit holds the bundled stylus. Along with the keyboard, the Chromebook x2 bundles a stylus powered by a AAAA battery. You can draw, write and navigate with it, but there arent any S-Pen-style tricks, nor does it have the pressure sensitivity of the HP Envy x2s extra-cost Digital Pen. Theres a fabric loop for it on the side of the keyboard, a good, if inelegant solution. Mid-range chip offers plenty of power The Chromebook x2 is powered by a Core m3 processor. It might make for a slow PC, but its pretty perfect for a Chromebook, especially one that doubles as a light-work tablet. We werent surprised that it outpaced lower-cost models, but we were impressed with how well it kept up with Googles far pricier Pixel Slate and Pixelbook. Thats good bang for buck. (Remember, Google updates Chrome OS constantly, so its always a variable in our test results.) Melissa Riofrio/IDG The HP Chromebook x2s Core m3 chip kept up surprisingly well with the faster Core CPUs in the Pixelbook and Pixel Slate in mainstream tasks. Running the Cr-XPRT performance benchmark (above), which measures everyday tasks such as web browsing and video playback, the x2 was nearly as fast as a Core i5, and handily bested a Celeron Chromebook. Melissa Riofrio/IDG In the broad Basemark test, the HP Chromebook x2 once again kept up well with its pricier Google rivals. The same was true with the Basemark 2.0 benchmark (above), which combines WebGL and Javascript performance. The Chromebook x2 trailed the i5 Pixel Slate, but not by nearly as much as I though it would. Melissa Riofrio/IDG Running Kraken JavaScript tasks, the HP Chromebook x2 trails the leaders slightly but is still a solid performer. On the JavaScript front, the Chromebook x2 again placed behind the Pixel Slate running the Kraken benchmark above, where shorter bars are better. While the JetStream benchmark below shows longer bars are better Melissa Riofrio/IDG The Jetstream JavaScript benchmark shows the same result as Kraken for the HP Chromebook x2, just in reverse scale (longer bars are better): Its the slowest of the fastest, still a good score. the result was about the same: The Chromebook x2 kept up pretty well with the Googles and lapped slower Celeron-based Chromebooks. Melissa Riofrio/IDG The HP Chromebook x2 has a projected battery life of 12.5 hours according to CrXPRT, jibing with our usage experience. Projected battery life (above) using Cr-XPRT was impressive as well. With brightness set to 200 nits (from a near-500-nit max) and medium volume, the x2 tested at 12.5 hours, making it one of the best models weve tested. While I was using it, I never had to worry about my proximity to an outlet, and benchmarks bore out my observations. The Chromebook x2s performance numbers tell a compelling story. It might not be quite as powerful as the Pixel Slate, but it keeps up surprisingly well. HP could have crammed a Core i5 into the x2 and jacked up the price by $200, but the m3 is a nice tradeoff. An option to upgrade to a better processor would be nice, but for the money, the Core m3 Chromebook x2 is just the right about of speed and power for the vast majority of buyers. Tripped up by the tablet interface The Chromebook x2 only recently adopted a true tablet interface with the Chrome 70 update, and I have the same problems with it here as I do with the Pixel Slate. Mainly, the two interfaces dont gel as well as they should, and switching between them is clunkier than it is on other 2-in-1 devices, namely the iPad Pro and Surface Pro. Christopher Hebert/IDG The trouble begins when you detach the Chromebook x2 from its keyboard base. I had fewer problems with the Chromebook x2 than the Pixel Slate when it came to crashes and bugs, and Android apps ran as well as Chrome extensions. That could have something to do with the version numberthe x2 is still running version 70, rather than version 71 on the Slateor the simple fact that HPs Chromebook has been on shelves longer, but whatever the case, the stability makes tablet mode feel more polished than it does on the Slate. With the clarity of a bug- and crash-free experience, I was able to get a better perspective on whats wrong, whats right, and what will hopefully be changed. Google has taken more than its share of cues from Android for Chromes tablet UI, including a back button, full-screen app presentation, and split-screen multitasking, and the interface works well enough in a vacuum. But when used alongside the classic Chromebook environment, the limitations of mobile are on full display, compounded by Googles deliberate decisions to overlook or ignore the things that make Chrome so effortless. Christopher Hebert/IDG The HP Chromebook x2 looks and acts like a standard laptop with docked. Some changes need to be made before Chrome on a tablet can be taken seriously. The first change Id make is to open the multitasking screen when switching to tablet mode. Going from floating windows to full-screen ones is a jarring transition. Jumping straight to the multitasking screen would better telegraph the interface changes. Id also like to see Chrome adopt a version of Android Pies gesture navigation and picture-in-picture, two features that would be right at home on Chrome. Should you buy an HP Chromebook x2? The HP Chromebook x2 has its shortcomings, but compared to the pricier Pixel Slate, its by far the better bet and bargain. Christopher Hebert/IDG The HP Chromebook x2 sounds great thanks to a pair of Bang & Olufsen speakers. At $600, the Chromebook x2 certainly isnt cheap, but its far more affordable than the Pixel Slate. The Core m3 version of the Pixel Slate has a newer 8th-generation processor, and twice as much RAM and storage as the Chromebook x2, but it costs $200 moreand thats without a keyboard a stylus. Add those things and youre looking at nearly $1,100. To match the Chromebook x2 in pricing, you need to go all the way down to the slowest Celeron configuration of Pixel Slate, but again, thats without a keyboard and pen. Beyond the price, the Chromebook x2 simply offers a better all-around experience than the Pixel Slate. That may change in future OS updates, but for now, if you want a 2-in-1 Chromebook, the x2 is the one to buy. Harriet Tubman is getting a new museum. The Underground Railroad hero will be the subject of a new permanent exhibit in Cape May, the Press of Atlantic City reports. Tubman came to Cape May in the 1850s to raise money to rescue slaves from the South. Her time on the Jersey Shore shore will be covered in a permanent exhibit at the museum. The museum is the work of members of the Macedonia Baptist Church and various community businesses and historical groups. Itll set up shop in the home of Macedonia Baptist Church pastor Rev. Robert Davis. Davis, who died in 2015. Davis collected historic slavery items and was known to use them to educate students at various schools, according to WHYY. Tubman wont be the sole focus of the museum, which will also shine a spotlight on Cape Mays historical African American population. At one point, African Americans made up 30 percent of Cape May residents, according to the museums developer, Bob Mullock, who was quoted in WHYY. The museum is expected to open in 2020. The plan is for the museums opening to coincide with the release of Tubmans visage on the $20 bill. But before that can happen roughly $700,000 needs to be raised to protect the building from potential flooding. You may enjoy these stories: The most popular Google search term for 2018 in the United States was none other than Amazon.com, according to satelliteinternet.com. The company has documented the most popular Christmas searches in every state. Those searches range from alcoholic eggnog recipes and last-minute Christmas deals to places to buy coal and asking if the Grinch is real. In Pennsylvania the most popular Christmas search term was: Planet Fitness hours. Seems we have skipped right over Christmas and are working on those New Years resolutions. In Oklahoma people are searching for restaurants open on Christmas Day and in South Carolina they want to know stores that are open on Christmas. Folks in Ohio are the ones searching for coal and in Nebraska they want to know where to find the best Christmas lights. Utah is curious about the Santa tracker and in West Virginia they want to know if Santa Claus is real. According to satelliteinternet.com the data was compiled by gathering a list of popular Christmas-related search terms and then using Google trends to match them with the states that Googled them Dec. 24-26, 2017. Oloroso in Philadelphia isnt playing games when it comes to one menu item. The Roasted Half Pigs Head is exactly what it says: a roasted half pigs head. When it arrives at your table it looks like, well, a pigs head -- snout and teeth included. We dont want there to be any mystery, said Townsend Wentz, the owner and chef of Oloroso. When youre ordering it, you know what youre getting. The pigs head is a traditional Spanish dish and takes the restaurant about a day and a half to prepare. The pig is cut by the restaurants butcher and then brined in Spanish brown beer and braised overnight. The head is then chilled before being slow roasted in the restaurants wood burning oven. Its then glazed with a sherry and rosemary gastrique. The finishing touches are sprinkles of Pimiento de Espelette, sea salt and chives. The dish, which comfortably feeds two, will set you back $38 per person and comes with a green olive tapenade, patatas bravas and blistered peppers. It has been part of the Oloroso menu since the restaurant opened in November 2017. This was one of the things we wanted to do on our menu and feature, Wentz said. We wanted to give something to the guests that they dont normally have available. He wasnt quite sure how people would receive it at first. For some people it might be a bridge too far, Wentz said. But the reactions we do get are almost universally positive. Theres a wow factor from guests and other people in the restaurant who see it. On Yelp, the dish has been described as out of this world and one of the best things Ive eaten all year. Chef Townsend Wentz. Oloroso is a Spanish tapas restaurant in Philadelphia. Julia Hatmaker | jhatmaker@pennlive.com The dish itself offers up a variety of textures. Theres the meat of the jowl which is loaded with fat, then the tender meat of the pork cheek. Theres also the tongue and various textures in the snout. And the skin itself is virtually dry fried. Its kind of a crispy pork candy, Wentz described. It may look a little tricky to eat, but Wentz says the key is just attacking it. Theres no messing up in the cutting, he said. Its all edible. That being said, the servers will carve it for you if youd like. After ordering, it takes about 45 minutes for the dish to come out, so Wentz recommends ordering a few tapas to tide you over. His favorites include the grilled octopus ($17) and squid ink rice ($15). Oloroso is located at 1121 Walnut St. in Philadelphia. Learn more or make reservations by calling 267-324-3014 or visiting olorosophilly.com. Want more stories about Philly? Click here for all our coverage of the City of Brotherly Love.You may also enjoy these videos of other unique eats in Pennsylvania. WASHINGTON - The Trump administration will ban bump-stock devices like the kind used in the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting, a decision that gun rights groups pledged to fight in court before the ban goes into full effect in about three months. Justice Department officials said Tuesday that a weapon modified with a bump stock - a type of device that attaches to the butt of a rifle and uses the energy of the gun's recoil to automatically fire another round - will be classified as a machine gun, meaning that only law enforcement agencies can use them. As a result, once the new regulations are published by the government Friday, owners of the devices will have 90 days to destroy them or turn them in to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. After the Las Vegas shooting, in which 58 people were killed by a gunman who used rifles with bump stocks to fire down on a crowded outdoor music concert, gun-control advocates began pushing for the ATF to re-examine regulations so it could declare bump stocks illegal, because they turn semiautomatic weapons into fully automatic ones. Justice Department officials said they will publish in the public register in coming days their finding that bump-stock-type weapons are machine guns, "because such devices allow a shooter of a semiautomatic firearm to initiate a continuous firing cycle with a single pull of the trigger." The move, which had been expected, led three gun-rights groups and a bump stock owner to quickly announce that they were suing the government to stop the new regulation. Joshua Prince, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs, accused ATF of misleading the public about bump stocks. "They are actively attempting to make felons out of people who relied on their legal opinions to lawfully acquire and possess devices the government unilaterally, unconstitutionally and improperly decided to reclassify as 'machineguns,' " Prince said. RW Arms, a company that sells bump stocks, did not respond to messages seeking comment, nor did the National Rifle Association. The gun rights group has urged the government to interpret regulations to restrict bump stocks, rather than seeking a law to ban them. In 2010, that ATF decided it could not regulate bump stocks; officials said the devices did not meet the definition of a machine gun, because they did not permanently alter a gun's trigger mechanism. The Trump administration began re-examining its regulations on bump stocks after the Las Vegas shooting, but that effort got a renewed push in April after a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, though that attack did not involve bump-stock weapons. The bump-stock announcement came the same day the Trump administration released a report on school safety from a commission formed after 17 students and teachers were killed in the Parkland shooting. The commissions report advised against imposing age restrictions for purchasing firearms and suggested that states adopt laws aimed at keeping guns from individuals who pose a threat to themselves or others. The Las Vegas attack stands as the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history, but it is the only major attack in which the gunman used a bump stock. Law enforcement officials have worried since Las Vegas that its use in that attack could spawn copycat killers. A 1986 law bans the sale of machine guns manufactured after that year and restricts the sale of such guns made before that year. Because bump stocks were created after 1986, the regulatory change amounts to an effective ban on the devices. Law enforcement agencies are unlikely to use bump-stock weapons, because they are difficult to fire accurately. Twenty years ago, on Dec. 19, 1998, President Bill Clinton was impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives. Clinton, who served as president from 1993 to 2001, however, was acquitted by the U.S. Senate on Feb. 12, 1999. Clinton had been charged with perjury and obstruction of justice alleging that he tried to conceal an affair he had with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, 22. The charges came after he testified before a grand jury in a sexual harassment lawsuit filed against him by Paula Jones. Clinton denied he had an affair with Lewinsky who was subpoenaed by lawyers for Paula Jones. Lewinsky at first denied the affair, however, there were audiotapes of her talking about the affair. After being granted immunity, Lewinsky cooperated. Clinton again denied the allegation but in August of 1989 acknowledged the affair in testimony before the grand jury. Clinton has been in Pennsylvania numerous times over the years including campaigning here in April and July of 1992. On May 10, 1996, he was the commencement speaker at Penn State University. In 1999 he visited Norristown and the Harley-Davidson plant in York County. In July 2000 he spoke at the National Governors Conference in State College. He campaigned for John Kerry in Philadelphia in October 2004. In March of 2008 he was at a rally for his wife, Hillary, at Dickinson College and in October 2008 attended a rally for the successful Democratic nominee, Barack Obama, at John Harris High School. In April and July 2016 he again campaigned in Pennsylvania in Harrisburg and Philadelphia for Hillary Clinton. WASHINGTON (AP) The Trump administration will withdraw all of the approximately 2,000 American troops in Syria, according to a U.S. official, as the White House declared victory Wednesday in the mission to defeat Islamic State militants there. Planning for the pullout has begun and troops will begin leaving as soon as possible, said the official, who was not authorized to publicly discuss military planning and spoke on condition of anonymity. President Donald Trump said American forces no longer were needed in a country torn apart by long-running civil war. Fighters of People's Protection Units, or YPG, gather at their outpost west of the city of Kobani, northern Syria, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. Turkey has vowed to launch a new offensive against YPG, which is the main component of a U.S.-allied force that drove Islamic State militants out of much of eastern Syria. U.S. troops are based in the area, in part to reduce tensions. (Ugur Can/DHA via AP) AP Trump has said since he was a presidential candidate that he wanted to bring back troops from the Middle East. But officials have said in recent weeks that pockets of IS militants remain. U.S. policy has been that American forces would stay in place until the extremists were eradicated. In addition, Pentagon and other officials have said that U.S. troops were countering Iran-backed militants in Syria, which was an expansion of the U.S. mission. Trump said on Twitter: "We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency." His tweet followed a series of news reports that the U.S. was preparing to withdraw its troops from Syria. The news was first reported by The Wall Street Journal. Reports of an abrupt withdrawal drew quick criticism from Congress. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said a full and rapid removal of troops would be a "grave error with broader implications" beyond the fight against IS. Responding to the reports, Pentagon spokesman Col. Rob Manning said in a statement that "at this time, we continue to work by, with and through our partners in the region." The U.S. first launched airstrikes against IS fighters in Syria in 2014. In the years that followed, the U.S. began partnering with Syrian ground forces to fight the extremists. The Pentagon recently said that IS now controls just 1 percent of the territory they originally held. By LOLITA C. BALDOR, SUSANNAH GEORGE and CATHERINE LUCEY, Associated Press A Middletown area man is accused of having dozens of pornographic images of children on his computer. Charles E. Castillo Jr., 64, of the 300 block of Caravan Court, is charged with 55 felony counts of child pornography, according to arrest records. According to court records, a Dauphin County detective received a tip from a national organization devoted to protecting children that an image of a nude girl under age 10 had been found on a computer server. Investigators from Dauphin County and the Pennsylvania Attorney Generals Office say the image was tied to an internet protocol address associated with Castillos home. Authorities say they obtained a search warrant and seized a computer from Castillos bedroom which had more than 50 images of child pornography on it hard driver. Authorities allege that Castillo admitted the computer belonged to him and admitted that he masturbated while looking at the pornographic images of children. HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf has issued his first act of clemency in more than two years, commuting a drug dealers life sentence. Sixty-year-old Benny Ortega of the West Chester area had already served 22 years in prison for selling marijuana and cocaine. He now must serve a year in a state halfway house before being released into the community. A spokesman for the governor says Ortega had taken steps toward rehabilitating himself and that the governor viewed his sentence as "egregious and inhumane." The commutation is Wolf's first since 2016 and only the governor's third since taking office in 2015. For inmates sentenced to life in prison in Pennsylvania, there is no parole. Commutation is the only path to release. Wolf also is considering whether to commute the life sentence of Tina Brosius, of Dauphin County. She was convicted in 1995 for permitting her newborn baby to die in a portable toilet; she was 18 at the time. The state Board of Pardons recommended last year that the governor commute her sentence. Nearly two months after the governor signed House bill 2557 into law allowing Harrisburg to keep its current taxing authority for five more years, three women have been appointed to a new financial oversight board that will monitor the city. A condition of the enhanced taxing extension was that a five-member board appointed by legislative leaders and the governor would approve a financial plan for Harrisburg and ensure the city followed it. The board is called the Intergovernmental Cooperation Authority of Harrisburg, or ICA for short. The House and Senate Democrats nominated Kathy Speaker MacNett, an attorney, and Tina Nixon, a vice president with PinnacleHealth, while the governors office nominated Audry Carter, who runs her own fundraising consulting firm. The House and Senate Republicans have yet to settle on their picks. Both leaders are still considering candidates and expected to announcement their appointments in early January. Some people expected the board members to be named already because a provision in the recently passed law said the members should be named within 30 days of the governor signing the law or within 30 days of the date of termination of receivership. The city, however, is not currently in receivership, but rather in the states Act 47 program for financially struggling cities with an assigned coordinator. Either way, the city cant exit the Act 47 program until an ICA is in place so its unclear how members would be named after the termination. Board members must live in the city, or have their primary place of employment in the city but not work for state government or hold an elected office. That narrows the field quite a bit, especially for Republicans when the city is primarily Democratic. (Democrats outnumber Republicans in the city six to one.) State Rep. Patty Kim, (D-Harrisburg) who worked on the legislation, said once a new House Speaker is elected on Jan. 1, he or she can approve the House Republicans appointee. Once all the volunteer members are appointed, they will select a chairperson and then hire a paid executive director. Kim said she hoped the board and executive director would be set by mid-January. The group will then negotiate a working agreement with the city. Once that agreement is finalized, the city can exit the states Act 47 program for financially struggling cities. That is expected next spring. Heres what we know about the ICA members so far: Kathy Speaker MacNett, a Harrisburg attorney, was appointed by House Minority Leader Frank Dermody. Kathy Speaker MacNett works as a managing member for Skarlatos Zonarich, where she focuses her law practice on management-side labor relations, employment law and relative legislative and regulatory developments. She represents public and private sector employers and non-profit organizations. Prior to her current assignment, she was a shareholder with the Harrisburg office of Buchanan Ingersoll and has previous governmental experience as a research director in the Pennsylvania House, Supreme Court law clerk and assistant counsel to the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board. She lives downtown and is a member of the Capital Area Neighbors Steering Committee. Tina Nixon, a vice president with Pinnacle Health, was appointed by Senate Minority Leader Jay Costa. Tina Nixon is well known in Harrisburg from her 15 years working at the YWCA of Greater Harrisburg. She left her CEO job there in May 2015 to join Pinnacle Health as the vice president for mission effectiveness and chief diversity officer. The position involves creating an environment of respect and understanding for people off all races, genders and religions within PinnacleHealth. It also involves interacting and collaborating with organizations outside PinnacleHealth which impact local health and related social problems. Audry Carter, who founded her own consulting company, was appointed by the governor. Audry Carter, of Italian Lake, founded her own management and fundraising consulting company serving many nonprofits, including the Nativity School of Harrisburg. Shes been working at her firm since 2011. Prior to that she served as president of the Sibley Memorial Hospital Foundation in Washington D.C., where she managed assets as they grew from zero to $40 million, according to her resume. Similar ICA boards have operated in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Harrisburgs ICA will meet as often as necessary but at least once per quarter, according to the law. The bodys annual budget is $100,000 and paid for by the state. The ICA is tasked with ensuring annual city budgets are balanced and based on reasonable estimates. The ICA also will provide state government leaders with an annual report about the citys financial condition. Lawmakers wanted an ICA to oversee the city if the city was going to continue levying a 2-percent earned income tax on residents and a tripled local-service-tax on anyone who works in the city after exiting Act 47. Those levels of taxing typically arent allowed for third-class cities outside of the Act 47 program. The additional taxing authority generates about $12 million annually for the city. A Jonestown man faces 211 charges, including many felonies, after police said he is responsible for a string of thefts and burglaries across Lebanon County. Dennis Huttsell, 35, was arraigned this week on the charges, according to online court records. According to state police, on Oct. 2, 2017, troopers began investigating a string of thefts and burglaries across the county, with crimes reported in Jackson, Bethel, Union and Annville townships, as well as Jonestown Borough and the city of Lebanon. The burglaries and thefts were committed under similar circumstances and were believed to have been committed by the same person or people, police said. The thefts and burglaries were committed between Oct. 2, 2017 and May 4 of this year, police said, adding that Huttsell was eventually identified as a suspect. According to police, a total of 211 charges were filed against Huttsell Wednesday. The charges include burglary, theft, criminal mischief, receiving stolen property, criminal trespass and persons not to possess firearms, police said. Online court documents show that Huttsell is to appear for a preliminary hearing at 8 a.m. Jan. 10 before Magisterial District Judge Anthony J. Verna. As of Wednesday afternoon, online documents showed that Huttsell remained incarcerated in Lebanon County Prison unable to post $250,000 bail. Harrisburgs Chief Academic Officer Jaimie Foster said the district knows that it has its academic challenges, and a new federal accountability model is going to help them advance more educated learners. Five Harrisburg School District schools fall into one of two categories under the Every Student Succeeds Act, Foster said. Downey School, Rowland Academy and the John Harris Campus of Harrisburg High School are considered Comprehensive Support and Improvement Schools. And, Foose and Scott elementary schools are considered Additional Targeted Support and Improvement Schools. Our school district is open for business, Foster said. Teachers are teaching, students are learning, principals are leading, administration is supporting. The district is working to help lifelong learners achieve their goals. Comprehensive Support and Improvement schools identifies the lowest performing 5 percent of individual schools in the state, based on several measures, that receive federal Title I funds. It also applies to any high school, regardless of whether it receives federal funds, that graduates 67 percent or less of its senior class. The state also developed a second category of schools in need of improvement, the Additional Targeted Support and Improvement (A-TSI) schools. Those are ones with subgroups of 20 or more students who performed at levels lower than the CSI schools or had a graduation rate of 67 percent or less. Subgroups are identified by race, economically disadvantaged, limited English proficiency, and disabilities. Under the federal law, the state was required to develop a plan to designate schools in need of extra help to turnaround their overall performance or the performance of a subgroup of students. Foster noted that the district will be working closely with the Pennsylvania Department of Education and the three improvement schools. Comprehensive and Improvement Schools will also be receiving additional funds, but the district doesnt know how much yet, she confirmed. Based on input from thousands of educators, parents and others, the state chose to look at multiple measures over a consecutive two-year period to weed out those schools for whom a single year of subpar performance in any of those indicators was an anomaly, said Matt Stem, deputy secretary for the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education. Foster said the new act is different than the former No Child Left Behind Act, in that the state dives deeper into assisting students with disabilities, and it now includes English-learner students as a subgroup. Parents and guardians of students in those schools will be receiving a letter from the district that explains the designation and why their respective school was designated, Foster explained. HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) A county prosecutor in Pennsylvania is opening a criminal investigation into construction on three natural gas liquids pipelines that have drawn blame for causing sinkholes and polluting drinking water and waterways. Tom Hogan, Chester County's district attorney, said Wednesday he's investigating because the governor and state utility regulators haven't ensured the construction was being done safely. We expected the state regulators and the governor to step in and assure the safety of Pennsylvanians. They have not," Hogan said. "So now the Chester County District Attorneys Office will demand that every aspect of these pipelines be conducted safely, or we will bring into play all of the tools of the criminal justice system. The investigation involves Sunoco Pipeline's Mariner East projects stretching across southern Pennsylvania. The parent company, Energy Transfer LP of Dallas, Texas, didn't immediately respond to messages, but Hogan says the company contacted him Wednesday to see if they can discuss it. He's investigating potential crimes including causing or risking a catastrophe, environmental violations and corrupt organizations. The pipelines have weathered millions of dollars in fines and two temporary shutdown orders from state agencies. In August, state officials levied a $148,000 fine against Sunoco Pipeline LP for harming private wells while building the Mariner East 2 pipeline in Lebanon, Berks and Chester counties. And in April, Sunoco agreed to pay a $355,622 penalty for allowing materials from drilling for the natural gas products pipeline to flow into streams and wetlands in Cumberland, Dauphin, Blair, Cambria, Huntingdon, Indiana, Lancaster, Washington, Allegheny and Westmoreland counties. Area holiday open houses on tap for this weekend A number of area holiday open houses will take place this weekend in the region, providing holiday cheer and family friendly festivities. Henrik Hecklen Wins PokerStars EPT Prague 10,300 High Roller for 503,700 December 19, 2018 Will Shillibier After almost three hours of heads-up play, Henrik Hecklen defeated Ole Schemion heads-up to win the PokerStars European Poker Tour Prague 10,300 High Roller for 503,700. Fresh from a 23rd place finish in the EPT Prague Main Event, famed online player Hecklen navigated his way to the top of the 259 player field to walk away with the biggest live cash of his career. The heads-up can only be described as an arm wrestle, with neither player managing to strike a decisive blow for quite some time. That was until shortly before midnight when Hecklen's queens held to send runner-up Ole Schemion to the rail for a 334,900 payday. Here are the final results: PokerStars European Poker Tour Prague 10,300 High Roller Final Table Payout Position Player Country Payout in Payout in $ 1 Henrik Hecklen Denmark 503,700 $569,181 2 Ole Schemion Germany 334,900 $378,437 3 Alexandre Reard France 244,950 $276,794 4 Danny Tang Hong Kong 197,720 $223,424 5 Daniel Dvoress Canada 155,010 $175,161 6 Tomas Paiva Portugal 117,340 $132,594 7 Jasper Meijer van Putten Netherlands 86,170 $97,372 8 Michael Addamo Australia 63,310 $71,540 * prize in $ via XE.com "You shouldn't look at two tournaments in correlation with each other," Hecklen told PokerNews after clinching victory, "But now that the Main Event didn't really work out it's nice to have this sort of consolation prize, and it's a good one obviously." "My background is in deepstacked cash games and heads-up, I think the structure was very favourable for me." The final day started with a packed field, featuring the defending champion from PSC Prague in 2017 Danny Tang, winner of the EPT Barcelona festival-ending 10,300 High Roller Max Silver and former EPT Prague champion and overnight chip leader Jasper Meijer van Putten. "You always have your chances, right? You don't plan for anything in tournament poker." There was no real clinching moment heads-up, and with both players deep they were able to take their time at the table. "It was quite tough because there weren't that many showdowns so it was kinda hard to figure out what [Schemion] was doing but overall I think he played really well. It was a tough one. "My background is in deepstacked cash games and heads-up, I think the structure was very favourable for me. It was certainly better than 20 big blind shoving poker. It suits me very well for sure. Hecklen Clinches Victory over Schemion PokerStars European Poker Tour Prague 10,300 High Roller Final Day Recap The day started with the eliminations of Serdar Dermican and Charlie Carrel who brought the field down to the final two tables. Jasper Meijer van Putten still lead, but Daniel Dvoress was making up ground, especially with the elimination of Hon Cheong Lee. Van Putten's stack would dwindle, but he would soon move back to the top of the chip counts with the elimination of Bahram Chobineh, but back came Dvoress who lead at the first break. Jasper Meijer van Putten Triple Crown winner Niall Farrell would bust in 11th, with Max Silver out in tenth to bring it to the final table. Just before that, Frenchman Alexandre Reard would double through Van Putten whose turbulent day continued, and it was Reard occupying second place behind Dvoress at the start of the final table. However he was soon overtaken by Henrik Hecklen who moved into the chip lead after rivering a straight against Reard, and once Reard doubled through Anton Yakuba, Dvoress finished off the Russian who bust in ninth. Tomas Paiva doubled through Ole Schemion, with Dvoress moving up to around four million in chips. Michael Addamo would then double through the Canadian before a flurry of exits. The Australian went first, shoving ace-king into the eights of Hecklen who then flopped a set. Then Van Putten, who had been involved in very few pots at the final table, shoved ace-three into the king-ten of Hecklen, who then turned a straight to bust the start-of-day chip leader. Then, to finish off 15 minutes of madness, Paiva's nines were finished off by the queens of Hecklen who had in the course of those three eliminations chipped up to over five million in chips. Daniel Dvoress A quick finish looked in the offing, but former PSC High Roller champion Danny Tang doubled twice; through both Reard and Dvoress, to stick around, before Hecklen added his fourth elimination in a row as Dvoress hit the rail in fifth. It was then Reard's turn to double three times as he recovered from a five big blind stack to over 40 big blinds, with Tang heading in the other direction. He was next to bust in fourth before a stunning hand eliminated Reard in third. Reard had flopped a set and check-called all three streets, only for opponent Schemion to have rivered a straight and bust the Frenchman in third. Ole Schemion Heads-up play started with Schemion at a chip disadvantage against his Danish opponent, who was on a roll after so many consecutive eliminations. However that soon disappeared, and indeed it was Schemion who looked likely to pull away. The German recorded two doubles during heads-up, but never quite managed to extend the chip lead to such a point as it looked like he might clinch it. As it happened, the pendulum swung the other way and Hecklen soon got things back to how he started heads-up play. After one hand where Schemion spiked a three-outer on the river to stay alive and deny Hecklen, the Dane wasn't going to let the next opportunity slip out of his hands. So when he picked up queens, they got in. They held. And Hecklen became the latest EPT High Roller champion. 10,300 High Roller Champion Henrik Hecklen The Stars Group is a majority shareholder in iBus Media. After almost three hours of heads-up play, Henrik Hecklen defeated Ole Schemion heads-up to win the PokerStars European Poker Tour Prague 10,300 High Roller for 503,700. Fresh from a 23rd place finish in the EPT Prague Main Event, Hecklen navigated his way to the top of the 259 player field to walk away with the biggest live cash of his career. The heads-up can only be described as an arm wrestle, with neither player managing to strike a decisive blow. That was until shortly before midnight when Hecklen's queens held to send runner-up Ole Schemion to the rail for a 334,900 payday. Here are the final results: Position Name Country Payout in EUR Payout in USD 1 Henrik Hecklen Denmark 503,700 $569,181 2 Ole Schemion Germany 334,900 $378,437 3 Alexandre Reard France 244,950 $276,794 4 Danny Tang Hong Kong 197,720 $223,424 5 Daniel Dvoress Canada 155,010 $175,161 6 Tomas Paiva Portugal 117,340 $132,594 7 Jasper Meijer van Putten Netherlands 86,170 $97,372 8 Michael Addamo Australia 63,310 $71,540 "You shouldn't look at two tournaments in correlation with each other," Hecklen told PokerNews after clinching victory, "But now that the Main Event didn't really work out it's nice to have this sort of consolation prize, and it's a good one obviously." The final day started with a packed field, featuring the defending champion from PSC Prague in 2017 Danny Tang, winner of the EPT Barcelona festival-ending 10,300 High Roller Max Silver and former EPT Prague champion and overnight chip leader Jasper Meijer van Putten. "You always have your chances, right? You don't plan for anything in tournament poker." There was no real clinching moment heads-up, and with both players deep they were able to take their time at the table. "It was quite tough because there weren't that many showdowns so it was kinda hard to figure out what [Schemion] was doing but overall I think he played really well. It was a tough one. "My background is in deepstacked cash games and heads-up, I think the structure was very favourable for me. It was certainly better than 20 big blind shoving poker. It suits me very well for sure. Hecklen Clinches Victory over Schemion Final Day Recap The day started with the eliminations of Serdar Dermican and Charlie Carrel who brought the field down to the final two tables. Jasper Meijer van Putten still lead, but Daniel Dvoress was making up ground, especially with the elimination of Hon Cheong Lee. Van Putten's stack would dwindle, but he would soon move back to the top of the chip counts with the elimination of Bahram Chobineh, but back came Dvoress who lead at the first break. Jasper Meijer van Putten Triple Crown winner Niall Farrell would bust in 11th, with Max Silver out in tenth to bring it to the final table. Just before that, Frenchman Alexandre Reard would double through Van Putten whose turbulent day continued, and it was Reard occupying second place behind Dvoress at the start of the final table. However he was soon overtaken by Henrik Hecklen who moved into the chip lead after rivering a straight against Reard, and once Reard doubled through Anton Yakuba, Dvoress finished off the Russian who bust in ninth. Tomas Paiva doubled through Ole Schemion, with Dvoress moving up to around four million in chips. Michael Addamo would then double through the Canadian before a flurry of exits. The Australian went first, shoving ace-king into the eights of Hecklen who then flopped a set. Then Van Putten, who had been involved in very few pots at the final table, shoved ace-three into the king-ten of Hecklen, who then turned a straight to bust the start-of-day chip leader. Then, to finish off 15 minutes of madness, Paiva's nines were finished off by the queens of Hecklen who had in the course of those three eliminations chipped up to over five million in chips. Daniel Dvoress A quick finish looked in the offing, but former PSC High Roller champion Danny Tang doubled twice; through both Reard and Dvoress, to stick around, before Hecklen added his fourth elimination in a row as Dvoress hit the rail in fifth. It was then Reard's turn to double three times as he recovered from a five big blind stack to over 40 big blinds, with Tang heading in the other direction. He was next to bust in fourth before a stunning hand eliminated Reard in third. Reard had flopped a set and check-called all three streets, only for opponent Schemion to have rivered a straight and bust the Frenchman in third. Ole Schemion Heads-up play started with Schemion at a chip disadvantage against his Danish opponent, who was on a roll after so many consecutive eliminations. However that soon disappeared, and indeed it was Schemion who looked likely to pull away. The German recorded two doubles during heads-up, but never quite managed to extend the chip lead to such a point as it looked like he might clinch it. As it happened, the pendulum swung the other way and Hecklen soon got things back to how he started heads-up play. After one hand where Schemion spiked a three-outer on the river to stay alive and deny Hecklen, the Dane wasn't going to let the next opportunity slip out of his hands. So when he picked up queens, they got in. They held. And Hecklen became the latest EPT High Roller champion. 2.2k SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard The witch hunt defense is dead, and Rachel Maddow showed exactly how Mike Flynns sentencing judge killed it for Donald Trump. Maddow said: It your contention that any misconduct by any member of the FBI raises any degree of doubt that Mr. Flynn intentionally lied to the FBI? Kelner, the defense tern, no, your honor. The references that I mention that appear in your sentencing memorandum raise some concerns on the part of the court. And my question is how is raising those contentions about the circumstances under which Mr. Flynn lied consistent with his acceptance of responsibility? Later on, in the proceedings, this is where Flynns lawyer essentially decide to take responsibility for that himself and basically apologize to the court for having raised it. The judge says, quote, let excuse me. The defense lawyer says the judge, let me make very clear, your honor, that the decisions how to frame general Flynns sentencing memorandum made by counsel, made by me, made by Mr. Anthony, the other defense counsel, those decisions are entirely ours and really should not and do not diminish in any way general Flynns acceptance of responsibility in this case. And the judge then sort of interrupts and says the point is well taken, but you understand why I had to make the inquiry? The defense attorney says I do. The judge, because Im thinking this sounds like a backpedaling on the acceptance of responsibility. So that did not work. Mike Flynn and his attorneys today disavow and essentially apologize, for ever suggesting to the judge that Flynn wasnt really guilty, that the FBI was somehow the real culprit here. I mean, that alone cancels like half the shows on Fox News tonight. All right. What are you going to talk about? But theres also the part where everybody starts talking about Mike Flynn and treason, and they cant stop saying the word Treason over and over again. Video: The witch hunt defense is dead, and Rachel Maddow showed exactly how Mike Flynns sentencing judge killed it for Donald Trump. https://t.co/SaeLJjIiPA pic.twitter.com/gQv7vFE8xt Sarah Reese Jones (@PoliticusSarah) December 19, 2018 The witch hunt defense has become a hot topic in conservative media because it allows them to argue that the entire Russia investigation is a conspiracy to get Trump and his friends. Flynns sentencing judge killed that defense in its tracks with a series of questions that revealed that there is no witch hunt. Mike Flynn was entrapped, and his crimes were real. If or when Trump is ever charged with a crime, the witch hunt defense is off the table, because Mike Flynns sentencing judge killed it where it stood. For more discussion about this story join our Rachel Maddow and MSNBC group. Follow Jason Easley on Facebook. 421 SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard By Lisa Lambert WASHINGTON (Reuters) The Trump administration on Tuesday banned the high-power gun attachments of the type used in last years Las Vegas shooting massacre of 58 people, giving the owners of bump stocks 90 days to turn in or destroy the devices and blocking owners from being able to register them. President Donald Trumps Republican Party typically supports gun ownership, and its members have fiercely fought off perceived threats to the U.S. Constitutions Second Amendment guaranteeing Americans the right to bear arms. His administration, though, is sidestepping any potential debate in Congress in issuing a final rule on Tuesday that adds bump stocks to a definition of machine guns written 80 years ago, during the heyday of gangsters use of tommy guns. The attachments use a guns recoil to bump its trigger, enabling a semiautomatic weapon to fire hundreds of rounds per minute, which can transform the firearm into a machine gun. The Justice Departments regulation follows the lead of many states and retailers that imposed stricter limits on sales of guns and accessories after a deadly shooting in February at a Florida high school. Gun Owners of America said on Tuesday that it was going to court to fight the new rule and would seek an injunction. The group said the department was attempting to rewrite laws, the regulation would lead to bans on other weapons, and bump stocks do not qualify as machine guns. On an earlier call with reporters, senior Justice Department officials said they were ready for any possible lawsuit and confident in the review of case law they conducted while writing and revising the regulation. The department received nearly 190,000 comments on its proposal for the regulation. The websites for the most well-known bump stock manufacturers, Bumpfire System and Slide Fire, displayed notifications on Tuesday that they had already ceased direct sales of the devices. RW Arms, which both manufacturers described as a leading retailer, was not immediately available to comment on the ban. While bump stocks are not widespread, they are still plentiful in the market, with high sales over the internet and in big-box stores, the officials said on the call. Walmart Inc stopped selling assault firearms and accessories in 2015. After the Feb. 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, the retailer raised the minimum age for buying guns at its stores. Other retailers, including Kroger Co, have also raised the minimum buying age. (Reporting by Lisa Lambert; editing by Jonathan Oatis and Grant McCool) 808 SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard Trump demanded a slatted structure that can be seen through, a.k.a. a fence after Democrats told him no wall. Trump tweeted: .It will be beautiful and, at the same time, give our Country the security that our citizens deserve. It will go up fast and save us BILLIONS of dollars a month once completed! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 19, 2018 In other words, Trump wants $5 billion for a fence. A structure made of steel with slats that you can see through is a fence. Build the artistically designed steel slats isnt going to go over well as a chant at the rallies. Trump isnt fooling anyone. The president is going to try to pass off the money to fix border fencing as funds for his wall when he caves and signs the deal to keep the government open. Last week, Trump was ready to shut down the government and own it. This morning, the Trump administration said that they dont need the whole $5 billion that Trump demanded, and by tonight, Trump is no longer building a wall. He is building a fence, even if he wont call it that. The wall is dead. Mexico isnt going to pay for it, and neither are the American taxpayers. Trump is trying to the definition of a wall to mean a fence so that he can claim victory and pretend like he kept his wall promise. Everyone knows that a fence is not the same thing as a wall, and the bottom line is that Donald Trump is going to get neither. For more discussion about this story join our Rachel Maddow and MSNBC group. Follow Jason Easley on Facebook. 1.4k SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard It just became official: the Republican Party is now the party of Donald Trump, which will probably result in disaster for them in the 2020 elections. POLITICO is reporting that the GOP has basically re-branded itself as the Trump Party: President Donald Trump is planning to roll out an unprecedented structure for his 2020 reelection, a streamlined organization that incorporates the Republican National Committee and the presidents campaign into a single entity. Its a stark expression of Trumps stranglehold over the Republican Party: Traditionally, a presidential reelection committee has worked in tandem with the national party committee, not subsumed it. Under the plan, which has been in the works for several weeks, the Trump reelection campaign and the RNC will merge their field and fundraising programs into a joint outfit dubbed Trump Victory. The two teams will also share office space rather than operate out of separate buildings, as has been custom. Republican National Committee (RNC) chairwoman Ronna McDaniel has already started bragging that this new structure will be the most efficient and unified campaign operation in American history. But the biggest problem with this approach is that a national party is supposed to support the campaigns of thousands of state and local candidates. A national party is not supposed to focus only on re electing the president. To do so could harm local organizing and fundraising efforts. Presidential campaigns get the most attention every election cycle, but this new RNC move will make the GOP focus on the presidency even greater than normal, to the detriment of all other party candidates. And it seems like a really stupid move, given Trumps legal problems and lack of popularity. Opinion polls show that the only people who like Donald Trump, and approve of his presidency, are Republicans. Nearly all Democrats and the vast majority of independents cant stand the guy. And Republicans are becoming a smaller part of the voting population each year. So the RNC move does not seem to make sense, politically. The only thing it does is build Trumps ego by giving him a big win. He has now completed his hostile takeover of the GOP, and is in complete control of it. And not only is Trump historically unpopular, a recent poll also shows that nearly two-thirds of American voters think he is a liar, and is not telling the truth about his contacts with and relationships with Russia and other foreign countries where he has business dealings. This proves that the historic Republican defeat in the 2018 midterms did not teach the RNC or the Trump re-election team anything at all. They dont seem to realize that Republicans lost the 2018 congressional races by a total of ten million votes, the widest margin ever, because disgust for Trump drove record midterm voter turnout in favor of Democrats. This proves that the overwhelming majority of American voters view being associated with Donald Trump as a huge negative for Republican politicians, except in places like North Dakota and Wyoming, with three electoral votes each. A more rational approach for Republicans would be to give their candidates throughout the country the option of distancing themselves from Trump. But that is not likely to happen now. Whats happening now is that if Republican candidates dont kneel before Trump and kiss his ring and pledge undying loyalty, they will be banned from the GOP kingdom. They will be scorned by Trump loyalists, attacked on social media, and challenged in party primaries. But lets not forget the 17 ongoing investigations into Trump, his family, and his associates. The Washington Post reported that Trumps corruption is widespread and has infected nearly every project and entity hes ever been involved with. While Republicans view Trump as a shining star, everyone else sees him as a sinking ship. And as the party ties itself more strongly to that sinking ship, the entire party is likely to go down in the 2020 elections. By Lisa Lambert and Paresh Dave WASHINGTON (Reuters) The attorney general for Washington, D.C. said on Wednesday the U.S. capital city had sued Facebook Inc for allegedly misleading users about how it safeguarded their personal data, in the latest fallout from the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The worlds largest social media company has drawn global scrutiny since disclosing earlier this year that a third-party personality quiz distributed on Facebook gathered profile information on 87 million users worldwide and sold the data to British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. Washington, D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine said Facebook misled users because it had known about the incident for two years before disclosing it. The company had told users it vetted third-party apps, yet made few checks, Racine said. Facebook said in a statement: Were reviewing the complaint and look forward to continuing our discussions with attorneys general in DC and elsewhere. Facebook could be levied a civil penalty of $5,000 per violation of the regions consumer protection law, or potentially close to $1.7 billion, if penalized for each consumer affected. The lawsuit alleges the quiz software had data on 340,000 D.C. residents, though just 852 users had directly engaged with it. Shares in the company were down 4.7 percent in afternoon trade on Wednesday. Privacy settings on Facebook to control what friends on the network could see and what data could be accessed by apps were also deceiving, Racine said. Facebooks lax oversight and confusing privacy settings put the information of millions of consumers at risk, he told reporters on Wednesday. In our lawsuit, were seeking to hold Facebook accountable for jeopardizing and exposing the information of its customers. Racine said Facebook had tried to settle the case before he filed the lawsuit, as is typical during investigations of large companies. He described Facebooks cooperation as reasonable, but said that a lawsuit was necessary to expedite change at the company. At least six U.S. states have ongoing investigations into Facebooks privacy practices, according to state officials. In March, a bipartisan coalition of 37 state attorneys wrote to the company, demanding to know more about the Cambridge Analytica data and its possible links to U.S. President Donald Trumps election campaign. Also in March, the Federal Trade Commission took the unusual step of announcing that it had opened an investigation into whether the company had violated a 2011 consent decree, citing media reports that raise what it called substantial concerns about the privacy practices of Facebook. If the FTC finds Facebook violated the decree terms, it has the power to fine it thousands of dollars a day per violation, which could add up to billions of dollars. State attorneys general from both major U.S. political parties have stepped up their enforcement of privacy laws in recent years, said James Tierney, a lecturer at Harvard Law School and Maines former attorney general. Uber Technologies Inc [UBER.UL] in September agreed to pay $148 million as part of a settlement with 50 U.S. states and Washington, D.C., which investigated a data breach that exposed personal data from 57 million Uber accounts. (Reporting by Lisa Lambert in Washington, D.C. and Paresh Dave in San Francisco; Additional reporting by David Shepardson and Jan Wolfe in Washington, D.C.; Editing by Phil Berlowitz and Rosalba OBrien) 1.9k SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard Presidential historian Jon Meacham said Tuesday that actions taken by Donald Trump may represent the definition of treason. This would be the case if Trump was aware of Russias efforts to interfere and help him win the 2016 election. Meacham, who is an expert on the history of U.S. presidents said: If, in fact, and its subjective, Trump knew about the Russian efforts on his behalf, then there is a live question about whether he has been giving aid and comfort to the enemy, which is the definition of treason in the Constitution. So, this isnt just a who-wins-the-week, who-loses-the-week conversation. This is an existential constitutional crisis, because its quite possible that the president of the United States right now is a witting or at least partially witting agent of a foreign power, and I say that with great care, but thats a possibility. And I think that we have to somewhat tap the brakes on our ordinary assessment of things and realize that this is possibly the biggest kind of question we could confront as a democracy. Meacham has studied in great depth the Watergate investigation of President Richard Nixon. He noted that Nixons downfall came about after many investigations and in the middle of an economic downturn. What begins to happen in 1974, is you have the investigations, but you also have the economy souring, Meacham said. And thats something to watch. One barometer about whats going to happen to President Trump is what the markets are doing. The historical parallels are obvious. Trump is still in denial about all of this, much as Nixon was. The president has continually attacked the Mueller investigation as a witch hunt. On Sunday he said that former Attorney General Jeff Sessions should be ashamed of himself for allowing it to proceed. He has said that the Michael Flynn charges are not warranted. He tweeted: It looks here as though General Flynns defenses are incidental to something larger which is for the prosecution to figure out if it can find a path to Donald Trump without quite knowing what that crime might be. It stops looking like prosecution and more looking like .a persecution of the President. Daniel Henninger, The Wall Street Journal. Thank you, people are starting to see and understand what this Witch Hunt is all about. Jeff Sessions should be ashamed of himself for allowing this total HOAX to get started in the first place! It looks here as though General Flynns defenses are incidental to something larger which is for the prosecution to figure out if it can find a path to Donald Trump without quite knowing what that crime might be. It stops looking like prosecution and more looking like Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 16, 2018 .a persecution of the President. Daniel Henninger, The Wall Street Journal. Thank you, people are starting to see and understand what this Witch Hunt is all about. Jeff Sessions should be ashamed of himself for allowing this total HOAX to get started in the first place! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 16, 2018 But Trump posted those tweets before Flynns sentencing judge yesterday suggested that Flynn not only committed very serious crimes and had sold out the country, but also may be guilty of treason. Its interesting that on the same day a judge used the word treason to describe Flynns crimes, an eminent historian used the same word to describe Donald Trumps behavior. As more evidence comes out, and as Mueller issues additional indictments, it is very possible that we will see the word treason used more often to describe all of the many crimes the president and his associates have committed against the United States of America. 306 SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard A new report from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) says that during 2018 a minimum of 53 journalists were killed throughout the world. This is evidence that more autocratic leaders in more countries are threatening democracy and freedom of the press. According to the report: The number of journalists targeted for murder in reprisal for their reporting nearly doubled in 2018 from a year earlier, driving up the overall count of journalists killed on the job. Afghanistan, where extremists have stepped up deliberate attacks on journalists, was the deadliest country and accounted for much of the increase. Thirteen journalists were killed in Afghanistan this year, the most since CPJ began tracking statistics on journalists deaths, according to the report. CPJ found that the majority of journalists were killed as retaliation for their truthful reporting on topics that leaders of their country wanted kept secret. They said that from January 1 to Dec. 14, 2018, 34 journalists were killed in retaliation for their published writings and investigative work. This is nearly double the number of journalists killed as retaliation during 2017. Nearly two-thirds of the journalists murdered for their work were covering politics. The Committee, based in New York City, used the death of Jamal Khashoggi, a U.S. resident at the time of his death, to bring attention to what it termed a significant lack of international leadership for journalists rights and safety. Khashoggi was a prominent critic of the Saudi Kingdom and was sent into exile after the Saudi government prohibited him from working in his home country. He was banned in Saudi Arabia for criticizing Donald Trump. He came to the United States and was working as a columnist for The Washington Post when he was murdered by assassins sent by the Saudi Arabian government in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey on October 2 of this year. Khashoggis death has led to widespread backlash from many sources, including U.S. members of Congress. The U.S. Senate passed a resolution last week holding Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman responsible for the murder. But President Trump has voiced skepticism over who is responsible and has said that the U.S. should maintain its relationship with the Saudis, who have denied they were involved in the incident. Essentially, Trump signaled that countries that do enough business with the United States are free to murder journalists without consequence, CPJ wrote in its report. Journalists have also died in the war-torn countries of Syrian and Yemen. But the CPJ report says that the number of journalists who were killed in conflict zones fell to the lowest number they have seen in the past seven years. Four journalists and a newspaper staff member were also killed in an attack earlier this year at the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, MD, which resulted in many people complaining that President Trump should stop calling the free media the enemy of the people. Trumps language is the same as is used in dictatorships, and his efforts to undermine the free press have been widely criticized. 43k SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard For those of us who wish the worst upon Donald Trump and his crime family, some good news occurred yesterday. Due to actions of the State of New York the possibility of Trump dying penniless just became very real. As the Washington Post reported: President Trump has agreed to shut down his embattled personal charity and to give away its remaining money amid allegations that he used the foundation for his personal and political benefit, New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood announced Tuesday. Underwood said that the Donald J. Trump Foundation is dissolving as her office pursues its lawsuit against the charity, Trump and his three eldest children. The suit, filed in June, alleged persistently illegal conduct at the foundation, which Trump began in 1987. Underwood is continuing to seek more than $2.8 million in restitution. As part of its agreement with the attorney generals office, the foundation will be required to sell its remaining assets and donate the proceeds, said Amy Spitalnick, a spokeswoman for Underwood. Whats important to note is that New York state is ordering the Trump Foundation to sell off its remaining assets, and give the money away. It is also seeking millions in restitution from Trump and his children. This sets a hugely significant precedent: the assets of a Trump entity are being sold due to one of his criminal scandals. This means prosecutors can in effect take Trumps assets, even though he is still president. As we reported back in 2017, governments are able to take away money and other assets without needing to even prove that a crime occurred: Law enforcement agencies use civil asset forfeiture laws to seize cash and property from individuals based on a suspicion that the property was involved in a crime. This means that either the federal or state governments can legally seize the assets of the Trump Organization. They can also seize the assets of any of his other legal entities that own valuable properties like Trump Tower. And if you were to think that Bob Mueller wouldnt really do this, you would be wrong. For, as we reported back in September, Paul Manaforts plea deal with the special prosecutor included Manafort forfeiting most of his ill-gotten net worth: Concerning forfeiture of Manaforts assets, reports say that as part of his guilty plea agreement the former Trump campaign chairman will forfeit four homes: three in New York and one in Virginia. He will also forfeit to the government a life insurance policy and four accounts at different financial institutions. According to New York Magazine, the total value of assets he is forfeiting is $46 million. The standards for asset forfeitures are not that great. The State of New York OR Mueller and other federal prosecutors OR congressional committees only have to show that Trumps assets were obtained illegally. Once they do that, they can take away what is most precious to Donald Trump: his money and properties. Donald Trump used the Trump Foundation as a personal piggy bank. And now government authorities have come in with a sledge hammer and smashed that piggy bank, taking Trumps Foundation money in the process. This shows that all of Trumps money and property are at risk of being seized and taken away from him by the government, given the extensive nature of his alleged crimes. Our dreams of Donald Trump dying penniless have just become very real, thanks to the acting attorney general of the State of New York. In A Never-Ending Sky We May Never Reach Them Thats Why We Have To Try New Horizons for Brian May With Brand New Solo Track Global Digital Release 12.02am EST January 1, 2019 Queens Brian May is to release his first new entirely solo work in over two decades with the global digital release January 1 of a brand new track, New Horizons, written by Brian and Don Black, recorded and completed only this month. The single will have its worldwide premiere from NASA control headquarters Maryland USA on New Years Day, Tuesday January 1. It is the legendary guitarist/songwriters first official solo single since Why Dont We Try Again taken from his Another World album in 1998. New Horizons is Brians personal tribute to the on-going NASA New Horizons mission, which on New Years Day 2019 will achieve the most distant spacecraft flyby in history, in an encounter with a remote Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) named Ultima Thule, far out beyond Pluto on the edges of the solar system. May, who has a doctorate in astrophysics, and is a New Horizons science collaborator, will be present at the New Horizons Maryland, Washington County, base of operations on New Years Day to witness the historic final approach as it happens. Brian was also present for new Horizons triumphal Pluto flyby in 2015, and delivered the worlds first stereoscopic image of Pluto, from the ground-breaking data that the NH probe delivered. Brians New Horizons track (Ultima Thule mix) celebrates the whole 12-year Journey of New Horizons probe, and includes a message from Stephen Hawking congratulating the team on their successful rendezvous with Pluto three years ago. In a broader sense, the song is an anthem to Mankinds spirit of exploration, reaching ever further out into the Universe. New Horizons will have its global premiere, broadcast live on January 1 at 12.02am EST (5.02am GMT) from the New Horizons control Center in Maryland, USA, at the moment when the historic Ultima Thule encounter is confirmed. Link Says Brian: This project has energised me in a new way. For me its been an exciting challenge to bring two sides of my life together - Astronomy and Music. It was Alan Stern, the Project Instigator of this amazing NASA Mission, who threw down the glove last May. He asked if I could come up with a theme for Ultima Thule which could be played as the NH probe reached this new destination. I was inspired by the idea that this is the furthest that the Hand of Man has ever reached it will be by far the most distant object we have ever seen at close quarters, through the images which the space craft will beam back to Earth. To me it epitomises the human spirits unceasing desire to understand the Universe we inhabit. Everyone who has devoted so much energy to this mission since its launch in January 2006 will be feeling they are actually INSIDE that small but intrepid vehicle - only about the size of a grand piano - as it pulls off another spectacular close encounter. And through the vehicles eyes we will begin to learn, for the very first time, what a Kuiper Belt Object is made of. And pick up precious clues about how our solar system was born. Brian has been teasing fragments of the track with specially adapted New Horizons video clips on his Instagram and Twitter feeds, as well on Brian's well-known Bris Soapbox' at www.Brianmay.com. The first two trailers have attracted over 200,000 likes in all, and a third episode is to be posted in the next few days. New Horizons Written & composed by: Brian May and Don Black Featuring Stephen Hawking, with kind permission of the Estate of Stephen Hawking Drums: John Miceli Produced by Brian May Co-produced and engineered by Justin Shirley-Smith and Kris Fredriksson Recorded and mixed at Allerton Hill Studios, England Additional engineering by John Miceli P. 2019 Duck Productions Ltd Further information: Phil Symes Tel: 0792 6697 902 philsymes@theprcontact.com Nicole Ettinger Tel: 07515 394 107 nicole@ettingerpr.com 4.5k SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard A new GAO report has found that the Trump administration violated federal law by buying $18 million in foreign aircraft parts instead of buying American. According to the office of Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT),The report found multiple occasions where the U.S. Departments of Defense (DoD), Health and Human Services (HHS), Homeland Security (DHS), and Veterans Affairs (VA), incorrectly recorded or misrepresented information related to the Buy American Act. For example, DHS incorrectly stated that an $18 million contract was spent on aircraft accessories manufactured in the United States, even though the parts were made by a foreign company. Sen. Murphy said in a statement provided to PoliticusUSA, I am tired of our government sending taxpayer dollars overseas for goods they can buy here at home. I requested this report because Ive seen how blatantly the federal government violates Buy American laws. Unfortunately, it hasnt stopped. The GAO just found out that the Trump administration spent $18 million on foreign aircraft parts that we should have bought from U.S. manufacturers. Connecticut manufacturers are the best at what they do and deserve to have an opportunity to compete for these contracts. These laws are in place for a reason. If President Trump is serious when he says America first, his administration must get serious about complying with laws that help our manufacturers make products to defend our country. Trump waves the flag while harming American workers Each time the Trump administration breaks the law by illegally purchasing from a foreign government, they are harming American companies and workers. Every illegal purchase means fewer jobs and lower wages. For Trump, putting America first is an empty slogan. Trump is putting America last, and as his trade war closes American factories and manufacturing, his administration is hurting workers by illegally buying products overseas. The paper recovery cant gloss over the real damage that Donald Trump has done to American workers since taking office. When Trump says America first, what he really means is workers last. For more discussion about this story join our Rachel Maddow and MSNBC group. Follow Jason Easley on Facebook. 3.3k SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard Trump admitted defeat as top Senate Republicans, and the White House said he would sign the funding deal with no wall money to keep the government open. The Washington Post reported: Trump has signaled his support for the plan but can change his mind if he wants to, said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), the No. 2 Senate Republican. A senior White House aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the administrations position, said the plan is for Trump to sign the legislation McConnell is introducing. That would represent a major defeat for Trump on his signature issue, the U.S.-Mexico border wall he long insisted Mexico would pay for but has demanded $5 billion in taxpayer money to fund. And its an abandonment of his stance from a week ago, when he claimed he would be proud to shut down the government to get his wall money. Trump got even less than he could have gotten if he would have taken the Senate Democrats offer of $1.6 billion for border security with no wall money. The president is going to sign a short-term spending bill that will run out as Democrats are taking over the House. By talking tough on a government shutdown, Trump got himself a worse deal than if he would have taken one of the two options that Democrats put on the table, None of the Democratic options included funding for the wall. Republicans had no stomach for shutting down the government for the wall. Republicans in Congress dont want the wall. The wall is not going to happen. Trump tried to take on Pelosi and Schumer, and he got crushed. For more discussion about this story join our Rachel Maddow and MSNBC group. Follow Jason Easley on Facebook. By Idrees Ali and Phil Stewart WASHINGTON (Reuters) The United States said on Wednesday it has begun withdrawing U.S. forces from Syria as U.S. officials said the United States was considering pulling out all its troops as it winds up its campaign to retake territory once held by Islamic State. We have started returning United States troops home as we transition to the next phase of this campaign, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said in a statement issued after President Donald Trump tweeted that We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there. It was not immediately clear from Sanders statement whether all of the roughly 2,000 U.S. troops in the country would leave and if so, by when. Sanders suggested that the United States would remain engaged to some degree. The United States and our allies stand ready to re-engage at all levels to defend American interests whenever necessary, and we will continue to work together to deny radical Islamist terrorists territory, funding, support, she said. A decision to pull out completely, if confirmed, would upend assumptions about a longer-term U.S. military presence in Syria, which senior U.S. officials have advocated to help ensure Islamic State cannot reemerge. It could also undercut U.S. leverage in the region and undermine diplomatic efforts to end a civil war in Syria that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced around half of the countrys pre-war 22 million population. The U.S. State Department is evacuating all of its personnel from Syria within 24 hours, a U.S. official told Reuters. Reports of a full U.S. military withdrawal drew immediate criticism, including from some of Trumps fellow Republicans. Trump has previously expressed a strong desire to bring troops home from Syria when possible, and his tweet on Wednesday showed he saw no further grounds for remaining. U.S. officials, who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity, did not disclose details about the deliberations on the troop withdrawal, and the timing was not immediately clear. But one official told Reuters that partners and allies had been consulted. Two U.S. officials said a decision to withdraw had already been reached but that could not be immediately confirmed. The Pentagon declined to comment, saying only that it continued to work with partners in the region. Republican U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham, often a Trump ally, said a withdrawal would have devastating consequences for the United States in the region and throughout the world. An American withdrawal at this time would be a big win for ISIS, Iran, (President) Bashar al Assad of Syria, and Russia, Graham said in a statement, using the acronym ISIS for Islamic State. Many of the remaining U.S. troops in Syria are special operations forces working closely with an alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF. The partnership with the SDF over the past several years has led to the defeat of Islamic State in Syria, but has also outraged NATO ally Turkey, which views Kurdish YPG forces in the alliance as an extension of a militant group fighting inside Turkey. The deliberations on U.S. troops come as Ankara threatens a new offensive in Syria. To date, U.S. forces in Syria have been seen as a stabilizing factor in the country and have somewhat restrained Turkeys actions against the SDF. A complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria would still leave a sizeable U.S. military presence in the region, including about 5,200 troops across the border in Iraq. Much of the U.S. campaign in Syria has been waged by warplanes flying out of Qatar and other locations in the Middle East. Still, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and U.S. State Department officials have long fretted about leaving Syria before a peace agreement can be reached to end the brutal civil war. Islamic State is also widely expected to revert to guerilla tactics once it no longer holds territory. A U.S. withdrawal could open Trump up to criticism if Islamic State reemerged. Trump has previously lambasted his predecessor, Barack Obama, for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq that preceded an unraveling of the Iraqi armed forces. Iraqi forces collapsed in the face of Islamic States advance into the country in 2014. A pullout would allow other countries, like Iran, to increase their influence in Syria, experts said. If we withdraw then who fills the vacuum, who is able to stabilize and that is the million dollar question, said Andrew Tabler, a Syria specialist at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy think-tank. The timing is hard to understand, Tabler said. LAST 1 PERCENT Islamic State declared its so-called caliphate in 2014 after seizing large swathes of Syria and Iraq. The hardline Islamist group established its de facto capital in the Syrian city of Raqqa, using it as a base to plot attacks in Europe. According to U.S. estimates, the group oversaw about 100,000 square kilometers (39,000 square miles) of territory, with about 8 million people under Islamic State control. It had estimated revenues of nearly one billion dollars a year. Brett McGurk, the U.S. special envoy for the global coalition to defeat Islamic State, said last week that the group was down to its last 1 percent of the territory it once held in its self-styled caliphate. The group has no remaining territory in Iraq. Hajin, the groups last major stronghold in Syria, is close to being seized by U.S.-backed SDF forces. After losing Hajin, Islamic State will control a diminishing strip of territory along the eastern bank of the Euphrates River in the area where U.S.-backed operations are focused. The militants also control some desert terrain west of the river in territory otherwise controlled by the Damascus government and its allies. But U.S. officials have warned that taking back the groups territory would not be the same as defeating it. Even as the end of the physical caliphate is clearly now coming into sight, the end of ISIS will be a much more long-term initiative, McGurk told a State Department briefing on Dec. 11. U.S. Marine General Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, cautioned earlier in December that the United States had trained only about 20 percent of Syrian forces required to stabilize areas captured from Islamic State. (Reporting by Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali; Editing by Frances Kerry) Get the SC business stories that matter. Our newsletter catches you up with all the business stories that are shaping Charleston and South Carolina every Monday and Thursday at noon. Get ahead with us - it's free. You are the owner of this article. Kalyn Oyer is a Charleston native who covers arts & entertainment and food & bev for The Post and Courier. She's a music festival & concert photographer and used to write about music for the Charleston City Paper, among other publications. One of SC's largest agencies looked 17 months for a leader. And then chose an insider. Jamie Lovegrove is a political reporter covering the South Carolina Statehouse, congressional delegation and campaigns. He previously covered Texas politics in Washington for The Dallas Morning News and in Austin for the Texas Tribune. Assistant Columbia bureau chief Adcox returned to The Post and Courier in October 2017 after 12 years covering the Statehouse for The Associated Press. She previously covered education for The P&C. She has also worked for The AP in Albany, N.Y., and for The Herald in Rock Hill. Political Reporter Caitlin Byrd is a political reporter at The Post and Courier and author of the Palmetto Politics newsletter. Before moving to Charleston in 2016, her byline appeared in the Asheville Citizen-Times. To date, Byrd has won 17 awards for her work. Gov. Henry McMaster and President Donald Trump at a rally in South Carolina during the 2016 presidential campaign. S.C. Republicans are considering not holding a presidential primary in 2020 given Trump's enduring popularity among the GOP base. File/John Bazemore/AP U.S. Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., on Aug. 12, 2018 said President Donald Trump has taken steps that have helped "move us in a better direction" as a nation when it comes to race relations. Screenshot. CBS. Sometimes your Christmas preparations or plans get knocked for a loop. Maybe someone in your family gets sick. Could be work commitments, school concerns, car breakdowns or a home issue that needs to be taken care of. Whatever the particular reason is, you fall behind. Cards arent done, the gifts arent bought and the cookies arent baked. It happens. A phone call last week from my sister in Duluth said Mom was headed from her assisted living facility to the emergency room. Deep down, you know some of that Christmas-busy stuff is sort of fluff. Icing on the Christmas cookies, so to speak, but you still hope to get it all done. I recently had talked to Mom and she didnt sound good. My radar was up. My wife and I had just received our photo Christmas cards and we were ready to tackle that chore. I still enjoy sending cards out. I also hadnt done any holiday shopping yet. This year we havent watched "Its a Wonderful Life" or "Die Hard," for that matter. Then my sister called and said Mom was going to be admitted to the hospital. I knew I needed to drive up to Duluth to see Mom. I looked at my week and started making a few cancellations. The next morning it was hard to leave my wife home, but she needed to stay. There were things to do and cats to care for. After 43 years of marriage, we function well together. We complement each others forgetfulness. My memory is not quite what it used to be, so she is key to me functioning at an acceptable level in society. We have enjoyed settling into a routine and comfortable life. As I headed north on Highway 52 on Thursday, it was a beautiful morning. The drive started out well, as a compact disc that had been stuck in my trucks CD player came out when I fished around in the slot for the umpteenth time with my pocketknife. I had to keep focused as cars flew by me, doing just a tad over the speed limit. A couple of them did not have their lights on, had their left hand on the steering wheel and their right hand holding their phone. They were gazing at their mesmerizing screen as they hurtled by me in the early morning hours. I was notified that my moms diagnosis was double pneumonia, but my sister felt she was doing pretty well. I said out loud a few times, "Im on my way, Mom." I had told my sister I would stop and pick up some clothes for Mom. I was tuned into Christmas music. I even heard on the radio that Duluth had just been named one of the top 10 Christmas towns in the nation by a New York publication. I thought that was pretty cool. Then I got another phone call. My wife told me not to stop and to just get to the hospital. All of a sudden I knew. I hoped and prayed I would arrive in time, but I didnt. My mom passed away an hour and a half before I reached Duluth. My sister and her husband were waiting for me. I was allowed some time by myself to say goodbye. I spent some time holding my moms hand. I cried, I prayed, I thanked her. A nurse came in her name was Rosie, I believe. She put her hand on my shoulder and asked if I needed anything. She told me to take as much time as I needed. She was kind. When I finished my goodbye and I gathered myself the best that I could, I thanked Rosie and another nurse who had cared for and made my mom comfortable. Christmas is many things. It is meaningful. It is family, it is faith, it is kindness and it is love. Sometimes we get behind in what we hope to accomplish. Its OK people will understand. Kind and caring folks will tell you to take all the time you need. I need more time. The Guam National Guard held a send-off ceremony Wednesday for 34 airmen who will deploy to Southwest Asia in January. The airmen from the Guam Air National Guard Headquarters, 254th Air Base Group, 254th Security Forces Squadron and 254th Force Support Squadron will deploy for six months in support of Operation Freedom Sentinel and Operation Inherent Resolve. "Each mission will be filled with challenges, and through the support of our families and community, our airmen and women will be successful and return home safely with pride and honor," said Maj. Gen. Roderick Leon Guerrero, adjutant general of the Guam National Guard. Success! An email has been sent to with a link to confirm list signup. Error! There was an error processing your request. The 254th Force Support Squadron will support operations in multiple locations in Southwest Asia. The 254th Security Forces Squadron will support 4,000 joint coalition war fighters in the same region. For 11 of the squadron's airmen, it's not their first time deploying. "They bring to the fight breadth and experience," Leon Guerrero said. Deploying airmen 254th Air Base Group Tech. Sgt. Jacob Barnes Master Sgt. David Blas Tech. Sgt. Michelle Castro Staff Sgt. John Patricio 1st Lt. Tommy Joe Rivera 254th Force Support Squadron Staff Sgt. Jianna Balajadia Tech. Sgt. Amy Lou Baleto Senior Airman Raymark Calimlim Airman 1st Class Aaron Paul Capati Staff Sgt. Colleen Cruz Capt. Francine Joy Cruz Airman Derrick Evangelista Tech. Sgt. Xylina Halmi Tech. Sgt. Joshua Leon Guerrero Staff Sgt. Kristine Macasaquit Capt. Erwin Manibusan Staff Sgt. John Martinez Airman 1st Class Kyle Martinez Airman 1st Class Tovin Mesa Airman Keith Lujan (alternate) Guam Air National Guard Headquarters Master Sgt. Eleanor Atoigue 254th Security Forces Squadron Staff Sgt. Brenton Adams Maj. Alvin Alvarez Airman 1st Class Dominic Bascon Airman 1st Class Christopher Camacho Staff Sgt. Jovito Carbon Senior Airman Ryan Cuna Staff Sgt. Nicolas Garcia Tech. Sgt. Shaun Morrison Airman 1st Class Keith Orlino Staff Sgt. Princes Prado Master Sgt. Frankie Quinata Tech. Sgt. Mark Sablan Senior Airman Danicia Santos Tech. Sgt. William Walker 'Commitment, bravery and honor' A historic milestone for the Guam Guard, it will be the 254th Air Base Group unit's first deployment. The group will be responsible for supplying communications support during the two operations. Eleanor Atoigue, an airman from the Guam Air National Guard Headquarters, also will experience her first deployment to provide administrative support throughout the overseas operations. "If there was really any group of people I put special prayer into, it's you folks," outgoing Gov. Eddie Calvo told the troops, who gathered with their families at the Guard's Readiness Center in Barrigada. "You represent the highest levels of commitment, bravery and honor a legacy that has been forged in the fires of our history," Calvo said. Jianna Nicole Balajadia, 30, is one airman from the 254th Force Support Squadron deploying for her first time. "It's an honor to serve my country. I have good, strong family support, so I'll be OK," Balajadia said after Wednesday's ceremony. With her son wrapped in her arms, and her daughter, siblings, parents and grandparents nearby, the Yona native said she was excited to do her job and serve her island and country. "Thank you for all your support," Balajadia said to the island community. "Continue to pray for us that are going out and pray for the ones still deployed and coming home. That's all we need prayers for our safety." The sentencing hearing before Judge Sullivan in the case of Michael Flynn was weird beyond belief yesterday. Judge Sullivan came across as a loose cannon, sounding off like a barroom loudmouth vaguely aware of the relevant facts but not too careful about them. Byron York provides a good summary. In its editorial today (accessible here via Outline), the Wall Street Journal tactfully characterizes the hearing as a fiasco. Flynn is a bit player the Russia hoax production. He is a casualty of the FBI investigation leading to the Mueller Switch Project. A former head of the Defense Intelligence, he has pleaded guilty to lying about the substance of his post-election conversation with the Russian ambassador. He may well be guilty of that and more. Reading the McCabe memo filed by the Special Counsel with the court last Friday, however, we see that Flynn believed that his conversations were probably intercepted and known to the FBI. What we would like to know is whether Flynn lied to the FBI about these conversations. If so, why? If not, the judge wont take his plea. Flynn is sticking with his guilty plea despite the issues he raised with it in his sentencing memo perhaps because he may be guilty and certainly because he wants the deal offered by the Special Counsel. Judge Sullivan pressed Flynn on the truthfulness of his plea without exploring the nature of the deal of which it is the key part. Flynn appears to have pleaded guilty in part because of financial distress and in part out of desire to protect his son from charges. We would like to know what threats the Special Counsel raised with Flynn along these lines in negotiations with him. We would also like to know how Flynns alleged misrepresentations could have been material in the FBI investigation when the FBI already had the conversations in hand. Reading the transcript of Comeys testimony to the House Committees on Monday (here in the adjacent post), one might reasonably conclude that Flynns misrepresentations were not material. The key players at the FBI had another object in mind. The Logan Act pretense is a joke, as even Judge Sullivan appears to recognize. Implying that he might not take the Special Counsels recommendation of no jail time, Judge Sullivan invited Flynn to postpone sentencing for another 90 days. It was an offer Flynn could not refuse. Those of us wondering what is happening here are left to wonder some more. Following the hearing, Judge Sullivan imposed standard restrictions on defendants travel when defendant is released on his own recognizance. He ordered Flynn to stay within 50 miles of the District of Columbia unless he gets permission from the court. While approving Flynns already planned international travel, he also ordered Flynn to hand over his passport. Ten parts are obviously not enough to bring this series to an end. Late last night, the Senate passed First Step, the leniency legislation that will free many thousands of felons from federal prison and shorten the sentences of many thousands of future felons. The vote was 87-12. Here are the 12 courageous Republicans who resisted pressure from the Trump administration and from big-money interest groups like the Koch Brothers, and voted to protect the public from the hardened criminals who populate federal prisons: Barrasso (WY) Cotton (AR) Enzi (WY) Kennedy (LA) Kyl (R-AZ) Murkowski (AK) Risch (ID) Rounds (SD) Rubio (FL) Sasse (NE) Shelby (AL) Sullivan (AK) Here are the Republicans who voted for the legislation. They are accountable for the crimes that will be committed by the felon-beneficiaries of First Step during periods when they would have been in federal prison absent the legislation. Most of these crimes will be committed years from now, when these Senators have passed on or become lobbyists, by future felons whose sentences will be shorter. But many will be committed by current felons who are released early. And some of them will be particularly heinous. I have bolded the names of GOP Senators who pushed hard for this legislation and, indeed, for its more lenient predecessor a few years ago. (Note: Lindsey Graham didnt vote yesterday, but has been a leader of the push for jailbreak legislation this year and in the past). XploreMR 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. XploreMR PR-Inside.com: 2018-12-19 05:39:40 Press Information XploreMR Contact Us XploreMR 111 North Market Street, Suite 300 San Jose, CA 95113, United States Tel: +1-669-284-0108 Email: sales@xploremr.com sales@xploremr.com Sales 6692840108 email http://www.xploremr.com # 605 Words Contact UsXploreMR111 North Market Street, Suite 300San Jose, CA 95113, United StatesTel: +1-669-284-0108Email: sales@xploremr.comSales6692840108 Market Insights offer a 10-year forecast for the Germany acid proof lining market between 2016 and 2026. In terms of value, the market is expected to register a CAGR of 5.9% during the projected period. The primary objective of the report is to offer insights on the advancements in the Germany acid proof lining market. The study demonstrates market dynamics that are expected to influence the current environment and future status of the Germany acid proof lining market over the forecast period. The primary objective of this report is to offer updates on trends, drivers, restraints, value forecasts, and opportunities for manufacturers operating in the Germany acid proof lining market.Report overview @ https://www.xploremr.com/report/1213/acid-proof-lining-market Acid proof linings high mechanical strength and high acid resistance property is driving demand for this product over other corrosion protection methods such as polymer coatings and rubber lining systems as they use of solvent based coatings which are non-environment friendly. Acid proof lining are coatings that protect concrete, plastic piping, fiber glass and steel structures against strong acids, solvents and alkalis. Acid proof lining also provides protection against mechanical abuse and elevated temperatures. They are employed in several end-use industries wherein the floors, walls and equipment constantly exposed to strong chemicals and acids. Acid proof lining benefits the EPCMs working in these industries by saving on long-term maintenance costs. Furthermore, positive outlook of various end-use industries in Germany is poised to aid market growth. Also, low entry barrier coupled with high scope of application is expected to drive the market. These factors are expected to bolster growth of the Germany acid proof lining market over the next five to six years.A section of report discusses on how the overall competition in the market is steadily increasing. It discusses various factors that are shaping internal as well as external competition in the market. Overall internal competition in the Germany acid proof lining market is studied to be comparatively low due to low number of major manufacturers of acid proofing products in the market. The Germany acid proof lining industry is facing external competition from availability of alternative lining solutions such as rubber lining systems. Various barriers to entry in the industry are analyzed and rated on the basis of their impact on the competition level in the market.The report talks about the market share of total Germany acid proof lining market by each of the buyer segment including manufacturers, distributors and suppliers. A section of the report highlights acid proof lining demand, state-wise. It provides a market outlook for 20162026 and sets the forecast within the context of the acid proofing ecosystem, including the new technological developments as well as product offerings in the Germany acid proof lining market.Enter your information below to receive a free sample copy of this report @ https://www.xploremr.com/connectus/sample/1213 In the final section of the report, a competitive landscape has been included to provide report audiences with a dashboard view. Key categories of acid proofing solution providers covered in the report are acid proof lining suppliers and distributors. Detailed profiles of the manufacturers are also included in the scope of the report to evaluate their long-term and short-term strategies, key offerings and recent developments in the acid proof lining space. Key players in the Germany acid proof lining market include Steuler-Kch GmbH, AGRU Kunststofftechnik GmbH, Simona AG, SKO Saureschutz und Kunststoffbau GmbH, GBT-BUCOLIT GmbH, Nittel GmbH & Co. KG, Christen & Laudon GmbH Kunststoff Apparatebau, Hurner-Funken GmbH, Knapper Oberflachentechnik GmbH and A-SPT Protective Solutions GmbH & Co. KG.Buy Now Full Report @ https://www.xploremr.com/cart/reports/buynow/1213 PR-Inside.com: 2018-12-19 11:51:13 Press Information Research Report Insights Research Report Insights 42 joseph street, Portcarling P0B 1J0, Muskoka, Ontario, Canada T: +1-631-721-4201 Email: sales@researchreportinsights.com Web Site: http://www.researchreportinsights.com Phone - (+91) 7875758555 email Published by Ethan Taylor +44-631-787-4201 e-mail https://www.trendsmarketresearch.com # 482 Words Research Report Insights42 joseph street,Portcarling P0B 1J0,Muskoka, Ontario, CanadaT: +1-631-721-4201Email: sales@researchreportinsights.comWeb Site: http://www.researchreportinsights.comPhone - (+91) 7875758555Ethan Taylor+44-631-787-4201 The emergence of innovative solutions, that improve mechanical endurance of food products and provide them longer shelf-life, has exerted importance on the use of active and modified atmosphere packaging. In terms of value, the global market for active and modified atmosphere packaging is predicted to reach US$ 17.0 Bn in 2016, and will continue to expand at a CAGR of over 5% during the forecast period 2016-2024. Research Report Insights (RRI) has compiled in-depth research on the markets insights and global analysis of growth opportunities is compiled in the report titled, Active and Modified Atmosphere Packaging Market: Global Industry Analysis and Forecast 2016-2024.Report For Sample with Table of Contents@ https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/sample/110114681/Active-And-Modified-Atmosphere-Packaging-Market Developments in global food packaging industry such as self-venting microwave packs and respiring trays will continue influencing the demand for active & modified atmosphere packaging solutions. Moreover, the consumption for active & modified atmosphere packaging products will be majorly concentrated among meat producer and retailers as they require packaging methods that provided better sustenance in terms of biodegradability and compostability. Although, packaging material recyclability and increasing initial costs in packaging processes are expected to curb the expansion of global active & modified atmosphere packaging market.In terms of revenues, the global market for active & modified atmosphere packaging is projected to exceed US$ 26.0 Bn by the end of forecast period 2016-2024. APAC region will dominate the market, increasing at a CAGR of over 6% over the forecast period.Request For Report Discount@ https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/discount/110114681/Active-And-Modified-Atmosphere-Packaging-Market Based on the applications, the global market for active & modified atmosphere packaging is segmented into processed food products, bakery & confectionery, fruits & vegetables, dairy products, meat, poultry & seafood, and others. Demand for modified atmosphere packaging is higher in fruit & vegetable vendors, while active packaging products are consumed higher in food processing companies. By 2016, the processed food segment is anticipated to account for 15% of the total revenue share of global active and modified atmosphere packaging market.Based on the material type, the global market is further segmented into polyethylene, polyvinyl chloride, polyamide, ethylene vinyl alcohol (EVOH), ethylene vinyl acetate (EVA), polypropylene, and others. Polymer materials such as polyethylene, polypropylene, polyvinyl chloride and polyethylene terephthalate provide additional properties to several active & modified atmosphere packaging materials.Among the markets regional segmentation, the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region will continue to procure leading value share in the global market. However, the APAC region will face close competition by the active & modified atmosphere packaging market in Latin America, which will exhibit a similar CAGR during the forecast period.Amcor Limited, Sealed Air Corporation, Winpak Limited Company, Coveris Holdings S.A., Berry Plastic Group Inc., Bemis Company Inc., Linpac Packaging, ULMA Packaging, and S. Coop and Ilapac International S.A., among others are recognised as some of the leading companies contributing to the growth of the global active & modified atmosphere packaging market.Report Analysis@ https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/rd/110114681/Active-And-Modified-Atmosphere-Packaging-Market PR-Inside.com: 2018-12-19 06:26:45 Press Information Published by ACCESSWIRE News Network 888.952.4446 e-mail http://www.accesswire.com # 711 Words ACCESSWIRE News Network888.952.4446 SINGAPORE / ACCESSWIRE / December 19, 2018 / Despite the recent stagnant crypto-currency market, AIDUS project ( https://aidus.io) has become a hot topic in the industry, getting investment from CoinBene, one of the world's leading exchanges, which would be a paradigm-shifting event.AIDUS project (AISYS GLOBAL PTE.LTD.) is building the AIDUS Decentralized Fund Platform (ADFP), where users can only subscribe to funds via AIDUS coin. ADFP is the platform to connect investors and asset management companies with AIDUS coin without any barriers of borders, language, and currency.The most important part of the ADFP is the Smart QTS (Quant Trading System), which boasts an annual average return of 100% (as of December 1, 2018). Smart QTS is an automated trading program that has been validated through more than 15 years of development and over four years of operational performance. The weekly returns are confirmed by law firms and accounting firms.Although the value of AIDUS is well appreciated by various professional organizations and investors, CoinBene, one of the world's biggest crypto-currency exchanges, has been most interested in the AIDUS entailing an MOU for collaborating as a listed and trading currency onsite in the 2018 November, 9th AIDUS Meet up in Hong Kong.[AISYS GLOBAL Founder Ted Min & CoinBene CoFounder Cheng Yidong]Following up, CoinBene has decided to invest in AIDUS. This kind of direct investment is hard to find in the current crypto-currency market, representing CoinBene's confidence in AIDUS coin.Also, AIDUS coin's IEO is scheduled from December 14, 2018, to December 31, 2018 through CoinBene.AngelVest, one of the largest venture investment groups in Shanghai, China, currently generates about 120% of annual return on a pilot fund, which is operated by Smart QTS.With the current rate of return, the value of AIDUS coin is expected to rise steadily. Since there is no system that yields the same rate as Smart QTS in the current fund market, many investors have to buy AIDUS COIN to join the fund through ADFP.AIDUS releases weekly returns of Smart QTS, which will play a critical role in ADPF, with certification by law firms and accounting firms every week, confirming its transparent operating policy.[Investment contract ceremony between CoinBene and AISYS GLOBAL. Left: CoinBene CMO Daniel Lee. Right AISYS GLOBAL Founder Ted Min]Through these core technologies, AIDUS COIN would be evaluated as a coin with the world's best Fundamental, the world's first Non-Zero value coin, and the world's first coin traded in the real market. It is expected to become the new standard of crypto-currency.In addition, because asset management companies have to return profits with the initials to investors, the firms have to purchase AIDUS coin. As demand is expected to continually rise while supplies are in shortage, the price of AIDUS coin is expected to rise sharply.In fact, AIDUS has been in the market for a very short period of time. In just one month since their international debut in the Hong Kong Meet up on November 9th, the growth of interest in AIDUS is unprecedented.The differences between the business model of AIDUS COIN and other crypto-currencies are:1. AIDUS coin can provide investors with the gates to high yield funds of asset management companies without border, time and foreign exchange barriers.2. AIDUS provides Smart QTS to asset management companies and provides stable returns to investors at the highest level of return.3. AIDUS coin value is expected to rise steadily as investors purchase more AIDUS coin due to stable profitability while asset management companies must purchase AIDUS coin to return profits to investors.Presently, AISYS GLOBAL PTE.LTD has held Meet ups for the AIDUS Project started from the Hong Kong Meet up on November 9th, 2018, followed by meet ups in Beijing, Tokyo, Manila and Seoul. US and Brazil meet ups are planned.Ted Min, Founder of AISYS GLOBAL PTE.LTD , stated, "Through the investment agreement with CoinBene, We believe that all participants who invested in AIDUS will be more confident in the AIDUS Project. More people will be informed about the AIDUS Project through strategic marketing and overseas meet ups." More information on AIDUS coin can be found in the White Paper on https://aidus.io Media Contact :Person name : Dennis LeeCompany Name : AISIS GLOBAL LTDEmail address : hkmin@ aidus.io Website : www.aidus.io SOURCE: AISIS GLOBAL LTD PR-Inside.com: 2018-12-19 22:05:57 Press Information Published by ACCESSWIRE News Network 888.952.4446 e-mail http://www.accesswire.com # 931 Words ACCESSWIRE News Network888.952.4446 VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / December 19, 2018 / Auryn Resources Inc. (TSX: AUG, NYSE American: AUG, "Auryn" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that it has entered into a series of agreements with Corporacion Aceros Arequipa S.A. ("Aceros") to option three important mineral concessions located within the Company's Sombrero project located in Southern Peru.The option takes the form of a mining assignment agreement combined with a framework agreement, trust agreement, shareholders' agreement and a corporate guarantee (the "Option" or the "Agreements"). In the event that the Option is exercised, an 80% (Auyrn) : 20% (Aceros) joint venture would be formed combining the 520 hectare Aceros concessions plus 4,600 hectares of Auryn's 120,000 hectare Sombrero land position (Figure 1). The Aceros concessions are considered important to create a cohesive land position over key target areas as Auryn's technical team advances the Sombrero Main area towards its initial drill program in 2019.A Message from Ivan Bebek, Executive Chairman & Director:"We are pleased to welcome Aceros Arequipa's involvement in our Sombrero Main project. Not only will these concessions help us to further consolidate the district into a comprehensive land package, their knowledge of the project and relationships with the local communities will be great assets as we move forward."Sombrero is becoming one of the most impressive projects that we are aware of, with several discovery opportunities. The abundance of mineralization sampled on surface, coincident with large chargeability and magnetic targets, as well as the grades of both copper and gold mineralization are remarkable."We are well underway with the permitting process and are looking forward to a maiden drill program, which we anticipate in Q2 of 2019."About the Aceros Concessions:The Aceros Concessions are comprised of two distinct blocks. El Fierrazo RV (200 hectares) is located on the eastern edge of Sombrero Main and Aceros HS 1 and Aceros HS 2 (320 hectares) are located on the northern edge of Sombrero Main (Figure 1). These concessions are characterized by localized magnetite bodies identified from surface and through magnetics.Figure 1:Terms of the Agreements:Under the terms of certain definitive agreements with Aceros, Auryn, through its wholly owned Peruvian subsidiary, Sombrero Minerales SAC ("SomMin"), will initially option the three concessions from Aceros through mining assignment and lease agreements using an internationally recognized bank trustee. Under these agreements, SomMin has a right to form an 80:20 corporate joint venture after completing a series of cash payments, work commitments and technical studies, which confirm certain minimum relative values of the two concession groups as detailed below.Option Terms:Due DateCash Payment made to Aceros (US$)Work Commitments within the Aceros ConcessionsUpon execution of Definitive Agreement$140,000Within 12 months from Definitive Agreement$60,000$ 150,000Within 24 months from Definitive Agreement$ 250,000$ 500,000Within 36 months from Definitive Agreement$ 350,000$ 1,500,000Within 48 months from Definitive Agreement$ 3,000,000Total$ 800,000$ 5,150,000If the Option is exercised, SomMin will hire an independent engineer to complete two preliminary economic scoping studies (PEAs) over a period of two years. These PEAs will be a study of the existing magnetite deposits and of any identified non-ferrous (including Cu, Au, Ag, Mo) mineralization, respectively. If it can be shown that the net present value (NPV) of any non-ferrous deposit located within Sombrero Main or the Aceros Concessions is greater than five times the NPV of the existing magnetite deposits within the Aceros Concessions then the Option is considered fulfilled and an 80:20 (SomMin:Aceros) corporate joint venture will be established using a newly-formed, jointly-owned Peruvian corporation.In the event SomMin is unable to show that the net present value (NPV) of any non-ferrous deposit is greater than five times the NPV of the existing magnetite deposits, then it can attain an extension of up to three years if an NPV of at least $100 million was shown and SomMin must pay Aceros an additional $2 million for each year of extension.Once the joint venture is established, it will be governed by a customary shareholders' agreement with specific provisions allowing for the dilution of non-contributing parties and drag-along and first refusal rights.Formation of the joint venture also requires that SomMin first exercise its existing option rights with Alturas Minerales SAC to acquire a 100% interest in the underlying Sombrero concessions. No securities of Auryn are involved in the transaction but Auryn will provide a customary parent company guarantee of SomMin's obligations to Aceros.ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF AURYN RESOURCES INC.Ivan BebekExecutive ChairmanFor further information on Auryn Resources Inc., please go to www.aurynresources.com or contact Natasha Frakes, Manager of Corporate Communications at (778) 729-0600 or info@ aurynresources.com About AurynAuryn Resources is a technologically driven junior mining exploration company focused on delivering shareholder value through acquisition and development of premier gold projects. The Company's management team is highly experienced with an impressive track record of success. It has assembled an extensive technical team as well as a quality gold exploration portfolio. Auryn is currently focused on scalable high-grade gold deposits in established mining jurisdictions, which include the Committee Bay and Gibson MacQuoid gold projects located in Nunavut, the Homestake Ridge gold project in British Columbia and a portfolio of gold projects in southern Peru, through Corisur Peru SAC.About the Sombrero ProjectThis project consists of the North Sombrero and South Sombrero properties, comprising approximately 100,000 mineral claims owned or optioned by Auryn Resources. The copper-gold Sombrero mining concessions are located 340 kilometers SE of Lima in southern Peru and are hosted in the Andahuaylas-Yauri belt. This belt is interpreted to be on the north-western margins of this Eocene-Oligocene aged copper-gold porphyry and skarn belt that hosts XploreMR 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. XploreMR PR-Inside.com: 2018-12-19 07:59:54 Press Information XploreMR 111 North Market Street, Suite 300, San Jose, CA 95113, United States Tel: +1-669-284-0108 Email:sales@xploremr.com Website: http://xploremr.com Neha Bhosle SEO Executive 6692840108 email http://www.xploremr.com # 680 Words 111 North Market Street, Suite 300,San Jose, CA 95113, United StatesTel: +1-669-284-0108Email:sales@xploremr.comWebsite: http://xploremr.comSEO Executive6692840108 Autoclaved aerated concrete (AAC) has gained popularity as one of the most effective and sustainable construction materials worldwide. The unique product characteristics and flexibility of AAC has enabled realization of energy-efficient and high-speed construction methods. Various AAC technologies have been specifically designed for high-quality industrial and residential applications. Speedy construction with AAC panels are gaining paramount traction as cost-effective and resourceful modular construction technique globally.In a bid to impart better governance, public infrastructure development has become top priority in several emerging countries including Mexico, Brazil, India, and China. Expansion of the construction sector across these countries is further bolstered by favorable housing schemes implemented by the governments, which in turn is auguring well for AAC suppliers and manufacturers. Additionally, sustainability, light-weight, and eco-friendly properties of autoclaved aerated concrete have meant that their adoption as construction materials will witness a tremendous rise in the years to come.Get Sample Copy of this report @ https://www.xploremr.com/connectus/sample/711 Scope of the ReportXploreMR has developed a comprehensive forecast analysis on the global market fir autoclaved aerated concrete (AAC) market, which imparts key insights on the way demand for autoclaved aerated concrete will increase over the period 2017 to 2026. The report provides qualitative intelligence on the growth of autoclaved aerated concrete market across different regional segments included in the report for the assessed period. A chapter on executive summary, which initiates the report, delivers succinct insights on the global AAC markets segments. Overview chapter, which follows the executive summary, gives a brief introduction to the market coupled with a formal definition of autoclaved aerated concrete.The report has been compiled with the help of a collaborative research approach, which involves constant discussions with industry leaders, opinion makers, and the market players. By employing a proven and tested statistical methods to forecast the market size, research findings from this report engulf the latest market trends, while delivering a self-explanatory roadmap on the way AAC market will grow in the upcoming years.Report Overview @ https://www.xploremr.com/report/711/autoclaved-aerated-concrete-aac-market Market Analysis and SegmentationEvery essential material and element apropos to production, and application of autoclaved aerated concrete is identified and thoroughly examined in the report. Intelligence from industry knowledge databases and authentic trade surveys has been gleaned, collated, and repurposed in order to improve accuracy of forecast on the global autoclaved aerated concrete market. Moving further, the report widely captures fabrication concerns associated with autoclaved aerated concrete, ranging from the supply chain characteristics to the viability of various materials incorporated. Data offered in the report has been elaborated, and popular trends in the market have been elucidated, with an aim to make report readers better understand impacts of subjective undercurrents on expansion of the AAC market.Key weighted chapters of the report impart segmentation analysis of the global autoclaved aerated concrete market, which offers forecasts & insights on the market growth based on segments such as vehicle type, filter type, and region. On the basis of region, the report further branches the global AAC market into Latin America, Japan, Europe, North America, Middle East & Africa, and Asia-Pacific excluding Japan. XploreMRs analyst network superintends to deliver forecasts on the regional as well as country-specific autoclaved aerated concrete market. The report further offers cross-segmental study & forecast on the global AAC market, wherein key chapters unveil presumptive scenarios related to future evolution of the market.All-Inclusive Forecast on Autoclaved Aerated Markets Competition LandscapeKey companies manufacturing autoclaved aerated concrete that actively support the market growth have been exhaustively profiled in the report. Information on latest strategic developments and current market standings of these companies has been provided in detail, in a chapter that unveils volumes of data regarding the competitor analysis. Analysis on prominent manufacturing trends, challenges, and supply chain of AAC has been offered in this chapter. Assessing the information given on the global AAC markets competitive landscape, the market players are enabled to develop informed strategies, which can facilitate them in attaining high-value business expansion during the forecast period.Buy Now Full Report @ https://www.xploremr.com/cart/reports/buynow/711 PR-Inside.com: 2018-12-19 22:21:01 Frisco, Texas, Dec. 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- COMSTOCK RESOURCES, INC. ANNOUNCES HAYNESVILLE SHALE ACREAGE ACQUISITION FRISCO, TEXAS, December 19, 2018 Comstock Resources, Inc. ("Comstock" or the "Company") (NYSE: CRK) announced today that it has entered into an agreement with Shelby Shale, LLC ("Shelby") to acquire an 88% interest in 6,124 gross acres (6,023 net) limited to Shelby's Haynesville shale rights in Harrison and Panola counties, Texas for $20.5 million. Comstock will pay the purchase price over a four year period by granting Shelby a 12% interest in each well drilled by Comstock on the acreage up to a total of $20.5 million in carried costs. Comstock has identified 33 (22.9 net) potential drilling locations on this acreage, including 27 (22.4 net) that would be operated by Comstock. "The additional acreage added by the Shelby acquisition is near our recently acquired Enduro acreage," stated M. Jay Allison, Chief Executive Officer of Comstock. "This acreage enhances our long-term opportunity set in the Haynesville shale and will be incorporated into our drilling plans over the next four years." This press release may contain "forward-looking statements" as that term is defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such statements are based on management's current expectations and are subject to a number of factors and uncertainties which could cause actual results to differ materially from those described herein. Although the Company believes the expectations in such statements to be reasonable, there can be no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. Comstock Resources, Inc. is an independent energy company based in Frisco, Texas and is engaged in oil and gas acquisitions, exploration and development primarily in Texas and Louisiana. The Company's stock is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol CRK. PR-Inside.com: 2018-12-19 08:26:22 Press Information Published by ACCESSWIRE News Network 888.952.4446 e-mail http://www.accesswire.com # 531 Words ACCESSWIRE News Network888.952.4446 VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / December 19, 2018 / Doubleview Capital Corp. ("Doubleview") (TSX-V: DBV, OTC: DBLVF, GER: 1D4) announces that it has entered into an amendment to mineral property option agreement with Farshad Shirvani, Chief Executive Officer and a director of Doubleview, to acquire a 90% interest in the Red Springs Project, British Columbia. Under the terms of the amendment agreement, Doubleview has agreed to issue a total of 1,320,000 common shares of Doubleview (1,188,000 common shares to Mr. Shirvani and 132,000 common shares to Erik Ostensoe) and, in consideration of which, the Company will be released of its obligation to pay $132,000 due under the option agreement. Upon closing of the amendment agreement, the Red Springs Project will be owned by the following persons: Doubleview will own a 90% interest, Mr. Shirvani will own a 9% interest and Mr. Ostensoe will own a 1% interest.The issuance of the shares to Mr. Shirvani pursuant to the transaction is considered to be a related party transaction subject to Multilateral Instrument 61-101. Doubleview intends to rely on exemptions from the formal valuation and minority shareholder approval requirements provided under sections 5.5(a) and 5.7(a) of Multilateral Instrument 61-101 on the basis that participation in the transaction will not exceed 25% of the fair market value of the Company's market capitalization.The amendment agreement is subject to the acceptance of the TSX Venture Exchange.About Doubleview Capital Corp.Doubleview Capital Corp., a mineral resource exploration and development company, is based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and is publicly traded on the TSX-Venture Exchange [TSX-V: DBV], [OTCBB: DBLVF], [GER:1D4], [Frankfurt: A1W038]. Doubleview identifies, acquires and finances precious and base metal exploration projects in North America, particularly in British Columbia. Doubleview increases shareholder value through acquisition and exploration of quality gold, copper and silver properties and the application of advanced state-of-theart exploration methods. The Company's portfolio of strategic properties provides diversification and mitigates investment risk.On behalf of the Board of Directors,Farshad Shirvani, M.Sc. GeologyPresident & Chief Executive Officer For further information please contact:Doubleview Capital Corp.409 Granville St., Suite #880Vancouver, BC V6C 1T2Farshad Shirvani, M.Sc. GeologyPresident & CEOT: (604) 678-9587E: corporate@ doubleview.ca Forward-Looking StatementsInformation set forth in this news release contains forward-looking statements that are based on assumptions as of the date of this news release. These statements reflect management's current estimates, beliefs, intentions and expectations. They are not guarantees of future performance. Doubleview cautions that all forward looking statements are inherently uncertain and that actual performance may be affected by a number of material factors, many of which are beyond Doubleview's control. Such factors include, among other things: risks and uncertainties relating to Doubleview's limited operating history and the need to comply with environmental and governmental regulations. Accordingly, actual and future events, conditions and results may differ materially from the estimates, beliefs, intentions and expectations expressed or implied in the forward looking information. Except as required under applicable securities legislation, Doubleview undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise forward-looking information.NEITHER TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE NOR ITS REGULATION SERVICES PROVIDER (AS THAT TERM IS DEFINED IN THE POLICIES OF THE TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE) ACCEPTS RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ADEQUACY OR ACCURACY OF THIS RELEASE.SOURCE: Doubleview Capital Corp. PR-Inside.com: 2018-12-19 01:47:09 Press Information Published by ACCESSWIRE News Network 888.952.4446 e-mail http://www.accesswire.com # 603 Words ACCESSWIRE News Network888.952.4446 VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE/ December 18, 2018 / Viridium Pacific Group Ltd. ("Viridium" or the "Company")(TSXV: VIR) (OTCPink: VIRFF) is pleased to announce that Experion BiotechnologiesInc. ("Experion"), a wholly owned subsidiary licensed under the Cannabis Act, haslaunched its first adult-use cannabis brand, Citizen Stash. During the O'CannabizConference & Expo, which took place December 9 to 11, 2018 in Vancouver, BritishColumbia, the Citizen Stash brand was introduced. The brand was created to appealto those seeking recreational cannabis in Canada's recently legalized market.Citizen Stash cannabis products will be hand cultivated inExperion's indoor facility in Mission, British Columbia to the highest standardsto ensure quality and exceptional user experience Although Experion has not seta firm launch date, the Company is aiming to market and have available for saleits first Citizen Stash product in the first quarter of 2019."Citizen Stash is about coming together. We want Citizen Stashto be a brand that is all about celebrating our collective experience as Canadians.Our efforts with regard to finalizing supply agreements for the recreational marketsin BC and Saskatchewan are progressing well, which means that we are getting excitedabout shipping our first Citizen Stash product," stated Jay Garnett, Viridium Presidentand Chief Executive Officer. "We will be supporting the launch of Citizen Stashthrough our web and social media efforts, and brand activities and experiences." Corporate NoteFurther to the Company's news releaseof March 16, 2018 announcing, amongst other things, the resignation of Steve Serenas,the Company advises that notwithstanding its best efforts, it has been unable tocome to a final understanding with Mr. Serenas on his terminal compensation packageeven though it was agreed to following his resignation. Similarly, upon Chris McArthur'sdeparture from the Company, as announced May 7, 2018, the Company has had ongoingdiscussions with him on his terminal compensation package but no agreement has yetbeen reached.About ViridiumViridium Pacific Group Ltd. is a consumer wellness and biotechinnovation company based in British Columbia, and the parent company of operatingsubsidiaries involved in horticultural production, (Experion Biotechologies Inc.)property development (Fish Trap Ventures Ltd.), and human resource management (StaveLake Services Ltd.) Experion Biotechnologies Inc., is a Health Canada licensed producerof cannabis, which operates in an 8,300 square-foot indoor facility outside of Mission,BC.More information about Viridium can be found under the Company'sprofile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com For further information:Renmark Financial CommunicationsInc.Melanie Barbeau: mbarbeau@ renmarkfinancial.com Tel: (416) 644-2020 or (514) 939-3989DisclosureThispress release contains forward-looking information within the meaning of Canadiansecurities laws. Although the Company believes that such information is reasonable,it can give no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct.Forwardlooking information is typically identified by words such as: believe, expect, anticipate,intend, estimate, forecast, postulate and similar expressions, or are those, which,by their nature, refer to future events. The Company cautions investors that anyforward-looking information provided by the Company are not guarantees of futureresults or performance, and that actual results may differ materially from thosein forward looking information as a result of various factors, including, but notlimited to: the state of the financial markets for the Company's equity securities;recent market volatility; the Company's ability to raise the necessary capital orto be fully able to implement its business strategies; the risks identified in theFiling Statement, and other risks and factors that the Company is unaware of atthis time. The reader is referred to the Filing Statement dated September 25, 2017and/or the most recent annual and interim Management's Discussion and Analysis fora more complete discussion of such risk factors and their potential effects, copiesof which may be accessed through the Company page on SEDAR at www.sedar.com SOURCE: Viridium Pacific GroupLtd. Generic Injectable Market: Global Industry Analysis 2012 - 2016 and Opportunity Assessment; 2017 - 2027 PR-Inside.com: 2018-12-19 14:53:35 Press Information Future Market Insights 616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018, Valley Cottage, NY 10989, United States T: +1-347-918-3531 F: +1-845-579-5705 Amir Shaikh SEO Manager 3479183531 email https://www.futuremarketinsights.com # 896 Words 616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705SEO Manager3479183531 Generic injectable drugs are those which have same active ingredient as innovator drug and is equivalent to its innovator drug in dosage form, safety, strength (dose), route of administration, performance, quality, and intended use. Some of the worlds largest manufacturers of sterile generic injectable have been making these drugs for over 80 years. Unlike branded sterile injectable drugs, generic injectable is cost-effective, especially cancer therapies, thus government in the majority of the countries are influencing to adopt generic injectable, in order to control healthcare spending. For instance, the global pharmaceutical industry is experiencing serious pricing issue and cost reduction pressure. e.g. North America pharmaceutical industry is growing at a sluggish rate of below 2% CAGR. A growth rate in Japan and Europe has seen never before decrease in drug prices. This, in turn, is impeding policy changes and encouraging use of generic injectable drugs in these key regions.Globally, a large number of generic drug makers are focusing on plant upgrades for an increase in captive manufacturing of sterile generic injectable drugs. Moreover, infamous regulatory delays in approval of sterile injectable drugs have contributed to the higher inclination towards investments in manufacturing of sterile generic injectable drugs in order to ensure higher quality. The average time period for regulatory approval for sterile drugs is over three to four years, however, that for bioequivalent sterile injectable is around 10-11 months. Faster regulatory approvals, low R&D investment, and the high margin are attracting manufacturers to invest in the generic injectable manufacturing.Request Sample Report @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-6051 Generic Injectable Market: Drivers and RestraintsThe global pharmaceutical industry is toning itself to fundamental changes in the marketplace and looking for new ways to achieve growth. Along with increasing efforts for manufacturing of sterile generic injectable, growing number of prescriptions for generic injectable is pushing the growth of the global generic injectable market. According to GPhA Conference report, 90% of injectable prescriptions in the U.S. in 2015 were for generic injectable, which is primarily driven by unprecedented series of patent expiration. Rapid expansion by key market players is another factor driving the growth of the global generic injectable market. Shortage of branded sterile injectable has further led to the adoption of generic injectable. Due to the complexity of manufacturing and stringency in the process, production of sterile injectable drugs is challenging and. This is causing frequent drug recalls due to safety issues. This can limit the growth of the global generic injectable market.Generic Injectable Market: SegmentationThe global generic injectable market has been classified on the basis of product type, indication, distribution channel, and geography.Based on product type, the global generic injectable market is divided into following:Monoclonal AntibodiesCytokinesInsulinVaccinesOthersBased on an indication, the global generic injectable market is divided into following:DiabetesCancerCardiovascular DiseasesInfectionsOthersBased on the disease type, the global generic injectable market is divided into following:Hospital PharmacyRetail PharmacyDrug StoresOnline Prescription StoresGeneric Injectable Market: OverviewAccording to fact sheet published by Hospira Inc., approximately 1.5 Bn doses of generic injectable are sold every year across the globe. Monoclonal antibodies being the largest revenue generating segment, will continue to dominate the global generic injectable market over the forecast period. Other cluster consists of include opioid analgesics, general and local anesthetics, antidotes for opioid poisoning, skeletal muscle relaxants etc. Cancer and cardiovascular diseases indication segments are expected to represent highest growth opportunities over the forecast period due to the launch of several antibodies based generic injectable products.Generic Injectable Market: Regional OverviewGeographically, the global generic injectable market is classified into regions viz. North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia-Pacific, Japan, Middle East and Africa. North America holds the largest share in the global generic injectable market. Even though the generic injectable industry has operations across the globe, majority of largest manufacturers produce a large volume of generic injectable in the U.S. However, overseas manufacturing facilities of these manufacturers are subject to same stringent FDA regulations and facilities are inspected on regular basis. Moreover, in the U.S. over 70% of hospital patients receive generic injectable drugs, which is further pushing the demand for generic injectable in North America. Asia Pacific is expected to experience the highest increase in production volumes of generic injectable over the forecast period of 20172027. Countries such as China and India have growing pharmaceutical industry of their own. According to the latest report published by PwC, India is the global leader in the production of generics and vaccines. However, Europe is expected to experience sluggish growth due to an economic slowdown. Request to View TOC @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-6051 Generic Injectable Market: Key PlayersSome of the key players identified in the global generic injectable market are Pfizer Inc.(Hospira Inc. Pfizer Established Products), Baxter International, Sanofi SA, Novartis AG (Sandoz), GlaxoSmithKline plc., AstraZeneca plc., Fresenius SE & Co. KGaA, Johnson & Johnson, Novo Nordisk A/S, Amgen Inc., Bristol-Myers Squibb Company etc. among others. Majority of these companies have independent subsidiaries that operate in a sterile injectable manufacturing. Consolidation through acquisition and partnerships are emerging as prominent trends in the global generic injectable market. A rapid expansion of emerging players such as Amneal Pharmaceuticals, Endo International plc. Alvogen, ANI Pharmaceuticals Inc. etc. among others would significantly contribute to the growth of the global generic injectable market. 3D Cardiac Mapping System Market PR-Inside.com: 2018-12-19 03:32:36 Press Information Persistence Market Research 305 Broadway 7th Floor, New York City, NY 10007, United States, USA Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353 Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.com Web: http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com Yogesh Sengar Team Lead 800-961-0353 email https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/ # 605 Words 305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb: http://www.persistencemarketresearch.comTeam Lead800-961-0353 Cardiac mapping is a technique in which the information from cardiac electrograms is gathered and displayed. Cardiac mapping is used to diagnose the heart rhythms especially in case of arrhythmia. The cardiac mapping procedure is usually done by inserting catheter into the heart chamber percutaneously and recording the electrograms sequentially, this is done in order to correlate the electrograms with cardiac anatomy. The new 3D cardiac mapping systems create the three dimensional model of any chamber of heart and can track exact location of the catheter. This allows movement of the catheters without using X-ray. They are designed to improve the resolution and gain prompt cardiac activation maps.3D Cardiac Mapping System Market: Drivers and RestraintsThe 3D cardiac mapping system market is anticipated to grow with a significant CAGR owing to the increase in number of patients with arrhythmia and other cardiac disorders, rising pressure to reduce diagnosis errors and increasing healthcare expenditure. The major factors driving the growth of 3D cardiac mapping systems is the precision and patient safety enabled by real-time monitoring. The increase in aging population who are more prone to chronic heart disorders will elevate the demand for the 3D cardiac mapping system. The increase in prevalence and diagnosis rate of cardiac illness is the major factors which is creating the demand for 3D cardiac mapping systems. The 3D cardiac mapping also help in reducing the time of diagnosis. The restraining factors for the 3D cardiac mapping system market are high cost of services and limited adoption rate of the systems.Request Sample Report@ https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/11383 3D Cardiac Mapping System Market: SegmentationThe global 3D cardiac mapping system market are classified on the basis of technology, end use and geography.Based on the technology, the global 3D cardiac mapping system market is divided into following:Electroanatomical mappingBasket Catheter mappingReal-time positional management (Cardiac Pathways) EP systemBased on end user, the global 3D cardiac mapping system market is divided into following:HospitalsClinicsDiagnostic Centers3D Cardiac Mapping System Market: OverviewThe awareness of 3D cardiac mapping system is giving rise to the adoption of the systems. The elimination of errors in diagnosis helps the physician in providing better treatment and cure. The adoption rate of 3D cardiac mapping system by the hospitals is high as compared to that of independent clinics and is estimated to be the fastest growing segment. Electroanatomical mapping are used widely as it hold the potential to increase the safety, efficacy and efficiency of catheter. Real-time positional management (Cardiac Pathways) EP system contribute maximum share in the overall 3D cardiac mapping systems during the forecast period.Request Report TOC@ https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/methodology/11383 3D Cardiac Mapping System Market: Regional OverviewOn the basis of geography, the global 3D cardiac mapping system market is segmented into seven key regions: North America, Latin America, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Asia Pacific, Japan, and Middle East & Africa. North America contributes maximum share to the 3D cardiac mapping system market. European countries are expected to represent significant growth rates due to the growing healthcare practices. Amongst the Asian countries, India and China are more promising due to large population pool, increased prevalence of cardiac diseases, increasing awareness, rapid improvement in healthcare services with the saturation in the developed markets.3D Cardiac Mapping System Market: Key PlayersSome of the key players in 3D cardiac mapping system market are Biosense Webster, Inc., St. Jude Medical and Boston Scientific Corporation, Inc. The companies are majorly focusing in the improvement of services provided to customers with the new techniques that provide the physicians in better and quick diagnosis. PR-Inside.com: 2018-12-19 14:30:57 Press Information Published by ACCESSWIRE News Network 888.952.4446 e-mail http://www.accesswire.com # 365 Words ACCESSWIRE News Network888.952.4446 ATLANTA, GA / ACCESSWIRE / December 19, 2018 / Cannabis Investor Magazine announced today LGC Capital Ltd. (TSX-V: LG) and (OTC PINK: LGGCF) ("LGC") is the featured company in the Cannabis Investor Magazine December 2018 Issue. Cannabis Investor Magazine is the leading industry investment magazine for cannabis investors, analysts, executives, entrepreneurs, and financial media. The digital version of the magazine is accessible and free to all subscribers who enter their email address. FSD Pharma's cover feature can be found by clicking on this link https://joom.ag/ma4a or visiting Cannabis Investor Magazine's website www.cannainvestormag.com About LGC Capital Ltd ( www.lgc-capital.com) LGC Capital is a leading cannabis investment firm with a focus on the Legal Global Cannabis market. Through its growing portfolio investment companies, LGC is building a world-leading, vertically integrated system of interconnected legal cannabis companies with cultivation, processing, and distribution in Australia, Jamaica, Switzerland, Italy, and Canada serving domestic and export markets. LGC Capital Ltd. is a Canadian incorporated public company listed on the TSX Venture Exchange (TSXV: LG).Through its partners and assuming pending transactions under review by the TSXV are approved, LGC currently will have over 450,000 square feet of planted cannabis in Jamaica, Switzerland, Italy, and Australia, with that number expected to increase to over 2,100,000 square feet by 2021, as its portfolio companies execute their expansion plans, in addition to the anticipated licensing of Tricho-Med's operations in Quebec, Canada.LGC partners currently sell cannabis products in over 1,000 points of sale across Switzerland and Italy under the ONE Premium Cannabis and EasyJoint brands as well as medical cannabis oils in Australia under the Little Green Pharma brand. LGC's partner's branded products are available in a variety of product formats including dry cannabis flower, tinctures, oils, seeds, and beverages.About CannaInvestor Magazine ( www.cannainvestormag.com) CannaInvestor Magazine is a free monthly subscription-based digital magazine with an exclusive focus on Cannabis industry finance that delivers convenient insights on publicly-traded and privately-held cannabis companies through informative articles, company profiles, and market trends that inform and educate cannabis investors, analysts, executives, entrepreneurs, and financial media.Contact:Cannabis Investor Magazineteam@ cannainvestormag.com or team@ cannainvestormag.ca 1-888-575-1254, Ext. 1SOURCE: Cannabis Investor Magazine XploreMR 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. XploreMR PR-Inside.com: 2018-12-19 08:10:24 Press Information XploreMR 111 North Market Street, Suite 300, San Jose, CA 95113, United States Tel: +1-669-284-0108 Email:sales@xploremr.com Website: http://xploremr.com Neha Bhosle SEO Executive 6692840108 email http://www.xploremr.com # 559 Words 111 North Market Street, Suite 300,San Jose, CA 95113, United StatesTel: +1-669-284-0108Email:sales@xploremr.comWebsite: http://xploremr.comSEO Executive6692840108 On account of their ability to retain enormous amount of water or any aqueous solution, superabsorbent polymers have sought increased penetration in the medical industry. Absorbing high amounts of liquids and exudates, medical superabsorbent polymers prevent infections, and enable faster healing of injuries. These polymers, in the form of non-woven and woven fabrics, are also being used for manufacturing various surgical and medical equipment such as surgical drapes, wound dressings, sponges, and medical gauzes.Market Researchs recently published report renders valuable insights and accurate forecasts on the medical superabsorbent polymers market for the period of forecast, 2018 to 2028. Key parameters such as impact of current and future growth determinants & deterrents, expected developments & regulatory scenario, demand statistics, and raw material procurement & supply are elucidated and analyzed. Influence of these parameters on the medical superabsorbent polymers markets growth has been quantified for deriving a market growth rate estimate.Get Sample Copy of this report @ https://www.xploremr.com/connectus/sample/1227 Medical Superabsorbent polymers Market Taxonomy & Segmentation AnalysisThis report also offers a scrutinized study on the market for medical superabsorbent polymers in terms of a segmentation analysis. The market has been divided into five key segments, namely, product type, end-user, application, technology, 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 medical superabsorbent polymers. A taxonomy table incorporated in the report illustrates all the market segments in a systematic manner as depicted below.Report Overview @ https://www.xploremr.com/report/1227/medical-superabsorbent-polymers-market Competitive Landscape Assessment on Medical superabsorbent polymers MarketIn its concluding chapter, the report quantifies revenues share of prominent companies in the medical superabsorbent polymers 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 on each market player profiled has been 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 medical superabsorbent polymers market, to enable them in making better future decisions for growth of the businesses.Robust Research Methodology to Provide Authentic Market IntelligenceA tested & proven research approach is employed by analysts at Market Research for evaluating key industry dynamics and offering precise and authentic market intelligence. A blend of primary & secondary research has been implemented for offering estimates and forecasts on the medical superabsorbent polymers market.Secondary research forms initial phase of our research, wherein the analysts conduct extensive information mining by referring to up-to-date and verified data resources that include technical journals, regulatory and government published material, and independent studies, which forms the basis of the market estimates.All the market estimates and forecast offered are further verified via an exhaustive primary research, wherein interviews are conducted with leading market participants, and industry experts. These comprehensive primary interviews aid in validating the information procured and gain significant industry insights, estimations and key developments.Buy Now Full Report @ https://www.xploremr.com/cart/reports/buynow/1227 Private-Public Partnerships at the Global Level to Provide the Necessary Funding for Meningococcal Vaccination Programmes PR-Inside.com: 2018-12-19 13:27:46 Press Information Future Market Insights U.S. Office 616 Corporate Way Suite 2-9018, Abhishek Budholiya Team Lead 3479183531 email https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/ # 529 Words U.S. Office 616 Corporate WaySuite 2-9018,Team Lead3479183531 Partnerships between the private sector and public institutions have been the chief agenda of global public health initiatives. The last few years have witnessed an increase in several private-public partnerships specifically focussing on vaccine provision in developing countries. Partnerships like the International Coordinating Group on Vaccine Provision for Epidemic Meningitis Control (ICG) help magnify the vaccine outreach to remote areas of the world with the maximum need. The governments of several countries across the globe initiate immunisation programmes periodically and these programmes are backed by global organisations such as UNICEF and WHO and private not for profits like the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI).Request to View Sample of Research Report @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-1252 A classic example of how private-public partnerships are helping boost vaccination programmes across deep regional pockets is Brazil. In 2010, Ezequiel Dias Foundation, Brazil formed a strategic alliance with Novartis Vaccines & Diagnostics for the sustainable supply of Menjugate MenC vaccines for Brazils National Immunization Program. By 2015, Brazil became self-sufficient in the production of the meningococcal C conjugated vaccine for the countrys public vaccination programmes. Such initiatives at the global level are anticipated to support global immunisation goals and at the same time boost growth of the meningococcal vaccines market.Factors Leading to Worldwide Adoption of Meningococcal Vaccination ProgrammesThe global meningococcal vaccines market is expected to be driven by enhanced access to vaccines in low and middle-income countries, growing investments by manufacturers and governments to cope with pandemic meningitis outbreaks, and rapidly growing consumption of meningococcal vaccines bolstered by immunisation alliances and mass vaccination campaigns among others. Partnerships and alliances between manufacturers and governmental healthcare organisations are facilitating the speedy introduction of vaccines in some of the economically challenged countries of the Middle East and Africa region. Enhanced access to vaccines in under-penetrated global markets is expected to accelerate revenue growth of the global meningococcal vaccines market.Approval of new vaccines in the U.S and Europe in 2015 and 2017 to treat meningococcal meningitis has revolutionised the global immunisation landscape. This is further boosting the growth trajectory of the global market for meningococcal vaccines.According to Future Market Insights projections, the global market for meningococcal vaccines is expected to reach US$ 6,008.9 Mn by 2028 end from a valuation of US$ 2,290.7 Mn in 2017 reflecting a CAGR of 9.2% during the 10 year period from 2018 to 2028.Request Report for Table of Contents @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/askus/rep-gb-1252 GlaxoSmithKline to Lead the Global Meningococcal Vaccines Market with About 50% Market Share Recorded in 2017The global meningococcal vaccines market is highly consolidated, with GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi together holding about 80% of the global market share in 2017. Pfizer is the third largest company in this market with just under 12% market share in 2017. Companies are expanding their production capacities through the acquisition of established vaccines production units of other global or local companies. Sanofi has a huge pipeline of 17 active meningococcal vaccines programmes and is targeting emerging markets; while GlaxoSmithKline has 5 active pipeline programmes for meningococcal vaccines, all of which are in the phase II clinical stage. Addition of the vaccine Bexsero has enabled GlaxoSmithKline to defend its brand against Sanofis aggressive portfolio in the paediatric vaccines space. Mobile Continuous Glucose Monitoring System Market PR-Inside.com: 2018-12-19 03:53:45 Press Information Persistence Market Research 305 Broadway 7th Floor, New York City, NY 10007, United States, USA Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353 Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.com Web: http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com Yogesh Sengar Team Lead 800-961-0353 email https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/ # 881 Words 305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb: http://www.persistencemarketresearch.comTeam Lead800-961-0353 Glucose is a form of sugar that is absorbed through food and is utilized by the body for producing energy. The body produces insulin to regulate glucose in the blood, however when the production of insulin in the body is hampered the glucose level in the blood becomes unregulated causing diabetes. Globally it has been witnessed that the disease burden of diabetes has been increasing at an accelerated rate during the past few decades. According to the WHOs 2014 estimates, nearly 422 million people have diabetes. Diabetes increases the risk of causing several complications in the body like heart attack, stroke, kidney failure, slow healing of wounds causing sepsis and leg amputations, nerve damage and vision loss, due to these severe risks, diabetic patients are required to monitor their blood glucose levels regularly. The traditional glucose monitoring techniques usually are make use of small incision on the finger to remove blood for screening the glucose level however diabetic patients may suffer from fluctuating glucose levels throughout the day and may require to inject insulin as the level of glucose in the blood increases, this requires continuous blood glucose monitoring systems. Continuous blood glucose monitoring systems are generally made up of two key components: a sensor that is placed under the skin which monitor the glucose levels and a transmitter which sends the data to a display device which may be smart phones of personal computers. These systems enable the patients or doctors to access blood glucose data constantly and even remotely.Request Sample Report@ https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/11563 The increasing incidence and prevalence rate of diabetes is mainly expected to boost the demand for continuous glucose monitoring systems. According to WHO the prevalence rate of diabetes has almost doubled in past few decades and is estimated to account up to nearly 8.5% of the global adult population. The increasing number of diabetic patients are expected to increase demand for continuous glucose monitoring systems. In recent years the internet and smartphone penetration has increased rapidly in the emerging countries like China, India and Latin American Countries, which is making it easier for the medical device manufacturers to introduce personal healthcare products based on the internet platform that can be easily accessed by the patients via smartphones. Technological developments like integration of smart watches into continuous glucose monitoring systems by companies like Apple, Inc. and others trying for the same is expected to increase the adoption rate of the continuous glucose monitoring systems and boost the overall demand for continuous glucose monitoring systems market. Moreover companies like Dexcom, Inc. are trying to manufacture products with capability of transmitting data to other devices and systems like integration of data into EMR (Electronic Medical Records) which is expected to significantly boost mobile continuous glucose monitoring system market. However the stringent regulatory policies like PMA (Premarket Approval) from FDA may decelerate the entry of new technology in the mobile continuous monitoring system market. Also the price of continuous glucose monitoring systems are comparatively higher than the conventional glucose monitoring devices which in turn is expected to hamper continuous glucose monitoring system market. Some other factors restraining the market growth are weak reimbursement policies, fierce competition among existing players and entry of several new players in the continuous mobile glucose monitoring system market.The mobile continuous glucose monitoring systems market in segment into following typesBy Product TypeDeviceSensorTransmitterDisplaySoftwareMobile ApplicationsBy Distribution ChannelRetail PharmaciesOnline PharmaciesBy TechnologyInvasiveNon-invasive (Exfoliation)As the diabetic patient pool is increasing rapidly the mobile continuous glucose monitoring systems market is expected to witness healthy CAGR over the forecast period.Geographically, mobile continuous glucose monitoring systems market is segmented into five key regions: North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific (APAC) and Middle East and Africa (MEA). Geographically North America and Europe are expected to be the leading markets for mobile continuous glucose monitoring systems. Several companies have established distribution network in the U.S. and Europe which is expected to boost the growth of mobile continuous glucose monitoring systems market. Also the Medicare provides coverage for several mobile continuous glucose systems in the U.S. which in turn is expected to increase adoption rate of the continuous mobile monitoring systems. Asia Pacific is expected to be next promising market for the mobile continuous glucose monitoring systems due to high diabetic population and increasing per capita healthcare spending. China and India are some of the leading countries in prevalence rate of diabetes also companies gain operational leverage due to low labor and raw materials cost in these countries which is expected to significantly boost the mobile continuous glucose monitoring systems market in this region. Latin America is expected to be next key market after APAC due to due to increasing adoption rate of the mobile continuous glucose monitoring systems mainly due to strong promotional and distribution strategies of the manufacturers. MEA region is expected to follow up after Latin America due to increasing standards in healthcare and rising incidence of diabetes.Request Report TOC@ https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/methodology/11563 Some key players in the mobile continuous glucose monitoring systems market are Dexcom, Inc., Insulet Corporation, Abbott Laboratories Limited, Panasonic Healthcare Corporation, Echo Therapeutics, Inc., Medtronic, LifeScan, Inc. Roche Diagnostics, Tandem Diabetes Care, Inc. and GlySens Incorporated. PR-Inside.com: 2018-12-19 09:21:01 SRV GROUP PLC STOCK EXCHANGE RELEASE 19 DECEMBER 2018 10.20 EET SRV to sell SRV Kalusto Oy to Ramirent SRV Group Plc and Ramirent Finland Ltd. have today signed a business purchase agreement for SRV Kalusto Oys entire share capital. With the acquisition, SRV is better equipped to develop the equipment rental and construction processes on its construction sites. The company's debt free purchase price is EUR 21 million. The price is paid in cash. SRV records capital gain of approximately EUR 14 million in the last quarter of the year. In 2017, the net sales of SRV Kalusto Oy amounted to approximately EUR 8 million and the operating profit was EUR 2.5 million. SRV Kalusto currently employs 33 people who will continue to work in the company without changes in their contracts. In connection with the agreement, SRV Kalusto Oy will change its name to Rami Kalusto Oy. SRV Kalusto Oy has acted as an internal equipment rental company in the SRV group, covering about 25% of SRVs equipment leasing and rental services on the sites. As part of the arrangement, SRV signed a long-term contract with Ramirent to cover a significant portion of SRV's annual equipment rental. The transaction does not change SRV's previous guidance of its operative operating profit for 2018, which is estimated to be in the red. For further information, please contact: Ilkka Pitkanen, CFO, tel. +358 40 667 09 06, ilkka.pitkanen@srv.fi Maija Karhusaari, SVP, Communications and Marketing, tel. +358 45 218 3772, maija.karhusaari@srv.fi www.srv.fi You can also find us on the social media: Facebook LinkedIn Twitter Instagram SRV - Building for life XploreMR 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. XploreMR PR-Inside.com: 2018-12-19 06:44:03 Press Information XploreMR Contact Us XploreMR 111 North Market Street, Suite 300 San Jose, CA 95113, United States Tel: +1-669-284-0108 Email: sales@xploremr.com sales@xploremr.com Sales 6692840108 email http://www.xploremr.com # 873 Words Contact UsXploreMR111 North Market Street, Suite 300San Jose, CA 95113, United StatesTel: +1-669-284-0108Email: sales@xploremr.comSales6692840108 Market Insights showcases a detailed and market friendly analysis of the global storage area network market in a publication titled Storage Area Network (SAN) Market: Global Industry Analysis and Opportunity Assessment, 2016-2026. In this report, we have studied the market behaviour and also tried to portray regional enhancements in the global storage area network market. In the in-depth analysis of the market, we have focussed on a gamut of market segments and judged their stability and potential in the competitive global climate.Report overview @ https://www.xploremr.com/report/1085/storage-area-network-san-market We have highlighted the greener patches in the market which will certainly help the stakeholders to understand and judge the growth potential of the global storage area network market. In this market insight, we have investigated the future of the global storage area network market. Our team of analysts has reviewed the market from 2016 till 2026 and it is an eye opener for the investors as it talks vividly about the drivers and restraints that are likely to define the performance of the global storage area network market.Our core team of analysts judged the market trends of the global storage area network market and also described how these trends will impact the future and the present of the market. As stakeholders play an important role in any market, we have also considered their international and domestic contribution. This has helped us understand their business strategies and also helped us take a deep-dive into the psyche of the global storage area network market.Request Sample At: https://www.xploremr.com/connectus/sample/1085 Report descriptionOut report sketches a proper canvas of the global storage area network market. We measure the growth potential of the market within the stipulated time period starting from 2016. The report starts with an executive summary followed by assumptions, acronyms and research methodology. The overview, snapshot, value forecast and extensive segmentation is also an integral part of this report.The report summary provides a 360-degee view of the global storage area network market. In the market taxonomy we have dissected the market based on different segments. In the next few chapters of the report, we have discussed the main drivers likely to fuel market growth and also highlighted some key restraints that might overshadow the development of the global storage area network market within the period of assessment.The next section is entirely dedicated to providing a proper intercontinental landscape of the global storage area network market. The last section of the report talks about the market analogy and also focusses on the present market share and contribution of key shareholders and reveals their future market investment plans.Market Insights research methodology is based on forecasts that highlight global as well as regional trends in the economy, technology and population along with company, product, country and demography specific trends. These trends are scrutinised minutely and factors underlying these trends are also detected.The factors to derive global market numbers include economic, technological, parent market (enterprise storage market) revenue, IT spending by various verticals for Storage Area Network application and some behavioural and competitive factors that affect the SAN market directly or indirectly. Forecast models are developed in order to quantify the impact of each of these factors on industry spending. A forecast scenario for each causative factor is then created and the contribution of each factor on a prospective basis is identified.Key metricsMetrics curate the base of a report. In our report on the global storage area network market, we have wrapped up all the major metrics to provide an extended picture of the market. We have used extensive data to compare and contrast the performance of the market across geographies.As a research firm, we know that every market is volatile and the overall performance of any market is completely dependent on the unpredictable, evolving nature of the economy and region and a slew of other factors. In this report, we have estimated the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of the regional and global markets and also noted down the Y-O-Y spike of the global storage area network market to understand the right opportunities and the climate of the market.Buy Now Full Report @ https://www.xploremr.com/cart/reports/buynow/1085 We have taken a multi-dimensional approach to measuring the embryonic development of the regional markets. We have adopted BPS (Basis Point Share) analysis and accounted for the individual contribution of each segment in the global market. This detailed approach towards the market has helped us understand the significant trends likely to dominate the global storage area network market in the forthcoming years.Another notable feature of our report is an analysis of the revenue forecast of the global market in terms of absolute dollar opportunity. While this is usually overlooked when forecasting the market, we believe absolute dollar opportunity analysis is critical in assessing the level of opportunity that market providers can look to achieve and also to identify potential resources in the storage area network market. In this report, we have also dissected the market segments on the basis of their individual performance and growth graph. The market attractiveness index at the end is included to help key stakeholders identify the future and present market scope. PR-Inside.com: 2018-12-19 20:21:45 Press Information Published by ACCESSWIRE News Network 888.952.4446 e-mail http://www.accesswire.com # 338 Words ACCESSWIRE News Network888.952.4446 VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / December 19, 2018 / Vertical Exploration Inc. (NEX: VERT.H) (the "Company") announces that it has closed the second and final tranche of its non-brokered private placement offering of Flow Through Units and Non-Flow Through Units, per its previous news releases on September 7, October 22, 2018 and December 4, 2018.For the second tranche, the Company issued 5,454,544 Flow Through Units at a price of $0.11 per Unit, for gross flow-through proceeds of $599,999.84, and 1,025,000 Non-Flow Through Units at a price of $0.10 per Unit, for gross hard dollar proceeds of $102,500 (for aggregate total gross proceeds of $702,499.84). Proceeds from the private placement will be used for qualifying expenditures, the Company's operating expenses and for general working capital.For both tranches the Company issued 6,904,544 Flow Through Units and 2,520,000 Non-Flow Through Units for total gross proceeds of $1,011,499.84.Each Flow Through Unit will be comprised of one "flow through" common share and one-half of a warrant. Each NFT Unit will be comprised of one non-flow through common share and one whole warrant. Each whole warrant will be exercisable at $0.20 per share, for a period of 2 years from issuance, subject to acceleration if the trading price of the common shares is $0.25 or greater for a period of 10 consecutive trading days. In such event, the Company may, in its sole discretion, accelerate the expiry date to a date that is 30 days after the Company issues a news release announcing same. All securities issued are subject to a hold period expiring on March 28, 2018.Finder's fees payable for the second tranche were $50,999.98 and 463,636 finder's warrants exercisable at $0.11 for a period of 2 years. In the second tranche, a director of the Company purchased 250,000 Non-Flow Through Units for a subscription price of $25,000.ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD"Peter P. Swistak"Peter P. Swistak, PresidentFor further information, please contact:Telephone: 604 683 3995Toll Free: 1 888 945 4770Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.SOURCE: Vertical Exploration Inc. PR-Inside.com: 2018-12-19 15:56:16 Press Information Web Design San Diego Brink Law Firm, 1201 Pacific Ave., Suite 2100, Tac Web Design San Diego Web Design San Diego +44(0)20 8892 1488 email https://www.yelp.com/biz/web-design-san-diego-san-diego-5 # 419 Words Brink Law Firm, 1201 Pacific Ave., Suite 2100, TacWeb Design San Diego+44(0)20 8892 1488 San Diego, USA 19 December 2018 - Web Design San Diego will redefine the notion of net design and online marketing for you.The internet is already everywhere. We are using it on a daily basis for all kinds of purposes. And even the market itself has been changed significantly, with most of the sales going online and all. 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Furthermore, the team will not leave you half way. In order for that design to work, you will need to make it as visible as possible and the best way to do so would be making the most from the SEO. Search Engine Optimization is a sort of a thing that does demand professional analysis and expert approach in order to really make the most from your positions, leads and conversions.Web Design San Diego therefore has you covered top to bottom. The agency will carefully analyze your needs and will deliver a number of choices so you could pick the one that suits you the most.About Web Design San Diego:Web Design San Diego is a team of extremely qualified and experienced web design and SEO experts ready to help you come up with the solid online strategy in no time! The company has an extensive portfolio and a number of flexible packages. Should you be interested in learning more, feel free to check out the official website.Contact:Company: Web Design San DiegoWebsite: https://www.yelp.com/biz/web-design-san-diego-san-diego-5 Organisers of the maiden Intra-African Trade Fair (IATF2018) said deals valued at about $32.6 billion were successfully sealed by various investors who participated in the seven day event. The event ended last Sunday in Cairo, Egypt. The African Export-Import Bank (AFREXIMBANK) organised the trade fair, hosted by the government of Egypt, in collaboration with the African Union. The bank said, in its preliminary report on the outcome of the trade fair sent to PREMIUM TIMES on Tuesday, that the amount represented the value of 100 deals concluded during the fair. The report said the number of deals might rise as there were some bilateral agreements among exhibitors that were yet to be recorded. The bank said majority of the deals were in industrialisation /export manufacturing sectors, where agreements on proposed projects valued at about $6.2 billion were signed during the fair. Other agreements were in the power sector ($6 billion) and financial services sector ($1.86 billion). The balance of the agreements on projects, worth over $18 billion, were in other key sectors, including oil and gas; transport and logistics; heavy industry; mining; infrastructure; healthcare and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) promotion. The preliminary report also showed that about 1,086 exhibitors attended the fair, with 45 countries having country pavilions. A total of about 584 companies were accommodated in country pavilions, while 375 were in private sector stands, with the creative industries having 36 participating exhibitors. In addition to operating country pavilions, Egypt and Nigeria also had special country days, which allowed them to enjoy a dedicated day for special programmes to showcase the business and investment potentials and opportunities in their countries. The IATF2018 Conference, which ran alongside the trade fair, also featured 42 sessions with 152 speakers drawn from across the world. The Virtual Trade Fair platform, which operated during the fair, attracted about 700 total registrations, with the rooms being accessed more than 7,000 times for product information. Market resources on the platform were accessed or downloaded about 2,000 times. About 300 booths have been built on the platform, which will remain active after the IATF. The creative industries component of IATF2018 featured six workshops and also attracted six mural artists. It also featured eight mini runway shows and an event called Fashionable Loud which was a major attraction attended by many visitors. The IATF2018, which ran from 11 to 17 December, was aimed at promoting trade among African countries and at supporting the implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement. Adeyemi Adetunji, managing director, Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) Retail said the company made N1.8 billion profit after tax in 2017. Mr Adetunji disclosed this in Abuja at the 1st Triennial Delegate Conference of the PENGASSAN, Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) Retail branch. NNPC Retail is a subsidiary of the NNPC. He said the total profit before tax was N3.2 billion in the year under review. NNPC Retail returns to the Corporation at the end of every year remains positive. In 2017, we made N3.2 billion profit before tax and after tax we had N1.8 billion profit, he said. He said the company had plans to expand to other markets in West Africa adding that it would continue to ensure effective marketing strategies. According to him, the company will continue to target good customer services and world class business model and performance. We have adopted a business model called POMP to help us to deliver on our mandate. P stands for people, without the people, we cannot run our business. O stands for operational excellence in supply and distribution especially on how we serve our customers While M represents Market focus and understanding the needs of customers. The P stands for partnership development which focuses on how to deliver values to customers, he said. Commenting on the 30 per cent market shares target given to the company by the NNPC Group Managing Director, Maikanti Baru, he said the company would strive to attain that and even more. Mr Adetunji said full implementation of POMP the new business model would help to drive the achievement of the target. (NAN) Drug inspectors have seized samples of Johnson & Johnson Baby Powder from a factory in northern India, an industry source said on Wednesday. The source said the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO) took samples from the firms Baddi plant in Himachal Pradesh state late on Tuesday. The seizures followed a Reuters report that the firm knew for decades that cancer-causing asbestos lurked in the product. J&J India did not have any immediate comment on the seizure. A CDSCO spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment. On Tuesday, Johnson & Johnson said the Reuters article, published on Friday, was one-sided, false and inflammatory. Johnson & Johnsons Baby Powder is safe and asbestos free, the U.S. company said. Studies of more than 100,000 men and women show that talc does not cause cancer or asbestos-related disease. Thousands of independent tests by regulators and the worlds leading labs prove our Baby Powder has never contained asbestos. Surendranath Sai, a regional drug officer in the southern state of Telangana, on Wednesday said he had instructed inspectors to seize samples there. On the basis of the news report, we are alerting staff to pick up samples. We will test them in a drug control lab here, said Sai. We will take action accordingly. Certainly we are worried because millions of babies may be affected. Earlier, the Times of India quoted an official source as saying 100 drug inspectors had been assigned to examine different manufacturing facilities, wholesalers and distributors linked to J&J India, starting early on Wednesday. A health ministry spokeswoman declined to comment when contacted, however a senior official at the ministry said the report was worrying. We are concerned about it and will take action, the official said. The official declined to be identified citing the sensitivity of the matter. The official did not elaborate on what kind of action. On Tuesday, a CDSCO spokeswoman said the Reuters report was under consideration. But she said it was too early to say whether a formal investigation would be launched into the baby powder that is ubiquitous in India, a country of 1.3 billion people. A Reuters examination of company memos, internal reports and other confidential documents, as well as deposition and trial testimony, showed that from at least 1971 to the early 2000s, Johnson & Johnsons raw talc and finished powders sometimes tested positive for small amounts of asbestos. Also company executives, mine managers, scientists, doctors and lawyers fretted over the problem and how to address it while failing to disclose it to regulators or the public. The documents also depicted successful efforts to influence U.S. regulators plans regarding limiting asbestos in cosmetic talc products and scientific research on talcs health effects. Johnson & Johnson said on Monday it planned to buy back up to five billion dollars of its stock, after $40 billion was wiped from its market value following the Reuters report. (Reuters/NAN) In this interview with PREMIUM TIMES Abdulaziz Abdulaziz, Chido Onumah speaks about his book We Are All Biafrans which will be presented to the public on Friday. He also speaks about citizenship in Nigeria, restructuring the country, and how to achieve a developed and democratic society. Excerpts 1. This is your third book all addressing issues of nationhood and development, are you not fatigued that most issues you and other essayists like you have been talking about remained unaddressed all this time? Certainly, not. Fatigued? No. But I am really concerned that the issues remain unaddressed. It is this issue that will shape the future of the country. It is unfortunate that we are not giving it the attention it deserves. I think the greatest challenge facing Nigeria today is the challenge of how to Nigerianize the country. We cant expect to develop as a nation if we dont address the issues of equity, unity and national integration. It is the elephant in the room. We talk about it in hushed tones. We revisit it when there is a national tragedy. Unfortunately, we seem not to have the will collectively to address it. Until we are ready and willing to address this issue, my duty as a writer is to continue to place it on the front burner of national discourse. 2. The title, We Are All Biafrans is provocative, and draws divergent comments. Was the choice deliberate? The title was deliberate, but it wasnt something I set out to do. I mean, I didnt plan to write a book and title it We Are All Biafrans. I have always attempted to be provocative in my writings and choice of book titles. My other books are Time to Reclaim Nigeria, Nigeria is Negotiable, Politics of State Robbery in Nigeria, and Death of a Nation: Biafra and the Nigerian Question. But this was something different because of the word Biafra. The word means different things to different people and can sometimes provoke anger or solidarity, depending on who you are speaking with. The idea came as a response to a public debate that took place at the height of the agitation by the group, the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) in late 2015. The main protagonists were Profs. Jibrin Ibrahim and Chidi Odinkalu. I think it started with a piece by Jibrin Ibrahim published in Premium Times (as well as in other papers) on November 30, 2015 with the title Resolving the Igbo Question. Several public intellectuals, including Profs Chidi Odinkalu, Jideofor Adibe, Okechukwu Ibeanu, and Victoria Ibezim-Ohaeri weighed in. Prof. Ibrahim raised some contentious issues in his piece. I would like to highlight a few. He wrote: The Igbos, we are told need emancipation from an oppressive Nigeria which has been oppressing and marginalising them since independence. Karl Marx would ask them if all groups in Nigeria have not been oppressed and marginalised as well. In addition, he would point out what history has done to the Igbos since colonisation, transforming them from an egalitarian society to one of the most unequal societies in the world in which abject poverty cohabits with the opulence of some of the richest people in the contemporary world. What the Igbo intellectual class has done is to develop a coherent marginalisation thesis, which the Igbo lumpen proletariat took and is running with. The thesis focuses on the issue of state creation, the Igbo presidency and the impact of the civil war. I followed the debate between Prof. Ibrahim and those who disagreed with him closely. Then I decided to weigh in. My intervention was titled We Are All Biafrans. I made the point that Prof. Ibrahims overall argument about the theory of marginalization can be applied to every group in Nigeria. My view is that really there is no Igbo question or there shouldnt be one. While it is true that different groups in the country have different demands, at the end of the day we all, as Nigerians, suffer the effect of mis-governance one way or another; that we should be more concerned about the Nigerian question. So, essentially the choice of the word Biafra was a metaphor to explain our collective woes as a nation. 3. At the centre for these essays is advocacy for a new political structure in place of the current arrangement. Why do you believe that would be the solution to Nigerias problems? I dont think that is the solution to all our problems and I have made this very clear in many of my interventions. I have said repeatedly that restructuring is not a silver bullet. But is it a pre-condition for any good thing we expect to happen in this country. Just like the great Pan-Africanist, Kwame Nkrumah, used to say, Seek ye first the political kingdom and all else shall be added unto you. As a nation, we need to seek first the restructuring kingdom because as a people we have yet to come to an agreement of what Nigeria means to us. Restructuring means different things to different people. I dont think that Nigeria will disintegratenot that it is impossible. But the country has become so intertwined that breaking it would only lead to the worst civil war in human history. We could have had three, four or more countries at independence or on the eve of the civil war in 1967 but we have a completely different scenario today. Of course, that is not to say we should take it for granted. I subscribe to the view of late Chief Bola Ige who once said that, There are two questions that must be answered by all of us Nigerians. One, do we want to remain as one country? Two, if the answer is yes, under what condition? This is the question every Nigerian should answer. By the time we get many Nigerians responding to this question, we will have an idea of what ails us. I am a firm believer in this country. I see a lot of potentials. But it is just that: potentials. We need to translate that potential to something concrete, something beneficial to the mass of our people. And the only way we can transform that potential is to have a common goal, a national ethos. 4. What specifics, in your view, are the issues with the current political structure we are operating in Nigeria? There are so many things wrong with the current structure of the country. But more than anything else, I think what we must confront is the question of citizenship rights. We must deal with the contentious issue of indigene vs settler. Nigeria is a federal republic in name. Of course, we must address the issue of fiscal federalism. The federal government is too over-bearing. The states need to be given more powers to run their affairs and contribute to the federal government rather than depending on the federal government. Take things like rail line and airports, critical infrastructure that every nation needs. These things are in the exclusive list of the constitution which means that only the federal government should handle them (even though some states have gone ahead to build their own airports). It is not the duty of the federal government to create local governments for states. There are so many things we can talk about. Much of structural problem we face today is a product of years of military rule. Perhaps, successive military governments felt the only way to keep the country together was to centralise everything. But that attitude does not take into consideration the history of the country. In many places around the world where the military intervened, they made sure not to tamper with the structure of those countries. After many years of dictatorship and corruption, those countries were able to pull themselves up and rebuild. In the case of Nigeria, the military were not only corrupt and brutal, they succeeded in destroying the very essence of the country which is federalism. 5. Those who are for the status quo would tell you that those in charge of our current sub-national structures do not justify why they should get greater power. Arent you concerned that giving more powers (and more resources) to the states would only create even greater problems? I am not concerned at all. That cant be an argument against returning to the very fundamental on which this country was created. Nigeria is a federal republic. It gained independence as a federation of three regions, then four. From that we had 12 states and today we have 36 states. That is not a problem. The problem is what you do with those states, their powers and relationship with the centre. There is nothing you accuse the states of that you can find at the centre. The states are the constituent parts of our federation and therefore should have the requisite powers. There will be states that will use their powers effectively while there will be others that will abuse their powers. 6. Patriotism and sense of belief in the country are issues you tackled in some of your essays. To what extent do you think lack of patriotism contributes to the worsening of our developmental issues and corruption? I think it is the lack of patriotism and belief in the country that has made it impossible for the country to develop. It explains the mindless corruption in the country. It is only a mad person that will steal from himself the way Nigerians, particularly those in public office, pillage the country. We need to bring back that sense of belief in the country. In another book of mine, The Politics of State Robbery in Nigeria, I referenced the seminal work of Prof Peter Ekeh, Colonialism and the Two Publics in Africa: A Theoretical Statement to buttress this argument about how we conveniently and unconscionably steal from the civic public and divert the loot to the primordial public. Again, let me restate what I wrote in one of the essays in the book, We Are All Biafrans. There is an undeniable link between national identity and development. As Francis Fukuyama notes in his book, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy, Critical to the success of state building is a parallel process of nation-building. This is the missing puzzle in Nigerias quest for development. Let me answer your question directly by quoting Fukuyama again. Much of what passes as corruption is not simply a matter of greed but rather the byproduct of legislators or public officials who feel more obligated to family, tribe, religion or ethnic group than to the national community and therefore divert money in that direction. They are not necessarily immoral people, but their circle of moral obligation is smaller than that of the polity for which they work. We have seen situations where public officers steal state funds meant for schools, roads, hospitals, etc., and then go and build churches and mosques. That is the tragedy of Nigeria. South Africa has issued an arrest warrant for Zimbabwes former first lady, Grace Mugabe, over an alleged assault in an upmarket district of Johannesburg last year, a police spokesman said on Wednesday. After the alleged assault with an electric cable came to light in August 2017, the South African government granted Grace Mugabe diplomatic immunity. That immunity was overturned by a South African court this year, after the alleged victim, model Gabriella Engels, challenged the decision. I can confirm that a warrant for the arrest of Grace Mugabe was issued last Thursday, South African Police Service spokesman Vishnu Naidoo said. He added that police were seeking Interpols help to enforce the warrant. There was no immediate comment from Mrs Mugabe or from authorities in Harare. Mrs Mugabe was seen as a potential successor to her 94-year-old husband Robert, who ruled Zimbabwe from 1980 until he was ousted in a coup late last year. She lived in a luxury hotel in Johannesburgs Sandton district at the time of the incident. She has denied assaulting Engels with an electric cable, saying an intoxicated and unhinged Engels attacked her with a knife after the model had gone to see the Mugabes sons at the hotel. South African advocacy group Afriforum, which represented Engels, has dismissed Mrs Mugabes denial as a lie. Mrs Mugabe has retreated from the limelight in Zimbabwe since her husband was ousted in the November 2017 coup. (Reuters/NAN) The United States is considering a total withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria, U.S. officials said on Wednesday. The consideration comes as it nears the end of its campaign to retake all of the territory once held by Islamic State. Such a decision, if confirmed, would nullify assumptions about a longer-term U.S. military presence in Syria. U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and other senior U.S. officials had advocated longer term presence to help ensure Islamic State cannot reemerge. Still, President Donald Trump has previously expressed a strong desire to bring troops home from Syria when possible. The timing of the withdrawal was not immediately clear. U.S. officials who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity did not disclose details about the deliberations, including who was involved. It was unclear how soon a decision could be announced. The United States still has about 2,000 troops in Syria. Many of them are special operations forces working closely with an alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF. The partnership with the SDF over the past several years has led to the defeat of Islamic State in Syria. However, this outraged NATO ally Turkey, which views Kurdish YPG forces in the alliance as an extension of a militant group fighting inside Turkey. The deliberations on U.S. troops come as Ankara threatens a new offensive in Syria. To date, U.S. forces in Syria have been seen as a stabilising factor in the country and have somewhat restrained Turkeys actions against the SDF. A complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria would still leave a size-able U.S. military presence in the region, including about 5,200 troops across the border in Iraq. Much of the U.S. campaign in Syria has been waged by warplanes flying out of Qatar and other locations in the Middle East. Still, Mr Mattis and U.S. State Department officials have long fretted about leaving Syria before a peace agreement can be reached to end that countrys brutal civil war. The war has killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced around half of Syrias pre-war population of about 22 million. In April, Mr Mattis said: We do not want to simply pull out before the diplomats have won the peace. You win the fight and then you win the peace. Islamic State is also widely expected to revert to guerrilla tactics once it no longer holds territory. A U.S. withdrawal could open Trump up to criticism if Islamic State reemerged. Mr Trump has previously lambasted his predecessor, Barack Obama, for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. That withdrawal preceded an unraveling of the Iraqi armed forces. Iraqi forces collapsed in the face of Islamic States advance into the country in 2014. (Reuters/NAN) The wife of the vice president, Dolapo Osinbajo, has appealed to Nigerians to stop the use of hard drugs. Mrs Osinbajo, in a press statement made available to PREMIUM TIMES on Tuesday, made the appeal during a courtesy visit to the minister of health, Isaac Adewole, by the Presidential Advisory Committee on the Elimination of Drug Abuse. The courtesy call to the minister, who incidentally, is also a member of the committee, was to advocate for more effort on the fight against the use of hard drugs in Nigeria. According to the statement, Mrs Osinbajo noted that drugs commonly abused include: cigarette, caffeine, tramadol and codeine. She added that the committee would ensure that health facilities across the country will not only heal drug users body but their minds as well, ensuring those free from drugs addiction do not get back to it. Drug abuse has become a common phenomenon in the country. Though some claim that the problem is predominant in the northern part of the country, this may not be wholly true, as the menace cuts across gender, age, culture, language and territorial zones of the country. The government, in an effort to curb the menace had earlier this year banned the importation and sale of tramadol and related drugs. However, this has not reduced the problem and has, instead, given rise to other forms of psychoactive stimulants. Mr Adewole, in his welcome address, debunked the narrative that drug abuse was only present in Northern Nigeria especially Kano State. He said states like Lagos, Rivers among others are also involved in the abuse of drugs. Mr Adewole tasked the working group to look at codeine and other related drug and enforce ban on their production, distribution and sales. The chairman of the committee, the former military governor of Lagos State, Buba Marwa, in his remark, pledged that the committee would interact with critical partners charged with the responsibility of putting an end to the issue of drug abuse in the country. Members of the presidential advisory committee include the wife of the president and vice president, representatives of Governors Wives Forum (North and South), Nigerian Custom Service, The National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control, The National Drug Law Enforcement Agency, The Nigeria Police Force, among others. Inserting ones finger or soap into the vagina causes infections which can overtime kill sexual pleasure, a gynaecologist at the University College Hospital in Ibadan, Imran Morhason-Bello, has said. In order to reduce infections and preserve the natural anatomy of the vagina, Mr Morhason-Bello advised women to stop using soap or perfume to clean private parts. Mr Morhason-Bello gave this advice on Wednesday as part of a lecture at an advocacy meeting on the need to curb medicalisation of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in Nigeria. The meeting which held in Abuja was organised by the Federal Ministry of Health in collaboration with the United Nations Population Fund (UNPFA) and University of Ibadan Center for Population and Reproductive Health. Mr Marhason-Bello said FGM is not the only bad practice that causes havoc to womens private part and their sexual lives but also actions of women in the bid of clean up their private parts. He said this causes consistent infections, thereby affecting their sex drive and ability to experience pleasure while having sex. He said FGM is not only related to cutting, it also involves using any material that could destroy the structural anatomy of the female external genitals. Mr Morhason-Bello while speaking with journalists explained that women need to avoid inserting non-prescribed medication, perfumes, and deodorants in their vagina as this can lead to infection. The reason is that there are some products that women are using for cleaning up, some of them have corrosive materials that will elicit corrosion at the clitoris and labia side which is very thin and heavily vascularised. When you disrupt it, then this area will heal by secondary intention and when it heals by secondary intention there is scaring in the nerve invasion that makes them to be sensitive and therefore their sexual drive will be lost, he said. Mr Morhason-Bello also condemned inserting of fingers into the vagina as a form of cleaning up. He advised that women wash the vagina with water and not mind the odour from the private parts because the odour is characteristic of the vagina. The surest material for a lady to use to clean up is clean water because when you use anything that has antiseptic materials, it would destroy the normal organisms that nature or God has created for that place, he said He also advised that when shaving the pubic hair, women should be careful so as not to bruise the region. Sometimes when you observe the vulva of some women because of multiple scars from shaving with blade, the area is disrupted and it can affect their sexual sensation later in life, he added. An explosion rocked the Abule Egba area of Lagos State Wednesday morning, PREMIUM TIMES can report. Our correspondent gathered that the explosion occurred when suspected vandals broke an oil pipeline in the area, leading to spillage. Numerous houses, cars and offices were destroyed by the explosion. A PREMIUM TIMES reporter currently at the scene of the incident Wednesday morning reported that residents were counting their losses. The number of human victims could not be ascertained as at before press time. Explosion rocks Abule-egba; cars houses burnt Explosion rocks Abule-egba; cars houses burnt Explosion rocks Abule Egba, Lagos Explosion rocks Abule Egba, Lagos Explosion rocks Abule Egba, Lagos Explosion rocks Abule Egba, Lagos Explosion rocks Abule Egba, Lagos Details later The All Progressives Congress (APC), has dissolved the executive committees in Imo and Ogun states at the state, local government, and ward levels. This dissolution was confirmed to PREMIUM TIMES by the publicity secretary of the party, Lanre Issa-Onilu, Wednesday morning. The dissolved executives were loyal to the respective state governors: Ibikunle Amosun of Ogun and Rochas Okorocha of Imo. Messrs Amosun and Okorocha have been at loggerheads with the party headquarters over the outcome of the APC primaries in their states. Although both governors are APC senatorial candidates and have pledged loyalty to President Muhammadu Buhari, they have publicly declared support for governorship candidates of other parties. The decision to dissolve the APC executives in Ogun and Imo, Mr Issa-Onilu said, was reached at the National Working Committee (NWC) meeting presided over by Mr Oshiomhole in Abuja on Tuesday. That is true. The two governors and the state excos have publicly expressed the fact that they will support (their) candidates in other parties, in their respective states, Mr Issa-Onilu said. So those excos, right from the state to the ward level are not people we can trust to work honestly, for the success of our party in the next election. He said the party views this action as anti-party activities, so it will not be in its interest to allow their structure to be used to undermine their chances in those states. It is within our powers to ensure that we protect the interest of the party and also to activate relevant sections of our constitution which prohibit members from carrying out activities that are inimical to the interest of the party, he said. In their place, the NWC said it would inaugurate caretaker committees that would take charge of party affairs in the two states ahead of the general elections. When asked what will be done to the governors who are involved in this, Mr Issa-Onilu said you would be hearing from us regarding that, shortly. The All Progressives Congress (APC) in Ogun State has dismissed its dissolution by the partys National Working Committee. PREMIUM TIMES reported the decision of the NWC headed by the partys national chairman, Adams Oshiomhole, to dissolve the APC at all levels of government in Ogun State. The Ogun APC is loyal to the state governor, Ibikunle Amosun, who has been at loggerheads with Mr Oshiomhole since the partys controversial primaries. Mr Amosun, who is still an APC senatorial candidate in the state, encouraged his allies, including a governorship aspirant who lost in the primaries, to defect to another party. He has pledged to work against the APC in the governorship election in the state. The APC national spokesperson, Lanre Issa-Onilu, confirmed the dissolution to PREMIUM TIMES on Wednesday. So those excos, right from the state to the ward level are not people we can trust to work honestly, for the success of our party in the next election, Mr Issa-Onilu said. In his response, the chairman of the dissolved Ogun APC executive, Derin Adebiyi, described the dissolution as an exercise in futility. He said the matter was sub judice, as it is before a court of competent jurisdiction, presided over by Hon. Justice Jude Okeke of the FCT High Court, Abuja. Read Mr Adebiyis full statement below. The Ogun State chapter of the All Progressives Congress (APC) has dismissed its dissolution by the National Working Committee (NWC) of the party, as an exercise in futility, noting that the state chapter of the party remains in office and is carrying out its legal duties in line with the constitution of the APC. It said the matter was sub judice, as it is before a court of competent jurisdiction, presided over by Hon. Justice Jude Okeke of the FCT High Court, Abuja. In the Suit No CV/363/2018, the Ogun State chapter of the party is seeking the protection of the court against attempts by the NWC to undermine it and abridge its tenure in any form. National Chairman of All Progressives Congress, (APC), Adams Oshiomhole 03946/23/7/18/Ismaila Ibrahim/NAN According to a statement signed by the Chairman of the state chapter of the party, Chief Derin Adebiyi, The Ogun APC views its purported dissolution as a brazen disregard for the judiciary, hence the Nigerian constitution and flagrant abuse of power by the Oshiomhole-led National Working Committee. The action of the NWC is patently illegal; it is an assault on the APC constitution and outside the bounds of acceptable standards in the conduct of party affairs the world over. It was such acts of impunity that led us in the first place to seek legal protection for a four-year mandate freely given to us by the overwhelming majority of party members in Ogun State in May 2018. There is no iota of truth in the charge of anti-party activities levelled against us, as we remain committed to the ideals of the APC, Adebiyi said. The party chairman further posited that You cannot dissolve a legally constituted body, such as Ogun APC exco on a whim. When a matter is in court, all parties are expected to maintain the status quo. What Oshiomhole-led NWC has done amounts to self-help and bare-faced attempt to render nugatory the judicial powers granted the courts by the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. According to him, We condemn this attempt to foist a faith accompli on the judiciary, undermine its powers and turn it into a toothless bulldog. The NWC is legally represented in the present suit. We urge it to allow the judicial process to run its full course. The statement urged party faithful in Ogun State to remain calm as the Derin Adebiyi-led APC exco remains in office for the good of our great party. Alexander Sabundu Badeh, Nigerias former Chief of Defence Staff whose career spanned 38 years at the twilight of which he led war efforts against Boko Haram Terrorism died Tuesday, December 18. He was 61. The retired general died from wounds sustained after gunshots were fired at him, alongside his driver, as he was returning from his farm along Abuja-Keffi Road, the military said Tuesday evening. Air Marshal Badeh was born on January 7, 1957, in Vimtim, or Vim for short, a little known Fali-speaking community in Mubi Local Government Area of Adamawa State, Nigerias North-east. Vim, as well as other parts of Mubi, fell to Boko Haram in late 2014 when the communitys most illustrious son ever was Nigerias highest-ranking military officer. The government later announced the recapture of Mubi but the terrorists earlier renamed it Modinatul-Islam and caused massive displacements. After his secondary school education, Mr Badeh gained admission to the Nigerian Defence Academy in January 1977 starting his career as a member of 21 Regular Course and was commissioned a Pilot Officer on July 3, 1979, when at the 301 Flying Training School, he first flew on Bulldog Primary Trainer aircraft. Between 1981 and 1982, he was at the Vance Air Force Base in the United States for the undergraduate pilot training. He later attended the junior staff course at Armed Forces Command and Staff College in 1988. Between 1995 and 1996, he attended the senior staff course at the same institution. In 2005, he was at the National War College Nigeria as a member of Course 14 and graduated in August 2006. He attended Safety International Institute at Teterboro in New York for a course in Simulator Recurrence. In 2008, he was promoted to the rank of Air Vice Marshal, after he had served as the Commander of the Presidential Air Fleet (2002-2004) under the Olusegun Obasanjo presidency. Late Alex Badeh in Court (Photo Credit: SaharaReporters) Before his appointment as the 18th Chief of Air Staff by President Goodluck Jonathan in 2012, he had served as the Chief of Policy and Plans at the Air Force Headquarters. As the Chief of Air Staff, most remarkably, he promoted R and D collaborations with various Nigerian universities and initiated Optimising Local Engineering, bringing together PhD and Masters degree holders in the Force to develop indigenous weapon systems. He later became the Chief of Defence Staff in April 2014, serving until July 2015 when he was fired by President Muhammadu Buhari. He reached the highest level attainable in the military. And it was not absolutely about a matter of personal achievements at least he drove local content. But as a wartime military commander, his show was dismal. Boko Haram took swathes of Nigerias territory, including his hometown, and killed thousands of people under what seemed to be a free reign of terror with the military under Mr Badeh unable to account for funds meant to prosecute the devastating war. Mr Badeh, before his death, was among top ex-service men standing trial for corruptly enriching themselves from the funds that should have been freed up for resources to combat Boko Haram. In one of his mansions, $1 million was found according to anti-graft EFCC operatives. In 2016, he spent days in Kuje Prison where he was remanded. As he struggled to meet his bail conditions, enduring poor conditions in the prison, he was reported to have rejected the food served him. What he had to endure was reminiscent of what men and women on the frontline facing Boko Haram fires in the North-eastern jungles have continued to complain about. They blame their chiefs, of which Mr Badeh was one, for a few years. Mr Badehs killing on the outskirts of Nigerias capital has triggered renewed conversations among Nigerians about the security situation in the country. Many opine it was the diversion of funds by people in positions of public responsibility, as Mr Badeh once was, that contributed to the state of insecurity in the country. President Muhammadu Buhari on Wednesday said N305 billion had been earmarked for petrol subsidy in the 2019 budget proposal. Mr Buhari stated this in his budget presentation speech to a joint session of the National Assembly in Abuja. We have allowed N305 billion equivalent to one billion U.S. dollars for under-recovery by the NNPC (Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation) on Premium Motor Spirit in 2019. Let me take this opportunity to address and clarify the under-recoveries on petrol. In a period of economic challenges where purchasing power is weak, we must reduce some of the burden on Nigerians, he said. The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the Buhari administration had withdrawn subsidy on petrol in 2016, forcing independent oil marketers to pull out of importation of the product. Their withdrawal left the NNPC as the sole importer of petrol, whose pump price remained capped at N145 per litre against a landing and supply cost of N185/litre. Since then, the NNPC has been drawing from the Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas (NLNG) dividend fund to cover the under-recoveries amounting to N40/litre in the importation of petrol. So far, the NNPC has utilised 1.05 billion dollars or N320 billion of the fund to cover the under-recoveries, according to its Group Managing Director, Mr Maikanti Baru. However, this has drawn the anger of the Senate, which believes the oil company lacked the legal powers to unilaterally spend the money without appropriation by the National Assembly. According to analysts, the provision for subsidy in the 2019 budget proposal will lay to rest the disagreement between the lawmakers and the NNPC on the matter. Mr Buhari said the problem with subsidy in the past was abuse and corruption, especially by independent oil marketers. Today, the government-owned NNPC is the sole importer of PMS, and therefore the under-recovery is from the NNPC trading account. This means the possibility of some oil marketers filing bogus claims is removed. We will continue working to bring it (subsidy) downward to ensure such revenue sources are freed up to meet the developmental needs of our people, the president said. (NAN) Adams Oshimhole, the National Chairman of the All Progressive Congress (APC) has called for a united labour movement that would confront the challenges bedevilling workers welfare in the country. Mr Oshiomhole said this at a programme in honour of the new President of the International Trade Union of Confederation (ITUC), Ayuba Wabba, on Tuesday in Abuja. The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that on December 5, Mr Wabba, who is the president, Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), was elected President of ITUC in Copenhagen, Denmark for a term of four years. ITUC is the largest trade union federation in the world and represents 207 million workers across the globe with 331 labour centres in 163 countries. Mr Oshiomhole said that unity had become necessary as there were a lot of distractions to divide the labour movement in the country. He said: I congratulate Comrade Wabba. But this must force us to do serious reflections if we are going to preside over the workers of the world. What do we do to deal with the distractions at home when we still have some of our brothers and comrades who still think that at this time, we can make sense out of a divided labour movement. The slogan that united we stand, divided we fall will always be valid. I hope that the spirit of your election will touch the heart of those who seem to be confused. There can be no question that united we stand, divided we fall. There is only one organised Labour and I am happy that President Muhammadu Buhari, speaking through the lips of the Vice President, has reassured Nigeria Labour Movement that his government will not provide a platform for anyone to factionalise organised labour. You are not under the kind of threat that we faced when I was President of NLC when the former President sent a law to the National Assembly, not only to deregister the NLC, but also to make it possible for any three or four unions to form a Labour Centre, he said. He said Mr Buhari believed that the country needed more national institutions and that organised labour was a potent unity bridge that must be sustained. APC National Chairman, Adams Oshiomole Photo: Oriental Times He added that under this government, there would not be another registered labour centre in the country. We need to be fired by the spirit of our people to work together and deal with all the issues that are bedevilling our country, he said. He, therefore, charged the new president of the ITUC to confront the new challenges as it concerns trade unions around the world. Also speaking, Boss Mustapha, Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF) said the presidency was delighted about the international recognition. I want to congratulate Comrade Ayuba and assure you that as a government, we will give you all the support that you desire to succeed because we believe that from this elevation, you have become an ambassador of Nigeria to the international arena. They will watch you as they will watch the President of Nigeria because by extension, every decision you take there within the context of the fact that you are first a Nigerian before leading the world. I plead with you that in your representation, let the spirit of excellence with which you have led in this country be reflected in your leadership so that for once, it will be adjudged by the entire world that Nigerians are competent, efficient, and effective when it comes to the provision of leadership. Mr Mustapha, however, said that Nigeria would continue to give effective leadership to the different organisations to which Nigerians have been appointed. (NAN) President Muhammadu Buharis main challenger ahead of the 2019 general elections, Atiku Abubakar, has again criticised him for allegedly running the economy aground and called on Nigerians to vote him out. The job report released by the National Bureau of Statistics on Wednesday, November 19, 2018, is not just terrible, it is catastrophic. They show that under the All Progressives Congress administration, a whopping 20.93 million Nigerians have lost their jobs, Mr Abubakar said via a statement by his spokesperson, Paul Ibe. To put this in perspective the unemployed population in Nigeria is now twice the population of Benin Republic!, it added. Mr Abubakar also said Nigeria cannot continue along this path, especially with an administration that continues to blame others for things that they should find solutions for. This is especially with the latest ridiculous episode being President Buharis blaming of former President (Goodluck) Jonathan for his own inability to appoint ministers for six months, an action that is directly responsible for the sorry state of unemployment in Nigeria. We urge Nigerians to note that a president who cant create jobs or wealth in his own private business cannot create jobs or wealth for the public because you cannot give what you do not have. Right now, Nigeria is the world headquarters of extreme poverty and our main challenge is jobs. Atiku Abubakar is an expert at job and wealth creation having created 50,000 jobs in his own private capacity. Whatever is entrusted into the hands of Waziri Atiku Abubakar blooms. This is a man who will never blame others and will always accept responsibility for changing things. Nigeria needs jobs and Atiku means JOBS, the statement added. Ahead of the 2019 general election, the Youth Initiative for Advocacy, Growth and Advancement (YIAGA) has said vote buying, domination by two political parties, violence against women and hate speech were factors that may hinder the success of the polls. In its second pre-election observation report titled, Is the Integrity of Nigerias 2019 Elections UNDER THREAT? under Watching The Vote (WTV) project, it also focused on the preparedness of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). YIAGA said the WTV second report was done between November 23 and December 6, and is based on reports received from all 774 Long-Term Observers (LTOs) across the country. YIAGA said this is one out of six reports it will issue to show its findings in the pre-election period. In this report, we present findings on the preparedness of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), voter education and information activities, political campaign activities, inclusion of women, persons living with disabilities (PWDs) and youth, as well as issues relating to pre-election violence, the report said. INEC The report showed that the WTV/LTO witnessed a high increase in the collection of PVCs adding that INEC in the North-west region has the highest level of preparation, while it said the North-central region INEC recorded the lowest level of reparation ahead of the elections. The North-west region has the highest incidence of preparatory activities by INEC while the North-central region recorded the lowest. Also, The North-central geopolitical zone recorded the highest collection rate while the North-east witnessed the least rate of PVC collection. Highlights The organisation in the report focused on campaigns, voter inducements, violence, buying of PVCs, treatment of women in political participation and low increase in voters. YAIGA said since the kick-off of party campaign, the ruling party All Progressive Party (APC) and the main opposition Party Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) have dominated the campaign scenes across the federation. The two major parties namely All Progressive Congress (APC) and Peoples Democratic Party (APC) have dominated the campaign scene across the federation. The South-west region recorded the lowest rate of campaigns by political parties. The PDP recorded 65 per cent while the APC 63 per cent in the level of electoral campaigns nationwide. Voter inducement increased in the second phase of the pre-election observation. There was an incidence of voter inducement in at least one LGA in each of the 36 states and the FCT. WTV LTOs witnessed the cases of voter inducement in 15 per cent of LGAs, a marginal increase of 3 per cent from the 12 per cent reported in the first reporting period, the report said inter alia. The report also warned of violence as the political temperature in some states rises. WTV observers witnessed the incidence of vandalism and destruction of properties belonging to candidates or political parties. The North-west region has the highest record of pre-election violence. In 18 per cent of LGAs. WTV Observers witnessed or heard of hate speech, violence or intimidation of candidates or people because they are women. Hate speech against people or candidates because of their faith was reported in 13 per cent of LGAs. Similarly, in 22 per cent of LGAs, there was hate speech against people or candidate because of their age and hate speech violence or intimidation of people as a result of their disability was reported in 6 per cent of LGAs. The report indicates the PVCs were bought for as high as N10, 000 and N20,000 in 15 states. It said this is a sign of danger for the credibility of the 2019 elections if unaddressed. WTV LTOs reported incidence of illegal procurement of PVCs from voters is 15 states namely: Benue, Kogi, Nassarawa, Abia, Akwa Ibom, Ebonyi, Edo, Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, Niger, Imo, Rivers, Oyo and Yobe States. WTV observers directly witnessed the buying of PVCs in 1 per cent of LGAs and in 16 per cent of LGAs, the observers heard of this illegal act. The report said physical violence towards women during political party campaign rallies was observed in the first reporting period. This incident was directly observed in 1 per cent of the LGAs during the first reporting period, the same percentage was also reported during the second reporting period. Incidents of physical attacks against women during political party campaign rallies were directly witnessed by LTOs in Benue, Kogi, Borno, Jigawa, Kebbi, Sokoto, Imo and Oyo States. Recommendations YIAGA advised INEC and other organisations to continue educating citizens on the importance of their votes, election timetable, the electoral process and PVCs collection. It also urged security agencies to partner with CSOs in monitoring violence for an effective response system, also to remain neutral throughout the electoral process and bring perpetrators of violence to book. President Muhammadu Buhari on Wednesday said N462.2 billion had been earmarked for education in the 2019 budget proposal. Mr Buhari said this in his budget presentation speech to a joint session of the National Assembly in Abuja on Wednesday. According to the president, every child counts. This is the guiding principle of our national educational system and entails far-reaching actions to boost digital literacy, impart functional skills to our children, and re-train tens of thousands of teachers every year. Indeed, we must equip our children from a very young age with skills for the modern era by emphasising education in science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics, he said. Meanwhile, the funds allocated to the sector, mostly for recurrent expenditure, is a bit higher than the N435.1 billion allocated in 2018. Despite the marginal increase, it is still low by UNESCO standards. UNESCO recommends 15 to 20 per cent of budgetary allocation to the education sector to enable nations adequately cater for rising demands. Also, the governments much-publicised commitment to increase spending on education is being called to question particularly as university teachers have been on strike since November 4. The university teachers are protesting poor funding of universities and the failure of government to implement an agreement it signed in 2009 with ASUU to improve facilities and enhance staff welfare at the institutions. Also, the Academic Staff of Union of Polytechnics (ASUP) has been on strike since December 12. The teachers went on strike over non-implementation of the NEEDS Assessment report of 2014, non-payment of salaries in state-owned institutions, non-payment of allowances and alleged victimisation of union members, among others. Meanwhile, Colleges Of Education Academic Staff Union(COEASU) suspended over two months old strike on December 5. The union said it will reconvene in January to reassess governments commitment and will not hesitate to stay away from work again if the government reneges on the agreement. Apart from the commitment to provide more funds for universities, the government is also under pressure to address the menace of out-of-school-children. According to Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC), Nigeria has about 13.2 million out- of- school children, the worlds highest. Earlier in his presentation, President Buhari said government proposed an estimated expenditure of N8.83 trillion for 2019, including grants and donor funds of N209.92 billion. He said as part of the recurrent expenditure, personnel costs would gulp an estimated N2.29 trillion, nearly about 40 per cent of projected revenues. A breakdown of the proposal shows about N4.04 trillion will go for recurrent costs; debt service (N2.14 trillion); statutory transfers (N492.36 billion); Sinking Fund (N120 billion) to be used to retire maturing bond to local contractors; and Capital Expenditure of N2.031 trillion. The senator representing Akwa Ibom North West, Godswill Akpabio says the inability of the Senate President, Bukola Saraki and the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara to deliver speech during President Muhammadu Buharis budget presentation is a sign of weakness. He asked them to resign their positions peacefully. Mr Akpabio stated this on Wednesday in an interview with journalists shortly after Mr Buhari presented the 2019 Appropriation Bill at the National Assembly in Abuja. Messrs Saraki and Dogara were expected to make opening and closing remarks respectively before and after the presentation. However, the rowdy session at the presentation made it impossible for the two presiding officers to deliver their speech. Reacting to the development, Mr Akpabio, a former governor of Akwa Ibom State, said Messrs Saraki and Dogara could not speak because they were no longer qualified to do so. They really couldnt talk because they shouldnt be sitting on those seats since they now belong to a minority party. When I was in the minority party, I was the minority leader; I wasnt the Senate President. So I will expect that what has happened today should be a wakeup call on the Speaker and the Senate President to resign peacefully, he said. On the rowdy session, he said such action was a characteristic of a parliament all over the world. But you could also notice that the majority party, the APC, showed its strength. There was a lot of quietness; there was a lot of silence whenever the President was making key points. The rest were just normal nuances of politics, he said. The senator said the 2019 Budget would revive the decayed infrastructure in the country. The good thing about todays Budget presentation is that there is hope that there is going to be what I will call a rejuvenation in terms of infrastructural decay in Nigeria. I believe Nigerians are very proud today that they have a government, they have a president who is very determined to change not just the mental psyche of the Nigerian child but to change the face of infrastructure in the country, he said. According to him, You would have noticed something about President Buhari quite unlike what happened in the past when we used to have so much of recurrent expenses sometimes up to 70 or 78 per cent. There was never a time under the PDP administration that we have more than 23 per cent on capital expenses, but look at the number of capital projects he rolled out today. That never happened before and that was why almost all the infrastructure died and we did not even have money for maintenance of infrastructure, he said. The former governor, who described the presentation as a success, said all that Mr Buhari had for each region in the budget were amazing. It was a very good budget presentation. It captures all facets of our national life and expectations of many Nigerians, he said. Mr Buhari unveiled a federal budget proposal of N8.83 trillion for the 2019 fiscal year. The 2019 total budget estimate is N300 billion lower than the N9.1 billion being implemented for the current fiscal year. The sum of N4.04 trillion or 50.31 per cent is earmarked for Recurrent Expenditure and N2.03 trillion representing 22.98 per cent for capital projects. (NAN) A group of civil society members on Wednesday protested at the National Human Rights Commission over the continued detention of political activist, Deji Adeyanju who was arrested for the third time in less than a month. Mr Adeyanju has been in detention for six days, without charge. Mr Adeyanju was earlier arrested following allegations of defamation and disruption of public peace among other offences by the police. He was arrested a third time on December 13. According to the police, Mr Adeyanjus latest arrest is related to his alleged involvement in a murder case, dispensed almost a decade ago by the courts of law. Despite the explanation by Mr Adeyanjus lawyer, Festus Keyamo that the detained man was acquitted and the case discharged by the court, the police has refused to release Mr Adeyanju. PREMIUM TIMES had earlier reported how Mr Adeyanju was held at the Abuja police command headquarters, barely a week after he was released on bail over duplicated charges of defamation initiated by the police and the Nigerian Army. Mr Adeyanju had on Thursday gone to collect a telephone which the police seized from him when he was first arrested for leading a protest against alleged police bias on November 28 and subsequently charged for defamation same day. But officers refused to release the device and instead arrested him shortly after 3:00 p.m. On Tuesday, Mr Adeyanju was transferred to Kano State, where the police say he has a case to answer. On Wednesday, a group of activists canvassing the release of Mr Adeyanju protested at the commission, demanding his unconditional release. The protesters were led by Dare Ariyo-Atoye, who coordinates a group called the Coalition in Defence of Nigerian Democracy and Constitution. Also speaking at the event, a journalist, Frederick Onwubufor, condemned Mr Adeyanyus arrest. He warned that Nigerias democracy will not be allowed to be tarnished by political forces, regardless of those in power. The group was received by the Director of Corporate Affairs and External Linkages, Lambert Okpara. The Social Democratic Party (SDP) said it had received a Federal High Court judgment directing it to recognise Jerry Gana as its presidential candidate for 2019 election. The partys Deputy National Chairman, Abdul Isiaq, disclosed this when he received Mr Gana who paid a courtesy visit to the party national secretariat on Wednesday in Abuja. The Federal High Court in Maitama, Abuja had last Friday declared Mr Gana, a former information minister, as the rightful candidate of SDP in the 2019 election. The party had earlier declared former Governor of Cross River, Donald Duke, as its flag bearer for the 2019 General Elections. The party declared Mr Duke as winner of its primary election; that he polled 812 votes while Mr Gana had 611. However, Mr Gana went to court seeking that it should declare him the winner in line with the zoning and rotation formula of the partys constitution. In his judgement, Justice Hussein Baba-Yusuf held that the regulations contained in the partys constitution were binding on every member and must be obeyed. He held that the zoning and rotation formula as contained in the partys constitution stipulated that both the chairman of the party and the flag bearer should not come from the same zone. Mr Isiaq said that the party would comply with the court directive. As a party we have received the judgment from the High Court. This party like you know is a very disciplined party and you will not find impunity in the process of our party. By so doing whatever the court say is what the party will comply with. The deputy national chairman said that the party would do the needful on Mr Ganas request to approve his policy document to enable him to launch his campaign. Mr Gana, speaking earlier, called on the SDP leadership to complete his nomination process with the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) in line with the recent court order. Arising from the court ruling, the INEC has been directed that you ensure that the processes of my nomination are put in place. Therefore, they (INEC) have given us the forms, we have completed them, and the forms are supposed to be directed back to INEC through you. I like to take this opportunity to say that by the grace of God the candidate of your party will be the president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Mr Gana, who presented his nomination forms to the party, urged the partys National Working Committee (NWC) to endorse his policy document to enable him to commence his nationwide campaign rallies. We like to appeal to the partys leadership to facilitate the processes of our reaching out to the nation because we have lost some time. We are ready to go into campaign. Mr Gana said details of his five-point agenda coded SWIFT would be made public once endorsed by the party leadership. As soon as you show us the green light we will reach out to the nation. We will run an issue-based campaign. We want to present to Nigeria a programme of development that will change the situation of ordinary people of Nigeria regarding the serious issue of security and biting poverty. Mr Gana, who promised to carry everyone along irrespective of what had happened, sought the support of the party leadership and its members. All of us must now mobilise because Nigerians are waiting for us. APC and PDP are not the answer, they are waiting for credible alternative, which is SDP. We believe in solidarity and in working together so, there will be tremendous reconciliation and accommodation so that we can move together because we want the SDP to win and by the grace of God we will win, he said. Asked if he was considering picking Duke as his running mate, Gana said it was a matter for the party leadership to approve. I will make proposal to them and they will approve and announce to the nation, he said. (NAN) At least 53 journalists were killed on the job this year, 34 of whom were targeted for murder in reprisal for their work, the Committee to Protect Journalists found in its annual analysis. The numbers, which represent those killed between January 1 and December 14, make 2018 the deadliest year for journalists in the past three years, according to CPJ data. Afghanistan, where extremists have stepped up deliberate attacks on journalists, was the deadliest country, followed by Syria and India. The recent uptick in killings comes as the jailing of journalists hits a sustained highadding up to ongoing global crisis of press freedom. Amid the physical dangers to journalists, many world leaders are doubling down on anti-press rhetoric. The year was marked by high-profile murders of journalists including Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, killed by Saudi agents in the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul in October. In February, Slovakian investigative journalist Jan Kuciak was shot to death alongside his fiance, the second murder of a European Union journalist covering corruption in less than six months. In Afghanistan, a suicide bomber targeted a group of reporters, killing nine in a single explosion in April. The 34 journalists murdered this year compares with 18 murders in 2017. The shooting at the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland, when a gunman shot dead four journalists and a sales associate in June, was the deadliest attack on the U.S. media in recent history. Murder is a form of brutal censorship that is disrupting the flow of information, said CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon. People around the world are increasingly recognizing whats at stake. Political leaders must stand up, speak out, and deliver justice on behalf of the journalists who gave their lives to bring us the news. CPJs database of journalists killed in 2018 includes capsule reports on each victim and filters for examining trends in the data. CPJ began compiling detailed records on all journalist deaths in 1992. CPJ considers a case work-related only when its staff is reasonably certain that a journalist was killed in direct reprisal for his or her work; in combat-related crossfire; or while carrying out a dangerous assignment. President Muhammadu Buhari has described the killing of a former Chief of Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Alex Badeh (rtd) as very sad and unfortunate. The president also directed security agencies to find his killers. PREMIUM TIMES reported how Mr Badeh was killed on Tuesday when armed persons attacked his vehicle along the Abuja-Keffi road. In a statement by his spokesperson, Femi Adesina, Mr Buhari commiserated with the family of the late four-star general, his friends and professional colleagues in the military, and the people and government of Adamawa State. Noting that the late Mr Badeh, who was also a former Chief of Air Staff, attained professional fulfilment in his over three decades military career, President Buhari regrets that he fell victim to incidence of violent and fatal attacks on the nations highways. He directs security agencies to find the killers of the 15th Chief of Defence Staff and bring them to face the full force of the law, while ensuring greater security and safety for all users of the countrys roads. The president prays that God Almighty comforts all those who mourn Air Chief Marshal Badeh and grant his soul peaceful rest, Mr Adesina said. Mr Badeh was the defence chief during the tenure of Goodluck Jonathan. He was accused of mismanaging about N3.9 billion arms funds while in office and is currently being prosecuted by the anti-graft agency, EFCC. The ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) has attributed the rowdiness that characterised President Muhammadu Buharis budget presentation at the National Assembly to lawmakers from the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). The party, which condemned the action, made this known in a statement by its publicity secretary, Lanre Issa-Onilu on Wednesday evening. PREMIUM TIMES had reported how the parliament witnessed a rowdy session during the presentation of the Presidents 2019 Appropriation Bill before the National Assembly. Lawmakers from different political divides booed and cheered the president as he explained the budget details. Some lawmakers were also seen holding placards, interrupting the presidents presentation. While some sang solidarity songs, other shouted lies after every of Mr Buharis claims. But the APC blamed the chaos on the PDP describing it as disgraceful conduct. It said the action succeeded in eroding the remnant of the publics respect, (if any) that the PDP has in the eyes of any respectable Nigerian. The party said the PDP has further confirmed its unsavoury image in the eyes of Nigerians. By law, respect for the office of the president or head of government in any clime is not a matter of choice but a civic obligation sanctioned by laws. Being an opposition party or critic is no licence for such wayward conduct by the PDP legislative caucus; most especially against the president of the country, the party said. The APC said Nigerians are not oblivious of the inactions and inactions of the National Assemblys presiding officers: Senate President, Bukola Saraki and Speaker, House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara while the president was being heckled by the PDP legislative caucus. Although the Mr Dogara tried to calm the lawmakers, the APC said the failure to rein in the unruly PDP members clearly confirms the PDP members action was premeditated and orchestrated to embarrass the president. When the APC was in opposition, Nigerians will recall statements by the PDP government that the immediate-past President Goodluck Jonathan did not personally present the budget to the National Assembly based on fears that he will be heckled and embarrassed by the opposition federal lawmakers at the time. The fears turned out to be misplaced as that never happened when Jonathan eventually presented the national budget, the party said. The APC wondered why the PDP lawmakers could not stomach what it described as the evident and verifiable achievements of the APC-led government in the areas of power, rail and road infrastructure, social intervention programmes as contained in the proposed budget. It commended the president for remaining calm and focused during the budget presentation despite the provocation. The APC called on the National Assembly to rise above political and selfish interests by putting the country first in its consideration of the proposed budget. Some air passengers who travel through the Abuja airport have commended the airport authority for fixing the sound system at the departure lounge of the Nnamdi Azikwe Airport, Abuja. The development came weeks after PREMIUM TIMES reported how the airport sound system malfunctioned, making announcements of flight details inaudible. The revelation came as part of a larger rot uncovered at the nations two major airports: the Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Lagos, and the Nnamdi Azikwe airport, Abuja. The three-part investigative series, published in November, showed how officials at the Lagos airport harass and extort passengers travelling through the airport. The report also uncovered how toilet cleaners and other touts issue fake yellow cards to willing air travelers at the Lagos airport. The third part of the series revealed how poor facilities and other logistic concerns frustrate airport users. Speaking with PREMIUM TIMES at the departure lounge of the airport, some air travelers said there has been a noticeable improvement in the sound system at the departure lounge of the Abuja airport. A Lagos-bound traveler, Ayo Oke, told PREMIUM TIMES although it may need to be improved upon, the announcements made are now audible and sound better than what obtained last month. I notice there has been an improvement in the sound system since the middle of this month and thats commendable, he said. Although it is not perfect, one hopes they would maintain it and improve on others. Another airport user, Caroline, told this newspaper that the improvement recorded would make the airport conducive for travelers even though other concerns need similar attention. She also said, I notice an improvement in the sound system and thats a good development. The should keep it up. Another airport user who declined to give his name said the improvement is not something to cheer about as it is a basic facility that any decent airport should have. He rather called on the authorities to address the numerous other challenges airport users face in Nigerian airports. Many air travellers have complained in the past that that they missed their flights due to the poor sound system at the departure lounge of the Abuja airport. In a message sent to PREMIUM TIMES on Tuesday, Henrietta Yakubu, spokesperson of the Federal Airport Authority of Nigeria, FAAN, confirmed that the sound system has been fixed. We improved on our sound system, she said. We carry out daily inspection, replaced some cables and bought new speakers, she explained. The Kano State Government says N786 million has been proposed in its 2019 budget to sensitise the electorate on the peaceful conduct of the general elections in the state. The Commissioner for Information, Muhammed Garba, made this disclosure on Wednesday shortly after he appeared before the state House of Assembly Committee on Information to defend the proposed amount. According to him, the ministry has no major project to carry out in 2019, except to focus on the sensitisation and mobilisation of the electorate to ensure that the election is conducted peacefully. He added that it is the responsibility of all media houses to create awareness, sensitise and educate the electorate on the importance of peaceful election. In the same vein, the Managing Director, Kano State Television, Abubakar Rimi Television (ARTV), Hajiya Saa Ibrahim, said N300 million was proposed for the station. According to her, the state government is planning to begin the operation of its newly established sun-station in Tudun Wada Local Government Area of the state. She said: We have a clinic in our station, meant for our staff, but we later expanded it to cover the nearest communities. Therefore, in 2019, we plan to boost and provide it with necessary equipment. Similarly, the Managing Director of Kano State-owned newspaper, Triumph, Lawal Sabo, said that N400 million had been proposed for capital projects in 2019. He said the major focus of the media house would be to procure a modern printing machines to enable the company work more effectively. (NAN) The Strike Force Team of the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) has announced the seizure of 5,662 bags of suspected smuggled rice and 137 bales of second hand clothes both valued at N137 million. Briefing journalists on Wednesday in Calabar, Abdullahi Kirawa, National Coordinator, Headquarters of the NIS Strike Force Team, Abuja, said the seizure was made within Cross River and Akwa Ibom Area Commands of the service. Mr Kirawa, who is a Deputy Comptroller of Customs, said the Strike force team, which operated under `ZONE C, covered the South South and South East states of Nigeria. According to him, the seizure was made within the last one month by men of the team in line with the federal governments policy of curbing the menace of imported rice into the country. In the last one month, men of the strike force team have seized 5,662 suspected smuggled foreign bags of rice and 137 bales of second hand clothes within Calabar and Akwa Ibom Area Command. Out of the 5,662 bags of rice, 2,153 were handed over to the Strike Force Team by the Nigerian Navy. This shows the collaboration and synergy that exist between the NIS, Nigerian Navy, police and other sister agencies. It is of note that this seizure wouldnt have been possible without the motivation of the Comptroller General of Custom, Rtd. Col. Hameed Ali, who has given us all that is required to do the job. The Comptroller General has given us all that is needed to ensure that not only is smuggling reduced or suppressed to the barest minimum, but to ensure that the menace of these smugglers is not perpetrated in these areas, he said. He called on members of the public to avail the service with useful and credible information that would help the team to make more arrests. He further said the seizure was high because of the yuletide where smugglers activities were on the increase. The suspects arrested with the rice will be charged to court accordingly. But for now, they are on administrative bail. I must commend the Nigerian Navy, Police and other security agencies for their collaboration and cooperation in this regard, he said. On what would be done with the seized rice and clothing, Mr Kirawa explained that the disposal of seized goods rests squarely on the board of the Nigeria Customs Service. He warned smugglers to desist from the act and take advantage of the agricultural policy of the federal government with a view to helping the country attain self-sufficiency in food production. (NAN) A Lagos-based non-governmental organisation, Legacy Initiative International Advocacy, has fixed January 10, 2019, as a national day of prayers to seek Gods intervention for the peaceful conduct of the 2019 general elections. At a media briefing in Lagos, Tuesday, the group said it is collaborating with the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), to mobilise one million Nigerians for the event. In a statement signed by Kenny Martins and Johnny Ucheaga, the grand patron and national secretary respectively, the group said it is also calling on Christian and Muslim leaders to allow God use them to identify the right candidates across parties for the country. The group said it believes that when leaders of both faiths close ranks and work together, mutual suspicion between them would be reduced and they can then better educate their followers on the evils of monetised politics. Our principal focus is to bring the leaders of the two principal faith groups in Nigeria, the Christians and the Muslims together through constant interactive sessions, inter-faith prayers, and co-ordinated positions on burning national issues, the statement said. We believe that if the leaders of these faith groups can find a common ground on national issues, it will be easier for them to communicate same to the adherents of their faith, who place a lot of trust on them. This will in turn reduce incidence of mutual suspicion and frequent needless bloodletting and wanton destruction of properties in many states of the federation fuelled by religious differences and incitement from the religious fundamentalists. The group also said when the right individuals are identified for elective positions, the practice of selling properties or taking bank loans to finance election campaigns would be reduced. And it will make them more responsive to the needs of their communities. According to Mr Martins, apart from bringing religious leaders together to positively contribute to the political process, the group is also advocating for the right of Nigerians in the diaspora to vote. We are also advocating for the right of our men and women living in the diaspora to have the right to vote during general elections in Nigeria, he said. The Direct Home Remittances (DHR) from the Nigerian diaspora constitutes the second largest source of foreign exchange inflow into our national economy. It is therefore not right that we should deny our nationals living abroad the right to vote during elections while many countries of the world recognise the right of their citizens living abroad to vote during their own elections. Videos Sorry, there are no recent results for popular videos. 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. MINNEAPOLIS, Dec. 18, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The fallout from the 2016 Panama Papers investigation is ongoing, as indicated by recent business news headlines. Hear from the journalist who broke the case, Bastian Obermayer, at the 2019 European Compliance & Ethics Institute (ECEI), 10-13 March 2019 in Berlin, Germany. Mr. Obermayer is a featured speaker at ECEI, the Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics' (SCCE's) annual event for the European compliance and ethics community. His presentation, "How We Broke the Panama Papers," will cover how a cryptic message turned into one of journalism's biggest scoops and how a year-long investigation involving 400 journalists was kept secret. "As recent indictments show, there are numerous lessons for compliance officers from the Panama Papers investigation," SCCE CEO Gerry Zack notes. "But hearing Bastian tell the inside story of how the high-stakes investigation unfolded makes for a compelling tale and adds much to the published accounts." The 2019 ECEI includes an impressive lineup of speakers from more than 16 countries. They will present 30+ sessions on topics that address current compliance challenges from a global perspective, including data risk and GDPR, anti-corruption, trade sanctions, and fostering an ethical culture. More than 200 compliance and ethics professionals from 38+ countries are expected to attend. Learn more and register at europeancomplianceethicsinstitute.org. About SCCE Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics (SCCE) is a non-profit, member-based association for compliance and ethics professionals. Since 2004, SCCE has been championing ethical practices and compliance standards to promote lasting success and integrity of organizations worldwide and across all industries. Headquartered in Minneapolis, MN, SCCE serves 7,400+ members in 95+ countries around the globe. SCCE offers 40+ educational conferences a year, weekly web conferences, publications, training resources, certification opportunities, and networking for career growth and program development. Visit the SCCE website at www.corporatecompliance.org or call 888.277.4977. Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/587233/Society_of_Corporate_Compliance_Logo.jpg Related Links https://www.corporatecompliance.org SOURCE Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics (SCCE) It is relevant to any airline or travel merchant doing business in the region or in any emerging region where financial inclusion, alternative payment methods and cross-border ecommerce are converging to create new and larger travel and tourism markets. The report includes: High-level business analysis of Latin America and the Caribbean , market-specific intelligence, and traveler-focused profiles of individual countries including Cuba and Brazil. and the , market-specific intelligence, and traveler-focused profiles of individual countries including and Brazil. Detailed overview of the many alternative payment methods (APMs) in the region, including bank transfers and cash vouchers, installments, local/regional credit cards and full-functioning mobile wallets. Best-practices on how Latin American and Caribbean airlines can start integrating ancillaries into a more holistic, seamless mobile experience where they can engage growing volumes of passengers and capture more of their travel dollars (or Pesos, or Reals...). CellPoint Mobile provides digital commerce and payment solutions to airlines and other travel merchants in Latin America and the Caribbean. Based on the company's experience in this growing and diverse region, CellPoint Mobile developed the Outlook 2019 report to explore the real, on-the-ground challenges and opportunities facing airlines, cruise lines, hotels and other travel merchants operating there. This includes the fact that mobile is the growth channel in Latin Americas and Caribbean travel sectors (the smartphone adoption rate in the region is outpacing the global average), and how payment service providers (PSPs) have "filled a vacuum" by helping travel merchants expand beyond traditional payment networks. Airlines and other travel merchants can download the Outlook 2019: Looking Ahead at Latin America and the Caribbean report now to better understand their market and accelerate the path to profits. The report can be downloaded here. For more information about the report, or to schedule an interview with one of CellPoint Mobile's Latin America and Caribbean regional experts, please contact Vanessa Horwell at vhorwell@thinkinkpr.com. About CellPoint Mobile We Make Travel Easier for airlines, travel merchants and their customers. CellPoint Mobile provides airlines, ground and sea transportation providers, and hospitality firms across the globe with flexible and efficient digital commerce and payment solutions to optimize the entire sales cycle. With a mobile-first culture since 2007, CellPoint Mobile's solutions are omnichannel and focus on boosting travel merchant's digital transactions. As both a fintech and a travel-tech company, CellPoint Mobile's portfolio include Velocity (Digital Payment), Voyage (Digital commerce), Vantage (Digital Promotion) and Vision (Digital Intelligence). CellPoint Mobile has locations in Miami, London, Chicago, Copenhagen, Dubai, Pune and Singapore. Visit www.cellpointmobile.com to learn more. Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/799749/CellPoint_Mobile___Outlook_2019_Looking_Ahead_at_Latin_America_and_the_Caribbean.jpg Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/328874/cpm_logo_logo_Logo.jpg Related Links http://www.cellpointmobile.com SOURCE CellPoint Mobile ST. PETERSBURG, Fla., Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Major storms, natural disasters and an uncertain economy impacted traveler behavior in 2018, but didn't stop Americans from traveling or insuring their trips. Based on customer data, Squaremouth reveals the top traveler trends of 2018. Travelers Spent Less on Trips The recent sluggish economy led to an overall decrease in how much travelers spent on trips in 2018. For the first time in 6 years, travelers spent less on their trips than the previous year, with the average trip cost declining by 3% Despite decreased spending, more travelers chose to protect their trip costs with travel insurance in 2018 Squaremouth reported a 28% increase in cancellation-style policy sales over last year U.S. Travelers Stayed Close to Home U.S. residents preferred travel within North America in 2018, which may have been a result of the uncertain economy or safety threats abroad. After the United States , the next 3 most popular 2018 destinations were Mexico , Italy and Canada , the next 3 most popular 2018 destinations were , and The cost to travel to these destinations has decreased by an average 5% over last year Weather and Natural Disasters Were a Top Concern Major natural disasters in 2018, such as hurricanes Florence and Michael, and the California wildfires, had more travelers worried about having to cancel their trips unexpectedly. The number of travelers who bought travel insurance in 2018 specifically for weather or a natural disaster increased by 13% over last year Traveler concern over weather surpassed terrorism as the top cancellation concern New Destinations Gain Ground More travelers, particularly Millennials, are opting for destinations that offer cultural and historical experiences over traditional locations. 2018 tourism to Egypt , Morocco and Japan increased 144%, 73% and 47%, respectively, compared to last year , and increased 144%, 73% and 47%, respectively, compared to last year Younger generations are leading the charge to these locations, which show a 65% increase in Millennial travelers over last year Cruises Continued to Gain Popularity More travelers of all ages are choosing to spend their vacations aboard cruises in 2018. The number of travelers buying cruise insurance in 2018 increased by 22% over last year in 2018 increased by 22% over last year Travelers purchasing travel insurance specifically for cruises has increased every year since 2012 The number of travelers over 70 years old taking cruises has doubled since last year, followed closely by Baby Boomers, Gen X and Millennials Methodology: Data is based on travel insurance policies purchased through Squaremouth from 1/1/2018 - 12/17/18. Statistics reflect year-over-year changes unless otherwise noted. ABOUT SQUAREMOUTH Squaremouth compares travel insurance policies from every major travel insurance provider in the United States. Using Squaremouth's comparison engine and third-party customer reviews, travelers can research and compare insurance products side-by-side. More information can be found at www.squaremouth.com . Available Topic Expert: Jenna Hummer [email protected] (434) 960-8093 SOURCE Squaremouth Related Links http://www.squaremouth.com NASHVILLE, Tenn., Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Apto Global , the world's first global adaptation skills platform, announces today a strategic partnership with MenaCare , a full-service business consulting firm focused on the transformation of healthcare delivery and economic development initiatives worldwide. The business development partnership will assist Apto Global in the expansion of its online applications and strategic consulting services to more than 10 countries across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. "Global adaptation skills are in high demand across the MENA region and we've had strong interest in healthcare, hospitality, energy and advanced manufacturing sectors including humanitarian aid and refugees assistance to bring a language and culture training solution to the market," says Traci Snowden, CEO of Apto Global. In recent weeks, Apto Global and MenaCare have conducted introductory meetings in the region with airline companies, real estate developers, universities, health training companies, government officials in the UAE, Oman and Lebanon, as well as embassies and foreign dignitaries in the Washington D.C. area. Apto Global is the only experiential learning platform that combines training for culture and language with local knowledge. The platform is actively used by learners in more than 134 countries for travel, tourism, relocation and cross-collaboration. MenaCare CEO, William Kaafarani, says, "The MenaCare team brings extensive knowledge and insights of the local market and a strong network to help Apto introduce its product and services to the Middle East North Africa region and build a long-term strategy for growth." The Apto Global learning platform improves quality of life for relocating internationals and their families to protect and maintain foreign direct investment in communities around the world. Apto Global learners gain confidence in their new language skills whether on the job, in school or in their community. In addition, international patients have an increased comfort level seeking medical treatment abroad using Apto Global in real-time interactions with doctors so they are clear on medical diagnosis and treatment options. About MenaCare MenaCare is a full-service business consulting company focused on the delivery of innovative transformational solutions. MenaCare specializes in planning and managing healthcare programs and projects throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Through its alliance with several strategic business partners, MenaCare assists international medical vendors, major manufacturers, hospitals, investors and government entities succeed in developing profitable ventures throughout the region. Learn more at http://menacare.com/ . About Apto Global Apto Global is the world's first global adaptation skills platform. Learners in more than 134 countries are actively using Apto Global to prepare for travel, relocation and interaction across the world. Apto Global is the only experiential learning platform that combines training for culture and language with local knowledge. The company has had successful engagements with Nissan, Mitsubishi, Bridgestone and Asurion among others. For more information, visit www.aptoglobal.com . Media Contact: Julie Lilliston 615-663-2121 [email protected] SOURCE Apto Global Related Links https://www.aptoglobal.com TOKYO and PLANTATION, Fla. and HONG KONG, Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- TradeStation, a Monex Group company (Monex Group, Inc. is listed on the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, code: 8698) and award-winning* broker-dealer and futures commission merchant, today announced the results of the "Monex Global Retail Investor Survey, Vol. 26." The survey found that U.S. investors who use the TradeStation analysis and trading platform continue to temper their expectations for the global and U.S. equities market entering 2019. Results of the recently conducted online survey show that U.S. investors remain generally positive in their outlook for the global equities markets, though expectations have diminished significantly from a year ago. Of U.S. survey respondents, 41% said they expect global stocks to further advance in the next three months nearly identical to the 42% in the last survey in June 2018 but well below the 62% result one year ago in December 2017. Nearly one-third (31%) of investors expect global equities to decline over the next three months, up from 24% in June 2018 and just 14% in December 2017. When asked about their expectations for the U.S. equities market over the next three months, U.S. investors remain bullish. Nearly three in four (74%) say they expect U.S. stocks to outperform their counterparts in Europe/U.K., Asia (excluding Japan) and Japan, little changed from 71% in the June 2018 survey. Expectations for the U.S. economy and U.S. dollar, however, sharply diverged. Just 40% of survey respondents expect the U.S. economy to improve in 2019 down from 65% just six months ago while 63% expect the U.S. dollar to strengthen against the other major currencies, up from 58% in June. Fully half (50%) of U.S. investors said they expect the Federal Reserve to take further action at its meeting this month. When asked about expectations for their own trading activity over the next 12 months, 51% said they expect their own trading volume to increase in 2019, compared to 54% six months ago; only 8% say they are likely to curtail their trading activity. "The survey results show that despite growing concerns about the domestic economy, U.S. investors remain committed to traditional equities markets," said John Bartleman, President of TradeStation Group, Inc. "TradeStation in turn remains committed to giving active traders and investors the tools they need to take advantage of opportunities in the increasingly volatile financial markets." In other survey results: When asked about which industry sectors would provide attractive opportunities over the next three months, strong majorities of U.S. investors cited healthcare (74%) and consumer goods (65%). Investors remain divided in their perceptions of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Sixty-five percent said they have no interest in virtual currency, up from 53% six months ago. The percentage of respondents who said they already have invested in virtual currency (16%) was virtually unchanged from six months ago (17%), but up from 11% in December 2017 . . In follow-up questions about cryptocurrency, 50% of investors expect virtual currency to increase its presence in the future, compared to 40% who do not. Of those expecting crypto to have a larger footprint in the future, fully 61% cited the groundbreaking nature of blockchain technology. Monex has been conducting its monthly retail investor survey with its Japanese clients since October 2009. The "Monex Global Retail Investor Survey," covering retail clients in Japan, Hong Kong and the U.S., was launched in June 2011. Please refer to the full report for complete results. The Monex Global Retail Investor Survey measures customer sentiment based upon answers to specific questions received from a random sampling of customers of Monex, Inc., TradeStation Securities, Inc., and Monex Boom Securities (H.K.) Ltd. Details of the methodology used to conduct the survey are available upon request. Accuracy and completeness of the data derived from the survey is not guaranteed. The information contained herein should not be construed as investment research or an offer or solicitation to buy or sell securities, securities derivatives or futures products or services. Investor sentiment derived from the survey responses is no guarantee of future performance or success. Active trading regardless of asset class (equities, options, futures) carries a high level of risk and may not be suitable for all investors. Relevant risk disclosures are available at www.tradestation.com. About Monex Group, Inc. Monex Group, Inc., listed in the Tokyo Stock Exchange (security code: 8698), has grown to become a major online financial institution that operates retail online brokerages in Japan, the U.S., China (including Hong Kong) and Australia. In addition, Monex offers business services in international forex, asset management, investor education and M&A advisory. Monex Group aims to create a new type of financial group for a new era. At its core, Monex will offer crypto asset banking operations and online brokerage services that link the world's financial markets by bringing together Coincheck's cryptocurrency trading, storage and payment capabilities with the expertise and technology of our online brokerage operations in Japan, the U.S., China and Australia. About TradeStation Group, Inc. TradeStation Group, Inc., through its principal operating subsidiary, TradeStation Securities, Inc., offers the TradeStation analysis and trading platform to the active trader and certain institutional trader markets. The TradeStation platform offers electronic order execution and enables clients to design, test, optimize, monitor and automate their own custom equities, options and futures trading strategies. TradeStation Group is a wholly owned subsidiary of Monex Group, Inc., one of the largest online financial services providers in Japan. * Visit TradeStation.com/Awards for more information. TradeStation Securities, Inc. (Member NYSE, FINRA, CME, SIPC NSCC, DTC & OCC) is a licensed securities broker-dealer and a registered futures commission merchant (FCM), and a member of the major stock, options and futures exchanges in the United States. The company's technology subsidiary, TradeStation Technologies, Inc., develops and offers strategy trading software tools and subscription services, and hosts the TradingApp Store. About Monex Boom Securities (H.K.) Limited Monex Boom Securities (H.K.) Limited ("BOOM") offers multi-market and multi-currency online securities trading services to investors all around the world. With BOOM's proprietary web-based trading platform, investors can trade equities in all major exchanges and manage different major currencies via one single account. Currently, it offers access to securities listed on over 17 stock markets in 12 countries. In addition, BOOM also develops trading solutions for other financial institutions. Being the first company to launch Internet stock trading in Asia/Pacific, BOOM introduced a new pattern of self-directed cross-border investment by applying new technology to traditional equities trading and financial services. BOOM aims to provide retail investors with PRIVATE, EASE, SPEEDINESS and INEXPENSIVE international stock trading services. BOOM is a fully licensed Broker / Dealer regulated by the Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) of Hong Kong, founded in 1997 and headquartered in Hong Kong. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Monex Group, one of the largest online financial services providers in Japan. SOURCE TradeStation Group, Inc. Related Links http://www.tradestation.com INDIANAPOLIS, Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Keeping with its long history of leading environmental responsibility, Carrier has once again taken a leadership role in offering the refrigerant of the future. After extensive tests and evaluation, Carrier has identified R-454B, to be known commercially as Puron Advance, as its primary lower Global Warming Potential (GWP) solution to replace R-410A in all of its ducted residential and light commercial packaged solutions sold in North America. The new refrigerant, to be offered in these Carrier products beginning in 2023, is expected to surpass the requirements of anticipated future regulations. Carrier will select the best-suited refrigerant for other applications as the need arises. Carrier's HVAC business, a world leader in high-technology heating, air-conditioning and refrigeration solutions, is a part of Carrier, a leading global provider of innovative HVAC, refrigeration, fire, security and building automation technologies and a unit of United Technologies Corp. (NYSE: UTX). Carrier has been working with The Chemours Company, a global leader in fluorochemicals and refrigerant technology, who will produce and distribute the new refrigerant in North America. With a GWP of 466 one-fifth that of R-410A Puron Advance refrigerant was selected as the best solution to minimize environmental impact and energy use, while improving performance, safety, and longevity, based on the United Nations Montreal Protocol Kigali Agreement phase down plan for HFCs. Carrier has worked closely with regulators and research groups to develop standards, codes and regulations that will help ensure the safe use of R-454B. "Carrier is committed to the environment by providing efficient, responsible solutions to its customers. The move to Puron Advance refrigerant is the next logical step in the evolution of our industry," said Matthew Pine, president, Residential HVAC, Carrier. "We carefully studied all alternatives and chose the most viable refrigerant with the lowest environmental impact for this product category. Innovation and technological advancement are in our DNA and we will continue to lead the way with the evolution of refrigerants of the future." Chemours was integral to the development of R-454B. "We designed R-454B to bring the optimal balance of performance, safety and sustainability to our customers and the market in the face of upcoming regulations," said Diego Boeri, vice-president, Chemours Fluorochemicals. "It's exciting to see Carrier, with their history of market innovation, embrace R-454B as its long-term solution for North America as the industry prepares to move away from R-410A." For more information, please visit https://www.carrier.com/residential/en/us/. About Carrier Founded by the inventor of modern air conditioning, Carrier is a world leader in high-technology heating, air-conditioning and refrigeration solutions. Carrier experts provide sustainable solutions, integrating energy-efficient products, building controls and energy services for residential, commercial, retail, transport and food service customers. Carrier's HVAC business is a part of Carrier, a leading global provider of innovative HVAC, refrigeration, fire, security and building automation technologies and a unit of United Technologies Corp. For more information, visit www.carrier.com or follow @Carrier on Twitter. SOURCE Carrier Related Links https://www.carrier.com BEIJING, Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Concord Medical Services Holdings Limited ("Concord Medical" or the "Company") (NYSE: CCM), a leading specialty hospital management solution provider and operator of the largest network of radiotherapy and diagnostic imaging centers in China, announced a topping out ceremony of Guangzhou Concord Cancer Center (the "Center") has been held at the construction site of the project. The Center has a construction area of 100,000 square meters, with 400 beds planned for two phases. The design of the Center is jointly completed by HKS, an internationally renowned American architectural design firm with a rich experience in hospital design, and Shanghai Architectural Design and Research Institute, which has proton center design experience in China. The construction started in February 2017 and the hospital is expected to be in full operation in early 2020. As one of the core projects of life and health in Sino-Singapore Guangzhou Knowledge City, the Center will be positioned as a "five in one" medical institution, integrating the clinical diagnosis and treatment, prevention, scientific research, training and remote consultation. The hospital will have complete cancer comprehensive diagnosis, treatment and adjuvant treatment department and will be equipped with Varian ProBeam multi-room proton therapy system, multiple linear accelerators, Da Vinci surgical robots and other high-end medical equipment. The construction of the Center in Guangzhou allows the Chinese cancer patients to enjoy the advanced cancer diagnosis and treatment technology without the need to going abroad. About Concord Medical Concord Medical Services Holdings Limited is a leading specialty hospital management solution provider and operator of the largest network of radiotherapy and diagnostic imaging centers in China. As of June 30, 2018, the Company operated a network of 30 centers with 21 hospital partners that spanned 21 cities and 14 provinces and administrative regions in China. Under long-term arrangements with top-tier hospitals in China, the Company provides radiotherapy and diagnostic imaging equipment and manages the daily operations of these centers, which are located on the premises of its hospital partners. The Company also provides ongoing training to doctors and other medical professionals in its network of centers to ensure a high level of clinical care for patients. For more information, please see http://ir.ccm.cn. SOURCE Concord Medical Services Holdings Limited Related Links http://ir.ccm.cn NEW YORK, December 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Elsevier, the information analytics business specializing in science and health, has acquired Science-Metrix Inc., a research evaluation firm that provides science research evaluation and analytics to assess science and technology activities. Headquartered in Montreal, Canada, Science-Metrix is known for high-quality and independent bibliometric analysis and research evaluation. (Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/754760/Elsevier_Logo.jpg ) "Science-Metrix was an early adopter of Elsevier's abstract database Scopus and has worked closely with Elsevier for more than 10 years," said Dr. Eric Archambault, Chief Executive Officer and founder of Science-Metrix. "I'm excited that now with Elsevier, we'll be even stronger and better positioned to develop better performance measurement tools for our customers." Science-Metrix works for governmental, educational, nonprofit and private organizations that perform scientific research or deal with funding and management of science and technology. Its services enable evidence-based decision-making, strategic planning and outcome assessment processes for governments, international organizations, universities, scientific societies, publishers and technology companies. "As a recognized leader in the assessment and evaluation of science-based programs, Science-Metrix will strengthen our research analytics capabilities alongside Plum Analytics and other complementary tools," said Dominic Feltham, President Research, Elsevier. "Together we look forward to improving performance analysis for the entire research community." As part of the acquisition of Science-Metrix Inc., Elsevier has also acquired 1science, a business started in 2015 to develop research intelligence products. Customers of 1science products will benefit from synergies with the Elsevier technology stack. Dr. Archambault and Gregoire Cote, Partner and President of Science-Metrix, and staff are remaining with the company in Montreal. The acquisition is in line with Elsevier's organic growth driven strategy, supported by acquisitions of innovative open science companies that are helping improve the research information ecosystem, following the acquisitions of Mendeley, SSRN, Plum Analytics, bepress and Aries Systems. About Science-Metrix, Inc. Science-Metrix is a Canadian research evaluation firm specializing in the assessment of science and technology (S&T) activities. Founded in 2002, the firm is an internationally recognized leader in the assessment of S&T using bibliometric methods and in the evaluation of science-based programs and initiatives. Science-Metrix has successfully completed around 500 research and evaluation contracts for dozens of organizations across North America, Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Over the years, the firm has developed cutting-edge expertise in the development and production of R&I indicators for bibliometrics and technometrics, including gender-based indicators and the measurement of open access publications. Our services facilitate evidence-based decision-making, strategic planning and outcome assessment processes. www.science-metrix.com About RELX Group RELX Group is a global provider of information and analytics for professional and business customers across industries. The Group serves customers in more than 180 countries and has offices in about 40 countries. It employs about 30,000 people of whom almost half are in North America. The shares of RELX PLC, the parent company, are traded on the London, Amsterdam and New York Stock Exchanges using the following ticker symbols: London: REL; Amsterdam: REN; New York: RELX. www.relx.com About Elsevier Elsevier is a global information analytics business that helps institutions and professionals advance healthcare, open science and improve performance for the benefit of humanity. Elsevier provides digital solutions and tools in the areas of strategic research management, R&D performance, clinical decision support and professional education, including ScienceDirect, Scopus, SciVal, ClinicalKey and Sherpath. Elsevier publishes over 2,500 digitized journals, including The Lancet and Cell, 38,000 e-book titles and many iconic reference works, including Gray's Anatomy. Elsevier is part of RELX Group, a global provider of information and analytics for professionals and business customers across industries. www.elsevier.com Media contact Tom Reller Vice President, Communications Elsevier [email protected] SOURCE Elsevier Estate owner Sandy Otellini was notified of the truffle find by her orchard manager Chris Majcherek, who discovered the truffle with Bella, his Border Collie who's been training to sniff out truffles. "My first reaction was: how big?" said Otellini. "It was a sensational moment." The truffle was of substantial size, measuring three inches across and weighing in at 108 grams. It was harvested from trees inoculated by ATC with the black Perigord truffle fungus and rigorously managed following ATC's strict scientific protocols tailored to the specific microclimate and soil conditions at the orchard site, which was planted in 2011 by Sandy and her late husband, former Intel CEO Paul Otellini. European black truffles (both the summer Burgundy and the winter Perigord varieties) do not grow naturally in North America. Of the two species, the winter Perigord is the most expensive and sought after black truffle in the world, historically fetching up to $1,200 per pound. Chef Ken Frank of Michelin starred La Toque was present for the weighing in of the truffle and ready with ingredients on hand to whip up a dish of Sandy's favorite truffle pasta. "I always knew it would happen," said Frank. "But I didn't expect that my first Perigord truffle of this season would be from California. The perfume was tremendous. This is the real thing and a game changer for us chefs!" "We're excited by the successful scientific cultivation of black truffles here in wine country," said Chang. "This achievement demonstrates our proven scientific methodology, and is indicative of future successes for all our North American truffle orchard partners." Dr. Paul Thomas, ATC's Chief Scientist, was able to view the truffle from his office in Scotland. "This is brilliant," he said. "The success of our scientific truffle cultivation technology now spans four continents. I look forward to more harvests in North America as more of our truffle orchards mature." About American Truffle Company Founded in 2007 by Robert Chang and Dr. Paul Thomas, American Truffle Company partners with North American land owners to create a custom-tailored approach for cultivating European black truffles that relies on years of scientific research and data from diverse truffle orchards in over 25 countries across the world. ATC expects to help meet the growing global demand for ultra-fresh, high quality and consistently-grown truffles for both professional and home chefs. For more information about the American Truffle Company, visit www.americantruffle.com. About The Founders Robert Chang, ATC's Managing Director and Chief Truffle Officer, brings his technical training (Stanford University: Bachelor and Master degrees in Electrical Engineering and qualified for Ph.D. program) to continually push the scientific envelope in truffle cultivation. With an MBA from Stanford University Graduate School of Business, he combines his technical background with wide ranging business experience from senior management roles in Silicon Valley to help ATC continue to break new grounds in truffle cultivation, distribution and business. ATC's Chief Scientist Dr. Paul Thomas is an internationally renowned mycologist who received his Bachelor of Science with honors in Natural Environmental Science from the University of Sheffield (England), followed by a doctoral dissertation focusing on long distance signaling pathways within the plant kingdom, which is central in truffle cultivation. During his studies, Dr. Thomas was awarded a university grant to commercialize and enhance the technology and system he pioneered to inoculate trees. He's since developed what is now the largest and most diverse range of truffle research sites worldwide, spanning four continents and a wide range of climatic and edaphic (soil) zones. The results from these ongoing sites have changed and challenged the traditional understanding of truffle biology. Dr. Thomas is also the lead researcher and Managing Director of Mycorrhizal Systems Ltd. in the U.K. About Chef Ken Frank Chef Ken Frank, founder and executive chef of Michelin starred La Toque in Napa, has been cooking with truffles for over 35 years. Widely considered the top truffle chef of North America, he also holds the distinct honor of being the first and only American chef invited to participate in the Fiera Internazionale Tartufo Bianco D'Alba, where he was recently knighted by the Order of the Knights of the Truffle and Wines of Alba. Chef Ken is also the host chef for the annual Napa Truffle Festival. About Napa Truffle Festival Potential growers can attend a Scientific Truffle Grower Seminar, presented by ATC at the annual Napa Truffle Festival. The daylong program provides a business and technical overview of the science and methodology involved in truffle cultivation, with presentations by ATC's Chief Scientist Dr. Paul Thomas and Chief Truffle Officer Robert Chang, and associate CPDT-KA dog trainer Alana McGee. A truffle orchard tour/dog training demo at Robert Sinskey Vineyards Truffle Orchard is included. Information available online. SOURCE American Truffle Company Related Links https://www.americantruffle.com CHICAGO, Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- United Benefit Advisors (UBA), the nation's leading independent employee benefits advisory organization, is pleased to welcome EHD Insurance to our family of Partners. EHD Insurance, established in 1896, has a long history of dedication to their clients. They take a personal approach to each company they work with, providing the attention of a local brokerage and the expertise of a large, national firm. EHD Insurance is committed to bringing broad and deep research to their clients and to offering flexible options that fit their specific needs. Taking an active role in learning about the constantly changing healthcare industry, and keeping their advisors updated so they can serve their clients to the best of their ability, EHD Insurance brings together knowledge and unrivaled service to create the best experience for customers navigating the employee benefits and risk management fields. "EHD Insurance keeps their promise to provide outstanding service to their clients and keep them informed of new regulations, issues, and news that might impact their business. Advocating for clients is an important part of the UBA Partner service model, and we believe EHD Insurance goes above and beyond this standard," said UBA President Peter Weber, M.S., CAE. "Their commitment to sharing and continuing research fits with the UBA mission, and we believe they will be a tremendous asset to the UBA community." "EHD is thrilled to join the UBA family and work with other client facing, independently owned agencies throughout the world. Our long-standing practice of placing our clients' needs first melds well with the cultures of other UBA firms and the organization as a whole," noted Scott Radcliffe, Executive Vice President of EHD. EHD Insurance joins a network of employee benefits advisory firms that serve employers of all sizes across the United States, Canada, England, and Ireland. As a combined group, UBA's annual employee benefit revenues rank it among the top ten employee benefit advisory organizations globally. About EHD Insurance Founded in 1896 as Engle-Hambright & Davies, EHD Insurance is now one of the most respected insurance brokers and advisors in the Mid-Atlantic region. They are proud of their long history, utilizing generations of knowledge and experience in the industry to provide clients with professional service. Their commitment to keeping their clients informed and ready to make decisions as healthcare changes is fundamental to their business, and in doing so, they have maintained their excellent reputation for more than a century. For more information, visit ehd-ins.com. About United Benefit Advisors United Benefit Advisors (UBA) is the nation's leading independent employee benefits advisory organization with more than 200 offices throughout the United States, Canada, England, and Ireland. UBA empowers more than 2,000 Partners to both maintain their individuality and pool their expertise, insight, and market presence to provide best-in-class services and solutions. Employers, advisors and industry-related organizations interested in obtaining powerful results from the shared wisdom of our Partners should visit www.UBAbenefits.com. Media Contact Bill Olson SVP Operations 312.416.3673 [email protected] SOURCE United Benefit Advisors Related Links http://www.ubabenefits.com LINDON, Utah, December 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- ForeverGreen Worldwide Corporation (OTCQB: FVRG), a global direct marketing company and provider of health and wellness products, announces that the company has on-going discussions about utilizing CBD in some of its top selling products. The company is currently formulating a line of products, specifically utilizing CBD for human wellness. The company has previously incorporated CBD in past products and believes the new products will first be available in the European Markets. The final 2018 Farm Bill should open the floodgates on this rapidly evolving industry. Up until now, United States industrial hemp production, from which CBD can be derived, has been restricted to mostly pilot and research programs. The long awaited bill would remove industrial hemp for the federal government's list of controlled substances, making it a lawful agricultural commodity in the U.S. The large majority of the U.S. hemp market today is for products that include the non-psychoactive compound. Given the growing awareness of the potential health benefits of CBD for a variety of health issues, ForeverGreen has evaluated the information and science supporting this fast growing segment. The company has decided to expand its presence in the category. The company plans to unveil a larger portfolio in the coming months. The increasing demand for Cannabidiol (CBD) and Hemp based products is expected to push both markets into new territories in terms of sales value in the next coming years. According to a report published by New Frontier Data, the U.S. CBD industry grew by nearly 40% in 2017, reaching USD $367 Million in sales across hemp-derived and marijuana-derived markets. The U.S. CBD market is primed for expansive growth across its three primary sectors, hemp-derived CBD, marijuana-derived CBD and pharmaceutical CBD. Cannabidiol is one of more than 100 compounds found in cannabis. The chemical doesn't make consumers high, but international demand for CBD is growing as word spreads about its potential medical benefits, including claims that CBD can ease seizures, calm anxiety and reduce inflammation. With recent developments and advancements in the hemp industry, farmers across the U.S. and globally are turning their attention to commercialization. According to the Brightfield Group, the Global market for CBD will top $22 Billion with the next four years. The 2018 Farm Bill, which was recently passed by both the House and Senate, would likely legalize CBD for farmers across the country and allow it for sale nationally in all channels. Non-psychotropic CBD is one of the most medicinal compounds in the cannabis plant, reportedly helping with everything from arthritis to epilepsy and cancer, and is seen by many as a natural remedy instead of a pharmaceutical or narcotic drug. "The focus of the Company has been to develop products that will distinguish the company. We believe that we can incorporate CBD into some of our existing product lines and are in ongoing discussions to add new products that may benefit from the addition of CBD. Our products already have tremendous advantages which could have additional health benefits with CBD incorporated. The company is poised to capitalize on this movement globally," stated Joe Jensen, ForeverGreen's Executive Officer. About ForeverGreen Worldwide Corporation Empowering a health-conscious community to focus on mindful self-care, ForeverGreen's products, opportunities and ideals reach around the globe to thousands of individuals in over 100 countries. ForeverGreen combines technology, science and ancient resources into products that can be shipped anywhere using a revolutionary envelope model. Despite this successful development, our most important product will always be people; community involvement and good character are the seeds of complete health. ForeverGreen is a publicly traded company based in Lindon, Utah. For more information, visit forevergreen.org. Welcome Home! Forward-Looking Statement This press release contains certain forward-looking statements. Investors are cautioned that certain statements in this release are "forward-looking statements" and involve both known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors. Such uncertainties include, among others, certain risks associated with the operation of the company described above. The company's actual results could differ materially from expected results. Contact: Joe Jensen +1(801)-655-5500 [email protected] Brokers and Analysts: Chesapeake Group +1-410-825-3930 [email protected] SOURCE ForeverGreen Worldwide Corporation The development and launch of this new tool, which will assist organizations to fulfill their duty of care towards employees traveling abroad, was made possible in part by GardaWorld's Crisis24 analysts team, as well as its previously announced strategic alliance with IHS Markit , a global leader in country risk intelligence and forecasting. GardaWorld continues to strengthen its expertise in country risk assessments, crisis management and response to the benefit of its diverse clientele, while reinforcing its position as a global leader in the security sector. With the Global Mobility Risk Map, employers now have a comprehensive global view of all potential travel security risks at their fingertips, so that they can properly prepare and mitigate risks for their business travelers. This newest tool is part of GardaWorld's commitment and approach to duty of carecoined "Duty of Care 2.0". The company offers comprehensive travel security services that cover corporate travelers from the moment a trip is planned, to the moment they return home. "This Global Mobility Risk Map is backed by intelligence from our own Crisis24 team of analysts and IHS Markit. It is based on proven threat assessment, vetted and up-to-date incident data and geopolitical analysis," said Stephan Malvoisin, GardaWorld's Managing Director, Crisis24, Travel Security and Response. "Duty of care in today's complex world is a foremost priority for both private and public sector organizations whose people need to travel safely around the world. GardaWorld's objective is to provide organizations with the tools, services and support they need to fulfill that duty." GardaWorld 2019 Global Mobility Risk Map: garda.com/mobilityriskmap2019en The map highlights the key issues and most volatile areas to watch out for in 2019. It takes into account unrest in western countries due to widespread perceptions that politicians are failing to adequately address increasing economic and social inequalities; the continued threat of large-scale terrorist attacks worldwide and the rise of far-right incitement and violence in Europe and North America; the high risk of cyberattacks targeting both government and private sector services, such as health, telecommunication and transportation providers; an intensification of natural disasters as temperatures and sea levels continue to climb; and political unrest due to upcoming elections in Senegal, Ukraine, Afghanistan and India. GardaWorld's expertise in security-related intelligence, crisis management and response, as well as its comprehensive range of other security and protective services, make GardaWorld a true one-stop shop for securing people and assets across the globe. About GardaWorld GardaWorld is the world's largest privately-owned security services company, offering cash services, physical and specialized security solutions and, with the Crisis24 portal, the dissemination of vetted information related to international security. A partner of choice for private companies, governments, humanitarian organizations, and multinationals with personnel all over the world, GardaWorld employs more than 65,000 highly skilled, dedicated professionals who serve a diverse clientele in North America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East. In the complex world we live in, our reputation is based on the quality of our services, as well as the commitment and integrity of our people. For more information, visit www.garda.com. About GardaWorld's Crisis24 Crisis24 delivers reliable security information through a customizable dashboard, accessible at any time on garda.com. The portal provides security alerts and the latest news, as well as detailed country reports. Crisis24 also offers industry-specific security reports to help clients make better-informed decisions about the safety of their local workforce, their employees working abroad, and those on the move. For more information, visit www.garda.com/crisis24 SOURCE Garda World Security Corporation Related Links http://www.garda.ca CHICAGO, Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Golub Capital recently announced that, as Administrative Agent, Sole Lead Arranger and Sole Bookrunner, it provided a GOLD facility to support the acquisition of CRH Healthcare ("CRH" or "the Company") by Freeman Spogli & Co. ("Freeman Spogli"), in partnership with CRH management. GOLD financings are Golub Capital One-Loan Debt facilities. Headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, CRH is a patient-focused operator of urgent care centers in Alabama, Florida and Georgia. CRH's centers are conveniently open seven days a week and provide walk-in care for injury, illness and minor emergencies, as well as family care to keep both parents and children healthy. In addition to a professional and courteous staff, each center has extensive lab capabilities and digital x-rays onsite, allowing patients to be seen for nearly all non-life threatening medical issues without the long wait or high costs of an emergency room visit. "We proudly support Freeman Spogli and management in connection with the investment in CRH," said Troy Oder, Managing Director at Golub Capital. "Freeman Spogli has a long track record of partnering with management to expand consumer-oriented, multi-location businesses, and we believe they are uniquely suited to add significant value to the CRH platform." "Golub Capital has proven to be a flexible and reliable financing partner to many of our portfolio companies, and we are excited to be partnering with them again in CRH," said Christian Johnson, Partner at Freeman Spogli & Co. "Throughout our longstanding relationship, Golub Capital has provided us with unique financing solutions, as well as additional support for our companies throughout our ownership." About Golub Capital Middle Market Lending Golub Capital's Middle Market Lending group provides financing for middle market, private equity-backed transactions with hold positions of up to $600 million and is an arranger of credit facilities up to $1 billion. Golub Capital's award-winning team specializes in delivering reliable, creative and compelling financing solutions to U.S. middle market companies backed by private equity sponsors. Golub Capital is a market-leading, award-winning private debt platform with over $25 billion of capital under management. The Middle Market Lending team has particular domain expertise in select industries, including software, technology services, healthcare, consumer and restaurant and retail. The firm's credit expertise also forms the foundation of its Late Stage Lending business and its Broadly Syndicated Loan investment program. Across its activities, Golub Capital nurtures long-term, win-win partnerships that inspire repeat business from its private equity sponsor clients and investors. Founded in 1994, Golub Capital today has over 350 employees and lending offices in Chicago, New York and San Francisco. For more information, please visit golubcapital.com. About Freeman Spogli & Co. Freeman Spogli & Co. is a private equity firm dedicated exclusively to investing in and partnering with management in consumer-related and distribution companies in the United States. Since its founding in 1983, Freeman Spogli has invested over $4 billion in 59 portfolio companies with aggregate transaction value of over $22 billion, and is currently making investments from FS Equity Partners VII, L.P. Freeman Spogli has offices in Los Angeles and New York. For additional information, visit www.freemanspogli.com. About CRH Healthcare CRH Healthcare (CRH) was founded in 2012 to build a consumer- and quality-focused urgent care center industry leader through both acquisitions and de novo development. Everything the company does is focused on what it calls "The 5 Cs"being Convenient, Caring, Courteous, Competent, and Compliant. With operations in Georgia, Florida, and Alabama, CRH is well positioned in the Southeast to help patients Get in. Get out. Get Better! CRH was recently named Atlanta's fastest growing private healthcare company for the second year in a row by the Atlanta Business Chronicle and as the nation's fastest growing urgent care company according to Inc Magazine's annual Inc 500 list (#845 overall). CRH Healthcare is a proud member of the Urgent Care Association of America. SOURCE Golub Capital Related Links http://www.golubcapital.com COLUMBIA, Md., Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Global Wireless Solutions, Inc. (GWS) has recently completed its most thorough testing of U.S. mobile networks. GWS conducted directed benchmark testing in all 50 states as well as Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands from January 2018 to August 2018. GWS drove close to one million miles across 501 regions throughout the U.S. during the testing process, resulting in the completion of over 8 million individual controlled voice and data tests. Collection and evaluation of data was done using Rohde & Schwarz SmartBenchmarker test equipment, Samsung Galaxy mobile devices, and GWS' Mobistat data evaluation and reporting platform. GWS Performs Comprehensive Testing of U.S. Mobile Networks With Rohde & Schwarz Benchmarking Solution GWS' data results was analyzed according to their OneScore ranking methodology, which combines engineering drive test data with consumer research. It takes into account both real-world wireless network performance as well as consumer considerations by choosing test factors that quantify human perception and assign a weight to each of them according to their importance. This includes everything from coverage to reliability, data speed, voice quality and video performance. The results of this analysis can be found here: www.gwsolutions.com/bestnetwork-USA "Our network testing specialists spent months crisscrossing the US, collecting key performance data using highly specialized test equipment and following methods and procedures that are designed specifically to measure network performance," said Dr. Paul Carter, CEO and founder of Global Wireless Solutions, Inc. "We tested in every major metropolitan market in the US, as well as smaller urban cities and rural towns. As a result, we completed the most comprehensive, consumer-oriented evaluation of US mobile networks to date." To learn more about measurement solutions from Rohde & Schwarz mobile network testing, visit https://www.mobile-network-testing.com/en/products/benchmarking/smartbenchmarker/ and https://blog.mobile-network-testing.com/ Press contacts: North America: Keith Cobler, Phone: +1 214 663 6394, E-mail: [email protected] Contacts for readers: Customer Support North America: Phone: +1 888 837 8772, E-mail: [email protected] Global Wireless Solutions, Inc. Global Wireless Solutions, Inc. defines the industry standard for network benchmarking, analysis and testing. GWS' proprietary OneScore network ranking combines high-level network testing data with real-world network usage scenarios to make the results of testing relatable and easy to understand. Working with some of the world's largest wireless network providers, GWS offers standardized, high-quality network data and engineering analysis to its customers through a suite of benchmarking products, services, and OneMeasure diagnostic apps that includes drive, venue, and in-building testing. Firmly rooted in a deep understanding of network engineering, GWS provides best-in-class, turnkey solutions to help customers better understand overall network performance as today's wireless networks grow and evolve. Founded in 1996, GWS is headquartered in Dulles, VA. At last count, GWS has driven 12 million data collection miles for its customers. For more information, visit www.gwsolutions.com and follow on Twitter at @gwsolutionsinc. Rohde & Schwarz The Rohde & Schwarz technology group develops, produces and markets innovative communications, information and security products for professional users. The group's test and measurement, broadcast and media, aerospace | defense | security, networks and cybersecurity business fields address many different industry and government-sector market segments. On June 30, 2018, Rohde & Schwarz had approximately 11,500 employees. The independent group achieved a net revenue of approximately EUR 2 billion in the 2017/2018 fiscal year (July to June). The company has its headquarters in Munich, Germany. Internationally, it has subsidiaries in more than 70 countries, with regional hubs in Asia and America. SOURCE Rohde & Schwarz NEW YORK, Dec. 18, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- With a 30-year legacy of showing travelers the wonders of Egypt, Insight Vacations and Luxury Gold are excited to see this iconic country make its highly anticipated comeback as a top 2019 bucket list destination. According to a September 2018 UNWTO global travel and tourism annual report, Egypt has seen a 55% increase in visitors, making it the world's fastest-growing destination. Insight Vacations and Luxury Gold, two award-winning global leaders in premium and luxury escorted journeys, stand proud of their continued support and exceptional journeys to Egypt, where travelers can visit one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. After visiting Egypt recently with her family, Ulla Hefel Bohler, CEO of Insight Vacations & Luxury Gold, spoke highly of the experience. "Egypt must be on every traveler's 2019 bucket list. I traveled to Egypt previously and loved the country then, with all it had to offer. We were welcomed back this year with open arms and felt perfectly comfortable and at ease at all times, without any crowds around. Apart from experiencing the incredible sights with our Egyptologist, it was also the personal touches that made a huge difference. We visited a local family home to learn more about Egyptian traditions and their way of life." The Great Pyramids of Giza, along with the ancient treasures and sacred temples that line the legendary Nile River, have been attracting visitors to this iconic destination for centuries. Guests can explore Egypt with an Egyptologist on the following guided journeys that include magical Insight Experiences and exclusive Luxury Gold VIP Experiences: Wonders of Egypt with Insight Vacations: Guests begin this spectacular 9-day journey by visiting the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and viewing the treasures of Tutankhamun with Insight's professionally trained Egyptologist. They'll experience the splendor of the Great Pyramids and venture inside one of the inner chambers before gazing upon the mythical Great Sphinx. Guests then take a scenic flight to Luxor, where they explore the massive temple complex of Karnak before boarding their cruise ship then visiting the Temple of Luxor, a UNESCO World Heritage site. On the west bank of the Nile they'll explore the Temple of Hatshepsut and the Valley of the Kings, home to the magnificent tombs of Egypt's pharaohs, and visit a working bakery to watch local artisans making authentic Egyptian bread. The following evening guests experience a traditional Egyptian dinner and galabeya party, and on the final day they see the imposing Aswan High Dam, the Unfinished Obelisk, and the majestic Temple of Isis. The trip ends with a ride in a traditional Nile felucca, where guests learn about the art of sailing this ancient craft from a local sailor. Splendors of Egypt with Insight Vacations: This 12-day land and river journey immerses guests in the timeless land of the pharaohs and includes a 7-night Nile cruise. Upon arrival, an Egyptologist guides guests through the Egyptian Museum and the Citadel, where they enjoy breathtaking views of Cairo. In Giza, they'll view the Great Pyramids and Sphinx and experience a memorable sound and light show. Continuing on, they'll visit the magnificent Temple of Horus at Edfu, dedicated to the Falcon God. Cruising to Aswan, guests then visit the High Dam and granite quarries and view the massive Unfinished Obelisk. Onboard a traditional Nile felucca, they'll meet a sailor and learn about the art of sailing this ancient craft. In Memphis, the renowned capital of the ancient world, guests view the towering statue of Ramses II and the Great Alabaster Sphinx. Elegance of the Nile with Luxury Gold: Guests begin this remarkable 12-day journey with sightseeing in Cairo and Giza, where they'll explore the Great Pyramids and see the guardian Sphinx with a professional Egyptologist. The journey continues with a 7-day river cruise on the luxurious River Tosca, whose stylishly adorned suites are among the most spacious in the industry. Guests will enjoy Exceptional Dining experiences, including an onboard welcome reception and gala dinner and Nubian-style hospitality at the traditional dwelling of a local family. They'll follow in the famous footsteps of Agatha Christie and Winston Churchill when they view the sunset and indulge in a colonial English-style high tea at Aswan's Old Cataract Hotel. In Luxor, guests will enjoy luxurious comfort at the opulent five-star Winter Palace Luxor Hotel overlooking the Valley of the Kings, which was built in 1886 by British explorers and was once a winter retreat for the Egyptian royal family. To make a reservation with Insight Vacations, contact your favorite travel professional, call 1-888-680-1241 or visit www.insightvacations.com. To make a reservation with Luxury Gold, contact your favorite travel professional, call 1-888-862-5952 or visit www.luxurygoldvacations.com. About Insight Vacations As a global leader in premium guided vacations, Insight Vacations has been crafting magical journeys that embody The Art of Traveling in Style for 40 years. Through meticulous planning, detailed preparation and boundless passion, Insight's collection of award-winning itineraries showcase the most outstanding destinations and curated experiences in Europe and North America. Guided by a highly skilled Travel Director, guests can look forward to traveling in smaller groups, savoring authentic dining and enjoying a range of immersive Insight Experiences. To find out more, visit insightvacations.com. About Luxury Gold Luxury Gold sets an unmatched standard with its collection of award-winning journeys. Guided by a Traveling Concierge, Luxury Gold is a journey beyond the ordinary, where guests enjoy exclusive VIP Experiences, savor exceptional dining and relax in luxury hotels on every curated itinerary. As global leaders in luxury travel with expertise accumulated over nearly 100 years, Luxury Gold epitomizes extraordinary exploration to some of the world's most spectacular destinations. To find out more, visit www.luxurygoldvacations.com. About The TreadRight Foundation Created as a joint initiative between The Travel Corporation's (TTC) family of brands, The TreadRight Foundation is a not-for-profit working to help safeguard the planet, wildlife & people for generations to come. To date, TreadRight has supported over 50 sustainable tourism projects worldwide. The Foundation's guiding principle is to encourage sustainable tourism through conservation, leadership and support for communities. The Foundation's priorities are set by the Steering Committee. Past project partners include WWF, Conservation International, WildAid, The Travel Foundation and The National Trust in the UK. Current initiatives include supporting various women's social enterprises, the recently announced Wildlife Conservation Society's Big Cat fund, WE.org and working with inspiring nature advocates like Celine Cousteau, Costas Christ and Terri Irwin. To learn more about our past and current work at TreadRight, please visit us at treadright.org and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter using our hashtag #MakeTravelMatter. Insight Vacations and Luxury Gold are members of the family-owned The Travel Corporation (TTC) and is renowned and trusted for its outstanding quality, service, value, reliability and financial stability. SOURCE Insight Vacations Related Links https://www.insightvacations.com PITTSBURGH, Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Maintaining sanitary living conditions requires vigilance against pest infestations and effective response when they do occur. Fortunately, an inventor from Upper Darby, Pa., has formulated a spray substance that acts quickly to remove pests and prevent their return. She developed MILLBOURNE SPRAY to kill bugs, rodents and other pests on contact or shortly thereafter. As such, it facilitates sanitary conditions and saves time and effort. Other appealing features are convenience, effectiveness and ease of use. This safe, practical and reliable substance is also pleasantly scented and affordably priced. In addition, its simple formula and package design minimize production costs. The inventor's work experience actually inspired the idea. "Working in residential care facilities," she said, "I periodically experienced the occurrence of bed bugs and realized this method would provide an effective way to get rid of them as well as other types of pests." The original design was submitted to the Philadelphia office of InventHelp. It is currently available for licensing or sale to manufacturers or marketers. For more information, write Dept. 17-PND-4963, InventHelp, 217 Ninth Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15222, or call (412) 288-1300 ext. 1368. Learn more about InventHelp's Invention Submission Services at http://www.InventHelp.com. SOURCE InventHelp Related Links http://www.inventhelp.com DALLAS, Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Ironside Human Resources was recently recognized as one of the "Best Entrepreneurial Companies in America" by Entrepreneur magazine's Entrepreneur360 List, a premier study delivering the most comprehensive analysis of private companies in America. Based on this study forged by Entrepreneur, Ironside Human Resources is recognized as a well-rounded company that has mastered a balance of impact, innovation, growth leadership and value. "We are honored to have been recognized for the second year in a row by Entrepreneur360," says Doug Carter, CEO of Ironside Human Resources. "Being recognized means we are doing things right and we are a well rounded company," continued Doug Carter. "Our annual evaluation of vetted data offers a 360-degree analysis of top privately-held companies across a multitude of industries," explains Jason Feifer, editor in chief of Entrepreneur Magazine. "They are deemed successful not only by revenue numbers, but by how well-rounded they are. The companies that make the list have pushed boundaries with their innovative ideas, fostered strong company cultures, impacted their communities for the better, and increased their brand awareness." Ironside Human Resources is a national healthcare recruitment firm that places Nurses, Therapists, Physicians, Ancillary, physician extenders and Healthcare Executives. Founded in 2011, Ironside Human Resources serves Hospitals, Clinics, Urgent Care Centers and Multi-Specialty Groups. Honorees were identified based on the results from a comprehensive study of independently- owned companies, using a proprietary algorithm and other advanced analytics. The algorithm was built on a balanced scorecard designed to measure five metrics reflecting major pillars of entrepreneurshipinnovation, growth, leadership, impact and business valuation. To learn more about Ironside Human Resources, www.ironsidehr.com. For additional details on the E360 List and the companies recognized, visit: entrepreneur.com/360 ABOUT ENTREPRENEUR MEDIA INC. For 41 years, Entrepreneur Media Inc. has been serving the entrepreneurial community by providing comprehensive coverage of business and personal success through original content and events. Entrepreneur magazine, Entrepreneur.com, GreenEntrepreneur.com and publishing imprint Entrepreneur Press provide solutions, information, inspiration and education read by millions of entrepreneurs and small business owners worldwide. To learn more, visit entrepreneur.com. Follow us on Twitter or Instagram at @Entrepreneur and like us on Facebook at facebook.com/entmagazine. Contact: Doug Carter Email: [email protected] Photo(s): https://www.prlog.org/12745695 Press release distributed by PRLog SOURCE Ironside Human Resources Related Links http://www.ironsidehr.com NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J., Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ) will host a conference call for investors at 8:30 a.m. (Eastern Time) on Tuesday, January 22nd, to review fourth-quarter results. Alex Gorsky, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Joseph J. Wolk, Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer and Christopher DelOrefice, Vice President, Investor Relations will host the call. Investors and other interested parties can access the webcast/conference call in the following ways: The webcast and presentation material are accessible at Johnson & Johnson's website www.investor.jnj.com. A replay of the webcast will be available approximately three hours after the conference call concludes. By telephone: for both "listen-only" participants and those financial analysts who wish to take part in the question-and-answer portion of the call, the telephone dial-in number in the U.S. is 877-869-3847. For participants outside the U.S., the dial-in number is 201-689-8261. A replay of the conference call will be available until approximately 12:00 a.m. on January 30, 2019 . The replay dial-in number for U.S. participants is 877-660-6853. For participants outside the U.S., the replay dial-in number is 201-612-7415. The replay conference ID number for all callers is 13685960. on . The replay dial-in number for U.S. participants is 877-660-6853. For participants outside the U.S., the replay dial-in number is 201-612-7415. The replay conference ID number for all callers is 13685960. The press release will be available at approximately 6:45 a.m. (Eastern Time) the morning of the conference call. About Johnson & Johnson At Johnson & Johnson, we believe good health is the foundation of vibrant lives, thriving communities and forward progress. That's why for more than 130 years, we have aimed to keep people well at every age and every stage of life. Today, as the world's largest and most broadly-based health care company, we are committed to using our reach and size for good. We strive to improve access and affordability, create healthier communities, and put a healthy mind, body and environment within reach of everyone, everywhere. We are blending our heart, science and ingenuity to profoundly change the trajectory of health for humanity. SOURCE Johnson & Johnson Related Links http://www.jnj.com NEW YORK, Dec. 18, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Elder Quentin L. Cook, an apostle of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, visited AJC headquarters today to meet with senior leadership of the global Jewish advocacy organization. Elder Cook is a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, the Church of Jesus Christ's second-highest governing body, the highest being the First Presidency. His visit was the second by top Church leaders to AJC headquarters. In 2014, two apostles, Elders L. Tom Perry and D. Todd Christofferson came to AJC, a historic visit that further deepened and expanded the relationship between AJC and the Church. "AJC's relationship with The Church of Latter-day Saints is about shared values, mutual dedication to our peoples' continuity, and commitment to the U.S. as a country of immigrants where the rights of all, particularly minorities, must be protected," said AJC President John Shapiro at the start of the luncheon conversation. "Latter-day Saints and Jews have a natural connection," said Cook, referring to similarities between the two faiths, particularly in their focus on education. Cook noted that the Church's support for the Jewish return to their holy land predates Israel's founding by more than a century. "On a personal level there have always been relationships," said Cook, adding that AJC has had a role in advancing the more formal leader to leader dialogue. The relationship with the Church, a fast-growing faith group, is a priority for AJC in its pioneering interreligious work. High-level national AJC delegations visited Latter-day Saints Church headquarters in August 2012 and November 2013. Elder Cook led AJC leadership in a tour of the Church's Philadelphia Temple before its dedication in August 2016. Earlier this year, AJC representatives constituted the sole national Jewish organizational delegation attending the funeral of longtime Church president Thomas Monson. AJC also has initiated Jewish dialogue with Latter-day Saints in cities across the United States and several AJC regional delegations have met with key Church figures in Salt Lake City. "The strength of the relationship has been our ability to identify shared interests and elevate them," said Shapiro. "When there have been crises in the relationship, such as the posthumous baptism controversy, the Church and the Jewish people, with AJC leadership, have engaged to solve our differences, to strengthen our relationship." Rabbi Noam Marans, AJC's Director of Interreligious and Intergroup Relations, who also spoke at the lunch meeting, has been central to AJC's positively evolving ties with the Church. In addition to Shapiro, AJC Board of Governors Chair Harriet Schleifer and Honorary President Stanley Bergman participated in the meeting. SOURCE American Jewish Committee Related Links http://www.ajc.org SALT LAKE CITY, Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Nav was recognized as one of the "Best Entrepreneurial Companies in America" by Entrepreneur magazine's Entrepreneur360 List, a premier study delivering the most comprehensive analysis of private companies in America. Based on this study forged by Entrepreneur, Nav is listed as number 29 out of 360 companies, being recognized as a well-rounded company that has mastered a balance of impact, innovation, growth leadership and value. Started in 2012, Nav is the leading Business Financial Management app offering free access to personal and business credit reports from major consumer and commercial credit bureaus including Dun & Bradstreet, Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. The Nav platform also helps small business owners make informed business credit decisions and hosts a robust marketplace with more than 110 business financing products including loans and credit cards. The company's marketplace uses a unique, lender-neutral approach to help business owners find the best financing options for their needs. Nav's solution is also leveraged by other business service providers to enhance their customer experience. This is the first year Nav has applied for and was awarded inclusion on the Entrepreneur360 List. "Nav is honored to be included on this year's Entrepreneur360 List," said Levi King, Nav's CEO and Co-Founder. "Recognition of our company's dedication to our employees and small business owners reinforces that we're making the right choices for everyone. Congratulations to all of the other companies on the listwe're proud to be in their company." In 2018, Nav also received recognition as one of: Inc's 5000 Fastest-Growing Companies The Top Fintech Startups Of 2018 in CB Insights Fintech 250 List San Francisco Bay Area's 2018 Best and Brightest Companies to Work For 2018 Best and Brightest Companies to Work For Salt Lake Tribune Top Workplaces 2018 "Our annual evaluation of vetted data offers a 360-degree analysis of top privately-held companies across a multitude of industries," explains Jason Feifer, editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine. "They are deemed successful not only by revenue numbers, but by how well-rounded they are. The companies that make the list have pushed boundaries with their innovative ideas, fostered strong company cultures, impacted their communities for the better, and increased their brand awareness." Honorees were identified based on the results from a comprehensive study of independently-owned companies, using a proprietary algorithm and other advanced analytics. The algorithm was built on a balanced scorecard designed to measure five metrics reflecting major pillars of entrepreneurshipinnovation, growth, leadership, impact and business valuation. To learn more about Nav, visit Nav.com. For additional details on the E360 List and the companies recognized, visit: entrepreneur.com/360. About Nav Nav is the leading Business Financial Management app offering free access to personal and business credit reports from major consumer and commercial credit bureaus including Dun & Bradstreet, Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. The company has offices in Silicon Valley and Salt Lake City. More information about Nav is available at Nav.com. About Entrepreneur Media Inc. For 41 years, Entrepreneur Media Inc. has been serving the entrepreneurial community by providing comprehensive coverage of business and personal success through original content and events. Entrepreneur magazine, Entrepreneur.com, GreenEntrepreneur.com and publishing imprint Entrepreneur Press provide solutions, information, inspiration and education read by millions of entrepreneurs and small business owners worldwide. To learn more, visit entrepreneur.com. Follow us on Twitter or Instagram at @Entrepreneur and like us on Facebook at facebook.com/entmagazine. SOURCE Nav Related Links http://www.nav.com STOCKHOLM, Dec. 19, 2018 This announcement is not an offer, whether directly or indirectly, in Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand or South Africa or in any other jurisdictions where such offer pursuant to legislation and regulations in such relevant jurisdictions would be prohibited by applicable law. Shareholders not resident in Sweden who wish to accept the Offer (as defined below) must make inquiries concerning applicable legislation and possible tax consequences. Shareholders should refer to the offer restrictions included in the section titled "Important notice" at the end of this announcement and in the offer document published on Quimper's website, www.quimperbidco.com. Shareholders in the United States should also refer to the section titled "Special notice to shareholders in the United States" at the end of this announcement. On 11 December 2018, Quimper AB (a company that has been or will be indirectly invested in by CVC Funds) ("Quimper")[1], announced a public offer to the shareholders in Ahlsell AB (publ) ("Ahlsell" or the "Company") to tender all their shares in Ahlsell to Quimper (the "Offer"). The Swedish language offer document relating to the Offer has today been approved and registered by the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority (Sw. Finansinspektionen). The offer document is available on Quimper's website (www.quimperbidco.com) and on Carnegie Investment Bank's website (www.carnegie.se), and will be available on the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority's website (www.fi.se) in Swedish. The acceptance form related to the Offer can be found on the first two of these websites. A copy of the offer document and a pre-printed acceptance form will be mailed to all direct-registered shareholders as of 19 December 2018, except for those domiciled in the excluded countries (see above). The acceptance period of the Offer starts on 20 December 2018 and ends on 11 February 2019. Settlement is expected to commence around 19 February 2019. This information was submitted for publication on 19 December 2018 at 10:00 a.m. (CET). Information about the Offer: www.quimperbidco.com Important notice The Offer is not being made, directly or indirectly, in or into Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand or South Africa by use of mail or any other means or instrumentality (including, without limitation, facsimile transmission, electronic mail, telex, telephone and the Internet) of interstate or foreign commerce, or of any facility of national security exchange, of Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand or South Africa, and the Offer cannot be accepted by any such use, means, instrumentality or facility of, or from within, Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand or South Africa. Accordingly, this press release and any documentation relating to the Offer are not being and should not be sent, mailed or otherwise distributed or forwarded in or into Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand or South Africa. This press release is not being, and must not be, sent to shareholders with registered addresses in Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand or South Africa. Banks, brokers, dealers and other nominees holding shares for persons in Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand or South Africa must not forward this press release or any other document received in connection with the Offer to such persons. Statements in this press release relating to future status or circumstances, including statements regarding future performance, growth and other trend projections and the other benefits of the Offer, are forward-looking statements. These statements may generally, but not always, be identified by the use of words such as "anticipates", "intends", "expects", "believes", or similar expressions. By their nature, forward-looking statements involve risk and uncertainty because they relate to events and depend on circumstances that will occur in the future. There can be no assurance that actual results will not differ materially from those expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements due to many factors, many of which are outside the control of Quimper. Any such forward-looking statements speak only as of the date on which they are made and Quimper has no obligation (and undertakes no such obligation) to update or revise any of them, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except for in accordance with applicable laws and regulations. Special notice to shareholders in the United States The Offer will be made for shares of Ahlsell AB (publ), a company incorporated under Swedish law, and is subject to Swedish disclosure and procedural requirements, which are different from those of the United States. The Company's financial statements, and all financial information that is included herein, or any other documents relating to the Offer, have been or will be prepared in accordance with IFRS and may not be comparable to financial statements of companies in the United States or other companies whose financial statements are prepared in accordance with US generally accepted accounting principles. The Offer will be made in the United States pursuant to Section 14(e) and Regulation 14E under the US Exchange Act as a "Tier II" tender offer, and otherwise in accordance with the requirements of Swedish law. Accordingly, the Offer will be subject to disclosure and other procedural requirements, including with respect to withdrawal rights, offer timetable, settlement procedures and timing of payments that are different from those applicable under U.S. domestic tender offer procedures and law. It may be difficult for U.S. shareholders to enforce their rights and any claims they may have arising under the U.S. federal securities laws in connection with the Offer, since the Company and Quimper are located in countries other than the United States, and some or all of their officers and directors may be residents of countries other than the United States. U.S. shareholders may not be able to sue the Company or Quimper or their respective officers or directors in a non-U.S. court for violations of U.S. securities laws. Further, it may be difficult to compel the Company or Quimper and their respective affiliates to subject themselves to the jurisdiction or judgment of a U.S. court. To the extent permissible under applicable law or regulations, Quimper and its affiliates or brokers (acting as agents for Quimper or its affiliates, as applicable) may from time to time after the date hereof directly or indirectly purchase or arrange to purchase shares of the Company outside the United States other than pursuant to the Offer, before or during the period in which the Offer remains open for acceptance, or any securities that are convertible into, exchangeable for or exercisable for such shares. These purchases may occur either in the open market at prevailing prices or in private transactions at negotiated prices. Any information about such purchases will be announced through relevant electronic media if, and to the extent, such announcement is required under applicable Swedish law, rules or regulations. In addition, the financial advisors to Quimper may also engage in ordinary course trading activities in securities of the Company, which may include purchases or arrangements to purchase such securities. The receipt of cash pursuant to the Offer by a U.S. shareholder may be a taxable transaction for US federal income tax purposes and under applicable U.S. state and local, as well as foreign and other, tax laws. Each shareholder is urged to consult his or her independent professional adviser immediately regarding the tax consequences of accepting the Offer. NEITHER THE SEC NOR ANY U.S. STATE SECURITIES COMMISSION HAS APPROVED OR DISAPPROVED THE OFFER, OR PASSED ANY COMMENT UPON THE ADEQUACY OR COMPLETENESS OF THIS OFFER DOCUMENT. ANY REPRESENTATION TO THE CONTRARY IS A CRIMINAL OFFENCE IN THE UNITED STATES. [1] Quimper is a newly formed entity that has been or will be indirectly invested in by funds or vehicles ("CVC Funds") advised by CVC Advisers Company (Luxembourg) S.a r.l. and/or its affiliates. "CVC" means CVC Advisers Company (Luxembourg) S.a r.l. and its affiliates, together with CVC Capital Partners SICAV-FIS S.A. and each of its subsidiaries. For additional information contact: Carsten Huwendiek Managing Director Global Head of Marketing & Communications CVC Advisers Limited Tel: +44-(0)-2074204240 e-mail: [email protected] Helena Stangberg Senior Director, Partner Hallvarsson & Halvarsson (for Swedish speakers) Tel: +46-709-71-12-53 e-mail: [email protected] This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com http://news.cision.com/cvc-capital-partners/r/offer-document-regarding-quimper-s-cash-offer-to-the-shareholders-in-ahlsell-made-public,c2703929 The following files are available for download: SOURCE CVC Capital Partners COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo., Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- As the 2018 Farm Bill awaits being signed into law by the White House, Colorado based Folium Biosciences announced the first outside member of its board of directors: J.P. Bilbrey, the immediate past President, CEO and Chairman of The Hershey Company. Mr. Bilbrey was instrumental in the growth of some of the world's largest and best-known brands during his career with Procter & Gamble, Danone Waters and the Hershey Company. Bilbrey also currently serves on the Board of Directors of Colgate Palmolive Company and as an advisory board member to the Royal Bank of Canada. CEO Kashif Shan issued the following statement about the Farm Bill's significance for the hemp industry and Bilbrey's participation: "Our markets are already large, and with the legitimization of hemp in the Farm Bill, they're primed to grow enormously. As soon as the Farm Bill passes, we expect to see a rapid penetration of mainstream food, beverage and cosmeceutical markets. For that reason, J.P. Bilbrey's arrival couldn't be more timely. His nearly 4 decades in consumer goods experience will prove an invaluable asset." Bilbrey understands the impact of removing hemp-derived products from the list of Schedule 1 substances: "I believe Folium Biosciences is a forward-thinking industry leader, which excels in research, product development, and innovation. With the passing of the Farm Bill, CBD will finally be legalized and will have remarkable growth potential." "This is an exciting time and I look forward to being involved with this significant growth opportunity," Bilbrey added. About Folium Biosciences: Folium Biosciences is the largest vertically-integrated producer, manufacturer, and distributor of hemp derived phytocannabinoids in the USA, if not the world. It is a B2B, bulk and wholesale supplier of hemp derived CBD 0.0% THC oil, CBD water soluble technology, CBD 0.0% THC edibles, and CBD for cosmeceuticals and animal health as certified by the state of Colorado. Folium Biosciences has over 300K-square-feet of indoor space in southern Colorado which supports agricultural intake, processing, extraction, and post extraction operations. Folium Biosciences is also proud to announce the forthcoming launch of its new pharmaceutical division. The Colorado Springs headquartered company ships its 0.0% THC white label, bulk and finished products to customers world-wide. It has been certified by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment as a producer of 0.0% THC products and has been issued Free Sale Certification. Media Contact: Jeannie Lee (407) 342.1323 [email protected] SOURCE Folium Biosciences Related Links https://foliumbiosciences.com/ AUGSBURG, Germany, December 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Specially developed for deployment in disaster-stricken areas, Augsburg-based robotics specialist German Bionic introduces its new Cray + exoskeleton model. Possible application scenarios for the portable robot system include rescue missions following natural disasters as well as serious traffic accidents or terrorist attacks. External skeletons, or exoskeletons as they are more commonly referred to, are human-machine systems combining human intelligence with machine power to support or amplify the movements of the wearer. The technology incorporated in the Cray + is based on the successful Cray X model, which was developed for implementation in industry and logistics where it has been used for some time. The new disaster relief Cray + model is specially designed for deployment in rescue operations - even if taking place in extreme weather conditions - and also integrates a communication and GPS system. Moreover, the Cray + features electric motors and batteries that are even more powerful than in its sister model, enabling rescue crews to lift heavy objects or necessary equipment as long and with as much power as possible in an emergency situation. "In the event of major disasters, relief workers and rescue teams go to the limits of their physical and mental capabilities. To best cope with this job, which is all too often a matter of life and death, they deserve to be equipped with the most advanced and powerful equipment possible," says Armin G. Schmidt, CEO of German Bionic. "The German Bionic Cray + was jointly conceived with civil protection specialists from Japan and manufactured in Augsburg, Germany. It allows for use in areas and situations where heavy rescue equipment cannot be safely deployed and assists the on-site rescue teams in performing their task, even when subjected to extreme physical pressure." Extremely strong and durable The German Bionic Cray + robot exoskeleton was specially developed for use in disaster areas. Rescue teams equipped with the Cray + in the future will be capable of lifting and clearing away heavy loads, such as debris or wreckage, with greater ease and endurance. Besides the additional power the rescue workers are provided with by the external skeleton, which is driven by two high-performance electric motors, an integrated GPS transmitter helps track their location in the disaster area. Furthermore, the Cray + can be equipped with a camera allowing live images of the rescue operation to be transmitted directly to the crisis center. The Cray + is supplied with an extra-long-life battery and is suitable for use in even the most extreme weather conditions. About German Bionic German Bionic, headquartered in Augsburg with offices in Berlin, Tokyo and Singapore, is a German manufacturer developing and building exoskeletons for use in industrial production. Exoskeletons are human-machine systems that combine human intelligence and machine power, thereby enabling individuals to gain increased strength and endurance. German Bionic is one of the world's leading robotics companies focusing on humans in Industry 4.0. Learn more about German Bionic, its products and the minds behind the company at https://www.germanbionic.com . Press pictures: https://www.germanbionic.com/en/about/#press Live updates via Twitter: https://twitter.com/germanbionic www.germanbionic.com Press contact: Eric Eitel [email protected] +49-175-1670-891 SOURCE GBS German Bionic Systems GmbH Built for reliable gaming on the couch, the Razer Turret for Xbox One offers a fast and stable 2.4 GHz wireless connection via a single dongle for the mouse and keyboard, and battery life of up to 40 hours on a single charge. With Xbox Dynamic Lighting and Razer ChromaTM technology, console gamers now have access to the largest ecosystem of lighting, with up to 16.8-million color options and lighting effects for their keyboard and mouse. Additionally, Razer has been working with developers to bring Xbox Dynamic Lighting and Razer ChromaTM support in-game, offering immersive experiences on supported titles such as "X-Morph-Defense", "Vermintide 2" and more. "Razer ChromaTM expands even further into the living room," says Tan, "building upon the success we've had with Philips Hue in room lighting." The keyboard features Razer's gaming grade mechanical switches engineered for durability and reliability with a lifespan of up to 80-million keystrokes. A dedicated Xbox key also instantly pulls up the Xbox One dashboard for seamless navigation. The included mouse is modelled after the popular Razer Mamba Wireless gaming mouse and features a high-performance 5G advanced optical sensor and RazerTM Mechanical Mouse Switches with up to 50-million clicks durability. The mouse surface is conveniently hidden underneath the main body of the keyboard and can be extended for use, then retracted for charging and storage. A built-in ergonomic wrist rest extends from the base of the Razer Turret keyboard for Xbox One for added comfort. The Razer Turret for Xbox One is also fully compatible with PC (Windows 10), enabling gamers to take their game from the PC to console and back. For more information, visit https://www.razer.com/gaming-keyboards/razer-turret-for-xbox-one/ Images: Press Images Price: $249.99 Availability: Microsoft Store (North America): Pre-order now (Get an Xbox gift card worth $25 with each pre-order) Worldwide: Q1 2019 Product Specs: Razer Turret for Xbox One keyboard: Razer Mechanical Switches with 50 g actuation force 80-million keystrokes Xbox Dynamic Lighting Powered by Razer Chroma with 16.8 million customizable color options Compact layout Ergonomic wrist rest Mid height keycaps Razer Synapse enabled 10-key roll-over anti-ghosting Compatible with both PC and Xbox One Fully programmable keys with on-the-fly macro recording (PC only) Gaming mode option (PC only) Approximate size: 194 mm / 7.64 in (Length) X 390 mm / 15.35 in (Width) X 36.93 mm / 1.45 in. (Height) Approximate size (with tray expanded): 194 mm / 7.64 in (Length) X 600 mm / 23.62 in (Width) X 36.93 mm / 1.45 in (Height) Approximate weight: 1860 g / 4.10 lbs. Cable length: 2 m / 6.56 ft. Razer Turret for Xbox One mouse: Razer 5G Advanced Optical Sensor with true 16,000 DPI Up to 450 inches per second (IPS) / 50 G acceleration 7 independently programmable Hyperesponse buttons Razer Mechanical Mouse Switches with 50-million click life cycle Gaming-grade tactile scroll wheel Ergonomic right-handed design Xbox Dynamic Lighting Powered by Razer Chroma with 16.8 million customizable color options Hybrid On-Board Memory and Cloud Storage Razer Synapse enabled Compatible with both PC and Xbox One Approximate size: 125.70 mm / 4.95 in (Length) X 70 mm / 2.75 in (Width) X 43.20 mm / 1.70 in (Height) Approximate weight (excluding cable): 106 g / 0.21 lbs Charging cable: 0.15 m / 0.49 ft / 0.49 ft USB cable length: 2.10 m / 6.89 ft Battery life (on a single charge): Razer Turret for Xbox One keyboard Up to 11 hours with default lighting enabled Up to 43 hours with lighting disabled Razer Turret for Xbox One mouse Up to 30 hours with default lighting enabled Up to 50 hours with lighting disabled ABOUT RAZER Razer is the world's leading lifestyle brand for gamers. The triple-headed snake trademark of Razer is one of the most recognized logos in the global gaming and esports communities. With a fan base that spans every continent, the company has designed and built the world's largest gamer-focused ecosystem of hardware, software and services. Razer's award-winning hardware includes high-performance gaming peripherals, Blade gaming laptops and the acclaimed Razer Phone. Razer's software platform, with over 50 million users, includes Razer Synapse (an Internet of Things platform), Razer Chroma (a proprietary RGB lighting technology system), and Razer Cortex (a game optimizer and launcher). Razer services include Razer Gold - one of the world's largest virtual credit services for gamers - which allows gamers to purchase virtual goods and items from over 2,500 different games. Founded in 2005 and dual-headquartered in San Francisco and Singapore, Razer has 15 offices worldwide and is recognized as the leading brand for gamers in the USA, Europe and China. Razer is listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (Stock Code: 1337). Press Contacts: Americas Kevin Allen [email protected] Europe/Africa Jan Horak [email protected] Asia Pacific Raymond Lau [email protected] China Evita Zhang [email protected] Global Alain Mazer [email protected] Razer For Gamers. By Gamers. SOURCE Razer Related Links http://www.razer.com BOSTON, Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Santander Bank today announced the opening of its newest branch in Brooklyn in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, located on 1298 Fulton Street. To commemorate the new location, Santander leaders joined community partners at a grand opening celebration and ribbon cutting on Friday, Dec. 14 to officially open the branch. Santander presented checks totaling $26,000 to three community organizations Brooklyn Neighborhood Services, Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation and New York Crusaders. "We're excited to expand our presence in Brooklyn and open our first branch in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood where we can help local residents and business owners with their banking needs," said Jim Uehlinger, region president for the Bank's Metro New York/Northern New Jersey region. "Santander is investing in its branch network and this location features our new modern design that encourages engaging, consultative customer interactions in a comfortable setting." The new branch offers a welcoming environment with innovative features designed to improve the customer experience. There are several meeting spaces for customers to interact with the branch team, including a meeting "nook" where they can meet privately with bankers to discuss their financial needs. The 24-hour ATM vestibule is available to customers after branch hours. Santander is donating $10,000 to Brooklyn Neighborhood Services to support its First Time Home Ownership program that provides comprehensive workshops and resources to low and middle income residents to assist with purchasing their first home. To assist Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation with its financial stability program, Santander is donating $15,000, which will provide workforce development training, asset building and social support services that facilitate economic self-sufficiency and upward mobility. New York Crusaders is receiving $1,000 from Santander to help families throughout Bedford-Stuyvesant and greater New York City obtain access to free health and fitness resources. Uehlinger added, "At Santander, we're committed to supporting the communities where we live and work, and Brooklyn Neighborhood Services, Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation and New York Crusaders align with our values of improving the quality of life for residents in Brooklyn." Santander Bank, N.A. is one of the country's largest retail and commercial banks with $74.2 billion in assets. With its corporate offices in Boston, the Bank's approximately 9,600 employees, over 600 branches, more than 2,000 ATMs and 2.1 million customers are principally located in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware. The Bank is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Madrid-based Banco Santander, S.A. (NYSE: SAN) - one of the most respected banking groups in the world with more than 125 million customers in the U.S., Europe, and Latin America. It is overseen by Santander Holdings USA, Inc., Banco Santander's intermediate holding company in the U.S. For more information on Santander Bank, please visit www.santanderbank.com. Media Contact: Nancy Orlando 617-757-5765 [email protected] SOURCE Santander Bank Related Links http://www.santanderbank.com SAN DIEGO, Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Port Arthur LNG, LLC, a subsidiary of Sempra Energy (NYSE: SRE), and the Polish Oil & Gas Company (PGNiG) today announced they have entered into a definitive 20-year sale-and-purchase agreement for liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the Port Arthur LNG liquefaction-export facility under development in Jefferson County, Texas. Today's announcement is an important milestone as Sempra Energy pursues its long-term goal of exporting 45 million tonnes per annum (Mtpa) of North American LNG. "This agreement marks an important step toward Poland's energy independence and security," said U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry. "As demonstrated with the launch of the Strategic Dialogue on Energy in Poland last month, the Trump Administration remains committed to increasing energy diversity, advancing energy security, strengthening national security, and creating a future of prosperity and opportunity in Poland and throughout the region." "This agreement with PGNiG represents an important expansion of our portfolio of contracts for LNG exports and major step forward in the development of our Port Arthur LNG project," said Jeffrey W. Martin, chairman and CEO of Sempra Energy. "Last month, we began the commissioning phase of our Cameron LNG liquefaction-export facility in Louisiana. This agreement, along with the great progress on Cameron LNG, continue to validate our growth strategy as we advance our vision to become North America's premier energy infrastructure company." "Our activities show that we consistently implement our strategy," said Piotr Wozniak, president of the management board of PGNiG. "Another long-term contract not only allows us to develop LNG portfolio with a view to delivering to Poland, but it gives us, in the near future, the possibility of trading in LNG purchased on a global scale. I am glad that Sempra Energy is among our American partners. I am convinced that we will have good long-term cooperation." While financial terms were not disclosed, the agreement is for the sale and purchase of 2 Mtpa, or approximately 2.7 billion cubic meters per year (after regasification) enough natural gas to meet about 15 percent of Poland's daily needs. The agreement is subject to certain conditions precedent, including Port Arthur LNG making a final investment decision. Under the agreement, LNG purchases from Port Arthur LNG will be made on a Free-On-Board basis, with PGNiG responsible for shipping the LNG from the Port Arthur terminal to the final destination. Port Arthur LNG will manage gas pipeline transportation, liquefaction processing and cargo loading, giving PGNiG flexibility in cargo management. PGNiG plans to deliver cargos to domestic customers in Poland or trade LNG on the global market, once operations commence. In addition to the PGNiG agreement, Sempra Energy signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Korea Gas Corporation last year for potential participation in the Port Arthur LNG project. Sempra Energy has partnered with Mitsubishi, Mitsui & Co. LTD. and Total S.A. on the construction of the Cameron LNG liquefaction-export project in Hackberry, La. The first phase of this project is currently being commissioned and with the expectation that LNG will be produced from all three liquefaction trains in 2019. Sempra Energy also has an MOU with Total, S.A. for some export capacity at Cameron LNG Phase 2 and Heads of Agreements (HOAs) with Mitsui & Co. LTD., Tokyo Gas Company and Total, S.A. for all of the export capacity at Energia Costa Azul Phase 1 in Baja California, Mexico. An MOU and HOA define terms and conditions of contracts to be negotiated and do not commit any party to enter into a definitive agreement. The Port Arthur liquefaction-export facility is proposed to include two natural gas liquefaction trains capable of processing approximately 11 Mtpa of LNG; up to three LNG storage tanks; two marine berths, and associated facilities. The Port Arthur liquefaction-export facility is scheduled to receive its final environmental impact statement from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission next month. Earlier this year, Bechtel was selected by Port Arthur LNG to serve as the engineering, procurement, construction and commissioning contractor for the facility, subject to reaching a definitive agreement. Development of the Port Arthur LNG liquefaction facility is contingent upon obtaining additional customer commitments, completing the required commercial agreements, securing all necessary permits, obtaining financing, incentives and other factors, and reaching a final investment decision. PGNiG is the leader of the Polish natural gas market. Listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange, the company's core businesses include the exploration and production of natural gas and crude oil, and through its key branches and subsidiaries import, storage, and sale of natural gas; the distribution of gaseous and liquid fuels; and heat and electricity generation. PGNiG holds exploration and production licenses on the Norwegian Continental Shelf and in Pakistan. Munich-based PGNiG Supply & Trading is engaged in gas trading in Western Europe and operates an LNG trading office in London. Sempra Energy, a San Diego-based energy services holding company with 2017 revenues of more than $11 billion, is the utility holding company with the largest U.S. customer base. The Sempra Energy companies' approximately 20,000 employees serve more than 40 million consumers worldwide. This news release contains statements that are not historical fact and constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements can be identified by words such as "believes," "expects," "anticipates," "plans," "estimates," "projects," "forecasts," "contemplates," "assumes," "depends," "should," "could," "would," "will," "confident," "may," "can," "potential," "possible," "proposed," "target," "pursue," "outlook," "maintain," or similar expressions or discussions of guidance, strategies, plans, goals, opportunities, projections, initiatives, objectives or intentions. Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of performance. They involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions. Future results may differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking statements. Factors, among others, that could cause our actual results and future actions to differ materially from those described in any forward-looking statements include risks and uncertainties relating to: actions and the timing of actions, including decisions, new regulations, and issuances of permits and other authorizations by the U.S. Department of Energy, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, states, cities and counties, and other regulatory and governmental bodies in the U.S. and other countries in which we operate; the timing and success of business development efforts and construction projects, including risks in timely obtaining or maintaining permits and other authorizations, risks in completing construction projects on schedule and on budget, and risks in obtaining the consent and participation of partners; our ability to successfully execute our plan to divest certain non-strategic assets within the anticipated timeframe, if at all, or that such plan may not yield the anticipated benefits; the availability of natural gas and liquefied natural gas, and natural gas pipeline and storage capacity; equipment failures; changes in energy markets; volatility in commodity prices; moves to reduce or eliminate reliance on natural gas; risks posed by actions of third parties who control the operations of our investments, and risks that our partners or counterparties will be unable or unwilling to fulfill their contractual commitments; weather conditions, natural disasters, accidents, equipment failures, explosions, terrorist attacks and other events that disrupt our operations, damage our facilities and systems, cause the release of harmful materials, and subject us to third-party liability for property damage or personal injuries, fines and penalties, some of which may not be covered by insurance (including costs in excess of applicable policy limits) or may be disputed by insurers; cybersecurity threats to storage and pipeline infrastructure, the information and systems used to operate our businesses; the impact of recent federal tax reform and uncertainty as to how it may be applied, and our ability to mitigate adverse impacts; changes in foreign and domestic trade policies and laws, including border tariffs, revisions to or the replacement of international trade agreements, and changes that make our exports less competitive or otherwise restrict our ability to export; and other uncertainties, some of which may be difficult to predict and are beyond our control. These risks and uncertainties are further discussed in the reports that Sempra Energy has filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. These reports are available through the EDGAR system free-of-charge on the SEC's website, www.sec.gov, and on the company's website at www.sempra.com. Investors should not rely unduly on any forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements speak only as of the date hereof, and the company undertakes no obligation to update or revise these forecasts or projections or other forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Sempra LNG & Midstream, LLC and Port Arthur LNG, LLC are not the same as the California Utilities, San Diego Gas & Electric Company (SDG&E) or Southern California Gas Company (SoCalGas), or Oncor Electric Delivery Company LLC (Oncor) and are not regulated by the California Public Utilities Commission. SOURCE Sempra Energy Related Links http://www.sempra.com Pioneering Mental Health Services Delivery for Rural Communities By the early 2000s, the state of Texas was in the midst of a widely recognized multi-decade crisis from lack of mental health services for people in need. Psychiatric facilities were above capacity, leaving patients in mental health emergencies with either jail or emergency rooms (ER) as their only options. The ones correctly identified as in need of emergency care were taken to an ER where they could wait for days or even weeks for an open psychiatric bed. Something had to be done. So, in 2004, Dr. Fishkind was tasked by the state of Texas with helping design a plan for bringing psychiatric emergency services to the entire state. "Texas is a big place, and many people with mental illness had to travel 500 to 600 miles in the back of a police car just to find an inpatient psych hospital bed somewhere. It was a huge drain on ER and police resources and a disservice to these patients. I was honored to help solve this problem," notes Dr. Fishkind, co-founder and former CEO of JSA Health, which was recently acquired by SOC Telemed. "I waited many, many years to spring emergency telePsychiatry on an unsuspecting world, so when we drafted the plan for the state, we based it around telePsychiatry and other cutting-edge methods." In 2007, with a state plan in place, the Texas legislature dedicated funding to improve the ailing state mental health crisis system. A percentage of those funds was earmarked for special projects in crisis response, contingent upon a 25 percent local match to be provided by the state. This availability of funds fueled regional mental health authority Burke into action. Having a year earlier developed an organized network of key stakeholders within the region, Burke was able to rally allies and additional funds to bring about much-needed regional change. "We covered an area over 11,000 square miles and did not have a single psychiatric hospital that could take people in crisis, nor did we have funding to solve the issue. We realized nobody was going to magically fix this state crisis for us," explains Susan Rushing, who has worked in various roles at Burke since 1980 and as CEO since 1990. "We knew the private hospital model was not the answer three had already gone under in our region. So, we worked with and surveyed many stakeholders to create a formal needs assessment, and what we concluded was needed was a dedicated place where patients in crisis could go, where hospitals could send people who were presenting in their ERs, and where law enforcement could take people they apprehended who needed immediate psychiatric help. From there our emergency care model was born." The newly available state funding, along with local matching funds and the state's new crisis plan, enabled the establishment of the Burke MHEC. The initiative opened in 2008 as an innovative option to hospital emergency room services for area residents experiencing a mental health crisis. Located in Lufkin, Texas, it is the first freestanding, rural comprehensive psychiatric emergency program in which psychiatric services are performed entirely by emergency telePsychiatrists. SOC's Dr. Fishkind co-designed with Burke the physical plant and clinical programming for MHEC, with his company providing access to 16 psychiatrists and one advanced practice nurse who administered care remotely, aided by Burke's onsite staff. Measuring a Decade of Success The Burke MHEC has become a significant provider in the area's healthcare safety net. Before MHEC, the first stop for all mental health emergencies was a hospital emergency department for medical clearance and transitioning to the next level of care. This process took an average of 9.2 hours, with one out of every 19 emergency visits resulting in medical-surgical hospital admission because of a lack of psychiatric beds. Since opening ten years ago, MHEC has treated nearly 11,000 county residents in crisis while providing more than 30,000 bed days all to patients who mostly fall in the category of low income. Without MHEC, these patients would have been transferred to area hospitals. Interested in understanding the financial and health impact to the community, Rushing commissioned a study that focused on the impact of prevented ER visits. In estimating ER cost avoidance, two analyses were conducted. The first looked at the cost avoidance associated with ER visits, and the second went beyond the ER cost to estimate the cost avoided for the entire hospital stay of which ER costs are a subset. Data used for this analysis was gathered from the Department of State Health Services' (DSHS) two hospital databases, capturing both inpatient costs as well as hospital outpatient data, including ER data, from 2010 to 2016. Taking into consideration the annual number of MHEC admissions, influence of each hospital in the 12-county area, patients who fell under the MDC (major diagnostics category) code and other variables, the study considers the estimate of MHEC-created cost avoidance in area hospitals to be a cumulative value between $17.7 M and $22 M, over the seven-year period measured. The report, "Exploring Cost Avoidance in Area Hospitals: The Impact of Burke's Mental Health Emergency Center," can be reviewed in its entirety at https://myburke.org/mhec-cost-avoidance-report-2018/. About SOC Telemed SOC Telemed (SOC) is the largest national provider of telemedicine technology and solutions to hospitals, health systems, post-acute providers, physician networks, and value-based care organizations. Built on proven and scalable infrastructure as an enterprise-wide solution, SOC's technology platform, Telemed IQ, rapidly deploys and seamlessly optimizes telemedicine programs across the continuum of care. SOC provides a supportive and dedicated partner presence, virtually delivering patient care through teleNeurology, telePsychiatry and teleICU as well as enabling healthcare organizations to build sustainable telemedicine programs in any clinical specialty. SOC enables organizations to enrich their care models and touch more lives by supplying healthcare teams with industry-leading solutions that drive improved clinical care, patient outcomes, and organizational health. The company was the first provider of acute clinical telemedicine services to earn The Joint Commission's Gold Seal of Approval and has maintained that accreditation every year since inception. SOC Telemed is backed by Warburg Pincus and CRG. For more information, visit www.soctelemed.com. Media Contact: Lauren Shankman (404) 214.0722 Ext. 121 [email protected] SOURCE SOC Telemed Related Links http://www.soctelemed.com CHICAGO, Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Sprout Social , a leading provider of social media marketing, analytics and advocacy solutions for business, today announced $40.5 million in new funding from Goldman Sachs, New Enterprise Associates and led by Future Fund. This latest round of investment brings its total capital raised to $103.5 million and underscores Sprout's momentum and foothold within the social media software space. New funds will be used to accelerate the company's plans for deepened platform capabilities and increased international expansion. "Social marketing and social data have become mission-critical to virtually all aspects of business. Sprout's relentless focus on quality and customer success have made us the top customer-rated platform in every category and segment," said Justyn Howard, CEO of Sprout. "In many ways, social is still in its infancy, and we're fortunate to help so many great customers navigate this evolving set of challenges." Sprout has experienced sustained, rapid growth in recent years, acquiring social analytics firm Simply Measured and recently surpassing 25,000 customers and 500 employees around the globe. The funding will allow Sprout to further accelerate that growth with investments across the business and their expanding platform. "The Sprout team has built a remarkable company, evidenced not only by their performance but their focus on culture, quality and their customers," said Jason Kreuziger of the Merchant Banking Division at Goldman Sachs. "Since our initial investment in 2016, Sprout has continually demonstrated their ability to lead and transform this category through best-in-class technology, tremendous leadership and their customer-centered approach." "As social media's impact on business and the world expands, we are committed to providing software that enables our customers to navigate this transformation, create real connections with their audience and drive their businesses forward." said Howard. ABOUT SPROUT SOCIAL Sprout Social offers deep social media listening and analytics, social management, customer care, and advocacy solutions to more than 25,000 leading brands and agencies, including Evernote, adidas, West Elm and Edelman. Sprout's suite of solutions supports every aspect of a cohesive social program and enables organizations of all sizes to extend their reach, amplify their brand and create the kind of real connection with their consumers that drives their businesses forward. Headquartered in Chicago, Sprout is a Twitter Official Partner, Facebook Marketing Partner, Pinterest Marketing Partner, Instagram Partner Program Member, LinkedIn Company Page Partner and Google+ Pages API Partner. Learn more at sproutsocial.com . Media Contact: Kaitlyn Corvino [email protected] SOURCE Sprout Social Related Links http://sproutsocial.com INDIANA, Pa., Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- S&T Bank, a full-service financial institution with assets of $7.1 billion, and locations in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York, congratulates Brian Dobis on his promotion to executive vice president, managing director of commercial and industrial (C&I) banking. "We recognize Brian's promotion as an evolution for the Bank one that will provide a platform for improved growth and future expansion of our C&I book," said David Antolik, senior executive vice president, chief lending officer. "Over the past three years, Brian has proven himself as a thought leader in this space, which gives me the utmost confidence that he will serve as a trusted resource and guide for our managers and market presidents within each of our individual markets." As EVP, managing director of C&I banking, Brian will act as a dedicated C&I resource to S&T bankers, serving as a direct line to the senior loan committee. Under Brian's leadership, the Bank will optimize its current efforts in order to accelerate the C&I loan portfolio in 2019 and beyond. Brian began his career with S&T in 2015 as senior vice president, commercial banking C&I team manager where he was charged with leading the middle market C&I group in western Pennsylvania. With nearly 13 years of industry experience under his belt prior to joining the team, Brian continues to offer a wealth of specialized knowledge in the areas of credit, treasury management, private banking, and wealth management. Brian graduated from the Stonier Graduate School of Banking at the Wharton School of Business in 2013 after attending both the University of Pittsburgh, where he earned a Master of Business Administration, and Marietta College. In addition to his education, Brian has completed comprehensive credit analysis training and received a multitude of accolades for banking excellence. For more information about S&T Bank, please visit www.stbank.com. About S&T Bancorp, Inc. and S&T Bank: S&T Bancorp, Inc. is a $7.1 billion bank holding company that is headquartered in Indiana, Pa. and trades on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the symbol STBA. Its principal subsidiary, S&T Bank, was established in 1902, and operates locations in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York. For more information visit www.stbancorp.com, www.stbank.com, and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn SOURCE S&T Bancorp, Inc. Related Links http://www.stbank.com "As the founder of The Dickey Foundation, it is my honor to be a part of such a giving Dallas community," says Maurine Dickey, Founder of The Dickey Foundation. "Without the support of the folks in our area, we would not have been able to gift these ballistic vests to the brave men and women of the Dallas Police Department." Though The Dickey Foundation's reach is national, the efforts are intensely local and Dickey's Barbecue Pit owners across the nation give back to their first responders and do so as often as they can. Donate to The Dickey Foundation here. Follow Dickey's on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. About The Dickey Foundation Since 1941, Dickey's Barbecue Pit has taken great pride in our Texas style barbecue and our commitment to the communities we serve. It is in that spirit, that The Dickey Foundation was created. The Dickey Foundation supports first responders who protect and unite our communities. Our Foundation is national but our efforts are intensely local, focusing on financial support, public education and providing the equipment necessary for the safety of our first responders. About Dickey's Barbecue Restaurants, Inc. Dickey's Barbecue Restaurants, Inc., the nation's largest barbecue chain was founded in 1941 by Travis Dickey. For the past 77 years, Dickey's Barbecue Pit locations across the nation have served guests Legit. Texas. Barbecue. At Dickey's, all meats are smoked low and slow on-site, every night in every location. The Dallas-based family-run barbecue franchise offers several slow-smoked meats and wholesome sides with 'No B.S. (Bad Stuff)' included. The fast-casual concept has expanded worldwide and includes more than 500 locations in 44 states. In 2016, Dickey's won first place on Fast Casual's "Top 100 Movers and Shakers" list and in 2018 Dickey's Barbecue Pit made the Top 10. Dickey's Barbecue Pit has also been recognized by Entrepreneur Magazine, Franchise Times and Nation's Restaurant News. For more information, visit www.dickeys.com. Media Contact: Callie Head [email protected] Ashley Richardson [email protected] SOURCE The Dickey Foundation Related Links http://www.dickeys.com LONDON, Dec. 18, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Valeo Groupe Europe announced today several notable milestones that occurred in 2018. In early Q1, Valeo Groupe Europe, through one of its affiliated entities, acquired Urban Student Life Ltd, (USL) a full-service specialist student management and development company, which has 3,000 beds under its management. This acquisition also includes the operation and management of two student-facing brands LIVStudent and Urban Student Life, under the Valeo Groupe Europe name. Valeo Groupe Chairman Ted Rollins (center with shovel) and team members breaking ground for the Sheffield student housing property. Q2-Q3, LIVStudent opened its first European development in Dublin, Ireland with 216 beds with 100 percent occupancy. opened its first European development in with 216 beds with 100 percent occupancy. The company broke ground on its next 586 bed LIVStudent property in Sheffield which boasts LIVStudent's second-generation brand standard designed with the resident in mind. This property is on schedule to open for the 2019 academic year. property in which boasts second-generation brand standard designed with the resident in mind. This property is on schedule to open for the 2019 academic year. Valeo Groupe Globally expects to commence development across its international platform in excess of 500mm in 2019. This includes its Valeo Groupe Europe, Valeo Groupe Americas and Valeo Groupe Nordics divisions. Urban Student Life will continue to grow its third-party management business with its fund and High Net Worth Investors to acquire and manage student residences across the UK and Europe . will continue to grow its third-party management business with its fund and High Net Worth Investors to acquire and manage student residences across the UK and . Valeo Groupe Europe and Advisors closed its first Iberian fund with Bankinter, one of the largest banks in Spain , and Plenium Partners an experienced Investor and Manager with a total equity raise of 153,000,000 Combined with a its planned debt facility, the fund is targeting a total investment of approximately 375-425 million to develop student residences in the main universities of Spain and Portugal , under Valeo's LIVStudent Brand. The fund has already acquired its first piece of land in Granada and plans to commit its capital during the first half of 2019. "These are exciting times for Valeo Groupe Europe. We are proud of our team and could not have better partners in Spain as we grow our footprint on the Iberian Peninsula ," said Ted W. Rollins , Chairman of Valeo Groupe and Vale Groupe Europe. The company will continue its expansion in the Iberian market, through the development, construction, execution and management of residential assets for students, targeting Madrid , Barcelona , Valencia , Granada, Sevilla Malaga, Lisbon , Porto and other cities. "Valeo Partners has been in a major expansion mode," said Rollins. "With our dedicated teams, their unwavering commitment to our communities, our customer experience and the environment, we will continue to achieve great things. I am humbled by their commitment and the help we receive from everyone on a daily basis." Valeo Groupe Europe is an affiliate of Valeo Groupe, which offers multinational interests in both senior and student niche housing markets. Valeo and its team members have a combined 100 years of experience in development, construction and operations, focused on student accommodation. Valeo Management Limited is the services arm of Valeo Groupe Europe which provides unparalleled development, construction and property management services to Valeo's Investors. Valeo's executive team is comprised of former members of Campus Crest Communities (Americas) and Opal Property Group (UK). Campus Crest Communities grew to the second-largest student housing REIT in the world with more than 46,000 beds in the US and Canada. Opal Property Group was one of the largest student accommodation companies in the UK and Europe and developed, constructed and managed more than 20,000 beds in the UK. Valeo's focus globally is leaving communities better than they found them, with an unwavering commitment to the customer's experience, driven by our culture and teams. Contact: Declan Lowy, USL Business Development Director [email protected] 07538 992 161 SOURCE Valeo Groupe Europe All 57 vehicles in this elite group earn good ratings in the Institute's five other crashworthiness evaluations and have an available automatic emergency braking system that rates advanced or superior for front crash prevention. IIHS now requires a good rating in the passenger-side small overlap front test to earn a 2019 TOP SAFETY PICK + versus an acceptable or good rating for the 2018 award. An acceptable or good rating in the passenger-side test is a new criterion to earn a 2019 TOP SAFETY PICK . This marks the sixth time that IIHS has raised the bar to earn the TOP SAFETY PICK+ award since introducing it in the 2013 model year to recognize vehicles that offer a superior level of safety. The TOP SAFETY PICK accolade launched in the 2006 model year to help consumers identify vehicles with the highest ratings. Over the years, IIHS has added to and strengthened criteria for both awards to encourage manufacturers to speed up safety advances. "We challenged manufacturers to provide the best possible protection in a range of crash scenarios and equip vehicles with an automatic emergency braking system to avoid crashes, as well as offer headlights that give drivers confidence when traveling at night," says IIHS-HLDI President David Harkey. "Fifteen brands hit all the marks to give consumers shopping for a new car a wide variety of 2019 models to consider." More models have standard front crash prevention Across manufacturers, the majority of award winners qualify only when optionally equipped because good or acceptable headlights and an advanced- or superior-rated front crash prevention system aren't part of their base trims. Twenty automakers have pledged to equip virtually all passenger vehicles with autobrake by 2022. Many are on track to beat the deadline under a voluntary commitment brokered in 2015 by IIHS and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. "Among the 57 vehicles that qualify for either of our 2019 awards, 31 of them have a standard front crash prevention system," Harkey says. "What's impressive is that all but one winner earn the highest rating of superior in our track tests, even though an advanced rating is enough to qualify." A variety of choices Cars and SUVs account for the bulk of the TOP SAFETY PICK+ winners in most size classes. Missing are microcars, minicars, minivans and pickups. All classes except for microcars and pickups are represented among the TOP SAFETY PICK winners. The Subaru brand leads with seven 2019 TOP SAFETY PICK+ winners. They are the Ascent, Crosstrek, Impreza sedan and wagon, Legacy, Outback and WRX. The Forester falls shy of the top award because its headlights rate acceptable, but the small SUV qualifies for TOP SAFETY PICK. Hyundai Motor Co. owns the Hyundai, Kia and Genesis brands. The Hyundai and Kia nameplates earn four and five TOP SAFETY PICK+ awards, respectively, while Genesis has three TOP SAFETY PICK+ awards. Hyundai also earns six TOP SAFETY PICKs, and Kia earns three. Mercedes-Benz and Toyota Motor Corp. and its Lexus brand qualify for three TOP SAFETY PICK+ awards each. BMW earns two top-tier awards and a TOP SAFETY PICK. Honda and its Acura brand pick up two TOP SAFETY PICK+ awards and four TOP SAFETY PICKs. Mazda has one TOP SAFETY PICK+ and two TOP SAFETY PICKs for 2019. Near misses on headlights, passenger-side crash protection Besides the Forester, 17 other vehicles just missed achieving the top award because of acceptable-rated headlights. The Honda Accord, Mitsubishi Outlander, Nissan Altima and Toyota Corolla are among this group. IIHS began rating headlights in 2016 based on research showing that many headlights don't do a good job of adequately lighting the road at night while limiting glare for oncoming drivers. Passenger-side protection in small overlap crashes was a hurdle that kept four vehicles from reaching TOP SAFETY PICK+ status. The Honda Pilot, for example, has good-rated headlights and a superior-rated autobrake system, but an acceptable rating in the passenger-side small overlap front test limits the midsize SUV to a TOP SAFETY PICK award. The Institute developed the passenger-side small overlap front crash test after it became clear that some manufacturers weren't paying sufficient attention to the passenger side as they made improvements to achieve better performance in the driver-side small overlap front test, introduced in 2012. IIHS began rating vehicles in the passenger-side test in 2017 and added it to award criteria for 2018. Five vehicles fell short of TOP SAFETY PICK+ because of an acceptable rating in the passenger-side small overlap test and acceptable-rated headlights. These are the Chrysler Pacifica, Hyundai Accent, Nissan Kicks, Nissan Pathfinder and Toyota Highlander. "Several automakers still need to bring their vehicles up to speed when it comes to offering advanced levels of safety and headlights that provide good visibility," Harkey says. Absent from the winner's circle are Fiat Chrysler's Dodge, Jeep and Ram brands; Ford and its Lincoln brand; General Motors' Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet and GMC brands; and Tesla. All failed to qualify for either award. The Ford Fusion and the Ram 1500 crew cab, for instance, are held back by underperforming headlights. What's more, several Dodge and Ford models with older designs still lack a good rating for driver-side protection in a small overlap front crash. Volvo hasn't yet qualified for a 2019 award due to missing passenger-side small overlap front test results. Under the IIHS test verification program, manufacturers can submit their own test data for certain ratings. If a model has a good driver-side small overlap rating, automakers may submit video footage and data from a passenger-side test conducted using the IIHS protocol, and IIHS will evaluate the information and assign a rating. The ratings are subject to occasional audit tests. Verification allows more vehicles to vie for a 2019 TOP SAFETY PICK+ award than IIHS would have time to test on its own. As 2019 progresses, the winner's list will grow as new models are evaluated. By the fall of 2018, 34 vehicles had earned the 2018 TOP SAFETY PICK+ award, and 54 had earned 2018 TOP SAFETY PICK. SOURCE Insurance Institute for Highway Safety Related Links https://www.iihs.org WASHINGTON, Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Wang Min, President and Chairman of XCMG, China's leading construction machinery manufacturer, who was a featured speaker at the eleventh annual U.S.-China CEO & Former Senior Officials' Dialogue which was hosted on December 4 in Washington D.C., shared XCMG's 22-year journey in the U.S. and the company's and his vision for future cooperation and development between the two nations. "Over the course of international development, XCMG hopes to further exchange and communicate with the American manufacturing industry and seek areas of cooperation and common interest. We are committed to growing with our American partners and are focused on bringing reliable, high-quality products to clients around the world together," commented Wang. As the first Chinese construction machinery manufacturer to enter the country, XCMG has deep roots in the U.S. market, which it began exploring in the 1980s. By 1996, after 10 years of extensive research, it established its first joint venture with a local U.S. company, starting bulk sales in the country. Since then, XCMG has attended CONEXPO-CON/AGG in Las Vegas eight times, ensuring that the voice of the Chinese manufacturing industry is heard on the world stage, and promoting XCMG's advanced and durable products to more clients in North America and around the world. In 2012, XCMG launched a more comprehensive program in the U.S. and started to invest significantly in talent and material resources, including the establishment of an R&D center. Today, teams of engineers and product designers from both countries work together to develop next-generation machinery for the North American market, and accumulative successes have been achieved in technology R&D, product localization and market immersion. XCMG's North American-edition loader, released in 2015, was the company's first high-end product created by American engineers. It's been a great success, having been sold in mature markets such as Australia and Europe. In addition, XCMG has also entered the U.S. equipment rental market, having recently signed a long-term contract to be the earthmoving equipment supplier to Ahern, the fourth-largest rental company in the U.S. About XCMG XCMG is a multinational heavy machinery manufacturing company with a history of 74 years. It currently ranks sixth in the world's construction machinery industry. The company exports to more than 182 countries and regions around the world. For more information, please visit: www.xcmg.com, or XCMG's pages on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Instagram. SOURCE XCMG Related Links http://www.xcmg.com/ DETROIT, Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The North American International Auto Show (NAIAS), in partnership with Techstars Mobility, announced today that 65 startups from 10 countries will showcase their innovative mobility-focused products and technologies at the 3rd annual AutoMobili-D exposition, Jan. 14 17. AutoMobili-D is a 150,000 square-foot exhibition featuring a wide range of automakers, suppliers, investors and tech startups demonstrating and discussing future mobility platforms. The Michigan Economic Development Corporation and PlanetM (MEDC/PlanetM) is the Title Sponsor of AutoMobili-D and Co-Presenting Sponsor of AutoMobili-D's FACE and Match Meeting Programs. "Each year AutoMobili-D has built upon the prior year's success with growing startup participation," said 2019 NAIAS Chairman Bill Golling. "In fact, we'll see a 20 percent increase in participation at the upcoming show with startups encompassing a wide range of technologies and businesses from autonomous and connected cars to mapping and journey planning to ride sharing and smart cities." Key 2019 startup highlights: 63 percent are first-time exhibitors 86 percent have existing relationships with automotive and tech companies Collectively, the startups employ over 872 worldwide "The startup area has grown by 59 percent since it began in 2017," said Techstars Mobility Manager Ted Serbinski. "Startups understand that every key decision in automotive and supplier strategy eventually goes through Detroit, where the future of mobility is as strong as ever. AutoMobili-D has been a key player in this process." Participating 2019 startups: 14bis Supply Tracking Houston, TX , United States : Proprietary middleware provides systems interoperability and full asset traceability with real-time awareness for supply chains of trust. We track physical or digital assets providing on-demand auditability. , : Proprietary middleware provides systems interoperability and full asset traceability with real-time awareness for supply chains of trust. We track physical or digital assets providing on-demand auditability. Advanced Connected Vehicle Solutions Farmington Hills, MI , United States: ACVS provides software solutions for securely connecting vehicles to cloud services. Our modular telematics client software supports needs such as remote operations, FOTA, and diagnostics. The client is code generated from our IoT Workbench tool providing complete API documentation and simulation. , United States: ACVS provides software solutions for securely connecting vehicles to cloud services. Our modular telematics client software supports needs such as remote operations, FOTA, and diagnostics. The client is code generated from our IoT Workbench tool providing complete API documentation and simulation. Aimotive Budapest, Hungary : Aimotive provides artificial intelligence-based software solutions for self-driving cars to global carmakers and Tier 1s. Our product suite includes artificial intelligence-based perception algorithms, state-of-the-art simulation and Neural Network acceleration technology. : Aimotive provides artificial intelligence-based software solutions for self-driving cars to global carmakers and Tier 1s. Our product suite includes artificial intelligence-based perception algorithms, state-of-the-art simulation and Neural Network acceleration technology. Airspace Experience Technologies Detroit, MI , United States : We enable private air mobility for the mass traveling public. , : We enable private air mobility for the mass traveling public. Alchemy Kitchener, ON , Canada : We are a nanotechnology startup pioneering two nanocoatings: a passive anti-frost coating and an abrasion resistant coating. Our coatings enable multi-climate reliability for AVs by providing impact/scratch resistance, frost prevention, deicing to combat snow/freezing rain, and water/dirt shedding. , : We are a nanotechnology startup pioneering two nanocoatings: a passive anti-frost coating and an abrasion resistant coating. Our coatings enable multi-climate reliability for AVs by providing impact/scratch resistance, frost prevention, deicing to combat snow/freezing rain, and water/dirt shedding. Alpha Drive Brooklyn, NY , United States : Validation of Autonomous Vehicle AI. , : Validation of Autonomous Vehicle AI. Alto Dallas, TX , United States : Alto offers on-demand rides that are safe, consistent, and tailored to our members' preferences. We use a dedicated fleet of new cars, employee drivers, and elegant apps and in-car technology to deliver exceptional rides, every time. , : offers on-demand rides that are safe, consistent, and tailored to our members' preferences. We use a dedicated fleet of new cars, employee drivers, and elegant apps and in-car technology to deliver exceptional rides, every time. Arbe Robotics Tel Aviv, Israel : The world's first company to demonstrate ultra-high-resolution 4D imaging radar with post processing and SLAM. : The world's first company to demonstrate ultra-high-resolution 4D imaging radar with post processing and SLAM. Autobon AI Chicago, IL , United States : Autobon is providing trucking fleets with the first aftermarket autopilot system that enables existing semi-trucks to deliver freight autonomously on U.S. highways. We are deploying the system in a way that builds trust with operators, while increasing job safety and efficiency. , : Autobon is providing trucking fleets with the first aftermarket autopilot system that enables existing semi-trucks to deliver freight autonomously on U.S. highways. We are deploying the system in a way that builds trust with operators, while increasing job safety and efficiency. Axle Travel New York, NY , United States : We help businesses create and manage their own ancillary mobility services. , : We help businesses create and manage their own ancillary mobility services. Bedestrian Ann Arbor, MI , United States : We develop autonomous lead robots and modular trailers for driverless delivery (indoor/outdoor) of food and prescriptions drugs, as well as hauling of goods. , : We develop autonomous lead robots and modular trailers for driverless delivery (indoor/outdoor) of food and prescriptions drugs, as well as hauling of goods. Bollinger Motors Ferndale, MI , United States : Electric Vehicle OEM Manufacturer. , : Electric Vehicle OEM Manufacturer. Busie Kingston, NY , United States : Busie simplifies online booking and logistics for operators and organizers. , : Busie simplifies online booking and logistics for operators and organizers. C2A Security Jerusalem, Israel : C2A provides protection from automotive life-threatening cyber attacks. : C2A provides protection from automotive life-threatening cyber attacks. CARMERA Brooklyn, NY , United States : CARMERA is building the world's most robust street intelligence platform, specializing in "living" high-definition maps for autonomous vehicles. , : CARMERA is building the world's most robust street intelligence platform, specializing in "living" high-definition maps for autonomous vehicles. CellularEMT Detroit MI , United States : CellularEMT is an on demand platform that connects certified repair contractors to consumers who need their smart devices repaired. , : CellularEMT is an on demand platform that connects certified repair contractors to consumers who need their smart devices repaired. Comet.ml New York, NY , United States : Comet is doing for ML what GitHub did for code. We allow autonomous vehicles and perception teams to automatically track their datasets, code changes, experimentation history and production models creating efficiency, transparency, and reproducibility. , : Comet is doing for ML what GitHub did for code. We allow autonomous vehicles and perception teams to automatically track their datasets, code changes, experimentation history and production models creating efficiency, transparency, and reproducibility. DeepHow Detroit, MI , United States : The first AI solution for skilled trades know-how capturing and training. , : The first AI solution for skilled trades know-how capturing and training. Derq Dubai, United Arab Emirates : Derq is a MIT -spinoff and Techstars mobility alum with a mission to eliminate crashes. Our AI-based ITS and V2X software applications predict the behaviors and intentions of road users to warn cars with enough time to avoid crashes. We live in Dubai and Detroit . : Derq is a -spinoff and Techstars mobility alum with a mission to eliminate crashes. Our AI-based ITS and V2X software applications predict the behaviors and intentions of road users to warn cars with enough time to avoid crashes. We live in and . Detroit Flying Cars Livonia and Ypsilanti, MI , United States : At Detroit Flying Cars, we are developing a uniquely more flexible form of transportation. Fly when you want to, drive when you want to. A distance airplane with VTOL option, and roadworthy EV with 400 miles range -- the ultimate freedom machine. and , : At Detroit Flying Cars, we are developing a uniquely more flexible form of transportation. Fly when you want to, drive when you want to. A distance airplane with VTOL option, and roadworthy EV with 400 miles range -- the ultimate freedom machine. Drive Spotter Omaha, NE , United States : Investors ask every CEO one key question -- every single answer hinges on their team -- we help CEOs incentivize their teams, which is increasingly crucial to effective supply chains. , : Investors ask every CEO one key question -- every single answer hinges on their team -- we help CEOs incentivize their teams, which is increasingly crucial to effective supply chains. Drive Time Metrics Jamestown, RI , United States : Media analytics and monetization of connected car data. , : Media analytics and monetization of connected car data. Driver Technologies Inc . Brooklyn, NY , United States : Driver delivers a dashcam with cloud storage, augmented reality navigation, AI-powered forward collision warnings and attention-assist through a free mobile app. At the same time, Driver gathers valuable data for the insurance, advertising, mapping and autonomous car software industries. . , : Driver delivers a dashcam with cloud storage, augmented reality navigation, AI-powered forward collision warnings and attention-assist through a free mobile app. At the same time, Driver gathers valuable data for the insurance, advertising, mapping and autonomous car software industries. Enertia Microsystems Inc . Ann Arbor, MI , United States : We are commercializing small, low-cost, and ultra-high-performance inertial sensors for dead-reckoning for Level-4 or Level-5 autonomous vehicles. . , : We are commercializing small, low-cost, and ultra-high-performance inertial sensors for dead-reckoning for Level-4 or Level-5 autonomous vehicles. FairFare New York, NY , United States : FairFare is a direct booking, ride hail marketplace app. Our algorithm tailors a client-oriented response. It's a marketplace that cross matches tailored transportation with lifestyle spending habits. Thereby becoming a direct asset to businesses, government and consumers. , : FairFare is a direct booking, ride hail marketplace app. Our algorithm tailors a client-oriented response. It's a marketplace that cross matches tailored transportation with lifestyle spending habits. Thereby becoming a direct asset to businesses, government and consumers. Fantasmo Los Angeles, CA , United States : Fantasmo is building a decentralized platform for 3D spatial maps and camera-based positioning. Our end-to-end solution enables the creation, access, management, and monetization of 3D maps which is critical for mobility, autonomous robotics, augmented reality, and many other emerging industries. , : Fantasmo is building a decentralized platform for 3D spatial maps and camera-based positioning. Our end-to-end solution enables the creation, access, management, and monetization of 3D maps which is critical for mobility, autonomous robotics, augmented reality, and many other emerging industries. FenSens San Francisco, CA , United States : FenSens produces smart car accessories and services for the full-connected vehicle experience. , : FenSens produces smart car accessories and services for the full-connected vehicle experience. Fleetonomy Tel Aviv, Israel : Fleetonomy offers artificial intelligence-based solutions to enable fleet owners, OEMs and smart mobility service providers to maximize their fleets by enhancing efficiency, generating more insights from their data, and creating new revenue streams by launching new smart mobility services. : Fleetonomy offers artificial intelligence-based solutions to enable fleet owners, OEMs and smart mobility service providers to maximize their fleets by enhancing efficiency, generating more insights from their data, and creating new revenue streams by launching new smart mobility services. Gridwise Pittsburgh, PA , United States : Gridwise provides a mobile platform that increases rideshare drivers earnings 39 percent by helping them find more rides and track their performance across each service they drive for. , : Gridwise provides a mobile platform that increases rideshare drivers earnings 39 percent by helping them find more rides and track their performance across each service they drive for. HAAS Alert Chicago, IL , United States : Vital safety information streamed to drivers, connected and autonomous cars via in-vehicle systems and smartphone apps when emergency vehicles are approaching and on-scene. Drivers, emergency crews and roadway operators use the C-V2X enabled solutions to avoid collisions and reduce traffic delays. , : Vital safety information streamed to drivers, connected and autonomous cars via in-vehicle systems and smartphone apps when emergency vehicles are approaching and on-scene. Drivers, emergency crews and roadway operators use the C-V2X enabled solutions to avoid collisions and reduce traffic delays. Hanseatische Fahrzeug Manufaktur GmbH (HFM) Holm, Schleswig- Holstein , Germany : HFM specializes in the development of highly complex mechatronics systems for electric and autonomous vehicles. Holm, Schleswig- , : HFM specializes in the development of highly complex mechatronics systems for electric and autonomous vehicles. HiHo Mobility Waterloo, ON , Canada : Shared work fleets with on-demand logistics (tools, supplies and assets). Already in use on university campuses. Greatly reduce costs, vehicles and go green. Human-driven for now, self-driving soon. , : Shared work fleets with on-demand logistics (tools, supplies and assets). Already in use on university campuses. Greatly reduce costs, vehicles and go green. Human-driven for now, self-driving soon. Humanising Autonomy London, United Kingdom : Humanising Autonomy improves safety and efficiency of autonomous mobility systems through better understanding of human behavior in cities. : Humanising Autonomy improves safety and efficiency of autonomous mobility systems through better understanding of human behavior in cities. Integral Detroit, MI , United States : Integral brings a Silicon Valley mindset of continuous innovation to mobility. Our Detroit -based product development consultancy brings expertise in lean product, human centered UX, and cloud engineering to collaborate with our customers on solving problems in CV, AV, EV, and shared mobility. , : Integral brings a Silicon Valley mindset of continuous innovation to mobility. Our -based product development consultancy brings expertise in lean product, human centered UX, and cloud engineering to collaborate with our customers on solving problems in CV, AV, EV, and shared mobility. IntelliTire San Mateo, CA , United States : Making tires smarter. , : Making tires smarter. INVENTEV LLC Detroit, MI , United States : Startup based in Detroit to provide vehicle mobility services, advisory services and commercial vehicle electrification. , : Startup based in to provide vehicle mobility services, advisory services and commercial vehicle electrification. IXR MOBILITY Detroit, MI , United States : Provide non-emergency transportation and shuttle services with an emphasis on Autonomous Automated Shuttles. , : Provide non-emergency transportation and shuttle services with an emphasis on Autonomous Automated Shuttles. Jrop Toronto, ON , Canada : Jrop has developed the most efficient way to generate machine-readable property maps to optimize first and last meter operations for driverless cars. , : Jrop has developed the most efficient way to generate machine-readable property maps to optimize first and last meter operations for driverless cars. Kepler51 Analytics, PBC Austin, TX , United States : Kepler51 is a Big Data analytics solutions provider with a core focus on predictive and real-time road weather information for automotive safety and mobility. We are pioneering the next step in ADAS applications for road safety. We are a Public Benefit Corporation for the Vision Zero movement. , : Kepler51 is a Big Data analytics solutions provider with a core focus on predictive and real-time road weather information for automotive safety and mobility. We are pioneering the next step in ADAS applications for road safety. We are a Public Benefit Corporation for the Vision Zero movement. LaneSpotter Pittsburgh, PA , United States : Mapping and navigation created for cyclists by cyclists, with a focus on safety. Think Waze for bikes! , : Mapping and navigation created for cyclists by cyclists, with a focus on safety. Think Waze for bikes! Metamoto, Inc Redwood City, CA , United States : Metamoto's Simulation as a Service platform provides orders of magnitude for more testing and training hours, miles, scenarios and data for testing, training, validating and debugging autonomous system software. , : Metamoto's Simulation as a Service platform provides orders of magnitude for more testing and training hours, miles, scenarios and data for testing, training, validating and debugging autonomous system software. Mobiag Lisbon, Portugal : Mobiag is a solution provider in the shared and electric mobility space. We build tools to empower sharing organizations and bring them together in a global independent network. We are based in Lisbon and currently serve over 25 clients in four continents, with over 6k cars managed on our platform. : Mobiag is a solution provider in the shared and electric mobility space. We build tools to empower sharing organizations and bring them together in a global independent network. We are based in and currently serve over 25 clients in four continents, with over cars managed on our platform. Numeero Monterrey, Mexico , Mexico : Automotive RFQ Collaboration Tool. , : Automotive RFQ Collaboration Tool. ParkMobile Atlanta, GA , United States : We enable consumers to reserve, book and pay for parking through our App - ParkMobile and through our APIs for in-car head-unit integration. , : We enable consumers to reserve, book and pay for parking through our App - ParkMobile and through our APIs for in-car head-unit integration. Parkofon Alexandria, VA , United States : Parkofon delivers automated on-street and off-street parking by using its high-accuracy geolocation device. We pilot with Avis and launch in Brooklyn, NY , next month. , : Parkofon delivers automated on-street and off-street parking by using its high-accuracy geolocation device. We pilot with and launch in , next month. Pitstop Toronto, ON , Canada : Automotive Prognostics Platform (PaaS). , : Automotive Prognostics Platform (PaaS). Powerlink Systems Detroit, MI (PlanetM's Landing Zone), United States : Powerlink Systems is an EV charging station distributor and installer with office locations in Rochester and Detroit, MI (PlanetM's Landing Zone). We provide turnkey solutions to businesses, cities and residents looking to install EV charging stations. (PlanetM's Landing Zone), : Powerlink Systems is an EV charging station distributor and installer with office locations in and (PlanetM's Landing Zone). We provide turnkey solutions to businesses, cities and residents looking to install EV charging stations. Prestio Kansas City, MO , United States : Prestio is an end-to-end Dealership eCommerce platform that enables dealers to sell cars fully online via our eCommerce Operating System that has three components: AI Marketing and Sales, Consumer portal, and Dealer OS. , : Prestio is an end-to-end Dealership eCommerce platform that enables dealers to sell cars fully online via our eCommerce Operating System that has three components: AI Marketing and Sales, Consumer portal, and Dealer OS. Priva Chicago, IL , United States : Priva is a regional transportation alternative to commuter flights - taking customers door-to-door in a private, connected, mobile office. , : Priva is a regional transportation alternative to commuter flights - taking customers door-to-door in a private, connected, mobile office. Reality AI New York, NY , United States : Artificial Intelligence for developing automotive products using sensors. Runs in real-time, in firmware, on inexpensive commodity hardware. Reality AI holds 12 patents and six patents pending, all in the field of machine learning as applied to sensors and signals. , : Artificial Intelligence for developing automotive products using sensors. Runs in real-time, in firmware, on inexpensive commodity hardware. Reality AI holds 12 patents and six patents pending, all in the field of machine learning as applied to sensors and signals. Safecar Detroit, MI , United States : Safecar is an Emergency-as-a-Service company that automatically connects people with 911-assistance without talking to dispatch. , : Safecar is an Emergency-as-a-Service company that automatically connects people with 911-assistance without talking to dispatch. Sawatch Labs Denver, CO , United States : Sawatch Labs provides algorithmic decision making to vehicle fleet stakeholders around electrification, infrastructure, fleet right sizing and more. , : Sawatch Labs provides algorithmic decision making to vehicle fleet stakeholders around electrification, infrastructure, fleet right sizing and more. SEEVA Technologies Seattle, WA , United States : SEEVA Technologies creates safety and perception enablement systems to help vehicles see better in the ADAS/AV world. , : SEEVA Technologies creates safety and perception enablement systems to help vehicles see better in the ADAS/AV world. Seoul Robotics Seoul, South Korea , Korea South: Seoul Robotics specializes in real-time 3D data perception software that enables intelligent and safer mobility technology. It helps companies to fully utilize their 3D sensors at a fraction of development cost and time, without sacrificing the performance. Democratize Lidar software technology! , Korea South: Seoul Robotics specializes in real-time 3D data perception software that enables intelligent and safer mobility technology. It helps companies to fully utilize their 3D sensors at a fraction of development cost and time, without sacrificing the performance. Democratize Lidar software technology! SICdrone Boston, MA , United States : SICdrone is a veteran-owned unmanned aircraft company founded by aerospace engineers featuring aircraft effective in the small unmanned (sUAS), urban transportation (UAS) and satellite markets. , : SICdrone is a veteran-owned unmanned aircraft company founded by aerospace engineers featuring aircraft effective in the small unmanned (sUAS), urban transportation (UAS) and satellite markets. Sway Mobility Inc. Cleveland, OH , United States : The Sway Mobility carshare platform combines operations, insurance, and technology to allow municipalities, neighborhood groups, transit authorities, and stakeholders to start or expand local carshare programs in small to mid-market cities. , : The Sway Mobility carshare platform combines operations, insurance, and technology to allow municipalities, neighborhood groups, transit authorities, and stakeholders to start or expand local carshare programs in small to mid-market cities. Tesloop Los Angeles, CA , United States : Connected Car Network for Data Driven Services and Car Sharing. , : Connected Car Network for Data Driven Services and Car Sharing. Toposens Munich , Bavaria, Germany : Toposens developed the world's first 3D ultrasound sensor, a robust and affordable 3D sensor enabling close-range object detection for autonomous driving cars or mobile robots. , Bavaria, : Toposens developed the world's first 3D ultrasound sensor, a robust and affordable 3D sensor enabling close-range object detection for autonomous driving cars or mobile robots. Vartega Golden, CO , United States : Vartega creates low-cost recycled carbon fiber to make cars and trucks lighter for fuel economy improvements and emissions reductions. , : Vartega creates low-cost recycled carbon fiber to make cars and trucks lighter for fuel economy improvements and emissions reductions. Voxel51 Ann Arbor, MI , United States : Find the signal in the noise of your video data using our automotive grade computer vision platform. , : Find the signal in the noise of your video data using our automotive grade computer vision platform. WaveSense Somerville, MA , United States : WaveSense is accelerating the arrival of self-driving vehicles by using subterranean maps created with ground penetrating radar. Vehicles with WaveSense can navigate in common but challenging conditions such as snow, rain fog, poor lane markings, and areas with sparse landmarks. , : WaveSense is accelerating the arrival of self-driving vehicles by using subterranean maps created with ground penetrating radar. Vehicles with WaveSense can navigate in common but challenging conditions such as snow, rain fog, poor lane markings, and areas with sparse landmarks. Weather Telematics Inc. Toronto, ON , Canada : Weather Telematics Inc. provides the essential data to enable autonomous vehicles to operate safely in poor weather conditions. , : Weather Telematics Inc. provides the essential data to enable autonomous vehicles to operate safely in poor weather conditions. Wise Systems Cambridge, MA , United States : Wise Systems is an autonomous Dispatch & Routing solution that empowers operations teams and drivers to improve fleet efficiency and customer service, seamlessly adapting to the everyday challenges they encounter. , : Wise Systems is an autonomous Dispatch & Routing solution that empowers operations teams and drivers to improve fleet efficiency and customer service, seamlessly adapting to the everyday challenges they encounter. Xapix San Francisco, CA , United States : Xapix is building an orchestration platform for digital mobility services, providing vehicle manufacturers, suppliers, and service providers with ultimate flexibility, speed, and security around data interoperability. This allows mobility companies to scale services faster and more secure than ever. , : Xapix is building an orchestration platform for digital mobility services, providing vehicle manufacturers, suppliers, and service providers with ultimate flexibility, speed, and security around data interoperability. This allows mobility companies to scale services faster and more secure than ever. Xtelligent Los Angeles, CA , United States : Intelligent traffic signal integration using V2I/X2I connectivity and edge computing. About Techstars Techstars is the worldwide network that helps entrepreneurs succeed. Techstars founders and their teams connect with other entrepreneurs, experts, mentors, alumni, investors, community leaders, and corporate partners who will help their companies grow. Techstars operates three divisions: Techstars Startup Programs, Techstars Mentorship-Driven Accelerator Programs and Techstars Corporate Innovation Partnerships. Techstars Mentorship-Driven Accelerator Programs help founders do more faster, and Techstars Startup Programs inspire, educate and connect entrepreneurs. Techstars Corporate Innovation Partnerships help brands supercharge growth by accelerating innovation and cultural transformation. Techstars accelerator portfolio includes more than 1,600 companies with a market cap of $17 billion. www.techstars.com About the North American International Auto Show In its 31st year as an international event, the NAIAS is the most influential annual automotive event in the world. NAIAS is where future mobility innovations meet the pavement. With the largest concentration of the world's top automotive and technology executives, designers, engineers and thought leaders, NAIAS serves as the global stage for companies to debut brand-defining vehicles and industry-shaping announcements. NAIAS is unmatched in the industry in presenting six unique shows in one, including: The Gallery, an ultra-luxury automotive event, AutoMobili-D, an inside look at future mobility platforms, Press Preview, Industry Preview, Charity Preview and then concluding with a nine-day Public Show. For more information, visit naias.com. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram for highlights and updates. 2019 NAIAS Dates: The Gallery: Saturday, January 12 Press Preview: Monday Tuesday, January 14-15 AutoMobili-D: Monday Thursday, January 14-17 Industry Preview: Wednesday Thursday, January 16-17 Charity Preview: Friday, January 18 Public Show: Saturday Sunday, January 19-27 SOURCE North American International Auto Show The year's best global auction results for three-dimensional artworks have - above all - rewarded 20th century French artists: Giacometti's works have elicited five new results above the $10 million threshold; Rodin signed his fourth best-ever auction result with Baiser, moyen modele dit Taille de la Porte (1890); Matisse's Nu allonge I (Aurore) (1907) elicited his second best-ever result and a piece by Constantin Brancusi attracted his highest-ever auction result. Only one Contemporary artist competes with these historical figures Jeff Koons (notwithstanding the current dip in his market). (Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/644091/Artprice_Logo.jpg ) (Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/800743/Artprice_Vanitas_9.jpg ) Rank - 1. Artist - Constantin BRANCUSI (1876-1957). Hammer Price ($) - 71 000 000. Artwork - La jeune fille sophistiquee (Portrait de Nancy Cunard). Sale - 2018-05-15 - Christie's New York Rank - 2. Artist - Jeff KOONS (1955). Hammer Price ($) - 22 812 500. Artwork - Play-Doh. Sale - 2018-05-17 - Christie's New York Rank - 3. Artist - Henri MATISSE, (1869-1954). Hammer Price ($) - 20 528 006. Artwork - Nu allonge I (Aurore). Sale - 2018-03-08 - Phillips London Rank - 4. Artist - Alexander CALDER (1898-1976). Hammer Price ($) - 17 975 000. Artwork - 21 Feuilles Blanches. Sale - 2018-11-15 - Christie's New York Rank - 5. Artist - Alberto GIACOMETTI (1901-1966). Hammer Price ($) - 17 187 500. Artwork - Le Chat. Sale - 2018-11-11 - Christie's New York Rank - 6. Artist - Alberto GIACOMETTI (1901-1966). Hammer Price ($) - 16 647 567. Artwork - Le Chat. Sale - 2018-06-19 - Sotheby's London Rank - 7. Artist - Auguste RODIN (1840-1917). Hammer Price ($) - 16 634 673. Artwork - Baiser, moyen modele dit Taille de la Porte. Sale - 2018-06-20 - Christie's London Rank - 8. Artist - Alberto GIACOMETTI (1901-1966). Hammer Price ($) - 15 781 250. Artwork - La Clairiere. Sale - 2018-05-15 - Christie's New York Rank - 9. Artist - Alberto GIACOMETTI (1901-1966). Hammer Price ($) - 13 812 500. Artwork - Femme assise. Sale - 2018-11-11 - Christie's New York Rank - 10. Artist - Alberto GIACOMETTI (1901-1966). Hammer Price ($) - 10 482 303. Artwork - Lustre avec femme, homme et oisera. Sale - 2018-02-28 - Sotheby's London copyright (c) 2018 artprice.com A new world record for Brancusi Fetching $71 million, the year's most expensive sculpture represents a veritable milestone in 20th century art history. A unique work that has defied time for 90 years, Brancusi's La jeune fille sophistiquee (Portrait de Nancy Cunard) is a beautifully polished gilded bronze on a white marble base, created in 1928. Its precious metal finish with dynamic and contrasting shapes characterise Nancy Cunard, a political activist and editor who advocated racial equality and civic rights in the United States. In Europe, she was close to the Dada movement and the Surrealists and she was a muse for Louis Aragon, James Joyce and a number of other artists and intellectuals. La jeune fille sophistiquee sold last May at Christie's New York, setting a new auction record for Brancusi, way beyond his previous record in May 2017 for his famous Muse endormie (1913). The price progression of the latter work over the last decade reflects a strong revaluation of Brancusi's masterpieces: fetching $6.6m in 1997, it was estimated $25 - 35 million in 2017 and sold for $57.3 million after a superb bidding battle lasting nearly ten minutes. With opportunities being so rare on this emblematic figure of Modern sculpture, his best works fetch significantly more than their pre-sale estimates. Alberto Giacometti has five results in the Top 10 With five of the top 10 results of the year, Alberto Giacometti dominates the high-end sculpture market. Like Picasso and Warhol, his works are among the most coveted on the planet. Giacometti is also one of the few artists whose works have crossed the $100 million threshold since the sale of L'homme qui marche I in 2010 ($103.6 million at Sotheby's) and L'homme au doigt in 2015 ($141.2 million at Christie's). A closer look at the rapid re-sales on his market suggests the euphoria of 2010 (year of his first 9-digit result) has somewhat receded. In 2010 his Le Chat (3/8) - one of his most famous bronze sculptures - fetched $20.8 million. In June this year the same piece fetched four million dollars less after being bought in against an estimate of 20 to 30 million dollars in May (at Sotheby's). However this substantial discount probably reflects a calming of the market more than disaffection for the artist's work; Giacometti has already proved himself on the market and the need for big results is less 'urgent'. Despite the absence of dazzling results this year, demand is particularly strong for this key signature: Giacometti remains one of the most sought-after artists on the market with a particularly low unsold rate (18%). He holds the 14th place in Artprice's provisional global ranking of artists by annual auction turnover for 2018 with a total of just over $100 million. Just one Contemporary artist Jeff Koons owes his presence in this ranking to the $22.8 million (incl. fees) Christie's hammered last May for his 3-metre polychrome aluminum sculpture Play-Doh (1994-2014) representing a pile of modeling pasta. The work had never been auctioned before and generated one of the Prince of Kitsch's top 10 results. This striking result somewhat mitigates a general under-performance: Koons' annual turnover is $32.4 million versus $89 million 10 years ago, and his price index has dropped 27 points over the year. The reason a sharp slowdown in the offer of his high-end works coupled with a dilution effect on his mid and low-end market due to a profusion of multiple works. Copyright 2018 thierry Ehrmann - http://www.artprice.com About the Artron Group: According to the Artron Group and its founder-Chairman Mr. Wan Jie "After 9 years of cooperation, Artron and Artprice have optimised their cooperation regarding the Chinese and Western art markets. The founders and Chairmen of both companies, Mr. Wan Jie and Mr. Thierry Ehrmann, with their enthusiasm for art, will create a Silk Road linking the Chinese and Western art markets on the principle of respect and mutual cooperation. The two groups will build a global, diversified and professional exchange platform in the Art Market, which will ultimately promote the sustainable development of the Global Art Market. Artron's Web: Artron.net About Artprice: Founded by thierry Ehrmann (see Who's who certified Biography ) (c) https://imgpublic.artprice.com/img/wp/sites/11/2018/10/bio-2019-whos-who-thierry-ehrmann.pdf ). Artprice is listed on the Eurolist by Euronext Paris, SRD long only and Euroclear: 7478 - Bloomberg: PRC - Reuters: ARTF. Dicover Artprice in video: https://www.artprice.com/video Artprice is the global leader in art price and art index databanks. It has over 30 million indices and auction results covering more than 700,000 artists. Artprice Images gives unlimited access to the largest Art Market resource in the world: a library of 126 million images or prints of artworks from the year 1700 to the present day, along with comments by Artprice's art historians. 12 Oct. 2018: Artprice and Artron have just created an "Art Media Mogul": Video: https://vimeo.com/296010836 Artprice permanently enriches its databanks with information from 6,300 auctioneers and it publishes a constant flow of art market trends for the world's principal news agencies and approximately 7,200 international press publications. For its 4,500,000 members, Artprice gives access to the world's leading Standardised Marketplace for buying and selling art. Artprice is preparing its blockchain for the Art Market. It is BPI-labelled (scientific national French label)Artprice's Global Art Market Annual Report for 2017 published last March 2018: https://www.artprice.com/artprice-reports/the-art-market-in-2017 Artprice's Contemporary Art Market Annual Report for 2017 - free access at: https://www.artprice.com/artprice-reports/the-contemporary-art-market-report-2017 Artprice's press releases: http://serveur.serveur.com/Press_Release/pressreleaseen.htm https://twitter.com/artpricedotcom Artmarket News: https://twitter.com/artpricedotcom & https://twitter.com/artmarketdotcom https://www.facebook.com/artpricedotcom & https://plus.google.com/+artpricedotcom/posts http://artmarketinsight.wordpress.com/ Discover the Alchemy and the universe of Artprice http://web.artprice.com/video, which headquarters are the famous Museum of Contemporary Art, the Abode of Chaos: http://goo.gl/zJssd https://vimeo.com/124643720 The Contemporary Art Museum The Abode of Chaos on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/la.demeure.du.chaos.theabodeofchaos999 Contact: thierry Ehrmann, [email protected] SOURCE Artprice.com Before the speech, Squirrel AI Learning's Co-founder and CEO Wei Zhou attended Slush Shanghai 2018 on Sept. 7 and 8 on invitation, and gave a speech titled "Squirrel AI Learning Gives Every Child a Super AI Teacher". He believes that the training of excellent teachers is a very long process, which requires continuous teaching practice and experience accumulation. At the same time, with limited energy and time, even excellent teachers cannot keep an eye on the whole learning process of every student. Based on this, the Squirrel AI intelligent adaptive learning system came into being. First, it analyzes the knowledge and skills of special-grade teachers based on advanced algorithms, forming a database with complete proprietary intellectual property rights. Next, by repeating the teaching process "early diagnosis focusing on cognitive blind areas - teaching intervention to make up for knowledge deficiency - assessment of current knowledge level - plan of the learning path for the next step", it assists students with efficient learning, and has become popular with many parents and students. So far, the renewal rate of Squirrel AI has reached 80%. Slush originated in Finland. With its focus on technology entrepreneurship and investment, Slush has grown from a small gathering of just 300 Finnish local tech entrepreneurs to one of the most popular and influential tech startup investment platforms in the world. So far, Slush has been successfully held in Helsinki, Tokyo, Beijing, Singapore and Shanghai, attracting 250 million people's attention worldwide. As a global tech conference committed to "helping the next generation of companies aiming to conquer the world to succeed", Slush Singapore focused on a number of areas, such as transportation and education, which are in urgent need of change. It attracted a number of industry leaders to give passionate speeches, including Hyperloop Transportation Technologies' Co-founder and Board Chairman Bibop Gresta, Golden Gate Ventures' Founding Partner Paul Bragiel, Intrepid Ventures' Co-founder and Chief Development Officer Zachary Piester, Entropical Labs' Co-founder and CEO Tommaso Demarie, and Squirrel AI intelligent adaptive education Partner Yifang Liao. At the conference, Squirrel AI intelligent adaptive education Partner Yifang Liao gave a speech titled "Squirrel AI Learning Will Surpass Human Teachers and Redefine Education" and gave the AI+ education industry a forward-looking interpretation. In Yifang Liao's opinion, for thousands of years, the ultimate goal of education has been "to put people first and teach students according to their aptitudes"; however, the actual condition is that school education is a kind of assembly line operation. In the K12 stage, a student is in a certain class of a certain grade; in college, a student is in a certain major of a certain school. The "talents" produced in this education environment are naturally standardized. It's against the goal of cultivating individualized and innovative talents. According to Liao, under the current education system, students not only fail to achieve the goal of efficient learning, but may be bored because of their unclear grasp of knowledge points. "Some students may need only a few minutes to master a knowledge point, while others a class period. The same student may be quick at learning some knowledge points, but slow at mastering others. However, it is impossible for teachers in the same class to slow down or speed up teaching for some specific students. It's common for "fast-learners to be underfed and slow-learners to be overfed," she said. In the 1990s, the concept of intelligent adaptive education began to emerge in the United States. Back then, students were just simply classified into three categories: good, medium and poor, according to their learning levels, so as to match students in each category with the most suitable learning content and path. This education concept achieves rapid development with the support of AI technology. Through AI algorithms, the system acquires and analyzes the learners' data and gives feedbacks to the existing knowledge maps, provides lessons and exercises at personalized difficulty levels and pace to the learners, thereby improving the learners' learning efficiency and learning effects. Although each country or region has its own history, language and cultural background, education concepts can be shared. The wave of intelligent adaptive education originated in the United States has quickly spread to places like China, India and Japan. For example, Knewton, ALEKS, Byju's, Dreambox, Squirrel AI and other institutions have launched their own intelligent adaptive education products. Khan Academy, which developed MOOCs in the early days, has also turned to adaptive education, developing targeted contents for different regions and examination outlines, which has accelerated implementing the applications of AI in education. For example, Squirrel AI system can "teach students in accordance with their aptitudes". It can accurately identify the weak points in each student's knowledge mastery and present learning content specifically, so that students can find the learning time suitable to them. Moreover, Squirrel AI can "trace the source". It can help students to master the most basic knowledge points in the knowledge system and fill in the loopholes in their knowledge. In addition, Squirrel AI can "strategically give up some content". It can give up some knowledge points that account for a small part and have a low occurrence rate in exams but are difficult to learn, and make students learn knowledge points that have the highest relative absorption and lead to the better scores in future exams. In a way, Squirrel AI makes education easier and learning more efficient. It frees students from the misery of excessive assignments, to help increase their interest and confidence in learning. Why does Squirrel AI have such confidence? Yifang Liao introduced the superiority of Squirrel AI to the audience. The core of AI intelligent adaptive education lies in breaking down knowledge points. Squirrel AI is remarkable in the following aspects. First, Squirrel AI can break down knowledge points 10 times finer than its rivals do and reach the nano-scaled level. For example, the knowledge about rational numbers is broken down to 20 knowledge points. Second, Squirrel AI initiated the theory of correlational probability of uncorrelated knowledge points in the world. The correlations between knowledge points are also sorted out to form a network of knowledge, so that the intelligent system can test students' knowledge levels with fewer questions. In real tests, Squirrel AI can test 10,000 knowledge points through 500 questions, reaching 90+% accuracy and improving the overall test efficiency and learning effects in education by 5-10 times. Third, while breaking down knowledge points, Squirrel AI also matches corresponding knowledge point explanation contents and examination questions. For one nanoscale knowledge point, it matches dozens of corresponding test questions at different difficulty levels. Aided by AI, the system matches the learning content with each student individually, solving 90% of the time and efficiency problems. What's more, Squirrel AI can also break down students' learning abilities and learning methods, making them "definable, measurable and teachable". It not only enables students to master effective knowledge points and get high scores in exams but also utilizes Squirrel AI teachers to cultivate and enhance students' creativity and imagination, thereby fully stimulating students' learning potentials. In addition, Squirrel AI keeps developing the theory of AI-enabled education and putting it into practice. In recent years, academic papers published by Squirrel AI have been recognized by international academic conferences such as AIED, CSEDU and UMAP. Squirrel AI Learning has designed an AI-enabled education lab in New York, established a joint lab for AI in Silicon Valley with Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and increased its investment in AI-enabled education. In the meantime, Squirrel AI Learning has organized four "human vs. machine teaching competitions", from the first competition in one city Zhengzhou to the fourth competition in 100 cities at different levels. Through competitions between the "machine-taught group" and "human-taught group", the implementation of Squirrel AI system is accelerated. As for whether AI teachers will impact the relationship between teachers and students, Yifang Liao also expressed her view. She said, "Instead, AI teachers will make the relationship between teachers and students more harmonious." Because in the traditional education model, teachers' tasks are relatively heavy. Besides teaching knowledge, they also need to care about students' emotions and other conditions. To some extent, it affects the improvement of teachers' professional levels. With the assistance of AI teachers, daily tasks such as teaching knowledge and checking homework can be handed over to AI teachers. Human teachers can focus more on cultivating students' morality, interest and other aspects, combining "teaching" with "education" perfectly. Up to now, Squirrel AI has opened more than 1,600 self-service learning centers in over 300 cities of 20 provinces (municipalities, autonomous regions) in China, providing more than 1 million users with personalized "one-on-one tutoring" services by AI teachers. "Our goal at the current stage is to subvert the traditional education model and make children learn with more confidence," said Squirrel AI intelligent adaptive education Partner Yifang Liao. SOURCE Squirrel AI Learning MIAMI, Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Atlas Renewable Energy has won one of the Bonds & Loans Latin America Awards 2019, in the category of Structured Bond Deal of the Year. Following more than 150 submissions from different companies, the Latin American renewable energy company, with the second largest solar base in the region, was recognized for the long-term financing program executed for its El Naranjal and Del Litoral solar PV projects in Salto, Uruguay, in partnerships with DNB Markets and IDB-Invest. The awards program, Bonds & Loans Latin America Awards recognizes outstanding deals from across Latin American capital markets in 2017/18. The recognition of industry excellence is determined by Bonds & Loans editors based on an exhaustive selection process involving examination of case studies, in-depth feedback and discussions with market participants. This year, over 150 companies submitted cases across 10 categories. The innovative financing method of the two Uruguayan solar energy plants combined a US Private Placement with several international investors, placed by DNB Markets, Inc. and the Inter-American Investment Corporation (IDB-Invest). The deal was arranged as an A/B Bond structure including a senior and a subordinated note tranches, with IDB-Invest as the lender of record. This type of partnership was the first of its kind, which explains why Atlas Renewable Energy was awarded the Bonds & Loans Structured Bond Deal of the Year accolade. Atlas Renewable Energy recognizes that the financing structure utilized to secure El Naranjal and Del Litoral was innovative in the financial industry and thank their partners, both IDB Invest and DNB Markets for their instrumental collaboration on a project that pushed the envelope for the industry. Not only did Atlas Renewable Energy place an investment grade senior tranche, but also a sub-investment grade subordinated tranche with private investors, both at very attractive rates and long tenors. Atlas Renewable Energy Head of Structured Finance, Michael Shea, says: "This award represents a step forward for Atlas Renewable Energy, as we expand our footprint throughout Latin America. Atlas Renewable Energy remains on the constant lookout for new opportunities to grow and innovate with great industry partners, such as DNB Markets and IDB Invest". Atlas Renewable Energy's solar base totals 1.2 GW of contracted projects across Latin America including Sol Do Futuro, Juazeiro and Sertao Solar (Brazil), Quilapilun (Chile), El Naranjal and Del Litoral (Uruguay), and Guajiro (Mexico). As solar energy production is on the rise, and the sector is estimated as a $160.8bn global industry, Atlas Renewable Energy will continue partnering with great financial institutions to fund more projects that can bring clean energy to Latin America. About Atlas Renewable Energy Atlas Renewable Energy is a renewable energy generation company that develops, builds, and operates renewable energy projects with long-term energy contracts across Latin America. The current company portfolio is 1.2GW of contracted projects in development, construction, or operational stages, and aims to grow an additional 1.5GW over the next decade. Launched in early 2017, Atlas Renewable Energy includes an experienced team with the longest track record in the solar energy industry in Latin America. The company is recognized by its high standards in development, construction, and operation of large-scale projects. Atlas Renewable Energy is part of the Energy Fund IV, co-founded by Actis, a leading private equity investor in the energy sector of emerging markets. Actis has allocated more than $600 million of equity in Atlas Renewable Energy to invest in long-term renewable energy contracted projects. Atlas Renewable Energy's growth is focused on the main emerging markets and economies of Latin America, using its proven development, commercialization and structuring know-how to bring clean energy to the region. By actively engaging with the community and stakeholders at the center of its project strategy, the company works every day to provide the world with a cleaner future. To know more about Atlas Renewable Energy, visit: http://www.atlasrenewableenergy.com/. About the Awards Bonds & Loans Latin America Deals of the Year recognizes outstanding achievement from across the Latin American credit markets. Over 150 deals were submitted across 10 categories. The recognition of industry excellence was determined by Bonds & Loans editors based on an exhaustive selection process involving examination of case studies, in-depth feedback and discussions with market participants. Presentation of the Awards will take place at the cocktail receptions of our following conferences: Bonds, Loans & Derivatives Mexico 2019: 7th February, Four Seasons, Mexico City Bonds, Loans Derivatives Andes 2019: 25th April, JW Marriott, Bogota Bonds, Loans & Derivatives Brazil 2019: 4th June, The Tivoli, Sao Paulo You can view the full list of Winners here: http://www.gfcmediagroup.com/bonds-loans-latin-america-deals-of-the-year/2019winners About GFC Media Group GFC Media Group is a leading producer of financial conferences, online market intelligence platforms and awards, which in turn facilitates idea-sharing and networking between corporates, SMEs, government entities, advisors, regulators, bankers and funds. At GFC Media Group our aim is to improve connectivity between companies looking to raise capital and investors seeking to deploy it. SOURCE Atlas Renewable Energy TORONTO, NEW YORK and LONDON, Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ - Bentall Kennedy and GreenOak Real Estate ("GreenOak") announced today the signing of an agreement to merge the two firms into a leading global real estate investment platform. The combined entity will be named Bentall GreenOak. GreenOak Co-Founders, John Carrafiell and Sonny Kalsi, existing GreenOak senior management and GreenOak's strategic partner Tetragon Financial Group Limited will all continue to hold significant ownership stakes in Bentall GreenOak. Bentall Kennedy's senior management team will also acquire a meaningful ownership position in the combined firm. Bentall GreenOak will be majority-owned by Sun Life Financial ("Sun Life") and will operate under Sun Life Investment Management, the alternative asset management arm of Sun Life. Sun Life has committed significant co-investment capital to support the growth of Bentall GreenOak and to enhance the firm's alignment with its clients. Senior management of the combined firm will include leaders from both Bentall Kennedy and GreenOak, and will be led globally by Gary Whitelaw, as CEO, and Sonny Kalsi, as President. John Carrafiell will be Senior Managing Partner of the Bentall GreenOak UK/European business. Bentall GreenOak will provide its clients with a broad range of complementary real estate investment strategies that include Core, Core Plus and Value Add/Opportunistic equity, as well as senior and tactical real estate debt strategies. With investment professionals in 14 offices in North America, and 7 offices internationally, Bentall GreenOak will have deep local knowledge and strong, long-standing investment track records across the United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia. "This combination brings together two successful real estate platforms to create a world class investment manager, supported by the significant resources and long-term stability of Sun Life Investment Management. GreenOak and Bentall Kennedy are two highly complementary firms with virtually no overlap in investment strategies or offices", said Gary Whitelaw, CEO, Bentall Kennedy. "As members of the combined leadership team have worked together before, and given our extensive discussions over many months, we believe we share very similar investment practices, underwriting discipline, and client-centric cultures," Mr. Whitelaw continued. "The mission critical element in any combination is ensuring that the leadership team and the teams directly managing the investment programs and assets on the ground are able to remain focused on creating value and managing risk", added Messrs. Carrafiell and Kalsi, Co-Founders of GreenOak Real Estate. "This combination of like-minded and compatible firms uniquely allows us to do that with our clients and fund investors working with the same local specialists with whom they have been working for many years." "Institutional real estate investment strategies increasingly benefit from a truly global framework. But being successful requires deep local knowledge, a rigorous underwriting culture and strong alignment between investors and the manager," said Steve Peacher, President, Sun Life Investment Management. "Bentall Kennedy and GreenOak each bring this knowledge, disciplined experience and a fiduciary culture to the new combined firm. Sun Life Investment Management is committed to deepening Bentall GreenOak's client/manager alignment by making strategic co-investments in future Bentall GreenOak funds and other initiatives in partnership with Bentall GreenOak's clients and partners", Mr. Peacher added. As of September 30, 2018, Bentall Kennedy and GreenOak have, in the aggregate, over 700 institutional clients with approximately $47 billion USD / $62 billion CAD in assets under management. Sun Life will have contractual rights to increase its ownership interest in Bentall GreenOak in 2026, though it is expected that a meaningful interest will continue to be held by the Bentall GreenOak management team on an ongoing basis. Bentall Kennedy and Sun Life Investment Management received financial advice on the transaction from Berkshire Global Advisors and legal advice from Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP. Evercore provided financial advice to GreenOak and Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP and Covington & Burling LLP provided legal advice to GreenOak and its owners. The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, including required regulatory approvals. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2019. About Bentall Kennedy Bentall Kennedy, a Sun Life Investment Management company, is a leading real estate investment advisor and one of North America's foremost providers of real estate services. Bentall Kennedy (which includes Bentall Kennedy (Canada) Limited Partnership, Bentall Kennedy (U.S.) Limited Partnership) serves the interests of more than 545 institutional clients with expertise in office, retail, industrial and multi-residential assets throughout Canada and the U.S. Bentall Kennedy's Investment Management group has approximately $36 billion USD / $48 billion CAD of assets under management (including approximately $18 billion USD / $24 billion CAD of Sun Life General Account Assets, of which $12.3 billion USD are commercial mortgages managed by certain affiliated Sun Life Investment Management entities outside the Bentall Kennedy group under the oversight of individuals who are officers both of Bentall Kennedy and those other affiliates, all as at September 30, 2018). We are one of the largest Real Estate Services providers in Canada, managing more than 60 million square feet on behalf of third-party and investment management clients (as of September 30, 2018). For more information, please visit www.bentallkennedy.com About GreenOak GreenOak Real Estate is a leading global real estate investment management firm with approximately US$11 billion of AUM, across discretionary closed-end funds for both equity and debt strategies in the US, Europe and Asia. Founded in 2010, GreenOak has acquired approximately 203 assets representing 40 million square feet and US$14.3 billion of real estate value within its target markets. GreenOak has offices in New York, Los Angeles, London, Madrid, Milan, Luxembourg, Tokyo, Seoul and Mumbai, with over 100 professionals in dedicated regional teams having deep, local knowledge, experience and extensive networks in each market. For more information, please visit www.greenoakrealestate.com About Sun Life Investment Management Sun Life Investment Management comprises Sun Life Institutional Investments (Canada) Inc. and Bentall Kennedy (Canada) Limited Partnership in Canada, and Prime Advisors Inc., Ryan Labs Asset Management and Bentall Kennedy (U.S.) Limited Partnership in the United States. These operations have combined third-party assets under management of $46 billion USD / $61 billion CAD (at $1.33 CAD/USD) as of September 30, 2018. Sun Life Investment Management is supported by the investment division of Sun Life Assurance Company of Canada that manages $109 billion USD / $146 billion CAD (at $1.33 CAD/USD) in assets under management for the Sun Life Financial group of companies as of September 30, 2018. For more information, please visit our website www.sunlifeinvestmentmanagement.com About Tetragon Tetragon is a closed-ended investment company that invests in a broad range of assets, including bank loans, real estate, equities, credit, convertible bonds, private equity, infrastructure and TFG Asset Management, a diversified asset management business. Tetragon is traded on Euronext in Amsterdam N.V. and on the Specialist Fund Segment of the main market of the London Stock Exchange. Tetragon partnered with the GreenOak Co-Founders on the launch of GreenOak, providing working capital, co-investment capital and operating infrastructure to the joint venture. TFG Asset Management will continue to hold its key investment in Bentall GreenOak, will serve on its Board of Directors, will participate in investment committees for funds in which TFG Asset Management will hold carried interest and expects to invest in new Bentall GreenOak funds. For more information please visit the company's website at www.tetragoninv.com Forward Looking Statements Certain statements in this news release are forward-looking statements within the meaning of certain securities laws, including the "safe harbour" provisions of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and applicable Canadian securities legislation. Information about risk factors relating to Sun Life (and Sun Life Investment Management) can be found in the annual information form of Sun Life Financial Inc. for the year ended December 31, 2017 under the heading "Risk Factors" and other regulatory filings filed with or furnished to Canadian and U.S. securities regulators available at www.sedar.com and www.sec.gov. Media Contacts Rahim Ladha Vice President, Corporate Communications Bentall Kennedy Group E: [email protected] Julie Wong Partner, Investor Relations GreenOak Real Estate T: 212-359-7828 E: [email protected] Connie Soave Director, Corporate Communications Sun Life Investment Management T: 416-407-5721 E: [email protected] SOURCE Sun Life Investment Management LAS VEGAS, Dec. 18, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Girl Scouts of Southern Nevada announced today a property and land gift valued at nearly $9 million from the Charles and Phyllis M. Frias Charitable Trust. The gift marks the largest single private donation in the history of the Girl Scouts. Honoring the memory of Las Vegas philanthropists Charlie and Phyllis Frias, the donation includes personal property and acreage in rural Lincoln County, Nev. located 90 miles north of Las Vegas. The donation of 70 acres of property includes: A Cowboy's Dream Bed and Breakfast, Windmill Ridge Restaurant and Lodging and undeveloped land. "On behalf of our Board of Directors, Southern Nevada Girl Scouts, and the thousands of local Girl Scout volunteers and alumnae, I share their infinite gratitude for this transformational gift," said Kimberly Trueba, chief executive officer of Girl Scouts of Southern Nevada. "This gift will enable us to be a champion for girls and continue the legacy of Phyllis and Charlie Frias. Generations of Girl Scouts will know their story, feel their frontier spirit, and be empowered to make our community and world a better place. This gift was made possible thanks to visionaries like Phyllis and Charlie and the trustees of their charitable trust, John H. Mowbray and Jack Hanifan." In early 2019, representatives from Girl Scouts of Southern Nevada will begin a study of potential uses of the land gift that will best provide enriching outdoor experiences for Girls. The gift announcement was made during a presentation held at the Girl Scouts of Southern Nevada's council office in Las Vegas. The ceremony included remarks by Trueba and Mowbray, and was attended by local representatives from each of the six levels of Girl Scouting. "As the trustees of The Charles and Phyllis M. Frias Charitable Trust, Jack Hanifan and I are pleased to announce an inaugural $9 million distribution to the Girl Scouts of Southern Nevada," said John H. Mowbray, co-trustee of The Charles and Phyllis M. Frias Charitable Trust and Attorney at Law at Spencer Fane, LLC. "During an extensive discernment process conducted over the past year, the trustees determined that no program has a better history of service to the girls in Southern Nevada than its inaugural recipient. While Phyllis and Charlie's philanthropic focus during their lifetimes benefited the youth in Clark and Lincoln counties, this inaugural distribution will be expanded to include girls in Nye and Esmeralda counties as well." About Charlie and Phyllis Frias Charlie and Phyllis Frias did not have any children. During their lifetimes, Charlie and Phyllis were actively engaged as philanthropists in Southern Nevada, supporting children, education and the less fortunate members of society. After Phyllis passed away on October 31, 2016, the Charles and Phyllis M. Frias Charitable Trust was established to continue their legacy of giving to the community they so cherished. A bout Girl Scouts of Southern Nevada Founded on April 14, 1932 in Boulder City, Girl Scouts of Southern Nevada (GSSNV) is the preeminent leadership development organization for girls. GSSNV focuses on four key pillars: STEAM, Outdoor Experiences, Life Skills, and Entrepreneurship. GSSNV serves the four Southern-most counties in Nevada: Clark, Lincoln, Nye, & Esmeralda, as well as the Southern California counties of Inyo and San Bernardino (eastern border) and has 4,300 girl and adult members. SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS: Facebook, Twitter and Instagram: @GirlScoutsNV SOURCE Girl Scouts of Southern Nevada Related Links http://www.girlscoutsnv.org SAN DIEGO, Dec. 18, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Shareholder rights law firm Johnson Fistel, LLP has launched an investigation into whether the board members of Civitas Solutions, Inc. (NYSE: CIVI) ("Civitas") breached their fiduciary duties in connection with the proposed sale of the Company to Centerbridge Partners, L.P. ("Centerbridge"). On December 18, 2018, Civitas announced that it had signed a definitive merger agreement with Centerbridge. Under the terms of the merger agreement, Centerbridge will acquire all outstanding shares of Civitas common stock for $17.75 in cash per share of Civitas common stock. The investigation concerns whether the Civitas board failed to satisfy its duties to the Company shareholders, including whether the board adequately pursued alternatives to the acquisition and whether the board obtained the best price possible for Civitas shares of common stock. Nationally recognized Johnson Fistel is investigating whether the proposed deal represents adequate consideration, especially given that one Wall Street analyst has a $20.00 price target on the stock, and analysts' projections for future earnings and revenue growth. If you are a shareholder of Civitas and believe the proposed buyout price is too low or you're interested in learning more about the investigation or your legal rights and remedies, please contact lead analyst Jim Baker ( [email protected] ) at 619-814-4471. If emailing, please include a phone number. Additionally, you can [Click here to join this action]. There is no cost or obligation to you. About Johnson Fistel, LLP: Johnson Fistel, LLP is a nationally recognized shareholder rights law firm with offices in California, New York, and Georgia. The firm represents individual and institutional investors in shareholder derivative and securities class action lawsuits. For more information about the firm and its attorneys, please visit https://www.johnsonfistel.com. Attorney advertising. Past results do not guarantee future outcomes. Contact: Johnson Fistel, LLP Jim Baker, 619-814-4471 [email protected] [Click here to join this action] SOURCE Johnson Fistel, LLP Related Links http://www.johnsonfistel.com CHICAGO, December 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- According to the new market research report"Custom Antibody Market by Service (Antibody Production, Characterization, Immunization, Fragmentation), Type (Monoclonal, Polyclonal, Recombinant), Source (Mouse, Rabbit), Research Area (Oncology, Immunology), and End Users - Global Forecast to 2023", published by MarketsandMarkets, the market is expected to reach USD 481 million by 2023 from an estimated USD 313 million in 2018, at a CAGR of 8.9%. (Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/660509/MarketsandMarkets_Logo.jpg ) Don't miss out on business opportunities in Custom Antibody Market. The major factors driving the growth of this market are an increase in research activity-especially in the life sciences industry-along with growing industry-academia collaborations are the primary growth drivers for this market. In addition, the objective behind custom antibody production is to acquire an antibody that performs well in a particular qualitative or quantitative immunodetection method. The quality of catalog antibodies (to ensure reproducibility of results) is also an area of concern in this market, which is primarily why end users prefer custom-made antibodies. By service, the antibody development segment is expected to account for the largest share of the Custom Antibody Market Based on service, the Custom Antibody Market is segmented into antibody development, antibody production & purification, and antibody fragmentation & labeling. The antibody development services segment is estimated to account for the largest market share in 2018. The large share of this segment can be attributed to the increasing focus of researchers on high-quality antibodies for reproducibility, which can be hampered by using commercially available antibodies. The antibody development segment is further subsegmented into antigen preparation, immunization & hybridoma production, and antibody characterization. Browse in-depth TOC on "Custom Antibody Market" 143 - Tables 36 - Figures 198 - Pages Get 10% Free Customization on this Report: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/requestCustomizationNew.asp?id=164328301 On the basis of type, the monoclonal antibodies segment is expected to account for the largest share of the Custom Antibody Market in 2018 Custom antibodies are categorized by type as monoclonal antibodies, polyclonal antibodies, recombinant antibodies, and other custom antibodies. The monoclonal antibodies segment is estimated to account for the largest market share in 2018. This is because monoclonal antibodies provide high specificity and selectivity and ease of production as compared to other antibodies, and are thus the preferred choice in all types of research studies. However, increasing recognition of recombinant antibodies as potential alternatives may hamper the growth of this segment to a certain extent. North America to dominate the Custom Antibody Market during the forecast period North America is expected to account for the largest share of the Custom Antibody Market in 2018, followed by Europe. The dominance of the North American region can be attributed to the increasing investments in the development of structure-based drug designs, growing research in the fields of genomics and proteomics, rising demand for high-quality research tools for data reproducibility, increasing focus on developing antibody-based therapeutics, and the presence of a large number of global players in this region. Inquiry Before Buying: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Enquiry_Before_BuyingNew.asp?id=164328301 The prominent players in the Custom Antibody Market are Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. (US), Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc. (US), Merck Group (Germany), Abcam plc (UK), Cell Signaling Technology, Inc. (US), Agilent Technologies, Inc. (US), GenScript (US), BioLegend, Inc. (US), Rockland Immunochemicals (US), ProMab Biotechnologies (US), Innovagen AB (Sweden), and ProteoGenix (US). Browse Adjacent Markets @ Biotechnology Market Research Reports & Consulting About MarketsandMarkets MarketsandMarkets provides quantified B2B research on 30,000 high growth niche opportunities/threats which will impact 70% to 80% of worldwide companies' revenues. Currently servicing 7500 customers worldwide including 80% of global Fortune 1000 companies as clients. Almost 75,000 top officers across eight industries worldwide approach MarketsandMarkets for their painpoints around revenues decisions. Our 850 fulltime analyst and SMEs at MarketsandMarkets are tracking global high growth markets following the "Growth Engagement Model - GEM". The GEM aims at proactive collaboration with the clients to identify new opportunities, identify most important customers, write "Attack, avoid and defend" strategies, identify sources of incremental revenues for both the company and its competitors. MarketsandMarkets now coming up with 1,500 MicroQuadrants (Positioning top players across leaders, emerging companies, innovators, strategic players) annually in high growth emerging segments. MarketsandMarkets is determined to benefit more than 10,000 companies this year for their revenue planning and help them take their innovations/disruptions early to the market by providing them research ahead of the curve. MarketsandMarkets's flagship competitive intelligence and market research platform, "Knowledge Store" connects over 200,000 markets and entire value chains for deeper understanding of the unmet insights along with market sizing and forecasts of niche markets. Contact: Mr. Shelly Singh MarketsandMarkets INC. 630 Dundee Road Suite 430 Northbrook, IL 60062 USA: +1-888-600-6441 Email: [email protected] Research Insight: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/ResearchInsight/custom-antibody-market.asp Visit Our Website: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com SOURCE MarketsandMarkets During the forum, Gutierrez declared that "Central America has great social and economic problems; but the true issue is politics, we are not prepared to govern () In the last 40 years we have had transitional and felonious governments, consequently we can't build a project of nation with a long-term vision". Therefore, he explained, he founded in Guatemala the project "Escuela de Gobierno" (School of Government), which has graduated nearly 200 students at a Masters degree in Public Management and Leadership. Moreover, he indicated that the Central American elite has been apathetical regarding political issues in their countries, "especially the business sector with little engagement, suffering an alarming political autism; such as the academy that is locked in their libraries, far away from the politic life." Later, Gutierrez held a meeting with Brazilian judge Sergio Moro, in which they exchanged reflections regarding corruption in Latin America and the fights that Brazil and Guatemala have fought in an attempt to extinguish it. During the forum, Moro stated that "It is necessary to bring an institutional response to those cases of great corruption" and that "once guiltiness is proved, it is necessary to have those convicted pay, no matter how powerful they are". He added that "the guilty should not only be condemned, but incentives to avoid corruption have to be created". Dionisio Gutierrez pointed that "the detachment to the political system, the lack of trust in institutions, and above all, the terrible results of our governments have made us envision politics as a mechanism that produces corruption and poverty." He concluded saying that: "Liberal values, freedom, rule of law, and democracy need to be rescued to straighten the way to the future of Latin America". Other leaders who exposed about the issues of the region were: Antonio Ledezma, former Major of Caracas, Cristian Larrouleet, former Minister of Presidency of Chile; Alvaro Vargas Llosa, writer and journalists; Manel Valls, candidate for major in Barcelona 2019, among others. SOURCE Fundacion Libertad y Desarrollo Whether it's celebrating Carnival in March, enjoying the summer music festival Baccha, diving or surfing, or enjoying the best rums in the world, Martinique is an island of many facets that delivers to its visitors a singular and unforgettable Creole adventure. Arriving in Martinique is even easier. Visit by cruise or by air. This winter, Martinique is rolling out the red carpet to North American visitors with more than 28 nonstop flights a week from Fort Lauderdale, Miami, New York and Montreal, Canada from which Norwegian has just inaugurated its service. Now in its third season in the U.S. Norwegian has increased service for the 2018/2019 season compared to previous years. Lucky New Yorkers will have 6 weekly flights from JFK and Floridians will benefit from 4 flights out of Fort-Lauderdale. American Airlines, which flies to Martinique all year round, has up to seven flights a week scheduled out of Miami. Check out this video to see more of what Martinique has to offer. Next year, head out on a Martinican encounter. The island awaits you with open arms! For more information, please visit us.martinique.org About Martinique Known as the Isle of Flowers, The Rum Capital of the World, the Birthplace of coffee in the New World, The Isle of the Famed Poet (Aime Cesaire) Martinique ranks among the most alluring and enchanting destinations in the world. As an overseas region of France, Martinique boasts modern and reliable infrastructure roads, water and power utilities, hospitals, and telecommunications, services all on par with any other part of the European Union. At the same time, Martinique's natural wonders are unparalleled in the Caribbean, so visitors here truly get the best of both worlds. Martinique is highlighted in the Caribbean segment of the New York Time's "52 Places to go in 2018" and a January 2018 article in Travel + Leisure. SOURCE Martinique Tourism Authority Related Links https://us.martinique.org SINGAPORE, Dec. 18, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Embraer has announced the signing of a contract with the Government of Kiribati, in partnership with their national airline, Air Kiribati, for two firm orders for the E190-E2 E-Jets and two purchase rights for the same model. With all purchase rights being exercised, the contract has a value of USD 243 million, based on current list prices. The order will be included in Embraer's 2018 fourth-quarter backlog. Scheduled for a 2019 delivery, the E190-E2 will enable the flag carrier for the Republic of Kiribati, located in the central Pacific, to fly longer domestic and international routes than it currently does with its turboprop fleet. Air Kiribati will be the launch operator for the E190-E2 in the Asia Pacific region (excluding China). This order comes after a three-week Asia Pacific tour of the 'Shark' livery E190-E2 in October, which included a stop in Tarawa, the capital of Kiribati. Spanning four time zones and comprised of more than 30 islands, Kiribati is the only country in the world to be in all four hemispheres. "We warmly welcome Air Kiribati to the Embraer family and we will work closely with the airline as they transition to the E190-E2 through our extensive entry-into-service package and world-class support team in the region," said Cesar Pereira, Asia Pacific Vice President, Embraer Commercial Aviation. "Flying in the Pacific, over large bodies of water, requires outstanding range, performance and ample cargo capacity. Air Kiribati's selection of the E190-E2 is yet another validation of the world's most efficient single-aisle jet design, which exceeds these requirements and will enable the airline to enhance its flight frequency and to boost its network." "We were impressed with what we saw when the E190-E2 visited Kiribati in October," said Hon. Willie Tokataake, Minister for Information, Communication, Transport and Tourism Development of the Kiribati Government. "Given its impressive range, lower fuel consumption and maintenance costs and dual class configuration that brings comfort to our passengers compared to its peers, the E190-E2's capabilities empower us to enhance connectivity within our country and beyond, taking our nation to its next phase of growth." With a maximum range of up to 2,850 nautical miles, the E190-E2 can operate over the vast expanse of Kiribati, including from Tarawa directly to Kiritimati (Christmas) Island, one of the most challenging routes in the Pacific. The current domestic connection from Tarawa to Kiritimati includes an international stopover in Fiji. The E190-E2 is part of Embraer's new generation E-Jets E2 family of aircraft, which can seat between 70 to 150 passengers. The E190-E2 specifically, can seat up to 114 passengers, and is the first member of the E-Jets E2 family of aircraft to enter into service in April 2018. Embraer has been present in the region since the first Bandeirante was delivered in 1978 in Australia and has been providing comprehensive support and services through the years to aircraft based in Australia and in the Pacific region. Embraer is the world's leading manufacturer of commercial jets with up to 150 seats. The Company has 100 customers from all over the world operating the ERJ and E-Jet families of aircraft. For the E-Jets program alone, Embraer has logged almost 1,800 orders and 1,500 deliveries, redefining the traditional concept of regional aircraft. Follow us on Twitter: @Embraer About Embraer Embraer is a global company headquartered in Brazil with businesses in commercial and executive aviation, defense & security. The company designs, develops, manufactures and markets aircraft and systems, providing customer support and services. Since it was founded in 1969, Embraer has delivered more than 8,000 aircraft. About every 10 seconds an aircraft manufactured by Embraer takes off somewhere in the world, transporting over 145 million passengers a year. Embraer is the leading manufacturer of commercial jets with up to 150 seats. The company maintains industrial units, offices, service and parts distribution centers, among other activities, across the Americas, Africa, Asia and Europe. PRESS OFFICES: Headquarters (Brazil) Corporate Communications [email protected] Cell: +55 11 98890 7777 Tel.: +55 11 4873 7984 North America Alyssa Ten Eyck [email protected] Cell: +1 954 383 0460 Tel.: +1 954 359 3847 Europe, Middle East and Africa Guy Douglas [email protected] Cell: +31 (0)657120121 Tell: +31 (0)202158109 China Mirage Zhong [email protected] Cell: +86 185 1378 5180 Tel.: +86 10 6598 9988 Asia Pacific Nilma Missir-Boissac [email protected] Cell: +65 9012 8428 Tel.: +65 6305 9955 SOURCE Embraer S.A. Every second counts for patients suffering life-threatening injuries, and the trauma unit at NYU Langone HospitalBrooklyn provides 24-hour coverage to meet that urgent need. Accredited by the American College of Surgeons, it is one of the few in the borough certified to handle the most severe injuries. Galina Glinik, MD, a former medical worker in the Soviet-Afghan war, serves as the program's interim director, and leads a team of physicians specializing in critical care and trauma surgery: Patricia R. Ayoung-Chee, MD, MPH; Helen T. Davido, MD; Pieter Smit, MD; Nicole D. Goulet, MD; and Onaona Gurney, MD. "It's vitally important to be able to rapidly assign priorities and determine the resources and personnel needed," Glinik says. "There are many things happening simultaneously to save a patient's life during a trauma call." As the Level I alert was broadcast that December morning, 15 to 20 additional specialists responded with the trauma team to the Emergency Department. The patient arrived awake, agitated, and in a state of distress with internal bleeding. The team worked quickly to stabilize and assess her injuries. "Responding to trauma can be exhilarating, particularly when we can stabilize quickly so that other life-saving procedures can be started," says Glinik. "The young woman suffered multiple internal injuries, including collapsed lungs and many broken bones. We were not sure if she would survive." Thomas Lyon, MD, chief of orthopedic surgery at NYU Langone HospitalBrooklyn, who completed a fellowship at R. Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center at the University of Maryland Medical Center, one of the country's top trauma facilities, worked with the team to repair the patient's multiple fractures. "Her breathing and other medical conditions had to be addressed before the most serious orthopedic injurya broken pelviscould be secured," he says. The patient survived, and even visited the hospital months after the accident to personally thank the team that saved her. More About the Trauma Unit and Dr. Glinik The trauma center at NYU Langone HospitalBrooklyn is one of the busiest in New York State. Annually, it treats approximately 2,100 cases with injuries caused by motor vehicle crashes, contact sports, falls, assaults, gunshots, stab wounds, and other accidents. A variety of surgical and medical specialists are required to be available 24/7 to assist whenever necessary. Additionally, hospital outreach workers provide safety training and injury prevention workshops in the community. Glinik studied neurosurgery at the Minsk State Medical Institute. After emigrating from Belarus in 1990s, she went on to earn her medical degree from St. George's University School of Medicine and completed residency training at The Brooklyn Hospital Center and fellowship in surgical critical care at North Shore University Hospital. "It should be of great assurance to our community that NYU Langone HospitalBrooklyn has a top-tier, highly experienced trauma team," says Prashant Sinha, MD, chief of surgery at NYU Langone HospitalBrooklyn. "While they work with precision in the acute setting, they also pay close attention to patient's physical and emotional needs in their recovery." Media Inquiries: Neal Gorman 718-630-8316 [email protected] Colin DeVries 718-630-7414 [email protected] SOURCE NYU Langone Hospital-Brooklyn Representatives of Farmers worked with local communities to surprise each teacher with their Dream Big Teacher Challenge $100,000 grant during the months of November and December following a public voting period that ended in early November. Voters around the country were asked to determine the most intriguing, forward-looking proposals that would deliver better learning experiences for students. The five proposals that received the most votes were: "It was an honor to surprise five visionary teachers with the funds to help make their dreams a reality and share in the excitement of the students, faculty and community members," said Tu-Han Phan, managing lead of Thank America's Teachers for Farmers Insurance. "Their ambitious proposals truly inspired us and the voting public, which led to Farmers Insurance granting $500,000 to support classroom projects ranging from a mobile literacy clinic to one of the nation's only elementary school agriculture curriculums." Through Thank America's Teachers, Farmers has awarded more than $4 million dollars in educational grants since 2014. Visit www.thankamericasteachers.com to learn more. About Thank America's Teachers Through Thank America's Teachers, Farmers has invested more than $4 million dollars in educational grants since 2014. Teachers are invited to submit proposals to receive $2,500 and $100,000 grants at ThankAmericasTeachers.com. About Farmers Insurance "Farmers Insurance" and "Farmers" are tradenames for a group of affiliated insurers providing insurance for automobiles, homes and small businesses and a wide range of other insurance and financial services and products. Farmers Insurance is proud to serve more than 10 million households with over 19 million individual policies nationally through the efforts of more than 48,000 exclusive and independent agents and approximately 21,000 employees. Farmers Insurance Exchange, the largest of the three primary insurance insurers that make up Farmers Insurance, is recognized as one of the largest U.S. companies on the 2018 Fortune 500 list. For more information about Farmers Insurance, visit Farmers.com, Twitter and Instagram, @WeAreFarmers, or Facebook.com/FarmersInsurance. Contacts: Farmers Insurance Media Relations 818-965-0007 [email protected] SOURCE Farmers Insurance Related Links http://www.farmersinsurance.com NEW YORK, Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- FSA company, Clarity Benefit Solutions, discusses the benefits of factoring in wellness programs during open enrollment. Open enrollment is busy time of year when employees have many decisions to make regarding their health plans, such as benefits, costs, and providers. Factoring in wellness programs during open enrollment can be advantageous to employer and employee alike, especially if the employer is making changes to the plan. This would be an opportune time to begin a workplace wellness initiative. Studies show that healthier employees miss less work, are happier, and thus are more productive. This may also make them more likely to stay longer. Plus, employers who offer wellness programs may attract new, fresh talent. The New Year is a time for new beginnings and resolutions. Rolling out wellness program offerings during this time may boost enrollment. Employers can either offer wellness programs directly to employees or as a component of their benefits package. Health screenings, weight-loss programs, counseling services, gym memberships, mindfulness classes, relaxation rooms, financial counseling, and tobacco-cessation programs are examples of successful wellness programs. Schedule biometric screenings, flu shot clinics, and blood drives to keep employees engaged in wellness initiatives. Employers can survey their employees to determine what types of wellness programs they may be looking to take advantage of. It is vital for employers to promote this culture of health and well-being by having senior leaders participate in wellness programs as well as offer their employees incentives to participate in these programs. Encourage healthy behaviors in and around the workplace. Hang posters that promote using the stairs and make sure employees get up and move around over the course of the day. Offer healthy meals during meetings and promote a tobacco-free policy. Establish measurable success guides to check that the wellness programs are working. Once the programs are well-established, employers should gather feedback to see what is working versus what needs to be refined. Include specific questions about health and wellness wants and needs and take employees' priorities into serious consideration. Making wellness a part of everyday work culture is a win-win for everyone! About Clarity Benefit Solutions: Clarity Benefit Solutions provides technology that makes the health insurance plan selection process fast, easy, and straightforward. For over two decades, we have provided clients with industry-leading technology, compliance, and exceptional customer service. Our offering is designed to save time and lower the costs of managing benefits while also promoting employee self-service and automated ACA compliance. SOURCE Clarity Benefit Solutions Related Links http://www.claritybenefitsolutions.com DALLAS, Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Generational Capital Markets, Inc., Member FINRA/SIPC and a leading mergers and acquisitions advisor for privately held businesses, is pleased to announce the sale of its client, Solid Systems CAD Services (SSCS), to Park Place Technologies. The acquisition closed October 4, 2018. SSCS, based in Houston, Texas, provides third-party maintenance and IT enterprise hardware support with a team whose average tenure at the company is 14 years. As an alternative to OEM support, SSCS dramatically impacts operating expense budgets for post-warranty servers, storage systems and networking hardware. "Our customers and employees have always served as a guide for our business. We have carefully and transparently created tailored solutions for our customers and have extended this level of attention and purpose to the establishment of our team," said Gahlen Carpenter, President, Co-Founder and Owner of SSCS. "The decision to be acquired by Park Place Technologies was an extremely thoughtful one and represented the best interests of our partners and employees. It's been an honor to be part of SSCS, and this change brings great opportunity for our organization and customers as Park Place Technologies upholds the values and culture we have ingrained in our company." Park Place Technologies is a leading provider of data center hardware maintenance and is committed to delivering superior service that exceeds customer expectations. It provides a post-warranty alternative to storage, server and networking hardware maintenance for IT data centers. With 24/7 access to a global contact center, support from the industry's most advanced engineers and a wide array of industry leading and award-winning services, Park Place Technologies empowers its customers to improve operational speed and maximize uptime. The company's services are spread across 35,000 data centers in more than 115 countries, and it serves businesses ranging from government, higher education, and healthcare institutions to cloud service providers, SMB and Fortune 500 companies. Its global headquarters are in Cleveland, Ohio. The deal to acquire SSCS marks the ninth acquisition Park Place Technologies has made over the past 24 months. Through this acquisition, Park Place Technologies will expand its scale within the TPM industry, resulting in added benefits for its global customers, which include an elevated level of service and operational support, greater resource availability and increased efficiencies. "As a veteran third-party maintenance provider, SSCS is well-respected for its exceptionally talented and tenured team, which includes leaders instrumental in the foundation of our industry," said Chris Adams, President and COO of Park Place Technologies. "SSCS has cultivated strong, long-term customer relationships as a result of its approach to service excellence and the ability to drive meaningful business value. SSCS' approach is admirable and closely aligns with how we engage with our customers." Generational Capital Markets Senior Managing Director Tom Staszak, with support from Senior VP Chris Gain, successfully closed the deal. Senior Managing Director Thomas Hamm established the initial relationship with SSCS. Agile Equity and its Managing Partner Dave Cummings co-represented SSCS with Generational Capital on the transaction. "SSCS is an outstanding company with extensive international operations," said Staszak. "The company is an ideal complement to Park Place's operations and growth strategy." About Generational Capital, LLC Generational Capital, LLC, is a Dallas, Texas-based merger and acquisition advisory firm. Generational Capital wholly owns Generational Capital Markets, Inc., Member FINRA/SIPC. More information can be found at www.gencm.com. Generational Capital and Generational Capital Markets are part of the Generational Group and are affiliated with Generational Equity, LLC, which The M&A Advisor named Investment Banking Firm of the Year in 2016, 2017, and 2018. GCM's most recent awards include The M&A Advisor's 2018 International Deal of the Year Awards in the professional services, corporate/strategic and private equity categories. For more information: Carl Doerksen 972-232-1125 [email protected] SOURCE Generational Capital Markets, Inc. Related Links https://www.gencm.com DALLAS, Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Generational Equity, a leading mergers and acquisitions advisor for privately held businesses, is pleased to announce the sale of its client, Total Systems Control Inc., to Multi-Flow Industries. The acquisition closed September 5, 2018. Located in Large, PA, Total Systems Control provides professional services to businesses operating within the hospitality and beverage industries. Founded in 1997, it is a certified vendor with the PA Gaming Commission as well as a certified Pure Flow Perlick Dealer, offering a variety of bar services and products to its customers. Multi-Flow is also a Pennsylvania-based business, headquartered in Huntingdon Valley. Founded in 1937 with the goal of providing the best quality fountain beverages at the best possible price, Multi-Flow now employs nearly 200 employees in seven states, with a geographic footprint spanning 15 service centers and new services offerings such as private labeling and contract manufacturing. Multi-Flow Industries is owned by a group of private investors and managed by Falconhead Capital of New York City. Generational Equity Senior Managing Director Doug Smith's team, led by trusted affiliate Jerry Yocum and assisted by Senior Vice President Ryan Johnson, successfully closed the deal. Senior Managing Director Rick Buchoz established the initial relationship with Total Systems Control. "This was a very enjoyable transaction," said Yocum. "Both the buyer and seller were very well established in the beverage space. There were strong synergies in the businesses. Each party worked to overcome all areas of disagreement to get the deal to the finish line." About Generational Equity Generational Equity, Generational Capital Markets (member FINRA/SIPC), DealForce and Talis Advisors 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, 2017 and 2018 Investment Banking Firm of the Year. For more, visit the https://www.genequityco.com/ or the Generational Equity press room. For more information: Carl Doerksen 972-232-1125 [email protected] SOURCE Generational Equity Related Links http://www.genequityco.com NEW YORK, Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Report Description Persistence Market Research (PMR) provides an exclusive analysis of the global cross laminated timber market in its revised report titled "Cross Laminated Timber Market: Global Industry Analysis 20132017 & Forecast 20182026".The main aim of this report is to offer an exhaustive analysis and insights pertaining to the cross laminated timber market. Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05662529 This report offers a comprehensive analysis of the global cross laminated timber market in terms of market volume (Cubic Metre) & value (US$ Mn) and year-wise (Y-o-Y) growth in the global cross laminated timber market according to type, end-use and application.The study considers 2017 as the base year with market values estimated for 2018 and a forecast developed for the duration of 2018 to 2026. The Compound Average Growth Rate (CAGR) is represented from 2018 to 2026.The study covers value chain analysis, cross laminated timber market dynamics, industry growth analysis, along with segmental-level projections in a comprehensive manner. As per industry experts and findings of the report, the global cross laminated timber market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 6.6 % between 2018 and 2026 in terms of value. The increasing demand for timber-based construction is one of the key factors assisting the growth of the cross laminated timber market. The Persistence Market Research report on cross laminated timber analyses the market at a regional as well as global level through market segmentation on the basis of type, end-use and application. The primary objective of the report is to offer key insights on current trends, competition positioning, growth rates, market potential and other relevant information and statistics in a suitable manner to readers and various stakeholders in the cross laminated timber market. Cross laminated timber can be defined as mass timber or massive product.Cross laminated timber is constructed by layering kiln dried dimensional lumber in a crosswise manner, gluing the layers and pressing them into panels. Cross laminated timber is utilized in the construction of single and multifamily housing, commercial and high-rise buildings. The report is structured to facilitate readers to develop a thorough understanding of the cross laminated timber market.It begins with market definitions, followed by the market taxonomy, market background and market dynamics and analysis of the market by key segments, regional market analysis and competition assessment. Each section of the report covers a quantitative as well as qualitative assessment of the cross laminated timber market on the basis of historical developments, facts, key opinions collected from the market participants through the interviews and trends in the cross laminated timber market. Cross Laminated Timber Market: Segmentation The global cross laminated timber market has been segmented on the basis of type, end-use, application and region. Based on the type, the global cross laminated timber market has been segmented into: Mechanically Fastened Adhesive-Bonded Based on the end-use, the global cross laminated timber market has been segmented into: Residential Commercial & Institutional Industrial Based on the application, the global cross laminated timber market has been segmented into: Walls Ceilings Roof Structures Beams Based on the region, the global cross laminated timber market has been segmented into: North America Latin America Europe South East Asia & Pacific China Japan Middle East & Africa In the next section, the report describes the cross laminated timber market structure, macro-economic factors, forecast factors, regional weighted average pricing analysis and an overview of value chain along with the profitability margins, an indicative list of the key stakeholders involved in every stage and an assessment of the production vs. consumption scenario on the basis of regions. The next section of the report provides value (US$ Mn) and volume (Cubic Metre) projections for the cross laminated timber market on the basis of respective segments at a global level.The global cross laminated timber market values represented in the section have been agglomerated by collecting the data and information at a regional level. Cross laminated timber market information along with the key insights and facts covers unique analysis frameworks such as year-on-year growth trend comparison, absolute $ opportunity analysis, market attractiveness and share analysis for each sub-types of the segments covered in each segment. The subsequent section of the report presents a summarized view of the global cross laminated timber market based on seven prominent regions considered in the study. The cross laminated timber market analysis section of the report covers weighted average pricing analysis and market projections for each segment, including market share analysis, Y-o-Y growth trends, market attractiveness analysis, market share analysis, and incremental $ opportunity assessment. All the above sections evaluate the present market scenario and growth prospects in the global cross laminated timber market, while the forecast presented in the section assesses the market size in terms of volume and value. The market numbers, pertaining to the regional as well as country level data and various segments by end-use industry are estimated through the combination of primary and secondary research among target regions and countries. Key sources referred to arrive at the global cross laminated timber market size include cross laminated timber manufacturers, suppliers, end-users, industry association & trade experts, along with the secondary documents available through public domain, paid database and PMR's in-house data repository. In order to offer an accurate market forecast, PMR's proprietary regression analysis forecast model was then utilized to derive the market estimation for forecast years, which takes into account effects of certain direct and macro-economic factors on the global and regional target market. The pertinent opinions of key primary respondents for specific segments and geographies, were also taken into consideration for forecasting the segment level market size and dynamics. In the final section of the report, competition landscape of the cross laminated timber market has been included to provide report audiences with a dashboard view categorized on the basis of providers present in the value chain, their cross laminated timber market presence and key differentiating strategies. Detailed profiles of the providers are also included in the scope of the report to evaluate their long-term and short-term strategies, key offerings and recent developments in the cross laminated timber market. Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05662529 About Reportlinker ReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place. __________________________ Contact Clare: [email protected] US: (339)-368-6001 Intl: +1 339-368-6001 SOURCE Reportlinker Related Links http://www.reportlinker.com ORLANDO, Fla., Dec. 18, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- HealthCoin Plus is very pleased to announce the release of its Health Work Out Watch or HWOWTM. The watch allows users to track their progress daily on staying healthy. It tracks steps, blood pressure, BPM and numerous other activities as well as does messaging. Once HealthCoin Plus' app is released, it will allow all fitness major-platform fitness devices to communicate with each other on steps, activity, and other data earned. "The app along with the HWOWTM will allow users to earn HealthCoin (to be known to consumers as HealthPointsTM and other names) with the watch through challenges and programs by the company's marketing partners. The watch apps will also connect to various social media platforms. The expansion of marketing partners accepting our token is growing every day. This expansion, in combination with the HWOWTM is bringing HealthCoin Plus closer to the completion of its roadmap to create a blockchain-based rewards program which now includes a company that provides direct-subscription Telehealth and other benefits. HealthCoin Plus continues to combine the best of traditional customer loyalty programs with the utility of cryptocurrency," said Rick Savage, Chief Strategist. Savage went on to say, "We continue to make significant progress in pre-selling out rewards tokens and, having a marketplace that is growing as ours is, now with the addition of our healthcare workout watch, has not only accelerated the process but also increases the value as our locked token sells out." With the Work Out Watch users can earn coin to spend in the HealthCoin Plus Rewards Marketplace which offers products and services from Vitabase, Massage Envy, CVS, GNC & now a telehealth service company. HLTH public quote is here: https://xchain.io/asset/HLTH but it is being offered at a discount to market price in pre-sale directly from HealthCoin Plus. National Sales and Marketing Manager Nick Cammarata stated, "We would like to offer, starting today, even though it is on the market for .30 cents, in the holiday spirit, the first 500 people who respond to this press release will receive that coin at .10 cents with the minimum purchase required and will also receive our Work Out Watch for free. HealthCoin Plus is selling out faster than we anticipated. Get stocked up now, before we sell out!" About HealthCoin Plus: HealthCoin Plus is a leader in blockchain healthcare rewards. The company has partnerships to provide fungible, tradable, and redeemable rewards as customer acquisition and retention incentives to business in the health and wellness space. HealthCoin Plus was created on the Counterparty platform with the symbol HLTH and currently trades on the Counterparty DEX. The company maintains two offices with a sales branch in Florida and headquarters in New Hampshire. For more information on the company, its products and services, please visit their website at https://www.healthcoinplus.info and fill out your information to be contacted or contact the National Sales Manager Nick Cammarata at (407) 735-1305. SOURCE HealthCoin Plus "This is not only a milestone for Farrah, but also for Hyundai and the quality of our vehicles," said Dean Evans, CMO, Hyundai Motor America. "Reaching one million miles with the original powertrain in just five years is an extremely rare and incredible achievement. We created the 1 Million Mile Emblem because we believe in making things better for our loyal customers and look forward to other Hyundai drivers joining Farrah in the one million mile club." To recognize this incredible achievement, Hyundai and its agency of record, INNOCEAN Worldwide Americas, created a digital video that was released on Dec. 5 that tells Farrah's story. The video is available on Hyundai's YouTube channel and can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFzp1pVPDPg. It is being promoted across Hyundai's social channels and website to honor this special customer and as a great example of Hyundai quality. Taking things one step further, Hyundai wanted to thank Farrah for being such a dedicated owner by surprising her with a new 2019 Hyundai Elantra. Since she delivers auto parts and other products seven days a week, day and night, Hyundai decided to order her a surprise delivery. Farrah stopped by a local auto shop to drop off what she thought was an auto part but she was instead greeted by her friends, family, and her very own 2019 Elantra. A video of the surprise giveaway was captured and posted on Hyundai's YouTube channel today: https://youtu.be/twoJahPTjq4 While Farrah's achievement might seem impossible, Hyundai ran multiple tests to validate her odometer reading. Product engineers inspected her engine casting numbers, service records, wire harness, and motor mounts. Hyundai service and system engineers also reviewed Farrah's mileage records for her two jobs, as well as a VIN report, and Carfax. "My Hyundai has been a great car to me," said Farrah Haines, "I love to drive and have made a successful career out of it, so it was no surprise that I was able to get to a million miles. The key is to prioritize regular maintenance and to have a quality vehicle. Over the years I have been beyond pleased at my car's performance, a quality that is inherit to the Hyundai brand. While it feels a bit like starting over, this gives me the opportunity to hit a million-five!" Credits Hyundai Motor America Dean Evans: Chief Marketing Officer Paul Imhoff: Director, Marketing Communications Monique Kumpis: Senior Group Manager, Brand Marketing & Advertising Tyler Branning: Analyst, Digital & Social Media Marketing INNOCEAN Worldwide Americas Barney Goldberg: VP Executive Creative Director Lori Martin: Creative Director Jera Mehrdad: Creative Director Jackie Barkhurst: Associate Creative Director, Art Ryan Simpson: Associate Creative Director, Copy Nicolette Spencer: VP, Head of Content Production Erin Hungerford, Celestina Lucero, Stephen Estrada: Content Producer Mike Braue, VP, Group Brand Director Cassie Reed: Brand Director Lacie Worrell: Brand Manager Kim Bates: SVP, Planning and Research Katherine Garfield: Strategy Director MJ Chow: Project Manager INNOCEAN Worldwide Founded in 2009, INNOCEAN Worldwide Americas is headquartered in Huntington Beach, California, with offices in New York, Chicago, and Dallas. With 400 employees, INNOCEAN Worldwide Americas is part of the INNOCEAN Worldwide network and currently serves as lead agency for Hyundai Motor America and Genesis Motor America, as well as partners with KIA Motors America and Hankook Tire. Hyundai Motor America Hyundai Motor America is focused on delivering an outstanding customer experience grounded in design leadership, engineering excellence and exceptional value in every vehicle we sell. Hyundai's technology-rich product lineup of cars, SUVs and alternative-powered electric and fuel cell vehicles is backed by Hyundai Assuranceour promise to deliver peace of mind to our customers. Hyundai vehicles are sold and serviced through more than 830 dealerships nationwide and the majority sold in the U.S. are built at U.S. manufacturing facilities, including Hyundai Motor Manufacturing Alabama. Hyundai Motor America is headquartered in Fountain Valley, California, and is a subsidiary of Hyundai Motor Company of Korea. Please visit our media website at www.HyundaiNews.com Hyundai Motor America on Twitter | YouTube | Facebook | Instagram 1 U.S. Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration, March 2018 (https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm) SOURCE Hyundai Motor America Related Links http://www.hyundainews.com WASHINGTON and LONDON, Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- InterGlobix LLC, a global solutions company focused on the convergence of datacenters, terrestrial and subsea fiber, and Total Telecom Ltd. a business media and global events company announced today that InterGlobix Magazine, the first magazine of its kind focused on Datacenters, Connectivity, Luxury and Lifestyle, will be a Media Partner for the following Connectivity events to be held in London, UK: Submarine Networks EMEA, 12-13 February 2019 Connected Britain , 18-19 June 2019 , Total Telecom Congress, 29-30 October 2019 "Total Telecom events in the UK cover a wide spectrum of Connectivity topics including Subsea, Terrestrial, Infrastructure, SmartCity, Stategy and Partnerships for the Telecom Industry. With our partnership with Total Telecom, the reach of our magazine will extend to the coveted datacenter and connectivity industry personnel in the UK," said Jasmine Bedi, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of InterGlobix Magazine. "We are glad to be supporting InterGlobix Magazine as a Media Partner. The concept of this publication is very intriguing and unique. We are looking forward to working together with InterGlobix Magazine," said James Llewellyn, Marketing Manager of Total Telecom. ABOUT INTERGLOBIX MAGAZINE InterGlobix Magazine is industry's premier datacenter and connectivity reference guide. It recognizes the key shapers behind this relatively young industry and delves deep into the lifestyle of the most successful industry personalities. It features behind-the-scenes stories at datacenter construction sites, looks into the emerging subsea ports, latest terrestrial and mobile industry innovations and keeps you in the know. Each luxury-packed issue offers a platform to our partners and clients to showcase their exclusive products and services to the coveted and elite high net worth individuals from the datacenter and connectivity industry. For more information, please visit www.interglobixmagazine.com. ABOUT TOTAL TELECOM LTD. Total Telecom is a business media company founded in 1997. Total Telecom meets the information and research needs of the Global Communications industry, from breaking news to expert analysis. It is the leading communications link between end users and the vendors, carriers and resellers of telecommunications technology and services. For more information, please visit www.totaltele.com. InterGlobix Media Contact Total Telecom Contact Jasmine Bedi James Llewellyn Founder & Editor-in-Chief Marketing Manager InterGlobix Magazine Total Telecom [email protected] [email protected] SOURCE InterGlobix LLC Related Links http://www.interglobixmagazine.com BEIJING, Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Jianpu Technology Inc. ("Jianpu," or the "Company") (NYSE: JT), a leading independent open platform for discovery and recommendation of financial products in China, today announced its participation in the following investor conferences: UBS Greater China Conference, January 7, 2019 at the Pudong Shangri-La Hotel in Shanghai at the Pudong Shangri-La Hotel in Morgan Stanley China New Economy Summit, January 8-9, 2019 at the Rosewood Hotel in Beijing at the Rosewood Hotel in Deutsche Bank 17th Annual dbAccess China Conference, January 14, 2019 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Shenzhen Management will meet with institutional investors throughout these events. For additional information, please contact your respective institutional sales representative at the sponsoring bank. About Jianpu Technology Inc. Jianpu Technology Inc. (NYSE: JT) is a leading independent open platform for discovery and recommendation of financial products in China. By leveraging its deep data insights and proprietary technology, Jianpu provides users with personalized search results and recommendations that are tailored to each user's particular financial needs and credit profile. The Company also enables financial service providers with sales and marketing solutions to reach and serve their target customers more effectively through online and mobile channels and enhance their competitiveness by providing them with tailored data, risk management and end-to-end solutions. The Company is committed to maintaining an independent open platform, which allows it to serve the needs of users and financial service providers impartially. For more information, please visit http://ir.jianpu.ai. Safe Harbor Statement 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," "confident" and similar statements. Statements that are not historical facts, including statements about the Company's beliefs and expectations, are forward-looking statements. 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: the Company's goal and strategies; the Company's future business development, financial condition and results of operations; the Company's expectations regarding demand for, and market acceptance of, its solutions and services; the Company's expectations regarding keeping and strengthening its relationships with users, financial service providers and other parties it collaborate with; 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 the Company's filings with the SEC. All information provided in this press release is as of the date of this press release, and the Company undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statement, except as required under applicable law. For investor and media inquiries, please contact: In China: Jianpu Technology Inc. Oscar Chen Tel: +86 (10) 6242-7068 E-mail: [email protected] The Piacente Group, Inc. Ross Warner Tel: +86 (10) 5730-6202 E-mail: [email protected] In the United States: The Piacente Group, Inc. Brandi Piacente Tel: +1-212-481-2050 E-mail: [email protected] SOURCE Jianpu Technology Inc. Related Links http://ir.jianpu.ai MONTEREY, Calif., Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The Monterey County Convention & Visitors Bureau (MCCVB) has joined two initiatives that will further its goal of ensuring Monterey County is one of the world's leading sustainable destinations by both setting ambitious goals and measuring long term impacts. The first is with Positive Impact, a global not for profit which exists to provide education and collaboration opportunities to create a sustainable event industry and a vision to address the role of plastics in this industry. MCCVB is the exclusive destination partner for Positive Impact on this project which has already included collaboration with a number of United Nations bodies and in Spring 2019 will see the launch of materials to help the global industry measure and understand the role of plastics. "MCCVB is already resetting boundaries for responsible tourism and by partnering with our organization they are taking a leadership position for the entire meetings industry," said Fiona Pelham, CEO for Positive Impacts. She added, "Certainly understanding the role of plastics which will lead to its elimination from the future meetings and conference landscape is a considerable goal, but it is critically important and partnerships such as this with Monterey County are the building blocks of collaboration necessary to achieve it." Meetings and events are big business in Monterey County, which is a destination known for inspiration and innovation. "This partnership is completely in line with that legacy," says Tammy Blount-Canavan, President and CEO of MCCVB. "Our tourism economy owes everything to our ecosystem, and so taking this bold step ensures further protection of our environment and further demonstrates the innovation of our region." Measuring success is also critical to MCCVB's mission. The organization joined the Global Destination Sustainability Index (GDS-Index) initiative, an alliance focused on helping destinations, convention bureaus, and businesses promote sustainable practices. The GDS-Index does this by measuring and comparing sustainability strategies, policies and performance of participating destinations and by sharing best practices from around the world. GDS-Index recently released its yearly survey of global destinations at the International Congress & Convention Association (ICCA) annual meeting in Dubai in November. Monterey County scored 52% on the sustainability index just behind Geneva and ahead of U.S. cities like Washington, D.C. and Houston. The scoring allows MCCVB to set a benchmark and improve in the coming years. "Ultimately, protecting our destination is every bit as important as promoting it," said Rob O'Keefe, Chief Marketing Officer for MCCVB. "These initiatives contribute to our long term viability as a top tourism destination plus they are essential to the balance we seek to foster between visiting travelers and the residents who call our beautiful region home." These latest partnerships align with the MCCVB's Sustainable Moments Collective. The purpose of the collective is to share best practices from concurrent sustainability initiatives and use the group's collective influence to reach visitors and residents alike. More information on MCCVB's Sustainable Moments initiative and collective can be found at SeeMonterey.com/Sustainable. For more information on Positive Impact, go to PositiveImpactEvents.com. For more on the GDS-Index, go to GDS-Index.com. ABOUT MONTEREY COUNTY CONVENTION & VISITORS BUREAU The Monterey County Convention & Visitors Bureau (MCCVB) is a 501c6 organization that drives tourism for Monterey County. Tourism is the largest industry on the Monterey Peninsula and the second largest in the County. The MCCVB is a partnership of the hospitality community and local governments that aims to drive business growth through compelling marketing and targeted sales initiatives that maximize the benefits of tourism to our guests, members and the community. Travel spending in Monterey County was $2.85 billion in 2017, representing a 3.5 percent increase from 2016. This $2.85 billion in visitor spending supported 24,990 jobs, contributed $255 million in total taxes and generated $127 million local tax dollars that directly benefited the community. CONTACT: [email protected] SOURCE Monterey County Convention and Visitors Bureau Related Links http://www.seemonterey.com RICHMOND, Va., Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Last week Virginia's 2019 Commemoration, American Evolution, the Library of Virginia, and Virginia Humanities opened a new exhibition called New Virginians: 1619 2019 & Beyond. The free, yearlong exhibit located at the Library of Virginia in Richmond offers an in depth look at the immigrant and refugee experience. Visitors are invited to discover new stories about Virginia's ever-changing and increasingly diverse population. The exhibit, produced jointly by the Library of Virginia and Virginia Humanities, shares videotaped conversations with immigrants from more than 30 countries who came to the United States seeking new opportunities or as refugees fleeing war and hardship. "New Virginians seeks to foster an honest discussion about diversity, the challenges of blended cultures, and the changing demographics of the Commonwealth," said Kathy Spangler, Executive Director of Virginia's 2019 Commemoration, American Evolution. "This in-depth exhibit features a series of interviews with first-generation immigrants and refugees who arrived in Virginia after 1976." With interviews conducted by David Bearinger and filmed by Pat Jarrett, the exhibit serves as an important reminder of the heterogeneity that strengthens Virginia, and highlights excerpts from personal conversations with the immigrants and refugees from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. These conversations explore the complexity of the immigrant and refugee experience by delving into deeply personal topics that include why people chose to leave their homes; questions about identity, assimilation, language and culture; what it truly means to be an American; and what living in Virginia today means to them. Those who visit the exhibit will hear from refugees and immigrants that come from a wide variety of backgrounds and work across different fields and industries. Virginia's Secretary of Education, Atif Qarni, is one of the exhibit's featured interviewees. To complement the videos, featured objects that have special meaning to the interviewees are on display at the exhibit, including: A graduation stole given to Isabel Castillo by her grandmother to celebrate Castillo's receipt of an honorary doctorate from the University of San Francisco ; by her grandmother to celebrate Castillo's receipt of an honorary doctorate from the ; A copy of Wedding Song , a memoir by Farideh Goldin about her journey from Iran to the United States ; , a memoir by about her journey from to ; A mask crafted by Ganna Natsag for a tsam (masked dance) ceremony practiced in his native Mongolia ; (masked dance) ceremony practiced in his native ; A stringed instrument called a charango from Bolivia ; from ; A Qur'an from Aliaa Khidr that represents the free practice of religion guaranteed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. A traveling version of the exhibition will be offered to communities and public libraries in Virginia. Complete interviews will be available early in 2019 through the Library of Virginia's YouTube channel and website. Images of select "New Virginians" interviewed are available on the Library of Virginia's Flickr page. New Virginians: 1619 2019 & Beyond is a Legacy Project of the 2019 Commemoration, American Evolution. The 2019 Commemoration has partnered with notable Virginia institutions and national partners to inspire local, national and international engagement in the themes of democracy, diversity and opportunity, and reinforce Virginia's leadership in education, tourism, and economic development. American Evolution is commemorating formative events that occurred in 1619 Virginia. These pivotal events include the First Representative Legislative Assembly in the New World, the arrival of the first recorded Africans in English North America, the recruitment of English women in significant numbers to the Virginia colony, the first official English Thanksgiving in North America and the entrepreneurial and innovative spirit of the Virginia colony. Over the next year, the 2019 Commemoration, American Evolution will host more than 20 events, programs and educational initiatives commemorating the 400th anniversary of these formative 1619 Virginia events. A full schedule of American Evolution programming, upcoming events, and educational initiatives can be found at: https://www.americanevolution2019.com/events/ About the 2019 Commemoration The 2019 Commemoration, American Evolution, highlights events that occurred in Virginia in 1619 that continue to influence America today. Featured programs, events and legacy projects position Virginia as a leader in education, tourism and economic development. American Evolution commemorates the ongoing journey toward the key ideals of democracy, diversity and opportunity. Dominion Resources is an American Evolution Founding Partner and Altria Group and TowneBank are Virginia Colony Partners. SOURCE American Evolution Related Links https://www.americanevolution2019.com LEUVEN, Belgium, December 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Oxurion NV (Euronext Brussels: OXUR), a biopharmaceutical company developing innovative treatments to preserve vision in patients with diseases affecting the back of the eye, announced today that Patrik De Haes, M.D., chief executive officer, will present a company overview at the 2019 Biotech Showcase [TM] conference at 3:30 p.m. PST on Tuesday, Jan. 8, 2019 at the Hilton San Francisco Union Square. Additionally, Dr. De Haes will participate in a CEO power breakfast roundtable as a panellist at 7 a.m. PST on Wednesday, Jan. 9, 2019 at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel in San Francisco. The panel will feature life sciences executives examining topics including drug innovation and strategic partnering moderated by FierceBiotech editor, Amirah Al Idrus. Please fill out the contact form to RSVP for the event. Furthermore, Oxurion's management team will also hold one-on-one meetings with institutional investors and analysts Jan. 7-9 in San Francisco. Institutional investors and analysts can register and request meetings through the online system . About Oxurion Oxurion (Euronext Brussels: OXUR) is a biopharmaceutical company focused on transforming treatments to preserve vision in patients with diseases affecting the back of the eye. The company is currently developing a competitive pipeline of disease-modifying drug candidates for diabetic eye disease, a leading cause of blindness of people of working age worldwide. Oxurion's most advanced drug candidate is THR-317, a PlGF inhibitor for the treatment of diabetic macular edema (DME), which is currently in a Phase 2 study in combination with Lucentis. THR-317 is also being evaluated in a Phase 2 study for the treatment of Idiopathic Macular Telangiectasia Type 1 (MacTel 1), a rare retinal disease that affects the macula and can lead to vision loss. Oxurion has two further pipeline candidates, THR-149, a plasma kallikrein inhibitor being developed for the treatment of DME; and THR-687, a pan-RGD integrin antagonist in development for the treatment of diabetic retinopathy and DME. Both THR-149 and THR-687 are in Phase 1 clinical studies. Oxurion is headquartered in Leuven, Belgium, and is listed on the Euronext Brussels exchange under the symbol OXUR. More information is available at http://www.oxurion.com. Important information about forward-looking statements Certain statements in this press release may be considered "forward-looking". Such forward-looking statements are based on current expectations, and, accordingly, entail and are influenced by various risks and uncertainties. The Company therefore cannot provide any assurance that such forward-looking statements will materialize and does not assume an obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or any other reason. Additional information concerning risks and uncertainties affecting the business and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from any forward-looking statement is contained in the Company's Annual Report. This press release does not constitute an offer or invitation for the sale or purchase of securities or assets of Oxurion in any jurisdiction. No securities of Oxurion may be offered or sold within the United States without registration under the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended, or in compliance with an exemption therefrom, and in accordance with any applicable U.S. state securities laws. For further information please contact: Oxurion NV Wouter Piepers, Global Head of Corp Coms & Investor relations +32-16-75-13-10 / +32-478-33-56-32 [email protected] EU - Citigate Dewe Rogerson David Dible/ Sylvie Berrebi Tel: +44-20-7638-9571 [email protected] US - LifeSci Public Relations Alison Chen +1-646-876-4932 [email protected] SOURCE Oxurion NV DUBLIN, Dec. 18, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Saudi Arabia Fitness Services Market Outlook to 2022 - By Revenue Stream (Gym Membership and Personal Training), by Organized and Unorganized, by Region, Gender and Membership Subscription" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. Saudi Arabia Fitness Services Market Outlook to 2022 covers market size by organized and unorganized fitness services providers along with market segmentation by revenue stream, market structure, region, gender, and membership subscription. The report also covers government rules and regulation, future outlook and projections analysis along with analyst recommendation and macroeconomic variables highlighting the major opportunities and cautions. Market Size: Saudi Arabia fitness services market has witnessed a tremendous growth in the past few years witnessing a strong double digit growth from 2012 to 2017. Rapidly rising obesity rate, heart problems, and increase in the consciousness about the personal health have propelled momentum to the market. Male population between 15 to 44 years has increased at a rate slightly over 2% from 2012 to 2017; similarly, female population between the same age group has witnessed a growth of close to 2.0% from 2012 to 2017. Growing youth population in the country, along with ease in laws for women has benefitted the market. Market Segmentation By Market Structure: The organized sector has contributed major revenue share to the overall Saudi Arabia Fitness Services market. In terms of membership subscription, unorganized sector has contributed majority share as compared to organized sector. This sector includes various entities such as men's gym, women's gym, mixed gym and CrossFit centers, indulged in providing all kinds of fitness services including Yoga, Pilates, Zumba and Personal Training. Unorganized centers have been better able to make use the opportunity and enter the fitness industry because it offer reasonably lower membership fee and are easier to set up. By Region: Riyadh has accounted for the maximum number of organized fitness centers in KSA, primarily for being the commercial capital of the country. It is followed by Makkah mainly because of the urban and wealthy population live in this region. Major fitness centers place high preference to location around these two provinces. These regions are followed by Dammam and Medinah in 2017. Other regions include Tabuk, Asir, Jawf, Hail, and Jizan. By Gender: Males have undoubtedly dominated the fitness service market. More than half of the total individuals who attended gyms in 2017 were males while the rest were females. With conservative norms still in place especially for women in Middle Eastern countries, the proportion of women attending fitness services has been low. However, with the changing lifestyle, trends, mentality and health consciousness among the population, along with lifting of bans on women population, this scenario is gradually changing. The demand for female specific fitness centers has already started picking up and this trend is assumed to continue in the future. By Membership Subscription: Membership packages offered for three months have contributed a major share to the overall revenue generated through fitness services in 2017 as it offers the option of experimenting with several gyms for short durations and trying new activities such as Yoga, Pilates and Mixed Martial Arts. Additionally, these packages are very suitable for people joining gyms for the first time. The second most preferred package has been the one-year package because of various reasons including tier pricing which makes the one year packages economical in relation to the other membership packages. Additionally, better offers, discounts and promotions offered by fitness centers on buying the long-term packages have attracted consumers in huge number. Competitive Analysis: Competition Stage and Company Positioning: The overall competition stage of the industry has been fragmented. The organized and unorganized gyms provide gym services along with supplementary facilities such as Spa, Sauna, Swimming Pool, Showers, Lockers facility and others. Few of the major organized players include Fitness Time, Body Masters, 9 Round, The Power Gym, Gold's Gym, and Fitness First. The major unorganized players have been Tytans Fitness, Bwell Center, Areka, Fitness Inn, and Fitness World. Future Projections: Saudi Arabia Fitness Services market's revenue has been anticipated to grow at a double digit CAGR during 2017 to 2022E, which shall cordially be supported by the increase in the number of health and fitness centers in the country during the same period. Growth during this period is expected to be supported by the rising number of obese population, increasing demand for personal training, expanding geographical presence of major fitness centers, diversifying services portfolio and others. Increase in health awareness would supplement growth in the market. Many new services and new technologies are expected to be launched in the forecast period having a positive impact on demand for fitness services. Key Topics Covered in the Report Saudi Arabia Fitness Services Market Evolution and Potential Saudi Arabia Fitness Services Market Size And Segmentation Emerging Trends and Developments in Saudi Arabia Fitness Service Market Fitness Service Market Issues and Challenges in Saudi Arabia Fitness Services Market Fitness Services Market Customer Pain Points and Decision Making Parameters Saudi Arabia Fitness Services Market Government Regulations Investment Model for Saudi Arabia Fitness Services Market Competitive Landscape of major Players in Saudi Arabia Fitness Service Market Fitness Service Market Saudi Arabia Fitness Services Market Future Outlook and Projections, 2018E-2022E Analyst Recommendations Macroeconomic Factors in Saudi Arabia Fitness Services market Key Segments Covered Market Segmentation by Market Structure (Organized & Unorganized) By Revenue Stream By Membership subscription By Region (For Organized) By Gym Type (For Organized) Market Segmentation By Gender (Male & Female) Market Segmentation By Revenue Stream (Membership Subscription & Personal Training) Market Segmentation By Membership Subscription (12 Months, 6 Months, 3 Months and Others) Market Segmentation By Region ( Riyadh , Mecca , Madinah , Dammam and Others) Key Target Audience Men's Fitness Service Centers Women Fitness Service Centers Mixed Fitness Service Centers CrossFit Centers Major Fitness Equipment Manufacturers Investors Time Period Captured in the Report: 2012-2017 - Historical Period 2018-2022 - Future Forecast Companies Covered: Organized Fitness Services Providers: Fitness First Gold's Gym Fitness Time World Gym Active Time Arena MMA Fitness Bodyline VIP center Central care Al Manahil Al Multaka Interval Plus CrossFit NuYu Curves Spectrum Wellness for Women Kore Lava Fitness Glow Fit Kinetico Fit Zone Pulse Studio Studio 55 9 Round The Power Gym Body Masters Muscles Factory Fitness Maker Unorganized Fitness Services Providers: G-Fit Bwell center Fitness Inn Areka Tytans fitness Iron hill Cross Fit Fitness World Marom Club Rio gym For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/4hwgwv/saudi_arabia?w=5 Research and Markets also offers Custom Research services providing focused, comprehensive and tailored research. Media Contact: Research and Markets Laura Wood, Senior Manager [email protected] For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470 For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630 For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900 U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907 Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716 SOURCE Research and Markets Related Links http://www.researchandmarkets.com SODERTALJE, Sweden, Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --The first phase of the trial started in August 2018 and involves a Scania XT 8x4 autonomous tipper truck working separately from Dampier's active operations. During this initial stage, a safety driver rides in the vehicle to observe the truck's performance and, if necessary, intervenes. In subsequent phases, additional autonomous Scania trucks will be added to develop vehicle-vehicle awareness and intelligent fleet supervisory controls. Rio Tinto head of Productivity & Technical Support, Rob Atkinson said, "We're pleased to be trialling this technology in trucks that are smaller than our traditional haul trucks. This has the potential to give us more flexibility in the way we operate in a number of areas across Rio Tinto. We have seen automation create safer and more efficient operations in our business and this is a next step in evaluating options for delivering further improvements through the use of technology." Bjorn Winblad, Head of Scania Mining said, "Mining sites given their high vehicle utilisation rates are ideal for testing new autonomous technology. The industry can reap the safety and productivity benefits of automation, and the experience gained here will be instrumental in developing fully autonomous solutions for other transport applications. It is very encouraging to note that the truck has been performing in a safe manner and in accordance with expectations with regards to the operations." Rio Tinto has pioneered the use of automation in the mining industry, with the largest fleet of driverless trucks, the world's first fully-autonomous heavy haul, long distance rail network, and fully autonomous production drills. For further information, please contact: Bjorn Winblad, Head of Scania Mining, Phone: +46-8-553-810-46, E-mail: [email protected] Hans-Ake Danielsson, Senior Advisor Communications, Phone: +46-8-553-856-62, E-mail: [email protected] Click here to dowload video footage. This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com http://news.cision.com/scania/r/scania-and-rio-tinto-trialling-autonomous-truck-in-western-australian-mine,c2703689 The following files are available for download: https://mb.cision.com/Main/209/2703689/965829.pdf Scania and Rio Tinto trialling autonomous truck in Western Australian mine http://news.cision.com/scania/i/scania-autonomous-truck-1,c2549553 Scania autonomous truck 1 SOURCE Scania LOS ANGELES, Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- As many in Los Angeles begin holiday celebrations, nearly a half million residents will receive special packages in their mailboxes, courtesy of Southern California Gas Co. (SoCalGas) and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP). The boxes contain simple devices that the utilities' customers can easily install to save water and natural gas over the holidays and throughout the coming years. Single-family and multi-family residents who had not received similar devices through other SoCalGas or LADWP water conservation programs in recent years were selected to receive the kits. All totaled, the program has the potential to reduce natural gas use in Los Angeles by about 5.4 million therms a year, and water consumption by 5.7 billion gallons each year. Photos of the kit are available here. Each package contains a water-efficient showerhead; two bathroom faucet aerators; a kitchen faucet aerator; and a device that alerts residents when their HVAC filter needs changing. Customers will also receive information on energy-saving water heaters, smart thermostats, clothes dryers and other appliances that are eligible for SoCalGas rebates. "Providing these energy-saving tools is one of the most cost-effective ways SoCalGas can help our residential customers in L.A. reduce their natural gas and water use," said Dan Rendler, director of customer programs and assistance. "SoCalGas encourages residents to install these devices to save energy, water and money, and benefit the environment as well." "Just in time for the holidays, LADWP and SoCalGas are spreading holiday cheer with care packages that will help us continue to protect our natural resources in 2019 and beyond," said Councilwoman Nury Martinez, who chairs the Energy, Climate Change, and Environmental Justice Committee of the Los Angeles City Council. "Simple initiatives such as these kits are highly impactful in our efforts to make saving water and energy a way of life." "LADWP is proud to partner with SoCalGas in expanding programs and education outreach that helps customers save on their bills, reduce energy use and save water," said David Jacot, LADWP Director of Efficiency Solutions. "LADWP has long recognized water and energy conservation as a core strategy for improving our service reliability and creating a more sustainable city." SoCalGas is a leader in researching and developing new technologies that improve energy efficiency, reduce emissions, and keep bills affordable for customers. In the past five years, SoCalGas energy efficiency programs have delivered more than 146 million therms in energy savings, enough to power 326,000 households a year, and reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) by more than 775,000 metric tons, the equivalent of removing nearly 165,000 cars from the road. These advances have also helped save SoCalGas customers more than $161 million in utility bill costs over the past five years. The utility is also working to increase the production and use of renewable natural gas, which turns waste from dairies, farms, wastewater and landfills, into a source of clean and renewable energy to fuel homes and businesses. Learn more about the environmental and cost-saving benefits of renewable natural gas by viewing the utility's latest video, Digesting the Facts About Renewable Natural Gas. In the City of Los Angeles, water conservation is among the city's multiple strategies to secure a sustainable water supply for Los Angeles and improve overall water supply reliability. With the help of LADWP's water conservation rebates and programs, coupled with educational and marketing campaigns, water conservation has become a way of life in Los Angeles. As of fiscal year 2017-18, each L.A. resident uses 112 gallons of water per day, one of the lowest of any major U.S. city. Today, the entire city of Los Angeles uses just as much as water as it did 40 years ago despite the rise in population by over 1 million. Read more at www.ladwp.com/waterconservation. About SoCalGas Headquartered in Los Angeles, SoCalGas is the largest natural gas distribution utility in the United States. SoCalGas delivers affordable, reliable, clean and increasingly renewable natural gas service to 21.8 million customers across 24,000 square miles of Central and Southern California, where more than 90 percent of residents use natural gas for heating, hot water, cooking, drying clothes or other uses. Natural gas delivered through the company's pipelines also plays a key role in providing electricity to Californiansabout 60 percent of electric power generated in the state comes from gas-fired power plants. SoCalGas is committed to investing in its natural gas system infrastructure, while keeping bills affordable for our customers. From 2013 through 2017, the company spent nearly $6 billion to upgrade and modernize its natural gas system to enhance safety and reliability. The company is also committed to being a leader in the region's clean energy future, and is working to accelerate the use of renewable natural gas from dairy farms, landfills and wastewater treatment plants and the development of renewable energy storage technologies. SoCalGas is a subsidiary of Sempra Energy (NYSE: SRE), an energy services holding company based in San Diego. For more information visit socalgas.com/newsroom or connect with SoCalGas on Twitter (@SoCalGas), Instagram (@SoCalGas) and Facebook. About LADWP The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is the nation's largest municipal utility, with a 7,880-megawatt electric capacity and serves an average of 438 million gallons of water per day to 4 million residents, its business and visitors in the City of Los Angeles. LADWP is aggressively working with its customers to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by expanding renewable energy, energy efficiency and other clean energy alternatives. LADWP puts customers first by offering numerous rebate and incentive programs to help them reduce their energy use while also saving on their bills. To learn more about LADWP's rebate programs visit ladwp.com/save or call (800) DIAL-DWP. LADWP is also on Twitter (@LADWP), Instagram (@ladwp1) and Facebook. SOURCE Southern California Gas Company Related Links http://www.socalgas.com WICHITA, Kan., Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Spirit AeroSystems, [NYSE: SPR] today announced the company plans to expand operations at its Tulsa, Okla., site by hiring about 250 employees and investing more than $80 million in capital projects to support fuselage manufacturing and assembly work. The multi-year expansion project, which begins in 2019, was achieved in partnership with the International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America (UAW). The state of Oklahoma and City of Tulsa offered incentives to help secure the work statement in Tulsa with support from the Tulsa Regional Chamber of Commerce. "This expansion would not have been possible without the strong collaboration among Spirit, the UAW and Oklahoma state and local officials," said Spirit AeroSystems President and Chief Executive Officer Tom Gentile. "The Spirit team in Tulsa has made great strides improving the site's efficiency and demonstrating the capability to bring in additional work. The Tulsa site has a critical role in helping Spirit meet rising airplane production rates and pursue growth opportunities." "Yet another expansion announcement in Oklahoma by Spirit AeroSystems is a thrilling development for our state," said Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin. "Spirit AeroSystems' continued investment in our people and growing presence in our state is a testament to the positive business climate that we have developed in Oklahoma and another example of how we are diversifying Oklahoma's economy." "Spirit AeroSystems stands as one of the leading designers and manufacturers of aerostructures in the world, and their presence in Tulsa has been an ongoing indicator of our city's strength in the industry," said Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum. "Today's announcement that Spirit will add 250 jobs over the next three years bolsters Tulsa's standing as a center of aerospace excellence. Over the past several months we have worked diligently with the team at Spirit to identify how we can ensure the growth of their Tulsa operations, and we are pleased to have the opportunity to leverage support through the Vision Tulsa Airport Infrastructure Fund to support Spirit's planned $80 million in capital projects investments. The new Tulsa jobs will support increases in 737 production rates by freeing up required space in Spirit's Wichita factory site. The work expansion in Tulsa is part of a larger effort to maximize operational efficiencies across Spirit's sites. As the production rates increase, the Wichita site will continue to hire additional workers to meet the increasing demand. The first phase of the Tulsa work expansion will begin with infrastructure set-up and employee training beginning in 2019. Full rate production is expected to be complete by the end of 2021. Additional investment in equipment, tooling and facilities upgrades will take place through 2022. On the web: www.spiritaero.com On Twitter: @SpiritAero About Spirit AeroSystems Inc. Spirit AeroSystems designs and builds aerostructures for both commercial and defense customers. With headquarters in Wichita, Kansas, Spirit operates sites in the U.S., U.K., France and Malaysia. The company's core products include fuselages, pylons, nacelles and wing components for the world's premier aircraft. Spirit AeroSystems focuses on affordable, innovative composite and aluminum manufacturing solutions to support customers around the globe. More information is available at www.SpiritAero.com. SOURCE Spirit AeroSystems Inc. Related Links http://www.spiritaero.com NEW YORK, Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- TABLE FOR TWO (TFT) USA, a nonprofit organization that aims to tackle obesity and worldwide hunger issues, organized their fourth annual social action campaign called "Change the World with Onigiri (Rice ball) #OnigiriAction." The campaign, which commemorates World Food Day, ran from Oct. 10 to Nov. 20. During the campaign, every photo of a Japanese rice ball (or onigiri) posted to the campaign website or social media with #OnigiriAction helps feed five children around the world. More than 200,000 photos were posted from all over the world by TFT fans and supporters. These photos made an impact. TFT can fund one school meal for a child in Africa with a single 25-cent donation. In the U.S., the same 25-cent donation can be used to add fresh vegetables and fruits to one school meal served in socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods. The campaign is supported by: J.C.C. Fund/Japanese Chamber of Commerce and Industry of New York, JFC International/Nishiki, Japan Commerce Association of Washington D.C. Foundation, Zojirushi America, San-J, ITOCHU International, SMBC Global Foundation, Misuzu Corporation, MUFG Union Bank, N.A., Otafuku Foods, Just One Cookbook, BentOn, and Onigilly. TFT awarded nine Onigiri photos from the posted photos taken all over the world! In total, the program generated 201,023 onigiri photos from all over the world nearly 200 percent more postings than the campaign in 2016. Through this call to social action, TFT will provide 1,050,000 warm school meals, enough to support 5,200 children in need for one school year. To commemorate this success, a mosaic of a smiling child in Africa was created using the posted photos. Among all the great photos, the "Best of the Best Onigiri" photos were awarded. You can view the winning photographs here: https://onigiri-action.com/en 1. "Wow" Location Award (top row, left) [Bhutan] "Satisfying onigiri enjoyed at 3,900 meters on the top of Mount Chele La." 2. Onigiri Halloween Award (top row, center) [USA] "No one can resist a delicious onigiri - not even No Face Kaonashi from Miyazaki's 'Spirited Away.'" 3. Onigiri Smile Award (top row, right) [Japan] "Seeing you all look happy with the onigiri makes us smile too. :-)" 4. Most Creative Onigiri Award (middle row, left) [Germany] "This is a typical Munich, Germany's breakfast. Pretzel, weisswurst (white sausage), and beer!" 5. Most Creative Onigiri Award (middle row, center) [Indonesia] "Symbolizing the global love of Onigiri Action." 6. Onigiri Kids Award (middle row, right) [USA] "Washington, D.C. student shows the world how to make the smallest rice ball!" 7. Best Onigiri Story Award (bottom row, left) [USA] "The Japanese National Honor Society at Hawaii Baptist Academy led a school-wide Onigiri Action project. The high school students showed their curiosity, compassion, and spirit by making a special PR video to explain what an onigiri is and make a call for Onigiri Action!" 8. Best Onigiri Story Award (bottom row, center) [USA] "In Virginia, the entire Fox Mill Elementary school students and parents banded together to tackle worldwide hunger! The school posted over 800 photos, beating their goal of 550. Students also created a banner with encouraging messages to children in need." 9. Best Onigiri Story Award (bottom row, right) [Hong Kong] "Five cultures came to create this rice ball feeding five children in need rice recipe from a Japanese chef, pork belly recipe from a Chinese chef, instruction on forming onigiri from a Singaporean, and a husband and wife pair who met in England and live in Hong Kong formed the rice balls together. From five to five across the world." Our campaign expanded this year with events spanning across the United States. In New York City, TFT participated in Anime Fest at NYCC x Anime Expo on Oct. 6. Sporting their fantastical and creative costumes, participants lined up to make onigiri at our TFT booth. SMBC organized an exclusive Onigiri Action event at their office, where staff and executives rolled up their sleeves together to join our campaign and make a difference around the world. Although pre-made onigiri was offered, many participants jumped into trying to make onigiri for the first time! With generous support from Mitsui Fudosan America, Hines, ITOCHU International, and MUFG Union Bank, N.A., we held a pop-up Onigiri Event in the lobby of the 1251 Avenue of the Americas skyscraper. We passed out more than 500 onigiri! In Los Angeles, we were honored to partner with Sanrio to organize a Hello Kitty-themed onigiri action event with the Japan Foundation Los Angeles at the Japan House. Meanwhile, students in Southern California participated in an Onigiri Event generously supported by MUFG Union Bank, N.A., who even provided employee volunteers to host the event. In Washington, D.C., the Japan Information and Culture Center at the Embassy of Japan and DC Public Schools worked together to help students at the John Eaton Elementary school learn about Japanese food culture and the challenges of world hunger. Students were called to action, and many took the opportunity to post images of their rice balls helping to feed children in need. We also partnered with a local Girl Scouts troop. The girls in the troop learned about worldwide hunger and food issues. Keeping with the organization's mission to make the world a better place, the girls contributed photos of their rice balls helping to feed children in need around the world. Not just in Washington, D.C., students from across the country joined us in Onigiri Action events organized at their schools rising to meet the challenge of achieving zero hunger around the world. In Germany, six charity Onigiri Action events were held. Participants learned how to make creative onigiri, while also making a difference in the lives of children around the world. TABLE FOR TWO USA Co-President, Mayumi Uejima-Carr said, "The results of this year's Onigiri Action Campaign exceeded our expectations. Photos were posted from all over the country, including from schools and organizations that had not participated last year. As the title of our campaign promises, onigiri did change the world. Numerous events were held nationwide to introduce onigiri over the course of a month. We were inspired by the enthusiasm we saw for this unique social action campaign. For instance, many schools from kindergarten to college organized onigiri workshops to enjoy learning about new Japanese food, while making a positive difference at the same time. We were very happy to see all the fun and heartwarming photos from adults, teens, and children all over the world. We appreciate everyone's support in bringing many smiles to those in need." To visit the campaign site, please visit: https://onigiri-action.com/en. For more information about TFT, please visit: http://usa.tablefor2.org About TABLE FOR TWO USA: TABLE FOR TWO USA (TFT) is a 501(c)(3) organization that that addresses the opposite issues of hunger and obesity through a unique "meal-sharing" program. TFT partners with corporations, restaurants, schools and other food establishments to serve healthy TFT-branded meals. For each one of these healthy meals served, a small portion of the cost is donated to provide one school meal for a child in need. In this way, TFT has served healthy meals to both sides of the "table" and helped to right the global food imbalance. TFT started in Japan and now operates in 14 countries. In its Onigiri Action campaign, Onigiri was featured to celebrate rice, one of the major Japanese agricultural products and to showcase the Japanese tradition of making onigiri for others with love. As one of the most well-known NPOs in Japan which is noted for the longevity of its people, TFT promotes Japanese healthy eating culture as well to tackle critical health issues. Media Contact: Jessy LeClair Communications Manager, TABLE FOR TWO USA E: [email protected] Related Images onigiri-action-2018-best-of-the.jpg Onigiri Action 2018 - Best of the Best Onigiri Awards TFT awarded nine Onigiri photos from the posted photos taken all over the world! mosaic-of-children-impacted-by.jpg Mosaic of Children Impacted by Onigiri Action To commemorate the campaign's success, a mosaic of smiling children in Africa was created using the over 200,000 photos posted from around the world. onigiri-action-at-1251-avenue-of.jpg Onigiri Action at 1251 Avenue of the Americas Skyscraper Thanks to the generous support of Mitsui Fudosan America, Hines, ITOCHU International, we held an amazing #OnigiriAction event at 1251 Avenue of the Americas skyscraper in New York. We passed out more than 500 onigiri! truly-global-effort-across-the-u-s.jpg Truly Global Effort Across the U.S. and Even Germany We held events across the United States from Los Angeles to New York and all between. Plus six charity events were organized in Germany, where people learned how to make creative onigiri, while also making a difference in the lives of children around the world! Related Links Onigiri Action Website SOURCE TABLE FOR TWO USA Related Links http://usa.tablefor2.org BRONX, N.Y., Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- As part of their commitment to supporting the needs of the medical community, Simone Healthcare Development, a leader among hospital construction companies , reviews architecture trends that best support the current needs of healthcare organizations. The primary aspect of medical treatment that supports optimal patient health is a skilled and compassionate medical team, but that team isn't effective without a quality facility in which to practice. Hospital architecture tailored to the needs of the community can have a large influence on the happiness and health of patients and employees alike. Below are some key trends in hospital architecture that provide for a better patient experience. Focusing on Functionality. Comfort and convenience are important for patients, their families, and employees. However, hospital construction should support functionality and operations first and foremost. At the end of the day, the primary goal of any healthcare facility is to keep patients healthy, and any new construction should keep efficiency and patient care at the forefront. Happy and efficient employees make for happy and healthy patients, and it's the responsibility of hospital leadership to provide a work environment that helps healthcare providers do their job as easily as possible. From easy access to cutting-edge equipment, to a floorplan that makes it easier for doctors and nurses to treat their patients, there are a wide variety of ways that hospital leadership can design a building with efficient operation in mind. Electronic Messaging Boards. Messaging boards straddle the line between functionality and comfort. Giving patients in the waiting rooms easy access to information related to their treatment such as wait times and the check-in process can make a stressful experience much more manageable. Keeping patients calm keeps them happy and can also make for a more efficient treatment experience for all; electronic messaging boards are a small investment that can make a huge difference. Patient Experience. In many situations, patients and their families may spend a significant amount waiting. Whether it's a wait to receive treatment, or time spent waiting for the doctor in the treatment rooms themselves, even the best-run hospitals have a limited amount of resources and employees that often end up stretched thin. While the wait may be unavoidable, some simple design choices can make a world of difference when it comes to the patient experience. Having outlets available for patients and their family to plug in their devices and easy access to food and beverages should be taken into account during construction. Even something as simple as providing comfortable seating can make for a more favorable treatment experience. About Simone Health Development Companies Simone Health Development Companies is a full-service real estate investment company specializing in the acquisition and development of office, retail, industrial and healthcare properties in the New York tristate area. Headquartered in the Bronx, the privately held company owns and manages more than 5 million square feet of property in the Bronx, Westchester County, Queens, Long Island, Connecticut and New Jersey. The company's portfolio includes more than 100 properties and ranges from multi-building office parks to retail and industrial space. The largest and most successful development from Simone Health is the 42-acre Hutchinson Metro Center office complex located directly off the Hutchinson River Parkway in the Pelham Bay section of the Bronx. The first two phases of the complex, which comprise nearly 750,000 square feet of Class A office and medical space, are fully leased. Two additional phases totaling 650,000 square feet (370,000-square-foot Metro Center Atrium and 280,000-square-foot Tower Two), are completed and fully leased. Visit www.simdev.com SOURCE Simone Health Development Companies Related Links http://www.simdev.com WASHINGTON, Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The nation's largest union representing federal and D.C. government workers the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) today held a national press call with members of Congress, days before the government faces entering its third shutdown of 2018. AFGE National President J. David Cox Sr. urged Congress to include legislation providing for a modest 1.9 percent pay adjustment for federal employees in any funding bill. The Senate already agreed to the pay raise earlier this year, and the raise has received bipartisan support in the House. The nation's largest union, AFGE, is calling on Congress to include a 1.9% pay raise for federal employees as part of any deal to avert a government shutdown at the end of the week. "It's imperative that federal employees be given a 1.9 percent pay raise next year, and we are going to be fighting night and day to make sure that happens," Cox said. Joining the call were Sen. Ben Cardin and Rep. Elijah Cummings, both of Maryland, along with AFGE local leaders representing the Bureau of Prisons and FEMA. AFGE also discussed results of an internal poll on how government shutdowns have impacted our members. The poll was emailed to members last week and we received 3,488 responses. Among the findings: 86.2 percent say they had not been given direction on what to do during a shutdown; 86.1 percent say the lead up to a government shutdown affects their ability to plan or fulfill their work duties or interrupts aspects of their personal and family life; 79.4 percent say their ability to do their work as normal is impacted when the government is about to run out of money; 78.4 percent say they have been impacted by a government shutdown during their careers; 68.7 percent say their finances have been negatively impacted by a shutdown. An audio recording of the press call will be available until 11:59 p.m. on Dec. 23. To listen, dial 800-475-6701 and enter access code 458707. The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) is the largest federal employee union, representing 700,000 workers in the federal government and the government of the District of Columbia. For the latest AFGE news and information, visit the AFGE Media Center. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. SOURCE American Federation of Government Employees Related Links http://www.afge.org United Nations, Dec 19 : A UN spokesman said that the redeployment of forces from the city of Hodeidah and three ports shall be completed within 21 days. "The full mutual redeployment of all forces from the city of Hodeidah and the ports of Hodeidah, Saleef and Ras Isa shall be completed within a maximum period of 21 days after the cease-fire enters into force," Xinhua quoted Stephane Dujarric, spokesman for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres as saying. The UN will convene Yemen's warring parties by video link on Wednesday to discuss the redeployment, he said on Tuesday, adding that the meeting will be chaired by retired major general Patrick Cammaert, who has been appointed as the UN Chair of the Redeployment Coordination Committee. The cease-fire agreement reached between the Yemeni government and Houthi rebels during the UN-sponsored peace talks in Sweden went into effect at midnight local time (2100 GMT) on Monday. The UN-brokered cease-fire covers the strategic Red Sea port city of Hodeidah along with its seaports which are still controlled by the Iranian-backed Houthis, local officials told Xinhua. United Nations, Dec 19 : Outgoing US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley has come under heavy criticism from Permanent Observer of Palestine to the UN Riyad Mansour for her hostility towards the Palestinian people. Haley, who is stepping down December end, gave her last statement on the Israel-Palestinian issue asking both sides to negotiate more at Tuesday's Security Council meeting. In her speech, Haley asked Israelis and Palestinians to engage in a new Middle East peace plan yet to be unveiled by the Donald Trump administration. The plan contains elements that both sides would like and dislike, noted Haley, who said she has read the plan. She asked Israelis and Palestinians to focus on parts they like and encourage negotiations to move forward. "Both sides would benefit greatly from a peace agreement, but the Palestinians would benefit more, and the Israelis would risk more," said Haley. Following which, Mansour told reporters: "Ambassador Haley, unfortunately, exhibited an excessive amount of hostility to the Palestinian people and to the Palestinian cause." "Different representatives of the US were always showing massive support to Israel. But yet in the same time, there was a bit more balance in terms of not ignoring the Palestinian side completely," said Mansour, who has seen many US ambassadors to the UN since he served the post in 2005. Haley was more aggressive, more pro-Israeli than previous US ambassadors, Xinhua quoted Mansour as saying. She would be replaced by Heather Nauert, the current US State Department spokesperson. Srinagar, Dec 19 : A cart vendor abducted in Jammu and Kashmir's Sopore area last week was released unharmed on Wednesday, police said. Tariq Ahmad Ganai, 32, who was abducted from Brath Kalan village by car-borne kidnappers, reached his home safely, said an officer. Washington, Dec 19 : A newly discovered amphibian that buries its head in the sand has been named after US President Donald Trump, apparently in response to his comments about climate change, media reported. "Dermophis donaldtrumpi is particularly susceptible to the impacts of climate change and is therefore in danger of becoming extinct as a direct result of its namesake's climate policies," said EnviroBuild co-founder Aidan Bell in a statement on Tuesday. The small, blind, creature is a type of caecilian that primarily lives underground. It was discovered in Panama and named by the head of a company that had bid $25,000 at an auction for the privilege. The company said it wanted to raise awareness about climate change, the BBC reported. Although US presidents tend to receive their fair share of honours, with Bell drawing an unflattering comparison between its behaviour and Trump's, the 45th president might want to ignore the latest. "Burrowing (his) head underground helps Donald Trump when avoiding scientific consensus on anthropomorphic climate change," Bell wrote. The world's leading scientists agree that climate change is primarily human-induced, but Trump, whose administration has pursued a pro-fossil fuels agenda, has accused those scientists of having a "political agenda" and cast doubt on whether humans were responsible for the Earth's rising temperatures, the BBc report said. "I don't know that it's manmade," he said in an interview with CBS's 60 Minutes in October. "I'm not denying climate change but (temperatures) could very well go back," he added, without offering evidence. In November, Trump questioned a report by his own government that found climate change would cost the US hundreds of billions of dollars annually and damage health. "I don't believe it," he told reporters at the time. After taking office he announced that the US would withdraw from the Paris Climate accord, which commits countries to keep a limit on rising global temperatures. He justified his decision by asserting that he had been elected to serve the citizens of Pittsburgh and not Paris and the deal disadvantaged US businesses and workers. San Francisco, Dec 19 : Personal information of some current and former employees of NASA were stolen in a data breach in October, CNET's sister site ZDNet reported on Wednesday. In an internal memo sent to all employees, NASA admitted on Wednesday to getting hacked, almost two months after the breach was discovered, the report said. The people behind the hacking have not yet been identified as NASA said that an unknown intruder got access to one of the agency's servers holding the personal data of the employees. The scope of the breach and the number of affected employees are also not known, according to the report. But the agency took the step of notifying all employees so they could take preventive action. NASA discovered the hack on October 23 and informed that it was working with federal cybersecurity partners "to examine the servers to determine the scope of the potential data exfiltration and identify potentially affected individuals." "Those NASA Civil Service employees who were on-boarded, separated from the agency, and/or transferred between Centers, from July 2006 to October 2018, may have been affected," Bob Gibbs, NASA Assistant Administrator was quoted as saying in the memo. NASA also suffered similar security breaches in 2011 and 2016, the ZDNet report said. Tokyo, Dec 19 : Tokyo has lodged a complaint with Russia over the installation of military barracks on two islands in the Kuril archipelago that are claimed by Japan, a government spokesperson said on Wednesday. The protest was made on Tuesday after the Russian media announced the construction of four barracks on the islands of Etorofu and Kunashiri -- the largest islands in southern Kuril, as well as plans to construct other military facilities, Efe news reported. Japanese government spokesperson Yoshihide Suga said that Tokyo had used diplomatic channels to submit a formal protest with Russia and it would continue negotiations to resolve the issue and sign a peace treaty between the two countries. Four islands of the archipelago's 56 were occupied during World War II by Russia, which has been involved in a dispute with Japan over their sovereignty ever since. The issue is a main point of contention between Moscow and Tokyo. New Delhi, Dec 19 : Minutes after the Lok Sabha was reconvened following an earlier disruption till 12 p.m. on Wednesday, the House was again adjourned till 2 p.m. as the opposition ruckus over various issues, including the Rafale deal continued. Soon after the House reassembled after the washout of the question hour and the zero hour, the Congress, AIADMK and Telugu Desam Party (TDP) members trooped near the Speaker's podium and started sloganeering. Amid the din, official papers were laid on the table of the House and Speaker Sumitra Mahajan allowed Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge to raise his demand. Kharge demanded that the government should allow a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) probe into the deal with France for 36 ready-to-fly Rafale fighter jets. "Serious apprehension of irregularities have appeared in the Rafale deal. The matter needs to be investigated and accountability needs to be fixed. That's why we are demanding a JPC probe," he said. He said the Supreme Court has given its judgement based on a letter provided by the government. "Kindly allow a JPC probe. Kindly ask the government to initiate a JPC probe into the matter," Kharge said. Responding to this, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Narendra Singh Tomar said that the government was ready for discussion on any issue, including the Rafale deal, but maintained silence over the demand for a JPC probe. Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh too, said the government was ready for any discussion on Rafale. Communist Party of India-Marxist MP Mohammad Salim accused the government of lying in Supreme Court on the defence deal and supported the Congress' demand for a JPC probe. The Trinamool Congress' Sudip Bandopadhyay said his party wants the House to run. He urged the Speaker to convene a meeting of the leaders to break the deadlock. Meanwhile, the AIADMK members were protesting Karnataka's proposal to construct a dam across the Cauvery river at Mekadatu. One of the AIADMK members tore a piece of paper and threw it in the air near the reporters table. The TDP members continued to raise demands for special status for Andhra Pradesh. As the din continued, Mahajan adjourned the house till 2 p.m. Earlier, she adjourned the House during the Question Hour after her attempts to run lower House's business failed with disruptions continuing. Bengaluru, Dec 19 : The European Commission (EC) has approved the cancer cure drug Ogivri that Biocon co-developed with its US-based partner Mylan, said the Indian biotech major on Wednesday. "The EC has granted marketing authorisation for our cancer cure drug Ogivri, developed jointly with our partner Mylan," said the city-based firm in a statement here. The European Medicines Agency's Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP) had earlier recommended approval of the drug as a biosimilar Trastuzumab to Roche's Herceptin on October 18. The drug can be prescribed as monotherapy or in combination with other medicines depending upon the diagnosis under professional supervision. San Francisco, Dec 19 : Facebook has elevated its senior Indian-origin executive Karandeep Anand to head Workplace -- the company's two-year-old enterprise communication tool now being used by over 30,000 organisations globally including in India. Anand, who was earlier Head of Product for Facebook Marketplace and Payments services, would handle the product team and work closely with Julien Codorniou, current Vice President of Workplace, a Facebook spokesperson told IANS on Wednesday. "We're thrilled that Karandeep is joining Workplace as its new head of Workplace, effectively immediately. Karandeep joins Workplace from Marketplace, and brings with him a wealth of experience from both a consumer and enterprise background," said the spokesperson. As Head of Product for Marketplace and Payments tools, Anand's team was responsible for powering commerce across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp. "Karandeep will be partnering closely with Julien Codorniou, who will stay in his current VP role to lead Workplace sales and partnerships," the spokesperson added. Before joining Facebook nearly four years back, Anand who is an alumnus of International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Hyderabad, spent 15 years at Microsoft in various key roles. "I'm excited to now be part of the journey of bringing Workplace to companies across the globe and help them unlock the potential of their biggest asset -- people," Anand wrote on his LinkedIn profile. Facebook launched Workplace in 2016 to help make companies more connected and productive. Currently, more than 30,000 organisations are using Workplace worldwide -- including Walmart, Heineken, Spotify, Lyft and the Reliance Group. "A company's culture is leading indicator of its success and the productivity of its work force. Workplace brings the power of shaping culture by connecting people at work in ways never imagined before," Anand wrote. Facebook in 2017 launched the desktop version of its Workplace Chat app that can be downloaded by anyone on PC, Mac, Android or iOS. Workplace Chat includes video chat with a co-worker or group, screen sharing and file sharing. "Workplace is one of the fastest growing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) product and a key growth area for Facebook," said Anand. New Delhi, Dec 19 : BJP MP Sanjay Jaiswal on Wednesday slammed Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Kamal Nath for his claims that influx of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh migrants deprived state youth of employment opportunities and demanded that he be summoned to Parliament to apologise. Raising the issue during Zero Hour in Lok Sabha, Jaiswal, who represents Paschim Champaran constituency of Bihar, said the newly elected Chief Minister should apologise, as he himself is from Uttar Pradesh's Kanpur city and yet made such a statement. "Kamal Nath has tried to divide the country on the basis of region. The House must condemn it. He should be summoned to the Parliament and asked to apologise," Jaiswal said. Kamal Nath has been at the centre of a storm over his government's decision that only those industries which employ 70 per cent local youth could avail incentives from the state. "People from states like Bihar and UP come here and local people don't get jobs...," he had said at his first press conference as Chief Minister. Following which he faced criticism left, right and centre. Kamal Nath, who took oath as Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh on December 17, is a nine time Member of Parliament from Chhindwara. He has not yet resigned from Lok Sabha. Beijing, Dec 19 : Authorities from China and the US on Wednesday discussed the 90-day truce aimed at putting an end to the trade war between the two countries, China's Commerce Ministry said. In a statement on its official website, the Ministry said it the two sides held a phone call at a "vice-ministerial level" about economic and trade issues that concern both nations. China did not reveal the proposals discussed over the call, or if a new agreement had been reached, Efe news reported. Chinese President Xi Jinping and his US counterpart Donald Trump agreed to a 90-day truce on December 1 during the G20 summit in the Argentinian capital of Buenos Aires. Since then, China has adopted several goodwill measures, including a tariff reduction on imported US vehicles and the resumption of American soy bean purchases. Trump, on his part, halted a proposal that would have raised tariffs on over $200 billion of Chinese goods from 10 to 25 per cent. Negotiations have been threatened by tensions over the detention of Huawei's Chief Financial Officer Wanzhou Meng, who was arrested in Canada after a request by US authorities for the alleged violation of economic sanctions imposed by Washington against Iran. New York, Dec 19 : The number of journalists killed on duty rose in 2018 and the number murdered in reprisal for their work doubled, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reported on Wednesday. "The number of journalists targeted for murder in reprisal for their reporting nearly doubled in 2018 from a year earlier, driving up the overall count of journalists killed on the job," the CPJ said in the report, which highlighted the killing of US-based Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey. In total, 53 deaths were registered from January 1 to December 15 this year, as compared to 47 in 2017 and 50 in 2016. Among the deaths, at least 34 were "singled out for murder" as compared to 18 journalists killed in the same way in 2017. "Afghanistan was the deadliest country and accounted for much of the increase," the CPJ said, adding that some 13 journalists were killed in the South Asian country -- nine of them on April 30 in a double suicide attack claimed by the Islamic State where the second blast seemingly targeted journalists and first responders who had gathered at the scene. The CPJ also noted the deaths of four reporters at the Capital Gazette newspaper in the US state of Maryland. They were killed by a man whose defamation case against the company had failed. In total, the CPJ said that as well as the 34 reporters killed in reprisal for their work, 11 were killed in crossfire or combat and another eight in dangerous assignments. According to the organization, the global crisis of press freedom was closely tied to "changes in technology that allowed more people to practise journalism even as it made journalists expendable to the political and criminal groups who once needed the news media to spread their message". Another factor was a "lack of international leadership on journalists' rights and safety". The report highlighted the case of Khashoggi in this respect. "The White House, traditionally a strong defender of global press freedom, has equivocated on the blame for Khashoggi's murder despite, according to the (Washington) Post, CIA conclusions that only the Crown Prince could have ordered such an operation," the report said. It pointed out US President Donald Trump's statement that whether Khashoggi's murder was ordered by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman or not, the US "intends to remain a steadfast partner of Saudi Arabia". "Essentially, Trump signalled that countries that do enough business with the US are free to murder journalists without consequence," the report said. The CPJ also highlighted a European crisis, citing the murder of Slovakian reporter Jan Kuciak in February after Malta's Daphne Caruana Galizi in 2017. Both cases remain unsolved, facilitating "a state of impunity that ... inevitably perpetuates further violence". On the other hand, the number of journalists killed in combat or crossfire dropped to the lowest since 2011. New Delhi, Dec 19 : To spread awareness about Internet safety and promote digital citizenship, Google on Wednesday announced the fourth edition of its "Web Rangers" contest that will reward school students who know how to stay smart, safe and savvy online. The competition aims to encourage teenagers to unlock creativity in highlighting the importance of cyber safety, the company said in a statement. The students can choose the category that interests them and put their creativity and skills to test. In the "Campaign" category, the participants have to run their own Internet safety campaign, either individually or as a team of three. It could be one large initiative or a collection of multiple projects like a social media campaign, a video series, awareness drives or all of them - there is no restriction on the format or the number of initiatives, Google said. In "Project" category -- for those who prefer to work individually -- the contestant has to create a video, website, app or a game that should empower users to stay safe on the Internet. "Web Rangers" was launched in India in 2015 with student ambassadors across more than 15 countries. The contest is open to students within the age group of 10 and 17 years and the deadline for submitting the entry is January 21, Google said. Washington, Dec 19 : A US man has been sentenced to 15 months in prison for a brutal attack on a Sikh American taxi driver in Seattle city last year. Swarn Singh, 53, was assaulted with a hammer by Rory Benson on December 16, 2017. The accused pleaded guilty to the attack and was given the sentence by a court in Seattle late last week, the community's civil rights group -- Sikh Coalition -- tweeted on Tuesday. During the incident, Singh who maintains Sikh articles of faith including unshorn hair and a turban, had parked outside an apartment building to drop Benson and his mother, the group said in a statement. It was then that Benson, who was sitting in the front passenger seat, brutally attacked Singh. He grabbed a piece of cloth and attempted to suffocate the victim with it. Singh managed to get out of the taxi but Benson grabbed a hammer from his bag and chased the victim on-foot. Benson hit Singh in the head repeatedly, specifically targeting his turban and knocking it to the ground. The victim suffered a scalp laceration and a skull fracture and was taken to hospital, the statement said. Benson was later arrested. The Sikh Coalition said it worked with Singh for 11 months to make sure the Bellevue Police Department and the King County Prosecuting Attorney's Office were properly investigating the incident and reviewing appropriate charges. Singh submitted a statement to the King County Superior Court, urging his attacker to recognize the damage caused, detailing his injuries and the impact of the assault on the Sikh community, the group said. Washington, Dec 19 : A 39-year-old man living in the US state of Arizona has been sentenced to 37 months in prison for threatening to kill President Donald Trump, officials said. According to a press release on Tuesday by the Office of the US Attorney, District of Arizona, Jerrod Hunter Schmidt was sentenced after he was found guilty in September by a jury of two counts of threatening the President and two counts of making interstate threatening communications. Schmidt made a series of calls to the court clerk's office from April 10 to April 11 after learning that his conviction for a prior felony was affirmed by the Nebraska Court of Appeals. He left voice messages threatening that he was going to "kill President Trump and put a bullet in his head", the Arizona Republic newspaper reported. Schmidt had also threatened to kill one of the clerks of the Nebraska Court of Appeals and other local political figures. The Secret Service conducted the investigation in the case with the assistance of the US Postal Inspection Service and the Nebraska State Patrol, the press release said, adding that Schmidt will be on three years of supervised release after serving 37 months in federal prison. Beijing, Dec 19 : China on Wednesday said it was not aware of the detention of the third Canadian as reported by the Canadian media. Beijing has already detained two Canadians for allegedly harming national security, a move perceived to be in response to the arrest of Chinese telecom giant Huawei's Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou in Canada. A report in the Global Affairs Canada said the Canadian Foreign Ministry was "aware of a Canadian citizen" who had been detained in China. The ministry, however, did not explain if the third detention was linked to Meng's arrest. In response, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said it was not aware of any arrest. "I have not heard of it," said ministry's spokesperson Hua Chunying. Former Canadian diplomat Michael Kovrig and Calgary-born entrepreneur Michael Spavor were earlier arrested by the Chinese authorities for "endangering" national security. While Kovrig worked for International Crisis Group, Spavor organised tours in North Korea. If confirmed, the third detention will further raise the tensions between China and Canada. Though Meng has been granted bail, she faces possible extradition to the US for allegedly doing business with Iran in violation of US sanctions. Kochi, Dec 19 : The Kerala High Court here on Wednesday dismissed a plea by the eighth accused in the infamous actress abduction case, actor Dileep, for a CBI probe into the case. In his petition, Dileep pleaded that he has been framed in the case by the police relying only on the statement of the prime accused, Pulsar Suni. Meanwhile, the prosecution put up their defense by stating that an accused in a case has no right to decide on what sort of probe should take place and, moreover, this is nothing but a ploy to delay the trial in the case. The police probe team has already filed the detailed charge sheet in the case and the court on March 14 summoned all the accused. Dileep was arrested after two rounds of questioning on July 10, 2017, for his alleged role in the conspiracy behind the abduction of the young actress. Dileep's former wife Manju Warrier is one of the witnesses in the case. After being in jail for 85 days, Dileep secured bail. The actress was allegedly abducted on February 17 last year while she was on her way to Kochi from Thrissur. Pulsar Suni, the prime accused, drove her around for two hours before she was dropped near the home of director-actor Lal, who later called the police. San Francisco, Dec 19 : Researchers at global cybersecurity firm McAfee saw an average of 480 new threats per minute and an increase of 73 per cent in malware targeting IoT (Internet of Things) devices. Cybercriminals have taken notice of the growing volume and lax security of many IoT devices and have begun to focus on them, said the report, according to the "McAfee Labs Threats Report: December 2018" on Wednesday. The financial sector saw a 20 per cent increase in data breaches, showed the findings. "Cybercriminals are eager to weaponise vulnerabilities both new and old, and the number of services now available on underground markets has dramatically increased their effectiveness," Christiaan Beek, lead scientist at McAfee, said in a statement. "As long as ransoms are paid and relatively easy attacks, such as phishing campaigns, are successful, bad actors will continue to use these techniques. Following up-and-coming trends on the underground markets and hidden forums allow the cybersecurity community to defend against current attacks and stay a step ahead of those in our future," Beek said. While unique ransomware families continued to decline in the third quarter of this year, new ransomware increased 10 per cent in this period, the research showed. The quarter also saw an over 70 per cent increase in cryptomining malware. The researchers found that 53 per cent of spam botnet traffic in the third quarter was driven by Gamut, the top spam-producing botnet spewing "sextortion" scams, which demand payment and threaten to reveal victim browsing habits. Some entrepreneurial cybercriminals have shifted away from using larger markets to sell their goods and have begun creating their own specialised shops, said the report. This shift has sparked a new line of business for website designers offering to build hidden marketplaces for aspiring shady business owners, it added. New Delhi, Dec 19 : The Lok Sabha was adjourned for the day on Wednesday after unrelenting protests by the opposition, creating ruckus over various issues including the demand for a JPC probe into Rafale fighter jets deal. The lower House, however, managed to conduct a little legislative business in the post-lunch session and passed the long-pending Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill 2016 amid uproar. As the Bill was passed, Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan urged the agitating AIADMK members to return to their seats as their demands were not possible to be fulfilled by her. "I can't solve it. You have to discuss the issue. Please go back to your seats," Mahajan said but the AIADMK members did not relent. The Congress and the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) members, who were also near Speaker's podium, shouted slogans in support of their demands. The Congress members were demanding a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) probe into the Rafale deal, while the TDP members were seeking special status for Andhra Pradesh. As the din continued, Mahajan adjourned the House for the day. Earlier, in the pre-lunch session also the House witnessed two adjournments as the Congress, AIADMK and the TDP members disrupted the proceedings over their demands. New Delhi, Dec 19 : Automobile major Maruti Suzukis Chairman R.C. Bhargava on Wednesday said it plans to stop manufacturing Bharat Stage (BS)-IV compliant cars by the end of 2019. The company's decision is in line with the Supreme Court's order stating that no BS-IV vehicle should be sold in the country from April 1, 2020 as the BS-VI emission norms would come into force. "Broadly, the production of BS-VI will largely come to a stop by December 2019," Bhargava said here during a media interaction. "We may still give you some BS-IV vehicles after December 2019 if there is a customer demand for those vehicles... and if we are sure that we can actually register the vehicle before March 31." Bhargava also observed that the sale of BS-VI compliant diesel vehicles may take a hit as their prices would be significantly higher than BS-VI petrol models. "In BS-VI, diesel car price will go up substantially and we will have to consider the customer preference to a diesel car at the new price of a BS-VI diesel car, which will be roughly Rs 2.5 lakh more than a petrol car of BS-VI," he said. The Indian auto industry will fully migrate to manufacturing only BS-VI compliant vehicles on a pan India basis from April 1, 2020. Earlier, the government had decided to "leapfrog directly from BS-IV to BS-VI grade by April 1, 2020, skipping BS-V altogether." New York, Dec 19 : Pregnant women and the extremely obese are among those at high risk for complications from the influenza or flu -- including death -- and should be tested and begin antiviral treatment promptly, according to new guidelines. The new guidelines released by the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA), noted that antiviral treatment should be given within two days after the start of flu symptoms in people both at high risk for complications (such as bronchitis, middle ear infection, and pneumonia), and even for those without. "High-risk individuals who are hospitalised with flu complications are at an increased risk for serious bacterial infections and infectious diseases. Physicians' expertise is critical to ensuring they receive the best care," said Andrew T. Pavia, from the University of Utah in the US. "Annual influenza vaccination is the best way to prevent influenza, but it is not 100 per cent effective. Those at high risk need to be encouraged to seek medical care right away if they develop influenza symptoms during influenza season," added Timothy M. Uyeki, chief medical officer of the National Center for Immunisation and Respiratory Diseases in the US. Influenza testing is important because physicians are more likely to treat patients with antiviral medications if they have a definitive diagnosis, further reducing the likelihood of prescribing antibiotics inappropriately, especially in outpatients. In addition, newer and highly accurate molecular tests that deliver results in 15-60 minutes should be used instead of rapid-influenza diagnostic tests (RIDTs), which produce quick results, the guidelines said. However, it can prove to be falsely negative in at least 30 per cent of outpatients with influenza. Others in the high-risk category include young children (especially those younger than two years old), women who have recently given birth, those with a weakened immune system due to disease or medication (such as people with HIV or AIDS, cancer, who have had an organ transplant or who are on chronic steroids), as described in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. Typical flu signs and symptoms include fever, cough, muscle aches, chills, runny nose and sore throat. Other symptoms can include headache and chest pain. Sriharikota (Andhra Pradesh), Dec 19 : Rounding off the year 2018, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) on Wednesday successfully launched a military communication satellite GSAT-7A, primarily for the Indian Air Force, in a text-book style. At 4.10 p.m. the GSLV-F11 rocket ascended into the sky from the second launch pad at Satish Dhawan Space Centre with a long fiery orange flame at its tail. Slightly over 19 minutes into its flight, the Indian rocket Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle-F11 (GSLV-F11) rocket slung the satellite in a geosynchronous transfer orbit (GTO). The GSAT-7A will be pushed up further to its final geostationary orbit firing its onboard motors in the days to come. The ISRO scientists at the rocket mission control centre were visibly happy when an announcement was made about the successful separation of the satellite from the rocket. "Today the GSLV-F11 rocket safely injected GSAT-7A in a super synchronous transfer orbit. One of the unique features of the rocket is the complete burn-out of its cryogenic engine. As a result, we got 2,000 km more than what we had expected. This has increased the life span of GSAT-7A," said ISRO Chairman K. Sivan soon after the successful mission. The GSAT-7A is the heaviest communication satellite to be lifted by a GSLV Mk II rocket. The 2,250 kg GSAT-7A is the 35th communication satellite built by ISRO. The satellite will beef up the communication capabilities of the IAF. The satellite's life span is projected as eight years. It would enable IAF to link its ground radar stations, its airbases and Airborne Early Warning and Control System (AWACS) planes. The satellite may also control IAF's unmanned aerial vehicles and drones. The GSLV is a three-stage/engine rocket. The core of the first stage is fired with solid fuel while liquid fuel fires the four strap-on motors. The second is the liquid fuel and the third is the cryogenic engine. A cryogenic engine is more efficient as it provides more thrust for every kilogram of propellant burnt. This is the second dedicated military communication satellite to be launched. The first, GSAT-7 or Rukmini, was launched in 2013, for use by the Indian Navy. Earlier the satellites were of dual use, for civilian and defence purposes. "There is increased demand for satellites from strategic sectors. About six/seven satellites are planned to be built," a senior ISRO official told IANS requesting anonymity. In November, ISRO put into orbit the sharp-eyed HysIS satellite for a range of applications. The data generated by it will also be accessible by the Indian military. With this successful launch, India established the performance of its GSLV rocket which in future may fetch orders from third parties for launching their satellites. India at present puts into orbit foreign satellites for a fee using its lighter rocket, the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV), as its weight carrying capacity is lower. Revenue for launching a satellites depends on weight of the satellite -- higher the weight, higher will be the revenue. "This year completed 17 rocket/satellite missions. The next year will have 32 rocket/satellite missions," Sivan told ISRO officials. The next year's missions include the complex Chandrayaan-2 or the moon mission. (Venkatachari Jagannathan can be contacted at v.jagannathan@ians.in) Washington, Dec 19 : Online retail giant Amazon has been slammed by several Sikh bodies for reportedly selling doormats, rugs and toilet accessories bearing the image of the highly-revered Golden Temple and was asked to immediately remove the "disrespectful products" that hurt the sentiments of the community worldwide. Prominent community body in the US, the Sikh Coalition, said in a statement on Tuesday that it was alerted to Amazon selling doormats, rugs and toilet seat covers with the image of Golden Temple. In response, the civil rights organisation said it "immediately contacted Amazon to remove the products while detailing the culturally insensitive problems with the items being sold and the offensive message it sent to Sikhs around the world". "The Golden Temple is not a doormat," it tweeted, adding that in the hours since, through community outreach, several pages had been removed from the Amazon portal. Another group, NGO United Sikhs, issued a statement calling on Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to do the same and said it had received "numerous complaints" from members of the community about the products. Some of the items had been removed from the website on Wednesday, but the Golden Temple toilet accessories remained available, the group said. "It's shocking and extremely disappointing that Amazon offers these products for sale," said United Sikhs operations manager Rajesh Singh. "The merchandise featuring the disrespectful placement of Darbar Sahib shows a total lack of understanding on behalf of Amazon and its employees. We demand Bezos address this issue immediately." The group offered "Sikh awareness training" in "an effort to educate Amazon's staff and prevent anti-Sikh products from being sold on the site in the future". It also "reached out to the manufacturers of the merchandise to demand their production to be ceased immediately". New Delhi, Dec 19 : The Delhi High Court on Wednesday set aside a trial court order issuing summons against Union Minister Smriti Irani in a defamation case filed by Congress leader Sanjay Nirupam. Justice R.K. Gauba allowed Irani's plea seeking quashing of trial court order and said that the continuance of such criminal prosecution on the basis of available material would be an abuse of the process of law. Irani has told the court that the complaint instituted by the Nirupam is an afterthought and counterblast to her complaint filed against the Congress leader. "Having regard to the chronology of events, it is clear that the criminal complaint leading to the summoning order against the petitioner (Irani) was instituted by the second respondent (Nirupam) in the counterblast to the complaint of the former, there being no explanation offered for the delay," the court said. The court rejected Nirupam's plea seeking to set aside the trial court order issuing summons issued against him in a defamation complaint filed by Smriti Irani. A magistrate court on March 11, 2013, had issued summons against Nirupam for defaming Irani. However, another magistrate court on June 6, 2014, issued summons against Irani after taking cognsiance of a defamation case filed by Nirupam against the minister. While discussing the Gujarat assembly elections in December 2012 on a TV channel, Nirupam mocked Irani as a former dancer who had entered politics only some years ago. Both leaders were involved in a verbal exchange in the course of the TV debate and later filed defamation case against each other. The HC noted that Irani retorted by stating that this was frivolous conduct similar to the one reflected by gunda elements. "She (Irani) at no stage called him a "rapist" or a "molester" or an "eveteaser", neither directly nor indirectly. Her (Irani) responses cannot be construed but as a caution to him (Nirupam) to remain within the bounds of decency and civility," the court said. "The petitioner and the second respondent have been in public life for quite long, engaged in active politics and associated with the political parties that generally have been seen to be opposed to each other. In their interest, their names have been withheld from mention, including in the cause-title," the judge said in the opening paragraph of both the judgements. London, Dec 19 : British business groups on Wednesday criticized lawmakers for focusing on disputes and said a no-deal Brexit scenario in 100 days' time would be catastrophic for the economy. The British Chambers of Commerce, Confederation of British Industry, Manufacturers' Organisation, Federation of Small Businesses and Institute of Directors on Wednesday said the risk of a no-deal Brexit was already having a negative impact on businesses and the economy, Efe news reported. "With just 100 days to go, the suggestion that 'no-deal' can be 'managed' is not a credible proposition," the joint statement said. "As a result of the lack of progress, the government is understandably now in a place where it must step up no-deal planning, but it is clear there is simply not enough time to prevent severe dislocation and disruption in just 100 days," the statement added. The business groups urged members of Parliament to listen to their communities and businesses over the Christmas period and reminded them the future of the British economy would be "in their hands". Prime Minister Theresa May's government -- whose parliamentary conservative minority is propped up by a regional Northern Irish party, the hardline DUP -- is under increasing pressure to ensure the UK does not leave the EU without a deal. May delayed a crucial parliamentary vote on her withdrawal deal last week as it faced almost certain defeat in the House of Commons. European Commission head Jean Claude Junker said the withdrawal deal on Brexit was final and could not be renegotiated. The final vote on the agreement regarding the country's withdrawal from the EU is set to take place in the third week of January. Bhopal, Dec 19 : Unperturbed by the attack on him for his remark that youth from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar are taking away the jobs in Madhya Pradesh, new state Chief Minister Kamal Nath defended his statement saying he has not said anything new. "I meant to say that local people should get preference (in employment). And this is everywhere. I did not say anything new. It is everywhere. Is it not so in Gujarat (that locals get preference in jobs)?," he told reporters. Kamal Nath was asked about the controversy over his statement that his government would give incentives for investors who provide 70 per cent of the jobs for youth from Madhya Pradesh in a bid to check outsiders from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh taking away jobs here. The remarks triggered a storm with leaders including those belonging to Congress allies like SP and RJD attacking him saying it was wrong and unfortunate. BJP leaders also joined in the attack and demanded Congress President Rahul Gandhi's apology. New Delhi, Dec 19 : Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS) MP and Telangana Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao's daughter K. Kavitha on Wednesday said TRS is working to form a federal front for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections that would not have either Congress or BJP in it. "A federal front is being floated. We believe that a neutral platform should be established which is free of both BJP and Congress. Our agenda is to address the people of this nation. There have been various political groupings in the country which failed while few succeeded," she told reporters here. Kavitha said that regional parties will have a greater role to play in the national politics because they can address the aspirations of the people which national parties could not do. "We have done it in Telangana. We want to replicate the same at national level and we will certainly work very hard to make sure to form an alliance which will not have either BJP or Congress," she said. Kavitha referred to DMK leader M.K. Stalin proposing the name of Congress President Rahul Gandhi as prime ministerial candidate and said TRS is not part of that grouping and pointed out that the move had been "opposed" by some members of that grouping. "This is not about one person becoming a Prime Minister or about one party rising to power, this is about truly addressing the issues of the people of this country," Kavitha said. She said that in the so-called semi-final before the Lok Sabha elections next year, the Congress did not do well in Telangana and did not get a clear victory in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. "In Rajasthan, where they expected a landslide victory, they barely scraped through. Default politics is the current state of the country," she said. The TDP MP said if there was a strong regional party in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, it would have played a major role. She hit out at the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA), saying it has "miserably failed" on delivery of various promises made to people. "We are not 'B' team of anybody but 'B' team of Indian people." She justified her father's remarks in which he had termed Rahul Gandhi as a "buffoon". "The whole nation watched when the Congress chief breaking all established practices of Parliament suddenly crossed the aisle and hugged a Prime Minister. Everybody felt it was a very silly move and that is why our leader responded," she said. Lucknow, Dec 19 : On a day a group of former civil servants attacked his government on the Bulandshahr issue, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on Wednesday said that the violence was a "political conspiracy" and far from being slammed his government should actually be "praised" for nipping the "conspiracy" in the bud. "The conspiracy that had been hatched in Bulandshahr has been unmasked. This political conspiracy was hatched by those who wanted to incite a riot and create anarchy through cow slaughter. They are cowards," Adityanath said. "But their designs have failed. I think those criticising us are doing so to hide their own failures. They should instead appreciate the government, they should thank the government," he added. Inspector Subodh Kumar Singh was shot dead during the violence that was provoked by allegations of cow slaughter on December 3. A group of former bureaucrats on Wednesday came down heavily on Yogi and his government and Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the Bulandshahr mob violence saying "politics of hate has taken the most dangerous turn". Meanwhile, Inspector Subodh Kumar's wife demanded to know from the government why after 16 days his killers have not been nabbed. She said evidence that could lead to the killers was being erased. Kolkata, Dec 19 : Bharatiya Janata Party activists on Wednesday held a 'civil disobedience programme' in West Bengal's Howrah district to protest against the denial of permission to the party's proposed Rath Yatra and accused the state government of "undemocratically impeding" their political programmes. The saffron party activists later clashed with the local police when the latter denied permission for the meeting and tried to forcibly remove them from demonstrating by blocking roads. "We know that the common people are inconvenienced due to our civil disobedience programme today. But our party is facing a bigger problem. In spite of being the biggest political party in the world, the BJP is barred from holding rallies and meetings in this state. That is why we are forced to hold such law violation programmes," state BJP president Dilip Ghosh said while addressing the gathering. "The Bengal government is forcing us to resort to such extremism. We are holding civil disobedience in all the districts to protest against this government's role to suppress the voice of the BJP," he said. The BJP leader further alleged that while leaders from other states and neighbouring countries are permitted to hold public rallies in Bengal, the Mamata Banerjee government is deliberately stopping his party from doing the same and stressed such "duality" will not be allowed for long. "All other political parties are allowed to hold meetings in the state. Even Muslim clerics from Bangladesh are allowed to hold meetings here. Leaders like Asaduddin Owaisi from Hyderabad were also allowed but not our leaders. There is neither any curfew in Bengal nor is the BJP a banned organisation, so why such things are happening?" he questioned. BJP's plea to hold the 'Rath Yatra', touted as the "save democracy rally", was rejected by the Bengal Government last week, stating there was "grave apprehension of major breach of peace and communal violence during and in the aftermath" of the programme. The matter is now sub judice in Calcutta High Court. Washington, Dec 19 : A US-based Sikh group's call for a referendum on Khalistan would come under the country's "bedrock principles" of freedom of speech, according to a State Department spokesperson. Asked by a reporter on Tuesday at the Department briefing "if freedom of speech gives one a right to call for disintegration of another country," Deputy Spokesperson Robert Palladino replied: "We have freedom of speech in the United States, we have freedom of association, and these are bedrock principles of American society." The reporter was referring to the "Referendum 2020" campaign on Punjab's secession by a New York-based organisation called Sikhs for Justice. Asked if the State Department was looking into it, Palladino said: "I'm not aware of it. That's -- I mean, I'm just not aware of it today. I haven't seen these reports." The US has constitutionally mandated broad freedom of speech protection actively enforced by courts that cover most expressions of opinions except for active calls for violence or some foreign government-financed campaigns. Several separatist movements campaign in the US, including "Yes California", which wants the state to secede from the US. Mumbai, Dec 19 : National Award-winning filmmaker Rima Das' Assamese feature film "Bulbul Can Sing" will compete in the Generation 14 Plus category at the Berlin International Film Festival 2019. After having its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, the film is all set to have its European Premiere at the upcoming edition of the Berlin International Film Festival. "Bulbul Can Sing" is about a teenaged girl, Bulbul, living in a village in Assam, fighting her way through love and loss as she figures out who she really is. "'Bulbul Can Sing' is selected for Berlinale. After the film premiered at Toronto, I didn't think we would get an invitation from Berlin because top festivals like Cannes, Berlin, Toronto and Venice usually ask for a World Premiere. They accept other films only in case of an exception! So it's a huge achievement," Rima said in a statement. "After getting immense love and appreciation from people for 'Village Rockstars', it was very challenging for me to come out with a new film which would meet people's expectation. But seeing the extraordinary journey of 'Bulbul...', I feel more hopeful now," she added. "Village Rockstars" was the official entry from India to the Oscars. It didn't make it to the shortlist. New Delhi, Dec 19 : Throwing away clothing that is no longer needed is a missed opportunity to turn the fabric into new products such as building materials, as well as address our unsustainable landfill problems, says an Indian-origin professor. According to Veena Sahajwalla from University of New South Wales(UNSW) in Sydney, the abundance of cheap clothes and short-lived fashion trends generate 10 million tonnes of landfill in the US alone each year, which decompose and release toxic chemicals and greenhouse gases. "It could be said that consumers and the fashion industry have a lot to answer for, given that clothing is now one of the biggest consumer waste streams, with 92 million tons estimated to be thrown out a year globally," said Sahajwalla, who is a Mumbai-born IIT Kanpur alumna. "The clothing and textiles industry is the second most polluting sector in the world, accounting for 10 per cent of the world's total carbon emissions. Not only is this bad for the environment, it also misses the opportunity to turn valuable clothing fibres into new products, Sahajwalla explained. To create new building materials, Sahajwalla and her team collected a random assortment of garments from charity bins. After removing zippers, buttons, buckles, they passed the leftover mix of cotton, polyester, nylon and other fabrics through a fine-grained shredder. They then treated the resulting fleece with a chemical to help the different fibre components stick together, then compressed it under heat to form solid panels. In a series of tests, the panels proved to be strong, water-resistant and minimally-flammable. Their properties could also be fine-tuned by mixing the fleece with other waste products such as sawdust filler from old couches. The panels had different textures and colours resembling wood, ceramic or stone "depending on their mix of components" making them suitable for use as floor tiles, wall panels or other interior finishes, Sahajwalla noted. Their strength could also make them suitable for load-bearing applications. Sahajwalla showcased these building products at a thematic session on emerging building technologies at the 10th TERI-GRIHA summit in New Delhi last week. Sahajwalla and her team have been scientifically reforming common waste items using prototype technology developed for a laboratory-scale "green microfactory" to be launched in 2019. New Delhi/Lucknow, Dec 19 : A group of former bureaucrats came down heavily on the Uttar Pradesh BJP regime and Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the Bulandshahr mob violence saying "politics of hate has taken the most dangerous turn" even as Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on Wednesday said his government should be "thanked" for defeating a "political conspiracy" to spread anarchy through communal violence in the state. Questioning Modi's "stony silence" over the December 3 mob violence in which a police officer was killed, the former bureaucrats and diplomats, in an open letter, said the Bulandshahr incident showed the "perverted" fundamental principles of governance and constitutional ethics of the Yogi government under which, "hooliganism and thuggery have been mainstreamed into governance". The letter signed by 83 former civil servants including former Foreign Secretaries Shiv Shankar Menon, Shayam Saran and Sujata Singh and former Ambassador and DGP Julio Ribeiro, called for the resignation of Adityanath and urged the Allahabad High Court to initiate a judicial enquiry taking suo-motu cognisance of the violence and the "cold blooded murder" of Inspector Subodh Kumar Singh. "The Bulandshahr mob violence instigated and engineered with malicious intent, marks the most dangerous turn yet in the direction taken by the politics of hate in recent times. "It shows that in India's most populous state, fundamental principles of governance, of constitutional ethics and of humane social conduct stand perverted. The Chief Minister of the state acts as high priest of the agenda of bigotry and majoritarian supremacy -- an agenda which now seems to take precedence over everything else," they said. Under Adityanath, hooliganism and thuggery have been mainstreamed into governance, not just to intimidate minorities but to teach a lesson to anyone, including police personnel and others in the administration, who dared to be even-handed in their approach to minority communities, they said. "The pace of erosion has been frightening and with each slip, we seem to sink further into a lawless abyss. "This was a deliberate attempt to display majoritarian muscle and send a message to Muslim communities living in the region that they have to live in fear, accept their subordinate status and conform to the cultural diktats of the majority community," the letter said adding that there was no doubt as to who the political elements were, that aided and abetted the violence. "The Chief Minister refuses to acknowledge the gravity of the incident and its communal intent, condemn the perpetrators of violence or direct the police to take action against them, instead asks them to focus attention on those responsible for illegal cow slaughter. "He (Adityanath) may try to mislead by calling it an accident, this was murder with an intent", they said alleging that the slain police officer was an "impediment" to the communal plans of local BJP and Sangh Parivar elements and "had to go". Turning their attention to Modi, the former civil servants said: "Our Prime Minister, who is so voluble in his election campaigns and who never tires of telling us how the Constitution of India is the only holy book he worships, maintains a stony silence even as he sees a Chief Minister handpicked by him treat the same Constitution with sheer contempt. "It is evident that for the Sangh Parivar, constitutional morality is of no value, and is necessarily subordinate to the ideals of majoritarian supremacy," they said asserting that never before in recent history had the politics of hate, division and exclusion been so dominant and the poisonous ideology, which had penetrated deep into the body politic. "This is a crucial moment and we can't take it lying down anymore," they said calling for a crusade against the politics of hate and division -- "a politics which aims to destroy the fundamental principles on which our republic is founded." Facing heat for focusing more on cow slaughter than the killing of the police officer, an unfazed Adityanath hit out at his detractors claiming the Bulandshahr violence, was a "political conspiracy" hatched by those who have lost political ground. "The state government has uncovered a big conspiracy. Those who wanted to spread anarchy and lawlessness through cow slaughter, their motive has been defeated. "Those who are making these comments are trying to hide their failure. They should thank and praise the government for preventing a big conspiracy to spread communal tension in the state," Adityanath told the media in Lucknow. Brussels, Dec 19 : The European Commission (EC) on Wednesday published a set of measures that would limit the negative effects on Europe of the UK leaving the EU without an exit deal. The Commission put the wheels in motion for a detailed contingency action plan to deal with the potentially catastrophic effects a no-deal Brexit could have on the bloc's economy and urged member states to implement the measures as a matter of urgency. "The Commission has consistently made clear that protecting EU citizens in the UK, as well as UK citizens in the EU is a priority," the EC said in a statement cited by Efe news. "It calls upon member states to take a generous approach to UK nationals who are already resident in their territory." As UK Prime Minister Theresa May's proposed exit plan struggles in Parliament, both sides are preparing for the worst case scenario. The contingency plans also included clauses on mitigating financial service risks by establishing temporary and conditional measures to be put in place for anywhere between 12 and 24 months, depending on the financial product and service, in order to allow for a smooth transition. The Commission broached complications that could arise with air travel by establishing a transition period that would allow for certain air services between the UK and the bloc to continue until an agreement had been reached. The movement of goods between the UK and the EU would also have a provisional extension period whereby they would be able to move across borders for nine months until bilateral trade negotiations were underway. In the event of a no-deal scenario, EU member states would be compelled to tax all imports from and exports to the UK by applying the bloc's agreed customs code. "The Commission reiterates its calls on member states to remain united also as regards contingency action, refraining from bilateral arrangements that would be incompatible with EU law and which cannot achieve the same results as action at the EU level," the EC said. "Such arrangements would also complicate the establishment of any future relationship between the EU and the UK," it added. New Delhi, Dec 19 : President's rule will be imposed in Jammu and Kashmir from Wednesday midnight with President Ram Nath Kovind signing a proclamation to give effect to the recommendation of the state Governor Satya Pal Malik. Home Ministry officials said that Kovind has signed the proclamation based on the proposal sent by the ministry following a report by the state governor. The term of Governor's Rule, imposed in the state in June this year, comes to an end on Wednesday. The state had plunged into a political crisis in June this year after BJP withdrew from the coalition government with People's Democratic Party. Last month Malik dissolved the state assembly which had been kept in suspended animation. Under the provisions of Jammu and Kashmir Constitution, Governor's rule can be imposed for six months, but with consent of the President. The Constitution grants special status to Jammu and Kashmir. Rawalpindi, Dec 19 : US Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation Zalmay Khalilzad discussed the ongoing peace process in the war-torn country with Pakistan's Army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa here on Wednesday, a military spokesperson said. The development came two days after Pakistan arranged crucial peace talks between the US and the Afghan Taliban in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) -- in the latest push to end the 17-year-long conflict in Afghanistan. Representatives from Pakistan, the UAE and Saudi Arabia also attended the talks. According to a statement by the Pakistani Army's media wing, the US envoy appreciated Islamabad's role in the Afghan peace process and discussed matters related to regional stability in the meeting at the general headquarters in Rawalpindi on Wednesday. It said that General Bajwa reiterated that "peace in Afghanistan is important for Pakistan" and assured that continuous efforts will be made "for bringing peace and stability in the region", Dawn online reported. Earlier this month, US President Donald Trump wrote a letter to Pakistan's Prime Minister Imran Khan seeking his assistance in the Afghan peace process. The US leader had also reportedly sought Islamabad's help in bringing the Taliban leadership to the negotiating table. Trump's letter was followed by a visit from Khalilzad to Islamabad seeking a peaceful resolution of the Afghan conflict. Washington, Dec 19 : US President Donald Trump is planning a "full" and "rapid" withdrawal of American troops from Syria, CNN reported on Wednesday citing a defence official. The decision would be a reversal from previously stated US policy. Trump had promised earlier this year to pull American troops out of Syria "very soon". According to the report, even though the US will continue to maintain troops in Iraq with the capability of launching strikes into Syria, its withdrawal of ground forces would fulfil a major goal of Syria, Iran and Russia and risked diminishing America's influence in the region. The US has about 2,000 troops on the ground in the country, where they are primarily training local forces to combat the Islamic State, CNN said. The US-led coalition recently denied any change to the US presence in Syria. "Any reports indicating a change in the US position with respect" to the American military presence in Syria "is false and designed to sow confusion and chaos," the coalition said in a statement earlier this month. General Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had said that the US needed to train thousands of local fighters to ensure a lasting defeat of the terror group. Bhopal, Dec 19 : Under attack from various quarters for his announcement that only those industries that employ 70 per cent locals could avail incentives from the state government, Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Kamal Nath on Wednesday said other states also have the policy of giving preference in employment to locals. Kamal Nath told the media: "Such policy exists in other states too, including Gujarat. So, I have not said anything new. Locals should get preference (in jobs)." Soon after taking oath as Chief Minister on Monday, Kamal Nath had told the media that his government would give concessions to those who invest in Madhya Pradesh provided they gave 70 per cent of the jobs to locals. He had also said that people from other states like Bihar and Madhya Pradesh took away the jobs of locals. Bhubaneswar, Dec 19 : The Odisha government on Wednesday said the farmers affected by cyclone Phethai will be provided compensation after getting reports from district collectors. "As per our estimation, there was crop loss due to the cyclone. We are waiting for crop assessment reports from the district collectors. The farmers will get assistance as per the government norms," said Revenue Minister Maheswar Mohanty. Special Relief Commissioner Bishnupada Sethi said the district collectors are asked to submit crop assessment reports within seven days. Farmers who have suffered 33 per cent damage are eligible for compensation. They will be provided agricultural input subsidy, he added. Sethi asked the collectors that the croplands already declared affected by cyclone Titli, flood, landslide and drought during the current year will not be included in the current assessment. IANS cd/prs New Delhi, Dec 19 : A Delhi court on Wednesday sent British national Christian Michel, the middleman accused in the Rs 3,600-crore AgustaWestland VVIP chopper deal, to judicial custody till December 28. Michel was presented before Special Judge Arvind Kumar on the expiry of his four-day custody with the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). He was extradited to India on December 4 from the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The court also reserved order on Michel's bail plea and said that it will pronounce order on his bail plea on December 22. Michel's counsel Aljo K. Joseph and Vishnu Sankar sought bail on the ground of parity as all other accused chargesheeted in the case are out on bail. The defence counsel said he would follow every condition imposed by the court if released on bail. The defence counsel told the court that no purpose would be served keeping him behind bars. The probe agency opposed Michel's bail plea saying that he is an influential person, enjoys proximity with highly placed persons and his conduct has remained evasive. Being a British citizen, there is every likelihood that if he is granted bail, he may not return to face trial. The apprehensions of CBI about his absconding from the process of law gets supports from his past conduct, the agency's counsel said. The CBI told the court that investigation in the case will be adversely affected if Michel was released on bail. Patna, Dec 19 : The CBI has filed a charge-sheet in a special court naming all accused in the infamous Muzaffarpur shelter home rape case, including jailed key accused Brajesh Thakur, an official said on Wednesday. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which is probing the Muzaffarpur shelter home case, filed a charge-sheet in special POCSO court. "A charge-sheet has been filed by the CBI against all accused," an official said. Meanwhile, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) has issued notices to Brajesh Thakur's wife Asha Thakur and son Rahul Anand. Both have been summoned to Patna for interrogation on December 24 and December 26 in connection with the case. Of the 42 girls lodged at the short-stay home run by the Brajesh Thakur's NGO, 34 were found to have been sexually assaulted. The crime came to light following a social audit by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, over six months ago. The Supreme Court is monitoring the CBI probe into the case. New Delhi, Dec 19 : Slamming the new Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Kamal Nath's comment on migrants from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on Wednesday said he should not forget about where he originally hails from. "Kamal Nath should remind himself where he actually belongs to. He has a connection with Kanpur and Kolkata. He came as an outsider in his constituency Chhindwara and won the elections," Sanjay Singh, Rajya Sabha MP from AAP, told the media. Immediately after taking oath as CM on Monday, Kamal Nath had told the media that his government would give incentives to those investors who provide 70 per cent of the jobs to the youth from Madhya Pradesh. He had also said that people from other states like Bihar and Madhya Pradesh take away the jobs of locals. "Earlier, it was Maharashtra and Gujarat who have been against migration of people from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar into those states. Now, Kamal Nath has come up with the same ideology. Congress should question him on what grounds he made such a statement and condemn it," Singh added. Bengaluru, Dec 19 : Karnataka's 111-year-old revered pontiff Shivakumara Swami of Siddaganga mutt at Tumakuru returned to the mutt from Chennai hospital, where he recently underwent a liver operation, an official said on Wednesday. "The pontiff has recovered from the surgery and is in good health," the mutt's administrative officer S. Vishwanath told IANS from Tumakuru, about 70km northwest from the state capital. The pontiff was flown to Chennai from Bengaluru on December 7 in an air ambulance for the operation to treat his liver and bile duct infection and was flown back after his recovery to Bengaluru on Wednesday. "The swami was able to travel by road to Tumakuru after he was airlifted to Bengaluru from Chennai," the official said. Known among his followers as a walking god and an incarnation of 12th century renowned social reformer Basava, the Lingayat seer is also the head of the Sree Siddaganga Education Society, which runs about 125 educational institutions in the state -- from engineering colleges to business schools. The over century-old Swamiji has been in and out of hospitals of late for treatment of symptoms related to his advanced age. Gandhinagar, Dec 19 : Eight candidates are fighting it out for the much-hyped byelection to the Jasdan assembly constituency, polling for which will be held on Thursday. All eyes are on the big two contenders from the BJP and Congress. The election was necessitated after cabinet minister Kunwarji Bavaliya quit the Congress to join the ruling BJP, which elevated him the same day recently. Jasdan in Saurashtra region's Rajkot district has been a pocket borough of the opposition Congress and Bavaliya, who is a prominent Koli community leader. The by-poll has gained significance in the backdrop of the BJP losing three of the Hindi heartland states in the recent state assembly elections. After the exit of Bawaliya, the Congress has fielded another strong candidate from the Koli community, Avshar Nakia, who is known to have a strong ground connect, which analysts say will help him give a good fight to the BJP. The Election Commission has deployed 1,150 personnel for Jasdan's 262 polling stations. Each polling station will have one presiding officer aided by three other personnel. "The observer, the Rajkot SP and the District Election Officer, have decided to appoint one micro observer. The three members have also identified 25 polling sttions where video cameras will be installed. There will be webcasting in some 24 polling stations also, said Murli Krishna, Chief Electoral Officer (CEO), Gujarat. The constituency has 2,32,236 voters comprising 1,22,180 male and 1,09,936 female voters. Besides that, there will be 120 services voters from various forces. "All security arrangements have been made. Today we have dispatched the men and material required for the by-poll," said Murli Krishna. New Delhi, Dec 19 : In a scathing attack at Congress, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Wednesday that the Congress has become more cunning since the Emergency and accused it of humiliating every institution, including courts and the Army. He also hit back at the opposition party for demanding a Joint Parliamentary Committee probe into the Rafale fighter jet deal even after the Supreme Court gave a clean chit to the government. The Prime Minister's attack came during his interaction with party workers from Puducherry, Vellore, Kanchipuram, Viluppuram and South Chennai through video-conferencing. "The Congress continuously attacked the Election Commission. They try to create an atmosphere of doubt against the pillar of democracy. However, when the same Election Commission declares results which they like, they seem to be fine with it," he said. He said not only the Election Commission, they have also humiliated the Army, the CAG and every institution important to democracy. "Take the case of courts. Recently they questioned a Supreme Court verdict just because they didn't like the decision. They tried to even impeach Chief Justice," he said. Modi said the last time when the Congress tried to threaten democracy, the people ensured it was stopped. "Reach out to people and tell them the Congress' DNA is still the same. Since the Emergency, they have become even more cunning. But India will not excuse Congress for playing with democracy. This has to be explained to the people," he said. He said the sunlight is the best disinfectant, similarly, information and awareness are important for democracy. "We should keep the people informed about the Congress party and its dangerous games. The perfect answer to undemocratic behaviour of the Congress is to strengthen democracy," he said. The Prime Minister said the opposition parties would do their best to mislead the people, but BJP workers need to counter their onslaught. "We need to improve rapport with people. BJP karyakartas stand out among all parties as most pleasant, informed and hard working. We need to reach out to all groups of people and convince them of the good work done." Responding to questions raised by the party workers on the reforms undertaken in the education sector since 2014, Modi said, "We are not only focusing on outlays, but on outcomes. We came up with the National Institutional Ranking Framework that ranks institutions based on objective criteria to ensure that we help institutions improve their quality and make them competitive." He said reforms are underway in the health sector too, with numerous AIIMS coming up in different states of the country. Guwahati, Dec 19 : Assam Forest and Environment Minister Parimal Suklabaidya on Wednesday visited Kaziranga National Park (KNP) and said security of the park will be enhanced. The minister's visit followed the killing of an adult male rhino in the park's Bagori Range on December 16. Officials said the incident took place in the Bhalukjan area of the Bagori Range. The carcass was found with its horn removed. This is the sixth incident of poaching in KNP in 2018. "The poachers disguised themselves as tourists," said the minister on Wednesday. The carcass of the rhino was first spotted by a tourist who was out on an elephant ride. "We will increase the manpower strength in the KNP soon," minister said. New Delhi, Dec 19 : India's civil aviation regulator on Wednesday said that aircraft engines manufacturer Pratt & Whitney (PW) has initiated steps to address the issue with its engines that eminated smoke inside aircraft's cabin. The development comes after a Jaipur-Kolkata IndiGo flight on December 10 had to make an emergency landing at Kolkata due to smoke inside the cabin and cockpit area. According to the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) Chief B.S. Bhullar, PW has informed the regulator about its plans to upload a software to fix the glitch which caused over heating of the engine's combustion chamber. Bhullar during a press interaction said that PW will soon be fixing the new issue with its engines that power the Airbus A320 new engine option (Neo) aircraft that are in service with GoAir and IndiGo. The global aircraft engines manufacturer is expected to resolve the glitch in GoAir by December 20 and IndiGo by January 5, 2019. IndiGo in a statement said: "Pratt (PW) has introduced a software upgrade to mitigate the problem. IndiGo's complete fleet will be retrofitted with the software upgrade within 3 weeks." New Delhi, Dec 19 : India's civil aviation regulator on Wednesday said that it has not found any safety concern with Jet Airways due to the financial strain being faced by the airline. According to the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) chief B.S. Bhullar, the regulator has been monitoring the airline for the past 4-5 months. The DGCA sought the information under its CAR (Civil Aviation Requirement) which relates to financial surveillance from safety perspective. Bhullar during a press interaction here said the regulator sought broad-based information from Jet Airways on its ability to maintain aircraft and schedule. The senior DGCA official said the information was sought every 15 days. Imphal, Dec 19 : Kishorechandra Wangkhem, a 45-year-old staff reporter of a local cable network, ISTV, who was detained under the National Security Act (NSA) in last week of November by the BJP-led coalition government in Manipur, has been sentenced to a 12-month jail term. The court sentencing came after he was arrested a second time within 24 hours over a Facebook post in which he had mocked Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Manipur Chief Minister N. Biren calling Biren the "puppet" of Modi. His first arrest was for attacking the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The Chief Judicial Magistrate (CJM), Imphal West, ordered his release after the first arrest on November 27 as his Facebook post did not amount to sedition. But, within a few hours, he was rearrested under the NSA. Lawyers said that the government should have challenged it in a higher court. They feel that a higher court will not take it seriously since the journalist was detained under the NSA wthout challenging the order of the CJM. As Manipur celebrated the birth anniversary of Rani of Jhansi, he reportedly resigned from the cable network and posted his Facebook message attacking Modi and Biren. He contended that the Rani had nothing to with Manipur and its history. Angered by the happenings, he is also said to have used some abusive words. However, the Press Council of India and the Indian Journalists Union strongly condemned the first attack, while support also came from the local journalists. The All Manipur Working Journalists' Union (AMWJU), however, refused to join the issue in the second instance of arrest. Ranjana Elangbam, his wife, said nobody came to his rescue. Brozendra Ningombam, President of the AMWJU and Editor in Chief of ISTV, said that the AMWJU does not get involved in issues which have nothing to do with the profession of journalism. Earlier this month, a review committee had approved the detention of Wangkhem under the NSA for one year. Congress leaders said that democracy has been murdered in Mannipur. State Congress spokesperson Khumkcham Joykishan said that the BJP does not tolerate dissenting voice and dared the BJP to arrest him since he has been speaking against the government. Lucknow, Dec 19 : In a bid to reach out to the far-flung areas and provide healthcare to people living in the countryside, India's largest online health camp, myUpchar, launched its "Saathi" app and "Health Card" in the state capital on Wednesday. "Under the new model, myUpchar has a partner in the operating villages along with a team of volunteers and support staff, who collect the basic details like weight, height, blood pressure, glucose, pulse and temperature, and shares those on the app with the doctor," an official said. During the launch event, the company declared that the users of this healthcare app are mostly from Lucknow, hence the launch event was organised in the capital city of Uttar Pradesh. In view of the upcoming trends of online healthcare services in different cities, myUpchar decided to launch it for the rural population. In the near future, myUpchar will be participating in the healthcare awareness and soon bring in e-clinic networks. "The focus of myUpchar is to solve the real healthcare problems in rural India where there are negligible healthcare facilities. Unlike other healthcare companies who serve only the elite class people, myUpchar is putting in every effort and hard work to solve the healthcare problems of the rural population in our country," portal's co-funder Rajat Garg said. Further elaborating, he said: "The demand for online healthcare services is more in Lucknow as compared to the other cities of India. Every month, 11 per cent of Lucknow's population has been seen urging for online healthcare services, which inspired us to launch 'Saathi' as well as 'Health Card' in Lucknow." Tehran, Dec 20 : Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on Wednesday said Washington cannot dictate its policies on regional countries for their relations with Iran. Rouhani made the remarks at Tehran's Mehrabad International Airport before leaving for Turkey, Xinhua news agency reported. He said the US has no longer any influence on relations between countries in the region, and it will no longer be able to dictate its policies to regional states, Press TV reported. Rouhani left Tehran for Ankara for an official two-day visit at the invitation of his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Rouhani will co-chair the fifth Turkey-Iran High Level Cooperation Council meeting in Ankara. He also hailed what he called Turkey's "firm" stance on unilateral US sanctions against the Islamic republic. Ties of Turkey, as friendly key regional player, are of high significance to Iran, he stressed. The number of people intending to retire in the next 12 months is estimated at 426,000, a 30% increase on the level seen in 2008 when it was 328,000, according to Roy Morgan Research. Men currently represent 220,000 intending retirees and women 206,000, the research found. Norman Morris, industry communications director at Roy Morgan, said additional pressures currently on retirement decisions are the declining real estate and stock market values which have the potential to delay retirement and encourage people to keep their jobs longer. Morris suggests there will be more pressure on government funding with increasing financial pressures. The average level of savings and superannuation for those intending to retire in the next 12 months is well below what is required to be able to lead what the Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia (ASFA) describes as a comfortable lifestyle," Morris said. "This will put more pressure on government funding for some time yet unless there are changes to eligibility rules, taxation or superannuation regulations. ASFA estimates that an individual would need $545k and a couple $640k for a comfortable lifestyle. Currently the average gross wealth of intending retirees is $331,000, up from $237,000 (40%) since 2008. Click here to enlarge. Intending retirees who own or are paying off their home have a major potential source of retirement funding, and with its tax exempt status, they have a considerable advantage over renters, even if values decline," Morris added. "To include the value of homes in retirement funding decisions is likely to take a major mind shift for many as the home is generally regarded as being sacrosanct and as such not to be involved in retirement funding. A major problem facing the Australian government and individuals is how to fund the retirement of an ageing population. Up to now, superannuation has been playing an increasing role in retirement funding and currently represents 69% of the gross wealth of intending retirees, up from 53% in 2008, according to Roy Morgan. Owner occupiers have a much higher potential source of retirement funding than renters. The average value of their homes has increased by 58% over the last ten years compared to only 37% for other investments. The status of leading Mosman agent Michael Coombs has become slightly clearer just days after McGrath Estate Agents ended its the franchise agreement on the Lower North Shore. The Coombs profile, along with four team members, came down from the McGrath group website this morning. Coombs has quit the LNS franchise, but yet to announce what his 2019 plans involve. Property Observer wrote earlier this week the franchise decision by head office meant the future of one of the McGrath group's top performers was in play. Coombs had previously held equity in the Mosman franchise but sold it back to the principals around 18 months ago. It allowed him the freedom to quit the McGrath office just days after McGrath head office gave their advisory that they'd be ending their agreement with the franchise principals who are listed as Dean Mackie, Piers van Hamburg and David Howe. Coombs has always rated highly with his sales tally among the McGrath agents, although his sales tally hasn't been public since he pulled out of the REB Top 100 ratings two years ago. Coombs ranked 26 in 2016 with $276 million in property sales. In 2015 with 13 year's experience, and three support staff his sales tally was $180 million. There was a $4 million average sale. Coombs sold 41 properties in 2014 for a $140 million total. McGrath is currently considering the "optimum" structure for the continuation of the McGrath presence in the key markets of Mosman, Neutral Bay, Chatswood and Northbridge. The cost cutting decision was couched has providing the opportunity of strengthening the profitability for the publicly listed estate agency. Startup Space is a unique chance for innovative entrepreneurs who are looking to change the future of the satellite connectivity landscape. SATELLITE Conference & Exhibition, the largest global satellite and space technology show, will be held May 6-9, 2019 at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington D.C. Startup Space is a unique chance for innovative entrepreneurs who are looking to change the future of the satellite landscape to make a real difference. This is the third year SATELLITE 2019 will be hosting Startup Space, a competition where entrepreneurs pitch their business and technology ideas to a panel of highly accomplished space professionals, investors, thought leaders, and fellow entrepreneurs. The event takes place all day on Tuesday, May 7, directly on the show floor, and is open to any of the 15,000 attendees. Out of hundreds of applicants, only twenty will be chosen to give a five-minute pitch for their company or product in front of a panel of judges, each followed by a Q&A between the judges and the contestants. The grand prize winner will receive: Private pitch meetings with major investors 1 free, full-week, full-access registration pass to the SATELLITE 2020 Conference & Exhibition An interview with SATELLITE 2019 Chairman, Jeffrey Hill, to be featured in Via Satellite magazine and more! Startup Space 2018 winner, Daniel Ceperley, Founder and CEO of LeoLabs, announced in July they had closed a $13 million Series A financing round led by global investors WERU Investment and Airbus Ventures, with participation from Space Angels and Horizon Ventures also. With this funding, LeoLabs will expand its network of next-generation radars for tracking small debris and satellites in LEO, and accelerate development of its ground-breaking LEO mapping and SSA platform. The deadline to apply to compete in the next Startup Space is December 31, 2018! Apply at: https://bit.ly/2Lt359m or http://www.SATShow.com/startup-space Are you a startup that wants to exhibit at SATELLITE 2019? The brand-new Startup Pavilion on the show floor has availability! If interested, contact Michael Cassinelli at mcassinelli@accessintel.com or +1-301-354-1691 or visit http://www.SATShow.com/startup-pavilion to learn more. SATELLITE 2019 will be held May 6-9, 2019 at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center located at 801 Mt Vernon Pl NW, Washington, D.C. 20001. Visit our website http://www.SATShow.com and register now and secure the lowest rates available. To apply for press credentials, visit http://www.SATShow.com/press-registration Follow SATELLITE 2019 LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/company/satellite-conference-exhibition/ Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/SATELLITEDC Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/SATELLITEDC (@SATELLITEDC, #SATShow) About SATELLITE 2019 SATELLITE unites 15,000 aerospace and connectivity thought leaders, entrepreneurs, executives, engineers, end-users and enthusiasts from over 100 countries for the largest and most important global satellite technology event of the year. Serving all industries looking to better their business operations or enhance their strategy through connectivity, the SATELLITE Conference and Exhibition will take place on May 6-9, 2019 at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington D.C. An exterior glimpse of the redesigned Annapolis, Md. office building. "The office now offers cutting-edge features, a sleek design and ample office space for leading businesses, said McLaren Engineering Group Vice President and Maryland Regional Director, David McLaren. McLaren Engineering Group has completed structural engineering work on a 22,000-square-foot office redevelopment project at 706 Giddings Ave. in Annapolis, Md., working with Solstice Partners, GriD Architects, Plano-Coudon, Bay Engineering and Campion Hruby. Through a complete redesign, the project team added 9,000 square feet to an existing 13,000-square-foot building, transforming it into Class A property, and improving the West Annapolis neighborhood. The $4 million project is the winner of the 2018 Urban Land Institute (ULI) Baltimore WaveMaker Award, which honors Marylands most successful real estate developments, and swept a variety of regional American Institute of Architects (AIA) awards. These 2018 awards, which recognize outstanding achievements in architectural design, include the Maryland Peoples Choice Award, Chesapeake Bays Honor Award, and a Baltimore Design Award. McLaren Engineering Group performed an initial feasibility study and condition assessment and worked to maintain the structural integrity of the floor framing. From there, the firm modified the sloped roof framing to convert it into occupiable office space and assisted with a vertical and horizontal expansion. This includes a new floor for additional offices, an outdoor terrace, plus a new lobby entrance and new stair and elevator locations to free up floor space. The structure now features linear planks, which subtly parallels a ships hull, highlighting Annapolis unique role as a maritime city. Were proud that the project has helped to revitalize this commercial section of West Annapolis and the office now offers cutting-edge features, a sleek design and ample office space for leading businesses, said McLaren Engineering Group Vice President and Maryland Regional Director, David McLaren. We were happy to partner with GriD Architects to bring a wholly unique vision to life. Since re-opening in 2018, 706 Giddings Ave. has attracted prestigious tenants including two national law firms and a private equity firm and has spurred two additional redevelopments nearby. Commenting on its unique, modern architecture and upscale features, GriD Architects Co-Founder and Principal, Alick Dearie, said, The intentionality of the design, paired with its attention to the surrounding context, allows the project to be a catalyst for the rest of the neighborhood. The West Annapolis neighborhood, which saw commercial growth stall for nearly a decade, has traditionally featured medical offices and boutique retail shops constructed during the 1960s and 70s. Identified as an area of opportunity in neighborhood studies, West Annapolis remains a gateway to the historic downtown, as it is highly trafficked yet retains walkable space. The 706 Giddings Ave. building capitalizes on that dynamic by offering outdoor seating, the neighborhoods first public bike rack and its first electrical vehicle charging station. Dearie continued, saying, This project elevates the neighborhoods existing design paradigm by implanting a modern tone that bridges the residential and commercial scales of the area. The building, owned by MRE Properties, was developed by Solstice Partners and designed by GriD Architects, with landscape architecture services from Campion Hruby, construction from Plano-Coudon and civil engineering by Bay Engineering, plus structural engineering from McLaren Engineering Group. About McLaren Engineering Group For over 40 years, McLaren Engineering Group has provided innovative, customized engineering solutions for more than 15,000 projects. With over 200 employees in 10 offices, McLaren is licensed in 49 states and serves 10 key markets. With experts in numerous engineering disciplines and a passion for creativity and out-of-the-box thinking McLaren can address any projects specific range of design requirements with technical excellence. McLaren has offices in Woodcliff Lake, N.J., New York City, N.Y., Albany, N.Y., Lehigh Valley, Pa., Middletown, Conn., Baltimore, Md., Roswell, Ga., Orlando, Fla., San Luis Obispo, Calif., and Oran, Algeria. http://www.mgmclaren.com. About GriD Architects The Annapolis, Md.-based GriD Architects, which boasts an extensive portfolio, is a firm dedicated to interconnectivity. The firm serves as an eager collaborator with its clients, other design professionals, engineers, artists, scientists and others. GriD Architects cares deeply about its profession and strives to balance the art of design with the craft of building. The firms work seeks to be a result of an incredible network of people, places and ideas. https://gridarchitects.com/. About Plano-Coudon Since 1998, Plano-Coudon has brought big-company sophistication, small-company flexibility, an engineers mindset and unparalleled enthusiasm to a broad range of construction projects. Based in Baltimore City, Md., Plano-Coudon is a contractor of choice for educational facilities from pre-schools to grad schools. We have developed deep expertise in healthcare, life sciences, mission critical, industrial, commercial, sustainable, residential and religious/nonprofit projects. Meanwhile, our Small Projects Division provides dedicated, expert service to clients in all sectors who need smaller construction jobs completed or building maintenance and support services. Plano-Coudon provides construction expertise, sound advice and outstanding performance in an environment that is positive and respectful. http://plano-coudon.com/. Susan Manzi, MD, MPH It is an honor to be serving as the Lupus Foundation of Americas Board Chair at such an important time in lupus research. Allegheny Health Network (AHN) announced today that Susan Manzi, MD, MPH, is now serving as chair of the Lupus Foundation of Americas national Board of Directors. Recognized as a national and international leader in lupus patient care and research, Dr. Manzi is a board-certified rheumatologist and co-founder of the AHN Lupus Center of Excellence at the AHN Autoimmunity Institute. In this role, Dr. Manzi is responsible for leading the Board to successful achievement of the mission, vision and strategic goals. Dr. Manzi has served the last 15 years as a member of the Lupus Foundation of Americas Medical-Scientific Advisory Council. As Medical Director for the Foundation for the last two years, she has led efforts to address gaps in education and the health care needs of people with lupus, and to advance the science and medicine of lupus. The Lupus Foundation of America is the oldest and largest national nonprofit voluntary health organization focused on improving the quality of life for people with lupus through programs of research, education, support and advocacy. In the Lupus Foundation of Americas announcement this fall of the appointment of Dr. Manzi as Board Chair, she was described as a lifelong, devoted researcher and clinician focused on lupus. She brings to the Board an understanding of the Foundations history, a mutual commitment to putting patients first and a shared vision for the organizations future as it accelerates the momentum in lupus research. Lupus is a chronic, autoimmune disease that can damage any part of the body (skin, joints, and/or organs inside the body). People of all races and ethnicities can develop lupus, although it is most common in women of childbearing age. It is estimated that at least 1.5 million Americans have lupus and more than 16,000 new cases are reported annually across the country. It is an honor to be serving as the Lupus Foundation of Americas Board Chair at such an important time in lupus research, said Dr. Manzi. Ive had the pleasure of being a part of the Foundation for many years working closely with the dedicated staff. The Foundation has a track record of boldly taking on the toughest challenges in lupus diagnosis, care, support and treatment and Im thrilled to be continuing this work. ### About the Allegheny Health Network Allegheny Health Network (AHN.org), a Highmark Health company, is an integrated healthcare delivery system serving the greater Western Pennsylvania region. The Network is composed of eight hospitals, including Allegheny General Hospital, its flagship academic medical center in Pittsburgh, Allegheny Valley Hospital in Natrona Heights, Canonsburg Hospital in Canonsburg, Forbes Hospital in Monroeville, Jefferson Hospital in Jefferson Hills, Saint Vincent Hospital in Erie, West Penn Hospital in Pittsburgh and Westfield Memorial Hospital in Westfield, NY. The Network provides patients with access to a complete spectrum of advanced medical services, including nationally recognized programs for primary and emergency care, cardiovascular disease, cancer care, orthopedic surgery, neurology and neurosurgery, womens health, diabetes and more. It also is home to a comprehensive research institute; Health + Wellness Pavilions; an employed physician organization, home and community-based health services and a group purchasing organization. The Network employs approximately 20,000 people, has more than 2,400 physicians on its medical staff and serves as a clinical campus for Drexel University College of Medicine, Temple University School of Medicine, and the Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine. About the Lupus Foundation of America The Lupus Foundation of America is the only national force devoted to solving the mystery of lupus, one of the world's cruelest, most unpredictable and devastating diseases, while giving caring support to those who suffer from its brutal impact. Through a comprehensive program of research, education, and advocacy, we lead the fight to improve the quality of life for all people affected by lupus. Learn more about the Lupus Foundation of America at lupus.org. For the latest news and updates, follow us on Twitter and Facebook. Whether its the needs of the power industry or the needs of our community, Ampirical is dedicated and committed to making a difference. By joining the sponsorship program, were able to showcase that commitment in a unique way. As a company that values the respect and safety of their employees, Ampirical has gone one step further by ensuring the safety of the community at large. By becoming a sponsor in California Adopt A Highway Program, Ampirical is keeping Californias highways safe, beautiful, and litter-free. Being reliable and compassionate is something that sets Ampirical apart in the electrical industry, and for this reason, Adopt A Highway Maintenance Corporatopm could not be more ecstatic to join forces. With the help of sponsors such as Ampirical, the San Diego community will no longer have to worry about unsightly litter obstructing traffic. Ryan Zellner, Marketing and PR Coordinator at Ampirical stated, Whether its the needs of the power industry or the needs of our community, Ampirical is dedicated and committed to making a difference. By joining the sponsorship program, were able to showcase that commitment in a unique way. Finding a company that supports highway cleanup efforts is something that should be celebrated after all, we all share the roads. Ampirical was established in 2006, and is respected in their industry for bringing complex and diverse electrical transmission and distribution projects to completion. They have formed relationships with their customers by incorporating their clients needs into each project while remaining within budgetary restrictions. For more information about Ampirical visit: http://www.ampirical.com For more information about the California Sponsor A Highway Program visit: http://www.adoptahighway.com Joshua Barrett, Branch Manager, Andrews Federal (second from the left in the back row) with SHAPE American Elementary students and staff. Andrews Federal Credit Union donated $900 to the SHAPE American Elementary School in Mons, Belgium for the purchase of the RAZ-KIDS software program. This program is designed to teach children how to read while testing reading comprehension along the way. Andrews Federal learned of the need for this program through its ongoing partnership with the school. This program will be used mainly with students who come from homes where English is not the primary language spoken. You cannot put a price on the ability to read, said Joshua Barrett, Branch Manager at the Chievres, Belgium branch, Watching these students use the program and learn brings me such joy. I am happy that we were able to provide this for them. About Andrews Federal Credit Union Andrews Federal Credit Union was founded in 1948 to serve the needs of military and civilian personnel by providing a vast array of financial products and services. With over $1.7 billion in assets, Andrews Federal has grown to serve more than 126,000 members in the District of Columbia, Joint Base Andrews (MD), Springfield, Virginia (VA), Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst (NJ), and military installations in central Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands. In addition, the Credit Union serves as a financial partner with many select employee groups in Maryland, the District of Columbia, Virginia and New Jersey. To learn more about Andrews Federal Credit Union and its community involvement, or to become a member, call 800.487.5500 or visit http://www.andrewsfcu.org New Chief Manufacturing and Supply Chain Officer at ARCA, Stefano Parmegiani "Stefano is a great addition to ARCA," says ARCA CEO Mort O'Sullivan. Stefano has a great deal of experience in identifying opportunities to streamline the manufacturing process. We're very excited to put ARCA in the position to benefit from his knowledge and leadership." ARCA, a leading provider of cash and check automation technology for financial and retail businesses, is pleased to announce the hiring of Stefano Parmegiani as Chief Manufacturing and Supply Chain Officer. Parmegiani has over 25 years of experience in Lean Production, Supply Chain Management, Industrial Engineering, Quality and Product Engineering. Parmegiani comes to ARCA from Safilo SpA, the second largest global manufacturer of eyewear with 29 brands such as Polaroid, Dior, Fendi and Carrera. He was formerly the Director of Operations and Product Engineering for Made in Italy Acetate and Injected Eyewear division and was responsible for manufacturing at two industrial sites in Italy. His work experience also includes the Director of Operations at Franke, an international industrial manufacturer, and many leadership positions within Whirlpool Europe. "Stefano is a great addition to ARCA," says ARCA CEO Mort O'Sullivan. "Having a highly efficient manufacturing and supply chain is critical to delivering our products to customers. It's one of the areas that really impacts the success of any company in so many ways. Stefano has a great deal of experience in identifying opportunities to streamline the manufacturing process. We're very excited to put ARCA in the position to benefit from his knowledge and leadership." "One of the things I've really enjoyed during my career is leading diverse teams of people in finding new ways to drive results by working together more effectively," says Parmegiani. "ARCA is a global company, and while that presents logistical challenges, it also yields great reward when we find ways to leverage on our strengths and potential synergies. ARCA makes great products that provide great value for customers. I look forward to working with my new colleagues to even further improve our ability to develop and produce high quality products." Parmegiani holds a Master Engineering degree in Electronics from Politecnico di Milano. He has also studied finance and business administration at SDA Bocconi School of Management in Milan, and leadership development at the IMD Business School in Switzerland and The University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Parmegiani will oversee all manufacturing and supply chain operations from ARCA's R&D Center of Excellence located in Ivrea and Bollengo Italy. He and his wife and daughter live in the Milan/Varese area. Promotions are always cause for celebration at Lucas Group, as we truly value the opportunity to advance the lives and careers of our Associates. Lucas Group, ranked third on Forbes Best Professional Recruiting Firms list for 2018, recently announced several internal company promotions and reorganizations. Promotions are always cause for celebration at Lucas Group, as we truly value the opportunity to advance the lives and careers of our Associates, said Lucas Group Chief People Officer, Carolina King. These Associates earned their new roles through hard work and dedication and we are excited to see these leaders continue to move Lucas Group to the forefront of executive recruiting. Here are the Atlanta-based Associates who are on the rise: After a significant year that saw him celebrate his 10th anniversary and spearhead the implementation of Bullhorn, Barry Banks will formally take over all Project Management for both Marketing and IT Projects as IT Project Manager. Since March 2017, Clay Bateman has played a key role in defining operation excellence for helpdesk support and has been elevated to Enterprise Operations Manager in recognition of those efforts. Just over a year into her tenure at Lucas Group, Felicia Kelley has been promoted to Staff Accountant to better reflect the increased responsibility she has taken on in both invoice processing and general accounting items for the department. While Jason Henderson has informally led Lucas Groups IT systems for the last 12 years, he now officially manages the department and will become more proactive in the areas of systems integration and management as the Network and Systems Manager. Lucas Group also announced some key reporting announcements that will give more responsibility and ownership to two principal Associates: Erica Frost, HR Business Partner, has taken on full responsibility of performance management workflow, compensation and employee relations. Ana Hey-Colon, Director of Training, increases her management role, further demonstrating Lucas Groups commitment to integrating the developmental and technological training passages for the organization. About Lucas Group Lucas Group is North Americas premier executive search firm. Since 1970, our culture and methodologies have driven superior results. We assist clients ranging in size from small to medium-sized businesses to Fortune 500 companies find transcendent, executive talent; candidates fully realize their ambitions; and associates find professional success. To learn more, please visit Lucas Group at http://www.lucasgroup.com and connect with us on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Backroads guests biking in Croatia It seems people want to get out in front of their New Years goals this year and plan early for 2019 adventures, said Backroads President and Founder, Tom Hale. Europe and Africa are hot destinations for active travel, particularly for families traveling together. Backroads, the leader in adventure travel, announced the most sought-after destinations for 2019. Europe topped the list, as Backroads guests are showing particular enthusiasm to explore classics like France, Italy, Portugal, Scotland and Spain, plus the newest Mediterranean hot-spot of Croatia. Interest in Active Africa Safaris is strong, inspiring new Backroads trips in Tanzania, Zambia and Botswana. Argentina, Iceland and New Zealand remain extremely popular with travelers of all ages. These hot-spots are some of the most sought-after 2019 destinations for early-booking. Patagonia - Argentina Dolomites Italy North and South Islands New Zealand Lofoten Islands Norway Camino de Santiago - Spain and Portugal Mallorca and Menorca Islands - Spain It seems people want to get out in front of their New Years goals this year and plan early for 2019 adventures, said Backroads President and Founder, Tom Hale. Europe and Africa are hot destinations for active travel, particularly for families traveling together. With these trends in mind, were introducing some exciting new trips in 2019, including yoga and expanded options for families with older kids. A pioneer in active and adventure travel, Backroads celebrates its 40th anniversary in 2019. Backroads was founded on the principles of creating extraordinary experiences for its guests, being the most guest-focused travel company on the planet and incorporating the highest quality possible into the philosophy and fabric of the company. For a complete listing of Backroads Adventures tours, visit http://www.backroads.com or call 1-800-462-2848. About Backroads Backroads was founded in 1979 by Tom Hale and has been a leading innovator in active and adventure travel for 40 years. The company hosts thousands of guests each year, 75% of whom are repeat guests or referrals from past guests, in hundreds of locations across the globe. Backroads is a founding member of the Adventure Collection. For more information, please visit backroads.com or call 800-462-2848 daily, 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., Pacific time. BioEnergetic Works Takes the Guessing Out of Your Health "My hope is that more pharmacists will soon start using bioenergetic screening, as it can ensure successful medication therapeutic outcomes and save money by avoiding drugs that dont work McClain said. It can also help uncover a condition that patients were unaware they had. Using non-invasive acupressure points on her patients fingers and toes, Dr. McClain assesses the health of all the organ systems in the body. Once the data is collected an algorithm determines the organs that are causing patients health issues. Bioenergetic screening has been active for more than thirty years, but is a fairly new technology in The United States. In fact, Dr. McClain is the first and only bioenergetic pharmacist to practice in the United States. However, the doctors McClain works with are open to bioenergetic science and are appreciative of her ability as a pharmacist to be proactive on the medication side. Every patient is required to bring any medication they have taken in last 30 days or intend to take in next 30 days. Using radiowave signals unique to each medication, McClain is able to see the patients organ systems energetically react to the medication and determine if it is a therapeutic match. During a standard visit, a patient is given a brass rod to hold, while a connector is placed on their chest. Then, McClain uses a probe to test the acupressure points on the patients fingers and toes. These pressure points are connected to specific organs in the body. The BioScan machine tests the function of each organ, the nervous system, cardiovascular system, hormonal system, allergy, auto-immune system, lymphatic system and more. Following the test, the machine produces a detailed color-coded report, noting which organs/systems are healthy, weakened, stressed or critical. The report also analyzes medications using radio-wave frequencies and specifically matches them with any condition the machine may detect. Fortunately, BioEnergetics uses a patients own body to help balance their organs and other biological systems. This process saves patients a lot of time and money by offering the best natural and/or pharmaceutical solutions that suit their individual bodies. Patients know which medicines will actually help them before they ingest their first pill. My hope is that more pharmacists will soon start using bioenergetic screening, as it can ensure successful medication therapeutic outcomes and save money by avoiding drugs that dont work McClain said. It can also help uncover a condition that patients were unaware they had. Over the years, Dr. McClain has helped patients and doctors discover critical problems early, including hypertension, diabetes, high blood pressure, depression, fibroids and precancerous conditions. Dr. McClain offers a range of bioenergetic screening packages. The most popular is the Bioscan Introductory Assessment and Solution Package which is $444 and includes a follow up. A simple wellness scan is $111. Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA) and Health Spending Accounts (HSA) holders can use their funds to cover the testing. To learn more about the BioEnergetic Works process and Dr. Ferryl B.McClain, call her office at (281) 915-0793, visit https://www.bioeworks.com email info@bioeworks.com. About BioEnergetics Works Pharmacist Dr. Ferryl McClain, BioEnergetic Works, LLC is located at 9402 Highway 6 South, Suite 400 in Missouri City, TX. BioEnergetic screenings provide patients an alternative form of comprehensive health analysis. Through the use of acupressure points, these screenings reveal physical and emotional stressors that cause imbalances in organs, glands, and other body systems. Using radio wave frequency matching, patients discover how they are being impacted by their prescriptions and supplements, and test results will provide recommended solutions in real time. To schedule an appointment, go to https://www.bioeworks.com The County of Orange government consists of 23 departments and is responsible for its 3 million residents. Burwood Group will deliver services to support the Countys IT and technology environments. Burwood was selected due to their culture of innovation, technical expertise, and experience in deploying and managing large voice solutions." Burwood Group, a leading IT consulting and integration firm, announced today it is part of the SAIC team awarded a $77 million IT services contract by the County of Orange. Burwood Group will lead the redesign of the Countys voice environment, which includes the design, implementation, and management of the Countys upcoming infrastructure. We are extremely proud to be part of the team selected to help the County of Orange achieve its long-term, strategic technology goals, said Joanna Robinson, SVP of Technology at Burwood Group. Burwood is at the forefront of communication and collaboration technology innovation and brings strong expertise in designing, implementing, and managing our customers unified communications. We are confident that our work alongside SAIC will help increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the County and enhance the services received by its constituents and businesses. Under the contract, Burwood Group will deliver services to support the Countys IT and technology environments in voice communications and IT service management. Burwood Group was selected by SAIC to join the bid for the County of Orange contract for its extensive expertise in designing and implementing Ciscos Unified Communications Suite. Burwood Group is a Cisco Gold-Master Collaboration Specialization Partner and also holds the Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise (UCCE) Specialist certification. Burwood Group has a long track record of successfully monitoring, managing, and operating very large Cisco Unified Communications installations from its Voice Operations Center in San Diego, CA. SAIC is excited to work with Burwood Group on the implementation of an on-premises voice solution for the County of Orange, said Bob Genter, SAIC SVP and General Manager of the Federal Civilian Customer Group. Burwood was selected due to their culture of innovation, technical expertise, and experience in deploying and managing large voice solutions. The County of Orange will have a reliable, secure, and cost-effective unified communication system built with the best that technology has to offer. The County of Orange government consists of 23 departments and is responsible for its 3 million residents. The county serves as a regional service provider and planning agency whose core businesses include public safety, public health, environmental protection, regional planning, public assistance, social services, and aviation. The SAIC team will provide IT managed services and solutions to agencies and departments within the County. The firm-fixed-price contract has a three-year base period of performance valued at approximately $51 million, two one-year options, and a total contract value of approximately $77 million, if all options are exercised. Work will be primarily performed in Santa Ana, California. About Burwood Group Burwood Group, Inc. is an IT consulting and integration firm. We help forward-thinking leaders design, use, and manage technology to transform their business and improve outcomes. Our services in consulting, technology, and operations are rooted in business alignment and technical expertise in cloud, automation, security, and collaboration. Burwood Group was founded in Chicago, IL and is celebrating 20 years in business. Today, Burwood includes 250 employees and seven U.S. offices including a 24x7 Operations Center in San Diego, CA. Whether you are developing strategy, deploying technology, or creating an operational model, Burwood is a dedicated partner. To learn more, visit https://www.burwood.com. About SAIC SAIC is a premier technology integrator providing full life cycle services and solutions in the technical, engineering, intelligence, and enterprise information technology markets. SAIC is Redefining Ingenuity through its deep customer and domain knowledge to enable the delivery of systems engineering and integration offerings for large, complex projects. SAICs more than 15,000 employees are driven by integrity and mission focus to serve customers in the U.S. federal government. Headquartered in Reston, Virginia, SAIC has annual revenues of approximately $4.5 billion. For more information, visit http://saic.com. For ongoing news, please visit our newsroom. For additional information: Colleen Barry Director, Marketing 312-327-4628 cbarry(at)burwood.com We are thrilled to recognize and honor top-performing partners who excel at meeting the needs of our joint customers. The CallTower Partner Awards celebrate our partners' achievements and exemplify how together we deliver industry-leading UCaaS solutions to maximize customers communication needs CallTower, a global leader in delivering cloud-based enterprise-class unified communications and collaboration solutions, announced today the winners of their first-annual Partner of the Year Awards for 2018. CallTower is celebrating channel professionals that have excelled in developing their partnerships with CallTower and growing mutual business opportunities and customers. CallTower is committed to delivering industry-leading UCaaS and collaboration solutions that enable mutual growth with partners. The 2018 CallTower Partner of the Year Awards recognizes partners for their outstanding performance and accomplishments that raise the standard for business excellence and customer satisfaction. Winners were chosen for their excellent financial performance, innovative solution selling and for driving meaningful business results for shared customers. CallTowers inaugural award winners are: Mike Dlug, Stratus IP; Kathleen Waters, Creekview; Steve Grimsley, ARG; Georgia Graves, Cobweb Industries; John Protass, Singlepath, Phil Spaer, CommQuotes; Robert Julian, Diversitel Networks; and Ali Niroo, CNSG. We are thrilled to recognize and honor top-performing partners who excel at meeting the needs of our joint customers. The CallTower Partner Awards celebrate our partners' achievements and exemplify how together we deliver industry-leading UCaaS solutions to maximize customers communication needs," said CallTowers Chief Revenue Officer, William Rubio. We have an extraordinary opportunity in front of us, with the vast number of companies looking to move to cloud-based business communication solutions. We are excited to continue working with our partners to deliver powerful business outcomes that enable our joint customers to transform and accelerate their businesses About CallTower CallTower exists to enable people to easily connect to transact business communications. Since its inception in 2002, CallTower has become a leading provider of cloud-based, enterprise-class Unified Communications solutions for growing organizations worldwide. CallTower provides, integrates and supports industry-leading, cloud-based, Unified Communications and Collaboration solutions, including Cisco Unified Communications Manager, Native Skype for Business, Microsoft Teams, CT Cloud, CT Cloud Boost, Office 365 and Zoom Video Communications for business customers. CallTower enhances our clients strategic and operational capabilities by integrating VoIP service, mobile applications, email hosting, unified messaging, instant messaging, audio, web and video conferencing, collaboration tools, contact center, cloud services and global networks solutions into one reliable platform. Im so proud of the collective efforts of the CMG team, said Steve Peck, President, CMG. Its been wonderful to see the team embrace family-focused workplace initiatives and flexibility. FirstService Residential, the leading property management company in North America, announced that its partner company, Community Management Group in Charleston, South Carolina, has been honored with a 2018 When Work Works Award for exemplary workplace practices. The prestigious When Work Works Award is part of the Society for Human Resource Managements (SHRMS) When Work Works project, a national initiative that helps employers become more successful by transforming the way they view and adopt effective and flexible workplaces. The award recognizes employers of all sizes across the country that are excelling at offering a variety of top-rated employee initiatives such as work-life fit policies, flexible scheduling and transition to parenthood programs. The award goes beyond work-life programs and includes initiatives that address the additional evidence-based aspects of effective workplaces, such as opportunities for learning, a culture of respect and trust, and job autonomy. Im so proud of the collective efforts of the CMG team, said Steve Peck, President, CMG. Its been wonderful to see the team embrace family-focused workplace initiatives and flexibility. A business which places service to one another above service to the bottom line will naturally attract and retain service-focused people. We see flexibility to bend and flow with the needs of a dynamic family-centric team, as the essential core of service. Family and flexibility have become part of our DNA. CMG was evaluated on factors associated with employee health, well-being and engagement: opportunities for learning; a culture of trust; work-life fit; supervisor support for work success; autonomy and satisfaction with earnings, benefits and opportunities for advancement. The organizations developed HR policies and programs to support and maintain this environment, and they are reaping the benefits with increased retention, productivity and overall success for their investment, said Lisa Horn, SHRM vice president, congressional affairs. The award is earned after a rigorous assessment that emphasizes the real-life experiences of employees and incorporates national benchmarks of employer practices from the National Study of Employers and the employee experiences from the National Study of the Changing Workforce. Two-thirds of an organizations winning score is based on a survey of its employees. ~ http://www.fsresidential.com ~ About FirstService Residential FirstService Residential is North America's largest manager of residential communities and the preferred partner of HOAs, community associations and strata corporations in the U.S. and Canada. FirstService Residential's managed communities include low-, mid- and high-rise condominiums and cooperatives, single-family homes, master-planned, lifestyle and active adult communities, and rental and commercial properties. With an unmatched combination of deep industry experience, local market expertise and personalized attention, FirstService Residential delivers proven solutions and exceptional service that add value, enhance lifestyles and make a difference, every day, for every resident and community it manages. FirstService Residential is a subsidiary of FirstService Corporation, a North American leader in the property services sector. For more information, visit http://www.fsresidential.com. About When Work Works When Work Works is a national initiative led by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) to help businesses of all sizes and types become more successful by transforming the way they view and adopt effective and flexible workplaces. When Work Works is one of the foremost providers of resources, rigorous research and best practices on workplace effectiveness and flexibility in the nation. The initiative administers the prestigious annual When Work Works Award, which recognizes exemplary employers for creating effective workplaces to increase business and employee success. Visit http://www.whenworkworks.org and follow us on Twitter @WhenWorkWorks. Consumer Health Digest is celebrating the 15 years of existence these days. This is a true milestone that speaks in favor of the reputation and tradition this brand has developed through time. Over the years, the platform has become the leader in the industry of online health information and a brand that consumers trust. It is not an exaggeration to call the last 15 years of Consumer Health Digest glorious. Allow us to use this special occasion and take a moment to look back at the rich history of the platform and see how it helped improve the quality of life of its readers. Why Consumer Health Digest is a Trusted Brand Ever since day one, Consumer Health Digest has had a simple mission deliver the visitors valuable, scientific-based, and evidence-checked health information. The objective was to create content that can boost the readers motivation to take better care of their health and wellbeing. The information offered on the platform is focusing on various health conditions and hot trending topics. A large portion of the website is dedicated to health product reviews so that the users can know which products can be truly helpful. The reason why people trust the information found on Consumer Health Digest is that it is always accurate and fact-checked. They know this platform offers comprehensive information regarding health products and topics presented in an understandable way. It is the key to why the website manages to expand its base of regular visitors every day. Growth & Analytics Consumer Health Digest owes its popularity and status of the industry leaders to the visitors. The statistics are impressive and clearly show that web users from around the world trust this brand. In 2018, the website had more than 34 million pageviews and over 21 million sessions. If you translate to it daily statistics, you find that more than 80,000 people are visiting the website every day. Even more important is that more than 15% of the visitors were returning to the platform. Finally, the length of an average session was one minute and eight seconds. An average user read 1.64 pages of the website which is another impressive figure. The presence on social media is also a vital factor of Consumer Health Digests popularity. With over 155K subscribers on YouTube, hundreds of useful videos, and millions of views, this platforms channel is extremely reputable among the users. The platform is also present on Instagram, Pinterest, and other social media, and ensures to offer different, but comprehensive health information across all channels. Top Contributors The success Consumer Health Digest achieved over the years would not be possible without its contributors. The entire staff of the website is extremely aware of the sensitivity of any topic related to health. This is why the platform gathers top experts in each field, including medicine, nutrition, fitness, and healthy lifestyle in general. Some of the most reputable contributors include: Dr. Michael Lam, Dr. Stacy Friedman, Dr. Sarah Brewer and more.. Aside from industry professionals, the platform also gathers experienced health writers and editors. About Health Awareness Program Consumer Health Digest is focused on helping customer manage their health more effectively, but the creators of the platform are well aware they cant do everything on their own. It is why they are proud of the Health Awareness Program they started. The goal of this program is to collaborate with other online participants in a joint goal of informing the public and raise health awareness throughout the entire world. Everyone who is willing to join is welcome, including members of the health community, as well as social influencers, and self-driven people sharing the same vision. Mentions on Reputable Websites As one of the leaders in the health community, Consumer Health Digest realizes the importance of partnering with other reputable websites. It is the top content value and reliable health information offered that secured numerous mentions of this website on other reputable platforms. Dr. Mercola, One Green Planet, and Mother Nature Network are only some of the mentions that are worth noting. Apart from that, Consumer Health Digest is often referenced by popular websites with huge daily traffic and popularity. This list includes but is not limited to Elite Daily, Cosmopolitan, Greatist, Business Insider, and the Popsugar. Check out the Press & Highlights section - https://www.consumerhealthdigest.com/press The Road Ahead: Looking Forward To 2019 Health Awareness program is the latest idea that originated from Consumer Health Digest and the platform will be focused on its further development with a particular emphasis on encouraging as many people as possible to join the program. Apart from that, the platform will continue to provide content of exceptional value that readers can rely on. Consumer Health Digest will stick to providing trusted and evidence-backed health information and focus on designing and implementing new ideas that can contribute to health awareness and help to improve better user health management. About Consumer Health Digest Consumer Health Digest is a commercial digital content website presented to individuals looking to improve overall health and well-being. All of the content appearing on the website is produced, selected, and reviewed by health writers and editors. Their mission is to provide the world with better access to accurate and easily understandable health information. They focus on providing valuable health information and savings on health-related products for better managing your health. Read more - https://www.consumerhealthdigest.com/general/aboutus.html Connect With Us https://www.facebook.com/ConsumerHealthDigest https://www.youtube.com/user/ConsumerHealthDigest https://www.pinterest.com/ConsmerHDigest/ https://twitter.com/ConsumerHDigest https://www.instagram.com/consumerhealthdigest/ Taino undergoes a sea trial (Photo provided by VT Halter Marine). From a business standpoint, Taino and El Coqui are key components of our integrated logistics offerings that are bringing speed to market and creating a competitive advantage for our customers in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean. Crowley Maritime Corp. has taken delivery of Taino the second of two of the worlds first combination container/roll on-roll off (ConRo) ships powered by liquefied natural gas (LNG) from shipbuilder VT Halter Marine Inc., of Pascagoula, Miss. Taino will soon join sister ship El Coqui, which was delivered in July, in providing fast, reliable and environmentally friendly shipping and logistics services between Jacksonville, Fla., and San Juan, Puerto Rico. This major milestone marks the final chapter in construction of Crowleys $550 million investment in the two newly built, Commitment Class ships and associated port upgrades. The resulting ships and port facilities have elevated the companys Puerto Rico supply chain services to world-class standards as a new era begins in the companys longtime logistics services for the island. Taino, like El Coqui, will be operated by Crowleys global ship management group. She is scheduled to make her maiden voyage to San Juan on Jan. 8 from her dedicated U.S. mainland port in Jacksonville, JAXPORT. The new Crowley ships, built specifically for the Puerto Rico trade, are 219.5 meters (720 feet), 26,500 deadweight tons (DWT), and can transport up to 2,400 twenty-foot-equivalent container units (TEUs) at a cruising speed of 22 knots. A wide range of container sizes and types can be accommodated, including 53-foot by 102-inch-wide, high-capacity containers, up to 300 refrigerated containers, and a mix of about 400 cars and larger vehicles in the enclosed and ventilated Ro/Ro decks. This type of shipboard garage is offered exclusively by Crowley in the trade. I want to congratulate and thank all the men and women at Crowley and VT Halter Marine who helped to bring these marvelous new ships to life, said Tom Crowley, company chairman and CEO. They are shining examples of maritime innovation and craftsmanship available right here in the United States thanks to the Jones Act. From a business standpoint, Taino and El Coqui are key components of our integrated logistics offerings that are bringing speed to market and creating a competitive advantage for our customers in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean, Crowley said. With our own vessels and proprietary transportation and distribution network, were reducing friction and complexity while increasing the velocity of customers goods moving to market and reducing their landed costs. VT Halter Marine is proud to be part of the Crowley Commitment Class project, said VT Halter Marine President and Chief Executive Officer Ron Baczkowski. We applaud Crowley Maritime Corp.s vision, leadership, and commitment to provide technologically advanced and environmentally friendly ships to support its Puerto Rico trade. Construction was managed in the shipyard by Crowley Solutions. This team included naval architects and engineers from company subsidiary Jensen Maritime. "The men and women of American Maritime Officers stand with Crowley in celebrating the Taino's commencement of service in the Jones Act Puerto Rico trade," said Paul Doell, national president of AMO, the union that represents the licensed officers aboard the Commitment Class ships. "We're proud to be part of Crowley's expanding cargo service between the mainland and Puerto Rico and the ongoing innovation under the U.S. flag as America's next-generation fleet of LNG-powered vessels continues to grow." Taino is named for the native Puerto Ricans who lived off the land with great appreciation and respect for their environment, and El Coqui is named for the popular indigenous frog on the island. Fueling the ships with LNG reduces emissions significantly, including a 100-percent reduction in sulphur oxide (SOx) and particulate matter (PM); a 92-percent reduction in nitrogen oxide (NOx); and a reduction of carbon dioxide (CO2) of more than 35 percent per container, compared with current fossil fuels. Working with Eagle LNG Partners, the ships are bunkered from a shoreside fuel depot at JAXPORT. The companys Isla Grande terminal upgrades included a new 900-foot-long, 114-foot-wide concrete pier and associated dredging needed to accommodate the two new ships; three new ship-to-shore gantry cranes; expanding terminal capacity for handling refrigerated containers; paving 15 acres to accommodate container stacking; adding containers and associated handling equipment to its fleet; installing a new electrical substation to provide power for the new gantry cranes; constructing a new seven-lane exit gate for increased efficiency; installing hardware required for a new, state-of-the-art terminal operating software system, and more. The Jones Act is a federal law that regulates maritime commerce in the United States. The Jones Act requires goods shipped between U.S. ports to be transported on ships that are built, owned and operated by United States citizens or permanent residents. Also known as the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, the law is vitally important to maintaining a strong U.S. maritime capability. Details, photos and videos about the achievement constructing the U.S. Jones Act ships and related upgrades under the Commitment Class project can be found at this project microsite. Crowley has served Puerto Rico since 1954, longer than any other U.S. shipping company. About Crowley Jacksonville-based Crowley Holdings Inc., a holding company of the 126-year-old Crowley Maritime Corporation, is a privately held family and employee-owned company that provides marine solutions, energy and logistics services in domestic and international markets. Crowley operates under four business units: Crowley Logistics, a singular ocean liner and logistics supply chain division; Crowley Shipping, which encompasses ownership, operations and management of conventional and dual fuel (LNG) vessels, including tankers, container ships, multipurpose, tugboats and barges; Crowley Fuels, a fuel transportation, distribution and sales division that also provides liquefied natural gas (LNG) and related services; and Crowley Solutions, which focuses on government services, including vessel management for government agencies, as well as engineering, project management, naval architecture through its subsidiary Jensen Maritime, and marine salvage and emergency response through its 50 percent ownership in Ardent Global. Additional information about Crowley, its subsidiaries and business units may be found at http://www.crowley.com. Laura Blanco, Director of Sales for Cruise Planners, accepts the Top Host Agency U.S. and Top Host Agency Worldwide for Sandals and Beaches Resorts on behalf of Cruise Planners. We wont stop until our brand is synonymous with all things travel - resorts, land travel and cruises, said Michelle Fee, CEO and Founder of Cruise Planners. Cruise Planners, an American Express Travel Representative, ranks No. 1 not only in the U.S., but in the world in sales for Sandals Resorts International. At the 17th annual Sandals Travel Agency Recognition (S.T.A.R.) Awards held recently at Sandals Ochi Beach Resort, Sandals awarded Cruise Planners the following top honors: Top Host Agency U.S. for Sandals and Beaches Resorts Top Host Agency Worldwide for Sandals and Beaches Resorts Best of the Best for Sandals and Beaches Resorts We wont stop until our brand is synonymous with all things travel - resorts, land travel and cruises, said Michelle Fee, CEO and Founder of Cruise Planners. Being named #1 in the world for Sandals and Beaches Resorts is a phenomenal testament to the dedication our team has put into building partnerships with major all-inclusive resorts, tour operators and destinations, expanding our land training programs and investing in technology tools. This continued investment into our network has led to our travel advisors continued sales growth in this segment. Sandals has done an incredible job spreading brand awareness worldwide, and when travelers see Sandals, they are encouraged to use a travel advisor and trust Cruise Planners advisors to best plan their trip. Cruise Planners, the nations most-highly decorated travel company, has a longstanding partnership with Sandals Resorts, the Worlds Leading All-Inclusive Company for 23 consecutive years. Cruise Planners travel advisors can become Certified Sandals Specialists at Cruise Planners annual Convention and local trainings and regularly take part in Sandals and Beaches Resorts FAM trips. Gary Sadler, Senior Vice President of Sales, Sandals and Beaches Resorts, shared a special message with Cruise Planners which enters its 25th year of business in 2019: On behalf of all of us at Sandals and Beaches Resorts, I would like to congratulate you, Cruise Planners, on 25 years of doing business. Twenty-five years in the travel industry is quite some time to be doing business and you guys have done the most amazing job, said Sadler. You have helped to shape the travel industry and you have helped to make the travel industry better than it was 25 years ago. About Cruise Planners, an American Express Travel Representative: Cruise Planners, an American Express Travel Representative, is the nations largest home-based travel agent franchise network in the travel industry. Cruise Planners operates a network of more than 2,000 franchise owners who independently book vacation and travel experiences for their clients. Headquartered in Coral Springs, Fla. since 1994, Cruise Planners supports its network of franchise owners with innovative marketing, booking and technology tools, professional development and training with the industrys top executives. Cruise Planners and has been named the No.1 travel franchise by Entrepreneur magazine for 15 consecutive years and was recently featured in Entrepreneur as one of the top 30 franchise innovators in technology. Consistently named as one of the Top Women-Owned Businesses by the South Florida Business Journal, Cruise Planners is on the Inc. 5000 list as one of the fastest-growing private companies in America, has been ranked as the #1 travel franchise by Franchise Business Review for 6 years and is recognized as one of the Top Workplaces by the Sun Sentinel. Cruise Planners has achieved top producer status with every major cruise line including Royal Caribbean International, Norwegian Cruise Line, Princess Cruises, Carnival Cruise Line, Celebrity Cruises, Holland America Line, MSC Cruises, Viking Cruises, Uniworld Boutique River Cruise Collection and Regent Seven Seas Cruises, as well as many land vendors such as Travel Impressions and Sandals and Beaches Resorts. As an American Express Travel Representative, Cruise Planners maintains a reputation for quality and offers exclusive American Express Travel benefits such as Pay with Points. Cruise Planners has earned the American Express Travel Representative Excellence Award since 2004, as well as numerous marketing, technology, franchise and philanthropy awards including an International Franchise Association FranTech award for innovation, Magellan Awards from Travel Weekly and Travvy Awards from travAlliance media. Cruise Planners celebrates diversity and supports are troops as one of the Top 50 franchises for Veterans according to GI magazine, the Top Franchise Brand for Veterans according to Franchise Business Review, one of the Top 25 franchises for African-Americans by Black Enterprise magazine and a member of the International Gay & Lesbian Travel Association. Visit our website, http://www.cruiseplanners.com, for more information or to view the complete list of awards and honors. Stay in Touch: Media can stay up-to-date with Cruise Planners by visiting our media room or Socially Yours page for social media updates and handles. For additional information or to make reservations, vacationers should locate a travel advisor near them. For those interested in becoming a franchise owner, please visit the Cruise Planners franchise website. Media Contact: Caitlin Gardner, Director of Corporate Communications and Digital Strategy Cruise Planners, an American Express Travel Representative CGardner@cruiseplanners.com 954-344-8060 Drucker + Falk wins big at Best Places to Work 2019 "We take a lot of pride in once again being named a finalist for the Best Places to Work in Multifamily. Our employees and our customers are important to us, and that shows in the honors that we have received over the years." For the third year in a row, Drucker + Falk has been named a finalist for the Best Places to Work in Multifamily. Consistently deemed a top multifamily apartment management company since 1938, this honor is the result of a rigorous evaluation process from the national Multifamily Leadership Program. Winners were informed of their place on the finalist list at the Multifamily Leadership Summit last month in Scottsdale, Arizona. The evaluation process is intense and took into account employee policies and procedures as well as feedback from the companys employees. The goal of the program is to support growth and merit throughout the multifamily apartment industry and to draw new strong leadership to the industry. Jim Ledbetter, president of Drucker + Falk commented, We take a lot of pride in once again being named a finalist for the Best Places to Work in Multifamily. Our employees and our customers are important to us, and that shows in the honors that we have received over the years. DF Multifamily will always be committed to excellence and will always be working to improve. In order to make this coveted list, multifamily qualifiers are required to prove that they have efficiently and consistently provided and maintained a notable work environment and a company culture that fosters growth and quality. This is where employee engagement and satisfaction plays such a key factor. The Multifamily Industry contributes more than $3.5 billion to the economy every day, supporting more than 12.3 million jobs with an extensive number of property management companies across America. For more information about, and to register for, the Best Places to Work Multifamily program, go to http://www.multifamilyleadership.com. ABOUT DRUCKER + FALK Founded in 1938, Drucker + Falk is a full service real estate and investment firm managing a diverse portfolio of more than 30,000 apartment homes and approximately 3,000,000 square feet of office, retail and industrial space in nine states. In addition to managing a broad range of properties, including class A+ to affordable apartment communities, mixed-use and all types of commercial properties, Drucker + Falk partners with clients on developing new properties, renovating and repositioning assets, converting historic properties to unique, upscale apartment homes and offers commercial leasing and sales services. For more information see http://www.druckerandfalk.com Winning a position on this contract represents a major milestone for EZteq and the joint venture partners Electrosoft and Zantech. Electrosoft, a leading provider of diversified technology-based solutions and services to the federal government, announces that EZteq, LLC a joint venture formed with Zantech has been awarded a position on the U.S. Army Information Technology Enterprise Solutions 3 Services (ITES-3S) contract. The potential nine-year ITES-3S Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (ID/IQ) contract, valued at $12.1 billion, includes five base years and four individual option years. It is anticipated that this firm-fixed-price and time-and-materials contract will serve as the primary source of IT-related services for the U.S. Army worldwide. Specific task order services available under ITES-3S are wide-ranging and will include cybersecurity, integration, operation and maintenance, business process engineering, and education and training, among other enterprise IT functions. The Computer Hardware, Enterprise Software and Solutions program at Ft. Belvoir, Va. will manage ITES-3S. Dr. Sarbari Gupta, President and CEO of Electrosoft, said, Winning a position on this contract represents a major milestone for EZteq and the joint venture partners Electrosoft and Zantech. I believe the combined experience and expertise of our firms, coupled with our reputations for integrity, business excellence and customer service across government, were key factors in our selection. We are excited about the business opportunities this position affords us and look forward to supporting the U.S. Army, other Department of Defense agencies and other included federal agencies. In total, the U.S. Army made 135 awards; 52 for ITES-3S unrestricted portion and 83 for the small business set-aside track. About Electrosoft Electrosoft, headquartered in Reston, Virginia, delivers a diversified set of technology-based solutions and services to federal civilian and defense agencies. We couple domain knowledge and experience with proven, mature management practices to design and deliver the right solutions on time and within budget. Our practices include an ISO 9001:2015 registered Quality Management System and Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) Level 3 assessed processes. Founded in 2001, Electrosoft is an 8(a) certified Small Disadvantaged Business (SDB) and an 8(m) certified Economically Disadvantaged Woman-Owned Small Business (EDWOSB). For more information about Electrosoft, visit our website at http://www.electrosoft-inc.com. About Zantech Zantech provides federal government agencies with the solutions and expertise to improve customer services while maintaining high levels of customer satisfaction. By focusing on standards-based processes and tools, Zantech helps clients meet their mission objectives, maintain critical functions and transform critical systems. We deliver leading-edge technology solutions in six strategic mission areas and, through strategic alliances with leading IT service providers, we provide high-quality, cost-effective, state-of-the-art holistic solutions to satisfy and exceed customer requirements. Zantech is focused on providing Outstanding Performance Always to our customers. For more information, visit our website at http://www.zantechit.com. Im passionate about providing innovation to the industry, and Im excited about the team we have assembled. Fortis, a professional consultancy and provider of asset management and monitoring solutions for rental companies and fleet owners across the equipment industry, today announced its official launch. The Fortis executive team will be led by Josh Mosko, Founder and CEO. Together, we possess more than a century of asset management and telematics expertise in the rental and equipment industry, said Mosko. Part of our value proposition is we have worked for rental, distributor, and OEM firms in various sales, operations, fleet, and product support roles. We understand the equipment, applications, and end-user expectations and the pain points of managing fleets from the field to the executive level. Fortis executives have been working to refine their solution, collaborating with strategic customers for extensive field testing. Today marks the first time their unique combination of expert consulting services and extensive product and solution offerings will be available to the marketplace. "Im passionate about providing innovation to the industry, and Im excited about the team we have assembled, Mosko said. Introducing: The Fortis Team Assessment For each engagement, the Fortis team begins with an assessment of fleet and customer needs. They also offer a free business strategy review and a demo of their recommended telematics solution. The demo illustrates the overall functionality and user interface of the system to monitor vehicles, engine-driven or non-engine-driven assets. Some of the standard features include: Google Maps powered interface for GPS location and directions Geofencing and grouping assets on a jobsite or project Sort and filter assets by ownership, division, location, asset type and other criteria Scroll over a particular asset and drill down to see equipment status, movement, and performance data Asset icons and asset specific pictures to recognize various equipment, makes and models Set-up alerts, generate push and pull reports Maintenance program for individual or group assets or fleets Hours of Service (HOS) compliance FMCSA Electronic Logging Device (ELD) application Fortis then adds additional value with the customization of features based on the customers business needs. The solution integrates with technology tools through APIs in order to utilize cross-functional technology. Todays customers want to understand how the machine is operating in specific applications as well as how it is being operated by a worker. There is an overwhelming amount of data available, so we help customers filter the data and create KPIs and customize dashboards for their business needs, Mosko said. A key differentiator is the way we customize hardware to monitor additional parameters on the equipment with analog and digital controls, Mosko continued. Furthermore, we have incorporated the ability to control settings, make adjustments over the air, start and stop, and troubleshoot equipment. This advanced telemetry monitoring allows proactive fleet management to identify performance trends and alert users of potential issues before failure occurs, preventing and/or minimizing downtime. It also supports predictive maintenance and rightsizing of parts inventory at locations or jobsites. Mosko and the Fortis team also possess deep field experience, having built solutions for small and large fleets from inception to implementation. They have taken their collective knowledge and developed technology solutions that can be embedded into the workflow to streamline operations and fleet management, plus add value for customer service. About Fortis Fortis was born out of a passion for solving the challenges inherent in streamlining businesses with technology and process improvements. Fortis offers a digital workflow platform, RFID and barcode scanning solution, and full, turnkey telematics and fleet management tools. Fortis also consults with companies on distribution and dealer strategies and with fleet owners and rental companies on streamlining their operations. Fortis also sells products and services through its vast network and channel partners. The partners in Fortis have more than 100 years of combined experience in the equipment industry with rental, OEM and distributor expertise. We specialize in matching our industrial and large commercial customers with the best possible solutions for their facility operations and maintenance needs, and we pride ourselves on offering the highest level of customer service and satisfaction while surpassing the expectations of our clients. For more information, visit http://fortistelematics.com Let Me Be Your Guide: A Clear and Understandable Tour of the Bible: an efficacious codex filled with compelling insights that easily explains the scriptures for better grasp and internalizing. Let Me Be Your Guide is the creation of published author, Fred Woodward, an ordained minister who has been teaching and preaching the Bible for nearly forty years, and a chaplain with Corporate Chaplains of America. Woodward shares, Why is it so important to God that we have His word and not the words of men? That question is easily answered. God wants to reveal Himself to us so that we might find Him, and after we have found Him, He wants us to have a close relationship with Him. To find God, we must have an accurate description of God. Otherwise, we will be looking for the wrong person in all the wrong places. In fact, according to the Bible, any faulty description or concept of God is called an idol. And well never find God if we are looking for an idol. God has accurately revealed Himself to us in the Bible. Published by Christian Faith Publishing, Fred Woodwards new book encourages readers with lessons that assures a closer and deeper relationship with God. This remarkable compendium reaches out to all individuals seeking to fathom their personal faith in the Lord by imparting facile points that guide to a stronger biblical foundation. View a synopsis of Let Me Be Your Guide: A Clear and Understandable Tour of the Bible on YouTube. Consumers can purchaseLet Me Be Your Guide: A Clear and Understandable Tour of the Bible at traditional brick & mortar bookstores, or online at Amazon.com, Apple iTunes store, or Barnes and Noble. For additional information or inquiries about Let Me Be Your Guide: A Clear and Understandable Tour of the Bible, contact the Christian Faith Publishing media department at 866-554-0919. We know that todays ultra-fractured audiences can be hard to reach, even if youre perfectly on message. - Peter Koeppel Its no secret that targeting your marketing to specific groups of people can do wonders to save money, increase revenue and better convert leads into customers. But when it comes to determining how to reach audiences based on their age or generation, its crucial to know where they are and what speaks to them most powerfully. A new infographic from Koeppel Direct, the Dallas-based direct-to-consumer advertising agency, gives us an at-a-glance look at the needs and wants of different generational groups, and offers actionable tips for best reaching them with the content they like best. We know that todays ultra-fractured audiences can be hard to reach, even if youre perfectly on message, explained Peter Koeppel, the agencys president and founder. We dont see this as a deterrent, however, and encourage clients and marketers to try a different platform or approach in this situation. With that in mind, we have put together a great generational content marketing resource to help do just that, Koeppel added. Knowing your audience is just step one of the equation. The all-important step two is to find where the audience is and what they best engage and interact with. Todays marketer needs to be familiar with several different groups of people, from Baby Boomers to Millennials to Generation Z. Wrong messages or wrong platforms can mean wasted budgets and other valuable resources. To help avoid just that, this generational content marketing infographic breaks audiences-by-generation down in numbers based on important metrics like population, smartphone usage, social media platform use and more. Some of the most interesting findings include these: Baby Boomers prefer text-light content on Facebook, with a range of about 300 words considered ideal. Generation X is a big fan of longer-form video with 30 seconds being the sweet spot for mobile video ads. Millennials are online shoppers to the core. Generation Z prefers video content and is highly influenced by social media. Grouping viewers by generation can help you drive your message home with greater precision, increased interaction and less ad spend per quality lead. View the complete infographic at: https://www.koeppeldirect.com/business/generational-content-marketing-optimization/ About Koeppel Direct Based in Dallas, Koeppel Direct is a leading direct-to-consumer advertising agency, specializing in multi-channel brand response television and digital advertising. As buyers of brand response advertising time, Koeppel Direct assists clients in strategically placing brand response advertising, as well as creating an effective advertising campaign that maximizes their clients' ROI. In addition to brand response TV and digital, Koeppel Direct provides media services for print and radio -- tapping into a broad range of opportunities for their clients. Founded in 1995 by President Peter Koeppel, the company has grown into a dynamic and diverse team, with each team member bringing expert direct marketing and advertising knowledge and experience. Koeppel himself is a thought leader who is a frequent direct marketing industry speaker and editorial contributor, serving on the Forbes Agency Council. Koeppel Direct's client portfolio includes major brands like TurboTax and Rubbermaid. The professional management and highly experienced staff have made Koeppel Direct a leading U.S. direct-to-consumer advertising agency. For more information about Koeppel Direct, please visit: https://www.koeppeldirect.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/koeppel-direct/ The Million Mile Emblem Farrahs story is amazing and we jumped at the chance to acknowledge her achievement. We also want make sure that anyone who goes 1 million miles will get to show it off on their odometer, said Barney Goldberg, INNOCEANs Executive Creative Director. In just five years, a delivery driver from Olathe, Kansas drove her 2013 Elantra one million miles with the original powertrain. Farrah Haines is a proud Hyundai owner who drives about 200,000 miles a year delivering auto parts and products, far outpacing the 14,000 miles of the average American driver. Since most digital odometers stop before one million, Hyundai joined her as she hit her epic milestone and presented her with the first-ever 1 Million Mile Emblem and adding it to her odometer. The emblem is a genuine Hyundai part and is now available for the odometers of all million mile drivers. This is not only a milestone for Farrah, but also for Hyundai and the quality of our vehicles, said Dean Evans, CMO, Hyundai Motor America. Reaching one million miles with the original powertrain in just five years is an extremely rare and incredible achievement. We created the 1 Million Mile Emblem because we believe in making things better for our loyal customers and look forward to other Hyundai drivers joining Farrah in the one million mile club. To recognize this incredible achievement, Hyundais agency of record, INNOCEAN Worldwide Americas, created a digital video that was released on Dec. 5 that tells Farrahs. The video is available on Hyundais YouTube channel and can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFzp1pVPDPg. It is being promoted across Hyundais social channels and website to honor this special customer and as a great example of Hyundai quality. Farrahs story is amazing and we jumped at the chance to acknowledge her achievement. We also want make sure that anyone who goes 1 million miles will get to show it off on their odometer, said Barney Goldberg, INNOCEANs Executive Creative Director. Taking things one step further, Hyundai wanted to surprise Farrah with a new 2019 Hyundai Elantra and thank her for being such a dedicated owner, but she delivers auto parts and other products seven days a week, day and night. So Hyundai decided to order her a surprise delivery. Farrah stopped by a local auto shop to drop off what she thought was an auto part but she was then greeted by her friends, family, and her very own new 2019 Elantra. A video of the surprise giveaway was captured and posted on Hyundais YouTube channel today: https://youtu.be/twoJahPTjq4 While Farrahs achievement might seem impossible, Hyundai ran multiple tests to validate her odometer reading. Product engineers inspected her engine casting numbers, service records, wire harness, and motor mounts. Hyundai service and system engineers also reviewed Farrahs mileage records for her two jobs, as well as a VIN report, and Carfax. My Hyundai has been a great car to me, said Farrah Haines, I love to drive and have made a successful career out of it, so it was no surprise that I was able to get to a million miles. The key is to prioritize regular maintenance and to have a quality vehicle, over the years I have been beyond pleased at my cars performance, a quality that is inherit to the Hyundai brand. While it feels a bit like starting over, this gives me the opportunity to hit a million-five! Credits: Hyundai Motor America Dean Evans: Chief Marketing Officer Paul Imhoff: Director, Marketing Communications Monique Kumpis: Senior Group Manager, Brand Marketing & Advertising Tyler Branning: Analyst, Digital & Social Media Marketing INNOCEAN Worldwide Americas: Barney Goldberg: VP Executive Creative Director Lori Martin: Creative Director Jera Mehrdad: Creative Director Jackie Barkhurst: Associate Creative Director, Art Ryan Simpson: Associate Creative Director, Copy Nicolette Spencer: VP, Head of Content Production Erin Hungerford, Celestina Lucero, Stephen Estrada: Content Producer Mike Braue, VP, Group Brand Director Cassie Reed: Brand Director Lacie Worrell: Brand Manager Kim Bates: U.S. Head of Strategic Planning Katherine Garfield: Strategy Director MJ Chow: Project Manager Hyundai Motor America Hyundai Motor America is focused on delivering an outstanding customer experience grounded in design leadership, engineering excellence and exceptional value in every vehicle we sell. Hyundais technology-rich product lineup of cars, SUVs and alternative-powered electric and fuel cell vehicles is backed by Hyundai Assuranceour promise to deliver peace of mind to our customers. Hyundai vehicles are sold and serviced through more than 830 dealerships nationwide and the majority sold in the U.S. are built at U.S. manufacturing facilities, including Hyundai Motor Manufacturing Alabama. Hyundai Motor America is headquartered in Fountain Valley, California, and is a subsidiary of Hyundai Motor Company of Korea. Please visit our media website at http://www.HyundaiNews.com Hyundai Motor America on Twitter | YouTube | Facebook | Instagram INNOCEAN Worldwide Americas Founded in 2009, INNOCEAN Worldwide Americas is headquartered in Huntington Beach, California, with offices in New York, Chicago, and Dallas. With 400 employees, INNOCEAN Worldwide Americas is part of the INNOCEAN Worldwide network and currently serves as lead agency for Hyundai Motor America and Genesis Motor America, as well as partners with KIA Motors America and Hankook Tire. We tend to keep our advisors, and their supporting cast (myself and our Boston team), for the long haul frankly this has been our only focus for over twenty-two years, and it sets us apart. Now, it is time to tell our story, and to expand our services to clients and advisors alike. - Paul Saganey Integrated Financial Partners, (IFP), a national financial planning and registered investment advisory firm, today announced the appointment of Jason Lahita to the leadership team as chief communications officer. Lahita will oversee strategic media relations, brand visibility and alignment of key messaging across all public facing materials, print and digital. In conjunction with the appointment, IFP launched a new website geared primarily towards financial advisors, and new messaging focused on the firms long history of doing right by financial professionals, and their clients. Lahita brings fifteen years of financial advisory marcomms experience to IFP following the sale of FiComm Partners, the PR firm he founded in 2012, to his business partner in August of this year. Prior to FiComm he ran the Los Angeles office of an international PR agency, and managed marketing and PR for United Capital Financial Advisers, a national registered investment advisory firm. We tend to keep our advisors, and their supporting cast (myself and our Boston team), for the long haul frankly this has been our only focus for over twenty-two years, and it sets us apart," said Paul Saganey, founder and president, Integrated Financial Partners. Now, it is time to tell our story, and to expand our services to clients and advisors alike. Jason will help us to do that, very effectively. We could not be more thrilled to welcome him aboard. Lahita joins a new crop of leadership team members announced recently, including chief investment officer, Dr. Rob Brown, formerly with United Capital, and Robert Sandrew, senior vice president, business development, formerly with LPL. The three join a long-serving industry veteran management team, some with the firm for over two decades. As the son of a physician, I grew up bearing witness to how hard a doctor works to keep their patients healthy - the tireless endeavor to protect, to heal and to counsel, said Lahita. From the moment I entered this industry and met some awe-inspiring financial advisors, I found myself holding them in the same high esteem with which Ive regarded my dad and all doctors like him, my whole life. I look forward to representing all of our advisors and the firm itself in the public domain. In conjunction with the recent hires, Integrated Financial Partners launched a new website, complete with new messaging directed towards advisors (as well as clients and professional partners CPAs, attorneys): come see for yourself precisely how we walk the talk, and why our advisors, clients and corporate employees feel so well taken care of. For more information, please visit http://www.ifpadvisor.com About Integrated Financial Partners Since 1996, Integrated Financial Partners has been helping financial advisors to achieve their entrepreneurial vision. We offer comprehensive business building services, designed with the truly independent advisor in mind. With over one hundred advisors and thirty-six regional offices across the United States, Integrated Financial Partners has built our reputation advisor by advisor, client by client. Constructed and grown upon a foundation of empowerment, integrity and trust, we believe in the power that financial advisors have to make a positive impact on peoples lives. Integrated Financial Partners supports advisors by offering a completely customizable open architecture business environment: technology, investment management, advanced planning, CPA partner program, family office platform, custody, marketing, public relations, M&A, succession planning and comprehensive business counsel. We believe in advisors. Let us prove it to you. Securities offered through LPL Financial, Member FINRA/SIPC. Investment advice offered through Integrated Wealth Concepts, a registered investment advisor. Integrated Wealth Concepts and Integrated Financial Partners are separate entities from LPL Financial. Invitation Homes Denver office team members packaged 33,016 pounds of dry goods at the Food Bank of the Rockies, which will be dispersed through partner agencies in the Denver area. One of our company values is to be a standout citizen and a good neighbor. We acknowledge and honor the differing needs of each of our communities and work to ensure our contributions and volunteerism are meaningful," said Dallas Tanner, founder and interim president of Invitation Homes. Invitation Homes (NYSE: INVH) offices around the country volunteered their time during the holiday season working with local charities and communities in need of assistance. From organizing food drives and collecting toys, to assisting the homeless and writing letters of gratitude to those serving our country, Invitation Homes associates were grateful to lend a helping hand. Our associates have deep ties to the communities where they work and call home. They frequently partner with local charitable organizations and know how particularly difficult the holidays can be for many community members, said Dallas Tanner, founder and interim president of Invitation Homes. One of our company values is to be a standout citizen and a good neighbor by contributing to the well-being of the communities where we live and operate. We acknowledge and honor the differing priorities and needs of each of our communities and work to ensure our contributions and volunteerism are meaningful and impactful. We are honored that so many of our offices shared in the spirit of giving. In total, Invitation Homes team members gathered and delivered toys to hundreds of children, packed and delivered tens of thousands of meals, and penned hundreds of letters to active-duty military: Carolina team members in Charlotte and neighboring offices held food drives to collect donations for Loaves & Fishes, a local food donation shelter. Nearly two truckloads of food items will go toward helping families and individuals in need during the holidays. Chicago team members volunteered a day of service to help the Feed My Starving Children local chapter in Schaumberg collect and assemble meal shipments to help feed undernourished children in developing nations around the world. Dallas team members partnered with the Salvation Army Angel Tree Program collecting, distributing and delivering gifts to 80 families in need. Denver associates worked with Food Bank of the Rockies, packaging 33,016 pounds of dry goods that will be distributed to 11 different agencies. Each pound of food feeds an average of three people a day. Houston team members helped sort and assemble 51 food boxes for the Houston Food Bank for community members in need of nutritious meals. Las Vegas team members volunteered to deliver toys for the Toy and Joy Shop for The Salvation Army; collected food for the Gift of Hope project with the Catholic Charities of Southern Nevada; and, collected needed items to support the Nevada Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Minneapolis team members volunteered a day of service to help the Feed My Starving Children local chapter. Volunteers assisted with the collection and assembly of meal shipments to help feed undernourished children in developing nations around the world. Northern California team members worked with The Gathering Inn and collected warm bedding for the homeless community and gifts for low-income children of Placer County. Volunteers also collected more than 50 toys to benefit the Toys for Tots local chapter. Orlando team members partnered with the Christian HELP Organization to collect gift items for children of unemployed or underemployed parents while they are struggling to find jobs. Phoenix team members prepared food packages for local children through the Feed My Starving Children organization; delivered warm clothing and bedding to the local homeless population working with Serving the Homeless Parks & Pets; and collected diapers and baby items to benefit pregnant and parenting women at Maggies Place. Phoenix volunteers also participated in Operation Gratitude, writing letters to express appreciation to members of the military for their service. Seattle team members volunteered a day of service to help Northwest Harvest Food Bank fight hunger by assembling 4,400 pounds of pasta, which provided 3,385 meals to those in need. Southern California offices volunteered their time and provided assistance to collect toys for children in the foster care system for Five Acres ensuring the kids have a present to open this holiday season. Volunteers also organized a food drive for Feeding America to provide immediate hunger relief in San Bernardino County. South Florida team members led a collection drive for children through The Salvation Army Angel Tree Program. In its fifth year partnering with the organization, office associates collected toys for more than 75 underprivileged children in need this year. Tampa team members led a holiday collection drive for children experiencing abuse, neglect and homelessness in the Tampa community with the help Youth and Family Alternatives, Inc. Donated items will be presented on Christmas morning and will include personal items, clothes, school supplies and toys for children aged 10 to 17. About Invitation Homes Invitation Homes is a leading owner and operator of single-family homes for lease, offering residents high-quality homes across America. With over 80,000 homes for lease in 17 markets across the country, Invitation Homes is meeting changing lifestyle demands by providing residents access to updated homes with features they value, such as close proximity to jobs and access to good schools. The company's mission statement, "Together with you, we make a house a home," reflects its commitment to high-touch service that continuously enhances residents' living experiences and provides homes where individuals and families can thrive. Investor Relations Contact: Greg Van Winkle Phone: 844.456.INVH (4684) Email: IR(at)InvitationHomes(dot)com Media Relations Contact: Kristi DesJarlais Phone: 972.421.3587 Email: Media(at)InvitationHomes(dot)com Moosh! Modeling Clay Sand w/ 4 Dino Sand Molds As time is running out this holiday season, dont be too quick to grab a gift thats shiny and bright, only to eventually bury it in a closet to avoid its annoying buzzing. Instead, look to constructive toys that transpire into hours of brainy play shared with siblings, friends, parents and grandparents. Not sure where to find such a treasure trove of learning toys? Welcome to the STEM toys think tank at USA Toyz, where inventive building sets delight children and parents with hours of imaginative play. The following toy sets encourage hands-on, screen-free fun, allowing kids to build basic and complex structures, vehicles, animals and more. One thing these cool creative toys don't include? Gender discrimination. All of these toddler toys are geared to attract both boys and girls a like. These gender-neutral toys make last minute shopping even easier because who doesnt love zoo animals and building blocks, right! Get all the details below to bring home memorable gifts that matter. And, for those who won't be home for the holidays, all of the USA Toyz STEM play sets come in a sturdy, sealable tote for easy travel. Yes, theyve thought of everything! Introduce kids to the nuts and bolts of engineering with Boltz educational toy tools and gear sets (Boltz 163 piece set and Boltz 101 piece set). Watch as gears turn and ideas connect as toddlers conceive and construct cool contraptions and crazy constructions with these creative building sets for kids! This quiet time activity brings out the best in family quality time, and teaches tots skills theyll carry through life. Take building toys to the atomic level with Quarks 160 piece engineering and construction toys. Colorful multilink spheres, connecting rods, wheels and panels take spatial thinking to the third dimension. These toddler toys combine engineering concepts with fine motor activities to inspire quizzical and creative minds. Spur kids creative energy the therapeutic feel of Moosh fluffy modeling clay. This reusable, moldable foam putty is a favorite sensory toy that provides endless imaginative fun. Squeeze, smash and sculpt colorful 3D creations! Play sand sets come with either 4 dinosaur molds or 10 jungle animal molds. Please contact Kaliber Global, parent company of USA Toyz for further info, quotes or sources you might need for your holiday guide, as well as a sample product requests. ######## About Kaliber Global: Kaliber Global is a top-tier Amazon seller and the fastest-growing retailer in Washington State (Inc. 500, 2017). They are a locally owned business based in Bellevue, Washington that specializes in Amazon seller management as well as growing their own private-label brands in the Amazon Marketplace since 2012. Contact: Amber Norell Marketing Manager, USA Toyz 407-432-0522 amber(at)kaliberglobal.com "The fact that we can taste today what our forebears tasted over 200 years ago is amazing, and we are proud that natural cork for centuries and even today plays such an important role in preserving wine and making this miracle possible," says Joao Rui Ferreira, President of the Association. The Liberty Hall Museum at Kean University auctioned off through Christie's Auction House a portion of its collection of centuries old wines and spirits, raising funds to provide handicap access to the museum. The entire collection, discovered during a 2016 museum renovation, includes over 40 demijohns (wicker covered 5-gallon bottles) and 6 cases of Madeira dating back to 1796, and over 300 bottles of various spirits from the 1800s all collected by the Kean family over their 185-year residence at Liberty Hall. The remainder of the collection will be used to establish a permanent exhibition entitled History in a Bottle: the Kean Collection of Historic Wines & Spirits, opening in Spring 2019. The highest price realized was for a demijohn of 1846 Madeira that sold for $39,000. Prior to the auction, the bottles were opened to be recorked and the wine was sampled and found to be in perfect condition, perfectly preserved under the 100+ year old original cork. New, custom made natural corks were provided by the Portuguese Cork Association, which worked with Christie's and Madeira winemaker Francisco Alberquerque on the recorking, and which is partnering with the museum to establish the History in a Bottle exhibition. The wines and spirits that were auctioned and will be exhibited in the museum are not just relics inside is living history. The fact that we can taste today what our forebears tasted over 200 years ago is amazing, and we are proud that natural cork for centuries and even today plays such an important role in preserving wine and making this miracle possible. Whats more, Madeira is a product of Portugal and was the drink of choice of colonial and post-colonial America, making it all the more fitting that we at the Portuguese Cork Association be part of this wonderful project, says Joao Rui Ferreira, President of the Association. Our mission is to offer all museum visitors a journey through time as we recreate American history through the experiences of one iconic family. The auctioned items are a portion of a collection that will be part of the History in a Bottle exhibition. The exhibition will help us fulfill our mission in a unique way by connecting what graced this familys table over time to changes in a dynamic and growing country, said Bill Schroh, JR. Director of Museum Operations. We were all nervous when they first opened the bottles, as we werent sure what we would find. But I guess the corks did their job and the auction proceeds prove that. For more information, please visit http://www.apcor.pt/en/ and 100percentcork.org and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. For questions please contact Maria Calvert of Colangelo & Partners. About APCOR: The Portuguese Cork Association (APCOR) exist to promote natural cork and its products. APCOR is the employers association of the cork sector that represents, promotes and carries out research in the Portuguese cork industry. It was created in 1956 and is based in Santa Maria de Lamas, in the council of Santa Maria da Feira, at the heart of the cork industry around 30 kilometers from Porto, Portugals second largest city. Membership of the association is open to all companies operating in the fields of production, marketing or export of cork products. The organization advocates on behalf of the Portuguese cork industry worldwide and is the driving force of an industry based on tradition, innovation and sustainability. About Liberty Hall Museum: Liberty Hall Museum, originally constructed in 1760, was built as a country getaway by the then prominent New York lawyer, William Livingston. Livingston would go on to serve in the First and Second Continental congresses, become New Jerseys first elected governor and sign the United States Constitution. The Kean family was the second generation to live at Liberty Hall, taking over the original estate in 1811. Multiple generations of the Keans continued to live at the estate until 1995, while the home was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1973. The family has worked to preserve and enhance the estates invaluable character. LISI has partnered with Colonial Life to offer voluntary benefits that help employees cover rising out-of-pocket health care costs. Colonial Lifes Accident, Critical Illness, and Medical Bridge voluntary benefits are available to small and large groups, effective December 1, 2018. Colonial Life is truly excited to partner with LISI, a premier General Agency in California. We look forward to helping their brokers provide clients the enhanced voluntary benefit offerings they need to help employees protect their families, their finances, and their futures, said Steve Vermette, Vice President of brokerage at Colonial Life. Were pleased to partner with Colonial Life to offer solutions that help employers and employees manage rising health care costs. These benefits offer a soft landing to employees who face increased deductibles, co-insurance, and out-of-pocket costs, said Becky Patel, LISI President and CEO. Accident Insurance Colonial Lifes Accident Insurance helps employees fill the gaps from deductibles, co-payments, and out-of-pocket costs that can come with an accidental injury. The insurance offers worldwide coverage; its portable; and its compliant with HSA guidelines. Critical Illness Insurance Colonial Lifes Critical Illness coverage offers a supplement to major medical coverage with a lump-sum benefit that can be used to pay direct and indirect costs related to the most prevalent critical illnesses. Some of the covered conditions include: Heart attack Stroke End-stage renal (kidney) failure Additional coverage options are available to help pay for health screenings, subsequent diagnoses, and cancer vaccines. Medical Bridge Insurance Colonial Lifes Medical Bridge coverage helps cover out-of-pocket expenses associated with a covered hospital stay. Insureds dont have to wait for any other insurance to adjudicate a claim, which means timely claims administration and less hassle. About Colonial Life Colonial Life & Accident Insurance Company is a market leader in providing financial protection benefits through the workplace, including disability, life, accident, dental, cancer, critical illness and hospital confinement indemnity insurance. The companys benefit services and education, innovative enrollment technology and personal service support more than 90,000 businesses and organizations, representing more than 3.8 million of Americas workers and their families. For more information visit http://www.coloniallife.com. About LISI As one of Californias largest general agencies, LISI enables more than 8,000 affiliated brokers to offer Medical, Dental, Vision and Specialty coverage for large and small employers from over two dozen carriers. For more information visit LISI. Contact Jeff Grocky Director of Marketing jgrocky(at)lisibroker(dot)com 818.431.0474 Litmus7 - a RetailSingularity Hub Every Litmus7 employee has a voice and the power to influence the organizations governance, thereby contributing to a bi-directional flatarchy organization. Litmus7 Systems Consulting, a leading retail technology services and consulting company headquartered in San Francisco, California, has been certified as one of the 50 Best Workplaces in the Indian IT & IT-BPM sector, 2019 by the Great Place To Work institute (GPTW). The Institutes methodology for assessing workplace culture is objective and rigorous and has been adopted by thousands of organizations globally. Litmus7s culture stems from the belief that small is beautiful. As is well-known, a relatively small unit is easier to manage and greatly aids in preserving the culture of deep personal ties and camaraderie. Litmus7 took lessons from this and have organized themselves into several 30-member strong autonomous teams called clubs. So, when a new member joins Litmus7, they are in fact joining a club, a close knit 30-member unit, rather than a large organization. This ensures that even when they grow to tens of thousands of employees, the individual would still experience all the accountability, fun, and rigor just the same. The system is designed for continuous improvement, adapting to the changing preferences of a constantly evolving workforce. The companys work culture characterized by democratic ethos and a flat hierarchy is certainly unusual and possibly unique. Every Litmus7 employee has a voice and the power to influence the organizations governance, thereby contributing to a bi-directional flatarchy organization. Venu Gopalakrishnan, Founder and Global CEO of Litmus7, has an abiding passion - to design an organization that enables everyone within the organization to differentiate and create a brand of their own. The goal is to be the visionary organization that conceptualizes a future which the rest of the world can build on. The firm has identified happiness, credibility, leadership and innovation as the four pillars on which all corporate actions are predicated. Venu, considers these four pillars as critical to self-differentiation. In his words, It is a matter of great honor and privilege to be featured on the list of the best, surpassing several much larger employers as we build a culture that will shape the future of workplaces. Empowerment is central to what Litmus7 aspires to do. Litmus7s retail innovation ecosystem provides a platform for retail visionaries to design the future of retail where commerce becomes invisible and omnipresent. The point at which this happens marks the beginning of the age of Retail Singularity. The Litmus7 spirit of upholding unity and integrity at the workplace keeps its flag flying high. A note on GPTW : More than 600 organizations within India had applied for assessment by GPTW in 2018, making it the largest study in the space of workplace recognition. Globally, GPTW partners with 10,000 plus organizations from over 58 countries for assessment, benchmarking, and planning. This year, out of 160 IT & IT-BPM organizations that were assessed, Litmus7 was ranked among the top 50. About Litmus7 Litmus7 is a technology company with a 100% focus on retail. We build, transform, enhance, and support platforms that enable the retailers digital commerce business. With one of a kind micro-vertical practices in grocery, general merchandise, fashion, beauty, and pet products, the biggest differentiation is the level of industry knowledge thats within the organization. Litmus7 is often brought in when major systems integrators fail. Litmus7s Innovation centers in Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Tel Aviv, Israel and India develop technologies and ideas on the frontiers of retail, such as consumer-as-a-service and invisible commerce, redefining every aspect of retailing we have seen thus far. NOLS President John Gans, pictured here in the gear room at NOLS Rocky Mountain, has announced his retirement. John led NOLS into the future. He built a leadership team that supported innovation and financial acumen. NOLS (National Outdoor Leadership School) President John Gans announced on November 28 his plans to retire at the end of 2019. He is the fifth president in the schools 53-year history and its longest-serving leader. Named White House Champion for Change for his commitment to youth, wilderness, and leadership in 2012, Gans will leave an enduring legacy highlighted by strong financial landscape, formalization of wilderness leadership curriculum, and a commitment to students in the outdoors. In his time, NOLS has been continuously accredited since 1995 by the Association for Experiential Education (AEE), acquired the Wilderness Medicine Institute, received the 1999 Leave No Trace Partnership Award, and the Outdoor Industry Association Inspiration Award for sponsoring the first all-African American team to attempt to climb North Americas highest peak. Founded in 1965 by Paul Petzoldt, the Lander-based nonprofit wilderness school grew from classrooms in Wyomings rugged Wind River mountain range evolving to become the premier outdoor education school, operating 16 campuses around the world and serving 28,363 students last year. Under Gans leadership, the school increased overall income by 300% and grew its faculty and staff from 475 to 1,296. NOLS contributed $1.9 million in financial aid awards in 2018 reflecting 437% growth in available needs-based scholarship funding during Gans tenure. Gans himself started his NOLS journey as a scholarship student in 1979 on a Semester in Kenya, later serving as director of NOLS Alaska, admissions & marketing director, and operations director before assuming the role of president in October 1995. He has been a part of the school for 38 years and at the conclusion of 2019, he will have served as the school's executive director and president for 24 years. John led NOLS into the future, said Marc Randolph, Netflix co-founder and Chair of the NOLS Board of Trustees. He built a leadership team that supported innovation and financial acumen, and evolved the school from an institution focused solely on the outdoor classroom to one that puts students first while achieving financial stability. Paving the Way When Gans took the helm as NOLS executive director, the school was celebrating its 30th anniversary. He inherited an organization facing flattening student enrollment. Looking forward, Gans directed the schools leadership team to achieve a number of firsts for NOLS, including long-term strategic planning and empowering staff and instructors be a part of the vision for the school. I am exceedingly proud of what we have accomplished together over these past 24 years, said Gans. Together, NOLS has made the world a better, more inclusive place and it has been an honor of the highest order to serve as the fifth leader of this remarkable organization. Under Gans tenure, the school formally established an endowment that has enabled the school to achieve financial stability. The endowment provides NOLS the confidence and freedom to better serve diverse student audiences to share its mission more broadly. As a result, the school has grown its financial aid and scholarship awards from $354,000 in 1995 to $1.9 million in 2018. For Gans, his proudest legacy was the formal development of the NOLS leadership curriculum. Prior to 1995, leadership was taught on NOLS courses in a purely organic and rather inconsistent way. Gans launched the Leadership Project a year into his directorship, inviting a cohort of senior NOLS staff to conduct a comprehensive study and develop teaching best practices. The result was the nationally-recognized 4-7-1 leadership model. This curriculum continues to be field-tested and incorporated into NOLS extensive course offerings today. Defining the leadership curriculum enabled NOLS to bring our leadership training into the 21st century, said Gans. This evolution helped the school solidify its mission and has become a key differentiator for our programs. It has given us a curriculum sought out by business schools, Google management, NASA, the military, and schools across the nation. Student Inclusion Gans prioritized the schools students first and foremostfrom their life-changing experiences in the field to their safety and well-being. He furthered NOLS proven safety track record by investing in risk management leadership and resources, such as developing accepted field practices around the world, which led to a decline in student incidents under his watch. Through Gans and his teams commitment to student diversity and financial support, the school grew its in-house Gateway Partner Program, attracting a growing number of youth-driven organizations seeking wilderness and leadership opportunities for students with high potential. NOLS has provided outdoor classrooms for students from Summer Search, C5 Youth Foundation, STEP, and many more. A pinnacle moment, NOLS sponsored Expedition Denali, the first all-African American team to attempt to climb the highest peak in North America in 2012. Led by NOLS instructors, Expedition Denali earned the 2012 and 2014 Outdoor Industry Associations Outdoor Industry Inspiration Award. Today, the expeditions documentary continues to inspire young people to pursue their dreams and to work toward equity in the outdoors. Close to home, NOLS improved the schools relationship with the Wind River Reservation and developed long-standing ties to Lander Valley High School, University of Wyoming, and Central Wyoming College. The school also created a dedicated scholarship for Fremont County residents. A Focus on Growth 2018 proved to be a record year as NOLS delivered wilderness education experiences to 28,363 students. Over the past 23 years, the school increased overall revenues by 300% and grew its faculty and staff from 475 to 1,296. The schools unparalleled organizational growth resulted from Gans ability to mobilize its board of trustees, donors, senior leaders, faculty and staff to develop and execute strategic initiatives. Gans leadership advanced NOLS from solely operating as an expedition-focused organization to establishing itself as an industry leader, providing a diverse portfolio of services including wilderness medicine certifications, professional leadership training, customized group programs, and risk management consulting. Supported by a visionary staff and board of trustees, NOLS acquired the Wilderness Medicine Institute, the leading provider of wilderness first aid and wilderness first responder courses, in 1999. The addition of wilderness medicine curriculum naturally complemented NOLS core expedition offerings. Today, NOLS Wilderness Medicine provides industry-recognized wilderness medicine credentials to 23,500 students annually, both directly and through synergistic partnerships with organizations such as REI, Landmark Learning, and over 400 sponsor organizations. In 2000, the school created a new division to better serve corporate and group markets. NOLS Custom Education has provided personalized leadership training to organizations as varied as NASA, The Robertson Scholars Leadership Program, top ranked business schools, military service organizations, secondary schools, and youth pathway programs. Success with the NOLS Custom Education business model led to NOLS investment in growing its risk management consulting offerings and the creation of NOLS Risk Services. This team provides risk management reviews and consultations to organizations with outdoor education programs and interests. NOLS Risk Services also serves as a founder and legacy partner of the successful Wilderness Risk Management Conference, now in its 25th year. Through strategic acquisitions and the evolution of our core expedition offerings, NOLS has leveraged its leadership and wilderness education curriculum, allowing the school to expand its reach and serve wider audiences, said Gans. Commitment to Central Wyoming NOLS shares a rich history in Lander, Wyoming, one that is embodied by tangible achievements during Gans tenure as president. Constructed in 2001, the new NOLS headquarters solidified the schools place and commitment to the Lander community. The multi-story building also represented NOLS growing and diverse needs as it matured into an established nonprofit with deep roots in the community. The historic Noble Hotel was renovated in 2005, honoring both Lander and NOLS history while providing a comfortable and welcoming first introduction for many NOLS students and a home base for many instructors. NOLS Rocky Mountain underwent renovations in 2008 and received a number of environmental sustainability-minded updates including solar panels, geothermal heat pumps, and interior space improvements. Most recently, the Wyss Wilderness Medicine Campus was completed in 2012 and is the first LEED Platinum project in Lander and the fifth in the state of Wyoming. The campus, home to the growing NOLS Wilderness Medicine program, includes classrooms, meeting spaces, offices, a student commons, and kitchen and dining facilities. Additionally, there is 4,500-square-feet of housing for 32 students and four staff. Industry Recognition NOLS ongoing commitment to its students, communities, and the environment have not gone unnoticed. NOLS has been continuously accredited by the Association for Experiential Education (AEE) since 1995 and received the Leave No Trace Partnership Award in 1999. Also in 1999, NOLS received the Educational Business Partner of the Year for Wind River Reservation award. In 2004, NOLS was recognized with the LEADER Corporation Award from Gov. Dave Freudenthal. The school was honored for ethical business practices by the Wyoming Business Report in 2005. NOLS received the Lander Chamber of Commerce Anchor Award consecutively in 2011 and 2012. A highlight in 2012, Gans received the honor of being named a White House Champion for Change for his commitment to youth, wilderness, and leadership. The Future Since 1965, NOLS has established its place as a global nonprofit school serving students from all backgrounds. With 16 NOLS locations worldwide, the school currently operates in all 50 states and in dozens of countries. Gans has shared that his immediate plans include more time spent camping in the outdoors and exploring wilderness with his family and Corgi. In December, the NOLS Board of Trustees will form a presidential search committee consisting of trustees and other members of the NOLS community. The search committee, chaired by trustee Greg Avis, will determine timing, scope, and process as the school endeavors to conduct a global search for its next President. About NOLS NOLS is a nonprofit, global wilderness school that educates students to step forward on an expedition, wilderness medicine, custom education or risk services offering. Graduates have a lifelong desire for leadership, commitment to continued skills development, and ongoing education. Since 1965, NOLS has embraced and explored the unknown through outdoor- and classroom-based courses. To discover the NOLS experience or to bring a course to your business or organization, visit http://www.nols.edu. 11TH ANNUAL ART OF PAINTING IN THE 21ST CENTURY CONFERENCE 11th Annual Art of Painting in the 21st Century Conference WHERE: John Natsoulas Gallery Davis, CA WHEN: Friday, March 8th and Saturday, March 9th March 8th 1pm- 4pm: Dean Fisher live demonstration 7pm 9pm: Collegiate competition awards ceremony and reception March 9th 10am-12pm: Gamblin workshop with Glenn Brill & Tom Colcord 1pm-2pm: Amer Kobaslija Lecture 2pm-3pm: Dean Fisher Lecture 3:30pm-5pm: Dorian Allworthy Lecture 7pm-9pm: Opening reception The Art of Painting in the 21st Century is an annual conference in its eleventh year and is geared towards nurturing dialog on contemporary painting and the shared ideas that define current trends in the field. Many painters work alone, an isolated process that deprives the artist of thriving debate until the work is shown. This years conference will feature some of the most talented and well known painters working today. This conference provides a unique opportunity and an intimate setting to interact with top artists. UC Davis, home to artist Roy de Forest, Roland Peterson, Wayne Thiebaud, and Robert Arneson, was instrumental in defining a new direction for a uniquely West Coast style. Nowhere else in the country will the participant be able to interact and discuss the purity of painting in one place. Meet face-to-face with distinguished artists you might only otherwise read about. This year, a collegiate exhibition of the top 20 young college student painters will be on display. Many cash awards will be given to these young artists that represent the future of painting. The conference is partially funded by the city of Davis. Dean Fishers carefully crafted compositions are the result of his deep connection to nature, great sensitivity to light and impressionistic use of color. Originally from Bosnia, Amber Kobaslija has been perfecting the still life ever since he fled his war-ravaged homeland in 1993, seeking refuge and inspiration in Germany, Switzerland, and the United States. Lastly, Dorian Allworthy is an American representational, tonal-realist painter working in Chicago, known for her drypoint engravings, still lifes, landscapes, and large figurative paintings. These three artists have unique histories and approaches to their stunning work. The goal of the conference is to provide audiences with this variety of perspectives and allow interaction between students and professionals, fostering the strong tradition of painting and culture through exposure and discussion. This is the kind of educational, intellectual event one expects from museums or universities, but which public institutions seem less and less able to provide. Artweek Magazine The 11th Annual Art of Painting in the 21st Century was funded in part by a grant received from the Yolo Visitor's Bureau. John Natsoulas Gallery 521 First St. Davis, CA 95616 530-756-3938 art(at)natsoulas.com http://www.natsoulas.com 93% of Americans believe that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, however, only 44% of adults (and 36% of kids K-12) eat breakfast every day. Helping to conclude 2018 and start the new year off on a healthy foot, Mediaplanet today announces the launch of this Decembers edition of Morning Nutrition. This campaign will advocate for better eating habits in the morning, while emphasizing best practices/ insight from industry leaders and celebrity influencers for readers everywhere to put into action into their daily morning routines. 93% of Americans believe that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, however, only 44% of adults (and 36% of kids K-12) eat breakfast every day. Eating breakfast decreases obesity, increases attention and promotes overall health, but due to Americans busy schedules and priorities, this vital meal is still being cast aside. Our focus is to use this campaign as a stepping stone for the future of how we look at breakfast as a daily driver, highlighting an importance of traditional breakfast foods, on-the-go breakfast options, dairy alternatives and many more. This year, we are uniting teens, parents, nutritionists, and more to give Americans the solutions they need to make breakfast a priority again! The print component of Morning Nutrition is distributed within todays edition of USA Today in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Chicago, Washington/ Baltimore, and Houston, with a circulation of approximately 250,000 copies and an estimated readership of 750,000. The digital component is distributed nationally, through a vast social media strategy, and across a network of top news sites and partner outlets. To explore the digital version of the campaign, visit: http://www.modernwellnessguide.com/topic/whats-for-breakfast This campaign was made possible with the support of General Mills (Cheerios, Fiber One), Navitas Organics, American Pistachio Growers, Powerful Foods, Del Monte Foods, Milkadamia, the Colorado Potato Administrative Committee, the American Society for Nutrition, and the American Heart Association. About Mediaplanet Mediaplanet specializes in the creation of content marketing campaigns covering a variety of industries. We tell meaningful stories that educate our audience and position our clients as solution providers. Our unique ability to pair the right leaders with the right readers, through the right platforms, has made Mediaplanet a global content marketing powerhouse. Our award-winning stories have won the hearts of countless readers while serving as a valuable platform for brands and their missions. Just call us storytellers with a purpose. Please visit http://www.mediaplanet.com for more on who we are and what we do. Press Contact: Fernando Isaacs Fernando.isaacs@mediaplanet.com (646) 518-5421 EMwatch is the first smart gadget to calculate your stress and stamina levels in real time, and by using AI algorithms to recommend how to reduce stress Emotion Labs, a highly-acclaimed tech startup, introduces EMwatch, a breakthrough in preventive health and emotional monitoring technology, for the first time available in the form of a gamified smartwatch. Just last year, national stress levels were reported at an all time high due to economic, social, political tensions. EMwatch has made it its mission to fully reshape daily stress management practices and is able to predict 75% of stress-related diseases thanks to more than three years of research by a team of a dozen biological and technological scientists. Going beyond the rudimentary time keeping and notes functions of early generation smartwatches, EMwatch is the first smart gadget to calculate your stress and stamina levels in real time, and by using AI algorithms, the EMwatch App will recommend how to reduce stress and will monitor customers progress along the way. The users will also benefit from one of the longest lasting batteries in the industry - up to 14 days. The cutting-edge, stress monitoring technology earned its female founders a spot in "The Alchemist", which is ranked among top-5 US Tech accelerators for the most promising startups. It is one of the few hardware startups to break even so fast, as initial launch of the product sold out in less than 2 weeks in Europe. The EMwatch team is excited to bring this innovative product to the US market with a launch at Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January 2019. "Our emotional monitoring avatar, a polar bear, responds to biological measurements with digitally animated feedback to inform users of their real-time stress levels. Before weve even entered the US market, several Fortune 500 companies have already expressed interest in incorporating EMwatch as part of their employee wellness programs, says Lisa Voronkova, one of the smartwatch startup's founders. Come experience the ground-breaking wellness technology in Booth# 53351, Eureka Park at CES Las Vegas on January 8-11th. Get your EMwatch at a promotional launch price of $129 on Amazon. CONTACTS: lisa(at)emotion.family 1-347-479-9768 180 Sansome Street, San Francisco CA 94104 http://www.emotion.family Dr. Rebecca Cerrato, Institute for Foot and Ankle Reconstruction, Mercy Medical Center, Baltimore, MD Orthopedic surgeon Dr. Rebecca Cerrato, one of the first surgeons in the United States to offer a new minimally invasive bunion surgery, is now joined by colleague Dr. Patrick Maloney, as top rated orthopedic surgeon skilled in the procedure. Drs. Cerrato and Maloney practice at The Institute for Foot and Ankle Reconstruction at Mercy Medical Center in Baltimore, MD. According to Dr. Cerrato, the minimally invasive approach offers an alternative to traditional surgery that can reduce post-surgical scarring, swelling and pain. Mercy is proud to be a leader in offering advanced treatment options to patients with foot and ankle concerns. Dr. Cerrato has helped lead the effort to bring this innovative bunion surgery to the U.S., and now is joined by Mercys Dr. Patrick Maloney in completing specialized training to employ the advanced techniques necessary for this procedure, said Dr. Clifford Jeng, Medical Director, The Institute for Foot and Ankle Reconstruction at Mercy. Its an exciting time in orthopedics and foot and ankle surgery, as we discover new, less invasive approaches to addressing patient needs. Im very pleased to join Dr. Cerrato in offering this minimally invasive procedure, Dr. Maloney said. A bunionectomy involves removal of a painful bunion through corrective bone cuts (osteotomies) and soft tissue rebalancing to realign the big toe joint. While traditional bunion procedures involve large incisions over the side of the bunion, the minimally invasive approach is achieved through smaller incisions which results in less post-operative pain, a faster recovery for the patient, and less stiffness and scarring at the big toe, Dr. Cerrato explained. Developed originally for maxillofacial procedures, the surgeon uses a specialized burr, a needle-shaped bone cutting tool, which creates precise bone cuts through keyhole incisions. Through several small incisions, typically no more than 3mm, the bone is cut and the soft tissue released, allowing the surgeon to realign the big toe joint. Patients may bear weight after surgery in a post-operative surgical shoe. Most patients transition to regular shoes after six weeks. According to Dr. Cerrato, minimally invasive bunion surgery may be an alternative to traditional bunion surgery for some patients. A recommendation to undergo minimally invasive bunion surgery will depend on the type and severity of the bunion, Dr. Cerrato said. Dr. Cerrato is a recognized leader in clinical education on a national and international level. Director of The Institute for Foot and Ankle Reconstructions Fellowship Program, she regularly participates in field related research, presentations and lectures. Dr. Cerrato is Board Certified by the American Board of Orthopaedic Surgery and serves as Chairman of the Membership committee for the American Orthopaedic Foot and Ankle Society (AOFAS). Dr. Patrick Maloney is a fellowship-trained physician Board Certified in Orthopedic Surgery. He provides comprehensive diagnosis and treatment for a wide array of foot and ankle conditions, including ankle arthritis, bunions, flat feet, foot and toe deformities, foot fractures, and other common and complex foot and ankle conditions. Founded in 1874 by the Sisters of Mercy, Mercy Medical Center is a university-affiliated medical facility with a national reputation for women's health care. For more information, visit Mercy at http://www.mdmercy.com, MDMercyMedia on FACEBOOK and TWITTER, or cal 1-800-M.D.-MERCY. MIAMI Chairman of the Board George C. Jalil Miami real estate continues trending upward, said MIAMI Chairman of the Board George C. Jalil, a Miami broker. Total Miami-Dade County home sales increased 7 percent year-over-year in November, marking the markets fifth consecutive month of year-over-year transaction gains, according to a new report by the MIAMI Association of Realtors (MIAMI) and the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) system. Total Miami home sales have now increased year-over-year in July, August, September, October and November, putting the market on pace to post more total sales this year than 2017. The Miami condo market has registered 12,793 transactions so far this year through November, a 6.8 percent increase from this time last year. The Miami single-family home market has recorded 11,920 sales this year through November, a 1.6 percent increase from this time last year. Miami real estate continues trending upward, said MIAMI Chairman of the Board George C. Jalil, a Miami broker. The Miami condo market increases last month are particularly noteworthy as the market posted big sales increases near the bottom of the market ($150K to $300K price range) and at the top of the market ($1-million-and-up). Increased inventory and sellers becoming more reasonable with their prices are leading to more home sales. Miami Existing Condo Sales Have Increased in Nine of the last 11 Months Miami existing condo sales increased 8.8 percent year-over-year in November, from 965 to 1,050. The largest segment of growth for existing condo sales is the $150,000 to $300,000 range. The segment recorded 535 condo sales, an increase of 19.4 percent from November 2017. The luxury sector ($1 million and up) also proved noteworthy in November 2018, posting 19.5 percent more sales in November 2018 (49 transactions) vs. November 2017 (41 transactions). Miami Single-Family Home Sales Increase 5.2 Percent in November Miami-Dade County single-family home sales increased 5.2 percent year-over-year, from 947 to 996. The largest segment of growth for single-family home sales is the $250,000 to $600,000 range. The segment recorded 652 single-family home sales, an increase of 12.9 percent from November 2017. The Miami luxury market ($1 million and up) surged 35.5 percent in November 2018, increasing from 62 sales to 84. Sales Dollar Volume Increased 15.5 Percent to $916 Million Total sales volume increased to $916 million from $793 million in November 2017. Existing condo sales volume increased from $334.6 million to $377.7 million (an increase of 12.9 percent). Single-family home total dollar volume rose 17.3 percent, from $459 million to $538.3 million. Luxury sales played a role in the rise of the total sales volume. Miami single-family $1 million-and-up luxury sales increased 35.5 percent, from 62 to 84. Existing luxury condo sales increased 19.5 percent, from 41 to 49. Luxury single-family home sales have now increased or stayed even for seven consecutive months. Luxury existing condo sales have increased in seven of the last nine months. Lack of access to mortgage loans continues to inhibit further growth of the existing condominium market. Of the 9,307 condominium buildings in Miami-Dade and Broward counties, only 12 are approved for Federal Housing Administration loans, down from 29 last year, according to Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation and FHA. Seven Consecutive Years of Price Appreciation in Miami Miami-Dade County single-family home prices increased 5.2 percent in November 2018, increasing from $330,000 to $355,000. Miami single-family home prices have risen for 84 consecutive months, a streak of seven years. Existing condo prices stayed even year-over-year at $230,000. Condo prices have increased or stayed even in 87 of the last 90 months. Low mortgage rates make purchasing a home more affordable. According to Freddie Mac, the average commitment rate for a 30-year, conventional, fixed-rate mortgage increased to 4.87 percent in November from 4.83 percent in October. The average commitment rate for all of 2017 was 3.99 percent. Miami Distressed Sales Continue to Drop, Reflecting Healthy Market Only 5.8 percent of all closed residential sales in Miami were distressed last month, including REO (bank-owned properties) and short sales, compared to 9.5 percent in November 2017. In 2009, distressed sales comprised 70 percent of Miami sales. Total Miami distressed sales decreased 34.8 percent year-over-year, from 181 in November 2017 to 118 last month. Short sales and REOs accounted for 1.1 and 4.6 percent, respectively, of total Miami sales in November 2018. Short sale transactions decreased 53.1 percent year-over-year while REOs decreased 28 percent. Nationally, distressed sales accounted for 2 percent of sales (lowest since NAR began tracking in October 2008), down from 4 percent a year ago. Miami Real Estate Selling Close to List Price The median number of days between listing and contract dates for Miami single-family home sales was 48 days, a 12.7 percent decrease from 55 days last year. The median number of days between the listing date and closing date for single-family homes was 93 days, a 13.9 percent decrease from 108 days. The median time to contract for condos was 64 days, a 21 percent decrease from 80 days last year. The median number of days between listing date and closing date decreased 13.1 percent to 106 days. The median percent of original list price received for single-family homes was 95.2 percent. The median percent of original list price received for existing condominiums was 94.1 percent. National and State Statistics Nationally, total existing-home sales increased 1.9 percent from October to a seasonally adjusted rate of 5.32 million in November. Sales are now down 7.0 percent from a year ago (5.72 million in November 2017). Statewide closed sales of existing single-family homes totaled 20,578 last month, up 3 percent compared to November 2017, according to Florida Realtors. Statewide closed condo sales totaled 8,643, up 4.9 percent compared to a year ago. The national median existing-home price for all housing types in November was $257,700, up 4.2 percent from November 2017 ($247,200). Novembers price increase marks the 81st straight month of year-over-year gains. November marked 83 months-in-a-row (more than six and a half years) that statewide median sales prices for both single-family homes and condo-townhouse properties increased year-over-year. The statewide median sales price for single-family existing homes was $255,000, up 6.3 percent from the previous year. Last months statewide median price for condo-townhouse units was $185,000, up 5.1 percent over the year-ago figure. Miamis Cash Buyers Represent almost Double the National Figure Miami cash transactions comprised 36.9 percent of November 2018 total closed sales, compared to 39.4 percent last year. Miami cash transactions are almost double the national figure (21 percent). Miamis high percentage of cash sales reflects South Floridas ability to attract a diverse number of international home buyers, who tend to purchase properties in all cash. Miami has a higher percent of cash sales for condos due to lack of financing approvals for buildings. Condominiums comprise a large portion of Miamis cash purchases as 50.1 percent of condo closings were made in cash in November compared to 23.1 percent of single-family home sales. Balanced Market for Single-Family Homes, Buyers Market for Condos Inventory of single-family homes increased 14.5 percent in November from 6,191 active listings last year to 7,091 last month. Condominium inventory increased 4.4 percent to 16,162 from 15,477 listings during the same period in 2017. The increase in inventory is for properties above $300,000 for condos and for properties above $600,000 for single family homes. Monthly supply of inventory for single-family homes increased 13.8 percent to 6.6 months, which indicates a balanced market. Existing condominiums have a 13.9-month supply, which indicates a buyers market. A balanced market between buyers and sellers offers between six and nine months supply of inventory. Total active listings at the end of November increased 7.3 percent year-over-year, from 21,668 to 23,253. Active listings remain about 60 percent below 2008 levels when sales bottomed. New listings of Miami single-family homes increased 2.7 percent to 1,627 from 1,584. New listings of condominiums decreased 3.2, from 2,290 to 2,217 Nationally, total housing inventory at the end of November decreased to 1.74 million, down from 1.85 million existing homes available for sale in October. This represents an increase from 1.67 million a year ago, however. Unsold inventory is at a 3.9-month supply at the current sales pace, down from 4.3 last month and up from 3.5 months a year ago. To access November 2018 Miami-Dade Statistical Reports, visit http://www.SFMarketIntel.com Note: Statistics in this news release may vary depending on reporting dates. MIAMI reports exact statistics directly from its MLS system. About the MIAMI Association of Realtors The MIAMI Association of Realtors was chartered by the National Association of Realtors in 1920 and is celebrating 98 years of service to Realtors, the buying and selling public, and the communities in South Florida. Comprised of six organizations, the Residential Association, the Realtors Commercial Alliance, the Broward Council, the Jupiter Tequesta Hobe Sound (JTHS-MIAMI) Council, the Young Professionals Network (YPN) Council and the award-winning International Council, it represents more than 46,000 real estate professionals in all aspects of real estate sales, marketing, and brokerage. It is the largest local Realtor association in the U.S. and has official partnerships with 204 international organizations worldwide. MIAMIs official website is http://www.MiamiRealtors.com. The reason we do this work is to provide health care decision makers with information that can be used to improve health outcomes. MN Community Measurement (MNCM) has released a new report highlighting quality of care for chronic conditions. The report, Quality of Care for Chronic Conditions, presents data collected by MNCM in 2018 on quality measures for chronic disease care, including comparisons by medical group and clinic. Key Findings of the Report While Minnesota has some of the best health indicators in the country, measurement results show a pattern of wide variation in health care quality overall and significantly different outcomes among some patient populations. Key findings of the report include: Statewide results for all chronic condition measures have been relatively stable over the last three years but show continued room for improvement. See page 8 of the report. Rates are, on average, significantly better for patients with chronic conditions who live in metro areas. For example, patients with asthma who live in small town or rural areas have the lowest rates. See page 10 of the report. In general, measures of how well chronic conditions are managed mostly improve with age. For example, the highest rates occur among people age 60 and older with ischemic vascular disease. See page 11 of the report. Outcome rates vary by race and Hispanic ethnicity. In general, rates for diabetes vascular and asthma are lower for American Indians, African Americans, and Hispanics. See page 13 of the report. The report also presents results by gender and language. The measures were developed or selected for their potential to reduce the modifiable risks and complications associated with these conditions. National and state statistics illustrate the need for improvement in care. Roughly 151 million adults in the United States are physically, emotionally, and financially affected by chronic disease. 60 percent of adults in the United States have a chronic disease and 40 percent of adults have two or more. This number is predicted to increase rapidly in future years. Chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, stroke, or cancer are leading causes of death and disability in the United States. In Minnesota, those diagnosed with chronic conditions accounted for 83 percent of all medical spending in the state in 2012, with an average of $12,800 in health care spending per person. Although statewide rates have been relatively stable, the report also illustrates substantial variation across health care providers (page 9 of the report). MN Community Measurement President Julie Sonier says, The reason we do this work is to provide health care decision makers with information that can be used to improve health outcomes. Many health care providers in Minnesota have been very successful in this effort, and we should look to spread these stories of success. Measurement Matters Andrea Walsh, president and chief executive officer of HealthPartners, one of the highest performing medical groups across most measures in Minnesota, says that data drives progress. High quality care doesnt just happen. Its a continual process thats guided by data to drive improvement and innovation across our system so that we can better serve patients, she explains. This report recognizes the work weve done to improve treatment of chronic conditions and pushes us to do better, especially our focus in reducing health disparities among diverse racial and ethnic communities. About MN Community Measurement MN Community Measurement is a nonprofit organization that empowers health care decision makers with meaningful data to drive improvement. A trusted source of health care data since 2003, MNCM works with doctors, hospitals, clinics, insurance companies, and state agencies to collect, analyze, and report health care data related to quality, cost, and patient experience. Learn more at http://www.mncm.org. Monem Salam, Executive Vice President and Portfolio Manager at Saturna Capital, has received the Islamic Relief USA Award in Sincerity. The award was presented at Islamic Relief USAs 25th Anniversary Gala in Washington, D.C., and recognizes Salams steadfast devotion to the organizations core values. It is a great honor to receive this award, said Salam. Islamic Relief USA is an organization thats done tremendous humanitarian work throughout the United States and the world over the past 25 years. It has been an honor to be a volunteer since its inception. In his engagement with Islamic Relief USA, Mr. Salam has worked to bring greater awareness to its causes through his continued involvement in the community. He has led fund-raising events and various initiatives to educate about the importance of helping the poor and vulnerable. Mr. Salams service exemplifies Saturna Capital's spirited ethic of philanthropy and community involvement, which have been part of the firms culture since its inception. The company supports the local, community-based organizations through annual donations. It also fosters employee giving through the employee-directed charitable giving program and by encouraging employee volunteer work with the local non-profits. About Saturna Capital Corporation Values-Based Global Asset Managers Saturna Capital Corporation, established in 1989 in Bellingham, Washington, USA, is a private, employee-owned, investment adviser with US$3.7 billion in assets under management, providing investment advisory services to mutual funds, institutions, businesses, individuals, and endowments. Saturna Capital is adviser to the Amana Mutual Funds Trust, the oldest and largest family of funds in the US that follow principles of Islamic finance. Saturna Capital is also adviser to the US-based Sextant Mutual Funds and Saturna Sustainable Funds. For more information about Saturna Capital, visit http://www.saturna.com. About Islamic Relief USA Islamic Relief USA was founded in California in 1993. They serve millions of people each year, providing humanitarian aid in the United States and more than 40 other countries around the world. More information about Islamic Relief USA can be found at irusa.org. "It's a Wonderful Life" Money Doctor Neil Gallagher, founder, president, and CEO of Gallagher Financial Group Inc., celebrated the holidays on November 29th by having Gallagher Financial Group Inc. lease out the legendary Palace Theater in Grapevine for a free showing of the classic Its a Wonderful Life. Weve been in business for 35 years, explains Gallagher, and we have shown this film for several years as well. The annual gift came with free hot dogs, candy, soft drinks, and popcorn for attending guests. The price of admission? Bringing a guest and holiday cheer, according to the flyer. Our continued success and growth is due to the support of thousands throughout Texas, primarily in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, states Gallagher, This is our way, during the holiday season, of saying thank you. Gallagher explains that the company chooses the James Stewart classic every year because it showcases values that have made America great: Love of God, love of family, love of country, hard work, delayed gratification, and a determination to never give up. These values come to a crescendo in the movie, right at Christmas Eve, and are very important to Neil Gallagher himself. Grapevine, Texas is the Christmas capital of Texas, and the Palace Theater is a refurbished 1950s theater with all the sights, sounds, and smells of a nostalgic time in America. Throughout the year, Gallagher Financial Group also leases the theater for additional special events, inviting the community to each one. For example, The Longest Day, was shown on Memorial Day to celebrate the military, and Yankee Doodle Dandy was shown on July 4th to celebrate American patriotism. After the movie, guests can stroll Main Street and experience Grapevines version of Bedford Falls. Neil Gallagher has worked in the financial field for more than two decades, managing over one billion in assets and serving over one thousand clients world-wide. In addition, he also hosts weekly radio programs covering financial communication, the psychology of investing, wealth creation, family enrichment, and the importance of estate planning. He was recently awarded the Best of Los Angeles Award - Best Financial Planner - 2018, according to Aurora DeRose, award coordinator for the Best of Los Angeles Award community. Its important to spend the holidays with family, concludes Gallagher, and this was the perfect opportunity to do so. We hope to continue doing these events going forward! For more information on these events, you can email neil(at)gallagherfg.com From Food Banks to Pet Shelters, EcoMark Solar Employees give back to their community Colorado Gives Day was December 4th and in keeping with that Colorado spirit, EcoMark Solar donated $20,000 and over 3000 cans of food and pet supplies to local charities in Colorado Springs, Fort Collins, and Denver. Colorado Gives Day was December 4th and in keeping with that Colorado spirit, EcoMark Solar donated $20,000 and over 3000 cans of food and pet supplies to local charities in Colorado Springs, Fort Collins, and Denver. In gratitude for the good people of Colorado allowing us to show them their solar opportunity, we wanted to give back to causes we all believe in, Jake DiRe CEO of EcoMark Solar explained at their annual holiday gathering. EcoMark employees then voted on how to distribute this years annual donation. In total $20,000 was donated to Max Fund - a no-kill pet shelter, The Home Front Cares - a military family assistance organization, The Childrens Hospital, and Energy Outreach Colorado. These four causes were chosen by employees and the checks were delivered to them on Colorado Gives Day this past December 4th. Annually, EcoMark Solar also facilitates a Kilowatt Can Drive. The company donates one can of food for each kilowatt of solar power sold or installed during the months of October and November. This year EcoMark also inspired its financing partner Mosaic Bank to match the food donations, making this years donation the biggest one yet with over 3000 cans of food. We were able to give twice the amount of food than we originally expected thanks to Mosaic Bank and their generous spirit, DiRe proudly announced. The organizations that received donations included 4 Paws Pet Pantry in Fort Collins, Metro Caring in Denver, and Care and Share Food Bank in Colorado Springs. EcoMark Solar is a Colorado-based solar panel and battery storage installation company that also provides roofing services. According to their website, ecomarksolar.com, they help homeowners understand both the financial and environmental benefits of installing solar panels on their homes. Being founded and operating exclusively in the Colorado market, they are uniquely focused on helping their Colorado neighbors in many ways. OnlineMasters.com, a trusted source for unbiased college rankings and higher education planning, announced the release of their Best Online Master's in Communication for 2019. The research identifies the top programs in the nation based on curriculum quality, program flexibility, affordability, and graduate outcomes. In addition to insights gained from industry professionals, OnlineMasters.com leveraged an exclusive data set comprised of interviews and surveys from current students and alumni. Each online degree program was analyzed with only 40 making it to the final list. The methodology incorporates the most recent data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) and statistical data from the National Center for Education Statistics. Most importantly, only programs from accredited nonprofit institutions were eligible. With the expansion of various online and social media platforms, businesses have sought out communications professionals to improve interactions with customers, says Barbara Montgomery, Program Recognition Manager According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there is also a lower unemployment rate for those with a graduate degree. Students who pursue a masters in communication can gain employment in high-level roles such as chief marketing officer, marketing director, public relations director or advertising director. The steady job growth in this market is just one of the many reasons OnlineMasters.com researched, analyzed, and ranked the Top Masters in Communication programs. To access the complete ranking, please visit https://www.onlinemasters.com/best-degree-programs/communication/ 2019 Best Master's in Communication Programs (in alphabetical order): American University Colorado State University Columbia University Concordia University - St. Paul Drexel University Edinboro University Florida International University Gonzaga University Johns Hopkins University Lasell College Liberty University Marist College Mercer University Michigan State University Mississippi College Missouri State University National University Northeastern University Northern Arizona University Notre Dame of Maryland University Ohio University Purdue University Queens University of Charlotte Regent University South Dakota State University Southern New Hampshire University Spring Arbor University Syracuse University Texas Tech University University of Alabama University of Denver University of Florida University of Iowa University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill University of Southern California Washington State University Webster University West Virginia University Western New England University Westminster College About OnlineMasters.com OnlineMasters.com provides proprietary and unbiased research to help students discover their options for the best graduate programs. The organization aims to inspire students to think big and make an impact in society through the pursuit of higher education. With user-friendly guides and hundreds of program rankings, OnlineMasters.com enables students to make informed decisions about earning a masters degree online. This study represents an advancement in understanding through a laboratory setting of novel surgical techniques for the challenging indication of massive RCTs, demonstrating the compelling biomechanical performance of the InSpace balloon and inviting further clinical investigation. OrthoSpace Ltd. (OrthoSpace or the Company) today announced the publication of a new study in Arthroscopy evaluating the use of novel surgical techniques, including the OrthoSpace InSpace balloon spacer, to address massive irreparable rotator cuff tears (RCTs). These tears represent a painful, disabling condition for which there are historically few treatment options. The present study is unique because it represents one of the first published biomechanical comparisons of the InSpace balloon and the alternative surgical technique of superior capsular reconstruction (SCR) for the treatment of massive RCTs. The cadaveric study, authored by Supriya Singh, M.D., George S. Athwal, M.D., FRCSC, and others, elucidates the biomechanical effects of massive RCTs and describes how the condition leads to humeral head migration, which is a likely source of patient symptoms. The authors assessed the impact of both InSpace, a biodegradable balloon spacer that is implanted between the acromion and the humeral head, allowing smooth gliding and frictionless movement between the two bones, and SCR on shoulder biomechanics. The study simulated massive RCTs and loading forces on cadaver shoulders and found that the presence of a massive tear directly contributed to humeral head migration. When testing the impact of the novel surgical solutions, the authors found that the implantation of the InSpace balloon effectively restored the humeral head to a nearly normal position, a result which OrthoSpace believes may contribute to a reduction of pain leading to improved shoulder rehabilitation. SCR performed similarly, with no significant differences reported between the two techniques. "Optimal surgical management of massive rotator cuff tears and the development of evidence based guidelines for treatment of massive rotator cuff tears are required. This patient population often suffers extreme pain and burdensome physical limitations, said George S. Athwal, M.D., FRCSC, one of the publications authors. This study represents an advancement in understanding through a laboratory setting of novel surgical techniques for the challenging indication of massive RCTs, demonstrating the compelling biomechanical performance of the InSpace balloon and inviting further clinical investigation. Dr. Athwals findings help to confirm the results of previously published clinical studies of InSpace. The study's conclusions validate how the InSpace balloon decreases superior humeral head migration and restores a more normal glenohumeral joint position. We congratulate Dr. Athwal and co-authors on the publication of this study, which deepens the body of understanding about complex shoulder biomechanics and the impact of innovative surgical techniques on shoulder anatomy and function, said Itay Barnea, CEO of OrthoSpace. InSpace has been shown to reduce shoulder pain and improve function in extensive clinical use outside the U.S. and across multiple publications, and we welcome this rigorous insight into the devices performance and benefits as we continue to advance our clinical program. About OrthoSpace Ltd. OrthoSpace is a privately held medical device company located in Caesarea, Israel. The Company's product, InSpace, is an orthopedic biodegradable balloon system that is simple, safe and a minimally invasive method that addresses unmet clinical needs in rotator cuff repair. InSpace is CE Marked and commercialized in Europe, Israel and several countries in Asia and Latin America. OrthoSpace has been granted an Investigational Device Exemption (IDE) to conduct a pivotal human clinical study of the InSpace System in the United States. Paresh Patel joined HNTB as project director in the firms New York transit/rail practice and associate vice president. As the regions transit agencies continue to modernize the critical infrastructure systems needed to improve service, his expertise will help our clients advance their programs. Paresh Patel, PE, joined HNTB Corporation as project director in the firms New York transit/rail practice and associate vice president. Based in the firms Empire State Building offices, he has more than 30 years of diverse transit design and construction experience with New York City Transit. Paresh is a recognized leader in the management of complex transit/rail construction programs as well as the design and implementation of core operating systems, said Stephen Dilts, HNTBs New York office leader and senior vice president. As the regions transit agencies continue to modernize the critical infrastructure systems needed to improve service, his expertise will help our clients advance their programs. Patels NYCT career includes serving as program officer, leading a $1.36 billion series of communications based train control and signaling system projects that included project management and construction management as well as overall system integration. His experience also includes the $225 million rehabilitation of the NYCTs Montague tube, a recovery and resiliency project to repair damage caused by Superstorm Sandy. A registered engineer in New York, Patel holds a masters in electrical engineering from the New Jersey Institute of Technology. HNTB plays an integral role in many of the regions most important infrastructure programs, including construction manager for renewal and rehabilitation of multiple station facilities for New York City Transit; program manager for the redevelopment of John F. Kennedy International Airport; program manager for the Port Authority Bus Terminal redevelopment project; owners engineer for the Gov. Mario M. Cuomo (Tappan Zee) Bridge; lead structural designer of the Kosciuszko Bridge; technical consultant for the Goethals Bridge replacement project; and general engineering consultant for the New Jersey Turnpike Authority, among others. About HNTB HNTB Corporation is an employee-owned infrastructure solutions firm serving public and private owners and contractors. With more than a century of service, including 96 years in New York, HNTB understands the life cycle of infrastructure and addresses clients most complex technical, financial and operational challenges. HNTBs New York City office in the Empire State Building together with offices in Albany, New York and Newark, New Jersey employ more than 400 full-time professionals. Professionals nationwide deliver a full range of infrastructure-related services, including award-winning planning, design, program management and construction management. For more information, visit http://www.hntb.com. Its our hope that this project can show the positive impact of community paramedicine, not just for the patient, but also for the health care industry as a whole, Biddy Smith, Network Task Lead for Special Projects at Quality Insights, said. Quality Insights and its community paramedicine partners from several counties have seen significant impact on West Virginia communities as a result of a project initiated last year. According to data provided from the Kanawha County Emergency Ambulance Authority (KCEAA), community paramedics have helped approximately 195 patients resolve social or medical issues, including necessary home repairs, vital medical interventions and education about patient health. This was accomplished during 301 home visits. Community paramedics also completed more than 272 medication reconciliations, which is a process of ensuring that a patients medication list is as up-to-date as possible including drug name, dosage, frequency and route and working with the patients doctor to make any necessary adjustments. Quality Insights also partnered with KCEAA, Partners in Health Network and Jan Care to produce two educational videos on the impact of community paramedicine in West Virginia. Quality Insights anticipates a return on investment of approximately $400,000 through the reduction of readmissions and emergency department visits. Quality Insights launched the project in 2017 to help emergency medical service (EMS) providers offer expanded care to people with Medicare who live in West Virginia. This form of expanded care - often referred to as mobile integrated health care services or community paramedicine (CP) is delivered by nationally-registered paramedics who have received additional training. A community paramedic may address both clinical and social needs. Community paramedics can provide home safety assessments, triage and referral services, chronic disease management education, support for family caregivers, medication compliance support, vaccinations and more. The goal of the collaboration has been to lessen unnecessary hospital admissions and emergency department visits while enhancing access to quality care for the states most vulnerable and rural residents. Funding for the project was provided by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). Its our hope that this project can show the positive impact of community paramedicine, not just for the patient, but also for the health care industry as a whole, Biddy Smith, Network Task Lead for Special Projects at Quality Insights, said. We want patients to understand how it can help improve their quality of life and we want providers to understand how its filling critical gaps in an effective and efficient way. For more information about this project, contact Biddy Smith at bsmith@qualityinsights.org, or call (304) 346-9864, ext. 3252. About Quality Insights Quality Innovation Network Quality Insights is the Quality Innovation Network-Quality Improvement Organization (QIN-QIO) for Delaware, Louisiana, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Quality Insights collaborates with healthcare providers, patients and allied organizations across the network to bring about widespread, significant improvements in the quality of care they deliver. We are committed to reaching the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services' goals of better care, smarter spending and healthier people. To learn more about the network, visit http://www.qualityinsights-qin.org. SiteLock is a shining example of a company thats firmly committed to these key tenets as it helps protect organizations big and small from wave after wave of attack, added Illena Armstrong of SC Media. SiteLock, the global leader in website security solutions, today announced that SiteLock SecureSite has been recognized as an Excellence Award finalist in the Best SME Security Solution category for the 2019 SC Awards. Finalists are recognized for outstanding leadership and providing superior security products to the cybersecurity industry. Winners will be announced at the SC Awards ceremony on March 5, 2019 in San Francisco. The Best SME Security Solution includes tools and services from all product sectors specifically designed to meet the requirements of small-to-midsized businesses. The winning solution will have been a leading solution during the last two years, having helped to strengthen the IT security industrys continued evolution. It is an honor to be recognized as a 2019 Excellence Finalist by SC Media, said Neill Feather, CEO of SiteLock. From the beginning, SiteLock has been dedicated to protecting every website on the internet by making enterprise-level security accessible and affordable to businesses of all sizes. As cyber threats continue to evolve at a rapid pace with no signs of slowing down, proactive website security is critical to keeping businesses and websites online. SiteLock SecureSite is designed with the SME in mind, helping to guard against these threats and prevent future attacks. Every new year brings with it an unpredictable mix of adversity and opportunity for information security professionals, said Illena Armstrong, VP, editorial, SC Media. In 2018, we watched as ransomware took down entire city governments, popular online platforms were accused of mishandling user data, and technology giants announced an unprecedented industry-wide effort to solve the Spectre and Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities. Through it all, this years SC Awards finalists found ways to break boundaries, overcome challenges and contribute fresh new ideas to the world of cybersecurity. Now in its 22nd year, SC Awards is recognized as the industry gold standard of accomplishment for cybersecurity professionals, products and services. Winners in the Excellence category are determined by an expert panel of judges with extensive knowledge and experience in the cybersecurity industry. The Excellence Award honors the professionals, products and services that have proven to be the best in the industry for protecting todays corporate world from an array of risks and threats. Combatting todays top security threats requires a combination of innovation, collaboration and education, added Illena Armstrong of SC Media. SiteLock is a shining example of a company thats firmly committed to these key tenets as it helps protect organizations big and small from wave after wave of attack. The SC Awards gala honoring the winners attracts top professionals in the cybersecurity community and provides an invaluable opportunity for networking. To register for the 2019 SC Awards gala, please visit https://scawards2019.splashthat.com/. About SC Media SC Media is cybersecurity. For 30 years, they have armed information security professionals with in-depth and unbiased information through timely news, comprehensive analysis, cutting-edge features, contributions from thought leaders, and independent product reviews in partnership with and for top-level information security executives and their technical teams. In addition to their comprehensive website, SC Media offers magazines, ebooks, and newsletters. They also host digital and live events such as SC Awards and RiskSec NY to provide cybersecurity professionals all the information needed to safeguard their organizations and contribute to their longevity and success. Friend us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/SCMag Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/scmagazine Event Information: Anna Naumoski, Events Manager anna.naumoski@haymarketmedia.com 646.638.6015 About SiteLock SiteLock, the global leader in website security solutions, is the only provider to offer complete, cloud-based website protection. Its 360-degree monitoring detects and fixes threats, prevents future attacks, accelerates website performance, and meets PCI compliance standards for businesses of all sizes. Founded in 2008, the company protects over 12 million websites worldwide. For more information, please visit sitelock.com. Through the work of the Foundation, we are able to truly deliver on our promise of providing Smiles for Everyone. The Smiles for Everyone Foundation (SFE Foundation), a non-profit public charity affiliated with Smile Brands Inc. (Smile Brands), is proud to announce the results for its charitable initiatives throughout 2018, in which more than $3 million worth of dental services were donated to communities in need across the U.S. and abroad. During the year, the organization hosted 21 free dental clinics (Days of Giving), an international outpost trip to Paraguay and 15 international outreaches in Ghana, Nicaragua, Thailand, Cambodia and Laos. In total, over 4,500 patients worldwide were able to receive care from dental professionals in Smile Brands network. Through the work of the Foundation, we are able to truly deliver on our promise of providing Smiles for Everyone, says Smile Brands CEO, Steven C. Bilt. Our impact in 2018 would not have been possible without the dedication and commitment of our Smile Brands staff and dental professionals. Days of Giving were held at Smile Brands affiliated offices in Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and Washington. These events provide an opportunity for low-income and underinsured individuals to receive same-day services such as exams and x-rays, cleanings, fillings and extractions, all free of charge. SFE Foundation partners with local nonprofits for these events to identify individuals in need to receive these services. Nonprofits include homeless shelters, food pantries, veterans organizations, childrens groups and support service organizations for victims of domestic violence. In July, Bilt lead a trip of fifteen Smile Brands affiliated dental professionals to Paraguay for a week-long service trip. On this trip, the team provided dental care and oral hygiene education to children and families at community centers and schools in the most impoverished areas surrounding the city of Asuncion. During this trip, they also focused on establishing relationships and training dental professionals in the area in an effort to provide ongoing care in Paraguay throughout the year. All initiatives spearheaded by the Foundation were supported by volunteers from Smile Brands network of offices. In 2018, nearly 1,000 dental professionals and support teams participated in the organizations Days of Giving and international work. Giving back is a pillar of Smile Brands company culture, says Bilt. Watching our teams willingness to volunteer with the Foundation is inspiring. These opportunities, we feel, give a sense of connection and bring new meaning to the work we do. SFE Foundation was founded in 2011 by Bilt with the vision to support communities, both domestically and abroad, in ways only dental professionals can, by providing access to dental services. Since then, the nonprofit has delivered 19,000 smiles and donated over $14.5 million in dentistry. More information on SFE Foundations charitable initiatives for 2018 and future initiatives for 2019 can be found by visiting the foundations website at http://www.smilesforeveryone.org. About Smile Brands Inc. Based in Irvine California, Smile Brands Inc. is one of the largest providers of support services to dental groups in the United States. Smile Brands Inc. provides comprehensive business support services through exclusive long term agreements with affiliate dental groups, so dentists can spend more time caring for their patients and less time on the administrative, marketing, and financial aspects of operating a dental practice. Smile Brands supports nearly 400 Bright Now! Dental, Monarch Dental, Castle Dental, A+ Dental Care, OneSmile Dental, Johnson Family Dental and P3 Dental Group offices in 16 states, including Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Maryland, Ohio, Oregon, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Washington. Smile Brands is a portfolio company of Gryphon Investors, a leading middle-market private equity firm based in San Francisco, CA. For more information, visit http://www.smilebrands.com. About the Smiles For Everyone Foundation The Smiles for Everyone Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization with the mission of delivering smiles for everyone by providing free dental care for those in need, both at home in the U.S. and around the world. Since 2011, the Smiles for Everyone Foundation has delivered over 19,000 smiles and $14.5 million in donated dentistry. The foundation currently supports programs which provide free dental care to those in need in Cambodia, Ghana, Laos, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Thailand, and the United States. For more information or to make a donation, visit http://www.smilesforeveryone.org. Media Contact: Solana Tanabe Curator PR for Smile Brands Solana.tanabe@curatorpr.com (916) 799-3193 Texas Super Lawyer Jana Wickham Paul joins Connatser Family Law Connatser Family Law announces the addition of Texas Super Lawyer Jana Wickham Paul to its team of award-winning family law attorneys. Connatser Family Law, PLLC, one of the regions leading family law firms, announces the addition of Texas Super Lawyer Jana Wickham Paul to its team of award-winning attorneys. Connatser Family law, a 2018 U.S. News & World Report Best Law Firm, handles all aspects of family law under the leadership of managing member Aubrey Connatser, specializing in divorce, child custody matter, pre- and post-marital agreement, modification, and collaborative law matters. Board certified in family law by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization, Jana Wickham Paul is also recognized as a Best Lawyers in Dallas by D Magazine (2011-2013), one of the Best Women Lawyers in Dallas (2010) and one of the Best Lawyers in Dallas under 40 (2006) and noted on the lists for Texas Rising Stars (2004) and Texas Super Lawyers (2004-2018). Jana is one of the most experienced family lawyers in North Texas, says Aubrey Connatser, Managing Member of Connatser Family Law. She handles the widest possible range of cases in family court and we are fortunate to have her available to provide services to our clients. I am honored to become part of the Connatser team and its mission of expert counsel for family law issues, said Ms. Wickham Paul. In addition to the firms record of excellence in family legal matters, managing member Audrey Connatsers commitment to ensuring fair access to legal representation is a critically important social impact cause that I am proud to be associated with. ABOUT JANA WICKHAM PAUL Ms. Wickham Paul earned her law degree from Southern Methodist University School of Law, now S.M.U. Dedman School of Law. Initially, she practiced law in El Paso at El Paso Legal Assistance Society, mainly handling family law matters for indigent clients. She served as in-house counsel for Hunter Industries in San Diego, California. Then she moved back to Dallas in 1997 and served as in-house counsel at her familys business. In 1999, she joined a well-known Dallas family law firm and then became a partner at her own firm. She is admitted to the College of the State Bar of Texas. She is a member of the Texas Academy of Family Law Specialists, the State Bar of Texas (Family Law Section), and the Dallas Bar Association (Family Law Section), where she served on the board as treasurer, secretary, vice chair, and, in 2009, as chair. She has served as co-chair of the Legal Lines Committee of the DBA. She is a fellow of the Dallas Bar Foundation and became a Fellow of the Texas Bar Foundation. She is past president and current member of Collaborative Law Dallas, a Collaborative Law practice group of Dallas family law attorneys. Outside of the practice of law, she is an active member of the Junior League of Dallas and the Dallas Museum of Art. ABOUT CONNATSER FAMILY LAW, PLLC Connatser Family Law is a North Texas firm specializing in family law matters, ranging from divorce, child custody matter, pre- and post-marital agreement, modification, and collaborative law matter. A U.S. News & World Report Best Law Firm, Connatser Family Law offers a team of deeply-experienced, award-winning attorneys, and is led by managing member and founder Aubrey Connatser. ABOUT AUBREY CONNATSER Ms. Connatser is a board-certified expert in family law with numerous awards and credentials, including: Top 100 Attorneys in Texas, Top 50 Women Attorneys in Texas, and one of the youngest Dallas family lawyers selected to Thomson Reuters Super Lawyers list. She has been chosen among the top 5% of all Texas attorneys for this honor in 2009 through 2011 and 2013-2015. She has been chosen for The Best Lawyers in America (Woodward White), the oldest and most prestigious legal review service, selected one of the Best Lawyers in Dallas by D Magazine. Connatser Family law under the leadership of Aubrey Connatser supports the Dallas Bar Associations Dallas Volunteer Attorney Program and the Equal Access to Justice Campaign. This is the third year in a row our students have achieved 100 percent pass rate on their licensing exams The National Commission on Certification of Physician Assistants announced on Dec. 11, 2018, that every member of MBKUs School of PA Studies Class of 2018 successfully passed the PA National Certifying Examination. This is the third year in a row our students have achieved 100 percent pass rate on their licensing exams, said Director of the School of PA Studies Judy Ortiz, PhD, PA-C. MBKUs School of PA Studies is led by committed faculty that ensure our students are prepared for their examinations each year. To say I am proud of our students would be an understatement. This is a significant accomplishment and each one of them should be extremely proud, Dr. Ortiz concluded. The National Commission on Certification of Physician Assistants is the only certifying organization for PAs in the United States. Established as a not-for-profit organization in 1974, NCCPA is dedicated to assuring the public that certified PAs meet established standards of clinical knowledge and cognitive skills upon entry into practice and throughout their careers. All U.S. states, the District of Columbia and the U.S. territories rely on NCCPA certification as one of the criteria for licensure or regulation of PAs. "Every member of the PA Class of 2018 performed exceedingly well on their exams," said President Kevin Alexander, OD, PhD. "As University President I am so proud of the academic accomplishments of our students, and when I see results like this I know that we have some of the best students and faculty anyone could ever ask for." To attain the PA-C designation, graduates of ARC-PA accredited PA programs must take and pass the Physician Assistant National Certifying Examination. The examination is a computerized, multiple-choice exam comprised of 300 questions that assess basic medical and surgical knowledge. It is administered by the National Commission on Certification of the Physician Assistant. The information tested in the PANCE are: cardiovascular, pulmonary, endocrine, EENT, gastrointestinal, genitourinary, reproductive, musculoskeletal, neurological, psychiatric, dermatologic, hematologic and infectious diseases. The skills and abilities tested are: history taking, lab diagnostic, formation of a diagnosis, health maintenance, clinical intervention, clinical therapeutics and the application of concepts. MBKUs School of PA Studies was established in 2012, and offers a 27-month, post-baccalaureate program leading to the degree, Master of Medical Science. The PA program is nine quarters in duration. About Marshall B. Ketchum University Located in Fullerton, Calif., Marshall B. Ketchum University is an independent, private, non-profit, accredited educational institution. MBKU is home to the Southern California College of Optometry, the School of PA Studies and College of Pharmacy. The Southern California College of Optometry confers a Doctor of Optometry and a Master of Science in Vision Science degree. The School of PA Studies awards a Master of Medical Science degree. The College of Pharmacy welcomed its first class in the fall of 2016 and will award a Doctor of Pharmacy degree. MBKU owns and operates two premier eye and vision care centers: the University Eye Center at Ketchum Health Anaheim and the University Eye Center at Ketchum Health Los Angeles. The University also opened a Family Medicine Practice in 2018, at its Ketchum Health facility in Anaheim. Superior lights up New York City for the second time with a Times Square billboard. Our companys mission is to continue to evolve and expand our business. Partnering with Macys is a significant milestone in helping to surpass this goal. Home City Inc., a home linen, textile, and area rug company, announced that their signature brand, Superior, has launched over 8,000 coveted products including bedding and sheet sets, bath linens, and curtains on macys.com. Superior area rugs will be available for purchase on macys.com in early 2019. We are thrilled to bring the Superior brand into the homes of the Macys customer, says CEO and President Sam Wahab. Our companys mission is to continue to evolve and expand our business. Partnering with Macys is a significant milestone in helping to surpass this goal. This collaboration will also help in building a relationship and loyalty with the Macys customer which falls directly in line with our current business model. What excites us most is that this partnership comes just in time for the holiday season. With the company's continuing efforts to make Superior a household name, the brand launched its second billboard advertisement right in the heart of New York Citys Times Square. While the brands first Times Square billboard concentrated on the companys rebranding efforts, this second advertisement directs holiday shoppers where to shop Superior products as well as focus on the companys continuing efforts to evolve and grow the brand. We are thrilled to be advertising alongside some of the biggest brands during the busiest time of the year. We hope this second Times Square feature will entice shoppers to give the gift of Superior to their loved ones this holiday season, says Vice President Tamer Wahab. Superior has become one of the industrys leading bedding, bath linen, and area rug brands by creating a niche for themselves and staying true to their tradition of creating innovative decor, designed for life. This partnership with Macys, now more than ever, is helping the Superior brand in becoming more accessible to consumers. Along with Macys, the Superior brand is now being featured across major retail and online stores including Bloomingdales, Amazon, Overstock, Wayfair, Walmart, Groupon, Woot, Fingerhut, Rue La La, Hayneedle, and more. To shop Superior at Macys, visit macys.com. Watch how Superior lit up Times Square on November 12th and again on December 17th. About Superior: Home City Inc.s signature brand, Superior has grown into an affordable home luxury brand that specializes in area rugs, bedding, bath linens, and curtains. All Superior products are made with top-class materials that have been designed to bring you a consistently exceptional experience. About Home City Inc.: Home City Inc. prides itself on a commitment to tradition to fabrics and textiles. Home City Inc. values the needs of its customers and stands behind the integrity of its products. Headquartered in Edison, NJ, Home City Inc. has grown into a leading wholesale and retail business with offices in the United States as well as in Egypt, China, Turkey, and India. Home City Inc. is an EDI-compliant organization, and our Superior brand products can be found across major online marketplaces. For Media Inquiries Contact: Katherine Flacco kflacco@homecityinc.com P: 732-243-9100 ext. 147 Dr. Arthur A. Kezian DDS is a dental office located in Larchmont Village, in Los Angeles, California. Dr. Kezian is known for his amazing dental skills, experience, and chairside manner. He covers almost all aspects of dentistry including general, cosmetic, and implant dentistry. He creates amazing smiles and helps his patients maintain them. The office covers procedures like porcelain crowns, porcelain veneers, dental implants, teeth whitening, white fillings, replacing amalgam fillings, cracked teeth, broken teeth, bad breath, teeth cleanings, and many more. Dr. Kezian has always been a very helpful individual; and this did not just stop with his dental office. Three years ago, he started a scholarship program that focused around science. He wanted to give students the chance to win some money to be able to use towards their educational expenses. The past two years had been very successful and Dr. Kezian along with his scholarship committee were very proud to see the number of students who participated. They admired how focused and motivated all the students were. Both years, the scholarship committee decided amongst themselves and rewarded a lucky student with $1200! The scholarship is officially open for this year as well! The Dr. Arthur A. Kezian DDS Science Scholarship is now accepting applications for the 2018-2019 school year! If you are a student or know one who would like to participate, please visit Dr. Kezian's website to pertain more information. Applications can be found on the following page and can be filled out and sent right through the website: https://www.drkezian.com/science-scholarship/ You can also find out about eligibility and requirements for the scholarship on the same page listed above. Please visit the website and send in your applications before the deadline (March 31, 2019). On behalf of the scholarship committee, we wish all our participants good luck! Best wishes in all your studies. Dr. Arthur A. Kezian DDS 443 N. Larchmont Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90004 (323) 467-2777 http://www.drkezian.com LSUS Pilot Pitch winner Tafadzwa Mariga is congratulated by EAP executive director Dave Smith "Through EAPs Grand Prix college business plan competitions, we are guiding students and young entrepreneurs in growing their businesses, taking them from concept to reality. - Dave Smith, Executive Director of EAP Students at three North Louisiana universities competed for prizes and startup assistance at BRFs Entrepreneurial Accelerator Programs (EAP) Grand Prix, a series of university business plan competitions held in November and designed to support student innovation. The top five participants individuals or teams at Northwestern State University (NSU), Louisiana State University Shreveport (LSUS) and Grambling State University (GSU) each pitched their business idea to a panel of judges made up of representatives from sponsors, university faculty, and the local business community. One of EAPs objectives is to foster entrepreneurial education at the university level, said Dave Smith, Executive Director of EAP. We think the best way to grow an entrepreneurial-minded ecosystem is to expose students to an environment that celebrates their innovation. Through EAPs Grand Prix college business plan competitions, we are guiding students and young entrepreneurs in growing their businesses, taking them from concept to reality. The top three finalists at each competition were awarded cash prizes, scholarships to the Louisiana Startup Prize 2019 and the Patent Academy, plus professional services from EAP. The grand prize winner of each competition received $3,000, while second and third place received $1,000 and $500, respectively. The winners of NSUs Inferno Pitch were Alba Maloff Johnson and Matthew Broekman who won first place for their idea to place a bio-sensor in vehicles that could detect drunk driving. This competition gave us insight to how it would be to do this ourselves, said Johnson. I didnt consider myself an entrepreneur before, but I do now! Tafadzwa Mariga won LSUS Pilot Pitch for his idea to target drip coffee, specialty coffee and whole bean coffee enthusiasts at various events. The team of Jarrid Richards, Kerwan Antoine and Casey Henry won GSUs Golden Pitch with their idea LimeLight, which allows students to seamlessly submit college applications to several institutions. This is the second year EAP has hosted university business plan competitions. After a successful first year at LSUS, the program expanded to NSU and GSU in 2018. The competition is expected to expand to more North Louisiana universities in the future. EAPs Grand Prix is sponsored by BRF, The Committee of One Hundred, Business First Bank, ANECA Federal Credit Union, NSU, LSUS and GSU. EAP, an initiative of BRF, is a public/private partnership between BRF, the Caddo Parish Commission and the City of Shreveport to diversify the regional economy, create jobs and expand the areas tax base by providing services to innovative startups that have high growth potential. Since EAP began in July 2014, the program has screened more than 690 startups, provided services to more than 220 companies and helped Northwest Louisiana-based startups raise more than $64 million in investment. "There is an increasing need for a unified face for the technology as well as increased efforts to ensure interoperability between devices. The Alliance will provide those and serve as a forum for collaboration across the industry. Today saw the public unveiling of the UWB Alliance, a global not-for-profit organization that will collectively establish Ultra Wideband (UWB) technology as an innovative and unique technology which is now ready to explode by evolving to a mature high-volume, open-standards industry. At its creation, the Alliance counts key players from across major industry sectors and includes founding members such as Hyundai, Kia, Zebra, Decawave, Alteros, Novelda, and Ubisense. We are at a significant inflection point in the adoption of UWB. In recent years we have seen dramatic growth in implementations of UWB across a range of industries and geographies. However, that expansion is accelerating as we see the introduction of the next generation of UWB devices based on the draft IEEE 802.15.4z standard, said Tim Harrington, Chairman of the UWB alliance. That means there is an increasing need for a unified face for the technology as well as increased efforts to ensure interoperability between devices. The Alliance will provide those and serve as a forum for collaboration across the industry. The UWB Alliance has been created with four key goals: To promote large-scale deployments of UWB technology and protect the millions of installed devices globally from encroaching radio technologies. To drive continued geographic expansion of UWB technology into new regions such as the recently announced UWB regulations in India. To support growth of UWB technologies through end-to-end, vendor-agnostic interoperability programs. To provide a forum for collaboration across the UWB ecosystem. The UWB Alliance has also tasked Tim Harrington, as Chairman and Executive Director, to lead the fast-paced growth of the group and drive the specification work. Harrington has spent over 30 years working in the wireless industry, working with companies such as Symbol, WhereNet, and Zebra to define and create markets for Wi-Fi and UWB. Harrington also currently serves as Chairman of the IEEE Task Group 802.15.4z and Vice Chairman of ETSI TGUWB in the European Union. The voice of the UWB industry in Washington DC and Brussels, the Alliance is working with government law makers and regulators to make progress on one of its key goals: ensuring effective interoperation and co-existence with other wireless standards. The IEEE 802 LAN/MAN Standards Committee that oversees Local and Metropolitan Area networking standards including standards used by UWB and Wi-Fi has drafted and approved comments to the FCC 6 GHz NPRM expressing its recognition of the need for coexistence between UWB and Wi-Fi as the latter technology seeks to expand into the 6 GHz band. The committee has also requested the 802.19 coexistence Working Group work toward an effective resolution on the issue. UWB Technology UWB is a unique radio technology that can use extremely low energy levels for short-range, high-bandwidth communications over a large portion of the radio spectrum. Devices powered by a coin cell can operate for a period of years without recharge or replacement. UWB technology enables a broad range of applications, from real-time locating and tracking, to sensing and radar, to secure wireless access, and short message communication. The flexibility, precision and low-power characteristics of UWB give it a unique set of capabilities unlike any other wireless technology. The IEEE 802.15.4 standard which includes UWB technologies will be enriched to include enhancements developed by 802.15.4z Task Group. With a technological merge being agreed upon by multiple silicon vendors in concert with major consumer manufacturers of devices such as smart phones the new standard is expected to be published in the latter half of 2019. About UWB Alliance UWB Alliance is a global not-for-profit organization that will collectively establish Ultra Wideband (UWB) technology as an open-standards industry. The UWB Alliance has been created to promote large-scale deployments of UWB technology and protect the millions of installed devices globally from encroaching radio technologies. In addition, the UWB Alliance will drive growth through end-to-end, vendor-agnostic interoperability programs that will provide accurate location, navigation, tracking, security, imaging, sensing, and communication to applications across multiple industries. SPiN Thoracic Navigation System This financing provides the resources and flexibility that will allow us to continue our commercial expansion and technological innovation in order to help physicians diagnose and treat lung cancer earlier and to ultimately save lives. Veran Medical Technologies, Inc., a privately held medical device company and leader in interventional pulmonology technologies, announced today that it has secured a new credit facility from Madryn Asset Management. The financing provides Veran with up to $35 million in aggregate proceeds, which provides increased financial and structural flexibility to support Verans continued investment into its strategic growth initiatives focused on improving the diagnosis and treatment of lung cancer. We are excited to partner with Madryn and its team of experienced healthcare investment professionals to support our continued advancement of interventional technologies for the lung cancer market, said Veran Medical CEO Jason Pesterfield. This financing provides the resources and flexibility that will allow us to continue our commercial expansion and technological innovation in order to help physicians diagnose and treat lung cancer earlier and to ultimately save lives. Madryns financing follows a strategic investment from BTG which joined Veran Medicals existing investors including Versant Ventures and River Cities Capital Funds. We believe that Verans technologies provide a precision navigational platform that enhances and expands physicians access to difficult-to-reach peripheral lung nodules, said Peter Faroni, Co-Founder and Partner of Madryn. There is significant unmet need in the diagnosis and treatment of lung cancer and we believe that expanding access to innovative interventional technologies such as Verans will result in faster diagnoses, improved patient outcomes, and lower costs to the healthcare system. We are thrilled to be joining Verans existing partners at this exciting time and look forward to supporting the companys creation of value over the long term. Verans next-generation SPiN Thoracic Navigation System offers an industry-leading, precision, thoracic guidance platform that allows pulmonologists and other lung specialists to seamlessly transition between a navigated, endobronchial approach and a navigated, transthoracic approach utilizing SPiN Perc, to help physicians diagnose lung cancer earlier. A published clinical study utilizing a multi-modality approach, including Verans SPiN System and SPiN Perc, have demonstrated a 92% diagnostic yield. Verans SPiN Thoracic Navigation System is the most versatile system on the market and is also utilized by thoracic surgeons for localization and marking of lung nodules in the operating room immediately prior to resection. In addition, Verans SPiN IR software application enables interventional radiologists to utilize the navigation platform for lung, liver, kidney, and other thoracic anatomy. Lung cancer remains the number one cancer killer worldwide. In the U.S. alone, 94 million current or former smokers remain at elevated risk for lung cancer and more than 8 million people currently meet the clinical criteria for lung cancer screening. When suspicious lesions are discovered, physicians and patients need diagnostic answers to inform treatment decisions. Mounting clinical data suggests that a large percentage of the hundreds of thousands of bronchoscopies performed every year on suspected lung cancer patients are non-diagnosticdelaying potential lifesaving therapy and often resulting in invasive, expensive, and potentially unnecessary surgical procedures. About Veran Medical Technologies Veran is a privately held medical device company headquartered in St. Louis, MO. The companys mission is to empower physicians to diagnose cancer earlier and to enable precision therapy to save lives. In the United States, lung cancer kills more people each year than breast, prostate, pancreatic and colon cancers combined. Veran has developed and commercialized an FDA cleared, next generation electromagnetic thoracic navigation platform called the SPiN Thoracic Navigation System. Verans breakthrough technology has been adopted by leading cancer centers throughout the United States. Veran provides physicians with a full line of bronchoscopic brushes, needles, forceps and steerable catheters with tiny electromagnetic sensors embedded in the tips for precise navigation. The combination of these proprietary Always-On Tip Tracked instruments and Verans exclusive patient respiratory gating technology enables physicians to accurately access lung nodules by accounting for nodule movement during patient breathing, a common challenge for lung specialists. Another challenge lung specialists face is that approximately 40% of lung nodules lie outside of an airway, making them very difficult to reach endobronchially, and traditionally requiring an additional procedure. Verans SPiN Thoracic Navigation System is the first and only FDA cleared technology that enables Pulmonologists or Thoracic Surgeons to safely and accurately access lung nodules outside of an airway using SPiN Perc, a navigated transthoracic needle. With SPiN Perc, Veran combines endobronchial navigation with percutaneous navigation, allowing physicians to access all lung nodules in a single procedure, regardless of nodule size or location. This eliminates the cost and risk of unnecessary procedures and empowers physicians to provide a same day diagnosis for their patients. The early diagnosis and treatment of lung cancer has been proven to save lives. About Madryn Asset Management, LP Madryn Asset Management, LP is a leading alternative asset management firm that invests in innovative healthcare companies specializing in unique and transformative products, technologies, and services. The firm draws on its extensive and diverse experience spanning the investment management and healthcare industries, and employs an independent research process based on original insights to target attractive economic opportunities that deliver strong risk-adjusted and absolute returns for its limited partners while creating long-term value in support of its portfolio companies. For additional information, please visit http://www.madrynlp.com. Based on recent research completed by Compass Intelligence, Verizon Connect, AT&T Fleet Complete, Spireon FleetLocate, Geotab, and Omnitracs were among the top ranked leaders in the fleet tracking industry. The A-List in Fleet Tracking Index includes companies providing products and services to support the fixed and mobile tracking of fleets including vehicles that support in the delivery of products and goods, service/maintenance/repair, and other trucking (light and heavy commercial vehicles) and transport solutions. This may include the use of GPS/satellite, sensor modules, camera systems, user dashboards, software, and other technologies to track, trace, monitor, and locate fleets as well as provide onboard intelligence and fleet information. While there are 1000s of fleet management and tracking companies, Compass Intelligence narrowed the scope to review roughly 60 companies or vendors serving across the globe and performed a final indexing of 25 companies. Based on a proprietary research framework and model evaluating company performance and metrics, product portfolio and features, market and brand strength, client successes, and other metrics, these top companies scored roughly 65 to 95 points out of a total of 100 points per the index. Verizon Connect tops the A-List in Fleet Tracking Index reaching a total of 92.3 index score on the index, followed by AT&T Fleet Complete with an index score of 90. Verizon Connect launched earlier this year, and represents the integration of Verizon Telematics, Telogis and Fleetmatics. Verizon Connect provides a comprehensive platform of solutions and services including fleet and field service management software, vehicle tracking, route optimization, commercial navigation and ELD compliance, serving customers with 24 offices across the globe. AT&T Fleet Complete offers GPS-based tracking and management solutions that connect fleet operators with operations staff, mobile workers, and fleet vehicles to help them boost productivity, control costs, improve safety and manage compliance. In addition to the top 5, other companies who placed high on the index include Inseego, T-Mobile (SyncUP FLEET), Vodafone, Teletrac Navman, Sprint, TomTom, Telefonica, Globalstar, Alphabet, and Trimble. Fleet and asset management has continued to be one of the largest segments for the overall global IoT market, states Stephanie Atkinson, CEO and Principal Analyst. Major advancements in fleet automation and technology are providing vital intelligence to improve operations, driver safety, and meet compliance mandates. Top 25 in The CompassIntel A-List in Fleet Tracking Index include: 1 Verizon Connect - 92.3 2 AT&T Fleet Complete - 90.0 3 Spireon (FleetLocate) - 89.0 4 Geotab - 89.0 5 Omnitracs - 88.4 6 Inseego - 88.1 7 T-Mobile (SyncUP FLEET) - 88.0 8 Vodafone - 86.0 9 Teletrac Navman - 85.0 10 Sprint - 82.4 11 TomTom - 82.2 12 Telefonica - 81.0 13 Globalstar - 79.4 14 Alphabet - 78.7 15 Trimble - 77.0 16 NexTraq - 75.6 17 SkyBitz - 75.0 18 GPS Insight - 74.0 19 BlackBerry Radar - 73.6 20 Pedigree Technologies - 73.4 21 Fleetup - 72.8 22 Lytx - 72.0 23 Zubie - 71.0 24 Arvento - 69.0 25 GPS Trackit - 68.0 The CompassIntel A-List Index is a research framework using economic indicators, vendor tracking analysis, firmographics, market metrics, quantitative tracking, and data analytics to provide a scoring and ranking system for vendors in the mobile, IoT, and emerging technologies markets. The CompassIntel A-List Index combines research, quantitative metrics analysis, and expert analyst due diligence. For a complete list, please be sure to visit https://www.compassintelligence.com/fleet-tracking-index-a-list-index.html and get access to the executive brief. About Compass Intelligence Founded in 2005, CompassIntel.com is a market analytics and consulting firm specializing in metrics-driven market intelligence and insights for the mobile, IoT, and high-tech industries. Compass Intelligence provides executive insights, market sizing/forecasting and modeling, competitive analysis, strategic consulting, advisory services, trending analysis, and survey research services. Compass Intelligence helps guide strategic business decisions, and support in the success of our clients through delivering content engagement, go to market planning, competitive positioning, and strategic advisory. Vertical Bridge, the largest private owner and operator of communications infrastructure in the United States, is proud to announce that its philanthropic arm, the Vertical Bridge Charitable Network (VBCN), has had its most successful year to date. In 2018, VBCN donated over $1.25 million to more than 100 non-profit organizations around the country, a nearly 30% increase in donations from 2017. Since Vertical Bridges founding four years ago, VBCN has donated more than $3.1 million. The 2018 contributions exceeded VBCNs goal this year by more than $50,000, thanks in large part to its employee matching program. Vertical Bridge employees participation in other VBCN initiatives also increased to record highs, including utilizing more than 1,000 hours of paid time off to give back to a charitable cause of their choice. Employees also organized over 30 VBCN-sponsored events throughout their communities nationwide. Philanthropy has been a pillar of Vertical Bridge since we started in 2014, and weve worked hard to maintain it as an integral part of our culture as weve grown the company, said Alex Gellman, CEO and co-founder of Vertical Bridge. 2018 was an extremely exciting year for Vertical Bridge, and to have a record year for VBCN, especially one driven by employee participation, is truly icing on the cake. Gellman noted that a particularly meaningful event this year was this summers Honoring, Inspiring & Celebrating Our Military, a company-wide initiative where more than 160 Vertical Bridge employees hosted an afternoon of games and fun for active and retired military servicemen, Florida public service officers and their families. Guests also had the opportunity to hear from and meet New York Times bestselling author and retired United States Army Staff Sergeant Travis Mills of the 82nd Airborne at the event. Additional highlights from 2018 included co-hosting a benefit concert with Music Movement to help create music programs for children with autism at this years WIA conference as well as making a $110,000 contribution to the organization; assisting with critical relief efforts after Hurricane Michael through a $65,000 donation to Feeding the Gulf Coast and Childrens Advocacy Center; contributing over $40,000 for classroom and educational supplies through DonorsChoose.org; and awarding more than $60,000 in college scholarships through VBCNs annual scholarship program. About Vertical Bridge Vertical Bridge is the largest private owner and operator of communications infrastructure and locations in the United States. The company owns, operates and master leases over 134,000 tower, rooftop, billboard, utility attachment and other site locations in support of wireless network deployments. Based in Boca Raton, Florida, Vertical Bridge was founded in 2014 by key executives from Digital Bridge Holdings, LLC and former senior officers of Global Tower Partners. The senior management team at Vertical Bridge has over 200 years of collective experience in tower infrastructure and related sectors. For more information, please visit http://www.verticalbridge.com. Atlanta-based marketing franchise Welcomemat Services recently celebrated its 15th year in business since its founding in 2003, and concluded 2018 with strong sales. This year also marked the fifth consecutive year that Welcomemat Services occupied a place on Entrepreneur's Franchise 500, and 2019 will mark the seventh consecutive year as a leader on Franchise Business Reviews list of Top 50 Franchise in Franchisee Satisfaction. Additionally, Welcomemat earned the title Top Innovative Franchise for 2018 and was named a Top 100 Franchise, both according to Franchise Business Review. With an emphasis on the health and wealth of local businesses in the local communities of franchisees and throughout the country, Welcomemat has enjoyed considerable growth and success. The company saw over 25 percent revenue year-to-date growth, surpassed 2018 growth expectations for five new revenue streams in digital, social media and direct mail built around data gained from patented tracking over the past 15 years. Overall new product revenue grew by 50 percent from Q1 to Q3 in 2018. This was a landmark year for our brand, said Brian Mattingly, CEO and Founder of Welcomemat Services. The launch of our new platform has allowed franchisees to offer even more big-business technologies at an affordable investment to their local community partners. The result of this new platform has been unparalleled growth throughout the year, resulting in one of our biggest years yet. Welcomemat takes care to balance both traditional marketing offerings with digital products as well, keeping the doors open for a wide market and positioning itself to meet a given clients changing needs. Franchisees also stay empowered to tailor marketing solutions to the needs of their local business clients, making Welcomemat a market-focused franchise poised for even greater success. Our franchisees value the connection to their communities and want to contribute to the success of local business in their area, said Mattingly. To this end, they serve as community marketing partners by bringing Welcomemats valuable marketing solutionsranging from its proprietary print and direct mail program to data-driven social media campaigns and email marketingright to the front doors of local business owners. Welcomemats approach is proving successful: Data-modeled and segmented mailings are producing response rates in the 5 percent to 17 percent range, whereas the average direct mail response rate is 2%. Buoyed by this momentum, Welcomemat Services plans to roll out a new patent-pending data-tracking technology to service its more than 60 territories in 25 states. This year also included the expansion of a Welcomemat multi-unit franchisee to their fifth territory, an exciting first for the company. Our growth showcases the value we bring our franchisees and clients alike, and differentiates us from others in the segment. We are excited to continue growing and targeting new markets in the year to come, said Mattingly. ABOUT WELCOMEMAT SERVICES A leader in the $133-billion local advertising industry, Welcomemat Services is a new mover marketing and technology company that provides loyalty marketing solutions designed to target families who have recently changed their address. The brand was named to Entrepreneurs 2015, 2016,2017, and 2018 Franchise 500." In 2017, the brand was named Entrepreneur's 'Best of the Best' in the Advertising Services category and named the #1 Advertising Franchise. Since 2003, Welcomemat Services technological innovation and marketing sophistication has enabled the brand to change the face of the direct-mail marketing industry. It offers local, regional, and national businesses & organizations unprecedented access to information about their new mover clients. For more information on Welcomemat Services, visit http://www.welcomematservices.com The Spanish Mustangs of the Cayuse Ranch have been preserved The Cayuse Ranch along with a Coalition of Wild Horse Advocacy and rescue groups that include: Return to Freedom, The Spanish Mustang Foundation, Cana Foundation, Spanish Mustang Preserve, Reach Out to Horses, Cranio-Connection and Zumas Rescue Ranch, are pleased to announce the successful rehoming of an entire herd of more than 150 Spanish Mustangs from Wyoming to California. The Cayuse Ranch, founded in 1916 by Wyoming homesteader Bob Brislawn, has for decades been home to some of the original bloodlines of the Spanish Mustangs, those horses brought to the Americas by Spanish explorers in the 1400s. Brislawn made it his mission to preserve the dwindling breed on his ranches, but following his death in 2016, his family was left with the overwhelming task of caring for the more than 150 horses in his charge. When the ranch was sold in 2017, the Brislawn family put out the call to help find the herd a new place to roam, and several groups answered. It takes a dedicated and focused group of warriors to save some of Americas last remaining Spanish Mustangs, said Jodi Messenich of Zuma Rescue Ranch. Together a group of private citizens and a few amazing horse preservation groups pulled this mission off seamlessly. Adam Edwards of PaHa Ponies and The Spanish Mustang Foundation worked tirelessly with the Brislawns to undertake this monumental effort throughout 2017, and were joined this year by CANA Foundation, Cranio-Connection, Reach Out to Horses, Return to Freedom, Spanish Mustang Preserve and Zumas Rescue Ranch to help rehome the herd. Return to Freedom, The Spanish Mustang Foundation, Cana Foundation, Spanish Mustang Preserve, Reach Out to Horses, Cranio-Connection and Zumas Rescue Ranch came together to bring this herd to a sanctuary in California. Relocating an entire herd of Mustangs from the range is a monumental undertaking and every single member of this focused group did all they could to make it possible. In an outstanding effort there were two women that drove from Longmont CO to Hulett WY multiple times to bring some of the horses to Denver for training and forever homes. After the initial trips these two amazing women saw how huge the task was and realized quickly that one man (Adam Edwards) on the ground with the herd wasnt enough. So, Lorraine Campbell and Kelly Moore continue to make multiple trips, trailer in tow to WY offering more hands-on helpers to sort and move the horses. After two years of effort, this small group of dedicated, passionate individuals were able to transport 30 of the herd to Lompoc, California, 25 stayed in WY with PaHa Ponies (Adam Edwards) and 60 were placed with Spanish Mustang preserve in Bayfield Wi. Now the entire Cayuse Ranch Herd has been placed into forever sanctuaries across the US. Relocating an entire herd of Mustangs from the range is a monumental undertaking and every single member of this focused group did all they could to make it possible, said Neda Demayo, founder of Return to Freedom. We were proud to answer the call and join with so many amazing groups working to protect and preserve these majestic creatures and ensure they have a healthy and safe home where they can run free. I thank the coalition members and Jodi Messenich from Zuma Rescue Ranch for being the catalyst of our involvement as the transportation sponsor. Sponsoring their journey to freedom is truly an honor for the CANA Foundation and inline with the work we do in rewilding Americas wild horses, shared Manda Kalimian, founder of the CANA Foundation. While this operation was heavy on passion, it was light on funding, and there are still outstanding expenses that the groups are seeking donations to help pay. Donations are being accepted through Zumas Rescue Ranch, a 501c3 charity in Littleton, visit the site to learn more and contribute: http://www.zumasrescueranch.com/general-donations. About The Cayuse Ranch: The Cayuse Ranch was homesteaded in 1916 near Oshoto Wyoming by the Brislawn Family. Bob Brislawn "Mr Mustang" shortly thereafter began the effort to preserve the true old Indian pony, the Spanish Mustang, that most considered extinct. The thousands of acres was home to, at its peak in the late 80's, 12 family bands of Spanish Mustangs on one pasture living as close to nature as possible. 2010 saw the sudden passing of Emmett Brislawn, Bob Brislawns son and lineage heir. Leaving the whole project to his daughter Josie. Mustang preservation being the non lucrative business that it is these days, the closure of the ol' Cayuse Ranch was basically inevitable. About CANA Foundation: The CANA Foundation is Long Island-based national 501(c) 3 not for profit organization that works to rescue, rehome and re-wild the more than 60,000 of America's wild horses who have been rounded-up off their lawful habitat and held captive in inhumane and overcrowded taxpayer funded, government holding facilities to the tune of over $100 million dollars annually. CANA is a solution based organization who is spreading the humane concept of REWILDING America's wild horses so they can live free, at no cost to taxpayers while in-turn protecting our open space, enhancing our environment and empowering the communities who welcome them home. For more information on the CANA Foundation, visit http://www.canafoundation.org. About Paha PoniesAdam Edwards: I believe that the horse was put here to help humans evolve in the best possible way. In the past, horses have helped us during war, provided transportation, and supported our agricultural pursuits. Now they are here to help us spiritually evolve as a species. In a time when we need to embrace and protect the natural world, we need a guide that is as close to nature as possible. There is no better conduit to nature than the Spanish Mustang. This is the most natural horse available to the human. There has been little human interference in their evolution for the past 500 years on this continent, which has resulted in an incredibly smart, herd driven animal. The Spanish Mustang is truly a magical horse. About The Spanish Mustang FoundationDoug Lanham: Our mission is to educate the public about the Spanish Mustang and the need to protect and perpetuate the breed. Thanks to a handful of dedicated breeders, who have made it their lifes work to preserve these special horses, the breed is still in existence today, albeit on the critical list of rare breeds. With funding from government sources, foundations and contributions from the general public, the Spanish Mustang Foundation seeks to promote understanding and protection for this deserving American horse. About Return to FreedomNeda DeMayo: Founded in 1997, Return to Freedom (RTF) is a national 501c3 non-profit wild horse conservation organization. Return to Freedom is dedicated to preserving the freedom, diversity and habitat of America's wild horses and burros through sanctuary, education, advocacy and conservation, while enriching the human spirit through direct experience with the natural world. Return to Freedom also operates its American Wild Horse Sanctuary on 5000 acres in 4 California locations and models minimally intrusive management solutions that can be applied on the range. Neda DeMayo is a lifetime horsewoman and advocates for viable alternatives to horse slaughter and for the preservation and protection of our wild horses and burros on their ranges. About Spanish Mustang Preservation--- Cindy and Dick Kalow, founded this Mustang preserve in 2007 after years of research into how the family could create something of meaningful for the Spanish Mustang Breed. Now the preserve located in Bayfield, WI is home to more than 70 sanctuary Spanish Mustangs including about 40 of the Cayuse Ranch Herd. About Reach Out to HorsesAnna Twinney: Anna Twinney is the founder of Reach Out to Horses, based in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Golden, Colorado. As an internationally respected Natural Horsemanship Clinician and Trainer, Animal Communicator and Reiki Master she travels the world teaching the art of creating a trust-based partnership between Humans, Horses and all Animal Companions. She has conducted clinics, classes and training sessions in Australia, Canada, Denmark, England, Germany, France, Holland, Sweden, Spain, Norway, and New Zealand and throughout the entire United States. Anna's dream is to take the Reach Out to Horses program around the world, especially to Third World countries, to make a difference in the lives of the working horses and people who don't have access to these ground-breaking methods. About CranioConnectionTracy Vroom: The CranioConnection, founded by Tracy Vroom, has been providing complementary healing and performance solutions specializing in horses and dogs for 20 years. Having grown up on a farm with many species of animals, Tracys passion for them came naturally. Today Tracy is the owner of Rocky Mountain School of Massage and Acupressure in addition to CranioConnection, both providing healing for animals throughout the US. About Zumas Rescue RanchJodi and Paul Messenich: Our organization is named in honor of the first horse our founders, The Messenich Family, purchased together nearly 20 years ago. Zuma was a bright spirit a truly once in a lifetime horse who forever changed the hearts and minds of some very experienced professional horse people. By partnering those in need so that they may in turn rescue each other, we honor Zumas legacy. Serving the community since 2008, the mission of Zumas Rescue Ranch is to foster an environment of healing by pairing rescued horses with at-risk youth in mutually therapeutic programs. The infectious laugh of Janice Clark, aka the Scottish Granny, has catapulted yet another picture book to global success. The Scottish Grannys latest viral hit is a September 22 video of her laughingly reading Dawn McMillan and Ross Kinnairds I Need a New Bum!, about a boy who decides he needs a new derriere after discovering his own has a crack in it. The video has been viewed more than a million times across YouTube and Facebook. Earlier this fall, Clark became an internet phenomenon when a video of her reading Craig Smith and Katz Cowleys The Wonky Donkey to her infant grandson went viral, pushing the book to the top of multiple bestseller lists. The Wonky Donkey continues to hold the #1 spot on PWs picture book list. I Need a New Butt! (the title of the U.S. edition of the book) debuted at #5 last week and currently sits at #9. Initially published in 2012 by New Zealand-based publisher Oratia Books, the book was acquired by Dover Publications at the Frankfurt Book Fair and released in the U.S. in 2014. Its ridiculous the way kids like to be ridiculous, said Dover publisher Jennifer Feldman, explaining why the company was initially attracted to the book. She said the humor in I Need a New Butt! made it a good fit for Dovers childrens list. The art is very, very cute. Its colorful and its fun, added Feldman, noting that picture books, while not a huge portion of the list, are part of the mix. Weekly print sales of I Need a New Butt! were in the low double digits until the Scottish Grannys video started making the rounds online. Its always been a fabulous book, but sometimes it takes something extra to get the attention [and] for people to find the book, said Feldman, who estimates the book has sold more than 100,000 copies since Clarks video. Weve been able to mostly keep it in print, but weve been running back for reprints repeatedly, which is an exciting issue to have. I thought to myself, if I keep going here Im going to make everyone a fortune, Clark said of her latest success. Im just reading to Archer, she added in reference to her grandson and YouTube co-star. Coincidentally, in 2019 Dover will release two similarly irreverent titles by the duo behind I Need a New Butt!: Doctor Grundys Undies will release in May and Seagull Sid and the Naughty Things His Seagulls Did! will release in June. Meanwhile, according to the Bookseller, the popularity of Clarks video has caused Scholastic U.K. to acquire U.K. and Irish rights to the book with a planned release date of December 20. Unlike The Wonky Donkey, which Clark and her daughter obtained very cheaply while shopping, most of the books Clark now reads online have been sent or suggested by fans, followers, and authors. I Need a New Bum! ended up in Clarks hands after a friend of author Dawn McMillan sent a copy. McMillan said she had no idea her friend was going to send the book to Clark, but shes pleased he did so. She is just a delightful person and her reading is wonderful, said McMillan. And the little babys look of bewilderment sort of all goes with it really. I feel very, very privileged that shes read the book. McMillan indicated the Scottish Grannys video has given I Need a New Bum! a global audience and has been generating international fan email. Im happy for it to go round the world if thats what happens, said McMillan. Meanwhile Ill just enjoy the fact that people are enjoying it. Although Clark is based in Australia, her daughter said Facebook stats indicate roughly 90% of the Scottish Grannys audience is global. At present, the Scottish Granny has more than 70,000 followers on Facebook and more than 20,000 subscribers to her YouTube channel. The number of people whove started reading to their kids, and all the comments, its just really, really nice, said Clark of her followers. Still, Clark said she doesnt have any particular plans to capitalize on her success. Ive just thought, Ill read books and keep a smile on their faces, she said. Its fun. We asked staffers at childrens publishing houses to tell us about their favorite childrens or YA book they read this year, and what they loved about it. Our only proviso: it couldnt be a book that their company had published. Happy reading! Allison Moore, editor, Bloomsbury Childrens Books I really enjoyed Amal Unbound by Aisha Saeed. I actually listened to the audiobook, and both the authors words and Priya Ayyars narration were nuanced, rich, and inspired. I love Amal as a character, balancing what she believes must change with what she knows is best for her family. This is the kind of book that can truly open readers eyes to the daily lives of young people across the world, in a way thats wholly accessible and not at all didactic, about seeing things from Amals perspective and understanding more and more about her ability to stand up for herself and challenge the status quo within the circumstances shes been allotted. And, of course, I loved the message about the power of reading, both to keep up Amals deep hope that there is a better life out there for her and, in the end, as a discrete path towards change. I hope this book makes its way into many classroomsit feels like a contemporary classic! Susan Rich, editor-at-large, Little, Brown Books for Young Readers The Wall in the Middle of the Book by Jon Agee: oh, the deadpan wit of a Jon Agee book! The deceptively simple art, the brilliantly crafted visual storyhow does he manage to make it all appear so effortless? All of Agees talents wind up together gloriously in this offering, with the added bonus of a setup that makes excellent use of a book as a machine with a hinge, and then he springs it all in action to play out with such satisfying surprise. And as always, Mr. Agee is a generous teller, allowing his reader to feel always one step ahead of the action, one realization ahead of our hero. And, without being too on-the-nose, here a book for these timesa wall in the middle of everything, that in the end, proves to be more of a bridge. Alex Robertson, editorial assistant, Candlewick When I saw a trailer for To All the Boys Ive Loved Before, I just knew I had to read the book. And let me say, I fell hard. I love that Lara Jean starts fake dating the popular guy to make the boy next door jealous. And I love that, of course, Peter K. and Lara Jean might actually start falling for each other as the line between fake dating and real dating starts to blur. But for me, the real love, the true love is the bond between Lara Jean and her older sister, Margot, and her younger sister, Kitty. As the girls argue, fight, and make up, I couldnt help but really miss my own sister. Its been five years since Ive consistently lived at home and like the oldest sister, Margot, who goes off to college, I cant help but feel a little guilty for missing out on certain moments that were important to my sister as she grew up. My sister is the most caring, kind, funny, loyal person that I know. But no matter how far apart or how much time passes between our in-person time together, I know shes forever my best friend, and that wed do anything and everything for each other. Carol Hinz, editorial director of Millbrook Press and Carolrhoda Books, Lerner Publishing Group The Girl Who Drew Butterflies: How Maria Merians Art Changed Science by Joyce Sidman captured my heart this year. I purchased it at the launch party at the wonderful Red Balloon Bookshop on a snowy February day, and that night I curled up with my seven-year-old son and began to read it aloud. Each night we read another chapter, and I was struck by the exquisite precision of Sidmans proseit flowed so smoothly and I never felt tripped up or tongue-tied as I went along. The sidebars came in just the right places to provide the context my son and I needed to fully understand the world Merian inhabited, and we appreciated the varied visuals, including archival images, photos of the life cycle of a painted lady butterfly, and of course, Merians own art. He and I were equally enchanted by the book, and I was more than a little sorry when we finally reached the end. Maggie Lehrman, executive editor, Amulet Books and Abrams Books for Young Readers Without much else to recommend it, at least 2018 will go down as the year I finally read the Betsy-Tacy books by Maud Hart Lovelace. I cant even remember who told me to read them because theyre favorites of so many of my friends and colleagues. The way they were described to me sounded like a gentle summer walk of a book, which was what I needed in a year like this. Right now Im almost finished with book three. I understand Ill get to see Betsy and Tacy as teenagers eventually, and at first that made me impatient to get through all this little kid stuffI edit for all age groups but often gravitate toward YA. But after a few chapters, Im perfectly happy to sit with Betsy and Tacy and Tib and have a picnic on the Big Hill for as long as Lovelace wants me to. Diana M. Pho, editor, Tor Teen/Starscape Melancholy, introspective, and beautifully told, Emily X.R. Pans The Astonishing Color of After truly swept me away from page one. I heard some wonderful buzz about the book in kidlit circles, but what really caught my eye was the gorgeous cover design while browsing at Powerhouse Arena after an event. Leighs teen voice feels painfully grounded and mythic at the same time; I love how her synesthesia literally brings vibrancy and nuance to the story as she explores grief, newfound love, and complicated family dynamics. I really look forward to seeing what the author writes next. Andrea Spooner, v-p and editorial director, Little, Brown Books for Young Readers Stumpkin by Lucy Ruth Cummins was mailed to me by the author-artists agent in a promotional mailing. It was a complete surprise when it arrived on my desk and I immediately fell in love with the sensory experience of it even without reading it: the texture of the jacket paper, the weight of the book in my hands, the clean and minimalist design of the cover and jacket. As I turned the pages, every choice seemed perfect: the limited palette with its pops of bright orange, the simple yet emotive storytelling that has the cozy familiarity of Corduroy but with a fresher voice and style; and the striking visual thinking behind the surprise page turns that reveal the world through a lonely pumpkins eyes. I was quite inspired by its combination of elegance and genuine child-appeal, and I hope it becomes a contemporary classic! David Levithan, v-p, publisher and editorial director, Scholastic There are very few books Ive waited over a decade to readbut Markus Zusaks Bridge of Clay had that much anticipation attached to it. And, lo and behold, it floored me. Its hard enough to write a book that connects emotionally with a readerits near miraculous to write a book that the reader experiences as if its life itself. But thats how I felt when I read this extraordinary story of love, loss, redemption, and regretlike I was experiencing a brilliant articulation of what its like to be human. Kerry Martin, director of art and design, Holiday House I recently received A Fish Out of Water by Helen Palmer, illustrated by P.D. Eastman, as a hand-me-down from my neighbor. It quickly became a favorite bedtime story to read my four-year-old son. He was delighted there are firefighters, since he believes himself to be one. When we got to the part where the boy calls the fire department to rescue the fish, I asked who the boy calls and my son whispered me. I loved reading the text out loud and indulging in the illustrations with their wonderful orange and green palette. Its out of rotation for now but I keep trying to put it back in. Ashley Kuehl, executive editor, trade YA nonfiction, Lerner Publishing Group The best and most inspiring book I read this year was The 57 Bus by Dashka Slater. A colleague mentioned it as a nonfiction title about trans issues, but of course it is so much more than that! Its kind of a new style of literary nonfiction. It includes snippets of poetry, journalistic-style news bits, novelistic prose, and a fascinatingly gripping true story. I have so many questions about how it was crafted and I still cant get them out of my head. Like, did the author bring the fully formed structure to her editor and they just tweaked things? Or did they work together on the idea and then have a lot of back-and-forth on the components? Or did the editor initially think it seemed too crazy to have random snippets of poetry... but then when s/he saw the end result, she saw how amazing it could be? I just wish I could have been a fly on the wall of that project. Phoebe Kosman, assistant director of marketing, publicity, and events, Candlewick Whenever were in Brooklyn visiting my brother, we stop by Stories to ask their hero booksellers for their recommendations; past slam dunks, courtesy of Stories, have included Remy Charlips Fortunately (which still has my now four-year-old son regularly starting sentences Unfortunately...). This year, we asked about an early chapter book series rec for that four-year-old, a Princess in Black superfan, and they steered us to Abby Hanlons antic, emotionally true, and completely hilarious Dory Fantasmagory books. Now the villain Mrs. Gobble Gracker makes regular appearances in family conversation, and recalling certain lines from the books makes me snort-laugh in public ( Here... look, do you want some floppy cookies? I whisper to her, which is my nickname for salami because I love it so much. She does not.) Eagerly awaiting the next installment (and the next trip to Stories)! Shelly Romero, editorial assistant, Scholastic If I had to pick just one favorite book of 2018, Id have to pick All of This Is True by Lygia Day Penaflor. I received a galley through YPGs Little Big Mouth mailing and after reading the letter attached, I knew this book was perfect for me: part Gossip Girl, part Pretty Little Liars, and filled with just as many twists and turns. The formatwhich combines interview transcriptions, a book within a book, and published diary entriesmade for a page-turning read that I devoured in less than two days. And as someone who spent a long time on Tumblr and in many fandoms, I felt the voice and actions of the teens who wanted to get closer to Fatima Ro were realistic. I highly recommend it! Karen Boss, associate editor, Charlesbridge I loved several books this year, and The Truth as Told by Mason Buttle by Leslie Connor is on the top of my pile. What a glorious, gorgeous, well-written, and excellently crafted book. Mason is one of the most alive, rounded characters Ive read in years, and Connor stayed away from emotionally manipulating her reader into feeling bad for him. Instead, we root for him and come to understand him. And in the current political climate, truth-telling is an important theme. Mabel Hsu, associate editor, HarperCollins/Katherine Tegen Books I kept hearing hilariously terrible French accents being performed out from the big, brown couch at Books Are Magic. I was working at the indie bookstore part-time, and every weekend I would hear parents playing out suspenseful page turns and both adults and children giggling loudly. Dave Eggers and Shawn Harriss Her Right Foot asks a boggling question: Why is the Statue of Libertys right foot raised? Is she on her way to grab a panini in SoHo? Or perhaps the West Village for vintage Nico records? No. Its because she remembers her immigrant roots, and thus cannot stay stillshe must greet our incoming immigrant friends at shore. What an incredibly timely and beautiful message, striking just the right balance of heart, humor, and history. I cannot stop reading aloud this book to many a friend and coworker. This is a special book, and it makes me proud to see our Lady Liberty on the move. Charles Kochman, editorial director, Abrams Every year this time I reread two booksThe Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger and The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, illustrated by Jules Feiffer. Sophisticated middle grade and YA, the best of the form by far, they remind me of why I got into this business in the first place. Each voice is authentic, witty, and the stories and art are transformative for the reader. They are also perfectly packaged/designed: the stark and spare magenta cover with yellow type of Catcher and the now-iconic artwork of Milo and Toc on a pure blue background are visceral, inexorably linked to the reading experience. What more could a reader, much less an editor, hope for? My dog-eared copies are always within reach, a set on my desk at work and on my nightstand by my bed. Emily Everhart, marketing associate, National Geographic Kids I first picked up Up to This Pointe by Jennifer Longo because Id heard about it on a podcast and it was a YA book that somehow incorporated early 20th-century Arctic explorers? The writing was funny and the themes poignant and universal. Harper was an incredibly relatable protagonist in a fascinating setting. There were also penguins. All wins in my book. Christine Engels (she/her), assistant editor, Candlewick Were all lucky that this year Oni Press published A Quick and Easy Guide to They/Them Pronouns by Archie Bongiovanni and Tristan Jimerson. Short, funny, and endlessly helpful, this little comic is a wonderful resource on gender neutral pronouns. I learned so much from this guide: it answered questions I felt silly for wondering about, taught me what kinds of questions are rude to ask, and provided plenty of tips on how to stick up for my trans, genderqueer, and nonbinary friends (including when to shut up and listen!). Theres an entire section written for folks who already use they/them pronouns, so this guide is worth reading no matter your familiarity with the subject. Get a copy for your family, leave one in the break room of your job, pass a copy around among your friends. I cant recommend it enough! Emily Seife, senior editor, Scholastic Press My favorite childrens book of 2018, the one that I have recommended to every single parent I meet, is City Moon by Rachael Cole, illustrated by Blanca Gomez. This picture book, about a mother and child who go for a walk to look for the moon, is either the perfect bedtime read, or the perfect stay-up-past-bedtime read, if you choose to take your child for a Moon Walk of your own. With a soothing, rhythmic text, and loads of fun details in the illustrations to notice and discuss (who doesnt love peering into apartment windows for a glimpse of other peoples lives?), City Moon is as delightful for adults as it is for kids. This book is the modern-day city equivalent of Owl Moon, and my daughter and I both love it. Diana Gill, executive editor, Tom Doherty Associates I loved the discussion of beauty and power and classism and colorism along with the tense adventure and the sisterhood of The Belles by Dhonielle Clayton. Id heard so many authors and peers raving about it and when I finally picked it up, I could see why they did. Totally recommend it. Melanie Cordova, associate editor, Candlewick I recently listened to the audiobook of American Panda by Gloria Chao in a single day because I couldnt stop playing it. The story is about Mei, a Taiwanese-American 17-year-old going through the growing pains of going to college and being away from her strict immigrant parents for the very first time. I loved every part of this story but I loved Meis mom most of all, maybe because she reminded me a little too much of my own immigrant mom. This book was full of laughs but also had so much heart. It was definitely a favorite of mine this year. Akshaya Iyer, editorial assistant, Scholastic/Graphix I absolutely adore YA fantasy. It can be trite, it can be trope-y, I will wrestle with the need to shake the protagonist or secondary characters on more than one occasion, and I inevitably rant to friends and family about the predictability and tedious rhythm that young adult tends to fall into. A quick stroll through Barnes & Noble led me to Damsel, which managed to blow me out of the water and set me sailing off to discover books that pack that level of punch. Damsel is sharp and relevant despite its fairy tale setting and it successfully re-awakened my love for magical lands, nefarious plots, and bold, dangerous quests. Seale Ballenger, publicity director, Disney Publishing Worldwide The book I discovered and loved this year is Julian Is a Mermaid, written by the aptly named Jessica Love. I had seen its outstanding reviews and was intrigued by the books themes of family, acceptance, and unconditional love. Months after its publication, I had the pleasure of seeing the author read her lovely story aloud to an audience of spellbound kids at the Brooklyn Book Festival. It was there that I first experienced the magic of the book firsthand, mesmerized and drawn from page to page, lost in the beauty and poignancy of each new image. The colors were as rich and glorious as the text, and I found myself pouring over it, basking in its warm glow, and welling up with tears. The book touched a nerve and made me think of my husband reeling from a devastating year of hardship, who like Julian had been buoyed throughout a difficult childhood by the unconditional love of a grandmother who set him on course to stay true to himself as he made his way in the world. It struck me that this gentle story might help guide him back from this difficult period by evoking memories of his own beloved grandmother. I quickly grabbed a copy, stood in line to meet the author and have her sign it, and rushed home to share it with him. As he opened the cover and saw the inscription, For Chris, who is a Mermaid, we both laughed and cried. And as we read it aloud and shared its warm and lovely embrace, memories of a joyful time came pouring back to him. Thank you, Jessica Love, for sharing such a heartfelt, impactful, and meaningful story. Beacon Press has announced the launch of a line of radical history books intended to provide young adult readers with accessible histories written from diverse viewpoints. The series will debut in 2019 and draw from Beacons decade-old ReVisioning American History series, bringing forward youth-focused adaptations of titles that emphasize the stories of underrepresented groups in American history. Senior editor Joanna Green oversaw the launch of the series and said it comes as a direct response to calls from educators, librarians, and parents for resources that more accurately represent the full spectrum of American history than traditional titles. What were doing is following their lead, Green said. The first book in the new line will be A Queer History of the United States for Young People, which is being adapted from Michael Bronskis 2012 Stonewall Book Award winning A Queer History of the United States. The following month, Beacon will publish An Indigenous Peoples History of the United States for Young People. The book was adapted by Indigenous educator Debbie Reese and curriculum specialist Jean Mendoza. Green began developing the series after the 2010 passage of the FAIR Education Act in California, which mandated a diversification of the states public school history curriculum to include LGBT and disability-focused history units. Working with editorial director Gayatri Patnaik, she set about creating the idea of an in-house YA history division from scratch, building a robust network of educators to help vet the content created for the series along the way. Patnaik noted that feedback from academic conferences has been consistently positive. Educators come to our booth saying, I teach at majority-minority institutions and I want books that reflect those students experiences. In many ways the series formalizes an approach the Boston-based publisher has tested with a handful of other titles. Beacon already has young adult adaptations in print for Viktor Frankls Mans Search for Meaning as well as A Time to Break the Silence, which anthologizes writings by Martin Luther King, Jr. for younger readers. The difference is that the forthcoming books are straight-up YA history texts, rather than narrative biographies or primary source documents. To have this history available for young readers is powerful, said Patnaik. Such books are also relatively scarce. The politics of releasing the books now is not without its potential for controversy. While conservative interpretations of American history in mainstream textbooks have been the subject of intense criticism in recent years, Beacons announcement comes at a time when radical interpretations of American history for young adults are also coming under fire from left-leaning academics. Earlier this year, Sam Wineburg, a Stanford education professor and author of Why Learn History (When Its Already on Your Phone) denounced the teaching of Howard Zinns popular A Peoples History of the United States in schools. Harvard University historian Jill Lepore shared similar criticisms in an interview with PW, discussing her new volume on American history, These Truths. Patnaik said that the academic debates about radicalism in the curriculum dont change the needs being expressed by educators or Beacons desire to support them, adding that all of the authors in the series are strong academics coming at this with strong academic backgrounds. For Green, reaching new readers with history that includes people like them is the most important point. Im inspired by the thought about the experience of the readera young person coming to grips with the material that they see themselves in, Green said. The publisher is currently looking at other titles in the series for adaptations, and also considering ways to publish forthcoming history titles simultaneously for adult and young adult audiences. Novice middle grade and young adult novelists looking to share their work and gain feedback from fellow writers have a new opportunity to consider. Enter Story Guild, a national program in which participants read from their unsubmitted novels and discuss their writing with their peers and a host author. The program will launch its first season this spring in six cities across the country. Story Guild is the brainchild of childrens author Jonathan Auxier (Sweep), who was inspired by his own experience as a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon 15 years ago, when students read from their thesis scripts that they had crafted over the summer. Not only was this a great way to induct the incoming class, but it also was great experience for returning writers, he said. They had to discard their old, beloved stories and use what theyd learned on something totally new. It was then that the seeds of Story Guild were first planted. Now an instructor in Chatham Universitys MFA program in Pittsburgh, Auxier has noticed the limitations that young writers face in the classroom: not being able to share a larger piece of work and get real-time feedback from their peers. With this in mind, he decided to launch a pilot Story Guild program with a group of MFA graduates, and within three months, participants walked away with a set of pages for their new book and helpful notes to take them to the next step. Auxier maintains this practice for his own writing, hosting a group of trusted friends to listen to the first 6080 pages of his next book and comment on his work. The feedback is invaluable, as is the chance to hear my story read aloud, he said. Theres no faster way to tell when what youve written hits a false note or starts to bore an audience. Getting On-Board One of the key components of Story Guilds format is the leadership of the host author. For the programs first season, Auxier reached out to potential hosts via Twitter and chose all those who responded. He believes the allure of serving as a host author lies in its flexibility. Ive found that a lot of writers have a passion for teaching, but between touring and deadlines, they are unable to find the time. Story Guild is built for them, he said. To help make hosting as simple as possible, Auxier has created a packet that steps them through the process and a guide Technically two separate things: the packet teaches the host authors how to get started and includes pre-drafted emails they can use to invite writers and then theres a formal guide for hosting workshops for running workshops, and encourages any writer interested in joining to reach out. Were not picky, he said. If you are a professional writer and want to participate, Story Guild wants you! One such writer that answered the call was Caroline Carlson, a friend of Auxier and fellow Pittsburgher. When he mentioned that he wanted to give published authors a chance to support emerging writers in their local communities, I knew right away that I wanted to be involved, she said. Having earned her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, she recalled faculty members who provided valuable feedback that served her well in her formative days as a writer. Im hoping that through Story Guild, she said, Ill be able to give up-and-coming writers some of the same insight and encouragement that I was lucky to receive as a new writer. Another Story Guild participant, Aaron Starmer, will serve as a host author in Burlington, Vt. Having met Auxier five years ago during a book festival, the two realized they shared similar passions. We both think a lot about the craft of writing and the role of storytelling in society, Starmer said. Recalling his own foray into childrens book publishing, Starmer said he lacked connections. I didnt have enough experienced people around me to bounce ideas off of, he explained. I hope I can share some of what Ive learned about writing for children and young adults. Its an opportunity I wish I had access to 10 years ago. The Value of In-Person Feedback Providing criticism in person, as opposed to virtual networking and online forums, is what Auxier believes is Story Guilds strength. The added bonus of having that feedback come from professional authors in a writers hometown offers even more value to the unpublished writer. There is something magical that happens in a live discussion; I often find that my best comment is one made in response to someone elses comment, he said. Carlson also sees the benefit of working in a structured setting. Writing can be a lonely pursuit, but if you participate in Story Guild, youll have an external deadline to motivate you, a group of local colleagues cheering you on, and plenty of thoughtful, informed feedback to help you move forward after Story Guild is over, she said. With six cities (including Chicago, Boston, Salt Lake City, and Duluth, Minn.) on tap to host Story Guild this spring, Auxier ultimately hopes to have workshops running twice a year in every city that can sustain the program, featuring rotating host authors. Id love Story Guild to find a home under a bigger organization like the SCBWI or NaNoWriMosome place that can help channel new applicants in the program and provide administrative support for authors, he said. While that goal may be out of reach for the time being, Auxier is content with the notion of giving fresh new voices a safe place to share their talents. My hope is that after these workshops are through, the attendees feel enough connection with one another that they might be able to continue reading and discussing each others work outside of the Story Guild workshop format. Writers interested in being part of Story Guild can sign up online. By submitting your email address, you acknowledge that you have read the Privacy Statement and that you consent to our processing data in accordance with the Privacy Statement (including international transfers). If you change your mind at any time about wishing to receive the information from us, you can send us an email message using the Contact Us page. Leah Panapa talks with Susan Trodden, TRON (The Rail Opportunity Network) spokesperson, on today's announcement of a Hamilton-Auckland train service. A train running between Hamilton and Auckland won't be fast enough to start with, but will be better than sitting in traffic, according to Hamilton mayor Andrew King. Transport Minister Phil Twyford announced on Wednesday a business case had been approved, allowing for the fit-out of stock and detailed design of infrastructure. He said it was an "exciting step" towards a five-year trial service expected to begin in March 2020. The trial's total cost, including the service operated by KiwiRail, is estimated to be $78.2 million, including $68.4m from the NZTA and $9.8m from local authorities. The planned refurbished diesel units will have toilets on-board as well as WiFi. Mr King told RadioLIVE's Summer Breakfast the last time a train ran between the cities it was doomed to fail, but this one will have proper investment to ensure it won't. But it will be slow to start off with. Night Talk with Leah Panapa, 7pm - 12am this week on RadioLIVE, and streaming live to the rova app on Android and iPhone. RadioLIVE. A train between Hamilton and Auckland may not be fast enough at the beginning, but will be better than sitting in traffic, says Hamilton mayor Andrew King. Transport Minister Phil Twyford announced on Wednesday a business case had been approved, allowing for the fit-out of stock and detailed design of infrastructure. He said it was an "exciting step" towards a five-year trial service expected to begin in March 2020. The trial's total cost, including the service operated by KiwiRail, is estimated to be $78.2 million, including $68.4m from the NZTA and $9.8m from local authorities. The planned refurbished diesel units will have toilets on-board as well as WiFi. Mr King told RadioLIVE's Summer Breakfast the last time a train ran between the cities it was doomed to fail, but this one will have proper investment to ensure it won't. But it will be slow to start off with. "It can't be fast enough at this stage, it's going to take about two-and-a-quarter hours but people in business, people who are working with other people, they're generally spending half their night on their PC," he said. "Going up and coming back you're not sitting in traffic jams taking three hours to get there, how it is now in a rush hour, you can be on a train and you can be doing work." Mr King said the service won't be for everyone but it's important to provide a choice for transport between the two cities. "Every day there's thousands going up and down and obviously it won't suit all of them but this is exactly what this Government's about, it's alternative forms of public transport." Passengers will be able to board the train at Frankton or the Base in Hamilton before it continues on to Huntly and ends at Papakura station in Auckland. Mr King said he expects passengers will have to wait around 10 minutes in Papakura before jumping on to an Auckland Transport train headed to Auckland central. Newshub. Welcome to Railway Gazette. This site uses cookies. Read our policy. OK In a startling admission, a senior leader in the Afghan Taliban told NBC News that thousands of foreign fighters are currently embedded in the group in Afghanistan. The admission is astonishing as the Taliban has attempted to obscure its relationship with al Qaeda, even though it slips up every now and then. FDDs Long War Journal has maintained for the last eight years that US military and intelligence estimates of between 50 to 100 al Qaeda in Afghanistan (later modified to 200) have been woefully low. The Taliban leader, who has not been named, admitted this to NBC News as the group was conducting negotiations with the US in Qatar. From the report: A senior Afghan Taliban commander who is also a member of the groups leadership council told NBC News that there were around 2,000 to 3,000 non-Afghan fighters in their midst, mostly from China, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Chechnya, Tunisia, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. We are Muslims and according to our religion we cannot deny shelter to someone if he or she comes to trouble, said the commander, who recently attended three days of talks with Khalilzad in Qatar. None of the foreign militants would be allowed to take up arms and use this soil against any country in the world. Thousands of Pakistanis are also thought to be fighting as members of the Taliban. It is unclear why the Taliban leader felt the urge to admit that thousands of foreign fighters are fighting alongside his group (most these are without a doubt al Qaeda, note how the Taliban commander refers to them as foreign militants). Perhaps he is emboldened by the US governments desperation to negotiate with the Taliban, and is unconcerned that his comments will make US officials reconsider the Talibans relationship with al Qaeda. Regardless of the reason, the admission further validates eight years of research by FDDs Long War Journal, which has rejected the absurd notions that al Qaeda was defeated in Afghanistan and the Taliban has distanced itself the group. Between 2010 and 2015, LWJ fought back against the US military and intelligence communitys unchanging assessment of 50 to 100 al Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan. Using the US militarys own press releases on operations against al Qaeda, and al Qaedas own statements of its operations in Afghanistan, it was clear that the terror groups footprint was far larger than 50 to 100 operatives. The fact that this estimate remained the same for six straight years was also a tell that the intelligence on al Qaedas strength in Afghanistan was being gamed, likely for political reasons, primarily to justify the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. The preposterous 50 to 100 estimate was completely discredited in Oct. 2015, when the US military raided two al Qaeda camps in Shorabak, Kandahar. More than 150 al Qaeda fighters were killed in an area that the US military and intelligence community claimed al Qaeda didnt operate. After admitting the 50 to 100 estimate was incorrect, US military leaders laughingly increased the estimate of al Qaedas strength to about 200 fighters. Now, a Taliban leader is saying thousands of foreign fighters are operating alongside it. Will the US military and intelligence community up its estimate? It is doubtful, as the US government is hell-bent on withdrawing, and the fact that thousands of al Qaeda are fighting alongside the Taliban would make it difficult to sell negotiations with the group that hosted al Qaeda when the US was attacked on 9/11. Bill Roggio is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Editor of FDD's Long War Journal. Are you a dedicated reader of FDD's Long War Journal? Has our research benefitted you or your team over the years? This holiday season we are asking readers to support our independent reporting and analysis by considering a one-time or monthly donation. Thanks for reading! You can make a tax-deductible donation here. This article appeared originally at FDD's Long War Journal. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abes meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing on October 26 marked the first time in seven years that a serving Japanese prime minister has traveled to China for official bilateral meetings with his counterparts. Lost in the headlines of this historic summit was the fact that the two leaders discussed North Korea and recommitted their nations to close cooperation on denuclearization and the implementation of United Nations Security Council resolutions aimed at Pyongyang. Many experts are cynical about Chinese cooperation on North Korea. They tend to focus on the unique aspects of the China-North Korea relationship, such as shared communist ties and geographical proximity, and view Chinas proactive diplomacy with North Korea, starting with the first summit between Xi and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un summit in March, as an attempt to maximize its own interests, which do not coincide with those of the United States and its allies. Chinese diplomacy on North Korea, however, can help achieve some positive results for the United States and its allies in the region. Therefore, it is important for policy makers in the United States and allies in East Asia to understand Chinas motivations in the region, in general, and on North Korea, in particular. This will help them work effectively with China while guarding against Chinese actions that could undermine their strategic priorities. When it comes to North Korea, China prioritizes stability over all else, including denuclearization. For Beijing, North Korea is neither a primary challenge to its stability, nor does Pyongyangs nuclear ambition pose a direct threat to Chinas national security. Instead, Beijing believes that it is Washingtons reaction to North Korea that in many ways represents the most immediate threat to regional stability. Beijings main concerns on North Korea are: (1) the impact of excessive sanctions or U.S. military actions that could cause a refugee crisis with North Koreans streaming across their border into China; (2) reinforcement of a U.S. military presence in the region and the use of North Korea as an excuse to sustain the de facto U.S.-Japan-Republic of Korea (ROK) alliance; (3) criticism of China for its perceived responsibility for North Koreas actions, and possible punishment by the United States as a consequence; (4) the negative economic impact of sanctions, particularly on Chinas northeastern provinces; and (5) the possibility of nuclear accidents and influence of nuclear tests on Chinas territory. Most of these concerns are linked to U.S. actions. This is why Beijing looks to Washington when North Korean nuclear tensions are heightened. Consequently, Chinas response to the North Korean nuclear crisis primarily focuses on the management of relations with the United States. When U.S. President Donald J. Trumps administration escalated its maximum pressure campaign on North Korea, including strongly calling for Chinese cooperation on the implementation of tougher UN Security Council resolutions, Beijing took steps to manage the situation within a U.S.-China context. North Koreas charm offensive early this year and meeting in Singapore between Trump and Kim on June 12, however, relieved much of the pressure felt by Beijing. China is eager to preserve the current positive atmosphere surrounding issues related to North Korea. Beijing definitely does not want to see further nuclear and missile tests by North Korea. It wants Kim to keep his commitment to denuclearization. Chinas encouragement of North Korea to move in this direction is good for the United States and its allies. Xis absence from celebrations of the 70th anniversary of North Koreas founding in September could have been a signal to Pyongyang that Beijing is not satisfied with North Koreas progress on denuclearization. Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula is clearly in Chinas interest. Most Chinese officials and experts believe that the United States is using North Koreas drive for nuclear weapons as an excuse to maintain and expand its military presence in Northeast Asia. This belief was demonstrated by Beijings opposition to the deployment of the U.S. Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defense system in South Korea. Progress on denuclearization could remove the U.S. justification for its military build-up and allow Beijing more room to press Washington to scale back its forces in the region. Progress on denuclearization would also open the door to more economic exchange with North Korea, although this is not something that Pyongyang would explicitly endorse. In light of its own experience, China believes close economic ties would be the best way to enable a soft landing for North Koreas economy. Furthermore, Chinas Jilin and Liaoning provinces, which share a border with North Korea, have suffered from a traditional dependence on state-owned enterprises. They could greatly benefit from the growth that would come about as a consequence of increased Chinese-North Korean trade. Despite the advantages of denuclearization, China places a higher priority on long-term stability than these short-term gains. While Beijing desires eventual progress, it currently has no incentive to compel North Korea to take quick action, putting it at odds with the United States and its allies. The United States and its friends should also recognize that Chinas active North Korean diplomacy aims to create an advantageous regional strategic environment in the medium and longer term. Simply put, China aims to compete for influence over the Korean Peninsula, weakening the U.S.-ROK alliance and the U.S. military presence in Northeast Asia. The United States and its allies must guard against China using easing tensions with North Korea to gain an edge in this competition. Against this backdrop, the United States, Japan, and South Korea should deal with China with a thorough, shrewd, and consistent strategy on North Korea. U.S.-China relations are increasingly deteriorating. Although China appreciates the South Korean presidents policy of engagement with North Korea, negative feelings over the deployment of THAAD persist in Beijing. Meanwhile, Japan is strengthening its ties with the United States by buying into a shared Free and Open Indo-Pacific vision. While the conversation between Abe and Xi on North Korea might have been short, it should be seen as a critical opportunity to jumpstart a new allied strategy to effectively engage China on the issue of North Korea. Taisuke Mibae is a visiting senior fellow with the Asia Security Initiative of the Atlantic Councils Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. He is also a minister at the Embassy of Japan in Washington. He earlier served as a minister covering Korean affairs at the Japanese Embassy in Beijing. The views expressed in this blog post are the authors own and do not reflect those of the Japanese government. This article appeared originally at Atlantic Council. In January, South Africa will fill a seat on the UN Security Council for the first time since the presidency of Jacob Zuma, whose support for state capture enabled cronies to exercise outsized influence over public entities and coffers, denting South Africas image abroad while decimating the economy at home. The timing for joining the UNs most influential body could hardly be better: UN Security Council membership can accelerate efforts by President Cyril Ramaphosawho ousted Zuma earlier this year after becoming head of the ruling African National Congress (ANC)to resuscitate South Africas global brand and return the country to its previous position, established by former president Nelson Mandela, as a defender of democratic governance and human rights. Ramaphosa, who has a strong grounding in foreign policy, has an opportunity to be a leader with influence beyond South Africa and a counterweight to growing global authoritarianism. Mandelas Legacy, Zumas Retreat During Mandelas presidency (1994-1999), South Africa had the worlds attention and sought to advance a foreign policy that emphasized human rights. Mandela premised South Africas engagement with the world on the belief in the compatibility of human rights, democracy, solidarity politics and [South Africas] own development needs. He made concessions to realpolitik though, for example, abandoning the two Chinas policy; the ANC had close ties to Taiwan during the final years of apartheid but abandoned Taipei to benefit from economic relations with Beijing. Mandelas successor, Thabo Mbeki, largely continued this approach, while placing greater emphasis on pan-African solidarity and African economic integration, under the brand of an African Renaissance. Zuma undermined much of this, and under his leadership, South Africas global standing declined rapidly. By the end of his near-decade in power (2009-2018), Zuma was not taken seriously by other leading heads of state, especially in the West, and was regarded with suspicion because of his strong personal relationship with Russian president Vladimir Putin, emphasis on the BRICS construct (the coalition of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) at the expense of broader engagement, and close relations with China. At the G20 meetings in Hamburg in 2017, while all other heads of state conducted numerous bilateral meetings, Zuma had just one, with the Chinese president. Over time Zumas administration turned increasingly inwards, anxious to avoid international scrutiny and wary of co-operation with perceived Western interests and governments, not least because Zuma periodically blamed the West and its intelligence agencies for the challenges faced by his government. On issues of democratic governance and human rights, South Africa under Zuma retreated from its earlier strong positions. At the UN General Assembly and in the UN Human Rights Council, South Africas voting record was disappointing, to say the least, its diplomats consistently voting against or abstaining on resolutions seeking to defend human rights in Syria, Iran, North Korea and elsewhere. After refusing to arrest Sudanese president Omer al-Bashir when he traveled to South Africa in 2015, despite a warrant from the International Criminal Court (ICC), South Africa sought to leave the ICC. As part of its effort to curry favor with China, South Africa repeatedly refused to issue a visa to the Dalai Lama. Change Afoot? Ramaphosas ascension to the presidency in Februarydefeating Zumas preferred successor, his ex-wife Nkosazana Dlamini-Zumawas greeted with a mix of relief and enthusiasm. Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau went out of his way to extend an invitation to Ramaphosa to attend the G7 meeting hosted by Canada in June, and other world leaders have sought to engage Ramaphosa after shunning Zuma. Ramaphosa comes to the job with significant experience in international relations. He has been involved in major conflict negotiations, including in South Sudan and Sri Lanka. It was to Ramaphosa that Tony Blair turned in the late 1990s to help secure the Good Friday agreement in Northern Ireland; Ramaphosa played a significant role in helping to shift the hardline negotiating positions of Sinn Fein and other key parties. Like his ANC predecessors, Ramaphosa has strong liberation credentials and was a central player in negotiations to end apartheid and chaired the process that delivered South Africas widely-admired final constitution. Ramaphosas business career, through which he became enormously wealthy, prepares him for the massive challenge of revitalizing South Africas sluggish economy, though his business dealings are also the source of some controversy. Ramaphosas fundamental instincts around rights, governance, and multilateralism are essentially progressive, but his inherent pragmatism and the urgency of addressing South Africas torpid economy and mobilizing investment mean his foreign policy cannot be taken for granted. The slender nature of his victory within the ANC last December52 percent-48 percent, with the National Executive Committee of the ANC, almost equally divided and many Zuma loyalists remaining in powerful positionsconstrains his reform agenda, though throughout 2018 he has consolidated power in government and within the ANC. With elections in May of 2019, all policy has to serve Ramaphosas primary domestic policy goals centered on job-creating economic growth. Foreign policy could be neglected, but it could equally serve as a means to advance the new governments desire to become a reputable, member of the international community, in service of the strategic objective of increased foreign investment. (Early in his presidency, Ramaphosa set a target of $100 billion in new investment.) Ramaphosa likely recognizes that the decline of South Africas international reputation undermines prospects for economic growth, including prospects for foreign direct investment, and seeks a return to the days when South Africa punched above its weight in multilateral forums. Much of the task of restoring South Africas international reputation falls to Lindiwe Sisulu, whom Ramaphosa appointed as minister of international relations and cooperation. She has significant political influence as a former minister of defense and minister of intelligence; ally of the president; and daughter of Walter Sisulu, one of the most revered anti-apartheid leaders. She has been clear in her commitment to restoring South Africas image and commitment to defending human rights. In a high-profile speech in May, Sisulu said, We want South Africa to be once again a moral compass and a voice of reason in a world increasingly overcome with selfish, narrow interests. We want to be the hope for all in times of despair. She affirmed that the fundamentals of our foreign policy are based on human rights, peace, equality, freedom from oppression and racism, freedom from poverty. To support her efforts, Sisulu has appointed a review panel of experienced foreign policy hands charged with learning from South African foreign policy since 1994 and advising her on reforms. Part of their task is to look at how to revitalize the beleaguered Department of International Relations and CooperationSouth Africas foreign ministrywhich suffered under Zuma as career diplomats were often sidelined in favor of politically-connected appointees, many of them ill-suited to their positions. There are signs that policy is changing. South Africa recently announced that it is reversing its position on an upcoming vote in the UN General Assembly to condemn human rights abuses in Myanmar and will now support the resolution. Sisulu also announced changes that will lead to greater scrutiny of all votes in international fora, with her approving each vote. Backlash and Challenges Ahead Ramaphosa and Sisulu will face resistance to their reform efforts, including from within the ANC. The party platform currently includes little explicit reference to traditional human rights, features language strongly supportive of the BRICS configuration, and affirms the ANCs previous resolution to withdraw from the ICC. Some Zuma loyalists remain in powerful positions, and for some in the ANC and the broader policy community, the language of human rights continues to be associated with a Western agenda and suggestions of regime change. There is evidence of a disconnect between Ramaphosa and Sisulus new rhetoric and the reality of policy execution. For example, in July, South Africa joined China and Russia in voting against a proposal at the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to strengthen monitoring mechanisms; and in the September session of the UN Human Rights Council, South Africa abstained on a resolution to extend an international investigation into human rights violations in Yemen by the Saudi-led coalition and the Houthi rebels. The economic diplomacy priorities of the Ramaphosa presidency may come into sharp conflict with a more rights-orientated approach. Already, in the early months of the new Ramaphosa administration there was debate within government and the ANC leadership about carrying out the ANCs resolution to close South Africas embassy in Israel. Opponents argued that such a move could undermine possible foreign investment. Another example of the potential conflict arose with Ramaphosas July trip to Saudi Arabia and the announcement that his visit had secured a pledge of $10 billion in Saudi investments. The South African delegation traveled bearing a briefing note concerning the Saudi role in the conflict in Yemen, in which millions have suffered. But it is unlikely that Ramaphosa would have wanted to complicate his economic pitch. The brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and global backlash raise additional questions about South Africas closer engagement with the kingdom, as does a possible partnership between the countries two state-owned arms manufacturersSaudi Arabian Military Industries (SAMI) and South Africas Denel SOC Ltd.whereby SAMI would potentially invest up to $1 billion in Denel. Within Africa, Ramaphosa is tested by two issues that wont wait until elections next year. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), President Joseph Kabila has evaded term limits, prolonged his time in office and slow-rolled election preparations. Zuma protected Kabila and was rumored to have significant personal investments in the DRC. Elections are now scheduled for December 23, in part because of increasing pressure on Kabila from South Africa, Angola, and the West. But elections are likely to be deeply flawed, and Kabila may yet seek to remain in office. If he does, Ramaphosa may be one of the few figures with the leverage and stature to influence his calculations. If the elections are blatantly rigged in favor of Kabilas hand-picked successor, South Africas reaction will help set the tone for the global response. In Zimbabwe, President Emerson Mnangagwa, who ousted Robert Mugabe in a coup last year, won deeply flawed elections in August, followed by violence that left at least six people dead. (A commission investigating that violence is led by former interim South African President Kgalema Motlanthe.) Zimbabwes economy is once again in crisis, forcing many Zimbabweans to emigrate to and seek economic opportunity in South Africa. If conditions worsen, Ramaphosa may be forced to intervene politically, as Mbeki did previously, in the interests of regional stability. Both the DRC and Zimbabwe are members of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the regional organization in which South Africa is by far the most powerful voice. Whether bilaterally or through SADC, Ramaphosa will be compelled to focus on both troubled countries. The Case for Global Engagement Will South Africa be prepared to offer global leadership? The primary argument in favor should be that South Africa has a responsibility to help progressive forces and institutions overcome attacks from those who oppose a rules-based international order and multilateralism. This provides an opportunity to re-brand South Africa while lending support to the defense of multilateralism, a principle that has traditionally been close to the ANCs heart. As South Africa prepares to join the UN Security Council, Ramaphosas ANC supporters and civil society should push for South Africa to assert itself in defense of multilateralism, fundamental rights, and democratic governance. His supporters should press for progressive positions, in alliance with like-minded countries, and be persistent in asserting that such positioning is consistent with South Africas wider interests, including its need to attract investment in job-creating parts of the economy. The rotation on the UN Security Council will ensure that foreign policy remains high on Pretorias political agenda and presents an opportunity for the countryat least while Ramaphosa remains in powerto begin rebuilding its lost reputation as a principled member of the global community. Reprinted with permission from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Jon Temin is the director of the Africa program at Freedom House and a non-resident senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. He was previously a member of the Secretary of States policy planning staff. Richard Calland is associate professor in public law at the University of Cape Town, a founding partner of the Paternoster Group: African Political Insight, and a fellow of the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership. The New York Times recently ran a piece with astounding implications that didnt get very much attention. The headline read: Two Decades After 9/11, Militants Have Only Multiplied. The story reported on a recent study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a pillar of the American foreign policy establishment. CSIS concluded that the number of Islamist militants operating around the globe is nearly four times what it was when the U.S. government began fighting them in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. Despite a cost of nearly $6 trillion dollars and the loss of nearly 7,000 U.S. military service members, the war on terror has clearly failed. The study estimated that Islamist militants now number 230,000 and are spread across 70 countries, with fighters recovering from conventional battle defeats in Iraq and Syria likely to launch guerrilla attacks there and in other nations. Yet CSIS warns that withdrawing American forces from Africa and the Middle East, which the military has already started to do as it prioritizes countering conventional powers, will only help terrorists. The report states that the West has failed to address the root causes of terrorism and concludes that [p]erhaps the most important component of Western policy should be helping regimes that are facing terrorism improve governance and deal more effectively with economic, sectarian, and other grievances. Seth G. Jones, one of the studys authors, predicts dire consequences if this is not done: Some of these groups do want to target Americans overseas and at home, particularly the Islamic State and Al Qaeda. All this indicates that terrorism is alive and well, and that Americans should be concerned. The Soufan Center of New York, which also studies terrorism, recently characterized the results of Americas counterterrorism campaigns as mixed at best. The center argued that one achievement has been the absence in the United States of another terrorist attack of the magnitude of 9/11 in the years since, even though the terrorists ideology has metastasized. Yet the center admitted that many of the conflicts that comprise Americas global counterterrorism campaign have a fiercely local component to them, meaning there is little that a Western country and its military can actually do to impact events on the ground for a sustained period of time. The shocking CSIS statistics about the growing threat from Islamist terrorism are an arresting signal that U.S. policy must change drastically and soon. Yet the think tanks report and one of its authors seem to conclude the U.S. government merely needs to rethink its adjustment of priorities: Instead of slogging through unending brushfire counterterrorism wars (at least nine are currently being conducted), Washington should favour planning for conventional threats from possible nation-states while spending more American resources to help developing countries deal with societal grievances and with governance. The Soufan Center implies that the absence of a 9/11-scale attack is due to U.S. government counterterrorism campaigns. Yet in all the years before 9/11, North America experienced very few terrorist attacks compared to other, more conflict-ridden continents. North America, and especially the United States, sits far away from the worlds centers of conflict. It presents problems of logistics and sanctuary for such terrorists. The Soufan Center is correct, however, that most terrorist groups have primarily local grievances. This can be said of even global terror groups such as al Qaeda and ISIS. The war on terror has been a disaster, as the CSIS statistics imply, simply because the U.S. government has never been honest with the American people on the underlying causes of the anti-U.S. terrorist attacks that do occur. George W. Bush, after the 9/11 attacks, told Americans that they were attacked because of their freedoms. Osama bin Laden, the perpetrator of the strikes, noted sarcastically that if that were the case, he could just as well have attacked Sweden. He was very specific that his war on the United States was in response to Washingtons military support of the corrupt government of Saudi Arabia, which is the guardian of the holiest sites in Islam. ISIS originated from resistance to the unneeded U.S. invasion of Iraq and spread from there. So instead of running at least nine counterterrorism wars at once -- and escalating them as the Trump administration has -- President Trump should follow his stated instinct to avoid unnecessary wars. He should not let the military, the foreign policy establishment, or think tanks and the media goad him into continuing these endless fiascos. Radical Islamism has existed for centuries and may exist for centuries more, but it is usually fueled by local grievances. It need not and likely will not be directed at the United States. The excessive use of American military power in Islamic countries and around the world is not the solution to terrorism. It only breeds terrorism and retaliation. Ivan Eland is a senior fellow at the Independent Institute and the author of "Eleven Presidents." The views expressed are the author's own. , We're sorry, this article is not currently available By Elizabeth Kwiatkowski, 12/19/2018 ADVERTISEMENT FOLLOW REALITY TV WORLD ON THE ALL-NEW GOOGLE NEWS! Reality TV World is now available on the all-new Google News app and website. Click here to visit our Google News page, and then click FOLLOW to add us as a news source! Elizabeth Kwiatkowski is Associate Editor of Reality TV World and has been covering the reality TV genre for more than a decade. alum Bibiana Julian has confirmed whether she is dating ette's Peter Kraus in light of recent speculation there's something romantic going on between the pair.Bibiana, 31, and Peter, 33, were spotted together at a Miami Heat game on December 4, sparking dating rumors.Although a source had told E! News earlier this month Bibiana and Peter are "casually dating" and "definitely into each other" despite living in different states, Bibiana has set the record straight."Nothing is going on with Peter Kraus and I. Absolutely nothing," Bibiana told Ashley Iaconetti and Ben Higgins during a Monday appearance on their Almost Famous podcast.Bibiana insisted her relationship with the Wisconsin personal trainer is strictly platonic right now but they did have a brief fling at one point."I wouldn't say it was something serious," Bibiana said."I'm just going to clarify -- and I don't know if he'll be happy with it -- but, like, him and I actually connected right after I got back from Paradise, so that's kind of, like, when it started off. But we stayed friends and then he was visiting Miami and I was, like, 'Why don't we go to a Heat game?' One of my friends hooked me up with sick seats."Bibiana explained reports about their relationship then "exploded," according to Us Weekly.Bibiana competed on season Peter was supposed to star on after he finished as the runner-up on Rachel Lindsay 's ette edition in 2017.Although she didn't receive Arie Luyendyk's final rose, she got to search for love again on : Winter Games and Bachelor in Paradise earlier this year.Bibiana, however, isn't exactly single heading into the new year. She reportedly revealed to Ashley and Ben there is a new man in her life and he's something special!"I don't want to jinx it, but this guy is kind of too good to be true [and] everything I would want in a person," Bibiana gushed without revealing the guy's identity."I want to tread lightly... Nobody knows him and it's not Peter Kraus ."Interested in more news? Join our The Bachelor Facebook Group Earlier today, numerous media outlets reported that ATF had finalized a regulation that would alter the definition of the term machine gun and ban the possession of bump stocks. The rule is set to take effect 90 days after publication in the Federal Register. During the rulemaking phase, a number of people had questions about the effect of a final rule. What would happen to binary triggers? Would bump stocks be grandfathered in? Would ATF consider an amnesty and open the registry? Perhaps most importantly, who is going to sue them? Binary Triggers While a number of people believed that binary triggers would be affected by this final rule, it appears that may not be the caseat least until a court decides otherwise. From the final rule: The Department disagrees that other firearms or devices, such as rifles, shotguns, and binary triggers, will be reclassified as machineguns under this rule.While semiautomatic firearms may shoot one round when the trigger is pulled, the shooter must release the trigger before another round is fired. Even if this release results in a second shot being fired, it is as the result of a separate function of the trigger. This is also the reason that binary triggers cannot be classified as machineguns under the ruleone function of the trigger results in the firing of only one round. Grandfathering of Bump Stocks/Opening the Registry Various commenters during the comment period argued that ATF would be able to simply grant amnesty or grandfather in current bump stocks. Some went as far to claim ATF could simply reopen the registry in a general amnesty period. Unsurprisingly, ATF disagrees: While in 1968 Congress left open the possibility of future amnesty registration of firearms subject to the NFA, ATF has long held that it eliminated any possible amnesty for machineguns in 198618 U.S.C. 922(0) would preclude the registration ofmachineguns during an amnesty period. Section 922(0) prohibits possession of machineguns which were not lawfully possessed prior to its effective date of May 19, 1986 . Since 922(o) [was enacted after the amnesty provision of the NFA], its provisions would prevail over any earlier enactment in conflict. This means that any future amnesty period could not permit the lawful possession and registration of machineguns prohibited by section 922(o). It would seem that amnesty or a grandfathering provision is not only off the table for bump stocks but any form of amnesty is no longer an option, at least from the government's position. Final Rule The final rule alters the definition of the term machine gun in the regulations dealing with the Importation of Arms, Ammunition and Implements of War (regulations for the Arms Export Control Act), Commerce in Firearms and Ammunition (regulations pertaining to the Gun Control Act), and those controlling Machine Guns, Destructive Devices, and Certain Other Firearms (the regulations for the National Firearms Act). For the purposes of this article, since this is the part that will affect the majority of the readers, the focus will be on the GCA and NFA regulations. The following language is added to the end of the current definition of a machine gun. * * * For purposes of this definition, the term automatically as it modifies shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, means functioning as the result of a self-acting or self-regulating mechanism that allows the firing of multiple rounds through a single function of the trigger; and single function of the trigger means a single pull of the trigger and analogous motions. The term machine gun includes a bump-stock-type device, i.e., a device that allows a semi-automatic firearm to shoot more than one shot with a single pull of the trigger by harnessing the recoil energy of the semiautomatic firearm to which it is affixed so that the trigger resets and continues firing without additional physical manipulation of the trigger by the shooter. As a result of this change in the definition, the Government is now clearly contending that bump-stock-type devices are machine guns for the purposes of both the GCA and the NFA. They went further to interpret or define the terms automatically and single function of the trigger. Lawsuit Shortly after the announcement of the final rule, Damien Guedes backed by institutional plaintiffs Firearms Policy Coalition, Inc., Firearms Policy Foundation, and the Madison Society Foundation, Inc. filed suit against the ATF, Acting Director of ATF, the purported Acting Attorney General, and the United States of America, seeking a preliminary injunction from the enactment of the final rule. The suit challenges the purported Acting Attorney General's authority to finalize a rule, documents various violations of the Administrative Procedures Act, reviews violations of ATF's rulemaking authority, along with several other issues. If you're interested in donating to the lawsuit, you may do so here. Check out this video from The Gun Collective on the topic of bump stocks: ABOUT THE AUTHOR Adam Kraut is a firearms law attorney practicing in southeastern PA and across the country federally. He hosts The Legal Brief, a show dedicated to crushing the various myths and misinformation around various areas of the gun world and The Gun Collective Podcast. He was also the general manager of a gun store in the suburbs of Philadelphia. 'Some farmers know when elections are due.' 'Before that, they take loans.' 'They then ask their farmer unions for loan waivers and the political party who shouts first about a loan waiver (gets the votes).' Photograph: Reuters. Kindly note the image has only been posted for representational purposes. The first decision the Congress party took on forming governments in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh was to waive farmers's loans up to Rs 200,000, thereby fulfilling an election promise to do so within 10 days of coming to power. The move may have helped the Congress score brownie points over the Bharatiya Janata Party, but according to economists it would have a serious impact on the states's finances. It was not the Congress alone which has done this; the BJP too promised farm loan waivers in Uttar Pradesh before the 2017 assembly election and announced it on coming to power in Lucknow. Dr Rakesh Bhardwaj, principal scientist, Indian Council of Agricultural Research-National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources, New Delhi, is hugely critical of loan waivers to farmers as he believes they only benefit a small minority of farmers. "This kind of announcement generates emotions in the country. Farmers feel this government is going to be our government. The BJP did it in UP and the Congress is doing it now, but hardly 10 percent of the farmers benefit," Dr Bhardwaj tells Rediff.com's Syed Firdaus Ashraf. How do you see this move by the newly elected Congress governments in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh to waive off farm loans up to Rs 2 lakh? I see it as a failure of policy. If we are allowing this to happen to farmers, then many more people will come forward and demand that their loans too must be waived. Ultimately someone else is paying for it. It is a systemic failure at the level of farming support system and maybe banks who have to link to the farming support system as when farmers are cultivating crops, it is also properly supervised so that farmers do not end up making losses because of mismanagement. In many cases, it is mismanagement (of farming). Your statement reminds one of Margaret Thatcher's famous quote, 'Socialist governments always run out of other people's money'... Socialism doest not work always. If we go the socialist way, then it will be a total failure as no one will work. The farmers's lobby argues that if corporate loans can be waived off, why not those of farmers? Corporate loans too must not be waived off. I have seen cases where a farmer has taken a loan and then used it for his child's marriage. Now how can he earn money on that loan when there is no income? Farm loan is easy and cheap, so it is taken. They build houses with that loan or set up small shops. The bank is giving loans, but there is no one checking whether the farmer is using the money for that (farming) process. The reality is that farmers are still committing suicide... I am not saying that this (misuse of loans) is so in 100 percent of cases. There should be a system where the failure is (avoided). When you are talking of farmers's suicides it is in case when crops fail. Why crops fail nobody investigates, but that investigation is needed. Scanty rainfall, bad harvests, sometimes over-production lead to losses. There is a need for policy. In our country today, so much sugarcane has been produced, which is not needed. Because we are an open democratic system we (farmers) do not want to listen to the government too. We should decide in which area which crop should be planted. If we do that, then we will have balanced production. Now if the government does this, the people will shout that the government has become draconian. Every year, farmers demand minimum support price for their crops and they ask the government to procure their crops. If that is the case, then the government must also have the right as to which crop has to be planted. When the government has no right to say which crops should be planted and which crops should be grown, then you come and demand that the government has to give you MSP. We have to have a strict policy as to which crop will grow in which area and what are the resources available. Also, what kind of soil supports the crop as in some states the water level has gone too low. Here the government must force it and stop rice cultivation. Even if the water level is too low, still the farmers want to go for paddy only because it is a comfortable crop like sugarcane. Instead, why are we not working on pulses and vegetables? Pulses are grown on the marginal land and not on mainland, why? Today, we have rice, wheat and sugarcane more than what is required, but there is a shortage of oil seeds and pulses, which we are importing. If the farmers know there are no takers for rice, wheat and sugarcane, there must be some reason why they are still growing these crops. One reason is the minimum support price as the government is procuring it, procurement is good. Secondly, these are comfortable crops and they don't have to invest in labour. Nowadays people are looking for comfort. Do you mean to say that the policy whereby the government gives MSP on 22 crops to farmers is wrong and flawed as it puts the farmers in a debt trap? It is a typical situation. Initially, the minimum support price started with wheat and then more crops were included. There is a problem also as the WTO (World Trade Organisation) says you have given farmers subsidy but under the WTO agreement you cannot give government subsidy. Whatever the situation, government procurement is a major reason for wheat, sugarcane, cotton and rice (cultivation). Farmers grow sugarcane because it can withstand hailstorms and also does not get destroyed by wild boars. So, why should they not grow sugarcane? We are growing sugarcane more than what is required. We don't need it. We should put emphasis on pulses and oil seeds which India still has to import. Why is nobody telling farmers what you are saying? I cannot say why, but politics always plays a part, be it the BJP or Congress. When we say India is an agrarian country, then why was there no policy on what amount of acreage should go for which crop so that we have balanced production and not get over-supply of a particular crop in the market? There is an argument that the problem is not about over-supply, but of traders who make money on farm products. While the farmers, say, sell onions for Rs 2 a kg to the traders, they in turn sell the same onions for Rs 20 a kg to consumers in the city. Managing traders is not an easy task. A simple solution would be to provide the farmers direct access to cities. Only farmers can come and sell in cities. Abolish the traders. The Maharashtra government tried to do so, but failed and had to withdraw its order. I am not aware of why it failed. But at least in big cities and middle level cities, farmers can sell their goods and customers will get a better price and fresh farm produce. Can we say loan waiver is both bad economics and bad politics? Do you have any statistics as to how many farmers take loans? And that too from a government bank, and what percentage of farmers are going to benefit from this move? But this kind of announcement generates emotions in the country. Farmers feel this government is going to be our government. The BJP did it in UP and the Congress is doing it now, but hardly 10 percent of the farmers benefit from this. Only 10 percent of farmers who have not repaid loans from government banks are going to benefit from such announcements. But the farmers who have worked hard and repaid their loan to banks, imagine their plight! They will be feeling like fools. This will also cause jealousy. Suppose a farmer took a loan from the bank for his daughter's marriage and didn't repay, and another took a loan, worked hard and repaid the loan, he will be thinking that he is a fool. Is it not possible to do farming without taking a bank loan? Many times the farmers feel the loan will be waived, therefore they take loans and don't repay. You are the first agricultural economist who is putting the blame on the farmers. I will say some farmers, not all farmers. So, is this some kind of scam? Some farmers know when elections are due. Before that, they take loans. They then ask their farmer unions for loan waivers and the political party who shouts first about a loan waiver (gets the votes). But is there a scam going on? It is possible. Ola's move to invest in Vogo is in line with the ride-hailing platform's move to evolve into a mobility provider rather than just a cab company, reports Alnoor Peermohamed. Photograph: Kind courtesy Ola Softbank-backed Ola has said it will invest $100 million in the scooter sharing start-up, Vogo, as part of a deal to allow the latter's customers access two-wheeler rentals from its app. The investment, made in tranches, will help Vogo add 100,000 scooters to its fleet as part of the strategic partnership between the two firms. The first installment was received by Vogo as part of its Series A funding in August. Vogo had raised around $7 million in its first round of institutional funding. It was led by Ola and also saw the participation of Matrix Partners, Stellaris Venture Partners and Hero MotoCorp chairman Pawan Munjal's family office. "Our investment in Vogo will help build a smart multi-modal network for first-to-last-mile connectivity in the country. Vogo's automated scooter-sharing platform, backed by Ola's expertise in the space, can help transform our cities," said Bhavish Aggarwal, co-founder and CEO of Ola. Ola's move to invest in Vogo is in line with the ride-hailing platform's move to evolve into a mobility provider rather than just a cab company. It also signals the company's move to tap the scooter rental space, which has been growing rapidly in the past one-two years in major metro cities. Image: Bhavish Aggarwal, CEO and co-founder of Ola. Photograph: Shailesh Andrade/Reuters The company did not outline or divulge details about the period over which the investment of $100 million would be made in Vogo, but a source close to the deal said it would depend on the scooter rental start-up's appetite to absorb the vehicles. He said while Munjal's investment in the company could be to align Vogo's vehicle purchasing to benefit Hero MotoCorp, no such exclusive deal had been signed. The Hero MotoCorp chairman's investment in Vogo is similar to Ratan Tata's investment in Ola, done in his personal capacity. "Vogo has seen a surge in the past five months, growing over 10x in scale. We are thrilled to have Ola join us on this journey and help turbocharge our growth by providing us access to strategic and capital-efficient supply, as well as to millions of customers on its platform in time to come," said Anand Ayyadurai, founder and CEO of Vogo. Ola's investment in Vogo will give its users access to scooter rentals, cabs and autos on its platform in Bengaluru and Hyderabad, and other cities as the start-up plans to scale up across India. Vogo, on the other hand, will get access to the 150 million plus customer base that Ola claims it has. As it looks to fend off rival Uber, Ola is actively looking at diversifying its business to attract funding from both new and existing investors. For this, the company acquired Ridlr, a provider of information and ticketing on public transport, apart from its acquisition of online food ordering app Foodpanda. It also experimented with bicycle sharing at select college campuses last year and is building an electric rickshaw for use as first and last-mile connectivity in cities. Tinesh Bhasin explains the tax liabilities that accompany receiving a gift. Illustration: Dominic Xavier/Rediff.com Surat diamond merchant Savji Dholakia gifted around 600 cars to his employees as Diwali gift this year. Some employees also received flats and cash, say reports. While it's good to have a large-hearted employer, the onus of paying tax on these gifts lies with the recipient employee. Any gift from an employer to employee is taxable as perquisites, if its value crosses Rs 5,000. In the income tax return form, these are taxed under the head 'salaries'. The limit of Rs 5,000 is for the entire financial year. "An employee receiving the gift of a car or house has to consider the fair market value of such gifts and pay tax on it based on her/his tax slab. Usually, the employer will deduct the tax at source on such perquisites," says Chetan Chandak, head of tax research, H&R Block. But if you are an employee who receives a gift from business acquaintances, there's some relief. The Income-Tax Act specifies a list of items that are taxable if received as gifts. This includes shares and securities, jewellery, archaeological collections, drawings, paintings, sculptures or any other work of art, and bullion. "As an employee, if you receive any gift other than the specified items, you don't need to disclose them in the returns or pay on it," says Naveen Wadhwa, a chartered accountant with Taxmann.com. As an employee, mobile phones or other electronic gadgets received from vendors or clients will not attract tax. Things are slightly different for professionals such as doctors, lawyers, chartered accountant, and so on. Section 28 lays down what is taxed as business income and includes the value of any benefit or perquisite, whether convertible into money or not, arising from business or the exercise of a profession. The fair market value of such items received by a business or professional should be added to the business income and tax needs to be paid on it. Gifts that professionals receive in due course of business are taxable to ensure that they don't receive expensive gifts from clients instead of fees and thereby avoid taxes. But not all gifts to professionals are taxable. If someone offers a gift in a personal capacity, then the taxation will be different. In this case, they won't need to pay tax on electronic gadgets, just like the salaried. Only those item included in the list (shares, bullion, etc) mentioned above are taxable, if the market value of all gifts received in a financial year cross Rs 50,000. If you receive gifts which are in the specified list, you will need to declare it under the head 'income from other sources' when filing returns and taxed accordingly. This is true even if it is from a friend or distant relative. Gifts are, however, not taxable only when the person receives it from close relatives. The Income-Tax Act says these include spouse, siblings and their partners, siblings of spouse and their partners, brother or sister of either of the parents of the individual and any lineal ascendant or descendant of the person of his/her spouse. Also, if you are getting married, any gift received during the wedding is free from tax. 'The autonomy of essential institutions is clearly under question as the Modi government seeks to influence them politically.' 'The credibility of institutions such as the EC, the CBI, the CVC, the UPSC, the RBI, media, and universities, has been compromised,' notes Zoya Hasan, the distinguished political thinker. IMAGE: Prime Minister Narendra Damodardas Modi at the launch of the Main Nahin Hum portal and app in New Delhi, October 24, 2018. Photograph: Press Information Bureau The Bharatiya Janata Party has relentlessly attacked the Congress party, Sonia Gandhi and the erstwhile National Advisory Council of conducting governance by remote control and undermining political processes and public institutions. Given this unwavering criticism it was assumed that once elected to power the BJP would restore the authority and sanctity of democratic institutions. Events under their dispensation indicate that the opposite has happened. Both State and non-State institutions have come under pressure as the regime attempts to recalibrate and readjust the relationship between institutions of democracy and the popular mandate to consolidate its own authority and ideological control over institutions. Since Independence, India's politics had taken the form of a centrist consensus. Clearly, that consensus has broken down with India's politics shifting decisively to the right since Prime Minister Narendra Damodardas Modi assumed power in 2014. The BJP has used its mandate to build a majoritarian State. This has redefined democracy and is beginning to change the institutional edifice it stands on. The autonomy of essential institutions is clearly under question as the Modi government seeks to influence them politically. The credibility of institutions such as the Election Commission, the Central Bureau of Investigation, the Central Vigilance Commission, the Union Public Service Commission, the Reserve Bank of India, media, and universities, has been compromised. The space to differ has been encroached. In view of the hyper-polarisation of political debate in India, the tendency to demonise and criminalise dissent leaves open the possibility that expressing such perspectives will be construed as harming the nation by the government. The taming of the media is by now so well known that it requires no recounting here. The environment in universities has been vitiated and disagreements stifled to a point of choking critical inquiry. Many of the higher education institutions have been compromised by appointing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh loyalists with virtually no relevant experience to head these institutions. These are not the first instances of a regime placing its favourites in positions of power and influence. Still, in the past, institutional heads or members of academic bodies had a semblance of professional attainment to their credit, whereas the record of most individuals favoured by the current dispensation is dismal, without the slightest pretence of expertise or achievement. These appointees have also played an active role in destroying democratic functioning in the institutions they head, most flagrantly in the case of Jawaharlal Nehru University. Agencies and institutions are often accused of doing the government's bidding and do not function above the cut and thrust of the political fray. Take two cases in point. Doubts have been raised on the role of the Election Commission, an institution whose autonomy and independence is of vital significance to the operation of our democratic polity. Two examples would suffice to underline the fragility of institutional independence. The EC rightly called electoral bonds scheme proposed by the government to clean up election finance a 'retrograde move'. But soon after, the commission changed its mind and said these bonds are a 'step in the right direction', even though it is clear that they were a blow to transparency as they would actually make funding of political parties more opaque. The EC's reputation took a more severe blow when it announced separate dates for elections in Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat at the end of 2017 even though the two states normally go to the polls simultaneously. The decision to de-hyphenate the two state elections allowed the central and state governments more time to announce sops to combat the anti-incumbency sentiment. The EC claimed it delayed the announcement on Gujarat so that the electoral code of conduct would not impede flood relief. But this was not a convincing alibi because the delay had nothing to do with flood relief, giving rise to suspicions that a Constitutional position was being reduced to serving the political interests of the ruling party. The RBI's autonomy has nosedived as well. Over the past few years, the finance ministry has at times announced new measures without consulting the RBI first. The disastrous decision to demonetise was taken without consulting the RBI, but the central bank had to retrospectively complete the paperwork to make demonetisation appear as if it came from the deliberations of the RBI board. The RBI-government face off escalated with regard to capital reserves and easing credit norms for small and medium businesses -- the backbone of the ruling party's local units. The government has been pushing to gain access to the RBI's capital reserves it keeps to deal with, say, a banking crisis. The jury is still out on whether the RBI-government face-off in the board meeting on November 19 ended with truce or a defeat for the central bank. (This column was written before Dr Urjit Patel resigned as RBI governor on December 10 with immediate effect.) But the controversy has drawn attention to the way in which the relationship between the government and the RBI has been reconfigured given the concerted bid to prevail over big institutions. Addressing some of these issues which have raised concern in the public domain, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley observed, while delivering the Atal Bihari Vajpayee Memorial lecture (October 27), that 'The nation, that is India, is taller than any institution or government'. He also regretted that the attempts were being made to weaken the authority of the elected, and to create a power shift in favour of non-elected, non-accountable institutions. The binary between the elected and the unelected is false. To project the former and disparage the latter is unmistakably undemocratic. To attempt to delegitimise non-elected institutions is to knock out the institutional foundations on which Indian democracy stands. An editorial in a leading national daily summed it up succinctly: 'In a democracy, there is no nation versus institution.' The Modi government's uneasiness with institutional autonomy is understandable because it weakens its authoritarian impulse to power, especially as several institutions have begun to guard their turf against government interference. As the 2019 elections approach and political winds begin to change direction, many of these institutions are sensing that the government could be on the losing side, and this has emboldened them to stand up against the rule by fiat which has been the hallmark of governance under this regime. There is no question that the Congress set the pace for weakening institutions. Indira Gandhi, in following her personal political ambitions, contributed to the emasculation of the party, Parliament, the bureaucracy, the judiciary, the presidency and the deinstitutionalisation of Indian democracy. But this has not changed. The country has witnessed a steady hollowing of public institutions under the top-heavy 'prime ministerialism' of Narendra Damodardas Modi that is designed to serve the interests of the ruling party and the supreme leader. The logic of deinstitutionalisation in this case is simple. There is only one legitimate authority: The leader. Consequently, independent, autonomous institutions, whether within the government or civil society are the adversary, and they must be controlled and defanged. But democracy cannot function if institutions are made subservient to the personal power or the ideological proclivities of political leaders. The BJP's attempt to control institutions is edging politics out of the central lane, shifting the middle ground to the right, which risks undermining the stability of institutions that India has spent decades building. This would undercut the many structural strengths of our democracy. Leaders must therefore accept institutional constraints to safeguard democracy. Zoya Hasan is Professor Emerita, Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. 'When the Babri Masjid was demolished, we didn't take permission from anyone.' IMAGE: Vishwa Hindu Parishad supporters gather around a cutout of Lord Ram during the Dharma Sabha at the Ramlila Maidan to press for the construction of the Ram temple in Ayodhya, New Delhi, December 9, 2018. Photograph: Ravi Choudhary/PTI Photo Even as the Bharatiya Janata Party has taken a 'wait-and-watch' stand on the construction of the Ram temple, two BJP MPs -- Ravindra Kushwaha and Hari Narayan Rajbhar -- raised the issue at its parliamentary meeting on Tuesday, December 18, 2019. The MPs, who represent Lok Sabha constituencies in Uttar Pradesh, said people keep asking them when the temple will be built, Press Trust of India reported quoting sources. However, Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh asked the MPs to be patient on the issue. Hindutva organisations, including the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, have in recent weeks intensified the demand for early construction of the temple, with many leaders, including RSS Sarsnghchalak Mohan Bhagwat, pitching for a law to enable it. Though the BJP has agreed with the sentiments of these organisations, it has so far not come out in support of a law. The Ram temple land dispute is currently being heard in the Supreme Court. "Faith is above the court and government. Courts and government must not come and intervene to stop the construction of the Ram temple," Rajbhar tells Rediff.com's Syed Firdaus Ashraf. What did you say on the Ram temple at the BJP parliamentary meeting? I want the Ram Mandir to be built in Ayodhya. The case is going on in the court and the government has so far not gone ahead on this issue. Since it is a matter of faith, I said the people of this country must come forward and build the Ram Mandir at the site of the disputed structure. When the Babri Masjid was demolished, we didn't take permission from anyone. So why do we need permission to build a Ram temple now from the court or for that matter from the government as this issue is related to faith? How can you build a temple when the matter is sub judice? In 1992, when the Babri Masjid was demolished, that time too a case was going on in the Supreme Court and the high court. Right now, at this moment, (a makeshift) Ram Mandir exists at the spot. So I feel there is no controversy on the issue as Muslims also want a Ram Mandir. It is my personal view. Is it legally practical to build a temple at the disputed site? I told you this is a matter of faith. Faith is above the court and government. As I told you, even in 1992 there was a court order, but the people of India went and demolished the disputed structure. Now there is a Ram Lalla statue placed there. There is already a Ram Mandir. This place is not a janambhoomi (birth place) of Babar, but of Lord Ram. So, the courts and government must not come and intervene to stop the construction of a Ram temple. In 1992, when the Babri Masjid was demolished there was a Congress government at the Centre. Now it is a BJP government. Why does your government not bring an ordinance and build a temple? This is the demand (to bring an ordinance) that I have made and it is now the government's responsibility. As a member of Parliament, I spoke on this issue within the party forum and I spoke within my rights. I am only saying the Ram Mandir must be constructed and my party members agree with my demand. Do you think people voted for the BJP in the 2014 Lok Sabha election for development or for a Ram Mandir? We got the votes for vikas (development), but for a Ram Mandir too. Right now I just want the people of India to come forward and construct a Ram temple. Do you think the BJP lost the elections in Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh because you could not fulfil your promise to construct a Ram temple in Ayodhya? No, that is not true. Winning and losing elections is all about people's choice and people's mandate. The Ram Mandir is a universal choice and everyone wants it. The BJP is being criticised for not raising the demand for a Ram Mandir since 2014, but raising it now, just before the general election. We have been raising the Ram Mandir issue since 1992. It is not a new demand. People of India want a Ram Mandir in Ayodhya. 'Women all over India want a safer atmosphere at the place where they go to pray or meditate.' IMAGE: 'Women not only go to religious places as believers; they also work in these ashrams, madrasas and Christian institutions.' Photograph: Ajay Verma/Reuters. Kindly note image has been posted only for representational purposes Advocate Maneesh Pathak recently filed a petition in the Supreme Court under Article 32 of the Constitution, seeking an extension of the Vishaka guidelines in religious places 'including ashrams, madrasas and Catholic institutions, to check the rampant rise in sexual exploitation of women in such places'. Till 1997, a person facing sexual harassment at the workplace had to lodge a complaint under Section 354 of the Indian Penal Code, 1860, that deals with the 'criminal assault of women to outrage women's modesty' and Section 509 that 'punishes an individual/individuals' for using a 'word, gesture or act intended to insult the modesty of a woman. This changed after Rajasthan state government employee Bhanwari Devi, who tried to prevent a child marriage, was gang-raped by higher caste members from the community. When she did not get justice from the Rajasthan high court and the rapists were allowed to go free, a women's rights group called Vishaka filed a public interest litigation in the Supreme Court. In 1997, the Supreme Court passed a landmark judgment in the Vishaka vs the State of Rajasthan case, laying down guidelines to be followed by establishments while dealing with complaints regarding sexual harassment. The court stated that these guidelines (which came to be known as the Vishaka guidelines) had to be implemented until legislation was passed to deal with the issue. Maneesh Pathak tells Shobha Warrier/Rediff.com why he wants religious places to implement these guidelines as well: You recently filed a PIL in the Supreme Court seeking the inclusion of the Vishaka guidelines in religious places. Did the Bishop Franco Mulakkal incident prompt you to file this petition? I wouldn't say that case prompted me to file the PIL. Many such incidents were reported in the past too. For example, the scandals concerning Daati Maharaj, Asaram Bapu, Ram Rahim, etc. These people had lakhs of women followers. I felt, after all these incidents, women felt very unsafe in many religious places. Another reason for filing the PIL is that religion is an integral part of a woman's life in India. As you know, the Vishaka guidelines pertain only to the workplace. Women not only go to religious places as believers; they also work in these ashrams, madrasas and Christian institutions. IMAGE: 'Whether it is the workplace or the religious place, the guidelines can be implemented if the top authorities are ready to do so.' Photograph: Umar Ganie. Kindly note image has been posted only for representational purposes Does your PIL talk only about the women working there, or are the followers or devotees included as well? Devotees also have to be included in the guidelines as past incidents show that they are the main victims of sexual exploitation. With many such incidents happening at many religious places, women feel quite unsafe; this is not good as they go to religious places for peace of mind. This amounts to curtailing their Right to Life and Liberty (Article 21); Right to Equality, which means they should be treated on par with men; Right to Freedom of Speech and Expression (Article 19) and also Article 25 (1) under which all are equally entitled to freely profess, practise and propagate religion. My decision to file a PIL was to make women feel safe and stop any form of sexual exploitation in religious places. Do you feel that exploitation of women at religious places will end by implementing the Vishaka guidelines? I feel if we extend the guidelines to religious places -- I have requested the court to include all religious places including ashrams, madrasas and churches -- we will be able to prevent such cases to some extent. I have asked the court to: 1. Implement the Vishaka guidelines in religious places. 2. Ensure verification of all the gurus. 3. Members of the Human Rights Commission should make periodic visits to these places. If all these three prayers are accepted by the honourable court, I feel it will make a difference. If the court decides to implement this in religious places, it can be extended to workplaces too. IMAGE: 'There shouldn't be any unwanted male pressure on any woman in the work place.' Photograph: Kind courtesy Anurag Agnihotri/Creative Commons. Kindly note image has been posted only for representational purposes Twenty-one years have passed since the Vishakha vs State of Rajasthan case. Looking at the number of #MeToo stories that are coming out, do you feel the Supreme Court guidelines have made a difference to the lives of women in their workplaces? The fact is that these guidelines were not implemented properly in the workplace due to two reasons. One, the implementation of the guidelines and following up on a complaint are very sluggish in all workplaces. I would say 70 per cent of the workplaces do not follow the guidelines correctly. If they did, these kinds of #MeToo incidents would not have occurred at all. The second reason is that women need to report such crimes without fear. They shouldn't shy away from doing so. Who is to be blamed? The woman who does not complain or the workplace that does not implement the guidelines properly? I would say the work place has to be more responsible. If an environment was created where a woman could courageously report a crime committed by her seniors or bosses, she would have done so. If she is not confident about getting justice, she will refrain from complaining. You said if the Vishaka guidelines were implemented properly, the #MeToo incidents would not have occurred. What is the proper way of implementing these guidelines? The proper way is to create a working environment where a woman feels secure to address any situation she faces. There shouldn't be any unwanted male pressure on any woman in the work place. Also, there should be a grievance committee in every company and the majority of its members should be women. The mechanism to address such an issue should be easy. Today, a woman has to cross several hurdles again and again to finally make someone hear her story. Why do you think she uses the social media to tell her story? Because she has not been able to do so in her workplace. If these guidelines are not being implemented properly in the workplace, do you think it will be possible to do so in a religious place? Whether it is the workplace or the religious place, the guidelines can be implemented if the top authorities are ready to do so. After I filed the PIL, I received a lot of positive feedback from women all over India which means they want a safer atmosphere at the place where they go to pray or meditate. 'There are many court decisions which cannot be followed, like ban on putting up loudspeakers on mosque or ban on Jallikattu; who is following it? In such decisions, let people decide about their beliefs. This should not be brought in judicial review, is my personal opinion' 'The judicial procedure was influenced which led to no convictions in the anti-Sikh riots of 1984' IMAGE: BJP president Amit Shah addresses a press conference at the party headquarters in New Delhi. Photograph: Arun Sharma/ PTI Photo Bharatiya Janata Party president Amit Shah on Wednesday made light of the the opposition 'mahagathbandhan' (grand alliance), calling it an illusion and expressed confidence that the BJP will retain power after the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. Speaking at a media summit in Mumbai, Shah also said that he was sure that the Shiv Sena will be with the BJP in the next Lok Sabha elections. Talks are on (with them), he added. "The reality of the opposition 'mahagathbandhan' is different. It (the opposition alliance) doesn't exist and is a 'bhranti' (illusion)," Shah said. "The mahagathbandhan does not exist anywhere. We have fought against all of them in 2014 and defeated them to form the government. They are all regional leaders, they can't help each other," the BJP president said. Shah said the BJP will gain in West Bengal, North-East and Odisha in 2019. "The issues of elections are: in five years how have we ensured national security and defeated corruption. We have provided toilets in eight crore homes and electricity in 2.5 crore homes," Shah said. "Not only for the BJP, but it is also necessary for the country that a strong government comes to power," the BJP president said. The election results in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh were definitely not favourable for the BJP, but it is not right to link them with the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, he said. State polls can't be linked to Lok Sabha poll results as both elections are fought on separate issues, Shah said. "It is our duty to work for the people and convince them, but if the mandate is against us we accept that too," he said. "I am not against analysis, but the elections are fought on different issues. The issues on the ground are different," he added. "In 2014, the BJP had government in six states, now we have it in 16 states. So tell me who will win the 2019 elections," the BJP president said. "We accept the people's mandate (in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh). We will introspect on the poll results," he said. The BJP chief said it does not matter who is pitted against Narendra Modi in the 2019 polls (as prime ministerial aspirant). "We are going ahead on the basis of our strengh and not on the basis of someone's weakness," he added. Targeting the Congress, Shah said judicial procedure was 'influenced', which led to no convictions for so long in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots. The Delhi high court on Monday sentenced Congress leader Sajjan Kumar to imprisonment for life, the first conviction of a politician in the 1984 riots in which over 2,700 people were killed. "The judicial procedure was influenced which led to no convictions in the anti-Sikh riots of 1984. It made people furious over the issue even after 34 years of the incident," Shah said. He said the NDA government set up another special investigation team after coming to power in 2014 and the convictions are taking place as per this body's findings. "This (Sajjan Kumar) is the fourth judgement that has come out," Shah pointed out. Despite there being the Misra Commission followed by Nanavati Commission, police did not carry out investigations properly in any case, Shah said. Referring to allegations of a journalist that he had seen Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Kamal Nath leading a march against Sikhs (during riots), Shah said, "It has been seen by many people. The SIT is looking into all cases related to 1984 anti-Sikh riots." "I believe the SIT we have set up will take the cases of 1984 anti-Sikh riots to their logical end. And we have made all provisions to equip the SIT," the BJP leader said. Asked about the time required for the legal battle over the Ram temple issue to get over, Shah said, "If the Supreme Court conducts daily hearings of the Babri demolition case, it will not take more than 10 days to get a verdict." "Ayodhya is a title issue. The BJP clearly states that we want to build a temple on the same site. The case was pending before the SC much before 2014. We have requested the court to clear the case and complete its hearings at the earliest," Shah said. Countering senior Congress leader and lawyer Kapil Sibal's demand for conducting the case hearing after the 2019 elections, he said, "I feel the case should be cleared at the earliest. Whatever decision SC wants to take, they should take it at the earliest." On not following the Supreme Court's verdict in the Sabarimala temple case, he said Sabarimala is related to religious faith and that "in some cases, there is no need for a judicial review." When one goes to a gurudwara (a religious place of Sikhs), one has to cover the head with a cloth, he said. "The god (Lord Ayyappa) is believed to be unmarried. It is the belief of locals. Why do you need a judicial review here. Here it is not about equal rights of men and women," Shah said. He said there are 12 temples in the country where men are not allowed inside. "Does it mean it is an injustice to men," he said. "If you are talking about equal rights for men and women, Hindus in this country have carried out so many social reforms on their own and without any order," he said. "The entire country rejected the 'Sati' pratha (a Hindu practice whereby a widow immolates herself on the funeral pyre of her husband) and child marriage while it accepted the Dowry Prohibition Act and the Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act. No one ever raised voice against it," he said. All these decisions were taken in order to protect women's dignity, Shah added. "There are many court decisions which cannot be followed, like ban on putting up loudspeakers on mosque or ban on Jallikattu; who is following it? In such decisions, let people decide about their beliefs. This should not be brought in judicial review, is my personal opinion," he said. Terming the triple talaq bill as a "social reform and not a religious issue," he said even Pakistan does not allow triple talaq to women. There are many Islamic countries where triple talaq is banned, he said. "We have brought the bill in Parliament and we will go ahead with it. It is up to the opposition to show whether they want to support Muslim women or oppose it," Shah said. Former Union minister P Chidambaram was Wednesday questioned by the Enforcement Directorate in connection with the INX Media money laundering case, official sources said. IMAGE: Congress leader P Chidambaram outside Parliament during the Winter Session in New Delhi. Photograph: Kamal Kishore/PTI Photo He arrived at the agency's office in Jamnagar House, near India Gate in New Delhi, at around 11:15 am along with his lawyer. This is the first time that the 73-year-old former finance and home minister is being grilled by the ED in this case. Sources said the senior Congress leader was asked to depose before the investigating officer of the case to record his statement under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act and was given a time for Wednesday. It has earlier questioned him in the Aircel-Maxis PMLA case. The Delhi high court, last month, had extended till January 15 the interim protection from arrest granted to Chidambaram on his pleas seeking anticipatory bail in the INX Media case lodged by both the ED and the CBI. The court had also directed him to cooperate with the investigation. The central probe agency has questioned Chidambaram's son Karti Chidambaram in the INX Media case in the past and has also attached his assets worth an estimated Rs 54 crore, located in India and abroad. The ED had registered a PMLA case in this deal case on the basis of a CBI FIR and had alleged that irregularities took place in the FIPB clearance to INX Media for receiving overseas funds to the tune of Rs 305 crore in 2007 when P Chidambaram was the Union finance minister. It had registered an Enforcement Case Information Report, the ED's equivalent of a police FIR, against the accused named in a CBI complaint, including Karti Chidambaram, INX Media and its directors Peter and Indrani Mukerjea. Karti Chidambaram was also arrested on February 28 by the CBI for allegedly taking money to facilitate the FIPB clearance to INX Media in 2007. He was later granted bail. Several Congress leaders interpreted it as a dig at Prime Minister Modi who is yet to address a single press conference in his 54-month tenure. Archis Mohan reports. IMAGE: Then prime minister Dr Manmohan Singh addresses a press conference in New Delhi, January 3, 2014. Photograph: Press Information Bureau Dr Manmohan Singh had long been criticised by many, including current Prime Minister Narendra Damodardas Modi, as a maun or silent prime minister. On Tuesday, December 18, Dr Singh hit back at his critics -- including his successor -- stating that he was never afraid of talking to the press during his 10-year tenure, and not only met journalists regularly but also addressed on-board press conferences after his return from overseas visits. The 86-year-old leader made the comment at the launch of a five-volume set titled Changing India, which is the compilation of his work as an economist, in the bureaucracy, and as a politician. Several Congress leaders present interpreted it as a dig at Modi who is yet to address a single press conference in his 54-month tenure. As Ashoka University Chancellor Rudrangshu Mukherjee -- one of the editors of the volumes -- said in his introduction, the fifth volume of the set has two parts that are the most voluminous of all. Ironically, these compile Dr Singh's speeches as prime minister, while "ignorant" critics would chide him for being a silent PM. Later, Dr Singh said, "I think these volumes speak for themselves and I don't want to boast about achievements as the prime minister, but the events that took place are well described, particularly in the volume that deals with 'Prime Minister Speaks'." Dr Singh recalled that in July 2005, during his first visit to the US, officials had advised him not to address a press conference organised by the National Press Club in Washington, DC. He said the officials were nervous, but it turned out to be successful and the verbatim record is published in these volumes. "I certainly would like to say that I was not the prime minister who was afraid of talking to the press. I met the press regularly and on every foreign trip that I undertook, I had a press conference in the plane or immediately after landing. There are press conferences whose results are also described," he said. Apart from addressing two 'national press conferences' at Vigyan Bhavan, Dr Singh would answer the media's questions at the start of Parliament sessions and always addressed the on-board media upon his return from officials visits abroad. Speaking to the media after the event, Dr Singh said he has not studied the impact of farm loan waivers that the Congress party has promised in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, but a commitment made to the people should be honoured. On the recent tension between the government and the Reserve Bank of India, Dr Singh said the relationship between the two is like that of 'husband-wife' and the difference in opinion must be resolved in a harmonious manner. "There will be hiccups, there will be difference in opinion, but ultimately these must be harmonised in a manner that the two great institutions can work in harmony," Dr Singh, who served as RBI governor from September 1982 to January 1985, said. "Whosoever is the governor of the RBI, I wish him well," Dr Singh said on Dr Urjit Ravindra Patel quitting as RBI governor and retired IAS officer Shaktikanta Das taking over as the new governor. The former PM said the country needed a strong and independent RBI, which has to work in close cooperation with the central government. "I do hope and pray that the government and the RBI find a way to work together," he said. The unveiling of the books -- Dr Singh credited his three daughters for putting the volumes together and Congress leader Jairam Ramesh for fishing out a couple of reports he had penned as the economic advisor to the Indira Gandhi government in the 1970s -- was followed by a conversation between him and former World Bank chief economist Dr Kaushik C Basu. The former PM said the volumes represented the entire lifetime of his professional life, nearly 62 years, and history will judge whether what he did was right or wrong. Dr Singh shared with the gathering his early years of struggle in a village in Punjab, now in Pakistan, and how he had to give his matriculation examination twice because of Partition. Dr Singh, who is currently a Rajya Sabha member, also reminisced about his equation with political leaders, including Indira Gandhi, Morarji Desai and P V Narasimha Rao. Dr Singh said many people have commented how he was an 'accidental prime minister', but what is not known is how he was also 'an accidental finance minister' when he was given the portfolio by Rao in 1991. Former RBI governor I G Patel was Rao's and P C Alexander's choice to be finance minister, he said, but Dr Patel turned it down and recommended Dr Singh's name. However, Dr Singh did not take Alexander's offer seriously, and only accepted the offer when Rao, the then prime minister, tracked him down at the University Grants Commission that he was heading then. Dr Singh said when the Janata Party government came to power, then prime minister Desai wanted to remove him given Dr Singh's proximity to the Indira Gandhi dispensation, but then finance minister H M Patel insisted that Dr Singh should continue. A journalist, who had criticised the Bharatiya Janata Party-led governments at the Centre and in Manipur on social media, has been sentenced to one year in detention by a local court, according to a statement issued by the state home department. The chief judicial magistrate of Imphal West district passed the order on December 14. The Advisory Board of the National Security Act, in its sitting held on December 11, had examined the allegations levelled against the journalist, Kishorechand Wangkhem. On December 13, the board recommended that there were sufficient grounds to detain Wangkhem under the provisions of the NSA, the statement said. Manipur Governor Najma Heptulla approved the advisory boards recommendation to detain the journalist for a maximum period of 12 months under the NSA. The 39-year-old Imphal-based journalist was detained under the NSA on November 26 for allegedly uploading videos criticising the BJP-led governments in Manipur and at the Centre for observing Rani Jhansis birth anniversary. Wangkhem works with a local TV channel and the videos that he had uploaded on November 19 in English and Meitei were not related to his official work, officials had said earlier. In the video clips, Wangkhem had purportedly said he was saddened and shocked to learn that the present government in Manipur was observing the birth anniversary of Rani of Jhansi, according to media reports. He reportedly said Rani of Jhansis deeds had nothing to do with Manipur and the state was observing her birth anniversary because the Centre had asked it to. In this context, he allegedly called Chief Minister Biren Singh a puppet of the Centre and a puppet of Hindutva. The chief minister had claimed that the Rani of Jhansi had played a role in the unification of India. November 19 is the birth anniversary of Laxmibai, the Rani of Jhansi, who was one of the leading figures in the 1857 sepoy mutiny. Wangkhems wife Ranjita Elangbam said on Wednesday that she has appealed to the ministry of home affairs to cancel the charges against him under the NSA but has not received any reply till now. Amid a controversy over his comments linking job deprivation of his states youth to influx of workers from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Kamal Nath on Wednesday said other states including Gujarat also have policies favouring employment to locals, even as a complaint was filed against him in a Bihar court. IMAGE: Social activist Tamanna Hashmi has filed a complaint against Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Nath in a court in Muzaffarpur, Bihar, alleging his remarks were insulting. Photograph: PTI Photo Some Bharatiya Janata Party MPs also raised the issue in Parliament, accusing Madhya Pradeshs new chief minister of inciting hatred against people of other states. Lot of industries are set up in which people from other states, like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, come to work. I do not want to criticise them, but the youth of Madhya Pradesh are deprived (of jobs), Nath had said on Monday announcing a new state government policy under which industries availing investment incentives will need to give 70 per cent employment to local youths. The remarks, made by Nath soon after he was sworn in, had drawn all-round criticism, with parties like the BJP, Rashtriya Janata Dal and Janata Dal-United expressing their disapproval. Defending his comments, Nath told reporters on Wednesday in Bhopal, Such policy exists in other states also. Is it not there in Gujarat? What is new in it? WATCH: Kamal Nath defends his comments on migrants Taking objection to the comments, a social activist, however, filed a complaint against Nath in a court in Muzaffarpur, Bihar, while alleging that the remarks made by the new chief minister of Madhya Pradesh were insulting for the people of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh and they were feeling aggrieved. Tamanna Hashmi, the activist who has filed several complaints in the past against politicians making controversial comments, filed his plea against Nath before the Chief Judicial Magistrates court under IPC sections 153 (provocation with intent to cause riot), and 504 (intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of peace). In the complaint, the petitioner has claimed he felt aggrieved by Naths statement, alleging it was against the countrys unity. The court is yet to fix a date for hearing of the complaint case. The senior Congress leaders remarks, which he made shortly after being sworn in as Madhya Pradeshs chief minister, has drawn flak from the ruling JD-U-BJP combine in Bihar. The RJD, an ally of the Congress in Bihar, has also termed the remarks as avoidable, though it accused the BJP of blowing the matter out of proportions. In Rajya Sabha, Chairman M Venkaiah Naidu allowed BJPs Bhupendra Yadav to make his submission on Naths statement amid slogan-shouting from the opposition as well as treasury benches over the Rafale deal and other issues. Yadav said a person holding a constitutional post cannot incite hatred against persons of other states and so his Zero Hour mention on the subject be taken on record. In Lok Sabha also, Sanjay Jaiswal, BJP MP from West Champaran in Bihar, slammed Nath for his remarks. The comments by various political leaders in the past about influx of migrant workers in their respective states, most noticeably in Maharashtra, have often triggered controversies. In October this year itself, Gujarat had seen widespread protests against migrants from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and other states. Hamid Nihal Ansari, the software engineer who has returned home after spending six years in a Pakistani jail, on Wednesday had an emotional interaction with External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj as tears rolled down his cheeks while narrating his ordeal. Please forgive me... Thank you so much, Ansari, accompanied by his mother and a number of family members, told Swaraj as she embraced and patted him. On her part, Swaraj, who was personally monitoring Ansaris case, hailed his courage and said destiny had taken him to that country and that he should not feel sorry. You have lots of courage You should not say sorry, Swaraj told a teary-eyed Ansari, who returned to India on Tuesday. Ansari was arrested in Pakistan in 2012 for illegally entering Pakistan from Afghanistan, reportedly to meet a girl he had befriended online. Authorities in Pakistan had slapped charges of espionage against him. Ansaris mother Fauzia too thanked Swaraj and her ministry for all the assistance to the family in its legal battle in Pakistan. Mera Bharat Mahan. Meri madam (Swaraj) Mahan (My India is great. My madam is great, an emotional Fauzia told Swaraj while hugging her. Officials said 33-year-old Ansari became emotional while explaining the difficult phase he had to endure in Pakistan. Ansari and the family thanked Swaraj and the ministry of external affairs for persisting with the case and taking it up with Islamabad. WATCH: An emotional Hamid Ansari meets Sushma Swaraj The Mumbai resident, who returned to India after crossing the Wagah-Attari border, was imprisoned in the Peshawar Central Jail after being sentenced by a military court on December 15, 2015. According to official sources, India issued 96 notes verbales to Pakistan seeking consular access to Ansari. The decision to release him was on account of relentless pressure from New Delhi, they said. Shortly before his arrival on Tuesday, Ansaris mother Fauzia Ansari told reporters that the prayers of the family and of all those who wished for his safe return had been answered. His father, Nihal Ansari, said, It is a new dawn for us. Ansaris jail term ended on December 15 but he was not able to leave for India as his legal documents were not ready. On Thursday, the Peshawar high court gave the Pakistan government a month's deadline to complete his repatriation process. The proceedings in Parliament were disrupted for the sixth consecutive day on Wednesday with treasury and opposition benches sparring again over the Rafale deal issue. The Telugu Desam Party, the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam continued to raise the issue of the dam over the River Cauvery and special status for Andhra Pradesh in both the Houses. While the Rajya Sabha was adjourned for the day soon after it met at 11.00 am, the Lok Sabha saw repeated adjournments, but managed to pass the Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill amid the din. Efforts to pass another legislation, The Consumer Protection Bill, failed as Speaker Sumitra Mahajan said there was too much of din, and the bill would be taken up on Thursday. Wednesday was the sixth working day of the Winter session which saw disruptions and adjournments over Rafale jet seal, special status for Andhra Pradesh and protests over construction of a dam over Cauvery river. Both Houses were adjourned for the day on day one of the session on December 11 after paying obituaries to former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and some sitting members. From December 12 onwards, the two Houses have witnessed frequent disruptions. While a bill to grant equal rights to persons with disabilities was passed in the Rajya Sabha this week, the Lok Sabha has so far passed two bills, including the one on Rights for Transgenders. It was a total washout for the Rajya Sabha on Wednesday. The upper house was adjourned for the day after Congress members holding placards seeking a Joint Parliamentary Committee into the Rafale deal trooped into the well of the House soon after official papers were laid on the table. They joined members of the AIADMK and DMK who have been trooping to the well of the House over the Cauvery issue ever since the Winter Session began. Treasury benches countered the Congress by raising banners seeking an apology from Congress president Rahul Gandhi following the Supreme Court clean chit to the Rafale deal. Amid the uproar, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Vijay Goel demanded that Congress deputy leader Anand Sharma withdraw the remarks made by him in the House on Tuesday. Goel said Sharma had wrongly quoted him to say that he had demanded an apology from Rahul Gandhi on the Rafale issue. Chairman M Venkaiah Naidu said he would look into the records. As the slogan shouting from both sides continued, Naidu said, It is very clear that none of you want the House to run. I dont want this (ruckus) to be seen by the people, he said, while adjourning proceedings for the day. The Lok Sabha was adjourned on three occasions on Wednesday amid uproar after the government rejected the opposition demand for a JPC probe into the Rafale deal. As the House re-convened for the second time in the noon, members from the Congress, AIADMK and TDP trooped into the Well, holding placards and shouting slogans. While AIADMK members protested the construction of a dam across the Cauvery river, those from the Congress demanded a JPC probe into the Rafale deal. The TDP sought to raise issues related to Andhra Pradesh. More than 40 members were in the Well. Some members from the ruling BJP also sought to raise certain issues from their seats. Mallikarjun Kharge, Leader of the Congress in the Lok Sabha, said there were serious apprehensions in the minds of the people over the Rafale deal and this needs to be probed by the JPC. Responding to this, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Narendra Singh Tomar said the government is ready for a discussion on this issue, but rejected the demand for a JPC. Home Minister Rajnath Singh said the government was ready to discuss any issue demanded by the opposition, including the Rafale deal. When the House met against at 2.00 pm, the surrogacy bill was taken up for consideration. Some members participated in the discussion before the bill was passed amid the din. While adjourning the House, the Speaker said, If you want to solve the Cauvery issue you have to discuss it... I am not saying no to discussion. If you want to solve the problem this is not the way... The message that goes is that you dont want to solve the problem. Gov. Andrew Cuomo recently criticized the Metropolitan Transportation Authoritys plans to raise fares on the subways and suburban commuter train lines, saying that the MTA should first crack down on its out-of-control spending. Its a reasonable view, except for the fact that the wasteful 2014 contracts Cuomo helped broker between the authority and transit unions are a major part of what brought us to this point. Few New Yorkers remember what massive giveaways those contracts contained less for what was given to the unions in wages and benefits than for what was not gotten back in streamlined work and overtime rules. First, in April 2014 when negotiating a contract for New York City Transit Employees, the Transit Workers Union threatened a strike at just the right time, as the governor was facing his first re-election. The last thing he wanted was a shutdown of the transit system to kick off his campaign. So he pressured the MTA to give the workers raises without the badly needed reforms to policies that elevate the salaries of some union members well into six figures. That July, the governor was just as eager to avoid labor unrest and give the unions representing Long Island Rail Road workers virtually everything they wanted. The unions proposed a 17 percent pay increase over six years. MTA management sought needed restructuring of rules pertaining to overtime and other benefits. At the time, I and other observers pleaded with elected officials to use the opportunity to reform the woefully inefficient MTA. If you couldnt get reforms at this point, where wages were hanging in the balance, youd never be able to get them. But after the nervous governor got involved, the unions got their 17 percent pay bump. The concession? It would come over six and a half years. Cuomo was wrong to throw in the towel when management was desperate to extract real reforms from the legendary wasteful spending practices of the agency. The LIRR had just been rocked by a huge scandal exposing that over 90 percent of their retirees were receiving disability benefits due to fraud that may have cost riders and taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. In a system called disability by appointment, former LIRR workers were choosing compliant doctors and getting disability benefits worth tens of thousands per year on top of their basic pensions. Many received six-figure annual benefits for doing nothing and not even being disabled. If ever the iron was hot to extract concessions, that was that moment. The disability payments were not the only indication that the MTA has a spending problem rather than a revenue problem. In 2014, Metro-North employees were exposed for abusing over time, claiming it for such arduous tasks as washing their hands. One in four MTA workers made over $100,000 that year, thanks in part to overtime payments that often exceed a workers base salary. In the early going, MTA management hung tough in seeking overtime and work rule concessions. Unfortunately, in the end, the overtime rules that led to that waste have not been changed. The MTAs overtime payments climbed by 4 percent in 2016. The LIRR is especially egregious. Last year, Newsday reported, The overtime figures include wages paid through lucrative union work rules some of which date to the 1920s that pay LIRR employees extra for certain assignments. For example, a locomotive engineer can make two days pay if he operates an electric train and a diesel train during the same shift. Another reason for all that overtime throughout the MTA might be that work rules require bringing in different employees for minor tasks: station agents cannot be asked to clean subway stations floors, for example, while cleaning crews cannot change light bulbs. A modicum of efficiency could bring operating costs more in line with revenues and reduce, if not eliminate, the need for fare increases. In 2015, the MTA spent $9.85 billion on salaries and benefits, while it collected $8.4 billion in total revenue. Closing that gap should be possible. Despite the deteriorating performance of New Yorks train and bus systems, MTA employees are very highly paid compared to workers who do the same job in other expensive cities. According to a New York Times analysis from last year, Subway workers, including managers and administrative personnel, now make an average of about $155,000 annually in salary, overtime and benefits. That is far more than in any other American transit system; the average in cities like Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington is less than $100,000 in total compensation annually. The Times noted, Members of the Transport Workers Union got a total of 19 percent in pay raises between 2009 and 2016, compared with 12 percent for the citys teachers union over the same period. And the paper pointed out that each TWU contract has cost more than anticipated. Workers should earn a living wage, but do train conductors need to earn two or three times as much as New York City public school teachers? And should the poorest riders be hit hardest with higher prices they cannot afford to subsidize all these six-figure salaries? Perhaps the MTA unions are less concerned with rising fares because, thanks to their contract negotiations, their members now ride the subway, Metro-North and LIRR for free. Absent political leadership, is it any wonder why the MTA doesnt conform to its mandate that its operations be self-sustaining? Gov. Andrew Cuomo is right that the MTA doesnt deserve more riders money until it reforms costs, so why didnt he demand cost-saving reforms when they had the chance to do so? Air Chief Marshal B S Dhanoa on Wednesday called Rafale a game changer and said the Supreme Court has given a fine judgment on petitions against the deal with France on the military aircraft. He also cautioned against politicisation of defence purchases, suggesting that this had earlier led to the delay in the army acquiring the Bofors gun. I am not going to comment on the judgment but the Supreme Court has given a very fine judgment. It has also said that this plane is badly needed, he told reporters. Dhanoa said as far as the technology is concerned, there is no argument against the Rafale aircraft. His remarks on the sidelines of a joint military exercise with Russia come days after the Supreme Court dismissed petitions seeking a probe into the Rafale deal. WATCH: Air chief says IAF needs Rafale jets The Congress has alleged irregularities in the deal for 36 aircraft and claimed that the Narendra Modi government is buying them at a price much higher than the one that was being negotiated by the previous government. Dhanoa said the Indian Air Force has made sure that the aircraft has the best systems onboard. He said the planned procurement had already taken a long time and during this period Indias neighbours have upgraded their own defence arsenal. We need it, given our strategic scenario, he said. He appeared to back the government's assertion that revealing details on the price of the fully-loaded aircraft would lead to rivals getting to know its capabilities. He said the taxpayers had the right to know where their money goes, but the Comptroller and Auditor General of India was there to ensure that it was being well spent. Referring to the shortfall in the number of aircraft, Dhanoa said the IAF is trying to optimise its resources. He watched Aviaindra 2018, a joint exercise by the Indian Air Force and the Russian Federation Aerospace Force going on at the IAF station in Jodhpur from December 10 to 21. This edition of Aviaindra is meant to expose the two forces to a counter-terrorism scenario. When, in 2019, it comes time for state Assembly Democrats to schedule debates, cast votes and push for their priorities, Buffalo Assemblywoman Crystal Peoples-Stokes will be the person they will need to find. Her Dec. 17 appointment by Speaker Carl Heastie as majority leader places day-to-day operations of the Assembly under her control time when Democrats are planning to do big things in Albany. As a member of the leadership, the legislator will have an outsized voice in her ninth term in shaping legislation and shepherding it through the Assembly while also offering some geographic balance for a Democratic caucus that is overwhelmingly centered downstate. That is in keeping with the tradition that the majority leader of the Assembly comes from upstate. She succeeds newly-elected Rep. Joe Morelle, a Rochester Democrat who served as majority leader for three terms. However, Peoples-Stokes differs from previous majority leaders in that she is not only African-American, but will be the first woman to serve as majority leader. She will have a leading role in making that happen in the Assembly by keeping Democrats in line. Here are the most important things to know about her biography, record and past political alliances: She is a leading proponent of marijuana legalization Peoples-Stokes has pushed for the legalization of recreational cannabis since 2013 when she first introduced the Marihuana Regulation and Taxation Act. That bill along with a companion bill in the state Senate would do more than just make it legal to buy, sell and smoke cannabis. It would also recognize how communities of color have been affected by prohibition. I think that the records should be sealed, upon legalization, of people who have previously been convicted and I also think there should be a significant amount of resources invested in those communities that have been disenfranchised as a result of mass incarceration, she said in an interview earlier this year. Gov. Andrew Cuomo has now come out in favor of legalization, but he has yet to specify what sort of regulatory scheme he prefers. With Peoples-Stokes now as majority leader, she will have a bigger platform to promote her plan. Cuomo might owe her some favors Peoples-Stokes has been a reliable Cuomo ally, in the public eye and behind the scenes. She was the co-chair of his 2014 reelection campaign along with Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr., giving his campaign some needed political cover with minorities. In the past year, she played a vocal role in pushing for a woman to replace disgraced former state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who resigned after accusations of sexual misconduct. Peoples-Stokes endorsed Attorney General-elect Letitia James at a time when she was becoming closer to Cuomo politically. Thats not the only way that Peoples-Stokes helped Cuomo recently. An effort to reform the state procurements process also came to a halt in the Assembly this past year after she refused to move two bills forward in a committee that she chairs. Though she has said the bills needed more work, some observers say she was really just trying to please Cuomo, who garnered some political benefit from the impasse. He was able to blame the Legislature for inaction on procurement reform while retaining control over state contracts despite calls for reform following the Buffalo Billion bid-rigging scandal. It remains to be seen how closely Peoples-Stokes will work with Cuomo moving forward, but it appears that she has earned some good will. Western New Yorks Assembly champion Now that Democrats are in control of both houses of the state Legislature, Peoples-Stokes importance has skyrocketed in regional politics. She will be the leading state legislator from the area. This will be a big change for a region that usually elects Republicans. It previously had five state senators in the majority, but now its only senator in the majority is Democrat Tim Kennedy. Peoples-Stokes has solid regional credentials. She grew up in a bipartisan household in Buffalo, attended local public schools and got both her bachelors and masters degrees from Buffalo State College. She worked briefly as a teacher and then at the Buffalo Urban League and Citizen Action before turning towards politics. As an assemblywoman she has sponsored successful bills that added nurses to public schools, cleaned up a toxic waste site and poured millions into local community development projects. While concerns still remain about whether the region will get its due under one-party rule in Albany, the selection of Peoples-Stokes as majority leader is assuaging some critics. To have someone like Crystal, who really gets Buffalo and all of Western New York and upstate, Dottie Gallagher, president of the Buffalo Niagara Partnership, told The Buffalo News, Is probably the best leverage were going to have to have any upstate influence over Albany. That may be slightly overstating it, but I dont think so. She has been a majority leader before Peoples-Stokes served from 1993 until 2002 in the Erie County Legislature, serving her final four years as majority leader. Hot issues of that time included how to handle a sluggish economy and county budgets affected by state changes to Medicaid. There was also a changing of the guard going on in New York Democratic circles at the time. A former secretary of the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, Andrew Cuomo, was seeking support in Erie County to run for governor. Peoples-Stokes, meanwhile, was making moves against incumbent Assemblyman Arthur Eve. ''I give him all due respect for his length of service and the sacrifices he has made,'' she told The New York Times during a heated 2000 Democratic primary. ''But that doesn't automatically make him the elected official to stay in power for life. I'm also running because the social agenda of the 60's is old and should be over with. We have to focus on economic issues now.'' She fell short of unseating Eve that year, but she would win her first term in the Assembly two years later. NEW HAVEN Some Connecticut drivers for two of the nations largest ride-sharing services Uber and Lyft are planning to not work Friday to protest a reduction in what they get paid by at least one of the companies. Organizers of the protest are hoping to get as many as 500 drivers to take off Friday as part of their protest, said Carlos Gomez, one of the organizers of the work stoppage. Speaking mostly through an interpreter, Gomez said he and others are trying to get drivers from Stamford, New Haven and Hartford areas to join in the protest, as well as anyone working for the ride-sharing services who regularly serves Bradley International Airport. About a dozen of the drivers met in a Long Wharf parking lot to discuss their plight. Until recently, Uber drivers had been getting paid 85 cents per mile for transporting passengers, said Casimiro Morales, a driver who lives in New Haven. The company has now lowered its rate to 65 cents per mile. The customer is still paying the same rate, but were not getting the same amount, Morales said. When they (Uber) first started here, we were getting paid a lot more. Officials from Uber and Lyft were not immediately available for comment Tuesday. Both ride-sharing services began operating in Connecticut about four years ago. It was not clear what the drivers issues were with Lyft. Gomez said the drivers are hoping to unionize and have reached out to Connecticut-based leaders of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Because get paid on a per-mile basis, they make more money when they take passengers longer distances, including to Boston and New York City. But when taking passengers to out-of-state locations, drivers are not allowed to try to pick up Uber users who may be headed to Connecticut. I have to come back home with an empty car, so Im not getting paid for my time and mileage, said Rosane Olin, a driver from New Haven. Its not fair. Olin said the ride-sharing service services also dont have fair reimbursement rates for drivers when food spills or someone vomits in their vehicles. Somebody spilled some sauce in my car and I spent $100 getting it cleaned, she said. They only gave $40 back for that. What happens to the other $60? Ride-sharing service drivers basically work when they want, and for how long they want, and all work is taken on a voluntary basis. Guillermo Estrella of Branford said he worked 14 hours on one day recently and only made $100, $30 of which went toward gasoline. We have to make a living, Estrella said. Its insane what were getting paid. luther.turmelle@hearstmediact.com 3 1 of 3 Crescendo / Contributed photos Show More Show Less 2 of 3 Crescendo / Show More Show Less 3 of 3 LAKEVILLE For its annual Holiday Concert, Crescendo presents Sublime Love A Celebration of the Life of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, on Dec. 28, at 6 p.m. at Saint James Place in Great Barrington, Mass., and on Dec. 29, at 3 p.m., at Trinity Church in Lakeville. Known as The Tenth Muse and Mexican Phoenix, the nun Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz challenged norms as a woman who was, in her time, and is still today, considered one of the finest poets of the 17th century Spanish New World Golden Age. A self-taught scholar, philosopher and composer, she celebrated women as the seat of reason and knowledge rather than passion. Condemned for her waywardness by church prelates, her scientific and philosophic writings, poems and music have been acclaimed through the centuries. Crescendos concerts will depict her life through music, artwork and poetry readings. 3 1 of 3 Contributed photo Show More Show Less 2 of 3 Don Perdue / Contributed photo Show More Show Less 3 of 3 TORRINGTON - Nearly 1,500 Torrington school children were treated to Nutmeg Ballets kid-friendly version of Tchaikovskys The Nutcracker on Dec. 14 at the Warner Theatre, thanks to a Northwest Connecticut Community Foundation grant provided by the Carlton D. Fyler and Jenny R. Fyler Fund. Torrington residents Carlton D. Fyler, a chauffeur, and Jenny R. Fyler, an educator, established the endowed fund in 1988 through their estate planning. Donna Labbe, project grant writer for the school system, said, The Fund continues their lifelong interest in supporting the moral, artistic, intellectual, and physical development of children. The Fund is managed through the Northwest Connecticut Community Foundation, a repository for charitable giving established in 1969. File photo / Hearst Connecticut Media LAKEVILLE The Skip Barber Racing School and Lime Rock Park have teamed up to hold the new Skip Barber Winter Driving Clinic, starting Dec. 29 and on select Saturdays through the winter at the park. This new school is filled with information and experiences that will take the mystery and worry out of winter driving, school officials said in a release. LITCHFIELD A cocktail party at the Benjamin Tallmadge House, celebrating his 265th birthday and hosted by Teno West, will be held Feb. 23, 5-7 p.m. Guests can see the restored home while learning the story of his life from a Tallmadge history expert. Rachel Smith, from the Office of the Connecticut State Historian and Benjamin Tallmadge expert, will share the story of George Washington's most trusted spy master. He organized the Culper Spy Ring, which was instrumental in winning the Revolutionary War. In 1782, Tallmadge settled in Litchfield and dedicated his life to serving the town. He became a prominent business man, was a U.S. Representative from Connecticut, and was heavily involved with the settlement of the Western Reserve. Tickets are $75 per person and space is limited. To order, call 860-567-4501. Proceeds benefit the Litchfield Historical Society's education mission. Goshen Players to hold auditions GOSHEN Goshen Players, Inc, are holding open auditions for its Spring 2019 musical, [title of show] with book by Hunter Bell and music and lyrics by Jeff Bowen. Auditions will be held Jan.13-14, 7-9 p.m, with callbacks (if needed) Jan. 17, 7-9 p.m. All auditions will be held at the Goshen Old Town Hall, 2 North St., at the Rotary Junction of Rts 4 & 63, Goshen. Those who would like to audition but cannot make the scheduled times should contact director Colleen Renzullo to make alternate arrangements, at colleenrenzullo@gmail.com. Production dates are March 29, 30, April 5, 6, 12 and 13 at 8 p.m., and March 31 and April 7 at 3 p.m. The Goshen Players is seeking 2 men and 2 women ages 25-40; all roles are available. The production will be directed by Colleen Renzullo, with co-direction by Jane Coughlin and musical direction by Scott Stanchfield. Rehearsals will be scheduled based on the availability of the actors and the directors. Attendance will be required at rehearsals March 24, 25, 26 and 27, with absolutely no exceptions. About [title of show]: Jeff and Hunter, two struggling writers, hear about a new musical theatre festival. However, the deadline for submissions is a mere three weeks away. With nothing to lose, the pair decides to try to create something new with the help of their friends Susan and Heidi with Larry on the keyboards. With the cast in place, Jeff and Hunter begin a conversation about what to write. Eventually, Jeff suggests they write about what to write about. They make a pact to write up until the festivals deadline and dream about the show changing their lives. [title of show] taken from the space on the festivals application form which asks for the [title of show] follows Hunter and Jeff and their friends on their journey through the gauntlet of creative self-expression. In the span of 90 minutes they write and perform their show at the festival and learn lessons about themselves as people, friends and artists. [title of show] is, above all, a love letter to the musical theater: a uniquely American art form--and to the joy of collaboration. The musical received a Tony Award nomination for Best Book of a Musical in 2009. For information, contact the director Colleen Renzullo at colleenrenzullo@gmail.com. Habitat for Humanity dance benefit set CORNWALL The Arthur Murray Dance Center of Danbury will host a Dancing for Homes Teach-a-Thon to benefit Housatonic Habitat for Humanity on Friday, Jan. 11, 10 a.m.-10 p.m., that will not only improve ones dancing skills but help build strong neighborhoods. Gift certificates are now on sale for the January event at $85 for a 30-minute lesson and is good for singles as well as couples. People can feel good about buying a lesson for themselves or as holiday gifts while supporting the creation of housing for local working families. We are very pleased to offer this special program to support the incredible work that Habitat for Humanity does in our area, providing housing to families in need and helping provide financial stability and revitalizing the community at the same time, said Andy Cabell, owner of Arthur Murray of Danbury. Fran Normann, Executive Director of Housatonic Habitat for Humanity, said, We are grateful to Andy and his talented team of instructors at Arthur Murray for hosting this teach-a-thon to support our mission of making a meaningful difference in the lives of qualified working families and strengthening neighborhoods and communities. Gift certificates for use anytime of the year, for group or personal classes, are also available at https://arthurmurrayofdanbury.com/shop/ Arthur Murray of Danbury is at 345 Main Street. For more information, www.arthurmurrayofdanbury.com or 203-792-0176. New Years party includes cookie contest WASHINGTON An old-fashioned New Year's Tea Party and Cookie Contest will be held in the Wykeham Room of the Gunn Memorial Library, 11 a.m.-1 p.m. on SAturday, Jan. 5. The snow date is Jan. 8, 4-6 p.m. Visitors will gather under the historic 1914 gilded ceiling mural by H. Siddons Mowbray in a festively decorated Wykeham Room. The museum will have Washington photo albums out for guests to browse. Bring a tea cup and the library will provide tea and sandwiches. Registration is requested; email your name(s) to info@gunnhistoricalmuseum.org or call 860-868-7586. One of the highlights of the Tea is the return of the Cookie Contest. The contest will give bakers an opportunity to have their culinary creations judged by professionals. Cookies should be homemade and baked by the contestant. Cookies will be judged in the following categories: most creative, best tasting, most festive, most original, baked by children under 16, and best overall. Young bakers (ages 10-16) are encouraged to enter the cookie contest and compete in any of the categories. While the judges are picking a winner, youngsters can enjoy a hot cocoa bar, rounds of cookie bingo, a blind Oreo taste test, and a cookie decorating station. Bakers are encouraged to bring a friend to join in the fun. Those interested in participating should pre-register by calling the library or signing up at the front desk. Entrants should submit 3 dozen cookies to the library at least half an hour before the event. Plates are to be submitted with an entry form which can be picked up at the library or accessed from our website. The Gunn Memorial Library is located at 5 Wykeham Road/Route 47 on the Green, in Washington. TORRINGTON Parking on crowded Franklin Street is so difficult, the owner of a nearby business said he sometimes gets blocked in and cant exit onto the road. But the parking situation may improve with the citys proposed purchase of the lot that is located near the corner of Franklin and Center streets . The Board of Finance is expected this week to approve the purchase of the nearly half-acre lot for $80,000. A public lot where (they plan) it, is great for the town, said Jon Pignatello, co-owner of Mila Rose Salon, at 23 Franklin St. Pignatello did have reservations about whether some of his clientele would choose to park in the lot, which is about a half block away, when its dark by 5 p.m. in the winter. Pignatello said his clients usually look for a spot on the street thats close to the salon. He said they will circle the block two times to find a space. The new lot would more likely help customers of Sawyers Bar and Grill at 79 Center St., Pignatello said. The business is located on the corner of Franklin and Center streets . The owners couldnt be reached for comment. The purchase of the lot from owner Nick Gazetos of General Real Estate Holdings LLC, in Danbury, also hinges on a final recommendation by the Planning and Zoning Commission. Its next meeting is Jan. 9. Property records show the parcel was purchased in 1993 and sold in 2008 for $400,000. The Danbury real estate firm took ownership of the lot in 2017 through a foreclosure proceeding, records show. The citys proposed purchase of the parcel fits in well with the Franklin Street Public Space project, officals said. More for you Torrington residents discuss street renewal project City Zoning and Wetlands Enforcement Officer Rista Malanca said if the acquisition of the land is approved, the property would be part of the whole plan, of the public space project. To spread the word about the project, Malanca and a number of city officials, held an outdoor event in June on Franklin Street. Neighbors, residents and business owners attended to share ideas and learn about the plan. The project includes construction of a pedestrian-friendly public space on Franklin Street. The June event provided an example with outdoor tables, pop-up exhibits and flower planters placed near the parking lot that the city is expected to buy. Valarie Ferro, a consulting planner for the city, said at the event that community engagement is a part of a multi-pronged approach for the project. We call it tactical urbanism, she said. We want to transform spaces. The Franklin Street public space plan is part of a larger project called the Brownfield Area-Wide Revitalization Planning Grant. The city received a $200,000 state grant in 2015, and began mapping the targeted areas, taking inventory of buildings and reviewing the flow of downtown traffic. Two key goals of the planning grant are to create a sense of place and enhance livability, and to spur tax base expansion and job creation. A.O. Centrul de Drept al Femeilor anunta concurs de oferte privind selectarea unui prestator de producere a unui film animat privind accesul la servicii si suportul oferit victimelor violentei in familie We must be unequivocal: It is a dangerous for public school teachers to carry weapons in the classroom. The federal government should not be encouraging this tactic. But it is one of the recommendations in the comprehensive report issued Tuesday by the Federal Commission on School Safety, headed by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. The commission was formed in response to the Feb. 14 Parkland, Florida high school shootings that killed 17 students and staff. During nine months of hearings, field visits and meetings, the commission developed recommendations for three areas related to school security: prevent; protect and mitigate; and respond and recover. Though the report is worded carefully to say the report has suggestions, not mandates, and school security is not a one-size-fits-all, the fact arming teachers is raised as a solution lends legitimacy to the bad idea. Among the recommendations for states and local communities is to determine, based on the unique circumstances of each school (such as anticipated law enforcement response times), whether or not it is appropriate for specialized staff and non specialized staff to be armed for the sake of efficiency and immediately responding to violence. (And was italicized in the report.) It is difficult for trained police officers to respond to active shooters with any degree of surety and accuracy, at times bystanders have been injured or the officers. Teachers would be no more effective in a crisis. Expecting them to engage with a gun-wielding intruder does a disservice to their profession, which is to educate students. Classrooms would be no safer if teachers had guns and students likely would feel anxious instead of secure. The 156-page report (not including appendixes) requires careful study. Not all recommendations are offensive, but two jump out. The commission recommends rethinking school discipline guidance from the Obama administration to track disciplinary actions by race, a policy designed to ensure fairness. It should remain in place. Importantly, we also have grave concerns about the federal government controlling what information about a mass school shooting goes to the media. The White House and all federal departments and agencies should adopt the principles of the No Notoriety campaign. This helps keep the focus on the facts and the victims and does not mention the names or publish photos of perpetrators once they are apprehended, the commission recommends. Neither the White House nor any government entity should be withholding information from the public. This is basic to a free press protected by the First Amendment. The who is an important part of any story. The media need not glorify the shooter, but holds a public responsibility to report the full facts. Some recommendations are worth considering, such as improving students access to school-based mental health and counseling, and ensuring teachers can lock all classrooms from the inside. School shootings, traced in the report back to 1979, must be prevented. The approach needs to be multipronged, but arming teachers is not part of the answer. MERIDEN Its time to renovate and expand Gov. Dannel P. Malloys legacy on homelessness and affordable housing, with an emphasis on more collaboration. Thats what a group of about 20 housing advocates, developers and housing authority leaders advised the team guiding Ned Lamonts transition into the governors office on Tuesday. Overcoming the natural friction of interagency collaboration can be achieved with a continued, purpose-driven transformation of the states bureaucratic culture, said Vin Tufo, CEO of Charter Oak Communities in Stamford. They recommended that Lamont use a member of his executive-office staff to lead a joint effort among the Department of Housing, the Department of Tranportation and other state agencies on projects. They pushed increasing reliance on public private partnerships. And the committee suggested the state promote shared services among local housing authorities. They pointed to Meriden Commons, where the meeting was held, as an example of what they were looking for: a mixed-income, mixed-use apartment complex in downtown Meriden. Within walking distance of the train station, it was constructed by a partnership between two private companies and the Meriden Housing Authority, with an influx of some state and federal dollars. Clay Fowler, chairman and CEO of Spinnaker Real Estate Partners, which is now working on projects in New Haven and Bridgeport, called for an attitude adjustment. I know I go to people at times (who think) Im the enemy, he said. Im not the enemy. Im the solution. Im the private-enterprise developer who will do what is necessary to get projects done, given the tools and given cooperation. emunson@hearstmediact.com; Twitter: @emiliemunson Around 1,200 hectares (2,965 acres) of protected forest from a commune in Cambodias Ratanakkiri province has been illegally logged for timber and sold to businessmen from neighboring Vietnam through collusion with Cambodian authorities, an environmental watchdog group said Wednesday. An investigator with the Cambodian nongovernmental organization Mother Nature, who spoke to RFAs Khmer Service on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal, said his group spent a month inspecting forest area in Sesan commune, in Ratanakkiris Ou Ya Dav district, and located around 20 trucks he said were used by Vietnamese loggers to haul illegally logged timber across the border. About 1,200 hectares of [illegally obtained] forest timber was sold to Vietnam through systemic collusion, he said, adding that the contraband was bring processed in Vietnams Gia Lai province. We went into Gia Lai province and found many saw mills. We have evidence that Vietnam is collecting wood from Cambodia illegally. The investigator showed RFA several minutes of exclusive footage from a documentary Mother Nature is preparing on the illegal timber trade, which purports to show thousands of cubic meters (1 cubic meter = 35 cubic feet) collected from protected areas in Ratanakkiri. He said the 1,200 hectares of illegally logged timber had been sold to Vietnamese businessmen and that logging in the protected areas is continuing actively and overtly. RFA was unable to reach Ministry of Environment spokesman Neth Pheaktra for comment on Mother Natures allegations on Wednesday, while the chief of Sesan commune refused to speak with reporters when asked about illegal logging in the area. Last month, Cambodias Minister of Interior Sar Kheng called for a reevaluation of existing laws intended to protect the countrys natural resources, citing widespread illegal logging and other smuggling, but activists have said the problem is linked to corruption, not ineffective legislation. On Wednesday, Alejandro Gonzalez-Davidson, the founder of Mother Nature who now lives outside Cambodia, urged the countrys Prime Minister Hun Sen to investigate the illegal logging his group had uncovered, which he said had continued for many years. [The smugglers] couldnt do without the collusion of local authorities, he said. Gonzalez-Davidson said that based on his findings he would issue a call for the European Union to refrain from importing Vietnamese wood, because much of it is illegally obtained from Cambodia, which he believes is facing a forestry crisis. Without proper prevention, the forest wont last another five years, he said. In October, Cambodian civil society groups sent a joint petition to the EU calling on the bloc not to sign an agreement with Vietnam governing the international trade in timber until Vietnam ends its support of illegal logging in Cambodia. Activists document illegally harvested timber in Ratanakkiri province's Sesan commune, in an undated photo. Credit: Mother Nature Rampant smuggling Cambodia has long endured the rampant smuggling of logs and timberoften with the complicity of local authoritiesto neighbors such as China and Vietnam, where the wood is used to make high-end furniture. In May last year, a report by the U.K.-based Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) said that around 300,000 cubic meters (10,594,400 cubic feet) of timberincluding endangered rosewoodhad been smuggled out of protected areas in Cambodia to Vietnam with the help of local authorities through some U.S. $13 million paid in bribes between November 2016 and March 2017. According to the NASA Earth Observatory website, between 2001 and 2014 Cambodia lost a total of 1.44 million hectares (5,560 square miles) of forestone of the worlds fastest rates of deforestation. Though other countries have lost more acres in recent years, Cambodia stands out for how rapidly its forests are being cleared, the agency said in a report last year. Reported by RFAs Khmer Service. Translated by Samean Yun. Written in English by Joshua Lipes. Cambodias Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld a lower court ruling to fine the acting president of the countrys now-dissolved opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) Sam Rainsy for defamation in connection with a lawsuit brought against him by Prime Minister Hun Sen. In December last year, the Phnom Penh Municipal Court ordered Sam Rainsywho has been living in self-imposed exile since 2015 to avoid convictions on charges widely seen as politically motivatedto pay 4 billion riel (U.S. $1 million) for a January 2017 Facebook post which alleged that Hun Sen had offered pro-government social media activist Thy Sovantha U.S. $1 million to attack the CNRP. Sam Rainsy, who was found guilty in absentia, was also ordered to pay a fine of 10 million riel (U.S. $2,500) to the state. On Wednesday, presiding judge Kim Sathavy dismissed Sam Rainsys appeal and said the Phnom Penh Municipal Courts ruling, and an Appeal Court verdict earlier this year that upheld the ruling, were correct. CNRP Vice President Mu Sochua, who is also living in self-imposed exile, called the Supreme Courts decision unjust and unacceptable. Cambodian court decisions at all levels are illegitimate, she said. They regularly fail to provide justice to members of the public and particularly to the leaders of the opposition. It is very unfortunate for Cambodia. The acting CNRP presidents accusation stemmed from leaked social media messages between Hun Sen and Thy Sovantha in November 2016, in which they discussed bringing down the opposition party, which was dissolved by the Supreme Court in November 2017 for allegedly working to topple the government with the backing of Washington. In the leaked messages, Hun Sen calls Thy Sovantha grandchild and offers her U.S. $1 million. Thy Sovantha has said her page was hacked. The Prime Minister has demanded that Sam Rainsy pay him compensation as ordered by the court and has promised to seize the acting CNRP chiefs home in Phnom Penh if he does not. On Wednesday, Hun Sens lawyer, Ky Tech, told the Khmer Times he would seek an order from the Phnom Penh Municipal Court to seize Sam Rainsys house, which was the now-dissolved CNRPs headquarters, for compensation. Reported by Tin Zakariya for RFAs Khmer Service. Translated by Samean Yun. Written in English by Joshua Lipes. US President Donald Trump (R) shakes hands with North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un (L) at the start of their historic US-North Korea summit, at the Capella Hotel on Sentosa island in Singapore, June 12, 2018. The North Korean government is holding special propaganda lecture sessions that praise Kim Jong Un, but the North Korean public is extremely cynical about the latest effort to venerate their leader. A source from Pyongyang told RFAs Korean Service on Saturday that the lectures, with titles like Praise the great man, Kim Jong Un are being held every day, with lecture materials provided by the Central Committee. They have propagandized the North Korea-U.S. and Inter-Korean summits, saying they were possible only through Kim Jong Uns diplomatic prowess and keen decision making, the source said. The lectures also proclaimed that these were critical meetings that will affect the future of the entire Asia-Pacific region, the source added. The lecture materials also say that most foreign media outlets have delivered special coverage praising [Kim, calling him a] great man with grand historical achievements that will [define] the 21st century, the source said. Each city government began holding the lectures as soon as the materials were distributed, but people here in Pyongyang are not buying it, calling it unfounded propaganda, the source added. News from outside North Korea spreads faster in Pyongyang than out in the provinces because there are many trade workers and others who work overseas, the source explained. This is why people here are well aware that we are under international sanctions. The propaganda depicts Kim Jong Un as everyones hero but they just laugh, said the source. Another source, from North Hamgyong province said on Monday, Educational materials that espouse the greatness of our respected leader have been provided to everyone in the province. In the two-page leaflet, the Central Committee clearly praises Kim Jong Uns way of globalization as a nuclear power, the source said. It praises Kim as a man of action, quotes the Philippine president as saying Kim is everyones hero, and claims that the Supreme Leader is becoming a global sensation, said the source. [The Committee] says that the world thinks Kims strategy of globalization is going smoothly. They even say hes a step ahead of [U.S. President] Trump and [South Korean President] Moon Jae-In! the source said. But people attending the conference had only cold and bleak responses, the source added. Expert Weighs In Bruce Klingner, a Senior Research Fellow with the Washington-based Heritage Foundation said Wednesday that the propaganda predictably praises Kim Jong-un and places great emphasis on claiming that foreign nations mimic this adulation. Pyongyangs depiction that the positive diplomatic developments of 2018 were the result of Kims diplomatic power and decision is also typical and, in a way, mimics President Trumps own claims for being solely responsible for the world stepping back from the brink of war, Klingner added. More interesting is that the propaganda seems to be falling on deaf ears amongst the North Korean populace and internal sources were comfortable enough to describe cynicism of the regimes statements, said Klingner. There are numerous indicators that more outside information is getting into North Korea and presumably this is impacting North Koreans views against Kim and his regime, he said. Reported for RFAs Korean Service by Jieun Kim and Hee Jung Yang. Translated by Leejin Jun. Written in English by Eugene Whong. Vietnamese civil society groups and individuals based both in Vietnam and abroad called on their government in a petition on Wednesday to implement political reforms, guaranteeing basic rights to assembly and freedom of the press and freeing prisoners jailed for peacefully expressing their views. The petition, titled An Eight-Point Demand for 2019, was sent to national leaders and to members of Vietnams National Assembly, and mirrors an eight-point petition presented to the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference by former Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh. Included in the petitions demands are calls for the release of political prisoners, reform of Vietnams legal system, guarantees for a free press and an end to censorship, the right to freedom of assembly and association, freedom of travel, and de-politicization of the countrys schools. It also calls for respect for rights already guaranteed by Vietnams constitution and the establishing of free and transparent elections. Implementation of these eight points will be the only way for Vietnam to achieve the goal of a prosperous people, a strong nation, and a democratic, fair, and civilized society, petitioners declare in the document, copies of which were also sent to the United Nations and to foreign diplomatic offices in Vietnam. The petition was signed by groups and individuals in Vietnam, Poland, the Czech Republic, and France. Challenge to legitimacy Speaking on Wednesday to RFAs Vietnamese Service, Professor Hoang Dungan instructor at a teacher training college in Vietnams Ho Chi Minh City, also called Saigonsaid it would be naive to think that todays petition will force rapid change in the one-party communist state. Todays petition stands out as an historical marker presenting Vietnams government and ruling party with a dilemma, though, he said. Their legitimacy is being challenged, he said. Their founding leader, Ho Chi Minh, made many of these demands a hundred years ago. But now that we are making demands similar to the earlier ones, they may find they cant agree. Vietnams one-party communist government currently holds more than 200 political prisoners, including rights advocates and bloggers deemed threats to national security, Nguyen Kim Binh of the California-based Vietnam Human Rights Network said in a speech on Dec. 9. It also controls all media, censors the internet, and restricts basic freedoms of expression. Reported by RFAs Vietnamese Service. Translated by Viet Ha. Written in English by Richard Finney. The Economist has named Armenia as its country of the year, saying the South Caucasus nation has a "chance of democracy and renewal" after street protests led to a peaceful change of government. Nikol Pashinian, a former anticorruption journalist and opposition lawmaker, "was swept into power, legally and properly, on a wave of revulsion against corruption and incompetence," the London-based weekly news magazine said on December 18. He was elected to the prime minister's post in May after spearheading weeks of mass protests that forced his predecessor, long-entrenched leader Serzh Sarkisian, to resign. Pashinians My Step alliance won more than 70 percent of the vote in December 9 snap parliamentary elections. "A Putinesque potentate was ejected, and no one was killed. Russia was given no excuse to interfere," The Economist said, adding that "an ancient and often misruled nation in a turbulent region has a chance of democracy and renewal." However, the weekly cautioned that Armenias "nasty territorial dispute" with Azerbaijan over the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh "has not been resolved and could ignite again." The Economist has picked a "country of the year" since 2013. The title goes to a country that "has improved the most in the past 12 months." MINSK -- A court in Minsk has reversed a decision to expel the press secretary of an opposition party in Belarus. The Maskva District Court ruled on December 19 that the migration officials' decision not to expel Russian citizen Anna Krasulina was final and cannot be appealed. Last month, Belarusian migration officials ordered Krasulina, a spokeswoman for the United Civil Party (AHP), to leave the country by November 30, in order to "secure public order." According to Krasulina, the reasons migration officials cited for her expulsion included a single unpaid ride on public transport -- though she said she had already paid a fine for that -- and participation in two unsanctioned demonstrations in 2016 and 2017. Krasulina, who has been the AHP press secretary since 2011, has stayed in Belarus and appealed the decision. The AHP's chairman Anatol Lyabedzka, who testified at the December 19 hearing, called the migration officials' ruling to expel Krasulina "a provocation by the authorities" and "political schizophrenia." Krasulina says she no longer has ties with Russia. She moved to Belarus in 2002 and her husband and children are Belarusian citizens. BRUSSELS -- The European Union has asked Western Balkans and EU Eastern Partnership countries that have visa-free regimes with the bloc's Schengen zone to take further measures to address irregular migration, as well as urging Georgia to do more to prevent unfounded asylum applications and calling on Ukraine to step up its fight against corruption. The exhortations came in the European Commission's annual report, published on December 19, on the functioning of the visa-free regime with Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Georgia, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Serbia, and Ukraine. While the commission stated that all eight continued to fulfill the visa-liberalization benchmarks, meaning that steps to suspend visa-free travel will not be taken, the report contained criticism of the Eastern Partnership countries in particular. Moldova "should take immediate steps to counter money laundering and Ukraine to fight corruption" while "the increasing number of unfounded asylum applications in the EU from Moldovan and Georgian citizens is a source of concern," it said. Ukraine must "take immediate action to ensure the continuous fulfillment of the anticorruption benchmark, as well as to address irregular migration challenges," the report said. It also said that irregular migration from Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina to the EU remains high. The visa waiver applies to all EU countries except for Britain and Ireland, and also includes non-EU states Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland. It enables citizens of the states with visa liberalization to enter these countries without a visa for 90 days in any 180-day period if they hold a biometric passport. The countries of the Western Balkans received visa liberalization in 2009-10, followed by Moldova in 2014, and Georgia and Ukraine in 2017. Citizens of Kosovo are still without a visa-free regime, despite a positive report from the European Commission earlier this year. Some EU member states are reluctant to grant any benefits to Pristina before the European Parliament elections in May 2019, EU officials and diplomats have told RFE/RL on condition of anonymity. Opposition lawmakers in Hungary have vowed legal and parliamentary moves to try and thwart Prime Minister Viktor Orban as protests over a new labor law waned. Around 200 people rallied outside the parliament building in Budapest on December 18, a fraction of the thousands that confronted police a night earlier outside the state broadcaster's headquarters. The main focus of the protests has been a newly passed law that drastically changes state labor rules. Opposition groups have called it a "slave law." A day earlier, one opposition lawmaker was hospitalized after a clash with security guards, and three others said they had been roughed up. "We're planning civil disobedience actions, road blocks with the trade unions, and further demonstrations," Timea Szabo, a lawmaker for a center-left party, told foreign reporters. Orban's right-wing government won a third consecutive term in April's national election. He has said the new labor rules are designed to ease an acute labor shortage and to enable workers to earn more. The demonstrations that started after lawmakers approved the new labor laws have been boisterous, but largely peaceful. Orban's allies have denounced the protests as the work of liberal groups financed by Hungarian-American financier George Soros, something Soross civil society organization has rejected. Soros has been repeatedly targeted by Orbans government. Based on reporting by AFP and AP A key Taliban commander has been killed in an operation conducted by Afghan government forces in the country's east, the Defense Ministry says. A ministry spokesman said Bilal Zadran was killed in the eastern province of Paktika late on December 18. Zadran was the head of the Taliban's special forces, also known as the Red Unit, for the provinces of Ghazni, Paktia, Paktika, Khost, and Logar, according to the spokesman, Ghafoor Ahmad Jawed. Jawed said Zadran had played a major role in destabilizing the five eastern provinces. The targeting of top Taliban commanders in Afghanistan is part of a strategy to apply heavier battlefield pressure on the extremist group and to eliminate militant field commanders seen as major obstacles to possible peace talks. Abdul Manan, the shadow Taliban governor of the province of Helmand and the militants' top military commander in southern Afghanistan, was killed in a joint operation by U.S. and Afghan special forces on December 2. Over the following days, the Taliban shadow governors of Ghor and Paktika Provinces were also killed in separate operations. Based on reporting by Khaama and 1TV The brother of Irans former reformist President Mohammad Khatami is being prosecuted for claiming in a recent interview that ballot-stuffing occurred during the disputed 2009 presidential election, a senior judiciary official has said. Tehran prosecutor Abbas Jafari-Dolatabadi said on December 18 that Mohammad Reza Khatami, the former leader of a banned reformist political party, has not provided any proof to back his claim. He said an indictment is about to be issued. In an October interview, Khatami had described the 2009 vote as unhealthy while suggesting that 8 million fraudulent votes had been added to the ballot boxes at the Interior Ministrys election headquarters to seal the victory of former hard-line President Mahmud Ahmadinejad. Khatami had said that informed sources from the conservative camp had told him about the alleged fraud. Khatami also said he still believes that an election coup took place in the 2009 election that handed Ahmadinejad a second term. Millions of Iranians protested Ahmadinejads reelection, which was followed by a state crackdown during which hundreds of reformists, journalists, and activists were arrested. Ahmadinejads two main rivals, former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Musavi along with his wife, university professor Zahra Rahnavard, and reformist cleric Mehdi Karrubi, who challenged the establishment over the vote, have been under house arrest since 2011. Last year, a court in Iran sentenced seven reformist politicians, including Mohammad Reza Khatami, to one-year prison terms and barred them from political and media activity for two years after convicting them of anti-regime propaganda, their lawyer had said. With reporting by RFE/RLs Radio Farda and Mehr BISHKEK -- Kyrgyz President Sooronbai Jeenbekov says he is not "fighting" with his predecessor, Almazbek Atambaev. Speaking to journalists at his first annual meeting with the media as president, Jeenbekov said on December 19 that his major goal is "nothing but to work day and night for our people and our country." Answering a question about an ongoing standoff between him and Atambaev, Jeenbekov said, "I am not fighting anyone." "I do not consider anyone a rival, as I am the president and I can only have rivals during the election," Jeenbekov said. Jeenbekov and Atambaev, former close allies, have been at odds recently. Limited to a single six-year term by the constitution, Atambaev tapped his prime minister, Jeenbekov, as his favored successor in the October 2017 presidential election. But the two in recent months have accused each other of a lack of professionalism. Earlier this year, some politicians and lawmakers called for an investigation into some of Atambaev's decisions while in office. Several of his close allies have been arrested on suspicion of corruption. On December 13, the Kyrgyz parliament approved in a first reading a bill that would eliminate immunity for ex-presidents, potentially opening the path for Atambaev's prosecution. Answering a question about the bill, Jeenbekov said that it is not targeted against Atambaev. "The law granting immunity to ex-presidents contradicts the constitution. The bill will affect me as well. I will also leave office in future. Everyone, including presidents, must remember about accountability for their deeds. No one can be above the law," Jeenbekov said. In recent weeks, some members of the Atambaev-led Social Democratic Party (SDPK), of which Jeenbekov is also a member, started a campaign dubbed "SDPK Without Atambaev." Jeenbekov told journalists that he had nothing to do with that. "I was one of the founders of the party and it is painful for me to see what is going on there. One must look for the cause of the current situation within the party, not around Jeenbekov but in another place," Jeenbekov said. He did not elaborate. Jeenbekov said he will quit politics after his single presidential term ends in 2023. Several Lithuanians have been arrested and charged with spying for Russia, the Baltic state's chief prosecutor said, drawing an angry reaction from Moscow. One of the suspects is Algirdas Paleckis, a politician who is known for pro-Russian views and has questioned Lithuania's membership of NATO and the European Union, Prosecutor-General Evaldas Pasilis said on December 19. Pasilis did not specify how many people were arrested. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called the arrests "another Russophobic move" and a "reversal of democratic rights and freedoms" in Lithuania. She did not explain the grounds for those statements. Since 2014, when Russia increased concerns among neighbors about its intentions by seizing Crimea and backing separatists in a war in eastern Ukraine, Lithuanian courts have convicted five people of spying for Russia or Belarus. One person charged with spying for Russia is currently on trial, while investigations against six other suspected Russian spies are under way. In July 2017, a court in Vilnius sentenced a Russian security official, Nikolai Filipchenko, to 10 years in prison after finding him guilty of attempting to recruit local officials to bug the home of the country's president. Based on reporting by Delfi, Interfax, and TASS Out of the 53 journalists killed on the job so far this year, 34 were targeted in reprisal for their work, a media watchdog said on December 19. In its annual report, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said the danger of reporters being targeted for their journalism grew this year, despite a decline in the risks for war and conflict. The toll representing those killed between January 1 and December 14 makes 2018 the deadliest year for reporters "singled out for murder" over the past three years, CPJ said. "The number of journalists targeted for murder in reprisal for their reporting nearly doubled in 2018 from a year earlier, driving up the overall count of journalists killed on the job," the report said. The total is up from 47 killed in 2017, of which 18 were "pinpointed for murder," CPJ said. The data echoed similar concerns in a report this week from the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders, which put the number of reporters killed at 80 based on a different methodology that includes bloggers, citizen journalists, and media workers. Both reports highlighted the increase in reprisals against journalists, highlighted by what the CPJ called the "brazen murder" of exiled Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Arabian Consulate in Istanbul. Afghanistan, where militants have stepped up attacks on journalists, was the deadliest country, followed by Syria and India, the report said. In Afghanistan, a suicide bomber targeted a group of reporters, killing nine in a single attack in April, it said. The CPJ also mentioned the killing in February of Slovakian investigative journalist Jan Kuciak, who was shot to death alongside his fiancee -- the second murder of an EU journalist covering corruption in less than six months, after the assassination of Maltese reporter Caruana Galizia in 2017. It lamented "a lack of international leadership on journalists' rights and safety" that may be increasing the dangers for the news media, illustrated by the Khashoggi killing. "The White House, traditionally a strong defender of global press freedom, has equivocated on the blame for Khashoggi's murder... Essentially, [U.S. President Donald] Trump signaled that countries that do enough business with the United States are free to murder journalists without consequence," the CPJ report said. It added that, ironically, "the most vocal head of state in Khashoggi's case has been Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose government has effectively shut down the independent media and is jailing more journalists than any other around the world for the third consecutive year." CPJ said it was investigating the killing of another 23 journalists in 2018 but so far not confirmed that the deaths were related to their work. With reporting by AFP A Moscow bus driver whose vehicle plowed onto the stairway of an underground passage, killing four pedestrians, has been sentenced to four years in prison. In a December 19 ruling, the Dorogomilovo District Court convicted Viktor Tikhonov, 58, of violating traffic rules in connection with the December 2017 accident. Tikhonov was at the wheel of a city bus that careered off a main avenue in western Moscow and plunged into a crowded underground walkway. A 12-year-old girl was among the four people killed, and several other pedestrians were injured. Tikhonov's lawyer, Ravil Saberov, said that his client was innocent, contending that the accident was caused by a mechanical fault. Judge Galina Talanina ruled that Tikhonov will not have a right to drive vehicles for three years after serving his prison term. Based on reporting by Interfax and TASS A 16-year-old boy has pleaded guilty to killing a 7-year-old girl in a case Austrian authorities say has raised fears that the victim's relatives might seek revenge, according to the dpa news agency. The families of the defendant and the victim are originally from Russia's Chechnya region, the Germany news agency said. The boy pleaded guilty on December 19, telling a court in Vienna that a voice in his head ordered him to stab the girl -- a neighbor -- with a knife, dpa reported. Police were on high alert over fears that relatives of the girl might seek revenge, dpa reported. The names of those involved were not being disclosed to the public. The girl's father has been missing since June, when he fled from a prison in Italy, where he had been convicted of smuggling migrants. Police said the crime occurred in May of this year, when the teenager had invited the girl to eat ice cream in his apartment while his parents were away. One psychiatrist told the jury that the crime was caused by untreated schizophrenia, while another said the boy was able to distinguish right from wrong despite a severe personality disorder. If convicted, he faces up to 15 years in prison as well as open-ended admission to a mental facility. Based on reporting by dpa The United States has started bringing home troops from Syria as it moves to a new phase in the campaign against the Islamic State (IS) extremist group, the White House says. The militant's "territorial caliphate" had been defeated, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said in a statement on December 19, amid media reports saying that the United States was preparing to withdraw all its troops from Syria. "These victories over [the IS group] in Syria do not signal the end of the Global Coalition or its campaign. We have started returning United States troops home as we transition to the next phase of this campaign," Sanders said. Earlier, President Donald Trump tweeted the IS group had been defeated in Syria and that was his "only reason for being there." There are currently around 2,000 American troops in Syria, many of them special operations forces working with an alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias battling the IS group. Most U.S. soldiers are based in northeastern Syria, where they had been helping to rid the area of IS fighters, but pockets of militants still remain. CNN quoted a defense official as saying on December 19 that the planning was for a "full" and "rapid" pullout. And CBS said it was told that the White House ordered the Pentagon to "begin planning for an immediate withdrawal." The coalition has "liberated" the IS-held territory, but the campaign against the group "is not over," Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White said. "For force protection and operational security reasons we will not provide further details. We will continue working with our partners and allies to defeat ISIS wherever it operates," White said in a statement, using an acronym for Islamic State. The Russian Foreign Ministry said the decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria creates prospects for a political settlement of the conflict there, according to the TASS news agency. Russia has repeatedly asserted that U.S. forces have no right to be in Syria because Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's government has not approved their presence. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said a decision by Trump to withdraw troops from Syria at this time would be "a mistake" and a big win for the IS group, Assad, and its allies -- Russia and Iran. Both Moscow and Tehran have given Assad crucial support throughout the Syrian conflict, which began with a government crackdown on protesters in March 2011 and has left more than 400,000 people dead, displaced millions, and devastated many historical sites across the country. In 2014, IS fighters seized large swaths of Syrian and Iraqi territory in a lightning offensive and proclaimed a so-called Islamic "caliphate." IS militants have lost virtually all the territory they once controlled in Iraq, but still carry out sporadic attacks. With reporting by Reuters, AFP, and the BBC The URL has been copied to your clipboard The code has been copied to your clipboard. In order to reduce waste, St. Petersburg freegans not only find food to eat for themselves at garbage dumps. They also arrange charity dinners made from discarded food. A Russian businessman who was found dead in southern England six years ago likely died of natural causes, a British inquest has found. Aleksandr Perepilichny collapsed while out jogging near his home south of London in November 2012, and there have been suspicions that he might have been murdered by poisoning. "I am satisfied on the evidence I have heard I can properly and safely conclude that it was more likely than not that he died of natural causes, namely sudden arrhythmic death syndrome," Nicholas Hilliard, who led the inquest into Perepilichnys death, said on December 19. "There really is no direct evidence that he was unlawfully killed," Hilliard added. Perepilichny, a Russian tycoon and Kremlin critic who sought refuge in Britain in 2009, had been helping a Swiss investigation into a massive Russian money-laundering scheme. He also provided evidence against Russian officials linked to the 2009 death of anticorruption lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in a Moscow jail. While police said at the time that there was nothing to suggest foul play, suspicions were fueled when an expert told a hearing that traces of a rare, deadly poison from the gelsemium plant had been found in his stomach. His stomach contents were flushed away during the first post-mortem investigation, making further testing difficult, but scientists concluded the unidentified compound had no link to the gelsemium plant species and was found in cheese and meat. Perepilichny had eaten soup containing sorrel for lunch the day he died, a fact that stoked speculation it had been replaced with gelsemium. But his wife Tatyana also ate the soup, and told the inquest she did not believe her husband was murdered. Hilliard said that he could not totally rule out the use of poison, but that none of the evidence pointed to it. Hilliard said that London police contacted him this month to confirm they were not conducting an investigation into Perepilichny's death and that there was no evidence of "any hostile state actor" being involved. He also said that he had considered the case in the context of the killing of Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko who was poisoned in London in 2006 with radioactive polonium-210. A 2016 inquiry concluded Litvinenko's murder was carried out by two Russians and was probably ordered by President Vladimir Putin. In September, Hilliard ruled that material about possible links between Perepilichny and British spy agencies would remain secret. He said the material was "marginal" to resolving the question of how the businessman died and that releasing documents from British spy agencies MI5 and MI6 relating to Perepilichny could harm national security. The British government earlier said police had completed a review of the Perepilichny case and 13 other deaths linked to Russia following the poisoning of Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the English city of Salisbury in March. It concluded there was no need to reopen any investigation. Britain blames the Russian government for the poisoning of the Skripals with the nerve agent Novichok. Moscow denies any involvement. With reporting by Reuters Russian legislation that will soften the punishment in some hate-crime cases has advanced amid concerns over prison terms handed down to people for "liking" or reposting memes on the Internet. The bill, approved by the State Duma in its third and final reading on December 19, would remove the possibility of a prison sentence for first-time offenders found to have incited ethnic, religious, and other forms of hatred and discord in public, including in the media or on the Internet. The legislation is the result of a rare climbdown by President Vladimir Putin, who proposed it amid a wave of potentially image-damaging concern over the arrests and imprisonment of Russians for publicly questioning religious dogmas or posting, reporting, or "liking" memes or comments that authorities say incited hatred. Following approval in the Duma, or lower parliament house, the bill is expected to be passed by the upper house -- which is also dominated by the Kremlin-controlled United Russia party -- and signed by Putin. Under the legislation, first-time offenders would face administrative instead of criminal prosecution, meaning they would be fined, do community service, or be jailed for up to 15 days. A person who is deemed to have committed a second, similar offense within a year would then face criminal prosecution and the possibility of two to five years in prison. But all offenders, including those found guilty for the first time, would still face up to six years in prison if their incitement to hatred involves violence, the threat of violence, the use of their official position, or is committed by a group, the bill says. Putin proposed the change in early October, following a string of cases in which Russians were charged for publishing material -- sometimes satirical or seen by many as harmless -- on social networks such as VKontakte and Facebook. Activists described those cases as part of an ongoing government crackdown on online speech and accused the Russian authorities of using the laws to stifle dissent. Reaction to the new legislation has been mixed, with Kremlin critics warning that the government will still retain many tools for suppressing dissent and limiting free speech. On October 2, Putin signed a law toughening punishment for those who refuse to remove information deemed illegal by a court from the Internet. The head of Russia's government media regulator has threatened fines against Facebook and Twitter if they don't comply with laws requiring user information be stored locally. Aleksandr Zharov's threat, made on December 18, was the latest effort by Russian authorities to exert greater control over global Internet and social-media companies. Zharov said his agency, Roskomnadzor, had sent legal warnings to the two companies, and they had 30 days to comply with laws requiring "localization" of data. The fines the two companies face are small, however: 5,000 rubles, or around $100. He didn't rule out larger fines or other measures to get the companies to comply, TASS reported. The warnings were the latest effort by Russian authorities to more tightly control and monitor content and users of social-media companies like Twitter and Facebook, but also Google and Apple. Russia's largest social-media company, VK, is widely believed to be in compliance. Russian authorities say the law, passed in 2014, is aimed at protecting Russians' personal data. Critics, however, see it as an attempt to tighten control over social-media networks. Roskomnadzor blocked the professional-networking website LinkedIn in November 2016, saying it failed to comply with the law. Based on reporting by RFE/RL's Russian Service and TASS If it's a white Christmas in the Siberian town of Myski, suspicious residents might want to look around for some empty cans of paint. The mining town's mayor has apologized after it was discovered that the snow on a children's sledding hill was painted white -- apparently to cover coal dust. Mayor Dmitry Ivanov said the chief of the company responsible for the towns development has been reprimanded for painting the hill white, according to a statement on the town's official website on December 19. "I apologize to residents whose New Year's mood has been spoiled by this incident," Ivanov said in the statement. In Russia, the big New Year's holiday is followed by Orthodox Christmas on January 7. The apology and reprimand came after videos posted online showed parents who brought their children to the sledding hill saying it was covered with white paint. In a tradition said to date back to Potemkin villages of the tsarist era, local officials eager to make a good impression sometimes have features like fences and building facades freshly painted ahead of visits by leaders. WASHINGTON -- The United States has imposed new sanctions on more than a dozen current and former Russian military intelligence agents, including two tied to the poisoning of a former Russian spy in England earlier this year and one linked to Kremlin-connected oligarch Oleg Deripaska. The Treasury Department also said on December 19 that it would lift sanctions on three companies tied to Deripaska, including the giant metals producer Rusal, and its parent company, EN+, after Deripaska cut his stakes in them. A billionaire with ties to President Vladimir Putin's inner circle, Deripaska was blacklisted earlier this year by Washington as part of a wider group of business tycoons that the United States said was involved in spreading "malign activities" around the world. But those sanctions sent shudders through global aluminum markets, because of Rusal's prominence, prompting U.S. authorities to revisit the actions to prevent supply disruptions. The Treasury announcement said it will lift the restrictions on Rusal, En+, and a third company in 30 days. Sanctions targeting Deripaska himself will remain in place. The Treasury also identified 15 members of Russia's military intelligence agency, known as the GRU, and said they were targeted "in response to Russia's continued disregard for international norms," according to the statement. Most of those named had been previously listed in other U.S. blacklists or U.S. criminal indictments. "The United States will continue to work with international allies and partners to take collective action to deter and defend against sustained malign activity by Russia, its proxies, and intelligence agencies," Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said. Four were indicted in October for past attempts to hack the computers of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, in The Hague, and the World Anti-Doping Agency, in Canada. The chemical weapons agency had been involved in the investigation into the Skripal poisoning, while the doping agency assisted investigators looking at Russias state-sponsored athlete doping program during the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. Another seven had been indicted by U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller in July on charges related to reported interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Two were identified as Aleksandr Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, whom British authorities have blamed for the March poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in the English town of Salisbury. Two other British citizens were exposed to the nerve agent in June, apparently by accident; one of them, Dawn Sturgess, died. London was joined by Washington and other European allies in expelling dozens of Russian diplomats in the wake of the incident. Moscow has denied any involvement. The U.S. measures also targeted an ex-military intelligence officer named Victor Boyarkin, who it said reported directly to Deripaska and allegedly worked with Deripaska to fund a Montenegrin political party ahead of the 2016 elections there. The political party was not named, and the Treasury statement gave no further details. Montenegrin officials have accused Russia of trying to interfere in the campaign leading up to the October 2016 parliamentary elections, a vote that occurred as the countrys leadership was negotiating to join NATO. Prosecutors later said Russia was behind an attempted coup that aimed to occupy parliament, assassinate then-Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic, and install a pro-Russian leadership to halt Montenegro's bid to become a NATO member. Moscow rejects the accusations. The December 19 Treasury move also added sanctions against several companies, and one individual, that have been linked to interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, including something called Project Lakhta, which U.S. authorities say was used to oversee the interference campaign. The White House has extended financial and travel restrictions on government-linked people from Uzbekistan, Russia, Ukraine, and elsewhere, under a U.S. law aimed at human rights abusers and corrupt officials worldwide. The order, dated December 19, prolongs the sanctions that were levied last year against the eldest daughter of the late Uzbek President Islam Karimov; the son of Russian Prosecutor-General Yury Chaika; a Ukrainian riot police commander; and others. The sanctions announced last year were the first to be imposed under the Global Magnitsky Act, a 2016 law that was modeled on another law passed in 2012 that specifically targeted Russians. It was named for Russian whistle-blower Sergei Magnitsky, who died in prison in 2009 after being accused of involvement in a massive tax-fraud scheme that he first discovered. Russia condemned both sanctions announcements. Gulnara Karimova, the eldest daughter of the late Uzbek president, was among the most prominent people on the list. For years, Karimova was widely seen as the heir to her father until reporters and European prosecutors uncovered a wide-reaching bribery and extortion scheme involving major international telecom companies. Last year, she was reportedly charged by the Uzbek Prosecutor-Generals Office with directly abetting the criminal activities of an organized crime group whose assets were worth over $1.3 billion. The bribery scheme has led to billions in criminal fines being paid by telecom companies in the United States and Europe. Artyom Chaika, the son of Russias prosecutor-general, is the most prominent Russian to be targeted. He has long been dogged by accusations of influence peddling stemming from his fathers prominence. When the first Magnitsky Act was passed in 2012, it infuriated Moscow, and Russian President Vladimir Putin responded a few months later by signing a law banning all adoption of Russian children by American parents. In 2016, as efforts to create a global version of the Magnitsky Act were building, a secretive lobbying campaign was started in Washington that sought to undermine the narrative behind Magnitskys discovery and death. That effort was funded in part by a businessman with connections to Chaika, and involved lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who met with President Donald Trumps eldest son in June 2016, as Trumps presidential election campaign was gaining momentum. The U.S. special peace envoy for Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, says he had "productive" meetings in the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) this week as part of efforts to encourage negotiations between the Taliban and Kabul to end the 17-year war in the South-Asian country. There were no breakthroughs during the three-day U.S.-brokered talks in Abu Dhabi that ended on December 19, but the discussions were seen as an important step to launch formal peace negotiations with the militant group. "Had productive meetings in the U.A.E. with Afghan and international partners to promote intra-Afghan dialogue towards ending the conflict in Afghanistan," tweeted Khalilzad. Khalilzad met Pakistan's army chief during a brief visit to Islamabad on December 19 before flying to Kabul. A statement from the U.S. Embassy in Kabul said Khalilzad would update Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah "on his engagements with regional partners and other interested parties to reach a negotiated settlement to the conflict in Afghanistan." The U.A.E. struck a positive tone, with the state-run WAM news agency saying that what it described as "U.S.-Taliban reconciliation talks" produced "tangible results that are positive for all parties concerned." WAM added that a new round of talks would be held in Abu Dhabi without providing further details. U.S. officials have not disclosed what was discussed during the talks in Abu Dhabi, which were attended by officials from Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., and Pakistan, three countries with significant influence over the Taliban. But a Taliban statement said the discussions focused on the withdrawal of foreign troops, a core demand of the militant group, as well as the release of Taliban prisoners. Washington insists that any peace settlement must be agreed between the Afghan government and the Taliban, but the militants have so far refused to talk directly with Kabul, insisting on first brokering an agreement with the United States. While Washington did not confirm direct meetings between Khalilzad and the Taliban, Khalilzad has previously held at least two rounds of talks with Taliban officials in recent months. Khalilzad has said he would like to see a "road map" agreement reached before the Afghan presidential election scheduled for next April. The decision to change the venue of the talks from Qatar to the U.A.E. was seen as an effort to involve Saudi Arabia, which is hostile to Doha, more closely in the process and to exert influence on its ally, Pakistan. Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., and Pakistan were the only three countries to recognize the Taliban government during its five-year rule, which ended following the 2001 U.S.-led invasion. The Taliban controls or contests nearly half of Afghanistan, where it is waging a deadly insurgency against the Western-backed Kabul government and government security forces. With reporting by Reuters, AP, and AFP The State Department says the United States has proposed the sale of a $3.5 billion Patriot missile system to Turkey. Congress has been notified of the proposed sale, aimed at boosting Ankara's air- and missile-defense capabilities. The State Department says the deal "will contribute to the foreign policy and national security of the United States by improving the security of a key NATO ally on the front lines of the fight against terrorism." The proposal comes after NATO member Turkey announced it was buying S-400 surface-to-air missile systems from Russia. Washington has complained that the Russian system is not compatible with weapons used by other NATO allies. The State Department says, "The proposed sale will enhance Turkey's interoperability with the United States and NATO." Asked about the American move, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on December 19 that Russia's contract to supply Ankara with S-400 missile systems is being fulfilled regardless of Turkey's decision about the Patriot missile system. With reporting by Reuters, AP, and Interfax The United States said it was imposing sanctions on a former senior Serbian police official who served as a commander of a camp where three Albanian-American brothers were killed during the 1999 Kosovo war. The State Department said on December 18 that Goran Radosavljevic was credibly implicated in the 1999 murder of the Bytyqi brothers and that Radosavljevics wife and daughter would also be hit with sanctions under whats called a Section 7031(c) provision. Thats a section of U.S. sanctions law that enables the secretary of state to bar foreign officials and their immediate families from entry to the United States if there is "credible information that [the officials] have been involved in significant corruption or gross violations of human rights." Speaking to RFE/RL by telephone from Serbia, Radosavljevic said he was neither interested in nor affected by the U.S. decision, and denied any involvement in the murder of the Bytyqi brothers. "I gave statements to the [Serbian] investigators, talked about that matter 1,000 times, so it is nonsense to say anything more about that case," he said. The 1999 slaying of Illy, Mehmet, and Agron Bytyqi has been a sticking point in U.S.-Serbian ties as Belgrade pushes for greater integration with the West. The Bytyqi brothers were all in their 20s when they traveled to Kosovo from New York in 1999 to join Kosovar rebels fighting the forces of then-Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. They were arrested after crossing an administrative border into Serbia on June 23, 1999, two weeks after hostilities in the Kosovo war had ended. They were later shot dead execution-style while in the custody of a special Serbian police unit. Less than a year after Milosevics ouster in October 2000, the brothers remains were discovered in a mass grave on the site of a special police unit base in the village of Petrovo Selo in eastern Serbia. In 2012, a Serbian war crime court acquitted two former policemen of involvement in their deaths, citing insufficient evidence to convict. The case of the Bytyqi brothers had also attracted scrutiny from Congress, where lawmakers in the past had introduced legislation aimed at pressuring Belgrade to bring Radosavljevic to justice. Nacogdoches, TX (75965) Today Foggy this morning, then partly cloudy this afternoon. High 77F. Winds SW at 5 to 10 mph.. Tonight Considerable clouds this evening. Some decrease in clouds late. Low 57F. Winds light and variable. Cancun International greets 24th million passenger, anticipating 25th million by year end Cancun, Q.R. The Cancun International Airport has received its 24th million passenger, a figure that was anticipated with the airport saying they are hoping for their 25th million by the end of the year. For the arrival of the 24th million passenger, Governor Carlos Joaquin was at the airport to greet French tourist Francois Rene Paul Pinotti and his wife who traveled from the east of France to spend two weeks in the state. We traveled to Quintana Roo to see destinations such as Playa del Carmen, Tulum and Coba. We are sure that this will not be the last time we come because we have a lot of fun. People are extraordinary, they always smile, said Francois Rene. During the reception of passenger 24 million, Carlos Joaquin said that this number of passengers represents an advance for the tourism industry. We are receiving a million passengers more than last year, and we hope that by the end of the year, we will reach the figure of 25 million passengers at the Cancun airport, said Governor Carlos Joaquin. Carlos Trueba Coll, general manager of the Cancun International Airport said that according to ASUR statistics, December is the most dynamic month of the year. The airport receives an average of two million passengers, which is why they anticipate that before the end of 2018, the terminal will reach 25 million passengers as initially estimated by the Ministry of Tourism. Last year, the governor of Quintana Roo received the 23rd million passenger, Maria Isabel Velazquez Sanchez, while in 2016, he received passenger 21 million, Robert Evans. AN INNOCENT youth worker who has endured a three-year battle after a UKIP tweet wrongly branded him a child groomer has won 40,000 in damages following a landmark case. At the High Court this morning (Wednesday), Zair Monir was awarded libel damages against the former chairman of Bristol UKIP, Steve Wood. Mr Monir had sued over a Tweet posted on the Bristol UKIP Twitter account three days before the General Election on May 4, 2015. The Tweet consisted of a photo of Rotherham MP Sarah Champion, together with two men, one of whom was Zahir Monir. The text of the Tweet read: Sarah champion labour candidate for Rotherham together with two suspended child grooming taxi drivers DO NOT VOTE LABOUR. High Court judge, Mr Justice Nicklin said: It needs to be stated clearly Mr Monir is completely innocent. He has been seriously libeled. He has been forced to fight a libel claim all the way through to trial with every single conceivable point being taken against him. Following the tweet, the community worker was subjected to abuse outside his childs school, his house was egged and vicious comments were posted about him online. Mr Monir (39) has been awarded 40,000 damages and his costs after successfully suing Wood, claiming that, although he did not personally write the tweet, he was legally responsible. Wood (57), who has since left his post, denied any responsibility for the publication, blaming his former campaign manager, John Langley. The tweet was only deleted weeks later when police phoned the chairman. Mr Monirs lawyers said in a statement: The Tweet had actually been written and posted by self-styled 'maverick' John Langley, who at the time was vice-chairman of Bristol UKIP." Lawyers said Wood had set up the Bristol UKIP Twitter account and Mr Langley was appointed as the campaign manager for the branch under instruction not to publish anything racist or too contentious. "Mr Monir brought his libel action against Mr Wood because there would have been no prospect of obtaining vindication or recovering damages from Mr Langley," the statement added. This was, therefore, an unusual and important case because it had to examine who is legally responsible for publication of social media posts. After a seven-day trial, Mr Justice Nicklin found that Mr Langley was quite clearly acting as the agent of Wood when he was posting material to the Bristol UKIP Twitter account including the May 4 Tweet. He also found that Wood who was UKIPs parliamentary candidate for the Bristol South constituency in the May 2015 General Election had been put on notice of the Tweet in a phone call from Mr Monir on May 8, 2015, and so in any event he was liable for the continued publication of the Tweet thereafter. The Judge said the tweet had transformed the life of Mr Monir and his family for the worse and blasted Woods refusal to apologise and withdraw the allegation. He said if the libel had been published in a national newspaper an award of 250,000 or more could easily have been justified. After judgment had been handed down, Mr Monirs solicitor Jeremy Clarke-Williams, of Penningtons Manches, said: The publication of the vile and baseless Tweet for cynical political reasons has caused huge damage and distress to Zahir Monir and his family. This judgment provides him with the complete vindication he deserves. He has had to endure more than three years of suffering and stress to achieve this victory and the failure of the defendant to apologise for, or retract, the allegation is, as the judge noted, on simply a human levela difficult stance to understand. From a legal point of view, the judgment is extremely important and every organisation will need to read it carefully to appreciate the potential liability of those who set up social media accounts but then delegate others to send out publications on their behalf and for their benefit. "If you are responsible for letting a maverick genie out of the bottle then you are likely to face the legal consequences and in the era of fake news that presents a real risk. A MILITARY man from Rotherham completed a 100-mile walk in just four days to commemorate fallen soldiers. Louis Blackwell (pictured), of South Anston, was among 100 current and ex-military personnel who took on The Long Walk Home from the Menin Gate in Ypres to the Cenotaph in London in November. They raised funds for the Haig Housing Trust, which provides homes at affordable rents to the ex-service community and specially-designed housing for wounded and disabled veterans. Louis, who serves in the Royal Navy as a meteorologist and raised 1,386.67 himself, said: I am proud to have been selected to be one of the walkers for the Long Walk Home. The was recognises the great sacrifice given by so many. The walk involved completing 25 miles on four consecutive days. You can still make a donation at https://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/LouisBlackwell. Aahana Kumra Mumbai, Dec 19 (PTI) Actor Aahana Kumra, who had accused Sajid Khan of inappropriate behaviour during a professional meeting, says people in the industry are now scared post the #MeToo movement. The actor says fear, which wasn't there earlier, has set in the industry and it is a good development. "Something good that has happened in the film industry because of these conversations (is) that people are scared while speaking to women. At least that fear has come and that fear is important. Respect has always been there but it's important to have that fear," Aahana told reporters. Sajid Khan Advertisement The actor was speaking at the launch of her ZEE5 webseries "Rangbaaz", Tuesday night. Aahana said the #MeToo movenent has been a "huge realisation" for both men and women and a time of serious introspection. "When big CEOs, content writers and casting agents are removed or get their names removed from films, which is happening, they get a huge setback. Then they also realise they have done something bad to someone. #MeToo movement "Life is so long that you don't realise you have hurt someone because you are living your life comfortably. You don't even realise that you have made people around you feel bad. #Metoo movement has been a huge realisation for both men and women," she added. The actor had herself come out and spoken about Sajid after the filmmaker was outed for indecent behaviour and sexual misconduct by two actors and a journalist. Aahana said the women who came out were brave and her going public with the ordeal has given her a much needed closure. Indian techie returns after 6 yrs in Pakistan jail Attari (Amritsar), Dec 19 (PTI) A software engineer from Mumbai, who had spent around six years in a Pakistan jail, was reunited with his family after he returned to India through the Attari-Wagah border on Tuesday evening. Hamid Ansari, 33, was earlier released from a jail in Peshawar on Tuesday for repatriation. He was arrested in 2012 for illegally entering Pakistan from Afghanistan, reportedly to meet a girl he had befriended online. The software engineer was subsequently sentenced to three years' imprisonment by a military court in 2015 for possessing a fake Pakistani identity card. The Mumbai resident's term ended on December 15, but he was not able to leave for India as his legal documents were not ready. It was an emotional moment for the Ansari family when his parents hugged their son soon after he entered the Indian territory through the Attari-Wagah land route. Advertisement Attari-Wagah border The 33-year-old, who was sporting a beard and wearing a cap, could be seen consoling his mother, Fauzia, and wiping her tears as she repeatedly hugged and kissed him. The bespectacled Hamid Ansari and his family members kissed the Indian soil after his return and thanked the Almighty for answering their prayers. Shortly before his arrival, Hamid Ansari's mother had told reporters that the prayers of the family and of all those who wished for his safe return had been answered. "I am immensely happy today. I don't have words to describe my feelings. " His father, Nihal Ansari, said, "It is a new dawn for us". Hamid Ansari was received by Indian officials at the Attari-Wagah route and crossed over into Indian territory after the conclusion of the beating-retreat ceremony. Immediately after his return, his medical checkup was conducted by doctors. He crossed over to India on the basis of emergency travel certificate issued by the Indian High Commission in Islamabad. Last Thursday, the Peshawar High Court had given the Pakistan government a month's deadline to complete his repatriation process. Lok Sabha passes Surrogate Bill New Delhi, Dec 19 (PTI) A bill that bars commercial surrogacy and allows the process only by close relatives for "altruistic" reasons was passed by the Lok Sabha Wednesday with Health Minister J P Nadda terming the proposed legislation historic. The surrogacy (regulation) bill was passed after an hour long debate amid noisy protests by Congress and AIADMK members over various issues. Health Minister J P Nadda Advertisement He said different sections of society, political parties, the Supreme Court and the Law Commission have spoken against commercial surrogacy and that the bill addresses these concerns. India had become a hub of commercial surrogacy and surrogate mothers also suffered from exploitation, he told the House. Though Members of different parties who spoke during the debate supported the bill, some including Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar of the Trinamool Congress and Supriya Sule (NCP) exhorted the government to expand its scope. It is a good bill but not modern enough, Sule said. Dastidar said same sex couples should also be allowed to have a child through surrogacy. She also called for stopping "fashion surrogacy", saying some celebrities go for it as they do not want their figures "destroyed". BJD's Bhartruhari Mahtab said surrogacy industry had been thriving due to regulatory gap. He asked the govenrment to define who close relatives can be. Supreme Court Advertisement Nadda said the aim of the bill was to stop commercial surrogacy but at the same time save families by allowing them to have children by using modern science. Only defined mother and family can avail of surrogacy and the same was not permitted for live-in partners or single parents, he said. The rules and regulations of the law will define close relatives, he added. The bill also has penal provision for misuse of surrogacy. Kartarpur Sahib Chandigarh, Dec 19 (PTI) The Kartarpur Corridor from Dera Baba Nanak in Punjab's Gurdaspur district up to the International Border will cost Rs 85-Rs 100 crore, officials said Wednesday. The corridor will facilitate easy passage to the Sikh pilgrims to the historic Gurdwara Darbar Sahib in Pakistan's Kartarpur. Gurdwara Darbar Sahib is located on the banks of the Ravi river in Pakistan, where Guru Nanak Dev, the founder of Sikhism, had spent 18 years of his life. Vijay Inder Singla Advertisement The corridor will be built by the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI). Punjab Public Works Department Minister Vijay Inder Singla said, "A sum of Rs 85 crore to 100 crore is estimated to be spent on constructing the Kartarpur Corridor". It will also involve cost of land acquisition for the four-lane highway from Dera Baba Nanak up to the International Border, he said.The Union Cabinet had on November 22 decided to develop and build the passage from Dera Baba Nanak in Gurdaspur district to the International Border. National Highways Authority of India Following this, the foundation stone for the Kartarpur Corridor was laid on November 26 at Dera Baba Nanak where Union minister Nitin Gadkari had said that his ministry would try to complete the construction work of the corridor expeditiously. Kartarpur is located in Shakargarh in Narowal district of Pakistan's Punjab. The gurdwara in Kartarpur is located about three to four km from the Indo-Pak border in Pakistan. Advertisement Nitin Gadkari The Pakistan government had also held the groundbreaking ceremony of the corridor on their side on November 28. The Punjab cabinet had recently passed a special resolution to set up a Dera Baba Nanak Development Authority for the development and beautification of the area in and around Dera Baba Nanak. A Kartarpur Gate has also been proposed to be set up on the Indian side of the International Border which would stand out as a monumental symbol to commemorate the 550th 'Prakash Purb' (birth anniversary) of Guru Nanak Dev. In recent years, public health officials have warned about a rising epidemic of loneliness, with rates of loneliness reportedly doubling over the past 50 years. In a new study, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine put a specific, concerning and surprising face to the issue. Publishing in the December 18 online issue of International Psychogeriatrics, a team led by Dilip Jeste, MD, Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Neurosciences and director of the UC San Diego Center for Healthy Aging, found that moderate to severe loneliness persisted across the adult lifespan, but was particularly acute during three age periods: late-20s, mid-50s and late-80s. Loneliness was also more prevalent than expected, according to the scientists. Three-fourths of study participants reported moderate to high levels of loneliness, using a well-established assessment scale. The figure represents a substantial increase from previously reported prevalence estimates in the U.S. general population, which have ranged from 17 to 57 percent. "This is noteworthy because the participants in this study were not considered to be at high risk for moderate to severe loneliness. They didn't have major physical disorders. Nor did they suffer from significant mental illnesses such as depression or schizophrenia, in which you might expect loneliness to be problematic," said Jeste. "Though there were clear demographic limitations to the group, these participants were, generally speaking, regular people." Specifically, the study was conducted in 340 San Diego County residents, between the ages of 27 and 101, who had participated in one of three earlier studies of aging and mental health. Persons with serious physical or psychological ailments, including diagnosed dementia, were excluded, as were persons living in nursing homes or requiring substantial living assistance. The researchers assessed participants using multiple measures, including the well-established, 20-point UCLA Loneliness Scale, Version 3; a four-item, self-reported measure of social isolation developed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the San Diego Wisdom Scale, created by Jeste and colleagues to assess an individual's level of wisdom, based on the conceptualization of wisdom as a trait with a neurobiological as well as psychosocial basis, and thus modifiable. Excluding evidence of mild loneliness, which Jeste said is common and expected to occasionally appear throughout adult life, the researchers found that loneliness severity and age "had a complex relationship," peaking at specific periods in both men and women. There were no sex differences in loneliness prevalence, severity, or age relationships. Concern about the individual and societal effects of loneliness have been much in the news, most notably related to its health implications. Former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murphy has said a prevailing pall of loneliness in the United States poses a greater, more intractable public health crisis than tobacco use or obesity. Earlier this year, the United Kingdom established a Ministry of Loneliness to address the psychosocial and health needs of lonely people. First author Ellen Lee, MD, a research fellow in geriatric mental health in the UC San Diego School of Medicine Department of Psychiatry, characterized the study's findings as both bad news and good news. On the negative side, she said, moderate to severe loneliness appears to be highly prevalent throughout adult life. "And loneliness seems to be associated with everything bad. It's linked to poor mental health, substance abuse, cognitive impairment, and worse physical health, including malnutrition, hypertension and disrupted sleep." On the plus side, Lee noted that the UC San Diego group found a strong inverse association between wisdom and loneliness. People who were deemed wiser were less lonely. "That may be due to the fact that behaviors which define wisdom, such as empathy, compassion, emotional regulation, self-reflection, effectively counter or prevent serious loneliness." Clearly, said Jeste, more research needs to be done. These are early days for the emerging sciences of wisdom and loneliness. This study, according to its authors, is the first known to assess loneliness using multiple measures with a well-characterized sample and broad age range and which examined both negative and positive psychological traits and states. "There are more gaps in knowledge than there are answers at the moment," said Jeste. "But these findings suggest we need to think about loneliness differently. It's not about social isolation. A person can be alone and not feel lonely, while a person can be in a crowd and feel alone. We need to find solutions and interventions that help connect people that help them to become wiser. A wiser society would be a happier, more connected, and less lonely society." Research completed at Johns Hopkins and the Greater Baltimore Medical Center has demonstrated that vaginal childbirth substantially increases the probability a woman will develop a pelvic floor disorder later in life. Pelvic floor disorders, including urinary incontinence and uterine prolapse, afflict millions of women in the United States. However, until now little was known about who will develop these conditions and how they progress over time. In this week's Journal of the American Medical Association, Johns Hopkins and Greater Baltimore Medical Center researchers report results of a 10-year study showing that some delivery modes, including spontaneous vaginal delivery, are associated with higher risk of some types of pelvic floor disorders. "We knew that these disorders are more common after childbirth, but now after following these women for 10 years, we have a good sense of how delivery mode impacts a woman's risk of developing a pelvic floor disorder," says Victoria Handa, M.D., M.H.S., professor of gynecology and obstetrics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and director of gynecology and obstetrics at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center. This study considered a woman's risk of developing one of four pelvic floor disorders: stress urinary incontinence (urine leakage during with activities that increase abdominal pressure), overactive bladder (frequent and urgent urination), anal incontinence (involuntary loss of solid stool, liquid stool or gas) and pelvic organ prolapse (when the uterus and vaginal walls fall downward into the vagina, protruding beyond the vaginal opening when bearing down). The research team enrolled 1,528 women within five to 10 years of their first birth. These women were followed annually for up to nine years. Of the women, 778 delivered all of their children via cesarean birth, 565 had at least one spontaneous vaginal delivery and 185 had at least one delivery involving forceps or vacuum-assistance, also called operative vaginal delivery. The median age at enrollment was 38.3 -- the youngest study participant at enrollment was 22.7 years old and the oldest participant at the end of the study was age 61.7. The team collected information from the women at the time of enrollment, including date of first birth, age at first birth, body mass index, whether they had developed any pelvic floor disorder already, birth delivery mode, and genital hiatus size -- the distance between the urethra and the posterior hymen. The team then collected information at follow-up visits -- the cesarean birth group made 4,039 visits, the spontaneous vaginal delivery group made 2,817 visits and the operative vaginal delivery group made 948 visits. Some women already had developed pelvic floor disorders at the time of study enrollment while others developed the conditions over the course of the study. In all, the researchers found that cesarean delivery substantially reduced the risk of pelvic floor disorders, most notably pelvic organ prolapse, while operative delivery increased the risk. And for pelvic organ prolapse, the magnitude of these differences grew over time. For example, by 15 years after a first delivery, prolapse of the uterus or vaginal wall beyond the vaginal opening was seen in 9 percent (7-12 percent) of women who had delivered by cesarean, 30 percent (25-35 percent) who had at least one vaginal delivery and 45 percent (37-53 percent) of those who had at least one operative delivery. The researchers also found that a large percentage of new cases of urinary and bowel incontinence developed in the first five years after delivery, while pelvic organ prolapse tended to develop many more years after childbirth. A third discovery was that the genital hiatus size is significantly associated with all pelvic floor disorders but most significantly with pelvic organ prolapse. This suggests that the genital hiatus size is a marker that might identify women at high risk of developing pelvic floor disorders with aging. "While this study was limited to one community hospital and might not accurately reflect populations nation- or world-wide, it is the first time we have been able to gather data over a significant period of time," says Handa. "These data help us understand which women might be at highest risk to develop these conditions. Ultimately this research will help us identify which women should be targeted for prevention strategies, and will hopefully improve our ability to deliver the right type of care to the right person." Anticancer vaccines have gained a new lease of life with techniques to personalise them to individual patients. Cutting edge developments in this re-energised field were revealed at the ESMO Immuno-Oncology Congress in Geneva, Switzerland. The original anticancer vaccines, launched in the late 1990s, were based on shared tumour antigens and failed to induce a potent immune response. After decades of disappointing results, a number of advances have sparked a renewed interest in the field. These include new technologies and prediction algorithms to personalise vaccines, and the introduction of checkpoint inhibitors for combination therapy. Dr Michal Bassani-Sternberg, Group Leader, Immunopeptidomics, Hi-TIDe Laboratory, Department of Oncology, University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research in Lausanne, said: "The 'Modern anticancer vaccines' session at the ESMO Immuno-Oncology Congress was timely since there is again a flurry of activity around anticancer vaccines. We can now customise vaccines for each patient based on the genomic information in their tumour, and the early results are promising." Personalisation has been made possible with high-throughput next generation sequencing. This technology identifies mutations that are unique to a patient's tumour and are not found elsewhere in the body, meaning that a vaccine mounts a cancer-specific immune response. Algorithms can predict which neoantigens should be targeted for vaccination. Bassani-Sternberg said: "We have a good way to fish out and propose targets for vaccination. The first trials were published last year and showed that the selected targets were immunogenic, meaning that vaccination induced immune responses or amplified existing immune responses against these neoantigens. In addition, the vaccines worked well with checkpoint inhibitors. We now need to see if vaccination against neoantigens leads to tumour regression in a larger cohort of patients." Neoantigens were explored in a dedicated session at the ESMO Immuno-Oncology Congress and were discussed in the session on modern anticancer vaccines, which also described the role of other vaccine targets. These include oncogenic proteins such as HER2, pathogens like the human papilloma virus (HPV), and prostate-specific antigens. These shared antigens are also being tested in combination with checkpoint inhibitors. Bassani-Sternberg said the combination of modern anticancer vaccines and checkpoint inhibitors appears to generate the most effective immune response. "Vaccines can induce new responses in patients with 'cold tumours' which lack immune cells, thus making the environment receptive to checkpoint inhibitors," she said. Numerous questions remain unanswered, such as when to vaccinate patients. Should this be immediately after surgery, when there are few tumour cells left, or beforehand? Should vaccines be administered against primary tumours and metastases? Will it be necessary to give new vaccines every few months as tumours evolve naturally and in response to treatment? How and when should vaccines be combined with other therapies? And while the choice of neoantigen seems crucial, decisions are also needed on the formulation (protein-based, RNA, cell-based), delivery vehicle (liposomes, virosomes, emulsions), route of administration (intranodal, intradermal), and adjuvants. But despite these questions, vaccination appears feasible. The technology to develop vaccines is available and getting better, the vaccines are safe and immunogenic, and there is openness from the regulators to testing vaccines in clinical trials. Bassani-Sternberg said: "We are counting on new technologies that have now matured. Next generation sequencing has made identification of vaccine targets more efficient, reliable, and cheaper. The algorithms to interpret this data are benchmarked and validated for predicting which targets are most likely to be immunogenic. Sequencing technologies are only going to get better and prediction tools will become even more accurate." "There is great hope for vaccines," she continued. "And they have the potential to benefit most patients because almost all tumours have targets that could be vaccinated." The California Supreme Court has denied one of Gov. Jerry Browns requests for a pardon, a rare move by the court, and with little explanation. The pardon was intended for Borey Ai, 37, released from prison in 2016 after serving 19 years for a murder he committed as teenager during a convenience store robbery. Ai, a Cambodian immigrant and legal U.S. resident, will be deported without the pardon unless a court intervenes. His destination is Cambodia, a country he has never seen. Ai was born in a refugee camp as his family was fleeing violence in the country. Court watchers are confused, given Ais extensive record of rehabilitation. The dissenting voice in the case was the Santa Clara County District Attorneys Office, who said Ai had been slow to acknowledge his guilt in the murder, and his victim was an Iranian immigrant whose family had also suffered in its native country. How these competing arguments landed with the justices when they rejected the pardon isnt clear. The case filings, including the breakdown of votes, have been kept sealed. Sign up for Bay Briefing Like what you're reading? Subscribe to The Chronicle's Bay Briefing newsletter and get the Bay Area's best journalism in your inbox every weekday. See More Collapse Top of the News A last visit: Its not a happy ending exactly, but it will be closure. A Yemeni mother who was barred from traveling to the United States to visit her dying 2-year-old son due to the Trump administrations travel ban has received a waiver to come to the States, her lawyer said Tuesday. Bottom line, a 13-year-old died: Sonoma County has agreed to pay $3 million to the family of Andy Lopez, a 13-year-old boy killed by a sheriffs deputy who said he mistook the boys toy AK-47 for a real gun. The county has not admitted liability or fault for the killing as part of the settlement. Hail Mary ruling: A lawsuit by Kristen Biel, a California Catholic school teacher who alleged she was fired after being diagnosed with breast cancer, will go forward after a federal appeals court ruled in her favor. At question was whether Biel was a religious employee, which would make her ineligible to sue the Catholic diocese. If the former principal named in the suit seems familiar, its because shes been accused along with another nun of embezzling $500,000 from the school and using the money for travel and casino gambling. Free vote: San Francisco voters will decide in November whether or not City College of San Franciscos Free City program which covers the cost of classes for city residents should be extended for 10 years. Better to have loved: Nikko, the beloved 35-year old Oakland Zoo gibbon who had recently been sent by zoo matchmakers to Jasmine, a fellow gibbon in Santa Barbara, has died of what veterinarians suspected was pancreatic cancer. Both Nikko and Jasmine had recently lost their mates. Going to a new home: As the number of immigrant children in U.S. custody approaches 15,000, the Trump administration has made several procedural changes that should clear the way for more than 2,000 children to be released to family members or other guardians over the next few days. Whats unclear is what will happen to the thousands of children living in a tent camp in Tornillo, Texas, which one U.S. senator called a prison camp in the desert after contract for the tent camp expires at the end of the year. An expensive ride: Tolls across the Golden Gate Bridge could go up to $9.80 by 2023, as the Golden Gate Highway and Transportation District is considering how to plug a $75 million budget hole, increase ferry and bus service and maintain the famous Art Deco span. Ready, set...: Sen. Kamala Harris traveled to Afghanistan over the weekend as part of a congressional delegation, alongside two GOP senators heightening speculation that Harris will announce a campaign for the presidency. The senator has said she would make a decision over the holidays. A state Senator walks into a bar...: And wants it to be open later. State Sen. Scott Wiener has reintroduced a bill to extend bar closing times in nine California cities to 4 a.m. A version of the bill was passed by the state Legislature but vetoed by Gov. Jerry Brown. 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. Jam packed with good flicks: How good of a year was 2018 for movies? The best of this century so far, film critic Mick Lasalle says. Vox Lux, Oakland-based Blindspotting and Crazy Rich Asians are among his picks for the Top Ten of the year. If youre looking for the best in non-big screen stories, John McMurtrie shares his Top Ten Fiction and Non-Fiction books of 2018. A story featured in Bay Briefing on Tuesday about the PG&Es statement that corrective actions taken to address charges of falsified records included the job title of a former executive whose departure was not related to the safety issues. The Kicker Lea Suzuki / The Chronicle Youre not imagining it the Bay Area has some of the loudest restaurants in the country. A survey of the regions dining establishments using an app that measures noise levels found the average restaurant in the region clocked in at 78 decibels 80 would cause hearing loss for someone who spends hours there every day. A number of restaurants had readings of over 85 decibels. SoundPrint, designed by Oakland native Gregory Scott, incorporates a decibel meter as well as a searchable map of businesses with ratings. Scott says his personal mission with the app was to help those with hearing loss or other sensory disorders. Yet hes found that many of the apps users have average hearing not a surprise when youre struggling to hear over dinner and drinks. Bay Briefing is written by Taylor Kate Brown and sent to readers email inboxes on weekday mornings. Sign up for the newsletter here and contact Brown at taylor.brown@sfchronicle.com Unless the courts intervene, 37-year-old Borey Ai will probably be taken from his San Francisco home soon and deported to Cambodia, a country he has never seen, for a murder he committed when he was 14. Ai is one of hundreds of Southeast Asian immigrants with criminal records who face deportation by the Trump administration, which has imposed or threatened foreign governments with financial punishment for refusing to accept them. But the immediate cause of Ais impending removal is an unexplained ruling by the California Supreme Court blocking outgoing Gov. Jerry Browns request for the mans pardon. A 19th century provision of the California Constitution requires the governor to gain approval from a majority of the court to grant clemency for convicts such as Ai who have at least two felony convictions. The justices had not denied any such requests since 1930, but on Dec. 12, the court announced that it had rejected Browns request. In March, while awaiting an expected wave of requests from Brown to grant pardons or reduced sentences to current and former prisoners, the justices announced a new, more deferential policy: They would not second guess the governors decision that an inmate deserved clemency, but would reject it if they believed it amounted to an abuse of that power held by the states chief executive. In contrast to their rulings in ordinary cases, the justices did not explain their reasoning why a pardon would be an abuse of power or give a breakdown of their votes. Don Thompson/Associated Press Ai was released from prison in 2016 after serving 19 years and was immediately taken into custody by federal immigration agents. He was freed again in May, with a monitoring ankle bracelet, because Cambodia did not have room for him in its latest group of deportees. Ai, a legal U.S. resident but a noncitizen, is subject to mandatory deportation under federal law because serious felonies remain on his record following the courts ruling last week. His lawyer, Anoop Prasad of the Asian Law Caucus, said Tuesday he would ask the governors office to file another request that the court could consider when it fills a vacancy by adding a seventh justice Joshua Groban, Browns senior legal adviser, whose confirmation hearing is scheduled Friday. Another attorney has asked a federal appeals court to bar Ais deportation on the grounds that he could face torture in Cambodia. If neither of those efforts succeeds, Prasad said, Ais departure is just a matter of time. David Ettinger, a Los Angeles attorney and author of the At the Lectern blog that follows the states high court, said he was mystified by the courts action. Maybe the Supreme Court thought that using a pardon to prevent deportation is an abuse of power, he said. Cambodia started accepting a limited number of deportees from the U.S. about 15 years ago. After the Trump administration threatened financial sanctions, the nation sharply increased its admissions last year and has continued to do so, Prasad said. Likewise, the Trump administration says it is revoking a 2008 agreement that barred the U.S. from deporting Vietnamese refugees who came here before 1995. Officials say they will remove only convicted criminals, but members of the Bay Area Vietnamese community have said anyone who supported the former South Vietnamese regime before fleeing to the United States after the Vietnam War could face retaliation by the Hanoi government if sent back. Ai was born in a refugee camp in Thailand after his parents fled violence in Cambodia that took many family members lives. The family came to the United States before he turned 4 and settled in Stockton. In 1989, Prasad said, Ai was at a Stockton elementary school when a gunman, Patrick Purdy, killed five children, including Ais cousin, and wounded 32 people before taking his own life. The slaughter traumatized Ai, Prasad said, and he soon fell in with gang members. He accompanied two of them in a robbery at a San Jose convenience store in 1996, where Ai pulled out a gun. The store owner tried to grab it, and he shot and killed her accidentally, according to his lawyers. Prosecuted as an adult, he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, and to a later robbery, and was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison. 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. Ais record in prison was remarkable, Prasad said he organized counseling programs to help convicts accept responsibility for their crimes, got a college degree, and became a counselor for rape victims and a state-certified alcohol and drug abuse counselor. Since his release from federal immigration custody in May, Ai has worked as a coordinator for a San Quentin prison program connecting former inmates with at-risk youths, and with another program that promotes restorative justice, while volunteering as a community health advocate. Mr. Ai has lived an honest and upright life since his parole, Peter Krause, Browns legal affairs secretary, said in a filing with the state Supreme Court seeking approval for consideration of a pardon. Some 36,000 people signed petitions to the governor supporting a pardon. The Santa Clara County district attorneys office opposed a pardon, saying Ai had been slow to acknowledge his guilt in the murder, and his 52-year-old victim, Manijeh Eshaghoff, was an Iranian immigrant whose family had also suffered in their native country. The irony of Mr. Ais use of his difficult childhood to support this application ... should not be overlooked, Deputy District Attorney Catherine Pozos said in a letter to Brown. Prasad, however, noted that state legislation recently prohibited adult prosecutions for anyone under 16. Ai is now facing deportation, the lawyer said, for a case in which today he would never be charged as an adult. Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @BobEgelko San Francisco Mayor London Breed has asked Gov. Jerry Brown to release her brother from prison, where he has served nearly two decades of a 44-year sentence for a manslaughter conviction in the death of a San Francisco woman, according to the mayors office. Breeds brother, Napoleon Brown, now 46, pushed 25-year-old Lenties White from a getaway car on the Golden Gate Bridge after an armed robbery in June 2000. She was struck by an oncoming drunken driver and died. Breed sent a letter to Gov. Brown on Oct. 23 asking him to consider leniency and commute her brothers prison sentence. The letter appears to have been sent on personal stationery, but the heading and the body of the letter reference her position as the citys mayor. The mayors letter was sent with similar messages of support from other family members, including Napoleon Browns mother, sister and cousin, as part of his application to have his sentence commuted, according to documents reviewed by The Chronicle. The mayors letter to the governor was first reported Tuesday night by NBC Bay Area. Napoleon Brown has served less than half of his 44-year-sentence for Whites death and the robbery of a Johnny Rockets restaurant on Chestnut Street in San Francisco. Breeds status as mayor could raise questions about whether the letter constitutes an improper attempt to use her status to influence the governors decision. I am very sorry for all the people I hurt with my crimes 18 years ago, Napoleon Brown wrote in his letter to the governor, in which he details his efforts toward self-improvement while in prison. Though he blames his crimes and bad behaviors on addiction, he wrote, I still take full and complete responsibility for all my actions. And he asks for the opportunity to re-establish a relationship with his children. In her letter to the governor, Breed said that Napoleon struggled early on with a sense of hopelessness. And like many others, he developed a bad drug problem at an early age. His drug addiction led to a young life of crime. Breed has often portrayed her impoverished upbringing in Western Addition public housing as an example of overcoming obstacles to succeed in life, especially in a city with stark income disparities. In that narrative, she has mentioned that her sister died of a drug overdose and her brother was in prison. Breed, 44, is two years younger than her brother. Her letter to the governor apparently contains the most information she has made public about his situation. Although I dont believe the 44-year sentence was fair, I make no excuses for him, Breed wrote. His decisions, his actions, led him to the place he finds himself now. Still, I ask that you consider mercy, and rehabilitation. Documents contained in her brothers commutation application indicate that his attorneys expected to negotiate with San Francisco prosecutors for a 20-year sentence, but the district attorneys office would only consider a package deal, with both Napoleon Brown and his co-defendant, Sala Thorn, pleading guilty. Thorn wanted a trial, according to Browns commutation application. Before she died from blunt force trauma and blood loss at a hospital, White told officers that Napoleon Brown had pushed her out of the getaway car she was driving, according to court documents filed in 2014 related to the case. Prison is not the place for him to stay clean, for him to make meaningful amends for his crimes, for him to pursue restorative justice, Breed wrote in her letter. The governors office did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Court records filed in federal court detail the moments leading up to Whites death. On June 19, 2000, Brown and Thorn, then 24, walked into the Johnny Rockets restaurant between midnight and 12:30 a.m. while employees were preparing to leave for the night. The two forced workers to lie facedown on the floor and pocketed more than $7,000 from a safe. Police Officer Gary Watts told investigators that he saw both men walking briskly toward him on Chestnut Street soon after the robbery. One of the men was carrying a red bank deposit bag, and the pair turned the corner and ran to a white Ford Escort with its taillights on, Watts said. White was behind the wheel. The men piled into the car on the passenger side and the car drove off. Watts pursued the car after hearing a radio dispatch report that police were responding to a robbery at the restaurant. He asked the California Highway Patrol for assistance in stopping the vehicle, then sped ahead of the car and stopped at a parking lot near the bridge and waited for the Ford to pass him, according to the court documents. After the Ford passed him and traveled onto the bridge, Watts followed closely behind but did not flash his patrol lights on the vehicle, he told investigators. Soon after driving onto the bridge, the Ford pulled into the buffer lane in the middle of the bridge, the drivers-side door opened, and White was pushed to the roadway, court records show. She lay sobbing facedown in the roadway, Watts said. 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. Watts told investigators that when he got out of his patrol car, he saw a man exit the passengers side of the Ford and walk toward the drivers side. Watts said he told the man to lie on the ground, but he ignored the order, got back in the car and drove off. Watts said he also yelled at White to get up, but she remained in the roadway and was struck by a Dodge Stratus. Its driver was arrested on suspicion of driving while intoxicated and vehicular manslaughter. Before dying, White managed to identify Napoleon Brown as the man who pushed her from the car, calling him by his nickname of S.B., and told police where he lived, police said. Breed, who was 25 at the time, told investigators that when she arrived at her grandmothers house around midnight on the morning of the robbery and Whites death, Brown was asleep on the couch, court records show. She said she could not remember if her brother was home when she left for work that morning. Police Inspectors Anthony Camilleri and Antonio Casillas interviewed Breed the day after the robbery and she confirmed that her brother went by the nickname Sonny or Sonny Boy, according to court records. But the defense argued that Breed denied ever telling the police that defendant used the nickname S.B. Napoleon Brown was convicted of manslaughter, robbery and other crimes. He was sentenced to 42 years, and received two years of extra time after prison officials found heroin in his possession while incarcerated. He is currently at Solano State Prison. Lauren Hernandez and Dominic Fracassa is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: lauren.hernandez@sfchronicle.com, dfracassa@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @LaurenPorFavor A former top executive at Pacific Gas and Electric Co. said Tuesday his recent retirement from the company was unrelated to regulators allegations that the utility falsified gas pipeline safety records for five years. Nick Stavropoulos, the utilitys former president and chief operating officer, said he was not one of the leaders whose departures PG&E described as part of corrective actions to address the issues raised by the California Public Utilities Commission. Stavropoulos came to PG&E in 2011 to lead the reform of its natural gas operations after the deadly 2010 San Bruno pipeline blast. He was promoted to president of the utility in 2017. In July of this year, PG&E announced he would retire at the end of September. Stavropoulos was one of the company officials examined under oath as part of the utilities commissions staff investigation, which found PG&E falsified certain gas records from 2012 through 2017. My departure had nothing to do with the (commission) investigation, Stavropoulos told The Chronicle in an email. After 40 years in the business I decided it was time for me to retire to spend more time with family and friends. The commission investigation found PG&E falsified records about locating and marking natural gas pipelines so they wouldnt appear late. One of the commissions administrative law judges will consider the case. In a statement Sunday, PG&E said it accepted the serious concerns of regulators. PG&E said it took and continues to take several critical corrective actions, one of which is making a number of personnel and organizational changes including some leaders no longer being with the company. But PG&E has not specified how many managers it was referring to or provide their names, ranks or dates of departure. Air Quality Tracker Check levels down to the neighborhood Ratings for the Bay Area and California, updated every 10 minutes PG&E spokesman Matt Nauman declined to comment further Tuesday, citing the ongoing utilities commission proceeding. He said in an email that PG&E is cooperating with regulators and is actively engaged in that process which precludes us from providing further details at this time. Aside from Stavropoulos, one other former top executive told The Chronicle his departure was unrelated to the investigation. Other executives who left the utility in recent months could not be reached for comment. Jesus Soto, PG&Es senior vice president of gas operations, was also examined under oath as part of the commission staff investigation. He remains employed by the utility in the same capacity, according to a PG&E spokesman. J.D. Morris is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jd.morris@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @thejdmorris Welcome back to Tech Chronicle. If you fill out this subscription form, Ill regularly disclose my reporting to you. When Jack Dorsey was in a giving mood Last week, I wrote about my search for Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorseys Start Small Foundation. Ive since learned that Dorsey, too, had been searching for someone to run it. As I wrote, Dorsey appeared to explore several different options for his foundation before picking Silicon Valley Community Foundation to house Square shares he was giving away through a donor-advised fund, a vehicle that allowed him to get a tax write-off while shrouding his philanthropy in secrecy. In summer 2017, the community foundation listed an executive director job for what it called the Start Small Project. A person interviewed for the position said the projects sponsor was later revealed to be Dorsey. Meaningful charitable giving does not require public recognition, a Square spokesman told me last week. The job listing suggested that a major aim of hiring someone to run the foundation was publicity. It called for candidates capable of deepening and refining all aspects of communications from web presence to external relations with the goal of creating a stronger brand and publishing and communicating program results with an emphasis on the success of the program as a model for national and regional replication. The community foundation interviewed candidates for the position in 2017, but ultimately no one was hired, said Sue McAllister, its marketing director. The onetime candidate, who spoke on condition of not being identified, said the search seemed to end abruptly that fall. That is around the time the foundation stopped holding 270,000 shares of Square that Dorsey had placed in his donor-advised fund as the San Francisco payments company went public in 2015. The Square spokesman declined to address questions about Dorseys search for someone to run the Start Small foundation and its plans to publicize Dorseys charity. Michael Macor / The Chronicle 2009 Facebook communicating A couple of weeks ago, I heard an intriguing rumor that Facebooks outgoing communications chief, Elliot Schrage, was talking to Gavin Newsom about some role with the governor-elects administration. Schrage announced his departure in June but remains an adviser to the Menlo Park company; his recent role included falling on his sword over the hiring of Definers Public Affairs, a PR firm that looked into the funding of anti-Facebook groups. There seems to be no substance to the rumor, though Schrages future plans drew such interest from his former colleagues that the prospect of his employment in Sacramento was, I am told, a topic on a conference call held by a group of ex-Facebook employees. More for you Where is Jack Dorseys charitable foundation? I buttonholed Schrage this month at an event held by the Atlantic magazine in San Francisco titled Free Speech (Un)Limited. The Facebooker was not speaking very freely. I understand youve been making all kinds of phone calls, he told me. Im not talking about anything right now. After making the aforementioned all kinds of phone calls, I am given to understand that Schrage does not figure into Newsoms plans, and vice versa. The company that runs the social network is hiring, however. Sarah OBrien, who joined Tesla as vice president of communications in 2016 and left in September, starts at Facebook as vice president of executive communications in January, a company spokesman told me. OBrien worked at Apple for eight years before Tesla. Im guessing her new job will have one key metric: the executive gaffe count. Given the deservedly poor reception executives have had whenever they open their mouths remember when Mark Zuckerberg defended Holocaust deniers? maybe shell have Facebook adopt Apples strategy of silence. Owen Thomas (othomas@sfchronicle.com) Air Quality Tracker Check levels down to the neighborhood Ratings for the Bay Area and California, updated every 10 minutes Quote of the week We made a spiritual pact. Musician Azealia Banks, on reports that she made an amulet from Jack Dorseys beard hair to protect him from the Islamic State; Banks did not address whether she was also a candidate to run the Start Small Project Coming up Sign Up for the Newsletter Want to get the latest on Silicon Valley in your inbox? Subscribe to Tech Chronicle. See More Collapse Its less than a week until Christmas, which means a lot of Amazon Prime last-minute orders, if I know you lot. I will no doubt be getting another dog sweater for Ramona the Love Terrier to put under the tree. What Im reading Melia Russell looks at an impossible-seeming job: running the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce. (San Francisco Chronicle) Instagram is Facebooks success story. That was not lost on Russian agents: the photo-sharing service played a much bigger role in election interference than previously understood, Sarah Frier and Steven Dennis report. (Bloomberg) Tech Chronicle is a thrice-weekly newsletter from Owen Thomas, The Chronicles business editor, and the rest of the tech team. Follow along on Twitter: @techchronicle and Instagram: @techchronicle San Franciscos market for office space set an all-time record in 2018, as companies struck deals for 11.9 million square feet space for nearly 80,000 employees. New deals and lease renewals in 2018 surpassed the previous record of 11.8 million square feet leased in 2014, when Salesforce signed its landmark deal for Salesforce Tower, according to brokerage CBRE. This year, Salesforce grew again, leasing a proposed skyscraper near the tower as it became the citys largest private employer. It was joined by fellow tech giants Facebook, Google and Amazon, which all expanded downtown. The tech sector accounted for around 62 percent of all leasing activity in 2018, the highest percentage since 2014. Office rents have soared by 153 percent since 2009, when the global recession ended, to more than $81 per square foot this year, an all-time high, according to CBRE. Leasing activity more than doubled from 5.9 million square feet in 2009 to 11.9 million square feet this year. The level of growth in 2018 was beyond expectations, given how strong of a year 2017 was and how low the vacancy rate was at this time, said Colin Yasukochi, CBRE research director. Growing companies may have a harder time filling their offices, given San Franciscos October unemployment rate of 2.3 percent, near a historic low. Todd Trumbull Bay Area housing costs and traffic congestion are also pushing companies to expand elsewhere. The tech sector is growing around the country and investing billions of dollars outside the Bay Area. In the past month, Salesforce leased 500,000 square feet in an unbuilt waterfront Chicago tower that will be named Salesforce Tower Chicago. Apple is on track to become the biggest employer in Austin, Texas, with a new $1 billion campus. Google said this week it would spend $1 billion on new offices in New Yorks Hudson Square neighborhood. And Amazon picked New York and Northern Virginia for office expansions last month. Yet tech continues to grow at a staggering pace in San Francisco and the Bay Area. Facebooks 756,000-square-foot deal in May for all of Park Tower, a Transbay district building, was not only San Franciscos biggest deal of the year, but the biggest in the citys history. It came less than a year after the Menlo Park companys 432,000-square-foot deal for nearby 181 Fremont. The growth comes even as Facebook grapples with scandals over privacy and election interference, or perhaps because of it; jobs to be filled include employees who work on security and moderate content. The two largest San Francisco leases by non-tech tenants were co-working operator WeWorks lease at 430 California St. and accounting and consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers move to 405 Howard St. Both companies have benefited by working with tech companies. WeWork, which isnt classified as tech by real estate brokerages, has received billions of dollars in venture capital and rents out space to tech companies. PwCs clients include large tech firms. Other major non-tech deals were signed by the Federal Home Loan Bank, a government agency, and renewable energy company Pattern Energy Group. San Franciscos economy includes large health care and tourism sectors, and a vast city government with more than 31,000 employees and an $11 billion budget. I still see it as well diversified. Essentially, all industries have a growing tech component. And because of the deep talent pool in the Bay Area and the urban environment this talent has wanted to live and work in, San Francisco has remained very popular, said Robert Sammons, Northwest research director at brokerage Cushman & Wakefield. Air Quality Tracker Check levels down to the neighborhood Ratings for the Bay Area and California, updated every 10 minutes However, many non-tech companies have been shifting growth to cheaper cities, said Sammons. Today more professional services firms tend to reorganize occupying less space and also moving back-office workers out of expensive markets, said Sammons. Market observers expect fewer large office deals in 2019, because of minuscule availability and a dearth of new office projects. The citywide office vacancy rate fell from 4.7 percent at the end of 2017 to 4.1 percent today the lowest level since the end of 2000. San Franciscos Transbay district is almost entirely filled up, with the exception of the under-construction Oceanwide Center, which will include 1 million square feet of office space in the citys second-tallest tower. No leases have been signed. The only other under-construction office project without tenants is 633 Folsom St., originally built in 1966. The Swig Co. is renovating and increasing its size to 270,000 square feet. The city rezoned the Central South of Market area last month, and office projects totaling 5.6 million square feet are proposed, but none have been approved. The supply pipeline is really limited, said Yasukochi. Oakland and the East Bay becomes a more attractive option. Downtown San Jose has capacity for growth. Roland Li is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer Email: roland.li@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rolandlisf WASHINGTON Congressional leaders agreed Wednesday to postpone the fight over President Trumps border wall until February. But in lining up a short-term government spending deal, their bill also leaves out funding for victims of California wildfires and other disasters. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., filed a bill that would extend funding at current levels through Feb. 8 for the roughly one-quarter of government that would otherwise run out of money Friday. The plan passed the Senate on Wednesday and is likely to pass the House, leaving the fight over money for a border wall to next years Congress. Trump has insisted that a funding bill include $5 billion for the wall and said he would be proud to own a partial government shutdown to get it, but the White House backed off that threat in recent days in the face of Democratic opposition and doubts that there were even enough Republican votes for the idea. However, because the bill provides for a clean extension of current spending, it does not contain any money for disaster relief. Gov. Jerry Brown has asked lawmakers for $9 billion for wildfire aid in a year-end spending package, and other states and U.S. territories devastated by natural disasters this year including hurricanes are also waiting on help. Browns office said the aid request included billions for hazardous waste and debris removal, the Department of Housing and Urban Developments disaster mitigation program and money to help damaged agricultural land. The state also said billions are still needed to recover from the 2017 wildfires. The money will have to come in the new year. Its pretty clean, Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Richard Shelby, R-Ala., said of the funding extension. He said disaster relief is still being worked out. What were working on is trying to find out what are the bona fide claims, how much money do we really need, Shelby said. Ultimately, well never turn our back on the people. I think a lot of that has to be, so many problems out there, theyre trying to figure out what they really need, what is bona fide. Rep. Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco said in a statement that Democrats would support the package, which will extend funding more than a month into her expected tenure as speaker in a Democratic-led House. But she also indicated that Democrats are likely to craft a spending package featuring their own priorities. This is a missed opportunity to pass full-year funding bills now, Pelosi said. Democrats will be ready to fully, responsibly fund our government in January. Fire Tracker Follow wildfires across the state Latest updates on wildfires burning across Northern and Southern California An aide to Pelosi did not say whether that package would include disaster funding, but said a relief bill would be needed and would be worked on next year. Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., said she was confident that funding would come in the new year. But she called it ridiculous that government continues to be funded through short-term extensions. We need to have long-term, stable, reliable and consistent funding, especially and in particular the essential responsibilities of government like helping out the people who have been absolutely devastated by the wildfires and the hurricanes and the floods, Harris said. This is one of the main responsibilities of government, she added, and the fact that we cant get it together to agree there should be consistent and long-term funding, its ridiculous. Tal Kopan is The San Francisco Chronicles Washington correspondent. Email: tal.kopan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @talkopan U.S. marshals arrested a 21-year-old fugitive in Texas for the Dec. 4 shooting of two teenagers in a marijuana sale gone wrong in Fremont, authorities said Wednesday. Law enforcement took Christian Lucas Kelling of Fremont into custody Dec. 12 after finding him at a home in Pflugerville, Texas, according to Fremont police. Kelling is accused of fatally shooting 17-year-old Damani Chadly and injuring a 19-year-old friend, causing the pairs car to crash into a home on the 34000 block of Torrington Court. Fremont police said Wednesday that Kelling was selling marijuana to Chadly and his friend when they began to argue. As the driver, who was not identified, left the scene, Kelling shot multiple times at the vehicle, police said. Investigators allegedly found marijuana packaged for sale in the victims car. Paramedics pronounced Chadly dead at the scene. The 19-year-old victim fled from the crash but was found by a resident not far from the wreck with non-life-threatening gunshot wounds. Eight minutes after the shooting, surveillance videos captured a 2013 Honda Civic linked to Kelling fleeing northbound on Fremont Boulevard, which authorities said was the closest route to the freeway from the crime scene. An Alameda County judge issued a warrant for Kellings arrest Dec. 12, and police said his Civic was found in San Leandro without license plates. The suspect allegedly went to Texas and showed up at his familys home in Pflugerville, where a vehicle with California license plates was located, said Lt. Mike Tegner, of the Fremont Police Department. U.S. marshals entered the familys home and found a loaded semi-automatic firearm, magazines, a sound suppressor, ammunition, a large sum of cash and what appeared to be marijuana. Kelling had planned to leave the country soon, authorities said. One of the ways we located him is that he had purchased a plane ticket for a flight out of Texas, an international flight, Tegner said. From that information we received, we were able to find the house associated with him. 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. Kellings family did not know about the Fremont shooting, and he was uncooperative with investigators, police said. He is in the Travis County Correctional Complex in Texas, awaiting extradition back to California to appear in court, authorities said. Gwendolyn Wu is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: gwendolyn.wu@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @gwendolynawu A former San Francisco tenants rights attorney charged with murder in the fatal stabbing of a man on Sixth Street three years ago was acquitted of all charges Tuesday, ending a twisting legal saga that has played out for years in the criminal courts. A San Francisco Superior Court jury found Carlos Argueta, 35, not guilty of three possible charges in the Sept. 3, 2015, death of 61-year-old James Thomas: second-degree murder, voluntary manslaughter and involuntary manslaughter. Im glad that I have my life back now, Argueta said outside court. Its been three years. Im just so thankful. Im very relieved. Argueta broke down in tears upon hearing the verdict as his attorney, San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi, stood with his left arm wrapped around him. The jury deliberated for a week following a monthlong trial. A man was stabbed to death. We believe the evidence pointed to an unlawful killing, but the jury disagreed. We respect the system, and so we respect their decision, said Max Szabo, a spokesman for the district attorneys office. Adachi took the unusual step of defending the case himself, but also called his client to the witness stand, subjecting him to cross-examination. I think it was important to get my story out there, and I think it was important for them to hear everything that happened, Argueta said. At trial, the prosecution played numerous videos from the night of the incident, showing Argueta and his colleague drinking heavily before the two stumbled onto the gritty block of Sixth just south of Market Street where the fateful encounter occurred. Adachi argued that the killing was a tragic accident and Arguetas knife pierced Thomas heart while he was pushing him away after being punched. The clash happened amid a larger confrontation over a messenger bag, prompting Argueta to pull out the blade. Adachi raised the stakes before trial by filing numerous motions to have the case dismissed, alleging prosecutorial misconduct and accusing a judge of racial bias against Latinos. 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. We put everything we could into this case, Adachi said. This is a huge relief for this young man. He faced life in prison. A judge in 2016 had previously dismissed the case at a preliminary hearing, prompting Assistant District Attorney Andrew Ganz to take the evidence to a grand jury to obtain an indictment. Ganz, 40, was later taken off the case, and a judge for the State Bar court has recommended he be suspended for 90 days and placed on probation for two years for actions related to a 2013 case when he worked as a prosecutor in Solano County. The state Supreme Court must approve the recommendation. Correction: A previous headline for a story about Carlos Arguetas acquittal in San Francisco misstated his work status. He is a former San Francisco tenants rights attorney and remains a lawyer. Evan Sernoffsky is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: esernoffsky@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @EvanSernoffsky The United States will move quickly to withdraw all forces from Syria, the White House abruptly announced Wednesday as President Donald Trump defied warnings from his top advisers and upended plans for a continued mission against the Islamic State. The move plunged U.S. allies into uncertainty and created the potential for greater regional instability even as it provided Russia and its ally Syrian President Bashar Assad, a chance to cement greater control of the country. "Our boys, our young women, our men, they're all coming back and they're coming back now; we won, and that's the way we want it," Trump said in a video message on Twitter. The step is the latest twist in a yearslong effort by two administrations to defeat the militants in Syria and end the country's long civil war. The conflict has made Syria a cauldron for terrorist threats and set the stage for a proxy battle that has included forces backed by the United States, Turkey, Iran and Russia. Since 2015, Moscow's military support has been crucial in helping Assad turn the war in his favor. The decision also delivers on the president's repeated threat this year to pull out troops. Since before taking office, Trump has promised to conclude the campaign against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, and questioned the value of costly and dangerous military missions overseas. Administration officials characterized Trump's order as a response to the fact that the Islamic State, which once ruled a vast swath across Iraq and Syria, nearly had been defeated. "We have started the process of returning U.S. troops home from Syria as we transition to the next phase of the campaign," Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White said in a statement. "We will continue working with our partners and allies to defeat ISIS wherever it operates." U.S. troops, working alongside Syrian forces, have struggled, however, to eradicate remaining pockets of militants. Behind the scenes, the move generated confusion as military officials raced to outline plans for a rapid departure of the entire U.S. force of more than 2,000 troops. U.S. forces have been working in small numbers with local forces since 2015. A host of officials, including Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, recently dismissed a precipitous departure as premature and risky as militants are embracing insurgent tactics and seeking to regain strength in areas they once controlled. "Getting rid of the caliphate doesn't mean you then blindly say, 'OK, we got rid of it,' march out, and then wonder why the caliphate comes back," Mattis told reporters in September. Current and former White House officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to talk abouto internal deliberations they weren't authorized to discuss, described the announcement as a "knee-jerk presidential reaction" to Trump's call last week with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The Turkish leader has threatened to launch a military offensive against Kurdish forces in Syria in coming days. Those forces are the chief U.S. partners on the ground in Syria, and U.S. troops remain positioned in areas that would be affected by a Turkish assault. The officials said Trump had startled his own aides earlier this year by saying U.S. forces would depart "very soon." Since then, Mattis, Chief of Staff John Kelly and others had repeatedly talked Trump out of ordering a swift exit, they said. "It was terrifying to us at one point when we're trying to have thoughtful planning sessions about what to do in Syria, and he just said, 'We're getting out of there,' " one former official said. "He sees Syria as a totally useless desert." "People have bought time, bought time for months," the official said. But the president complained that his wishes were being slow-rolled, and he expressed skepticism about Pentagon arguments that the United States had a responsibility to keep the region safe. The officials said national security adviser John Bolton, who recently outlined a policy to remain in Syria to counter Iranian influence, was among those who opposed the move. "I haven't spoken to a person in the building who is happy about this," a second official said. The announcement came as a surprise to European and Arab allies, including some whose forces have fought alongside the United States in Syria. The Wall Street Journal and Reuters first reported the plans Wednesday. The opposition from Trump's senior advisers suggested that the withdrawal could possibly be slowed or abandoned. But a senior U.S. official downplayed the significance of the conflicting statements from Trump and his chief aides. "The president's statements on this topic have been 100 percent consistent from the campaign through his announcement today," the official said. "And it was the president's decision to make, and he made it." U.S. forces have been positioned mostly in Syria's north-central and northeast areas, which are largely under the control of Syrian Kurdish partner forces. American troops also have a smaller ground presence in southern Syria, along the border with Jordan. The withdrawal plans leave major questions for an alliance of U.S.-backed Kurdish and Arab militias, known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, which have provided key aid for U.S. forces in the fight against the Islamic State. But the SDF is strongly opposed by Turkey, which sees any powerful Kurdish militia as a potential threat and further inspiration for Kurdish separatists inside Turkey. A senior Kurdish official said the alliance would hold an "emergency meeting" to plan next steps. 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. Officials in Russia, which has repeatedly been condemned by the United States for bombings of civilian areas and support for Assad, expressed cautious satisfaction with the decision. Moscow has long described the U.S. mission in Syria as illegal because it wasn't approved by the Assad government. "A very important consequence that might flow from this decision is that it could really, truly clear the way for a political settlement," Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said, according to Russia's Tass state news agency. The dual message from Washington created skepticism in foreign capitals about whether the United States would actually follow through. Russian President Vladimir Putin had announced Russian withdrawals from Syria, but the Russian military remains active there. As recently as last week, Brett McGurk, the presidential envoy for the global anti-Islamic State coalition, told reporters that "it's fair to say Americans will remain on the ground after the physical defeat of the caliphate, until we have the pieces in place to ensure that that defeat is enduring." Any other policy, he said, would be "reckless. . . . I think anyone who has looked at a conflict like this would agree with that." Gen. Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, suggested earlier this month that the military would be in Syria for an extended mission, saying the Pentagon had a long way to go in standing up local security forces capable of preventing the Islamic State from returning. Lawmakers from both parties immediately criticized Trump's decision. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said in an interview that he was "completely blindsided" by the announcement. "With all due respect to the president, ISIS has not been defeated in Syria or Iraq and certainly not Afghanistan, where I just returned," he said. "ISIS has been dealt a severe blow but are not defeated. If there has been a decision to withdraw our forces in Syria, the likelihood of their return goes up dramatically." Sen.s Robert Menendez, D-N.J., and Jack Reed, D-R.I., the ranking members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Senate Armed Services Committee, respectively, warned in a statement that the decision would benefit Russia and Iran, Assad's other major patron. "It is alarming to see President Trump running headlong into a hasty and poorly thought-out decision that could further abdicate U.S. leadership," they said. A small group of lawmakers applauded the move. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who shares the president's distaste for foreign wars, said on Twitter that he was "happy to see a president who can declare victory and bring our troops out of a war. It's been a long time since that has happened." - - - Contributing to this report were The Washington Post's Paul Sonne, Paul Kane, John Wagner, Seung Min Kim, Brian Murphy and Karen DeYoung in Washington; Anton Troianovski and Natalia Abbakumova in Moscow; and Liz Sly and Louisa Loveluck in Beirut. Before he became the nations shortest-serving national security adviser, Michael Flynn foreshadowed strange days ahead by leading the Republican National Convention in a chant of Lock her up! Damn right! Flynn said as the delegates called for Democratic nominee Hillary Clintons incarceration. Were saying that because if I, a guy who knows this business if I did a tenth of what she did, I would be in jail today. Now Flynn faces that prospect. Despite having admitted that he deceived federal agents about his contacts with Russia, the retired general had been expected to escape prison thanks to his military record and cooperation with Special Counsel Robert Muellers team. It was only after Flynns team minimized the crime in court filings that U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan said he might well be locked up. Flynn pleaded guilty to a federal felony a year ago and has since sat for 19 interviews with Muellers team. And yet his lawyers intimated last week that the then-national security adviser was hoodwinked into lying to FBI agents about his conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. That prompted the judge, who is known for being tough on prosecutors, to demand more information from both sides. And it emboldened those portraying Muellers investigation as a witch hunt chief among them President Trump, who publicly wished Flynn good luck in court Tuesday. But neither luck nor facts were on Flynns side. As Muellers team noted, Flynn told similar lies about his Russian contacts to the media and Vice President Mike Pence, and, as a career military and intelligence official, he could be expected to know not to lie to federal agents. The judge seemed to agree, expressing disgust and disdain for Flynns crime, forcing him to reiterate his guilt, and refusing to rule out prison time. At Sullivans suggestion, sentencing was delayed until March to give the defendant more time to earn leniency by cooperating with investigators and, presumably, accepting his responsibility. None of that prevented Trumps press secretary from repeating Flynns discredited claims of FBI misconduct soon after the hearing. The difference is between holding forth in a briefing room or a political convention and holding up in court. This commentary is from The Chronicles editorial board. We invite you to express your views in a letter to the editor. Please submit your letter via our online form: SFChronicle.com/letters. Rick Bowmer/Associated Press At last the Trump administration did something about gun safety, however belated and however modest. The Justice Department on Tuesday issued a new rule that would ban so-called bump stocks, the attachments to semiautomatic rifles that effectively transform them into machine guns. This was the device of choice for Stephen Paddock, the gunman in the October 2017 Las Vegas massacre that killed 58 and wounded hundreds more concertgoers. Using bump stocks, Paddock sprayed more than 1,000 rounds on the crowd in 10 minutes from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay casino-hotel. The yellow vest riots in Paris should alarm Democrats, especially the new progressive governors in blue states like California. As with the president of France, todays liberals believe they have a mandate to solve the problems of the world, only to learn that all politics are local. The electorate, while entertaining ideas at the extremes, always gravitates toward the center and its own vested interests. In France, President Emmanuel Macron thought he had a clear mandate to implement the Paris Climate agreement and sought to limit carbon emissions via raising the price of petrol from $7 per gallon to $7.40. Fuel would be more expensive, people would drive less or more thoughtfully, and the problem would be solved, tout de suite! Hmmm. How do you say the straw that broke the camels back in French? So now enters the next governor of California, champion of sanctuary cities and San Franciscos drug-addicted sidewalk defecators, and a promiser of higher taxes, father of the Californias budget-busting single-payer health care proposal, building his own wall against climate change. He seeks to convert all transportation to make air pollution a thing of the past ... Tout de suite, encore! Obviously, with the most progressive electorate and state Legislature in the country, piece of cake as the French used to say. Yellow vest alert! California has highest marginal income tax rate of the states, 13.3 percent. Completing the trifecta, California also has relatively high property and sales taxes. But honestly, who cares? Apparently no one. Certainly not those 40 percent of Californians who dont pay any state income tax. And apparently not the top 1 percent who make 24 percent of the income and pay 48 percent of the taxes. But what about the other 59 percent, the middle-income earners who pay 50 percent of the taxes, high property and sales taxes, and are increasingly unable to buy a home or even afford rent? Wasteful government spending? Rising fuel, power and water bills? No problem. And, California is doubling down. In the last election, Californians gave Gavin Newsom a landslide victory with 62 percent of the vote, the largest margin in California since 1950. This was apparently because Newsom as governor promised to raise taxes even further. Veiled in a tax conversation during the gubernatorial campaign were promises of higher spending, a single-payer health plan and feigned indifference to repealing property tax limits. Gov.-elect Newsom clearly might think he has a mandate to continue a high spending progressive agenda, but when might the yellow vests come out? How about April 15? Just about the time Newsom is getting comfortable in the governors chair, people will be reminded that they cannot deduct those huge California income or property taxes on the federal tax forms. They will also be limited to how much of their high California mortgage payments they can deduct. Those getting ready to buy new homes may run the numbers and decide they cannot afford to buy at all. When President Trump visited France earlier in the year, President Macron gave him a withering lecture on what he called the unattractive rhetoric of nationalism. He suggested it was narrow-minded and stingy. Trump had made the cardinal, global-political error of calling himself a nationalist, by which he meant that he was focused on protecting American interests through what has appeared to be a protectionist agenda. Macron had a strong point, in the European context, of nationalism leading to the Balkanized Europe that precipitated two world wars in the last century. But in the Trump context of keeping politics truly local and looking out for the jobs, factories, and economic prosperity of your citizens, the Paris riots suggest that Trump may have gotten the last laugh. And, in the broader U.S. progressive context, who will have the last laugh going into the 2020 elections? Grady Means of Half Moon Bay is a writer and former corporate strategy consultant who served in the White House as an assistant to Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. The hulking, dilapidated vans that took over a quiet residential street in San Franciscos Outer Mission District have all dispersed, city officials said Tuesday. Andy Thornley, a senior analyst for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, announced the development at the agencys Board of Directors meeting Tuesday afternoon. He said that after homeless outreach workers spent months meeting with occupants of the eight RVs parked on De Wolf Street, all of them agreed to leave. Four people went into homeless shelters or supportive housing, and the rest simply drove away, though two of them offered to stay in touch with outreach workers, officials said. On Thursday, the city posted signs banning parking of oversized vehicles anything taller than 7 feet or longer than 22 feet between 12 a.m. and 6 a.m. In the end, everyone disbanded peacefully, said Randy Quezada, spokesman for the city Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing. There were no tows and no citations, he said. The SFMTA board on Tuesday also unanimously approved a policy for regulating RVs, which have become prevalent throughout San Francisco particularly in southeast areas that are crisscrossed by freeways. Instead of posting signs that effectively shunt the mobile homes from one neighborhood to the next, transit officials will work with the homelessness department to try to coax the inhabitants into shelters and services. Only after every person has been evaluated would the SFMTA impose standard parking regulations like meters, time limits or resident permits. Mayor London Breed initiated the process in November, following a citywide count that identified 432 inhabited vehicles, more than half clustered in Mission and Bayview neighborhoods. Breed, along with Supervisors Ahsha Safai and Vallie Brown, laid out a multipronged strategy to assess each vehicle and offer help including gas money to get home, wherever that might be. Separately, Supervisor Hillary Ronen has held community meetings about the prevalence of camper vans in the Portola neighborhood, particularly along the long, uninterrupted curbs around University Mound Reservoir and McLaren Park. Its not a perfect system, Thornley said. Officials will still, in all likelihood, conduct difficult triage, responding to complaints from residents and supervisors and trying to persuade homeless people to leave what they probably consider to be safe spots. Still, he sees the new policy as more compassionate than simply chasing the RVs out, and more responsible than sitting back and doing nothing. Safai, whose district includes the Outer Mission, said he was encouraged by the results on De Wolf Street. He called it the first step in a longer-term strategy to ... move people from living on the streets into more permanent housing, receiving necessary services or returning to their home communities outside San Francisco. Rachel Swan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rswan@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rachelswan Gov. Jerry Brown has picked a new leader to temporarily helm the states beleaguered Department of Motor Vehicles, which is struggling with excessive wait times and fury over 23,000 botched voter registrations. Chief Deputy Director Bill Davidson will take over as acting director of the department beginning Dec. 31. Davidson has worked at the DMV 16 years. Director Jean Shiomoto will retire at the end of the year, leaving behind an agency thats been tasked with hefty new responsibilities, like processing Real ID licenses and regulating autonomous vehicles, even though its offices still use antiquated computer technology. One of the biggest challenges has been the launch of a new Motor Voter system in April that automatically registers DMV customers to vote. Software glitches led to errors in 23,000 voter registration records filed with the secretary of state between April 23 and Aug. 5, prompting Brown to call for a state audit in September. Two months later, Shiomoto told her staff she planned to step down after five years in the post. Asemblyman Phil Ting, D-San Francisco, praised Shiomoto for some innovations, like DMV kiosks in supermarkets and a permit system to test driverless cars. But Ting also questioned the departments efficiency after lawmakers allocated millions of dollars for new field offices in the past two budgets. The wait times are down, but were concerned that without the proper staffing and intervention, theyll go back up, he said. Republican Assemblyman Jim Patterson of Fresno was less charitable. Im not surprised there was a retirement from the current director given this catalog of mistakes, fumbles and downright incompetency, he said. Patterson was among GOP lawmakers who called for an audit in August, after getting snowed under with complaints from constituents who had to wait weeks for an appointment to obtain or renew a drivers license, only to stand in line for hours at a field office. Three Democratic senators scuttled that attempt at an investigation by declining to vote, saying the audit would redirect resources and slow the departments efforts to reduce wait times. But the following month, Gov. Brown ordered up the audit. In Pattersons view, the DMV needs a top-to-bottom overhaul. He suggests that incoming Gov. Gavin Newsom tap a Silicon Valley innovator to turn the dinosaur bureaucracy into a nimble machine. Strain on the department will only increase as more people apply for Real ID licenses, which will be required to board domestic airline flights in 2020 unless passengers show a passport. Over the summer, DMV officials took steps to speed up service by extending hours, opening 60 offices on Saturdays and installing self-service terminals. Those measures achieved significant results. In August, the average wait time for a customer without an appointment hovered at 130 minutes. By October, it had gone down to 46 minutes. But those incremental improvements werent enough to satisfy Department of Finance Director Keely Martin Bosler. State auditors are working on a review of the DMVs information technology and customer service functions. Theyve contracted with an outside firm to do a separate evaluation of the Motor Voter registration process. Auditors expect to complete both reviews and release their findings in April. Rachel Swan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rswan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rachelswan City voters will have a chance to extend for a decade or halt altogether free classes at City College of San Francisco, now that the Board of Supervisors has agreed to place the question on the Nov. 5 ballot. The supervisors voted 7-1 Tuesday to put a charter amendment before voters that would pay for 10 years of no-cost classes for all city residents, starting in 2020. Supervisor Catherine Stefani cast the lone no vote, and Supervisors Malia Cohen, Aaron Peskin and Katy Tang were absent. The free tuition program began last year and is scheduled to expire in June. College and city officials expect to reach an agreement to fund the program until voters decide what to do, said Supervisor Jane Kim, who has championed the Free City program and the 2016 ballot measure that pays for most of it. We have one of the fastest-growing economies that is the envy of cities and states around the nation, and the fastest-growing income gap, Kim said. The great equalizer has always been education. It was the final board meeting for Kim, who is leaving office because of term limits. Lea Suzuki / The Chronicle The proposed charter amendment would establish the Free City College Fund, which would be administered by the citys Department of Children, Youth, and Their Families. The funds would come from a set-aside money earmarked for a specific purpose in the citys general fund. If voters approve, the city would appropriate $15 million to $16.4 million a year for free classes at City College for three years, starting in fiscal 2020-21 After 2023, the city controller would have the authority to add or subtract funding each year, depending on how much discretionary revenue the city has. The charter amendment would need a simple majority vote for approval. Free City College is funded thanks to Proposition W, the 2016 ballot measure that raised a city transfer tax on residential and commercial properties that sell for at least $5 million. It raised about $28 million this year and is not set to expire. The money from Prop. W goes into the citys general fund, but supporters of the tax were clear at the time that it would be spent to fund residents tuition at City College. The tax has come up $5.4 million a year short of full funding, however, forcing City College to cover the rest. Lea Suzuki / The Chronicle The free-tuition program means San Francisco residents dont have to pay $46 per unit to attend classes. The program provides grants of up to $500 a semester for textbooks and other costs of attending college for low-income students who already qualified for free tuition. Stefani, the only supervisor to vote against putting the charter amendment on the ballot, said she believes in a free City College but not in funding it through a budget set-aside. I support free City College for all San Franciscans, but want to see it done in a way that maximizes federal and state aid for students and creates an economically sustainable City College, she said. Set-asides are a fiscally irresponsible practice that limits our ability to effectively run the government. The measure would create the citys 20th budget set-aside, according to a report by the city controller. Stefani also said City College has failed to require students to exhaust all other sources of funding, such as Cal Grants and federal Pell grants, before tapping into the Free City money. But Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, a former president of the City College Board of Trustees, said it is important to get students into school first. Then the college can work with them to tap other aid sources, he said. This charter amendment is important because it settles the question of whether this is a long-term program that its students can rely on, he said. Under the proposed charter amendment, the city could freeze its contribution in any year when it runs a budget deficit of at least $200 million. The Board of Supervisors would also have the authority to adjust contributions to the Free City fund by two-thirds vote if, for example, it decided City College could pay for the program itself. Separately from Tuesdays vote, City College Chancellor Mark Rocha told Mayor London Breed this month that he would like to reach a deal with the city to make changes to the free-tuition program, including steering more money toward low-income students. After nearly two years of administering the Free City program in its current form, we are keenly aware that (it) isnt adequately serving our students, particularly our most vulnerable students, Rocha said in a letter to Breed. As for the proposed charter amendment, a spokesman for Breed said, The mayor supports the free City College program. and she will be looking at the measure to determine whether it aligns with her priorities. Trisha Thadani and Nanette Asimov are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Emails: tthadani@sfchronicle.com, nasimov@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @TrishaThadani @NanetteAsimov Elisa Barragan heard the screams first. Neighbors rushed into the yard of the San Jose house that she had rented for 20 years, yelling fire. One of them grabbed a hose from next door and sprayed the roof as an electrical fire began to spread and melt the gutters. Barragan ran. Not out, but farther inside, to the rear bedroom to her 24-year-old son, Isaiah Alcala. Born with half a brain, Isaiah has paralysis of all four limbs and cannot swallow or speak. I was not going to leave him, Barragan said. She stayed with Isaiah until four men, all of them strangers, plowed through the smoke to the back of the house and carried Isaiah outside. In minutes, the San Jose Fire Department arrived, then a television crew to cover the heroic rescue for the evening news. It was Mothers Day, this year. The family was safe, but the troubles had just begun. Suddenly homeless, Barragan, 61, had to temporarily leave her son at a residential facility. Her 9-year-old granddaughter, Khloe, who has lived with Barragan for most of her life, went to stay with relatives. Barragan checked into a Motel 6 and began to search for a new apartment in San Jose the city where she grew up and raised a family but could no longer easily afford. Jessica Christian / The Chronicle In August, the family found a place to rent in a neighborhood near downtown San Jose called Little Portugal. There was a catch: Barragan had to post a security deposit, and had only a few weeks to come up with the money. It was a tough task for someone on a fixed income. Facing possible homelessness again, Barragan turned to Midtown Family Services, where office coordinator Lidia Jimenez helped her gain one-time assistance through The Chronicles Season of Sharing Fund. The grant from Season of Sharing covered the deposit. When Isaiah was born, he was the first disabled person that Barragan had ever met. She quit her job as a secretary at a banking company to take care of him and hasnt worked a steady gig since. The family subsists on her Social Security income and her late ex-husbands pension. Isaiah was diagnosed with a range of disabilities, including microcephaly, a condition in which a babys head is abnormally small, usually the result of the brain not developing properly, either in the womb or after birth. Isaiah has never spoken, Barragan said. But he coos for her when she sings to him. Barragan sometimes puts a tambourine where Isaiahs arm crunches against his chest, letting him pretend to play along with his niece Khloe on guitar. Shes heard her sons laugh once. We try to live a normal life, but the reality is its not normal, she said. After the fire, when Isaiah was placed into the residential facility, Barragan said some people tried to persuade her to keep him there. They wanted her to be able to join her extended family on trips to Disneyland and to enjoy retirement without limitations, she said. Separating her blended family permanently was never an option, she said. The day she went to pick up Isaiah from the facility and bring him to their new home in Little Portugal, Barragan said she felt butterflies in her stomach. I felt like I was in love for the first time, Barragan said. Melia Russell is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: melia.russell@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @meliarobin San Francisco Mayor London Breed has asked Gov. Jerry Brown to release her brother from prison, where he has served nearly two decades of a 44-year sentence for a manslaughter conviction in the death of a San Francisco woman, according to the mayors office. Breeds brother, Napoleon Brown, now 46, pushed 25-year-old Lenties White from a getaway car on the Golden Gate Bridge after an armed robbery in June 2000. She was struck by an oncoming drunken driver and died. Breed sent a letter to Gov. Brown on Oct. 23 asking him to consider leniency and commute her brothers prison sentence. The letter appears to have been sent on personal stationery, but the heading and the body of the letter reference her position as the citys mayor. The mayors letter was sent with similar messages of support from other family members, including Napoleon Browns mother, sister and cousin, as part of his application to have his sentence commuted, according to documents reviewed by The Chronicle. The mayors letter to the governor was first reported Tuesday night by NBC Bay Area. Napoleon Brown has served less than half of his 44-year-sentence for Whites death and the robbery of a Johnny Rockets restaurant on Chestnut Street in San Francisco. Breeds status as mayor could raise questions about whether the letter constitutes an improper attempt to use her status to influence the governors decision. I am very sorry for all the people I hurt with my crimes 18 years ago, Napoleon Brown wrote in his letter to the governor, in which he details his efforts toward self-improvement while in prison. Though he blames his crimes and bad behaviors on addiction, he wrote, I still take full and complete responsibility for all my actions. And he asks for the opportunity to re-establish a relationship with his children. In her letter to the governor, Breed said that Napoleon struggled early on with a sense of hopelessness. And like many others, he developed a bad drug problem at an early age. His drug addiction led to a young life of crime. Breed has often portrayed her impoverished upbringing in Western Addition public housing as an example of overcoming obstacles to succeed in life, especially in a city with stark income disparities. In that narrative, she has mentioned that her sister died of a drug overdose and her brother was in prison. Breed, 44, is two years younger than her brother. Her letter to the governor apparently contains the most information she has made public about his situation. Although I dont believe the 44-year sentence was fair, I make no excuses for him, Breed wrote. His decisions, his actions, led him to the place he finds himself now. Still, I ask that you consider mercy, and rehabilitation. Documents contained in her brothers commutation application indicate that his attorneys expected to negotiate with San Francisco prosecutors for a 20-year sentence, but the district attorneys office would only consider a package deal, with both Napoleon Brown and his co-defendant, Sala Thorn, pleading guilty. Thorn wanted a trial, according to Browns commutation application. Before she died from blunt force trauma and blood loss at a hospital, White told officers that Napoleon Brown had pushed her out of the getaway car she was driving, according to court documents filed in 2014 related to the case. Prison is not the place for him to stay clean, for him to make meaningful amends for his crimes, for him to pursue restorative justice, Breed wrote in her letter. The governors office did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Court records filed in federal court detail the moments leading up to Whites death. On June 19, 2000, Brown and Thorn, then 24, walked into the Johnny Rockets restaurant between midnight and 12:30 a.m. while employees were preparing to leave for the night. The two forced workers to lie facedown on the floor and pocketed more than $7,000 from a safe. Police Officer Gary Watts told investigators that he saw both men walking briskly toward him on Chestnut Street soon after the robbery. One of the men was carrying a red bank deposit bag, and the pair turned the corner and ran to a white Ford Escort with its taillights on, Watts said. White was behind the wheel. The men piled into the car on the passenger side and the car drove off. Watts pursued the car after hearing a radio dispatch report that police were responding to a robbery at the restaurant. He asked the California Highway Patrol for assistance in stopping the vehicle, then sped ahead of the car and stopped at a parking lot near the bridge and waited for the Ford to pass him, according to the court documents. After the Ford passed him and traveled onto the bridge, Watts followed closely behind but did not flash his patrol lights on the vehicle, he told investigators. Soon after driving onto the bridge, the Ford pulled into the buffer lane in the middle of the bridge, the drivers-side door opened, and White was pushed to the roadway, court records show. She lay sobbing facedown in the roadway, Watts said. Watts told investigators that when he got out of his patrol car, he saw a man exit the passengers side of the Ford and walk toward the drivers side. Watts said he told the man to lie on the ground, but he ignored the order, got back in the car and drove off. Watts said he also yelled at White to get up, but she remained in the roadway and was struck by a Dodge Stratus. Its driver was arrested on suspicion of driving while intoxicated and vehicular manslaughter. Before dying, White managed to identify Napoleon Brown as the man who pushed her from the car, calling him by his nickname of S.B., and told police where he lived, police said. Breed, who was 25 at the time, told investigators that when she arrived at her grandmothers house around midnight on the morning of the robbery and Whites death, Brown was asleep on the couch, court records show. She said she could not remember if her brother was home when she left for work that morning. Police Inspectors Anthony Camilleri and Antonio Casillas interviewed Breed the day after the robbery and she confirmed that her brother went by the nickname Sonny or Sonny Boy, according to court records. But the defense argued that Breed denied ever telling the police that defendant used the nickname S.B. Napoleon Brown was convicted of manslaughter, robbery and other crimes. He was sentenced to 42 years, and received two years of extra time after prison officials found heroin in his possession while incarcerated. He is currently at Solano State Prison. Lauren Hernandez and Dominic Fracassa is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: lauren.hernandez@sfchronicle.com, dfracassa@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @LaurenPorFavor As expected, Icelandic low-cost carrier WOW Air has filed schedule adjustments showing that it will drop its California service in 2019. Last week, we reported that WOW was moving ahead with a cost reduction plan that would remove the wide-body Airbus A330s from its fleet the ones it needs for longer routes like Reykjavik-San Francisco and Reykjavik-Los Angeles as it negotiated for investors at Indigo Partners to take an equity position in the company and provide it with up to $75 million in badly needed capital. Now Routesonline.com, which tracks all airline filings of schedule and route adjustments, says that WOW will end its LAX-Reykjavik service on January 23. The airline's seasonal San Francisco-Reykjavik service, which is currently in hiatus for the winter, was supposed to resume in April, but now it has been scrapped, the site said. Two weeks ago, WOW Air launched its longest international route, from Reykjavik to New Delhi, India (also flown with an A330). But according to Routesonline.com, the carrier will discontinue those flights as of January 22. WOW had said earlier that it would not resume seasonal service from Cincinnati and Cleveland in 2019, and that it would drop its St. Louis route in January. Other U.S. seasonal service that will not resume in 2019, Routesonline.com said, now includes WOW's flights to Reykjavik from Dallas/Ft. Worth and New York JFK. Its Vancouver-Reykjavik service will also end. The airline's routes from the eastern U.S. to Iceland including Chicago, Orlando, Detroit, Washington D.C., Pittsburgh and Boston are flown with single-aisle Airbus A321s. But it is also giving up four of those planes as part of its restructuring, so it remains to be seen if all those routes will survive. WOW Air has been involved in an intense rivalry with Icelandair over the past couple of years, and last month Icelandair had announced it was going to acquire WOW. But that plan quickly fell apart, and WOW turned to Indigo Partners (which owns Frotnier Airlines) for a deal instead. After WOW launched service out of Dallas/Ft. Worth, Icelandair and American Airlines both started competing service out of DFW. Now Routesonline is reporting that Icelandair will drop its DFW route effective in March 2019. Don't worry, you can still get to white-hot Iceland from from SFO nonstop on Icelandair. But time will tell how long those too-good-to-be-true low fares will last. Read all recent TravelSkills posts here Get twice-per-week updates from TravelSkills via email! Sign up here Chris McGinnis is the founder of TravelSkills.com. The author is solely responsible for the content above, and it is used here by permission. You can reach Chris at chris@travelskills.com or on Twitter @cjmcginnis. Knuffingen Airport in Hamburg, Germany is a busy place. More than 250 flights a day land and take off there. The curbside and terminals are always crowded, and its gigantic circular parking garage is constantly full. The airport is a technical masterpiece that took six years to build and cost 4 million euros. Just one thing: you'll never be able to arrive or depart at Knuffingen. It's the world's largest miniature model airport that is arguably the most fascinating among the many fascinating parts of the tourist hotspot Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg. (See the slideshow at the top of this post for a look at this mini-wonder.) The fictitious Knuffingen Airport is inspired by Hamburg Airport. All of the European airlines are well represented with Lufthansa having the most jets flying into, out of, or lumbering through this airport. The only United States carrier to fly to Knuffingen is United Airlines but we'll see what happens in the coming weeks since United announced it would cease its Newark, New Jersey-Hamburg flight for Summer 2019. If you've ever been to the attraction, you know it's a place to write home about or in this case, share lots of photos as you can see in our slideshow at the top of this post. Read all recent TravelSkills posts here Get twice-per-week updates from TravelSkills via email! Sign up here Chris McGinnis is the founder of TravelSkills.com. The author is solely responsible for the content above, and it is used here by permission. You can reach Chris at chris@travelskills.com or on Twitter @cjmcginnis. U.S. marshals arrested a 21-year-old fugitive in Texas for the Dec. 4 shooting of two teenagers in a marijuana sale gone wrong in Fremont, authorities said Wednesday. Law enforcement took Christian Lucas Kelling of Fremont into custody Dec. 12 after finding him at a home in Pflugerville, Texas, according to Fremont police. Kelling is accused of fatally shooting 17-year-old Damani Chadly and injuring a 19-year-old friend, causing the pairs car to crash into a home on the 34000 block of Torrington Court. Fremont police said Wednesday that Kelling was selling marijuana to Chadly and his friend when they began to argue. As the driver, who was not identified, left the scene, Kelling shot multiple times at the vehicle, police said. Investigators allegedly found marijuana packaged for sale in the victims car. Paramedics pronounced Chadly dead at the scene. The 19-year-old victim fled from the crash but was found by a resident not far from the wreck with non-life-threatening gunshot wounds. Eight minutes after the shooting, surveillance videos captured a 2013 Honda Civic linked to Kelling fleeing northbound on Fremont Boulevard, which authorities said was the closest route to the freeway from the crime scene. An Alameda County judge issued a warrant for Kellings arrest Dec. 12, and police said his Civic was found in San Leandro without license plates. The suspect allegedly went to Texas and showed up at his familys home in Pflugerville, where a vehicle with California license plates was located, said Lt. Mike Tegner, of the Fremont Police Department. U.S. marshals entered the familys home and found a loaded semi-automatic firearm, magazines, a sound suppressor, ammunition, a large sum of cash and what appeared to be marijuana. Kelling had planned to leave the country soon, authorities said. One of the ways we located him is that he had purchased a plane ticket for a flight out of Texas, an international flight, Tegner said. From that information we received, we were able to find the house associated with him. Kellings family did not know about the Fremont shooting, and he was uncooperative with investigators, police said. He is in the Travis County Correctional Complex in Texas, awaiting extradition back to California to appear in court, authorities said. Gwendolyn Wu is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: gwendolyn.wu@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @gwendolynawu We gained myriad new restaurants, bars, and attractions in San Francisco in 2018 Che Fico, Candytopia, Last Rites, to name a few. But, as things go particularly in this city, we also lost some important and respected businesses, media entities and concert venues. RELATED: Restaurants that closed in San Francisco in 2018 Some losses stung worse than others. The music community mourned news that Elbo Room, the lively dive with an upstairs concert area, would be torn down for condos at the end of the year; then they mourned again when Hemlock Tavern was to meet the same fate. Not all losses were tragic, though. A statue in Civic Center many saw as racist has been removed, while the city considers public displays honoring great women to place around the city. See more things we lost in San Francisco in 2018 in the gallery above. Alyssa Pereira is an SFGATE staff writer. Email her at apereira@sfchronicle.com or find her on Twitter at @alyspereira. WASHINGTON The Trump administration released an action plan Wednesday against devastating childhood exposure to lead, but critics said it held little new to protect millions of American children living with high levels of the metal. Children in at least 4 million American households are exposed to high levels of lead, including through old, chipped lead-based paint, or contaminated dust and soil, water and air, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A half-million children ages 5 or younger have blood-borne lead at levels that should trigger public-health intervention, the CDC said. KANSAS CITY, Mo. Kansas has agreed to pay $1.1 million to a man who spent 17 years in prison after being wrongfully convicted of a robbery that he says was committed by someone who looks just like him. Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt said Tuesday that a settlement was reached Monday with 42-year-old Richard Anthony Jones of Kansas City, Mo Schmidt said Jones is the first person to agree to a settlement payout under a new state law that provides compensation to people who are wrongly imprisoned. Two other mistaken conviction lawsuits are pending in Kansas. We are committed to faithfully administering the new mistaken-conviction statute the legislature enacted, Schmidt said in a news release. Eyewitness testimony sent Jones to prison for an attack and robbery in the parking lot of a Walmart in Roeland Park, Kan. No physical evidence linked Jones to the crime, and he always maintained his innocence. He was freed after supporters found evidence that another man who looked just like him lived near the Walmart. We are absolutely very happy by the result, said Tricia Bushnell, executive director of the Midwest Innocence Project, which helped represent Jones. This is why weve all worked so hard to get compensation in the state of Kansas. This will allow Richard to start to rebuild his life after the years that were taken, and that means a lot. His lawyers with the Midwest Innocence Project and the Paul E. Wilson Defender Project at the University of Kansas presented the other man at a June 2017 hearing. After the victim and witnesses withdrew their identification of Jones, Johnson County District Judge Kevin Moriarty ordered Jones release. While not saying the other man committed the crime, Moriarty found that based on the new evidence, no reasonable juror would have convicted Jones. The other man, known as Ricky, testified at the hearing that he did not commit the robbery. Under the settlement, Jones was granted a certificate of innocence and will receive counseling and health care through the state for two years. The settlement requires final approval by a state council. Heather Hollingsworth is an Associated Press writer. For nearly a decade, Bahia Amawi worked as a speech pathologist and therapist for children in the Pflugerville Independent School District, which includes schools in Austin. She was, to her knowledge, the only certified speech pathologist working for the district who spoke Arabic, which made her indispensable to children whose first language was Arabic. She had renewed her contract annually without incident. But this year, her contract came with an addendum: She was asked to affirm that she would not boycott Israel during the term of the contract. Amawi, 46, a Palestinian-American mother of four who has relatives in the occupied West Bank, said she did not consider herself an activist but avoided buying products from Israel. This is a personal choice, she said. Im always aware of the products and where they come from. Its just a habit of mine that when I purchase anything, I always like to see where its made. So she didnt sign, and her contract wasnt renewed. Now, Amawi is suing the school district and Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, in a case that has gained widespread attention. In the culture wars over free speech, battles over the right to boycott Israel are among the most contentious. Its an international issue, tangled up in U.S. politics and wrestled over at the state level and not just in Texas. Cases like Amawis are being litigated in several states. The policy preferences of a foreign country are taking precedence over the needs of Bahias students, who have benefited from her knowledge and her fluency in multiple languages, said Gadeir Abbas, a lawyer with the Council on American-Islamic Relations who is representing Amawi. The lawsuit is part of a broader debate over efforts to boycott, divest investments from, and place sanctions on Israel a movement known as B.D.S. Some supporters see the movement as a way to pressure Israel to end the occupation of the West Bank, provide full equality under the law to Palestinian citizens of Israel and grant a right of return to Palestinian refugees. But many opponents consider the movement anti-Semitic and see it as calling for the destruction of Israel. Anti-Israel policies are anti-Texas policies, and we will not tolerate such actions against an important ally, Gov. Greg Abbott said in a statement when he signed the bill into law in May 2017. The American Civil Liberties Union does not take a public position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But it has been challenging the state laws, one by one, on the basis of free speech and with lawsuits that are very similar to Amawis. In Kansas, for example, the American Civil Liberties Union represented another education contractor who lost work after refusing to promise that she would not participate in a boycott of Israel. In Arizona, the ACLU represented a lawyer who had a state contract to work with incarcerated people, and who did not want his purchases to support companies linked to Israel. In September, a federal court blocked the enforcement of that states law, too. Jacey Fortin is a New York Times writer. NEW YORK President Trump lashed out Wednesday at New York Democrats over their efforts to shut down his charitable foundation. Trump tweeted that his foundation has done great work and given away lots of money. New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood announced Tuesday that the foundation would dissolve while it fights a state lawsuit accusing it of illegally operating like an extension of Trumps businesses and political campaign. In response, Trump tweeted that Underwood does little else but rant, rave & politic against me. He called former state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman a sleazebag, and he complained that the states attorney general-elect, Letitia James, openly campaigned on a GET TRUMP agenda. Trump also criticized New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who wasnt involved in the lawsuit but praised it in a tweet. Will never be treated fairly by these people, he said, a total double standard of justice. Underwood and attorneys for the Trump foundation agreed Tuesday on a court-supervised process for shutting down the charity and distributing some $1.7 million in remaining funds to other nonprofit groups. Her office has also pursued a lawsuit that could bar the president and his three oldest children from the boards of other New York charities, The deal comes even as Trump continues to fight allegations he misused the foundations assets to resolve business disputes and boost his run for the White House. Underwoods lawsuit, filed last spring, alleges that Trump and his family illegally operated the foundation as an extension of his businesses and his presidential campaign. The attorney general said the foundation operated as little more than a checkbook to serve Mr. Trumps business and political interests. Nonprofit foundations are supposed to be devoted to charitable activities. But the attorney generals office has charged that the Trump Foundation was used to win political favor, accusing the foundation of virtually becoming an arm of the Trump campaign, with its campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, directing the foundation to make disbursements in Iowa only days before the state held its presidential nominating caucuses. Is there any way we can make some disbursements (from the proceeds of the fundraiser) this week while in Iowa? Specifically on Saturday, Lewandowski wrote to the foundations treasurer in an email disclosed in the lawsuit. Trump was required to sign annual filings with the Internal Revenue Service in which he attested that the foundation did not engage in political activity. New York Times contributed to this report. The school district and sheriffs office in the Florida county that is home to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School had no constitutional duty to protect the students there during the deadly February massacre, a federal judge has said in a ruling. The decision was made in the aftermath of a lawsuit filed by 15 students who said they suffered trauma during the Feb. 14 attack in Parkland, Florida. A total of 17 students and staff members lost their lives; 17 others were injured. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for Nikolas Cruz, 20, the former Stoneman Douglas student who is accused of opening fire at the school on Valentines Day. He has pleaded not guilty, but his lawyers have said he would plead guilty in exchange for a life sentence. The Dec. 12 ruling, by Judge Beth Bloom, came on the same day that a county judge, Patti Englander Henning, came to the opposite conclusion. Henning found that Scot Peterson, the armed sheriffs deputy who heard the gunfire but did not run in and try to stop the attack, did have an obligation to confront Cruz. The two decisions in rapid succession highlight an assumption often made: the belief that the public has a right to receive protection from police officers. But police officers, in fact, generally are not under any legal obligation to protect citizens who are not in their custody. Neither the Constitution, nor state law, impose a general duty upon police officers or other governmental officials to protect individual persons from harm even when they know the harm will occur, said Darren L. Hutchinson, a professor and associate dean at the University of Florida School of Law. Police can watch someone attack you, refuse to intervene and not violate the Constitution. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the government has only a duty to protect persons who are in custody, he pointed out. Courts have rejected the argument that students are in custody of school officials while they are on campus, Hutchinson said. Custody is narrowly confined to situations where a person loses his or her freedom to move freely and seek assistance on their own such as prisons, jails or mental institutions. There are exceptions, Hutchinson said, as when a crossing guard who is specifically assigned to protect children traveling across a street allows a child to get run over while, say, the guard is being distracted by a smartphone. The crossing guard is in a special relationship with the children, in legal eyes. When an officer has a special relationship with people, or acts to enhance the risk of harm, the officer can be liable for any resulting injury under state negligence laws, Hutchinson said. This is likely how Henning found that Peterson did have a duty to protect those inside the school and refused to dismiss the negligence lawsuit filed by Andrew Pollack, whose daughter Meadow was killed. The county lawsuit argued that Peterson had a special relationship with students and staff members at the school because he was specifically assigned to offer them protection. Video footage and other evidence shows Peterson, the only armed officer at the school, staying outside while shots could be heard exploding from inside the school. Peterson also launched a code red to put the entire school on lockdown. They also argued that he enhanced the risk of death, or injury, by Cruz by negligently ordering a lockdown, which prevented escape from the building, Hutchinson said. Either of these assertions could support liability for Peterson. But I would not be surprised if the state case was reversed on appeal. It is very difficult to establish liability in this area of law. The federal decision is expected to be appealed. A state commission that has been investigating the attack found last week that there was a multitude of failures on the part of the school and law enforcement officials in the response to the shooting. At least eight sheriffs deputies who raced to the school and heard gunshots stayed outside the building, the commission wrote in a 400-page draft report, and officers lost even more time scrambling to retrieve bulletproof vests from their cars. This article originally appeared in The New York Times WASHINGTON The Trump administration on Tuesday scrapped one of several requirements it recently added for releasing undocumented immigrant children from custody, hoping to speed up a process that has caused the number of youths in government care to skyrocket. Other measures imposed by the administration remain in place, however, as the number of immigrant children in U.S. custody approaches 15,000. Experts say those measures are resulting in children being detained for months instead of being turned over to relatives or other guardians in the U.S. Since June, the Department of Health and Human Services had been checking fingerprints of every adult in a home where an unaccompanied immigrant child might stay. The agency, which runs the vast shelter network that houses such children, reversed course Tuesday and said it will require only the adult seeking to care for a child to be fingerprinted. Fingerprinting other adults in guardians homes did little to promote child safety and slowed the process of releasing the children, the agency said. The procedural change alone should clear the way for more than 2,000 children to be released over the next few days, according to a Health and Human Services spokeswoman. She said those childrens cases were being held up only by fingerprinting requirement. The number of immigrant children in government custody has risen to record levels, even as the number of undocumented children arriving in the U.S. by themselves has remained consistent. The nearly 15,000 youths in custody have put the national shelter network for such children at 90 percent capacity. A group of Democratic lawmakers visited a tent camp over the weekend in Tornillo, Texas, that is housing thousands of children. Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley called it a prison camp in the desert. Texas Rep. Beto ORourke told reporters that many of the children had been there since the summer and could be released to sponsors if the process could be accelerated. The contract for the tent camp expires at the end of the year and has yet to be renewed, and it is not clear what Health and Human Services will do to accommodate the children being kept there. Fingerprinting all adults in a would-be guardians home was just one of several vetting measures that the Trump administration added in June. Most controversially, Health and Human Services is working with the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement to conduct its background checks. ICE has used that information to make nearly 200 arrests since the procedures went into effect. Roughly 80 percent of the homes seeking to sponsor the children include members who are undocumented. In the past, the government has not used information gathered during background checks to arrest them. But since July, ICE has arrested 170 undocumented immigrants who came forward as part of this process, nearly two-thirds of whom had no criminal record, The Chronicle first reported. Health and Human Services said Tuesday that the sponsors will continue to be fingerprinted and have background checks conducted. The individuals information will still be checked against Homeland Security databases. Homeland Security and ICE did not respond to requests for comment about how that information will be used. Members of Congress including Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., have proposed legislation that would prohibit ICE from using information uncovered in the sponsor process for routine immigration enforcement. The New York branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, which has sued over the policy, praised the administrations decision to scale back on the fingerprinting requirement. This major reversal should help speed up the process to reunite children with their families and protect family members from the risk of deportation, said Executive Director Donna Lieberman. The changes to the fingerprint policy created massive and unnecessary backlogs for the release of detained migrant children, adding weeks and months while their family members waded through bureaucratic delays. Tal Kopan is The San Francisco Chronicles Washington correspondent. Email: tal.kopan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @talkopan SAN FRANCISCO (BCN) A federal grand jury has returned a superceding indictment in a case in which three men are charged with conspiring to murder a man in East Oakland in 2016, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office. The indictment filed in federal court in San Francisco on Tuesday alleges that Marcus Etienne conspired with Mario Robinson and Burte Gucci Rhodes to murder 28-year-old Trince Thibodeaux of Los Gatos in the 8900 block of International Boulevard at about 10:15 p.m. on March 22, 2016, prosecutors said. The indictment alleges that Rhodes, 37, of Oakland, shot and killed Thibodeaux and was promised $5,000 was promised in exchange for the murder. Prosecutors said the indictment charges Etienne, who's also known as "Hitler," Robinson, 35 of Oakland, and Rhodes, who's also known as "Moeshawn," with murder-for-hire, a number of firearm and drug distribution offenses and related crimes. Etienne, 37, of Opelousas, Louisiana, and Robinson also are charged with racketeering conspiracy, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office. The superseding indictment amends racketeering, murder and conspiracy charges originally filed against Etienne, Robinson, and other defendants on Feb. 16, 2017, and updated on Aug. 3, 2017. Prosecutors say the charges stem from a multi-state marijuana trafficking organization and the murder of Thibodeaux. They say the indictment alleges that Etienne ran an enterprise consisting of more than five members who conducted a continuing and extensive narcotics conspiracy and criminal organization that distributed marijuana from California to Louisiana and Texas. Etienne and Robinson also are charged with racketeering conspiracy and being part of an enterprise referred to in the indictment as the "Etienne Enterprise" that's based in St. Martin Parish, Louisiana. The U.S. Attorney's Office alleges that the Etienne Enterprise engaged in narcotics distribution, assault, robbery, extortion, extortionate collection of extensions of credit, murder for hire, murder, money laundering, illegal firearms possession and obstruction of justice. Prosecutors said a gambling operation through a large-scale dog-fighting ring was among the activities of the racketeering conspiracy. They allege that the racketeering conspiracy existed since Jan. 7, 2013, and its members operated in Louisiana, Northern California, Texas and elsewhere. Etienne and Robinson already were on custody based on the previous indictments and Rhodes was arrested Dec. 5 on a federal arrest warrant, according to prosecutors. The case is assigned to U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco. Copyright 2018 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. SAN JOSE The San Jose City Council today approved the construction of two "tiny home" communities to house unsheltered individuals over the next two years. The Emergency Bridge Housing, or EBC, will be located at Mabury Road near the Berryessa BART station and near the U.S. Highway 101 and Interstate Highway 680 interchange near Felipe Avenue. The cabins are expected to house about 320 individuals while transitioning at least 240 into permanent housing, according to city officials, who are currently in the process of negotiating a lease agreement with Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority and Caltrans. Habitat for Humanity EastBay/Silicon Valley will oversee the development of both sites, which will each include 40 cabins, community space, restrooms and showers. The city said construction and operation and services by HomeFirst are expected to cost about $7 million annually. Similar structures, like "Tough Sheds" have also popped up in other Bay Area cities, including Oakland and San Francisco. Residents of the temporary homes have offered mixed responses, including concerns about security and excessive police presence. The City Council's decision is ultimately a temporary fix, and includes collaboration with landowners to research additional emergency housing sites, such as unused industrial land or parking lots. In September, Hope Village received a short-term lease for a fenced-off tent village near Mineta San Jose International Airport after facing a threat of removal. The lease prevents law enforcement from doing a sweep, and is among a new crop of emergency measures from the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors and the city to mitigate an escalating homelessness crisis in the South Bay. According to a federal housing department study released today, the San Jose/Santa Clara County area has the fifth-largest homeless population in the country, with New York City first and Los Angeles city and county second. About 75 percent of 7,254 homeless individuals and families in the area are unsheltered, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The San Jose City Council most recently declared a shelter crisis on Nov. 27, 2018, preceded by three others beginning in 2015. The city housing department predicts the crisis will continue through Jan. 1, 2022. A pastor this evening announced that a record 157 people died on the streets of Santa Clara County between Dec. 1, 2017, and Nov. 30, 2018, according to a public records request he made to the medical examiner's office. The previous record was about 135, Rev. Scott Wagers said. The numbers this past year surprised him because so much attention has been given to homelessness recently, he said. Copyright 2018 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. SAN FRANCISCO (BCN) A former attorney for a tenancy advocacy group was acquitted today of murder in a 2015 fatal stabbing of a street vendor in downtown San Francisco. A jury found Carlos Argueta, 35, not guilty of murder in the Sept. 3, 2015, slaying of James Thomas, 61, near Market and Sixth streets. Argueta also faced a robbery charge, but that charge was dismissed mid-trial. Upon hearing the verdict, Argueta, who remained free on bail during the trial, broke down in tears. Outside of court, Public Defender Jeff Adachi, who represented Argueta during the trial, said surveillance video shown during the trial helped prove to jurors the stabbing was accidental. "Video evidence is extremely important otherwise it's he said she said," Adachi said. "This is a situation where Carlos did everything he could to deescalate the situation." Today's verdict closes the case on a three-year legal battle for Argueta. In 2016, a judge dismissed charges against Argueta and his co-defendant Pascal Krummenacher. However in 2017, a grand jury recharged Argueta but not Krummenacher. "There's just so many emotions, but I guess I'm glad I have my life back now after three years. I thought I had it back when it was dismissed the first time," Argueta said outside of court. "I'm not sure what my next step is going to be but I don't want to stop practicing law. I want to keep helping people." According to prosecutor Adam Maldonado, the stabbing occurred after Krummenacher and Argueta, both heavily intoxicated, left the now-closed Showdown Bar on Sixth Street. The pair was celebrating Krummenacher's completion of his internship with the Eviction Defense Collaborative, where Argueta worked as an attorney. Immediately after leaving the bar, Krummenacher allegedly mistakenly took a red bag from Thomas. Thomas, a complete stranger to the pair, was selling items on the sidewalk. When Thomas confronted Krummenacher about the stolen bag, a fight quickly ensued between Thomas, Thomas' friends, Krummenacher and Argueta. Although Thomas was able to retrieve his bag at one point during the melee, the fight continued and at another point, Krummenacher grabbed the bag away from Thomas and disappeared. According to Adachi, Argueta armed himself with a 3.5-inch butterfly knife for self-defense. Although the fight appeared to have ended, Argueta stayed at the scene to look for his own bag, which had disappeared during the scuffle. Thomas, however, then punched Argueta, striking him in the ear. In a knee-jerk reaction, Argueta pushed Thomas away with the knife in his hand, ultimately stabbing him. The knife grazed his lung and punctured his heart, according to Maldonado. After the stabbing, several bystanders confronted Argueta, but Argueta retreated into a nearby restaurant and waited for police. Thomas was taken to San Francisco General Hospital where he died from his injuries. Krummenacher, a law student who was visiting from Switzerland, did not appear at the trial. In the months leading up to the trial, Adachi filed a motion to disqualify Judge Ethan Schulman from the case alleging that in previous cases Schulman had expressed bias against Latinos, exhibited racial insensitivity and showed a preference for the prosecution. Although the motion to dismiss Schulman was dismissed, Judge Samuel Feng presided over the new trial. Adachi also filed a motion to dismiss Argueta's charges altogether, alleging prosecutorial misconduct by prosecutor Andrew Ganz. Ganz had been accused of six counts of misconduct connected to an unrelated 2012 murder case he worked on as a Solano County prosecutor. Ganz was found culpable of four of the six counts of misconduct, but the motion to dismiss the charges against Argueta was denied. Copyright 2018 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. SAN FRANCISCO (BCN) A federal judge will hear arguments in San Francisco today on whether he should continue to block President Donald Trump's restriction on asylum applications from immigrants at the southern U.S. border. The measure, issued in a proclamation by Trump on Nov. 9, would allow asylum applications only from people who enter the United States at official entry points at the border with Mexico. U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar will consider a motion by four refugee assistance groups for a preliminary injunction that, if granted, would remain in effect until a full trial is held. Tigar previously issued a temporary restraining order against the restriction on Nov. 20 and a federal appeals court refused to stay that order in a ruling filed on Dec. 7. The four plaintiff groups, led by the Berkeley-based East Bay Sanctuary Covenant, say the measure violates a federal law that allows applications from people who enter the United States at any point, "whether or not at a designated port of arrival." They also say some asylum seekers hoping for refuge from persecution don't know the locations of designated entry points or have lengthy waits in dangerous conditions at those points. The U.S. Department of Justice contends the restriction is needed to assure an orderly asylum claim process and deter dangerous and illegal border crossings. In another development, the Department of Justice has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stay Tigar's temporary restraining order. Copyright 2018 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. SAN FRANCISCO (BCN) A federal judge in San Francisco said this morning he will decide by the end of the day today whether to issue a preliminary injunction that would continue blocking a partial asylum ban by President Donald Trump. U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar last month issued a temporary restraining order halting the ban, but that order will expire at midnight. Four refugee assistance groups led by the East Bay Sanctuary Covenant asked Tigar at a hearing today to convert the temporary order to a longer-lasting preliminary injunction, which would continue until the case is resolved by a trial or a summary judgment. The partial ban, issued in a proclamation by Trump on Nov. 9, would allow asylum applications only from people who enter the U.S. at official entry points at the border with Mexico. U.S. Department of Justice attorneys contend the restriction is needed to assure an orderly asylum claim process and deter dangerous and illegal border crossings. The refugee groups say the restriction violates a federal law that allows asylum applications from people who enter the country at any points, "whether or not at a designated port of arrival." On another track in the same case, the Justice Department has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stay the temporary restraining order while the case proceeds through the court system. Copyright 2018 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. SAN JOSE (BCN) The San Jose public library system donated over 6,000 English and Spanish books today for an annual toy drive this week, amounting to the charity's largest single donation this year. Sacred Heart Community Service this year has a goal of collecting 18,600 toys for 6,200 children. With the library's donation, the charity will be able to include two toys, a stocking stuffer and a new book in each gift. "We know that children who use libraries and own books in the home are more likely to achieve literacy and have greater success in school," Jill Bourne, director of city libraries said in a news release. "We want every child to experience these gifts during the holiday season and throughout the year." Today was also the last day of Sacred Heart's holiday food distribution to give community members 50 pound-boxes of food with a turkey, ham or chicken. Through both Thanksgiving and the Christmas seasons, the charity said it served 7,400 families. Sacred Heart is still working toward its gift goal and residents interested in making a donation can drop off most-needed items, like gifts for teens, Legos and action figures, at 1381 S. First St. in San Jose. Copyright 2018 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. SAN FRANCISCO (BCN) A man accused of fatally stabbing a 16-year-old boy as the boy filmed a street fight earlier this month near San Francisco's Excelsior District remains hospitalized for injuries he suffered that night, his attorney said today. Sergio Rocha, 38, has been charged with murder for the Dec. 1 fatal stabbing of Josue Mejia-Sanchez. Although Rocha has undergone two surgeries and remains in the intensive care unit, he was arraigned on Monday at the hospital and pleaded not guilty, according to Public Defender Elizabeth Camacho. Today, Camacho called Mejia-Sanchez's death tragic, but said in a statement that Rocha "is an innocent victim who suffered a serious attack on his life by a number of unidentified assailants. "One measure of this is that Mr. Rocha stayed on the scene of his attack, awaiting police and medical care. By contrast, the still-unknown assailants fled the scene in a car," she said. According to court documents, the incident began when Rocha and his friend, a 48-year-old man, were walking near Mission Street and two younger males allegedly attacked Rocha's friend, prompting a fistfight between Rocha's friend and one of the unidentified aggressors. As the two were rolling on the ground and exchanging blows, more young males began to surrounded them, including Mejia-Sanchez, who was now filming the fight with his phone, prosecutors said. Rocha, armed with a knife, then pushed another member of the group back and allegedly plunged the knife into the neck of an unsuspecting Mejia-Sanchez. Afterward, Rocha allegedly began swinging the knife at other members of the group. One of the young males, however, stabbed Rocha in the chest while another hurled a beer bottle at Rocha's head, causing Rocha to collapse and hit his head on concrete. Rocha's friend was able to come to his aid and pull him up and the two fled to a restaurant near Geneva Avenue and Mission Street. Around this time, the group of young assailants who appeared to be friends of Mejia-Sanchez loaded the injured teen into a car and dropped him off at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, but he was already dead. Emergency personnel responded to the restaurant where Rocha and his friend allegedly fled to and transported them to Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, where Rocha underwent surgery for his injuries. After his surgery, court documents said, investigators confronted him about Mejia-Sanchez's killing with video surveillance from the area. Rocha allegedly initially denied having a knife, but later admitted to it. He said didn't intend to hurt anyone. The involved young men have yet to come forward and have not been identified. Rocha is scheduled for a hearing Jan. 10, 2019. Copyright 2018 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. FREMONT (BCN) A Fremont man has been arrested and charged with murder for the fatal shooting of a 17-year-old San Ramon high school student in a marijuana deal gone wrong in Fremont two weeks ago, police said today. Christian Kelling, 21, was selling marijuana to Damani Chadly and Chadly's 19-year-old friend in the 34000 block of Torrington Court in Fremont's Northgate neighborhood shortly after 11:15 p.m. on Dec. 4 when a dispute occurred that prompted Kelling to fire several rounds into the vehicle that Chadly and his friend were traveling in, according to Fremont police Lt. Mike Tegner. Chadly and his friend were struck multiple times and Chadly was pronounced dead at the scene at 11:35 p.m. that night, police said. Chadly's 19-year-old friend was transported to a hospital to be treated for his injuries but was later released. Marijuana packaged for sales was located during a search of the victims' vehicle, police said. Tegner said a search of Fremont's community cameras revealed that about eight minutes after the shooting, a 2013 Honda Civic associated with Kelling was captured traveling north on Fremont Boulevard at Enea Court, which he said is the most direct route from the shooting scene to the nearest freeway. After collecting evidence, conducting witness interviews and continuing to investigate the case, detectives developed probable cause to believe Kelling was the primary suspect in the shooting, Tegner said. A no-bail warrant for the arrest of Kelling on charges of murder and attempted murder was signed by a judge and he was arrested by a U.S. Marshals team at a home in Pflugerville, Texas, at about 5:30 p.m. on Dec. 12. During a search of the home, investigators located a loaded semi-automatic firearm, additional magazines, a sound suppressor, ammunition, a large quantity of cash and suspected marijuana, according to Tegner. Detectives learned that Kelling had arrived at the residence unannounced two days after the shooting and that he had been making plans to flee the country, Tegner said. When authorities talked to the home's residents, they denied any knowledge or ownership of the items that were found there, according to Tegner. The Alameda County District Attorney's Office on Tuesday charged Kelling with murder and attempted murder. Tegner said Kelling is expected to be transported to Alameda County soon to be arraigned on those charges. Chadly was a senior at California High School in San Ram0n, according to a GoFundMe campaign that seeks to raise $35,000 for Chadly's family. The campaign at https://www.gofundme.com/support-kareem-as-he-mourns-the-loss-of-his-son had raised $9,515 as of late this morning. The campaign's website says, "We are devastated by the tragic loss of Damani, also known as Elijah. Please support his father, Radio Reem (Kareem) at this difficult time as he mourns the death of his only child." The site says, "Both Damani and his dad Kareem are cherished members of the Youth Radio and Bay Area Media Community." It says Damani Chadly was "always full of life and bustling energy" and describes him as "a vibrant and talented young man who was a part of the fabric of our life and work." The website says, "Damani was not only an impressive artist and welcoming person, but he was also an outstanding student, musician, and friend." Copyright 2018 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. The Sonoma County Board of Supervisors this morning announced a $3 million settlement of a federal excessive force civil lawsuit filed by the family of 13-year-old Andy Lopez, who was fatally shot by a county sheriff's deputy in 2013. The board unanimously approved the settlement in a closed-door session. County Counsel Bruce Goldstein said the county did not admit liability or fault in Lopez's death on Oct. 22, 2013. Lopez, 13, was shot seven times by Deputy Erick Gelhaus, now a sergeant, as he walked along Moorland Avenue south of Santa Rosa with a pellet gun that was designed to look like an AK-47 assault rifle. Gelhaus said he believed the rifle was real and the barrel raised upward as Lopez turned toward him. Goldstein said the plaintiffs and defendants in the suit evaluated the risk of going to trial and agreed the settlement was best for the Lopez family, the Sonoma County Sheriff's Office and the county. A Yemeni mother is receiving a visa waiver that will allow her to see her 2-year-old son clinging to life at an Oakland hospital after previously being unable to come to the U.S. because of President Donald Trump's travel ban applying to mostly Muslim-majority countries. The Sacramento Valley chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations announced this morning that Shaima Swileh, who is currently in Egypt, will be able to come see her son Abdullah, who has a genetic brain condition that is worsening and is being treated at UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital. Doctors have told the family that the boy's body won't withstand life support much longer. Abdullah's father, Ali Hassan of Stockton, joined CAIR and other civil rights and religious leaders for a news conference in Sacramento on Monday to call on the Trump administration to grant a waiver for Swileh. Tech firm founder Marc Benioff and his wife Lynne have given a $15 million gift to UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital Oakland to address a shortage in mental health services for children in the East Bay. University of California at San Francisco announced the gift today and said it is the final piece of a $50 million commitment the Benioffs made to the hospital in 2014. Marc Benioff is the founder and chairman of the San Francisco-based cloud computing company Salesforce. The funds will enhance current mental health programs at the hospital, including by increasing the number of providers on staff. The money is expected to allow an additional 5,000 psychiatric visits per year, twice the hospital's current capacity, UCSF officials said. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suicide is now the second leading cause of death for adolescents worldwide. State Treasurer John Chiang and other officials today launched a new program aimed at helping people with disabilities save more money and take steps to become more financially independent. Speaking at a packed event at the Ed Roberts Campus in Berkeley, Chiang said the program, which is called CalABLE, allows people with disabilities to save up to $15,000 per year and up to a total of $529,000 and still maintain benefits such as CalFresh and Medi-Cal. He said people with disabilities who want to keep their Supplemental Security Income (SSI) can save up to $15,000 a year and up to a total of $100,000. Previously, people with disabilities risked losing their public benefits if they saved more than $2,000 per year. The Decennial Census is looming in April 2020, and a new question about citizenship is fueling concerns that Contra Costa County could lose out on federal funding over the following decade if hard-to-count populations like undocumented immigrants are left out. Renters, young children, adults ages 18 to 24 and people who move more than once in a year are also difficult to count for the purposes of the census, according to county staff who presented a report on the issue at today's Board of Supervisors meeting in Martinez. Each person that gets left off of the final tally will cost the county an estimated $2,000 annually in federal funding. If the final tally is off by 5 percent, staff estimates it will cost the county $1.1 billion over 10 years. The citizenship question has been challenged in a lawsuit filed by California's attorney general, but that matter is expected to go to trial next year and has not yet been resolved. In an effort to ensure that every resident of Contra Costa County is included in the census count, the board is organizing an outreach plan using $362,605 in funding from the state. San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera sued an array of prescription drug makers and distributors today, accusing them of fraudulent practices and creation of a public nuisance in contributing to the opioid epidemic. The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco on behalf of the city of San Francisco and the state of California. It is expected to be transferred to federal court in Ohio, where U.S. District Judge Dan Polster of Cleveland is coordinating more than 1,200 similar lawsuits filed nationwide by cities, counties, states, Native American tribes and other groups. The San Francisco lawsuit accuses drug makers such as Purdue Pharma of misleading doctors and patients about the dangers of pain-killing opioid drugs such as OxyContin, oxycodone and fentanyl. It accuses wholesalers such as San Francisco-based McKesson Corp. of failing to effectively monitor and report suspicious sales of the drugs as required by state and federal laws. A Southern California woman who was killed in a hit-and-run crash early Monday morning has been identified as 29-year-old Nicole Stanton of San Dimas, according to the Santa Clara County medical examiner's office. Stanton was a caregiver at the nonprofit Visiting Angels in Glendora, working with senior citizens in the San Gabriel Valley. She had begun working at Visiting Angels in October, according to the nonprofit, and was married with two young children. Stanton was crossing North First and East Rosemary streets at 12:46 a.m. Monday when she was hit by a vehicle, according to police. Officers are searching for the driver involved in the crash, but have not yet released a description of the suspect or the vehicle. A woman who was hit and killed by a car Saturday evening in San Jose has been identified as 50-year-old Joan Crowley, according to the Santa Clara County medical examiner's office. Crowley was walking across an uncontrolled intersection at 6:12 p.m. when she was hit by a 2018 Porsche traveling east on Quito Road at Northlawn Drive. Police said the woman was taken to a hospital, where she was pronounced dead shortly afterward. The woman driving the Porsche remained at the scene and cooperated with police, who don't believe drugs or alcohol were factors in the fatal crash. Crowley was the 21st pedestrian fatality on San Jose streets in 2018 One person died in a collision between a passenger vehicle and a box truck in Union City early this morning, police said. The collision was reported at 4:21 a.m. at the intersection of Whipple Road and Dyer Street. The passenger vehicle's driver was taken to a hospital and died there, according to police. The driver's identity is not yet being released. The truck driver remained at the scene and is cooperating with investigators. No other information about the crash was immediately released. Petaluma police are investigating a pair of deaths in the city on back-to-back days that they believe could be opioid overdose deaths. The first was reported at 11:11 a.m. Sunday when the roommate of a 19-year-old Petaluma man contacted police saying he was not responding to requests to open the door at a residence in the 800 block of Lakeville Circle. Police said they forced entry into the room and found the man without a pulse. Officers and paramedics attempted CPR, but he died. The man's name is not being released. The second death was reported at about 4:45 a.m. Monday when police were dispatched to the 100 block of Magnolia Avenue for a report of a possible drug overdose. Police said the drug Narcan was administered to try to reverse the effects of an opioid overdose and CPR was attempted, but the man, a 67-year-old Petaluma resident, also died. A 35-year-old gibbon who was moved last month to Santa Barbara from the Oakland Zoo died suddenly on Sunday from a previously unknown medical condition, zoo officials said today. Nikko, a white-handed gibbon, showed a decrease in appetite in the last two weeks at the Santa Barbara Zoo and died while en route to veterinary internal medicine specialists. A necropsy found a suspected cancerous mass in the upper abdomen and abnormalities in both kidneys and the liver, although confirmation on his cause of death is pending tests that will take two to four weeks, according to the zoo. Nikko had spent 32 years at the Oakland Zoo but became increasingly quiet after his mate died in January. After a search for a new mate in Oakland, the zoo decided to move him to Santa Barbara to live with a 40-year-old female gibbon and a 4-year-old adolescent female gibbon. Nikko's body will be returned to the Oakland Zoo, per the zoo's request, to be buried. Copyright 2018 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. Sonoma County Sheriff Rob Giordano this afternoon said he hopes today's $3 million settlement in an excessive use of force lawsuit regarding a deputy's fatal shooting of a 13-year-old boy will help bring healing to the teen's family and the community. Deputy Erick Gelhaus shot Andy Lopez seven times on Oct. 22, 2013, as Lopez walked down Moorland Avenue south of Santa Rosa with a pellet gun that was designed to look like an AK-47 rifle. Gelhaus said he believed the gun was real and the barrel of the pellet rifle rose upward as Lopez turned toward him when he told him to drop the rifle. "It's been a difficult road for the Lopez family, the sheriff's office, the community and the deputy. The bottom line is a 13-year-old died," Giordano said. "The deputy was cleared of all wrongdoing and I understand why he did what he did. The sad part is people across the nation are hurt or killed because of fake weapons. Don't buy them, and if you have them, get rid of them." Giordano said. The excessive force lawsuit Lopez's family filed against the county and Gelhaus alleged Gelhaus violated the Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable search and seizure by using excessive force. The county and Gelhaus claimed his use of force was reasonable under the circumstances. The trial was scheduled to begin this summer in federal court in San Francisco. County Counsel Bruce Goldstein said the plaintiffs and defendants agreed to a settlement rather than risk a trial and the settlement was best for all parties involved. The county did not admit liability or wrongdoing, Goldstein said. Giordano, who finishes his term as sheriff this month, said since the Lopez shooting, the sheriff's office has adopted more realistic training that includes a simulator of similar situations. Giordano said there is no way to de-escalate a deadly threat with a weapon that fires as quickly as an assault rifle. "Sadly, there will be another replica weapon shooting in this country," Giordano said. Efforts to ban the sale of fake guns are not working and society has to buy into a ban and do it themselves, Giordano said. The sheriff's office also improved community engagement programs and its communication in person and on social media after the Lopez shooting, Giordano said. The Lopez family's attorney Arnoldo Casillas did not return emails or phone calls for comment today. Copyright 2018 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. SAN FRANCISCO (BCN) San Francisco supervisors voted six to one today on a charter amendment to let voters decide during next year's November election whether to extend City College of San Francisco's free tuition program through the next decade. In 2017, San Francisco became the nation's first city to make community college free, implementing a two-year pilot program in the fall of that year, set to expire after the 2019 spring semester. Most supervisors supported the charter amendment during today's special meeting, with the exception of Supervisor Catherine Stefani who voted against it. Supervisors Malia Cohen, Sandra Lee Fewer and Hillary Ronen were not present. Under the new measure, the city would put aside $15 million annually for the program and extend it through 2030. Funding for the current pilot program came from 2016's Proposition W, which raised the real estate transfer tax on properties of more than $5 million. Voters approved Prop W by 61.8 percent. During a rally ahead of today's meeting, outgoing Supervisor Jane Kim, who has been leading the free tuition effort, said that in addition to extending the program through the next decade, the charter amendment would allow for more generous stipends to help low-income students pay for textbooks and other costly supplies. "This is a program that takes in any of our residents whether you're a high school student trying to take on additional classes to prepare for college or whether you're a mid-career adult looking to re-up on skills or advance or to switch careers," Kim said. "This is an institution that is for everyone and that is why this is something so important for our city to invest in." Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, who cosponsored the legislation and is a former City College board of trustees member, said, "City College needs certainty around this program and that's why it's so important to have this charter amendment on the ballot." The Free City College Program has been lauded by former presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, who has called for the city's program to become a national model. "We promised the voters when they passed Proposition W, that the money would go primarily to City College and our students. We promised the students that they could get an education with free tuition. We keep our promises at City College," Thea Selby, City College board of trustees member, said. Copyright 2018 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. Today is the second and last day of a toy drive for East Bay children and children affected by the fire that burned Paradise, organizers said. From 3 p.m. to 8 p.m., donations from the public will be taken at the office of the Service Employees International Union Local 1021 at 100 Oak St. in Oakland. The union is organizing the drive. "As workers at public agencies, local nonprofits, schools and more, we see the needs of so many families at this time," SEIU 1021 member Angel Valdez said in a statement. "We wanted to get together and bring them some holiday cheer." Valdez works at La Clinica de La Raza, a healthcare provider in Oakland. A pedestrian has died in a collision with a vehicle in the unincorporated Contra Costa County community of El Sobrante, according to preliminary information from the California Highway Patrol. The collision was reported at about 6:10 p.m. Tuesday at Hilltop Drive and El Centro Road. A federal judge will hear arguments in San Francisco today on whether he should continue to block President Donald Trump's restriction on asylum applications from immigrants at the southern U.S. border. The measure, issued in a proclamation by Trump on Nov. 9, would allow asylum applications only from people who enter the United States at official entry points at the border with Mexico. U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar will consider a motion by four refugee assistance groups for a preliminary injunction that, if granted, would remain in effect until a full trial is held. Tigar previously issued a temporary restraining order against the restriction on Nov. 20 and a federal appeals court refused to stay that order in a ruling filed on Dec. 7. The four plaintiff groups, led by the Berkeley-based East Bay Sanctuary Covenant, say the measure violates a federal law that allows applications from people who enter the United States at any point, "whether or not at a designated port of arrival." San Francisco supervisors have voted on a charter amendment to let voters decide during next year's November election whether to extend City College of San Francisco's free tuition program through the next decade. The vote, which six supported and one opposed, was taken Tuesday. In 2017, San Francisco became the nation's first city to make community college free, implementing a two-year pilot program in the fall of that year, set to expire after the 2019 spring semester. Most supervisors supported the charter amendment during Tuesday's special meeting, with the exception of Supervisor Catherine Stefani who voted against it. Supervisors Malia Cohen, Sandra Lee Fewer and Hillary Ronen were not present. Under the new measure, the city would put aside $15 million annually for the program and extend it through 2030. Funding for the current pilot program came from 2016's Proposition W, which raised the real estate transfer tax on properties of more than $5 million. Voters approved Prop W by 61.8 percent. Sonoma County Sheriff Rob Giordano has said he hopes a $3 million settlement in an excessive use of force lawsuit regarding a deputy's fatal shooting of a 13-year-old boy will help bring healing to the teen's family and the community. Giordano made the statement Tuesday, the day of the settlement. Deputy Erick Gelhaus shot Andy Lopez seven times on Oct. 22, 2013, as Lopez walked down Moorland Avenue south of Santa Rosa with a pellet gun that was designed to look like an AK-47 rifle. Gelhaus said he believed the gun was real and the barrel of the pellet rifle rose upward as Lopez turned toward him when he told him to drop the rifle. "It's been a difficult road for the Lopez family, the sheriff's office, the community and the deputy. The bottom line is a 13-year-old died," Giordano said. "The deputy was cleared of all wrongdoing and I understand why he did what he did. The sad part is people across the nation are hurt or killed because of fake weapons. Don't buy them, and if you have them, get rid of them." Giordano said. A Tesla Model S car caught on fire at an auto shop in Los Gatos and fortunately no one was injured, Santa Clara County fire officials reported. The vehicle had been towed to the parking lot of the auto shop in the 500 block of University Avenue at about 2 p.m. Tuesday after the owner got a flat tire on state Highway 17, according to fire Capt. Bill Murphy. The car was in the parking lot for about ten minutes when a witness heard a loud noise, smelled smoke and found the car was on fire, Murphy said. Firefighters arrived and quickly contained the flames to the front portion of the car in the hood area, according to Murphy. The flames did not reach the auto shop and firefighters remained on the scene to cool the car's batteries. The cause of the fire is currently under investigation. An Alameda County prosecutor told jurors that if they focus on the evidence they will agree with him that an ex-convict is guilty of murder for the fatal shooting of another man in Oakland two years ago. In his closing argument Tuesday in the trial of Patrick Dempsey, 41, prosecutor Butch Ford said witness statements and physical evidence show that Dempsey killed 27-year-old Spencer Reboredo in the 900 block of 35th Street, near a Chevron gas station, at about 4:15 a.m. on July 14, 2016, because he was upset at Reboredo for taking his van. Ford accused defense attorney Megan Burns of trying to get jurors to engage in "speculation" by saying that she thinks Reboredo was killed by another man, not by Dempsey. Ford alleged that Burns "is distracting you from the evidence" and told jurors to "focus on the evidence." Burns said Dempsey "lacked a motive" to kill Reboredo because he had sufficient cash to buy several vans, so he wouldn't have been overly upset at Reboredo for borrowing his van and refusing to return it. A pedestrian was struck and killed by a vehicle in Fremont late Tuesday night, according to police. The collision occurred around 10:05 p.m. at the intersection of Fremont Boulevard and Grimmer Road, police said. Fremont Fire Department crews pronounced the pedestrian dead at the scene. The driver of the vehicle remained at the scene, police said. No further information is immediately available. Copyright 2018 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. Stand Alone is a term that was used a lot during the discussion on the power of the President to dissolve parliament. The issue was whether the clause preventing dissolution until Parliament completes four and a half years supersedes the surreptitiously inserted clause permitting dissolution. That insertion was pernicious as was the entire 19th Amendment, clearly introduced for partisan purposes by the chief architects, meaning representatives of the United National Party and the Tamil National Alliance (Jayampathy Wickramaratne and M.A. Sumanthiran respectively). That the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) voted for it should be noted and seen as an example of political puerility. Well, thats been resolved by the Supreme Court. At the end of the day, much heartache was caused to die-hard UNPers thinly disguised as born-again democrats. They are cured now and the chances are that they will retire their democratic urges until the partys political future is next threatened. There were positives. The notion of a national government, in effect rather than in constitutional edict, was sorted out. The UNP plus the Sri Lanka Musilm Congress will not add up to national government. So, although the national government clause was inserted (against surreptitiously and against the grain of good governance as well as rhetoric regarding cabinet size), the cabinet will be limited to 30. Secondly, the post of Leader of the Opposition went to the true Opposition instead of a staunch pro-government adjunct, the TNA, that is currently a tail wagging the dog as the adage goes. Theres a third positive. Its a positive that might jog the memories of retired leftists whove found lucrative positions in the NGO industry, have long since forgotten class struggle, have no qualms about being quiet on capitalism and would love people to believe that the UNP is the vanguard of the democratic revolution. Simply, Maithripala Sirisena is the first President of the country to actually speak up against neoliberalism. His word? Well! But thats a different matter. Its a small positive, thats it. The talk now is about the Executive Presidency. Thats where the stand alone matter comes into play. People talk about the Executive Presidency as the Mother of All Anti-Democratic Evils. Make no mistake, theres nothing angelic about the executive presidency. On the other hand, we need to remember that it is not the only evil around. And, as evil goes, it has its redeeming features, especially with respect to what I consider the most pernicious piece of legislation to follow J.R. Jayewardenes constitutional tinkering exercise, i.e. the 13th Amendment. The people of this country were conspicuously absent(ed) in that process. It was thrust down our throats to resolve a mis-defined conflict and (partially, according to some, including the aggrieved) exaggerated grievances. And today, ladies and gentlemen (especially those chest-beating democrats who came out of the woodwork recently), no one seems to really care about Provincial Councils. Six PCs are effectively non-functional. The terms of three more will expire in a few months. Not even the TNA, a party that wants more than what the 13th gave by way of devolution, doesnt appear to mind the current state of affairs. As for the people, they have not uttered one word of concern. Ideally, the people should have the opportunity to state their opinion of this lot in a General Election. This side of such an eventuality, it is appropriate to point out the danger of constitutional tinkering by this Parliament That said, the 13th is still a part of the Constitution. This is where the 20th Amendment (which proposes to abolish the Executive Presidency) comes into play. The executive president is a key part of the 13th Amendment because it carries the safeguards against moves by provinces to break away. Any move to abolish the executive presidency that does not at the same time address the impact of such an amendment to the operationalising of the 13th is erroneous and irresponsible. Patali Champika Ranawakas party, the Jathika Hela Urumaya has consistently reminded lawmakers and others of this danger. What Ranawaka has to say now will indicate to what extent the party (and of course he himself) has dissolved its ideology for political profit. A related issue is the fact that it would be a travesty of justice if these 225 Members of Parliament touched this constitution. Sure, thats part of the Job Description as per the constitution, but theyve demonstrated beyond any shadow of doubt that they are absolutely incompetent. Only one member, Sarath Weerasekera, objected to the 19th Amendment, let us not forget, and that is as mentioned above a piece of garbage. Moreover they had the opportunity to do away with the executive presidency (Note: Sirisenas manifesto mentioned change and wwnot abolish). They didnt. Events proved that the 19th, as far as pruning presidential powers, was eyewash. The checks introduced, namely the independent institutions, constituted a monumental joke considering the composition of the Constitutional Council (politician-heavy, federalist-heavy) and in terms of the appointments they oversaw (bypassing seniority in appointing judges for example). Today, after being stumped by the hero-turned-zero Sirisena, those who used him and turned a blind eye to his many faults, want to bulldoze his office. Thats what it boils down to. And thats exactly the wrong reason to engage in constitutional reform. You dont do things just because you like the immediate beneficiary or because it helps you checkmate with a political opponent. Thats the logic that has prevailed in the 40 years that passed after the Second Republican Constitution was instituted. Apart from the 17th, it was all about political expedience (leaving out the 13th because it was extracted from a weak UNP President who, like his successors didnt have faith in the citizens of this country) and not about the larger interests of the nation. This parliament has outlived its usefulness on account of incompetence, subterfuge and downright disrespect for the people. Theyve prostituted the word democracy enough. They are not to be trusted. Today, the movers and shakers in Parliament are essentially the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) and the TNA, the former a shameless lackey of the UNP and the latter operating as though the UNP is its lackey. Both parties have terrorist pasts: the JVP in 1971 and in 1988//89 and the TNA as the mouthpiece of the LTTE. They are batting here with the UNP, which while in power unleashed terror and disappeared some 60,000 Thajudeens, Ekneligodas and Lasanthas. The SLFP has its own violent history (1971). All these parties have shamed themselves to the point that they really dont deserve the right to use the word democracy. Ideally, the people should have the opportunity to state their opinion of this lot in a General Election. This side of such an eventuality, it is appropriate to point out the danger of constitutional tinkering by this Parliament. The 20th, as proposed, is a mischievous and dangerous document which can only make sense if the 13th Amendment is repealed simultaneously. The UNP, fighting shy of holding even PC elections, ought to salivate at the prospect of not having to face the people before a General or Presidential Election, but this is not about the political tastes of a particular party. It is about sovereignty and territorial integrity. It is also about the blood and lost body parts of all those who fought against separatist terrorists. That memory must also be factored in. If true representational democracy, territorial integrity and sovereignty are babies, then you can make a case for calling the executive presidency bathwater but lets not forget that the baby will be at risk of all kinds of infections if you throw THAT bathwater out whilst keeping the toilet wash that is the 13th Amendment. malindasenevi@gmail.com. www.malindawords.blogspot.com In order to celebrate this years Christmas giving it a spiritual value with a vision of ethic, Soulmate - an active social group has planned to bring the little ones living in line-rooms in estates to Colombo and make them enjoy the glamour of Colombo City and make opportunities for them to experience the Christmas festivity. The children from hill country estates will travel from Badulla to Colombo by Train to participate in this programme of activities arranged on December 22 and 23. Soulmate Group also has planned to give these children an opportunity to acquaint with the other children in South and enjoy with them by visiting and experiencing the splendid atmosphere of 5-star hotels with swimming-pools in the city and elegant shopping complexes and also to visit places like the harbour and airport. The children will also receive gifts from these places. The Soulmates prime objective is to provide an opportunity for these children, who are deprived of social relationship due to communication gap and inherent poverty of their families. The readers are also invited to join and help this cause, which is focused to improvise the lives of little children who are living in estates, by sending your generous cash donations to Sampath Bank Account No.117561003978 - Super Branch, Colombo, opened on behalf of Soulmate. For more information please contact : Gishan 0777217315, Sashini 0775434217 and Shehan 0772259585 The CID today informed the Fort Magistrate that experts from Hong Kong were able to recover several voice recordings which were deleted from the phone of the Operations Director of the Anti-Corruption Force Namal Kumara. Police Spokesman SP Ruwan Gunasekera said the three-member team from the CID and Government Analyst Department who left for Hong Kong had returned on December 14. Two officers, an Assistant Superintendent of Police (ASP) and a Chief Inspector of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) together with an official from the Government Analyst Department left for Hong Kong on December 8 with Namal Kumaras phone. SP Gunasekera said the CID officials had submitted a report and a pen drive comprising of the deleted voice recordings to the Fort Magistrate. Earlier, the Fort Magistrate granted permission to send Namal Kumaras mobile phone to Hong-Kong to recover the telephone conversations.(Darshana Sanjeewa) MARIB, Yemen At the age of 13, Mohammed was an unflinching fighter for Yemens Houthi rebels. Indoctrinated in their camps, he went into battle even as gunfire filled the air and the earth shook from air strikes. He says he tortured and killed. He didnt care if he lived or died. His one comfort was the serial number on the bracelet the Houthis gave him to wear his jihadi number. If he died, he knew, the bracelet guaranteed his body would make it home to his family. When I become a martyr, they enter my number in the computer, retrieve my picture and my name, then print them with the name Martyr underneath, Mohammed said. Mohammed was among 18 former child soldiers interviewed who described the Houthis efficiency in recruiting boys as young as 10 to fight in the war against a military coalition led by Saudi Arabia and backed by the United States. The Houthis have inducted 18,000 child soldiers into their army since the beginning of the war in 2014, a senior Houthi military official acknowledged. That figure is higher than any number previously reported. The United Nations was able to verify 2,721 children recruited to fight for all sides in the conflict, the large majority for the Houthis, but officials say that count is likely low. An unknown number of young fighters have been sent home in coffins. More than 6,000 children have died or been maimed in the war, the U.N. childrens agency reported in October, but it could not determine how many were combatants. Brig. Gen. Yahia Sarie, a Houthi military spokesman, denied that children under 18 are systematically recruited and said the military has issued orders to send home children trying to join its ranks. He said any children who try to enlist do so out of anger at coalition atrocities. He dismissed the accounts the children gave, saying their claims were coalition propaganda. The former child soldiers were interviewed at displacement camps and a Saudi-funded rehabilitation center in the city of Marib, which is controlled by the coalition. They came to Marib after slipping away from rebel forces or being captured by coalition units. Because of their ages and because some acknowledge committing acts of brutality, the Associated Press is only using their first names. The war began after the Houthis, a Zaidi-Shiite insurgent movement with ties to Iran, swept down from the northern highlands in late 2014, seizing the capital, Sanaa, and then pushing south. Yemens internationally recognized government sought help from Saudi Arabia, which formed the coalition with U.S. backing, determined to stop what they saw as an Iranian move to take over, turning a civil war into a proxy war. Maggie Michael is an Associated Press writer. ANTANANARIVO, Madagascar Voters have begun casting their ballots across the Indian Ocean island nation of Madagascar Wednesday to select a new president in a runoff election that pits two former leaders against each other. Andry Rajoelina, 44, president from 2009 to 2014, received 39 percent of the vote in the first round in November, while Marc Ravalomanana, 69, president from 2002 to 2009, got 35 percent. They face off for the first time since political turmoil in 2009 forced Ravalomanana from power. Both have said they will accept the runoffs results. WASHINGTON The Trump administration will soon withdraw all of the approximately 2,000 American troops from Syria, a U.S. official said Wednesday as President Trump declared victory in the mission to defeat Islamic State militants there. Planning for the pullout has begun and troops will begin leaving as soon as possible, said the official, who was not authorized to publicly discuss military planning and spoke on condition of anonymity. On Wednesday, as Vice President Mike Pence met with top military leaders in the Pentagon, Trump tweeted: We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency. That declaration of victory is far from unanimous, and the withdrawal decision immediately triggered demands from Congress including Republicans for more information and a formal briefing on the matter. Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., who just returned from Afghanistan, said he was meeting with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis late in the day. The decision will fulfill Trumps long-stated goal of bringing troops home from Syria, but military leaders have pushed back, arguing that the Islamic State remains a threat and could regroup as it battles in Syrias long-running civil war. Trump has argued for the withdrawal since he was a presidential candidate. But the decision underscores the division between him and his military advisers, who have said in recent weeks that pockets of Islamic State militants remain and U.S. policy has been to keep troops in place until the extremists are eradicated. Leading Republican senators reacted with displeasure to the news. Graham, typically a Trump backer, said he was blindsided by the report and called the decision a disaster in the making. He said, The biggest winners in this are ISIS and Iran. Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida said the withdrawal would be a grave error with broader implications beyond the fight against Islamic State. Just last week, the U.S. special envoy to the anti-ISIS coalition, Brett McGurk, said U.S. troops would remain in Syria even after the Islamic State was driven from its strongholds. I think its fair to say Americans will remain on the ground after the physical defeat of the caliphate, until we have the pieces in place to ensure that that defeat is enduring, McGurk told reporters on Dec. 11. Nobody is declaring a mission accomplished. Defeating a physical caliphate is one phase of a much longer-term campaign. And two weeks ago Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the U.S. still has a long way to go in training local Syrian forces to prevent a resurgence of Islamic State and stabilize the country. He said it will take 35,000 to 40,000 local troops in northeastern Syria to maintain security over the long term, but only about 20 percent of them have been trained. The withdrawal decision, however, is likely to be viewed positively by U.S. ally Turkey, and comes following several conversations between Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan over the past several weeks The Pentagon recently said that Islamic State now controls just 1 percent of the territory it originally held. Lolita C. Baldor, Susannah George and Catherine Lucey are Associated Press writers. VATICAN CITY Pope Francis has accepted the resignation of a Los Angeles auxiliary bishop, Monsignor Alexander Salazar, following allegations of misconduct with a minor in the 1990s, officials said Wednesday. The Vatican announced the resignation, the latest in a string of cases of alleged misconduct against bishops to come to light this year. It follows the scandal of ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick that exposed how bishops have largely avoided sanction for improper behavior. In the past decade alone, numerous brands have taken steps towards digitalizing their marketing practices.Effectively achieving this however, requiresdefinitive expertise. Enter Digibrush, one of the fastest growing digital agencies in Sri Lanka. Established in 2009,and armed with the dedication to revolutionize the digital marketing sphere, Digibrush has grown into a powerhouse for digital solutions just a decade since inception. Over the last year, Digibrush has bagged several global accolades, one of which when Union Bank PLC waslaudedfor the Best Facebook Campaign at theCMO Social Media and Digital Marketing Awards 2017at the CMO Asia Awards held in Singapore. 2018 saw even greater achievements, with the company establishing itsprowess by winning the coveted Best Fashion/Beauty Website at the Web Marketing Associations Web Awards 2018. The winning streak continued with Digibrush dominating the Digital Retail Segment at the recently concluded SLT 01 Awards. Digibrush brought home the Gold in several categories, including the Best Digital Media Agency Retail Sector, Best Website Retail Sector, Best Digital Integrated Campaign Retail Sector. Alongside these accolades, Digibrush also received the 1st and 2nd Runners-Upawards for Best Digital Media Agency Media and Publishing Sector and the Best Website Manufacturing, Storage and Logistics Sector, respectively. An initiative organized by Sri Lanka Telecom PLC, the SLT 01 Awards -this year held for the second time in Sri Lanka-is a program dedicated to the recognition of digital excellence. The Awards recognizesinstitutions, individuals, and brands for their achievements in leveraging digital technologies, and is judged by a panel of experts hailing from a range of varying professions and industries. 2018 has beenan amazing year for us at Digibrush, said Hisham Zulfiqar -CEO and Co-Founder of Digibrush- commenting on the companys achievements.Winning these 3 Gold Awards is a testament to the strength of our footholdin the digital sphere, especially in the retail industry. These achievements are the successes of the collectiveefforts of Digital Strategists, Art Directors, Data Scientists, PPC Specialists,and Designers and Developers, all working in harmony. As a digital agency, we have always focused on delivering quality mobile-first content. Simply creating great-looking content does not suffice anymore. Every piece of content must be backed by effective distribution methods and optimized strategies in order to ensure maximum content penetration, he continued. We dont believe that one solution fits all. Rather, we specialize in design thinking, which focuses on the cognitive, strategic, and practical processes developed by design-oriented teams. This allows us to not only produce aesthetically-appealing solutions, but also to ensure that they are all functionally relevant. Hisham also touched on the agencys other achievements and upcoming plans. The recent awards arent all we have achieved this year. Weve made other notable strides, like increasing our customers e-commerce revenue by 175% over the last 12 months,and I am thrilled to announce that over the next 18 months we will begin rolling out an extremely unique product. The newest solution will involve automationand -to a certain degree- Artificial Intelligence, and will create journey-based marketing solutions that will ensure that our clients reach their target audiences across multiple digital touch points. By automating certain processes, we are able to offer cost-effective solutions, scalable across a range of business platforms. Ever since 2009, Digibrush has evolved into a multi-faceted and resourceful agency with a 40 member-strong team associated with numerous brands -both big and small- ranging from consumer electronics, retail and FMCG industries with the likes of EZY Corporation, Huawei Sri Lanka, McDonalds, Crocodile, Union Bank, Unilever and Dialog. ISLAMABAD The latest talks between the Taliban and a U.S. peace envoy on the war in Afghanistan focused on the withdrawal of NATO troops, the release of prisoners and halting attacks on civilians by pro-government forces, a Taliban spokesman said Wednesday. U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, who tweeted that talks held this week in the United Arab Emirates were productive, was in Pakistan on Wednesday to meet with the chief of the countrys army before heading to the Afghan capital Kabul later in the day. The UAE talks also involved Saudi, Pakistani and Emirati representatives. Thomas Dartmouth "Daddy" Rice (18081860) was an aspiring white actor from New York who gained notoriety in the 1830s when he delivered a performance in blackface before a theater audience in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Blackface was makeup, initially burnt cork or coal, applied to the faces and limbs of white performers to give them an exaggeratedly Black appearancefar darker than African Americans. Rice's "Jim Crow" song and dance won rave reviews from white audiences in major cities throughout the North. By the early 1900s, "Jim Crow"the name of Thomas "Daddy" Rice's blackface characterdescribed the institutional segregation in place in the American South. To this day, it's unclear why this elaborate system of racial separation became synonymous with Rice's minstrel routine. It's possible that whites in the early-20th century, still preferring the image of the jovial, gimpy slave to more sober and truthful representations of Blacks, found the phrase useful for referring to such laws. Page Content Employers in New York City must comply with a host of new laws that either took effect in 2018 or will take effect in 2019. New mandates on sexual-harassment-prevention training and policies, lactation accommodations, and minimum wage and exempt salary thresholds top the compliance checklist. Now is a good time for a comprehensive review of employee manuals and onboarding materials, said Laurent Drogin, an attorney with Tarter Krinsky & Drogin in New York City. Under some laws, employers must provide a copy of the policy to new hires, make it available online or post it in the workplace, he noted. Knowledge is the key to compliance, said Gena Usenheimer, an attorney with Seyfarth Shaw in New York City. "Once New York City employers understand the scope of their legal obligations for 2019, we recommend a broad review of their policies, practices and payroll procedures to ensure compliance." Anti-Harassment Training New sexual-harassment-prevention training requirements may be a little confusing for some New York City employers that will have to follow state and city mandates, noted Jonathan Bing, an attorney with Jackson Lewis in New York City. The statewide training requirements apply to all employers, whereas the city law applies to employers with 15 or more workers. [SHRM members-only HR Q&A: What are the different types of sexual harassment?] Although employers have until April 2020 to complete the training under the city law, the first training session under the state law must be completed by Oct. 9, 2019. In addition to providing training, employers statewide had to adopt a written sexual-harassment-prevention policy by Oct. 9 of this year and distribute it to employees. Although the laws overlap, there are some differences. For example, the New York City law is broader and covers more topics, such as bystander-intervention training. Compliance with the two mandates may be difficult, particularly for smaller businesses that don't have HR professionals who are keeping up with changes and guidance, Bing noted. Still, all employers can search the state and local government websites to monitor for changes and find compliance tools, guidance and answers to frequently asked questions. Lactation Accommodations Beginning March 18, 2019, employers in the Big Apple with at least four workers must provide lactation rooms and create a written lactation-accommodation policy that must be given to workers when they are hired. The city's human rights commission will release a model policy before the effective date. Covered employers will have to provide a clean space (not a bathroom) for employees to express breast milk. The space must be shielded from view and free from intrusion and have an electrical outlet, a chair and a surface for personal items. The space must be close to running water and the employee's work area, and there also must be a refrigerator near the employee's work area. Many employers have already been providing such space as an accommodation under existing laws, Drogin said, but the new law covers smaller businesses and goes into greater specificity about what must be provided. Since the rule impacts the physical worksite, employers will need to do some planning to ensure they have a space available that meets the requirements, Bing said. There is a limited exception to the requirement if it will cause an undue hardship for the employer. Minimum-Wage Hikes Employers should review their pay practices to ensure employees are earning the appropriate hourly minimum wage or weekly salary, Usenheimer said. Employees have six years to bring a claim under the New York Labor Law and penalties can be significant for employers, "so it's best to stay on top of these upcoming changes," she noted. On Dec. 31, New York City's minimum wage will rise to $15 an hour for businesses with at least 11 employees and for all fast-food workers regardless of their employer's size. The minimum wage will rise to $13.50 for all other businesses with 10 or fewer employees. By Dec. 31, 2019, employers of all sizes and industries must pay workers in the city at least $15 an hour. Employers should also note that the salary threshold for the executive and administrative exemptions to overtime-pay requirements will increase for workers in New York City to $1,125 a week ($58,500 annually) if their employer has at least 11 employees and $1,012.50 a week ($52,650 annually) for workers at smaller businesses. According to the New York Department of Labor, the higher minimum wage and minimum salary thresholds apply to New York City employees even if the employer has fewer than 11 employees in the city, so long as the employer has 11 or more employees at all locations. So, for example, if an employer has 100 employees and only one in New York City, the higher rates would apply to that one employee in the city. Review 2018 Changes Now is also a good time for employers to ensure compliance with laws that already took effect in 2018, Usenheimer said. "Go back and take a look at what you may have missed," Drogin said. The New York State Paid Family Leave Law took effect in January 2018, and the New York City Paid Safe and Sick Time Actwhich expanded the city's sick-leave mandatetook effect in May 2018. Both laws have written policy requirements. Additionally, amendments to the New York City Human Rights Law require employers to engage in a "cooperative dialogue" with workers who have disabilities and others regarding their accommodation needs. "While many of the cooperative dialogue obligations reiterate or expand upon existing requirements for employers when engaging in a robust interactive process, there are also some new obligations under the law," Usenheimer said. Look Ahead New York City employers should also plan for what may be coming down the pike, Bing said. Progressive Democrats recently took control of the state Senate, he said. So it's possible that some New York City requirements will be implemented statewide and that state laws may become more progressive and require employers in the city to adjust their policies again, he noted. LeapFrog Investments,the leading Profit with Purpose investor,today announced a USD $12 million investment in Softlogic Life Insurance PLC, purchasing the shares of FMO, the Dutch development Bank. The company, growing at 2x the market, is one of Sri Lankas fastest growing life insurers, providing Sri Lankans with individual life and health, group life, and other policies. The main shareholders of the Company will now comprise Softlogic Capital, DEG and LeapFrog Investments. The team, products and high growth of Softlogic Life make for an outstanding company. We are thrilled to see them join the LeapFrog portfolio, said Dr Andrew Kuper, Founder and CEO of LeapFrog Investments. This investment reveals our positive view of Sri Lankas long-term trajectory, and its financial services industry. The deal also caps the best year of deployment in the history of our firm. Softlogic Life, a top five player, has established itself as a leader in providing quality life insurance products to Sri Lankans.The company leads the market in customer-centric product innovation including tailor-made products such as a worldwide cashless hospital settlement product integrating more than 60 local hospitals,doorstep doctor visits and medical testing. It was also first-to-market in Sri Lanka in offering life insurance via mobile through a partnership with Dialog Axiata.The company employs a 2400-person agent force, as well as distributing protection products via banks and direct means. We are excited about the next wave of growth for Softlogic Life and our ability to continue to accelerate our market-growth strategy in partnership with the LeapFrog team and the insurance and financial services expertise they bring to the table. We are deeply appreciative of FMOs partnership to build our Company to this strong position and are happy to have provided an excellent return on exiting their investment. said Ashok Pathirage, Chairman Softlogic group. LeapFrog has a reputation for partnering to achieve channel expansion, as well as to help solidify strategic relationships that underscore growth two continued areas of focus for the Softlogic Life business. We hope that this is the first of many investments in Sri Lanka and with the Softlogic Group. Sri Lanka presents a compelling investment opportunity, with an underpenetrated, yet high growth insurance market, said Fernanda Lima, Director, LeapFrog Investments. By taking advantage of a diversified distribution strategy, and in-particular delivering insurance in partnership with mobile companies and financial institutions, we will be able increase the reach of relevant products into thecountrys emerging consumer segment, who have traditionally been excluded from easy, and affordable access to insurance. Mobile insurance products significantly open-up access to the emerging consumer demographic people living under $10 USD a day. LeapFrog was an early investor in BIMA, which in only four years grew to become the leading emerging consumer mobile insurer, scaling to over 30 million polices for emerging consumers in only four years. LeapFrog sold the majority of its stake in BIMA as part of a $96.6 million investment to Allianz X, the digital investment unit of Allianz group. An innovator in insurance, Softlogic Life was recently selected as one of the Top 3 Insurers in the Asian region by Asian Insurance Review and has won a multitude of accolades. Its strong brand and customer-centric agent force combined with tailor-made products are enabling strong growth. FMO, the Dutch Development Bank who exited their holding to LeapFrog said, FMO has been an investor in Softlogic Life Insurance PLC since December 2012, at that time a small insurance company, combining general and life insurance products. Some of the main reasons to invest were the professional staff, Softlogic Group being a strong shareholder and the companys approach to introducing innovations in the insurance sector, said Linda Broekhuizen Chief Investment Officer FMO. By making insurance products customer friendly and increasing accessibility, the Softlogic Life team improved financial inclusion in Sri Lanka. We are proud that the company has performed so well that the reputable LeapFrog Investments took over to further guide the company. With a population of 21 million, Sri Lanka is currently underserved with life and health insurance products yet represents a strong growth opportunity with penetration at only 0.6% versus GDP. Between 2012 and 2017, the insurance industry grew at a CAGR of 12% driven by growing awareness of the benefits of insurance as well as the introduction of new and innovative products to service the market. STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Live fish, Peking ducks and freshly steamed pork buns are no more at Asian Food Markets in Travis. The grocer with its in-house restaurant at 1801 South Ave. officially closed Monday. But the good news for fans of the sprawling store -- known as a rich source of ingredients for Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, South East Asian and West Indian cooks -- is that it will reopen as Asian Food in Mariners Harbor. Its new address will be 2343 Forest Ave. in a shopping complex under development by Waldman Partners of West Brighton. The project is expected to be completed in November 2020, according to the Work In Progress posting at the site. The complex is also expected to house Burger King and Popeyes restaurants, said a rep for the contractor. Asian Food Markets closed in Travis on Monday. It will reopen in a new shopping complex located at 2343 Forest Ave., Mariners Harbor, at the corner of Northfield Street. (Staten Island Advance/Pamela Silvestri)(Staten Island Advance/Pamela Si Asian Food Markets was the second major Asian food retailer to land in the borough. It was established in the summer of 2006 following the arrival of Kam Man Foods. Kam Man opened in December 2005, and was located on Forest Avenue in Mariners Harbor where Western Beef now lives. Both Asian Food Markets and Kam Man ventured to Staten Island, as noted by reps of both stores when they opened, to appeal to its blossoming Asian populations. In the interim, Asian Food can be found at 701 Route 440 in Jersey City, N.J., and 1339 Centennial Ave., Piscataway, N.J. On Staten Island, other places to source ingredients for Asian dishes include Phil-Am Foods, 527 Tompkins Ave., Rosebank; 718-876-6948, which specializes in Filipino items and has a restaurant across the street, Phil-Am Kusina. Items can also be found at Freshway (formerly Food Universe), 375 Tompkins Ave., Rosebank; 718-815-1234. STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Alex Harris went to the roof of his six-story apartment building in South Beach on April 3 and stepped off its ledge in an attempt to kill himself. He survived, and now hopes his story can help others struggling with mental illness and thoughts of suicide. Suicide is not the answer. Ending your life is not the answer, because at the end of the day it might satisfy you, but its not satisfying the people that really care and love you, he said. Doctors diagnosed Harris, 22, with bipolar and schizoaffective disorders, he said. He spent much of his time before he attempted suicide with the doctors at the South Beach Psychiatric Center in their outpatient program while he was living with his family at the South Beach housing project on Kramer Street. Before moving there with his parents, Harris said he spent time in the foster system, blaming his own behavior and substance abuse issues. A high school drop out, Harris said he spent about eight months in school, and was frequently the victim of bullying. It made me feel like I had nothing. That I was just a piece of c---. I felt like there was no way out, he said. Those feelings, and his struggles with mental illness led him to attempt to take his own life. He said he saw it as a way of showing people he didnt care. In all actuality, I was hurting other people more than I was hurting myself, he said. The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention lists 11 warning signs of suicide, and what to do if you know someone experiencing suicidal ideations. (Staten Island Advance/Paul Liotta) Harris has been in the hospital since attempting suicide. He spent two months at the Staten Island University Hospital Ocean Breeze campus -- more than a month of which was spent in a medically-induced coma -- and was moved to the hospitals campus in Princes Bay about six months ago. He credits staff at both hospitals for helping him in his recovery. Hes paralyzed in his entire right leg, cant feel his left leg below his foot, and said he has an abundance of metal plates and rods throughout his body. Only in the last two months has Harris regretted his decision. The constant pain, and possibility that he might never walk again, initially made him wish he wouldve succeeded in his suicide attempt. But the support of his family, and the hospital staff has helped him fight for his recovery. He recently took his first steps with the help of parallel bars. A foot infection slowed down his recovery process, but Harris said he wants to continue making progress. You never know. In 10 years, I could be walking again, he said. In addition to his own recovery, Harris wants to help others in their own struggles with mental illness. He hopes to speak to other young people about his own experience, and has set up a Facebook page -- Battling Demons -- a place where, he said, people can reach out to him. I regret what I did, because I didnt have to go that way if I had the help that other people need too, he said. Suicide is not the answer. If you need help, cry out to somebody. You always got to turn the negative into a positive. RELATED COVERAGE: Earlier this year, the Advance ran a series called Hidden Pain: Understanding and Preventing Suicide. Here are stories from that series: STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- A new report released by an independent commission is asking the city to re-examine constructing a jail on Staten Island. Released Wednesday by the Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform, A More Just New York City, lays out a blueprint of recommendations on how the city can increase fairness and public safety, close the Rikers Island facility, and cut the number of people in jail by half. The commission was assembled in 2016 by then-City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito for an independent look at the criminal justice system in New York City. The same year, Mayor Bill de Blasio said New York City is committed to closing Rikers within 10 years. NEW JAILS IN 4 BOROUGHS De Blasio and City Council Speaker Corey Johnson announced plans to open four smaller, safer, and fairer borough-based jails in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and The Bronx. Hizzoner has unequivocally maintained that Staten Island will not be getting a new jail. The first report issued by the commission in 2016 asked the city to reduce the size of the proposed facilities. The report issued Wednesday asks the city to still reduce the facilities size and to reconsider a Staten Island facility. We ask the city to reduce its planned 6,040 bed capacity to the 5,500 bed capacity that we recommended, if not lower, and look for other ways to design smaller facilities that fit better with their surroundings, including by re-examining a facility in Staten Island, the report said. Several years ago the city considered two Staten Island properties to help replace Rikers Island as part of a theoretical exercise. Public land along Arthur Kill Road in Rossville and at the Teleport in Bloomfield were included in a presentation made to First Deputy Mayor Anthony Shorris called "Alternatives for Rikers Island." JAIL POPULATION The report also states that the citys jail population has dropped from 9,753 inmates to 8,254, the current population, over two years. The population could be further reduced by an estimated 2,200 if the state reforms the criminal justice system and enacts bail reform, which is one of the reports recommendations. Recommendations also include: Transparency; listen and respond to community concerns; end cash bail; address violence in jail, sexual assault, and misconduct against incarcerated women; and fast-track the closure of Rikers and repurpose the facility. STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- A man and woman have been charged in connection with the death of a man found with a gunshot wound to the head at the Richmond Hotel in St. George. Jonathan Julio, 37, and Krystal Isolda, 36, who both reside at the hotel, are accused in the death of James Johnson, 38, according to a statement from the NYPDs Deputy Commissioner of Public Information. The suspects were arrested on Tuesday at about 4:25 p.m. in front of a strip mall on the 2200 block of Forest Avenue in Mariners Harbor and then taken to the 120th Precinct stationhouse in St. George. The New York-New Jersey Regional Fugitive Task Force and the Staten Island Homicide Squad participated in the apprehension after the suspects were identified as persons of interest, according to an NYPD spokesman. Julio has been charged with murder and criminal possession of a weapon, according to the statement. Isolda has been charged with criminal possession of a weapon and hindering prosecution, according to the statement. The New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) identified Johnson and determined that he was a victim of a gunshot wound to the head. OCME said the gunshot caused skull fractures and brain damage. Johnson was a Brooklyn resident, according to police. Police told the Advance that Johnson was found unconscious and unresponsive with head trauma at around 8:45 a.m. on Dec. 11 inside a room at the 71 Central Ave. hotel. The suspects are expected to be arraigned Wednesday afternoon. STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Staten Island residents' excitement about a clean and debris-free Front Street was cut short on Monday when the city began erecting a fence around the recently cleaned lot to cut off public access. Citing safety concerns, Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS) spokesman Nick Benson said, New York City has a world-class network of parks and other public spaces that are provided for the enjoyment of all New Yorkers. While the city owns over 14,000 properties, not all are developed for public use, including this site. The 860,000-square-foot lot behind the Clifton train station is under the jurisdiction of the city Department of Small Business Services and is managed by DCAS. New Dorp resident Kevin Ryan said hes been fishing and launching his kayak off the waterfront on Front Street for at least 30 years. To lose access because of a few individuals who decide to litter is not fair, Ryan told the Advance on Monday upon learning about the fence. Ryan isnt the only resident whos up in arms about the fence. This is just BS, said an SILive commenter. I love to go down there on a nice summer night and just relax, listen to the water and see the boats coming and going and to be able to see the fireworks. Why do they keep taking places from the nice people, the commenter said. Another commenter said, If the city was really concerned they would have installed garbage cans so people could dispose of their lunches, whatever trash they had instead of throwing it out on the ground. Ok, so what exactly is it used for? It clearly should be for public access; what else will it do? Sit vacant? another commenter wondered. COUNCILWOMAN ROSE WRITES TO DCAS COMMISSIONER Residents werent the only people unhappy with the citys response to Front Street. Councilwoman Debi Rose (D-North Shore) said she was shocked to learn about the erection of the fence in her district from constituents and the press instead of from the city. It was therefore disturbing to hear that the Department of Citywide Administrative Services plans to fence off a significant stretch of waterfront on Front Street. It was even more disturbing that I heard this news not from your office directly, but by word of mouth from constituents and then the press, Rose said in a letter to DCAS Commissioner Lisette Camilo. Rose said her vision has always been to have an open, accessible waterfront -- a vision that her constituents and other Staten Islanders share. She said she understands the difficulties that are faced when trying to keep Front Street litter free and safe for residents to enjoy -- but its not impossible an impossible task and would require a multi-agency approach. My constituents should not have to choose between a clean waterfront and an open waterfront. They deserve both, the letter said. She asked DCAS to immediately cease construction of the fence and welcomed it and other government and law enforcement stakeholders to her office to find a solution. McMAHON, ODDO MEET WITH NYPD, DOT, DSNY ABOUT DERELICT VEHICLES In the days following the massive cleanup, residents told the Advance that the cars and RVs that had been parked at the lot were now a few blocks away on Willow Avenue and on Carroll Place in St. George. An RV, two vehicles and a motorcycle were spotted on Willow Avenue, a few hundred feet from the intersection at Bay Street. On Carroll Place was the RV that Mike, an 18-year-old who was living on Front Street, said he recently purchased to live in. Mike said the RV does not run. District Attorney Michael McMahon and Borough President James Oddo asked the Department of Sanitation (DSNY), Department of Transportation (DOT) and the NYPD to find a better solution in regards to the RVs and derelict vehicles placed on residential streets. While we are thrilled that the chronic issues on that site were remedied, some of these vehicles moving to public streets, claiming valuable parking spaces and negatively impacting the quality of life and safety of those who live nearby, is not an acceptable alternative, they said in a letter. Similar to the issue with litter and cleaning, Oddo and McMahon acknowledged the difficulties in enforcement concerning the vehicles, but asked that they meet and come to a solution together. They were set to meet Monday. STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Police are asking for the publics help to locate a man reported missing last weekend from Port Richmond. Alfredo Ortiz, 43, was last seen leaving his Simonson Place home on Saturday at about 12:01 a.m., according to a statement from the NYPDs Deputy Commissioner of Public Information. Police describe the missing man as black with a dark complexion and black hair. He stands about 510 tall and weighs about 190 pounds, with a medium build. He wears eyeglasses. He was seen wearing a green shirt and black jacket, according to a post on the 121st Precinct Twitter feed. Anyone with information is asked to call the NYPDs Crime Stoppers Hotline at 1-800-577-TIPS (8477) or for Spanish, 1-888-57-PISTA (74782). The public can also submit their tips by logging onto the Crime stoppers website at WWW.NYPDCRIMESTOPPERS.COM or by texting their tips to 274637 (CRIMES) then entering TIP577. All calls are strictly confidential. STATEN ISLAND -- As state lawmakers head into the next legislative session, likely with a plush 64 percent raise in hand, Island state reps are either vehemently opposed to the pay hike -- or are welcoming it with open arms. Earlier this month, the Commission on Legislative and Executive Compensation recommended state lawmakers salary go from the current $79,500 to $110,000 starting Jan. 1, 2019; $120,000 starting in 2020; and $130,000 in 2021. The state Legislature pay raise marks the first of its kind in two decades -- but it comes with some caveats. The commission ruled to limit lawmakers outside income to 15 percent -- or $19,500 -- of their legislative base salary once the 64 percent pay hike kicks in in 2021. A DECISION TO MAKE So, some lawmakers will have to choose between staying on in the state Legislature or sticking to their side job, Island reps say. The panel also voted to scrap many of the lawmakers leadership stipends, which can range from $9,000 to $41,500. Island State Sen. Andrew Lanza (R) is one of those lawmakers who earns an outside income higher than 15 percent of the legislative base salary. According to his latest 2017 financial disclosure form, Lanza earned between $155,000 to $270,000 in his capacity as an attorney. However, the senator says that on average he has made under $70,000 as an attorney each year. In 2018 he said he made $40,000; in 2017, he said he earned $160,000 from a large case; 2016 he said he earned $43,000; and in 2015 he said he earned $35,000. Lanza says he is vehemently opposed to the new pay raise and wants a special session called for lawmakers to vote up or down on the raise before the start of the new year. For now, he says he is unsure if come 2021, he plans to stay on as an Island rep or choose his other job if the rules remain unchanged. People will have to make a decision and youll probably lose the best and the brightest from the Senate and the Assembly, Lanza said. OTHER VIEWS Other Island lawmakers welcomed news of the raise. I support raises, I dont care how we get them, said State Sen. Diane Savino (D-Staten Island), who does not earn any additional outside income. Nobody should go 20 years without a salary increase and the truth is, its an expensive state to live in and most of our counterparts in other bodies whether it be county legislators or the city council make far more money so its absolutely long overdue. Savino, pointed out that other legislative bodies receive raises and have caps on outside incomes, so the New York State Legislature should not be any different. The bigger problem is this is not a part-time job in spite of the way some people want to portray it and its very difficult to do it full-time if you also have to carry a second job, she continued. Assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis (R-Staten Island), who also does not have a side job, said that ultimately, taxpayers should not be on the hook for the new pay raises because lawmakers typically spend a lot of their time voting on bills that end up going nowhere. She also thinks the new limit on outside income could deter qualified candidates from the job. The founding fathers wanted a citizenship Legislature and that meant people coming from all different walks of life, different industry backgrounds and they come represent their communities and then go back to their profession for the rest of the year, she said. I think were straying too far away from that, and youre going to lose a lot of good people as a result because we have many dedicated people who may be small business owners for example who wont be allowed to have any form of outside income and youll lose many perspectives from around the state and from various sectors. Incoming Assemblyman-elect Michael Reilly (R-Staten Island), who also does not have a side job, said he ran knowing that his salary would be $79,500 if he won, so either way, he said he is indifferent to the raise. I ran under the assumption that the salary was 79,500, Reilly said. For me, running wasnt about the salary, it was about me helping my community and in that sense thats all Ive ever wanted to do. Not just the state Legislature, but the governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general, state comptroller, and commissioners will also receive a pay bump come Jan. 1. The pay raises will also go into effect regardless Jan. 1, unless the Legislature and governor pass a statute to void it before that date, the New York Times reported. Assemblyman-elect Charles Fall (D-Staten Island) could not be reached for comment for this story. FOLLOW SYDNEY KASHIWAGI ON TWITTER. There is no earthly reason why any able-bodied, community-minded, generous-of-spirit judge should be compelled to stop doing what he does so well because of an arbitrary number. But such is the case of Surrogate Robert J. Gigante, who must step down this year for that very reason, at age 70, thanks to an unfair and anachronistic provision of our State Constitution. To state that he is the embodiment of fairness and patience is to state what the Staten Island legal community has known for a long time. He consistently ranks at the top of the top 10 judges statewide on the blog known as The Robing Room. Compassionate, sincere, and a truly genuine man with a space in his heart for people, are some of the comments there. Judge Gigante presided over Staten Islands first Integrated Domestic Violence Court, as an opportunity to help families deal with the scourge of domestic violence, but in a humane and understanding way. He saw it as a challenge to bring families in three courts under one roof. He immediately organized various service providers from the community to address the mental health, guardianship, legal, child care, substance abuse, safety, parenting skills, and other needs of the Courts litigants. I was fortunate to serve as his Law Clerk for 10 years. When you serve as a law clerk, you build a bond and a relationship of confidence that cant be duplicated elsewhere, so I can attest to one thing: What you see is what you get. He had enough confidence in me, when he was Democratic County Chairman, to be the partys candidate for Civil Court in 1991. He was a constant source of positive advice during the race, on how to comport myself with voters, how to speak in front of groups, and to always be positive even when things were not going as planned. What I have learned from him, now that Im a judge, is being a judge is much more than knowing statutes and rules of evidence. Theres a human side because youre solving real problems for real families. He has long realized that the number of cases disposed of is not important - its what you accomplish with those cases. Nor is the speed with which you dispose cases a true measure of your success. One of his favorite expressions is, Sometimes, you just have to let a little grass grow under their feet, a philosophy that has worked well in my approach to matters before me. He sought the Surrogate position because he realized that families often face overwhelming tasks and obstacles when dealing with the death or tragic disability of a loved one, or trying to add another member. As he has said repeatedly, hes not settling cases, hes settling peoples lives. The most telling thing about the character of the man is his pet project, the annual Teddy Bear drive, which helps children with cancer. Groups as diverse as the Freedom Aquatics Swim Club, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts have participated in his drive. The most famous individual to get involved was Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon. When he discovered that many people were ordering Teddy Bears on his companys website, and sending them to a judges chambers, he had to find out why. One of his representatives called Judge Gigante, and when told they were given to children with cancer, Bezos arranged for another 100 to be sent. In fact, when he first initiated the drive, certain court administrators questioned whether it was appropriate for him, as a judge, to solicit donations of Teddy Bears. His response was that he was ready to give up his robes if he couldnt do it. Who else but Judge Gigante would arrange and host Guardianship Recognition Ceremony to give the guardians he appoints, and their wards, an opportunity to meet with Surrogates Court staff and bank representatives who protect their assets, to put a face to a file. Anthony Catalano, the Public Administrator, related that the re-adoption of his two children was one of the first Judge Gigante performed as Surrogate. You cant have a more pleasant person to work with. He is laser-focused on getting the assistance of the Court to the people who need it. His heart is in the right place, he said. His current secretary and long-time confidant, Debra Passarello, told me that hes always been a good boss to work for, and always gave me the flexibility to both work and take care of my family...Our kids are very close, and we spend holidays together. Ron Cerrachio, the Chief Clerk of the Surrogates Court, described Judge Gigante as one of the most compassionate, understanding, and generous people I know, who stresses the importance of life as well as business. To him, his courtroom is more than a place for trials. Its for celebrations, education, and receptions, as well. His chambers is more than a place to hold meetings; its where joyous decorations are in abundance during the Christmas season, and bagels, muffins, and coffee are in abundance the rest of the year, for the breakfast enjoyment of staff and friends. His son, Robb, said he thinks his dad will miss the courthouse, its staff, and interacting with the lawyers on a daily basis. He said his father never took work home, even during tough trials. John Gulino, the Staten Island Democratic chairman, believes the judge was cross-endorsed for Surrogate in 2007 due to his demeanor and that he had proven himself as a Supreme Court Justice. Gulino, who has known Judge Gigante since both were young lawyers building their practices, marveled at how he always finds the time to give of himself to young lawyers. Allan Cappelli, Staten Island representative to the City Planning Commission, who has known Judge Gigante for at least 30 years, agrees. He should relax and enjoy his family. Its a shame to lose him from the bench, because he deeply cared about the litigants. Hon. John Fusco, his predecessor, told me he was happy to have been instrumental in securing a cross-endorsement for Judge Gigante in 2007. The fact that he was from the opposing party didnt make a difference. He was the best candidate, Republican or Democratic, and he was highly regarded by the Surrogate Court staff. The tradition of excellence continued under him. Bar Association president Toni Ann Barone bemoaned the loss were going to feel is the heart he brings to cases, and the fact that someone from the Court will actually call you back. As much as hes accomplished, and all of the important people hes been associated with, Ive found that hed rather talk about what his four children, or wife Barbara, have accomplished, or if not that, then what his beloved Mets are doing. Speaking of that team, the axiom that currently appears in big bold letters engraved in the rotunda of Citi Field says it all about Judge Gigante: Integrity: A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives. I was appointed to the bench in 2010, and Im sure that many of my colleagues who have been so appointed believe they got the nod based solely on their intelligence, legal acumen, reputation, and judicial temperament. I learned from Surrogate Gigante that a judge is more about caring and improving peoples lives. I would never have had the opportunity to serve my community as a jurist without Judge Gigantes efforts. The next Surrogate has some mighty big shoes to fill. (Note: this article is condensed from a version that previously appeared in the Richmond County Bar Associations Journal). Former President Mahinda Rajapaksa was still a patron and a member of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) and therefore, there was no obstacle for him to be appointed as the Opposition Leader, MP Mahindananda Aluthgamage said today. He said all SLFP MPs, who backed SLPP including Mr Rajapaksa continued to pay their membership fee to the SLFP and that they had not withdrawn from that party. Neither have we withdrawn from the SLFP nor were we expelled from it. All of us, including Mr Rajapaksa, still pay the membership fee to the SLFP. Last month Rs.3,000 had been deducted from Mr Rajapaksas salary to the account of SLFP as membership fees, he told a news briefing. Mr Aluthgamage said MPs R. Sampanthan, Lakshman Kiriella and Rauff Hakeem had opposed the appointment of Mr Rajapaksa as the Opposition Leader because Mr Rajapaksa would thwart UNPs attempts of bringing in acts and laws which were detrimental to the country. When questioned about Mr Rajapaksa obtaining the membership of the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) on November 11 at his Wijerama Residence at a grand function, MP Aluthgamage said a statement would be issued by SLPP General Secretary in this regard. All I can say is that Mr Rajapaksa is still a member of the SLFP. SLPP General Secretary will comment whether Mr Rajapaksa had obtained SLPP membership or not. Yes, there were media reports which said Mr Rajapaksa obtained SLPP membership back then but then again the reports can be interpreted in many ways, he said. When asked about the tweets by MP Namal Rajapaksa on November 10 and 11 which said he was joining the SLPP effective immediately and also included a photo which showed an SLPP membership card, the MP said he saw the tweets but it was up to the SLPP General Secretary to make a comment. Meanwhile, MP John Seneviratne said Mr Rajapaksa was a legal member of the SLFP though he might have accepted the membership of the SLPP. (Lahiru Pothmulla) Video by Sanjeewa To continue, please log in, or sign up for a new account. We offer one free story view per month. If you register for an account, you will get two additional story views. After those three total views, we ask that you support us with a subscription. A subscription to our digital content is so much more than just access to our valuable content. It means youre helping to support a local community institution that has, from its very start, supported the betterment of our society. Thank you very much! For a parliamentarian, the biggest concern is to get re-elected to Parliament over and over again until he or she retires from politics. When President Maithripala Sirisena finally succumbed to pressure and reappointed United National Party (UNP) Leader Ranil Wickremesimnghe as the Prime Minister, the dust looked settled as far as the political crisis was concerned. Instead, it was a relative lull. The crisis is not yet over as the UNP is struggling to finalise the list of Cabinet Ministers. It is true by all means that the path is cleared for the UNP to form the Government. Be that as it may, it would not be a smooth sailing for the UNP to run the Government under a President who is now even more hostile towards it. Also, this UNP-led Government would not in anyway be as strong as it used to be before October 26. Before October 26, the UNP led unity Government enjoyed a clear cut majority in Parliament. In fact, it fell short of a few seats only to muster the two-thirds. Today, it is bound to lead a Government that has to depend on the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) in the opposition for crucial support as and when the situation demands. The UNP faces some electoral compulsions in counting on the TNA to run the Government. Giving into the demands put forward by the TNA will be an unpopular move in the Sinhala majority electorates of the country. The release of the LTTE suspects commonly called Tamil political prisoners and the evolution of a constitutional package are among the TNAs demands for it to support the UNP while being in the opposition during this trying time. Yet, for the UNP, it involves a political cost to implement these demands. Against the backdrop, some UNP MPs such as Patali Champika Ranawaka insist that it should win over at least ten MPs from the United Peoples Freedom Alliance (UPFA) to clinch the simple majority of 113 in the House. It is nothing new that the MPs cross the floor of the House to join another party. It happened both during the last and the present Parliament. The three UPFA MPs- Gamini Wijith Wijeyamuni Zoysa, Lakshman Seneviratne and Indika Bandaranayake- crossed the floor of the House on Tuesday to join hands with the UNP. The wide perception is that such crossovers are triggered by horse trading. The MPs are lured to switch allegiance from one party to another through the offer of cash inducements. One cannot rule it out. In fact, it has marred South Asian politics today, let alone Sri Lanka. All in all, it is not the sole reason that compelled parliamentarians to break ranks with their parties and join another in politics. For them, there are other reasons as well. For a parliamentarian, the biggest concern is to get re-elected to Parliament over and over again until they retire from politics. According to the present electoral system of proportional representation, an electoral district returns a certain quota of members to Parliament. Then, each political party and independent group in the fray have to fight for a limited number of slots. When the political situation in the country develops or unfolds, some serving parliamentarians get well entrenched in politics and are able to consolidate their electoral holds. Alongside, there are others who are pushed to the margin triggering concerns about their inability to be re-elected from their present political party of choice. Under such circumstances, these MPs who sense their imminent defeat tend to look for opportunities in another party. Accordingly, crossovers are sometimes a phenomena triggered by such concerns. As for the latest crossovers, it appeared to be the most plausible reason. MP Gamini Wijitha Wijeyamuni Zoysa contested the election from the Moneragala district last time. He could not get elected, but was later nominated to Parliament on the National List of the UPFA. It is difficult for him to get elected from that side next time either. As a result, it would have compelled him to look for an opportunity with the UNP this time. The same goes for Seneviratne and Bandaranayake. The UNP faces some electoral compulsions in counting on the TNA to run the Government. Giving into the demands put forward by the TNA will be an unpopular move in the Sinhala majority electorates of the country However, the UNP is at a loss on how to accommodate these crossovers in the Cabinet. According to the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, the size of the Cabinet has to be restricted to 30 except in the case of a national government. During the last Cabinet prior to October 26, there were 32 UNPers holding Cabinet posts. Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe has proposed to give Cabinet posts to MPs Ravi Karunanayake and Palitha Range Bandara. It means four UNP MPs who served in the previous Cabinet should opt out to accommodate these MPs and to restrict the number of Ministers to 30. According to UNP sources, the party initially expected its senior MPs such as Gamini Jayawickrama Perera and D.M. Swaminathan to stay away this time. But, neither of them stepped down. So, UNP MP Malik Samarawickrama, at the UNP parliamentary group meeting on Tuesday, offered to remain without a portfolio this time. Along with him, MPs Mano Ganeshan and Rishad Bathiudeen agreed to do so. Let alone, the UNP insisted that they should remain in the Cabinet as vital stakeholders of the Government. UNP Deputy Leader Sajith Premadasa sounded a warning against giving Cabinet posts to those tainted with allegations of corruption and frauds. Our party has gained a bit now. We have to improve on it. We should not fall back again by appointing fraudsters to the Cabinet posts, he said. Ravi K insistent on Finance Ministry MP Karunanayake is adamant that he should be appointed as the Finance Minister. It is reported that he boycotted some meetings as a mark of protest over some MPs reluctance to give him the post. Most MPs dont mind him being given a Cabinet portfolio, but not the Finance Ministry. It has created an impasse in the appointment of the Cabinet Ministers. Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), headed by President Sirisena, had its Central Committee meeting on Tuesday evening. It is the first such meeting after the party severed its ties with the unity government. Tension at SLFP CC meeting There was tension at the meeting after some MPs such as Dayasiri Jayasekara proposed to take disciplinary action against those who teamed up with the UNP regardless of the partys decision to remain in the opposition. MPs Duminda Dissanayake, Mahinda Amaraweera and Mahinda Samarasinghe confronted it saying there was no basis for such action. If we take such action against them, we will have to institute disciplinary action against those who obtained the membership of Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP), they said. This created dissension within the SLFP with one section making the allegation against the other that it was clearing the path for the UNP to lure the SLFPers. After such tension, the SLFP, however, discussed the need to revive the party. For this purpose, a membership drive will be launched lasting one month, early next year. Political crisis a loss for SLPP on the one hand, and a gain on the other Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) is also to undertake a re-organization campaign early next year. Its population was a bit on the wane after it was forced out of power through parliamentary and judicial actions. In one aspect, the party lost a bit in terms of its popularity. At the same time, it also made gains from this whole exercise. First, its leader Mahinda Rajapaksa managed to become the Opposition Leader in Parliament. Also, it denied the UNP two-thirds majority in the House. As the main opposition, it will also get substantial representation in the Constitutional Council that makes vital appointments in the Government sector and the judiciary. The political crisis ended with a defeat for the SLPP on the one hand, and a gain on the other. Historian Professor Keith Baker described National Australia Bank's pay report as "obscene" and wondered what chief executive Andrew Thorburn could possibly "do with $4 million a year" as shareholders slammed the bank at a fiery meeting in Melbourne. NAB recorded a record-breaking 88 per cent vote against its remuneration report as angry shareholders described the bank's performance as "grovelling" and "disconnected" as chairman Ken Henry made his first public appearance since the scathing royal commission. Unimpressed Professor Keith Baker has owned NAB shares for 25 years. Credit:Charlotte Grieve "I lost count of the number of times the chairman said sorry and promised things would get better," said Professor Keith Baker, who has owned shares for 25 years, and described the meeting as "grovelling". The 85-year-old historian was one of the 88.1 per cent of shareholders who voted against the bank's remuneration report in a historic show of dissatisfaction with management performance. Mining giant will negotiate a possible extension of an iron-ore joint venture with the China Baowu Steel Group in Australias minerals-rich Pilbara region, the company announced on Wednesday. An agreement was signed in Shanghai to reinforce the so-called Bao-HI joint venture, which controls the Eastern Ranges and Western Range mines and has delivered sales of more than 180 million tonnes of iron ore since it was created in 2002. Iron ore bound for Port Hedland. Credit:Tony McDonough The signing of this agreement is a significant milestone in the partnership between Rio Tinto and Baowu that extends back more than four decades and was enhanced with the creation of the Bao-HI JV, Rio Tinto iron ore chief executive Chris Salisbury said. The success of this relationship has contributed to the growth of both our organisations over many years and is one which continues to develop and strengthen over time. Australian shares closed lower on Wednesday weighed down by the local energy sector as oil prices dropped further overnight on supply concerns. The S&P/ASX 200 Index fell 8.9 points, or 0.2 per cent, to 5580.6 as the market remained on track to record its worst December quarter since the global financial crisis. "We're leaving a Santa rally a bit late in the year," said Atlas Funds Management chief investment officer Hugh Dive. "I think we're somewhat beholden to the US. If we do see some positives coming out of the US, we're likely to see the ASX rally on some thin volumes." Oil prices dropped further overnight. Credit:James Davies Oil prices fell to their lowest level in more than a year on Tuesday on the back of continued economic uncertainty and growing global supples. Brent crude fell 5.6 per cent to $US56.26 a barrel on Tuesday, down 35.8 per cent from its October peak. The local energy sector fell in response on Wednesday. Origin Energy shares fell 5.7 per cent to $6.46, Woodside Petroleum slid 1.8 per cent to $30.19, Santos closed 3.7 per cent lower at $5.22, Oil Search declined 2.7 per cent to $6.85, AGL Energy ended trade at $19.64, down 0.9 per cent and Beach Energy slipped 3.6 per cent to $1.35. Australias powerful construction and maritime union has been fined $125,000 after three officials showed arrogant disregard of the law by attending a picket line blockading a major container terminal and stranding millions of dollars of cargo. During a hostile workplace dispute at the Port of Melbourne last year stevedoring company Victorian International Container Terminal (VICT) was hit with an around-the-clock blockade preventing trucks from reaching more than 1000 shipping containers carrying retail goods, fresh produce and medicine for two weeks in the lead-up to Christmas. The docks were the subject of a protests and a picket. Credit:AAP Victorias Supreme Court had twice ordered the maritime union not to go within 100 metres of the terminal access gates and to lift the illegal picket line. But the blockade remained in force and was referred to as a community protest by supporters in the wider trade union movement. The union admitted its officials had been in breach of the injunction when they addressed the picketers on the afternoon of December 14. "We unwrap so much at Christmas. We uncover and expose a great deal to the light." As always, Vanessa Redgrave's husky narration signals the opening to Call the Midwife and its Christmas special: a seasonal staple that's as comforting and wholesome as Christmas lunch with your family isn't. Judy Parfitt as Sister Monica Joan and Helen George as Trixie Franklin in Call the Midwife. Credit:Sophie Mutevelian There's snow! Shiny-cheeked children! Nuns! A pantomime! Sure, it'd be easy to dismiss Call the Midwife as a glossy period piece that has about as much substance as the cake they are continually eating. But if you peer a little deeper, it's a wonderfully feminist show that deals with the tough stuff death, sexual abuse, domestic violence, mental health all covered in a neat hour (or in tonight's case, 78 minutes). It champions women looking after women, women working, the importance of community and sticking together when times are tough. Yes, it sounds cliched but it's comforting. And in a year when we've been through about six prime ministers, had to think about Barnaby Joyce's sex life and we still have refugee kids suffering on Nauru, what could be better than lying back and thinking of England (on the sofa, of course, with a cup of tea or gin depending on your festive mood). There remains less than a year until Sri Lanka braces for its next elections. With the recent series of political dramas that unfolded, it is no surprise for Sri Lankans to witness the advent of new parties or old alliances being reborn. That is what happened during almost all the elections that have taken place. While the most asked question who can measure up to be a politician remains debated in a country where there is no formal qualification to serve as a politician, a collective of Sri Lankan professionals, activists and artistes gathered at the Sri Lanka Foundation Institute (SLFI) on December 17 and formed a movement called National Peoples Movement (NPM). Absence of a feasible alternative They emphasised that Sri Lanka as a country is eroding on multiple fronts socially, economically and culturally. The professionals pointed out that the power of people is the strongest and it can solve almost all the burning issues in the country. They stated that a power struggle and rivalry among main political parties may eventually pave the way for the evolution of a brutal dictatorship or even anarchy, in the absence of a feasible alternative to the people of the country. The NPM platform is a collaboration of 17-member organizations including United Professionals Movement, Deshodaya Organization, Vinivida Foundation, Lawyers for Equal Rights, Sri Lankan Engineers Association, Trustees (Gte.) Ltd, Jathika Janatha Commission, Jathika Parisarika Sanvidana Ekamuthuwa, Alliance for Political Conscience , Paramparika Ha Deshiya Waidyawarunge Ekamuthuwa, Jathika Guru Balaya, Udara Sri Lanka Organization, Independent Organization to Protect Depositors, Mihithala Mithuro Environment Development Foundation, Janatha Niyojanaye Purogami Sabhawa, AI Imam Shafi Center for Education & Development and Dambulu Govijana Vyaparaya. The people in power have become disconnected from the citizenry. They develop interests separate and apart from the voters. They push policies that benefit themselves and harm the broader population The members of the NPM said that the movement was formed with seven main objectives. These objectives include being an active force that empowers people to create an impactful social, economic and political transformation, build a people friendly, modern and an efficient nation free of corruption, where equity, equality, justice and respectfulness prevails, develop a national agenda/road map through an inclusive process to address the social, economic and political challenges we face, ensure the establishment of a new constitution through a wide consultative and participatory process, establish a stable environment for innovation and creativity based home grown industries, promote national unity, ethnic and religious harmony and reconciliation and finally developing a new political leadership and a political culture to build the nation by identifying most suited individuals to run for government, while retaining power with the people. Serving instead of ruling NPM Media Spokesman Gamini Nanda Gunawardana began his speech with a stern reminder: The people in power have become disconnected from the citizenry. They develop interests separate and apart from the voters. They push policies that benefit themselves and harm the broader population. He believes that by being an individual pressure group, there isnt much an organisation could do in order to make a positive impact on the society and its citizens. We have gathered here today and formed our movement not to support an individual purpose, but for a common purpose. Public representatives should serve the nation instead of ruling the nation, he said. He suggested that people of Sri Lanka should no longer wait till politicians fulfill their election promises. Responding to a question, Gunawardana said that the members of the NPM may contest upcoming elections. Transformation Public interest lawyer Nagananda Kodituwakku believes that the Sri Lankan political system has become extremely corrupt and very unfair leaving people with no faith in it. This sorry state of affairs reflects what we have become. It is just a system of Government, which we built, and which we could replace. So why dont we replace it with something better? he asked. He pointed out that all the 225 MPs in Parliament dont serve public interests, but that most of them are self-serving. He was of the view that those who have offered support to the NPM are not exploiters of public money and resources. People in both South and North have the same problems despite their ethnic differences. All like-minded individuals and organisations are invited to join us and transform the present political system to a more democratic and participatory system of governance, he said. Sri Lankan women Representing the females, Samitha Ethuldora Arachchi, a psychologist, stressed that although Sri Lankan women have been given all the rights, they have unfortunately failed to create a strong and effective ideology in the society. Sri Lankan women have to break barriers and come forward to protect the country from evils just like they protect their babies, she said. Ethuldora Arachchi affirms that Sri Lankan women have to not only fight for their own rights but also must join hands with organizations such as the NPM to ensure a better country for the future generations. It is just a system of Government, which we built, and which we could replace. So why dont we replace it with something better? Stand tall Meanwhile, National Organizer of the NPM Palitha Abeywardana said that the professionals who make their voices heard only when they need to obtain vehicle permits and salary increments, should feel ashamed. We were waiting to remove the tag professionals and go right into the people as a peoples movement. For years, we have been working on this concept, he said. Abeywardana stressed that the NPM isnt another so-called trade union that works on a personal agenda. The speakers said that Sri Lankan leaders who have ruled over 70 years since independence, have at various points in the history ventured to amend the Constitution with the basic intention of ensuring their political longevity and constitutional loopholes for their personal benefits, while eroding the rights of each citizen. They also said that the leaders have also failed to manage not only the economy, geopolitical relations, socio-economic advancement of the populace, but also the preservation of the countrys environment and culture. They also invited other professional organisations to join them in co-creating the NPM to fulfill its seven objectives. In the 1950s, international travel to distant places was mostly undertaken by ship. The great dream for many was to one day travel by plane. That is why cigarette-maker Peter Stuyvesant abandoned its print slogan of "The smell of the large far world" for commercials featuring an airport departure-board rotating through the names of the most glamorous cities in the world. James Bond author Ian Fleming was a key player in this global romanticisation from the moment his first 007 novel, Casino Royale, appeared in 1953. Fleming had a journalist's gift for vivid word pictures and could effortlessly conjure up for readers such exotic places as Istanbul, French Guinea and Moscow. He was so good at it that The Sunday Times sent him around the world by plane in 1959, the 13 articles he wrote en route later forming his best-selling Thrilling Cities (1963). People read Fleming to escape their constrained existences for the imagined thrills of unknown lands (though Fleming also had a sombre side, revealing in harrowing prose the genocide of the local Taino in Ian Fleming Introduces Jamaica two year later). James Bond explodes into action in vivid 4K detail on pay-TV service Stan. James Bond first appeared on the cinema screen in 1962's Dr. No, the film's producers having wisely hired a talented cameraman in Ted Moore to photograph Bond (Sean Connery) as he dashed from a London casino for the rich and famous to the sun-bleached beaches of Jamaica, where Honey Rider (Ursula Andress) so memorably emerges from an iridescently blue sea. Dr No helped fuel the world's passion for travel, but it was From Russia with Love that would set the standard for all the films that followed. Bond is sent to Istanbul to seduce Tatiana Romanova (Daniela Bianchi), then has to outsmart a Soviet assassin on the Orient Express to Venice, before nearly being killed by a steel-tipped KGB shoe and then cuddling Tatiana in a gondola on the Venetian lagoon. Loading These two worlds are about to collide with more bare breasts than are strictly necessary, and with Adrielle's favourite dress turning out to be far more risque than the actual nudity. And there's so much snogging going on that you can't help but get distracted wondering how many gallons of Listerine they had to have on the set. Best and Pataky are perfect in their roles, holding up their respective poles of the circus tent with great aplomb and demonstrating a remarkable ability to keep a straight face. Some of the others are less convincing, though it might have helped if they were given more convincing dialogue. Take Augie telling his sister not to have sex with the Tidelanders: "I know they look good, but that's meat you don't eat." Tidelands is available to watch on Netflix now. All that said, series creators Stephen M. Irwin and Leigh McGrath (Secrets & Lies) have come up with an imaginative story, and though it takes too long to engage, those who persevere through the first few episodes might find themselves getting sucked in. Watch The Mike Nolan show on Comedy Central. The Mike Nolan Show comedycentral.com.au Animated Australian Mike Nolan is a council-work and cash-in-hand specialist and the owner of the foulest mouth ever to have sucked back a few rum and Cokes down at the pokies. The five-minute episodes of this pseudo-reality series have him taking a young, naive camera crew around his world, showing them how to pick up work and get out of random breath tests, and introducing them to his increasingly weird friends. Writers struggling with blue-collar dialogue should check it out, along with Mr Inbetween (Foxtel On Demand). Donald Glover's Weirdo is funny and poignant. Credit:AP Donald Glover: Weirdo Netflix Community star Donald Glover gave us one of the most stunning and politically powerful performances of the year in the video for This Is America, a song he wrote for his rap alter-ego, Childish Gambino. Weirdo, Glover's 2012 stand-up comedy special, certainly isn't as electrifying, and it treats some heavy topics with a levity that some will might find surprising. It's still funny and poignant, though, particularly when dealing with race and with how Glover grew up alongside the foster children his parents took in. Author William Burroughs. William S. Burroughs: A Man Within Docplay William S. Burroughs wasn't merely a writer of stunning originality; he expanded the scope of literature and cultural conversation by placing gritty realities of homosexuality and drug addiction in the spotlight for the first time. He was a mentor and inspiration to Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and countless others down the decades, but remained in many ways a closed and enigmatic figure. This poignant biography has friends, lovers and biographers piece together a portrait of a man far more vulnerable and wounded than many will have suspected. Benicio Del Toro as Richard Matt and Paul Dano as David Sweat in Escape at Dannemora. Credit:Showtime Escape at Dannemora Stan* As snooze-inducing titles go, Escape at Dannemora is right up there with The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair. A better title would have been Patricia Arquette Is Amazing, and Benicio Del Toro and Paul Dano Not Too Shabby Neither. This seven-part slow-burn drama recounts the real-life escape of murderers Richard Matt and David Sweat from a prison in upstate New York in 2015. Loading The central figure, however, is Joyce "Tilly" Mitchell (Arquette), the 51-year-old civilian supervisor of the prison's tailoring workshop, and a woman involved in unlikely affairs with both killers. Unhappy, unglamorous and deeply unlovely, Tilly is a fascinating character, and Arquette leaps into her skin with fearless commitment, whether it be having a disturbing kind of knee-trembler in a supply closet, or setting down subtle layers that blur the distinctions between manipulator and chump. The series, created and written by Brett Johnson and Michael Tolkin and directed by Ben Stiller, initially paints too sypathetic a picture of Matt and Sweat (Del Toro and Dano) but it's uncommonly absorbing television tailor-made for bingeing. The inspector also found non-compliant electrical boards, incorrect signage, the site littered with materials and waste, incomplete and non-compliant scaffolding and a lack of barriers to elevated edges. The inspector found a worker at the Coombs site incorrectly performing work for a mobile crane, a role that required a high-risk licence which the worker did not hold. Lifestyle Homes (ACT) pleaded guilty in the ACT Industrial Court earlier this year to six charges arising from a random WorkSafe ACT inspection of the 63-unit site Opus in October 2017. Magistrate Glenn Theakston said that before the inspection the company had on paper a range of appropriate work, health and safety processes, and had hired a work, health and safety manager. But the processes did not translate into practices that avoided the breaches, he said. "The WorkSafe inspection uncovered six separate breaches of the regulations, some of which had some potential to cause injury, and others that had a high potential to cause injury," he said. "In particular, the breaches in relation to the scaffolding, namely the risks of workers and objects falling, were particularly high in the circumstances. "Those breaches exposed workers to immediate and proximate risk of very serious injury or death, and were risks that would have been obvious to an observer and had been brought to the notice of the defendant. A predator-proof sanctuary in the middle of Gungahlin may house the solution to Canberra's carp clean-up problem: the eastern long-neck turtle. Canberra's recent spell of wet weather has been prime time for the turtles, with softer soil making it easier to make nests and lay eggs as they migrate around the capital, including near Yerrabi Pond. An eastern long neck turtle peaks its head out of its shell at Mulligans Flat Sanctuary. Credit:Lawrence Atkin While the eastern long-neck turtle isn't endangered, Western Sydney University associate professor in ecology Ricky Spencer warned their population was in decline nationally and they formed an important part of the ecosystem. "They're the major vacuum cleaners of the river," Dr Spencer said. Canberras many cultural offerings are all very well, but visitors can attest its the driving and parking experience that makes or breaks a visit to the capital. Just in time for the holidays, several of Canberras cultural institutions have banded together to provide a free shuttle bus between the various venues. Directors from Canberra's main institutions have joined forces to provide a free "culture loop" bus service for Canberra commuters. Credit:Karleen Minney The Culture Loop bus is a joint six-month pilot venture launched by 10 organisations, which will run seven days a week from 9am to 5pm. The one-hour round trip, which starts at 9am on Thursday, December 20, will include stops at the National Museum of Australia, the National Film and Sound Archive, Regatta Point, the National Library, Questacon, the Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House, Australian Parliament House, Canberra Museum and Gallery, and the Canberra Centre. ActewAGL has collected 91 per cent of bills which were sent out by mistake to 400 customers last week in a massive privacy breach that affected 6000 Icon Water and ActewAGL customers. That means a week after the first bundle of bills was identified, the private billing information of about 540 utility customers is still in the hands of strangers. ActewAGL is still retrieving bills that were sent out in bulk to customers by mistake. Credit:Jasper Lindell ActewAGL confirmed last week that 400 electricity, gas and water customers had received bundles of bills addressed to 6000 other customers. The bills arrived loose leaf in envelopes and boxes, in some cases containing more than 500 bills. A 10-year-old boy was allegedly raped three times in an immigration detention centre on Nauru as the federal government failed to protect him, lawyers argue in a new claim. The lawsuit, brought on the boys behalf by his mother, also alleges security failures by centre contractors Wilson Security and Broadspectrum, then known as Transfield Services. The controversial Nauru Detention Centre. Credit:Amnesty International Dimi Ioannou, principal at Maurice Blackburn lawyers, said her firm was dealing with several sexual assaults of asylum seekers but this was thought to be the first Australian case involving a child. The boy, now 14 and living in Sydney with his mother, suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, major depression and anxiety, thoughts of suicide, incontinence and ongoing physical pain, the claim said. Commentary on Scott Morrison rarely takes seriously the fact that he is yet another Sydney Liberal leading this country. His Pentecostal church-going is elevated as is his occupational background in tourism and the Liberal party state organisation and his ministerial background in immigration and treasury. Sometimes his local background in the Sutherland shire and his support for the Cronulla Sharks is emphasised. But rarely his state of origin as such. He comes from Australias largest state, New South Wales, and Australias biggest and most cosmopolitan city, Sydney. He shares his origins with the previous three Liberal prime ministers, John Howard, Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull, as well as Brendan Nelson, the other federal Liberal leader during this time. Scott Morrison, third from left, is part of the Sydney Liberal 'bubble'. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen There are important Liberal players from other states, including the conservative Queenslander Peter Dutton, who undermined Turnbull, and the former deputy leader, Julie Bishop, from Western Australia. But in a world where the culture of the state Liberal parties varies considerably, the NSW Liberals really do own the nations conservative leadership. That makes the Liberal leadership and the conservative side of Australias prime ministerial coups quite different from those on the Labor side where Kevin Rudd from Queensland deposed Kim Beazley from Western Australia and was in turn overthrown by Julia Gillard from Victoria before returning the favour. The Labor leadership now rests with another Victorian, Bill Shorten. Labor exhibits a much more national look than a succession of Sydney Liberal leaders. When David Cox offered his excellent Japan Times headline (C8), Bill Jennings of Runaway Bay (Qld) was reminded of the time decades ago, when a group of US journalists in a pre-Christmas drinks session, contested to see who could invent the most startling headline. The winner was the journalist who came up with Archduke Ferdinand Found Alive World War I a Mistake. "Can anyone say where the word 'mullygrubber' comes from?" asks Ray Wilson of Grafton. "Pat Cummins was bowled by one in Perth." John Boddington could do worse than joining the Gunning Hookers (C8), thinks Anne Cook of Ermington. You never know, they could be a charming lot and, guaranteed, you'd be the class pet. Janice Creenaune of Austinmer couldnt agree more. I can't see a problem, John. The oldest profession is not gender specific and neither is crochet. In addition, for some, knowing a man who understands the difference between knitting and crochet may be a real turn-on. "Scientists say the release of sterilised male mosquitoes helps to decrease mosquito-borne diseases such as dengue fever," writes Stephanie Edwards of Roseville. "How exactly do you sterilise a male mosquito? Vasectomy?" It's not just animals catching public transport (C8) that amuses us. They do a pretty good job as pedestrians too. Colleen Riga of Potts Point noticed that a number of ibises "strolled out of Fitzroy Gardens in Kings Cross and walked down to the pedestrian crossing. When they had all arrived, they proceeded across the crossing as a group. A laugh-aloud moment enjoyed by the passing humans." A husband and wife duo are behind bars after a long-running investigation targeted them as ringleaders of a scheme that has been issuing fraudulent construction industry trade qualifications to unqualified people for a fee since at least 2015. Cameron Russell, 55 and wife Fay, 52, were extradited to NSW earlier this month before they were charged over the scheme, which allegedly issued fake certificates in trades such as building, electrotechnology, gas fittings, air-conditioning and refrigeration. Cameron and Fay Russell. Credit:Facebook It is estimated hundreds of fake qualifications may have been issued through the scheme, raising concerns about the potential number of unqualified people currently working on construction sites around Sydney. The couple, believed to be the ringleaders of the scheme, were among nine people arrested and charged over the alleged construction industry fraud, which has been under investigation by the Organised Crime Squads Money Laundering Unit and the NSW Crime Commission since June. From left: SAGT Commercial and Marketing Manager Dhashma Karunaratne, ONE Lanka Product and Network General Manager Lohitha Hettiarachchi, ONE Lanka Manager and Operations Head Nalaka Alwis, ONE Lanka Commercial and Marketing and Product and Network Senior General Manager Ayesh Perera, One Lanka Managing Director Vishvanath Daluwatte, SAGT Chief Executive Officer Romesh David, SAGT Chairman Susantha Ratnayake, SAGT General Manager Operations Upul Jinadasa, SAGT Operations Manager Senaka Ranasinghe, SAGT Planning Manager Prasanga Silva and SAGT Chief Commercial Officer Ted Muttiah South Asia Gateway Terminals (Pvt.) Ltd (SAGT), Sri Lankas first public-private partnership, a flagship venture of the Board of Investment, today achieved an impressive two million 20-foot equivalent container units (TEUs) in a calendar year, for the first time. SAGT commenced operations in 1999 and along its 19-year journey, has consistently established groundbreaking benchmarks, securing several global and regional awards in recognition of its operational high performance, productivity and efficiency. However, the achievement of two million TEUs in a single year is a first for the company and particularly significant, considering the terminals original design capacity being assessed at just 1.1 million TEUs. Over the last five years, SAGT has averaged around 1.7 million TEUs per annum. Its previous highest volume was 1.9 million TEUs achieved in 2009 and 2010. SAGT Chairman Susantha Ratnayake was all praise for Team SAGT saying, This is an outstanding outcome as a result of sound planning, management and operational execution. This is Sri Lankan talent showcasing local expertise and world-class competencies in a global business. It is a proud day for Sri Lanka and Sri Lankans. Commenting on the occasion of discharging the momentous two millionth TEU, SAGT CEO Romesh David said, Team SAGT is delighted to have once again risen to the occasion. The continued narrowing of the supply and demand for terminal capacity in the port means this achievement enables additional capacity in support of the Port of Colombos growth aspirations. Furthermore, this is an excellent example of team work within the SAGT family and with multiple industry stakeholders and service partners whose collective commitment to be the best, realize a new horizon of excellence. We appreciate the support of our loyal customers and acknowledge the leadership of the Sri Lanka Ports Authority (SLPA), harbour master and port pilots, who provide vital ancillary services, making these outcomes possible, he added. SAGTs achievement of two million TEUs generated over a 940-metre quay length provides the best operational yield per metre of quay length in the Port of Colombo and indeed in the South Asia region. General Manager Operations Upul Jinadasa, who has been with the company from the inception, said, SAGT continues to evolve driving innovation and safety at the heart of its operational efficiency. This is an inspiring turning point for our operations. We are excited at the prospect of making this the new normal at SAGT. SAGT is the first public-private partnership container terminal in Sri Lanka with approximately 60 percent Sri Lankan shareholding and commenced operations in 1999, launching the Port of Colombo as global trades preeminent gateway hub to South Asia. Today, the terminal is one of three operators in the Port of Colombo and continues to offer the international container shipping community a competitive best in class service. SAGT is a Board of Investment flagship company, whose shareholders include John Keells Holdings, Maersk/APM Terminals, the SLPA and Evergreen Marine Corporation. Bankrupt and "a guest of Her Majesty", Salim Mehajer is busy representing himself in court from prison. After years of unrelenting headlines, thanks to a big wedding in August 2015 and a raft of court cases, the colourful former deputy mayor of Auburn returned to relative obscurity in June after he was sentenced to 11 months in prison for electoral fraud. Salim Mehajer outside the Federal Court in April. Credit:AAP But on Wednesday, Mehajer returned to the limelight and the Federal Court in Sydney via audiovisual link from Cooma Correctional Centre. Dressed in prison greens and surrounded by court documents, Mehajer told Justice Michael Lee he would be "out of custody in three to four months" and would make a fresh bid to overturn his bankruptcy "the moment I'm out of custody". To his opponents, Pierre Azzi was part of a powerful "junta" of councillors who ran an aggressively pro-development council at Canterbury that is now mired in a corruption scandal. But Mr Azzi said he hadn't been cut out to lead. "I'm a soldier, I'm not a general," Mr Azzi told a long-running probe into the council on Wednesday. Pierre Azzi: 'I'm not a general, I don't carry guns', he told the ICAC. Credit:Dean Sewell Mr Azzi, former councillor Michael Hawatt and the council's general manager Jim Montague are at the centre of an investigation by the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption. An ethics unit has been set up inside the NSW Department of Planning and Environment, following the receipt of a report by former deputy police commissioner Nick Kaldas into the governance of the states planning system. NSW Planning Minister Anthony Roberts released Mr Kaldas report on Wednesday, and said the government would accept all 19 recommendations from Mr Kaldas "health check" of the planning system. NSW Planning Minister Anthony Roberts released Nick Kaldas' report on Wednesday. Credit:AAP The purpose of one of those recommendations the ethics unit would not be to investigate specific complains of corruption, but to provide pre-emptive advice about corruption risks within the states notoriously complex planning system. I think it is a really highly complex system, Mr Kaldas said of the states planning system. After a 153-year wait, women will be able to join Brisbane's Tattersall's Club after its male members voted for change. The results of a postal ballot of members were announced at a special general meeting in the members' bar of the Brisbane CBD club on Wednesday evening. The Tattersall's Club in the Brisbane CBD Credit:Felicity Caldwell The vote to expand membership to include women passed with 1405 voting in favour, while 1368 voted against. In response to the vote, Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk - now eligible for membership - said: "History. It's about time." The Ramsay Centre educational foundation is this week celebrating its first project, a $50 million grant to the University of Wollongong to establish a bachelor of arts degree course in "western civilisation". The centre, established in 2017 with a multimillion-dollar bequest from Liberal Party donor, the late Paul Ramsay, and guided by a board of conservatives including John Howard and Tony Abbott, has provoked controversy since its inception. Ramsay Centre chief executive Professor Simon Haines with University of Wollongong vice-chancellor Professor Paul Wellings after signing the deal. The centre aims to "re-invigorate" the humanities and liberal arts in Australia by restoring to the centre of academic life the study of the western canon of literary and philosophical classics such as Shakespeare and Plato. It says that this great tradition, taught in small tutorials like those in the colleges of Oxford or Cambridge, can play a unique role in forming young minds. Ramsay's offer of enough funding to pay for small class sizes, quality lecturers and very generous stipends of $30,000 a year per student has tempted universities and both the University of Sydney and of Queensland are considering courses of their own. What do you do when you become the killer shark capital of the world, have to ban residents and visitors from even entering the water and your tourism industry goes into freefall? The answer, in the case of Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean, is ask Australia for help. SharkSpotter is a world-leading artificial intelligence technology developed by the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and operated by the Ripper Group which owns the drones. The technology was used on the French island near Madagascar this year to help identify bull sharks terrorising surfers and swimmers. This summer, as part of a deal signed with the Westpac Lifesaver Rescue Drone program on Monday, drones will also be used in 51 locations across Australia, 19 in NSW (including Sydney's northern beaches and along the Central Coast). Utzon dreamt up these extraordinary shapes for his competition entry and they were free shapes, Zunz told the BBC in a documentary in July this year. The first thing Arup did when they were asked to collaborate is they took these free shapes and developed a series of mathematical models which as near as possible matched Utzons competition design. None of these shapes appeared buildable, he said. The building of the roof was so time consuming and complex, recalled Zunz, that many joked to him it could never be built. The building was actually constructed around the capacity of the largest tower crowns which could be found in the world (which had been used to rebuild Dresden after it was destroyed in World War Two). Personally I wasnt sure to admit to working on it at the time. If you got into a taxi in Sydney you got an earful on all the money that was wasted on god knows what, Zunz said. Then suddenly in September 1961 Utzon had an idea to construct it from a sphere. He came back a week later and said: 'Ive solved it'. But in so doing he changed the architecture quite radically, said Zunz. Utzons idea, known as the spherical solution, meant the sails could be built from pre-stressed concrete, with shapes made of moulds using repeated geometry. But this radically altered the structure at Bennelong Point. Arup escaped death narrowly with Utzon not long after their Eureka moment. Zunz, then one of Arups senior London men and Utzon, were booked to fly to Sydney to present to the NSW government and the Sydney Opera House Trust, the Yellow Book, which detailed stage two and how the roof was to be built. Jack Zunz at the Building The Opera House exhibition in London in 2014. Credit:Arup But Arups technical drawings ran a week late and the two men had to delay their departure for two weeks. The delay was a fortunate turn of events and saved the lives of both Utzon and Zunz. The Boeing 707 American Airlines flight they had originally been booked on to fly from New Yorks Idlewild Airport to Los Angeles, plunged into the water minutes after take-off, killing all 95 passengers and crew. Even before stage two (as the Opera House roof was called), work had to be held up for four months while the underground concrete piers were reinforced. Zunz confessed that this was his fault; hed designed them when the roof load had been expected to be much lighter. The only solution was to strengthen the concrete piers that had been sunk down through the base to support the roof. And the only way to do this was to blast them with explosives. So Zunz brought in gelignite to blast out the piers that Civil & Civic had so carefully constructed under the podium only a few years before and a series of explosions rung out at about 5 pm each evening across Sydney harbour for days on end in early 1963. One newspaper claimed Zunzs error cost around $80,000 (40,000 pounds). There was a lot of rain too, which didnt help. The blasts were scheduled for times that would least disturb the city. Manly ferry commuters were disrupted once, when some debris from an explosion landed on their vessel, but luckily no one was injured. Workers on site jokingly called it Zunzs folly. He was great fun to work with particularly in those early years, Zunz said of Utzon. Hed won a couple of competition entries but as far as building anything of any scale, he hadnt really done very much, said Zunz. Gradually a growing tension between Utzon and the Arup team began to become apparent. The Dane clashed with Zunz and Lewis so much that a brick wall between architects and engineers was built between their on-site offices at Bennelong Point. Not long after his 1963 move to Australia, Utzon attempted to draw a clear demarcation, setting down unequivocally who was in charge of what at Bennelong Point. Zunz, still in Arups London office, naturally sided with his boss and the Arup man on the site, Michael Lewis, was in no doubt that everyone had been seduced by Utzon and his head in the clouds approach. The whole situation started going downhill. Utzon couldnt, wouldnt, didnt produce any documents which his client desired, Zunz told the BBC this year. It was a terrible shock I mean terrible, Im not sure Utzon saw himself able to complete the job, Zunz said. Zunz, who was knighted for his engineering work as Arup's lead structural engineer, provocatively quipped before the roofs were enclosed, "just leave it as it is as a sculpture". The building was completed and he attended the 1973 opening with his boss Sir Ove Arup. You can't quantify the extent to which the human spirit has been lifted by the Sydney Opera House, Zunz said earlier this year. As well as the Sydney Opera House, Zunz was behind numerous other projects, including the Britannic House for BP in London, the hanging-floors Standard Bank building in Johannesburg, the Emley Moor transmitting station in West Yorkshire and the HSBC headquarters in Hong Kong. Its not a Liberal Party Christmas without the annual John Winston Howard office party held Tuesday (sans cocktails, heavy on the Oyster Bay sav blanc) and this year it certainly did not disappoint. Our spies at the MLC offices in the city spotted another former prime minister, Tony Abbott, in the crowd, but no sign of current Kirribilli House resident Scott Morrison or previous tenant Malcolm Turnbull. Another partygoer informed us Abbott was in full praise of former chief of staff Peta Credlin, who he suggested should have a shot at the federal Victorian seat of Mallee. Illustration: John Shakespeare Credit: Its being vacated by Andrew "G'day Ladies" Broad, and we hear Abbott quipped that Libs are just city Nationals (it would help that Credlin grew up in the electorate). When VCE results were released on Friday, Ms Karvouni discovered shed reached that goal a year earlier. Auburn High has joined the coveted 30 club an important benchmark for schools striving for a solid academic reputation. Achieving a median study score of 30 means a schools VCE performance is no longer considered below average. Auburn High School was one of four Victorian schools that achieved the coveted 30 score for the first time this year. The other three schools were: Mordialloc College, a government school in Melbournes south-east; Keilor Downs College, a government school in Melbournes north-west; and the St Pauls campus of Emmanuel College, a Catholic school in Altona North. Auburn High is also celebrating 8.6 per cent of its study scores being 40 or above. Achieving a study score of 40 or above (out of a possible 50) places a student in the top 9 per cent of the state in that subject. We are so excited, Ms Karvouni said. We are finally reaping the benefits of all our work. This work has included overhauling the curriculum and using data to determine what is and isnt working in the classroom. Principal Maria Karvouni strolls through the school grounds with students celebrating their VCE results Credit:Simon Schluter Auburn High is surrounded by independent schools the top VCE performer, Bialik College, is next door and Scotch College is a stones throw away. Ms Karvouni knew that if she wanted to win over parents in the area, she had to look at what her competitors were offering. While it was difficult to match the shiny facilities of neighbouring schools, the principal did her best to spruce up Auburn High. She painted walls, pruned overgrown bushes and trees in the school yard, purchased new furniture and threw out the stained, yellow curtains that made the staff room look like a smoking lounge. The school uniform was overhauled, with all students required to wear a red blazer with the school logo emblazoned on the front. A bilingual French program was introduced and an extensive range of extra-curricular activities, including robotics, coding and debating, were rolled out. And just like the nearby private schools, the state school started handing out badges to students who had excelled in philanthropy, public speaking, STEM, sport and the arts. This was very strategic on my behalf, Ms Karvouni said. I know this community. I wanted them to see that they could get these same opportunities in a government school. The transformation is certainly attracting parents. Next year, 120 students will start year 7 at Auburn High. Year 12 student Krystina Pelas said when she started year 7 at the then-Hawthorn Secondary College, people questioned her choice. I don't think it had a very good reputation. she said. What I had heard coming into the school was not positive. But the 18-year-old, who hopes to study psychology at Monash University next year, said these perceptions had dramatically shifted over the past five years. Now they usually ask me how the teachers are. I tell them how much they have improved. We are definitely a high-achieving school. For Mordialloc College, the jump to a 30 was a sudden one - for the past three years the school has attained a median of 27. Its principal Michelle Roberts brought a bottle of champagne to Fridays staff meeting to celebrate. I shook it up and sprayed it everywhere and took a swig, she said. The maritime union has been fined $125,000 for contempt after breaching court orders by blockading access to a Melbourne port where millions of dollars of shipping goods were being held. Union members march to Webb Dock in December 2017 taking industrial action after a casual worker was denied further shifts. Credit:Luis Asqui Loading The sacking of a worker who was refused security clearance to work at the Webb Dock prompted protests from unions including the Maritime Union of Australia outside the port, preventing trucks from entering or leaving late last year. The Victorian International Container Terminal sought an injunction against the then MUA, which is now under the umbrella of the CFMMEU, on December 1, 2017, but the protests continued and a second injunction was granted on December 12. From left Sampath Banks Assistant General Manager Operations,Mr. Maheel Kuragama; Branch Manager - Negombo Super Branch,Ms. Kanchana Senarathne; Managing Director, Mr. Nanda Fernando and Senior Deputy General Manager - Consumer Banking, Mr. Tharaka Ranwala at the ribbon cutting ceremony of the Banks latest Super Branch in Negombo Sampath Bank has introduced 365 day banking in Negombo with the opening of its latest Super Branch at No. 408, Main Street, Negombo.Open from 8am to 8pmevery day of the year, including Saturdays and Sundays and even public holidays. The Super Branch comprises of all the facilities of a modern bank offeringmany innovative products and state of the art banking services. Residents of the area can now enjoya world of conveniencewith unparalleled levels of accessibility to a variety of savings solutions, housing loans, leasing facilities andeven electronic banking services, right in the heart of Negombo. Mr. Nanda Fernando, Managing Director of Sampath Bank ceremonially opened the Super Branch. Members of the Banks senior management team, its customers, several other distinguished guests and well-wishers also graced the opening ceremony. This latest branch in Negombo joins Sampath Banks existing network of 12 Super Branches located in Anuradhapura, Borella, DharmapalaMawatha, Wellawatte, Galle, Gampaha, Kandy, Kiribathgoda, Kurunegala, Maharagama,Matara and Panadura, bringing the total count of Sampath bank branches around the island to 229. A Catholic school student has been accused of dealing drugs at their Year 12 formal. Police were called to the St Kevin's College Year 12 formal at Melbourne Park on Tuesday night. A parent is said to have noticed suspicious behaviour in the toilet cubicles and called police, The Age was told. Police attended just before 9pm, a Victoria Police spokeswoman said, and spoke to an 18-year-old. They seized his mobile phone, an amount of cash and a number of capsules believed to be MDMA. Revellers enjoy a warm Christmas Day at St Kilda beach last year. Credit:Darrian Traynor After a tumultuous month of weather that has seen raging bushfires and flash floods, relieved Victorians are set to enjoy a warm, dry and sunny Christmas day. Melburnians can expect a pleasant top of 29 degrees and a low of 17 for Christmas this year, with light winds and dry conditions. In the north of the state, the temperature is expected to soar into the mid-30s. "It looks like a fairly settled day right across the state," said Bureau of Meteorology forecaster Richard Carlyon. Its the second time in three years the school has finished on top. The Jewish private school in Hawthorn East jumped from third to first place this year, achieving a median study score of 38, with 40.2 per cent of study scores 40 or above. Bialik College has clawed back its coveted position as the top VCE performer after snatching the title from Mac.Robertson Girls' High School. Principal Jeremy Stowe-Lindner said his schools impressive results were due to its balanced approach to the VCE. When you look at the high achievers, they are all kids who are involved in sport, performing arts and the leadership team, he said. They are not kids locked in a room. He said this ethos of balance filtered down to the way the school communicated with parents and students. For instance, in his recent VCE letter to the school community, Mr Stowe-Lindner details how much money students have raised for charity, how many hours they have volunteered and their participation rates in sport and art. And that's before VCE results are even mentioned. We see a correlation between the more you do outside your studies and the better you do, he said. Elf on a Shelf. Are you in or out? This Christmas-themed stuffed toy elf has taken over my life since December 1 when he 'became alive' again and started terrorising my children and getting up to mischief while we slept. For those unfamiliar with the Elf of a Shelf, it started as a charming tradition in the house of author Carol Aebersold. A small elf arrived in her home to watch over her children and would report their naughty or nice behaviour back to Santa. The naughty elf did a poo in my daughter's bed. Credit:Tazli Bowe In 2005 Carols book The Elf on the Shelf: A Christmas Tradition was published and the book is sold with the small toy elf. Whoever was the first person to stage their elfs naughty overnight behaviour, no one knows, but the original concept of Elf on a Shelf may be lost as more and more people share their elfs antics on social media. Since confessing my Team Elf status I have been sent the following cartoon, not just once but many, many times from my friends via social media. The head of peak employer organisation Australian Industry Group has written to Opposition Leader Bill Shorten, imploring him to resist union pressure on industry bargaining after revelations the party has privately committed to the policy. AI Group chief executive Innes Willox said in the letter that industry-wide bargaining would be "very damaging" to the nation's economy, which had "survived the GFC much better than most other countries ... due to our flexible labour market". "If this flexibility is lost, the next economic shock will create much greater hardship," Mr Willox said. Opposition Leader Bill Shorten is weighing union demands against employer concerns on industry bargaining. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen At Labor's national conference this week, the party's industrial relations spokesman Brendan O'Connor reportedly told union delegates that an ALP government would allow workers to pursue pay claims against multiple employers "where enterprise bargaining has failed or is failing". The Morrison governments "PaTH" internship program has signed up just 20 per cent of the businesses needed to hit its target. The new figures show the $840 million program is falling short of its aim of getting 120,000 vulnerable Australians into job placements over four years, with only 36,290 securing a placement over the first two years of the program,. Responses to questions on notice at Senate estimates show that there have been no formal written reports of host organisations and the onus has been placed on providers, not the department, to contact participants to verify PaTH arrangements. Cafes are the biggest employers under the PaTH program Credit:Tamara Voninski The Coalition has lauded the program "as delivering successful outcomes for young people," but the headline figures are now so dire that Labor has left all options on the table, including ditching the billion-dollar platform if it wins the next election. And so happy Christmas for black and for white Our planet's much hotter, lets stop all the fights Another year of fading faith in the major parties. Credit:Andrew Campbell Not surprisingly, voters have had enough of our politicians and political processes. Support for both major parties has declined consistently from over 90 per cent in the early 1970s to 70-75 per cent. Expect it to continue in the next election, probably with more significant individuals running as independents and winning in their own right, and in recognition of their skills and experience, perhaps to collectively hold the power of balance in both Houses. Voters have tired of the political games, the point-scoring, the blame-shifting, politicians almost exclusive focus on themselves and on what they can extract from the system, the scandals, and the snouts in the trough. All while the big challenges have been left to drift. They have tired of the crude attempts by both sides to set and control the narrative and their attempts to confirm this by negativity to create fear and anxiety about the other side. The endgame of politics today is not good government, based on good policy, responding to voter needs and aspirations, but simply winning elections at all costs, saying and doing whatever feels necessary to win hence the daily barrage of supposedly clever sound bites, stunts, and slogans, rather than leadership and substantive public debate. Responses to the big challenges such as climate, education and training, health, productivity and ageing are mostly seen as an opportunity to be tribal and partisan, to serve short-term political objectives rather than the national interest. One clear lesson of the recent Wentworth byelection is that voters are starting to reject such political strategies. Morrisons ill-considered, opportunistic attempts to exploit issues such as advertising on the Opera House sails, ABC independence, white supremacism, the treatment of gays in schools, refugee children, and our Israeli embassy all backfired. Loading On climate and energy policy voters are frustrated and dismayed. How can our political masters continue to ignore their consistently expressed concern about the need for urgent and decisive action, as revealed by some 70 per cent in many surveys and polls over many years? It is a national embarrassment that, having been a leader in the Kyoto process in the 1980s, we are now globally condemned as a laggard, especially as one of the highest per capita polluters, the second largest exporter of fossil fuels, while we have enviable natural endowments of solar and wind resources and the technology to exploit them and to lead the world. How many jobs have been missed? How much investment and growth has been squandered? This week the government went to great lengths to spin the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook, not only to claim victory for the prospective surplus but to exaggerate the strength of our economy and outlook, hoping to confirm the perception that it is the better economic manager. A war over climate change and energy policy has erupted between the NSW and federal Coalitions, as Premier Gladys Berejiklian makes a defiant push to distance her government from the federal policies of Scott Morrison. With the two governments preparing to fight simultaneous election campaigns, NSW Energy Minister Don Harwin repeatedly attacked Prime Minister Scott Morrison's government on Wednesday, criticising it as being "out of touch on energy and climate policy" and urging a "change of course". Premier Gladys Berejiklian supported her minister's comments as she called for the federal government to develop a national energy policy that provided certainty to investors. "We want to have, and continue to have, strong investment in both traditional forms of energy but also renewables and we need to have a standard policy across the nation that delivers that," Ms Berejiklian said. Two NSW Greens MPs have withdrawn their threat to quit the party, after a deal was brokered with the Australian Greens to launch a review into the warring state party's constitution and processes. The federal party's intervention was triggered by upper house MPs Cate Faehrmann and Justin Field, who last week warned of an "irrevocable split" in the NSW Greens unless the party conducted a recount of a recent preselection ballot and expelled members from the hard left factions. Greens MP and Environment spokesperson, Cate Faehrmann. Credit:Rachel Murdolo Both MPs backed down from this threat on Wednesday despite neither demand being met. In a joint statement, Ms Faehrmann and Mr Field welcomed the Australia Greens involvement as an "unprecedented step ... to address the systemic issues in the NSW Greens." Re-elected MP Fiona Patten has put drug law reform at the top of her political agenda by introducing a bill to legalise marijuana in Victoria, which she hopes will gain the support of the new Parliament. Ms Patten wants cannabis legalised so that it can be cultivated and manufactured while subject to regulation. Reason Party leader Fiona Patten will introduce a private members bill to legalise cannabis. Credit:James Brickwood She will introduce the private member's bill to the Victorian Parliaments upper house on Wednesday afternoon the first sitting day of the new Parliament. The change would contribute $204.6 million to Victorian coffers over four years, Ms Patten argued. Seven Indian fishing trawlers held by the Sri Lanka Navy, while engaging in illegal fishing in Sri Lankan territorial waters, were released from Sri Lankan custody yesterday with the assistance of the Sri Lanka Coast Guard. Navy said the released trawlers had been seized in 2015, 2016 and 2017 for trespassing on Sri Lankan territorial waters. These trawlers were moored at the jetties of Trincomalee and Jaffna, and were repaired by a dedicated team of Indian engineers who recently arrived in Sri Lanka, before their release, the Navy said. Accordingly, the Fast Attack Craft CG 402 of the Sri Lanka Coast Guard assisted the handing over of the seven trawlers to the Indian Coast Guard Ship Ameya at the IMBL north of Kankesanthurei last evening. If one thing's clear by now it's that the McGowan government is prepared to die in a ditch defending its decision to sling controversial Chinese telco Huawei $206 million to build a mobile data network for our public rail system. Despite being banned from mobile networks around the world; despite Australian intelligence chiefs raising security concerns about it; despite the arrest of its CFO in Canada where she awaits extradition to the US over allegations the telco contravened trade sanctions against Iran; despite British Telecom ripping its hardware out of mobile networks across the UK, the WA government reckons Huawei is tops. And yet the company is at the leading edge of the West's stance against an increasingly assertive Chinese regime. So why is the state government digging in so aggressively on the Huawei mobile data contract? London: Britain's opposition leader sparked a political furore on Wednesday after he was accused of calling Prime Minister Theresa May a "stupid woman" in the House of Commons. Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn was caught on camera appearing to mutter the insult during the Prime Minister's weekly question-and-answer session. He denied, it, saying instead that he had called Conservative lawmakers "stupid people". The always-lively session was even more heated than usual, as lawmakers' frustrations and divisions over Brexit boiled over into raucous shouting and personal jibes. If you haven't logged off of Facebook yet today, one of America's oldest African-American advocacy groups would like you to do so - now. Facebook is one of the most common habitats of internet trolls. The National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People took to its website and Twitter page to call for everyone to boycott not just Facebook, but also Instagram and the WhatsApp messaging platform. The call came after a report from a Senate committee on Monday said that Russia's Internet Research Agency (IRA) used the social media outlets to manipulate and influence black voters in the 2016 US presidential election. The Russians' segmented messaging and disinformation targeted African Americans in particular, according to the reports for the Senate Intelligence Committee released on Monday. Washington: For a full eight minutes, US District Judge Emmet Sullivan read aloud an inventory of Michael Flynn's lies, describing his "disgust" that President Donald Trump's national security adviser sought to deceive FBI agents while "on the premises of the White House". Flynn, a retired general who is the highest-ranking Trump aide to plead guilty as part of the special counsel investigation, listened tensely, his face tight, as the judge ticked through his misdeeds. Former national security adviser Michael Flynn arrives at court for sentencing. Credit:AP This was not how Flynn's supporters or President Trump thought Tuesday's sentencing hearing would unfold. They had pinned their hopes on Sullivan, an independent-minded jurist with a history of ferreting out prosecutorial misconduct, as the one who would reveal overreach by special counsel Robert Mueller III and the FBI. Some Flynn allies even speculated the judge might toss out Flynn's guilty plea and clear his name. Instead, the 71-year-old veteran jurist used his platform to puncture conspiracy theories that paint Flynn as a victim of deep-state persecution. And he reminded the country of a few simple creeds commonly held in courthouses but increasingly dismissed by the president's allies. Lying to the FBI is against the law. Breaking the law is bad. People who work in the White House are supposed to be held to a higher standard. How it works The mechanics of online opinion formation in influence operation have been studied in Russia as far back as six years ago. Attendees wave Russian flags in support of President Vladimir Putin as he speaks on screen during a pre-election rally at Luzhniki stadium in Moscow in March. Credit:Bloomberg A 2012 report in the Russian business journal Kommersant detailed a series of contracts let by the Russia intelligence agency seeking people to research the ability to understand how information is spread on social media. Included were the "methods of covert control on the internet", and the "dissemination of special information on social media platforms". Issue-targeting appears to be related to this area of research. Those running such a campaign consult publicly available information about political opinions like that found on election forecasting sites, for example, according to Fuisz. Sees issues that will move people: John Fuisz of SSR Industries. Those sources can contain hints about the motivations and interests of voters, which are then tested as issues on social media for their ability to catalyse a response online. For example, using a combination of human analysis and purpose-built software, SSR identified Korea as a possible catalyst issue that was used to sway opinion in the Senate race in the US state of Missouri. The subject was perceived as one that could bias voters against incumbent Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill in favour of a Republican, perhaps because of the Senators hawkish statements on Pyongyang, or because of Trumps perceived success of the Singapore summit with Kim Jong-un in June. SSR's Fuisz has concluded that an adversary to the US began actively testing "Korea" as an idea that would whether rationally or not negatively affect perceptions around McCaskill, who was facing a toss-up election. McCaskill had already been targeted by Russian state-backed hackers. Even so, the consensus view in an election futures market in early October was that McCaskill would prevail in what was a close race. "As Senator McCaskills consensus rating increased, which represented her perceived chance of victory, the number of Korea tweets coming through the network increased." "Senator McCaskills consensus [expectation of winning] then dropped indicating the attacks were effective." McCaskill lost her Senate seat at the mid-term election after Donald Trump campaigned for her rival. Her loss likely cannot by fully attributed to any influence campaign, as other political factors were in play, but researchers say it may have had an effect. Local, not national George Mason University associate professor Trevor Thrall, whose team collaborated on the work with SSR, said the results suggested Russian, or foreign adversaries, could have a greater effect on local, rather than national elections in the US. With fewer voices competing to influence the outcomes [of individual elections], Russian interference could play a relatively bigger role in shaping public discourse, attitudes, and voting patterns, Thrall said. I personally am much more worried about Russian efforts to influence local and state elections than I am about their ability to alter outcomes at the national level." The risk is hightened by the fact that in the US, movements often only shape national politics after being embraced at the local level first, Thrall said. Another issue-based campaign to influence British voters was discovered in April, ahead of local British elections. One UK-based blogger's conspiratorial views that the Skripal poisonings, the Syrian War, NATO and Brexit topics were related was pushed by a network of accounts, some human, some likely not. A surge in volume of tweets from a mere 14 Twitter accounts, pushed out a content on these issues, all of which were seen as tapping an implicit bias against the conservative government of the UK, led by Theresa May. In issues-targeting the origin of the catalyst doesnt matter as much as its effect. So real news, alternative news, propaganda can all be equally effective if they shift the behaviour of the target. While May wasnt up for vote, Labour saw an 8 per cent swing towards it in local elections, while Conservatives retreated 3 per cent overall. Such influence campaigns also provide a lever that can be pulled to damage a candidates standing. Given the increasingly polarised nature of political debate on social media, it actually takes less of a push to shift opinions, recent unrelated research from MIT shows. [Researchers] found that on polarised networks, a few bots are able to shift a disproportionate number of people over a threshold, according a summary of a recent paper. Clearly, the UK attack would not have been the only factor driving PM Mays slumping popularity. Yet the issues outlined tapped the implicit bias of voters, hardening their views against the UK leader. A backward-looking analysis of key races in the 2016 US election yielded evidence of the term unemployment being used as a catalyst to affect perceptions in the state of Pennsylvania on Twitter and Facebook, helping deliver the state to US President Donald Trump. Another campaign was discovered retrospectively in Wisconsin. It used Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. This campaign even reused an undetected Russian accounts from the infamous Jade Helm exercise of 2015. In this exercise, a routine US military exercise in Texas became the source of online hysteria over fears that it was actually a plot by the Obama Administration to round up political dissidents. Fears prompted the Texas governor to dispatch observers and reassure the public. This was later seen as a test of Russias influence capabilities ahead of the 2016 election. Like Russian influence operations of the past, the goal is not always straightforward. In the 1980s, the US State Department concluded Russian influence ops don't "necessarily seek immediate gains and are not looking for a major impact from every effort." Continually damaging Western politicians may be the goal, rather than achieving a specific electoral outcome. Yet the ability of a numerical minority to shape the broader conversation online is supported by findings elsewhere. Looking at the debate around the murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi on Twitter, Alexei Abrahams at Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto found that just 485 human-controlled accounts drove 80 per cent of traffic out of 400,000 unique accounts from October and November. Rather than relying on motivating masses with bogus memes and false political propaganda, issue-targeting can focuses on a specific human bias. (Fuiszs past work involves understanding customer motivation.) Deep research How views are shaped online, and what can change them, are topics Russia has researched at least since 2012. In that year, Moscow-based business journal Kommersant reported a trio of contracts, worth 30 million rubles (then the equivalent of $A900,000), tendered by intelligence service SVR for firms to develop new methods of monitoring the blogosphere. The contracts aims were the massive expansion of information sources on social media platforms with the goal of shaping popular opinion. The first project described in the Kommersant article, called "Dispute" would monitor the blogosphere, undertaking research into processes of the shaping of internet social groups that spread information on social media platforms and delineation of factors that influence the popularity and spread of information". That information would be analysed by another system called "Monitor-3" whose purpose was the development of methods of organisation and control of virtual internet societies of designated experts. A third system, called "Sturm-12", was designed to be a complex for the automated dissemination of information and the development of mechanisms to initiate scripted scenarios for mass audiences on social media platforms. The article said the SVR systems could be used for internal as well as external audiences, beginning in Eastern Europe. The timing of the US announcement, followed by the Russian one may suggest that the Russian state was reacting to what it believed was aggression aimed at it. In 2011, the Pentagon awarded a $US2.7 million contract to a company for a system that would allow it to manipulate social media sites in conflict zones. The US government is prohibited from promoting propaganda to its own citizens. While there is no confirmation the systems discussed in Kommersant are being used for issue-targeting, the report showed a Russian awareness of the concepts in the realm of social media. The issue may not be how to divide the masses, using banks of human trolls and armies of bots, but how to find the nexus of an online debate, and then how to inflame and manipulate it from afar. It could help explain how the controversy of certain issues can be amplified without an appreciable increase in accounts. Its only after this initial phase that the masses weigh in - both genuine and automated. Mark Rober's muse was a package thief. Two package thieves, to be exact, both of whom had made off with a delivery from his California verandah one day in broad daylight, about seven months ago. Indignant, Rober - a former NASA engineer who runs a popular YouTube channel documenting his many quirky science experiments - started thinking about how he could apprehend the thieves. Though he had caught the thieves on his security cameras, Rober said police had told him it was not worth their time to look into. "So you also feel powerless. And I just felt like something needs to be done to take a stand against dishonest punks like this," Rober said in a YouTube video posted Monday. "And then I was like, hold up." Washington: The Trump administration has banned bump stocks, the firearm attachments that allow semi-automatic weapons to fire like machineguns and were used during the worst mass shooting in modern US history. The regulation gives gun owners until late March to turn in or destroy the devices. After that, it will be illegal to possess them under the same federal laws that prohibit machineguns. A device called a bump stock is attached to a semi-automatic rifle at the Gun Vault store and shooting range in South Jordan, Utah. The controversial device was used in the Las Vegas shooting, allowing a semi-automatic rifle to mimic a fully automatic firearm. Credit:AP Bump stocks became a focal point of the gun control debate after they were used in October 2017 when a man opened fire from his Las Vegas hotel suite into a crowd at a country music concert, killing 58 people and injuring hundreds more. The regulation was signed by acting Attorney-General Matthew Whitaker on Tuesday. It will take effect 90 days after it is published in the Federal Register, which is expected to happen on Friday. Marigot:--- On December 13th, The Rotary Club of St. Martin Sunset installed its first Little Free Library in on the waterfront in Marigot, with a brief ribbon-cutting ceremony in the presence of Rotary International President, Barry Rassin, along with Past District Governor, Victor Gibbs and members of the club. The concept of the little free library was first introduced in 2009 by Rotarian Todd Bol from Hudson, Wisconsin, who was inspired by philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. The idea quickly gained popularity, and today, there are thousands of community libraries across the United States. The Rotary Club of St. Martin Sunset embraced the concept of the little free library as a means to promote literacy among children and adults, one of the key areas of focus of Rotary International. The Little Free Library contains both adult and childrens books, which can be taken out and returned when the reader is finished. Members in the community can also donate books to the little library by simply placing their books inside. The Rotary Club of St. Martin Sunset would like to extend their gratitude to Mr. Michael Walton for contributing his time, materials and labor to construct and install the little library. We are very excited about this project, not only to promote literacy but to provide accessibility of books to the Marigot community. It is our goal to install more community libraries throughout the island as we continue to create awareness on the importance of literacy President Jaida Nisbett stated. PHILIPSBURG:--- Minister of TEATT Stuart Johnson reacted to the various articles that state that the Dutch Government and the European Investment Bank wanted to finance the reconstruction of PJIAE to the tune of $100M and the government of St. Maarten did not show interest. Johnson said in a letter to the media that the statements made could be considered malicious since it coincided with the celebration of the 75th anniversary of PJIAE. Further to that, the Minister of TEATT confirmed the conditions set forth by the Dutch Government for the refinancing. Below is the contents of the letter sent out by Minister Johnson. Today I address you on the critical matter of the Airport's ongoing work to acquire financing for its reconstruction project. As the Shareholder Representative for the Princess Juliana International Airport (PJIA) and Minister of Tourism, it is ultimately my responsibility to ensure that the Airport is rebuilt and that the Government of St. Maarten's plans to complete the improvements to the airport such as the FBO Facility, US Pre-Clearance, and the Fuel Farm are finalized. Having said this, I have taken note of the "concerns" expressed in certain quarters about the alleged offer of the Dutch government and the European Investment Bank (Effi) to finance the reconstruction of PJIA in the amount of US $100 million. I have also taken note of the claim that the St. Maarten government is apparently not interested in accepting this offer. This is a complete misrepresentation of the facts. In fact, it can even be considered malicious given its timing to coincide with the kick off of the 75th Anniversary Celebrations of the SXM Airport and the migration back into the Terminal Building of arrival and departure operations for the first time since Hurricanes Irma and Maria. In the interest of full disclosure of truth and facts, I wish to inform you that discussions have been ongoing about a US$50 million loan from the European Investment Bank, EIB to be matched by a US$50 million grant from the Trust Fund. To date, the St. Maarten government, however, is still waiting for the actual "Terms and Conditions" of this proposed financing and the proposals from other potential financiers to be spelt out in writing. Until this is done, I as Shareholder representative and the Council of Ministers as the representatives of the people of St. Maarten cannot naturally take any decision. We must also take into account that the St. Maarten government cannot contract any loans, while under financial supervision, without the explicit and written consent of the Dutch. The conditions that the Dutch and World Bank have so far mentioned in discussions include: A virtual takeover of the Supervisory Board of Directors of PJIAE A takeover of the Management Board of the airport The criteria for requiring local company participation in bids for work at the airport is not possible based on World Bank and EIB standards. As a responsible Government, we would like to have these conditions in writing. We welcome all the assistance we can get, but under no guise should help become a hostile takeover of our most valuable strategic asset. Let me state categorically as Shareholder, that the Government of St. Maarten itself is not in negotiations with other potential financiers for the reconstruction of the airport. I must also stress that nobody, and Imean nobody, can be more interested, more concerned and more eager to get our award-winning Princess Juliana International Airport back to its glory days, before Hurricanes Irma and Maria, as quickly as possible as I am as Minister of Tourism. That is why we celebrated the return into the Terminal Building as a significant step on that journey to full recovery and reconstruction. We appreciate the eagerness to give St. Maarten this money so quickly. However, our people would have enjoyed the same speed and determination in getting roofs over their heads months ago. It has been over a year since our island was devastated by hurricane Irma and if a Loan or Grant from the Trust Fund can be made available within such a short period for the Airport, then there should be no excuse for it not to be made available for building the much needed homes for our people. We look forward to real collaboration with any lending institution who is willing to work in the interest of moving St. Maarten's economy and its people forward. Ravenquest announces significant supply agreement with Wayland Group Posted by Publisher Internet Vancouver, British Columbia: RavenQuest BioMed Inc. (the ?Company? or ?RavenQuest?) ? (CSE: RQB? OTCQB: RVVQF? Frankfurt: 1IT -? http://www.commodity-tv.net/c/search_adv/?v=298617) and Wayland Group (CSE:WAYL) (FRANKFURT: 75M) (OTCQB:MRRCF) (?Wayland?) are pleased to announce that they have entered into a supply agreement whereby Wayland will purchase up to 8,000 kg of dried flower cannabis from RavenQuest in 2019.? The total quantity will be shipped periodically throughout 2019 as product becomes available. As part of the supply agreement, Wayland will immediately make a one-time payment of $2 million to RavenQuest in anticipation of the first major shipment of cannabis flower in March 2019.? Pricing for the transaction is comparable with prevailing wholesale cannabis prices. ?RavenQuest is very excited to be working with Wayland as we both do our part to meet the huge demand for cannabis across Canada,? stated George Robinson, CEO of RavenQuest.? ?Negotiations were smooth and without major challenges; Ben Ward and his team at Wayland are a pleasure to work with. This supply agreement is a significant win for both sides of the transaction.? For RavenQuest?s part, 8,000 kg represents about 80% of our estimated production for 2019, meaning this transaction provides us much more certainty when it comes to selling our 2019 production at competitive prices,? Robinson continued. ?We are thrilled to be working with George and his team at RavenQuest to provide their specialty indoor product to recreational cannabis consumers across Canada through our existing distribution network. This agreement provides for efficiencies for both companies, constructively working together to meet Canadian demand through our existing resources. At the same time, this allows us to channel our existing supply to the European market,? stated Ben Ward, CEO of Wayland. Maricann Group Inc., through its subsidiaries, is operating under the Wayland Group name. For further details see the press release dated September 24, 2018. About RavenQuest BioMed Inc. RavenQuest BioMed Inc. is a diversified publicly traded cannabis company with divisions focused upon cannabis production, management services & consulting and specialized research & development.? RavenQuest is a licensed producer with facilities located in Markham, Ontario and Edmonton, Alberta.? RavenQuest maintains a research partnership with Montreal?s McGill University focused upon cultivar (strain) recognition, plant stabilization and yield maximization of the cannabis plant.? The Company focuses on partnerships with Indigenous communities. About Wayland Group Wayland is a vertically integrated cultivator and processor of cannabis. The Company was founded in 2013 and is based in Burlington, Ontario, Canada and Munich, Germany, with production facilities in Langton, Ontario where it operates a cannabis cultivation, extraction, formulation, and distribution business under federal licenses from the Government of Canada. The Company also has production operations in Dresden, Saxony, Germany, Regensdorf, Switzerland, Allesandria, Piedmont, Italy, Ibague, Colombia, London, UK and now Argentina. Wayland will continue to pursue new opportunities globally in its effort to enhance lives through cannabis. Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements All statements in this press release, other than statements of historical fact, are ?forward-looking information? with respect to the Company within the meaning of applicable securities laws, including statements with respect to the fulfillment of cannabis orders and payment therefore pursuant to the supply agreement with Maricann, the first shipment of cannabis flower in March 2019 and its estimated 2019 cannabis production. The Company provides forward-looking statements for the purpose of conveying information about current expectations and plans relating to the future and readers are cautioned that such statements may not be appropriate for other purposes. By its nature, this information is subject to inherent risks and uncertainties that may be general or specific and which give rise to the possibility that expectations, forecasts, predictions, projections or conclusions will not prove to be accurate, that assumptions may not be correct and that objectives, strategic goals and priorities will not be achieved. These risks and uncertainties include but are not limited to those identified and reported in the Company?s public filings under the Company?s SEDAR profile 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 information, 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 information will prove to be accurate as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements.? The Company disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise unless required by law. Sri Lanka experienced 52 days of chaos which ended up on a rather smooth note thanks to the judiciary. However, the on-going recovery period seems challenging. This is because it has much to do with shame, economic losses and abuse of power. Sri Lanka, has now come under the spotlight and the international community is being observant as to how fast it will recover. As the clock ticks , there seems to be a delay in appointing the cabinet; once again raising doubts among onlookers. But, on a rather positive note, the crisis period offered an opportunity for all citizens to voice out for their rights; which was in the name of democracy. And the fight continues. Hence, the Daily Mirror spoke to a few individuals, who actively protested to bring the country back to normalcy, to find out what they now expect from those who will wield power in a few days time. Prez likely to interrupt RWs agenda -Wijesooriya Following the Supreme Court ruling, President Sirisena had to reappoint Ranil Wickremesinghe (RW) as the Prime Minister, but he specifically mentioned that he didnt want to work with him, recalled Prof. Sarath Wijesooriya, Convener of the Movement for a Just Society. This is a warning that he will not allow RW and the cabinet to function smoothly. Therefore it is highly likely that he would interrupt the agenda of the yet-to-be established government and try to prove that RW cannot do anything. We are already witnessing a delay in the appointment of the cabinet and ministerial portfolios, said Prof.Wijesooriya. A politicians responsibility is to win the hearts of the public and stay clear of allegations Prof. Wijesooriya further said that the United National Front and the Prime Minister should adopt the criteria suggested by Prof. Siri Hettige in appointing cabinet ministers. He has drafted this document on a scientific basis, so that politicians with less allegations and accusations could be appointed to their posts. In this backdrop nobody can hope for any development until the crisis situation is fully settled, he added. Referring to the appointment of cabinet ministers, he further said that neither the seniority nor the close ties between them and the premier should be an added advantage for these appointments. Those who have failed in their duties should be debriefed and opportunities should be given to young blood. A politicians responsibility is to win the hearts of the public and stay clear of allegations or accusations if he or she wants to have a successful career in politics. he said. The Presidential system doesnt suit our country -Viyangoda We recently faced the biggest challenge after 2015, said Gamini Viyangoda, co-convener of the movement Puravasi Balaya. The President said that he will not support the PM and therefore it is clear that he would not allow the government to run smoothly. In this situation we cannot talk about development or the way forward. If they dont compromise we will have to go in for a Presidential Poll. Somehow it has been proved that the Presidential system doesnt suit our country. After 1978 the past few weeks have dragged the country back to square one. he said. The President said that he wont support the PM and therefore it is clear that he would not allow the government to run smoothly People of this country deserve better -Wickramasinghe As far as many of us are concerned, the fight for democracy is not over yet, said Aritha Wickramasinghe a lawyer by profession. Over the last 50 days of this crisis, many of us were on the streets demanding the upholding of our Constitution, the rule of law and a fresh political culture. The Constitution is at the very heart of our Republic but we are deprived of our rights and freedom. People expect those responsible for this attack on the very foundation of our country to be held accountable for their actions. The Supreme Court was very clear in its judgment that no one is above the law. We expect our representatives in Parliament to take note of the Supreme Court judgment and to take action against all persons responsible for unconstitutional acts. We also demand a new political culture. Many people thought this would have happened beginning in 2015, but clearly it hasnt. People are tired of constantly being given a raw deal by their politicians. The people of this country deserve better, he opined. We expect politicians to take note of the Supreme Court judgment and to take action against those responsible for unconstitutional acts Time for politicians to uphold rights of citizens - Ruwanthie De Chickera During the period of the Constitutional crisis, several groups took to the streets and protested in the name of democracy. Among these groups was a protest done by a collective of women representing various fields of expertise. The women joined during a heavy shower and handed over a petition to the President himself. Airing her views on the need to restore democracy, renowned dramatist Ruwanthie de Chickera, who was also an active participant at this protest by women, said that as Sri Lankans we are a long way from achieving democracy. It is a long process. Politicians are still not held accountable for democracy. They are enjoying impunity, perks and benefits. But it is important to note that everybody is equal before the law. However, what is significant is that after a long period of being inactive or partially active, minority groups have started to fight for democracy. All citizens saw how easy it is for politicians to create chaos overnight and how shaky our foundations of democracy are. They have seen how fragile our democracy is and now they have begun to claim it as their own right. Now, different people are willing to fight for their principles. said de Chickera. She further said that the crisis isnt over yet. The citizens have to continue with holding politicians accountable for democracy. We dont have a constitutional crisis anymore, but we now have a crisis in terms of democracy. It is a severe crisis in terms of leadership and governance. We saw how citizens stood by politicians during the period of the Constitutional crisis. Now that it has been solved, we have to question whether the politicians will standby the citizens in bringing about democracy. It would be interesting to see if they would continue with upholding the rights of the citizens. Every one who took to the streets had undertaken risks. There was a chance that people whom we were protesting against would have returned to power, she said. We saw how citizens stood by politicians during the period of the Constitutional crisis. Now that it has been solved She further said that we have a morbid culture of politics. The next steps depend on whether the politicians and the citizens would work together rather than against each other. Politicians have to show that they are responsible, decent and humble and are ready to accept valid criticisms against them. They should have the humility, honesty and integrity to acknowledge change. But if they dont do that, people will have to protest against them, de Chickera said. Public should engage in civil rights activism - Chandrasekaram The main objective of protesting was to restore democracy rather than protect politicians or their interests said Visakesa Chandrasekaram, a fiction, screenplay and creative writer, a film director who is also practicising as a human rights lawyer, a community legal educator and a diversity practitioner in both Sri Lanka and Australia. The public therefore should engage in civil rights activism. The crisis situation was an ideal opportunity for civil rights movements to participate in protests, write opinion pieces and engage in public discussions. The distance between communities has also minimized due to technology and the effective use of social media. There is another task vested upon the people. That is, as much as we allocate our time to sleep, for recreation and other purposes I think we also need to allocate our time for civil rights activism. If it doesnt happen it will not become a priority for the people, said Chandrasekaram. When asked what immediate measures have to be taken to restore democracy, Chandrasekaram said that it is important to bring about stability in the government. They should elect the cabinet soon. Then they should move a motion in Parliament to abolish the Executive Presidency and it should be done within the next six months. Its important to ensure the rule of law. People now have some faith on the judiciary after its judgment. The law is equal to everyone and all criminals-those involved in the Constitutional conspiracy, those involved in the bond scam and other abductions and murders- should be punished. he affirmed. Chandrasekaram said that in the long-term, it is important to establish the independence of the public service. Everybody from the labourer to the executive officer should be appointed on a merit-based system. It is also important to ensure the independence of quasi-judiciary institutions and while doing all that we need to awaken the public, he concluded. Concentra Analytics announces new senior hires and expansion into Asia Pacific Concentra continues to invest for growth following a ?41 million equity investment in May 2018. London, 18 December 2018 ? Concentra Analytics, the creator of Software as a Service (SaaS) data solutions used to visualise, model and track business operations, is pleased to announce several new hires to the Executive Team in recent months, all of whom will be contributing significantly to this exciting stage in Concentra?s journey. Dominic Ely has taken up the post of CFO, with over 25 years? experience in private equity and finance, including a 5-year post at the international SaaS company, Zinc Ahead. Meanwhile, Pavey Purewal has joined the team as CMO, following a 20-year career in Silicon Valley, including senior positions in Dynamic Signal and VMware. Tim Ross also joins as General Counsel, following a 15-year career, including senior positions at VEON, Vodafone and Kelway (now CDW UK). Rupert Morrison, CEO and Founder of Concentra, says: ?We?re delighted to welcome Dominic, Pavey and Tim to the team, and look forward to working together to continue to build on Concentra?s success. It?s been an exciting six months for the company as we continue to invest and grow, and OrgVue ? our flagship workforce analysis and modelling product ? goes from strength to strength in supporting our global clients to create more effective operating models.? New President of Concentra Asia Pacific and new office in Hong Kong To spearhead Concentra?s expansion into APAC, Robert Rooks has been appointed President of Concentra Asia Pacific. In his previous role at Deloitte as Financial Services Industry Clients and Markets Leader, China, Robert was responsible for leading the development of the firm?s Financial Services Market & Clients initiatives as well as the Banking and Securities segment in China. His 25 years of experience living and working in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Australia means he is ideally placed to develop OrgVue?s presence across the region. Working from Concentra?s recently opened Hong Kong office, Robert has hired a number of senior delivery staff in Hong Kong and, with an office opening in Australia early in 2019, hired a senior country head and support team locally to service existing as well as new clients in-country and across the Asia Pacific region. Robert is pleased with the rate of growth, ?We?ve already been able to make a number of important hires in the APAC region, which is a key, high-growth market for us. So far, we?ve seen an excellent reaction from our existing clients and, with new name client signings across the region, I look forward to leading the Concentra?s growth and expansion and feel confident our product, OrgVue, will continue to support ongoing business change initiatives across the region.? Crossing the divide - automating security processes across physical, business and IT domains Security is a critical requirement for all organisations. Getting security right involves the correct mix of people, processes and technology working together. However, many enterprise companies dont look at the full mix that encompasses information security, and instead split their physical security and business continuity teams away from their IT security departments. According to research by ASIS, around half (52 per cent) of companies have converged two or three out of their physical, IT security and business continuity teams together, with the majority of those opting to bring together their continuity and physical security teams. Of those that have not brought teams together, around 70 per cent have no plans to do so. It's Important to bring all department's security together The reason for this is that cybersecurity is perceived as having a more specialist role within the business and that this prevents companies from bringing their departments together. However, while IT security has its own specialist requirements and skills, it should not be looked at alone. Businesses are looking at how to manage risk more effectively across all their operations, and they have problems when their teams are siloed and dont have the full picture. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has developed its own guide to this area, based on the growth of the Internet of Things and more connected devices entering both homes and businesses, so this will continue to grow in importance. The rise of automation The pace of change that companies face today, coupled with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, means that more organisations are moving to digital services and automating their operations as much as they can. Security is no exception here - according to our research on security and automation, 75 percent of companies say they would need an additional three or more analysts in place to deal with all their incoming alerts in the same day, while 83 percent say their teams face alert fatigue. IT security teams are drowning in data, but they feel unable to cope - yet at the same time, they will have to work more closely with other departments as well. Automation is necessary to deal with all these problems, but it should not be looked at in isolation. While IT security teams are keen to invest in automation using technologies like Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) and Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR), these investments can be used across both physical and IT security. As IT security teams invest in automation, they can adapt and extend their approach to help risk management and security in the physical world as well. The best approach to be successful around this is to look at areas where real-world and IT security challenges cross over for businesses. To adopt this approach successfully involves understanding business processes better. Fraud detection processes Automation involves using data and analytics to improve how a process operates from beginning to end, including where IT and technology is used to support physical interactions or activities. A good example of this would be a banks fraud detection process, where multiple digital and physical transactions have to be monitored and investigated. Bringing together different teams - physical security, business continuity, risk management and IT security - is about how to protect the whole organisation against risk. While the most well-known area for fraud investigation would be credit card transactions, there are multiple different types of transactions to track, from national and international wire transfers to prepaid phone cards and other prepaid cards that can be used for credit purchases. Each of these will have its own workflows and requirements to investigate a transaction, This can include looking at whether transactions are false positives or need further investigation, which is based on a mix of digital documentation for online purchases and physical data from in-person transactions. At the same time, the sophisticated nature of fraud can mean there is a large IT component to any investigation. Members of the IT security team may need to be involved alongside the anti-fraud department. While this investigation is necessary, it pulls analysts away from cybersecurity tasks, which can be especially frustrating where false positives are concerned. Instead, automating the investigation process can help. Consolidating Physical, IT and risk management By consolidating processes and automating the workflow, this pulls physical, IT and risk management together in a smarter and more efficient manner. It also improves productivity for an anti-fraud team as they can remove false positives from the workflow and get automated support for IT analysis. If the team needs more human insight, they can bring this in where they need it rather than requiring it for every investigation. While anti-fraud is one example of where this kind of convergence and collaboration is required, there are other use cases. For instance, industrial control and manufacturing applications that run production lines around the clock are frequently targeted for attacks, either to steal vital data or to disrupt business operations. This crosses over from the realm of IT into the world of operational technology, where systems are very different and the systems used may have been in place for years, even decades. Bringing together different teams - physical security, business continuity, risk management and IT security - is about how to protect the whole organisation against risk. By working together, teams can be more efficient rather than working in their respective silos. This involves better use of data across those teams, which will rely on more automation to be efficient. Using SOAR, security analysts and business risk professionals can cut the amount of time needed to respond to potential problems, reducing the impact and remediating faster. At the same time, it reduces the waste associated with false positives and manual work. The emphasis here should be on how to support the business with better security - by consolidating processes and working more effectively, security teams across the organisation can achieve that goal. After more than 50 days of unprecedented political turmoil, the new United National Front government has recommitted itself to work towards its 2015 vision and goals -- a just, peaceful and all-inclusive society with interracial and inter-religious unity in diversity. Such pledges have often been made before and most people have become justifiably cynical. Thus we hope that Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghes government will practise what it preaches and preach only what it practises. More than ever before Sri Lanka needs political leaders who are gifted with the virtues of honesty and integrity with the grace to sincerely, sacrificially and selflessly serve the people, especially the millions who are caught up in a poverty trap. For too long, most politicians -- perhaps corrupted by power and the resultant greed to get more -- have been doing business in politics. This must stop and stern legal action taken against those found to be involved in bribery, corruption or other frauds. These reflections come to mind as the world today marks the United Nations International Human Solidarity Day with the world body saying the new sustainable development goals (SDGs) agenda is centred on the people and the planet, underpinned by human rights and supported by a global partnership determined to lift people out of poverty, hunger and disease. It will be thus built on a foundation of global cooperation and solidarity. According to the UN, today we need to celebrate our unity in diversity. It is a day for governments to remember their commitments to international agreements, a day to raise public awareness of the importance of solidarity, a day to encourage debate on the ways to promote solidarity for the achievement of the SDGs including poverty eradication and a day of action to encourage new initiatives for a more equitable distribution of wealth and resources. Solidarity is identified in the Millennium Declaration as one of the fundamental values of international relations in the 21st Century, wherein those who either suffer or benefit least deserve help from those who benefit most. Consequently, in the context of globalization and the challenge of growing inequality, strengthening of international solidarity is indispensable. Therefore, the UN General Assembly, convinced that the promotion of the culture of solidarity and the spirit of sharing is important for combating poverty, proclaimed December 20 as International Human Solidarity Day. Through initiatives such as the establishment of the World Solidarity Fund to eradicate poverty and the proclamation of International Human Solidarity Day, the concept of solidarity was promoted as crucial in the fight against poverty and in the involvement of the relevant stakeholders. The concept of solidarity has defined the work of the UN since the birth of the organization. The creation of the UN drew the people and the nations of the world together to promote peace, human rights and social and economic development. The organization was founded on a basic premise of unity and harmony among its members expressed in the concept of collective security that relies on the solidarity of its members to unite to maintain international peace and security, the UN says. But there are major questions as to what extent these goals have been achieved, especially in this era of populism and extreme nationalism. For instance we regularly see United States President Donald Trump scoffing at the UN goals and even describing the vital issue of climate change as a Chinese hoax. In Sri Lanka where people of four major religions live, we have the potential to achieve unity in diversity, poverty alleviation and make significant progress in the battle against global warming or climate change. What is lacking is good political leadership and example and we hope we will see that in the coming year or two when provincial, presidential and parliamentary elections are scheduled to be held. NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will indeed get very close to the mysterious, distant object Ultima Thule on New Year's Day. Mission principal investigator Alan Stern today (Dec. 18) gave the all-clear for New Horizons to stay on its optimal flyby course, which will take the probe within just 2,200 miles (3,500 kilometers) of Ultima Thule at 12:33 a.m. EST (0533 GMT) on Jan. 1. The decision came after a nearly three-week search of New Horizons images for rings, moons or other debris near Ultima Thule that could pose a danger to the probe during the flyby, mission team members said. The detection of significant hazards could have spurred the team to divert New Horizons to a safer trajectory one that would have taken the spacecraft about three times farther away from Ultima during the encounter. [NASA's New Horizons Mission in Pictures] "Our team feels like we have been riding along with the spacecraft, as if we were mariners perched on the crow's nest of a ship, looking out for dangers ahead," hazards team leader Mark Showalter, of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, California, said in a statement. "The team was in complete consensus that the spacecraft should remain on the closer trajectory, and mission leadership adopted our recommendation." This image was made by combining hundreds of photos taken between August and mid-December by New Horizons' Long Range Reconnaissance Imager. It has been colored using deep blue for the darkest regions and yellow for the brightest. Ultima Thule is the bright-yellow spot in the middle, and New Horizons' two possible flyby distances are indicated by the two concentric circles. The mission has decided to fly along the closer path, toward the target point marked by an X. Individual images contain many background stars, but by combining images taken at different distances from Ultima Thule, most of the stars can be identified and removed. However, some of them leave behind traces, which can be seen as faint circles radiating away from the target point. (Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute) The recent hazard hunt was capable of detecting any moons at least 2 miles (3.2 km) wide, and any ring structure that reflects at least 0.00005 percent of the sunlight falling on it, mission team members said. The Ultima Thule flyby is the centerpiece of New Horizons' extended mission. The probe's prime mission focused on the first-ever flyby of Pluto, which New Horizons pulled off in July 2015, zooming within 7,800 miles (12,550 km) of the dwarf planet. "The spacecraft is now targeted for the optimal flyby, over three times closer than we flew to Pluto," Stern, who's based at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said in the same statement. "Ultima, here we come!" Ultima Thule, which is officially known as 2014 MU69, lies about 1 billion miles (1.6 billion km) beyond Pluto. So, the New Year's flyby will be the most-distant planetary encounter in the history of spaceflight. And it should reveal key insights about the solar system's early days, because Ultima is a pristine, deep-frozen relic left over from the planet-formation period, mission team members have said. It's a mysterious relic as well. Ultima appears to be reddish in color and about 23 miles (37 km) wide, but that's about all astronomers know about the object. Indeed, they aren't even sure if Ultima is a single body or a close-orbiting pair. We'll know a lot more after the flyby, of course. And, if you want to send New Horizons some words of encouragement on encounter day, there's still time. You can arrange to beam a greeting to the far-flung probe through Friday (Dec. 21). Go to http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Send-Greetings/ to learn more. Mike Wall's book about the search for alien life, "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate) is out now. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us @Spacedotcom or Facebook. Originally published on Space.com. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the GPS III SV01 navigation satellite for the U.S. military stands atop its launchpad ahead of a Dec. 18, 2018 launch attempt from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. WASHINGTON SpaceX on Tuesday scrubbed the Falcon 9 launch of the Air Forces first GPS 3 satellite. Another attempt is planned for Wednesday at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. The commander of the 45th Space Wing that oversees launch operations at Cape Canaveral said calling off the GPS 3 mission was the right thing to do. "We saw some sensors today that gave us a little bit of an alarm so we decided to hold the launch at that time," Air Force Brig. Gen. Douglas Schiess told SpaceNews during a conference call Tuesday. Also on the call were Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson and Lt. Gen. John Thompson, the commander of the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center. Wilson was at Cape Canaveral to watch the launch with Vice President Mike Pence. The 45th Space Wing is responsible to ensure public safety during every launch from Cape Canaveral or Kennedy Space Center. "The team is always making sure we have mission assurance and safety as our main priorities," Schiess said. "We did that today." The weather is not a concern at this point, he said. "We're working through some issues" that could delay the launch beyond tomorrow, Schiess said. "We're are now working with General Thompson's folks and SpaceX to see whether we can launch tomorrow," he said. "When we get ready, and the rocket's good, we're looking forward to a great launch of the first EELV launch for SpaceX." The Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle is the Air Force program that procures launch services. On whether a Wednesday launch appears likely, Schiess expressed some doubts. "I can't say we're confident on that right now. We're holding tomorrows schedule. But were not confident at this point. Wilson agreed with the wing commander's decision to hold off. "We were hoping to see the launch of the GPS satellite this morning," she said. "It's certainly on my bucket list. I hope to be able to come back and see a launch. But I also give a lot of credit to the folks who are running the operation, that safety and mission assurance come first, and they made the right decision this morning." This is SpaceX's first mission awarded by the Air Force under the EELV program. The contract was awarded to SpaceX in April 2016. SpaceX has an additional four GPS 3 launches on contract, all of which will be launched on Falcon 9. Thompson said that regardless of when the launch takes place, the Air Force is encouraged that SpaceX is now competing for military launches. "For the first time in the history of the EELV program, we have competition back," he said. "This opportunity for SpaceX to compete and win this mission and then put up such as a significant payload as our very first GPS 3 satellite is tremendously significant not just for SpaceX and for the satellite provider Lockheed Martin but for the United States," Thompson added. "Our launch industrial base, particularly for big rockets, is very robust right now." This story was provided by SpaceNews, dedicated to covering all aspects of the space industry. The U.N. Security Council is considering a draft resolution that asks U.N. chief Antonio Guterres to submit proposals by the end of the month on how to monitor a ceasefire agreed by Yemens warring parties for the key port city of Hodeidah, diplomats said on Monday. The Iranian-aligned Houthi group and the Saudi-backed government of Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi agreed on Thursday after a week of U.N.-sponsored peace talks in Sweden to cease fighting in the Red Sea city and withdraw forces. The ceasefire begins on Tuesday in Hodeidah. Britain circulated the draft resolution to back the deal to the 15-member Security Council on Monday. It was not clear when it would be put to a vote. A resolution needs nine votes in favour and no vetoes by the United States, France, Britain, China or Russia to pass. The draft, seen by Reuters, asks Guterres to submit proposals on how the United Nations will support the Stockholm Agreement as requested by the parties, including, but not limited to, monitoring operations for the ceasefire and mutual redeployment of forces from the city of Hodeidah and the ports of Hodeidah, Salif and Ras Issa. It also wants to know how the United Nations will play a leading role in supporting Yemen Red Sea Ports Corporation in the management of, and inspections at, the ports of Hodeidah, Salif and Ras Issa and how the United Nations will strengthen its presence in those areas. UNITED NATIONS (Reuters), DECEMBER 18, 2018 An Arianespace Soyuz rocket successfully launched a new reconnaissance satellite into orbit for France Wednesday (Dec. 19), the first of a new constellation of spy satellites for the French military. Arianespace launched the Russian-built Soyuz rocket from the South American spaceport of Guiana Space Centre to deliver the CSO-1 Earth-observation satellite into orbit for France's Ministry of Defense, the French space agency (CNES) and the country's defense procurement agency (DGA). Liftoff occurred at 11:37 a.m. EST (1637 GMT) after it was delayed by one day due to bad weather. "The orbiting of CSO-1 shows once again how CNES is working effectively with the Ministry of Armed Forces to develop and operate its space systems," CNES President Jean-Yves Le Gall said in a statement. [Declassified US Spy Satellites in Photos] An Arianespace Soyuz rocket launches the French military reconnaissance satellite CSO-1 into orbit from Guiana Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana on Dec. 19, 2018. (Image credit: Arianespace) The CSO-1 satellite (its name is short for Composante Spatiale Optique, French for "Optical Space Component") is the first of a three-spacecraft constellation of military observation satellites for France's ministry of defense. The satellite weighs 7,861 pounds (3,566 kilograms) and will be used for reconnaissance during its 10-year mission lifetime, according to an Arianespace description. Wednesday's Soyuz launch placed CSO-1 in an initial sun-synchronous orbit at an altitude of 497 miles (800 kilometers) above Earth. "Once at its final orbital location, CSO-1 will be used to take 3D pictures and to acquire very-high-resolution images in the visible and infrared bandwidths, day or night and in fair weather, and using a variety of imaging modes to meet as many operational requirements as possible," Arianespace representatives said in a statement. An artist's illustration of the French military reconnaissance satellite CSO-1 in orbit. (Image credit: French Ministry of Defense) A second CSO satellite will also be used for reconnaissance, while the third will serve a target identification role, the European launch provider said. Airbus Defense and Space built the CSO-1 satellite for the French military. Wednesday's launch marked the 11th mission of 2018 for Arianespace and its 20th Soyuz launch overall under an agreement with Russia's space agency Roscosmos. It was also the second space mission of the day, following the successful launch of the GSAT-7A communications satellite by the Indian Space Research Organisation. A United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy rocket is also scheduled to launch Wednesday evening to deliver a U.S. spy satellite into orbit from California's Vandenberg Air Force Station. And top it all off, a Roscosmos Soyuz spacecraft is scheduled to return three crewmembers home from the International Space Station overnight. Email Tariq Malik at tmalik@space.com or follow him @tariqjmalik. Follow us @Spacedotcom and Facebook. Originally published on Space.com. AWOL was written by the team of Gary Dontzig and Steven Peterman and was directed by none other than Joe Regalbuto Frank! I liked this episode because it highlighted how news gathering has changed since the show first aired, and because it once again seems to be headed in the direction of ripped from the headlines. Im talking, of course, about the shameful murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.As the episode begins, Murphy (Candice Bergen) is interviewing Major Stansfield (Robert Farrior) about Afghanistan. He keeps doing what the White House has been doing for this administration every time Murphy asks a direct question, he changes the subject and refuses to answer. He finally just gets up and leaves with Murphy in hot pursuit! I love them following her with a handy-cam and her asking him how hes going to get out of Afghanistan if he cant even get out of their building. She also points out that he cant escape her because shes bionic she has two fake hips!At home, Avery (Jake McDorman) is still struggling with having been fired. It doesnt make things any better that WOLF has replaced him with a clone of himself Mark Clark (Zachary Storey) who is willing to toe the party line and spout fake news. Avery is amusing himself by teaching Benny tricks which are more than adorable!!! Murphy isnt so happy when he wakes her up though.Murphy is clearly worried about Avery and assures him that showing integrity is never a bad career move even if it does get you fired. Avery is concerned that he hasnt had any job offers in 8 weeks. Murphy tells him to just get out of the house But shes not too happy when he shows up atMeanwhile, we get another great temp assistant for Murphy who she quickly fires. Jayden (Bubba Weiler) is the entitled Millenial that Pat (Nik Dodani) isnt. I like that the show exhibits some nuance when it comes to stereotypes.Real life also sneaks in as the team has their story meeting. Murphy tries to get Miles (Grant Shaud) to tell Avery he cant sit in, but of course, Miles refuses. They discuss the Afghanistan situation, and Corky (Faith Ford) points out that its an important story that everyone is ignoring because they are distracted by the Presidents tweets because thats his point Diana (Merle Dandridge) sticks her oar in to say that they cant have an hour to cover the story because peoples attention spans are three minutes. Honestly, Dandridge has never really meshed in the show for me. Frank ends the meeting by pointing out that Afghanistan is just like Vietnam the government is insisting they are winning when they definitely arent. And then Murphys source stops responding to her texts.Avery ends up at Phils, and Phyllis (Tyne Daly) echoes Murphy, telling him that she admires his integrity for quitting WOLF the way he did. When the bar is left unattended, Avery jumps behind it to help, and suddenly everyone thinks hes working there! Pat calls it sad. Miguel (Adan Rocha), however, has another take on it. He really doesnt have the luxury of integrity if he were to quit his job, hed be in real trouble.The gang arrives in the bar and eventually call Avery over to join them. They tell him about Murphys source going AWOL. They reminisce about how 20 years ago journalism was a much more romantic profession. There were news bureaus all over the world staffed with reporters gathering information. Now they have to do it all long distance and use freelancers because its more cost effective.Back at home, Benny is clearly training Murphy to bring him food when he rings the bell. I know this because my dog trained my mother to give him treats when he asked to shake her hand! When Murphy goes up to Averys room, she finds him packing. Its hilarious and another nice mom moment when she knocks first and suggests she can come back later if hes doing something private.Avery is packing to go to Afghanistan to find Murphys source. Murphy thinks its crazy because hell have no network sources or support. But Avery is prepared theres the balanced look at the Internet and its possibilities again! Besides theres no one there reporting. Murphy is clearly worried about Averys safety even if she wont say so in as many words. Avery doesnt hesitate to tell her that he loves her too. Its a sweet ending to the episode which leaves us with this cliffhanger!I thought this was another solid episode that mixed humor and drama from a balanced perspective. What did you think of the episode? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below! Shaheed Alhafed, December 16, 2018 (SPS) Sahrawi Association of Landmine Victims (ASAVIM) has reiterates call on the international community and its relevant bodies, in particular the United Nations, in order to exert pressure on Morocco to comply with conventions on banning mines and cluster munitions (Ottawa and Oslo), in a statement. The statement called for allowing international organizations to clean the buffer zone as it poses risks to citizens and their livestock, and dismantling the Moroccan military wall dividing the territory of Western Sahara and separating its people in addition to the fact that the majority of incidents related to mine explosions occur in the adjacent areas. It confirmed that, after 27 years of cease-fire in the region under the United Nations responsibility, mines continue to claim lives in Western Sahara, one of the most contaminated areas in the world. The statement appealed to citizens to exercise maximum caution and avoid mine suspected places. ASAVIM) had learned about incidents of mine explosions in places of the liberated territories of Western Sahara. An explosion occurred on December 13, 2018 in the area of "Um-Degan" in a vehicle carrying three people, resulted in the death of citizen Mahfoud Shakrad, and serious injuries to his brother Sid-Ahmed Shakrad, in addition to the driver, Ambarak Meskeh, who also suffered injuries. This happened when they were on their way to make sure of an explosion they had heard in the same area. The second explosion took place on 14 December 2018 in a vehicle in the area of "Akhneig Lajawad." Until now, ASAVIM has not received the details of the incident. (SPS) 062/SPS Minerals and materials firm Covia plans to close its downtown New Canaan offices in 2020, a consolidation with its Ohio headquarters that would cut dozens of local jobs in the next year. About 60 employees, at the 258 Elm St. office, would be affected, according to a company letter received this week by the state Department of Labor. Most of the related layoffs will take place in 2019, starting in the first quarter. In May, Ohio-based Covia was created through the merger of fracking-materials maker Unimin Corp., which already operated at 258 Elm, and Ohio-based sand-products specialist Fairmount Santrol. All affected employees have been made aware of these facts, and were made aware at least 60 days prior to any scheduled termination date, and will continue to receive wages and benefits through their exit dates, unless they voluntarily resign, Jennifer Fox, Covias vice president of human resources, wrote in the letter to the Labor Department. A number of New Canaan employees were offered similar positions at other Covia locations across the U.S., a Covia spokesman said Wednesday, in response to an inquiry from Hearst Connecticut Media. He did not specify the number of relocated workers. The company said it also offering job-outplacement services to laid-off employees. Covia employs more than 3,000 and operates more than 50 plants and 94 operating terminals in the U.S., Canada and Mexico. When the merger was announced last year, Unimin and Fairmount said they would combine to become the largest seller of proppants used in the fracking process. The technique extracts additional fuels from underground wells by injecting masses of mineral solutions. The process has attracted major opposition for allegedly tainting water supplies and affecting seismic activity. Unimin sells UniFrac, a hydraulic fracking sand it touts as having greater purity and uniformity to better hold up during fracking. The firm also sells minerals for a range of industrial customers in glass, coatings, ceramics and metals markets. The Unimin portfolio also included the Winchester & Western railroad line operating in New Jersey and West Virginia. Since the merger, New Canaan First Selectman Kevin Moynihan has participated in discussions for the town to possibly buy Covias 258 Elm building for a proposed complex to house police and school officials. Amid the looming layoffs, New Canaan continues to post one of the lowest unemployment rates in the state. In October, its residents had an unadjusted jobless level of 3.1 percent, compared with an unadjusted statewide average of 3.8 percent. Includes previous reporting from Alexander Soule. pschott@scni.com; 203-964-2236; Twitter: @paulschott STAMFORD The Stamford Jewish Community Centers Gallery at the J is welcoming a new show. Variationsis an exhibition of artwork by artist Ellen Gordon. The exhibit takes place at The Stamford Jewish Community Center from Jan. 3 through Feb. 28. A reception for the artist will be held on Jan. 17 from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. Admission is free. The JCC is located at 1035 Newfield Avenue. Ellen Gordon is a Stamford based mixed media artist. Her work on display is inspired from drawings from private sessions with a model. The finished work speaks about the creative magic that happens when inspiration and form collide. The artwork itself is the result of a searching process - finding the shapes and lines in the figure and transcribing those lines into contemporary portrait compositions. Gordon will be exhibiting her trademark figurative collages and new intaglio print series. She holds an undergraduate degree from Boston University and a masters degree from Baruch College located in New York City. She has exhibited regionally and is the recipient of many awards. Her work is in many private locations across the country and abroad. Gordon serves on the board of the Greenwich Art Society and is the immediate past director of the Loft Artists Association in Stamford. Gordon teaches art programs for art lovers of all ages. The Jewish Community Center is open Monday through Thursdays from 5:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Its open on Fridays from 5:30 a.m. to 6 p.m., Saturdays from 7:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. and Sundays from 7:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. For more information, call (203) 322-7900 or visit www.stamfordjcc.org. For more on the artist, visit her website at www.ellensgordon.com erin.kayata@stamfordadvocate.com It's one of the oldest business adages in the book: You don't get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate. Successful negotiation, particularly in high-stakes situations, is often the difference between a smashing success and a crushing failure. Related: How to Deal With Jerks at Work Without Becoming One In the past, negotiation has been conceived of as a battle of wills, a deadlock between two aggressive parties where the first one to blink loses. However, in my experience, successful negotiation is much more nuanced -- and much less testosterone-fueled. Winning is good, but finding solutions that are satisfactory to both parties is best. Women, with their innate emotional intelligence, are uniquely equipped with the soft skills required to succeed in negotiation. Here's why: 1. Successful negotiation requires building relationships. The key to any successful negotiation is establishing relationships of trust. Without these mutual understandings, the parties will focus on serving their own selfish needs and compromise will be difficult. It's rare for any two parties to enter negotiation ready to fully yield to the other's requests. The power of a healthy relationship can step into this gap and help build bridges between two otherwise estranged groups. "Women tend to be better at emotional empathy than men, in general," Dr. Dan Goleman wrote in Psychology Today. "This kind of empathy fosters rapport and chemistry. People who excel in emotional empathy make good counselors, teachers and group leaders because of this ability to sense in the moment how others are reacting." Ranking high in emotional intelligence gives women an edge when it comes to building relationships. Empathy -- understanding where people are coming from and what they need, is perhaps the single most important part of building a strong relationship -- and successfully negotiating with someone. Related: Women, It's Time to Take Control 2. Being able to articulately describe feelings is key. The ability to express one's feelings is another crucial element of negotiation. Two stiff-lipped negotiators can stare each other down for hours without success, waiting for the other to crack. As women, society gives us the necessary permission to use the language we need to communicate our emotions. As LaRae Quy, an FBI counterintelligence agent, has noted, "Little girls are given permission by society to be empathetic, use language that expresses emotions, and place priorities on developing deep and meaningful relationships (starting with dolls)." Unfortunately, men do not receive the same opportunity. Men's stoicism can be an Achilles heel in negotiation, as successfully identifying and matching emotional currents in the room can mean the difference between success and failure. "The effective negotiator or mediator must take into account not only the economic, political and physical aspects of the process, but also the emotional tenor of themselves as well as that of all of the parties," Edward Kelly and Natalija Kaminskiene wrote in their landmark study on the importance of emotional intelligence in negotiation and mediation. Women's ability to recognize and speak about their feelings and those of others make them naturally suited for negotiation. 3. In negotiation, influence means more than authority. Men often approach negotiation from a position of authority. While there's nothing inherently wrong with that, I believe it is not the best or most effective tactic to use when trying to build consensus. Everyone has some level of resistance to authority. Related: Powerful Women Don't Need the Limelight to Be Influential. Here's Why. With power always comes the threat of abuse. Influence, on the other hand, is a more subtle thing. It's generated by empathizing with the person you are negotiating with and steering their opinions in your direction. It's what really sparks the combustion in the engines of negotiation. Women's empathy and relationship-building ability allows them to quickly build influence with others. They can read a room and gauge what the peripheral audience thinks of the situation. All of this data collection gives them sway in the negotiation. Their influence over the situation increases the odds that the final compromise will swing in their favor. 4. Sensitivity to feedback is crucial when working out a compromise. A 2016 study detailed in the Harvard Business Review compared dozens of male and female students at a Spanish business college, and found that the women were significantly more sensitive to peer feedback than their male counterparts. While one's self-esteem should never be reliant on the opinions of others, sensitivity to feedback can be a tremendous advantage in some situations -- like high stakes negotiation. If you're not listening to the other party and taking their positions seriously, you're not engaged in a negotiation -- it's an argument. Every negotiation is different, and of course, men have innate skills that are very valuable as well, but women are rightfully beginning to take their place at the table as expert negotiators, and it's not hard to see why. Related: 4 Reasons Emotional Intelligence Gives Women an Upper Hand as Negotiators Get Salary Negotiating Tips From Ellen Pompeo, One of the Highest Paid Women on TV 9 Things to Never Say in a Salary Negotiation Copyright 2018 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved If you've been dreaming of finding a cheap way to build a large following on Instagram, you might want to hurry. Instagram recently announced it plans on shutting down the most cost effective way to generate a large list of followers or create some artificial engagement around your social posts. Related: 7 Marketing Tips to Help Grow Your Brand on Instagram While this may be disappointing to the typical 20-year-old hoping to impress his college classmates with how popular he is on social networks, it's big news for the influencer marketing industry, which has been plagued by fraud, with some claiming as much as 50 percent of the engagement around promoted posts is fake. This means big financial losses for the advertisers in the now multibillion-dollar industry. What exactly is Instagram fighting? There are places in the world called "like factories" where tens of thousands of phones are programmed to generate fake engagement on social networks. These same factories create fake comments, recommendations, likes and shares. Perhaps you need to see it to believe it. These places have made it so that anyone with $1.99 can easily boost their online followership or engagement significantly without effort. A simple Google search shows how competitive the space has become, with dozens of companies offering the services at extremely low prices. The really bad companies simply create fake accounts that follow you. The more sophisticated ones follow other accounts and then unfollow them later -- generating a way of "follow backs" to the customer. They claim that this is a way to get "real followers," but it's hard to argue that these followers are not what advertisers are looking for. These companies put influencers in a true bind. They're so accessible and cost effective that many influencers use them to boost their stats, making it tough for influencers who play by the rules to compete. Brands often aren't sophisticated enough to dig deep and evaluate influencers based on how big their audience is. If they're taking an extra level of caution they'll average out the influencer's engagement rate on their latest posts. As a result, influencers often have no choice but to bend the rules if they want to stay competitive. It's a little like the Tour de France. If some cyclists use performance enhancing drugs, the others might risk taking them as well or they won't stand a chance in the race. Related: 11 Ways to Make Your Next Instagram Marketing Campaign Dazzle What can social networks do? It's a tall order, but the fact is that a large amount of social network members aren't active, or are just barely active. They never engage with most of the people they followed, and often don't even log into the platform. That's the real metric marketers need to see. Do 10 people with 1 million followers each all have the same strength? Obviously not. Some of them have an incredibly strong and engaged following, while others have a declining audience base that no longer cares about them. Think I'm wrong? When was the last time you checked out Rebecca Black's YouTube channel? Social networks should go a step further and reveal whether a user's relationship with his or her audience is strong, and more importantly, whether that audience has actually logged onto the platform recently. If 70 percent of the audience hasn't been active on the platform for three months, can an advertiser really count them as part of the audience that might be exposed to their content? Related: The Content Strategies of 13 Instagram Icons What should advertisers do? As influencer marketing becomes a revenue generator for social networks that benefit from the presence of influential people on their platform, brands need to be clear. We need transparency, which starts with a real understanding of audiences. If brands work with influencers on the platform, they want the tools to understand how many people the company will end up reaching and who those people are. Advertisers should refuse to work with influencers who are unwilling to disclose all the information they have from the social networks. They should install tracking solutions that evaluate the actual performance of each influencer in order to ensure that the engagement is real. More importantly, they need to take a stance -- like Unilever has -- and announce they will not work with influencers who modify their own statistics. Influencers should expect extreme scrutiny in the near future. Technological solutions will break apart their audience and recognize fake followings and fake engagement instantly. This is only part of the problem, because these solutions will also expose the inactive audience members and allow advertisers to easily evaluate which of them actually have real influence, and which are just instafamous. Related: When It Comes to Influencers, Fake Engagement Is Only Half the Problem The Human Connection Goes Viral - How One Influencer Marketer Creates an Echo Effect The Secret to Making Boards More Successful Is to Make Them More Approachable Copyright 2018 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved The United States has praised the restoration of Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and voiced eagerness to work with him, NDTV reported on Tuesday. US State Department spokesperson Robert Palladino has said they were pleased that the leadership in Sri Lanka has resolved the political crisis of the past several weeks in accordance with constitutional norms and the rule of law. "Sri Lanka is a valued partner in the Indo-Pacific and we look forward to engaging with Prime Minister Wickremesinghe and his cabinet to advance cooperation on bilateral and regional issues of common interest," Mr Palladino said. Meanwhile, US Ambassador Alaina Teplitz said they would work with this, and future Sri Lankan Governments resulting from a constitutionally legitimate process to advance cooperation on bilateral and regional issues. I t's the seventh day of the 12 Days of Christmas messages supporting the Evening Standard AIDSfree appeal and David Walliams wants you to think about the fact 7,000 young women become infected with HIV every week. The comedian and TV presenter is the latest celebrity to record a message asking for your donation to the appeal and support the Elton John AIDS Foundation in boosting awareness of HIV and funding access for testing and treatment, both in the UK and abroad. Walliams says in his appeal: It's incredible to think it is such a huge number. For me, that number became real when I visited projects supported by the [Elton John AIDS] Foundation in Ukraine. There were young homeless women living in -20 degree temperatures. An HIV test seemed impossibly remote but that could be the key to saving their life. Elton John AIDS Foundation projects in six key cities - London, Nairobi, Atlanta, Kiev, Delhi and Maputo - will be supported by donations to AIDSfree, and this week the campaign has been focussing on the fight against the disease in the Ukrainian capital. Walliams continued: The AIDSfree campaign is highlighting people who are vulnerable to HIV in cities around the world, and in London. By donating, you are supporting projects that help vulnerable people get tested and stop them from dying from Aids. TODO: define component type apester G laxoSmithKline boss Emma Walmsley floored the City today as she unveiled a landmark blockbuster tie-up with rival Pfizer to create a 10 billion consumer health powerhouse. The move, which paves the way for GSK to be split in two, will bring together brands including Panadol and Sensodyne with US giant Pfizers Advil and Chapstick, leaving GSK with a standalone pharmaceuticals business which Walmsley is keen to strengthen. The new UK-based over-the counter goods firm, which will be led by Brian McNamara, will be spun off and listed separately on the London stock market within three years. The combined businesses have annual sales of 9.8 billion and would claim a market share of 7.3%, putting the new entity ahead of rivals such as Johnson & Johnson. GSK will own 68% of the new business. The update sent GSK roaring to the top of the blue-chip index, pushing the shares up 102.36p, or 7%, to 1550.56p. It is the latest in a string of mega-deals from Walmsley, pictured, since taking the reins in April 2017. This year has seen GSK buy Switzerlands Novartis out of their consumer healthcare joint venture for $9.2 billion, and unveil a $5.1 billion swoop for cancer-focused drugs firm Tesaro. Walmsley, one of only a handful of FTSE 100 female bosses, said: Today is a landmark day for GSK. The chief executive, who formerly headed GSKs consumer care arm, added: The new joint venture will be very well positioned to deliver stronger sales, cashflow and earnings growth, driven by category-leading power brands, science-based innovation and substantial cost synergies. GSK refused to comment on the number of jobs under threat but savings of 500 million by 2022 are expected. Walmsley stressed the firm was committed to being in the UK, adding: In a beyond-Brexit world this is a very exciting country for businesses to be in. A history of inventions and alliances The break-up of GSK undoes a merger forged 18 years ago with the marriage of Glaxo Wellcome and SmithKline Beecham, but the roots of the business stretch back well over a century. Glaxo Laboratories was registered as a company in 1935, and in 1995 merged with Burroughs Wellcome itself founded in 1880 in London by two pharmacists to become Glaxo Wellcome. Pharmacist Thomas Beecham first opened for business in 1848 and the company he founded invented Lucozade in the 1920s and Macleans toothpaste, before merging in 1982 with US company SmithKline Beckman, which traces its own history back to 1830s Philadelphia. After the 2000 merger GSK House in Brentford was opened by then Prime Minister Tony Blair in 2002. The deal comes after GSK walked away from an auction to buy Pfizers consumer arm in March. Walmsley said today: It was an auction which would have required us to cut across the capital allocation priorities that Id set, when our number one priority was to invest in the strengthening of the pharma pipeline. The merger will produce a bonanza for investment bankers. GSK is being advised by Citi, JPMorgan Cazenove and Greenhill, Pfizer is working with Centerview, Guggenheim and Morgan Stanley. GSK will pay a break fee of $900 million if the deal does not go ahead. It plans to pay shareholders a dividend of 80p per share for this year and next. Liberum analyst Graham Doyle said: The idea of a JV with Pfizer makes significant sense as it is a capital-light way of achieving the synergy benefits of an acquisition, the potential for which caused much concern over the past 12 months. Who is Brian McNamara? The new chief of GSKs consumer healthcare empire Brian McNamara joined the business less than four years ago as a result of another mega-deal pulled off by the drugs giant. This was its joint venture with Switzerlands Novartis, which GSK took full control of this year in a $13 billion (10 billion) deal. McNamara is steeped in consumer goods, having spent 16 years at Procter & Gamble and managing one of its biggest sellers, US laundry brand Tide, before moving to Novartis in 2004. S antander was left red faced on Wednesday when it was whacked with a near-33 million fine for mishandling the finances of the dead and their surviving relatives. The Spanish-owned bank is the second-biggest in Britain after RBS by market share. Today the Financial Conduct Authority fined it 32.8 million for failing to handle the accounts of deceased customers with due care. It did not transfer funds of 183 million when it should have done, affecting more than 40,000 customers. Mark Steward, executive director of enforcement and market oversight at the FCA, said: These failings took too long to be identified and then far too long to be fixed. To the firms credit, once these problems were notified to the board and senior management, they were fixed properly and promptly. But recognition of the problem took too long. Firms must be able to identify and respond to problems more quickly especially when they are causing harm to customers. In the UK, Santander is a hotch-potch of failed former building societies Abbey National, Bradford & Bingley and Alliance & Leicester. The watchdog ruled that its probate and bereavement processes failed. The bank did not properly communicate with deceased customers relatives, resulting in it holding on to money that should have been passed on. Some of the bereaved people were unaware that the funds existed. Santander said it has completed a comprehensive tracing exercise and has transferred the majority of funds in deceased customers accounts to their rightful beneficiaries. It has paid interest by way of compensation. It is changing its bereavement processes. L ets do the arithmetic: the big red Vote Leave bus promised us a 350 million a week dividend supposedly for the NHS if Britain left the European Union. We now learn that 3,500 troops are on standby to deal with the unknowable upheavals that would arise from a no-deal Brexit. That works out, at least in theory, at 100,000 per soldier although I dont remember this being mentioned during the 2016 referendum campaign. Funny, that. Yesterday, the Defence Secretary, Gavin Williamson, announced that these forces are ready to support any government department on any contingencies they may need. The details are, to say the least, fuzzy. But the earmarked personnel are part of a developing no-deal blueprint codenamed Operation Yellowhammer, the urgency of which is increasing now that the official date of departure is only 100 days away and the prospect of Theresa Mays deal with Brussels being passed by the Commons is negligible. Though this country does not have a formal equivalent of the US Posse Comitatus Act which prevents the federal government from using the armed forces for law enforcement, except in the most extraordinary circumstances there is a strong aversion in Britain to the confusion of military and civilian functions. The Gordon Riots of 1780 and the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 scorched into the national consciousness a powerful sense that there is an inviolable distinction between the defence of the realm and the maintenance of social order. Churchill never lived down his decision as Home Secretary in 1910 to send troops to reinforce the police against striking miners during the Tonypandy riots. In 1983, before the last great miners strike, Margaret Thatcher secretly planned to use troops to transport coal as a potential strike-busting measure but was warned by senior officials that this might lead to dangerous confrontations at picket lines. More recently, the 2011 riots persuaded David Cameron to explore the possibility of military involvement in future social unrest: accordingly, hundreds of troops from the Parachute Regiment were trained in the containment of rioters. Yet there remained deep unease in the Tory/Lib -Dem coalition about such exercises and the prospect of maroon-bereted Paras facing balaclava-clad teenagers. Naturally, government sources are swift to insist that the Brexit contingency plans are essentially logistical in character, do not threaten the constitutional separation of military and civilian enforcement, and are consistent with recent precedent. Matthew d'Ancona In 2001, after all, the military assumed command and control of the foot-and-mouth crisis; during the 2009 floods, 200 army specialists were deployed to provide emergency assistance; more than 18,000 Army, Navy and RAF personnel were used during the 2012 Olympics. The preparations for a no-deal Brexit are no different or so we are told. But this is hypocrisy of the highest order. All these cases were exceptional unforeseeable crises or, in the case of the Olympics, an absolutely singular event that made London the most thrilling city in the world but also the most obvious target for a terrorist attack. At such rare moments of geopolitical significance it is entirely correct to involve the military. In absolute contrast, Brexit was sold to voters as a great act of emancipation, a restoration of ancestral liberties and an opportunity for the citizens of the UK to take back control. There was no mention by the Leavers in 2016 of food shortages, perils to NHS supply-chains and gridlock at British ports. "If we really need the military for a so-called managed no deal, could we consult the definition of management" When the champions of Brexit promised a smooth, frictionless and exhilarating departure, they did not say that troops might be deployed on the streets amid the scenes of national jubilation. When Boris Johnson declared at last years Tory party conference that this was a moment to let the British lion roar, he did not say that it might be competing with a military klaxon. When Jacob Rees-Mogg warns that Britain would be reduced to a vassal state by the PMs deal, he does not, as far as Im aware, concede that a no-deal departure would involve military vehicles patrolling the streets. Some learned Brexitologists insist that Mays very public escalation of these preparations is mostly political in significance. According to this theory, the more systematically the Government plans for a no-deal exit, the more MPs will be forced to consider the real-life implications of rejecting the PMs 585-page deal when they finally vote on its contents next month. I have even heard it suggested that the spectre of troops on the streets has partly been invoked to pile psychological pressure on Democratic Unionist MPs, for whom the maintenance of order by the military is an all-too-recent memory rather than a worst-case scenario. One can only hope that this is not so for it would represent a new low even for this desperate Government. Can we at least agree that the words Project Fear have run out of road? When the Cabinet itself is planning the deployment of troops to handle the risks of a no-deal Brexit, it no longer makes sense to portray those who voice anxiety as alarmist metropolitans who just dont get it or dont respect the views of the 17.4 million. If we really need the military for a so-called managed no deal, could we please consult the definition of management in the latest edition of the Newspeak Dictionary? E ven before victory in 1945, plans had begun to repair and rebuild many fine buildings destroyed during the Blitz. Over more than 10 years the War Damage Commission spent some 300 million on righting the damage done. One of the largest single beneficiaries were the Benchers of the heavily bombed Inner Temple south of Fleet Street. The cost of reconstruction of the Inn was 1.5 million, of which the Commission paid 1,432,082, leaving the Benchers to find just 110,887. These generous funds went towards the restoration of the famous Temple Church, the Hall and the Library and other nearby buildings. So why is it that the Governing Benchers are now bent on disfiguring the beautiful Inner Temple Library, a superb example of a tripartite college library in the manner of Sir Christopher Wren, obliterating the mezzanine galleries with their beautiful oak balustrades and the heads of the baroque doorcases? The architect of the present library, T W Sutcliffe, had repeatedly revised the designs to achieve a beautiful result at a price the War Damage Commission would pay for. The Benchers have until December 20 to vote. They should retreat from this squandering of the generous sums of public money they received. Marcus Binney SAVE Britains Heritage EDITOR'S REPLY Dear Marcus The Inner Temple is one of Londons hidden gems: a working environment of course, but an extraordinary place by any reckoning, not least in its remarkable Temple church perhaps the only thing we have to thank Dan Brown for is that he brought it to the attention of millions. The architecture of the place is not merely the responsibility of the Benchers but something that we all have an interest in. And if, as you say, they are allowing an inept and clumsy revision of the Wren-style library, it is an abnegation of their responsibility as its custodians. English Heritage and other architectural preservation bodies should intervene now to remind the Benchers of their duty of care, especially since, as you remind us, they had substantial public funding after the war to restore their buildings. Melanie McDonagh, Senior Writer Few tickets to ride after McCartney Paul McCartneys superb concert on Sunday night at the O2 finished in a disaster for up to 20,000 spectators. The show finished at 23.10. By the time the crowds were permitted by the crowd management to reach North Greenwich Tube, it was midnight. There was no westbound Tube and only a couple of eastbound trains at intervals of 12 minutes. There were chaotic scenes of people trying to storm the few buses and cabs. Who decided it was a good idea to finish the Sunday show so late? Who made sure there were no westbound Tubes, while well aware of the thousands of people that were stranded? We were forced to battle onto the last Stratford-bound train, then take a night bus to Oxford Circus, then walk. By the time we got to Bond Street it was 1.45 am. Thank you, TfL, for ruining the night out. Vassilina Bindley Electric bikes have their advantages Further to Paul Caseys letter, if by motorised cycles Mr Casey is referring to electric bikes, the definition by law is that they are pedal assisted, and speed restricted [Motorising cycles misses the point December 17]. That is, you still have to pedal, and thus it still counts as exercise. True, it is less intense exercise than riding a standard bike, but for those of us who are elderly, need to go a longer distance, or have a hilly route to work and no suitable place to shower, theyre a good option. The health benefits of this low-intensity but longer-duration exercise are, I imagine, similar to those gained by walking. T he National Gallery will more than double the amount of work it shows by women artists when it opens a new exhibition dedicated to 17th-century painter Artemisia Gentileschi. The show, set to open in April 2020, will gather about 35 paintings by the Italian, who has become a feminist icon since her death in about 1656. There are currently 26 works by women in the gallery, which has 2,300 paintings, sketches and sculptures. That includes Gentileschis Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria which the gallery paid 3.6 million. It went on display today after five months of conservation work. Curator Letizia Treves said: We didnt buy the painting because she is a woman but because she is one of Caravaggios best followers and has been on our wishlist for many, many years. Born in Rome, she was the first woman to be a member of Florences Accademia delle Arti del Disegno and counted the Grand Duke of Tuscany and King Philip IV among her clients. For many years, Gentileschis reputation was overshadowed by her ordeal when she was raped aged 18 by another painter, Agostino Tassi, and subjected to a seven-month trial. She is now recognised as one of the greatest painters of her time, but there are only two other paintings by her in this country, one owned by the Queen. Restored: Gentileschis Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria is on display now / National Gallery, London Ms Treves said: The public really identify with her so the personal story is important but I want to present her as an artist first. She added that the conservation work had had a transformative effect. The self-portrait will leave the gallery in March for a short UK tour, including the Glasgow Womens Library before returning for the show. London exhibitions coming soon - In pictures 1 /12 London exhibitions coming soon - In pictures Artemisia October 3-January 24, National Gallery National Gallery, London Zanele Muholi November 5-March 7, Tate Modern Courtesy of the Artist and Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg and Yancey Richardson, New York Zanele Muholi Yayoi Kusama Spring 2021-Spring 2022, Tate Modern (Courtesy Ota Fine Arts and Victoria Miro) Bruce Nauman October 7-February 12, Tate Modern Tate Lynette Yiadom-Boakye November 18-May 9, Tate Britain Lynette Yiadom-Boakye Michael Clark Exhibition October 7-January 3, Barbican Richard Haughton Wildlife Photographer of the Year October 2020, Natural History Museum Yongqing Bao Marina Abramovic 2021 (no dates yet), Royal Academy Getty Images Bags! November 21-September 12, V&A Museum The LIFE Images Collection Turners Modern World October 28-March 7, Tate Britain JMW Turner, Rain, Steam and Speed (The National Gallery) Summer Exhibition (in the Autumn) October 6-January 3, Royal Academy David Parry/ Royal Academy of Arts Tracey Emin/Edvard Munch November 15-February 18, Royal Academy Tracey Emin, It - didnt stop - I didnt stop, 2019(HV-studio, courtesy the Artist and Xavier Hufkens) National Gallery director Dr Gabriele Finaldi said: This is the first painting by Artemisia to enter a public collection in the UK I am delighted that it will be the focus of a national tour in 2019 and a major exhibition in 2020. Review at a glance C iaran Dowds Don Rodolfo is truly a show for all seasons. Well, two at least. This summer it wowed crowds at the Edinburgh Fringe and bagged the Edinburgh Comedy Awards Best Newcomer prize. It now reaches wintry London and feels like the perfect crowdpleasing adult panto with its daft audience interaction and gleeful sense of absurdity. Dowd, who is also in sketch group Beasts, plays Rodolfo, a swaggering black-clad Zorro-like swashbuckler. Or, to give his full name, Don Rodolfo Martini Toyota. Yes, it gets as silly as that very quickly indeed as we soon hear about his epic trek across Europe hunting down his six-handed nemesis to avenge the death of his father. This is a piece that is low on production values but ultra-high on quickfire fun. There are songs, gasp-worthy twists, film references, tales of cheese addiction and a terribly corny Spanish accent. Rodolfo shuttles between cartoon cod-Andalucian and Dowds real Irish brogue as he brags about his rapier skills: I was invincible. I could not be vinced. The star takes great pleasure in sending up his deluded, narcissistic character, who has a habit of burning houses to the ground for no apparent reason. Every scene is performed in a playful, knowing style from the opening Errol Flynn duel to the final payoff via nods to Don Juan and Don Quixote. There are echoes of other comic creations too, notably Rik Mayalls Flashheart in Blackadder. Yet what this lacks in originality it more than makes up for in self-mocking gusto. If you want to be pretentious you could argue that his misplaced machismo is a post-#metoo critique of masculinity. But dont analyse or play spot the reference, just relax and enjoy the swordsman with the sharpest gags in town. Funniest jokes at the 2018 Edinburgh Fringe 1 /26 Funniest jokes at the 2018 Edinburgh Fringe Funniest jokes at the 2018 Edinburgh Fringe Faye Treacy I was dating an older man not because I have issues with my father, Im just really competitive with my mother. Steve Best Mawaan Rizwan I saw two male giraffes having sex and got envious of their freedom. It took me another ten years to be free enough to have sex in a zoo. Rebecca Need Menear Stevie Martin A simile is, of course, when something is like something else. For example the moon is, like, in space. Idil Sukan Archie Maddocks Me and my girlfriend are doing great. Were in a serious relationship! I know that because she told me. Tom Leishman Angela Barnes When I see Donald Trump I get the same thought in my head as I get after a particularly painful bikini wax. Bush wasn't that bad. Rosie Jones During birth, my shoulder got stuck coming out. Well, it was the eighties. Rob Carter Mr Cumcision refused his knighthood. Edward Moore Aatif Nawaz "I was cast in an EasyJet advert this year. It was one of the rare times people got excited about a Muslim on a plane. Olga Koch I have all kinds of friends - white friends, black friends; male friends, female friends; gay friends, straight friends, friends who don't like to identify as...friends. Pete Firman A professional magician never reveals his tricks, or the fact he still lives with his parents. Karla Gowett Lou Sanders I thought I was a communist and then I had to use the same toilets as everyone else at a festival. Idil Sukan Ivo Graham I'm not sure if I'm ready to be an uncle. Mainly because I insist on saying "uncle" rather than "father". Chris Turner "'Never Apologise! Never Explain! Sorry, thats my motto. Abby Tebeau Adele Cliff I have a fear of loneliness. I can't be the only one. Rebecca Need Alice Fraser I saw my optometrist the other day. Which made him a bit redundant. Sally Sparrow Leo Kearse I saw a woman in a T-shirt with "SMASHING PATRIARCHY!" on it. Nice to see that some of them appreciate the hard work we put in. Olaf Falafel My dad caught me curing a piece of salmon to teach me a lesson he made me smoke the whole packet. Damian Clark I have to stop saying 'new baby', because ALL babies are new. An old baby is a person. Kymann Power Christian Finnegan Have you been to a protest march? Its like spending three hours exiting a sporting event." Mindy Tucker Nick Elleray There are many ways to sexually please a snake. But I won't rattle them off. Adrian Tauss John Hastings I don't like marijuana. If I want to be hungry and think all my friends hate me all I need to do is wake up. Tim Leyes Christian Talbot I like my coffee like I like my women. Unintentionally neglected while I deal with some admin and eventually going cold on me. Matt Rees Im no good at talking to women. Im 28 and recently my Grandmother and I had the are you gay conversation. She isnt. Mark Dawson Tom Stade I like Jesus, but he loves me, so it's awkward. Kathy Lette All husbands think theyre Gods. If only their wives werent atheists. 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 View Results Ranil Wickremesinghe (left) taking oaths as premier for the 5th time The United National Part (UNP) has gone from strength to strength reminding the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) of an old saying united we stand, divided we fall. The UNP was in tatters many years ago when a sizable section of the party rebelled against its Leader Ranil Wickremesinghe, who was on December 16 (Sunday) sworn in as Prime Minister for the fifth time. Being a shrewd politician Wickremesinghe survived all that, including a series of election defeats by the Green Party, to hold on to the party leadership. Later on, probably due to the maturity of other Green Party members, the rebel movement within the UNP died a natural death. During the recent 52-day political crisis witnessed in Sri Lanka, UNP members stood behind its leader like never before; showing that they couldnt be bought over for money. This was a time when one parliamentarian who showed an interest in crossing over to strengthen the Rajapaksa-Sirisena regime was allegedly offered as much as rupees 500 million. The UNP showed through its actions that democracy cant be undermined and is invaluable. Ranil has not changed as a person regardless of whether he is in the government or the opposition Sirisenas national thinking policies were often undermined by the Western influenced Wickremesinghe The prime minister isnt a people friendly person to obtain such a large number of votes Today the SLFP can only envy the Green Party. SLFP parliamentarian Wijith Wijayamuni Zoysa, who has decided to sit on the side of the Government, told Parliament about the woes of the SLFP. But whats important at this juncture is that Zoysa along with Lakshman Senewiratne and Indika Bandaranayake choosing to throw their weight behind the Government to be formed by the newly appointed Premier Wickremesinghe. Zoysas shift in alliance may not be because he fancies Wickremesinghe, but could be largely influenced by the fact that he felt that the country was suffering due to the selfish motives of politicians and something had to be done about it. The individual who caused this chaos, Sirisena, gives all indication that he would give the Wickremesinghe led government a hard time. The president has informed all SLFPers not to accept posts in the Cabinet to be formed. Sirisena has said that he would not take disciplinary action against any SLFPers who offer support for a UNP led alliance that intends forming the new government. But Sirisena, with his back to the wall, can at this time be a ruthless individual. Though the 19th A clips some of his executive powers he can annul certain decisions taken in Parliament. A good example is when he annulled the approval of an increase in the salaries of Government ministers by over 200%. What Ranil sees The Sirisena-Wickremesinghe clash leaves a trail which if closely viewed shows that there is a confrontation between the thinking of the elite and those from the village. Sirisenas national thinking policies were often undermined by the Western influenced Wickremesinghe who believes in the thinking that the brains of foreign nations would bring the much needed solutions to the islands economic woes. A good example is the hurriedly signed Free Trade Agreement Sri Lanka entered into with Singapore. Many are of the opinion that this FTA would not provide any significant or worthwhile benefit to Sri Lanka. Sirisena continues to warn that foreign powers are looking for an opportunity to get involved in the affairs of Sri Lanka. This is nothing new given that Sri Lankas geographic location is so important to countries like India, China, Japan and the USA. But Wickremesinghe has seen what Sirisena has failed to see in the form of an opportunity that has arisen for Sri Lanka to develop its country through the brains and finances of other nations. But whats of concern are the attempts by Wickremesinghe to sell off government assets to foreign nations. Now Wickremesinghe is busy getting ready to form a new alliance by the name Democratic National Front (DNF). He claims that he has the support of the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress, All Ceylon Makkal Congress, Jathika Hela Urumaya, Tamil Progressive Alliance and some members of the SLFP who are threatening to break away. Wickremesinghes idea to form an alliance is probably backed by the realization that the UNP alone would not in the future have the numbers to form the majority in Parliament. The UNP badly needs the support of the Tamil National Alliance (TNA). But the TNA has put its support on hold pending receiving the UNPs approval or consent regarding the many demands by the Tamil Ealam Liberation Organization; a constituent party of this alliance. Wickremesinghes idea to form an alliance is probably backed by the realization that the UNP alone would not in the future have the numbers to form the majority in Parliament If the Wickremesinghe initiated NDF is formed and the goal of mustering two thirds of the votes in parliament is achieved, it would help abolish the executive presidency. If this happens Sirisena would be reduced to a puppet. The shrewd thinking of Wickremesinghe unfortunately seems to fuel his ambition to retain power for ever; rather than lift the country from the financial mess it is in. The large crowds that gathered at Galle Face green on Monday (December 16) dont really say much about the real support for Wickremesinghe. . Much of the crowd looked like they were there on the promise that they would be well looked after later in the evening. But Wickremesinghe has got the approval he most needs. And that has come from the European Union, United States of America, China, Canada and Australia. These foreign forces have commended Sri Lanka for peacefully resolving its political crisis keeping in accordance with the Constitution. And that Sri Lanka is now headed by Wickremesinghe and eventually hed take ownership of the compliments paid to this countrys legislators by the outside world. Better living conditions Wickremesinghe early this week promised the people of this country better living conditions in the future. For this to materialize the government to be formed must curtail extravagant spending by ministers and introduce a reasonable tax policy. Wickremesinghe has not changed as a person regardless of whether he is in the government or the opposition. He is accused of wanting luxuries which is confirmed by the fact that the Yahapalana regime wanted more perks for ministers. He also sees his real opponent, Mahinda Rajapaksa, being the same unchanged person he is; both sharing one common trait and that is to hold on to power forever. As far as ambition is concerned Wickremesinghe does not seem to be short of fuel. But given his age and the capacity needed for a seasoned politician to understand the real needs of the people, Wickremesinghe has really fallen short of expectations. S ara Pascoe has revealed details of two massive London shows. The comedian, whose LadsLadsLads tour sold out venues across the UK, will visit the London Palladium on March 10 for both a matinee and evening performance. Both the gigs will be filmed and later broadcast as a comedy special. There will 100 tickets for each show made available to NHS workers at a reduced rate, marking the 70th anniversary of the health service. These tickets can only be purchased through the venue, using the code NHS100. In the Standards four-star review of Pascoes LadsLadsLads show back in January, we called it gloriously funny. Check out the full review here. How to get tickets for Sara Pascoe at London Palladium Tickets will go on sale at 10am on Wednesday December 19. They will be available for purchase here. Sara Pascoe dates 2.30pm, March 10 London Palladium 7.30pm, March 10 London Palladium The Australian pop princess, 50, will take to the stage for the Sunday afternoon Legends slot, following in the footsteps of Lionel Richie, Barry Gibb and Dolly Parton. The news was announced on Wednesday morning on the festivals official Twitter account in a post which read: We are delighted to announce that Kylie is finally bringing her show to Glastonbury. Shell play the legendary Sunday afternoon slot at next year's Festival. And we cannot wait. Minogue was scheduled to headline the Worthy Farm event in 2005 but cancelled a month before as she battled breast cancer. Minogue is the second act to be confirmed for the festival after Stormzy was revealed last month . The likes of Paul McCartney, Madonna, ABBA and the Cure are all rumoured to be performing at the festival in 2019. Tickets for Glastonbury sold out within 32 minutes last month, with many fans missing out. There will be a resale in April, which fans can register for here. G one are the days when we would have been happy with a mince pie and some festive chocolate at Christmas. Nowadays it seems retailers everywhere are experimenting with whacky flavour combinations and interesting seasonal snacks. The novelty festive food has been springing up in all sorts of places, and is the culinary equivalent of a pair of whacky sunglasses with everyone jumping on the bandwagon each year. From Brussels sprouts tea to a Christmas dinner pizza, here are six of the most unusual foods you can get your hands on this Christmas. Marmite sprouts Iceland is selling Marmite Brussels sprouts / Iceland It's safe to say that both Brussels sprouts and Marmite are divisive, with the former a much maligned part of Christmas dinner and the latter basing a whole advertising campaign around people either loving or hating it. So why Iceland has decided to combine the two we will never know, but apparently the salty taste of the marmite brings out the sweetness of the sprouts. You can pick up a 400g back for 1.50 here. Christmas dinner pizza Asda is selling this limited edition Christmas dinner pizza / Asda Christmas dinner is great. Pizza is great. So why not combine the two together? Whoever over at Asda came up with this idea deserves a massive clap on the back for their sterling festive creation. The limited edition pizza features two different types of cheese, turkey, pigs in blankets and sage and onion stuffing balls, along with a sachet of cranberry sauce to drizzle on as a condiment. And it only takes around 10 minutes to cook, making Christmas Day a whole lot easier for most. A 10" version costs 2.30 and a 12" 3.40 from here. Prosecco and pink peppercorn Pringles Ever wanted to try alcohol-flavoured crisps? / Pringles If you are the sort of person who loves both alcohol and fried potatoes then you are in for a treat because Pringles has created a Prosecco and pink peppercorn flavour crisps. If this sounds like your sort of thing you can get your hands on a tube at both Asda and Tesco for 1.12-1.25 - but you'll have to be quick because they're only available until the end of December. Pigs in blankets and Brussels sprouts tea Brussels sprouts tea / Sainsbury's Pigs in Blankets tea / Sainsbury's Hands up who wants a cup of hot, liquid Brussels sprouts? Thankfully, for fans of both controversial vegetables and our national drink, Sainsbury's has come to the rescue with this year's tea-based festive offering. But not only has the retailer decided to turn sprouts into tea, it's also launched a "pigs in blanket" flavour - so you can get double the Christmas dining experience in your mug this year. If this sounds like your thing, then head over to the website where you can pick up a packet for just 1 Christmas tree flavour crisps Ever wanted to know what Christmas tree tasted like? / Iceland Whatever happened to ready salted? For those people who have ever looked at a pine tree and thought, "my word, that looks delicious," Iceland has you covered. The frozen food retailer has taken the plunge and released its own novelty foodstuff this Christmas season. If it takes your fancy, head over to Iceland's website where you can buy a packet for 1. Christmas pudding gammon Fancy this gammon with a mince pie glaze? / Aldi Gammon and mince pie is a flavour combination we never thought we wanted - until now, that is. Aldi has really pulled the proverbial rabbit out of the hat this year with its festive offering of a Christmas gammon with a mince pie glaze stuffed with fruit. P rimary school pupils are getting meditation sessions to promote wellbeing and improve mental health. Longwood Primary Academy in Harlow, Essex, has installed a wooden anti-stress pod where children, as well as teachers, can take time out. Mindfulness and resilience classes are already taught by schools to combat mental health problems. Almost 400,000 young people are in contact with the NHS about their mental health. The classes are to help combat conditions such as anxiety, depression and eating disorders. But Longwood, which has more than 300 pupils, is understood to be among the first schools to offer special meditation breaks. Children will be encouraged to spend from 15 to 30 minutes thinking time in the pod. They will be able to listen through headphones and via an MP3 player to a selection of soothing tracks. The pod has wooden slats to let in light and prevent children from feeling claustrophobic. Headteacher James Hollinsley said: Making sure that all our pupils feel happy and secure in the school is a top priority. This will further enhance staff and pupils state of mind and create an environment of calm and focus. His school has been innovative in its approach to improving childrens emotional wellbeing. Former pupil Cerys Kenny, now 13, was presented with a national award by the Duchess of Cambridge in 2016 in recognition of her work creating booklets to help young people overcome anger and deal with upsetting problems. Stressed-out City workers have already benefited from pods. Londons first one was installed in October at co-working space Uncommon in Borough. The meditation sanctuary is the brainchild of business partners Adiba Osmani and Ghazal Abrishamchi. A man has died after being gunned down in a shooting in north London. Police were called to the scene in St Joseph's Road, Enfield, at about 9.15pm on Tuesday. The victim, whose age has not yet been released, was pronounced dead at the scene. Three males were arrested at the scene on suspicion of murder, Scotland Yard said. A crime scene remained in place into the night. A Metropolitan Police spokesman said: Officers, including firearms officers, attended the scene. A n evil American paedophile who was stopped from trafficking a teenager into the UK to sell sex during the London Olympics has been jailed for 30 years by a US court. Jason Gandy, from Houston, paid for the 15-year-old boys flight to London and was planning to make him provide massages during the 2012 Games. But the pair were stopped by suspicious UK Border Force staff and deported back to the US where he has now been jailed for child sex offences. The court was told that Gandy, 41, who was convicted of four counts of trafficking a minor for sex, ran a parlour from his home in the US where the boy gave massages to paying clients which ended with him having to perform sexual services. Customers were also allowed to fondle the boy, who had already been molested by Gandy before their trip to London. The court heard that Gandy, who was also convicted of sexual exploitation of a child, transportation of a child and transportation of child porn, had at least three other young victims who had to sell sexual services during massages. Each of his victims testified in court, describing how he had made them feel worthless and stole their innocence, leaving them struggling with drug abuse and suicidal feelings. The Houston court heard that in the case of the boy brought to the UK in 2012, Gandy was stopped by Heathrow officials suspicious that a man of his age was travelling with a child he was not related to. Both were sent back to Houston on separate flights, to be met by US officers. Sentencing Gandy, chief district judge Lee H Rosenthal said he was an abuser of vulnerable human beings and added: You are evil and most evil are those who willingly exploit others for their own gratification. Mark Dawson, from the US Homeland Security investigations unit, said afterwards: Thanks to the outstanding partnership we have with the UK Border Force, we have sent a resounding message that the global law enforcement community is united in our mission to bring those who victimise children to justice. Operation Predator, a global project to prevent child sexual exploitation, has led to 16,000 arrests. Raj Johal, the Border Forces assistant director at Heathrow, said: The skill, expertise and judgment exhibited by the Border Force officers involved in this case back in 2012 almost certainly saved many more vulnerable children from falling victim to this predator. It highlights the importance of the safeguarding work that frontline Border Force officers are engaged in every day and how a single intervention can have potentially massive implications. A high-flying Labour MP who once dreamed of being Britains first black female Prime Minister is facing jail today for spinning a web of lies in a desperate bid to avoid a speeding prosecution. Fiona Onasanya, 34, plotted with her brother Festus to deceive police by claiming one of their former tenants had been driving her Nissan Micra when it was caught on a speed camera. However the web of deceit began to unravel when detectives discovered the driver had been at home with his parents in Russia on the day of the offence, while Onasanyas phone was in use close to where the car was caught doing 41mph in a 30mph zone. Onasanya, a former Labour whip and key Corbyn ally, insisted she had done nothing wrong and blamed her chancer brother for the legal woes. But she was undone when two of her former aides came forward to say they had seen her driving that day. A jury at the Old Bailey today found Onasanya guilty of perverting the course of justice after a second trial. She showed no emotion as the guilty verdict was delivered, and now faces political ruin, the end of her career as a solicitor, and a possible prison sentence. The case has striking similarities with the downfall of former Lib Dem cabinet minister Chris Huhne, who was also caught plotting with his wife Vicky Pryce to try to dodge a speeding prosecution. When found guilty at trial in 2013, Huhnes spectacular fall from grace ended with an eight-month prison sentence. Onasanya, a qualified property solicitor, was fast-tracked on to Cambridgeshire county council after being overheard talking about the London riots in a pub in 2011. She claimed the Peterborough seat in June 2017 from the Tories with a slender 607 majority, declaring afterwards: I would like one day in the future to become the first black, female Prime Minister of this country. But just seven weeks into her Parliamentary career, the speeding incident that would bring her down had occurred. Onasanya was sent a Notice of Intended Prosecution over the speeding incident, in The Causeway in the Cambridgeshire village of Thorney just after 10pm on July 24 last year. When the form was returned, the name of Aleks Antipow was given as the driver in an attempt to absolve Onasanya of blame. But detectives discovered that Mr Antipow was actually at home with his parents in Russia that day. Onasanya initially claimed she had been in London when the car was caught speeding, but admitted a year later as her trial was approaching that this was wrong as Parliament was on recess at the time. She claimed this was a simple mistake and denied being flexible with the truth, but was forced to admit that she has never tried to investigate who was driving that fateful day. Police already knew Onasanyas phone had been in use in the area at the time of the speeding offence, but landed a major breakthrough when two of the Labour MPs former aides came forward to give evidence against her. Dr Christian DeFeo, who had been communication manager on Onasanyas election campaign, said he and his wife had seen the MP drive to their home, off The Causeway, on July 24. I never dreamed in my darkest dreams I would have to be sitting here, he said, revealing they had decided to come forward after reading about the case in the local media. "It is with the greatest reluctance that I have had to do this, but to do otherwise I can't, it's morally and legally unacceptable. In a bid to shift the blame, Onasanyas barrister Christine Agnew QC branded the MPs musician brother Festus a dishonest chancer who was responsible for the legal woes. She claimed Festus had told her it was sorted out, while she was dealing with the chaos of her first weeks in Parliament and medical treatment for her multiple sclerosis. I'm afraid to say that Festus is dishonest. He is a chancer and he's a dishonest chancer. He is someone that will manipulate anyone to get himself out of a hole, said Ms Agnew in her closing speech to the jury. But prosecutor David Jeremy QC said Onasanya had only offered a string of excuses for her efforts to dodge the speeding rap. It was a succession of lies over many months, he said. She knew from 24 July 2017 who was driving that car. Onasanya, from Peterborough, denied perverting the course of justice. A jury in her first trial were deadlocked, but a second jury today convicted her unanimously. A man who burgled the home of illusionist Dyanmo has been jailed for killing a 77-year-old man in a hit-and-run with a stolen car. Prolific thief Alistair McWilliams, of Camden, was driving at three times the speed limit when he crashed into Richard Docherty, in Kentish Town. McWilliams was driving a stolen Nissan Primera at the time, and mounted the pavement before going through a brick will in front of a house in Leighton Road. The 33-year-olds speed was caught on CCTV, where he is also seen to be running away from the scene and leaving Mr Docherty behind. McWilliams was sentenced at the Old Bailey today and ordered to serve 12 years and nine months. Jailed: Alistair McWilliams McWilliams was also disqualified from driving for 12 years and five months upon release. was He had previously pleaded guilty to aggravated vehicle taking, causing death by dangerous driving, causing death by driving whilst uninsured, causing death by driving whilst unlicensed and failing to stop after a road traffic collision. Dynamo real name Steven Frayne had his home ransacked by the prolific thief, who stole designer watches, high-value jewellery and a deck of cards. Mr Frayne had returned home from a trip to South Africa to find his 1.3 million home near Hampstead Heath had been broken into. (The culprit raided the home of the magician which is near Hampstead Heath PA Archive/PA Images) / PA Archive/PA Images Cath Carrie, from the CPS, said: McWilliams stole a car a mere three days before dangerously joyriding through the streets of north London. The strong CCTV evidence presented by the prosecution clearly showed McWilliams driving erratically speeding, swerving from side to side, overtaking a black cab driver and without any front or rear lights on. (Dynamo and his wife Kelly Frayne GC Images) / GC Images When he was arrested he told police officers that he had been drunk out his nut. McWilliams prolonged, persistent and deliberate course of very bad driving ultimately led to a loss of life. I hope todays sentence shows the devastating consequences dangerous driving can have on peoples lives and makes clear that the police and CPS will work together to do whatever is possible to prosecute dangerous drivers where there is the evidence to do so. A young mother whose children died after she left them in a car overnight has been jailed for 40 years. Amanda Hawkins, 21, left her one and two-year-old daughters in her car for more than 15 hours while she smoked marijuana with a friend. Temperatures had reached almost 32 degrees by the time she returned to her car in Kerrville, Texas, which had the windows closed. After finding the girls, Ms Hawkins ran cold water on them in a bathtub, while Googling on ways to revive people from heat exhaustion, according to the Hill Country Breaking News. The mother claimed the girls had been smelling flowers in a park when they fell ill, but did not take them to hospital initially because she did not want to get into trouble. The girls died around 5pm on June 8 2017, hours after Ms Hawkins found the pair unconscious. The case was labelled by far the most horrific case of child endangerment that I have seen in 37 years by Sheriff Rusty Hierholzer. Judge N. Keith Williams said he would have given her more punishment if possible. He added: People in our community take better care of their pets than you took care of your kids. Ms Hawkins allegedly sent text messages to family members telling them that her and a friend were staying in San Antonio with the girls and taking them to Seaworld the next day while they were in hospital. Dr John Gebhart, who treated the children, said that the girls most likely went into profound shock while they were left in the hot car and probably died very painful deaths. A n Uber driver who was involved in a violent struggle with police while armed with a Lord of the Rings-style sword outside Buckingham Palace has been found not guilty of a terror charge. Jurors were unanimous in acquitting Mohiussunnath Chowdhury, 27, of Luton, Bedfordshire, of one allegation of preparing acts of terrorism after a retrial at the Old Bailey. Mr Chowdhury was involved in the incident with officers on August 25 last year. He told a trial at the Old Bailey earlier this year that he wanted to be killed by police and had no intention of hurting anyone himself. Mr Chowdhury bit his lip, raised his eyebrows and then saluted the jurors after they spent 11 hours and 36 minutes considering the verdict. A woman in the public gallery cried "It should never have happened" moments after the verdict. Two unarmed officers suffered cuts to their hands when they fought to disarm him near the Queen's London residence in 2017. The court had previously heard how Mr Chowdhury swerved in front of a police van outside the Royal residence. He tussled with officers as they tried to restrain him, it was said. Jurors heard how Mr Chowdhury was born in London to a "close and supportive family" but became "self-radicalised" through watching Islamic State propaganda online. The defendant, of Kirkwood Road, Luton, Bedfordshire, told the court he was upset at the Government's role in arming Saudi Arabia and felt responsible for the deaths of innocent people in Yemen. A London entrepreneur has hailed the growing number of women going into business saying there is now more of a level playing field than before. Aneeqa Khan, 31, launched the company Eporta, which connects interior designers with independent furniture manufactures. This year she secured a 6 million boost to her firm, which has been described as the Airbnb of interior design. Ms Khan said: It is not as unusual any more to have women in business. There has been a shift and business is more of a level playing field than before. Ms Khan is the cover star for business anthology 100 Stories Of Growth: How They Did It, which details stories of some of the countrys best-known brands. On the book, she said: It is really hard to access advice from people who have done it in a digestible way. This is great because it is storytelling. She added: The more women we have being profiled, the better. Guy Tolhurst, the entrepreneur behind the 100 Stories Of Growth campaign and co-author of the book, said: I wanted to create an empowering resource that inspires current and future entrepreneurs. A train derailment between Southbury and Edmonton green has sparked chaos for commuters. Network Rail said a track maintenance train, known as a rail grinder, had derailed near Edmonton Green early on Tuesday evening. Greater Anglia said it has trapped trains in the depot meaning services were significantly reduced on London Overground, Greater Anglia and Stansted Express on Wednesday morning. Departures from Hertford East to Liverpool Street that normally run via Seven Sisters have been diverted to via Tottenham Hale. In a statement, a Network Rail spokesman said there will be no service between Enfield Town and Seven Sisters, and between Cheshunt and Seven Sisters this morning. They said services will be able to run between Seven Sisters and Liverpool Street. "Network Rail engineers are on site and hope to resolve the issue as soon as possible," the spokesman said. "We apologise to passengers affected, and advise them to check before they travel this morning with their train operator or via National Rail enquiries. London Overground said trains will be departing from Seven Sisters for Liverpool Street and 20 and 50 minutes past the hour. Trains will depart from Liverpool Street to Seven Sisters at 21 and 51 minutes past the hour. Commuters took to Twitter to complain about the delayed services and crowding. One said: "@greateranglia Could you not have had Seven Sisters line trains stopping along the Tottenham Hale line? Its dangerously overcrowded and many people were unable to board at Ponders End it seems." While another said they were stuck in the rain and will be late for work. T he king of clubs Robin Birley has joined neighbours fighting plans for a casino in Mayfair which he says will destroy the area. Developers have applied to convert a Grade II listed Georgian townhouse in Charles Street into a 24-hour casino, with a new restaurant and a bar. The property close to Mr Birleys exclusive private members club 5 Hertford Street was the former home of flamboyant society hostesses Dame Margaret Greville before being turned into a gentlemens club. It later became the home of society etiquette experts Debretts before being turned into offices in the Seventies. Residents said the conversation is entirely inappropriate, will blight their community and attract drugs and prostitution. They added that a casino would lead to extra traffic through the night, pollution, noise and have a 24-hour impact on families. 16 Charles St. in Mayfair, where the 24-hour casino is intended to go / Google Street View Mr Birley, the son of Annabels founder Mark Birley, said Mayfair is a very special mix of businesses while Charles Street is residential. He said: If you tamper with that mix, and start turning residential streets into busy commercial areas the planners will destroy the nature of the area. Most of the properties in the road were built in the 1750s and are a stones throw from the embassies of Myanmar and Saudi Arabia in an area where four-bedroom terraced houses sell for more than 7 million. A campaign group called Mayfair Against Casino Expansion (MACE) is fighting the proposal. One anonymous resident said: At present there are numerous people begging and sleeping rough in the area. With high-end clients attending the casino at all hours of the day, this will increase. An NHS doctor who lives in the street said: This is my only home. It is my childrens home. Please do not let it be destroyed. A spokesman from the applicant Continuity Capital said they were listening to their neighbours and looking at ways to minimise the impact of the casino. A decision on the proposal is expected to be made by Westminster councils planning committee early next year. E vening Standard readers can help raise up to 50,000 for the Felix Project food poverty charity this evening by ordering a takeaway through the Deliveroo app. The London-based delivery company has pledged to make a 5 donation every time a customer types in the code FelixProject when they make an online order. The Felix Project collects surplus food from supermarkets and other suppliers and delivers it free to more than 200 charities and schools across the capital. To trigger the donation Deliveroo customers have to enter the codeword in the promotion box between 5pm and midnight. Deliveroo will pay 5 for each of the first 10,000 times that it is used, up to a maximum of 50,000. Dan Warne, UK managing director at Deliveroo, said: Deliveroo is proud to support the Felix Project, as they raise vital funds to provide healthy meals and help the most vulnerable in our society. We know our customers, riders and restaurants believe that no one should go hungry this Christmas. Thats why we hope that together we can make a real difference, helping to feed Londons disadvantaged adults and children this festive season. Mr Warne made a special delivery to Felix Project volunteers in west London yesterday afternoon to show appreciation of their work. The Felix Project was founded in 2016 by the family of Felix Byam Shaw, who died suddenly aged 14 from a rare strain of meningococcal septicaemia. Its chief executive, Hilary Croft, said: The Felix Project relies on the generous support of individuals and companies to be able to deliver good food to good causes. We are so grateful that Deliveroo are supporting us with this great initiative and hope that Evening Standard readers will use the FelixProject code to support us this Christmas. The Deliveroo initiative follows a charity gig in Shepherds Bush on Friday that raised 13,000 for the Felix Project. Brit award winner James Bay, 28, took to the stage at St Stephens Church, where there were also performances from Tom Walker, The Staves, Jade Bird, Benjamin Francis Leftwich, Maisie Peters, Matt Maltese and Adam French. T he Princes Trust has warned of a dangerous disconnect between young people and their communities that is impacting on their aspirations. The charity found a third of young people feel uncared for by their wider community. Their YouGov poll of more than 3,000 18 to 30-year-olds published today also found 44 per cent did not have a positive role model in their lives, while a fifth felt their actions had no impact on those around them. Youth worker Gideon Buabeng, 25, said role models made gangs seem less appealing to youngsters. One of the reasons they join gangs is because it creates that sense of community, he said. Its a family and they get comfort within the gang. Yes, there is violence but thats just part of it. They are with their friends, are comfortable and value the loyalty. The loyalty is key because it makes them feel protected and not something they find in their communities. Mr Buabeng grew up in south London where gangs were commonplace during his teens. After leaving school, he secured a place at university and worked as a supermarket delivery driver. But three years ago he was ambushed by a group of men who stabbed him 14 times and left him fighting for life. After recovering, he became involved with the Princes Trust where he was assigned a mentor who encouraged him to write down his story to share with others. As an ambassador for the trust, he has spoken twice in the House of Lords during debates on youth crime and devises workshops to help tackle knife crime. For the last year he has been a youth worker in primary schools and pupil referral units in an attempt to be a positive influence on the younger generation. He said: As a society it can look scary to see reports of youth stabbings and people do not want to get involved. But we need more community leaders showing the way. The trust has set up the UK2030 taskforce to determine how the Government, charities and businesses can turn the tide of disenfranchisement. V oters back a second EU referendum in every area of the UK, new analysis of polling figures show. The research, released 100 days before the scheduled date of Brexit, found that Britain would now vote to Remain by a margin of 56 per cent to 44 per cent. The 12-point lead for Remain is higher than seen in any mainstream conventional poll since the 2016 EU referendum, which was won by Leave by 52 per cent to 48 per cent. Analysis suggested that voters in the constituencies of Prime Minister Theresa May, Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson would all prefer to stay in the EU. Best for Britain's research is based on modelling by data consultancy Focaldata using a method called Multilevel Regression and Post-stratification (MRP) on raw data from polling of more than 8,000 people between October 24 and November 6. According to the campaign group, the analysis found majority support for what they term a People's Vote among supporters of every major party, residents of every region of the country and both men and women. Respondents were asked whether they "support the British public having the final say on the Brexit deal". The reported results omit those who said "don't know" or refused to answer, so that totals add up to 100 per cent. Support for giving the public the final say was higher among women (69 per cent) than men (63 per cent) and stronger among younger voters (75 per cent for those aged 18-44) than older (69 per cent for 45-54 year-olds, 61 per cent for 55-64 year-olds and 51 per cent for those aged 65 and older). TODO: define component type apester In Mr Johnson's Uxbridge constituency, the analysis found 67 per cent backing a public vote, against 33 per cent opposing it. In Mrs May's Maidenhead seat the split was 63 per cent to 37 per cent in favour and in Mr Corbyn's Islington North 78 per cent to 22 per cent. Some 77 per cent of Labour supporters said they wanted the public to be given the final say, against 52 per cent of Conservatives. And support for a public vote was highest in London (72 per cent) and Scotland (71 per cent), followed by the North East, North West and Wales (67 per cent), Yorkshire and the Humber (66 per cent), and the South East and West Midlands (64 per cent), and lowest in the East Midlands, East of England and South West (63 per cent). The research found a majority in favour of Remain in every age group except the over-64s, who backed Leave by 56 per cent to 44 per cent. Younger voters were the biggest Remain backers, with 64 per cent of 18-24 year-olds, 66 per cent of the 25-34 group and 62 per cent of the 35-44s. Some 57 per cent of 45-54 year-olds and 52 per cent of 55-64 year-olds said they would vote Remain in a re-run poll. Support for Remain was highest in Scotland (70 per cent) and London (68 per cent), followed by the North West and Wales (56 per cent), the South East (54 per cent), South West (53 per cent) and the North-East and Yorkshire and Humber (52 per cent). The East Midlands backed Leave by 51 per cent to 49 per cent, while the East of England and West Midlands said they would vote for EU withdrawal by less than half a percentage point over 50 per cent of those expressing a preference. Eloise Todd, chief executive of Best for Britain said: "This shows that with 100 days to go till Brexit a record amount of the public do not want to leave. "This should be a wake-up call for politicians. With Westminster deadlocked, I believe we must throw it back to the people and give them the final say on Brexit." - Best for Britain's figures are based on modelling by Focaldata on raw data from a Populus poll of 8,154 people taken between October 24 and November 6. T oday marks just 100 days until Britain leaves the EU. Despite having two-and-a-half years to prepare, Prime Minister Theresa May is arguably no closer to agreeing a workable Brexit deal than when she took the top job in summer 2016. So, why is the issue still up in the air, and what could it mean for the UK? Here is the Standard's simple guide to Brexit. Theresa May, pictured dancing at the Conservative Party conference, has still not secured a Brexit deal / AFP/Getty Images What is Brexit? Brexit is a blend of the words British and exit. Its the process of Britain withdrawing its membership of the European Union (EU), which we joined 45 years ago. What is the EU? The EU is a political and economic partnership of 28 (to be 27 once Britain leaves) European countries. It has its own economic system, called the single market, which lays down standardised laws across all member nations. This includes arrangements like free movement of people and goods. Former Prime Minister David Cameron called the referendum. After backing Remain, he resigned after the result in 2016 (PA) / PA Archive/PA Images Why is the UK leaving the EU? In the 2015 general election, the Conservative Party made a manifesto pledge to hold a referendum on Britains EU membership. After the Tories seized overall control of Parliament, the vote was eventually held in June 2016. Fifty-two per cent of the 33 million voters chose to Leave, with 48 per cent wanting to Remain. When will Brexit happen? Britain is set to leave the EU on March 29 next year, after the government triggered a piece of legislation called Article 50. Theresa May on March 29, 2017, after she announced Article 50 had been triggered / PA What is happening now? A deal is yet to be passed. After two-and-a-half years of painstaking negotiations with EU leaders and numerous political crises along the way Prime Minister Mrs May presented her Withdrawal Agreement deal to Parliament last month. However, it was met with a rebellion from all sides of Parliament, including hardline Brexit supporters from her own Conservative Party. TODO: define component type apester What is the Withdrawal Agreement? It encompasses how Britain will leave the EU, and its future relationship with member states. Key aspects include: The Northern Irish "backstop", an insurance policy to avoid a return to border checks between Britain and EU member Ireland that could threaten the 1998 peace agreement. Freedom of movement ending, with Britain free to set its own immigration rules. A transition period of Britain remaining in the single market and being bound by its rules until the end of December 2020 while the two sides continue to work out a new trade relationship. Britain paying a divorce bill as part of leaving the EU, covering things like existing commitments to EU programmes. Its estimated to be about 39 billion. Boris Johnson is among the Conservative MPs who have fought Mrs May's deal (Reuters) / REUTERS Why is it so unpopular with critics? The key sticking point is the backstop. Leading Brexiteers, like Boris Johnson, have said the EU would use the backstop to "blackmail" the UK to get what they want out of the future trade negotiations. The Democratic Unionist Party, which is propping up Mrs Mays minority government, fears it could align Northern Ireland more closely with the EU than the rest of the UK, and that it could threaten the countrys place in the UK altogether. Oppositions parties including Labour, the Scottish Nationalist Party and the Liberal Democrats have also refused to back the current deal. When will MPs vote on Mrs Mays deal? After Mrs May pulled the original vote last week, the Prime Minister confirmed Parliament will renew the debate on her Withdrawal Agreement in the week beginning January 7. A vote will finally take place in the week beginning January 14. No exact has been set. Theresa May watches as Jeremy Corbyn announces he will table a motion of no confidence in her following delays to the Withdrawal Agreement vote / AFP/Getty Images Is there any chance of Mrs Mays deal passing? It remains unlikely at this stage. The Prime Minister has been forced to endure bruising sessions in the Commons as MPs from all parties have lined up to attack her deal and her governance. Meanwhile, the European Commission continues to insist no changes can be made to her deal. This means Mrs May will struggle to make changes on sticking points such as the Irish backstop in order to appease Tory Brexiteers on her backbenches. What will happen if the Withdrawal Agreement is voted down? Brexit secretary Stephen Barclay has insisted that if MPs reject the deal, the governments default option is to leave the EU without an exit agreement. Stephen Barclay is the third Brexit secretary after the resignations of David Davis and Dominic Raab / AFP/Getty Images What will happen in the event of a no deal Brexit? The government has begun to ramp up its preparation for no deal after Cabinet ministers agreed they needed to make it a priority. Defence secretary Gavin Williamson, for instance, has said 3,500 troops will be on standby to support any government department with contingencies. Is there any chance of a second referendum? T he European Union today triggered bare bones emergency plans to mitigate chaos in the event of a no-deal Brexit. Brussels announced 14 measures to stop aeroplanes being grounded at UK and EU airports, limit disruption to the City and hauliers, protect citizens abroad and ease the impact on businesses. But its measures would hit Brexiteer hopes of a managed no-deal departure. The European Commission warned that its proposed actions would be time-limited, often to just nine months or a year, and would not stop turmoil in many areas of daily life. Fears remained that there could still be queues at borders and scaled back flight schedules. The Commission stressed: These measures will not and cannot mitigate the overall impact of a no-deal scenario. TODO: define component type apester Brexit Day, March 29, 2019, is just 100 days away. The Commission stressed to member states that it was essential and urgent to adopt its blueprint today to ensure the necessary contingency plans are in place in time. They are limited to specific areas where it is absolutely necessary to protect the vital interests of the EU and where preparedness measures on their own are not sufficient, the commission added. As a rule, they will be temporary in nature, limited in scope and adopted unilaterally by the EU. The development came as a Cabinet minister hinted that many members of the Government could resign if the fantastical mythical creature of a no-deal Brexit is made official policy. In an interview with the Standard, Justice Secretary David Gauke rounded on senior Conservatives for not facing up to reality by claiming that leaving the EU without a deal is viable. Theresa May leaves from 10 Downing Street in central London on December 19, 2018 before heading to the House of Commons to attend the weekly Prime Minister's Questions / AFP/Getty Images He is also the third Cabinet minister in a week to argue openly that MPs could stage an indicative vote on other options, such as a second referendum, if Theresa Mays deal is voted down in the Commons. Downing Street has rejected the idea. Asked if he thought Cabinet members would resign if no deal became official policy, Mr Gauke told the Standard: I think there are many Cabinet ministers who dont think that that would be a responsible course of action. His comments came as three Tory MPs Nick Boles, Anna Soubry and Sarah Wollaston said they would resign the party whip if a no-deal Brexit became policy. The Justice Secretary, a loyalist who backs the Prime Ministers withdrawal agreement, said passing her deal was the best way of taking no deal off the table. He hit out at Brexiteers who claim a managed no deal could be achieved without inflicting catastrophic damage. The policy is reportedly being pushed by 11 Right-wingers in Cabinet, including Commons leader Andrea Leadsom and International Development Secretary Penny Mordaunt. Pointing to the clear reality that the EU would not sign a deal that left out the Irish border backstop and a financial settlement, currently 39 billion, Mr Gauke said: Anyone suggesting there is a deal that doesnt involve those elements, I fear, is not facing up to the hard choices that are in front of us. Relying on some fantastical mythical creature of a deal that has all the aspects we would like and with none of the downsides the EU will insist upon is not facing up to reality. Urging MPs not to pretend there are other deals out there, he said they should use the Christmas break to think long and hard and then back Mrs Mays deal in the national interest. Mr Gauke follows Work and Pensions Secretary Amber Rudd and Education Secretary Damian Hinds in arguing that indicative votes may have to be staged. At the moment MPs are too often acting as critics rather than participants and not taking responsibility, he said. Indicative votes might be a means by which we can force MPs to take that responsibility and act in the interests of the country. O pposition parties have tabled a vote of no confidence in the Government in a move that follows pressure on Jeremy Corbyn to make the move. It comes after the Labour leader demanded a Commons vote on Theresa Mays future after she confirmed a vote on her Brexit deal would not happen until after Christmas. Mr Corbyn tabled a non-binding motion in the Prime Minister, but stopped short of bringing one against the Government under the Fixed-term Parliaments Act (FTPA). The SNP, Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru and the Green Party have now tabled a confidence vote in the Government following a meeting on Tuesday evening. The party leaders accused Mr Corbyn of failing to hold the Government to account, adding that their move was a bid to strengthen the motion he tabled earlier. It is understood the Government only has to give time to motions tabled in the name of the Leader of the Opposition, which is currently Mr Corbyn. If he called the vote of confidence in Government, and if it was won, a General Election could be triggered. Jeremy Corbyn table no-confidence motion, but what does it mean for Theresa May? SNP Westminster Leader Ian Blackford MP met with Liberal Democrat Leader Vince Cable, Plaid Cymru MP Liz Saville Roberts and Green MP Caroline Lucas and make a joint decision to table the motion. Mr Blackford said: "Labour has failed to hold the UK government to account over their shambolic Brexit negotiations. Their motion of no confidence in the Prime Minister on Monday was a gimmick - we attempted to strengthen it with our own amendment and it's regrettable it was not offered time for debate in Parliament. Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn clash in the Commons on Monday / AFP/Getty Images "By tabling our motion on Tuesday evening, we hope to be afforded time by the UK government to debate it before Parliament closes for the Christmas recess. "It is clear the Prime Minister's tactic has been to run down the clock and deprive Parliament of any alternative to her deal. He added: "Jeremy Corbyn seems happy to let her - presumably to avoid having to make a decision on a second EU referendum. This is not acceptable and people deserve better. "We want this motion to succeed but if it doesn't, Labour's only excuse for not backing a second referendum will be removed. We can then all get on with building a majority for that vote." It is understood the Government only has to give time to motions tabled in the name of the Leader of the Opposition. T he Work and Pensions Secretary has said that there is a "plausible" argument for a second referendum if the Prime Minister's Brexit deal is rejected. Amber Rudd suggested that she could see a situation where there might be a fresh vote if Theresa May fails to get her controversial deal for leaving the European Union through the Commons. "I don't want a people's vote, or a referendum in general, but if Parliament absolutely failed to reach a consensus I could see there would be a plausible argument for it," she told ITV's Peston. "But I think it is incumbent on MPs to find the centre ground in Parliament and to try to find where the majority is there. Because, quite frankly, I don't think the majority of people ... want to be asked again how to vote." It appears to be the first time a cabinet minister has said there is a plausible argument for a second referendum. Ms Rudd has previously suggested a Norway-plus model soft Brexit could be plausible if MPs were asked to back an alternative to Mrs May's deal. She backed the idea of an indicative vote where MPs could reveal which options they would back if Mrs May's deal cannot get through. Work and Pensions Secretary Amber Rudd / AFP/Getty Images "I quite like the idea of indicative votes because it would flush out where people's majority is, so people who hold on to the idea of one option or another would see there's no majority for that so they need to move to their next preference," she said. "We would hopefully be able to find where the compromise and the consensus is for a majority of support." Her comments come after Welsh First Minister Mark Drakeford told reporters in Downing Street that a second referendum would be "unavoidable" if no deal was agreed by MPs and there was not a general election. "The Prime Minister should put her deal to the House of Commons and see what support she can mobilise for it and see whether there are any alternatives - a Norway-plus arrangement for example - that might have a better chance of responding to where the centre of gravity in the House of Commons may currently lie," he said. TODO: define component type apester "If the House of Commons is deadlocked we need a general election and a new House of Commons. A Cabinet minister today hinted that many members of the Government could resign if the fantastical mythical creature of a no-deal Brexit is made government policy. In an interview with the Standard, Justice Secretary David Gauke rounded on senior Conservatives for not facing up to reality by claiming that leaving the EU without a deal is viable. He is the third Cabinet minister in a week to argue openly that MPs could stage an indicative vote on other options, such as a second referendum, if Theresa Mays deal is voted down in the Commons. Downing Street has rejected the idea. Asked if he thought Cabinet members would resign if no deal became official policy, Mr Gauke told the Standard: I think there are many Cabinet ministers who dont think that that would be a responsible course of action. His comments came as three Tory MPs Nick Boles, Anna Soubry and Sarah Wollaston said they would resign the party whip if a no-deal Brexit became policy. Justice Secretary David Gauke leaves Downing Street, London / PA Mr Boles said he would also vote in any way necessary to stop it from happening. The Justice Secretary, a loyalist who backs the Prime Ministers withdrawal agreement, said passing her deal was the best way of taking no deal off the table. He hit out at Brexiteers who claim a managed no deal could be achieved without inflicting catastrophic damage. The policy is reportedly being pushed by 11 Right-wingers in Cabinet, including Commons leader Andrea Leadsom and International Development Secretary Penny Mordaunt. Pointing to the clear reality that the EU would not sign a deal that left out the Irish border backstop and a financial settlement, currently 39 billion, Mr Gauke said: Anyone suggesting there is a deal that doesnt involve those elements, I fear, is not facing up to the hard choices that are in front of us. Relying on some fantastical mythical creature of a deal that has all the aspects we would like and with none of the downsides that the EU will insist upon is not facing up to reality. Countdown to Brexit: 100 days until Britain leaves the EU Urging MPs not to pretend there are other deals out there, he said they should use the Christmas break away from the Commons to think long and hard and then back Mrs Mays deal in the national interest. Mr Gauke follows Work and Pensions Secretary Amber Rudd and Education Secretary Damian Hinds in arguing that indicative votes may have to be staged to find a solution. Home Secretary Amber Rudd / EPA At the moment MPs are too often acting as critics rather than participants and not taking responsibility, he said. Indicative votes might be a means by which we can, if you like, force MPs to take that responsibility and act in the interests of the country. He warned Brexiteers that a second referendum was gaining ground among opposition MPs. My sense is the Labour benches are increasingly moving in that direction, he said. But he warned EU leaders hoping for a second referendum that it may not go the way they want. There is a distinct risk that the vote would be in favour of Leave again, he said. By far the lowest risk, from the EU point of view, is to enable the PM to deliver her deal. A no deal, he said, would potentially be devastating for our reputation for economic competence. TODO: define component type apester For those who believe, as I do, that the Conservatives are the party of competence, if we find ourselves leading the country in that direction we should not be under any illusion how damaging that would be to our reputation. That is deeply alarming in the context of a hard-Left, economically illiterate Labour Party which would inflict even greater harm to our country. Business leaders have pleaded with ministers to take no deal off the table. Jasmine Whitbread of London First said no deal would be a hammer blow to the economy. The Prime Minister urged leaders from the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland devolved administrations to pull together and back her deal with exactly 100 days until Brexit Day on March 29, 2019. J eremy Corbyn has been criticised for failing to apologise after he was accused of calling Theresa May a "stupid woman" at Prime Minister's Questions. The Labour leader insisted he said the words "stupid people" when he returned to the Commons as he faced accusations of "misogyny" over his remark. Mr Corbyn was immediately criticised for not issuing an apology. Andrea Leadsom told the Commons: "the country and this house will have drawn their own conclusions" His remark during PMQs earlier today sparked a furious backlash from MPs who called for Mr Corbyn to apologise. Jeremy Corbyn appears to mouth 'stupid woman' towards Theresa May during PMQs He returned to the chamber this afternoon and said: "I did not use the words stupid woman about the prime minister and I'm completely opposed to the use of sexist and misogynist language in any form at all." Cries of "rubbish" could be heard after his response. The Labour leader came under fire from Tory, Labour and SNP MPs after he appeared to mouth stupid woman during exchanges with Mrs May at PMQs. The Labour party earlier issued a response saying Mr Corbyn used the words "stupid people." Video showed the Opposition leader saying something under his breath after the Prime Minister likened Labours attempt to table a no confidence motion in her to a pantomime. Health Secretary Matt Hancock wrote on Twitter: The mask slips. Jeremy Corbyns abuse of the Prime Minister shows what a reactionary misogynist he is Conservative Party chairman Brandon Lewis added: Will @jeremycorbyn apologise or clarify exactly what he was saying? Looks shocking on the film, unacceptable in any environment. Tory former minister Sir Patrick McLoughlin used a point of order in the Commons to accuse Mr Corbyn of having muttered that Theresa May was a stupid woman. Cries of shame and disgraceful were heard from the Tory benches at this point. Sir Patrick added: Would it not be appropriate for him to come back into this chamber and apologise? TODO: define component type apester Amid the row, Jeremy Corbyn posted on Twitter: "The Prime Minister is recklessly running down the clock, in a shameful attempt to make her bad deal look like the lesser of two evils." A Labour Party spokesperson said: He did not call her a stupid woman so I dont think theres any basis for an apology. "He said stupid people. He was clearly responding to what was going on in the chamber. However even some Labour MPs thought he said "stupid woman." Labour MP Stella Creasy, who has talked publicly about misogynist abuse she has faced on social media, wrote on Twitter: This is not ok. PMQs is a hotbed of emotions but I hope that Jeremy will accept this kind of behaviour isnt his normal good nature or what we expect of progressive men #21stcenturycalling SNP MP Stewart McDonald tweeted: If Corbyn did say the PM was a stupid woman then yes, its a disgrace and he should apologise. Britains best known lip-reader, deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie, is very certain Mr Corbyn said stupid woman, a BBC producer revealed. Tim Johns, who produces the Jeremy Vine show on BBC radio, tweeted: I just showed Evelyn Glennie, the famous percussionist, the footage of Jeremy Corbyn in the Commons. "She's deaf and can lip read. She wasn't aware of the story and her interpretation of what he said was "stupid woman". She says she's very certain. Labour-supporting singer Mick Hucknall tweeted: He clearly said Woman. Digging a hole that didnt need to be dug. Stupid Man. Actor Rob Lowe tweeted: FYI- I have to say, I saw Jeremy Corbin call the Prime Minister a stupid woman with my own eyes watching on [Sky News]. S ajid Javid was today battling to stave off criticism from business leaders over post-Brexit immigration policies, despite a new blueprint that will allow tens of thousands of lower-skilled workers to continue coming to Britain. The Home Secretary claimed proposals unveiled today in a long-delayed immigration White Paper which also include an end to the cap on skilled migrants coming to this country and reforms to make it easier for foreign students to stay to work after their degrees were designed to be pro-business. He said his plans would also encourage employers to upskill British workers and invest more, rather than relying on cheap overseas labour, and that the US, Canada and Australia showed it was possible to have a thriving economy without freedom of movement. In a further attempt to appease business critics, Mr Javid promised to consult on whether to press ahead with a proposed 30,000 salary minimum for future foreign workers, which is intended to shut the door on lower-skilled staff paid below this sum. He also repeatedly refused to state that the Conservative manifesto pledge to seek to cut net migration to the tens of thousands remained government policy. But a No 10 source said: Its in the manifesto, yes it remains our policy. Seeking to allay business concerns, the White Paper includes a transitional scheme running up to 2025 allowing temporary short-term workers in lower-skilled roles for people from specified low risk countries most likely to be in Europe to come to Britain for up to a year to fill gaps in sectors such as construction and social care. Such staff will have no right to public funds, to bring dependants, or to stay long-term, and will have to go home for a 12-month cooling off period before being able to return for another short stay. That measure which todays blueprint says could be extended appears to ensure significant numbers of low-skilled migrants will be able to enter Britain for several more years at least. But businesses warned that the plans, due to be phased in from 2021, would increase existing skills shortages and damage national prosperity. Mark Hilton, of business group London First, said the proposed 30,000 minimum salary needed to be reduced to the London Living Wage figure of 20,155 and added: We risk leaving critical sectors and public services with too few people to do the job. H ome Secretary Sajid Javid has revealed that the Conservatives have effectively abandoned their target to bring net migration below 100,000 post-Brexit. He made the admission on the BBC's Today programme ahead of the Government's White Paper on Britains post-Brexit immigration system being published later today. But the Cabinet minister denied the Government was abandoning commitments in the partys general election manifesto and said that there will still be a system to bring net migration down to more sustainable levels. Bringing net migration below 100,000 was a key pledge in the party's 2017 General Election manifesto. Speaking about reducing annual net migration target, Mr Javid said: There is no specific target. It will be a system that will bring net migration down to more sustainable levels. If you look at the current level of migration, the latest stats show 273,000. Most people agree that is very high, certainly by historical standards. "In the last two decades it has been in the hundreds of thousands. If you go back further than that it was much lower. Ministers met on Tuesday to intensify plans for leaving the European Union without a deal / AFP/Getty Images "What we want to do is bring it to a level where it is sustainable, in the sense that it meets first our economic need and at the same time, though, it is not too high a burden on our communities or on our infrastructure." Mr Javid had previously pledged to reduce the annual net migration figure to below 100,000, but refused to repeat the commitment on the Radio 4 show. Mr Javid added the Government would also be consulting further about the future of minimum salary requirements for high-skilled workers applying to the UK. He said: We are not setting the exact threshold today. There will be a threshold. The MAC (Migration Advisory Committee) suggested it should be 30,000. "That is their view and it is based on their evidence and it is very important for us to listen to that. It is equally important to listen to business to find the right threshold. "We will consult further on whether it is 30,000 or thereabouts. What is important is that it is the principle that the MAC set out, which is absolutely right, where we want to focus on high skills." The body representing the NHS trusts has warned the 30,000 minimum salary could affect the NHS's ability to recruit the staff it needs. NHS Providers deputy chief executive Saffron Cordery said they were "deeply concerned" about the proposals in the Government's immigration White Paper. "We are deeply concerned about what is going to happen. High skills does not equal high pay," she told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme. "You have got starting salaries for nurses at 23,000 - also for paramedics, midwives. Junior doctors starting salaries at 27,000, healthcare assistants at 17,000, all coming in way below that 30,000 cap. "It is not just health workers, it is social care as well. We have to remember where the skills lay. They lay in those staff under 30,000." A multi-millionaire Russian businessman who was suspected of being poisoned on the orders of the Kremlin died from natural causes, a coroner has ruled. Alexander Perepilichnyy, 44, collapsed while out jogging near to his 3 million estate in Weybridge, Surrey, in 2012, sparking claims of foul play by Moscow and poisoning. At the time of his death, he had been helping UK-based campaigner Bill Browder's Hermitage Capital Investment expose an alleged $230 million (142 million) money laundering ring in Russia. It was claimed Mr Perepilichnyy was on a Moscow hit-list because of his whistleblowing and poison may have been slipped into his favourite soup dish. But Coroner Nicholas Hilliard QC today ruled that Mr Perepilichnyy is most likely to have collapsed and died during his jog because of sudden arrhythmic death syndrome, known as SADS. "There is no direct evidence that Mr Perepilichnyy was murdered", he told an Old Bailey inquest hearing. "In my judgment it is likely that he died of natural causes." He dismissed claims that the Russian was on a hit list and a dossier had been found at an assassin's home as "not sufficiently robust". The coroner said he could not definitively rule out poisoning, but said there was no evidence of who might have done it and the window of opportunity was "extremely small". Surrey Police has faced fierce criticism over its handling of the initial investigation, after key evidence including the contents of Mr Perepilichnyys stomach and data from his computer were discarded. The force maintains there was no evidence of "third party involvement or foul play", but an Assistant Chief Constable in December 2012 identified missed opportunities in the investigation. Coroner Mr Hilliard said the fact the death was not immediately treated as a suspicious has hampered his investigation, as there were no photos of the scene when Mr Perepilichnyy was found, "limited" CCTV was seized, and the forensic post mortem did not happen until 18 days later. But he added: "Faced with a middle-aged man in jogging clothes at the top of a steep hill, it is unsurprising those officers came to this view." Mr Perepilichnyy, a married father-of-two, had a secret liaison in Paris with his Ukranian lover, former model Elmira Medynska, the day before he died, it emerged during the inquest. Ms Medynska recalls the businessman complaining about "bad tasting" food and vomiting after a meal out at a Japanese and Chinese fusion restaurant. But the coroner said this could be put down to a mild case of food poisoning. On the day Mr Perepilichnyy died he had eaten a bowl of traditional Russian soup, which usually includes the vegetable ingredient sorrel. Tests on his stomach after his death found no traces of sorrel but identified a compound which it was claimed could have been an extremely poisonous species of the flowering plant gelsemium. However, Mr Hilliard said: "We can put aside evidence an an unknown compound in Mr Perepilichnyy's stomach, which I'm satisfied has no links to the gelsemium species. "It has now probably been identified as a widely occurring and innocuous compound." The coroner added that he was satisfied Mr Perepilichnyy's wife "made soup containing sorrel for her husband and she ate some of it - she suffered no ill effects". Insurers Legal and General were involved in the inquest as Mr Perepilichnyy had taken out 3.5 million of life insurance and allegedly applied for another 5 million of policies when he died. Mr Hilliard said the financier had been the subjects of threats, but had not hired a bodyguard for his family's safety and travelled openly and under his own name. "Someone can be killed without warning", he said. "But he never sought to implement security measures to protect himself or his family. "It is possible he was naive but given his intelligence and his acumen, I think it is unlikely. "I think he took the view that the threats were things he could adequately manage himself." The Russian was seen moments before his collapse as he jogged up a steep hill while "struggling", clutching his stomach, and "appearing to be in pain and grimacing". It was suggested during the inquest that Mr Perepilichnyy was working with British intelligence, but the government successfully applied to keep its contact with the financier secret in the national interest. Bob Moxon Browne QC, representing the insurers, demanded that the papers be made public, arguing the death of Mr Litvinenko, as well as the Novichok poisonings in Salisbury, show that if Mr Perepilichnyy's was viewed in Moscow as an "enemy, traitor or turncoat" was relevant. M embers of the royal family were seen arriving at Buckingham Palace for the Queens annual Christmas lunch today. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge were seen leading the way in a vehicle with Princess Charlotte and Prince George. Meanwhile, Harry and pregnant Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex were also seen arriving for the annual gathering. Other royals spotted arriving at the palace included Prince Charles, Princess Beatrice, Prince Andrew, Princess Anne and the Duke of Edinburgh. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex arriving for the Queen's Christmas lunch at Buckingham Palace / PA The Countess of Wessex was one of the first members of the royal members of the family to arrive. The family were attending the lunch at the palace, which takes place mid-week, before they then head to Sandringham. Harry was seen behind the wheel of a car with wife Meghan, who is expecting their first child in the spring, sat beside him. Prince Charles was seen arriving at Buckingham Palace / EPA The duchess has had an eventful week, visiting a care and nursing home for retired actors, directors and entertainers on Tuesday which followed a public appeal from her father Thomas Markle to stop shunning him, he claimed, and get in touch. Kate was also seen arriving for the festive royal lunch sat in the front seat of a car with William behind the wheel. Prince George was pictured in the car with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge / PA She waived to the crowds and sat behind her could be seen Prince George with his nanny Maria Teresa Turrion Borrallo. J ohn Bercow has been accused of previously using the words stupid woman in the Commons as the row over Labours Jeremy Corbyn allegedly using the phrase rumbles on. The Labour leader was today accused of calling Theresa May a stupid woman at Prime Ministers Questions, which sparked a furious backlash from MPs who called for him to apologise. Mr Corbyn faced accusations of misogyny over the remark, although he insisted he said the words stupid people. The phrase has allegedly previously been used by Mr Bercow about Commons Leader Andrea Leadsom, who also claims she was called f****** useless by the Speaker in May. The pair clashed again over the exchange on Wednesday before fellow Tory Vicky Ford also hit out at Mr Bercow. Ms Ford told the Commons: I have heard the words stupid woman being used in this chamber about myself and Im afraid to say Ive heard it from yourself in the Speakers chair. So Mr Speaker please can we have an apology, draw a line against this and move on. Vicky Ford MP said she had heard the words "stupid woman" being used about her / PA Mr Bercow responded: "The honourable lady has at no time previously, that is to say prior to today, made that allegation against me, she has not come to me and said that and to my knowledge I'm not in receipt of a letter alleging that. If there is such an allegation I refute it 100%. I say with absolute certainty, it is not correct. I have not said that to or about her", he added. Commons Speaker John Bercow responds / PA Footage earlier on Tuesday showed Mr Corbyn saying something under his breath after the Prime Minister likened Labours attempt to table a no confidence motion in her to a pantomime. The Opposition leader returned to the chamber later to address the allegations, saying in a statement: I did not use the words stupid woman about the Prime Minister. He added: Im completely opposed to the use of sexist and misogynist language in any form at all. Jeremy Corbyn denied reports he muttered the words "stupid woman" / AFP/Getty Images MPs took to Twitter to slam the Labour leader for the alleged remarks, with Health Secretary Matt Hancock writing: The mask slips. Jeremy Corbyns abuse of the Prime Minister shows what a reactionary misogynist he is. Conservative Party chairman Brandon Lewis added: Will @jeremycorbyn apologise or clarify exactly what he was saying? Looks shocking on the film, unacceptable in any environment. Tory former minister Sir Patrick McLoughlin used a point of order in the Commons to accuse Mr Corbyn of having muttered that Theresa May was a stupid woman Theresa May during PMQs / PA/UK Parliament/Mark Duffy Cries of shame and disgraceful were heard from the Tory benches at this point as Sir Patrick added: Would it not be appropriate for him to come back into this chamber and apologise? Amid the row, Jeremy Corbyn posted on Twitter: "The Prime Minister is recklessly running down the clock, in a shameful attempt to make her bad deal look like the lesser of two evils." A Labour Party spokesperson said: He did not call her a stupid woman so I dont think theres any basis for an apology. O fficials in South Africa have issued an arrest warrant for Zimbabwes former first lady, Grace Mugabe, over an alleged assault on a model. The AfriForum campaign group said it was informed by South African police about the warrant for Ms Mugabe, who was accused of assaulting model Gabriella Engels in a Johannesburg hotel last year. Ms Mugabe had said at the time she was acting in self-defence after she claimed the model attacked her in a room where her two sons lived, the BBC reported. The South African government had granted diplomatic immunity to Mrs Mugabe, who returned to Zimbabwe despite calls for her prosecution. She returned with her husband, who was then president of Zimbabwe and attending a regional summit in Pretoria. He was forced to resign in November 2017. A newly-discovered blind amphibian will be officially named after Donald Trump in recognition of the presidents climate change denial. The name Dermophis donaldtrumpi was chosen by the boss of a sustainable building materials firm which paid thousands at an auction for the right. The small creature is blind and has an ability to bury its head in the ground. These features EnviroBuilds Aidan Bell said match the US leaders opinion on climate change. EnviroBuild bought the naming rights for the amphibian, which was found in Panama, for $25,000 (19,740). In a blog on the companys website, Mr Bell said the creature hs rudimentary eyes which can only detect light or dark. Comparing this feature to Mr Trump, he wrote: Capable of seeing the world only in black and white, Donald Trump has claimed that climate change is a hoax by the Chinese. The amphibians live almost entirely underground and are believed to have lost their limbs at least 60 million years ago as an adaptation to burrowing, according to Mr Bell. Again comparing this to the president, he wrote: Burrowing its head underground helps Donald Trump when avoiding scientific consensus on anthropomorphic climate change and also appointed several energy lobbyists to the Environment Agency, where their job is to regulate the energy industry. The 10cm creature is a caecilian and its naming rights were auctioned to raise money for the Rainforest Trust. D onald Trump has declared victory against ISIS in Syria. The United States president tweeted on Wednesday: "We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency." It comes as the US considers a complete withdrawal of its forces from Syria, as it winds up its campaign to retake all the territory once held by Islamic State. Mr Trump has previously expressed his wish for the remaining 2,000 troops to come home when possible, and his latest tweet suggested he saw no further grounds for remaining. A convoy of US army troops and Kurdish militia on patrol in Syria last year / EPA One official, speaking under the condition of anonymity, told Reuters that partners and allies had already been consulted on a withdrawal. The Pentagon declined to comment, saying only that it continued to work with partners in the region. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, often a Trump ally, said a withdrawal would have "devastating consequences" for the US in the region - and throughout the world. He said in a statement: "An American withdrawal at this time would be a big win for ISIS, Iran, Bashar al Assad of Syria and Russia. A convoy of US army troops and Kurdish militia on patrol in Syria last year / EPA Many of the remaining troops in Syria are special operations forces working closely with an alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias known as the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The partnership with the SDF outraged NATO ally Turkey, which views the Kurdish YPG forces in the alliance as an extension of a militant group fighting inside Turkey. A complete withdrawal of US troops from Syria would still leave a sizeable US military presence in the region, with about 5,200 troops across the border in Iraq. T his is the ingenious tactic a former NASA engineer used to catch thieves who stole packages from his porch. Mark Rober spent six months creating a fake package containing glitter and fart spray after a package was stolen from his porch. The theft was caught on camera however police said they could not look into it. He said in the video: If youve been in a situation like this, you just feel violated. "And when I took this to police, even with the video footage, they said its just not worth their time to look into it, so you also feel powerless. The video shows how he designed a new package containing glitter and fart spray. Mr Rober used fine glitter that is hard to clear up and ensured that the fart spray was released five times, every 30 seconds. In the package, he also added four phones to record the reaction of the thieves. It also meant that he could track where the packages ended up. Mr Rober then shows some of the reactions of thieves who panic when the glitter is tossed everywhere. Others were seen opening the package in their house, with one person smelling the spray and immediately taking the package outside. A mum who was blocked from seeing her terminally ill two-year-old son because of Donald Trumps so-called "travel ban" has been granted a visa. Abdullah Hassan, who was born with a genetic brain condition and is terminally ill, went to the United States with his father Ali for treatment. But his Yemeni mother, Shaima Swileh, who currently lives in Egypt, was barred from travelling to California to see her son because Yemeni citizens are banned from travelling to America indefinitely. The Council on American-Islamic Relations' Sacramento Valley chapter announced on Tuesday that her visa had been granted after they filed an emergency lawsuit. Abdullah Hassan, pictured with father Ali, is on life support at UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital in Oakland / CAIR/AFP/Getty Images Ms Swileh is expected to arrive on Wednesday evening. Mr Hassan said: This is the happiest day of my life. Just last week I was about to pull him off life support and CAIR-Sacramento Valley stepped in to help. I can't thank them enough and all those who answered the call to help our family. Abdullah is terminally ill at USCF Benioff Children's Hospital / CAIR/AFP/Getty Images I want to thank UCSF Benioff Hospital for the loving care they have provided my son. This will allow us to mourn with dignity. Citizens from Yemen and four other mostly Muslim countries, along with North Korea and Venezuela, are restricted from coming to the United States under the travel ban enacted under Mr Trump. Abdullah was taken to Oakland for treatment by his father three months ago. His mother had applied for a waiver and multiple expedite requests before CAIR got involved in the case. CAIR Civil Rights Attorney Saad Sweilem said: We are so relieved that this mother will get to hold and kiss her son one last time. The public outpouring of support for this family was incredible. Our happiness for the family is tempered by the imminent loss of Abdullah and the fact that he could have been receiving comfort from his mother for many additional days or weeks if the U.S. government had not enforced its racist Muslim Ban, or if Embassy staff had not required a massive public mobilisation to commit an act of humanity. N ew Zealand is to vote on whether or not marijuana will be legalised in 2020, the government announced this week. The country would be the third in the world to do so in what could be a ground-breaking move. The government announced a referendum to decide the outcome will be held alongside the next general election, in 2020. New Zealand's Green Party welcomed the move. Green Party MP, Chloe Swarbrick said: We've long advocated for a binding referendum with legislation setting out a clear, evidence-based regulatory framework. That way, we avoid a Brexit-type situation figuring out what a 'yes' vote means after the fact, and cut grey moral panic from the debate. If the country legalises marijuana, it would be third in the world after Uruguay and Canada. T he US has been added to the list of the worlds most dangerous countries to be a journalist for the first time. It comes after six people were killed after a gunman opened fire on the offices of Maryland newspaper Capital Gazette on June 28. It was the deadliest single attack on the media in US history. Two more reporters were killed while covering extreme weather, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists report. The number of journalists killed worldwide in retaliation for their work has nearly doubled this year. 34 journalists were killed in retaliation for their work as of December 14, while at least 53 were killed overall. That compares to 18 retaliation killings among the 47 deaths documented by the committee in 2017. Screams: journalist Jamal Khashoggis dying words were reportedly caught on tape / AFP/Getty Images The report includes the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, a native of Saudi Arabia fiercely critical of its royal regime. His death on October 2 inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul caused shockwaves across the global political scene amid allegations that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was involved. Mr Khashoggi lived in self-imposed exile in the United States, and had gone to the Saudi consulate to formalise his divorce, but was instead strangled and dismembered. Saudi agents are alleged to have been behind the killing. Asked whether he believed the crown prince had ordered Mr Khashoggi's murder, US president Donald Trump said last month: "Maybe he did and maybe he didn't." While Mr Trump condemned the violence against journalists, the Committee to Protect Journalists noted that he has called them "enemies of the people". In addition to retaliation killings, journalists have died in combat or crossfire, or on other dangerous assignments. The deadliest country for journalists this year has been Afghanistan, where 13 journalists were killed, some in back-to-back blasts staged by suicide bombers and claimed by the militant group Islamic State, according to the report. Time magazine last week recognised jailed and killed journalists as its "person of the year", including Mr Khashoggi, Maria Ressa, who is imprisoned in the Philippines, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, who have been jailed in Burma, and staff at the Capital Gazette. Journalists also died this year in Slovakia, where 27-year-old investigative reporter Jan Kuciak was fatally shot while probing alleged corruption, and in Malta, where Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was on a similar mission, was killed by a bomb placed in her car. At least four journalists were murdered in Mexico, two in Brazil, and two Palestinian journalists were shot and killed by Israeli soldiers during protests in the Gaza Strip, according to the report. P rincess Eugenie has hailed a Canadian filmmaker who died in a scuba diving accident while making a documentary about illegal fishing and shark finning as a "hero". Eugenies comments came as she joined celebrity guests including models Pixie Geldof and Cressida Bonas at the UK premiere of Sharkwater Extinction in London on Tuesday night. The action-packed documentary was made by acclaimed Toronto director and conservationist Rob Stewart, 37, who died while filming off the coast of Florida in January 2017. "I think it's going to be amazing," Eugenie said before the screening at Curzon Soho cinema. It's such a wonderful cause and Rob is such a hero and inspiration. So any way we can share his message and the story of these sharks and what the world can do to be a part of it is amazing." Pixie Geldof attends the charity premiere of Sharkwater Extinction in London / Dave Benett The princess, who is an ambassador for global ocean charity Project Zero, met the filmmaker's mother Sandy Stewart, who finished the documentary with husband Brian after their son's death. Mrs Stewart said she was "really, really proud" of her son, who always had a passion for the ocean since he was a boy, convincing his entire family to take up diving by the age of 13. "Rob did so much for sharks and the oceans. He changed people's perceptions of sharks around the world," she said. "He was the first person to alert the world about shark finning. So he's changed so much. His films are action-adventure and fun to watch. He really made an impact." Shark Extinction is Stewart's third film, following his award-winning Sharkwater (2006) and Revolution (2012), and it recounts his crusade across four continents to investigate pirate fishing and the illegal shark finning industry. Shark fins are used to make shark fin soup and some traditional cures, and Stewart's film warns the practice is leading to the extinction of the ocean's oldest predator. Mrs Stewart, who travelled from Toronto for the premiere, said she and her husband went through 400 hours of their son's footage to piece the film together. Cressida Bonas arrives for the screening at the Curzon Soho on Tuesday night / Dave Benett "Then we hacked into Rob's iPad, which Apple said you couldn't do, but we had a clever IT guy," she added. Inside there were scenes, graphics, the exact cinematography he wanted for each scene, the exact messaging he wanted each scene to convey. "So it was kind of a roadmap. But nevertheless he left 400 hours of footage so it was a big job." She said Stewart wanted people to "live in harmony with nature". "Conservation is really the preservation of human life on earth," Mrs Stewart said of her son's message. You can't save something without saving everything. The oceans matter, and the sharks matter to the oceans." P iers Morgan has revealed he was forced to go to the hospital after his flu symptoms failed to subside. The Good Morning Britain presenter, who has been ill for over a week, told how he had to make the trip hours after ITVs Dr Hillary Jones told him he was over the worst. Speaking on Wednesdays show the 53-year-old said: Doctor Hilary yesterday diagnosed me and said, 'Don't worry you're over the worst'. "I ended up in hospital yesterday and got diagnosed with bronchitis, laryngitis and sinusitis. Thanks Hilary." On Tuesday, Morgan admitted he was a sweaty mess and had chest pains after contracting a virus. Asking Dr Hilary for advice, Morgan said: "Ten days into the cold I've come out with these terrible sweats all morning. "Is it the expulsion of demons or could it be the beginning of the end?" Oh dear Morgan has been battling with his sickness for over a week / ITV/Good Morning Britain Dr Hilary replied: "It's run its course, you've been suffering from an upper respiratory tract infection. By soldiering on it probably kept the virus going a little bit. You are over the worst of it though. Piers Morgan calls a guest the worst ever on GMB "It doesn't normally last several weeks, but at this time of year it's not unusual." However it appeared the hosts illness had little impact on his ability to debate with guests. Countries & Areas Search for country or area A Afghanistan Albania Algeria Andorra Angola Antigua and Barbuda Argentina Armenia Australia Austria Azerbaijan B Bahamas Bahrain Bangladesh Barbados Belarus Belgium Belize Benin Bhutan Bolivia Bosnia and Herzegovina Botswana Brazil Brunei Bulgaria Burkina Faso Burma Burundi C Cabo Verde Cambodia Cameroon Canada Central African Republic Chad Chile China Colombia Comoros Costa Rica Cote dIvoire Croatia Cuba Cyprus Czechia D Democratic Republic of the Congo Denmark Djibouti Dominica Dominican Republic E Ecuador Egypt El Salvador Equatorial Guinea Eritrea Estonia Eswatini Ethiopia F Fiji Finland France G Gabon Gambia Georgia Germany Ghana Greece Grenada Guatemala Guinea Guinea-Bissau Guyana H Haiti Holy See Honduras Hungary I Iceland India Indonesia Iran Iraq Ireland Israel Italy J Jamaica Japan Jordan K Kazakhstan Kenya Kiribati Kosovo Kuwait Kyrgyzstan L Laos Latvia Lebanon Lesotho Liberia Libya Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg M Madagascar Malawi Malaysia Maldives Mali Malta Marshall Islands Mauritania Mauritius Mexico Micronesia Moldova Monaco Mongolia Montenegro Morocco Mozambique N Namibia Nauru Nepal Netherlands New Zealand Nicaragua Niger Nigeria North Korea North Macedonia Norway O Oman P Pakistan Palau Palestinian Territories Panama Papua New Guinea Paraguay Peru Philippines Poland Portugal Q Qatar R Republic of the Congo Romania Russia Rwanda S Saint Kitts and Nevis Saint Lucia Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Samoa San Marino Sao Tome and Principe Saudi Arabia Senegal Serbia Seychelles Sierra Leone Singapore Slovakia Slovenia Solomon Islands Somalia South Africa South Korea South Sudan Spain Sri Lanka Sudan Suriname Sweden Switzerland Syria T Taiwan Tajikistan Tanzania Thailand Timor-Leste Togo Tonga Trinidad and Tobago Tunisia Turkey Turkmenistan Tuvalu U Uganda Ukraine United Arab Emirates United Kingdom Uruguay Uzbekistan V Vanuatu Venezuela Vietnam Y Yemen Z Zambia Zimbabwe Academician Eugen Simion, head of the Department of Literature and Philology with the Romanian Academy, is winner of the 2018 Alfred Nobel Gold Medal awarded by the International Society of Philology considers the prize is a recognition of the critical activity of an East European individual. "It has been awarded to the greatest linguists of the last century, starting with Trubetzkoy, Roman Jakobson, Yuri Lotman... A few years ago, it was granted to Umberto Eco, whilst last year it went to Noam Chomsky, the great American linguist. Well, this year it happened to be granted to me. Possible to be granted to Eastern Europe too. Well, I don't see it very close to a continuation of the noted prize given by the Swedish Academy. I only take it as it is, let's say, as a recognition of the critical activity of an individual from Eastern Europe," Eugen Simion told AGERPRES. According to a release by the Romanian Academy sent on Tuesday night to AGERPRES, the awarding ceremony will take place at the beginning of 2019 at the European Parliament seat in Strasbourg and will be followed by the organisation of another ceremony, according to the regulation, in the laureate's country of origin."I wrote to the President of Romania to organise the awarding ceremony at the very seat of the Presidency," Simion added, specifying that the event is to take place in January most probably.In the letter sent to the Romanian Academy, the International Society of Philology addresses congratulations to the laureate, academic Eugen Simion, and Romania. The Romanian literary critic and historian Eugen Simion is the 20th awardee of the reputed prize.Eugen Simion is a literary critic and historian, essayist and editor, literature professor with the Faculty of Letters at University of Bucharest. He used to teach classes of Romanian culture and civilisation at the Universite Paris IV (Sorbonne) and to be a visiting professor at the Ecole Normale Superieure de Paris (Fontenay-aux-Roses). He is the director of the George Calinescu Literary History and Theory Institute with the Romanian Academy.Eugen Simion is an impressive member of the Romanian Academy ever since 1992, only one year after he was elected corresponding member. From 1998 to 2006 he was chairman of the Romanian Academy. He initiated and coordinated fundamental projects of the Romanian Academy, among which "The general dictionary of the Romanian literature", the full facsimile editing of the manuscripts of (national poet, ed. n.) Mihai Eminescu, the Pleiade-type collection, "The Fundamental Works", of which until now 200 volumes were published. He is a founder (1999) and chairman of the National Foundation for Science and Art under the Romanian Academy aegis.Simion is a member of the Europea Academy (London), of the Royal Academy of Science and Letters of Denmark, of the Moral and Political Sciences Academy of France, of the Academy of Athens, of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Moldova and recently of the Academy of Sciences and and Letters of Serbia. The avalanche of fiscal-budgetary measures announced a few days before the end of the year and with a significant impact on the entire economy is unacceptable, while being a symptom of a fracture between the government and the economic operators, the representatives of the Coalition for Romania's Development (CDR) consider. The CDR calls on the Romanian Government not to adopt this Emergency Ordinance and to allow for an ample space for public debate. "The rumors that have circulated in the last week were confirmed by the announcement of the Ministry of Public Finance, in the press conference held by Minister Eugen Teodorovici and by the publication of the proposals on the ministry's website. The business environment was presented 57 pages of substantial modifications, having only one day to study and understand them, all in the context in which only in 2018 the Fiscal Code has undergone over 200 modifications," CDR says in a press release sent to AGERPRES.CDR expresses its deep concern that over recent days the market has been flooded with these rumors of taxes that will be imposed on companies at the last minute and will be approved at this year's last government sitting. These measures refer to the tax on greed applied to financial-banking institutions, the decrease of the administration fee for the Pension Pillar II, the transfer by state companies of 35 percent of the amounts that were not invested, the capping of gas prices from domestic production and others."Instead of destabilizing the economy through overnight measures, we encourage the government to collect the owed taxes and duties, as the budget balancing measure," the CDR representatives said.CDR is a private, apolitical initiative, built as a collaborative agreement through the collective participation of its members, and brings together 45 organizations and associate members. CDR members volunteer with the resources and expertise needed to formulate common views on public policies that impact on the business environment. The companies represented by the 25 CDR member organizations employ more than one million people and generate about 50 percent of the GDP. Foreign Affairs Minister Teodor Melescanu considers the documentary film "The European Destiny of Romania", presented on Tuesday at the Romanian Cultural Institute (ICR), represents a special commemoration act of those who participated in the Greater Union, in the achievement of the European destiny of our country. "For us it is an extraordinary advantage because, starting with 1 January, 2019, we will ensure the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union," Melescanu said at the event. He said that he wanted this film to be screened at all the actions organized at the opening of Romania's presidency. "We have seven more projects. With God's help, we hope to carry them through," concluded the head of the Romanian diplomacy.ICR President Liliana Turoiu characterized the event as a special one, bringing to mind that during the year 2018, the ICR organized about 3,000 events, almost three times more than any year, of which over 700 dedicated to the Centennial of the Greater Union and the Great War.The premiere of the documentary film "The European Destiny of Romania", celebrating the Centennial of the Greater Union and presenting the main contributions of our country to the history of Europe over the past 100 years through prominent personalities, took place on Tuesday at the Romanian Cultural Institute.The film, produced by the TEOFOR Education Association, in partnership with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, will be screened in the European Parliament on the occasion of the cultural events associated with the takeover of the EU Council Presidency by Romania. Romania supports the European and Euro-Atlantic path of the Republic of Macedonia, Minister-delegate George Ciamba said on Tuesday at a meeting with senior officials from this country, a press release issued by the Foreign Ministry informs. Minister-delegate for European Affairs George Ciamba paid an official visit to the Republic of Macedonia on Tuesday, at the invitation of Bujar Osmani, Deputy Prime Minister for European Affairs, and had consultations with Deputy Prime Minister Osmani, followed by meetings with Prime Minister Zoran Zaev, Parliament Speaker Talat Xhaferi, Foreign Affairs Minister Nikola Dimitrov, as well as with the Chair of the Parliamentary Committee on European Affairs, Artan Grubi, with the participation of the members of this committee. According to the Foreign Affairs Ministry, during the talks with senior Macedonian officials, the Romanian official stressed that the advancement of the EU enlargement process, on the basis of its own merits, will be among the priorities of the Romanian Presidency of the Council of the European Union.The minister-delegate also referred to the regional events to be held during the presidency, mentioning the conference on youth in the Western Balkans that will focus on opportunities for young people, entrepreneurship and ways of meeting European aspirations, starting from the key role of young people in the democratic transformation of the region and reconciliation.The minister-delegate congratulated the authorities for the progress made last year, which led to the invitation to join NATO, as well as the European Commission's recommendation to open the accession negotiations.Minister-delegate George Ciamba encouraged all political actors in the Republic of Macedonia "to continue the dialogue and cooperation both in the implementation of the Prespa Agreement and in the comprehensive reform process in order to meet the necessary criteria with a view to the adoption by the Council of the European Union of the decision to launch accession negotiations with the EU in June 2019, respectively, the organization of the first accession conference by the end of 2019."Ciamba also reviewed the status of the bilateral relations, as well as the fast track of the political and diplomatic dialogue, the very good cooperation within the regional and international fora, as well as the constant increasing trend of the bilateral trade and highlighted the willingness of Romania to offer expertise and technical assistance for the EU and NATO accession processes, including through the Mobility Fund implemented by Romania's International Development Cooperation Agency. Foreign tourists spent by 120 million euro more in Romania as compared to last year, according to a press release issued for AGERPRES on Tuesday by Tourism Minister Bogdan Trif. "The Romanian tourism has seen growth everywhere thanks to the measures taken by the Executive in the past year, so the National Institute of Statistics officially confirmed the development of tourism in terms of revenues and the number of foreign tourists who visited Romania. On average, a foreign tourist spent 2,367.7 lei while in Romania, around 50 euro more than in the same period of last year. In total, foreign tourists spent some 1.1 billion euro, which means higher receipts by about 120 million euro extra for the Romanian industry," the press release reads. The tourism minister says that this year the number of authorizations of tourist accommodation facilities (hotels and hostels) has increased by over 40pct. President Klaus Iohannis stated that the Opposition "has pretty good chances of success" when referring to the censure motion filed against the Dancila Government, that is to be debated and voted on Thursday in Parliament. "I wish them much success and I believe they have pretty good chances of success," Klaus Iohannis stated on Wednesday at the Cotroceni Presidential Palace, when he was asked by journalists regarding this topic. In respect to the fact that his involvement could have done more in terms of this demarche, the head of state mentioned: "I believe that we should be aware that the separation of powers in state doesn't mean the President is not to go to the Government, because they are both from the Executive, therefore, there isn't such a thing, a separation of power between the Government and the President. Both the Government and the President represent the executive side of the state power, but Parliament is the legislative power and, in no case, is the president's business to draft Parliament's schedule. As it's not Parliament's business also to draft the president's schedule. This matter is settled in Parliament, through procedures outlined there, but, certainly I will allow myself to be sympathetic to one side and dislike the another side." Read also: President Iohannis: I don't know if I'll go to the gov't meeting, I've got no agenda Iohannis confirmed that he "firmly" maintains his decision not to appoint a Prime Minister form the Social Democratic Party (PSD), when asked about this. "Yes, it is firm," the President said. The motion called "Enough! Dragnea - Dancila Government, shame of Romania!," initiated by the National Liberal Party (PNL), the Save Romania Union (USR) and the People's Movement Party (PMP), was filed with Parliament on Friday. The document was signed by 163 MPs. The motion is to be debated and voted in the sitting on Thursday. AGERPRES . President Klaus Iohannis on Wednesday said he didn't know if he would go to the next government meeting, since he did not receive any agenda of the respective meeting and he didn't know if the meeting will actually take place. After the reunion of the Supreme Council for Country Defence (CSAT), the journalists asked the President if he would go to the government meeting on Thursday. "We will see tomorrow. Do you happen to have the agenda of the government meeting? Cause we didn't receive anything. This question can also be taken as generic. The government doesn't even know what it's doing - this ordinance (announced by FinMin Teodorovici - editor's note) is just another prove. There is no announcement about a meeting or the hour when it's supposed to start or about the agenda to be discussed. And this is why I have to say - let's wait and see. I like to plan things, to have an agenda, so that everyone knows what's happening. It seems like the Government doesn't like it like this. So we will wait for the Government to announce the meeting," said Klaus Iohannis.When the journalists also asked him if he plans to go to all the government meetings, Iohannis said: "Of course."He added that the CSAT meeting only approached topics on the agenda. Stephen LENDMAN The claim is the Big Lie that wont die no matter how often accusations and allegations are debunked. Imagine the following: If endless political, media, think tank, fake reports, and other efforts spent trying to prove nonexistent Russian US 2016 presidential election meddling went for promoting world peace, social justice, and other positive actions, imagine how much better the state of America and world might be today. Oxford Universitys Computational Propaganda Research Project (COMPROP) claims to investigate how tools like social media bots are used to manipulate public opinion by amplifying or repressing political content, disinformation, hate speech, and junk news. A report it prepared for the Senate Intelligence Committee yet to be released, perhaps in cahoots with the Theresa May regime and anti-Trump undemocratic Dems, falsely claims the Kremlin used social media platforms to help Trump triumph over Hillary. Exhaustive House and Senate investigations since January 2017 found no evidence linking Trump or his team with Russia nor anything suggesting Kremlin election meddling. Special council Muellers probe since May 2017 fared no better nor the US intelligence community might of the DNI, FBI, CIA, NSA, and other US agencies. US sophisticated investigatory powers, including countless millions of dollars spent, failed to find credible evidence of Russian US election meddling, nor an improper or illegal Trump team connection to Moscow because none of the above exists no matter how long probes continue. Did Oxford Universitys COMPROP find a way to uncover information that eluded Americas best and brightest, or is its report the latest example of Russia bashing based on nothing but invented rubbish? It reportedly analyzed material provided to the Senate Intelligence Committee, its report to be released in days. The neocon/CIA-connected Washington Post said it saw a draft of the report, leaked so the broadsheet could bash Russia more than already, other US-led Western media to follow suit on their own. According to WaPo, COMPROPs data were provided by Facebook, Twitter and Google and covered several years up to mid-2017, when the social media companies cracked down on the known Russian accounts, adding: The report, which also analyzed data separately provided to House Intelligence Committee members, contains no information beyond the mid-2017 period. COMPROP claims all of the messaging (information it analyzed) sought to benefit the Republican party, adding: Trump is mentioned most in campaigns targeting conservatives and right-wing voters, where the messaging encouraged these groups to support his campaign. The main groups that could challenge Trump were then provided messaging that sought to confuse, distract and ultimately discourage members from voting. According to WaPo, (t)he report offers the latest evidence that Russian agents sought to help Trump win the White House despite no credible evidence proving it, an indisputable fact. Its unclear what information Facebook, Twitter and Google provided to COMPROP. Last week, Google CEO Sundar Pichai revealed what he called the full extent of possible (not proved) Russian meddling in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. In House Judiciary Committee testimony, he said we undertook a very thorough investigation, and, in 2016, we now know that there were two main ad accounts linked to Russia which advertised on Google for about $4,700 in advertising. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the total amount spent by candidates for all offices in US 2016 elections was around $6.5 billion (with a B), including for primary races. The amount spent by 2016 presidential aspirants was $2.4 billion, including for primaries. In all races, Republicans and Dems each spent around 48% of the total amount (96% combined). Trump spent $398 million compared to Hillarys $768 million, nearly double DLTs amount. What possible impact could $4,700 have even 10x over on all social media platforms compared to billions of dollars spent by candidates? Facebook explained that 56% of ads linked to Russia on its platform appeared after the US 2016 presidential election. Alleged Internet Research Agency Russian hackers spent $100,000 from mid-2015 to mid-2017 on 3,000 ads. One-fourth of them were never shown to anyone. Only around 1,000 ads appeared during the presidential campaign. Many ads expressed no preference for any candidate. Facebook said US presidential candidates spent hundreds of millions of dollars in online political advertising 1000x more than any problematic ads weve found admitting virtually no evidence of Russian use of the platform for improper meddling. Asked to examine 450 accounts Facebook flagged as fake, no evidence connecting them to Russia was found, just groundless suspicions. Twitters vice president Colin Crowell explained (w)e have not found accounts associated with this activity to have obvious Russian origin but some of the accounts appear to have been automated. Twitter found and suspended 22 suspicious accounts once again, nothing connecting them to Russia. Another 179 were suspended for terms of service violations none of the 201 accounts registered as advertisers. Twitter found over 3.2 million automated accounts, providing no evidence of any connected to the Kremlin. RT, RT America and RT en Espanol spent $274,100 for 1,823 US ads none supporting one US presidential aspirant over another. The bottom line conclusion is indisputable. No Russia US meddling occurred online or in any other way. No evidence suggests it. Claims otherwise are spurious. Yet they persist endlessly, the latest from the dubious COMPROP report rubbish masquerading as credible analysis. A previous article said Russiagate should be called Hillarygate. With considerable media help, she, her campaign, and the DNC cooked the books for her to be Dem standard bearer. She and the DNC hired former MI6 spy Christopher Steele to produce a dodgy dossier on Trump filled with unverified accusations and allegations, an effort with no credibility. No Russiagate witch hunt investigation was warranted. No special counsel should have been appointed. The whole ugly business should be terminated straightaway. All the allegations and accusations about Russian election meddling were and continue to be bald-faced Big Lies. Not a shred of credible evidence indicates otherwise. stephenlendman.org On 30 December 2009, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sent a cable (subsequently released to the public by WikiLeaks) to Americas Ambassadors in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Kuwait, and Pakistan, headlined, Terrorist Finance: Action Request for Senior Level Engagement on Terrorism Finance. Terrorism finance is whats generally referred-to by the official phrase state sponsorship of terrorism. This cable from Clinton contained the US Governments confidential list of state sponsors of terrorism. Her cable discussed exactly how bad the situation was in each of those countries. The supply of money to jihadists is what makes a government a state sponsor of terrorism. Supplying money to jihadists is illegal in almost every country, including the United States. And very little even of private money is paid from Americans to jihadists. However, the US Government hides its own quite substantial supply of weapons to jihadists. Here are some examples of that: On 24 March 2013, the New York Times bannered Arms Airlift to Syria Rebels Expands, With Aid From C.I.A., and reported that From offices at secret locations, American intelligence officers have helped the Arab governments shop for weapons, and that A conservative estimate of the payload of these flights would be 3,500 tons of military equipment, said Hugh Griffiths, of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, who monitors illicit arms transfers. The US Government tried to hide its involvement in this, by doing it through allied Arab governments, which were named in this news-report: Qatar and Saudi Arabia had been shipping military materials via Turkey, and all four of these Governments (US, Sauds, Turkey, and Qatar) were trying to overthrow Syrias Government. Then, on 8 September 2014, AFP headlined Islamic State fighters using US arms: study, and they reported that the US Government was supplying ISIS. On 1 September 2017, Russian Television reported that the US Government was secretly supplying weapons to ISIS and that an anti-Assad fighter had even quit the CIA-backed New Syrian Army because of that. However, these supplies were only weapons, not money. For example: the study cited by AFP documented weapons seized by Kurdish forces from militants in Iraq and Syria over a 10-day period in July. Militants were also called rebels, and they had US weapons, which were seized by US-backed Kurdish forces, whom the US Government called rebels, but who thought that rebels didnt include ISIS, and that ISIS wasnt also being armed by the US Government. They were mistaken. In fact, on 2 July 2017, the great investigative journalist Dilyana Geytandzhieva headlined 350 diplomatic flights carry weapons for terrorists Azerbaijans Silk Way Airlines transports weapons with diplomatic clearance for Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Congo. Bills of lading, etc., were presented as documentation, for the CIAs secret operation to arm the jihadist groups that were trying to overthrow and replace Syrias Government. However, these were not supplies of money to the rebels. Only the supply of money is what makes a government a state sponsor of terrorism. And that was her cables topic. Secretary of State Clinton told those Ambassadors to those Muslim-majority lands, to make clear to the given nations aristocrats, that, under the new US President, Barack Obama, there would no longer be any allowance for continuation of their donations to Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups that attack the United States. Her cable opened, This is an action request cable, meaning that the operations of the local US Embassy in the given nation would be monitored for compliance with the Secretary of States request. Clintons focus was: on disrupting illicit finance activities in Afghanistan and Pakistan and the external financial/logistical support networks of terrorist groups that operate there, such as al-Qa'ida, the Taliban, and Lashkar e-Tayyiba (LeT). The IFTF's [Interagency Illicit Finance Task Force] activities are a vital component of the USGs [US Governments] Afghanistan and Pakistan (Af/Pak) strategy dedicated to disrupting illicit finance flows between the Gulf countries and Afghanistan and Pakistan. The IFTF has created a diplomatic engagement strategy to assist in the accomplishment of this objective. The strategy focuses on senior-level USG engagement with Gulf countries and Pakistan to communicate USG counterterrorism priorities and to generate the political will necessary to address the problem. The IFTF has drafted talking points for use by all USG officials in their interactions with Gulf and Pakistani interlocutors. These points focus on funding for terrorist groups threatening stability in Afghanistan and Pakistan and targeting coalition soldiers. These points have been cleared through the relevant Washington agencies. Although the named concern was groups threatening stability in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the US Secretary of State was actually telling her agents (the Ambassadors) to warn the local aristocracy to stop funding the groups that pose a terrorist threat to the United States as well. She was listing the actual countries that are State Sponsors of Terrorism and threaten the people of the United States and of other countries. These confidentially listed State Sponsors of Terrorism were being listed as of 2009, which was 8 years after 9/11; and so, after eight years of George W, Bushs being in the US White House, these were the nations that still were leading the world in the financing of the Sunni fundamentalist group Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations, which were doing such attacks. This cable reviewed the existing situation regarding each one of the governments, and it included separate instructions to each of the Embassies: Concerning Saudi Arabia: While the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) takes seriously the threat of terrorism within Saudi Arabia, it has been an ongoing challenge to persuade Saudi officials to treat terrorist financing emanating from Saudi Arabia as a strategic priority. Donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide. Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qa'ida, the Taliban, LeT, and other terrorist groups, including Hamas, which probably raise millions of dollars annually from Saudi sources. She noted that, In 2002, the Saudi government promised to set up a Charities Committee that would address this issue, but has yet to do so. She instructed the US Ambassador there to: encourage the Saudi government to take more steps to stem the flow of funds from Saudi Arabia-based sources to terrorists and extremists worldwide, and to, encourage the Saudi government to take more steps to stem the flow of funds from Saudi Arabia-based sources to terrorists and extremists worldwide. Concerning Qatar: Qatar's overall level of CT [Counter Terrorist] cooperation with the US is considered the worst in the region. Al-Qaida, the Taliban, UN-1267 listed LeT, and other terrorist groups exploit Qatar as a fundraising locale. Although Qatar's security services have the capability to deal with direct threats and occasionally have put that capability to use, they have been hesitant to act against known terrorists out of concern for appearing to be aligned with the US and provoking reprisals. However, given the current focus of US engagement with the GOQ [Government of Qatar] on terror finance related to Hamas, it would be counter-productive for Embassy Doha to engage the GOQ at this time on disrupting financial support of terrorist groups operating in Afghanistan and Pakistan. [No explanation of that was provided, but one interpretation of it might be: Protecting Israel from Hamas was more important to the Obama Administration than was disrupting financial support of terrorist groups operating in Afghanistan and Pakistan.] Concerning Kuwait: Kuwait has been less inclined to take action against Kuwait-based financiers and facilitators plotting attacks outside of Kuwait. Al-Qa'ida and other groups continue to exploit Kuwait both as a source of funds and as a key transit point. Clinton noted that though Kuwait's law prohibits efforts to undermine or attack Arab neighbors, the GOK [Government of Kuwait] faces an uphill battle to implement comprehensive terror finance legislation due to a lack of parliamentary support. In other words: Kuwaits aristocracy refused to donate to jihadist groups that attack themselves or the aristocracies of other Arab countries, but did contribute to jihadist groups which attacked non-Arab countries. Furthermore, the official reason why they did was that the parliament, which consists of people who are elected by the public, supported jihadists who attacked non-Arab countries. (Actually, when they supported jihadists trying to take over Syria, they were violating that rule, but only because those Sunni jihadists would be replacing a Shiite leader, Bashar al-Assad, who was, to them, even worse: hes a non-sectarian Shiite, whose political party, the Baathist Party, is committed to a separation between church-and-state.) The Washington Posts Karen DeYoung headlined on 25 April 2014, Kuwait, ally on Syria, is also the leading funder of extremist rebels. She reported that, Last month, the administration decided to go public with its concerns Such fundraising was not illegal in Kuwait until last year, when the government took advantage of an unrelated parliamentary boycott to push through a new law. Disappointingly, since then there has not been much vigor shown in implementing a ban on terrorist financing. DeYoung went on: Unlike other monarchies and autocracies in the region, Kuwaits politics are relatively open and combative. The executive branch, headed by Emir Sabah Ahmed al-Sabah, frequently clashes with a feisty parliament composed of warring political groups within both the Sunni majority and the Shiite minority. Unlike other Gulf countries, Kuwait allows broad freedom of association for its 2.7 million citizens, and Sabahs rule is characterized more by political incorporation than confrontation. Secretary of State Clintons cable continued: A particular point of difference between the US and concerns Revival of Islamic Heritage Society (RIHS providing financial and material support to al-Qaida. In Kuwait, RIHS enjoys broad public support as a charitable entity. The GOK to date has not taken significant action to address or shut down RIHS's headquarters or its branches. So: whereas the Sabah family had been saved by Americas 1991 war against Saddam Husseins invasion and attempted takeover there, they didnt crack down against Al Qaeda; they didnt stop the funding to Al Qaeda. They took advantage of an unrelated parliamentary boycott to push through a new law, but, after the boycott ended, didnt enforce the new law. Concerning UAE: UAE-based donors have provided financial support to a variety of terrorist groups, including al-Qa'ida, the Taliban, LeT and other terrorist groups, including Hamas. Concerning Pakistan: Pakistan's intermittent support to terrorist groups and militant organizations threatens to undermine regional security and endanger US national security objectives in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Although Pakistani senior officials have publicly disavowed support for these groups, some officials from the Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) continue to maintain ties with a wide array of extremist organizations, in particular the Taliban, LeT and other extremist organizations. These extremist organizations continue to find refuge in Pakistan and exploit Pakistan's extensive network of charities, NGOs, and madrassas. This network of social service institutions readily provides extremist organizations with recruits, funding and infrastructure for planning new attacks. Those were the countries that, in private, the US Government recognized as being State Sponsors of Terrorism. All of them were being identified as funders of fundamentalist-Sunni groups who perpetrate terrorism upon the US and other countries. The United States Government has an official list of State Sponsors of Terrorism, and only four governments are on it: Syria (as of 1979), Iran (as of 1984), Sudan (as of 1993), and North Korea (as of 2017). None of them is a fundamentalist-Sunni-led nation, and none of them has ever attacked, nor even threatened to attack, the United States of America. By contrast, fundamentalist-Sunni terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda, which are primarily funded by the actual State Sponsors of Terrorism (mainly Saudi Arabia), have attacked the US Furthermore, on 6 September 2016, Asia News headlined Conference in Grozny: Wahhabism exclusion from the Sunni community provokes Riyadhs wrath and reported that at the international Islamic conference in Grozny, jihadist sects were condemned by all Governments except Saudi Arabias, and that the only Government continuing to support the most extremist sect, Wahhabism, was Saudi Crown Prince Salman, the American regimes closest ally. Furthermore, in a secret 2014 court case in the United States, the financial bagman who had personally collected tens of millions of dollars for Al Qaeda during the years prior to Saudi Arabias 9/11 attacks, said there, under oath, that, without the money of the of the Saudi, you will have nothing of Al Qaeda. And, yet, Saudi Arabia wasnt even on the official list of State Sponsors of Terrorism, not at all. The US Government continues, to this day, to protect the royal Saud family, who own and control Saudi Arabia and its Government and who were the chief funder of the 9/11 attacks. Consequently: On whose side is the Government of the United States of America? Is it on the side of countries such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar; or is it on the side of countries such as Iran and Syria countries that the Sauds want to take over? And why does it lie (deceive), so much, calling State Sponsors of Terrorism countries such as Syria and Iran that are instead the chief enemies of the actual state sponsors of terrorism? As I have previously documented, the only country that has any authentic reason to worry about terrorism that comes from Shiites, such as in (or that are backed by) Iran, is Israel. But is the US Government supposed to be representing and protecting the people in Israel, or instead to be representing and protecting the people in the United States of America? Whats actually behind the US Governments systematic lying, against Shiites, and for Sunnis (especially Wahhabist ones) and Israel? And why is this US Government lying bipartisan not Republican or Democratic, but both at the very top of the US regime: the people who actually control both of Americas political Parties? Or, do the American people actually not control the American Government? If not, then what should be done to the American Government, and why are such questions not being publicly debated and discussed, especially in the American press and among the American people? Is the US lockdown that complete? (This commentary is being submitted to all US newsmedia for publication, to get that essential public conversation in America started.) Photo: Flickr Russian military journals have always been a good source of how new Russian strategy and tactics are evolving. The actual rules (doctrine) are usually secret but to speed development contending views and interpretations are allowed in the military journals. Such is the case with Russian operations in Syria and Ukraine (and before that in Chechnya). The current crop of articles are notable because many are written by senior Russian generals, some of them considered likely candidates to take over top positions in the Russian armed forces. The articles also indicate that Russia considers the Syrian campaign just about done and doesnt make much mention of similar operations in Ukraine, which are far from over. These journal articles talk about new doctrines to be applied widely so that indicates current (Ukraine) and future operations will rely heavily on this new doctrine. One feature of the new doctrine is the recognition that Russia is now and will in the future operating on a small military budget. The new doctrine stresses the need to use all available resources and ignore the conventional rules of war (Geneva conventions) because those transgressions will be sufficiently hidden by the Russian ability to influence global mass media with Internet-based disinformation. Actually, that did not work out so well in Ukraine and Russia has been suffering from economic sanctions since 2014 because of it. But in a place like Syria, where there are many players, it is possible to shift the blame for bad behavior on someone else sufficiently to make it less obvious that Russia is misbehaving as much as the worst of them. Case in point was the use of airstrikes (often using unguided weapons) against enemy (or neutral) civilians. This had been a Syrian tactic even before the civil war began in 2011 and was also used by many rebel factions (especially those that were Islamic terrorists). Russia made it clear in the journal articles that Russian commanders were, as much as possible, in overall command once they arrived in force during late 2015. That meant when the Russians or Syrians bombed civilians it was no accident. Russian forward observers for airstrikes or artillery fire were mainly concerned with not hitting allied forces. This was especially true of Iranian forces, which, the Russians admitted, did not take orders from the Russians but would cooperate to avoid friendly fire incidents. The Russians simply handled the Iranians the same way they did other Islamic terror groups and treated them as potentially useful and not to be antagonized unless absolutely necessary. More cooperative militias and factions got better support from the Russians and this overall doctrine worked quite well. The new doctrine stresses the use of rapid decision making and using video conferencing as much as possible to replace traditional face-to-face meetings to finalize plans and assignments. The Russians considered the tech available for video conferencing mature enough to rely on regularly. The new doctrine stresses the need to use all available resources, including civilian gear (like construction equipment) to get the job done. This improvisation was often learned from the Syrians and the enemy, who were often operating largely off stuff they had stolen. The paramilitary nature of operations in Syria made it easy to accept the widespread use of Russian military contractors in combat roles. NATO forces had been using a lot more armed military contractors since 2001 but mainly for security around bases. Russia often used their military contractors as combat troops to reinforce the capabilities of Syrian forces. This includes Syrian army infantry or irregulars the Syrians made great use of for local security and, occasionally, offensive operations. The Russian military contractors were nearly all former Russian military and while not considered Russian soldiers they were considered more reliable and trustworthy and were paid much more than Russian troops. The military contractors also got around the Russian laws prohibiting the use of conscripts in a combat zone. This was recognition that the Russian public would tolerate heavy losses among Russian contractors and allied forces, but not among members of the Russian military and especially conscripts. Russia had a limited number of non-conscript Russian troops willing or able to go to Syria. Highly paid contractors were another matter. Russian military journals used to make a big deal about the usefulness of an all-volunteer force but since the sanctions and lower oil prices showed up after 2014 (and the defense budget was cut 30 percent in 2016) the prospects of an all-volunteer force are quite dim. So the new Russian doctrine emphasizes keeping casualties for Russian troops as low as possible. The new doctrine takes for granted that Russia has to fight a poor mans war because there is no alternative. Many of these new doctrinal principles are those employed by successful irregular forces in the past. The Russians stress the rapid integration of any available resources into the Russian led war effort. The Russian journal articles make it clear that Russia only went into Syria with the understanding that the Russians would be in charge, even if that meant annoying the Iranians at times. The Iranians cooperated as long as the Russians did not embarrass them or publicize the fact that the Russians were providing technical resources (air power, electronic warfare capabilities) that Iran lacked. That approach worked less well with the Turks, who occupied portions of northwest Syria and were generally left alone by the Russians. The Iranians were different in that provided a large (at times more than 60,000) mercenary force that comprised the largest reliable force of ground troops available to the Syrians. The new Russian doctrine points out the importance of adapting and doing so quickly. An example of this could be seen in how the Russians handled occasional problems with the Syrian tactic of negotiating with civilians in a rebel-held area (especially one that was surrounded) and offering safe passage for Islamic terrorists and civilians who wanted to remain with them, to another rebel-held area. One shortcoming of this tactic was that the Syrian and Iranian forces could not always be trusted to observe the safe part of safe passage. The Russians solved this by inserting their own troops to ensure compliance, even if it meant the Russians had to arrest or even fire on their allies to compel compliance. Russia even brought in military police units comprised of Russian soldiers and police from Moslem parts of Russia who volunteered for this peacekeeping duty. The presence of armed Russian Moslem troops discouraged Islamic terrorists and similar minded Iranian mercenaries from misbehaving while carrying out these safe passage operations. Russia has come to call this use of superior command and control and discipline management superiority and that is an accurate term. The Russian commanders were allowed to do whatever worked to get the job done. If this resulted in some bad publicity because of dead civilians or other battlefield indiscretions the Russian government would criticize in private and praise in public (and quickly and quietly transfer home officers who were not up to the job). This made it possible for Russian commanders to be more flexible and innovative than Russian officers have been allowed to be since World War II. As a result, this new doctrine is very popular with most Russian officers and troops. The management superiority also included the authority to quickly assess the quality of local forces and put them to work doing what they were best at. Russia quickly identified the most competent and effective Syrian officers and supported them with additional resources and whatever else they needed. The Syrian government went along because the Russians were helping to create Syrian heroes the Syrian government could take credit for. It also became common knowledge among all factions (enemy and friendly) in Syria that the Russians were willing to make deals quickly and decisively. This proved to be a valuable military asset. In many respects, this new doctrine isnt much different than what was adopted, on a much larger scale, after the Nazis invaded Russia in mid-1941. The Russian leaders (especially dictator Josef Stalin) was shocked, not only that the Germans had broken their promises to him but that the military reforms and changes Stalin had made in the 1930s had crippled the Russian military. That allowed the Germans to advance quickly and kill or capture millions of Russian troops in the process. Stalin adopted a new doctrine remarkably similar to the current new one. Reality will do that to you if you pay attention. The United States is exploring the possibility of working out a peace deal with the Taliban. The major problem with that is getting Pakistan to cooperate because the Afghan Taliban cannot make any deals without Pakistan agreeing. Then there is the larger problem of such a deal turning control of Afghanistan over to drug gangs, Pakistan, Iran and Islamic conservatives (who ban education for women and generally unpopular lifestyle restrictions). Then there are the traditional (usual) how to negotiate with infidels rules used by Islamic terrorist groups. These rules stress the use of lies and deception because the Islamic scripture mentions it so it must be the only way to go. This approach has been very consistently used by Islamic terror groups and the fact that the Afghan Taliban are actually a front for Pakistan makes no difference because Pakistan is increasingly dominated by their armed forces who have been using (if not believing in) Islamic terror groups against their real or imagined enemies since the 1980s. The drug gangs, which also depend on Pakistan to stay in business and are largely run by Pushtuns, will go along with whatever Pakistan wants. In other words, the Afghan Taliban are actually a minor decision maker when it comes to peace in Afghanistan. That has always been the case, especially before the Taliban lost control of Afghanistan in 2001. Back then the Taliban provided sanctuary for Islamic terrorists, especially al Qaeda. This was allowed by Pakistan because it was seen as a minor problem but it turned out to be a major problem. The Taliban is still on good terms with al Qaeda, although Pakistan is not. But as long as the Afghan Taliban cooperates in keeping al Qaeda out of Pakistan all is well. The Afghan Taliban is also seen by the majority of Afghans as the creation of Pakistan and a largely Pushtun organization financed by Pakistan supported drug gangs. The Pushtun are 40 percent of the Afghan population and the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan. The Pushtun dominate the opium and heroin business which is also opposed by most Afghans, if only because it has created so many addicts. The Taliban are also not a unified organization. The Afghan Taliban has sanctuaries in Pakistan which keep their senior leadership safe and are also the site of border crossings where most of the chemicals for refining opium into heroin get into Afghanistan along with the fertilizer and other chemicals used to make bombs. All this is common knowledge and the only practical reason to negotiate with the Afghan Taliban is to force more Pushtun tribes (that are still technically Taliban supporters ) to decide if they still are pro-Taliban and OK with the Taliban and Pakistan controlling the Afghan government. Another obvious negotiating problem is the Afghan government, which is elected and democracy is haram (forbidden) as far as Islamic terrorists are concerned. All this explains why the U.S. is demanding a six-month ceasefire as a precondition to negotiations. The Taliban cannot afford to allow that because most of the Taliban activity is in support of the drug gangs which the majority of Afghans are quite vocal about opposing and not willing to leave alone for six months. In other words, the peace negotiations are not about peace but about smoking out the real intentions of Pakistan in Afghanistan. Making it even more obvious that Pakistan is a major backer of Islamic terrorism and the heroin trade makes it easier to understand that the fears of Islamic terrorists having nuclear weapons have already been realized given the direction the military-dominated Pakistan government is headed. Again this is nothing new and certainly not a secret to those who have worked with (or paid attention to) Pakistan for a while. The War So far this year 15 American military personnel have died in Afghanistan, the same as for all of 2017 and more than the 13 in 2016. The increase has to do with more active use of American air power and the U.S. trained Afghan special operations troops. The Afghan commandos were often accompanied by American trainers who observe and provide backup if needed. The Americans also provide the helicopters if a mission requires them but in most cases, the Afghan special operations forces travel via ground transportation. The Afghan Special Forces and commandos have been especially effective in finding and killing Taliban and ISIL leaders. Another factor in higher American losses is the Taliban deliberately going after foreign troops (five other NATO soldiers were killed so far this year, the highest number since most NATO forces left Afghanistan in 2014, when 14 died, along with 55 Americans). The first ten months of 2018 saw American airpower used more often in Afghanistan than at any other time (including the 2011 surge). This year the coalition warplanes (mostly U.S.) used 11 percent more bombs and missiles than in 2011. Coalition warplanes have flown an average to 660 sorties a month, with 12 percent of sorties resulting in weapons being used. This includes AC-130 gunships but not attack helicopters. The trend has been accelerating throughout the year. In September the U.S. Air Force used 841 smart bombs and missiles (28 a day) in airstrikes. That was 18 percent more than in August and double what it was in September 2017. The September 2018 numbers were the highest monthly use since late 2010. The Taliban want the Americans gone in large part because of the greater use of airstrikes by American and Afghan warplanes and changes to the ROE (Rules of Engagement). In 2017 American commanders were again allowed to determine the ROE for U.S. troops overseas, especially in places like Syria and Afghanistan. For example in Afghanistan U.S. troops can now fire on the Taliban even when the Taliban are not firing on them and at long distance. Afghan civilians, the most frequent victims of Taliban violence, complained when the U.S. gradually changed its ROE after 2008 to make it impossible for Americans to fire on the Taliban when Afghan civilians were nearby. When asked Afghan civilians pointed out that was when they most needed the Americans to open fire. As the Afghan air force carries out more airstrikes (about a dozen a day by mid-2018) the Afghan ROE has reduced the enemy use of human shields. The Afghan ROE ignores human shields and puts the priority on killing Taliban or ISIL fighters. This made human shields in general much less effective, even though most of the air strikes are carried out by foreign (usually American) warplanes. So far in 2018 American aircraft are carrying out airstrikes at the highest rate ever (about eighteen bombs or missiles used a day) and a third higher than the previous peak year (2011). The greater availability of air strikes encourages Afghan security forces to be more aggressive. December 18, 2018: In the southeast (Paktia province), an American UAV used missiles to destroy a vehicle and kill 13 Taliban including a local leader. December 16, 2018: In the east (Kunar province), there were battles between Pakistani and Afghan Taliban that lasted several days. There were apparently over 30 dead and many more wounded. These clashes are usually over who shall control which portion of the border areas. There are also similar battles between ISIL and both Taliban groups over the last several days. Since 2015 Afghanistan has had problems with both ISIL factions and two Taliban organizations. The Pakistan Taliban continue to make attacks in Pakistan and most of these efforts can be traced back to bases in eastern Afghanistan. These attacks tend to take place in the tribal territories of the northwest and southwest but not across the border in Waziristan, where Pakistani troops are still involved in a major anti-terrorist campaign they began in mid-2014 and did not officially end until early 2017. The Pakistani Taliban are not as numerous as their Afghan counterparts and that is largely because the Pakistani Taliban do not have as much money. While Pakistani Taliban make some money from providing security for drug smuggling they have to depend on a lot of other criminal activities to maintain operations. Both the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban are also suffering internal problems and both have broken up into mutually hostile factions. The rise of ISIL in the region is part of this. The drug gangs dont really care as long as their hired guns protect the drug production and smuggling. December 13, 2018: In the south (Zabul Province), an American UAV used missiles to kill three Taliban, including one man who had become infamous for openly acting as the public executioner for the Taliban in the area. This may have led to more locals taking a big risk and reporting (to Afghan security forces who are often corrupt) where the executioner was. December 10, 2018: In the east ( Ghazni province), the local security forces displayed a large number of recently captured Taliban weapons that were manufactured, quite recently, in Iran. The provincial governor accused the Iranians of supplying the Taliban with weapons. The Iranians denied that and pointed out that the Taliban in Ghazni were also going after the local Shia, which Iran, as the largest Shia nation in the world, is sworn to prevent. What Iran fails to mention is that some Taliban factions in western Afghanistan receive aid (training and weapons) from Iran. Earlier in 2018 captured Taliban in western and northern Afghanistan spoke of a special Taliban force being trained in Iran, where they also receive new equipment and weapons with the understanding that they will return to Afghanistan and concentrate their attacks on Americans and ISIL. Iran is desperate to strike back at the Americans for renewing economic sanctions and thwarting Iranian efforts to take control of Syria and then launch attacks on Israel. These Iran backed Taliban have apparently been going after ISIL groups in western Afghanistan but not the Americans, at least not as far as anyone can tell. So far in 2018 15 Americans have been killed but none of those deaths can be traced back to Iranian influence. Meanwhile, as many as 600 Taliban are being trained or completed their training in Iran. This sort of foreign meddling is unpopular in Afghanistan where such interference by neighbors, especially Pakistan and Iran, is an ancient and always unwelcome problem. But Iran and Pakistan both interfere and Iranians and Indians have doing so for thousands of years and see no reason why they should not continue doing so in the 21st century. For Iran, its mainly about trying to protect their fellow Shia from attack. Shia Afghans (15 percent of Afghans) are a particular target for Sunni Islamic terrorists like ISIL. The Taliban and al Qaeda are less likely to attack Shia because both organizations sometimes discreetly rely on Iran for sanctuary and other support. Most of the Afghan Shia are Hazara, who are ten percent of the population and the descendants of the hated Mongols who conducted several invasions during the 13th and 14th centuries. These Mongol attacks destroyed more of the country and its population than any other conquerors. For centuries Hazara have suffered a lot of discrimination and actual violence in Afghanistan. But Iran is seen as an ally (at least against Pakistan) by most Afghans and Iran is mostly Shia and sees itself as the defender of all Shia. How does this explain Iranian weapons in eastern Afghanistan? Simple, once you provide weapons to any Afghan faction those weapons are seen as valuable items to be used or traded. Iran and Pakistan understand this but Western aid providers still have a hard time accepting this ancient custom. In Ghazni, the Afghan Taliban have been waging a major campaign to gain control of the province since August. They now control or contest over half the territory in the province and threaten traffic on several major highways passing through the province. Recently the government sent a special operations unit to Ghazni to help protect Hazara Shia there. The special operations force suffered dozens of casualties as the Taliban sent in hundreds of additional gunmen. Hazara in Ghazni have formed pro-government militias although the main reason for these militias is to protect Hazara from Taliban violence. Ghazni is near the Pakistani border and contains some major heroin smuggling routes into Pakistan. These routes are kept open by the Taliban. Ghazni has long been fought over, because of the heroin smuggling routes. Normally the drug gangs find it cheaper and more reliable to use bribes but because of the growing number of addicts inside Afghanistan the bribes sometimes dont work and the national government often sends down commandos and NDS (Afghan intel) agents to carry out specific tasks which tend to be bribe proof. Massive intimidation attacks like this often fail, mainly because of the popular anger towards the drug gangs that keep supplying the local addicts. The fact that the Afghan Taliban has always been supported by Pakistan is another incentive to fight back. Opposing Pakistani meddling in Afghan affairs is a popular issue among most Afghans. One reason Western troops are tolerated in Afghanistan, which has, for thousands of years been hostile to foreigners, is because the Westerners and Afghans are both eager to shut down the drug trade and keep the Pakistanis out. Pakistan sees battles like Ghazni as a success because over a thousand Afghans (including security personnel and civilians) were killed and there was a degree of intimidation achieved. Operations like this cost Pakistan little as the Afghan drug gangs supply the cash required. They have no choice because the ISI can deny easy access to Pakistan for needed supplies (chemicals for converting opium into heroin) and secure smuggling routes through Pakistan to the port city of Karachi. It was later discovered that most of the 500 (or more) foreign fighters ISI supplied for the Ghazni battle cane from three known Pakistan based Islamic terror groups known to work for ISI. The most prominent of those with a contingent in Ghazni was the Haqqani Network, whose leader currently runs the Afghan Taliban. The Afghan prime minister is demanding that his newly elected Pakistani counterpart do something about what happened in Ghazni province. So far the official Pakistani response is; it wasnt us. Pakistani prime minister Imran Kahn is more concerned with nations considered more important to Pakistan, like Saudi Arabia and China. To Pakistanis, Afghanistan is more of a potential problem than anything else. But to Afghanistan, and most of the world community, the biggest problem in Afghanistan is not the Taliban or the drug gangs, but Pakistan. December 9, 2018: In central Afghanistan (Uruzgan province), the Afghan air force carried out their first nighttime airstrikes, using their new smart bomb equipped A-29 aircraft. The A-29s have been very active this year but, until now, only carrying out daylight missions. Earlier in 2018, the Afghan Air Force reported that its dozen or so A-29 aircraft now account for a third of the 15 airstrikes carried out by the Afghans each day (on average). The A-29 Super Tucano is a five-ton single engine turbo-prop two-seat trainer/attack aircraft that is used by over a dozen nations. A-29s are armed with two internal 12.7mm (.50 caliber) machine-guns along with 1.5 tons of bombs and rockets. It can stay in the air for 6.5 hours at a time. It is rugged, easy to maintain and cheap. Eighteen A-29s were in service with Afghanistan at the end of 2018 with an additional six arriving in 2019. The first A-29s entered service in Afghanistan during early 2016. These aircraft can use laser-guided bombs as well as unguided ones in addition to Hellfire missiles. The Afghans plan to start using their MD-530F light attack helicopters for night airstrikes as well. Being able to call on night airstrikes is a major advantage because allows Taliban and drug gang targets to be hit without any warning and when the enemy is less alert to any attack. December 6, 2018: In the west (Farah province), an American UAV used missiles to kill eight Taliban, including a senior leader. There tend to be more of these UAV attacks in Farah province because, since 2016 western Afghanistan (Farah, Herat and Badghis provinces) has been the scene of much fighting between rival Taliban factions. This has left hundreds of Taliban dead and even as this infighting continued the army moved to oust the Taliban from areas the Islamic terrorists long controlled directly or indirectly. All this factional fighting forced Taliban leaders to be less cautious when they traveled and that made it easier for American Intel to find out who was where and arrange for an American UAV to be present. December 5, 2018: NATO military leaders met in Belgium to discuss the situation in Afghanistan. There was alarm that Afghan security forces had been suffering about 500 casualties a month in 2018. By Western standards that is a high casualty rate but by Afghan standards, it isnt. The Taliban, with about 60,000 armed men (a fifth of what the government has) often suffers heavier losses each month. The Taliban have no air and artillery strikes available to use. Since most of the foreign troops left the Afghan security forces have suffered about 28,000 deaths. This seems high by current Western standards but is far less than Afghans suffered during the Russian occupation of the 1980s or the civil war that followed. Currently, the 15,000 or so foreign troops in Afghanistan are suffering losses of about 130 per 100,000 (per year), the same as 2017 but up from 100 in 2016. That loss rate peaked at about 400 per 100,000 in 2012. At the peak of the fighting (2005-7) in Iraq, the American losses were nearly 600 per 100,000. The rate for U.S. troops in Vietnam and World War II was about 1,500 per 100,000 troops. It was higher for German and Russian troops, more like what Afghan security forces have suffered since 2014. As high as this is, its higher (twice what the army and police lose) for the Taliban and such loss rates were always common in Afghanistan. When the tribal irregulars fought Russian troops in the 1980s they suffered even higher losses. During that period the invading Russians never suffered more than 1,000 per 100,000 dead per year and eventually left because they could not afford the financial cost of seemingly endless fighting in Afghanistan. The Soviet Union fell apart a few years later and nearly three decades later Afghanistan is still a mess. December 2, 2018: In the north (Samangan province), local Taliban are having problems getting truck drivers to pay $93 protection money each to avoid being attacked as they transport coal to major towns and cities. The local Taliban declare that they control some key roads used by the coal trucks but local police, tribal militias and police do not agree. The Taliban kidnapped at least fifty of the drivers but quickly released them so it is difficult to see who really has the power in this area, which is traditionally hostile to the Taliban and drug gangs. December 1, 2018: In the south (Helmand province), an American airstrike killed the Taliban governor of Helmand, along with four of his associates as they were driving along a rural road. This is a big deal because Helmand is the most important province for the Taliban because it is where most of the opium and heroin is produced. November 29, 2018: In the west (Heart province), there was another outbreak of factional fighting within the Taliban. There were at least 28 dead and many more wounded. This battle was because of a dispute between the breakaway Rasool faction and Pakistan backed Afghan Taliban. The factional fighting is an unresolved aftereffect of the Taliban civil war that broke out in 2015. This was all about disagreements over who should take over as Taliban leader after founder Mullah Omar was revealed in 2015 to have died in 2013 (in a Pakistani hospital). The information was kept to a few key Omar associates who were then accused of lying as part of a plot to install an Omar successor who was second-rate. The civil war began in late November 2015 when Mullah Mansour, leader of the OT (Original Taliban) ordered attacks against the forces of rival Taliban leader Mullah Rasool. This marked a major defeat for the Taliban as they have now lost a major asset; unity. Similar fighting has also occurred in Zabul province. By 2017 the Taliban infighting had diminished but not disappeared mainly because the dissident factions had arranged truces with Pakistan backed ones so that everyone could make money working for the drug gangs. The Pakistani ISI (intelligence service) was a major factor in preventing the factional fighting from escalating. ISI arranged to have Haqqani Network leaders with Taliban ties take sides and eventually take over the senior Taliban leadership. This reduced but did not eliminate the feuding. As a result, the Taliban sought to regain territory they had lost to government forces in 2017, especially near the Iran and northern borders. This was important because these border areas were used for smuggling heroin and opium into Iran. In the United States (Washington DC), the Americans put a vast trove of Iranian weapons or fragments (of ballistic missiles, naval mines, remotely controlled bomb boats or UAVs) collected from countries throughout the Middle East (Yemen., Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and so on) as evidence of illegal Iranian arms exports. Most of the items displayed have Farsi (the Iranian language) markings. Opening the display in Washington makes it accessible to many foreign embassy personnel and journalists. November 28, 2018: The Afghan government presented its peace plan at a European conference. The plan was all about democracy, prosperity and making Afghans safe from Taliban violence and the drug production the Taliban protected. The Taliban were not at this conference but soon responded by posting their position on the Internet. To the Taliban, the Afghan government was illegitimate because it was not Islamic enough and tolerated the presence of foreign and non-Moslem troops. What the Taliban have always wanted is all foreign troops out of Afghanistan. When making these demands the Taliban referred to themselves as the Emirate of Afghanistan and the true and legitimate government of Afghanistan. Thats because the Taliban will eliminate democracy and other un-Islamic practices (like education for girls and non-religious education in general). The Taliban did not mention the drugs or the need to attack and kill any Afghans who opposed Taliban rule. This was especially the case with Afghan Shia. The last time the Taliban controlled and government most of the country they financed themselves with taxes on the drug gangs. That practice continues, although now the Taliban are basically hired guns for the drug gangs. The Afghans who run the drug gangs dont care if the Taliban take control once more as long as the drug business continues. Most Afghans oppose that because of all the Afghan addicts and the fact that the drug gangs are responsible for most of the violence and economic disruption in the country. November 27, 2018: In the east ( Ghazni province), four American Special Forces soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb. So far this year 13 American troops have died in Afghanistan. November 23, 2018: In the east (Khost province), a Taliban suicide bomber got into the mosque on a military base and set off his explosives during weekly prayer services. This left 26 dead and over twice as many wounded. November 20, 2018: In Kabul, a Taliban suicide bomber got into a wedding hall where hundreds of Afghan Islamic scholars and clerics were assembled to commemorate the birthday of the prophet Mohammed. The suicide bomber detonated his explosives and killed at least fifty people and wounded about a hundred. Most Afghan clerics oppose the Taliban and attacks like this are supposed to intimidate the scholars and clergy into halting their criticism of the Taliban. November 15, 2018: Afghanistan returned to Pakistan the body of a Pakistani policeman who had been kidnapped by ISIL in the Pakistani capital and taken to eastern Afghanistan (Nangarhar province). That is where his body was recently found, in a remote area near the Afghan border. There was a note from ISIL claiming responsibility. This caused an uproar in Pakistan because ISIL had kidnapped the policeman in the capital and then secretly transported him to eastern Afghanistan. The Provincial Growth Fund is investing $924,000 in Coromandel aquaculture and marine services, Regional Economic Development Minister Shane Jones has announced. It makes sense to invest in aquaculture, which has grown by 70 per cent in seven years, has annual sales of $612 million and can drive regional development, says Shane Jones. Funding into feasibility studies will help get the planning right to support future aquaculture and marine services. There are three projects based in Coromandel: Sugarloaf Wharf, Coromandel, $558,000 Coromandel Marine Gateway, $93,850 Kopu Marine Precinct, Coromandel, $270,000 There is potential to expand Sugarloaf Wharf to accommodate growing aquaculture demand, so were exploring that as a first step. Coromandel produces around 26 per cent of New Zealand greenshell mussels and 24 per cent of Pacific oysters, but current wharf infrastructure will limit the ability to meet demand. Production is expected to double over the next 10-15 years, creating 550 new jobs, so this investment will help the industry get match fit for those emerging opportunities. Well also look at the feasibility of developing a large marine facility at Coromandel Gateway to increase capacity and overall safety for recreational users and ferry and charter boats. Currently Coromandel Town has no all-tide marine facilities and a severe shortage of boat ramps, but there is growing demand for all these facilities. The Coromandel Marine Gateway is anticipated to incorporate a marina with boat stack storage, limited berths for fishing charter boats, a marine services area and facilities for charter vessels as well as a ferry landing. Once underway, the project is estimated to create up to 50 new jobs including permanent marine and charter crew and management roles, as well as jobs in related industries. At Kopu Marine Precinct well investigate enhancing the current marine facilities and supporting services for large locally-based boats and barges. There is strong local support for improvements in this space and evidence a local marina is needed, stretching back to the early 2000s. This Government is willing to fast track the work because it will make a difference to the people of the Coromandel." Great news for Hauraki in aquaculture Todays announcement that nearly a million dollars will be injected into Coromandel aquaculture and marine services is great news for the people of Hauraki, says the Minister of Maori Development Hon Nanaia Mahuta. Todays announcement by Minister Shane Jones comes as a Christmas present for our people across the region. They will know they have a Government that is working for them. The funding will be in feasibility studies to get the planning right for the industry that will support my peoples ambitions in aquaculture and marine services. The Provincial Growth Fund means that this community will able to broaden training, employment and enterprise schemes right across Hauraki, says Nanaia. The money will be earmarked for three Coromandel projects including a feasibility study to expand the Sugarloaf wharf. The Government has made it clear that its prepared to fast track these studies as it will make such a difference to the people of Coromandel and Hauraki." Seventeen-year-old Courtney Bignell organised the vigil on Friday for murdered British backpacker Grace Millane. Its the first time Courtney, an ex-Otumoetai College student has organised a community event. She wanted to show the Millane family they are supported throughout the country. About 70 people including Labour list MPs Jan Tinetti and Angie Warren-Clark gathered at the Edgewater Fan on the Strand waterfront to pay their respects. We wanted the community to be able to come together and show Graces family were there and we support them, says Courtney. Her death has led to a show of solidarity throughout the country, with all of us coming together. Courtney was also supported by the Warehouse Tauranga who provided tea light candles and a print poster of Grace. The vigil is in relation the death of 22-year-old British woman Grace Millane. Grace arrived in New Zealand on November 20 as part of a year-long backpacking trip. She was reported missing after she failed to respond to birthday messages on Sunday December 2. Prior to her disappearance, Grace had been in contact with her family every day. Her body was discovered in an area of bush about 10 metres off the road in Aucklands Waitakere Ranges, following a week long police investigation. A 26-year-old man has been accused of her murder. Graces body has now been returned to her family. Syracuse, N.Y. -- Nearly 900,000 Spectrum internet customers in New York can expect refunds of up to $150 under the giant cable companys consumer fraud settlement with the states Attorney Generals Office. But when? Under the settlement, Charter Communications, which does business as Spectrum, is required to issue $62.5 million in refunds within 120 days. Those refunds consist of $75 to each of more than 700,000 active subscribers who leased modems or Wi-Fi routers unable to deliver the internet speeds promised by the company. Anyone subscribing to a Time Warner Cable legacy speed plan of 100 Mbps or higher are also eligible for the $75 refund. In addition, Charter is required to award an additional $75 refund to each of more than 150,000 subscribers who had an inadequate modem for 24 months or longer. Customers dont have to do anything to get the refunds. Charter will notify subscribers of their eligibility for refunds and disburse them within 120 days. (Charter has already issued $6 million in refunds for inadequate modems, separate from the settlement. Customers who received those refunds are ineligible for a further payment.) In addition to the refunds, Charter is required to offer more than $100 million in free video and streaming services to about 2.2 million active internet subscribers; Charter will offer all subscribers currently receiving internet and cable television from the company a choice of either three free months of HBO or six free months of Showtime. (This benefit is available to subscribers who do not already subscribe to both HBO and Showtime through Charter.) All other active Charter internet subscribers will receive a free month of Charters Spectrum TV Choice streaming service , which provides access to broadcast television and a choice of 10 pay TV networks, as well as a free month of Showtime. As with the direct refunds, Charter must notify subscribers of their eligibility for video and streaming services and provide details for accessing them within 120 days. (Receiving the video and steaming services as restitution will not affect a customers eligibility for future promotional pricing for those services.) The agreement between the company and Attorney General Barbara Underwood settles the AGs consumer fraud action alleging that Charter, the states largest internet service provider, denied customers the blazing fast internet service that it advertised. The AG alleged that Charters customers received up to 80 percent slower speeds than they were paying for, often because of inadequate internet modems or combination modem/Wi-Fi routers provided by the company. For example, customers promised 300 Mbps speeds received on average 85 Mbps, according to a lawsuit filed against the company by Underwoods predecessor, Eric Schneiderman, last year. Charter became the largest ISP in New York when it acquired Time Warner Cable in a $60 billion deal in May 2016. It initially operated under the Time Warner Cable brand, later switching to the Spectrum name. We are pleased to have reached a settlement with the Attorney General on the issue of certain Time Warner Cable advertising practices in New York prior to our merger, and to have put this litigation behind us," Charter said in a statement Tuesday. "Charter has made, and continues to make, substantial investments enhancing internet service across the state of New York since our 2016 merger, as acknowledged by the Attorney General in this settlement. We look forward to continue providing the best TV, internet, voice and mobile products to our customers, and to bringing broadband to more homes and businesses across the state. The Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard police blotter of arrests from police agencies around Central New York has been updated today. Most of the new arrests are from the last couple weeks. The police blotter is searchable by name, charge or agency. You can search current dates or find arrests made in the past. Our database contains arrests from the current year and two years back. Among the 278 new arrests are: An Oswego man charged with non-support of a child 33 people charged with DWI A Syracuse woman charged with prostitution Information in the police blotter is provided by the agencies that made the arrest. Information about arrests is also published in the Neighbors pages of The Post-Standard. LYONS, N.Y. (AP) A 26-year-old man has been charged with murder in the deaths of his missing girlfriend and her 14-month-old child, whose remains were found on an upstate New York farm. WHEC-TV reports Tuesday that Everardo Donoteo-Reyes, also known as Alberto Reyes, was arraigned after being indicted by a Wayne County grand jury on murder and tampering with physical evidence charges. Donoteo-Reyes is accused of killing 18-year-old Selena Hidalgo-Calderon and her son. The mothers body was found buried on a farm in Sodus last spring. The skeletal remains of her son were found scattered in the woods on the same farm months later in October. Donoteo-Reyes lived with his girlfriend on the farm. He has admitted to burying her, but not killing her. Information on his lawyer wasnt immediately available. Hes due back in court Jan. 15. Syracuse, NY -- Syracuse police, a city court judge and St. Josephs Hospital Health Center worked together last year to conduct a highly unusual drug search. They collaborated to sedate a suspect and thread an 8-inch flexible tube into his rectum in a search for illegal drugs. The suspect, who police said had taunted them that hed hidden drugs there, refused consent for the procedure. At least two doctors resisted the police request. An X-ray already had indicated no drugs. They saw no medical need to perform an invasive procedure on someone against his will. The notes from police and doctors suggest some tension, a standoff. At one point, eight police officers were at the hospital. A doctor remembers telling officers: We would not be doing that. The hospitals top lawyer got pulled in. He talked with the judge who signed the search warrant, which was written by police and signed at the judges home. When they were done, the hospital lawyer overruled its doctors. The lawyer told his doctors that a search warrant required the doctors to use any means to retrieve the drugs, records show. So St. Joes medical staff knocked out the suspect and performed the sigmoidoscopy, in search of evidence of a misdemeanor or low-level felony charge, records show. The idea of a government-ordered medical procedure for such a common offense surprised defense lawyers here and national experts in medical and legal ethics. Its crazy. Its over the top, by far, said Hermann Walz, a longtime criminal attorney and professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Youre looking for marijuana and cocaine? Its extreme. If they wanted to cut him open and look at his stomach, that would be OK, too? Critics say the cops, the judge and hospital may have violated the civil rights of the suspect, subjected him to medical risk, and exposed the city and the hospital to a lawsuit. The whole thing is cuckoo nuts to me, said the suspects defense lawyer, Charles Keller. What country are we living in? So, was it worth the risk? The X-ray was right. The scope found no drugs. And when they were done, St. Joes sent the suspect a bill for $4,595.12. Charles Keller, a Syracuse defense lawyer, says the drug search of his client, Torrence Jackson, went too far. "What country are we living in?" he asked. City Hall, judge and hospital arent talking Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard pieced together what happened Oct. 16, 2017 by reviewing police reports, medical records and court documents. We interviewed more than a dozen people including the suspect, his lawyer, an emergency room doctor, and legal and medical experts. Syracuse police, St. Josephs officials and Syracuse Mayor Ben Walshs administration refused to be interviewed for this report. Syracuse City Court Judge Rory McMahon, who issued the search warrant, said he couldnt discuss his decision because the case was sealed. In an email statement, the hospital said the medical procedure without consent fits its policy for complying with search warrants. Jeff Piedmonte, president of the Syracuse Police Benevolent Association, said hed never heard of doctors using a medical procedure and anesthesia for such a search. What we used to do is give them medication and wait for them to go to the bathroom, he said. One of the doctors who refused police told Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard that such a search violated his medical ethics. I told police: We would not be doing that, Dr. William Paolo said of the requested search. Not while I was there. A suspect with a bad reputation Torrence Jackson was subjected to a forced sigmoidoscopy under general anesthesia in a search for drugs in his rectum. None were found. (Dennis Nett | dnett@syracuse.com)Dennis Nett | dnett@syracuse.com The suspect -- Torrence Jackson, 42, of Syracuse -- had built a bad reputation with police long before they picked him up Oct. 16, 2017. He frequently defied officers, often in dangerous ways. His criminal record started as a juvenile with a prison sentence for robbery in the mid-1990s. While on parole in 1998, he fled from police in a high-speed chase through Syracuse that included a pursuit on Interstate 81. An officer broke his ankle chasing Jackson after he ditched the car, records show. Jacksons 20-page rap sheet includes multiple charges of resisting arrest, fleeing officers, drug use and illegal gun possession. He led police on another chase on I-81 and I-690 in 2013. Police used a Taser twice to subdue him, records show. In 2015, after yet another arrest, a judge admonished Jackson for his reckless behavior around police. Weve been through this before, Judge John Brunetti told Jackson. You did not cooperate with police and they had to (take) you to the ground That does not have to happen, OK? Jacksons pattern continued after last years search. Hes facing felony weapons and drug charges after an August arrest, accused of possessing a loaded handgun, heroin, hydrocodone and drug paraphernalia in his residence. He was interviewed for this story while in jail on the new charges. He was later released. A pretext stop gets violent On the Monday that ended with his forced medical search, Jackson was stopped by police at East Beard Avenue and South State Street shortly after noon. Members of the Syracuse Police Gang Violence Task Force said they stopped Jackson because he didnt signal a turn in time, records show. The so-called pretext stop is a court-approved way for police to investigate someone they find suspicious. Jackson had been in a confrontation with one of the officers in the past, his lawyer said. They recognized him, he said. Jackson didnt have a valid drivers license. He had a baggie of marijuana in his waistband. A test of the drivers seat came back for the presence of cocaine, police said. No cocaine was collected at the scene, his lawyer said. While stopped, Officer Anthony Fiorini wrote in a police report, he saw Jackson raise his buttocks off the seat so far that his head was sticking out the window. That is consistent with someone hiding drugs in his rectum, Fiorini said. At the jail, Fiorini said, Jackson quickly reached into the rear of his pants and yelled, I got it in there! Jackson denies ever saying he had drugs hidden in him. Officers forced Jacksons hands out of his pants. They struggled as Jackson, who is 6 feet tall and 270 pounds, resisted. An officer was injured, and Jacksons arm was broken, records show. A county jail Special Emergency Response Team arrived to control Jackson. They took him to another room to check for illegal drugs before booking him into the jail, Fiorini wrote. There, another commotion broke out and deputies converged again as Jackson yelled and continued resisting, Fiorini wrote. Jackson was observed sticking his fingers into his rectum , Fiorini wrote. Deputies used pepper spray to control him, the officer wrote. A standoff at the hospital St. Joseph's Hospital Health Center. Ellen Blalock | The Post-Standard Officers put a spit mask on Jackson and took him under guard to St. Josephs Hospital Health Center. By that point, Jackson said in an interview, he was in a manic state. The spit mask made it hard to breathe, he said. Hospital personnel confirmed in medical files that Jackson complained of burning from pepper spray when he arrived by ambulance shortly after 2 p.m. A nurse described him as agitated and combative. Jacksons was threatening to kill staff members in the parking lot, the nurse wrote in Jacksons medical file. Jackson, considered by medical staff as a risk to himself and others, was given prescription sedatives. Fiorini, a Syracuse police officer since 2015, said he drafted the search warrant at police headquarters, then drove to the judges house to get it signed. Fiorini then came to the hospital. The medical staff noted the warrants arrival at 6:36 p.m. Doctors werent budging. Police requesting for retrieval of foreign object per rectum, with warrant present. Pt (patient) is refusing all interventions. Given strong pt refusal, no further actions taken, resident doctor Kavitha Muruganantham wrote in the medical notes. Around that time, the medical staff X-rayed Jacksons abdomen. It showed no radiopaque foreign body in the rectum. Thats where Keller, Jacksons lawyer, says the search should have ended. Typically, in these cases, police use less aggressive methods to get the drugs. State courts have approved searches in which a doctor uses a gloved hand to pull out drugs. Federal courts have encouraged enemas gas or water injected into the rectum. Mostly, they help nature to run its inevitable course, lawyers said. Its coming out, Keller said. You cant hold onto it forever. About an hour later, Dr. Kishani Heller wrote in the notes that Jackson continued to refuse any intervention. He refused to drink a medicine designed to speed up a bowel movement. He refused a rectal exam. He refused to answer questions, Heller wrote. The hospital lawyer steps in Syracuse City Court Judge Rory McMahon and St. Joseph's General Counsel Lowell Seifter. (Syracuse.com/provided photo) At 7:45 p.m., doctors consulted with St. Joes top lawyer. Spoke with hospital attorney Mr. Lowell Seifter who has reviewed court order and has spoken with judge who issued the court order, and states that pt does not have the right to refuse, Heller wrote at 9:14 p.m. Seifter, the hospitals general counsel, has been a prominent lawyer for decades in Syracuse. Before coming to St. Joes in 2012, he was a partner in the Green and Seifter law firm, which later became Bousquet Holstein. His expertise is in business, real estate and health care, according to the hospitals website. His office declined to comment for this story. The doctor who performed the search, Hui Hing Tin, also checked with Seifter. He got the same answer, his notes show. it's a valid warrant and we are obligated to help the police under any means to retrieve the object, Tin wrote. At 10 p.m., the doctors approached Jackson with their plan. Pt continues to refuse any interventions, Heller noted. He became violent and hospital police called. By 10:30 p.m., eight police officers surrounded Jackson, according to Tins notes. Fiorini indicated he was there. At 11:38 p.m., Tin inserted the colonoscope into Jackson, who was unconscious. It confirmed the X-ray: No drugs. Keller, the lawyer, defended his clients resistance to the procedure. Good for him, he said. If somebody was going to do surgery on me without any evidence, I would be upset, too. Jackson said he woke up, not sure what had happened. I felt tampered with, he said. Jackson was released from jail the following day. There was blood in his underwear, he said. He went to the emergency room at Community General Hospital. There, he said, an emergency room examined him and told him what happened: Someone had probed his colon. Jackson didnt pay his bill for the unwanted procedure, and St. Joes threatened to send it to a collection agency before forgiving the cost. Jacksons drug charges were thrown out and he pleaded guilty to traffic tickets. This bill for the forced sigmoidoscopy was sent to Torrence Jackson. He refused to pay it. Provided photo. Did doctors act properly? St. Joes has maintained that it was just following a court order and would do so again. We comply with court orders whenever they are issued for detainees who come to our hospital in police custody, the hospital said in its statement to Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard. The mayors office also declined to say whether police have ever requested such a search in the past or if theyd do so again. In defense of the warrant, Mayor Walshs corporation counsel noted the marijuana and cocaine residue found in the vehicle Jackson was driving, the officers description of Jacksons admissions and behavior, as well as Jacksons drug history. The citys statement also expressed concern for Jacksons well-being. Of particular concern was the risk to Mr. Jackson in the event the suspected narcotics packaging was ruptured while in his rectum, Corporation Counsel Kristen Smith wrote. The hospital, in its statement, also referred to its concern for Jacksons safety. Regardless of the circumstance, the safety and well-being of all people in our care is always our top priority, the hospital said. But police and medical notes in Jacksons case show doctors, who are charged with deciding the patients best care, were willing to wait it out. And they dont need a search warrant to order necessary emergency care. Its the police, hospital lawyer and judge who made the call. Paolo, the ER doc who refused to do the search, said nothing he knew about the situation posed a serious risk to Jackson. The physicians role is merely to aid the patient, said Paolo, a professor at Upstate Medical University who covers emergency room ethics in the classroom. If an individual doesnt have any medical complaint and is purely there for evidentiary collection, and is not an imminent threat to themselves, then the doctor is not there to do anything against the patients wishes. Another doctor warned Jackson about the risk. I have explained to the pt that the packets may rupture and cause cardia arrest (sic), wrote Heller, one of Jacksons doctors. The pt stated that he is fine w/ dying and understands the risk. I did not conduct a rectal exam pt refused. The search warrant makes no mention of acting to help the patient. Paolo said he doesnt agree with what happened. I dont believe anybody should have any procedure that is not deemed necessary, he said. If a particular foreign body is not a threat to the patient, then theres no medical necessity. Doctors are not an agent of the state and not obligated to become an agent of the state. Torrence Jackson looks out a window at the Onondaga County Justice Center jail during an interview with Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard. (Dennis Nett | dnett@syracuse.com) Similar case at St. Joes but no search Since the Jackson search, the hospital handled a similar situation differently in May 2018. A man was brought in by police who suspected he had hidden cocaine in his rectum. X-rays were also negative. The suspect refused consent. But here, doctors -- who consulted with hospital lawyers -- wrote in their notes: Policy states that no cavity search to be performed unless medically indicated. Doctors noted that any drugs would come out in time. The patient will need to move his bowels at some point with expected expulsion of the foreign body, they wrote. We will follow in case an urgent procedure is needed. St. Josephs said in its statement the two cases were different, citing the two warrants and subsequent conversations with the two judges who signed them. The hospital lawyer told doctors that McMahons search warrant compelled Jacksons procedure. In the more recent case, City Court Judge Ross Andrews told the hospital that his warrant wasnt compulsory, according to doctors notes provided to Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard. Doctors are not detectives An emergency room doctor who has researched body-cavity warrants warned that doctors are not agents of police. Doctors dont have to do something unethical simply because police order it. Police cant have a private citizen break into a car for them, Dr. Charles Pilcher, a Washington-based emergency room doctor who has researched the topic, told Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard. The same logic holds true for cavity searches: Its a fine line between compliance and assault. What if doctors had punctured Jacksons bowel during the search? Pilcher wondered. Whos at fault? Whos paying the bills for that? he said. Pilcher summed up his position in a 2016 article for the American College of Emergency Physicians newsletter. A physician cannot be made an agent of the state for the purposes of law enforcement; if an activity being performed isnt advancing the health care of a patient, then the physician has no business performing that activity, Pilcher wrote. Still, Pilcher said, some situations call for doctors to promote public safety over patient privacy. A blood draw against the will of a suspected drunken driver, for example, is generally permissible. Judges broad search warrant Keller said the warrant, drafted by Fiorini and signed by McMahon, led to his clients ordeal. I was shocked that a judge would sign off on the warrant based on what was presented, Keller said. Theres no medical necessity to anything that was done. Even worse, there was an X-ray that showed no foreign bodies. The warrant allowed: St. Josephs Hospital to utilize any/all medicines and/or medical/surgical procedures to assist in said removal to include, but not limited to, anesthesia, IV, X-ray/sonogram and/or physical manipulation, and any and all other medical procedures determined by said medical staff to be necessary and prudent to assist in the retrieval/removal of said illicit/illegal substances (evidence) located within the anal cavity of Torrence L. Jackson. Walz, the NYC lawyer, said the warrant gives cops too much power. Theyre basically saying to police: Do whatever you want to this guy. Could you put him into a medically induced coma and take out his colon? he said. How far can a search warrant go? In a widely publicized 2013 case, a New Mexico man won $1.6 million from authorities after being subjected to a colonoscopy during a drug search. The U.S. Supreme Court has set standards for how far medical warrants can go. They range from the permissible blood draw in the case of a DWI suspect to the impermissible removal of a bullet from a murder suspect under general anesthesia. In a 2012 case, a federal appeals court in Texas shares some facts with Jacksons case. There, a drug suspect was subjected to a proctoscope inserted into his rectum while sedated. However, the suspect there was conscious; in the Syracuse case, Jackson was knocked out. The Texas court ruled that search was illegal, and that it should raise concern for more than just the victim. In our society, the thought of medical technicians, under the direction of police officers, involuntarily sedating and anally probing a conscious person is jarring, the court ruled. Such a procedure is degrading to the person being probed -- both from his perspective and societys. SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- A dilapidated apartment complex where two young males were shot and killed in recent months will be demolished early next year, according to city officials. The building at 165 John St. is where 16-year-old Antonio Gullotto was shot and killed last night. And in October, James Springer, 12, died after being shot and killed in front of the home. He lived there with his family and was slain by a bullet police said wasn't intended for him. At the scene of the shooting on Tuesday, police were seen fastening boards over the doorway of the north-most section of the complex, which is emblazoned with red graffiti memorializing Springer. Syracuse police board up the doorway to an apartment where a 16-year-old was shot and killed Monday night. When the father of a tenant at the apartment where Gullotto was killed asked officers what happened to his daughter's dogs, police told him the apartment was "seized" and to contact animal control. In a statement, the city's top lawyer said the property's days are numbered. The land bank can now destroy the building after a drawn-out legal battle with the property's Australia-based landlord. The city seized the property, which is at the corner of Park and John streets, in May 2018 for failure to pay taxes, and it was given to the Greater Syracuse Land Bank, said Syracuse Corporation Counsel Kristen Smith. But the land bank wasn't able to immediately manage the property due to legal action by the previous owner, Smith said. The city and the land bank "aggressively" fought the landlord in court and ultimately won, getting a judge's approval to take control of the building Dec. 11, Smith said. The land bank is now beginning the process to "take over responsible management of the property, which appears unfit for habitation given its condition and history of code violations." The land bank plans to demolish the structure in early 2019, officials said. It's unclear how many tenants are still living there. A city spokesman said no action was taken toward the demolition of the building specifically due to the homicide last night. The process has been ongoing since May. Gullotto's death marks the 20th homicide in Syracuse in 2018. Eight people 19 years old or younger -- including Gullotto -- have been killed in homicides in the city this year. Anthony Tate, a good friend of Gullotto's, lights candles for his friend on Tuesday. The death of Springer, the 12-year-old, in October prompted community-wide calls for a cease to violence against youth here. Police have made an arrest in that homicide. The apartment complex has since slowly become a monument to the boy, with numerous handwritten or spray-pained messages to him, like "Gone but never forgotten." Deflated balloons are tied to a street sign. Burnt candles and empty liquor bottles have been placed around the home's front porch, above which a wrap-around patio is sagging, possibly near collapse. On Tuesday afternoon, even more candles were added to the building's concrete front porch, but these were placed there in memory of the city's latest young victim of gun violence. Anthony Tate lit about a dozen candles for Gullotto, his good friend, stopping every so often to hunch over and weep. He described Gullotto as like a nephew to him. "He was the type of person that would make you smile on your worst day," he said. "He was a free spirit. He had no fear." Tate and Nigel Emerson, 16, who is Gullotto's cousin, said Gullotto had recently been released from jail, though they didn't know what he was accused of. The teen was looking forward to a clean start and a Christmas back at home, his cousin said. Tate said there isn't enough for young people to do in Syracuse to prevent falling into situations where they are victims of or perpetrate violence. "They're not bad kids, they just don't have anything to do with their time," he said. NOTE: This story has been updated to reflect the fact that is the the Land Bank, not the city, that would be demolishing the complex. The Land Bank is a separate entity. SkyHawks pull off upset victory PLATTSMOUTH The Skutt Catholic football team took another step closer to winning their sixth championship on Nov. 5 when they went on the road and defeated second-seeded Plattsmouth 20-10... Gretna rallies past Storm in quarterfinals ELKHORN A strong defensive effort was not enough as the Elkhorn South football team fell to Gretna 14-7 Friday in the Class A State Quarterfinals. They (Gretna) are an... Badgers shut out Vikings, quest for title continues BENNINGTON Many times the game of football can flip in the blink of an eye. Thats what happened at Bennington High School on Friday night in a Class B... Storms title defense ends in semis LINCOLN The season came to an end for the defending Class A champ Elkhorn South Storm on Friday night when they were defeated in straight sets by top seed... Wolf upset bid falls short in state semis LINCOLN The fourth-ranked Elkhorn North Wolves made history on Saturday. The Wolves swept past the Lexington Minutemaids in straight sets at Elkhorn North High School to capture the Class... Galt MacDermot, a composer who gave the Age of Aquarius its rock and roll soundtrack in the Broadway musical Hair, wrote the score to a Tony-winning adaptation of Two Gentlemen of Verona and became a widely sampled staple of 1990s hip-hop, died Dec. 17 at his home on Staten Island, one day before his 90th birthday. The precise cause was not immediately known, said his daughter Elizabeth MacDermot. A onetime church organist and choirmaster in Montreal, MacDermot was perhaps an unlikely choice to compose the music for "Hair," which opened on Broadway on April 29, 1968 - a date chosen by the producer's astrologer - and featured hallucinogenic drug use, draft-card burning, frank discussions of homosexuality and an infamous nude sequence at the close of the first act. Then 39, living in a quiet Staten Island neighborhood with his wife and children, he had received two Grammy Awards as a jazz composer and was a far cry from the production's lyricists, Gerome Ragni and James Rado, who wrote the musical's book and starred as two of its long-haired, tie-dye-clad leads. Yet drawing from his student years in South Africa, where he fell in love with the rhythmically complex music of artists such as Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba, MacDermot gave "Hair" a funky, guitar-filled score that made it one of the most successful productions of its era, as well as one of the earliest rock musicals in Broadway history. "The show is the first Broadway musical in some time to have the authentic voice of today," wrote New York Times reviewer Clive Barnes, "rather than the day before yesterday." Directed by Tom O'Horgan, "Hair" ran for 1,750 performances and raked in tens of millions of dollars, playing in around 20 cities around the world. Its cast album won a Grammy Award in 1968, and the musical was adapted into a 1979 film directed by Milos Forman, revived on Broadway in 2009 and will be broadcast live on NBC next spring. For many listeners, songs such as "Aquarius" and "Let the Sunshine In" became generation-defining anthems, joyous numbers that heralded a new era of peace, love and understanding. A medley of those two tracks was recorded by the 5th Dimension and spent six weeks at the top of the Billboard charts in 1969; one year later, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers announced that the medley was played more than any other song on U.S. radio and television. Other "Hair" numbers, recorded by artists including Liza Minnelli, Diana Ross, Barbra Streisand, Nina Simone and Quincy Jones, were nearly as successful. The musical's title song, recorded by the Cowsills, rose to No. 2 on the charts; "Good Morning Starshine," sung by Oliver, hit No. 3 and was performed by Bob McGrath on an episode of "Sesame Street"; and "Easy to Be Hard," covered by Three Dog Night, reached No. 4. While the musical was primarily a work of pop-rock, it incorporated elements of jazz and even liturgical music, as in a song called "Sodomy," in which a character named Woof catalogues his sexual preferences. "I figured that it was kind of a religious experience for that guy," MacDermot said, adding that he "wrote it as a hymn." He later continued writing rock musicals with productions such as "Two Gentlemen of Verona," which opened in December 1971, ran for 614 performances, and beat out "Grease" and "Follies" to win the Tony Award for best musical. Produced by Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival, it featured lyrics by playwright John Guare, who later wrote "Six Degrees of Separation," and a book adapted by Guare and director Mel Shapiro from Shakespeare's comedy. MacDermot, who received a Drama Desk Award for outstanding music, was nominated for a Tony and Grammy. But his work ranged far beyond Broadway, stretching into jazz and funk, and was incorporated into soundtracks for movies such as "The Thomas Crown Affair" (1968), which used his instrumental "Coffee Cold" for an erotically charged chess scene with Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway. MacDermot was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2009. By then, his songs had been rediscovered - and repurposed - by hip-hop artists such as J Dilla, Snoop Dogg, Mos Def, Nas, LL Cool J, MF Doom and Public Enemy. His song "Space" was a key sample in Busta Rhymes' hit 1996 single "Woo-Hah!! Got You All in Check"; in 1993, Run DMC used the "Hair" song "Where Do I Go?" for "Down With the King." "It's great that my stuff is being picked up by these hip-hoppers, 'cause those guys are allowing rhythm to come back," MacDermot told the Village Voice in 2001. "Disco kinda killed rhythm for a while there in the '70s, and rap brought it back. To me, that's what music's all about." Arthur Terence Galt MacDermot was born in Montreal on Dec. 18, 1928. His father was a history professor and diplomat who played the piano and served as ambassador to South Africa, Greece, Israel and Australia; his mother was a teacher who also assisted with diplomatic duties. MacDermot studied at Upper Canada College, an elite Toronto prep school where his father was principal, and in 1950 received a bachelor's degree from Bishop's University in Quebec, taking classes in English and history. He moved to South Africa to join his father, and he received a second degree around 1953, studying organ and composition at the University of Cape Town. His first hit as a composer was "African Waltz," which earned him Grammys for best original jazz composition and best instrumental theme after saxophonist Cannonball Adderley recorded it in 1961. MacDermot moved to Staten Island three years later, developing a rigorous schedule by which he composed in the morning, working from 7 a.m. until noon, before heading to recording studios in Manhattan to play piano with celebrated backing musicians such as bassist Jimmy Lewis and drummers Idris Muhammad and Bernard Purdie. He became involved with "Hair" in 1967, after producer and jazz critic Nat Shapiro introduced him to Ragni and Rado; within three weeks, by his account, he had composed music to go with their lyrics. The production premiered at Papp's nonprofit Public Theater in 1967 and was revised considerably - more than a dozen songs were added, and the plot was all but eliminated - before opening on Broadway. His other theatrical credits included the music for "Isabel's a Jezebel," a West End production based on a Brothers Grimm fairy tale; "Who the Murderer Was," featuring British progressive rock band Curved Air; "Dude," a country-infused bomb that saw him partner again with Ragni; "Via Galactica," a sci-fi epic about misfits who live on an asteroid; and "The Human Comedy," from a coming-of-age novel by William Saroyan. MacDermot also wrote the off-Broadway musical revue "Time and the Wind," and composed the score to movies including "Cotton Comes to Harlem" (1970), considered one of the first blaxploitation films, and "Rhinoceros" (1974), a Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder comedy based on the play by Eugene Ionesco. Survivors include his wife of 62 years, the former Marlene Bruynzeel, a clarinetist; five children; one sister; seven grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. While "Hair" has proved an enduring success, MacDermot said he was surprised by the controversy it generated upon its release. Two Apollo 13 astronauts made headlines when they walked out after the first act, following a scene in which the American flag is wrapped around an actor. Im from Canada, a small and unimportant country where you can say and do anything and nobody notices, he told the Los Angeles Times in 2001. I was just very naive about New York theater. SYRACUSE, N.Y. A former top Upstate Medical University official who helped orchestrate a pay padding scheme at the SUNY school prayed in court for serenity today before he was sentenced to a one-year conditional discharge. Steven C. Brady, Upstates former vice president of finance, was allowed to withdraw his previous guilty plea to felony falsifying business records in exchange for his cooperation with the state Attorney Generals investigation of pay padding at Upstate. He pleaded guilty today to the lesser charge of falsifying business records in the second degree, a misdemeanor. Brady, 71, of Chittenango, admitted he falsified records in 2010 to set up a deferred compensation plan to benefit himself and other top Upstate management officials. Court records show he did that at the direction of Dr. David R. Smith, Upstates former president, who was sentenced Monday to three years probation and ordered to pay restitution for his role in the scheme. Before he was sentenced, Brady told Onondaga County Court Judge Thomas J. Miller he worked at Upstate 44 years and loved the institution. Brady then recited the Serenity Prayer. God grant me the courage to change the things I can, the serenity to accept the things I cannot and the wisdom to know the difference, he said. Mary Gorman, an assistant New York Attorney General, said Brady complied with all aspects of the plea deal he made with her office in May. As part of that deal, he has repaid $60,000 he received in unauthorized pay raises at Upstate. Had he not cooperated, Brady could have been sentenced to 1 1/3 to 4 years in prison. Under the conditional discharge, Brady wont go to jail or be subjected to supervision by a probation officer as long as he stays out of trouble. Court records show Smith told Brady to give him a $28,450 annual pay raise through the State University of New York Research Foundation without state approval. Brady also got an unauthorized $10,000 annual pay raise through the foundation which, over time, added up to the $60,000 he repaid. Smith also directed Brady to set up a $1.4 million deferred compensation plan through MedBest Medical Management, a nonprofit Upstate affiliate, with money taken from an Upstate medical school fund. After SUNY discovered the scheme, that money was returned to the medical school fund and the deferred compensation plan was dissolved. The case was originally investigated by the FBI and federal prosecutors, who dropped the probe after concluding there was not enough evidence to bring charges. But the state Inspector General's Office investigated the case and turned over information to the state Attorney General's Office for prosecution. Brady was in charge of Upstates finances, internal auditing and accounting, and supervised its facilities and capital programs. State records show he was paid more than $300,000 in 2012. Smith pleaded guilty to three counts of official misconduct, a misdemeanor. He was ordered to pay $247,419 in restitution and $3,000 in fines. Hes already paid back $75,000. Smith, 64, who now lives in North Carolina, was put on probation for three years. MEXICO, N.Y. -- Matthew Cox usually sticks to buying $1 or $2 lottery tickets. But early last month, he was feeling lucky. Cox stopped by the Fastrac in Mexico before heading to his landscaping job -- his second gig after his job at the Dot Food warehouse. The 34-year-old Liverpool man had just gotten paid and wanted to buy a cup of coffee and a few lottery tickets. He then decided to take a chance and spend $20 on a $10,000 A Week For Life ticket. I had a good feeling about it, he said, speaking Wednesday at the Main Street gas station. And you were right, replied Yolanda Vega, of the New York Lottery. Cox scratched off the ticket in his car. When he saw his ticket had matching numbers, Cox said he figured hed won back the $20 hed spent on the ticket. Then, he scratched off the final box and uncovered his prize: $10,000 a week for life. That was a big shock, Cox said. From left to right: Matthew Cox, 34, of Liverpool, speaks to Yolanda Vega, of the New York Lottery, about scratching off a winning $10,000 A Week For Life ticket at the Fastrac in Mexico. Vega awarded Cox a giant check on Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2018, at the Main Street gas station. In disbelief, Cox walked back into the Fastrac. A lottery machine and an employee confirmed hed won the top prize. The new multimillionaire said he called his aunt, who is an accountant, and shared his news. Then, he tucked the winning ticket into his pocket and went to work. Cox claimed his prize on Nov. 7. Then, he made plans. I figured it was going to be a great rest of my life, he said with a grin. Vega handed Cox a giant check Wednesday at the Mexico gas station where the winning ticket was sold. Cox opted to receive his prize in annual $520,000 installments. After taxes, he will take home a sum of $349,336 a year for the rest of his life. When he took a chance and bought the $20 scratch-off ticket, Cox was right to feel lucky: According to the New York Lottery, the chances of winning the top prize on the $10,000 A Week For Life game are 1 in 5,520,800. Cox, a Mexico native, said he wants to keep working -- both to hold onto his health insurance and keep himself busy. He wants to pay off bills, set up college funds for his young children and build up his savings. The father of two also plans have fun with his prize. Cox said he wants to buy an ATV and take his kids to Disney World. There is also a house hes been eyeing -- a big house on a large plot of land. Probably going to get that, too, Cox said. WASHINGTON - The Senate prepared Wednesday to pass a short-term spending bill that would keep the government open through the New Year but deny President Trump the money he wanted for his border wall - a stark retreat for Republicans in their final days in control of Congress. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., announced the deal on the Senate floor Wednesday to extend government funding through Feb. 8, when Democrats will be in control of the House. Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said Democrats would support it. The outcome would temporarily break an impasse that threatened to shutter large portions of the government this weekend and send hundreds of thousands of federal workers home without pay just before Christmas. Trump has signaled his support for the plan but "can change his mind if he wants to," said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, the No. 2 Senate Republican. A senior White House aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the administration's position, said the plan is for Trump to sign the legislation McConnell is introducing. That would represent a major defeat for Trump on his signature issue, the U.S.-Mexico border wall he long insisted Mexico would pay for but has demanded $5 billion in taxpayer money to fund. And it's an abandonment of his stance from a week ago, when he claimed he would be "proud" to shut down the government to get his wall money. Trump has oftened changed his mind or threatened to veto bills at the last minute, so a shutdown is still possible. Trump continued to assert over Twitter on Wednesday that the wall would be built, insisting Mexico would pay for it via the renegotiated North America trade deal and that the military would build it. The legality of such an approach is in question, and Schumer insisted Democrats would not let it happen. It's also unclear how the trade deal would mean Mexico is paying for the wall. McConnell blamed the outcome on Democrats after they turned down a GOP offer on Tuesday that would have provided $1.6 billion for border barriers and another $1 billion for Trump to spend on other immigration priorities. "Faced with this intransigence - with Democrats' failure to take our borders seriously - Republicans will continue to fulfill our duty to govern," McConnell said. "That's why we will soon take up a simple measure that will continue government funding into February: So we can continue this vital debate after the new Congress has convened." Schumer spoke on the floor shortly thereafter, saying: "I'm glad the leader thinks the government should not shut down over the president's demands for a wall, and Democrats will support this CR." A CR is a "continuing resolution" extending government funding. The Senate could pass the measure as soon as Wednesday and the House by Thursday, marking a humbling end to the 115th Congress and two years of unified GOP control of Washington. About 25 percent of government funding would run out at the end of Friday absent action by Congress and Trump. "One way or the other, we will win on the Wall!" Trump said in a morning tweet. In another, he sought to make the case that because of "large scale criminal and drug inflow" the military would be justified in building a border wall. Just last week, Trump told Democratic congressional leaders that he'd be "proud" to shut down the government to get his wall money. But in recent days, Democrats have held firm against his demand, and Republicans have appeared increasingly eager to avoid a partial shutdown heading into the Christmas holiday. During a television appearance before McConnell's announcement Wednesday morning, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway insisted Trump had not softened his stance on the wall but said the White House wanted to see what Congress would produce. "The president has said he's willing to do what he has to do to get that border security, including a government shutdown," she said on Fox News's "Fox & Friends." "Now we'll see what the Senate and the House, what they come together and present to the president. We don't know what's going to make it to his desk." She said that while Congress had worked successfully with Trump on other issues, lawmakers seemed to be "walking away" on border security. She also reiterated the White House's view that it could redirect money from other areas, a strategy that has limits given congressional powers over appropriations. "There are other ways for him to get that money," Conway said. "He's not going to back down." Multiple budget experts said it would be illegal for Trump to take money from the Pentagon and redirect it toward the construction of a wall. At a minimum, such a change would require the approval of at least four congressional committees, two of which will be controlled by Democrats in two weeks. "If Congress did not appropriate money to build a wall, you cannot just use other unrelated appropriations to do that," said Todd Harrison, director of defense budget analysis at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Schumer said Democrats would not allow it to happen. "Let me be very clear. The administration cannot reprogram funds appropriated by Congress for the full wall without our assent," Schumer said on the Senate floor. "To do so would violate Congress' Article One powers. They cannot do it on their own and the House and Senate will not approve a wall from reprogrammed funds or anything else. It won't happen." If Trump did order the military to build a wall anyway, Democrats or landowners could file a lawsuit and seek an immediate injunction to halt the construction. Trump has also not disclosed how he plans to deal with all the private property that runs along the border in Texas. If he orders the military to effectively seize that land through eminent domain it would open a host of additional legal issues. Congress passed a spending bill for military programs that runs through September 2019, giving the White House even less flexibility in reappropriating existing funds. But White House officials have been scouring the budget rules for weeks and could try to combine a number of unrelated programs in a way that helps with the construction of a barrier. They haven't specified how they would do that though. Congress has passed several spending bills in the past year that allowed the administration to repair and rebuild existing portions of border walls and even add some new barriers, but these projects have fallen far short of the scope Trump sought during the campaign. A partial government shutdown would be the third this year, after Congress's terminal budget dysfunction forced two brief shutdowns in January and February before lawmakers managed to get their spending bills back on track. But that effort was derailed again in recent fighting over the border, as Trump demanded taxpayer funds for a wall he had long claimed Mexico would pay for. In one of his tweets Wednesday, Trump again asserted that Mexico would be paying for the wall "indirectly" through a pending trade deal with Canada and Mexico - a concept his advisers have struggled to explain. White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Tuesday that funding would come from new revenue to the Treasury Department triggered by economic growth, but this would be very hard to measure with any precision, if at all. House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) said on Fox News Wednesday that Trump could use his State of the Union address late in January to make his case for the wall, as well as to hammer Democrats for blocking funding for it. If the negotiation is going to go until February, one of the good things about that is the State of the Union will be right before that next funding resolution, which means the president has a real good opportunity to go to the country, make a case at the State of the Union for why Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are on the wrong side of this issue, not wanting to keep our country safe, while the president is fighting to build the wall, Scalise said. ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) A New York state senator apologized Tuesday for what he called a poor choice of words after sending a tweet to a legislative staffer urging her to kill herself. Democrat Kevin Parker's tweet to Republican Senate aide Candice Giove consisted of only two words: "Kill yourself!" It came after Giove took to Twitter to accuse Parker of misusing a Senate parking placard in Manhattan. Parker quickly deleted the tweet and later apologized in another message sent to Giove. Messages were left with his office. First elected in 2002, the Brooklyn lawmaker won re-election last month and was recently named the incoming chairman of the Senate Energy Committee. "I used a poor choice of words," he wrote. "Suicide is a serious thing and and (sic) should not be made light of." Commenters on Twitter quickly condemned the remarks, with some urging Parker to resign. The Senate's incoming leader, Democrat Andrea Stewart-Cousins, released a statement welcoming Parker's apology. "I was disappointed in Senator Parker's tweet," Stewart-Cousins wrote. "Suicide is a serious issue and should not be joked about in this manner. I am glad that he has apologized." Giove is a spokeswoman for the Senate's Republican conference. The Senate's Republican leader, Long Island Sen. John Flanagan, called on Parker's Democratic colleagues to "reprimand" him for the comments. There is simply no place for discourse like this in politics, in government, or anywhere, Flanagan said. It took Robb Lawson until he was 45 to finally confront a dark memory from his days as a Boy Scout. Lawson was a teenager at the time, a member of a troop in Georgia, picked to attend a wilderness challenge to win entry in the Scouts' prestigious Order of the Arrow. He recalls that he wasn't feeling well, and a trip leader took him to a tent and raped him. The lawsuit he filed against the Boy Scouts of America in 2016 represented a personal turning point for Lawson. For the Boy Scouts, his story reflects the nationwide scandal and financial stakes that have pushed the 108-year-old organization to consider filing for bankruptcy. Last week, Chief Scout Executive Michael Surbaugh acknowledged media reports that the group was considering Chapter 11 protection, saying it's "exploring all options available" to ensure that scouting programs continue uninterrupted. Nothing's been decided, said Boy Scouts spokeswoman Effie Delimarkos in an email. "It's due diligence for an organization whose motto is 'be prepared' to explore all of our opportunities and pathways forward." The Scouts are fighting hundreds of claims, a rash of litigation fueled by the public emergence in 2012 of the organization's own meticulous records of thousands of sexual abuse and misconduct allegations. BSA executives say the documents-known as the "ineligible volunteer files"-were part of their system for protecting kids by weeding out those who shouldn't have been allowed to work with them. Plaintiffs and their lawyers call it something else: evidence of a massive cover-up that endangered other children and, in the words of Lawson's suit, "put scouting's image and financial interests-its 'brand'-ahead of the safety of the scouts." Already under pressure from declining enrollment, the Scouts have worked to minimize the financial impact of sex abuse litigation. The group has paid more than $11 million to the law firm leading its legal defense and has doubled its level of insurance reserves since the records were made public. The group has also raised dues and, in the interest of reaching a new audience, opened its programming to girls starting next year, when the traditional scouting program will be renamed Scouts BSA. It's also in court with its insurance companies, which argue that they shouldn't have to pay claims related to abuse that the Scouts could have reasonably prevented. BSA and several councils sued the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co. and First State Insurance Co. in Texas for $13.5 million in June, after the insurers argued that BSA's own records showed the organization hadn't done enough to warn or protect kids. These weren't unrelated incidents, according to the insurers, but all the result of the organization's failure to warn parents of the risk. In a different legal dispute, insurers are refusing to pay for sex-abuse settlements and legal defense fees, arguing that the events weren't accidents, or even unforeseen. "We have a social and moral responsibility to fairly compensate victims who suffered abuse during their time in Scouting, and we also have an obligation to carry out our mission to serve youth, families and local communities," Surbaugh said in his statement. "At no time in our history have we knowingly allowed a sexual predator to work with youth, and we always seek to act swiftly when alerted to abuse allegations." At the same time, the organization has lobbied lawmakers in various states to limit its exposure - seeking to defeat measures that would give child victims more time to claim damages as adults. Last year, the Boy Scouts spent almost $950,000 on lobbying, four times its average over the previous five years. The group doesn't say how all of that money was spent, but the increase was enough to draw the scrutiny of nine members of Congress, who expressed concern about the nature of the group's advocacy. More kids participate in the Boy Scouts than in almost any other American organization. Even after years of declining enrollment, more than 2 million youth participated in its programs in 2017, where they were supervised by 889,000 adult leaders. By some measures, its reach dwarfs that of the U.S. Catholic church, which has been reckoning with its own history of systemic abuse: There are fewer kids in American Catholic schools than in Scouts programs, and grownup volunteers outnumber practicing priests in the U.S. by more than 20 to 1. Since the 1980s, the Boy Scouts have made active efforts to address and prevent sex abuse, Delimarkos said. Volunteers have to pass background checks and complete youth-protection training every two years. Rules prohibit one-on-one contact between adults and kids, on social media and in person. All volunteers and employees are required to go to law enforcement with any allegations or suspicions of abuse. There's a 24-hour help line for reporting concerns and violations, and staff members are available to support victims and their families. "It's good that they're trying to address it," says Lawson, whose case awaits a judge's ruling on whether his claims against the Boy Scouts as an organization can move forward. "But I don't know how you atone for the past as well." In personal-injury law, victims typically have a finite amount of time to seek damages. For a car accident or a slip-and-fall, that makes sense. Those injuries and related damages are readily apparent and describable. Survivors of sexual assault, especially those who were victimized as children, sometimes need decades to come forward, let alone press charges or seek damages. As the last 18 months have cast in sharp relief, even adults with power, fame and money are often loath to point a finger at an abuser. "Look at how hard it is for adults to come forward," says Steven Berkowitz, a child and adolescent psychiatrist and visiting professor in psychiatry at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. "There are so many factors and obstacles and difficulties in our legal system and otherwise, why would you put yourself through that?" In recognition of the obstacles for child victims, states have responded with laws that effectively give survivors more time to sue. Washington became the first to change its statute of limitations: Since 1988, victims of child sex abuse have been able to bring claims within three years of the act, or three years from the time they remember the abuse or realize its damaging effects. In some parts of the U.S., survivors can now bring claims into their 30s and 40s. Several states have created opportunities, often referred to as look-back windows, to seek justice for older cases. California, Delaware, Minnesota and Hawaii are among those that have given plaintiffs limited time periods of one to three years to bring lawsuits that would have otherwise been barred. All told, about 3,525 cases have been filed that would have otherwise been too old, according to Child USA, an advocacy group that tracks legal protections for children. Even when they can't overcome the statute of limitations for personal injury, some plaintiffs' lawyers have gotten creative and, increasingly, judges have been receptive. In Idaho, Montana, Iowa and Oregon, courts have allowed plaintiffs to sue for fraud, using the Boy Scouts' records as evidence that the organization knew about, and covered up, a pervasive sex-abuse problem. For fraud claims, the statute of limitations starts only when victims discover the alleged fraud. 'The Ordeal' provides Scouts with little food and requires them to sleep alone Much of the litigation explosion traces to a case that began in 2007, when six men in Oregon sued the Boy Scouts, alleging abuse at the hands of an assistant scoutmaster in the 1980s. At the time, Oregon allowed victims to file suit up to their 26th birthday or three years from when they discovered the connection between their childhood abuse and their injuries. The state later extended the statute of limitations for victims to age 40. During the first trial in the Oregon suits, the jury was allowed to read thousands of the Boy Scouts' internal records related to abuse. This was a first; no previous jury or plaintiff had seen the scope and detail of how the organization handled sexual-misconduct allegations. The jury awarded plaintiff Kerry Lewis more than $19 million in damages. The case brought new national attention to the BSA's problem with child abuse-and eventually, the group's efforts to shield its internal records from public view unraveled. In 2012, Oregon forced the release of the files presented as evidence in the trial: a list of more than 1,200 men alleged to have been involved in sexual abuse or misconduct between 1965 and 1985, as documented and tracked by the national organization. Survivors could suddenly see for themselves that their experience wasn't anomalous. One man who would eventually scroll through an online database of the files was Robb Lawson. In 2015, he began his own investigation of what happened to him in the Boy Scouts. He found an entry for Gainesville, Georgia, his hometown, with no name listed. It also contained a troop number that didn't exist in Gainesville, and no further documentation except a year: 1995. With about 40,000 people, Gainesville is a small place, and smaller still for Lawson, whose great-great-grandfather, great-grandfather and mother had all served as mayor. Together with his lawyer, Lawson started asking around. It didn't take long to come up with a name for the trip leader Lawson remembered: R. Fleming Weaver, a deacon in the First Baptist Church of Gainesville and, for more than a decade, a scout troop leader in the area. In 2015, Lawson got a legal opening to sue Weaver when Georgia instituted a two-year look-back window. Weaver, now in his mid-80s, denies Lawson's claims. His lawyer declined to comment. The Georgia look-back window did not apply to institutions, but Lawson filed suit against the Boy Scouts as well, alleging the group engaged in racketeering and conspiracy by covering up Weaver's actions and hiding the widespread abuse in other troops. He also alleged the group was creating a public nuisance: "Despite knowing that child predators operate within their organizations, BSA and the Northeast Georgia Council continue to hold themselves out as organizations of integrity and safety and continue to actively solicit new members." Lawson's lawyer, Esther Panitch, says that the Boy Scouts have a file of accusations against Weaver dating to his time as a troop leader before he moved to Georgia, but the BSA hasn't turned the records over. The organization has said in court filings only that "it has since acquired knowledge that Weaver had been accused of sexually abusing Scouts in other troops" prior to his work with Troop 26 in Gainesville. The Boy Scouts asked the court to dismiss the charges, arguing that the claims are too old, and that Georgia's look-back window applied only to cases against people, not institutions. The judge partially agreed, though he hasn't yet ruled on the conspiracy and public nuisance claims, which have a longer shelf life. "We are damned determined to explore any possible avenue toward getting the Boy Scouts to be held responsible," says Panitch. "The problem is they are still hiding the files. There's been a reckoning in the country, and the Boy Scouts are still not owning what they did." In 2017, a new proposal with the potential to boost Lawson's case began making its way through the Georgia legislature: It would have opened a one-year look-back window for claims against institutions that "intentionally or with conscious indifference concealed evidence" of abuse. The Boy Scouts hired several lobbyists to fight the measure. After passing the state House unanimously last February, it died in the Senate judiciary committee. The BSA takes pride in the political success of its graduates. By its own tally, 150 members of Congress were scouts or volunteered as adults. It is also one of a relative handful of organizations to have a congressional charter, along with the U.S. Olympic Committee and a slew of veterans groups. Advocates for statute of limitations reform say there's new hope for success. The New York State Senate, the stumbling block in previous efforts, has switched from Republican to Democratic control. And in California, Jerry Brown, who has twice vetoed such legislation since 2013, will soon be replaced by governor-elect Gavin Newsom. At the federal level, congressional oversight is typically pretty minimal, but last month, a handful of representatives asked the Boy Scouts to answer questions about allegations that the group shielded volunteers it knew to be predators and reports of its efforts to stymie look-back proposals in Georgia, Michigan and New York. "As BSA prepares to welcome girls and young women into its programs, we are concerned about what your position means for the safety and well-being of these future recruits," Rep. Jackie Speier, a California Democrat, and eight other representatives wrote in a letter dated Nov. 20. They requested information on safety procedures and reporting mechanisms, and additional precautions the organization may be putting in place as it tries to attract girls into the ranks. In response, the Scouts plan to ask Congress for federal support to advance child safety, according to Delimarkos, including allowing youth-services organizations to share information about individuals who have been removed from their programs for alleged inappropriate conduct-even if the individuals have not been arrested or convicted. Meanwhile, the Boy Scouts continue to confer the Order of the Arrow on boys who best exemplify the Scout Oath and Law in their daily lives. It begins with a mandatory induction ceremony, still called, as it was in Lawsons childhood, the Ordeal - a camping trip that provides little food and requires participants to sleep alone at night. Scouts are expected to maintain silence the entire time. Canada's foreign service confirmed that a third national was being held in China, the National Post newspaper reported, citing a statement from Global Affairs Canada. An agency spokesperson provided no further details, and drew no link between the case and those of two other Canadians detained last week in China, the National Post said. The Canadian Embassy in Beijing referred questions of the third case to public relations staff in Ottawa, who didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday. The report will likely fuel anxiety among Canadians traveling in China after the country's spy agency detained a former diplomat and a man who helped organize tourist trips to North Korea. The cases follow Canada's Dec. 1 arrest of Huawei Technologies Co. Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou as part of a U.S.-led extradition bid, although Beijing has deflected questions about any link between the detentions and the Chinese executive's case. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told a regular briefing in Beijing on Wednesday that she wasn't aware of the report of a third detained Canadian. A faxed request for comment sent to the Ministry of Public Security wasn't immediately answered. The moves have prompted people on both sides to reconsider travel to each others countries. The national Canadian body that markets the country as a tourist destination is halting new advertisements in China, CBC News reported Wednesday. Egypt announced on Saturday the discovery of a well-preserved ancient tomb of a royal priest and his family. Authorities said that that the tomb is a one of a kind find because of its perfect condition. Dates Back To Egypt's Fifth Dynasty The 4,400-year-old tomb was discovered in Saqqara, which served as a vast ancient burial ground, or necropolis, for the ancient Egyptian capital Memphis. Today, the city is a tourist attraction drawing big crowds who visit the place to admire its pyramids and the remnants of ancient Egypt civilization. Egypt's minister of antiquities Khaled al-Anani said that the newly-discovered tomb dates back to the rule of Neferirkare Kakai, the third king of the fifth dynasty of ancient Egypt. The fifth dynasty, which lasted from 2,500 B.C. to about 2,350 B.C., ruled not long after the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza. Royal Priest The tomb is the final resting place of the royal priest Wahtye. Excavation officials said that Wahtye loved his mother very much as suggested by the artifacts in the tomb. The tomb has two levels filled with statues and colorful drawing of the priest and his family. Mostafa Waziri, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said that there were mentions of the name of the priest's mother almost everywhere. One Of A Kind Find The tomb measures 10 meters long, 3 meters wide and under 3 meters in height. Its walls are adorned by hieroglyphs and statues of pharaohs. Waziri said that the tomb was untouched and unlooted, and described the discovery as "one of a kind in the last decades." "The color is almost intact even though the tomb is almost 4,400 years old," he said. Archaeologists who removed a last layer of debris from the tomb last week found five shafts inside, four of which were sealed. One was unsealed and has nothing inside. Archaeologists are expecting to make more discoveries once the shafts are excavated. Waziri was hopeful for one particular shaft, which he said should lead to a coffin or a sarcophagus of the tomb's owner. 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. African-American men continue to report a significant reduction in systolic blood pressure a year after signing up to interventions held in barbershops. A Barbershop Intervention In a study led by the late Ronald Victor, a professor of medicine at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, a total of 319 African-American men with an average systolic blood pressure of 152.4 mm Hg experienced an intervention in 52 participating barbershops in Los Angeles. During the experiment, trained pharmacists assisted with testing and treating men who had high blood pressure. After six months, those who were involved saw a significant drop in their blood pressure. On Monday, Dec. 17, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center published a follow-up study to see if the changes observed in the first six months of the experiment have been sustained after 12 months. They found that the men who were involved in the experiment continued to improve their health. For the next phase of the experiment, the researchers decreased the number of pharmacists available in barbershops. Despite the absence of in-person pharmacists, however, the participants' average systolic blood pressure dropped to 123.8 mm Hg. Why Barbershop Intervention Works According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, less than 120 mm Hg of systolic blood pressure is considered normal. Meanwhile, those who have 120-139 mm Hg systolic blood pressure are considered to be at risk. African-American men are also at a higher risk of developing high blood pressure compared to people from other ethnicities. Part of the problem stems from the fact that they are less likely to see their doctors for diagnosis and treatment. Bringing the intervention in barbershops considered to be social hubs within the African-American men proved to be an effective way to get them to care for their health. The researchers report that, even when they were not scheduled to get a haircut, participants ended up coming to the barbershops anyway to see a pharmacist. "A lot of times you walk in and people are hanging out, not getting their hair cut but watching TV, or watching a game or playing cards," explained Ciantel Blyler, lead author of the study and one of the pharmacists who assisted the participants. "It was easy to convince them to come see me for 30 minutes." The study was published in the journal Circulation. 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Not to be outdone by the likes of OnePlus and Vivo, Lenovo has now also announced its latest flagship that's all beastly and phenomenally spec'd. The premium device boasts a whopping 12 GB of RAM, which follows and outpaces the footsteps of a couple of recently announced phones, the OnePlus 6T McLaren Edition and Vivo Nex Dual Display, each with 10 GB of RAM. Lenovo didn't pull any punches with the Z5 Pro GT, equipping it with as much as 512GB of onboard storage and the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 chipset, ensuring flagship-level quality through and through. The only unfortunate thing is that it won't ship with a 5G radio, unlike OnePlus' forthcoming device, which is one of the only few announced phones to be powered by the newest Snapdragon processor. Lenovo Z5 Pro GT And Z5 Pro The Z5 Pro GT has a sibling, the Z5 Pro, and while both handsets look practically identical from afar, the red metallic frame around the former's screen does plenty enough to distinguish it, not to mention, the red rims around both main cameras and the carbon fiber pattern beneath the glass on the back. Lenovo Z5 Pro GT Specs The specs are nothing short of impressive. There's a massive 6.39-inch display on the front, with a resolution of 2,340 x 1,080. It's an AMOLED screen, too, which means it can showcase brighter and more vivid colors than a typical LCD. On the back are 16-megapixel and 24-megapixel dual rear cameras, and there's also a dual camera system consisting of a 16-megapixel and 8-megapixel combo on the front for more dynamic selfies. A respectable 3,350 mAh battery will keep everything juiced up for several hours each day. There's also NFC and dual nano SIM slots. Lenovo skipped the headphone jack this time. There is, however, a USB Type-C-to-headphone jack dongle included in the box. Unfortunately, some sacrifices had to be made to keep the bezels as thin as possible. The earpiece and the front cameras are separated from the front panel via a sliding mechanism in which users will have to slide the phone to receive calls or take selfies. Even more unfortunate is the fact that the phone lacks some US-friendly LTE bands, making it impossible to use in certain regions. In any case, pre-orders for the Lenovo Z5 Pro GT on Jan. 15, 2019. Don't count on it coming to the United States, though. 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Based in Dallas, this vehicle provided satellite connections, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone service, video capabilities and SMART board availability in the Merrimack Valley area of Massachusetts following natural gas explosions there in September; and at Mexico Beach, Fla., after Hurricane Michael damaged the city extensively in October. It also offers conference room seating; internal and external TV or video monitors; and expanded exterior seating via an attachable inflatable tent that can be heated and cooled by the trailers own temperature system. Satellite hardware from iDirect, designed to Verizon standards, enables exterior connectivity while a wireless access point ensures wireless access inside the trailer. For night operations, theres red night vision lighting that enables meetings without temporarily compromising safety officials eyesight when they step outside. The trailer is self-contained via its own generator for about five days before it must be refueled. Periodically, it visits cities like Sacramento to build awareness. On Monday, officials from the Department of Motor Vehicles headquarters tested their ability to reissue drivers licenses and ID information via the trailer and their own applications, to demonstrate how it might be done during an emergency. Designed to be adaptive and autonomous, this trailer like similar pieces of Verizon equipment operates on the assumption it may be deployed to an area where, following a disaster, connectivity is minimal at best. With that in mind, it can communicate 22,000 miles up to a satellite, then down to whichever of the companys three ground stations is best for the situation. But if existing Verizon service is still available, the trailer can also communicate across the companys 4G LTE network a capability added during the last couple of years. Shiny and gray with a 30-foot satellite mast that emphasizes communication, Verizons Tactical Mobile Command Vehicle was in Sacramento Monday and today to network with local authorities and businesses. But its eight semi-truck-sized wheels revealed its more urgent mission: Just this year, its moved across the country at least twice to connect governments during major emergencies.The trailer, built two to three years ago, is billed as a Community Connection Center per lettering on its exterior that also highlights access to free phone charging, email and Internet access; and news and information. It's capable of speeds of 100 Mbps receiving and 30 Mbps transmitting. But for the public sector, this 43-foot-long, roughly $800,000 road warrior has a far deeper significance. Offering connections to Verizons MPLS network via links to one of four satellites, trailers like this are part of the companys larger landscape of mobile connectivity offerings it has deployed since Hurricane Andrew in 1992, with an increasing depth of service: Are you looking for some of the Best DNS Servers for Gaming. to enhance your gaming experience? Well, you came to the right place because here, in this article, we are providing you with the 10 Best DNS Servers for Gaming. But before moving further we must be familiar with what DNS servers are What is a DNS Server? The term DNS stands for Domain Name System. Its basically known as the Phonebook of the internet because humans cant access information online through IP addresses, they have to remember the Domain names such as Google.com or Wikipedia.org. On the other hand, Web browsers interact through IP (Internet Protocol) addresses only and the DNS Systems translates those Domain names to IP addresses so that browsers can load the content. How does DNS work? The DNS (Domain name system) server converts the Domain names (example techworm.net ) to Equivalent IP addresses (such as 192.168.1.1). IP addresses are similar like our home addresses. For example, if someone wants to visit us then they need to follow the right address in order to reach us. Similarly, if someone wants to visit a particular website then they need to follow the right IP address of that server on which the website is stored. Related Best Public DNS Servers Top 10 DNS Servers for Gaming DNS Primary DNS Server Secondary DNS Server Google DNS Server 8.8.8.8 8.8.4.4 Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 1.0.0.1 OpenDNS 208.67.220.220 208.67.222.222 Comodo DNS 8.26.56.26 8.20.247.20 Level3 209.244.0.3 209.244.0.4 Quad9 9.9.9.9 149.112.112.112 OpenNIC 23.94.60.240 128.52.130.209 DYN 216.146.35.35 216.146.36.36 Safe DNS 195.46.39.39 195.46.39.40 DNS.Watch 82.200.69.80 84.200.70.40 The first on our list is Google DNS Server. Its the worlds leading, and amongst largest DNS Server available online. Trusted by billions of people across the globe, Google DNS Server has become the most popular option, as the best DNS for gaming. The biggest feature of Google DNS Server is that it boosts up the browsing experience with enhanced security and gaming experience with lag free and smooth gaming. So if anyone wants to use it they just have to configure the DNS settings of their network just by simply following these IP addresses: Preferred DNS Server: 8.8.8.8 Alternate DNS Server: 8.8.4.4 2. Cloudflare DNS Second, on the list is Cloudflare DNS which has a coverage spanning across 250 cities around the world. Cloudflare is used by 10% of the websites as a reverse proxy for protection against attacks on the web servers and also provides extra load-bearing capacity. It comes with several features that make it a good choice as a DNS server for gaming, which also includes: Built-in DNSSEC that protects users from DNS spoofing, preventing the hijacking of records DNS lookup speed of 11mg on average, being amongst the top in the world Optional WARP app that creates a secure connection over your standard network tunnel for additional security They also provide 24/7/365 support across the board for any issues regarding their servers or troubleshooting of any nature. Preferred DNS Server: 208.67.222.222 Alternate DNS Server: 208.67.220.220 Our third recommendation in this list is Open DNS. Its a free cloud-delivered network security service that provides shielding against the dangerous attacks over the network devices. It also offers two free solutions for personal customers: OpenDNS Family Shield OpenDNS Home. The main purpose of this is to provide the users with faster and safer internet with almost downtime limited to zero. And at last, it also offers a smooth gaming experience. In order to use this Open DNS server, one should configure their Domain Name System settings to the following IP addresses. Preferred DNS Server: 208.67.222.222 Alternate DNS Server: 208.67.220.220 Comodo Secure DNS service is the most reliable DNS Service available online. It delivers the fastest and most dependable internet browsing experience to its users. Speedier DNS means much faster gaming experience and its a fact. So, In order to use Comodo secure DNS, you have to configure the DNS settings of your networks by using following DNS IP addresses. Preferred DNS Server: 8.26.56.26 Alternate DNS Server: 8.20.247.20 The next very popular DNS Service on our list is Level3. It is considered as the best after Google and Open DNS service provider. In order to use this level3 DNS server, one should configure their Domain Name System settings to the following IP addresses. Favored DNS Server: 209.244.0.3 Exchange DNS Server: 209.244.0.4 6. Quad9 DNS Quad9 provides a DNS with an in-built filter and monitor that looks for malicious activities on the network. This DNS blocks all malwares of all nature from getting on the network tunnel and entering your device. It looks up malicious names from a centralized name and matches against incoming packets for taking appropriate action. The Swiss-based Quad9 foundation has 150 DNS resolve clusters across 90 countries that helps in reducing latency and offering maximum possible speed. Preferred DNS Server 9.9.9.9 Alternate DNS Server 149.112.112.112 The next on the list in OpenNic and like many other DNS Servers OpenNic is the best alternative of your default DNS Server. However, the best part is it will protect your laptop/pc from attackers and even from the government. Hence maintaining your privacy at a very high level. So if you want to use it set your preferred and alternate DNS servers to be: Preferred DNS Server 46.151.208.154 Alternative DNS Server 128.199.248.105 Similar like other mentioned above options, DYN offers the same fast and secure web browsing experience to its users. With smoother browsing, it also protects your information from most phishing attacks and hackers. So in order to use it, all you need is to set your preferred and alternate DNS servers to: Preferred DNS Server 216.146.35.35 Alternate DNS Server 216.146.36.36 Another very known DNS Service called Safe DNS is the best option for those who like to protect their Laptop/PC from attacks. In order to use it, one can set their preferred and alternate DNS servers to: Preferred DNS Server 195.46.39.39 Alternate DNS Server 195.46.39.40 Last but definitely not the least DNS.watch is the free DNS service in the list. It provides uncensored, fast and stable web browsing experience and that too for free of cost. In order to use it, one should set their preferred and alternate DNS servers to: Preferred DNS Server 84.200.69.80 Alternate DNS Server 84.200.70.40 Also Read Best Discord Bots To Enhance Your Server Conclusion So this was all regarding the 10 Best DNS Servers for Gaming. If you find it useful then do let us know in the comment section below, would love to hear that. Since its advent in 2003, Skype has become an industry standard when it comes to video calling on Windows PC. In addition to video calls, Skype is also a full-fledged messaging and voice calling application that is available for smartphones as well. Even after its immense popularity, Skype is still not the most feature-rich and secure video calling application. So these are some of the best alternatives to Skype that will definitely enhance your video calling experience. Best Free Skype Alternatives 1. WhatsApp The first Skype alternative for PC that you are probably already using is WhatsApp. This immensely popular messaging application also doubles up as a reliable video-calling application. WhatsApp is available for both smartphones and computers. A majority of your friends and family members are already using WhatsApp, which eliminates the need for signing up for new services. WhatsApp now supports group video calls, using which you can communicate with up to four friends at once. Overall WhatsApp is a reliable Skype alternative. DOWNLOAD WhatsApp 2. Google Hangouts Google Hangouts is another popular video calling service that is mainly used by various organizations to interact with co-workers. Similar to WhatsApp Google Hangouts is also available for smartphones and computers. Using Google Hangouts you can hold a video call with up to 25 participants. So as to invite and connect with different users you only need their email address or phone number. During calls, Google Hangouts offers impressive audio and video quality and the connection is secure as well. DOWNLOAD Google Hangouts 3. LINE The next feature-rich Skype alternative is LINE. This alternative to Skype has a very well developed UI and cross-platform support offers a seamless messaging experience. Similar to other Skype alternatives on the list, LINE can also be used for video calls, voice calls, and text messaging. Nifty features like Keep, Animated Stickers, LINE Today, Face Play, Stories, and Live help LINE to stand out from the crowd. Lastly, using LINE you can also share all sort of media and document files with your contacts. DOWNLOAD LINE 4. Facebook Messenger The next best Skype alternative that you are possibly already using is Facebook Messenger. Using Messenger you can communicate with any of your Facebook friends and the quality of video calls is impressive as well. In addition to video calls, Messenger also allows users to have voice calls with their friends. Messenger is available as a full-fledged application for Windows, iOS, Android, and MacOS. DOWNLOAD Facebook Messenger 5. Tox Tox is one of the most secure Skype alternative that has gained popularity in recent years. Well, if security and privacy is your major concern then Tox is the best Skype alternative for you. Since Tox is open-source it is completely advertisement free. Similar to other Skype alternatives, Tox also offers messaging, file sharing, and voice calling features. Using the Screen Sharing feature you can even share your desktop with your friends. Lastly, Tox is available for both Windows and MacOS. DOWNLOAD TOX 6. WeChat The next smartphone oriented Skype alternative is WeChat. Similar to other Skype alternatives WeChat offers voice calls, text messaging, video calls and group chats. As mentioned earlier, WeChat is a smartphone-oriented application but its still available for Windows and MacOS in their respective App Store. It is worth noting that, a smartphone is required for logging-in to WeChat Web version. WeChat allows a maximum of four participants in a group video call. To sum it all, WeChat is a reliable Skype alternative that simply gets the job done. DOWNLOAD WeChat 7. ooVoo The next capable Skype alternative on the list is ooVoo. This instant messaging application offers a great messaging experience and supports emoji, stickers, and GIFs. ooVoo supports HD video calling with up to 8 people simultaneously. The SuperClear technology helps ooVoo to optimize the quality of video calls based on your internet speed. ooVoo is available for Android, iOS, Windows, and MacOS. This feature-rich Skype alternative also doubles up as a reliable file transfer tool. DOWNLOAD ooVoo 8. Viber Viber is another impressive Skype alternative for secure video calls and messaging. Unlike other Skype alternatives, Viber allows users to play built-in games and interact with popular websites when no one is present at the moment. If you worried about privacy and security then end-to-end encryption on Viber will definitely impress you. Viber even allows users to delete seen messages. In addition to Windows, Viber is also available for MacOS and Linux. Viber is one among very few instant messaging applications that allow users to customize applications theme and overall UI based on their preferences. DOWNLOAD Viber 9. Wire If security and privacy are on top of your priority list then Wire will definitely impress you. Wire is an ideal Skype alternative for business or organization based communication needs. This application offers end-to-end encrypted audio conference call with up to 10 people. In addition to messaging and video calls, Wire also doubles up as a secure file and screen sharing tool. Since Wire is an open-source application its completely ad-free and there are no in-app purchases. Overall, Wire is a professional alternative to Skype that is used by many big companies. DOWNLOAD Wire 10. Riot The last Skype alternative on the list is Riot. Nifty features like voice and video conferencing, file sharing, notifications, and project reminders definitely help Riot to stand out from the crowd. Riot can be used on any web-browser and its available for smartphones and computers as well. Chats and calls on Riot are also end-to-end encrypted. Overall Riot is a reliable Skype alternative that simply gets the job done. DOWNLOAD Riot CONCLUSION So these were some of the best Skype alternatives that are more secure and feature-rich as compared to Skype. Do share your favorite Skype alternatives in the comments section below. Philippines, Turkey Sign MoU for T-129 Helicopter, Milgem Corvette The page you requested is only available to subscribers. 1. If you are a Premium Service subscriber, please log in here to access this story: Log-in : Password : 2. If you are not a subcriber, you can: -- buy access to this page: unlimited access for seven days costs 3.00 EUR + VAT (at 20%) if applicable. Clicking on the "Ok" button below will place the item in your shopping cart and return you to our home page, where you will be able to select additional stories. -- select additional stories and services from our home page and pay for them at the same time. -- see your shopping cart. You can also see the contents of your shopping cart at any time by clicking on the "Order" tab on the navigation bar at the top of any page, or by clicking on the "Your order" light blue link in the top right-hand corner of our home page, immediately under the log-on box. Purchases made via links on our site may earn us an affiliate commission Santa never makes a mistake. That is the credo organizers follow in putting on an annual Christmas party for North County foster children, former foster youths and their families at Solana Beach Presbyterian Church. In this years event held Saturday, Dec. 7, foster parents of about 120 families received wrapped gifts for their children to open on Christmas Day, or whichever holiday they celebrate. Solana Presbyterian Foster Youth Ministry Leadership Team at the recent Fostering Christmas Wishes event for foster parents and their children (l-r): Bill Morgan, Lorna Rammon, Gretchen Morgan, Danielle Kruger. Not pictured: Claudia Bell and Stacey Haywood. Courtesy Each of the approximately 600 presents was tailored to the wishes of the children, as related by their parents to the churchs Foster Youth Ministry volunteers in the weeks leading up to the party. We talk to the families specifically about what kind of gifts they want, said Gretchen Morgan, a foster ministry leader and chief organizer of the party. Claudia Bell, a ministry volunteer who helps coordinate the process of soliciting wish lists from parents, said foster children often receive gifts from charities that are randomly distributed rather than geared to each child. I think its important for any child to get a special gift they asked for and wanted for Christmas, the Encinitas resident said while supervising the gift-wrapping room Saturday. This is a way of helping them feel a little more normal since they dont have a chance to have Christmas with their birth parents. Said Morgans husband, Bill, also an event volunteer: Its quite a task to make sure we get it right. The Del Mel couple and Bell were among more than 100 volunteers from several nonprofit organizations, including Safe Families for Children and Just in Time for Foster Youth, who assisted in staging what was a multi-faceted fiesta in the churchs Childrens Ministry Center. While a platoon of helpers busied themselves downstairs wrapping items donated through the ministrys outreach efforts, others assisted upstairs in engaging children of all ages in games, arts and crafts. Activities included making holiday cards and snow globes, decorating tree ornaments and cookies, and water painting. A large table offered fruit juice, water, cheese and vegetable trays and desserts. While the children played, the parents were escorted downstairs to pick up their pre-assigned wrapped gifts whose total value is probably in the tens of thousands of dollars, Bill Morgan said. Parents also could choose among hundreds of donated sweaters as well as books contributed by Friends of the Solana Beach Library. These are the rock star families, Morgan said. The most important thing about this is to provide support for foster families because theres not a lot of support for them. ... Most of us wouldnt attempt to do what theyre doing. Escondido resident Elda Martinez, the mother of one foster child and four adopted children, said she has attended the party over the last few years. This is an amazing project that they do, she said. The kids have fun, while we do our shopping. To kids, getting any gift is incredible but for them to get a gift they want and like is even better. Im always very humbled that the community has such a great heart. It makes me happy, and (the volunteers) are all smiling. It gets us all warm and fuzzy. In addition to families that now rear foster children, young adults who were former foster children are invited to attend the party through Just in Time. The countywide group is devoted to helping those who turn 18 and leave the foster care system. It gives support to this particular demographic and enables them to come back into the community, said Just in Time coordinator Steven Silva, who was a foster child himself outside of San Diego County. These are not only survivors, theyre thrivers, Morgan said of the foster children-turned-adults. Theyve had to put in a lot of work to get where they are. The Just in Time clients who attend the celebration, many of whom now have their own children, received stockings packed with several hundred dollars worth of items and gift cards. San Diego resident Tianisha Davis, a former foster child who is the mother of a 19-month-old son, was appreciative of the gifts, especially because of a limited Christmas budget. So, I dont have to freak out like I cant get this and I cant get that, she said. Its been a pretty good day. Carmel Valley resident and church member Andrea Cunningham, who was lending a hand in distributing the stockings, said this was the sixth year she has participated in the party. Theres just such a warm feeling, she said. Its festive and helps me to remember the true meaning of Christmas. Volunteer Carolyn Taylor working on Christmas craft with an event participant. Courtesy Volunteers checking in foster families to the event. Courtesy The man accused of killing a Denham Springs couple in October has been extradited to Louisiana after his arrest in Kentucky last month. Longtime Denham Springs residents Eugene "Frank" Gurley, 72, and Patricia Gurley, 70, were found beaten to death in their company's building Oct. 31. An autopsy found they died of blunt force trauma. Authorities called the crime heinous and senseless. +10 In killing of elderly couple in Denham Springs, police identify person of interest; man may have fled state A couple in their 70s were found dead Tuesday at their Denham Springs pool company and police have linked a man who had lived near the busines Michael T. Collins was arrested in Scottsville, Kentucky, just days after their bodies were found following a Crimestoppers tip that indicated he was there. After awaiting extradition, he was returned to Louisiana on Tuesday, according to a news release Tuesday night from the Denham Springs Police Department. Collins didn't waive extradition, which required local authorities to obtain a "governor's warrant" for his return, the release says. Collins was booked at the Denham Springs Police Department on two counts first-degree murder, two counts automobile theft and one count of simple burglary, then transported to the Livingston Parish jail. +10 In killing of elderly couple in Denham Springs, police identify person of interest; man may have fled state A couple in their 70s were found dead Tuesday at their Denham Springs pool company and police have linked a man who had lived near the busines Top stories in Baton Rouge in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up The Gurleys owned National Pool Builders Inc., on Pete's Highway on the east side of Denham Springs. Neighbors said Collins had lived on the business' property in a trailer. He was originally from Tennessee but had been in Louisiana since at least 2016, court records show. Authorities said results from tests performed by the Louisiana State Police Crime Lab linked Collins to the crime, providing enough evidence to support a warrant for his arrest. Police said then they believed Collins had fled Louisiana in Frank Gurley's white 2016 Nissan Frontier pickup. The Kentucky State Police recovered the truck in the parking lot of a state park about 10 miles from the residence where Collins was arrested, Denham Springs police said Tuesday. Collins has a lengthy criminal record, including arrests on assault and burglary in Tennessee, and an incident in Denham Springs where he pleaded no contest to domestic abuse battery in 2016. The Gurleys were longtime Denham Springs residents, known by many for their kindness and their pool business. Frank Gurley also taught for many years at Denham Springs High School and Denham Springs Junior High. A Baton Rouge man suspected of raping a woman after the two had drinks together turned himself in and was arrested Tuesday. The arrest came about 24 hours after Baton Rouge police announced they had issued a warrant for Justin Jermaine Carter, 28. Police seek Baton Rouge man accused of raping woman after having drinks A 28-year-old Baton Rouge man is accused of raping a woman after having drinks at a local business, according to the Baton Rouge Police Department. Carter was booked into Parish Prison on one count of third-degree rape, police spokesman Sgt. Don Coppola Jr. said in a news release Tuesday evening. Carter is accused of raping a woman on or around Sept. 25. Investigators later obtained a DNA match that connected Carter to the assault, police said. He was then identified from a photo lineup. Gov. John Bel Edwards says "in all likelihood" he would oppose any attempt to shift Louisiana from its unique "jungle primary" system to a closed primary system closer to what other states have. "I think it's served us pretty well," Edwards said during his monthly call-in radio show on Wednesday. "I have no reason right now to support a move back to closed primaries." Louisiana Republican leaders have increasingly suggested that the state revert back to a closed primary system, and Democrats have suggested privately that they also are mulling the idea and could be open to a shift. Under the current "jungle" primary system, Louisiana races are decided by putting all candidates regardless of party onto one ballot. If no one gets more than 50 percent of the vote, then the top two vote-getters again, regardless of party face each other in a runoff a month later. That means elections can be decided in head-to-head matchups between two Republicans or two Democrats. The scoop on state politics in your inbox Get the Louisiana politics insider details once a week from us. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up A change to primaries that pit Republicans against each other for one nomination and Democrats against each other for an opposing nomination would require legislative action. The Legislature's next session begins in April, so it's unlikely that any change could happen before next year's statewide elections for governor, lieutenant governor and other offices, as well as elections to the state House and Senate. With Jeff Landry not running for Louisiana governor, here's how race is shaping up Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry has ended speculation that he might mount a run for governor next year by announcing Wednesday that he Whoever the governor is in office -- Edwards faces challenges from Republicans Eddie Rispone and Ralph Abraham in the coming year and more could enter the race -- if legislation is successful would have an opportunity to veto the legislation. Edwards, who had not publicly staked out a position on the topic, said he hasn't had deeper discussions with those advocating for the change and suggested he'd be open to debate, but Edwards said he worries closed primaries would shift the state more toward partisanship seen on the national level. "There's less bipartisanship and much more rigid ideological partisanship," he said. "I believe the open primary has served our state well." Rep. Julie Stokes, R-Kenner, has served as chairwoman of the Sales Tax Streamlining and Modernization Commission since 2015. The commission has been trying to come up with ways to make Louisiana's sales tax less convoluted. Sixteen years ago, Alejandra Cisneros traveled to Bali and became entranced by its simplicity and beauty. The Del Mar native had found a new home. After moving to the Indonesian island, Cisneros a Torrey Pines High School graduate who had practiced architecture in San Diego for 12 years before that fateful trip began designing homes almost entirely made from antique teakwood and traditional materials. Cisneros, who lives in the town of Ubud, shares her insights on reimagining traditional homes and the thinking behind her craftsmanship in a new book, "Seen | Unseen," which was released in August. The book features stunning photos of 11 homes designed by Cisneros, as well as an interview with the architectural designer. She recently spoke about her intentions with the book, what she's learned from Bali and what made her fall in love with the Island of Gods. This Q&A has been edited and shortened for length. Seen | Unseen by Alejandra Cisneros Courtesy Q: What made you want to put this book together? A: I never ever had the idea to put the book together, at all. I used to work with an architect here in San Diego, and then I moved to Bali 16 years ago. I had just been working there quietly, very much under the radar. I do have some family members who are architects, and my cousin's husband came, and he looked at the houses and said, 'Alejandra, I think there's a book here.' ... He put me in touch with some publishers in Australia, who specialize in architecture and design books. Somehow, I ended up with this book. Q: When you went on your first trip to Bali, what made you decide to stay? A: I had been wanting to move to Mexico. That was my plan. In the 1990s, I spent a lot of time kind of going back and forth, and I couldn't quite pull that off. I decided to take a sabbatical. I had sold the house that I had remodeled and used that money to go to Asia. While I was in Thailand, I decided to visit this island that people had mentioned to me -- Bali -- and it just took my breath away. The thing about Bali that's very different from other places is the reverence for beauty. It's very much a part of their everyday lives and their spirituality. ... If you are a designer or an artist, and you show up on Bali, you can make anything. The Balinese are such talented craftspeople. ... It took a number of years to actually build a clientele. People had to trust me. I had to build my own project first so I could build my portfolio. I built my own house. Q: What was it about the architecture that drew you in? A: I kind of fell in love with these old teak structures that were ceremonial structures at the end of the last century. ... Basically, they are these wood structures that are made of teak. I decided that I would buy one. They all come apart. I saw one that they happened to have on Bali, and I decided to buy it. When it arrived, it was all taken apart. It was just a pile of wood. It looked like a big bonfire of wood. ... Slowly, I pieced it together. It's not really meant as a house. They were really meeting areas. There were no walls in between. I kind of created the walls. I bought other panels that I put in to separate the bedrooms. I decided to leave the living room completely open, so there are no doors in the living room. It's like an open pavilion. Bali is one of the few places where you can do this because it's very safe and the weather is very mild. Q: How do you come up with the designs for these structures? A: The styles can vary quite a bit depending on the clients' tastes and what they want. For instance, I did one project for a Finnish family. They had a child, so we ended up making quite a long structure with two bedrooms, two baths and a big living room in between. Q: What can people here learn from the people who live in Bali? A: From the very beginning that I arrived in Bali, I realized their great love of living with simplicity. Even though the Balinese don't exactly have a house like the ones I design, people rarely have more than a simple two-burner stove. Even restaurants have two-burner stoves. They're not at all, yet, as consumer-oriented as we are. You learn that you don't really need as much. I used to design kitchens that cost $100,000. There's nothing wrong with spending that money, but I try, in Bali, to make everything by hand as much as possible -- poured cement, countertops, the cabinets are just a two-by-four frame with whatever leftover wood we found. ... It's almost like a piece of art. We spend a lot of time crafting each little piece. Each house is completely one-of-a-kind and can't be reproduced. ... It is a little bit like a tiny house. The spirit is a tiny house spirit. Q: Where does the name 'Seen | Unseen' come into play? A: Seen | Unseen is very much the central part of Balinese spirituality. Everything that you see -- the ceremonies and everything they have going on -- isn't the important part. The really important part is what's underneath that; the unseen portion of life. I love that because it's the life force that the naked eye can't really see. That's important. I like these photos of my houses and this book about photographs of my houses, but that's not the important part. What is important is what is underneath. ... In the book, I also talk about my own personal story. My brother and I were my father's unseen family. In a way, there's kind of a full circle about that in the book, and it's the first time I talk about being my father's secret family. He had another family in Venezuela. When we were children, we were told we could have a great life as long as nobody saw us. We got that message. ... It does make you see life in a different way. We grew up very differently. We also can appreciate this other kind of life force that isn't the most readily seen. Loading Shareholders have had several issues with NAB's recently rejigged remuneration structure. Earlier this year, NAB announced it would combine long- and short-term bonuses into a single incentive for its top executives. It also ditched the link between total shareholder returns and included other metrics including conduct. Investors were particularly concerned about the bonus paid to former bank chief customer officer Andrew Hagger, who left the bank after a train wreck appearance at the royal commission. Based on the conversations with major investors in the lead-up to the meeting, Dr Henry said more than one-third of the "no" votes were due to the fact that "we have changed the design of our scheme". "Of the remainder, the 'against' votes relate to factors including the quantum of remuneration, scheme design, and how [the] board has applied the scheme, for the first time, in respect of the 2018 financial year," he said. Illustration: Matt Golding Credit: "No doubt, there are also many other reasons for shareholders registering a 'no' vote on the remuneration report this year." Dr Henry said he had been appalled at some of the evidence produced against the bank and its competitors at the banking royal commission. "We are sorry," he said. Dr Henry said NAB could have waited until after the royal commission to rejig its pay structures. A key focus of the commission has been the incentives paid to executives and more junior staff in the banking industry. "The board came to the view long before the commission started that our executive remuneration scheme was not right," Dr Henry said. Loading "It didn't put enough focus on the management of non-financial risks and conduct matters. And, there was a risk that our so-called long-term incentive scheme might even be encouraging short-term thinking and value-destroying behaviours." 'Failed capitalists' Mr Thorburn told the meeting that the royal commission had been challenging. "We have heard examples of where we have let our customers down; where we have lost their trust; where we haven't acted or fixed things quickly enough, and where we haven't got it right for all our customers, all of the time," he said. Shareholder Chris Schott took NAB to task over the bank's performance, saying the value of his shares in the bank had gone backwards over the past 10 years. Mr Schott praised Dr Henry's statements at the royal commission that there needed to be a greater discussion on the role of capitalism in society. "The board and senior managers are failed capitalists. You have destroyed billions and billions of shareholder value," Mr Schott said. "You're the unacceptable face of capitalism," he added to raucous applause from other shareholders. You have destroyed billions and billions of shareholder value. You're the unacceptable face of capitalism. NAB shareholder Chris Schott Mr Schott also took aim at the company over saying it would fight any criminal charges laid against its staff, which he said he had read in a newspaper, arguing the bank should not pay for the legal fees of any staffer accused of criminal conduct and questioned why NAB had spent $100 million on events and executive perks because of an alleged fraud against the bank. Loading Responding to this comment at the AGM, Dr Henry said: I dont know where that comment you referred to came from, I dont recall saying anything on these matters to any journalist, ever. We will see. We will await, as we should the outcome of the royal commission. We will show the royal commission that consideration. We will see what recommendations are made by the royal commission. I will say I hold the royal commission in great esteem." Dr Henry acknowledged shareholder concerns about the alleged fraud committed at the bank. Mr Thorburn's chief of staff and an external events company, the Human Group, are subject to a police investigation. Police investigation As revealed by The Age and Herald last month, Mr Thorburn took a luxury holiday to a private island in Fiji and received a thermomix arranged through the Human Group. No one has been charged as a result of the investigation and Mr Thorburn is not accused of any wrongdoing. "Andrew is a witness for the police in these inquiries. The NSW Police have asked us not to comment while they are conducting their investigation," Dr Henry said. Another shareholder, Lachlan Watts, also challenged the bank over its Human Group issues and the bank's lacklustre share price growth. It was in August that The Age made the decision to devote the first five pages of a Thursday newspaper to the deaths of four Victorian women in cases involving domestic violence, under the banner headline ''THIS MUST STOP''. With each brutal death reported in Australia since then, it is tempting to despair of the situation and our ability to make a difference. This year has seen calls for an end to gesture politics around a matter of life and death that looms large in so many areas of social breakdown, from homelessness to murder. At these moments it is crucial to remind ourselves of the progress that has been made, with the Andrews government in Victoria committed to implementation of more than 200 recommendations delivered in March 2016 by its Royal Commission into Family Violence and promising to devote $1.9 billion to tackling the issue over four years, stretching across prevention, policing, the courts and womens services. It is also essential to grasp that such violence, as tragic and as graphic as it is, is only the tip of the iceberg formed by gender inequality in our society and around the globe. Altering such a pervasive element of our social fabric is bound to take time and is not always guaranteed to generate headlines. Loading It may be too late to impress upon the current federal government that this is an issue too fundamental to our future to be left to the states. When it emerged during a Senate estimates hearing in October that Canberra would not continue to fund the Keeping Women Safe in Their Homes program because the $15.9 million over three years granted in 2015 was only ever meant to supplement state and territory spending, it not only gave the opposition a free kick Bill Shorten soon announced that, if elected, Labor would pick up the tab it also renewed questions about the Coalition's priorities. We all hope for an overflowing stocking on Christmas morning. But for most people, the biggest gift they will ever receive is an inheritance. Whether a house, a car or a share portfolio, inheritances can change lives. And as wealth grows and inheritances get larger, these intergenerational transfers will also play more of a role in shaping Australian society. Illustration: Dionne Gain Credit: National wealth has grown by $2.8 trillion or more than a third since the Global Financial Crisis. And a lot of this is in the hands of older Australians. Net wealth of people in their 60s, 70s and 80s has grown more than 40 per cent since 2004. That equates to some healthy nest eggs. The average household headed by someone older than 75 has more than $1 million in net assets. Households headed by someone 65-74 have $1.4 million. Police have released a computer-generated image of the man. Credit:Victoria Police A man who approached a Melbourne schoolgirl and offered her a lolly while she was walking home is being hunted by police. Police were told the 12-year-old girl was walking along Arthurs Creek Road, Hurstbridge, in Melbourne's north-east, on Tuesday afternoon when the man approached her about 4pm. He then offered her a lolly. The girl declined and ran away from the man, arriving home and telling one of her parents what had happened. Her parents reported the incident to police. A final year law student charged over the shooting of a Melbourne man says he did not fire the gun but has refused to identify two others with him at the time. Serdar Kilic is one of three people alleged to have turned up at the Glenroy home of Eddie Diesel on August 28 to resolve a dispute over a Mercedes. Shell casings were found at the scene matching a 9mm pistol owned by Mr Kilic but the 28-year-old says he did not use the firearm, a Supreme Court bail hearing was told on Wednesday. "He's been unco-operative in identifying further accused that are also involved but remain unknown to the police at this stage," prosecutor Mark Sontang said. Mr Diesel, who was shot in the stomach, was taken to hospital with non-life threatening injuries and kept overnight for observation. A woman has been left with an eight centimetre gash across her neck after she was robbed and assaulted while shopping during the mid-afternoon in St Kilda. The woman, in her 30s, was walking near a laneway at Inverleith Court about 3.30pm when she was approached by a man she didn't know. Port Phillip Crime Investigation Unit detectives are hoping to identify a man after a woman was robbed and assaulted with a knife in St Kilda last month. Credit:Victoria Police He demanded she give him her purse, but she refused. The man then produced a small cutting knife and slashed the woman on the neck. A Solana Beach redevelopment project jumped one of its biggest hurdles Monday, Dec. 17, as it was approved by the city council after about three years of debate and re-designs. The council with council member Peter Zahn absent unanimously approved the Solana Highlands project, following two special meetings that cumulated to about eight hours of discussion. Project plans call for the demolition of an existing 196-unit apartment complex to construct a new residential community with 260 residential units including 32 senior affordable units a clubhouse, 525 onsite parking spaces, 233 garages, landscaping, recreational amenities and an open space area on 13.41 acres of land. The project has been contested since 2015, when 15 neighbors submitted view claims against it. The city's View Assessment Commission denied the project in 2015 due to the potential impairment of private views. Representatives for H.G. Fenton, the project's developer, said in the last three years they have worked to modify buildings to negotiate with the appellants, including lowering building heights, removing buildings to open view corridors, moving from pitched to flat roofs and shifting building locations. Five claimants submitted new claims this year, with the VAC ultimately denying them Nov. 28. Four of those claimants appealed that decision, but the council also denied their appeals Monday. One appeal, by John Wilson, who has owned his home on South Nardo for 30 years, "had the most notable impacts," said Mayor David Zito. Wilson has expressed concerns with the height of "Building 13," a three-story building which he said story poles have indicated would block his views of nearby places such as the race track and ocean. John LaRaia, project manager for H.G. Fenton, has said that building's pad has already been lowered by about nine feet, and they have changed the framing method of the roof to reduce height. Additionally, changing the shape of the roof to flat reduced the height by another 4.5 feet, he said. Zito said the project should add a condition regarding controlling nearby vegetation to help maintain Wilson's open view. Additionally, council member Lesa Heebner said Building 13 should be lowered by an additional six inches, and no structures, including solar panels, should sit on top of the building. Residents living near the project urged the council to provide a landscape buffer for the project and consider a single-phased construction approach with no demolition on Saturdays. They also advocated against the complex charging residents for parking and for garages only to be used for cars, rather than as storage units. Neighbors said if the complex charges residents for parking, that would entice people to park on nearby streets, which are already crowded and riddled with traffic congestion. Adrian Davenport, who has lived on the nearby Nardo Avenue for six years, said the street is already dangerous with a curvy, steep road with parked cars and vehicles traveling at high speeds down the hill. "It's really imperative that the dangerous conditions on Nardo are not made worse," she said. Council member Judy Hegenauer advocated for the addition of traffic- calming measures on Nardo Avenue, including speed tables, to help make the street safer. Bomber Command veteran Harry Brabin, who with his crew flew 43 missions over France and Germany, has died in Paddington aged 96. He was given the French award of Chevalier in the Legion of Honour and earlier this year attended the new international Bomber Command memorial in Lincoln, England. On his 28th mission, in October 1944, his Halifax bomber was "coned" - targeted by three blinding searchlights. Expecting a shell to hit within seconds, the pilot dived steeply and changed direction. They avoided the shell but the extreme G-forces meant that both pilots had to put their feet on the dashboard and pull hard to level the plane. Brabin, who was seated under the pilots, likened the experience to being on the Big Dipper. Harold William Brabin was born in Victoria but at the age of three moved to the Manly area. His father William Brabin worked as a draftsman at the Manly Gas Company. His mother, Nellie Hitchcock, worked in the home. Harold Brabin, 95, who flew with Bomber Command in WWII. Credit:Janie Barrett Young Brabin had a carefree childhood. His Wood Street gang were a mischievous lot, pinching fruit from neighbours trees and hijacking the milkmans horse and cart. He was educated at Manly Boys High leaving school when he was 14. Denpasar: An Australian man could face the death penalty in Indonesia after being indicted for cocaine possession by a Bali court. Brendon Luke Johnsson, 43, from Brisbane, and his partner Remi Purwanti, 43, an Indonesian national, have been indicted on two counts and face two possible charges by Indonesian authorities. Despite the possibility that Johnsson could face the most severe of consequences the death penalty if found guilty, it is unlikely that a judge would impose such a harsh sanction on the Australian man for the relatively small amount of drugs in his possession. Indonesian authorities executed Bali Nine ringleaders Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan in 2015 for their part in that drug smuggling plot, but the other seven members were ultimately handed prison sentences ranging from 20 years to life in prison for attempting to smuggle more than eight kilograms of heroin to Australia. LEARN MORE: Jeep News, Reviews, Comparisons, Video and Specs LEARN MORE: Jeep Auto Show Press Pass Coverage About Jeep Jeep is an automobile marque (and registered trademark) of Chrysler. It is the oldest off-road vehicle (also sport utility vehicle - SUV) brand, with Land Rover coming in a close second. The original vehicle which first appeared as the prototype Bantam BRC became the primary light 4 wheel drive car of the US Army and allies during the World War II and postwar period. Many vehicles serving similar military and civilian roles have since been created by many nations. The first jeep prototype (the Bantam BRC) was built for the Department of the Army by American Bantam in Butler, Pennsylvania, followed by two other competing prototypes produced by Ford and Willys-Overland. The American Bantam Car Company actually built and designed the vehicle that first met the Army's criteria, but its engine did not meet the Army's torque requirements. Plus, the Army felt that the company was too small to supply the number needed and it allowed Willys and Ford to make second attempts on their designs after seeing Bantam's vehicle in action. Some people believe that Ford and Willys also had access to Bantam's technical paperwork. Quantities (1,500) of each of the three models were then extensively field tested. During the bidding process for 16,000 "jeeps", Willys-Overland offered the lowest bid and won the initial contract. Willys thus designed what would become the standardized jeep, designating it a model MB military vehicle and building it at their plant in Toledo, Ohio. Like American Bantam, Willys-Overland was a small company and, likewise, the military was concerned about their ability to produce large quantities of jeeps. The military was also concerned that Willys-Overland had only one manufacturing facility: something that would make the supply of jeeps more susceptible to sabotage or production stoppages. Based on these two concerns, the U.S. government required that jeeps also be built by the Ford Motor Company, who designated the vehicle as model GPW (G = governmental vehicle, P showed the wheelbase, and W = the Willys design). Willys and Ford, under the direction of Charles E. Sorensen (Vice-President of Ford during World War II), produced more than 600,000 jeeps containing their cost slightly above 300 dollars per unit, due to its mass-production system economy. Besides just being a "truck" the jeep was used for many other purposes. The jeep was widely copied around the world, including in France by Hotchkiss et Cie (after 1954, Hotchkiss manufactured Jeeps under license from Willys), and in Japan by Mitsubishi Motors. There were several versions created, including a railway jeep and an amphibious jeep. As part of the war effort, Jeeps were also supplied to the Soviet Red Army during World War II.During the jeep's service in Korea the name was referred to as "Just Enough Essential Parts" by the troops due to the very basic design. Californias requirement that cities and counties guarantee equal housing opportunities for all income levels reliably elicits angst among constituents of jurisdictions trying to comply with the mandate. Such is the case in Del Mar, where some civic leaders and residents went before the City Council on Monday, Dec. 17, to express concerns about potential land-use plan alterations designed to meet the states demands. I ... with all due respect, call for a public vote on changes of this magnitude, resident Arnold Wiesel said. Sanctioning zoning amendments, however, was not on the councils agenda. Rather, the citys staff asked the five-member panel whether to authorize $150,000 for conducting an environmental study. The study will analyze proposals to allow residential development, including lower-income housing, in the downtown business district and a commercial zone between downtown and the Del Mar Fairgrounds. Also, the staff asked the council if it wanted to include four public sites the Civic Center, post office, library and Del Mar Shores Park in the analysis. That could be done without additional cost to determine if they are viable for future housing. Despite opposition from eight of nine residents speaking on the issue, the council voted 5-0 to endorse the analysis of the two commercial districts. Council members also voted 3-2 to extend the review to the post office, library and Civic Center properties, while excluding the park. Mayor David Druker and newly elected City Councilwoman Terry Gaasterland cast the dissenting votes in the latter action, stating they did not want to subject other public facilities to the analysis. Completion and approval of the environmental study will set the stage for the city to enact amendments endorsed earlier this decade. The amendments would allow residential development of up to 20 units per acre, including those affordable to lower income households, in the citys two commercial zones. City officials say the amendments are needed to comply with the state housing mandates and avoid penalties for noncompliance. This is where were between a rock and hard place, because the state imposes these obligations on us and none of the above is not an option, Councilman Dwight Worden said. The opponents focused mostly on two aspects targeted for the environmental study the park and the north commercial zone. Representing Friends of Del Mar Parks, Laura DeMarco said the organization opposed the inclusion of the 5-acre Shores Park park in the analysis. She contended it contradicts the citys long-term commitment to maintaining the property as a recreational site after purchasing it from the Del Mar Union School District years ago. A section of the park is leased from the city by The Winston School, an independent sixth-through-12th-grade institution focusing on preparing students for college. It is unconscionable to me that you would even consider this, DeMarco said of the councils consideration of studying the site for housing possibilities. Council members stressed the environmental work is intended to identify the constraints on residential development in the two zones and public properties. The citys housing plan already calls for the allowance of residential development downtown and the north commercial zone. Still, such changes require going through the environmental analysis, Planning Commission review, council endorsement and California Coastal Commission approval to be instituted. 100 Days Until Brexit: Firms Watching in Horror as Clock Runs Down With just 100 days until Brexit, UK ministers met on Dec. 18 to ramp up preparations for Britains potential no-deal crash-out of the European Union. No-deal means there would be no transition, so the exit, set in law as 2300 GMT on March 29, would be abrupt. Preparations include setting aside space on ferries to ensure a regular flow of medical supplies and keeping 3,500 armed forces personnel ready to support the government with its contingency plans. But British business groups say the idea that no-deal can be managed is not credible. Businesses have been watching in horror as politicians have focused on factional disputes rather than practical steps that business needs to move forward, the heads of Britains five biggest business lobby groups said. The lack of progress in Westminster means that the risk of a no-deal Brexit is rising, said the statement y the bosses of the British Chambers of Commerce, the Confederation of British Industry, the Federation of Small Businesses, the Institute of Directors, and the main manufacturers organization EEF. The business leaders fear additional checks on the post-Brexit UK-EU border will clog ports, silt up the arteries of trade, and dislocate supply chains across Europe and beyond. Firms are pausing or diverting investment that should be boosting productivity, innovation, jobs and pay, into stockpiling goods or materials, diverting cross-border trade and moving offices, factories and therefore jobs and tax revenues out of the UK, the business groups said. Bank of England Governor Mark Carney had earlier said leaving the EU with no transition could be akin to the 1970s oil shock. Pro-Europeans fear Britains exit will weaken the West amid growing assertiveness from Russia and China. It weakens Europes economy and removes one of its only two nuclear powers. Not Where We Should Be May has yet to win the support of a deeply divided parliament for the deal she struck last month with EU leaders to maintain close ties with the bloc. Failure to agree an alternative Brexit course deepens concerns that the United Kingdom will drop out of the worlds biggest trading bloc without a deal. The worlds fifth largest economy now faces three main choices: agreeing a new last-minute deal, halting Brexit or crashing out with no deal. The lobby groups said businesses were now triggering contingency plans to deal with the expected chaos, though hundreds of thousands had yet to start planning. There are also hundreds of thousands who have yet to startand cannot be expected to be ready in such a short space of time, said a statement from the collection of business lobbyists. The five business groups said the governments preparations to ensure a smooth transition in the event of a no-deal scenario are doomed to fail. It is clear there is simply not enough time to prevent severe dislocation and disruption in just 100 days, the groups said, according to the report. This is not where we should be. Priority: Secure a Deal At Tuesdays cabinet meeting, ministers stressed Mays deal with Brussels remains the top priority and is the best alternative to a no-deal departure. However, according to The Daily Mail, they said they were determined to prepare for every eventuality. Cabinet agreed that with just three months until our exit we have reached the point where we need to ramp up those preparations, Mays spokesman said. We will set in motion the remaining elements of our no deal plans. Brexit Secretary Steve Barclay said, The Governments priority is to secure a dealthat hasnt changed. But alongside that, as part of our continuation of preparing for no deal, a responsible Government needs to ensure that we are ready for that default optionwhich we dont want to happenbut we are ready in the event that it did happen. Thats why at Cabinet today we agreed that preparing for no deal will be an operational priority within Government, but our overall priority remains to secure a deal. Just a Bad Dream Theresa Mays government has insisted all along that there would be no going back from Brexit, but as the likelihood of failure to win approval for her negotiated deal looms closer, political winds have been building behind a second referendum. May had insisted that lawmakers have only two options: accept her negotiated deal, or crash out of the EU with no deal. But many lawmakers reject this binary choice, and believe that there is a third way. The Good Law Project, one of the parties making a case for a second referendum, said in a statement, It can be, legally, like the decision to Brexit was just a bad dream. The European Court of Justice, meanwhile, ruled on Dec. 10 that if the UK chose to back out of Brexit, it could do so unilaterally, without needing a nod of approval from other EU states confirming Britain would be welcome back. The European Commission, meanwhile, is publishing the legislation needed to ensure continuity in eight sectors on a temporary basis, the BBC reported. Those areas cover data protection, plant and animal health, customs, climate policy, selected financial products, and the rights of British people living in the European Union. If there is no Brexit deal, these will apply from 29 March until the end of 2019 at the latest. Britain voted to leave the EU by a margin of 51.89% to 48.11% in a referendum in June 2016. The UK is scheduled to leave on 29 March 2019. Reuters contributed to this report. After Deadly Horse-and-Buggy Crash in Minnesota, Victims Identified as Elderly Couple Officials on Dec. 17 identified the husband and wife died after their horse-drawn buggy was hit by a truck in Minnesota. The Star-Tribune reported Robert A. Keppers, 72, and Mary J. Keppers, 66, both of Avon, died in the crash at around 11:15 a.m. on Dec. 16. They were heading on the shoulder of County Road 9 near Avon, the Stearns County Sheriffs Office. Marc L. Knapp, of Avon, was heading north when his truck hit the horse-drawn buggy from behind, sending it into a nearby ditch, the paper reported. Some people stopped to help with the resuscitation efforts, but the couple succumbed to their injuries, according to the sheriffs office. The horse also died in the crash, and family friends removed its remains, according to the Park Rapid Enterprise. A photo taken from the scene of the crash shows a smashed buggy with an orange triangle on the back, which is used to alert motorists of a slow-moving vehicle. Its unusual to have somebody with their horse and buggy on a county road, Chief Sheriffs Deputy Jon Lentz told the Tribune. On township roads, its not that unusual. The cause of the crash is being investigated by the Minnesota State Patrol and the sheriffs office. Knapp was not arrested, and there was no sign that alcohol was involved. The accident was reported by the Ford F-150 OnStar crash activation system, Park Rapid Enterprise reported. Several other people stopped to assist at the crash scene, a release from the sheriffs office stated, according to the SC Times. While officers were en route, information was received that both parties in the buggy were critically injured and CPR was in progress. Avon Fire & Rescue, Gold Cross Ambulance, Minnesota State Patrol officials responded to the crash. The Stearns County Sheriffs Office UAV was deployed to film and photograph the scene to assist with reconstruction, police also said. Other details about the crash are not clear. Other Buggy Crashes Last year, a crash involving a horse-drawn carriage and a pickup truck in Michigan left three children dead in Michigan. Michigan State Police said at the time that a red Dodge Ram was traveling eastward when it hit the carriage and crushed it. According to Michigan State Law, carriages are considered traffic and said that a person riding an animal or driving an animal-drawn vehicle upon a roadway shall be granted all of the rights and shall be subject to all the duties, criminal penalties, and civil sanctions applicable to the driver of a vehicle by this chapter, except those provisions of this chapter which by their very nature may not have application. #News via #FOXNEWS "Michigan buggy crash: 3 children killed, 6 hurt after truck slams into carriage" | https://t.co/ZAvDYFmjpY pic.twitter.com/0SK3GKhLUX Jorge Luis Lopez Esq (@lopezgovlaw) October 29, 2017 In 2017, a teen was killed after a semi-truck hit a horse and buggy in central Minnesota. David Miller of Staples was driving the horse and buggy when a semi rear-ended the horse and buggy about 7:20 a.m., killing Miller and the horse, Twincities.com reported. Samy El-Goarany, a Baruch College student who was killed fighting for ISIS. Ahmed Mohammed el-Gammal, 46, was sentenced on Dec. 18, 2018, to 12 years in prison for helping El-Goarany travel to Syria to fight for the Islamist terror group. (U.S. Attorneys Office for the Southern District of New York) American Man Sentenced to 12 Years in Prison for Helping Student Join ISIS An American man was sentenced to 12 years in prison on Dec. 18, for helping another man join the Islamist ISIS terrorist group. Ahmed Mohammed El Gammal, 46, was indicted in August 2015 for providing material support to the terror group, which has been behind a number of bombings, mass shootings, and other terror attacks. Prosecutors also said that he helped a New York college student travel to Syria to get military training from ISIS. These relationships were allegedly made and solidified through the internet while Gammal was in Arizona. This is another example of how social media is utilized for nefarious and criminal purposes around the world, said Assistant Director in Charge Diego Rodriguez of the FBIs New York Field Office at the time. El Gammal was convicted by a jury in January 2017 and sentenced to prison on Dec. 18 by U.S. District Judge Edgardo Ramos. After his conviction, then-U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Baraha said in a statement that El Gammal was an ambassador for ISIS right here in America. Once again, we have shown that terrorists and terrorist enablers can be brought to justice fairly, openly, and swiftly in the crown jewel of our justice systemcivilian courts, Bahara added. Communications Officials said that El Gammal was an outspoken online supporter of ISIS and the terror groups government in Syria, announcing at one point that he support[s] jihad everywhere and saying that [b]eheadings have a magical effect. If ISIS made it into Egypt, he said in one post, hed like to join them so I can torture the Egyptians, and whip them. In August 2014, a New York City college student, Samy El-Goarany, began to express support for the Islamist group. He soon began to communicate with El Gammal through an encrypted platform. El Gammal sent El-Goarany a documentary about life in ISIS that included details about the type of training the terrorists provide. In the midst of communicating with the student, El Gammal traveled to New York City and met with him. During the visit, he gave the student the contact for a person in Turkey, who ultimately helped the student travel from Turkey to ISIS in Syria. El-Goarany left New York for Turkey in January 2015 and was soon shuttled across the border. After starting training with ISIS, El-Goarany wrote to El Gammal that everything [was] going according to plan. A few months later he said, May God reward you with goodness. El Gammal later wrote to the student to inquire about traveling to Syria himself. El-Goarany said it was too risky. El-Goaranys brother received a message from an ISIS member on Nov. 23, 2015, stating that the student had been killed in battle. Facing terrorist charges Ahmed Mohammed El Gammal in Pho. Fed Court pic.twitter.com/1TKP4KYXp8 Mike Watkiss (@mikewatkiss3tv) August 28, 2015 Plea for Mercy El Gammals lawyers argued during the trial that El-Goarany would have reached Syria even without their clients aid. Speaking before the judge before the sentencing, El Gammal claimed that he is a proud American. I love this country, he said repeatedly, reported the Associated Press. I ask for forgiveness and mercy. Judge Ramos said that El Gammal was not the typical terrorism suspect, or the type of true believer, and thinks that the man wont commit another crime after being released. From NTD News A picture shows the Ten Commandments written in Hebrew on stone tablets on top of the abandoned Dar Bishi synagogue in the Libyan capital Tripoli on Sept. 28, 2011. The Jewish community in Libya dates back to the third century BC and at its peak numbered around 38,000 people, although it was always the smallest of the Jewish populations in north Africa. Most of the Jewish population left in the 20 years following World War II, although several hundred were still living there during ousted leader Moamer Kadhafi's coup of 1969. (Joseph Eid/AFP/Getty Images) Americas Ministry of Truth Part V: Tenets of Minitrue Commentary Previous installments in this series have covered how academic sources for Americas Ministry of Truth constitute the driving force that powers The Narrative, which determines what constitutes permissible news for the countrys citizens. Racism and heresy are the principal crimes, and punishment is administered on the basis of offenders national reputation and relationship to the progressive cult. Skeptics, outsiders, and deniers are mercilessly excoriated and occasionally threatened with violence, as Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, and many others have experienced. Clueless violators of The Narrative and well-intentioned backsliders are assaulted by battalions of correctness commissars equipped with hair-trigger heresy sensors; confession, apology, and absolution soon follow. All of which proceeds from elite mandarins faithfully enforcing the tenets of Americas Ministry of Truth, although few, if any, seem to grasp the implications of their actions. By contrast, the vast army of intellectual worker ants in Orwells Ministry of Truth knew exactly what they were doing. Orwell even appended the Principles of Newspeak at the end of Nineteen Eighty-four to explain more fully Minitrue job descriptions. Their modern counterparts imagine theyre defending the country from a baleful and boring bunch of -isms and phobias, whereas, in fact, theyre doing the oppositewhich is quite Orwellian itself. In all events, the principles of progressive censorship need to be extracted from cult members actions and not from stated intentions. Fortunately, this isnt hard to do. Tenet 1: Criticism Is Not Permitted As Karl Marx commanded in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Do not think and do not ask me questions. Although Marxs notoriety is based on mountains of mostly irrelevant falderol that he accumulated from obsolescent analyses of capitalism in the British Museum Reading Room, perhaps few of his utterances have had a more devastating effect than this singular comment, which he made while baring his soul in documents that werent published until the 20th century. His ego didnt permit diddling with trifles such as questions; in fact, even respectful queries ignited his rageshouting, stomping, hurling objectsthat sort of thing. Not a very accommodating guy. Neither are his modern acolytes. In fact, like their master, screed-mongering mullahs on the political left have been morally eviscerated by narcissism and rage, rendering them incapable of examining their own beliefs or permitting questions about their motives and tactics. This deadly combination is the historical propellant for totalitarianism, especially diktats that forbid questions, as German-American political philosopher Eric Voegelin explained so effectively in Science, Politics, and Gnosticism. Progressive devotees wouldnt be pleased to learn that Voegelin lumps their creed in a category that includes positivism, psychoanalysis, communism, fascism, and national socialismnot exactly a bundle that can masquerade with a happy face. Worst of all, Voegelin points out gravely that the injunction against asking questions is not harmless. Hence, the terrifying response of Rudolf Hoss, the commandant of Auschwitz, who, when asked whether he questioned orders to perpetrate mass murder, said: I do not believe that even one of the thousands of SS leaders could have permitted such a thought to occur to him. Something like that was just completely impossible. This morose but necessary reminder leads to the second tenet of Americas Ministry of Truth. Tenet 2: Fanatical Commitment to a Fictitious World German philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendts observation in The Origins of Totalitarianism remains one of her most stunning insights, and its importance is impossible to overstate: The Nazis and Bolsheviks concocted worlds so dominated by monstrous lies, by colossal fictions, that ordinary citizens sealed off from reality couldnt consider alternative explanations for ordinary events. And the bigger the lie, the better. Hitler stated it best in Mein Kampf, when he insisted that in the primitive simplicity of their minds, they [the people] more readily fall victims to a big lie than the small lie. In short, if you want the masses to follow you, dont skimp in the lying department. Lies propagated by Americas Ministry of Truth fall into two categories, depending on their long- or short-term utility. Thus, fictions that perpetuate the regime are solidly entrenched in academic, media, business, and governmental structures, such that attempts to eradicate them and educate the public are virtually impossible. The Stalinist technique of constructing a gargantuan security apparatus enforces the belief that the governments huge commitments of resources must mean something deadly sinister is occurring; surely, the country is honeycombed with saboteurs, wreckers, and spies! As Arendt explained in her coverage of Nazi and Bolshevik totalitarian regimes, the lies are built into the organizations and their influence saturates public consciousness. In the United States and Europe, several fictions serve long-term elite needs and regime maintenance perfectly, especially apocalyptic prophecies about the effects of global warming (now climate change). Thus, when we read headlines such as, U.N. Climate Chief Has Solution to Urgent Climate Threat: We Require Deep Transformations of our Economies and Societies, a more aggressive, authoritarian approach can scarcely be imagined. Naturally, deniers can barely contain their skepticism. For instance, Nicolas Loris of the Heritage Foundation declared that the doomsday scenarios in the National Climate Assessment [released in November 2018] are close to impossible, a case of garbage-in-garbage-out data spooned into mathematical models to crank out an end-of-the-world fright-fest by the year 210082 years into the future. Most of us would be satisfied with a reasonably accurate weather report for next week. In all events, John P. Dunne, head of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University, dismisses the report as a 400-page pile of crap. What are these voices of reason up against? A $1.5 trillion global climate-change industry employing many thousands of cultists, crusaders, plutocrats, kleptocrats, statists, and nut-cases without real lives. No wonder President Donald Trump doesnt believe that compilation of exhaust fumes from the Obama administration; no sane person would. And the French are having none of it; Paris rioters are conveying their outrage for being sacrificed on the altar of green pieties. Multiculturalism has also ballooned into a giant industry, fueling departments of diversity that employ thousands of administrators who consume billions of dollars, all for the benefit of propagating racist explanations for everything imaginable while imposing solutions for many fictitious crimes. Meanwhile, H.P. Lovecraft-like tales of horror and the macabre seep through fevered accounts detailing the Mueller investigation, caravan travails, and Black Lives Matter crusadesall of which serve short-term interests of Minitrues commitment to a fictitious world. Additional tenets that guide practitioners in Americas Ministry of Truth beckon explanation. Though few in number, they demand compliance, lest offendersthats practically all of usface draconian penalties that threaten our livelihoods. These will be covered in our next installment. Marvin Folkertsma is a retired professor of political science and a fellow for American studies with The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College. The author of several books, his latest release is a novel titled The Thirteenth Commandment. Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. Over the past few months, the Sidecar Doughnut truck has occasionally parked at Del Mar Highlands Town Center giving people a taste of whats to come. Building hype worked: At a pre-opening community open house on Dec. 14, a line of people wrapped around the circular center counter for most of the morning and afternoon for a complimentary hot and fresh doughnut and cup of coffee. Sidecar serves up hot and fresh doughnuts. Tawny Alipoon An official grand opening for the long-awaited sweet spot out of Orange County and Los Angeles was Dec. 17 and they will celebrate all month with a piping hot Birthday Cake doughnut, a vanilla bean cake topped with pink glaze and rainbow sprinkles. Every day at Sidecar, customers can pick from a selection of the worlds freshest doughnuts. The daily line-up includes flavors of Butter and Salt, a vanilla bean cake with brown butter glaze sprinkled with fleur de sel; Maple Bacon; Madagascar Vanilla Glazed; Saigon Cinnamon Crumb; and the best-selling Huckleberry, slightly more tart than the average berry donut, made with freshly imported Oregon huckleberries. The Old Fashion is Sidecars take on classic buttermilk with a bit of a cinnamon cake vibe, deliciously spiced with nutmeg and topped with a vanilla bean glaze. They also serve up a savory Basil Eggs Benedict and there is always a gluten free option. The Carmel Valley location is still new but once they get going, the menu will rev up to include four monthly flavors in addition to the daily eight. In the Costa Mesa and Santa Monica shops the Decembers seasonal flavors have included Eggnog Brule and Chocolate Peppermint. Sidecar opened in Costa Mesa five years ago, the brainchild of founders Sumter and Chi-Lin Pendergrast and co-owner Bob Nilsen. Sumter Pendergrast actually came from a background in clothing design, It was quite a departure, he said of trading haute couture for hot doughnuts. Inside the new Sidecar Doughnuts. JTran Photos What he took most from his experience in fashion was brand building and that is what he and his fellow co-owners have tried to create with Sidecarbuilding a reputation for a tasty, high-quality product and using their artistic flair for design to create cool gathering places that people want to be. Originally, Pendergrasts idea was to do a coffee shop, but he had a feeling that by the time he got good at roasting coffee the third wave of coffee would pass him by. I looked at American staples and the doughnut I felt like was one of them, Pendergrast said. The East Coast seemed to be doing a better version of the doughnutthere was nothing like that out here. The Costa Mesa Sidecar served up inventive flavors and artisan spins on classic doughnuts, and rather than roasting his own coffee, Pendergrast brought in Portlands Stumptown Coffee Roasters. The concept took off and they were able to opened their second shop in Santa Monica in 2015. Coming down to San Diego seemed a natural progression for Pendergrasthe lives next door to the Del Mar Highlands Town Center ownership in Costa Mesa. We wanted to be in a different community and San Diego was a really great opportunity, Pendergrast said. In the Carmel Valley center they benefit from a lot of foot traffic and the fact that they are the only doughnut shop for miles, We felt like it was an under-served market for our product, he said of their treats but also their coffee. Sidecar now serves up its own coffee that is sourced and roasted in Costa Mesa by Common Room Roasters: the menu includes single Sidecar single origin coffee, cold brew and espresso drinks as well as Vietnamese iced coffee sweetened with condensed milk. Were excited about it, Pendergrast said of the Sidecar proprietary blend. It is still one of my passions to have great coffee. A fresh batch of Old Fashion doughnuts goes on display. Karen Billing As someone who grew up knowing that the best time for a Krispy Kreme was when the hot sign was lit up, Pendergrast had that idea in mind when it came to his product. In the beginning, he converted an art studio into a doughnut factory for him and his wife to test recipes and every Saturday they gave out the delectable treats for free. When the doughnuts didnt even have time to sit out for long and were still warm was when people were most whipped into a frenzyhe knew he had to find a way to keep their doughnuts as fresh and hot as possible. The solution: Small batches of 12 doughnuts or less are fried all day long, different than the traditional model where you fry em up once and let them sit all day or until theyre gone. Thats what makes us, Pendergrast said. People say its the freshest doughnut that theyve ever had. That sometimes means a customer has to wait for their favorite flavor to finish, but as the first rush of customers on Friday proved, people were willing to wait for a fresh huckleberry. Pendergrast was encouraged by the opening days and is excited to see the shop buzzing on its first full weekend. We have to ingratiate ourselves to the locals and win their business by giving them great hot doughnuts, good customer service and fresh coffee, he said. Part of Sidecars business is giving back to the community with its Side Cares program a portion of proceeds are donated to a selected partner charities throughout the year. In 2018, Side Cares paired with Arts and Learning Conservatory, Meditation Mount, Best Friends Animal Society, the Ecology Center and the Surfrider Foundation. At Del Mar Highlands, 10 percent of the proceeds from the sale of the Birthday Cake doughnut will go toward Side Cares. Richard Overton (C), who is believed to be America's oldest living veteran is acknowledged by U.S. President Barack Obama during a ceremony to honor veterans at the Tomb of the Unknowns on Veterans Day at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia on Nov. 11, 2013. (Olivier Douliery-Pool/Getty Images) Americas Oldest Living Veteran, 112, Expected to be Released From Hospital The oldest living veteran in the United States is expected to be released from the hospital on Dec. 19, family members said. Richard Overton, 112, served in World War II. He was admitted to the hospital in Austin for pneumonia last week, relatives told Fox 7. He has already battled the illness twice this year, according to his cousin, Volma Overton Jr. I want to let everyone know that Richard Overton is in the hospital fighting pneumonia once again for his 3rd battle this year with that infection. So at this time I am asking for your prayers for him and we are so thankful for the love and support that you have given him this past 24 months, cousin Overton Jr. wrote on GoFundMe on Dec. 18. Will give you an update tomorrow on his stay in the hospital. Peace, Blessings and Love to you all. A month earlier, he wrote that Overton had just been released from the hospital after being treated for pneumonia. Given time to recover from this we are hoping that he will be able to speak and do other activities soon, he wrote. Overton lives in East Austin in a home he built in 1945. He has received increasing attention as hes gotten older, especially after becoming the oldest veteran in the United States. Hes also believed to be the oldest man living in the country. Overton went on his first private jet ride to Washington in April for a tour of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. In June, his identity was stolen and his personal bank account was drained, but the Bank of America later restored the funds. Overton Jr. said that the investigation into the hack is ongoing. What I do know now is that Richard just happened to be one of thousands that this has happened to and that this is much bigger than I could have imagined, he said. Routines Overton in May celebrated his 112th birthday on his front porch, which is known locally as his stage. The World War II vet loves to smoke cigars, and regularly smokes a dozen a day, mostly on the porch. The Morning News reported that strangers often stop by the house on Richard Overton Avenue, renamed after him last year, to take his picture or shake his hand. They can also go to a nearby mural that includes him in it. After several cigars in the morning, he enjoys a sweet breakfast of waffles, pancakes, or cinnamon rolls with several cups of coffee. He likes to listen to music, exercise, and travel. Many of his family members have died, including his nine siblings, his wife, and his ex-wife. He never had any children. His cousins often stop by and hes cared for by a rotating group of four nurses. The care is funded through money raised by a fundraiser on GoFundMe, which has garnered over $450,000 in 24 months. Richard has out lived all of his closest relatives and is in need of 24/7 home care. We are asking for donations to keep him living in his home instead of a nursing home, wrote Oveton Jr. From NTD News Arizona Man Who Threatened to Shoot President Trump Sentenced to Prison An Arizona man who threatened to shoot President Donald Trump, along with other political figures, was sentenced to 37 months in prison this week. Jerrod Hunter Schmidt of Kingman was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Steven Logan on Dec. 17, the Department of Justice said. The sentence came after Schmidt was found guilty in September by a jury of two counts of threatening the President of the United States and two counts of making interstate threatening communications. Prosecutors said that Schmidt made multiple phone calls after learning that his conviction for a prior felony was affirmed by the Nebraska Court of Appeals. The calls on April 10 and April 11 were made to the court clerks office. In them, Schmidt said he was going to shoot and kill Trump, one of the clerks of the Nebraska Court of Appeals, and other political figures. In one, he said he was going to kill President Trump and put a bullet in his head, according to Secret Service personnel who listened to the calls, court records obtained by the Arizona Republic show. The felony that was affirmed was for child molestation. After serving nine years in prison for the crime, Schmidt filed motions with the Nebraska Court of Appeals claiming he was owed money for wrongful imprisonment, but the court disagreed. After serving 37 months in prison in Arizona, he will be on three years of supervised release. North Dakota Man Pleads Guilty to Planning to Kill Trump A North Dakota man admitted he schemed to attempt an assassination on President Donald Trump. Gregory Lee Leingang, 42, pleaded guilty in federal court on Nov. 30 to one count of attempting to enter or remain in a restricted building and on grounds while using a dangerous weapon. The weapon of choice, according to the agreement, was a forklift, which he also pleaded guilty to stealing. Leingang had also been charged with one count of attempting to damage government property, but that charge was dropped in the plea deal reported the Bismarck Tribune. U.S. Assistant States Attorney Brandi Sasse Russell said Leingang knew Trump was set to give a speech on tax reform at the Andeavor Mandan Refinery in Bismarck, North Dakota on Sept. 6, 2017. Prior to Trumps arrival, he stole a forklift in Mandan and entered the motorcade route. The intent was to basically try to get to the limo, flip the limo and get to the president, Russell said. He wanted to kill the president. But the plan failed after the forklift got stuck in a gated area. Leingang fled but was apprehended. He later admitted to the plan. Leingangs public defender argued he was suffering a serious psychiatric crisis during the incident. Leingang told U.S. District Court Judge Daniel Hovland that he suffers from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and bipolar disorder. That morning, Leingang set two fires. One was at the Bismarck Municipal Ballpark maintenance shop and another was at the state parole and probation office. Per a guilty plea entered for those crimes, Leingang was sentenced to 10 years in state prison. Another five years was added on from the guilty plea he entered for stealing the forklift, and yet another five years for a guilty plea in a separate burglary case. A sentencing hearing for the building plea was scheduled for Feb. 15. From NTD News Two cups of autumn mulled wine or gluhwein with spices and orange slices on rustic table top view. Traditional drink on autumn holiday on the background of autumn leaves - Image. (Shutterstock) Around the World in 12 Holiday Drinks For most, the festive season is rooted in ritual and tradition. But who says you cant explore a drinkable tradition different from your own? In examining the holiday drinks of the world, a few trends quickly revealed themselves: Colder climates gravitate toward warm and creamy drinks; everyone loves holiday spice; and, my favorite, there appear to be few rules at all. Embrace the chance to improvise and enjoy by transporting your guestsor just yourselfacross the pond, beyond the border, or over the river and through the woods with these 12 holiday drink ideas. Mull Over Some Wine Neither the Greeks nor the Romans wasted wine. The precious commodity wasnt as readily available as it is today, so fermented grape juice that didnt make the cut wasnt dumped; it was mixed with honey and spices and made palatable enough to drink. The Romans traveled across Europe, often conquering but sometimes trading, bringing their wine-related customs and recipes to the far-reaching corners of their amassed Empire. In addition to their much-appreciated contributions to modern democracy, not to mention the Roman alphabet I know so well, their gift of mulled wine to Germania (Germany), Brittania (the UK), Gallia (France), and Hispania (Spain) spread throughout the Western Hemisphere. Now, each country does it slightly differently. German Gluhwein Germans, for instance, call theirs gluhwein, a red wine-based drink traditionally spiced with varying combinations of cinnamon, cardamom, clove, star anise, ginger, and bitter orange. Serve it warm, just like they do at German Christmas markets and at the bottom of the slopes. If its that kind of party, know that this is often served mit Schuss, or with a shot of liquor added. Frohe Festtage! Close relative: Scandinavian glogg is also red wine-based, but the Nordic countries are colder, and therefore more liberal with additional spirits, including brandy or a large dose of aquavit to warm the belly. They add a few raisins and almonds to the glass or mug, then top off with the hot glogg. Roll With These Punches Jamaican Sorrel Punch Baby, its cold outside, but this cold punch will remind you that its warm somewhere. Served everywhere you go on the island during the Christmas season, the punch is made from the steeped petals of sorrel (often sold in the United States under the name dried hibiscus or Jamaica flowers), mixed with sugar, fresh ginger, lime juice, and rum. Tweak the sweet, spicy, tart, and boozy levels as you wish. Sorrel punch is also popular throughout the Caribbean and in many Latin American countries. In Jamaica, its considered a panacea, believed to cure high blood pressure, colds, and coughs, and aid in weight loss. Great holiday news! Note: Dont mistake this for the bitter green sorrel plant. Its a flower petal that yields a lovely burgundy color. Mexican Ponche Navideno This warmed punch is sold by street vendors around Christmastime in Mexico. Though readily available all season, its directly tied to Las Posadas, the nine days leading up to Christmas that commemorate the nine months of Marys pregnancy. Ponche typically includes a mix of sugar cane, cinnamon sticks, guavas, apples, pears, citrus, raisins, and prunes, but it comes with no rules, so let your creative flag fly. A common local ingredient (but no one will know if you cant find it) is tejocotes, the holiday fruit of Mexico. It looks like a miniature apple with thin, bright yellow skin. The cream-colored fruit has a sweet and sour taste reminiscent of apricots. If you cant find it, just add extra apple. The two spirit selections added are rum or tequila. United (Kingdom) We Warm Up Scottish Hot Toddy The entrance point to the world of warm cocktails is the hot toddy or hot whiskey, a mixture of spirit (usually whiskey), hot water (or tea), and honey (or sugar). Other spices, such as cloves and cinnamon, and a lemon slice are often added, and as the name indicates, its served hot. Hot toddies are traditionally drunk before retiring for the night, or in wet or cold weather. Its been long believed that the drink has medicinal qualities, relieving symptoms of the cold and flu. British Wassail Love and joy come to you, and to you your wassail, too, starts the refrain of Here We Come A-wassailing, a traditional English Christmas and New Years song. Wassailing dates back to the 15th century, when beggars and orphans went door-to-door singing carols in hopes of their holiday spirit melting the icicles from the hearts of the well-to-do. With any luck, the wassailers would be invited inside to partake in the housemasters warm hearth and take a drink from their bowl of wassail, a hot, mulled cider. Though the tradition died down and wassailing was replaced with caroling, wassail is still enjoyed over a toast to good healthwassail is Old English for be well. Close relative: History lesson. Hot buttered rum is actually an American variation on the toddy. In 1655, the British Royal Navy captured Jamaica, and rum replaced those sailors daily ration of brandy. Colonists started to import the rum, and soon set up distilleries so they could make their own rum from inexpensive imported molasses. The drink is hot, sugary, spicy, and laced with rum; the pat of butter is the evolutionary cherry on top. Cream of the Crop North American Eggnog It may be familiar, but boy, is it delicious. Hot or cold, spiked or not, this is the definitive drink of Christmas in both the United States and Canada. Its a blend of milk, eggs yolks, sugar, and spirit. Which spirit? Depends where you live and what you like! Bourbon, rum, brandy, and whiskey are all common. Theres much debate on eggnogs lineage, but its commonly believed to have come from the medieval British drink called posset, made with hot milk curdled with wine or ale and flavored with spices, and used as a cold and flu remedy. Sounds delicious. Close relative: Advocaat, or advocaatenborrel for those who enjoy syllables, is a traditional Dutch alcoholic beverage made from eggs, sugar, and brandy at a minimum, often further enhanced with honey, vanilla, cream, or evaporated milk. Though often called Dutch eggnog, its more like a creamy brandy custard with a pudding-like texture. Etymology tells the tale here: Advocaat means lawyer in Dutch, while borrel refers to a small alcoholic drink consumed slowly at social gatherings. The Dutch decided that everyone deserves an intensely creamy holiday. Puerto Rican Coquito A wintry pina colada! Its not the holidays in Puerto Rico without this rich, blended drink. Coquito is a blend of, at a minimum, coconut cream, coconut milk, sweetened condensed milk, and Puerto Rican rum. Once those requirements are met, any addition of nutmeg, cloves, and cinnamon is acceptable. Coquito is believed to be a descendant of eggnog, as English settlers would have brought their version and adapted it to the local ingredients, but rarely will you find it made with any egg at all. Makes sense, as coconut cream and condensed milk both hold their own in the thickness category. Chilean Cola de Mono This cold milk punch is a mix of milk, sugar, coffee, and aguardiente (a catch-all name for several Latin American alcohols, though in Chile its usually made from grapes). Its much like a White Russian, but with Chilean spice such as cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, and vanilla bean. While assembling this drink is easy, explaining the translation, monkeys tail, is not. Chileans cant even do it. Whats for sure is that this is the premier Chilean drink of the holiday season. Lithuanian Poppy Milk This traditional drink, made of the simple ingredients of poppy seeds, water, and honey, is part of the 12-dish Christmas Eve Supper, kucios, served in Lithuania and across much of Eastern Europe. Its made by steeping and then crushing poppy seeds (quite a time-consuming and labor-intensive process) before mixing them with boiling water and honey. This is a non-alcoholic drink, but given the opiate qualities of poppy heads, you have to wonder Amanda Burrill sees through an adventurous lens, typically focused on culinary and travel. Her education includes a bachelors in archaeology, a masters in journalism, a culinary degree from Le Cordon Bleu, and wine and spirits credentials earned while living in Paris. She is a U.S. Navy veteran, Ironman triathlete, high-alpine mountaineer, and injury connoisseur who ruminates on UnchartedLifestyleMag.com. Meng Wanzhou, Executive Board Director of the Chinese technology giant Huawei, attends a session of the VTB Capital Investment Forum "Russia Calling!" in Moscow, Russia, on Oct. 2, 2014. (Alexander Bibik/Reuters) Beijing Desperate to Rescue Its Key Asset Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou Scrutiny of Chinese company goes beyond violation of Iran sanctions News analysis Soon after Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Huawei, was arrested by the Canadian authorities in Vancouver, the Chinese regime prioritized her release. Meng was arrested at the Vancouver International Airport on Dec. 1 at the request of the U.S. government, which alleges that Huawei, one of Chinas flagship telecom companies, violated sanctions restricting the sale of most goods to Iran. When the news broke in the Western press, the Chinese regime had a strong public response to the incident, detaining two prominent Canadian nationals in China and encouraging a boycott of Canadian apparel company Canada Goose. This and other actions suggest that Meng is of great value to Beijing. Meng is accused of committing fraud because she told banks in the United States that Huawei and Skycom, a Hong Kong-based company reportedly doing business with Iran, had no connections. However, the court heard from lawyers representing the Canadian government that Huawei effectively controlled Skycom. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has deployed its national security, media, diplomatic, and other channels to support Meng and Huawei. Since Dec. 7, Geng Shuang and Lu Kang, the spokespersons of Chinas Ministry of Foreign Affairs, had criticized the arrest and the possible extradition, and urged Canada to release Meng. On Dec. 8, Le Yucheng, Chinas vice foreign minister, summoned Canadian Ambassador to China John McCallum, and demanded that Canada release Meng, saying that otherwise the consequences will be serious and Canada must bear full responsibility, the state-run news agency Xinhua reported. On Dec. 10, national security agents in Beijing detained former Canadian diplomat Michael Kovrig, who is now being accused of espionage. Kovrigs manager, Robert Malley, has denied this allegation. The same day, Canadian businessman Michael Spavor was detained by Chinese authorities in the northeastern province of Liaoning on the same charges. Spavor is close to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and runs a business promoting tourism and investment in North Korea. Meng was released in the evening of Dec. 11 on bail. Soon thereafter, the Chinese consul-general in Vancouver, Tong Xiaoling, and two other officials from the embassy visited Meng at her home in the morning of Dec. 12. They spoke for about an hour and a half before being seen off by Meng and her husband. Meng is living under surveillance and is being guarded by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) to prevent Meng from attempting to flee the country or contact Chinese regime agents. Global News reported on Dec. 14 that Meng was also being watched by agents from the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS), which conducts intelligence operations abroad. Three provincial-level Communist Party secretaries have visited Huaweis offices to show solidarity with the state-linked company. Du Jiahao, the secretary of Hunans provincial CCP committee, visited Huaweis software office in Changsha on Dec. 11. Liu Qi, the Party secretary of Jiangxi Province, visited Huaweis Yingtan office on Dec. 12 and 13. Chen Hao, the Party secretary of Yunnan Province, visited Huaweis Dongguan campus with Ruan Chengfa, Yunnans governor, on Dec. 13 and 14. Meng Wanzhou: A Key Asset Huawei is Chinas largest telecommunication company, and is deeply involved with the CCPs strategic goals in China and overseas. In October 2011, the CIA-based Open Source Center published a report showing that Huawei had links to the Ministry of State Security. Prior to that, in 2010, eight Republican U.S. lawmakers raised national security concerns that Huawei had sold communications technology to the by then deposed and executed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, as well as the Iranian government, military, and Islamic Revolutionary Guard, all of these parties being the targets of U.S. sanctions. Huawei has a long history of supplying militant groups around the world. In 2001, Indian intelligence agency reported that Huawei India allegedly helped supply communication surveillance equipment to Taliban forces in Afghanistan, and also sold telecommunications equipment to Pakistan, Indias main strategic rival. Huawei has its Indian branch in Bangalore, and launched a Research and Development Center there in 1999. As of this year, it employs more than 4,000 software engineers and market technical support engineers there. Given that Huawei was charged with the sale of telecommunication systems to the Taliban and other rogue groups, its likely that Meng Wanzhou has knowledge not only regarding Huaweis deals with Iran, but the companys other illicit business relations. The South China Morning Post reported on Dec. 6 that in an internal company meeting on Oct. 29, Meng had shared her views with her father Ren Zhengfei, the founder of Huawei, on compliance with international sanctions and other ordinances. Both father and the daughter said that Huawei needed to keep the costs of compliance with sanctions under control, categorizing different kinds of illicit business into red and yellow groups. While red indicates sanctions that Huawei has no choice but to abide by, yellow sanctions imply those that Huawei has determined it can bend, the newspaper reported. According to the SCMP report, even red sanctions are ultimately negotiable, meaning that they can be ignored like the yellow ones. In such cases, after a reasonable decision-making process, one may accept the risk of temporary non-compliance. Mengs words at the meeting suggest that she is fully aware of her companys widespread violation of other regulations around the world, including those imposed by the United States, Europe, and the United Nations. This would give the CCP regime a powerful incentive to secure Mengs return to China and prevent U.S. judicial authorities from obtaining her extradition from Canada. Chicago Officers Likely Didnt See Train That Killed Them CHICAGOTwo Chicago police officers may not have seen or heard the commuter train that fatally struck them because they were focused on another train coming from the opposite direction, a department spokesman said on Dec. 18. Spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said very limited video from a body camera one of the officers was wearing helped investigators piece together how the tragedy might have happened. The officers had run onto an elevated area of the tracks Monday night on the citys far South Side to investigate gunfire. On the video, they clearly acknowledge a northbound train just before the southbound train hit them, Guglielmi said. They must have thought the sound they heard was the northbound train, he said. They must have missed the sound of the train right behind them. Officers Eduardo Marmolejo and Conrad Gary were doing surveillance after Shotspotter technology that detects the sound of gunfire alerted police about shots fired in the area. Between the sound of the first train and the fact that they were focused on finding a gunman, they were unable to move off the tracks. The man Mamolejo and Gary were pursuing was taken into custody by other officers a short time later, and a gun was recovered near where the officers were struck. Guglielmi said the man was being questioned and had not yet been charged with any crime. These brave young men were consumed with identifying a potential threat, Superintendent Eddie Johnson explained to reporters at a news conference late Monday night. Later, Guglielmi said, Johnson led a delegation of the departments command staff to search the area along the tracks to recover the remains of the two officers. Guglielmi said Johnson has met with the families of the two officers. The officers were assigned to the Calumet police district. Marmolejo, 36, had been a member of the department for 2 years; Gary, 31, had been on the force for 18 months. Both were married with children. Marmolejo was the father of three children, one in high school and two younger children; Gary had a 6-month-old daughter. Four Chicago police officers now have been killed in the line of duty this year. The tragedy bore similarities to the 2002 death of Chicago Police Officer Benjamin Perez, who was fatally struck by a commuter train while conducting surveillance on narcotics activity on the citys West Side. Officer Samuel Jimenez was killed in a shootout last month after he chased a gunman inside a hospital on Chicagos South Side. That shooter also killed two other people before taking his own life. And in February, Cmdr. Paul Bauer was fatally shot while pursuing a suspect in the Loop business district. The total is the highest number of Chicago officers killed in the line of duty in one year since five were killed in 2010. Their deaths mark the first time two officers died in the same incident since 1990, according to Dave Bayless, spokesman for the Chicago Police Memorial Foundation. Mayor Rahm Emanuel mourned the officers on Monday night, telling reporters, I think its really important that we put our arms around the Chicago Police Department and hold them up and support them at this critical juncture, because we are so dependent on their professionalism and their sense of duty. By Don Babwin China Makes Second Purchase of US Soybeans Since Trade-War Truce, USDA Confirms CHICAGOChinese importers returned to the U.S. soy market on Dec. 18 for their second round of purchases since the two countries agreed to a truce in their trade war, four traders with knowledge of the deals and the U.S. Soybean Export Council said. Private exporters sold about 1.3 million tons of U.S. soybeans for shipment to China, the U.S. Agriculture Department said Dec. 19. The sales come after U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping agreed to a 90-day trade-war truce to negotiate a deal after meeting at the Group of 20 summit in Buenos Aires earlier this month. The total sales to China since the meeting havent yet met expectations of grain traders and U.S. farmers, who are holding massive stockpiles of the oilseed following a record large harvest this autumn. Chicago Board of Trade soybean futures gyrated on both sides of previous levels Dec. 19 as the market weighed prospects for further sales to China ahead of the early March deadline for securing a trade deal. Soybean prices at U.S. Pacific Northwest and Gulf Coast export terminals rose by 1.5 percent, as the new wave of buying sent exporters scrambling for supplies shipped by rail or barge from the Midwest farm belt. This confirmation takes us up to about 3 million tons, Terry Linn, an analyst with Linn & Associates in Chicago, said of the total sales since the trade-war truce. Is this big enough to further upside in soybeans? Not in my opinion The expectation coming out the Argentina meeting was 10 [million] to 12 million tons, Linn said. The 25-percent tariff that Beijing imposed on U.S. soybeans in retaliation for duties Trump put on Chinese goods remains in effect, limiting interest from private soy importers in China. China last year imported about 35 million tons of U.S. soybeans, almost 60 percent of U.S. export shipments, in deals valued at $12.25 billion. The renewed buying lifted benchmark soybean futures prices at the Chicago Board of Trade on Dec. 18, although gains were tempered by the slower-than-anticipated pace of purchases by the worlds top soybean importer. It was unclear how much China would buy. Last week, state-run companies booked more than 1.6 million tons of U.S. soybeans for shipment from January to March, the countrys first major U.S. soy purchases in six months. One trader said Chinese state-owned companies bought 15 cargos on Dec. 18 for shipment from January to March, deals that would be worth more than $300 million. Trump on Dec. 17 said he authorized a second round of payments from an aid package of up to $12 billion, to help farmers suffering from the 90-percent plunge in Chinese demand for U.S. soy. The purchases in recent days wont do much to benefit farmers, but they do provide a goodwill gesture before the next round of U.S.-China talks to change terms of trade. The United States has a long list of complaints against China regarding intellectual property, forced technology transfers, and industrial subsidies. Francisca Odhiambo, a fish monger at Dunga Beach on the shores of Lake Victoria, Kenya, prepares fish for sale on Dec. 7, 2018. (Dominic Kirui/Special to The Epoch Times) Chinese Fish Imports Hurting Kenyan Fish Traders Beijing uses Chinese-funded projects as hostage to keep fish exports to Kenya KISUMU, KenyaThe early morning rays beat onto the Dunga Beach in Kenyas Kisumu County as the fishermen bring forth their catch and the women fishmongers buy it from them to resell on the beach. Their customers are tourists who come here to enjoy the view and maybe take a boat ride on Lake Victoria, Africas largest lake by area and the worlds largest tropical lake. Francisca Odhiambo, one of the fishmongers, is busy scaling, gutting, and deep-frying her fish, getting them ready to sell. I have done this for more than 15 years, she said. The 42-year-old mother of five says her family depends on the business to survive, but for her and many other fishmongers at the beach, things have changed since Kenya began importing fish from China. My husband works as a shopkeeper and we put together what we get from our businesses to pay rent and send our children to school. Many women here are widowed and since the Chinese fish came, most of them cannot even pay rent for their houses, she explained. People cannot differentiate between our fish and the fish that is imported and this has affected our business. We sell tilapia, a delicacy for most people, but since the Chinese fish came people are buying that, thinking they are getting tilapia, because they cant tell the difference. In October, Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta heard concerns from traders who told him about the negative impact of the imported Chinese fish during an annual Small and Medium Enterprises Conference at Strathmore University in Nairobi. Kenyatta acknowledged their concerns and later announced a ban on the fish. We can say that the fish that has arrived is bad, and we close it out. There are many ways the government can work for us to ensure our people make profits, if we really intend on serving our people, he said, according to local media. Two weeks later, China retaliated. During a familiarization tour of the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) at the Chinese embassy in Nairobi in late October, the acting Chinese ambassador to Kenya Li Xuhang expressed doubts about the fate of Chinese-funded projects in the country, such as the SGR. China threatened to withhold funds meant for the completion of the second phase of the railway line from Naivasha to Kisumu as part of its One Belt, One Road initiative. The plan includes building a railway line connecting the Port of Mombasa to Malaba, then on to Kigali, Rwanda, and further into Bujumbura, Burundi, with a junction to Juba, South Sudan. This prompted the Kenyan government to lift the ban on the import of fish from China and quickly repair its relations with Beijing. Susan Imende at the Kenya Fisheries Service issued a statement to this effect in late October, saying the governments move was intended to foster consultations between the two countries. In recent years, concerns have mounted over how China is drowning African countriesespecially in the Sub-Saharan regionin loans for projects that employ Chinese citizens and exploit natural resources. Countries such as Kenya, Zambia, Sudan, Burkina Faso, Namibia, and Zimbabwe are feeling the effects of Chinas presence. Chinas growing influence in these countries could be why the Chinese ambassador reacted so angrily to Kenyas announcement to ban the import of Chinese fish, terming it a declaration of a trade war. Godfrey Agong, the treasurer at the Dunga Beach Management Unit in Kisumu, says the fishmongers who buy fish from the fishermen to sell at the market in Kisumu or on the beach are affected the most. They buy from the fishermen and then they go to the market only to [find] the Chinese fish at the marketplace and thats where they get a lot of challenges because of the Chinese fish that has flooded the market, Agong said. But for the fishermen on the Lake Victoria, things are also looking grim. Fredrick Ochieng, 29, has been in the fishing business for the past 11 years and says the issue of imported Chinese fish has the potential to devastate the fishermens livelihood. If the fishmongers do not get a market for the fish and tomorrow we want to sell to them, how will they be able to buy? he said. As for Odhiambo and many other fish traders across the country, life will certainly change if the import of fish continues. Theyll be forced to either get out of the business or continue making losses. All I wish for now is that our government can do something to rescue us and our business since this trade is what we depend on to feed our families and school our children, she said. Government should not simply look at some vested interests and forget about our welfare as citizens. A European Union flag is seen outside the EU Commission headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, on Nov. 14, 2018. (Reuters/Francois Lenoir) Chinese Hackers Target European Union Diplomatic Communications The European Union is actively investigating a data breach after reports that hackers linked to the Chinese communist regime intercepted sensitive EU diplomatic communications. An article published on Dec. 18 by The New York Times alleged that for the past three years cyber-espionage operators associated with the Peoples Liberation Army managed to access and download thousands of EU diplomatic cables. The blocs Council Secretariat said in a statement to reporters that it is aware of allegations regarding a potential leak of sensitive information and is actively investigating the issue. Thousands of Messages Intercepted Area 1 Security, a U.S. cybersecurity firm, told NY Times that a unit of Chinas Peoples Liberation Army, acting on government orders, broke into a secure communications network used by the EU to coordinate foreign policy. Thousands of messages were reportedly intercepted in which diplomats referenced a range of subjects from global trade to concerns about the behavior of China, Russia, and Iran. NY Times published some of the captured messages, known as diplomatic cables. European officials said that communications marked as highly confidentialincluding those designated tres secretwere not affected by the hack. The breach also did not affect cables relating to decisions about the Iran nuclear deal. European Commission Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis told reporters that the bloc took any report of hacking its systems extremely seriously but refused to comment on details of the leak. What is clear is that no institution or country is immune to these kinds of hacksall communications systems have vulnerabilities, he told reporters, as reported by Agence France-Presse. Were constantly dealing with this challenge, upgrading our communication systems to respond to the threats. No Doubt Chinese Military Involved One expert, who was not named in the report, told NY Times that the methods used by the hackers resembled those known to have been used by the Chinese military. After over a decade of experience countering Chinese cyber-operations there is no doubt this campaign is connected to the Chinese government, the individual said. A number of other institutions, including the United Nations, were also reportedly affected by the breach and have since been alerted, but according to the report, the hackers managed to access only low-level classified documents. Understanding Chinese Spy Operations In 2014, five Chinese military hackers were indicted for offenses that included computer hacking and economic espionage, targeting Americans in industries such as nuclear and solar power. It was the first time criminal charges were brought against Chinese military hackers for cyberattacks. The individuals were part of Peoples Liberation Army Unit 61398, one of 22 known operations bureaus under the Third Department of the General Staff Departmentthe war-fighting branch of the Chinese military. Each of these bureaus is involved in different forms of cyber operations, many of which target the United States and other countries, according to an October investigative report. The Human Factor There is often a human actor working in at least some element of a cyber breach, such as using a USB drive to download something. The hackers and spies of the Chinese military work together. Through interviews with former Chinese agents, The Epoch Times learned how one of the regimes espionage tactics uses insiderspeople working for a target organizationto steal information. If the insider stole data, hackers with the Chinese military would launch cyberattacks against the same network at the same time. When the company later conducted a cyber-forensic investigation to try to analyze the breach, they would surmise that a cyberattack was the cause of theft. Bowen Xiao and Joshua Philipp contributed to this report. DMV Director Announces Retirement Leaving Many Unsolved Issues After being criticized for long wait times and registering noncitizens for voting in the 2018 election, the California Department of Motor Vehicles confirmed on Dec. 17 that its current director will retire by the end of the year. Jean Shiomoto, who has been leading DMV over the past five years, announced last month to her staff that she will not continue her role as the director of DMV, wrapping up her 38-years of state service, the DMV told the Epoch Times in a statement. DMV Director Jean Shiomotos letter to Gov. Jerry Browns secretary [Dated December 7] informing office that shes retiring. This comes after a controversial year of long wait-times, technology outages, and voter registration issues at DMVs across the state. pic.twitter.com/XweRPErKTK Ashley Zavala (@ZavalaA) December 17, 2018 Outgoing Gov. Jerry Brown later on Dec. 17 announced that the departments chief deputy director, Bill Davidson, will replace Shiomoto as acting director as of Dec. 31. Shiomoto was appointed by Gov. Jerry Brown as the director of the DMV in Nov. 2013, ten months after she assumed the role of acting director in the department. However, it wasnt until 2018 that her leadership was called into question. Starting last summer, wait times in DMV field offices had increased dramatically across the state. In August, the average wait time increased to 69 minutes, not including the potential two- to three-hour wait outside the DMV office for customers who did not make an appointment. Thomas Welch tells me he got to the SF DMV office at 9 am to renew his licenseits now 4:30pm and theres only six more people in front of him. How the DMV is promising to fix long wait times is the story were working on @nbcbayarea pic.twitter.com/5JFkqcNx5Z Mark Matthews (@MarkMatthewsNBC) August 7, 2018 The DMV explained the excessive wait times experienced over past few months were due to demand for Real ID applications, which will be required for all passengers to board airplanes by Oct. 1, 2020 for those travelling domestically without a passport. To reduce long wait times, the DMV convinced the state legislature to allocate nearly $17 million to the department in additional funding to hire another 230 staff. However, some Republican lawmakers doubted the effectiveness of this strategy. In September, Assemblymember Jim Patterson, who advocated for an audit of the DMV, pointed out that the department had 35 outages in the last 18 months and the longest one was nine hours long. He described there is a pattern, adding that the DMV cant be trusted to police itself. In addition, the DMV was found to have mishandled the information for 23,000 voter registrations, including giving people the wrong political party preference and sending non-qualified peoples information to Californias secretary of state, who maintains the list of registered voters. California Secretary of State Alex Padilla in October called for an independent audit of the DMV after the agency admitted that around 1,500 people, including non-citizen individuals, were wrongly registered to vote through the Motor Voter program during the period from April 23 to Sept. 25. These mistakes from DMV are absolutely unacceptable. We were told last month that the instance of the 23,000 that they had a fix and while this problem seems to be different. Its another mistake nonetheless it risks jeopardizing confidence in the electoral process, said Alex Padilla at the press conference. However, the issue got more serious after Shiomoto recently revealed that the DMV failed to transmit 589 voter records to elections officials before the November election, which could have prevented those people from voting. BREAKING: DMV director retires. Gov. Newsom has a real opportunity here. Hire a director who sees CA drivers as paying customersnot annoyances. pic.twitter.com/1nFiWrjOm5 Jim Patterson (@JimPatterson559) December 17, 2018 In a letter to Brown and Newsom on Dec. 14, Padilla asked them to promptly appoint new leadership at the DMV. This is now the fourth egregious error DMV has committed since the launch of Motor Voter earlier this year, he said in the letter. This latest error could have potentially disenfranchised eligible California citizens. Patterson in a statement on Shiomotos retirement, This is not surprising, given the catalogue of mistakes with the DMVs Motor Voter program and the public uproar caused by outrageous wait times this year. Previously, Shiomoto had been asked to resign by Republican gubernatorial candidate John Cox. Watch Next: How They Brainwash You: Government, Media, and Special Interest Group Tactics A false reality is being painted by news outlets, governments, activists, and special interest groups that is warping psychology and concepts. Dog Tied Down and Shot by BB Gun Over 100 Times at Close Range in North Carolina: Officials A dog is recovering after being tied down and shot 100 times with a BB gun in North Carolina, according to local reports. Police are now looking for a suspect in the case. The dog, named Brownie, was shot dozens of times before it was left in a ditch, WBTV reported. A good Samaritan rescued the animal and took it to the vet before performing surgery to remove the BBs shot into its body and face. Christie Fries and her mom, Janet Lott, the two who rescued the dog, were able to send it back to its owner, Edith Pritchard. You need to be in jail and rot there.Brownie lost her sight and her hearing during the horrible ordeal. Investigators are still looking for the person responsible. WBTV News 20181218 Pritchard told the station she usually lets her 7-year-old Jack Russell mix run around in her neighborhood and the dog will normally come back home. Someway or another he wandered away from the neighborhood, said Pritchard. When the dog was dropped into a ditch, Lott saw the animal as she drove past and rescued it. Brownie got shot by a bb gun multiple times. Someone shot him in his eyes, ears, neck, and chest. My mother and stepfather was driving to my house and it was trapped in the snow. He couldnt even move. Ms. Pritchard is an elderly lady that lives on a fixed income. She lost one dog name Petey the same day that a good samaritan took Brownie to the vet. He needs a cage outside so he can go outside when he wants to. We also want to offer a reward for the arrest of the horrible person that did this to Brownie, according to a GoFundMe for the woman. Pritchard said she cannot believe someone capable of such violence lives in her community. I couldnt believe that anybody could put that many small bullets in a dog, said Pritchard, adding that the dog doesnt respond when she calls Brownies name. She believes the animal is now deaf. He was always a happy dog coming to meet me at the door, she said, according to the Charlotte Observer. The Burke County Sheriffs Office said Animal Control is now investigating the case. No suspects are in custody. You need to be in jail and rot there, said Fries of the suspect. To hold a dog down and shoot it in its eyes thats uncalled for. I want to know why they are so evil that they could do an animal like this, added Pritchard. Pritchard said she allowed her other dog, a 6-year-old Chihuahua named Petey, to go out at the same time as Brownie. Petey also died, but A Better Life Animal Rescue President Gwen Hood said its believed the dog got into something poisonous, according to The Associated Press. They were both allowed outside while unsupervised. Anyone with information about the case can call the Burke County Sheriffs Office. What to Do if Animal Is Abused? The Humane Society said that most reported animal cruelty comes in the form of neglect and less is direct violence. It notes, Neglect, or a failure to provide basic needs for an animal, makes up the vast majority of cruelty cases that animal control officers respond to. Neglect often includes hoarding, lack of shelter or veterinary care, tethering and abandonment, as well as other forms of abuse, the organization said. To report abuse, it adds, Call your local animal control agency as soon as possible or dial 9-1-1 if youre unfamiliar with local organizations. If you make a report of alleged animal cruelty, the responding agency is required to investigate. By Robert Stavins 18 December 2018 (The Conversation) The global climate change conference in Katowice, Poland, that wrapped up on Dec. 15 had a challenging mission. Three years ago in Paris, 196 countries and regions agreed to curb global greenhouse gas emissions Now they had to agree on rules and guidelines for how to do it. Two urgent realities hung over the negotiations. First, U.S. President Donald Trump announced in June 2017 that the United States would withdraw from the Paris Agreement in November 2020 the soonest that any nation can actually do so. Second, although countries that are responsible for 97 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions have pledged to make cuts, the initial reductions will surely not be enough to keep global warming below two degrees Celsius. So, a key question is how the Paris Agreement can facilitate increased ambition over time.Delegates in Poland wanted to make progress by filling in details of the skeletal Paris Agreement. Was the meeting a success? A simple yes or no would be misleading. But from my perspective leading a delegation from the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements at the conference, there were were significant gains in two key areas. Nations agreed on uniform rules for measuring and reporting their own performance in cutting emissions. There also were intensive discussions of how to connect reduction efforts across regions, nations and sub-national areas, which offers many economic and other benefits. Even though the latter issue was not resolved in Katowice, I see the final agreement as a glass that is more than half full.As I wrote in 2015 when it was signed, the Paris Agreement was a major milestone. In it, 195 countries plus the European Union accounting for 97 percent of global emissions pledged to develop national targets and action plans for reducing their emissions. They also agreed to revise these contributions every five years, with an eye to ratcheting up their goals over time. In contrast, the predecessor international agreement, the Kyoto Protocol, covered only 14 percent of global emissions. Oil and gas industry supporters gather at a pro-pipeline rally at City Hall in Calgary on Dec. 17, 2018. (The Canadian Press/Jeff McIntosh) Federal Bailout, Bill C-69 Miss the Mark for Albertas Oil Patch NEWS ANALYSIS The federal governments efforts to placate the oil and gas sector and Alberta Premier Rachel Notley arent working. In fact, the divide between Albertans and the rest of the country may be growing, given the uproar caused by the lack of pipelines and now Bill C-69. We understand that when Alberta hurts, so does Canada, said Natural Resources Minister Amarjeet Sohi at a press conference in Edmonton for announcing the $1.6 billion support package on Dec. 18. The bailout, consisting mostly of non-forgivable loans at commercial rates, is effectively a mere stopgap measure for a sector reeling from an inability to get product to markets other than the United States. Notley was not aware that the support package from the feds was coming, but was hoping for a lot more. She called it a bit of a cut and paste from previous support announcements and assumed the $1.6 billion was the first step of many more to come. There had better be many steps, she said at a news conference a couple of hours after the federal announcement. Notley also criticized the bailouts purpose, stressing that the issue is not expanding into new markets but simply getting the product to marketwhat she calls a 15-year slow-motion car crash. She was also not in favour of going into debt as a long-term solution. Regulatory Overload While the lack of pipelines is the elephant in the room, another big problem is onerous regulation and Bill C-69, which would make Alberta even less attractive to investment. Bill C-69, which would radically change the process of environmental assessment for big infrastructure projects like pipelines, is now undergoing a second reading in the Senate. A rally of over 1,500 pro-pipeline protestors in Grande Prairie, Alta., on Dec. 16 denounced the bill to revamp the National Energy Board (NEB), saying it would make it impossible to build new pipelines. A similar rally was held in Calgary on Dec. 17. Martha Hall Findlay, president and CEO of the Canada West Foundation (CWF), said it would create even less trust from the investment community. The former Liberal MP said Bill C-69 emphasizes social and environmental concerns much more than economic growth and competitiveness, in a podcast with the ARC Energy Research Institute on Dec. 14. Additionally, regulatory bodies are supposed to be apolitical, but the proposed bill would ultimately make it the ministers job to decide on project approvals, she said. An inordinate amount of discretion is left with the minister of the environment, she added. The irony is this is far more laden with political discretion than what we had before. Findlay doesnt think the NEB process is broken and believes that introducing more uncertainty with a whole new process under new legislation would throw a wet blanket on new capital spending. Bill C-69 would replace environmental legislation and give new agencies broader scope for review. A new watered-down Canadian Energy Regulator would replace the NEB, Findlay argues. Dont kick the industry when its down, she said. Proponents of Bill C-69 want more Indigenous consultation and stronger environmental protections. CWF agrees the bill has some merit with larger impact assessments and that the NEB can be improved. Sohi reaffirmed his support for Bill C-69, calling it so fundamentally important. But the pendulum has tilted too far. In a Dec. 2 editorial in The Globe and Mail, Findlay noted that in the 392-page Bill C-69 proposed legislation, competitiveness appears twice and economy and economic growth dont even appear. The bill and support package are turning into polarizing issues. Aaron Wudrick, federal director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, wants to scrap Bill C-69 and criticized the governments support package, saying families dont want to depend on corporate welfare. Tying one hand behind the energy sectors back while sprinkling corporate welfare into the other hand is not a real plan, he said in a statement. Misunderstanding All sides concur that the Canadian economy needs Albertas oil and gas industry to do well and credit the provinces ingenuity in developing the oilsands and being profitable when given the opportunity. Ottawas $1.6 billion bailout will likely be most helpful to the smaller firms facing cash crunches. The funding would help an industry get through a rough spot. The support, however, is only a small fraction of the total amount of the larger companies capital spending budgets. For example, Canadian Natural Resources 2019 base capital budget is about $3.7 billion. Randy Ollenberger, managing director of oil & gas research at BMO, told BNN Bloomberg that the new financing from the feds wont actually lead to longer-term economic improvement like the hiring of workers. And despite one of the immediate symptoms of the challengethe differential between Western Canada Select (WCS) and the U.S. benchmark West Texas Intermediate (WTI)having returned to normal thanks to Albertas decision to cut production in 2019, Alberta cant seem to catch a break, as WTI hit a 15-month low on Dec. 18 even after OPECs Dec. 7 announced production cuts. Follow Rahul on Twitter @RV_ETBiz 4 Major Blows to the Credibility of the Steele Dossier With the current flow of news, its now easy to miss some intriguing details that serve to highlight an underlying theme: The Steele dossier has been debunked. Christopher Steele is currently involved in litigation in a British court, where he is being sued for defamation by three Russian bankers because of claims he made in the dossier, namely that Alfa Bank had meaningful ties to Russian leader Vladimir Putin. In his most recent responses to the court, Steele made a rather startling admission: Fusions immediate client was law firm Perkins Coie LLP. It engaged Fusion to obtain information necessary for Perkins Coie LLP to provide legal advice on the potential impact of Russian involvement on the legal validity of the outcome of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. Based on that advice, parties such as the Democratic National Committee and HFACC Inc. (also known as Hillary for America) could consider steps they would be legally entitled to take to challenge the validity of the outcome of that election. Steele was hired to prepare information that would allow Clinton to challenge the validity of the 2016 election. That legal challenge was never made, although a less-formal effort was aggressively undertaken. Meanwhile, Steeles dossier, which remains uncorroborated by the FBI, was used to obtain a FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) warrant for spying on Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page. Steelewho also is being sued for libel by Russian businessman Aleksej Gubarevused a technique known as circular reporting to assist in the corroboration of his dossier with the FBI. Isikoff Denies Steele met with Yahoo News reporter Michael Isikoff in September 2016 and gave Isikoff information from the dossier. The resulting Sept. 23, 2016, article from Isikoff was then cited by the FBI as validating Steeles claims and was featured in both the original FISA application and the three subsequent renewals. Steele was fired by the FBI in late October or early November over his contacts with journalists in violation of FBI protocol. His dossier, however, was nevertheless used by the FBI in obtaining the FISA warrant, and subsequent renewals, of the Page surveillance. Interestingly, Isikoff recently gave an interview on John Zieglers podcast Free Speech Broadcasting on Dec. 15; that interview didnt go as Zeigler had hoped (from the 26:50 mark): Zeigler: You mention the Steele dossier, which to me has been unfairly derided, especially by Trump fans. Would you agree that a lot of whats in the Steele dossier has been at least somewhat vindicated? Would you agree with that assessment? Isikoff: No. Zeigler: You would not? Isikoff: No. Zeigler: Tell me why. Isikoff began his explanation, noting that, In broad strokes, Christopher Steele was clearly onto something, that there was a major Kremlin effort to interfere in our elections, that they were trying to help Trumps campaign, and that there was multiple contacts between various Russian figures close to the government and various people in Trumps campaign. But then, Isikoff came to his underlying conclusion, admitting: When you actually get into the details of the Steele dossier, the specific allegations, we have not seen the evidence to support them, and, in fact, theres good grounds to think that some of the more sensational allegations will never be proven and are likely false. But based on the public record at this point, Id have to say that most of the specific allegations have not been borne out. Zeigler responded, noting somewhat wryly, Thats interesting to hear you say that Michael because, as Im sure youre well aware, your book was kind of used, indirectly, to try to validate the pee tape for lack of a better word. Comey Testifies It wasnt just Isikoff questioning the veracity of the dossier. James Comey, the former FBI director, recently made some notable admissions during congressional testimony (found on page 127 of the testimony transcript): What I understand by verified is we then try to replicate the source information, so that it becomes FBI investigation and our conclusions rather than a reliable sources. Thats what I understand itthe differenceto be. And that work wasnt completed by the time I left in May of 2017, to my knowledge. Comey told congressional investigators the Steele dossier wasnt verified as of May 2017. Again, the dossier was used as the primary piece of evidence by the FBI to obtain the Page FISA warrant on Oct. 21, 2016. Further highlighting the importance of the dossier, former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe testified to the House Intelligence Committee in December 2017 that no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the FISC (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court) without the Steele dossier information. The importance of Comeys statement cant be overemphasized. The Steele dossier was never confirmed or verified by the FBI, yet it was used by the FBI as the primary piece of evidence before the FISA court. More Inconsistencies Another element contained within the dossier was in regard to President Donald Trumps former lawyer, Michael Cohen. Steele had claimed that Cohen had visited Prague, something that has been consistently and vehemently denied by Cohen and his former lawyer and now-adviser, Lanny Davis. In a Dec. 16 appearance on MSNBC, Davis was asked by Kasie Hunt if the Prague trip ever happened. Davis responded, laughing: No. No. Everybody, America, we all love Kasies show. No, no Prague, ever, never. A month earlier, Greg Miller, the national security correspondent for The Washington Post, appeared in an interview televised on C-Span, while promoting his book, The Apprentice: Trump, Russia and the Subversion of American Democracy. Miller was asked his opinion of the dossier and responded (32:25 mark): Its most accurate in its broadest and most sweeping assertions and conclusions. The narrower you get, the more particular you get, the harder it is to figure out whether its on the mark. In other words, the actual underlying details that make up the dossier fail to stand up to scrutiny. Miller then noted specific assertions The Washington Post had attempted to prove and failed: Its not for lack of trying. Theres other material in the dossier, we literally spent weeks and months trying to run down. Theres an assertion in there that Michael Cohen, Trumps lawyer, went to Prague to settle some payments that were needed at the end of the campaign. We sent reporters through every hotel in Prague, through all over the place, just to try to figure out if he was ever there, and came away empty. Weve talked to sources at the FBI and CIA and elsewhere. They dont believe that ever happened. Interestingly, Miller failed to make these disclosures in his book. And to my knowledge, The Washington Post has, for some unknown reason, never mentioned their failed investigative efforts in any articles. Why the Lies in Steele Dossier Matter The continued and proven failures of the Steele dossier matter. Not only was it used in obtaining the Page FISA warrant, but was also used in intelligence-community documents provided to Obama and his administration. Former CIA Director John Brennan has claimed he never used the dossier in the Intelligence Community assessment. That claim was later disputed by his co-author, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who said on CNN that some of the substantive content, not all of it, but some of the substantive content of the dossier, we were able to corroborate in our Intelligence Community assessment from other sources in which we had very high confidence to it. Former NSA Director Mike Rogers was more specific: In a March 5, 2018, letter to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, Adm. Rogers informed the committee that a two-page summary of the dossierdescribed as the Christopher Steele informationwas added as an appendix to the ICA [Intelligence Community Assessment] draft, and that consideration of that appendix was part of the overall ICA review/approval process. In August, Brennan did an interview with MSNBCs Rachel Maddow that was discussed in an Epoch Times article, Did Brennan Admit to Using Reverse Targeting to Spy on the Trump Campaign? During that interview, Brennan repeatedly stated his knowledge of Russian contacts with U.S. citizens. Maddow pursued his conclusions from those contacts: Maddow: While you were in office as CIA director, before you left on inauguration day, did you conclude that U.S. persons were successfully leveraged in that effort? Brennan: No. The look of shocked surprise on Maddows face was notable at Brennans denial that the Russians had successfully engaged Americans to obtain their goals. The Steele dossier, written by a British national and former MI6 agent, was used by both the FBI and the CIA and a summary of the document was provided directly to Obama. And yet, for all the weight attached to this document, most of its assertions have never been proven to be factual, many have been proven to be false and it remains unverified to this day. Which is perhaps fitting for a document that had its origination as something to be used by Hillary Clinton to challenge the election in the then-unlikely event she lost. 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. A member of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) holding his rifle in Hajin, in the Deir Ezzor province, eastern Syria, on Dec. 15, 2018. (Delil Souleiman/AFP/Getty Images) ISIS Kills 700 Prisoners in East Syria: Syrian Observatory BEIRUTThe Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Dec. 19, that the ISIS terrorist group had executed nearly 700 prisoners in nearly two months in eastern Syria. The UK-based war monitoring group said the prisoners were among 1,350 civilians and fighters that ISIS had been holding in territory near the Iraqi border. The jihadists control a shrinking strip of land east of the Syrias Euphrates River around the town of Hajin, which U.S.-backed forces entered this month. The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), led by the Kurdish YPG militia, has battled ISIS there for several months with the help of U.S. air power and special forces. SDF commander-in-chief Mazloum Kobani told Reuters last week that at least 5,000 ISIS extremists remain holed up in the enclave, including many foreigners who appear ready to fight to the death. ISIS self-proclaimed caliphate has crumbled after different offensives across Iraq and Syria, though its fighters still operate in the desert border region and mount attacks. By Ellen Francis Killing of American Woman in Costa Rica Was Organized by Multiple People: Report The killing of an American woman who was found dead in Costa Rica in early December was organized by multiple people, investigators said. Carla Stefaniak, 36, a Florida resident, was celebrating her birthday in the typically-peaceful Central American country. Espinoza Martinez, a Nicaraguan who was allegedly working illegally as a security guard at the hotel La Mares, which rents out rooms through Airbnb, was arrested on suspicion of killing Stefaniak. Family members have kept relatives, friends, and others interested in the cast updated through a Facebook page, Finding Carla, that was started when she was missing. According to sources close to the case, the results of the forensic examinations lead investigators to believe that Finding Carla 20181213 On Dec. 13, the page shared an article from the Q Costa Rica website. Citing sources close to the case, the website said that there may be three or four people involved in the death, based on forensic analysis of the body. Investigators are working on a version of a guest who would have heard noises coming from victims villa, furniture being moved and cleaning inside the villa. This, allegedly occurring hours after the victim would have been murdered, it added. Investigators found the villa clean on Dec. 3. A lawyer representing the hotel owners claimed that it was cleaned after other guests had stayed there following Stefaniaks stay. Stefaniak was killed on Nov. 27 or Nov. 28 and investigators say the motive was sexually motivated, believing Stefaniak was killed while trying to fight back against an attempted sexual assault. Father Speaks Out At a press conference following the discovery of his daughters body, Carlos Caicedo said that he was in terrible pain. The whole world will know about you in a tragic way. What a terrible pain. How I would have liked to go through my life unnoticed, without the whole world knowing about us, Carlos Caicedo, Stefaniaks father, said in Spanish at a press conference on Dec. 5. It doesnt give me any comfort but I really want the authorities, especially the judicial authorities, to track down those responsible for this abominable and terrible act, and to bring the full weight of the law upon them, he added. He said that he saw her body at the morgue. She had her head bashed in and throat slashed, an image he said has stuck with him. The death came after the U.S. State Department in September issued a travel advisory for U.S. nationals visiting Costa Rica. Exercise normal precautions in Costa Rica. Some areas have increased risk, the agency said. The FBI and State Department are involved in the investigation of the murder. Airbnb Concerns Stefaniaks death came just weeks after a couple died from carbon monoxide poisoning at an Airbnb residence they were renting in Mexico. Airbnb said theyve reached out the families of the victims, and said it runs background checks on U.S. residents to look for prior felony convictions, ex-offender registrations, and significant misdemeanors. The company has not indicated that it will change any policies based on the deaths. Anthony Roman, a risk management expert who runs his own firm Roman & Associates, said that travelers should carry portable carbon monoxide detectors while noting that theres no way to fully predict what could go wrong in a rental, whether it is through Airbnb or not. Even if the algorithm is very thorough in checking multiple sources and cross-referencing those sources, it is still insufficient to be completely predictive of the risk, he told USA Today. If you feel isolated or feel uncomfortable, you should remove yourself from that environment. In other words, dont take chances. Jordan Arnold, a former prosecutor in Manhattan and an executive managing director at security company K2 Intelligence, said that the company can do background checks but cant prevent all attacks. Airbnb or Marriottno host can 100 percent eliminate risk for a guest, he said. The only person to blame for this incident is the man charged with homicide. Its not the fault of the victim or Airbnb. From NTD News Lebanon Set to Get New National Unity Government in Days: Politicians BEIRUTLebanon is on track to form a new national unity government in the next few days, politicians said on Dec. 18, raising hopes for an end to more than seven months of wrangling that has darkened the outlook for its struggling economy. Efforts to form the new government, led by Prime Minister-designate Saad al-Hariri, have been obstructed by conflicting demands for cabinet seats that must be parceled out in line with a finely balanced, sectarian political system. Heavily indebted and suffering from a stagnant economy, Lebanon is in dire need of an administration that can set about long-stalled reforms to put public debt on a sustainable footing. Matters are moving quickly and if things stay like this without obstaclesand I dont expect obstaclesthe government will soon see the light, Major General Abbas Ibrahim, a top security official involved in efforts to end the impasse, said in a televised news conference. Finance Minister Ali Hassan Khalil told Reuters the process was in the last phase and it is probable that the government will be formed before the Christmas holiday. This will leave a positive impact on the financial and economic situation and open the way for a start to dealing (with) this file, he added. Fitch Ratings on Dec. 18 changed Lebanons outlook to negative from stable, citing a further deterioration in government deficits and debt dynamics and signs of rising pressures on Lebanons financing model. The May 6 national election, Lebanons first in nine years, produced a parliament tilted in favor of the heavily armed, Iran-backed Shiite Muslim group Hezbollah, which together with its political allies won more than 70 of the 128 seats. Hariri, who enjoys Western backing, lost more than one-third of his lawmakers, though he remained Lebanons biggest Sunni Muslim leader and as such was nominated again as prime minister. His Future Movement said it was now possible to wager on the government being formed before the holidays, saying this was a pressing matter due to economic and financial challenges. In Washington, a State Department official said the United States hoped that Lebanons next government would be willing to work with it on areas of mutual interest and expressed concern over Hezbollahs rising political clout in the country. The United States is the biggest backer of the Lebanese army, providing more than $1.5 billion in support since 2006. We continue to have deep concerns regarding Hezbollahs growing political power inside Lebanon, the official told Reuters. We are concerned about the efforts of Hezbollahs political allies that provide it with top cover and a veneer of legitimacy. Compromise Efforts to form the government have faced a series of obstacles, the last of which surrounded Sunni representation, with Hezbollah demanding a cabinet seat for one of its Sunni allies to reflect their election gains. Hezbollah is expected to get three ministries in the upcoming cabinet for the first time, instead of two, including the health ministry. Hariri has resisted the demand. But under a compromise that has taken shape, the Hezbollah-linked Sunnis are expected to be represented in government by a candidate acceptable to them rather than insisting that they themselves should get the seat. In exchange, they say they want Hariri to acknowledge their political standing as a group of Sunnis independent of his Future Movement by meeting them. The Hariri family has dominated Lebanese Sunni politics for decades. Within two or three daysGod willingyou will hear the news that the Lebanese masses were waiting for, Abdel Rahim Mrad, one of the pro-Hezbollah Sunni MPs, said after meeting Ibrahim. All the problems have been solved. The Sunni minister is expected to be named among a group of ministers allotted to President Michel Aoun, a compromise on the part of his Free Patriotic Movement (FPM). Every solution requires a concession and everybody has conceded, Gebran Bassil, the head of the FPM and Aouns son-in-law, said. By Tom Perry & Laila Bassam Mother Arrested After 8-Year-Old Girl Dies Trying to Crawl Under Freight Train Californian authorities have arrested a mother suspected of forcing her 8-year-old daughter to crawl under a freight train so that the family could catch a bus. Joy France Collins, 44, was arrested on Dec. 17, Fresno police said, after her daughter, Joyanna ( also written as Joy Anna) Harris was killed when she crawled under the idling train. Joyannas 9-year-old brother had already successfully crawled under the train, police chief Jerry Dyer said, according to Fox, adding that Joyanna was hesitant to go. Collins shouted, Hurry up!' Dyer said. Upon being encouraged by the mother to cross the track, she too made her way underneath the rail car and attempted to get to the other side, Dyer said. The mile-long train had stopped for 12 seconds and was reportedly blocking the familys route to a bus that Collins wanted the family to catch. She had made the children take such measures in the past, authorities said. But as Joyanna was trying to cross the tracks, the train suddenly lurched forward, the girl was trapped underneath and dragged 500 feet before her mother was able to free her. The 8-year-old died at the scene from her injuries. Fresno resident David Hunt told ABC30, There was nothing that could prepare me for what Ive seen. He added, My head is still spinning trying to grasp what was going on. Other than that Im thanking God that my kids all made it home tonight. Hunt said his 10-year-old son Andre had been playing on the tracks. Hes nonstop crying, all hes saying is it couldve been him, it couldve been him, he said. We Know That She Is Hurting Dyer said that although Collins had been arrested, he was aware that she would also be suffering after the death of her daughter. A mother placed her daughter in a position where she could be seriously injured or killed, and thats what we have to look at, he said. We have a responsibility to hold that person accountable. Because it was dark at the time Collins asked her children to cross and Joyannas reluctance, authorities have determined that Collins was negligent. We know that she is hurting, Dyer added. I hope people understand that there is a balance that we have to achieve in law enforcement. No one last night wanted to arrest the mother for this crime but the law is the law. Dyer said that child protective services had prior contact with Collins. Local man James Whitehead climbed over a fence to chase the train as Joyanna was dragged along, the Fresno Bee reported. Wheres the kid? Wheres the kid? he said to himself, according to the outlet. Weve seen five or six people die on the tracks here, but never a kid. Whitehead said a fence needs to be built between the tracks and homes. Collins has been charged on suspicion of child neglect likely to cause great bodily injury or death. NASAs 1st Flight to Moon, Apollo 8, Marks 50Th Anniversary CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.Fifty years ago on Christmas Eve, a tumultuous year of assassinations, riots, and war drew to a close in heroic and hopeful fashion with the three Apollo 8 astronauts reading from the Book of Genesis on live TV as they orbited the moon. To this day, that 1968 mission is considered to be NASAs boldest and perhaps most dangerous undertaking. That first voyage by humans to another world set the stage for the still grander Apollo 11 moon landing seven months later. There was an unprecedented and unfathomable risk to putting three men atop a monstrous new rocket for the first time and sending them all the way to the moon. The mission was whipped together in just four months in order to reach the moon by years end, before the Soviet Union. There was the Old Testament reading by commander Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders. Lastly, there was the photo named Earthrise, showing our blue and white ballhumanitys homerising above the bleak, gray lunar landscape and 240,000 miles in the distance. Humans had never set eyes on the far side of the moon, or on our planet as a cosmic oasis, surrounded completely by the black void of space. A half-century later, only 24 U.S. astronauts who flew to the moon have witnessed these wondrous sights in person. The Apollo 8 crew is still around: Borman and Lovell are 90, Anders is 85. To Lovell, the journey had the thrill and romance of true exploration, and provided an uplifting cap for Americans to a painful, contentious year marked by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, nationwide riots and protests of the Vietnam War. The missions impact was perhaps best summed up in a four-word telegram received by Borman. Thanks, you saved 1968. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstinewho at age 43 missed Apollomarvels over the gutsy decision in August that year to launch astronauts to the moon in four months time. Hes pushing for a return to the moon, but with real sustainability this next go-around. The space agency flipped missions and decided that instead of orbiting Earth, Borman and his crew would fly to the moon to beat the Soviets and pave the way for the lunar landings to come. And that was despite on its previous test flight, the Saturn V rocket lost parts and engines failed. Even more worrisome than all of this, Bridenstine noted earlier this month, Apollo 8 would be in orbit around the moon on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. In other words, if there was a failure here, it would wreck Christmas not only for everybody in the United States, but for everybody in the world. As that first moon shot neared, Bormans wife, Susan, demanded to know the crews chances. A NASA director answered: 50-50. Borman wanted to get to the moon and get back fast. In his mind, a single lap around the moon would suffice. His bosses insisted on more. My main concern in this whole flight was to get there ahead of the Russians and get home. That was a significant achievement in my eyes, Borman explained at the Chicago launch of the book Rocket Men last spring. Everyone eventually agreed: Ten orbits it would be. Liftoff of the Saturn V occurred on the morning of Saturday, Dec. 21, 1968. On Christmas Eve, the spaceship successfully slipped into orbit around the moon. Before bedtime, the first envoys to another world took turns reading the first 10 verses from Genesis. It had been left to Borman, before the flight, to find something appropriate to say for what was expected to be the biggest broadcast audience to date. We all tried for quite a while to figure out something, and it all came up trite or foolish, Borman recalled. Finally, the wife of a friend of a friend came up with the idea of Genesis. In the beginning, Anders read, God created the heaven and the Earth Borman ended the broadcast with, And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of youall of you on the good Earth. On Christmas morning, their spacecraft went around the moon for the final time. The engine firing needed to shoot them back to Earth occurred while the capsule was out of communication with Mission Control in Houston. Lovell broke the nervous silence as the ship reappeared: Please be informed there is a Santa Claus. Back in Houston, meanwhile, a limousine driver knocked on Marilyn Lovells door and handed her a gift-wrapped mink stole with a card that read: To Marilyn, Merry Christmas from the man in the moon. Lovell bought the coat for his wife and arranged its fancy delivery before liftoff. Splashdown occurred in the pre-dawn darkness on Dec. 27, bringing the incredible six-day journey to a close. Time magazine named the three astronauts Men of the Year. It wasnt until after the astronauts were back that the significance of their Earth pictures sank in. Anders snapped the iconic Earthrise photo during the crews fourth orbit of the moon, frantically switching from black-and-white to color film to capture the planets exquisite, fragile beauty. Oh my God, look at that picture over there! Anders said. Theres the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty! Before the flight, no one had thought about photographing Earth, according to Anders. The astronauts were under orders to get pictures for potential lunar landing sites while orbiting 70 miles above the moon. We came to explore the moon and what we discovered was the Earth, Anders is fond of saying. His Earthrise photo is a pillar of todays environmental movement. It remains a legacy of Apollo and humanitys achievement, said professor emeritus John Logsdon of George Washington Universitys Space Policy Institute, forever underscoring the absence of political borders as seen from space. Anders wondered thenand nowThis is not a very big place, why cant we get along? Lovell remains awestruck by the fact he could hide all of Earth behind his thumb. Over 3 billion people, mountains, oceans, deserts, everything I ever knew was behind my thumb, he recalled at a recent anniversary celebration at Washingtons National Cathedral. Astronaut-artist Nicole Stott said the golden anniversary provides an opportunity to reintroduce the world to Earthrise. She and three other former space travelers are holding a celebration at NASAs Kennedy Space Center on Friday, 50 years to the day Apollo 8 launched. That one image, I think, it just gives us the who and where we are in the universe so beautifully, she said. By July 1969, Apollo 8 was overshadowed by Apollo 11s Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin moon landing. But without Apollo 8, noted George Washingtons Logsdon, NASA likely would not have met President John F. Kennedys deadline of putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Borman and Anders never flew in space again, and Soviet cosmonauts never made it to the moon. Lovell went on to command the ill-fated Apollo 13but thats another story. That flight was the most demanding, he said, But Apollo 8 was the one of exploration, the one of repeating the Lewis and Clark expedition finding the new Earth. By Marcia Dunn Rare Tornado Damages Homes in Washington State SEATTLEA rare tornado touched down in a Seattle suburb on Dec. 18, damaging several homes and toppling trees, authorities said. Based on radar imagery and video evidence, a tornado touched down south of Port Orchard shortly before 2 p.m., said Brent Bower, hydrologist with the National Weather Service in Seattle. There were no immediate reports of injuries. Emily Silverman told the television station KOMO-TV she was driving to a store with her husband at the time. Its raining and its pouring down really bad and before you know it everything was flying everywhere, Silverman said. Our car back windows blew out, our side windows blew out I thought I was a goner. Her 2-year-old son was in the back seat. So glad hes OK because the whole back window just busted in, Silverman said. It was just crazy. Ive never seen anything like this in my life. The Kitsap County Sheriffs Office called the damage catastrophic, saying it was contained to neighborhoods east and south of a Walmart in Port Orchard. Power lines were down and roads were closed in the area, the sheriffs office said. About 50 buildings were affected, Deputy Scott Wilson told the Seattle Times. KOMO-TV reports damage was reported on Rhapsody Drive and at the Bethel Tavern. Video from the television stations helicopter at the scene showed trees down, homes with roofs ripped off and debris scattered across yards. Bower said they wouldnt be able to survey the area before it was dark and that theyd send a team Wednesday morning. They were working with emergency management partners to learn the extent of the damage. How rare are tornadoes in Washington? On average, the state averages 2.5 tornadoes a year. December tornadoes are even more rare, averaging just 0.1 a year. #wawx NWS Seattle (@NWSSeattle) December 19, 2018 The state averages 2.5 tornadoes a year, but December tornadoes are extremely rare, the weather service said on Twitter. Most tornadoes in Washington are rated EF-0s with minor damage, Bower said. Port Orchard is about 15 miles west of Seattle, across Puget Sound on the Kitsap Peninsula. By Lisa Baumann In this Tuesday, May 22, 2018, file photo, Republican congressional candidate Dan Crenshaw reacts to the crowd with his wife, Tara, as he comes on stage to deliver a victory speech during an election night party at the Cadillac Bar, in Houston, Texas. (Mark MulliganHouston Chronicle via AP, File) Rep.-Elect Dan Crenshaw Called Pete Davidson After Troubling Social Media Post Texas Rep.-elect and military veteran Dan Crenshaw said that he reached out to Pete Davidson of Saturday Night Live after Davidson made a concerning post on Instagram. Davidson posted on the social media website over the weekend, saying, I really dont want to be on this earth anymore. Im doing my best to stay here for you but I actually dont know how much longer I can last. All Ive ever tried to do was help people. Just remember I told you so <3, he added. The post was soon deleted but many friends and fans expressed concern, with some saying theyd personally reached out to Davidson. Crenshaw said that he was among those who got in contact. It was pretty devastating. You dont want to see somebody in that kind of positionto the point where theyre actually putting out a cry for help on social mediathats not a good place to be in, Crenshaw told KPRC. I talked to him personally yesterday and talked to him for a little bit about it. We dont go back very far, were not good friends, but I think he appreciated hearing from me. Crenshaw said he conveyed a message that everyone has a purpose. God put you here for a reason, but its your job to find that purpose. And you should live that way, he said, recounting the conversation before noting that Davidson helps others by providing laughter. And [you should] know that you have value, and that you do more good than you realize for people. Especially a guy like that. He makes people laughsometimes he makes people madbut he makes people laugh a lot. Thats what we talked about. It was a good conversation. Davidson briefly appeared on Saturday Night Live later on Dec. 15 to introduce musical guest Miley Cyrus. Responding to what appeared to be a call for help from comedian Pete Davidson, @DanCrenshawTX with me for #HouNewsmakers EXTRA talks about his response and phone call. https://t.co/BRiFwhBjD8 pic.twitter.com/GpqlUCPXpw Khambrel Marshall (@KPRC2Khambrel) December 17, 2018 History Crenshaw, who is set to enter office in January 2019, was targeted by Davison during an episode on SNL earlier this year. You may be surprised to hear hes a congressional candidate from Texas and not a hitman in a porno movie, Davidson said. Im sorry, I know he lost his eye in war, or whatever. Davidson later apologized and Crenshaw was brought onto the NBC show to accept an in-person apology. In what Im sure was a huge shock for people who know me, I made a poor choice last week, Davidson said, eliciting audience laughter. I made a joke about Lt. Commander Dan Crenshaw. And on behalf of the show and myself, I apologize. I mean this from the bottom of my heart, Davidson said. It was a poor choice of words. The man is a war hero and he deserves all the respect in the world. He added, And if any good came of this, maybe it was that for one day the left and the right finally came together to agree on somethingthat Im a [expletive]! Crenshaw then appeared on stage, looked at Davidson and asked You think?! as the audience broke out in cheers. The former Navy SEAL then added, Apology accepted. Crenshaw has since appeared on a number of cable news programs to analyze the news, including pushing back on accusations that President Donald Trump is undermining democracy. Epoch Times reporter Tom Ozimek contributed to this report. From NTD.tv Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Sen. Corry Booker (D-N.J.) listen to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) speak on the passage of the First Step Act on Dec. 19, 2018, in Washington. (Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images) Senate Overwhelmingly Passes Criminal Justice Reform Bill The U.S. Senate on Dec. 18 passed a landmark prison-reform bill, dubbed the First Step Act, that would help inmates readjust to society after completing their sentences, addressing concerns that too many Americans have been imprisoned for nonviolent crimes without support later on. The bipartisan bill, approved by a vote of 8712, will expand programs that reduce the recidivism risks of prisoners, such as job training programs, while also reducing the sentences for some low-level, nonviolent offenders. It would also adjust certain mandatory minimum sentences and cut costs. The act only affects federal prisoners and aims to make the criminal justice system fairer, reduce overcrowding, and, in the process, save taxpayer dollars. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said in a statement that the acts passage is the product of careful deliberation and input from a wide range of stakeholders and hailed it as an important victory. The Senate passage comes after years of overhaul efforts and comes as a major policy victory for President Donald Trump, who has said that he would sign the bill. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence both praised the acts passage and argued it would help make communities safer. A number of liberal and conservative advocacy groups also rallied in support of the bill. The House is widely expected to pass the bill sometime this week before sending it to Trumps desk for his signature. The act, co-sponsored by more than a third of the Senate, has evenly balanced support among both Democrats and Republicans. America is the greatest Country in the world and my job is to fight for ALL citizens, even those who have made mistakes, Trump wrote in a Dec. 18 tweet. This will keep our communities safer, and provide hope and a second chance, to those who earn it. In addition to everything else, billions of dollars will be saved. I look forward to signing this into law! Pence called the reform Historic on Twitter and urged the House to pass the act as soon as possible. The act also preserved the maximum potential sentences for violent and career criminals while providing judges with more leeway in the sentencing of nonviolent drug offenders who cooperate with law enforcement. One notable provision reduces the life sentence to 25 years in prison for some drug offenders with two or more convictions, compared to the previous mandatory term of life imprisonment without release. Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said the passage proved that we can work together for the good of our nation, adding that he looks forward to seeing it signed by the president. A number of law enforcement groups have backed the bill, including the nations largest police group, The Fraternal Order of Police, which has over 345,000 members. It also has support from 172 former federal prosecutors and sheriffs from 34 states across the country. By Kate Dooley 17 December 2018 (The Conversation) Three years after the Paris Agreement was struck, we now finally know the rules or most of them, at least for its implementation.The Paris Rulebook, agreed at the UN climate summit in Katowice, Poland, gives countries a common framework for reporting and reviewing progress towards their climate targets.Yet the new rules fall short in one crucial area. While the world will now be able to see how much we are lagging behind on the necessary climate action, the rulebook offers little to compel countries to up their game to the level required.The national pledges adopted in Paris are still woefully inadequate to meet the 1.5 or 2 global warming goals of the Paris Agreement. In the run-up to the Katowice talks, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a special report detailing the urgent need to accelerate climate policy. Yet the summit ran into trouble in its efforts to formally welcome the report, with delegates eventually agreeing to welcome its timely completion. Rather than directly asking for national climate targets to be increased, the Katowice text simply reiterates the existing request in the Paris Agreement for countries to communicate and update their contributions by 2020. Much now hinges on the UN General Assembly summit in September 2019, to bring the much-needed political momentum towards a new raft of pledges in 2020 that are actually in line with the scientific reality.A key element of the Paris Agreement is the Global Stocktake a five-yearly assessment of whether countries are collectively on track to meet the Paris Agreements goals to limit global warming. The new rulebook affirms that this process will consider equity and best available science. But it does not elaborate specifically on how these inputs will be used, and how the outcomes of the stocktake will increase ambition. This raises concerns that the rulebook will ensure we know if we are falling behind on climate action, but will offer no prescription for fixing things. This risks failing to address one of the biggest issues with the Paris Agreement so far: that countries are under no obligation to ensure their climate pledges are in line with the overall goals. A successful, ambitious and prescriptive five-yearly review process will be essential to get the world on track. [more] A still from the famous 1967 Patterson-Gimlin film that claimed to have captured the ape-like bigfoot. Sheriff Investigates Reports of Hunter Shooting at Man He Thought Was Bigfoot Its a question that has lingered in the mind of many a sasquatch hunter: If you see Bigfoot, do you shoot it? One mysterious Montana hunter, identified only by his black F-150 ford pick up truck, has his answer. After firing several shots at a man in the hills near Helena, Montana, the hunter claimed to have mistaken him for the legendary ape-like creature rumored to live in wooded areas in the Northwest. The shooter, who is being sought by local sheriffs, was later reported to have fired at a woman in a separate incident. The victim who was allegedly mistaken for the creature had been pinning shooting targets to trees on public land in the North Hills, according to the local sheriffs office, when he himself became a target. After two bullets had zipped past, one landing to his left, the other to the right, the 27-year-old dived for cover in the trees. After several more rounds, he confronted the shooter, according to Lewis and Clark County Sheriff Leo Dutton. I thought you were Bigfoot, the shooter told the man, according to Dutton. I dont target practicebut if I see something that looks like Bigfoot, I just shoot at it. The man described the incident to dispatchers in a 911 call following the incident, said Dutton, ABC reported. Media reports do not date the incident. You Should be Wearing Orange But the shooter didnt appear apologetic, according to the Sheriff. Then the guy said, You should be wearing orange. It seemed like a non-emotional approach to something thats extremely serious, said Dutton. However, the bigfoot stand-in did not want to press charges. According to the Idaho Statesman, Dutton said that there was some question about the veracity of the report because it was called in the day after, and because the man couldnt describe the alleged shooter. But the mans story was given more credence when a second person stepped forward, describing a similar experience, according to the Stateman. The woman told law enforcement that she had also been shot at by a man in a black Ford F-150. She didnt mention Bigfoot, but like the other man, she had also confronted the shooter Were working to find this person, Dutton said, according to the Statesman. It is of great concern that this individual might think its okay to shoot at anything he thinks is Bigfoot. The shooter could face charges for attempted negligent homicide. However, Dutton said he doesnt think the public is in danger, saying it appeared localized to the North Hills near Helena. The incident caused a stir on social media locally, with a number of humorous remarks. Guess he should have shaved, wrote one Facebook user. It isnt the first time Bigfoot has been blamed for accidents. Last year, a woman in the neighboring state of Idaho drove her Subaru Forester into a deer which she claimed was being chased by Bigfoot. The 50-year-old told the Latah County sheriffs office she was driving on Highway 95 when she saw a 7-8 foot tall shaggy figure chasing a deer on the side of the road. She looked in her mirror, according to the Moscow Pullman Daily News, to get a second look. As she drew her gaze back to the road in front, the deer ran in front of her and she drove into it. 6 Killed in Colombian Town Once Dubbed Benchmark for Peace Process Advancements BOGOTA, ColombiaSix people were killed on the evening of Dec. 17 in the remote Colombian town of Mapiripan in an incident the army suspects was related to drug trafficking. The victims, among them one minor, were confirmed dead the next day by President Ivan Duque who condemned the incident via social media and dispatched emergency troops to the area. The town lies in the countrys eastern plains and forms part of a drug trafficking route to Venezuela currently fought over by both former guerrillas and paramilitaries. It is also synonymous with one of the Colombian conflicts most atrocious massacres to date when paramilitaries butchered at least 13 people with machetes and chainsaws in 1997. The gruesome manner in which the incident took place, along with the disposal of the butchered corpses in a nearby river, means a reliable death toll was never established, but could be as high as 77. Mapiripan was described by the government as a benchmark of resilience, opportunity, and progress in June of this year following the 2016 peace accord with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The agreement formally ended a conflict estimated to have left more than 260,000 dead and 7 million displaced. The observations were attributed to a boom in investment and employment in African palm production, but now appear gravely premature. The accord has lowered homicide rates across the country but its slow and spotty implementation has left certain demographics and areas of the country more vulnerable to violence. At least 120 social leaders have been killed this year alone, according to the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), potentially making 2018 the deadliest year for labor or human rights defenders since the accord was signed in 2016. Human rights advocacy groups denounced the incident in Mapiripan, the fourth massacre recorded this year. What happened has made us incredibly sad as we have a lot of faith in the peace process, Blanca Maria Lopez, a social leader in Mapiripan under state-protection, told the Epoch Times. We are awaiting a true explanation from the authorities; we hope the peace process is not going backwards. Lopez described the incident as a terrible reminder of the massacre in which she lost friends and neighbors in 1997. We dont know those [killed in the recent attack], but it hurts us to know their families are suffering the loss of their loved ones, she added. Security analysts are hesitant to attribute the incident to any particular organization with contradictory reports attributing the killings to FARC Marxists rebels who refused to lay down their weapons as well as a local paramilitary group known as Los Puntilleros. They do, however, fear the type of massacres commonly witnessed in the 1990s and 2000s could increasingly re-haunt Colombias more remote regions as the state fails to establish its presence in areas previously operated by the FARC. The group responsible and the motive is unclear but there is a greater signal here that the vacuums of power left by the FARC and unoccupied by the government have taken on a new shape, said Sergio Guzman, a political risk consultant in Bogota. This is clearly an escalation of conflict in rural areas that will give many heartaches to rural residents. Certain regions are now believed worse off post-peace accord and increasingly resemble the security panorama in certain Mexican states. Some areas have several organized crime groups confronting each other, in a way that rarely happened when the FARC was the largest national armed group, commented Adam Isaacson, an expert on regional security at WOLA. Places like Mapiripan are starting to look like Michoacan or Tamaulipas, Mexico, with several smaller, regional groups competing for illegal wealth. On Dec. 19, the Director of the Defensoria del Pueblo, the government agency charged with protecting human rights, informed local media that it had voiced concerns back in August over potential human rights risks in the region, but those calls went unanswered. A rally of the main opposition Kuomintang (KMT) for Taipei mayor candidate Ting Shou-chung during the elections campaign in Taipei, on Nov. 10, 2018. (Sam Yeh/AFP/Getty Images) Six US Senators Raise Concern About Beijing Meddling in Taiwan Elections TAIPEI, TaiwanSix U.S. senators have written a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other national-security officials in the Trump administration to express concern about Beijings meddling in Taiwans recent elections. Sens. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Chris Coons (D-Del.), Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), and Ted Cruz (R-Texas), signed the letter dated Dec. 13, according to a press release from Gardners office. CCP [Chinese Communist Party] attempts to erode democratic processes and norms around the world threaten U.S. partnerships and prosperity, the senators wrote. The letter was also addressed to Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, and FBI Director Christopher Wray. Allegations such as those surrounding Taiwans recent elections must, therefore, be pursued with seriousness and urgencyWe encourage your departments to do all you can to support Taiwan in investigating these allegations and taking necessary action in response, they continued. Taiwans Nov. 24 elections saw a number of local races, including contests for mayors, county magistrates, and legislators. The Kuomintang (KMT), the current opposition party which is known for its Beijing-friendly platforms, won a landslide victory. The party took many seats from the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which has historically advocated for formal independence from mainland China. However, some DPP politicians, including current president Tsai Ing-wen, hold a more moderate position and prefer the status quo in relations with Beijing. While Taiwan is a de facto country with its own constitution, democratically elected government, currency, and military, Beijing views the island as a renegade province that must be united with the mainland, by force if necessary. Beijing has tried to manipulate public opinion among Taiwanese in support of the idea of unification with mainland China. It seeks to achieve this through conducting favorable business deals with cities and counties under the KMTs jurisdiction, while supporting pro-Beijing candidates to win elections. Strong public support for unification, Beijing believes, could be the basis of its legitimate takeover of Taiwan, whether by non-violent or military means. CCP [Chinese Communist Party] used illegal funds and disinformation to influence the election results in favor of the CCPs strategic interests, the senators wrote, citing allegations from Taiwanese authorities and independent observers. The letter mentioned several ongoing investigations by Taiwanese authorities related to Beijings meddling in the latest elections, including 33 cases of illegal campaign contributions from Chinese entitiesa violation of Taiwans Political Donations Act and the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Areaand CCP-linked individuals allegedly bribing or coercing voters. In terms of disinformation, the letter pointed out allegations by Taiwan authorities that Beijing spread false information through social media and messaging platforms, including Facebook, Line, and the online bulletin board, PTT. Some [Taiwanese] candidates have even claimed to possess evidence showing that these disinformation campaigns originated from mainland Chinese IP addresses, according to the letter. The Epoch Times has previously documented such efforts to meddle in the recent elections, showing how Beijing used social media to spread fake negative news about certain political candidates. The senators concluded, If [allegations of election meddling were] true, CCP interference in Taiwans elections would be deeply concerning not only for Taiwans future, but also for fellow democracies around the world where the CCP may choose to interfere. Joseph Wu, Taiwans Minister of Foreign Affairs, when asked by journalists about the U.S. senators letter before attending a meeting at Taiwans parliament, expressed gratitude to the senators for their support for Taiwan, according to Taiwans government-run Central News Agency. Wu added that U.S. support of Taiwan has shined a light on freedom and democracy in Asia. Wu also said Taiwan will continue to improve ties with the United States, and expressed hope that the island could be a positive force in the peaceful and open Indo-Pacific region. The same concerns about Beijings meddling in Taiwans elections were raised by U.S. Rep. Ted S. Yoho (R-Fla.) in November, when he posted a statement on his official website. Taiwans vibrant democracy and upstanding international conduct are qualities the Communist Party should aspire to, rather than undermine, he wrote. South Carolina GOP Says Canceling 2020 Presidential Primary Not Under Consideration The chairman of the South Carolina GOP said that canceling the Republican primary in the state for the 2020 presidential election has not been considered as of yet. South Carolinas primary is slated for Feb. 29, 2020. If canceled, it would be the second state in the country and the first in the southern United States. Its not, whatsoever, under consideration. Its not been thought about, talked about, contemplated, South Carolina GOP chairman Drew McKissick told The State. That (vote by the partys executive committee) wouldnt happen until summer 2019. McKissick made the statement after the Washington Examiner, quoting McKissick, said that the state could cancel its primary. We have complete autonomy and flexibility in either direction, McKissick told the publication. Considering the fact that the entire party supports the president, well end up doing whats in the presidents best interest. The Examiner noted that McKissick said that the state party executive committee hasnt held any formal discussions about the primary, but said he would not rule out canceling the primary. Several states have scrapped primaries in the past, including South Carolina. Republicans scrapped primaries in 2004 and 1984 as Presidents George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan ran for re-election; Democrats in the state did the same when Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama sought re-election. In Iowa, the GOP canceled the primary in 1992 as President George H.W. Bush ran for re-election. Youre showing the support of your incumbent president when a state doesnt hold a primary, said Katon Dawson, the states former GOP chairman, told The State. Certainly people have the right to have primaries and petitions. Its a privilege for a party to do that. Dawson noted that it costs up to $3.2 million to hold a primary. We did not want to have a primary, Luke Byars, a veteran Republican operative in South Carolina and the executive director of the state party in 2004, told the Examiner about that year. We had a meeting of executive committee, passed a resolution endorsing the president for re-election and said there would no Republican primary. High Approval Trump has maintained high approval ratings among Republicans and no formidable challengers have emerged as of yet. According to a December poll from Winthrop University, 80 percent of Republican or Republican-leaning Southerners approve of Trump, who handily won South Carolina in the 2016 presidential race and the Republican primary. Top officials in South Carolina have regularly praised Trump, including Gov. Henry McMaster and former governor Nikki Haley, who recently announced she was resigning as ambassador to the United Nations to take time away from government positions. Now, the United States is respected. Countries may not like what we do, but they respect what we do, Haley said at a joint press conference with Trump. The U.S. is strong again and the U.S. is strong in a way that should make all Americans very proud. Haley said she would not run against Trump in 2020 and would support his re-election; he said he hopes she re-joins his administration in the future. From NTD News Southwest Airlines Passenger Says She Was Forced to Leave Pet Fish Behind A Southwest Airlines passenger said that she was forced to leave her pet fish behind, despite federal policies that appear to allow fish to be flown on airplanes. Lanice Powless said that she tried taking her pet fish, Cassie, with her onto the plane recently but a Southwest employee forced her to leave it at Denver International Airport. This lady was just not having it, Powless told KGTV. So the supervisor comes and she said Unfortunately, you cannot bring fish onto Southwest Airlines.' Powless was confused because she had taken the fish on planes before. I have traveled with it. I had it in my container too. Maybe they just didnt make a big deal out of it at the time? Powless said. Powless then proposed that she leave the fish on their counter and have a friend come by in 30 minutes to pick the fish up, but Southwest employees said no. She then started asking other people to take the fish, and one said yes. Powless wasnt able to get her name or contact information. They were not allowing us to converse at all because they were thinking we were going to do some secret exchange throughout the airport, Powless said. Even after I was no longer in possession of the fish, they still continued to have security around us, and follow us through the airport and escorted onto our plane, as if we brought something bad onto the airport. Everyones laughing at me. Yes, its a fish. I know. But dang, it was my pet. And just because it wasnt a cat or dog, it wasnt as important? she added. According to the Transportation Security Administration, which provides security, including screening, at airports nationwide, live fish are not allowed in checked bags but are allowed in carry on bags if they are in water and a clear transparent container. Southwest Airlines, though, states on its website that the only pets that are allowed on airplanes are small cats and dogs in carriers that can be stowed under the customers seat. A National City woman says she flies with her travel buddy, Cassie, all the time. But this time, she says Southwest Airlines unfairly ripped them apart at the https://t.co/DQ7CGuZpvV Rina Nakano (@RinaNakanoTV) December 15, 2018 And if people want to bring their cat or dog, they must make reservations before flying. The company previously accepted other animals but said in August that a rule change starting in September would allow only dogs or cats. Powless said that she was not aware that airlines could have separate rules from the administration. In a statement, Southwest said it made an offer to Powless, which she denied. A Customer attempted to bring a pet fish onboard their flight from Denver to San Diego. Our Customer Service Agents informed the Customer about Southwests pets policy which does not allow for live fish to travel in the passenger cabin, Southwest said in a statement sent to USA Today. Our Team offered to re-book the Customer for a later flight to allow them to make arrangements for their pet but the Customer refused that option. The Customer eventually traveled on their originally scheduled flight. From NTD News Texas Couple Raises $1,500 for Homeless Man Who Sells Newspapers A Texas couple whose initial goal was to raise $100 for a homeless man they frequently pass by ended up presenting him with $1,500. Pierce and Amy Caldwell said they see the homeless man, who they said is named Bill, several times a week selling newspapers to try to earn money. Pierce Caldwell shared video footage showing him and his wife presenting Bill with the money. My wife and I raised $1,500 for Bill. Felt great giving it to him. Merry Christmas Bill, Caldwell wrote on Facebook. In the video, Amy Caldwell can be heard saying, I know you dont know me, but Ive seen you around San Antonio for a long time and a lot of the customers that you give papers to wanted to get together and wish you a Merry Christmas. She shows the man the money they raised and says how much it is, leaving the man stunned. $1,500?! he says. Amy Caldwell wrote on GoFundMe that the man, Bill, goes around San Antonio selling newspapers, including on 1604 and 281. He has such a sweet Thankful attitude and always a smile on his face. Bill never misses a day of work, rain or shine. Through his gentle attitude, kindness, and positive outlook on life he brings happiness to others. Our community and Neighbors would like to show our appreciation to Bill this holiday season by gifting him a much-deserved blessing, she wrote. Pierce Caldwell told KOAI that he and his wife wanted to show their appreciation for the homeless man. We appreciate him and the community appreciates him. The people that buy his papers are the people who donated money so it wasnt just us to feel this happiness for this man. It was 80 other families that felt the same way as us, said Caldwell. I hope its a jump start to improving his future. He said that the moment the man saw the money, his eyes lit up. Just shock like pure just shock. I saw his eyes light up. I dont think he knew how much money it was and then when we told him, he was like just so happy, said Caldwell. He said he grew up poor and remembers what it was like. Based on the success of the fundraiser, the Caldwells are now working on a new campaign for Christmas gifts for children in San Antonio. We want to give out as many Christmas Presents to kids as possible. For the kids who may not get any Christmas Presents we want to make sure they have a good Christmas. Anything helps. If you cannot donate please try to do something nice for somebody this holiday season, wrote Piece Caldwell on the new campaign. From NTD News The Texas state flag flies at half staff at the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge April 4, 2013 in Dallas, Texas. (Ronald Martinez/Getty Images) Texas Police in Search of Intruder Who Attacked Elderly Mother Saji Alummuttil left in a panic after receiving a call from his 83-year-old mothera call he can only describe as sounding like a struggle. While on the other side of the call, Alummuttil could hear an intruder attacking his mother, trying to take away her cellphone. It was around 6 a.m. when Suzy and John Alummuttils Fort Worth home in Texas was broken into as Suzy sat on her wheelchair and John, who had recently returned from hospice, laid in his bed. The black male calmly trespassed through the residences door, which was left unlocked as the couple awaited their hospice nurse. Intruder on Camera The Alummuttils were able to provide footage of the suspect breaking into the home to the Fort Worth Police Department (FWPD). It was then uploaded to Twitter by FWPD, who is asking the community to help with any information about the suspect that they might have. #HeadsUp THIS GUY This guy attacked an 83-year-old woman inside her son's home.he tried to take a cell phone from her&knocked her off her own wheelchair. He also stole the son's pickup truck. Please call 817-392-4730 if you know who he is.
1 of 2. pic.twitter.com/o0VHi9QgbO Fort Worth Police (@fortworthpd) December 17, 2018 After the suspect entered the home, Suzy confronted him and attempted to call 911 and her son for help. John could do nothing but watch in his condition. Although the suspect wasnt able to take the cellphone away from Suzy, he ultimately knocked her off her wheelchair during the altercation. The suspect didnt steal anything inside the home but during his get-a-way, he grabbed Sajis Chevrolet keys and left in the pickup truck. <2 of 2. Details of elderly woman being attacked inside her son's home. Please call 817-392-4730 w/any information.#HeadsUp pic.twitter.com/1OpsJ08fJg Fort Worth Police (@fortworthpd) December 17, 2018 Coincidentally, the incident took place only two days after Saji installed a camera in the home in order to keep an eye on his parents. Fathers Last Memories Sajis parents were both unharmed but John, Sajis father, passed away the day after the home invasion. The WFPD said they dont think the incident had anything to do with his death. The break-in is also one of his last memories, assuming that he was not really cognizant, said Saji. We had a hard week last week. Detectives are currently exploring all possible leads on their search for the intruder. CNN Wire contributed to this report. Watch Next: How Doctors in China Are Asked to Commit Murder Former Chinese surgeon Enver Tohti said he was turned into a killing robot while thinking he was working for a great cause. One of two suitcases found by Australian law enforcement officers on board the cruise ship Sea Princess on Aug. 29, 2016. (Australian Border Force) Third Person, Andre Tamine, Sentenced in Cruise Ship Cocaine Bust The third person involved in a conspiracy to sell cocaine from a cruise ship as it went around the world was sentenced to eight years in prison on Dec. 18. Andre Tamine, 65, was sentenced to court in Australia, where the cruise ship was when authorities found 94 pounds (42.7 kilograms) in his cabin in 2016. Judge Kate Traill indicated that the sentence could have been longer but said that Tamine was remorseful for his actions, reported the Sydney Morning Herald. In a letter Tamine penned that Traill read aloud in the courtroom, he said he was embarrassed and humiliated. I stupidly did as others told me to do, rather than stand up for myself, the letter read, reported news.com.au. I know what I did was very wrong and that I must be punished for my actions. He said he was thankful the drugs on the ship were seized and hadnt made it to land. Traill said that Tamine was an integral part of the drug operation, and not merely a drug mule, but said he didnt realize the seriousness of the crime. Tamine was introduced to a person in Montreal in May 2016 who offered him $158,000 to participate in the drug trafficking scheme. He organized berths for two women involved in the scheme, Melina Roberge and Isabelle Lagace, as well as another man who disembarked before the ship reached Australia. The group boarded the Sea Princess on July 9, 2016. The seven-week cruise was scheduled to berth in multiple locations across Oceania and the Americas. The trio was arrested on Aug. 28, after officials searched their cabins and found a combined 160 pounds (72.74 kilograms) of cocaine. Tamine pleaded guilty to importing a border-controlled drug earlier this year. With time served, he could be released as early as March 27, 2022. Under Australian law, he could have received a life sentence, reported the Canadian Press. Tim Fitzgerald, New South Wales regional commander for the Australian Department of Immigration and Border Protection, noted previously that the amount was the largest seizure by Australian authorities of narcotics carried by passengers of a cruise ship or airliner. Previous Rulings Late last year, Isabelle Legace, 29, was sentenced to five years in prison after pleading guilty to attempting to smuggle cocaine into Australia. Legace, a part-time actress and model, said she only agreed to participate in the scheme because she was $21,000 in debt. I was to provide my bag to another passenger who would insert what I understood to be an illegal substance, she said in her affidavit. She also could have landed a sentence of up to life in prison. Traill was also the sentencing judge and said that Legace had displayed contrition and remorse, at her trial, and had very good prospects of rehabilitation. Roberge, 24, was sentenced to eight years in prison earlier this year. Traill said in that case that It is a very sad indictment on her relative age group in society to seem to get self-worth relative to posts on Instagram, reported news.com.au. Traill was referring to how Roberge and Legace left a string of Instagram posts during their time on the cruise. It is sad they seek to attain such a vacuous existence where how many likes they receive are their currency, Traill said. She was seduced by lifestyle and the opportunity to post glamorous Instagram photos from around the world. This highlights the negative influence of social media on young women. From NTD News Trump Looks to Military to Build Border Wall as Hopes in Congress Diminish President Donald Trump has solidified his suggestion that the U.S. military will build the wall along the southern border, as the chances of Congress passing funding for the project by the Dec. 21 deadline shrinks. Because of the tremendous dangers at the Border, including large scale criminal and drug inflow, the United States Military will build the Wall! Trump wrote in a Dec. 19 tweet. The Pentagon has backed Trump, acknowledging there is a legal option to use military funds for border barriers, although also saying theres no plan in place to do so. To date, there is no plan to build sections of the wall, Pentagon spokesman Army Lt. Col. Jamie Davis said in a Dec. 12 statement, CNBC reported. However, Congress has provided options under Title 10 U.S. Code that could permit the Department of Defense to fund border barrier projects, such as in support of counter-drug operations or national emergencies. Trump has asked Congress for $5 billion for the wall, but has faced a unified opposition from the Democrats and even from some Republicans. Trump has repeatedly said he would partially shut down the government over money for the border wall, meaning he would veto a Homeland Security budget bill that doesnt include the funding. A large part of the government is already funded through next September, including the military, public health care agencies, education, and veterans programs. Yet Congress still has roughly $450 billion of funding left to approve before several agencies run out of money Dec. 21. Temporary Fix As the deadline draws near, Republicans appear to have lost hope that theyll be able to convince at least nine Democratic senators to reach the necessary 60 votes to get the border-wall funding through. On Dec. 19, Congress began advancing legislation to the remaining federal agencies through Feb. 8, excluding the wall money. Well soon take up a simple measure that will continue government funding into February so that we can continue this vital [border security] debate after the new Congress has convened [in January], said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). A Senate Democratic aide said the appropriations bill, which would keep the Department of Homeland Security and several other agencies operating on a temporary basis, was expected to pass the Senate on Dec. 19 or Dec. 20. The House of Representatives would then have to pass the bill and hope Trump signs it into law. By postponing decisions on spending for agencies that include the departments of Justice, Commerce, Interior, and Agriculture, Democrats will have more power over the process next year when they take majority control of the House, though that will also put a greater spotlight on their responsibility for the process. In an attempt to resolve the impasse this year, Trump and McConnell on Dec. 18 proposed giving Trump a $1 billion fund that he could use at his discretion for border security. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) labeled that a slush fund that would lack the votes to pass Congress. On Dec. 19, McConnell criticized Democrats for rejecting it, saying, It seems like political spite for the president may be winning out over sensible policy. Other Money The White House said Dec. 19 it would look at already appropriated government funds to be redirected toward building the wall if Congress continued to block its request for the money. In our Country, so much money has been poured down the drain, for so many years, but when it comes to Border Security and the Military, the Democrats fight to the death, Trump said in a Dec. 19 tweet. We won on the Military, which is being completely rebuilt. One way or the other, we will win on the Wall! Democrats have already signaled they will try to stop Trump from using other monies on the wall. Schumer, speaking on the Senate floor Dec. 19, said the administration couldnt legally do that without Congress consent. The House and Senate will not approve a wall from reprogrammed funds or anything else. It wont happen, he said. Trumps senior adviser Kellyanne Conway took Republican lawmakers to task for not pushing harder on the issue. On this, theyre walking away, Conway said in an interview on Fox News. Trump originally promised that Mexico will pay for the wall. Hes recently brought back the argument, saying the new trade agreement with Mexico and Canada (USMCA), gives the United States more of a trade advantage with Mexico and thus enriches the United States more than the wall would cost. Mexico is paying (indirectly) for the Wall through the new USMCA, the replacement for NAFTA! Far more money coming to the U.S., he said in one of the Dec. 29 tweets. The wall was projected to cost some $24 billion. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the federal agency responsible for border security, has a priority plan for 33 segments of wall covering 1,100 miles in total. The cost varies from $5 million to $25 million per mile, depending on the terrain, CBP Commissioner Kevin McAleenan said during a Dec. 11 congressional hearing. Reuters contributed to this report. An incomplete tunnel still being built was discovered by American and Mexican officials, running from Nogales, Mexico to Nogales, Arizona, on Dec. 17, 2018. (U.S. Customs and Border Protection) Tunnel Running From Mexico to United States Discovered by Border Control A cross-border tunnel that started in Nogales, Mexico and ended in Nogales, Arizona was discovered by authorities. Tuscon Sector Border Patrol agents found the incomplete and illegal tunnel during a routine bi-national sweep with Mexican law enforcement officers on Dec. 17, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection said. The entry point was submerged underwater along an international waterway channel that was built below both cities of Nogales. The tunnel was adjacent to the Port of Nogales and came to a stop beneath a parking lot in Nogales, Arizona. At approximately 50 feet in length, the tunnel extended 44 feet into the United States and was two feet wide by two feet tall. Within the tunnel, agents discovered structural shoring and digging tools, which indicate excavation was still in progress and incomplete, the agency stated. Agents will continue to monitor and inspect the incomplete tunnel until it is properly secured and remediated with concrete filler. Border Patrol Agent Daniel Hernandez told the Arizona Republic that the agency has been working on taking a more proactive approach in recent years, working with officers in Mexico to conduct sweeps to explore underground areas to look for signs of tunnels before theyve been completed. The tunnel was the first discovered in the Nogales area in about two years; the area is where the most tunnels have been found along the U.S.-Mexico border. Another cross-border tunnel, complete with a rail system, electricity, ventilation, and lighting, was discovered in Jacumba, California in October, several weeks after the opposite entrance was uncovered in Jacume, Mexico. The tunnel stretched 627 feet, including 336 feet in the United States, but did not have an exit point into America. Agents reported that there was a solar panel system used to run the electrical, lighting and ventilation systems that were in the tunnel. There were also two sump-pump systems within the tunnel to pump out any water that gathered in the tunnel, the Border Patrol said. Agents also reported that a rail system was installed that ran the entire length of the tunnel. Tunnels Under Border The exact number of tunnels is unknown but some figures exist indicating there have been hundreds dug and found over the years. Since the early 1990s, an average of two completed cross-border tunnels has been discovered by law enforcement officers every year, according to High Country News, with nearly 200 tunnels found in total, many incomplete. Lance Lenoir, the head of the five-member Tunnel Rats team, described many of them as primitive and not sophisticated. I would not want to give our enemies that kind of credit, he said. The only thing thats of note when it comes to these tunnels in San Diego is their persistence and audacity. The tunnels are used to smuggle illegal immigrants into the United States, in addition to drugs. According to the San Diego Union-Tribune, the first large-scale cross-border tunnel was discovered in Douglas, Arizona on May 17, 1990. The tunnel, which stretched about 300 feet to Agua Prieta, Sonora, into a house in Mexico where the entrance was hidden by a cover that was under a pool table. The cover was opened by turning the water on at an outdoor spigot; a hydraulic pump system forced a section of the floor to rise about eight feet. the tunnel was equipped with a rail system for carts and lights. Several other major tunnels were found in the 90s, the outlet said, but things really started ramping up in the 2000s, with the number of tunnels being discovered increasing dramatically. From NTD News Canadian, UK Universities Warned by Intelligence Agencies to Be Wary of Huawei Security experts in Canada and across the pond in the United Kingdom are urging universities to be cautious of telecom giant Huawei given growing cyberintelligence concerns around the company. Huawei has an extensive network of academic relationships with leading research universities around the world. In Britain, top universities like Oxford, Cambridge, Manchester, and York have accepted funds from the company totalling more than $7.5 million. But following the recent detention in Vancouver of CFO Meng Wanzhou, British security officials are urging universities to be very cautious about accepting money from the company. Security expert Anthony Glees, director of the Center for Security and Intelligence Studies, called Huaweis involvement in British universities a security risk. This is about the electronic agenda being driven by the injection of Chinese money into British universities, he said. That is a national security issue. In Canada, Huaweis academic network has a focus on next-generation communications technologies. According to a Globe and Mail investigation, the company has committed up to $50 million in research projects at leading research universities, acquired dozens of patents from researchers, and appeared as a co-author on hundreds of peer-reviewed papers in the last decade. Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) officials met with research vice-presidents from U15 universitiesthe countrys 15 leading research universitiesin early October to discuss security concerns over Huaweis research partnerships with the universities, according to a Globe report. At least one follow-up meeting was planned with about 20 McGill university academics for Dec. 19, the report said, including several whose research is underwritten by Huawei. Earlier this month, CSIS Director David Vigneault warned of increasing state-sponsored espionage in fields that are crucial to Canadas future, including 5G and artificial intelligence. He described universities as often having less robust security than a large company, and as being less aware of the threat they face. Hostile states typically target companies or universities that are active in emerging technologythe kind of potentially revolutionary discoveries that can bring massive profits, Vigneault said, without naming a specific country or company. Huawei and 5G Security Concerns Huawei, which is the largest telecommunications equipment maker in the world and the second-largest maker of smartphones, announced on Dec. 18 that it had 25 commercial contracts for 5G. It also announced plans to spend $2 billion on cybersecurity over the next five years. The announcements come amid increasing global scrutiny of Huawei due to security risks and its relationship to the Chinese communist regime. Two reasons concerns are mounting are that Huaweis founder, Ren Zhengfei, is a former Peoples Liberation Army officer, and that the regimes 2017 National Intelligence Law can compel companies to aid in national intelligence work. In August, the United States officially banned technology from Huawei, ZTE, and a number of other Chinese companies from use by the U.S. government and government contractors. The United States has repeatedly called on ally nations to do the same. Washington has also repeatedly called on its allies to ban the use Huawei technology in their 5G networks, citing national security concerns. Three of Canadas allies in the Five Eyes intelligence alliancethe United States, Australia, and New Zealandhave banned Huawei technology from their 5G networks. In the U.K., the Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre, which monitors Britains use of Huawei technology, said in a report earlier this year that they could give limited assurance that Huawei posed no threat to national security. The report downgraded previous assessments that said any risks from Huawei were sufficiently mitigated. The UKs BT Group, the countrys largest telecommunications company, has also excluded Huawei from its 5G network and committed to removing the company from its 4G network. Canada has not banned Huawei from developing its 5G network, though the company cannot bid on government contracts. In March 2016, Huawei Canada in partnership with the province of Ontario announced a five-year, $500 million plan to accelerate investment and job creation in 5G-related research initiatives. Earlier this month, Japan joined other nations in banning Chinese companies from government contracts, a Washington Post article says, though Huawei and ZTE were not specifically mentioned. Three of the countrys largest companies told Reuters they had not yet made any decisions regarding whether they would follow suit. France hasnt explicitly banned Huawei, though the government has reportedly pushed for tighter regulations. Frances largest telecommunications company Orange SA has said it is not using Huaweis technology in its 5G network. Germany is preparing to auction its 5G frequencies for 5G wireless networks in spring 2019, and three of the countrys largest telecom companies continue to work with Huawei equipment in building 5G networks. According to the Spiegel, Germanys Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) found no proof that Huaweis network infrastructure was any more or less secure than its competitors, and its president said evidence is needed before they would recommend a ban. Dr. Kevin Carrico, a China studies lecturer from Macquarie University, in an interview after a panel discussion on the Chinese regimes infiltration of Australian society in Sydney, on March 27, 2018. (NTD/Screenshot) US-Australian Academic Stalked by Beijing Linked Media in Hong Kong: Reports A Hong Kong tabloid with links to the Chinese Communist Party has been accused of stalking a U.S.-Australian academic during his recent visit to Hong Kong, according to reports. Dr. Kevin Carrico, who lectures on Chinese studies at Macquarie University in Sydney, had just arrived back in Australia on Dec. 17 when a friend sent him a link to the Hong Kong tabloid Wen Wei Po. Its front page featured a number of stealth photos of Carrico himself with a lengthy article covering details of Carricos trip, including who he met and where he went. One photo showed him standing on the street in a suit. Another showed him at the airport about to leave Hong Kong, and yet another showed Carrico talking to a friend at a restaurant. The tabloid claimed that Carrico has close ties with members of the Hong Kong independence organisation and secretly came to Hong Kong. Grant Thought to Be a Factor Behind Week Long Stalk Carrico, a U.S. citizen and an Australian permanent resident, recently received a large grant from the Australian government to research tensions emerging between Hong Kong and China, according to The Guardian. I spent the entire week having a faint sense that someone was following me. It was of course quite discomforting, he told The World, an Australian Broadcasting Corporation program. Was it Chinese state security, was it the Hong Kong police, was it someone else? Carrico said. It was actually a relief when these pictures were featured on the cover of Wen Wei Po, so that I can know that it was essentially Beijing-controlled media that had chosen to follow me for an entire, probably a very boring, week. He recalled how he first noticed a woman appearing to be in her 30s on several occasions during a Dec. 8 visit to Tung Chung, an area he described to have growing tensions as a result of an influx of tourists from China in recent weeks. He told The World the woman seemed to be essentially everywhere I went and, in a city of 7 million people, this isnt something that happens very often. Shed followed him on a train, then to a shopping center, and almost to the mens restroom at the bottom floor of the shopping center, according to the story. Privacy Concerns Raised When he rode the escalators from the bottom floor, he tried to take a photo of the woman who at the time was standing some distance behind him. She turned 180 degrees, essentially riding the escalator backward to avoid having me photograph her, Carrico told The World. He later tried to take another photo of her a second time but she hid behind a tree, according to The Guardian. Wen Wei Po is very, very closely linked with the liaison office, which is Beijings office in Hong Kong, Carrico told The Guardian. I dont know if this is an attempt to build up pressure to get me banned from Hong Kong, or to intimidate me from returning to Hong Kong. He added the episode raises some pretty major questions. How did this newspaper know I was there? Do they have access to border control? How were they able to start following me the day after I arrived and how did they manage to keep a tail on me for what seems like an entire week? From NTD.com US Begins to Withdraw Troops From Syria The United States has begun to withdraw troops from Syria, having completely defeated the ISIS terrorist group in that country, according to the White House. The Department of Defense is designing a timeline for the withdrawal, according to a senior administration official. The withdrawal is consistent with President Donald Trumps campaign promise and public statements since his inauguration, the official said. We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency, Trump wrote on Twitter on Dec. 19. While the United States began operations in Syria in late 2014 with the goal of eradicating ISIS, gains against the terrorist group accelerated dramatically under President Donald Trump. According to the State Department, the president adopted several policies that have empowered the military, including the delegation of decision-making from the White House to commanders in the field. These victories over ISIS in Syria do not signal the end of the Global Coalition or its campaign, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement. We have started returning United States troops home as we transition to the next phase of this campaign. We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency. Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 19, 2018 Sanders didnt specify a timetable for withdrawing the estimated 2,000 U.S. troops in the region or how many troops have already returned home. She added that Washington will continue to work with the global alliance against ISIS. The United States and our allies stand ready to re-engage at all levels to defend American interests whenever necessary, and we will continue to work together to deny radical Islamist terrorists territory, funding, support, and any means of infiltrating our borders, Sanders said. The State Department is evacuating all of its personnel from Syria within 24 hours, a U.S. official told Reuters. Trump has previously spoken of his desire to bring the troops home from Syria. His Dec. 19 message showed that he saw no further reason to keep troops in the region. One official told Reuters that partners and allies had been consulted. Two U.S. officials said a decision to withdraw had already been reached but that could not be immediately confirmed. The Pentagon declined to comment, saying only that it continued to work with partners in the region. Many of the remaining U.S. troops in Syria are special operations forces, working closely with an alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias known as the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The partnership with the SDF over the past several years has led to the defeat of ISIS in Syria, but has also outraged NATO ally Turkey, which views Kurdish militia forces in the alliance as an extension of a militant group fighting inside Turkey. The deliberations on U.S. troops come as Ankara threatens a new offensive in Syria. To date, U.S. forces in Syria have been seen as a stabilizing factor in the country and have somewhat restrained Turkeys actions against the SDF. A complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria would still leave a sizable U.S. military presence in the region, including around 5,200 troops across the border in Iraq. Much of the U.S. campaign in Syria has been waged by warplanes flying out of Qatar and other locations in the Middle East. The United States is currently working on stabilizing and providing early recovery efforts in areas liberated from ISIS control, including the removal of explosive war remnants and the restoration of essential services. In addition to leading the global coalition to defeat ISIS in Syria, the United States is the single largest donor for efforts in response to the conflict in Syria. Washington has provided nearly $8.1 billion in assistance for people displaced since the crisis started, including 12.1 million people suffering in Syria and 5.6 million Syrian refugees in the region. The crisis in Syria began in 2011 along with similar unrest in the Middle East during the Arab Spring protests. Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad violently suppressed protests against his regime, triggering an armed conflict that has ravaged Syria since and allowed ISIS to gain territory. Reuters contributed to this report. Two layers of barbed wire fencing surround the "Hotan City apparel employment training base" where Hetian Taida has a factory in Hotan in Xinjiang, China, as seen on Dec. 5, 2018. (Ng Han Guan/AP) US Reviews Report of Imports from Forced Labor in China Camp BEIJINGThe U.S. government said on Dec. 18 that it is reviewing reports of forced labor at a Chinese internment camp where ethnic minorities are sewing clothes that have been shipped to the U.S. market. U.S. Customs and Border Protection said in a statement that reporting by The Associated Press and other media for the first time appears to link the internment camps identified in western China to the importation of goods produced by forced labor by a U.S. company. The AP tracked shipments from a factory in a camp in Chinas far western Xinjiang region to Badger Sportswear in North Carolina. The company ships clothing to universities, colleges and schools around the United States. Experts and a human rights organization say that possibly as many as 1 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs and others from predominantly Muslim groups are arbitrarily detained in such camps, whose functions range from political indoctrination to forced labor. Following the recent news media reports, Badger said that it had suspended business with Chinese supplier Hetian Taida Apparel and was investigating. A statement on its website says one percent or less of Badger products was sourced from Hetian Taida. The Washington-based Workers Rights Consortium (WRC), which has agreements with many educational institutions to make sure the products they sell on campus are ethically manufactured, said that forced labor of any kind is a severe violation of university codes of conduct. The groups executive director, Scott Nova, said in a message to affiliate universities that, building off the APs report, WRC had gathered additional evidence indicating the factory that supplied Badger with collegiate apparel was one and the same as the factory inside the highly-guarded internment compound seen by AP reporters. The factory was featured on a Chinese state television segment in October that characterized the camp as a vocational training center that helps minorities steer clear of religious extremism and gain employable skills. The state-run China Daily published an article on Tuesday which profiled ethnic minorities in Xinjiang who have been recruited to work in garment factories. The story featured a 23-year-old woman named Burebgul Ali who was described as being reluctant to work at the factory. But after skills training and learning Mandarin, the story said, Burebgul found her job quite comfortable and could make at least 3,000 yuan ($435) per month. The AP spoke to a dozen former detainees and individuals who had friends or family in similar centers in Xinjiang who said they were given no choice but to work at factories on site. The Uyghurs and Kazakhs, who were interviewed in exile in Kazakhstan, said that even professionals were trained to do factory work. Its against U.S. law to import products of forced labor. Customs and Border Protection said it is part of its mission to enforce both laws to protect individuals from forced labor and our nations economy from businesses profiting from this form of modern slavery. The Chinese regime has used the excuse that Xinjiang faces a serious threat from Islamist militants and separatists who plot attacks and stir up tensions with the ethnic Han Chinese majority to crack down on the local population in Xinjiang. Western countries including Canada, France, Germany, and the United States have urged China to shut down camps in Xinjiang. By Martha Mendoza & Yanan Wang. The Epoch Times contributed to this report. METULA, Israel - On the edge of an apple orchard a few yards inside Israel, a newly dug shaft gives a glimpse of what the country's military says is one of four tunnels burrowed under the border from Lebanon by the militant group Hezbollah. Bulldozers shifted earth in the driving rain Wednesday, and mobile drilling rigspunched holes in the ground, as part of what the military has called Operation Northern Shield - to uncover and eventually destroy the cross-border tunnels. The tunnel tour for journalists came as members of the U.N. Security Council met in an emergency session requested by Israel and the United States. In a speech in Jerusalem before the council convened, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called on the international community to hold Lebanon, Iran and Hezbollah accountable for the violation of Israeli sovereignty. "Lebanon is doing nothing at best, colluding at worst," he said in a rare briefing for international reporters in Jerusalem. "My message is Hezbollah is putting you in great jeopardy." Israel, which battled Hezbollah in a punishing war in 2006, has repeatedly warned that any future fight with the militant group will also encompass Lebanese government targets. Israel sees a strengthening arc of Iranian influence - from Lebanon, through its proxy Hezbollah, across Syria to Tehran - as a threat to its security, and it has pointed to the tunnels as evidence of its enemies' nefarious aims. President Donald Trump's decision, reported Wednesday, to draw down U.S. forces in Syria comes as a blow to Israel, which had previously urged the Trump administration to maintain a presence there. Israel wants U.S. forces to be a buffer against Iran, which has sent fighters to back the Syrian regime in the country's civil war. Israel has been fortifying the dividing line with Lebanon in recent years and building a hefty concrete wall, but the military says Hezbollah has been secretly digging for four years. Just on the other side of the border, the Lebanese town of Kfar Kela overlooks a white tent that the Israeli military has erected over a shaft it has opened into the first tunnel it found after launching its operation on Dec. 4. The four tunnels it has exposed so far had no openings on the Israeli side and were detected through seismic sensors and ground-penetrating radar, said Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, a spokesman for the Israeli military. The military has not disclosed the location of two of the tunnels. A video shot by a military robot and released last month showed two suspected Hezbollah operatives inside one tunnel. The robot set off a warning explosion, according to an Israeli military official at the site, who declined to be named in keeping with protocol. Other tunnels have been rigged with explosives, he said. The United Nations peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon, UNIFIL, has confirmed that two tunnels cross the demarcation line, known as the "blue line," in a breach of U.N. Security Council 1701, which was adopted after the 2006 war. Lebanon has also accused Israel of repeatedly violating the resolution with incursions into its airspace, notably when Israeli jets cross into Syria to bomb targets linked to Iranian proxies. The army began suspecting that Hezbollah was digging at Kfar Kela in 2015, Conricus said, when production at a concrete block factory on the edge of town slowed, but activity there did not. The addition of a sentry tower and military-grade generator provided further clues, he said. Netanyahu's political opponents charged that the timing of the operation was political, launched to rebut accusations that he has been weak on Hamas, the militant group that controls the Gaza Strip, by agreeing to a cease-fire. Netanyahu has also been beset by corruption allegations, and police have recommended his indictment in two criminal cases. The military contends that it was aware of Hezbollah's diggingbut that it developed the technology to precisely locate the tunnels only recently. "Their goal has been to penetrate our territory, to kidnap our people, including civilians, murder civilians and conquer the northern piece of the Galilee," Netanyahu said in the briefing. "This is not merely an act of aggression; it's an act of war." At the U.N. meeting Wednesday, Israel called on all Security Council members to condemn Hezbollah and designate it a terrorist organization in its entirety. It also pressed for increased sanctions against the militant group and demanded that Lebanon stop allowing its territory to be used to carry out attacks against Israel. Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, showed aerial imagery of the area of Kfar Kela, including the concrete block factory and a nearby UNIFIL observation post. He said that after Israel gave precise information to the peacekeepers on the location of the tunnel, the UNIFIL force was prevented from accessing the area. Danon accused the Lebanese army of tipping off Hezbollah. "If Hezbollah dares to attack Israel, it will bring ruin to Lebanon," he said. How are you doing on your Christmas shopping? For the cooks, bakers, and eaters on your list, shopping should be a snap. For anyone who enjoys a good bottle of wine, fine spirits, or craft beers, its easy to please. Here are a few wish list suggestions for last-minute shopping that will be an alternative to scarf, hat, and gloves. Theres no need to worry about sizes and, if your lucky, you may be invited to share. Books are always welcome. Joshua McFadden, farmer, chef, and owner of the renowned Ava Genes restaurant in Portland, Oregon, has divided the year into six parts for his cookbook, Six Seasons, a new way with vegetables. We ate at Ava Genes last year and were swept away by cherry tomatoes on grilled bread. I asked for the recipe and was told to wait for the book. Its finally here. The easy yet magical recipe for tomato rubbed grilled bread topped with tomato salad is on page 263. This recipe alone makes the book worthwhile, but theres so much more. The rising popularity of Aperitif and Amaro alone or in cocktails seems unstoppable. These French and Italian infused wines are taking over bar carts with their herbal, bitter, exotic flavors. In Aperitif, cocktail hour the French way, Rebekah Peppler dives into the culture with history, drink formulas, and recipes for the delightful snacks served before dinner in France. These low-alcohol, refreshing, classic drinks are a delightful way to start any evening. This year I got hooked on The Great British Baking Show, a long-running, genteel, amateur baking competition on British TV available here on Netflix. Mary Berry, one of the two host-judges, has been the public face of baking in Great Britain for four decades. Her book, Mary Berrys Baking Bible, includes many of the confections seen on the show as well as the full range of traditional British sweets. Such fun! I love doughnuts, but Im scared to deep fry at home. My paranoia includes putting a dark greasy spot on the ceiling, filling the house with oily smoke, burns from splashing, and, of course, fire. But if youre more intrepid, then get a copy of Doughnuts, Simple and Delicious Recipes to Make at Home by Lara Ferroni. The second edition, which perfects the recipes, is self described as, 90 simple and delicious recipes to make at home. The book is filled with mouth-watering pictures. If you take the plunge, Id be happy to taste. If you know someone with a thirst for fine wines and spirits, here are some ideas to make them smile. Heitz Cellars is one of the great names in the Napa Valley, easily recognized by anyone who enjoys California wines. In the high-value 2016 Chardonnay ($25 Total Wine) peach and citrus flavors are balanced with modest oak and bright acidity. The Heitz family describes the 2014 Cabernet ($46 TW) as powerful, yet elegant from a classic vintage. If you want to splurge, go for the single vineyard Trailside ($76 TW) These are among the last vintages made by the Heitz family before the recent sale of the winery. Highland Park is one of the great names in single malt whisky. We visited the distillery on the Scottish island of Orkney and tasted a broad range of their spirits. Highland Park 12-year-old ($40) is their flagship bottling and a fine example of their unique heather-honey style. The 18 ($130), with an additional six years in the barrel, is an exceptional if pricey, single malt experience. Its a bit of an indulgence, but will keep your favorite single malt drinker just as warm as a cashmere sweater for about the same price. In between the two is Valknut ($72 TW), made primarily with local Orkney grain and matured in sherry casks. You cant go wrong with Chocolate. Krauses Chocolates of Saugerties, New York has been making hand-dipped candies since 1929. If you cant visit the sweet-smelling shop, order online. Caramels, creams, nuts, fruits and truffles come enrobed in milk or dark chocolate by the half or full pound. For stocking stuffers, no home in Connecticut (the nutmeg state) should be without a nutmeg grater and a supply of whole nutmegs. Look for them at the Cooks Nook in Wilton. Any spices or seasonings from Penzeys Spices on Westport Avenue fit right in the stocking. I particularly enjoy the French and Italian dressing herb blends. Trader Joes has a sweet-tart sugar plum jam that puts visions of Christmas in my head. Cant decide what to give? Give a restaurant! A gift card to your favorite place is always a winner. We like Washington Prime in SoNo, Barcelona or Peaches Southern Pub on Wall Street. Or you may want to try a stylish new place, like the Tavern at Gray Barns in Norwalk. Perhaps a special occasion restaurant with an excellent reputation like the Whelk in Westport or Bernards in Ridgefield would fill the bill. Any of these will bring Christmas cheer after the holiday hub-bub dies down. I hope these suggestions are helpful. Get your shopping done soon so theres time for food and drink as you celebrate with friends and family. And from ours to yours, best wishes for a Merry Christmas! Frank Whitman can be reached at NotBreadAloneFW@gmail.com. Governor Andrew Cuomo just announced that hes making New York weed legalization a priority in 2019. "Let's legalize the adult use of recreational marijuana once and for all," Governor Cuomo said in a speech detailing his plans for his first 100 days in office. Not only are New Yorkers closer than ever to legal cannabis consumption, but legalization could help solve many of the Empire States most daunting problems. Heres why Governor Cuomo and the majority of New Yorkers are pushing for weed legalization in what will be Americas biggest recreational cannabis market. New York City will be the largest legal weed market in the country. Both West Coast chains and newer East Coast weed businesses want access to New York, Americas third-largest economy, and New York City, the countrys largest regional economy. And not only is New York City the biggest city in the U.S., but New Yorkers smoke the most weed in the world. Brad Nattrass, CEO of agriculture technology firm urban-gro, explained, Should this legislation pass, New York will be one of the largest recreational markets and will open the door for many commercial cultivators. More specifically, New Yorks retail cannabis market size would be worth an estimated $3.1 billion, and New York City alone would be worth $1.1 billion, according to a report filed by New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer. As a result, cannabis growers, retailers and ancillary services are itching to move into this big, untapped market and pro-weed lobbying is over the past five years ranges in the millions. Related: New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo Declares Full Legalization Is a Priority for 2019 Politicians and citizens alike want more NY tax revenue (without raising taxes). A $3.1 billion a year market translates to a lot of tax revenue for the state. New York City alone would be looking at $336 million in annual tax revenue. And New York State would receive $436 million, per the Comptrollers report. According to Jessica Billingsley, CEO and Co-Founder of MJ Freeway, Governor Cuomos commitment to opening legal and regulated access to cannabis creates a billion dollar revenue stream that will directly impact lives of New Yorkers. Potential tax revenue is so significant that recreational cannabis could be a means to fund New York Citys estimated $4 billion Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) renovation project. Notable supporters include Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins who sees legalization as one of a few potential solutions to solve the MTAs budget crisis, as opposed to less popular options like congestion pricing. The majority of New York residents support legalization. Marijuana legalization is much more popular among voters than nearly any politician, explained Josh Rosen, CEO of 4Front, a brand development company in the cannabis space. According to a Quinnipiac University poll, 63 percent of New York State and City voters are in favor of legalizing possession of small amounts of cannabis for personal use. New York City is under scrutiny for racial disparities in weed possession arrests. Numerous reports have found that though people of different ethnicities consume the same amount of cannabis, there are unignorable racial disparities in weed-related arrests. In New York City, 87 percent of people arrested for weed possession were Hispanic or Black. Following public outcry, there is increasing momentum to stop racially biased policing and expunge convictions. Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie has advocated for clearing marijuana-related convictions as part of legalization. Governor Cuomo has also cited the "debilitating criminal stigma" associated with weed-related convictions. Related: Cannabis Legalization and the Quest for Social and Economic Justice Legalizing weed would fight New Yorks opioid epidemic. New York weed legalization could curb the states opioid epidemic. In states with legal weed, opioid overdose deaths have fallen by 25 percent. The New York Health Department released a report that correlates legal cannabis with a decrease in opioid addiction. States with medical marijuana programs have been found to have lower rates of opioid overdose deaths than other states, the Health Department explains in the report. Related: Minnesota Study Adds to Growing Evidence Medical Marijuana Reduces Opioid Use New York stands to lose potential tax income to New Jersey and Massachusetts. The longer New York weed legalization takes, the more New Yorkers will turn to neighboring states with recreational cannabis, notably New Jersey (presuming it finally succeeds at passing legalization) and Massachusetts. Kris Krane, President of 4Front, explained that New York advocacy from groups like Drug Policy Alliance and neighboring legalization efforts have both played a role in Cuomos decision to support recreational cannabis. Marijuana is now being legally sold to adults in the Northeast, and the retail store in Northampton MA is only a 90-minute drive from the NY Governor's Mansion in Albany, Krane said. Why havent we seen a push for New York weed legalization until now? Legalization in the Empire State is long overdue. Governor Andrew Cuomo is a Democrat. Democrats also have a majority in the state Senate for the first time in many years, and hold a strong majority in the state Assembly. Public opinion, state coffers and the national tide all point toward New York weed legalization. But before Cuomos game-changing decision to add New York weed legalization to the docket for early 2019, cannabis reform wasnt even on the New York Democratic Partys official list of priorities. Anti-cannabis lobbying is still prevalent nation-wide. The biggest reason for this is anti-cannabis lobbying. Though the cannabis industry is booming, other industries see a direct negative correlation between their profitability and legalization. In states with legal medical cannabis, the average doctor prescribed 1,826 fewer painkiller doses per year according to a study published in Health Affairs. Not only that, but anti-anxiety, anti-nausea and seizure medication prescriptions also decreased by approximately 500 doses per doctor per year. In other words, there is significant incentive for pharmaceutical companies to stop, or delay, New York weed legalization, especially considering the size of the market. Keep in mind that Bristol-Myers Squibb and Pfizer, two of the nations largest pharmaceutical companies, are based in New York. Anti-cannabis lobbying has been the biggest obstacle facing legalization efforts nationwide and in New York. In addition to big pharma, casinos, private prisons and the alcohol industry have all lobbied against weed legalization across the country. According to FollowTheMoney.org, private prisons alone have spent over $800,000 in New York state elections since 2012. Related: A Plea to Our Elders: Consider Medical Marijuana Before Opioids Is New York weed legalization in the near future? Governor Cuomo has stated that legislation will be drafted as early as January 2019, and the reasons to legalize recreational cannabis have never been more compelling. Businesses are lobbying for the economic opportunities of a New York market, public support is at an all-time high, the state is desperate for income and racial disparities in police arrests have galvanized a large social movement. But as weve seen with legalization in New Jersey, this process takes time -- even when politicians, voters and corporations all want the same thing. No legislation has been proposed, nor is there an official timeline for legalization in New York. Though cannabis legalization in New York seems behind schedule already, there is still a long road or negotiations ahead before weed hits the shelves. Related: What Took So Long? New York Has Many Reasons to Legalize Cannabis US Cannabis Leaders are Carefully Watching the Looming Canadian Wave Cannabis Legalization and the Quest for Social and Economic Justice Copyright 2018 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved For the Intelligencer EDWARDSVILLE Madison County announced Tuesday it had received an additional $600,000 in the Low Income Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) funding to assist low-income residents with home energy costs. The county obtained the additional funding through the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity (DCEO.) These funds are above what the Energy Assistance program received in its initial budget due to the departments ability to utilize and process the additional funding. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Endy Bayuni (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Wed, December 19, 2018 09:04 1079 75e76da2d15e495661b6357e2e2ed9a6 1 Opinion Indo-Pacific,Indonesia,geopolitics,US-China,ASEAN Free A growing consensus is emerging that Indo-Pacific best defines the region that is most immediately impacted by the Asian Century, with all the unpredictable changes that it brings to the geopolitical and geo-economic landscapes. Foreign policy and defense communities, including government officials, diplomats, military officers, scholars and commentators talk about Indo-Pacific like the way they discussed Asia Pacific just two decades ago. Getting everyone to talk about Indo-Pacific is one thing, getting them to agree about what the future holds for this newly defined region is completely another. There is no consensus as countries, big and small, grapples with the implications of the rapidly changing geopolitical environment to their strategic national interests. Nations in the Indo-Pacific region are still oceans apart about what the future holds for the region. A best case scenario has all countries in the region prospering together. A worst case one has the United States and China, both nuclear powers, engaging in cold or hot war, and other countries in the region being pulled apart to take sides. Indo-Pacific makes more sense because it places Asia, as the centrifugal of global economic activity this century, at the center of the geographical map rather than at the periphery the way we would under the Asia-Pacific concept. In most literatures, Indo-Pacific spans from Japan to the north, to Australia to the south, and from the western Pacific islands to the east, to India to the west. Where the line is drawn to the west however is still debatable, with some stretching it all the way to the western coast of Africa, including South Africa. While this definition excludes the American continent, any analysis on the Indo-Pacific geopolitical environment could not exclude the US, which has a long history of military presence and alliances with countries in the region. The US is among the first to officially embrace the idea of Indo-Pacific region. The National Security Strategy paper in 2017 named China, along with Russia, as competitors to challenge US power, influence and interests, and put Indo-Pacific as the most strategically important region. In May, it renamed the Pacific Command (PACOM) the US Indo-Pacific Command. China regards these moves as a US attempt at containing its rise. Chinese official literatures had avoided using the term Indo-Pacific because it smacks too much of Americanism. Yet, its 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, the ocean portion of its Belt and Road Initiatives (BRI), spans from the western Pacific islands, through Southeast Asian waters and the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea and Mediterranean. BRI is at least partly Indo-Pacific, just not in name. Another reason for Chinas reluctance is that the US is reviving discussions of the Indo-Pacific Quadrilical Security Dialogue that includes Japan, Australia and India. First mooted in 2008, the Quad is regaining traction, and although it purportedly seeks to secure a Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP), it is seen in Beijing as another piece of US containment policy. Chinas military buildup in the South China Sea, and the construction of sea ports along the Indian Ocean that would give access to its warships, as well as its aggressive economic expansion through the BRI, have only sowed suspicions of its hegemonic intentions among countries in the region. More than transforming the geo-economic landscape, the Asian Century is changing big power relations in the Indo-Pacific region. The rise of China not as peaceful as it was once regarded and the US response is creating tensions, and countries caught in the middle have to respond and adjust one way or another. How and what they have to adjust to is something that most nations struggle today as the geopolitical environment remains fluid. Almost every nation in the region counts China as its biggest trading partner, but many still rely on the US for their security some through alliances, others out of strategic interests. Even the two big powers are still finding their feet in this new geopolitical landscape: The US is struggling to accept the reality that it will have to share power, and China is struggling on how use its new found power, acquired through rapid economic rise in the last three decades, without scaring off neighbors. The contest for Indo-Pacific hegemony has been further complicated by old security issues in the region, including the North Korea nuclear issue, tensions in the Korean Peninsula and the Formosa straight, Japans plan to become a military power, and territorial disputes that are potential flashpoints, such as in the South China Sea, the East China Sea and the India-China border. These issues, directly or indirectly, have repercussions on big power relations. The future of Indo-Pacific region for now looks hazy as each country. Where does this leave Indonesia? As a matter of principle, Indonesia once again will be tasked to take the middle path in this emerging superpower contest. Along with other middle powers in Asia, such as India, Indonesia could play a more active diplomatic role in preventing the Indo-Pacific region from turning into the next theater of war, both cold and hot, between the two superpowers. Indonesia can look back with pride at its record during the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union, when it steered clear of the superpower conflict, refusing to be aligned with either, but playing an active role nevertheless to ensure peace and stability for its own immediate region in the Southeast Asia. Indonesias own proposal for an Indo-Pacific regional architecture, one that is more open, transparent and inclusive (meaning to include China), now being debated with other members of the ASEAN, could help to close the gap and narrow existing mistrusts among countries in the region. *** The writer is a senior Indonesian journalist who took part in the IndoPacific Security Dialogue on Dec. 10 to 12 at the East West Center in Honolulu, Hawaii. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Veronica Koman (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Wed, December 19, 2018 11:12 1079 75e76da2d15e495661b6357e2e2f48ca 3 Opinion #Papua,#PapuaMassacre,Papua,papua-massacre,Nduga Free While we mourn for the more than a dozen lives lost in the Papuan regency of Nduga recently, we should spare a thought for the thousands of other lives lost in the natural resources-rich territory since this conflict began. We should ask why it is one of the worlds longest-running struggles and what can bring it to a close. On Dec. 13, the speaker of the House of Representatives stated that he would provide support for a military operation other than war in Papua. Papuan people have suffered through at least 16 official military operations since 1961. Further operations would only deepen Papuas wounds and make a peaceful resolution more difficult to achieve. In previous military operations in Papua, civilians made up the largest numbers of victims. Furthermore, military impunity and a weak legal system means there has never been accountability for these civilian deaths. As a first step toward justice, instead of sending more troops, an independent team from the National Commission on Human Rights should be deployed to investigate the conflicting claims in Nduga. There is a strong movement for peaceful resolution of the Papua conflict via an exercise of the right to self-determination. This non-violent movement is growing fast and not only in Papua itself. Thousands of people, Papuan and non-Papuan, have participated in meetings, public discussions and peaceful demonstrations in dozens of cities across Indonesia in recent years. Of the 537 people arrested for peacefully demonstrating on Dec. 1, alone, 185 were non-Papuans. If the West Papua National Liberation Army (TPNPB) freedom fighters in Nduga are captured or killed in a military operation, we can expect that they would be replaced. Papuan youths who are members of non-violent organizations show tremendous support for the TPNPB. To them, TPNPB freedom fighters are elders making extreme sacrifices. Crushing the TPNPB in Nduga would not solve the conflict in West Papua; it would outrage and radicalize the non-violent wing of the movement. The same goes for the repressive tactics being used against the non-violent movement. Non-violent activists in Papuas urban areas have been subjected to illegal arrests, harassing surveillance, arbitrary destruction of property and other forms of interference. Many have told their lawyers, including me, that this repression leaves them feeling there is no room for peaceful action in urban areas and that they would do better to take up arms with the TPNPB in the jungle. Papuan students in Java face additional repression from civil militia groups who threaten violence without fear of arrest. Some of these students have told me that if they have to fight off thuggish militias determined to stifle free speech, they might as well go all the way and fight the Indonesian military by joining the TPNPB. The origins of the TPNPB show that the Papuan people have long fought to remain independent. In 1942 during the Japanese occupation, Papuans in Biak declared their independence. Tens of thousands of Free Papua Movement members in 1965 resisted Indonesia in the lead-up to the fatally flawed 1969 act of free choice. This history illustrates the fact that todays TPNPB freedom fighters are continuing a longstanding war of national liberation. International humanitarian law recognizes them as combatants and not, as the government prefers to describe them, merely members of an armed criminal group. Wars of national liberation are addressed under Additional Protocol I of the 1949 Geneva Conventions. Although Indonesia is not yet a signatory to this protocol, combatants on both sides must still respect basic international humanitarian law as a matter of customary international law during the armed conflict. Until President Joko Jokowi Widodo fulfills his long-neglected promise to open access to Papua for foreign journalists, the outside world will cry foul. Free domestic discussion is also imperiled: Police have threatened a Papuan senator with prosecution under the draconian Electronic Information and Transactions Law after he spoke about six civilians who were allegedly killed in a joint military and police operation in Nduga. Since last year, security forces have made similar threats against ordinary civilians and human rights defenders monitoring military and police operations in Papuas remote areas. Any accounts differing from the biased military line are declared to be hoaxes. We must urgently resolve the conflict in Papua once and for all. The government is misguided in its belief that an infrastructure program will placate Papuans abiding demand for self-determination. As the Indonesian Institute of Sciences has recognized, the root cause of the conflict is the forceful integration of Papua into Indonesia.Indonesian lawmakers would do well to acknowledge this reality. As a newly elected member of the UN Security Council, Indonesias stated priority is fighting for the noble cause of the Palestinian peoples right to self-determination. It should be no less a priority for Indonesia to democratically address the same fundamental demand being voiced by the Papuan people. *** The writer is a human rights lawyer representing hundreds of activists who rallied on Dec. 1. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official stance of The Jakarta Post. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Editorial Board (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Wed, December 19, 2018 09:04 1079 75e76da2d15e495661b6357e2e2ed3fe 4 Editorial TNI,Polri,National-Police,#Editorial,mob-attack Free A week after an angry mob set fire to a police station in the East Jakarta district of Ciracas, nobody has been held responsible, let alone arrested. Several videos of the midnight arson attack have circulated but investigators from both the police and the military have not looked much further into the case. The Dec. 12 incident is believed to have a link to an assault against a Navy captain and an Army soldier, who is a member of the Presidential Security Detail, by a group of parking attendants outside a restaurant in Ciracas two days earlier. The police were quick to arrest five of the parking attendants, including a woman, within less than 48 hours after the attendants beat up the military personnel. But they have failed to identify even a single perpetrator of the arson attack after six days of investigation, which unsurprisingly leaves questions unanswered. Apparently, the police also had no action in mind regarding an incident in which the house of the parents of one of the men who was accused of beating the two Indonesian Military (TNI) members was damaged. The act of vandalism occurred almost at the same time as when the police station was ransacked. While assault, particularly when resulting in injury or death, is a crime, attacks at police stations and private property are similarly punishable by a jail sentence. The burning of the Ciracas police station is more than just a crime it is a show of disrespect against the countrys law enforcement. Worse still, the incident constitutes contempt for the national justice system, given the findings that the mob went to the police station to take the law into their own hands against five parking attendants who were in police custody for their roles in the assault case. It is regrettable that the police have dragged their feet in their investigation into the mob attacks, which brings us to the question about who the people behind the act were that makes it so the police appear reluctant to go after them. It is true that the military police are involved in the investigation, but this should not prevent the police from upholding their independence and professionalism in enforcing the law. There is a clear mechanism in place in the event military personnel are accused of committing a crime, though it will not always satisfy justice seekers. The longer the confusion lasts, the higher the possibility that the state lets the practice of impunity persist. There is no room for impunity as it is a blatant violation of the Constitution, which ensures equality before the law for all. The TNI, too, can help the police speed up the investigation if there is evidence that any of its members were involved in the arson attack. Indeed, collaboration between the two is a must given the TNIs pivotal role in protecting the nation and its citizens. Failure to cooperate will only confirm allegations of a rivalry between the two ever since they were separated to fulfill the mandate of reforms 20 years ago. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Antonio Vitorino (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Wed, December 19, 2018 Migration is the great issue of our era. Migration with Dignity is the theme of this years International Migrants Day, which we observed on Tuesday. Dignity is at the core of our mission. Treating all migrants with dignity is the fundamental requirement we face before anything else we attempt on migration a troubling issue coming at a troubling time for the world community. So, too, does our present. I am newly arrived at the International Organization for Migration (IOM), recently chosen to lead one of the international communities oldest and most effective organizations. Yet migration is as old as humankind. Which means that IOM, at a mere 67 years of age, is a relative newcomer. So, there remains much to do and learn. But dignity comes first. Foremost: the dignity to choose. We are today a species on the move approximately one of every seven people planet-wide in the broadest sense are migrants. Migration is a force for dignity because it allows people to choose to save themselves, protect themselves, educate themselves, or free themselves. It lets millions choose participation over isolation, action over idleness, hope over fear and prosperity over poverty. We must dignify those choices by paying them respect. We respect them by treating those who make such choices with dignity. We, too, have the choice. To answer migrants hopes with our acceptance, to answer their ambition with opportunities. To treat their arrival as welcome. We must also respect and listen to those who have become frightened of the change migration brings to their lives. Whether their fears are warranted or not, they are authentic and deserve, too, to be addressed with dignity. Unless we give all citizens the assurance, their choices, too, are respected, we risk losing a real opportunity for progress. Migration embodies choices we make together either by responding to our new neighbors (or potential new neighbors) arrival with a sense of community, or to seek to erect barriers to keep our neighbors out. The adoption on Dec. 10 in Marrakech of the Global Compact on Migration by an overwhelming majority of United Nations member states takes us one step forward toward dignity for all, and toward a more balanced discourse and widespread cooperation on migration. [...] the greatest danger often lies sadly in migration itself. to Read Full Story SUBSCRIBE NOW Starting from IDR 55,000/month Unlimited access to our web and app content e-Post daily digital newspaper No advertisements, no interruptions Privileged access to our events and programs Subscription to our newsletters We accept Register to read 3 premium articles for free Already subscribed? login Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official stance of The Jakarta Post. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin News Desk (Agence France-Presse) Antananarivo, Madagascar Wed, December 19, 2018 10:06 1079 75e76da2d15e495661b6357e2e2f19ed 2 Environment lemur,Madagascar Free The Indian Ocean island of Madagascar is the leading global producer of vanilla and blessed with a bountiful biodiversity, yet it remains one of the poorest countries in the world. Here is some background as the country heads to the polls Wednesday in the second round of its presidential elections: Fourth largest island Stretching across 587,000 square kilometres (nearly 227,000 square miles), Madagascar is the world's fourth largest island, bigger than Spain or Thailand in size. The country lies just over 400 kilometres (250 miles) off the southeastern coast of Africa and is home to a population of nearly 25 million people (2016, World Bank), including 18 ethnic groups. Madagascar is frequently exposed to extreme weather events, such as tropical storms, flooding and drought. One of the most powerful cyclones in recent years, Enawo, claimed nearly 80 lives in March 2017. While it is renowned for its luscious biodiversity, some of this is under threat including critically-endangered lemurs, its rare and ruby-coloured rosewood trees, and several tortoise and turtle species. Wildlife smuggling and trafficking of its abundant natural wealth remains a national concern. Political divisions The former French colony, which gained independence in 1960, has been mired in political division and upheaval for decades. A disputed 2001 presidential election led to clashes that ended with Marc Ravalomanana, the mayor of the capital, taking power. The outgoing leader was Didier Ratsiraka, a one-time Marxist who had ruled since 1975 and went into exile. Ravalomanana was toppled in 2009 by another Antananarivo mayor, Andry Rajoelina, in an army-backed coup. But Rajoelina was barred from contesting 2013's elections over his links to the country's troubled past, as were Ravalomanana's wife and Ratsiraka. Protests erupted again in April 2018 over claims that laws due to be enacted ahead of the presidential vote would see certain candidates barred. After weeks of unrest and calls for him to quit, President Hery Rajaonarimampianina was forced to replace his government with a "consensus" administration in June 2018, which has organised Wednesday's polls. Read also: Ending decades of doubt, 'biggest bird' dispute put to nest Vanilla, sapphires, malnutrition Heavily reliant on international aid, Madagascar has registered annual growth of more than four percent since 2016, the World Bank says. But most people have not benefited from the improved economic situation, with 76 percent living in extreme poverty. The country supplies about 80 percent of global vanilla bean stocks and is also one of the world's leading producers of sapphires. Its agriculture sector, the main source of income for most people, is vulnerable to its regular natural disasters. Rice production fell by about 20 percent from 2016 which led to significant price hikes, according to the World Bank. Madagascar has the sixth highest rate of malnutrition in the world, with nearly half of all Malagasy children under the age of five suffering from chronic malnutrition according to the UN children's fund, UNICEF. It is among the nations with the highest levels of child illiteracy. Only about 13 percent of the population has access to electricity. Sources: AFP, UNICEF, World Bank Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Ismail Bellaouali (Agence France-Presse) Taliouine, Morocco Wed, December 19, 2018 07:02 1079 75e76da2d15e495661b6357e2e2ea30f 2 Food saffron,Moroccan-saffron,Moroccan-saffron-farmers,knockoff-spices Free Saffron farmers in southern Morocco have long taken pride in the coveted spice they produce from the purple-petalled Crocus sativus, but some are worried knockoff versions are threatening their business. "The pure saffron of Taliouine is the best in the world, according to experts," local grower Barhim Afezzaa boasted, proudly noting his spice's designation of origin (PDO) label. But the 51-year-old is worried that "counterfeit" crops are tarnishing Taliouine's reputation and its PDO -- which guarantees a product's origin and uniqueness. In small plots below the snowy peaks of Mount Toubkal, saffron cultivation in Taliouine has remained largely unchanged for centuries. The flower requires drastic climate conditions -- hot summers and cold, wet winters -- and it can only be harvested during a month-long window from mid-October to mid-November. Workers start at dawn each morning, meticulously picking the delicate flowers by hand and placing them in wicker baskets. The purple blooms are picked before they fully open to ensure quality. Once dried and sorted, the flower's crimson stigmas and styles are turned into saffron -- the world's most expensive spice -- popular with top chefs across the globe. Morocco is the world's fourth largest producer of saffron, behind Iran, India and Greece, according to the figures published in 2013 by FranceAgriMer, France's specialist institute of agriculture and fishing. Read also: 'Old Bay' spice maker McCormick is no fan of rival 'New Bae' 'From father to son' The spice is both a source of pride and a lifeline in the Berber city of Taliouine, which, along with a neighbouring town, produces 90 percent of the kingdom's saffron. Some 1,500 families in Taliouine depend on sales from the crop to survive. Knockoff versions "damage the image of this culture handed down from father to son, which is our pride", said 24-year-old Driss, a member of a local collective in the area. Saffron's rarity and its painstaking cultivation help explain its price -- it takes nearly a kilogram (2.2 pounds) of flowers to create 12 grams of the spice. In Morocco, PDO-certified saffron sells for about three euros ($3.5) a gram, according to Dar Azaafaran, or The House of Saffron, which works with 25 local cooperatives. To maintain their PDO-label and association with Dar Azaafaran, producers submit their harvest for various tests that check for moisture content, taste, colour and smell. Counterfeit saffron can sell "for less than a euro a gram at the famous Derb Omar market in Casablanca", said Dar Azaafaran's head Ismail Boukhriss. Local producers say counterfeiters often use chemical dyes and remains of other plants in an attempt to pass poor quality saffron off as a top-shelf spice. Boukhriss said that while authorities hold PDO-labelled producers to a high standard, "the informal market is not subjected to the same controls". The National Food Safety office told AFP that some "non-conformities" were detected in bulk sales of saffron which had not been properly packaged or labelled. It advised buyers to only purchase "products labelled and packaged by approved and authorised sellers". Some say salesmen working to sell saffron outside the PDO-approved collective networks are to blame, while other small growers sell to middlemen to avoid payment delays common to larger groups. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin News Desk (Agence France-Presse) Wed, December 19, 2018 17:03 1079 75e76da2d15e495661b6357e2e30ff25 2 Lifestyle Celebrities,makeup,beauty,#beauty Free Celebrity makeup lines have dominated the beauty industry for the past two years, but there are signs that the rich and famous could be moving on to skincare for 2019. Here are some of the names to look out for. J-Lo Jennifer Lopez recently dropped a beauty bombshell: the superstar is launching a skincare line late 2019, she recently revealed in New York (as per Refinery29). "I want it to be something that encompasses all the things I've learned and all the secrets I have," she said of the venture. "And it doesn't have anything to do with needles." Kim Kardashian Beauty queen Kim Kardashian has seen major success in the fields of makeup and perfume since launching her KKW Beauty and KKW Fragrance brands back in 2017, so it is only natural that she has her eye on skincare in her quest for total domination of the industry. The entrepreneur hinted that a new business could be on the cards in an interview with Fashionista this month, in which she admitted: "I really would love to do skin care." Kylie Jenner Not one to be left behind, Kardashian's younger sister and fellow makeup mogul Kylie Jenner has also sparked rumors that she could be closing in on a skincare deal. Back in October, Trademark Ninja spotted that the star had registered three trademarks for "Kylie Skin" and "Kylie Skin by Kylie Jenner" with the United States Patent and Trademark Office: watch this space. Read also: Three Bali-based organic skincare brands to try Victoria Beckham Fashion designer Victoria Beckham first let slip that she was working on skincare and fragrance lines in a Facebook Live video interview back in March, and it looks like 2019 could be the year the new series finally hits the shelves. Last month saw the British creative unveil a YouTube channel dedicated to beauty -- which could work as the ideal platform to debut any potential new products. Lisa Eldridge Celebrity makeup artist and Lancome creative director has been a beauty star in her own right for years now, and the creative finally capitalized on her reputation this year with the launch of her debut lipstick line. And she doesn't plan to stop there: "I have more things coming, but with more of a skin focus," she teasingly told WWD back in November. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Arya Dipa (The Jakarta Post) Bandung Wed, December 19, 2018 09:08 1079 75e76da2d15e495661b6357e2e2edd9d 4 Art & Culture bandung,art-exhibition,fine-art,bekraf Free One of Indonesias modern art hubs, Bandung, is finally hosting a major art exhibition after more than a decade hiatus. Art_Unltd: XYZ showcases the works of more than 100 artists, mainly Bandung-based artists, at the Gas Negara Building from Dec. 15 to 20. The event, organized by the Creative Economy Agency (Bekraf) and ArtSociates Indonesia, displays a wide range of fine art pieces, from paintings and statues to surfboards and mechanical installations. Interestingly, Art_Unltd: XYZ offers more than just an exhibition, it also caters to visitors interested in learning about or purchasing the artworks. Last Sunday, artist Henryette Louise spent the day answering visitors questions about artworks displayed in the Galeri Kertas exhibition area. One university student, Tutun Turmudzi, had his interest piqued by Ugo Untoros Sleeping Buddha Series, which consists of three paintings, each showing a pair of feet. The exhibition triggered my curiosity. I want to know [...] what does the artist want to convey through his paintings? Tutun asked. Henryette was glad to answer Tutuns question. Interactions like this should be incorporated into exhibitions, Henryette said. It gives people a chance to learn and know more about fine art. Also at the exhibition, seasoned artist John Martono presented The Soul of Happiness, a series of paintings embellished with handsewn silk thread. Meanwhile, contemporary artist Muhammad Akbar utilized ultra violet light to create a mesmerizing work titled Frog Eye. The artistic team coordinator, Asmudjo J. Irianto, explained that the title of the exhibition Art_Unltd: XYZ referred to three branches of fine arts: fine art, applied art and craft with the three able to intertwine with each other just like the X, Y and Z axes in mathematics. The letters also represent three generations in the art scene. Generations Y and Z are the emerging artists, while the established artists belong to generation X. Bandung is home to the countrys oldest fine arts school and has long been a base for many of the countrys leading artists, such as Sunaryo and Nyoman Nuarta. But when it comes to fine art events, Bandung still lags behind. Yogyakarta and Jakarta have successfully built their art markets through the Art Jog and Art Jakarta events that have been around for a decade. The two contemporary art exhibitions have become annual events, anticipated by artists and the general public alike. As far as I can remember, the last exhibition with such a concept was the Bandung Art Event in 2002. Its been a long time since Ive seen an exhibition like this, said painter R.E. Hartanto, who participated in Art_Unltd: XYZ. Bekraf marketing deputy director, Joshua Simanjuntak, expressed hope Art_Unltd: XYZ would open the eyes of the local government to the publics desire for more fine art events. The public and the fine arts community need more exhibitions, said Joshua. Bekraf head Triawan Munaf noted there was ample room for the fine art market to grow. According to data from Bekraf, fine arts ranked as the fourth-lowest contributor out of 16 subsectors in the creative economy in 2016. Fine arts contributed Rp 20.3 trillion (US$1.4 billion) in 2016, equaled to 0.22 percent of the creative economys gross domestic income. The fine arts subsector has the potential to have a great competitive edge both domestically and internationally, said Triawan. He suggested that one of the problems lay in the fine art markets dependency on a small group of collectors and upper-class buyers. [Therefore] we will try to provide a platform for young artists so their artwork can be enjoyed by the public to expand the fine arts market, said Triawan. Jakarta-based artist Hanafi said the exhibition had provided a platform for new artists to shine. [My only issue] is with Bekrafs point of view. It is better to not only see [the event] from a business standpoint, he said. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Wed, December 19, 2018 16:30 1079 75e76da2d15e495661b6357e2e30e5f1 1 Lifestyle We-Bare-Bears,Cartoon-Network,Christmas,Mary-Poppins-Returns,City-of-Light,Mal-Taman-Anggrek,Pacific-Place-Mall,Senayan-City Free Jakarta may not be the place for a classic white Christmas, but holiday festivities are sure to welcome you whenever you step into its malls. Lively thematic installations in mall atriums often come with exciting activities that visitors and families can participate in. The Pacific Place mall in SCBD, for instance, presents a Mary Poppins-themed installation in collaboration with the Disney Corp. The installation is in the malls atrium, complete with a part suspended from its towering ceiling. Visitors of the mall flock to the installation during opening hours, taking turns to take selfies at different parts of the installation, including a bathtub and a giant handbag. A schedule of choir and dance performances enlivens the installation and there is also a Mary Poppins Returns interactive night of storytelling, music, dance and movies at @america on Dec. 21. The installation is to remain in the malls atrium until early January. While Pacific Place presents an installation connected with a newly released movie, Mall Taman Anggrek marks the holiday festivities with a Christmas with We Bare Bears exhibition that is to run until Jan. 6. We Bare Bears is an animated series from TV's Cartoon Network. It tells the tales of three bear brothers Grizzly, Panda and Ice Bear trying to fit in with the high-tech human world. The show is based on a webcomic by cartoonist Daniel Chong. The exhibition has festooned Taman Anggrek Malls center atrium with Christmas decorations and pop-up stores selling snacks and desserts. The malls signature four display windows each showcase marionettes of the three bears in Christmas settings. We chose We Bare Bears because its trendy and educational for young children, Taman Anggrek Mall's advertising and promotion manager, Elvira Indriasari, told The Jakarta Post at a press conference. This is We Bare Bears first Christmas visit to Indonesia. The Cartoon Network has been taking the bears on a tour to countries such as South Korea, Japan and China. Read also: Five Christmas feast destinations in Jakarta The Cartoon Networks Southeast Asia licensing agent partner, Carol Tan, said that the bears have been receiving plenty of interest from Indonesia. We could see that from the merchandise sales of regional partners such as Miniso, she said. The exhibition is open at 6 p.m. on Wednesdays and Fridays and at 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. on weekends. Visitors can book a 20-minute photo session with the bears by spending Rp 500,000 in Taman Anggrek or Rp 300,000 at the We Bare Bears merchandise stores on weekends. However, the photo sessions on weekdays do not require shopping beforehand. Meanwhile at the Senayan City mall, Christmas festivities are leaning toward a contemporary theme by presenting City of Light in collaboration with Signify (the new name of Phillips lighting that is to be officially announced in January). City of Light, an installation that introduces innovative lighting technology called the Interact IoT (Internet of Things) platform, features a 16-meter-high Gaze of Light tower as its highlight. The tower is to project a decorative light show complemented with sound effects. The installation also becomes a background for many festivities taking place in Senayan City, including midnight shopping with "Hourly Surprises" giveaways, music performances and educational activities for children. (iru/mut) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Wed, December 19, 2018 18:32 1079 75e76da2d15e495661b6357e2e311f72 4 Art & Culture Saudi-Arabia,festival,Janadriyah-Festival,travel,culture,tourism,Indonesia Free Indonesia is set to participate as a guest of honor at the Janadriyah Festival, considered the biggest annual art and cultural festival in the Middle East, which will open on Thursday. "As the guest of honor, Indonesia will perform our best in the Janadriyah Festival, which will run for 21 days and include various cultural performances and films," said Alwi Shihab, a presidential special envoy for the Middle East and Islamic Cooperation Organization (OIC) as quoted by tempo.co. Read also: Discovering Little Arabia in Puncak Slated to take place in Janadriyah village in Riyadh, the festival will feature the rich cultural heritage of the Middle Eastern kingdom and all it has accomplished. Each of the countrys province, along with guest countries, will exhibit their cultural highlights in pavilions. Indonesia will reportedly highlight "unity in diversity to strengthen moderation and world peace" as its theme. (kes) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin News Desk (Reuters) New York, United States Wed, December 19, 2018 20:06 1079 75e76da2d15e495661b6357e2e3156ec 2 Lifestyle nunchucks,Bruce-Lee,ban,new-york,martial-art Free A federal judge knocked down a New York state law banning nunchucks that dated to the 1970s, when martial arts star Bruce Lee popularized them in his movies by whipping around the twin sticks linked by a chain. U.S. District Court Judge Pamela Chen sided with an amateur martial artist who opposed the ban, reasoning that the right to bear arms protected by the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution applies not just to firearms but also to nunchucks. The 44-year-old law that makes possession of chuka sticks a crime is an unconstitutional restriction on the right to bear arms under the Second Amendment and are, therefore, void, Chen wrote in a judgment rendered on Friday in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn. The law was challenged by James Maloney, who claimed the ban prevented him from teaching his twin sons a martial arts form that used nunchucks. Nunchucks are a traditional martial arts weapon developed in Okinawa and made famous in Lees 1970s martial arts movies. The connected sticks, made of heavy wood, plastic or metal, can be whipped around or, held in each hand, used to choke an opponent. Read also: Bruce Lee and the need for a Chinese hero Evidence introduced during the trial showed that at least 64,890 wood or metal nunchucks were sold in the United States in the past 23 years. In her 27-page ruling, Chen said Nassau County District Attorney Madeline Singas, the defendant in Maloneys lawsuit, had failed to provide sufficient evidence that possession of nunchucks, also known as nunchakus, should not be protected by the Second Amendment. Simply put, Defendant does not contradict the contention that the nunchakus primary use, which Defendant concedes is as a tool from the sphere of martial arts ... is a lawful one, the judge wrote. Chens ruling, however, left open the possibility that the state could at some point present further evidence that might lead to a ban or restriction of nunchucks. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Emily Chang and Ian King (Bloomberg) Thu, December 20, 2018 01:02 1078 75e76da2d15e495661b6357e2e319c7b 2 Science & Tech Qualcomm,Apple,iPhone,China,ban Free Qualcomm Inc. General Counsel Don Rosenberg said Apple Inc. needs to take seriously a Chinese courts ban on the sale of some iPhone models. The court order, granted last week after Qualcomm argued that Apple is infringing on its patents, is in force and cannot be circumvented automatically by a software or operating system update as the iPhone maker has claimed, according to Rosenberg. Qualcomm is seeking an extension of the ban to cover the latest models of the phone, he said in an interview on Bloomberg Television to be aired later Tuesday. Its something that needs to be taken very seriously, Rosenberg said. The order should be taking a bite out of Apples sales right now. Read also: Latest iPhones officially on sale in Indonesia, starting at Rp 15.2m The two U.S. companies are locked in a worldwide dispute over licensing fees that Qualcomm charges for use of technology that the chipmaker says underpins all modern phone systems. Apple has argued its former supplier unfairly leverages its position as the biggest provider of chips for smartphones to force payment. Qualcomm has countered that Apple is using its intellectual property without paying for it, and legal cases are aimed at forcing it to lower licensing charges. The Fuzhou Intermediate Peoples Court ruled that Apple is infringing two Qualcomm patents and issued injunctions against the sale of the iPhone 6S, iPhone 6S Plus, iPhone 7, iPhone 7 Plus, iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus and iPhone X, the San Diego, California-based chipmaker said last week. The order doesnt cover the newer iPhone XS, XR and XS Max, which were released after Qualcomm appealed to the court. The chipmaker is asking to extend the ban to those newer models, Rosenberg said Tuesday. Apple said in a court filing that in 2017 it sold an estimated 50 million iPhone units in China. The device is the companys most important product, generating more than 60 percent of Apples annual revenue. The Qualcomm executive said the burden is on Apple to comply with the order or return to the court to prove that its no longer in infringement. The ban will remain in place until the court reverses it, he said. Read also: Apple phones still sold in China despite ban Rosenberg declined to comment on whether the two sides are in settlement talks, but said that his company is open to negotiation. Qualcomm rose 1.2 percent to $57.66 at 12:30 p.m. in New York trading. The dispute with the iPhone maker has halted the flow of billions of dollars in licensing payments - its chief source of profit - and hurt its stock price, which was down 11 percent this year before Tuesday. Apple shares gained 1.5 percent to $166.46. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Wed, December 19, 2018 09:01 1079 75e76da2d15e495661b6357e2e2ed332 1 City children,identity-card,Bekasi Free Bekasi Population and Civil Registration Agency in West Java has announced that starting next year, it will be mandatory for students to possess child cards when they are enrolled at schools. The agency's acting head, Jamus Rasidi, said the requirement would apply to all children under 17 years old. "This is part of the requirements to enroll at schools. Basically, all children should have the cards before enrolling at schools," he said in Tuesday as quoted by kompas.com. He said that throughout this year, his office had prepared 10,000 cards for children, adding that 200,000 more cards would be prepared in 2019. Separately, Bekasi Mayor Rahmat Effendi said that apart from being a requirement to enroll for school, the card could also be beneficial for children when they wanted to open a savings account at a bank. "It will also be useful to register with the BPJS [Social Security Management Agency], for immigration matters and other things. Basically it is needed to fulfill children's rights," he said. To obtain the card, parents will have to register at their district offices by submitting parents' ID cards, birth certificate, family card and photographs. (fac) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Ida I. Khouw (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Wed, December 19, 2018 08:03 1079 75e76da2d15e495661b6357e2e2eab8d 1 City plastic-ban,ban,jakarta Free The Jakarta administration is drafting a gubernatorial regulation to ban single-use plastic bags, with a fine that would be up to Rp 25 million (US$1,726) for enterprises that provide single-use plastic bags. Jakarta Environment Agency head Isnawa Adji said Governor Anies Baswedan would approve the draft later this month and that the regulation would take effect in January next year. Our plan is that, in the first six months after the regulation is legalized, we will educate and make an awareness campaign at retailers, traditional markets, schools and other places to prohibit the use of plastic bags, he said on Tuesday at the Kramatjati traditional market in East Jakarta as reported by kompas.com. Once the regulation is in full effect, the fines for plastic producers, retailers and merchants at traditional markets that still provide single-use plastic bags would be set at between Rp 5 million to Rp 25 million, Isnawa said. According to the agencys data, out of some 7,250 tons of waste produced daily in Jakarta, 14 percent of it are plastics and 1 percent of the plastics are non-degradable, single-use plastic bags. We want to promote the use of environmentally friendly bags at retailers and traditional markets. We, along with city-owned market operator PD Pasar Jaya, have encouraged 153 traditional markets to ban single-use plastic bags. We have started by exchanging their plastic bags with green bags, he said. (fac) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Bambang Muryanto (The Jakarta Post) Yogyakarta Wed, December 19, 2018 21:41 1079 75e76da2d15e495661b6357e2e318c45 2 National Pancasila,Yogyakarta,cross,grave,graveyard,intolerance Free In a strongly worded statement, the Semarang Catholic Archdiocese has claimed that the incident in Purbayan, Kotagede, Yogyakarta, in which local residents cut the top off a cross-shaped headstone on a Catholics grave and prevented his family from holding prayers was a violation against the state ideology of Pancasila and the 1945 Constitution. The church reached the conclusion following an investigation conducted by its commission on peace and justice in Yogyakarta. The duty of the security apparatus and the government is to protect the human rights and basic rights of citizens, Agus Sumartoyo, who heads the commissions investigative team. said in a statement on Wednesday. The commission claims to have found indication that the family of the deceased Catholic, Albertus Slamet Sugihardi, had suffered from acts of intolerance before despite his efforts to live harmoniously with his neighbors. They were even once physically threatened, Agus said. Read also: 'This is community consensus': Yogyakarta villagers destroy cross on public cemetery Some newcomers with the backing of outsiders had physically and psychologically pressured [the family], directly or indirectly, through some community members. The team sent out by the commission also found that the written statement showing that Maria Sutris Winarni, Slamets wife, would not make an issue of the incident was drafted and sent to her by seven people representing village officials, the police and local military command. Winarni told the church that she was told to sign the statement to shut down the outrage on social media over the incident. The duty of the [state] apparatus is to protect the little ones and the weak, and not to pressure the little ones so they budge to create pseudo harmony, Agus said. The church said there was a serious threat against pluralism in Yogyakarta and that it would monitor the investigation into the case. Meanwhile, Unity in Diversity Alliance coordinator Agnes Dwi Rusjiati called on the government to do more to fight the rise of intolerance, which has started to influence the grass roots. I believe the government is turning a blind eye to the fact that many acts of intolerance are happening, she said. She argued that the incident in Purbayan was the result of a society that had become increasingly intolerant. It is not enough for the community to recognize a religion, it is also required to respect the rituals and traditions of the said religion, she said. The cross is a religious symbol that should be respected. Yogyakarta deputy mayor Heroe Poerwadi said the administration would thoroughly investigate the incident and assured the public that it was committed to upholding the rights of its citizens, particularly in practicing their beliefs. Father Paulus Christian Siswantoko from the Indonesian Bishops Conference (KWI) said that desecrating the cross was an act of intolerance. The cross is the symbol of Catholicism, when it gets cut off then the sense of identity of the related person is disturbed too, he said on Wednesday. He said he hoped the local government would be an impartial party that could create a forum where all related parties could sit together to get to the root of the problem to prevent it from spiralling into a bigger problem. If there is indeed a scenario where this has been planned, then this is a sign that intolerance has become a serious problem in Yogyakarta, he said. Yogyakarta is a city of students, culture and tolerance, so the citizens should be progressive in thinking, cultured, and use their rationality clearly. In Jakarta, the Home Ministry said it was looking into the incident. It called on the local administration to immediately address the problem if there was evidence that there was a violation against freedom of religion in Purbayan. (spl) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Shawn Donnan, Jennifer Jacobs, Alex Wayne and Saleha Mohsin (Bloomberg) Washington Wed, December 19, 2018 11:42 1079 75e76da2d15e495661b6357e2e2fc4f8 2 Business US,China,talks,January Free The US and China are planning to hold meetings in January to negotiate a broader truce in their trade wars but are unlikely to have any face-to-face contact before then, according to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. Mnuchin, speaking in a roundtable interview Tuesday at Bloombergs Washington office, said the two sides had held several phone conversations in recent weeks and were still in the process of planning further formal discussions. Were in the process of confirming the logistics of several meetings and were determined to make sure that we use the time wisely, to try to resolve this, Mnuchin said. Both sides are now focused on trying to document an agreement by a March 1 deadline for their current tariffs truce to run out. We expect there will be meetings in January, he said. Previously the administration hadnt been specific on the timing of talks. The two sides are planning to meet in January, according to Chinese officials with knowledge of the discussions who asked not to be named as the talks were private. Chinas Ministry of Commerce didnt respond to a faxed request for comment. Mnuchin said neither he nor President Donald Trump were aware of the arrest of a senior executive from Huawei Technologies Co. when they met with Chinas Xi Jinping for dinner on Dec. 1, the same day that the companys chief financial officer was arrested in Canada. The Treasury secretary also sought to play down the presidents declaration last week that he would be willing to intervene on Huaweis behalf if it was necessary to help reach a trade deal between the worlds two largest economies. Weve been very clear and China understands that these are separate tracks, Mnuchin said. Xis Defiant End to 2018 Signals More US-China Tension Ahead He and the president had not had any direct conversations about the Huawei case, Mnuchin said. He also declined to comment on whether the Treasury Department was preparing a broader case against the Chinese telecommunications-equipment provider, which has been accused by the US of conspiring to violate U.S. sanctions against Iran. Hawks in the Trump administration have long raised questions about just how much the US should trust any promises of economic reforms made by Xi given the experience of past administrations in dealing with Beijing. But Mnuchin said the two sides had agreed that any eventual deal would be enforceable and verifiable and have specific dates on it. We are determined that if we have an agreement it will be specific enough that time frames and details and everything else will be laid out, he said. Reducing the trade deficit with China remained a major priority for Trump but Mnuchin said the administration understood it would take time and was also focused on securing structural changes in the Chinese economy that would help balance trade. The USs monthly trade deficit in goods with China hit a record in October and is on track to have expanded through the first two years of the Trump presidency. I dont think that wed expect that overnight, Mnuchin said of the prospect of eliminating the trade deficit with China. But he said the US and China had agreed on the need for more balanced trade and that would set the stage for meaningful change. (bbn) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Natalia Drozdiak (Bloomberg) Brussels, Belgium Wed, December 19, 2018 20:30 1079 75e76da2d15e495661b6357e2e316ba9 2 World EU,hacker,diplomatic-missions,NewYorkTimes Free The European Union is investigating "a potential leak of sensitive information" following a report that hackers breached the blocs diplomatic communications network. Using techniques similar to those used by an elite unit of Chinas Peoples Liberation Army, hackers downloaded cables over a period of three years, according to the report by the New York Times published late Tuesday. In response, a spokeswoman for the European Council said Wednesday they were "aware of the allegations" and "actively investigating the issue." The alleged attack was discovered by US-based cybersecurity firm Area 1 Security, and included thousands of cables that reveal concerns about Donald Trumps administration, struggles dealing with Russia and China and Irans nuclear risks. In one cable, European diplomats described a July meeting between US President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin as successful (at least for Putin), the New York Times reported. In another, a detailed report quoted Chinas President Xi Jinping in a meeting with European officials the same month as accusing Trump of "bullying" Beijing. The news comes as relations between Washington and Brussels remain tense over trade, but are aligning over concerns over possible espionage by China, enabled by telecoms equipment companies like Huawei Technologies. The hackers discovered by Area 1 allegedly breached the EUs system through a phishing campaign directed at diplomats in Cyprus, after which they obtained access to passwords for the EUs database of exchanges, the NYT said. A spokeswoman for Cyprus in Brussels didnt immediately respond to a request for comment. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Zarir Hussain (Reuters) Guwahati, India Wed, December 19, 2018 14:38 1079 75e76da2d15e495661b6357e2e30942c 2 World #India,#FreedomOfExpression,journalist,jailed,criticism,Narendra-Modi,Puppet Free An Indian television journalist has been detained for criticizing the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government on social media under laws intended to ensure national security, leading to protests in the capital, New Delhi. Kishorechandra Wangkhem was working for a television channel in the northeastern state of Manipur when he uploaded several video clips last month calling the state's BJP chief minister, N Biren Singh, a puppet of the central government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. "It is nothing but a blatant abuse of the law and powers of the government," Wangkhem's lawyer, N. Victor, told Reuters by telephone. Victor said he planned to appeal against his client's detention, with a hearing likely on Thursday. India has one of the world's largest and most diverse media industries, but its journalists often face harassment and violence. The country is ranked 138th in the World Press Freedom Index run by Reporters Sans Frontieres - lower than Zimbabwe, Afghanistan and Myanmar - as a result of censorship laws and the murder of several journalists. Wangkhem was initially arrested on separate charges of sedition on November 21, before being released on November 25, his wife, Ranjita Elangbam, told Reuters. He was then detained on November 27 under India's National Security Act, which allows for detention of up to a year without trial, and has since been held at a jail in the state capital Imphal. A board of judges set up under the Act approved his detention on Thursday. In the posts, Wangkham criticised the state government for commemorating a north Indian freedom fighter, the Rani of Jhansi, a symbol of resistance against British colonial rule in the mid-1800s, who he said had nothing to do Manipur's own struggle against the British. "Dont betray, dont insult the freedom fighters of Manipur," he said in one of the posts. Manipur's deputy home minister Dr Th Charanjeet Singh said in a statement the state had considered the evidence and stood by its decision to detain Wangkhem. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Wed, December 19, 2018 13:44 1079 75e76da2d15e495661b6357e2e306b47 1 City brawl,South-Tangerang,theft,victim Free Nine people have been arrested for allegedly participating in a brawl that killed senior high school student Anwar, 19, in South Tangerang, Banten, on Sunday, The fight was reportedly triggered by a stolen mobile phone. Eight of the suspects are students. The police are searching for two more people who were allegedly involved in the incident. The case involves murder, assault and aggravated robbery, leaving one person dead. Most of the suspects are still underaged, South Tangerang criminal investigation unit head Adj. Comr. Alexander Yuriko said on Tuesday as reported by kompas.com. The suspects, he said, actively searched for another group of young men after a music concert on Friday night to confront them about the theft of one of their mobile phones, which they claimed had been stolen by a member of the latter group in November. The suspects waited until early Saturday morning and allegedly launched their attack as the other group was climbing onto a truck. Some reportedly blocked the vehicle while one stabbed Anwar with a small sickle and another took his phone. Anwar was rushed to the hospital but died en route. Police arrested the suspects at their respective homes on the same day. Alexander said the police have contacted the Banten branch of the Law and Human Rights Ministrys social unit and South Tangerang Integrated Women and Children's Centers (P2TP2A) as well as lawyers to represent the suspects as they were still underage. (ami) Georgia Legislature completes new districts The General Assembly has adjourned the 2021 Special Session for reapportionment, the process by which State House, State Senate and Congressional districts are decided in Georgia. Population shi... Sorry! An... Georgias Heartbeat Bill to be impacted by upcoming Supreme Court ruling The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments today on one of the most significant abortion cases in years, and the after effects of its ruling will be felt here in Georgia.... Defendants found guilty of murder of Ahmaud Arbery A Glynn County jury convicted three men Wednesday of murdering Ahmaud Arbery in February of last year near Brunswick. Greg McMichael, his son Travis and William Roddie Bryan were found... Plant Farley to test outdoor sirens on December 8 Alabama Powers Plant Farley, located near Dothan, will activate the outdoor sirens around the plants 10-mile radius as part of an annual test on Wednesday, December 8 at noon CT.... Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin News Desk (Agence France-Presse) Wellington, New Zealand Wed, December 19, 2018 10:07 1079 75e76da2d15e495661b6357e2e2f2259 2 World #NewZealand,#Internet,government,warning,Google,breach,law,murder Free New Zealand warned Google to "take responsibility" for its news content Wednesday, after the internet giant broke a court order suppressing the name of a man charged with murdering a British backpacker. An Auckland court granted the man interim name suppression this month but Google revealed his identity in an email to subscribers of its "what's trending in New Zealand?" service. Justice Minister Andrew Little said the breach was unacceptable and he had made his views known to Google executives at a meeting in parliament on Tuesday night. While Google has argued the breach was inadvertent and it was unaware of the court order when the automatically generated email went out, Little said that was not good enough. "I put the ball back in their court," he told commercial radio on Wednesday. "If they choose to set up their algorithms and distribute news, they've got to take responsibility for that." The case concerns the murder of British tourist Grace Millane, 22, whose body was found earlier this month just outside Auckland, resulting in a 26-year-old man being arrested and charged. The case generated intense interest in New Zealand and Britain, where some media outlets have also named the accused, arguing the court order does not apply to them. Little said he met two local Google executives, and a senior legal counsel from the company's California headquarters joined them by video. He said they appeared genuinely concerned about the breach and assured him they were working to ensure it did not happen again, with another meeting scheduled for early 2019 to assess their progress. Little conceded that controlling information on the internet and social media was challenging but said court orders were made for a reason and must be respected. "We can't just stand back and say this is all too hard," he said. "The price of that (would be) we have to capitulate and concede what are very important rights that anyone going through the courts has." He said the case highlighted the potential need for an international agreement if Google "won't do anything (or) can't do anything" to resolve the issue. "They can expect us to talk to partner countries around the world who have a similar interest... about reaching an agreement to enforce each others' orders in each others' countries," he said. "That may well happen inevitably anyway because it's not just Google, there are others as well and we have to protect the integrity of our court system." Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Veronica Koman (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Wed, December 19 2018 While we mourn for the more than a dozen lives lost in the Papuan regency of Nduga recently, we should spare a thought for the thousands of other lives lost in the natural resources-rich territory since this conflict began. We should ask why it is one of the worlds longest-running struggles and what can bring it to a close. On Dec. 13, the speaker of the House of Representatives stated that he would provide support for a military operation other than war in Papua. Papuan people have suffered through at least 16 official military operations since 1961. Further operations would only deepen Papuas wounds and make a peaceful resolution more difficult to achieve. In previous military operations in Papua, civilians made up the largest numbers of victims. Furthermore, military impunity and a weak legal system means there has never been accountability for these civilian deaths. As a first step toward justice, instead of sending more troops, an independent team from the National Commission on Human Rights should be deployed to investigate the conflicting claims in Nduga. to Read Full Story SUBSCRIBE NOW Starting from IDR 55,000/month Unlimited access to our web and app content e-Post daily digital newspaper No advertisements, no interruptions Privileged access to our events and programs Subscription to our newsletters We accept Register to read 3 premium articles for free Already subscribed? login Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Wed, December 19, 2018 18:16 1079 75e76da2d15e495661b6357e2e3111e4 1 City plastic-bag,single-use-plastic,ban,reaction,business,retailer,association Free Retail businesses in Jakarta are ready to welcome a regulation banning single-use plastic bags, while business associations are criticizing the move. Association of Indonesian Retailers (Aprindo) head Roy Nicholas Mandey said the city should only reduce the use of plastic bags instead of banning them. Aprindo regrets the ban when it should have only been reduced, Roy said on Tuesday, kompas.com reported. Article 3[2] of Presidential Regulation No. 97/2017 also said reduced [plastics use], there is no mention of a ban, he said. He said the result of those regulations were the use of nationally certified (SNI) biodegradable plastic bags recommended by the National Standardization Agency (BSN), in accordance with a recommendation from the Environment and Forestry Ministry. He said the biodegradable plastic bags had been used in 35,000 retailers. However, the association would still follow Jakartas single use plastic ban once it was enacted. We are still ready to eliminate [plastic bags] because it also reduces [business] costs, Roy said. Separately, Alfamart corporate affairs director Solihin said the company supported the planned policy. If a regional administration, city administration or regency administration makes such a regulation, we will follow it, Solihin said on Wednesday. He said a plastic bag ban would benefit the retailer as Alfamart also sold reusable shopping bags for Rp 3,500 (24 US cents). Jakarta Environment Agency head Isnawa Adji said the planned gubernatorial regulation would stipulate a six month transition period to educate retailers, vendors and consumers about the ban before a total ban by the middle of 2019. (ami) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Wed, December 19, 2018 15:24 1079 75e76da2d15e495661b6357e2e30b8c7 4 Business rupiah,FOMC,meeting,strengthening Free Ahead of a Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting, the rupiah strengthened on Wednesday to Rp 14,380 per United States dollar, sitting 0.91 percent stronger than its position on Tuesday, according to the Jakarta Interbank Spot Dollar Rate (JISDOR). Futures firm Monex Investindo Futures analyst Putu Agus Pransuamitra said the rupiah appreciation was caused by a weakening US dollar index sparked by speculation that the Federal Reserve might take a dovish position during the meeting. The banking sector, analysts and market players also project that the Fed will only hike its reference rate twice next year. It puts the US dollar under pressure ahead of the FOMC meeting, Putu said as quoted by kontan.co.id on Wednesday. He said the decline of crude oil prices had also created positive sentiments for the Indonesian currency because it would help ease the burden of the countrys imports and narrow the trade balance. Putu had estimated that the rupiah exchange rate would be between Rp 14,325 and Rp 14,435 per US dollar on Wednesday. The Federal Reserve is expected to announce its decision on Wednesday in the United States or early Thursday in Indonesia. (bbn) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Wahyoe Boediwardhana (The Jakarta Post) Surabaya Wed, December 19, 2018 20:27 1079 75e76da2d15e495661b6357e2e3165cd 1 National surabaya,sinkhole,fukuoka,Siloam-hospital Free The Surabaya administration has promised that in 10 days the busy road of Jl. Raya Gubeng will be open again to motorists after they finish filling in the giant sinkhole that opened up on Tuesday evening. Deputy Mayor Wisnu Sakti Buana said he did not yet know who actually should take responsibility for funding the repair. We will repair it as soon as possible. Better to make sure its functioning rather than wait for the private sector, because [the repair] is crucial, he said on Wednesday. He said the funds would be discussed with Mayor Tri Rismaharini but the administration had emergency money for disasters that could be used for Jl. Raya Gubeng. At present, the administrations building inspector is teaming up with the National Polices forensics lab and a team of geologists from 10 November Insitute of Technology (ITS) to investigate the cause of the hole, which measures about 30 meters wide and 15 meters deep. Surabayas building inspector, Mudji Irmawan, said his team could not confirm whether the sinkhole was caused by the expansion project of Siloam Hospital in Surabaya. The project is right next to the sinkhole and earlier several officers including deputy mayor Wisnu and Surabaya Development Planning Agency head Eri Cahyadi said the sinkhole was related to the Siloam project. Were suspecting three things could be the cause. First the water in the ground, second the ground anchor and third the depth of the digging. But we cannot make any conclusion that this is due to a mistake in the construction project. It is not for us to say, Mudji said. He said how quickly the administration would be able to fix the road depended on the availability of the materials like double sheet piles, which will take time to procure. Geologist and disaster mitigation expert from ITS, Amien Widodo, said the sinkhole in Gubeng was different from the one in Fukuoka, Japan. In November 2016, a giant sinkhole opened on a road in Fukuoka. A time lapse video of the repair went viral globally as the Japanese authorities managed to fill in the hole in 48 hours and reopen it within a week of the disaster. The Fukuoka administration said it believed the sinkhole was related to construction work on an underground train line. In Fukuoka, the street was built on limestone soil. But its not the case here. ITS has researched that the soil in this area is sedimentary soil, said Amien. Amien said the Surabaya administration needed to know about the soil movement in the area after the sinkhole. He said the city needed to scan the area from above, measure soil movement using GPS and drill the soil at several spots as deep as 30 meters to find out what kind of soil existed deep underground. (evi) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin News Desk (Reuters) Beijing, China, Wed, December 19, 2018 15:55 1079 75e76da2d15e495661b6357e2e30d0ea 2 World #China,Canada,Canadian,detained,Huawei,executive,arrested Free A third Canadian citizen has been detained in China, Canada's National Post newspaper reported on Wednesday, citing the Canadian foreign ministry. China's foreign ministry spokeswoman, Hua Chunying, told a daily news briefing in Beijing that she was unaware of the report. Two Canadians - former diplomat Michael Kovrig and businessman Michael Spavor - were detained after Canadian police arrested Huawei Technologies Co Ltd's chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, on Dec 1. Canada's Global Affairs office told the National Post that they were aware of a detention but did not provide details and did not suggest a connection to Meng's detention. The newspaper did not identify the third person to be detained but a source who had spoken to the individual's family told the newspaper that the individual was not a diplomat or an entrepreneur. Canada's embassy in Beijing did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment on the report. The Canadian government has said that there is also no explicit link between Meng's arrest and the detentions of Kovrig and Spavor. But Beijing-based Western diplomats and former Canadian diplomats have said they believe the detentions are a form of "tit-for-tat" reprisal by China, in response to Meng's arrest. US prosecutors accuse Meng of misleading multinational banks about Iran-linked transactions, putting the banks at risk of violating US sanctions. Meng, who is the daughter of Huaweis founder, has said she is innocent. She has been released on bail. China has repeatedly called for Canada to correct its mistake and to release Meng or face unspecified consequences. Both Kovrig and Spavor are being investigated on suspicion of endangering China's state security, the Chinese government has said. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Paul Handley (Agence France-Presse) Washington, United States Wed, December 19, 2018 08:46 1079 75e76da2d15e495661b6357e2e2ed15b 2 World #USA,#politics,DonaldTrump,security,chief,sold,Russia Free A federal judge accused President Donald Trump's former national security chief Michael Flynn Tuesday of selling out the United States but agreed to delay his sentencing for lying over secret communications with Russian officials. Judge Emmet Sullivan said Flynn had behaved in a "traitorous" manner while he was in the White House in early 2017 and threatened to impose a stiff prison sentence, rejecting a recommendation by prosecutors that the retired three-star general benefit from cooperating and receive no jail time. But the judge gave Flynn the option to delay his sentencing, to better demonstrate why he merited a light punishment. "I want to be frank with you, this crime is very serious," Sullivan said. "I'm not hiding my disgust, my disdain." "Arguably, you sold your country out," he added. - Surprise rebuke - It was a sharp and unexpected rebuke to the highest-ranked Trump aide so far to face a judge in the Russian collusion investigation of Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Flynn, a lanky 60-year-old former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, showed no emotion as he answered the judge's questions as briefly as possible. Trump has maintained that Flynn has fallen prey to a "witch hunt" by the FBI and allied Democrats to undermine his administration. "The whole Russian Collusion thing was a HOAX, but who is going to restore the good name of so many people whose reputations have been destroyed?" Trump tweeted earlier Tuesday. White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said following Tuesday's hearing that Flynn had been mistreated. "The FBI broke standard protocol in the way they came in and ambushed General Flynn and in the way they questioned him," she said. Flynn has been a central focus of the Mueller probe. Two FBI agents arrived at the White house on January 24, 2017 -- four days after Trump was inaugurated -- to interview Flynn about his conversations the previous month with Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak. The agents said Flynn lied about those contacts, in which he allegedly promised to remove sanctions on Russia even while the Obama government was in the process of strengthening them over Moscow's interference in the 2016 election. Weeks later Flynn left the White House under a cloud for the alleged lies, but Trump persisted in defending him. In private meetings he pressured then-FBI director James Comey to pull back the investigation into Flynn's Russia contacts, Comey has testified. After Comey refused, Trump fired him, an act which led to Mueller's appointment as an independent prosecutor in charge of the Russia probe. An additional consequence of Comey's firing was that Trump himself came under investigation for attempted obstruction of justice. - Turning point in Russia probe? - Flynn was one of the first to seek a deal with Mueller, admitting one count of lying a year ago but putting off his sentencing while he cooperated in the broader Mueller probe. So far at least 38 people have been indicted in cases brought by Mueller or spun off from his investigation. Flynn's case reaching the sentencing stage could mark a turning point for the investigation: all the cases filed against non-Russians have been resolved with guilty pleas and, in one case, a jury conviction. Mueller is believed now poised to take the probe to a new level where people in Trump's inner circle, including possibly the president himself, are implicated in wrongdoing, from collusion with Russians during the election to financial crimes. Little is known about the exact targets of the highly secret special council operation, but Trump's repeated attacks trying to delegitimize the operation suggest he is worried. - Trump foundation shut down - Trump was forced on Tuesday to shut down his personal charity, the Trump Foundation, after the New York attorney general accused it of a "shocking pattern of illegality" to advance the president's political and business interests. The state sued the foundation in June, accusing it of "persistently illegal conduct," naming the president, his sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, and daughter Ivanka Trump, who were on the board. The foundation had functioned "as little more than a checkbook to serve Mr. Trump's business and political interests," state Attorney General Barbara Underwood said. "This is an important victory for the rule of law, making clear that there is one set of rules for everyone," Underwood added. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Wed, December 19 2018 According to the 2017 Food Sustainability Index published by the Economist Intelligence Unit in cooperation with the Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition, Indonesia generates around 315 kilograms of food waste per person per year. Meanwhile, around 20 million people in the country still face food insecurity. Concerned about this disparity, the West Jakarta administration has taken measures to reduce the amount of organic waste being dumped in landfills through a program called Kampung Penanganan Sampah Terpadu (integrated waste management village). to Read Full Story SUBSCRIBE NOW Starting from IDR 55,000/month Unlimited access to our web and app content e-Post daily digital newspaper No advertisements, no interruptions Privileged access to our events and programs Subscription to our newsletters We accept Register to read 3 premium articles for free Already subscribed? login Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Wed, December 19, 2018 19:37 1079 75e76da2d15e495661b6357e2e312ed3 4 News Volcano,volcanic-activity,travel,mountain Free The Volcanology and Geological Hazard Mitigation Center (PVMBG) has noted that there are 20 volcanoes with above normal levels of activity across the country. "One of them has the status of awas [danger], two are on siaga [watch] and the remaining 17 mountains are on waspada [caution]. The awas is Mount Sinabung [North Sumatra], and the siaga are Mount Agung [Bali] and Mount Soputan [North Sulawesi]," said Kristianto, PVMBG's head of the western region volcanic mitigation subsector, as quoted by tempo.co. Kristianto said a number of volcanoes were popular tourist destinations during the Christmas and New Year holiday period. The PVMBG has coordinated with the respective tourist area managers, he added. "For Mount Tangkubanparahu [West Java], Dieng [Central Java], Papandayan [West Java], Gede [West Java] and Bromo [East Java], we have given the direction to remain cautious and coordinate with us at the PVMBG or with the Volcano Observation Post, which is on stand-by to provide information," Kristianto said. Read also: Mount Krakatau tops Volcano Cup poll on Twitter He also cautioned that volcanoes could erupt with little or no warning. "It's not that there are no signs, but they are short, and not obvious," he said. A number of volcanoes have such characteristics, including Mount Tangkubanparahu and Mount Papandayan. "Mount Tangkubanparahu in 2013, for example, issued several phreatic eruptions that were not preceded by obvious signs," he said. Kristianto said the phreatic eruptions produced a burst of material that fell around the crater of Mount Tangkubanparahu. "It is imaginable that if it happened during daytime, it could cause a panic, and maybe someone could get hit. In general, the material thrown out by phreatic eruptions is not hot, but it's the aspect of panic that could actually cause new problems. This is what needs to be watched out for," he said. He added that the PVMBG had already established intensive communication to anticipate such events, especially during this holiday season. "Communication between our managers and us from the PVMBG, as well as officials in the Volcano Observation Post, has been intensified. Especially at Tangkubanparahu, we have arranged for information to be disseminated," he said. (liz/kes) 58 minutes ago Dollar General opening more $5 or less Popshelf stores Getting more bang for your buck used to be the mantra of dollar store shoppers everywhere, but times are changing - and prices are rising. As consumers continue to contend with escalating prices for food, clothing and other items thanks to inflation, discount retail chains like dollar stores are rethinking their pricing strategies. Read Article Vietnam shrimp exports down 4% in first 3 quarters Total shrimp exports of Vietnam in the first nine months reached US$2.6 billion, down 4% compared with the same period last year after a downward trend that began in the second quarter, according to the Vietnam Association of Seafood Exporters and Producers (VASEP). Specifically in July, exports fell 20.3% from the same period last year. In August they declined nearly 14%, and in September, the decline continued, at 14.8% to nearly US$332 million. Whiteleg shrimp took the main share of Vietnam's shrimp export products, accounting for 68.4% during the nine-month period, followed by black tiger shrimp with 23.1% and marine shrimp with 8.5%. In the first nine months, the value of processed whiteleg shrimp exports increased 1%, while that of black tiger shrimp fell 7% and that of marine shrimp also fell 28% compared with the same period last year. The EU is Vietnam's largest shrimp importer, accounting for 24.7% of Vietnam's total shrimp exports to markets. Vietnamese shrimp exports to this market reached $648.4 million in the first nine months, up 11% over the same period in 2017. The UK, the Netherlands and Germany are the three largest shrimp importers of Vietnam in the EU. In the first nine months of this year, shrimp exports to the three markets showed positive growth of 27.6%, 11.6% and 19.4% respectively over the same period last year. Phuket Marine Chief oblique on Phoenix dereliction of duty charges, assures no illegal tour boats PHUKET: The Acting Chief of the Phuket Marine Office, Wiwat Chitchertwong, was silent yesterday (Dec 18) on questions about marine officials being prosecuted for dereliction of duty for allowing the tour boat Phoenix to put to sea, in the wake of the investigation into the Phoenix sinking on July 5, killing 47 Chinese tourists. tourismmarinetransportdisastersdeathaccidentscrimeChinesepoliceSafety By Tanyaluk Sakoot Wednesday 19 December 2018, 11:07AM The Phoenix is pictured at the Rattanachai Shipyard, east of Phuket Town, late last month. Photo: Supplied Although it has already been confirmed that other boats also built in Phuket have the same design as the Phoenix, Mr Wiwat yesterday assured that no boats with illegal substandard designs were still operating among the Phuket tour boat fleet. Mr Wiwats reaction followed Immigration Bureau chief Pol Lt Gen Surachate Hakparn on Monday (Dec 17) publicly revealing that the Phoenix was substandard and illegally approved, and that officials and others connected with the July 5 tragedy will lose their jobs. Chinese and German specialists agree that the boat was substandard It was not built at a shipyard but at a machine shop. Police have laid down charges during the interrogation process. Phuket marine officials were prosecuted for dereliction of duty, he said. (See story here.) Gen Surachate, who previously served as Deputy Commander of the national Tourist Police, has been tasked with leading the investigation into the Phoenix tragedy, along with Royal Thai Police Deputy Commander Lt Gen Rungroj Sangkram. (See story here.) Mr Wiwat yesterday assured,All designs of boats (in operation in Thailand) are approved by the Ship Standard Registration Bureau of the Marine Department. The same applies for all designs, including the design for the Phoenix. We inspected more than 1,000 boats operating from ports (and piers) in Phuket after the July 5 disaster. We found some boats did not match their designs, and their owners were ordered to have them corrected. They have been taken out of service until they have undergone reworking at shipyards, he said. Marine Department officials from (the Ship Standard Registration Bureau) in Bangkok will come to check the boats again to make sure they meet safety standards. If they pass, they will be approved for use by the Marine Department officials from Bangkok and the Phuket Marine Office, he added. Mr Wiwat declined to specify how many boats had been ordered to be rectified or which shipyards were carrying out the redesigns. He just said, In Phuket province. There are no illegal boats in Phuket for which the owners will be charged. I have ordered them to have the boats fixed already. Currently, there are no boats (in operation) that do not meet the standards required, Mr Wiwat repeated. Mr Wiwat declined to confirm or deny whether any officials at the Phuket Marine Office were involved in approving the Phoenix to put to sea with tourists on board. Some Marine Department officials who are concerned with the Phoenix boat are being questioned by investigators. I dont know any more details, he said. The investigation of the Phoenix disaster is being carried out by the Royal Thai Police, as Gen Surachate Hakparn revealed to the press (on Monday). I dont disagree with what he said, but I am waiting for official confirmation by documents, not just words, Mr Wiwat added. Of note, Mr Wiwat was not the Chief of the Phuket Marine Office at the time of the Phoenix disaster on July 5. He was installed as the Acting Director from his post as the Chief of the Ayutthaya Marine Office, a position he still officially retains. The Phuket Marine Chief on July 5 was Surat Sirisaiyat, who was transferred immediately after the disaster to the post of Acting Chief of the Ayutthaya Marine Office, where he is expected to remain while the investigation continues. Mr Surat was last in Phuket on Nov 18 to be present in person for the official handover of the Phoenix wreck to police investigators when the boat was pulled up onto stands on the hardstand at the Ratanachai shipyard on the east side of Phuket Town. Now this is done my responsibility with this boat has concluded as it is no longer in the water, Mr Surat told The Phuket News that afternoon in a brief conversation by phone. I have officially transferred responsibility of the boat over to the Royal Thai Police investigation team. Now it is their job to investigate the Phoenix further, he said. Mr Surat declined to comment further about the Phoenix, which was operating tours for Chinese tourists while he was the Phuket Marine Chief. I have done my job already. I have no comment about the Phoenix. Now, I am on the way back to the Ayutthaya Marine Office, he said before the conversation was terminated. Phukets market mix has evolved: Down but definitely NOT out PHUKET: There are many mixed messages emerging over Thailands key tourism arrival results in the wake of a series of accidents coupled with a global economic shift. Attention has been focused on Phuket often considered Thailands gem and the recent lack of tourists, especially from China. tourismeconomicspatongChineseRussian By Andrew J Wood Wednesday 19 December 2018, 02:10PM Patong Beach, Phuket Photo: AJ Wood Following the tragic Phoenix boat accident in July when 47 Chinese tourists drowned in strong seas, business from China has been affected. Last year, 9.8 million Chinese tourists visited Thailand. Making up the lions share of the countrys 35mn annual visitors. Total number of visitors to Thailand increased from 32.59mn in 2016 to last years 35.38mn in 2017. Back in February 2018 Kasikorn Research Centre in Bangkok anticipated that a favourable atmosphere will continue to greet Chinese tourists to Thailand given many positive factors. In its forward forecast it stated, In 2018, the aggregate total of Chinese visitors to Thailand may reach 10.4-10.6mn, rising 6.3-8.4% over-year, versus the 12.0% growth recorded for 2017. Tourism receipts generated by Chinese tourists vacationing in Thailand are estimated will reach B 573.1-584.6 billion, up 9.3-11.4% YoY, versus 15.8% growth YoY during 2017. Following the Phoenix tragedy, most observers believe arrivals from China have taken a downturn. Reuters reported at the time of the boat accident, The worst tourist-related disaster in Thailand in years and underscores long-standing concerns about the industrys safety. The South China Morning Post reported last month saying, Chinese tourist arrivals in Thailand are tumbling, dragging down overall visitor growth in the Southeast Asian nation and dimming the outlook for an economy that relies on spending by holidaymakers. Travellers from China slid 12% in August, the biggest drop in more than a year, keeping the overall pace of visitor growth near a 16-month low. Thai officials are rattled as Chinese visitors are the top source of foreign receipts in an industry that makes up about a fifth of the economy. It went on to say, Thailands image in China has also been hurt by a dengue outbreak, the strength of the baht and a viral video of an airport guard apparently punching a Chinese tourist. A recent report in Thailands Nation was also reporting, Expensive Phuket Dead as a Dodo this High Season, with claims that Phuket has priced itself out of the market and both Thais and foreigners are voting with their feet, claiming that a trip to the Thai holiday island is as expensive as going abroad. Most hoteliers I spoke to do admit that November was quieter. But its not all doom and gloom and not as bad as some are making out. The mix of tourist feeder markets has changed, which is not uncommon for a tourism destination. They are all optimistic however that visitors arrivals will bounce back. I spoke with respected hotelier Matthew C Hindmarch, Director of Resorts and Hotels for the Aksara Collection, a Phuket-based business which operates both resorts and apartments on Phuket and includes their newest property The Sis Kata Resort and the popular Kata Sea Breeze Resort. Mr Hindmarch can often be found at most trade shows around the world promoting his properties to buyers and tour operators. Widely travelled, Mr Hindmarch is considered a Thailand expert and one of the most knowledgeable hoteliers on the island. He speaks or emails travel agents and tour operators from around the world on a daily basis. He had the following to say a few days ago, about current market conditions: Last weekend it was lovely to see Patong so busy both daytime and nighttime as I drove through on my daily drive. Yes, it has been rather sluggish this year in comparison with last, but we have faced challenges for example, the very strong Thai Baht, Brexit to a very small extent as UK guests are holding onto their cash at the moment to see what actually does or does not happen. Scandinavia, especially Sweden, has seen issues with their own currency making overseas travel more expensive than ever. The Russian market (we work on commitment rooms) has fallen with very last minute sales and some heavy discounted needed to attract customers. Some operators put this down to the lack of slots at Phuket (HKT) International Airport resulting in them having to operate to Krabi instead. The Chinese market has been greatly affected by recent events, however, we have already closed out during the Chinese New Year (Feb 2019) at one of our resorts with the Chinese agents trying to secure pre buy during this time. Recent trips to China produced positive results and new agents are coming to work with us here in Phuket. Agents told us that they expect to bounce back at Chinese New Year to previous figures, he said. About the Author: Andrew J. Wood https://www.ajwoodbkk.com Born in Yorkshire, England, Andrew was educated at Batley Grammar School and Napier University, Edinburgh. A Hotelier. He arrived in Thailand in 1991 and has remained here ever since. Working in senior posts with Shangri-La Hotels, the Royal Garden Resort Group (now Anantara) and the Landmark Group. Latterly he has been the General Manager at the Royal Cliff Group of Hotels in Pattaya and the Chaophya Park Hotel Bangkok & Resorts. Andrew is currently President of Skal International Bangkok and Vice President Skal Intl Asia (Southeast) and continues to travel and write. Thailand Yacht Show & RendezVous Driving Growth Of Marine Leisure Tourism In Thailand PHUKET: The fourth edition of the Thailand Yacht Show & RendezVous is set to take place in Phuket 10 to 13 January 2019 during the islands peak season at the centrally located Royal Phuket Marina. Targeting yachting enthusiasts and wealthy lifestyle-seekers from all over the region, the Thailand Yacht Show & RendezVous has become a key marketing platform and revenue generator for the industry, as well as positioning Thailand in its rightful place as the primary Asian destination in the world yachting arena. marinetourismeconomicstransport By Press Release Wednesday 19 December 2018, 01:02PM The Thailand Yacht Show & RendezVous, organised in partnership with the Thai Government, is an international gathering of some of the biggest and best-known yachting and luxury lifestyle brands, in a highly social setting in one of the worlds most beautiful yachting destinations. The Thailand Yacht Show & RendezVous, organised in partnership with the Thai Government, is an international gathering of some of the biggest and best-known yachting and luxury lifestyle brands, in a highly social setting in one of the worlds most beautiful yachting destinations. The Thailand Yacht Show & RendezVous, organised in partnership with the Thai Government, is an international gathering of some of the biggest and best-known yachting and luxury lifestyle brands, in a highly social setting in one of the worlds most beautiful yachting destinations. Andy Treadwell, CEO of show organisers, Verventia, notes: This is now the fourth year of our collaboration with Thailand's forward-thinking government in our joint mission to develop high-spending yacht tourism here. Everyone is now working together with a common goal of strengthening and growing Thailand's marine industry and properly promoting Phuket as the boating hub for Asia. We are driving increasing awareness of this spectacular yachting destination globally, and expect to see more and more foreign yacht owners coming to discover the extraordinarily beautiful cruising grounds, the first-class hospitality and luxury tourism offerings that await them in Phuket and all around the Kingdom." The 2019 show is set to be the biggest and most impressive yet, with the greatest ever number of international yachts premiering in Thailand. The exhibitor line-up includes all the best-known yacht brands and brokers, charter agencies, high-end property developers, bespoke travel organisers and leading names in the automotive, hospitality and food and beverage industries. Speaking of their in-water display, Richard Allen, General Manager of Simpson Marine, says We are very pleased with our confirmed line up at the 2019 Thailand Yacht Show & RendezVous. To have nine yachts with six Thailand premieres is a great achievement and a showcase of Simpson Marines rich portfolio of the worlds best brands. There will be something for everyone starting with Sanlorenzo, Monte Carlo Yachts, Beneteau power, Lagoon Catamarans and Aquila Power Catamarans. As every year, the show is a great chance to meet our owners and buyers, and with this year our largest display to date and the biggest display at the show, we are sure its going to be a great event. I look forward to seeing everyone there. A special Superyacht Hub will be located at the neighbouring private island of Koh Rang Noi, where up to a dozen very large yachts, too big to enter the marina, will be displayed by Asia Marine, Burgess, Fraser Yachts and Simpson Marine, amongst others, showcasing the ultimate in luxury yacht ownership and charter in an outstandingly beautiful environment. On the back of the collaboration between the Thai Government and the Thailand Yacht Show & RendezVous, global awareness of Phuket's beauty and world-class facilities is growing amongst superyacht owners. With vast latent potential, this sector of the marine industry is excepted to grow exponentially in the coming years and become a significant economic generator for the entire marine industry as well as bringing wealthy visitors to Phuket benefitting the wider tourism and island economy. Something for everyone from Superyacht owners to Stand-up Paddle Boarders From small sailboat manufacturers to megayacht builders, RIBs to jet-skis, navigation systems and chandlery to the latest watersport toys, the Thailand Yacht Show & RendezVous is an immersive experience where visitors can enjoy the fun and glamour of an active lifestyle with wine tastings and dinner parties, as well as sea trials and on-water activities. Exhibiting for the first time are Cantieri Capelli: We have been looking forward to the Thailand Yacht Show for a long time as it will be our official launch of the Capelli brand in Thailand. We believe the Show will help us reach out to marine enthusiasts around Thailand and our team are ready to showcase our two Capelli Tempest RIBS to visitors to the show, comments company owner Uberto Capelli. With wealth in India growing at a rate faster than anywhere else in the world right now, but with no marinas and little chance of anything changing very soon, the Thailand Yacht Show & RendezVous are collaborating with GoAir the fastest growing airline in the world today to promote yachting in Thailand to millions of Indian boaters. Organisers want to highlight how Phuket is the best and most convenient marine playground for would-be boat buyers from India to adopt. To this end, GoAir are offering an exclusive deal to entice Indian boaters to come to the show and see for themselves: anyone registering to attend the Thailand Yacht Show & RendezVous will get a 50% discount on the normal return fare through official airline partner GoAir. This exclusive deal works both ways: any show visitor will qualify for the deal, whether coming from or going to India so if you are coming to the show and want to visit the Taj Mahal or any other of Indias amazing cultural destinations, you can pick up a special voucher at registration to get this very special deal. Phuket is a truly cosmopolitan destination and while known around the world for its quality tourism, the yachting potential of the island and surrounding areas is still relatively untapped. We are keen to support the industry and grow awareness of #DestinationPhuket, by helping open up new markets such as India to the spectacular yachting opportunities and onshore infrastructure that Phuket and Thailand has to offer, adds Treadwell. The Thailand Yacht Show & RendezVous, organised in partnership with the Thai Government, is an international gathering of some of the biggest and best-known yachting and luxury lifestyle brands, in a highly social setting in one of the world's most beautiful yachting destinations. For more information visit www.thailandyachtshow.com and follow www.facebook.com/thaiyachtshow. Mother, daughter looking to grow support for sled hockey in Watertown Watertown resident Meghan Brink wants to show young athletes in the area that hockey is not just for those who can stand on skates. It's the age old debate: is Die Hard, the classic action thriller starring Bruce Willis, a Christmas movie or not? Many claim that it isn't, because it doesn't follow the traditional Christmas movie formula - i.e. being kid-friendly, positive, no violence, etc. Others (us) have claimed that it is, as the action classic is set at Christmas time - so how could it not be? Well, toss whatever argument aside, because 20th Century Fox just settled the debate. Die Hard is a Christmas movie, and Fox have even gone one step further to declare it is "the greatest Christmas story ever told". Fox is releasing Die Hard in an all-new Christmas Edition on DVD and Blu-ray, which includes four exclusive holiday cards to help celebrate the action thriller's 30th anniversary. They've remade and released a new official trailer for the 30th anniversary of the film, incorporating a lot more Christmas themes. The parent company of Labatt Breweries of Canada has struck a research deal with Tilray Inc. thats expected to result in the creation of a variety of non-alcoholic beverages containing some of the active ingredients found in cannabis. Tilray chief executive Brendan Kennedy says that the B.C.-based cannabis producer and the Canadian arm of brewing giant Anheuser-Busch InBev will set up a joint venture to build on the expertise of their respective businesses. Each partner has committed to provide the equivalent of about $67.5 million of funding to the joint venture, which has yet to be named. Theres also no timetable yet for when the joint venture will have drinks ready to sell on the Canadian market. Current federal law allows non-medical use dried cannabis by adults but other forms of marijuana arent yet legal for recreational use in Canada. Molson Coors Canada and HEXO Corp., a Quebec-based cannabis producer, announced a similar partnership in August. Alcohol producer Constellations Brands Inc. invested $5 billion in Canopy Growth Corp. the same month. Kennedy says that Tilrays strategy is to partner with global companies, like AB InBev, that can help it eventually grow beyond Canada one of the first countries to allow cannabis products for non-medical use by adults. Were proud to be global pioneers and we want to pioneer with other global pioneers who are leaders in their respective sectors, Kennedy said in an interview. Read more: AB InBev halves dividend as beer remains out of favour Tilray goes global with Novartis marijuana sales partnership Cannabis legalization voted Canadian Presss Business Story of the Year Tilray and Labatt will look at a broad spectrum of ready-to-drink and ready-to-mix beverages in many different forms, for different types of consumers and different consumer needs, he said. Kyle Norrington, president of Labatt, says his company intends to develop a deeper understanding of non-alcohol beverages containing THC and CBD that will guide future decisions about potential commercial opportunities. THC, or tetrahydrocannabinol, is the ingredient that provides pot users with a buzz while CBD, or cannabidiol, is a nonintoxicant that has medicinal properties. Tilray Inc. shares closed at US$71 on the Nasdaq market prior to the announcement, down US$5.50 from the previous close after they gained more than $10 Tuesday following an expanded co-operation agreement with the Sandoz AG of Novartis, a global pharmaceutical company. The Sandoz announcement follows recent additions to Tilrays international advisory board, which includes former finance ministers from Canada, Australia and Germany and politically connected representatives from the United States including former Vermont governor Howard Dean and former lieutenant governor of Maryland Michael Steele. In Canada, Tilrays operation in Nanaimo, B.C., is licenced to produce dried cannabis and cannabis extracts, including both bottled oil and capsules, for medical purposes in Canada. The companys High Park subsidiary, which will work with Labatt, has a licenced facility in Enniskillen, Ont., that it intends to use to service the adult market for dried cannabis and its seeking a licence for a processing facility in London, Ont. Canadas decision on whether to allow Huawei Technologies Co. access to its next-generation wireless network wont be a political one, Justin Trudeau said. The prime ministers comments, made Wednesday at a year-end news conference in Ottawa, come amid heightened tensions with Beijing. Three Canadians have been detained in China since the arrest of a top Huawei executive in Vancouver on a U.S. extradition request earlier this month. The firm is racing to develop 5G technology, the fifth-generation mobile network that could be 100 times faster than existing standards. Australia and New Zealand have effectively banned Huawei from their grids, while the U.K and Germany are being pressed to follow suit over concerns the gear could be exploited by Chinas spy agencies. There are millions of dollars, billions of dollars at stake in technology and in communications infrastructure, there is also the extraordinary imperative that Canadians and people around the world expect to be kept safe and free from interference and cyber attacks, Trudeau said. It shouldnt at all be a political decision made on how we engage, but a decision made by experts and a decision based on recommendations by our intelligence and security agencies, he said. Read more: Third Canadian citizen detained in China, government says Canada stops running tourism ads in China after Huawei arrest, says CBC Huawei slams efforts to block it from 5G rollout Espionage Concerns U.S. lawmakers wrote to Trudeau in October urging him to block Huawei from 5G in Canada, and American officials ramped up pressure on Germany over the same issue this week. The company rejects espionage concerns outright, saying that excluding it from the new networks will snarl the advent of future wireless technologies worldwide. Trudeau also sought to keep politics out of the cases of three Canadians captured this month by Chinese authorities. While the most recent detainee has yet to be identified, the prime minister said the case appears unrelated to the first two, who are facing national security investigations. Michael Kovrig, a diplomat on leave from his post in Hong Kong, and Michael Spavor, entrepreneur who helped organize tourist trips to North Korea, were seized by Chinese state security officers nine days after Huawei Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou was taken into custody on Canadas Pacific coast. She is now out on bail, pending an extradition hearing. We are looking into the details on this most recent one that doesnt seem to fit the pattern set by the previous two, Trudeau said. He added that political posturing or political statements arent necessarily going to contribute to their successful resolution. Read more about: China is blowing the geopolitical opportunity of a lifetime. There has probably never been a better moment to undo Americas greatest strategic advantage by dividing the U.S. from its global network of democratic allies, many of which are horrified by President Trumps rhetoric and policies and deeply worried about Washingtons staying power. Yet Beijing is doing its best to remind that democratic world that it has far more to fear from a hegemonic China than from an erratic America. The latest example is Chinas response to the detention of Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Huawei, in Canada. The timing of that arrest, on charges of violating bank laws and U.S. trade sanctions, surely struck Chinese officials as suspicious. It came on the same day Trump met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Buenos Aires, amid high U.S.-China tensions in an ongoing trade war. Yet some unwise comments from Trump notwithstanding there is no indication that this was anything other than a legitimate effort to enforce U.S. laws that Huawei had broken. Canadian authorities simply would not have made the arrest otherwise. The New York Times described Chinas official reaction to Mengs arrest as measured. In reality, it has been anything but. Beijing has responded with a modern form of hostage-taking, detaining two Canadians (and, according to reports on Wednesday, possibly a third) on what appear to be spurious charges. The hawkish, quasi-official newspaper Global Times has implied that citizens of other Five Eyes countries (the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand) might face the same treatment. Arrest one of ours, China is saying, and well snap up two of yours. From a Chinese perspective, this approach has its logic. Accustomed to a justice system that is wholly politicized, Chinese officials surely believe that Mengs arrest was simply an American pressure tactic. That perception was no doubt heightened by Trumps remarks suggesting that Meng might be released as part of a trade deal, by the presidents ongoing efforts to politicize the U.S. justice system, and by well-known U.S. and Western concerns that Huawei is an arm of Chinese intelligence. Chinas decision to target Canada, rather than the U.S., is also superficially strategic. The idea is to punish smaller, weaker countries for co-operating with Washington, and thereby make them think twice about doing so in the future. That logic, however, is deeply flawed, and it risks squandering the remarkable geopolitical opening that China has been given. Americas allies Canada especially are profoundly worried about where the U.S. is going. A wildly disruptive and often hostile president has slapped punishing trade tariffs on democratic allies based on nonsensical national security concerns. He has flagrantly disrespected allied leaders, even lashing out on them on their own soil. The U.S. alliance system, which provides Washington with global influence and advantages its competitors can only envy, is going through its sternest test in decades. Western leaders including Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau have been openly speaking about cultivating deeper economies ties with China as a hedge against relying on an increasingly unreliable, predatory U.S. What should China do in this situation, given that it apparently seeks to displace the U.S. as the primary power in the Asia-Pacific and perhaps globally, as well? A smart, subtle strategy would emphasize playing nice with Americas allies de-escalating bilateral disputes, playing down Chinese geopolitical ambitions in the Asia-Pacific and beyond, avoiding coercive or heavy-handed diplomacy and otherwise striving to appear the very picture of moderation in comparison to Trumps abrasively unilateral America. It would and ostentatiously advertising Beijings support for the liberal international order (as Xi Jinping did, however implausibly, at Davos in 2017) and ease back from some of the predatory economic and financial practices that have generated international unease. In short, it would let the U.S. destroy the system and squander the advantages it has built over many decades. But instead, Beijing is behaving in ways that should remind every democracy just how much it will hate living in a Chinese-dominated world. It is showing that an increasingly empowered China will be a China that feels unconstrained in seizing foreigners on even the most dubious pretexts, and in subjecting them to the same arbitrary justice to which it subjects its own citizens. It is making democratic countries (Canada especially) think very hard about whether China is a plausible partner after all. And this isnt the only instance in which Beijing has recently advertised its more brazen, authoritarian inclinations. Chinese authorities have conducted extralegal kidnappings in Hong Kong, Myanmar, Thailand and other locales to force the return of exiled dissidents to China. Beijing has repeatedly engaged in economic and diplomatic coercion of countries that dare to speak out against its suppression of civil liberties and basic human rights. It has also worked assiduously to undermine democratic systems overseas by suppressing free speech and bribing or otherwise co-opting key political actors, while supporting authoritarian regimes from Southeast Asia to Latin America and building the worlds most technologically sophisticated police state at home. And all this in addition to advertising, more explicitly than at any time in decades, Chinas desire to take centre stage in the world and offer a global alternative to liberalism. At a time when so many international observers worry about the danger Trump poses to the liberal international order, China is giving plenty of evidence that it is by far the greater threat. Why is a country that, for decades, followed Deng Xiaopings strategy of hiding its capabilities and biding its time now acting in such a counterproductive way? The first reason is that this is what rising powers do. Countries on the make especially those who insist, as Chinese leaders do, that the existing order is biased against them invariably reach a point where they can hardly help behaving more provocatively. With growing power comes a decreasing willingness to suffer slights that once had to be suffered; the attraction of flaunting ones capabilities and confidence before the world becomes irresistible. This is just what happened to Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II, the country to which China is so often compared. The second reason is that China is simply manifesting the pathologies of authoritarian statecraft. There is no hermetic seal separating foreign and domestic affairs. To the extent that they can get away with it, powerful autocracies almost always end up behaving internationally as they behave at home: In a thuggish and domineering fashion that defies international law and accepted norms. Chinas foreign minister openly advertised what was coming back in 2010, when he told a gathering of Southeast Asian Nations that China is a big country and other countries are small countries, and thats just a fact. Chinas hostage-taking may be shocking, but it is hardly surprising. Beijing is acting just as one should expect a rising, ambitious autocracy to act. Thats bad news for the two Canadians being held prisoner. But its also a useful warning to the democratic world. Read more about: For years, Facebook gave some of the worlds largest technology companies more intrusive access to users personal data than it has disclosed, effectively exempting those business partners from its usual privacy rules, according to internal records and interviews. The special arrangements are detailed in hundreds of pages of Facebook documents obtained by The New York Times. The records, generated in 2017 by the companys internal system for tracking partnerships, provide the most complete picture yet of the social networks data-sharing practices. They also underscore how personal data has become the most prized commodity of the digital age, traded on a vast scale by some of the most powerful companies in Silicon Valley and beyond. The exchange was intended to benefit everyone. Pushing for explosive growth, Facebook got more users, lifting its advertising revenue. Partner companies acquired features to make their products more attractive. Facebook users connected with friends across different devices and websites. But Facebook also assumed extraordinary power over the personal information of its 2.2 billion users control it has wielded with little transparency or outside oversight. The social network allowed Microsofts Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users friends without consent, the records show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users private messages. The social network permitted Amazon to obtain users names and contact information through their friends, and it let Yahoo view streams of friends posts as recently as this summer, despite public statements that it had stopped that type of sharing years earlier. Read more: Facebooks Sandberg vows action following reports of Russian interference Tech companies faced privacy backlash, car makers hit bumps in 2018 Facebook has been reeling from a series of privacy scandals, set off by revelations in March that a political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, improperly used Facebook data to build tools that aided U.S. President Donald Trumps 2016 campaign. Acknowledging that it had breached users trust, Facebook insisted that it had instituted stricter privacy protections long ago. Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive, assured lawmakers in April that people have complete control over everything they share on Facebook. But the documents, as well as interviews with about 50 former employees of Facebook and its corporate partners, reveal that Facebook allowed certain companies access to data despite those protections. They also raise questions about whether Facebook ran afoul of a 2011 consent agreement with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission that barred the social network from sharing user data without explicit permission. In all, the deals described in the documents benefited more than 150 companies most of them tech businesses, including online retailers and entertainment sites, but also automakers and media organizations. Their applications sought the data of hundreds of millions of people a month, the records show. The deals, the oldest of which date to 2010, were all active in 2017. Some were still in effect this year. In an interview, Steve Satterfield, Facebooks director of privacy and public policy, said none of the partnerships violated users privacy or the FTC agreement. Contracts required the companies to abide by Facebook policies, he added. Still, Facebook executives have acknowledged missteps during the past year. We know weve got work to do to regain peoples trust, Satterfield said. Protecting peoples information requires stronger teams, better technology and clearer policies, and thats where weve been focused for most of 2018. He said that the partnerships were one area of focus and that Facebook was in the process of winding many of them down. Facebook has found no evidence of abuse by its partners, a spokeswoman said. Some of the largest partners, including Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo, said they had used the data appropriately, but declined to discuss the sharing deals in detail. Facebook did say that it had mismanaged some of its partnerships, allowing certain companies access to continue long after they had shut down the features that required the data. With most of the partnerships, Satterfield said, the FTC agreement did not require the social network to secure users consent before sharing data because Facebook considered the partners extensions of itself service providers that allowed users to interact with their Facebook friends. The partners were prohibited from using the personal information for other purposes, he said. Facebooks partners dont get to ignore peoples privacy settings. Data privacy experts disputed Facebooks assertion that most partnerships were exempted from the regulatory requirements, expressing skepticism that businesses as varied as device makers, retailers and search companies would be viewed alike by the agency. The only common theme is that they are partnerships that would benefit the company in terms of development or growth into an area that they otherwise could not get access to, said Ashkan Soltani, former chief technologist at the FTC. Soltani and three former employees of the FTCs consumer protection division, which brought the case that led to the consent decree, said in interviews that its data-sharing deals had probably violated the agreement. This is just giving third parties permission to harvest data without you being informed of it or giving consent to it, said David Vladeck, who formerly ran the FTCs consumer protection bureau. I dont understand how this unconsented-to data harvesting can at all be justified under the consent decree. Details of the agreements are emerging at a pivotal moment for the worlds largest social network. Facebook has been hammered with questions about its data sharing from lawmakers and regulators in the United States and Europe. The FTC this spring opened a new inquiry into Facebooks compliance with the consent order, while the Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission are also investigating the company. Facebooks stock price has fallen, and a group of shareholders has called for Zuckerberg to step aside as chairman. Shareholders also have filed a lawsuit alleging that executives failed to impose effective privacy safeguards. Angry users started a #DeleteFacebook movement. This month, a British parliamentary committee investigating internet disinformation released internal Facebook emails, seized from the plaintiff in another lawsuit against Facebook. The messages disclosed some partnerships and depicted a company preoccupied with growth, whose leaders sought to undermine competitors and briefly considered selling access to user data. As Facebook has battled one crisis after another, the companys critics, including some former advisers and employees, have singled out the data-sharing as cause for concern. I dont believe it is legitimate to enter into data-sharing partnerships where there is not prior informed consent from the user, said Roger McNamee, an early investor in Facebook. No one should trust Facebook until they change their business model. Unlike Europe, where social media companies have had to adapt to stricter regulation, the United States has no general consumer privacy law, leaving tech companies free to monetize most kinds of personal information as long as they do not mislead their users. The FTC, which regulates trade, can bring enforcement actions against companies that deceive their customers. Besides Facebook, the FTC has consent agreements with Google and Twitter stemming from alleged privacy violations. For some advocates, the torrent of user data flowing out of Facebook has called into question not only Facebooks compliance with the FTC agreement, but also the agencys approach to privacy regulation. There has been an endless barrage of how Facebook has ignored users privacy settings, and we truly believed that in 2011 we had solved this problem, said Marc Rotenberg, head of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an online privacy group that filed one of the first complaints about Facebook with federal regulators. We brought Facebook under the regulatory authority of the FTC after a tremendous amount of work. The FTC has failed to act. According to Facebook, most of its data partnerships fall under an exemption to the FTC agreement. The company argues that the partner companies are service providers companies that use the data only for and at the direction of Facebook and function as an extension of the social network. But Vladeck and other former FTC officials said that Facebook was interpreting the exemption too broadly. When The Times reported last summer on the partnerships with device-makers, Facebook used the term integration partners to describe BlackBerry, Huawei and other manufacturers that pulled Facebook data to provide social-media-style features on smartphones. All such integration partners, Facebook asserted, were covered by the service provider exemption. Since then, as the social network has disclosed its data-sharing deals with other kinds of businesses including internet companies such as Yahoo Facebook has labelled them integration partners, too. Facebook even recategorized one company, the Russian search giant Yandex, as an integration partner. Facebook records show Yandex had access in 2017 to Facebooks unique user IDs even after the social network stopped sharing them with other applications, citing privacy risks. A spokeswoman for Yandex, which was accused last year by Ukraines security service of funneling its user data to the Kremlin, said the company was unaware of the access and did not know why Facebook had allowed it to continue. She added that the Ukrainian allegations have no merit. In October, Facebook said Yandex was not an integration partner. But in early December, as The Times was preparing to publish this article, Facebook told congressional lawmakers that it was. How closely Facebook monitored its data partners is uncertain. Most of Facebooks partners declined to discuss what kind of reviews or audits Facebook subjected them to. Two former Facebook partners, whose deals with the social network dated to 2010, said they could find no evidence that Facebook had ever audited them. One was BlackBerry. The other was Yandex. Read more about: Royal Bank of Canada is denying a report that it was able to read, write and delete users' messages on the social networking website Facebook. The New York Times has published a story claiming Facebook gave RBC, along with Spotify and Netflix, the ability to see private messages between its users. The claims were based on hundreds of internal Facebook documents obtained by the newspaper, that have not been verified by The Canadian Press. The Times story says more than 150 companies were given access to personal information from Facebook users, including entire friends' lists and contact information without their permission or knowledge. RBC says it was given permission to send messages to Facebook users from 2013 to 2015 when it offered a mobile app service that enabled customers to send money to their friends through the social network. It says it did not have the ability to see users' messages. The bank says it needed to be able to send the messages to confirm the identity of the Facebook user receiving the money and to send them a receipt of the transaction. The bank denied having access to private messages, or needing access to these messages. Read more: Washington DC sues Facebook over privacy scandal The service, which used the bank's mobile app, was decommissioned in 2015 due to low usage. "RBC's use of the Facebook platform was limited to the development of a service that enabled clients to facilitate payment transactions to their Facebook friends," said RBC spokesman AJ Goodman in an email. "As part of our security and fraud protocols, we needed to uniquely identify the recipient of funds and payments to securely process the transaction and deliver the notification. We did not have the ability to see users' messages." Netflix Canada also disputed the claim in the Times story and said that at no time did it access people's private messages on Facebook, or ask for the ability to do so. The popular video streaming service said in 2014, it launched a feature that allowed users to recommend TV shows and movies to their friends through Facebook messenger, but the feature was shut down a year later because it was not popular. Read more about: EDMONTONCanadas oil and gas sector will get $1.6 billion in federal support to tide over the industry as oil prices climb out from the bottom of the barrel. On Tuesday morning, Natural Resources Minister Amarjeet Sohi shared details of the support package at the main campus of the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology, a polytechnic in Edmonton. He was joined by International Trade Diversification Minister Jim Carr, and Randy Boissonnault, the MP for Edmonton Centre. The availability of capital at a tough time is essential for the long-term viability of businesses, Carr said. But the support doesnt necessarily amount to free cash. Most of the assistance comes in the form of loans available at commercial rates to businesses of all sizes to meet the liquidity issue at a time when they may have trouble accessing capital, Carr added. He cited $1 billion in commercial financial support from Export Development Canada, and a three-year, $500-million financing envelope for energy diversification from the Business Development Bank of Canada both intended to help industry explore and expand to new markets. But critics say it may not be enough to revive the struggling industry. Nor does the support alleviate the anger felt by many workers in the industry, who maintain the support would not be necessary if Alberta oil had a pipeline for access to tidewater and other markets. Read more: Why a provincial crisis in Western Canada is boosting global oil Opinion | Chantal Hebert: Pipeline politics ensures Ottawa and Alberta will remain divided Hundreds protest at Calgary pro-oil rally as Nenshi insists this isnt about entitled Albertans Mount Royal University political science professor Duane Bratt said the new funds wont quell the anger sweeping across Alberta. There isnt a whole lot there, Bratt said. These are not new programs. These are existing programs, where they just added a bit more money for companies to apply for. Bratt said there are other steps the federal government could have taken to appease its critics. Oil and gas industry advocates have been pushing for the federal government to kill Bill C-69, but Sohi defended the bill Tuesday. The bill, which is under consideration in the Senate, would create a new Impact Assessment Agency and introduce new timelines and steps that companies and governments will have to take in order for energy projects to go ahead. The support was announced after Alberta Premier Rachel Notley revealed plans early in December for a short-term reduction in oil production by 8.7 per cent to narrow the price differential between Western Canadian Select and West Texas Intermediate, a difference costing the Canadian economy as much as $80 million per day. The price of Alberta crude fell as low as $10 a barrel in late November, but was trading at above $26 by the end of last week. At the press conference, Sohi called the oil and gas industry the core of Canadas economy, and recognized that it has been hurting, especially in Alberta since the last recession. He recognized that more pipeline is essential for the long-term, but in the meantime, the new supports help companies diversify export markets beyond the United States to get the most value for every barrel of Canadian oil. With pipelines running at capacity, and the Trans Mountain expansion on hold after a court ruling overturned federal approval, he said the government was fulfilling its promise to help in any and every way possible, because we understand, when Alberta hurts, so does Canada. Though the MPs announced the aid in Albertas capital, oil and gas companies across the country are eligible for the funding, aimed to help with loans, investment in clean growth, and reaching new markets other than the United States. Sohi said the new funds are available as we speak, and encouraged companies to apply. Three middle-aged men sporting yellow vests and jackets, popularized by recent riots in France, and demonstrations that have spread to Canada (including Edmonton and Calgary), were also at the announcement to air their grievances. Jerret Wiens, who said he has worked in the pipeline industry for 34 years, called the federal assistance a joke. Build the frickin pipeline, he told media following the conference. Never mind throwing up $1.6 billion. Get the pipeline in the ground. Another man, Marc Jacquard (who wasnt wearing yellow), said he has worked in the industry for 20 years, and saw the support as a pittance. But he said he was more concerned with who wasnt there for the announcement. Weve got an NDP government in this province, too. Where are they? Jacquard asked. Do you see anybody in here from them? Notley, who was speaking at a separate event in downtown Calgary on Tuesday afternoon, said she wasnt particularly impressed with the announcement, but expected it would be the beginning of many more shows of support from the feds. To be very clear, theres very little money in this its mostly loans, Notley told reporters. While she admitted that enhanced access to capital would likely help small producers, echoing feedback she has heard from the industry, Notley questioned financing as a temporary fix. We made an ask to the federal government, and we didnt ask for the opportunity to go further into debt as a means of addressing the problem, she said. The issue is not finding a market for our product, she said. The issue is getting our product to market. We dont need help finding more markets, we need help moving our product, and I dont think I could have been more clear about that. In recent weeks, Notley has been pushing the federal government to fund rail cars to move oil in lieu of pipeline capacity, but on that front, Sohi could only offer that the feds are working with the province to evaluate the business case for the rail proposal. In the meantime, he said he has instructed the National Energy Board to conduct a study to optimize pipeline capacity, which is expected to be done in February. The money also includes a $50-million investment from Natural Resources Canadas Clean Growth Program for oil and gas projects, which aims to generate $890 million in investment, and $100 million to be made available through Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canadas Strategic Innovation Fund is for economic diversification projects, along with investments from the National Trade Corridor Fund for projects to address freight rail bottlenecks and make for smooth shipping of commodities. With files from The Canadian Press Read more about: LONGUEUIL, QUE.Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques took a break from his scientific responsibilities aboard the International Space Station Tuesday to ponder a more profound question. Can you see Santa Claus from the International Space Station? Elise asked as Grades 1 and 2 students from the elementary school Saint-Jacques attended were linked up with him at Canadian Space Agency headquarters. Saint-Jacques face lit up as he promised he would do his best. Santa Claus, I dont know whether we will manage to see him. We can see the North Pole from here, but its a little at the edge of the horizon, he said. We are going to try to look for him. We have good binoculars. The questions from the pyjama-clad students of Ecole des Saints-Anges in St-Lambert, Que., followed a storytime from space, in which Saint-Jacques read a new space-themed ebook launched Tuesday by the space agency. The Explorers Club tells the story of Layla, Niko, Gemma and Mathias as they set off on their own space mission to find a lost dog. It is aimed at encouraging interest in space, science and reading in young children. Read more: Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques set to blast off to space on Monday Canadian David Saint-Jacques now scheduled to launch Dec. 3 on space mission Canadian astronaut Saint-Jacques astounded by voyage to space station Saint-Jacques took the opportunity to play the clown in spaces microgravity, spinning his microphone and shooting upwards when the rocket in the story blasted off. When a child named Matteo asked how he washed in space, Saint-Jacques spilled a few drops of water from a container to show how they float. Just talking to him, just saying hello to him was really impressive, Maxence, 8, said at the end of the event. He was particularly intrigued by the absence of gravity. I could do acrobatics and play ball, he said. Lilianne imagined games of floating tag and the tricks that could be played on her friends. I dont know how they do it, floating in all those machines, she said. And what surprises me is they can do almost anything they want, but instead of doing it on the ground, they do it in the air. The children were also interested in what Christmas in space would be like. Saint-Jacques said he and his fellow astronauts Anne McClain of NASA and Oleg Kononenko of the Russian space agency, Roscosmos brought special food to share the culinary traditions of their respective countries. Some questions reflected real concerns in the minds of the children, in particular when one girl asked if Earths most polluted areas were visible from space. When we fly over large cities, we can see that there is a grey cloud over them. Air pollution is the easiest thing to see, Saint-Jacques replied. We can also see the effect of global warming because we can see that glaciers in the mountains are smaller now than they were 100 years ago. The stars of The Explorers Club are the children and their dog, but Saint-Jacques makes an appearance as the astronaut in the space station with a message. Dream big and reach for the stars. Dare to explore! he tells them. Read more about: CARPINTERIA, CALIF.They call it fresh skunk, the odour cloud or sometimes just the stink. Mike Wondolowski often finds himself in the middle of it. He may be on the chaise longue on his patio, at his computer in the house, or tending to his orange and lemon trees in the garden when the powerful, nauseating stench descends on him. Wondolowski lives a half-mile away from greenhouses that were originally built to grow daisies and chrysanthemums but now house thousands of marijuana plants, part of a booming and pungent business seeking to cash in on recreational cannabis, which has been legal in California since January. If someone is saying, Is it really that bad? Ill go find a bunch of skunks and every evening Ill put them outside your window, Wondolowski said. Its just brutal. When Californians voted to legalize recreational marijuana in 2016, there were debates about driving under the influence and keeping it away from children. But lawmakers did not anticipate the uproar that would be generated by the funk of millions of flowering cannabis plants. As a result of the stench, residents in Sonoma County, north of San Francisco, are suing to ban cannabis operations from their neighbourhoods. Mendocino County, farther north, recently created zones banning cannabis cultivation the sheriffs deputy there says the stink is the No. 1 complaint. Read more: Weed sellers target women whod rather not smell like a skunk Is pot smoke more objectionable than cigarette smoke? Depends who you ask Researchers smoke out the genes that give cannabis its kick In Santa Barbara County, cannabis growers confronting the rage of neighbours are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars installing odor-control systems that were designed for garbage dumps. The smell from commercial cannabis farms, which brings to mind a mixture of rotting lemons and sulphur, is nothing like the wafting cloud that might hover over a Phish show, pot farm detractors say. Its as if a skunk, or multiple skunks in a family, were living under our house, said Grace Guthrie, whose home sits on the site of a former apple orchard outside the town of Sebastopol. Her neighbours grow pot commercially. It doesnt dissipate, Guthrie said. Its beyond anything you would imagine. When cannabis odours are at their peak, she and her husband, Robert, sometimes wear respirators, the kind one might put on to handle dangerous chemicals. During Labor Day weekend, relatives came to stay at the house, but cut short their visit because they couldnt stand the smell. I cant be outside more than 30 minutes, Robert Guthrie said of peak odour times, when the cannabis buds are flowering and the wind sweeps the smell onto his property. The windows are constantly closed. We are trapped inside. Theres no escape. After nearly one year of recreational sales in California, much of the cannabis industry remains underground. Stung by taxes and voluminous paperwork, only around 5 per cent of marijuana farmers in the state have licenses, according to Hezekiah Allen, executive director of the California Growers Association, a marijuana advocacy group. Sales of legal cannabis are expected to exceed $3 billion this year, only slightly higher than medical marijuana sales from last year. Tax revenues have been lower than expected, and only about one-fifth of California cities allow sales of recreational cannabis. The dream of a fully regulated market seems years off. The ballot measure legalizing recreational marijuana passed in 2016 with a comfortable majority of 57 per cent. Many of those complaining about cannabis odours say they were among those who supported it. They just dont want it stinking up their property, they say. Just because you like bacon doesnt mean you want to live next to a pig farm, said Lynda Hopkins, a member of the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors, whose office has been inundated with complaints about the smell. In Sonoma County, hearings on cannabis ordinances at the board of supervisors overflow with representatives from the cannabis industry, who wear green, and angry residents, who wear red. Of the more than 730 complaints Sonoma County has received about cannabis this year, around 65 per cent are related to odour, according to Tim Ricard, the countys cannabis program manager. Theres been a tremendous amount of tension in the community, said Hopkins, the Sonoma supervisor. If I had to name an ice-cream flavour for cannabis implementation it would definitely be rocky road. Cannabis executives recognize that pot grows can be odorous but say their industry is no different from others that produce smells. You have a smell issue that sometimes cant be completely mitigated, said Dennis Hunter, a co-founder of CannaCraft, a large marijuana business based in Santa Rosa in Sonoma County. But we have dairy farms here in the area or crush season for the vineyards theres agricultural crops, and a lot of them have smells. Britt Christiansen, a registered nurse who lives among the dairy farms of Sonoma County, acknowledges that her neighbourhood smells of manure, known locally as the Sonoma aroma. But she says she made the choice to live next to a dairy farm and prefers that smell to the odour that drifted over from the marijuana farm next door to her house. We opened the door and the smell kicked us in the face, Christiansen said. Her neighbours banded together in October and sued the operators of the pot business; the case is ongoing. One problem for local governments trying to legislate cannabis odours is that there is no objective standard for smells. A company in Minnesota, St. Croix Sensory, has developed a device called the Nasal Ranger, which looks like a cross between a hair dryer and a radar gun. Users place the instrument on their nose and turn a filter dial to rate the potency on a numerical scale. Charles McGinley, the inventor of the device, says a Level 7 is the equivalent of sniffing someones armpit without the deodorant or maybe someones feet a nuisance certainly. A Level 4, he said, is the equivalent of a neighbours freshly cut grass. It could still be a nuisance, but it wouldnt drive you away from your front porch, McGinley said. Standing next to a flowering cannabis bud, the smell would easily be a Level 7, McGinley said. The Nasal Ranger is in use in Colorado, the first state to legalize recreational marijuana, but California counties and cities are still struggling with the notion that smells are subjective. Ever-Bloom in Carpinteria is one of a number of marijuana businesses that have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars to mitigate the stink. Two previous systems failed, but the current one, modelled on devices used to mask the smell of garbage dumps, sprays a curtain of vapour around the perimeter of the greenhouses. The vapour, which is made up of essential oils, gives off a menthol smell resembling Bengay. Dennis Bozanich, a Santa Barbara County official charged with cannabis implementation who has become known as the cannabis czar, says the essential oil odour control has been largely successful. But not every grower can afford to install it. On weekends, Bozanich becomes a cannabis odour sleuth, riding his bicycle through Carpinteria sniffing the air for pot plants. He recently drove through the area with a reporter, rolling down the windows on a stretch of road with cannabis greenhouses. He slowed the car and puzzled over where a cannabis odour was coming from. Ive got one stinky location right here and I cant quite figure it out, he said. His description of the stink? Dead skunk. Ryerson University is pushing through with their plans to open a new law school which would be the eighth in Ontario despite having a key funding request rejected by the provincial government last month. In November, the Ontario government told Ryerson that potential law students would not be eligible for the Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP), which helps students pay for post-secondary education in the province. We were very disappointed to learnthe government was not supportive, said Mohamed Lachemi, president of Ryerson. My reaction to that was to send a letter to the minister of training, colleges and universities to have some discussion. The university has not yet received a response as of press time. The law school is slated to begin accepting applications and hire a new dean in the fall of 2019, and open its doors to students by September 2020. In a statement, Ryerson said, government program approval is not required in order to proceed, noting that the plan had already received approval internally from the Ryerson senate and the Ryerson board of governors, and externally from the Quality Assurance Council, the Federation of Law Societies of Canada, and the Law Society of Ontario. Lachemi noted that the university was not seeking additional funding, but just to have new law students be eligible for government financial aid, in order to make legal education more accessible to people who otherwise would be unable to attend. The government said a new law school would not be in the interests of the people given concerns that there may be too many lawyers in the province and too many students seeking articling positions. In response, Lachemi said Ryerson had already solved the problem through a partnership with the Law Society of Ontario. The Law Practice Program, or LPP, was launched in 2014 as an alternative to articling where students would combine online training and experiential learning with a hands-on work term, and last approximately eight months. Lachemi noted that the placement, which would take place in the latter half of the program, has had 100 per cent of students placed. Given the lack of provincial funding, Ryerson is now turning towards donors to help bridge the gap. We are in the process of evaluating, assessing the situation, working with some donors to make sure that we may also find a solution to provide some financial support to those students, Lachemi said. The proposed tuition at the new law school is $20,000, which is substantially lower than York Universitys Osgoode Hall (upwards of $28,000) and the University of Toronto (approximately $38,000). Ryerson first began considering a law school in 2016. Ilya Banares is a breaking news reporter, working out of the Stars radio room in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: @ilyaoverseas Read more about: Karin and Tom Collins just spent a month visiting one of their daughters in Georgetown. Now they are travelling to Texas in their 25-foot trailer. At one point well go to Kentucky and well spend one month with (another daughter) in her driveway in our trailer, said Karin, 67. Were just hanging out waiting, she said. We just keep moving so we dont stay too long with our kids. The couple sold their Barrie house in the summer of 2016 and, because the market was competitive, didnt get another house. Instead they bought a pre-construction condo in Georgetown in the Residences of the Hotel McGibbon and decided to travel while it was built. It was originally supposed to be ready in March 2019 but has become the latest Toronto region condo to be cancelled this year, leaving buyers like the Collins wondering where they will live out their retirement. The McGibbon was cancelled for unspecified financial reasons on Dec. 4, after a series of delays, including heritage concerns from the Town of Halton Hills about brickwork on the 1888 property and what buyers called a frustrating lack of communication from the developers, Toronto-based Greg Marchant, who heads the numbered company that owns the property, and local builder, Silvercreek Commercial. Read more: Builder behind cancelled Icona condos proposing another project in Vaughan Condo buyers call for better protections as second major Vaughan condo project killed Growing population in Toronto and Hamilton need housings missing middle, report says Both Marchant and Silvercreek president Douglas Pattison refused requests to be interviewed. Marchant sent an email saying only that, Each agreement of purchase and sale was cancelled because the vendor condition regarding construction financing was not achieved. Pattison also emailed saying he expects the project will be built by someone in the foreseeable future but it will not have anyone from the current development team participating. The 10-storey, 125-unit condo is small compared to the Icona and Cosmos projects that were cancelled in Vaughan earlier this year by the Gupta Group and Liberty Developments, respectively. Like the purchasers in those projects, McGibbon buyers have received refunds but have lost the interest on their deposits. Have your say The McGibbon was about 85 per cent sold, said Sara Kelcey, a sales representative for the Milborne Group, the projects sales agent. Hunter Milborne, president of the Milborne Group, and Marchant are partners in a B.C. ski resort development. Many McGibbon buyers are seniors, who say they have few downsizing alternatives. There are two or three apartment buildings outside the downtown, but youre kind of stranded and theres no bus service here so you have to have a car to get to anything, said Janet Duval, 70, who has lived in Georgetown for 44 years. She and her husband were ready to sell their house but wanted to stay near their friends and church. When they saw the McGibbon, they were thrilled by the prospect of being able to walk to restaurants, the church and library. We really thought this is going to be great. No matter if we lose our licence or what happens in the future we can go out the door, Duval said. The two-bedroom-plus-den unit they purchased, was going to be lovely, looking both south and west, she said. Since receiving their refund, the Duvals have purchased in the only other downtown development, a six-storey project by Amico but that will be a wait, said Duval, as its not expected to be ready until 2020. Retired businessman Brian Herner, 72, was also concerned about the lack of larger, better appointed apartments in Georgetown. In 2015, he was among a group of residents that pushed the town and a couple of developers to build for them. That led to the McGibbon and the Amico projects. The old hotel had issues with soil contamination and heritage concerns. The project ended up at the Ontario Municipal Board (OMB), which delayed it for about seven months. The settlement brought the projects height down from 11 to 10 storeys, resolved some parking issues and should have allowed it to move forward, he said. Georgetown, deservedly or not, has a reputation amongst developers of being very difficult to work with. The town would swear thats not the case but it just keeps coming up, Herner said. He thinks the developers also share responsibility even if they are within their legal rights to cancel. If Marchant wasnt going to carry it forward they never should have bought the deal ... that to me is irresponsible, he said. Town of Halton Hills Mayor Rick Bonnette said the McGibbon condos were a very difficult file because of the heritage issues and concerns around the height and parking. But he disputes any suggestion the municipality caused the projects cancellation. The Amico condos process started after the McGibbon and are moving ahead, Bonnette said. He said Marchant and Silvercreek failed to submit a site plan for their project even after OMB settlement. In his email to the Star, Silvercreeks Pattison cited the projects award winning design, calling it the first new project in downtown Georgetown and the first condo in 25 years. It also moved the local Heritage Committee from a rag tag group of misfits to a professional body with standards, he wrote. Tarion, the agency responsible for administering Ontarios home warranty program, says it is investigating whether Silvercreek met the conditions for terminating the Georgetown project. It also expects to add information on cancelled projects to its builder directory next year to help consumers flag developers who fail to complete projects. Some of this years condo cancellations are a result of rising construction costs, trade shortages and lengthy approvals, Tarion said. It warned there could be more cancellations ahead, especially on pre-construction projects that were sold two or more years ago. The agency encourages developers to communicate more with home buyers. McGibbon project purchasers including Duval said the developers waited months to answer queries. In an email, Tarion said the industry may not be communicating enough. Currently, builders are required to advise purchasers of any changes in the anticipated closing or occupancy date for their home. In general, a builder must give 90 days notice if the date is going to change. Developing a more formalized communication requirement is one option that can be considered as we look to address the ongoing challenges posed by condo cancellations. Toronto police say theyre looking for a man in connection to a sexual assault in a Scarborough apartment building earlier this week. At about 12:45 p.m. Monday afternoon, police say a naked man approached a 21-year-old woman in the common area of an apartment building near McCowan Rd. and Sheppard Ave. E. The naked man sexually assaulted the woman, then ran to a stairwell where he had stashed his clothes, police spokesperson David Hopkinson said. The man then got dressed and fled the building on foot, Hopkinson said. Its very disturbing, he said. The man is described as 25 to 30 years old, five-foot-10, muscular, with a dark complexion, short black dreadlocks and no facial hair. He was last seen wearing brown dress shoes, black jeans, black gloves, a blue denim jacket and a green brimmed hat, and carrying a black messenger bag. Anyone with information is asked to contact Toronto police or Crime Stoppers. Milton councillors have decided, for now, to opt out of proceeding with hosting retail cannabis stores in town. At the first full meeting of the new town council on Monday, councillors voted 6-2 to opt out of the process being overseen by the provincial government. Voting to opt out were councillors Zeeshan Hamid, Rick Malboeuf, Colin Best, John Challinor, Mike Cluett and Sameera Ali. Voting against opting out, for now, were Rick Di Lorenzo and Kristina Tesser Derksen. The purchase and use of recreational marijuana has been legal in Canada since Oct. 17. For now, it is only available to buy in Ontario through the online Ontario Cannabis Store. However, the provincial government is permitting privately-licensed stores to sell cannabis in municipalities via storefronts beginning April 1, 2019. Read more: Toronto council opts in on pot shops Mississauga council says no to cannabis shops The Ford government has given Ontarios municipalities a deadline to make a decision as to whether to allow cannabis-selling businesses in their area. The decision to opt out must be made by Jan. 22, 2019. If a decision to opt out is not made by then, the municipality will, by default, opt in to permitting retail cannabis stores. Municipalities that decide to opt out may later reverse that decision. A municipality that opts in, by its own resolution or by default, cant reverse that decision. Despite opting out of retail stores for now, councillors hedged their position by directing staff to report back to council to reconsider opting-out once more information on the issue becomes available, but no later than December 2019. New provincial legislation now permits private cannabis retailers to establish stores in areas zoned for commercial/retail uses and only restricts those retailers from locating within 150 metres of a school. That has concerned many municipalities. Also, municipalities will not have the ability to regulate the number of authorized retail locations as applications will be received, reviewed and issued by the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario. Initially, the province was going to permit unlimited numbers of retail cannabis stores to open in towns or cities where there is proper zoning for retail/commercial uses. Now, the Ford government has announced a phased approach to licensing; there will be a lottery for 25 initial retail cannabis licences in Ontario. In Halton, so far Milton is the only municipality to make a firm initial decision. The Town of Oakville will vote on the issue at its first meeting of the new year, on Jan. 14. Halton Hills and the City of Burlington have both voted to defer the issue until January. The City of Mississauga has opted out of the process while the City of Toronto has opted in. The province has committed to providing $40 million in funding over two years to municipalities to assist with the implementation costs of recreational cannabis legislation. Milton Coun. Rick Malboeuf said his mind has been changed on the issue based on recent provincial government moves. I was going to support opting in but . . . we have no control over how many stores can come in (and where). The other concern I have is that the rules keep changing. Seventy-two hours ago it went from an open market for all and now its down to 25 (licences) to start. We can always opt in later but once we opt in we cant opt out. We lose nothing by waiting, Malboeuf said. We dont have the tools to do this job. Were best off to wait, agreed Coun. Colin Best, noting a federal election is coming next October and that perhaps the rules on cannabis sales/stores will change again. Councillor Kristina Tesser Derksen thought it was best to opt in to having cannabis retail stores from now. What would it have to look like for us to opt our forever? Tesser Derksen said, noting that Colorado had $1.5 billion (U.S.) in cannabis sales last year. She said theres money to be made with retail stores and also likes the idea of keeping the illegal sale of pot out of the hands of those doing it now. The people who want us to opt out are those selling it right now. The sooner we can take the wind out of their sales, the better, said Tesser Derksen. Councillor John Challinor said organized crime is playing both sides of the situation, indicating that it will sell it legally and illegally. Were not going to keep the substance away from anybody. Councillor Rick Di Lorenzo said opting out means more work for Halton police, noting an illegal cannabis dispensary was raided in Milton last week. He also told council he spoke to a police officer informally and was told they believe it will be easier and cheaper to monitor the sale of recreational marijuana from legal sources. Di Lorenzo wanted to defer a vote on opting in or out of cannabis retail stores until the public can be surveyed. He said an unofficial survey he conducted showed 63 per cent of people in Milton want the town to opt in. Di Lorenzos motion to defer a decision until the Jan. 21 council meeting, a day before the provinces final opt in-opt out deadline, was defeated 6-2. CAIROAn internationally backed ceasefire in the key Yemen port of Hodeida got off to a shaky start Tuesday when fighting erupted moments after it took effect at midnight. The clashes died down hours later, and by late Tuesday, residents of the war-torn port were enjoying their first respite from a fight that has raged since June, displacing at least 550,000 people and leading to thousands of civilian deaths. The truce, agreed to in Sweden last week by Yemens Saudi-backed government and its Houthi foes, is intended to ensure humanitarian access to Hodeida, which is the conduit for 70 per cent of aid to Yemen. The deal has stoked hopes the belligerents could start full-blown talks to end a war that has driven the Arab worlds poorest country to the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe. But the cessation of hostilities, which followed a weekend of heavy combat in the city, is fragile. And the sporadic bursts of gunfire that rang out even late Tuesday were a reminder that without concerted international support, heavy fighting could resume there. Whats the plan to make the ceasefire stick? At the talks in Sweden last week, the warring parties agreed to withdraw their troops in Hodeida to the city limits within 21 days under the supervision of a United Nations-led committee. The UN envoy for Yemen, Martin Griffiths, says he wants that committee to be headed by Patrick Cammaert, a retired Dutch general who previously led UN peacekeeping forces in the Democratic Republic of Congo and along the border between Ethiopia and Eritrea. To make the deal stick, Griffiths is hoping to get the Security Council to pass a resolution supporting the latest peace efforts. More broadly, hes hoping to build on a surge of international attention on Yemen in recent weeks that culminated, on Dec. 13, in a stunning move in Washington, when the Senate voted for the United States to end all military support to the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen. The resolution, which had bipartisan support, will likely have a symbolic rather than concrete impact, at least until a new House is sworn in. But it did send a sobering signal to President Donald Trump, a staunch Saudi ally, that his Yemen policy is now a matter of intense scrutiny. Why such strong global interest in Yemen now? One reason: The prospect of a catastrophic famine has focused minds. A recent UN food survey found that 16 million Yemenis are living with food shortages, including 5 million in pre-famine conditions and 63,500 more who are starving to death. Those figures have increased by 42 per cent since the last survey in March 2017, and have raised the prospect of a nationwide famine. Distressing photos of skeletal children, like Amal Hussain, 7, who died in October, have galvanized public attention on a crisis that, until recently, was overshadowed by other Middle Eastern conflict zones like Syria and Iraq. But the new focus on Yemen is also a product of international politics. Global revulsion at the murder of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul in October set off a wave of hostility directed at the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, who the CIA believes is responsible for the killing. For at least some American senators, voting to stop all assistance for the Saudi-led war in Yemen was a way of registering their anger at the crown prince, and at Trumps refusal to take punitive action despite mounting evidence of his role in Khashoggis death. So this is good news for war-weary Yemenis, right? Yes and no. The sudden international focus on Yemen pressured both sides to come to the negotiating table. The Trump administration, hoping to dampen criticism of its support for the Saudis, recently stopped refuelling coalition warplanes over Yemen in an effort to stem the shocking rate of civilian casualties. Thousands have died since 2015, often killed with U.S.-supplied weapons and munitions. But there are also worries the two sides will struggle to deliver on the promises made in Sweden and that if the fighting does resume, it could be fiercer and exact a higher human cost than ever. Previous ceasefires, most recently in 2016, have crumbled. Experts say that, despite the peace moves, both sides are still motivated to continue the war. In the past six months Saudi Arabias chief ally, the United Arab Emirates, has led a military force which has fought to the gates of Hodeida, hoping to snatch the city from Houthi control, which would be a major blow to that group. But Yemen analysts say it is unclear whether the loss of the city would cause the Houthis to give in, or fight even harder. And even as Hodeida fell quiet, fighting continued on other fronts in Yemen, like in the northern province of Hajjah. Whats next for Hodeida? On Tuesday, anxious city residents waited to see if the truce would hold. Some said that Houthi militias had arrested dozens of people from the eastern and southern neighbourhoods where fighting has raged in recent weeks. Anwar Salem, a schoolteacher, said the gunfire that rang out Tuesday night was among the heaviest he had ever heard. You could hear it from everywhere, he said. Last week in Sweden, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres exulted as Houthi and Yemen government representatives smiled and shook hands in Sweden. Now he has the harder task of turning those gestures into on-the-ground realities. The Security Council is considering a resolution, drafted by Britain, that calls for plans for a peace-monitoring force in Hodeida to be put forth by the end of the month. Analysts say he needs to move swiftly. The biggest reason for optimism right now is that both sides have agreed to meet again in January, said Farea al-Muslimi of the Sana Center for Strategic Studies. Otherwise, it all depends on so many ifs and buts. So we will have to see. Read more about: BEIJINGFacing deepening tensions abroad and anxieties at home, Chinas leader, Xi Jinping, delivered an unabashed defence of his policies Tuesday, using a key anniversary to argue that his recipe of guided growth under strong Communist Party control must not waver. Xi made his case to some 3,000 officials and guests gathered in the imposing Great Hall of the People in Beijing to commemorate 40 years since China embarked on far-reaching economic changes after decades of upheaval and malaise under Mao Zedong. The resonant date had inspired expectations among some analysts and investors that Xi would give clearer priorities to counter economic headwinds and trade tensions that have flared with the United States. But he offered none, referring only obliquely to the economic and diplomatic challenges confronting China. Instead, he used the meeting, broadcast live on Chinese television, to stress that only the partys dominance would allow China to continue its stunning transformation into the decades ahead. The first lesson from 40 years of reform, he said, was the need to maintain party leadership over all tasks. It was precisely because weve adhered to the centralized and united leadership of the party that we were able to achieve this great historic transition, Xi said. Xis speech, lasting nearly one and a half hours, came at a pivotal, potentially fraught moment in the country when all the contradictions in its governance appeared in stark relief. Xis political power is as great as that of any leader in decades, yet his partys tightening of controls over the economy and ever more aspects of society suggest a deep-seated insecurity at the highest levels. Xis government has been forced to make some compromises with the United States as President Donald Trumps trade demands have escalated. But Beijing has also intensified corporate espionage and reacted with unbridled fury when U.S. prosecutors sought to extradite an executive of Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications giant, who was recently arrested in Canada. China quickly arrested two Canadians, apparently in retaliation. Xi said that a country of Chinas size and influence was right to hold lofty aspirations. China will never develop itself by sacrificing the interests of other countries, Xi said, but added that China also would not abandon its own legitimate rights and interests. Throughout his speech, Xi performed similar rhetorical swerves, promising both greater openness and assertiveness, both strong state companies and prospering private businesses. The governments intensifying repression of Muslims in Xinjiang, crackdown on Christians and secretive detention of the Chinese chief of Interpol have all clouded its global standing at a time when it aspires to play a larger international role. Xis speech risked leaving Chinese officials no clearer about his policy agenda at a time when relations with the United States in particular have deteriorated badly. When everything is a priority, nothing is a priority, Yuen Yuen Ang, a professor of political science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, who studies China, said by email after watching the speech. Today many policy goals in China are in tension with one another. Which ones take precedence? This is what officials will need to know to carry out their work on a practical level. Even as Xi spoke, stock markets dropped in Asia. Though such speeches are not Chinas usual vehicle for announcing specific policy measures, some investors had been hoping for signals that Beijing would take further steps to liberalize the economy or ease tensions with Washington. Xi and Trump agreed early this month to call a truce in disputes over trade and investment, and to allow 90 days to reach an agreement. But Xis speech Tuesday was likely to dampen hopes of a breakthrough, said Ryan L. Hass, a former director for China at the National Security Council who is now a fellow at the Brookings Institution. Hass said his Chinese contacts had described the speech as the place where Xi would send a signal to Trump on his own terms about the market openings and other reforms on the horizon. If those messages were embedded in the speech, he added, they appear to have been well concealed. Xi warned that the future contained all kinds of risks and challenges, but he said repeatedly that the party had expertly guided the country thus far and must continue to do so. He emphasized twice that the party had been completely correct in its embrace of economic overhauls, a remark that brushed over the many internal debates, as well as ups and downs, that accompanied those changes. Xi called for revitalizing Marxist-Leninist doctrine, a reflection of the partys fears that it could lose its grip over a younger, increasingly wired and well-travelled generation. Let contemporary Chinese Marxism shine even more brilliant rays of truth, Xi said. According to Julian B. Gewirtz, a scholar at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard, who watched the speech while visiting Beijing, This was a speech about the party more than anything else. It remains to be seen whether Xis remarks will reassure Chinese private companies, as he has tried in recent weeks to do. Business leaders and economists have complained about meddlesome officials, heavy and capricious tax burdens, restrictions on investment and banks that prefer to channel loans to big state companies that enjoy the patronage of party leaders. They have welcomed Xis promises, but also warned that the economy remains troubled by risks. Of all the anniversaries related to the reforms 20 years, 25 years, 35 years this 40th anniversary is perhaps the least optimistic I have seen, said Ding Xueliang, a professor emeritus at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology who has long studied Chinas reforms. People in very senior positions also have no clear idea of the direction, he added. Not a single person in the past half year who I talked with in China, not a single person, said he or she is clear about the next stage. Adding to the anxiety were signs that the government was tightening the release of local economic data amid a sharp slowdown. Last month, the southern province of Guangdong stopped releasing the results of a monthly purchasing managers index a survey that takes the temperature of Chinas important factory sector citing a notice from the National Bureau of Statistics. The bureau said Tuesday that the province had violated regulations on statistics gathering. In his speech, Xi repeatedly touted the huge advances China has made since reform and opening began in 1978, rattling off detailed statistics on personal incomes, education and life expectancy. Gone are the days when food and clothing were rationed, he said. Hunger, food shortages and poverty, which plagued the Chinese people for thousands of years, have been generally left behind, he said. Xi paid tribute to Deng Xiaoping, the former leader who presided over the reforms in the 1980s. In past anniversaries of the reform era, Deng stood out in tributes and displays, but Xi has shifted the spotlight to his own achievements since he became party leader in 2012. Xi has repeatedly promised to ensure that China offers businesses and foreign investors an open, fair market, but many have become skeptical that he will follow through. Instead, many say Xis drive to extend party control, stifle public debate and defend the state sector have stymied economic liberalization. Pledges to reform are sincere, but simultaneous pledges to prevent all instability too often nullify progress, said Daniel H. Rosen, a founding partner of Rhodium Group, an economic analysis firm that helps keep a running scorecard on Chinas promised changes. Reform necessarily means some instability and trying to have it both ways will not work. The occasion of the speech Tuesday was the anniversary of a party meeting in 1978, when Deng and other veteran leaders who had fallen during Maos Cultural Revolution began to reassert their power and lay out ideas for restoring the economy after decades of strife. The meeting now features in the partys heavily mythologized history of that time as a watershed, although it was only years afterward that reform and opening up became an official party formula. Read more about: MOSCOWA gravelly voice rings out from the phones loudspeaker: Arent you scared of me? The man on the screen, 32-year-old Chechen video blogger Tumso Abdurakhmanov, frowns. Im not scared of people like you, he says, looking into the camera. But you people are cruel, so Im always on my guard. He was apparently talking to one of the most feared men in the Russian province of Chechnya, Magomed Daudov, the right-hand man of strongman Ramzan Kadyrov. Kadyrov and his security forces have been widely accused by international rights groups of extrajudicial arrests, torture and killings and Kadyrov has warned that Chechens who fled abroad will pay dearly for their criticisms of his rule if they return home. Abdurakhmanov who fled Chechnya in 2015 and has been seeking asylum ever since now faces deportation from Poland. His case highlights the challenges for people from mostly Muslim Chechnya trying to seek asylum in Europe, where governments have become increasingly reluctant to let them in amid terrorism fears and growing anti-migrant sentiment. If I go back there, thats the end for me, Abdurakhmanov told The Associated Press. I cant even fathom the horrible things that will happen. The chilling video in which Daudov reportedly contacts Abdurakhmanov through WhatsApp and threatens him has been watched by over 2 million people. It offers a rare glimpse at the methods Chechen authorities use to intimidate critics. Forced to flee Chechnya after falling afoul of a powerful official, Abdurakhmanov runs a highly popular YouTube channel, criticizing and ridiculing Chechnyas authorities. His channel, which has over 100,000 subscribers, focuses on human rights violations and endemic corruption. He calls it a breath of fresh air for Chechens who cant freely discuss such subjects at home. Its a rare phenomenon that someone from the worst totalitarian enclave in Europe has become so outspoken, said Katya Sokirianskaia, director of the Conflict Analysis and Prevention Center in St. Petersburg. Human rights activists have strongly opposed his deportation, warning he will face torture or even death if he returns to Chechnya. In August, another Chechen refugee, Azamat Bayduev, was deported from Poland. A day later, Bayduev was arrested and hasnt been heard from since. Chechnya is a place that is dominated by fear, said Svetlana Gannushkina, the founder of Russias Civic Assistance Committee and a well-respected rights activist. People are afraid of the authorities, they are afraid of each other, they are afraid of everything. To talk about the violation of human rights in Chechnya is pointless they simply dont exist. In a 2016 video, Kadyrov warned those in exile when you are kicked out of Europe and have nowhere to go, you will answer to me for every word! Poland has provided subsidiary protection to Abdurakhmanovs wife and three young children, accepting that a threat to their lives exists in Chechnya. But it has rejected his asylum appeal on the grounds that he poses a possible security threat due to possible links to extremist organizations. Poland has kept its reasons classified, meaning even Abdurakhmanov doesnt know what hes suspected of. Polands Office for Foreigners says each asylum application is viewed on a case-by-case basis. Spokesman Jakub Dudziak would not comment on Abdurakhmanovs case, but said each person requesting protection must be vetted by the security services. Polands Internal Security Agency and the Polish Border Guards both declined to comment on his case. Chechen authorities have accused Abdurakhmanov of leaving Russia for Syria on Nov. 8, 2015, to join the Islamic State group and flagged him as a wanted suspect to Interpol. He was put on Interpols global list of wanted suspects but Interpol later took him off it. Abdurakhmanov rejects the Chechen accusations. He showed the AP copies of his passport, which has stamps proving that on the dates Chechen authorities claimed he was in Syria he was in Kazakhstan, getting his wife and children to safety. Sokirianskaia said Chechen authorities often fabricate cases against critics, pointing to the current trial of Oyub Titiyev, a rights activist accused of drug charges that are widely seen as fabricated. They understand very well that terrorism charges are the most effective in getting a reaction from European governments, she said. Russia has often been accused of trying to use Interpol for political ends. Abdurakhmanov says he was an ordinary telecommunications worker when he ran afoul of Islam Kadyrov, a relative of Chechnyas leader, who disliked his heavy beard. Chechnyas leader has cast himself as a pious Muslim and encouraged strict Islamic rules in the southern Russian region, but has launched a sweeping crackdown on suspected followers of radical Salafi branch of Islam who wear long beards. Abdurakhmanov says he was threatened with torture and death. The next day he fled with his family, sending his wife and children separately to Kazakhstan and then driving his mother and brother to the ex-Soviet nation of Georgia. He said he stayed in Georgia for 20 months and was twice refused asylum. On July 11, 2017, Abdurakhmanov and his family flew from Georgia to Russias westernmost exclave of Kaliningrad on a flight that stopped over in Warsaw, where he told border guards they were refugees. They spent the next six months in the grim conditions of a Polish migrant detention centre. Following his release, Abdurakhmanov applied for refugee status, but when his application was rejected for a second time in August he was ordered to leave the country. I dont have anywhere else to go, he said, his voice cracking. I cant seek asylum elsewhere. I cant go home. I can only sit here and await my fate. Abdurakhmanov is not alone. According to Polish statistics, 3,100 people filed for asylum in Poland in the first nine months of 2018, about 2,000 of them Russians, primarily from Chechnya. But just 63 Russians were granted asylum. EU governments have become increasingly reluctant to accommodate refugees, not just ones from Chechnya. Germany tightened its asylum regulations after more than 1 million migrants, primarily from Syria and Iraq, entered the country in 2015-2016. Fewer than 10 per cent of the Chechens who have applied for asylum since 2013 were allowed to stay in Germany. German authorities have become increasingly worried about Chechen migrants, saying in April that Chechen-dominated criminal groups . are linked especially to violent crime, extortion and illegal drug trafficking. Frank Nuernberger, the domestic intelligence chief in the state of Brandenburg, home to Germanys biggest Chechen community, told public radio Antenne Brandenburg that many Chechen men have combat experience from the regions separatist wars against Russia in the 1990s and some have fought with Islamic State militants in Syria. Many Chechens have indeed joined global jihadists groups in recent years, Sokirianskaia said. Most (asylum) cases from Chechnya now get rejected, and we can see a pattern of the security threat being used as a reason for rejection. But she said Abdurakhmanov is the type of person that asylum laws were designed for. This is a clear case of someone as an outspoken critic, who has the highest likelihood of being subjected to torture, and who requires protection, she said. ISLAMABAD, PAKISTANWhen President Donald Trump started the new year by suspending billions of dollars of security aid to Pakistan, one theory was that it would scare the Pakistani military into co-operating better with its U.S. allies. The reality was that Pakistan already had a replacement sponsor lined up. Just two weeks later, the Pakistani air force and Chinese officials were putting the final touches on a secret proposal to expand Pakistans building of Chinese military jets, weaponry and other hardware. The confidential plan, reviewed by The New York Times, would also deepen the co-operation between China and Pakistan in space, a frontier the Pentagon recently said Beijing was trying to militarize after decades of playing catch-up. All those military projects were designated as part of Chinas Belt and Road Initiative, a $1-trillion chain of infrastructure development programs stretching across some 70 countries, built and financed by Beijing. Chinese officials have repeatedly said the Belt and Road is purely an economic project with peaceful intent. But with its plan for Pakistan, China is for the first time explicitly tying a Belt and Road proposal to its military ambitions and confirming the concerns of a host of nations who suspect the infrastructure initiative is really about helping China project armed might. As Chinas strategically located and nuclear-armed neighbour, Pakistan has been the leading example of how the Chinese projects are being used to give Beijing both favour and leverage among its clients. Since the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013, Pakistan has been the programs flagship site, with some $62 billion in projects planned in the so-called China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. In the process, China has lent more and more money to Pakistan at a time of economic desperation there, binding the two countries ever closer. For the most part, Pakistan has eagerly turned more toward China as the chill with the United States has deepened. Some Pakistani officials are growing concerned about losing sovereignty to their deep-pocketed Asian ally, but the host of ways the two countries are now bound together may leave Pakistan with little choice but to go along. Even before the revelation of the new Chinese-Pakistani military co-operation, some of Chinas biggest projects in Pakistan had clear strategic implications. A Chinese-built seaport and special economic zone in the Pakistani town of Gwadar is rooted in trade, giving China a quicker route to get goods to the Arabian Sea. But it also gives Beijing a strategic card to play against India and the United States if tensions worsen to the point of naval blockades as the two powers increasingly confront each other at sea. A less scrutinized component of Belt and Road is the central role Pakistan plays in Chinas Beidou satellite navigation system. Pakistan is the only other country that has been granted access to the systems military service, allowing more precise guidance for missiles, ships and aircraft. The co-operation is meant to be a blueprint for Beidous expansion to other Belt and Road nations, however, ostensibly ending its clients reliance on the U.S. military-run GPS network that Chinese officials fear is monitored and manipulated by the United States. In Pakistan, China has found an amenable ally with much to recommend it: shared borders and a long history of co-operation; a hedge in South Asia against India; a large market for arms sales and trade with potential for growth; a wealth of natural resources. Now, China is also finding a better showcase for its security and surveillance technology in a place once defined by its close military relationship with the United States. The focus of Belt and Road is on roads and bridges and ports, because those are the concrete construction projects that people can easily see. But its the technologies of the future and technologies of future security systems that could be the biggest security threat in the Belt and Road project, said Priscilla Moriuchi, director of strategic threat development at Recorded Future, a cyberthreat intelligence monitoring company based in Massachusetts. An Asset on the Sea The tightening China-Pakistan security alliance has gained momentum on a long road to the Arabian Sea. In 2015, under Belt and Road, China took a nascent port in the Pakistani coastal town of Gwadar and supercharged the project with an estimated $800 million development plan that included a large special economic zone for Chinese companies. Linking the port to western China would be a new 3,200-kilometre network of highways and rails through the most forbidding stretch of Pakistan: Baluchistan province, a resource-rich region plagued by militancy. The public vision for the project was that it would allow Chinese goods to bypass much longer and more expensive shipping routes through the Indian Ocean and avoid the territorial waters of several U.S. allies in Asia. From the beginning, though, key details of the project were kept from the public and lawmakers, officials say, including the terms of its loan structure and the length of the lease, more than 40 years, that a Chinese state-owned company secured to operate the port. If there was concern within Pakistan about the hidden costs of CPEC, there was growing suspicion abroad about a hidden military aspect, as well. In recent years, Chinese state-owned companies have built or begun constructing seaports at strategic spots around the Indian Ocean, including in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Malaysia. Chinese officials insisted that the ports would not be militarized. But analysts began wondering whether Chinas endgame was to muscle its way onto coastal territories that could become prime military assets much as it did when it started militarizing contested islands in the South China Sea. Then, Sri Lanka, unable to repay its ballooning debt with China, handed over the Chinese-built port at Hambantota in a 99-year lease agreement last year. Indian and American officials expressed a growing conviction that taking control of the port had been Chinas intent all along. In October, Vice-President Mike Pence said Sri Lanka was a warning for all Belt and Road countries that China was luring them into debt traps. China uses so-called debt diplomacy to expand its influence, Pence said in a speech. Just ask Sri Lanka, which took on massive debt to let Chinese state companies build a port of questionable commercial value, Pence added. It may soon become a forward military base for Chinas growing blue-water navy. Military analysts predict that China could use Gwadar to expand the naval footprint of its attack submarines, after agreeing in 2015 to sell eight submarines to Pakistan in a deal worth up to $6 billion. China could use the equipment it sells to the South Asian country to refuel its own submarines, extending its navys global reach. Deepening Debt When China inaugurated Belt and Road, in 2013, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharifs new government in Pakistan saw it as the answer for a host of problems. Foreign investment in Pakistan was scant, driven away by terrorist attacks and the countrys enduring reputation for corruption. And Pakistan desperately needed a modern power grid to help ease persistent electricity shortages. Pakistani officials say that Beijing first proposed the highway from Chinas western Xinjiang region through Pakistan that connected to Gwadar port. But Pakistani officials insisted that new coal power plants be built. China agreed. With CPEC under fresh scrutiny, Chinese and Pakistani officials in recent weeks have contended that Pakistan has a debt problem, but not a Chinese debt problem. In October, the countrys central bank revealed an overall debt and liability burden of about $215 billion, with $95 billion externally held. With nearly half of CPECs projects completed in terms of worth Pakistan currently owes China $23 billion. But the country stands to owe $62 billion to China before interest balloons the figure to some $90 billion under the plan for Belt and Roads expansion there in coming years. Pakistans central bank governor, Ashraf Wathra, said publicly in 2015 that he had no clarity on Chinese investments in Pakistan and was concerned about rising debt levels. It still took him months after that to secure a briefing from cabinet officials. My main question was, Do we have any feasibility studies of these projects and a cost-benefit analysis? Their answers were all evasive, recalled Wathra, who has since retired. Ahsan Iqbal, a cabinet minister and the main architect for CPEC in the previous government, said the project was well thought-through and dismissed Wathras account. No one wanted to invest here the Chinese took a chance, Iqbal said in an interview. But the bill is coming due. Pakistans first debt repayments to China are set for next year, starting at about $300 million and gradually increasing to reach about $3.2 billion by 2026, according to officials. And Pakistan is already having trouble paying what it owes to Chinese companies. Fighter Jets and Satellites According to the undisclosed proposal drawn up by the Pakistani air force and Chinese officials at the start of the year, a special economic zone under CPEC would be created in Pakistan to produce a new generation of fighter jets. For the first time, navigation systems, radars and on-board weapons would be built jointly by both countries at factories in Pakistan. The proposal, confirmed by officials at the Ministry of Planning and Development, would expand China and Pakistans current co-operation on the JF-17 fighter jet, which is assembled at Pakistans military-run Kamra Aeronautical Complex in Punjab province. The Chinese-designed jets have given Pakistan an alternative to the U.S.-built F-16 fighters. The plans are in the final stages of approval, but the current government is expected to rubber-stamp the project, officials in Islamabad say. For China, Pakistan could become a showcase for other countries seeking to shift their militaries away from U.S. equipment and toward Chinese arms, Western diplomats said. And because China is not averse to selling such advanced weaponry as ballistic missiles which the United States will not sell to allies like Saudi Arabia the deal with Pakistan could be a stepping stone to a bigger market for Chinese weapons in the Muslim world. For years, some of the most important military coordination between the two neighbours has been going on in space. Just months before Beijing unveiled the Belt and Road project in 2013, it signed an agreement with Pakistan to build a network of satellite stations inside the South Asian country to establish the Beidou Navigation System as an alternative to the American GPS network. Beidou quickly became a core component of Belt and Road, with the Chinese government calling the satellite network part of an information Silk Road in a 2015 white paper. Like GPS, Beidou has a civilian function and a military one. If its trial with Pakistan goes well, Beijing could offer Beidous military service to other countries, creating a bloc of nations whose military actions would be more difficult for the United States to monitor. By 2020, all 35 satellites for the system will be launched in collaboration with other Belt and Road countries, completing Beidou. Beidou, whatever any users use it for whether its a civilian navigating their way to the grocery store or a government using it to co-ordinate their rocket launches those are all things that China can track, said Moriuchi, of the research group Recorded Future. And thats what is most striking: that this authoritarian government will be a major technology provider for numerous countries in Asia, Africa and Europe. For the Pentagon, Chinas satellite launches are ominous. The PLA continues to strengthen its military space capabilities despite its public stance against the militarization of space, including developing Beidou and new weaponry, according to a Pentagon report issued to Congress in May, using a common abbreviation for Chinas military. In October, Pakistans information minister, Fawad Chaudhry, said that by 2022, Pakistan would send its own astronaut into space with Chinas help. We are close to China, and we are getting more close, he said in a later interview. Its time for the West to wake up and recognize our importance. Read more about: WASHINGTONHackers infiltrated the European Unions diplomatic communications network for years, downloading thousands of cables that reveal concerns about an unpredictable Trump administration and struggles to deal with Russia and China and the risk that Iran would revive its nuclear program. In one cable, European diplomats described a meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and President Vladimir Putin of Russia in Helsinki as successful (at least for Putin). Another cable, written after a July 16 meeting, relayed a detailed report and analysis of a discussion between European officials and President Xi Jinping of China, who was quoted comparing Trumps bullying of Beijing to a no-rules freestyle boxing match. The techniques that the hackers deployed over a three-year period resembled those long used by an elite unit of Chinas Peoples Liberation Army. The cables were copied from the secure network and posted to an open internet site that the hackers set up in the course of their attack, according to Area 1, the firm that discovered the breach. Area 1 made more than 1,100 of the hacked EU cables available to The New York Times. The White House National Security Council did not have an immediate comment Tuesday. The compromised material provides insight into Europes struggle to understand the political turmoil engulfing three continents. It includes memorandums of conversations with leaders in Saudi Arabia, Israel and other countries that were shared across the European Union. Read more: U.S. to condemn China over hacking, economic espionage U.S. charges Chinese spies and hackers in conspiracy to steal trade secrets State-backed hackers target Gmail of U.S. senators, aides But it also revealed the huge appetite by hackers to sweep up even the most obscure details of international negotiations. The cyberintruders also infiltrated the networks of the United Nations, the AFL-CIO, and ministries of foreign affairs and finance worldwide. The hack of the AFL-CIO focused on issues surrounding the negotiations over the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal that excluded Beijing. Part of the UN material focuses on months in 2016, when North Korea was actively launching missiles, and appears to include references to private meetings of the world bodys secretary-general and his deputies with Asian leaders. Some of the more than 100 organizations and institutions were targeted years ago. But many were not aware of the breach until a few days ago, when some were alerted by Area 1, a firm founded by three former officials of the National Security Agency. The cables include extensive reports by European diplomats of Russias moves to undermine Ukraine, including a warning Feb. 8 that Crimea, which Moscow annexed four years ago, had been turned into a hot-zone where nuclear warheads might have already been deployed. U.S. officials say they have not seen evidence of nuclear warheads in Crimea. The European diplomats account of their private meeting in July with Xi quoted the Chinese president vowing that his country would not submit to bullying from the United States, even if a trade war hurt everybody. China was not a backward country anymore, the European note taker described Xi as saying. In their conversations with U.S. officials after the Helsinki meeting in July, European diplomats described efforts by the White House to engage in damage control after Trump had gone off-script during a joint news conference with Putin. Trump appeared to agree to allow Russians to question former U.S. diplomats in exchange for the U.S. interrogation of Russians who had been indicted by Robert Mueller, the special counsel. According to a July 20 document describing their private exchanges, White House officials assured the Europeans that Trumps agreement would be nipped down to prevent the questioning of Americans. A March 7 cable summarized the difficulties in relations between the United States and the European Union that had developed during the Trump administration. In it, a senior European official in Washington spoke of messaging efforts to deal with the negative attitude to the E.U. in the beginning, which had created a lot of insecurity. The official, Caroline Vicini, deputy head of the EU mission in Washington, recommended that diplomats from the 28 member nations describe the United States as our most important partner even as it stood up to Trump in areas where we disagreed with the U.S. (e.g., on climate, trade, Iran nuclear deal). The cable also recommended working around Trump by dealing directly with Congress, and urged European diplomats in Washington to emphasize member state interest when pushing on a host of issues, including trade, renewable energy and Brexit. In a statement Tuesday night, the European Unions secretariat issued a statement saying it is aware of allegations regarding a potential leak of sensitive information and is actively investigating the issue. But it seemed to avoid the issues raised by the disclosure, saying it does not comment on allegations nor on matters relating to operational security. The trove of European cables is reminiscent of the WikiLeaks publication of 250,000 State Department cables in 2010. But they are not as extensive and consist of low-level classified documents that were labelled limited and restricted. The more secretive communications including a level known as tres secret were kept on a separate system that is being upgraded and replaced, according to European officials. And cables that focused on decisions about world powers 2015 nuclear deal with Iran from which Trump withdrew the United States in May are walled off from the internet in an entirely different system. Unlike WikiLeaks in 2010 or the Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee and other Democratic Party leaders in 2016, the cyberattack on the EU made no effort to publish the stolen material. Instead, it was a matter of pure espionage, said one former senior intelligence official familiar with the issue who spoke on the condition of anonymity. It also displayed the remarkably poor protection of routine exchanges among EU officials after years of embarrassing government leaks around the world. In this case, the cables were exposed after a run-of-the-mill phishing campaign aimed at diplomats in Cyprus pierced the island nations systems, said Oren Falkowitz, chief executive of Area 1. People talk about sophisticated hackers, but there was nothing really sophisticated about this, Falkowitz said. After getting into the Cyprus system, the hackers had access to passwords that were needed to connect to the European Unions entire database of exchanges. Area 1s investigators said they believed the hackers worked for the Strategic Support Force of the Peoples Liberation Army, part of an organization that emerged from the Chinese signals intelligence agency that was once called 3PLA. After over a decade of experience countering Chinese cyberoperations and extensive technical analysis, there is no doubt this campaign is connected to the Chinese government, said Blake Darche, one of Area 1s experts. The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not return calls for comment Tuesday. After burrowing into the European network, called COREU (or Courtesy), the hackers had the run of communications linking the European Unions 28 countries, on topics ranging from trade and tariffs to terrorism to summaries of summit meetings, from the vital to the insignificant. Many of the reports were the ordinary business of diplomacy weekly reports from missions from places like Kosovo, Serbia, Albania, Russia, China, Ukraine and Washington, and included descriptions of conversations with leaders and other diplomats or visits to non-European countries. Among the cables were requests for authorization to finance exports to Iran, as well as details of efforts throughout 2018 to continue economic arrangements that might entice Tehran to comply with the terms of the 2015 nuclear agreements terms, even after Trump abandoned it. There was also an inquiry about whether to allow Dmitry O. Rogozin, a former Russian deputy foreign minister who had called for the annexation of Crimea, to travel to Austria for an international meeting on the peaceful uses of outer space. At the time, Rogozin was under European financial sanctions. There was much analysis in the cables of foreign policy and of Europes strategies on issues of trade, counterterrorism, migration and enlargement that could be picked apart by China and other countries looking for an advantage. Asked Tuesday about the hack, the National Security Agency said it was still examining the discovery of the European trove. But the former senior intelligence official said that the European Union had been warned, repeatedly, that its aging communications system was highly vulnerable to hacking by China, Russia, Iran and other states. The official said the warnings were usually received with a shrug. European officials said they are now trying to overhaul their outdated and vulnerable networks an expensive process in which technological improvements usually cannot protect against flawed human judgment. They insisted that confidential, secret and tres secret material is handled differently than the cables seized by the hackers and noted that a new system, known as EC3IS, is being developed to handle the more sensitive documents that are shared among the diplomats. For communications in capitals like Moscow and Beijing, yet another network, known as Zeus, is being installed for delegations of member states. The Europeans appear, belatedly, to be waking up to the threat. Its senior staff members increasingly use encrypted telephones, and isolated speech rooms of Lucite are being installed in key posts. One such room is already used for a daily 8:30 a.m. meeting of senior staff members, and another is in use in the European Council building in Brussels for intelligence briefings. Of course no security system is foolproof, and they must constantly be upgraded, one senior EU official said. Read more about: WASHINGTONA federal judge who described himself as disgusted by Michael Flynns behaviour upended a straightforward sentencing hearing, postponing punishment for U.S. President Donald Trumps first national security adviser and telling him in a stinging rebuke, Arguably, you sold your country out. Lawyers for Flynn requested the delay Tuesday after a tongue-lashing from U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan raised the prospect that Flynn could spend time behind bars for lying to the FBI about his Russian contacts. Prosecutors hadnt recommended prison, but the hearing that began with the defendant upbeat and smiling took an unexpected turn when the judge said his sentence would take into account not just Flynns extensive co-operation with investigators but also the lies the Trump administration official told from the grounds of the White House. I cant make any guarantees, but Im not hiding my disgust, my disdain for this criminal offence, Sullivan said. The postponement gave Flynn a chance to continue co-operating with the government in hopes of staving off prison and proving his value as a witness, including in a foreign-lobbying prosecution unsealed this week. The possibility of prison had seemed remote for Flynn since prosecutors had praised his co-operation, including 19 meetings with investigators. But the judges upbraiding suggested otherwise and made clear that even defendants like Flynn who have co-operated in special counsel Robert Muellers Russia investigation may nonetheless be shadowed by the crimes that brought them into court in the first place. The hearing upset what had been a carefully crafted agreement and pushed months into the future a resolution of one of Muellers signature prosecutions. Read more: Judge delays Flynn sentencing, not hiding disgust at crime Comey lambastes GOP over Trumps continued attacks on FBI: Stand up and speak the truth Flynns ex-business associates charged with illegal lobbying This is a very serious offence. A high-ranking senior official of the government making false statements to the Federal Bureau of Investigation while on the physical premises of the White House, Sullivan said. He later softened his tone, apologizing for suggesting that Flynn had worked as a foreign agent while in the White House when that other work had actually already ended. He also backpedaled on an earlier question on whether Flynns transgressions amounted to treason, saying he didnt mean to suggest they did. Flynn was to have been the first White House official sentenced in Muellers investigation into possible co-ordination between the Trump presidential campaign and Russia. The hearing, though incomplete, marked a remarkable fall after a three-decade military career that included tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and oversight of the Defence Intelligence Agency during the Obama administration. Though Flynn served only briefly in Trumps White House, he campaigned for him and attracted attention for leading a Republican National Convention crowd in a Lock Her Up chant about Hillary Clinton. The hearing came amid escalating legal peril for Trump, who was implicated by federal prosecutors in New York this month in hush-money payments involving his former lawyer to cover up extramarital affairs. Nearly a half-dozen former aides and advisers have pleaded guilty, agreeing to co-operate with prosecutors. Some, like Flynn, were tripped up by concealing Russian contacts. Flynns help in the probes was especially notable. Yet hes nonetheless enjoyed Trumps continued sympathy, thanks in part to a sentencing memo last week that tapped into the presidents suspicion of law enforcement and took aim at the FBIs conduct during the investigation. Trump tweeted good luck to Flynn hours before the sentencing and said that, despite tremendous pressure being put on him, there was no Collusion! At the White House, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Flynns actions had nothing to do with Trump. Its perfectly acceptable for the president to make a positive comment about somebody while we wait to see what the courts determination is, she said. Sanders repeated her allegation that the FBI ambushed Flynn in an interview in which he lied. Of Trumps earlier FBI criticism, she said, We dont have any reason to want to walk that back. Flynns legal woes stem from transition-period calls with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak that raised intelligence community alarms even before Trump took office. During those conversations, Flynn urged against a strong Russian response to Obama administration sanctions for Russian election interference and encouraged Russias opposition to a U.N. resolution on Israeli settlements. But when FBI agents approached him in the White House on Jan. 24, 2017, Flynn lied about those conversations, prosecutors said. Flynn has never said why he lied, but Sullivan nonetheless castigated him for a deception that was then parroted by other senior administration officials. The tone of Tuesdays hearing startled Flynn supporters who hoped his lawyers arguments about the FBIs conduct they suggested he was discouraged from having a lawyer present during the interview and wasnt informed it was a crime to lie would resonate more than it did with Sullivan, who a decade ago tossed out the prosecution of a U.S. senator over government misconduct. But while Sullivan tested those arguments, he was ultimately unmoved and Flynn mostly walked them back. He acknowledged that he indeed knew that lying to the FBI was a crime. Neither he nor his lawyers disputed that hed lied to agents. Flynn attorney Robert Kelner asked Sullivan not to penalize Flynn for the sentencing memo arguments, saying they were mostly intended to differentiate Flynn from other defendants in Muellers investigation whod received prison sentences for lying. Though Sullivan said none of the other defendants was a White House official, Kelner suggested none had been as co-operative. He made the decision publicly and clearly and completely and utterly to co-operate with this investigation, knowing that because of his high rank, that was going to send a signal to every other potential co-operator and witness in this investigation, he added. After a prosecutor raised the prospect of Flynns continued co-operation with other investigations in the future, Sullivan warned Flynn that he might not get full credit for his assistance to the government if he were sentenced as scheduled. Sullivan gave a visibly shaken Flynn a chance to discuss delaying the hearing with his lawyers. The court briefly recessed. When they returned, Kelner requested a postponement so that Flynn could keep co-operating. Kelner said he expected Flynn would have to testify in a related trial in Virginia involving Flynns former business associates, and the defence wanted to eke out the last modicum of co-operation so he could get credit. Flynns lawyers were instructed to submit a status report by March 13. The judge also directed him to stay within 80 kilometres of the District of Columbia come Jan. 4. Read more about: LOS ANGELESPope Francis has accepted the resignation of a Los Angeles auxiliary bishop, Monsignor Alexander Salazar, following an allegation of misconduct with a minor in the 1990s, officials said Wednesday. The Vatican announced the resignation in a one-line statement. It was the latest in a string of misconduct allegations against bishops to come to light this year, following the scandal of ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington that exposed how bishops have largely avoided sanction for improper behaviour. The current archbishop of Los Angeles, the Most Rev. Jose Gomez, said the archdiocese learned of the claim in 2005. Gomez said county prosecutors declined to bring charges but that the archdiocese forwarded the complaint to the Vatican office handling sex abuse cases. Gomez said that office, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, imposed precautionary measures against Salazar and that a further investigation by the archdioceses independent review board found the allegation to be credible. Gomez said Salazar, 69, has consistently denied any wrongdoing. The archdiocese said it had received no other allegations against Salazar. These decisions have been made out of deep concern for the healing and reconciliation of abuse victims and for the good of the churchs mission, Gomez told the Los Angeles faithful in a letter. Let us continue to stay close to the victim survivors of abuse, through our prayer and our actions. Read more: Pope taps experts, women for group to prepare summit on abuse Italys bishops respond to long-ignored clergy sex abuse U.S. Bishops will delay votes on steps to combat sex abuse crisis Gomez said the alleged misconduct occurred while Salazar was a parish priest in the 1990s and that the claim was never directly brought to the archdiocese. Critics decried how long it took between the archdiocese learning of the allegation and Salazars resignation as well as the lack of details in the announcement, which called it an early retirement. It takes 13 years for LA Catholic officials to disclose this allegation and even now, they withhold key details about when they and the Vatican looked at it and purported(ly) took precautionary measures against Salazar, which of course have rarely stopped more clergy sex crimes, David G. Clohessy, former director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said in an email to The Associated Press. The law firm Jeff Anderson & Associates, which pursues litigation on behalf of alleged victims of clergy sex abuse, noted that Salazars name wasnt included in archdiocese lists of credibly accused priests released in 2005, 2008 and this year. What does his resignation mean? Has he been laicized? Is he simply retired? What safety protocols are being imposed on Bp. Salazar? the firm asked in a statement. Why did it take the Vatican this long to act? The resignation comes during a year in which the clerical abuse scandal has exploded anew. In July, Francis removed McCarrick, the retired archbishop of Washington, as a cardinal after a U.S. church investigation determined an allegation he groped a minor in the 1970s was credible. Subsequently, several adult seminarians have said he pressured them for sex. McCarrick has denied the initial allegation and has said through a lawyer that he looks forward to invoking his right to due process. The McCarrick scandal exposed the loopholes in how the church treats allegations of misconduct against bishops, who answer only to the pope. Bishops have largely escaped the same scrutiny as ordinary priests accused of misconduct in the decades-long sex abuse scandal, and until recently they have rarely been sanctioned or removed for covering up for abusers. Salazar was born in San Jose, Costa Rica, and came with his family to the United States in 1953. They settled in Los Angeles, and he became a U.S. citizen at 18. He entered St. Johns Seminary in suburban Camarillo in 1977 and was ordained a priest in 1984. From the 1980s through early 2000s, Salazar served at several parishes before being installed as a bishop in 2004. He served as a regional bishop for San Pedro, one of five pastoral subdivisions within the archdiocese, until 2009 and since then had been vicar for the office of ethnic ministries. A statement from the archdiocese said the accusation against Salazar was reported directly to law enforcement in 2002 by a young adult alleging misconduct in the 1990s when Bishop Salazar was a priest and the alleged victim was a minor. The statement said the archdiocese was informed through a third party. Law enforcement investigated and recommended prosecution, but the district attorney didnt file charges, the statement said. The archdiocese said Cardinal Roger Mahony, the Los Angeles archbishop at the time, also reported the allegation to the Vaticans Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The congregation investigated and permitted Bishop Salazar to remain in ministry subject to certain precautionary conditions, which he has respected, the statement said. Mahony retired in 2011, his tenure tarnished by his handling of clergy sex abuse cases, and was replaced by Gomez, who publicly rebuked him. By 2014, the archdiocese agreed to pay $720 (U.S.) million to abuse victims over the previous decade and released internal files showing Mahony shielded priests and ordered a surrogate to withhold evidence from police. The archdiocese said Gomez requested a review of all allegations of sexual misconduct involving minors to update a 2004 report that listed accused priests. WASHINGTONU.S. President Donald Trump has ordered a rapid withdrawal of all 2,000 U.S. ground troops from Syria within 30 days, declaring the four-year American-led war against Daesh militants as largely won, officials said Wednesday. We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency, the president said in a Twitter post Wednesday morning. He offered no details on his plans for the military mission, nor a larger strategy, in Syria. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement that we have started returning United States troops home as we transition to the next phase of this campaign. But Pentagon officials who had sought to talk the president out of the decision as late as Wednesday morning argued that such a move would betray Kurdish allies who have fought alongside U.S. troops in Syria and who could find themselves under attack in a military offensive now threatened by Turkey. One U.S. official said Kurdish leaders were informed of the presidents decision Wednesday morning. Read more: Syrian Kurdish-led fighters take Hajin, last town held by Daesh Russian warplanes strike Syrian rebels after alleged gas attack leaves more than 100 in hospital Daesh gunmen kill 40 U.S.-backed fighters in eastern Syria At this time, we continue to work by, with and through our partners in the region, Col. Rob Manning, a Pentagon spokesperson, said in a brief statement. A second official said the withdrawal of troops would be phased out over several weeks and that the U.S.-led airstrike campaign against Daesh in Syria, which began in 2014, would continue. That official said the military hoped to rely on Kurdish fighters on the ground to help with targeting. Officials discussed the emerging policy on condition of anonymity before any announcement from the White House. Emerging from a Senate conference lunch with Vice-President Mike Pence and other Republican senators, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina attacked the decision to withdraw troops from Syria. A lot of us were blindsided, Graham said, likening the withdrawal to Iraq all over again a reference to the Obama administrations decision to end the military mission in Iraq in 2011. The departure of U.S. troops there allowed the deadly strengthening and spread of Daesh. If Obama had done this, all of us would be furious, Graham said. If Obama had done this, wed be going nuts right now: How weak, how dangerous. Graham said he wanted Congress to hold hearings about the consequences of the decision, and asked why lawmakers were not notified of Trumps order. In a series of meetings and conference calls over the past several days, Defence Secretary Jim Mattis and other senior national security officials have tried to dissuade Trump from a wholesale troop withdrawal, arguing that the significant national security policy shift would essentially cede foreign influence in Syria to Russia and Iran at a time when U.S. policy calls for challenging both countries. Abandoning the U.S.-backed Kurdish allies, Pentagon officials have argued, will hamper future efforts by the U.S. to gain the trust of local fighters, from Afghanistan to Yemen to Somalia. In addition, Daesh has not been fully vanquished from the small territory it controls on the Syrian-Iraqi border. The group has held that territory for more than a year in the face of attacks by U.S.-allied forces, and has used it as a launch pad to carry out attacks in Iraq and Syria. Less than a week ago, Brett H. McGurk, the U.S. envoy to the coalition fighting Daesh, said continuing to train Syrian security forces, as U.S. troops are doing, will take some time. The military mission is the enduring defeat of ISIS, McGurk told reporters Dec. 11. We have obviously learned a lot of lessons in the past, so we know that once the physical space is defeated, we cant just pick up and leave. So were prepared to make sure that we do all we can to ensure this is enduring. Nobody is declaring a mission accomplished, he said. But Trump promised during his presidential campaign to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria, and has been looking for a way out since. He reluctantly agreed in April to give the Defence Department more time to finish the mission. In recent days, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey has given Trump just such a possible path: Erdogan has vowed to launch a new offensive against the Kurdish troops that the U.S. has equipped to fight Daesh in Iraq and Syria. As the debate over withdrawing from Syria was raging inside the White House over recent days, Trump argued that the risk of a Turkish incursion could be a threat to U.S. forces in Syria, officials said, although Erdogan would likely face huge reprisals if Turkish troops killed or wounded any Americans. On Monday, Erdogan said he told Trump that Turkey would launch its offensive soon. Turkey considers the American-backed Kurdish forces to be a terrorist group because of their connection to the Kurdistan Workers Party, a Kurdish insurgency in the region. The Syrian Kurds hope to create an autonomous region in northeast Syria, similar to the one in neighbouring Iraq. They now control about 30 per cent of Syrias territory. Pentagon officials have been pushing for a diplomatic solution to the issue. Daesh, also known as the Islamic State or ISIS, has lost nearly all of its territory in Iraq and Syria, where the 2,000 U.S. troops are mostly advising a militia made up of Kurdish and Arab soldiers. In recent days, Turkey has accused the U.S. of failing to tackle security threats in the region. The U.S. and Turkey are NATO allies but uneasy partners in the war against Daesh. But one Defence Department official suggested that Trump also wants to divert attention away from the series of legal challenges confronting him over recent days: the Russian investigation run by the special counsel, as well as the sentencing of his former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, in a hush-money scandal to buy the silence of two women who said they had affairs with Trump. Trumps former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, was in court Tuesday, where he was harshly criticized by a federal judge for his efforts to mislead federal investigators. Read more about: The Big Debate: Is it OK to say Merry Christmas? Dec. 17 I think it is time that we collectively come to the admission that there are, in fact, two Christmases: Christian Christmas; and secular Christmas. True Christian Christmas really requires little explanation: it is for true Christians, true believers, who know in their heart that Jesus Christ was born of Mary, and was the son of God. He was, in fact, God in human form. It has nothing to do with Santa Claus, reindeer, Christmas trees or presents. It is entirely about celebrating the miracle of the birth of Jesus, and what his birth, life and death mean to true Christians. Secular Christmas is something else altogether. It might have its historical origins in the Christian tradition, but it morphed into its own a very long time ago. Its celebrated with Santa, reindeer, sleigh rides and Christmas trees. It has nothing really to do with the birth of Christ, but everything to do with the best of humanity: kindness, happiness, generosity, empathy and love. It is personified by Santa Claus himself for the very young, and the spirit of Santa Claus for the rest of us. It is the force that encourages us to donate to food banks and charities. Its the spirit that somehow encourages us to pay for the driver behind us at Tim Hortons, and let the poor driver in the lane beside you merge. Who can take issue with that? I would wager that the vast majority of Christmas enthusiasts open their gifts on Christmas Day without even a passing thought of the true Christian origin. I would bet a huge number of their days come and go without even a passing thought to God or prayer. But they still embrace the spirit of the season. No matter what type of Christmas is in your heart, it is a season of love, of giving, of kindness and compassion, and I dont know how anyone could take issue with that. Secular Christmas is for everyone of every tradition and culture. Merry Christmas! Susan James, Beeton, Ont. Sadie-Rae Werner has taken a stand against wishing others Merry Christmas. How tragic is that? She bases her objections on her unfortunate youth during which she had to endure people wishing her that when she is not a Christian. The irony is she also bases her disdain on inclusiveness which is exactly what sharing Christmas spirit is all about. ... In the same Star edition, Judith Timson suggests using the greeting May your joys be greater than your oys. I wish Werner more joys than oys in 2019. Maurice Sacco, Toronto I visit my daughter in Ottawa a few times a year, and while there I walk our dog through the streets of her subdivision, which is a very multicultural environment. One night during Eid, a group of Muslim children approached me and offered gifts, which I accepted happily. I spoke with the parents about this holiday and its traditions for a short while. There was joy. Last November on an another visit in the evening I came by the same familys home and found them outside decorating their trees for Christmas. Again we discussed this celebration and its traditions, which I knew much more about. Our consensus was that it brought joy. Life is short; share what ever you can to bring joy. Nearly 100 students will be laid off from their part-time jobs at the Toronto Catholic school board because the programs they work for are being axed by the Ford government as part of the provinces $25 million funding cut to school boards. Those job losses are just the tip of the iceberg because all of Ontarios 72 school boards are being impacted by funding cuts or reductions to specialized grants. Its deplorable and despicable, said Toronto Catholic District School Board chair Maria Rizzo. Kids will suffer in the long run (by the cuts). A report by the boards staff to its trustees outlines which of its programs have been impacted by the cuts and reductions because of the 2018-2019 funding changes to EPO (Education Program-Other). Cancelled programs include the Focus on Youths after-school program, which operates in high-needs urban neighbourhoods and employs about 60 part-time students, mostly from high school. Also on the chopping block is the Tutors in the Classroom program, which will impact about 35 university and college students. Those kids are going to be laid off, said Rizzo, adding the government is impacting students who rely on those jobs to pay for tuition and gain valuable work experience. And those job losses are just at that one board, she said, adding she assumes hundreds will be impacted provincewide. Taylor Dallin, a TCDSB student trustee, called the job losses astounding and worries they may impact some students from lower-income families. Read more: Ontario education cuts to hit vulnerable youth the most, students say School boards blindsided as Ford government slashes program funding Seeing them lose their jobs and having funding for the programs (cut) will be extremely detrimental to not only these individuals but to the greater community at large, said the Grade 11 student at Cardinal Carter Academy for the Arts. I feel like were going to see quite the ripple effect. Dallin said students were blindsided by news of the funding cuts and reductions, saying the programs are extremely important to maximize the potential of youth. Other cancelled programs include ones that help support Indigenous students, the physical activity needs of elementary and secondary students, and projects such as SpeakUp, which encourages students to lead projects in their schools. According to the report, the TCDSB estimates the cancelled programs amount to about $655,000 in EPO funding. But because these programs are being cut in the middle of the school year, the report notes that the board has already spent about $255,000 on them. Other programs will receive reduced funding, but its unclear how much less. The province is expected to provide more details by the end of the week. New Democrat MPP Marit Stiles called the cuts a slap in the face to parents who took part in the governments public consultations on changes to the education system, which wrapped up Saturday a day after the government announced the $25 million funding loss. For this school year, EPO funding will be $400 million. They are causing utter chaos in our school boards and in our schools, Stiles, the NDPs education critic and a former Toronto school board trustee said Tuesday in the legislature. Stiles accused the government of taking an axe to programs that help vulnerable students. Overwhelmingly, the programs affected are designed to help at-risk youth. The government has yet to share what actual research they have conducted that shows that children getting physical activity or children getting programming to help them succeed if they are at risk or providing leadership opportunities for children are programs that need to be cut. Education Minister Lisa Thompson noted the government will continue to spend $400 million in EPO funding this school year even though $425 million was promised by the previous government last March. Were moving forward with thoughtful investments that make a difference in the classroom environment, Thompson said during question period. She has previously said that following a line-by-line audit of spending, the changes were responsible. Her spokesperson has previously said some of the EPO spending was wasteful. Thompson also said tens of thousands of people responded to the governments education consultations. I cant wait to start diving into that data, its so rich, she said. That consultation was based on informing our direction for the next school year of 2019 thats what our consultation was based on. Speaking with reporters, Premier Doug Ford revealed that the government received about 35,000 responses as part of its public consultation process, calling it the largest consultation in Ontarios history. And when asked whether the cuts in EPO funding are responsible because they impact vulnerable children, he said, were reviewing everything right across the board we have to go line-item-by-line-item. With files from Robert Benzie Read more about: Premier Doug Fords Progressive Conservatives are sending mixed signals about whether the government will abide by the integrity commissioners ruling on its controversial appointment of Ron Taverner as commissioner of the Ontario Provincial Police. Integrity Commissioner J. David Wake is expected to rule within four to six weeks whether Taverner, a Ford family friend, received a political patronage plum. On Wednesday, Community Safety Minister Sylvia Jones repeatedly declined to say whether the Tories would accept findings from Wakes probe into whether the premier played a role in the hiring of the Toronto police superintendent. Im not going to presuppose anything that happens. Im going to wait for the integrity commissioner to report, said Jones. But Attorney General Caroline Mulroney said we respect his work and we will respect his recommendations. We will of course abide by the recommendations of the integrity commissioner, said Mulroney. NDP Leader Andrea Horwath said she is hopeful Wake will use his powers to strike an independent inquiry into Taverners hiring. I wrote to the integrity commissioner, asking him to use his power under the Members Integrity Act to conduct a full, public inquiry into this matter, said Horwath. Given the importance of the OPP commissioners position, only a full, public inquiry can ensure full, public confidence and give the public the answers they deserve, she said. Ford, meanwhile, was under fire Wednesday for seeking what the New Democrats are lampooning as an OPP-supplied, off-the-books personal pleasure wagon. But Jones insisted Ford only wanted the OPP to give him a van instead of the customary SUV so he could do work on the road. With the premier ducking the legislatures daily question period to avoid the opposition barrage over the appointment of Taverner, it was left to the minister to defend the government. She insisted Ford wanted a used van because he wants some space to work so that he can call constituents and he can continue to work. In a letter last week to the Ontario ombudsman, OPP Deputy Commissioner Brad Blair alleged the premiers chief of staff, Dean French, asked the force to purchase a large camper-type vehicle ... modified to specifications the premiers office would provide us and keep the costs off the books. Ford, who blasted Blair on Tuesday for complaining about Taverners appointment, has called that a baseless claim without merit, and said he merely asked if they had a used one for him. Read more: Doug Ford blasts OPP deputy commissioner for Ron Taverner complaint Opinion | Martin Regg Cohn: The hidden danger for Ontario when a premier meddles in the OPP No concerns about hiring of Ron Taverner to head the OPP, says Ontario Safety Minister Sylvia Jones Jones told reporters that the accusation that was made about having it off the books was categorically false. Asked if she thought Blair was lying, the minister said, Im saying that he is suggesting something that didnt occur. Through his lawyer, Julian Falconer, the OPP deputy commissioner declined to weigh in on Jones comment. The minister, meanwhile, refused to say whether one of the customized features sought by the premier was a swivel chair for the police van. NDP MPP Taras Natyshak (Essex) implored the Tories to stand up to this premier and tell the premier that providing an off-the-books personal pleasure wagon is not the job of the Ontario Provincial Police. Taverner, a 51-year Toronto police veteran, is awaiting the results of an integrity commissioner report on whether there is any conflict of interest in his appointment before being sworn in. Horwath, whose party obtained Fords schedule through a freedom of information request, wondered about the appropriateness of the premier dining with Taverner and Toronto police Chief Mark Saunders on July 30 at Posticino Ristorante in Etobicoke. That dinner at the swish trattoria was held five days after the premier met privately with then-OPP commissioner Vince Hawkes. I would think that that meeting with Vince Hawkes was one where the commissioner of the day had probably informed the premier that he would be announcing his retirement shortly, the NDP leader said. Very coincidental then that five days later, Mr. Fords calendar includes a dinner with Mr. Taverner. Interim Liberal Leader John Fraser said Ford is emerging as the chief conductor on the gravy train. The premiers chief of staff has ... requested that the OPP provide a special sole-sourced vehicle for the premier and for it to be kept off the books and out of public scrutiny, said Fraser. Taverner has not returned repeated requests from the Star seeking comment. Robert Benzie is the Star's Queen's Park bureau chief and a reporter covering Ontario politics. Follow him on Twitter: @robertbenzie Read more about: The project PaNOSC, Photon and Neutron Open Science Cloud, is one of five cluster projects funded under the European H2020 programme. The project, which will run until December 2022, is coordinated by the ESRF and brings together six strategic European research infrastructures. Large-scale research infrastructures produce a huge amount of scientific data on a daily basis. For their storage and future (re)use, data need to managed according to the FAIR principles, i.e., be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable. The adaptation and development of both policies and technologies are key to making FAIR data a reality and to serving the broad set of stakeholders who will benefit from a coherent ecosystem of data services. Under the headline European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), projects covering a wide range of scientific disciplines from physics, astronomy, and life sciences, to social sciences and humanities, have been funded by the European Commission to build and develop the EOSC, which includes a comprehensive catalogue of services for the storage, management, analysis and re-use of research data. The project PaNOSC, Photon and Neutron Open Science Cloud is one of five cluster projects funded under the European H2020 programme. PaNOSC started on the 1st of December 2018, and will be officially launched on January 15th, 2019 at the kick-off meeting, which will take place at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble (France). The project, which will run until December 2022, is coordinated by the ESRF. By bringing together six strategic European research infrastructures (ESRF - https://www.esrf.eu, CERIC-ERIC http://ceric-eric.eu, ELI-DC https://eli-laser.eu, the European Spallation Source https://europeanspallationsource.se, European XFEL https://www.xfel.eu and Institut Laue-Langevin, ILL https://www.ill.eu) and the e-infrastructures EGI https://www.egi.eu and GEANT https://www.geant.org, PaNOSC will contribute to the construction and development of the EOSC, an ecosystem allowing universal and cross-disciplinary open access to data through a single access point, for researchers in all scientific fields. The project will work closely with the national photon and neutron sources in Europe in order to develop common policies, strategies, and solutions in the area of FAIR data policy, data management and data services. The services developed for data preservation and open access, as well as for data storage, analysis and simulation, will allow users to access data from the catalogues of the existing research facilities in a seamless and easy fashion, for immediate sharing and re-use. Connection to the EOSC Service Catalogue will be an essential step to make the catalogue an entry point to all the available tools and services developed for users in the frame of EOSC-related projects. The mission of PaNOSC is, therefore, to contribute to the realization of a data commons for Neutron and Photon science, providing services and tools for the many scientists from existing and future disciplines using data from photon and neutron sources. To achieve this aim, the exchange of know-how and experiences will be crucial to driving a change in culture by embracing Open Science among the scientific communities that the project will target. For such a paradigm shift to take place, actions fostering communication with other EOSC projects from the other clusters, participation in scientific and science policy events, and the development of materials for e-learning for scientists and IT staff, will be carried out throughout the project. ALTON A former Alton gang member was charged Wednesday after a run-in with police last week in which he allegedly struck two officers with his vehicle, causing injuries to both. Todd C. Lockhart, 34, of the 1100 block of Brown Street, Alton, was charged Wednesday with two counts of aggravated battery to a police officer, a Class 1 felony; one count of unlawful possession with intent to deliver methamphetamine, a Class X felony; and two counts of resisting a peace officer, a Class 4 felony. Bail was set at $250,000. According to police, Alton officers were responding to an incident around 4:13 a.m. last Friday in the 1000 block of Tremont Street and encountered Lockhart. They attempted to take Mr. Lockhart into custody, but he retreated into a vehicle, Illinois State Police Lt. Mark Doiron said last week. Upon trying to remove him from that vehicle a struggle ensued and Mr. Lockhart attempted to drive away with the officers partially inside the vehicle. Officers discharged their weapons at the suspect vehicle, hitting Lockhart, but he drove away, allegedly dragging two officers with his vehicle in the process. Upon his arrest last Friday, he was taken to a local hospital for treatment of gunshot wounds. The aggravated battery charges allege he struck two Alton officers, causing abrasions to one officers legs and a left ankle ligament tear to another. The drug charge alleges he was in possession of more than 15 grams of methamphetamine. Lockhart is a former part-time Alton Middle School football coach and member of the Flyboyz gang. The gang was based at 1022 Tremont, which was shuttered as a result of a civil action by the city and county. The home, directly across from Lovejoy School, was the scene of 27 criminal or civil complaints by the time the suit was filed in 2015. Lockhart and other gang members were ordered to stay at least 500 feet away from the home. The civil suit alleged that Lockhart and other members of the gang were associated with 27 incidents within five years, including aggravated discharge of a firearm, aggravated battery with a firearm and first-degree murder. Lockhart was sentenced to four years probation for a 2009 drug dealing charge. He also has convictions for obstruction of justice, violation of probation and aggravated domestic battery. Reach reporter Sanford Schmidt at 618-208-6449. GLEN CARBON At the end of its Dec. 11 Village Board meeting, Glen Carbon closed a chapter on the 20th century and opened one on the 21st. Starting next month, the Village Board meetings will be streamed on Facebook Live instead of using Edwardsville City Television (ECTV). Instead of two cameras in the boardroom, there will be a single camera at the back of the room that can zoom in or out but will not pan left or right nor tilt up and down. Glen Carbon Village Administrator Jamie Bowden said the village had used ECTV since January 1999. ECTV shot videos and recorded them to CDs, which the village then uploaded online. The village made the switch because we can live-stream directly to our Facebook page and download a link within 24 hours, so theres no need for a third party, Bowden said. ECTV has provided us a great service, but technology has allowed us to manage this more expediently and more cost-effectively. Coleen Schaller, the villages public safety administrative supervisor, said the change is part of a broader effort to modernize how the village communicates with its residents and businesses. We have been doing a lot of social media expansion, she said. Its an instant connection to the community, which is nice. The villages police department is on Facebook and Instagram. So far, our feedback has been excellent, she said. She said posters will cross-post things between the two platforms. I have received a lot of legacy photos. A popular use has been to publicize the villages warming centers during the winter and its cooling centers during the summer. Another popular aspect has been to take photos of lost dogs and post them on the villages pages. Usually, within an hour, the owner is here to claim their pet, she said. For 2019, Schaller said she hopes to do more with photos and obtain more followers. I also want to reach out to local businesses to share information and share whats happening here, she said. GLEN CARBON On Tuesday, during its final meeting of 2018, the Village Board unanimously approved a five-year, lump sum engineering service with Thouvenot (thoo-ven-oh), Wade & Moerchen (TWM) to set up a pavement maintenance program in light of aging roadways. The program will cost $107,250 or $21,450 per year. The Pavement Management system is meant to be a fluid program that may change from year-to-year depending upon how our villages roadways have aged, said Jennifer Doody, the villages public works director. She explained there are many factors that weigh into how a road deteriorates the type of pavement and sub-base material, age, type, traffic load, and maintenance history. We are really excited to implement this program and feel that it will provide our residents with a transparent, science-based roadway rehabilitation plan, she said. This program will rank all of our streets and will be reviewed annually to allow the village to better program maintenance and focus our limited funds on the neediest roadways each year, Doody said. First, TWM will create a pavement inventory using Geographic Information System (GIS) from the current pavement management program and the villages current GIS platform. Next, they will convert the current pavement ratings into a Pavement Condition Index (PCI) rating system. Jeff Rice, a TWM project manager, said the software ranks streets using PCI that goes from zero (the worst) to 100 (the best). After the conversion, TWM employees will perform a drive-through visual assessment. The inspections TWM uses vary from a simple windshield one to a detailed walk-through to using a van with specialized cameras to view pavement distress via high-resolution images. The survey works on asphalt or concrete streets and notes potholes, wavy or bumpy roads and those with cracked, broken or eroded pavement. Once the streets are ranked, we can develop a capital improvement plan for the village, Rice said. TWM employees will analyze the pavement ratings to create an annual transportation improvement plan. Rice said TWM hopes to start surveying village streets in January and it should be finished by late spring or early summer. TWM will send its survey data to Glen Carbon officials for review then the design phase will begin in late 2019. Rice added that as of now, TWM envisions street construction starting in 2020. TWM will re-inspect all village streets once between the second and fifth years to ensure the ratings are up-to-date, provide an annual report with program updates, cost estimates and maps and give the Village Board an annual presentation discussing the program. The inventory and rankings will become part of the Pavement Management (PM) system using the villages existing GIS database. TWM staff also use MicroPAVER, specialized pavement management software, to build inventory and analyze data. Another software program, FieldInspector, collects the pavement distress data. Other area projects TWM has engaged in include a PM system for the city of Shiloh, PM for Collinsville and Grotefendt roads, Poplar Street reconstruction in Mascoutah and Route 159 pavement micro-surfacing. In other news, the village council: Unanimously approved a contract with Granicus for NovusAGENDA meeting software designed to reduce paper usage. The cost is $7,630 and includes, set-up, configuration, and online training. The village is also eligible to receive up to five two-day passes to the 2019 Granicus National Summit, which will take place May 14-15, 2019 in Washington, D.C. Voted 5-2 to approve a letter providing no objection to the city of Edwardsville annexing portions of Madison County Transits Goshen and Nickel Plate trails in accordance with the boundary agreement. Board members Steve Slemer and Walter Harris voted no. Unanimously adopted the village budget for the 2019 fiscal year, which starts Jan. 1. Unanimously passed an ordinance establishing the tax levy and 2018 tax assessments in the amount of $2.89 million. Scott Borror, director of finance said the levy reflects an increase from the 2017 tax extension of $99,989 or 3.6 percent. Based on an estimated 4.5 percent increase in the villages rate-setting Equalized Assessed Valuation (EAV) to $375.7 million, officials anticipate the rate to drop slightly. Borror said the actual EAV and tax rate will be set in the spring. Unanimously approved an agreement between Glen Carbon and Great Rivers & Routes Tourism Bureau, costing $25,000. Unanimously approved an agreement between the village and Motorola Solutions for 43 portable and mobile radios for the police department. The current radio system has reached the end of its service life. If the Village Board signs a purchase agreement prior to Dec. 21, it would save $30,000. The next Village Board meeting will be Jan. 8, 2019 at 7 p.m. Abilityto manage a diverse range of property management services; Ability to applyanalytical skills in a wide range of statistics on property management;Analytical capacity and proven business process management; Expertknowledge of the UN Financial Regulations and Rules; Demonstratedexpertise in logistics/supply chain management. Shows pride in work and inachievements; demonstrates professional competence and mastery of subjectmatter; is conscientious and efficient in meeting commitments, observingdeadlines and achieving results; is motivated by professional rather thanpersonal concerns; shows persistence when faced with difficult problems orchallenges; remains calm in stressful situations. Takes responsibility forincorporating gender perspectives and ensuring the equal participation ofwomen and men in all areas of work. Nadiya Hussain and her husband Abdal got remarried in a 'no frills' ceremony 'The Great British Bake Off' winner Nadiya Hussain and her husband have tied the knot again, 14 years after their arranged marriage. The 33-year-old chef - who has two sons Musa, 12, Duwad, 11, and daughter Maryam, 8, - has remarried her partner Abdal, and says she would do it "all over again". Nadiya took to Instagram to share pictures of a double finger ring on her hand, and their wedding cake, which was covered in mini cup cakes and macarons. Alongside the photos, she wrote: "Nothing fancy just love. "No frills. Just us. We did it again. I do. I always will. I would do it all over again #married #secondtime. (sic)" Abdal replied: "You can't run away from me now. I love you to infinity and beyond Xxx. (sic)" Expand Close Nadiya Hussain wedding cake / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Nadiya Hussain wedding cake Nadiya had only met Abdal once when she married him aged 19 in a nuptials arranged by their parents in a traditional Islamic ceremony in Bangladesh. Last year, the 'Bake Off' winner said: "I didn't know my husband, and then we had two children, and then I fell in love with him." Earlier this year, she revealed the couple's secret to a happy relationship, admitting she and Abdal refuse to argue. She previously said: "We disagree on things. Video of the Day "We're two very different people, we're really different - but we just don't argue. "I want to argue sometimes, but he just doesn't he just walks." Nadiya rose to fame after winning the sixth series of 'The Great British Bake Off' in 2015. Since triumphing on the programme, she has hosted a number of her own food shows, released several books and was commissioned to bake a cake for the Queen's 90th birthday. Touched by the compassion of the nurses who tended to her... Saira Banu on Tuesday said she wants to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi to discuss about the release of builder Samir Bhojwani, who, she says, is falsely claiming ownership of two plots on which Dilip Kumar's bungalow was built. On Sunday, via Kumar's official Twitter account, Banu had requested a meeting with the prime minister in the wake of Bhojwani's release. The former actor said she was unable to meet the prime minister when he was on a one-day visit to Maharashtra, but she plans to follow up with the matter. "I did not meet the prime minister here as he has been busy. But I have learnt that his office has asked people here to look into the matter. I have tweeted about it. " "I will meet him in Delhi if needed. I have no idea how I will follow this up. But I will follow it up," Banu, 74, told PTI. Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis on Monday said he will speak to Kumar, 96, and his family to allay their fears over the property issue involving Bhojwani. Kumar's bungalow is located in the upscale Pali Hill area of Bandra. Earlier this year, Banu had approached police and lodged a complaint against Bhojwani. In January, the Economic Offences Wing (EOW) of Mumbai police had registered a case of cheating against the builder for allegedly trying to grab the bungalow of the veteran actor. The police officials suspected that Bhojwani forged certain documents to grab the property. After the offence was registered, a team of EOW sleuths raided Bhojwani's residence in Bandra from where they seized weapons, including knives and daggers. Bhojwani was arrested by EOW in April. Actor Andy Von Eich, who features in Manikarnika: The Queen of Jhansi, on Tuesday alleged that he is yet to be paid in full for his performance in the period drama by the production house. The film, fronted by Kangana Ranaut, has been produced by Zee Studios in association with Kamal Jain and Nishant Pitti. Von Eich, who plays one of the British officers in the film whose trailer was launched on Tuesday, took to Twitter to express his disappointment. "Today #Manikarnika trailer released. I still haven't received full payment for my acting in this movie by the production house. I can't imagine that this is in the sense of #KanganaRanaut if she would know about that. Please help. #ManikarnikaTrailerLaunch #zee #karios," the actor, who hails from Germany, tweeted. Last month, Federation of Western India Cine Employees (FWICE) claimed that the makers of the film are yet to clear dues of approximately Rs 1.5 crore to workers and junior artists. The allegations were later refuted by Jain who said that all the legitimate and due payments have been made, except of one vendor, who is arm-twisting them. The producer in a statement had said they have filed a complaint with the Film & TV Producers Guild of India against Film and Allied Union over the disputed vendor. According to Jain, the shoot got over on October 13, and "all legitimate and due payments were made." "As a production house we are absolutely clear on not holding back any ones payment which is legitimate and due, as we immensely respect everyone's hard work that has gone into this film. We are thankful to each vendor/individual who has helped us on making this film," he said in a statement. The producers are yet to comment on Von Eich's allegations. Manikarnika is due to be released on January 25 next year. After the farm loan waiver order, newly elected Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Kamal Nath has turned his attention to the allotment of palatial bungalows to former heads of the state. The spacious pre-independence bungalow, belonging to the Nawab era, was originally allotted to Union Minister of External Affairs Sushma Swaraj. She was allotted the bungalow in Bhopal, in her capacity as the MP from Vidisha. However, after she declared that she will not contest the upcoming Lok Sabha polls, the house was lying largely unused. The bungalow, situated in a posh colony, is just a kilometre away from the chief minister's residence and had served as the "CM House" during the 70s when Prakash Chandra Sethi headed the state. It had also served as the residence of deputy chief minister Subhash Yadav, during the period of Digvijaya Singh. Allotting government residences to former chief ministers had snowballed into a controversy in Madhya Pradesh four months ago when Jabalpur High Court ordered the state government to withdraw the facility. Acting on the directive of the High Court, all former chief ministers, including Uma Bharti, Kailash Joshi, Babulal Gaur and Digvijaya Singh, had to vacate their homes. However, of the four, three were relocated. Digvijaya Singh was the chief minister of the state from 1998 to 2003, and Uma Bharti between 2003 and 2004, and veteran Kailash Joshi became chief minister in 1977. Babulal Gaur headed the state from 2004 to 2005, when Shivraj Singh was appointed the new chief minister. Digvijaya Singh had to vacate his house under unpleasant circumstances. He shifted to a rented house. The bungalow was kept vacant in the anticipation that he may want to occupy the house later, said a senior government official. Chief Minister Kamal Nath issued orders to re-allot the same Shyamala Hills bungalow where Digvijaya Singh was living for the past 14 years. During the Digvijaya Singh regime, the state government passed an order giving all former chief ministers cabinet minister rank, and all the facilities that come along with it, including a government residence. Two years ago, chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan again amended the actMadhya Pradesh Ministers (Salary and Allowances) Act 1972to allow former chief ministers lifelong access to facilities like housing, salary and perks on par with that of a cabinet minister. The amendment came as a follow-up of a court case, which objected to certain perks for the former chief ministers. Repatriated Indian national Hamid Nihal Ansari, along with his mother, met External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj in New Delhi on Wednesday. Ansari, a software engineer, returned home on Tuesday after spending six years in a Pakistani jail. Ansari's mother Fauzia Nehal thanked the minister and the foreign ministry for their help in getting back her son and said: "Mera Bharat Mahaan, meri madam mahaan, sab madam ne hi kiya hai." Ansari (33), a resident in Mumbai, was arrested in 2012 for illegally entering Pakistan from Afghanistan, reportedly, to meet a girl he had befriended online. He was imprisoned in the Peshawar Central Jail after being sentenced by a military court on December 15, 2015. His three-year jail term ended on December 15 but he was not able to leave for India as his legal documents were not ready. Official sources said the decision to release Ansari was on account of relentless pressure from New Delhi. "Welcome home, son!" tweeted MEA spokesperson Raveesh Kumar, which was later retweeted by Swaraj. Welcome home, son! Indian national, Hamid Ansari returns home after six years of incarceration in Pakistan. EAM @SushmaSwaraj warmly welcomed him in Delhi today. pic.twitter.com/vM4HXF2ORc Raveesh Kumar (@MEAIndia) December 19, 2018 Ansari was reunited with his family at the Attari-Wagah border on Tuesday evening. Fauzia said her son had no wrong intention while crossing the border. "My son went with noble intentions. He had no bad intentions, but went missing and was later caught and framed. He shouldn't have gone without a visa. His release is a victory for humanity," she was quoted as saying. In just one season, the Telangana Congress has gone from a probable ruling party, to the one on the verge of losing the main opposition party status. In the just concluded state elections, the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) romped home with 88 seats, while the Congress won 19 seats. Its ally, TDP, got just two out of 119 assembly seats. The biggest challenge, ahead of the 2019 parliament elections, for the Congress is to retain its opposition party status. As per the rule, any party which has 10 per cent of assembly seats can qualify as an opposition party. The Congress needs 12 seats to qualify as an opposition party and they have more than that. However, within the Congress camp, the fear of poaching looms large. According to sources in the Congress, the ruling TRS has approached a number of Congress legislators to cross the fence. Speculation is rife that more than half a dozen MLAs are ready to switch sides and TRS is hunting for a few more. The plan will be to make 12 MLAs elect a legislature party leader and then merge the group with the TRS so that there is no opposition in the state. We are aware of what is going on. The TRS has reached out to our leaders and some of them have even participated in the negotiations. The attempts seem to have failed as the TRS is finding it tough to accept the conditions of some of the Congress MLAs. We are hopeful that 12 MLAs would not leave the party, said a Congress leader on condition of anonymity. Evidently, the morale of the party is low. The senior leaders seem to be resigned to the fact that it is almost impossible to keep the flock together despite their efforts. In our Congress office, we have been switching off electricity on time to save bills. That's our financial condition. How can we stop our MLAs from resisting tempting offers. And even if we do, how do we convince them? The TRS has money and power on their side and it is easy for them to poach. They will rule the state for next five years which will be the biggest pull. Those who are loyal will stay back and those who are hungry for power will go to the TRS, said a member of All India Congress Committee (AICC), who did not want to be named. Senior Congress leaders from Delhi and Hyderabad are meeting the new legislators on Wednesday where they will be counselled to not leave the party. This is a dictatorship and not democracy. How can the ruling party kill an opposition party? If the party in power is elder brother then opposition party is like a younger brother. Do you kill a brother? questioned G Narayan Reddy, treasurer, Telangana Congress. Keeping politics aside, if we talk in a philosophical tone, nature will teach a lesson to those who indulge in dictatorial ways as we have seen in the past, he added. Reddy is confident that none of the party leaders will go to the TRS even though serious poaching attempts are underway. Another headache for the Congress party are the cases of the senior and influential leaders who have lost elections or were denied tickets. It is learnt that they have also been approached keeping the upcoming parliament elections in mind. We have not been in power for five years and will not be in power for another five years. Even a junior government officer wont listen to us. For many, there is no point in staying in the Congress as they are unsure of it winning any parliament seat in the current situation, said another senior Congress leader. The TDP, with just two legislators, seems to be better off. The TDP Telangana president, L. Ramana, said that his party MLAs have not been approached and there is no way they will even consider going to the TRS. In case the TRS is successful in relegating the status of the Congress in the assembly, two of the TRS dreams may come trueTRS founder and Chief Minister K. Chandrashekar Raos wish to win 16 out of 17 parliament seats, leaving one for MIM, KCR's son and current working president of the TRS, KT Rama Raos prophesy that the MIM will be the second largest party in the assembly. The hunger strike by students of Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Hyderabad entered its third day on Wednesday and is expected to continue until the administration is ready to meet their demands. Prior to the hunger strike, students had been on an indefinite protest from December 10. The lack of transparency of the TISS administration in making important decisions has created anguish among the student community of the Hyderabad campus. Students and a section of the teaching staff had discovered the administrations decision to scrap the BA Social Sciences (BASS) course and make TISS Hyderabad non-residential through a newspaper advertisement on October 31. On November 22, after repeated attempts, the TISS students council met Director Shalini Bharat, who said that the decisions would not be reverted. Enraged by a public statement worded in a threatening tone released by the Internal Management Committee (IMC) and the poor responses received, students went on an indefinite strike from last week. The student community is deeply infuriated by the insensitive and completely ignorant attitude and accountability of the TISS administration towards the student body despite the indefinite agitation at the campus on 14th December 2018, a joint press release by the Students Council of TISS Hyderabad stated. The students demanded a meeting between the TISS Mumbai administration and the students council as most of the concerns in the Demand Charter of the students come under the purview of the Mumbai administration. The major demands are decentralisation of off-campuses power, reversion of the decision to make the campus non-residential and reinstating the BASS course. Radhika Vemula and Raja Vemula, mother and brother of Rohith Vemula, addressed the students and joined the hunger strike launched on December 17. A few activists have also expressed their solidarity towards the issue. Several students have decided to stay back in the academic building since December 14 demanding that their voices be heard. All protesting students have decided to continue the hunger strike with more volunteers till the Mumbai administration comes to Hyderabad to discuss the matter. The director has dismissed the demands and pointed out that the Hyderabad administration is responsible. Meanwhile, the Hyderabad administration has said that the Mumbai administration controls the funds and hence, they have to be contacted. Altogether, 10 students are sitting in the hunger strike, including first years, from today, said Varsha Priyadarshini, a student who has been staying back in the campus since last week. What we want basically is her (the director) to come down to Hyderabad and have a discussion with us. The UK Cabinet Tuesday ramped up contingency plans for a no-deal Brexit, which could see Britain leave the European Union without a formal divorce agreement in place in time for the March 29 deadline. Preparations for such a chaotic scenario have become necessary because the deal proposed by British Prime Minister Theresa May remains unacceptable to most parties in the UK Parliament, mainly over a controversial "backstop" as part of the post-Brexit border arrangements between UK territory Northern Ireland and European Union member-country Ireland. Critics of the deal fear the clause would keep the UK tied to the European Union (EU) even after it has formally left the 28-member economic bloc and curb its ability to strike independent trade deals around the world. As a result of the impasse, the Cabinet is believed to have begun deliberations on Tuesday on how a 3 billion pound Brexit contingency fund, earmarked by the UK Treasury, would be split between the various government departments in the event of what is being dubbed a "managed no deal" Brexit. It marks a significant shift in the UK government's Brexit strategy, which is also being seen as a warning to the the EU that the UK is serious about walking away unless new concessions on the Irish backstop are granted. The House of Commons needs to approve the agreement reached by prime minister May with EU leaders for it to go ahead and so far there seems little chance of that happening. Amid heated exchanges in the Commons on Monday, Opposition Labour Party tabled a motion of no-confidence in the British Prime Minister after she refused to offer a vote on the deal before the week of January 14. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn accused her of trying to "run down the clock" to force MPs to back her agreement or risk a no-deal Brexit by the time they return from their Christmas recess. But other Opposition parties, including the Scottish National Party (SNP), Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru and the Greens, demanded Corbyn push for a no-confidence vote against the government as a whole. Unlike a vote aimed only at the British Prime Minister, the UK government would have to allow such a vote and, if successful, it could force a General Election. Prime Minister May, bolstered by the backing of her own Conservative Party MPs not keen to see the government toppled, also dared Corbyn to make a no-confidence motion against her government if he feels his party is ready for such a scenario. However, the divisions within the Opposition itself have meant that the motion was dismissed as a "political stunt" by Downing Street. "Labour tabling a motion just in the PM rather than in the entire Government begs the question which Tory do they want to see as PM," said Nicola Sturgeon, SNP leader and the First Minister of Scotland, in an attack on the Labour Party for what is being seen as a half-hearted attempt at shaking up the government because it is not confident of the backing of Parliament over a no-confidence vote in the Tory government. "We are not interested in parliamentary antics or play-acting of the Labour Party. We are focused on the meaningful vote and the need to secure necessary changes to ensure the right deal for the UK," said Nigel Dodds of Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), which plays a crucial role in keeping May's government in power by providing her the required MPs for a Commons majority. Meanwhile, Britain's exit arrangements and future relationship with the EU continue to hang in the balance. There are supporters of a second referendum to seek fresh public opinion on the issue within the Cabinet but May has ruled out such a prospect as breaking faith with the electorate who voted in favour of Brexit in the June 2016 referendum. "Another vote which would likely leave us no further forward than the last. And another vote which would further divide our country at the very moment we should be working to unite it," she said. May has insisted that the EU has listened to the concerns of the British MPs over the contentious issue of the Northern Ireland border backstop and she hopes to secure additional "political and legal assurances" in the coming weeks about how it might come into force and how the UK could leave it. She is hoping to use the few weeks' breathing space between now and when MPs return from parliamentary recess on January 7 to try and drive home this point in order to win the vote on her Brexit deal in Parliament. In his finest hour as Congress president, Rahul Gandhi took care to appear humble, polite and refined. He was at pains not to wave at the cheering party workers on the lawns of the partys 24 Akbar Road head office, not to smile too much, and rather looked sombre at times. There was no spring in his gait, no bombast in his words, no sarcasm in his tone, no spite towards his foes, and, of course, no flashy clothes (never his wont). I have learnt my lesson from Narendra Modi.... I have learnt humility, he said, almost sounding like a defeated general. Rahul Gandhi, called Prince and Pappu by detractors, has learnt not to be another Modi. He understands that pride went before the BJPs fall in central India, till now thought to be a saffron fortress. In the elections to the three assemblies in Madhya Bharat, the tone of his opponents campaign had been one of political arrogance and rhetorical sarcasm, directed not just at the Congress or Rahul, but even at revered national icons of India. A sarcasm that had hurt many a noble soul steeped in ancient Indian values of humility and self-denial. Pride and hate, they have said through their vote, are not values cherished by this ancient civilisation. On the back foot: BJP president Amit Shah | PTI The way people voted has lessons for both winner and loser. It was majorly the votes from this very heartland that had catapulted Modi and company to national power four and a half years ago. The three states account for 65 seats in the Lok Sabha, of which Modis BJP had won 62. The new electoral arithmetic thrown up by the results is discomfiting for Modi and his party chief Amit Shah, who has been called an electoral Chanakya. Of the 519 seats in the three assemblies, the BJP was defeated in 322. Transposing these into Lok Sabha seats is the nightmare the BJP is now confronting. Chhattisgarh had given the BJP 10 of its 11 Lok Sabha seats in 2014; Madhya Pradesh 27 of 29, and Rajasthan its entire 25. The current round shows that the BJP can count only one in Chhattisgarh, 17 in Madhya Pradesh and 13 in Rajasthan. The tally reduces the BJPs potential central India reap from 62 seats in 2014 to 31 in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. Combined with this is the prospect of losing seats in Gujarat and Karnataka, where it underperformed in the assembly elections. Then there is the fall from grace of the Akali Dal, its ally in Punjab. Indeed, the BJP has made gains in the northeast, and is claimed to be making inroads into West Bengal and Odisha, but these states are expected to yield much fewer gains than what are being lost in central India. In most other regions, the party had already saturated by 2014. Rahul, too, has arithmetic reasons to be humble. The dazzling show of defeating three of Modis satraps has been offset by the bleeding victory in Rajasthan, where the party was hoping for a triumphal trot. The infighting between old warhorse Ashok Gehlot and the young Sachin Pilot, and the inability to prevent party rebels from contesting and winning has exposed serious fault-lines that Rahul will have to address. In Madhya Pradesh, despite the anti-incumbency against three-termer Shivraj Singh Chouhan, the BJP conceded only a three per cent loss in vote share. Lessons in personal conduct apart, what are the political lessons that Rahul has to learn, rather unlearn, from Modi? Modis biggest problem has been that, unlike a Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Narasimha Rao, Manmohan Singh or A.B. Vajpayee, he has not yet matured into a statesmanly ruler of a great nation-state, despite his win in 2014 and his increasing popularity. At home, he remains the shrill campaigner he had been prior to 2014, and has been carrying on his relentless struggle, now against invisible Nehruvian spirits, much like a Don Quixote sighting demons in windmills and tilting at them. So shrill was his campaign that even a mild Manmohan Singh had to openly say that Modi was yet to get prime ministerial. Up to the challenge: Rahul Gandhi and Narendra Modi | PTI This image problem worked against the well-entrenched BJP during the campaign. Modi did not realise that the shrillness of his own campaign was lowering himself to the level of a Pappu he had been mocking all along. With Modi leading the shrill campaign, the second-rung leaders did not want to be found wanting. Though Shah was talking only about Modis development measures to seminar-hall audiences, the sight of huge crowds at rallies awakened his shriller instincts. His biggest mistake, perhaps, was fielding Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, who spoke more of gods, demons, temples and castes at rallies than about Jan Dhan or jobs, toilets or crop prices. If the shrillness was adopted to tide over the missteps of the government, the ploy backfired. Rahul and his Congress elders focused on reminding voters of the note-ban fiasco that had left millions spending precious man-hours in front of cashless bank counters, and of the GST goof-ups that had made the lives of shopkeepers and petty businessmen hell. They rubbed into the voters mind the fact that neither the note ban nor the rhetoric against corruption had sent one bad moneybag to jail. Rather, quite a few of them had fled abroad. The whirlwind Rahul campaign (he addressed 82 rallies, which worked to two a day), even while hurling corruption charges over Rafale against the Modi government, had taken care to not be shrill. Initially, the BJPs game-plan had been to field second-rung leaders and insulate Modi from any likelihood of a drubbing. However, Rahuls barbs and Modis instinctive combative nature brought him out and finally down to the level his enemies wanted him to be. All the same, the Congress continued to focus on farmers penury, lack of jobs, and corruption, which has degenerated from bribe-taking to crony capitalism that has got entrenched under the Modi regime. Rahul turned a round of provincial assembly elections into a referendum on Modis performance as prime minister. If his bhakts had been giving him credit for all that has been good in India, Rahul and company sought to blame him for even the lapses of his chief ministers. The biggest challenge for Rahul, perhaps, was the inherent divisiveness within his party, which many expected Shah to exploit. It was a surprise that Rahul could manage the competing ambitions and make the warring factions work unitedly, especially in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, conceded a BJP leader. If Modi had once been reputed as a risk-taker, Rahul, too, did take a few calculated risks this time. One was to make Kamal Nath the party president in Madhya Pradesh, against the competing claims of the young and charismatic Jyotiraditya Scindia, who was fielded more as a campaigner than a commander in the war-room. Both proved to be aces. Nath mobilised the resources with the backing of the old warhorse Digvijaya Singh. While the two planned the campaign, Scindia led from the front. However, the races in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan were too close for comfort. The partys own surveys had indicated that the anger index, mainly over farm distress and lack of jobs, had been the highest in Madhya Pradesh, but the Congress failed to bring enough of the angry voters to the booths. The BJP, on the other hand, had superior booth-level management that Shah has innovated since 2014. In Jaipur, Rahul had given a free hand to the young Sachin Pilot, following the rout in the 2013 state elections. Veteran Ashok Gehlot had been kept in Delhi with other crucial duties, but was fielded to battle when the elections were announced, despite the discomfiture of the Pilot camp. Chhattisgarh was left to the local leaders, who proved to be the real stars of the Congress campaign, having scored the most glittering win among all three states. The road ahead is going to be bumpier for both Rahul and Modi. It is not going to be one on one in 2019, which this round indicated. In Telangana and Mizoram, both fared miserably as regional strongmen triumphed. As Telangana Rashtra Samithi president K. Chandrashekar Rao proved, there are unyielding titans in India who would like either to form a third front before the election, or to call the shots in case of a hung Lok Sabha. The Samajwadi Partys Akhilesh Yadav and Bahujan Samaj Party president Mayawati have been wary of accepting the primacy of the Congress or Rahul in an opposition conglomerate. Both know that together they can deny most of the 68 of 80 seats that Modi had won in Uttar Pradesh in 2014. Also, both boycotted the Congress-initiated meeting of 21 opposition parties on the eve of the election results, indicating that they would rather decide after the election. All the same, the triple victory in this round will help the Congress bargain from a position of strength with regional players, especially Mamata Banerjees Trinamool Congress in West Bengal and the DMK in Tamil Nadu. On the other side, the BJPs debacle in the Hindi heartland has made the AIADMK think whether it should stay away from alliances and get a better bargain amid post-poll desperation. Meanwhile, at the Centre, Modi can be expected to effect a change of style, and even the content of his governance. As the government prepares for the budget, there are expectations of populist economic measures, especially after the exit of RBI governor Urjit Patel, who was proving difficult to handle. Shah is expected to decentralise the party machinery, while the remaining chief ministers, especially Adityanath and Devendra Fadnavis of Maharashtra, would be asked to focus more on how they run the states, which together have 128 seats in the Lok Sabha, of which 90 are with the BJP. Either way, there are two things that can be safely predicted. One, a Congress-mukt Bharat is still a distant dream. Two, as Rahul himself said, no party should think of getting rid of another. In the dance of Indias pluralistic democracy, there is still space for several more. Brussels, Dec 19 (AP) With British politics gridlocked and just 100 days until Brexit, the European Union on Wednesday triggered contingency plans designed to cushion some of the shock of a "no-deal" UK exit from the bloc. The EU measures, announced a day after Britain ramped up its own no-deal planning, are intended to alleviate "major disruption" to people and businesses in sectors including financial services, customs, air transport and climate policy. European Commission Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis told reporters that the plan was "an exercise in limiting damage." He said the aim was "to turn an abrupt exit into a more soft landing." Britain is due to leave the EU on March 29, but it remains unclear whether lawmakers will approve the divorce agreement Prime Minister Theresa May's government has negotiated with the bloc. Leaving without a deal risks plunging the British economy into recession and touching off chaos at the borders. The 14 EU actions include temporary one- to two-year measures to allow U.K.-EU financial services to continue and a 12-month provision to keep planes flying between Britain and the bloc. But Dombrovskis stressed that the measures "cannot replicate the benefits of the withdrawal agreement, and certainly it cannot replicate the benefits of EU membership." On Tuesday, the British government stepped up U.K. no-deal preparations, putting 3,500 soldiers on standby and warning thousands of businesses and millions of households to get ready for disruption. The government said the plans which include chartering boats and stockpiling medicines are a sensible precaution. But opposition politicians accuse the government of trying to scare lawmakers into supporting May's Brexit deal. Opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn on Wednesday accused May of "a cynical attempt to drive her deeply damaging deal through this House." "No-deal would be a disaster for our country and no responsible government would ever allow it," Corbyn said. Many businesses agree. Britain's five leading business groups said in a rare joint statement that businesses "have been watching in horror" as political infighting made the prospect of a disorderly Brexit more likely. Organizations including the British Chambers of Commerce and the Confederation of British Industry urged lawmakers to "return to their constituencies over Christmas and talk to their local business communities." "We hope that they will listen and remember that when they return to Parliament, the future course of our economy will be in their hands," the groups said. In a bid to regain some of its vanished political momentum, the British government was publishing long-awaited plans Wednesday for a post-Brexit immigration system that will end free movement of EU citizens to the UK. Home Secretary Sajid Javid said the proposals Britain's biggest immigration changes in more than 40 years would create a "skills-based immigration system built around the talent and expertise people can bring, rather than where they come from." At present, all EU nationals can live and work in Britain under the bloc's free-movement rules, but that will end after the U.K. leaves in March. The government is proposing no limit on the number of well-paid, skilled immigrants who can settle in Britain, but curbs on "low-skilled" workers. The rules will not apply to more than 3 million EU citizens currently living in Britain. The government has said they can stay, even if the UK leaves the bloc without an agreement on future relations. The EU, in its no-deal plans, urged member states to extend the same right to more than 1 million resident British nationals. Immigration was a major factor behind Britain's 2016 vote to leave the EU, and May has made "taking back control of our borders" her key Brexit goal. But that has put her at odds with many business leaders, and some members of her own Conservative government. Big chunks of Britain's economy, from agriculture to health care, have come to depend on European workers more than 1 million of whom have moved to Britain in the last 15 years. Businesses fear that choking off the flow of lower-skilled workers could lead to acute employee shortages. Saffron Cordery, deputy chief executive of NHS Providers an umbrella group for Britain's state-funded health care system said the health sector was "deeply concerned" about the planned changes. "High skills does not equal high pay," she told the BBC. The government plans suggest setting a salary threshold that immigrants will have to meet in order to be given the right to settle in Britain. A figure of 30,000 pounds ($38,000) a year, recommended by an independent report earlier this year, is more than the starting salary for nurses, paramedics, junior doctors and many other professions. Javid said the "exact threshold" would be decided after public consultation. He also said the plan would not commit to reducing net immigration below 100,000 people a year a longstanding goal of the Conservative government that it has never come close to meeting. Net immigration in the year to June was 273,000. Javid said the plans would seek to reduce migration to "more sustainable levels," but would not set a specific target. (AP) AMS AMS Chandigarh, Dec 19 (PTI) The Haryana government has decided to install solar energy plants on gram panchayat land through Haryana Power Generation Corporation Limited (HPGCL). A decision to this effect has been taken in the review meeting of New and Renewable Energy Department held under the chairmanship of Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar here Wednesday. A written communication should be sent to all gram panchayats with immediate effect that if they want to get solar energy plant installed on their land, whether barren or fertile, then they can contact and submit their option to Renewable Energy Department provided that land should be at least 10 acres, the chief minister said. Apart from this, if a panchayat instals solar energy plant at its own resources then HPGCL will provide technical assistance, an official release said. Haryana Minister O P Dhankar apprised in the meeting that Badhsa, Ghaglan and other villages of district Jhajjar have been applying for establishing solar power plant. On this, it was decided that HPGCL will initially establish solar power plant in these villages on pilot project basis. PTI SUN BAL BAL (Eds: Disclaimer: The following press release comes to you under an arrangement with PR Newswire. PTI takes no editorial responsibility for the same.) And Indian Nationals Who Are Permanent Residents In Those Countries NASSAU, Bahamas, Dec. 18, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The Bahamas Ministry of Foreign Affairs, of The Commonwealth of The Bahamas, has announced new visa regulations for Indian nationals visiting the islands: Nationals of India with a visa issued by Canada, United Kingdom, USA or Schengen Member State for a maximum stay of 90 days Nationals of India with a Permanent Residence Permit issued by United Kingdom or Schengen Member State for a maximum stay of 90 days Nationals of India with a Permanent Resident/Resident Alien Card (Form I-551) issued by the USA for a maximum stay of 30 days Nationals of India with a Permanent Resident Card issued by Canada for a maximum stay of 30 days ABOUT THE BAHAMAS The Islands Of The Bahamas have a place in the sun for everyone. Do everything or do nothing, just remember It's Better in The Bahamas. Call 1-800-Bahamas or visit www.Bahamas.com, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. http://www.bahamashclondon.net Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/799998/BahamasMinistryofTourismLogo.jpg PWR PWR Mumbai, Dec 19 (PTI) Vir Das is headed to Netflix again and the actor said he is currently working on his third outing with the streaming giant. Last year, the actor-comic became the first Indian to have his own Netflix comedy show, "Abroad Understanding". His second, "Losing It", started streaming on the platform from December 11. Das said the show will go on floors in 2019. "I am currently working on the script for the third special. We will shoot it next year. The response for 'Losing It' has just been phenomenal and I look forward to working on another one," he said in a statement. The actor-comic would be the only Indian so far to do three back-to-back shows for Netflix. PTI RDS BK BK Barclays CEO Jes Staley ignored his CCO and GCNew Yorks Department of Financial Services fined Barclays Bank PLC and its New York branch $15 million Tuesday because of attempts by the banks CEO, Jes Staley, to unmask a whistleblower in contravention of Barclays established whistleblowing policies and procedures. The DFS said it found shortcomings in governance, controls and corporate culture relating to Barclays whistleblowing function. Those flaws permitted a sequence of events that potentially could have had a detrimental impact on the efficacy of Barclays whistleblowing program. In May this year, UK regulators fined Staley 642,430 (about $871,000) for trying to identify at least one anonymous whistleblower who made allegations about Staleys role in recruiting another employee. The Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority said Staley failed to act with due skill, care and diligence by trying to hunt down the whistleblower. In a statement Tuesday, New Yorks DFS said several members of Barclays senior management didnt follow whistleblowing program and instead protected the CEO and the bank itself. The regulator also said it found limited gaps in Barclays whistleblowing policies and procedures. Barclays cultural transformation that its compliance group had been working hard to instill in the more than one hundred thousand Barclays employees worldwide, was not nearly complete, the DFS said. An anonymous whistleblower who claimed to be a Barclays shareholder sent a letter to the banks board in 2016. A later anonymous letter purportedly came from a group of Barclays employees. The letters raised nearly the same concerns about how a senior Barclays employee was recruited and Staleys role in the hiring. Barclays chief compliance officer and general counsel both firmly advised Staley several times not to try to identify the author or authors of the letters, the DFS said Tuesday. But Staley asked Barclays security chief, Troels Oerting, to find out who wrote the first letter, which had a U.S. postmark. Oerting asked U.S. federal law enforcement authorities for help tracking down the sender. After the UK fined Staley for failing to act with due skill, care and diligence, Barclays board cut his annual bonus by 500,000 ($678,000). He had earned 2.35 million ($3.19 million) in 2016 and received a bonus of 1.3 million ($1.76 million). Staley, 62, an American banker originally from Boston, said in a statement to the BBC in May that his personal involvement in the whistleblower complaints was inappropriate. I have apologized for mistakes which I made, he said. I accept the conclusions of the board, the FCA, and the PRA, following their respective investigations, and the sanctions which they have each applied, Staley said. Tuesdays $15 million consent order (pdf) also requires Barclays to submit to the DFS an enhanced written plan for internal controls and a compliance program and a board oversight plan with best practices for whistleblowing. The bank must also report any attempts since the start of 2017 to identify whistleblowers or retaliate against them. ____ Richard L. Cassin is the publisher and editor of the FCPA Blog. Mumbai, Dec 20 (PTI) Newly wed couple Priyanka Chopra and Nick Jonas hosted their wedding reception for family and friends in Mumbai. It seems celebrations have not ended for Priyanka and Nick as 19 days after their grand wedding, the first reception in the city was held for family, friends and the media at a suburban hotel in Juhu on Wednesday evening. Another reception is scheduled for Thursday evening for Bollywood celebrities at a five-star hotel in suburban Bandra. The venue was decorated with white lilies, orchids and candles, featuring an entwined N and P in the backdrop. Wearing a strapless traditional Indian lehenga in blue and gold, Priyanka looked gorgeous as she accessorised her outfit with a huge diamond necklace. While Nick was seen in a grey colour suit and black T-shirt. After posing for the shutterbugs, Priyanka thanked everyone for coming. "I am going to take your attention for two seconds... It means so much to us that all of you came tonight. This has been an extremely special chapter in my life and I wanted my husband to meet all the special people who have contributed to it. "So thank you very much for being here, friends of my parents, my dad who I know is here. Thank you very much for coming and I hope you have a wonderful time tonight," Priyanka said. Looking at her hubby, she added, "And this is my husband, Nick Jonas". While Nick said, "This is my first show in India. And thank you all so very much for coming out." "I wasn't too far from here that I took Madhu (Priyanka's mother) out to lunch and asked her if I could marry her daughter. So to be here tonight with all of you...the people who have helped shape who she has become means the world to me. To be embraced with such open arms, it's just unbelievable. Tonight is about celebrating and spending time, it is my first introduction with you all." Priyanka and Nick tied the knot at Jodhpur's iconic Umaid Bhawan Palace on December 1. They married as per Christian and Hindu rituals. The extravagant wedding was followed by a reception in Delhi on December 4, which was attended by PM Narendra Modi. After their Delhi reception, the couple went off to Oman. As per media reports, Priyanka later went back to New York, to promote her movie "Isn't It Romantic". PTI KKP ABH ABH Islamabad, Dec 19 (PTI) US' special peace envoy to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad Wednesday met Pakistan Army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa to discuss regional security and peace process in the war-torn country, days after his crucial meeting with Taliban representatives in the UAE. The talks between the US and Taliban representatives were held in Abu Dhabi this week. Officials from Pakistan, the UAE and Saudi Arabia also participated in the talks. Khalilzad reportedly held two rounds of negotiations with Taliban leaders in Qatar before the new round of talks. Army spokesman Major General Asif Ghafoor said in a tweet that "regional security and Afghan peace process were discussed" in the meeting. "Visiting dignitary appreciated Pakistan's efforts for Afghanistan peace process. COAS (Chief of Army Staff) reiterated that peace in Afghanistan is important for Pakistan and assured continuous efforts for bringing peace and stability in the region," Ghafoor said. It was Khalilzad's third trip to Pakistan in recent months. According to diplomatic sources, Pakistan helped in arranging the direct talks between the US and Taliban, creating a ray of hope for ending more than 17-year-old Afghan conflict. It was the second time Pakistan arranged direct talks between the US and Taliban representatives after a similar initiative fell apart in 2015 at the hill resort of Murree, near Islamabad. The US administration has appreciated Pakistan's role in arranging the meeting with Taliban leaders. Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan, after taking office in August, made it clear that Pakistan wanted to establish peaceful ties with all its neighbours. Earlier this month, US President Donald Trump wrote a letter to Prime Minister Khan, asking for help to arrange talks with the rebels. Trump, however, earlier this year accused Pakistan of doing nothing despite take billions of dollars from the US. Washington also suspended millions of dollars in military aid to Islamabad. In one of the America's longest war, the US has spent over USD 1 trillion in Afghanistan since the coalition forces ousted the Taliban in 2001. PTI SH MRJ MRJ MRJ New Delhi, Dec 19 (PTI) Following are the top foreign stories at 1700 hours: FGN5 US-H4-LD VISA US court to hear lawsuit against H-4 visa authorisation to spouses of H1B visa holders Washington: A top US court has given the go ahead for hearing a lawsuit challenging the work authorisation to H-4 visa holders after the Trump administration delayed a formal notification over the issue that can impact spouses of H-1B visa holders, mostly Indians. By Lalit K Jha FGN10 PAK-SHARIF Pak court to deliver judgment in two corruption cases against Sharif on Dec 24 Islamabad: An anti-corruption court in Pakistan on Wednesday said it will deliver judgment on December 24 in two remaining corruption cases against ousted prime minister Nawaz Sharif. By Sajjad Hussain FGN6 CHINA-CANADIAN-ARREST Third Canadian detained in China: report Beijing: A third Canadian citizen has been detained in China, a Canadian newspaper reported Wednesday, amid a diplomatic spat between Beijing and Ottawa over the arrest of a Chinese telecom executive. (AFP) FGN7 EU-CABLES-HACKING 'Thousands' of EU diplomatic cables hacked: report Brussels: Hackers apparently connected to China accessed thousands of sensitive EU diplomatic cables, the New York Times reported Wednesday, in the latest embarrassing data breach to hit a major international organisation. (AFP) PTI AMS AMS Washington, Dec 19 (AFP) The United States is preparing to withdraw its troops from Syria, US media reported Wednesday, a major move that throws into question America's role in the region. A US defense official told CNN the US was planning a "full" and "rapid" withdrawal of troops. The Wall Street Journal said the withdrawal would be from northeastern Syria. The Pentagon refused to comment. Currently about 2,000 US forces are in Syria. (AFP) MRJ MRJ Toronto, Dec 20 (AP) A third Canadian has been detained in China, the Canadian government has said, but Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the latest case doesn't seem to the fit the pattern of the previous two and said he favours deescalating the tensions. The first two cases appeared to be in retaliation for the arrest of a top Chinese tech executive in Canada on behalf of the United States. Global Affairs Canada said it is aware of a third Canadian citizen detained in China and consular officials are providing assistance to the family. Trudeau said in French on Wednesday it appears to be a routine case, not involving the sort of national security charges listed against the other two. He brought up the possibility of it being a visa issue. "There are tens of thousands of Canadians that live, travel and work in China," Trudeau said at a year-end news conference. He added that the new case "doesn't seem to fit the pattern of facts on the previous two." He said officials are working to get more details. Asked at what point he'll escalate his concerns to China's president, Trudeau said political posturing or statements are not necessarily going to help those detained. "Escalation or very strong political statements can actually end up being counterproductive to," Trudeau said. "Escalation and political posturing might be satisfactory in the short term to make yourself seem like you are stomping on the table and doing something significant, but it may not contribute to the outcome we all want." Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, was arrested in Canada on Dec. 1 at the request of the US, which wants her extradited to face charges that she and her company misled banks about the company's business dealings in Iran. The Chinese then secretly detained two Canadians on Dec. 10 on vague suspicions of "engaging in activities that endanger the national security" of China. Beijing didn't allow Canadian officials to see Michael Kovrig, a former diplomat in China, for four days and Canadian entrepreneur Michael Spavor for six days. Meng is out on bail in Canada. David Mulroney, a former ambassador to China, said it would be highly unusual if the third arrest is a coincidence. "It's possible but I find it unlikely," he said. Mulroney said it would be problem for Canada and China. "One detention is bad enough. Two is terrible. Three underlines how ruthless China can be," he said. "It serves as a reminder for people that China is a detention state." The case has set off a three-way diplomatic spat in which Canada is stuck in the middle. US President Donald Trump complicated matters by saying he might intervene in the case if it would help clinch a US trade agreement with China much to the consternation of Canadian officials who said the arrest was not political and they were just following their extradition treaty obligations. (AP) ABH ABH Mumbai, Dec 19 (PTI) A 20-year-old Swiggy executive, who was out delivering food, saved 10 lives from the massive fire at a Mumbai hospital that killed eight people. Sidhu Humanabade was passing by when he saw smoke bellowing out from upper floors of the ESIC Kamgar Hospital. He left his bike and asked the firemen if he can join them in rescuing people. After a nod from officials, he reached fourth floor of the building with the help of fire brigade's ladder and rescued some stranded patients and visitors. Braving the dense smoke that engulfed the area, he managed to bring out 10 people to safety in two hours. During this, he chocked on the smoke and is currently admitted at the nearby Seven Hills Hospital. Speaking to PTI from his hospital bed, Sidhu said when he heard people crying for help, he could not stop himself. "I joined the firemen in their rescue operation. Thankfully, the firemen allowed me to climb their ladder to reach the fourth floor. I broke the building's glass with an axe and entered the premises." He then asked the patients to come over to the window ledge and brought them down one by one. "One patient slipped from my hand and fell down, but fortunately she survived," said Sidhu. Sidhu is from Airoli but shifted to Andheri's Marol, where the hospital is, with his uncle a few days back when he joined Swiggy. Union Minister of State for Labour and Employment Santosh Gangwar Tuesday met the victims admitted in various city hospitals and assured that they would be provided proper treatment. Sidhu said the minister met him too and enquired about his health and also asked about his deed. "It was nice to get appreciation from him," said Sidhu, a class 12 pass out. Besides, a woman also recalled how her presence of mind led her to save herself and her infant daughter. Reenu Narayan had brought 8-month-old Sonika to the hospital for treatment of pneumonia. "When I saw people crying and screaming all over the place and the smoke spreading fast, I picked up my baby and ran. I was lucky to find a passage to reach out to safety," Narayan said. Meanwhile, all the rescued patients and visitors were undergoing treatment in seven hospitals across the city and 29 of them were in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), a civic official said. Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis on Tuesday ordered a probe into the fire. The Union labour ministry also announced a compensation of Rs 10 lakh for the kin of each of the deceased, Rs 2 lakh for victims who received serious injuries and Rs 1 lakh for those who suffered minor injuries. On Tuesday, the hospital staffers protested against its management and alleged that working conditions and infrastructure at the facility were "poor". "The hospital building doesn't have fire safety installations nor any emergency exits. Its renovation work began 10 years ago and is still on. Doctors and nurses keep falling sick due to the bad working conditions. We want our grievances to be addressed," a protesting staffer said. City-based public health activist Ravi Duggal said the Employee's State Insurance Corporation or ESIC has a huge cash reserve which is required to be spent properly on hospitals run by it. "The ESIC has reserves worth Rs 50,000 crore. The money is being used to open medical colleges, which is not mandated. It (ESIC) gets contribution of Rs 16,000 crore every year from its members, but only Rs 7,000 crore is used for healthcare and the remaining is used somewhere else, like investments in corporate bonds," he claimed. PTI APM GK SOM SOM Assembly polls, Dalit unrest kept Madhya Pradesh in news By Lemuel Lall and Manish Shrivastava Bhopal, Dec 19 (PTI)The Congress stormed to powerin Madhya Pradeshafter 15 years, while violent protests over dilution of the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act kept the Hindi heartland state on tenterhooks during 2018. The state witnessed hectic political activity before the Assembly polls which concluded with a nail-biting finish when Congress, after a see-saw battle with the BJP, emerged as the single largest party, with five seats more than the BJP. Nine-time Lok Sabha member Kamal Nath became the chief minister and hours after taking charge, announced a farm loan waiver, a poll promise of Congress president Rahul Gandhi, expected to cost Rs 50,000 crore to the state exchequer. Nath faces the challenge of putting the state economy, having borrowings of around Rs 1.60 lakh crore, back on track. The year saw a setback for the BJP as its longest serving chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan was unseated. In pre-poll surveys, Chouhan emerged more popular than Nath and Congress leader Jyotiraditya Scindia but this did not help the BJP retain power despite it getting 41.02 per cent votes as against Congress' 40.89 per cent in the state polls. Till now, a party securing less vote share than its rival never came to power in the state. In the run-up the the polls, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Congress chief Rahul Gandhi addressed 10 public meetings in MP between November 15 and 25, while BJP president Amit Shah addressed 15 public meetings and held road shows. On November 25, Shah stumbled and fell while alighting from a vehicle during his road show in Ashok Nagar district, but escaped unhurt. The state witnessed violent protests in April after the Supreme Court on March 20 "diluted" provisions of the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, ruling that government servants should not be arrested without prior sanction and private citizens too, can be arrested only after an inquiry under the law. Opposing the verdict, several Dalit bodies called for a nationwide strike in which violent incidents and blockades of roads and rail tracks were reported from several states. Six people were killed in Madhya Pradesh during the bandh which witnessed clashes between police and protesters and incidents of arson. It led to the birth of anewpolitical party called 'SAPAKS'(Samanya Alpsankhyak Pichda Adivasi Varg Kalyan Samaj), which pocketed 0.4 per cent votes in the state polls, affecting prospects of other parties' candidates. A few months before the polls, Chouhan's move to accord Minister of State (MoS) status to five seers drew sharp criticism from the Congress. Chouhan tried to justify his action, saying it was aimedatroping in all sections of society for public good. The seers had earlier announced that they would take out a 'Narmada scam yatra' to expose corruption in the river cleanliness drive. Later, Swami Namdeo Tyagi, the self-styled godman popularly known as Computer Baba, resigned as MoS, accusing Chouhan of not fulfilling his promises. In January, former Gujarat chief minister Anandiben Patel was appointedthe state governor. February brought good news for the Congress when it retained both Mungaoli and Kolaras Assembly seats in bypolls. In June, farmers came out on streets in some parts of the state seeking remunerative price for their produce. Former Union Minister Arjun Singh's wife Saroj Kumari (83) petitioned a local court in June seeking action against her son and then Leader of the Opposition Ajay Singh, who lost his traditional Churhat seat in the November assembly polls. Vyapam scam, a multi-crore recruitment and admission racket, also kept the state in news. Congress leader Digvijay Singh filed a complaint in a court alleging that prosecuting agencies CBI and others were protecting then chief minister Chouhan, Union minister Uma Bharti and police officers in the scam. PTI LAL MAS GK VT VT VT Shillong, Dec 19 (PTI) The search operation launched to trace at least 14 labourers, trapped in an illegal coal mine in Meghalaya's East Jaintia Hills district, resumed Wednesday after it took a hit due to strong winds and heavy rains, police said. The labourers were reportedly trapped on December 13 after water from nearby Lytein river had gushed into the illegal rat-hole mine at Ksan area Lumthari village, a senior official said. The exact number of labourers trapped inside the pit could not be ascertained as the mine owners did not maintain a logbook, a top police officer said. They are now feared dead as water from a nearby river has been gushing into the 370-feet-deep pit. Incessant rainfall affected Tuesday's operations as the road leading to the mine was not accessible, the officer said. National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) Assistant Commandant, S K Singh said, "We need to pump out 500 gallons of water per minute to drain out water from the mine." Two pumps could be put into service to flush out water from the mine and authorities were planning to use more pumps as there was no sign of dip in the water level. Tests have also confirmed that the acidity of the water in the river and the mine is the same though it could not be known from which point the water was entering the mine, Singh said. One person, identified as Krip Chullet, has been arrested so far pertaining to the case. He was allegedly involved in hiring labourers, overseeing the work and sending them down the shaft. The Meghalaya government Monday sought the Union Home Ministry's help to rescue the miners. The NDRF teams, which are involved in the rescue operation, along with the Meghalaya Disaster Response Force, have suggested the district administration to ask the Oil Natural Gas Corporation to deploy submersible water pumps to reduce the water level. The Meghalaya Human Rights Commission Tuesday initiated suo motu action against the state government and issued a notice for an enquiry into the incident. Aldous Mawlong, secretary of the Human Rights Commission, said Tuesday that a notice has been issued to chief secretary Y Tsering to cause an effective enquiry into the entire matter and submit a detailed report within 30 days. The commission has also filed a suo motu case against the Meghalaya government seeking compensation for the trapped miners, he said. Justice Aftab Hussain Saikia, chairperson of the commission, has taken strong exception to the fact that illegal mining has been continuing in the state despite NGT ban, Mawlong added. In 2014, the National Green Tribunal had imposed a ban in Meghalaya on rat-hole coal mining, a technique that entails digging small vertical pits to reach the mineral pockets. PTI JOP MM KJ Shillong, Dec 19 (PTI) The operation to rescue more than a dozen labourers, who got trapped in a Meghalaya mine last week, continued for the seventh day on Wednesday. The rescue efforts has so far failed to extricate any person as the water level in the flooded mine in East Jaintia Hills district has not receded, a senior official said. Superintendent of Police (SP) Sylvester Nongtynger told PTI that the family of a person, Assh Bahadur Limbu of Assam's Karbi Anglong district, have said that he was among those inside. If the claim is true, then the total number of people trapped inside the mine now stands at 15, the officer said. He has said the exact number of miners trapped in the mine could not be ascertained as its owners did not maintain a logbook. The labourers have been trapped in the illegal "rat-hole" mine in Lumthari village of Khliehriat area -- around 80 km from Shillong -- since last Thursday after water from the nearby Lytein river had gushed into it. They are now feared dead as water from the river has been entering into the 370-feet-deep pit. The SP said over 100 personnel from the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF), the SDRF and the police were at the site and water was being pumped out continuously from the mine. Doctors said the chances of survival of the trapped miners were diminishing every minute. "Taking into consideration that the miners could have escaped to higher and safer grounds, starvation, dehydration, compounded with the toxic gas underneath, is a cause of concern," they said. The authorities have not given up its efforts to rescue them, district Deputy Commissioner F M Dopth said. Chief Minister Conrad K Sangma had on Monday sought the help of the Union Home Ministry. The NDRF has suggested the district administration to ask the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) to deploy submersible water pumps to reduce the water level. PTI JOP KK HMB The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) today banned former Goldman Sachs banker Tim Leissner for life after his plea deal with the U.S. Justice Department admitting his role in the 1MBD scandal. The MAS, Singapores central bank and financial regulatory authority, imposed the lifetime ban following Leissners admission to criminal charges in the United States. Leissner is the former chairman of Goldman Sachs in Southeast Asia. He pleaded guilty in November to FCPA and money laundering conspiracies in connection with a plot to loot the Malaysian sovereign wealth fund 1MDB, formally known as 1Malaysia Development Berhad. The Singapore order bars Leissner from any regulated activity under the Securities and Futures Act, and participating directly or indirectly in the management of any capital markets services firm in Singapore. The ban extends the 10-year prohibition the MAS issued against Leissner last year. In the United States plea deal, Leissner was ordered to forfeit $43.7 million. Hell learn the rest of his sentence later. Another ex-Goldman banker, Ng Chong Hwa, 51, also known as Roger Ng, was charged by the DOJ with conspiring to violate the FCPA and launder money. Goldman Sachs underwrote more than $6 billion in bonds issued by 1MDB in three separate bond offerings in 2012 and 2013 while Ng was a managing director. The indictment also charged Low Taek Jho, 36, also known as Jho Low, a Malaysian businessman allegedly at the center of the plot to steal billions of dollars from 1MBD. The DOJ alleged that Low, Ng, Leissner, and others conspired to bribe officials at 1MDB and in Abu Dhabi to win business for Goldman, including the 2012 and 2013 bond deals. They allegedly stole the proceeds from the bond deals and used some of the money to take kickbacks and pay bribes to officials at 1MDB and in Abu Dhabi. The DOJ said they conspired to launder the money in the United States by buying luxury residential real estate in New York City and elsewhere, and artwork from a New York-based auction house, and by funding major Hollywood films, including the Wolf of Wall Street. In Malaysia earlier this year, police charged former Prime Minister Najib Razak and his wife with laundering money looted from 1MDB. During raids on the couples houses and condos, Malaysian police recovered $273 million worth of jewelry, handbags, and other valuables. Police also seized cash in 26 currencies with a total value of $28.6 million. The DOJ has filed forfeiture actions against nearly $1.7 billion in assets linked to 1MDB. ____ Harry Cassin is the managing editor of the FCPA Blog. Patna, Dec 19 (PTI) Lok Janshakti Party (LJP), a key constituent of the ruling NDA, Wednesday pressed for finalisation of the coalition's seat-sharing arrangement in Bihar by month-end while making it clear it will not agree for anything less than six Lok Sabha seats and one in Rajya Sabha. The assertion was made by LJP's state president Pashupati Kumar Paras, younger brother of the party chief and union minister Ram Vilas Paswan, a day after the party's parliamentary board chairman Chirag Paswan expressed dissatisfaction over no headway being made on the seat-sharing issue despite several meetings with the BJP leaders. Paras said the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) has "undoubtedly" weakened in Bihar with exit of partners like Jitan Ram Manjhi and Upendra Kushwaha. Speaking to reporters here, Paras said Kushwaha parted ways after he ran out of patience, as BJP chief Amit Shah and JD(U) chief Nitish Kumar made an announcement that their parties would contest an equal number of seats without taking into account that there were other constituents. Ideally, all NDA partners should have sat together and arrived at a seat-sharing formula through consensus, he said, while asking what would be left for other allies following a decision by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Janata Dal (United) deciding to fight on an equal number of seats in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. "Lack of clarity on the issue led to the RLSP's exit. A final decision on sharing of seats among the remaining allies must be arrived at by December 31," said Paras, who is also a member of the Nitish Kumar cabinet in the state. He said Chirag Paswan's tweets reflected the party's sentiments and the seat-sharing formula must be timely and respectable. Pointing out that the party had contested seven seats in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, the state LJP chief said there was no reason why it would settle for less than that for the 2019 elections, or for six Lok Sabha seats and one in Rajya Sabha. There has been speculation that the LJP chief and union minister Ram Vilas Paswan may not fight the Lok Sabha polls next year owing to bad health and leave his Hajipur (reserved) constituency for some family member and himself opt for the Upper House. In a series of tweets, Chirag Paswan had on Tuesday cautioned the BJP against damage to the NDA in the event of the BJP's failure to arrive at a seat-sharing formula that was respectable for other allies. His tweets have triggered speculations that the party, which was part of the Congress-led UPA for a decade before switching over to the BJP-led coalition during the 2014 polls, was bracing for changing sides yet again. Reacting to the developments, RLSP's Upendra Kushwaha said the LJP should follow his example and leave the NDA. He alleged the BJP and Nitish Kumar in their arrogance were hell bent upon destroying the smaller parties. State BJP spokesman Nikhil Anand, however, sought to downplay the latest outbursts from the LJP leaders saying the NDA remains intact and any delay in announcing a seat-sharing formula could be due to the top leaders of his party having been busy in assembly polls for five states. He said things will be settled amicably and in time. JD(U) spokesman Rajiv Ranjan Prasad said the tuning between all three constituents of the NDA in Bihar is perfect and there is no need for getting alarmed over the tweets. He asserted that all three parties -- JD(U), BJP and LSP -- will fight together and the NDA will win all 40 Lok Sabha seats in the state. Senior Congress leader Prem Chandra Mishra, however, said the recent defeat of the BJP in its strongholds of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan has put a question mark on the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his allies have become uncertain about their own prospects. The LJP's stance has to be viewed in this light, he said. RJD national vice-president Shivanand Tiwary squarely blamed Nitish Kumar for the present crisis in the NDA, saying he is like a "Brahmin" who has to be appeased at the cost of others. He said it would not come as a surprise if the LJP becomes the next casualty in the NDA. PTI NAC SNS BJ BJ New Delhi, Dec 19 (PTI) A group of former civil servants has written an open letter criticising the Centre and the Uttar Pradesh government for failing to take action on the killing of a policeman in Bulandshahr and demanded the resignation of Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath. The letter, signed by 83 former bureaucrats on Tuesday, asked citizens to unite in a "crusade against the politics of hate and division a politics which aims to destroy the fundamental principles on which our Republic is founded". "It is a measure of the rapid erosion of constitutional values that we, as a group, have felt a compelling need to speak out as many as nine times in the last eighteen months," the letter read. The latest letter follows the December 3 killing of Inspector Subodh Kumar Singh and another man in Bulandshahr following mob violence over alleged cow slaughter. The main accused in the case is a leader of right-wing group Bajrang Dal. PTI had earlier reported that local BJP leaders had demanded his transfer after accusing him of creating obstacles for religious functions. According to the letter, the violence in Bulandshahr was a deliberate attempt to display majoritarian muscle and send a message to the Muslim communities living in the region that they "have to live in fear, accept their subordinate status and conform to the cultural diktats of the majority community". "World over, in any civilized society, the killing of a policeman is a more serious offence than any other crime, because it represents an assault on the very basis of that civilisation," it said. Among those who have signed the letter are former foreign secretaries Shyam Saran and Sujatha Singh, former IAS officials and activists Aruna Roy and Harsh Mander, former Delhi lt governor Najeeb Jung, former Prasar Bharati CEO Jawahar Sircar and former Planning Commission secretary N C Saxena. The letter said the Uttar Pradesh chief minister "refuses to acknowledge the gravity of the incident and its communal intent, condemn the perpetrators of violence or direct the police to take action against them but instead asks them to focus attention on those responsible for illegal cow slaughter". The former bureaucrats also attacked Prime Minister Narendra Modi. "Our Prime Minister, who is so voluble in his election campaigns and who never tires of telling us of how the Constitution of India is the only holy book he worships, maintains stony silence even as he sees a Chief Minister handpicked by him treat that same Constitution with sheer contempt," they said. They also requested the Allahabad High Court to take suo motu cognizance of the Bulandshahr incident and order a judicial enquiry. The bureaucrats also reminded the state's chief secretary, the director general of police and the home secretary "of their constitutional duty to fearlessly implement the Rule of Law rather than the perverse dictates of their political masters". A similar letter was issued after the rape cases of minors in Kathua and Unnao, calling it post-independent India's "darkest hour". PTI SOM SOM MIN MIN New Delhi, Dec 19 (PTI) The country's top drug regulator, the CDSCO, drew samples of Johnson and Johnson's baby powder from the company's Baddi plant in Himachal Pradesh on Wednesday amid reports that the product allegedly contained cancer-causing asbestos. This was part of a massive nationwide action against the American multinational pharmaceutical major to draw samples of their talcum powder. The company said they were "fully cooperating" with the Central Drugs Standard Control Organization (CDSCO) by providing tests and samples, and asserted that the characterisation of these visits as 'raids or seizures is "incorrect". The CDSCO, under the Union Health Ministry, said over the next four to five days, drug inspectors will search manufacturing plants and wholesalers of J&J's talcum powder and collect samples of the powder for testing. The inspectors will check if the products complied with the cosmetics standards in India, officials said. "The action will take place at 12-15 locations across the country and samples of all brands of the Johnson and Johnson talcum powder will be collected for testing to check for the presence of asbestos. "Samples of raw material as well as the finished product from retail stores are being collected," a government official said. Sources said the CDSCO has constituted a team of 100 drug inspectors for the purpose. The country's top drug regulator will test the collected samples for presence of asbestos and also check if the brands complied with all regulatory and manufacturing standards, the official said. The effects of long-term unsafe asbestos exposure on human health are well documented and asbestos fibres are easily inhaled and carried into the lower regions of the lung where those can cause fibrotic lung disease (asbestosis) and changes in the lining of the chest cavity (pleura). These diseases can lead to reduced respiratory function and death, while long-term inhalation of asbestos fibres also increases the risk of lung cancer and mesothelioma. According to a senior official, powder samples of Johnson and Johnson were tested in 2016 but they were found to be complying with Indian standards. Some recent reports claimed that the firm allegedly knew for decades about the presence of cancer-causing asbestos in their product. The action by CDSCO came at a time the American pharmaceutical major is already embroiled in a controversy over its faulty hip implants. The Union Health Ministry recently approved the formula for determination of compensation for patients who prior to August 2010, had received faulty articular surface replacement hip implants manufactured by Johnson and Johnson. When contacted, the company confirmed that a few of its facilities were visited by the CDSCO and local Food and Drug Administration officials on Wednesday. A company spokesperson said they are "fully cooperating" with the authorities by providing tests and samples. "The characterization of these visits as 'raids or seizures' is incorrect as has been reported in some instances. The tests have been conducted in the regular way that the FDA collects samples," the spokesperson said. The company said Johnson & Johnson's baby powder is asbestos-free and doesn't cause cancer. "We have scientific evidence to prove that our talcum powder is safe and beneficial for use," the spokesperson said. The company said the safety of cosmetic talc is based on a long history of safe use and decades of research and clinical evidence by independent researchers and scientific review boards across the world. It pointed out that in the past, authorities in India like the FDAs and the CDSCO have confirmed that its products comply with Indian standards and are free of asbestos. "We unequivocally stand by the safety of our products, are fully compliant with regulatory standards and requirements in India and will continue to work with the regulatory authorities," the spokesperson said. According to reports, earlier this year, a Missouri jury in the US ordered the company to pay a record USD 4.69 billion to 22 women who alleged that its talc-based products, including its baby powder, contained asbestos and caused them to develop ovarian cancer. PTI PLB TDS NSD Chandigarh, Dec 19 (PTI) Ruling BJP on Wednesday swept the mayoral elections in five cities in Haryana, with Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar terming it as an endorsement of the policies and development agenda of the government by the people. The party's mayoral candidates from Hisar, Karnal, Panipat, Rohtak and Yamunanagar registered emphatic wins. Though opposition Congress did not contest these polls, some of its leaders extended support to independents. The INLD-BSP combine, which was contesting some of the mayoral seats on party symbol, faced a severe beating and was even behind the independents. It was the first time that mayors of the five municipal corporations were elected directly. Earlier, the councillors used to elect the mayor. Also the Haryana Election Commission had decided to treat 'none-of-the-above' or NOTA option as a "fictional candidate", making it must for winning candidates to secure more votes than those cast for NOTA. In case, NOTA would have got more votes, the election would have been held afresh. The election was considered a battle of prestige for the chief minister who had campaigned extensively. Asked if there was a possibility that Assembly polls, which are due in October next year, would be held together with the 2019 Lok Sabha election, Khattar tld reporters, "If there is any proposal from the Centre's side, we are ready (for the assembly polls). But on our part, we have said that these polls will be held as per schedule. From Panipat, Avneet Kaur registered a massive victory over her nearest rival Anshu Kaur, who was backed by a local Congress leader, The BJP candidate had polled 1,26,321 votes and won by a margin of 74,940 votes. Immediately after her win, Avneet said among her immediate priority will be to come up with a plan to decongest traffic in Panipat city. From Khattar's home constituency Karnal, Renu Bala Gupta overcame a combined opposition challenge. She defeated Asha Wadhwa, who was supported by Indian National Lok Dal (INLD), Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and Congress, by a margin of 9,348 votes. Gautam Sardana defeated Rekha Aren by a margin of 28,091 votes to register win from Hisar, where the rival candidate was supported by two senior Congress leaders from there. Manmohan Goyal defeated Congress-supported Sita Ram from Rohtak by a margin of 14,776 votes while in Yamunanagar, Madan Singh defeated Rakesh Kumar. There are 10 municipal corporations in the state and polls were earlier held in Gurugram and Faridabad. Due to delimitation exercise and related litigation, municipal polls are yet to be held in Sonipat MC, Panchkula and Ambala. Expressing happiness over the election results, Khattar told reporters, I congratulate the people of Haryana. Our candidates have registered wins at five places while majority of our councilors too have won. This is victory of people of Haryana, victory of our workers. People have endorsed our government's policies, our development agenda and various initiatives which we have taken to take the state forward during the past four years. It is a stamp of approval from the public' This is victory of our government's achievements. To serve people has been our priority and will remain so in future also, he said. Opposition parties had targeted the chief minister for allegedly playing 'Punjabi' card to woo the urban voters in these polls. Khattar was asked about a controversial advertisement for which Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal had targeted him during his Sonipat visit a few days ago. Referring to advertisements in two Hindi newspapers, Kejriwal had said on Sunday, the day when civic polls were held, that "the advertisements say that after a gap of 52 years Haryana has got a chief minister belonging to the Punjabi community. If you commit a mistake today, then in another 60 years you will not get a Punjabi chief minister". Khattar said he had nothing to do with that particular advertisement and that people issue advertisements on their own. I have nothing to do with that, he said. He also added: We are committed to development of entire state, from day one we have said 'Haryana Ek Haryanvi Ek', this is the mantra we believe in. People belong to different castes, but we do not discriminate on basis of caste, we treat all as one. Replying to a question on civic polls, he said opposition had to bite dust.Opposition had shown great unity in Karnal, but there too they were defeated, he said. He congratulated Avneet Kaur from Panipat for her "landslide win". Replying to a question, Khattar said "civics, assembly, Lok Sabha polls are all different in nature and he does not treat any election as 'semi-final'". He, however, said that win will give a boost to the ruling outfit to work even harder to take the state on the path of progress. Asked about demands by opposition for voting through ballot paper, Khattar said: When they win, the same EVM is good for them. When they lose, they raise doubts over EVM, this has become their habit. The EVM system is good, it is transparent and results are out in shortest period of time. To another question, Khattar said it is up to the Election Commission to see when they want to hold bypolls to Jind assembly segment, which has fallen vacant after the death of INLD MLA Hari Chand Middha in August. PTI SUN e RT New Delhi, Dec 19 (PTI) Over 2 lakh Indians have been repatriated from 68 countries in the last four years, with the highest number of 95,606 Indian nationals being sent back from Saudi Arabia, the Lok Sabha was told Wednesday. Responding to a question in the Lower House, Minister of State for External Affairs V K Singh said the total number of Indian nationals in distress repatriated by missions or posts from May 2014 to May 2018 is 2,08,186, including those rescued from 96 countries. Loss of passport, landing in a country due to flight diversions, stuck due to natural calamity or terror attack, and abuse by foreign employer are among the reasons of distress causing the repatriation, Singh said in a written reply. The highest number of Indians were repatriated from Saudi Arabia at 95,606, followed by Malaysia at 31,830 and Qatar at 9,236, he said. PTI UZM IJT New Delhi, Dec 19 (PTI) A delegation of 48 newly-elected sarpanches of panchayats from Jammu and Kashmir called on Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday and sought his assistance for the development of the state. Led by chairman Shafiq Mir of All Jammu and Kashmir Panchayat Conference (AJKPC), an apex body of panchayat leaders of the state, the delegation thanked Prime Minister Modi and conveyed its appreciation to him for empowering the institutions of local self-governance through the successful and peaceful conduct of panchayat elections in the state. Modi conveyed his best wishes to the newly-elected representatives and exhorted them to strive for the welfare and upliftment of people. He said the government is committed to the empowerment of the people, and will stand shoulder to shoulder with the local government representatives for the welfare of the state, to fulfil the aspirations of the masses. Modi assured them of the government's full support for making the Panchayati Raj model a success, and responsive to the people's basic necessities and grievances. Empowerment of grassroots institutions is a significant step in taking Jammu and Kashmir away from the path of violence and secure the rights and development of the local populace, he said. AJKPC chairman Mir said the people overwhelmingly participated in the elections which shows their strong belief in democracy. The state recorded an overall polling of 74 per cent in the nine phases of panchayat polls, according to election officials. The polls passed off peacefully amid tight security with no untoward incident despite a boycott call given by separatists and the lurking threat of violence by terrorists. Major regional parties, the National Conference (NC) and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), did not participate in the polls. Mir said that despite the PDP and the NC boycotting the elections, "an impressive 74 per cent voting was registered in the state which shows that the people have faith in democracy". Terming the peaceful and successful panchayat elections in the state as a victory of democracy, he said that they will not allow leaders to play politics on panchayats, saying that these are community institutions and not a political battleground. He expressed gratitude to the people for taking part in the elections in a large number despite all odds. "The politicians of the state should now understand one fact that people do not believe in their dirty politics. They want peace to return to the Valley," he said. "I urge people in the country not to see Kashmir from any isolated incident of violence or stone throwing. The people believe in peace and tranquillity," he said. Expressing sorrow over the killing of seven civilians in Pulwama recently, Mir said it was a very unfortunate incident which should not have happened. He also urged people in the state not to visit an encounter site. "The majority of the people in the Valley want peaceful and dignified life. Some vested interests have exploited youngsters and are playing with their lives as well as future," Mir said. Seven civilians died last week when security forces opened fire at an unruly mob that thronged the site of an encounter in south Kashmir's Pulwama district in which three terrorists and an army man were killed. Asked about some elected representatives living in hotels in Kashmir, the AJKPC chairman said majority of the elected leaders are living in their village and home and some of them might be living in hotels. Mir asked political parties in the state not to link the elections with any kind of political ideology and said that a panchayat is just a community institution and local governance body "which has nothing to do with politics". PTI CPS CK CK New Delhi, Dec 19 (PTI) The government should consider a sub-category under Priority Sector Lending (PSL) for boosting affordable housing sector in the country, the NITI Aayog suggested on Wednesday in its 'Strategy for New India @ 75' document. The government think-tank also suggested the government that the land lying idle with various sick/loss making public sector undertakings (PSUs) of the Centre or state governments may be used to resolve the issue of land availability for affordable housing projects under 'Housing for All'. The Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (Urban), launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in June 2015, aims to ensure "Housing for all by 2022" by providing financial assistance to a beneficiary. Under the PMAY (U), the government has set a target of constructing one crore houses in urban areas across the country over a period of seven years -- 2015 to 2022. "To ensure greater access for the poor to institutional finance, the Department of Financial Services should consider a subcategory under priority sector lending (PSL) for affordable houses," the NITI Aayog said in the document. In 2017, the Modi government had also announced infrastructure status to affordable housing. The 'Strategy for New India @ 75' document, unveiled on Wednesday, also suggested that government should also consider relaxing eligibility conditions for bank loans such as raising the cap of Rs 10 lakh on the cost of the house and raising the Rs two lakh income threshold. In order to reduce cost, government projects should focus on the life cycle cost (LCC) approach to the construction of houses rather than the cost per square foot approach to ensure quality of construction and reduce expenditure incurred on the maintenance of houses, it said. According to an official figure, till December 3, a total 65,43,970 houses have been approved for construction under the PMAY(U) across the country. Of these, 35,49,531 houses have been grounded for construction. As many as 12,26,530 houses have been completed out of which 12,19,549 have been occupied by the beneficiaries. PTI BUN SLB CK New Delhi, Dec 19 (PTI) Uttar Pradesh and Bihar are lagging behind in construction of toilets in rural areas under the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM), the Centre's think-tank Niti Aayog stated in its vision document unveiled on Wednesday. The much awaited document titled 'Strategy for New India @ 75' aimed to accelerate growth to 9-10 per cent and make the country a USD 4-trillion economy by 2022-23. The Niti Aayog said the constraints faced by the clean India mission are largely related to implementation challenges, including lack of availability of space for construction of household toilets. "Tackling the problem of lagging states of the 1.56 crore household toilets yet to be constructed in rural areas, 0.90 crore are to be constructed in two states, namely Uttar Pradesh and Bihar," the vision document stated. It also suggested that the expenditure on bio-toilets/bio-digesters may be considered for concession from the Goods and Services Tax (GST) to encourage large-scale adoption. It also recommends "the higher monetary compensation and social security to rag pickers and small sanitation workers for segregating waste. This will help waste-to-energy plants as well as projects related to dry waste management and help reduce the burden on landfills". Solid and liquid waste management projects should be covered under priority sector lending, the document said, adding that to maintain the open defecation free (ODF) status of villages and cities, the government should continue to monitor and undertake corrective measures for areas that might be slipping back from ODF status. The Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) was launched on October 2, 2014, to make India open defecation free by October 2, 2019. It has two sub missions --(1) Swachh Bharat Mission (Gramin) for rural areas and (2) Swachh Bharat Mission (Urban) for urban areas. The Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation is the nodal ministry for SBM with several other ministries, including Housing and Urban Affairs, being actively involved in achieving its goals. PTI JTR RCJ Jaipur, Dec 19 (PTI) Rajasthan Deputy Chief Minister Sachin Pilot Wednesday said the government's decision to waive off farm loans was the step towards fulfilling the commitment of the Congress party to farmers of the state. "Our government has announced the loan waiver as per the promise of party president Rahul Gandhi," Pilot said Wednesday night. Two days after being sworn in, the Congress government in Rajasthan Wednesday waived short-term crop loans from cooperative banks and loans of up to Rs 2 lakh taken by farmers from other banks. "This will put a burden of Rs 18,000 crore on the exchequer," Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot told reporters. PTI SDA AQS Monito, a Lausanne, Switzerland-based comparison website for international money transfer services, raises $2.5M in Series A funding. The round was led by Tamedia, Switzerlands leading media group, who owns digital brands such as Doodle, Zattoo, Ricardo.ch (amongst others), with participation from Silicon Valley-based serial fintech entrepreneur Alexandre Gonthier, B&Y Venture Partners and existing investors. The company intends to use these funds to extend its international audience and hire new software engineers, designers and digital marketers to complement its current team. Led by Francois Briod, co-founder and CEO, Monito helps individuals and businesses find, compare and review the best money transfer provider for their needs out of the hundreds of available options (over 400 money transfer providers) across more than 190 countries. The comparison website, which ranks money transfer services based on their cost, speed, pay-out method, trustworthiness and more, has already been used by millions of people from all over the world and currently employs 7 staff members. FinSMEs 19/12/2018 Lucknow, Dec 19 (PTI) Hitting back at the opposition which stalled the proceedings of the Uttar Pradesh legislature over the issue of law and order, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath said on Wednesday the Bulandshahr violence, was a "political conspiracy" hatched by those who have lost political ground. The entire Question Hour was washed out in both the Houses of the state legislature amid uproar and sloganeering by the opposition Samajwadi Party and the Congress over various issues, including the plight of farmers and the law-and-order situation in the state, that led to repeated adjournments. "The December 3 (Bulandshahr) violence is a political conspiracy (hatched) by those who have lost political ground," he told reporters after the Assembly was adjourned for the day amid opposition ruckus. "It was a political conspiracy which has been exposed... peace and order will be maintained at all cost... the administration and government have repulsed the designs (of conspirators) sternly," Adityanath said. The chief minister had earlier termed the Bulandshahr incidents an accident. The Bulandshahr violence, which occurred over an incident of alleged cow slaughter, claimed two lives including that of a police inspector. Responding to questions on the issue, Adityanath said those whose political ground has receded are embracing each other to hide their shortcomings. Wednesday was the second day of the brief winter session of the state legislature spread over four sittings. Both the Assembly and the Legislative Council were adjourned on the first day of the current session Tuesday after condoling the deaths of former chief minister N D Tiwari, BJP legislator Patel Ram Kumar Verma and Union minister Ananth Kumar. PTI SAB SMI NSD NSD Muzaffarpur (Bihar), Dec 19 (PTI) A complaint was lodged in a court here on Wednesday against Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Kamal Nath for allegedly hurting the sentiments of the people of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh with his comments on migrant workers. Social activist Tamanna Hashmi filed a petition before the Chief Judicial Magistrates court under IPC sections 153 (provocation with intent to cause riot), and 504 (intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of peace). "Lot of industries are set up in which people from other states, like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, come to work. I do not want to criticise them, but the youth of Madhya Pradesh are deprived (of jobs)," Nath had said on Monday announcing a new state government policy under which industries availing investment incentives will need to give 70 per cent employment to local youths. In the complaint, the petitioner has claimed to have felt aggrieved by Nath's statement. The court is yet to fix a date for hearing of the complaint case. The senior Congress leader's remarks, which he made shortly after being sworn in as Madhya Pradesh's chief minister, has drawn flak from the ruling JD(U)-BJP combine in Bihar. The RJD, an ally of the Congress in Bihar, has also termed the remarks as avoidable, though it accused the BJP of blowing the matter out of proportions. PTI CORR NAC SNS Speaking to reporters in Bhopal on Wednesday, Nath defended his comments saying other states including Gujarat also have policies giving employment preference to locals. PTI CORR NAC SNS BJ BJ Congress humiliated all democratic institutions: Modi Chennai, Dec 19 (PTI) Hitting back at the Congress, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Wednesday it has humiliated every institution of democracy, be it the Army or the CAG. He said the main opposition party even questioned a Supreme Court verdict just because it did not like it, apparently hinting at the continued assault by the party on him over the Rafale deal. The prime minister was interacting with booth level workers of Vellore, Kanchipuram, Viluppuram and south Chennai districts of Tamil Nadu, and Puducherry, through video conferencing from New Delhi. "The Congress party has become more cunning since the days of Emergency," he said, sharpening his assault on the Congress. Congress president Rahul Gandhi had on Sunday lashed out at the Modi government, saying he will not allow the "destruction" of institutions like the Supreme Court and the Reserve Bank of India. The BJP government believes "only one idea should run India", Gandhi had told a public rally organised by his party's southern ally the DMK in Chennai. Modi asked party workers to increase their outreach by creating awareness about his government's welfare schemes. "From housing to health care, from sanitation to skills, there are schemes for every section of society," he said, and asked booth level workers to reach out to people about those measures. PTI VGN SK SK SK Pratapgarh (UP), Dec 17 (PTI) A 35-year-old man was killed after his neighbours allegedly poured petrol and set him on fire over a land dispute in UP's Pratapgarh, police said Wednesday. According to police, there was a dispute over land in Sarai Narayan Singh village. Late Monday night, when Rajesh Kori was fetching water from a hand pump, his neighbours started pouring petrol on him and soon set him ablaze. Rajesh's brothers, Arjun and Anoop, also suffered burn injuries when they tried to save him. "The three were rushed to Allahabad for treatment, where Rajesh succumbed to his injuries," Lalganj Circle Officer OP Dubey said. Four persons have been arrested in the incident a case has been registered. Police said further investigations are underway. PTI CORR NAV AD SOM Srinagar, Dec 19 (PTI) The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the National Conference (NC) Wednesday extended support to the people of Kargil demanding a full-fledged university. The PDP attacked the governor administration, saying it was sowing seeds of discord in Jammu and Kashmir by neglecting Kargil. Senior PDP leader Naeem Akhtar said while the PDP welcomes the decision of creating a new university in Leh district, Kargil should not be rendered as a left out entity. "The PDP supports the demand of the people of Kargil for a full-fledged university in the district," he said in a statement. Attacking the governor administration, he said, "By functioning without taking public sentiment into consideration or assessment of requirements, the governor administration is causing tension and sowing seeds of discord in the state," Akhtar said. Akhtar said the decisions pertaining to the overall development of the state, including the creation of new universities, are best taken by the public representatives who get feedback from the people and are connected with the problems facing different regions of the state like Ladakh, Chenab and Pir Panchal. The residents of Kargil have been protesting against the decision of the governor administration for not sanctioning a university in the district while granting one to Leh. NC vice-president Omar Abdullah in a tweet said, "I wholeheartedly support this demand of the people of Kargil. It's very important for Governor Malik to balance the demands & requirements of Leh AND Kargil. Failure to address the concerns of BOTH districts leads to alienation & anger. Kargil deserves justice." PTI MIJ DPB DPB Ludhiana, Dec 19 (PTI) The Punjab unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party held a protest here Wednesday against the Congress for allegedly "speaking lies" about the Rafale fighter aircraft deal. Activists of the saffron party led by Punjab BJP Chief Shwait Malik staged dharna and gheraoed the local office of the Congress near Clock Tower chowk here. They also raised slogans against Congress president Rahul Gandhi. "Rahul Gandhi is trying to befool people by raising illogical questions on the Rafale deal. The Supreme Court had also found no basis in the allegations over Rafale deal," said Malik while addressing the gathering. Malik demanded Gandhi's resignation from the party. The Supreme Court on Friday dismissed the pleas challenging the deal between India and France for the procurement of 36 Rafale jets saying there was no occasion to "really doubt the decision making process". The BJP is holding press meets in 70 cities across the country to attack the opposition party against the backdrop of the Supreme Court's verdict on the controversial Rafale deal. PTI COR CHS CK Raipur, Dec 19 (PTI) In a sudden move, the newly-elected Congress government in Chhattisgarh late Wednesday evening removed Director General of Police (DGP) A N Upadhyay. D M Awasthi, a 1986-batch IPS officer, has been given temporary charge of the post. As per an order issued by the government, Upadhyay, a 1985-batch IPS officer, who was the DGP since March 2014, has been made Chairman-cum-Managing Director of the Police Housing Corporation. Awasthi, who is Special Director General (SDG) for anti-naxal operations and the State Intelligence Branch (SIB), has been given temporary charge of DGP Chhattisgarh Police along with his existing charges, it said. Moreover, Awasthi, who also used to handle Police Housing Corporation as Chairman-cum-Managing Director, will be relived from this charge after Upadhyay takes over, the order said. PTI TKP AQS AQS Puducherry Dec 19 (PTI) Chief Minister V Narayanasamy said Wednesday if a dam is built across the Cauvery river by the Karnataka government in Mekedatu, it will adversely affect farmers in Puducherry's Karaikal region. The chief minister said he has conveyed this to Union Minister for Road Transport, Shipping and Water Resources Nitin Gadkari. "If a dam comes up at Mekedatu as planned by the Karnataka government across the Cauvery river in Karnataka, farmers in Karaikal region would face serious setback for want of water for farm operations," Narayanasamy told reporters here after returning from Delhi. The chief minister said he has made it "very clear" to the Union minister that interests of riparian regions, including Puducherry, would be hit if the Karnataka government constructed the dam. Narayanasamy said he has registered his protest with Gadkari over the Centre's nod to Karnataka to prepare the Detailed Project report (DPR) for the dam. The Union minister was informed that there would be violation of the final order of the Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal if the project was pursued, he said. The chief minister said he had also brought to Gadkari's notice that "no move should be made to construct the dam without holding discussions with the riparian Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Puducherry". Gadkari has listened to the plea and indicated that the joint meeting with riparian states and Puducherry would be held in the next ten days by the Central Water Commission, he said. PTI CORR AQS ANB ANB CALEB MAGGS, Chariho, Football, Junior; Maggs caught 11 passes for 119 yards and two touchdowns in the Chargers loss to East Greenwich on Thanksgiving eve. He had scoring receptions of 1 and 29 yards. LUKE LOWRY, Stonington, Football, Junior; Lowry caught a pair of TD passes in the Bears Thanksgiving Day loss to Westerly. The two scoring receptions matched a record for the holiday game held by five others. Lowry had touchdown catches of 36 and 67 yards. He was named Stoningtons top offensive player in the game. ZACK TUCK, Westerly, Football, Junior; Tuck rushed for 241 yards and scored three touchdowns in the Bulldogs Thanksgiving Day victory over Stonington. Tuck was named the games MVP and was also selected as Westerlys top offensive player. Vote View Results Rothys, a San Francisco, CA-based womens footwear brand, received $35m investment from Goldman Sachs Investment Partners. Founded in 2016 by Stephen Hawthornthwaite and Roth Martin, Rothys is a brand whose shoes are made from 100% recycled plastic water bottles and other recyclable materials, 3D knitted into seamless silhouettes and assembled by hand. The company plans use the funds to open regional stores in major US cities and internationally. The brand owns 100% of its manufacturing processes, including a facility in China, which allows the brand to test new products while remaining responsive to consumer demand signals. Rothys offers four stylish silhouettes for women, the Flat, the Point, the Loafer, and the Sneaker, and one silhouette for girls, the Girls Loafer. The shoes are available online and the company recently launched its first retail presence on Fillmore St. in San Francisco. The company has sold more than 1 million pairs of shoes in 2018 year to date, generating revenue of more than $140 million. FinSMEs 19/12/2018 Fraud victims will next month get greater powers to complain about banks where their stolen money ends up. It is a victory for Money Mail's campaign for victims of push-payment scams, where people are deceived into transferring money into a fraudster's account. If, after complaining, the victim is still unhappy with the way the bank has handled their case, new rules will allow them to escalate their complaint to the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS). Victims of push-payment scams will next month get greater powers to complain about banks Currently the criminal's bank is not obliged to deal with issues raised by victims who are not customers. Following a review, the Financial Conduct Authority decided that receiving banks could do more to identify incoming payments and prevent accounts from being compromised by fraudsters. Victims of so-called authorised push payment (APP) fraud will be able to complain to the receiving bank from January 31. Victims of scams before this date will not have the same rights. Some 145 million was lost to APP fraud in the first six months of 2018, according to UK Finance. Of this, just 31 million was returned to victims. a.murray@dailymail.co.uk Battle: Maureen Stephenson struggled to get a refund Customers of Economy Energy are being forced to battle for refunds worth hundreds of pounds. With Christmas just six days away, some households have been left more than 800 out of pocket after switching to a new supplier months ago. Money Mail readers have told how the small supplier, which has 305,000 customers, has repeatedly ignored their complaints. And according to the Coventry-based firm's own figures, it received 7,073 complaints between April and June compared to 2,837 in the same period last year. Retired policeman Derek Boldison, 83, switched his gas and electricity to Octopus Energy in August after Economy Energy tried to increase his electricity payment by 20 a month. When he received his final bill, he realised the firm owed him almost 300. Three-and-a-half months on, Derek, who lives with wife Pauline in Selby, North Yorkshire, is still waiting for his money back. He says: 'I feel so angry that the company is not taking responsibility for refunding its customers. I could use the money to pay some outstanding bills and around Christmas a little extra money always comes in handy.' After Money Mail stepped in, Derek received a call to say his refund is being processed. Tony Clarke, 63, has been waiting for 500 since he switched to People's Energy on July 11. He says he was told there are many more people ahead of him in the queue for a refund. The driving instructor, from Cambridge, says: 'I got the impression Economy Energy is a company that uses customer money to fund its business. They ask for two months' payments in advance and then refuse to give you your money back.' Joanne Taylor, 38, of Cheshire, has been chasing a refund of 866 since July 30. She became an Economy Energy customer in May 2017 when she bought her house. according to Economy Energy's own figures, it received 7,073 complaints between April and June compared to 2,837 in the same period last year Due to extensive renovations, Joanne, her husband and two children were not able to live in the property so energy usage was low and she built up credit. But when Joanne requested a refund, she was told she would only be entitled to some of the money to make sure she stayed in credit over the winter. Angry at having her money withheld, Joanne complained. She was surprised to be told the only way she could get a full refund was to leave the company. She cancelled her contract on September 5 and switched to Bulb but has yet to get her money. Clive Parker, 75, has been battling with Economy Energy since October for a refund of 320, after building up credit over the summer. Clive, a retired engineer from Brampton, Cumbria, regularly switches to a cheaper provider when his deals expire. He moved to SO Energy on October 23 and waited for Economy Energy to issue a refund, but instead the firm took another payment for gas and electricity in November. Clive and wife Pauline, 72, a retired business owner, have since made repeated attempts to get their money back. He says: 'To say we have been given the run-around is an understatement. They admitted they owed the money but could not say when I would receive it.' Clive threatened to make a formal complaint but was told it would be 'logged and closed' because the complaints team already knew of its refund problems. Frustrated, Clive contacted Money Mail and has now been refunded in full. Last year the Energy Ombudsman received 467 complaints about Economy Energy. This year's figure has nearly quadrupled to 1,825. Citizens Advice scored the firm just 2.4 out of five in its most recent customer service league table. Ofgem says suppliers cannot withhold direct debit surpluses without a valid reason Former building society manager Maureen Stephenson, 71, had to battle with Economy Energy for 12 weeks to get her refund of 244 after switching to a new supplier in September. Maureen, from Doncaster, says: 'It is not about needing the money, it is the principle. I built up that credit over the summer to use in the winter and they would not let me have it.' Maureen finally received her refund on December 13. It is the latest scandal to hit a small energy supplier this year. Last week we revealed how One Select had become the eighth to go bust in just 12 months. In October we sent energy watchdog Ofgem a dossier of around 120 complaints from readers about Green Star Energy's customer service. Ofgem says suppliers cannot withhold direct debit surpluses without a valid reason. A spokesman says it routinely monitors suppliers' compliance and will raise issues directly where there is evidence of widespread or serious problems. Economy Energy has also had a number of clashes with Ofgem this year. In June it faced accusations of colluding with E, another supplier, to avoid targeting each other's customers. In October, it missed the deadline for paying its share of renewable energy subsidies shortly after hiking the price of its variable rate Switch Saver by 38 per cemt. Economy Energy, which was set up in 2012, declined to comment, but a statement on their website said: 'In response to the recent speculation and circulating misinformation, we would like to provide assurance that we at Economy Energy have no intention of closing our doors. 'We will pay our outstanding (renewable energy subsidies) obligation in full, business will continue as usual for our customers.' s.partington@dailymail.co.uk British companies are watching in horror as the country careers towards a no-deal Brexit, top lobby groups have warned. Political leaders must unite to stop a disastrous break with the European Union, the five business organisations said in a rare joint statement setting out their concerns. The groups which represent hundreds of thousands of businesses with millions of staff warned the economy is already suffering from uncertainty as arguments rage over whether to approve Theresa May's agreement with Brussels. Business groups warned the economy is already suffering from uncertainty as arguments rage over whether to approve Theresa May's agreement with Brussels It was signed by the bosses of the Confederation of British Industry, the British Chambers of Commerce, the Federation of Small Businesses, the Institute of Directors, and the EEF manufacturers' organisation. It said: 'Businesses have been watching in horror as politicians have focused on factional disputes rather than practical steps. 'The lack of progress in Westminster means that the risk of a no-deal Brexit is rising. Businesses of all sizes are reaching the point of no return.' This investment in no-deal planning means cash is not being spent on improving productivity, hiring extra staff or helping firms grow, the business chiefs said. The groups said no-deal would mean 'businesses would face massive new customs costs and tariffs. Disruption at ports could destroy carefully built supply chains'. Barclays boss Jes Staley launched a campaign to uncover the author of poison pen letters about a senior employee Barclays has been fined 12million in the US over boss Jes Staleys crusade to unmask a whistleblower. The bank was hit with the penalty after a probe by the New York Department of Financial Services into the chief executives campaign to uncover the author of poison pen letters about a senior employee. Attempting to uncover the identity of someone anonymously raising concerns is against UK and US rules. The DFS found shortcomings in Barclays governance and corporate culture. Staley was enraged by letters sent to him and the board in 2016 which levelled false accusations against employee Tim Main, a friend. The 61-year-old twice ordered his security team to look for the sender, although their identity was never uncovered. Bosses at Asos have bought almost 200,000 worth of shares in the online retailer in an attempt to reassure investors that Mondays profit warning was just a temporary blip. Chief executive Nick Beighton spent 99,700 buying 3,645 shares for 27.35 each. The 49-year-old owns around 0.2 per cent of the company. Asoss chairman Adam Crozier bought his first shares in the firm as he scooped up 3,750 for 26.71 each, a total of 100,200. The deals from the two directors follow a crash in Asoss share price on Monday. It fell 37.6 per cent to 2614p after warning investors that its sales in November were significantly behind expectations, adding to the bloodbath for retailers. Asos hief executive Nick Beighton spent 99,700 buying 3,645 shares for 27.35 each. The 49-year-old owns around 0.2 per cent of the company While the shares rose in early trading, as investors found confidence in the fact that Crozier and Beighton were backing the company, the recovery didnt last for long. More cynical observers may have questioned how much faith the two directors actually have in Asos, since the purchases were actually relatively small compared with previous transactions. Just over a month ago, for example, Beighton sold 22,808 shares for more than 1.2million. Asoss shares ended the day down 0.5 per cent, or 14p, at 2600p. Nevertheless, analysts at Credit Suisse took a positive stance on the company. Though sales in the near term are unpredictable, they said, Asoss business model still has the potential to grow and there is probably room for cost-cutting. Over in the energy sector, a move by regulator Ofgem to cut customers bills left National Grid feeling disappointed. Stock Watch - Infrastrata Gas storage business Infrastrata was on the rise as it applied for permission to develop more underground caves in Northern Ireland. This would allow it to develop an extra 15 storage caves, on top of the eight planned. Founded in 2007, Infrastrata believes its gas caves will be popular with energy firms, since they should help to even out gas prices when events such as cold snaps cause a spike in demand. Shares climbed by 6.4 per cent, or 0.06p, to 0.92p. Shares in the power supplier slid as Ofgem proposed slashing the rate of return which network companies can pay to investors in dividends by around half to 4 per cent. The company makes money for its investors through the bills it charges customers. National Grid will have to lower its charges to consumers by limiting the amount it can return to shareholders through dividends to 4 per cent. But National Grid has argued that cutting investors returns is unfair, because it means they are not being sufficiently rewarded for the risks they are taking on. Its shares, which are loved by many for their dividends, slumped by 9.2 per cent, or 76.6p, to 758.7p. The energy companys decline weighed on the FTSE 100, which ended the day down 1.1 per cent, or 71.65 points, at 6701.59 points. Opioid addiction treatment company Indivior, which has taken a battering from cheaper competitor Dr Reddys Laboratories, began to climb as it pulled together a contingency plan. It reminded investors that Dr Reddys was still not allowed to sell its generic copycat version of its dissolvable film drug until US courts had decided whether or not to lift their injunction. If no other copycat treatment came onto the market before 2019, Indivior said it would meet its revenue guidance of between 783million and 807million. The company also said it would launch its own generic, unbranded film drug if a competitor came into the market, and would cut costs in its administrative and research departments to help support revenues. Shares climbed 17.7 per cent, or 16.78p, to 111.7p. A war of words at Urals Energy, the Russian oil and gas exploration company, has caused its share price to plummet. A subsidiary, JSC Petrosakh, posted a statement on its website purporting to be from its president Sergey Kononov. The company has been in a battle with Kononov after he allegedly made unauthorised loans of company funds. He has lashed out against Urals board. Urals disputed any suggestion of mismanagement, but shares still sank by 9.3 per cent, or 2.5p, to 24.5p. British drugs firm GlaxoSmithKline and US rival Pfizer are joining forces to combine their consumer healthcare divisions. As a duo, the joint venture will rake in around 9.8billion worth of sales in one year and paves the way for a further break-up of Glaxo into pharmaceutical and consumer arms in future. The deal will bring together Glaxo brands including Sensodyne, Voltaren and Panadol with Pfizer's Advil, Caltrate and Centrum. Deal: British drugs firm GlaxoSmithKline and US rival Pfizer are joining forces to combine their consumer healthcare divisions In a statement, Glaxo said: 'The Joint Venture will be a category leader in Pain Relief, Respiratory, Vitamin and Mineral Supplements, Digestive Health, Skin Health and Therapeutic Oral Health.' In early morning trading, FTSE 100 listed Glaxo's share price was already up 7.55 per cent or 109.4p to 1,557.6p. Glaxo will have a majority controlling equity interest of 68 per cent and Pfizer will have an interest of 32 per cent in the joint venture. The deal is expected to close in the second half of next year and still needs to be given the green light by shareholders. Within three years of closing the transaction, Glaxo intend to de-merge its consumer division, splitting the company into two separate businesses one focused on consumer and one on pharma and vaccines. Emma Walmsley, chief executive of Glaxo, said: 'Through the combination of Glaxo and Pfizer's consumer healthcare businesses we will create substantial further value for shareholders. 'At the same time, incremental cashflows and visibility of the intended separation will help support GSK's future capital planning and further investment in our pharmaceuticals pipeline.' Ms Walmsley added: 'Ultimately, our goal is to create two exceptional, UK-based global companies, with appropriate capital structures, that are each well positioned to deliver improving returns to shareholders and significant benefits to patients and consumers.' Brands: The deal will bring together Glaxo brands including Sensodyne, Voltaren and Panadol with Pfizer's Advil, Caltrate and Centrum Cost savings: The deal is set to deliver cost savings of 500million by 2022 The deal is set to deliver cost savings of 500million by 2022, of which up to 25 per cent will be reinvested in the business. On the dividend front, Glaxo said it 'remains committed to its current dividend policy and confirms it continues to expect to pay 80 pence per share in dividends for 2018.' Glaxo added: 'Recognising the significance of this proposed transaction and the importance of dividends to shareholders, the company is today confirming that it expects to pay dividends of 80 pence per share for 2019.' Commenting on the deal, Michael Hewson, an analyst at CMC Markets, said: 'The pharmaceutical sector is likely to face enormous challenges in the years ahead with respect to margin compression and the prospect of increased competition, and this move appears to go some way to addressing these challenges further, particularly since companies like Amazon have helped push prices lower.' Mr Hewson added: 'This long term plan may also have something to do with the announcement earlier this year that Amazon's Jeff Bezos, JP Morgan's Jamie Dimon and Warren Buffet were looking to combine resources to build a health care company that would seek to drive down costs and improve affordability for ordinary consumers.' Phone, broadband, insurance and mortgage companies are ripping off loyal customers by 4 billion. Following a 'super complaint' by Citizens Advice, the Competition and Markets Authority investigated concerns that companies penalise existing customers by charging them higher prices than new customers. It also found that vulnerable people, including the elderly and those on a low income, may be more at risk of paying a so-called 'loyalty penalty'. Millions of people across the UK are affected, from around 1 million in the mortgage market to nearly 12 million in the insurance market. The damning report published today found longstanding customers end up paying much more than new customers. It found companies introduce a sharp increase after the introductory price, and successive price rises, while customers on older tariffs - such as in the broadband market - often pay higher prices for similar services. Virgin Media has been overcharging some 83 per cent of its broadband customers each month, according to crowd sourced customer records, while O2 overcharged 65 per cent of its sim-only customers every month. BT was named as the broadband provider with the biggest loyalty penalty in a new report The watchdog's report follows This is Money and MailOnline's exclusive story revealing the worst loyalty penalty offenders, in which we called on people to fight back by demanding a better deal or switching. The CMA's probe uncovered 'damaging practices' by firms, including continual year-on-year stealth price rises; costly exit fees; time-consuming and difficult processes to cancel contracts or switch to new providers; and requiring customers to auto-renew or not giving them sufficient warning their contract would be rolled over. Business Secretary Greg Clark said:'Britain has long been a world leader in ensuring that markets work in the interests of consumers, but many loyal customers are still paying more than they need to. I saved 444 a year by challenging my bill Donna Robinson challenged her bill Mother-of-four Donna Robinson was paying Virgin Media 54 per month but got that down to 17.64 when she asked for a better deal. That means she will now save 444 over the next year of her broadband and TV bills. Customers of broabband, TV and phone companies have been hit by a succession of small price rises in recent years. She had used Ismybillfair to challenge her costs and said they had risen as it felt like the firm 'added 3, then added 3, then added 3.' She said: 'It isn't right. Loyalty should pay'. Advertisement 'The CMA's report reinforces the action that Government is already taking, including introducing our energy price cap this winter and launching a review of how technology can help consumers access the best deals. 'Companies continuing to take advantage of loyal consumers should not doubt our willingness to go further. 'We will publish a comprehensive Consumer White Paper in the first part of next year to ensure markets provide consumers with competitive prices and quality products and services.' The CMA is recommending government and regulators crack down on harmful business practices using enforcement powers, stating clearly the principles businesses should follow and holding firms publicly to account for their actions. Most radically, it also suggests that 'targeted price caps' should be put in place to protect the people worst hit. The CMA recommended that Ofcom puts regulation in place to stop mobile providers charging pay-monthly customers the same rate once they've effectively paid off their handsets at the end of the minimum contract period. The FCA, meanwhile should 'look closely' at evidence that insurance firms continually raise prices and take action to prevent people being exploited. This should include considering 'pricing interventions'. Retired headteacher Ben Beavan has been a loyal BT customer since he bought his first flat in Winchester 35 years ago. But he has since discovered he was being charged 246 more a year more than a new customer for his BT package, which includes unlimited weekend calls, broadband, and line rental. When we challenged retired headteacher Ben Beavan's bills, BT cut them Home insurance companies 'making money' from customers' loyalty Nick Munday had been a home and contents insurance customer with the same provider for 20 years. He said his insurance premium with Santander was 2,000 a year, having used their services for two decades. When he shopped around, he was quoted a price of 469 from another provider. He contacted Santander, which said it could reduce his premium to 750. He told the BBC: 'It is despicable. They are treating loyal customers really poorly. 'Loyalty should be worth something. It would be good if big companies rewarded people accordingly.' Source: BBC Advertisement Mr Beavan, 63, who lives with his wife Liz, 62, had believed that as a loyal customer he would be getting a good deal. But while he was paying 45.49 a month, a new customer could get the same deal for just 24.99 a month for the first 18 months, and 32.99 thereafter. He said: 'I was shocked to discover my loyalty had gone completely unrewarded. I felt like I had been taken advantage of. BT is using me like a cash cow to fund the deals it offers to new customers which is not fair.' He said: 'We were confident we were getting the best deal as we had been customers for so long. The problem is I do not want to change my service but I am paying massively over the odds. I wish BT would charge its loyal customers fairly.' After MoneyMail intervened BT reduced the price of Mr Beavan's package to 32.99. A BT spokesman said: 'We fully agree that customers shouldn't overpay for the service they receive. We're working harder than ever to be even clearer with our customers about their options.' THE BROADBAND LOYALTY PENALTY Broadband providers Average overcharge per month % of customers overcharged Overcharge as a % of average bill BT 22.75 77% 40% Sky 21.94 80% 41% Virgin Media 18.18 83% 30% EE 14.45 60% 35% TalkTalk 13.84 67% 34% Plusnet 11.08 82% 32% Source: ThisisMoney.co.uk / ismybillfair.com crowd sourced customer records, correct as at 5th December 2018 THE BREAKDOWN LOYALTY PENALTY Breakdown cover providers Average overcharge per month % of customers overcharged Overcharge as a % of average bill AA 11.07 59% 47% RAC 9.17 39% 41% Source: ThisisMoney.co.uk / ismybillfair.com crowd sourced customer records, correct as at 5th December 2018 SIM-ONLY MOBILE LOYALTY PENALTY SIM only providers Average overcharge per month % of customers overcharged Overcharge as a % of average bill EE 10.32 46% 36% Vodafone 9.54 62% 38% O2 9.27 65% 37% BT Mobile 7.66 23% 35% Tesco 7.52 25% 39% Three 7.18 33% 30% GiffGaff 6.60 7% 30% iD 5.44 21% 40% Virgin Mobile 5.33 17% 35% Plusnet Mobile 3.33 25% 28% Source: ThisisMoney.co.uk / ismybillfair.com crowd sourced customer records, correct as at 5th December 2018 Andrea Coscelli, chief executive of the Competition and Markets Authority said: 'Our work has uncovered a range of problems which leave people feeling ripped off, let down and frustrated. 'They shouldn't have to be constantly 'on guard', spending hours searching for or negotiating a good deal, to avoid being trapped into bad value contracts or falling victim to stealth price rises.' Gillian Guy, chief executive of Citizens Advice, added: 'This is a strong response from the CMA, recognising that loyal customers are getting ripped off. That is exactly why we've been fighting to stop the loyalty penalty, and why we made the super complaint. 'While the CMA needs to hold regulators to account, the onus is now on Ofcom and the FCA to act. The CMA has set a six-month deadline for progress and expectations are high. Regulators must do whatever it takes to fix the loyalty penalty.' A BT spokesperson: 'We fully agree that customers should get great value and a service that suits them, and we believe that this is best achieved through clear communications with our customers about their options. 'We're working to provide even clearer information to our customers throughout the life of their contract. 'This is part of our work with Ofcom as we improve our communications and continue to support a dynamic market where customers get great value and choice.' Lindsey Fussell, Ofcom's Consumer Group Director, said: 'We welcome the CMA's report, which supports our existing work to protect customers, including our reviews of mobile handset charges and broadband prices, and our plans to require companies to tell people about the best tariffs available when their deal is ending.' iShares MSCI Global Energy Producers ETF's stock was trading at $11.08 on March 11th, 2020 when Coronavirus reached pandemic status according to the World Health Organization. Since then, FILL stock has increased by 57.8% and is now trading at $17.48. View which stocks have been most impacted by COVID-19. Northern Investors Company PLC is an investment company. The Company is a private equity investment trust managed by NVM Private Equity LLP. The Company's investment objective is to conduct an orderly realization of its portfolio with a view to returning capital to shareholders. The majority of the Company's investments are in small and medium-sized unquoted companies. The Company invests in a range of industry sectors, such as technology, media and telecommunications, business services, healthcare, oil and gas, industrials, leisure and consumer. The Company is a member of The Association of Investment Companies (AIC). NVM Private Equity (NVM) is an investment advisor and manager of the Company. Read More First Trust North American Energy Infrastructure Fund's stock was trading at $20.3259 on March 11th, 2020 when COVID-19 reached pandemic status according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Since then, EMLP shares have increased by 17.9% and is now trading at $23.97. View which stocks have been most impacted by COVID-19. POTTSTOWN Two suspects will be heading to trial in relation to the home invasion and murder of a Pottstown woman in November. Defendants Aaron Joseph Taylor, 18, of the first block of West Second Street, and Camren Xavier Williams, 17, of the 800 block of North Franklin Street, each waived their preliminary hearings Tuesday in relation to charges involving the death of Pottstown resident Sylvia Williams, 38. Defendant Camren Xavier Williams has no relation to the victim, authorities said. An investigation began about 6:43 p.m. Nov. 18 when borough police responded to the residence to investigate the activation of a security alarm. As officers arrived at the scene, they observed a male jump from the second floor of the home and he told police that his girlfriend, Sylvia Williams, was injured and still inside the residence. When police entered the residence they found Sylvia Williams, with a bleeding wound to her head, dead in a second-floor front bedroom. At the time they arrived on the scene, police also observed a light-colored compact car leaving the area at a high rate of speed, according to the criminal complaint filed by county Detective John Wittenberger and Pottstown Detective Mark Wickersham. An autopsy determined Sylvia Williams died from a gunshot wound to the head and her death was ruled a homicide. Sylvia Williamss boyfriend told detectives he was on the second-floor of the residence when he heard yelling. As he started to descend the stairwell to the first-floor, Sylvia Williamss boyfriend observed a male, wearing a mask and armed with an automatic handgun, according to the arrest affidavit. According to detectives, the victims boyfriend said he ran to his bedroom, which also was occupied by the victim, and he closed the bedroom door, holding it closed with his feet while lying on the floor. Sylvia Williams then handed her boyfriend an alarm remote and a panic alarm was activated, detectives alleged. Sylvia Williams then assisted her boyfriend in holding the door shut. (The boyfriend) stated the suspect tried to get into the bedroom by striking the door before (the boyfriend) heard one gunshot, Wittenberger and Wickersham alleged in the arrest affidavit. The boyfriend reported it got quiet, following the gunshot and he noticed the victim was not moving and was bleeding from her head, according to the arrest affidavit. Police subsequently learned that the home invasion had been captured on video through a security system in the home. Still photos from the footage were released to the public in an effort to identify the suspects. Additionally, police were able to identify the vehicle through footage from nearby street cameras. Police were then able to identify the suspects as Taylor and Williams. Williams has been charged with criminal homicide, robbery, conspiracy, possession of an instrument of crime with intent, firearms not to be carried without a license and burglary. Taylor is being charged with murder of the second degree, murder of the third degree, robbery, conspiracy, possession of an instrument of crime with intent, burglary and firearms not to be carried without a license. The pair will be formally arraigned on February 13, 2019. Reporter Carl Hessler contributed to this report. Bethlehem The town of Bethlehem was awarded $200,000 Tuesday to continue its micro-enterprise grant program. The money was awarded through the state's annual Regional Economic Development Council competition in which 10 regions of the state vie for their share of the state's economic development funding. This year's competition put $763 million up for grabs. The money comes from Empire State Development Corp. and other state agencies. Candidates for awards must submit standardized applications through their regional council, made up of a committee of local business, civic and cultural leaders. The Capital Region council was awarded $67 million for 95 projects. Bethlehem's grant is coming from the state Office of Homes and Community Renewal. Bethlehem has been awarded similar grants in 2014 and 2016 that have been used to help 20 small businesses either expand or relocate to Bethlehem with grants ranging between $5,000 and $35,000. Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter. The businesses that have won the grants are part of a resurgence of retail stores and small businesses that have opened in Delmar and other parts of Bethlehem in the past several years. Winners have included Wildbird Junction, Barefoot Space, Bliss, Brewtus Roasting Co., O'Slattery's Irish bar and restaurant, the Twisted Vine wine bar, Rain Hair Studio, Bombshell Uptown Studio, Gabler Realty, Sawyer Screen Printing and the Royal Meadery. All are within walking distance of the Four Corners intersection in Delmar. Malta In many ways, Jennifer Kelley has been training for her new job as an assistant economic developer at the Saratoga County Prosperity Partnership for much of her life. That's because Kelley is the daughter of Jon "Jack" Kelley, the local real estate executive who is best known for his work convincing Advanced Micro Devices (later GlobalFoundries) back in 2006 to choose the Luther Forest Technology Campus in Saratoga County for its new billion-dollar computer chip factory. And Jennifer Kelley was there every step of the way, having tagged along with her father on numerous site visits and meetings with prospects over the years before forging her own path that has included learning Swahili at St. Lawrence University and extensive travel in Africa as part of her graduate studies at Boston University. Kelley, 25, was also did an internship at C.T. Male Associates where she assisted on two projects that won awards from the American Council of Engineering Companies. Marty Vanags, the president of the Saratoga County Prosperity Partnership, said he is "thrilled" to have hired Kelley, who goes by Jenny. The hire gives him four full-time and one part-time employees at the non-profit organization, which serves as the county's economic development office "With deep connections in communities across Saratoga County, a unique background and understanding of what drives winning projects, and a passion for making economic development successful, she is an outstanding addition to our professional team," Vanags said of Kelley. During the time he worked trying to lure the computer chip industry to Saratoga County, Jack Kelley worked for the Saratoga Economic Development Corp., a separate non-profit that created Luther Forest and had a contract as the county's official economic development arm at the time. Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter. In 2014 the county created the Saratoga County Prosperity Partnership to be its official economic development arm, although SEDC remains active in the region. Jack Kelley says he avoided speaking with Vanags for several months to avoid appearing to influence the hiring process despite the fact that left SEDC years ago to become head of economic development for Prime Cos., a real estate company based in Cohoes. But Jack Kelley is rightfully proud of his daughter, who he says never forgot her roots or her enthusiasm for Saratoga County after graduating from Corinth High School. "That's really important to her, and she will bring new thoughts and new ideas to the job," Jack Kelley said. It's a banner year for film music at the Grammys. Works from "Black Panther" and "A Star Is Born" are in contention in some of the top categories. "The Greatest Showman" soundtrack was the first album to sell a million copies in 2018. But a small rules change may also herald a shift for an overlooked craft at the Grammys: music supervision. This is the first year in which supervisors are eligible to win Grammys in the compilation soundtrack album category. In a time when music curation plays an ever-more important role in film and TV, the Recording Academy is finally acknowledging the importance of this job in the dialogue between music and visual media. "It rises and falls over the years, but this feels like a peak year for music in media influencing the Grammys," said Thomas Golubic, president of the Guild of Music Supervisors. "There's a growing understanding that supervision is a key contributor to storytelling. That credit is long overdue." In announcing the rules change, the Grammys body itself described music supervision as a "growing role" in the industry. Music supervisors have, of course, always been essential to curating Grammy-winning soundtracks. But the nominating rules previously excluded them from eligibility in the compilation soundtrack album category unless they were also credited as producers. The work of curating a soundtrack is a distinct craft from traditional score work or soundtrack production. "A lot of people muscle in on producer credit," Golubic said. "Sometimes producers are actively involved, but that shuts out supervisors' key role in stitching projects together. Producers were winning awards when they hadn't been as creatively involved as supervisors. Supervision is a creative craft with a huge influence on the quality of a project." This year's nominees for compilation soundtrack for visual media "Call Me by Your Name," "Lady Bird," "Deadpool 2," "The Greatest Showman" and the Netflix series "Stranger Things" have wildly different takes on the craft. Take for instance the unexpectedly moving use of the Dave Matthews Band in the millennial coming-of-age film "Lady Bird," or how Sufjan Stevens' music provides the delicate framework for some of the most powerful shots in "Call Me by Your Name." "Stranger Things" would be unimaginable without its menacing synth soundtrack. The Guild of Music Supervisors has its own awards (the ninth annual event hits the Theatre at the Ace Hotel on Feb. 13). The crossover is significant four out of five of the Grammy nominees for compilation soundtrack album were previously nominated for the guild's awards as well. As the Grammys look to correct for its white- and male-dominated reputation, recognizing savvy supervision work in film could be part of the solution. The diversity of supervision plays out all over the Grammys, from "Black Panther's" expert dive into contemporary South African club music to "The Greatest Showman's" crowd-pleasing, ambitious read on the movie-musical tradition. "As the Grammy Awards mature and evolve, diversity is much more of a factor," Golubic said. "The years where 'supervision' was five white guys doing similar work is changing. There's lot of diversity and inclusion this year, and palettes expanding benefits everyone." There still is no dedicated Academy Award for music supervision, an omission that's become something of a white whale for the Guild (the Emmys do have a dedicated award). The creation of one could even help clear up some instances, as with 2014's "Birdman" and 2016's "Arrival," where powerful scores were deemed ineligible for the original score Oscar for using pre-existing compositions. But as the Grammys become more and more open to acknowledging the craft, that influence could spread throughout the industry. "It opens doors, ultimately," Golubic said. "Our influence, especially in the time of Peak TV, is huge, when you look at how much supervisors have contributed to the storytelling process. As the Grammys opens their doors to us, we'll contribute to their community and add our own influence to the conversation about what makes culture exciting." ALBANY Whats the definition of a hazard for a youngster who is walking to school? According to a state transportation aid program, it could be a roadway with no shoulder, or a railroad crossing. Albany city school officials, however, believe there are other hazards including crime-ridden neighborhoods or vacant building lots that students must traverse on their way to and from school. They say the current guidelines for determining which students receive state-subsidized bus service are too focused on hazards that rural or suburban kids face, as opposed to urban threats. We believe there are safety considerations that should be taken into account that are more relevant in cities, said Albany school spokesman Ron Lesko. Its one of the arguments the district is making in seeking financial assistance for providing bus service to kids who live within 1.5 miles of school. New York State helps offset transportation costs for students who live more than 1.5 miles away. Many suburban districts, such as neighboring Bethlehem, bus kids who live as close as a half mile away from their schools and the district bears the extra cost. But in Albany, officials say that spending more for bus service within 1.5 miles would be too much to ask of hard-pressed taxpayers. So theyve been talking to state legislators looking to change the guidelines that are used in determining if the shorter bus trips can get state aid. The majority of State Eds criteria for the establishment of Child Safety Zones do not take into account many of the factors that can impact student and families living in urban neighborhoods with high rates of poverty, reads a fact sheet that the school board has been sharing with lawmakers. Districts can choose to transport students less than 1.5 miles without state reimbursement, it reads adding, but residents and business owners in Albany already shoulder a heavy tax burden. The district also argues that extra bus aid should be viewed as a strategy to address high absenteeism at schools that are on a state list of struggling schools. At Schuyler elementary, for example, attendance varied from almost 96 percent to a low of 90 percent during the past winter, making for a seasonal drop of more than 5 percent. Bus service could presumably get more kids to school on cold or snowy days. Albany Democratic Assemblywoman Patricia Fahy, who has previously served on the city school board, said the question of bus service has long dogged the district. When she was on the board she wanted to put up referendums that would let voters choose if they wanted to pay for more bus service, but never got it past other board members who were fearful of the anti-tax blowback. If I had a nickel for every kid I saw walking in gym shoes through the snow, she said. The state can pay anywhere from 6.5 to 90 percent of operating costs for school buses, plus some debt service on the vehicles, depending on factors like the wealth of a given district. Albany gets 81.5 percent of bus costs, which run about $70,000 per vehicle. The state has budgeted $1.9 billion for transportation aid this year. Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter. There are plenty of barriers and obstacles facing youngsters walking to school in Albany. Kids walking, say, from the South End to Hackett middle school can find themselves walking through a darkened Lincoln Park on the way home during the short days of winter. And crime is a concern for some parents. When school officials were looking to get kids to come back to the district after the Brighter Choice middle school closed in 2015, one parent said she worried that her child would have to walk past a playground near Livingston and Lake avenues where a man had recently been shot. The 1.5 mile rule is also an issue in an upcoming referendum, in May, that would allow North Albany Academy to be renovated into a middle school. If that happens, students now at North Albany (formerly known as School 20) might have to walk up to 1.3 miles to Arbor Hill elementary. The walk would take them through some sparsely populated industrial areas that lie below Arbor Hill. Albany does have one existing Child Safety Zone. Thats the area along Southern Boulevard/Route 9W where students must walk along some heavily traveled, non-sidewalk areas to get to Delaware elementary. Nineteen students are in the Child Safety Zone. Walking along a busy highway, though is the kind of scenario found in largely suburban areas. Its really written with rural areas in mind, Fahy said of the current standards. rkarlin@timesunion.com 518-454-5758 @RickKarlinTU Jacom Stephens / Getty Image QUEENSBURY A bicyclist was badly injured Tuesday when he was hit by a car that left the scene, deputies said. The crash on Corinth Road sent the bicyclist to Albany Medical Center Hospital with what the Warren County Sheriff's Office described as serious injuries. SARATOGA SPRINGS In the wake of a public controversy over disarming the district's 14 grounds monitors, the New York Schools Insurance Reciprocal recommended that the Saratoga Springs City School district hire another school resource officer. SROs are law enforcement officers who are allowed to carry guns on school grounds. They differ from the district's grounds monitors, who are mostly retired from law enforcement jobs. Earlier this school year, controversy arose when the school board voted against allowing grounds monitors to continue to be armed, as they had been for decades. The recommendation for a new SRO hire to cover the three schools outside of the city limits Maple Avenue Middle School, and Greenfield and Dorothy Nolan elementary schools was among a number of suggestions made by the risk management provider to the district on Monday night. The NYSIR consultant Bob Blaisdell also recommended that the district continue its partnership with the state Mental Health Association, improve its threat assessment and response protocols to provide early intervention and enhance security drills with feedback and recommendation from law enforcement. But the recommendations did not appease the group of parents who want the Board of Education to reverse its Oct. 9 decision to disarm the district's grounds monitors who, with the exception of one, are retired police officers. The split decision, 5 to 4, came after the Superintendent of Schools Michael Patton discovered the monitors were carrying weapons out of compliance with state law. For monitors to continue carrying weapons, the school board needed to approve a measure allowing them to do so. "Adding one more SRO is woefully inadequate," said Kara Rosettie, founder of Saratoga Parents for Safer Schools, which wants the grounds monitors to be armed. "The National Association of School Resource Officers recommends a minimum of one SRO per 1,000 students. Saratoga Springs School District has 6,000 students. That would mean six SRO minimum for the district." Currently the district has one SRO at the high school. Rosettie and her parents' group want the district to follow the recommendations from a Public Safety Commission's report for Florida's Marjory Stoneman Douglas school, where 17 students and staff were killed by a gunman on Feb. 14. That commission suggested that at least one law enforcement officer should patrol every school. "Based on the recommendation from MSD Public Safety Commission, our district should have eight SRO/armed security guards at a minimum," Rosettie said. "And clearly (we'd) would prefer far more than eight due to the need for there to be onsite backup available for emergency situations." Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter. Julianne Lewis, another parent, does not believe that more guns will make students safer and she was happy that Blaisdell's report was recommended adding just one additional armed officer at district schools. "It's too risky to have extra weapons," Lewis said. "Those carrying weapons must be well-trained and that was not the case for the grounds monitors." Lewis feels that more preventative measures must be emphasized, mainly mental health support for students and families so that students who are troubled don't fall through the cracks. "Mental health supports are less expensive and they benefit everyone," Lewis said. Blaisdell did say that the district is doing many things right when it comes to safety, including regular emergency drills, a strong relationship with law enforcement and a dedicated staff for mental health and school support services. ALBANY After missing its statutory October deadline, the state Drinking Water Quality Council is recommending nation-leading limits on three industrial pollutants in drinking water linked to cancer. Following a discussion on the chemicals and their impact, the panel on Tuesday voted to recommend maximum contaminant levels (MCLs) of 10 parts per trillion for PFOA and PFOS 20 ppt combined on Tuesday. For 1,4 dioxane, the panel recommended a maximum level of 1 part per billion in drinking water sources. The 12-member council, created in September 2017 and overseen by the state Health Department, was tasked with creating recommendations for maximum contamination levels for chemicals including PFOA, PFOS and 1,4 dioxane in drinking water by October of this year. The council is led by Health Commissioner Howard Zucker and Environmental Conservation Commissioner Basil Seggos. New York joins at least eight states, including Vermont and New Jersey, in creating recommended limits on these chemicals, which are linked to cancer and other diseases, that go well beyond federal standards. Only Vermont has enforceable MCLs, while the others have created advisory standards that are "aspirational," noted to Brad Hutton, New York's deputy commissioner of the Department of Health. Vermont has set statutory limits for PFOA and PFOS at 20 ppt. No state has set statutory limits on 1,4 dioxane. In 2016, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recommended setting maximum levels for PFOA and PFOS at 70 parts per trillion, but a June Department of Health and Human Services report suggested maximum levels be significantly lower. Citing scientific and health studies, NYPIRG and other partner organizations have recommended a combined MCL of 4 parts per trillian for PFOA and PFOS and an MCL of 0.3 parts per billion for 1,4 dioxane. While the technology to treat these pollutants is available and effective, capital and maintainance costs for treatment systems vary significantly depending on MCL levels. These chemicals have wreaked havoc on drinking water sources in Newburgh, Long Island, and Hoosick Falls. NYPIRG Environmental Policy Director Liz Moran thanked Hoosick falls residents for pushing for standards. Many of the residents attended Tuesday's meeting. Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter. "There are communities that have been exposed to these chemicals, and they don't feel any level is safe ... there's more science that is coming out that is assuredly safe for public health," she said, urging the council to consider lowering the limits. "I also have to encourage that we move quickly to adopt these recommendations into regulations," she said. "There are over 4 million New Yorkers who have been exposed to unhealthy levels of PFOAs, PFOS and 1,4 dioxane. Emily Marpe, a Hoosick Falls resident, brought her daughter Ellie, who tested positive for significant PFOA when she was 7 weeks old, and urged the panel to set recommendations for other emerging chemicals. "I wanted to bring her here so you could see her," Marpe said, her voice shaking. "As a mom this journey has been tough. I went from being just a normal mom to trying to be a toxicologist and epidemiologist. It's terrifying." In October, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo's office announced $200 million in grant funding for filtration systems and infrastructure to help communities address the contaminants. SCHENECTADY The story of Capital Region news photographer and the post-World War II community he lived in will be spotlighted at an event 7 p.m. Friday, Dec. 28, at Proctors. The film "More Than Words" features the story of the late Bob Paley, who worked for the former Knickerbocker News and Times Union for nearly 30 years and contributed to selective Time-Life publications. The Knickerbocker News folded in 1988. ALBANY A legal settlement reached Wednesday will significantly dampen the impact of sweeping new regulations governing New York's lobbying industry, according to David Grandeau, an attorney who was among the parties that recently sued to strike down the rules. The Times Union has learned that under the terms of the settlement, the 92 pages of regulations passed in April by the state Joint Commission on Public Ethics are defined simply as a "statement" for how the ethics watchdog agency plans to administer and enforce state lobbying law. Attorney General Barbara Underwood's office, which was representing JCOPE, agreed that the new regulations will not in and of themselves have the force and effect of law. That makes the guidelines different from some regulations traditionally created by state agencies, violations of which can on their own be the basis for penalties. JCOPE Executive Director Seth Agata disagreed with Grandeau, and said the settlement does not dramatically water down enforcement of the regulations. Agata argued that, in practical terms, the settlement would have virtually no effect, and that the agency still planned to vigorously enforce the regulations as planned. He said that many types of regulations do not in and of themselves carry penalties, and are simply a statement of how any agency views enforcement of the law. "Mr. Grandeau is mischaracterizing the terms of the settlement," Agata said in a statement, noting that the petitioners had withdrawn their challenge to JCOPE's authority to regulate lobbying. When the new regulations go into effect Jan. 1, he said, "Those who violate the regulations will face thousands of dollars in fines under the Lobbying Act." But according to Grandeau, the upshot of the settlement is that if a lobbyist is penalized by JCOPE going forward and the lobbyist challenges the action in court, JCOPE would have to prove a violation had occurred under the strictures of the state Lobbying Act, which was passed by the state Legislature and does not contain many of the sweeping and specific measures included in the new regulations. In other words, in future court proceedings JCOPE would not be able to rely solely on the text of the new regulations, which would exist solely as guidance as to JCOPE's thinking about the law. In late November, three petitioners filed what's known as an Article 78 proceeding against JCOPE in Supreme Court in Albany that sought to strike down the regulations and stop the ethics panel from enforcing them in the meantime. Among the plaintiffs was Grandeau, the state's former top lobbying enforcement official and now a top private lobbying compliance attorney and a strident critic of JCOPE. On Wednesday, he declared victory. "It's clear that under the settlement, the regulations cannot be the predicate for a cause of action," Grandeau said. "If they think differently, they should read the settlement. You can call a dandelion a rose, but that doesn't make it smell any sweeter." Grandeau maintains that while JCOPE has the authority under law to write opinions, it has the power to write regulations only in very specific circumstances. The Legislature never passed a law authorizing JCOPE to broadly reinterpret the state's lobbying rules, the lawsuit maintains; instead, the commission's job is primarily to administer and enforce existing laws. A major motivation had emerged for JCOPE to settle: If the lawsuit had been successful, it would likely have derailed the implementation of a new, multi-million-dollar online system for tracking lobbying activities in New York. According to Underwood's office, a court injunction blocking JCOPE from enforcing the new lobbying regulations would have caused "confusion and delay" in the rollout of the watchdog's newly launched, $2.4 million online lobbying platform, which incorporates the new regulations in its functions. The new regulations are "inlaid into the application, which (JCOPE) has been developing for over three years," according to Underwood's office. In April, JCOPE's commissioners appointed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo and legislative leaders of both parties unanimously passed the new regulations. Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter. The plaintiffs argued those rules would unduly burden lobbyists and their clients, and infringe on their free speech rights. "This is a case about bureaucratic overreach," the suit stated. The new rules, developed by JCOPE staff over a period of more than two years, were among the most substantial pieces of work produced by the ethics watchdog panel since its creation in 2011. The rules are intended to define as lobbyists a class of political consultants that has wielded influence with elected officials through close relationships, without the consultants themselves actually engaging in traditional arm-twisting. The regulations were meant to update New York's lobbying rules for the 21st Century, as modern lobbying campaigns emphasize the application of public pressure on lawmakers separate from more traditional person-to-person lobbying. For instance, the new rules required people who used their close relationships with a elected official to set up a lobbying meeting, without themselves directly lobbying, to register as a lobbyist. In recent years, high-profile firms had emerged in this mold in New York, such as Manhattan-based BerlinRosen, whose employees have represented many clients with state government business, but whose employees did not register as lobbyists. BerlinRosen did campaign consulting work for Mayor Bill de Blasio and has a close relationship with him, but does not itself lobby the mayor or other politicians. The firm's activities may have been an impetus for the new rules: de Blasio is a political adversary of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who appoints six of the 14 JCOPE commissioners, and the commission's top staff includes many Cuomo veterans. Due to the settlement, efforts by JCOPE to enforce the new provisions in court will be much more challenging, according to Grandeau. The new rules, for instance, include an explicit requirement that lobbyists disclose the names of the lawmakers that they lobby. Currently, lobbyists and their clients often simply list "Senate," "Assembly" or "Executive" as the entity that they have lobbied, making it difficult for the public to know which lawmakers or top officials are being influenced. The lawsuit against JCOPE specifically argued that provision was illegal, noting that no law passed by the Legislature ever included such a requirement. Under Grandeau's reading of the settlement, if a lobbyist fails to list the specific lawmakers they have lobbied, JCOPE would have to prove in court that that the act violated the lobbying law which, unlike the regulations, does not explicitly include the requirement to disclose specific names. The lawyer who filed the lawsuit for the complainants is Joshua Seifert, whose Manhattan-based practice has focused on commercial litigation. Besides Grandeau, the petitioners also included the New York City-based lobbying firm York Group Associates, as well as Voters for Animal Rights, a nonprofit that sprung out of the initial effort to ban horse carriages in Manhattan's Central Park. Washington A federal judge on Tuesday abruptly postponed the sentencing of President Donald Trump's first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, declaring himself disgusted and disdainful of Flynn's crime of lying to the FBI and raising the unexpected prospect of sending the retired Army lieutenant general to prison. Lawyers for Flynn, who admitted lying to the FBI about his Russian contacts, requested the delay during the hearing in which U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan told the former Trump aide in a blistering rebuke that "arguably you sold your country out." "I'm not hiding my disgust, my disdain, for his criminal offense," the judge said. The postponement gives Flynn a chance to continue cooperating with the government in hopes of staving off prison and proving his value as a witness, including in a foreign lobbying prosecution brought just this week. The possibility of prison had seemed remote for Flynn, who was smiling and upbeat as he entered the courtroom, since prosecutors had praised his previous cooperation and didn't recommend any time behind bars. But the judge's upbraiding suggested otherwise and made clear that even defendants like Flynn who have cooperated extensively in special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation may nonetheless be shadowed by the crimes that brought them into court in the first place. The hearing upset what had been a carefully crafted agreement and pushed months into the future a resolution of one of Mueller's signature prosecutions. "This is a very serious offense a high-ranking official of the government making false statements to federal agents while on the physical premises of the White House," Sullivan said. He later softened his tone, apologizing for suggesting that Flynn had worked as a foreign agent. He also backpedaled on an earlier question on whether Flynn's transgressions amounted to treason. Flynn was to have been the first White House official sentenced in special counsel Mueller's ongoing investigation into possible coordination between the Trump presidential campaign and Russia. The hearing marked a remarkable fall after a three-decade military career that included tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and oversight of the Defense Intelligence Agency during the Obama administration. It all comes amid escalating legal peril for Trump, who was implicated by federal prosecutors in New York this month in hush-money payments involving his former lawyer to cover up allegations of extramarital affairs. Nearly a half-dozen former aides and advisers have pleaded guilty or agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter. Flynn's help in the probes, including 19 meetings with investigators, has been notable. Yet he has nonetheless enjoyed Trump's continued sympathy, thanks in part to a sentencing memo last week that tapped into the president's suspicion of law enforcement and took aim at the FBI's conduct during the investigation. Trump tweeted "good luck" to Flynn hours before the sentencing. At the White House afterward, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked if the administration had changed its stance on Flynn or the FBI after his admissions and guilty plea. "Maybe he did do those things, but it doesn't have anything to do with the president," she said. "It's perfectly acceptable for the president to make a positive comment about somebody while we wait to see what the court's determination is." Sanders repeated her allegation that the FBI "ambushed" Flynn in an interview in which he lied. MENANDS Nearly 100 animals were being cared for at the Mohawk Hudson Humane Society on Wedneday after being pulled from a filthy, abandoned Troy home on Tuesday, the shelter said. Troy police are calling it a case of animal hoarding. No arrests have been made at this time. All of the cats and dogs are infested with fleas and worms, and many were scratching themselves incessantly when they arrived at the shelter, Mohawk Hudson Humane Society spokeswoman Marguerite Pearson said. Some of those animals also suffered hair loss as a result of the fleas and many of the dogs were covered in encrusted feces, she said. All of the pets have been treated for fleas and worms, and are now in a clean environment, which will provide some relief, Pearson said. Many of the cats have severe eye infections and some of them will likely undergo surgery to have eyes removed, she said. The shelter's veterinary staff have triaged the animals and are giving them individual exams, while other staff members work at the home to rescue more cats and birds. Troy police were called to 92 Campbell Ave. on Tuesday and found dozens of animals living in squalor inside. Troy Police Deputy Chief Daniel DeWolf said most of the animals 38 dogs, 38 cats, six ferrets and 18 birds were removed from the abandoned home on Tuesday. Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter. Officers entering the home where some animals roamed free and others were confined to cages were greeted by the strong smell of animal waste. Police said Tuesday that the home is uninhabitable. The Mohawk Hudson Humane Society encouraged local residents Wednesday to donate money or drop off supplies for the Troy animals' medical care, as well as consider adopting other pets to make room in the shelter. Adoptions are 50 percent off through Sunday. The animals rescued from the Troy home are not ready to be adopted but 104 other dogs, cats, mice Guinea pigs and rabbits are available. Anyone with information about the home is asked to call the Troy police. BETHLEHEM Town police investigating a string of stolen credit cards are trying to identify two people wanted for questioning. Police said they believe the pair, whose faces were captured by a local shop's surveillance camera, have "specific information" about the case. ALBANY Joe Percoco won't spend New Year's Eve in federal prison. U.S. District Judge Valerie Caproni on Wednesday pushed back the surrender date for the former top aide to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo from Dec. 28 to Jan. 31. Percoco has filed a motion for bail pending the appeal of the corruption verdicts lodged against him in March. In September, Caproni handed down a six-year sentence against him. On Tuesday, Percoco's attorney Walter Loughlin asked Caproni to delay Percoco's surrender date until after the court rules on the motion for bail filed by Steve Aiello of COR Development in Syracuse. Aiello was convicted in March of conspiracy to commit honest services wire fraud for funneling $35,000 to Percoco, and convicted in July on wire fraud alongside former SUNY Polytechnic Institute president Alain Kaloyeros at the end of the second trial related to the upstate development investigation. Aiello was sentenced earlier this month to three years in prison. Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter. Loughlin noted that Percoco and Aiello were both convicted of conspiring to commit honest services wire fraud in the first trial, and that "there are likely to be common issues in both defendants' bail motions." In expectation of the possible consolidation of the two men's appeals, Loughlin asked that Percoco's surrender date should be pushed to 20 days after the court rules on Aiello's motion. Washington President Donald Trump and leaders in Congress appeared to be pulling back Tuesday from a government shutdown over his $5 billion request for border wall funds. The White House set the tone early when Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders indicated Trump who just last week said he'd be "proud" to shut down the government doesn't want to after all. The president was looking at ways to find the funding elsewhere, Sanders said. It was a turnaround after days of impasse. Without a resolution, more than 800,000 government workers could be furloughed or sent to work without pay, disrupting government operations days before Christmas. One option that has been circulating on Capitol Hill would be to approve government funding at existing levels, without a boost for the border, as a stopgap measure to kick the issue into the new Congress next year. The White House preference was for such a short-term package, said a person familiar with the negotiations. "We want to know what can pass," Sanders said at a press briefing. "Once they make a decision and they put something on the table, we'll make a determination on whether we'll move forward." The turn of events kick-started negotiations that had been almost nonexistent since last week's televised meeting at the White House, when Trump neither accepted nor rejected the Democrats' offer to keep funding at current levels of $1.3 billion for border security fencing and other improvements, but not for the wall. The Senate's top Republican and Democratic leaders began negotiating new proposals and talks were expected to continue. One idea could be a stopgap measure into February. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he was confident there would not be a government shutdown Friday. McConnell said a stopgap measure could be approved, though he suggested Nancy Pelosi, who is poised to become House speaker when the Democrats take control Jan. 3, would not want to saddle the new year with a budget brawl. Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter. Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer have made it clear they are not interested in funding Trump's border wall. During a meeting earlier Tuesday on Capitol Hill, McConnell had proposed $1.6 billion for border fencing, as outlined in a bipartisan Senate bill, plus an additional $1 billion that Trump could use on the border, according to a senior Democratic aide. Democratic leaders immediately spurned the proposal. Schumer called McConnell to reject it. Democrats also rejected the administration's idea of shifting money from other accounts to pay for Trump's wall. The State Police are searching for drug suspects and alleged drunken drivers and thieves as part of their Warrant Wednesday effort that asks the public to help them find fugitives. Ahquan Stevenson, 30, is wanted by State Police in Middletown on a charge of criminal possession of a controlled substance. Troopers said a bench warrant was issued after he did not return to court to face the charges. THE ISSUE: Gov. Cuomo's aggressive legislative agenda includes some positive changes to state laws that regulate voting. THE STAKES: The updates are long overdue and will undoubtedly improve voter participation. Gov. Andrew Cuomo's preview to his upcoming State of the State address offers an unabashedly progressive agenda, but one set of reforms he puts forward bears no ideological label: clearing the hurdles that have hindered voter participation in New York elections. The governor lays out an ambitious legislative program for the first 100 days of his third term, an agenda likely to be far more achievable with the Senate in Democratic control next year. Under Republican leadership, his more liberal proposals were often dead on arrival. When it comes to voting rights, though, partisan politics really shouldn't be an issue. The question should be whether the proposals are sound. Most of Mr. Cuomo's appear to be so. New York's arcane voting laws are out of step with many states, and changes that make the process easier are overdue. It's long been clear what those changes should include: "No excuse" absentee balloting: New Yorkers can now vote by absentee ballot only for a limited number of reasons sickness, disability, infirmity, or being out of town on Election Day. Having a long work shift or commute, or routine family care responsibilities, are not currently valid excuses. Mr. Cuomo's solution no-excuse mail-in voting is the right direction. Early voting: Absentee ballots aside, New York is a one of a minority of states that still restrict voting to a single day. The governor is right to want to expand the voting period as a way to increase voter participation; the question will be just how much. Going too far beyond the weekend before Election Day could cause problems of its own, such as voter remorse if minds are changed by developments in the final stretch of a campaign. Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter. Voter registration: State residents should be automatically registered to vote on their 18th birthday and be able to make address or name changes online. Further, people who arrive at the polls to discover they are not registered should be allowed to do so on the spot, though that would require a state constitutional amendment. For now, the Legislature can at least shorten the registration period from 25 days before Election Day to only 10. Also, registered voters should be allowed to easily change their party enrollment a few weeks prior to a primary, rather than the current 190 days. One proposal that may need more study is the governor's idea to make Election Day a state holiday. The state can't order private businesses to honor a holiday, so this would mainly affect governments and schools and people with children who would need another day of child care. If early voting is enacted, the exact day of the election matters less, anyway. If the goal is to underscore the importance of voting, the state might encourage schools to use the day to teach about the democratic process. And if legislators finally make it easier for people to vote, they'll be setting a good example for the citizens of tomorrow. CIVITAS SOLUTIONS, INC. SHAREHOLDER ALERT: Rigrodsky & Long, P.A. Announces Investigation of Buyout Rigrodsky & Long, P.A.: Do you own shares of Civitas Solutions, Inc. (NYSE: CIVI )? Did you purchase any of your shares prior to December 18, 2018? Do you think the proposed buyout is fair? Do you want to discuss your rights? Rigrodsky & Long, P.A. announces that it is investigating potential legal claims against the board of directors of Civitas Solutions, Inc. ("Civitas" or the "Company") (NYSE: CIVI) regarding possible breaches of fiduciary duties and other violations of law related to the Company's entry into an agreement to be acquired by funds advised by Centerbridge Partners, L.P. ("Centerbridge") in a transaction valued at approximately $1.4 billion. Under the terms of the agreement, shareholders of Civitas will receive $17.75 in cash for each share of Civitas common stock. If you own common stock of Civitas and purchased any shares before December 18, 2018, if you would like to learn more about this investigation, or if you have any questions concerning this announcement or your rights or interests, please contact Seth D. Rigrodsky or Gina M. Serra toll-free at (888) 969-4242, by e-mail at [email protected], or at https://www.rigrodskylong.com/offices-contact. Rigrodsky & Long, P.A., with offices in Delaware, New York, and California, has recovered hundreds of millions of dollars on behalf of investors and achieved substantial corporate governance reforms in numerous cases nationwide, including federal securities fraud actions, shareholder class actions, and shareholder derivative actions. Attorney advertising. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20181218005915/en/ [December 18, 2018] Missile Defense Agency Awards Lockheed Martin Contract to Design, Manufacture and Construct Homeland Defense Radar-Hawaii MOORESTOWN, N.J., Dec. 18, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) was awarded a $585 million contract by the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) to design, develop and deliver its Homeland Defense Radar-Hawaii (HDR-H) in Oahu, Hawaii. The HDR-H radar will provide autonomous acquisition and persistent precision tracking and discrimination to optimize the defensive capability of the Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS) and counter evolving threats. "Lockheed Martin will leverage the development of our Long Range Discrimination Radar (LRDR) to provide the lowest risk and best value HDR-H solution to MDA, which includes open, scalable architecture for future growth," said Chandra Marshall, program director for Lockheed Martin's Missile Defense Radars market segment. LRDR is currently under construction in Clear, Alaska, and is scheduled for an on-time delivery in 2020. The system's open architecture design will enable future growth to keep pace with emerging threats./p> The work for HDR-H will be performed in Moorestown, New Jersey, and Oahu, Hawaii. As a proven world leader in systems integration and development of air and missile defense systems and technologies, Lockheed Martin delivers high-quality missile defense solutions that protect citizens, critical assets and deployed forces from current and future threats. The company's experience spans missile design and production, hit-to-kill capabilities, infrared seekers, command and control/battle management, and communications, precision pointing and tracking optics, radar and signal processing, as well as threat-representative targets for missile defense tests. About Lockheed Martin Headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, Lockheed Martin is a global security and aerospace company that employs approximately 100,000 people worldwide and is principally engaged in the research, design, development, manufacture, integration and sustainment of advanced technology systems, products and services. This year the company received three Edison Awards for ground-breaking innovations in autonomy, satellite technology and directed energy. View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/missile-defense-agency-awards-lockheed-martin-contract-to-design-manufacture-and-construct-homeland-defense-radar-hawaii-300768553.html SOURCE Lockheed Martin [December 18, 2018] Johnson Controls maximizes value of entire buildings portfolio with Metasys(R) 10.0 KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Johnson Controls, the global diversified technology and multi-industrial leader, today announced the release of Metasys 10.0, designed to deliver unified building management. This marks another milestone as Johnson Controls brings the power of its combined portfolio to the market following a series of mergers and acquisitions in the buildings space. The strength of the combined portfolio includes solutions from Tyco (merger in 2016) and York (sole owner of York (Malaysia) in 2014). This latest Metasys release provides facility personnel with smarter building automation, faster responses to critical alarms and new integrations with fire detection, and security and lighting systems -- all with visibility from a single common interface. Another innovation is the Ethernet ring topology support. Metasys is the only building automation system in the market that offers this. Delivered as part of Johnson Controls strategic alliance with Cisco, it allows controllers to be configured in a ring network, avoiding risk of single point of failure, thus improving system reliability and resiliency. This is especially important in mission-critical facilities like hospitals and data centers. "Johnson Controls has been steadily growing as a systems integrator for smarter buildings and cities in Malaysia -- York with its air-conditioning technology, Tyco with its security and fire solutions. With such comprehensive breadth as a systems integrator, we deeply appreciatehow important it is to provide access to critical system data from a single, intuitively-designed interface. Metasys has always delivered a strong integrations platform, but now it is even easier for customers to integrate both HVAC and non-HVAC systems into Metasys 10.0. One of the earliest sites seeing great success is Georgia-Pacific in Atlanta," said Fam Wee Chean, general manager, Building Technologies & Solutions, Johnson Controls Malaysia. Johnson Controls' solutions and products are installed in more than 35 percent of commercial buildings in Malaysia including those requiring the most complex integrations such as hospitals. Improvements with the release of Metasys 10.0 include: New Metasys Application Programming Interface (API) -- API enables data to be securely extracted from Metasys 10.0 and integrated with third-party data visualization tools for robust data analysis and reporting. (API) -- API enables data to be securely extracted from Metasys 10.0 and integrated with third-party data visualization tools for robust data analysis and reporting. Simpler integration with SIMPLEX Fire System -- The SIMPLEX Fire System is enhanced to include a BACnet/IP integration with the Metasys system to automate building conditions when triggered by a fire event. -- The SIMPLEX Fire System is enhanced to include a BACnet/IP integration with the system to automate building conditions when triggered by a fire event. New integrations with CCURE 9000 Access Control and victor Video Management Systems -- New integration drivers are added to the Metasys system to provide data from CCURE 9000 Access Control and victor Video Management Systems from Tyco Security Products. -- New integration drivers are added to the system to provide data from CCURE 9000 Access Control and victor Video Management Systems from Tyco Security Products. Simpler integrations with lighting systems from leading lighting providers -- LED lighting and sensor networks from preferred partners are tightly integrated with the Metasys system to coordinate lighting behaviors with HVAC operation. For more information on Metasys 10.0, visit metasys.johnsoncontrols.com. About Johnson Controls Johnson Controls is a global diversified technology and multi-industrial leader serving a wide range of customers in more than 150 countries. Our 120,000 employees create intelligent buildings, efficient energy solutions, integrated infrastructure and next generation transportation systems that work seamlessly together to deliver on the promise of smart cities and communities. Our commitment to sustainability dates back to our roots in 1885, with the invention of the first electric room thermostat. We are committed to helping our customers win and creating greater value for all of our stakeholders through strategic focus on our buildings and energy growth platforms. About Johnson Controls Building Technologies & Solutions Johnson Controls Building Technologies & Solutions is making the world safer, smarter and more sustainable -- one building at a time. Our technology portfolio integrates every aspect of a building -- whether security systems, energy management, fire protection or HVACR -- to ensure that we exceed customer expectations at all times. We operate in more than 150 countries through our unmatched network of branches and distribution channels, helping building owners, operators, engineers and contractors enhance the full lifecycle of any facility. Our arsenal of brands includes some of the most trusted names in the industry, such as Tyco, YORK, Metasys, Ruskin, Titus, Frick, PENN, Sabroe, Simplex and Grinnell. For more information, visit www.johnsoncontrols.my or follow Johnson Controls Asia Pacific on LinkedIn. Photo - https://photos.prnasia.com/prnh/20181212/2324610-1 Logo - http://photos.prnasia.com/prnh/20150623/8521504142LOGO SOURCE Johnson Controls [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 19, 2018] PFS & Correos Roll out AliExpress Gift Card Programme for the Post Office Network in Spain FinTech, Prepaid Financial Services has delivered AliExpress gift card payment functionality for Correos, Spain's national post office network. AliExpress is owned by the Chinese online retail giant Alibaba Group. The Correos AliExpress Regalo Mastercard prepaid card packs are available in post offices throughout Spain. They can be used for buying online and for offline purchases wherever Mastercard is accepted. Carlos Millan, Chief Commercial Officer at Correos explained: "We are very pleased to incorporate this new card to our prepaid services and also provide a comfortable and secure means to pay e-commerce purchases." Valerie Moran, Head of Client Relations & Operations at PFS said: "Our long-term partnership with Correos continues to bring payment technology and innovation to people across Spain. Prepaid Financial Services is pleased to have successfully brought the Correos AliExpress Regalo vision to life." About Prepaid Financil Services Prepaid Financial Services Limited (PFS) provides multi-award-winning payment technology solutions by offering comprehensive innovations in e-money. As a pioneer in the evolution of FinTech, its world-class solutions include e-wallets, physical and virtual prepaid cards, as well as IBAN accounts in the UK and Eurozone. PFS is Authorised and Regulated by the FCA in the UK as an electronic money institution and has passported its e-money license to enable e-money issuance in the EEA. PFS has rapidly expanded to become one of Europe's largest e-money issuers. The company has returned profits for 10 consecutive years. With programmes active in 24 countries and growing, PFS has the ability to transact in 22 currencies. PFS' products and state-of-the-art technology platforms are trusted by governments, local authorities, NGOs, mobile network operators, banks, and corporate clients globally. PFS is an agile FinTech chosen by FinTechs. Explore the future of prepaid financial solutions today by visiting https://prepaidfinancialservices.com Discover more about PFS' next-generation payment solutions [email protected] Ends ### View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20181219005054/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 19, 2018] Longview announces its Fall '18 release is now available TORONTO, Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Longview is pleased to announce the general availability of Longview Fall '18 which delivers major innovation in user interactions and experiences across our entire suite of products: Close, Plan, Tax and Analytics. Longview Fall '18 highlights include: Seamless integration of Longview Analytics and Longview Plan powered by Tidemark for better analysis and better business insights powered by Tidemark for better analysis and better business insights New Planning visualization canvas to create compelling dashboards and narratives for executive reporting Process Maps added to Longview Tax and Close to simplify user adoption and navigation through customer defined process maps, a feature previously enjoyed by Tidemark Plan customers New functions added to Longview Analytics supporting quicker & easier creation of robust applications New Net Income Bridge and Variance Analysis to help users understand the root cause of performance variations exist between different scenarios such as actual, budget and forecast Further enhancements to our new Operational Transfer Pricing solution UI/UX Modernization and alignment user inerfaces have been dramatically enhanced, improving usability through a refreshed look and feel these updates across Longview's portfolio of solutions provide cohesion and familiarity when navigating between applications Wayne Stevens , Chief Product Officer at Longview comments: "These enhancements continue to build on our vision of Connected Finance." He adds: "By accelerating Close, Plan, Tax and Analytics functions, we definitely help empowering organizations to maximize efficiency and performance." Longview Fall '18 is available now customers can visit the "What's New" section of our customer portal to access a summary of the enhancements and to view the product Release Notes for full technical details of this release. About Longview Longview makes enterprise software that connects Finance and drives competitive advantages for organizations. Hundreds of thousands of business leaders from Global 2000 companies, operating in more than 100 countries, leverage Longview daily to make strategic and immediate business decisions with confidence. Longview elevates planning, consolidation, tax reporting, and analytics from data collection and validation to strategic business processes. Longview's 25+ years of domain knowledge and experience, combined with our state-of-the-art cloud-based and on-premise platforms, deliver the most robust and innovative performance management solution in the marketplace. Longview is a global company headquartered in Toronto, Canada with offices around the world. Further information about our company and our solutions can be found at www.longview.com For media inquiries, please contact: Sarah Bergseth Vice President of Global Marketing, [email protected] [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 19, 2018] Maxar's SSL Highlights its U.S. Industry Leadership in Next-Generation Solar Electric Propulsion SSL's new high-power thruster increases power, flexibility, performance for commercial and government missions PALO ALTO, CA, Dec. 19, 2018 /CNW/ - SSL, a Maxar Technologies company (NYSE: MAXR) (TSX: MAXR), and a leading provider of innovative satellites and spacecraft systems, recently demonstrated its next generation solar-electric propulsion system on two commercial missions to geostationary orbit (GEO). As a U.S. industry leader, SSL continues to develop commercially sustained high power spacecraft propulsion systems that provide increased power, flexibility and performance for future missions, backed by a long heritage of electric propulsion success. "Through careful and deliberate insertion of next-generation systems, SSL is driving forward the industry's most advanced electric propulsion capabilities," said Dario Zamarian, group president, SSL. "Our high-thrust systems bring another space-proven addition to our toolkit, with value for a broad range of government and commercial missions." Commercial Missions Last week, SSL completed orbit raising of a multi-mission communications satellite known as Azerspace-2/Intelsat 38 using its next-generation, high-power electric thruster, known as the SPT-140. This thruster leverages the Power Processing Unit 140 (PPU-140) with multiple gimbaled Hall Effect thrusters to provide 8-kW of electric propulsion. It was used in a hybrid system together with the company's traditional bi-propellant system to propel Azerspace-2/Intelsat 38 to the geostationary arc, 22,300 miles above the equator. Using electric propulsion can reduce launch mass for large high-performance payloads and for longer missions by eliminating the need for bi-propellant tanks that can add hundreds or thousands of kilograms of mass to a spacecraft. For commercial satellites, electric propulsion helps reduce launch costs and enables the use of larger and more powerful payloads. Earlier this year the SPT-140 was demonstrated for the first time on a large communications satellite built for Telesat, one of the world's leading communications satellite operators. The Telstar 19 VANTAGE satellite was launched in July and is operating according to plan using the SPT-140 electric thrusters to maintain its precise position in its orbital slot, known as station-keeping. Proven Performance The SPT-140 is an evolution of the SPT-100 electric thruster, which has been used on 34 SSL missions and has more than 100,000 hours of firing time. These recent on-orbit successes position SSL as an industry leader in commercially sustained high power solar electric propulsion, providing customers with cost-effective solutions and proven performance and reliability. Advancing Technology In addition to demonstrating its next-generation system on commercial missions, in August, SS was awarded a NASA Tipping Point contract to advance a high-efficiency 6kW dual mode electric propulsion engine. SSL is developing a highly flexible power processing unit capable of providing variable voltage for increased mission efficiency and greater power, flexibility and velocity for future missions. SSL currently has four commercial satellites under construction that will also use the SPT-140 to reach their orbits, including one all-electric spacecraft. The company is also providing a high-power solar electric propulsion spacecraft chassis for a NASA mission called Psyche to explore what is believed to be an all metal asteroid. The electric propulsion system will be the driving force to carry the spacecraft and its scientific instruments to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Rounding out its accomplishments in solar electric propulsion, early next year SSL will enable a unique mission in conjunction with SpaceX and Spaceflight that will bring several payloads to orbit. An SSL high-throughput communications satellite equipped with SSL's next-generation propulsion system will carry a ride along payload beyond geostationary orbit before reaching the orbital slot where it will operate. About SSL SSL, based in Palo Alto, California, is a leading provider of advanced spacecraft systems, with broad expertise to support commercial and government satellite operators and innovative space missions. The company designs and manufactures spacecraft for services such as direct-to-home television, video content distribution, broadband internet, mobile communications, in-orbit servicing, space exploration, and Earth observation. As a Silicon Valley innovator for 60 years, SSL's advanced product line includes state-of-the-art small satellites, and sophisticated robotics and autonomous solutions for remote operations. SSL is a Maxar Technologies company (NYSE: MAXR; TSX: MAXR). For more information, visit www.sslmda.com. About Maxar Technologies As a global leader of advanced space technology solutions, Maxar Technologies is at the nexus of the new space economy, developing and sustaining the infrastructure and delivering the information, services, systems that unlock the promise of space for commercial and government markets. As a trusted partner, Maxar Technologies provides vertically-integrated capabilities and expertise including satellites, Earth imagery, robotics, geospatial data and analytics to help customers anticipate and address their most complex mission-critical challenges with confidence. With more than 6,500 employees in over 30 global locations, the Maxar Technologies portfolio of commercial space brands includes MDA, SSL, DigitalGlobe and Radiant Solutions. Every day, billions of people rely on Maxar to communicate, share information and data, and deliver insights that Build a Better World. Maxar trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange and New York Stock Exchange as MAXR. For more information, visit www.maxar.com. Forward-Looking Statements Certain statements and other information included in this release constitute "forward-looking information" or "forward-looking statements" (collectively, "forward-looking statements") under applicable securities laws. Statements including words such as "may", "will", "could", "should", "would", "plan", "potential", "intend", "anticipate", "believe", "estimate" or "expect" and other words, terms and phrases of similar meaning are often intended to identify forward-looking statements, although not all forward-looking statements contain these identifying words. Forward-looking statements involve estimates, expectations, projections, goals, forecasts, assumptions, risks and uncertainties, as well as other statements referring to or including forward-looking information included in this release. Forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties which could cause actual results to differ materially from the anticipated results or expectations expressed in this release. As a result, although management of the Company believes that the expectations and assumptions on which such 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. The risks that could cause actual results to differ materially from current expectations include, but are not limited to, the risk factors and other disclosures about the Company and its business included in the Company's continuous disclosure materials filed from time to time with Canadian and U.S. securities regulatory authorities, which are available online under the Company's SEDAR profile at www.sedar.com, under the Company's EDGAR profile at www.sec.gov or on the Company's website at www.maxar.com. The forward-looking statements contained in this release are expressly qualified in their entirety by the foregoing cautionary statements. All such forward-looking statements are based upon data available as of the date of this release or other specified date and speak only as of such date. The Company disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements in this release as a result of new information or future events, except as may be required under applicable securities legislation. Contact Wendy Lewis | SSL Media Contact | 1-650-852-5188 | [email protected] Jason Gursky | Maxar Investor Relations | 1-303-684-2207 | [email protected] View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/maxars-ssl-highlights-its-us-industry-leadership-in-next-generation-solar-electric-propulsion-300768397.html SOURCE Maxar Technologies Ltd. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 19, 2018] HotLink Enables Service Providers to Battle Cybersecurity Attacks with New Fully-Integrated Veeam Cloud Connect Technology HotLink Corporation, the market leader in IT transformation solutions, today announced its beta program for Veeam Cloud & Service Providers (CSPs) to address next-generation cybersecurity threats affecting their backup and replication customers. As a Veeam Alliance Partner, HotLink's new technology delivers robust cybersecurity capabilities to identify, analyze and remediate a broad spectrum of security threats that negatively impact disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) and backup as a service (BaaS) end users. With this new HotLink technology, Veeam partners can provide their customers with the automated cyber analysis and actionable intelligence to fight compromises that render backups unrecoverable in the event of a cyberattack or other production irregularity. According to a recent Ponemon study, two-thirds of small- and mid-sized businesses reported a threat evaded their intrusion detection systems, and 53 percent were attacked by ransomware two or more times. As next-generation malware, ransomware, phishing attacks, advanced persistent threats, internal bad actors and inadvertent IT errors escalate in frequency and complexity, threats can lie dormant for months - taking 197 days on average to identify a cyber breach, according to recent research. Months of undetected vulnerabilities then propagate into backup files and disaster recovery (DR) systems designed to protect companies if front-end security solutions fail, making recovery time protracted or often infeasible. HotLink's new technology for Veeam DRaaS and BaaS providers offers a powerful, cost-effective solution for detection and remediation of security threats for end users of all sizes. "Most organizations count on their backup solution to help them recover from advanced security threats and other cyber incidents," said George Crump, founder and president of Storage Switzerland. "As cyber threats become more sophisticated, it's taking longer toidentify breaches, and this inherently compromises the backup workloads and data that are required for recovery. No one has the time or resources to test every restore point in a sandbox environment. Rather, customers need the automated ability to analyze backup repositories for problem files and compromised data in a practical and cost-effective way. This is precisely what this new HotLink technology is designed to do." Industry research shows that more than 50 percent of IT shops indicate security is a top priority in their 2019 budgets. HotLink helps Veeam partners differentiate their DRaaS and BaaS offerings and gain new revenue opportunities by offering robust and unique cybersecurity capabilities, such as fine-grained security fingerprints, correlation to threat intelligence and policy-based analysis of every backup and replica - all without the requirement to restore virtual machines in a sandbox or affecting customer production environments. This is an industry first and an important step toward protecting Veeam customers from the daily attacks facing critical operations. To support various service provider business models, HotLink's cybersecurity technology for Veeam will have a range of licensing options, including: Continuous backup and replication cybersecurity fingerprinting and analysis with correlation to multiple threat intelligence feeds, enabling the most comprehensive threat protection and recovery; Basic backup and replication cybersecurity fingerprinting and threat analysis, enabling a low-cost, easy-to-use entry level CSP (News - Alert) offering; and Limited-term cybersecurity analysis following broad-based malware or ransomware outbreaks, assuring customers can identify latent threats and avoid major disaster. HotLink CEO Lynn LeBlanc said, "Security threats are continuously evolving and evading the front-end tools that companies are deploying. With malware and bad actors becoming more clever by the day, CSPs are in a unique position to fortify backup and DR systems and help eliminate cyber incidents that threaten predictable recovery following a production failure. HotLink's new technology for Veeam DRaaS and BaaS systems is a giant step forward in helping the market combat accelerating cyberattacks." Additional information Read: "Backup has Fallen - How Cyber Threats are Compromising Your Backup System" from Storage Switzerland For more information about HotLink's beta program: Contact [email protected] Are you a Veeam partner interested in cybersecurity offerings for 2019? Contact [email protected] About HotLink Corporation HotLink enables today's next-generation data centers to easily adopt a wide range of hybrid computing resources without adding complexity to their IT operations, while delivering advanced security of cloud-based data protection resources. The company's security division is built around patent-pending fingerprinting technology that provides integrated and continuous, fine-grained cybersecurity protection against the steady stream of IT cyber threats. Only with HotLink can IT teams easily integrate on-site and cloud-based systems, plus protect operations from the escalating complexity and frequency of security breaches. HotLink has earned dozens of awards and industry accolades, including Best of VMworld honors such as Best in Show, Public and Hybrid Cloud Computing, Storage and Backup, and Virtualization Management. HotLink is a privately held, venture capital-backed company based in Santa Clara, California. For more information, visit www.hotlink.com or connect with us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20181219005195/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 19, 2018] Gorilla Technology Announces $15 Million Series D Funding from SBI Group Gorilla Technology Group, an Edge AI and computer vision solutions provider, has secured $15 million in D-round funding from SBI Investment, a subsidiary of the SBI Group, which is Japan's leading financial services company and is also a global leader in making active investments in Fintech, AI and Blockchain. This new round of funding comes ahead of Gorilla Technology's announced participation at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show (CES (News - Alert)) conference in Las Vegas. The funding marks SBI Investment's first investment in a Taiwanese, AI-focused company and will give SBI Group a minority stake in Gorilla Technology. Gorilla plans to use the investment to enhance their AI and video analytics algorithms for the financial tech space, work toward cementing a worldwide sales and marketing presence, as well as expand the company footprint in Japanese markets. Tomoyuki Nii, Executive Officer of SBI Investment said, "SBI's investment follows the establishment of SBI AI & Blockchain Fund (SBI A&B Fund) earlier this year. The SBI Group is actively involved in introducing AI solutions to financial institutions in Japan, and strongly believes in the future of this field." Gorilla Technology approached SBI Group based on its work creating viable solutions for Edge AI, where edge devices process priority AI algorithms locally, and allow real-time intelligent results, while cloud and server-based AI is coordinated over a smart and optimized network connection. Based on its future AI vision, Gorilla was also recently certified on Intel's (News - Alert) OpenVINO toolkit, which the company has currently utilized successfully to further improve computer vision and video analytis in the manufacturing, retail, healthcare and transportation industries. "Financial companies worldwide have started tapping on the video analytics and facial recognition door as cybersecurity threats continue to grow and expand in 2019. We are committed to creating new avenues of success and security for the FinTech markets, and we strongly believe the next natural step is to expand Edge AI, computer vision and Data as a Service," said Dr. Spincer Koh, CEO of Gorilla Technology. "SBI Group's investment into our company and vision strengthens our position as an Edge AI leader. It's a key driver toward our goals in video analytics technology, and keeps Gorilla positioned at the forefront of video AI technology. We can't wait to see what the future holds." Gorilla Technology successfully completed A, B and C investment rounds in 2007, 2009 and 2015, respectively, by tapping EMC for A and B rounds, while Telstra Ventures and Acer were the main C round investors. Gorilla develops its own AI and video analytic platforms from its research and development facility in Taiwan, and in June this year, Intel announced Gorilla as the first certified video analytic solution on Intel's OpenVINO IoT toolkit. Gorilla will continue to deepen their relationships with SBI Group, Intel and other partners to bring Edge AI and computer vision to the next level in system integration. For more information about Gorilla Technology, or to set up a meeting during CES, visit https://www.gorilla-technology.com or contact the company: https://www.gorilla-technology.com/contact-us. About SBI Investment SBI Investment, the core business in the Asset Management Business of the SBI Group, operates and manages venture capital funds under the management philosophy to become the leading company in the creation and incubation of core industries of the 21st century as a "new industry creator." About Gorilla Technology Gorilla Technology, a privately held company established in 2001, is a global leader in video intelligence, network intelligence and IoT technology. They develop a wide range of video-centric and content management applications including Smart Retail, Smart School, Smart Enterprise, Smart Surveillance and broadcast media. In addition, Gorilla provides a complete security convergence solution to government institutes, telecom companies and private enterprises with network surveillance and cyber security. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20181219005283/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 19, 2018] Cambridge Mobile Telematics Raises $500M from the SoftBank Vision Fund Cambridge Mobile Telematics (CMT), the world's leading mobile telematics and analytics provider, has secured a $500 million investment from the SoftBank Vision Fund. This investment will accelerate the adoption of CMT's successful DriveWell platform used by insurers, fleets, wireless carriers, and other entities to measure driving risk and improve driver safety. It will also fuel CMT's growth in automated crash and claims management, video analytics, and safety for emerging vehicle and mobility systems. The investment is subject to regulatory approval. Drawing on numerous innovations in mobile sensing, artificial intelligence (AI), and behavioral science, CMT has become the market leader in mobile telematics. Today, CMT works with customers in more than 20 countries, accurately measuring driving performance for insurance pricing, providing incentives to improve driving quality, and lowering operating costs by reducing crash rates and automating some claims processing functions. CMT's partners include leading insurers such as State Farm, Liberty Mutual, Desjardins, Discovery, Admiral, MS&AD Group, QBE, AIG, and Insurance Australia Group, yielding a global customer base of several million users. "CMT is breaking new ground in the application of telematics, machine learning, and behavioral analytics to solve challenging problems in insurance and safety," said Akshay Naheta, Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers. "CMT is uniquely positioned to help insurers develop the insights to better support customers and advance their operations, while promoting long-term improvements in driving standards around the world." "Over the past few years, the DriveWell platform has helped make roads safer by making drivers better in a world where crashes are rising due to factors like distracted driving," said Hari Balakrishnan CMT's Chairman and CTO, who founded CMT with Bill Powers (CEO) and Sam Madden (Chief Scientist). "Our rapid growth has been fueled by a culture that values collaboration with our customers and invests in research to improve our solutions and develop new products. This partnership with the Vision Fund is the start of the next stage of our journey to bring safe mobility solutions for people and goods at massive scale." CMT has pioneered many innovations since its inception, in 2010, from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. CMT deployed the first service to efficiently gather and process sensory data from phones for auto insurance (2012), use phone sensors to measure phone distraction (2013), and induce better driving with gamification (2014). Together, these innovations created the category of "behavior-based insurance", also known as "mobile usage-based insurance". Results from the field are compelling: the driving feedback, rewards, and contests delivered via the DriveWell platform reduce phone distraction by 35% on average with 30 days, and at-risk speeding and hard braking by 20%. These improvements lead to significant measurable reductions in crashes and insurance claims. CMT's DriveWell Tag, invented in 2014, was the first fully wireless "Internet of Things" (IoT) device to measure vehicle dynamics for actuarial scoring and for real-time impact alerts with roadside assistance; in 2018, CMT shipped its 6 millionth Tag. Since 2016, CMT has introduced new services for crash reconstruction and loss notification with telematics data, dashcam video analytics for risk scoring, fleet features for commercial insurance, and best-in-class risk scoring models. These models enable insurers to accurately price risk using telematics data and have been approved by several regulators. CMT's progress has been widely recognized by many independent experts. In October, CMT was named the market leader in mobile usage-based insurance by Ptolemus, a research firm focused on connected mobility and IoT. In June, DriveWell was named the Best Auto Digital Insurance Product by TU-Automotive Detroit. CMT's insurance technology solutions have also won multiple awards from Celent, Gartner (News - Alert), and Digital Insurance. For more information about CMT, visit CMTelematics.com. About Cambridge Mobile Telematics Cambridge Mobile Telematics (CMT) aims to improve safety in the mobile world for people and goods using mobile sensing and IoT, AI, and behavioral science. Since its first product launch in 2012, which helped establish the new category of mobile usage-based insurance, CMT has grown to become the world's leading mobile telematics and analytics company. Headquartered in Cambridge, MA, steps from the MIT (News - Alert) campus, CMT's award-winning DriveWell platform is used by leading insurers, fleets, cellular carriers, and other organizations in more than 20 countries, improving safety for millions of mobile users. To learn more, please visit cmtelematics.com and follow CMT on Twitter (News - Alert) @cmtelematics. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20181219005339/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 19, 2018] New NanoSeptic Self-Cleaning Surfaces Address Hygiene Issues for Travelers in Airports, Hotels and Airplanes FOREST, Va., Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- With a flurry of news reports about germs in airports and hotels, travelers have never been more concerned with cleanliness, and businesses have never been more concerned with traveler experience. NanoTouch Materials' new self-cleaning surfaces address these traveler concerns. In just the first few months after moving to their new headquarters, The Center for Innovation in Smart Materials, NanoTouch has released a self-cleaning film for touch screens that can turn any airport check-in kiosk or in-flight screen into a continuously self-cleaning surface. They have also released self-cleaning elevator button covers. These innovations add to their current lineup of travel products which include portable self-cleaning mats that the individual traveler can use on the airplane tray table or hotel bathroom vanity, and super durable self-cleaning mats for TSA security bins. This was the same product line that won the Innovation Award at last year's ISSA Conference in Las Vegas. "I think we can now say for sure that travelers are paranoid about dirty public surfaces when traveling," says NanoSeptic co-founder Dennis Hackemeyer. "Whether it's the airplane tray table, hotel bathroom vanity, or TSA security bin, travelers just don't trust the cleanliness of these surfaces." The portable self-cleaning travel mat is one product that both vacation and business travelers seem to be clamoring for since it provides a cleaner place to rest a toothbrush, eyeglasses, medications or other personal items on a hotel bathroom vanity. And it provides a much cleaner place to rest your peanuts or pretzels on the airplane tray table. "Our travel mat not only makes travelers feel safer and more secure, it's also a great in-room or in-plane amenity that can generate new revenue," says Mark Sisson, co-founder. "And because we can dd the hotel, airline or cruise line logo to the mat, it's another way these travel companies can extend their brand wherever the traveler goes and however they get there." But the product that generates the most excitement from the travel industry is the NanoSeptic self-cleaning mat for TSA security bins in airports. "Over and over again, we would tell the story of how travelers walk around the airport, including on bathroom floors, then take off their shoes and put them in the bin going through TSA security," says Hackemeyer. "Then the next traveler puts their phone, glasses, keys and other personal items where those shoes were. Before we could even finish telling the story, the reaction was always the same....please stop, I think I'm going to be sick." After 6 months of testing by a regional TSA team, the NanoSeptic mats were sent to TSA's national testing facility for verification. After TSA approval, the mats made their debut at the Akron-Canton airport, providing a cleaner surface for more than 1.4 million travelers per year. "One thing that really surprised our team was when we started getting calls about using the TSA security bin mat in other facilities," says Hackemeyer. "We designed the mat specifically for airports, but soon after the launch we were contacted by nuclear power plants and government facilities since they have similar security screening processes." NanoSeptic products are positively disrupting the travel and hospitality industry by getting businesses to look at cleanliness differently. Historically, hotels and other travel-related businesses took the approach of hiding their cleaning efforts. The old line of thought was that if people saw a facility taking steps to improve cleanliness, they might think the facility was dirty. But research has shown the opposite to be true. Travelers already assume the airplane, hotel or cruise ship is dirty. Furthermore, their purchase decisions can be directly affected by addressing hygiene issues and making clean visible. A NanoSeptic self-cleaning mat placed on the bathroom vanity of each room in a hotel has been shown to cause a "halo" effect, positively affecting a guest's perception of the cleanliness of the room and the facility in general. NanoSeptic self-cleaning products could also be a valuable part of a hotel, airline, cruise line, or credit card reward program. More than 150 travelers volunteered to be part of experiential market research that was conducted at the Akron airport on the day the TSA bin mats were launched. To download the research report on traveler perception just visit www.nanoseptic.com/traveler. Media Contact: Dennis Hackemeyer 888-411-6843 [email protected] View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-nanoseptic-self-cleaning-surfaces-address-hygiene-issues-for-travelers-in-airports-hotels-and-airplanes-300768700.html SOURCE NanoTouch Materials [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 19, 2018] Motorola Solutions Files Copyright Infringement Proceedings in Australia Against Hytera Communications and Hytera Communications (Australia) Pty Limited Motorola (News - Alert) Solutions, Inc. (NYSE: MSI) today announced it has filed a claim for copyright infringement against Hytera Communications Corporation Limited (SHE: 002583) of Shenzhen, China and Hytera Communications (Australia) Pty Limited of Australia (collectively, "Hytera") in the Federal Court of Australia. Motorola Solutions' application for leave to introduce the copyright infringement claim was heard on 13 December 2018 and orders were made by the Federal Court granting leave on 19 December 2018. The new claim asserts that Hytera unlawfully copied Motorola Solutions' MotoTRBO source code into Hytera's Digital Mobile Radio (DMR) equipment, thereby infringing and continuing to infringe Motorola Solutions' copyright in violation of Australian copyright laws. Motorola Solutions seeks damages or an account of profits for this unlawful conduct, as well as an injunction preventing the importation or sale in Australia of all Hytera products using the code, including adaptations of that code and such additional relief as the Federal Court deems appropriate. The devices that are the subject of Motorola Solutions' claim for copyright infringement include Hytera's so-called i-Series product line. As previously announced in July 2017, Motorola Solutions filed patent infringement proceedings against Hytera in the Federal Court of Australia asserting that certain Hytera DMR products offered in Australia infringe three of Motorola Solutions' Australian patents: AU2005275355, AU2006276960 and AU2009298764. The DMR products at issue include a substantial number of Hytera's DMR portables (37 models), mobiles (6 models), and repeaters (4 models). In connection with those patent infringement claims, Motorola Solutions seeks a declaration hat Hytera has infringed Motorola Solutions' patents and an order permanently restraining Hytera from continued infringement, as well as damages or an account of profits and such additional relief as the Federal Court deems appropriate. "As evidenced by our recent victories at the U.S. International Trade Commission and in Germany, Hytera is a serial infringer and copier that has cheated its way to the market," said Mark Hacker, general counsel and chief administrative officer of Motorola Solutions. "We will not relent in holding Hytera accountable for its egregious and illegal behavior and protecting our intellectual property for the benefit of our customers, shareholders, employees, partners and other stakeholders." In addition to the Federal Court of Australia, Motorola Solutions' patent infringement, copyright infringement and trade secret theft lawsuits against Hytera are still pending in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. The proceedings in the Federal Court of Australia are proceeding number NSD1283/2017. For additional information regarding Motorola Solutions' legal actions against Hytera, please visit https://newsroom.motorolasolutions.com/presskits/hyteralitigation.htm. Forward-Looking Statements This press release contains certain forward-looking statements including statements regarding expectations with respect to litigation filed by Motorola Solutions, Inc., and the outcomes possible if successful. By their nature, forward-looking statements involve risk and uncertainty because they relate to future events and depend on circumstances that will or may occur in the future and are outside the control of Motorola Solutions, Inc., and its officers. Actual results may differ from those expressed in such statements depending on a variety of factors including those discussed in this release. About Motorola Solutions Motorola Solutions (NYSE: MSI (News - Alert)) is a technology company that provides mission-critical communications, software and video solutions that help build safer cities and thriving communities. Public safety and commercial customers globally depend on the company's two-way radios, broadband technology, video surveillance and analytics solutions, services and software to keep them connected, from extreme to everyday moments. Learn more at www.motorolasolutions.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20181219005428/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 19, 2018] Acuity Link Announces Availability of Patient Leakage Detection Functionality and Clinician User Credentialing BOSTON, Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Acuity Link, a comprehensive non-emergency medical transportation (NEMT) communications and logistics management platform provider, today announced that it has enhanced its technology offering with added functionalities for patient leakage detection and clinician user credentialing. The company's solution links healthcare systems with non-emergency medical transportation (NEMT) providers and ambulance crew members for all levels of care and any health setting. Both new features have been developed to gain further insights and data as it relates to the movement of patients and enhancing efficiencies throughout the healthcare ecosystem to ultimately improve patient care and experience. According to a recent study conducted by Sage Growth Partners, almost half of respondents (43%) estimated that their organization loses over 10% of revenues due to patient leakage, and 19% are losing more than 20% of revenues. Determined to directly combat this substantial amount of annual revenue loss, Acuity Link's new leakage detection feature was developed to aid health systems in better understanding the flow of patients throughout the various healthcare facilities. Leveraging this new capability, hospitals can identify why, when and how patient populations are moving to and from their system to others, and the reasons for doing so. Customizable triggers and filters within Acuity Link's database provide the ability to pull reports and analytics around patient referral and patient movement trends, associating the level of care required with appropriate transport, and identifying sending and receiving physicians. Additionally, the platform capturesdata around the movement of tangible hospital equipment, allowing hospitals to track down and return it to its proper location. Having this new level of insight into the movement of both patients and equipment, health systems can make more informed decisions around the treatment of patients, enhance care coordination, and minimize lost revenue. The company's new clinician user credentialing feature, which mirrors the Medicare guidelines the signing of medical necessity forms, guarantees that credentialed clinicians are signing medical necessity forms for ambulance use. This feature also validates the necessity form process for ambulance billing and reimbursement, limiting waste, fraud and abuse of ambulance resources, whether intentional or otherwise. With the user credentialing feature, all actions within the dashboard are time dated and stamped, helping to ensure the right transportation resource based on a patient's clinical condition. "Acuity Link was purpose-built to link hospitals and healthcare systems with the most comprehensive, available and suitable transportation resources, which has proven to have a substantial impact on patient flow, shorter discharge times and ultimately, improved patient care and experience," said Alex Theoharidis, CEO of Acuity Link. "Our platform is always advancing to meet the need for forward-looking automation capabilities and comprehensive data and analytics intelligence that are critical for enhancing efficiencies within the healthcare ecosystem. These newest leakage detection and user credentialing features are the latest additions to the evolution of the Acuity Link solution." Acuity Link was recently named the winner of the Fierce Innovation Award: Healthcare Edition 2018 in the Financial/Operational Solutions category based on its unique ability to provide valuable operational insights and actionable data. To learn how healthcare organizations today are turning to Acuity Link to address mounting patient discharge workflow challenges head-on, please visit https://www.acuity-link.net/. About Acuity Link Acuity Link is a comprehensive communications and logistics management platform that links healthcare systems with non-emergency medical transportation (NEMT) providers and ambulance crew members for all levels of care and modes of transportation. With Acuity Link's technology, organizations benefit from instant access to the closest available and most suitable transportation resources, reducing bottlenecks that impact patient flow, leading to shorter discharge times, and in turn, enhanced patient care and experience. The company's HIPAA-compliant, customizable, easy-to-use Software-as-a-Service solution can be implemented into any healthcare setting to streamline NEMT and patient flow processes which provides a new level of data critical to enhancing efficiencies within the healthcare ecosystem. This previously unavailable intelligence generates accurate, actionable insights needed to make more informed operational and clinical decisions. For more information about Acuity Link, please visit https://www.acuity-link.net/. Media Contacts Jessy Green or Sarah Larrow SVM Public Relations [email protected] 401.490.9700 View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/acuity-link-announces-availability-of-patient-leakage-detection-functionality-and-clinician-user-credentialing-300768907.html SOURCE Acuity Link [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 19, 2018] University of Illinois Ushering in New Frontier of Computer Science Curriculum CHAMPAIGN, Ill., Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has launched a five-year initiative that will educate and certify high school teachers to teach computer science. The Illinois Secondary Teacher Education and Computer Science (I-STECS) initiative, funded through the campus' Investment for Growth program, will help address the shortage of high school computer science teachers in Illinois and across the nation. "The I-STECS initiative responds directly to recent, urgent calls from politicians, business leaders, educational policymakers, and school administrators, especially in Chicago, for the establishment of programs of computer science throughout secondary schools in the State of Illinois and nationally," says College of Education Dean James D. Anderson. I-STECS will recruit undergraduate students to enroll in its program, including incoming freshmen in math and physics, students already in computer science, and education students who are interested in incorporating technology in their classrooms. In addition, I-STECS is developing summer institutes where teachers can receive credit. The program is also establishing connections with local schools to generate more computer science education beyond introductory classes. Initiative officials are encouraging schools who offer AP classes in computer science to expand those offerings. "We will build capacity by developing a secondary teacher education program in computer science and an endorsement program for teachers localy, across the state, and nationally," says Mark Dressman , a professor in Curriculum & Instruction in the University of Illinois' College of Education and lead author and project coordinator of the initiative. "In these programs, teachers and pre-service teachers will acquire content knowledge in computer science as well as knowledge of how to teach this content to students in K-12 and, possibly, community college settings." I-STECS is a collaborative effort involving faculty and administrators from the College of Education, the College of Engineering (the Department of Computer Science), and the Council on Teacher Education. "Between the College of Education and Department of Computer Science at Illinois, the expertise and experience are in place to develop a very strong program and help Illinois excel in this area," says Chad Lane, associate professor in educational psychology. "It will also open up new possibilities for developing and deploying innovative methods for teaching computer science that are more age-appropriate and potentially engaging for younger learners." About the College of Education within the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Founded in 1905, the College of Education is one of the nation's first land-grant schools of education, revered for its groundbreaking research, preparation of educator-leaders, and worldwide impact. U.S. News and World Report consistently rank the College and its programs among the world's best. Home of the late Dr. Samuel Kirk, the "father of special education," and now more than 70 tenure-track faculty and over 2,000 undergraduate, graduate, doctoral, and online studentsGreat Minds Think Illinois. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, founded in 1867, has a total enrollment of over 47,000 students from all 50 states and more than 100 countries. The University of Illinois pioneers innovative researchlike inventing the MRI, designing the first graphical web browser, and defining the modern tree of lifeto tackle grand challenges and expand the human experience. With interdisciplinary hubs of discovery including the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the largest public university library in the nation, our transformative learning experiences are designed to produce alumni who desire to make a significant societal impact. Contact Gina Manola, Director of Marketing and Communications, College of Education University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 217-300-5939 [email protected] View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/university-of-illinois-ushering-in-new-frontier-of-computer-science-curriculum-300768305.html SOURCE College of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 19, 2018] InterGlobix Magazine and Total Telecom, organizer of Internet Infrastructure events, enter into Media Partnership WASHINGTON and LONDON, Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- InterGlobix LLC, a global solutions company focused on the convergence of datacenters, terrestrial and subsea fiber, and Total Telecom Ltd. a business media and global events company announced today that InterGlobix Magazine, the first magazine of its kind focused on Datacenters, Connectivity, Luxury and Lifestyle, will be a Media Partner for the following Connectivity events to be held in London, UK: Submarine Networks EMEA, 12-13 February 2019 Connected Britain , 18-19 June 2019 , Total Telecom Congress, 29-30 October 2019 "Total Telecom events in the UK cover a wide spectrum of Connectivity topics including Subsea, Terrestrial, Infrastructure, SmartCity, Stategy and Partnerships for the Telecom Industry. With our partnership with Total Telecom, the reach of our magazine will extend to the coveted datacenter and connectivity industry personnel in the UK," said Jasmine Bedi, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of InterGlobix Magazine. "We are glad to be supporting InterGlobix Magazine as a Media Partner. The concept of this publication is very intriguing and unique. We are looking forward to working together with InterGlobix Magazine," said James Llewellyn, Marketing Manager of Total Telecom. ABOUT INTERGLOBIX MAGAZINE InterGlobix Magazine is industry's premier datacenter and connectivity reference guide. It recognizes the key shapers behind this relatively young industry and delves deep into the lifestyle of the most successful industry personalities. It features behind-the-scenes stories at datacenter construction sites, looks into the emerging subsea ports, latest terrestrial and mobile industry innovations and keeps you in the know. Each luxury-packed issue offers a platform to our partners and clients to showcase their exclusive products and services to the coveted and elite high net worth individuals from the datacenter and connectivity industry. For more information, please visit www.interglobixmagazine.com. ABOUT TOTAL TELECOM LTD. Total Telecom is a business media company founded in 1997. Total Telecom meets the information and research needs of the Global Communications industry, from breaking news to expert analysis. It is the leading communications link between end users and the vendors, carriers and resellers of telecommunications technology and services. For more information, please visit www.totaltele.com. InterGlobix Media Contact Total Telecom Contact Jasmine Bedi James Llewellyn Founder & Editor-in-Chief Marketing Manager InterGlobix Magazine Total Telecom [email protected] [email protected] View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/interglobix-magazine-and-total-telecom-organizer-of-internet-infrastructure-events-enter-into-media-partnership-300768922.html SOURCE InterGlobix LLC [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 19, 2018] GWS Performs Comprehensive Testing of U.S. Mobile Networks With Rohde & Schwarz Benchmarking Solution COLUMBIA, Md., Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Global Wireless Solutions, Inc. (GWS) has recently completed its most thorough testing of U.S. mobile networks. GWS conducted directed benchmark testing in all 50 states as well as Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands from January 2018 to August 2018. GWS drove close to one million miles across 501 regions throughout the U.S. during the testing process, resulting in the completion of over 8 million individual controlled voice and data tests. Collection and evaluation of data was done using Rohde & Schwarz SmartBenchmarker test equipment, Samsung Galaxy mobile devices, and GWS' Mobistat data evaluation and reporting platform. GWS' data results was analyzed according to their OneScore ranking methodology, which combines engineering drive test data with consumer research. It takes into account both real-world wireless network performance as well as consumer considerations by choosing test factors that quantify human perception and assign a weight to each of them according to their importance. This includes everything from coverage to reliability, data speed, voice quality and video performance. The results of this analysis can be found here: www.gwsolutions.com/bestnetwork-USA "Our network testing specialists spent months crisscrossing the US, collecting key performance data using highly specialized test equipment and following methods and procedures that are designed specifically to measure network performance," said Dr. Paul Carter, CEO and founder of Global Wireless Solutions, Inc. "We tested in every major metropolitan market in the US, as well as smaller urban cities and rural towns. As a result, we completed the most comprehensive, consumer-riented evaluation of US mobile networks to date." To learn more about measurement solutions from Rohde & Schwarz mobile network testing, visit https://www.mobile-network-testing.com/en/products/benchmarking/smartbenchmarker/ and https://blog.mobile-network-testing.com/ Press contacts: North America: Keith Cobler, Phone: +1 214 663 6394, E-mail: [email protected] Contacts for readers: Customer Support North America: Phone: +1 888 837 8772, E-mail: [email protected] Global Wireless Solutions, Inc. Global Wireless Solutions, Inc. defines the industry standard for network benchmarking, analysis and testing. GWS' proprietary OneScore network ranking combines high-level network testing data with real-world network usage scenarios to make the results of testing relatable and easy to understand. Working with some of the world's largest wireless network providers, GWS offers standardized, high-quality network data and engineering analysis to its customers through a suite of benchmarking products, services, and OneMeasure diagnostic apps that includes drive, venue, and in-building testing. Firmly rooted in a deep understanding of network engineering, GWS provides best-in-class, turnkey solutions to help customers better understand overall network performance as today's wireless networks grow and evolve. Founded in 1996, GWS is headquartered in Dulles, VA. At last count, GWS has driven 12 million data collection miles for its customers. For more information, visit www.gwsolutions.com and follow on Twitter at @gwsolutionsinc. Rohde & Schwarz The Rohde & Schwarz technology group develops, produces and markets innovative communications, information and security products for professional users. The group's test and measurement, broadcast and media, aerospace | defense | security, networks and cybersecurity business fields address many different industry and government-sector market segments. On June 30, 2018, Rohde & Schwarz had approximately 11,500 employees. The independent group achieved a net revenue of approximately EUR 2 billion in the 2017/2018 fiscal year (July to June). The company has its headquarters in Munich, Germany. Internationally, it has subsidiaries in more than 70 countries, with regional hubs in Asia and America. View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/gws-performs-comprehensive-testing-of-us-mobile-networks-with-rohde--schwarz-benchmarking-solution-300768949.html SOURCE Rohde & Schwarz [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 19, 2018] Orbital Sidekick Deploys ISS Sensor System Orbital Sidekick (OSK) announces the successful deployment of its first-generation hyperspectral system on the NanoRacks External Platform on-board the International Space Station (ISS). The system is designed to enable efficient monitoring of energy assets and infrastructure integrity using OSK's proprietary Spectral Intelligence platform. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20181219005479/en/ Orbital Sidekick's ISS-HEIST hyperspectral payload (silver rectangular box, right) integrated into the NanoRacks External Platform and awaiting deployment on the International Space Station. Credit: NanoRacks/NASA Orbital Sidekick will initially provide monitoring solutions to the energy industry, leveraging extensive capabilities in aerial and space-based hyperspectral imaging and analytics. Current methods used by the industry fall short in providing scalable monitoring & early leak detection capabilities. With its Spectral IntelligenceTM analytics platform, OSK converts hyperspectral data into actionable information that can be used to optimize safety operations inthe oil and gas industry while also achieving compliance obligations. According to MarketsandMarkets Research, the global pipeline monitoring systems market is estimated to grow from USD 4.13 Billion in 2015 to USD 8.72 Billion by 2026. With the deployment of its first-generation sensor system on the ISS, OSK will unlock persistent monitoring services for its customers and further develop its propriety system for the needs of the global Energy sector. The firm ultimately aims to leverage its expertise and extend its capabilities to the Defense, Agriculture and Infrastructure sectors. OSK has already received backing from the US Air Force, recently announcing that AFWERX, the United States Air Force program with the goal of fostering a culture of innovation within the service, has awarded OSK a Phase I SBIR contract for dual use technology pertaining to its space-based hyperspectral sensor on-board the International Space Station. In 2019, OSK will team with Loft Orbital to deploy a second-generation hyperspectral payload, providing a high frequency monitoring solution that meets industry demands, while utilizing the partnerships, product testing and intelligence-gathering activity already underway. Loft Orbital provides affordable and reliable access to space infrastructure. "Our team is already digging into the powerful data generated by our ISS-HEIST payload," said Dan Katz, CEO & Co-Founder of Orbital Sidekick. "Beyond our primary commercial use case in the Energy sector, we plan on providing disaster monitoring services to deeply affected areas, particularly those close to home here in California." Katz continued, "NanoRacks has been instrumental in helping us bring this amazing hyperspectral capability to fruition on their ISS External Platform, and we're incredibly excited to begin working with the Loft Orbital team on our 2019 mission." OSK currently operates aerial pilot programs with multiple oil & gas pipeline operators to deliver Spectral IntelligenceTM for asset integrity and regulatory compliance monitoring. About Orbital Sidekick - Orbital Sidekick is building a space-based monitoring service, providing access to near-real-time alerts from space. OSK's space-based hyperspectral assets, in conjunction with its Spectral IntelligenceTM platform, provide a unique ability to chemically identify elements, compounds and objects that are key to monitoring assets and identifying anomalies. More information: www.orbitalsidekick.com View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20181219005479/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 19, 2018] Keysight, Qualcomm Achieve 3GPP 5G NR Standalone End-to-End IP Data Transfer 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 the successful demonstration of a 3GPP 5G New Radio (NR) standalone (SA) mode IP data transfer using Keysight's 5G network emulation solutions and a mobile smartphone form-factor test device consisting of a 5G modem and antenna modules from Qualcomm (News - Alert) Technologies, Inc., a subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated. The high-speed IP data download transfer was achieved using a network configuration that combines the latest 3GPP Release 15.3.0 5G NR technologies. This achievement is an important milestone that enables mobile operators to deploy 5G NR SA mode, which does not rely on an anchor in the LTE (News - Alert) network, to deliver enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) services required by many 5G use cases. "We are delighted that Keysight's expertise and innovations in 5G solutions are helping us in the next major milestone of achieving IP data transfer in standalone mode," says Jon Detra, vice president, engineering, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. "With 5G commercialization starting in the first half of 2019, Qualcomm Technologies joining forces with Keysight, helps enable the entire mobile ecosystem to make 5G a commercial reality." Keysight's track record of developing early 5G solutions in collaboration with Qualcomm Technologies has yielded many 5G industry-first milestones, including the introduction of the first 5G NR-ready network emulation solutions. "We are excited to continue our close collaboration with Qualcomm Technologies to achieve this technology landmark, enabling the entire wireless industry ecosystem to accelerate 5G standalone operation," stated Kailash Narayanan, vice president and general manager of Wireless Devices and Operators at Keysight Technologies. "Qualcomm's modem customers can easily validate device performance and speed development, as well as achieve consistent test results by using Keysight's 5G network emulation solutions." About Keysight in 5G The development of 5G depends on up-to-date tools that let designers easily explore new signals, scenarios and topologies. Keysight's 5G solutions are ready to enable deeper insights as development evolves with the standard. In design and test, Keysight is helping industry leaders innovate across new and existing technologies as they transform ideas into reality. Additional information about Keysight's 5G design, test and measurement solutions is available at www.keysight.com/find/5G. 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 $3.9B in fiscal year 2018. 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/20181219005218/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 19, 2018] Razer Launches The World's First Wireless Keyboard And Mouse Designed For Xbox One IRVINE, Calif., Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Razer, the leading lifestyle brand for gamers, today introduced a new way to play on console with the Razer Turret for Xbox One, a wireless keyboard and mouse combo designed for Xbox One. "We're extremely proud to team up with Microsoft to bring you this exclusive collaboration," says Razer Co-Founder and CEO Min-Liang Tan. "With the Razer Turret for Xbox One, it is now possible to bring the full experience of a keyboard and mouse, with lighting and game integration to Xbox One." Built for reliable gaming on the couch, the Razer Turret for Xbox One offers a fast and stable 2.4 GHz wireless connection via a single dongle for the mouse and keyboard, and battery life of up to 40 hours on a single charge. With Xbox Dynamic Lighting and Razer ChromaTM technology, console gamers now have access to the largest ecosystem of lighting, with up to 16.8-million color options and lighting effects for their keyboard and mouse. Additionally, Razer has been working with developers to bring Xbox Dynamic Lighting and Razer ChromaTM support in-game, offering immersive experiences on supported titles such as "X-Morph-Defense", "Vermintide 2" and more. "Razer ChromaTM expands even further into the living room," says Tan, "building upon the success we've had with Philips Hue in room lighting." The keyboard features Razer's gaming grade mechanical switches engineered for durability and reliability with a lifespan of up to 80-million keystrokes. A dedicated Xbox key also instantly pulls up the Xbox One dashboard for seamless navigation. The included mouse is modelled after the popular Razer Mamba Wireless gaming mouse and features a high-performance 5G advanced optical sensor and RazerTM Mechanical Mouse Switches with up to 50-million clicks durability. The mouse surface is conveniently hidden underneath the main body of the keyboard and can be extended for use, then retracted for charging and storage. A built-in ergonomic wrist rest extends from the base of the Razer Turret keyboard for Xbox One for added comfort. The Razer Turret for Xbox One is also fully compatible with PC (Windows 10), enabling gamers to take their game from the PC to console and back. For more information, visit https://www.razer.com/gaming-keyboards/razer-turret-for-xbox-one/ Images: Press Images Price: $249.99 Availability: Microsoft Store (North America): Pre-order now (Get an Xbox gift card worth $25 with each pre-order) Worldwide: Q1 2019 Product Specs: Razer Turret for Xbox One keyboard: Razer Mechanical Switches with 50 g actuation force 80-million keystrokes Xbox Dynamic Lighting Powered by Razer Chroma with 16.8 million customizable color options Compact layout Ergonomic wrist rest Mid height keycaps Razer Synapse enabled 10-key roll-over anti-ghosting Compatible with both PC and Xbox One Fully programmable keys with on-the-fly macro recording (PC only) Gaming mode option (PC only) Approximate size: 194 mm / 7.64 in (Length) X 390 mm / 15.35 in (Width) X 36.93 mm / 1.45 in. (Height) Approximate size (with tray expanded): 194 mm / 7.64 in (Length) X 600 mm / 23.62 in (Width) X 36.93 mm / 1.45 in (Height) Approximate weight: 1860 g / 4.10 lbs. Cable length: 2 m / 6.56 ft. Razer Turret for Xbox One mouse: Razer 5G Advanced Optical Sensor with true 16,000 DPI Up to 450 inches per second (IPS) / 50 G acceleration 7 independently programmable Hyperesponse buttons Razer Mechanical Mouse Switches with 50-million click life cycle Gaming-grade tactile scroll wheel Ergonomic right-handed design Xbox Dynamic Lighting Powered by Razer Chroma with 16.8 million customizable color options Hybrid On-Board Memory and Cloud Storage Razer Synapse enabled Compatible with both PC and Xbox One Approximate size: 125.70 mm / 4.95 in (Length) X 70 mm / 2.75 in (Width) X 43.20 mm / 1.70 in (Height) Approximate weight (excluding cable): 106 g / 0.21 lbs Charging cable: 0.15 m / 0.49 ft / 0.49 ft USB cable length: 2.10 m / 6.89 ft Battery life (on a single charge): Razer Turret for Xbox One keyboard Up to 11 hours with default lighting enabled Up to 43 hours with lighting disabled Razer Turret for Xbox One mouse Up to 30 hours with default lighting enabled Up to 50 hours with lighting disabled ABOUT RAZER Razer is the world's leading lifestyle brand for gamers. The triple-headed snake trademark of Razer is one of the most recognized logos in the global gaming and esports communities. With a fan base that spans every continent, the company has designed and built the world's largest gamer-focused ecosystem of hardware, software and services. Razer's award-winning hardware includes high-performance gaming peripherals, Blade gaming laptops and the acclaimed Razer Phone. Razer's software platform, with over 50 million users, includes Razer Synapse (an Internet of Things platform), Razer Chroma (a proprietary RGB lighting technology system), and Razer Cortex (a game optimizer and launcher). Razer services include Razer Gold - one of the world's largest virtual credit services for gamers - which allows gamers to purchase virtual goods and items from over 2,500 different games. Founded in 2005 and dual-headquartered in San Francisco and Singapore, Razer has 15 offices worldwide and is recognized as the leading brand for gamers in the USA, Europe and China. Razer is listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (Stock Code: 1337). Press Contacts: Americas Kevin Allen [email protected] Europe/Africa Jan Horak [email protected] Asia Pacific Raymond Lau [email protected] China Evita Zhang [email protected] Global Alain Mazer [email protected] Razer For Gamers. By Gamers. View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/razer-launches-the-worlds-first-wireless-keyboard-and-mouse-designed-for-xbox-one-300768660.html SOURCE Razer [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 19, 2018] Area 1 Security Uncovers Cybersecurity Breach of European Diplomatic Network Initiated By Chinese Government REDWOOD CITY, Calif., Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Area 1 Security today announced discovery of an ongoing cyber campaign that has gained access into the diplomatic correspondence network of the European Union. Area 1 Security's active sensors and research team began observing technical artifacts of a cyber campaign directed at Intergovernmental Organizations, Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Ministries of Finance, as well as trade unions and think tanks. This attack had further breached and accessed a communications network used by the European Union to facilitate cooperation on urgent foreign policy matters. This network, known as COREU, operates between the 28 EU countries, the Council, the EEAS and the Commission. It is a crucial but little-known instrument in the EU system of policymaking. Area 1 has tied the activities to the Strategic Support Force (SSF) of the People's Liberation Army (PLA). They have been able to identify a consistent set of characteristics and chain of events that links together a larger campaign that includes targeting of the United Nations and the AFL-CIO, in addition to the accessing of diplomatic cables from the European Union's COREU network. "Our mission is to eliminate phishing. Through the course of our normal business we often discover the origins and outcomes of cyber campaigns," said Oren Falkowitz, CEO of Area 1 Security. "The cybersecurity doom narrative has become so embellished that we have lost the nerve to take action. Cybersecurity needs an optimistic all-out assault on the problem, that starts by seeing cyber attacks for what they are, routine assembly line operations, neither extraordinary or insurmountable to defeat," Falkowitz continued. Cyber campaigns linked to China have served for many years as a catalyst for ational-security and cybersecurity experts to raise awareness and allocate resources to an issue historically relegated to the basements of organizations. After years of publicly censuring the PRC for cyber-based economic espionage, Washington and Beijing reached an agreement in 2015 to curtail the hacking of private companies for commercial gain. "Our report is not the first to expose a specific cyber campaign, nor will it have a direct impact on deterring the actors responsible. But it does show three consistent facts about cyber campaigns that make them unremarkable," said Blake Darche, Chief Security Officer of Area 1 Security. "1. Phishing remains the dominant method through which cyber actors gain access into computer networks 9 out of 10 times. 2. Cyber attacks are more assembly line than individual snowflakes. Very little about this or any other cyberattack is cutting edge computer science 3. Cyber actors continually use their imagination to find the weakest links in the digital chain, as we show here in attacking the MFA of Cyprus to gain access to the entire European Union diplomatic communications network." As 2018 comes to a close, tensions between the two countries over hacking allegations are once again on the rise. "Cyber campaigns continue to be the essential tool for waging war, influencing global trade, theft of intellectual property and financial assets, espionage and other geopolitical effects with minimal resources or repercussions," Falkowitz said. About Area 1 Security Area 1 Security is the first to bring accountability to cybersecurity. Backed by top-tier investors, Area 1 Security is led by security, Artificial Intelligence, and data analytics experts who created a preemptive solution to stop phishing, the number one cause of cyber attacks. Area 1 Security works with organizations worldwide, including Fortune 500 banks, insurance, and tech companies, and healthcare providers to realign their cybersecurity posture for combating the most significant risks, protecting customer data, and stopping attacks before they happen. Area 1 Security is a recipient of Inc. Magazine's "2018 Inc.'s Best Workplaces" in America. To learn more about Area 1 Security, visit www.area1security.com , join the conversation at @area1security or follow the blog for the latest industry news and insights on how to stop phishing. Media contact: Blake Schenerlein [email protected] 304-483-1516 View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/area-1-security-uncovers-cybersecurity-breach-of-european-diplomatic-network-initiated-by-chinese-government-300768487.html SOURCE Area 1 Security [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 19, 2018] NGINX Wraps Best Year-to-Date with Appointment of Christine Puccio as Vice President of Global Strategic Alliances & Partnerships NGINX, Inc., the company based on the popular open source project and offering a suite of technologies designed to develop and deliver modern applications, announced continued rapid growth for 2018 and expansion plans for 2019. In its largest year of growth to date, NGINX grew to more than 1,500 customers, including three of the five largest global banks, three of the five largest U.S. retailers, and five of the ten largest technology companies. Powering more than 400 million sites globally, NGINX has more than tripled the business in the last three years, including 100% revenue growth among the Global 2000. Further underscoring NGINX's momentum in 2018, the company's San Francisco headquarters has relocated to Twitter's (News - Alert) former office location at 795 Folsom Street. With the goal of employing 400 personnel globally by the end of 2019, the new office will support the growth and development of engineering, technical staff, sales and marketing, and channel resources. The new office space is centrally located to many of NGINX's customers and partners, and its single-floor layout is designed for collaboration across teams, with plenty of open meeting space for employees. Looking forward, NGINX will further expand into the APAC region, with a new office location planned for Tokyo in early 2019. To showcase NGINX's commitment to the expansion of its partner ecosystem and address its go-to-market plans, the company has hired Christine Puccio as vice president, global strategic alliances and partnerships. With the recent launch of NGINXs Partner Network, Puccio will focus on the breadth and depth of NGINX's program, working to help expand existing partnerships in the microservices ecosystem with platform providers such as AWS, Docker, Red Hat, and Google (News - Alert), in addition to solution providers like Datadog, New Relic, Okta, Ping Identity, Sysdig, and Splunk. Puccio joins from Red Hat (News - Alert), where she most recently served as the global senior director of AWS and Google Cloud, and drove increased revenue from Red Hat's cloud computing partners. During her tenure, Puccio accelerated the growth of Red Hat's SAP (News - Alert) business by closing Red Hat's largest software deal with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SAP HANA. The business grew over 300% year-over-year under her management. "NGINX is poised for significant growth within the enterprise, and finding new, strategic partners while nurturing NGINX's existing partner base is my top priority," said Puccio. "I'm thrilled to be working with a company that has such a bold vision and strong leadership team, where I can bring my unique perspective and help drive their success." "Driven by the increase in enterprise demand for application delivery solutions, 2018 has been the best year so far for NGINX, and we're well-positioned for an even stronger 2019," said Gus Robertson, CEO of NGINX, Inc. "By focusing on our platform vision and go-to-market strategy, we're able to invest in employees like Christine, as well as our products, which will extend NGINX's leadership in the microservices industry." To learn more about NGINX, visit www.nginx.com. Join the conversation by following @nginx on Twitter. About NGINX, Inc. NGINX, Inc. is the company behind the popular open source project trusted by more than 400 million sites. We offer a suite of technologies for developing and delivering modern applications. The NGINX Application Platform enables enterprises undergoing digital transformation to modernize legacy, monolithic applications as well as deliver new, microservices-based applications. Companies like Netflix, Starbucks, and McDonalds rely on NGINX to reduce costs, improve resiliency, and speed innovation. NGINX investors include Blue Cloud Ventures, e.ventures, Goldman Sachs, Index Ventures, MSD Capital, NEA, Runa Capital, and Telstra (News - Alert) Ventures. We are headquartered in San Francisco, CA, with our EMEA head office in Cork, Ireland and APAC head office in Singapore. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20181219005163/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 19, 2018] CL3VER Unveils its New Real-time 3D Cloud Rendering Technology and Solution Based on NVidia RTX BARCELONA, Spain, Dec. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- CL3VER, the pioneering 3D startup from Barcelona, announces today its new proprietary cloud solution based on NVidia RTX to visualize any real-time 3D content directly in a web browser. This technology is based on CL3VER's brand new 3D ray tracing engine that renders any 3D scene, regardless of its complexity, in the cloud, live-streaming the visualization to the browser using standard html5 technology compatible with any recent device (desktop or mobile) without the need of any plugin. This new technology offers photorealistic results, immersive 3D navigation, fast loading times and instant changes, making it the perfect choice for web-based 3D applications such as real estate and product configurators, training and educational modules, interactive storytelling and so on. With this new solution, CL3VER targets all types of companies that want to improve engagement with their users, offering them a new way of interacting with their products with an unmatched visual quality. "Our new solution is going to makea big impact in the market and lead the next generation of 3D user experiences in the browser, helping companies to engage their customer in ways they couldn't even imagine before," CL3VER's CEO, Daniel Iborra, said. "Seamless 3D navigation in the browser has been in the radar of industrials, advertising agencies, video game companies and so on for many years and now CL3VER finally delivers it to the user." CL3VER's cloud solution is available through a variety of business models, including a SaaS platform. CL3VER is also working on integrating this new technology into CL3VER Presenter, its presentation authoring tool, which will allow 3dsMax and Revit users to create photorealistic real-time 3D presentations from their 3D scenes and share them, in a few clicks, without rendering times or any additional production time, thanks to its compatibility with V-Ray content. Launched this November, RTX is NVIDIA's revolutionary ray tracing technology is already praised for the advances it brings in real-time 3D rendering. Founded in 2011 in Barcelona, CL3VER is a pioneering real-time rendering technology company focused on bringing photorealism to mobile and web-based applications. A live demo or more information can be requested from this link: https://www.cl3ver.com/contact-us/ Media Contact: CL3VER Barcelona Spain +1-(410)-779-9556 from US +34-93-328-41-67 from EU www.cl3ver.com View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cl3ver-unveils-its-new-real-time-3d-cloud-rendering-technology-and-solution-based-on-nvidia-rtx-300769011.html SOURCE CL3VER [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 19, 2018] Scott+Scott Attorneys at Law LLP Alerts Investors to Securities Class Action Against Tenaris S.A. (TS) Scott+Scott Attorneys at Law LLP ("Scott+Scott"), a national shareholder and consumer rights litigation firm is notifying investors that a class action lawsuit has been filed against Tenaris S.A. ("Tenaris" or the "Company") (NYSE: TS) and certain of its officers and directors, related to alleged violations federal securities laws. If you purchased Tenaris securities between May 1, 2014 through November 27, 2018, you are encouraged to contact a Scott+Scott attorney at (844) 818-6980 for more information. Tenaris is a manufacturer and supplier of steel pipe products. The lawsuit alleges that defendants made false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose that: (1) Tenaris's CEO and Chairman, Paolo Rocca, knew that one of his company's executives paid cash to govenment officials from 2009 to 2012 to expedite compensation payments for the sale of Sidor; (2) this conduct would lead to Rocca being charged in a graft scheme, and subject Tenaris, its affiliates, and/or executives to heightened governmental scrutiny; and (3) as a result, Tenaris's public statements were materially false and/or misleading at all relevant times. On November 27, 2018, Bloomberg and the Financial Times (News - Alert) reported that Tenaris's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Paolo Rocca was indicted for his role in the Argentinian "notebook scandal." According to Bloomberg (News - Alert), "[t]he judge charged Rocca after the Argentine billionaire testified that one of his company's executives paid an undisclosed amount of cash to government officials in monthly installments from 2009 to 2012." On this news, the price of Tenaris American Depository Receipts (ADRs) dropped $2.64 per share or roughly 10% to close at $24.36 on November 27, 2018. What You Can Do If you purchased Tenaris securities between May 1, 2014 through November 27, 2018, inclusive, or if you have questions about this notice or your legal rights, please contact attorney Rhiana Swartz at (844) 818-6980, or at [email protected]. The lead plaintiff deadline is February 11, 2019. About Scott+Scott Attorneys at Law LLP Scott+Scott has significant experience in prosecuting major securities, antitrust, and employee retirement plan actions throughout the United States. The firm represents pension funds, foundations, individuals, and other entities worldwide with offices in New York, London, Connecticut, California, and Ohio. Attorney Advertising View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20181219005704/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 19, 2018] SimMNSA has been granted Security Approval by the Global Positioning System Directorate Spirent (News - Alert) Federal Systems, the nation's leading provider of GPS/GNSS test equipment, announced today that their new M-Code solution, SimMNSA, has been granted Security Approval by the Global Positioning System Directorate. They are the first and only company to provide this highly anticipated solution for simulating classified GPS signals, and are currently taking orders. In 2017, Spirent Federal Systems partnered with Rockwell Collins to develop new software that will use the Modernized Navstar Security Algorithm (MNSA). This new approach of M-Code simulation adds to Spirent Federal's portfolio of classified signal simulation solutions, and will be available to authorized users of the GSS9000 series simulators. Ellen Hall, CEO of Spirent Federal Systems said, "With the increased focus on M-Code by the GPS Directorate, we are pleased that our team has paved the way in the development of SimMNSA. It was a great challenge to get to this point, but we are excited about what we have accomplished." This new test solution continues Spirent Federal Systems history of innovation and being first to market with M-Code simulation software. Spirent's GPS/GNSS solutions have supported numerous government, military, and DoD programs over 30 years. For more details, please rach out to us directly at [email protected] or 801-785-1448. https://www.spirentfederal.com/gps/products/simmnsa/overview/ About Spirent Federal Systems Spirent Federal Systems was formed in July 2001 by Spirent Communications (News - Alert) as a wholly owned subsidiary and U.S. proxy company. Spirent Federal markets and sells Spirent Communications' products in North America. The company also provides value-added features and ongoing customer support. Spirent Federal Systems is headquartered in Pleasant Grove, UT., with support and sales offices throughout the US. About Spirent Spirent Communications plc. (LSE: SPT) offers test, measurement, analytics, and assurance solutions for next-generation devices and networks. The company provides products, services and information for high-speed Ethernet, positioning and mobile network infrastructure markets, with expanding focus on service assurance, cybersecurity and 5G. Spirent is accelerating the transition of connected devices, network equipment and applications from development labs to the operational network, as it continues to innovate toward fully-automated testing and autonomous service assurance solutions. For more information, please visit www.spirent.com. Any product roadmap information provided above is for informational purposes only and is subject to change. No contractual commitments are being made. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20181219005774/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 19, 2018] AM Best Affirms Credit Ratings of Markel Corporation and Most Subsidiaries AM Best has affirmed the Long-Term Issuer Credit Rating (Long-Term ICR) of "bbb+" of Markel Corporation and all of its Long-Term Issue Credit Ratings (Long-Term IRs) and indicative Long-Term IRs (see below for a detailed list of Long-Term IRs and indicative Long-Term IRs). AM Best also has affirmed the Financial Strength Rating (FSR) of A (Excellent) and the Long-Term ICRs of "a+" of most of the members of the Markel North America Insurance Group. (See below for a detailed list of companies.) Concurrently, AM Best has affirmed the FSR of A (Excellent) and the Long-Term ICRs of "a" of Markel Bermuda Limited (Hamilton, Bermuda) and its affiliates, Alterra America Insurance Company and Markel Global Reinsurance Company (collectively, Markel Bermuda). The outlook of these Credit Ratings (ratings) is stable. At the same time, AM Best has upgraded the Long-Term ICRs to "a+" from "a" and affirmed the FSRs of A (Excellent) of SureTec Insurance Company and SureTec Indemnity Company. The outlook of the Long-Term ICR has been revised to stable from positive while the outlook of the FSR remains stable. These two companies are now members of the Markel North America Insurance Group. Both companies are headquartered in Houston, TX. Concurrently, AM Best has upgraded the Long-Term ICRs to "a+" from "a" and affirmed the FSR of A (Excellent) of State National Insurance Company, Inc. and its subsidiaries, which operate under a pooling agreement and are collectively referred to as State National Group (State National) (see below for a detailed listing of companies). The outlook of the Long-Term ICR has been revised to stable from positive while the outlook of the FSR remains stable. All companies are headquartered in Bedford, TX. The ratings of the Markel North America Group, which is considered the lead rating unit in the Markel Corporation enterprise, reflect its balance sheet strength, which AM Best categorizes as strongest, as well as its adequate operating performance, favorable business profile and appropriate enterprise risk management (ERM). Concurrently, AM Best has affirmed the FSR of A (Excellent) and the Long-Term ICR of "a+" of Lloyd's Syndicate 3000 (Markel Syndicate Management Limited) (Syndicate 3000) (United Kingdom). The outlook of these ratings remains stable. Markel Corporation (Markel) is the ultimate parent company of Syndicate 3000's managing agent, Markel Syndicate Management Limited, and of its corporate member, Markel Capital Limited. Syndicate 3000 is important to Markel as its main underwriting center for marine, large U.S. and international property risks and specialty and financial lines written in the London market. The group's balance sheet strength assessment reflects its risk-adjusted capitalization, which is categorized as strongest under baseline and various stress scenarios. Balance sheet strength is further supported by the group's lengthy track record of favorable loss reserve development, strong and positive cash flows and a comprehensive reinsurance program. However, the group maintains relatively high underwriting leverage, and investment income generation tends to trail the average of the composite, reflecting that the group's investment strategy focuses primarily on long-term capital appreciation, with investment income as a secondary consideration. The group's underwriting performance is in line with the peer group average, but its total return on equity outperforms the peer group average reflecting the benefit of its investment strategy. The group's operating ratio and pre-tax return on revenue tend to lag the peer group averages. The favorable business profile assessment reflects the group's solid market position, ranking among the top 35 writers of property/casualty insurance in the United States, with a solid ranking among U.S.-based surplus lines writers. The group's business is well-diversified by geography and line of business within the United States and globally. The group has entities able to write on an admitted and non-admitted basis, which allows it to retain business under a variety of market conditions. Markel has developed, implemented and embedded a risk management framework that appropriately addresses the riss inherent in its profile, and its risk management capabilities generally meet or exceed its risk profile. The ratings of Markel Bermuda reflect its balance sheet strength, which AM Best categorizes as very strong, as well as its adequate operating performance, neutral business profile and appropriate ERM. The group's strongest level of risk-adjusted capitalization is supported by the generally favorable development of loss reserves in recent years and substantial retrocession program consisting primarily of highly rated reinsurance and collateralized programs. Operating performance generally lags the reinsurance peer composite but outperforms the industry overall, despite the impact of weather losses in 2017 and 2018. The group's business is well-diversified by geography and line of business, as well as between reinsurance and insurance. The ratings of State National reflect its balance sheet strength, which AM Best categorizes as very strong, as well as its strong operating performance, neutral business profile and appropriate ERM. The group's strongest level of risk-adjusted capitalization is supported by the extended history of sustained operating profitability driven by its core collateral protection insurance business, and long-standing market position providing fronting services. These positive factors are offset somewhat by the group's elevated gross leverage, reflecting its business model of providing program services that include significant cessions to unaffiliated reinsurers. The group has managed the associated collateral and credit risk well, mostly mitigating concern related to the elevated leverage. The group's operating performance over time has outperformed the industry by a substantial margin, which was a key factor in the rating upgrade. Extensive ERM programs are in place and specialized to the State National business model utilizing comprehensive capabilities managing collateralized counterparty relationships. The ratings of Syndicate 3000 reflect the balance sheet strength of the Lloyd's market, which AM Best categorizes as very strong, as well as the market's strong operating performance, favorable business profile and appropriate ERM. The Lloyd's market rating is the floor for all syndicate ratings, reflecting the Lloyd's chain of security and, in particular, the role of the Central Fund, which partially mutualizes capital at the market level. The Markel Corporation maintains financial leverage and coverage that are within AM Best's guidelines for its rating and a level of risk-adjusted capitalization that supports its insurance operations, as well as the risk in its considerable non-insurance investment portfolio. While common stock leverage is elevated as a result of the group's investment strategy, which emphasizes long-term capital growth, the company has a long track record of successfully managing these investments. While underwriting results have been challenged by catastrophe activity in 2017 and 2018, AM Best anticipates that the company will produce favorable underwriting results over the long term while maintaining risk-adjusted capitalization. The FSR or A (Excellent) and the Long-Term ICRs of "a+" have been affirmed, each with a stable outlook, for the following members of Markel North America Insurance Group: Markel Insurance SE Essentia Insurance Company Evanston Insurance Company FirstComp Insurance Company Markel American Insurance Company Markel Insurance Company Markel International Insurance Company Ltd. EC Insurance Company Limited* * Concurrently, AM Best has withdrawn the ratings of EC Insurance Company Limited, following management's request to no longer participate in AM Best's interactive credit rating process. The Long-Term ICRs have been upgraded to "a+" from "a" and the FSR of A (Excellent) has been affirmed. The Long-Term ICR has been revised to stable from positive while the FSR remains stable for the following members of State National Group: State National Insurance Company, Inc. National Specialty Insurance Company United Specialty Insurance Company City National Insurance Company Independent Specialty Insurance Company The following Long-Term IRs have been affirmed, each with a stable outlook: Markel Corporation- -- "bbb+" on $350 million 7.125% senior unsecured notes, due 2019 -- "bbb+" on $250 million 5.35% senior unsecured notes, due 2021 -- "bbb+" on $350 million 4.9% senior unsecured notes, due 2022 -- "bbb+" on $250 million 3.625% senior unsecured notes, due 2023 -- "bbb+" on $300 million 3.5% senior unsecured notes, due 2027 -- "bbb+" on $200 million 7.35% senior unsecured notes, due 2034 -- "bbb+" on $250 million 5.0% senior unsecured notes, due 2043 -- "bbb+" on $500 million 5.0% senior unsecured notes, due 2046 -- "bbb+" on $300 million 4.3% senior unsecured notes, due 2047 Alterra Finance, LLC (guaranteed by Markel Corporation)- -- "bbb+" on $350 million 6.25% senior unsecured notes, due 2020 The following indicative Long-Term IRs under the existing shelf registration have been affirmed, each with a stable outlook: Markel Corporation- -- "bbb+" on senior unsecured debt -- "bbb" on subordinated debt -- "bbb-" on preferred securities This press release relates to Credit Ratings that have been published on AM 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 AM 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 AM Best press releases, please view Guide for Media - Proper Use of Best's Credit Ratings and AM Best Rating Action Press Releases. AM 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/20181219005798/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 19, 2018] Baron & Budd Accepting Cases from Delivery Drivers Mislabeled as Independent Contractors Today, the national law firm of Baron & Budd announced that it is accepting cases for current and former delivery drivers who are mislabeled as an independent contractor when in reality they fully depend on the company they work for. Large companies such as Amazon, Instacart, Uber, Lyft, TaskRabbit, or DoorDash, may have wrongfully labeled their delivery drivers as an independent contractor. In recent years, there has been an increase in the types of deliveries offered, from food delivery from different restaurants like Uber Eats to groceries from Amazon. These deliveries have made these large corporations very popular with consumers. A consumer is happy to purchase something and haveit quickly delivered to them. Because it has become a norm, these companies have hired many delivery drivers as independent contractors. This allows them to pay that driver based on a contract and not provide them with employee benefits. Delivery drivers that work exclusively for many months or even years for the same company, contribute little financial investment towards the work and have little control over their schedules, may ultimately be employees under state or federal law instead of independent contractors. It is critical for these workers to re-evaluate their relationship with their employer and how they are classified, even if they have signed an independent contractor agreement. These workers may be missing substantial unpaid compensation that would ultimately help their individual bottom line. If you are a current or former delivery driver for Amazon, Instacart, Uber, Lyft, TaskRabbit, or DoorDash and feel you were wrongfully classified as an independent contractor, please get in touch with an attorney with Baron & Budd by calling 866-419-6060. ABOUT BARON & BUDD, P.C. Baron & Budd, P.C. is among the largest and most accomplished plaintiffs' law firms in the country. With more than 35 years of experience, Baron & Budd has the expertise and resources to handle complex litigation throughout the United States. As a law firm that takes pride in remaining at the forefront of litigation, Baron & Budd has spearheaded many significant cases for hundreds of entities and thousands of individuals. Since the firm was founded in 1977, Baron & Budd has achieved substantial national acclaim for its work on cutting-edge litigation, trying hundreds of cases to verdict and settling tens of thousands of cases in areas of litigation as diverse as dangerous pharmaceuticals and defective medical devices, asbestos and mesothelioma, environmental contamination, fraudulent banking practices, motor vehicles, employment law, and consumer fraud issues. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20181219005840/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Disney Plus boasts a gigantic library of classic movies and hit Marvel TV shows, which have been the key to its success and popularity since it launched nearly two years ago. Its consistent releasing of popular movies and shows is the reason why it's one of the best streaming services. Everything that's great about the platform was celebrated on Disney Plus Day and we've got full details on what we learned below. There's more much more on the way in the form of Marvel series, Star Wars shows and reboots of beloved favorites. Whether you're curious about Baby Yoda's next adventures in The Mandalorian season 3 or the Ryan Coogler-helmed Wakanda TV show, Disney Plus has a full calendar ahead to keep you from canceling. The service includes streaming most of the Marvel movies in order, as we're still waiting on the Spider-Man movies and that one Hulk movie. Not only that, some of the Marvel movies that are already in the library are getting bigger thanks to a new feature called Imax Enhanced. Plus, there's also the ability to soar through Skywalker saga and see the Star Wars movies in order. The best Netflix shows and TV series How to get Disney Plus customer service Plus: Everything we know about the Disney Plus Hawkeye show Want to know more about what makes Disney Plus so great? Check out our Disney Plus review. As for what's coming up next on Disney Plus? Well, check out our story on the Encanto Disney Plus release date to see when the big animated film is coming to streaming. We're still trying to figure out when Eternals is. There's also the Disney Plus Star channel, available everywhere but the U.S. and making Disney Plus more complete with content from Hulu and elsewhere. This means you'll need to learn how to manage Disney Plus parental controls, because a lot of the new stuff isn't for younger audiences. So, welcome to our guide to everything you need to know about Disney Plus. We're constantly updating this page with details about pricing, deals, supported devices and release dates. Disney Plus Day brought movies and shows and a future of Marvel shows featurette to Disney Plus. A new feature, IMAX Enhanced, is bringing the big theatrical feel to over a dozen Marvel movies. The Book of Boba Fett release date revealed for Dec. 29 Disney Plus cheat sheet Price : Disney Plus costs $7.99 per month, though it offers a $79.99 per year price that essentially gives you 2 months free. : Disney Plus costs $7.99 per month, though it offers a $79.99 per year price that essentially gives you 2 months free. Bundles : Disney Plus, Hulu and ESPN Plus are bundled together in a $13.99 per month package, which saves you nearly $8 per month. : Disney Plus, Hulu and ESPN Plus are bundled together in a $13.99 per month package, which saves you nearly $8 per month. Supported Devices: Roku, Amazon Fire, Chromecast, PS4, Xbox One, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Android and Chromebooks. Roku, Amazon Fire, Chromecast, PS4, Xbox One, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Android and Chromebooks. App download links : The Disney Plus apps are available on a wide range of devices. : The Disney Plus apps are available on a wide range of devices. Key shows and movies : Loki's first episode set a record for Disney Plus, and preceding that, Mandalorian was (by far) the most popular Disney Plus show for a while. : Loki's first episode set a record for Disney Plus, and preceding that, Mandalorian was (by far) the most popular Disney Plus show for a while. What's next : Hawkeye and Book of Boba Fett make up the tail end of 2021. Ms. Marvel is possibly not dropping until 2022. : Hawkeye and Book of Boba Fett make up the tail end of 2021. Ms. Marvel is possibly not dropping until 2022. IMAX Enhanced: 13 Marvel films can be viewed in the IMAX Expanded Aspect Ratio, so you can see more movie on your screen. How to sign up for Disney Plus Disney Plus is now available for all, around the world, and you can sign up here. Check out our guide for how to use Disney Plus to take full advantage. And while the regular Disney Plus free trial is over, other options can be found. The streaming service, which boasts a library of thousands of movies and shows made by Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, National Geographic, and 20th Century Fox, offers annual plan options for those looking to save money. Cord-cutters in the United States might want to check out the details below on the ESPN Plus and Hulu bundles. The latter is especially important for watching series like The Handmaid's Tale, the new High Fidelity series and Rick and Morty the kind of not-exactly family-friendly content that Disney Plus is primarily comprised of. Either way, Disney Plus features a mix of classic titles (Cinderella, Toy Story, Star wars) and new programs developed exclusively for Disney Plus (The Mandalorian, High School Musical: The Musical). Disney Plus price and bundles (Image credit: Future) Disney Plus costs $7.99 per month or $79.99 per year, which essentially gives you two free months. If that's not enough savings, we're tracking the best Disney Plus deals. Disney Plus international pricing Canada: $11.99CAD per month (or $119.99 per year) New Zealand: $12.99NZ per month (or $129.99 per year) Australia: $11.99AUD per month (or $119.99 per year) New Zealand: $12.99NZD per month (or $129.99 per year) United Kingdom: 7.99 per month (or 79.90 per year) Hulu viewers should consider the Disney Plus, Hulu and ESPN Plus bundle, which costs $13.99 and saves you about $8. But those who don't want ad-supported Hulu now have an easier time now that Disney is promoting the ad-free Hulu Disney Plus bundle. The Disney Plus pricing is pretty competitive, and quite cheaper per month than the $13.99 "Standard" Netflix package most people get (though there's a basic plan with standard definition streaming that costs $8.99 per month). Apple TV Plus is even cheaper, at $4.99 per month, but has much less content. Disney CEO Bob Iger defended his service's higher price, arguing that Disney Plus' unique mix of originals and the incomparable Disney library makes the service stand out, even in front of more affordable services. Check out our Disney Plus vs Apple TV Plus face-off guide for more details. Also, see our Apple TV Plus review to learn about the quality of its shows and the issues with its web streamer. One caveat to all of this is Disney Plus makes it tricky to watch post-credit scenes in Marivel movies, which can be frustrating. Disney Plus shows Disney Plus may have a huge film library, but it's been winning thanks to new original shows and classic TV series. Recent big debuts included Star Wars: The Bad Batch, Big Shot and The Falcon and The Winter Soldier. The next big Disney Plus shows coming are Hawkeye (Nov. 24) and The Book of Boba Fett (Dec. 29). In 2022, Disney Plus will get a ton of new shows including the hilarious-looking Tatiana Maslany-led She-Hulk and the spooky-looking Oscar Isaac-led Moon Knight. Also that year (during the summer) Kamala Khan comes to Disney Plus in Ms. Marvel. Also, Obi-Wan Kenobi returns to your TV, and he's bringing Darth Vader back with him. We just learned that Willow is going to get a sequel that's just for Disney Plus, in the form of a TV series. (Image credit: Future) Classic shows already on Disney Plus include Disney Channel faves as well as shows produced by 20th Century Fox, like the entire series of The Simpsons. Originally, Disney Plus was led by the breakout hit The Mandalorian (Baby Yoda, we love you). Other originals include High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, Encore and Diary of a Future President. Disney Plus movies On Disney Plus Day, Nov. 12, the service got two big movies from this past summer: Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and Jungle Cruise. Disney's new Home Alone movie Home Sweet Home Alone (starring Aisling Bea, Archie Yates, Ellie Kemper, Rob Delaney, Pete Holmes and Kenan Thompson) also debuted that day. Other big-name additions include the feature-length taping of Hamilton, Clouds and The One and Only Ivan. Disney's vault also offers the big mix of animated films. Those include classics like Little Mermaid, Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast. There are also newer hits like Frozen and Frozen 2, as well as Pixar favorites like Finding Dory and Toy Story 4. Since Disney owns Lucasfilm, Disney Plus is home to Star Wars films, including the original trilogy, the prequel trilogy and the sequel films. Yes, The Rise of Skywalker is there too, now. And Disney also owns Marvel, so you can stream Avengers: Endgame, Black Panther, Captain Marvel and most of the other MCU movies (some are still on other streaming services, due to previous licensing deals). But while Disney Plus is great for kids and families, adult-oriented content is lacking. For instance, for Valentine's Day, Disney Plus had a sad collection of romantic movies for grown-ups. Disney Plus 2021 titles Disney Plus review and recommendations In our Disney Plus review, we gave the service positive marks, naming it one of the best streaming services yet, especially for families. The early hiccups of streaming issues have subsided, and Disney Plus' elegant animated interface continues to charm us. It doesn't hurt that Disney throws in included 4K Ultra HD resolution and family sharing (up to four devices). Plus, its $7.99 price is hard to argue with, especially now that Disney keeps adding new movies and shows. Disney Plus streaming devices and apps Disney Plus is available on desktop browsers on Mac and PC. The Disney Plus app is also available on most major streaming-capable devices: iPhones and iPads Android phones and tablets Apple TV Android TV Fire TV Fire tablets Roku Chromecast Chromebook Microsoft Xbox One PS4 Smart TVs (LG WebOS, Samsung Tizen, Android TV, Vizio SmartCast, Roku TV) Marvel movies and TV on Disney Plus The Disney Plus Marvel lineup has assembled, and it's almost complete. After launching with 16 titles, including Tom's Guide favorite: Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Disney Plus got Thor: Ragnarok on Dec. 5, and later acquired Black Panther, after its Netflix contract expired. Here's how to watch the Marvel movies in order. (Image credit: Future) In terms of MCU Phase 4 programming, we've got What If...?, Hawkeye, Moon Knight and Ms. Marvel as the next big Disney Plus Marvel shows. Star Wars movies and shows on Disney Plus All of the Star Wars films are on Disney Plus. That means on top of the whole Skywalker Saga (Episodes I through IX), Rogue One and Solo are both there too. Here's how to watch the Star Wars movies in order on Disney Plus. (Image credit: Future) The Mandalorian Season 3 is off in the distance, coming after The Book of Boba Fett. Rosario Dawson will reprise her role of Ahsoka Tano in the Disney show bearing the same name, on Disney Plus. The Bad Batch is currently airing, and feels like a continuation of Clone Wars. But wait, there's more the Obi-Wan Kenobi and Star Wars: Andor (2022) shows will help Disney stop people from unsubscribing to the service over the coming years. Disney Plus 4K HDR and downloads You don't need to concern yourself with spending more to get a more-complete version of Disney Plus. Unlike on Netflix (where you need to spend an extra $5 per month to move from 1080p to 4K), Disney Plus includes Ultra HD streaming and 4 simultaneous streams at its standard price. Disney Plus also lets you download all of its shows and movies to its apps. Laptop makers probably weren't feeling particularly thankful in November. According to Digitimes Research, shipments from the five largest notebook vendors fell 11 percent that month, even though consumerist "holidays" like Black Friday and Cyber Monday typically lead to strong sales. Individual results varied. Digitimes Research said that Lenovo saw a ten percent increase in shipments from October to November prompted by Chinese e-commerce platforms. Dell's year-over-year shipments fell, but they were actually higher than they were last November, with a reported sixpercent growth in shipments thanks to enterprise customers. HP's shipments fell month-over-month and dropped 14 percent compared to last year. DigiTimes (the editorial side of the company) blamed the falling shipments on a continued shortage of Intel CPUs and escalating tensions between the U.S. and China. The former has been a problem since early September, when analysts said a lack of Whiskey Lake processors hurt notebook supplies and gave AMD the chance to gain a foothold in the market. Intel promptly announced investments in fab sites to address the shortage. The risk posed by the U.S. and China's not-quite-trade-war, meanwhile, has risen over the last few weeks. President Donald Trump told The Wall Street Journal in November that upcoming tariffs could hit laptops and iPhones at a rate of up to ten percent. Trump's aides have reportedly advised against these new tariffs--mostly because they fear the potential consumer backlash--but they could easily be expanded to laptops in the future. But one month of bad results doesn't necessarily mean doom for the laptop market. The IDC actually said notebooks were "a silver lining" around declining interest in traditional PCs in favor of smartphones. The firm blamed declining laptop sales on a combination of the processor shortage--just like Digitimes Research--but also pointed the finger at a dip in sales for detachable devices (laptops whose displays can become standalone tablets). The IDC's senior Devices & Displays research analyst, Lauren Guenveur, said 2018 saw the "detachable category waver as important product announcements were pushed to the last quarter of the year." But she said the IDC believes "the market will recover in 2019 as new products from Apple, Microsoft, Samsung and Google become more readily available." Laptops might be down, but they probably aren't out. (Image credit: Facebook) Updated, 12/21/2018, 12:10pm PT: A Netflix spokesperson provided the following statement to Tom's Hardware: "Over the years we have tried various ways to make Netflix more social. One example of this was a feature we launched in 2014 that enabled members to recommend TV shows and movies to their Facebook friends via Messenger or Netflix. It was never that popular so we shut the feature down in 2015. At no time did we access peoples private messages on Facebook, or ask for the ability to do so." (Emphasis theirs.) Updated, 12/20/2018, 7:10am PT: Facebook published another blog post about Netflix, Spotify, Dropbox, and the Royal Bank of Canada's access to user messages. The company said these partners were only given read, write, and delete access to user messages because those permissions were required to enable messaging features in the other companies' services. (Such as sending a song via Spotify or a movie via Netflix.) Facebook said the "partnerships were agreed via extensive negotiations and documentation, detailing how the third party would use the API, and what data they could and couldnt access." It also claimed the features were experimental and had been shut down "for nearly three years." Original article, 12/19/2018, 7:54am PT: Facebook has become part of the fabric of the internet. That's partly because people use the platform to create accounts with new services, share things with their friends and receive custom-tailored experiences based on their interests. But a New York Times investigation this week has revealed that it's also because Facebook partnered with more than 150 companies between 2010 and 2017 to offer them access to its data without first informing users. The list of partners named in the report is a who's-who of tech companies. The New York Times said Amazon could find users' names and contact information via their friends; that Bing could "see the names of virtually all Facebook users' friends without consent"; that Netflix and Spotify could read users' private messages; and that Yahoo could "view streams of friends posts" even though Facebook publicly said it had ended that practice. Facebook is also said to have shared information with media companies, online retailers and automakers, among other tech companies. The full extent of these data partnerships was never revealed to Facebook's users, leading The New York Times and several privacy experts to claim the practice violated the social media platform's 2011 agreement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to only share data with explicit consent. This is the latest in a string of privacy-related controversies involving Facebook in 2018. The most notable was the Cambridge Analytica scandal that inspired lawmakers around the world to finally scrutinize Facebook's handling of approximately 2.2 billion people's personal information. But the company also came under fire after another New York Times report on its data partnerships and for numerous bugs that exposed private data. Facebook's Response Facebook responded to the recent New York Times' report, with most of its defense essentially being that the reports merely described APIs that enabled features its users wanted. The rest mostly comes down to neglect--it simply failed to remove APIs related to shuttered programs--and claims that it was unfair for The New York Times to complain about things it ended a few months ago when they were first revealed to the public. "To be clear: none of these partnerships or features gave companies access to information without peoples permission, nor did they violate our 2012 settlement with the FTC," Facebook said, adding "Our integration partners had to get authorization from people. You would have had to sign in with your Facebook account to use the integration offered by Apple, Amazon or another integration partner." There's likely some truth to Facebook's claims. Compelling features often require access to more information than people expect, and when that data-sharing is explained in layman's terms, things they were fine with suddenly become outrageous. But the company's been spewing hogwash about user privacy for so long that it's hard to even visit its social network without breathing in the faint smell of insecurity. The reality is that few people outside Facebook--including the company's own partners--know the extent to which it shares user data. Several companies told The New York Times they never knew they had special access to certain data, that they didn't realize they still had that access, or that they didn't plan to use their access but had it anyway. Either they're lying to escape criticism or Facebook and its "partners" are estranged. Intel has been hyping up Xe Graphics for about two years, but the Intel Arc Alchemist GPU will finally bring some needed performance and competition for Team Blue in the discrete GPU space. This is the first 'real' dedicated Intel GPU since the i740 back in 1998 or technically, a proper discrete GPU after the Intel Xe DG1 paved the way earlier this year. The competition among the best graphics cards is fierce, and Intel's current integrated graphics solutions basically don't even rank on our GPU hierarchy (UHD Graphics 630 sits at 1.8% of the RTX 3090 based on just 1080p medium performance). Could Intel, purveyor of low performance integrated GPUs"the most popular GPUs in the world"possibly hope to compete? Yes, actually, it can. Plenty of questions remain, but after Intel revealed additional details of its Arc Alchemist GPU architecture at Intel Architecture Day 2021, we're cautiously hopeful that the final result will be better than previous attempts. Intel has also been gearing up its driver team for the launch, fixing compatibility and performance issues on existing graphics solutions. Frankly, there's nowhere to go from here but up. The difficulty Intel faces in cracking the dedicated GPU market can't be underestimated. AMD's Big Navi / RDNA 2 architecture has competed with Nvidia's Ampere architecture since late 2020. While the first Xe GPUs arrived in 2020, in the form of Tiger Lake mobile processors, and Xe DG1 showed up by the middle of 2021, neither one can hope to compete with even GPUs from several generations back. Overall, Xe DG1 performed about the same as Nvidia's GT 1030 GDDR5, a weak-sauce GPU hailing from May 2017. It was also a bit better than half the performance of 2016's GTX 1050 2GB, despite having twice as much memory. So yes, Intel has a steep mountain to ascend if it wants to be taken seriously in the dedicated GPU space. Here's the breakdown of the Arc Alchemist architecture, which gives us a glimpse into how Intel hopes to reach the summit. Actually, we're just hoping Intel can make it to the base camp, leaving the actual summiting for the future Battlemage, Celestial, and Druid architectures. But we'll leave those for a future discussion. (Image credit: Intel) Intel Arc Alchemist At A Glance Specs: Up to 512 Vector Units / 4096 Shader Cores Memory: Likely up to 16GB GDDR6 Process: TSMC N6 (refined N7) Performance: RTX 3070 / RX 6800 level, maybe Release Date: Q1 2022 Price: Intel needs to be competitive Intel's Xe Graphics aspirations hit center stage in early 2018, starting with the hiring of Raja Koduri from AMD, followed by chip architect Jim Keller and graphics marketer Chris Hook , to name just a few. Raja was the driving force behind AMD's Radeon Technologies Group , created in November 2015, along with the Vega and Navi architectures. Clearly, the hope is that he can help lead Intel's GPU division into new frontiers. Obviously, Arc Alchemist represents the results of several years worth of labor. Not that Intel hasn't tried this before. Besides the i740 in 1998, Larrabee and the Xeon Phi had similar goals back in 2009, though the GPU aspect never really panned out. Plus, Intel has steadily improved the performance and features in its integrated graphics solutions over the past couple of decades (albeit at a slow and steady snail's pace). So, third time's the charm, right? Of course, there's much more to building a good GPU than just saying you want to make one, and Intel has a lot to prove. Here's everything we know about the upcoming Intel Arc Alchemist, including specifications, performance expectations, release date, and more. Potential Intel Arc Alchemist Specifications and Price This concept rendering of Intel's Xe Graphics is a reasonable guess at what a larger card could look like, but definitely not the final product. (Image credit: Intel) We'll get into the details of the Arc Alchemist architecture below, but let's start with the high-level overview. We know that Intel has at least two different GPU die planned for Arc Alchemist, and we expect there will be a third GPU in the middle space that uses a harvested chip with the larger die. There might be more configurations than three, but that's the minimum we expect to see. Here's what we expect to see in terms of specifications. Intel Arc Alchemist Expected Specifications Arc High-End Arc Mid-Range Arc Entry GPU Arc 00071 Arc 00071? Arc 00329 Process (nm) TSMC N6 TSMC N6 TSMC N6 Transistors (billion) ~20 ~20 (partial) ~8 Die size (mm^2) ~396mm2 (24x16.5) ~396mm2 (24x16.5) ~153mm2 (12.4x12.4) Vector Engines 512 384 128 GPU cores (ALUs) 4096 3072 1024 Clock (GHz) 2.02.3 2.02.3 2.02.3 VRAM Speed (Gbps) 16? 1416 1416 VRAM (GB) 16 GDDR6 12 6 GDDR6 Bus width 256 192 96 ROPs 128? 96? 32? TMUs 256? 192? 64? TFLOPS 16.4-18.4? 12.3-14.1? 4.14.7? Bandwidth (GB/s) 512? 336384? 168192? TBP (watts) 300? 225? 75? Launch Date Q1 2022 Q1 2022 Q1 2022 Launch Price $599? $399? $199? As we dig deeper throughout this article, we'll discuss where some of the above information comes from, but we're fairly confident about many of the core specs on the full large and small Arc Alchemist chips. Based on the wafer and die shots, along with other information, we expect Intel to enter the dedicated GPU market (not counting the DG1) with products spanning the entire budget to high-end range. For now, we anticipate three products built from two chips, but that could change. Intel has just a few variations on its CPU cores, for example, but ends up selling dozens of different products. But Intel has ruled the CPU world for decades, while its GPU efforts are far behind the competition. So eliminating the cruft and focusing on just three core products would make more sense in our view. The actual product names haven't been announced, though the Intel Arc branding will be used. We could see Something like Arc 1800, Arc 1600, and Arc 1200 roughly corresponding to the i7, i5, and i3 CPU branding, or we could see something entirely different. There's no sense getting lost in the weeds right now, though, as Intel will eventually decide on and reveal the actual names. Prices and some of the finer details are estimates based on expected performance and market conditions. Of course, actual real-world performance will play a big role in determining how much Intel can charge for the various graphics card models, but if and that's a pretty big if! the high-end card can compete with AMD's RX 6800 and Nvidia's RTX 3070 Ti, we would expect Intel to price it accordingly. There's an alternative view as well. Intel could lowball the pricing and look to make a splash in the dedicated graphics card market. Considering the shortages on current AMD and Nvidia GPUs and the extreme pricing we see at online stores it's often not much better than the eBay scalper prices we track in our GPU price index many gamers might be more interested in giving Intel GPUs a shot if they're priced at half the cost of the competition, even if they're slower. That's probably a bit too wishful thinking, as Intel will want to make a profit, and the extreme demand for GPUs means Intel likely won't have to undercut its competitors by that much. That takes care of the high-level overview. Now let's dig into the finer points and discuss where these estimates come from. Arc Alchemist: Beyond the Integrated Graphics Barrier (Image credit: Intel) Over the past decade, we've seen several instances where Intel's integrated GPUs have basically doubled in theoretical performance. Despite the improvements, Intel frankly admits that integrated graphics solutions are constrained by many factors: Memory bandwidth and capacity, chip size, and total power requirements all play a role. While CPUs that consume up to 250W of power exist Intel's Core i9-10900K and Core i9-11900K both fall into this category competing CPUs that top out at around 145W are far more common (e.g., AMD's Ryzen 5000 series). Plus, integrated graphics have to share all of those resources with the CPU, which means it's typically limited to about half of the total power budget. In contrast, dedicated graphics solutions have far fewer constraints. Consider the first generation Xe-LP Graphics found in Tiger Lake (TGL). Most of the chips have a 15W TDP, and even the later-gen 8-core TGL-H chips only use up to 45W (65W configurable TDP). Except TGL-H also cut the GPU budget down to 32 EUs (Execution Units), where the lower power TGL chips had 96 EUs. In contrast, the top AMD and Nvidia dedicated graphics cards like the Radeon RX 6900 XT and GeForce RTX 3080 Ti have a power budget of 300W to 350W for the reference design, with custom cards pulling as much as 400W. We don't know precisely how high Intel plans to go on power use with Arc Alchemist, aka Xe HPG, but we expect it to land in the same ballpark as AMD and Nvidia GPUs around 300W. What could an Intel GPU do with 20X more power available? We'll find out when Intel's Arc Alchemist GPU launches. Intel Arc Alchemist Architecture (Image credit: Intel) Intel may be a newcomer to the dedicated graphics card market, but it's by no means new to making GPUs. Current Rocket Lake and Tiger Lake CPUs use the Xe Graphics architecture, the 12th generation of graphics updates. The first generation of Intel graphics was found in the i740 and 810/815 chipsets for socket 370, back in 1998-2000. Arc Alchemist, in a sense, is second-gen Xe Graphics (i.e., Gen13 overall), and it's common for each generation of GPUs to build on the previous architecture, adding various improvements and enhancements. The Arc Alchemist architecture changes are apparently large enough that Intel has ditched the Execution Unit naming of previous architectures and the main building block is now called the Xe-core. To start, Arc Alchemist will support the full DirectX 12 Ultimate feature set. That means the addition of several key technologies. The headline item is ray tracing support, though that might not be the most important in practice. Variable rate shading, mesh shaders, and sampler feedback are also required all of which are also supported by Nvidia's RTX 20-series Turing architecture from 2018, if you're wondering. Sampler feedback helps to optimize the way shaders work on data and can improve performance without reducing image quality. The Xe-core contains 16 Vector Engines (formerly called Execution Units), each of which operates on a 256-bit SIMD chunk (single instruction multiple data). The Vector Engine can process eight FP32 instructions simultaneously, each of which is traditionally called a "GPU core" in AMD and Nvidia architectures, though that's a misnomer. It's unclear what other data types are supported by the Vector Engine (possibly FP16 and DP4a), but it's joined by a second new pipeline, the XMX Engine (Xe Matrix eXtensions). Each XMX pipeline operates on a 1024-bit chunk of data, which can contain 64 individual pieces of FP16 data. The Matrix Engines are effectively Intel's equivalent of Nvidia's Tensor cores, and they're being put to similar use. They offer a huge amount of potential FP16 computational performance, and should prove very capable in AI and machine learning workloads. More on this below. (Image credit: Intel) Xe-core represents just one of the building blocks used for Intel's Arc GPUs. Like previous designs, the next level up from the Xe-core is called a render slice (analogous to an Nvidia GPC, sort of) that contains four Xe-core blocks. In total, a render slice contains 64 Vector and Matrix Engines, plus additional hardware. That additional hardware includes four ray tracing units (one per Xe-core), geometry and rasterization pipelines, samplers (TMUs, aka Texture Mapping Units), and the pixel backend (ROPs). The above block diagrams may or may not be fully accurate down to the individual block level. For example, looking at the diagrams, it would appear each render slice contains 32 TMUs and 16 ROPs. That would make sense, but Intel has not yet confirmed those numbers (even though that's what we used in the above specs table). The ray tracing units are perhaps the most interesting addition, but other than their presence and their capabilities they can do ray traversal, bounding box intersection, and triangle intersection we don't have any details on how the RT units compare to AMD's ray accelerators or Nvidia's RT cores. Are they faster, slower, or similar in overall performance? We'll have to wait to get hardware in hand to find out for sure. Intel did provide a demo of Alchemist running an Unreal Engine demo that uses ray tracing, but it's for an unknown game, running at unknown settings ... and running rather poorly, to be frank. Hopefully that's because this is early hardware and drivers, but skip to the 4:57 mark in this Arc Alchemist video from Intel to see it in action. Based on what was shown there, we suspect Intel's Ray Tracing Units will be similar to AMD's Ray Accelerators, which means even the top Arc Alchemist GPU will only be roughly comparable to AMD's Radeon RX 6600 XT not a great place to start, but then RT performance and adoption still aren't major factors for most gamers. (Image credit: Intel) Finally, Intel uses multiple render slices to create the entire GPU, with the L2 cache and the memory fabric tying everything together. Also not shown are the video processing blocks and output hardware, and those take up additional space on the GPU. The maximum Xe HPG configuration for the initial Arc Alchemist launch will have up to eight render slices. Ignoring the change in naming from EU to Vector Engine, that still gives the same maximum configuration of 512 EU/Vector Engines that's been rumored for more than a year. Intel didn't quote a specific amount of L2 cache per render slice or for the entire GPU. We do know there will be multiple Arc configurations, though. So far, Intel has shown one with two render slices and a larger chip used in the above block diagram that comes with eight render slices. Intel also revealed that its Xe HPC GPUs (aka Ponte Vecchio) would have 512KB of L1 cache per Xe-core, and up to 144MB of L2 "Rambo Cache" per stack, but that's a completely different part, and the Xe HPG GPUs will likely have less L1 and L2 cache. Still, given how much benefit AMD saw from its Infinity Cache, we wouldn't be shocked to see 32MB or more of total cache on the largest Arc GPUs. While it doesn't sound like Intel has specifically improved throughput on the Vector Engines compared to the EUs in Gen11/Gen12 solutions, that doesn't mean performance hasn't improved. DX12 Ultimate includes some new features that can also help performance, but the biggest change comes via boosted clock speeds. Intel didn't provide any specific numbers, but it did state that Arc Alchemist can run at 1.5X frequencies compared to Xe LP, and it also said that Alchemist (Xe HPG) delivers 1.5X improved performance per watt. Taken together, we're looking at potential clock speeds of 2.02.3GHz for the Arc GPUs, which would yield a significant amount of raw compute. The maximum configuration of Arc Alchemist will have up to eight render slices, each with four Xe-cores, 16 Vector Engines per Xe-core, and each Vector Engine can do eight FP32 operations per clock. Double that for FMA operations (Fused Multiply Add, a common matrix operation used in graphics workloads), then multiply by a potential 2.02.3GHz clock speed, and we get the theoretical performance in GFLOPS: 8 (RS) * 4 (Xe-core) *16 (VE) * 8 (FP32) * 2 (FMA) * 2.02.3 (GHz) = 16,38418,841.6 GFLOPS Obviously, GFLOPS (or TFLOPS) on its own doesn't tell us everything, but 16-19 TFLOPS for the top configurations is certainly nothing to scoff at. Nvidia's Ampere GPUs theoretically have a lot more compute the RTX 3080, as an example, has a maximum of 29.8 TFLOPS but some of that gets shared with INT32 calculations. AMD's RX 6800 XT, by comparison 'only' has 20.7 TFLOPS, but in many games, it delivers similar performance to the RTX 3080. In other words, raw theoretical compute absolutely doesn't tell the whole story; Arc Alchemist could punch above or below! its theoretical weight class. Still, let's give Intel the benefit of the doubt for a moment. Depending on final clock speeds, Arc Alchemist comes in below the theoretical level of the current top AMD and Nvidia GPUs, but not by much. On paper, at least, it looks like Intel could land in the vicinity of the RTX 3070/3070 Ti and RX 6800 assuming drivers and everything else doesn't hold it back. XMX: Matrix Engines and Deep Learning for XeSS Image 1 of 3 (Image credit: Intel) Image 2 of 3 (Image credit: Intel) Image 3 of 3 (Image credit: Intel) We briefly mentioned the XMX blocks above. They're potentially just as useful as Nvidia's Tensor cores, which are used not just for DLSS, but also for other AI applications, including Nvidia Broadcast. Intel also announced a new upscaling and image enhancement algorithm that it's calling XeSS: Xe Superscaling. Intel didn't go deep into the details, but it's worth mentioning that Intel recently hired Anton Kaplanyan. He worked at Nvidia and played an important role in creating DLSS before heading over to Facebook to work on VR. It doesn't take much reading between the lines to conclude that he's likely doing a lot of the groundwork for XeSS now, and there are many similarities between DLSS and XeSS. XeSS uses the current rendered frame, motion vectors, and data from previous frames and feeds all of that into a trained neural network that handles the upscaling and enhancement to produce a final image. That sounds basically the same as DLSS 2.0, though the details matter here, and we assume the neural network will end up with different results. Intel did provide a demo using Unreal Engine showing XeSS in action (see below), and it looked good when comparing 1080p upscaled via XeSS to 4K against the native 4K rendering. Still, that was in one demo, and we'll have to see XeSS in action in actual shipping games before rendering any verdict. More important than how it works will be how many game developers choose to use XeSS. They already have access to both DLSS and AMD FSR, which target the same problem of boosting performance and image quality. Adding a third option, from the newcomer to the dedicated GPU market no less, seems like a stretch for developers. However, Intel does offer a potential advantage over DLSS. XeSS is designed to work in two modes. The highest performance mode utilizes the XMX hardware to do the upscaling and enhancement, but of course, that would only work on Intel's Arc GPUs. That's the same problem as DLSS, except with zero existing installation base, which would be a showstopper in terms of developer support. But Intel has a solution: XeSS will also work in a lower performance mode using DP4a instructions. DP4a is widely supported by other GPUs, including Intel's previous generation Xe LP and multiple generations of AMD and Nvidia GPUs (Nvidia Pascal and later, or AMD Vega 20 and later), which means XeSS in DP4a mode will run on virtually any modern GPU. Support might not be as universal as AMD's FSR, which runs in shaders and basically works on any DirectX 11 or later capable GPU as far as we're aware, but quality could be better than FSR as well. It would also be very interesting if Intel supported Nvidia's Tensor cores, through DirectML or a similar library, but that wasn't discussed. The big question will still be developer uptake. We'd love to see similar quality to DLSS 2.x, with support covering a broad range of graphics cards from all competitors. That's definitely something Nvidia is still missing with DLSS, as it requires an RTX card. But RTX cards already make up a huge chunk of the high-end gaming PC market, probably around 80% or more (depending on how you quantify high-end). So Intel basically has to start from scratch with XeSS, and that makes for a long uphill climb. On the bright side, it will provide the XeSS Developer Kit this month, giving it plenty of time to get things going. So it's possible (though unlikely) we could even see games implementing XeSS before the first Arc GPUs hit retail. Arc Alchemist and GDDR6 (Image credit: Intel) Intel hasn't commented on what sort of memory it will use with the various Arc Alchemist GPUs. Rumors say it will be GDDR6, probably running at 16Gbps but that's just guesswork. At the same time, it isn't easy to imagine any other solution that would make sense. GDDR5 memory still gets used on some budget solutions, but the fastest chips top out at around 8Gbps half of what GDDR6 offers. There's also HBM2e as a potential solution, but while that can provide substantial increases to memory bandwidth, it would also significantly increase costs. The data center Xe HPC will use HBM2e, but none of the chip shots for Xe HPG show HBM stacks of memory, which again leads us back to GDDR6. There will be multiple Xe HPG / Arc Alchemist solutions, with varying capabilities. The larger chip, which we've focused on so far, appears to have eight 32-bit GDDR6 channels, giving it a 256-bit interface. That means it might have 8GB or 16GB of memory on the top model, and we'll likely see trimmed down 192-bit and maybe 128-bit interfaces on lower-tier cards. The second Arc GPU Intel has shown only appears to have a 96-bit interface, probably for 6GB of GDDR6. The Intel Xe DG1 card goes an entirely different route and uses a 128-bit LPDDR4X interface and 4GB VRAM, but that was a special case. It only works in select Intel motherboards, and performance was, frankly, underwhelming. We don't expect Intel to make the same mistake with Arc Alchemist. Arc Alchemist Die Shots and Analysis (Image credit: Intel) Much of what we've said so far isn't radically new information, but Intel did provide a few images and video evidence that provides some great indications of where Intel will land. So let's start with what we know for certain. Intel will partner with TSMC and use the N6 process (an optimized variant of N7) for Arc Alchemist and Xe HPG. That means it's not technically competing for the same wafers as AMD uses for its Zen 2, Zen 3, RDNA, and RDNA 2 GPUs. At the same time, AMD and Nvidia could also use N6 as well it's design is compatible with N7, so Intel's use of TSMC certainly doesn't help AMD or Nvidia production capacities. TSMC likely has a lot of tools that overlap between N6 and N7 as well, meaning it could run batches of N6, then batches and N7, switching back and forth. That means there's potential for this to cut into TSMC's ability to provide wafers to other partners. And speaking of wafers... (Image credit: Intel) Raja showed a wafer of Arc Alchemist chips at Intel Architecture Day. By snagging a snapshot of the video and zooming in on the wafer, the various chips on the wafer are reasonably clear. We've drawn lines to show how large the chips are, and based on our calculations; it looks like the larger Arc die will be around 24x16.5mm (~396mm^2), give or take 510% in each dimension. We counted the dies on the wafer as well, and there appear to be 144 whole dies, which would also correlate to a die size of around 396mm^2. That's not a massive GPU Nvidia's GA102, for example, measures 628mm^2 and AMD's Navi 21 measures 520mm^2 but it's also not small at all. AMD's Navi 22 measures 335mm^2, and Nvidia's GA104 is 393mm^2, so Xe HPG would be larger than AMD's chip and similar in size to the GA104 but made on a smaller manufacturing process. Still, putting it bluntly: Size matters. This may be Intel's first read dedicated GPU since the i740 back in the late 90s, but it has made many integrated solutions over the years, and it has spent the past several years building a bigger dedicated GPU team. Die size alone doesn't determine performance, but it gives a good indication of how much stuff can be crammed into a design. A chip that's around 400mm^2 in size suggests Intel intends to be competitive with at least the RTX 3070 and RX 6800, which is likely higher than some were expecting. (Image credit: Intel) Besides the wafer shot, Intel also provided these two die shots for Xe HPG. Yes, these are clearly two different GPU dies, numbered 00071 on the larger chip and 00329 on the smaller one. They're artistic renderings rather than actual die shots, but they do have some basis in reality. The larger die has eight clusters in the center area that would correlate to the eight render slices. The memory interfaces are along the bottom edge and the bottom half of the left and right edges, and there are four 64-bit interfaces, for 256-bit total. Then there's a bunch of other stuff that's a bit more nebulous, for video encoding and decoding, display outputs, etc. A 256-bit interface puts Intel's Arc GPUs in an interesting position. That's the same interface width as Nvidia's GA104 (RTX 3060 Ti/3070/3070 Ti) and AMD's Navi 21. Will Intel follow AMD's lead and use 16Gbps memory, or will it opt for more conservative 14Gbps memory like Nvidia? And could Intel take a cue from AMD's Infinity Cache? We don't know yet. The smaller die looks to have two render slices, giving it just 128 Vector Engines. It also looks like it only has a 96-bit memory interface (the blocks in the lower-right edges of the chip), which could put it at a disadvantage relative to other cards. Then there's the other 'miscellaneous' bits and pieces. Obviously, performance will be substantially lower than the bigger chip, and this would be more of an entry-level part. While the smaller chip should be slower than all the current RX 6000 and RTX 30-series GPUs, it does put Intel in an interesting position. Depending on the clock speed, one render slice should equate to around 4.14.9 TFLOPS of compute. That could still match or exceed the GTX 1650 Super, with additional features that the GTX 16-series GPUs lack, and hopefully, Intel would provide the GPU with at least 6GB of memory. Basically, Nvidia and AMD haven't announced any new GPUs in the entry-level market, so this would be a nice addition. Will Intel Arc Be Good at Mining Cryptocurrency? (Image credit: Intel) With the current GPU shortages on the AMD and Nvidia side, fueled in part by cryptocurrency miners, people will inevitably want to know if Intel's Arc GPUs will face similar difficulties. Publicly, Intel has said precisely nothing about mining potential and Xe Graphics. However, given the data center roots for Xe HP/HPC (machine learning, High-Performance Compute, etc.), Intel has probably at least looked into the possibilities mining presents. Still, it's certainly not making any marketing statements about the suitability of the architecture or GPUs for mining. But then there's also the above image (for the entire Intel Architecture Day presentation), with a physical Bitcoin and the text "Crypto Currencies," and you start to wonder. Generally speaking, Xe might work fine for mining, but the most popular algorithms for GPU mining (Ethash mostly, but also Octopus and Kawpow) have performance that's predicated almost entirely on how much memory bandwidth a GPU has. For example, Intel's fastest Arc GPUs will likely use 16GB (maybe 8GB) of GDDR6 with a 256-bit interface. That would yield similar bandwidth to AMD's RX 6800/6800 XT/6900 XT as well as Nvidia's RTX 3060 Ti/3070, which would, in turn, lead to performance of around 60-ish MH/s for Ethereum mining. Intel likely isn't going to use GDDR6X, but it might have some other features that would boost mining performance as well if so, it hasn't spilled the beans yet. Nvidia has memory clocked at 14Gbps on the RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3070, and (before the LHR models came out) it could do about 6162 MH/s. AMD has faster 16Gbps memory, and after tuning, ends up at closer to 65 MH/s. That's realistically about where we'd expect the fastest Arc GPU to land, and that's only if the software works properly on the card. Considering Arc GPUs won't even show up until early 2022, and given the volatility of cryptocurrencies, it's unlikely that mining performance has been an overarching concern for Intel during the design phase. Ethereum is by far the best coin for GPU mining right now, and most estimates say it represents over 90% of the GPU power used on mining. Ethereum 2.0 is slated to move from proof-of-work mining to proof-of-stake in December, which means no more GPU mining on that coin. This means building a GPU around Ethereum mining would be a bad idea right now. That still doesn't mean Arc Alchemist will be bad or good at mining, though. Best-case (or worst-case, depending on your perspective), we anticipate mining performance will roughly match AMD's Navi 21 and Nvidia's GA104 GPUs. The mining software will likely need major updates and driver fixes to even work properly on future GPUs, though. I did give mining a shot using the Xe DG1, and it failed all of the NiceHashMiner benchmarks, but that's not saying much as most of the software didn't even detect a "compatible" GPU. At launch, I'd expect the Arc GPUs to be in a similar situation, but we'll have to see how things shape up over time. (Image credit: Intel) The core specs for Arc Alchemist are shaping up nicely, and the use of TSMC N6 and potentially a 400mm^2 die with a 256-bit memory interface all point to a card that should be competitive with the current high-end GPUs from AMD and Nvidia but behind the top performance models. As the newcomer, Intel needs the first Arc Alchemist GPUs to come out swinging. However, as discussed in our look at the Intel Xe DG1 , there's much more to building a good graphics card than hardware which is probably why the DG1 exists, to get the drivers and software ready for Arc. Alchemist represents the first stage of Intel's dedicated GPU plans, and there's more to come. Along with the Alchemist codename, Intel revealed codenames for the next three generations of dedicated GPUs: Battlemage, Celestial, and Druid. Now we know our ABCs, next time won't you build a GPU with me? Those might not be the most awe-inspiring codenames, but we appreciate the logic of going in alphabetical order. Tentatively, with Alchemist using TSMC N6, we might see a relatively fast turnaround for Battlemage. It could use TSMC's N5 process and ship by the end of 2022 which would perhaps be wise, considering we expect to see Nvidia's Lovelace RTX 40-series GPUs next year, and probably AMD's RDNA 3 architecture as well. Shrink the process, add more cores, tweak a few things to improve throughput, and Battlemage could keep Intel on even footing with AMD and Nvidia. Or it could arrive woefully late and deliver less performance. Intel needs to iterate on the future architectures and get them out sooner than later if it hopes to put some pressure on AMD and Nvidia. For now, we finally have a relatively hard launch date of Q1 2022 we expect we'll see and learn more at CES 2022, and it would be great to see Arc Alchemist launch in January rather than March. Intel's steampunk Oblivion concept graphics card, coming in 2035. Or 1865. (Shown in early 2020 at CES.) (Image credit: Intel) Final Thoughts on Intel Arc Alchemist The bottom line is that Intel has its work cut out for it. It may be the 800-pound gorilla of the CPU world, but it has stumbled even there and faltered over the past several years. AMD's Ryzen has gained ground, closed the gap, and is now ahead of Intel in most metrics, and Intel's manufacturing woes are apparently bad enough that it needs to turn to TSMC to make its dedicated GPU dreams come true. As the graphics underdog, Intel needs to come out with aggressive performance and pricing, and then iterate and improve at a rapid pace. And please don't talk about how Intel sells more GPUs than AMD and Nvidia. Technically, that's true, but only if you count incredibly slow integrated graphics solutions that are at best sufficient for light gaming and office work. Then again, a huge chunk of PCs and laptops are only used for office work, which is why Intel has repeatedly stuck with weak GPU performance. There are many aspects to Arc Alchemist that we don't know, like the final product names and card designs. For example, will the Arc cards have a blower fan, dual fans, or triple fans? It doesn't really matter, as any of those with the right card design can suffice. We also expect Intel to partner with other companies like Asus, Gigabyte, and MSI to help make the graphics cards as well, though how far those companies are willing to pursue Arc ultimately comes down to the most important factors: price, availability, and performance. We're curious about the real-world ray tracing performance, compared to both AMD and Nvidia, but that's not the critical factor. The current design has a maximum of 32 ray tracing units (RTUs), but we know next to nothing about what those units can do. Each one might be similar in capabilities to AMD's ray accelerators, in which case Intel would come in pretty low on the ray tracing pecking order. Alternatively, each RTU might be the equivalent of several AMD ray accelerators, perhaps even faster than Nvidia's Ampere RT cores. While it could be any of those, we suspect it will probably land lower on RT performance rather than higher, leaving room for growth with future iterations. Again, the critical elements are going to be performance, price, and availability. The Intel Xe DG1 is only about as fast as good integrated graphics solutions. For a dedicated graphics card, it's a complete bust. As a vehicle to pave the way for Arc, though? Maybe it did it's job Intel has certainly gotten better about driver updates during the past year or two, and the latest beta drivers are supposed to fix the issues I saw in my DG1 testing. But DG1 was also a 30W card, built off a GPU that primarily gets used in 15W laptops. Arc Alchemist sets its sights far higher. We'll find out how Intel's discrete graphics card stacks up to the competition in the next six months or so. Ideally, we'll see the Intel Arc Alchemist at least match (or come close to) RTX 3070 and RX 6800 levels of performance, with prices that are lower than the AMD and Nvidia cards, and then get a bunch of cards onto retail shelves. We may also get entry level Arc cards that cost less than $200 and don't suck (meaning, not DG1). If Intel can do that, the GPU duopoly might morph into a triopoly in 2022. KCI Short Circuit Tonight KCI airfield lights temporarily down, flights diverted KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Airfield lights at KCI weren't operational for about 20 minutes Tuesday night. Some flights were delayed or diverted. Olivia Althoff told 41 Action News she was on a Southwest flight from Orlando scheduled to land at KCI at 5:30 p.m. More Deets On Local Meth Gang 5 accused of conspiracy to distribute PCP, meth, other drugs | The Kansas City Star A federal grand jury indictment unsealed Tuesday in Kansas City accuses five people in a large-scale drug distribution conspiracy. The group was allegedly responsible for dealing PCP, methamphetamine and lesser amounts of heroin and cocaine. Suburban Crash Scene Lenexa police investigate crash where elderly man who was hit by car died LENEXA, KS (KCTV) - Lenexa police are investigating after a pedestrian was struck by a car. 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, an elderly man was hit by a car when he attempted to cross a road. The fatal crash took place near West 75th Terrace and Pflumm Road. Meth Town Road Danger Law firm says stretch of highway in Independence is the deadliest in Missouri An area law firm says a short stretch of US Highway 24 in Independence, Missouri is the deadliest highway in the state. Those details come as part of a local law firm's study of fatal crashes in Missouri and Kansas. Show-Me Miracle Baby!!! Rock Chalk Rescue?!?! Child Welfare Groups Want Kansas To Spend $30 Million To Keep Kids Out Of Foster Care Studies show even children raised by parents with money problems or substance abuse tend to fare better than those routed through a chronically troubled foster care system. So the federal government wants states to invest more heavily in keeping troubled families safely together. Taxpayers Out Of Town Don't Count For our late night readers, a quick overview of some of the more important news stories this evening . . .And this is thefor tonight . . . Missouri to begin accepting application fees for some medical marijuana facilities The Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services said that it will begin accepting application fees for some medical marijuana facilities in January. Beginning Jan. 5, fees will be accepted for facilities involved in cultivation, infused products manufacturing and dispensaries. This paper work might be important for stoners who want to get their convictions thrown out should the run afoul offor charges that are otherwise meaningless within city limits. Read more: Double Trouble Scam Report Couple out $130K in real estate money wire scam KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Ross and Melinda Fulton live a modest lifestyle. Ross is a retired pastor, serving 46 years in churches throughout Missouri. The two were excited to learn their first grand baby is due next Spring. They did what many first-time grandparents do, and started looking for homes closer to their daughters who live in the Kansas City area. Kansas City Turkey Redux KCPD: No burglary, just a wild turkey What looked and probably sounded like a burglary in progress at a Kansas City apartment over the weekend turned out to involve "fowl play." Kansas City police said investigating officers found a broken window and feathers on the floor of the apartment. A search outside led them to the suspect -- a wild turkey. Sunflower State Payback Kansas Pays $1 Million-plus To Man Who Spent 17 Years In Prison For His Doppelganger's Crime Richard Jones, who spent nearly 17 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit, is getting $1.1 million from the state of Kansas. It's the first payment made under the state's new mistaken-conviction statute. The payment resolves a lawsuit filed by Jones after his conviction was thrown out and the charges against him were dismissed last year. Lesson In Anti-Vape Hype JoCo Rescue Effort Good Samaritans tried to help in Overland Park crash OVERLAND PARK, Kan. - A 19-year-old woman died in a crash late Monday night in Overland Park, Kansas. It happened as she was exiting off 69 Highway and College Boulevard. Before first responders arrived on scene, good Samaritans stepped into help. Local Diploma Mill Blues Students upset after Kansas City college suddenly closes KANSAS CITY, MO (KCTV) -- Hundreds of people are suddenly out of a job and thousands more out of money and diplomas. This is after Vatterott College abruptly announced its closure Monday. Tuesday, the doors are locked, and students don't know if they'll get any credit for the work and money they put into the school. Soggy Forecast Ahead Warm Wednesday with slight chance for showers ahead Hide Transcript Show Transcript WEBVTT A LOT OF PEOPLE ARE GOING TO HIT THE ROAD FOR THE HOLIDAYS. HOPEFULLY THE WEATHER COOPERATES. >> IT WILL BE DRIVER MOST OF US. LOOKING AT THE TRAVEL MAP ON WEDNESDAY, HERE YOU SEE IT FOR YOURSELF. Fanboy Celebration Tonight Six Chiefs named to 2019 Pro Bowl Six Kansas City Chiefs are headed to the 2019 Pro Bowl, the NFL announced on Tuesday night. They are: CHIEFS PR: Fisher has started all 14 games this season, allowing only 2.0 sacks in 516 pass attempts. CHIEFS PR: Fordhas started at linebacker in all 14 games this season, registering a career-high 45 tackles (36 solo) and 11.5 sacks (-64.0 yards). Quick look at two very important topics inspired by hottie Tessa and her commitment to the online discourse via her fashion journey . . .Closer to home, these news links dominate our evening . . .And this is thefor right now . . . The Cut: Someone Keeps Telling the Press That Leonardo DiCaprio Is Ready to Propose Daily Caller: Young Americans Trust In Establishment Media Has Imploded Over The Last 20 Years Building Better KCMO Blue Collar Jobs Educators And Execs Welcome Workforce Development Collaboration "Our students are not widgets!" Certainly that is the sentiment of educators who see business involvement in schools as "putting in orders" for workers. Yet that refrain might be less common in an era when the whole notion of career and technical education is evolving way beyond shop class. Po-Po Payout Shawnee police surprise resident with $100 bill from Secret Santa SHAWNEE, KS (KCTV) -- Protect, serve and surprise. That's the mission for Shawnee police officers recruited by a Secret Santa who donated thousands of dollars to be handed out, $100 bill at a time. The anonymous donor asked police to help spread joy while on patrol. TV Star Local Good Deeds Winter Is Coming For Hipsters Wild Way mobile coffee shop makes camp for winter in warehouse Winter weather has proven a little too wild for Christine Clutton's coffee camper, the Wild Way founder said, revealing an indoor, seasonal home for the mobile coffee shop. "We are in a warehouse, but operate in a camper still," she said of the Wild Way Winter Warehouse space at 708 E. Classy Kansas City Remix KC Symphony's film-score concerts have become blockbuster hits To see a movie with its score performed by a live orchestra is to see it entirely anew. Lucky for us, Kansas City Symphony is screening/scoring three of the most popular movies of all time over the next few months. Urban Core Breakfast Winning Local eatery recognized as one of the best in the nation Nestled in Columbus Park, Happy Gillis cafe & hangout made the list of Thrillist's 22 best breakfast spots in the nation. According to Thrillist: "Happy Gillis is like that well-loved denim jacket that's repeatedly handed down, getting just a little tattier and more lovable with each new owner... Cloudy Kansas City Christmas First Alert: Mostly cloudy, slight chance for rain this afternoon We'll see mostly cloudy skies for your Wednesday. There is a 30 percent chance for rain after 1 p.m. Look for a high in the mid-50s. To start the midweek, we consider truth and beauty in the mainstream media . . .Closer to home, we review these somewhat important news links:is the song of the day and this is thefor right now. The ride-hailing industry is witnessing a lot of changes lately. Moving from car services to cycles, to pressing autonomous cars into service, etc., this industry is seeing a lot of things happening rapidly. Now, two giants, Uber and Lyft have decided to go public. Both companies have already filed the necessary S-1 paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, confirming their intent to go public on the New York Stock Exchange. Buy Stock In Uber and Lyft According to Wall Street Journal, Uber filed its paperwork confidentially earlier this week, just a few days after Lyft did. Sources reveal that Lyft is eyeing a March or April IPO debut. Uber, on the other hand, has not decided on a rough date, but the chief executive, Dara Khosrowshahi, has told investors that Uber is targeting an offering in the first half of the year. Another report from Bloomberg states that if Uber does not list itself by the end of next year, investors will be free to sell their shares on the private markets. Money Matters Speaking in numbers, a public listing could see Uber raise as much as $120 billion, Bloomberg states. Morgan Stanley will lead Ubers public offering next year while Goldman Sachs Group will also play a role throughout the IPO process. Lyft is still unclear as to how many shares it will sell in the listing or the potential price range for the stock. JP Morgan Chase & Co., Credit Suisse Group AG, and Jefferies Financial Group Inc. will be involved with Lyft to take it public. These banks have pitched valuations from about $18 billion to $30 billion for Lyft. Its A Cat-Fight The $120 billion and the $30 billion dont reflect the fact that both the companies are struggling to bring in consistent profits. In the third quarter of 2018, Lyft reported revenues of $563 million and lost $254 million, whereas Uber lost $1.1 billion in the third quarter on $2.95 billion in revenue. Do you think this is a wise move by the two giants? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below. Further reading Read more Uber news. Treehugger and our third-party partners use cookies and process personal data like unique identifiers based on your consent to store and/or access information on a device, display personalized ads and for content measurement, audience insight, and product development. To change or withdraw your consent choices for Treehugger.com, including your right to object where legitimate interest is used, click below. At any time, you can update your settings through the "EU Privacy" link at the bottom of any page. These choices will be signaled globally to our partners and will not affect browsing data. List of Partners (vendors) Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. Store and/or access information on a device. Select personalised content. Create a personalised content profile. Measure ad performance. Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners (vendors) This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For over 14 years and 30,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going. uttara@tribuneindia.com Tribune News Service New Delhi, December 19 Finance Minister Arun Jaitley released NITI Aayogs strategy paper on New India envisaging goals for the country to achieve in the 75th year of Independence in 2022 on Wednesday. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said: "We stand in an important era in Indian history where we can make up for lost opportunities." He, however, acknowledged that "economic reforms since 1991 have yielded dividends". The emphasis on reforms needed to be accompanied by social consciousness, said Jaitley, adding that "sloganeering will only derail the efforts of the government". According to the NITI Aayog strategy paper, the government aims to increase India's tax-to-GDP ratio to 22 per cent and accelerate economic growth rate to 8 per cent. The central government headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, according to the strategy paper, is aiming to set up an independent regulator for Indian Railways. The central government's target is for India is to be a $4.0 trillion economy by 2022, when India celebrates the 75th anniversary of independence. Modi had earlier given a clarion call for establishing a New India by 2022. ROBINSINGH@TRIBUNE.COM Tribune News Service Chandigarh, December 19 Two youths, including an MBA, both residents of Himachal Pradesh, who were riding a Hyundai Verna car, were nabbed by the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) with 16.5 kg of charas, valued at around Rs 25 lakh. NCB sleuths had information about the two youths involved in drug trafficking following which a Verna car, bearing a Himachal number, was intercepted near the Khuda Lahora bridge on December 18. The suspects, both natives of Bhuntar in Kullu district, were riding the vehicle. Mohinder Jit Singh, Assistant Director, NCB, Chandigarh, said the duo had concealed 16.5 kg of charas under the seat, which was recovered while checking the vehicle. The charas was meant to be supplied to a drug peddler in Delhi, he said. Sources said the charas was brought from the Malana valley near Bhuntar. NCB sleuths said charas from the Malana valley cost between Rs 1.50 lakh and Rs 2 lakh per kg, depending upon the quality. The charas recovered from the duo is valued at Rs 25 lakh, the NCB official said. Officials said the Hyundai Verna was owned by the father of one of the suspects, who claimed to be an MBA. The suspect claimed that he pursued MBA in Tourism from a private university in Mohali district. However, we are yet to to verify the same, said the NCB official. This is the 49th seizure of drugs this year by the NCB, Chandigarh. Drug Was to be supplied in Delhi The suspects, both natives of Bhuntar in Kullu district, were riding a Hyundai Verna car. Mohinder Jit Singh, Assistant Director, NCB, Chandigarh, said the duo had concealed 16.5 kg of charas under the seat, which was recovered while checking the vehicle. The charas was meant to be supplied to a drug peddler in Delhi, he said. ROBINSINGH@TRIBUNE.COM Tribune News Service Chandigarh, December 19 Five youths have been booked by the Chandigarh Police for allegedly thrashing a teacher at Post Graduate Government College (PGGC), Sector 11. The incident was reported on December 17. Sources said the victim, Dr Ajit Singh, was on invigilation duty on the day and he stopped some youths from entering the college campus. Later, when the victim was leaving the college campus in his car, the miscreants stopped his car at the main gate of the college. An altercation took place between the victim and the miscreants, which turned ugly when the latter hit the victim with a sharp weapon. They then escaped from the spot. The police were informed about the incident and the victim was taken to a hospital for treatment. The sources said the college authorities also informed senior police officials about the incident on December 17. The police visited the college and procured footage of CCTV cameras installed on the campus. College Principal Rama Arora said the miscreants appeared to be outsiders. Police sources said three youths had been identified. A case has been registered under Sections 147 (punishment for rioting), 149 (every member of unlawful assembly guilty of offence committed in prosecution of common object), 323 (punishment for voluntarily causing hurt) , 506 (criminal intimidation) and 341 (wrongful restraint) of the IPC at the Sector 11 police station. What all happened Sources said the victim, Dr Ajit Singh, was on invigilation duty on the day and he stopped some youths from entering the college campus. Later, when the victim was leaving the college in his car, the miscreants stopped his car at the main gate of the college. An altercation took place between the victim and the miscreants, which turned ugly when the latter hit the victim with a sharp weapon. They then escaped from the spot. ROBINSINGH@TRIBUNE.COM Tribune News Service Chandigarh, December 19 Sector 22-D traders held a protest against the decision of the Chandigarh Municipal Corporation to shift vendors to the market. The traders closed their shops throughout the day against the decision. Later, the traders and area residents also held a candlelight march against the decision. Arvind Jain, president of the Market Welfare Association, 22-D, and Ravi Ranjan Verma, president of the Booth Markets Welfare Association, said allotting space in front of shops to vendors would create law and order problems. He said there were many jewellery shops in the market, which would have security problems. The traders stopped MC employees who reached the market to mark sites. Later, the police were called by the employees. Manjit Singh, Sardul Singh, Parveen Duggal, Subhash Narang and KL Chawla, all traders, said they would continue to protest till the MC changed its decision. Charanjiv Singh, chairman of the Chandigarh Bepoar Mandal, and leaders of the Progressive Shopkeepers Association also supported the protest. Arvind Jain said the public was angry as the MC had decided to go ahead with its vendor zone plan ignoring the suggestions and objections raised by residents and traders. Verma said members of the Traders Welfare Association had raised objections as the MC was trying to make Sector 22 the biggest vendor zone in the city. Radhika Ramaseshan Radhika Ramaseshan Senior journalist The drill of appointing a chief minister, couched speciously as electing one, is full of anomalies, irrespective of whether it is conducted by the Congress or the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) because neither has any policy, criteria or methodology to simplify and streamline the process. Expediency and nepotism are apparently the measures because the chief minister's position, being what it is, is regarded as a means of bestowing patronage and inveigling lifelong allegiance to a party's central command, much as the BJP touts its internal democracy as a feature that distinguishes it from the Congress. No clear yardstick The absence of a clear yardstick was visible after the Congress turned in an impressive showing in three state elections in the Hindi belt recently. The only success it had registered in the recent past was Punjab. Capt Amarinder Singh headed the Congress Punjab unit and was credited with leading the party to victory. Consequently, Singh's anointment as chief minister seemed correct and legitimate. The typical rush of factional leaders staking their claim to the top job was off and it appeared as though the high command was presented with a fait accompli, a done deed. Punjab could have recommended itself as a norm to the Congress. A leader heading a state unit and spearheading the party to a win would be the natural choice as chief minister. Punjab almost became a precedent after the victory in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, except that in Rajasthan, the prelude to appointing the chief minister was influenced by the factional fight that preceded it, during electioneering. Sachin Pilot was despatched to head the Rajasthan Congress in January 2014, ground himself in the state and recharge the party that had sunk to its lowest ever depth in the 2013 Assembly elections. Pilot executed the mandate with diligence and aggression, but when it came to naming the chief minister, veteran Ashok Gehlot beat him to it. That Gehlot and Pilot were not on the same page for long was obvious to the Rajasthan Congress. In MP and Chhattisgarh, Rahul Gandhi, the Congress President, handed over the baton to the respective state party chiefs, Kamal Nath and Bhupesh Baghel. Nath and Baghel had earned plaudits for revamping the party organisation and lifting workers morale from the near-oblivion that they were consigned to after 15 years in the Opposition. Baghel reinvented the Congress after the entire brass was eliminated in a deadly attack at Jhiram Ghati in Sukhma district. Thereafter, Ajit Jogis stranglehold over the Congress, with his controversial son, Amit, as a back-up did not help the Congress. Baghel leveraged his position to marginalise the Jogis and rebuild the Congress from scratch. He had formidable contenders in TS Singh Deo and Charan Das Mahant, but when it was down to brass tacks, the PCC president won the day. Why was Rajasthan an exception? Ex post facto, a number of reasons have been given for Rajasthan being the exception. First, the verdict that denied the Congress a clear majority and increased its dependence on the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) called for realpolitik skills that only an old hand like Gehlot could summon. Second, his experience would come in useful during the Lok Sabha elections. Third, Gehlot belonged to the Mali caste that had never upset social equations while Pilot was from the dominant Gujjar caste that was a red rag to other powerful groupings, such as the Meena, Jat and Rajput. When Telugu pride was hurt Maintaining social equipoise is one aspect of the scenario. The Congress has generally treated its chief ministers like puppets of the high command that manipulated the strings. Sub-nationalist sentiments might never have been kindled in Andhra Pradesh had the high command been more benign towards its chief ministers. Between 1978 and 1983, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi appointed and deposed five individuals as chief minister, including J Vengala Rao, M Chenna Reddy, Tanguturi Anjaiah, Bhavanam Venkatrami Reddy and K Vijayabhaskara Rao. The frequent changes hurt Telugu pride and fostered an ambience for the rise of NT Rama Rao and his Telugu Desam Party. Anjaiah, who was ousted for irritating Rajiv Gandhi when Gandhi visited Hyderabad as Congress General Secretary, famously remarked I came by the grace of Madam, I am going under her orders. I dont know why I came and why I am going. A classic understatement, considering that as chief minister, he ensured that the heads of local body were directly elected by the electors for the first time and reduced the voting age from 21 to 18. Has BJP acquitted itself more honourably? Regarding the BJP, consider the aftermath of the last Himachal Pradesh election. Prem Kumar Dhumal was announced as CM candidate in the penultimate week of electioneering. Serendipitously, he lost his seat. It emerged later that from the beginning, the central leaders had Jairam Thakurs name in mind. Its tantalising to speculate what might have happened if Dhumal had won. BJPs central observers Nirmala Sitharaman and Narendra Singh Tomar, whom party President Amit Shah sent to Shimla to oversee the election of the chief minister, went through the motion of consulting the Himachal Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and legislators. When Dhumals supporters raised slogans for him despite the defeat, Shah dealt the final blow when he directed Dhumal to issue a statement declaring he was not in the race. The high command had had its way. Rahul Gandhi added a new dimension to the exercise by involving Congress workers in the selection of their chief ministers through the designated Shakti online platform. The idea was to message to a larger audience that he wanted to end the exclusive and elitist high command culture. A laudable initiative, but are the countrys mainstream parties ready to discard the weight of legacy? rchopra@tribunemail.com New York, December 19 A man in the US has been sentenced to 15 months in prison for brutally attacking a 53-year-old Indian-origin Sikh taxi driver in Seattle last year. Swarn Singh was assaulted with a deadly weapon by Rory Benson in December 2017, according to Sikhs civil rights group The Sikh Coalition. Benson, who pleaded guilty to assaulting him, was sentenced to 15 months in prison by a court in Seattle on Friday. Singh, who maintains Sikh articles of faith, including unshorn hair and a turban, had parked outside an apartment building to drop off Benson and his mother. Benson, who was sitting in the front passenger seat, attempted to suffocate him with a piece of cloth kept in the taxi to wipe the windshield, the coalition said in a statement. He immediately ran out of the taxi, and Benson grabbed a hammer from his bag, chasing him on foot. Benson hit Singh in the head repeatedly, specifically targeting his turban and knocking it to the ground, it said. He suffered a scalp laceration and a skull fracture as a result of the attack and was rushed to hospital. Benson was arrested. The coalition said it worked with Singh for 11 months to make sure the Bellevue Police Department and the King County Prosecuting Attorneys Office were properly investigating the incident and reviewing appropriate charges. Singh submitted an impact statement to the King County Superior Court, urging his attacker to recognise the damage caused, detailing his injuries and the impact of the assault on the Sikh community. PTI editorial@tribune.com Tribune News Service Chandigarh, December 19 Buoyed by success in the MC polls, Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar on Wednesday expressed the hope that its success would be replicated in next years Jind byelection and parliamentary and Assembly elections. People of five cities have endorsed policies of the state government, including transparency in administration and drive against corruption. We hope to get peoples support in the upcoming Jind bypoll and next years Lok Sabha and Assembly elections, he told reporters. Khattar said usually there was anti-incumbency against the ruling party, but the culture of governance practised by the BJP in the last over four years had been liked by the people, which was clear from the results. He took a dig at former CM Bhupinder Singh Hooda, saying he always blamed EVMs, whether the Congress won or lost any election. Opposition parties had targeted the CMfor allegedly playing Punjabi card to woo urban voters in the polls. Khattar was asked about a controversial advertisement for which Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal had targeted him during his Sonepat visit a few days ago. Khattar said he had nothing to do with that particular advertisement and that people issue advertisements on their own. editorial@tribune.com Azhar Qadri Tribune News Service Srinagar, December 19 Two senior leaders of the PDP Basharat Bukhari and Peer Mohammad Hussain, who were expelled from the party yesterday, joined the National Conference today, strengthening its electoral base in south as well as north Kashmir. Bukhari, a two-time legislator from north Kashmirs Sangrama Assembly constituency, and Peer Mohammad Hussain, a founding member of the PDP and a minister during the PDPs first time in power between 2003 and 2005, joined the NC and were welcomed by senior party leaders, including president Farooq Abdullah and vice-president Omar Abdullah. The entry of Bukhari and Hussain into the NC is a major boost for it ahead of the Assembly and parliamentary elections, likely to be held next year, and a significant setback to the PDP, which has already lost several influential members to the Sajad Lone-led Peoples Conference. Bukhari and Hussains inclusion into the NC is likely to expand the electoral base of the party in north Kashmir, where Bukhari has represented the Sangrama constituency twice, and in south Kashmir, where Hussain was elected as a legislator of Shangus in 2002 and had also contested but lost the parliamentary election by a thin margin in 2009. The NC president and senior Abdullah welcomed the two former PDP leaders and described them as good people. I congratulate them and hope they will work honestly for the betterment of people, he said while presenting them bouquets. The two former PDP leaders formally joined the NC at Abdullahs highly guarded residence on the Gupkar Road here, where a large gathering of party leaders, including general secretary Ali Mohammad Sagar and provincial president Nasir Aslam Wani were present. People have to be taken out of the turmoil in which they are trapped and for that we need good people and it is Gods mercy that good people are joining this party, Farooq said. With the exit of Bukhari and Hussain, the PDP is now significantly reduced in strength as five other former legislators and councillors have left the party since it lost power after the BJP withdrew support to the ruling coalition earlier this year. Among those who have quit the PDP is influential Shia cleric Imran Ansari, who joined the Sajad Lone-led Peoples Conference, and former Finance Minister Haseeb Drabu, who has disengaged himself from the party affairs. editorial@tribune.com Majid Jahangir Tribune News Service Srinagar, December 19 Terming the boycott of the recently concluded municipal and panchayat elections as a mischief, the newly appointed Peoples Democratic Party patron Muzaffar Baig has claimed that party president Mehbooba Mufti was compelled by some party leaders to stay away from the poll. In an exclusive interview with The Tribune, his first after being elected as PDP patron, Baig however justified the breaking of the PDP-BJP alliance, saying that the principle of the coalition was correct but its execution on the ground was not. Expressing apprehensions about the PDP repeating its 2014 electoral performance, he suggested the party should re-embrace its founding principles and publicly apologise for the 2016 unrest killings and pellet injuries that happened during its term. Baig, the lone PDP MP, had recently gone public against the party decision to boycott the elections and had even hinted at joining the emerging third front led by Sajad Lone. But Mehbooba had reached out to the sulking senior party leader and he was appointed the party patron - a post which was lying vacant since the death of Mufti Mohammad Sayeed in 2015. Mehboobaji explained her position on various issues over which there was a difference of opinion. We agreed to go back to the roots and to the basic principles on which this party was founded, Baig said. On the PDP boycotting the municipal and panchayat elections by linking them to the Article 35A controversy, Baig said: Elections are essential for development. There can be no development without these institutions (municipalities and panchayats). The boycott reason was explained to me by Mehboobaji. But I cannot go into the details of how she was compelled by some of our party colleagues to take that decision. Baig conceded that he was not sure whether the PDP would be able to repeat the 2014 Assembly poll performance. It had won the highest number (28) of seats since its formation in 1999. I will be the happiest man if we could repeat the performance (of 2014). But I am afraid we will not reach the number. This is because, firstly, we were not able to present to the people the real purpose of forming an alliance with the BJP; secondly, due to the rise in militancy and civilian killings somehow people think this is the backlash against the alliance (with the BJP). Because of a disconnect with the people during those two or three years, we lost some public support, he said. amansharma@tribunemail.com New Delhi, December 19 The CBI has filed its first charge sheet in connection with the sexual abuse of minor girls at a shelter home in Bihar's Muzzafarpur against 21 people, including prime accused Brajesh Thakur, officials said. Tahkur runs an NGO Seva Sankalp Evam Vikash Samiti that managed the shelter home. The agency filed its charge sheet against Thakur, his employees, his associate Shaista Parveen and a government officer Rekha Rani before a special court. In its charge sheet, the CBI has confirmed that the girls were subjected to sexual abuse and slapped stringent Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act on the accused. The charge sheet deals with alleged violation of rules, aiding and abetting the heinous crimes against the girls, criminal conspiracy and other charges. More serious offences like murder, rape, involvement of people, who were part of exploitation racket, will be chronicled in a future charge sheet, the sources said. They said identification of the perpetrators, alleged customers and others, is a time consuming process as the victims, who are in shock and trauma, are not being examined by the CBI, but experts from the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (NIMHANS). It is important that they are interviewed and counselled by experts because of the sensitive nature of the case, their age, and trauma that they bore for years, the sources said. Filing of this charge sheet will ensure that the arrested persons may be kept behind bars by the courts as they will not be able to exploit of the chance of seeking bail for the want of charge sheet even after 90 days of their arrest, they said. The agency has alleged that the then assistant director of the state social welfare department Rekha Rani had known about the abuse at the NGO-run shelter home of Thakur, but she turned a Nelson's eye towards it, the sources said. Parveen's house was allegedly used by Thakur's aides for abusing the girls, they said. - PTI amansharma@tribunemail.com Chennai, December 19 Hitting back at the Congress, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Wednesday it has humiliated every institution of democracy, be it the Army or the CAG. He said the main opposition party even questioned a Supreme Court verdict just because it did not like it, apparently hinting at the continued assault by the party on him over the Rafale deal. The prime minister was interacting with booth level workers of Vellore, Kanchipuram, Viluppuram and south Chennai districts of Tamil Nadu, and Puducherry, through video conferencing from New Delhi. "The Congress party has become more cunning since the days of Emergency," he said, sharpening his assault on the Congress. Congress president Rahul Gandhi had on Sunday lashed out at the Modi government, saying he will not allow the "destruction" of institutions like the Supreme Court and the Reserve Bank of India. The BJP government believes "only one idea should run India", Gandhi had told a public rally organised by his party's southern ally the DMK in Chennai. Modi asked party workers to increase their outreach by creating awareness about his government's welfare schemes. "From housing to health care, from sanitation to skills, there are schemes for every section of society," he said, and asked booth level workers to reach out to people about those measures. - PTI harinder@tribunemail.com New Delhi, December 19 A Delhi court on Wednesday reserved for December 22 its order on the bail plea of Christian Michel, alleged middleman arrested in the AgustaWestland VVIP chopper case, and sent him to judicial custody till December 28. Michel was produced before Special Judge Arvind Kumar at the end of his four-day CBI custody. The probe agency said he was not required for further custodial interrogation. Michel was arrested in the UAE and extradited to India on December 4. The next day, he was produced before the court, which allowed his five-day custodial interrogation, extending it by five days and later another four days. In his bail plea, the accused told the court he was cooperating with the investigations and that the CBI was carrying out the proceedings against him with the same facts and accusations that the Italian court had arrived at a finding of acquittal. PTI amansharma@tribunemail.com Bhopal, December 19 At the centre of a controversy over his remarks insinuating that youths in his state were losing out on jobs to migrants from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Kamal Nath on Wednesday said other states, including Gujarat, also have policies giving employment preference to locals. The 'job deprivation' remarks made by Nath soon after taking oath on Monday had drawn all-round criticism, with parties like the BJP, RJD and JD(U) expressing their disapproval. Meanwhile, a complaint was lodged in a court at Muzaffarpur in Bihar on Wednesday against the Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister for allegedly hurting the sentiments of the people of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh with his comments on migrant workers. Social activist Tamanna Hashmi filed a petition before the Chief Judicial Magistrate's court under IPC's Sections 153 (provocation with intent to cause riot), and 504 (intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of peace). Defending his comments, Nath told reporters here on Wednesday, "Such policy exists in other states also. Is it not there in Gujarat? What is new in it?" The chief minister was speaking after chairing a high-level meeting of police officers at the police headquarters here. Announcing a new state government policy under which industries availing investment incentives will need to give 70 per cent employment to local youths, Nath had said, "Lot of industries are set up in which people from other states, like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, come to work. I do not want to criticise them, but the youth of Madhya Pradesh are deprived (of jobs)". "So those who want to come here and take advantage of the investment policies will have to give employment to 70 per cent locals of Madhya Pradesh. I have already signed on the file in this regard," he had said soon after being sworn in as the state's new chief minister. The BJP-ruled Gujarat had witnessed protests against migrants from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in October this year. Asked about his meeting with police officials, Nath said the morale of the police force should remain intact and "the police uniform be respected". - PTI rchopra@tribunemail.com Mumbai, December 19 President Ram Nath Kovind will attend the centenary celebrations of the city-based Yoga Institute next week. The institute, established in 1918 by Yogendraji, will hold a two-day concluding function of its year-long centenary celebrations on December 28 and 29 at the suburban Bandra-Kurla Complex (BKC) where Kovind will be the chief guest. President Kovind will grace the historic occasion and conclude the year-long celebrations on December 28. Maharashtra Governor Ch Vidyasagar Rao, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and other dignitaries will also be present, institute director Hansa J Yogendra told reporters on Tuesday. Yoga, panel discussions and workshops on related issues would be held during the two-day event, she said. Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu had in December last year inaugurated the centenary celebrations of the institute. He had said that yogic philosophy had all the properties to fight lifestyle problems of modern days. The Yoga Institute was earlier this year selected for the prime ministers award for outstanding contribution for promotion and development of yoga. It has produced more than 50,000 yoga teachers and has over 500 publications to its credit. PTI gspannu7@gmail.com London, December 19 Vijay Mallya intends to file an application to appeal against a British courts verdict in favour of his extradition to India, the embattled liquor barons legal team confirmed on Wednesday. The 63-year-old businessman told reporters soon after the ruling by Westminster Magistrates Court Chief Magistrate Emma Arbuthnot last week that he would consider the verdict in detail and decide his next course of action. Mallya has now been able to consider the courts decision and intends to file an application for permission to appeal at the appropriate time, said Anand Doobay, Partner at UK-based Boutique Law LLP, who has been Mallyas solicitor through the extradition trial process. Under the Extradition Treaty procedures, the Chief Magistrates verdict has been sent to UK Home Secretary Sajid Javid because it is the minister who is authorised to order Mallyas extradition and has two months within which to make that decision. The Home Secretarys order rarely goes against the courts conclusions as he has to consider only some very narrow bars to extradition which are unlikely to apply in this case, including the possible imposition of a death penalty in a particular case. Whatever that decision (by the Home Secretary), the losing side has up to 14 days within which to approach the High Court and seek leave to appeal. Any appeal if granted will be heard at the Administrative Court [High Court], noted a statement by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), which represents the Indian government in the extradition case. Meanwhile, Mallya remains on bail on an extradition warrant executed by Scotland Yard in April last year after the Indian authorities brought fraud and money laundering charges amounting to Rs 9,000 crores against the former Kingfisher Airlines boss. While Mallyas legal team had argued in the UK court that the default on the loans sought by the now-defunct airline were the result of business failure, the CPS had claimed fraudulent intentions by the businessman in seeking and then dispersing those loans. Judge Arbuthnot, in her ruling delivered on December 10 at the end of a year-long trial, concluded there is a case to answer in the Indian courts over substantial misrepresentations by the flashy billionaire of his financial dealings. The judgment had also dismissed the defence teams attempt to challenge the case on human rights grounds by claiming that Barrack 12 of Arthur Road Jail in Mumbai, where the businessman is to be detained following his extradition, did not meet the requirements. The UK court said it was satisfied with the various assurances provided by the Indian government, including a video of the jail cell, which had not only been recently redecorated but was also far larger than the minimum requirement threshold. Mallya needs permission to appeal against this verdict within 14 days of the Home Secretarys decision, and the case would then proceed to the UK High Court if the appeal is allowed. There is some limited recourse for the case to go on to a further level of the Supreme Court, but that is only possible if the High Court certifies that the appeal involves a point of law of general public importance, and either the High Court or the Supreme Court gives leave for the appeal to be made. PTI monicakchauhan@gmail.com Imphal, December 19 A journalist, who had criticised the BJP-led governments at the Centre and in Manipur on social media, has been sentenced to one year in detention by a local court, according to a statement issued by the state home department. The chief judicial magistrate of Imphal West district passed the order on December 14. The statement was accessed by PTI on Wednesday. The Advisory Board of the National Security Act (NSA), in its sitting held on December 11, had examined the allegations levelled against the journalist, Kishorechand Wangkhem. On December 13, the board recommended that there were "sufficient grounds" to detain Wangkhem under the provisions of the NSA, the statement said. Manipur Governor Najma Heptulla approved the advisory board's recommendation to detain the journalist for a maximum period of 12 months under the NSA. The 39-year-old Imphal-based journalist was detained under the NSA on November 26 for allegedly uploading videos criticising the BJP-led governments in Manipur and at the Centre for observing Rani Jhansi's birth anniversary. Wangkhem works with a local TV channel and the videos that he had uploaded on November 19 in English and Meitei were not related to his official work, officials had said earlier. In the video clips, Wangkhem had purportedly said he was saddened and shocked to learn that the present government in Manipur was observing the birth anniversary of Rani of Jhansi, according to media reports. He reportedly said Rani of Jhansi's deeds had nothing to do with Manipur and the state was observing her birth anniversary because the Centre had asked it to. In this context, he allegedly called Chief Minister Biren Singh a "puppet of the Centre" and a "puppet of Hindutva". The chief minister had claimed that the Rani of Jhansi had played a role in the unification of India. November 19 is the birth anniversary of Laxmibai, the Rani of Jhansi, who was one of the leading figures in the 1857 sepoy mutiny. Wangkhem's wife Ranjita Elangbam told PTI on Wednesday that she has appealed to the MHA to "cancel" the charges against him under the NSA but has not received any reply till now. PTI gspannu7@gmail.com Mumbai, December 19 A 38-year-old woman from Mumbai, who was allegedly trafficked to Kuwait City under the pretext of employment but was forced to work as a domestic help for a local resident there, has been rescued with the help of Indian embassy. The victim, identified as Sairabanu Shaikh, was reunited with her husband and other family members on Tuesday night, after she was rescued with the help of the embassy and a Mumbai-based foundation, her husband said on Wednesday. Shaikh, a Bandra resident who worked as a social worker, said she spent harrowing three months when she was in the Arab country. Shaikh came into contact with a placement agency while she was collecting donation for a community wedding and helping senior citizens. She said the owner of the agency asked her and her husband Haidar Mulla if they are willing to work in Kuwait. Shaikh said she was told that they are initially supposed to work in an unorganised sector before getting a job that involves taking care of ailing patients in Kuwait. Shaikh said she proceeded to Kuwait in September alone, as the departure visa of her husband was not ready. She said she landed in Kuwait with other women from India and met an agent named Ali. She said Ali sent her to a mansion of an Arab where she was forced to do domestic chores. I used to do cooking, cleaning, dusting and mopping, which would start early morning and continued till late night, she said. After working at the mansion for at least a month, Shaikh called up Ali and told him that she didnt want to work there anymore. Ali contacted my employer and collected my salary. However, he kept me at his home where I was forced to do domestic chores again, Shaikh said, adding that she was not allowed to leave home as she didnt have a civilian ID card of Kuwait. She alleged that Ali tortured her and demanded Rs 2 lakh for sending her back to India. By the time, I got a chance to speak to my husband who lodged a complaint with Indian Embassy in Kuwait. He also sought help from Abraham Mathai, the chairperson of Harmony foundation, she said. Shaikh said she managed to sneak out of Alis residence in Kuwait on December 2 and hired a taxi that took her to the Indian embassy. After completing all formalities, I was given a flight ticket for India. I reached here on Tuesday, she said. Her husband Haider expressed happiness. Whatever my wife suffered should not happen again with any other Indian woman, so we are going to file a complaint at local police station against the placement company and the agent, he said. Mathai said Shaikh was sent to Kuwait illegally, which is a case of human trafficking. It is good to see that she is reunited with her family, said Mathai. PTI uttara@tribuneindia.com Smita Sharma Tribune News Service New Delhi, December 19 Political mudslinging between the treasury and opposition benches over Rafale deal and resultant chaos led to complete washout of the seventh consecutive day of Winter Session in Rajya Sabha on Wednesday, as the controversial defence deal continues to dominate agenda in Parliament. Minutes after Wednesdays proceedings began, MoS Parliamentary Affairs Vijay Goel and Congress leader Anand Sharma traded charges of misleading the House in the previous days session. Soon Congress lawmakers began to chant slogans and moved into the Well of the House to demand a Joint Parliamentary Committee probe into the matter. With All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazagham and the Dravida Munnetra Kazagham Members of Parliament were already in the Wellwhere they were protesting the proposed Mekedatu dam over the Cauvery riverunbridled chaos ensued, forcing Chairman M. Venkaiah Naidu to adjourn the House for the day. One must look at who is benefiting out of these disruptions? Definitely BJP. The real losers are people of this country. The essence of a debate is openness. We want an open debate on Rafale, but it must be preceded by your (governments) commitment to agree to a JPC, RJDs Manoj Jha told The Tribune. The BJP meanwhile blames the chaos on the opposition. There is clearly a deliberate attempt to almost allow disruption and the current status quo to continue. People are hiding behind calls for JPC. Some are hiding behind a proposed Cauvery dam issue. It's almost like some MPs have decided that the holiday season has started for them, said BJP MP Rajeev Chandrashekhar. Political impasse continues even with only 13 days to go for the session to end. Among important Bills pending in Parliament is The Trafficking of Persons (Prevention, Protection and Rehabilitation Bill, 2018, which Lok Sabha passed in July. This is almost a lame duck government. Bills need scrutiny in Rajya Sabha, said a Trinamool Congress leader said. Trafficking is a very important issue that affects children and women all around the country and one that has been under legislated and under policed. So I would have hoped that we could start 2019 with fresh impetus on how to create safe environment for women and children around the country. But I am very disappointed that the Bill has not come up for discussion yet, Chandrashekhar said. Opposition has been demanding that a Joint Parliamentary Committee look into the deal, but the central government has refused to heed. amansharma@tribunemail.com Nagpur, December 19 Congress leader Pramod Tiwari on Wednesday termed as "rumours" the reports of the BSP and the SP joining hands for the 2019 polls. He said Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) chief Mayawati and Samajwadi Party (SP) president Akhilesh Yadav had not officially announced their alliance so far. Responding to a query, the former Rajya Sabha member added that the Congress did not want division of votes against the BJP in the upcoming general elections. "As per my information, neither Mayawati ji nor Akhilesh ji have officially announced about it (alliance). I think these are all rumours...I want to thank Mayawati ji and Akhilesh ji for supporting Congress in forming governments in Rajasthan and Madya Pradesh," he told reporters here. "As far as Congress is concerned, it does not want division of votes against the BJP," he added. Tiwari also hit back at Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who had Sunday termed the previous defence deals by the Congress government as "tainted" and dubbed Italian businessman Ottavio Quattrochi and alleged middleman Christian Michel as "uncles" (of Congress). Speaking in Raebareli on December 16, Modi had said, "I want to know from the Congress as to why it is agitated and speaking lies repeatedly. Is it because there is no Quattrochi mama or Christian Michel in the defence deals done by the BJP government." On a query over the allegation that the Congress delayed the Rafale deal by over a decade, Tiwari said there was no delay. "The actual process of open bidding started in 2009 and the deal was about to get completed...We pursued for better fighter planes, better price and a better deal," he said. - PTI uttara@tribuneindia.com Vibha Sharma and Shahira Naim Tribune News Service New Delhi/Lucknow, December 19 Virtually overlooking the changed political scenario after the Congress victory in three Hindi-speaking states, Bahujan Samaj Party and Samajwadi Party along with Rashtriya Lok Dal have almost finalised a pre-2019 alliance in Uttar Pradesh, reportedly leaving two seatsAmethi and Raebarelifor the Congress. However, some sources with BJPas well as SP and BSPindicated that the arrangement was still fluid and could perhaps change depending on political developments. Although not officially confirmed, sources in the SP, BSP and RLD have admitted that things have been worked out and an announcement was now a mere formality. If such a plan is executed, it is a foregone conclusion that the Congress would contest independently or tie up with a few smaller parties. According to sources of the 80 Lok Sabha seats Mayawatis BSP would contest 38 seats, SP on 37 seats RLD on three seats leaving two seats for the Congress. It is learnt that from its own quota of 37 seats, the Samajwadi party may spare a few seats for Nishad Party and Peace Party. Of the seats of Kairana, Muzaffarnagar , Baghpat and Mathura the RLD would be asked to select three. According to a SP MLC, they have decided to go ahead after waiting for the Congress for a long time. Speaking on condition of anonymity, he said that despite an understanding the Congress had betrayed them in Gujarat where SP had been promised five seats in an alliance. He said that the pattern repeated itself in Chattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, when after initially committing seats to the SP, the Congress did not follow through, forcing the SP to tie up with Gondwana Gantantra Party. Insiders in SP and BSP pointed out that after the victory in Chattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, the Congress would surely demand more seats that they did not want to give, as according to them, Congress votes are not transferable. In the emerging scenario, a triangular contest appears to be inevitable with the secular votes being split two-ways. Three to tango However, sources in BJP, and even BSP and SP, have said that this isnt the last word on the development, and that all parties are keeping their options open, especially BSPs Mayawati. In any case, any announcement on seat sharing can only be made after model code of conduct is enforced for next years Lok Sabha elections, sources familiar with ongoing negotiations between SP and BSP said. The two regional parties hold the key to Uttar Pradeshs 80 Lok Sabha seats. For the BJP, their coming without the Congress would be a nightmare scenario that it wouldnt like to reliveespecially given its losses in Gorakhpur, Kairana and Phulpur. As BJP sees it, if the Congress were to join the BSP-SP combine, the saffron party stands to gain 6 per cent Brahimn votes in the state, which could translate into a difference of 12 per cent votes with its closest rival, sources said. Brahmins would rather vote for the BJP if the Congress ties up with the SP, they said. As it stands, Mayawati, who is playing her cards very carefully so far as the BJPs concerned, hasnt said anything too adverse about its top leadership. However, an alliance with the saffron party could displease her core voters. In 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP and allies won 73 of the 80 Lok Sabha seats. Samajwadi Party won five seats, Congress remained limited to Amethi and Raebareli while the BSP drew a blank. monicakchauhan@gmail.com Lucknow, December 19 Hitting back at the opposition, which stalled the proceedings of the Uttar Pradesh legislature over the issue of law and order, Chief Minister Adityanath said on Wednesday the Bulandshahr violence, was a "political conspiracy" hatched by those who have lost political ground. The entire Question Hour was washed out in both the Houses of the state legislature amid uproar and sloganeering by the opposition Samajwadi Party and the Congress over various issues, including the plight of farmers and the law-and-order situation in the state, which led to repeated adjournments. "The December 3 (Bulandshahr) violence is a political conspiracy (hatched) by those who have lost political ground," he told reporters after the Assembly was adjourned for the day amid opposition ruckus. "It was a political conspiracy which has been exposed... peace and order will be maintained at all cost... the administration and government have repulsed the designs (of conspirators) sternly," Adityanath said. The chief minister had earlier termed the Bulandshahr incidents an accident. The Bulandshahr violence, which occurred over an incident of alleged cow slaughter, claimed two lives, including that of a police inspector. Responding to questions on the issue, Adityanath said those whose political ground has receded are embracing each other to hide their shortcomings. Wednesday was the second day of the brief winter session of the state legislature spread over four sittings. Both the Assembly and the Legislative Council were adjourned on the first day of the current session Tuesday after condoling the deaths of former chief minister N D Tiwari, BJP legislator Patel Ram Kumar Verma and Union minister Ananth Kumar. Perverse A group of 83 ex-bureaucrats however have called for Adityanaths resignation over the violence. In an open letter, a group of 83 former bureaucrats said the December 3 mob violence "instigated and engineered with malicious intent" that lead to the murder of a police officer, marked "the most dangerous turn" yet in the direction taken by the politics of hate in recent times. Demanding the resignation of Adityanath who "flaunts his bigotry as his badge of identity", they also questioned the silence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the issue and the Chief Minister's "sheer contempt for the Constitution". "It (Bulandshahr violence) shows that in India's most populous state, fundamental principles of governance, of constitutional ethics and of humane social conduct stand perverted. The Chief Minister of the state acts as a high priest of the agenda of bigotry and majoritarian supremacyan agenda that now seems to take precedence over everything else," they said in the letter. While observing that "cow protection politics" has been used as a means of isolating and cornering the Muslim community, they said Adityanath's regime has "mainstreamed hooliganism and thuggery". "Under Yogi Adityanath, hooliganism and thuggery have been mainstreamed into governance not just to intimidate minorities but to teach a lesson to anyone, including police personnel and others in the administration, who dare to be even-handed in their approach to minority communities," they said. Calling the violence and the murder of Inspector Subodh Kumar Singh a "deliberate attempt to display majoritarian muscle" and a "murder most foul", the former civil servants expressed alarm over the "horrifying" response of the administration to the incident. "The Chief Minister refuses to acknowledge the gravity of the incident and its communal intent, condemn the perpetrators of violence or direct the police to take action against them, instead asks them to focus attention on those responsible for illegal cow slaughter. "He (Adityanath) may try to mislead by calling it an accident, this was murder with an intent", the letter said. The slain police officer was an impediment to the communal plans of local BJP and Sangh Parivar elements and "had to go". Citing ample video evidences, they said that the perpetrators of the violence and their leaders were allowed to roam scot-free while, alleged cow killers, without any evidence, were taken into custody "just because they are Muslims". Questioning Modi's "stony silence", the former bureaucrats said for the Sangh Parivar, "constitutional morality was of no value and it was necessarily subordinate to the ideals of majoritarian supremacy". In the letter, signed by former Additional Secretary to Ministry of Shipping and Transport S.P. Ambrose and former chairman Administartive Reforms and De-centralisation Commission Uttar Pradesh, J.L. Bajaj, among others, they have also urged the Allahabad High Court to take suo motu cognisance of the incident and order a judicial enquiry. They have also called upon citizens to unite in a crusade against the politics of hate and division. "Never before in recent history has the politics of hate, division and exclusion been so dominant and the poisonous ideology which informs it penetrated so deep into the body politic. "Never before has hate been directed with such calculated intent against minority communities, hate which is nursed, aided and abetted by those in power. editorial@tribune.com Tribune News Service Chandigarh, December 19 Amid the controversy over Cultural Affairs Minister Navjot Singh Sidhu bringing a stuffed black partridge from Pakistan, in alleged violation of the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972, Chief Minister Capt Amarinder Singh has sent the bird to the Chief Wildlife Warden for custody and appropriate action as per the law. Chief Wildlife Warden Kuldeep Kumar has shared the information with UTs Chief Conservator of Forests and Chief Wildlife Warden Debendra Dalia after the latter asked about the jurisdiction to probe the issue. Since the stuffed bird had been gifted in Chandigarh, SP Gupta, Chairman, Animal Welfare Board of India, had directed the UT to investigate the matter and inform the board if any offence was committed under the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1960. In reply to the UTs query, Punjabs Chief Wildlife Warden has stated that necessary action was being taken as per law. A senior CMOfunctionary said the Chief Wildlife Warden had been asked to get back with the rules. Last week, two activists had approached the Animal Welfare Board and the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau against Sidhu for allegedly possessing the stuffed partridge in violation of the Act. At a meeting with Capt Amarinder last week, Sidhu had gifted him the stuffed partridge. The CM had told Sidhu that he would have to check if it was permissible to keep the bird protected under Schedule IV of the Act. Wildlife Department officials said as per rules the possessor of the stuffed bird had to approach the Chief Wildlife Warden and obtain certification, before keeping it or gifting it. The black partridge, however, was not covered under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. editorial@tribune.com Saurabh Malik Tribune News Service Chandigarh, December 19 Digging deep into the issue of awarding mining contracts in the state, the Punjab and Haryana High Court on Wednesday called for a status report on the procedure adopted for the purpose. The direction by Justice Rajan Gupta to the state government and other respondents came on a petition filed by Sanjit Singh Randhawa and another petitioner. They had raised serious objections to certain observations made in a report submitted by a commission headed by Justice JS Narang. Appearing before Justice Guptas Bench, their counsel contended that two of the petitioners were termed as frontmen of other partners in a partnership firm. This amounted to casting a stigma on them. The counsel added that the commissions terms of reference were to inquire into the auction of the mining contracts. The inquiry was ordered as it was alleged that the then Cabinet minister had influenced price bids by virtue of his position and had, thus, financially benefited from the tender and caused a loss to the state exchequer. The commission was also to examine whether the minister had himself received undue financial benefit from the award of the mines to H-1 bidders. The counsel told Justice Guptas Bench that the commission gave a clean chit to the minister. But, it passed certain disparaging remarks against all petitioners which amounted to stigma. The counsel prayed that such remarks were required to be expunged. He added that the amount deposited by the petitioners for the allotment of mines had also not been refunded by the department concerned. He further relied upon judgment passed in a case titled State of Bihar versus Lal Krishna Advani and others and contended that notice was not issued to the petitioners before passing adverse remarks against them in the report. Taking a note of the assertions, Justice Gupta issued notice of motion. Accepting the notice, a deputy advocate-general present in the court prayed for time to seek instructions and address the court. The law officer added that the court would be apprised of entire facts and circumstances of the case. A status report regarding the procedure being adopted for award of mining contracts be also filed on or before the next date of hearing, Justice Gupta added. monicakchauhan@gmail.com Chandigarh, December 19 The Kartarpur Corridor from Dera Baba Nanak in Punjab's Gurdaspur district up to the International Border will cost Rs 85-Rs 100 crore, officials said on Wednesday. The corridor will facilitate easy passage to the Sikh pilgrims to the historic Gurdwara Darbar Sahib in Pakistan's Kartarpur. Gurdwara Darbar Sahib is located on the banks of the Ravi river in Pakistan, where Guru Nanak Dev, the founder of Sikhism, had spent 18 years of his life. The corridor will be built by the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI). Punjab Public Works Department Minister Vijay Inder Singla said, "A sum of Rs 85 crore to 100 crore is estimated to be spent on constructing the Kartarpur Corridor". It will also involve cost of land acquisition for the four-lane highway from Dera Baba Nanak up to the International Border, he said. The Union Cabinet had on November 22 decided to develop and build the passage from Dera Baba Nanak in Gurdaspur district to the International Border. Following this, the foundation stone for the Kartarpur Corridor was laid on November 26 at Dera Baba Nanak where Union minister Nitin Gadkari had said that his ministry would try to complete the construction work of the corridor expeditiously. Kartarpur is located in Shakargarh in Narowal district of Pakistan's Punjab. The gurdwara in Kartarpur is located about three to four km from the Indo-Pak border in Pakistan. The Pakistan government had also held the groundbreaking ceremony of the corridor on their side on November 28. The Punjab Cabinet had recently passed a special resolution to set up a Dera Baba Nanak Development Authority for the development and beautification of the area in and around Dera Baba Nanak. A Kartarpur Gate has also been proposed to be set up on the Indian side of the International Border which would stand out as a monumental symbol to commemorate the 550th 'Prakash Purb' (birth anniversary) of Guru Nanak Dev. PTI pardeepdhull@gmail.com Beijing, December 19 A third Canadian citizen has been detained in China, Canadas National Post newspaper reported on Wednesday, citing the Canadian foreign ministry. Chinas foreign ministry spokeswoman, Hua Chunying, told a daily news briefing in Beijing that she was unaware of the report. Two Canadians former diplomat Michael Kovrig and businessman Michael Spavor were detained after Canadian police arrested Huawei Technologies Co Ltds chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, on December 1. Canadas Global Affairs office told the National Post that they were aware of a detention but did not provide details and did not suggest a connection to Mengs detention. The newspaper did not identify the third person to be detained but a source who had spoken to the individuals family told the newspaper that the individual was not a diplomat or an entrepreneur. Canadas embassy in Beijing did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment on the report. The Canadian government has said that there is also no explicit link between Mengs arrest and the detentions of Kovrig and Spavor. But Beijing-based Western diplomats and former Canadian diplomats have said they believe the detentions are a form of tit-for-tat reprisal by China, in response to Mengs arrest. U.S. prosecutors accuse Meng of misleading multinational banks about Iran-linked transactions, putting the banks at risk of violating US sanctions. Meng, who is the daughter of Huaweis founder, has said she is innocent. She has been released on bail. China has repeatedly called for Canada to correct its mistake and to release Meng or face unspecified consequences. Both Kovrig and Spavor are being investigated on suspicion of endangering Chinas state security, the Chinese government has said. Reuters pardeepdhull@gmail.com Washington, December 19 US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo held a rare meeting with Nepals Foreign Minister Pradeep Gyawali as part of the Trump administrations effort to thwart increasing Chinese influence in the Himalayan nation. Pompeo described his meeting on Tuesday with Gyawali as historic and said this demonstrates Americas commitment to its strong partnership with Nepal. He emphasised the great potential for further development of the US-Nepal ties, State Department deputy spokesperson Robert Palladino said. During the meeting, Pompeo highlighted the enduring strength of the US-Nepal partnership and the close people-to-people ties that form the foundation of the relationship. The two leaders discussed Nepals USD 500 million Millennium Challenge Corporation compact, Nepals central role in a free, open, and prosperous Indo-Pacific, and global issues, including North Korea, Palladino said. The meeting came amidst Chinas foray into the land-locked Himalayan nation where Beijing has been investing heavily for the last few years to enhance connectivity and infrastructure. The US is concerned about Chinese investments in the Indo-Pacific and stepped up its efforts to expand its engagements with the countries in the region, including India and Nepal. It fears that Chinese investments and activities are undermining sovereignty and economic stability in the region and will also be a threat to Americas vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific. American officials believe that said Chinas Belt and Road Initiative for infrastructure development and investments in countries in Europe, Asia and Africa lacked transparency and was aimed at fulfilling Chinas own security and strategic interests rather than promoting economic development. They also warn that Chinese credit could lead to debt trap and undermine sovereignty. PTI shriaya.dutta@tribuneindia.com Washington, December 19 A 39-year-old man living in the US state of Arizona has been sentenced to 37 months in prison for threatening to kill President Donald Trump, officials said. According to a press release on Tuesday by the Office of the US Attorney, District of Arizona, Jerrod Hunter Schmidt was sentenced after he was found guilty in September by a jury of two counts of threatening the President and two counts of making interstate threatening communications. Schmidt made a series of calls to the court clerk's office from April 10 to April 11 after learning that his conviction for a prior felony was affirmed by the Nebraska Court of Appeals. He left voice messages threatening that he was going to "kill President Trump and put a bullet in his head", the Arizona Republic newspaper reported. Schmidt had also threatened to kill one of the clerks of the Nebraska Court of Appeals and other local political figures. The Secret Service conducted the investigation in the case with the assistance of the US Postal Inspection Service and the Nebraska State Patrol, the press release said, adding that Schmidt will be on three years of supervised release after serving 37 months in federal prison. IANS rchopra@tribunemail.com United Nations, December 19 Outgoing US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley has come under heavy criticism from Permanent Observer of Palestine to the UN Riyad Mansour for her hostility towards the Palestinian people. Haley, who is stepping down in December-end, gave her last statement on the Israel-Palestinian issue asking both sides to negotiate more at Tuesdays Security Council meeting. In her speech, Haley asked Israelis and Palestinians to engage in a new Middle East peace plan yet to be unveiled by the Donald Trump administration. The plan contains elements that both sides would like and dislike, noted Haley, who said she had read the plan. She asked Israelis and Palestinians to focus on parts they liked and encouraged negotiations to move forward. Both sides would benefit greatly from a peace agreement, but the Palestinians would benefit more, and the Israelis would risk more, said Haley. Following which, Mansour told reporters: Ambassador Haley, unfortunately, exhibited an excessive amount of hostility to the Palestinian people and to the Palestinian cause. Different representatives of the US were always showing massive support to Israel. But yet in the same time, there was a bit more balance in terms of not ignoring the Palestinian side completely, said Mansour, who has seen many US ambassadors to the UN since he served the post in 2005. Haley was more aggressive, more pro-Israeli than previous US ambassadors, Xinhua quoted Mansour as saying. She would be replaced by Heather Nauert, the current US State Department spokesperson. IANS monicakchauhan@gmail.com Beijing, December 19 For the first time, the iconic Potala Palace, the official residence of the Dalai Lama was closed to visitors on Wednesday due to heavy snow in Lhasa, Tibet's capital. The Dalai Lama resided at the 1,300-year-old Potala Palace before he fled to India in 1959 following the take-over of Tibet by China. Due to the heavy snow, the steep stone stairs leading to the palace atop a hill became slippery, according to a statement released by the palace's administrative office late on Tuesday. "The palace is only closed on the Tibetan New Year's Eve and the second day of the New Year. There was no closure due to weather in the past," state-run Xinhua news agency quoted Jorden, deputy director of the palace administrative office as saying. Over 440 palace staff and some 30 firefighters participated in the snow removal, Jorden said. This winter's first snow in Lhasa came early on Tuesday morning and did not stop until Wednesday morning. The city saw 10 cm of snow, and the temperature dropped to minus 9.4 degrees Celsius at 9 AM Wednesday, according to the regional meteorological bureau. The regional meteorological bureau issued a yellow alert for a blizzard on Tuesday morning. The palace has been converted into a museum. It was declared a UNESCO world heritage site in 1994 and is the most famous tourist attraction in Tibet. Over 1.45 million tourists visited it in 2017. The construction of the palace took 45 years and was completed in 1694. The Potala Palace was built in the seventh century and was expanded in the 17th century, covering an area of 41 hectares atop a craggy hill in the heart of Lhasa. PTI rchopra@tribunemail.com Seoul, December 19 A US envoy on North Korea is to visit South Korea, officials said on Wednesday, as Washington and Pyongyang struggle to find a breakthrough in their stalled talks aimed at ending the Norths nuclear programme. Stephen Biegun, the US special representative for North Korea, is scheduled to arrive in the South Korean capital, Seoul, on Wednesday afternoon for a four-day stay, a diplomatic source told Reuters. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un vowed to work towards denuclearisation at his landmark summit with US President Donald Trump in Singapore in June but the two sides have since made little progress. They have yet to reschedule talks between US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and senior North Korean official Kim Yong Chol after abruptly cancelling a meeting in November. North Korean state media has credited Trump for his willingness to continue dialogue but has also slammed Washington for stepping up sanctions, accusing the State Department of being bent on bringing the DPRK-US relations back to the status of last year which was marked by exchanges of fire. The report referred to the Norths official name, the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK). The State Department said communication between both sides was going on but sanctions relief would come after they achieved the goal of a final, fully verified denuclearisation. The sooner North Korea denuclearises, the sooner sanctions can be lifted, deputy spokesman Robert Palladino told a news briefing on Tuesday. The stalled negotiations also had an impact on inter-Korean ties, with the North remaining aloof towards the Souths plan to host Kim Jong Un in Seoul this month as agreed at his summit with President Moon Jae-in in Pyongyang in September. Kims trip was unlikely to take place this year, Moons secretary said last week. Biegun is expected to explore ways to maintain the momentum for nuclear talks during his stay, officials in Seoul said. He was scheduled to hold talks on Thursday with his South Korean counterpart, Lee Do-hoon, ahead of their session on Friday of a working group launched last month to boost coordination on North Korean policy. Biegun will also meet Unification Minister Cho Myoung-gyon on Friday amid US concerns that Seoul may be moving too quickly with Pyongyang relative to the lacklustre progress on denuclearisation. The two Koreas plan to hold a ground-breaking ceremony next Wednesday for their project to reconnect rail and road links, which would need US sanctions exemptions. Reuters laxmi@tribune.com Sanaa, December 19 All Shaima Swileh wants is to give her son one more kiss before he dies. The Yemeni woman is about to get her wish after winning her fight for a waiver from the Trump administrations travel ban so she can fly to California where her two-year-old son is on life support. The State Department granted Swileh the waiver on Tuesday after lawyers with the Council on American-Islamic Relations sued this week, ending a year-long battle for the family. Swileh is planning to fly to San Francisco to see Abdullah at UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital in Oakland. This will allow us to mourn with dignity, the boys father, Ali Hassan, said in a statement provided by the Sacramento chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Hassan, who is a US citizen and lives in Stockton, brought Abdullah to California in the fall to get treatment for a genetic brain disorder. My wife is calling me every day wanting to kiss and hold her son for the one last time, Hassan said, choking up as he made a public plea at a news conference on Monday, a day before the government granted the visa. The couple moved to Egypt after marrying in war-torn Yemen in 2016 and had been trying to get a visa for Swileh since 2017 so they could all move to California. Citizens from Yemen and four other mostly Muslim countries, along with North Korea and Venezuela, are restricted from coming to the US under the travel ban enacted under President Trump. When the boys health worsened, the father decided to go ahead to California in October to get their son help. As Swileh and her husband fought for a waiver, doctors put Abdullah on life support. Immigration attorneys estimate tens of thousands of people have been affected by what they call blanket denials of visa applications under Trumps travel ban, which the US Supreme Court upheld in a 5-4 ruling in June. The waiver provision allows a case-by-case exemption for people who can show entry to the US is in the national interest, is needed to prevent undue hardship and would not pose a security risk. AP THE DEBATE about climate change is over. We have witnessed increased forest fires, devastating floods, and other deleterious effects upon people and the environment from climate change-related events. It is time to accept that we have a duty to reconsider the way we do business. WHEN Emmanuel Brown was a child, his view of the world extended no further than the distance This blog covers software patent news and issues with a particular focus on wireless, mobile devices (smartphones, tablet computers, connected cars) as well as select antitrust matters surrounding those devices. FILE - In this Feb. 5, 2018 file photo, plastic bottles and other plastics including a mop, lie washed up on the north bank of the River Thames in London. European Union officials agreed on Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2018, to ban some single-use plastics, such as disposable cutlery, plates and straws, in an effort to cut marine pollution. The measure will also affect plastic cotton buds, drink stirrers, balloon sticks, and single-use plastic and polystyrene food and beverage containers. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham, File) There was plenty of awful legal news for President Trump this week, but the worst may have come from an official who hasnt yet been sworn in. Letitia James, who will become the New York state attorney general next month, told NBC she plans to use every area of the law to investigate President Trump and his business transactions and that of his family as well. James also said she hopes to pursue state charges against Trump associates whom the president might pardon for federal crimes. No wonder Trump was so untethered when Chuck and Nancy dropped by. Trump has been walking a tightrope of lies all his adult life, and now he is teetering. He has inflated his wealth. He has aggrandized his business acumen. He has managed to convince supporters that he is a respected businessman who brilliantly commanded a vast real estate empire. In a fanciful 2015 statement of his net worth, he claimed that his brand alone just the name Trump was worth $3 billion. I wonder what its worth now. In reality, Trump has never come anywhere near the top rank of New York real estate developers. He ran not a huge, sprawling enterprise but a small family firm in which he and his children had direct control. He was seen as so unreliable that genuine moguls refused to have anything to do with him. When he tried to go big risking everything on casino development in Atlantic City he failed miserably despite his fathers efforts to bail him out. His bankers were left holding the bag, and now most major financial institutions wont lend the Trump Organization a dime. It was Trumps undeniable skill as a television performer on The Apprentice that saved him from total ruin. Republicans are trivializing Michael Cohens crimes. Their cynicism is hurting the country. (Joy Yi, Kate Woodsome, Danielle Kunitz/The Washington Post) Now the law is beginning to squeeze him from all directions. His former consigliere, Michael Cohen, was sentenced Wednesday to three years in prison. One of the crimes Cohen confessed to was violating federal campaign finance laws by orchestrating six-figure payments to a Playboy model and an adult-film star, in the weeks before the 2016 election, to ensure their silence about sexual encounters they say they had with Trump. Cohen says he did this at Trumps direction. Trumps see-no-evil allies dismiss Cohen as a proven liar about other matters. But also Wednesday, the company that owns the National Enquirer American Media Inc. (AMI), which is run by Trumps close friend David Pecker admitted playing a major role in that same hush-money scheme. The aim, according to the company, was to help Trump win the election. Trump responded by tweeting that I never directed Michael Cohen to break the law. But in the past, the president has also said that there werent any hush-money payments; that if such payments were made, he didnt know about them; and that the payments, which totaled $280,000, were a simple private transaction. The bottom line is that two witnesses, Cohen and AMI, independently now implicate the president of the United States in the commission of two felonies. The campaign finance case is being brought by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York. Back in Washington, meanwhile, special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has been busy, as well. Grand juries have brought down industry titans and a sitting president. So what do we know about the ones working on the Trump-Russia probe? We learned this week that Michael Flynn, Trumps short-lived national security adviser, has met with Muellers team 19 times to tell them what he knows. We also learned that Cohen has been eagerly cooperating with the Mueller probe. This means that at least two people in a position to know whether collusion with the Russians took place are singing like songbirds. Potentially more serious for Trump and his family in the long run, however, is what the New York state probe might discover. How much of the Trump Organizations revenue has come from the sale of luxury real estate to oligarchs from Russia and other kleptocracies? Where did these buyers money come from? Why was Deutsche Bank recently raided by German authorities and under investigation for money laundering the only major financial institution willing to lend money to Trump in recent years? Where did Trumps company get the large amounts of cash used in several transactions that Post reporters uncovered? How much commingling of funds was there between Trumps company and his eponymous foundation? Trumps longtime accountant, Allen Weisselberg, has turned states evidence. He may be the Virgil who guides federal, state and local prosecutors through a Trumpian inferno of shell companies and opaque transactions. The outlines of Trumps fate begin to emerge. Eugene Robinsons email address is eugenerobinson@washpost.com Critically-acclaimed grimdark turn-based strategy title hits consoles with new features; available Day One via Xbox Game Pass for Console and PC; new elite units DLC packs also out for console and PC - A training program will be rolled out in 2019 to train the guards on gun handling - Training will be limited to VIP guards and security for cash in transit - Trainers will be given international accreditation to enable them work anywhere in the world - Employers will be given permits with specific minimum wage to pay for their guards Soon select private security guards will be armed in an effort to complement police officers in offering security services to Kenyans. Private Security Regulatory Authority (PSRA) is set to roll out a training programming for the guards on handling and proper use of guns. Send 'NEWS' to 40227 to receive all the important breaking news as it happens READ ALSO: Kenya's mobile coverage surpasses 100% mark The guards will undergo training and receive international accreditation to handle guns. Photo: UGC Source: UGC READ ALSO: Somali man arrested for plotting to blow up St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican PSRA Director General Fazul Mahamed said already a curriculum was being developed by the agency and the training will be rolled out in 2019. Mahamed said they had requested the Technical and Vocational Education and Training institutions (TVETS) and the National Industrial Training Authority (NITA) to jointly provide the training. "We have formally made the request and brought in experts who will go through the curriculum. By the end of next year, you will all have gone through the training," Mahamed told the guards during a meeting in Nairobi. READ ALSO: 16-year-old boy falls in love with commercial sex worker who took his virginity in sex island Mahamed further said once the guards finish the training they will undergo vetting to assess their skills before they are given licences and accreditation to enable them have firearms in their line of duty. However, the director general clarified the training would be provided for guards on specific assignments such as protection of Very Important Persons (VIP) and security for cash in transit. "We are acquiring international accreditation for such trainings so that by the time the authority issues you with licences, you will be able to seek jobs even in Dubai, London and Qatar but we are not going to arm everybody, only those who will be given such assignments," he added. READ ALSO: TV girl Jacque Maribe, detained lover Jowi in tight romantic embrace before cameras The guards will be expected to undergo refresher courses to ascertain their suitability in handling the guns. Also, employers will be required to pay their guards a minimum wage that will be set by government and all those who are unable to pay them will have their permits withdrawn. 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 The Producer Making Music For The Deaf | Tuko TV Source: Tuko News - The Auditor General said the report did not come from his office - The said report alleged government named KPA as borrower of loan used to construct SGR - According to the report, revenue generated by KPA would be used to pay the loan - The report indicated in the event KPA fails to pay the debt, then China could take over corporation's assets - Kenya owes China over KSh 320 billion used to construct SRG between Nairobi and Mombasa - The govt holds that SGR would generate enough revenue to clear the loan once it breaks even - Economic experts however argue the SGR is not economically viable and would not break even - Some of the countries which found themselves in trouble after failing to pay China's loans include Zambia and Sri-Lanka The Auditor General has denied releasing report claiming Kenya is likely to lose its port in Mombasa should the government fail to pay loan it borrowed from China to construct the more than KSh 320 billion Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) between Nairobi and Mombasa. The said report indicated the Government of Kenya had entered into a payment agreement with China on how the huge debts would be settled should the borrower default on the loan. Send 'NEWS' to 40227 to receive all the important breaking news as it happens READ ALSO: Lesson for Kenya as China writes off debt for Botswana after taking over Sri Lanka's port The national government reportedly gave up assets belonging to the Kenya Ports Authority as security for the loan used to build the Standard Gauge Railway between Nairobi and Mombasa. Source: UGC READ ALSO: China's KSh 6 trillion investment pledge to Africa raises eyebrows Under the payment agreement cited in the report, revenue generated by Kenya Ports Authority (KPA), which was named as the borrower, would go towards clearing the debts owned to China's ExportImport Bank. "The payment arrangement agreement substantively means that the Authority's revenue would be used to pay the Government of Kenya's debt to China Exim Bank if the minimum volumes required from consignment are not met as per schedule one," the report seen by TUKO.co.ke on Wednesday, December 19, read in part. READ ALSO: We are slowly selling Kenya to the Chinese - Senator Mutula Kilonzo The report further stated China Exim bank would become the new manager of KPA in the event that Kenya Railways Corporation (KR) defaults in its loan obligations. "The KPA assets are exposed since the Authority signed the agreement where it has been referred to as a borrower under clause 17.5 and any proceeding against its assets by the lender would not be protected by sovereign immunity since the government waived the immunity on the Kenya Ports Assets by signing the agreement," the report indicated. READ ALSO: Government gets KSh 25 billion to convert SGR to electric railroad It was noted the agreement between Kenya and China's Exim bank was biased because any non-performance or disputes that may arise between the two parties would be referred to arbitration in China, whose fairness in resolving the dispute is not guaranteed. "The Authority did not disclose this guarantee in the financial statements," the report indicated. It went further to recommend that KPA should disclose the guarantee in the financial statements. "Confirm in the management representation letter the KPA assets are not a floating charge or guarantee to the Government of Kenya loan as the borrower," the report said. READ ALSO: Kenya Railways initiates investigations into mistreatment of SGR staff by Chinese bosses However, the Office of the Auditor General has distanced itself from the report saying it has released no such document. "Our attention has been drawn to reports that OAG_Kenya has released an audit report on Kenya_Ports for FY 2017/18. This is to clarify that the Office has not released any such report," the Auditor General tweeted. READ ALSO: Section of angry Kenyans claim Kenyas judiciary has failed under Maraga Nevertheless, TUKO.co.ke understands Kenya is yet to repay more than KSh 320 billion it borrowed from China's Exim Bank to construct the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) between Nairobi and Mombasa. Although the government had indicated phase one of the SGR would start generating profit by 2020 and pay back its own loan, critics like David Ndii, an economist, have repeatedly disagreed with that position. "We evaluate investment development projects based on four criteria. First, would it make money? Second, will the economic benefits exceed cost? Third, would it promote equity? And lastly, would it be sustainable? The SGR failed on all four parameters," Ndii argued. READ ALSO: Transport CS Macharia reveals Standard Gauge Railway suffered KSh 10 billion loss in 2017/18 FY Kenya, which is ranked among the wealthiest countries in Africa, would not be the first country to lose its assets to China over unpaid debts. The world has not forgotten Sri-Lanka was in December 2017 forced to hand over Hambantota Port to China after the South Asian country failed to pay back a loan estimated at more than KSh 800 billion owed to Beijing, the New York Times reported. Zambia also had to hand over its international airport to China in September 2018 after it failed to pay its debt to China. In Kenya, there has been growing concern over the Jubilee government's insatiable appetite for Chinese loans. The country's total debt owed to China had risen to over KSh 479 billion, about 66% of the countrys bilateral debt, as of 2017. 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. Memorable moments during Uhuru's Kisumu Visit - On Tuko TV Source: Tuko Breaking News - Museveni said rich Ugandans contributed to the traffic congestion in major towns across the country - He said the other categories of people causing traffic jams include business people transporting goods and services - His government, he said, is tarmacking highways and new roads to reduce the traffic gridlock in Kampala and other towns Uganda's President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni has accused rich Ugandans owning more than one car of causing unnecessary traffic jams in Kampala city and other towns. The Ugandan strongman claimed the perennial traffic jams in the country's major towns and city was being caused by three categories of people. Send 'NEWS' to 40227 to receive all the important breaking news as it happens READ ALSO: Museveni threatens to do away with Ugandan Parliament Uganda's President Yoweri Kagita Museveni, believes rich Ugandans owning many cars were largely responsible for the traffic jam in Kampala city. Source: UGC READ ALSO: Snake creeps on Museveni while addressing public, forces him to cut short speech Speaking during the launch of the Kampala flyover at Clock Tower on Wednesday, December 19, Museveni said owners of many cars largely contributed to the traffic snarl-up in Kampala. Since you have so much peace and are very rich, you have many cars that are now causing jam.You keep on moving from one bar to another and others keep on rumour mongering and circulating in the city causing jam, Museveni claimed as quoted by Uganda's Nile Post. READ ALSO: Yoweri Museveni boasts of how Uganda exports more goods to Kenya than the reverse Besides the rich Ugandans, the other categories of people the president believes are responsible for the crazy traffic congestions are those working and living in Kampala and then those transporting goods and services within the city. According to the president, the government has been trying to address the traffic jam by tarmacking new roads and highways linking Kampala to other towns. READ ALSO: President Museveni warns lovers against using their mouths while making love Most of the major roads, he said, have already been tarmacked and the government is now focusing on how to improve the infrastructure within Kampala and other towns in the country with the hope of reducing the traffic congestions. Once we have the needed infrastructure in place, like the flyover and the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR), the traffic jam will be a thing of the past. Those going upcountry will no longer need to pass through the city centre, the president said. READ ALSO: Museveni's phone call by the road photos go viral He added the business people involved in the movement of goods and services would use the SGR, once its completed, instead of roads which will be left for the rest of road users. Do you have a hot story or scandal you would like us to publish, please reach us through news@tuko.co.ke or WhatsApp: 0732482690 and Telegram: Tuko news. Kenyans accuse NTSA of incompetence and corruption and want it disbanded - On Tuko TV Source: Tuko.co.ke The following is a release issued by the US State Department on November 30, 2021. Knife attacks on par with larger cities : Bonn forms network to prevent youth violence Bonn The City of Bonn is working with the University of Marburg to develop a concept for youth violence prevention. While the administration sees positive results for the interim, there are concerns about increasing knife attacks by youth and young men. Teilen Teilen Weiterleiten Weiterleiten Tweeten Tweeten Weiterleiten Weiterleiten Drucken The City of Bonn is zeroing in on youth violence, developing a prevention concept together with the University of Marburg. After one year, the city sees positive results. Compared to other cities, Bonn does not show any anomalies so the emphasis is on prevention. At the same time, Bonn has shared the spotlight with much larger cities when it comes to violent crime. In July, the prevention concept is to be presented to politicians and city administrators. Many initiatives but not always coordinated It was the violent death of the teenager Niklas Pohler in May of 2016 in Bad Godesberg city center that tipped the scales. A "Round Table Against Violence" was subsequently established, with members developing a violence prevention concept for all of Bonn. The measures target both physical and psychological violence. According to Udo Stein, director of the Youth Welfare Office, there have been an "impressive number" of people and initiatives in Bonn, but they were "not always coordinated". Besides the University of Marburg and the Youth Welfare Office, the Bureau of Education and Bonn police are also on board. Around 750 organizations and institutions - from kindergartens and schools to churches and youth clubs - were invited to take part in an online survey. As well, background discussions were held with the various institutions. Networking is key, "Only together can violence prevention succeed", said Lord Mayor Ashok Sridharan. Youth crime statistics According to Udo Stein, the interim results available for Bonn - also in comparison to other cities - show that "no anomalies" could be determined. The number of cases seemed to be declining in the past years and to follow the national trend. The percentage of crime suspects under the age of 21 (3,136 persons) was just under 22 percent. According to the NRW Ministry of Justice, the number of convicted juvenile offenders aged 14 to 18 has fallen from 3,423 to 1,049 in a ten-year comparison (2006 to 2016), a decrease of more than two thirds. But authorities are concerned about repeat offenders. The crime statistics in NRW can also be interpreted differently. Recently, the number of criminal offenses at schools in NRW rose from 25,596 (2015) to 27,541 cases; the number of assaults rose by more than 400 cases (2017: 4,343). Teachers' associations also report an increasing number of cases in which teachers are attacked, threatened or verbally insulted. Bonn on par with larger cities when it comes to knife attacks Meanwhile, the two major police unions are warning against more and more knife attacks by young men and teenagers and in unison they see a link to immigration. Meanwhile, the SPD in the Dusseldorf state parliament evaluated police press releases and found that there had been 33 knife attacks in Bonn just in the six months between September 2017 and March 2018. Age groups were not broken down separately. In the evaluation, Bonn is on par with much larger cities such as Cologne (39), Dortmund (31), Essen (34), Dusseldorf (32) and Duisburg (44). A further problem when it comes to youth violence is that many victims remain silent for fear of retaliation. For that reason, part of the prevention concept now includes anonymously surveying ninth graders about their personal experiences in schools chosen at random. Hi, my name is Scott C. Waring and I wrote a few books and am currently a ESL School Owner in Taiwan. I have had my own UFO sighting up close and personal, but that's how it works right? A non believer becomes a believer when they experience their first sighting. You witnessed it, your perceptual field changes, so now you need to share it. I created this site to help the UFO community get a little bit organized. I noticed that there was a lot of chaos when searching for UFO sighting reports, so I hope this site helps. I wanted to support those eyewitnesses who have tried to tell others about what they have seen, yet were laughed at by even closest of friends. More and more each day the governments of the world leak bits and pieces of UFO information to the public. They have a trickle down theory in hopes of slowly getting citizens use to the idea that we are not alone in universe and never have been. The truth is being leaked drop by drop until one day we look around and find ourselves neck high in it. The discovery of alien species in existence is the most monumental scientific event in human history, suppression of that information is a crime against humanity. About me: I live in Taiwan. I OWN MY OWN ENGLISH SCHOOL, AND ONCE HAD 5 SCHOOLS. Am Former USAF at SAC base (flight line). Age: 42 Educ: BA in Elem ed. Masters in Counseling ed. I had two UFO sightings, (30+bus size orbs) in military and in 2012 personally saw the UFO over Taipei 101 building on New Years Day (and recored it). With all the UFO evidence we have at our disposal, with all the eyewitness testimonies about abductions and encounters, the one thing that everyone wants the most is to meet them. Here I will introduce you to them by showing you their faces. Each species has a distinct appearance of the face and that is why they use faces to commemorate great individuals of their species, much like America made Mount Rushmore with the faces of the greatest presidents upon it. This file will be added to as more and more faces are found. The USAF states in Area S4 that they know of 56 space faring species. Also in Rocca Pia, Italy a story exists of aliens below the castle that came up and talked to the people...they called themselves the W56. Coincidence? No. I am in search of these 56 species and when I find their faces, I will place them below. The above photo shows three alien faces. Three species together. It may have a fourth or far right, but harder to identify it. (Monkey skull, Lizard or frog face, fox face.) This is my discovery SCW. Source NASA photo PIA10214 by Spirit Rover, Mars. Original at this NASA url http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mer/images/sol1369a-F-20080102.html Above alien is reptilian as you can see from the features. This person had royal status (crown or scales). Also looks like the taller greys. Source of photo is my discover and is in same photo as the three faces above it. PIA10214 Spirit Rover, Mars. The above photo is also from PIA10214 by Mars Spirit Rover, and was not discovered by me, but another person here in Asia. It led me to the other discoveries. Note the three figures and their bent joints that are 100% the same as ours. They are alive, not the pink bald head of the center male. They are looking in the direction of the Rover as it photographs them. The above photo is from PIA10214 by Mars Spirit Rover. Small yet its facial features stand out. The above image is the first face I ever discovered (Scott C. Waring) , that was 35 years ago. It was first published in a book the size of a dictionary with full page black and white photos. This photo was taken in 1976 by Viking 1. YepI was in first grade when I discovered it in a book that was one day old when I opened it in the school library. The above photo is a close up of a mountain on Mars, NASA source: http://is.gd/IcMTjf Also at this post: http://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/2014/05/demon-face-on-mars-and-buildings-on.html The upper two faces of a male and female together is also in the same photo as the below faces. The upper two photos and the lower one photo are in the same post. I found the faces and highlighted them in colors for you to see easier. Can you see the two faces in the below photo? http://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/2014/05/demon-face-on-mars-and-buildings-on.html Photo by NASA Spirit Rover. The above image is on Mars, image source: Malin Space Science Systems (MSSS) MOC narrow angle image MO3-05549 at this URL http://www.msss.com/moc_gallery/ab1_m04/images/M0305549.html Four faces, three little ones I did discover (SCW), the largest I did not. I have run into it by accident twice while searching Mars photos. It's an amazing feelingto meet them face to face. Malin Space Science Systems image (MSSS) M02-03051 at http://www.msss.com/moc_gallery/ab1_m04/images/M0203051.html Mars face found in the Cydonia. This goes to show that aliens have a sense of humor about life. This unnamed crater on Mars is 3 kilometers or 1.9 miles across. It is located among the Nereidum Montes, north of Argyre basin, near 45.1AS, 55.0AW. Photo credit: NASA/JPL/MSSS and was taken by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Photograph taken by the NASA/JPL Mars Global Surveyor. I found the one on top, not the lower one. There are many faces in the photo this came from. What can you find in the source? Link at http://www.msss.com/moc_gallery/ab1_m04/nonmaps/M0100047.gif In the above Moon photo, I Scott C. Waring discovered this face in the crater on the Earth's Moon. It is in a crater called Jenner. The face is about 8KM from chin to top of head. The floor of Jenner Crater is 40 km across. The above photo you see the shadow of the astronaut and his tool sitting on the rock, but do you see the face upon the rock further away? Credit NASA Archives. This moon face was discovered by me SCW. It looks like a lion facing one way with its back to a bird that faces the other. It is in the location where Apollo 20 recovery mission took place (without your knowledge). Source at NASA: http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/apoll o/frame/?AS15-P-9630 New Moon Face in above photo. I just discovered this face in the above NASA photo today, June 10, 2010 as I was exploring the Lunar Orbiter 2 photos. Source at: http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/lunarorbiter/images/preview/2162_h3.jpg ---------------------------------------------------------------- Note: There is also lots of domes over craters in the URL photo! I (SCW) looked over this recent Mercury Messenger photo (ABOVE PHOTO) and found many new faces right next to one another. The smallest is sitting in a crater bed. The other three look like a guerrilla, Elf with giant eyes and a Yoda like face with body. Credit to NASA for the faceser.citieserthe photo. Source of photo: http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/gallery/sciencePhotos/pics/3_Solomon_3_4_5.jpg The above photo I Scott C. Waring discovered when I found the mirror like dome city near it. Date of sighting: March 9, 2011 Location of sighting: 5 deg South, 134.1 deg East. NASA Photo Archives, Lunar surface The dome and face are in both of these photos at http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/apollo/frame/?AS17-P-1928 and http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/apollo/frame/?AS17-P-1923 I discovered this human like face on the Planet Mercury on June 26, 2011. I (Scott C. Waring) was looking through Mercury photos when I came across this face. As you know if you frequent my site, I like to search for faces on alien planets and moons. Why? Because It's the closest thing to meeting them. So I search. Credit to NASA for the alien face and source photo http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/gallery/sciencePhotos/pics/EN0214641016M_web.png The Above big face and small face is near Medicine Hat, Canada. Alien Royal Prince Face 400+ meters across. When looking at Canada using Google Earth (free program) I (SCW) found an area of land that resembles the shape of a face. Now this is not hills and mountains that formed a face, this is a face that formed the hills and mountains. My video teaching U to find it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cY65HFr0BxA I (SCW) discovered this bird skull on Mars on July 5, 2011 at West Valley. The Spirit Rover took the photo. Either this is a structure in skull form orthe skull of a real ancient bird on Mars. http://marsrover.nasa.gov/gallery/all/2/p/1208/2P233602757EFFATEEP2373L7M1.HTML I (Scott Waring) found the above face with the flat head on July 5, 2011. Location is Mars. Source photo at http://marsrover.nasa.gov/gallery/all/2/p/1108/2P224729009EFFASL5P2559L5M1.HTML The above skull was found on July 2011 by European Space Agency (ESA). They probably figured I would find it and take credit for its discovery in a few weeks time so they might as well release it to the public. Found in the Cydonia region where the first Mars face was discovered. Ohthat first one I did discover 34 years ago. Source photo at http://www.flickr.com/photos/europeanspaceagency/5058957153/in/photostream/ Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum) Scott Waring discovered the above face on July 7, 2011 using Google Earth 2D version. I thought that some people would have difficulty seeing it so I colorized the face so that it stands out more from the rest of the picture. By Scott Waring I SCW discovered the above Mars face on July 8, 2011 using Google Earth 3D version. It was the first time I ever used this program and it took me 2-3 minutes to find the face. Notice the helmet it is wearing and the mustache and beard? ============================================ On July 11, 2011 SCW discovered the above face that looks like an old indian with head dress on. Location of discovery: Melas Chasma on Mars. ======================================== Why the cat face? Because a UFO sighting in Russia in March 2011 confirmed the UFO transmitted cat like voices to the control tower. Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1361878/Russian-flight-controllers-UFO-aliens-speak-cat-like-language.html On July 11, 2011 SCW discovered the above faces of a cat species and bird species that seem to be humanoid on Mars surface. Above photo is a Face of Thunder God Tupan Patera Found on Jupiter's Moon IO. I SCW discovered this on July 17, 2011. Perhaps because it was tilted with the face pointing up originally, may be why others did not find it first. The image of the face was taken by the Galileo space craft on October 2001. I made this discovery on July 18, 2011. The location of the above face is on the moon IO (orbiting Jupiter) it is in the are called Babbar Patera. SCW, Credit to ipad app & NASA. I found the above alien face on Earth's moon. Date of discovery August 1, 2011. The above face is at Eichstadt K crater, moon. SCW I Scott C. Waring found this Yoda face on the moons surface. Does this mean that the species Yoda comes from is realmost likely yes. Found Sept 2011. Original Photo at: http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/apollo/frame/?AS15-P-9583 Image atlas here: http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/apollo/catalog/pan/revolution/?AS15R38Cf The three screenshots above are of a face that I SCW discovered yesterday, January 7, 2012. The face is on Mars surface and can be found using Google Mars, for more information look at the video I made about it at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XC_C3nDyFUs Below photo is face on Mars Full photo below of face on Mars. Discovered on Feb 18, 2012, I (Scott Waring) was looking over Mars photos as you know I love to do and I came across this photo which had a face smack dab in the middle of it. I noticed that it had a lot of similarities to the ancient Babylonians. It prominent nose and eyes, its lips with no expression, its long beard and long flowing hair, the traditional hat or helmet. Source at http://areo.info/mer/spirit/108/2P135963098EFF3300P2395L5M1_L2L5L5L7L7.jpg Face on Moon in Above and below photo. Two faces from moon found in full photo below. Location of sighting: Near Keeler Crater, Moon Date of discovery: February 22, 2012 Latitude / Longitude: 9.7 S / 159.4 E (Pertaining to the two faces on moon in photos above this). I was looking over some moon photos today and found two faces that look similar to the Buddha statues that I see here in Taiwan temples. Both faces are in the same moon photo and are very close to one another. As you can see, some of the aliens look like us. This is from the Apollo 17 Panoramic Index from NASA. Click here for source photo. This photo include the crater "Keeler," which is a large crater on the moons far side. Credit NASA. SCW Source: http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/apollo/frame/?AS17-P-1734 Above and below face on moon found near Simpelius C. Crater, by SCW. Above and below face on moon found near Simpelius C. Crater, by SCW. The above face I discovered this March of 2012 when looking over some NASA moon maps. I highlighted the face in red to make it easier to see. It looks male I deduce from its adams apple on his neck. I love to find the faces, it takes the fear away from people, fear of the unknown, and shows that many aliens look just like us. Scott C. Waring The two photos above are on the moon. I found these two face in the same crater. It is near Comrie Crater on the moon. I found this March 2012. Source: http://the-moon.wikispaces.com/Comrie The above face was discovered by me SCW in Tycho crater, Earth's moon. There were about ten faces in this main photo of Tycho, however only this face was intact enough to bother showing you. The link is here: http://wms.lroc.asu.edu/lroc_browse/view/M102230053LE Credit to NASA Date of discovery: Sept 27, 2012 Location of discovery: Mars I was looking over Google Mars map and found these four faces not far from each other. They look worn down from wind and sand over millions of years, but they are still clearly faces. I don't think everyone has the ability to discern such details, but many will. All you have to do is put the coordinates into the search box of Google Earth...switch the button to Mars and you have it. Why am I always looking for faces? Because I want to know how they look. SCW Coordinates: 4549'37.62"S 14132'2.48"E Date of discovery: September 30, 2012 Location of discovery: Mars I was looking over Mars photos and came across one in Sol 116A that happened to have not one but multiple faces in it (four or more). These faces look like they were cut from stone and left there long ago. The first face is of a round faced person with very curly hair. And if you look very carefully right above this one and touching it is a bearded face of a species I have never seen before in stone. Then on the far lower right there was another faceshighly unusual with a long hat or crown. Above it is a half face. I took the half face and flipped it over so you could see what the whole face would look like. Source photo: http://pancam.astro.cornell.edu/pancam_instrument/images/False/Sol617A_P2291_1_False_L257_pos_14.jpg Searching through Mars photos taken by the rover Opportunity I came across a face with unusually great detail and of a species I have never seen before and know this, I have seen hundreds of faces, only the best make it to my posts. This face is almost lamb like in appearance, but I am sure with its uniquely high intelligence it must be a phenomenal species. Almost cute...but what devastating tragedy became of them? Those poor creatures. Below is the link that shows you where I found the NASA photo. SCW NASA Source: http://areo.info/mer/opportunity/2136/ Date of discovery: November 8, 2012 Location of discovery: Mars Type this in the google Mars search box: 3721'41.32"S , 14955'17.97" I heard Google Mars (free program) had a massive update that increased the detail of the map. I checked it out and I really thought it was a crappy effort on behalf of NASA. Even a simple satellite with an iPhone 5 camera would take better photoswhich goes to prove that NASA is hiding info from the public. Anyways, I was searching Mars and came across this face. I actually found three, but am only showing you this one above because one was deliberately blurred by NASA and the other was beyond ancient so its eyes and forehead were gonehmmm, I will put the photos Above here just for the fun of it. All three faces are near each other. SCW Latitude: 3721'41.32"S Longitude: 14955'17.97" I discovered the above face on the surface of mars. The face is looking to the right side of the photo. You can clearly make out the eyes, nose, mouth, chin, cheeks. SCW Source: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA01907.jpg For Above photo. Date of sighting: November 14, 2012 Location of sighting: Mars I was looking over some NASA photos in the hand of the University of Arizona where I discovered this face. The face itself looks to be a male with a tall long hat. This hat is the same style as the hat that Queen Nefertiti of Egypt has on her sculptured bust. So the hat must be a symbol of their powerful and respected position and the face was made in the hills because they wanted to commemorate a great leader, just as humans carved Mount Rushmore with the images of four faces of great US presidents. SCW Source: http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/ESP_029234_2015 http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/images/wallpaper/2880/ESP_029234_2015.jpg Date of discovery: Oct 7, 2012 Location of discovery: Mars I (Scott Waring) found this face (side view looking left) in not just one photo, but nine taken by the Mars Rover Opportunity. It really looks like an ancient Egyptian face with the elongated back. Its very similar to King Tuts golden sarcophagus. Even the beard coming down with a bend on its end is there. Part of me is thinking this face is not a statue buried to the shoulders but instead is a headstone for someone buried there. A headstone with the face of the person that died, weathered by hundreds of thousands of years of blowing sand. SCW Source Photo: http://areo.info/mer/opportunity/2172/ Date of discovery: June 24, 2013 (above and below photos) Location of discovery: Three craters above "Ares Vallis," Mars Video I made: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEJBXZ07gF0&list=LLQhbp52zX0ySztdZ5Oi1rXQ&feature=mh_lolz I was looking over Google Mars map and came across this amazing face on the side of the crater. I thought it was really cool, but wasn't going to report it...then I found the other two faces all about the same position on the craters. All the craters are lined up one after the other and all the faces are either looking left or right. The faces of the intelligent species out there are the most important evidence next to meeting them in person. The fact that this is direct evidence that we are not alone in the universe makes these faces even more significant. What great deeds did these three aliens do that gave reason to preserve their faces on the surface of Mars? We are looking at three distinctly different species of aliens here. One seems to have a sheep like face with tentacles hanging from its chin (maybe beard). Another has a very long face. And yet another that looks very similar to our human species except its chin is sharper and longer than our own. This is real universe and now you knowwe are not alone and never have been. These faces can be found if you type "Ares Vallis," into the search box and move above it to the three craters side by side. Good luck and you might find something I didn't. See Below photo. Date of sighting: July 28, 2013 Location of sighting: Mars Surface NASA photo: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA17081.jpg This is a highly detailed face of a species of alien whose face resembles half sheep and half human. Look carefully and you will see the upper and lower lips, chin, jaw, cheeks, eye, nose, nostrils, and long flowing hair. See photo below for sheep face. SCW Date of discovery: March 27, 2012 (Photos Below) Location of discovery: Earths Moon Chang'e Map: http://159.226.88.30:8080/CE2release/cesMain.jsp (slow to load) I found this face last year, but most the information about it has disappeared off my UFO site for some unknown reason, so here I am posting it again. This is an an alien face that I discovered using the Chang'e 2 Orbiters moon map. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- The above and below photos are of the same face. The one below has been cut off and flipped over...mirrored side by side for you to see the whole face. Date of discovery: February 2014 Location of discovery: Mars NASA photo: http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/pia17931-main_m34-sol528-wb.jpg Someone at http://ufosightingz.blogspot.com discovered this face above so I thought I better confirm it there and check out the original NASA photo. It is there and then some. Also in the same photo as the face above I found the two faces below. Where there is one, there is more. SCW --------------------------------------------------------------------- Date of discovery: April 10, 2014 Location of discovery: Earths Moon Photo: http://wms.lroc.asu.edu/lroc/view_lroc/LRO-L-LROC-2-EDR-V1.0/M1141785879RE I was looking over NASA photos and came across this alien face. As you know, I have found a lot of faces, but this one is unique in that the face has ridges along the top and side of its head. By searching for these faces, we are able to know what aliens look like. Seeing the real faces of aliens takes the fear from people...that movies and Hollywood has instilled into the public. This is an intelligent species and probably very ancient. SCW --------------------------------------------------------------- Date of discovery: November 24, 2014 Location of discovery: Mars Source Photo: http://ida.wr.usgs.gov/fullres/complete/ab1013/ab101303.jpg Below 3 photos: This is one of the photos from the Mars Global Surveyor mission. Not only does it show an alien base, but there is also a face of the species that built the base near it. --------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------- Date of discovery: November 16, 2014 Location of discovery: Mars NASA Photo: http://mars.nasa.gov/mer/gallery/all/2/p/482/2P169153230EFFAAB2P2417L7M1.JPG ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date of discovery: November 9, 2014 Location of discovery: Mars Description: MSL 778 MAST 100 Photo Source: http://www.gigapan.com/gigapans/164557 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ----------------------------------------------------- Date of discovery: November 6, 2014 Location of discovery: Mars NASA Photo: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/tiff/PIA00780.tif I was looking through some Mars photos and stopped when I saw some arrows. I was trying to figure out what they were pointing to when I noticed a sculpture face with a big blue arrow pointing at it. The face had probably been attached to a statue when it broke off during the big attack on Mars. SCW ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date of discovery: October 26, 2014 Location of discovery: Crater Fram, in the Meridian Planum Region of Mars NASA Source: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA05990 This week I found some interesting anomalies in this Mars photo. The photo shows a close up of the crater Fram. In this photo are many unusual objects, including a walking figure. SCW 4 photos below. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Date of discovery: October 2014 Location of discovery: Mars NASA Source: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/msss/00711/mcam/0711ML0030270000304691E01_DXXX.jpg -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date of discovery: Oct 2014 Location of discovery: Mars Source photo: http://mars.nasa.gov/msl/images/mars-diverse-terrain-mount-sharp-msl-curiosity-rover-labeled-PIA19397.jpg The two screenshots below have not one, but three faces visible. The largest one in looking left of the photo. Right beside it is a childs face, and then below the child to the right is an animals face. The animal looks like a dog. SCW -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date of discovery: Oct 2014 Location of discovery: Mars NASA source: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/msss/00385/mcam/0385MR0015770000301891E01_DXXX.jpg ------------------------------------------------------------- Date of discovery: October 7, 2014 Location of discovery: Saturn moon, Dione Source NASA photo: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA12743 I found this face on a moon of Saturn called Dione. The face is very large and easy to see. As I have said before, I have found faces of aliens on most planets, moons and asteroids in our solar system. There are a lot of aliens species out there. SCW ------------------------------------------------------------------ Date of discovery: Sept 25, 2014 Location of discovery: North end of Greenland, Earth Method used: Google Earth Searching Google Earth is a lot of fun. A face inside a face. Yes, two faces, maybe more. The things you find often blow you away, for example this giant face in Greenland. It measures 191 miles (306km) by 191 (306km). Yeah, a perfect square area. This face has a broken nose in two places which tells us he was a fighter. Also he has on a feather like crown, which tells us he was a leader of a tribe of people. He must have been ten kinds of awesome to be commemorated by aliens this way. He wasn't necessarily an alien himself, but may have been a fantastic leader that raised the bar, so they wanted the future humans to one day find this face and remember him. Also please notice the smaller faces inside this faces hat area. He is remembered. SCW -photo below- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Date of discovery: Sept 15, 2014 Location of discovery: upper right from Tsiolkovsky crater, Earths moon. Source NASA Photo: I was looking over moon photos when I was taken aback by a familiar face...Leonardo da Vinci. The face even has the unique dark shading that Leonardo often used. People often tell me Leonardo was an alien, because of he was a man of "unquenchable curiosity" and "feverishly inventive imagination". This face stands out really well inside the crater. Did a alien species celebrate da Vinci's life by creating this face in the crater or is it just a famous face among their own culture that just happens to look like da Vinci? We may never know, but one thing is obvious, this portrait in the crater was created by a species not unlike our own in appearance. SCW ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date of discovery: September 2014 Location of discovery: Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko Source Photo: http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2014/09/Comet_on_10_September_2014_NavCam There is a also an alien face...defiantly not handsome in human terms, but nevertheless a face of one alien species. So now we know, this is why Rosetta satellite was sent to Comet 67P, to see if it can retrieve some alien tech. Oh...there is a white disk UFO very clear in the URL photo, but not my screenshot. SCW ------------------------------------------- Date of discovery: Sept 2014 Location of discovery: Kenting, South end of Taiwan I found these two faces in South of Taiwan in Kenting. Its a sign that an alien base is nearby. SCW ---------------------------------------------------- Date of discovery: 3-4 years ago. Location of sighting: Mars Source image: http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/207023main_vincent-20071220.jpg I found this statue about 3 to 4 years ago, but came across this video talking about it. They colored the statue so that you can see it better. This is a really interesting photo and there is a color version available, but not sure where at the moment. You can clearly make out the Egyptian face, shoulders, hat and body. There are also a lot of other anomalies in this photo, but this one is the best. Cool the discovery is still being passed around. photo below. SCW ---------------------------------------------------------------- Date of discovery: August 16, 2014 Location of discovery: Mars Source Map: http://www.google.com/mars/#lat=22.662491&lon=-132.809085&zoom=9&map=infrared Guys I found this today and I am still amazed at what it is. The face alone is an incredible find, but this one has 70% of a figure to it. This guy looks like a warrior with his massive shoulders and arms. The other leg and arm look faded and warn, not by time, but by an ancient lake area. I have to say, I see a lot of resemblance between this and the ancient Greek gods. Perhaps a story that has lasted thousands of years has more truth to it than once thought. photos below. SCW ------------------------------------------------------- Date of discovery: August 3, 2014 Location of discovery: Mars NASA photo: Hey guys, I was looking over Mars photos and found this amazing face. It resembles the ancient Chinese lion. The detail of its eye, the carved lines below and above the eye are great. Also the nostrils are slightly visible as well as the mouth and forehead. Overall it explains how the symbol of the Chinese lion originated...from an ancient species that once visited Asia, but will never be forgotten. Also, this is near another discovery I made a few years ago. An alien body is visible and its head is about the same size as the Chinese lion head near it. You can see that this alien more closely resembles a humanoid because of its legs, hand bones, and skull with eye, nose, mouth openings. The evidence is there...if NASA would only go back to check on them, however finding evidence of life is clearly not their real mission. SCW photos below. ---------------------------------------------------- Date of discovery: July 7, 2014 Location of discovery: -166.77761 , -76.83666 China Map: http://159.226.88.30:8080/CE2release/cesMain.jsp I was looking over the Chinese lunar map and found a few faces that stood out well. When you find faces, buildings are always in the area and yes, there are a lot of rectangular structures nearby. This is a unique map that NASA has not been able to edit, so are a lot of anomalies that China has missed during the editing of the map. SCW 3 photos below. -------------------------------------------- Date of discovery: June 1, 2014, 13:13 Location of discovery: Earths sun Source: SOHO photo camera EIT 195 I was looking through the SOHO shots of the sun today and came across this unusual face. Sure you can see other faces near it, but this one face is larger and better detail. Professor Michio Kaku says that there are three types of alien civilizations, humans not even rating on the scale we are so primitive in our technology. However a type 2 civilization would have harnessed the power of sun. So this alien civilization is at least a type two but maybe a type 3. Why put the face on the sun...perhaps a great person in their society passed away and they want to show their appreciation and respect to that person. Or perhaps its to commemorate the birthday of a great individual within the civilization. SCW 2 photos below -------------------------------------------------------- Date of discovery: Unknown Location of discovery: Village of Oak Creek, Arizona, USA Coordinates to face: 3448'32.92N 11144'37.77"W The above coordinate are not exact. Needs update. --------------------------------------------------------- Date of discovery: April 13, 2014 Location of discovery: Mars Photo source: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/?rawid=0597ML0025180030301190E01_DXXX&s=597 -------------------------------- Date of discovery: March 15, 2014 Location of discovery: De Forest Crater, Moon Area of Moon: South Polar region Coordinates: 77.3S 162.1W Moon URL : http://wms.lroc.asu.edu/apollo/ Cabius Base Photo (Ames): http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/images/content/393894main_ACD09-0220-089_full.jpg I I found this face in a crater and it looks like its has on a crown. I have found many faces inside of craters. This one stand above the ground. It means there is an alien city underground not far away. SCW I ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date of sighting: Nov 29, 2014 Location of sighting: Mars Photo URL: http://www.gigapan.com/gigapans/157503 Hey, check out this layered apple like face on Mars. Layered from 3D printed material. I don't believe these things we have been finding are carved. They all have a layered appearance as if they were 3D printed with nano circuitry inside. Looks a lot like what you might see in the Planet of the Apes movie, doesn't it? I have found many chimpanzee looking monkey faces, this one looks very different from the others. Probably a different species. Photo below. SCW ____________________________________________________________ Date of discovery: December 5, 2014 Location of discovery: Mars Coordinates: 4422'16.95"S 100 3'31.39"W Was checking out Google Mars...a free program to download and use, when I found this face. I have never reported on it before and it looks really big. Its hidden inside a crater and has a lot of similarities to the ancient China statues from thousands of years ago. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Date of discovery: December 11, 2014 Location of discovery: Mars Source photo: http://www.gigapan.com/gigapans/157774 While looking for anomalies in Mars photos I found two extraordinary things. First was a face that resembles that of a lion. Second was a living creature that resembles a slug or worm, but may be a plant. Photos below. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date of discovery: December 12, 2014 Location of discovery: Mars Source Photo: http://www.gigapan.com/gigapans/157372 Lets try to get ahead today shall we? Uh...sorry, it's Saturday here in Taiwan and I was looking through some Mars photos when I noticed this big head in the middle of the photo. The eye was evident, but looks as if it were closed. The nose and mouth are easy to make out. The lower jaw is very small and looks like it has very little strength in it. The back area of the skull has some interesting protruding cheek bone ridges which really make this species kind of cool looking. Remember this photo is HD, so check it out. Lots of things to yet to find. SCW -photos below- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date of discovery: December 2014 Location of discovery: Mars NASA source photo 1: http://mars.nasa.gov/mer/gallery/all/2/m/1452/2M255267229EFFAX16P2956M2M1.HTML NASA source photo 2: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA06287 NASA source photo 3: http://mars.nasa.gov/mer/gallery/all/2/m/1434/2M253668328EFFAX05P2936M2M1.HTML Chance of being a real coin: 90% Now this is interesting. Paranormal Crucible of Youtube has reported finding some coin like objects on Mars. I have to admit, one of these photos is very convincing. It may be a coin, medallion or broach. The object does have a face on it, however it is not a single face...it's a double face. There are two faces of two species on the front. One species looks semi human on the right side. The left face looks nothing like a human, but I have seen it before. The most significant discovery here is the fact that these two species put their historical figures on this coin together as a symbol of their bond of friendship. SCW ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date of discovery: November 24, 2014 Location of discovery: Mars Source Photo: http://ida.wr.usgs.gov/fullres/complete/ab1013/ab101303.jpg This is one of the photos from the Mars Global Surveyor mission. Not only does it show an alien base, but there is also a face of the species that built the base near it. I found this last night while scouring the archives. The base is probably able to lift off of the planets surface. I say this due to its compact shape, however it must have been there a very long time for them to have created a face near it. The face itself actually has a line from below the nose to the top of the lower lip, much like a cat or lion. Russians have recorded sounds and radar images of a cat like species a few years ago. I will put the video below for you to see the actual Russian recording from the flight tower (May 2010) SCW photo below. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Date of discovery: Nov 2014 Location of discovery: Mars Source: http://www.gigapan.com/gigapans/164628/snapshots/418105 Its hard to believe, but faces are the main signs of life people are currently finding on Mars. This face is a bit eerie in the fact that its white...which is a totally different color than the surroundings. This white face looks to be made of the same material I showed you last week of a white wall made below some stones. Also a angry bear face. photos below. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date of discovery: November 9, 2014 Location of discovery: Mars Description: MSL 778 MAST 100 Photo Source: http://www.gigapan.com/gigapans/164557 I found these faces in the photos and they are beyond unique. I hope you like them. SCW Photos below. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date of discovery: November 2014 Location of discovery: Mars Coordinates: 7924'28.73"S 634'44.17"W Method used: Google Mars (free program) This smiley face was discovered by Youtube user TheCalifornian. I have seen this one before, and I have to say I am baffled at what these are made from. At one point it almost looks like trees, but in another it looks like ancient walls and building foundations. The smile face shows that at least one species out there has a sense of humor. Note: Two sources confirm there are at least 56 space faring species in our solar system (Confirmed by Bob Lazar of Area 51 and the Friendship Case in Rocca Pia, Italy). Lets hope we get to meet them first. SCW Photos below. ------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date of discovery: October 26, 2014 Location of discovery: Crater Fram, in the Meridian Planum Region of Mars NASA Source: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA05990 This week I found some interesting anomalies in this Mars photo. The photo shows a close up of the crater Fram. In this photo are many unusual objects, including a walking figure. This figure is upright and we can make out the head, neck shoulders and legs. We can even see the feet, which appear very large in proportion to the figure itself. This figure is very short, just over 1 foot tall if we use the Mars Curiosity Rovers tracks as a measure comparison. There are also several faces that show a lion-like species that once existed or may have come from their cultural mythology. SCW --------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------- Date of discovery: December 16, 2014 Location of discovery: Mars (photos below) NASA Mars photo: http://mars.nasa.gov/mer/gallery/all/1/p/3801/1P465617351ESFCHWNP2596L2M1.JPG This head was found by a user on Youtube this week. Its difficult to see the details of the face due to the shadows and it being an infrared photo, but we can still make out the two massive eyes, small nose and small mouth. The ridges above the eyes and nose are also evidence for this being real. This is a great example of an alien face. It closely resembles the alien species we call greys. SCW ----------------------------------------------------------- Date of discovery: Feb 2015 Location of discovery: House Rock, Earths Moon Google Moon Coordinates: 850'33.31"S 1528'4.58"E Video of Apollo 16 at Alien Face (House Rock): I did a little snooping and found a view of House Rock that looks like a massive 2 floor high face, but to top it off...there are two astronauts jumping around and exploring around it. If NASA astronauts found this rock to be special, so special they call it HOUSE ROCK, then this confirms that these are ancient alien structures. Just listen to the astonishment in the astronauts voice at what they find. They are not looking at just rocks here, but ancient alien artifacts.SCW http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA05990NASA Mars photo: http://mars.nasa.gov/mer/gallery/all/1/p/3801/1P465617351ESFCHWNP2596L2M1.JPG --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- All faces were confirmed by facial recognition software developed in the Sony Cyber-shot. Date of discovery: March 2015 Location of sighting: Mars NASA Source: http://www.msss.com/moc_gallery/m13_m18/full_gif_non_map/M18/M1800558.gif This UFO was found on Mars by Paranormal Crucible of Youtube. I checked out the original photo at NASA and yes, I can confirm the disk is there and does have a metallic glint to it. I searched the photo and found face after face in the surrounding area. I will highlight the faces with color to make them easier to see. I also used a Sony Cyber-shot to check the photo for faces. The Cyber-shot has facial recognition and put a square box around all the faces that I found. If I see it, and the Sony Cyber-shot camera sees it, then you should be able to see it. You can say the faces are in my imagination, but the camera has no imagination, no bias, no agenda, then why does it see the faces? Because they are real and there! SCW (photos above.) ========================================= Date of discovery: March 22, 2015 Location of discovery: Idaeus Fossae, Mars Coordinates: 35 0'56.03"N 4924'2.73"W This alien face and body was found by Alfredo Viller of Youtube. He is a new up and coming researcher that looks for familiar designs and ancient structures on Mars. He found a fantastic alien full body formation. I went to Google Mars map (free to download) to confirm his finding, and I found that not only is it there, but the best happy face ever found on Mars is just below it! He probably saw it, but not sure. Very cool discoverers by Alfredo Viller of Youtube, go subscribe to his channel. SCW =========================================== Date of discovery: April 6, 2015 Location of discovery: Mars Source photo: http://www.gigapan.com/gigapans/170651 I found three faces in this Mars photo. The faces are all fragmented. Most of each face has been destroyed, but I am sure you can see it. ============================================================== Date of discovery: March 28, 2015 Location of discovery: South of Jojutla crater, Mars Google Mars coordinates: 7942'46.23"N 16720'7.02"W I found two gold faces and another alien structure inside of a crater nearby. There are massive deposits of gold on the surface of Mars in this area. It looks like 20-24k gold sand. Its no wonder why NASA wants to go to Mars, there is a crap load of gold there and other minerals of extreme value. But the frosting on the cake is the alien tech they will find in ancient structures. SCW ======================================= Date of discovery: June 2015 Location of discovery: Mars Photo source: http://hirise-pds.lpl.arizona.edu/PDS/EXTRAS/RDR/PSP/ORB_003100_003199/PSP_003115_1810/PSP_003115_1810_RGB.NOMAP.browse.jpg This week a UFO researcher who goes by the name of Martian Archeology on Youtube found what looks like to many to be a intelligently made water dam. I have to agree, this does look like it held water and I did find signs of some ancient black structures in the photo a little ways away. Also I found the face of the species that lived in this area of Mars. The face has a beard and mustache and a face similar to humans, but its lost a lot of details over the years. I told you, when you find a face, you are in a once populated area of Mars. SCW ========================================== Date of discovery: June 18, 2015 Location of discovery: Earths Moon Source NASA photo: http://history.msfc.nasa.gov/saturn_apollo/photos/apollo17_GPN-2000-001148.html Hey guys, check this out. I found a face in a NASA photo and its 100% new. New meaning no one has ever reported it. However I have seen similar faces on the moon in NASA photos. I added color to it to better see it. I don't even think that the astronauts noticed the face, but I am sure that they were testing the object to see if its a rock or alien tech. I bet that some species are closely monitoring Earth, and looking for information about themselves to see what we have learned. I also feel that by finding the faces, we prove that humanity is more intelligent than they give us credit for. Also, it teaches us about the different species that humanity may one day meet. Aliens may live forever, but I don't, so I try to find them and learn from their faces, one by one. Scott C. Waring-Taiwan ================================================ Date of discovery: July 20, 2015 Location of discovery: Mars Rover: Curiosity Photo 1: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/proj/msl/redops/ods/surface/sol/01044/opgs/edr/ncam/NRB_490189184EDR_F0482200NCAM00354M_.JPG Photo 2: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/proj/msl/redops/ods/surface/sol/01044/opgs/edr/ncam/NRB_490189151EDR_F0482200NCAM00354M_.JPG Photo 3: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/proj/msl/redops/ods/surface/sol/01044/opgs/edr/ncam/NRB_490189090EDR_F0482200NCAM00281M_.JPG Guys I was looking at one of the two Mars blogs where they upload most the photos taken, and today they uploaded hundreds. In about 8 of them I saw this face near the edge of the hill, but the photos were low quality. Then I came across the same face in higher quality photos and just had to post them here for you to see. I have seen this alien face before and it is human-like with a pointy nose. The alien is wearing a cloak over their head and around their neck. Sure the face is really beaten, but if this was found on Earth, they would say its man made. Just because of its location...many deny the truth. Time to...face the facts. SCW ============================================== Date of discovery: July 26, 2015 Location of discovery: Mars Source photo: http://www.gigapan.com/gigapans/171865 Messing around in Gigapan indexes I found some cool anomalies that really say ancient culture on them. Some of them are faces, which could have bodies buried below the surface. Some of the faces depict human-like species, others show a feline or cat species, and another WTH face I have never seen before. NASA put this massive photo into false color (baby poop brown), so you need to hit auto adjust on any photo program to get the normal color. That is all I did to make it stand out. SCW ========================================== Date of discovery: July 26, 2015 Location of discovery: Pluto, icy mountain. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydU-YrG_INk I was watching a new video made with Plutos images and posted by NASA at their official Youtube site and I could not help but notice this face. The face stood out very well and looks almost human. A few things about it seem different. The ear on its right side looks different from ours. Also his neck seems thinner, weaker than our own. Everything else looks similar, his hair, eye, nose, mouth, lips, cheeks, forehead. It must be a very famous person in their culture to get this special treatment. A great ruler, or hero to the people. You can view the face in the NASA video at 12 seconds until 28 seconds into the video. Best at 28. And to the aliens who made this face...We know you are out there, watching, wondering. We see you. SCW ========================================= Date of sighting: August 8, 2015 Location of sighting: Mars Mars Photo: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/images/curiosity-rover-kimberley-mastcam-sandstone-pia19068-full.jpg I was looking through some old Curiosity Rover photos when I found this really amazing looking face. The face is looking upwards, and toward the right side of the photo. It looks a lot like a sphinx face with the nose broken off. From its cheeks and hair, I would say its female, but thats my guess. Its eyes are Asian, its hair long and straight. Scott C. Waring www.ufosightingdaily.com ============================================== Date of discovery: July 2015 Location of discovery: Mars Source photo: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/msss/00125/mcam/0125ML0777006000E1_DXXX.jpg This face on Mar is of an alien species that looks nothing like humans. The first photo was discovered by a Youtube user and the face has features that resemble an insect or reptile. The face in the screenshot below I found myself in the same photo. It is a reptilian face, but different from the above face. These two ancient artifacts all back up one another that this is an archeological site worth diving into, rather than being ignored by the NASA rover. SCW Above screenshot is a face looking to the right side of the photo with closed eyes. ========================================== Date of discovery: Unknown Location of discovery: Reeks Island, Canada This face is just one of many large faces around Canada. Often people say it was the ancient indians in the area that made them, but one massive face found is hundreds of meters long and only visible from the sky. This is a beautiful example kept in pristine condition. Ancient aliens, pirates or indians? Its a well known fact, aliens create faces near their bases. SCW ======================================= Can you see the face behind the pyramid? Date of discovery: June 2015 Location of discovery: Mars Source Mars photo: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/msss/00978/mcam/0978MR0043250040502821E01_DXXX.jpg The news was reporting a pyramid on Mars, but I do believe that this was just the pinnacle structure of a much larger building that was buried below the dirt or destroyed. There is also a face near the pyramid and two other not far away. The news didn't report about the faces, so I decided to make my own video to let you know. I hope you find this interesting and please help me by subscribing and liking the video. Thanks everyone, Scott C. Waring ========================================= Date of discovery: June 2015 Location of discovery: Ceres NASA photo: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA19323 This is on Ceres and I came across a face. This face is important, because it tells us what the species looked like that claims ownership of Ceres. There is no telling if the species is still there, but its 100% chance they were there hundreds of thousands or even millions of years ago. SCW ======================================== Date of discovery: May 17, 2015 Location of discovery: Mars Source photo: http://www.gigapan.com/gigapans/172607 Gigapan index is an amazing library of Mars photos close up in HD. You really have to check it out sometime. I found several faces and one of them is very interesting in the fact that it looks like an ancient god statues in Siem Reap, Cambodia. The hat on the face is very similar to the Cambodia hat. The eyes are Asian, the cheeks are protruding as if in anger. The mouth and nose area is broken, but we can still confirm that this was the face of a stone wall carving long ago. SCW ========================================== Two faces in this photo above and below, one I colored for you, and another I will let you find. Date of sighting: Aug 9, 2015 Location of sighting: Mars Google Mars Coordinates: 556'09.76"S 7022'00.21" This was sent in to me by a reader. He found this on Mars using Google Mars Map, which is a free download. The face really stands out. I see others near it, but this one is very pronounced. The person has a very large nose, and ears. The person looks old and their hat shows their royal or political status. It was discovered by Marcelo Irazusta, who lives in Mar del Plata, Argentina. Why is this more important than anything I posted today? I made this site to learn about aliens, and the best way to learn about them, it by looking at them. For millions of years they have made these faces of important cultural figures. I am just trying to identify as many as possible in hope of getting some idea about what they look like, and how many species are near Earth. Excellent discovery Marcelo. Scott C. Waring www.ufosightingsdaily.com ============================================== Date of discovery: August 15, 2015 Location of discovery: Rossetta Comet Rosetta is an interesting comment isn't it? Its shaped like a reptilian face thats been beaten and torn apart slowly as its travel through space for the last few million years. Yet, most of the face still exists. In this new image I found three really extraordinary things. First was a hovering UFO. This UFO has a shadow that matches its shape below it on the ground, so we know its off the ground. Also its shape is tubular. Not far away is another small face of the same species as the one that the comet was also designed to look like. Dawn was sent to Rosetta for one reason, to answer the alien message being sent from it. Scientists have heard it singing an alien message for over 20 years, and only just this year told the public about it. Scott C. Waring www.ufosightingsdaily.com ============================================= Date of discovery: September 1, 2015 Location of discovery: Mars Source photo: http://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/data/msl/MSLMST_0003/EXTRAS/RDR/SURFACE/FULL/0184/0184MR0009250760202138E01_DRCL.JPG I went to check out this photo and I found the mother load. I found faces all over the freaking place. This is unusual. I mean, usually you never see them so close to one another. The faces are all right side up, which means they were constructed in the same place they are now. These faces are small. The Klingon face which is the largest in this photo is about 2.5 meters high. The other closer faces are about 1 foot across. Intelligent beings on Earth make most statues outside in the open, so that they are same or 20% bigger that life size. So, this is more evidence that some of these species are tiny little guys. There is one face that looks like a Klingon type of face, but of course is not a fictional species, but a real species. A part of me thinks that since I did find a grave maker, that these faces are of the victims that died in this spot. That they made the faces after they found the bodies in the same location. The faces are at the exact same place the person died. Probably made by AI drones programed to pay a final respect to the deceased. A way not to be forgotten for awhile. Man I feel sad now. I mean do disrespect to the dead, but at least, they will be remembered. Scott C. Waring www.ufosightingsdaily.com =========================================== Date of discovery: Sept 1, 2015 Location of discovery: Mars Source photo: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/msss/01087/mcam/1087MR0047770350600427E01_DXXX.jpg With the thousands of faces found on Mars, its interesting that people can still deny the truth. Perhaps they only see one post here and do not visit to see the others every few days. Scott C. Waring www.ufosightingsdaily.com ========================================= Date of discovery: August 30, 2015 Location of discovery: Mars Source photo: http://mars.nasa.gov/mer/gallery/press/spirit/20060911b/seminole_iff_cypsu_L2_brt_byte-A943R1.jpg Check ou the head in the photo above that is looking upwards and has a big ear like a fish fin. Very cool. Also the reptile lizard head below. ========================================== Date of discovery: August 27, 2015 Location of discovery: Mars Mars photo: http://www.gigapan.com/gigapans/177985 Photo ID: MSL 1080 M-100 While looking over some Mars photos, I found a few faces. Most of them do not resemble us, but the best quality ones do. There is a woman with long curly hair (above) that does resemble humans. There is also a youthful looking childs face (below). The woman face is very similar to the Obama face I found a while back. I hope you find it as interesting as I did. Scott C. Waring www.ufosightingsdaily.com =========================================== Date of discovery: August 27, 2015 Location of discovery: Ophir Chasma, Mars Source photo: http://www.isro.gov.in/pslv-c25-mars-orbiter-mission/3d-portrayals-of-ophir-chasma-terrain Was reading in the news that India Mars orbiter had taken some fantastic photos and they were sharing some with the news. I had to dive in head first on this one. I was looking for structures and faces, but what I found was a combination of both. This structure is actually in the shape of an alien shoulders, neck, cranium and face, but the eerie part is that the head is split wide open, and there are structures inside this head. There is also another face inside the head, but it was to dark with the shadows to bother trying to point it out. I added yellow to outline the outer body, pink being the inside of the skull. A city inside a head shaped structure. This is proof that sometimes aliens can be artistic, bizarre, and eerie. Scott C. Waring www.ufosightingsdaily.com ======================================== Date of discovery: August 2015 Location of discovery: Pluto NASA photo: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA19710.jpg Now this is interesting. Mister Engima of Youtube has found the same face me and others found, but he realized the face also had a body on it. I also see by the date that he found his first. Very cool, so many UFOlogists are working in the same areas on the same photos. It really is necessary to find every bit of evidence possible. Awesome find. Scott C. Waring www.ufosightingsdaily.com ========================================== Date of sighting: July 15, 2015 Location of sighting: Pluto NASA Photo: https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/from-mountains-to-moons-multiple-discoveries-from-nasa-s-new-horizons-pluto-mission/ This Face was found by Jason Hunter of Youtube. I went to confirm it and yes, its a real face and there is also another cat-like fact (half) to the right of it. Its hard to see the cat face, so I colored it orange, and the face Jason found I colored green. Excellent discovery, and now we know some of the species that once lived or still live on Pluto. We are learning more from UFOlogists in a three years, than we have in a lifetime with NASA. Scott C. Waring www.ufosightingsdaily.com =========================================== Date of discovery: August 2015 Location of discovery: Mars Source photo: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/msss/00036/mcam/0036MR0148001000E1_DXXX.jpg This is an interesting and rare discovery made by MMSPZC of Youtube, and his UFAH group UFO researches. http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA19710.jpg ======================================== Date of discovery: September 30, 2012 Location of discovery: Mars I was looking over Mars photos and came across one in Sol 116A that happened to have not one but multiple faces in it (four or more). These faces look like they were cut from stone and left there long ago. The first face is of a round faced person with very curly hair. And if you look very carefully right above this one and touching it is a bearded face of a species I have never seen before in stone. Then on the far lower right there was another faceshighly unusual with a long hat or crown. Above it is a half face. I took the half face and flipped it over so you could see what the whole face would look like. I am not just looking for facesbut using these faces to identify the different species of aliens out there. There are many, Bob Lazar a nuclear physicist in Area 51 said that when they were training him one of the papers he had to read told him there were 56 different alien species known to the USAF. Oh have you seen the most amazing of all of them? I found Yoda's face on the moon. He is real, I would bet my life on it. (Click here to view Yoda.) SCW Source photo: http://pancam.astro.cornell.edu/pancam_instrument/images/False/Sol617A_P2291_1_False_L257_pos_14.jpg =============================================================== Date of discovery: November 12, 2013 Location of discovery: Mars Coordinates are: 4332'56.65" S 14752'39.10" E I found this face today and I loved the detail of its braided or curly hair making the face stand out more. The face looks to be more worn than the hair, probably due to being made of different minerals. It's important to look for faces on the planets and moons in our solar system so that we can educate ourselves on the alien species that we share this system with. Don't you want to know what they look like? Don't you want to meet them? I sure as hell do, and this is how I learn about them. Through NASA photos which cannot be contested. SCW ============================================== Date of discovery: March 12, 2014 Location of discovery: Earths Moon NASA Photo: http://wms.lroc.asu.edu/apollo/view?image_name=AS17-M-2455 Hey everyone, My name is Scott C. Waring of UFO Sightings Daily and I found this really cool looking face that looks a little like the side view of Jesus. I colored the hair, beard, skin in the photo so you can see it better. What do you think? Did Jesus come from an alien and try to instil his values and morals on humanity? SCW ============================================== Date of discovery: November 26, 2014 Location of discovery: Mars Source Mars photo: http://www.gigapan.com/gigapans/115098 Chance of being a real sculpture head: 98% I found this face and posted it, a few days later it went viral, because they said it looks like President Obama. Searching for structures on Mars I found this head. From the way its standing up I would say that it is a full statue, but is buried from the shoulders down. Its standing perfectly upright. It looks humanoid, but hard to tell with a sculpture. Most people are calling these rocks carvings, but I highly doubt that this is mere rock, but instead is probably a 3D printed substance with tech printed inside. Sure we see scatterings of rocks, but it may just be the remains of an alien civilization that was hit hard by a competing alien race. Sure hope humanity never discovers such weapons. SCW Photos description states: This is the Spirit Pancam "Everest" panorama, acquired on sols 620 to 622 (October 1 to 3, 2005) from a position in the Columbia Hills at the true summit of Husband Hill. The summit region is a broad plateau about 100 meters (300 feet) above the surrounding plains of Gusev crater, consisting mostly of outcrop rocks and windblown drifts. The distant view in the center of this mosaic is looking from the summit into the South Basin, the region where Spirit will be driving down into and exploring over the coming months. ======================================================================== Date of discovery: February 2016 Location of discovery: Earths Moon Source photo: https://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/data/change3/pcam/png/PCAMR-C-014_SCI_N_20140112132507_0007_A_2C.png China has recently released a few photos from their Chang'e 3 rover giving us some new color views of the moon. I searched for less than three minutes and found this one with a large face engraved on a nearby stone. The face looks human and has a hat or hair. There are other faces I see on that same rock, but only this one seems to stand out powerfully. Now this is just a few meters from the Chang'e rover, the quality is good, and the photo is a 7MB size. Scott C. Waring www.ufosightingsdaily.com https://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/data/change3/pcam/png/PCAMR-C-014_SCI_N_20140112132507_0007_A_2C.png Date of discovery: April 20, 2016 Location of discovery: Mars Source: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/msss/01044/mcam/1044MR0045730060204454E01_DXXX.jpg You gota love this photo. It has a bit of everything for everyone. It has a very large face with a helmet. It has an animal standing on a rock. It has a curly shell with a face on it, and there is a helmet near a frog-rooster statue. Loads of things, and nothing that anyone at NASA expected the public to find. Hows it feel...being smarter than the scientists at NASA? Because such discoveries are proof of it. Scott C. Waring www.ufosightingsdaily.com ============================================= Date of discovery: April 2016 Location of discovery: Mars Google Mars Coordinates: 1012'53.08"N 157 9'51.54"E These are some great faces along a ridge in Mars. An Argentine researcher Marcelo Iranzusta sent this into me and its just mind blowing. The first face is looking left, the second smaller face is looking right. Why are faces important? They tell us what that particular species looks like. These two have similar facial features to humans...a nose, chin, two eyes, forehead, two nostrils, mouth under nose...protruding eyebrow ridge. What more could you ask for? Scott C. Waring www.ufosightingsdaily.com ============================================ Date of discovery: April 20, 2016 Location of discovery: Mars, SOL 1317 Source photo: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/proj/msl/redops/ods/surface/sol/01317/opgs/edr/ncam/NLB_514419964EDR_F0540746NCAM00350M_.JPG Here is a face, and its actually quite remarkable in its simplicity. Its smirking. Its got a smug, irritated look on its face, unlike most faces found on Mars. Its different that way. Just below it is another face that looks normal. Sure they are both crude...but they are still obvious. Have you ever looked at a Picasso or Andy Warhol and say...I could do better than that? Sure you have. Well, this is like that, just on a different planet, by a different species. Scott C. Waring www.ufosightingsdaily.com ===================================================================== Date of discovery: April 20, 2016 Location of discovery: Mars Source: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/msss/01044/mcam/1044MR0045730060204454E01_DXXX.jpg You gota love this photo. It has a bit of everything for everyone. It has a very large face with a helmet. It has an animal standing on a rock. It has a curly shell with a face on it, and there is a helmet near a frog-rooster statue. Loads of things, and nothing that anyone at NASA expected the public to find. Hows it feel...being smarter than the scientists at NASA? Because such discoveries are proof of it. Scott C. Waring www.ufosightingsdaily.com =========================================== Date of discovery: April 26, 2016 Location of discovery: Mars Source photo: http://areo.info/mer/spirit/615/tn/2P180961230ESFAENLP2591L5M1_L4L5L5L5L6.jpg.html Oh...and I found a head, always important to get a head in life...so, here you go. It looks mostly human, almost Mayan in appearance. Scott C. Waring www.ufosightingsdaily.com ======================================================================= Date of discovery: June 2016 Location of discovery: Mars, Sol 693 NASA Source URL: http://areo.info/mer/spirit/693/tn/2P187884425EFFAK00P2418L5M1_L2L5L5L7L7.jpg.html I found these two giant faces on Mars this week. One is whole and undamaged showing a great side profile, while the other is only visible from the upper lip on up. This is 100% evidence that intelligent life once existed on Mars and its been delivered to us directly from the NASA archives. Something that they never thought in a million years that the public would look over. I just love evidence that has a NASA source, don't you? Because it is evidence coming directly from the US governments and directly from a non biases, non living object...the rover. Sure NASA calls themselves a institution held by the gov and the public, but why is it...the public calls this a lie? Has your neighbor, teacher or Facebook friend been invited to drive the Mars rover this weekend or any weekend for that matter? Hell no! Its government run. I challenge NASA to let me and 3 UFO researchers of my choice run the rover for a month, but thats not allowed...the public working at NASA. Scott C. Waring www.ufosightingsdaily.com ===================================================================== Notice not just the face, but that NASA deliberately blurred the upper right part of this above screenshot. Date of discovery: June 11, 2016 Location of discover: Mars, SOL 432 Source photo: http://areo.info/mer/spirit/432/2P164712660EDNA8C5P2275L5M1_L4L5L5L5L6.jpg I found this grinning face that seems to still contain some of its character. Its laying on its right side and had it been found by any archeologists on Earth, they would have declared that they have found a beautifully carved sculpture, a treasure that would be proof of an ancient city in this location. Instead I fear that that will never happen. But I know in my heart that these faces were created by an ancient race of intelligent beings. I also know that many of you out there feel the same way. So, this is not for the world, but only for each of you, the readers of UFO Sightings Daily, because its you that inspires me to go on with this everyday. To keep searching, to keep trying to move forward. We make a good team, you and I. Scott C. Waring www.ufosightingsdaily.com ================================================================== Date of discover: June 19, 2016 Location of discovery: Mars, Sol 771 Source NASA photo: http://areo.info/mer/spirit/771/tn/2P194808210ESFAPBCP2593L5M1_L2L5L5L6L6.jpg.html I found this interesting face that resembles a that of an ancient monster from greek mythology...Medusa. This face has wavy snakelike hair. The face is placed at the top of the rock and upright in the correct position...so it must have been this way before the mass extinction that took place on Mars. You may have to look at it for a minute to let your eyes adjust to light and dark areas, but you will soon see it. I also found some other unusual shapes that resemble sculpture, including something very intriguing...something that resembles an angry rabbit, but with a mouth like a salmon. Well, maybe if I was born on Mars I could tell you exactly what the hell these are and who the hell made them, but I am of Earth...a normal guy, who only studies this area. I know you have the burning question in your mind just as I do. But answers only create more questions...not less. With less answers...we ask less questions, which means less new and unusual info...which means less fear of the unknown in our minds. Maybe thats better. Scott C. Waring www.ufosightingsdaily.com ================================================ =================================================================http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/msss/01044/mcam/1044MR0045730060204454E01_DXXX.jpghttp://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/proj/msl/redops/ods/surface/sol/01317/opgs/edr/ncam/NLB_514419964EDR_F0540746NCAM00350M_.JPGhttp://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/msss/01044/mcam/1044MR0045730060204454E01_DXXX.jpghttp://areo.info/mer/spirit/693/tn/2P187884425EFFAK00P2418L5M1_L2L5L5L7L7.jpg.html Date of discovery: July 29, 2016 Location of discovery: Mars Sol 2010, opportunity rover Source photo: http://areo.info/mer/opportunity/2010/tn/1P306622571EFFA600P2410L5M1_L2L5L5L7L7.jpg.html I found this face on Mars in a rover photo. The face looks like a dwarf face that is often in story books. The face is sitting up right, which means it did not break off a statue and fall here, but was made in this location. Its easy to make out the two eyes, eyebrows, round bulbous nose, thick lips and long chin. It also has curly hair around its ear area and upper forehead. Its been long believed that Mars once had life on it, the evidence that UFO researchers have found has already confirmed this many years ago. Scott C. Waring www.ufosightingsdaily.com ================================================ Date of sighting: November 8, 2016 Location of sighting: Source NASA photo: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/proj/msl/redops/ods/surface/sol/01512/opgs/edr/ncam/NRB_531734905EDR_F0591596NCAM00653M_.JPG Source NASA photo 2: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/proj/msl/redops/ods/surface/sol/01512/opgs/edr/ncam/NLB_531734873EDR_F0591596NCAM00653M_.JPG Source NASA photo 3: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/proj/msl/redops/ods/surface/sol/01513/opgs/edr/ncam/NLB_531805412EDR_F0591596CCAM15903M_.JPG I was looking at the NASA Curiosity Rover photos and found this face in one last night. Then this morning, I found two more of the same face. When you have one photo its nice, but when you have three, its 100% proof of something. This face is the side view of a intelligent species. How do we know its intelligent? It made this artwork or structure, so it has a high intelligence. Its eye really stands out thanks to the large eyebrows and forehead. The nose is long, but closer to the face. The checks are not fat, but seem muscular. The mouth has a smile on it...a grimace. The chin is strong and powerful. The only evidence of life better than this is if we see an alien walking past the Mars rover...oops, yeah that happened twice before actually. Scott C. Waring-Taiwan Click here to see life walk past the Mars rover. ============================================ Date of discovery: May 10, 2017 Location of discovery: Mars, Sol 2519 Source photo: http://areo.info/mer/opportunity/2519/tn/1P351810711EFFB1E2P2586L5M1_L2L5L5L7L7.jpg.html I found this really cool face on mars with a long hat or crown on it as you see in the photos below. http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/proj/msl/redops/ods/surface/sol/01044/opgs/edr/ncam/NRB_490189184EDR_F0482200NCAM00354M_.JPGhttp://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/proj/msl/redops/ods/surface/sol/01044/opgs/edr/ncam/NRB_490189151EDR_F0482200NCAM00354M_.JPGhttp://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/proj/msl/redops/ods/surface/sol/01044/opgs/edr/ncam/NRB_490189090EDR_F0482200NCAM00281M_.JPGhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydU-YrG_INk Below PHOTO:http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/mapcatalog/LEMC/lemc2/http://mars.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/deepzoom/PIA16702/ Fife Symington , Republican Governor of Arizona Date of sighting : March 13, 1997 Location of sighting : Phoenix, Arizona, USA Ten years after the Arizona UFO incident known as the 'Phoenix Lights', former Arizona Republican Governor Fife Symington, III, now says that he himself was a witness to one of the strange unidentified flying objects. "I witnessed a massive delta-shaped craft silently navigate over Squaw Peak.." On March 13, 1997, one of the most massively witnessed UFO sightings occurred in the skies over and around Phoenix, Arizona. Witnessed by thousands of people and photographed by hundreds, there is no doubt that something was seen over the skies of Phoenix that night. The question remains - what did they see? The strange lights were sighted during a three hour period between 7:30pm and 10:30pm on March 13. They covered a 300 mile corridor from the Nevada line through Phoenix to the Northern edge of Tucson. Since thousands of witnesses called local Air Force bases, news stations, and UFO organizations with their reports, we are able to glean the exact route that the mysterious object took. Dennis Kucinich , US Congressman & Presidential canidate. Sighting L ocation : Graham, Washington, USA Sighting Date: September 1982 From the Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper, October 22, 2007 : Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich has seen a UFO, writes Shirley MacLaine in her new book, "Sage-Ing While Age-Ing." Kucinich, she writes on page143-144 of the book, "had a close sighting over my home in Graham, Washington, when I lived there. Dennis found his encounter extremely moving. The smell of roses drew him out to my balcony where, when he looked up, he saw a gigantic triangular craft, silent, and observing him. It hovered, soundless, for ten minutes or so, and sped away with a speed he couldn't comprehend. He said he felt a connection in his heart and heard directions in his mind." During a Democratic Presidential debate in October, 2007 in Philadelphia, Tim Russert of NBC News asked Kucinich if he saw a UFO. "This is a serious question," Russert said before asking the question. The Chicago Tribune quotes the candidate's reply: "I did," Kucinich said. "And the rest of the account -- I didn't -- I -- it was unidentified flying object, okay. It's like -- it's unidentified. I saw something. "Now, to answer your question," Kucinich said, "I'm moving my -- and I'm also going to move my campaign office to Roswell, New Mexico and another one, an extra, to New Hampshire, okay... And also, you have to keep in mind that more -- that Jimmy Carter saw a UFO, and also that more people in this country have seen UFOs than, I think, approve of George Bush's presidency." Reinhold Messner , famous mountain climber from Italy. Date of sighting : 1981 Location of sighting : Katmandu, Nepal KATMANDU, Nepal Italian Reinhold Messner, one of the world's foremost mountaineers, said Friday he watched a UFO "the size of a full moon" for nearly three hours while climbing in the Himalayas. On his return to Katmandu after an unsuccessful attempt on 24,248-foot Mount Chamlang, he said he spotted the UFO as it drifted south into Nepal from Tibet over the mighty snowcapped mountains. "It was moving very slowly," he said. "It moved eastward and then went again southwest and drifted finally north into Tibet." His climbing partner Doug Scott, a British schoolteacher, also sighted the object, he said, as did a nearby joint Polish-British expedition, but at a different time. "It could not be a satellite because they move in an eliptical manner." he said. "The movements of this object were irregular." John Lennon. Sighting Date: August 23, 1974 Sighting Location: New York City, New York, USA August 23, 1974 - John Lennon reports seeing a UFO in NYC. Lennon's sighting occurred when he was with his personal secretary, May Pang, in New York, at the time when he and Yoko Ono were separated. He refers to the experience on the cover of his album "Walls And Bridges", which was released in 1974, saying that he saw a UFO. May Pang reports in her book, "Loving John".... "We had just ordered up some pizzas and since it was such a warm evening, we decided to step out on the terrace," recalled Pang. "There were no windows directly facing us from across the street, so John just stepped outside with nothing on, in order to catch a cool breeze that was coming in right off the East River. I remember I was just inside the bedroom getting dressed when John started shouting for me to come out on the terrace. I yelled back that I would be right there but he kept screaming for me to join him in that instant. As I walked out onto the terrace, my eye caught this large, circular object coming towards us. It was shaped like a flattened cone and on top was a large, brilliant red light, not pulsating as on any of the aircraft we'd see heading for a landing at Newark Airport. When it came a little closer, we could make out a row or circle of white lights that ran around the entire rim of the craft - these were also flashing on and off. There were so many of these lights that it was dazzling to the mind. It was, I estimate, about the size of a Lear jet and it was so close that if we had something to throw at it, we probably would have hit it quite easily." Eerily the object passed by. "We often had helicopters flying above us but this was as silent as the night and about seventeen storeys above street level." The object flew off but returned later, by which time she and Lennon had set up a telescope through which they could view it in more detail. "The light was so brilliant coming from the craft that no additional details could be seen. We did take a couple of pictures but they turned out overexposed." They also rang a local newspaper to report the sighting and were told at least seven other people had seen the UFO too. "We even called the police, that's how excited we were, and they told us to keep calm, that others had seen it too." During what was left of the evening, John kept saying, "I can't believe it... I can't believe it... I've seen a flying saucer!" Major General Vladimir Kovalyonok , Russian Cosmonaut Date of sighting : May 5, 1981 Location of sighting : Orbiting Earth Below is his drawing of the UFO he saw. Many cosmonauts have seen phenomena which are far beyond the experiences of earthmen. For ten years I never spoke on such things. The encounter you asked me about happened on May 5, 1981, at about 6 PM, during the Saljut Mission. At that time we were over the area of South Africa, moving towards the area of the Indian ocean. I just made some gymnastic exercises, when I saw in front of me, through a porthole, an object which I could not explain. It is impossible to determine distances in Space. A small object can appear large and far away and the other way around. Sometimes a cloud of dust appears like a large object. Anyway, I saw this object and then something happened I could not explain, something impossible according to the laws of Physics. The object had this shape, elliptical, and flew with us. From a frontal view it looked like it would rotate in flight direction. It only flew straight, but then a kind of explosion happened, very beautiful to watch, of golden light. This was the first part. Then, one or two seconds later, a second explosion followed somewhere else and two spheres appeared, golden and very beautiful. After this explosion I just saw white smoke, then a cloud-like sphere. Before we entered the darkness, we flew through the terminator, the twilight-zone between day and night. We flew eastwards, and when we entered the darkness of the Earth shadow, I could not see them any longer. The two spheres never returned. Victor Afanasyev , Soviet Cosmonaut Date of sighting : April 1979 Location of sighting : Earth orbit, enroute to Soviet Solyut 6 Space Station Below photo is the drawing Victor Afanasyev made of the UFO he saw. n April of 1979, Cosmonaut Victor Afanasyev lifted off from Star City to dock with the Soviet Solyut 6 space station. But while en route, something strange happened. Cosmonaut Afanasyev saw an unidentified object turn toward his craft and begin tailing it through space. "It followed us during half of our orbit. We observed it on the light side, and when we entered the shadow side, it disappeared completely. It was an engineering structure, made from some type of metal, approximately 40 meters long with inner hulls. The object was narrow here and wider here, and inside there were openings. Some places had projections like small wings. The object stayed very close to us. We photographed it, and our photos showed it to be 23 to 28 meters away." In addition to photographing the UFO, Afanasyev continually reported back to Mission Control about the craft's size, its shape and position. When the cosmonaut returned to earth he was debriefed and told never to reveal what he knew, and had his cameras and film confiscated. Those photos and his voice transmissions from space have never been released. It is only now, with the collapse of the Soviet Union that Afanasyev feels that he can safely tell his story. "It is still classified as a UFO because we have yet to identify the object." James McDivitt , NASA Astronaut, Gemini 4 Date of sighting : June 1965 Location of sighting : Orbiting Earth In June 1965, Major James McDivitt saw, filmed, and photographed an object, which approached the Gemini IV (3rd June 7th June 1965) capsule in which they were orbiting the Earth, passing over Hawaii. The UFO had a long arm sticking out of it. Here is what Major James McDivitt repeated many times: "I was flying with Ed White. He was sleeping at the time so I don't have anybody to verify my story. We were drifting in space with the control engines shut down and all the instrumentation off (when) suddenly (an object) appeared in the window. It had a very definite shape - a cylindrical object - it was white - it had a long arm that stuck out on the side. I don't know whether it was a very small object up close or a very large object a long ways away. There was nothing to judge by. I really don't know how big it was. We had two cameras that were just floating in the spacecraft at the time, so I grabbed one and took a picture of (the object) and grabbed the other and took a picture. Then I turned on the rocket control systems because I was afraid we might hit it. At the time we were drifting - without checking I have no idea which way we were going - but as we drifted up a little farther the sun shone on the window of the spacecraft. The windshield was dirty - just like in an automobile, you can't see through it. So I had the rocket control engines going again and moved the spacecraft so that the window was in darkness again - the object was gone. I called down later and told them what had happened and they went back and checked their records of other space debris that was flying around but we were never able to identify what it could have been. The film was sent back to NASA and reviewed by some NASA film technicians. One of them selected what he thought was what we talked about, at least before I had a chance to review it. It was not the picture - it was a picture of a sun reflection on the window." Buzz Aldrin , NASA Astronaut Date of sighting : July 18, 1969 Location of sighting : Moon Buzz stated this in an interview: Buzz Aldrin: There was something out there that, uh, was close enough to be observed and what could it be? Narrator: Traveling along side of Apollo 11 was a mysterious object like this one (a ringed object at close range is shown), filmed on a later mission. If it wasn't part of their own rocket, it could only be one thing, a UFO. Aldrin: Mike (Collins) decided he thought he could see it in the telescope and he was able to do that and when it was in one position, that had a series of ellipses, but when you made it real sharp it was sort of L shaped. That didn't tell us very much. Dr. David Baker (Apollo 11 Senior Scientist): NASA knew very little about, um, the object reported by the Apollo 11 crew. It was obviously an unidentified flying object, but such objects were not uncommon and the history of even earth orbit space flights going back over the previous years indicated that several crews saw objects. Narrator: Despite having a clear view of the UFO, the crew were wary of reporting it to Mission Control. Aldrin: Now, obviously, the three of us were not going to blurt out, 'Hey Houston we got something moving along side of us and we don't know what it is, you know, can you tell us what it is?'. We weren't about to do that, cause we know that those transmissions would be heard by all sorts of people and who knows what somebody would have demanded that we turn back because of Aliens or whatever the reason is, so we didn't do that but we did decide we'd just cautiously ask Houston where, how far away was the S-IVB? Narrator: Unaware of the drama unfolding in space, Mission Control radioed the position back to Apollo 11. Mission Control: 'Apollo 11, Houston. The S-IVB is about 6,000 nautical miles from you now, over.' Aldrin: And a few moments later, why they came back and said something like it was 6,000 miles away because of the maneuver, so we really didn't think we were looking at something that far away, so we decided that after a while of watching it, it was time to go to sleep and not to talk about it anymore until we came back and (went through) debriefing. Narrator: To this day, whatever it was that the crew saw has never been positively identified or officially acknowledged. Gordon Cooper , NASA Astronaut. Date of sighting : 1957 Location of sighting : Edwards Air Force Base, California, USA In 1957, Cooper was one of an elite band of test pilots at Edwards Air Force Base in California, in charge of several advanced projects, including the installation of a precision landing system. "I had a camera crew filming the installation when they spotted a saucer. They filmed it as it flew overhead, then hovered, extended three legs as landing gear, and slowly came down to land on a dry lake bed! "These guys were all pro cameramen, so the picture quality was very good. "The camera crew managed to get within 20 or 30 yards of it, filming all the time. It was a classic saucer, shiny silver and smooth, about 30 feet across. It was pretty clear it was an alien craft. "As they approached closer it took off." When his camera crew handed over the film, Cooper followed standard procedure and contacted Washington to report the UFO and "all heck broke loose," he said. "After a while a high-ranking officer said when the film was developed I was to put it in a pouch and send it to Washington. "He didn't say anything about me not looking at the film. That's what I did when it came back from the lab and it was all there just like the camera crew reported." When the Air Force later started Operation Blue Book to collate UFO evidence and reports, Cooper says he mentioned the film evidence. "But the film was never found supposedly. Blue Book was strictly a cover-up anyway." Cooper revealed he's convinced an alien craft crashed at Roswell, N. Mex., in 1947 and aliens were discovered in the wreckage. "I had a good friend at Roswell, a fellow officer. He had to be careful about what he said. But it sure wasn't a weather balloon, like the Air Force cover story. He made it clear to me what crashed was a craft of alien origin, and members of the crew were recovered." Why has the government kept its UFO secrets for so many years? "It started in World War 2, when the government didn't want people to know about UFO reports in case they panicked," said Cooper. "They would have been fearful it was superior enemy technology that we had no defense against. "Then it got worse in the Cold War for the same reason. "So they told one untruth, they had to tell another to cover that one, then another, then another . . . it just snowballed. "And right now I'm convinced a lot of very embarrassed government officials are sitting there in Washington trying to figure a way to bring the truth out. They know it's got to come out one day, and I'm sure it will. "America has a right to know!" Richard Russell , US Senator. Date of sighting : October 13, 1955 Location of sighting : Russian Federation One of the most powerful U.S. senators in modern history actually eye-witnessed two UFOs while on a fact-finding trip through Russia in 1955, and the U.S. government kept the sightings a secret for more than three decades. The incredible encounter is detailed in 12 TOP SECRET CIA, FBI, and Air Force reports, and declassified in 1985. Those startling reports reveal that Senator Richard B. Russell, Jr. (D-GA), then chairman of the Armed Services Committee, was on a Soviet train when he spotted a disc-shaped craft taking off near the tracks. He hurriedly called his military aide and interpreter to the window and they saw the UFO, plus another one that appeared a minute later. The astonished trio reported the sightings to the U.S. Air Force as soon as they were out of Russia. The Air Force Intelligence report says Russell and his two traveling companions spotted the UFOs on October 4, 1955, while traveling by rail across Russias Transcaucasus region. "One disc ascended almost vertically, at a relatively slow speed, with its outer surface revolving slowly to the right, to an altitude of about 6000 feet, where its speed then increased sharply as it headed north," the report states. "The second flying disc was seen performing the same actions about one minute later. The take-off area was about 1-2 miles south of the rail line." Walter Cronkite . CBS News anchor. Date of sighting : 1950 Location of sighting : South Pacific In the 1950s Cronkite was part of a pool of News Reporters brought out to a small South Pacific island to watch the test of a new Air Force missile. After a short inspection of the new system by the reporters, they were lead to an area that was a safe distance from the launch site. The missile was mounted on a specially-built launcher that was attached to a cement base. It was obvious that the area had been quickly built just for the test. The details about the missile were going to be given to the reporters in he form of hand-out sheets and press releases after the test. Cronkite mentioned that he and the other reporters had been warned that photography of the missile test and any audio transmissions or recordings by the press were forbidden. They would have to give a written account of the event. Just as the test was ready to proceed, everyone was writing as fast as they could. As Air Force Security personnel walked around the perimeter of the test area with guard dogs and the news reporters watched, the missile was fired-up and about to be released. Just then, a large disc-type UFO appeared on the scene. Cronkite guessed that the object was about 50-60 feet in diameter, a dull grey color and had no visible means of propulsion. Because the noise of activity around him and the missile engine was so loud, he couldn't tell whether the disc made any noise. He did not notice any coming directly from the object. As Air Force guards ran toward the UFO with their dogs, the disc hovered about 30 feet off of the ground. It suddenly sent out a blue beam of light which struck the missile, a guard and a dog all at the same time. The missile was frozen in mid-air about 70 feet from the launcher as it had taken off. A guard was frozen in mid-step and a dog frozen in mid-air as it had jumped at the disc. Cronkite reminded me that this all happened within the space of about five minutes or less. Suddenly, the missile exploded! After that, the disc vanished. The guard and dog looked alright, but were quickly taken away by medical personnel always present at tests in case anyone became injured. At the same time, guards rapidly ushered the reporters into a concrete observation bunker. After about thirty minutes of sitting in that hot box, they were brought out into the air again and addressed by an Air Force Colonel. The officer told them, "It was all part of the test." Obviously making it up as he went along, the Colonel said that the event was "staged" to test media reaction to UFOs. He reinforced the usual line to the reporters that Flying Saucers were probably not extra-terrestrial, but what people were actually seeing was secret planes being tested by the Air Force. This test was designed to show the media how "shocking" it could be to suddenly view a new technology. Well, Cronkite was certain that what he viewed was a new technology, but he was also sure it was not an Earthly one! He didn't believe the Air Force explanation then, and he still didn't believe it at the time when he told me the story. After the event, reporters were told that since it was a test of media reaction to new technology, they could not report on it! But, they would be compensated later with exclusive stories on new Air Force projects (a promise that was never kept). Being as private as he was, Cronkite never did share with me his own beliefs about UFOs beyond the story he told me. I was so happy to have heard the story that I was afraid to ask anything further! Clyde Tombaugh , Astronomer who discovered Pluto. Date of sighting: August 20, 1949 Location of sighting : Las Cruces, New Mexico, USA Tombaugh was probably the preeminent astronomer to have reported seeing Unidentified Flying Objects. On August 20, 1949, Tombaugh saw several UFOs near Las Cruces, New Mexico. He described them as six to eight rectangular lights, stating "I doubt that the phenomenon was any terrestrial reflection, because... nothing of the kind has ever appeared before or since... I was so unprepared for such a strange sight that I was really petrified with astonishment." A similar shocked response has been reported by many other who claim to have seen mysterious aerial objects. Tombaugh was also later to report having seen three of the mysterious Green Fireballs, which suddenly appeared over New Mexico in late 1948 and continued at least through the early 1950s. In 1956 Tombaugh had the following to say about his various sightings: "I have seen three objects in the last seven years which defied any explanation of known phenomenon, such as Venus, atmospheric optic, meteors or planes. I am a professional, highly skilled, professional astronomer. In addition I have seen three green fireballs which were unusual in behavior from normal green fireballs...I think that several reputable scientists are being unscientific in refusing to entertain the possibility of extraterrestrial origin and nature." Christopher Columbus UFO sighting. Date of sighting : October 11, 1492 Location of sighting : Atlantic Ocean Even Christopher Columbus, it appears, saw a UFO. While patrolling the deck of the Santa Maria at about 10:00 PM on October 11, 1492, Columbus thought he saw "a light glimmering at a great distance." He hurriedly summoned Pedro Gutierrez, "a gentleman of the king's bedchamber," who also saw the light. After a short time it vanished, only to reappear several times during the night, each time dancing up and down "in sudden and passig gleams." The light, first seen four hours before land was sighted, was never explained." Edmund Halley , discoverer of Halley's Comet sees UFO. Date of sighting : March 1676 Location of sighting : United Kingdom Edmund Halley, the astronomer who discovered Halley's comet, could recall two accounts involving unidentified crafts. His first experience was in March of 1676, when he saw a, as he said, "Vast body apparently bigger than the moon." He estimated it at 40 mi. above him. He also stated that it made a noise, "Like the rattling of a great cart over stones." After estimating the distance it traveled in a matter of minutes, he came to the conclusion that it moved at a speed greater than 9,600 m.p.h. Alexander the Great records two great "flying shields." Date of sighting : 329 BC Location of sighting : Central Asia Alexander the Great records two great silver shields, spitting fire around the rims in the sky that dived repeatedly at his army as they were attempting a river crossing. The action so panicked his elephants, horses, and men they had to abandon the river crossing until the following day. Alexander the Great was not the first to see them nor was he the first to find them troublesome. He tells of two strange craft that dived repeatedly at his army until the war elephants, the men, and the horses all panicked and refused to cross the river where the incident occurred. What did the things look like? His historian describes them as "great shining silvery shields, spitting fire around the rims... things that came from the skies and returned to the skies." Feel free to use our photos, videos, comments and articles from UFO SIGHTINGS DAILY for the education of others on your own site, show or news post. Peace. Scott C. Waring ---------------------------------------------------- March 7, 2019: I made it on CNN Turkey today. I also made it on 4 other news sites today, and often get on 1-6 news sites worldwide daily every 24 hours...according to Google search. Here is a screenshot of Turkey CNN article and link https://www.cnnturk.com/dunya/marsta-tartisma-yaratan-gizemli-goruntu-sosyal-medya-ikiye-bolundu?page=8 ----------------------------------------------- July 5, 2018; I reported an alien body with white penis on Mars and got into UK Mirror News. The article keeps a serous tone on the subject and says kind words about me and my site. https://www.mirror.co.uk/science/conspiracy-theorists-claim-spot-dead-12857879 -------------------------------------------------- March 22, 2018 I reported Jabba The Hutt head I found on Mars. Got on Yahoo front page and CNET. ----------------------------------------------------- May 8, 2017 UFO Sightings Daily made it on Popular Mechanics this week. I found a troop transport ship on the moon and the story quickly went viral. http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a26480/alien-tank-on-the-moon/ My original post here. http://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/2017/05/60-meter-ufo-found-on-moon-in-nasa.html ================================== November 11, 2016 We made it on Taiwan TV News...my home! They talk about a UFO that I found near the Trump helicopter, a UFO I found near Obama and a face on Mars I found that looks like Trump. :) ============================== UFO Sightings Daily On C/NET Today Nov 11, 2016 C/net article: https://www.cnet.com/news/mars-alien-face-ufo-rocks/ Its great to see us again in C/NET news. I came across the article on Yahoo front page by accident, so posted here to share. We are in the news daily, so just hit Google search, push last 24 hours, then push the news button, and see. Its great the world is contemplating the existence of aliens and how that existence will change how we see ourselves, our lives, the Earth, and the universe. SCW ==================================== April 27, 2016: I have stopped updating this section only because UFO Sightings Daily is now in the news with 4-10 agencies around the world every 24 hours. To prove it, go to google News, search UFO SIGHTINGS DAILY, then press the search tool button. Then press 25 hours. Now you will see all the articles we are in. As of writing this post, we are only in 4 newspapers today. From China, Colombia, India and America. Its been this way for years...I just don't have time to make daily updates. Scott C. Waring www.ufosightingsdaily.com ============================== Oct. 27. 2015 Hey, this post made it into The China Times News and Taiwan Yahoo News! UFO http://tube.chinatimes.com/20151027003387-261407 UFO https://tw.news.yahoo.com/-ufo--054349635.html ================================================== Hey, we were in the news at several major news sites this week. Oct 21, 2015. Guys this is all over the news talking about us at UFO Sightings Daily and Paranormal Crucible of Youtube. That Buddha Statue Post seems to be all over the news, both positive and negative, but all around amazing. Its nice UFO researchers are being taken seriously, that this area is a new science and we are the trailblazers. Scott C. Waring www.ufosightingsdaily.com Good Morning America: https://gma.yahoo.com/mars-buddha-rock-formation-sends-imaginations-running-wild-142047287--abc-news-topstories.html UPI News: http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2015/10/19/The-Internet-found-a-Buddha-statue-on-Mars/6051445258419/ Christian Science Monitor: (WTH?) http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2015/1019/No-there-isn-t-a-Buddha-on-Mars.-What-s-behind-all-these-bizarre-sightings ========================================================== Source: http://news.yahoo.com/alien-corpse-discovered-near-nuclear-power-plant-132241429.html I just wanted to let you know that UFO research is being taken more seriously every day. The news is putting the truth out there for the public to see and we are getting recognition for our hard work. I hope this inspires others out there to do some of this type of research and start posting your discoveries on your sites. I hope you are the next one to get into the news. Scott C. Waring www.ufosightingsdaily.com =============================== This Site Is On CNN Again! Awesome! Date of article: Aug 28, 2015 News URL: http://edition.cnn.com/2015/08/28/tech/mars-photos-alien-life/index.html Source: CNN UFO researcher are being taken more seriously every day, especially by the news media, so I had to record this for my site. Its great to see the public winning. Its not about me, its about UFO researchers in general. Scott C. Waring www.ufosightingsdaily.com ========================================== My site got into the news again and I just wanted to record them talking about it so I can put it on my site. Its nice the news respects UFO research. The Inquisitr on Jan of 2015 http://www.inquisitr.com/1765098/ufo-nasa-video-stream/ =============================== We got into the Daily Mail UK news! April 20 2015. ============================== My site got into the Express in UK on April 15, 2015. So great the news takes UFOs seriously. http://www.express.co.uk/news/nature/571649/Alien-spacecraft-FOUND-in-55-year-old-NASA-photograph ============================== https://www.mirror.co.uk/science/conspiracy-theorists-claim-spot-dead-12857879http://edition.cnn.com/2015/08/28/tech/mars-photos-alien-life/index.htmlhttp://www.express.co.uk/news/nature/571649/Alien-spacecraft-FOUND-in-55-year-old-NASA-photograph UFO Sightings Daily Gets On CNN Int Ed On August 16, 2014, UFO Sighting News. CNN site: http://edition.cnn.com/2014/08/15/tech/innovation/ufo-fun-with-iss-cameras/index.html?hpt=hp_t2 I am recording this for my readers, who may not have seen that we were on CNN again this week. Absolutely awesome that UFO sightings are getting into the media more and more each year. Sure the article is not flattering, but its not about good or bad, its about getting the attention of the public so that they are aware that UFO sightings can be seen and recorded using NASA space station live cam. -------------------------------------------------------------------- June 24, 2014: Got onto "Yahoo News," in England & Ireland. Just recording this for our site so others can see it later. Its nice UFO research is being taken seriously and if more people see this, maybe they will try harder to do such research. SCW https://uk.news.yahoo.com/ufo-actual-alien-captured-google-earth-map-072735755.html#a4sT4s7 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- June 21, 2014: Got Onto "The Mirror" Newspaper in England! June 23, 2014, and I was searching UFO info and came across myself by accident. I just wanted to record it so I can post it at my site on the "News About US" section. Thanks, Scott Waring http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/ufo-alien-head-sticking-out-3736030 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ May 2, 2014: Just recording this for our site so others can see it later. Its nice UFO research is being taken seriously and if more people see this, maybe they will try harder to do such research. SCWhttps://uk.news.yahoo.com/ufo-actual-alien-captured-google-earth-map-072735755.html#a4sT4s7 Hey, I was looking for some computer news and found an article about my site on Yahoo. It was written by Examiner.com and wow, they said a lot of really nice things about it. Examiner.com post: http://www.examiner.com/article/huge-cylindrical-ufo-captured-by-mars-curiosity-rover ---------------------------------------------------- April 24, 2014: UFO Sightings Daily was on Yahoo News Front page. I wasn't looking for it, but found it by accident when looking for tech news. They liked the NASA Lem photo I found that NASA had altered. Post is here, http://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/2014/04/apollo-16-lem-photo-is-proof-of-nasa.html -------------------------------------------------- Hey, We Got Onto Taiwan News...My Home. UFO over military base in Taiwan and face 11km from each other. Source 1: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/NASA-photo-on-strange-light-on-Mars-has-UFO-buffs-5387337.php Source 2: http://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/bright-blips-mars-pictures-spark-buzz-among-ufo-fans-n74261 Source 3: http://www.myfoxny.com/story/25193386/picture-of-bright-light-on-mars-has-ufo-fans-crying-alien ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Date of broadcast: March 5, 2014 Source: http://tw.news.yahoo.com/---ufo-055536781.html Source 2: http://www.appledaily.com.tw/realtimenews/article/hot/20140305/354849 My original UFO post about Face: http://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/2014/03/giant-face-on-taiwan-mountain-near.html Hi, I'm just had to share this so that others can see that UFO researchers are being taken seriously here in Asia. This video was shown on over 4 TV channels here in Taiwan and Yahoo TW News. http://tw.news.yahoo.com/---ufo-055536781.html I was first in the world to report the Google UFO in Taiwan thanks to a reader telling me about it. Also My wife discovered the face in Taiwan only 11km from the place of the UFO. Yes...thats my big head in the video. ------------------------------------------------------------ We Got Onto UK International Business Times! Feb 20, 2014. I just wanted to record this so that maybe it will inspire more people out there to make UFO and paranormal web sites. UFO researchers around the world are being taken more seriously than ever before. This is our time, our moment to make a difference in this world and while doing so...raise the level of awareness of all of humanity. Maybe also, this will inspire other UFO researchers to assist in searching NASA, ESA, JAXA and other photo of heavenly bodies for alien evidence. Sou rce: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/ufo-alert-structures-mercury-nasa-photos-evidence-alien-life-1437313 UFO Sightings Daily Gets into Paranormal Magazine in Asia! Nov 2013. This just came to me in the mail today, a copy of a Japanese paranormal magazine with my site mentioned on the first page and one of our posts. I'm really glad to see that people in Japan like our posts here and feel very faltered that they mentioned us. November 7, 2013 UFO Sightings Daily got onto Fox News and they placed it under the science section. So great that a world famous news site takes UFO researchers so seriously. Here is the video of the story about the iguana on Mars. Source: http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013/11/07/nasa-curiosity-rover-spots-iguana-on-mars/ June 13 and 14, 2013 UFO Sightings Daily Gets on Fox News and they mention Scott C. Waring. _____________________________ June 1, 2013 UFO Sightings Daily Gets On Front Page Of YAhoo News. They talked about the unusual discovery of a rat on Mars in a Curiosity Rover photo. January 7, 2012, THE SUN newspaper in UK wrote about UFO Sightings Daily. The Sun is read by many, having an average daily circulation of 2,715,473 copies in October 2011. Jan 3, 2012 The Canadian Mentions UFO Sightings Daily. The Canadian, a Canada newspaper mentioned us again, talking about a triangle caught on a NASA cam approaching Earth. Scary news for 2012. This is not the first time they mentioned us but its more like the 7th or more. Here is their article below. Its very kind of them and please visit them sometime. Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine Oleksandr Turchynov has held a meeting with the leaders of the diplomatic missions of the Republic of Lithuania in the Eastern Partnership countries. During the meeting, the parties discussed the issues of Russian military aggression against Ukraine in the Kerch Strait, the need to strengthen sanctions against the Russian Federation, as well as the intensification of bilateral cooperation between our countries, the NSDCs press service reported. According to Turchynov, despite the existing sanctions, the military and political leadership of the Russian Federation does not stop aggression against our state. "Therefore, without a significant strengthening of the sanctions pressure, Putin will feel impunity," he said. Also, speaking about the need to strengthen sanctions against Russia, the NSDC secretary noticed that "it is illogical for our partners to strengthen economic sanctions against the Russian Federation and, at the same time, support the strategic economic and energy projects of the Russian Federation, in particular, Nord Stream 2". "Ukraine is becoming a significant factor in European security, and the help for our state should be considered in the context of that by supporting the security and defense sector of Ukraine Europe strengthens its own defense," Turchynov emphasized. In his turn, Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Lithuania Darius Skusevicius stressed that Lithuania understood Putin's desire "to demonstrate to the whole world that his actions remain unpunished". "That's why we are trying to make sure that he is responsible for his every step," Skusevicius said, adding that Lithuania had recently imposed additional sanctions on individuals involved in aggression in the Sea of Azov. ish It would be very logical for NATO ships, invited by Ukraine to the ports of the Sea of Azov, to prove that Russia must comply with international law. However, this initiative has not received a response yet. "It would be very logical for NATO ships, which we invite to the ports of the Sea of Azov, to prove that Russia must comply with international law. Our initiative has not received a response yet. However, I hope they will at least send their observers during the next passage of Ukrainian warships through the Kerch Strait," Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine Oleksandr Turchynov said in an interview with BBC News Ukraine when asked whether NATO ships could appear in the Sea of Azov to help Ukraine. Responding to a question about a threat of possible seizure of NATO and OSCE representatives by Russians, Turchynov expressed the hope that Russia would not dare to act in such an aggressive manner. If the attention of the leading world countries is focused on this issue, Russia will tail off and will not dare to act aggressively. However, if we let the situation around the Kerch Strait run its course, if our sailors are not released from captivity immediately, then the civilized world will actually recognize that Russia has the right to any aggression, to any changes in borders and takes no responsibility for this," Turchynov stressed. ol Hyde Park attraction : Bonn giant rollercoaster a sensation in London London/Bonn The gigantic Munich Looping is thrilling British visitors at the Winter Wonderland in Hyde Park. But perhaps not everybody has the nerve to climb aboard the ride, which is operated by a Bonn family with a long tradition in the fair industry. Teilen Teilen Weiterleiten Weiterleiten Tweeten Tweeten Weiterleiten Weiterleiten Drucken No matter in which city it is set up, it is a magnet for spectators, a top attraction and a big sensation all at the same time. The Olympia loop-to-loop rollercoaster, which is operated by the Barth family of Bonn is always a crowd pleaser. Currently, it is set up in Londons Hyde Park and is captivating British fans of the Winter Wonderland amusement park. The roller coaster, which is well known at many European fairs, makes its third appearance in the British capital. For the winter run in London, the Barth family always has to change the name of the rollercoaster. In England, it is known as "Munich Looping" for legal reasons. "The British regard the name "Olympia" as being protected by copyright," Michael Barth explained to GA on the phone. And how do visitors react to the Munich Looping? Barth, the sixth generation of a family in the amusement industry, says: "They are basically enthusiastic and want to try out the roller coaster. But there is a peculiarity. When there are only very few passengers on board, the visitors hesitate and think long and hard about whether they should dare go on it. The 20-year-old also noticed something quite British: Even if he has opened four ticket boxes, the British only line up where there is a queue of people. And "Whether it's raining or not, the passengers won't be stopped. In Germany the fair would be empty. The British are very special." A ride on the 900-ton steel giant costs about ten euros per person. Its a steep price because the transport and energy costs are very high. Numerous trucks were needed to transport it from the Rhineland to Calais, where it then went by ferry to Dover. After it arrived in London, ten employees spent ten days setting up the rollercoaster. It has been in operation there since the start of November and will remain until January 6. Then it will be taken apart and transported to Euskirchen for storage and maintenance. In 2019, the family will have operated the five-loop rollercoaster for 30 years. When asked about plans for the coming year, Barth said they had not yet made a concrete decision, only that they would for sure be at the Octoberfest in Munich. A visit to Putzchens Markt in Bonn was not in the cards due to the scheduling conflict with the Octoberfest. As for Barth and his holiday plans, he will fly back to Bonn to help his parents dismantle their mulled wine hut at the Bonn Christmas market, and he will spend Christmas with his family in Bonn. Then he flies back to London, where he will be over New Years Eve. An aside note: German fair attractions enjoy a great reputation in Great Britain. At least two other fair rides or attractions are currently in Hyde Park: Bavarian Village and XXL-Maus, both from Hamburg companies. The Germans have a lot to offer in this industry, stressed Barth in a telephone interview with GA. The IMF Executive Board approved a new Stand-By Arrangement (SBA) for Ukraine and decided to provide the first tranche under the new program in the near future. Yet another good news as agreed with International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde, the Board of Directors of the International Monetary Fund has just approved a stand-by program for Ukraine for 14 months of $ 3.9 billion. Also approved is a decision to allocate the first tranche of $ 1.4 billion within this program, which is to happen shortly, President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko posted on his official Facebook following the IMF Executive Board meeting in Washington. He called the Funds decision an important display of recognition of Ukraines undeniable progress in macroeconomic stabilization and confirmation of success in reforms. Such decisions that come from leading world financial institutions ensure stability of our progress and strengthen resilience of Ukraine against severe internal and external challenges, Petro Poroshenko noted. As reported, the Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has approved a 14-month Stand-By Arrangement (SBA) for Ukraine worth a total of $3.9 billion. ol Ukrainian ambassador to Serbia Oleksandr Aleksandrovych has rebuked Belgrade for voting against the resolution put forward by Ukraine at the UN General Assembly despite the fact that Kyiv supported Serbia in the Kosovo issue. Ukraine does not recognize the independence of Kosovo. We say that Kosovo is a sovereign part of Serbias territory. However, yesterday, Serbia was one of 19 countries that voted against the resolution condemning the militarization of Crimea and the Sea of Azov by Russia at the UN General Assembly meeting. Serbia could at least abstain, because in July, during the visit of Petro Poroshenko to Belgrade, he and the Serbian president had agreed that our countries would not vote against each other, the Kurir news agency reports, citing the statement of the Ukrainian ambassador for the Tanjug agency. Aleksandrovych stressed that he does not understand such a behavior of Serbia as recently Ukraine had voted against Kosovos membership in the Interpol. Ukraines ambassador to Serbia express regret that Belgrade had not joined the anti-Russian sanctions, obviously, due to the large turnover of Russian-Serbian trade. ol The governments of Israel and Ukraine will sign the Free Trade Area (FTA) Agreement at the end of January 2019. Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the State of Israel to Ukraine Joel Lion stated this at a meeting of the Open World Discussion Club, an Ukrinform correspondent reported. "As of today, the date [to sign the FTA agreement] is the third week of January," he said. The Ambassador also expressed hope that the signing of the document will take place during the official visit of President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko to Israel. On December 17, President Petro Poroshenko said he intends to visit Israel in January 2019 to sign the FTA Agreement. iy The crew of the Pomerenia Sky container ship, which consisted of eight Poles, two Filipinos and a Ukrainian, have been released from captivity by Nigerian pirates, the Polish Foreign Ministry has reported. "The crewmembers of the Pomerenia Sky ship, who were kidnapped at the end of October 2018 off the coast of Nigeria, have been released. All sailors, including eight Poles, are in a safe place and are waiting for a return to their families," the ministry said in a statement. The Polish Foreign Ministry thanked the ship's owner and advisers for professional management of the complex case, and also expressed gratitude to the Nigerian authorities. It recalled that this had been the fifth abduction of Poles in the Gulf of Guinea since 2013. It was reported in late October that 11 crewmembers from the Pomerenia Sky ship, including eight Polish citizens, two Filipinos and a Ukrainian, had been abducted near the Nigerian coast. The container ship flying the flag of Liberia was seized 50 nautical miles off the coast of Nigeria at 04.00 on October 27. | By Patricia Fanning President Jay A. Perman, MD, described a successful focus on technology transfer at the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) as he joined state officials and representatives of federal laboratories and private industry at the 2018 Maryland Technology Transfer Summit. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan gave the keynote address at the summit, which was held April 20 and attended by Sen. Benjamin Cardin and Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and by Maryland Commerce Secretary Mike Gill, who conducted the senators panel discussion. (View a photo gallery.) UMB President Jay A. Perman, MD, appeared on a panel moderated by Laurie E. Locascio, PhD, vice president for research at the University of Maryland, College Park. Maryland truly is open for business, and much of our success begins with all of you in our tech sector, Hogan told a large audience gathered in an auditorium at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Md. The governor described a thriving startup ecosystem as a significant asset and praised the University System of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University, whose leaders understand the importance of technology transfer to industry. Perman, who appeared on an academic panel, said that technology licenses have doubled, licensing revenue has tripled, and the number of startups created has tripled over the past four years at UMB. He attributed much of the success to UM Ventures, which is UMBs tech transfer partnership with the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP). Since UMB and College Park started working together through UM Ventures, he said, weve seen such an acceleration of our tech transfer efforts, and weve seen investors much more willing to jump in. So I think theres merit to creating a larger Maryland consortium focusing on commercializing therapeutics and medical devices. Perman mentioned successful models elsewhere in the nation that involve multiple universities working in partnership with biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies. One, known as the New York Model, involves private industry, philanthropy, and three major academic medical centers that are jointly de-risking therapeutic targets. The latter refers to closing the gap between academic research and technology development and the stage at which companies and venture capitalists are ready to invest in the technology. In Maryland through UM Ventures, were adding resources to further de-risk and advance our most promising technologies, he said. Plus, were building interdisciplinary teams spanning both universities that are working on medical devices and health informatics. The academic panel was moderated by Laurie E. Locascio, PhD, vice president for research at UMCP. Together UMCP and UMB are collaborating through an initiative established and funded by the state legislature called the University of Maryland Strategic Partnership: MPowering the State. Also on the panel were Christy Wyskiel, MBA, senior advisor to the president of Johns Hopkins University; Sanjay Rai, PhD, senior vice president for academic affairs, Montgomery College; and John M. Wasilisin, president and chief operating officer, Technology Development Corp. of Maryland (TEDCO). Perman mentioned TEDCOs Maryland Innovation Initiative and the Maryland Industrial Partnerships Program as helping universities to bridge the gap between the research and investment stages. During a question-and-answer session, he also noted the role of students who are eager to become entrepreneurs. He said the development of resources such as UMBs The Grid are ways to help them and their institutions meet that goal. The business keynote address was given by W. Ripley Ballou, MD, vice president and head of GlaxoSmithKline Global Vaccines U.S. R&D Center in Rockville, Md. Also speaking were Maryland Commerce Deputy Secretary Benjamin Wu, JD; U.S. Under Secretary of Commerce for Standards and Technology and NIST director Walter Copan, PhD; and 10 representatives of federal laboratories located in Maryland such as NIST and the Science and Engineering Lab at the Food and Drug Administration. | By Patricia Fanning When students in the UMB CURE Scholars Program gathered on Dec. 8 to celebrate their accomplishments of the past six months, they had plenty of help in marking the occasion. Joining many of the 105 West Baltimore students at the Winter Wonderland, End of Semester Celebration were Jay A. Perman, MD, president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB); leaders of the National Cancer Institutes (NCI) Center to Reduce Cancer Health Disparities (CRCHD), leaders and staff members of UMB CURE; teachers and a principal from partner public schools, and many of the youngsters parents and siblings. (View a photo gallery on Facebook.) President Jay A. Perman, MD, greets UM School of Medicine students Latasha Easter, left, and Danielle Day, right, with eighth-grader Rocari Polk, a UMB CURE Scholar whom the students began mentoring as a sixth-grader. Yet another group of well-wishers was striking in its steadfast support: mentors. Some of these enthusiastic mentors were new to the program, having volunteered in fall 2018, including a large group from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). Others had been engaged in their mentees lives since the first day the students entered the program, matching up with one another in a carefully orchestrated mixer held after the annual induction ceremony. At UMB CURE, the ratio is 5-to-1. That means each scholar has multiple role models to emulate, and their devoted mentors can stretch their own academic and professional schedules to fit in enrichment activities held all day on Saturdays and after school twice weekly. Its quite a commitment. Hence President Perman warmly greeted the pair of University of Maryland School of Medicine students who were in attendance to support Rocari Polk, an eighth-grader at Green Street Academy (GSA). We started mentoring Rocari when he joined the program in sixth grade, said Latasha Easter, speaking for herself and for Danielle Day of the rewarding relationship. Similarly, medical student Katherine Coburn has been mentoring Joshua Terry, a ninth-grader at Paul Laurence Dunbar High School for Health Professionals, since he was a sixth-grader at Southwest Baltimore Charter School (SBCS). The students in the oldest group of scholars, known as Cohort 1, entered three years ago. The NCIs Continuing Umbrella of Research Experiences (CURE) program was established by the cancer institutes CRCHD in 1999 to help support underrepresented students in biomedical research and career development. Like the CURE programs at every academic level, UMB CURE establishes a pipeline to science and health care careers. The need is vital, as Perman noted in his remarks to kick off the event in the auditorium of the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy. As this country changes so there is no majority, we have to have a health care workforce that looks like the country, he said. When you have people who deliver health care who look like the people who are being taken care of, scientific evidence shows the outcomes are the best. It was not until the launch of UMB CURE in 2015 that students could be nurtured starting as early as middle school. As the nations first, the program is regarded as a model. And because its first scholars started so young, they were treated to an affectionate greeting from Alison Lin, PhD, program director of the Diversity Training Branch at CRCHD, who followed Perman to the podium. Cohort 1, raise your hands, Lin requested early in her remarks. My babies! she exclaimed. Lin went on to greet the remaining cohorts while stating CRCHDs view that each student it supports is part of an extended family. She was accompanied by Hana Odeh, PhD, program director in the Office of the Director; LeeAnn Bailey, PhD, MBBS, MS, chief of the Integrated Networks Branch; and Anil Wali, PhD, program director of the branch. They brought the scholars a poster signed with personal wishes such as Make us proud, and holiday greetings such as Feliz Navidad from staff members of the agencys latest initiative, iCURE. Its from one part of our family to another part, Lin said. Speaking on the theme of love, in keeping with the holidays, Lin urged scholars to ask their parents why the families send them regularly to the program. Perhaps for better opportunities and to one day see them become physicians, she suggested. All that and more, but what theyre really saying is it's because they love you, she said. Lin also urged that they ask the educators and mentors why they spend so much time with their scholars. They want to be role models, and this is a service that is meaningful to them, she said, but what theyre saying is that they love you. UMB CURE Executive Director Robin Saunders, EdD, MS, led the presentation of medals to groups of scholars and to individuals for achievements ranging from perfect attendance and academic excellence to participation in activities such as Cancer Research Day and a dinner with the Maryland Business Roundtable for Education. Mentors also were given their due, including a dozen undergraduate students who made commitments through the Shriver Center at UMBC. Its well-invested time, commented mentor Zuriel Herran, 20, adding, Im here every Saturday. Besides helping with academics such as preparation for future performance on the PSAT exam, Herran said he and the other UMBC students want to just be encouraging and to be understanding of the struggles surrounding middle school. It can be such a behemoth. Its intimidating, he said. Meanwhile, another group of mentors is being groomed to help the youngest UMB CURE scholars navigate sixth grade at their schools, which are GSA, SBCS, and Franklin Square Elementary Middle School. Theyre the ninth-graders in Cohort 1. As part of the grant supporting C2, which is the UMB CURE program for scholars who have entered high school, teenagers learn mentoring skills. During a series of workshops for families and scholars held in conjunction with Winter Wonderland, students in cohorts 1 and 4 had their own version of a mentor matchup. It was held under the supervision of Alphonso Mayo, founder of Mentoring Mentors, which specializes in near-to-peer mentoring. Start connecting and build relationships with people. Some of you are shy and some are confident, Mayo told the teens and pre-teens. At the conclusion of a pairing process, he asked a Cohort 1 scholar to express one benefit of being chosen as a mentor. The reply: It made me feel special and noticed. Ancillary activities at the event included an exchange of holiday gifts among scholars and a bus trip for the eighth-graders in Cohort 2 to the School Choice Fair held by the Baltimore City Public Schools at the Baltimore Convention Center. A recent surge in pledges to protect and sustainably manage our ocean pushed the number of concrete actions registered on the United Nations global platform for voluntary ocean commitments to 1,500, signaling that health of our ocean remains a priority for many governments, businesses and civil society organizations around the world. The commitments build on the nearly 1,400 made during a global call for action at the UN Ocean Conference in 2017. That 100 valid commitments have been made in the year since the conference shows that progress towards achieving Sustainable Development Goal 14, Life Below Water, is moving ahead. The new commitments, like the others, will join the nine Communities of Ocean Action (COAs), the thematic multi-stakeholder groups facilitated by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, to follow up on implementation. Im very pleased to see that 1,500 voluntary commitments have now been registered in our global effort to support SDG14, to conserve and sustainably use the resources of the ocean, said Ambassador Peter Thomson, the UN Secretary-Generals Special Envoy for the Ocean. The international community has a universal plan to reverse the cycle of decline in which the Ocean has been caught I refer of course to SDG 14, the ocean goal. The nine COAs set up at the United Nations to steward the voluntary commitments will work with the organizations that made these new commitments to assist in their implementation and thereby help us along the road to achievement of all ten of SDG 14s targets. Recent commitments include: The Association of Arctic Expedition Cruise Operators will contribute to the UN Environment Clean Seas initiative by drastically cutting back on single-use plastics on Arctic cruise vessels and include shoreline clean-ups in its programmes. The Government of Mauritius has committed to restore its mangroves and hold mangrove education events, as well as map its mangrove ecosystems by June 2020 to overcome knowledge gaps and offer an early warning system to identify threats. The Associazione Mediterraneo Ricerca e Sviluppo in Italy is working to protect the habitat of bottlenose dolphins in the Sicilian Channel and increase scientific knowledge about them. The Mundus Maris organization launched a small-scale fisheries academy in Senegal to serve as a space for reflection, training and knowledge-sharing for local fishermen. All of the ocean commitments are required to submit progress reports once a year until the completion of the initiative to maintain active status. A traffic light transparency system on the platform shows the status of each commitment. About the Communities of Ocean Action: To follow-up on the implementation of the voluntary commitments, to catalyze and generate new voluntary commitments, and to facilitate collaboration among different actors in support of SDG 14, the UN has launched nine thematic multi-stakeholder Communities of Ocean Action (COAs). Each community is coordinated by designated co-focal points who work together with UN Special Envoy for the Ocean Peter Thomson and UN DESA in carrying out the activities. The nine COAs are: Refugees from Syria and South Sudan arrive in Lisbon, Portugal, after a flight from Egypt. UNHCR/Jose Antonio de Oliveira Ventura GENEVA / LISBON, 19 December 2018 UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, welcomed the arrival this week in Lisbon of six refugee families originally from Syria and South Sudan. The 33 people, who landed in the Portuguese capital on Monday and today, are the first of 1,010 refugees whom Portugal pledged to admit from Turkey and Egypt by October 2019 in the framework of the current EU resettlement programme. It will be the most ambitious resettlement programme carried out in Portugal to date and demonstrates the countrys strong commitment to refugee protection. Under previous programmes, some 30-45 individuals were resettled each year, increasing to approximately 180 over a two-year period between 2016 and 2017. In addition, Portugal accepted some 1,500 asylum-seekers from Italy and Greece between 2015 and 2017 under an EU relocation programme. These refugees have found a durable solution to their plight and will now be able to rebuild their lives, said UNHCRs Director of the Bureau for Europe, Pascale Moreau. Municipal authorities and NGOs throughout Portugal will support the refugees, who will be offered initial support with housing and basic needs while they learn the Portuguese language and pursue employment. The refugees will have access to healthcare and education, as well as professional and vocational training. UNHCR thanks the government of Portugal for making resettlement an effective, durable solution for these families whose lives have been convulsed by violence and persecution, as well as all the NGOs and municipal authorities involved in welcoming them and providing them with the care they need. Todays arrivals are a concrete gesture of solidarity by Portugal in providing refugee resettlement places that are so badly needed, added Moreau. In 2017, for every 21 refugees in need of resettlement globally, only one departed to a resettlement state. Expanded resettlement and complementary safe and legal pathways are among the ways communities around the world can help share responsibility for refugees at a time of record forced displacement an idea central to the Global Compact on Refugees, validated this week at the General Assembly. UNHCR implements resettlement programmes in more than 65 countries of asylum worldwide and estimates that 1.4 million refugees will need resettlement in 2019 globally, a 17% increase from 2018. For more information on this topic, please contact: Venezuelans wait to register their exit from Colombia before entering into Ecuador, at the Rumichaca International Bridge, Colombia August 9, 2018. REUTERS/Daniel Tapia On August 8th, in response to the massive influx of Venezuelans arriving to the country, the Government of Ecuador declared a state of emergency in human mobility in the provinces of Carchi, Pichincha and El Oro. UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, welcomes and supports this decision, which allows Ecuador to assign additional resources and step up its response and reaffirms Ecuadors long tradition of welcoming refugees and other persons on the move. The exodus of Venezuelans from their country is one of Latin Americas largest mass population movements in history. Since the beginning of the year, some 547,000 Venezuelans have entered Ecuador through the Colombian border at a daily average of between 2,700 and 3,000 men, women and children. However, the influx is now accelerating and, in the first week of August, some 30,000 Venezuelans entered the country (more than 4,000 per day). Many of the Venezuelans are moving on foot in an odyssey of days and even weeks in precarious conditions. Many run out of resources to continue their journey and, left destitute, are forced to live rough in public parks and resort to begging and other negative coping mechanisms in order to meet their daily needs. Up to 20 per cent of the new arrivals are identified as showing specific protection needs and other vulnerabilities, including women and children at risk, single parents or caregivers and persons with disabilities in urgent need of assistance. Women and girls represent 40 per cent of the new arrivals and face serious risks of sexual violence, in particular survival sex and trafficking. Xenophobic reactions to the exodus have been noted in some quarters. With the declaration of emergency Ecuador is already assigning resources and stepping up its response to this dramatic increase in arrivals of Venezuelans. An example of this has been the swift upscaling by the Ecuadorian immigration authorities of their capacity to register as many as 5,600 people entering the country each day and ensure that people no longer have to sleep out in the open on the Ecuadorian side of the border while waiting to be processed.) The majority of the Venezuelans entering Ecuador continue onwards to Peru and Chile. Up to 20 per cent, however, remain in the country, some 7,000 of whom have sought asylum since 2016. The government-run asylum system is feeling the pressure. Ecuador has also provided other forms of legal stay to tens of thousands of Venezuelans. UNHCR is stepping up its response to establish a contingency plan and the necessary actions for humanitarian assistance. Under the leadership of the Ecuadorian Government, together with the International Organization for Migration (IOM), and in close cooperation with the UN country team and NGO partners, UNHCR will continue to respond to the immediate protection and assistance needs of the Venezuelan influx. UNHCR has strengthened its presence at the key border crossings in the north, and is planning to do so in the south of the country; it is stepping up its overall emergency and operational response capacities; providing technical assistance and supporting the Government in shoring up its refugee status determination, registration and other protection delivery mechanisms; working to identify vulnerable Venezuelans for protection and assistance referral; and ensuring that asylum-seekers, refugees and migrants have consistent protection and other vital information. For more information on this topic, please contact: Liberia-born Wilmot Collins first came to the United States as a refugee in the 1990s, and settled in Helena, Montana. After more than two decades working, paying taxes and putting his kids through school in the city, its residents elected him as their mayor. Refugees are no different from anyone of you. Refugees youre looking at one. Youre speaking to one. Were no different. All we ask is, give us that second chance, and see what we can do for the community, he said. Over the years, Wilmot and his family have given back to Helena. He served 22 years in the military; his wife is a nurse at the local Veterans Affairs hospital, and their daughter is now active duty military serving overseas. Weve given tenfold. And we will continue to give. Because thats us. Thats what we want. We appreciate our host country. We appreciate our second country, you know and so we give back, he added. All we ask is, give us that second chance, and see what we can do for the community. Collins spoke on the sidelines of a high-level meeting in Geneva to explore the key role that cities and urban areas around the world are increasingly playing in giving refugees, internally displaced and stateless people that second chance. A recurring theme taken up by mayors from Helena, to Quito, Bristol and Mogadishu taking part in the High Commissioners 11th Dialogue on Protection Challenges is the positive contribution refugees can make to their adoptive communities, when given the opportunity. Refugees can provide different ideas, visions, perspectives, and all that enriches the city. It fosters the diversity of a community, and therefore that provides our people with chances of steering economic development and job creation, said Mauricio Rodas Espinel, the mayor of Ecuador's capital, Quito. I see refugees as an opportunity rather than as a threat, and I think thats the way we should all look at them. There are a record 68.5 million forcibly displaced people worldwide, including 25.4 milion refugees. Around 60 per cent of them live not in camps but in cities and urban areas. Mayor of Bristol Marvin Rees at the 11th High Commissioner's Dialogue on Protection Challenges in Geneva. UNHCR/Susan Hopper Deputy Mayor of the Municipality of Rabat, Morocco, Souad Zaidi at 11th High Commissioner's Dialogue on Protection Challenges in Geneva. UNHCR/Susan Hopper Bristol, in the west of England, declared itself a "City of Sanctuary" for people fleeing violence and persecution, and strives to create a culture of welcome and safety for all. The thing weve learned by providing a safe haven is that if you do it well, and if you put a good support structure around it, win the support of the population and business and local government, that actually becomes an asset for the city, said Mayor Marvin Rees. Having an international population in the city brings you phenomenal connectivity. And one of the points weve been making is that if we follow our populations to countries of origin, across the Middle East, across Africa, across South America, well find economic opportunity there, opportunities to do investment, to do trade, and to do business. So its in our own interest, as well as creating a more vibrant culture and when a place begins to access a diversity of thought, it becomes a place of innovation. Having an international population in the city brings you phenomenal connectivity." Souad Zaidi, the deputy mayor of Rabat and member of Moroccan parliament, meanwhile said that refugees had brought benefits as they settled in the nations capital. This has been really very beneficial for the city of Rabat. Refugees and immigrants are now well integrated into society. They have the right to go to school. They have the right to public services. They have the right to health care. They feel right at home. Today Rabat is no longer a city people transit through. Its a city that welcomes people. In Mogadishu, the Somalian capital emerging from decades of conflict, including returning refugees and internally displaced in reconstruction is key, the mayor, Abdirahman Omar Osman, stressed. Its my vision to reclaim Mogadishu, and the glory it used to have, Osman said, calling the contribution of thousands of returnees and forcibly displaced Somalis key to that goal. We see the bigger picture. They can contribute to the economic development of the city. They can help to get employment and creation for jobs. So we see them as a positive. See more stories from the Cities of Light series 24-year-old in critical condition : Man plunges from Bonn parking garage while fleeing police Bonn While fleeing from the police, a 24-year-old fell from the railing of a parking garage on Kolnstrae in Bonn on Monday evening. The young man remains in critical condition. Teilen Teilen Weiterleiten Weiterleiten Tweeten Tweeten Weiterleiten Weiterleiten Drucken A 24-year-old man fell from the top floor of the Stifts Parking Garage on Monday evening, suffering life-threatening injuries. The police said on Tuesday afternoon that the man had fallen from the railing of the parking garage on Kolnstrae. According to police, the man had jumped over the railing and was hanging on to it with both hands. They tried to keep him from falling, but he plunged 15 meters to the ground. He was taken to the hospital and as of Tuesday afternoon, he remained in critical condition. At around 9:45 p.m., the police had been informed about a suspect who was looking at cars in the multi-level car park. Since parked cars had been damaged there in the previous days, two plain clothes police officers were dispatched to the car park immediately. They entered the parking garage separate from each other, making their way through the different levels, when one officer saw the suspect. The plain clothes police officer identified himself as a policeman and shouted to the man: "Stop! Police! Stop!" He then informed his fellow police officer of his location. The suspect fled, running to the edge of the garage where there is a protective railing, and swung himself over it. According to the report, the officer had called out to the young man while he was running that he should climb back over the railing. When the officer reached him, he tried to hold onto the young man, but the 24-year-old plunged to the ground. An emergency doctor treated the injured man at the scene and he was then transported to hospital. Several accidents in the Stifts Parking Garage According to police, passers-by had seen the man hanging from the railing and the policeman trying to save him. On Tuesday, various people in the vicinity told GA that they had only become aware of the incident when the emergency doctor arrived. The operator of the private parking garage did not want to comment on the incident. Bonn police are in charge of the investigation. Police spokesman Robert Scholten said it was not considered necessary to hand over the case to other authorities. The public prosecutor's office had been informed. It's not the first tragic event in this building. Three years ago, a 40-year-old had fallen from the top floor of the Stifts Parking Garage onto Kolnstrae, with numerous people having witnessed the incident. An emergency doctor resuscitated the man, who died shortly afterwards in a hospital. According to the Bonn police, there were no signs of third-party negligence. In 2011, a 19-year-old let his 16-year-old girlfriend drive his car on the eighth floor of the parking deck. According to the investigators' findings, she probably mistook the accelerator pedal for the brake pedal. The car went through the barrier and plummeted. The man died at the scene of the accident, while the driver survived, having sustained serious injuries. The garage operator then had the side walls of the two upper parking decks reinforced with impact protection. Eias Elnejemi studies at the Cite Universitaire in Toulouse, France, thanks to a scholarship programme for Syrian refugees, December 2017. UNHCR/Benjamin Loyseau Joint Press Release Data released today shows that OECD countries have admitted more people from major refugee source countries on non-humanitarian permits than through resettlement schemes in the last eight years. A study by UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, and the OECD, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development titled Safe Pathways for Refugees shows that more than 560,000 people from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and Eritrea entered OECD countries through family, work and study permits in an eight year period. This compares to 350,400 from the five countries who arrived within the same period through resettlement schemes. These figures do not include people from those five refugee populations who have been granted refugee status or humanitarian permits through national asylum systems and procedures. These amount to 1.5 million in the same period, highlighting the critical importance of fair and efficient national asylum systems. Of all the non-humanitarian entry permits issued by OECD nations to people from the five refugee source countries, family permits account for 86 per cent, followed by student permits (10 per cent) and work permits (four per cent). While these pathways are not a substitute for resettlement, they can complement humanitarian programmes by facilitating safe and legal entry for refugees to other countries. Not only can this help mitigate refugees having to resort to dangerous journeys, it will also go some way towards alleviating the strains on major refugee hosting nations, said UNHCRs Assistant High Commissioner for Protection, Volker Turk. This study is the first, comprehensive mapping exercise of its kind, building on the commitments made by the international community in the 2016 New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants to improve data collection on resettlement and other pathways for admission of refugees. In the current global context of large-scale refugee flows and forced displacement, alternative pathways family, study and work permits can play an important contribution. It is hoped that this evidence base can help states further scale up predictable, sustainable and protection-sensitive admission systems, said Stefano Scarpetta, OECDs Director for Employment, Labour and Social Affairs. With developing regions hosting 85 per cent of the worlds refugees, or 16.9 million people, ensuring a more timely, equitable and predictable sharing of responsibilities by increasing access for refugees to move to third countries is a key objective of the Global Compact on Refugees. Findings from this report will support the development of a three year strategy envisaged by the Global Compact on Refugees to expand resettlement and complementary pathways. Data in the report will also be updated on a regular basis, with the report intended to be issued by UNHCR and OECD every two years. The report is available here: https://www.unhcr.org/complementary-pathways Media Contacts UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, signed on Monday a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) and three cooperation agreements with the Government of Qatar, Qatar Fund For Development (QFFD) and Qatar Charity (QC) to support UNHCR's operations around the world. On the sidelines of the 18th Doha Forum, Kelly T. Clements, Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees signed a host country agreement with the Government of Qatar to establish a UNHCR office in Doha, in addition to a Memorandum of Understanding and a Core Contribution Agreement with Qatar Development Fund (QFFD) for a total of USD 16 million to support UNHCRs operations worldwide. The MoU is a continuation of ongoing collaboration between UNHCR and QFFD aimed at supporting refugees and displaced persons, including supporting UNHCR efforts to provide international protection to refugees and provide durable solutions to their needs in three main areas, namely: voluntary repatriation, integration into host countries where they have sought asylum or resettlement in a third country. "UNHCR is proud of its collaboration with QDDF and appreciates its support to UNHCR's efforts and initiatives to respond to the humanitarian needs of communities suffering from displacement," said Ms. Clements. "With the world facing unprecedented levels of forced displacement, the support we receive from our partners is of vital importance in our ability to respond to the growing humanitarian needs of forced displacements. Qatar has always been a key supporter of our efforts, and we look forward to strengthening our relations with the various actors in the humanitarian field in the country, at governmental and non-governmental levels, and we are grateful for the support we receive from them." On the other hand, Amin Awad, Director of the Middle East and North Africa Bureau and Regional Coordinator for Refugees in Syria and Iraq, signed a tripartite cooperation agreement worth USD 2.67 million with Qatar Fund For Development and Qatar Charity to alleviate the suffering of more than 26,000 internally displaced persons in Yemen, and provide them with shelter and basic services. "We are proud of the cooperation and partnership with the humanitarian actors in Qatar, particularly QC, and their significant contributions in recent years. This support contributes to our capacity to respond to the different humanitarian needs of refugees and displaced persons around the world. Awad commented. "This agreement will contribute to alleviating the suffering of displaced people in Yemen and help them face the humanitarian challenges they face due to the crisis in their country," he added. This support comes within the framework of Qatars interest to help provide a decent life for the needy around the world and empowering them through improving education, health and social services. UNHCR and various humanitarian actors in Qatar have a long history of cooperation to support refugees and displaced persons, an example of which is Qatar Charitys funding of 14 UNHCR projects worth more than USD 33 million in Syria, Yemen, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Iraq, Somalia, Jordan and Lebanon. For more information on this topic, please contact: NEW YORK/GENEVA UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, welcomes todays endorsement by the UN General Assembly of a Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. This comes two days on from Mondays agreement by UN member states to a Global Compact on Refugees. The decision formally endorsing the migration compact in the UNGA today follows its adoption at an inter-governmental conference in Marrakesh on 10 December. Together it is expected the two compacts will improve international cooperation to respond to all people on the move migratory flows on the one hand, and refugee movements on the other. "The effective implementation of both compacts will help reinforce the objectives of the other, said UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi. Better managed migration with more options for people to move in regular ways can help reduce pressure on overloaded asylum systems. At the same time, greater solidarity and a stronger response to refugee flows will encourage a tolerant and more receptive environment for all people on the move, said Grandi. At a moment when both refugees and migrants are too often the casualties of divisive politics, these two complementary compacts can help drive a more principled, human and practical response. The two compacts grew out of the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants in September 2016, and were developed in separate parallel processes over the last two years. Both compacts are non-binding frameworks to enhance international cooperation. The Global Compact on Refugees builds upon the existing international protection regime for refugees that is people fleeing conflict, violence, or persecution. The main purpose is to bolster international cooperation in responding to large movements of refugees, and to garner more systematic and robust support for those forced to flee and the communities hosting them. The Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration is the first international agreement negotiated between governments, under UN auspices, to cover all dimensions of international migration. It is based on the existing human rights legal framework. UNHCR will support the implementation of the migration compact through its participation in the UN Network on Migration, alongside other UN entities. Media contacts: Ukraines ambassador also expressed regret over Serbia's non-alignment with EU sanctions introduced against Russia. Following Serbia's vote against the UN General Assembly's resolution on Crimea, Oleksandr Aleksandrovych, the Ukrainian Ambassador to Serbia, has accused Belgrade of violating the so-called gentlemens agreement earlier reached by presidents of the two states. The envoy recalled that in July during the Belgrade visit of Ukrainian President Petro, the informal deal was struck not to vote against each other at the UN, European Pravda reports referring to Kurir. At the same time, Serbia turned out to be one of 19 countries that voted against the UNGA Resolution urging Russia to withdraw its troops from the territory of the occupied Crimea and condemning the growing Russian military presence in the Black and Azov seas. Read alsoPoroshenko: UN resolution on Crimea important step toward end of its occupation "Serbia could at least abstain," said Aleksandrovych. Unfortunately, we don't understand Serbia's actions, he added, noting that Ukraine had not supported Kosovos membership in Interpol and was showing concrete steps in not recognizing Kosovo's independence. The ambassador also expressed regret over Serbia's non-alignment with EU sanctions introduced against Russia. As UNIAN reported earlier, on December 18, the UN General Assembly supported the draft resolution "Problem of the Militarization of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the City of Sevastopol, Ukraine, as well as Parts of the Black and Azov." Sixty-six countries backed the Resolution, 19 voted against it and 72 abstained. The U.S. also encourages respect for all Ukrainians' ability to worship as they choose. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has underscored U.S. support for religious freedom and Ukrainian sovereignty. Read alsoU.S. congratulates Ukraine's Metropolitan Epifaniy on election as head of local Orthodox Church "Secretary Michael R. Pompeo spoke on the phone with newly elected head of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine Metropolitan Epifaniy today to underscore U.S. support for religious freedom and Ukrainian sovereignty," the U.S. Department of State said after Secretary Pompeo's call with Metropolitan Epifaniy. "The Secretary encouraged respect for all Ukrainians' ability to worship as they choose," it said. As UNIAN reported earlier, the unification council of representatives of Ukrainian Orthodox churches on December 15 elected Epifaniy (Serhiy Dumenko) head of the united local Orthodox Church of Ukraine. It will be Epifaniy who will on January 6, 2019, receive from Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I in Constantinople (Istanbul) a tomos (a decree), granting autocephaly (independence) to the newly created church. The program is designed for 14 months. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has praised the approval by the Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) of a new Stand-By Arrangement (SBA) for Ukraine. Read alsoIMF confirms new US$3.9 bln program approved for Ukraine "Another good news as agreed with IMF Managing Director [Christine] Lagarde, the IMF's [Executive] Board has just approved a stand-by program worth $3.9 billion for Ukraine for 14 months. Also approved is a decision to allocate a first tranche of $1.4 billion under this program," he wrote on Twitter on December 18, 2018. As UNIAN reported earlier, the IMF Executive Board green-lit a new 14-month SBA totaling $3.9 billion for Ukraine. Novikov says it will be an incredibly difficult task for Russia to organize the trial. Lawyers of 24 Ukrainian sailors captured by the Russian Federation near the Kerch Strait on November 25 hope the trial will not take place. Read alsoVolker, Yovanovitch urge Russia to release Ukrainian sailors "So far, we [lawyers] believe there should be no trial... And, by the way, it will be an incredibly difficult task to organize it. To bring 24 people to court, into the courtroom, give every lawyer the opportunity to speak out on each issue this means we simply have no chance to complete this process within a reasonable period of time. But this is still ahead," lawyer Ilya Novikov told Pryamiy TV Channel. He said all Ukrainian sailors illegally captured by Russia should meet with their lawyers before the New Year holidays. According to him, it will be known by late December what kind of status each of the sailors has, and whether they recognize themselves a criminal or a prisoner of war. The lawyer added 10 people had already declared they were prisoners of war. "So far, all those to whom the lawyers have come, and these are 10 people, have declared that. We are waiting for the statements from another 14 people," he said. If Ukraine stops and retreats, Russia will fulfill its task of seizing the Azov Sea, presenting to the rest of the world the new self-defined sea borders in the Black Sea, de facto legalizing the occupation of the Crimea, according to the NSDC secretary. Ukrainian ships will try to pass through the Kerch Strait, taking representatives of OSCE and other international organizations on board as witnesses, despite the Nov 25 armed attack on a group of Ukrainian naval boats and their seizure by Russia, that's according to Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, Oleksandr Turchynov who spoke with the BBC Ukrainian bureau. "Yes, this is a principled thing for us," Turchynov told a BBC journalist, answering a question on whether the Ukrainian Navy will send more vessels to pass through the Kerch Strait, Hromadske reports. "If we stop and retreat, Russia will actually fulfill its task of seizing the Azov Sea, presenting to the rest of the world the new self-defined sea borders in the Black Sea, de facto legalizing the occupation of the Crimea," the NSDC secretary said. Turchynov added that Ukraine "must not delay" the next attempt, noting that representatives of international organizations will be invited onboard the ships. Read alsoUNGA votes for resolution calling for end to Russia's occupation, militarization of Crimea "We also propose that our partners take part in the passage from the Ukrainian Black Sea ports to the Ukrainian ports on the Azov coast. We will invite representatives of the OSCE and other international organizations to come on board our ships to prove to the whole world that Ukraine and its sailors do not violate any laws and international rules. We have no alternative to such actions," Turchynov said. UNIAN memo. On the morning of November 25, Russia blocked the passage through the Kerch Strait of the Ukrainian Navy's Yany Kapu tugboat and two small artillery boats, Berdyansk and Nikopol. The boats were on a scheduled redeployment from the Black Sea port of Odesa to the Azov Sea port of Mariupol. Read alsoRussian aggression in Kerch Strait: U.S. to "continue to hold Russia accountable" As Ukrainian vessels were leaving the Kerch Strait area to return to Odesa, Russian ships opened aimed fire on them. Russia captured 24 Ukrainian sailors, including three injured in the attack, and seized the vessels. The detained sailors, who Ukraine firmly insists must be treated as POWs, given Russia's armed attack on Ukrainian Navy boats, were accused of "illegally crossing the Russian border" and are now facing up to six years in prison. Russia-controlled "court" in the occupied Crimea ruled to remand all sailors in custody. The Ukrainians were subsequently transferred to Moscow-based detention facilities. Ukraine has to take urgent steps in fighting corruption and address outstanding recommendations included in last year's report. The European Commission on Wednesday, Dec 19, approved its second assessment of the fulfillment of the visa liberalization benchmarks by the Western Balkan countries: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia as well as the Eastern Partnership countries: Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. This annual report shows that the visa liberalization requirements for the concerned countries continue to be met but that action in some cases immediate is required for a number of countries in specific areas to ensure this continues to be the case. Commissioner for Migration, Home Affairs and Citizenship Dimitris Avramopoulos said that visa free travel is "a great achievement" which brings benefits for both sides. "It also comes with responsibilities and obligations. I welcome that all concerned countries continue to fulfill their obligations, but call for swift and enhanced efforts to continue curbing irregular migration, and fighting corruption and organized crime," he said. The European Commission states that Ukraine should take urgent measures in its fight against corruption and address outstanding recommendations from last years report. Read alsoEntry ban for Russian men of military age: What's in it for Ukraine? The report indicates that Ukraine has not abolished the obligation for anti-corruption activists to file e-declarations. Brussels calls on Kyiv to do it urgently. Also, the EU expects a quick launch of the High Anti-Corruption Court, a full-fledged system for checking electronic declarations, National Anti-corruption Bureau and Special Anti-corruption Prosecutor's Office, which, according to the European Commission, continue their work, but issues regarding their effectiveness and independence have not been resolved. In particular, the NABU has not yet been audited, "the politically motivated appointment of auditors is of concern." In addition, the report expects restoration of independence of and trust to the SAPO. The report indicates that irregular migration from Ukraine, as well as from Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, remains high. According to the report, in 2017, the number of EU entry refusals for Ukrainians increased by 47% - up to 33,000, and continued growing in 2018. But the number of Ukrainians who stay in the EU illegally was up by only 13% in 2017, while there was no growth in the first half of this year. At the same time, Brussels is concerned about the increase in the number of unfounded asylum claims on the part of citizens of Moldova and Georgia. Also, the European Commission pointed to organized crime in the EU with the participation of citizens of all eight countries. It is about smuggling, in particular drugs, illegal human trafficking, money laundering, cybercrime, and embezzlement. The European Commission noted that Ukrainians are primarily involved in cigarette smuggling to the EU and in cybercrime. The crewmen were abducted by pirates off the coast of Nigeria in October 2018. Eleven people, including a Ukrainian citizen, abducted from the Pomerenia Sky ship flying the Liberian flag off the coast of Nigeria in October 2018 have been freed. Read alsoUkrainian, Bosnian among crew members kidnapped off Nigeria media The crew of the Pomerenia Sky are safe and waiting for return to their families, the public broadcaster Polish Radio's IAR news agency reported, without saying where the sailors were, Radio Poland said. The agency reported that the Polish foreign ministry had thanked the ship owners for their handling of the case, and the Nigerian authorities for their assistance. Polish broadcaster RMF FM reported late in October that the crew had been abducted by pirates in motorboats who targeted the ship some 60 nautical miles off the Nigerian coast. Over 3,000 military reservists from across the country have been sent to eight training centers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine says all active reservists called for training may return home before Christmas if there is a lower threat of Russian invasion. "In case of a reduction in threats of the aggressor's invasion of Ukraine, all reservists will go home for Christmas holidays and spend them with their families and relatives," the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine wrote on Facebook. Active reservists have been trained at the Ukrainian Armed Forces training centers. Read alsoLarge-scale military, reservist training starts Dec 3 "The training of active reservists, which began with the introduction of martial law, is coming to an end. These activities are under way as part of large-scale preparations during the martial law regime for readiness to act and win amid a full-scale military invasion by the enemy," the report reads. The General Staff noted the purpose of training reservists was to refresh skills of certain categories of persons eligible to join military service, as well as to train personnel in critical qualifications, and others. Head of the Personnel Training Office of the Main Directorate of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Mykola Huben said that reservists had refreshed the knowledge and skills acquired during the preliminary training, their combat experience, which they had gained while participating in hostilities in the area of the Joint Forces Operation (Anti-Terrorist Operation), as well as acquired new knowledge. He said over 3,000 military reservists from across the country had been sent to eight training centers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The training is organized in 42 military areas of expertise and over 120 different specializations (positions). For better training of reservists, the chief of the General Staff has also decided to hold a military internship in primary command positions at training centers for up to 250 students of higher military educational institutions. "Having communicated with the servicemen. we've seen they are patriots and everyone is ready to defend their country. This training ensures the maintenance of previously acquired skills, gives the opportunity not only to perform the task, but also to save lives. For this purpose, the relevant training subjects, such as combat safety and survival, have been included in training programs," Huben said. The enemy employed 122mm artillery systems and 120mm mortars. Russia's hybrid military forces mounted 13 attacks on Ukrainian army positions in Donbas in the past 24 hours, with one Ukrainian soldier reported as wounded in action. Read alsoNew casualties of Russian-led forces reported in Donbas (Photo) "One Ukrainian soldier was wounded in the past day. According to our intelligence reports, one invader was wounded," the press center of Ukraine's Joint Forces Operation said in an update published on Facebook as of 07:00 Kyiv time on December 19, 2018. The Russian occupation forces opened fire from grenade launchers of various types, heavy machine guns and small arms to attack the defenders of the town of Avdiyivka, and the villages of Slavne, Pisky, Chermalyk, Lebedynske, and Pavlopil. The enemy also employed 122mm artillery systems and 120mm mortars, shelling the Ukrainian positions near the village of Novotoshkivske, while 82mm mortars were used near Pavlopil. "Since Wednesday midnight, Russian-led forces haven't attacked the Ukrainian positions yet," the report said. According to Klymenko, this is the first NATO warship paying a visit to the Black Sea with a direct statement of the purpose of visit related to the Azov crisis. The HMS Echo (H87) reconnaissance ship of the British Royal Navy moored at the berth of the Odesa sea port at 10:30 on December 19. Read alsoRussia completes rearming air defense forces in Crimea with S-400 missile systems Russian media "Residents of Odesa don't miss it, we are waiting for your photos," Andriy Klymenko, the head of the supervisory board at the Maidan of Foreign Affairs Foundation and editor-in-chief of the portal BlackSeaNews, wrote on Facebook, adding the first picture from Naval Attache at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office Daniel Hallett. According to Klymenko, this is the first NATO warship paying a visit to the Black Sea with a direct statement of the purpose of visit related to the Azov crisis. UNIAN memo. HMS Echo (H87) is a modern ship, designed to conduct hydrographic survey operations in support of submarines or amphibious operations. She can provide almost real-time tailored environmental information, and also has a secondary role as a mine countermeasure tasking authority platform, for which she is capable of embarking a dedicated mine counter measures command team. The sanctions announced last year were the first to be imposed under the Global Magnitsky Act. The White House has extended financial and travel restrictions on government-linked people from Uzbekistan, Russia, Ukraine, and elsewhere, under a U.S. law aimed at human rights abusers and corrupt officials worldwide. The order, dated December 19, prolongs the sanctions that were levied last year against the eldest daughter of the late Uzbek President Islam Karimov; the son of Russian Prosecutor-General Yury Chaika; a Ukrainian riot police commander; and others, Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) said. Read alsoReuters: U.S. sanctions 17 Saudis over killing of journalist Khashoggi The sanctions announced last year were the first to be imposed under the Global Magnitsky Act, a 2016 law that was modeled on another law passed in 2012 that specifically targeted Russians. It was named for Russian whistle-blower Sergei Magnitsky, who died in prison in 2009 after being accused of involvement in a massive tax-fraud scheme that he first discovered. Russia condemned both sanctions announcements. Gulnara Karimova, the eldest daughter of the late Uzbek president, was among the most prominent people on the list. For years, Karimova was widely seen as the heir to her father until reporters and European prosecutors uncovered a wide-reaching bribery and extortion scheme involving major international telecom companies. Last year, she was reportedly charged by the Uzbek Prosecutor-General's Office with "directly abetting the criminal activities of an organized crime group whose assets were worth over $1.3 billion." The bribery scheme has led to billions in criminal fines being paid by telecom companies in the United States and Europe. Artyom Chaika, the son of Russia's prosecutor-general, is the most prominent Russian to be targeted. He has long been dogged by accusations of influence peddling stemming from his father's prominence. When the first Magnitsky Act was passed in 2012, it infuriated Moscow, and Russian President Vladimir Putin responded a few months later by signing a law banning all adoption of Russian children by American parents. In 2016, as efforts to create a global version of the Magnitsky Act were building, a secretive lobbying campaign was started in Washington that sought to undermine the narrative behind Magnitsky's discovery and death. That effort was funded in part by a businessman with connections to Chaika, and involved lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who met with President Donald Trump's eldest son in June 2016, as Trump's presidential election campaign was gaining momentum. (@ChaudhryMAli88) The first batch of 68 students of Mehran University of Engineering and Technology Jamshoro passed out the first level of the training course of Chinese language on Wednesday. HYDERABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 19th Dec, 2018 ) :The first batch of 68 students of Mehran University of Engineering and Technology Jamshoro passed out the first level of the training course of Chinese language on Wednesday. The management of Mehran University organised the training course on the theme "Skills of language, writing, reading and speaking" in collaboration with Hanban University China, the university spokesman said adding that the Vice Chancellor Prof Dr Muhammad Aslam Uqaili gave certificates to passed out students at a ceremony organised at the Office of the Research, Innovation and Commercialization. Speaking on the occasion, the vice chancellor said the university was providing opportunities to its students to learn the Chinese language so that they could easily get jobs in the Chinese companies and CPEC projects. The economy of China is dominating in the world and providing job opportunities in its projects, he said and advised the students to avail the university's effective platform of learning, writing, reading and speaking Chinese language. He thanked to Chinese government for extending cooperation for launching such effective programmes at university level adding that registration of a large number of students proved that the youth desired to learn Chinese language. The Director ORIC Dr Inamullah Bhatti said that out of 153 students who applied for registration in the training course, 71 were registered of them 68 appeared in the examination of the four months long first level training course. He informed that three students have clinched 200 out 200 marks while 15 students obtained 195 out of 200 marks of the examination. (@ChaudhryMAli88) The European Union on Tuesday repeated its call on Serbia, an aspiring member, to align its policies toward third countries with those of other member states. BRUSSELS (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 18th December, 2018) The European Union on Tuesday repeated its call on Serbia, an aspiring member, to align its policies toward third countries with those of other member states. An EU-Serbia stabilization and association council met in Brussels for the fifth time since 2014 to assess the Balkan nation's progress in preparations for accession and set priorities for further work. "The SA Council reiterated its call on Serbia to progressively align its policies towards third countries and its positions within international organisations with the policies and positions adopted by the Union and its Member States, in the period up to accession," the statement reads. The union has also been pushing Serbia to "normalize" its relations with the breakaway province of Kosovo, recognized by 23 of 28 EU member states. Brussels warned that normalization was one of the steps that would continue to determine the pace of accession talks overall. Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine on Wednesday signed a memorandum of cooperation on peaceful conflict resolution, including with breakaway areas, media reported. TBILISI (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 19th December, 2018) Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine on Wednesday signed a memorandum of cooperation on peaceful conflict resolution, including with breakaway areas, media reported. "The aim is to create a three-nation framework to share the political experience of bringing territories back under government control," the document said, as quoted on Georgia's First Channel. The memorandum - reportedly co-signed by ministers in charge of reintegration and occupied territories - lays the ground for strategic regional cooperation and outlines ways of reciprocal assistance. DAMASCUS (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 19th December, 2018) Iraqi President Barham Salih will pay an official visit to the Syrian capital in the next few days for the first time since the start of the Syrian civil war back in 2011, an Iraqi diplomatic source told Sputnik on Tuesday. "The president of Iraq will pay an official visit to Damascus in the coming days," the source said. (@ChaudhryMAli88) Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov met Wednesday with Guinea's Minister of State to the President of the Republic in charge of Defence Mohamed Diane to discuss military and investment cooperation, the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement. MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 19th December, 2018) Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov met Wednesday with Guinea 's Minister of State to the President of the Republic in charge of Defence Mohamed Diane to discuss military and investment cooperation, the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement. "During a detailed discussion, in which Guinean Ambassador to Russia [Mohamed] Keita also participated, Russia-Guinea cooperation in politics, trade, investment, and military areas was discussed. At the same time, the sides noted a solid potential for the activation of bilateral partnership through the implementation of promising joint projects in the fields of geological exploration and development of mineral deposits, energy and infrastructure, as well as building humanitarian ties," the statement said. Russia and Guinea have been developing ties in various fields. Trade between the two countries, which shows year-to-year growth, amounted to $10.7 million in 2016. Russia mainly exports technological goods, including land transport vehicles, to Guinea, while importing fruits, nuts and gemstones. The countries also actively cooperate in humanitarian field. In particular, Russia helped Guinea to fight Ebola Virus Disease outbreak, as well as provided 60 scholarships for Guinean students to attend universities in Russia. Washington and Skopje have agreed on the need for Macedonia to carry out crucial reforms required by NATO and the European Union, State Department Deputy Spokesperson Robert Palladino said in a press release on Wednesday. WASHINGTON (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 19th December, 2018) Washington and Skopje have agreed on the need for Macedonia to carry out crucial reforms required by NATO and the European Union , State Department Deputy Spokesperson Robert Palladino said in a press release on Wednesday. "On December 18 in Skopje, Deputy Secretary of State John J. Sullivan reaffirmed with President Gjorge Ivanov the United States' continued support of the landmark Prespa Agreement," Palladino said. "The two also agreed on the need to implement key reforms required by NATO and the EU, including crucial judiciary reforms." Sullivan is now on his final stop of a multi-day, multi-country trip, which saw him visit Vienna, Bratislava and Sarajevo. He is the highest-level State Department official to visit Macedonia since 2001. In September, the referendum on the deal to change the name of Macedonia, officially known as the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, to the Republic of North Macedonia was held. According to the State Election Commission, 91.46 percent of voters supported renaming the country, while 5.65 percent voted against. The referendum failed, however, to secure the 50 percent turnout needed to make the vote valid. The referendum was held after the Greek and Macedonian foreign ministers signed the renaming accord in June. The agreement came as a solution to the long-standing dispute over the use of the name "Macedonia," which is also the name of a region in Greece. If it does change its name, Macedonia will be allowed to pursue EU and NATO membership, a process that had previously been blocked by Greece. (@rukhshanmir) The World Trade Organization's (WTO) Dispute Settlement Body (DSB), at its Tuesday meeting, decided, on a second US request, to establish an arbitration panel on the dispute with Russia on additional import duties on certain goods from the United States, a source familiar with the talks told Sputnik. BRUSSELS (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 18th December, 2018) The World Trade Organization's (WTO) Dispute Settlement Body (DSB), at its Tuesday meeting, decided, on a second US request, to establish an arbitration panel on the dispute with Russia on additional import duties on certain goods from the United States , a source familiar with the talks told Sputnik. Russia on August 5 introduced new import duties on a number of US goods in response to earlier US steel and aluminum tariffs. Additional import tariffs on steel (25 percent) and aluminum (10 percent) were introduced by the United States on March 23, 2018. They apply to imports from all countries except Australia and Argentina. Zambias National and Diocesan Pontifical Mission Societies (PMS) Directors together with the Pastoral Coordinators have been meeting, this week in the nations capital, Lusaka, for a preparatory meeting of the "Extraordinary Mission Month October 2019" (EMM OCT. 2019). Paul Samasumo Vatican City The Extraordinary Mission Month announced by Pope Francis celebrates the 100th anniversary of Pope Benedict the XV's Apostolic Letter of 30th November 1919, in which he emphasised the missionary responsibility of all baptised persons in announcing the Gospel. This responsibility is not only a duty of religious men and women but of the whole Church. Baptised and sent Every year, the universal Church marks the month of October a unique period for the missions. In 2019, the month of October will be extraordinary because of this special commemoration. According to the Holy Sees Congregation for the Evangelisation of People and the Pontifical Mission Societies, EMM OCT. 2019 will also be an opportunity for renewal of the missionary zeal, and an introduction of the missionary dimension in ordinary pastoral care. The theme of EMM OCT. 2019 is, "Baptised and sent: The Church of Christ on Mission In the World." EMM OCT. 2019 Various initiatives have been launched by the Pontifical Mission Societies (PMS) to publicise EMM OCT. 2019. A website, www.october2019.va has been launched to promote and animate EMM OCT. 2019. Through the website, Church multimedia providers can also find resources and content to inspire their audiences. The United Nations Prize in the Field of Human Rights is awarded every 5 years to organizations and individuals in the forefront of defending human rights. By Robin Gomes Pakistans fearless human rights activist and lawyer, late Asma Jahangir was posthumously awarded the 2018 United Nations Prize in the Field of Human Rights, along with 3 others at a ceremony at the UN on Tuesday. They are Rebeca Gyumi of Tanzania, an activist for womens and girls rights, Joenia Wapichana of Brazil who fights for the rights of indigenous communities, and Front Line Defenders, an Irish organization that fights for the protection of human rights defenders. Every five years, the UN human rights prize is awarded to organizations and individuals which embody excellent activism in the defence of human rights. This years winners were announced earlier on 25 October. As part of the UNs activities in observance of Human Rights Day on Dec. 10, which this year coincided with the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the human rights champions from across the world were honoured at the General Assembly Hall on Dec. 18. UN chief Speaking at the event, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said that the work of the winners and of other human rights defenders around the world is essential for the collective efforts to sustain peace and ensure inclusive sustainable development and respect for human rights for all. Listen to Antonio Guterres He said human rights defenders give voice to the voiceless and shield the powerless against injustice. They work to empower people through education, and help to protect other human rights defenders from harassment, intimidation or arrest, Guterres added. Jehangir Jahangir who died of cardiac arrest on Feb. 11 at the age of 66, was represented by her daughter Munizae at the awards ceremony. Munizae said she was sure her mother who also fought religious extremism and for the rights of oppressed minorities, would have liked to share her award with human rights defenders across the world and with the women of Pakistan whom she spent a lifetime defending. The four winners join a small but notable group who have been recognized since the prize was established by the General Assembly in 1966. Among them are figures such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Jimmy Carter, Malala Yusafzai, this year's Nobel Peace Prize winners, Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad, and organizations such as Amnesty International and the International Committee of the Red Cross. El Dorado Cantina, an authentic Mexican restaurant and bar close to the Las Vegas Strip celebrates National Sangria Day with $7 sangria by the glass. Executive Chef Paco Cortes and the restaurants talented bartenders will serve: Red Sangria: Merlot, fresh peaches and raspberries, St. Germain, Grand Marnier, Sky Infusions Georgia Peach, cinnamon sticks and lemon lime soda White Sangria: dry white wine, fresh lemon juice, blueberries and red apple, Pavan Liqueur, VeeV Acai Liqueur and lemon lime soda The around-the-clock restaurant is best known for being one of the only Mexican restaurant in the valley to offer cuisine made with organic, non-GMO ingredients and for its extensive menu featuring dishes inspired by regions all across Mexico. Chef Cortes and his team believe in using sustainably-raised products, which means that all of the beef, chicken, pork, shrimp, and fish used in the dishes originate from carefully-selected farms in the U.S. and are free from antibiotics, pesticides, and steroids. Happy Hour is available 2 to 6 p.m. and again from midnight to 4 a.m. daily, featuring half off well and domestic beer, $7 food menu and $3.50 street tacos. El Dorado Cantina offers $5 1942 Don Julio tequila shots (valued at $35) every Tuesday. The long-awaited WWE SmackDown Live was jam-packed with celebrities, which usually correlates to some surprise visits in downtown Las Vegas later in the evening (Pictured: WWE Maria and Mike Kanellis Photo credit: the D Casino Hotel) WWEs very own Maria and Mike Kanellis stayed in Vegas a few extra days and headed down to one of the citys most buzzworthy restaurants, the award-winning Andiamo Italian Steakhouse. Photo credit: the D Casino Hotel The former beauty queen/current wrestling redhead wanted to share a remarkable evening with her husband, so they opted for downtown Vegas WWE go-to hangout, located inside the D Casino Hotel. Between their anniversary and the upcoming holidays, the power couple figured they had to go all out so they called the Ds casino executive Richard Wilk and he knew exactly where they could celebrate. Photo credit: the D Casino Hotel Maria and Mike were seated in a beautiful secluded booth while they enjoyed some signature filet, and surf n turf dishes. To their surprise, an incredible dessert platter was presented to them by the Andiamo staff on their special day. Nothing says I love you like an unbeatable evening at the top-rated Italian steakhouse in the whole city. After the WWE superstars (smack)downed their mouth-watering meals, they decided to venture off and see what the rest of the town had in store. Of course, they decided to be chauffeured in the casinos luxurious D branded stretch limo! Considering the parade of talent that walks through Andiamos doors on a daily basis, its apparent that another downtown shocker is around the corner. The holidays are here and with that comes special menus! Over at the Tropicana Las Vegas, Oakville Steakhouse will be preparing a special New Years Eve menu to celebrate the New Year that includes Champagne, a seafood tower, entree, personal side dish and desserts, priced at $235 for two (Pictured: Oakville Steakhouse Seafood Tower) Guests can begin the romantic night with a glass of Perrier-Jouet BRUT 2002 before starting off with the seafood tower that includes king crab, shrimp, oysters, lobster tail, and more! For the entree, the famed 40oz Creekstone Tomahawk (bone marrow, fig and blueberry compote, brioche toast points) will be the highlight of the night with the choice of lobster mashed potatoes, truffle mac and cheese, sauteed mushrooms, or creamed corn for the personal side dish. To finish off the dinner, guests will be treated to the delicious Valencia orange gelee and Breton chocolate mousse. These dishes are also available a la carte. Girl Scouts of Southern Nevada announced a property and land gift valued at nearly $9 million from the Charles and Phyllis M. Frias Charitable Trust. The gift marks the largest single private donation in the history of the Girl Scouts (Pictured: John Mowbray, Girl Scouts and Kimberly Trueba Photo credit: Denise Truscello / WireImage). Honoring the memory of Las Vegas philanthropists Charlie and Phyllis Frias, the donation includes personal property and acreage in rural Lincoln County, Nev. located 90 miles north of Las Vegas. The donation of 70 acres of property includes: A Cowboys Dream Bed and Breakfast, Windmill Ridge Restaurant and Lodging and undeveloped land. On behalf of our Board of Directors, Southern Nevada Girl Scouts, and the thousands of local Girl Scout volunteers and alumnae, I share their infinite gratitude for this transformational gift, said Kimberly Trueba, chief executive officer of Girl Scouts of Southern Nevada. This gift will enable us to be a champion for girls and continue the legacy of Phyllis and Charlie Frias. Generations of Girl Scouts will know their story, feel their frontier spirit, and be empowered to make our community and world a better place. This gift was made possible thanks to visionaries like Phyllis and Charlie and the trustees of their charitable trust, John H. Mowbray and Jack Hanifan. In early 2019, representatives from Girl Scouts of Southern Nevada will begin a study of potential uses of the land gift that will best provide enriching outdoor experiences for Girls. The gift announcement was made during a presentation held at the Girl Scouts of Southern Nevadas council office in Las Vegas. The ceremony included remarks by Trueba and Mowbray, and was attended by local representatives from each of the six levels of Girl Scouting. As the trustees of The Charles and Phyllis M. Frias Charitable Trust, Jack Hanifan and I are pleased to announce an inaugural $9 million distribution to the Girl Scouts of Southern Nevada, said John H. Mowbray, co-trustee of The Charles and Phyllis M. Frias Charitable Trust and Attorney at Law at Spencer Fane, LLC. During an extensive discernment process conducted over the past year, the trustees determined that no program has a better history of service to the girls in Southern Nevada than its inaugural recipient. While Phyllis and Charlies philanthropic focus during their lifetimes benefited the youth in Clark and Lincoln counties, this inaugural distribution will be expanded to include girls in Nye and Esmeralda counties as well. An Introduction to Doing Business in Vietnam 2020 will provide readers with an overview of the fundamentals of investing and conducting business in Vietnam.... Constant improvement and technology innovation have made life easier and more comfortable in modern times and advances in healthcare are a great part of this, as better technology has saved countless lives. Abbott has been well-known as one of the leading global healthcare companies A world of thousands of health challenges Diabetes patients live in constant battle. Every day, they need to use a glucose meter to take a blood sample from their fingers to measure their blood sugar, an uncomfortable and painful process. They also need to remember to repeat this process up to 10 times, regardless of day or night, not to mention abstain from indulgence in food to ensure a stable blood sugar index. Overindulgence can be fatal to any diabetic especially those who are of a working age and often have social encounters. There are also other familiar challenges in everyday life. For example, millions of elderly are suffering from muscle loss (due to ageing), who can no longer take care of themselves or their everyday needs. They have difficulty in sometimes the simplest daily activities, such as getting up and down the stairs, and depend on their children to cook, wash or even carry a small pot of plants. Muscle loss due to ageing also reduces the resistance of people over 50, they will fall easier, lose confidence, and the joy of living by themselves, being self-reliant in all their activities. Even children, our most cherished and protected, are at the mercy of health challenges. Millions of children around the world face malnutrition because they have little access to adequate nutrition for a variety of reasons. Obviously, health issues can plague anyone of any age. As a world-leading healthcare company with a history of nearly 130 years, Abbott and its scientists and employees know that every breakthrough, every successfully applied health-related technology will help millions of people around the world. The latest healthcare technologies of Abbott are used in a variety of other fields Innovation and technology can make a difference Abbott has been known as one of the leading global healthcare companies with a history of nearly 130 years, not only in nutrition, but also in pharmaceuticals, diagnostics, neuro-modulation, diabetes care, and the treatment of cardiovascular diseases. At Abbott, scientists are heart-and-soul devoted to developing life-changing technologies that help millions of people around the world live their best lives through good health. Every day, every employee of Abbott create the miracle of healthcare throughout the world. These achievements have also been introduced to the people of Vietnam, especially with the two breakthrough products, which are the result of many years of scientific research as well as clinical and pre-clinical trials: Similac HMO and Ensure HMB formulas. At Abbott, scientists are heart-and-soul devoted to developing life-changing technologies that help millions of people around the world live their best lives through good health. These latest products show the great care with which Abbott treats people of all ages. For the healthy development of children, Similac with HMO is one of the most prominent achievements in pediatric nutrition in the past decade, helping narrow the gap in immunity between formula-fed babies and breast-fed babies. For the elderly, Abbotts new Ensure Gold with HMB is a nutrient that supports muscle health, a gift of health bringing joy every day, helping the elderly to stay active longer and reach their unfulfilled dreams. Abbott believes that good health is not only about treating an illness or managing a medical condition. It is about supporting peoples health as if it were its own so they can enjoy all life has to offer. At Abbott, scientists develop life-changing technologies that help people live their best lives through good health. From providing nutrients for moms and babies and freeing people with diabetes from routine finger sticks to building a cardiac device to save lives and hunting for new virus mutations, every day Abbott employees are doing work that matters. Besides nutrition, the latest healthcare technologies of Abbott are used in a variety of fields. In diagnostics, Abbott products help to provide accurate and timely information for patients and clinicians to make the right decisions. Technology is also applied to supportive products for the cardiovascular or nervous system as well as for the treatment of motor disorders and chronic pain by targeting specific areas of the brain. On the other hand, Abbott also focuses on caring for people with diabetes, giving optimal solutions to better manage their health, particularly helping them to get rid of the trouble brought by complex and painful medical devices. Moreover, Abbotts pharmaceutical business provides high-quality and trusted medicine for customers to access the most up-to-date healthcare solutions in the world. One of Abbott's remarkable achievements is m-PIMA HIV-1/2 VL an advanced technology test that simplifies the health screening process for HIV patients, particularly in remote and underserved communities. Libre FreeStyle sets the diabetics free from bleeding fingers by helping them to monitor their glucose levels in a hassle-free, discreet, convenient, and informative way. Technology has the power to change lives. At Abbott, scientists and employees are constantly exploring the most innovative and breakthrough solutions to help each person lead a better, happier life. When you achieve a dream or have a full day doing things you love in good health, that is the time every employee of Abbott feels proud of their contributions. Danang wishes to reach sustainability by opening up more towards high-end tourism In recent years, Danang has received a boom in the number of Chinese tourists visiting the city on cheap tour packages and so-called Zero Dong tours. Visitors on these budget tours have to follow travel agent itineraries of tourist attractions, restaurants, and shopping sites where they are often overcharged for products and services. Moreover, these visitors are often guided to selected sites that take payment with specific e-commerce systems that sends money straight to parent companies abroad. As a result, the local authorities have been urged to take steps to prevent tourism revenue being adversely affected by these tours. Since last year, the number of tourists from China has surpassed those from Japan and the US, according to the Danang Tourism Department. Che Viet Dong, a guide to Chinese tourists, told VIR, There are two main reasons for the existence of cheap tour packages. Firstly, Chinese tourists prefer cheap rates, while the market there is so large that travel agencies are forced to reduce prices, even if it means accepting losses to close the deal. The consequence of cheap tours is that they pressure visitors into purchasing products or services whilst on tour. However, these products are usually made in China but are labeled as Made in Vietnam products. Operators often overcharge for products and services to make higher profits that can compensate for the cheap air ticket, accommodation, and guides. Tour guides then become marketers and salespersons for products and services, not only guides introducing the cultural and historical beauty of the destinations, said Dong. BUDGET TOURS RISK SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT According to Huynh Tan Vinh, chairman of the Danang City Tourism Association, there is an urgent need to stop these packages because of the risks they bring to the sustainable development of the city and its tourism industry. It is now time to focus on high-end tourism markets with high spending. We cannot base an industry on the budget tour market, Vinh stressed. Ngo Quang Vinh, director of the Danang Tourism Department, said that Danang is not the only Vietnamese city to be facing similar challenges from budget tourists. As recent statistics reveal, the number of budget tourists account for about 30 per cent of the overall tourist markets around the world. To control budget tour packages and promote effective tourism towards sustainable development, the city has applied strict regulations, strengthened penalties, imposed inspections on prices and payments of shopping and eating sites around the city, and intensified control of product origins to make the market fairer. In addition the local authorities have also mobilised support from shopping and service sites operating legally to create a fair and clean business environment. It also helps to create more favourable conditions for business. Accordingly, both the Danang Tourism Department and Transport Department signed an agreement to install cameras on tour buses to enhance security for visitors and help state management agencies better oversee travel activities. Furthermore, Danang has taken steps to open tourism representative offices abroad in markets such as China and South Korea to closely control the implementation of tours from these markets. The offices also benefit from promoting unique, authentic Vietnamese tourism products that attract more high-end tourists, especially from the Chinese market. ESTABLISHING TOURISM POLICE FORCE IS A NEED According to Nguyen Xuan Binh, deputy director of Danang Tourism Department, the recently set up fast-respond team ensures tourism activities are undertaken safely and orderly. The department is proposing the city submit plans to the state for the approval of a Danang tourism police. We must highlight the slogan sustainable development for Danang tourism. We must aim to promote high-quality services instead of quantity. We must stop snatching business and operate long-term investments that earn stable benefits, said Dang Viet Dung, Deputy Chairman of the Danang Peoples Committee. Dung also emphasised that the city has always defined tourism as a key economic industry. Therefore, the city is calling on the business community from the travel, service, and shopping sectors to focus on training, innovating, improving, upgrading, and diversifying tourism products and services to ensure they can be compared to, and match, international standards. Furthermore, waterway tourism is a strong point of the visitor experience in Danang so we should invest further in order to create new cruise tours that attract more tourists, increase the revenue for the citys budget, and create more jobs for local people, Dung said. Topica Edtech Group Online education firm Topica Edtech Group has recently wrapped up a $50 million investment in Series D funding from Singapore-based private equity firm Northstar Group, marking one of the largest funding rounds received by a Vietnamese tech firm to date. Topica provides a range of online educational products, including live tutoring courses led by native English speakers from the US, the UK and other countries. The company plans to use the fresh overseas fund to develop new products and upgrade its artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. ELSA, a mobile application whose name stands for English Language Speech Assistant, has so far raised $3.2 million for its AI-assisted language learning platform that teaches people how to speak English. The funding was led by Monks Hill Ventures, one of the most respected and longstanding venture capitals in Southeast Asia. According to Vu Van, co-founder and CEO of ELSA, the startup currently gives access to 1.5 billion English language learners across the globe to increase their speaking fluency. ELSA will use the fresh injection of capital to seek top-tier talent to develop new AI capabilities, open its voice recognition API, and expand existing speech recognition technology to teach new languages. Previously, Monkey Junior, an English learning software model developed for children under six years of age, received $100,000 of support from Google, while online study app 1ASK secured a VND1 billion ($43,500) investment from Facebook. According to Ralf Matthaes, managing director of Infocus Mekong Research, online education is currently enjoying a boom period in Vietnam for three key reasons. The first and foremost factor driving this trend is convenience of use. Millennials are keen on an experience when using a product, and the convenience found in educational technology is a major pull for todays students. Sitting behind the laptop in a location of their choosing whilst learning is a much more comfortable experience overall, Matthaes said. Secondly, with so many students having been brought up with technology, many are sometimes more comfortable talking to a computer rather than to humans. Last, the cost of online education is typically cheaper than traditional education, as students do not have to pay to cover costs such as classrooms and their teachers time. As for negatives, traditional education allows for immediate feedback to questions, creating a better sharing environment for better discourse and discussion. They are some of the elements that online education lacks, Matthaes added. Dao Xuan Hoang, CEO of Monkey Junior, noted that the Vietnamese online education market presents huge opportunities as Vietnamese parents are willing to spend big on their childrens education, making the country a fertile land for potential startups in the sector. However, the industry faces a number of challenges from domestic users who are not willing to pay for online mobile apps. Therefore, the startups need to first prove their value in order to encourage users to spend on additional subscription fees. Rick Bennett, head of RMIT Vietnams School of Communication & Design, said that Vietnam is quickly catching up with regard to online learning. While admitting he is not certain students are ready for online learning like they are in other countries, he said it is an exciting time in the country because the divide in thinking between parents and their children is perhaps bigger than it has ever been before. Moving forward, Matthaes said the next evolution in teaching will be the virtual classroom, where students will be wearing virtual technology to recreate a classroom environment with students and professors, interacting in real time, via live streams. This is already a norm among some schools globally. The smartphone is the nations everything device, so it clearly has a role to play in the education system. It just depends on the users preference between laptops and desktops or smartphones. Ultimately screen size will be the deciding factor, said Matthaes. The Vietnamese are incredibly tech savvy, so I am positive there will be more local innovations as well as further adaptation for new online educational systems. Ultimately the confluence of innovation on present technology will be a key driver moving forward for the countrys online education sector, he noted. A lack of investment capital has been plaguing the 30,000 square metre site for years According to a previous investment plan which was approved in 2013, the VND10 trillion ($434.78 million) complex belonging to VietinBank consists of two 68-storey buildings linked together by an eight story podium, a 48-storey building, and two basements which have a total area of 30,000 square metres. VietinBank had planned to make the 68-storey building its office, with the rest being reserved for a hotel and apartments for lease and sale. According to the explanation from the banks Board of Directors, the bank has a shortage of investment capital for the project. Accordingly, three options were proposed to interested investors. Firstly, the bank could transfer 100 per cent of the assets and then re-lease the 68-storey tower as an office building. The bank would then acquire the tower when the leasing period expired at a negotiated price. This option was favoured by the banks Board of Directors. The second option on the table was transferring the 48-storey building and the podium to a new investor, with the 68-storey building being kept as the banks office tower. The final option, if no new investors emerge, is for the bank to continue with the project. The VietinBank complex is located in the Ciputra complex, one of the largest townships in Hanoi which consists of over 300 hectares of land. Ciputra became the first foreign-invested property project in Hanoi, being developed as a joint venture between Vietnams UDIC and the Indonesian Ciputra Group in 2007 with the total investment capital of $2.1 billion. This joint venture developed a major part of the project. The other parts were transferred to other investors to develop sub-projects. Apart from apartment buildings, townhouses, and villas developed by Ciputra or the VietinBank Tower, the area is also home to the Ciputra Hanoi Mall. The mall was acquired by Lotte Group two years ago after over six years of delays. The South Korean group is keen to develop a $600 million Lotte Hanoi Mall in the area. The VietinBank complex began in 2010 with a similarly ambitious plan as Lotte Hanoi Mall, but was stopped with only the basement and a few storeys complete. Work was expected to be finished by 2014, but due to a lack of finance it has yet to be completed. In 2007, the bank signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Singapores PAP to implement the project in which VietinBank would contribute 28 per cent. However, the Singaporean side withdrew from the deal one year later due to clashes of opinions. After failing to find a new investor, VietinBank decided to go alone on the project. Despite suffering heavy delays, it is hoped that there is now finally a way ahead to complete the venture. Lu Van Hung (right), Secretary of the Hau Giang Party Committee, granted investment certificates to investors at Hau Giang Investment Promotion Conference 2017, Photo: Huymh Bien HOW HAS HAU GIANG FARED IN ATTRACTING INVESTMENT SINCE IT WAS FOUNDED 15 YEARS AGO? Le Tien Chau, Chairman of the Hau Giang Peoples Committee In the past 15 years, with active support from the central government and lucid guidance from provincial leaders in investment promotion, Hau Giang has posted important achievements in domestic and foreign investment attraction. Up to now the province has courted 29 foreign-invested projects worth more than $485 million in total committed capital, including 15 foreign-invested ones with $314 million in total registered capital and 14 joint ventures valued at $171 million. These projects came from 10 countries and territories including Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, the US, and Japan. Hong Kong has taken the lead among foreign investors with four projects worth more than $281 million in total committed capital. As for domestic investment, the province is home to 493 projects valued at a total VND123.9 trillion ($5.39 billion). Noticeable improvements were recorded in business registration as in recent years the province has granted business registration certificates to 4,981 businesses valued at VND46.8 trillion ($2.03 billion) in total registered capital. Hau Giang is currently home to one hi-tech agricultural zone, two industrial zones (IZs) and eight industrial clusters (ICs), of which the Song Hau IZ space has been entirely occupied by investors. Meanwhile at all the ICs, industrial factories have been put into operation. The ICs under direct management from the Hau Giang Industrial Zones Management Authority have attracted 45 investors with 50 projects, providing jobs to 23,000 labourers. The investment landscape in Hau Giang has been significantly improved in recent years thanks to the presence of large-scale projects such as the shrimp export processing plant of Minh Phu Seafood Processing JSC, a freshwater production facility with a daily capacity of 800,000-1 million cubic metres; Aquaone Water Supply JSC, a brewery by Masan Group which produces beer under the While Lion brand; and Vincom trade centre by leading private group Vingroup. On the list are also Tien Thinh Agricultural Processing Ltd, which produces fruit juice for export in Phung Hiep district, and the 5,200-megawatt Song Hau 1 thermal power plant which is slated to begin a test run next year. Along with those, FLC Group, Dat Xanh Group, and the Institute of Vietnam Organic Agricultural Economics have engaged in creating procedures for investment into organic agriculture and new urban area projects in the province. WHAT FACTORS HAVE LED TO THE PROVINCES ROSY INVESTMENT PICTURE DESPITE A RELATIVELY-SHORT 15 YEAR LIFESPAN AND THE REMAINING LIMITED INFRASTRUCTURE CONDITIONS? More and more investment projects have landed in Hau Giang, and businesses have increased in both number and quality of operation. These results came by virtue of Hau Giangs constant efforts to improve the business climate, increase support for companies, and applying effective investment promotion both at home and abroad. As of now, the administrative procedures for carrying out investment in Hau Giang have been simplified to ease business operations. Particularly, the time to provide registration certificates was reduced to 1.5 days from the regulated three days and for changing business registration contents to 0.5 days; the time to approve investment proposals has been reduced to an average 15 days from 32 days; and the time to provide investment certificates reduced to two days as opposed to the former five days. In the industry and trade field, the time to provide food safety certificates and the certificates on petroleum trading was reduced to an average of three days, from a much longer 15 days. In addition, Hau Giang has applied the one-stop shop mechanism in processing administrative and investment procedures and approved online licensing in several fields such as business registration, construction and land issues. Hau Giang also charms investors by virtue of specific incentives on offer. Accordingly, seven out of its eight district-level administrative units are the areas specified as especially difficult for socio-economic development, so that investing in these areas is subject to enjoying the highest incentives in tax and rental rates. Investors will receive the highest benefits in terms of incentive support policies. The province is penning the policy to attract investment into agriculture, rural areas and the Hau Giang hi-tech agriculture zone in light of the governments Decree No.57/2018/ND-CP issued on April 17, 2018 and Decree No.98/2018/ND-CP issued on July 5, 2018. In addition, the investors operating in priority sectors as agriculture and hi-tech will be entitled to other incentives such as land rent exemption or exemption for land use purpose changes. WHAT SECTORS DOES HAU GIANG FOCUS ON ATTRACTING INVESTMENT CURRENTLY? To lure investment into important fields having the potential to create breakthroughs in socio-economic development, on October 11, 2018, the Hau Giang Peoples Committee enacted a wish-list of six major projects which will be piloted in attracting investment under significantly shortened investment licensing process. Accordingly, within seven days of investors sufficiently submitting application documents, they will receive investment certificates. The six projects include infrastructure development for Nhon Nghia A IC over 100 hectares with a total investment capital of about VND500 billion ($21.7 million); building a resettlement area for Nhon Nghia A IC over 43.7ha with an investment of about VND350 billion ($15.2 million); building a new urban area in Chau Thanh A districts Mot Ngan town over a 102ha area with total capital of about VND816 billion ($35.5 million); implementing a model large-field project in Vi Thuy districts Vi Thanh commune (the investor and farmers jointly co-operate) over 216ha with capital of about VND216 billion ($9.4 million); developing a high-tech agriculture zone in Vi Thuy districts Vi Dong commune over 209ha with about VND418 billion ($18.2 million) in investment; and infrastructure development for Tan Tien IC over 56ha at VND280 billion ($12.2 million) in total. Besides this wish-list, the province is focussing on luring investment into hi-tech agriculture and green tourism such as Nga Bay floating market, Lung Ngoc Hoang nature reserve, and Mua Xuan agriculture centre. The province has also instructed the Hau Giang Department of Planning and Investment to join hands with relevant agencies and local areas to work on presenting another investment wish-list for enactment in 2019 and beyond. WHAT MEASURES WILL THE PROVINCE PRESENT TO HELP IT FURTHER APPEAL TO INTERESTED PARTIES IN THE UPCOMING TIME? We will focus on implementing several measures to attract investors. The measures cover accelerating construction and perfecting infrastructure of ICs; intensifying efforts for training quality human resources to meet the growing need of businesses; increasing publicity and transparency in the investment licensing process at local authorised agencies, and furthering administrative procedure reforms, along with much more. Vanessa Lou, director of Actuarial Services in Southeast Asia, EY Singapore IN THE SIMPLEST WAY, HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE IFRS 17? IFRS is the core of auditing and accounting. It has completely changed the face of this area a change so big that it requires alterations in all other aspects to be able to respond to the continual evolution of the accounting profession. Those aspects include strategy, product categories, people, system, and processing. This also means that IFRS significantly changes the way insurance companies operate. However, we should also see this as an opportunity to restructure product categories, strategy and business operations in general. A new business strategy will bring in new gains for such companies. WILL DRASTIC CHANGES ALSO BRING IN LOTS OF SUBSTANTIAL CHALLENGES? This is true. IFRS 17 introduces new requirements which would bring unique challenges in implementation for insurance companies, such as CSM calculation, level of aggregation, the availability of data, transitioning, risk adjustments, allocating expenses, and more. However, I think expertise is the greatest challenge, as insurance companies will need to find someone with a suitable and in-depth knowledge of IFRS 17. They will also need to find someone with experience and knowledge in various fields such as accounting, actuary, and IT. This is a challenge as the Vietnamese insurance industry is still small and does not have many suitable experts available. Thus, the search for people is becoming increasingly difficult with a growing gap between the expansion of insurance industry and the shortage of industry experts. WHAT WILL INSURANCE COMPANIES GAIN FROM IMPLEMENTING IFRS? Despite many challenges, once IFRS is successfully adopted, there will be a homogeneous financial reporting system between different insurance companies and different markets globally. Reports created in the same country can be identical. However, when compared to different countries such as Vietnam and Singapore, there will be great differences. This is because Vietnam is using its own accounting standards, while Singapore is using IFRS. Once IFRS 17 is successfully implemented locally in the future, the reporting process of insurance companies will be standardised. Then, readers will be able to compare the financial reports of different insurance companies from varying countries. This comparison based on the same standards will give people a clearer and more meaningful understanding of the financial information, and from there they will be able to make better decisions in investing, management, and regulation. HOW SHOULD THE IFRS 17 JOURNEY TAKE PLACE IN VIETNAM? As far as I know, Vietnam plans to adopt IFRS before 2025 to replace the current VAS. In May 2017, the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) released IFRS 17, focusing on insurance contracts effective from January 1, 2022 according to the latest plan. This means insurance companies in Vietnam should start planning for IFRS 17 implementation. Early planning would help these companies identify necessary tasks and allocate the needed resources for implementation. In my opinion, the best way to implement IFRS 17 is to go backwards. First, we should think about how the world will be in 2022, then about what you can or need to do now to reach it in a timely and well-managed manner. Implementing IFRS 17 will feel like crossing a bridge as you are building it. VIETNAM HAS NEVER IMPLEMENTED IFRS BEFORE. WHAT CAN THE COUNTRY LEARN FROM INTERNATIONAL EXPERIENCE? There are three things that can be learned from a country such as Malaysia. First, there must be an agreement across organisations relating to the implementation project as it requires resources from various departments such as finance and accounting, actuary, and IT. To reach this agreement, a project manager must be identified. This person will play the biggest role in selecting leading individuals from different departments and assign them to the project. Second, we must look at the database and IT infrastructure that an insurance company currently has to see where it stands. From there, we must identify data requirements and how well the current system responds. We need to identify our starting point, our goal, the distance to reach our goal, and plan to close the gap. Third is how to hire new and keep current people. To maintain people, especially those with true potential, companies need to have a clear plan. Aside from salary and bonuses, companies must provide them with opportunities to learn and climb the career ladder if they choose to stay. This is a must-do for companies to retain talent. It is necessary to accept hiring people from different companies in the same field. Also, hire from related fields such as finance, banking, securities and IT is needed. Once they are in, they can be further trained to fit with the companys operation. Members of South Korean boyband Wanna One pose on the red carpet at the Mnet Asian Music Awards (MAMA) in Seoul on December 10, 2018. (Photo: AFP/Jung Yeon-je) The three fans of K-pop band Wanna One boarded the Seoul-bound Korean Air flight in Hong Kong on Saturday, ignored flight attendants' requests to be seated and instead took pictures of the 11-member band. "The fact is there were passengers who falsely checked in on the flight to see celebrities," a Korean Air official told Reuters. The fans, in their 20s, got refunds on their tickets, excluding some penalties, but the rest of the 360 passengers had to disembark and go through security screening again, delaying the flight by almost an hour, the company said in a statement. The company said all passengers have to go through screening again if some passengers get off voluntarily. The airline will charge an additional 200,000 won (US$177) to passengers who cancel international flights from Jan 1. Liverpool, managed by Jurgen Klopp (left) are one point clear of Manchester City at the top of the Premier League. (AFP/FRANCK FIFE) Liverpool have a one-point lead over City after 17 games following last weekend's victory over Manchester United but the German is in no doubt Pep Guardiola's men are in the driving seat. "Only City can stop City, to be honest," Klopp said to reporters on Tuesday (Dec 18). "We have to play our own game and get as many points as possible." With Liverpool and City playing at different times in recent weeks, one side has known the other's result going into a game. Last weekend City played first but this week it will be Liverpool. The Merseysiders face Wolverhampton on Friday before the champions take on Crystal Palace the following day. Klopp insists the schedule is of little relevance. He said: "I would say we are always motivated at the highest level so where could we put this extra portion, saying if City lost then it makes us more motivated? That doesn't work. We are really concentrating on our situation. "But we are in December. Tottenham, Chelsea, Arsenal - they are so close. I shouldn't think about one opponent or we are the only one that can stop City." Liverpool face City at the Etihad Stadium on Jan 3 but, with three other fixtures first, that is not yet on Klopp's mind. Liverpool learned on Monday they will face Bayern Munich in the last 16 of the Champions League, with Klopp calling it a "big, big challenge". "The good thing is a couple of years ago if we'd have had Bayern Munich it would be like, 'Wow, no chance'. The thing is we have a chance. That is enough to know. "We know it is difficult, they know it is difficult and that's how it should be. Two big games, 100 percent." Klopp also said that right-back Trent Alexander-Arnold is making progress in his recovery from the ankle injury sustained against Napoli last week, and is hopeful the 20-year-old could still play a part in Liverpool's festive programme. "It actually looks surprisingly good," he said. "I think Wolves will still be a bit too early but after that, they told me we can think about him. "So far he didn't train but the pain goes down second by second, which is good. The moment when he can deal with it, he is on the pitch, and the moment he is on the pitch we'll make a decision. But it looks good for Trent." A young entrepreneur in Thanh Hoa at his farm, set up with the help of VBSP Young people in Thanh Hoa often leave their hometown for work opportunities in major urban areas. However, many people under 40 years of age decided to stay at home and set up their own business usually micro-sized household businesses. At least 1,500 family-owned companies have been established by young people, who take up half of the working population in the province. A significant challenge to this entrepreneurial dream is lack of capital. Young people find it difficult to take out loans for their new business, which in turn also limits their ability to hire new employees. It is estimated that 35,000 young people in Thanh Hoa do not have a stable job and 25,000 college graduates cannot find employment yet. To help young people achieve their goal of setting up a business and find a job, VBSP and the Thanh Hoa Province Youth Union have carried out a microfinance programme designed for young entrepreneurs between 2017 and 2020. After a year, this programme has helped 229 young people in the area to find jobs and financed 118 projects with a total of VND10 billion ($434,800). Among the loan recipients is Hoang Anh Son in Thach Thanh district, who received help to launch a small factory with his family. Son specialised in mechanical engineering and has so far hired eight employees for his business. Nguyen Hoai Chau in Hau Loc district also received VND350 million ($15,200) for his food manufacturing firm, securing jobs for seven employees, and Pham Van Chau in Ngoc Lac district spent VND300 million ($13,000) of loans on expanding his husbandry business with six staff members. Most notably, Trung Thanh JSC from Nong Cong district received a preferential loan of VND1 billion ($42,900), which was spent on hiring 40 employees on top of 32 staff members already working at the company. Tran Ngoc Quang in Thach Thanh district expressed his gratitude for the loan package, saying that without the financial assistance, he and his family would not have had enough capital to expand their small farm. Two years after receiving the loan, Quangs farm now incorporates agriculture, husbandry, and forestry and the family hires seven full-time employees for the upkeep. Ta Van Phuong, deputy head of the VBSP transaction office at Thach Thanh district, was elated that VBSP microfinance has helped young entrepreneurs in Thanh Hoa fulfil their dream. Importantly, these young entrepreneurs were able to hire new people to expand their business, helping Thanh Hoa solve its unemployment problem. However, we still need to collaborate with other organisations besides the Youth Union to offer a comprehensive solution for young people in Thanh Hoa, said Phuong. VBSP Hung Yen strives for greater efficiency in microfinance Vietnam Bank for Social Policies (VBSP) in Hung Yen province looks back at its accomplishments in the past 16 years and expects an ever stronger ... VBSP creating jobs for farmers By taking out loans from the Vietnam Bank for Social Policies, various families in rural areas have gained access to credit for business activities. They ... Micro finance transforms the lives of poor Vietnamese women Access to micro finance programmes has helped thousands of women in Vietnam escape poverty and furthered the gender equality agenda. Many farmers in Dak Nong province more than doubled their yield with Nescafe Plan, Photo: Le Toan Grown Respectfully, the new concept that was globally introduced in September this year, encapsulates the work Nescafe has been doing so far, to help farmers grow more and better coffee via the Nescafe Plans three pillars respect for farmers, respect for communities and respect for the planet. Through Grown Respectfully, Nescafe conveys real and inspiring farmer experiences that contribute to the coffee taste of great quality to the consumers. The farming techniques of many coffee producers in Vietnam are outdated and dependent on weather conditions. Also, when crops fail, rural households suffer greatly. Le Hong Thanh, a farmer from the Central Highlighs province of Dak Nong, told VIR that his farming techniques used to be rudimentary and he selected coffee beans based on personal observation, without any form of technology. The quality of our beans was inconsistent and the weather could make or break our crops. Our fertilizer use was also tied to the weather and personal experience, and we knew nothing about sustainability, said Thanh. Everything changed when he signed up for the Nescafe Plan to improve productivity and his familys earnings. Thanh said that the Nescafe Plan provided him with 1,700 coffee plantlets, as well as practical training and technical assistance on good agriculture practices. Nestle also helped with the bean selection and required all farmers to keep a farming diary to check the progress of their crop. Moreover, local farmers were recommended to grow other plants to lower risks and diversify their income. Thanks to better farming practices, my production capacity doubled from three tonnes per hectare in 2014 to seven tonnes this year. The quality of our beans is ensured, and Nescafe Plan also connected us with merchants for market-based trading, said Thanh. He then showed his farming diary, revealing that he invested VND180 million ($7,830) when joining Nescafe Plan. This year, he expected to earn VND220 million ($9,570) of revenue from six tonnes of coffee sold, and the number is forecast to go up in the coming years. I am very optimistic and happy about the results and my future, he said. Lately, Thanh joined the competition within the Vietnamese Coffee Day 2018 promoting sustainable coffee production among local farmers. Though the team from his hometown Dak Nong came second after neighbouring province Lam Dong, he was still happy to participate at the event where local farmers from diverse locations can meet and exchange experiences and improve knowledge about sustainable agricultural practices. For Thanh, the most interesting part was learning another technique from Nescafe agronomists, coffee tasting. With this technique, farmers can identify the coffee beans quality, differentiate and clearly understand the value of different coffee types. The Nescafe Plan was first launched in 2010 in major coffee growing areas globally to bring sustainable values to coffee growers, communities, and the planet. Among the coffee growing countries, the Nescafe Plan in Vietnam have been reaping the greatest success. The local programme, with an aim to perfecting the coffee value chain, also joined a public-private partnership co-operation programme between Nestle Vietnam, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, the Western Highlands Agriculture and Forestry Science Institute, and local agricultural agencies in the Central Highlands provinces. Since 2011, the project has contributed to improving 20,000 hectares of aging coffee area. The company has collected 25-30 per cent of the Vietnamese coffee output for its production needs and for export, and distributed more than 27 million quality coffee plantlets. In addition, Nescafe Plan has provided 200,000 farmer training events on sustainable farming, helping over 21,000 Vietnamese farmers to achieve 4C international certification and increasing the income of farmers using Nescafe Plan techniques and best practices by 30 per cent. The Nescafe Plan also helps protect the natural environment through reducing water usage by 40 per cent and reducing fertilizer and pesticide use by over 20 per cent. Last July, Nestle also put into operation two production lines of Nescafe Dolce Gusto capsules, with the initial capacity of about 2,500 tonnes per year. This production line uses 100 per cent high-quality coffee beans sourced from Vietnam and meets the needs of Vietnam and 14 different export markets around the world. Previously, Nestle Vietnam brought to life Asias largest water-based decaffeinated coffee plant in Vietnam and developed the Nescafe brand from Vietnamese coffee to boost Vietnamese coffee exports. All Nescafe coffee products use 100 per cent Vietnamese coffee holding the 4C international certificate. The CPTPP deal means Vietnam will have greater access to 10 other major economies, Photo: Le Toan According to the World Banks freshly-updated survey on key impacts of the CPTPP on the Vietnamese economy, the country will be one of the top beneficiaries from the deal following its entry into force on December 31, 2018. Based on simulated results, the bank stated that in terms of output, by 2030 Vietnams GDP is estimated to be 1.1 per cent higher, compared with 0.4 per cent higher under the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), and 3.6 per cent higher under the TPP-12 (which included the US) with respect to baseline economic conditions. Assuming a modest boost to productivity, the estimated increase of GDP would amount to 3.5 per cent from the CPTPP, compared with 6.6 per cent for the TPP-12 and 1 per cent from the RCEP, the survey said. As for exports and imports, under the deal, Vietnams exports are projected to grow by 4.2 per cent, and imports by 5.3 per cent, with larger increases of 6.9 and 7.6 per cent, respectively, assuming productivity gains. In addition, exports from Vietnam will also benefit from the deal. The average trade-weighted tariffs faced by Vietnamese exporters to CPTPP markets will fall from 1.7 to 0.2 per cent. Non-tariff measures faced by Vietnam in CPTPP markets are expected to decline, on average, 3.6 percentage points in ad-valorem tariff-equivalent terms. Tran Toan Thang, head of the World Economic Board under the National Centre of Socioeconomic Information and Forecast, told last weeks seminar on Vietnams economic outlook that from 2019 the country will enjoy significant benefits via the CPTPP. The deal will add $1.7 billion per year to Vietnam, as opposed to $2.7 billion for the TPP-12, Thang said. Vietnamese export turnover will also involve another $4.09 billion per year, while import turnover will also add $4.93 billion. According to the World Bank, the largest growth in output through the agreement is estimated to be in food, beverage, and tobacco; clothing and leather; and textiles, along with more modest growth in several manufacturing sub-sectors. Export growth is expected to be strongest in food, beverage, and tobacco; clothing and leather; chemical, leather, and plastic products; transport equipment; and machinery and other equipment. Imports are expected to grow in all sectors. Ngo Tuan Anh from the Economics Faculty of the National Economics University said that based on his studies, garments and textiles, footwear, and aquatic products are now largely exported to Canada, Chile, and Australia, which are members of the CPTPP, and will continue being boosted in these markets upon the deals entry into force. Meanwhile, telephones and computers will have more opportunities to be exported to Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Mexico, and New Zealand, Tuan Anh said. Recently, HSBC released a comprehensive survey of global businesses, including 200 from Vietnam, showing that 63 per cent of enterprises in Vietnam believe the CPTPP will have a positive impact on their business. HSBC Vietnams CEO Pham Hong Hai said that with the US not present in the CPTPP, Vietnams benefits may be less than originally forecast in the former TPP set-up. For example, GDP will only move up 1.32 per cent instead of 6.7 per cent and exports will increase by 4 per cent instead of 15 per cent. However, industries like garments and textiles, leather footwear, and labour-intensive ones will still benefit. Vietnam will be able to take advantage from access to member markets, especially those on the other side of the Pacific, such as Canada and Mexico, Hai said. According to Djoann Fal, co-founder and CEO of GetLinks, Vietnam, an active country working on modernisation and Industry 4.0, is in huge need of high-tech labour force which the company can provide. Djoann added that Vietnam has a strong community of enterprises and startups and is also home for many multinational groups which are always in need of high-tech labour force. We will bring our wealth of experience and knowledge on providing qualified high-tech labour force to both domestic enterprises and international companies in Vietnam, he said. Djoann Fal, CEO of GetLinks, sees great opportunities in Vietnam Apart from providing high-tech labour force, GetLinks will also connect Vietnam based and foreign universities to ensure a supply of graduate students and will also organise training courses for students before introducing them to recruiters. GetLinks, the platform and ecosystem that connects tech talents with opportunities across Asia, has had a massive year in 2018 when it successfully secured investment from Australias SEEK Group and Alibaba Hong Kong Entrepreneur Fund. The Thailand-based tech recruitment service currently has more than 500,000 profiles of developers, designers, and digital marketers on its platform and caters to over 3,000 companies operating in six major tech hubs in Asia, including Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, Hong Kong, India, and South Korea. Founded in 2015, GetLinks was developed with a vision to redefine the future of work, by creating an adaptive work community. It has been focusing on creating an online adaptive talent platform that upskills employees while providing them opportunities with leading tech companies across Asia. During its three years of operation, GetLinks has established a community of talents across the tech world, ranging from developers, designers, and digital marketers to operation managers and sales leaders. Its priority at the moment is scaling up in existing markets by acquiring candidates through a series of networking activities, including organising events, producing content, as well as supporting digital transformation and talent mobility. Ultimately, we want to build an adaptive talent workforce, and encourage the worlds best to help build a Silicon Valley in Asia, continued Djoann. To date, GetLinks has been involved in over 130 events, reaching out to over 200,000 attendees region-wide, including Saigon Tech Startup Fest held at the Independence Palace in March 2016, endorsed by the Ministry of Science and Technology of Vietnam. Some of the companies who have used GetLinks services include giant tech brands such as Alibaba Group, Traveloka, Baidu, Grab, Google, Line, Agoda, SingTel, Accenture, and Garena. Ambassador Bruno Angelet, head of the European Union Delegation to Vietnam Vietnam has been very successful in attracting foreign direct investment (FDI), which has annually increased by almost 1,000 per cent over the last 10 years. FDI has been a major driver of Vietnams economic development and has contributed to the impressive growth rates averaging at 6.5-7 per cent over the past decade. It has created resources for the government and jobs for the people. With its population of almost 100 million, the Vietnamese market is extremely attractive for investors. In addition, a network of free trade agreements (FTAs) concluded by Vietnam offers competitive access to other markets. These are the factors that can make the country an important destination for investment in the region. However, after 30 years of this rapid economic development, Vietnam needs better investment that will leave more value in the country, create higher skilled jobs, and that would support the governments policy of sustainable development respecting the environment and society. The next generation of FDI is needed for Vietnam to continue its impressive economic development path and upgrade the profile of its economy. STRENGTH OF EUROPEAN INVESTMENT This is exactly what European investment can bring to Vietnam: it can offer funds in hi-tech, environmentally friendly, and less energy-consuming sectors. European business does not only bring technology and quality jobs but also responsible business practices. This quality European investment can create useful links with local companies and integrate them into the global value chain. Currently, European investment in Vietnam does not yet meet its full potential. Over the past decade, investment from the EU accounted for $23.9 billion in capital and 2,133 in the number of projects. The EUs ranking in comparison with other important FDI partners of Vietnam during the past 10 years varied from third to sixth position. Up to now, EU investment in Vietnam has concentrated mainly in industrial processing and manufacturing, accounting for 35 per cent of the $23.9 billion. Electricity generation is also an important sector attracting up to 18 per cent of its capital. The EUs presence in other economic sectors remains modest compared to South Korea or Japan, and extremely small compared to its potential. Although the EU has been the biggest non-Asian FDI partner of Vietnam, its ranking in the list of Vietnams FDI partners, on a cumulative basis since 1988, is at fifth position after South Korea, Japan, Singapore, and even Taiwan (China). In 2017 alone, the EU ranked fourth with $915 million in committed FDI. NEW DRIVER The EU and Vietnam have just concluded an ambitious 21st century trade deal: the EU-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement (EVFTA) and Investment Protection Agreement (IPA) and look forward to signing both agreements shortly. The FTA covers trade in goods and services, government procurement, and allows a high level of protection of intellectual property rights (IPR). The FTA will undoubtedly create new opportunities for our investors. EU investors will benefit not only from increased market access, but also from the new investment protection provisions that are now an integral part of the EUs trade policy. Vietnam and the EU have agreed to high-level protection standards and to a reformed dispute resolution mechanism. The existing Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs) in force between Vietnam and EU member states will be replaced by the IPA once it enters into force. The agreement includes key protection standards, including: -Non-discrimination; -Protection against expropriation without prompt and adequate compensation; -Possibility to transfer and repatriate funds relating to an investment; -Fair and equitable treatment and physical security. While ensuring a high level of investment protection for funders, it preserves the EUs and Vietnams right to regulate their policies to pursue legitimate public policy objectives. The agreement sets up a permanent dispute resolution system under which disagreements about the respect of one of the investment protection provisions in the IPA can be submitted to a standing and fully independent investment tribunal system. RECOMMENDATIONS Until now Vietnams FDI attraction policy relied heavily on tax breaks, concessional rates, and import duty exemptions. Many investors have come to Vietnam because of the incentives and low labour costs. Attracting innovative, technologically-advanced FDI requires a more sophisticated policy and tools. Therefore, Vietnam should continue working towards removing existing trade and investment barriers and improving the business climate. In this context, transparency is key for investors to know the regulations and procedures to follow. A fair, transparent, stable, and predictable business climate tops EU businesses priorities when they mull on investment plans. It is also vital that Vietnam guarantees a stable legal framework for investors to operate and a functioning enforcement system. We urge Vietnam to improve the recognition and enforcement of foreign arbitral awards and to set up a grievance system for financiers to avoid disputes. Vietnam is also strongly encouraged to accede to the ICSID (International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes) Convention. Importantly, EU investment also requires highly-skilled workers. This offers Vietnam an excellent chance of job creation with secure income, international-standard working environment, acquiring management skills and technical knowledge, and transfer of technologies. Nevertheless, accompanying this opportunity is a challenge that the educational system of Vietnam must cope with to satisfy its needs. Vietnam can be proud of its hardworking labour force and the high literacy rate, however, working with European companies require better preparation, more practical and technical knowledge, and experience. Last but not least, the protection of IPRs plays a crucial role in the decision-making process of an investment project from the European perspective. About 39 per cent of total economic activity in the EU worth some 4.7 trillion ($5.35 trillion) is generated annually by IPR-intensive industries, and 26 per cent of all employment in the EU (56 million jobs) is provided directly by these industries while a further 9 per cent of jobs in the EU stems indirectly from IPR-intensive industries. Furthermore, IPR-intensive industries account for about 90 per cent of EU exports. These facts should not be underestimated. The existence and proper enforcement of IPR protection laws is indispensable for attracting FDI from Europe. The EVFTA will address some of the above issues. It will strengthen transparency about regulations in Vietnam. It will also increase IPR protection beyond the standards of the World Trade Organization (WTO): EU innovations, artworks, and brands will be better protected against being unlawfully copied, including through stronger enforcement provisions. But most importantly, the EVFTA will create a stable legal framework for trade and investment relations between the EU and Vietnam that will enable us to co-operate and achieve a win-win solution. Siti Aisyah is one of two women accused of murdering Kim Jong Nam by smearing nerve agent VX on his face at Kuala Lumpur airport AFP/Mohd RASFAN Siti Aisyah from Indonesia and Doan Thi Huong from Vietnam have been on trial for over a year, accused of murdering Kim Jong Nam by smearing nerve agent VX on his face at Kuala Lumpur airport. The brazen assassination in February last year shocked the world but the women have denied murder, saying they believed they were taking part in a prank and were tricked by North Korean agents. The women, in their 20s, went on trial together in October 2017 but proceedings have moved slowly due to the large numbers of witnesses and the fact hearings are held infrequently. The defence stage of Aisyah's trial had originally been due to begin in November but was delayed to January after her main lawyer fell ill. And on Tuesday proceedings in Aisyah's case were temporarily halted when the High Court refused to grant her lawyers access to some witness statements, and they decided to appeal. Huong's trial is due to resume in March and the court will rule Friday whether it will go ahead, or be put on hold with Aisyah's. The prosecution stage of the trial, during which the women appeared for hearings together, wrapped up in August. The defence parts of their trials will be held separately. Aisyah's lawyer Gooi Soon Seng said the witness statements were "essential" for the defence and he would appeal the ruling - a process that could take months. "Without (the statements) there would be a real miscarriage of justice. It would compromise our case," he told reporters at the court in Shah Alam, outside Kuala Lumpur. The seven statements are from witnesses including people who drove Kim Jong Nam around in Malaysia and acquaintances of Aisyah. Prosecutors have refused to hand them over, arguing they should not be made public. Under current laws, the women will be sentenced to death by hanging if convicted of murdering the estranged relative of the North's leader, Kim Jong Un. Malaysia's new government, which took power in May, has vowed to abolish capital punishment for all crimes, although parliament still needs to vote on the change. Major leaders across Asia and the world mostly voiced approval for Tuesday's agreement between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to push toward ending Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program, even as South Korea and others adopted a more cautious stance. South Korean President Moon Jae-in said he told Trump in a phone call that the Singapore summit pact laid down a "big framework" for peace on the Korean peninsula and across the globe. WATCH: S. Koreans React with Joy, Concern to summit But Seoul's presidential office said it was still trying to understand Trump's decision to end joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises, long an irritant to North Korea. Trump announced at a news conference he was terminating the war games and said it would "save us a tremendous amount of money." But the Seoul-Washington drills were not mentioned in the document that Trump and Kim signed. The next set of exercises were set for August, but Seoul's Defense Ministry said, "At this current point, there is a need to discern the exact meaning and intent of President Trump's comments," adding that there had been no discussions with Washington about the war games. Trump labeled them as "inappropriate" as North Korea moves toward denuclearization. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said, "The United States and North Korea have been in a state of antagonism for more than half a century. Today, that the two countries' highest leaders can sit together and have equal talks has important and positive meaning, and is creating a new history." Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe welcomed Kim's approval of a commitment to complete denuclearization. The Japanese leader thanked Trump for raising the issue of North Korea's abduction of Japanese nationals with Kim and said that "Japan will deal firmly with North Korea face-to-face" on the issue. European reactions Russia's Foreign Ministry said the "normalization of American-North Korean relations... is an integral part" of resolving "the problems of the Korean peninsula, including the nuclear one." But Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the foreign affairs committee in the upper house of the Russian parliament said that Trump's claim that denuclearization of North Korea will start soon is "more of a wish than a fact." European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said, "This summit was a crucial and necessary step to build upon the positive developments achieved in inter-Korean relations." She said the ultimate goal remains the same: "complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization." She said the summit statement "gives a clear signal that this goal can be achieved." British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson called the Trump-Kim summit "an important step towards the stability of a region vital to global economic growth." Johnson said Kim's pledge of denuclearization of the Korean peninsula is a signal that he "may have finally heeded the message that only a change of course can bring a secure and prosperous future to the people of North Korea. There is much work still to be done, and we hope Kim continues to negotiate in good faith towards complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization." The head of the United Nations watchdog agency, director general Yukiya Amano, said his agency "stands ready to undertake any verification (of denuclearization) activities" in North Korea as the Kim regime winds down its weapons program. Iran appeared to be alone in questioning the validity of the signed Trump-Kim pact, with a Tehran spokesman claiming that Trump could nullify any agreement. "We are facing a man who revokes his signature while abroad," the semi-official Fars news agency quoted Mohammad Bagher as saying, referring to Trump's renunciation of a communique at last weekend's G-7 economic summit after he had left the gathering of world leaders in Canada. The economic and political crisis in Venezuela hasn't stop people from helping each other during this holiday season. An initiative created by a group of friends has helped - for more than 13 years - Venezuelan families providing food, clothes, toys and most importantly joy. A commission in Zimbabwe says the army was responsible for the killing of six people in post-election violence but it absolved the government of President Emmerson Mnangagwa for deploying the troops. As Columbus Mavhunga in Harare reports, one of the survivors welcomes the commission's recommendation for compensation. A federal judge in Washington Tuesday postponed sentencing for President Donald Trumps former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, but not before giving him a scolding (tongue lashing) over his crime. Flynn pleaded guilty last year to lying to investigators with the Russia probe led by special counsel Robert Mueller. Flynn is being given more time to cooperate, as we hear from VOA National correspondent Jim Malone in Washington. Syrian Kurdish allies of the United States reacted with alarm to Wednesday's surprise announcement by President Donald Trump on Twitter that all American forces have begun withdrawing from Syria. A rapid withdrawal, they say, will leave them vulnerable to an offensive Turkey has threatened to launch against them east of the Euphrates river and would likely lead to a peeling away of Arab fighters aligned with them who are being courted by Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad. The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces said in a statement Thursday that a U.S. pullout would have a negative effect on the fight against Islamic State militants and could allow the group to rebuild itself. Russia welcomed the announcement Wednesday, saying the decision creates opportunities for a political solution to the crisis there. The Trump administration has not detailed any withdrawal plan, or explained how the United States will remain engaged in the conflict after its troops leave. But it could have immediate consequences for the tense relations between Kurdish and Turkish troops in the region. Turkey-Kurd Tensions On Monday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he was ready to launch a new cross-border military operation at any moment against the Kurdish Peoples' Protection Units, or YPG, which have been shielded from Turkey by the U.S. military presence. Speaking at a rally earlier this week, the Turkish leader claimed he had won concessions from Washington during a lengthy phone conversation with Trump about a new offensive against the U.S.-allied YPG. Ankara sees the YPG as an affiliate of Kurdish militants in Turkey. Earlier on Wednesday at a regular press briefing, Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called the U.S. military presence in northern Syria "illegal" and said it was an obstacle to finding a political solution to the Syria conflict. "From being a factor in the fight against terrorism, the illegal American presence in Syria is becoming a dangerous obstacle to the path to a settlement," she was quoted by Russian media outlets as saying. Impact on US allies Hours later, the Wall Street Journal first reported the U.S. leader was weighing whether to order an immediate withdrawal of about 2,000 U.S. soldiers stationed in northern Syria, where they have been fighting jointly with the Syrian Kurds against the Islamic State group as part of an international anti-terror coalition that includes European powers Britain and France. Kurdish commanders in northern Syria say they still hold out hopes that the U.S. president might reverse his decision. "We are being told that the Pentagon is pushing back which is why we are being careful in what we are saying now," said one YPG commander. "But if there isn't change of heart, this will be green-light for Turkey to attack," he added. British officials say although they had been readied by Washington for a possible Syria-related announcement but that Trump's tweet took them by surprise. Tobias Ellwood, a defense minister said he "strongly disagrees" with Trump's assessment of IS's defeat. He said the terror group "has morphed into other forms of extremism and the threat is very much alive." British officials say they have no immediate plans to follow suit to withdraw from the conflict a position echoed by French officials. French president Emmanuel Macron believed he had only recently convinced Trump to keep U.S. troops in Syria as a bulwark against any possible IS resurgence. He pointed to a United Nations report in August that estimated IS still had up to 30,000 fighters in Iraq and Syria. Recent US assurances on Syria European officials say they had been lulled by remarks made by just a few days ago by Brett McGurk, Trump's special presidential envoy for the global coalition to defeat IS, who said: "Nobody is saying that [IS fighters] are going to disappear. Nobody is that naive. So we want to stay on the ground and make sure that stability can be maintained in these areas." Syrian Kurdish commanders say they had been given assurances by their American partners of a continued U.S. military presence at least until IS couldn't mount any kind of resurgence and there is greater stability in northern Syria. U.S. forces have been maintaining patrols around potential flash-points between Turkish and YPG units close to the town of Manbij and along the Syria-Turkey border to deter any clashes. Trump's tweet triggered strong criticism from several U.S. analysts who are focused on the long-running Syria conflict, who say that an American withdrawal from Syria risks allowing IS the opportunity to re-group and will strengthen Assad. "The Trump administration's repeatedly stated primary goal in Syria has been the enduring defeat of ISIS," says Charles Lister, an analyst at the Middle East Institute, a Washington-based think tank. "We're arguably years from achieving that. To make that fact as clear as day, ISIS claimed responsibility for an attack in Raqqa only 10 minutes before Trump's mission-accomplished tweet. That's a city the U.S. liberated and in which U.S. troops and USAID and State personnel are deployed in to this day," he said. Lister added: "Geopolitically, this is not just a dream scenario for ISIS, but also for Russia, Iran and the Assad regime, all of whom stand to benefit substantially from a U.S. withdrawal from Syria." Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a former U.S. ambassador, tweeted in response to Trump's: "One can only hope any U.S. military withdrawal from Syria would not be unconditional. It would be strategically and morally wrong to leave Syrian Kurds to their fate vs Turkey. Same holds for leaving Syrian people to face their government, Iran, and Russia." An Arizona man convicted of helping a New Yorker join the Islamic State group in Syria was sentenced to 12 years in prison Tuesday by a judge who said he was not the typical "true believer'' terrorism defendant. Ahmed Mohammed el-Gammal, 48, a suburban Phoenix man who sold car parts, was sentenced by Judge Edgardo Ramos in Manhattan federal court. Ramos said the "consequences of Mr. el-Gammal's conduct were tragic indeed'' because the 24-year-old student he helped reach Syria in 2015 was eventually killed in combat. The trial was the first Islamic State group-related prosecution to occur in Manhattan federal court. El-Gammal was convicted last year for helping Samy el-Goarany, who flew to Turkey in January 2015, and made his way to Syria. El-Gammal was arrested in August 2015, months before el-Goarany's brother was informed that el-Goarany, a Baruch College student, was killed fighting for the Islamic State group. During el-Gammal's trial, defense lawyers argued that el-Goarany would have reached Syria anyway as he looked for meaning in life to erase his own feelings of inadequacy. They noted that others, including relatives, were unable to stop him from joining the Islamic State group. When he spoke before the sentence was announced, el-Gammal told the judge that he is a "proud American.'' "I love this country,'' he said repeatedly. "I ask for forgiveness and mercy.'' Prosecutors said el-Gammal and el-Goarany communicated extensively on the internet in the months before the student flew to Turkey and made his way to Syria days later to begin his military training. Ramos said el-Gammal was not the "typical terrorism suspect ... the type of true believer'' and he doubts he'll commit another crime. He also said there was no question that el-Goarany was "very set on traveling to Syria,'' with or without el-Gammal's help. In recent years, the tech industry has looked to China as a key partner to help build and sell cutting-edge devices and services. But rising tensions between Washington and Beijing have Silicon Valley worried it will be caught in the middle of a growing trade war. Over the summer, President Donald Trump slapped $250 million of tariffs on Chinese goods sold in the U.S. and claimed that China offers U.S. businesses an uneven playing field as Beijing seeks to make China into a tech super power. The detention in Canada earlier this month of a Huawei executive for allegedly breaking U.S. sanctions on Iran has made tech executives feel even more vulnerable. China, for its part, denies the U.S. claims and has taken steps to pursue a formal inquiry about the tariffs at the World Trade Organization. A delicate line For the tech industry, the increasing tensions come as it was already walking a delicate line. Tech executives complain about intellectual property theft in China and what they see as unfair conditions for doing business. But the two regions have strengthened their bonds through investment, trade and partnerships in areas such as artificial intelligence, robotics and autonomous cars. The tensions have left tech executives questioning what they can share about their work, said Stanley Kwong, adjunct professor at the University of San Francisco. All of these people are worried if they traveled back and forth, they might be arrested because of the IP, something they know and they talk about in both China, and in the USA, he said. Silicon Valley firms have complained the relationship isnt as reciprocal as it needs to be, said Sean Randolph, senior director of the Bay Area Council Economic Institute. The relationship, from some tech firms point of view, is about the extraction of technologies involuntarily from foreign companies to accelerate China's technology leadership, he said. Critical technologies Chinese money that has helped fuel the current tech boom in Silicon Valley may start drying up. One reason a new U.S. law, the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act (FIRRMA), beefed up oversight of foreign investment and acquisitions of critical technology that are deemed strategically important. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. has expanded powers to block foreign purchases of U.S. firms. Silicon Valley people have been optimistic for a long time, said Xiaohua Yang, professor of international business at the University of San Francisco. But now, they have begun to worry about the lack of Chinese investment coming to support Silicon Valley technology development. Lawmakers are concerned that U.S. tech companies, as they pursue the Chinese market or seek Chinese investment, might hand over core technology to the Chinese government, a competitor and sometime adversary on the global stage. The tech industry waits, as what constitutes critical technologies under FIRRMA is still being developed. For U.S. entrepreneurs, the changing climate may mean they will become more cautious, said Kwong, who advises startups. If you want to do business in China, if you're doing consumer products, I say, that's probably fine, he said. But let's presume you're doing AI. You better find out exactly what you're doing. You can have AI in a coffee machine, and I don't think that's much to do with defense. If you're doing facial recognition that may be something that's going to have a major problem. Randolph said that the tech industry has long had an open market, open platform approach, with the idea that anyone can come and we're moving innovation forward globally. But if tensions between Washington and Beijing continue to escalate, experts say, the very openness of Silicon Valley may be a casualty even if tech firms stand to benefit if China becomes more open for doing business. When U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton rolled out the United States new Africa strategy last week, he used the occasion to identify China as an imminent threat to both American and African interests. At different points in prepared remarks delivered at the Heritage Foundation, Bolton characterized Chinas presence in Africa as predatory, opportunistic and power-hungry. He focused on Chinese involvement in Djibouti, where Beijing has built its first overseas military base, and Zambia, where rumors have swirled since September that unsustainable debt will force the mineral-rich country to hand its state-owned power company, ZESCO, over to China. Both Zambian and Chinese officials have denied a takeover, yet Bolton was adamant that African nations will pay dearly for Beijings ambitions, if the United States doesnt step up. But U.S. jabs are unlikely to change Sino-Africa dynamics, which have been developing for more than a half century, Yun Sun, the director of the China program and co-director of the East Asia program at the Stimson Center, told VOA. US concerns Bolton is just the latest U.S. official to ring alarm bells about Chinas presence in Africa. Last month, two members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sens. Marco Rubio and Chris Coons, wrote a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Secretary of Defense James Mattis expressing concerns that China might take over a strategic shipping container terminal in Djibouti. Gen. Thomas D. Waldhauser, the commander of United States Africa Command, first raised concerns about the terminal in statements to the Senate Armed Services Committee in March. But U.S. grievances havent yet shaped how China does business with Africa, Sun said. When the Chinese look at their lending practices in Africa, what they care more about is the reaction within the recipient countries, she said. African nations concerns might differ from Washingtons. And as long as countries like Zambia are willing to work with China, Sun said, U.S. grievances arent likely to sway Beijings decision-making. The Chinese reaction will be that, If you dont like what we do, why dont you offer then an alternative? Lending traps Sun said its unlikely China has intentionally pushed African nations into debt distress. Although the Chinese government is an authoritarian government, it doesnt mean that their investment does not require any return, Sun said. Beijing has put tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer money and foreign reserves on the line for African infrastructure projects, and China doesnt want to find itself in lending traps any more than African countries want to be in debt traps, Sun added. If you owe the bank $1 million, you are in trouble; but if you owe the bank $1 billion, the bank is in trouble, Sun said. I think debt trap and lending trap are two sides of the same coin. Beijing also has a track record of forgiving debt, Sun said, and adjusting terms to make defaulting less likely. At this years Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, for example, Chinese President Xi Jinping struck a deal with Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed to double the payback timetable for the multi-billion dollar loan used to construct a railway from Addis Ababa, the capital, to neighboring Djibouti. Punching bag The United States isnt alone in its criticism of China. In campaign speeches, opposition parties across Africa often point to the problems ruling parties alliances with Beijing have caused in their countries. That was true in Zambias general elections in 2008 and 2011, Sun said. But the concerns have a way of fading when opposition parties assume power. Once they take over government, Sun said, they discover working with China is non-negotiable. China is not a dispensable partner in the process, Sun said. But criticisms of Beijing continue to punctuate campaign rallying cries, not only across Africa but also in Southeast Asia and, in the 2016 general election, in the United States. I think the Chinese are used to the fact that, during political transitions, China will be used as a punching bag, Sun said. But for resource-strapped countries looking to develop much-needed infrastructure projects, the Chinese model hasnt lost any of its luster. Beijing offers easy cash and requires little in the way of governance or transparency. Loans are easy to adopt, and the implications of financing dont come to fruition until much later. In some cases, Chinese money is the only financing African nations have available. African choices Beijings footprint in Zambia, and most other African countries, cant be disputed, Sun said. African leaders know the money Chinese lends isnt free, Sun said. But that doesnt mean theyll have the foresight or political will to navigate both short- and long-term risks. Some deals may well compromise countries sovereignty, even if that isnt Beijings aim. I think theres also a key question in terms of whether the African governments are making the right choices, Sun said. And Sino-Africa relations have faced various headwinds in recent months. Ongoing investigations into corruption in Kenya have led to arrests of both Kenyan and Chinese officials. Allegations of Chinese hacking at the African Union headquarters put a pall over what was billed as a gift of goodwill to the continent. And last week, Zambian President Edgar Lungu likened Chinese to cockroaches resilient but unavoidable in off-the-cuff comments at a dinner, the Lusaka Times reported. Despite these setbacks, sharp rhetoric from the U.S. isnt likely to sway dynamics in Zambia and beyond, Sun said. For real influence, the West should not just lobby African governments to see Chinese loans as evil gifts, but provide appealing alternatives, she added. 2018 has been a chaotic year at the U.S.-Mexico border, where desperation collided with politics, and children bore the brunt of a debated threat - all of this in the shadow of the still unfunded border wall. The year did not begin with "a national emergency," at the border, as President Donald Trump claimed or as his critics prefer, a manufactured crisis. In January's State of the Union speech, Trump outlined his four-pillar immigration plan: a path to citizenship for young people brought to the U.S. as children, the abolishment of the diversity visa lottery, an end to chain migration and...construction of a wall on the southern border. "These four pillars represent a down-the-middle compromise, and one that will create a safe, modern, and lawful immigration system," Trump said. But the Republican-controlled Congress did not agree, failing to pass any immigration legislation. In the 2018 omnibus budget, Congress allotted only $1.375 billion for border security, none of which included construction of a border wall. "Repairs, drones and pedestrian fencing, but no wall construction," Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), lamented in a statement.Like Trump and his supporters, FAIR takes a hard-line position on immigration. "I am considering a veto," Trump tweeted a day after Congress passed the budget, in part because "the BORDER WALL, which is desperately needed for our National Defense, is not fully funded." The wall had been Trump's signature promise when he ran for president. His campaign rallies were often punctuated with chants to "build the wall." Trump signed the budget bill on March 23 but vowed to never do it again. Ten days later on April 1, he tweeted for the first time about the migrant caravan. Migrant caravan "Getting more dangerous. 'Caravans' coming," the president tweeted. Americans were largely unaware that some 1,000 migrants were walking toward the U.S. border. Thegroup had left Tapachula, Chiapas, near the Guatemalan border on March 25. It wasn't the first caravan. "These Stations of the Cross' migrant caravans have been held in southern Mexico for at least the last five years," the Associated Press reported. But this one still weeks away from the U.S.generated new interest. On April 4, Trump called up the National Guard, "to protect our country and stop the stream of illegal immigration." On April 6, he issued an executive order calling for an end to catch and release, an Obama-era policy that released asylum seekers into the U.S. usually with ankle bracelets to assure their appearance in immigration court. Family separation When the migrants crossed the U.S.-Mexico border in May, they were put into detention under a policy announced April 6 by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Under the 'Zero Tolerance' Policy, criminal charges were filed against anyone who crossed the border illegally. Since children could not by law be detained with their parents for more than 20 days, thousands were taken from their parents and placed in their own detention centers. The flow of separated children soon outpaced the government's capacity to hold them. In mid-June, the Department of Health and Human Services opened a tent city near Tornillo, Texas, to hold 1,200 children. It was later expanded to house 2,500. Reports of mistreatment and leaked audio of crying children outraged Americans. Separation was becoming a political crisis for the president when he signed an executive order ending it on June 20. Six days later, a federal court ordered the children be reunited with their parents. But multiple federal agencies had kept poor track of the children numbered at 2,654 in later court filings and missed several deadlines to return them. Four months later, 245 children had yet to be reunited with their parents, court documents showed. Trump's order also called for families to be detained as a unit while their cases proceeded through the courts. But a federal court denied permission. Unable to separate families or detain them together, immigration authorities fell back on catch and release. More caravans Less than a month before the midterm elections, new caravans were reported heading toward the U.S. border. "Great midterm issue for Republicans," Trump tweeted. In the weeks before the Nov. 6 midterms, he warned repeatedly at his rallies and on Twitters about an "assault on our country" and urged the caravans to "TURN AROUND." At the president's request, the Pentagon sent 5,200 active troops to join the 2,000 National Guard members already at the border in late October. Like the Guard, the troops could not legally do police work and were confined to support duties such as stringing concertina wire in advance of the caravan's arrival, still weeks away. After the election, the president issued a proclamation that anyone who entered the U.S. illegally would not be eligible for asylum. The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups immediately sued, arguing U.S. law guarantees the right to request asylum no matter how immigrants get into the country. A federal judge and court of appeals agreed. The government appealed to the Supreme Court in December. Hundreds of migrants who arrived in Tijuana in mid-November were also blocked when they tried to enter legally at ports of entry. U.S. Customs and Border Patrol admitted only a few migrants each day, claiming they had limited capacity. Waiting times extended into weeks. In late November, tensions boiled over. Migrants launched projectiles at border guards, who responded with tear gas. A photograph of a 39-year-old woman from Honduras fleeing the tear gas with her two children went viral. Up against the wall again At year's end, the wall was back. Trump wanted $5 billion in funding for it. When Democratic congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer demurred during an Oval Office meeting in mid-December, he vowed to shut down the government. "I am proud to shut down the government for border security," Trump declared, recalling his vow never to sign a budget that did not include the wall. Bangladesh's main opposition alliance has written to the Election Commission seeking action to end what it says are violent attacks against its workers by ruling party activists and the arrests of candidates on trumped up charges. At least 14 candidates in the Dec. 30 election under the National Unity Front alliance have been arrested in "fictitious cases" in recent weeks, the alliance said in a letter dated Tuesday, a copy of which was seen by Reuters. Some 1,500 opposition workers have suffered injuries since Dec. 2, an alliance spokesman said separately. Elections in Bangladesh are often marred by violent clashes, but the opposition alliance says the ruling party is trying to cripple its campaign by locking up, threatening and attacking its workers. "We demand immediate release of these candidates on bail and also request issuance of instructions that no further candidates be arrested with an intention to harass," the alliance said, also accusing the police of aiding the attacks, often dressed in plainclothes. "The Higher Court must issue directives on forbidding any law enforcers performing duties in civil dress," it said. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's Awami League, which is seeking a third straight term in power, has denied the allegations. Police spokesman Sohel Rana said people could file complaints and "we will look into the allegation and take proper action." Chief Election Commissioner KM Nurul Huda did not respond to calls requesting comment. 'No level-playing field at all' The opposition letter comes after Mahbub Talukdar, one of the five commissioners that make up Bangladesh's Election Commission, said there was "no level-playing field at all" between contesting parties. His comments were dismissed as "untrue" by Huda. Hasina's government, while credited for improving Bangladesh's economy, has been criticized by rights groups for suppressing dissent and sweeping arrests of opposition workers. Violent clashes have broken out across the country since campaigning began last week, and two Awami League workers have also died. More than 20,000 paramilitary troops have been deployed and the army is scheduled to be deployed on Dec 24. Brazil's far-right President-elect Jair Bolsonaro said on Tuesday that he would take all action "within the rule of law and democracy" to oppose the governments of Venezuela and Cuba. Bolsonaro, who takes power Jan. 1, is a fervent anti-communist who has praised his country's 1964-1985 military regime. He frequently targets Venezuela and Cuba for verbal attacks, a drastic change from Brazil's governments under the leftist Workers Party that ruled from 2003 to 2016 and had warm relations with those regimes. Brazil's incoming president did not provide any details during the Facebook live video when he made his most recent comments on Venezuela and Cuba. The United States is counting on Brazil under Bolsonaro to be a strategic ally. In late November, U.S. President Donald Trump's national security adviser John Bolton met Bolsonaro in his Rio de Janeiro home to help cement ties. Bolton said Bolsonaro's election was a "historic opportunity" for Brazil and the United States to work together on security, economics and other issues. Bolton hailed Bolsonaro's election as a positive sign that Brazil would support U.S. pressure on Venezuela's left-wing government of Nicolas Maduro, which he describes as part of "the troika of tyranny" in the Americas, alongside Cuba and Nicaragua. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says his government is trying to get more information about a third Canadian citizen detained in China. Two others were taken into custody shortly after Canadian police arrested a top Chinese telecom executive on a U.S. warrant Dec. 1. Meng Wanzhou is accused of evading U.S. sanctions against Iran. Trudeau said during a news conference Wednesday he does not believe the third detention of a Canadian has any ties to the other cases, calling it "a very separate case." He was asked why his government appears not to be doing more to get the Canadians freed. "Canadians understand that even though political posturing might be satisfactory in the short term to make yourself feel like you're stomping on a table and doing something significant, it may not directly contribute to the outcome we all want," he said. Although Canadian officials have not directly tied the detentions in China to Meng's arrest, former Canadian ambassador to China, David Mulroney, finds that unlikely. "One detention is bad enough. Two is terrible. Three underlines how ruthless China can be. It serves as a reminder for people that China is a detention state," he said. Along with the third still-unidentified Canadian, former diplomat Michael Kovrig and business consultant Michael Spavor are also being detained. The Chinese foreign ministry said they are accused of endangering China's national security. It has given no other information. Meng Wanzhou is the chief financial officer of Chinese telecom giant Huawei Technologies, one of the world's biggest manufacturers of mobile phones. U.S. officials say she lied to banks about Huawei's control of Hong Kong-based Skycom a company that allegedly sold U.S. goods to Iran in violation of U.S. sanctions. Meng is out on bail in Vancouver while she awaits a hearing on extradition to the United States. China has warned Canada of "grave consequences" if it does not free Meng. President Donald Trump told Reuters last week that he would personally intervene in the Meng case if it would benefit U.S. national security or help close a trade deal with China. Police fired tear gas to disperse rock-throwing opposition supporters in Congo's capital on Wednesday after the governor ordered a halt to campaigning ahead of Sunday's presidential vote on security grounds. The decision by Governor Andre Kimbuta, a member of the ruling coalition, follows crack-downs by security forces last week that killed at least seven people and a fire that destroyed thousands of voting machines. A few hours after the ban was announced, carloads of police using pink tear gas blocked supporters of opposition candidate Martin Fayulu in the outskirts of Kinshasa on his way to a rally, a witness said. "What are they scared of? I only have God and my people," Fayulu said in a tweet. Police did not respond to a request for comment. The long-delayed election is meant to choose a successor for President Joseph Kabila, due to step down after 18 years in power. If successful, it would be Democratic Republic of Congo's first democratic transfer of power, but Kinshasa authorities said they feared violence. "The information in our possession attests that in all the political camps of the main presidential candidates, extremists have prepared and are preparing for a street confrontation in the city of Kinshasa during election campaign activities," Kimbuta said in a statement, without giving further details. Kinshasa is an opposition stronghold, where security forces killed dozens during protests against Kabila's refusal to step down when his mandate officially expired two years ago. Fraud allegations Campaigning was due to end at midnight on Friday in the race between Kabila's preferred successor, Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary, and two main challengers, Fayulu and Felix Tshisekedi. Their camps rejected the ban. "We cannot submit to a law that violates not only well established principles but that also violates the rights and freedoms of the candidates," said Jean-Marc Kabund, secretary-general of Tshisekedi's party. Opposition leaders say the government is trying to rig the results with new electronic voting machines and falsified voter registrations. The government denies that. Governor Kimbuta said the only way candidates could campaign in Kinshasa would be via media, where Shadary has a big advantage due to sizeable campaign funds and state or ruling party control of many media outlets. However, a rare national opinion poll in October showed Tshisekedi leading the race with 36 percent, well ahead of Shadary's 16 percent. Fayulu had 8 percent. Congolese hope the election draws a line under decades of conflict and authoritarian rule. Millions died in two wars around the turn of the century and dozens of militia remain active near the eastern borders. More than 100 people have died in clashes this week between rival ethnic groups in the normally peaceful northwest, local activists told Reuters. The lawmaker leading a congressional delegation to visit several of the last places a Guatemalan girl was alive while in federal custody called for the head of the U.S. border protection agency to resign on Tuesday. "I believe he should step down," Representative Joaquin Castro said of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner Kevin McAleenan during a news conference in Lordsburg, New Mexico. Castro was among 13 representatives and newly-elected members of Congress who asked to tour two facilities where 7-year-old Jakelin Caal Maquin was taken by border agents after she, her father and 161 other migrants were detained Dec. 6 in the New Mexico desert. The girl died Dec. 8, prompting multiple investigations into how and when she fell ill, how agents handled her care and what, if anything, could have prevented her death from septic shock so quickly after arriving in the U.S. U.S. Representative Raul Ruiz, an emergency room doctor turned lawmaker from California, said the equipment and training the border agents had was insufficient to properly care for the girl, who began vomiting during an early-morning bus ride to Lordsburg. Another delegation member said the table where she was treated in Lordsburg now has two microwave ovens on top of it. The first facility where Jakelin and the other detainees were taken in an even more remote stretch of New Mexico called Antelope Wells does not have running water due to contamination and has only two portable toilets available, according to delegation members. "The SPCA [Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals] wouldn't allow animals to be treated the way humans are being treated in this facility," U.S. Representative Al Green said after the visit. The group, led by the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, called for a congressional investigation in addition to the internal reviews under way at the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees CBP. "My heart goes out to the family," DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said in a statement after news of the tragedy broke Friday. She added, "This is a very sad example of the dangers of this journey. This family chose to cross illegally." Delegation members also said President Donald Trump's insistence on building up the border wall along the frontier with Mexico is "out of touch with realities on the ground," and that the real need is for better equipment, procedures and training. Trump and Congress are locked in a budget battle that could lead to a partial government shutdown in the coming days over funding for the border wall. With more than 140 million Internet users, Indonesias e-commerce industry has grown rapidly in the past decade, leading to calls for more government regulation in the sector. Its a new industry so its growing very fast. [E-commerce] started booming in 2010 and since then some of the players that started during that time have become unicorns, said the chairman of Indonesia E-Commerce Association (IDEA), Ignatius Untung, referring to startup companies that are valued above $1 billion. The Indonesian Ministry of Industry estimates the value of the digital industry at $100 billion, and in 2020 the government expects it will increase to $130 billion. Creating new unicorns Untung said the consumer base for the e-commerce industry continues to grow as there are a continuously increasing number of Internet users in Indonesia, although they are still concentrated in the cities. In a market conducive enough for digital companies to thrive, Indonesia has managed to establish several unicorns. One of them is Tokopedia, an online marketplace. In 2017, the startup company received a $1.2 billion investment from Alibaba, the massive online retailer in China. Priscilla Anais, the CEO Office Manager of Tokopedia, said the Gross Merchandise Volume or total sales value of goods sold through the marketplace has increased by four times in the past year. Now we have more than 90 million active users monthly and have reached 93 percent of all districts in Indonesia, she told VOA via email. But the value of Indonesias biggest online marketplace is still far below Gojek, a ride-hailing app, that has received $1.2 billion in investment from several companies, including Google and Tencent holdings. The Indonesian startup has a company value of $ 4 billion. Other unicorns include Traveloka, an online travel startup, and Bukalapak, an online marketplace. Lack of regulation Despite the digital economy in Indonesia growing rapidly and receiving support from the government, Untung said clear regulations are still needed. For example for online payment, or e-wallet. There are players that have the platform and consumers but when they apply for a permit for e-wallet, it was declined. But there are others that dont have the platform but received the permit. So we should make it clear, what are the criteria, he said. Untung also mentioned the issue of online ojek (motorcycle taxi). Motorcycle taxis are especially popular in big cities in Indonesia, such as Jakarta, where traffic is often congested. The former Transportation Minister Ignasius Jonan, issued a notification letter in 2015 banning online motorcycle taxis. But in December 2015, President Joko Widodo, said online transportation cannot be banned because people need it. With so many people using ride-hailing app, and motorcycle taxi, who can ban it now? Untung said. According to the Indonesian Consumers Agency Foundation (YLKI), 84 percent of Jakarta citizens use the service of online transportation. Nevertheless, Untung lauded the e-commerce roadmap that was established through the Government Regulation No. 74/2017 under the Coordinating Ministry of Economic Affairs. Samuel Pangerapan, the director general of informatics application at the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology said the roadmap was made to prepare an ecosystem that can transform the country to a digital economy era. We are addressing issues such as connectivity, infrastructure that can support digital transformation, and the regulations. President Jokowi has instructed us to conduct a study and find out all the things that can interfere with digital economy, he told VOA. Human resource remains a problem Untung said one of the biggest problems many e-commerce companies in Indonesia are facing is human resources. Supply is low, but demand is very high, he told VOA. Untung added that some companies decided to import skilled workers from overseas or acquire companies to be able to use their service. So weve started to think how can we have good human resources. The association is thinking to start a vocational school, we also reach out to universities and tell the younger generation that a career in digital economy is possible, he said. A lot of young people still dont know where they want to go after they finish high school. And many Indonesians are still thinking that becoming doctor, engineer, or pilot, is still the ultimate dream. Pangerapan assured that the government will also tackle the issue of a lack of skilled workers. We definitely need to prepare a workforce that will be able to handle digital transformation, he said. Untung also mentioned that the e-commerce association has started a roadmap to provide better protection for consumers. The end goal is to certify e-commerce companies in Indonesia. So lets say a grade A e-commerce is one that has enough resources, they have people to handle complaints and have a guarantee of service. And then well start to educate the consumers, please shop at e-commerce that have better grades. After that we will encourage the players to improve their service, he said. He added that he has targeted the certification program to be launched in 2020. The European Union on Wednesday gave U.S. President Donald Trump two months to name an ombudsman to tackle EU citizens' complaints under a data protection deal sealed by predecessor Barack Obama's team. Brussels has previously sought assurances the Trump administration is committed to the deal to protect Europeans' personal data held in the United States by internet giants like Google and Facebook. The European Commission, the EU's executive arm, said an annual review found that Washington "continues to ensure an adequate level of protection for personal data" under the 2016 Privacy Shield. But it said the United States should "nominate a permanent ombudsperson by February 28, 2019 to replace the one that is currently acting." If this does not happen, the commission warned it could take "appropriate measures" under the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which was adopted in May. The privacy shield came into force in August 2016 to replace a previous arrangement that the EU's top court struck down over concerns about U.S. intelligence snooping. "Today's review shows that the Privacy Shield is generally a success," said Andrus Ansip, the Commission vice president for the digital single market. More than 3,850 companies have been certified, including giants Google, Microsoft and IBM, creating "operational ground" to improve how the deal works, he said. During the first review more than a year ago, the Commission said more than 2,400 companies had been certified. "We now expect our American partners to nominate the ombudsperson on a permanent basis, so we can make sure that our EU-US relations in data protection are fully trustworthy," Ansip said in a statement. After the first review, the Commission said the Trump administration had dispelled initial EU doubts about its commitment to the privacy deal despite its "America First" policy. Officials say the Privacy Shield lays down tough rules to prevent U.S. intelligence agencies accessing European data. Companies face penalties if they do not meet EU standards of protection. The European Court of Justice threw out the earlier Safe Harbour arrangement after Austrian activist Max Schrems sued Facebook in Ireland, citing U.S. snooping practices exposed by former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden. Roger Stone, a former campaign adviser to Donald Trump, has settled a $100 million lawsuit accusing him of publishing false information on the InfoWars website. The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that exiled Chinese businessman Guo Wengui sued Stone in March. In the settlement reached Monday, Stone acknowledged that he publicly stated that Guo had been "convicted of financial crimes in the United States" and "violated U.S. election law." Stone now says, "All of these statements are not true." In a statement Tuesday, Stone clarified that "at no time did I knowingly publish material that I knew to be false." Rather, he said, he made "the terrible mistake of relying on the representations of Sam Nunberg in my reporting." The settlement identifies Chinese-American media tycoon Bruno Wu as "the apparent source of the information" and says it was conveyed to Stone by Nunberg, a former Trump campaign aide. Stone said Tuesday, "When incorrect statements were brought to my attention I apologized and agreed to a retraction." Guo has criticized high-level corruption in China and applied for asylum in the U.S. The settlement allows Stone to avoid paying any damages if he publishes national newspaper ads apologizing for the statements and retracts the statements online. He still is of interest to investigators probing Russian interference in the 2016 election. Leaders from Iran and Turkey are scheduled to hold talks Thursday, a day after U.S. President Donald Trump announced he was withdrawing American forces from Syria because they defeated Islamic State militants in the country. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani's visit with Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Ankara could worsen U.S.-Turkish relations, which have been strained recently over Ankara's threat to attack a Syrian Kurdish militia that is a key U.S. ally in the fight against IS. How the U.S. will remain engaged in the region following the troop pullout remains unclear, but a White House statement called the withdrawal the "next phase" of the military campaign, which remains focused on denying "radical Islamist terrorists territory, funding, support and any means of infiltrating our borders." Troop withdrawal impact Syrian Kurdish allies of the U.S. reacted with alarm to the announced pullout, saying a rapid withdrawal would leave them vulnerable to the threatened Turkish offensive. In Ankara, Rouhani is expected to try to further widen the Turkish-U.S. rift over Washington's support for the Syrian Kurdish militia, the YPG. With the militia controlling around a quarter of Syrian territory, analysts suggest Washington now sees it playing a role in containing Iran's growing influence in Syria. Ankara accuses the YPG of supporting the PKK Kurdish rebel group that has been fighting a decades-long insurgency in Turkey. Erdogan is vowing to oust the YPG from Syrian territory bordering Turkey, and Turkish forces are massing on the frontier. International relations professor Huseyin Bagci of Ankara's Middle East Technical University said, "It's possible if Turkey intervenes in Syria, Turkey would be on the opposite side of America and confrontation would be inevitable, and probably the Iranians suggest it would support Turkey." Cooperation With Iran having its own restive Kurdish minority with similar secessionist aspirations, Bagci suggests Rouhani most likely will reach out to Erdogan on the need to work together. "The Iranians have the same Kurdish problems like the Turks. There are many common positions," Bagci said. "The Turks, the Arabs and Iranians have a common enemy, in quotation marks, the Kurds, which will try to establish a possible Kurdish state in the region. At the moment, Americans seem to be the protector and supporter of this Kurdish state." But analysts say the Damascus regime Tehran supports may have reservations over any Turkish operation in Syria, even though it, too, shares concerns about Kurdish secessionism. "A non-YPG-dominated region is in the interests of Damascus, so Damascus may be happy to turn a blind eye [to a Turkish operation]," said former senior Turkish diplomat Aydin Selcen. "But of course, Damascus will not welcome an indeterminate Turkish armed forces presence on its own territory." In a move to assuage Damascus' concerns, Iranian officials Wednesday said Ankara must secure Damascus' permission for any military operation into Syria. Damascus strongly opposed two previous Turkish military operations against the YPG in Syria. Turkish forces now control a large swath of Syrian territory. Analysts suggest Ankara's control of Syrian territory is part of a strategy to ensure it has a voice in deliberations on the future of Syria. Iran and Turkey remain historical regional rivals even though they are working together on Syria. Bagci suggests the rivalry could ultimately mean that Turkey and the United States share the goal of containing Iran. "Turkey is also not happy that Iran is gaining more and more space and influence in the area," said Bagci. "In the long run, Turkey understands it will be the loser." ' Ankara's long-term strategic regional interests may be closer to Washington's than Tehran's, said former Turkish diplomat Selcen, if Washington abandons its support of the YPG. "It's a continuation of their [Washington] policy with other means and other partners," said Selcen. "They wish to deny this area to Iran, from east of the Euphrates. Once Turkish forces are there, it will mean Iran will stay out." Matter of trust Analysts point out Erdogan's inviting Rouhani to Ankara at such a critical moment in U.S.-Turkish relations will provide ammunition to the Turkish president's critics in Washington who say Turkey has become an unreliable ally. Erdogan invited Rouhani to attend the fifth meeting of the Turkey-Iran High Level Cooperation Council, which was created to coordinate diplomatic and economic activities. Voters in Madagascar are casting their ballots in a presidential runoff election between two former presidents and bitter rivals. Andry Rajoelina and Marc Ravalomanana were the top two vote-getters in November's first round of voting, with Rajoelina receiving 39 percent and Ravalomanana winning 35 percent. President Hery Rajaonarimampianina finished well behind his predecessors in the November vote. Ravalomanana was president of the Indian Ocean island nation from 2002 to 2009, until he was forced out of office in violent street protests led by Rajoelina, who was then serving as mayor of the capital, Antananarivo. Rajoelina was installed by the army and ruled until 2014. Madagascar is renowned for its biodiversity, its vanilla crops, and its stunning beaches - but also for its crushing poverty, recurrence of bubonic plague, and frequent, devastating cyclones. The World Bank says more than two thirds of the former French colony's citizens live in extreme poverty. The bestselling book of all time is believed to be the Bible, but the holy book is not the only title attracting readers looking for books that reflect Christian values. Christian publishers produce a variety of fiction novels covering traditional commercial genres historical, suspense, romance, contemporary but their readers desire more than a good story. Your reader is looking for something consistent with the biblical world view, says Andrea Doering, editorial director for Revell Books, a division of Baker Publishing Group, one of the dominant Christian publishers in the market. They are not going to run into language thats offensive, theyre not going to run into premarital sex being celebrated as a real lifestyle or having affairs as something that is commonplace or OK. Its not that that doesnt happen in the plotline, but its not considered the best way of living. They want the story, but they dont want to have to put a filter on. The Christian book market accounts for 7 percent of the total book market so far in 2018, earning $44 million, up from $39 million, or about 6 percent of the total book market, last year, according to The NPD Group. Between 2016 and 2017, the Christian market saw a revenue increase of 5 percent. These steady increases over the past three years have continued despite a decline in Christian book distributors and the shuttering of Family Christian Stores, the largest retailer of Christian books and merchandise in the country, which closed all 240 of its stores in 36 states in 2017, after declaring bankruptcy in 2015. Nonfiction titles tend to dominate the Christian publishing market. In December 2018, the top five Christian bestsellers were nonfiction, according to The NPD Group. One of 2018s overall breakout publishing stars is blogger Rachel Hollis. Her self-help book, Girl Wash Your Face, has sold more than 2 million copies since its publication in February 2018 and has stayed on The New York Times bestseller list for 34 weeks. Holliss runaway hit was published by Thomas Nelson, a division of HarperCollins that focuses on providing Christian content. At Baker Publishing Group, the current bestselling title is a clean joke book for kids. Other big moneymakers for the publisher include Manual to Manhood and The Girls Guide to Conquering Life, which offer basic tools for living for adolescents. Revell publishes books for people with a faith-based background that are looking for hope and help in their everyday life. Theyre looking for inspiration. Theyre looking for tools to live better, says Doering. In all of our fiction even, hope is definitely an element, even in the suspense. You know, the good guy wins, justice is always served. We want to show basically that there is power in the truth and theres power in the gospel. The average Christian book buyer is a woman, about half of Christian book buyers are over the age of 45, and almost half of Christian book-buying households earn less than $50,000, according to a 2015 report released by Nielsen BookScan (which was acquired by The NPD Group in 2017). On the fiction side, suspense, romantic suspense and romance are among Revells bestselling titles, according to Doering. Stories set in America, including in Amish country, have the most appeal to readers. Certain rules apply in Christian fiction. For example, cursing and premarital sex are big no-nos. Author Vanessa Riley, a Stanford graduate with a PhD in mechanical engineering, says she rarely thinks about guidelines when writing her faith-filled historical romances. Her books are influenced by her upbringing in the American South, the so-called Bible Belt, and her own 30-day Christian courtship, during which she met and became engaged to her husband of 22 years. As a woman of faith, writing a story of faith, theres just things that youre just not going to do, Riley says. If you have an inground faith, if you have a passion to tell a story thats going to edify the soul and make people think that theres hope, you dont really need a list of this, that and the other thing to make sure your stories fit. Riley, whose historical romances feature multicultural characters, has been published by both mainstream and Christian publishers, but she says its been a challenge to find a home for her stories in the Christian publishing world. I think that the inspirational market as is, is telling very similar stories to what theyve always told and I think there is a definite market for that, Riley says. If they want to diversify their readership so they look like more of middle America, the urban cities, the South as we see it every day, then theyre going to have to look for more stories and I think thats their quandary. They dont know how to tap into these other markets. Doering, who has not worked with Riley, says she welcomes all kinds of characters. If someone positions a book as 'This would be great to add to your multicultural or your diversity landscape,' I would say, Well, you tell me a great story and then lets talk.' Thats the key. For a reader, its all about the story. More than 50 police officers who patrolled the same area in Sao Paulo were arrested on Tuesday, accused by state prosecutors of taking bribes from Brazil's largest drug gang to allow its members to sell narcotics, authorities said. The Sao Paulo state police's internal investigations unit worked with state prosecutors who focus on combating the powerful First Capital Command (PCC) drug gang to gather what prosecutors said in a statement was proof of collaboration between officers and the cartel. A growing influence The PCC has rapidly grown in strength in recent years, investigators say, now largely controlling cocaine and gun shipments into Brazil and also the flow of drugs grown in neighboring countries and shipped to Africa and Europe through Brazilian ports. By late afternoon, 53 members of the 22nd Battalion of the Sao Paulo state police were under arrest nearly 10 percent of that battalion's entire force, according to state prosecutors. Three suspected PCC members are also in custody. Top priority Battling Brazil's rampant crime and ever-growing drug gangs is a top priority for President-elect Jair Bolsonaro, who campaigned on a law-and-order platform and openly calls for police to assassinate suspected drug gang members. Tuesday's operation in one of Brazil's safest states, however, underscored the complexity of the country's security situation, with poorly paid and trained police routinely being found to tip off drug gangs about police raids, or being active members of paramilitary militias that battle the drug gangs for turf. The Pittsburgh City Council began considering a package of gun-control laws Tuesday, including a ban on assault-style rifles, nearly two months after a gunman shouting anti-Semitic messages killed 11 people in a synagogue. The measure would also ban certain types of ammunition and allow courts to ban gun ownership by people deemed to pose a significant threat of violence. Seven of nine council members agreed to co-sponsor the legislation at Tuesday's meeting. "As gun violence escalates across the country, it would be unconscionable for me to stand by and do nothing," Councilman Corey O'Connor, one of the legislation's authors, said in a statement. O'Connor represents Squirrel Hill, the neighborhood where the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue took place. Assault-style weapons, with the capacity to fire multiple rounds in a short period of time, have played a significant role in the series of deadly mass shootings the United States has experienced in recent years. A vote on the legislation is expected to be held in February. Gun-rights advocates opposed the measures and threatened legal action if they passed. The Allegheny County Sportsmen's League and Firearm Owners Against Crime noted that a state law forbids local governments from enacting stricter gun laws than those in place statewide. The groups also said the proposal would violate the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Robert Bowers, 46, is accused of shooting and killing 11 worshippers at Pittsburgh's Tree of Life Synagogue on Oct. 27, using a legally purchased assault-style rifle and three handguns. He has pleaded not guilty. Lebanon is on track to form a new national unity government in the next few days, politicians said on Tuesday, raising hopes for an end to more than seven months of wrangling that has darkened the outlook for its struggling economy. Efforts to form the new government, led by Prime Minister-designate Saad al-Hariri, have been obstructed by conflicting demands for cabinet seats that must be parceled out in line with a finely balanced, sectarian political system. Heavily indebted and suffering from a stagnant economy, Lebanon is in dire need of an administration that can set about long-stalled reforms to put public debt on a sustainable footing. "Matters are moving quickly and if things stay like this without obstacles and I don't expect obstacles the government will soon see the light," Major General Abbas Ibrahim, a top security official involved in efforts to end the impasse, said in a televised news conference. Holiday surprise? Finance Minister Ali Hassan Khalil told Reuters the process was "in the last phase and it is probable that the government will be formed before the Christmas holiday. "This will leave a positive impact on the financial and economic situation and open the way for a start to dealing (with) this file," he added. Fitch Ratings on Tuesday changed Lebanon's outlook to negative from stable, citing a further deterioration in government deficits and debt dynamics and signs of rising pressures on Lebanon's financing model. The May 6 national election, Lebanon's first in nine years, produced a parliament tilted in favor of the heavily armed, Iran-backed Shi'ite Muslim group Hezbollah, which together with its political allies won more than 70 of the 128 seats. Hariri, who enjoys Western backing, lost more than one third of his lawmakers, though he remained Lebanon's biggest Sunni Muslim leader and as such was nominated again as prime minister. His Future Movement said it was now possible "to wager" on the government being formed before the holidays, saying this was "a pressing matter" due to "economic and financial challenges." Hezbollah a concern In Washington, a State Department official said the United States hoped that Lebanon's next government would be willing to work with it "on areas of mutual interest" and expressed concern over Hezbollah's rising political clout in the country. The United States is the biggest backer of the Lebanese army, providing more than $1.5 billion in support since 2006. "We continue to have deep concerns regarding Hezbollah's growing political power inside Lebanon," the official told Reuters. "We are concerned about the efforts of Hezbollah's political allies that provide it with top cover and a veneer of legitimacy." Compromise Efforts to form the government have faced a series of obstacles, the last of which surrounded Sunni representation, with Hezbollah demanding a cabinet seat for one of its Sunni allies to reflect their election gains. Hezbollah is expected to get three ministries in the upcoming cabinet for the first time, instead of two, including the health ministry. Hariri has resisted the demand. But under a compromise that has taken shape, the Hezbollah-linked Sunnis are expected to be represented in government by a candidate acceptable to them rather than insisting that they themselves should get the seat. In exchange, they say they want Hariri to acknowledge their political standing as a group of Sunnis independent of his Future Movement by meeting them. The Hariri family has dominated Lebanese Sunni politics for decades. "Within two or three days God willing you will hear the news that the Lebanese masses were waiting for," Abdel Rahim Mrad, one of the pro-Hezbollah Sunni MPs, said after meeting Ibrahim. "All the problems have been solved." The Sunni minister is expected to be named among a group of ministers allotted to President Michel Aoun, a compromise on the part of his Free Patriotic Movement (FPM). "Every solution requires a concession and everybody has conceded," Gebran Bassil, the head of the FPM and Aoun's son-in-law, said. Pope Francis has accepted the resignation of a Los Angeles auxiliary bishop, Monsignor Alexander Salazar, following allegations of misconduct with a minor in the 1990s, officials said Wednesday. The Vatican announced the resignation in a one-line statement. It was the latest in a string of cases of alleged misconduct against bishops to come to light this year, following the scandal of ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick that exposed how bishops have largely avoided sanction for improper behavior. The current archbishop of Los Angeles, Most Rev. Jose Gomez, said the archdiocese was made aware of the claim in 2005. Gomez said county prosecutors declined to bring charges, but that the archdiocese forwarded the complaint to the Vatican office that handles sex abuse cases. Gomez said that office, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, imposed precautionary measures against Salazar and that a further investigation by the archdioceses independent review board found the allegation to be credible. Gomez said Salazar, 69, has consistently denied any wrongdoing. The archdiocese said it had received no other allegations against Salazar. These decisions have been made out of deep concern for the healing and reconciliation of abuse victims and for the good of the churchs mission, Gomez told the Los Angeles faithful in a letter. Let us continue to stay close to the victim survivors of abuse, through our prayer and our actions. Gomez said that the alleged misconduct occurred while Salazar was a parish priest in the 1990s, and that the claim was never directly brought to the archdiocese. The resignation comes during a year in which the clerical abuse scandal has exploded anew in the U.S. and elsewhere. In July, Francis removed McCarrick, the retired archbishop of Washington, as a cardinal after a U.S. church investigation determined that an allegation he groped a minor in the 1970s was credible. Subsequently several adult seminarians have said he pressured them to sleep with him. McCarrick has denied the initial allegation and through a lawyer has said he looks forward to invoking his right to due process. The McCarrick scandal exposed the loopholes in how the church treats allegations of misconduct against bishops, who are answerable only to the pope. Bishops have largely escaped the same scrutiny as ordinary priests accused of misconduct in the decades-long sex abuse scandal, and until recently they have rarely been sanctioned or removed for covering up for abusers. Salazar was born in San Jose, Costa Rica, and came with his family to the United States in 1953. The family settled in Los Angeles and he became a U.S. citizen at age 18. He entered St. Johns Seminary in suburban Camarillo in 1977 and was ordained a priest in 1984. From the 1980s through early 2000s, Salazar served at several parishes, the former St. Vibiana Cathedral and as vice chancellor of the Archdiocesan Catholic Center before being installed as a bishop in 2004. When his selection as auxiliary bishop was announced, he said in a statement: California is the land of dreams and visions, but I have been blessed with more. I have been specially privileged to serve as a priest a parish priest. He served as a regional bishop for San Pedro, one of five pastoral subdivisions within the archdiocese, until 2009 and since then had been vicar for the office of ethnic ministries. A statement from the archdiocese said the accusation against Salazar was reported directly to law enforcement in 2002 by a young adult alleging misconduct in the 1990s when Bishop Salazar was a priest and the alleged victim was a minor. The statement said the archdiocese was informed of the allegation through a third party in 2005. Law enforcement had investigated the allegation and recommended prosecution but the district attorney did not file charges in the case, the statement said. The archdiocese said Cardinal Roger Mahony, who was the Los Angeles archbishop at the time, requested that law enforcement review the case and he also reported the allegation to the Vaticans Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The Congregation investigated and permitted Bishop Salazar to remain in ministry subject to certain precautionary conditions, which he has respected, the statement said. Mahony retired as head of the archdiocese in 2011, his tenure tarnished by his handling of clergy sex abuse cases, and was replaced by Gomez, who publicly rebuked him. By 2014, the archdiocese had agreed to pay $720 million to clergy abuse victims over the previous decade and released internal files that showed Mahony shielded priests and ordered a surrogate to withhold evidence from police. The archdiocese said Gomez requested a review of all allegations of sexual misconduct involving minors to update a 2004 report that listed accused priests. This investigation was conducted by the archdioceses own Clergy Misconduct Oversight Board, which found the allegation to be credible, Gomez said in his letter. The messages The University of Texas completed its investigation on Tuesday into whether State Sen. Charles Schwertner sent sexually explicit messages -- including photos of his genitals -- to a student, issuing a report that neither fully incriminates nor clears the Georgetown Republican of wrongdoing.The same afternoon, responding to a public record request, the university released the offensive text messages and LinkedIn messages that led to the probe. Schwertner told a UT investigator that the texts came from his accounts, but were sent by a person he knows and shared his user information with, but refused to identify.Schwertner and his attorneys said the report served as vindication for their claims that he was innocent."I do not condone sexual misconduct of any kind. The University of Texas has closed their investigation because I did not send the offensive text messages in question," Schwertner said in a prepared statement.The university reported it could not prove Schwertner sent the offensive messages, and a forensic investigation found that they did not come from his phone. However, the messages did come from Schwertner's Hushed account, a privacy app that allows people to send messages from separate phone numbers, and his LinkedIn account.The UT investigation also described Schwertner as uncooperative and unwilling to be interviewed or answer questions about whether he had other electronic devices where the messages could have originated.Schwertner's attorneys said in a statement that they prevented him from being interviewed by the university because they considered the school's investigative process unfair.An attorney purporting to represent a mysterious third party, whose identity was never revealed to the investigators, at some point claimed responsibility for sending the messages. Schwertner told investigators he knew this unidentified person, and shared his user name and passwords with the individual, but refused to reveal their identity in the investigation.The university investigative report acknowledged that the unnamed person might not exist."We recognize that it is plausible that the Respondent [Schwertner] sent the text messages and photograph from a device other than his personal cell phone and the third person claiming responsibility is being untruthful or does not exist, but we have no evidence to support those possibilities," the investigation summary reads.Reached for contact, UT spokesman J.B. Bird said the university will let the report speak for itself.The messages begin on May 3 with a professional back and forth on a LinkedIn account belonging to a Charles Schwertner MD and an unnamed student, discussing the student's desire to work in health care and politics. Schwertner is a surgeon.On Aug. 28, Schwertner appears to ask the student via LinkedIn message for her cellphone number at 2:20 p.m. and then at 3:59 p.m. he mentions her attending a committee meeting, inviting her to sit in the audience.The student responds with her number, which is redacted, and thanks him for connecting her to his staff members and accepts his invitation to sit in the audience. The student provides emails from Schwertner's chief of staff Drew Graham and another senate staff member following up on his offer to attend a committee hearing.At 6:20 p.m. that same day in the LinkedIn message, Schwertner appears to say, "Hope you're getting my texts I sent you."The student responds, "Please stop the inappropriate texts, it is unprofessional."Separately, UT released text messages provided by the student from a person claiming to be "Charles." The texts are not dated, but the UT report notes they were made on the same day the LinkedIn account asked for her cellphone number.UT also released a photograph of Schwertner's legislative business card, where the phone number used for the texts is written in by hand."Sorry. I really just wanted to f--- you," the string of texts begins."If you'd like to still sit in the audience then by all means come," the text said referencing the LinkedIn conversation."This is Charles""Send a pic?""I'll send you one""Hello? Want to just use LinkedIn? Or my main cell?""It's me want me to prove?""And I have more proof of life ;)"The photos are redacted.The student wrote in the text, "Please stop, this is unprofessional. I'm a student interested in learning about Healthcare Policy. These advances are unwanted."The student received no subsequent messages from Schwertner's accounts.In September, the Austin American-Statesman first reported that Schwertner was being investigated by the University of Texas, after a student complained he sent lewd text messages including apparent photos of his genitals.Schwertner won re-election to his Senate seat on Nov. 6.On Tuesday evening, Texas Democrats jumped on the results of the report."These are not the actions of an innocent man," said Texas Democratic Party Executive Director Crystal Perkins. "Sen. Charles Schwertner is a liar and clearly unfit to serve in elected office."After the investigation surfaced, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the Senate president, said he would reserve comment until after the investigation was complete.Patrick's spokesman Alejandro Garcia said Tuesday evening said Patrick was reviewing the materials. At least 63 journalists around the world were killed doing their jobs in 2018, with Afghanistan being the deadliest place for journalists worldwide, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said Tuesday. The Paris-based organization, which advocates for freedom of the press around the world, reported violence against reporters rose 15 percent compared to 2017. If all media workers and citizen journalists who were killed globally were included, the number of fatalities increased to 80. "The hatred of journalists that is voiced ... by unscrupulous politicians, religious leaders and businessmen has tragic consequences on the ground, and has been reflected in this disturbing increase in violations against journalists," RSF Secretary-General Christophe Deloire said in a statement. The group said in its annual report that Afghanistan was the world's deadliest country for journalists in 2018, with 15 deaths, followed by Syria with 11 journalists killed in the country this year. Deadliest country The increased fatalities among journalists in Afghanistan is due in part to bombings and shootings that targeted media workers. In April, a double bombing in Kabul killed nine journalists, including six Radio Free Europe reporters. The Islamic State (IS) terror group claimed responsibility for those attacks, which they said deliberately targeted journalists. WATCH: Twin Attacks in Kabul Advocacy groups say that extremist groups, such as Taliban and IS, are the biggest threat to journalists in Afghanistan. "According to our data, these two groups have been responsible for most of [the] journalist casualties. Taliban and IS were responsible for at least 11 of [the] journalists killed [in 2018]," Najib Sharifi, director of Afghan Journalists Safety Committee, told VOA. "The Afghan government cannot provide security for journalists. Media organizations are also not mature enough to ensure the safety of their journalists," Sharifi said. "We have provided a safety guideline for the protection of journalists, but it has yet to be implemented." Training Some analysts echoed that concern, saying journalists in countries like Afghanistan are not well-trained to protect themselves on the job. "Unfortunately, lack of skills [for protection] is one of the big challenges that journalists always face," Hamidullah Zazai, managing director of Mediothek Afghanistan, a group that promotes peace and democracy in the country, told VOA. Zazai added that mafia and warlords, who are part of the political system in Afghanistan, could also be a threat to "the safety of journalists." Syria The RSF report said 11 journalists and media activists were killed in Syria in 2018. Despite a decline in the number of deaths in the war-torn country, journalists continue to take greater risks to cover the war that has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and displaced millions of others. Redwan Bezar, a 33-year-old Syrian reporter, survived two attacks in 2017 while covering the battle to liberate the Syrian city of Raqqa the former de facto capital of the IS terror group. "Since those attacks, every time I leave my house to cover something in Raqqa or elsewhere, I feel it would be my last time," Bezar told VOA. In both incidents, Bezar said he and his crew were targeted by IS suicide attacks. "The environment we work in is very hazardous. Warring sides don't respect journalists and their works," he said. "In addition to killing, many journalists have also been subject to abduction and arrest." Since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011, more than 200 journalists covering the conflict have been killed, including three American reporters, according to RSF. War zones Siruan Hadsch Hossein, executive director of Arta for Media and Development, a Syrian organization that is partially funded by a U.S. government program, said there should be more efforts by international groups to protect journalists in war zones like Syria. "More resources should be available to local journalists in Syria, where journalists have played an important role in reporting on what's really happening in this devastating and complex war," Hossein told VOA. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), a New York-based group that advocates for journalists' rights, also tracks causalities among journalists in conflict zones around the world. "It's very challenging to protect journalists who work in conflict zones with many state and nonstate actors who are killing journalists," Courtney Radsch, advocacy director at CPJ, told VOA. "But I do think that by providing safety guidance and by ensuring that journalists understand the steps that they can at least take to keep themselves safe, knowing the risks, that can help somewhat," Radsch said. At least 5,000 residents in and around the South Sudanese capital now have access to clean drinking water after the opening of a U.S.-funded, solar-powered water distribution system in the area. Speaking at a ribbon-cutting ceremony Tuesday at the plant, U.S. Ambassador to South Sudan Tom Hushek said the $70,000 project not only will supply residents with clean drinking water, but it should lessen the number of sexual attacks on women and girls who often walk several hours a day to find clean water. Previously, residents in Juba's Gudele West neighborhood and nearby Luri County had to pay 500 South Sudanese pounds for a 120-liter water container. Now, residents can fill up containers of drinking water for free in their neighborhood. Agnes Stephen, a 22-year-old Luri County resident, is overjoyed. "We used to face a lot of challenges accessing water. The water tankers would attempt to reach to our area, but because the roads are bad with a lot of bumps, they would not reach. And the water tankers that managed to reach us, they sell the water expensively," Stephen told VOA's South Sudan in Focus. The system consists of an 80-meter-deep borehole and an elevated water tower with a tank that can hold up to 30,000 liters of water. Using solar power, the water is pumped from the borehole to the tank. The water then flows by gravity into three distribution points. Women and other residents ululated Tuesday as Hushek cut the ribbon, officially opening the new water plant to residents. Hushek said a big secondary benefit to having easy access to clean drinking water is preventing the spread of disease. "The project is improving community health and helping prevent diseases such as cholera. But the project does a lot more than that. I am especially proud that this project is sustainable because the community manages it. They have elected a water committee, and it includes 50 percent women," Hushek said. The International Organization for Migration constructed the new water distribution plant as part of a $34 million government-funded project providing humanitarian assistance across South Sudan. According to U.N. agencies, more than 90 percent of the population in war-ravaged South Sudan lacks access to clean water. Lawmakers in Somalia's South West region elected a new president Wednesday, with a former leader of militant group al-Shabab kept off the ballot despite angry protests last week from supporters. Officials confirmed to VOA that Somalia's former state minister for trade, Abdiaziz Hassan Mohamed, also known as Lafta Gareen, is the region's new leader. Mohamed won 101 out of 147 votes from regional lawmakers, defeating three other candidates. Analysts predicted the victory of Mohamed last week after Mukhtar Robow, the former spokesman and deputy leader of al-Shabab, was arrested by Somali police in the region's main town, Baidoa, and taken to Mogadishu. Somalia's federal government banned Robow from running in the election, noting that he is subject to U.N. Security Council sanctions. They also accused him of being a security threat. At least 12 people were killed in Baidoa in violence that erupted following Robow's arrest. Among those killed was a member of the regional parliament. Robow defected to the government in August 2017, five years after leaving al-Shabab due to disputes with the group's then-emir, Ahmed Godane. Wednesday's election was peaceful, with security in Baidoa strengthened by hundreds of Ethiopian troops who form part of the African Union peacekeeping force (AMISOM) in Somalia. The Ethiopians were seen helping Somali security forces cordon off most of the town to prevent the outbreak of more protests. Runner-up Aden Saransoor congratulated Mohamed on his victory and said he looks forward to working closely with the new regional leader. "The election was free and fair, and I congratulate the winner and look forward to working with him," Saransoor said. South African authorities issued an arrest warrant for Grace Mugabe, the wife of Zimbabwe's former leader who was accused of assaulting a woman in Johannesburg last year, South African police said Wednesday. The warrant follows a long legal process during which a South African court this year ruled that the government acted illegally in granting diplomatic immunity to Mugabe when the alleged attack was first reported. It also marked another setback for Grace and Robert Mugabe, who have kept a mostly low profile since the former president was forced from office in November 2017. Robert Mugabe, whose command over Zimbabwe once seemed impregnable, is now 94 years old and ailing. "I can confirm that a warrant for the arrest of Grace Mugabe was issued last Thursday. We are following the Interpol processes," said South African police Brig. Vishnu Naidoo. Whether Zimbabwe would assist South African authorities with any extradition request is in doubt, though the arrest warrant means Grace Mugabe would be vulnerable if she visits her sons, who stay in South Africa. She also owns a house there. Grace Mugabe allegedly attacked model Gabriella Engels in an upscale hotel on Aug. 13, 2017, whipping her with an extension cord that cut her forehead. However, Mugabe was allowed to return to Zimbabwe despite calls for her prosecution. She traveled with her husband, who was then president of Zimbabwe and attending a regional summit in Pretoria. Robert Mugabe was ousted only a few months later after a military takeover, impeachment proceedings led by the ruling party that once backed him and large demonstrations for his removal. Representatives of Grace Mugabe have said that Engels was the actual aggressor in the altercation between the two. AfriForum, a South African group that represented Engels, said the court ruling that Grace Mugabe had no right to diplomatic immunity had allowed police to proceed with an investigation. "We're now at a point where an arrest is possible," said Kallie Kriel, the group's CEO. "We believe that this sends out a strong message that nobody is above the law, not even if your surname is Mugabe." The White House and Congress appeared headed Wednesday toward agreement on a stopgap spending plan to avert a partial government shutdown at midnight Friday, but it does not include $5 billion President Donald Trump wanted for construction of a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. The Senate approved the measure by voice vote late Wednesday. It would fund operations for one-quarter of the U.S. government until Feb. 8 when Trump and lawmakers could again face the possibility of a partial closure. The measure now moves to the House of Representatives. Democratic leader Charles Schumer said Democrats would support the temporary spending plan, with the remainder of the U.S. government already funded through the end of next September. Trump made a pledge during his 2016 campaign to build a border wall to thwart illegal immigration and make Mexico pay for it. The president, however, has not been able to secure U.S. taxpayer funding for it even though both houses of Congress currently are under the control of his Republican Party. He faces an even more daunting political challenge in the new year, when Democrats, who are adamantly opposed to the wall, take control of the House of Representatives, while Republicans retain their Senate majority. On Twitter, Trump said, "One way or the other, we will win on the Wall!" Trump aide Kellyanne Conway told reporters that the U.S. leader would "take a look at" the stopgap funding plan, "certainly." Trump last week said he would "proudly" own a shutdown in order to get $5 billion in funding for construction of a wall along the 3,200-kilometer border with Mexico; but, without enough votes in Congress, Trump retreated Tuesday, with the White House saying it would look for "other ways" to secure funding by trying to tap unused money from several federal agencies. "We'll see what happens," Trump said. "It's too early to say. We need border security." Democrats have proposed keeping 2019 funding at $1.3 billion for border security fencing and other improvements, but not specifically for the wall. In a pair of tweets, Trump blamed opposition Democrats for the spending impasse, although some Republicans also oppose construction of the wall. "In our Country, so much money has been poured down the drain, for so many years, but when it comes to Border Security and the Military, the Democrats fight to the death," he said. Trump wrongly claimed that "Mexico is paying (indirectly) for the Wall" through the new U.S. trade deal with Mexico and Canada, with "far more money coming to the U.S." But the pact has yet to be ratified by Congress and has not taken effect. Congress has approved funding for three-quarters of U.S. government operations through Sept. 30, but the remaining quarter left without a 2019 spending plan includes the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees border control operations, and the State Department handling U.S. diplomatic operations. If a deal is not reached to avert the partial government shutdown, the affected agencies would start winding down nonessential operations Friday, with more than 800,000 federal workers furloughed or working for no pay. On Tuesday, McConnell proposed $1.6 billion for border fencing money already agreed upon in a bipartisan Homeland Security bill and an additional $1 billion Trump could use to spend on the border. McConnell called the offer "reasonable." Democratic leaders said no. House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said she and Schumer could "not support the offer they made of a billion-dollar slush fund for the president to implement his very wrong immigration policies." The U.N. Secretary-General on Wednesday welcomed the formal adoption of the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration at the General Assembly. "The compact is a non-legally binding agreement that reaffirms the foundational principles of our global community, including national sovereignty and universal human rights, while pointing the way toward humane and sensible action to benefit countries of origin, transit and destination as well as migrants themselves," Antonio Guterres said in a statement. There are 250 million migrants worldwide, many traveling at great peril and at the hands of smugglers or traffickers. The General Assembly voted 152 in favor, five against, with 12 abstentions to endorse the compact, which was the outcome of a conference in Marrakesh, Morocco, earlier this month. U.S. among few that object The compact is intended to be a framework for global cooperation. It is not a treaty and it does not impose any legal obligations on states, but it still incurred strong objections from a handful of countries. The United States withdrew from negotiations on the compact last December over sovereignty concerns, just as delegates were gathering in Mexico to work on it. At Wednesday's vote, the U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration, Andrew Veprek, expressed Washington's opposition. "While the United States honors the contributions of the many immigrants who helped build our nation, we cannot support a compact or process that imposes or has the potential to impose international guidelines, standards, expectations, or commitments that might constrain our ability to make decisions in the best interests of our nation," Veprek said. Focus on U.S. borders He focused on the importance the Trump administration places on protecting U.S. borders and regulating migration into the country. "The United States proclaims and reaffirms its belief that decisions about how to secure its borders, and who to admit for legal residency or citizenship, are among the most important sovereign decisions a state can make," he said. "They are not subject to negotiation or review in international instruments or fora." Hungary, which has taken a hardline position on migration under the government of Viktor Orban, staunchly opposed the compact. Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto told the assembly the pact is "unbalanced, biased and extremely pro-migration" and that it would contribute to launching "new massive migratory flows all around the world." "This document suggests as if migration would be a fundamental human right, which is definitely not the case," Szijjarto said. "This document describes migration as if it would be the best thing that ever happened to humanity, but this is not true. Migration is a dangerous phenomenon." Ireland backs compact In addition to the United States and Hungary, also voting against were Israel, Poland and the Czech Republic. Other states welcomed the compact, though, saying it would help countries of origin, transit and destination to better manage migration, making it safer and more dignified. "My country, Ireland, knows migration," Ambassador Geraldine Byrne Nason told the gathering. "We have a long history of Irish people migrating all over the world. We believe this gives us a responsibility to play our part now." She noted there are some 70 million people of Irish descent around the world, forced to migrate over centuries of political and economic uncertainty. Nason said that today, 17 percent of Irish citizens live overseas, while more than one in six Irish residents was born abroad. "We are now benefiting from the contribution of the 'new' Irish and those who have made Ireland their home," she added. Speaks for African nations Namibia's U.N. envoy, Neville Gertze, spoke on behalf of the African group of nations. "This landmark document constitutes a roadmap to prevent suffering of thousands of migrants. It will provide space to develop cooperation strategies that will benefit all," Gertze said. "Our global situation today and for the foreseeable future is one that will include migration, we cannot ignore this reality," said Canadian Ambassador Marc-Andre Blanchard. "We must find ways to harness the opportunities migration presents and to address the challenges. Today, we have an opportunity to begin working together." The U.N. Security Council Tuesday urged all parties to reject violence five days before the presidential election in the Democratic Republic of Congo. At least six people have been killed in violence in the run-up to the December 23 election, which will see the conflict-ridden central African country emerge from President Joseph Kabila's 17-year rule. Kinshasa denies any link between the bloodshed and campaigning. The Security Council asked all sides "to continue to reject violence of any kind, exercise maximum restraint in their actions and ... refrain from provocations such as violence and violent speeches and to address their differences peacefully," a U.N. statement said. The members also underscored the importance of ensuring the safety and security of candidates and voters during the campaign period. Meanwhile, they reiterated their call on all parties to engage peacefully and constructively in the electoral process, to ensure transparent, peaceful and credible elections. "While welcoming the progress in the technical preparation of the polls, the members of the Security Council are worried about" incidents of violence marring the final days the electoral campaign, the statement added. As such, the council "calls on the DRC government to quickly investigate these events," it said. Students at Northwestern University in Illinois are calling for the removal of a guest scholar for views he's expressed in articles titled "Why Are Black Women Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?" "Why Liberals and Atheists are More Intelligent," and "What's Wrong with Muslims?" Satoshi Kanazawa's other titles include "Why What You See Really Is What You Get," a video that explains, in his opinion, that "you indeed can judge a book by its cover nice people look nice and nasty people look nasty." "Just by looking at people ... you can often tell who are criminals and who are law-abiding citizens ... because they do look different," Kanazawa said in a bigthink.com video. In another published paper, Kanazawa wrote, "For cultural, social, and institutional reasons, Asians cannot make original contributions to basic science. ... I believe that its future will continue to be in the United States and Europe." Students say they want Kanazawa removed. "Ban Dr. Satoshi Kanazawa from conducting research at Northwestern," is the title of an online petition signed by 4,174 people who object to Kanazawa's line of thinking. "Kanazawa is just one in a growing number of academics using his intellectual identity to promote racism, sexism and xenophobia," the petition states. "Kanazawa's misogynoir nonsense should not be tolerated on Northwestern's campus, a campus that prides itself with its commitment to support a diverse and inclusive campus community." "Kanazawa's fraud research and studies reflect modern eugenics, and Northwestern should be ashamed of approving his application to conduct research in Evanston." Eugenics was a movement in the early 1900s that promoted breeding for a better society. By 1936, more than 60,000 sterilizations were forced in the United States "on mostly poor (and often African-American) people confined to mental hospitals. Students are also asking the university to examine procedures that vet visiting scholars. In an editorial penned by the college staff of the Daily Northwestern news site, the psychology department chair who approved Kanazawa's request said he was "not aware" of the controversies. "Meanwhile," the news site staff wrote, "a simple Google search of his name is enough to pull up several articles about his racist views, work controversies and more; many of the pieces themselves are available online as well." University provost's response Northwestern's Provost Jonathan Holloway agreed. "I find that his scholarship presents ideas that are antithetical to values that Northwestern University holds dear," Holloway wrote to the Northwestern community. However, Holloway wrote, "intellectual freedom" should prevail over "odious" views. "Due to the open nature of a comprehensive research university, there will unfortunately be occasions when offensive ideas emerge and when people advance arguments that run afoul of well-established, peer-reviewed research findings," Holloway wrote Dec. 13. "When these moments arise, the first thing that must be done is to remind the community of the University's values, standards and principles if they are at odds with these people or their research. This is such a moment." Holloway wrote that Kanazawa doesn't teach, and the university does not pay him. "Like all guest research scholars, he is entitled to express his personal views, including on his personal web pages, as long as he does not represent such opinions as the views of the University," Holloway wrote. "Kanazawa has made clear his opinions are his own. As a member of the Northwestern community, I believe that personally held views, no matter how odious, cannot be a reason to undermine the vital principle of intellectual freedom that all academic institutions serve to protect." Attempts to reach Kanazawa were not returned. The United States and China blamed each other for the crisis in the world trading system during a two-day "trade policy review" of the United States at the World Trade Organization. The Chinese representative to the WTO, Hu Yingzhi, accused the United States of deforming the rules of world trade, which is having a detrimental impact on the economy and on American workers. U.S. Ambassador to the WTO Dennis Shea retorted that the crisis was caused by China's trade-distorting practices. He disputed the charge that the United States is the center of the crisis, saying instead that the U.S. is the epicenter of the solution. WTO Trade Policy Review Division Director Willy Alfaro described the two-day debate as lively and engaged. He told VOA that member states expressed a number of concerns, including worry about a shift of focus in the U.S. trade policy, which is based on five pillars. "The first one is the adoption of trade policies supporting the national security policy," Alfaro said. "The second one is building a stronger U.S. economy and [third is] negotiating better trade deals, [fourth is] vigorous enforcement of domestic trade laws and rights under existing trade agreements, and finally reform of the multilateral trading system." Alfaro said the U.S. has received a lot of support from member countries on the need to reform the multilateral trading system and to make it more transparent. However, WTO officials said members also raised concerns regarding the introduction of new "Buy American" provisions, which could result in unnecessary trade barriers and increased protectionism. They also criticized U.S. agricultural policy, particularly the limited market access for certain commodities, high tariffs, and the continued use of trade distorting support. The State Department has granted a waiver to the Trump travel ban to a mother from Yemen, allowing her to come to the United States and be with her dying toddler son. Shaima Swileh is expected to arrive in San Francisco Wednesday, where her 2-year-old child, Abdullah Hassan a U.S. citizen is on life support with a rare genetic brain condition. The boy's father, Ali Hassan, is also an American citizen and is already in California. 'Mourn with dignity' "This is the happiest day of my life. This will allow us to mourn with dignity," Hassan said in a statement released by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Hassan has said he was ready to take his son off life support, giving up hope that his wife would ever get to see their dying child. CAIR lawyers took up Swileh's case and sued the State Department so she could get a visa. State Department spokesman Robert Palladino called it a "very sad case," and said U.S. officials struggle to determine which appeals for waivers are legitimate while balancing national security concerns. "These are not easy questions. We've got a lot of foreign service officers deployed all over the world that are making these decisions on a daily basis and they are trying to do the right thing at all times," Palladino said. Lee offered assistance President Donald Trump's travel ban restricts citizens from Yemen and six other mostly Muslim countries from coming to the United States, citing a threat of terrorism. But critics of the ban have pointed to the Swileh case as an example of what they call discrimination against Muslims. U.S. Representative Barbara Lee, a Democrat from California, also intervened on the family's behalf, calling the travel ban "heinous" and "un-American." A state senator on Tuesday apologized for telling a Republican staffer to "Kill yourself!" on Twitter.Sen. Kevin Parker (D-Brooklyn) quickly apologized on Twitter and the exchange with Candice Giove, a spokeswoman for the Senate's Republican conference, was deleted.The Twitter exchange began when Giove sought to help a local resident figure out whose car was blocking a local bike path. The car had a New York City-issued parking placard, provided to many politicians and others in the city as a perk. The local resident said the placard was being abused by an "arrogant scofflaw" and used a profanity.Giove tweeted that the placard belonged to Parker, who then responded: "Kill yourself!" That tweet later was scrubbed from the website."I sincerely apologize," Parker tweeted later Tuesday. "I used a poor choice of words. Suicide is a serious thing and should not be made light of."Senate Democratic leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins issued a statement: "I was disappointed in Senator Parker's tweet. Suicide is a serious issue and should not be joked about in this manner. I am glad that he has apologized."A Stewart-Cousins aide didn't respond when asked if Parker would be disciplined."It sounds wildly inappropriate," Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, said of Parker's tweet as she attended a news event in Albany.Minutes after his apology and as the exchange was being furiously retweeted, Parker returned to Twitter to take on Giove. He said she was "on the wrong side of history" in many liberal causes when she was chief spokeswoman for the Independent Democratic Conference, which worked with the then-Republican majority to bring some progressive issues to the floor for passage. The IDC was a breakaway group from Parker's Democratic minority conference and is now defunct. Critics say the IDC kept mainline Democrats out of power in the Senate.Neither Parker nor Giove responded to requests for comment."This was reprehensible and it was wrong, and there can be no justification for it. Ever," said Senate Republican leader John Flanagan (R-East Northport). "Suicide is a serious issue, and his cavalier and harmful language shouldn't be dismissed as just a poor choice of words. These words are beyond the pale and beneath the state Senate."Flanagan called for Parker to be reprimanded by his fellow Democrats.A week ago, Parker had introduced a bill that would require social media background checks before a person could buy a gun. It called for denial of firearms permits for anyone found on social media to be "threatening the health or safety of another person."In 2009, Parker was stripped of his then-leadership position after he was accused of damaging a press photographer's car. He agreed to undergo an anger management course and has since become a leading veteran voice in the Democratic conference that on Jan. 1 will become the Senate majority. The White House's announcement that U.S. troops are withdrawing from Syria caught U.S. lawmakers by surprise and angered some of President Donald Trump's top allies on Capitol Hill. "I can't tell you that it is the right time [to withdraw from Syria], because I didn't know this was going to happen," Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican, told VOA. "I was not consulted, and I think I should have been consulted." "It blindsided me," South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham said. "I'm meeting today with the secretary of defense [Jim Mattis]. I don't know what they've done, but this is chaos." In a tweet early Wednesday, Trump referenced the fight against the Islamic State terror group, saying, "We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump presidency." Lawmakers questioned the White House decision. "Did the president do this with the advice of military leadership, against the advice of military leadership?" Virginia Democrat Tim Kaine said. "Does the military leadership now say that ISIS is such a non-threat that we don't need to worry about it, or somebody else is going to take care of it? Turkey? We don't know the answers to those questions." Republican Senator Rand Paul, a member of the chamber's Committee on Foreign Relations, was one of the few lawmakers to praise the move. But even senators who long have had misgivings about America's military campaign in Syria absent congressional authorization found the president's announcement perplexing. "There's no question the ISIS, the caliphate, is shrinking, but they still have a presence in Syria," Ben Cardin, a senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told VOA. "I'm one who questions our authorization for our troops being there, but clearly this administration and the previous administration have taken the position that we need to have a military presence against ISIS. And my guess is that ISIS still has an influence in Syria. "Dealing with terrorism, dealing with ISIS, we've made a tremendous investment, and we've got to make sure the job is done," he added. "You could pull all the ground troops out and still be running missile strikes against the Syrian government, or air campaigns against the Syrian military, and I would find that objectionable without a congressional authorization," Kaine said. "So, I don't know that the removal of 2,000 ground troops means that we are not going to be engaged." Graham, a fierce advocate of continued U.S. military engagement in Syria, said Trump is making a grave error. "A lot of people applaud withdrawing troops no matter where they are from. [Former President Barack] Obama got a lot of applause when he withdrew from Iraq, but I have the same feeling about this that I did in Iraq over time, this is not going to play well," Graham said. "I saw the president's tweet. I could not disagree more. I don't think they [ISIS] is defeated in Syria or Iraq, and I know they're not defeated in Afghanistan. I think this is a serious miscalculation to think that conditions warrant our withdrawal. We're all at risk from the emergence of ISIS." The United States is committing billions of dollars toward development in Central America and Mexico, as part of a plan to strengthen economic growth in the region and curb illegal immigration, the U.S. and Mexican governments said Tuesday. Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has been seeking to persuade U.S. counterpart Donald Trump to work with Mexico to develop Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, as well as Mexico's impoverished south, to stem the flow of migrants. But Trump's threats to slash aid to the region if illegal immigration is not contained have persistently raised doubts about how much the United States would provide. Much of the new aid pledged Tuesday will depend on the viability of the projects. Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard said the United States is committing $5.8 billion toward development in Central America. It is also increasing public and private investment in Mexico by $4.8 billion via the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), $2 billion of which is set to go to the south. Speaking as the U.S. State Department issued a statement setting out the commitments, Ebrard said that the Mexican government had also pledged to find $25 billion to develop the south of the country during the next five years. "The agreements established here mean more than doubling the foreign investment in the south of Mexico from 2019," the minister told a news conference in Mexico City. It was not immediately clear how much of the investment announced represented new funding. A spokesman for Ebrard told Reuters he understood that $2.5 billion of the pledges to develop Central America were fresh commitments. The State Department said the United States and Mexico would organize a business summit in the first quarter of 2019 to create investment opportunities focusing on southern Mexico and the three Central American countries. A State Department official who declined to be named said the U.S. pledges include $1.8 billion Washington has spent or allocated between 2015 and 2018, as well as the budget requested for next year. The sums also incorporate OPIC's current projects and potential pipeline, and the U.S. government's current Millennium Challenge commitments. OPIC's current projects and pipeline for Mexico total $2.8 billion, the official said, adding: "We announced today that OPIC could make another $2 billion available for southern Mexico if commercially viable projects are presented." Washington is reconsidering its practice of letting hostile Iranian officials send their children to U.S. schools because it sees that as unfair to other Iranians, U.S. Special Representative for Iran Brian Hook says. In an exclusive interview with VOA Persian at the State Department, Hook noted that most Iranians are barred from entering the U.S. because of their governments perceived support of terrorism and other malign behaviors. Hook had first raised the prospect of revoking U.S. visas of students related to Iranian leaders in a video posted to the U.S. State Departments Farsi Twitter account on December 11. In the video, Hook said the Trump administration was working on the issue in response to questions from Iranian Twitter users, but he added that he could not discuss internal policy deliberations. VOA Persians full interview with U.S. Special Representative for Iran Brian Hook: Speaking to VOA Persian last Thursday in an interview broadcasted Monday on VOA Persians News at Nine program, Hook said: One of the consequences of (Iran) being the No. 1 state sponsor of terrorism in the world is that it causes the U.S. and other countries to have to impose visa restrictions. He said Tehran also does not share sufficient information about Iranians who apply for U.S. visas, asserting that Iranian authorities know what they need to do (and) the behaviors that they need to change. Tehran says it is a victim of terrorism rather than a perpetrator. Hook said the Iranian governments behaviors have brought about a situation that is unfair to its citizens. The Iranian people understand that it is unfair for the regime to have its children here, and that same regime makes it very hard for its own people to get (U.S.) visas, he said. Hook also repeated his assertion, made in the December 11 Twitter video, that it is hypocrisy for the leaders of an Iranian government that encourages public chants of Death to America to also send their children to the U.S. for study purposes. These are some of the things that we are looking to change, in getting into a much better place for a better future with the Iranian people, Hook told VOA Persian. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Trump administration regulations banning the entry of most citizens of seven nations for security reasons. Those nations include Iran and four others with Muslim majorities, in addition to North Korea and Venezuela. Under the travel ban, U.S. officials said they would continue to issue visas to Iranian students, subject to enhanced screening and vetting requirements. U.S. TV network NBC reported earlier this month that families of Americans detained in Iran were urging U.S. authorities to deny visas to Iranian officials children in order to pressure those officials into releasing the Americans. NBC said the families provided the Trump administration and several U.S. lawmakers with a list of U.S.-based Iranian nationals alleged to be the children or relatives of senior Iranian officials, including President Hassan Rouhani himself. The NBC report said other people on the list include the son of Iranian Vice President for Family and Womens Affairs Masumeh Ebetekar and the daughter of Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani. The report said the list came from relatives of some of the four Americans and one U.S. legal resident being detained in Iran on espionage charges that those relatives and U.S. authorities have rejected as bogus. In comments published last month by pro-Larijani Iranian news site Khabar Online, Ebetekar said the decision of many Iranians to study in America in past decades does not necessarily denote an approval of the hegemonic nature of the U.S. and its administrative policies." Most readers who commented on the article were unimpressed by the comment and viewed her sons study in the U.S. as contradicting her active role in the 1979 Islamic Revolution that ruptured Irans relations with Washington. This article originated in VOAs Persian Service. The U.S. Senate on Tuesday overwhelmingly approved legislation to decrease Americas substantial prison population by lowering some mandatory federal sentences, giving inmates added opportunities to earn reductions in jail time, and encouraging prisoners to better themselves so they are less likely to return to crime upon release. Passing 87-12, the First Step Act was hailed by proponents as a long-overdue retooling of the federal criminal justice system, an effort that drew resounding support from both Republican and Democratic lawmakers as well as President Donald Trump. Congratulations to the Senate on the bipartisan passing of a historic Criminal Justice Reform Bill, Trump tweeted shortly after the vote. I look forward to signing this into law! The bill makes smart changes to our criminal justice system in ways that will make it fairer, more humane, and more just, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York said. This legislation is proof that we can be tough on crime and more compassionate to those who deserve a second chance, Mississippi Republican Roger Wicker said in a statement. The bill retroactively ends the discrepancy in federal sentences for drug offenses involving crack and the powder form of cocaine, which would reduce jail time for thousands of prisoners convicted of crack offenses. The legislation also reduces some mandatory sentences, gives federal judges more flexibility to make exceptions to mandatory prison terms, and allow inmates to earn greater sentence reductions through good behavior and vocational training. Proponents said the bill aims to correct a failed 1980s-era attempt to deter illegal drug use that established long mandatory prison sentences for drug convictions Since 1980, the federal prison population has grown by over 700 percent, Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin said. Today, the United States of America holds more prisoners by far than any country in the world, more than Russia or China. Durbin added the existing law has unfairly targeted people of color, saying, The majority of illegal drug users and dealers in America are white. But three-quarters of the people serving time in prison for drug offenses are African-American or Latino. The House of Representatives passed a similar version of the bill earlier this year. This week, the Senate raced to complete work on the legislation before the chamber adjourns for the Christmas holiday. The First Step Act had robust but not universal Senate support in its current form. A group of Republicans argued it would open the door to lenient or vastly reduced sentences for violent offenders, and that it cedes too much authority to prison administrators. Justice exists when people receive what they deserve. Justice exists when a rapist receives a penalty proportionate to his crime, Louisiana Republican John Kennedy said. This bill says (current) sentences are unjust, so we are going to give the wardens, the director of the Bureau of Prisons that authority to let out whomever he or she wants to. Kennedy added, Im not going to vote to pass the buck to the bureaucracy and trust them to do the right thing. Kennedy and other opponents of the bill offered amendments specifying that violent offenders will be excluded from sentence reductions. All were defeated. The legislation is certainly not a get-out-of-jail-free card for violent criminals or sex offenders, Schumer said, explaining his opposition to the amendments. Americas prison population exceeds 2 million people, and incarceration consumes vast resources within the nations justice system. Once implemented, the First Step Act would have a modest impact on incarceration numbers, as the bill only applies to federal inmates, who account for less than 10 percent of the national total. Other initiatives seek to achieve similar results at the state level. A wide array of law enforcement organizations support the bill, as do both right-leaning and left-leaning advocacy groups. American families will be stronger and our communities will be safer, Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee said. This is a huge win for America and President Trump. The White House said Wednesday that 2,000 U.S. troops in Syria had begun withdrawing, shortly after President Donald Trump tweeted that the U.S. had defeated Islamic State in the Middle Eastern country. The announced withdrawal marked a sudden reversal in U.S. military strategy in the region, where senior U.S. military and other officials have been pushing for a longer-term military presence to help ensure IS does not re-emerge. Here are answers to frequently asked questions about the development How long have U.S. troops been in Syria? U.S. ground troops have been in Syria since 2015. An American-led military aerial campaign against IS began in 2014. Where are the U.S. troops located? U.S. troops are primarily in north-central and northeast Syria, with a smaller presence along Syria's southern border with Jordan. What do U.S. troops do in Syria? U.S. troops advise and collaborate with an alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias known as the Syrian Democratic Forces. Who are the Kurds the U.S. troops are based near? The Kurds are the largest ethnic minority in Syria, with fewer than 2 million living in northeastern Syria, according to The Kurdish Project. The U.S. forces have been deployed with the YPG Kurdish militia, which is based in the region. Syrian Kurds intend to establish an autonomous region in northeast Syria, as Kurds did in neighboring Iraq. What is the situation in northeastern Syria? North-central and northeast Syria is now largely controlled by Syrian Kurdish allied forces. The future of the region will be determined by two Kurdish political parties, the Kurdish National Council (KNC) and the Democratic Union Party (PYD). The parties disagree on how to defeat IS and how to best govern the area. Why is Turkey concerned about the U.S. military's collaboration with the Kurds? Turkey views any powerful Kurdish militia as a possible threat and more motivation for Kurdish separatists in Turkey. Turkey threatened earlier this month to deploy forces to Syria to repel Kurdish and Arab militias. Turkey is concerned that this region of Syria could become an independent or quasi-independent region linked to the Kurdish separatist group PKK, which Turkey and the United States classify as a terrorist organization. Turkey has been engaged in a war with the PKK for three decades. The White House said on Tuesday it was searching for ways to unilaterally fund the building of a controversial wall on the U.S.-Mexico border that Congress is balking at, possibly easing chances of a government shutdown this weekend. White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters President Donald Trump has asked his Cabinet agencies to "look and see if they have money that can be used" to begin building the wall. Previously, Trump had demanded that Congress approve $5 billion in new funds for the wall that he argues is needed to stop illegal immigrants and drugs from entering through the southwest border. On Tuesday, Trump said it was too early to say whether a partial government shutdown will be averted by a Friday midnight deadline when existing funds for several agencies expire. "We'll see what happens," he told reporters. But some Republican senators said they thought the president could be persuaded to sign a bill that does not fund his wall, and several Republican and Democratic senators spoke of the possibility of a stop-gap funding bill passing this week that would simply extend government operations into the new year. The new Congress that convenes on Jan. 3 would then have to grapple with the budget impasse. Given the continued uncertainty, however, federal agencies began publicizing their plans in case of a partial government shutdown. The State Department, for example, said its consular operations, both domestic and abroad, would continue "as long as there are sufficient fees to support operations." However, passport agencies might not operate if they are located in government buildings affected by the lapse in appropriations. Earlier on Tuesday, Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had proposed a plan that would have had Congress approve $1 billion in unspecified money that Trump could use to advance his border security priorities. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer called it a "slush fund" that was promptly rejected. Democrats, along with some Republicans, oppose the wall as a costly, ineffective border security tool. Even some Republicans balked at the $1 billion fund. "I'm not sure I would insist on that," Senator Roger Wicker told reporters. Republican Senator Marco Rubio, referring to the prospects of a bill to extend current spending for a short period, such as a few weeks "might be the only route forward considering the time constraints we face." Schumer said Democrats would "very seriously consider" such a move. Congress has been trying to approve around $450 billion in funds to keep a variety of federal agencies operating beyond Friday. Included is the Department of Homeland Security, which is responsible for border security. Failure to agree to new appropriations by that deadline could leave about a quarter of the federal workforce without paychecks and some federal programs shuttered until the impasse is resolved. Trump has demanded $5 billion as a down payment on construction of a wall, which was a key pledge of his 2016 presidential campaign. Trump originally said Mexico would pay for the wall, but Mexico has refused. It was unclear whether any Cabinet heads, such as Defense Secretary James Mattis, would find money in their existing accounts to funnel to a wall, or whether they even had the authority to do so. The White House said Wednesday the United States has begun withdrawing troops from Syria, shortly after U.S. President Donald Trump tweeted the U.S. has defeated the Islamic State terror group there. "We have started returning United States troops home as we transition to the next phase of this campaign," White House spokesperson Sarah Sanders said in a statement. She added the defeat of IS does not mean the military campaign by coalition forces is ending in Syria. "The United States and our allies stand ready to re-engage at all levels to defend American interests whenever necessary, and we will continue to work together to deny radical Islamist terrorists territory, funding, support, and any means of infiltrating our borders," Sanders said. Later on Wednesday, Pentagon spokesperson Dana White said in a statement that "the coalition has liberated ISIS-held territory, but the campaign against ISIS is not over." ISIS an acronym for the Islamic State terror group. "We will continue working with our partners and allies to defeat ISIS wherever it operates," she said, giving no details as to a timeline, noting "force protection and operational security reasons." Just last week, U.S. special presidential envoy for the global coalition to defeat ISIS, Brett McGurk, told reporters at the State Department that liberating the last one percent of IS-held territory could take "a period of months." "There is a significant concentration of the most hardened ISIS fighters in that little splotch of territory," McGurk said on December 11. "A couple of thousand hardened fighters remain in that area." Pentagon estimates from August of this year warned IS still had at least 13,000 fighters in Syria, where the caliphate had already collapsed. A withdrawal of the troops would mark a sudden reversal in U.S. military strategy in the region. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and other senior U.S. officials have been advocating for a longer-term military presence in Syria to help ensureIS cannot reemerge as a force in the Middle East.The U.S. has about 2,000 troops in Syria, many of whom work closely with an alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias known as the Syrian Democratic Forces. Despite the Pentagon's preference for an ongoing military presence in the war-torn country, Trump has said he wanted to bring the troops home when possible. Reuters quoted a U.S. official as sayingthe State Department is evacuating all personnel from Syria over the next 24 hours and that the time frame for the troop withdrawal is 60 to 100 days. Lawmakers weighed on Wednesday's announcement of the U.S. withdrawal from Syria, with Senate Armed Services Committee member Lindsey Graham tweeting, "Withdrawal of this small American force in Syria would be a huge Obama-like mistake." Former President Barack Obama drew the ire of Trump for withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq before Iraqi forces collapsed at the hands of IS in 2014. Sen. Rand Paul, a member of the chamber's Committee on Foreign Relations, praised the move on Twitter. Harry Kazianis, a defense expert with the Washington-based think-tank Center for the National Interest, said the Trump decision should not be seen as a shock. "In fact, with President Trump promising to the American people he would act only in the national interest and that U.S. forces have accomplished their objective to defeat the Islamic State there was no reason for them to stay any longer," Kazianis said. Mattis and State Department officials have expressed concern about leaving Syria before a peace agreement is reached to end the civil war that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and displaced about half of Syria's pre-war population of about 22 million people. The withdrawal of U.S. troops comes as the U.S. approaches an end of a coalition campaign to recapture territory once controlled by IS. While an alliance military campaign has defeated IS in Syria, the defeat has angered Turkey, a NATO ally, which is threatening a new offensive in Syria. Turkey considers the Kurdish forces in the alliance an extension of a militant group fighting inside Turkey. A total pullout of U.S. troops from Syria would still leave the U.S. military with a sizable presence in the region, including more than 5,000 troops in neighboring Iraq. VOA's Wayne Lee contributed to this report. The Islamic State group may be defeated geographically in the Middle East, but radical extremism is spreading to other parts of the world, and a new crop of potential terrorists now in prison will be out in a few years. A week after a deadly terrorist attack in eastern France, a top international law enforcement official warned that countries should brace for future assailants mirroring the profile of the alleged gunman Cheriff Chekatt, a man with an extensive prison record. Interpol Secretary General Jurgen Stock says a second wave of radicals linked to the Islamic State group and other organizations may soon emerge from jail. The inmates, he warns, are serving relatively short sentences for lesser terrorism-related charges, but may have become hardened in prison. "This generation of early supporters or early terrorists will be released in the next couple of years in two, three, four, five. We will see a wave of those who need to be released, and will again perhaps be part of a terrorist group, or those supporting terrorist activity," Stock said. Despite deradicalization experiments in several countries, Stock says prisons remain a top incubator for radical ideology. Since the Islamic State group's geographical defeat in Syria and Iraq, it and other movements have migrated to places like sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, where they compete and sometimes cooperate with other extremist groups. Homegrown terrorism is another threat, with cases like Chekatt, a native of Strasbourg, France, who killed five people and injured a dozen others in his hometown last week. Interpol Based in Lyon, France, Interpol is the world's only global police organization, with 194 member states. The body aims to intensify international cooperation in fighting criminal activity, ranging from drug and human trafficking to sex crimes and terrorism. Interpol recently emerged from high drama, after its former president Meng Hongwei was detained in China over corruption allegations and last month's election to replace him saw South Korea's Kim Jong-yang win over a controversial Russian candidate. But speaking to reporters in Paris, Stock emphasized the body's apolitical mandate, noting Interpol committee members like Meng serve on a sort of honorary capacity. "What we saw was a Chinese official arrested by Chinese authorities on Chinese soil. That is what happened," Stock said. "That is an issue of sovereignty of a member country ... it is not in Interpol's mandate to judge what a sovereign member country is doing." Top challenges Stock says Interpol is building what he calls a global early-warning system against terrorist activity, including a database on foreign terrorist fighters that has zoomed from profiles of a dozen individuals in 2012 to 44,000 today. Another key challenge is policing the so-called Dark Net parts of the internet purposefully not open to public view. Stock says 60 percent of the Dark Net's content deals with illegal material. A commission in Zimbabwe says the army was responsible for the killing of six people in post-election violence earlier this year. But it absolved the government of President Emmerson Mnangagwa for deploying the troops. One of the survivors welcomes the commission's recommendation for compensation, but the opposition is not happy. President Emmerson Mnangagwa says the commission he had set up to investigate violence post election violence had absolved his government of deploying the army, which killed six people. Mnangagwa said the use of the army was "unavoidable," but "lawful" since lives and property were under threat." But he said troops were not supposed to use live ammunition against the demonstrators, who were protesting a delay in election results. "It is imperative for the police urgently to complete their investigations to enable prosecution of those persons responsible for crimes committed on Aug. 1 Those particular members of the military and police found to have been in breach of their professional duties and discipline on Aug. 1, should be identified as soon as possible for internal investigations and appropriate action sanctioned," Mnangagwa said The commission, led by former South African interim president Kgalema Motlanthe, recommended Tuesday that families of victims who lost their lives be compensated, while those wounded must have their medical bills paid for. Adrian Manjere's arm was fractured by a stray bullet from an AK-47 on August first, according to a medical report. He told VOA he is still in pain and very bitter, but he welcomed the commission's call for compensation. "I think justice has been done if they say they are compensating us, that is all we ever needed, because we were struggling with bills. Right now I cannot even afford physiotherapy. So it is good news that they are going to compensate us," Manjere said. The 31-year-old says he has spent about $11,000 for medical treatment since the incident, and is struggling to care for his family. I would prefer a life compensation something like $100,000 or $200,000, I think with that figure I will be able to cope up. Because I was told by medical experts that I can not do hard or manual job with this hand anymore, so I have to do minor chores. So I think if I would get that amount of money, it will be able to help me, but it will not be able to cover up for the loss. No. No. It is only a little token to get a living, Manjere said. President Mnangagwa did not indicate if his government would accept all the commission's recommendations, including those for compensation and medical refunds. That is a real issue given that Zimbabwes government is struggling to meet all its obligations. During the hearings, officials said the opposition Movement for Democratic Change was responsible for the Aug. 1 protests. The investigators made no mention of the opposition Tuesday. But MDC spokesman Jacob Mafume says the commission was a waste of time. Mafume continued, "It returns back to the perpetrators the question, 'Who shot people? Who was in command?' It simply says, 'The army', which is what everyone knew before the commission was set up. People expected the commission to ask serious questions, 'Who, what are their names, have they been taken before a disciplinary or a criminal process?" On Monday, President Mnangagwa promoted Anselem Sanyatwe to the rank of major general. Sanyatwe, the outgoing head of the presidential guard, commanded the military unit that shot at the protesters. The URL has been copied to your clipboard The code has been copied to your clipboard. Candidates running for president in the DRC promise to fix the ailing economy and spread the country's vast natural wealth to its people. But voters doubt that Sunday's poll will bring the change they seek. VOA's Anita Powell reports from Kinshasa. New Policing Priorities Policing Under Trump In his final hours as U.S. Attorney General last month, Jeff Sessions issued a memo limiting the Justice Departments power to pursue and enforce federal consent decrees with local police departments.These court-enforced arrangements were a major tool for the Obama administration to curb patterns of police abuse and misconduct during a time of heightened national attention on the issue. The Obama administration launched "pattern or practice" investigations into 25 police departments and entered into 14 consent decrees. By comparison, the Trump administration has initiated zero.Sessions eleventh-hour decision did not come as a surprise.The Department of Justice under this administration will never negotiate or sign a consent decree that could reduce the lawful powers of the police department, said a DOJ spokesman last year Sessions' order could restrict existing and future police reform agreements.For example, it states that consent decrees should not last longer than three years, and it doesn't explicitly require departments to fully comply with the terms of the agreement in that time.This will allow the political leadership of DOJ to let abusive departments off the hook even when they havent instituted the reforms necessary to turn themselves around, says Chiraag Bains, director of legal strategies at Demos and a former federal prosecutor with the Civil Rights Division under Obama's DOJ.The changes are just the latest in the Trump administration's shift away from overseeing police and toward other priorities like further reducing violent crime, which has already been declining since the 1990s. (While Trump largely pushes for "tough on crime" policies, he said he intends to sign a bill the U.S. Senate passed on Tuesday that would reduce prison sentences for certain crimes.)During his 21-month tenure as the nations chief law enforcement officer, Sessions maintained that federal police consent decrees can reduce morale of police officers and prevent them from performing their jobs effectively. In April 2017, Sessions ordered a review of all existing Justice Department consent decrees. That same month, the DOJ unsuccessfully tried to delay the Obama administrations final consent decree with Baltimore Sessions' DOJ also abandoned negotiations for a consent decree with Chicago , according to Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan. The inaction prompted Madigan to file a lawsuit against the city, leading to a rare agreement in July between a state AG and a city mayor to mandate sweeping police reforms overseen by a federal judge.Among this shift in policing priorities, Sessions revamped a community policing program in September 2017 that was established by Obama in 2011. Under the Collaborative Reform Initiative (CRI), departments could request a DOJ review of their practices, and afterward, receive a public assessment with recommended changes. Departments could also receive federal funding and training to help implement the changes.Thats huge because a lot of the things that start as deficiencies we need to keep them from turning into patterns of unconstitutional conduct. But [Sessions] took that away, says Christy Lopez, a Georgetown University law professor who led the team that investigated the Ferguson Police Department after Michael Browns 2014 shooting.The Trump administration announced that the revamped CRI program would increase its focus on helping police departments tackle violent crime, fight gangs and deal with protests. The move has left about a dozen police departments that requested CRI assistance under Obama still waiting for completed reports.The ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request in 2017 for updates on the status of these reports. In response, the DOJ said the CRI program "will no longer be issuing progress reports relating to previous assessments."Chester, Pa.'s police department requested CRI assistance in 2016. Police Chief James Nolan says they received some good training opportunities in late 2017 through mid-2018,focused on de-escalation, supervision, conflict resolution and statistical analysis, but they never received the written report they were promised.Overall, Nolan says he would grade the process overall a B. He appreciated the less accusatory presence from Sessions Justice Department, but he says a written report and sustained communication would have improved their reforms.It would go from B to A if there was some follow-up or assistance in implementing changes. Lacking any sort of management study and then trying to address issues makes things sort of difficult, Nolan says.In addition to revamping CRI, the Trump administration discontinued funding for an Obama-era program called the National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice. Launched in 2014, the initiative sought to address racial tensions, implicit bias and other issues influencing relationships between communities and police.The Gary, Ind., Police Department was one of six pilot sites for the program. Brian Evans, Gary's deputy police chief, says the program "was nothing but helpful. ... We received so much positive feedback from the community on our officers behavior.Under Trump, the Gary police department has had little communication with the DOJ, says Evans. Absent federal involvement, the police department still works with the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, which helped implement the National Initiative, to continue the practices it learned, particularly with addressing how police engage with local youth.Since taking office, Trump has vowed to make officer safety and violent crime a priority -- and has made good on those promises.In addition to the CRI updates, a 2017 memo directed U.S. attorneys to implement "an enhanced violent crime reduction program" based on lessons learned from President George W. Bush's Project Safe Neighborhoods. Last month, the DOJ announced $56 million in funding for officer safety , including bulletproof vests, body cameras and safety research.Still, the Trump administration has not abandoned all efforts to address use of force, according to information provided by the DOJ.Under the newly restructured Collaborative Reform Initiative, for example, 65 police departments across nine states have received technical assistance since the updated program launched in March of this year. Fifty-five of those departments have received de-escalation training, according to DOJ records.Sgt. Shawn Dodson, head of the training division for Joplin, Mo.'s police department, says officers underwent a two-day, "multi-faceted" training this month addressing some of the psychological and emotional roots of use of force.In Iowa, the Cedar Rapids Police Department also received assistance this year under the new CRI program for a range of areas, including crowd management of large-scale events. Police Chief Wayne Jerman says that he "welcomes any federal assistance" and has not noticed significant changes in the DOJ's policing programs between the Obama and Trump administrations.Amid the national conversation about police misconduct, Dodson says "oversight is great, but there seems to be a gap between what is legally acceptable for law enforcement and the [public] impression of what's acceptable."Much of Sessions' vocal opposition to federal intervention focused on his belief that it's a states right to regulate local police. Experts challenge that idea.If a police department is providing unconstitutional policing, then only the Department of Justice -- which enforces the United States Constitution -- can fix that. I dont think they can ever walk away from that, says Ronal Serpas, a criminology professor at Loyola University New Orleans and former Nashville police chief.With Sessions now out of office, there are no signs that the Trump administration will become more involved in overseeing and reforming police misconduct. In lieu of federal oversight, Serpas believes that local communities have an important role to play."Presidents come and go, Congresses come and go," Serpas says. "Change is going to come from different parts of the country -- maybe at different times -- through local government. Its the way were set up." Zimbabwes President Emmerson Mnangagwa, on Tuesday made good on his promise to make public the findings of the three-month investigation into the post-election violence that left six people dead, and 35 injured. According to the report, compiled by a seven-member Commission of Inquiry picked by President Mnangagwa to look into what caused the violence that broke out on August 1st, the police and army were found responsible for the deaths and injuries sustained from the clashes between citizens and members of the security forces. The death of these six people and injuries sustained by the 35-others, rose from the actions of the military and the police, President Mnangagwa said, quoting the report. However, the report also attributed blame on the protestors, some suspected to be members of the opposition Movement for Democratic (MDC) Alliance, who were demanding the release of the July 30th presidential results. At least six persons sustained injuries as a result of the actions by the protestors, noted the report. Though the commission found the deployment of the military to assist police in containing the violence justified and constitutionally provided for in terms of Section 213 Subsection 2 of the Constitution and Section 37 Subsection 1 of the Public Order and Security Act (POSA) Chapter 11.1.7, given the riotous demonstrators, it also found the militarys use of force, which included beating demonstrators with baton sticks and rifle butts, as well as shooting into the crowds, unjustified and outside the command of the regulating authority. The use of live ammunition directed at people, especially when they were fleeing was clearly unjustified, and disproportionate, the report noted. The use of sharp shambokos, baton sticks and rifle butts to assault members of the public, indiscriminately was also disproportionate. MDC Role in Post-Election Violence While the report puts much of the blame on the army and police where it related to the death and injuries, it however implicated fake, fabricated news on social media, and the opposition MDC led by Nelson Chamisa, for sparking the violence, that resulted in the August 1st incident and involvement of the army and the police. Speeches made by political leaders, mostly the MDC Alliance, before and after the elections, heightened tensions and played a part in inciting some members of the public to protest, noted the report. During the pre-election rallies, the MDC Alliance had taken a position that if their presidential candidate, Nelson Chamisa, did not win the election, they would protest. A threat that they implemented. The commission further determined that, the protests were pre-planned and well-orchestrated as shown, for example, by the fact that the groups arrived in containers of assortment of products of objects such as stones, bricks, sticks, posters, etc., etc. which they used in their demonstrations, the report noted. The MDC refutes the reports findings as far as their involvement in instigating the violence, saying the whole investigation is a white wash to cover up the real culprits of the August 1st violence. We are surprised that the report says we caused the violence, but they didnt name even one person shot by the MDC, they havent even mentioned one member of the MDC who was even there, they are only referring to speeches that were made at rallies, said MDC spokesperson, Jacob Mafume. Mafume says his party is still going through the report. Commission Recommendations Aside from just pinning blame on suspected culprits of the violence, the Commission, which was chaired by former South African President Kgalema Motlanthe, also offered recommendations to prevent future outbreaks of election and other-related violence, as well compensation for victims of the violence and their loved ones. The payment of compensation is recommended for all victims of the violence, and dependents of the deceased. Where the deceased had young children, they should be urgently assisted with school fees and their general welfare, recommended the commission. The government should put in place a special committee to assess and determine the quantity of damages and compensation to be awarded to victims on a case by case basis, offered the report, and even noted names of victims. The report also calls for further internal investigation by the police to get to the bottom of who overstepped their boundaries while responding to the violence. It is imperative for the police urgently to complete their investigations to enable the persecutions of those persons who are responsible for all alleged crimes committed on the 1st of August 2018, noted the report. Those particular members of the military and police found to have been in breach of their professional duties and discipline on the first of august 2018 should be identified as soon as possible, for internal investigations and appropriate actions which should include hearing from the victims. MDC spokesperson Jacob Mafume, took issue with the reports call for tossing the investigation back to the police, saying the commission tasked with the investigation, should have resolved this. That was the commissions job, said Mafume. But it is now returning the matter back to the perpetrators, those who committed the killings, to say who ordered the shooting, and who killed people. The Commission also recommended the use of enhanced ICT facilities to enable election officials to quickly transfer election results to the command center, so that crucial results like the presidential results, can be announced faster than the current five-day waiting period, provided for by the constitution. To ensure that peoples right to demonstrate is protected, the commission also recommended more awareness to educate political parties and members of the general public on how to exercise their rights within the provisions of the law. Commenting on the commission findings, President Mnangagwa said his government will study the recommendations and set the way forward. The lawyer representing South African model Gabriella Engels, who was allegedly attacked by Zimbabwes former First Lady Grace Mugabe with an extension cord last year, says he welcomes the South African governments decision to issue a warrant of arrest for the former first lady. Willie Spies, who represents both Engels and the non-profit group Afriforum which advocates for the rights of minorities, says the issuance of the warrant represents justice for Engels. We are very glad to hear the news that the national prosecuting authority has gone to the length of issuing a warrant of arrest for Grace Mugabe, said Spies. The warrant of arrest for Mrs. Mugabe relates to a 2017 incident where she allegedly attacked Engels, who was with her sons in a hotel room in Johannesburg, with an extension cord, causing damages to her face. Following the incident, Mrs. Mugabe applied for and was granted immunity, and allowed to leave the country, without answering to the charges. Afriforum challenged South Africas decision to grant Mrs. Mugabe immunity, resulting in the high court overturning the decision earlier this year, paving the way for the arrest warrant to be issued, Spies explained. We were involved in a civil process and the civil process was actually to take the initial decision by the political decision makers on review, to set the diplomatic immunity that was granted to Grace Mugabe, said Spies. Since that happened and the court handed down their judgement setting aside the diplomatic immunity, the ball was back in the prosecuting authoritys court. For the arrest warrant to be executed, Mrs. Mugabe will have to physically visit South Africa where the warrant is in effect. Alternatively, however, Spies said though South Africa does not have extra-territorial jurisdiction in Zimbabwe, it can request the extradition of Mrs. Mugabe through its global extradition treaties, but ultimately the government of President Emmerson Mnangagwa would have to agree. As a country, we do have extradition treaties with countries all over the world which makes provisions for extradition in certain cases, and I assume if the authorities do take necessary steps, it will be possible to apply for her extradition, and then it will be a decision for Zimbabwean authorities, whether they are willing to extradite her, said Spies. Speaking on behalf of the Zimbabwe government, Ministry of Information Permanent Secretary Nick Mangwana said they have yet to receive formal notice from South Africa on the arrest warrant, and will only address the issue when it arises. As far as the government of Zimbabwe is concerned, we havent received anything from South Africa regarding Mrs. Mugabe, so from a government point of view and position, we do not have a position until or unless we receive something from the government of South Africa, said Mangwana. Then it will be considered by our own due process and will be treated in accordance with our processes and law. Mangwana indicated that even if the extradition request was made, the process could be lengthy. Extradition is a big process which involves our home affairs, it involves the attorney general, even the ministry of justice, it also involves provincial magistrates. Whether or not Mrs. Mugabe is ever arrested, Spies said the mere fact that Mrs. Mugabe will now have to think twice before visiting South Africa for shopping or any other private business, is punishment in itself, and a win for his client, Gabriella Engels. If she doesnt come, nothing will happen but she wont be able to do any shopping for now, which I think is in itself a huge penalty to her given the excessive spending tendencies that she displayed over the past few years, said Spies. Efforts to reach Mrs. Mugabe or her lawyers were unsuccessful. A U.S. judge in Washington sternly rebuked President Donald Trump's first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, for lying to investigators about his contacts with Russia in the weeks before Trump assumed power in early 2017, but delayed his sentencing. "I can't hide my disgust, my disdain," U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan said of Flynn's behavior, before later acceding to a request by Flynn's lawyers to postpone his sentencing. Flynn acknowledged to Sullivan, "I was aware," that it was a crime to lie to interrogators when they asked him about his discussions with Russia's then-ambassador to Washington, Sergey Kislyak. The judge told Flynn that his offense was "very serious" and that "arguably you sold your country out." Special counsel Robert Mueller had recommended the 60-year-old Flynn, a retired Army general and once head of the country's Defense Intelligence Agency, not be sentenced to any prison time because he had provided "substantial" cooperation with prosecutors in their on-going 19-month investigation of Trump 2016 campaign links with Russia and whether, as president, Trump obstructed justice by trying to thwart the probe. But Sullivan said he could not guarantee that Flynn will avoid a prison term when he is eventually sentenced, sometime in the months to come. Flynn was set to be the first Trump administration official to be sentenced in the Mueller probe.Last week, Trump's former attorney, New York lawyer Michael Cohen, was sentenced to three years in prison, in part for his role, at Trump's direction, of making $280,000 in payments shortly before the election to buy the silence of two women who alleged they had affairs with the future president a decade before he entered politics.Others in Trump's orbit are awaiting sentencing for various offenses. Hours before Flynn headed to court, Trump, in a Twitter remark, wished his former aide "good luck." Trump added, "Will be interesting to see what he has to say, despite tremendous pressure being put on him, about Russian Collusion in our great and, obviously, highly successful political campaign. There was no Collusion!" Flynn served as Trump's national security adviser at the outset of his administration, but was fired after less than a month on the job.Evidence surfaced that Flynn had lied to Vice President Mike Pence and others about his contacts with Kislyak in the period between Trump's election in November 2016 and becoming president on January 20, 2017. Flynn was a fixture at Trump's political rallies during the 2016 campaign, often mocking the Democratic challenger, former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.At the Republican national convention that formally nominated Trump as the party's 2016 candidate, Flynn led thousands of Trump supporters in chanting against Clinton, "Lock her up! Lock her up!" for her usage of a private email server during her tenure as the country's top diplomat. Flynn met 19 times with Mueller's investigators since pleading guilty a year ago, talks that drew the interest of Trump just ahead of the sentencing as to what he might reveal about the inner workings of the 2016 campaign.Prosecutors told Sullivan it was possible Flynn would continue to cooperate with investigators. Flynn had drawn investigators' scrutiny before he ran afoul of the FBI investigation in January 2017.While serving as an adviser to the Trump campaign in 2016, he lobbied for a Dutch company linked to the Turkish government without registering as a foreign agent. On Monday, the United States charged two of Flynn's former business associates with illegally carrying out a Turkish lobbying campaign.The government said the scheme was an effort to push American officials to expel a Muslim cleric, Fethullah Gulen, alleged by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to have orchestrated the failed 2016 coup against Erdogan's government. Flynn began cooperating with the special counsel after pleading guilty to lying to federal agents about his conversations with Kislyak.He became the first of five former Trump associates who have entered guilty pleas with the special counsel's office. Trump has for months derided Mueller's probe, tweeting several more broadsides against it after wishing Flynn well. U.S. President Donald Trump appears to be backing away from his threat to force a partial federal government shutdown, with White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders saying there are "other ways" to get $5 billion for a wall along the U.S. southern border. "At the end of the day, we don't want to shut down the government," Sanders told Fox News."We want to shut down the border from illegal immigration." Sanders cited existing legislation, likely the Senate's bipartisan funding measure for the Department of Homeland Security.The bill, approved by a committee vote last summer, calls for $26 billion, including $1.6 billion for barriers. Sanders said the measure is "something that we would be able to support" as long as it is attached to other funding proposals for defense and border security. Before Sander's remarks, there was little public indication of progress in resolving the stalemate over U.S. government spending, which could trigger a partial shutdown at midnight Friday. At the center of the dispute is Trump's insistence that Congress approve $5 billion in spending for his proposed wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Democrats and some Republicans oppose the plan, and Democratic leaders have offered $1.3 billion in other border security funding. Trump used Twitter to attack the Democrats on Monday as the two sides came no closer to an agreement. "Anytime you hear a Democrat saying that you can have good Border Security without a Wall, write them off as just another politician following the party line," the U.S. leader said on Twitter. "Time for us to save billions of dollars a year and have, at the same time, far greater safety and control!" The top Democrat in the Senate Chuck Schumer said there is not enough support in Congress for Trump's wall, and that "no threat or temper tantrum" will change that. "If President Trump decides to shut down the government, there is no end game in which President Trump gets the wall," Schumer said."There is no end game for Republicans in which they can avoid their share of responsibility - overwhelming share -for a shutdown.The time to solve this problem is now." In a meeting last week at the White House, Trump told Schumer and House Speaker-designate Nancy Pelosi that he would be happy to take responsibility for a government shutdown rather than give up any ground on the border wall issue. But to avert a Friday shutdown, Democrats and Republicans could reach agreement on a stopgap spending plan to fund government operations through the end of this year and into 2019. Spending for three-fourths of the government has already been approved through next September, but the remaining bills include 2019 funding for the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department, the Department of Justice, and the Interior Department. The URL has been copied to your clipboard The code has been copied to your clipboard. South Africa has issued an arrest warrant for Zimbabwe's former first lady Grace Mugabe. Police say the arrest is over an alleged assault against a a young model in August last year. George Ng'ang'a reports. Funeral Announcements A daily list of current funeral annoucements as heard on KXRA 1490 AM/100.3 FM News Updates The daily news, sports, and events delivered daily from Voice of Alexandria. Sports Update This current sports headlines delivered daily from Voice of Alexandria. Upcoming Events This email is the events of the area delivered daily from Voice of Alexandria. Breaking News The big news. Sent only as it happens. Below Deck Check Yourself! Season 6 Episode 12 Editors Rating 4 stars * * * * Previous Next Photo: Bravo This might be the horniest, craziest, least competent cast Below Deck has ever had and I am so here for it. They bone, they fight, they abandon rich people on sand bars, then they get drunk and do it all again. But mostly, they try to figure out with whom they can do it. In the opening post-charter, prenight-out trash purge sequence, Rhylee and Tyler engage in a prelude to doing it in the little deckhand garage area, where they flirt as they fold towels and organize rope. In reference to going out Rhylee says, Dont let TOO loose wrap it up, Tyler! Tyler grunts and goes, I dont wanna have a baby in Tahiti. Well theres the viewing publics single point of commonality with Tyler no one wants him to have a baby in Tahiti. Ross and Ashton have a moment where Ashton tells Ross that after he almost died and Ross hugged him, he felt safe in Rosss arms. Then, as Ross puts on floral sleeves for the night out, Ashton slips his pants on without underwear, his ass bared to America. Rosss face is right next to Ashtons bare ass so he asks him what hes thinking. Ashton explains its for easy access. He did, after all, have sex in a van. They get in their vans, and drive about 20 feet to a restaurant where the decor consists of rope wrapped around wooden pillars and out of view probably hangs a fishing net suspending plastic lobsters. This strikes me as the Tahitian version of the type of place Rhylee goes to in Alaska for a beer after a hard day of slaughtering oppressed fish. Laura orders tequila and soda, which is the vocal fry of cocktails. She asks Adrian flirtatiously about the house salad while holding his hand, which makes Adrian think she wants to bone him. The editors then cut in another flashback to Tylers pre-boat existence. He was in a car accident after high school and couldnt run track anymore because although he didnt break any bones he was picking rocks out of my skin. Once he finished with that, he decided to become an adrenaline junkie and perhaps even to refer to himself as such. He says, I decided I was gonna live every day like it was gonna be my last. Well thats one way to romanticize folding towels and wiping windows. After they eat Kate wonders if they should go out or back to the boat and Lauras like, LETS GO OOOUUUUTTT. And Kate stares blankly at the horizon while she says she wasnt really asking Lauras opinion. Then Laura starts talking about how Kate is disrespecting her, which just foreshadows how crazy Laura is. Usually the people who use the word disrespect repeatedly on reality shows are those who have outbursts and are prone to violence. Rhylee stands up and announces shes glad she can pick her wedgie through her outfit, which includes overalls with gaping sides. Maybe her consistently perplexing going-out looks are a byproduct of living in Alaska, where you never get to dress for warm weather and therefore have no idea how to do it. Then a bunch of crazy stuff happens rapidly. First, Tyler and Ross talk about Rhylee while urinating. Ross gives him permission to pursue her, saying, Youd be doing me a favor. And Rhylee, because the walls in this place are thin, hears them and gets ragey. Back on the boat, she and Tyler go right to their room and just crawl in bed together. Just like that. Adrian is hand-wringing over why Laura doesnt want to do him after she engaged in conversation with him about salad he gets so worked up over it he has to call his girlfriend for comfort and then, just like that, Rhylee and Tyler are in bed without clothes. While this unfolds, Kate and Lauras disdain for each other begins metamorphosing into a huge fight. Josiah tells Kate that Laura doesnt like them, so Kate leaves her room and goes to confront Laura. Lauras like, its you who doesnt like me, and Kate is like, you said we do a bad job as soon as you got on the boat. Two factions form: the Ashton/Laura faction, because Ashton is still just trying to get some, and the Josiah/Kate/Ross faction. Yes, poor lonely Ross, the last man other than Josiah and Captain Lee who isnt chasing Rhylee or Laura. He slumps on Kates bunk with a bag of Cheetos, nodding listlessly along to their complaints, the disappointment that his fun shirt had to end its night like this evident in his entire being. Meanwhile, Laura has gone off with Ashton to seek sympathy. Ashton recites a bunch of phrases he probably saved to a Pinterest board of how to hit on girls who are in fights with other girls, and they wrap themselves in a tarp and start humping, resembling, in the night-vision cam, a sea cucumber in distress. In the morning, Ashton and Laura go back to their rooms where they admit that they only writhed and kissed, they didnt actually fornicate. Tyler and Rhylee make similar claims. A flurry of chores commence while Captain Lee lies shirtless on a chaise. Then he calls Ross, Kate, and Adrian up to his office to impart that the incoming primaries are all primaries. Theyre all splitting the bill, which means there are no freeloaders that the crew can safely serve the wrong drinks and strand in shark-infested waters. Pretty soon, its night again, so Rhylee and Tyler start having sex. In the morning, Rhylee, giggling and smug, says she only got two hours of sleep. Tarps are ripped off chairs with the same passion reserved for Rhylees bunk, toilet paper is furiously folded into points, and the crew changes into their white greeting attire. Then the horde of primaries comes aboard and remark on how the decor looks Italian, prompting a narrative to take hold amongst the crew that the largest guest is in the mafia. Soon its time for lunch and Kate asks Rhylee to help carry plates to the table because she has decided to banish Laura to the laundry room. Lauras like, Its just the biggest slap in the face. Right, not being allowed to carry a plate to the table is the worst. Lee pulls up to the site he wants to park the boat at and asks the deck crew to drop the anchor. Ashton does it and Rhylee complains that she hasnt yet been on that anchor. Yeah, but she did just get to carry a plate to someone. While Rhylee is thinking about professional advancement, Tylers complex mind is in one place: When hes at work hes mostly thinking about that, he says, but when hes not hes thinking about havin sex with Rhylee. Then Josiah and Kate go through the mob wifes stuff, which is all black, which scandalizes them, which scandalizes me as a New Yorker. What is wrong with the all-black? Yes its especially funereal to wear in Tahiti versus, say, riding the Q train, but if this woman gets hot all she has to do is snap her fingers and Ashton will be at her side in a loincloth fanning her with a palm frond. Later, Adrian cleans mussels while he quizzes Ashton about Laura, coming to the bitter conclusion that he pities Laura because she doesnt know whats coming for her. Adrian stuffs his mussels (hey, at least he gets to stuff something!) as Laura reports to Kate that shes done with turndowns. After the mussels make it to the table, Kate checks the turndowns and finds dirty towels scattered all around the cabins. She asks Laura why the towels are a mess, and Laura accuses her of being aggressive. Kate tells her that shes in a rush because she has to go finish serving dishes consisting of a thousand ingredients each to the one million primaries. Laura gets even angrier and tells Tyler that shes actually going to freak out, and Tyler, who presumably does not derive adrenaline from drama, shrugs. At the dinner table, the guests are presented with seafood tagliatelle and the lady who wears only black is so excited by Adrians food that she says she wants to wash his knives for him and visit him in the kitchen. Adrian, who just wants Laura to wash his knives, is like sure. Laura then tells Kate she needs to speak with her, so Kate ushers her downstairs so she can have her outburst where the guests wont hear her. Then she launches into a tirade about how Kate is insane and needs to seriously figure [her] shit out She tells Kate it was unacceptable for her to go through the cabins after she pretended to turn them down, and that its unacceptable for her not to show her any appreciation. Next week: Kate tries to get Laura fired and Ashton tries to find someone else to bring to his van. Juelz Santana. Photo: Johnny Nunez/WireImage Juelz Santana has been sentenced to more than two years in prison for gun and drug possession. TMZ reports that the Dipset rapper (ne LaRon Louis James) pleaded guilty to possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, carrying a weapon on an aircraft, and possession of a controlled substance; he was sentenced to 27 months in prison, with an additional year of being under supervised release. In March, Santana was caught by TSA at Newark Airport with a loaded handgun and nonprescription Oxycodone in luggage with his identification on it. He initially abandoned his bags and fled the scene but then turned himself in three days later and was arrested. In 2011, Santana pleaded guilty to gun and drug possession after police raided his studio in New Jersey. He was also given probation in 2013 for threatening a neighbor whod allegedly witnessed him assaulting his now-fiancee and Love & Hip Hop co-star Kimbella Vanderhee. Last month, Dipset released their first album in 14 years. Role Call is a series in which Vulture talks to actors about performances they've probably forgotten by now, but we definitely haven't. Photo: Twentieth Century Fox My favorite genre of movie is bustling, dramatic upper-middle-class white family loses their minds during one particularly charged weekend. The Family Stone released in 2005 to middling reviews is this genres crowning achievement. Sarah Jessica Parker stars as the career-driven Meredith Morton, who spends Christmas with her boyfriend Everetts (Dermot Mulroney) New England family. Merediths nervousness reads as iciness from the moment Everetts car pulls into the Stones driveway, and the family immediately circles the wagons when they see that their prodigal son has decided to marry her. If Everetts mother Sybil (Diane Keaton) isnt undercutting her every action, his younger sister Amy (Rachel McAdams) sips coffee and sets traps for Meredith in every conversation. Eventually, Meredith calls for backup: She calls for her sister Julie (Claire Danes), and the Stone family is immediately smitten with the more outgoing Morton. I mean, theres really no smooth way to say this next part: Everett, boneheaded, falls for Julie. Meredith, against her better judgement, warms to Everetts weed-smoking, sweatpants-wearing brother Ben (Luke Wilson). The whole family is reeling from the news that Sybils breast cancer has returned. Theres a deeply uncomfortable dinner scene where Meredith is cluelessly homophobic, and another scene where she accidentally points to a black character as a charades clue for The Bride Wore Black. Stunningly, the only set piece missing here is a beloved family dog. And yet I love this movie unironically. I watch it every Christmas. I watch it even when its not Christmas. I love Rachel McAdamss scowl. I love Diane Keatons pristine white button-up, and the way she wears it under a frumpy robe. I love Luke Wilsons oversize North Face parka, which he definitely could not afford. I love that Mulroneys character is named Everett, because thats my cousins name. Also, The Family Stone is fun! And its the rare studio movie that features three women, and, instead of begging you to like them, presents them with sharp sides and questionable intentions intact. Every year I basically die because no one wants to listen to me talk about this movie at length. (The militia of Family Stone warriors is small, and its mostly just me and Bobby Finger.) So I decided to talk to Sarah Jessica Parker about it. Can you give me a sense of what your life was like when you signed on to The Family Stone? I think you were winding down work on Sex and the City. Im not sure if I had finished Sex and the City yet, actually. When I first met [director] Tom Bezucha and the offer came, I had recently finished. I was feeling good. I had just completed a long run as part of a project that I was proud of and had obviously changed the course of my life. I felt very privileged, and it felt like we were able to stop [the show] in a way that we all felt good about. But also I did have a young son, and I was looking forward very much to being his parent and having real time with him. When Family Stone came up, I remember that I had some time between wrapping Sex and the City the series and starting a movie. I knew my son was going to come with me, which was really important. Thats kind of the beauty of movies: Theyre a finite period. While they are intense and all-consuming, its kind of like a window. As a parent who wanted to spend time with my child, it was ideal. What was your meeting with Tom like? I was excited that he wanted me to play the part. He had very specific ideas about this character. He offered a really nice challenge. He wanted her to be skilled in ways that I had not been onscreen. There was a sort of chilly quality to her, where her neuroses were so evident, and yet she works so hard to mask that. She was wound so tight. The way she moves and behaves, its all very restrained. There was also that stillness. Carrie Bradshaw was very physical. She moved around a lot; she gesticulated a lot. Hands were an important part of the way she told stories, and Tom really didnt want that, which was exciting to me. We really did talk a lot about that. Even in the process of shooting, there would be times that he would remind me of some of those original landmarks that we were shooting for. Last night I read some old reviews about the movie, and Ive become so defensive of Meredith. People call her unlikable or shrill, which are obviously very loaded labels. I think shes just really nervous who cant relate to that? Did it bother you, how she was received? I dont read reviews, luckily. Im always curious when there is a general opinion about a woman not being likable. I take personal offense to it, as well. I really struggle with how to have those conversations with people and not be defensive, but actually talk about what those words mean, and why qualities that are called unlikable when they are attributed to a female character in cinema are not at all applied to a man. Ive had that even recently with Divorce. Its so curious. Its not without frustration on my part. I didnt think she was unlikable at all. Especially in romantic comedies, theres this idea about likable, relatable gals. I think it does a huge disservice to the billions of woman who are all wonderfully different. Somebody is nervous, or lacks confidence? I found none of it unlikable. In fact, I found her compelling. I was drawn to her because of her exhibited neuroses. I think Meredith was probably somebody who had very high standards for herself and lived in a world that was about discipline, appearance, success, ambition, and personal achievement. I think it made her actually quite touching. I really liked her, and I was sorry that she suffered so much, that she was so hard on herself and so hard on others. She was making an attempt to have a full life, a life that she thought was a portrait of success. I found those qualities very human. On the other side of this dynamic is Diane Keaton. Were you nervous? Was it hard to not take her attitude with your character personally? I was nervous about it. She and I actually had worked together before; we did First Wives Club. I didnt spend a lot of time on camera with her, but I had been around her a little bit. I was nervous, but at least I had some exchanges with her previous to that. She was very nervous-making. She was tough on me. Tough how? I wasnt certain in the beginning whether she was being personally tough on me, whether it was her relationship to the character. I came to understand that it was very much about the dynamic that the characters, what are they engaging in. She was tough on me in a way, but it was very specific to the on-camera story, and not personal and not mean. It was a huge joy to play those scenes with her, and wonderfully terrifying. I loved working with her because I learned a lot about I got it was sort of a backstage pass to better understanding why I loved her so as an actor, and I do, and have for many, many years. Can you tell me what you appreciate about her as an actor, about her process? Shes very particular about the work. She worked extremely hard. She asks a lot of questions. Shes serious about the work. Theres a lightness to her. Theres a sort of souffle thing about Diane Keaton. She has this really buoyant do you know what I mean? Yeah. Shes witty and shes clever and shes seemingly scattered in a way. But that does not actually speak to the enormous intelligence and seriousness that she brings to her work. Its not an accident, her work. Its not easy. Its thoughtful and considered. I hope Im not saying something I shouldnt, but she wears headphones on the set. To stay focused, shell wear headphones basically until they call action. I think its a very interesting way to stay focused. A set is wonderfully chaotic. Theres a lot going on, and a lot of last-minute adjustments, people talking and going over lines, all the various disciplines on the set taking care of what they need to do. Its a strangely chaotic place considering what has to happen the second the camera rolls, which is that everything goes quiet and still. Who do you think was more vicious, the Diane Keaton character or the Rachel McAdams character? You probably know the movie better than I do, Ive only seen it once. My guess is that the mother remains the most important person, the person whose approval you most need. I think that family, when they circled the wagons, is very intense and formidable combatants, but the gravitas of a mother kind of eclipses [anyone else]. How many times did the three of you have to fall into that egg dish, the breakfast strata? Many times. Many times. Please tell me everything about it. I know we had a bunch of costumes ready. We did it a lot because it was covered from a bunch of different angles. As always, before those scenes, its a lot of discussion about how its going to happen and when its going to happen. You try to control as much as you can simply I think for a camera to be able to capture it. But it has to feel completely out of control and reckless and spontaneous. I was absolutely completely covered with it. I recall going in for coverage, and having to stay covered in it. Like, I couldnt clean up. I had to stay because they were going in for tighter shots, and we couldnt try to re-create how it had spilled on me. I spent many, many hours staying in that outfit. I love that stuff. I love falling. I love all the physical stuff. I love props. For me, the more real all that can be, the better the work is, the better I feel like Im actually having the experience, so I dont want anyone else to do it for me. I dont care if Im covered in some Swedish egg casserole or whatever that was. I definitely know that I was the last of the day. I know that they covered me last. I spent many hours in some version of that, but it didnt really bother me. After the strata scene, I think the second most infamous is the dinner scene: Meredith has a really hard time asking Everetts gay brother and his partner if theyd really want a gay son. Was that excruciating to film, someone whos wrong but having such a hard time explaining even what shes thinking? Yeah, it was excruciating because of the silences, you know? I didnt want anything about that to be easy, and I didnt want it to feel familiar. You do so many takes of scenes like that because youre moving around the table very slowly with the camera so that everybodys covered in the scene, and that really is a scene where you really need to be on people at different times in the editing room, you need all those choices. So, yes, it was, because theres nobody to help you. You really are alone in it. Shes trying so hard to defend an argument to course correct really quickly but its a long-held belief. She isnt arriving at this as a conversation piece. Its not like youre joining in and saying, I just wondered, Did you ever think that maybe it might be easier if you hadnt made that choice, or if this wasnt your life? That is much more painful because it was so revealing about her, but also she was so much on her own. And, yes, all the actors were looking at me. I wanted to feel isolated, so it was excruciating, but it felt appropriately so. Was Merediths tic always the throat-clearing? Yes. From the beginning, I think it was written into the script. Do you remember the cast doing a lot of improv, or finding things on the day? I dont think theres a lot of improv. Diane can do it and does it beautifully. I tend not to because I think its hard to do it really, really well. Im sure youve seen many cases when people think theyre good at it. Its sort of awful when someone isnt great at it and doesnt add something meaningful. Would you be mad if your own sister stole your fiance? I guess it would depend on the circumstances. What!! I mean, I dont know. I guess that would be pretty hurtful. You mean like a current fiance, not someone that is broken up, but that somebody who is in fact, to your knowledge, your fiance? Yes. And you are engaged? Mm-hmm. Just like in the movie. Well, yes. It would be very upsetting. That would be awful. Also, its very hard to imagine that my sister I have many sisters. I cant imagine any of them doing that. Our tastes are very different, lets just start with that. Yeah, I think that would be probably really problematic for everybody, for the entire family. I want to go back to the kitchen scene for a second because thats maybe my favorite line reading in the movie: Youre covered in the food and sort of whimper, Whats so great about you guys? I dont even remember when I say it. You have to remind me, Im so sorry. No, youre fine! I literally watch this movie every year, so Im very familiar with it. Maybe I should watch it again. Maybe my daughters would love it. Theyre 9. Are they too young, or are they the right age? I think thats the perfect age. I think its totally appropriate. You have to show it to them. But anyway, its when the strata has just dropped in the kitchen. Youre looking at Diane, sort of like, Why would I even want to be a part of this family? Whats so great about you guys? Diane says, Well, you know, were all weve got. Right, yeah. Thank you. Im truly recounting this movie to you, Im so sorry. Oh my God, no, thank you. Since you have kids, have you ever considered that maybe youll become this Sybil character when or if they bring someone home for the holidays? You know, I thought a lot about my children and their romantic life. Matthew [Broderick, her husband] and I would do our very best to be decent and civilized and hospitable to somebody who wed think is not deserving or worthy of our children. Ive also said to [her son] James Wilkie, You know, when you go to college, you can come home or when hes married, when hes a grown-up person and he has a romantic partner. I would tell him he was going to marry a woman named Mary, and I have no idea why. I was like, You understand you have to come home every Friday for dinner, with or without your partner. I always imagine that it will be like, How could this have happened? That theyd be the most perfect, the most suitable choice, that wed get so lucky. I hope that were a house that our kids want to come home to, and that people want to spend time with us for holidays. It would be a thrill. I dont know what you do if you dont care for a childs romantic selection. I dont know how youre supposed to get through that. Looking back, I know for sure that I brought some people home that, later on, my brothers and parents revealed to me they were so relieved when we broke up. I love that. But they were very generous [with the guests, at the time]. Would you, Sarah Jessica, pick the Luke Wilson character or the Dermot Mulroney character? This is very hard because I love those actors so much. Okay, but theres definitely a wrong answer here. Do you want to tell me what my answer should be? Do you want me to pick Luke? Yeah. Only because Everett was consistently the worst. Sorry. That dinner scene he abandons Meredith in that dinner scene! He doesnt even try to help her. I could not respect him after that. Well, you know more than I do. Of course she should end up with Luke. Of course she should! Luke has a line, he says, You have a freak flag, Meredith, but you just dont fly it. I wanted to hear what that advice means to you. I guess what he meant, and what it would mean to me, is youre not allowing yourself to be your unique self. Youre not allowing yourself to be flawed or wrong or silly or ridiculous or vulnerable. Youre not allowing yourself to be your true person. I guess thats certainly what I would mean if I said that. What do you think changed in Meredith? I think its what you said, that shes just relaxed and herself. A lot of the anxiety comes from not doing that, which I think is what makes the performance so great. Well thank you. As Ive said, this is my favorite holiday movie and I watch it all the time, but especially this time of year. Do you have a favorite holiday movie? We dont watch a lot of movies at Christmas. Its very strange. I didnt grow up watching movies at Christmas. At Christmas, we always went to whatever the big movie was, as a family. Actually, we used to watch now, Im remembering this when you could start renting movies on your own we always watched Albert Brookss movies at Christmas. Always. Which ones? We watched Defending Your Life. We watched Modern Romance. Real Life. We were obsessed with Albert Brooks, and we watched them over and over again. Well, thank you so much for talking to me and letting me indulge Thank you. I feel like you know so much more. But mostly thank you for loving Meredith. Its so touching and so nice to hear. This interview has been edited and condensed. Statement Festival. Photo: Frida Winter/AFP/Getty Images Presenting a lesson in how to completely miss the point: Swedens government has declared it unlawful that a festival created by and for women didnt want any men. The inaugural Statement Festival, held in August, was promoted as the worlds first festival completely free from cis men, inviting only people who identify as women, nonbinary, and transgender for both the lineup and the audience. Festival organizers said it was a statement against the rampant sexual harassment and abuse against women that occurs in festival culture. (In 2016, more than 27 sexual assault cases were reported at a single Swedish music festival.) Now, after a months-long investigation, Swedens Discrimination Ombudsman has found that the festivals rhetoric breached a gender-discrimination law by discouraging a certain group from attending the event, despite also finding that the festival did not enforce a man free policy at entry and being unable to prove anyone was actually discriminated against. As such, the festival wont be penalized. Statement has responded with exactly the statement youd imagine: Its sad that what 5,000 women, non-binaries and transgender [people] experienced as a life-changing festival made a few cis men lose it completely. The success of the Statement festival shows that is exactly what we need and the DOs verdict doesnt change this fact. Otherwise, we have no comments. We are busy changing the world. Meanwhile, the Swedish government is busy worrying about men. A federal judge says Broward schools and the Sheriff's Office had no legal duty to protect students during the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.U.S. District Judge Beth Bloom dismissed a suit filed by 15 students who claimed they were traumatized by the crisis in February. The suit named six defendants, including the Broward school district and the Broward Sheriff's Office, as well as school deputy Scot Peterson and campus monitor Andrew Medina.Bloom ruled that the two agencies had no constitutional duty to protect students who were not in custody."The claim arises from the actions of [shooter Nikolas] Cruz, a third party, and not a state actor," she wrote in a ruling Dec. 12. "Thus, the critical question the Court analyzes is whether defendants had a constitutional duty to protect plaintiffs from the actions of Cruz."As previously stated, for such a duty to exist on the part of defendants, plaintiffs would have to be considered to be in custody" -- for example, as prisoners or patients of a mental hospital, she wrote.Peterson was the only armed person at the school when Cruz showed up with an assault rifle and murdered 17 people, in addition to wounding 17 more. Peterson has been widely vilified for taking refuge outside the school and not confronting Cruz."His arbitrary and conscience-shocking actions and inactions directly and predictably caused children to die, get injured, and get traumatized," the lawsuit claimed.Medina knew Cruz and saw him arrive on campus, but did not confront him.The lawsuit argued that the Sheriff's Office and School Board "either have a policy that allows killers to walk through a school killing people without being stopped. Alternatively, they have such inadequate training that the individuals tasked with carrying out the polices ... lack the basic fundamental understandings of what those policies are such that they are incapable of carrying them out."Kristoffer R. Budhram of Jacksonville, who represented the students, could not be reached by email or phone for comment.Bloom's ruling contrasts with the action of a Broward County judge last week.In that case, Peterson's lawyer sought to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the family of Meadow Pollack, one of 17 people killed in the shooting. Broward Circuit Judge Patti Englander Henning rejected his argument that Peterson had "no legal duty" to protect the students and faculty.Englander Henning found that Peterson had a duty to the school community as someone whose job was security and who had an "obligation to act reasonably" under the circumstances of the shooting.The judge also found Peterson was not protected from the lawsuit by "sovereign immunity," a legal doctrine that shields public employees from legal action based on their official conduct.Joel Perwin, Pollack's attorney, said: "We don't think it's even debatable that Peterson had a duty to these students. Peterson's disclaimer of any legal responsibility is a mirror of his abdication of his responsibility for these kids," he said.Peterson's lawyer, Michael Piper, said he would appeal the ruling. Photo: Universal Pictures Mark Hogancamp is a photographer and storyteller, but prefers to think of himself as a film director. So reads the opening line of the artist bio for Hogancamp, made art-world famous in 2006 for his elaborately realized miniature WWII tableaux, indie-documentary famous, and now mainstream-holiday-movie famous in 2018, courtesy of director Robert Zemeckis. Though Hogancamps medium is technically photography the works that he sells are prints and photo books at one point in Jeff Malmbergs 2010 documentary Marwencol, Hogancamp admits hes been working with a camera with a broken light meter, and he figured out how to light his evocative frames through trial and error. His work is narrative and psychological and feeling, less so than technical craft. And while Zemeckis does more than Malmberg was equipped to in terms of bringing the stories and drama and violence of Marwencol to life, the whole time I found myself wondering: Why doesnt someone let Mark make the movie? In Zemeckiss film, Hogancamp, played by a chain-smoking, cargo-short-wearing Steve Carell, is still working through the aftermath of the 2000 beating that left him without most of his memory, and for a while, his ability to speak and walk. Marwen, the 1:6 scale Belgian village that sits outside his trailer home in Kingston, New York, is already fully operational, populated by Marks WWII fighter pilot doll proxy, and a bevy of ferocious, armed-to-the-teeth women, each a stand-in for various characters in Marks real life. (They are voiced and embodied by Janelle Monae, Diane Kruger, Merritt Wever, Eiza Gonzalez, and a bizarrely, cartoonishly Russian Gwendoline Christie.) The film opens with a confrontation between the residents of Marwen and a crew of perennially invading Nazis, brought to cinematic but still stiffly jointed life in the movie in Marks mind. But we are soon yanked back out to the mundane world human Mark inhabits post-hospital, post-rehab, but still very much in recovery from his trauma. Potential salvation comes in the form of a new neighbor Nicol (Leslie Mann), whom Mark immediately becomes infatuated with, and soon immortalizes in his village along with the rest of the women in his life, casting her as his doll-Marks new love interest. He and Nicol become friends, and she is cautiously understanding of her role in his art, but its clear some boundaries will need to be set before someone gets hurt. Meanwhile, Marks friends and lawyer try to help him work up the courage to appear in court and testify against the men who attacked him, the idea of which still sends him into panic attacks and to his bottle of pain pills. The Marwencol documentary saved the reveal of Marks cross-dressing as a third-act twist, possibly to its detriment. The least that can be said for Zemeckiss adaptation is its willingness to embrace that queerness from the get-go. The bar attack, Hogancamp learned after the fact, was in response to him discussing his love of womens clothing at a bar, and getting the perpetrators tried for a hate crime comprises much of the driving drama of Marwen. But if this is all starting to sound like a lot, then Im conveying it accurately: Welcome to Marwen is a totally confounding movie. None of this is because of Hogancamps actual story, which remains rich and wild and full of pathos, nor Carells performance, which is subtle and wounded and resists all mawkish special-man tics it could have lapsed into. But the frame of a Robert Zemeckisdirected Inspirational True Story and the syrupy Alan Silvestri score that blankets it are just too many layers of abstraction over a story that already contains multitudes. We should perhaps be suspicious when the art made about an artist begins to overshadow the artists actual work. The cyclical drama of Marwencol, as one can gather from Hogancamps work and the bits of it we see in both Malmbergs and Zemeckiss films, is a totally engrossing blend of violence and sadism, sex, masculinity, matriarchy, and magic. Its repeated over and over again that the project is Hogancamps form of therapy and self-excavation, but isnt most art, at some point or another? Theres so much more going on here that a story of art merely mirroring life cant capture, and I found myself wanting, at the very least, the surreal, tragic, kinky WWII movie that Hogancamp has been writing through his art for the last two decades. That movie would tell us more about the artist, sure, but it would also perhaps have a chance to be about more than Mark Hogancamps specific circumstance about the violence and hang-ups and trauma of the world that created that circumstance. WAAY 31 spoke with the widow of a well-known EMT who was laid to rest in Athens on Monday. Wayne Dement worked for Athens Emergency Medical Services for 38 years and was loved by many in the community. His wife, Nancy Dement, told WAAY 31 she buried the love of her life on their 42nd wedding anniversary. Im going to count those 42 years the best years of my life," she said. Thats how Nancy describes the time she had with her husband, Wayne, before he passed away. He was my knight in shining armor," she said. In fact, Nancy said she still remembers their very first date. He handed me a card that said, You are the sunshine of my life. A similar thing happened on their last day together. I would sing to him and he would sing to me, You are my sunshine. My only sunshine. Wayne passed away Thursday after he suffered from congestive heart failure. Nancy said Wayne had health problems for a while and had a near-death experience after a massive heart attack in 2008. I said, You know I love you so much. Please dont leave me. He said, Im not going to leave you. And although he was in and out of the hospital, Nancy says she was happy she got to keep Wayne for another ten years. And Nancy says poor health didnt keep Wayne from working. She says he spent as much time as he could with his friends and coworkers at Athens Emergency Medical Services. He wouldve worked for free. He loved the ambulance and he loved helping people," she said. "They knew if Wayne was on the scene, it was going to get done. Nancy says December is a tough month for her, as she lost her youngest son in a car accident on Christmas Eve last year; but despite her tremendous loss, Nancy still keeps a positive attitude. For him to be released out of that body at Christmas, I know its hard, but I am just so happy that hes home now and with our little boy," she said. Nancy told WAAY 31 her insurance wouldnt pay for Waynes funeral, but thanks to overwhelming support and donations from the community, the service was still able to happen. If you would like to donate money to help Wayne's family with a tombstone, you can go by Redstone Federal Credit Union in Athens. The account name is "Wayne Dement Donations." WAAY 31 learned more about a man who's in the Madison County Jail without bond for violating his probation. Martin Hicks Jr. is now facing 10 years in prison. Hicks was arrested in Marshall County this month for domestic violence charges, and now his girlfriend at the time said she's relieved he's back in jail without bond because she doesn't think that's the first time he's violated his probation. Casie Long said she was Martin Hicks latest victim. The two had been in a relationship until last week when he attacked Long and her daughter. "I had never been afraid for my life until the night he attacked me and my daughter. He was pushing me down and standing over me yelling. She grabbed the back of his shirt, and when she did he turned around and grabbed her and pushed her down," she said. Long said nearly 5 hours after the yelling started she was able to run down the road and call 911. Now, she hopes he never gets out of jail after dating him for more than a year. Hicks is in the Madison County Jail awaiting a hearing for a probation violation. The violation comes after he was convicted of negligent homicide. Hicks pleaded guilty to running over his girlfriend Jamie Varvel with a U-Haul while under the influence of meth in 2016. "I truly believe he is an evil person. I believe he did get away with murder," Long added. Hicks was sentenced to 5 years probation and 10 years in jail if he didn't follow it. "I know he didn't follow his probation. He failed drug tests and bragged to me about it," Long said. WAAY 31 called the probation office on Monday and an Officer Haney identified herself as his probation officer, but she wouldn't tell us if Hicks had failed drug tests. Haney also wouldn't tell us her first name. However, when we called the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles who oversees probation they told us James Johnson was his probation officer. Long said she doesn't believe his probation officer turned a blind eye to his violation. One of the many problems the WAAY 31 I-Team uncovered after police arrested Jimmy Spencer. A parolee charged with killing three people in Guntersville over the summer. "He told me on one occasion she was proud of him and if everyone did as well as he did it would make his job a lot easier," she said. Long only talked to Officer Haney once since he was put on parole and when the officer contacted long she was looking for Hicks. "She wasn't trying to speak with me. She was trying to speak with him, and I believe she was calling him to warn him honestly that they were signing warrants," she said. As for Hicks, she told me she hopes he serves his ten year sentence and doesn't get released anytime soon. "I will be there at every parole hearing to stand behind Jamie's family for that. I couldn't imagine my child being killed especially after watching him hurt my child," she said. Law enforcement officials have apprehended George Bennett, who was sought for a weekend burglary in Lawrence County, Tennessee. On Wednesday, deputies and troopers searched an abandoned trailer near the Lawrence County and Lewis County line and arrested Bennett. He was taken to the Lawrence County Detention Center and is currently being held without bond. During the raid, officers recovered several items that had been reported stolen. Description GIS - 19 December, 2018: The protection of the image of Mauritius as a sound International Financial Centre is key to ensuring a competitive investment climate and consolidating the financial services sector as a major pillar of the economy. This statement was made by the Minister of Financial Services and Good Governance, Mr Dharmendar Sesungkur, at a press conference yesterday at the Sicom Tower in Ebene during which he dwelt on some of the accomplishments of the sector. Minister Sesungkur highlighted Governments determination to ensure that principles of ethics and good governance remain prevalent in financial institutions, more particularly in banks and insurance companies. With regard to the latter, he pointed out that these organisations will be called upon to demonstrate greater accountability, transparency and efficiency. He underscored that Vision 2030 anticipates the positioning of Mauritius in the league of high income countries and a higher purchasing power of citizens hence, a better quality of life. The contribution of the financial services sector, he emphasised, is expected to increase to reach 15% to Gross Domestic Product by 2020 in comparison to the current 12%. The sector, he added, also caters to the direct and indirect employment of some 15 000 persons. The Minister recalled that some of the recommendations of a Blueprint aiming to take the financial centre to a new level of development were effectively implemented while regulatory bodies were further reinforced following appropriate changes in the framework. As regards the Ombudsperson for Financial Services Bill, he outlined that it will bring about a change in the way complaints and remedial actions are dealt with and will better protect consumers of banking and financial services. According to him, the countrys laudable performance supported by several international indices showcases the relentless efforts of the Government to improve business investment environment. Mauritius, he stressed, ranked 25th out of 190 countries for ease of doing business by the World Banks Doing Business 2018 Report. Moreover, Minister Sesungkur reiterated that Moodys reaffirmed the Government of Mauritiuss Baa1 long term issuer and senior unsecured ratings while the findings of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Developments Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes concluded that Mauritius enjoys an overall compliant rating. The Minister highlighted that Mauritius remains the largest source of Foreign Direct Investment for India and to this end, discussions were held for a company to be enlisted on the Bombay Stock Exchange. He also pointed out that Government will make a request for the extension of some two years as regards the Indo-Mauritius tax treaty. (TNS) A tornado tore through a neighborhood near Port Orchard Tuesday afternoon, ripping roofs off of buildings and pulling trees to the ground, authorities said.One homes roof was torn off completely, revealing its second-story rooms to news helicopters above. Twenty homes were evacuated after a possible gas leak.Based on radar imagery and images weve seen from social media, it looks a tornado touched down near Port Orchard around 2 p.m., said Kirby Cook, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.About 50 buildings were affected, said Deputy Scott Wilson, of the Kitsap County Sheriffs office.There are buildings with roofs off and trees down, Wilson said. I dont have any numbers of anybody injured, or, God forbid, anybody deceased.At least seven homes were damaged, according to Bob Calkins, of the Kitsap County Department of Emergency Management.Wilson said the tornados epicenter was near the intersection of Bethell Road Southeast and Southeast Salmonberry Road just outside of Port Orchard and a few blocks away from a Walmart Supercenter. The tornado traveled northeast.The sheriffs office described the damage as catastrophic, warning residents to stay out of the area or shelter in place. Power lines are down and gas lines are being checked for leaks, the office said in a tweet.This area has not been deemed safe,' the tweet said.Calkins said authorities were investigating a reported gas leak in a neighborhood near Southeast Tiburon Court.Theres about twenty homes that we know of now that weve asked people to evacuate, Calkins said, noting that he did not know if those homes had been damaged or if the leak was related to the tornado.The evacuation area was in the Tiburon Court area west of Harris Road Southeast and between Lund Avenue Southeast and Salmonberry Road. Everyone else should take shelter, Calkins said.The American Red Cross planned to open an evacuation center at 4 p.m. in the St. Gabriel Roman Catholic Church in Port Orchard.Its raining really hard, so if people are out of their homes, we want to make sure they have shelter, Calkins said.The storm cell that produced the tornado has dissipated, Cook said. Meteorologists were not expecting tornado activity Tuesday, and it caught them by surprise.We do have thunderstorms in the forecast. We were not expecting any to be severe. Certainly this one was, Cook said. Part of the challenge with this kind of phenomenon its so infrequent here. Its hard to forecast. It highlights why folks should pay attention to the weather and be aware.Tornadoes are relatively rare in the Northwest. From 1950 to 2016, 120 tornado events were recorded in Washington state, according to storm event data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.Were not Tornado Alley. This isnt the Midwest, Cook said. We tend to get them in the cool months this is a cold season event for us in the Northwest.2018 The Seattle TimesVisit The Seattle Times at www.seattletimes.comDistributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. (TNS) AT&T announced Tuesday that its 5G network is live in parts of a dozen cities. And it said its first 5G-compatible device a mobile hotspot will soon be in the hands of some customers.It marks the Dallas-based carriers latest steps toward a nationwide rollout of the next-generation mobile network thats expected to bring faster, more reliable cellphone service and support emerging tech like autonomous cars, virtual reality and widespread use of robotics in manufacturing.AT&Ts mobile 5G network is live in four Texas cities: Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Waco. Its also in areas of Atlanta; Charlotte and Raleigh, N.C.; Indianapolis; Jacksonville, Fla.; Louisville, Ky.; Oklahoma City; and New Orleans.In the first half of 2019, AT&T said it will go live with 5G in parts of seven more cities: Las Vegas; Los Angeles; Nashville, Tenn.; Orlando, Fla.; and San Diego, San Francisco and San Jose, Calif.But theres a hitch: You cant use the mobile network for your phones yet. Smartphones that connect to the mobile network will start hitting the market in 2019. AT&T has said itll offer a 5G-compatible smartphone from Samsung in the first half of 2019 and will add another one to its lineup in the second half of next year.Apple is expected to hold off on launching an iPhone for the 5G network until at least 2020. With the launch of 3G and 4G, it similarly waited to launch an iPhone until up to a year after the technologys deployment and the debut of rival smartphones.While customers wait for the smartphones, theyll be able to buy AT&Ts first 5G-compatible device: a mobile hotspot that connects to their devices, such as laptops and tablets. Starting on Dec. 21, the Netgear Nighthawk 5G Mobile Hotspot will be available to a select group of businesses and customers chosen by AT&T as its early adopters.The puck will be available to the public in the spring. The device will cost $499, with a 15 gigabyte data plan running $70 a month.In a statement, Andre Fuetsch, AT&Ts chief technology officer and president of AT&T Labs, called the device the first taste of the mobile 5G era.Texas has been one of AT&Ts 5G testing hubs.The company launched a 5G pilot in Waco at Magnolia Market at The Silos, a retail complex owned by HGTV stars Chip and Joanna Gaines that attracts about 5,000 tourists a day.It also opened a new lab in Austin this spring to simulate how the mobile 5G network will be used by customers. And it is working with Samsungs semiconductor facility in Austin to test how 5G could be used in manufacturing.Verizon launched its 5G network earlier this year, but its a broadband replacement instead of a standards-based mobile service.Verizon 5G Home, which went live in October, uses a device that resembles a home broadband router to deliver Wi-Fi. It costs $70 a month, or $50 a month for Verizon customers. Its available in only one Texas city: Houston. Its also available in Indianapolis, Los Angeles and Sacramento, Calif.The rival carrier also plans to release a 5G smartphone with Samsung in the first half of 2019. Defence minister says use of army to be limited to "emergency cases." A plan to call in the army to fix Rome's potholed roads, as part of a 240 million package allocated by the Italian government, has been declared "inadmissable" by the Italian senate. The proposal to use the army to repair roads has also been clarified by Italy's defence minister Elisbetta Trenta, of the populist Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S), who told reporters that soldiers would only "intervene in emergency situations, on the streets with very high mortality rates." Rome city hall, however, remains "very confident" that "a solution will be found for the streets of Rome and that promises will be honoured", according to reports by Italian news agency ANSA. This optimism was shared by Laura Castelli, the M5S undersecretary of Italy's finance ministry who said: "We are making a simple formal correction of the text, which will be resubmitted shortly." Speaking on 18 December, Rome's M5S mayor Virginia Raggi had hailed the agreement as "a great deal for Rome and the Romans." Photo Il Messaggero 23 Dec. Rome's Vitala Festival hosts a special pre-Christmas gospel concert featuring the acclaimed Chicago High Spirits whose repertoire ranges from traditional Spirituals to modern Gospel and Christmas songs by award-winning artists. The group, which has 25 years' experience playing around the world with acts ranging from Andrea Bocelli to Amii Stewart, will be joined on the night by the choir Charlies Gospel Angels. The concert takes place at 21.00 on Sunday 23 December at Teatro S. Genesio in the city's Prati district, with optional buffet and refreshments available from 20.00. For full details see Facebook event page. The Post detailed allegations this month about a culture of anti-competitive behavior in the generic drug industry, which is dominated by companies with offices in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The states lawsuit said companies worked together to divide markets for certain drugs, rigged bids submitted to wholesalers and pharmacy chains, and conspired to keep prices high. The lawsuit and complaints filed by other plaintiffs documented price spikes of up to 3,000 percent in some cases. At the reception (Photo: VNA) According to Mr. Enrico Letta, the dialogue was held for the 1st time in Jakarta, Indonesia, in May 2017, with the participation of 250 major businesses from ASEAN and Italy. The 2nd dialogue attracted 300 businesses to Singapore this April and the 3is expected to be held in Hanoi from June 5-6, 2019. He affirmed that Italys selection of Hanoi as the host of the dialogue reflects the close relationship between Vietnam and Italy. It is also a new start for the relationship between Vietnam and the European Union (EU) as apart from large businesses, Italy will invite high ranking representatives from the EU, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and Southeast Asian countries, ensuring that the event holds great significance in both economics and politics, he added. The event also confirms that Italy is a strategic gateway for Vietnam to the EU and Vietnam will be a gateway for Italy to the ASEAN region. In particular, according to the former Italian Prime Minister, as Hanoi will host the Formula One Grand Prix for the first time in 2020, Italy will send Ferrari, an important part of the race, to the event. Confirming that the 3rd High-level Dialogue on ASEAN-Italy Economic Relations is an important economic-political event to be held in Hanoi next year, Chairman Chung said that it will open up opportunities for Vietnamese businesses to study the Italian market. He proposed that on the occasion, the two sides should organise a Vietnam-Italy cultural and art exchange to introduce the special cultural features of both countries to Hanoians, as well as Vietnamese and foreign tourists. Hanoi will closely coordinate with the Italian Embassy in Vietnam to make the event successful, he stressed./. (TNS) After being accused of defrauding its Internet subscribers, Charter Communications Monday agreed to a whopping $174.2 million settlement with New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood, the Daily News has learned.In February 2017, the AG charged in a civil lawsuit that Charter Communication, and its predecessor Time Warner Cable, knowingly delivered since 2012 slower Internet speed to customers than promised.Under a deal reached Monday, Charter Communications/Spectrum Management Holding Company, agreed to repay $62.5 million directly to more than 700,000 active customers, who will each receive between $75 and $150 from the company.It is believed to be the largest ever refund by an Internet provider in U.S. history, according to the Underwood's office.The company also agreed to provide 2.2 million of its active subscribers in New York more than $110 million worth of streaming services and premium channels at no charge, the AG's office said."This settlement should serve as a wakeup call to any company serving New York consumers: fulfill your promises, or pay the price," said Underwood said.The attorney general said not only will it cost the company tens of millions of dollars, but "it also sets a new standard for how Internet providers should fairly market their services."Charter, which purchased Time Warner Cable and renamed it Spectrum Cable in 2016, has agreed to implement various reforms, including "substantial network investments," modem replacements, and upgraded WiFi routers, and will also be subjected to new advertising obligations and prohibitions.It is the first settlement resulting from a broader investigation into broadband Internet service providers in New York.Charter did not admit to any wrongdoing in the settlement."We are pleased to have reached a settlement with the Attorney General on the issue of certain Time Warner Cable advertising practices in New York prior to our merger, and to have put this litigation behind us," said Charter spokesman John Bonomo. "Charter has made, and continues to make, substantial investments enhancing Internet service across the state of New York since our 2016 merger, as acknowledged by the Attorney General in this settlement."He added: "We look forward to continue providing the best TV, Internet, Voice and Mobile products to our customers, and to bringing broadband to more homes and businesses across the state."The AG's lawsuit, which was first filed in Manhattan state Supreme Court when Eric Schneiderman was attorney general, included emails showing how top company executives knew that despite the company's promises, they couldn't deliver the higher Internet speeds.In many cases, Internet speed was up to 80% slower than advertised and customers couldn't access such services as Netflix, Facebook and gaming platforms and Internet, the lawsuit alleged."We are going to experience a mismatch between what we actually sell to the customer and what they actually measure on their laptop, tablet, etc.," read one executive's email, according to the lawsuit.Charter fought to move the case to federal court, but it was ultimately returned to state Supreme Court. It subsequently lost its bid to have the case dismissed outright.The complaint had also charged that Time Warner Cable had knowingly leased older modems that couldn't deliver high-speed services to 900,000 subscribers.Meanwhile, the lawsuit is separate from a battle Charter is having with Gov. Cuomo, who has accused the company of going back on its promise to greatly expand broadband Internet access upstate as part of the state Public Service Commission approval of the merger between Charter Communications and Time Warner Cable.The Public Service Commission earlier this year sought to force Charter out of New York by rescinding its approval and forcing Charter to sell its operations to another cable company. Charter and the PSC have been negotiating the matter, with the state giving the company until the end of the year to reach a settlement.The cable giant's news channels like NY1 have also been boycotted by many New York Democratic officials like Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio over an ongoing nearly two-year strike by one of its unions. In a city where growing prosperity conceals profound divides of race and class, the damage done by heroin and fentanyl has fallen squarely on African Americans. Of the 860 people known to have died of opioid overdoses since 2014, 4 in 5 were black, according to the chief medical examiner. In 2017 the most recent year of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention the rate of fatal drug overdoses among African Americans in the District was higher than that of whites in West Virginia, Ohio or New Hampshire. In the last Broadway revival of All My Sons, in 2008, George and Ann Deever were played by Christian Camargo and Katie Holmes. Mosher, who in 2009 directed a well-received Broadway revival of another Miller play, A View From the Bridge starring Scarlett Johansson and Liev Schreiber, pointed out that a concurrent revival of All My Sons at Londons Old Vic, starring Sally Field and Bill Pullman, will have a multiracial cast. The two black actors in that production, however, are not appearing in the roles of George and Ann. Although Laverne & Shirley seemed a tad more concerned with its period details than Happy Days, to go back and look at either show now is to notice a warpy display of anachronisms. Watch as Laverne and Shirley comport to Eisenhower-era expectations; the show was obsessed with near-instances of marriage for either of these self-consciously single women, sometimes teasing audiences with double-wedding fiascoes that always got called off. Yet, in the same context, see also how Laverne and Shirley take charge of their decisions with liberated, 70s-like clarity. (And well do it our way yes, our way, extolled the shows theme song. Make our dreams come true.) Whats striking about this potential strike news is that Slate has a union in the first place. The magazine was a digital pioneer, founded by Microsoft Corp. in 1996, and later purchased by The Washington Post Co., which became Graham Holdings after it sold its eponymous newspaper to Amazon founder Jeffrey P. Bezos in 2013. Throughout most of its existence, Slates newsroom was union-free. That changed in January when it organized under the Writers Guild of America, East (WGAE) and began bargaining for a contract. (TNS) Police in Arizona's East Valley have a new tool to target child predators and human trafficking, thanks to the generous donation of a mobile forensics unit to the Mesa Police Department.Equipped with computers and monitors, the mobile trailer will allow detectives to analyze cell phones and laptops much faster than previously, looking for digital evidence that could link a defendant to a variety of sex crimes.Once search warrants are obtained, the digital evidence could reveal that someone is in possession of child pornography or is even holding children captive as part of a sex ring, said Mesa Police Sgt. Jason Troth.The $300,000 lab was donated by doTERRA, a company that makes essential oils with natural therapeutic properties, and Operation Underground Railroad, a national and international organization dedicated to fighting sexual exploitation of children.Its going to allow us a platform to harvest digital evidence sooner. Its going to speed things up for us, Troth said.He said such evidence can be gleaned from a variety of electronic devices, including laptops and other computers that predators use to store child pornography, sell or exchange with others, or even to operate sex trafficking rings.Police target web sites typically used by sexual predators through the FBIs Internet Crimes Against Children and Human Trafficking task force. Mesa detectives are also adept at tracking down such evidence, Troth said.We really try to identify child victims through sexually exploitive images seized as evidence in hopes of liberating potential victims and saving them from the sex trade, Troth said.He said the Mesa unit also will be used to assist other East Valley police in sex investigations, with police realizing that criminals do not pay attention to city borders.Mesa police have a long-term commitment to regional policing through the East Valley Fusion center, where detectives from a variety of agencies work together to share surveillance information and identify serial criminals.Its a gift," Troth said about the new unit. Part of having a gift is to share it.Jon Lines, executive director of Operation Underground, said he selected Mesa police to receive the mobile lab because of their deep commitment to fighting sexual exploitation of children and human trafficking.He said the goal of the mobile unit is to eliminate any delay between the collection of evidence at a crime scene and the analysis needed to develop probable cause for an arrest.If they can do it in real time, they can make an arrest immediately, Lines, a former Department of Homeland Security supervisor, said. Theres nothing more important we can do as a police department and a community than to protect our most vulnerable.Mesa City Councilmember Kevin Thompson said he was appalled when he learned that adult men were pursuing 12- and 13-year-old girls for sexual gratification.Referring to the mobile forensics unit behind him, Thompson said, if we can save one child or one person from being sold for sex, its worth its weight in gold.Mesa Mayor John Giles compared the city defending its children to the country protecting its national security.The battleground is one of technology, he said. These battles are fought over the web. We just landed an aircraft carrier.Mesa police conduct stings from time to time that lead to the arrest of men pursuing underaged girls. Police have said many times that illicit, underaged sex is advertised over the web and children also are recruited and manipulated over the web.Many Mesa stings are financed through grants from the Hickey Family Foundation, which has made significant contributions to pay for police overtime.Nancy Baldwin, trustee and executive director of the foundation, said she just donated $160,000 to pay for additional investigations after making donations of $140,000, $121,000 and $120,000 in past years.She said she realized the importance of such investigations after understanding that children are very vulnerable to sexual predators, especially those from underprivileged backgrounds. Todays Headlines The most important news stories of the day, curated by Post editors and delivered every morning. Email address By signing up you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy D.C. police said on Twitter that the shooting happened just after midnight in the 1700 block of West Virginia Avenue NE near Gallaudet University. Police said the shooters were believed to be two men last seen heading west on West Virginia. There were few details on the shooting. West Ct., 500 block, 2:45 a.m. Dec. 11. Two males exited a vehicle, and one of them shot a man sitting in his parked vehicle. The man was treated at a nearby hospital for a bullet wound to his upper body. The injury was not life-threatening. The bill has to go through congressional review and be signed by Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D), though the council enacted it as emergency legislation to allow the provisions to take effect immediately and last 90 days. A stricter version of that requirement, debated by the council two weeks ago, looked as though it would torpedo the project. But in the last hour of the last day of the legislative session, after lawmakers had been debating and passing bills for nearly eight hours, there were enough votes to approve the plan. However, teachers also said the devices have sometimes made it more difficult to manage the behavior of students. More than half of middle school teachers who completed a survey said their students had frequent or extensive inappropriate use of the computers. They reported that students were breaking through firewalls and using the computers to play games or find an academic shortcut, such as searching for an answer. The suit cited examples from one of the Bible in the Schools lessons: If all of the Israelites had chosen to follow the Ten Commandments, think of how safe and happy they would have been. Another lesson asked students to imagine that humans and dinosaurs existed at the same time. So picture Adam being able to crawl up on the back of a dinosaur! it read. He and Eve could have their own personal waterslide! Wouldnt that be so wild! (TNS) Two years after Sedgwick County was bilked in a half-million dollar email scam, someone pretending to be a county official is targeting the countys vendors seeking sensitive business information.The current scammer managed to spoof a county email address and sent several vendors an official-looking message, seeking information on past financial transactions with the county, spokesman Van Williams said Tuesday.The scam attempt was brought to light by a vendor, who contacted a county employee to question a suspicious message the company had received, Williams said.The employee appropriately informed the right people in finance, he said. They called IT (the Information Technology Department) and they called the sheriff.No money or sensitive information is believed to have been exchanged, said a statement issued by the county just before the close of the business day Tuesday.The emails were generated by a malicious actor who is unassociated with Sedgwick County, Joe Currier of the IT department said in that statement.The county has been working to get word out to its vendors to watch out for suspect communications purporting to come from the government, Williams said.While spoofing and phishing for information that can be used to engineer a scam is fairly commonplace, theres a high level of sensitivity to that at Sedgwick County.The county Finance Department got tricked into handing over $566,000 in September 2016, when a man spoofing himself as an employee of Cornejo and Sons Construction got the county to change the bank routing number on a contract payment.The scammer, George S. James, 48, of Brookhaven, Georgia, was later arrested and pleaded guilty.The county eventually got back $466,000 of the original $566,000 that was stolen minus a $100,000 insurance deductible.News of the current county scam comes one day after Westar Energy and Kansas City Power & Light issued a warning about a separate scam attempt being run against their customers.The people running that attack tell customers theyre behind on the electric bill and their service will be disconnected if they dont pay immediately with a prepaid money card.Westar spokeswoman Gina Penzig said the company would never require a prepaid card for payment, and wouldnt disconnect any customer without multiple contact attempts beginning long before the final shutoff day.In addition, utility customers are currently protected by the states Cold Weather Rule, which prohibits companies from disconnecting vital utilities when temperatures are forecast to fall below 35 degrees. Referring to Slatten, prosecutor Fernando Campoamor-Sanchez told jurors, You know that this man took this sniper rifle, and through this scope he took aim at Ahmeds head, and he fired. Boom. And he fired again. Boom. And why? Campoamor-Sanchez said in his closing argument. Because, ladies and gentlemen, he thought he could get away with it. Nobody would know. He would never have to answer to people like you sitting in this jury room today. Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix the Court, a nonpartisan group that seeks more accountability on the high court, said Tuesday that the judicial council may have reached the conclusion required by law, but it is wholly unsatisfactory to anyone looking for moral leadership from our nations top jurists. The decision, he said in a statement, underscores the need for the Supreme Court to adopt its own code of conduct or for Congress to write one. Trump picked Whitaker last month to serve in the acting capacity after forcing Sessions to resign and has said he intends to formally nominate William P. Barr to fill the post. Until Barr is confirmed by the Senate, Whitaker is the nations top law enforcement officer and oversees the special counsels investigation into Russias interference in the 2016 election. Whitakers elevation has raised concerns about his qualifications, his past statements as a U.S. Senate candidate and his business practices. Agee said the ruling could wreak havoc among colleges and universities. Make no mistake, the majoritys novel and unsupported decision will have a profound effect, particularly on institutions of higher education, he wrote, unless the Supreme Court intervenes. He wrote that institutions like the university will be compelled to venture into an ethereal world of non-university forums at great cost and significant liability, in order to avoid the Catch-22 Title IX liability the majority now proclaims. These were among incidents reported by the Loudoun County Sheriffs Office and the Leesburg and Purcellville police. For information, contact your police or sheriffs department. Mangum acknowledged in the legal document that the company used pesticides that were not approved by the Maryland Department of Agriculture, failed to ensure that employees used personal protection equipment and failed to implement required security measures. Some of those pesticides have since been approved for use by the state. But researchers studying the system in San Francisco, where ranked-choice voting has existed for more than 20 years, and in Maine, which has used ranked-choice voting for some local contests since 2010 and tried it for a congressional race for the first time this year, say the benefits of ranked-choice voting are limited. For many listeners, songs such as Aquarius and Let the Sunshine In became generation-defining anthems, joyous numbers that heralded a new era of peace, love and understanding. A medley of those two tracks was recorded by the 5th Dimension and spent six weeks at the top of the Billboard charts in 1969; one year later, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers announced that the medley was played more than any other song on U.S. radio and television. Niki Lauda has now returned home after a long period in hospital and rehabilitation. That is the news from Dr Helmut Marko, who is F1 legend Lauda's Austrian countryman and friend. 69-year-old Lauda, the Mercedes team chairman, underwent a lung transplant in early August and missed the rest of the 2018 season. But Red Bull official Marko says Lauda's recovery is going "very well". "After five months, Niki has finally left the hospital and rehabilitation clinic and is back home," he told Servus TV. "All his organs are working, now it's time to regain his strength. I am optimistic we will see him back in Australia next March." As for Red Bull, Marko said Red Bull's preparations to switch to Honda power are on track. "So far, all their promises on the technical side have been kept," he told the Austrian broadcaster. "If this continues, we will then have a great chance to compete for the title in the coming season." Marko said he is not worried the Red Bull-Honda collaboration will end as badly as McLaren's did. "We have a different approach than McLaren," he explained. "It is the first time in 14 years that we have factory status. We said to Honda 'Bring us the strongest engine you can build. Whatever you bring, we'll put it in the car'. "At McLaren, the approach was different," said Marko. "We are prepared for Honda having a different culture, but they have the potential and the financial resources to succeed in formula one. We will see how things go." (GMM) Marion Saffold Oates was born on Sept. 29, 1919, in Montgomery, Ala. Her grandfather, William C. Oates, was a colonel in the Confederate army during the Civil War. At Gettysburg in 1863, he led a failed assault on Little Round Top that helped turn the tide of the battle in the Unions favor. A year later, he lost his right arm in fighting near Petersburg, Va. After the war, he served seven terms in Congress and then was Alabamas governor from 1894 to 1896. He then practiced law with his son, Mrs. Charless father. Some employees and volunteers said the practice of transporting animals to Eberlys farm in Loudoun County was inappropriate, but Curzon defended the practice. He described Eberly as an experienced farmer and said it was not a mystery that some animals were being kept at her farm as Claude Moore decamps from McLean and determines what to do with its resources, which he valued at a couple million dollars. These were among reports received by the Calvert County Sheriffs Office and the Maryland State Police. Anyone with information about these crimes is asked to call the Criminal Investigation Division at 410-535-2800 or 301-855-1194, the Crime Solvers line at 410-535-2880 or the state police Prince Frederick Barrack at 410-535-1400. Many of the records of the enslaved population were destroyed when Buckingham Countys courthouse was burned in 1869, in what Fjord said was an attempt, repeated throughout the South, to keep former slaves from being able to file lawsuits against their former owners. Fjord has been working with the state Department of Historic Resources to recognize the Union Hill area but said the lack of documentation has made it hard to complete the application. The traditional clam chowder. Photo: Melissa Hom Through his midtown restaurant Esca, Dave Pasternack has had a major influence on the way New Yorkers eat seafood. Hes the reason every restaurant this side of the Hudson offers crudo, the questionably Italian raw seafood dish that has become one of 21st-century New Yorks essential dishes. (Yes, including fluke.) A dedicated fisherman, hes espoused the virtues of local seafood, like bluefish, filtered through Italian cuisine. Pasternack also hasnt strayed far from his home base of 16 years, having opened only one other restaurant (the short-lived Barchetta) until now. The chef is a partner at the waterfront restaurant Barca, which soft-opens today in the Staten Island Urby. We met through a mutual friend in the fish business. Its all about the fish, Pasternack said when asked how he got into business with his partner Vic Rallo, the New Jersey restaurateur who is also behind the nearby Surf. Staten Island boasts some top-notch pizzerias and the citys best collection of Sri Lankan restaurants, but Pasternack is easily the biggest outside name to open a new restaurant in the borough in, arguably, forever. That name wont just be on the awning. Oh, 100 percent involved, the chef says of his involvement. To run the kitchen as executive chef, Pasternack and Rallo brought on Katie ODonnell, who worked at Esca for seven years. The three share a love of seafood. On her days off shes going fishing says Rallo. Me, I go out and kind of fish, always bring a nice bottle of wine, and usually dont bring back much. Spaghetti allAragosta with a side of the Verrazzano Bridge. Photo: Melissa Hom Anyone who has spent a sunny day on, say, Midland Beach, or another of Staten Islands surprisingly great beaches, knows that its eastern shore has excellent vistas onto the city. So while winter isnt exactly waterfront restaurant season, its worth noting that Barca features unencumbered views of Brooklyn, the Verrazzano Bridge, and lower Manhattan. (Not to mention the ships passing through.) Excellent waterfront restaurants are surprisingly rare in this city, despite all the water around. Often, it seems like restaurants use the prime real estate in lieu of great food it can feel as if the two things are mutually exclusive. Pasternack, Rallo, and ODonnell would like to change that, at least on one waterfront. The pesce spada or swordfish Milanese. Photo: Melissa Hom Barca is not meant to be a clone of Esca: its a bit more accessible in flavor if not in price. That means more meat, but the menu is still about three-quarters seafood. Its divided into five main sections, along with sides and raw bar selections. One of these is, of course, crudo, like two-minute ceviche razor clams and pink snapper with black lava salt. You might want to start a meal with an autumn vegetable and sheeps milk ricotta salad, or antipasti like salt-cod arancini and Daves zuppa di vongole, a.k.a. clam chowder. There are house-made pastas, like your usual linguine with clams, orecchiette with house sausage and garlic, and spaghetti allAragosta with spicy tomato, mint, and Maine lobster. The secondi include pesce spada, or swordfish Milanese, or if youre not feeling so fishy, pork chop cooked like chicken Scarpariello with its white wine and hot cherry peppers. A good waterfront restaurant is a place for occasions, and this one has a 150-bottle wine list that emphasizes Italian producers. Theyll serve a handful of beers like Six Point Crisp, with five cocktails including a Margarita Italiano with elderflower and blood orange and a Martino Bergamotto with Rosilio di Bergamotto, Nardini acqua di Cedro, and prosecco. Where do you find restaurants on the water? Youre looking at Brooklyn or Jersey City. Youre not looking at Manhattan, says Vito. Its pretty cool, you see Coney Island, the Statue of Liberty, on a clear day you can see all the way up to the George Washington Bridge. The arancini with baccala, camaroli risotto, and spicy cherry tomato sauce. Photo: Melissa Hom The crudo tasting features six kinds of fish, including black sea bass with chervil and ora king salmon with extra-virgin mustard seed oil. Photo: Melissa Hom The Conchiglie with preserved tuna and puttanesca. Photo: Melissa Hom The Berkshire center-cut pork chop is cooked akin to chicken Scarpariello. Photo: Melissa Hom Desserts include a double chocolate torte with espresso mousse, Galliano creme anglaise, and candied coffee prosciutto. Photo: Melissa Hom Fish! Photo: Melissa Hom The dining room. Photo: Melissa Hom Barca, 44 Navy Pier Ct., nr. Front St.; 718-556-9300 At home that weekend, he typed a letter to Detroits parents. He noted that the district had done what most others across the country do not test its water despite the lack of any requirement to do so. We did this because it was the right thing to do for our students and staff, he wrote. Vitti added he would begin searching for a remedy, but wrote, There are no quick solutions to our challenge. She noted that 2019 enrollment lagged behind the nation in one state, New Jersey, which rejected two of the administrations changes to the ACA. President Trump signed a Republican tax law that eliminated the federal penalty for failing to comply with the ACAs requirement that most Americans have insurance, and Trump health officials widened access to skimpy health plans that are cheaper because they bypass the laws required benefits and consumer protections. New Jersey passed state laws to blunt both those changes from taking effect and still ended up with a bigger enrollment drop than the national figure, Verma said. Toward the meetings end, one of the invited scientists, Stanford University researcher Irving Weissman, who participated remotely, pressed officials about their intentions. I want to know the bottom line about future funds, Weissman recounted in an interview afterward. Brett Giroir, HHSs assistant secretary for health, replied that, at least for grants and contracts for researchers employed by universities and nongovernment labs, there will be no pause as long as experiments comply with the ethical guidelines of their universities and the federal government, as well as state laws, Weissman said. Swileh and the boy had been living in Egypt and she had hoped to accompany them but was not given a visa to enter the United States. Citizens from Yemen and six other mostly Muslim countries are restricted from traveling to the United States under the travel ban enacted under President Trump. Defenders of the anti-BDS laws maintain that refusing to buy products made in Israel is an economic activity, not a political expression. Under this theory, Amawi has the right, on her own time, to speak in support of the BDS movement but if she practices what she preaches, Texas can refuse to do business with, or employ, her. Similarly, under the Citizens United doctrine that corporations, being groups of individuals, also have free-speech rights, the owners and employees of a company can express support for the BDS campaign. But their company can be penalized if it refuses to do business with Israeli firms. On top of the reeducation effort, the New York Times and Financial Times report that China is building factories at the camps, pushing the Uighurs into forced labor, which is regarded as violating a fundamental human right protected by international law and agreements. The New York Times cited commercial registration records that show factories opening in the camps for making textiles, noodles and clothing, as well as printing. In Kashgar, the predominantly Uighur area of southern Xinjiang, plans were made this year to send 100,000 inmates who had been through the job-training centers to work in factories, the report said. The Financial Times cited interviews with the families of detainees, who said they had been employed at textile factories with little to no pay; they are not allowed to leave the factories, and communication with relatives, if permitted, is heavily monitored. A few weeks ago, I attended the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, Calif., where panel after panel of defense experts dutifully discussed Important Issues such as gray zone warfare, the defense industrial base and the future of U.S. policy toward Syria. It all seemed disconnected from reality, as if the defense cognoscenti were living in an alternative universe where they can generate policy options in the expectation that a wise and well-informed president will choose the best of the lot. That is not the situation we are in. We are at the mercy of an ignorant and impetuous president who, as Jeffrey Toobin quipped, is unfit to run a charity in New York State but fit to control nuclear weapons that could destroy the world several times over. Russias Internet activity wasnt just about fomenting division. The IRA was also trying to develop assets who could be used in later covert operations. The recruitment pitches included attempts to drive people to the streets for events, attempts to get people to perform jobs, and more insidious attempts to connect with people around very personal challenges. One of my most vivid memories of the medias zeal involved an energetic female reporter who has since become a high-profile network television journalist. As I was leaving our nondescript offices on the seventh floor of a K Street building to use the corridor restroom, the reporter pressed me for a comment on our squabble with the president over the White House tapes. When I demurred and kept walking, she persisted: If you dont think that I have the b-lls to follow you into the mens room, you have something to learn. (She did stop at the door.) That was when just three national television networks and a few major newspapers were on the trail. Now, Mueller and his team have to deal with armies of print, television and online reporters desperate for a scoop. Imagine your own little girl or boy being forced to stare down the barrel of a semiautomatic. Then imagine knowing that their death was preventable if only it werent so easy for anyone to get their hands on weapons of war, including the AR-15s used in most mass shootings in recent memory. Once youre flagged with a red notice, getting it removed is extremely difficult. Interpol refused my request, saying it is not the organizations role to assess countries law enforcement or judicial systems. I was also advised by Interpol that the UAE had said I was free to appeal the conviction for my supposed crimes. Based on what I knew from the experience of others who had run afoul of the Emirates, I regarded the offer as an attempt to lure me back to the UAE, where I might be imprisoned. We should continue to fight sexual assault on college campuses, while simultaneously insisting on fair processes for adjudicating complaints. Last month, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos proposed changes to Title IX rules governing the treatment of sexual harassment and assault in schools. While some changes would make the process for handling complaints more fair, others would weaken protections for sexual assault survivors. For example, the new rules would require schools to investigate only the most extreme complaints, and then only when they are made to designated officials. Women on campuses already have trouble coming forward about sexual violence why would we allow institutions to scale back supports? The primary barriers to healthy eating for residents of D.C.s food deserts, Marthas Table has found, are money, time and transportation. This program could help break down all three. A $2.50 ride, 50 of which will be available to pilot participants from January through June, is only 50 cents more than a bus trip. And traveling door to door is faster, not to mention less physically taxing, than trudging to a bus stop to a supermarket to the stop to home again, often uphill. This time and effort crunch not only prevents people from getting to the store in the first place, but also discourages them from buying the products that are best for them without worrying about refrigeration or how much all those bags weigh. But the conduct Sullivan called out was that of Flynn and his lawyers, who in their sentencing memo noted that Andrew McCabe and other FBI officials decided the agents would not warn Flynn that it was a crime to lie during an FBI interview because they wanted Flynn to be relaxed, and they were concerned that giving the warnings might adversely affect the rapport. Flynns team argued that this was different from the warnings given to others. It is Bernhardt who is speeding past environmental reviews to lock in oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, one of the worlds last truly wild places. It is Bernhardt who is dismantling Western states plans, designed in conjunction with a bipartisan group of governors, to conserve habitat for the greater sage grouse and other wildlife, so that the oil industry can drill wherever it wants. And it is Bernhardt who told a Post reporter that his department has little legal obligation to address climate change: The last time I checked there was a law that said I must provide a guy to help the Department of Energy to write a report. The program isnt much like what its architects wanted; the insurance covers fewer people, with less-generous benefits, and higher premiums, than originally envisioned. But it also isnt as dire as critics predicted. Though exchange enrollment seems to be declining, its on a gentle downward slope rather than the catastrophic death spiral that opponents were hoping for. Obamacare may well have reached the kind of perfect mediocrity to which Washington provides eternal safe harbor: not really doing what it was supposed to, but too complicated to fix and not quite bad enough to repeal outright. Regardless of what happens over the next two years, the question of what conservatism will become after Trump will remain a valid one. And on this point, I am far more optimistic about the energy and dynamism on the intellectual right over the past two years than many others. While the country is consumed with stories of palace intrigue and the presidents latest tweet, there has been a revival on the right of thinkers and publications engaging with urgent problems facing middle- and working-class Americans. I need not provide an exhaustive list, as Time magazines October cover story by Sam Tanenhaus, How Trumpism Will Outlast Trump, did a good job surveying the landscape that includes thinkers such as Julius Krein at American Affairs, Daniel McCarthy at Modern Age, Yuval Levin at National Affairs, Michael Anton at Hillsdale College and David Azerrad at the Heritage Foundation. Thus, McSally will become her midterm opponents Senate colleague. McSallys eventual rise hasnt been without pitfalls, including opposition earlier this year from McCains family. McSally, who ran against Sinema on a pro-President Trump platform (despite previously criticizing the president), apparently insulted the family and McCains memory by failing to acknowledge him when touting legislation that was actually named for him the John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019. It was perceived as a low blow, seemingly contrived to mimic Trump, who also withheld McCains name from mention during comments when he signed the act into law. At days end, the judge issued one last shot at Flynn, ensuring that he understood he will be treated like all other defendants. Noting that there had been no restrictions on Flynns travel, Sullivan wrote in an order that beginning Jan. 4, the former general will no longer be allowed to travel more than 50 miles outside Washington without permission. He will also have to surrender his passport. I believe that theres ample reason to be concerned about his truthfulness, Schiff said Sunday on NBC Newss Meet the Press. And I do think that with respect to Mr. Stone, and perhaps others, the special counsel is in a better position to determine the truth or falsity of that testimony, and that we ought to provide it to the special counsel. It also overhauls the federal prison system to help inmates earn reduced sentences and lower recidivism rates. A different version passed the House this year, so the House would have to pass the latest draft before it can be sent to Trump for his signature. The House is expected to endorse that bill when it comes up for a likely vote later this week, and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) has expressed support for the legislation. By not reaching as many vulnerable veterans as it could have, the Veterans Health Administration, the agencys health-care arm, may not have exposed as many people in the community, such as veterans at risk for suicide, or their families and friends, to its suicide prevention outreach content, the report concluded. Since then, Trump has periodically demanded wall funding and threatened to shut down the government to get it a fight GOP leaders ultimately persuaded him to put off until after the midterm elections. But there were never the votes in the narrowly divided Senate for Trump and Republicans to win the fight once the moment arrived, a reality that McConnell and GOP leaders acknowledged Wednesday after Democrats rejected a final offer to spend $1.6 billion on border security and an additional $1 billion on other immigration priorities apart from the wall. According to a newly released transcript of the interview, GOP members of the House Judiciary and Oversight committees focused intently on whether federal investigators should have taken better care to ensure that Flynn was accompanied by a representative of the White House Counsels Office during his interview and that he knew lying to FBI investigators was a crime. Comey said it was totally reasonable and consistent with FBI practices not to warn Flynn of the consequences of lying and suggested that officials were simply encouraging Flynn to proceed without a lawyer when they told him requesting one could slow things down. Among the more detailed requests is one sent to the White House related to use of personal email and messaging accounts by staff there for government business. In addition to some broader inquires, the letter from Cummings asks the White House to identify with specificity the number of emails to and from Ivanka Trumps personal email account referring to or relating to official business. On Wednesday, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), chairman of the Oversight Committee, said there were no plans to speak with Rosenstein before January, noting that if he is coming, I dont know about it. Gowdy also said he was unaware of any plans to summarize the panels findings. He noted that he could not speak for Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), but that his preference would be to release the transcripts and let people read them for themselves. Gowdy did not say when he expected the transcripts to be released. The Catholic Church has dealt this year not just with cases of predator priests, but with cases that expose the misdeeds of bishops and cardinals, who either failed to stop abusers or carried out abuses themselves. Scandals have played out in France, Chile, Australia, the United States and elsewhere, implicating members even of Pope Franciss inner circle. Increasingly loud critics say Franciss papacy has been damaged by the cases and by the churchs struggle to hold prelates accountable. So now, Menon said, all of a sudden, people go: Hang on. You promised us frictionless trade. And shes, Oh, yeah, that was impossible. And people say, You said no deal was better than a bad deal. And shes, Oh, yeah, I was kidding. So its only now that those trade-offs are being spelled out in a coherent way, and even now shes not doing it particularly clearly. Israel has been fortifying the dividing line with Lebanon in recent years and building a hefty concrete wall, but the military says Hezbollah has been secretly digging for four years. Just on the other side of the border, the Lebanese town of Kfar Kela overlooks a white tent that the Israeli military has erected over a shaft it has opened into the first tunnel it found after launching its operation on Dec. 4. CBP officials have said food and water were available at the small border outpost in New Mexico where Jakelin and her father were held after crossing into the United States on the night of Dec. 6, and that the child consumed both after having nothing to eat or drink for several days. Nery Caal, 29, has disputed the governments account, and his attorneys said cookies were the only thing available to the families in custody that night. But Castro had few remedies for the complex migration forces that brought a 7-year-old from rural Guatemala to a remote stretch of the U.S. border in the middle of the night. He and other members of the delegation did not describe the arrival of so many Central Americans as a problem, but rather likened the trend to the waves of Irish and Italian immigrants who came to the United States generations ago seeking better lives. In response to the filing, Sullivan ordered the Justice Department to produce the FBI records of Flynns interviews, as well as two related documents. What those materials show is that, contrary to the claims of Flynns most devoted defenders, Flynn was given a heads-up by a senior FBI official that the agents were coming to question him, the general knew what the questioning would be about, and that Flynn made statements that were provably false. Two days later, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services issued guidance to asylum officers on how to apply Sessions decision as they assessed the claims of those seeking safety in the United States. Together, the new policies generally made it harder to seek asylum, particularly in the early stage of the process where applicants must demonstrate they have credible fear to stay. At the reception (Photo: hcmcpv.org.vn) He made the statement while receiving newly-appointed Danish Ambassador to Vietnam Kim Hojlund Christensen on December 18 According to Mr. Phong, over the past 5 years, the Vietnam Denmark relationship has changed from traditional development aid to comprehensive partnership, reporting diverse encouraging results, especially the EU-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement (EVFTA) to be signed and adopted in the future, which promises to facilitate strong development in the two countries trade and investment relations. Of which, Vietnam can learn from Denmarks experience in urban planning and architecture, he said. Vietnam and Denmark are also developing relationships at local levels in traffic, energy and green growth cooperation. Appreciating Denmarks experience in green growth and sustainable development, Mr. Phong said he hoped that Denmark will continue to support Ho Chi Minh city in managing risks caused by urban flooding. Ho Chi Minh city is willing to work with the Danish Embassy in Vietnam to deepen the Vietnam Denmark comprehensive partnership, looking forward to marking the 50th anniversary of the diplomatic relationship in 2021, he added. Asserting that the Vietnam - Denmark relationship is developing well in all areas, Ambassador Kim Hojlund Christensen said that more and more Danish businesses want to invest in Vietnam. He expressed his hope that Ho Chi Minh city will create favourable conditions for businesses to invest in the development of agricultural product chains, food safety, urban traffic and prevention of urban flooding. He also pledged to heighten the two-way trade turnover./. Officials have not confirmed who the prosecutors on the case are, but on the day the court order under appeal was issued, two lawyers were observed exiting a sealed hearing before Chief Judge Beryl A. Howell of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia who oversees grand-jury proceedings along with five prosecutors with the special counsels office, including appellate specialist Michael Dreeben. Also among the individuals who were sanctioned is a former GRU officer who gave money to a political party in Montenegro before its 2016 elections. The Treasury Department said Victor Boyarkin was acting on behalf of Oleg Deripaska, a Kremlin-connected oligarch who despite being sanctioned has been invited to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Youre either deployable, or you need to find something else to do. Im not going to have some people deploying constantly and then other people, who seem to not pay that price, in the U.S. military, Mattis told reporters in February. If you cant go overseas [and] carry a combat load, then obviously someone else has got to go. I want this spread fairly and expertly across the force. The step is the latest twist in a years-long effort by two administrations to defeat the militants in Syria and end the countrys long civil war. The conflict has made Syria a cauldron for terrorist threats and set the stage for a proxy battle that has included forces backed by the United States, Turkey, Iran and Russia. Since 2015, Moscows military support has been crucial in helping Assad turn the war in his favor. Chefs at the Australian restaurant fronted by Heston Blumenthal are being underpaid as much as $30,000 each per year, according to new estimates provided to the workplace watchdog. The international restaurant empire fronted by Blumenthal was revealed in an investigation by The Age and Sydney Morning Herald to be run through a series of notorious offshore tax havens while also substantially underpaying staff at its high-end Australian eatery. Individual chefs have been underpaid as much as $35,000 a year, according to new estimates. Now the Fair Work Ombudsman has been handed information on two chefs at the high-end restaurant, Dinner by Heston, who were underpaid significant amounts due to excessive unpaid overtime. One was underpaid $20,000 to $25,000 a year, according to estimates, and another chef received $30,000 a year less than due under the award, according to the information provided by a lawyer for the Hospo Voice union. I have fair skin, a tendency to burn, light eyes and hair along with a family history of melanoma. That puts me in the high risk group for skin cancer. But, I am one of the one in three Australians who has never had a skin check. Check your skin or get it checked this summer. Credit:Stocksy Many people dont get a check because two thirds dont realise how common skin cancer is, according to the research commissioned by life insurance company TAL. Skin cancer accounts for 81 per cent of all new cases of cancer diagnosed in Australia each year and about two in three Australians will be diagnosed with skin cancer by the time they are 70. A revolutionary cancer therapy that supercharges a patient's immune cells to hunt and destroy cancer cells has been approved for use in Australia, ushering in a new era in medicine. Desperate patients with aggressive blood cancers who have not responded to conventional treatments have been heading overseas to receive a shot of the "custom-made" drug and experiencing "miraculous" results. Daniel Clarke, left, travelled to the US in September to undergo CAR-T therapy for lymphoma cancer. In a last-ditch attempt, Daniel Clarke, 45, and his family dropped everything and travelled to Boston so that he could undergo CAR-T therapy for diffuse large B cell lymphoma (DLBCL). One month later, scans showed the cancer was gone. "I felt like someone had just handed my life back to me," Mr Clarke, a Qantas engineer from the Sutherland Shire, said. A woman has been charged after a man died at Mirrabooka home on Wednesday morning. Police were called to a home in Tinsel Place Mirrabooka about 8.40am, where they found a man 38-year-old man with traumatic life-threatening stab wounds to his upper body. Neighbours have described hearing a woman's "bloodcurdling screams" from inside the home just before police and ambulance crews arrived. Officers are at the scene. Credit:Kate Hedley A St John Ambulance spokesman said the man was taken to Royal Perth Hospital as a priority one patient, but died a short time later. Beijing: A city in northern China has been stripped of Christmas cheer after the authorities banned all festive decorations from its streets. Santa Claus in Beijing Credit:AAP Officials in Langfang said the move, which prohibits shops and street vendors from selling anything Christmas-themed, is part of efforts to keep the streets clean to win a National Civilised Cities award. The award, presented every three years, is the highest honour for a Chinese city, and is judged on social development, economy, infrastructure construction and public services. However, critics have said that the rules are part of wider curbs on freedom of speech and religion. Beijing: A third Canadian citizen has been detained in China, Canada's National Post newspaper reported on Wednesday, citing the Canadian foreign ministry. China's foreign ministry spokeswoman, Hua Chunying, told a daily news briefing in Beijing that she was unaware of the report. Detained in China: Canadian nationals Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor. Credit:AP Two Canadians former diplomat Michael Kovrig and businessman Michael Spavor were detained after Canadian police arrested Huawei Technologies Co Ltd's chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, on December 1. Canada's Global Affairs office told the National Post that they were aware of a detention but did not provide details and did not suggest a connection to Meng's detention. London: Britain's government ramped up preparations on Tuesday for the possibility that the country could leave the European Union in 101 days without a divorce deal - putting soldiers on standby and warning thousands of businesses and millions of households to get ready for the worst. Leave the European Union supporters hold placards and protest across the street from the Houses of Parliament. Credit:AP With the country's departure set for March 29, it remains unclear whether British lawmakers will approve the divorce agreement that Prime Minister Theresa May's Conservative government has negotiated with the EU. The alternative, a "no-deal" Brexit, risks plunging the British economy into recession and touching off chaos at the borders. "The government's priority remains to secure a deal, but we need to recognise with 14 weeks to go, that a responsible government is preparing for the eventuality that we leave without a deal," Brexit Secretary Steve Barclay said. Fort Lauderdale, Florida: Royal Caribbean Cruises is not responsible for the overboard death of a US man who was reportedly served the equivalent of 30 drinks, a federal jury in Miami has found. Todd and Lisa Skokan, parents of Nathaniel Skokan, along with brothers Samuel and Zachary, had sought more than $US75,000 ($104,000) in damages from the Miami-based cruise line. The Independence of the Seas, from which Nathaniel Skokan (inset) fell overboard after reportedly being served the equivalent of 30 drinks. Credit:AP, Supplied Nathaniel Skokan, 22, died on December 22, 2016, on the last day of a five-day cruise out of Port Everglades aboard Independence of the Seas. His parents, from Omaha, Nebraska, charged that the cruise line served him an excessive amount of alcohol as part of its all-inclusive drink package and "knew or should have known" he was a danger to himself or others. As recently as last week, bomb threats have been made across the country, and close to home in North Central Florida. When it comes to bomb threat investigations, the team at the Marion County Sheriff's Office is the only agency with a bomb squad in the county. If there's a threat in the City or the County, in places like Dunnellon or Belleview, the Marion County Sheriff's Office investigates every bomb threat. They'll even assist other agencies, like the Levy County Sheriff's Office, that don't have a bomb unit. Take a look at we go inside a bomb threat investigation. It only takes one device to totally disrupt multiple lives, or even a single life, said Sergeant Eric Larson, the MCSO Bomb Squad commander. Larson has been working on the Marion County Bomb Squad for years. He says that each investigation is different, but one thing stays the same... We have had a few that have been the actual devices, but the way we look at it is if theres a threat involved, or something that doesnt look right, we are going to treat it as a real device, regardless of whether it is or not, he said. Being a part of this team isn't for the faint of heart. This gear is older than what bomb techs are using these days, which is even heavier than this, but that's why they undergo serious physical training. Everyone goes through a good amount of training, we have tryouts before you get on the team, Larson continued. And after deputies pass the physical test, they take courses to become certified bomb technicians. Typically we will use remote access, remote devices to get into a suspicious package," said Sgt. Larson, "But occasionally we do you have to put on a bomb suit and go down and do things by hand. The technicians look for specific wiring, switches, or explosive materials, but they have to keep some practices confidential, because not all threats are made to the public. Sometimes devices are made not necessarily to hurt anybody in the public, but to hurt us, he said. The Bomb Squad has investigated twelve threats or suspicious packages within the past six months. Weber State Awarded $300,000 to Fund Mental Health Advocacy Program December 19, 2018 OGDEN, Utah Weber State University has been awarded the $300,000 Garrett Lee Smith Campus Suicide Prevention Grant to fund the Wildcat Support Network: a peer-based program created to decrease mental health stigma and give students additional mental health support. The program will help students better manage stress and work toward decreasing depression, anxiety and thoughts of suicide. WSUs Counseling & Psychological Services Center received the grant money from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, an agency within the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. A portion of the grant, $97,000, was issued on Nov. 30; the remaining sum will be received over the next two years: $101,000 in 2019 and $102,000 in 2020. The money will fund marketing, support staff and incentives for student participation in the Wildcat Support Network. The first prong of the Wildcat Support Network is educating students as peer advocates for mental health and training them to recognize peers in distress. Students will learn about mental health disorders, suicide-prevention awareness and substance abuse. Additionally, they will learn about campus and community mental health resources and how to respond effectively to peers in crisis. The second prong of the Wildcat Support Network is a peer support-group facilitator course offered to selected students who have completed Psychology 2810. This course teaches students how to co-facilitate a support group by understanding group dynamics, learning support-group techniques and demonstrating their facilitation skills in a group setting. Trained students will provide mental health support to peers to help them succeed in their education. Peer support groups will be available to students, beginning midway through fall semester 2019. Our nation is battling a mental health crisis with ever-increasing rates of anxiety and depression, said Amy Blunck, WSUs coordinator of mental health initiatives. With more than 19,000 eligible Weber State students, the Counseling & Psychological Services Center alone cannot help all of them. Research has shown students are most likely to turn toward their peers for help when they are in crisis. As a result, we are using the peer-based Wildcat Support Network as an additional way for students to receive the mental health support they need. The Wildcat Support Network is designed to meet an increased demand for mental health services on campus. Weber State currently has a student-to-counselor ratio of 1-to- 1,837. The program will increase the universitys capacity for mental health support. Additional mental health support is provided by Therapy Assistance Online (TAO), a platform of free self-help educational modules designed for students to develop strategies to aid in their daily lives. TAOs educational modules can be completed anytime, and anywhere. Students with an @mail.weber.edu address can sign up for an account at thepath.taoconnect.org. We believe that mental health advocacy and suicide prevention is everyone's business, said Dianna Abel Counseling, Health, and Wellness executive director. We're doing our very best to address these important issues as a community. Visit weber.edu/wsutoday for more news about Weber State University. Netiquette Die Kommentare auf weltwoche-daily.ch dienen als Diskussionsplattform und sollen den offenen Meinungsaustausch unter den Lesern ermoglichen. Es ist uns ein wichtiges Anliegen, dass in allen Kommentarspalten fair und sachlich debattiert wird. 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Unzulassig sind Wortmeldungen, die Nichts mit dem Thema des Artikels zu tun haben Kommerzieller Natur sind andere Forumsteilnehmer personlich beleidigen einzelne Personen oder Gruppen aufgrund von Rasse, Ethnie oder Religion herabsetzen in Rechtschreibung und Interpunktion mangelhaft sind verachtliche Abanderungen von Namen oder Umschreibungen von Personen enthalten mehr als einen externen Link enthalten einen Link zu dubiosen Seiten enthalten Nur einen Link enthalten ohne beschreibenden Kontext dazu Als Medium, das der freien Meinungsausserung verpflichtet ist, handhabt die Weltwoche Verlags AG die Veroffentlichung von Kommentaren liberal. Die Online-Redaktion behalt sich jedoch vor, Kommentare nach eigenem Gutdunken und ohne Angabe von Grunden nicht freizugeben. Es besteht grundsatzlich kein Recht darauf, dass ein Kommentar veroffentlich wird. Weiter behalt sich die Redaktion das Recht vor, Kurzungen vorzunehmen. Authorities say a West Virginia jail escape was thwarted last month and eight inmates were arrested. News outlets cite the criminal complaint in Monday reports that details the alleged escape plan. State troopers discovered an 18-inch (46-centimeter) hole in a cell wall leading to a pipe chase that could allow access to prohibited areas of Southern Regional Jail. Raleigh County prosecutor Brian Parsons says the Greenbrier County Prosecutor's Office contacted his office Nov. 15 with a tip about the planned escape during Thanksgiving weekend. The complaint says authorities were told the motive for the plan was to take guns and a weapon used in a killing out of the state. The eight men were apprehended on attempted escape and other charges. Parsons says the public was never in any danger. The following suspects are charged with felony conspiracy; attempted escape, which is also a felony; and destruction of property. - Jonathan Felts - Marcus Hannah - Charles Stanley - Danny Malone - Harry Culotta - Thomas Dunbar - Derek Walls - Jason Roberts Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc on December 18th receives a delegation from the Holy See, led by Under-Secretary for Relations with States Antoine Camilleri (Photo: VNA) The PM spoke highly of positive exchanges between Vietnam and the Holy See over the past and expressed his pleasure with the organisation of the Vietnam-Vatican Joint Working Groups seventh meeting. He said he believes that this meeting will mark important progress in the relations between Vietnam and the Holy See, satisfying the common interests of both sides as well as those of the Vietnamese Catholic community. He affirmed that the Vietnamese Government will continue to promote national solidarity and is consistent in respecting and ensuring the right to freedom of belief and religion of all people. He appreciated the active and effective contributions of the Vietnamese Catholic community towards national development, underlining the Governments policy of encouraging and facilitating the operation of religions, including Catholicism, in line with legal regulations. The PM urged the Holy See to continue its work on guiding the Vietnamese Catholic community to engage in national development, contributing to promoting the image of the Vietnam Catholic Church and fostering Vietnam-Holy See relations. For his part, Antoine Camilleri asserted that Pope Francis and the Holy See are looking to further develop bilateral relations and encourage Catholic followers in Vietnam to be good citizens and actively contribute to national development. He said the Pope has always paid special attention to Vietnam and wishes that the Vietnam Catholic Church will make more contributions to national prosperity. Under-Secretary Camilleri thanked the Vietnamese Government for creating favourable conditions for the non-resident Vatican representative to work in the country, expressing his belief that the two sides will witness new developments in their relations. On the occasion, PM Phuc conveyed Christmas and New Year greetings to the Vaticans Pope Francis and Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin. He conveyed his warm welcome to Secretary of State Parolin to soon visit Vietnam./. Members of the Parliament on Tuesday voted 102-72 in favour of the bill, which despite the long-running debate surrounding it is not expected to have any major implications for the prevalent case-law in Finland. The much-discussed government bill to make laying off easier for small businesses has been passed by the Finnish Parliament. The bill effectively introduces no amendments to the legal grounds for terminating employees, stating simply that the size of the business must be taken into consideration in a way that makes laying off easier for small than large businesses. The objective, therefore, is to encourage hiring by small businesses by reducing the risk associated with hiring new employees. It was supported by all members of the ruling, three-party coalition, as well as four members of the Christian Democratic Party, ex-Centre Party member Paavo Vayrynen, ex-National Coalition Party member Harry Harkimo and Maria Tolppanen of the Social Democrats. Tolppanen, who has previously estimated that the bill lacks the backing of the working class, admitted that she voted for the bill by accident. That was a workplace accident. I stood up immediately and said I voted for the wrong option, she told Uusi Suomi on Tuesday. I certainly dont support the lay-off bill. This is completely senseless. Even if everyone else supported it, I wouldnt. Aleksi Teivainen HT Source: Uusi Suomi Those who grew up with the 1964 movie Mary Poppins may be at a disadvantage when it comes to realizing how very unusual it was for a kids movie. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 19/12/2018 (1079 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Those who grew up with the 1964 movie Mary Poppins may be at a disadvantage when it comes to realizing how very unusual it was for a kids movie. First and foremost, it was a full-blown musical, using the talents of Broadway vets Julie Andrews (My Fair Lady, Camelot) and Dick Van Dyke (Bye Bye Birdie). Second, in the nascent years of psychedelia, it had a decidedly hallucinogenic flavour, with whole sequences putting live actors in animated settings and acting opposite cartoons (now standing operating procedure in visual effects-driven films). Emily Blunt (right) is Mary Poppins, who falls from out of the sky to again help the Banks family, Michael (Ben Whishaw, centre) and Jane (Emily Mortimer). (Disney) Most challenging of all, perhaps, was the character of Mary herself. A magical nanny, Mary arrived at the home of the Banks family to sort out the tangled tensions of the household. Wise, mysterious, mystical and possibly ancient, she often speaks in Zen koans. ("Open different doors. You may find a you there that you never knew was yours.") She is also "practically perfect in every way," meaning she is a character without an arc: she is the exact same person at the end of an adventure that she was at the beginning. Julie Andrews won an Oscar for her performance anyway, on the strength of formidable song-and-dance skills and her stoic embrace of the madness of it all. In that spirit, director Rob Marshall (Chicago; Into the Woods) embraces the madness of doing a sequel 54 years after the first film. In Mary Poppins Returns, the Banks children are all grown up. Michael (Ben Whishaw) is struggling to raise his three rambunctious children after the death of his wife. His supportive sister Jane (Emily Mortimer), following in the tracks of her suffragette mother, is a labour activist. The bank where Michael works the same bank where his father toiled is threatening to foreclose on the family home as the distraught Michael has missed payments. He could use a little magic. And though he attributes his childhood adventures with Mary (an unflappable Emily Blunt assumes the role) as a flight of juvenile fancy, he assents to putting his kids under her care after she descends from the sky, still her favourite mode of travel. Director Rob Marshall captures the spirit of the original, but is at a disadvantage in that none of the movies songs are as infectious as those from the first film. (Disney) Lamplighter Jack (Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator-star of Hamilton) serving as the proxy of Van Dykes chimney sweep character Bert, accompanies Mary and the kids on their adventures, which include a visit to a cartoon English music hall. Interestingly, the kids cartoon adventures mirror the realities they will face in the real world. (In a way, Mary Poppins Returns is like a Disneyfied version of Carlos Castanedas guided peyote-flown adventures with Yaqui shaman Don Juan.) Marshall captures the English-eccentric spirit of the original, and the former Broadway choreographer is well-suited to stage the musical sequences with lively energy. He is at a disadvantage in that none of the movies songs are as infectious as the original Sherman brothers-penned ditties. Ready, Pet, Go! Leesa Dahl looks at everything to do with our furry, fuzzy, feathered, fishy (and more!) pet friends. Arrives in your inbox each Monday. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. Having conquered Broadway, Miranda proves a good match for the film medium; he is a magnetic presence, and if he cant quite match Van Dykes goofy charm, hes a lot more successful with the English accent. By contrast, Blunt matches Andrews quite successfully in playing Mary. The character still doesnt have a discernible arc, but Blunt succeeds in finding her own shadings to the character, particularly in the gleeful wickedness of Marys wit. Blunt is, in the end, perfect enough. randall.king@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @FreepKing Jack (Lin-Manuel Miranda, from left), Annabel (Pixie Davies), Georgie (Joel Dawson), John (Nathanael Saleh) and Mary Poppins (Emily Blunt) take audiences on a new adventure 54 years after Marry Poppins first opened her umbrella. (Disney) If you value coverage of Manitobas arts scene, help us do more. Your contribution of $10, $25 or more will allow the Free Press to deepen our reporting on theatre, dance, music and galleries while also ensuring the broadest possible audience can access our arts journalism. BECOME AN ARTS JOURNALISM SUPPORTER Click here to learn more about the project. Washington-based asset manager the Carlyle Group has agreed to acquire StandardAero from Veritas Capital. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 19/12/2018 (1079 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. Washington-based asset manager the Carlyle Group has agreed to acquire StandardAero from Veritas Capital. It will the second time Carlyle has owned StandardAero after acquiring it from the British firm Doughty Hanson in 2004 and selling it in 2007 to Dubai Aerospace Enterprises (DAE) for a reported US$1.9 billion. Veritas acquired it from DAE in 2015. No terms of the deal were disclosed. StandardAero was founded in Winnipeg in 1911 and is now one of the largest engine maintenance, repair and overhaul operations in the world. Winnipeg continues to be the largest and most diversified of the companys 37 facilities located around the world. The company has almost doubled in size under the ownership of Veritas Capital, with a handful of acquisitions including buying Vector from Airbus late last year. When DAE acquired the company from Carlyle in 2007, it moved its head office from Winnipeg to Phoenix. The sunny days are over for some Manitoba companies since the termination of Manitoba Hydro's Power Smart's two year solar power incentive program. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 18/12/2018 (1079 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. The sunny days are over for some Manitoba companies since the termination of Manitoba Hydro's Power Smart's two year solar power incentive program. The program that provided a $1 per watt incentive on approved solar power installations generated far more interest than Manitoba Hydro anticipated -- a total of more than 50 mega watts according to some -- ended in April as per the original plan. RUTH BONNEVILLE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Riley Unger with Living Skies Solar on farm in Springfield MB. with 580 foot long, 144 kW solar system that produces up to $4,000 of power a month it peak times. While the end date was not a surprise, some in the business are bemoaning that fact it was a hard stop and not phased out as is often the practice for such programs. Riley Unger, the sales manager at Living Skies Solar in Headingley that was formed a couple of months after the incentive program began, said his company has no choice but to pack up and move to Saskatchewan. "Without any new sales our hands were forced to protect past customers," he said. "We have to be in Saskatchewan to get some new sales to keep things running." Saskatchewan's incentive program is 61 cents per watt and it was recently renewed again for three years and has been a stable market for many years. Unger believes that Manitoba Hydro did not make it easy for companies like his to service the strong demand that was created by the incentive and that it changed the policy regarding selling the power into Manitoba Hydro's grid. He said it also will mean the potential for the loss of hundreds of jobs in the province. "it's pretty disappointing to have to go to Saskatchewan to keep chasing a dream," said the University of Manitoba environmental science grad. "It's truly a loss to the province." The $1.00 per watt or $1,000 per kilowatt incentive was the richest in the country when the program was announced in the spring of 2016. Manitoba Hydro officials have acknowledged the 1,500 applications for installations were much more -- as much as 10 times more -- than was originally anticipated. 'It's pretty disappointing to have to go to Saskatchewan to keep chasing a dream. It's truly a loss to the province' Riley Unger, sales manager at Living Skies Solar While the incentive did open up a groundswell of demand it remains the case that even in the current climate of rising rates Manitoba remains one of the cheapest electricity jurisdictions in North America. On the other hand, electricity rates in Saskatchewan are among the highest in the country making solar power there that much more of an economically attractive alternative. A mitigating factor in the sudden end of the successful pilot project -- that generated more than $100 million in private sector investment and diversified the electrical grid that was solely dependent on the generation of hydroelectricity -- is the transition of the demand side management in Manitoba from Power Smart to a newly created Crown entity called Efficiency Manitoba. That organization is in the final stages of its incorporation and has still not hired its senior management team. Bruce Owen, spokesman for Manitoba Hydro, said, "Any decision on any type of program regarding solar energy will have to be discussed with Efficiency Manitoba and Manitoba Hydro because it is plugged into our grid. That is down the road." Some in the industry believe it is reasonable to expect Efficiency Manitoba will eventually come up with a renewed or updated solar incentive program. A spokesperson for the province, said, "We will have an announcement on a new CEO very soon, and we will not prejudge what the incoming CEO and the board of directors decide in terms of the solar energy program." Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. Sycamore Energy Inc. (which also operates as Solar Manitoba), is the largest and one of the oldest players in solar industry in the province, is also setting up shop in Saskatchewan but is not leaving Manitoba. Justin Phillips, CEO of Sycamore, said, it's not good for the industry to have the incentive program shut down cold turkey. But he believes that once Efficiency Manitoba is up and running it will re-investigate a program to support the solar industry. He also believes that since the cost of solar power and the increased efficiency of installation has improved in just two years, that an economic case can still be made for solar, even in Manitoba. "Right from the beginning they said it was a two year pilot project," Phillips said. "We will be fine. We stabilized our business. We also still have about 180 projects left to install in the province (that will be covered by the incentive program)." Wayne Clayton, chairman of Manitoba Sustainable Energy Association, said he is looking forward to having the chance to provide input to Efficiency Manitoba in putting together an effective and efficient sustainable energy plan. "The solar incentive was a great program," he said. "It was a win-win in the sense it stimulated a lot of private investment in Manitoba without a huge investment from Manitoba Hydro." martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca HALIFAX - Nova Scotia's projected budget surplus is being chipped away by falling income tax revenue and the rising cost of health care and ferry service subsidies. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 19/12/2018 (1078 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. A projected budget surplus by Nova Scotia's Liberal government is being sliced away by falling income taxes and the rising cost of healthcare and subsidies to a ferry service. Nova Scotia Finance Minister Karen Casey heads to table the budget after briefing reporters at the legislature in Halifax on Tuesday, March 20, 2018. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Andrew Vaughan HALIFAX - Nova Scotia's projected budget surplus is being chipped away by falling income tax revenue and the rising cost of health care and ferry service subsidies. In a fiscal update released Wednesday, the province estimated a surplus of $27.3 million for 2018-19 $7.2 million less than the estimate provided earlier this fall, on a budget with revenues of $10.8 billion. The update also noted that income tax revenue had plunged by $110 million, prompting suggestions from the Tory opposition that the province's economy is starting to sputter into low-growth mode. Tory finance critic Tim Halman argued that without additional federal transfer payments of $27 million coming in earlier this month, the province's projections of a series of surplus budgets would be in jeopardy. However, Finance Minister Karen Casey said the various shifts in revenues and costs are being watched carefully, and she remained confident of a surplus come next March. She also emphasized the estimated surplus is still down just $2 million from the original budget estimate for a $20.4 million surplus as of March 31, 2019. "We know there are many moving parts, changes in revenue ... It's our responsibility to ensure we manage those and keep our eye on the surplus," said the minister. "We need that to give us the flexibility for when we have to respond to demands that come from ... departments for increased services." Casey said the rising cost of health care is difficult to project, as the province's population continues to age and the Nova Scotia Health Authority treats a variety of complex illnesses. But NDP leader Gary Burrill said the failure to spend the surplus on needed social services such as increased numbers of long-term care beds causes spending to rise in other parts of the health care system. He calls it a "hyper-focused obsession with putting money in the bank." Ready, Pet, Go! Leesa Dahl looks at everything to do with our furry, fuzzy, feathered, fishy (and more!) pet friends. Arrives in your inbox each Monday. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. "Because of the lack of investments in new nursing home beds, we see hospitals unable to function the way they should function and emergency services not working the way they were set up to function," he said. Burrill said if he were premier, he would immediately restore $5 million in annual operating costs to the long-term care facilities. Health spending was $105 million over budget, with over half of that due to rising demand for health services provided by the Nova Scotia Health Authority. Meanwhile, cannabis tax revenues were $6.3 million lower than expected, mainly due to the delay in the rollout of the legalization and supply shortages. The Department of Internal Services has received an additional $14 million to upgrade its computer systems, including health information technology services. The Department of Transportation has received an additional $9.9 million, "primarily due to the Nova Scotia to Maine ferry costs," the Finance Department said. Richardson International Ltd. announced an agreement with Conagra Brands Inc. to purchase its well-known Wesson cooking oil brand, including a large production facility in Memphis, Tenn. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 18/12/2018 (1079 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Richardson International Ltd. announced an agreement with Conagra Brands Inc. to purchase its well-known Wesson cooking oil brand, including a large production facility in Memphis, Tenn. Wesson is the largest vegetable oil brand in the U.S., with about 11.5 per cent of the U.S. market for canola, soy and blended vegetable oil products. SUPPLIED Wesson is the largest vegetable oil brand in the U.S., holding about 11.5 per cent of the market. Richardson is already the largest agribusiness company in Canada. When the deal is completed sometime during the first quarter of 2019, the 280,000-square-foot Memphis production facility will become the largest of the privately held Winnipeg companys current holdings. The company said the acquisition reinforces the growth strategy for its food business and complements its position as a vertically integrated canola processor. Curt Vossen, president and CEO of Richardson International, said it is an exciting deal for his company and for the city of Winnipeg. "We are from gate to plate, so to speak, in Canada," he said. "This extends that reach into the biggest consumptive market in the world for products like canola oil and other oils. This basically supports the biggest retail oil brand in the U.S." The Memphis facility processes about 150,000 tonnes of product per year, more than twice the output of Richardsons Lethbridge, Alta., facility, which was one of the first in the world to market canola oil. While the Wesson brand is not available in Canada, it is larger in the U.S. than brands such as Mazola or Crisco. As a private company, Richardson is not legally obliged to disclose the purchase price. Vossen said Conagra has chosen to withhold the price until its next analyst call. Richardson is already the largest handler of canola in Canada with about 30 per cent of the market. Vossen said the Wesson acquisition will provide more pull into a much bigger market in the U.S. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. "It will give us and our customers some optionality," he said. "We will continue to move Canadian agricultural production as we have been doing. Now we will be able to do it on larger scale, right from the farm, through our processing and into a packaged form that will go all over the U.S." Richardson is currently in the process of building a $30-million research and innovation centre in downtown Winnipeg, focused on product development. The Wesson agreement is subject to the usual closing conditions, including regulatory approval, and is expected to be finalized in the first quarter. The deal comes nine months after the U.S. Federal Trade Commission moved to block the proposed US$285-million acquisition of Wesson by J.M. Smucker Co. over concerns the combination would lessen competition. Smucker had planned to move production to its facility in Ohio. with files from The Canadian Press martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Residents of a remote western Alaska island are concerned about a possible lapse in air service after PenAir was purchased by another airline. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 18/12/2018 (1079 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Residents of a remote western Alaska island are concerned about a possible lapse in air service after PenAir was purchased by another airline. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. KTVA-TV reports PenAir had provided regular flights to St. Paul Island in the Bering Sea, but the company filed for bankruptcy and Ravn Alaska agreed to buy it earlier this year. PenAir spokeswoman Missy Roberts says the company is "uncertain" if service to St. Paul will continue once the asset sale is complete. City manager Phillip Zavadil says Ravn is working to obtain federal certification to service the area, but that certification is not expected until February. Amos Philemonoff, president of the Aleut Community of St. Paul, says city and tribal leaders are planning to meet with the federal transportation officials to help maintain air service. ___ Information from: KTVA-TV, http://www.ktva.com BEIJING - The U.S. government said Tuesday that it is reviewing reports of forced labour at a Chinese internment camp where ethnic minorities are sewing clothes that have been shipped to the U.S. market. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 18/12/2018 (1079 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. In this Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2018, photo, two layers of barbed wire fencing ring the "Hotan City apparel employment training base" where Hetian Taida has a factory in Hotan in western China's Xinjiang region. This is one of a growing number of internment camps in the Xinjiang region, where by some estimates 1 million Muslims are detained, forced to give up their language and their religion and subject to political indoctrination. Now, the Chinese government is also forcing some detainees to work in manufacturing and food industries. Some of them are within the internment camps; others are privately owned, state-subsidized factories where detainees are sent once they are released. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan) BEIJING - The U.S. government said Tuesday that it is reviewing reports of forced labour at a Chinese internment camp where ethnic minorities are sewing clothes that have been shipped to the U.S. market. U.S. Customs and Border Protection said in a statement that reporting by The Associated Press and other media "for the first time appears to link the internment camps identified in Western China to the importation of goods produced by forced labour by a U.S. company." The AP tracked shipments from a factory in a camp in China's far western Xinjiang region to Badger Sportswear in North Carolina. The company ships clothing to universities, colleges and schools around the United States. Experts and a human rights organization say that possibly as many as 1 million Uighurs, Kazakhs and others from predominantly Muslim groups are arbitrarily detained in such camps, whose functions range from political indoctrination to forced labour. Following the recent news media reports, Badger said that it had suspended business with Chinese supplier Hetian Taida Apparel and was investigating. A statement on its website says "one per cent or less" of Badger products was sourced from Hetian Taida. The Washington-based Workers Rights Consortium (WRC), which has agreements with many educational institutions to make sure the products they sell on campus are ethically manufactured, said that "forced labour of any kind is a severe violation of university codes of conduct." The group's executive director, Scott Nova, said in a message to affiliate universities that, building off the AP's report, WRC had gathered additional evidence indicating the factory that supplied Badger with collegiate apparel was "one and the same" as the factory inside the highly-guarded internment compound seen by AP reporters. The factory was featured on a Chinese state television segment in October that characterized the camp as a vocational training centre that helps minorities steer clear of religious extremism and gain employable skills. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. The state-run China Daily published an article on Tuesday which profiled ethnic minorities in Xinjiang who have been recruited to work in garment factories. The story featured a 23-year-old woman named Burebgul Ali who was described as being "reluctant to work at the factory." "But after skills training and learning Mandarin," the story said, "Burebgul found her job quite comfortable and could make at least 3,000 yuan ($435) per month." The AP spoke to a dozen former detainees and individuals who had friends or family in similar centres in Xinjiang who said they were given no choice but to work at factories on site. The Uighurs and Kazakhs, who were interviewed in exile in Kazakhstan, said that even professionals were trained to do factory work. It's against U.S. law to import products of forced labour. Customs and Border Protection said it is part of its mission to enforce "both laws to protect individuals from forced labour and our Nation's economy from businesses profiting from this form of modern slavery." ___ Mendoza reported from Santa Cruz, California. Bring a bud for your brother, grab some ganja for granny, decorate a doobie for dad or wrap some wacky tabacky for your wife. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 18/12/2018 (1079 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Bring a bud for your brother, grab some ganja for granny, decorate a doobie for dad or wrap some wacky tabacky for your wife. Whatever your weed, it's beginning to look a lot like a green Christmas for the first festive season with legalized cannabis. RUTH BONNEVILLE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS LEVO oil infuser sold at Tokyo Smoke. "That is a trend that we're seeing. People are coming in and, often, they're purchasing something for themselves and purchasing something for somebody else," said Deanna Garand, manager of the Tokyo Smoke store in Winnipeg's Exchange District. "They'll do theirs first, and get a little treat for somebody else." A recent cross-Canada survey by Lift & Co., a cannabis issues online magazine, reported one in 10 Canadians plans to give cannabis as a gift this Christmas. Manitobans and Albertans rated the most likely to give cannabis, as 12 per cent of Manitobans surveyed said they were planning to give someone a merry marijuana Christmas. Garand said people are stopping by the store to prep for seasonal parties. "We're very big on pre-rolls (marijuana already rolled into joints or cigarettes) at our location," Garand said. "The way that we're comparing it is like bringing a bottle of wine to a party at holiday time. People will buy some pre-rolls to bring and have some options (different types of product) for people to try and experience and explore with." The Lift & Co. survey found men were twice as likely to gift cannabis: 14 per cent of men and seven per cent of women said they would give cannabis as gifts this holiday season. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. "Definitely. It's just something different. It's fun and it's legal," said Eric, 44, a customer who did not want his last name published. "I'm not a big fan of alcohol consumption and I'm not really interested in that. You can't get anything done when you're inebriated from alcohol, but whereas you can still do stuff if you're stoned." He noted he would caution anyone to whom he gave cannabis to consume it safely and driving while high is illegal. Among millennials ages 18 to 34, 20 per cent of those surveyed said they would gift cannabis. That number was almost double of all the other age groups combined. Since recreational cannabis was legalized nationally Oct. 17, Garand said people are investigating more ways to consume it than smoking it and other effects it may have for people than just a high. "Now that we're getting more mature into legalization, a lot of people are really interested in the benefits of it for people in their lives that they care about. They want to give them alternative ways to mitigate problems or for their health," she said. Garand said accessories and other products, such as the Levo oil-infusing machine that is popular with cooking enthusiasts, are being purchased along with cannabis for holiday gift-giving. Roaring down Corydon Avenue with siren blaring, precious seconds tick by as Jay Shaw waits for drivers in front of him to get out of the way. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 18/12/2018 (1079 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Roaring down Corydon Avenue with siren blaring, precious seconds tick by as Jay Shaw waits for drivers in front of him to get out of the way. Its a Friday evening during rush hour and the assistant chief of the Winnipeg Fire Paramedic Service is heading to Main Street Project, downtown Winnipegs only "wet" shelter, which allows people who have consumed drugs or alcohol to access services and stay overnight. He's responding to a call about two people showing signs of medical distress, potentially meth psychosis. MIKAELA MACKENZIE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS 'Consistently inconsistent, Predictably unpredictable.' That's how Jay Shaw, assistant chief of the Winnipeg Fire Paramedic Service, describes every meth-related call. Shaw uses four words to describe every meth-related call the WFPS gets. "Consistently inconsistent," he says. "Predictably unpredictable." WFPS received 7,128 chief complaints about substances from January through November this year, compared with 7,888 in all of 2017. The vast majority of complaints (5,452) were related to alcohol, which was the same as last year (6,389). The complaints catalogued are based on patients' and paramedics' descriptions of events. Crystal methamphetamine continues its upward climb as runner-up. There were 771 incidents in which meth was mentioned last year. In the first 11 months of 2018, the number was up to 1,046 about a 36 per cent jump. Substances identified as chief complaint. Documented by WFPS paramedics (2017-Nov. 30 2018) But the data doesn't matter now, not while Shaw is stuck in traffic. Hes one of about 1,400 members of the WFPS, about 250 of whom take to city streets every night trying to save lives. When he finally arrives at the Martha Street facility, two paramedics are wheeling out a gurney with a body on it. A young womans frame is covered by a ghostly bed sheet. Only the toes of her dark high-top sneakers peek out from the bottom. She isnt dead. "Shes extremely embarrassed; thats why she covered her face," Shaw explains after briefly speaking with her. The stigma associated with drug use can still howl inside a users brain, no matter how high or how far away they are. Its not immediately clear what she took, so she'll be assessed further, as will another young man Shaw describes as "belligerent." The paramedics suspect he may have consumed meth and alcohol. The two ambulances speed off towards Health Sciences Centre, Manitobas largest hospital. In August, meths devastating impact on the health-care system became crystal clear. A leaked security video from HSC, considered by many to be the provinces most secure health facility, underscored the dangers front-line hospital staff are facing. Footage showed a nurse being repeatedly punched by a patient allegedly high on meth. Four security guards stormed around a hallway corner as the patient flailed his fists. After seven swings and about 18 seconds, the guards managed to tackle the patient to the floor. "I think it was great; Im glad it was leaked," an HSC nurse says three months later. "Its triggering change, or at least some small change." The nurse, one of three who spoke to the Free Press under condition of anonymity, says violence in HSCs emergency room has "skyrocketed over the past couple years," along with the number of meth users showing up at the city's hospitals. There were a dozen recorded meth-related visits to local emergency departments in April 2013, monthly counts compiled through triage notes by the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority show. Five years later, the number in April ballooned to 218. It hit a peak of 252 visits in August, a staggering 2,000 per cent increase from April 2013. Suspected meth-related visits to the ER. Number of times meth was mentioned in triage notes in all Winnipeg emergency rooms (monthly). Data source: Winnipeg Regional Health Authority "Before going to work and stuff, I sort of panic a little bit because you dont know whats going to happen today," says the HSC nurse, who has been assaulted on the job. "Weve pulled weapons off of people I pulled a bat with nails hammered into the edge of it off somebody they gave it up willingly, but thank God." Every shift is predictably unpredictable. Consistently inconsistent. But the nurse says one thing remains the same: "Youre just going and babysitting meth-heads all day." HSC added more security measures in a pilot project rolled out this fall, including locking some adult patient units in the evenings and restricting visiting hours. Ronan Segrave, interim chief operating officer, says the changes were made permanent early this month. And the hospital will soon expand the measures to other facilities focused on treating women and children. In November, HSC began to provide staff and volunteers with personal alarms, which they can attach to keychains or lanyards. Seven thousand of the "screamers" have been doled out so far and another 2,000 are expected to arrive in January. The alarms arrived after a staff member was pepper-sprayed when leaving after a shift, a nurse says, noting other staff have also been attacked. MIKAELA MACKENZIE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Health Sciences Centre staff are provided with personal alarms they call 'screamers.' Segrave says the move wasn't spurred by a specific incident. He likens the devices to a "hand grenade," which staff are advised to throw away from themselves, using the loud noise to distract an assailant. "Personal alarms can't be used in isolation from other security measures, but they are an additional protection, if you like, for staff who do find themselves alone or walking through the campus in a dark area," he says. After the August security video leaked, all HSC staff received a memo warning against speaking to media and notifying them that an internal investigation was underway. One nurse doesnt believe the WRHA would have made any security changes if the assault footage hadn't leaked. The nurse isnt sure if they want to continue working in emergency. "I wanted to help people for sure, for sure, but now it just seems so futile," the nurse says. "Meth is the problem. Like I said, I used to love my job I was really good at it. And now Im just like, I dont even feel like I want to do it anymore because its just so dangerous." A nurse who works next door at Childrens Hospital is also noticing changes in that ER. "We have seen an increase in children presenting with meth use," the nurse says. "The children arriving are often combative, requiring they be physically restrained as well as chemically restrained to keep them safe." It can take up to five or six security guards to keep the kids, other patients and staff safe, the nurse says, noting the kids have been as young as 12. Often its the same patients they see over and over again, the same children brought in by emergency medical services, the same kids who can't remember their own names or addresses. "So many resources are used to find their caregivers and resources used to keep them safe," the nurse says. "It is so sad to see them crying out and scared and having no idea what is happening. We cannot talk to them as they are violent and screaming." Segrave, however, says the nurse's concerns are overblown. "First thing I want to make absolutely clear is they are not reflective of the Childrens Hospital emergency department... they are a very small minority," he says. "In relation to those incidents that are in Childrens Hospital (emergency department) that do involve any degree of violence, the most common cause is alcohol. Its not crystal meth. "We are not seeing significant numbers of adolescents approaching with crystal-meth addiction. Not to say we arent seeing any, but its very small numbers." A nurse at St. Boniface Hospital laments having too few staff available to deal with a spike in violent or psychotic patients. "Its like pulling teeth trying to get enough staff in, not to mention everybody is working overtime," the nurse says, repeating a notion that's been regularly raised this year by the Manitoba Nurses Union. Staff at the St. Boniface ER began seeing more frequent visits by meth users as early as 2014, the nurse says. They have also reportedly been assaulted by patients experiencing fits of psychoses. "One of the docs I work with got punched in the face and hes a super nice guy," the nurse says. "Ive seen a pregnant co-worker get kicked in the belly by someone whos high on meth." "Theres no rational thought with some of these patients, so its scary.... When Im going in a room to talk to them, I take my stethoscope off my neck, I take my name tag off my neck. I dont want to be strangled to death. These are not normal thoughts for someones job." Katarina Lee, a clinical ethicist at St. B, says violence in the workplace is an ongoing concern and meth-related issues have sprouted as a major issue. MIKAELA MACKENZIE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS WFPS received 7,128 chief complaints about substances from January through November this year. Last summer and again in November, the hospital hosted addictions-education sessions in response to staff requests. It also added a security guard to patrol the emergency room 24-7 and established a multidisciplinary working group in the fall. They meet regularly to discuss safety and how the hospital can best respond to people with substance addictions. More staff are also brought into the ER on an as-needed basis, says Sara Gilchrist, the hospital's manager of nursing initiatives. "It's an ongoing dialogue every day, but we do enhance the nursing and health-care aide support when those situations come forward," she says. MIKE DEAL / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Manitoba Nurses Union president Darlene Jackson: 'This is a long-term problem' MNU president Darlene Jackson says increasing violence in hospital ERs extends past the Perimeter. Meth's grip has also taken hold at facilities in Brandon and Portage la Prairie. "This is a long-term problem," Jackson says. "It cant be solved overnight. We do know that we need more (treatment) beds. The question is do we need (supervised) injection sites for harm reduction? I dont know the answer to that." Back at Station 1 at Ellen Street and McDermot Avenue, the busiest fire-paramedic hall in the city, Shaw talks with WFPS medical director Dr. Rob Grierson and Deputy Chief Christian Schmidt about the merits of supervised consumption sites. Last week, WRHA documents revealed skyrocketing levels of syphilis and hepatitis B and C in the city, tied to a spike in intravenous drug use. Having access to clean needles and a safe space to inject could help slow the growth of such diseases. However, considering WFPS crews see an overwhelming number of alcohol-related calls, Grierson says a managed alcohol program may be a more pressing concern for Winnipeg. Ottawa, Calgary and Kenora already have effective models. MIKAELA MACKENZIE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Christian Schmidt, deputy chief of the Winnipeg Fire Paramedic Service: 'Its putting pressures on all of the public-safety departments' "If you were going to support one in our city, in my own personal opinion, I think a managed alcohol program would be (key) because of the numbers of people. I think definitely I would put my eggs in that basket," he says. "But I think it would be hard to do one and not the other, to be honest with you. I think if theres funding for one there should be funding for the other." Shaw offers his two cents. "When these individuals come into these (supervised consumption) sites, its an opportunity for counselling, for relationship-building," he says. "An ability for them to start the process that they actually want to go down. "So youve got to separate the criminality and the stigma aspect of (doing drugs)." The men also debate whether Winnipeg's situation constitutes a meth "crisis." Ever practical, Grierson pulls out his phone and looks up the definition. "A time of intense trouble or danger," he reads. "The synonyms they use are 'disaster,' 'catastrophe' or 'calamity.'" He ponders the results for a minute. "Crisis brings in a fear factor that I dont think is quite warranted at this point," he says. "Certainly for individuals that are touched by the effects of the drug, their families, the people around them, (they) absolutely understand it is a crisis for them," Schmidt says. "In terms of the effects its having on our department, its putting pressures on all of the public-safety departments fire-paramedic, police. I wouldnt necessarily describe it as a 'crisis,' but it is in terms of our ability to manage what were being asked to come and respond to." All three agree the government responses to the meth situation have so far been inadequate. "They have to collectively get their you-know-what together and say, 'OK, we all have a responsibility here to kind of solve this problem together,'" Grierson says. MIKAELA MACKENZIE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS WFPS medical director Dr. Rob Grierson says a managed alcohol program may be a more pressing concern for Winnipeg. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. And four days later, Mayor Brian Bowman, Health Minister Cameron Friesen and Winnipeg Centre MP Robert-Falcon Ouellette make a joint announcement about illicit drugs in Manitoba and establish a tri-level government task force to study and address the issues surrounding meth. It's the first time representatives from all three levels of government publicly discuss the province's meth problems in the same room, years after the so-called "crisis" began. The politicians say they were having discussions behind the scenes for months. And some measures the establishment of Rapid Access to Addictions Medicine clinics, implementing flexible-length treatment beds and providing anti-psychotic drug Olanzapine to paramedics are already being co-ordinated by different levels of government. Now, they're ready to collaborate. Maybe the politicians couldnt hear the WFPS sirens before. Seems like they are being heard clearly now. jessica.botelho@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @_jessbu Arlene Buchberger sits in chair six in the infusion area at the Misericordia Health Centre with a magazine in her lap and a needle in her hand. Buchberger is one of 2,300 clients who use the Community Intravenous Program (CIVP) to receive antibiotics. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 18/12/2018 (1079 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Arlene Buchberger sits in chair six in the infusion area at the Misericordia Health Centre with a magazine in her lap and a needle in her hand. Buchberger is one of 2,300 clients who use the Community Intravenous Program (CIVP) to receive antibiotics. On Nov. 28, the CIVP consolidated its services from Lions Manor on Sherbrook Street to the Misericordia Health Centre. The new central location is closer to infectious disease clinics like the St. Boniface Hospital and Health Sciences Centre Winnipeg, where most CIVP referrals come from. Inside the Misericordia Health Centre, clients can find more private exam rooms, 10 stations designated for intravenous therapy, diagnostic imaging and lab services. "Its wonderful," Buchberger said. "Its easy to access, its very clean, the nurses are very helpful." While Buchberger said she travels to the Misericordia Health Centre by taxi, clients can also benefit from the location by increased parking and public transit options. Gina Trinidad, Winnipeg Regional Health Associations chief health operations officer for continuing care and community, said there has been a 40 per cent increase in client demand for services over the past four years. "Like all of the changes we are making, our goal is to improve the quality and timeliness of care for our patients and clients that they expect and they deserve," Trinidad said. "Really, thats what this announcement is all about; its about helping our clients have access to the care they need, closer to the communities in which they live and work." The move brought together around 100 staff members to form an inter-professional team of infectious disease physicians, nurses, pharmacists and administrative staff to care for clients. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. Health Minister Cameron Friesen said the change is partly in response to Manitobas "complex health care system." "It is not an incremental change, rather it is some very bold change," Friesen said. "But it is done for the right reasons and its done for the purpose of getting better clinical outcomes, getting a stronger health care system not just today, but long into the future for those who need it." The program began more than 30 years ago to help bring intravenous services to the community beyond the hospital. Friesen said since the programs inception, it has reduced the number of scheduled visits to Winnipeg emergency departments. nadya.pankiw@freepress.mb.ca The provincial government is finally making good on an outstanding $5.9-million payment to city hall from 2017 for the southwest transit corridor project. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 19/12/2018 (1078 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. The provincial government is finally making good on an outstanding $5.9-million payment to city hall from 2017 for the southwest transit corridor project. Mayor Brian Bowman said Premier Brian Pallisters government is covering its share of the project agreement it signed with the city shortly after winning election in 2016, ending the possibility of legal action to settle the dispute. "The provincial government is respecting the current legal agreement," Bowman said in a year-end interview with the Free Press. "They paid all outstanding accounts to date, some of which are in process right now and were expecting to have confirmed in the next day or two." The city learned in February that the province wanted to renegotiate the deal when the estimated cost of the corridor unexpectedly dropped to $467.3 million from $587.3 million. Ottawa agreed to pay $137.3 million, with city hall and the province splitting the remaining $450 million in half. City officials said the province was holding back several million dollars of its share and wanted to renegotiate its contribution. The province wanted to renegotiate the rapid-transit funding deal when the estimated cost of the corridor dropped from $587.3 million to $467.3 million. (David Lipnowski / Winnipeg Free Press files) It appeared the province was concerned that the size of the contingency portion of the budget hadnt been reduced when the project cost decreased. Civic officials insisted the original deal ensured all three levels of government would share any cost savings as the project proceeded. Bowman said on more than one public occasion that the city would be prepared to take the Pallister government to court to force it to honour the deal and pay its share; provincial officials said they were taking their time doing due diligence on outstanding billing from city hall. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. In July, the city and province agreed the outstanding amount owing from 2017 was more than $10 million. By November, the figure had dropped to $5.9 million. The province has been slow in making good on a series of funding agreements to city hall. City chief financial officer Mike Ruta reported in November that besides $5.9 million on the transit project, the province still owed the city $18.9 million for policing services in 2018, $82.2 million for 2018 capital infrastructure project grants and $5.4 million for infrastructure projects going back to 2017. The province also put the city in a financial bind when it unilaterally ended its 50-50 cost sharing agreement for Winnipeg Transit operational costs and bus fleet purchases and froze all funding contributions at 2016 amounts for the following two years. Bowman said Wednesday there appears to be a thaw in city-provincial relations, which was evident in Tuesdays joint news conference to announce the creation of an illicit drug task force. Bowman attributed the change to a scheduled 30-minute meeting he had with the premier about two weeks ago that lasted 21/2 hours. aldo.santin@freepress.mb.ca Brian Pallister rejects the notion that his government's response to the meth crisis will define his premiership. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 18/12/2018 (1079 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Brian Pallister rejects the notion that his government's response to the meth crisis will define his premiership. In a year-end interview, Pallister said his administration is working to fix the province's finances while instituting major reforms in health, the justice system and, soon, in education. "What I cannot ever do as premier, and what our government cannot do, is forget that there are a lot of other people in the province that have other priorities at the same time that may not involve meth," he said. Pallister noted that while crystal meth is now considered the No. 1 illicit drug problem in Manitoba, it wasn't too long ago that fentanyl was viewed as the main scourge. "People wanted to call it a crisis. Now they don't call fentanyl a crisis, they call something else a crisis," he said. The Progressive Conservative government has faced a barrage of criticism from Opposition MLAs for not responding quickly and forcefully enough to the methamphetamine problem. While it has announced some initiatives including walk-in clinics for adults with addictions, a joint program with Ottawa that will boost assistance for addicts going through withdrawal, and equipping paramedics with an anti-psychotic drug they can administer to potentially violent users many feel it has not been enough. A Winnipeg Regional Health Authority briefing note on meth, brought to the public's attention recently by the NDP, said a "lack of provincial leadership" has hampered the city's ability to cope with the problem. "We've taken numerous steps already, and there's more to do," the premier said, adding that "this is not an issue that government solves by itself." Asked if the meth problem has made him feel less safe, Pallister said: "It concerns me if it concerns Manitobans, and I know it concerns Manitobans. I've had too many meetings and discussions with people to believe otherwise. But it's not just meth. And it's not just solutions like (that which) are being proposed by other political organizations, like safe-injection sites (something the PC government has rejected so far). There's not an instant answer." Pallister said public-safety perceptions surrounding meth can potentially affect business. "You've got people who've invested their life savings in a small business, say, in the core. and if people aren't going down there because they're afraid, that's having a devastating effect on that family or that small business, too." The premier made an allegation, first raised by his health minister in an interview with the Free Press, that the "rapidity in the legalization of cannabis" in Canada has played a role in fuelling the meth problem. "People are choosing (meth) because it's so cheap. It's been made available cheaply by the same people who were previously engaged in selling cannabis (before legalization)," he said, citing conversations he's had with the RCMP and Mayor Brian Bowman on the issue. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. "Maybe just stopping meth dealers isn't the answer because that then just means they're just selling something else. Stopping the flow of meth isn't by itself going to address the issue. It's the seller," he said. "We can't just focus totally on the unfortunate situation of a meth addict." Might fully addressing the mushrooming methamphetamine problem tax the government's resources as it labours to balance the budget? "Well, it has already. And it is right now. And it will more," he said. Meanwhile, Pallister dismissed the view expressed in a recent Free Press editorial that meth is the "defining issue" of his career. "I would say I seriously doubt that," he said. larry.kusch@freepress.mb.ca Global warming is physics and chemistry, and you cant negotiate with science for more time to solve the problem: more emissions mean a hotter planet. Dealing with the problem, however, requires an international negotiation involving almost 200 countries. In big gatherings of that sort, the convoy always moves at the speed of the slowest ships. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 19/12/2018 (1079 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Opinion Global warming is physics and chemistry, and you cant negotiate with science for more time to solve the problem: more emissions mean a hotter planet. Dealing with the problem, however, requires an international negotiation involving almost 200 countries. In big gatherings of that sort, the convoy always moves at the speed of the slowest ships. Thats why the reporting on the UN Climate Change Conference in Poland that ended on Saturday, two days later than planned, has been so downbeat. It didnt produce bold new commitments to cut greenhouse gas emissions. It saw the usual attempts by the biggest fossil-fuel producers the United States, Russia and Saudi Arabia to stall the process. And in the end, it just produced a "rulebook." But thats all it was supposed to do, and its not "just" a rulebook. The great breakthrough at the Paris conference three years ago saw every country finally agree to adopt a plan for emission reductions, but the Paris accord was a mere sketch, only 27 pages long. Fleshing it out what the plans should cover, how often they should be updated, how countries should measure and report their emissions, how much leeway should be given to poor countries with bad data was left until later. Later is now, and in the end they did come up with a 256-page rulebook that fills in most of those blanks. "We have a system of transparency, we have a system of reporting, we have rules to measure our emissions, we have a system to measure the impacts of our policies compared to what science recommends," the European Unions climate commissioner Miguel Arias Canete said. It was an excruciating process, and it still leaves a few things out, but it settled a thousand details about how the Paris deal will really work. Oh, and one big thing. China abandoned its claim that as a "developing country" it should not be bound by the same rules as rich countries like the United States. There will only be one set of rules for both rich and poor countries, although the really poor ones will get a lot of financial and technical help in meeting their commitments. This years conference dealt with the details at ministerial level. Next year, UN secretary general Antonio Guterres will host a summit of the biggest emitters to lay the groundwork for the key 2020 meeting. Thats when countries will report whether they have kept their 2015 promises on emissions cuts, and hopefully promise much bigger cuts for the next five years. The rise of populist nationalists like U.S. President Donald Trump and Brazils Jair Bolsonaro, both climate-change deniers, will make future negotiations even harder. Its all moving far too slowly; the human factor keeps getting in the way. For example, Bolsonaro wants Brazil to get extra carbon credits for protecting the Amazonian rainforest, even as he plans to carve the forest up with big new roads and cut a lot of it down. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. The Paris deal is important, but it has come far too late to stop the average global temperature from rising to the never-exceed target of 2 C that was adopted many years ago, let alone the lower target of 1.5 C that scientists now believe is necessary. We are already at 1 C, and current promises of emission cuts will take us up past 3 C. At the moment, emissions are still going up (by three per cent this year). Even if countries make further major commitments to cut emissions in 2020, its hard to believe that we can avoid devastating heat waves, droughts, floods and sea-level rise, and a sharp fall in global food production. So while we are cutting emissions, we also need to be working on ways to remove some of the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases we have already put into the atmosphere. Various ideas for doing that are being worked on, but they will probably become available on a large scale too late to keep the temperature rise below 2 C. So geo-engineering direct intervention in the atmosphere to hold the temperature down while we work on getting emissions down will probably be needed as well. Nobody really wants to do "solar radiation management," but cutting the amount of sunlight reaching the planets surface by just a small amount is technically feasible. It could temporarily halt the warming and give us the extra time we are probably going to need. We are getting into very deep water here, but we may have no other options. If we had started cutting our emissions 20 years ago (when we already knew where they would eventually take us), such drastic measures would not be necessary. But thats not the human way, and so well have to take the risks or pay the price. Gwynne Dyers new book is Growing Pains: The Future of Democracy (and Work). Facebook is in crisis mode, but the company can take major steps to fix itself and the global community it says it wants to promote. Facebook founder, CEO and majority shareholder Mark Zuckerberg need not wait for governments to impose regulations. If he and other industry leaders wanted to, they could make meaningful changes fairly quickly. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 19/12/2018 (1079 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Opinion Facebook is in crisis mode, but the company can take major steps to fix itself and the global community it says it wants to promote. Facebook founder, CEO and majority shareholder Mark Zuckerberg need not wait for governments to impose regulations. If he and other industry leaders wanted to, they could make meaningful changes fairly quickly. It wouldnt be painless, but Facebook in particular is in a world of hurt already, facing criticism for contributing to civil unrest and sectarian turmoil around the world, delayed responses to disinformation campaigns, misleading users about data-handling policies, and efforts to discredit critics not to mention a budding employee revolt. Facebook, Twitter, Google and other social media companies are causing society-wide damage. But they tend to describe the problems as much smaller, resulting from rogue individuals and groups hijacking their systems for nefarious purposes. Our research into how social media can be exploited by manipulative political operatives, conducted with Joan Donovan at the Data & Society research institute, suggests the real problem is much larger than these companies admit. We believe the roots lie in their extremely profitable advertising systems, which need a major overhaul. We have identified some key changes that these giant powerhouses could make right away. These moves could reduce opportunities for political manipulation and limit the harm to democratic societies around the world. Users minds in the crosshairs Facebook, Google, Twitter and other social media companies have built an enormous digital influence machine powered by user tracking, targeting, testing and automated decision-making to make advertising more effective and efficient. While building this supercharged surveillance system, companies have promised users and regulators that targeted advertising is mutually beneficial for both consumers and advertisers. In this bargain, users are supposed to receive more relevant ads. Facebook, for instance, explains that its "interest-based advertising" serves users who "want to see ads that relate to things they care about." Its true that these methods can identify ads that connect with users actual interests. But the very same data-driven techniques that tell a surfer about a new board design can also identify strategic points where people are most vulnerable to influence. In particular, the leading social media advertising systems let political operatives experiment with different ads to see which are the most effective. They can use these tools not only to see if certain issues resonate with particular targets but also test for fears or prejudices that can be invoked to influence political behavior. One key way to do this is to make people feel that someone else represents an emotionally charged threat to their identity. In 2016, for instance, Russia-linked operatives bought thousands of Facebook ads targeted to specific audiences suggesting Hillary Clinton had insulted their groups dignity or threatened their safety. Some ads alleged Clinton espoused disrespect for specific occupations, like coal miners, or racial groups, like African-Americans. Others claimed she would confiscate guns or supported radical political movements seeking to overturn familiar ways of life. Targeting political ads is not unique to online advertising, but the tools of digital ad systems are vastly more powerful than traditional mass media. Advertisers can try out several versions of an ad simultaneously and receive almost instant feedback on which ones most effectively drive specific audiences to share, like or comment on them. This digital feedback loop helps political operatives refine their tactics, probing for just the right images, words and emotions to influence very specific subgroups of citizens. Move fast and fix things Members of Congress and even some key Silicon Valley figures have begun discussing the need for tighter government oversight and greater accountability in digital advertising. Change need not wait for politics. Based on our analysis, here are some steps companies could take right away on their own. These moves may hurt the firms finances, but would demonstrate serious and lasting commitment to limiting their platforms usefulness in political manipulation campaigns. As their first move, social media companies could stop allowing their ad services to be used as freewheeling experimental laboratories for examining their users psyches. Just as marketers and academic researchers must obtain permission from their test subjects, political advertisers that run online ad experiments could get informed consent in advance from every user who is involved. Companies should ask for users consent in specific notifications about ad experiments and not penalize users for opting out by limiting their access to services. We suspect many users would opt out of these tests if given the choice, but in any case this policy would help draw public attention to the hidden manipulation tools that platforms offer to their real customers: the political and commercial advertisers who pay the bills. Make targeted political advertising transparent To increase transparency and limit the ability of special interests to secretly influence politics, social media companies could refuse to work with so-called "dark money" groups. All political advertisers should be required to disclose their major donors in a format users can easily access. A new policy banning dark money ads would respond to evidence that political operatives have used impersonation and manipulative ad tactics to stir in-fighting or sow division among coalitions of their adversaries. Impersonation clearly works best when ad sponsors are able to hide their identities and motives. Anonymous ads are also more likely to violate ethical standards simply because no one fears being held responsible for them. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. Make platforms more democratic A more significant change social media companies could make would be to introduce democratic oversight of how they collect and use peoples data. Facebooks Zuckerberg recently took an initial step in this direction, announcing that he will create independent review panels to handle users appeals against the companys removal of content it judges inappropriate. He explained that he wanted to ensure "these decisions are made in the best interests of our community and not for commercial reasons." Whatever you think about this plan and it has been greeted with plenty of skepticism Zuckerbergs reasoning acknowledges that because social platforms have become so central to democratic life, their own policies and design decisions require democratic accountability. A more ambitious vision would let independent ethics panels representing diverse communities of users set enforceable policies for ethical political advertising. Similar sorts of groups are common in medicine and are emerging in artificial intelligence, among other fields. The details of how such committees operate will be critical to their success. If these committees are set up in partnership with nonprofit organizations with proven records of advocating for democratic communication and campaign finance transparency, perhaps they could help social media companies earn greater public trust by prioritizing democracy over maximizing their profits. Anthony M. Nadler is an associate professor of media and communication studies at Ursinus College. Matthew Crain is an assistant professor of media, journalism and film at Miami University. This article was first published at The Conversation Canada: theconversation.com/ca. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 19/12/2018 (1079 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Opinion Winnipegs crystal methamphetamine crisis continues to skyrocket. I think a case can be made that, in large part, the meth problem is a reflection of a much deeper societal malaise. We are still in the midst of what is now a 40-year revolution, driven in large part by dramatic technological change and accompanied also by deep and disruptive socio-economic transformation. Many are reeling from its effects. Among the most dramatic of these is the shift away from manufacturing, with its full-time, well-paid, unionized jobs with benefits and security, to the new, precarious labour market with poorly paid, often part-time jobs that have no benefits and no security or union protection. As a result, many peoples economic circumstances have deteriorated, and in too many cases this has been accompanied by a loss of the dignity and sense of purpose and meaning that come with holding a job that contributes to society and can support a family. For many of us, our sense of the future has changed. We are increasingly fearful about the future, and about the future of our children and grandchildren. These are existential fears. The revolution that we are living through has also been accompanied by and to a considerable extent, driven by a shift in values toward extreme individualism and hyper-competitiveness. These values and the astonishingly rapid pace of change have pushed aside and left behind very large numbers of people. Yet even while ever-growing numbers are left by the wayside, the gap between the rich and the rest of us has grown so wide as to be obscene, thus adding to the sense of exclusion and in many cases, the resentment of those left behind. Todays hyper-competitiveness, and the social fragmentation and isolation that it leaves in its wake, has contributed to the erosion of our collective sense of the common good. Gone are the commitment to sharing and solidarity that previously found expression in the creation of such overwhelmingly positive benefits as medicare, the Canada Pension Plan and Canadas equalization program. Growing numbers of young people are socially isolated, and are experiencing what scholar Henry Giroux provocatively calls "social homelessness." There is increasingly widespread despair, and in at least some cases even a sense of hopelessness among those who are being left out of the benefits of the new economy, and those who feel the future holds little for them. For some, these feelings are not new. Many who are poor and in Manitoba, especially those who are Indigenous and poor have long felt that they have been left out of the benefits of the modern economy. The long-term and ongoing impact of colonialism, and what Sen. Murray Sinclair called "cultural genocide," has produced despair for many Indigenous people. But the issue is not at all confined to those who are Indigenous. Far too many young people the children and grandchildren of those of us who feel weve been lucky enough to have done all right in our lives see little hope for a meaningful future, faced as they are with the prospect of poorly paid part-time jobs alongside the soaring costs of housing and of post-secondary education, and the increasingly troubling levels of income inequality. We are paying a price for all of this. It was Milton Friedman, intellectual architect of todays ultra-competitive and ultra-individualistic economy, who insisted that there is "no free lunch." There is always a price to be paid. And we are paying a price for the kind of economy and society that has been systematically fashioned over these past 40 years. We can count that price in a multitude of ways. For example, across North America, we are seeing rising rates of violence, anger, xenophobia and hatred. Rapacious greed is celebrated. The incidence of suicide and mental health problems is soaring. And many of us are truly and genuinely shocked by the extent to which voters are attracted to authoritarian demagogues. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. American writer Chris Hedges argues, referring particularly to the United States, that these are the morbid symptoms of a society in decay. It might well be argued that here in Manitoba, these symptoms include the attraction of meth. Why meth? A spokesperson for the Addictions Foundation of Manitoba said at a recent public information session that meth produces a more intense and longer-lasting high than other drugs, and is very inexpensive. For those who feel left out, who see their lives going nowhere, who experience a social homelessness, whose lives are overwhelmed by despair and hopelessness, why not escape? And even while the meth problem that police Chief Danny Smyth has called a "crisis" explodes, governments across North America and much of western Europe are cutting taxes for the wealthiest, while imposing austerity on the rest of us, with particularly harsh effects on those who are the socially homeless, and increasingly the literally homeless. The meth crisis is one part of the price that we are paying for the kind of society we have created or that has been created for us by those who are its increasingly wealthy and powerful beneficiaries. The real solution is more dramatic than adding more treatment centres, although our austerity-driven governments, to their eternal shame, wont even do that. Jim Silver is a professor at the University of Winnipeg and a Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives research associate. WASHINGTON - The Senate approved legislation Wednesday to temporarily fund the government, a key step toward averting a federal shutdown after President Donald Trump backed off his demand for money for a border wall with Mexico. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 19/12/2018 (1079 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., and Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the assistant Democratic leader, talks to reporters about the possibility of a partial government shutdown, at the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. Congress and President Donald Trump continue to bicker over his demand that lawmakers fund a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, pushing the government to the brink of a partial shutdown at midnight Friday. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite) WASHINGTON - The Senate approved legislation Wednesday to temporarily fund the government, a key step toward averting a federal shutdown after President Donald Trump backed off his demand for money for a border wall with Mexico. Senators passed the measure, which would keep government running to Feb. 8, by voice vote without a roll call. The House is also expected to move before Friday's deadline, when funding for a portion of the government expires. Without resolution, more than 800,000 federal workers would face furloughs or be forced to work without pay, disrupting government operations days before Christmas. While the White House indicated Trump was open to reviewing whatever Congress could pass, the president did not immediately weigh in on the short-term plan. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said the Senate will remain in session Thursday. "We have to see what the House does," he said. Many of Trump's supporters were frustrated that he appeared to retreat on his shutdown threats after promising a fight over the wall, which had been central to his presidential campaign. Just last week Trump said he would be "proud" to shut down the government over his demand for $5 billion for the wall. Some allies described the move as caving on his pledge, expressing concern that it could hurt Trump's 2020 prospects. Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., a leader of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, said Trump's political base "will just go crazy" if he signs a bill without wall funding. He warned it will be tougher to win the money next year when Democrats control the House. He said supporters of the president "believe it's a promise that he's been telling them that he will keep." On Twitter, Trump appeared to respond to criticism by insisting that "one way or the other, we will win on the Wall!" Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., speaks to reporters about the possibility of a partial government shutdown, at the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. Congress and President Donald Trump continue to bicker over his demand that lawmakers fund a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, pushing the government to the brink of a partial shutdown at midnight Friday. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite) Trump counsellor Kellyanne Conway also faced tough questioning on "Fox & Friends," the morning show known to be one of Trump's favourites. Host Brian Kilmeade said Wednesday that Trump has "no leverage," while Ainsley Earhardt asked why Trump was "softening" his position. "The president is not softening his stance," Conway said. "He has a responsibility to keep the government moving forward, and he has a responsibility to get border security." McConnell, though, portrayed the short-term spending measure as a "simple" bill that would show that Republicans, who control Congress now, will finish the year by not prolonging a potential crisis. "Republicans will continue to fill our duty to govern," he said. Voting was delayed until late Wednesday as a bipartisan group of lawmakers, mostly from the West, pushed a package that would reauthorize a popular Land and Water Conservation Fund, which expired Sept. 30, and add other measures addressing public lands. Unable to reach agreement, they postponed action as talks continued. At one point late in the late evening, senators broke out in a round of Christmas carols from a corner of the chamber. A few moments later, retiring Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., gaveled a procedural vote closed by suggesting "Rudolph" had voted present. It was unclear how many House members would return to Washington for votes after Republicans lost the majority in the midterm election. Some 70 members missed Wednesday's session, almost as many Democrats as Republicans. With many House Republicans sour on the spending package, passage could depend on Democrats. House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi of California, the speaker-designate for the new Congress in January, talks to reporters after meeting with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., as Congress and President Donald Trump bicker over his demand that lawmakers fund a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, pushing the government to the brink of a partial shutdown, in Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018. Without a resolution, parts of the federal government will shut down at midnight Friday. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite) Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi, who is on track to become speaker when Democrats take control Jan. 3, signalled support for ensuring funding. Should the legislation become law, the border money fight would drag into the next Congress, which could prove even more difficult for Trump. Pelosi will probably be able to quickly win approval of a longer-term measure to keep government running in 2019. "Democrats will be ready to fully, responsibly fund our government in January," Pelosi said in a statement. As some Republicans grumbled that Trump caved, McConnell lashed out at Democrats for failing to give Trump any of the $5 billion that he wanted for the wall. The bill keeps funding at current levels, $1.3 billion, for border security and fencing, but not for the wall. "This seems to be the reality of our political moment," McConnell said. "It seems like political spite for the president may be winning out over sensible policy." Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York said Democrats oppose Trump's border demands because the wall is "inefficient" and because Trump, as a candidate, promised that Mexico would pay for it, which Mexico has refused to do. "We want smart, effective border security," Schumer said. "That's not a wall." But the White House showed its willingness to budge as it became apparent the president did not have support in Congress for paying for the wall. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders indicated earlier this week that Trump did not want to shut down the government. She said the administration was looking at ways to find the money elsewhere, though that was uncertain because it would also likely need congressional approval. Congress did pass legislation to fund much of the government through the current budget year, until next Oct. 1. At issue is money for nine of 15 Cabinet-level departments and dozens of agencies, including the departments of Homeland Security, Transportation, Interior, Agriculture, State and Justice, as well as national parks and forests. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. The stopgap measure would approve government funding at existing levels for those departments, without a boost for the border. It would include a temporary extension of a national flood insurance program, the Violence Against Women Act and other measures. Several lawmakers have complained that the appropriations process continues to be tangled in partisan politics. Top appropriators had tried to improve the process this year by passing bipartisan bills that would have funded those agencies, as they hoped to stem the cycle of shutdown crises. They lamented having to abandon those efforts for the temporary measure. Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said they "worked a long time" on the bills, but hope "evaporated" as the shutdown risk deepened. Many agencies, including the Pentagon and the departments of Veterans Affairs and Health and Human Services, are covered for the year and would continue to operate as usual. The U.S. Postal Service, busy delivering packages for the holiday season, would not be affected by any government shutdown because it's an independent agency. ___ Associated Press writer Laurie Kellman in Washington contributed to this report. iShares iBoxx $ High Yield Corporate Bond ETF's stock was trading at $80.84 on March 11th, 2020 when COVID-19 (Coronavirus) reached pandemic status according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Since then, HYG shares have increased by 6.0% and is now trading at $85.65. View which stocks have been most impacted by COVID-19. iShares MSCI BRIC ETF's stock was trading at $38.73 on March 11th, 2020 when Coronavirus (COVID-19) reached pandemic status according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Since then, BKF shares have increased by 21.4% and is now trading at $47.03. View which stocks have been most impacted by COVID-19. Augusta Gold Corp., a junior exploration company, engages in the acquisition and exploration of mineral properties in the United States. It primarily explores for gold, silver, and other metals. The company holds interests in the Bullfrog gold project located in the north-west of Las Vegas, Nevada. It also owns, controls, or has acquired mineral rights on Federal patented and unpatented mining claims in the state of Nevada for the purpose of exploration and potential development of metals on a total of approximately 7,800 acres of land. The company was formerly known as Bullfrog Gold Corp. and changed its name to Augusta Gold Corp. in January 2021. Augusta Gold Corp. was incorporated in 2007 and is headquartered in Vancouver, Canada. Read More Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, a diversified financial institution, provides various financial products and services to personal, business, public sector, and institutional clients in Canada, the United States, and internationally. The company operates through four strategic business units: Canadian Personal and Business Banking; Canadian Commercial Banking and Wealth Management; U.S. Commercial Banking and Wealth Management; and Capital Markets. The company offers chequing, savings, and business accounts; mortgages; loans, lines of credit, student lines of credit, and business and agriculture loans; investment and insurance services; and credit cards, as well as overdraft protection services. It also provides day-to-day banking, borrowing and credit, investing and wealth, specialty, and international services; correspondent banking and online foreign exchange services; and cash management services. The company serves its customers through its banking centers, as well as direct, mobile, and remote channels. Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce was founded in 1867 and is headquartered in Toronto, Canada. Read More 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. Read More The following companies are subsidiares of Hyatt Hotels: CHANCELLOR STREET CONDOMINIUM ASSOCIATION INC., GLENDALE HOTEL PROPERTIES L.L.C., HT-SEATTLE HOLDINGS LLC, 1379919 ALBERTA INC., 319168 ONTARIO LIMITED, 3385434 CANADA INC., ADMINISTRACION DE PERSONAL ANDARES S. DE R.L. DE C.V., AIC HOLDING CO., AIRPORT PLAZA ASSOCIATES LIMITED PARTNERSHIP, AIRPORT PLAZA HOTEL LLC, AIRPORT PLAZA OFFICE BUILDING LIMITED PARTNERSHIP, AMERISUITES FRANCHISING L.L.C., ARANCIA LIMITED, ARUBA BEACHFRONT RESORTS LIMITED PARTNERSHIP, ARUBA BEACHFRONT RESORTS N.V., ASIA HOSPITALITY INC., ASIA HOSPITALITY INVESTORS B.V., ASIAN HOTEL N.V., ATRIUM HOTEL L.L.C., AUSTIN RESORT BEVERAGE LLC, AmeriSuites Hotel, BAKU HOTEL COMPANY - AZERI, BAKU HOTEL COMPANY - CAYMAN, BASTROP MARKETING L.L.C., BAY II INVESTOR INC., BELLEVUE ASSOCIATES, BH PLAZA LLC, BRE/AMERISUITES PROPERTIES L.L.C., BRE/AMERISUITES TXNC GP L.L.C., BRE/AMERISUITES TXNC PROPERTIES L.P., BURVAN HOTEL ASSOCIATES, CAL-HARBOR SO. PIER URBAN RENEWAL ASSOCIATES L.P., CELAYA RESORTS S. DE R.L. DE C.V., CHESAPEAKE COMMUNITIES LLC, CHESAPEAKE RESORT LLC, CIUDAD DEL CARMEN DIAMANTE RESORT S. DE R.L. 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PROPERTIES LIMITED, GAINEY DRIVE ASSOCIATES, GALAXY AEROSPACE COMPANY LLC, GHE HOLDINGS LIMITED, GRAND HYATT BERLIN GMBH, GRAND HYATT DFW BEVERAGE LLC, GRAND HYATT SAN ANTONIO L.L.C., GRAND HYATT SF L.L.C., GRAND RIVERWALK BEVERAGE LLC, GRAND TORONTO CORP., GRAND TORONTO VENTURE L.P., GREENWICH HOTEL LIMITED PARTNERSHIP, H.E. ATLANTA CENTENNIAL PARK HOLDINGS L.L.C., H.E. AUSTIN L.L.C., H.E. BERMUDA L.L.C., H.E. CAP CANA L.L.C., H.E. DRISKILL LLC, H.E. GRAND CYPRESS L.L.C., H.E. IRVINE L.L.C., H.E. KANSAS CITY L.L.C., H.E. LENOX L.L.C., H.E. NASHVILLE L.L.C., H.E. NEWPORT L.L.C., H.E. ORLANDO L.L.C., H.E. PHILADELPHIA HC HOLDINGS L.L.C., H.E. PHILADELPHIA HC HOTEL L.L.C., H.E. PHILADELPHIA HC PARKING L.L.C., H.E. PHILADELPHIA HC RETAIL L.L.C., H.E. PHILADELPHIA SANSOM L.L.C., H.E. PORTLAND HC L.L.C., H.E. PORTLAND L.L.C., H.E. PROPERTIES HOLDING L.L.C., H.E. PROPERTIES L.L.C., H.E. SAN ANTONIO I L.L.C., H.E. SAN ANTONIO L.L.C., H.E. TUCSON HOLDINGS L.L.C., H.E. 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DE R.L. DE C.V., HOTELS CS CELAYA S. DE R.L. DE C.V., HP ATLANTA CENTENNIAL PARK JV LLC, HP AUSTIN L.L.C., HP BEVERAGE DALLAS DFW AIRPORT LLC, HP BEVERAGE SUGAR LAND LLC, HP BOSTON HOLDINGS L.L.C., HP GLENDALE JV HOLDINGS L.L.C., HP GLENDALE L.L.C., HP INDIA HOLDINGS LIMITED, HP LAS VEGAS BEVERAGE L.L.C., HP M STREET L.L.C., HP ROUTE 46 TEXAS LLC, HP SAN FRANCISCO L.L.C., HP SAN JUAN L.L.C., HP TEN TEXAS LLC, HPHH ATLANTA L.L.C., HPHH DENVER L.L.C., HPHH SAN JOSE JV HOLDINGS L.L.C., HPHH SAN JOSE L.L.C., HQ CHESAPEAKE LLC, HR LOST PINES RESORT LLC, HR MC HOTEL COMPANY S. DE R.L. DE C.V., HR MC SERVICES II S. DE R.L. DE C.V., HR MC SERVICES S. DE R.L. DE C.V., HRHC LLC, HT- WAILEA LLC, HT-AVENDRA GROUP HOLDINGS L.L.C., HT-AVENDRA L.L.C., HT-CHESAPEAKE COMMUNITIES INC., HT-CHESAPEAKE RESORT INC., HT-HOTEL EQUITIES INC., HT-HUNTINGTON BEACH INC., HT-JERSEY PIER INC., HT-JERSEY PIER L.P., HT-JERSEY PIER LLC, HT-LONG BEACH L.L.C., HT-MIAMI BEACH L.L.C., HT-PARK 57 INC., HT-SEATTLE LLC, HT-SIERRA L.L.C., HT-VANCOUVER INC., HTLB L.L.C., HTS - NS L.L.C., HTS - NY L.L.C., HTS-ASPEN L.L.C., HTS-BC INC., HTS-INVESTMENT L L.C., HTSF L.L.C., HTW BEVERAGE LLC, HY LONG BEACH HOTEL LLC, HYATT (BARBADOS) CORPORATION, HYATT (JAPAN) CO. LTD., HYATT (THAILAND) LIMITED, HYATT ARUBA N.V., HYATT ASIA PACIFIC HOLDINGS LIMITED, HYATT AUSTRALIA HOTEL MANAGEMENT PTY LIMITED, HYATT AUSTRIA GMBH, HYATT BEACH FRONT N.V., HYATT BORNEO MANAGEMENT SERVICES LIMITED, HYATT BRITANNIA CORPORATION LTD., HYATT CC OFFICE CORP., HYATT CHAIN SERVICES LIMITED, HYATT CRYSTAL CITY LLC., HYATT CURACAO N.V., HYATT DISASTER RELIEF FUND, HYATT DO BRASIL PARTICIPACOES LTDA, HYATT EQUITIES L.L.C., HYATT FOREIGN EMPLOYMENT SERVICES INC., HYATT FRANCHISING CANADA CORP., HYATT FRANCHISING L.L.C., HYATT FRANCHISING LATIN AMERICA L.L.C., HYATT FULFILLMENT OF MARYLAND INC., HYATT GLOBAL SERVICES INC., HYATT GTLD L.L.C., HYATT HOC INC., HYATT HOLDINGS (UK) LIMITED, HYATT HOSPITALITY SERVICES L.L.C., HYATT HOTEL MANAGEMENT LIMITED, HYATT HOTELS CONSULTANCY SERVICES ASIA PACIFIC LIMITED, HYATT HOTELS CORPORATION OF KANSAS, HYATT HOTELS CORPORATION OF MARYLAND, HYATT HOTELS FOUNDATION, HYATT HOTELS MANAGEMENT CORPORATION, HYATT HOTELS OF CANADA INC., HYATT HOTELS OF FLORIDA INC., HYATT HOTELS OF PUERTO RICO INC., HYATT HOUSE CANADA INC., HYATT HOUSE FRANCHISING L.L.C., HYATT HOUSE HOTEL HOLDING COMPANY L.L.C., HYATT INDIA CONSULTANCY PRIVATE LIMITED, HYATT INTERNATIONAL (ASIA) LIMITED, HYATT INTERNATIONAL (EUROPE AFRICA MIDDLE EAST) LLC, HYATT INTERNATIONAL - JAPAN LIMITED, HYATT INTERNATIONAL - SOUTHWEST ASIA LIMITED, HYATT INTERNATIONAL -ASIA PACIFIC LIMITED, HYATT INTERNATIONAL -SEA (PTE) LIMITED, HYATT INTERNATIONAL CORPORATION, HYATT INTERNATIONAL HOLDINGS CO., HYATT INTERNATIONAL HOTEL MANAGEMENT (BEIJING) CO. LTD., HYATT INTERNATIONAL MILAN L.L.C., HYATT INTERNATIONAL PROPERTY MANAGEMENT (BEIJING) CO. LTD., HYATT INTERNATIONAL TECHNICAL SERVICES INC., HYATT JV HOLDINGS L.L.C., HYATT LACSA SERVICES INC., HYATT LOUISIANA L.L.C., HYATT MAINZ GMBH, HYATT MARKETING SERVICES INC., HYATT MARKETING SERVICES NIGERIA COMPANY LIMITED, HYATT MINNEAPOLIS LLC, HYATT MINORITY INVESTMENTS INC., HYATT MSS L.L.C., HYATT NORTH AMERICA MANAGEMENT SERVICES INC., HYATT OF AUSTRALIA LIMITED, HYATT OF BAJA S. DE R.L. DE C.V., HYATT OF CHINA LIMITED, HYATT OF FRANCE S.A.R.L., HYATT OF GUAM LIMITED, HYATT OF ITALY S.R.L., HYATT OF LATIN AMERICA AND CARIBBEAN L.L.C., HYATT OF LATIN AMERICA S.A. DE C.V., HYATT OF MACAU LIMITED, HYATT OF MEXICO S.A. DE C.V., HYATT OF PHILIPPINES LIMITED, HYATT PARTNERSHIP INTERESTS L.L.C., HYATT PLACE ANNE ARUNDEL BEVERAGE INC., HYATT PLACE CANADA CORPORATION, HYATT PLACE FRANCHISING L.L.C., HYATT PLACE OF MARYLAND INC., HYATT REGENCY COLOGNE GMBH, HYATT REGENCY CORPORATION PTY. LIMITED, HYATT SERVICES AUSTRALIA PTY LIMITED, HYATT SERVICES CANADA INC., HYATT SERVICES CARIBBEAN L.L.C., HYATT SERVICES GMBH, HYATT SERVICES INDIA PRIVATE LIMITED, HYATT SHARED SERVICE CENTER L.L.C., HYATT TRINIDAD LIMITED, HYCANADA INC., HYCARD INC., HYSTAR L.L.C., Hyatt Corporation, INFORMATION SERVICES LIMITED, INTERNATIONAL RESERVATIONS LIMITED, JOINT VENTURE ITALKYR CLOSED JOINT STOCK COMPANY, JUNIPER HOTELS PRIVATE LIMITED, KSA MANAGEMENT INC., KYOTO HOLDING CO., LHR-PARTNERS LTD., LORING PARK ASSOCIATES LIMITED PARTNERSHIP, LOST PINES BEVERAGE LLC, MACAE PARTNERS S.A.R.L., MAHIMA HOLDINGS PRIVATE LIMITED, MARION RESERVATION CENTER L.L.C., MEXICO CITY HOTEL INVESTMENTS B.V., MILAN HOTEL INVESTMENTS B.V., MIRAVAL ARIZONA GUARANTOR LLC, MIRAVAL GROUP LLC, MIRAVAL RESORT ARIZONA HOLDINGS LLC, MIRAVAL RESORT ARIZONA LLC, MIRAVAL RESORT ARIZONA OPERATING CO. INC., MIRAVAL RESORT TUCSON LLC, MONROE MR HOLDINGS I LLC, MONROE MR HOLDINGS II LLC, MONROE MR HOLDINGS III LLC, MONROE MR HOLDINGS LLC, MONROE MR HOLDINGS TRUST, MRG ATX BEVERAGE HOLDINGS LLC, MRG ATX HOLDINGS II LLC, MRG ATX HOLDINGS LLC, MRG ATX INVESTMENT LLC, MRG ATX MANAGEMENT I LLC, MRG ATX MANAGEMENT II LLC, MRG ATX OPERATIONS LLC, MRG CRW HOLDINGS LLC, MRG CRW MANAGEMENT I LLC, MRG CRW MANAGEMENT II LLC, MRG CRW OPERATIONS LLC, MUNICH OPCO GMBH, Miraval Resort, OASIS LUXURY RENTALS INCORPORATED, PARIS HOTEL COMPANY B.V., PARK HYATT HAMBURG GMBH, PARK HYATT HOTEL GMBH, PARK HYATT WATER TOWER ASSOCIATES L.L.C., PH NEW YORK L.L.C., PHMC RESIDENCIAS S. DE R.L. DE C.V., POLK SMITH REGENCY LLC, PT HYATT INDONESIA, PVD INVESTMENT COMPANY S.A.R.L., Peabody Hotels & Resort, RCG PROPERTIES LLC, REGENCY BEVERAGE COMPANY LLC, REGENCY RIVERWALK BEVERAGE LLC, RESERVATIONS CENTER L.L.C., RIO JV PARTNERS PARTICIPACOES LTDA., RIO PRETO PARTNERS HOTEIS LTDA., RIO PRETO PARTNERS S.A.R.L., ROSEMONT PROJECT MANAGEMENT L.L.C., ROUTE 46 MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES CORP., RUNWAY HOLDING L.L.C., RUNWAY L.L.C., SAO PAULO INVESTMENT COMPANY INC., SAO PAULO INVESTORS LIMITED, SASIH, SDI EQUITIES INVESTOR L.L.C., SDI INC., SDI SECURITIES 11 LLC, SDI SECURITIES 6 LLC, SELECT HOTELS GROUP L.L.C., SELECT JV HOLDINGS L.L.C., SEOUL MIRAMAR CORPORATION, SERVICIOS DE HOTELERIA SAN JOSE S. DE R.L. DE C.V., SERVICIOS HOTELEROS LA PAZ S. DE R.L. DE C.V., SETTLEMENT INVESTORS INC., SHG PUERTO RICO INC., SIERRA HEALTHSTYLES LLC, SJC DESARROLLOS S. DE R.L. DE C.V., SKS CORP. N.V., SMC HOTELS B.V., SOROCABA PARTNERS HOTEIS LTDA, SOROCABA PARTNERS S.A.R.L., STANHOPE L.L.C., STARHILL LORING PARK L.L.C., SUGAR LAND/HP LLC, THE GREAT EASTERN HOTEL COMPANY LIMITED, THE GREAT EASTERN HOTEL HOLDING COMPANY LIMITED, TIJUANA PARTNERS S. DE R.L. DE C.V., TR MANAGEMENT INVESTMENT LLC, TUCSON VILLAS HOLDINGS LLC, TUCSON VILLAS LLC, TWO SEAS HOLDINGS LIMITED, Two Roads Hospitality, WAILEA HOTEL & BEACH RESORT L.L.C., WAILEA HOTEL HOLDINGS L.L.C., WAILEA MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATION L.L.C., WAILEA RESORT VILLAS HOLDINGS L.L.C., WAILEA RESORT VILLAS L.L.C., WEST END RESIDENCES L.L.C., XENIA ASSURANCE COMPANY INC., XENIA ASSURANCE COMPANY OF ILLINOIS, ZURICH ESCHERWIESE HOTEL GMBH, and ZURICH HOTEL INVESTMENTS B.V.. There is not enough analysis data for EACO. 4.5 Community Rank Outperform Votes EACO has received 78 outperform votes. (Add your outperform vote.) Underperform Votes EACO has received 36 underperform votes. (Add your underperform vote.) Community Sentiment EACO has received 68.42% outperform votes from our community. MarketBeat's community ratings are surveys of what our community members think about EACO and other stocks. Vote Outperform if you believe EACO will outperform the S&P 500 over the long term. Vote Underperform if you believe EACO will underperform the S&P 500 over the long term. You may vote once every thirty days. Previous Next The following companies are subsidiares of Sysco: 2234829 Alberta ULC, 2234842 Alberta ULC, A. M. Briggs Inc., A.M. Briggs, Almacen Fiscal Frionet Caldera S.A., Almacen Fiscal Frionet Limon S.A., Appert's Foodservice, Arnotts (Fruit) Limited, Asian Foods, Bahamas Food Holdings Limited, Bahamas Food Services Limited, Brake Bros, Brake Bros Foodservice Ireland Limited, Brake Bros. Foodservice Limited, Brake Bros. Holding I Limited, Brake Bros. Ltd., Brakes Foodservice NI Limited, Buchy Food Service, Buckhead Beef Co., Buckhead Meat & Seafood of Houston Inc., Buckhead Meat Company, Buckhead Meat Midwest Inc., Buckhead Meat of Dallas Inc., Buckhead Meat of Denver Inc., Buckhead Meat of San Antonio LP, Buzztable Inc., CAKE Corporation, Central Seafood Co., Christys Wine & Spirits Limited, Clafra Aktiebolag, Colorado Boxed Beef Co - Specialty meat-cutting division, Corporacion Frionet Sociedad Anonima, Crossgar Foodservice, Crossgar Foodservice Limited, Crown I Enterprises Inc., Cucina Acquisitions (UK) Limited, Cucina Finance (UK) Limited, Cucina French Holdings Limited, Cucina Fresh Finance Limited, Cucina Fresh Investments Limited, Cucina Lux Investments Limited, Curleys Quality Foods Limited (Third Party), Davigel Belgilux S.A., Davigel Espana S.A., Desert Meats & Provisions, Distagro, Doerle Food Service, Doughtie's Foods Inc., Dust Bowl City LLC, Eko Fagel Fisk o mittemellan AB, Enclave Insurance Company, Enclave Parkway Association Inc., Enclave Properties LLC, European Imports, European Imports Inc., Figg Inc., Freedman Meats, Freedman Meats Inc., Freedman-KB Inc., Fresh Direct (UK) Limited, Fresh Direct Group Limited, Fresh Direct Limited, Fresh Holdings Limited, FreshPoint, FreshPoint Arizona Inc., FreshPoint Atlanta Inc., FreshPoint California Inc., FreshPoint Central California Inc., FreshPoint Central Florida Inc., FreshPoint Connecticut LLC, FreshPoint Dallas Inc., FreshPoint Denver Inc., FreshPoint Hawaii LLC, FreshPoint Inc., FreshPoint Las Vegas Inc., FreshPoint North Carolina Inc., FreshPoint North Florida Inc., FreshPoint Oklahoma City LLC, FreshPoint Pompano Real Estate LLC, FreshPoint Puerto Rico LLC, FreshPoint San Francisco Inc., FreshPoint South Florida Inc., FreshPoint South Texas Inc., FreshPoint Southern California Inc., FreshPoint Tomato LLC, FreshPoint Vancouver Ltd., Freshfayre Limited, Fruktservice i Helsingborg AB, GHS Classic Drinks Limited, Gilchrist & Soames Inc., Gilchrist & Soames UK Limited, Guest Packaging LLC, Guest Supply, Guest Supply Asia Limited, Guest Supply Singapore Pte. Ltd., International Food Group, Isakssons Frukt & Gront AB, J & M Wholesale Meats, J. Kings Food Service Professionals, J. Kings Food Service Professionals Inc., Kent Frozen Foods, Les Ateliers Du Gout, Liquid Assets Limited, M&J Seafood Holdings Limited, M&J Seafood Limited, Manchester Mills LLC, Mayca Autoservicio S.A., Mayca Distribuidores S.A., Menigo Foodservice AB, Mitshim Etatu Supply LP, Newport Meat Company, Newport Meat Northern California Inc., Newport Meat Pacific Northwest Inc., Newport Meat Southern California Inc., Newport Meat of Nevada Inc., North Star Holding Corporation, North Star Seafood, North Star Seafood Acquisition Corporation, North Star Seafood LLC, PFS de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Palisades Ranch Inc., Pallas Foods, Pallas Foods Farm Fresh Unlimited Company, Pallas Foods Unlimited Company, Pauleys Produce Limited, Promotora del Servicios S.A. de C.V., Restaurangakdemien AB, Restaurant of Tomorrow Inc., Rohan Viandes Elaboration SAS, SMS Bermuda Holdings, SMS GPC International Limited, SMS GPC International Resources Limited, SMS Global Holdings S.a.r.l., SMS International Resources Ireland Unlimited Company, SMS Lux Holdings LLC, SOTF LLC, SYY Netherlands C.V., SYY Panama S. de R.L., Serca Foodservice, Servicestyckarna I Johannes AB, Servicios Ameriserve S.A. de C.V., Shenzhen Guest Supply Trading Co. Limited, Societe Civile Immobiliere (SCI) Bianchi Montegut, Societe Civile Immobiliere (SCI) De Boiseau, Societe Civile Immobiliere (SCI) De Garcelles, Societe Civile Immobiliere (SCI) J.D. Lanjouan, Societe Civile Immobiliere (SCI) Le Dauphin, Specialty Meat Holdings LLC, Stockflag Limited, Stockholms Fiskauktion AB, Supplies on the Fly, Sysco Albany LLC, Sysco Asian Foods Inc., Sysco Atlanta LLC, Sysco Autoservicio S.A., Sysco Baltimore LLC, Sysco Baraboo LLC, Sysco Bermuda Partners L.P., Sysco Boston LLC, Sysco Canada Holdings S.a.r.l., Sysco Canada Inc., Sysco Central Alabama LLC, Sysco Central California Inc., Sysco Central Florida Inc., Sysco Central Illinois Inc., Sysco Central Pennsylvania LLC, Sysco Charlotte LLC, Sysco Chicago Inc., Sysco Cincinnati LLC, Sysco Cleveland Inc., Sysco Columbia LLC, Sysco Connecticut LLC, Sysco Corporation, Sysco Corporation Director's Deferred Compensation Plan Trust, Sysco Corporation Employee's 401(k) Plan Trust, Sysco Corporation Executive Deferred Compensation Plan Trust, Sysco Corporation Good Government Committee Inc., Sysco Corporation Retirement Trust, Sysco Corporation Supplemental Executive Retirement Trust, Sysco Corporation Supplemental Unemployment Benefits Plan Trust, Sysco Detroit LLC, Sysco Disaster Relief Foundation Inc., Sysco EI VI S. s.r.l., Sysco EU II S.a.r.l., Sysco EU III S.a.r.l., Sysco EU IV Capital Unlimited Company, Sysco EU IV S. s.r.l.., Sysco EU V S. s.r.l., Sysco Eastern Maryland LLC, Sysco Eastern Wisconsin LLC, Sysco Foundation Inc., Sysco France Holding SAS, Sysco France SAS, Sysco George Town II LLC, Sysco George Town Limited S. s.r.l.., Sysco Global Finance LLC, Sysco Global Finance LLP, Sysco Global Holdings B.V., Sysco Global Resources LLC, Sysco Global Services LLC, Sysco Grand Cayman Company, Sysco Grand Cayman II Company, Sysco Grand Cayman III Company, Sysco Grand Rapids LLC, Sysco Guernsey Limited, Sysco Guest Supply Canada Inc., Sysco Guest Supply Europe Goods Wholesalers LLC, Sysco Guest Supply Europe Limited, Sysco Guest Supply LLC, Sysco Gulf Coast LLC, Sysco Hampton Roads Inc., Sysco Hawaii Inc., Sysco Holdings II LLC, Sysco Holdings LLC, Sysco Indianapolis LLC, Sysco International Food Group Inc., Sysco International Inc., Sysco Iowa Inc., Sysco Jackson LLC, Sysco Jacksonville Inc., Sysco Kansas City Inc., Sysco Knoxville LLC, Sysco Labs Europe Limited, Sysco Labs Pvt. Ltd., Sysco Leasing LLC, Sysco Lincoln Inc., Sysco Lincoln Transportation Company Inc., Sysco Long Island LLC, Sysco Los Angeles Inc., Sysco Louisville Inc., Sysco Memphis LLC, Sysco Merchandising and Supply Chain Services Canada Inc., Sysco Merchandising and Supply Chain Services Inc., Sysco Metro New York LLC, Sysco Minnesota Inc., Sysco Montana Inc., Sysco Nashville LLC, Sysco Netherlands Partners LLC, Sysco North Central Florida Inc., Sysco North Dakota Inc., Sysco Northern New England Inc., Sysco Philadelphia LLC, Sysco Pittsburgh LLC, Sysco Portland Inc., Sysco Raleigh LLC, Sysco Resources Services LLC, Sysco Riverside Inc., Sysco Sacramento Inc., Sysco San Diego Inc., Sysco San Francisco Inc., Sysco Seattle Inc., Sysco South Florida Inc., Sysco Southeast Florida LLC, Sysco Spain Holdings SLU, Sysco Spokane Inc., Sysco St. Louis LLC, Sysco Syracuse LLC, Sysco Technologies Cayman Ltd., Sysco Technologies LLC, Sysco UK Holdings Limited, Sysco UK Limited, Sysco UK Partners LLP, Sysco USA I Inc., Sysco USA II LLC, Sysco USA III LLC, Sysco Ventura Inc., Sysco Ventures Inc., Sysco Virginia LLC, Sysco West Coast Florida Inc., Sysco Western Minnesota Inc., The SYGMA Network Inc., Upsys, Victua SAS, Walker Foods Inc., Waugh Foods, and Wild Harvest Limited. There is not enough analysis data for Bionik Laboratories. 4.4 Community Rank Outperform Votes Bionik Laboratories has received 103 outperform votes. (Add your outperform vote.) Underperform Votes Bionik Laboratories has received 51 underperform votes. (Add your underperform vote.) Community Sentiment Bionik Laboratories has received 66.88% outperform votes from our community. MarketBeat's community ratings are surveys of what our community members think about Bionik Laboratories and other stocks. Vote Outperform if you believe BNKL will outperform the S&P 500 over the long term. Vote Underperform if you believe BNKL will underperform the S&P 500 over the long term. You may vote once every thirty days. Previous Next The following companies are subsidiares of Bristol-Myers Squibb: 1096271 B.C. ULC, 345 Park LLC, A.G. Medical Services P.A., AHI Investment LLC, AbVitro LLC, Abraxis BioScience Australia Pty Ltd., Abraxis BioScience Inc., Abraxis BioScience International Holding Company Inc., Abraxis BioScience LLC, Abraxis BioScience Puerto Rico LLC, Acetylon Pharmaceuticals Inc., Adnexus, Adnexus a Bristol-Myers Squibb R&D Company, Allard Labs Acquisition G.P., Amira Pharmaceuticals, Amira Pharmaceuticals Inc., Amylin Pharmaceuticals, Apothecon LLC, B-MS Generx Unlimited Company, BMS Benelux Holdings B.V., BMS Bermuda Nominees L.L.C., BMS Data Acquisition Company LLC, BMS Forex Company, BMS Holdings Sarl, BMS Holdings Spain S.L., BMS International Insurance Designated Activity Company, BMS Investco SAS, BMS Korea Holdings L.L.C., BMS Latin American Nominees L.L.C., BMS Luxembourg Partners L.L.C., BMS Omega Bermuda Holdings Finance Ltd., BMS Pharmaceutical Korea Limited, BMS Pharmaceuticals Germany Holdings B.V., BMS Pharmaceuticals International Holdings Netherlands B.V., BMS Pharmaceuticals Korea Holdings B.V., BMS Pharmaceuticals Mexico Holdings B.V., BMS Pharmaceuticals Netherlands Holdings B.V., BMS Real Estate LLC, BMS Spain Investments LLC, BMS Strategic Portfolio Investments Holdings Inc., Blisa Acquisition G.P., Bristol (Iran) S.A., Bristol Iran Private Company Limited, Bristol Laboratories Inc., Bristol Laboratories International S.A., Bristol Laboratories Medical Information Systems Inc., Bristol-Myers (Andes) L.L.C., Bristol-Myers (Private) Limited, Bristol-Myers Middle East S.A.L., Bristol-Myers Overseas Corporation, Bristol-Myers Squibb (China) Investment Co. Ltd., Bristol-Myers Squibb (China) Pharmaceuticals Co. Ltd., Bristol-Myers Squibb (Israel) Ltd., Bristol-Myers Squibb (NZ) Limited, Bristol-Myers Squibb (Proprietary) Limited, Bristol-Myers Squibb (Shanghai) Trading Co. Ltd., Bristol-Myers Squibb (Singapore) Pte. Limited, Bristol-Myers Squibb (Taiwan) Ltd., Bristol-Myers Squibb (West Indies) Ltd., Bristol-Myers Squibb A.E., Bristol-Myers Squibb Aktiebolag, Bristol-Myers Squibb Argentina S. R. L., Bristol-Myers Squibb Australia Pty. Ltd., Bristol-Myers Squibb Axia Limited, Bristol-Myers Squibb B.V., Bristol-Myers Squibb Belgium S.A., Bristol-Myers Squibb Business Services Limited, Bristol-Myers Squibb Canada Co., Bristol-Myers Squibb Canada International Limited, Bristol-Myers Squibb Delta Company Limited, Bristol-Myers Squibb Denmark Filial of Bristol-Myers Squibb AB, Bristol-Myers Squibb EMEA Sarl, Bristol-Myers Squibb Egypt LLC, Bristol-Myers Squibb Epsilon Holdings Unlimited Company, Bristol-Myers Squibb Farmaceutica Ltda., Bristol-Myers Squibb Farmaceutica Portuguesa S.A., Bristol-Myers Squibb GesmbH, Bristol-Myers Squibb GmbH & Co. KGaA, Bristol-Myers Squibb Holding Germany GmbH & Co. KG, Bristol-Myers Squibb Holdings 2002 Limited, Bristol-Myers Squibb Holdings Germany Verwaltungs GmbH, Bristol-Myers Squibb Holdings Ireland Unlimited Company, Bristol-Myers Squibb Holdings Limited, Bristol-Myers Squibb Holdings Pharma Ltd. Liability Company, Bristol-Myers Squibb Ilaclari Inc., Bristol-Myers Squibb India Pvt. Limited, Bristol-Myers Squibb International Company Unlimited Company, Bristol-Myers Squibb International Corporation, Bristol-Myers Squibb Investco L.L.C., Bristol-Myers Squibb K.K., Bristol-Myers Squibb Kft., Bristol-Myers Squibb Luxembourg International S.C.A., Bristol-Myers Squibb Luxembourg S.a.r.l., Bristol-Myers Squibb MEA GmbH, Bristol-Myers Squibb Manufacturing Company, Bristol-Myers Squibb Marketing Services S.R.L., Bristol-Myers Squibb Middle East & Africa FZ-LLC, Bristol-Myers Squibb Norway Ltd., Bristol-Myers Squibb Nutricionales de Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Bristol-Myers Squibb Peru S.A., Bristol-Myers Squibb Pharma (HK) Ltd, Bristol-Myers Squibb Pharma (Thailand) Limited, Bristol-Myers Squibb Pharma Company, Bristol-Myers Squibb Pharma EEIG, Bristol-Myers Squibb Pharma Holding Company LLC, Bristol-Myers Squibb Pharma Ventures Corporation, Bristol-Myers Squibb Pharmaceuticals Limited, Bristol-Myers Squibb Pharmaceuticals Unlimited Company, Bristol-Myers Squibb Polska Sp. z o.o., Bristol-Myers Squibb Products SA, Bristol-Myers Squibb Puerto Rico Inc., Bristol-Myers Squibb Puerto Rico/Sanofi Pharmaceutical Partnership Puerto Rico, Bristol-Myers Squibb Romania S.R.L., Bristol-Myers Squibb S.A.U., Bristol-Myers Squibb S.r.l., Bristol-Myers Squibb SA, Bristol-Myers Squibb Sanofi Pharmaceuticals Holding Partnership, Bristol-Myers Squibb Sarl, Bristol-Myers Squibb Service Ltd., Bristol-Myers Squibb Services Sp. z o.o., Bristol-Myers Squibb Spol. s r.o., Bristol-Myers Squibb Theta Finance Ltd., Bristol-Myers Squibb Trustees Limited, Bristol-Myers Squibb Verwaltungs GmbH, Bristol-Myers Squibb de Colombia S.A., Bristol-Myers Squibb de Costa Rica Sociedad Anonima, Bristol-Myers Squibb de Guatemala S.A., Bristol-Myers Squibb de Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Bristol-Myers Squibb/Astrazeneca EEIG, Bristol-Myers Squibb/Pfizer EEIG, Bristol-Myers Squibb/Sanofi Pharmaceuticals Partnership, Bristol-Myers de Venezuela S.C.A., CHT I LLC, CHT II LLC, CHT III LLC, CHT IV LLC, CR Finance Company LLC, Cardioxyl Pharmaceuticals, Cardioxyl Pharmaceuticals Inc., Celem LLC, Celem Ltd., Celgene, Celgene A.B., Celgene AS, Celgene Ab (Finland), Celgene Alpine Investment Co. II LLC, Celgene Alpine Investment Co. III LLC, Celgene Alpine Investment Co. LLC, Celgene ApS, Celgene B.V., Celgene BVBA, Celgene Brasil Produtos Farmaceuticos Ltda., Celgene CAR LLC, Celgene CAR Ltd., Celgene Chemicals Sarl, Celgene China Holdings LLC, Celgene Co., Celgene Corporation, Celgene Distribution B.V., Celgene EngMab GmbH, Celgene Europe B.V., Celgene Europe Limited, Celgene European Investment Company LLC, Celgene Financing Company LLC, Celgene Global Holdings Sarl, Celgene GmbH [Austria], Celgene GmbH [Germany], Celgene GmbH [Switzerland], Celgene Holdings East Corporation, Celgene Holdings II Sarl, Celgene Holdings III Sarl, Celgene Ilac Pazarlama ve Ticaret Limited Sirketi, Celgene Inc., Celgene International Holdings Corporation, Celgene International II Sarl, Celgene International III Sarl, Celgene International Inc., Celgene International Sarl, Celgene K.K., Celgene Kft., Celgene Limited [Hong Kong], Celgene Limited [Ireland], Celgene Limited [New Zealand], Celgene Limited [Taiwan], Celgene Limited [UK], Celgene Logistics Sarl, Celgene Ltd, Celgene Luxembourg Sarl, Celgene Management Sarl, Celgene NJ Investment Co, Celgene Netherlands B.V., Celgene Netherlands Investment B.V., Celgene Pharmaceutical (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Celgene Pte. Ltd., Celgene Pty Ltd, Celgene Puerto Rico Distribution LLC, Celgene Quanticel Research Inc, Celgene R&D Sarl, Celgene RIVOT LLC, Celgene RIVOT Ltd., Celgene RIVOT SRL, Celgene Receptos Limited, Celgene Receptos Sarl, Celgene Research Incubator At Summit West LLC, Celgene Research S.L.U., Celgene Research and Development Company LLC, Celgene Research and Development I ULC, Celgene Research and Development II LLC, Celgene Research and Investment Company II LLC, Celgene S. de R.L. de C.V., Celgene S.L.U., Celgene S.R.L., Celgene SAS, Celgene Sarl AU, Celgene Sdn Bhd, Celgene Services Sarl, Celgene Sociedade Unipessoal Lda, Celgene Sp. Z.o.o., Celgene Sro [Czech Republic], Celgene Summit Investment Co, Celgene Switzerland Holding Sarl, Celgene Switzerland II LLC, Celgene Switzerland Investment Sarl, Celgene Switzerland LLC, Celgene Switzerland Sarl, Celgene Tri A Holdings Ltd., Celgene Tri Sarl, Celgene UK Distribution Limited, Celgene UK Holdings Limited, Celgene UK Manufacturing II Limited, Celgene UK Manufacturing III Limited, Celgene UK Manufacturing Limited, Celgene d.o.o., Celgene sro [Slovakia], Celmed LLC, Celmed Ltd., ConvaTec Divestiture, Cormorant Pharmaceuticals, Cormorant Pharmaceuticals AB, Crosp Ltd., Delinia Inc., Deuteria Pharmaceuticals Inc., DuPont Pharmaceuticals, E. R. Squibb & Sons Inter-American Corporation, E. R. Squibb & Sons L.L.C., E. R. Squibb & Sons Limited, EWI Corporation, EngMab Sarl, F-star Alpha, FermaVir Pharmaceuticals L.L.C., FermaVir Research L.L.C., Flexus Biosciences, Flexus Biosciences Inc., Forbius, Galecto Biotech, GenPharm International L.L.C., Gloucester Pharmaceuticals LLC, Grove Insurance Company Ltd., Heyden Farmaceutica Portuguesa Limitada, IFM Therapeutics, Impact Biomedicines Inc., Inhibitex, Inhibitex L.L.C., Innate Tumor Immunity Inc., JuMP Holdings LLC, Juno Therapeutics GmbH, Juno Therapeutics Inc., Kosan Biosciences, Kosan Biosciences Incorporated, Linson Investments Limited, Mead Johnson (Manufacturing) Jamaica Limited, Mead Johnson Jamaica Ltd., Medarex, Morris Avenue Investment II LLC, Morris Avenue Investment LLC, MyoKardia, O.o.o. Bristol-Myers Squibb, Oy Bristol-Myers Squibb (Finland) AB, Padlock Therapeutics, Padlock Therapeutics Inc., Pharmion LLC, Princeton Pharmaceutical Products Inc., Receptos LLC, Receptos Services LLC, RedoxTherapies Inc., Route 22 Real Estate Holding Corporation, SPV A Holdings ULC, Seamair Insurance DAC, Signal Pharmaceuticals LLC, Sino-American Shanghai Squibb Pharmaceuticals Limited, Societe Francaise de Complements Alimentaires(S.O.F.C.A.), Squibb Middle East S.A., Summit West Celgene LLC, Swords Laboratories, VentiRx Pharmaceuticals Inc., Westwood-Intrafin SA, Westwood-Squibb Pharmaceuticals Inc., X-Body Inc., ZymoGenetics, ZymoGenetics Inc., ZymoGenetics LLC, ZymoGenetics Paymaster LLC, iPierian, and iPierian Inc.. 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.. Party General Secretary and President Nguyen Phu Trong shakes hands with Chairman of the Presidium of the Communist Party of Japan Central Committee Kazuo Shii (Photo: VNA) He made the statement in Hanoi on December 18th while receiving Chairman of the Presidium of the Communist Party of Japan (CPJ) Central Committee Kazuo Shii, who is paying an official visit to Vietnam. At the meeting, the leader of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) proposed the two parties to bolster partnership, theoretical exchanges, and experience sharing, as well as effectively cooperate in regional and international forums, thus contributing to regional and global peace, stability, cooperation, and development. He congratulated his guest on the achievements of the CPJ over the years and thanked the CPJ for its support during the revolutionary cause of the CPV and Vietnamese people over the time. He also spoke highly of the significant contributions by the CPJ to the two countries relations, voicing his belief that the CPJ will reap further success in the implementation of the 27th Congress resolution towards its 100th founding anniversary in 2022. Congratulating Trong on his election as the President of Vietnam, Shii highly valued the achievements of the Vietnamese people in national construction under the leadership of the CPV. He also hailed the positive growth of the Japan-Vietnam ties, affirming that the CPJ will spare no efforts in strengthening the countries relations. He briefed his host on the policies and activities of the CPJ, and noted that various exchanges between the two parties, especially theoretical exchanges, hold important meaning in completing the parties theoretical systems. Earlier, a delegation of the CPV, led by Politburo member and permanent member of the Party Central Committees Secretariat Tran Quoc Vuong, held talks with the visiting CPJ delegation. The two sides briefed each other on the current situations of their respective parties and nations, and exchanged views on regional and international issues of mutual concern. They also discussed orientations and measures to enhance cooperation and the traditional friendship between the two parties and to contribute to the Vietnam - Japan strategic partnership. The delegations also agreed to maintain theoretical exchanges, as well as increase information exchange and collaboration at multilateral political party forums./. The following companies are subsidiares of D.R. Horton: 10700 Pecan Park Austin Inc., 11241 Slater Avenue NE LLC, 2 C Development Company LLC, 8800 Roswell Road Bldg. B LLC, 91st Avenue & Happy Valley L.L.C., ANN & 215 LLC, Austin Data Inc., BP456 Inc., C. Richard Dobson Builders Inc., CH Funding LLC, CH Investments of Texas Inc., CHI Construction Company, CHM Partners L.P., CHTEX of Texas Inc., CV Mountain View 25 Inv LLC, Cane Island LLC, Continental Homes Inc., Continental Homes of Texas L.P., Continental Residential Inc., Continental Traditions LLC, Crown Operating Company Inc., Cypress Road L.P., D.R. Horton - CHAustin LLC, D.R. Horton - Colorado LLC, D.R. Horton - Crown LLC, D.R. Horton - Emerald Ltd., D.R. Horton - Georgia LLC, D.R. Horton - Hawaii LLC, D.R. Horton - Highland LLC, D.R. Horton - Indiana LLC, D.R. Horton - Iowa LLC, D.R. Horton - MV LLC, D.R. Horton - Nebraska LLC, D.R. Horton - Permian LLC, D.R. Horton - Regent LLC, D.R. Horton - Terramor LLC, D.R. Horton - Texas Ltd., D.R. Horton - WPH LLC, D.R. Horton - Wyoming LLC, D.R. Horton BAY Inc., D.R. Horton CA2 Inc., D.R. Horton CA3 Inc., D.R. Horton CA4 LLC, D.R. Horton Commercial Inc., D.R. Horton Cruces Construction Inc., D.R. Horton Inc. - Birmingham, D.R. Horton Inc. - Chicago, D.R. Horton Inc. - Denver, D.R. Horton Inc. - Dietz-Crane, D.R. Horton Inc. - Greensboro, D.R. Horton Inc. - Gulf Coast, D.R. Horton Inc. - Huntsville, D.R. Horton Inc. - Jacksonville, D.R. Horton Inc. - Louisville, D.R. Horton Inc. - Midwest, D.R. Horton Inc. - Minnesota, D.R. Horton Inc. - NNV, D.R. Horton Inc. - New Jersey, D.R. Horton Inc. - Portland, D.R. Horton Inc. - Torrey, D.R. Horton Inc. Foundation, D.R. Horton Insurance Agency Inc., D.R. Horton LA North Inc., D.R. Horton Life Insurance Agency Inc., D.R. Horton Los Angeles Holding Company Inc., D.R. Horton Management Company Ltd., D.R. Horton Materials Inc., D.R. Horton Realty LLC, D.R. Horton Realty of Atlantic County LLC, D.R. Horton Realty of Central Florida LLC, D.R. Horton Realty of Delaware LLC, D.R. Horton Realty of Georgia Inc., D.R. Horton Realty of Melbourne LLC, D.R. Horton Realty of Northwest Florida LLC, D.R. Horton Realty of Southeast Florida LLC, D.R. Horton Realty of Southwest Florida LLC, D.R. Horton Realty of Tampa LLC, D.R. Horton Realty of Virginia LLC, D.R. Horton Seabridge Marina Inc., D.R. Horton Serenity Construction LLC, D.R. Horton Urban Renewal LLC, D.R. Horton VEN Inc., D.R. Horton Corpus Christi LLC, DBC54 LLC, DHI Commercial - Lakeview LLC, DHI Commercial - Signal Butte LLC, DHI Commercial - Tamarron LLC, DHI Commercial Inc., DHI Communities Construction LLC, DHI Communities Construction of Arizona LLC, DHI Communities Construction of Colorado LLC, DHI Communities Construction of Florida LLC, DHI Communities Construction of Iowa LLC, DHI Communities Construction of Nevada LLC, DHI Communities Construction of North Carolina LLC, DHI Communities Construction of South Carolina LLC, DHI Communities Construction of Texas LLC, DHI Communities Construction of Utah LLC, DHI Communities Construction of Virginia LLC, DHI Communities II LLC, DHI Communities Inc., DHI Engineering LLC, DHI Insurance Inc., DHI Mortgage Company, DHI Mortgage Company GP Inc., DHI Mortgage Company LP Inc., DHI Mortgage Company Ltd., DHI Ranch Ltd., DHI Realty of Alabama LLC, DHI Realty of Mississippi LLC, DHI Title GP Inc., DHI Title LP Inc., DHI Title of Alabama Inc., DHI Title of Arizona Inc., DHI Title of Florida Inc., DHI Title of Minnesota Inc., DHI Title of Nevada Inc., DHI Title of Texas Ltd., DHI Title of Washington Inc., DHI Verandah South Shores Communities LLC, DHIC - Bridges LLC, DHIC - Brittmore LLC, DHIC - Carolina Forest LLC, DHIC - Desert Peak LLC, DHIC - Durbin Creek LLC, DHIC - Freestone LLC, DHIC - Hammock Landing LLC, DHIC - Heritage LLC, DHIC - Horizon Uptown LLC, DHIC - Jacobs Reserve LLC, DHIC - Lakeview LLC, DHIC - Lipoma LLC, DHIC - Minton Cove LLC, DHIC - Mountain Vista LLC, DHIC - Naco LLC, DHIC - Northshore LLC, DHIC - Prairie Village LLC, DHIC - South Creek LLC, DHIC - Tamarron LLC, DHIC - Valley Vista LLC, DHIC - Varina Gateway LLC, DHIC - Waterleigh II LLC, DHIC - Waterleigh III LLC, DHIC - Waterleigh LLC, DHIC - Westridge LLC, DHIC LLC, DHIC Glendale LLC, DHIC Grove West LLC, DHIC South Park LLC, DHIC Westinghouse LLC, DHIR - Aspen Vista LLC, DHIR - Avian Pointe LLC, DHIR - Emerald Lakes LLC, DHIR - Fosters Ridge LLC, DHIR - Gulf Stream LLC, DHIR - Parkview at Lynn Haven LLC, DHIR - Poplar Terrace LLC, DHIR - Properties I LLC, DHIR - Rock Ridge LLC, DHIR - Sunset Village LLC, DHIR - Village at Hickory Street LLC, DRH - ARK LLC, DRH - ASG LLC, DRH - HWY 114 LLC, DRH Cambridge Homes LLC, DRH Capital Trust I, DRH Capital Trust II, DRH Capital Trust III, DRH Colorado Realty Inc., DRH Construction Inc., DRH Energy Inc., DRH FS Mortgage Reinsurance Ltd., DRH Land Opportunities I Inc., DRH Land Opportunities II Inc., DRH Mountain View LLC, DRH Oil & Gas Inc., DRH Opportunities I Inc., DRH Properties Inc., DRH Realty Company Inc., DRH Realty of Iowa LLC, DRH Regrem L LLC, DRH Regrem LI LLC, DRH Regrem LII LLC, DRH Regrem LIII LLC, DRH Regrem LIV LLC, DRH Regrem LV LLC, DRH Regrem VII LP, DRH Regrem XII LP, DRH Regrem XIV Inc., DRH Regrem XIX Inc., DRH Regrem XLIX LLC, DRH Regrem XLV LLC, DRH Regrem XLVI LLC, DRH Regrem XLVII LLC, DRH Regrem XLVIII LLC, DRH Regrem XV Inc., DRH Regrem XVI Inc., DRH Regrem XVII Inc., DRH Regrem XVIII Inc., DRH Regrem XX Inc., DRH Regrem XXI Inc., DRH Regrem XXII Inc., DRH Regrem XXIII Inc., DRH Regrem XXIV Inc., DRH Regrem XXV Inc., DRH Southwest Construction Inc., DRH Tucson Construction Inc., DRHI Inc., Deer Valley Office Park LLC, Desert Ridge Phase I Partners, Emerald Creek No. 4 L.P., Emerald Realty of Alabama LLC, Emerald Realty of Central Florida LLC, Emerald Realty of North Florida LLC, Emerald Realty of Northwest Florida LLC, Emerald Realty of Southeast Florida LLC, Emerald Realty of Southwest Florida LLC, Encore II Inc., Encore Venture Partners II (California) L.P., Encore Venture Partners II (Texas) L.P., Encore Venture Partners L.P., Express Realty of Central Florida LLC, Express Realty of North Florida LLC, Express Realty of Northwest Florida LLC, Express Realty of Southeast Florida LLC, Express Realty of Southwest Florida LLC, Forestar Group, Forestar Group Inc., Founders Oil & Gas II LLC, Founders Oil & Gas III LLC, Founders Oil & Gas IV LLC, Founders Oil & Gas LLC, Founders Oil & Gas Operating LLC, GP-Encore Inc., Georgetown Data Inc., Germann & McQueen L.L.C., Grand Title Agency LLC, Grande Realty Incorporated, Grande Realty of Pennsylvania LLC, Greywes LLC, HPH Homebuilders 2000 L.P., Hadian LLC, KDB Homes Inc., Kaomalo LLC, Lexington Homes - DRH LLC, MRLF LLC, Martin Road Lake Forest LLC, McQueen & Willis LLC, Meadows I Ltd., Meadows II Ltd., Meadows IX Inc., Meadows VIII Ltd., Meadows X Inc., Melody Homes Inc., Pacific Ridge - DRH LLC, Rielly Carlsbad LLC, Rielly Homes Madison LLC, SFTEN LLC, SGS Communities at Grand Quay L.L.C, SHA Construction LLC, SHLR of California Inc., SHLR of Nevada Inc., SHLR of Washington Inc., SRHI LLC, SSHI LLC, Schuler Homes of Arizona LLC, Schuler Homes of California Inc., Schuler Homes of Oregon Inc., Schuler Homes of Washington Inc., Summerlin Pkwy & Cimarron LLC, Surprise Village North LLC, The Club at Cobblestone LLC, The Club at Hidden River LLC, Tierra Financial Advisors LLC, Travis County Title Company, Treasure Assets LLC, Venture Management of South Carolina LLC, Vertical Construction Corporation, WPH-Camino Ruiz LLC, WPH-Copper Canyon II LLC, WPH-Copper Canyon LLC, Walker Drive LLC, Western Pacific Brea Development LLC, Western Pacific Housing - Mountaingate L.P., Western Pacific Housing - SDG LLC, Western Pacific Housing - Westlake II L.P., Western Pacific Housing Inc., Western Pacific Housing Management Inc., Western Pacific Housing-Antigua LLC, Western Pacific Housing-Broadway LLC, Western Pacific Housing-Canyon Park LLC, Western Pacific Housing-Carrillo LLC, Western Pacific Housing-Communications Hill LLC, Western Pacific Housing-Copper Canyon LLC, Western Pacific Housing-Creekside LLC, Western Pacific Housing-Lomas Verdes LLC, Western Pacific Housing-Lyons Canyon Partners LLC, Western Pacific Housing-McGonigle Canyon LLC, Western Pacific Housing-Norco Estates LLC, Western Pacific Housing-Pacific Park II LLC, Western Pacific Housing-Park Avenue East LLC, Western Pacific Housing-Park Avenue West LLC, Western Pacific Housing-Playa Vista LLC, Western Pacific Housing-River Ridge LLC, Western Pacific Housing-Terra Bay Duets LLC, Western Pacific Housing-Torrey Meadows LLC, Western Pacific Housing-Torrey Village Center LLC, Western Pacific Housing-Windemere LLC, and Wilson Parker Homes. The following companies are subsidiares of BorgWarner: B80 Italia S.r.l., BERU AG, BW El Salto S.A. De C.V., BWA Receivables Corporation, BWA Turbo Systems Holding LLC, Borg Warner Europe Holdings (PDS) B. V., BorgWarner (China) Investment Co. Ltd., BorgWarner (Reman) Holdings L.L.C., BorgWarner (Thailand) Limited, BorgWarner Aftermarket Europe GmbH, BorgWarner Alternators Inc., BorgWarner Arden LLC, BorgWarner Arnstadt RE GmbH & Co. KG, BorgWarner Asia Inc., BorgWarner Automotive Asia Limited, BorgWarner Automotive Components (Beijing) Co. Ltd., BorgWarner Automotive Components (Jiangsu) Co. Ltd., BorgWarner Automotive Components (Ningbo) Co. Ltd., BorgWarner Automotive Components (Tianjin) Co. Ltd., BorgWarner Automotive Components (Wuhan) Co. Ltd., BorgWarner Brasil Ltda., BorgWarner Chungju Co. LLC, BorgWarner Comercial e Distribuidora de Pecas para Veiculos Automotores Ltda., BorgWarner Comercializadora PDS S. de R.L. de C.V., BorgWarner Componentes PDS S. de R.L. de C.V., BorgWarner Cooling Systems (India) Private Limited, BorgWarner Cooling Systems GmbH, BorgWarner Diversified Transmission Products Services Inc., BorgWarner Drivetrain Engineering GmbH, BorgWarner Drivetrain Management Services de Mexico S.A. de C.V., BorgWarner Drivetrain de Mexico S.A. de C.V., BorgWarner Electric Motors L.L.C., BorgWarner Emissions Systems (Ningbo) Co. Ltd., BorgWarner Emissions Systems (Ningbo) Co. Ltd., BorgWarner Emissions Systems Holding LLC, BorgWarner Emissions Systems India Private Limited, BorgWarner Emissions Systems LLC, BorgWarner Emissions Systems Portugal Unipessoal LDA, BorgWarner Emissions Systems Spain S.L.U., BorgWarner Emissions Systems of Michigan Inc., BorgWarner Emissions Talegaon Private Limited, BorgWarner Engineering Ketsch RE GmbH & Co. KG, BorgWarner Engineering Kibo RE GmbH & Co. KG, BorgWarner Esslingen GmbH, BorgWarner Europe GmbH, BorgWarner Europe Holding S.a. r. l., BorgWarner Gateshead Limited, BorgWarner Germany Holding GmbH, BorgWarner Germany Holding Services GmbH, BorgWarner Germany REH GmbH, BorgWarner Germany REM GmbH, BorgWarner Germany Verwaltungs GmbH, BorgWarner Global Holding S.a. r. l., BorgWarner Heidelberg I RE GmbH & Co. KG, BorgWarner Heidelberg II RE GmbH & Co. KG, BorgWarner Heidelberg REH GmbH, BorgWarner Heidelberg REM GmbH, BorgWarner Holding Inc., BorgWarner Holdings Limited, BorgWarner Hungary Kft., BorgWarner IT Services Europe GmbH, BorgWarner India Holdings Inc., BorgWarner Investment Holding Inc., BorgWarner Ithaca LLC, BorgWarner Ketsch Plant RE GmbH & Co. KG, BorgWarner Ketsch REH GmbH, BorgWarner Ketsch REM GmbH, BorgWarner Kft., BorgWarner Kibo RE GmbH & Co. KG, BorgWarner Korea Holdings (PDS) B.V., BorgWarner Korea Holdings LLC, BorgWarner Korea LLC, BorgWarner Limited, BorgWarner Ludwigsburg GmbH, BorgWarner Ludwigsburg RE GmbH & Co. KG, BorgWarner Markdorf Plant RE GmbH & Co. KG, BorgWarner Markdorf REH GmbH, BorgWarner Markdorf REM GmbH, BorgWarner Massachusetts Inc., BorgWarner Mauritius Holdings Ltd., BorgWarner Mexico Holding BV, BorgWarner Mexico Holdings II LLC, BorgWarner Mexico Holdings LLC, BorgWarner Morse Systems India Private Limited, BorgWarner Morse Systems Italy S.r.l., BorgWarner Morse Systems Japan K.K., BorgWarner Morse Systems Mexico S.A. de C.V., BorgWarner Muggendorf RE GmbH & Co. KG, BorgWarner NW Inc., BorgWarner Netherlands Holdings (PDS) B.V., BorgWarner Oroszlany Kft., BorgWarner PDS (Anderson) L.L.C., BorgWarner PDS (Changnyeong) LLC, BorgWarner PDS (Indiana) Inc., BorgWarner PDS (Livonia) Inc., BorgWarner PDS (Ochang) LLC, BorgWarner PDS (Thailand) Limited, BorgWarner PDS (USA) Inc., BorgWarner PDS Brasil Produtos Automotivos Ltda., BorgWarner PDS Irapuato S. de R.L. de C.V., BorgWarner PDS Mexico Holdings S. de R.L. de C.V., BorgWarner PDS Technologies L.L.C., BorgWarner Poland Sp. z o.o., BorgWarner Pyongtaek LLC, BorgWarner Romeo Power LLC, BorgWarner Rzeszow Sp. z o.o., BorgWarner Shenglong (Ningbo) Co. Ltd., BorgWarner South Asia LLC, BorgWarner Southborough Inc., BorgWarner Spain Holding S.L.U, BorgWarner Sweden AB, BorgWarner Systems Lugo S.r.l., BorgWarner Thermal Systems Inc., BorgWarner Thermal Systems of Michigan Inc., BorgWarner TorqTransfer Systems Beijing Co. Ltd., BorgWarner Tralee Ltd., BorgWarner Transmission Products LLC, BorgWarner Transmission Systems Arnstadt GmbH, BorgWarner Transmission Systems GmbH, BorgWarner Transmission Systems Korea LLC, BorgWarner Transmission Systems Tulle S.A.S., BorgWarner Trustees Limited, BorgWarner Turbo & Emissions Systems France S.A.S., BorgWarner Turbo Systems Engineering GmbH, BorgWarner Turbo Systems GmbH, BorgWarner Turbo Systems LLC, BorgWarner Turbo Systems Worldwide Headquarters GmbH, BorgWarner Turbo Systems of Michigan Inc., BorgWarner Turbo and Emissions Systems de Mexico S.A. de C.V., BorgWarner UK Financing Ltd., BorgWarner UK Holding and Services Ltd., BorgWarner US Holding LLC, BorgWarner USA Industries L.L.C., BorgWarner United Transmission Systems Co. Ltd., BorgWarner Waterloo Inc., BorgWarner Wrexham Limited, Cascadia Motion LLC, Creon Insurance Agency Limited, Delphi Technologies, Dytech ENSA, Gustav Wahler GmbH u. Co. KG, Haldex, Kuhlman LLC, Kysor Europe Limited, M. & M. Knopf Auto Parts L.L.C., NSK-Warner (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., NSK-Warner K.K., NSK-Warner Mexico S.A. de C.V, NSK-Warner U.S.A. Inc., New PDS Corp., Old Remco Holdings L.L.C., Old Remco International Holdings L.L.C., Remy International, SeohanWarner Turbo Systems LLC, Sevcon, Sevcon New Energy Technology (Hubei) Company Limited, and Transmission Systems AutoForm LLC. The following companies are subsidiares of Dover: Accelerated Production Systems, Acme Elevator, Advansor A/S, Advansor Dover International (Poland) sp. z o.o, Advansor Germany GmbH, Alfred Fueling Systems Holdco Ltd., Alfred Fueling Systems Inc., Alfred Fueling Systems Intermediate Holdco Ltd., All-Flo Pump Company, Anman LLC, Anthony Equity Holdings Inc., Anthony Holdings Inc., Anthony Inc., Anthony International, Anthony International Foreign Sales Corp., Anthony International Holding Company, Anthony Mexico Holdings LLC, Anthony North Holdco Inc., Anthony Specialty Glass LLC, Anthony TemperBent GP LLC, Auto Glanz Solutions LLC, Automatik Grundstucksverwaltungs GmbH & Co. KG, Automatik Plastics Machinery (Taiwan) Ltd., BSC Filters Limited, Background2 Limited, Belanger, Belanger Inc., Belvac Middle East FZE, Belvac Production Machinery Inc., Blackmer, BlitzRotary GmbH, Butler Engineering and Marketing S.P.A., CDS Visual, CEP Liquidation LLC, CP Formation LLC, CPC Europe Inc., CPI Products Inc., Caldera, Canada Organization & Development LLC, Chief Automotive Technologies (Shanghai) Trading Company Ltd., Chippewa Square Captive Insurance Company, Colder Products Company, Colder Products Company GmbH, Colder Products Company LTD, Cook Compression BV, Cook Compression LLC, Cook Compression Limited, Cook-MFS Inc., DD1 Inc., DDI Properties Inc., DE-STA-CO Benelux B.V., DE-STA-CO FRANCE, DE-STA-CO Shanghai Co. Ltd., DESTACO UK Limited, DFH Corporation, DFS Netherlands B.V., DSR BZ Holdings LLC, Datamax International Corp, De Sta Co (Asia) Company Limited, De-Sta-Co Cylinders Inc., DeStaCo Europe GmbH, Delaware Capital Formation Inc., Delaware Capital Holdings Inc., Dover (China) Investment Co. Ltd., Dover (Schweiz) Holding GmbH, Dover (Shanghai) Industrial Co. Ltd., Dover (Shenzhen) Industrial Equipment Manufacturing Co. Ltd., Dover (Suzhou) Industrial Equipment Manufacturing Co. Ltd., Dover Asia Trading Private Ltd., Dover Australia Holdings Pty Limited, Dover Business Services EMEA Limited, Dover Business Services LLC, Dover Business Services Philippines Corporation, Dover CLP Formation Limited Partnership, Dover CR spol s r.o., Dover Canada Holdings ULC, Dover Canada Operations ULC, Dover Corporation Regional Headquarters, Dover DEI Services Inc., Dover Denmark Holdings ApS, Dover EMEA FZCO, Dover Energy UK Ltd, Dover Engineered Products Segment Inc., Dover Europe Inc., Dover Europe Sarl, Dover Fluids UK Ltd, Dover France Holdings, Dover France Participations, Dover France Technologies, Dover Fueling Solutions Segment Inc., Dover Fueling Solutions UK Limited, Dover Germany GmbH, Dover Global Holdings LLC, Dover Holdings de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Dover Imaging & Identification Segment Inc., Dover India Pvt. Ltd., Dover Intercompany Services UK Limited, Dover International B.V., Dover International Operations Inc., Dover International Ventures Inc., Dover International Ventures Tunisia S.a.r.l., Dover International ithalat ihracat ve Pazarlama Limited Sirketi, Dover Italy Holdings S.r.l., Dover Luxembourg Finance Sarl, Dover Luxembourg Participations Sarl, Dover Luxembourg S.a.r.l., Dover Luxembourg Services Sarl, Dover Operations South Africa (Pty) Ltd, Dover Overseas Ventures Inc., Dover Pumps & Process Solutions Segment Inc., Dover Refrigeration & Food Equipment Segment Inc., Dover Refrigeration & Food Equipment UK Ltd, Dover Resources International de Mexico S. de R.L. C.V., Dover Solutions Colombia SAS, Dover Southeast Asia (Thailand) Ltd., Dover Spain Holdings S.L., Dover UK Pensions Limited, Dover WSCR Holding LLC, Dover WSCR LLC, Dover do Brasil Ltda., Dow-Key Microwave Corporation, Dresser Wayne Data Technology (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Dresser Wayne Fuel Equipment (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., EOA Systems Inc., Ebs-Ray Holdings Pty Ltd, Ebs-Ray Industries Pty. Ltd., Ebs-Ray Pumps Pty. Ltd., Em-tec, Espy, Ettlinger, Ettlinger Kunststoffmaschinen GmbH, Fairbanks Environmental Limited, Fibrelite Composites Limited, Fibresec Holdings Limited, Fibresec Limited, Finder, GAL LLC, GIIER LLC, Gala Industries, Gala Kunststoff-und Kautschukmaschinen GmbH, Guangdong Tokheim LIYUAN Oil Industry Technology Limited Company, Highland Park Insurance Company, Hill PHOENIX Inc., Hill PHOENIX WIC LLC, Hill Phoenix Costa Rica Sociedad De Responsabilidad Limitada, Hill Phoenix El Salvador Limitada de Capital Variable, Hill Phoenix Guatemala Sociedad Anonima, Hill Phoenix Honduras Sociedad Anonima, Hill Phoenix Nicaragua Sociedad Anonima, Hill Phoenix de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Hiltap Fittings Ltd., Hydro Systems Company, Hydro Systems Europe Ltd., Hydronova Australia-NZ Pty Ltd, Industrial Motion Control LLC, Innovative Control Systems, Innovative Control Systems Inc., Inpro/Seal LLC, JK Group, JK Group S.P.A., JK Group USA Inc., K S Boca Inc., K&L Microwave DR Inc., K&L Microwave Inc., KPS (Beijing) Petroleum Equipment Trading Co Ltd., KPS Fueling Solutions Sdn. Bhd., KPS Hong Kong Holding Limited, KPS UK Limited, KS Formation Inc., KS Liquidation Inc., KSLP Liquidation L.P., Kiian Digital (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Knappco LLC, Knowles Electronics, LIQAL, Liquip, Liquip International Pty Limited, MAAG, MARKEM FZ SA, MARKEM-IMAJE Corporation, MIP Holdings Inc., MS Printing Solutions, MS Printing Solutions S.R.L., Maag Automatik GmbH, Maag Automatik Plastics Machinery (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Maag Gala Inc., Maag Italy S.R.L., Maag Pump Systems, Maag Pump Systems (US) Inc., Maag Pump Systems AG, Maag Reduction Inc., Maag Service (Malaysia) Sdn. Bdn., Maag Systems (Thailand) Limited, Marathon Equipment Company (Delaware), Markem Imaje Center of Competencies Spain S.L.U., Markem-Imaje, Markem-Imaje (China) Co. Limited, Markem-Imaje - Unipessoal Lda, Markem-Imaje A/S, Markem-Imaje AB, Markem-Imaje AG, Markem-Imaje AS, Markem-Imaje B.V., Markem-Imaje CSAT GmbH, Markem-Imaje Co. Ltd., Markem-Imaje GmbH, Markem-Imaje Holding, Markem-Imaje Identificacao de Produtos Ltda., Markem-Imaje Inc., Markem-Imaje India Private Limited, Markem-Imaje Industries, Markem-Imaje Industries Limited, Markem-Imaje KK, Markem-Imaje LLC, Markem-Imaje Limited, Markem-Imaje Limited, Markem-Imaje Ltd., Markem-Imaje N.V., Markem-Imaje Oy, Markem-Imaje Philippines Corporation, Markem-Imaje Pty Ltd, Markem-Imaje S.A., Markem-Imaje S.A. de C.V., Markem-Imaje S.r.l., Markem-Imaje SAS, Markem-Imaje Sdn Bhd, Markem-Imaje Singapore Pte. Ltd., Markem-Imaje Spain S.A.U, Markpoint Holding AB, Midland Manufacturing LLC, Mouvex, Northern Lights (Nevada) Inc., Northern Lights Funding LP, Northern Lights Investments LLC, Nova Controls Inc., OK International, OK International (UK) Ltd., OK International Holdings Inc., OK International Inc., OPW Engineered Systems Inc., OPW Fluid Transfer Group Europe B.V., OPW Fluid Transfer Solutions (Jiang Su) Co. Ltd., OPW Fluids Group Inc., OPW France, OPW Fuel Management Systems Inc., OPW Fueling Components (SuZhou) Co. Ltd., OPW Fueling Components LLC, OPW Iberia Sociedad Limitada, OPW Malaysia Sdn. Bhd., OPW Slovakia s.r.o., OPW Sweden AB, Officine Meccaniche Sirio S.R.L., PDQ Manufacturing, PDQ Manufacturing Inc., PISCES by OPW Inc., PSD Codax Holdings Limited, PSD Codax Limited, PSG (Shanghai) Co. Ltd, PSG (Tianjin) Co. Ltd., PSG California LLC, PSG Germany GmbH, Petro Vend Sp. z o.o., Pike Machine Products Inc., Pole/Zero Acquisition Inc., Precision Brasil Equipamentos E Servicos Para Postos De Combustiveis Ltda., Precision Service - Servicos De Manutencao E Instalacao De Postos De Abastecimento De Combustivel Ltda., Production Control Services, Pump Management Services Co. LLC, RAV Equipos Espana S.L., RAV France, Ravaglioli Deutschland GmbH, Ravaglioli S.P.A., Reduction Engineering GmbH, Revod Corporation, Revod Luxembourg S.a.r.l., Revod SAS, Revod Singapore Holdings Pte. Ltd, Revod Sweden AB, Robohand Inc., Rosario, Rosario Handel B.V., Rotary Lift Consolidated (Haimen) Co. Ltd, SE Liquidation LLC, SWEP Germany GmbH, SWEP Malaysia Sdn. Bhd., SWEP North America Inc., SWEP Slovakia s.r.o., SWEP Technology (Suzhou) Co. Ltd., Seabiscuit Motorsports Inc., Simmons Sirvey Corporation, So. Cal. Soft-Pak, So. Cal. Soft-Pak Incorporated, Solaris Laser, Solaris Laser S.A., Somero Enterprises, Sound Solutions, Space S.R.L., Spirit, Start Italiana Petrol Cihazlari Sanayi Ticaret Anonim Sirketi, Start Italiana S.R.L., Swep Energy Oy, Swep International A.B., Swep Japan K.K., Sys-Tech Solutions, Sys-Tech Solutions Inc., Systech GB Limited, Systech Shanghai Consulting Company Limited, TQC Quantium Quality S.A. de C.V., TTSI III Inc., TWG Canada Consolidated Inc., TXHI LLC, Tartan Textile Services Inc., The Heil Co., Tokheim Belgium, Tokheim China Company Limited, Tokheim GmbH, Tokheim Group, Tokheim Hengshan Technologies (Guangzhou) Co. Ltd., Tokheim Holding B.V., Tokheim India Private Limited, Tokheim Sofitam Applications, Trans - Logistic Group S.R.L., Triton Systems, Tulsa Winch Inc., UPCO Inc., US Synthetic, Unattended Payment Solutions LLC, Unified Brands, Unified Brands Inc., Val TemperBent Glass L.P., Vectron Frequency Devices (Shanghai) Co. Ltd, Vehicle Service Group LLC, Vehicle Service Group UK Limited, Vos Food Store Equipment Ltd., WSCR Corp., Warn Automotive LLC, Warn Industries, Waukesha Bearings, Waukesha Bearings Corporation, Waukesha Bearings Limited, Waukesha Bearings Russia LLC, Wayne Fuel Management UK Ltd., Wayne Fueling Systems, Wayne Fueling Systems (Rus) Limited Liability Company, Wayne Fueling Systems Australia Pty Ltd, Wayne Fueling Systems Canada ULC, Wayne Fueling Systems Deutschland GmbH, Wayne Fueling Systems Italia S.R.L., Wayne Fueling Systems LLC, Wayne Fueling Systems Ltd., Wayne Fueling Systems Sweden AB, Wayne Fueling Systems UK Holdco Ltd., Wayne Industria e Comercio Ltda., WellMark, XanTec Steuerungs- und EDV-Technik GmbH, and em-tec GmbH. American Consumer News, LLC dba MarketBeat 2010-2021. All rights reserved. 326 E 8th St #105, Sioux Falls, SD 57103 | U.S. Based Support Team at contact@marketbeat.com | (844) 978-6257 MarketBeat does not provide personalized financial advice and does not issue recommendations or offers to buy stock or sell any security. Our Accessibility Statement | Terms of Service | Do Not Sell My Information 2021 Market data provided is at least 10-minutes delayed and hosted by Barchart Solutions. Information is provided 'as-is' and solely for informational purposes, not for trading purposes or advice, and is delayed. To see all exchange delays and terms of use please see disclaimer. Fundamental company data provided by Zacks Investment Research. Gildan Activewear Inc. manufactures and sells various apparel products in the United States, Canada, and internationally. It provides various activewear products, including T-shirts, fleece tops and bottoms, and sport shirts under the Gildan, Gildan Performance, Gildan Hammer, Comfort Colors, American Apparel, Anvil by Gildan, Alstyle, Prim + Preux, and GoldToe brands. The company also offers hosiery products comprising athletic; dress; and casual, liner, therapeutic, and workwear socks, as well as sheer panty hoses, tights, and leggings under the brands of Gildan, Under Armour, GoldToe, PowerSox, GT a GoldToe Brand, Silver Toe, Signature Gold by Goldtoe, Peds, MediPeds, Kushyfoot, Therapy Plus, All Pro, Secret, Silks, Secret Silky, and American Apparel. In addition, it provides men's and boys' underwear products, and ladies panties under the Gildan and Gildan Platinum brand names; and ladies' shapewear, intimates, and accessories under the Secret and Secret Silky brands. The company sells its products to wholesale distributors, screen printers, or embellishers, as well as to retailers and consumer brand companies. The company was formerly known as Textiles Gildan Inc. and changed its name to Gildan Activewear Inc. in March 1995. Gildan Activewear Inc. was founded in 1946 and is headquartered in Montreal, Canada. Read More Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. engages in global investment banking, securities, and investment management, which provides financial services. It operates through the following business segments: Investment Banking, Global Markets, Asset Management, and Consumer & Wealth Management. The Investment Banking segment serves public and private sector clients around the world and provides financial advisory services, help companies raise capital to strengthen and grow their businesses and provide financing to corporate clients. The Global Markets segment serves its clients who buy and sell financial products, funding and manage risk. The Asset Management segment provides investment services to help clients preserve and grow their financial assets. The Consumer & Wealth Management segment helps clients to achieve their individual financial goals by providing a wealth advisory and banking services. The company was founded by Marcus Goldman in 1869 and is headquartered in New York, NY. Read More The following companies are subsidiares of Allstate: AIMCO Private Fund I Holding LLC, AIMCO Private Fund I LLC, AIMCO Private Fund II LLC, ALIC Reinsurance Company, ALINV Mosaic LLC, ANIHI Newco LLC, AP Real Estate LLC, AP Riverway Plaza LLC, AP Timber LLC, Allstate Assignment Company, Allstate Assurance Company, Allstate County Mutual Insurance Company, Allstate Digital Ventures LLC, Allstate Distributors L.L.C., Allstate Enterprises LLC, Allstate Exchange Services LLC, Allstate Finance Company Agency Loans LLC, Allstate Finance Company LLC, Allstate Financial Advisors LLC, Allstate Financial Corporation, Allstate Financial Insurance Holdings Corporation, Allstate Financial LLC, Allstate Financial Services LLC (1), Allstate Fire and Casualty Insurance Company, Allstate Global Holdings Limited, Allstate Indemnity Company, Allstate Insurance Company, Allstate Insurance Company of Canada, Allstate Insurance Holdings LLC, Allstate International Assignments Ltd., Allstate International Holdings Inc., Allstate Investment Management Company, Allstate Investments LLC, Allstate Life Insurance Company (2), Allstate Life Insurance Company of Canada, Allstate Life Insurance Company of New York, Allstate Motor Club Inc., Allstate New Jersey Insurance Company, Allstate New Jersey Property and Casualty Insurance Company, Allstate Non-Insurance Holdings Inc., Allstate North American Insurance Company, Allstate Northbrook Indemnity Company, Allstate Northern Ireland Limited, Allstate Property and Casualty Insurance Company, Allstate Settlement Corporation, Allstate Short Term Pool LLC, Allstate Solutions Private Limited, Allstate Texas Lloyds, Allstate Texas Lloyds Inc., Allstate Vehicle and Property Insurance Company, American Heritage Life Insurance Company, American Heritage Service Company, Answer Financial Inc., Answer Marketplace LLC, Arity 875 LLC, Arity International Limited, Arity LLC, Arity Services LLC, CE Care Plan Corp, Castle Key Indemnity Company, Castle Key Insurance Company, Complete Product Care Corp, Current Creek Investments LLC, E.R.J. Insurance Group Inc. (3), Encompass Floridian Indemnity Company, Encompass Floridian Insurance Company, Encompass Home and Auto Insurance Company, Encompass Indemnity Company, Encompass Independent Insurance Company, Encompass Insurance Company, Encompass Insurance Company of America, Encompass Insurance Company of Massachusetts, Encompass Insurance Company of New Jersey, Encompass Insurance Holdings LLC, Encompass Property and Casualty Company, Encompass Property and Casualty Insurance Company of New Jersey, Esurance Holdings Inc., Esurance Insurance Company, Esurance Insurance Company of Canada, Esurance Insurance Company of New Jersey, Esurance Insurance Services Company of Canada, Esurance Insurance Services Inc. (4), Esurance Property and Casualty Insurance Company, First Colonial Insurance Company, Identity Protection Strategic Solutions LLC, InfoArmor Aggra Inc., InfoArmor Inc., Insurance Answer Center LLC (5), Intramerica Life Insurance Company, Ivantage Insurance Brokers Inc., Ivantage Select Agency Inc., Kennett Capital Inc., NBInv AF1 LLC, NBInv AF2 LLC, NBInv AF3 LLC, NBInv AF4 LLC, NBInv AF5 LLC, NBInv AF6 LLC, NBInv AP1 LLC, NBInv AP2 LLC, NBInv AP3 LLC, NBInv AP4 LLC, NBInv AP5 LLC, NBInv AP6 LLC, NBInv AP7 LLC, NBInv AP8 LLC, NBInv APAF1 LLC, NBInv Riverside Cars1 LLC, NBInv Riverside Management LLC, North Light Specialty Insurance Company, Northeast Agencies Inc. (6), Pablo Creek Services Inc., Pafco Insurance Company, Pembridge Insurance Company, PlumChoice Business Services Inc., PlumChoice Inc., Protection Plan Group Inc., Right Answer Insurance Agency LLC, Road Bay Investments LLC, ST Product Care Corp, Signature Agency Inc., Signature Motor Club Inc., Signature Motor Club of California Inc., Signature Nationwide Auto Club of California Inc., Signatures Nationwide Auto Club Inc., SquareTrade Australia Pty Ltd, SquareTrade Canada Inc., SquareTrade Europe Limited, SquareTrade Holding Company Inc., SquareTrade Inc. (7), SquareTrade Insurance Services Inc., SquareTrade Limited, SquareTrade Protection Solutions Inc., SquareTradeGo Inc., Tech-Cor LLC, and West Plaza RE Holdings LLC. There is not enough analysis data for Santa Fe Gold. 5.0 Community Rank Outperform Votes Santa Fe Gold has received 71 outperform votes. (Add your outperform vote.) Underperform Votes Santa Fe Gold has received 23 underperform votes. (Add your underperform vote.) Community Sentiment Santa Fe Gold has received 75.53% outperform votes from our community. MarketBeat's community ratings are surveys of what our community members think about Santa Fe Gold and other stocks. Vote Outperform if you believe SFEG will outperform the S&P 500 over the long term. Vote Underperform if you believe SFEG will underperform the S&P 500 over the long term. You may vote once every thirty days. Previous Next iShares Gold Trust shares reverse split before market open on Monday, May 24th 2021. The 1-2 reverse split was announced on Wednesday, March 3rd 2021. The number of shares owned by shareholders was adjusted after the closing bell on Friday, May 21st 2021. An investor that had 100 shares of iShares Gold Trust stock prior to the reverse split would have 50 shares after the split. iShares MSCI Japan ETF's stock reverse split on Monday, November 7th 2016. The 1-4 reverse split was announced on Friday, October 14th 2016. The number of shares owned by shareholders was adjusted after the closing bell on Friday, November 4th 2016. An investor that had 100 shares of iShares MSCI Japan ETF stock prior to the reverse split would have 25 shares after the split. iShares MSCI Spain ETF's stock was trading at $22.48 on March 11th, 2020 when Coronavirus reached pandemic status according to the World Health Organization. Since then, EWP stock has increased by 12.7% and is now trading at $25.33. View which stocks have been most impacted by COVID-19. John Wood Group PLC, together with its subsidiaries, provides consulting, project management, and engineering solutions to energy and built environment worldwide. It operates through four segments: Asset Solutions Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia; Assets Solutions Americas; Technical Consulting Solutions; and Investment Services. The company offers operations solutions, including maintenance, modifications, commissioning and decommissioning, and aftermarket services, as well as industrial services, such as painting, insulation, scaffolding, rope access, E&I, asbestos removal, and civil and earthworks services; engineering, procurement, and construction management; plant operations and life extension; technology solutions; supervision and management services; fabrication and inspection services; and construction and field services. It also provides environment and infrastructure solutions comprising environmental studies and compliance, environmental remediation, public infrastructure, and geotechnical and materials services; clean energy solutions; mine planning and design, mineral processing and metallurgy, mineral resources and project assessment services; and automation and control solutions, such as asset protection and facility and process automation solutions, as well as simulation, learning, and virtual systems. In addition, the company offers subsea and export systems, including subsea, umbilical, riser, and flowline design, as well as planning, design, and development of marine terminals and pipelines; and hull and marine services. It serves oil and gas, infrastructure, industrial and manufacturing, mining, power, and government sectors. John Wood Group PLC was founded in 1912 and is headquartered in Aberdeen, the United Kingdom. Read More The Williams Cos., Inc. operates as an energy infrastructure company, which explores, produces, transports, sells and processes natural gas and petroleum products. It operates through the following segments: Transmission and Gulf of Mexico; Northeast G&P; and West. The Transmission and Gulf of Mexico segment comprises of interstate natural gas pipelines, Transco and Northwest Pipeline, as well as natural gas gathering and processing and crude oil production handling and transportation assets in the Gulf Coast region. The Northeast G&P segment includes midstream gathering, processing, and fractionation businesses in the Marcellus Shale region primarily in Pennsylvania and New York, and the Utica Shale region of eastern Ohio. The West segment consists of gas gathering, processing, and treating operations in the Rocky Mountain region of Colorado and Wyoming, the Barnett Shale region of north-central Texas, the Eagle Ford Shale region of south Texas, the Haynesville Shale region of northwest Louisiana, and the Mid-Continent region which includes the Anadarko, Arkoma, and Permian basins. The company was founded by David Williams and Miller Williams in 1908 and is headquartered in Tulsa, Read More 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. Read More Mallinckrodt plc (NYSE:MNK) released its quarterly earnings results on Tuesday, August, 4th. The company reported $1.89 earnings per share for the quarter, beating analysts' consensus estimates of $1.34 by $0.55. The company had revenue of $700.90 million for the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $630.19 million. Mallinckrodt had a negative net margin of 89.94% and a positive trailing twelve-month return on equity of 34.26%. The firm's revenue was down 14.9% on a year-over-year basis. During the same period last year, the firm earned $2.53 earnings per share. View Mallinckrodt's earnings history. 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.. iShares Russell 1000 Growth ETF's stock was trading at $158.09 on March 11th, 2020 when Coronavirus (COVID-19) reached pandemic status according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Since then, IWF stock has increased by 87.3% and is now trading at $296.03. View which stocks have been most impacted by COVID-19. Medtronic Plc is a medical technology company, which engages in the development, manufacture, distribution, and sale of device-based medical therapies and services. It operates through the following segments: Cardiac and Vascular Group; Minimally Invasive Technologies Group; Restorative Therapies Group; and Diabetes Group. The Cardiac and Vascular Group segment consists of products for the diagnosis, treatment, and management of cardiac rhythm disorders and cardiovascular disease. The Minimally Invasive Technologies Group segment focuses on respiratory system, gastrointestinal tract, renal system, lungs, pelvic region, kidneys, and obesity diseases. The Restorative Therapies Group segment comprises of neurostimulation therapies and drug delivery systems for the treatment of chronic pain, as well as areas of the spine and brain, along with pelvic health and conditions of the ear, nose, and throat. The Diabetes Group segment offers insulin pumps, coninuous glucose monitoring systems, and insulin pump consumables. The company was founded in 1949 and is headquartered in Dublin, Ireland. Read More Invesco Emerging Markets Sovereign Debt ETF's stock was trading at $25.82 on March 11th, 2020 when Coronavirus (COVID-19) reached pandemic status according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Since then, PCY shares have increased by 1.5% and is now trading at $26.21. View which stocks have been most impacted by COVID-19. Pendragon PLC, together with its subsidiaries, operates in the automotive retail sector in the United Kingdom. It operates through Car Store, Franchised UK Motor, Software, and Leasing segments. The company sells new and used motor cars, motorbikes, trucks, and vans together with associated aftersales activities of service, body repair, and parts sales. It also operates carstore.com, an online marketplace for used cars; and distributes aftermarket parts, accessories, and workshop consumables under the Quickco brand. In addition, the company provides cloud-based dealer management systems; and Licence Link, an online license checking tool for fleets, as well as leases cars and vans to small, medium, and large fleets under the Pendragon Vehicle Management brand, and retails vehicles under the Evans Halshaw and Stratstone brand names. It operates 142 franchise points. Pendragon PLC was incorporated in 1988 and is headquartered in Nottingham, the United Kingdom. Read More The following companies are subsidiares of PerkinElmer: Analytica of Branford, Applied Biosystems, Arnel Inc., ArtusLabs, Beijing Huaan Magnech Bio-Tech Co. Ltd., Beijing Longrun Bio-Tech Co. Ltd., Beijing Meizheng Bio-Tech Co. Ltd., Beijing Meizheng Testing Lab Co. Ltd., Beijing OUMENG Biotechnology Co. Ltd., Bio Evolution SAS, Bioo Scientific Corporation, Biosense Picolabs Inc., Biosense Technologies Pvt Ltd., Caliper Life Sciences, Caliper Life Sciences Inc., Cambridge Research & Instrumentation Inc., CambridgeSoft, Ceiba Solutions, Chengdu PerkinElmer Medical Laboratory Co. Ltd., Chromo G.A. SAS, CisBio US Inc., Cisbio Asia Pacific Ltd, Cisbio Bioassays SAS, Cisbio China Ltd., Cisbio Group SAS, Cisbio KK, Cisbio.com, DNA Laboratories Sdn. Bhd., Dani Analitica S.r.l., Dexela, EUROIMMUN (Hangzhou) Medical Laboratory Diagnostics Co. Ltd., EUROIMMUN (South East Asia) Pte Ltd., EUROIMMUN (Tianjin) Medical Diagnostic Technology Co. Ltd., EUROIMMUN AG, EUROIMMUN Brasil Medicina Diagnostica Ltda., EUROIMMUN Diagnostics Espana S.L.U., EUROIMMUN France SAS, EUROIMMUN Italia Diagnostica Medica S.r.l., EUROIMMUN Japan Co. Ltd., EUROIMMUN Medical Diagnostics (China) Co. Ltd., EUROIMMUN Medical Diagnostics Canada Inc., EUROIMMUN Medical Laboratory Diagnostics South Africa (Pty) Ltd., EUROIMMUN Medizinische Labordiagnostika AG, EUROIMMUN Polska Spolka z o.o., EUROIMMUN Portugal Unipessoal Lda., EUROIMMUN Schweiz AG, EUROIMMUN Turkey Tibbi Laboratuar Teshisleri A.S., EUROIMMUN UK Ltd., EUROIMMUN US Inc., EUROIMMUN US Real Estate LLC, Geospiza, Guangzhou EUROIMMUN Medical Diagnostic Products Co. Ltd., Hangzhou EUROIMMUN Medical Diagnostic Products Co. Ltd., Horizon Discovery, Immunodiagnostic Systems, Integromics S.L., Jiangsu Meizheng Bio-Tech Co. Ltd., LabMetrix Technologies, Labtronics, ManCell SAS, Nexcelom Bioscience, NovaScreen Biosciences Corporation, Opto Technology, Orchid Biomedical Systems Pvt Ltd., Oxford Immunotec, Pediatrix Medical Group - Newborn Metabolic Screening Business, Perkin Elmer Chile Ltda., Perkin Elmer Italia SpA, Perkin Elmer Sdn. Bhd., Perkin Elmer Yuhan Hoesa, Perkin Elmer de Mexico S.A., Perkin-Elmer Argentina S.R.L., Perkin-Elmer Instruments (Philippines) Corporation, PerkinElmer (Hong Kong) Ltd., PerkinElmer (India) Pvt Ltd., PerkinElmer (Ireland) Ltd., PerkinElmer (Schweiz) AG, PerkinElmer (Shanghai) Equity Investment Fund L.P., PerkinElmer (Shanghai) Equity Investment Fund Management Co. Ltd., PerkinElmer (UK) Holdings Ltd., PerkinElmer Analytical Solutions B.V., PerkinElmer Automotive Research Inc., PerkinElmer BVBA, PerkinElmer CV Holdings LLC, PerkinElmer Cellular Technologies Germany GmbH, PerkinElmer Danmark A/S, PerkinElmer Diagnostics Global Holdings S.a r.l., PerkinElmer Diagnostics Holdings Inc., PerkinElmer Espana S.L., PerkinElmer Finance Luxembourg S.a r.l., PerkinElmer Finland Oy, PerkinElmer Genetics Inc., PerkinElmer Germany Diagnostics GmbH, PerkinElmer Global Diagnostics S.a r.l., PerkinElmer Global Financing S.a r.l., PerkinElmer Global Holdings S.a r.l., PerkinElmer Health Sciences (Australia) Pty. Ltd., PerkinElmer Health Sciences B.V., PerkinElmer Health Sciences Canada Inc., PerkinElmer Health Sciences FZ-LLC, PerkinElmer Health Sciences Inc., PerkinElmer Health Sciences Pvt Ltd., PerkinElmer Healthcare Diagnostics (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., PerkinElmer Holding Luxembourg S.a r.l., PerkinElmer Holdings Inc., PerkinElmer Holdings Pty. Ltd., PerkinElmer IVD Pte Ltd., PerkinElmer Inc., PerkinElmer Informatics Inc., PerkinElmer Instruments (Suzhou) Co. Ltd., PerkinElmer International C.V., PerkinElmer Investments Ky, PerkinElmer Israel Ltd., PerkinElmer Japan Co. Ltd., PerkinElmer LAS (Germany) GmbH, PerkinElmer LAS (UK) Ltd., PerkinElmer Life Sciences International Holdings, PerkinElmer Limited, PerkinElmer Ltd., PerkinElmer Management (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., PerkinElmer Nederland B.V., PerkinElmer Norge AS, PerkinElmer Oy, PerkinElmer Polska Sp z o.o., PerkinElmer Pty. Ltd., PerkinElmer SAS, PerkinElmer Saglk ve Cevre Bilimleri Ltd., PerkinElmer Shared Services Sp z o.o., PerkinElmer Singapore Pte Ltd., PerkinElmer South Africa (Pty) Ltd., PerkinElmer Sverige AB, PerkinElmer Sweden Health Sciences Holdings AB, PerkinElmer Taiwan Corporation, PerkinElmer VertriebsgmbH, PerkinElmer chemagen Technologie GmbH, PerkinElmer do Brasil Ltda., Perten Instruments, Perten Instruments (Beijing) Co. Ltd., Perten Instruments AB, Perten Instruments France SASU, Perten Instruments GmbH, Perten Instruments Italia S.r.l., Perten Instruments of Australia Pty Ltd., RHS Ltd, RayAl Ltd., Shandong Meizheng Bio-Tech Co. Ltd., Shanghai Haoyuan Biotech Co. Ltd., Shanghai Spectrum Instruments Co. Ltd., Shanghai Spectrum Instruments Co. Ltd., Signature Genomic Laboratories, Solus Scientific Solutions Inc., Solus Scientific Solutions Ltd., Surendra Genetic Labs, Suzhou PerkinElmer Medical Laboratory Co. Ltd., Suzhou Sym-Bio LifeScience, Suzhou Sym-Bio Lifescience Co. Ltd., Tulip Diagnostics, Tulip Diagnostics Pvt Ltd., Vanadis Diagnostics, Vanadis Diagnostics AB, ViaCell, ViaCord LLC, VisEn Medical, VisEn Medical Inc., Wallac Oy, Wellesley B.V., Xenogen Corporation, ZeLab SAS, and chemagen Biopolymer-Technologie AG. 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. Rowan Companies PLC (NYSE:RDC) issued its earnings results on Wednesday, October, 31st. The oil and gas company reported ($1.13) earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, topping the consensus estimate of ($1.15) by $0.02. The oil and gas company earned $192.90 million during the quarter, compared to analysts' expectations of $179.39 million. Rowan Companies had a negative net margin of 42.12% and a negative trailing twelve-month return on equity of 9.19%. The business's revenue for the quarter was down 33.8% compared to the same quarter last year. During the same period in the previous year, the company earned ($0.16) earnings per share. View Rowan Companies' earnings history. Royal Dutch Shell plc operates as an energy and petrochemical company worldwide. The company operates through Integrated Gas, Upstream, Oil Products, Chemicals segments. It explores for and extracts crude oil, natural gas, and natural gas liquids; markets and transports oil and gas; produces gas-to-liquids fuels and other products; and operates upstream and midstream infrastructure necessary to deliver gas to market. The company also markets and trades natural gas, liquefied natural gas (LNG), crude oil, electricity, carbon-emission rights; and markets and sells LNG as a fuel for heavy-duty vehicles and marine vessels. In addition, it trades in and refines crude oil and other feed stocks, such as gasoline, diesel, heating oil, aviation fuel, marine fuel, biofuel, lubricants, bitumen, and sulphur; produces and sells petrochemicals for industrial use; and manages oil sands activities. Further, the company produces base chemicals comprising ethylene, propylene, and aromatics, as well as intermediate chemicals, such as styrene monomer, propylene oxide, solvents, detergent alcohols, ethylene oxide, and ethylene glycol. Royal Dutch Shell plc was founded in 1907 and is headquartered in The Hague, the Netherlands. Read More Royce Micro-Cap Trust, Inc. is a closed-ended equity mutual fund launched and managed Royce & Associates, LLC. It invests in the public equity markets of the United States. The fund seeks to invest in stocks of companies operating across diversified sectors. It primarily invests in value stocks of companies with market capitalization of less than $500 million. The fund benchmarks the performance of its portfolios against Russell 2000 Index. Royce Micro-Cap Trust, Inc was formed on December 14, 1993 and is domiciled in the United States. Read More There is not enough analysis data for RWE Aktiengesellschaft. 4.1 Community Rank Outperform Votes RWE Aktiengesellschaft has received 32 outperform votes. (Add your outperform vote.) Underperform Votes RWE Aktiengesellschaft has received 20 underperform votes. (Add your underperform vote.) Community Sentiment RWE Aktiengesellschaft has received 61.54% outperform votes from our community. MarketBeat's community ratings are surveys of what our community members think about RWE Aktiengesellschaft and other stocks. Vote Outperform if you believe RWE will outperform the S&P 500 over the long term. Vote Underperform if you believe RWE will underperform the S&P 500 over the long term. You may vote once every thirty days. Previous Next Temple Bar Investment Trust PLC is a closed-ended equity mutual fund launched and managed by Ninety One Fund Managers UK Limited. It is co-managed by Ninety One UK Limited. The fund invests in the public equity markets of the United Kingdom. It seeks to invests in stocks of companies operating across diversified sectors. The fund primarily invests in stocks of companies across all market capitalizations, which are constituents of the FTSE 350 Index. It benchmarks the performance of its portfolio against the FTSE All-Share Index. Temple Bar Investment Trust PLC was formed in 1926 and is domiciled in the United Kingdom. Read More KBR, Inc. engages in the provision of differentiated professional services and technologies across the asset and program life-cycle within the government services and hydrocarbons industries. It operates through the following segments: Government Solutions, Technology Solutions, Energy Solutions, Non-strategic Business, and Other. The Government Solutions segment provides full life-cycle support solutions to defense, space, aviation, and other programs and missions for military and other government agencies. The Technology Solutions segment combines KBR's proprietary technologies, equipment, and catalyst supply and associated knowledge-based services into a global business for refining, petrochemicals, inorganic, and specialty chemicals as well as gasification, syngas, ammonia, nitric acid, and fertilizers. The Energy Solutions segment provides full life-cycle support solutions across the upstream, midstream and downstream hydrocarbons markets. The Non-strategic Business segment represents the operations or activities which the company intends to exit upon completion of existing contracts. The Other segment includes corporate expenses and general and administrative expenses not all Read More Valley National Bancorp is a bank holding company, which engages in the provision of retail and commercial banking services. It operates through the following segments: Consumer Lending; Commercial Lending; Investment Management; and Corporate and Other Adjustments. The Consumer Lending segment consists of residential mortgage loans, automobile loans and home equity loans, as well as wealth management and insurance services. The Commercial Lending segment includes the floating rate and adjustable rate commercial and industrial loans as well as fixed rate owner occupied and commercial real estate loans. The Investment Management segment refers to investments in various types of securities and interest-bearing deposits with other banks. The Corporate and Other Adjustments segment represents the income and expense items not directly attributable to a specific segment. The company was founded on November 12, 1982 and is headquartered in New York, NY. Read More The following companies are subsidiares of Brinker International: BI INTERNATIONAL SERVICES LLC, BI MEXICO HOLDING CORPORATION, BIPC GLOBAL PAYROLL COMPANY LLC, BIPC INVESTMENTS LLC, BIPC MANAGEMENT LLC, BRINKER AIRPORTS LLC, BRINKER ALABAMA INC., BRINKER ARKANSAS INC., BRINKER ASIA INC., BRINKER BRAZIL LLC, BRINKER CANADIAN HOLDING CO. ULC, BRINKER CANADIAN RESTAURANT CO. ULC, BRINKER CB LP, BRINKER CB MANAGEMENT LLC, BRINKER FHC B.V., BRINKER FLORIDA INC., BRINKER FREEHOLD INC., BRINKER GEORGIA INC., BRINKER INTERNATIONAL PAYROLL COMPANY L.P., BRINKER LOUISIANA INC., BRINKER MICHIGAN INC., BRINKER MISSISSIPPI INC., BRINKER MISSOURI INC., BRINKER NEVADA INC., BRINKER NEW JERSEY INC., BRINKER NORTH CAROLINA INC., BRINKER OF BALTIMORE COUNTY INC., BRINKER OF CARROLL COUNTY INC., BRINKER OF CECIL COUNTY INC., BRINKER OKLAHOMA INC., BRINKER OPCO LLC, BRINKER PENN TRUST, BRINKER PROPCO FLORIDA INC., BRINKER PROPERTY CORPORATION, BRINKER PURCHASING INC., BRINKER RESTAURANT CORPORATION, BRINKER RHODE ISLAND INC., BRINKER SERVICES CORPORATION, BRINKER SOUTH CAROLINA INC., BRINKER TEXAS INC., BRINKER VIRGINIA INC., CHILIS BEVERAGE COMPANY INC., CHILIS INC. a Delaware corporation, CHILIS INC. a Tennessee corporation, CHILIS INTERNATIONAL BASES B.V., CHILIS OF BEL AIR INC., CHILIS OF KANSAS INC., CHILIS OF MARYLAND INC., CHILIS OF WEST VIRGINIA INC., Grady's Inc., MAGGIANO'S OF ANNAPOLIS INC., MAGGIANO'S OF HOWARD COUNTY INC., MAGGIANO'S OF KANSAS INC., MAGGIANOS BEVERAGE COMPANY, MAGGIANOS HOLDING CORPORATION, MAGGIANOS INC., MAGGIANOS OF TYSONS INC., MAGGIANOS PROPERTY CORPORATION, MAGGIANOS TEXAS INC., PEPPER DINING HOLDING CORP., PEPPER DINING Inc., and PEPPER DINING VERMONT INC.. Weatherford International plc, an oilfield service company, provides equipment and services for the drilling, evaluation, completion, production, and intervention of oil and natural gas wells worldwide. The company operates in two segments, Western Hemisphere and Eastern Hemisphere. It offers artificial lift systems, including reciprocating rod, progressing cavity pumping, gas, hydraulic, plunger, and hybrid lift systems, as well as related automation and control systems; pressure pumping and reservoir stimulation services, such as acidizing, fracturing and fluid systems, cementing, and coiled-tubing intervention; and drill stem test tools, and surface well testing and multiphase flow measurement services. The company also provides safety, downhole reservoir monitoring, flow control, and multistage fracturing systems, as well as sand-control technologies, and production and isolation packers; liner hangers to suspend a casing string in high-temperature and high-pressure wells; cementing products, including plugs, float and stage equipment, and torque-and-drag reduction technology for zonal isolation; and pre-job planning and installation services. In addition, it offers directional drilling services, and logging and measurement services while drilling; services related to rotary-steerable systems, high-temperature and high-pressure sensors, drilling reamers, and circulation subs; managed pressure drilling, conventional mud-logging, drilling instrumentation, gas analysis, wellsite consultancy, and open hole and cased-hole logging services; reservoir solutions and software products; and intervention and remediation services. Further, the company provides equipment and drilling tools; tubular handling, management, and connection services; equipment rental services; and onshore contract drilling and related services through a fleet of land drilling and workover rigs. Weatherford International plc was incorporated in 1972 and is headquartered in Baar, Switzerland. Read More Western Asset Variable Rate Strategic Fund Inc. is a closed ended fixed income mutual fund launched and managed by Legg Mason Partners Fund Advisor, LLC. It is co-managed by Western Asset Management Company, Western Asset Management Company Limited, and Western Asset Management Company Pte. Ltd. The fund invests in the fixed income markets across the globe. It seeks to invest in variable rate investment grade securities, including U.S. and non-U.S. investment grade and high yield debt, senior loans, emerging markets debt and derivatives related to these securities. The fund seeks to maintain an average duration of around one to two years with an average credit quality of BBB+. It benchmarks the performance of its portfolio against the Merrill Lynch Constant Maturity 3-Month LIBOR Index. The fund was formerly known as Salomon Brothers Variable Rate Strategic Fund Inc. Western Asset Variable Rate Strategic Fund Inc. was formed on August 3, 2004 and is domiciled in the United States. Read More Xcel Energy, Inc. operates as a holding company, which engages in the generation, purchase, transmission, distribution and sale of electricity. It operates through the following three segments: Regulated Electric Utility, Regulated Natural Gas Utility and All Others. The Regulated Electric Utility segment generates, transmits and distributes electricity primarily in portions of generates, transmits and distributes electricity in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, North Dakota, South Dakota, Colorado, Texas and New Mexico. In addition, this segment includes sales for resale and provides wholesale transmission service to various entities in the United States. It also includes commodity trading operations. The Regulated Natural Gas Utility segment transports, stores, and distributes natural gas primarily in portions of Minnesota, Wisconsin, North Dakota, Michigan and Colorado. The All Others segment engages in steam, appliance repair services, nonutility real estate activities, processing solid waste into refuse-derived fuel and investments in rental housing projects that qualify for low-income housing tax credits. The company was founded in 1909 and is headquartered in Minneapolis, MN. Read More 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 Read More Amid diplomatic tensions between the US and Turkey on a range of issues, the US State Department announced Tuesday that it approved the possible sale of a $3.5 billion Patriot missile system to Turkey. The approval is an attempt by the US to get Turkey to give up its plans to purchase the Russian-made S-400 missile defense system. The proposed purchase has been a major impediment to closer US-Turkish relations amid fears the Russian system could allow Moscow to collect intelligence on American and NATO systems. Business and industry sectors Business, economy and trade Continents and regions Defense industry Eastern Europe Europe Middle East Middle East and North Africa Military Military weapons Missile systems North America Russia The Americas Turkey United States Weapons and arms Turkey's pursuit of the S-400 has jeopardized its acquisition of the F-35 joint strike fighter, as members of Congress have attempted to block Ankara's receipt of the jet over concerns about the Russian system. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Wednesday that Moscow is moving ahead with agreements to sell the Russian-made S-400 missile-defense system to Turkey, calling the news of the US Patriot missile sale approval "unrelated." 'Nothing more, nothing less' While the announcement came shortly after President Donald Trump spoke to his Turkish counterpart, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, on Friday, a State Department official denied any connection between the announcement and recent developments, including Trump's announcement Wednesday that he has decided to pull US troops out of Syria. "This notification provides a NATO-interoperable alternative to the S-400: nothing more, nothing less. It has no connection to other policy matters," a State Department spokesman told CNN. In addition to concerns over Turkey's purchase of the Russian weapons system, Washington and Ankara have engaged in very public disputes on a wide range of issues, including US support for Kurdish militias in Syria and Washington's reluctance to extradite exiled cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Turkey accuses of a coup attempt. WHITESTOWN, N.Y. -- Deputies in Whitestown made an arrest while attempting to assist a driver in a disabled vehicle. Sheriffs say they came upon the vehicle around 3 a.m. Wednesday morning on Judd Road in Whitestown. They say it turns out the vehicle was on a "be on the lookout" stemming from a larceny at the Rome Walmart. Tristen Williams, 37, allegedly tried to run, but was caught after a short chase. He's charged with resisting arrest, obstruction of government administration, and possession of a hypodermic instrument. UTICA, NY-- Gov. Andrew Cuomo is pushing to legalize recreational marijuana in the state early next year, but some believe it would do more harm than good. The governor outlined his priorities for next year at the New York City Bar Association in Manhattan on Monday. He said he will push to legalize recreational marijuana within the first 100 days 2019. But Oneida County Sheriff Rob Maciol said it will have a dangerous consequences. "We know that people will die," Maciol said. "We look at reports all the time and we keep looking at reports of things in Colorado because they legalized marijuana, they've had it legalize longer than any other state and we clearly see in the data that there's a spike in fatal car accidents as a result of people being under the influence of marijuana." Maciol said when someone is drinking and driving its easier for officers to detect alcohol but detecting drugs is a little more complicated. Cassandra Sheets, CEO for the Center For Family Life & Recovery, said legalizing the drug could make it easier for children to use. "The younger anybody uses, whether it's alcohol, whether it's marijuana, whether it's prescription drugs, any kind of substance the younger they are the higher the risk of addiction," she said. Periods of rain Thursday-Thursday night (breezy to windy tonight [from the south-southwest], but not so much for much of Thursday) will give way to a change-over to a wind-driven snow Friday morning. Winds may gust to 35-40 mph from the north Friday. After the wind tonight, it will go light by tomorrow afternoon-evening. That could lead to areas of dense fog before the wind cranks back up Thursday night (& shifts to the northeast), dispersing the fog. Some very minor snowfall accumulation is possible. Much of it will be 0.4" or less, given temperatures hovering around 32-33. In our far eastern counties, it appears that some localized amount of up to 1" may accumulate. This would be mainly on grassy & elevated surfaces. 1-3" could fall east of the area in eastern Indiana & into Ohio. We will monitor to make sure that does not shift westward any. Total rain & snow liquid should amount to 0.25-0.60". Snowfall projection for Friday: Wind gust projection for the next 2.5 days: Saturday looks dry, partly cloudy & highs in the 30s with lows in the 20s. Sunday features a weak clipper passing through with increasing clouds & a few snow showers. No accumulation is expected. Highs will run in the 30s with lows in the 20s. Monday, Christmas Eve, will just feature increasing clouds with highs in the 30s & lows in the upper 20s. As said, the U.S. models have a lack of any snow on Christmas Day. The Canadian CMC is backing off any snow for Christmas now, however. The UKMet model appears to be holding on to the Christmas snowfall notion. The problem is that there is already a pretty substantial Colorado low-type storm system coming Wednesday-Thursday after Christmas & models appear to have trouble figuring out if the clipper will just be absorbed into that Wednesday-Thursday system or it is renegade on its on with its own precipitation in the cold air on Christmas Day. It is a tight forecast & an unclear one at that. The European model is still on-board with accumulating snowfall on Christmas, however. Note the German model for North America below that depicts a system of snow around Christmas. The 540 line is south of the Ohio River. Anything north of the 540 line would be snow. It depicts 0.04" of liquid. Given the efficient snowmaking set-up observed in the model, this would be around 1" of snow. Today, 4 of the 20 U.S. GFS model ensemble members have snow on Christmas Day. It all boils down to whether this clipper will be independent, then the next system moves in Wednesday-Thursday, or it is absorbed into one main system that will bring a a wintry mix at the onset, then rain late next week. After that, we watch New Years, as system forms on the tail end of the post-Christmas storm system. It could bring wintry mix &/or snow. Much colder weather will follow in January. By mid-January to early February, multiple mornings at -20 to -15 are likely with a deep snowpack developing. LAFAYETTE, Ind. (WLFI) - The YWCA Spanish Reflections Support Group may be going on years of existance, but it still continues to impact the lives of the women who rely on it. "We want this group for them to know that they are not alone, that they can support each other, that there are people who are going through difficult times just like they are," said Nohemi Lugo, Hispanic Advocate at the YWCA of Greater Lafayette. Lugo said the purpose of the group is so that Hispanic women living in this area have a place to make friends, feel supported, and find resources to help them through tough situations. In a YWCA brochure, the group is described as a place where Hispanic women discuss topics such as self-esteem, relationships, and more in terms of their traditions and cultural expectations. They have been meeting twice a month, every month, for the past 20 years. Lugo has been leading the group for the past 17 years. "They can be vulnerable, they can be transparent, and they can be themselves," she said. "When you come to another country as an immigrant a lot of times you leave your family behind so we want this group for them to know that they are not alone." For Angela Cruz, who is originally from Puerto Rico, coming to America and joining this group has helped her out of a dangerous situation. "They help me with my situation in the past of 17 years of domestic violence," said Cruz. She says she also came here to be with her son, who is teaching at Purdue. At the group's Christmas party on Wednesday, this was Cruz's first time decorating a ginger bread house. Lugo said that several members of the group have faced similar circumstances as Cruz. "They feel that they belong, it's good for them to know other people and that they aren't the only ones going through domestic violence," said Lugo. "The ladies need something to improve their lives," said Cruz. "It's so important for women to find someone who can help them." Lugo emphasized the importance of celebrating the Christmas holiday. She said Lafayette has a strong and well connected Hispanic community in Lafayette. Cruz said it's very important to her to get to celebrate the holiday with her community. "Christmas is a huge celebration in the Hispanic countries, we celebrate the birth of Jesus, and it is a really big deal in our countries," said Lugo. "I know for the ladies who don't have family here, this is their Christmas." And Lugo said they hope to continue to impact the lives of these women for the next 20 years. Any woman who is 18 or older and speaks Spanish is welcome to join the group. They meet on the second and fourth Wednesday of every month from 10 a.m. - 11:30 a.m. at the YWCA Advocacy Center. Ambassador Ngo Thi Hoa presents flowers to painter Hoang Ha Tung (Photo: baoquocgte.vn) This is the second time he has organized an individual exhibition in the Netherlands, after the success of his first exhibition in 2017, which displayed portraits of Vietnamese and Dutch farmers and was actively welcomed by Dutch friends. At this exhibition, he introduced many paintings about sceneries of Hanoi and Kampen, which are drawn by visualization method with simple brushstrokes in combination with the most complex colour palettes, to express his love for the two cities that brought him a lot of inspiration. Vietnamese Ambassador to the Netherlands Ngo Thi Hoa and Mayor of Kampen city Bort Koelewijn both attended the exhibition to congratulate painter Hoang Ha Tung. Mayor Bort Koelewijn welcomed the painter to return to the beautiful, gentle and hospitable city of Kampen. He said he is moved by how the painter depicts Kampen through his paintings. Speaking at the exhibition, Vietnamese Ambassador Ngo Thi Hoa highly appreciated the creative energy of Hoang Ha Tung, as well as the active cooperation between artists of the two countries, especially the Netherlands Stichting Work #art has given maximum support to Hoang Ha Tung so he has the opportunity to display his works there, bringing Hanois image closer to the Dutch art loving public and helping Dutch friends admire their country through the eyes of a Vietnamese artist. The exhibition was on display at Het Werk art center and Huize Maria Galery, the headquarters of the Stichting Work #art, an ancient space built in 1880. The images at the exhibition were also recorded by Dutch friends and posted on Kampen's own Youtube website and channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLsZw_O02Fs./. The ambassador of the European Union in Peru signed an agreement here Monday with a consortium of civic groups to promote actions to equip journalists and citizens to battle corruption and promote public integrity. Diego Mellado told EFE that it is a project of about 400,000 euros ($450,000) for which the EU will provide 360,000 euros, while the rest is to come from the four Peruvian organizations: Transparencia, Proetica, IPYS and the Andean Commision of Jurists. Among the planned actions are seminars, exercises of citizen oversight and a ranges of events to promote awareness about the effects of corruption. Mellado said that corruption and a lack of transparency are estimated to cost Europe 10 billion euros a year. The president of Proetica, Jose Ugaz, said during the signing ceremony that last year Peru lost "$2 billion to the paralysis of the Southern Gas Pipeline, which means that 150,000 Peruvians have not been able to escape poverty. The pipeline was one of several projects entrusted to Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht during the 2011-2016 administration of Ollanta Humala, but the contract was subsequently canceled after the company admitted to having paid bribes to obtain lucrative public works concessions. Ugaz, formerly Perus chief anti-corruption prosecutor, said it was no coincidence that at a time when corruption has increased significantly in the country, poverty has worsened, anemia affects nearly 47 percent of children in rural areas and very significant sums (of money) are being lost. The voluminous reserves of natural gas and its relatively low price in Mexico makes it an essential material for generating cleaner energy using combined-cycle power plants like those that Spains Iberdrola is constructing in various parts of the Aztec nation. Were in one of the best areas in the world. And for combined-cycle, we believe that natural gas will be the basic energy source for the next 15 years, because of its abundance and its competitive price, the director general of Iberdrola Mexico, Enrique Alba, told EFE. According to the Mexican energy departments Natural Gas Prospect 2018-2032, domestic demand for the fuel grew 28.4 percent between 2007 and 2017. On Jan. 1, 2018, Mexicos total proven, possible and probable gas reserves (3P) were 30.02 billion cubic feet, while the cost of the fuel here is roughly $3 per million BTUs (British thermal units), compared with $10 per million BTUs in Europe, Alba said. A large part of the continuing rise in demand for natural gas in Mexico is due to the combined-cycle power plants, so-called because they use both a gas and a steam turbine. At El Carmen in the northern state of Nuevo Leon, two imposing new plants, which today are on the point of starting commercial operations, dispense a delicate white vapor. The 878MW 43 Noreste plant, also known as Escobedo, is 99 percent complete, while the 866MW El Carmen plant is 85 percent done. Together, the two projects represent an investment of roughly $850 million. And though the plants are practically twins, the energy they produce will be distributed through different channels. At Escobedo, awarded through public bidding, we will sell the energy to the (state-owned utility) Federal Electricity Commission, and at El Carmen well sell it directly to the new wholesale electricity market, Iberdrola Project Director Pablo Mano told EFE. For the construction of this infrastructure, 4,000 jobs were created. And when both are in operation, there will be some 70 direct employees and 500 employed indirectly. There were also some important challenges. This is the first time these machines are to be used in Latin American, and we developed the engineering ourselves, Mano said. As for pollutant emissions, Deputy Project Director Camilo Martinez said that Iberdrola uses the best technologies to guarantee that much less carbon dioxide is sent into the atmosphere than the law allows. Were always well below the limit. We invest in that because tomorrow the rules can change, he said. An armed gang killed the judge presiding over the case of the murder in Mexico of Spanish citizen Pilar Garrido and the trial has been suspended, authorities said Tuesday. The security spokesman for the government of the northeastern state of Tamaulipas, Luis Alberto Rodriguez, confirmed to EFE the death of Judge Abelardo Ibarra and a prosecutor identified by Mexican media outlets as Erica Granados. In a bulletin, the state Attorney Generals Office said that an investigation has been opened into the shooting deaths of two people in a vehicle on the streets of Ciudad Victoria, the state capital. A reward will be given to whoever provides information that leads to the identification and locating of the perpetrator of the homicides, the statement said. The lawyer representing Garridos husband, Jorge Fernandez, who is charged with her murder, ruled out any connection between the case and the murder of Judge Ibarra. Jesus Eduardo Govea said a hearing had been scheduled for this Tuesday with the participation by videoconference of Garridos mother and sister, two key witnesses for the defense because they have always insisted that Fernandez is innocent. With the Tuesday hearing the trial would have been almost over, but it has been suspended due to the slaying and will not be resumed until Jan. 8, Govea said. Pilar Garrido disappeared on July 2, 2017, when she was returning with her husband and baby by car back home to Ciudad Victoria in Tamaulipas state after spending several days at the beach. Later that month her skeletal remains were found along with shreds of clothing near the place she went missing, and 15 days afterwards DNA tests identified the victim as the Valencian woman. The case took another turn when the state AG Office detained Fernandez on Aug. 29, 2017, alleging contradictions in his statements. Last weekend, Amazon workers demonstrated against productivity requirements at Amazons Shakopee, Minnesota fulfillment center. Over 200 people protested in the suburban area. Their demonstration ended with a march toward the front entrance of the warehouse, where over a dozen police vehicles immediately surrounded the protest and broke it up. Earlier this year, Amazon was forced to negotiate with the Awood Center, a non-profit which organized Amazon workers in opposition to the unfair speed of work as well as against the companys decision to deny religious workers time to pray. Minneapolis, near where the fulfillment center is located, is home to the largest East African immigrant community in Minnesota and the Awood Center reports that 60 percent of the Amazon workforce is East African. The East African workers are predominantly Muslim and were not given enough time to take prayer breaks. Moreover, Amazon recently increased rates for many workers to 230 items per hour, a policy which will result in more injuries and arbitrary firings. The World Socialist Web Site spoke with workers at the rally about the issues faced by Amazon workers in Minnesota and across the country. The workers said the fight for lower rates should involve all Amazon workers worldwide. Jamal, a worker at the Shakopee fulfillment center told the WSWS, At any moment, you could be fired or written up for being too slow. They want us to pack 230 items an hour, which means you have to scan and pack an item every 10 seconds. When you go to the bathroom, that counts against your rate. We cant go to the bathroom, get hurt, or take a prayer break without fear of being fired. Jamal continued, adding that if no one took action against Amazon, The rates are going to keep increasing, and no one will be able to keep up. Jamal agreed with the WSWS that the struggle of Amazon workers should be linked up with the rest of the working class, adding, Jeff Bezos doesnt understand how hard it is to work faster, while we made him rich. Another worker, who chose not to give her name, spoke about Amazons recent wage raise. We get $16.50 an hour here in Shakopee, she said. Fifteen dollars an hour is not a big deal for Amazon. At my previous job, we had showers and longer breaks, and I made the same amount. While workers at the protest were voicing their opinions about low pay and high rates, the organizers made no clear demands aside from lowering the productivity requirements in general. Amazon workers everywhere sympathize with the opposition that is developing among Minnesota workers to high rates, low wages and short breaks, both on the basis of demanding better working conditions, as well as for defending the right of Muslim workers to practice their religion free of discrimination. Despite this, several organizations linked to the Democratic Party and the trade unions, including the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the Teamsters, attempted to take over the movement and prevent it from growing. Rather than fighting for the interests of workers, the trade unions try to prevent strike action and to keep workers tied to the Democratic Party, which is the party that has received most of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos donations in the 2018 election cycle. The SEIU brought recently-elected Democratic Party Congresswoman Ilhan Omar to speak at the protest, where she made vague appeals for Amazon to respect us or hear our voice. The SEIU brought Omar to present the Democratic Party as a vehicle for change, capable of hearing the appeals of East African workers. The SEIU did not mention that it was the Democratic Party under Barack Obama who carried out record numbers of drone strikes in Somalia, killing hundreds. The Teamsters union was also present. Two months ago, the Teamsters rammed through a sell-out contract for 250,000 United Parcel Service (UPS) workers, despite the fact that workers rejected the deal in the contract vote. The contract included the introduction of a new, lower-paid tier of hybrid workers, who will work on weekends and shift back and forth from the warehouse to driving, all while being paid up to $6 per hour less than current drivers. The contract set the starting wage at UPS lower than current Amazon workersat $13 per hour. The Teamsters were also engaged in a blackmail campaign against the UPS workers, threatening them to vote for the concessions contract or face a pay cut. The struggle of East African Amazon workers in Minnesota is significant, and the eruption of anger over unsafe working conditions is a step in the resurgence of the class struggle worldwide. But to succeed, workers must break free from the trade unions and Democratic Party hacks who are trying to keep their struggle from developing and block them from linking with workers at other fulfillment centers and in other industries in a common fight against the corporate giant. Theresa Mays Conservative government announced yesterday that 3,500 soldiers were on standby to deal with economic disruption and to confront social unrest in the event of a no-deal Brexit. The UK faces crashing out of the European Union (EU) if no agreement can be reached by Parliament before a January 21, 2019 deadline. May refused to put the agreement reached with the EU to a vote in Parliament on December 11, knowing that it would have been voted down. The UK is scheduled to exit the EU on March 29, 2019. Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson told Parliament that his department will have 3,500 service personnel held at readiness, including regulars and reserves, in order to support any government department on any contingencies they may need. The announcement that ministers were to ramp up preparations for a no deal came after the Cabinet met Tuesday morning. The Guardian reported, Downing Street said delivering the prime ministers deal remains the top priority, but when presented with three options on whether to increase, maintain or wind down preparations, there was unanimity in cabinet to implement all no-deal contingency planning across departments. The decision was made after Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn once again refused to move a motion of no confidence in the government, after a day in which Corbyns political prevarication descended into farce. At just after 3:00 p.m. yesterday, Labours central office let it be known that Corbyn would move a motion of no confidence on the prime minister, not the government, just ahead of May addressing Parliament at 3:30 p.m., if she did not announce a parliamentary date for a debate on her proposed deal with the EU. The circulated text read: That this house has no confidence in the prime minister due to her failure to allow the House of Commons to have a meaningful vote straight away on the withdrawal agreement and framework for the future relationship between the UK and the EU. The media immediately declared that Corbyn had bottled out. His was a non-binding motion committing neither Labour nor Parliament to anything. He specifically avoided putting through a Vote of Confidence in the government as a whole, which under the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act of 2011 would have to be acted on and debated once the leader of the opposition demands it. Had Corbyn tabled a motion with the specific wording, That this house has no confidence in her majestys government, a motion of confidence would have to be passed in the government within 14 days, or a general election would be called. The Democratic Unionist Party, on which May depends for a majority, and the hard-Brexit Tory European Research Group both immediately made clear that they would not support Corbyns toothless resolution anyway. When May spoke, she announced that she intended to seek concessions from the EU and would then present them to MPs to vote on during the week of January 14, i.e., on the eve of the voting deadline. Her intention was clearly to present MPs with an ultimatumvote for her deal or face a hard Brexitin order to minimise any rebellion by Tories and the DUP and hopefully to also secure the reluctant backing of pro-Remain Blairite Labour MPs. To make matters worse, Corbyn followed May without putting his motion! It was only after three hours of debateand after Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell had said Labour had got what it wanted when May set a date and would not proceed with the motionthat Corbyn then put his motion, stating that a January vote was unacceptable. So pathetic was Corbyns move that May walked out of the parliamentary chamber immediately, with Downing Street describing his motion as a stunt that will not be granted any parliamentary time for debate. Once again Corbyn has been instrumental in allowing two unaccountable cliques, the Tory Brexiters on one side and Remain in the EU-supporting Blairites on the other, to dominate political eventsincluding planning the use of troops against the working class. Corbyns politics are an example of parliamentary cretinism on steroids. He justifies not acting on principle, of demanding an end to a Tory government that has imposed savage austerity on millions and which is up to its neck in deadly military adventures in the Middle East and internationally, with calculations that waiting a little longerand allowing Mays plan to be rejectedwill open up the possibility of cross-party support for a general election so that Labour can renegotiate a soft Brexit, or, failing that, the second referendum urged by the Blairites. As is now the norm, this left his right-wing opponents free to denounce him for not calling for the government to be brought down: Not because they want this to happen, but because this would finally get the issue of a general election off the agenda and clear the path for a second referendum with the option of remaining in the EU. Former Labour minister Chris Leslie commented, This feels like a pantomime on the [EU/UK Brexit deal] vote: in then out, on then off. It seems the [Labour] leadership will do anything including pulling its punches against the Government to avoid a Peoples Vote. Labour MP Chuka Umunna added, We need to settle the issue of whether there can be a general election to resolve the chaos so this confidence motion is overdue. If it fails we can then move straight on to holding a Peoples Vote on Brexit and let the electorate decidethe only way of breaking the deadlock in Westminster. The differences between Corbyn and his critics are largely of a tactical rather than a principled character. Corbyn is opposed to the mad gambol of the Blairites and their allies in the pro-Remain Scottish National Party and Liberal Democrats towards a second referendum on the basis that this could further destabilise a country that is already deeply divided politically over Brexit and, more importantly still, socially polarised after a decade of unrelenting austerity and a collapse in the living standards of the working class. He wants to make an attempt to negotiate a soft Brexit, focused on maintaining access to the Single European Market with some form of customs union, while still allowing UK business to strike the independent trade deals with the US and other non-EU countries that is the central concern of the Brexiteers. He also wants to appease anti-immigrant sentiment by ending free movement of EU labour in favour of managed migration. However, he has made clear that if this pro-capitalist wish list fails, then he will back a referendum on Remain. No one needs to wait to see what a Corbyn government would look like in office. Its political essence is revealed in the Brexit crisis. Nothing he says or does is based on an appeal to the working class to act against the government and the employers, to oppose austerity and militarism and avert the growing danger of military and police repression. Otherwise he could never have moved a resolution calling for May to be replaced while leaving the Tories in government! His speech made clear his class loyalties by being peppered with references to the demands of big business. In finally tabling his non-vote of no-confidence, Corbyn again took the opportunity to present himself and Labour to the ruling elite as the only political force that can avoid further instability. In response to Mays announcement, he said, We face an unprecedented situation, the Prime Minister has led us into a national crisis. The country, workers and businesses are increasingly anxious, he added. Outlining the concerns of big business, he declared, The [Confederation of British Industry] said yesterday: Uncertainty is throttling firms and threatening jobs not in the future but right now. The British Chamber of Commerce has said: There is no time to waste. After the December 9 public meeting in Detroit organized by the World Socialist Web Site to fight back against the General Motors plant closures in the US and Canada, a WSWS reporting team returned to the GM plant in Sao Caetano do Sul, Sao Paulo, Brazils oldest auto plant, to distribute the report of the meetings decision to build rank-and-file committees in opposition to the unions and talk to workers about the situation they face in the plant and the global struggle of autoworkers. I think its absurd [the announced layoffs], GM only thinks of increasing its profits, GM worker Renato said with anger to the WSWS reporters. Showing solidarity with the future fired workers, another worker, Marcos, said, the layoffs mean that 15,000 heads of households are going to the streets. When the reporters told him about the decision of building rank-and-file committees, he said that unions are unfortunately not struggling. Today, none of them are struggling as they were in the past. He added that he only pays dues to the local union because there are a few benefits, like a discount on medicines and a holiday camp that it runs. GM plant in Brazil However, more than two weeks after GM announced its decision to close the plants, many autoworkers still didnt know about the closures. Those who did found out through conversations with other workers on Whatsapp and other social media groups. Others, like Mauricio, told the WSWS reporters that he knew about the plant closures through news websites, and that the local union has not informed us about the plant closures. This role of the local union in isolating the workers in their own factories has also been used to ram through more concessions in contract negotiations in face of the shutdown of other plants. When asked why the GM plant in the city of Sao Jose dos Campos, 80 km north of Sao Caetano, is the only GM plant in Brazil that has not received any investment in the past yearsand there are rumors of a possible shutdownEduardo, a worker with 10 years at GM, said, What we hear from our union is that the Sao Jose union is too uncompromising. Another worker, Jefferson, confirmed what Eduardo said: They [the officials of their union, which is controlled by Forca Sindical, which was linked to the Brazilian dictatorship] said that the [Sao Jose] union is too strong and it doesnt accept anything. The alleged uncompromising character of the Sao Jose union, controlled by the Morenoite CSP-Conlutas union federation, did nothing to prevent GM from laying off two-thirds of its peak workforce of 12,000. The only answer of CSP-Conlutas was an empty threat to sue GM over an unfulfilled promise to bring new investments to the local plant. It made no attempt to mobilize the workers against the job cuts. The situation of the GM plant in Sao Caetano at this point contrasts with the companys plant closures around the world. In February of this year, the company presented expansion plans for the Sao Caetano complex, with an investment of 1.2 billion reais ($308 million) involving a new 400,000-square-meter building, which will increase car production from 250,000 to 330,000 annually. The company plans to invest 13 billion reais ($3.3 billion) in Brazil by 2020, according to GMs website. At the same time, since 2015, GM has closed production facilities in Europe, Australia, Russia, Indonesia, India and South Africa, besides the recent announcements of plant closures in the US and Canada. Brazil has attracted this investment based on the recent sellouts of autoworkers which have included the firing of senior workers, wage freezes and union permission for generalized outsourcing, which has created a permanent crisis situation for thousands of workers. According to the UOL website, GM investments in Sao Caetanos plant will include a new global auto export platform, which will produce a new SUV that will substitute for the Mexican-produced Tracker model. This investment plan also coincides with the introduction of a new GM electric car model in BrazilBolt EVfor next year, which was announced in November during Sao Paulos major auto fair, Salao do Automovel. Vice president of GM Mercosul, Marcelo Munhoz, said the company intends to bring the production of the Bolt EV to the Sao Caetano plant. This year Salao do Automovel also saw Brazilian President Michel Temer sign a decree implementing the long anticipated Rota 2030, a massive program of tax breaks for the auto companies which is aimed at stimulating the production of safer and cleaner cars to make the national auto industry more competitive. Rota 2030 reduces taxes on electric and more fuel-efficient vehicles in general, and likely self-driven ones in the future. The most important part of the program is a tax break of up to 1.5 billion reais ($385 million) for companies that invest at least 5 billion reais ($1.28 billion) in research for such endeavors. Volkswagen, which recently announced its Roadmap E plan to produce electric vehicles, announced in the beginning of December that it will produce its first electric truck in Brazil by 2022, turning the Resende plant in Rio de Janeiro into one of its 16 plants in the world producing electric vehicles. After the announcement of Rota 2030, VW also announced the testing of its hybrid bus in Brazil for the next year. GM and VW investment plans in Brazil have been followed recently by other major auto companies, like Scania, Mercedes-Benz and Mitsubishi, with either increases in production, new hiring, or bringing on new shifts. However, the 15 percent increase in vehicle production in Brazil this year compared to last year has occurred only after three consecutive years of decline in vehicle production, as the country has suffered its worst economic crisis in 100 years. Vehicle production in Brazil, which in 2010 accounted for one-fifth of the world total, and now comprises just one-eighth, despite this increase, is returning to the same levels set in 2015. UOL auto journalist Fernando Calmon called Rota 2030 the most important event since the regulation of the auto industry in Brazil, in 1956. It is part of the Brazilian governments response to the auto industrys global restructuring plans and the shift toward the production of electric vehicles. For autoworkers, however, it will have disastrous effects. Toyotas president for Brazil, Rafael Chang, said at the ceremony launching Rota 2030 that last years labor reform was another important step to strengthen the economy and encourage new investments. Together with the outsourcing law passed in March 2017 by the Brazilian congress, which allows companies to outsource any job, it makes the working conditions and wages of Brazilian autoworkers even more precarious. According to a report last year in the UKs Auto Express, In Brazil, the hourly pay rate is only a dollar higher than it is in China, at $6.17 on average. Despite the Sao Caetano plant having no contract workers on the assembly line, Douglas, a recently hired contract worker said that during the period of temporary layoffs, there are up to 100 outsourced companies working in GM, doing adaptations, modifications and maintenance. However, GM worker Mauricio believes that the hiring of contract workers on the assembly line will happen here and will be extremely harmful for workers. In Brazil, contract workers wages are 25 percent less and they work three more hours a week than a worker hired directly by the company. Next year, under the presidency of the fascistic former army captain Jair Bolsonaro, the class tensions in Brazil will only intensify. Last Thursday, December 13, Bolsonaro praised the changes in the Brazilian labor law. The daily Folha de S. Paulo reported that Bolsonaro intends to introduce new flexibilizations [of the labor law] because businessmen are discouraged in Brazil due to the excess of workers rights. Responding to Bolsonaros statement, GM worker Jose said, He insists on talking about it. I think the class that has more rights is the one to which he belongs. When asked about a way to fight back against Bolsonaros threatened attacks on workers, Jose said that, through the existing unions, workers will not get into a fight that we already know were going to end up losing. He added, In the past, the opposition was intense between the company and the union, but today, its not like that. I think that the union has to defend workers, but I dont know in what way that will happen. That union reality will not come back. After the popular front of union federations, social movements and pseudo-left parties failed to mount any resistance to Temers labor reform and outsourcing law passed last year, Brazilian autoworkers see no way forward within the confines of the existing unions. The call by the December 9 meeting in Detroit for the building of rank-and-file committees in opposition to the unions has utmost relevance to the present situation in Brazil, where these committees are needed not only to defend the jobs, wages and working conditions of autoworkers, but also to prepare the fight of the entire working class against the incoming Bolsonaro government. WSWS reporters spoke last weekend to members of the Central American caravan who have been waiting in a queue for months, at the West pedestrian entrance of the San Ysidro border crossing in Tijuana, for US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) to begin processing their asylum claims. Just last month the US military and CBP agents fired tear gas, rubber bullets and flash bang grenades at desperate workers and their families at the San Ysidro Port of entry. It is estimated that between six and seven thousand immigrants from Mexico and Central America are currently in Tijuana. Most of the caravan members spoke of feared repercussions from gangs they had fled and asked that their faces not be photographed. Guillermo, 30, left Honduras with his wife, 12-year-old son and 9-year-old daughter, following a death threat from a local gang that had been extorting him and recently murdered two of his cousins. The gangs had been extorting increasing amounts of money from his convenience store, so much so that very little was left for his family. I could not give them what they wanted. One day in June, Guillermo received notice that if he did not pay the amount demanded, he would be killed. He went home and told his wife and children they were leaving that day. Guillermo explained that two of his first cousins, who lived just two blocks away from him, were killed by las maras, members of the MS-13 gang, within a month of one another. They both worked for a taxi service and the gang that was extorting them demanded more payment. Guillermo showed WSWS reporters the photos of the mutilated bodies of his cousins, which he hoped would assist with his familys asylum claim. One man had a long cross cut through his abdomen, from which his intestines had been removed, and another had been hogtied and left in an alley to rot, where authorities found him. He told reporters that he was fortunate to have been given a warning, one that his cousins had not received. They were very close family, we are lucky that we got out, Guillermo said. The family has been in Mexico for nearly six months and only arrived in Tijuana in the last month. While running low on food and supplies, Guillermo had to find work in Chiapas for a while before the family could make their way to Tijuana. Guillermo and his family have joined a list of thousands, and have been waiting for their number to be called on the West Port of Entry from Tijuana into Southern California. He expressed frustration over receiving conflicting and contradictory information from legal counselors. There are some that give us hope and some that make it seem impossible. I want people in the US to know there are many good and hard-working people here, that one persons actions do not represent the whole. Manuel, a 52-year-old Honduran man, told reporters that he and his 10-year-old son had been in Tijuana for a little over a month and had seen immigration officials service just a few hundred people in that time. When we arrived on November 12, they were at number 1025, and a month later they are only at 1308, he said. Manuel, who did not wish to be photographed, said he sold hot dogs at a cart in Honduras and was also being extorted and threatened by las maras, which prompted their journey. A small tent outside the San Ysidro port of entry has been taking names and distributing queue numbers to new arrivals, who must continually check on the numbers being serviced daily. However, with the recent change in venue to El Barretal, an abandoned nightclub turned into a makeshift shelter, a 35-minute drive away from the port of entry, constant check-ins are difficult. Interactions between US Customs and Border Patrol and new arrivals are facilitated by Grupo Beta, which consists of volunteers who are themselves asylum seekers waiting for their own numbers to be called by immigration officials. Once their number is called a separate volunteer will step up to replace them. Immigration volunteers working with Al Otro Lado and other agencies, who provide legal advice to the caravan in Tijuana, stated that the entire number ledger system being used by CBP is in violation of international asylum and refugee law and that it is illegal for the US to decide it is only going to process a certain number, now 200-300 per month. Asylum seekers should be able to present themselves at a port of entry and have their asylum claim processed and be granted entryit is irrelevant if in the end their case is accepted or denied. By law, they must be granted safe entry while they await proceedings, one attorney explained to a group of volunteers. We help them navigate through hell... we tell them they will be stripped down, separated from their children, kept in Hielera (Icebox) for its freezing temperatures, fed two small frozen burritos a day; if your children were healthy, expect them to get sick in there. Just last week, seven-year-old Jackeline Caal died in the custody of CBP. Antelope Wells, the CBP facility where she had become extremely ill, had no medical personnel and was entirely unprepared to receive refugees in family groups. Her death was a direct consequence of the punishing and ruthless repression of immigrants by the Trump administration. Separated from parents and thrown into immigration prisons where temperatures are freezing, the conditions faced by migrants and their children are deliberately calibrated for the purpose of maximizing their suffering. Bowing to Trump, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has already made clear that Mexico will continue to prevent immigrants from reaching the US. Washington and Mexico City are currently negotiating a deal that would force Central Americans applying for asylum with the US to remain in Mexico during the process, also known as Remain in Mexico. Advocates and legal counselors warn that a Remain in Mexico policy would allow Mexico to becoming what is known by asylum law as a safe third country. Such a designation would allow US immigration officials to argue in the future that asylum in the United States is no longer necessary if they have safety in Mexico. During the first three months of the year alone in Mexico, 7,667 murders were reported, an average of 85 a day, according the Executive Secretariat of the National System of Public Security (SESNESP). Nearly 28 million people live in extreme poverty in Mexico, the majority of whom are concentrated in rural areas. Half of Mexicos 127 million residents do not earn enough to meet basic needs, and one in five suffers from hunger. Over half of Mexicos children live in poverty, and a United Nations study found that 14 percent of children suffer from stunted growth as a result of malnutrition. The stark reality that is avoided in all the coverage of the Central American caravan is that there are thousands of Mexicans, particularly from rural areas, who are seeking asylum in the United States, fleeing the same conditions as their Central American counterparts, and they have also spent endless months in Tijuana. The migrants and their supporters worldwide must reject entirely whatever deal is being worked out by Trump and AMLO, which will only exacerbate the violent repression of immigrants at Mexicos southern border. Only a movement by the international working class can defend the rights of the asylum seekers. Among the demands of such a movement must be the safe passage and legal entry for all caravan participants into the United States, the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the dismantling of the militarized border region, the immediate liberation of all immigrants detained in the United States, the provision of jobs, homes, health care and educational opportunities to the caravan participants and all immigrants, and a multi-trillion-dollar program to rebuild Central America, to be paid for by expropriating the wealth of Americas billionaires. The author also recommends: Mexican immigrants seek asylum amidst growing social inequality and crime [20 June 2018] The Labor Party concluded its three-day national conference in Adelaide yesterday by unanimously adopting a pro-US platform under conditions of rising geo-strategic conflicts and dangers of war, particularly between the US and China. The most revealing resolution omitted signing the UN nuclear weapons ban treaty, so as not to threaten the US alliance. Another opposed calls for a war powers act to limit the ability of governments to deploy troops or join US-led wars. These two key motions were adopted without any dissent during the final conference session on Australias place in a disrupted world. They underscored Labors intensified commitment to the US strategic and military alliance on which the Australian ruling class has relied since World War II. Exactly what was at stake in these resolutions was spelled out in a very public intervention, just hours before the carefully-orchestrated debate on foreign policy, by Gareth Evans, a former foreign minister. Making a prominent visit to the conference, Evans bluntly declared that signing up to the international campaign to abolish nuclear weapons would amount to tearing up our US alliance commitment. Gareth Evans with Penny Wong Evans, the foreign minister under the Hawke and Keating Labor governments from 1988 to 1996, used an interview with the Guardian to warn that if Australia signed the UN treaty it would be banned from assisting the US through the bases at Australias North-West Cape and Pine Gap, which were critical components of the alliance relationship. These satellite and communications bases are pivotal to US military operations throughout the Middle East and Indo-Pacific region, helping to conduct intensive surveillance, and guide missile strikes and drone assassinations. In the days before the conference, media reports had misleadingly predicted that Left faction leaders would call for the adoption of the UN treaty and war powers legislation. The mooted Left amendments to the party platform were designed to head off widespread anti-war sentiment. One measure of this sentiment came in an Ipsos opinion poll a month ago. It showed that 78.9 percent of Australians supported joining the nuclear ban treaty, which 122 countries have signed. Only 7.7 percent were opposed. By the time the issue got to the conference floor, however, a consensus motion had been drawn up with the help of Left leader, ex-Deputy Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who had been touted as insisting on signing up to the treaty. Anthony Albanese Albanese moved the agreed resolution, which cynically congratulated the pro-treaty International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons for returning to global prominence the cause of nuclear disarmament and claimed to agree with the ban treatys aspiration to rid the world of nuclear weapons for all time. After paying lip service to nuclear disarmament, the motion acknowledged the centrality of the US alliance to Australias national security and strategic policy. In order to uphold this alliance, the resolution said a Labor government would sign and ratify the treaty, but only after ensuring the treatys interaction with the long-existing Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and working to achieve universal support for the Ban Treaty. As everyone involved in this manoeuvre was well aware, this means never signing the UN treaty, because the US and other nuclear powers have refused point blank to support it, determined to retain their monopoly over the use of nuclear weapons via the NPT. Albanese himself was at pains to emphasise: I am a strong supporter of the US alliance. He argued that signing the UN ban treaty, on the terms and conditions contained in the motion, would not interfere with the alliance. Seconding the motion, however, shadow defence minister Richard Marles echoed Evans. He said it was no secret that the US opposed the ban treaty and the American alliance remains central to Australias strategic interests. Shadow foreign minister Penny Wonga leader of the Left faction alongside Albanesealso had made clear her vehement opposition to signing the UN treaty. In October she told the Australian Institute of International Affairs that the ban treaty had significant shortcomings and there was no prospect of existing nuclear weapons states signing the treaty. Earlier in yesterdays session, Marles had declared that the US alliance was more relevant than ever because Australia faced the most challenging set of strategic circumstances since the second world war. This was a thinly-veiled reference to the possibility of another world war. Marles claimed that the rise of China was fundamentally goodespecially for Australian mining exports. Nevertheless, Labor is totally committed to backing Washington, which is aggressively seeking, via trade and economic war, and military preparations, to prevent China from ever challenging its post-World War II hegemony in the Asia-Pacific and globally. Penny Wong During the session, Wong sought to satisfy another requirement of Washingtonthat Australia step up its military, economic and diplomatic activity in the South Pacific in order to block increasing Chinese aid, investment and influence. Wong said the platform represented a step-change in expanding Australias presence in the Pacific, making it front and centre in Australian foreign policy. Throughout the session, not a single vote was cast against any aspect of this predatory, pro-US imperialist foreign policy. There was an identical line-up against calls, championed by the Be Sure on War group, for legislation requiring parliamentary approval for entering conflict overseas. The outcome was another warning that a Labor government was ready to go to war in defiance of anti-war opposition. The Australian newspaper had reported that members of the Left, including Albanese and deputy party leader Tanya Plibersek, were advocating a resolution to give parliament to have the authority to declare war and send troops to a foreign battlefield. Such a resolution would not have challenged the governments power to launch war. Rather, it would have sought to legitimise such a decision by attaching a parliamentary rubber stamp. But the military-intelligence establishment had made it plain that any, even cosmetic, limit on the war power was unacceptable. Richard Marles Speaking to the Australian, Marles, the shadow defence minister, therefore flatly rejected any such resolution. He insisted that deploying military personnel outside Australia must remain the sole prerogative of executive government. As a result, all the factions came together to back a resolution asking a Labor government to refer the issue to an inquiry to be conducted by a parliamentary committee. The British Labour government convened a similar inquiry following the exposure of the weapons of mass destruction lies used to justify involvement in the invasion of Iraq in 2003. That inquiry ended with the power to launch wars being left legally in the sole hands of the prime minister, exercising the ancient war prerogative of the monarchy. The final version of Labors platform reinforced its unconditional pro-US orientation and war preparations by pledging to ramp up military spending, on top of the $200 billion already promised by the Liberal-National Coalition government over the next decade. Moreover, the conference vowed to foster a strong national defence industry and make it a national mission, involving all levels of government, employers and the trade unions. This echoes the historical role of Labor governments, which were called to office during both world wars in order to impose the burden on the back of the working class. Since Canada, acting at Washingtons behest, arrested senior Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, Canadas major media outlets have gone into high gear to justify her seizure as lawful and to depict China as a menace to Canada and the world. The criminal charges the US has brought against Meng are transparently trumped up and politically motivated. Yet this has not stopped the media from greeting Chinas complaints over Mengs arrest with hoots, and from portraying Canada as under attack from an overbearing and bellicose China. The Globe and Mail gloated, in a December 14 editorial titled "The end of the Trudeau government's China delusion," that Meng's Dec. 1 detention and the subsequent tit-for-tat arrest of two Canadian citizens in China have put paid to the Liberal government's plans for a free trade deal with Beijing. "The case of Meng Wanzhou has torpedoed the Trudeau governments China policy," enthused the Globe, the traditional mouthpiece of the Bay Street financial elite. "At the same time, it has also sunk Chinas Canada policy. Call it a win-win." The neoconservative National Post was equally jubilant. Writing in the wake of the arrest by Chinese authorities of former Canadian diplomat Michael Kovrig and businessman Michael Spavor, the Post declared their arrests could "prove useful," because "they ought to make it impossible for our prime minister, or any future prime ministers, to keep turning a blind eye to the criminal and thuggish nature of Beijings rulers." This turns reality on its head. The Beijing regime is no doubt authoritarian, representing as it does the capitalist oligarchy that emerged from the Stalinist bureaucracys restoration of capitalism in the Peoples Republic. But it is not the aggressor in this case. On the contrary, Canada, in collusion with its closest geostrategic and economic ally, mounted a political provocation, effectively kidnapping Meng on the very same day that US President Donald Trump met Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the G20 summit with the ostensible aim of reaching a deal to settle their US-instigated tariff war. The US is seeking to extradite Meng to face two charges of fraud, each of which carries a potential penalty of 30 years in prison. The charges arise from Washingtons unilateral extraterritorial sanctions on Iransanctions that in their global reach are both illegal and tantamount to an act of war. As observers have noted, Meng has clearly been singled out for exemplary treatment. Till now the US had not tried to hold executives of major corporations personally liable when seeking retribution for alleged cases of sanctions busting, choosing rather to levy financial penalties on the corporations involved. The day after Meng's arrest was made public, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau acknowledged that he was warned in advance about the planned action. Trump's National Security Adviser, John Bolton, also revealed that he knew about the plan to detain Meng, underscoring that her impending arrest was discussed at the highest levels of both the US and Canadian states. Acting on the orders of Canadas Justice Minister and Attorney-General Jody Wilson-Raybould, Crown prosecutors sought to deny bail to Meng, who in addition to being Huaweis Chief Financial Officer is the daughter of the companys founder and current CEO, Ren Zhengfei. Instead, a judge imposed onerous and humiliating bail conditions on Meng. These include that she must wear an electronic ankle tag at all times and pay for a round-the-clock security detail tasked with watching her every move, until her extradition hearing is concluded, a process that is expected to take many months. US President Donald Trump has himself underlined the political character of the charges against Meng, exploding Trudeaus pretense that her arrest was simply a legal-administrative matter. Last week Trump said he might intervene in Mengs case if it would help the progress of trade talks with China. In other words, Meng is to be used as a bargaining chip in US imperialism's drive to subordinate China to its global predatory economic and geostrategic interests. Reports have since emerged confirming that the arrest of Meng is part of a carefully prepared campaign, mounted by the United States and its allies in the Five Eyes global spy network, to prevent Huawei and other Chinese telecommunications and computer companies, from expanding their influence in global markets. The Sydney Morning Herald has revealed that a meeting of Five Eyes intelligence chiefs in Halifax, Nova Scotia last July discussed measures to combat the influence of Huawei and Chinese technology more broadly in the development of global 5G networks. The US, Australia, and New Zealand have already banned Huawei from their respective 5G markets, and Washington is pressuring Britain and Canada to follow suit. According to a report in Mondays Globe and Mail, the Halifax meeting, which Trudeau attended in part, was the second time this year spy chiefs from the Five Eyes intelligence network briefed Prime Minister Justin Trudeau about the national-security risk from Chinese high-tech giant Huawei. For both commercial and military-security reasons, US imperialism is determined to prevent China from becoming a major player in global technology markets, especially in the area of wireless 5G communications. As Michael Morell, who twice served as the acting director of the CIA put it in a Dec. 14 Washington Post column, the US is engaged in a "tech war" with Beijing. Morellno doubt outlining the ambitions of the Pentagon and National Security Agency should the US dominate the worlds 5G networkswarned that China could use Huawei-developed 5G technology as "espionage platforms;" and, since 5G will be "particularly suitable for connecting thingsand other mission-critical functions, to conduct sabotage, as well." The article concluded in a belligerent militarist tone, "There may not be an end to this technological cold war anytime soon, but it is vital for our national security that we not cede the fieldand win the battle for 5G." This is part of a much broader US-led strategy of confrontation towards China, arising in response to the loss of American imperialisms global economic dominance. Beginning with the Obama administration's "Pivot" to Asia, Washington has vastly expanded the military resources it has deployed in the Asia-Pacific to prepare for an armed clash with China. American warships and planes have repeatedly launched provocations over disputed territories in the South China Sea. These tensions have only escalated under Trump, whose tariffs against steel, aluminum, and other imports are principally aimed at forcing Beijing to permit greater foreign ownership in key economic sectors and to abandon its plans to make China a high-tech leader, under its so-called made in China 2025 strategy. The Globe and National Post editorials welcoming the Meng affair as an opportunity to shift the Trudeau government and public opinion behind a more aggressive stance against China underscore the broad support within the Canadian ruling circles for the US offensive against China. During the past year, both the media and security-intelligence establishment have stepped up pressure on the government and other institutions to take a hardline stance towards China. This included media support or at least acquiescence to Trumps imposition on Canada of a clause in the renegotiated North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that gives Washington an effective veto over any future free trade deal between Ottawa and Beijing. In his maiden public speech as head of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), David Vigneault warned of national security threats to Canada from foreign technology. While he did not mention China by name, this was clearly understood to be his target. Last week, the Globe revealed that senior CSIS officials met with representatives of the country's top research universities to urge them to beware of Huawei and curb Huawei-funded academic research. Important sections of Canadian big business are concerned about the potential damage to Canada-China trade caused by the deterioration of bilateral relations. But the Canadian ruling class views maintenance of its economic and military-security alliance with the US and of North American global hegemony as vital to upholding and advancing its own imperialist interests. That is why not only has the Trudeau government done Washingtons bidding in the Meng case and key corporate media voices pressed Ottawa to join the US in taking a more belligerent stance against Beijing. It is also why successive Conservative and Liberal governments have taken steps, behind the backs of the Canadian people, to integrate Canada ever more fully into the US military-strategic offensive against China. These include: The Harper Conservative governments conclusion of a secret agreement with the US in 2013 for enhanced cooperation between the US and Canadian militaries in the Asia-Pacific. The Canadian Armed Forces negotiation of forward-basing agreements with Singapore and South Korea to facilitate military deployments in the event of a conflict in the Asia-Pacific. The Liberal governments identification of China as a "global strategic threat" in its June 2017 National Defence Policy Reviewthe same review that announced a more than 70 percent increase in military spending over the next decade. The Canadian militarys deployment of ships and submarines to the South China Sea and the Strait of Malacca, and its assertion Canada must have a growing presence in these waters to assert its strategic interests and assure its role as a global player. Late Tuesday night, United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 2335 announced the ratification of its contract with auto parts manufacturer Lear Corporation in Hammond and Portage, Indiana, by a razor-thin 50.8 percent margin. The results, even if the vote count is to be believed, are illegitimate, the outcome of a corrupted contract negotiation process. The deal the union claims to have ratifiedwhich maintains the tier system and poverty wages and increases healthcare costshad already been rejected overwhelmingly by workers twice, first by 74 percent in October and then by 67 percent in November. The UAW responded to worker opposition to its pro-company proposal by doubling down on its efforts to ram it through, defying a 90 percent strike authorization vote taken in October. It announced last Thursday that it would be forcing a third vote on essentially the same deal workers had rejected, with the addition of a larger signing bonus and a few other paltry sweeteners thrown in. It continued to insist that there was no more money on the table, despite the fact that Lear, a Fortune 500 company, has been reaping record profits, showering its shareholders with $4 billion in stock buybacks and dividends since 2011. The large opposition in the official vote count359 in favor to 333 against, with 14 void ballotsreflects the ongoing and courageous determination of workers in the face of the increasingly desperate efforts of the union and the company to strong-arm them into accepting a sellout deal. Many workers who voted yes in the latest round did so under economic duress, with the UAW threatening job losses or the possibility of a fruitless and self-defeating strike over the holidays. Throughout the contract struggle, the UAW harassed outspoken or critical workers. I heard a lot of people were told if we didnt vote yes that they already had a group to replace us for less pay, a veteran worker at the Hammond plant said. Another worker at Hammond reported that Lear management was seeking to influence the outcome directly, reminding workers to vote over the PA system yesterday. Workers have responded with outrage to the ratification announcement. The second worker at Hammond said the moods at the plant Tuesday morning were angry, mad, somber, disgust, betrayed, pissed, cheated, etc. Stop me anytime. I think we got screwed plain and simple, said a worker at the Portage plant. They talk about wanting us to be able to afford better things, yet they forced us to accept a horrible deal knowing that we cant afford anything with what they stuck us with. Management was going around asking if we had voted; if we said no, they excused us from the line to go vote. Basically, what we got was the UAWs version of a Merry Christmas. They get their pockets lined by Lear, and we get a stupid fleece and dinner. Janet, a worker at the Hammond plant, wrote to the WSWS and said, THEY FINALLY GOT IT TO PASS....IM SICK TO MY STOMACH THIS MORNING!!! Workers posted bitter or angry comments on Local 2335s Facebook page, some asking how to leave the UAW or stating their intention to quit paying dues. So what is the proper procedure to opt out of this so called union? wrote Antalaya. Might as well keep the $59 that is taken out of my check monthly to offset the increase in my insurance and whatever else. People will sell their souls for a few coins. Hector, a worker at Ford, replied to a workers comment denouncing the results by pointing to the UAW corruption scandal. You need look no further than whats happening at the international level and it will answer all your questions. The UAWs claim to have ratified the sellout agreement at Lear over massive opposition confirms the warnings made by the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter: the UAW is not a workers organization, but rather a cheap-labor contractor that is immune to pressure from workers and dedicated to enforcing the companys will at all costs. As with other sections of the working class coming into struggle throughout this yearwhether teachers in West Virginia and other states, UPS workers, hotel workers or othersLear workers have found they are up against not just the company, but also the union. It feels like were fighting the union more than the company, Janet told the WSWS on Monday. My union president acts as if he owns us. Like were his property. The Autoworker Newsletter calls on Lear workers to hold emergency meetings and elect new organizationsrank-and-file factory committees independent of the UAWto discuss the vote and prepare workers response. Given the enormous opposition that has repeatedly been expressed to the contract and the hairs-breadth amount by which it supposedly passed, workers should demand a revote, free from the coercion of the UAW and the company and conducted under the supervision of workers committees. In order to carry forward the struggle and win new gains, such committees should formulate demands based on what workers actually need, such as: an end to the tier system; all workers immediately brought up to full pay with a 40 percent increase; the restoration of COLA, pensions, and health care, to be fully paid for by the company; and an end to the punitive point system. It is critical that workers at Lear break through the isolation imposed by the UAW and link up with workers at General Motors, Fiat Chrysler, Ford, and beyond, all of whom are facing a similar fight. Above all, rank-and-file committees must take as their starting point the fact that workers have class interests separate and opposed to the profit interests of the corporations and their wealthy owners, which are defended tooth and nail by the unions. The WSWS Autoworker Newsletter encourages workers at Lear to contact us today to share their reactions to the vote and discuss the organization of rank-and-file committees. Perhaps the stupidest slander among the many hurled at the Yellow Vest movement in France by the corporate media is the claim that the workers involved in militant protests over social inequality, poverty and low-wage jobs are opposed to environmental concerns because they balked at the gas tax imposed by President Emmanuel Macron. The New York Times, which has regularly circulated such smears, carried an op-ed column in its Sunday edition under the headline, Is Environmentalism Just for Rich People? Written by Dr. Neil Gross, a professor of sociology at Colby College in Maine, the column claims that the Yellow Vest protests are making environmentalists nervous and praises Macrons gas tax as part of an ongoing ambitious effort to combat global warming. Gross directly compares the Yellow Vests to workers in the United States: As with working class support for the faltering coal industry in the United States, the question arises: Is environmentalism a boutique issue, a cause only the well-off can afford to worry about? He cites a supposedly landmark 1995 sociological study showing that support for environmentalism is strongest in the higher income brackets, because citizens were apt to prioritize environmental concerns only if they were rich enough not to have to fret about more basic things like food and shelter. Rising economic inequality only exacerbates the problem, Gross maintains, arguing that in many of todays capitalist democracies, class and status resentments, fostered by rampant inequality and whipped up by opportunistic politicians, have developed to such an extent that issues like the environment that affect everyone are increasingly seen through the lens of group conflict and partisan struggle. A class-conscious movement of the working class (i.e., one that views issues through the lens of group conflict), must therefore by definition be hostile to environmental concerns that affect everyone. While Gross is clearly hostile to right-wing populists like Donald Trump and Marine le Pen, he essentially echoes their arguments that protecting the environment and protecting workers jobs and living standards are incompatible goals. Gross ignores the obvious fact that the measures proposed by the Macron government do not affect everyone, and certainly not equally. They slash the living standards of working people in the name of reducing fossil fuel consumption, while Macron lavishes tax cuts, business deregulation and other favors on the corporate elite. A second column in the Times on Monday is more openly reactionary, to the point of seeming absurdity. Professor Todd May, a professor of philosophy at Clemson University in South Carolina, poses the question in his headline: Would Human Extinction Be a Tragedy? May argues that this appalling suggestion is a valid one and an active subject of discussion in bourgeois philosophical circles. Why? Because we are devastating the earth and causing unimaginable animal suffering, which presumably justifies the extermination of seven billion human beings and their descendants. May concludes that if the planet no longer contained human beings it might just be a good thing. The professor argues that the entire human race is guilty of crimes against nature: It is humanity that is committing a wrong, a wrong whose elimination would likely require the elimination of the species The wrong includes the human contribution to climate change, the encroachment of human activity on various ecosystems and the development of factory-farming methods in agriculture that foster the creation of millions upon millions of animals for whom it offers nothing but suffering and misery before slaughtering them in often barbaric ways. May concedes that humanity has made valuable contributions such as the development of reason, art and science, and admits, Were our species to go extinct, all of that would be lost. However, he then launches into an argument founded on equating human and animal lives, posing what he apparently regards as an unanswerable question, [H]ow much suffering and death of nonhuman life would we be willing to countenance to save Shakespeare, our sciences and so forth? He answers, Unless we believe there is such a profound moral gap between the status of human and nonhuman animals, whatever reasonable answer we come up with will be well surpassed by the harm and suffering we inflict upon animals. At the risk of an accusation of species-ism, it has to be said that the May column calling for the death penalty for humanity for its cruelty to animals would appear more suited to the Onion than to the New York Times. But this dismal product of the academic sanctum is a serious warning of the political disorientation of sections of the upper-middle class under conditions of mounting class conflict within capitalism. Both columns, by May and Gross, are demonstrations of the literal dead end arrived at by thinking limited to the socio-economic framework of the profit system. It is not humanity that is guilty of contributing to climate change or the destruction of the ecosystem, as May claims. It is the capitalist class, which controls the world economy and determines its activities and development, including its impact on the environment. Nor is it the case, as Gross argues, that seeing issues through the lens of group conflict blocks the development of solutions to an environmental crisis that affects the entire planet. On the contrary, only a perspective based on the independent political mobilization of the working class offers a way forward. The inability of capitalism and the nation-state system to resolve the climate crisis was on display over the past two weeks in Katowice, Poland, the site of yet another UN-sponsored climate summit. The representatives of more than 200 governments, including 25,000 bureaucrats, scientists and diplomats, could not even agree to endorse a report on the looming dangers of global warming, let alone take any serious action to forestall it. They adopted a meaningless rulebook to implement the Paris climate agreement, which climate scientists regard as completely inadequate. This was done to preserve the pretense of international unity, under conditions where the Trump administration has already announced its intention to withdraw from the Paris accord next year, the earliest date at which it can legally do so. The unspoken premise of all discussion of the environment by the capitalist class and its representatives is that to stop climate change, the working class has to suffer. But why should workers have to pay for the criminality, incompetence and nationalistic pig-headedness of the capitalist ruling elites? The crisis of climate change underscores the deadly consequences of the anarchic and unplanned character of capitalist production, driven by profit and the strategic interests of the most powerful capitalist nation states. Far from environmental degradation being the responsibility of everyone, the 2017 Carbon Majors Report showed that 70 percent of all greenhouse gases released from 1988 to 2015 came from just 100 companies, all of which are controlled by multimillionaires and billionaires in the capitalist classes of the major countries. The only realistic response to the environmental crisis is a socialist one: the nationalization of the giant corporations and banks under workers control, the institution of scientific planning of the world economy, and the abolition of capitalism and the nation-state system. The Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) says that one in three GPs will likely quit their practice within five years. This confirms previous findings that a haemorrhaging of family doctors from the UKs National Health Service (NHS) is underway, as tens of thousands of people seeking treatment and medical advice already struggle to get appointments nationwide. Many are forced to go to hospital Accident and Emergency departments that are at breaking point. The RCGP surveyed over 1,000 GPs, with 31 percent of respondents stating they were likely to leave the general practice workforce within five years. Stress was one of the main reasons cited. Out of those surveyed, 37 percent said that there were vacancies needing filling in their current practice. Even more concerning were the 5 percent who stated their belief that their practice would close within the next year. Another survey released by the General Medical Council (GMC) regulating body concluded there was a high risk of doctors leaving the profession in unprecedented numbers. Its poll of 2,600 doctors found that more than half (56 percent) were looking into other career options, with a quarter having already cut their hours or gone part-time. Of concern, noted the GMC, was that the poll revealed that 21 percent of 45- to 54-year-olds and two-thirds of 55- to 64-year-olds planned to take early retirement by 2021. These figures could escalate, with the GMC warning that its findings come amid a backdrop of uncertainty over Brexit, which could affect the 9 percent of UK licensed doctors who are European Economic Area (EEA) qualified. This corroborates earlier findings, from the national GP work-life survey conducted at the end of 2017, which included 2,195 GPs in England. It found that 39 percent of respondents expected to leave direct patient care by 2022. This was comparable to 19.4 percent who expected to leave in 2005 and 35.3 percent in 2015. The work-life survey found that the principal reasons for stress included: increasing workloads, having too little time to do justice to the job, paperwork, changes to meet requirements of external bodies, and increasing demands from patients. In September, it was revealed that over 1,200 GPs were receiving support from a specially created mental health service that had been set up to assist primary care doctors. The main reasons were stress, fatigue and addiction-related issues. The Independent reported that the data suggested that as many as 357 surgeries were at risk of closing due to the direct risks of departing GPs. Given the average number of patients on the books of each surgery, this could result in a staggering 3 million people losing their doctors. A Freedom of Information investigation conducted by the Pulse GP news website revealed that 1.3 million patients have seen their surgery closed as a result of practice closures or mergers over the last five years. Nearly 450 GP surgeries were closed during that period. The past two years have seen an unprecedented acceleration of this process. Last year alone, there were 134 GP surgery closures displacing more than 450,000 patients. Doctor Helen Stokes-Lampard, chief of the RCGP, warned, We are talking about highly-trained, highly-skilled doctors, that the NHS is at risk of losingsome will retire, which is to be expected, but many are planning to leave earlier than they otherwise would have done because of stress and the intense pressures they face on a day-to-day basis, whilst simply trying to do their best for their patients. The crisis of departing health sector workers comes despite the pledge by the Conservative government, made as far back as 2015, to increase the number of GPs by 5,000. Official figures released this May instead show that the number of GPs in England has dropped by a 1,000 since 2015. Vacancies across the NHS, at the end of June, stood at a staggering 107,743 health sector workers . While data suggests that up to 320 GPs were retained through the GP retention schemedesigned to support GPs who would otherwise have left general practicethe figures are very small and inconsequential comparative to the numbers of GPs leaving. Statistics made available by NHS Digital for 2016/17 show that 5,159 GPs left the profession, equating to 430 departures a month. Pointing to the historic implications, Dr. Richard Vautrey, chair of the British Medical Associations (BMA) General Practitioners Committee of England, said, For the last 70 years general practice has been the foundation on which the NHS is built, but without proper support, investment and a plan to tackle the current retention crisis, it is in serious risks of crumbling. In March, a BMA survey found that 54 percent of respondents reported that retention rates had worsened or significantly worsened, with only 7.5 percent reporting any improvement in retention rates. Last year, Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) reported that more nurses and midwives left the register than joined, reversing the year-on-year increase of registrants from 2013 to 2016. The number of registered nurses and midwives dropped by more than 5,000 last year alone, with England having more than 40,000 nursing vacancies. As with GPs, terrible conditions, as the result of cost-cutting, and the decimation of frontline services have forced nurses and midwives to leave the register. The NMC conducted a survey between June 2016 and May 2017. Of the 4,544 responses received by the NMC from nurses and midwives regarding the reasons for them leaving the register, less than half cited retirement. In contrast: * 44 percent cited poor working conditions, for example, low staffing levels and workload. * 28 percent cited a change in personal circumstances, such as ill-health and childcare responsibilities. * 27 percent cited disillusionment with the quality of care provided to patients, along with poor pay and benefits . GP surgery closures and problems in recruitment and retention of family doctors, nurses and midwives are a direct outcome of the starving of funds and policies aimed at accelerating the privatization of the NHS carried out by successive Labour and Conservative governments. Private GP surgeries have sprung up across the country, in some cases within the same premises of NHS-run surgeries. Those who have money can pay 80 and 140 respectively for 20- and 40-minute consultations and to jump the queues. They can even have full health checkups by paying 450. In contrast, tens of thousands of working-class people continue to wait up to four weeks to get an appointment to see their family doctor in a flying consultation. Support the NHS FightBack campaign initiated by the Socialist Equality Party. For further details visit nhsfightback.org and facebook.com/Fight4theNHS The Bangladesh government is planning to move hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees from Burma (Myanmar) into prison-like dwellings on the remote and geographically unstable silt island of Bhasan Char. Around 900,000 Rohingya refugees are currently living in bamboo shelters and other makeshift accommodation in flood-prone valleys in Bangladesh, having fled murderous attacks by the Burmese military and Buddhist supremacist forces since August last year. The refugees are from Burmas north-western Rakhine state where they constitute an oppressed Muslim minority. Stripped of their citizenship rights in 1982, they have been subjected to systematic, state-sanctioned oppression and violence, including murder, rape, the destruction of whole villages and mass expulsions. A recent UN report estimates that almost 400 villages have been destroyed, and about three quarters of a million Rohingya have been forced to flee Burma. The Burmese government brands the Rohingya, who have lived in Burma for decades, or even centuries, as Bengalis or illegal immigrants and has called for their expulsion to neighbouring Bangladesh. About 200,000 Rohingya refugees were already living in Bangladesh before the latest exodus. The Rohingya have sought refuge in neighbouring Bangladesh in the hope that they would be sympathetically treated in the Muslim majority country. These hopes, however, have been cruelly dashed by successive governments in Dhaka. Despite widespread public sympathy for the refugees, the Awami League government initially used the military to block the entry of the latest wave of refugees. When this failed the government forced the refugees into squalid, over-crowded settlements and camps that lack clean water, proper sanitary and health facilities and adequate supplies of food. The government now wants to shift them to Bhasan Char. The prison-like conditions, which the government is attempting to hide, were revealed in video footage published late last month by the British-based Guardian newspaper. According to the newspaper, the Bangladesh government plans to send some 700,000 refugees to the island, which is situated at the mouth of the Meghna River, and only accessible by boat. The refugees will be housed in tiny breeze-block concrete rooms 2m x 2.5m, with small, steel-barred windows. There will only be one bathroom per 25 housing units. The government wanted to begin moving the refugees in October but construction delays forced a postponement until early next year. Nervous about domestic and international criticism, the government is attempting to hide information about the facilities and has placed the island under the tight control of the navy. Apart from registered construction workers, selected UN members and government officials, all access to the island and the building site is strictly prohibited. No official details or photos of the facilities have been released. An anonymous human rights activist who shot the video told the Guardian that the yet-to-be-completed facility was eerie and said that the hundreds of thousands of prison-like units [would create] an entire city of Rohingya This feels more like a prison camp than a refugee haven. Bhasan Char, which is prone to severe monsoonal flooding and typhoons, is a three-hour boat ride from the mainland and under military control. The shape-shifting island emerged from the muddy waters of the Bay of Bengal less than two decades ago. While the government has tried to justify its moves by claiming that the relocation is a temporary arrangement, the concrete structures at Bhasan Char make clear that the facilities are to be permanent. Refugees will only be able to leave the island if they agree to return to Burma or are accepted by a third country. With national elections scheduled for late December, the Bangladesh opposition parties are attempting to exploit widespread popular concern about the treatment of the Rohingya refugees for their own political gain. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina is waiting until the elections are over before releasing any details of its plan which will inevitably involve forcible relocations. The US-based Human Rights Watch has warned that the governments plans essentially turn the island into a detention centre. The agencys Asia deputy director, Phil Robertson, told the Guardian: Bangladeshs plan to transform a desolate isle into a packed settlement of Rohingya housed in stark concrete residential blocks raises concerns for both freedom of movement and long-term sustainability. Spelling out some of the future dangers that the refugees will face, he added: The housing blocks on display look sturdy, but how will they fare if a typhoon hits and floods the island? Will Dhaka ensure that anyone who agrees to move to the island will be allowed to leave and return freely? Last month the Bangladesh government attempted to forcibly repatriate 2,200 refugees to Burma but was forced to abandon these plans in the face of widespread protests. Mohamad Saddiq Hossain, a community leader from the Kutupalong refugee camp, told the Dhaka-based Telegraph on November 18: We will not return without being given our rights as citizens.. . We would rather die here than be taken back there. While Rohingya continue to flee Burma, the refugees, rather than endure the miserable treatment meted out in Bangladesh, are prepared to risk their lives by attempting to sail to Malaysia, Indonesia and other countries. Over 200 lives have been lost in the Bay of Bengal since August last year. The Guardian reported on December 5 that six boats carrying refugees from Burma had been washed ashore or stopped by authorities since October. Refugee boat sailings generally stop during June and August because of dangerous monsoon conditions. The fact that these sailings have resumed is another indication that the persecution of Rohingya by the Burmese government and its military and police continues unabated. The author also recommends: UN condemns Burmas persecution of Rohingya minority [30 August 2018] Seventy thousand Rohingya have fled Burma since repatriation agreement signed [21 March 2018] The characteristic aroma of the caranday poty (coconut blossom in Guarani), the most typical of Paraguays Christmas fragrances, is enjoyed throughout this season by shoppers visiting Asuncions Market 4. The coconut blossom, long and full of little yellow seeds that are continually shed and cover the floor of the market, is one of the products most in demand during the Christmas season, salesman Ruben Sosa told EFE. He said the flower has a pretty fragrance, so he and his family collect them from their own palm trees in the town of Aregua, some 30km (19 miles) north of Asuncion, because people like to put them in their offices and their homes. He added that there is also a red blossom that is called the caraguata flower, which is used to adorn the Nativity scene. Sosa makes traditional Paraguayan Nativities out of different kinds of wood and straw. He said people used to make their own, but since no one has time for that anymore, they come snap them up in the market. The Nativity sets, which can cost up to 600,000 guaranis ($100), are for a single use and aside from the ceramic figures representing the birth of Jesus in the Christian tradition, include offerings of fruits like watermelons, apples and corn on the cob so there is abundance in the home, Sosa said. Nonetheless, at present what is most common among urban Paraguayans is to decorate their Nativities with such fruits but now made of ceramic, since the real ones rot as time passes while these last a lot longer, said another of the vendors in the market, Magdalena Torres. Torres, also from Aregua, and who has been coming every Christmas for 40 years to sell in Market 4, added a sour note to the colorful aspect of the Asuncion bazaar in December, explaining that she and her family sleep in their stand during the two months of the Christmas season. They bed down right in the market to avoid being robbed and because its not worth paying the transport fare from Aregua and back every day. She noted that the lady who manages the stand next to her keeps watch on the place and sometimes a municipality representative drops by to collect the fee for selling goods there, but doesnt always collect it. She added that she doesnt pay taxes on her sales because, while she might be asked for a legal receipt, she just doesnt have the money. A woman has been found guilty of several federal offenses after climbing onto the base of the Statue of Liberty on the Fourth of July this year to protest the Trump administrations immigration policy, including the separation of families at the border and the jailing of migrant children. Magistrate judge Gabriel Gorenstein convicted Therese Patricia Okoumou on Monday afternoon after a one-day bench trial, insisting that Okoumous political and moral motivations were not justifiable before the law. Okoumou was found guilty of trumped-up charges, including trespassing, interfering with government agency functions, and disorderly conduct, carrying a sentence of up to 18 months in prison. At the beginning of her trial, Okoumou said the treatment of children at the US-Mexico border prompted her to make an aggressive statement by climbing the Statue of Liberty. I wanted to send a strong statement that children do not belong in cages, she said. After convicting Okoumou, however, Judge Gorenstein claimed that he would be undermining the rule of law if he did not find Okoumou guilty, despite her political reasoning. According to Gorenstein, it would violate his oath as a judge if he considered Okoumous motivations for her alleged crime. During the trial, the prosecution focused entirely on the supposed illegality of Okoumous actions. She knew that what she was doing was wrong and illegal, the prosecution said in its opening statement. Whether one sympathizes with the defendant politically and morally is not at issue in this case. The prosecution applauded the judges verdict, claiming Okoumous protest to be a dangerous stunt that endangered herself and the NYPD and US Park Police officers who rescued and apprehended her. In a press conference, US Attorney General Geoffrey S. Berman said, The act of climbing the base of the Statue of Liberty went well beyond peaceable protest, a right we certainly respect. It was a crime that put people at grave risk. We commend Judge Gorensteins decision to hold Therese Okoumou accountable for her dangerous and reckless conduct. Judge Gorensteins assertion that the law must be upheld is ludicrous. The laws set and made within the United States are interpreted for the benefit of the capitalist order and the ruling class. Okoumou was indeed exercising her First Amendment right to protest the inhumane treatment of migrants, but this was seen as inexcusable by the US government. It is no accident that Okoumou was found guilty shortly after the death of 7-year-old Jackeline Caal in the custody of US Border Patrol. Okoumous conviction is a message meant to intimidate anyone who opposes the terror practices meted out by the government against migrant workers and their families at the border and across the country. Although the Trump Administration reversed its policy of separating children from their parents upon crossing the border, it reportedly continues to do so by various means, and is also detaining children who have crossed the border unaccompanied. Nearly 15,000 migrant children are currently being held in detention camps across the US. Okoumou told reporters she was not discouraged by the verdict and would continue to fight for the rights of immigrants. Migrant children who simply came to this country, like our ancestors did, to seek happiness, freedom and liberation, instead of welcoming them like Lady Liberty symbolizes, instead of treating them with kindness, what we showed them is cages. So, if I go in a cage with them, I am on the right side of history. Trotsky, the Russian mini-series about Leon Trotsky, is now available on Netflix. The WSWS posted this comment on the slanderous eight-part series in November 2017. Russian television marked the hundredth anniversary of the October Revolution with the broadcast of an eight-part serial titled Trotsky. The series is an exhibition of the political, intellectual and cultural depravity of all those involved in the sponsorship and production of this grotesque falsification of history. No excuses can be made for anyonethe producers, director, scriptwriters, actors and assorted technical personnelwho participated in this mixture of lies, pornography, anti-communism and blatant anti-Semitism. They deserve, individually and collectively, nothing but contempt. Their association with this pathologically reactionary enterprise will define their careers forever. To the extent that this Trotsky has any enduring significance, it is as a demonstration of the fear and hatred of the October Revolution held by the Russian regime and the oligarchical elite. A quarter century after the dissolution of the USSR, the Putin regimewhich more or less openly promoted this film and welcomed its broadcast on Kanal Pervyi (the most prominent TV channel) as an official eventcannot allow anything approaching an objective and honest portrayal of the October Revolution. The main poster for the Trotsky TV-serial Above all, the Putin regime and the semi-criminal cabal of oligarchs who owe their current power and wealth to the theft of state assets that followed the restoration of capitalism require the perpetuation of the anti-Trotsky narrative. The lies that were employed to justify Stalins terror eighty years ago remain the foundation of official Russian history. The television serial departs from the script of the Moscow Trials of 1936-38 only in its more explicit reliance on anti-Semitism. Stalins regime, which still sought to present itself as the political continuity of the 1917 socialist revolution, portrayed Trotsky as the agent of British imperialism, German fascism, and the Japanese Mikado. Putins government, which strives to represent itself as the resurrection of Holy Russia, portrays Trotsky as the Judeo-Bolshevik anti-Christ. In fact, the main poster advertising the series consists of a frightening image of Trotsky dressed in black and with his eyes concealed by sunglasses in which a hell-like fire is reflected. Attached to his chest is a bloodstained cross. No doubt the Russian Orthodox Church, todays official state religion, gave its blessing to the depiction of Trotsky as a demonic, Mephistophelian figure. Trotsky is joined by a contrived portrayal of another Jewish socialist, Alexander Parvus (Gelfand), the alleged mastermind of behind-the-scenes treachery. What is it that motivates Parvus scheming? In this anti-Semitic horror story, the answer is insatiable greed. In various interviews, the films directors, Aleksandr Kott and Konstantin Statskii, and the scriptwriter, Oleg Malovichko, have explained their conception of the films principal character. Trotsky was a rock star, lacking only a guitar. Kott and Statskii do not provide Trotsky with a guitar. Instead, they clad him in black leather, surround him with women groupies, and supply him with hallucinations, not necessarily drug-induced, but the product of a tormented soul. The actor chosen to play the role of Trotsky, Konstantin Khabensky, had already played Trotsky a decade ago, somewhat sympathetically, in the film Esenin. According to Konstantin Ernst, one of the new series main producers and general director of Channel One, [Khabensky] had played him incorrectly, and we discussed this with Kostya. He took everything into account and understood what and how he would act now. Khabensky apparently learned his lesson well. He notes on the films website: Trotsky was a terrible man with a terrible fate. Nothing in Trotsky attracted me. This is a confession of artistic bankruptcy. With this statement Khabensky denies the character that he has been selected to portray any identifiable element of humanity. Trotsky as played by Konstantin Khabensky The plot device upon which the film turns is bizarre and totally unconnected to historic reality. The screenwriters fabricate a close and prolonged relationship between Trotsky and the man who will ultimately murder him. His assassin, Frank Jacson (Ramon Mercader) poses as a Canadian journalist (untrue) and approaches Trotsky for a series of interviews (which in real life were never sought or granted). After first refusing, Trotsky agrees to the interviews, although he knows that Jacson is a fervent Stalinist! Trotsky then nonchalantly strolls through the streets of Mexico City with Jacson (another fiction), who soon becomes a close confidant and welcome guest in the Trotsky household. These lengthy confessions, as concocted by the screenwriter, begin in May 1940, the time of the first attempted assassination carried out by the painter David Siqueiros and his gang of Stalinist killers. They continue into August 1940, right up to the day of the assassination, August 20 (wrongly dated August 21 by the filmmakers). As scriptwriter Malovichko explains: Jacson is the eyes and ears of the viewer. As the interviewer, he helps us penetrate into the secrets of Trotskys personality. We wanted to ask Trotsky uncomfortable questions, those that he avoided in his memoirs and other writings. Why, for instance, did he kill so many people? Using the interviews between Jacson and Trotsky, we could ask those uncomfortable questions. We wanted to make Jacson something like Trotskys inner voice, a voice that he always wanted to stifle. The many flashbacks to Trotskys earlier life provide a monstrously distorted view of Trotskys biography. The list of distortions and falsifications is so long, it would take a book to refute all of them. In one of the earliest scenes chronologically, in an Odessa prison in 1898, the 19-year-old Leiba Bronstein is presented as a young Jewish upstart who doesnt understand the Russian people. As is typical in anti-Semitic portrayals of the young Bronstein, he is assigned the name Leiba, the Yiddish form of the Russian name Lev. In fact, Lev was the young Bronsteins first name. But that is a comparatively minor distortion, compared to what follows. Bronstein/Trotsky has been arrested and imprisoned. It is there in prison that the young revolutionary forms his political philosophy, which is inspired not by books, but by advice from an unlikely mentor. The prison warden, Nikolai Trotsky, teaches him over a game of chess that the Russian people can be ruled only by fear. Meanwhile, he angrily declares, the naive dreams of the young revolutionary will lead only to the nightmarish vision in a quote allegedly from Dostoevsky: And then, in the 21st century, to the accompanying howl of the triumphant mob, a degenerate will pull a knife from his boot, climb the stairs to the marvelous image of the Sistine Madonna [a painting by Raphael seen by Dostoevsky in a Dresden museum], and slash this image in the name of universal equality and brotherhood. Thus, Bronstein learns a basic lesson: the Russian people will only be controlled through fear, but he must learn to unleash the mob to gain power. The Jacson of 1940 quizzically asks: So you took his last name? Trotsky replies: I not only took it, I made it immortal. Another fictional explanation for the formation of Trotskys bloodthirsty personality is the personal torment caused by his Jewish identity. Trotsky is mocked for being Jewish by, among others, his father, Stalin, Lenin, and Nikolai Markin (a sailor close to Trotsky who is much maligned in the film). The other malevolent Jew who plays a major role in this film is Alexander Parvus. This historic figure as presented in the film series is a crude caricature of the real personality. In the serial, Parvus is nothing but a lecherous and money-mad adventurer, seeking to destabilize Russia at the behest of the German government (beginning in 1903!). In fact, Parvus was for many years recognized as a major political theorist and strategist in the Russian and European social democratic movement. In 1897, he was one of the first to challenge Eduard Bernsteins revisionism, and in 1904-1906 he actively engaged in helping develop Trotskys theory of permanent revolution. It was after 1907, following the defeat of the first Russian Revolution, that Parvus became politically demoralized, and became involved in dubious commercial activities that were to shatter his reputation. But Parvus complex personality is dissolved into the sort of scheming money-grubber conjured up in anti-Semitic propaganda films produced by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945. The treatment of Lenin, though without anti-Semitic overtones (the Bolshevik leader was not Jewish), is an absurd portrayal of this monumental historical figure. He is presented as a scheming megalomaniac, the epitome of an utterly ruthless and inhuman will to power. No one can escape his drive to dominate and control. On the eve of the Second Congress in 1903, Lenin even threatens to drop Trotsky onto the street below (from a third-floor balcony) if he doesnt follow his instructions at the upcoming congress. Later, Trotsky hands over power to Lenin after leading the insurrection in 1917, as Stalin approvingly looks on. Natalia Sedova, Trotskys second wife, is treated as a Bohemian in Paris who is captivated by Trotskys take-down of Freud at a lecture in Vienna, an event which, like innumerable episodes in the serial, never happened. But Freud is used to provide further insights into Trotskys character. First of all, in 1903, he looks into Trotskys eyes and tells him that he has seen such eyes only among serial killers and religious fanatics. At the same time, he notes that Trotskys behavior at the lecture was that of a sexual aggressor who cannot satisfy his aggressive impulses, due, perhaps, to weakness. Later, in 1940, Freud appears before Trotsky in a hallucination that once again is the scriptwriters scurrilous concoction. After Trotsky assures Freud that he has not succumbed to weakness and is not afraid of dying, Freud adds: You know who is not afraid of dying? One who is already dead inside. The episode ends, punctuated by dark and ominous music, but anyone the least bit familiar with Trotskys vigorous fight to build the Fourth International (founded in 1938) and defeat Stalinism will know that Trotsky was hardly a man who was already dead inside. These scenes embody bad psychology, worse history and debased filmmaking. Other characters deserve mention. The sailor Nikolai Markin (1893-1918) is treated as a buffoonish, drunken semi-gangster (shaking down a pawnshop owner, for instance), who not only helps Trotsky and his family in 1917, but inexplicably has considerable authority among fellow sailors at Kronstadt and among delegates at the Petrograd Soviet. Markin and the Kronstadt sailors are portrayed as the main element in overthrowing the Provisional Government, acting, however, as an uncontrolled mob; workers are hardly seen, and peasants are completely out of the picture. Markins death in the Civil War near Kazan was a genuine tragedy aptly described in Trotskys My Life, but the young hero is used in the film mainly to suggest that he had an affair with Natalia Sedova (Jacson tells Trotsky that there were rumors to that effect), a total invention by scriptwriter Malovichko. Meanwhile, the revolutionary journalist Larisa Reisner and the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo are introduced semi-pornographically to titillate the audience and illustrate Bolshevik sexual immorality. Trotsky and Frida Kahlo, a major theme in the TV serial The scenes conjured up in Trotsky are at one moment absurd, at another despicable, and often a combination of the two. The directors cannot contain their malicious glee as they show in quick succession the deaths of Trotskys four children: Nina (coughing up blood on her deathbed in 1928); Zinaida (committing suicide in Berlin in 1933); Sergei Sedov (being shot by Stalins executioners in 1937); and Lev Sedov (injected with poison while recovering in a clinic in Paris after an appendix operation). Of all the many historical falsifications, the worst is the final scene dealing with the assassination of Trotsky in August 1940. With Jacson/Mercader in the next room, Natalia and Trotsky receive a telegram from the Canadian consulate explaining that Jacson is not a Canadian citizen as he has claimed. They realize that Jacson is a GPU assassin. But, after Trotsky tells Natalia that he loves her, he willingly goes to meet his fate at Jacsons hands. When Jacson appears reluctant to carry out his assignment, Trotsky starts beating him with his walking stick. Finally, in self-defense, Jacson grabs an alpenstock prominently mounted on the wall of Trotskys study and savagely strikes his victim three times. Virtually every detail in this scene involves fabrication and falsification. Trotsky did not know that Jacson was a GPU agent. The alpenstock with which Trotsky was assaulted was concealed in Jacsons raincoat. Worst of all, the assassin is portrayed as a hero who correctly defends Stalin and has held the moral high ground in all his conversations with Trotsky. Finally, Jacson/Mercader mercifully delivers his tormented victim from his empty and meaningless life. Trotsky and Jacson, in one of their fabricated excursions on the outskirts of Mexico City. In this ludicrous scene, Trotsky proves a point by pushing Jacson into the water that is supposedly filled with crocodiles. Jacson, of course, survives, chastened but able to later carry out the assassination. The film concludes with a bizarre fantasy. After he has been killed, Trotsky is seen walking into a blizzard before being run over by his civil war armored train, which had appeared in every episode as Trotskys virtual alter-ego (heartless, relentless, merciless in its destructive power). This film is a travesty of history. All who participated in its production have brought shame upon themselves. A few historians have made criticisms of the series after seeing the first episodes. Konstantin Skorkin, author of a major study of oppositionists victimized by Stalin, wrote an article entitled, The serial Trotsky has become the next pseudo-historical hack-work of Channel One. Joshua Rubenstein, author of the 2011 biography Leon Trotsky, said in September: Im intrigued by the idea that the producers would put Trotsky in the center of the narrative and not Lenin. I wonder what their intention is by putting an explicitly Jewish figure like Trotsky at the center of the story. He continued: If theyre saying that Trotsky was behind the execution of the Tsar [as the film suggests], thats simply not true. Lenin and Sverdlov executed the Tsar If theyre saying it was Trotsky, then I really question their motives because this is a very sensitive point. Trotsky always wanted to bring the Tsar to trial and serve as a prosecutor. The Tsar is an honored figure by the Russian Orthodox Churchto say that a Jew was behind his execution is a very incendiary accusation. Aleksandr Reznik, who has written two books on Trotsky, summed up the serials problems; In essence, the problems with Trotsky flow one after the other: 1) disregard for historical context, 2) tendentious interpretation of events, and 3) widespread distortion of facts. Given that the serial played prominently on Channel One, Reznik concludes that the creators of Trotsky bear responsibility for the falsification of history before an enormous audience. As Trotsky wrote eighty years ago, the lie is the ideological cement of social and political reaction. The interests and the very survival of the present ruling capitalist oligarchy, like the Stalinist bureaucracy from which it emerged, depend upon lies. On August 2, 2018, the Frankfurt-based lawyer, Seda Basay-Yildiz, received a letter evidently from far-right radicals. Using the vile language of the Nazis, the letter denounced Basay-Yildiz as a lousy Turkish pig and even threatened to slaughter her two-year-old daughter. The lawyers private address, which had never been published, was also included in the anonymous fax, which was signed NSU 2.0. Ms. Basay is a prominent lawyer in Germany. She represented the Simsek family in the trial of the NSU fascist terror gang which murdered 10 people, most of whom were migrant workers. Basay is also the lawyer for Sami A, who has been declared a threat to the German state. When the state administration in North Rhine Westphalia illegally deported Sami A to Tunisia, Ms. Basay filed an appeal against the deportation, resulting in a fine of 10,000 for the responsible authority. The anonymous hate letter, dated 2 August 2018, referred to this latter case. In retaliation for the 10,000 euro penalty we will slaughter your daughter, it read. One day later, on 3 August, Basay lodged a complaint with the police. However, it was only at the start of December, four months later, that Ms Basay learned moreand then via the press, not from the police. The complaint made by the lawyer was apparently a crucial clue in exposing a far-right network within the Frankfurt police. Attempts to ascertain how Ms Basays home address became public led directly to the service computer of the First Police Station in Frankfurt. According to official records, a policewoman had requested this information, without giving any reason, shortly before the threatening letter was sent. Following a search of the mobile phone and other hard drives of the policewoman, it emerged that she had conducted a xenophobic and right-wing exchange with four other police officers over a considerable period. Through WhatsApp, the five officers had exchanged neo-Nazi messages, pictures of Hitler and swastikas, as well as messages denouncing immigrants and disabled people. These findings were apparently kept secret by the authorities for months. Based on information from the Hessian State criminal office, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) reported on the existence of a right-wing police network in Frankfurt only in early December, although an internal inquiry against the suspects had already commenced. The lawyer was not informed of any of these developments and only read about them in the FAZ, which reported her saying: I would have preferred it if the police had informed me beforehand. The lawyer, concerned for the safety of her daughter, had repeatedly asked the police for information, without ever receiving a proper answer. Officially, it is now being said that the police and prosecutors are extremely cautious, fearing that the case may assume even larger dimensions, i.e., far more suspects than the five policemen could be involved. Leading politicians are now making every effort to play down the case. CDU member of parliament Armin Schuster stated: We must be very careful to ensure that there is no social unrest! Schuster is chairman of the interior committee in the German Bundestag and a leading advocate of a pan-European police network. The comment by a member of the Bundestag for the Greens in Hesse, Omid Nouripour, is also significant. Asked by the Neue Presse in Frankfurt whether he believes that the police are more predestined for extremism than other social groups, Nouripour emphasized: No way. He then demanded an early warning system for the police, claiming that this could prevent similar cases in future. Using such arguments, politicians are seeking to distract attention from their own role. The Greens share power in the state of Hesse with the CDU, and both parties are responsible for the systematic rearming of the security forces. They have deported refugees more systematically and brutally than many other states, thereby creating conditions in which the far right could thrive. It is not just a few rotten apples in an otherwise healthy system. This case again shows that the fascist threat stems not from the working population, but rather from the state apparatus. The far right cell within the Frankfurt police is actually the tip of a massive iceberg. Right-wing extremist structures exist in all parts of the state apparatus. Recently, the head of the German domestic intelligence service (BfV), Hans-Georg Maaen, was relieved of his post after denying that neo-Nazis had run riot in the city of Chemnitz. In its most recent report, the BfV does not mention the Alternative for Germany (AfD), although this party regularly incites against immigrants, stirs up racism and downplays the crimes of the Wehrmacht and the Nazi state. The Socialist Equality Party (SGP), on the other hand, is referred to in the BfV report as left-wing extremist on the grounds that it is opposed to alleged nationalism, imperialism and militarism and criticizes capitalism. A neo-Nazi network was also uncovered last year in the Bundeswehr, when the terror plans of Franco A. emerged by accident. The Bundeswehr officer had registered as a Syrian refugee, procured firearms and planned attacks on high-ranking politicians, seeking to blame them on refugees. Nevertheless the Higher Regional Court in Frankfurt Main saw no reason to bring charges against him. More recently, when the Focus magazine published new details in November about a neo-Nazi terrorist cell in the German Army involving about 200 former and active Bundeswehr soldiers, other media outlets did not react and the matter was quickly hushed up and dropped. The judiciary in Germany often looks the other way when it comes to the criminal activities of fascists. It accepts the close connection of the prosecution and the police. No satisfactory explanation has ever been offered in the cases of Oury Jalloh and Amad Ahmad, who both burned to death in police custody in separate incidents. In both cases, the prosecution accepted the unconvincing arguments given by police. Another example is the NSU trial, which ended in July 2018 after five years, and 438 days of hearings. The only defendant to be sentenced was Beate Zschape, the only survivor of the NSU murder trio. The trial simply ignored the role played by the dozens of undercover agents and police officers, who actively supported or were active in the milieu surrounding the trio. Prominent supporters of the NSU such as Ralf Wohlleben and Andre Eminger, who assisted in the murder of nine immigrants and a policewoman, received only brief prison sentences. They are already both at large. Attorney Seda Basay-Yildiz took part in the NSU trial as a co-prosecuting attorney for the Simsek family. In an informative review of the NSU trial by the radio station Bayern 2 (Whats left of the NSU trial?), she notes that she lost many illusions and became more political in the course of the trial. She stated: In the case of every family of the victims, the family itself was always the first to be suspectedall families with an immigrant background. According to the constitution we should all be the same but this is simply not the case. The WSWS UPS Workers Newsletter urges workers to subscribe for regular updates here. It is more than two months since the Teamsters union illegitimately ratified a sellout five-year national labor contract covering a quarter of a million United Parcel Service (UPS) workers. The union utilized a loophole in its constitution to despotically override a 54 percent no vote by the membership. One month later, the Teamsters forced through a separate contract on almost 12,000 subsidiary UPS Freight division workers, after making them vote again on virtually the same agreement they had already rejected. The Teamsters threatened the freight workers with a lockout and the loss of medical benefits if they continued to resist the company-backed deal and declared that they would instruct workers at the much larger parcel division to remain on the job if the freight workers went on strike. The outcome of the unions gangsterism is a series of far-reaching attacks that will permanently reduce the conditions and wages of current and future UPS workers. These include the creation of a new tier of lower-paid hybrid warehouse/driversa first step for extending the conditions of part-time work from the warehouse to the delivery driversand the maintenance of poverty-level wages for hundreds of thousands of warehouse employees who remain part-time employees. As if this were not bad enough, the unions actions have given the company a green light to press its offensive. Workers from multiple hubs who spoke to the WSWS UPS Workers Newsletter this week report that in the past two months, management has carried out a wave of layoffs and firings of workers, cut workers hours, and closed or idled unprofitable hubs. At a southern California hub, Irene, a porter who has worked at UPS for more than a decade, said the company is firing people left and right for things like stealing hours, which means they were having a conversation at work. In the last couple months, I know four people whove been fired, and thats just those I know of, she said. Sometimes you go years before hearing about someone fired, and then its four in a row. She said one worker with 22 years at the company was terminated last week because they said he had stolen 400 hours of time from them over 22 yearsthe equivalent of approximately 20 minutes per week, or 4 minutes per shift. Its ludicrous, she said. It took them 22 years to find that out? Another coworker was terminated because they said they caught him sleeping on camera. Irene said the company has to have proof for that, but the Teamsters Business Agent didnt even show up to the review panel. Whenever you call them about something, they say theyre away at panelbut then theyre never there when you need them. The worker was so intimidated he didnt challenge it and left. Last Thursday, Irene and her coworkers arrived at work at 6:30am to a notice from management written on the dry eraser board: Combo [combination] workers, no more than four hours, and part-timers, no more than 3.5. This means Irenes hours have been cut from almost full-time to 18 hours per week. Its crazy. Ive never witnessed this before. They say theyre making cuts everywhere. Management just told us they might be laying us off after New Years. The company says the union is not going to fight for you, so youve got take it. Irene also said that warehouse workers are yet to see the $13 an hour starting wageitself below the poverty-line for a familywhich the Teamsters proclaimed as a central victory in its sellout agreement. Were told we might see our retroactive pay increases in March. We asked the Teamsters Business Agent about it and he said we are selfish. Every day is like something new thats bad. Peter is a part-time warehouse worker in Indianapolis. He earns $10.35 an hour and works a midnight shift, often for as few as three and a half hours. He earns so little he cannot afford a car, so when he is told to go home early, he has to wait in the break room for up to an hour until the 4:30am bus. He described the conditions of endless management harassment, which have been intensified since the contract. We have slave-like conditions, he said. Management bark and push and order the part-timers. They preach safety, but were pushed harder and faster. He said that if UPS could go back down to $8.50 an hour, theyd do it. The supervisors are told by management that they should get eight hours of work from us in 3.5 hours [and] to get it done at all costs. They are supposed to send the full-timers home, while getting us part-timers motivated. That means constantly yelling and screaming, Go, go, go! Lee, a UPS Freight driver in Illinois, said multiple workers have been laid off or not asked to come in to work since the contract was pushed through. Having been permitted by the Teamsters to empty all the freight from its system in the midst of the contract vote in Novemberan action aimed at intimidating workers with the threat of a lockoutmanagement is now justifying layoffs with reference to a loss of business as a result of its own actions. Another driver at Lees hub had been called in to work on only two days in the month since the contract was ratified. Lee noted that the driver was one of those guys who filed grievances. Im starting to think they are weeding out the ones they think are troublemakers. He said he had seen a lot of guys posting about closures and layoffs on Facebook. They said one of the hubs in North Carolina was now unprofitable. A lot of line-haul and dockworkers are being laid off. Ive been telling people that being a Teamster used to mean something, but it doesnt anymore. The powers that run it are doing backroom deals, midnight handshakes with the very people theyre negotiating with and selling out the membership. Lee said he had seen the report by the WSWS on the December 9 public meeting in Detroit, organized by the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter, where autoworkers from the Midwest adopted a resolution calling for the formation of rank-and-file workplace committees, independent of the United Auto Workers, to organize a struggle against General Motors planned plant closures in the US and Canada. I think this is an excellent thing, Lee said, adding that if workers have their own committees, the guys on the floor will have a voice that can be heard, and could address grievances on the shop floor. If youre a janitor in a school, or the guy out there on the assembly line building Buicks, we all take pride in our job and want to go home at the end of the day, he said. We dont want to be scared to death of not having a job at 5pm or if youll get paid or have benefits next week. Something like that, if its organized, will unite so many people on so many levels. I deliver grinding wheels that are used in auto assembly. We are connected. We have to come together and have a voice and unite us all: UPS, auto industry, schools, hospitals, all of us. It would send a clear message that we arent going to take what corporate America is selling anymore. And we should do it internationally, he added. The companies are saying we cant afford it and we can go somewhere else. That way theyll be met by the same voice, wherever they go, that theyre met with here. Irene said she was proud of the decision by autoworkers to establish a committee to fight back. Everyone should get away from the damn union because its useless, she said. We all need to walk out together: not just UPS, but Amazon and auto too. This isnt just America, whats happening in France [mass Yellow Vest protests] is what were dealing with here, she said. The whole world is fighting. So, we have to fight. The corporations need to fall. More and more people are saying we need to break from the unions. They threaten to fire you if you stop paying union dues, and thats how they hold onto you. But the people have to stand up. The WSWS UPS Workers Newsletter urges workers to subscribe for regular updates here. TUPELO, Miss. (WTVA) - A deadly drive-by victim's family is filing a claim against the City of Verona and its police chief after they say a suspect was illegally released from jail without bond. The notice of this lawsuit comes right after the funeral for the victim was held Tuesday. Latavious Betts, 17, is accused in the death of 66-year-old Annie Walton in the December 7 shooting that occurred in the Palmetto community of Lee County. He never should have been on the streets," said the Walton's attorney Casey Lott on Betts. "He should have been behind bars and incapable of committing crimes. The ball was dropped not once but twice by Chief J.B. Long. In a previous interview, Long stated that he did not have enough evidence to hold Betts. The facts on which the claim is based state that Long arranged for Betts to not see a judge for an initial appearance on his first murder charge for a shooting that took place back in April. Legal documents for the suspect's waiver of initial appearance and appearance bond were never signed by a judge or Lee County Sheriff Jim Johnson. Fast forward to July, Betts is back in handcuffs for another shooting, in which he is charged with aggravated assault. So he never should have been allowed to post bond on the aggravated assault charge," said Lott. "Unfortunately, he was allowed to do so because the chief of police, J.B. Long, failed to inform Judge Holland that he was already out on bond for a first-degree murder charge. The recent deadly shooting could have all been avoided, according to the family. Never have I heard of this happening before," expressed Lott. "Someone being released on a recognizance bond on a murder charge is Im sure unprecedented. Update 12/19/18 4:26 p.m. The following update was reported by the Associated Press. Webster County Sheriff Tim Mitchell Scene at Webster County Sheriff's Department Scene at Webster County Sheriff's Department Tim Mitchell | Photo: MHP Tim Mitchell | Photo: MHP Webster County Sheriff Tim Mitchell (AP) - A charging document says a northern Mississippi sheriff was stealing guns and drugs, seeking sex with inmates and threatening employees if they told anyone about the crimes. Webster County Sheriff Timothy Mitchell was arrested Wednesday at his Eupora home and is jailed awaiting a Thursday court appearance. District Attorney Doug Evans says he knows of no lawyer representing Mitchell. A sworn statement accuses him of crimes beginning in November 2017, when he's accused of illegally buying pills from an informant. Beginning this spring, Mitchell is accused of seeking sex with two women in his jail. He's also accused of ordering a deputy to remove four guns from evidence and conveying at least some to an employee and an inmate. Mitchell also provided that inmate with illegal drugs and a cellphone, charges say, while ordering the deputy to remove drugs from evidence. Charges say Mitchell threatened then-Chief Deputy Jeffrey Mann and two other employees if they told anyone. Update 12/19/18 2:05 p.m. Tim Mitchell is expected to make his initial court appearance tomorrow, Dec. 20, at 3 p.m. in Eupora. See the original post below. WEBSTER COUNTY, Miss. (WTVA) - Webster County Sheriff Tim Mitchell has been arrested on multiple felony charges. According to the Mississippi Department of Public Safety and the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, Mitchell, 53, of Eupora, has been arrested and charged with the following: - 2 counts of embezzlement - 2 counts of trafficking in stolen firearms - 1 count of attempting sex and/or sexual acts with an inmate - 1 count of tampering with physical evidence - 3 counts of retaliation against a witness - 1 count of permitting possession and/or sale of a controlled substance in jail - 2 counts of furnishing an inmate with weapons, cell phone, and narcotics He is currently serving his second term as the sheriff of Webster County at the time of his arrest. He is currently in the Lafayette County jail pending his initial appearance. RELATED: Webster sheriff says he will retire in January John Bissell of Greylock Federal Credit Union and Diane Pearlman, executive director of the Berkshire Film and Media Arts Collaborative, lead a memorial to the late Lauri Klefos at 1Berkshires' annual meeting at Greylock Works last Thursday. Diane Pearlman and John Bissell talk about their friend and colleague, Klefos. Klefos would go through all the metrics for the organization on a giant spreadsheet every week. Kelli Kozak of MountainOne talks about how 1Berkshire ties in with the financial institution's community endeavors. Danielle Gonzalez, a board members, tells of her involvement that began through the Berkshire Leadership Program. Erika Allison concludes the annual meeting. Grazie Ristorante catered the event. A broad array of member businesses and organizations were on display in the marketplace. PreviousNext 1Berkshire Annual Meeting Remembers Klefos, Looks to Year Ahead 1Berkshire President and CEO Jonathan Butler welcomes members and local elected leaders to the organization's annual meeting. NORTH ADAMS, Mass. 1Berkshire's annual meeting last Thursday was a celebration: not just of the work the organization's been doing this past year but a reflection on the life of one its primary architects. Vice President Lauri Klefos, who had been head of the merged Berkshire Visitors Bureau, had died unexpectedly just a week before, sending shockwaves through the tourism and business community. "She saw 1Berkshire as a vehicle that would allow us to leverage our resources and amplify our voice for a larger audience," John Bissell, president and chief executive officer of Greylock Federal Credit Union. "When it came to the 1Berkshire model, Lauri just plain got it." It was incumbent upon the 1Berkshire team to keep it together and push through and get the annual meeting ready, said 1Berkshire President Jonathan Butler, who like many of those affiliated with 1Berkshire was wearing a bit purple, Klefo's favorite color. "You're all very familiar with what our organization has gone through the past week and it meant everything to this group that we proceed with this annual meeting," he told the large gathering at Greylock Works. "We did right by Lauri and we put together it all tonight so I just want to say, team, job very well done." The annual meeting included a marketplace of members showing off their wares from educational institutions to chocolatiers and a breakdown of the initiatives and events of the past year, along with a reorganization of officers. Also speaking were Kelli Kozak, vice president of community engagement at MountainOne, the meeting's presenting sponsor, and Danielle Gonzalez, human resources director at Williams College. Butler said he believed one of his more important responsibilities was to report back to the membership on the efforts and results of the previous year. "Keeping you updated about the work that we're doing, being transparent and detailed when highlighting the impact of your investments in the work that we do," he said. The annual meeting is one of two major fundraisers for the organization, which is in its third fiscal year as an integrated entity of the former Berkshire Chamber of Commerce, Berkshire Visitors Bureau, Berkshire Creative and Berkshire Economic Development Corp. Butler said the organization continues to grow in revenue generated through dues from its 1,000 or so members, investors that give above their dues, state and federal grants, events and programs, and the initiatives such as the new "jobs thing." Of the $1.8 million budget, about $400,000 comes from dues. Butler said 1Berkshire has a very diverse membership of small and large businesses in a wide array of fields from every one of the county's 32 communities. He believes there is room to continue to grow membership. He pointed to the organization's new director of member services, Erika Allison, who has changed the way 1Berkshire communicates with its members by creating excitement and engaging members on social media promotions. The pool of investor funds helps underwrite a lot of 1Berkshire's economic development work and the events bring in about $9,000. Programs products that the 1Berkshire generates itself are a growing revenue source, Butler said, and include things such as ads on the website, guides, co-op marketing and the jobs thing. On the economic development side, the team has had more than 200 interfaces with local businesses in 2018, offering guidance, assistances, mentorships and referrals, and graduated nearly two dozen through its mentor training sessions and business boot camp. The jobs things also launched with the goal of attracting new talent to the region as well as being a local jobs resource. It's had 120 job postings for positions starting at $50,000 or more with 100 filled. The initial marketing campaign through Facebook and LinkedIn saw a half-million impressions. 1Berkshire is also the co-chairing a state-created commission on the Berkshire Flyer 2.0 project with the Berkshire Regional Planning Commission with the goal of restoring passenger service between New York City and Pittsfield. "A huge percentage of the work we do is marketing," Butler said. "Marketing to visitors, marketing to new recruits, marketing to businesses. The backbone of this has always been how we communicate with visitors who bring lots of revenue into our economy." 1Berkshire had more than 162 million PR impressions (or interaction with any content) in fiscal 2018 but believes that counting other sites such as the Clark Art Institute or Jacob's Pillow creates a multiplier of three or four. "So you're talking about the approach of billions of impressions in terms of the Berkshires brand around this country in different markets," he said. There are also more than 35,000 followers between This Is the Berkshires and 1Berkshire, the two primary social media outlets. "That gives us significant reach with very little expense." The team has also found video is driving the most traffic and outperforming all other banner ads by 20 percent. Butler said the 1Berkshire is still focused on the so-called "legacy visitor" but is finding the numbers are closing to a 50/50 split between legacies and next generation of Gen X and millennials so is shifting to communicate better with the younger visitors who may be more interested in outdoor recreation and the food economy. "As an organization, the trend that Lauri worked hard on, we're spending more and more marketing on the all four seasons experience in the Berkshires," Butler said. For 2019, the jobs thing will be getting bigger, Berkshires.org/Berkshires.com will be getting an overhaul, a podcast on living and working in the Berkshires will begin, and the Berkshire Blueprint 2.0 will launch. "It's been a huge initiative that's lasted 18 months and we believe we're going to publish this thing at the end of January and we're pretty excited," he said. The blueprint, a followup on the decade-old countywide action plan, will take "a very deep dive" into five economic clusters: tourism and hospitality, manufacturing, health care, food and agriculture, and the creative economy. Lauri Klefos was involved in the county's tourism industry for a decade. She died unexpectedly at Berkshire Medical Center on Nov. 28. "It's going to create a roadmap for how we continue to leverage growth in those industries that are all on trajectories with the potential to grow right now," Butler said. "It's also going to outline massive regional investment made the past few years, which will probably be the most positive takeaway in terms of momentum that we have in the Berkshires. It's going to synthesize it in a way where people can better understand some of the good things that are happening here." The business meeting was preceded by a 10-minute dedication to Klefos punctuated with cries of "We love you Lauri!" lead by Bissell and Diane Pearlman, executive director of the Berkshire Film and Media Arts Collaborative. Bissell and Pearlman shared their stories of working with Klefos, her friendship and her dedication to the Berkshires. "Lauri loved to explore this region," Bissell said. "Lauri always knew what was in the pipeline and how to package the message for the upcoming visitor season. ... She could tell you where to find the perfect gift, where to look for the best local bargain, and definitely where to find a good glass of wine." Klefos was a stickler for detail and a thorough professional, they said. And while she expected a lot from her teams she also the inspired them to be their best, Pearlman said. "What I learned about Lauri was when she put her mind to something, you just had to ride your horse in the same direction," Pearlman said. She later added, "One person said to me on Facebook, she was a soft, powerful person. But my favorite line was this: she was kind, genuine and sort of a badass." 1Berkshire reorganized with the following departures and elections: leaving at the end of their terms are Van Shields, Joseph Thompson and John Vittori; voted in are Adam Davis and Jodi Joseph; renewing three-year terms are John Bissell, Jerry Burke, Gordon Dinsmore, Danielle Gonzalez, Donna Halton, Riad Maher, Vicki Saltzmann, Betsy Strickler and Colleen Taylor; elected are Chairman John Cahir, Vice Chair Danielle Gonzalez, Vice Chair Eva Sheridan, Treasurer Lori Gazzillo-Kiely and Clerk Jeffrey Cook. Executive Director Amber Besaw speaks during the forum at First Congregational Church in Williamstown on Dec. 14. North Berkshire Coalition Forum Listens to Community's Kids WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. Out of the mouths of babes. At the Northern Berkshire Community Coalition's December monthly forum held for the first time outside of North Adams, at First Congregational Church in Williamstown Executive Director Amber Besaw unveiled a six-minute video she made in conjunction with Paul Marino from Northern Berkshire Community Television in which several local children were filmed answering questions about their own families. The airing of the video to the nearly 100 people in the church's Fellowship Hall kicked off the forum subject: "Re-Imagining How We Support Children in Our Community." The topics brought together people from all walks of life with an interest in the health and well-being of North Berkshire children, including school nurses and pediatricians, child care providers and social workers, education officials and many, many parents with first-hand interest and experience. But even for those who don't have children or actively work with children, the community as a whole should support the healthy development of today's youth, Besaw said. She shared an anecdote about the use of the "our" in front of "kids" in the title of the video, "What 'Our Kids' Had to Say'" the "our kids" used to mean the community's children but has come to mean instead one family talking about their own children, a shift toward isolationism and away from community. "There are all of our kids in our community," she said. The film led to a discussion in which breakout groups discussed the five "protective factors" of healthy families, a research-based, cost-effective framework developed by the Center for the Study of Social Policy over the last decade. These five factors are enhancing parental resilience; providing an array of social connections; providing parents concrete support in times of need; facilitating knowledge of parenting and child development; and supporting healthy social and emotional development in young children. "It's an approach," said Stacy Parsons, who worked for Child Care of the Berkshires until recently taking the job of education program manager at the Berkshire Museum. "It's not something you have, it's something you do. "Kids need adults who can model these in a positive way." The adults in the room happily supplemented by a few teen voices, thanks to the presence of students from Drury High School's E3 Academy shared thoughts and suggestions for how to support those protective factors in North Berkshire, from the need for parents to have solid support networks and to understand appropriate child development to the need for community members to be comfortable reaching out to help parents in non-judgmental ways. "We need to create a healthy interdependence of all families," said Amy Hall, the program director of the Family Center, a part of Child Care of the Berkshires. But it was perhaps the voices of the kids in the video themselves that highlighted the forum, even in a short six minutes. The children, ranging in age from early education to adolescence were asked a variety of questions about their families and their parents, and their answers ranged from funny to sweet to inspiring. In answering the question, "What makes your family strong?" several of the kids cited their love for each other. "We get along," one child said. When asked how parents learn to be parents, many of the kids intuitively seemed to understand they learned from watching their own parents or other parents, although one child said parents learn from their kids, too. And one child said, "they can make mistakes sometimes." When asked how their families solve problems and how they go back to being OK after a disagreement, the kids mentioned working together to help each other or taking a breather in their rooms. "We work together to make things right," one child said, and another said, "We just try to keep it normal for a while." At the end of the video, the kids were asked what they would want to tell adults it's like to be a kid. One child offered that "kids just need time away from their parents when times get hard" and another said, "sometimes we like to fool around and sometimes they don't like that so they might want to know that sometimes we want to fool around and sometimes they should just let us fool around." And then they were asked what they would tell adults if they could only tell them one thing: "They can't yell." "Being a kid is fun." "Never give up on your children." "I love them." "Kids' words are important." Illustrator Dawn Nelson reads 'The Bag Family' at Real Eyes Gallery on Saturday. Nelson displays her rendition of the diaper bag that joins 'The Bag Family.' PreviousNext North Adams Artist Publishes Children's Book 'The Bag Family' is a product of two college friends who were inspired to return to their efforts 35 years after they started. ADAMS, Mass. Dawn Nelson had a book rolled up in the back of her closet for 35 years. On Saturday, she was finally able to debut "The Bag Family" that she wrote and illustrated with her college friend, Karen Zander. The short children's book is the story of the bags used by a family every day. A diaper bag arrives with the new baby and is soon learning about the roles that each of the bags including a pocketbook, a backpack and a briefcase with self-esteem issues play in the family. When they try to change things up with the help of a family pet, it disrupts everyone's day and they learn to work together as a team. At a reception held at Real Eyes Gallery on Park Street, the local artist said she and Zander had attended college together and later had both moved to Boston. "She said, 'let's do a children's book together,'" Nelson said. "She had this idea, she had little kids and she was dragging around their bags ... The bags started, like, matching the kids and it sort of seemed like their own family." Zander wrote a draft and Nelson made the initial drawings. And that's where it ended. "We got so busy that there's no way we could have finished it," Nelson said. "It got rolled up in the back of my closet." Fast-forward 35 years and the two friends, who remained in touch, were hitting retirement and had more time on their hands. Zander wanted to finish the book she'd thought up so many years ago when her children now long grown had been little. "For the last year and a half the both of us have been working on it really feverishly and figuring out how to get it out there," Nelson said. "So it's really brand new and we're just really really excited that we actually finished it. ... And we really like it!" Picking up so many years later was a little difficult for the Nelson because her style of drawing had changed dramatically. The retired Weston Middle School art teacher, who splits her time between her loft in the Eclipse Mill in North Adams and her home in Jamaica Plain, found that her skills in new technology could be the bridge to her older drawings. She was able to scan the original sketches and use software to make the changes she needed to bring the book to life. "I wanted to keep that look from 35 years ago, it's from my house where I lived 35 years ago," she said. "I lived with Audrey, who was an attorney. So Aunt Audrey really did have a briefcase, it really was very heavy, and she really just dumped it when she came in ... all of the characters were from actual bags we were using or people who were in our lives." Nelson thought the story might be a little dated but found that the way we use bags hasn't changed much she just added in a laptop for the briefcase to update things. "It was really interesting," she said. "They held their own and we didn't need to change them at all." The book met the exacting criteria of Keziah Zelazo, 9, who came for the reading at the gallery and to draw some pictures from the book. "I like the part where they switched up the things that are inside the bags," she said, adding she'd read the book the day before. "It looked interesting and it was a kid's story and I like kid's stories especially if they're short. I don't like long stories." Bibi to UN: Condemn Hezbollahs Wanton Acts of Aggression The Fellowship | December 19, 2018 The United Nations Security Council is scheduled to discuss the attack tunnels currently being dug by Hezbollah and currently being discovered and destroyed by Israel and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu had words for the international body ahead of its debate. Ynet News reports that Netanyahu called on the U.N. to change its anti-Israel ways and stand up for the truth: Speaking ahead of a Security Council session on the issue, Netanyahu said UNIFIL, the UN presence in Lebanon, should be granted unrestrained access to any area in southern Lebanon, where the Iranian-backed Hezbollah has traditionally operated unfettered. He said that UNIFIL should not be hampered in its work, or restricted by Hezbollah or the Lebanese army in any way. I demand that UNIFIL meet its mandate, Netanyahu said, adding that the organization must report any violations of UN Resolution 1701 to both the United Nations and Israel I hope the UNSC stands up for the truth and takes the necessary action, Netanyahu said, and called on the UN Security Council to stand up for truth and peace and security and take necessary action. He said that Israel has the right to defend itself against Iranian aggression, and will continue to take all the necessary action to protect our people and defend our borders Magyar Posta will modernise its letter delivery system in a Ft 5.7 billion project, with the help of Ft 2.4 billion in EU and state support, the state-owned company announced yesterday. Customers will be able to track the delivery of registered letters on the Magyar Posta website or with a mobile app. Some 8,000 letter carriers will be given personal digital assistants. Those in larger towns will also be provided with a small printer to leave official notice of registered mail delivery in postboxes. The paper slip signed by the addressee on delivery of registered letters will be phased out in 2019, to be replaced by an electronic system. Magyar Posta will start to test the new system in selected districts in Budapest, Ercsi, Gyongyos, Miskolc, Monor, Sopron and Nagykata in the second half of November. A national security committee meeting with recent events at public media MTVA headquarters on its agenda lacked quorum because ruling party representatives stayed away from it. The extraordinary meeting was originally initiated by deputy committee head Janos Halasz and Gyorgy Hubay, both of ruling Fidesz, to discuss an immunity request, committee head Adam Mirkoczki, of conservative opposition Jobbik, said. However, in a letter sent on Tuesday morning, the interior minister requested that the subject be removed from the agenda. Mirkoczki said that he and Socialist representative Zsolt Molnar then initiated a debate on current national security issues but eventually neither the ruling party representatives nor those invited showed up. Fidesz told MTI that their representatives had stayed away because the interior minister had withdrawn the topic that would have served as the reason for the meeting, and the other item on the agenda submitted later only involved the opposition trying to create a political scandal. Mirkoczki insisted that it would have been in the ruling parties interest to show up for the meeting to discuss the events of the past several days and how far the authority of MPs and armed security guards extends. He said the meeting would have also served to determine which side had erred during the protests in front of MTVAs headquarters. Mirkoczki told reporters after the meeting that when he and LMP lawmakers visited the national police headquarters on Monday, they were promised that the police chief would attend todays committee meeting and answer questions in connection with the recent demonstrations. The Socialist Partys Zsolt Molnar said Fidesz and the co-ruling Christian Democrats were avoiding discussing any issues that are uncomfortable for them. Peter Ungar of opposition LMP said that the fact that the ruling parties MPs have fled meant that they were incapable of backing up even their own statements. Agnes Vadai of the leftist opposition Democratic Coalition, who is not a member of the committee but has security clearance to attend its meetings, told reporters that it was worrying that the interior minister had yet to address the recent events on Kossuth Square and in front of and inside the MTVA headquarters. She vowed to try to convene a meeting of the defence and law enforcement committee to discuss the demonstrations. Vadai was asked by a correspondent of current affairs channel M1 after the meeting why the opposition lawmakers who entered the MTVA headquarters had claimed that they would not try to force their way into the studios when they later did so on multiple occasions. Vadai replied by asking whether she or any other MP had entered the studios. Molnar said the door to the studio was unbreachable. Vadai told M1 that she did not think the lawmakers had acted beyond their rights attached to their parliamentary mandate. MTI photo According to a new report, 'air pollution is bad' in Budapest, Dunaujvaros, Hernadszurdok, Kecskemet, Putnok, Sajoszentpeter, Szazhalombatta, Szekesfehervar, Szolnok, Tokol and Vac. The concentration of microparticles in the air has reached unhealthy levels in Miskolc and Salgotarjan in the north, as well as Szombathely in the west, the national public sanitation authority now says. The authority warned people in sensitive groups such as the elderly, children, as well as people with cardiac or respiratory ailments should not to stay outside longer than necessary. The authority has also called on residents not burn banned pollutants in their stoves. From the organisers: At 23 December you still do not need to worry to get your presents as WAMP will be open all day with plenty of designers, so you will surely get all your gifts even in the last minute. Due to the wide spectrum of local designer brands it is indeed easy to find unique presents for your loved-ones. At WAMP you can get a personal shopping experience as you can always ask the creators for suggestions and you can even create your own presents at one of our workshops. The jewellery of Inventino are made of fine leather and processed with various manufacturing techniques that ensure a wide variety of designs and shapes. The bold colours of the GABRIEL collection make each piece highly attractive, they are suitable as presents but they can be perfect match to your own style too. The wall stickers of JUSTa Sticker are real fun and they turn any boring space into a lively area. You can decorate the walls or the furniture of your room with them but you can also use them in your bathroom as the stickers are waterproof as well as reversible, so you can always remove them if you want to change the style. The sets are packed with patterns which make it a lot easier to fix the stickers in order without measuring or marking your wall. Beyond the stickers the brand also offers uniquely labelled paperbags, tinmugs and wall pictures. If you want to impress your gourmet friends choose a supertasty vegetable cream or a chutney from the dip selections of Kanalka which are made exclusively of local ingredients from small farmers without any preservatives or additives. For those with a sweet tooth we recommend the high quality chocolate selections of chocoMe which are made of the finest Belgian chocolate and other carefully selected ingredients. The brand makes a wide range of chocolate bars such as the ones with freeze dried fruits, tasty oily seeds, spices, edible flowers, and even 23 carat goldflakes. The sweets are packed in gorgeous boxes so you will surely give a real heart-warming gift if you choose them. This time the biggest Hungarian design fair will also be found in the virtual space through the augmented reality application developed by ARcityBudapest which will give you more information on WAMP and the programs on the spot throughout the day. For this special experience just download the free wikitudes application to your mobile, search for arcity and scan one of the flyers at the entry of the fair, and a whole new world will open up for you. With this application you can also join a game where you can win cool presents offered by WAMP designers. Buy your presents from Hungarian designers this season! You not only make your loved-ones happy with this choice but you also support Hungarian design and local creative enterprises. Date and time: 23 December 2018, 10 am to 6 pm Venue: Millenaris Hall B 1024 Budapest, Kis Rokus u. 16-20. Entry is 500 HUF which can be used as a voucher for shopping at the fair. Source: www.wamp.hu/en A Mississippi officer has been reassigned after dropping off his retired police dog at an animal shelter. Officer Carl Elliss K-9 partner, Ringo, retired from the force in October. Following his retirement, Ellis gave the dog up to a local shelter where he was later adopted from, The Clarion-Ledger reported. Until now, the Jackson Police Department was under the impression that Ringo was still living with Ellis as that is standard for police dogs even after their retirement. Once JPD became privy to his adoption, Ellis was reassigned to patrol duty, The Clarion-Ledger reported. The Jackson Police Department respects and holds our canines with high regard just as we do any other officer within our department, the JPD explained in a statement obtained by the newspaper. They are family, and we do not feel they deserve anything less than a loving home in retirement. Randy Hare, a professional dog trainer with the Alpha Canine Training center in Jackson, adopted Ringo after finding out he was at a Madison animal shelter, WAPT reported. RELATED: Firefighters Rescue Dog from Dangerous, Icy Pond Plunge The treatment of dogs who are involved in law enforcement is sometimes really really good and sometimes its not so good, Hare told WAPT. A lot of times theyre treated like equipment and when theyre treated like equipment, sometimes theyre disposed of like equipment. Ringo, along with another police dog, served the Jackson Police Department for nearly a decade in the narcotics department. Because of their tireless efforts, JPD thought it was best to let both dogs live the rest of their lives as regular dogs. They served the city very well, Detective Anthony Fox told The Clarion-Ledger. Hundreds of thousands of dollars, unaccountable seizures with narcotics. They can be a dog now. Given what happened to Ringo, the police department is now implementing a protocol, which requires retired dogs to receive welfare checks. RELATED: Police Dog Given Final Salute by NYPD Officers Before She is Put Down: She Was a Trooper Additionally, policy is currently being drafted that will address specific requirements related to retired canines and their welfare, so that they are provided with the best care possible, the JPD said, The Clarion-Ledger reported. At this time, it is not clear if Ringo still remains with Hare. Neither Hare nor the Jackson Police Department responded to PEOPLEs request for comment. Way back before the midterms, President Trump was so desperate for Republicans to retain their majority in the House of Representatives that he blurted out his intention to give the middle class a big tax cut. We are going to be putting in and are studying very deeply right now, around the clock a major tax cut for middle-income people, the president said after a rally on October 20th. Not for business at all. For middle-income people. He promised that the tax cut would be implemented before the end of the month, despite Congress not being in session. No one knew what he was talking about. A few days later, Trump clarified that he would be putting in a resolution for Congress to cut taxes after it reconvened. Still, the details were unclear. None of this ever happened, of course. Bloomberg recently broached the issue in an interview with Steve Mnuchin. The treasury secretary didnt have much to offer when asked about his bosss pre-election promise. Im not going to comment on whether it is a real thing or not a real thing, he said. Im saying for the moment we have other things were focused on. After Trump floated the idea of a new tax cut before the election, Mnuchin said he was working with House Republicans to put it together and that it would be released shortly. As Congress prepares to close, Trump has been laser-focused on securing funding for a border wall. Democrats have been unwilling to provide it, which had led Trump to threaten to shut down the government, and also to tweet a lot. In our Country, so much money has been poured down the drain, for so many years, but when it comes to Border Security and the Military, the Democrats fight to the death, he wrote Wednesday morning. We won on the Military, which is being completely rebuilt. One way or the other, we will win on the Wall! In our Country, so much money has been poured down the drain, for so many years, but when it comes to Border Security and the Military, the Democrats fight to the death. We won on the Military, which is being completely rebuilt. One way or the other, we will win on the Wall! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 19, 2018 On Tuesday, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the administration has asked Cabinet agencies to find money for the wall, while at the same time maintaining that taxpayers would not wind up footing the bill. Despite the presidents confidence that he will win on the Wall, the New York Times reported on Tuesday that Republicans are trying to choreograph a compromise that would protect Mr. Trumps ego and still be broadly acceptable. The tax cut Trump proposed and subsequently campaigned on last month seems to have been forgotten entirely amid the chaos surrounding the border wall. This could also be due to the fact that, in reality, the administration gave up on the idea a long time ago. Weve been noodling more on this middle-class tax cut, how to structure it, and even pay for it, National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow told Politico days after the midterms. I dont think the chances of that are very high, because the Democrats are going to go after the corporate tax and all that stuff. In other words, its not a real thing. Happy holidays. Trump orders US troops to leave Syria as White House declares victory over ISIS originally appeared on abcnews.go.com The Pentagon announced Wednesday that it has started the process of withdrawing all 2,000 U.S. troops from Syria after the White House confirmed President Donald Trump had given the surprise order to leave because ISIS there had been "defeated." The announcement was met with backlash from Capitol Hill, especially from Republican senators, and Wednesday afternoon Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker, R-Tenn., was headed to the White House for an unscheduled meeting with the president. President Trump's decision followed a phone call with Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan last Friday which triggered the decision, a U.S. official told ABC News. During that call, Trump told Erdogan that he was planning to pull U.S. troops out of Syria, a senior Turkish official said. Five years ago, ISIS was a very powerful and dangerous force in the Middle East, and now the United States has defeated the territorial caliphate," White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said in a statement. "These victories over ISIS in Syria do not signal the end of the Global Coalition or its campaign. Earlier Wednesday, amid breaking news reports about the withdrawal, Trump tweeted that ISIS has been "defeated" in Syria, saying it was "my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency." We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency. Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 19, 2018 Chief Pentagon spokesperson Dana White said in a statement on Wednesday that the U.S. had "started the process of returning U.S. troops home from Syria." Once officially ordered by Defense Secretary James Mattis, the withdrawal would be completed within 30 days, an official told ABC News. Story continues (MORE: President Trump's troop withdrawal from Syria a 'huge' mistake: Senator Lindsey Graham) A second U.S. official said the withdrawal would be dependent on the security environment for the American units, so that it's safe for them to leave. Mattis has not yet signed the orders that would trigger the actual withdrawal, those officials said, though they have been drafted by the Joint Staff. The State Department is already beginning to pull out the dozen U.S. diplomats from Syria who were running programs to stabilize areas liberated from ISIS, a third U.S. official told ABC News. PHOTO: President Recep Tayyip Erdogan speaks about the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi during his weekly parliamentary address, Oct. 23, 2018, in Ankara, Turkey. (Getty Images) Trump's call with Erdogan on Friday followed a week of rising tension with Ankara, including the Turkish leader saying he would launch a military operation against U.S.-backed Kurdish fighters in northeast Syria "within a few days." The third official told ABC News that the call made it clear that Trump never bought into the idea of keeping U.S. troops in Syria, despite officials believing they had convinced him otherwise. While Erdogan and other world leaders such as Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu were alerted to the president's impending decision earlier, some top U.S. officials were unaware until Tuesday. Later on Wednesday, the State Department also announced an intended $3.5 billion sale of the U.S. Patriot missile system to Turkey. There are about 2,000 U.S. troops in eastern Syria advising and assisting the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in the fight against ISIS. The first U.S. troops arrived in Syria under the Obama administration in October 2015. The original force of 50 U.S. advisers grew to an official level of more than 500, though it actually grew beyond that figure to approximately 2,000 over the following year. PHOTO: U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Jamie Jarrard (L), thanks Manbij Military Council commander Muhammed Abu Adeel during a visit to a small outpost near the town of Manbij, northern Syria, Feb. 7, 2018. (Susannah George/AP) Arriving at the Pentagon on Wednesday for meetings with Mattis and other top military officials, Vice President Mike Pence ignored shouted questions from reporters about the possible withdrawal. State Department and Pentagon officials had cautioned as recently as last week that the fight against ISIS is not over -- with the coalition recently estimating that about 2,000 ISIS fighters remain in Syria. "Even as the end of the physical caliphate is clearly now coming into sight, the end of ISIS will be a much more long-term initiative," Brett McGurk, special presidential envoy for the global coalition to defeat ISIS, said at a State Department briefing last week. "Weve talked about that many times. Nobody working on these issues day to day is complacent. Nobody is declaring a mission accomplished." A Department of Defense spokesperson told ABC News in a statement last Wednesday that "the campaign against ISIS is not over" as U.S. and SDF forces continue offensive operations against ISIS in the Middle Euphrates River Valley near the city of Hajin. "We should not and cannot allow ISIS to breathe at this critical point or we will jeopardize the significant gains we have made alongside our Coalition partners and risk allowing ISIS to resurge," the spokesperson said. One of Trump's usual allies on Capitol Hill, South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, was quick to criticize the president' move as an "Obama-like mistake." If these media reports are true, it will be an Obama-like mistake made by the Trump Administration. While American patience in confronting radical Islam may wane, the radical Islamists passion to kill Americans and our allies never wavers," Graham said in a statement. An American withdrawal at this time would be a big win for ISIS, Iran, Bashar al Assad of Syria, and Russia. I fear it will lead to devastating consequences for our nation, the region, and throughout the world," Graham said. (MORE: Trump orders strike on Syria in response to chemical attack ) In March, Trump caught most senior members of his administration off guard when he publicly announced his intention to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria like, very soon, sending officials scrambling to square the presidents declaration with U.S. policy. PHOTO: Soldiers of the U.S-backed Syrian Manbij Military Council, a part of the SDF, stand next to a U.S. humvee at a U.S. military outpost on a road leading to the front lines between Syria and Turkish backed fighter,north of Manbij, Syria. (Hussein Malla/AP) Last week during the rising tensions between Washington and Ankara, the Pentagon announced it had established observation posts in northeast Syria near the Turkish border because the U.S. wanted to warn the Turks of individuals moving in that area, namely Kurdish fighters who belong to a force that Turkey considers to be an element of a terrorist group. But some of those Kurdish fighters also serve in the U.S.-backed SDF. In the past, skirmishes between Turkey and the Kurds along the Turkish-Syrian border drew Kurdish fighters away from the final offensive against ISIS, even causing the U.S.-backed fighting force to suspend their operations for a short time. "The argument can be made that -- by leaving Syria -- we have placed our allies, the Kurds, at greater risk of being targeted by Turkey," said ABC News contributor John Cohen, the former acting undersecretary for intelligence and a former counterterrorism coordinator at the Department of Homeland Security. (MORE: US military to build observation outposts in northern Syria to reduce tensions with Turkey) In addition to Trump telling Erdogan he was going to pull U.S. troops out of Syria, the two leaders also spoke about Turkey's security concerns there, according to a readout of that conversation the White House released on Friday. "The Presidents agreed to continue coordinating to achieve our respective security objectives in Syria," the readout continued. ABC News' Rym Momtaz, Alexander Mallin, and Mariam Khan contributed to this report. Trump's travel ban almost blocked a woman from seeing her dying son originally appeared on abcnews.go.com A mother who had been blocked from seeing her terminally ill child due to the Trump administration's travel ban has been granted a visa waiver, advocates said Tuesday. Shaima Swileh's 2-year-old son, Abdullah, has a genetic brain condition that has continued to worsen, according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations' Sacramento Valley chapter, which filed a writ of mandamus to try to help her get an expedited visa. Abdullah and his father, Ali Hassan, are both U.S. citizens, and came to the U.S. so he could receive treatment at the University of California San Francisco's Benioff Children's Hospital in Oakland a few months ago, according to CAIR. Swileh is currently in Egypt, according to Hassan, and has not seen her husband or son since they arrived in the U.S. After having submitted multiple requests for her visa waiver to be expedited, she is expected to arrive at San Francisco International Airport Wednesday, according to CAIR. PHOTO: Abdullah Hassan, 2, who suffers from a genetic brain condition, is pictured at UCSF Benioff Childrens Hospital in Oakland, Calif., in an undated handout photo from the Council on American-Islamic Relations' Sacramento Valley chapter. (CAIR, Sacramento Valley) "This is the happiest day of my life," Ali Hassan said in a statement, thanking both CAIR and the hospital staff. "This will allow us to mourn with dignity," he added. Swileh had been barred from traveling to the U.S. to see her son because she is from Yemen, one of the countries the Trump administration has restricted travel from indefinitely. On Tuesday, CAIR's Sacramento Valley chapter tweeted that a visa waiver had been granted for Swileh and that the organization is working on "getting her here ASAP." BREAKING: Yemeni mother Shaima receives #MuslimBan visa waiver to see her dying child in a California hospital. Were getting her here ASAP.#ForAbdullah #NoMuslimBanEver pic.twitter.com/nJq4q5DCSw CAIR-Sacramento Valley (@CAIRSacramento) December 18, 2018 On Monday, religious and civil rights leaders gathered with Hassan at CAIR's office in Sacramento to demand Swileh be allowed to see her son before he is taken off life support, ABC San Francisco affiliate KGO-TV reported. Story continues "My wife is calling me every day wanting to kiss and hold our son for one last time," Hassan said during the press conference. "Time is running out, please help us get my family together again." The hospital where Abdullah is being treated released a statement in support of the family. "[W]e greatly empathize with the family of 2-year-old Abdullah Hassan, a child currently on life support in our hospital whose mother is being prevented from entering the United States under the ban on travel from certain majority-Muslim countries," the hospital's statement said. "UCSF and the Benioff Childrens Hospitals support the familys desire to come together in Abdullahs final days. In the meantime, we are doing everything we can to keep the child comfortable and help the family through this difficult experience." PHOTO: Abdullah Hassan, 2, who suffers from a genetic brain condition, is pictured at UCSF Benioff Childrens Hospital in Oakland, Calif., in an undated handout photo from the Council on American-Islamic Relations' Sacramento Valley chapter. (CAIR, Sacramento Valley) During a briefing with reporters Tuesday, Deputy State Department Spokesperson Robert Palladino called it a "very sad case," adding that their thoughts go out to the family at "this trying time." But he defended the administration's actions, saying visa waivers are decided on a "case-by-case basis" and that State Department employees are "committed to following United States administration law and ensuring the integrity and security of our country's borders." "These are not easy questions," Palladino added. "We've got a lot of Foreign Service officers deployed all over the world that are making these decisions on a daily basis, and they're trying very hard to do the right thing at all times." (MORE: Supreme Court upholds Trump's travel ban) Three California Democratic House members, Rep. Doris Matsui, Rep. Jerry McNerney and Rep. Barbara Lee, wrote a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Monday, requesting that the State Department expedite its decision regarding Swileh's visa waiver. CAIR Sacramento Valley's civil rights attorney, Saad Sweilem, denounced the delay in granting Swileh a visa in a statement Monday. "The loss of a child is something no parent should experience, but not being able to be there in your child's last moments is unfathomably cruel," Sweilem said in the statement. Sweilem, who is representing the family along with attorney Jennifer Nimer, also asked for privacy when Swileh arrives. "She is a grieving mother who hasn't seen her child in months," Sweilem said in a statement. The organization had also launched an online petition in support of Swileh that had garnered more than 10,000 signatures. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Trump's travel ban, which restricts most travel to the U.S. from Yemen, Chad, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Syria and Venezuela. Civil rights groups have denounced the policy as a "Muslim ban," since many of the countries on the list are Muslim majority. ABC News' Conor Finnegan contributed to this report. New York (AFP) - A Canadian man who plotted to bomb the New York subway and Times Square and "create the next 9/11" in support of the Islamic State group was sentenced Wednesday to 40 years in prison. Abdulrahman El Bahnasawy, 20, of Mississauga, Canada, pleaded guilty two years ago to seven counts of terrorism-related offenses following his arrest in May 2016. But the charges against him were kept under seal until October 2017 while US authorities sought other participants in the plot. According to the Justice Department, El Bahnasawy launched the plot together with a US citizen living in Pakistan, Talha Haroon, and Philippines native and resident Russell Salic. El Bahnasawy scouted out possible attack locations in New York, including bombing targets and concert venues where he would shoot people, with his target date in mid-2016. The Justice Department said he had acquired materials to make bombs and a place to stay just outside of the city from which to stage the attacks. "Demonstrating his commitment to carry out the attacks, El Bahnasawy pinpointed bomb locations on a map of the subway system, and acquired an array of bomb-making materials. El Bahnasawy aspired, in his words, to 'create the next 9/11,'" said Geoffrey Berman, the US attorney from New York. Haroon had planned to fly to the United States to take part while Salic wired money from the Philippines to help them. The plot was disrupted by an FBI agent who posed as an Islamic State supporter ready to take part in the plot, the Justice Department said. El Bahnasawy was arrested after he traveled to the New York City area to prepare for the attacks. Haroon was arrested in Pakistan in September 2016 and Salic was arrested in the Philippines in April 2017. Both are still being held and face extradition requests from the United States. By Gene Emery (Reuters Health) - - The odds of a child dying before age 18 are far higher in the U.S. than in other high-income countries, with firearms and motor vehicle accidents accounting for much of the exceptionally high mortality, a new analysis shows. The odds that a child will be killed by a gun is 36 times higher in the U.S. than in other high-income countries. Suicide by firearm makes up more than one third of those gunshot deaths among adolescents. Homicides accounted for nearly two thirds of firearm-related deaths and gun-related accidents another 4 percent, researchers report in The New England Journal of Medicine "Guns are killing more children than cancer," said lead author Dr. Rebecca Cunningham, who directs the Injury Prevention Center at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Motor vehicle crashes are the deadliest category, responsible for 20 percent of child and adolescent deaths. Use of cell phones by young drivers and pedestrians appears to be the chief contributor to the fatality rate in this category that's more than three times higher than in other high-income countries, the researchers found. Cancer caused 9 percent of deaths; suffocation caused 7 percent. Next most common were drowning, drug overdose and poisoning. "Devastated families take no comfort from the fact that childhood deaths are now far less common than they were in centuries past," the Journal's executive editor Dr. Edward Campion writes in an accompanying commentary. It is wrong to refer to these deaths as accidents, he argues. "Car crashes and lethal gunshots are not random results of fate. Both individuals and the larger society need to understand that there is much that can be done to reduce the rate of fatal trauma." The study used data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for 2016, the most recent year with complete statistics, and from the World Health Organization. Only a few low-to-middle-income countries such as Thailand, Romania and Mongolia had more children dying from motor vehicle crashes per capita than the U.S. While the rate of firearm deaths among kids in the U.S. is 4 per 100,000, in a dozen other high-income countries it averages 0.11 per 100,000, the study found. "For firearm deaths, there's really no comparison," Cunningham said in a telephone interview. "We have substantially more firearm deaths across all the high-, low- and middle-income deaths we examined." And 2017 data released last week show the trend is continuing, she noted. "Firearm injuries continue to go up." "One in three U.S. homes with youth under 18 years of age has a firearm, with 43 percent of homes reporting that the firearm is kept unlocked and loaded, which increases the risk of firearm injuries," the researchers write. The scope of childhood firearm deaths will be news to most people, Cunningham said. "We've invested billions of dollars to decrease motor vehicle crashes from the late 1990s to now. The same with cancer. The public accepts that as something we should be investing in to keep our children safe. But we've invested virtually nothing in firearm-related prevention. We've done virtually no research. Yet we can do things that do not affect our Second Amendment rights at all." Some good news: Cancer deaths dropped 32 percent from 1990 to 2016, drowning deaths declined 46 percent and death from home fires plummeted by nearly 73 percent, probably because fewer people were smoking, more homes had smoke detectors and building codes improved. "We are living in a divisive era in which there are few areas of consensus and agreement. Perhaps one of the few core beliefs that all can agree on is that deaths in childhood and adolescence are tragedies that we must find ways to prevent," Campion writes. "Shouldn't a child in the United States have the same chance to grow up as a child in Germany or Spain or Canada?" SOURCE: https://bit.ly/2A1Dqjk The New England Journal of Medicine, online December 19, 2018. By Lisa Lambert and Paresh Dave WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The attorney general for Washington, D.C., said on Wednesday the U.S. capital city had sued Facebook Inc for allegedly misleading users about how it safeguarded their personal data, in the latest fallout from the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The case joins several legal and regulatory proceedings that threaten to hit Facebook with significant penalties and increase its operating costs. Authorities and consumer advocates have questioned whether Facebook's efforts on security, content moderation and cultural diversity have kept pace with the social responsibility it should have for its services, including WhatsApp and Instagram, which are essential communication tools for more than 2 billion people each month. The world's largest social media company has drawn global scrutiny since disclosing earlier this year that a third-party personality quiz distributed on Facebook gathered profile information on 87 million users worldwide and sold the data to British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. Washington, D.C., Attorney General Karl Racine said Facebook misled users because it had known about the incident for two years before disclosing it. The company had told users it vetted third-party apps, yet made few checks, Racine said. "This continues a year of bad publicity and significant issues for [Facebook], making it more likely that the U.S. government will take action to penalize and/or regulate" it, said financial analyst Scott Kessler of CFRA Research. "Yet, we still see its fundamentals as healthy and valuation as attractive." Facebook shares suffered their biggest drop since July 26, closing down more than 7 percent at $133.24 on Wednesday, extending a roughly five-month stretch since the company warned that profit margins would erode in coming years because of consumer and government pressure to better guard data and suppress objectionable content. Story continues "Facebook could have prevented third parties from misusing its consumers' data had it implemented and maintained reasonable oversight of third-party applications, according to the lawsuit filed in the Superior Court of Washington, D.C., on Wednesday. Facebook said in a statement, "We're reviewing the complaint and look forward to continuing our discussions with attorneys general in D.C. and elsewhere." The court could award unspecified damages and impose a civil penalty of up to $5,000 per violation of the district's consumer protection law, or potentially close to $1.7 billion, if penalized for each consumer affected as is typical. The lawsuit alleges the quiz software had data on 340,000 D.C. residents, though just 852 users had directly engaged with it. 'CONFUSING SETTINGS' Facebook offered separate privacy settings around 2013 to control what friends on the network could see and what data could be accessed by apps, enabling the quiz and other services to collect details about their users' Facebook friends without many of them realizing it, according to the lawsuit. It further alleges Facebook misled users by allowing several partners, including mobile software maker BlackBerry, "to override Facebook consumers privacy settings and access their information without their knowledge or consent." The New York Times reported new details on Tuesday about the user data that remained available to such partners years after they had shut down the features that required them. Facebook acknowledged the lapse, but said that it has not found evidence of wrongdoing by those partners. Racine criticized Facebook's "lax oversight and confusing privacy settings," telling reporters that Facebook had tried to settle the case before he filed suit, as is common during investigations of large companies. He said that a lawsuit was necessary "to expedite change" at the Silicon Valley company. Britain's data protection authority in July fined Facebook 500,000 pounds for the breaches of data in the Cambridge Analytica incident. Since then, Facebook has disclosed a pair of security breaches involving profile data and posts of up to 29 million users and 6.8 million users, respectively. At least six U.S. states have ongoing investigations into Facebook, according to state officials. In March, a bipartisan coalition of 37 state attorneys wrote to the company, demanding to know more about the Cambridge Analytica data and its possible links to U.S. President Donald Trump's election campaign. At the same time, the Federal Trade Commission took the unusual step of announcing an investigation into whether Facebook had violated a 2011 consent decree, exposing the company to a multi-billion dollar fine. State attorneys general have found some success taking on technology companies over data privacy. Uber Technologies Inc [UBER.UL] in September agreed to pay $148 million as part of a settlement with 50 U.S. states and Washington, D.C., which investigated a data breach that exposed personal data from 57 million Uber accounts. Agnieszka McPeak, a professor at Duquesne University School of Law, said states will likely make claims similar to those of D.C., pressuring Facebook into a settlement that involves both a monetary fine and modified business practices. If a company faces 51 separate actions around the country for deceptive practices, that can have a real impact, McPeak said. (Reporting by Lisa Lambert in Washington, D.C., and Paresh Dave in San Francisco; Additional reporting by David Shepardson and Jan Wolfe in Washington; editing by Rosalba O'Brien and Phil Berlowitz) By Francesco Guarascio BRUSSELS (Reuters) - European Union governments have reached a preliminary deal to clamp down on money laundering by strengthening bank supervision through the European Banking Authority (EBA), the EU said on Wednesday. The EU has been beset by money-laundering scandals this year, including probes into 200 billion euros ($229 billion) of payments made through Danske Bank's Estonian branch, the collapse of Latvia's ABLV Bank and the closure of Malta's Pilatus Bank. The reform was rolled out by the EU Commission in September after cases of alleged money laundering at some EU banks that "raised concerns that anti-money laundering rules are not always supervised and enforced effectively across the EU," an EU statement said. Under the agreed text, the EBA would be able to directly force individual banks to take measures against money laundering "as a last resort" if national authorities do not act. The text, backed by diplomats from the 28 EU states, needs the approval of the EU parliament to become law. However, the overhaul does not address loopholes that give states broad discretion in imposing sanctions, and does not create a dedicated agency to counter money laundering at the EU or euro zone level, as proposed by the European Central Bank. The agreement was announced as Estonia said it had arrested 10 former employees of the local branch of Danske Bank as part of an international investigation of alleged money laundering. Latvia's ABLV liquidated itself after being accused by the U.S. Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network of money laundering, violating sanctions on North Korea and using bribery to influence Latvian officials. The ECB withdrew Pilatus Bank's licence in November, after the bank's chairman was charged in the United States over money laundering and bank fraud. Under the reform, the EBA, which is moving from London to Paris after Brexit, will have new powers to force national supervisors to investigate cases of suspected breaches of anti-money laundering rules. In exceptional cases, when national supervisors do not act within set deadlines, the EBA could take measures against a bank "requiring it to take all necessary action to comply with its obligations", the text proposed by the EU's executive Commission said. But decisions on penalties would remain in the hands of member states, some of whom have shown little interest in imposing or trumpeting sanctions, fearing reputational damage. International guidelines say publicising sanctions is one of the most effective tools to prevent money laundering. The EBA already has the power to investigate breaches of money-laundering rules and did so against Malta over its supervision of Pilatus Bank. Under the overhaul, the EBA would get more powers and staff, but it will continue to depend on vague laws that have prevented it from acting in the past. The EBA admitted that it could not pursue its probe into Malta's financial supervisor because of a lack of clarity in EU rules, which will not change. Under the reforms, the EBA would get 10 new employees from two now to monitor risks of money laundering at thousands of EU banks. The ECB has called for a new agency with more resources dedicated to this task, but these calls have been opposed by member states who prefer to maintain national control. (Reporting by Francesco Guarascio, editing by Robin Emmott and Adrian Croft) Lagos (AFP) - Gunmen have shot dead a former defence chief on a main road outside Nigeria's capital Abuja, the air force said, in an attack that underscores worsening security in the vast west African nation. "It is with a heavy heart that I regretfully announce the unfortunate demise of former Chief of Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Alex Sabundu Badeh", air force spokesman Ibikunle Daramola said in a statement late Tuesday. Badeh, 61, died Tuesday "from gunshot wounds sustained when his vehicle was attacked while returning from his farm along Abuja-Keffi road". The air force did not say if any arrests had been or suggest motives behind the killing. Badeh who served as Nigeria's defence chief under former president Goodluck Jonathan, retired in 2015. He has been on trial since his retirement over allegations of corruption while in office. Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, is battling a myriad of security problems, from Boko Haram jihadist insurgency in the northeast to farmer-herder conflict in the centre and kidnappings for ransom ans armed robberies in the south. President Muhammadu Buhari who came to power in 2015 and is seeking a second term in February elections, has come under fire for not doing enough to address the security challenges. Metula (Israel) (AFP) - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday urged the UN Security Council to condemn Hezbollah for digging cross-border "attack tunnels" and to demand Lebanon prevent such activity from its territory. Netanyahu's remarks came ahead of a Security Council meeting to discuss what Israel says is a network of tunnels dug by the Iranian-backed Shiite militant group, of which at least four have been uncovered. "I call on all the members of the Security Council to condemn Hezbollah's wanton acts of aggression, to designate Hezbollah in its entirety as a terrorist organisation, to press for heightened sanctions against Hezbollah," Netanyahu told foreign media in the Israeli parliament. Israel also wanted the Security Council "to demand that Lebanon stop allowing its territory to be allowed to be used as an act of aggression and its citizens to be used as pawns, to support Israel's right to defend itself against Iranian inspired and Iranian conducted aggression," he said. The army on Wednesday transported journalists in armoured vehicles to film one of the tunnels just dozens of metres (yards) from the Lebanese border near the Israeli town of Metula. The media trip came two weeks after the army announced the launch of an operation dubbed "Northern Shield" to destroy tunnels it said have been dug under the border by Hezbollah. The tunnel shown to journalists appeared to extend around 40 metres inside Israeli territory. An exit point was not seen, only an access hole that had been dug above it. Bulldozers were at work in the mud nearby close to the concrete barrier which Israel has built along the border. Concrete was being poured into several holes that had been excavated. "We'll stay here until we've finished. It took Hezbollah years to construct these tunnels. Our operation will set them back years," a military official told journalists, asking not to be named. Story continues The UN said Wednesday that an investigation it conducted showed two tunnels allegedly dug by Hezbollah snaked under the Israeli side of the border with Lebanon, but it did not find any exit points. It called the findings a "serious violation" of a UN resolution that ended the brutal 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon, which was triggered by a Hezbollah raid on the same border. The 2006 war was halted by a UN-brokered truce. Hezbollah is the only group in Lebanon not to have disarmed after the country's 1975-1990 civil war. - 'Act of war' - Netanyahu called the tunnels "an act of war" and accused the Lebanese government of not preventing their creation. "The Lebanese government, which should be the first to challenge this and protest this, is doing nothing at best, and colluding at worst," he said. Netanyahu noted that UNIFIL, the UN peacekeeping force in south Lebanon, has confirmed the existence of four tunnels, stressing that it must be given swift and "unlimited access" to observe and document them. The Israeli leader said the Lebanese army did not appear to have had prior knowledge of the tunnels being dug. "But they know about it now. And they should be there... They should be uncovering them and neutralising them," he said. A federal judges ruling late Friday that the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional is raising questions for tens of millions of Americans who depend on the law for their health insurance. However, the law has not been invalidated yet, and the White House, Healthcare.gov, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services have said that 2019 enrollment will proceed as planned. Most legal experts agree that the law will likely stand, at least until it is reviewed by the Supreme Court. The high court is unlikely to hear the case until 2020, the Associated Press reported. Abbe Gluck, a Yale Law School professor who specializes in health law, tells TIME that the federal judge in the case, Reed OConnor, has overstepped by attempting to reshape the law. While she feels that the ruling is unlikely to survive an appeal in the circuit court or in the Supreme Court, she says that the political heft of the Affordable Care Act means that it is vulnerable to political attacks. The statute carries such political and legal traction that you never can become complacent, said Gluck. If the 2,000-page law dubbed Obamacare is repealed, Gluck says, it will have serious consequences across the healthcare system not only for people on Medicaid, but also for those on private insurance, insurance through their workplaces, or on Medicare. All of those laws will have gaps now, and people will be paying more and losing coverage, Gluck says. She notes that many people are unaware that the benefits of the law touch the entire health system, and include provisions to keep down the price of drugs for Medicare patients; coverage for childrens vaccines, and preventive services such as cancer screenings. The judges decisions to throw out the ACA also comes as the law is increasingly popular, according to poll data. In 2013, the law had an overall approval rating between 33% and 39%, according to Kaiser Family Foundation polls. By 2018, the approval rating rose to 53%, and many Democrats in the November midterm elections ran on protecting the law. Story continues Heres what you need to know about the ruling, and what it means for your health insurance. Why did a federal judge in Texas rule the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional? To understand OConnors argument, one must look back to the 2012 Supreme Court Case National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) v. Sebelius, in which the court considered the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. Two major provisions of the ACA were reviewed: the individual mandate, which required individuals to buy a minimum level of health insurance; and the expansion of Medicaid. The ruling did not ultimately strike down any provision of the Affordable Care Act. The court found that that the individual mandate was constitutional under Congresss taxation power. At the same time, a majority of the judges agreed that the expansion of Medicaid was unconstitutional because states hadnt received enough notice to consent to the change. Nevertheless, the court ruled that the Medicaid provision could survive if the Health and Human Services Secretary had limited power to enforce the law which in practice made the expansion optional for states. In his ruling, Texas Judge OConnor argued that since Congress eventually eliminated the individual mandate, the Affordable Care Act is no longer constitutional under Congresss taxation power. However, many legal experts, including Gluck, have argued that OConnors ruling is on shaky ground. Gluck says the Texas federal judge threw out the entire law on the grounds that Congress had never intended for the law to exist without the individual mandate. Eliminating the entire Affordable Act wasnt the purpose of eliminating the individual mandate, Gluck says; the legislators only intend to alter it. A later Congress is entitled to amend the law, Gluck says. Will the ruling affect my health insurance under the Affordable Care Act? The Affordable Care Act will stay in place until the appeals process is completed and the case will possibly go before the Supreme Court. For now, at least, people with preexisting conditions, young adults between 21 and 26, and others who have been able to enroll in health insurance under the law will remain protected. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement that it will continue to uphold the Affordable Care Act until the courts reach a final decision. HHS will continue administering and enforcing all aspects of the ACA as it had before the court issued its decision, the statement said. This decision does not require that HHS make any changes to any of the ACA programs it administers or its enforcement of any portion of the ACA at this time. White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said that the law will stay in place until the appeal process is completed. The judges decision vindicates President Trumps position that Obamacare is unconstitutional, Sanders said in a statement. Once again, the President calls on Congress to replace Obamacare and act to protect people with preexisting conditions and provide Americans with quality affordable healthcare. How does the ruling affect open enrollment? For the time being, open enrollment for 2019 is going forward as planned, although in 39 states, the deadline for the Affordable Care Act was Dec. 15. However, 11 states California, Colorado, Connecticut, Idaho, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington and Washington, D.C. have their own marketplaces, as well as their own deadlines. Connecticut also expanded its enrollment deadline until Jan. 13 in response to the ruling on Friday. To check the deadline for your state, visit the website of Healthcare.gov. What should I do if I missed the deadline for enrollment? People seeking certain kinds of insurance may still be able to apply. Americans can apply at any time for Medicaid or the Childrens Health Insurance Program (CHIP). Some may also qualify to apply during the Special Enrollment Period. This applies to those who have missed the deadline because of a life event, such as getting married or divorced; experiencing a natural disaster; having a child; or the death of someone on their marketplace plan. Where does the law stand now? In some ways, the Affordable Care Act is stronger than ever. The number of Americans without health insurance has fallen from 18.2% in 2010 to 10.2% in 2017, according to analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation. The expansion of Medicaid in certain states also drove up enrollment, rising from 72.4 million last year to 75.1 million in 2018. However, the Trump Administrations efforts to dissuade people from applying to federal and state exchanges appears to also be having an effect. Enrollment in the exchanges is down as much as 12% compared to last year, according to analysis by the nonprofit Get America Covered, a group that advocates for expanding the Affordable Care Act. The number of uninsured non-elderly Americans has dropped significantly since the Affordable Care Act was instituted from more than 44 million in 2013 to 27 million in 2016. Brad Woodhouse, president of Protect Our Care, an advocacy group that supports the Affordable Care Act, says he will not feel confident about ACAs future the Supreme Court rules on this latest challenge to the law. I dont take a lot of comfort in what people think will happen, Woodhouse says. The consequences would be dire. The Daily Beast Photo Illustration by The Daily BeastOXFORD, MichiganDetailed descriptions of a wish to massacre classmates on his cellphone and in a journal. At least one social media post pointing to elation at access to a handgun bought by his dad. A mom who thanked Trump for my right to bear arms. And a meeting between his parents and school administrators about his conduct just hours before the attack.Authorities on Wednesday identified the teenage suspect in the mass shooting a day earlier at Michigan